Having been granted rulership over the city of Vanhoover, and confessed their feelings for each other, Lex Legis and Sonata Dusk have started a new life together. But the challenges of rulership, and a relationship, are more than they bargained for.
(While this story is a direct continuation of an existing plotline, it has been written to be accessible all on its own. You do not need to have read the previous works to understand and enjoy what's here.)
Recently returned from the world of Everglow, Lex Legis, a brusque but brilliant unicorn, has finally achieved his dream...after a fashion. Convinced that he can govern Equestria better than the alicorn princesses, he and his new girlfriend, Sonata Dusk, have negotiated for rulership of the distant city of Vanhoover, devastated in the wake of the elemental chaos that has rocked Equestria.
But Vanhoover's problems go far beyond simple disaster-relief, and the pair soon come to learn that maintaining their dreams might be even more difficult – and more dangerous – than achieving them ever was.
Cover art created by the exceptionally talented Little Tigress.
"It’s a thrilling page-turner of a piece that I looked forward to seeing every day." -Paul Asaran, Paul's Thursday Reviews.
“A wonderful story that will capture your attention, the surprises are everywhere, behind all corners. Keep your eyes open for this art piece of the unexpected.” -Firefoxino, My Little Reviews & Feedback.
"This story gets a 9/10, and I initially thought it had all the obvious external hallmarks of a badfic." -kalash93, Reviewers Cafe.
Ticket Stub had always loved trains. Ever since the first time he’d ridden on one, when his parents had taken him on a trip to see his grandmare in Whinnyapolis, he had been utterly entranced by everything about them. From the sound of the train whistle to the way the cars swished lightly as they raced down the tracks, everything about trains was wonderful.
But even all of that paled in comparison to the absolutely best thing about trains: the ponies that rode on them. Being on a train was, to Ticket Stub, like looking at a snapshot of all of Equestria. Here, ponies from all walks of life gathered together, joined in the common experience of traveling from place to place. Brought together in the comfortable train cars, you got to make new friends that you’d likely never have run across otherwise.
He’d earned his cutie mark on that trip, and ever since then he’d known that it was his destiny to ride the trains and make sure that everypony enjoyed them as much as he did!
“Next stop, Pineville,” he announced as he stepped into the fourth passenger car, repeating the announcement he’d made as he’d strode through each car. “Next stop, Pineville!”
He always announced the next stop twice, just in case the passengers were so engrossed in their conversations that they didn’t hear him the first time. It wasn’t really necessary in this case, though, as there were only two ponies in this car. Smiling, Ticket Stub trotted towards them. “If this is your destination, I’m happy to help if you need anything.”
It wasn’t his usual policy to offer assistance unless it looked like a passenger needed it, but in this case he had reason to make an exception. That reason being the earth pony mare – she had no wings or horn, so she had to be an earth pony – that smiled up at him in response to his question. Just like every other time he’d made this offer, the sight made him go weak in the knees. She was gorgeous!
Her soft white coat was tinged with a blue shading so light that you could have stared at it for hours and still not have been sure it was there at all. It was perfectly accentuated by her mane and tail, whose gentle arctic coloration was interspersed with darker blue stripes that seemed to shimmer as she moved. And her eyes…their soft raspberry-red hue contrasted perfectly with the rest of her, giving them a captivating look. Even her cutie mark was beautiful, being a bright red heart with a jagged blue musical note in front of it.
“Thanks! We’re all good here,” the mare replied cheerfully. Her voice matched her looks, having a clear quality to it that made its high pitch all the more enchanting.
“W-well, if there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.” Ticket Stub tried to fight down a blush, hoping that his attendant’s uniform was on straight. “My name’s Ticket Stub, and I-”
“We know,” cut in a sharp voice. It came from the unicorn stallion sitting next to the mare, and who could not have been more different from her. His coat was a dull grey, the color of a cobblestone road. The bland coloration was broken up only by his cutie mark, depicting a podium in front of an amphitheater. His mane was cut awkwardly, as though the barber had decided that nothing could enhance the plain brown coloration and so had simply cut it at random. That same brown could be found in the stallion’s eyes, which were currently filled with irritation.
“We know your name is Ticket Stub, and that you’ll help us with whatever we need if we’re disembarking here. We know that because you said that before we arrived at Hoofington, and Pinto Creek, and Bronco Downs, and Neighton. For three days, you’ve made sure to tell us who you are and what you’re here for every single time this train has pulled into a station! We get it, so just go away!”
The voice was thick with annoyance, and Ticket Stub couldn’t help but wince as the stallion looked up from the set of scrolls he’d been perusing. It wasn’t the words that caused him to take an involuntary step back at the rebuke, though. Rather, it was the stallion’s only two notable features. The first was his horn, of which only the base had the stallion’s natural grey coloration; everything above that was a stark, blood red.
The other was his shadow, which despite the soft lighting shining in from the windows, was darkly casting the unfriendly pony’s silhouette. More unnerving was that it wasn’t falling away from the light, but rather was casting itself up on the interior wall of the train car in complete defiance of normality.
Between the stallion’s acerbity and his unnerving features, it was easy to see why – when they’d exited the sleeping cars – the couple had invariably wound up with a car all to themselves in short order.
“Ah, well I’ll, um…I’ll just, be off, then…” Ticket stammered before heading towards the next car. Behind him, the mare was giving him an awkward wave, an apologetic look on her face. It was only after he had left that she turned to her companion with a sigh.
“Lex, was that, like, really necessary? He was just trying to be nice.”
The stallion, Lex Legis, had already gone back to his scrolls, not bothering to look up as he replied. “Yes, Sonata, it was. We only have another day left before we arrive in Vanhoover, and I need to use that time to try and come up with a plan to put the city back in order. Every minute that I’m distracted from doing that by that obsequious dimwit is a minute longer that its citizens have to suffer.”
Sonata Dusk tilted her head to the side, a confused expression crossing her features. It wasn’t just because she had no idea what “obsequious” meant. She had gotten Lex to explain the details of what he was working on several times over the last few days, but it still didn’t make any sense to her. “But we have a plan. We take that big bag of bits that we got from Princess Celestia and Princess Luna and we go use it to fix the city. With your brains and my charm, we’ll start running things and have that place cleaned up in no time!”
Leaning across the hoofrest between their seats, she nuzzled the red-horned unicorn in a way that would have made it obvious to anyone watching that they were more than just friends. “And once we do, everyone will see how awesome your ideas are, until even those stuck-up princesses will have to admit that you’re, like, a total genius.”
An exasperated expression flitted across Lex’s features, but he couldn’t sustain it in the face of his girlfriend’s affection, and he gently nuzzled her back. “I’ve told you, it’s not that simple. Between the severe flooding that Vanhoover experienced, and the attendant influx of aquatic monsters, the damage was likely severe, if not catastrophic. Even if both of these disasters have since ended, that doesn’t mean that the situation has improved. In fact, based on what Twilight told us, it’s likely gotten worse.”
Two months ago Equestria had been the victim of what had since become known as “elemental bleeds”: instances of the heretofore-unknown Elemental Planes superimposing themselves over patches of Equestria. While that alone had been a disaster of unmitigated proportions – one rumor had it that an entire city had caught fire! – what made it worse was that these phenomena were always accompanied by monsters of a similar elemental bent. These creatures, either because of their alien nature or simple malice, had only made bad situations worse.
The elemental bleeds had lasted less than a week, but the damage they’d wrought had been severe. Even so, the heartland of Equestria had bounced back fairly quickly thanks to its proximity to the alicorn princesses. In contrast to that, the outlying areas were still struggling to recover from the disaster. And few parts of Equestria were more of an outlier than its northwestern-most city, Vanhoover. Nestled between the Frozen North, the western ocean, the Unicorn Mountains to the east, and White Tail Woods to the south, it had been all but ignored during the recovery. Or at least that’s what its citizens seemed to think, according to what Twilight had told Lex and Sonata before they’d set out for the city.
“Aww, I bet it’ll be fine,” smiled Sonata. “You’ll tell me what to tell them, and I’ll make a fun song out of it, and I bet we’ll have everything high and dry by dinnertime!”
Lex sighed. “Again, it’s not that simple. Even if we had more resources to draw on than the measly one thousand bits we were given, minus the cost of these train tickets, there are still all sorts of logistical issues to deal with when trying to coordinate a rebuilding effort of this scope and magnitude. Furthermore, when you consider how…” Lex trailed off as he noticed that Sonata had closed her eyes and started humming, swaying back and forth lightly in her seat and murmuring something under her breath. “What are you doing?”
“I’m, like, trying to make up the lyrics. Okay…what rhymes with ‘magnitude’?” Unaware of the nonplussed expression on her boyfriend’s face, Sonata continued to mutter to herself, waving a hoof in the air as though conducting an imaginary band.
Lex briefly considered bringing her back to the subject at hoof, but decided against it. She was keeping herself occupied this way, and that made it easier for him to concentrate on figuring out the best course of action. That…and he had to admit that hearing her voice, especially when she was singing, was always pleasant.
The two of them spent the next hour lost in their own little worlds, until the feel of the train stopping shook them from their respective reveries. “Hey, I’m famished,” Sonata piped up suddenly. “Let’s run into town and grab something to eat while we’re here.”
Receiving an affirmative grunt from Lex, Sonata jumped down from her seat and stepped into the aisle to stretch, making sure to moan softly as she did while glancing at him out of the corner of her eyes. Much to her chagrin, he hadn’t noticed, instead focusing on putting his scrolls away. Huffing, she waited for him to finish before they headed toward the nearest exit, which was at the back of the train.
They had almost reached the door to the next car when it opened, and they very nearly collided with Ticket Stub. “Oh! I’m sorry!” he exclaimed. His eyes flickered between the pair before fixing firmly on Sonata, finding her to be the more preferable pony to speak to. “Will you be disembarking here?”
“Only to get some lunch. Then we’re right back on all the way to Vanhoover!” Sonata pumped a hoof in the air, almost cheering the last part.
Ticket’s brow furrowed in confusion at her proclamation. “Well, the train will be here for a half-hour while we load some more coal, but what do you mean by ‘all the way to Vanhoover’?”
Both ponies froze in response to his question, eyes widening in horrified realization. An uncomfortable silence fell for several long moments before it was broken by Lex. “What do you mean ‘what do you mean’? We’re taking this train until it reaches its last stop on this line, which is Vanhoover.” His voice was tense, hoping against hope that the response wouldn’t be…
“…I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. This train doesn’t go to Vanhoover. The last stop is Tall Tale.”
“You bought the wrong tickets?!” Lex’s angry shout seemed to fill the train car, making Sonata wince. “How could you possibly have bought the wrong tickets?!”
“Um, I-”
Lex didn’t give her a chance to answer, continuing to rant. “This entire time we’ve been talking about going to Vanhoover! Princess Celestia and Princess Luna said that they’d cede me authority over Vanhoover! Twilight gave us an overview of the current situation in Vanhoover! When we looked at the map in the royal library, the city we focused on was Vanhoover! So why,” he lifted the pair of boarding passes in his telekinetic grip, waving them in Sonata’s face, “do we have tickets for Tall Tale?!”
The silence that followed was deafening, and it took Sonata a moment to realize that Lex’s last question hadn’t been rhetorical. Flattening her ears, she glanced around to see if there was anything that would let her easily change the subject. Naturally, there was nothing to be found; the car had been empty before, and even the train attendant had fled after Lex had begun shouting in response to finding out that they had bought tickets for the wrong train.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out why he’d run away. Whenever Lex used his magic, even something as innocuous as lifting things with his horn’s telekinesis, his eyes began to glow with a sickly green light, and purple contrails sprouted from the outer corners of them. Together with his eerie-looking shadow and his blood-colored horn, the latter of which was currently sheathed in a roiling purple aura, matching the one surrounding the pair of tickets, the entire display was quite intimidating.
“Um, I just thought that, you know…since Tall Tale and Vanhoover were right next to each other, that a train that went to one would have to go to the other,” Sonata explained, a sheepish smile spreading across her face. Maybe Lex would get captivated by how cute she looked when she was embarrassed, and forget all about being angry at her?
He wasn’t. “Right next to each other? What are you talking about? They’re not right next to each other, they’re separated by over twenty miles and a river!”
“But on that map they were almost side-by-side!” Sonata protested.
Lex’s features softened, but only to the extent that some of his anger changed into incredulity. Before they’d left, they’d looked at a map of Equestria with Twilight. Being a sister city to Vanhoover, Tall Tale was located just to the south of it, which on a map that showcased the entire continent made them appear very nearly adjacent to one another. Apparently Sonata had read a little too deeply into that.
“You have to take into account the map’s scale.” The words, spoken around gritted teeth, were almost a growl.
A look of incomprehension spread across Sonata’s face. “Its scale? But it didn’t look like it weighed very much.”
Lex’s answer was to press a hoof to his face and groan, every inch of him radiating exasperation. Sonata waited for him to get ahold of himself, but Lex didn’t move, apparently unable to do anything but struggle to deal with how big of an idiot she was.
Almost thirty seconds went by like that, and Sonata could feel herself starting to get upset. So she’d made one little mistake! It wasn’t worth all of the melodrama! “Look, it’s not like this is a major problem or anything. So Tall Tale’s like, a little bit away from Vanhoover. It’s still not that far away. We’ll get there and then hitch a ride the rest of the way on a wagon or something. It’ll be fun!”
Lex lifted his face from his hoof at that, but only to give her a sour look, clearly disagreeing with her assessment of the situation. “C’mon, I’m serious!” she pressed. “Twenty miles isn’t that big of a deal, and I bet we can even get some of the locals in Tall Tale to-, oh my gosh!” Her eyes widened as a totally brilliant idea came to her. “Like, brainstorm! We can talk to the ponies in Tall Tale and get them to help us help Vanhoover!” She stood up on her hind legs and spread her forelegs wide, a huge smile on her face, clearly thrilled with herself.
Lex frowned, not in disapproval but in thought as he considered the notion. He doubted it would be that easy, since it was likely that Tall Tale had experienced their own problems. Still, it wasn’t the worst idea in the world. If nothing else, it would allow them to figure out why, according to Twilight, Vanhoover had never asked its neighboring city for assistance after the floodwaters had receded. At the very least, a brief stopover would let them spend their bits to purchase a modest supply of food and medical supplies to help with their relief efforts.
“I…suppose that’s not a bad idea,” he admitted.
“You see? It’s seren-, um, sering…it’s a happy accident.” Despite flubbing the word, Sonata was all smiles as she fell back onto all fours. “I totes had a plan all along, I just didn’t know it!”
“The word is ‘serendipity,’” corrected Lex with a snort, but Sonata picked up on the wry tone in his voice and couldn’t help but giggle, delighted at how she’d turned things around.
“C’mon, let’s run into town and get that lunch before-” just as she spoke, the train gave a lurch, causing the pair to stumble as it began to pull out of the station.
“…or we could just head on over to the dining car?”
After eating, the pair returned to what had unofficially become “their car,” since nopony else ever seemed to want to be in there for some reason. Lex had returned to his scrolls and Sonata was watching the scenery, letting several hours pass in the patterns they'd established.
“Lex, you should take a look at this. The leaves are just starting to change colors, and the sunset is making them all look, like, super pretty!” She couldn’t help but stare out of the window, enraptured by the beautiful vista.
Her very special somepony failed to match her enthusiasm, giving a half-hearted “yeah” without looking up from the notes he was jotting on one of his scrolls. For the last three days, he’d spent virtually all of his free time jotting down notes about what to do once they arrived in Vanhoover. For all of his work, the results were far from the comprehensive plan that he would have preferred.
When dealing with a natural disaster, the best-case scenario was to prevent the disaster from occurring in the first place, or at least to have plans and mechanisms in place to reduce the damage as much as possible. That opportunity was long passed by now though, so instead they needed to put everything possible on relief and recovery.
The problem was that both of those things required a great deal of funding, resources, and ponypower to accomplish…and Lex was keenly aware that he and Sonata were distinctly lacking in all of those things. Even though they’d been given a large sack full of bits, and even though they each commanded magical powers far in excess of what other ponies could use, that still wasn’t going to be enough to make a measurable impact on a city with tens of thousands of ponies.
This would have been easy if Celestia and Luna had simply given me all of Equestria like I wanted them to, he groused internally. Had the alicorn sisters acceded to his demands and abdicated in favor of him, fixing this problem would have been far simpler! With the whole of Equestria at his disposal, it would have been foal’s play to move money and materials to the areas that needed them most via emergency decrees. The neighborly sentiment that characterized the individual towns and cities across the country would have been elevated into a national sense of unity, letting the recovery effort swell in response.
And of course, he would have been at the center of it all, directing everything in the most efficient and orderly manner possible. With the efficacy of his leadership on display, there would have been no problem with expanding the scope of the work, and surpassing the prosperity that Equestria had been enjoying before the elemental bleeds had struck.
But now…
Now, with the alicorn sisters granting him only a single city, the best that he could hope for was to make use of whatever resources were still available in Vanhoover, and that was a dicey prospect at best. Between the extensive scope of damage that a major flood could cause, and that the survivors would be desperate to get their hooves on anything they could in order to sustain themselves in the aftermath, Lex couldn’t imagine that there was a surfeit of materials, capital, or goodwill that he’d be able to draw upon once they arrived.
They did it on purpose. The words flowed through Lex’s mind, filled with malice despite their lack of a voice. They set you up to fail, and you were foolish enough to agree to their terms.
Lex glanced at his shadow, currently spreading across rows of empty seats towards the back of the car, perpendicular to the sunset shining in from the windows, knowing that it was the source of the spiteful words. Or rather, that his shadow was the closest that the source of the words could come to a material manifestation in the real world.
In fact, the real source of the hateful dialogue was a rebellious fragment of his own mind, giving his fears and doubts a quasi-life of their own. Still, as long as he kept himself in check and didn’t respond to its barbs, he knew it would sink back into silence and leave him alone…at least for a little while.
“…Lex?”
His musings interrupted as Sonata poked him gently, Lex looked over at her. She was sitting directly in front of the sunset, and the effect was stunning. The panorama of gentle colors played over her, making her mane and her coat catch the soft light in a way that made them appear incandescent. The sight of her in that moment pushed everything else from his mind.
Sonata blinked as Lex looked at her with an inscrutable expression. She was about to ask him if something was wrong, when he leaned towards her, giving her just enough time to feel surprised before he kissed her gently.
The effect was electric. They had confessed their feelings for each other only a few days ago, just before they’d started this trip in fact, and since then they hadn’t shared very many kisses…and almost all of those had been initiated by her. As such, the sudden press of his lips against hers was enough to make her melt, and she momentarily forgot what she’d been about to tell him in favor of closing her eyes and reveling in the romantic moment.
“Er…”
The two of them jumped at the unexpected voice, the moment suddenly shattered at the interruption. Two pairs of eyes swung around to behold a blushing Ticket Stub, who was standing beside their seats with a wide, shallow box full of various items. “I, uh, I was just asking the lady if either of you wanted a postcard or a brochure for Tall Tale…” he smiled awkwardly. Sonata flushed, suddenly remembering why she’d called Lex’s name in the first place.
For his part, Lex stared silently at the train attendant, who fidgeted in growing nervousness. “We also have, um, m-magazines or newspapers if you’d p-prefer,” he all but whimpered, holding up a newspaper as though to shield himself from the outpouring of wrath that he was certain was imminent.
The newspaper was suddenly snatched away by unicorn’s telekinesis, and Ticket squeaked in fear, squeezing his eyes shut. But there was no outburst accompanying the paper’s loss, and after a moment he opened his eyes a crack. Much to his surprise, the stallion was reading the paper intently, apparently absorbed in the headline.
Ticket shared a look with Sonata, her face reflecting the surprise that he was sure was on his own. “I, uh, guess we’ll take a newspaper,” she hesitantly offered. She tossed him a few bits in payment, and he grabbed them before fleeing from the car while his good fortune held out.
Once she was sure they were alone again, Sonata nudged her traveling companion. “Hey. Wanna pick up where we left off?” No response was forthcoming, with Lex apparently unable to tear himself away from the newspaper. “Lex?” she tried again.
She got a reaction that time. Or rather, there was a reaction, but it wasn’t in response to her, as his eyes stayed firmly affixed to the newspaper even as they suddenly blazed green and purple, his lips pulling back in a snarl of rage. “Those nags!” he hissed in sudden fury. “Those miserable…treacherous…backbiting…nags!”
Sonata fell back, caught completely off-guard at the sudden outpouring of anger from Lex. “Whoa! Like, what’s going on? What’s in that newspaper?”
Lex didn’t answer for a long moment, and she was about to ask again when he practically shoved it at her. She took it gingerly, giving him a worried look. He was obviously furious, glaring straight ahead and breathing heavily, clearly caught up in whatever had so upset him. Lowering her eyes to the newspaper, she read the headline and sub-headline out loud.
“‘Princess Cadance Declares Holy Mission. Pledges That Her Goddess’s Love Will Restore Equestria.’ Well that sounds nice of her.” Sonata tilted her head, unsure why that had set her boyfriend off. Maybe it was because this “Cadance” person was a princess? He really didn’t seem to like any of them.
“Keep reading,” hissed Lex, his eyes still aglow with anger.
“Okay, let’s see here. ‘Princess Cadance, the ruler of the Crystal Empire, announced on Tuesday that she would be sending ac-, um, a-co-lee-tes…” She stumbled on the unfamiliar word, trying to sound it out.
“‘Acolytes,’” corrected Lex. “It means low-ranking religious functionaries.”
“Oh, right. ‘…acolytes of her city’s new patron goddess, Lashtada, to outlying parts of Equestria in order to speed the rebuilding efforts. ‘As a pony who’s felt Lashtada’s gentle touch in my own life, I want every pony to have that same chance to find love,’ declared Princess Cadance in her speech. ‘But that can’t happen while so many ponies are still struggling to rebuild their lives after the disasters of the elemental bleeds. As such, I’m sending teams of ponies, blessed with the new magic that comes from accepting Lashtada’s love, to the distant regions of Equestria in order to help with the recovery efforts.’ While details were said to be forthcoming, her husband, Prince Shining Armor, stated that ‘we’re going to start with major cities that still need help, and then focus on the smaller communities that require assistance.’”
Sonata looked up, still confused. “I’m still not seeing what the problem is. I thought you didn’t like the princesses because they weren’t being all active and stuff about running things. It sounds like at least one of them is, now.”
“Think, Sonata!” Lex’s eyes were still off-colored, evidence that his anger had not abated. “It’s been two months since the disasters happened, and yet one of the princesses is just now launching a coordinated, nation-wide effort. Just now, when I’m trying to establish that there’s a better way to govern.”
“Um, when we’re trying, you mean,” interjected Sonata. But Lex wasn’t listening.
“This is not a coincidence. Celestia and Luna put Cadance up to this. It wasn’t enough for them to limit my ideas to just one city and in doing so cripple their efficacy. Now they’re trying to undercut even that!” He punctuated his last sentence with a stomp of his hoof, but the seat cushion swallowed the impact enough that it lacked any real emphasis.
“C’mon, this doesn’t really change anything,” ventured Sonata. She had been hoping that he’d recover his good mood and they could go back to making out, but that was looking increasingly unlikely. Still, she gave it one more try. “I mean, okay so these eco-lites might show up in Vanhoover. So what? A couple of extra ponies won’t make a difference, even if they’re talking about how great Princess Cadance or Lashtoodles or whoever is.”
“It will if they have sacerdotal thaumaturgy. Divine magic,” he translated that last part in response to the quizzical look on Sonata’s face. “Remember what the article said? She’s sending teams of ponies that were ‘blessed with the new magic of Lashtada’s love’? That’s her out-and-out admitting that she’s sending ponies that have learned how to channel divine magic.”
“But you can do that too. I’ve seen you heal injuries and make food out of nowhere,” countered Sonata, but Lex was already shaking his head.
“What little sacerdotal thaumaturgy I had is gone.” It was bitter for him to admit, but the trickle of divine spellcasting he’d been granted had been withdrawn ever since they had returned to Equestria. He had been receiving a hooffull of divine spells from a deity native to Everglow, that awful world that he had found himself stuck in on more than one occasion, called the Night Mare. But after invoking her when he and Sonata, plus several others, had been trapped in the realm of the manipulative goddess Kara, the Night Mare had withdrawn her power from him in recompense. Though he knew that it had been a very small price to pay, the loss of that power was still one that he felt keenly, as the spells that she had granted him had been directly focused on supporting others.
Still, there was little that could be done about it now. The spells he’d received had been the Night Mare’s gift to him, rather than being the result of obeisance the way most deities granted their power to mortals. And god or not, Lex Legis groveled before nopony!
That aside, this latest development had placed him at a severe disadvantage. With the power to heal diseases and produce food from thin air, these missionaries – and Lex had no doubt that’s what they were – would quickly enjoy massive popular support, leaving him with little in the way of public influence, even with Sonata’s considerable charisma.
And the most important thing is that you gain a position of power? Are you not pleased that “your” city will receive dedicated healers to help all of the ponies suffering there? The words cut Lex to the quick, and he only barely managed to suppress a snarl. Without influence, he wouldn’t be able to direct the years-long recovery efforts, let alone demonstrate his principles of governance! The short-term gains that these clerics would bring would come at the cost of the long-term good that he could offer!
“So, like, what do we do?” Sonata glanced out the window, where the sun had by now fully sunk below the horizon. That train attendant had mentioned that they’d arrive in Tall Tale by morning, so if Lex had been spending the last few days trying to come up with a plan before, he wasn’t going to have much time to make changes to it now.
“I’m working on it,” Lex replied curtly. His eyes had changed back to normal though, indicating that he was finally getting his temper under control.
When he didn’t elaborate any further, Sonata sighed. “Alright. I’m gonna go to bed, so I guess tell me whatever you come up with in the morning, 'kay?” A light nod was Lex’s reply, and Sonata paused just long enough to nuzzle him again before heading to the sleeping cars.
She paused at the door, wondering if she should have asked Lex to join her. They had, at his insistence, rented two sleeping rooms, despite each one having enough beds for four ponies. She’d teased him about being shy, and even pointed out that that was an unnecessary use of their funds, but he had been adamant about not sleeping in the same room as her. It had been disappointing, but not totally unexpected. He’d been the same way back when they’d been staying in Drowsy’s inn back on Everglow. There, she’d rented out the entire inn just so they’d have some privacy, but he’d insisted on keeping a separate room. Before she’d thought that he was just old-fashioned. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Entering her room with a sigh, she started getting ready for bed. By the time she slid under the covers, though, she’d recovered most of her earlier good mood. After all, it’s not like he’s not interested, after a kiss like that, she thought, lightly brushing her lips with a hoof.
The thought brought a smile to her lips, and she was still smiling as she fell asleep.
SCREEEEEEEEECH!
“Waaaugh!” Sonata went tumbling out of bed with a cry, thrown from her mattress by the sudden deceleration. Tumbling into the opposite wall with a grunt that was more of surprise than pain, she was pinned there for a moment before the train completed its sudden halt, letting her slump over as the momentum abated.
Kicking her way free of her blankets, Sonata unsteadily climbed to her feet. “What happened?” she asked, only to remember a moment later that there was no one else in her room to answer. Having a moment to catch her breath, she suddenly remembered her traveling companion. Rushing to the door, she stepped out into the hallway, where several other ponies were beginning to mill in fright and confusion.
Pushing past them, she hurried to Lex’s room, throwing the door open. “Lex? Are you-” The room was empty. Biting her lip, she turned and made her way back to the car where she’d last seen him. Geez, what is it with us and trains? she mentally complained as she made her way through the rapidly-filling hallway. The very first adventure she had shared with Lex was when a train that they had been riding back on Everglow had derailed, and now it looked like history was trying to repeat itself!
Finally, she reached the car where she’d left her boyfriend. “Lex, are you in here?”
A pained groan was her answer, and she rushed over to the source of the sound. Slumped over in his seat, Lex was rubbing his head where a large bruise could already be seen forming. “Oh my gosh! You’re hurt!” Even though there was absolutely nothing she could do, she still rushed over to examine his injury.
Lex waved her away. “I just hit my head when the brakes came on, I’ll be fine. More importantly, what happened?”
“I don’t know! I was sleeping and all of a sudden I was thrown out of bed and then I came looking for you!” She glanced around as she spoke, as though the answer to the current situation would make itself obvious. Instead, all she saw was that it was still dark outside. “What time is it anyway?”
“I think it’s a little after midnight,” answered Lex, bending down to start gathering up where his scrolls had been thrown in the sudden stop. He’d clearly still been working when the brakes had been thrown.
He got the last of them back in his bags just as the door to the back of the car opened up, letting several shaken ponies enter. “Do either of you know what’s going on?” asked an older-looking pegasus mare, with her question being echoed by the ponies behind her. Apparently their current circumstances were enough to override their discomfort toward Lex.
Sonata shook her head in response, and the small crowd milled forward slowly, clearly intent on reaching the front of the train to get some answers.
Lex waited until they passed by before speaking. “Sonata, I’m going to go after them and see what caused this.” He could see her opening her mouth, doubtlessly about to insist on accompanying him, and he put a hoof up to forestall her objection. “I want you to go back and check on the other passengers. See if anypony’s hurt or otherwise needs help. If you think that there’s any sort of danger, anything at all, then use your magic to deal with it.”
Sonata’s eyes widened at the instructions. “For realsies?! But you said that using my powers to mess with ponies’ minds was all, like, immoral and stuff.”
“I did, and it is. But there are circumstances were coercive force is required, and imminent danger is one of them.” He turned away from her and started heading towards the front of the train, but not before tossing one last comment over his shoulder as he did so. “I trust your judgment.”
The words brought a big smile to her face, especially after she’d screwed up the whole thing with the train tickets before. “I won’t let you down!” she called after him, saluting before turning and running towards the back of the train.
For his part, Lex had made it two cars forward before the crowd became too thick to push through. He thought about using his own magic to make them part, before the obvious idea came to him, and he used one of the exits to disembark from the train, galloping alongside it until he reached the engine. He was about to climb aboard it and ask the conductor what was going on, when he noticed that the engine’s headlight was still on, and it illuminated a small group of ponies, all of them in railway uniforms, talking in hushed voices.
Lex approached them, about to ask what was going on, but the question died in his throat as the subject of their conversation, and the reason why the train had suddenly thrown its brakes on, became clear.
Up ahead, roughly fifty feet from where the train had stopped, a stretch of railroad track had been torn to pieces. The stone ballast had been scattered wildly, as had the timber sleepers that undergirded the rails. As for the rails themselves, the thick steel bars were not only snapped, but the ends curled in the air, twisted as though they were made of licorice instead of metal.
Unable to help but gawk slightly at the scope of the destruction, Lex approached the group slowly. As he did so, he overheard one of them mutter a comment that, to his mind, perfectly summarized the situation.
For a long moment, Lex simply stared at the twisted wreckage of the railroad track. Though he knew that the odds of this having anything to do with him personally were virtually nil, he couldn’t help but feel slighted. First Sonata had bought the wrong tickets, then Princess Cadance’s sending missionaries to upstage him before he’d even arrived, and now this. It was like the entire endeavor was cursed.
Shaking off his self-pity, Lex approached the group of ponies in railway-worker uniforms that were huddled in front of the ruined tracks. “What happened here?” he called out as he neared them. He doubted they’d have any answers, but given that they rode trains for a living, maybe they’d have some sort of insight, no matter how slight.
It was a slim hope to begin with, and it was dashed a moment later as the group turned to face him. “‘What happened here?’” echoed a middle-aged-looking unicorn. “Something done torn up the track is what happened here! Look at this mess! Never seen anything like it in all my years.”
There was a murmur of assent from the rest of the group, and the old unicorn continued. “It’s a good thing that I was keeping such a close eye on things, otherwise this’d been ten times worse!” He turned to regard his fellows, his tone turning lecturing. “You see? This is why a real engineer never slacks off on the job, no matter how many times he’s been over a route!”
Lex, however, wasn’t concerned with the instructional value of the narrowly-averted disaster. “But what happens now? How do we get to Tall Tale?”
The engineer turned back to him, his face making it clear what he thought of the question. “Son, are you daft? We’re not getting to Tall Tale with the track like this!” He waved a hoof at the devastation behind him. “Nothing we can do except throw the train into reverse and head on back. We’ll let the authorities know and they’ll send out a team to make some repairs. Shouldn’t take more than a couple a’ weeks to get it all patched up.”
“A couple of weeks?” Lex fought down a surge of anxiety at the pronouncement. There had to be some other option!
The older unicorn seemed to sense Lex’s distress. “Listen son, it’s not the end of the world. If you really need to get to Tall Tale so bad, you can ride back to Canterlot and switch lines to go to Vanhoover. That’s darn close, though you’ll need to get to Tall Tale from there on your own, since the marshlands make it downright impossible to lay decent tracks.”
“How long will that take?” asked Lex through gritted teeth. He didn’t bother to correct the stallion about his ultimate destination.
“Well, we’ll need four days to get back, since we’ll want to go a little slower in reverse just to be safe. After that, you’ll need five days to get from Canterlot to Vanhoover, since you’ve gotta go around the mountains. And I’d have to check the schedule, but you might need to wait a couple a’ days to catch the next train to Vanhoover anyway. So I’d say about a week-and-a-half or so, two weeks at most.”
Lex opened his mouth to say exactly what he thought of that option, but before he could he was interrupted by the sound of Sonata calling his name, an edge of worry in her voice that instantly captured his attention, making him turn to face her as she came galloping up to join him. “What’s wrong?”
“Bad news! The passengers are-, whoa!” She stopped instantly at the sight of the wrecked tracks, eyes wide. “Like, what happened here?!”
Putting a hoof under her chin, Lex turned her to face him. “Sonata, focus! The passengers! What happened?”
“Oh yeah! The passengers are all, like, super spooked!”
A pregnant pause ensued, until it slowly dawned on everypony there that that was all she had to say. “What…that’s it?” sputtered Lex.
Sonata nodded, a serious expression on her face. “Yeah! They’re all totes freaked out that we’ve just stopped in the middle of nowhere! I think some of them have caught a glimpse of what’s going on, because I heard some of them saying something was wrong with the track, but I had no idea it was like this.”
She looked at the twisted metal that had once been the rails again, seeming to consider them. “Though when you look at it more, it’s really not all that frightening. I mean, I once used a spell to totally pump myself up so that I could bend metal just like that really easily. You remember that? It was after that other train we were on had wrecked, and we were looking for survivors.” She smiled, apparently remembering the incident fondly.
She was alone in her sentimentality, as several of the railway workers had raised eyebrows in response to her story. “I, um, I should go back to the passengers. Try to calm them down,” ventured one of them. Several agreements were murmured, and the gathering began to break up and head back to the train.
Only the unicorn engineer stayed behind, walking up to Sonata with a curious look on his face. “Little lady, I’ve never heard of a pony casting spells if they’re not a unicorn, but if you weren’t pulling our legs with that story, then could you maybe do something about that stretch of track?”
“Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. Putting a hoof to her chin, she looked upwards in consideration before glancing at the tracks and giving a loud “hmm.” She repeated the process a few times before finally admitting, “Sorries. But I don’t have any spells to fix stuff, and I don’t think that just bending the tracks back will be enough. I mean, they look totally trashed.” Despite her diagnosis, she was smiling. “But I totally bet this guy here can fix things!” She pointed at Lex and continued. “He’s, like, a genius, and he’s got super awesome magic!”
Lex didn’t seem to appreciate her vote of confidence. In fact, he shifted rather uncomfortably in response. “Sonata…there’s nothing I can do to fix this.”
“No way! I thought you’d have, I dunno, nine different plans for how to make this all better!”
He shook his head, slightly shamefaced at not living up to her expectations, but he had already considered his capabilities in response to the current situation and come to the conclusion that repairing the tracks was beyond him. He had known a spell that might have been able to repair even this extensive level of damage…but it had been one of the spells that the Night Mare had withdrawn from him after he’d lost her favor.
The other option was to call upon the dark magic of King Sombra that he’d inherited when he’d grafted his horn onto himself. One of the primary powers it had granted him was to crystalize pure darkness into any shape he desired, though the more mass it had, the more power it required to create. Moreover, such objects were always far stronger than steel. Using that, it wouldn’t have been unduly difficult to create a blade and cut away the broken rails, and then make new rail lines to replace the old ones.
Unfortunately, Lex had been forced to reject that option as well. Even though he could create rails, he couldn’t conjure enough material to fill in the deep gouges in the underlying ballast, and without that the train would tip over even if the rails were secured. Besides, the crystal objects he created could only last for an hour or so before they crumbled into nothing, so even if he could have gotten the train past this obstacle he would have needed to be present on the return trip to do so again, since stranding it on the last leg of its journey was clearly less viable for the train and its operators than simply reversing course.
Sensing Lex’s disappointment, Sonata stepped closer to him, putting a hoof on his shoulder. “Well, it’s no big deal. I mean, we’re almost all of the way there anyway.” She turned to look at the engineer. “Right?”
He nodded. “By my reckoning, we’re only about a hundred miles or so from Tall Tale. It’s a shame to have to go back when we’re most of the way there, but those’re the cards we’ve been dealt.”
He had barely finished speaking when Lex cut in. “Wait, a hundred miles?” He cast an evaluating look back at the train, then returned his gaze to the older unicorn. “We were told that we wouldn’t get to Tall Tale until morning, and it’s only a little after midnight now. This train should be able to go fast enough that it could easily have reached the city before sunrise. Why were we going so slow?”
The engineer burst into laughter, not so much at the question but at the clear suspicion with which Lex had asked it. “There’s no mystery to it, son. It’s just that it’s pretty inconvenient for most of the passengers to arrive in the middle of the night. We’d have to go and wake them up to let them know we were here, and then they’d have to wander around the city in the dark. Most of them are likely visitors who would need to wake up the friends and relatives that they were visiting, and so on. Nopony wants that, so we just cut back on the coal and cruise at a mellow pace so that we get there just when Princess Celestia’s bringing the sun up.”
His good humor faltered a bit as he glanced at the wreckage one more time. “Truth is, I doubt we could have managed to stop in time if we hadn’t already cut the speed.”
Shuddering, he returned his gaze to Lex and Sonata. “Listen, I didn’t want to focus on this so as not to cause any more consternation among the rest of the staff, and, well, I guess I didn’t want to think about it either, but…” he paused as his eyes flickered between the two of them before coming to rest on Lex. “From what the little lady was saying, you two sound like you have some experience with this sort of business, so I can’t help but ask: do you have any idea what could have done this?”
Sonata shook her head immediately before turning to Lex with a questioning look. His brow furrowed in thought, not answering immediately. Instead, he took a step closer to the wreckage.
Slowly, Lex walked around the mangled area, taking the entire scene in, then glancing around the surrounding area, before returning to the waiting pair. “If I had to guess, I’d say that a dragon did this.”
“A dragon?!” The responses came from Sonata and the engineer in chorus, though the former sounded almost excited where the latter sounded panicked.
“Oh wow!” gushed Sonata. “Just imagine if we can find where the dragon lives and defeat it! We’d be dragonslayers!” The thought left her starry-eyed, and she grinned widely as, in her imagination, a huge parade was held in their honor for defeating the monster. “That’ll be, like, super-duper awesome!”
“Now just hold on a minute. I admit I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head that could’ve done something like this, but that doesn’t mean that it was a dragon!” The engineer seemed spooked just from considering the notion, glancing around as though he expected the creature to suddenly leap down at any moment.
“A dragon would fit most of the clues left behind. Look at how much damage there is; this level of strength would require that the creature be of exceptional size, and yet,” he waved a hoof to the side, “we’re surrounded by trees on both sides, with no evidence that they’ve been disturbed by anything particularly massive. That would mean that the creature was flying.”
“Well, I guess,” admitted the middle-aged stallion. “But didn’t the little lady just admit that she could use magic to make her just as strong? Maybe this was something that could do something similar.”
“Possibly, but I’m not detecting any lingering magical auras.” Lex ignored the confused expression on the other unicorn’s face, not wanting to get sidetracked with explaining how the circlet he wore allowed him to detect magical emanations. “Moreover, something that could leave such large claw marks inside the area of devastation wouldn’t need magic to augment its strength.”
“Claw marks?” blinked Sonata, trotting over to look. The headlight from the engine cast uneven shadows around the area, making it difficult to see any details. It was only by chanting a spell and conjuring up a light of her own that she was able to confirm that there were deep claw marks, several inches long, where the track had been torn up.
“Huh, I’ll admit that I’m impressed that you were able to see that, son, but that’s still not very-“
“And finally,” Lex interrupted, “there’s the broken ends of the rail.”
Curiosity at Lex’s pronouncement caused the other two to move closer to the twisted metal. “Like, what about them? They just look all mangled to me.”
“Look closer,” urged Lex.
The two peered at them for a time, before the engineer suddenly piped up with wide eyes. “Well I’ll be! I thought they’d just been torn, but this…this is something else.”
Sonata glanced between the engineer and Lex, who was nodding sagely, still not seeing what they did. “What? What about it?”
The engineer looked turned to face her. “Railroad track is made special, so the metal doesn’t get too brittle. If it was, then exposure to the elements would weaken it enough so that when the train came through, the pressure would cause it to snap. That’s why something really strong could twist the tracks around before actually snapping them.”
He looked back to the jagged ends of the track as he continued. “I thought that’s what happened here, that these ends were all warped-looking because they’d been stretched out before they finally split, but that’s not the case.”
Pausing for just a moment, he finally revealed. “They’ve been melted. You know, from a fire…like the sort a dragon breathes.”
“Wow…” whispered a wide-eyed Sonata, though whether she was in awe from her boyfriend’s deductive work or from the idea of a fire-breathing dragon was unclear.
Off to the side, Lex frowned. The ends of the track were indeed melted, but it hadn’t been from fire. There were no scorch marks anywhere that he’d seen, and something breathing fire should have left them all over the place. It seemed more likely to him that the melted metal was the work of some sort of powerful solvent, but that poked a big hole in the theory that a dragon was responsible for this. He’d heard stories about dragons from all over Equestria, and they all had the common trait that such creatures were fire-breathers.
Lex was drawn from his thoughts by the engineer giving him a pat on the back. “I’ll admit, that was some pretty fine detective work, son. Your girl was right when she said you were a genius. C’mon, I’ll upgrade you to two to first-class on the way back.” The conversation was apparently over at that point, as he started back towards the train.
“That will not be necessary,” replied Lex, holding out a hoof to stop Sonata from returning to the train as well.
“Huh? What are you talking about?” The engineer blinked in surprise.
“We will not be returning with you,” answered Lex. “We’re going to walk the rest of the way to Tall Tale.”
“Son, I’ll ask you one last time: you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” answered Lex flatly, not bothering to look up from the food he was wrapping. This was the fourth time the engineer had asked him that in the fifteen minutes since he’d stated his intention to continue on to Tall Tale without the train. The idea that repeatedly asking the question would somehow elicit a different answer was enough to make him roll his eyes.
Before the engineer could try and talk him out of it again, Sonata exited the train and trotted over to them, balancing two trays of food on her back. “This is the last of it,” she announced, setting them down beside Lex. “I made sure to get extra sugary treats, so that we’ll have plenty of energy for the walk there!”
She grinned with pride at her reasoning, not noticing Lex’s wince. He much preferred bland food.
“Your stallion’s still keen on going through with this. What about you, little lady? It’s not too late to catch a ride back with us,” the older unicorn reiterated as he turned his worry-filled gaze on Sonata.
She smiled at his concern, but waved it off. “Don’t worry about us. We’re totes going to slay that dragon and become super-awesome heroes! You’ll be able to tell every pony about how you were there at the beginning of our adventure!”
The engineer made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort. “I still think this idea is completely daft, but if you two want to go walking along a hundred miles of empty track all by yourself with a dragon on the loose, I can’t stop you.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but a shout from one of his attendants that they were ready to go turned his attention back to the train.
Giving them one last backward glance, he slowly returned to the engine and climbed aboard. A moment later the train began to lurch backward, picking up speed as it began its impromptu return journey. Conjuring a soft light as the shine of the engine’s headlight began to recede, Sonata animatedly waved goodbye to the departing vehicle.
Lex ignored the departing locomotive entirely, placing the last of the food in his pack. Although his haversack was enchanted so that each of its pockets had storage capacity far in excess of what their appearance suggested – with the central pouch being notably deeper than its two counterparts on the sides – the multiplicity of items that he had already placed into it during his time on Everglow, where he had originally acquired this particular bauble, made it so that the five days’ worth of food that he and Sonata had bought for themselves had barely fit into storage.
Normally, Lex would have fussed over the placement of edible items alongside his myriad scrolls, gemstones, and other collections of materials. Concerns such as the food getting squished or staining his things would have caused him a great deal of consternation. However, the magic that allowed his pack to hold such a prodigious capacity of things without increasing its size or weight had likewise eliminated this problem.
Since the folded space within the haversack’s pockets was isolated from the world outside of it, accessible only by each pouch’s mouth, this meant that the contents of each pocket were not subject to jostling or bumping. Regardless of how delicately the contents were arranged, their placement would not be disturbed even if the wearer of the backpack were to turn cartwheels.
By themselves, these features were remarkable enough. But what Lex truly found ingenious about the simple-looking backpack was how it allowed for the convenient retrieval of stored materials. Even the most diligent packing job would be disrupted if you needed to dig through the stuff on top in order to reach what was on the bottom. But the way the haversack manipulated space cleverly allowed for even this inconvenience to be avoided.
Rather than having to root through the contents, whatever item was desired was always the top-most item, placed just under the leather flap as though eagerly waiting to be retrieved. Lex had experimented with this function several times, curious about how the pack was able to accomplish this without displacing any of the other materials placed in a given pocket. What he had eventually discovered was that the haversack was subtly rearranging the orientation of the opening of its pouches with regards to its contents every time they was opened. In this way, the “top” item was whatever the user wanted it to be.
It was, in other words, a device of truly impressive utility. To Lex’s mind, it perfectly underscored why Equestria needed his leadership. An item like this couldn’t currently be produced in Equestria without extraordinary effort; while creating minor magic items could be done without undue difficulty, such materials were extremely limited in what they could accomplish. Anything that approached the level of complexity exhibited by this pack was virtually unknown, relegated to the realm of near-mythical creations by the greatest of unicorn wizards, such as the sage Meadowbrook, Aponyus of Maretonia, or Star-Swirl the Bearded. Everglow, by contrast, considered this a minor item, a modest luxury that could be found in most magic shops.
The disparity was unsurprising, at least to Lex, who was keenly aware that the magic of Everglow was more advanced than that of Equestria. Indeed, knowing what he did about Everglow, such a discrepancy between it and his native world was only to be expected. Unlike his homeland, Everglow was a world where strife and chaos were the natural state of things, and civilization and security needed to be forcibly maintained. It was little wonder then that the magic used by the ponies of Everglow was so much stronger than that used by their Equestrian counterparts; it had to be, in order to stand up to myriad threats that were accepted as a natural part of their world.
Lex understood all of this, and yet he still found it to be a poor excuse for the fact that the native magic of his home-world was so feeble in comparison. Or rather, that it had existed in such a meager state for so long, with no change between the era he had been born into and now.
A pony that paid careful attention to their diet and got enough exercise had an excellent chance of living to see a full century, even if only barely. Those few unicorns that reached the highest tiers of Equestrian magic could learn a spell to manipulate aging that would let them have a lifespan three times as long as their fellows before its efficacy was expended. Lex, in comparison, was more than a thousand years distant from the time of his birth. But that millennium had not been one that he’d personally lived out; rather, he’d spent it locked away in stasis along with the Crystal Empire, the victim of King Sombra’s curse when the tyrant had been defeated by Princess Celestia and Princess Luna.
Upon his – and the Crystal Empire’s – return, Lex had been horrified to find that Equestria had virtually stood still in his absence, with no real change to speak of having occurred. While minor differences could be found in abundance, such as Celestia and Luna now ruling from Canterlot instead of maintaining a separate castle of their own, or how small towns and hamlets had risen and fallen in the interim, everything that was even remotely substantive had not changed in the slightest.
No new forms of magic. No breakthroughs in technology. No advances in culture.
Equestria, his beloved and beautiful homeland, had become stagnant.
Lex placed the blame for this squarely on the alicorn sisters who ruled the land. To his mind, one of the central responsibilities of leadership was to nurture the growth of new ideas and innovation. Progress should be encouraged even if there wasn’t some sort of existential necessity for it, the way it was on Everglow. There was a reason why the root of “leadership” was “lead”; to be a ruler was to chart a course forward, not to sit back and do nothing as everything ground to a halt.
Lex had attempted to share this wisdom with Princess Celestia, appearing before her six weeks ago and broadly outlining her and her sister’s myriad failures and how, if they would just abdicate in favor of his rulership, he would correct their mistakes and plot a new, better course for Equestria. But he had been denied, his ideas cast aside without any consideration in favor of her simplistic ideology of “it’s a virtue, not a vice, to let ponies govern themselves.”
He had been prepared for a vigorous debate, be it on politics, economics, or philosophy. He had not been prepared for such self-righteous simplemindedness. In the face of such willful incompetence, such deliberate intransigence that would neither correct its own flaws nor allow anyone else to do so, Lex had taken the only course left to him, and declared open rebellion against the alicorn sisters’ rule.
That he’d needed to flee Equestria immediately after doing so was a humiliation that still gnawed at him. But there had been no other choice; for all his fiery words about casting Celestia and Luna down by force, he knew that he had little hope of victory should he face them in battle. Retreating to Everglow, where the abundant magic and myriad dangers could serve as a crucible, was the only practical course of action to take.
Retreating to Everglow…and to Sonata.
Though he’d only met the beautiful sea pony – a breed of pony that was unknown on Equestria, but was apparently similar enough to an earth pony that the difference struck him as little more than academic – a short time before, they had, to his everlasting surprise, developed a rapport, even going on a date together. Since a misunderstanding had caused her to remain behind on Everglow when Lex had returned to Equestria, he had run to Sonata’s side without hesitation upon going back to that world.
He had been wise to do so. Although he had been intent on making plans for gaining power enough to wage war on Celestia and Luna, Sonata had counseled him otherwise. She was the one who had, again and again during their conversations, insisted that there was a better manner of getting what he wanted than by using force. Instead, she had urged him to limit his ambitions, to negotiate for a deal that was more amenable to both sides, even if that meant that he would receive less than absolute rulership of all Equestria.
He had strongly resisted her advice at first, but to his astonishment she won him over to her point of view during their time together. Not completely, of course; he was still firmly convinced that he could manage Equestria far more adroitly than Celestia and Luna, and was still intent on making that happen. But she’d somehow convinced him that it was better to reliably achieve something small, rather than potentially fail completely while trying to accomplish everything in one fell swoop.
That hadn’t been the only revelation she’d given him. The other had been that, at some point during their time together, his uncharacteristic appreciation for her presence had turned into genuine affection, which had shortly thereafter blossomed into love. He hadn’t even realized it at first. It was only when he’d thought she was in danger that he’d realized just how much he needed her, and that realization had pushed him to confess his feelings. Even though she had already admitted that she loved him too, telling her that he’d fallen for her had simultaneously been the most terrifying and most thrilling moment of his life.
Watching her now, as she kept waving goodbye to the train she had mistakenly gotten them onto in the first place, he was struck by how much his feelings for her and his ambitions for the future had become intertwined. But rather than upset him, he felt comforted by that. It seemed natural, and correct, that the most important things in his life had become so intricately bound together.
Finally convinced that the train was completely out of sight, Sonata turned to Lex. “So! What’s the plan?” she asked in a chipper voice.
He was quiet for a moment before answering. “Sonata…I’m glad you’re here with me, and…I love you very much.”
A look of surprise blossomed on Sonata’s face – it was the second time he had ambush-romanced her today! – before it melted into a smile. It wasn’t her usual cheerful grin, but rather a look of heartfelt joy. Closing the small distance between them, she kissed him before responding, “I love you too.”
Stepping back, her usual excitement returned full-force. “Now let’s go slay us a dragon!”
Sonata giggled to herself as she and Lex walked along the tracks, tossing between her hooves the rock that she’d enchanted to cast light. “This is so cool!” she gushed. It had been maybe ten minutes since the train had left, and she was eagerly looking forward to some excitement after three days of staring out the train windows. “Just you and me against a big, nasty dragon! Ooh, I can’t wait until we beat it and tell everypony how we did it! Hey, do you think we can have a concert afterwards? I’d, like, totes love to sing about-”
“We’re stopping here,” announced Lex suddenly, cutting her off.
“Huh? Why?” Sonata blinked in surprise, looking around. As far as she could see, there was nothing particularly notable about the place Lex had picked. “Are we near the dragon’s lair?”
Lex sighed. She had been going on nonstop about dragon-this and dragon-that ever since he’d put forth his theory as to what had ruined the rail line, and while he enjoyed hearing the sound of her voice, that didn’t mean that the content of what she was saying was at all worth listening to. “Sonata, we haven’t conclusively determined that it was a dragon that did that to the tracks. It could be something else entirely.”
“Really? If it’s not a dragon then, like, what is it then?”
“I don’t know; that’s the point.” Lex spoke slowly, as though trying to explain the concept to a child.
“But then it could be a dragon, right?” asked Sonata with a grin.
Lex closed his eyes for a long moment before grudgingly replying. “Yes…”
“Cool! So, like, what’s around here?” she checked the area again. Just like the last time she’d looked around, whatever had enticed Lex to stop here eluded her, making her turn to face him again in expectation.
“Nothing.”
“Awesome! Then we-, wait, nothing?”
“Not that I can see,” shrugged Lex, before stepping off of the tracks and moving towards the treeline.
“But then why are we stopping here?” Sonata rushed to keep up with him. “And where are you going?”
“‘Why are we stopping?’” echoed Lex with a slightly incredulous tone in his voice, as though he couldn’t believe she needed to ask. “We’re stopping because it’s the middle of the night and I’m exhausted, that’s why. And it seemed like a better idea to move away from the track before we settled in, since that’s the area with the least cover.”
“Oh, right. I forgot you hadn’t gone to sleep before the train stopped.” The memory reminded her of how he always insisted on sleeping alone, and it made her frown. She shooed the unpleasant thought away, focusing instead on something else. “I get the whole ‘cover’ thing, but isn’t going into the woods just as dangerous?”
“White Tail Woods isn’t like the Everfree Forest,” explained Lex as they reached the edge of the trees. “It’s rare for monsters to be found here. Since whatever tore up the rail line was most likely flying, it’s more prudent to camp out where we can’t be seen from the air.” He kept walking as he spoke, leading them deeper into the forest…but only about thirty feet before he stopped. “This should be sufficient.”
Reaching into his pack, he pulled out a ball of thick string. Unwrapping several feet of it, he used his telekinesis to break it off, replacing the ball in his haversack. He adjusted his circlet before making several gestures and muttering the words of the spell, tossing the length of string he’d cut into the air. Rather than falling, it hung in the air, anchored in empty space.
“Oh, I remember you telling me about this!” exclaimed Sonata. “At the other end of the rope is a magic tree-fort, right?”
“‘Tree-fort’?” muttered Lex quietly to himself, a pained look crossing his face. Deciding that it wasn't worth getting into, he waved a hoof towards the rope. “…right. So anyway, you go ahead. I’m going to cast some more defensive spells.”
Sonata started towards the rope, but stopped at the base of it, her eyes moving back toward Lex. The way he’d told her to go ahead of him had brought back her earlier thoughts about how he never wanted to room with her, and it was enough to suddenly make her suspicious. “You are going to come up here too after you finish, right?”
“Once everything is secured,” he nodded. It was enough to dispel Sonata’s fears, and she smiled as she began climbing, her anxiety put to rest. Reaching the top of the rope, she gave an excited squeal as she passed through the faint shimmer at the top of it, and came out into a plain, featureless room.
“Huh. I didn’t think it’d be quite so…empty,” she remarked aloud as she stepped further in. The room was about fifteen feet in each direction, and the entire thing was an icky, off-white color, like milk that had started to curdle. Extinguishing the light spell she’d cast on her rock, Sonata noted that the room was bathed in soft light, though it didn’t seem to come from any particular source.
Moving over to a corner and settling down, Sonata glanced back at the entrance to wait for Lex. The area around the edge of the rope was completely black in a large area, and it took her a moment to realize that it was showing her the outside, which was now completely dark since she’d taken the only light source with her. She debated casting another light spell on the rock and tossing it down to Lex, but decided against it. He probably had some other means of seeing in the dark, and she didn’t want to do something dumb like hit him in the head just when he was climbing up to join her.
Congratulating herself on her foresight, Sonata lowered her head to the ground, but kept her eyes fixed on the entrance, wanting to wait for Lex to arrive before going to sleep.
After what felt like a few minutes, she rolled onto her back, idly kicking her hooves in the air in boredom. How long could it take to cast a couple of spells? Frowning, she sat up. Maybe she should go check on him, just to make sure everything was okay? Or would that bother him if she did?
Deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt, she settled back down, turning onto her other side to try and get more comfortable. Long seconds ticked by, or was it minutes by now? Sighing, she turned back onto her hooves. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just look in on him really quick?
“Lex? Everything okay?” she called tentatively. When no response came, she could feel herself starting to become worried. “Lex?” Still no answer.
Worried, she got to her hooves. Did sound even travel through this place? What if something had happened to him after she’d left? Oh no! What if the dragon had come back?! Alarmed, Sonata cast another light spell on her rock before kicking it through the entrance of the room, diving after it as she practically leapt down the rope. “Lex!”
“Wha-?!” Lex’s answering cry instantly got her attention, drawing her eyes to where he was…sitting up from where he’d been resting his head on his pack at the base of a tree. No, from where he’d been sleeping at the base of a tree.
“What were you doing down here? I thought you were going to join me up there once you were done?” There was a harsh edge in her voice. He hadn’t been planning on joining her at all!
Bleary-eyed, Lex tried to get a handle on what was happening. “Sonata? What are you-”
“You lied to me! I can’t believe you!” She could feel herself getting angrier, and she didn’t resist it. It wasn’t so much that he hadn’t done what he said, but rather that his apparent determination not to sleep near her felt like he was keeping her at forelegs’ length, and that hurt.
“Hold on!” Lex protested, more fully awake now, but Sonata would not be stopped.
“I really can’t believe you!” She was yelling now. “You tell me you’re glad I’m here, you kiss me like you’re head-over-hooves for me, but you can’t stand the thought of sleeping in the same room as me?! What, do you think I’m going to try and cast a spell on you while you’re asleep?! Is that it?! You don’t trust that somepony that was a Siren won’t try and use her oh-so-immoral magic to-”
“Sonata! Calm down and listen to me!” Lex went over and put his hooves on her shoulders, demanding her attention. “I didn’t go up there with you because I realized that there was a problem, and I was trying to figure out what to do about it!”
Sonata shook him off, taking a step back, clearly not completely mollified. “What problem?”
Lex pointed a hoof at his haversack. “I realized that this pack and the space I created were both extradimensional, and it’s dangerous to put one extradimensional space inside of another. I sat down to try and figure out what to do about it, and I must have fallen asleep.”
“That’s all?” Sonata frowned. “Why didn’t you just, I dunno, just bury it in leaves or something to hide it and then come up?”
“If something happened to these supplies we’d be in a pinch. It was too risky.”
Sonata’s frown deepened. Something didn’t add up. “What do you mean ‘too risky’? You’re the one who said that this place is supposed to be safe, remember?”
Lex started, clearly caught off-guard by having his previous words thrown back at him, and Sonata couldn’t resist giving him a nasty smirk. “I may not be as smart as you, but I know when someone’s trying to mess around with me. I have a lot of experience with that thanks to my sisters.” She trotted closer to him, and this time it was her turn to reach out with a hoof, putting it under his muzzle and making him look her in the eye. “Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”
Neither noticed her inadvertent double-entendre, and Lex paused. Sonata, who could feel her anger abating, waited patiently for him to collect his thoughts.
After a moment, Lex stepped back, looking at the ground. “I wasn’t lying before, there really is an issue with taking the bag into that space I made,” he muttered. The way he was pouting and refusing to meet her eyes made Sonata think that he looked like a little colt who had been caught doing something bad.
“But that’s not, like, all there is to it, is there?” she prompted. A long moment passed, and then Lex shook his head.
He didn’t seem to want to say anything else, so Sonata went over and nuzzled him. “Tell me,” she said softly.
Lex looked up, obviously surprised that she had suddenly taken a soft approach, before glancing away again, looking supremely uncomfortable. She didn’t press him again, and after several seconds he quietly spoke. “…I have nightmares.”
Sonata blinked. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but it hadn’t been that. “Nightmares?” He nodded, and the mortified look on his face only confused her more. “But, everyone has nightmares sometimes. I had one last week where a giant taco was eating me. They’re scary when they happen, but they’re not a big deal.”
“I have them every night,” Lex admitted in a small voice.
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Every night? Like, every single night?”
He nodded again, and she went over and hugged him, causing him to stiffen in surprise for a moment before he slowly relaxed. “That sounds totes awful, but why does that make you want to sleep alone? I’d absolutely want someone there if I had nightmares all the time.”
Lex sighed. “I don’t know if I thrash or cry out in my sleep, and I…I didn’t want you to see me like that.”
Sonata didn’t respond, and they stayed like that, with her embracing him, for a minute before she finally let him go. Trotting over to where his haversack was, she started to push leaves onto it.
“What are you doing?” asked Lex.
“I’m burying this so that it’ll be harder to find, and then we’re going to bed,” she responded matter-of-factly.
He started to protest, but she cut him off before he could get a word out. “No but’s. We’re going inside that tree-fort you conjured up and then we’re both going to get a good night’s sleep. Period.”
Lex started to say something else, but couldn’t manage to get the words out. He was physically exhausted, mentally spent, and emotionally drained. Normally, none of that would have been enough to make him back down from a conflict, but this just…felt different. For some reason he couldn’t conjure up his usual stubbornness and indignation. So when Sonata finished burying his pack under the leaves a minute and nudged him towards the rope, he didn’t protest.
Climbing up it, she followed behind him. He glanced back at her in a silent question, and she smiled at him reassuringly. “Go on.”
Moving over to a corner, he slowly settled down, and an instant later she was by his side, gently leaning against him. He softly let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, and felt his muscles release their tension. He closed his eyes, and a few moments later his weariness caught up to him and he fell asleep.
Sonata watched him for a little bit before leaning over and planting a kiss on his cheek. “Sweet dreams, Lex.”
Lex woke up with a start, breathing heavily as he abruptly transferred from sleep to full wakefulness, his brain immediately processing everything around him with a speed borne of fright. An off-white room. Light pouring in from the window around the entrance. A warm body pressed against him. Soft breathing coming from beside him. No scents.
A fraction of an instant later his memories of last night came back to him, and he instantaneously clamped down on the intense anxiety that he felt, recognizing that it was a phantom from his dreams that had no place in his current situation. This was his usual morning routine, and it was not a pleasant one, but he’d had no choice but to get used to it since it had been almost ten months since he’d last slept peacefully.
Still, it could have been worse. Although he'd heard that Princess Luna had the power to enter a pony's dreams, and often made use of it to soothe the nightmares of her subjects, she had never once done so for him, much to his relief. The thought of somepony else – especially one of those wretched princesses! – rooting through his mind was a prospect he found far, far more terrifying than any bad dreams. Presumably his horn's dark magic was warding her off, but without any way to actively test that, it remained only a theory; he'd have preferred to have more concrete knowledge, but like so much else about his current situation, he'd need to make do with what he had.
Letting out a breath, he turned his head to regard Sonata, who was still asleep, not having moved from where she’d laid down beside him last night. He regarded her for a long moment, his face not showing any of the torrent of emotions he felt as he thought back to last night. Glancing back at the sunlight streaming in, he put his ruminations aside and nuzzled her. “Sonata. Wake up.”
He had to repeat the process twice more before she began to stir, yawning as she opened her eyes. “Mmm…morning Lex,” she smiled up at him as she rubbed her eyes, before moving in and complementing her words with a kiss.
He blinked, his eyes remaining open in surprise as she pressed her lips to him. After what had definitely felt like a fight the previous evening, it made no sense to him that she’d be amorous this morning. He thought about asking her to explain the reasons for her current temperment, but put it aside in favor of a simple “Good morning” in reply.
She stood up and stretched, and Lex rose a moment later, heading immediately for the entrance and sliding down the rope. A bit put out that they couldn’t enjoy waking up together a bit more, Sonata followed him.
Once exiting the extradimensional room, she found Lex scattering the leaves she’d bunched up the previous night, retrieving his pack with a sigh of relief. “See?” she called out. “Told you it’d be fine.”
“It was still a risk that we shouldn’t have had to take. Given the number of setbacks we’ve experienced so far, I’m not inclined to allow for any more possibilities of misfortune if I can help it.”
Sonata rolled her eyes, but the corners of her mouth turned up in a wry grin. “Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ll come up with an idea by tonight, Mister Super Genius. Now come on, dig some of the food out of that thing and let’s have breakfast!”
Breakfast had been a brief affair, with Sonata scarfing down several raspberry oat cakes while Lex stuck to a plain muffin. After sipping some water from a canteen, they made their way back to the tracks and – after Lex had spent a half-hour closely examining the wreckage in the light of day just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything – resumed following them towards Tall Tale. Several hours had passed since then, with the pair making light conversation as they traveled.
“So, like, what’s the plan for when we fight the dragon?” Sonata asked. After a nice heart-to-heart with her boyfriend and a yummy breakfast, she felt ready to take on the world!
“Dragons are little better than animals,” snorted Lex derisively, as much towards her continued belief that there would be a dragon for them to face as it was towards the subject of dragons themselves. “There’s not much information about their social patterns or society, but based on what I’ve read, that’s because they don’t have much of either one.”
“Oh yeah?”
Lex nodded. “They have a modicum of intelligence when they’re young, but as they get older they become more bestial even as they grow in mass. If the creature was large enough to do that level of damage to the tracks, then it won’t be capable of much in the way of cognitive abilities. And we’re going to use that to our advantage.”
“Ooh, I like where this is going!” Sonata squealed.
Lex rolled his eyes before continuing. “Since they breathe fire, I’ll cast a spell to resist damaging heat on both of us. Their scales are powerful armor against physical and magical attacks, but I’ll use my dark magic to lay some curses that will erode that.” He glanced at Sombra’s horn-, no, he glanced at his horn, before returning his gaze to the path ahead of them.
“Awesome! What else?” Sonata pressed him. Unlike Lex, her eyes were glued to her companion. She loved seeing him this way; he was so cool when he was making plans like this, the very picture of confidence!
“Once I’ve done that, your job will be to hang back, away from its claws and fangs, and use your enchantments to keep its thoughts muddled so that it can’t muster a counterattack. While you do that, I’ll use deadlier magic to bring it down. If it tries to fly, then I’ll use dark magic to turn into a shadow and follow it until I can force it back to the ground.”
“So my job is just to stay in the background and make sure it can’t eat you while you get in there and do everything else?” Sonata pouted. “I wanted to be more than a backup singer.”
“Do you have any spells that can cause physical harm, or defend against damage?” countered Lex.
Sonata raised her eyes in thought, and after what Lex thought was far too long of a time, finally shook her head “Nope. Pretty much all the magic I know is about messing with someone’s head.”
“Precisely. That’s why it’s better for you to play a support role. Besides, I’d prefer you to be away from danger so that I can better focus on the situation at hoof.” A memory came to him as he said that, remembering when he and Sonata – alongside Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, and several others – had attacked a group of gnolls back on Everglow. One of the creatures had known some magic, and Lex could clearly recall the sense of panic he’d felt when Sonata had been hit with a fireball. She had only been singed, but just the thought of her being hurt like that again was enough to make him feel sick.
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” Her cheerful voice drew him from his reverie, and he glanced over at her, just now noticing her intense gaze. “You know, you can be really nice when you put your…your…”
She trailed off as, rounding a bend, something came into view that was enough to stop both ponies in their tracks.
“Like, is that what I think it is?” asked Sonata, her eyes widening.
“Yes,” replied Lex. Unlike her, his eyes were narrowing at the sight. Without another word, he started to gallop forward, and Sonata was right behind him.
Dead ahead of them was another devastated section of railroad track.
“It’s the same,” concluded Lex. He’d spent ten minutes eyeing the damage, and it was virtually identical to the one several miles back, having deep claw marks that had shredded not just the steel rails, but had also scattered the sleepers and cut deep gouges into the underlying ballast.
More notably, at least to Lex’s eyes, was that the broken ends of the rails were once again deformed in a way that suggested that they had been melted. It was the one discordant element in what otherwise seemed like the rampage of some sort of gigantic beast.
No, Lex realized suddenly, there’s one other thing that’s unusual about this.
“Wow, this dragon really hates trains. I mean it totes hates them,” remarked Sonata, pawing at the gashes cut into the ground. “Maybe one ran over its mother or something?”
“This was deliberate,” murmured Lex.
“Huh? What was that?” asked Sonata, heading back to where Lex had sat down and was staring at the broken track.
“I wasn’t certain before, but I am now; this was done on purpose. The first incident was suspicious for how the damage was localized to just the track and none of the surrounding area, but that could conceivably have been a coincidence, or due to some unusual circumstance. But a second occurrence,” he waved a hoof at the mess in front of them, “miles from the first can only be due to deliberate action. Whatever did this had a specific goal in mind when it did so.”
“You mean whatever dragon did this had a specific goal in mind,” corrected Sonata.
Lex gave her a flat look. “Alright…I’ll ask. You’ve been hooked on the idea that this might be a dragon ever since I mentioned that it was a possibility. Why?”
“Well duh!” scoffed Sonata, as though she couldn’t believe he had to ask. “Because dragons are, like, the biggest and most epic monsters there are! Even back on Earth, all the best stories were about heroes defeating dragons, and they didn’t even have any there!” She reared up, spreading her forelegs out in a sweeping gesture. “Defeating a big nasty creature is enough to make you a hero, but defeating a dragon makes you, like, a legend. The kind that lasts forever and ever.”
Still holding her forelegs out, she looked at Lex with eyes that practically sparkled with excitement. “Beating monsters and rescuing ponies makes everyone think that you’re awesome, but dragonslayers…dragonslayers are adored.” She breathed the last word softly, almost reverentially.
Lex frowned, unmoved by her speech. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m beginning to have serious doubts that a dragon is the culprit here.”
“Aw, how come?” Sonata fell back to all fours with a disappointed look.
“You mean besides the fact that dragons breathe fire, and there are no scorch marks around here? Or that the metal tracks have been melted somehow? There’s also the fact that, as I mentioned before, dragons lose intelligence as they grow, and while I’m no dracologist, the size of those claw marks and the scope of the damage suggest that this one isn’t a juvenile.” He felt quite confident of that, thanks to having seen Twilight’s pet. It had been an irritating creature, but it was at least useful as a baseline for draconic growth.
“The only question left,” continued Lex, “is why this creature, whatever it is, is doing this. Why attack train tracks over and over in the middle of nowhere? What is it trying to accomplish?” He lapsed into silence, looking down with a thoughtful frown, trying to unravel the mystery. The answer was there, he was sure of it. If he just had a few more clues to work with, just one good idea or insight, he was sure that he could figure it out.
“Beats me,” shrugged Sonata. “I just wish it had done it closer to a town. It’s only been half-a-day, and I’m already getting tired of walking.”
“‘Closer to a town,’” murmured Lex quietly. “‘Closer to a town…’”
“Yeah,” replied Sonata, not noticing that he had completely ceased paying attention to her. “I mean, I like camping out with you and all, but it’s super inconven-”
“That’s it!” yelled Lex suddenly, raising his head. “That’s why it’s doing this! It’s trying to…oh no…” he trailed off as his look of revelation changed into one of horrified realization.
“To what? What’s it trying to do?” asked Sonata, growing more alarmed in response to his apparent distress.
Lex didn’t answer, instead getting up and charging down the tracks as fast as he could.
“Hey!” yelled Sonata. “Wait for me! What’s going on?!”
“We have to get to Tall Tale as fast as we can!” Lex called back over his shoulder. “It’s trying to isolate the city from the rest of Equestria!”
“Lex!” called Sonata as she followed him. “Slow down!”
She had expected him to ignore her and continue barreling down the train tracks. Thus she was rather surprised when he seemed to heed her call, slowing his frenzied dash to a moderate jog, allowing her to catch up with him.
Smiling at him in thanks, the two kept up their pace for an hour before exhaustion forced them to come to a stop. “Don’t you, like, have some sort of spell or something that’ll let us get there faster?” panted Sonata.
Lex shook his head. “I have a spell that will increase our speed, but it only lasts for a minute or so,” he said, also breathing hard. “And my magical travel spell is short-range, covering a little under a thousand feet at most.”
“Well we can’t keep this pace up.” Sonata sank to the ground, giving her aching legs a rest before motioning to Lex. “Gimme your pack.”
“Why?” Despite trying to catch his breath, Lex managed to shoot her a disapproving look, clearly intending to rush forward again once he’d gotten his wind back.
“It’s lunchtime.”
Lex blew up. “‘It’s lunchtime’?! Are you joking?! We need to-” He ended his rant abruptly, before he could work himself into an even greater tirade. Closing his eyes, he forced himself to calm down. He had always considered himself an intellectual, and intellectually he knew she was right. Ignoring food and rest in favor of pushing themselves to their physical limits wouldn’t get them to Tall Tale any faster, since the resulting exhaustion would require a commensurately greater recovery period. Worse, if whatever was destroying the tracks caught them when they were incapacitated, they’d be in little position to fight it off.
Taking a deep breath, Lex held it for several seconds before letting it out. Silently, he took off his haversack and tossed it lightly to Sonata. Catching it, she favored him with another smile before walking to the grass surrounding the train tracks and pulling out a blanket. Lex joined her as she set it out, and the two settled down to eat.
It took only a few minutes to finish the cold hayburgers that Sonata had procured from the dining car of the now-departed train, but neither moved to get up after finishing, knowing that exerting themselves immediately after eating would only make them sick. Instead, they sat in silence, each pondering what they should do next.
Sonata spoke first. “What did you mean back there, about the dragon…or whatever it is,” she added that last part in a slightly morose voice, clearly disappointed that their foe might not be the legendary beast she’d been hoping for, “trying to isolate Tall Tale?”
“The fact that it had limited itself to the tracks was suspicious from the beginning,” replied Lex without hesitation. “There was no immediate reason for doing so, which meant that whatever did that had some greater goal in mind. At first I thought that it might have simply been trying to cause an accident, but that didn’t fit the data.”
“It didn’t?” Sonata tilted her head, not following.
Lex shook his head. “Remember what that engineer said? They deliberately went slower at night so that they wouldn’t arrive until morning. That’s why they were able to stop before they hit the wreckage, which meant that a wreck was unlikely from the beginning.”
Sonata paused for a moment, apparently doing some hard thinking, before nodded. “He did say that, but what if this dr-, this thing was thinking that the train would come along during the day, when it’d be going a lot faster?”
“That still wouldn’t have resulted in a wreck. Even if the train had been going full-speed, the daylight meant that they would have seen the wreck in advance, and so had enough time to throw on the brakes.” Lex stared into space as he spoke, focused on the swirl of information going through his mind.
Sonata frowned, still not entirely sure that she got it. “But maybe this thing didn’t know that? I mean, dragon or not it’s still a big scary monster, right? I don’t think they let those into train school.” She paused long enough to giggle at the image that conjured up for her, imagining a dragon in a conductor’s uniform, before continuing. “So, like, maybe it thought that would cause a wreck anyway.”
“I considered that,” admitted Lex. “But if that was the case, it wouldn’t have destroyed a second section of track. No matter which way a train was going, having a single break in the line would have been enough to derail it, making a second instance completely superfluous, and since this thing is intelligent enough to plan to that degree, it likely would have realized that.”
“Completely super-what now?” asked Sonata, making Lex close his eyes in a silent sigh.
“In other words, two broken pieces of track wouldn’t mean two train wrecks, so there must be another reason why it did that again.”
“Ohhh,” Sonata nodded. “I get it. Why didn’t you just say that from the beginning?”
Ignoring that last comment, Lex moved on. “So that leads us to another question: if it wasn’t trying to derail the train, what was it trying to do?”
“I understand that part, but how did you come up with ‘keep everypony out of Tall Tale’?”
“Keep everypony out, or everypony that’s already there in,” corrected Lex. “By my estimation, we covered about fifteen miles between when we left the first wreck and when we came to the second one. What does that tell you?”
Sonata was sure there was a particular answer that Lex had in mind, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what it was, silently signaling that she had no idea. Lex was still staring at nothing, but he picked up on her motion in his periphery and continued.
“Fixing a ruined stretch of track isn’t an easy task. It will be difficult to cut away the twisted metal and fill in the ballast. After that, they’ll need to carefully measure the replacement rail lines and have them welded into place. That’s why that engineer said it would take a couple of weeks to repair.”
“He did? I don’t remember that.”
“You hadn’t arrived by that point.”
“Oh, okay then. But what does that have to do with how far apart the two wrecks were?”
“The tracks make a few turns between there and here. Even though they’re small ones, the distance involved and the surrounding forest makes the train operators have moderate tunnel-vision. I’d be surprised if they could see more than a mile or two ahead.”
“So?” Sonata couldn’t help but wonder if he was deliberately dragging things out before he got to the point. She didn’t mind too much – it was pretty cool how he could put all the puzzle pieces together – but she was getting impatient to catch up.
Her question was enough to shake Lex more fully from his reverie, and he looked at her. “So, that means that they won’t even discover the second wrecked area until after they fix the first. That means that they’ll have to start over again, and the entire thing will take twice as long. In other words, Tall Tale is certain to be isolated for quite a while…giving that thing plenty of time to do whatever it’s going to do.”
That thought was sobering enough that both sat in silence again for a few minutes, before Sonata piped up hopefully. “Maybe some pegasus pony will fly by and report that there are two wrecks?”
“I doubt it.” It never occurred to Lex that Sonata was simply trying to be positive, and he responded as though her idea had been literal. “We’re almost a hundred miles from Tall Tale, and quite a distance from whatever the last town was-”
“Ooh! I remember this one! It was Pineville!” Sonata grinned, pleased to have been able to contribute something. She could be smart too!
“Right, Pineville. Which means that any flying passerby noticing the wreckage is unlikely.” He paused, as something else occurred to him. Is it doing this so far from either town to try and increase the repair times even more? He turned the thought over only for a moment before rejecting the idea. No, if it’s this intelligent, it would know that the repair workers can just take the train directly to the affected area and back in no time at all. That means… “It doesn’t want the ponies in Tall Tale to know what it’s doing.”
Silence greeted his latest revelation, and he glanced over at Sonata, wondering why she hadn’t asked any follow-ups. For her part, she simply raised her eyebrows and gave him a pointed look, twirling a hoof in a “hurry up” gesture.
Huffing slightly, Lex explained. “It went a hundred miles from Tall Tale to do this. Why so far away? Because it doesn’t want the ponies there to know what’s happened. The train was on its way there, which likely means that Tall Tale doesn’t have a train of its own that they can use to go looking for help when they realize that nopony can reach them.”
“That’s good, right?” Sonata asked as she stood up, stretching slightly.
Lex did the same, stepping off the blanket as she gathered it up again. “Most likely. If it’s trying to perpetrate a deception, then that means it’s not acting openly. So the ponies in Tall Tale are safe, at least for the moment. But whatever this thing is doing, it’s definitely no good.”
“Totes,” nodded Sonata seriously. Finishing packing up the blanket and passing the haversack back to Lex, the two of them headed back to the train tracks and started forward again, walking this time.
The sun was low in the sky by the time they discovered the third stretch of wrecked track. This time, Lex looked at it for barely a minute before concluding that it was the same as the others and moving on. Privately, he also suspected that it was the last one, since by that point they had no longer become unexpected, and so even the most dense of ponies would start checking ahead so that repairs could be coordinated simultaneously.
That, and they were getting closer to Tall Tale now too. They’d covered quite a lot of ground already, and in Lex’s estimation they’d be there in another two days. That only gives me the two days after that to figure out what this thing is, what it wants, and how to deal with it. After that it’s the equinox, and I’ll have to commit to a course of action…
He was pulled from his musings as Sonata nudged against him. “Hey, the sun’s setting. Think it’s time we settled in for the night?”
Realizing that he’d lost track of the time, Lex fought down a mild blush and nodded. “I’ll get everything ready,” he said, digging his muzzle into one of his haversack’s pockets to retrieve the rope he’d used last night in preparation for creating another extradimensional space.
“Should I gather up some more leaves, too?” teased Sonata gently.
“That won’t be necessary, I’ve thought of a solution for that particular problem. All I need to do is adjust the phase of this bag’s folded space so that the resonance shift doesn’t overlap with that from the rope trick spell, and it should be fine.” Lex stated this matter-of-factly, as though he were discussing the weather. “It won’t be a permanent alteration, of course, but it should last the night easily. That way we can take the bag into the conjured space without either of them being adversely affected.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that last night.”
“…yeah. That’s like, super embarrassing of you,” replied Sonata, her voice a mixture of sarcasm and incredulity as she moved off the tracks and towards the woods.
Lex, not picking up on her tone of voice, frowned and opened his mouth to rebut her assertion, but suddenly froze. “Sonata!” he hissed, his voice tense.
Picking up on her boyfriend’s alarm, she quickly turned back to him. “What is it?”
“Look over there.” Lex was looking towards where the sun was setting, staring further down the track.
Squinting against the dying light, Sonata didn’t see anything at first, and was about to say so when she noticed that one of the shrubs didn’t look quite right. It was slightly too far out from the tree-line. For that matter its silhouette was too smooth, like it wasn’t a bush at all. In fact…it wasn’t a bush at all!
Near-totally hidden due to the trees around it and the setting sun behind it, staring at Lex and Sonata from almost a thousand feet away, was a pony.
Squinting into the sunset, Lex tried to make out the features of the pony silhouette that was looking at them. He considered calling on Sombra’s magic, the mutable nature of which allowed him to sharpen his physical senses in myriad ways. But doing that would result in his eyes giving their tell-tale glow, and the last thing he wanted to do was alert the unknown pony that they had spotted-
“Hi!” yelled Sonata, waving a hoof jovially.
The pony instantly disappeared into the woods, and Lex paused just long enough to glare at Sonata before he cast a spell and vanished, a momentary portal swallowing him up even as another one instantaneously deposited him close to where the unknown pony had been. Lex shook his head, trying to clear it after the dizzying sensation of magical travel, before he plunged into the forest in pursuit, ignoring Sonata’s cry for him to wait for her.
Casting that spell was a calculated risk. It was powerful enough that, had he tried to retain it via channeling the energy through his body rather than expending the spell’s thought-form, he likely would have suffered severe muscular weakness, and he didn’t dare incapacitate himself like that when they still didn’t know what they were up against. That meant that his magical travel spell was – barring some extremely unusual circumstances – gone, at least until the equinox arrived and he was able to gather enough power to prepare it again.
But it was worth it. Although the mysterious pony had a good lead on him, Lex was – by using Sombra’s power to enhance his vision as the forest’s canopy blocked out what little sunlight was left – able to keep them in his sight. They had a yellow coat and a cream-white mane and tail, though further details were lost amidst the trees.
Cursing as he almost tripped over a root, Lex drew upon more of his horn’s dark magic, and let his body dissolve into shadows. Unencumbered by having to worry about the terrain any longer, he flew forward, passing harmlessly through branches and rocks. The other pony, though still moving with more surety than they should have from running in what was now near-total darkness, still had to contend with the terrain, and it wasn’t long before Lex was able to work his way around in front of them.
Restoring himself to corporeality several dozen feet in front of his quarry, Lex held up a hoof. “Stop!”
The other pony, an earth pony stallion about Lex’s age, let out a cry of surprise and turned abruptly, trying to run in a different direction. It got almost ten feet before Lex completed another spell – one minor enough to channel its energy through his circlet, preserving its thought-form in his mind – and suddenly the ground beneath the pony’s feet turned into a puddle of slippery grease, causing him to slip and fall with a yelp.
Walking up to him calmly, Lex tried his best to soothe the yellow stallion’s fear. “Calm down, you idiot! You’re not in any danger, I just want to talk to you.”
“G-get away! I’m warning you!” The other stallion, obviously terrified, yelled as he got to his hooves, controlling his balance remarkably well.
Lex stopped roughly ten feet from him. He was about to reiterate that he didn’t mean the other pony any harm, when suddenly the other pony’s form blurred, and in its place was a monster.
It had the torso of a pony, but it had eight spindly legs. Its tail was replaced with a spinneret. Worst of all was its face, which was still recognizably pony-like, but now had compound eyes and large pincers, dripping with ichor, sprouting from its mouth.
Lex gaped, momentarily stunned by the horrific transformation, and the creature used that to its advantage as it leapt at him, clearly having abandoned flight in favor of fight. Closing the distance between them in an instant, its jaws tried to close around his neck, only for them to come to an abrupt halt less than an inch from his skin, stopped by an unseen force. It had no way of knowing that the pony it was attacking had long ago woven layers of force armor over his body.
Lex threw himself backwards while intoning a spell, one of the very first that he’d learned after inventing his own style of magic. A scintillating cone of colors shot out, momentarily brightening the forest in a rainbow splash of light. The thing threw a leg over its eyes protectively, and for a moment Lex hoped that he had bought himself some breathing room.
That hope was dashed almost immediately as the monster recovered virtually instantly. But rather than rushing at Lex again, it began to chant and gesture with one of its legs. Lex’s eyes widened, caught by surprise for the second time in less than a minute, as the creature cast a spell. Instantly, a dark red beam shot out from its outstretched leg, and before Lex could dodge it struck his side, causing him to cry out as it felt like someone had just set him on fire.
Faced with an unknown monster that could also cast spells, Lex abandoned all thought of restraint. While he still hadn’t figured out how to use the normal levels of ambient magical energy to replenish his spells – for that he needed a major magical resource, such as a powerful artifact or certain seasonal conjunctions – he had learned how to draw upon those ambient energies to enhance the spells he did cast, though only a few times per day.
He did that now as he hissed the words to the deadliest spell he knew, pushing it to maximize its destructive potential. This disintegration spell was his “last resort” attack spell, the one he fell back on only in dire emergencies, which this was definitely looking like. Pointing a hoof at the thing, he let a green beam of light spring forth at it.
It tried to leap out of the way, but wasn’t fast enough to avoid having its spinneret struck, which immediately turned to dust under the onslaught. But as the creature screamed in agony, the green glow failed to spread over its body, and Lex realized that it had managed to resist the full force of the spell.
Not that it had done much good. With a major part of its body gone, the spider-pony fell back, weakly dragging itself against a fallen log, apparently having lost its will to continue the battle as it made a wailing noise that Lex belatedly realized were agonized sobs.
Breathing heavily from the unexpected fight, Lex drew a wand from his haversack. Pointing it at the creature, he prepared to unleash the lightning contained within, and put this horror out of its misery.
The thing’s form blurred again, and suddenly it was a buttery-colored pony again, albeit one that no longer had a tail. It’s, or rather, his face was screwed up in pain and fear, and tears were running down it. “P-please…please don’t…” he held up a shaking hoof in Lex’s direction weakly. “Don’t kill me…”
The plea stopped Lex cold. Although it hadn’t actually used the word, its pleading still constituted asking for mercy, and in Lex’s rigorously-defined set of morals mercy had to be shown whenever it was asked for, regardless of the circumstances or the nature of whoever, or whatever, asked for it. The only exception was if the asker was clearly and unambiguously insincere, and that was a high bar that the current situation didn’t meet. Still holding his wand at ready, Lex tried to figure out what to do.
Suddenly light poured over the area, and a soft, feminine voice sang an enchantment. Recognizing the words as a powerful spell to induce slumber, Lex turned just in time to see Sonata – carrying another rock that she’d enchanted to glow – round a nearby bend. Completing her spell, the spider-thing-turned-pony immediately slumped over, unconscious, causing Sonata to let out a whoop.
“Didja see that? I got him!”
Twenty minutes later, Lex had cast his rope trick spell and, after casting an alarm spell to alert him if anything came within twenty feet of the hanging rope, levitated the unconscious creature – he refused to think of it as a pony – inside it. He’d gone up next, followed by Sonata.
Once they were all inside, Lex had used Sombra’s magic to wind black crystal chains around the creature, making sure its limbs were secured. The material, he knew, was strong enough that even if it transformed again it wouldn’t be able to dislodge them, and with its legs unable to move freely it shouldn’t be able to cast anymore spells, or so he hoped.
Nodding to Sonata, he sat back as she slowly walked over to their captive and shook him. “Hey there. Wakey wakey.” Groaning softly, his eyes fluttered open before they settled on Sonata’s face, and he sat up with a start. Or at least, he tried to, his bonds keeping him from righting himself, causing him to wriggle for a panicked moment before he gave up, lying back.
“All done?” asked Sonata. Her tone was light, but neutral, lacking either warmth or cruelty. The pony looked up at her before shifting his eyes to Lex, who was sitting back with his wand held in his telekinetic grip, pointing at the ground.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked in a quavering voice.
“Uh-uh.” Sonata shook her head. “We’re the ones asking the questions here. Your job is to answer them, and if we like what we hear,” she put a hoof underneath the stallion’s chin, lifting it up to make him look at her, “you just might get out of here alive.”
“Sonata!” barked Lex.
“Aw c’mon!” she whined in reply to his chastisement. “That’s what they say on TV!”
“I don’t know what ‘TV’ is, but you can’t make death threats,” shot back Lex. “We have to maintain moral superiority.”
Sonata gave an exasperated groan, rolling her eyes before replying. “Fine!” Turning back to the chained stallion, she started over. “Okay, look. We’re, like, totally not going to hurt you or kill you or anything. We just want to ask you some questions. First…is it true that you’re a were-spider?”
Now it was Lex’s turn to roll his eyes, as the yellow pony looked confused. “What?”
“You know. Like, you’re a normal pony by day, but under the light of the full moon you transform into a giant bug and eat flies and stuff. Like that?” she asked. Behind her, Lex was biting his lip.
The yellow pony’s face showed confusion. “No…I’m an aranea.” Sonata made a prompting gesture, and he slowly continued. “We’re born with the ability to change between our arachnid form and our, er, pony form.” He glanced at himself as he finished speaking.
“I’ve never heard of any such creature,” interjected Lex. “What’s your place of origin?” He had a good idea of what the answer was, based on the fact that the creature’s spellcasting had utilized gesturing and chanting, but he was hoping against hope that he was wrong, that there was some other explanation.
They yellow pony looked confused by the question. “You mean where I live?”
“No. I mean where you lived before you came here.”
The stallion’s eyes flickered from Lex to Sonata and back again before he spoke. “I’m from Everglow.”
The parallel world that was similar to Equestria in so many ways, but profoundly different from it in all the ways that, to Lex, really mattered. He had been there twice, the first time due to an accident and the second time fleeing there in desperation, and had come to the conclusion that he hated the place. For all that he had gained while he was there, it didn’t excuse the fact that the world was one that was far more hostile to ponies than Equestria was, and Lex could not forgive it that. He would have been happy never to go back there again.
But with three words, this spider-pony thing – this “aranea” – had made it clear to Lex that he didn’t need to go back; Everglow was apparently able to come to him.
“How did you get here from Everglow?” Lex almost snarled the question, stamping a hoof in agitation. Crossing the planar divide between Equestria and Everglow was no small feat. He could do it, and he knew that powerful spellcasters like Twilight or Princess Celestia could as well, but anything less than that should have found the barrier between dimensions to be insurmountable. That meant that either this thing had exceptional magical abilities, or had access to an entity or item that did.
“I don’t know,” the yellow stallion answered miserably, likely knowing how his answer would be taken.
“You’re lying,” snapped Lex.
“No, I’m not!” Desperation was written all over their captive’s face. “I swear, I don’t know how we got here, it just happened!”
“Nothing ‘just happens’!” Lex was yelling now. He’d chased this pony, or aranea, or whatever it was, because he’d wanted answers. But so far all it was giving them was more questions! “Every effect has a cause, and I want to know what caused you to be here, or else I’ll-”
“Okay, time out!” Sonata, who had been watching the exchange silently up until now, suddenly interrupted, placing herself in front of Lex so that she blocked his line of vision to the yellow stallion.
Gently putting a hoof on his shoulder, Sonata ushered Lex into a huddle on the other side of the room, lowering her voice. “Look, I wanted to play the bad cop, but since you’re already doing such a good job of it, how about you, like, take five and let me play the other role, ‘kay?”
Lex paused for a moment, trying to parse her statement, before admitting, “I have absolutely no idea what you just said.”
She snorted in amusement. “Just watch.”
Turning back to the chained pony, Sonata gave him a warm smile, trotting over to him and sitting down. “We got off to a bad start before. Let’s try again. I’m Sonata, and this-” she pointed a hoof at Lex, who was glowering in their direction, “is Lex.” She leaned in closer and stage-whispered, “Don’t worry, he always looks like that.” Sitting up, she resumed speaking normally. “What’s your name?”
Looking only slightly less fearful, the yellow stallion paused for several moments, before softly saying, “Fireflower.”
“Aw, that’s adorable!” gushed Sonata. “It fits your cutie mark perfectly!” She pointed to the stallion’s flank, where a picture of a flower with petals made out of flames could be seen.
“I-is that what it’s called?” Fireflower asked. “I thought ponies referred to these as ‘brands of destiny.’”
Lex groaned softly, closing his eyes in consternation. He’d believed this thing when it had said that it was from Everglow before – how else would it even have known the name of that world otherwise? – but it had just given a corroborating detail. “Brand of destiny” was the overly-grandiose term by which the ponies of that world referred to their cutie marks, and was the sort of thing that a liar would have likely tripped over.
And if this creature was telling the truth about that, then it was likely telling the truth about not knowing how it got here either…
Sonata ignored her boyfriend’s theatrics and kept talking. “They’re called cutie marks here in Equestria.” She paused for a moment, having picked up on a different detail in Fireflower’s question than Lex had. “You sound like you didn’t have one before. Did you just get it?”
Fireflower looked uncertain, but hesitantly ventured, “No. Well, kind of…I guess.” He flattened his ears, as though just trying to explain was difficult.
“It’s okay,” encouraged Sonata, never letting her smile falter. “Take your time.”
Glancing back and forth at the two of them from where he lay on the floor, Fireflower licked his lips before speaking up. “Can…I’m sorry, do you have any food? I haven’t eaten in days.”
Sonata was about to make a show of being concerned for his health, but to her surprise Lex beat her to it, taking his haversack off and pulling out one of her raspberry oat cakes. Holding it in his purple aura, he silently offered it to the bound pony. Fireflower didn’t hesitate to gobble it up, offering a muffled thanks around a mouthful of food.
Once he was finished, he laid down as best he could around with the chains around him. Calmer now, he took several slow breaths and looked up at the ceiling, not making eye contact with anyone as he started to speak. “Back on Everglow, we didn’t look like this. I mean, we were still arachnids, but our other form wasn’t a pony…it was a human.”
Lex’s lip curled. A creature that combined a spider and a human? And he hadn’t thought anything could be more disgusting than that human-pony hybrid he’d met on Everglow.
“That’s part of what made it so confusing when we arrived here. We had changed and the world had changed and we didn’t know why…and then when we were attacked it just…” Fireflower's voice cracked, and for a moment he looked like he was going to cry.
Sonata opened her mouth to speak, but Lex beat her to it. “What attacked you?” From what it had just said, it sounded like there was more than one of these things, and that something had frightened it after it had arrived in Equestria.
Fireflower was silent for a long moment, and Lex was about to repeat the question when he began to speak. “There were six of us, altogether. Waterlily had invited us to the edge of the lake so she could show off the new spell she’d discovered.” He smiled in remembrance, letting out a breath that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “She, um, she always spun her webs between the trees that were closest to the water’s edge, you know? No matter how many times the wind whipped up the waves and soaked them, she would just make new ones.” He shook his head ruefully. “She said that it was a small price to pay to wake up seeing the sun shining on the water every morning.”
No one missed that he had spoken in the past tense.
Licking his lips, he continued. “So we all got there, and she started casting, and then just…I don’t know, everything went crazy.”
“How?” asked Sonata quietly.
“I don’t know,” Fireflower sighed. “It felt like, like being dizzy, I guess. That way you feel when you’ve spun around too fast for too long, but without being nauseous. And there was a sound like a huge wave of water, even though the lake was calm at the time. Next thing I know we’re underwater and struggling to get to shore…and when we do the forest isn’t anywhere nearby.”
“Could she-” Lex paused as he realized he’d referred to Fireflower’s absent friend as ‘she’ rather than ‘it,’ and tried his question again. “Could your friend have miscast the spell, causing this?”
Fireflower’s head was shaking before Lex even finished his question. “Waterlily never miscast a spell, not since she was a child and accidentally froze her back-left legs in a block of ice for an entire day.” He smiled again at the memory. “We never stopped teasing her about that.” Silence fell for a moment, until Lex prompted him to continue.
“After we all got to shore, Rockwood took charge. He was always the most practical-minded of us. He saw some trees to the south – I think it was south – and had us head over some marshes to get to them. At some point we realized that we were turning into ponies and we started freaking out…he was the only one of us who kept his head, telling us not to focus on it until after we got to safety.” Fireflower let out a snort, muttering “safety” again derisively.
Lex’s eyes narrowed at the story. If he remembered correctly, there was a stretch of marshland to the north of Tall Tale, separating it from Vanhoover. Between that and the water-based nature of however they’d crossed over, he was starting to put a theory together as to how these araneas had come to Equestria.
“We got to the forest,” continued Fireflower, “but it wasn’t anyplace we knew. I mean we knew our forest like the back of our, er, our hooves,” he offered a sheepish grin to the pair, which only Sonata returned. “But this place was completely different. It was nice and all, but it wasn’t home, you know?”
Lex frowned. As much as he hated to admit it, he could sympathize with what that felt like, having not only lost his native time, but twice having lost his native world as well. “What happened next?” he prompted.
Fireflower turned his gaze away again before he resumed his story. “We found a cave, and we thought we would hide in it for a while until we figured out where we were and how to get back. We’d barely gotten inside when its owner came back.”
“Its owner?” Sonata tilted her head. “Who’d own a cave?”
Fireflower shuddered. “A dragon.”
“WOO!” Sonata’s yelp caught the two stallions by surprise, though not nearly as much as the impromptu dance number she broke out into. “Alright! I knew there was a dragon around here! I totes knew it!” She turned to Lex, grinning from ear to ear. “How do you like that, Mister ‘it could be anything’?” She didn’t wait for an answer, spinning back to Fireflower. “So, like, what kind of dragon was it? Big and nasty, right?”
For the first time since they’d captured him, a reproachful look crossed Fireflower’s face, clearly disapproving of Sonata’s celebratory attitude towards the dragon’s existence. “‘Big and nasty’? Yeah, it was big and nasty. It killed Waterlily. It did it right in front of me.” He paused, slumping down. “After that we all ran for our lives. We got split up…for all I know, I’m the only one that made it.”
Sonata’s good mood was swept away, instantly replaced with mortification. “Oh! Oh gosh! I’m, like, so sorry!”
Lex, whose expression had yet to change during the story, stamped a hoof to gain the others’ attention. “When and where did this happen?”
Fireflower shrugged as best he could through his chains. “At least a couple of days ago. Maybe more. I don’t know where though. I got lost after I ran, and I’ve been wandering ever since. I haven’t seen anyone else before I spotted you two.” His stomach rumbled loudly then, as if to underline how long he’d gone without food.
Lex reached for his haversack again, but Sonata stopped him. “Let me.” He gave her a brief nod, and she fished another oat cake out of it, taking it over to Fireflower, who accepted it – and her implicit apology – with a grateful smile.
“Have you seen this dragon since then?” asked Lex. “Is it what’s been ruining the train tracks?”
“I haven’t seen it since then,” answered Fireflower, licking the last of the crumbs off his lips, “and I don’t want to. I hadn’t even come across the train tracks before now.”
Lex nodded, as though he’d expected that answer. “Alright then, here’s what we’re going to do. Once the sun comes up, we’re going to resume heading for Tall Tale. You,” he pointed at Fireflower, “will accompany us there. Once we’ve confirmed the situation, we’ll see if we can retrace your steps.”
“What? Why?” Fireflower asked nervously, as though he knew what the answer would be. Sonata, by contrast, couldn’t help her look of anticipation.
“We’re going to track down this dragon,” answered Lex. “And then we’re going to slay it.”
Silence reigned in the wake of Lex’s bold pronouncement. Sonata looked like she was about to squeal in happiness, while Fireflower looked like he was preparing to be sick.
“You can’t be serious!” he choked out, glancing back and forth between Lex’s look of determination and Sonata’s grin. “Do you have…do you understand what you’re talking about? This is a dragon! You’d need an army to slay it!”
“That’s what’s going to make us so awesome when we do it all by ourselves!” smiled Sonata. She could practically see the parade that would be held in their honor!
“How ‘awesome’ do you think it will be when you have to see that thing kill someone you love?!” Fireflower’s shout snapped Sonata out of her daydream. “Do you have any idea how that feels? Because I do, and it’s awful!” He screwed up his features into a look of resolve before shaking his head. “I am not going back there.”
“You don’t have a choice,” replied Lex coldly. “We need to find out where this thing lives, and right now you’re the only one who’s seen where that is. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You’re taking us there.”
Despite being bound by chains, Fireflower looked ready to argue the point, but stopped as Sonata gently put a hoof on his side. “I’m sorry about what happened to Watermaple,” she said gently. “Were you close?”
“Waterlily, and of course we were,” snapped Fireflower testily. He didn’t seem to be able to sustain his anger though, and he let out a sigh a moment later, looking down. “She is…she was…my little sister. We’re all siblings. Rockwood, Shadowvine, Waterlily, Brightrose, Breezyleaf, and me. We’ve been together our whole lives.”
Lex opened his mouth, intent on making it clear that he couldn’t have cared less and reiterating that this was too important to indulge one not-pony’s fit of pique, but his attitude must have been written all over his face because Sonata glanced at him and gave a slight shake of her head. Reluctantly, Lex bit back his words.
Before they had started this ill-fated journey, he and Sonata had worked out an agreement, where she would speak for him so that his ideas could be presented while still observing whatever social nonsense was required for ponies to actually consider them. Normally, that meant that he’d use magic to quietly feed her what he wanted to say, and she’d parse it into something more digestible for simpler minds.
In this case, he was willing to allow her a greater degree of latitude. Unlike whatever ineffable quality he possessed that invariably upset ponies when he tried to explain why he knew better than them, Sonata had incredible social grace. Even without magic, she usually found it easy to charm others, and had proven how valuable that made her time and again. As such, Lex was willing to trust that she could do so here as well.
“I have, I used to have, two sisters. Aria and Adagio.” Sonata’s voice lacked its usual exuberant tone. “They never liked me very much, and I felt the same way, but no matter what happened we were always together.”
Lifting his gaze to look at her, Fireflower couldn’t help but ask. “What happened to them?”
Sonata smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I guess you could say the band broke up.” She glanced around to see if either stallion appreciated her quip. When neither seemed to, she sighed and tried again. "We were raising trouble the way we usually did, and we all got punished for it. I know that Adagio cut some sort of deal for herself, and Aria was banished somewhere, but that’s about it.” She was silent for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t really want to see them again, but I wouldn’t want what happened to Waterlily to happen to them.”
“Then how can you ask me-” started Fireflower, but Sonata cut him off.
“This pony right here,” she pointed at Lex, “is, like, the smartest pony ever. He says that something really bad is going to happen to Tall Tale, a town near here, really soon, and that that dragon might be what does it.” She paused to let that sink in, then continued. “If he’s right, then what happened to your sister will happen to a lot of ponies. We want to stop that, but we can’t do it without your help.”
“I…” Fireflower’s ears folded back, and he seemed to struggle with the decision before coming to a resolution. “Alright. But only to take you to where the cave was. You’re on your own for fighting it. I’m not going to join you in committing suicide-by-dragon.”
Lex snorted contemptuously, more at the idea that Fireflower would ever have been part of his plans, even nascent as they were, to defeat the dragon than at the aranea’s cowardice. His derision was lost amidst Sonata’s clapping of her hooves in appreciation, however.
“Thank you so much! We really appreciate your help with this, and when we’re done we’ll make sure you get some of the credit too!” She smiled over at Lex, making a small gesture, nodding her head towards Fireflower with exaggerated motions.
Frowning, Lex squinted in confusion. Unlike her shaking her head at him earlier, he had no idea what she was trying to signal at him now. Seeing that she hadn’t been understood, she repeated the motion, causing Lex to scowl. Did she really think that if he hadn’t understood her the first time, doing it again would make things any more clear? When she did it for a third time, Lex’s patience finally broke. “I don’t know what you’re signaling,” he said flatly.
“Like, oh my gosh!” Sonata rolled her eyes in exasperation. “I’m telling you to let the chains off of him!”
“What? No!” retorted Lex immediately. “Absolutely not! He-, no, it,” he pointed a hoof at Fireflower, “is too dangerous!” To indicate this, he turned so that he was standing in profile to her, making obvious the burn on his side where he’d been struck by the aranea’s spell during their fight.
“I’m sorry about that,” piped up Fireflower. “Really. I panicked because, when you started chasing me, I thought you might be another aranea whose territory I’d wandered into. I hadn’t eaten or slept in days. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s still kinda weird, isn’t it?” asked Sonata. “I mean, if you ran into others of your own kind, wouldn’t you ask them for help?”
Fireflower shook his head. “Maybe that’s how it is for ponies, but we’re different. We keep to ourselves in small colonies, and only go into another colony’s territory when we’re looking to, you know…” he turned slightly red, “to meet someone else. Even then, there’s supposed to be some formal way of declaring yourself, or so Brightrose told me. Anything else is an attack.”
“Nopony cares,” said Lex curtly. “The chains stay on.”
“Can you excuse us for a moment?” Sonata asked Fireflower with a tight smile. She didn’t wait for an answer before going over to Lex and whispering harshly, “Why are you being such a jerk about this? He said he’d help us, so we need to do something nice to show that we trust him!”
“It’s an ‘it,’ not a ‘him,’ and I don’t trust it!” Lex hissed back. “You didn’t see this thing before, Sonata! It may look like a pony, and talk and act like a pony, but it isn’t a pony!”
“…Is that how you think about me?” asked Sonata quietly.
Her question had only been meant to make him listen to himself, to hear how unfair he was being, but the effect was far more dramatic than she’d expected. Lex gave a start, as though she’d slapped him, and for a moment he gaped at her as though he couldn’t believe what she’d just said.
Sonata realized that, for whatever reason, he’d taken serious offense to what she’d just said, and opened her mouth to try and walk it back, but it was already too late. Lex’s face settled into a cold mask, and the look he gave her didn’t have even the slightest trace of affection in it, displaying nothing but antipathy. “Have it your way, then,” he said tonelessly, and stomped a hoof on the ground. Instantly, the black crystal chains around Fireflower shattered, crumbling into powder.
Sitting up gingerly, Fireflower knew better than to say anything to the feuding pair, unable to help having heard their entire conversation in the close confines of the extradimensional room. Instead he made sure to keep his gaze firmly on the floor, trying to give them at least the illusion of privacy.
He didn’t need to try very hard, as both ponies seemed to have forgotten he was there. For her part, it was with a sinking feeling that Sonata tried to repair the situation. “Lex…c’mon, don’t be like this.” She tried to put a hoof on his shoulder, but he batted it away.
“We have a long day tomorrow. Go to sleep.” It was unmistakably a command, and Sonata’s ears folded back at the harshness of his words.
Not willing to let this go, she tried again. “Listen, I don’t know why you’re so upset, but I’m really-”
“I told you to shut up and go to sleep,” Lex cut her off, and although his voice was quiet it was practically dripping with venom. “Now, I know you’re stupid, but are you really too stupid to understand even that much?”
Stung, Sonata fell back, and she could feel her eyes watering. “Fine! Just…fine!” Stomping to the other side of the small room, she practically threw herself down, facing away from him.
Lex then turned his gaze to Fireflower, but the other stallion had already anticipated that Lex’s instructions were meant for him as well, and he had settled into one another corner of the room, facing the wall. Nevertheless, Lex glared at him for long moments, actively hoping that that monstrous, disgusting thing that wore a pony’s form would do something to provoke him. He wanted to storm out of there, but that was impossible in the current circumstances; if he left and that spider-monster hurt Sonata…even imagining that level of guilt and self-recrimination was almost too much to bear.
Fireflower failed to provide any provocation, however, and Lex slowly forced himself to lie down as well. He could hear Sonata sniffling, but the sound only made him angrier. She had hurt him deeply by questioning his feelings for her, and she was going to act like the wounded party?! Though she was facing away from him, he couldn’t help but give her a hateful glare. Sleep, he knew, would be a long time in coming.
A few feet away, Sonata was similarly doubtful that she’d get much rest. She’d been with Lex long enough to have gotten used to him ranting and yelling whenever he was mad about something, but she knew from experience that when he got all quiet like this was when he was at his angriest. That had only happened once before, when they had been lost in the realm of the goddess Kara, and that time, just like this time, she had no idea why he suddenly hated her so much, or how she could fix it.
The only thing that had snapped him out of it then was when Kara had whisked her away to privately console her, and Lex had apparently freaked out that she’d disappeared. Sort of disappeared, at least. She’d later found out that he and everypony that was with them had seen her and Kara’s talk, but even so…he’d been so relieved to have her back that the fight had been over.
Kara, I really wish you were here right now, thought Sonata miserably. I could really use your help again. Sonata rubbed her watery eyes as she remembered the nice mare that had soothed her troubled heart before.
It was nothing more than a passing wish, formed more from desperation more than any sincere hope that it would come true. But even that was still a prayer, and Sonata had no idea that at that moment, her sincere feelings towards the goddess were winding their way across the planes toward their intended recipient…
Sonata woke up slowly, rubbing her eyes with a yawn. She frowned as she realized she felt sad, but couldn’t remember why. Glancing around blearily, her eyes fell on Lex, who was sleeping across from her, and she wondered why he wasn’t right next to her…and then her memories from last night came flooding back.
Sagging under the weight of them, she kept looking at her boyfriend – at least she hoped he was still her boyfriend – and wondered what to do. No answers came to her, and with a sigh she started to get up. It was only as she stretched that she caught sight of Fireflower looking at her, apparently already awake.
Forcing herself to smile, she nodded at the room’s exit, and he bobbed his head in understanding. Pausing just long enough to abscond with Lex’s haversack, she shimmied down the rope, followed by the aranea stallion. It was only when they reached the bottom that Sonata gave him a half-hearted “Good morning.”
…or at least, she intended to. But the words got lost as she noted the ragged stump that was his tail. “Oh my gosh, what happened to you?!” The sight was severe enough to chase her misery from her mind, at least momentarily. His tail was completely lacking any hairs, and was an angry red color that looked like it had been severely abraded.
Fireflower’s face was also slightly red, but that was because he was blushing, both from the sudden attention and from where his injury was located. “Oh, er, it happened before…” he trailed off, not quite sure how to say “when I tried to kill that pony you care about so much.” As it was, he was just glad that the damage didn’t seem nearly as bad in this form as it did in his other one. He still wasn’t sure why he had a pony body now instead of a human one, but apparently the magic that let him switch between them had decided that his arachnid form’s spinneret was homologous to a pony’s tail.
“Lex did that?” Sonata asked, suddenly indignant on Fireflower’s behalf. “I can’t believe him! Picking on you like that!” She scowled, feeling herself getting angrier the more she thought about it. She knew Lex had been hurt too, but that had just been a small burn; Fireflower’s injury seemed way out of proportion. Between that and how awful Lex had been to her last night, Sonata could almost feel her angst turning into anger.
“Well, um, the thing is…” Fireflower wasn’t sure what to say, since he knew that Sonata’s characterization wasn’t the most accurate way to describe what had happened last night. At the same time, he was reluctant to place himself in a less favorable light with her, considering how much she seemed to be on his side.
Sonata wasn’t listening. “Turn around, let me get a better look.” Not noticing how Fireflower flushed even more as he complied, she dug around in Lex’s haversack. “Let me see, I think that there’s a first-aid kit in here somewhere…ah ha!” Pulling out a small box, she produced a tube of cream and several bandages. “Okay, let’s get that tail patched up!”
It took her a few minutes to rub the ointment on (“stop wriggling so much!”) and get the bandages tied (“I think you’re cutting off my circulation…”), but eventually she gave a satisfied nod. “Much better! Now, let’s get some breakfast!”
Producing some food for the both of them, Sonata handed half of it to Fireflower before she began to dig in, munching quietly. She didn’t notice that her companion kept stealing glances at her as he ate. She was so nice…not like that other pony that was still sleeping up there.
Swallowing a mouthful of oat flakes, Fireflower paused in his mental characterization of Lex, wondering if he was being entirely fair. After all, the surly stallion had still fed him last night when Fireflower had admitted to being very hungry, and for all his talk about not trusting him, he’d still removed the chains when Sonata had pressed him to. For that matter…he could have killed me last night.
He shifted a little, not sure what to make of either of them now that he stopped and thought about it. Lex’s words had been awful, but his sharp tongue seemed to be the extent of his cruelty, and Sonata was much nicer than he’d thought ponies would be. In his colony, only Brightrose and Breezyleaf had traveled outside of their forest. While the former had apparently enjoyed his time abroad, Breezyleaf's description of her travels had not been encouraging, describing most of the other people she'd met as being selfish and moderately xenophobic.
That last term fit Lex to a “T,” though Sonata seemed more open-minded. Moreover, from what little time he’d spent with these two, neither of them seemed very selfish. If anything, they weren’t selfish enough, as they were suicidally intent on fighting a dragon to save a town. Just remembering that made Fireflower shake his head. Wouldn’t it be better just to evacuate the town instead?
He sighed, the thought of fleeing making him wonder about his remaining siblings. They had all scattered once the dragon had attacked, and although poor Waterlily hadn’t made it, he desperately hoped the others had. I hope they’re okay. I miss them so much.
“Hey. A bit for your thoughts.”
Fireflower looked over at Sonata, who had finished eating and was looking at him. He suddenly felt embarrassed, wiping a hoof over his muzzle to clear away any remaining crumbs as he swallowed the last of his food. “Oh. I was just thinking about the others. My siblings, I mean. I haven’t seen them since the dragon, and I’m kind of worried about them.”
“Maybe they ended up at Tall Tale, and we’ll run into them when we get there?” ventured Sonata hopefully.
“I hadn’t thought of that!” admitted Fireflower, his eyes widening at the prospect of possibly seeing his brothers and sisters again. “Wow, that would be great! I just hope I can recognize them. We didn’t have very long to get used to these pony bodies before we were attacked.”
Sonata went over to him, putting a hoof on his shoulder in a show of camaraderie. “I bet we’ll be able to find them, we just have to know what to look for. Do they have anything that makes them stand out?”
Fireflower shrugged. “They’re really good at their type of magic?” he ventured, not sure how that would stack up against whatever magic ponies had.
Sonata’s ears perked up. “Oh yeah, I forgot you can use magic! What kind?”
“Oh, um, fire magic.” Caught off-guard by her interest, he fumbled to expand on what he thought of as a very simple, straightforward type of magic. “It’s actually really versatile, and it can be used for a lot of different-”
“That’s so cool!” interrupted Sonata, her voice brimming with enthusiasm. “I wish my magic could be all flashy like that! I mean, it’s cool to be able to make people do what I want and all, even if Lex says that it’s all, like, ‘immoral’ or whatever…” she trailed off, her good mood dampening as her thoughts turned back to the pony that she was currently feuding with. Refusing to let that jerk drag her down, she forced herself to keep talking. “But having fire spells must be, like, a total showstopper! You totes have to show me some!”
“Really?” Fireflower wanted to say something impressive to match her unexpectedly positive view of his magic, but found that he couldn’t stop a big, goofy grin from spreading across his face. Feeling unexpectedly warm, he got momentarily lost in Sonata’s smile for a moment before he came back to himself. “You mean right now?”
“Yeah. Show me what you got!” nodded Sonata. Fireflower was such a nice pony, how could Lex be so awful to him? It totally served him right to miss out on all of this awesome magic!
Fireflower trotted several yards away from Sonata. “Stand back, this is dangerous,” he warned her. In fact, this spell wasn’t really very dangerous at all, since he had total control over the effect. But he couldn’t resist the urge to try and impress her. Sonata nodded, backing up to give him some room.
Chanting and making several gestures with his hooves, Fireflower cast one of the strongest spells he knew, causing a large ball composed of flames five feet in diameter to appear between them. Hearing Sonata’s cry of wonder, he felt his spirit soar. “You think that’s something, how do you like this?” he called, and with a moment’s concentration, began rolling it around so that it circled her, making sure that it stayed far enough away from her to be safe. Sonata, for her part, let out another whoop, stomping her hooves in delight.
Both of them were caught completely by surprise when Lex suddenly dropped down into their midst. His teeth were bared in a snarl, his horn was sheathed in a roiling purple aura, and his eyes were blazing green as they locked onto Fireflower.
“I'LL KILL YOU!”
Lex awoke suddenly. By itself that wasn’t unusual, as his nightmares always caused him to snap awake with a start. But this time he knew immediately that wasn’t the case. Instead, something had tripped the alarm spell that he had set last night, meaning that something was within twenty feet of the entrance to their extradimensional hideaway.
His head snapping up as he instantly realized that there was a threat, Lex’s blood ran cold as he realized that both Sonata and that spider-thing were gone. An instant later, he heard Sonata’s voice cry out, and in the split-second that it took him to turn his gaze to the window around the room’s entrance, he heard Fireflower’s voice call out, “You think that’s something, how do you like this?” A moment later, the edge of a large globe of fire rolled through the window’s field of view.
The information collated in his mind instantaneously, coming to the logical conclusion: something had happened, and now that thing was attacking Sonata.
Even as Lex bodily hurled himself across the few feet to the room’s exit, time seemed to slow down. A thousand thoughts flowed through his mind. How could this have happened? No, how could he have let this happen? They knew absolutely nothing for certain about this “aranea,” except that it was a dangerous creature from a dangerous world; everything else that it had offered them was unverifiable, and therefore suspect. To have let it be completely without restraint, to actually fall asleep and let it have unsupervised access to both of them while they were completely defenseless…what kind of insanity had seized him that he’d allowed that?
Except he knew exactly what madness had taken hold of him. He’d let himself to be blinded by how hurt he’d felt when Sonata had suggested that his feelings for her were less than completely sincere. It seemed so stupid now, so incredibly foolish to have let something like that get in the way of making sure that she was safe. And now…now she was going to pay the price for his childishness.
What if it’s already killed her? The words from his shadow floated through his mind, even as his forelegs reached the exit and started to pass through. What if she’s dead, and the last thing you ever said to her was to tell her how stupid you thought she was? The thought of that made Lex feel as it something was squeezing his heart, and for an instant it was like he couldn’t breathe.
…and then he was through the entrance, and falling towards the ground, and he could see her. The globe of fire was passing around her, and he could see her crying out, her hooves working under her as if she wanted to run but didn’t know where, but she was alright.
She was alive…
Time started to flow normally again, and Lex reached the ground, already turning his head to where he’d spotted Fireflower out of his periphery. The cold feeling that had taken hold of him had left with the realization that the one pony that actually mattered to him was still in this world. What replaced it was a sense of rage so powerful that, as soon as Fireflower became centered in his field of view, Lex’s vision momentarily swam.
Frozen by Lex’s unexpected appearance and subsequent scream of fury, both Fireflower and Sonata could only gape in shock. This allowed Lex to immediately spring into action, turning his head to the flaming sphere that Fireflower had conjured and rattling off a quick chant and making several sharp gestures. Instantly, the ball of flames winked out of existence.
Not stopping, Lex hissed a series of arcane syllables as he gesticulated again, this time towards Fireflower. The result was much like the spell of Fireflower’s that he had just dispelled, being a five-foot globe of energy. But where Fireflower’s had been composed of flames, Lex’s was composed of electricity…and there were three of them, crackling softly as they floated in midair.
It took only a hate-filled thought to send them hurtling towards Fireflower, who shrieked and began dodging for his life. Lex vaguely heard Sonata yelling something, but at the moment he was too enraged to care. This thing had tried to hurt his mate; it needed to die, and it needed to die immediately!
Scared out of his mind, Fireflower threw himself backwards as two of the lightning balls crashed into where he’d just been, rolling over as the third one impacted right next to him. The terror that came over his mind was familiar, having experienced it just a few days ago when another creature of overwhelming power had attacked him. Just like then, any thought of fighting back was drowned under the horrifying realization that he was going to die unless he got out of there.
His form shimmered as he ran for his life, and in an instant the yellow-coated stallion was replaced by a bulbous spider with yellow and white markings. Stumbling due to his missing spinneret, he nevertheless began to scuttle up a tree, hoping that the increased cover of the canopy would let him dodge death for a few moments longer.
Sonata yelled at Lex again, pleading for him to snap out of it, but for the second time he acted like he couldn’t hear her. In desperation she raced forward, intent on tackling him before he could make good on his threat to kill poor Fireflower. But just as she was about to barrel into him his body dissolved into churning blackness, and she passed through his now-immaterial form to go tumbling head over hooves through the dirt.
Barely noticing that he had changed into shadows, much less what was going on around him, Lex’s green-and-purple eyes – the only parts of him that were still visible in the roiling mass of darkness that he’d become – were still trained directly on where Fireflower was trying to get away. “You will not escape!” he roared, his rage burning hotter with every moment that that thing avoided death. How dare it try to save itself?! How DARE it think that it had any right to live after what it had done?!
Lex spat another spell, and Fireflower’s body shuddered as a profound lethargy sank into his limbs, slowing him to a crawl even as he desperately tried to ascend the tree further. The balls of lightning came soaring in, and he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get away. Whimpering, Fireflower did the only thing he could and relaxed his limbs completely, letting himself fall.
In the fraction of a second after he began to fall, all three electrical spheres hit the tree where he’d just been, causing a hideous buzzing sound as chips of wood flew in all directions. An instant later, he impacted the ground, the sudden pain leaving him stunned. It dimly occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to dodge again…that he was about to die.
Lex was thinking the exact same thing, and mentally directed the spheres to-
“STOP IT!”
Sonata’s scream was enhanced and directed thanks to her magic, increasing its volume while centering it all on Lex alone. To everyone else, her cry was completely inaudible, but to him it was loud enough that, had he been corporeal at that moment, his ears would have bled. As it was, the pain her spell had caused him managed to accomplish her primary objective, which was to grab his attention. The lightning spheres ceased their descent as he stopped focusing on them, drifting to a halt in midair less than ten feet from Fireflower’s prone form.
“Sonata, what are you doing?!” Lex’s voice was thick with tension and confusion as he returned to solid form.
“What am I doing?!” she shrieked. “What are you doing?! You’re going to kill him!”
“Of course I am!” Lex retorted hotly. “He tried to hurt you!”
“What?!” Sonata’s eyes widened in a mixture of anger, horror, and confusion. “No, he didn’t!”
“He attacked you with a spell!” Lex insisted. “A ball of fire! I saw it, and I heard you cry out!”
“He was showing me his magic! I asked him to do it, and I was cheering because I thought it looked cool! No one was being attacked!” That he had a reason for what he’d done didn’t make Sonata feel better at all.
“But…” Lex trailed off as her words sank in. Could that have been the case? He had been so sure…
“Apologize to him!”
“What?” Lex shook his head, not in denial but to try and focus on what she was saying, having trouble keeping up with her while he was still trying to reevaluate the data that had led him to his initial conclusions. He needed to figure out how the reality of the situation could have been so different from what he’d thought it was. “To who?”
“To Fireflower!” Sonata stamped a hoof, getting angrier by the minute. He’d been a complete jerk to her last night, had almost killed Fireflower this morning over a total misunderstanding, and now he was still refusing to acknowledge him as a person?! This went beyond just being arrogant or prickly; it was completely inexcusable! She grabbed Lex’s ear in her mouth and, ignoring his squawk of surprise, dragged him over to where Fireflower – now back in his pony form – was starting to right himself with a pained groan. “You tell him you’re sorry this instant!”
Lex was still thinking back over the last few minutes, and a shudder ran through him as he started to realize that Sonata’s version of events was holding up to his mental scrutiny. If she was right – and the more he thought about it, the more it looked like she was – then his initial conclusion as to what had been going on had not only been incorrect, but wildly so. If that was the case, then it meant that he had tried to kill a being that was, even considering his race, most likely a member of the moral community. That was an act that, regardless of the circumstances, could not be justified; beings worthy of moral consideration, which included not only all members of noble species such as ponies and griffons, but also exceptional members of lesser species, had a right to life that was utterly inviolable.
It was because of that that Lex refused to consider, even for a moment, apologizing for his actions. To do so would mean acknowledging that he had severely abrogated the moral framework to which he held himself. Having lost, at one time or another, his home, his magic, and even his entire world, that rigorous code of conduct was the one thing that had never been taken from him. To admit that he’d transgressed it would mean that the only remaining thing that had been a constant in his life, the one permanency that had been his last source of strength and comfort in the face of so many things that he found frighteningly incomprehensible, could be taken away from him too.
To apologize would mean admitting that the sense of security he felt from understanding something, truly understanding it in a way that left no room for ambiguity or mistakes in interpretation, could not be found in anything, not even in his own actions. It would mean that the one thing he had left to believe in was a lie, and that thought was enough to terrify Lex to the bottom of his soul.
To apologize would mean admitting that he’d been wrong.
“No,” he said firmly, looking Sonata dead in the eye. “I made the best decision I had with the data that was available to me at the time. I can’t be faulted for having insufficient facts in a situation that demanded split-second decision-making.”
His denial, delivered calmly, was enough to shatter Sonata’s anger, and instead a look of shock mixed with horror slowly spread across her face. “Y-you can’t be serious. Lex, you tried to kill him.” Lex’s only response was to look at her in silent passivity, and for the first time Sonata could remember she suddenly felt afraid of him. To do something so awful and not even be willing to say that he was sorry he’d done it…that wasn't just being awkward or having a temper.
It was completely monstrous.
Slowly, she backed away from him, making sure not to take her eyes off of him for even a second. He moved as if to approach her, and she held out a hoof warningly, a look of controlled fear spreading across her face. Tensely, she moved to Fireflower’s side, bending down to help him get up. “Are you alright?” Even when she spoke, she didn’t take her eyes off of Lex, whose stoic expression was beginning to dissolve into perplexity.
“Y-yeah…” shakily getting to his feet, Fireflower let Sonata usher him behind her, moving with her as they kept backing away from Lex.
“Sonata, what are you doing?” He started to take a step towards her, and her reaction was immediate.
“Stay back!” Her voice was sharp. “We’re leaving, that’s what we’re doing.”
“No…” Lex's denial wasn’t towards her stated intentions, but rather was that this situation was happening at all. “Don’t do this.” He didn’t even hear the pleading tone in his voice, his mind racing desperately to try and figure out some way to stop this. He had figured out how to rationalize his previous actions within the context of his moral code, surely he could figure out how to make her want to stay with him!
Still backing away from him, Sonata was unmoved. “We’re going back. Don’t try to follow us.” She hoped that he’d heed her warning; she had no idea what she’d do if he did come after them. Behind her, Fireflower was still trembling, obviously severely unnerved by what had just happened.
Lex tried to think, tried to find some way to change how this situation – the situation he’d dreaded ever since he’d realized he’d had feelings for Sonata – was unfolding. But the only thing that came to him was a rising tide of panic and upset, as though he were falling off a cliff in slow motion, watching as the deadly impact grew ever closer.
“Don’t go…” his voice was too soft, and it didn’t carry across the ever-widening distance between himself and her. She kept backing away, and a few moments later she was obscured by the underbrush. The whole time she never took her eyes off of him, her expression unreadable to his gaze.
…and then she was gone, with only the echo of his whimper to signify that his entire world had just ended.
Lex had no idea how long he’d been standing there.
Some part of him realized that it must have been quite some time. His legs ached, and his stomach hurt in a way that let him know he hadn’t eaten in too long. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t.
If he moved, even a little, then it would be real. No, not real, but…over. Moving would mean that it was done. It would mean that the situation was no longer extant, that it had concluded, leaving him with no opportunity of stopping it before it entered the immutable realm of the past.
So long as he stayed right there, it was something that was still happening, not something that had happened, and that meant that the opportunity to fix it wasn’t lost. He just had to not move, to hold still and think of a solution and surely he’d be able to make her see-
A snapping sound came from behind him, and Lex spun around, desperate hope surging through him. Maybe she had circled around him for some reason. Maybe she had gotten lost and was approaching from the opposite direction, and then…and then…
The squirrel that had dislodged the fallen branch scampered away, frightened off by Lex’s sudden motion.
His breathing becoming ragged in growing tension, Lex turned back around. That didn’t count, it didn’t affect his unwillingness to let the situation expire. He just had to resume his position from before. He just had to get back into position, right…right here…
No, wait, the view was slightly off. Had he moved off-center when he’d spun around? Or…or had the sun moved enough to make the shadows from the leaves fall differently? Making a minute adjustment to recapture his original standing, and then another, and then another, Lex tried to push away the thoughts that were more and more intruding on his concentration, the growing awareness of the utter futility of what he was doing.
He moved again, and suddenly went tumbling to the ground, tripping over his own hooves. It wasn’t much of a fall; even a foal would have bounced right back up from it without a bruise. But Lex felt something inside of him break as he hit the ground, and he suddenly found himself pressing his hooves against his mouth as a horrible sound tried to escape from his throat.
It had ended, the situation that he’d tried so hard to keep from ending. Or rather, it had ended a while ago, and what had just finished was his illusion that there was anything he could do about it. All there was was the horrible, inescapable truth of what had happened. It ran through his mind again and again and again, raw and agonizing and defeating his every effort at rationalizing it or distancing himself from it or any other way of making it even slightly more bearable.
Sonata was gone.
Once she’d backed far enough away from Lex that she couldn’t see him anymore, Sonata turned her attention to Fireflower. “C’mon, we need to get back to the train tracks.” She got a shaky nod in response, and they slowly made their way back, Fireflower leaning on Sonata for support.
It was only after they’d reached their destination that she paused, glancing back at the woods. Lex didn’t seem to be following them, and Sonata was surprised that she had mixed feelings about that. She’d half-expected him to rush after her, either spewing threats and mean things or shouting an apology and trying to convince her not to go. To just let them go without saying a word like that wasn’t like him.
But then again, after what he’d tried to do to Fireflower, she wasn’t sure she really knew what Lex was like anyway. After all, she’d never thought he would do something like that. He’d always been quick to get angry when something didn’t meet with his approval, but to try and do such an awful thing and then not even be sorry about it…it sent chills down her spine just thinking about it.
“I…I, um…”
Fireflower’s stuttering drew her from her reverie, and she turned to look at him. What she saw made her heart ache. He had been shaking the entire way back, but putting some distance between themselves and Lex hadn’t calmed him down any; if anything, he seemed to be worse now, trembling all over.
“Hey, it’s okay now. He’s gone, and you’re going to be alright. I promise.” She put a hoof on his shoulder, and that was all it took. Fireflower gave a strangled, inarticulate cry and threw his forelegs around her, burying his face in her neck as he began to sob. She gently hugged him back, feeling her own eyes start watering as she quietly made soothing noises. How could anypony ever want to hurt such a sweetie?
“I was so scared…!” Fireflower hiccupped. He didn’t just mean Lex’s unexpected attempt on his life. Rather, his cries were in response to everything he had gone through over the last few days. Before this, his entire life had been one of quiet camaraderie with his siblings in their forest, practicing his magic. Then, all at once, he’d lost his home, been attacked by a deadly monster, seen it kill his little sister, wandered through the wilderness alone, and then almost been killed by some horrible stallion…twice!
“I wanna go home…I wanna go home…I wanna go home.” He repeated it over and over as his tears flowed, wishing with all of his heart that whatever had dragged him there would reverse itself and that, when he opened his eyes again, this nightmare would be over and he’d be back in his forest with his family.
But when he finally opened them again, he was still there.
Rocking Fireflower slightly, Sonata waited until the last of his sobs had stopped before gently rubbing his back. “Feel better?”
“Yeah,” he sniffled. “No. I don’t know.”
“Just let me know if you’re gonna throw up, okay? I’m totes gonna shove you away if you are.”
She smiled as that got a laugh out of him, which seemed to waver back and forth between laughing and crying for a minute before he seemed to settle on the former. Sniffling, he pulled away from her, taking a step back as he rubbed his eyes. “I’m okay…”
She gave him an encouraging smile, and nodded her head back down the track in the direction that she and Lex had originally come from. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Lex had dully dismissed the extradimensional space he’d created the night before, stuffing the limp length of rope back into his haversack before he’d donned it and trudged back to the railroad tracks. He’d glanced in each direction, both hoping and fearing that he’d see Sonata, but the path had been clear in both directions, the tracks stretching out for what seemed like a long way before their gentle curve through the forest cut off his line of sight in each direction.
Slowly, mechanically, Lex turned in the direction of Tall Tale and started walking. Vaguely wondering how much time he had wasted by trying to deny the undeniable, Lex glanced up, noting that the sun was directly overhead. That made sense, since his cursed shadow never fell in the proper direction, and now it was stretched out ahead of him, as though determined to darken each step before he took it.
Not that it mattered, of course. Even if it had been directly beneath him or stretched behind him or if he’d closed his eyes, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing could stop its insidious telepathic whispers. Worse, the detestable thing was more active now than it had ever been, flooding Lex’s mind with its endless diatribe of cutting remarks and vicious scorn. Usually, if he refused to engage with it, it would quiet down in short order, but now…now it unrelenting.
Less than a week, that’s how long it took for you to destroy her feelings for you, it voicelessly spat. Just a few days ago, she was offering you her love, her companionship, and now she can’t bear to even be in your presence.
Lex endured the remarks in stony silence, not because he hoped that would eventually erode the thing’s appetite for his misery, but because he had no answer to give even had he wanted to. The thing was an independent manifestation of his own fears and self-doubts. It always knew just where to direct its barbs to cause the most pain.
She would have followed you anywhere, and now the only place she wants to be is away from you. Did you really think that it could have turned out otherwise? Even back when you were interested in trying to make friends, this was always the end result. Why should she be any different?
She had been different because she had been different. That had been obvious from the beginning, when she’d approached him and had refused to let whatever it was about him that repulsed everypony else do the same to her. It vaguely occurred to him that he’d never asked her what it was about him that had attracted her in the first place. Maybe if he had, he’d have been able to do things differently…
It wouldn’t have mattered. You’re not capable of sustaining a relationship. That’s why you’re worthless. You claim that you want to use your magic and your intellect to help others, but you’re so noxious, so horrible to be around that others don’t want anything to do with you. They don’t want to hear your ideas, they don’t want to listen to your plans, and if you can’t even make a practical difference to those around you then what good are you?
And so it went. Hours passed as the malicious, one-sided dialogue pierced his heart over and over. Nevertheless, Lex didn’t stop walking. He had to get to Tall Tale. They were in danger, and that meant that he was obligated to do what he could to help them. That sense of moral duty, that code of ethics that unambiguously and unfailingly determined whether an action was right or wrong, was absolute.
Keeping it inviolate had cost him everything, but at least he knew what he needed to do.
At some point the sun set, but Lex continued walking, idly calling on Sombra’s magic to enhance his sight after the last of the daylight faded. More hours passed, and he dimly realized that he was famished, but he ignored the sensation, knowing that with his stomach as knotted as it was he wouldn’t have been able to keep anything down anyway. It was cold, but that was fine; the chill would prevent him from falling asleep, and he didn’t dare fall asleep.
But you will at some point, and then it will be so much worse…
Lex knew it wasn’t a threat, but a promise. For all that he hated how his shadow would torment him at odd intervals during the day, it was nothing compared to the unceasing nightmares that it caused him each night. The thing had little more substance in his dreams than it did in the real world, but it had total control over their content, and always used that control to replay scenes of his past failures and humiliations, or to enact things that Lex feared would come to pass. But he would bear it, the same way he had borne every hardship that he’d endured up until now. There was no other acceptable choice.
Silently repeating that last thought to himself, Lex rounded a bend and several lights entered his field of vision from up ahead. Not many, but enough for him to realize that they were coming from buildings.
He had arrived at Tall Tale at last.
The fire crackled warmly, keeping the chill at bay as Sonata settled down for the night, watching Fireflower poke the flames with a stick, coaxing them to blaze higher. Sleeping outside wasn’t as comfy as an extradimensional room, but it had a lot more charm to it.
“That should stay going for a little while,” announced Fireflower, stepping back before laying down. “So long as it doesn’t rain, we should be okay.”
Sonata shook her head. “Nah, I haven’t seen any pegasi around, so I don’t think that they’re gonna come along in the middle of the night just to drop a downpour on us.”
Fireflower made a curious noise, but didn’t follow up on it. He’d heard that the ponies on Everglow could control the weather, and it seemed like it was the same here, but he’d never seen it himself. To him, wind and rain and other weather were just things that happened.
“We’ll, like, try looking for some food in the morning, but we should be able to get back to Pineville pretty soon if we keep up a good pace tomorrow, I think,” Sonata continued. In fact, she wasn’t sure about that, but it sounded right. The train she and Lex had been on had left Pineville at noonish, and they were supposed to get to Tall Tale the following morning, so she felt like she should have been able to do the math and figure out the distance, but it was all so confusing! Plus, hadn’t there been something about the train going slower overnight?
Shaking her head to clear it, she noticed that Fireflower was still looking at her, and she smiled at him reassuringly. Poor little guy was like a lost puppy. It wouldn’t do to worry him over little details like that. “Don’t you worry, you’ll see that most of the ponies here are super nice.”
He nodded, but didn’t look entirely convinced. She decided not to push it, since he’d find out for himself anyway. Yawning, she laid her head down. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight Sonata,” he replied. “And…thank you.”
She smiled at him one more time before closing her eyes, falling asleep almost immediately.
Sonata wandered through the forest, trying to find a way out. She knew she was running, that she had to get out of here, but she didn’t feel afraid. Instead she felt…anxious, like she had lost something and couldn’t even get to where she’d lost it to search for it. If she could just get out of here and back there!
“…ta…”
It was just one faint syllable, but Sonata knew it was her name. They were so far away! She had to get to them! “I’m here!” she cried out, turning every which way. “Please find me!”
“S…a”
The voice floated through the landscape again, as soft as a breeze, and Sonata knew that they wouldn’t find her. The only way was if she found them. She had to, she just had to! They were the only one who could help! But how?
“Where are you? Please! I need you! I need your help so much!”
This time only silence answered her, and Sonata felt a wave of anxiety crash over her. She knew that if she didn’t find them soon, she wouldn’t be able to at all. The thought of that made her want to cry.
She ran, even though she didn’t know what direction she was running. Trees passed her in a blur, but she could tell she wasn’t getting any closer. No no no!
“Help me! Kara!”
As soon as the name left her lips, Sonata felt the ground underneath her hooves give way, and she went tumbling down a steep ravine, one that led into a cave. Although it leveled off once she was passed the mouth of it, she kept falling forward…or maybe the cave was moving around her. Either way, there was a definite sensation of traveling a great distance, even as she kept twisting, unable to right herself. There were many voices now, but none of them were calling her. Instead, they were raised in cries, moaning and shrieking, though she couldn’t tell if they were of pain or pleasure.
Then, as suddenly as the odd journey began, it was over, and her hooves were back under her as she stumbled into a room. Standing in the center was a pony that Sonata was very familiar with. An alicorn, she stood roughly twice as high as Sonata, her horn the same dark purple as her coat. Her wings were similarly colored, but the feathers lightened near their ends, with the tips being the same pure white as her mane and tail. Flowers were woven into both, and an emerald amulet hung around her neck.
“Hello Sonata,” smiled Kara, Everglow’s goddess of love. “You’re looking a little lost again.”
Despite his weariness and fatigue, Lex knew something was wrong even before he set hoof into Tall Tale.
The train station was set slightly outside the city. To Lex, it was obvious that that had been done so that the lumber from the surrounding forest could be more easily loaded onto train cars, rather than needing to haul it into the center of town just to ship it out again. Tall Tale was, after all, a city whose central export was wood.
But as he began to close the last of the distance between himself and the station, Lex could tell that logging had ceased, and not just because night had fallen. In the distance he could just barely make out a worksite, and it painted a grim picture. A number of tools lay scattered about haphazardly, axes and saws tossed carelessly to the ground in a way that suggested they had been discarded carelessly, as though the workers couldn’t be bothered to put them away properly…or hadn’t been able to.
That alone was enough to cause worry, but a half-hour later, as Lex finally walked up to the train station, there was another indication that something had happened. When he was a stone’s throw away from the receiving platform, the door to the station entrance opened and a half-dozen ponies came spilling out.
Each of them was carrying a weapon.
The sight was unusual enough to make Lex stop where he was, from surprise more than alarm. While it had been commonplace in Everglow, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen ponies in Equestria going about armed, save only for the Royal Guard that surrounded the princesses. And these ponies, a rag-tag group dressed in flannel and wielding axes and saws like those at the abandoned logging site, were quite clearly not with that august company.
What had happened here that ponies would start guarding the city at night?
“I’m tellin’ you, I saw something out there!” insisted a pegasus mare, obviously used to the hacksaw she was wielding in her mouth to be able to speak so clearly around it.
“It’s just your mind playing tricks on you,” replied a burly earth pony stallion holding an axe. His nervous tone belied his words, and he glanced around nervously, his eyes passing over Lex without stopping.
Frowning at their inability to see him, it took Lex a moment to remember that they didn't have magic to see in the dark the way he did. For them, the only thing to see by was what was pouring out of the station windows, along with the lantern one of them was carrying. Neither was enough to push back the darkness very far.
Knowing that his eyes were glowing green and sprouting purple contrails from the dark magic he was using to see through the blackness, Lex let the magic strengthening his vision fade. They were already nervous, and approaching them while he looked even more threatening would only make it more difficult to extract any useful information from them. Preparing himself, he stepped forward until he was within the light from their lantern, making sure to move with deliberate slowness so as to showcase nonviolent intent.
For all his precautions, the group on the platform still reacted as though he was a creature that had just crawled from the depths of Tartarus.
Giving a collective shriek of fright, they surged backwards, two of them bolting and running for the door to the station. The pegasus mare shot upward, only to crack her head on the overhang covering the platform and fall back down, swaying woozily. The other three hefted their weapons, faces wrought with fear at the sight of the stony-faced unicorn with the weird horn and the freaky-looking shadow that had come lurching out of the darkness.
“S-stay back!” barked the earth pony stallion that had spoken before. “Who are you and what do you want?!”
“My name is Lex Legis,” replied Lex calmly, not moving from where he’d initially appeared. “I need to speak to whoever’s in charge about what’s happened here.”
“‘What’s happened here’?” asked the pegasus mare, rubbing her head as she got up, her hacksaw forgotten. “You mean with the spiders?”
Lex’s ears perked at that, his eyes widening. “Spiders? What spiders?” Thoughts of Fireflower suddenly filled his mind. There was no way that this was a coincidence!
“Hold on now, first things first!” the burly stallion spoke up again. Motioning to his two friends who hadn’t run, they slowly stepped forward, moving to stand directly in Lex’s path. Apparently now that they’d determined that there was no imminent threat, they found it much easier to be brave. “Why’re you walking into town on the railroad tracks all by your lonesome? And where’s the train? It was supposed to arrive almost two days ago!”
“The train was forced to stop due to damage to the tracks one hundred miles back,” replied Lex. He felt irritated that they were asking questions rather than giving him answers, but he was too wrung out to take them to task. “We’re the…” he trailed off for a moment, remembering that he was alone now. Gritting his teeth, he corrected himself. “I’m the only one who decided to proceed on hoof.”
“And you got here all on your own without those spiders getting you? Sounds mighty suspicious to me,” frowned the burly stallion, hefting his axe in a way that Lex suspected was supposed to be threatening. Lex’s only response was to step forward, already regretting his earlier decision not to simply demand the answers he wanted. He opened his mouth to do just that when the pegasus mare stepped forward.
“For Celestia’s sake, Lumber, look at him!” she nudged the burly stallion as she gestured at Lex. “He’s clearly on his last legs, especially if he’s dragging himself into town at this time of night. Poor fellow’s gonna collapse before you get done interrogating him.”
Having admonished her companion, she flapped her wings and flew down Lex’s side, smiling at him. “You’ll have to excuse the poor welcome, it’s been a bad last few days for all of us. I’m Tender Tree, and that lunkhead there,” she indicated the earth pony she’d just chastised, who despite his frown had put his axe down, “is my hubby, Lumber Jack.”
Lex nodded curtly. “What happened here? What was he saying about spiders?”
Tender held up a hoof to forestall answering. “This isn’t a place to settle in for a nice long chat, and you look like you’re about to keel on over anyway.” Lex started to protest, but Tender kept right on going, throwing a hoof around him as though they were old friends. “C’mon, my sister runs the nicest little bed and breakfast. Since the train’s apparently not coming in, there should be plenty of room for you.”
Unwilling to use magic to forcibly free himself from the overbearing mare, there was little Lex could do but let her drag him towards town.
“I have to say, I’ve been wondering how you were doing. I can’t tell you how happy it made me when I heard you calling out to me before.”
Kara’s words instantly made Sonata feel better, and she righted herself before rushing up to the beautiful alicorn. “Kara! Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to see you!” Sonata caught herself just as she was about to throw her forelegs around Kara, suddenly unsure of herself. Was it okay to hug a goddess? A lot of the ponies she’d met on Everglow had talked about their gods as if they were all high-and-mighty, and she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to be quite that friendly with somepony like that, were you? But then again, Kara had been so nice to her the last time they’d met.
Sonata’s indecision was answered for her a moment later when Kara reached out and gently pulled her closer. “Don’t worry, I accept all affection that’s directed towards me,” she said softly, as though she’d read Sonata’s mind. “I’m not like some of those stuck-up gods that think they have to be aloof.”
“You’re so nice,” murmured Sonata from where her face was pressed against Kara’s chest. “I wish everypony was as nice as you.”
“Everypony, or a certain pony in particular?” asked Kara in a knowing voice.
Sonata let out a shudder that ended in a sigh as she slowly disentangled herself from Kara. Even though she had originally called out to her for help in figuring out how to deal with Lex, that had been before…before she…
“I left him,” she blurted out suddenly.
Kara’s eyes widened slightly. “You don’t love him anymore?”
“No!” replied Sonata immediately. “I mean, no I don’t not love him…er, I mean I haven’t stopped, um, not being in love…” she trailed off into mumbles, confused both by what she was saying and what she meant to say.
Kara placed a hoof over Sonata’s lips, silencing her. “If you feel that confused, then it means you still have feelings for him.” Sonata’s ears lowered, knowing that she was right. One of the friends she’d made back on Everglow, a purrsian – a winged cat-person – named Willow had once told her the same thing.
“Tell me what happened.” Kara gently guided Sonata to a large cushion that she hadn’t noticed before, and the two of them curled up on it.
“Well, it all started last night,” began Sonata. She explained how Lex had suddenly gotten so mad at her when she’d tried to get him to be nicer to Fireflower, followed by how he’d done such an awful thing the next morning, and then refused to say he was sorry. Eventually finishing, she looked at Kara expectantly, clearly waiting for her opinion.
“Poor dear, that sounds like it must have been so awful for you, seeing your beloved do such a terrible thing and then refusing to take responsibility for it.” Kara stretched out a hoof and languidly stroked Sonata’s flank as she spoke. As she did, Sonata suddenly felt tired, as if describing what had happened had drained her. She lay down, letting the goddess pet her slowly.
Kara continued speaking. “You were probably right to do what you did. After all, if your stallion would try to kill someone as sweet at this ‘Fireflower,’ then it was probably only a matter of time before he’d try to do the same to you, right?”
Sonata shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t…” she paused for a long moment, before shaking her head. “No. He wouldn’t do that. I mean, I felt afraid when he wouldn’t say he was sorry, but…not that kind of afraid.”
“No?” Kara tilted her head, her face the picture of incomprehension. “What kind of afraid did you feel?”
Sonata bit her lip, not sure how to explain it. “It was like…like walking into your house and falling into a hole, you know what I mean? Like something you know really well suddenly turned into something totally different.”
“If he had apologized, would you have felt that way?”
Sonata shook her head. “Uh-uh. I mean, then it would have meant he’d known what he’d done wrong and would try not to do it again. Everyone makes mistakes.”
Kara nodded as she began to stroke Sonata’s mane. “You’re right. There’s no way that a stallion like him would ever change his ways without admitting he was wrong first. After all, he never has before, right?”
Sonata started to voice her agreement, then stopped as a memory came to her suddenly. She had changed Lex’s ways before; it was the entire reason they’d started their journey together. Sonata sat up as her thoughts began to spin, Kara silently watching her.
Before they’d gone back to Equestria together, Sonata had spent several weeks living with Lex at an inn in Viljatown on Everglow. During that time, Lex had often ranted about how he was the only pony fit to rule Equestria, going on about all sorts of weird ideas and philosophies that Sonata didn’t understand at all. Apparently Equestria’s princesses hadn’t either, because Lex had frequently mentioned that he’d presented his ideas to them, and they’d shot him down.
The consequence of that was that Lex had been insisting that the only way left was to fight the princesses, a point on which Sonata had fervently disagreed with him, trying to explain that it was better not to fight, even if that meant he only got some of what he wanted. They had debated that a lot, and Lex had never once agreed with her…until they’d gone back to actually speak to the princesses again. Suddenly, without explaining why, he’d agreed to try things her way, and the result had been that they’d been given Vanhoover to rule over.
He’d admitted that she’d been right and he’d been wrong. He just hadn’t wanted to say it out loud.
“I made a mistake.” Although Sonata’s voice was quiet, it was heavy with realization. “I did it wrong and I made a mistake.”
“Then you’ll need to hurry back and fix it,” said Kara, another knowing smile on her face. She stood up, and Sonata did the same. Giving the goddess a grateful smile, Sonata turned and hurried from the room, charging back into the tunnels.
As she did so, Kara’s last words followed her. “And remember, if you need my help again, you just need to call out my name.”
Because Sonata’s back was turned to her, she couldn’t see the wolfish smile on Kara’s face.
His brothers and sisters were laughing and running alongside him, racing each other from the lakeshore to the edge of the forest in a way that they hadn’t done together since they were little. Breezyleaf was in the lead, and Shadowvine was accusing her of using her wind-magic to cheat, causing Brightrose to shoot Fireflower a look of mock-exasperation at their sister’s perpetually-sour mood. Behind him, he could hear Rockwood teasing Waterlily about falling behind. Even though they’d all been born at almost exactly the same time, Lily had always been the baby of the group.
Suddenly the dream changed, and they were in the forest now, with Fireflower was at the back of the group as they scrambled over legs and jumped over gullies. The laughter and the banter were gone, replaced by desperate panting as they ran as fast as they could. It wasn’t a race anymore.
Instead, they were running for their lives.
Behind him, Fireflower could hear the sound of something heavy chasing them, interspersed with the flapping of large wings. He didn’t dare turn around though, knowing that if he did there’d be a dragon there, and it would get him. He tried to push himself harder, but he could feel himself slowing down, his muscles not responding to his efforts.
But he wasn’t the only one. Around him, his siblings were also failing to keep up, trading looks of terror as they all realized that there was no escape. Fireflower tried to yell, to call out to them, but his voice wasn’t working right.
Waterlily was the first one to fall behind, giving a loud, horrible wail that suddenly cut off. Then the same thing happened to Brightrose. Then Shadowvine. Then Rockwood. Each time they fell from his field of vision, Fireflower felt panic and anguish tear at his heart.
Only Breezyleaf was left now, panting as she continued to lose ground. In another moment she’d be gone, and then…then it would get him.
But in the instant before she fell back, Breezyleaf stretched out a hoof – why was she a pony now? – and brushed Fireflower’s side. Suddenly he was moving faster, and he realized that she’d used her magic to save him at the cost of herself. “No!” he screamed, his voice came back to him, too late.
Her last words floated to him as she fell back, where he knew she’d be gone forever. “Go, Fireflower!”
“Fireflower!”
“Hah?!” He sat up suddenly, shaking and panting in momentary incomprehension. A second later, his awareness of his surroundings kicked in, and he slumped as he realized that he was with Sonata, camping out in the forest.
She put a hoof in his back, rubbing gently. “You were having a nightmare. I could hear you crying out in your sleep.”
He flushed with embarrassment. Why did she have to see that?! “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“Oh, you didn’t,” she reassured him. “I had a pretty intense dream myself, and I’d already woken up from that.”
“Okay.” Silence fell for a moment, and Fireflower glanced at the sky. It was still pretty dark, but he was sure that he could see the faintest tinges of color coming from the horizon. “I need to-”
“-go back.”
Both of them stopped, sharing a surprised look as they realized they’d spoken in unison. It was bizarre enough that Sonata let out a snicker, and that seemed to act as a trigger because suddenly they were both laughing. For a full minute neither could do anything except laugh at the sheer absurdity at what had just happened, and how perfect it seemed in light of all the other absurdities they’d gone through.
Finally they calmed down, Fireflower rubbing his eyes as he managed to get his mirth under control. Even then, he couldn’t help but smile, suddenly feeling a lot better. “You go ahead,” he gestured to Sonata. “I interrupted you.”
She shook her head, her mood also improved. “Like, no. You say what you were going to say. I insist.”
“I-, alright.” Fireflower had been about to argue the point, but changed his mind suddenly, feeling like he should be more assertive. “I have to look for my brothers and sisters. You said some of them might have gotten to Tall Tale. If they have, I want to find them.” His smile slowly faded as he spoke, but it was in favor of a look of resolve.
Sonata nodded. “I need to go to Tall Tale too. I…” for a moment, she seemed to waver, her eyes dropping to the ground. Heaving a sigh, she forced herself to pick her head back up. “I want to find Lex.”
Fireflower had been able to guess that that was what it was, but he was surprised by how easily he accepted her statement. He’d thought that he’d be scared of seeing the brooding stallion again, or upset that Sonata still seemed to want to be with him after everything that had happened. But instead he felt…okay with it. It’s because I’m the same as her, he realized suddenly. Even if it seems like a bad decision, we both want to find the people important to us.
Sonata must have taken his lack of reaction the wrong way, because she began to elaborate. “He’s not a bad pony. Even if he acts really super awful sometimes, I know that he wants to do good things. He just makes mistakes, is all, and…I want to be there to help him when he does.”
“Okay.” Fireflower’s one-word statement was accompanied by a warm smile, and although Sonata didn’t understand why he was so okay with her going after the pony that had tried to kill him, she was grateful for it nonetheless.
Pausing just long enough to make sure that the campfire they’d started last night was thoroughly quenched, the pair set off in the direction of Tall Tale, moving quickly to make up for lost time.
It was the pancakes that caused Lex to finally snap.
For the last five minutes, he had been trying to ask Tender Tree about what had been happening in the city, but the pegasus mare had proven to be unrelentingly loquacious, and he hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise. That would have been fine if she’d been providing him with useful information, but every word out of her mouth had been utterly inane. So far she had told him about her sister’s bed-and-breakfast, her extended family, the family business, and now things were coming full circle as she began to talk about her sister’s place again.
“But when I say that she has the comfiest featherbeds this side of Canterlot, I’m not just spinning a yarn, no sir! That’s actually a quote from Trenderhoof himself, can you believe it? He actually wrote that! Ever since then, business has been booming! I mean, before things got bad-” Lex attempted to interrupt here, but Tender was on a roll. “And she made sure to soundproof the walls really well too! Otherwise you’d hear ponies sawing logs inside and outside! Get it? Sawing logs!” She burst into momentary laughter before immediately moving on. “Say, do you like pancakes? My sister can whip up the best-”
“You…blithering…imbecile!”
Tender froze at Lex’s outburst, silenced at last as her eyes widened in shock. For his part, Lex was glaring at her, a snarl contorting his features as everything he’d endured in the last twenty-four hours – the heartbreak, the stress, the exhaustion – boiled over all at once. “Pancakes? This city is being threatened by dragons and spiders and who knows what else, and you’re wasting my time with pancakes?!”
“Uh-”
“Shut up!” he roared. “From now on do not speak unless it’s to answer my questions! Now-” his telekinetic grip fastened around the collar of her flannel shirt, and he yanked her closer until she was practically nose-to-nose with him. “Tell me everything you know about what’s happened to this city! NOW!”
Lex’s outburst had been enough to unnerve her, but seeing his eyes erupt in green and purple as he dragged her closer to him was enough to make Tender Tree descend completely into hysterics. “H-help!” she screamed, starting to thrash. “Somepony help me!”
Lex started to tighten his grip on her, her failure to comply only fueling his rage and causing him to wonder what he’d need to say to make her realize that he was acting in her best interests, when one of her flailing hooves caught him across the face and he instinctively let her go, almost falling over. Instantly, Tender took to the air, flying back towards the train station in fright. For an instant, Lex considered going after her, but as the adrenaline rush that had accompanied his anger wore off he slumped over, almost collapsing before he started to drag himself into the city proper.
You just accosted a pony for being too enthusiastic in wanting to help you. Even without a voice, the words were thick with disdain in his mind.
“I needed to stop her prattle and get her to tell me something useful.” Lex hated how dejected his voice sounded right then.
And you failed miserably. Had you not thrown away the only pony that actually cared about you, Sonata would have had that mare eating out of her hooves, and you’d have had all the information you wanted right now.
Lex had no answer for that, and kept trudging into the city. It vaguely occurred to him that he was pushing himself too far, that he needed to rest…but he couldn’t afford to do so. Not when he only had the rest of the day to figure out what was going on. After that was the equinox, the only time he could replenish his magic, and by that time he’d need to know what he was dealing with so that he could prepare the right spells.
Pausing beneath a streetlamp to consider what to do next, Lex blinked as it suddenly turned off. Looking up at it, he realized that the sky was growing lighter, with sunrise not far off. The city would be active soon…which meant that there’d be more ponies out and above, making it more likely that he’d be able to find somepony who had some answers. Slowly, Lex got to his hooves and kept walking.
A block behind him, a figure peered out of an alley before it continued to follow him.
In the hour that he had wandered through Tall Tale, Lex had failed to acquire a single useful piece of information.
The local newspapers had not been delivered yet, and the retail shops that would have had yesterday’s news had likewise not opened this early. There were a few ponies out on the streets, of course, rushing to get a jump on their day or coming back from some nighttime activity, but all of them had made a dedicated effort to avoid him.
It took only a glance at himself in a store window to see why. Even if his horn, always so arresting in how mismatched its bright red color was to his dull gray coat, hadn’t been enough to alert others that he was potentially trouble, his face would have done the trick all on its own. His features, in addition to being marred by his usual scowl, had grown haggard, with dark bags visible under his sunken eyes. His posture had stooped, as though he was struggling just to find the energy to move…which he was.
And of course, his shadow continued to make itself known, ignoring the early morning light by staying directly beneath him, as though it were high noon.
The shade behind the shop window, which had been drawn, suddenly went up, and a pony’s face appeared from behind it. Said pony took one look at Lex, and as if to confirm his suspicions, gave a shriek and yanked the shade back down.
Sighing, Lex walked away. At this point he was moving simply because he knew that if he sat or lay down, even for a moment, he’d pass out, and he wasn’t willing to give up yet. Not when there was so much at stake…or when sleep would bring what he knew would be incredible nightmares. He had to persevere, had to at least figure out wh-
Not realizing that he’d failed to account for the step down from the sidewalk into the street, Lex lost his balance and went tumbling. His head hit the pavement, and even as much as it hurt he was suddenly struck by how good it felt to lie down. He knew he had to get up, had to get back to doing whatever it was he’d been doing, but maybe for just a moment…
A minute later, the figure that had been following Lex pounced on his unconscious form.
Failure was something that Lex was intimately acquainted with.
He had made many earnest efforts to make friends as a colt, but they had all ended the same. In each case, the ponies he’d approached had all come to one conclusion: that he was “awkward” or “odd” or “weird.” Something about him, some combination of his mannerisms, his reactions, his style of speaking, was putting other ponies off enough that they never felt entirely comfortable around him. Even after myriad instances of holding his frustration and incomprehension in check and simply trying to act the way the ponies around him had acted, it had never worked. They’d always seemed to know that he wasn’t being genuine, and had subsequently distanced themselves from him.
At some point, Lex had come to understand the deeper meaning of his repeated failures to make even a single friend. There hadn’t been any flash of insight or moment of sudden illumination. Instead it had been like a flower opening, being a gradual realization of the true nature of the problem:
There was something wrong with him.
It wasn’t a question about what he was or wasn’t doing properly. It was that there was something about him that was so unpleasant, so off-putting to others that they couldn’t help but withdraw from him. Sometimes the reaction was immediate, and other times it was gradual, but the end result was always the same: his presence simply could not be countenanced.
As painful as that was, what made it truly unbearable was his inability to comprehend just what was wrong. Without knowing what it was about himself that unfailingly drove others away, he had no way of fixing it. No matter how he closely he reviewed past failures or how exactingly he tried to plan subsequent encounters, the true nature of whatever it was about him that repulsed others refused to clarify itself.
The existential anguish of it all was indescribable. If he couldn’t form a connection with others, then he had no place to belong. He knew he had gifts, that he possessed natural talents that gave him something worthwhile to contribute, but without the acceptance and recognition of his peers there was no venue in which to make use of them. That meant, in practical terms, that he had nothing to offer, and what was the value of someone with nothing to offer?
Nothing. Such an individual was worthless.
He was worthless.
It was out of desperation to escape from that label that made Lex change his focus. If he couldn’t isolate and repair whatever his fundamental flaw was, then surely he could at least compensate for it. Though he was unwilling to cease experimenting with social interaction – he couldn’t ignore the chance that some new insight would be unexpectedly unveiled – he would instead endeavor to demonstrate, on a scale so grand as to be undeniable, the worth of what he and he alone could do. Such a thing would surely be enough to eclipse whatever was wrong with him, and win the respect and admiration of his fellows.
At first he’d tried leveraging his aptitude for magic to this end, but although he had created new magic that had many advantages over native Equestrian spellcasting, it had a central flaw in that recharging it required batteries of tremendous magical power that were extremely difficult to find. It was something he was still trying to correct, with no breakthroughs other than minor compensatory techniques to show for it.
Upon returning from the Crystal Empire during its stasis, the horrifying stagnation of his homeland had inspired his next attempt at greatness, which was to revolutionize the philosophy of governance. That had also hit a wall when those short-sighted princesses had spurned his ideas and denied him the chance to execute them. That second attempt, to show his worth via rulership, had only been saved because of Sonata.
…Sonata…
Sonata had been the one pony that had completely defied his history of dealing with others. For reasons that he had never asked and still didn't understand, she had been drawn to him. She had wanted to be around him.
…she loved you...
Not only that, she had believed in him. Although she’d debated how he should achieve it, she had supported his goals of showing other ponies why his authority could bring about prosperity. She had taken his dreams as her own, freely offering her assistance and insights…insights that had, much to his surprise, turned out to be wise counsel. With her at his side, he had actually started to draw closer to the goals that he’d sought for so long.
…and you ruined it…
He had driven her away, the same way he had driven away every other pony he’d tried to get close to. No matter the reasons, no matter what justifications or explanations he made, the end result was that he’d driven away not only the one person who had wanted him to succeed, but was also the only individual that had brought joy – not petty intellectual stimulation or a tepid sense of moral superiority but actual joy – into his ash-gray existence.
…now you’re alone again…
Though Lex prized knowledge, though he lionized new insights and understandings, the awareness of the full scope of what he’d lost was almost more than he could bear. The weight of her absence was crushing. The silence where her beautiful voice should have been was deafening. And the hole in his heart from where she’d been was a gaping wound that could not be closed.
…it will never get better…
During his waking hours, his shadow’s barbs could be mentally “heard,” but that was the extent of its spite. But when he slept, it changed from an irritation into an unstoppable force. Memories that he didn’t want to recall came rushing back in vivid detail. Thoughts that he tried to push away flooded his consciousness. Fears that he refused to acknowledge became impossible to ignore.
Over and over, they tore through him. The regret and the despair and the longing for who he’d lost. If only he had another chance, just one more chance, to make things right with…
“Sonata!” Lex awoke with her name on his lips, his voice practically a sob. He always woke up from his nightmares into an instant state of full wakefulness, but this time the overwhelming sadness arrived before the rest of his awareness returned.
“Who’s Sonata?”
The voice that he didn’t know brought Lex back to himself, and he looked around frantically for the source. Belatedly, he realized that he was inside now, lying on the floor beside a bed in what looked like a hotel room. Sitting at a desk across from him was a unicorn mare he didn’t recognize. Her coat was the color of coal, and her mane and tail were blonde. Her cutie mark was a magnifying glass over a newspaper, and she was currently peering at him over the top of a pair of glasses.
Lex slowly got up, returning her gaze warily. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Where am I, and how did I get here? I-” he was cut off as his stomach growled sharply, reacting to a stimulus that his initial inspection of his surroundings had overlooked: the smell of food. Sitting on a small table near the bed was a plate with toast, scrambled eggs, and slices of potatoes.
The mare gave him a disarming smile. “Go ahead. I ordered it for you.”
Despite her invitation, Lex hesitated, suspicion flaring. A thought was all it took for his circlet to let him view magic…only to find that there was none present, save for the few spells that he’d permanently woven onto himself. Turning his attention back to the meal that had been laid out, he called on Sombra’s power to enhance his senses as he inhaled its aroma again. It was mouth-watering, and completely lacking in foreign substances that he could tell.
A squeal of delight reached his ears, and he glanced at the unknown mare sharply. She had produced a pencil and notepad from somewhere, and was glancing between it and him as she wrote. “Eyes turn green…purple thingies from the corners,” she muttered. “Purple aura around horn…this is great stuff!” She had declared that last part louder, nodding to herself in satisfaction.
Apparently done with her note-taking, her grin radiated satisfaction as she finally looked back at him. A note of confusion dampened her enthusiasm as she glanced between him and the food. “You’re seriously not going to eat anything? Your stomach was growling so loud I thought I was going to get noise complaints.”
Lex was about to demand answers again, only to have his belly punctuate her statement with another loud rumble. Grudgingly picking up the plate in his telekinetic grip, he brought it to him as he climbed on the bed and sat down, the mare occupying the only chair in the room. He took a bite of the toast, and for a moment almost forgot about everything else as his hunger was finally satisfied.
“So, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but that food’s not exactly free.” Her statement caused Lex to pause in mid-bite of a potato slice, and he turned a baleful gaze on his apparent savior. “Whoa, no need for the stink-eye!” she protested, waving her hooves in a warding gesture. “I just meant that I wanted to ask you some questions, is all.”
Swallowing the mouthful of food, Lex gave her a level look. “Before anything else, you tell me who you are and what’s going on.”
“Fair enough. I’m Nosey.” She placed a hoof on her chest, and Lex had time to wonder if she was describing herself before she continued. “Nosey Newsy. And what’s going on,” her voice took on that excited squeal again, this time keeping her gaze directly on him, “is that I’m about to have an exclusive interview with King Sombra!”
Lex stared at the mare, caught completely off-guard by her statement. “What?”
Nosey apparently didn’t hear him, holding her notepad and pencil at the ready in her yellow aura. “First, how did you survive that last battle at the Crystal Empire? According to witness statements you sort of…” she paused to flip through her notes, nodding to herself before continuing, “exploded.”
Lex frowned. “You’re a reporter.” It was a statement, rather than a question. He had no particular antipathy towards reporters, since their ability to disseminate information performed a valuable public service…at least, when they did it right. Still, if this mare was at least halfway decent at her job, then maybe she’d know what was happening in Tall Tale.
“Darn tootin’!” Nosey puffed up pride at the label. “One of the best in all Equestria, if I do say so myself. You know that scandal about the food in Canterlot from a few months back? The one that totally rocked the city? I was the one who broke the story.”
She turned her head to regard a bag sitting on the desk behind her, and telekinetically withdrew a newspaper clipping, holding it up for Lex. “‘Bakery Fakery’,” he read the headline out loud. “‘Local Confectioners Advertise Pure White Sugar, Use Brown Instead.’” He gave her a flat look, clearly unimpressed.
The effect was lost on her, as she had already withdrawn the clipping and was regarding it with a thorough sense of self-satisfaction. “It was all anypony could talk about for a week,” she mused. “Let me tell you, I made some pretty powerful enemies with that scoop; almost got me run right out of Canterlot. Even today, I can’t so much as buy a cupcake in that town.” Rather than being upset, she sounded like she was bragging.
“Ever since then,” she continued, “I’ve been going around writing pony interest stories. Those’re okay, especially after all the craziness from those ‘elemental bleeds’ and all, but I’m really ready to get back to the hard-hitting investigative stuff, which is what made it so great that I heard you assaulting that mare!” She put her clipping away, again lifting up her notepad and pencil, starting to jot something down. “So, what evil schemes are you up to now? No, wait.” She turned her pencil over, quickly erasing something. “I should say ‘nefarious’ instead. ‘Nefarious schemes.’ That’s a lot better, don’t you th-”
“Listen to me,” Lex interjected. He had let her babble on as long as he had only because he had been eating. Having cleaned his plate, he was no longer interested in doing so. “I am not King Sombra, and I’m not up to any ‘schemes,’ nefarious or otherwise. I’m trying to save Tall Tale from an impending disaster, so I need you to tell me what’s been happening here.”
Nosey was scribbling furiously, unconsciously poking the tip of her tongue out and pressing it against her upper lip as she did. “Wait wait wait…if you’re not King Sombra then who are you, and why do look and act so much like him? I covered the Equestria Games, and while the crystal ponies didn’t want to talk about you, er, him a lot, they did give me some basic details.”
She flipped through her notes again, before reading them off. “‘Red horn with purple aura. Dark gray coat. Green eyes with purple fire from the corners. Black mane and tail.’” She paused there to glance over at Lex, and he could have sworn he heard her mutter “dye job” under her breath before she continued. “‘Nasty attitude. Shadow-based magic.” She threw a pointed glance at Lex’s own shadow, currently rising up on the wall behind him, before meeting his eyes again. “So if you aren’t him then you’re sure doing a good job acting like it. Are you some sort of groupie, maybe? Or-, oh!” Her eyes widened. “Are you his son?! Oh wow, that’d be incredible! I can just see the headline now! ‘Son of Sombra!’ Oh this is so much better than a bakery scandal! I can’t wait to-, hey! Where are you going?!”
“To find somepony else that can actually tell me something useful,” Lex shot back, already moving for the door. This was the second mare he’d met that was so wrapped up in herself that she couldn’t be made to focus on the big picture. Even if she was a reporter, she was useless if she couldn’t tell him anything!
Nosey started to protest, but Lex ignored her as he yanked open the door to the hotel room…and stopped dead. The hotel was the sort where the individual rooms opened directly outside, and once the door was open, Lex immediately realized that the sun was shining from the wrong angle. He knew what that meant, what it had to mean given that he felt so rested now, but he still turned back to Nosey for confirmation. “What time is it right now?”
“Huh? It’s six-thirty in the evening. Why?”
Cursing softly, Lex closed the door without exiting. Turning back around to face Nosey, he gave her a sour look. He hadn’t confirmed that she was up to date about current events in Tall Tale, but there wasn’t much chance of him finding another pony that was simply by wandering the streets; he’d tried that earlier and it hadn’t worked. Worse, in a few hours the equinox would begin, and he’d need most of the day to start preparing his spells. As much as he hated to admit it, she was his best bet at the moment.
“Listen to me,” he spoke slowly, the way he would to a particularly stupid child. “Something terrible is going to happen here, probably sooner rather than later. I need you to tell me everything you know about what’s been happening, so that I can stop it.”
“Hmm.” A sly grin spread across Nosey’s features. “Well, if you’ve got questions for me, and I’ve got questions for you, then how about we trade?”
“Trade?” echoed Lex, arching an eyebrow skeptically.
Nodding, Nosey pushed her glasses up from where they’d been sliding down her muzzle. “That’s right. I ask a question, you answer it. Then you ask a question, and I answer it. Back and forth. Deal?”
Lex grit his teeth in frustration. “This entire city is in danger, and you’re playing games?”
Nosey frowned. “If there really is this big, terrible danger, then everypony deserves to know about it. Hence why I want to write about it.”
“Then I’ll give you an interview afterwards!”
“Nothing doing!” Nosey retorted. “I’ve been burned by that whole ‘help me now and you can interview me later’ bit before. Not this time. Some big disaster and King Sombra’s kid brother? No way I’m waiting until later on this!”
“Did it ever occur to you that if I was King Sombra, I could use my magic to make you tell me what I wanted?” Lex hissed at her, hackles rising.
“Yeah? Well you’re the one who said you’re not him. Besides,” she rooted in her bag for a moment before extracting a small card. “I have a press pass, which means that I’m off-limits.”
She said that with a voice full of certainty, and for a moment Lex could only gape at her. “You can’t possibly be that stupid, to think something like that would protect you.”
“Hey! I’ll have you know that everypony respects the press!” Nosey raised her nose in the air. “They have to, otherwise we’d totally trash them in the court of public opinion.”
“I don’t recall King Sombra being too put out by whatever drivel was being written about him,” Lex replied, but there was no heat in his voice. Returning to the room’s bed, he sat on it. Recognizing that she’d won the argument, Nosey likewise returned to her seat, all smiles once again.
“Now,” she began, “first question: what’s your name?”
“Lex Legis,” he answered immediately. “My turn. That mare from before-”
“The one you were attacking?” cut in Nosey.
“I wasn’t attacking her!” snapped Lex. “I was trying to interrupt her monologue of inanity to get her to tell me something that was actually informative, and she panicked!”
“I’ll corroborate that with her later.”
“Whatever! She said that there was something with giant spiders attacking the city. What do you know about that?”
“Let’s see here,” Nosey checked her notes some more. “According to some of the statements I got, several days ago a group of loggers were attacked by giant spiders just outside the city. They managed to get away, but said that they had strange powers, which was confirmed,” she flipped a page, “when some more spiders appeared just outside of a pet store in the downtown area two days ago. Several witnesses described one of them sending bolts of acid into a crowd, another made some sort of ray appear that made those it hit feel weak, and a third made a cloud of fog that they vanished into when they were done.”
Lex was silent for a long moment, brooding over what he’d been told. That was undoubtedly spellcasting, and given what little he knew about Fireflower’s elemental inclinations, these sounded like his missing siblings. But why were they attacking ponies here in Tall Tale? Unless he’d been right to assume that those creatures were savages in the first place.
The streak of regret that went through him at that thought was so powerful that he almost winced. It had been that kind of thinking that had cost him the love of his life. Even if he hadn’t been wrong per se to react the way he did, it had still turned out to be incorrect. For now, it would be better not to draw any conclusions about the other araneas before he had all the facts.
“Next question,” continued Nosey. “Why are you so much like King Sombra?”
Lex sighed. “That’s a long story.”
“Good,” came the immediate answer. “I like writing long stories.” Nosey grinned again as she held her pencil at the ready, awaiting his answer.
Shadowvine sipped her drink, the cloying sweetness causing her to grimace. “What’s this supposed to be, again?”
“The waiter said it was an ‘apple cider latte.’” The answer came from Shadowvine’s left, where a lime-green mare with a mane and tail of ice blue was sipping the same drink with more enjoyment.
“So that’s supposed to be what? Apples and milk together?” Shadowvine grimaced, giving her head a shake as though that would dispel the lingering flavor in her mouth. But all she accomplished was making her black mane whip around for a moment before settling back down against her dark purple coat. “Disgusting. I really don’t know how you can drink that stuff, Breezyleaf.”
“It’s not so bad,” the green mare protested. “I mean, it’s a little on the strong side and all, but it’s still good.”
“You can have mine, then.” Shadowvine pushed her drink towards her sister, instead focusing on the salad in front of her. She clearly didn’t approve of this either, face twisting at her first bite. “Weeds, all of it. Do these ponies really eat nothing but plants and candy?”
“It’s their nature,” came the voice of the remaining pony at their table. Sitting to Shadowvine’s right, the evening light made the café’s interior subdued enough that the stallion’s chocolate-brown coat looked even darker, contrasting with his dark gray mane. He looked up from his own salad to address the other two. “You should eat. We all need to keep our strength up.”
Breezyleaf nodded, turning her attention back to her food, but Shadowvine frowned at the instructions. “We should just out into the forest and hunt for our own food, Rockwood. Come to think of it, how are we even paying for all of this, anyway?”
“We can’t go hunting,” replied Rockwood, taking another bite of his meal. “They’ve got ponies watching the forest, so we’d be spotted if we left. As for how we’re paying,” he paused to swallow a mouthful of lettuce, “I picked up some wallets that were dropped when the ponies were running away before.”
“I hope it’s enough to last us for a while,” spoke up Breezyleaf. “I don’t want to have to do that again, at least not anytime soon. I feel so bad for these ponies, they’re really scared.”
Shadowvine slammed a hoof down on the table. “Brightrose is the one who’s really scared! Can you imagine, being all alone in the back of that cave, trapped by that, that…monster! If you want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for him!”
Breezyleaf looked down, eyes brimming with tears. “I do! I do, but these ponies…they’re not bad. I thought that they’d be all standoffish like you said, but they seem really nice.” She sniffled, turning her attention to her brother. “I bet Fireflower’s found some of them who’ll help us by now. He’ll find his way back soon, right?” Her voice was almost pleading.
Rockwood looked down for a moment, before making himself meet his sister’s gaze. “Maybe.” Breezyleaf brightened for a moment, but Rockwood continued. “But we can’t count on that. In the meantime, we have to do what we can to protect Brightrose…and that means we have to do keep frightening the ponies here.”
Breezyleaf sniffled, but Shadowvine just snorted. “Fine by me. What do we care if some ponies freak out a little, if that means that we don’t lose any more of us…” she trailed off, not sure that she could keep her voice steady. The others didn’t say anything, all of them thinking of what had happened to Waterlily.
After several moments of silence, Rockwood gestured to the food in front of them. “Finish up. We’re going to need to go again soon.”
“When?” asked Shadowvine, before forcing herself to shovel more greens into her mouth.
“Tomorrow morning, before the mayor’s speech,” replied Rockwood. “We’re supposed to make sure that the ponies are scared enough that none of them want to stay behind when she starts the evacuation.”
Fireflower and Sonata were practically leaning on each other by the time they stumbled into Tall Tale.
“We made it,” groaned Fireflower, looking around as the scenery transitioned from forests to buildings. He’d never actually been in a city before, having only heard about them from his siblings’ stories. “So…where do we start looking?” Despite his hunger and his exhaustion, he was eager to begin searching for his brothers and sisters, hoping against hope that they’d be reunited here without anything else happening.
“Like, how about that restaurant?” Sonata pointed to a building down the street, where a sign read “Healthy Horse Grill,” and didn’t wait for Fireflower’s acknowledgment before heading towards it. Her companion didn’t hesitate in following her.
The two of them had pushed themselves hard to reach Tall Tale so quickly, having covered well over fifty miles in just over twenty-four hours. While their primary motivation had been to find the ones who were most important to them – for Sonata that was Lex, while Fireflower wanted to find his missing family – there had been another reason for them to reach the city as fast as they could.
That reason was made obvious by their rumbling bellies as they sat down in a booth. After they had parted ways from Lex, the lack of food hadn’t been an immediate concern. But after the first day, the two had realized that they had a serious problem. Neither knew how to forage, nor could Fireflower catch anything with his spinneret so badly damaged. The result had been an undercurrent of desperation, driving them to get to Tall Tale as fast as possible.
“But seriously, after we’re done here, where should we start?” asked Fireflower as Sonata nodded pointedly at a waiter. “I mean, we know that they’re here, right? After what they said at the train station they just have to be!”
The two had passed the train station on their way into the city, whereupon several ponies had approached them to check on the two strangers making their way into the city. They had regaled the pair with stories of monster spiders and strange ponies with dark magic, much to the delight of Sonata. Fireflower had been more alarmed at the idea that the “spiders” were attacking people, and had started to protest that they wouldn’t do that.
Needless to say, those reactions were not the ones the guard ponies had expected. It had only been due to some quick thinking on the duo’s part, making up a story about being investigators of weird phenomena, that they’d been allowed to pass at all.
“I’m sure they are,” nodded Sonata, “and we’ll figure out where to start looking right after we eat. After all, it’s a well-known fact that people get all dumb when they’re hungry.”
“It is?” asked Fireflower, blinking.
“Totes!” insisted Sonata. “It’s got something to do with, like, the level of nutrients in your blood or something, and if they’re too low then your brain gets all underworked and stuff.”
“Wow, I had no idea!” Fireflower’s eyes widened slightly as he absorbed this new knowledge. He’d thought that Sonata had come here just because she was hungry, but she’d been thinking far ahead!
“Yep. I saw it on TV one time.” Noticing Fireflower’s uncomprehending look, Sonata started to explain. “Er, TV is a thing from this other world I was on, and it’s kinda-”
“Hello, and welcome to the Healthy Horse Grill, where every meal is guaranteed to be as healthy as it is tasty!” Their waiter made his presence known, smiling as he passed out menus to the pair. “Since today is the equinox, we’re serving a special to commemorate the princesses who raise and lower the sun and moon. For just one hundred bits, you can get a combo platter with grilled-black vegetables on edible hay skewers along with a serving of vanilla yogurt and freshly-peeled apples, all with our choice of beverage! We also have-”
“That sounds great, we’ll each take that,” interrupted Sonata, eager to get to the food.
“Certainly! And to drink?”
“Oh, um…” Pausing, Sonata gestured to Fireflower, indicating he should answer.
“Er, just water for me, I guess,” he fumbled, not sure what his choices were.
“I’ll have the same.”
“Two combo platters and two waters, coming right up!” Retrieving the menus, the waiter went back to place their orders.
Waiting for their food to come out, Sonata tilted her head for a moment as something occurred to her. “Hey, I just realized. You know what Lex looks like and all, but I have no idea what your brothers and sisters look like.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess not…” For an instant, Fireflower wasn’t sure why she was mentioning that, until the obvious answer came to him a moment later. “Wait, you want to help me search for them?!” The idea shouldn’t have been shocking, but it was. He had just assumed that they were each going to look for their respective targets, or even split up to try and find them separately. Somehow, he hadn’t considered the possibility that they’d work together once they’d arrived.
“Well duh! What’re friends for?” She replied, flashing him a brilliant smile that would have knocked Fireflower over had he not already been sitting. He managed a nod of acknowledgment, suddenly unable to bring himself to speak.
Although he hadn’t known Sonata very long, Fireflower felt as close to her as he ever had to his siblings…maybe even more. Over the last few days, they had gone through so much together. When he’d been sad, she’d cheered him up. When he’d been scared, she’d calmed him down. Every word she’d said to him had always been unfailingly kind. Even now…even now she was thinking about how she could help him, despite having someone else she was looking for.
The thought of her actually wanting to be with that harsh, unpleasant pony made about as much sense to him as planting a flower in a dank cave. The same way it couldn’t bloom under such conditions, Fireflower couldn’t imagine someone as wonderful as Sonata being with someone as awful as Lex. He felt guilty even thinking that; he knew how much the red-horned unicorn meant to her, and that he had no real right to question her choices, especially after all she had done for him, but still…
“Hello? Fireflower? You reading me?” Fireflower blinked, coming back to himself as Sonata waved a hoof in his face. “You totally spaced out for a second, there. Everything okay? I don’t want you to collapse from hunger just before the food gets here.” She giggled at that, the thought of fainting from want of food just before being served being funny to her.
Rather than joining her in her laughter, however, Fireflower felt almost light-headed. Even now she was worrying about him. “Sonata, I have to tell you something.” He could feel the words bubbling up inside of himself, and knew that he couldn’t possibly hold them back. Even if she didn’t feel the same way, he had to tell her. “I think…I think that I lo-”
“And here we are! Two combo platters and two waters!” The waiter, utterly unaware of what he’d just interrupted, slid their orders in front of the pair. “You all need anything else?”
Practically salivating, Sonata shook her head quickly. “This looks great! Thanks!” Without any further preamble, she dug right in, picking up a hay-skewer of fried vegetables and chowing down. Not having eaten in two days, the taste was almost overwhelming, and it was enough to push everything else from her mind.
In contrast to her, Fireflower sat frozen for a long moment before the enticing aroma pulled him out of his reverie, and he slowly started to eat. What had he almost done? What could possibly have possessed him that he’d almost said…what he’d almost said. He knew how she felt about Lex, and besides, they weren’t even the same species! By any measure it was crazy! But even so…as his eyes slid from his meal over to her, watching as she dipped an apple slice into her yogurt and munched on it with an expression of unbridled joy, he could feel that urge to open his heart to her rising up again.
Pushing it down, Fireflower focused on his meal. By the time he finished, he felt reasonably sure that he could keep himself under control. Sonata had been right; going too long without food really did make you dumb.
Leaning back, Sonata rubbed her belly contentedly. “Oh wow, that has to have been the tastiest food, like, ever!” She savored the feeling of being full for a few moments longer before turning her attention back to Fireflower. “So, what were you gonna say just now?”
“Huh?” He tilted his head, not sure what she meant.
“You started to say something. You ‘think you lo-’, remember?”
“Oh! Oh yeah, ha ha, I did…” He chuckled nervously. “I, um…I was trying to say…”
Sonata smiled curiously, unsure why he was suddenly acting that way, and then all of a sudden it came to her. “Oh! I get it!”
Fireflower’s heart leapt up into his throat. “Y-you do?!”
She nodded, and gave him a gentle smile that turned the food in his stomach into butterflies. “Yeah, and there’s no need to be embarrassed. If anything I should be embarrassed for not realizing it sooner.”
“Th-then…!”
She nodded again. “You think you looked at your siblings’ pony forms when you first got here, but you’re not sure you remember what they were. That’s why you didn’t answer when I asked you about them, right?”
Sonata was sure she was correct just from seeing the look on his face. It was frozen in an expression that combined surprise and embarrassment. Poor guy, she’d really put him on the spot! “Well,” she continued, “don’t worry, we’ll figure it out somehow. In the meantime, let’s get out of here.”
Waving a hoof, she smiled at the waiter as he trotted over to them. “All done? Can I interest you guys in some dessert, or should I get the check?”
Sonata sighed internally. She knew Lex would hate this, but, well…he’d said that she should use her powers in an emergency, and this was an emergency, right? Waving her hooves, she sang a quick enchantment, the pony in front of her giving her a curious look. Fireflower’s was more knowing, but still curious since he didn’t recognize the exact spell she was using.
Once the last note left her lips, their waiter’s smile changed, becoming friendly rather than just polite. Knowing that her spell had worked, Sonata smiled at him in return. “Actually, could you do us a teensy little favor and get rid of the bill for this?”
The waiter’s smile wavered. “I don’t know…I’m really not supposed to do that. I mean, I really want to help you out, but, well, that’s really against the rules.”
Standing up, Sonata leaned closer to him, batting her eyes. “Like, pretty please? I’d really appreciate it if you could help my friend and me out. We’re really in a jam, and all we can rely on is your friendship.”
His face looked confused for a second, as though he wasn’t sure why he was putting so much stock in what she said, and Sonata knew that he was trying to fight her spell off. But she had been enchanting people since long before he’d been born, and knew how it’d turn out. Sure enough, his features relaxed a moment later and he nodded. “Well…when you put it that way, how can I say no? You all go ahead, I’ll take care of things here.”
“Aw, thank you so much!” Sonata beamed at him in thanks before turning around and ushering Fireflower out with her.
He glanced at her as they quickly put the restaurant behind them. “What was that? I know it was magic, but I’ve never seen that kind before.”
“It’s my special talent,” replied Sonata. “I can use magic to make ponies do what I want.” She sighed a bit, giving Fireflower a smile that was tinged with sadness. “I used to use it all the time, until some friends told me that it was wrong to mess with ponies’ heads.” She paused before adding, “Lex used to say the same thing.”
Not wanting to see her looking like that, Fireflower immediately spoke up. “I think it’s great!” She looked up at him, slightly surprised by the vehemence in his voice. “I mean, um,” he stuttered, trying to figure out what he was saying. “You can use it to, you know, to get ponies to do good things, without having to threaten them or hurt them or anything bad like that…” he trailed off, realizing that he was babbling, and that he probably sounded like an idiot.
“Aw, you’re so sweet, trying to cheer me up!” Sonata threw a hoof around Fireflower’s neck, pulling him in for a quick hug that left him grinning in a way that he definitely knew made him look like an idiot, though at that moment he couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Everypony! Stay away from the town square!”
The moment was interrupted by a shrill cry from above them. A pegasus mare was flying overhead, shouting that warning over and over again. In the distance, several other pegasi could be seen, echoing the same message.
“Hey!” Sonata yelled up at her. “What’s going on?!”
“It’s the spiders!” came the reply from the pegasus. “They’re attacking again!”
Rockwood sighed internally as he overlooked the havoc, wishing that the ponies he and his sisters were terrorizing would at least make a pretense of fighting back. If they did then maybe he wouldn’t feel so guilty about what he was doing. But just like every other time, all they did was scream and try to run away.
Chanting a spell, Rockwood pointed one of his eight legs toward an area near the fountain at the center of the townsquare. Several ponies were lingering there, trying to help a pony that was wailing about being blind, something Rockwood knew was due to Shadowvine’s magic. The sight was pitiful enough that he changed where he was pointing just as he completed the incantation, causing the resulting rain of pebbles and dirt to rain down onto the fountain instead of on their heads.
The ponies yelped in terror at the unknown phenomenon happening right next to them, but none of them abandoned their fellow. Instead, they managed to lift the crying mare between them, and began carrying her off. The sight was enough to make Rockwood feel wretched about what they were doing…but what choice was there? Just like those ponies, he was trying hard to save someone else that he cared about.
Across the plaza, Breezyleaf was at the mouth of an alley, gesturing for them to fall back, and Rockwood scurried over to her. Shadowvine joined them a moment later, and Rockwood could see several ponies bound in webbing behind her, unconscious. He frowned at the sight, but didn’t say anything. A moment later, Breezyleaf cast her spell, and a thick fog descended over them. Confident that they were hidden from sight, they followed the plan they’d used each time so far and changed back into ponies before exiting the other side of the alley, just another group of terrified bystanders.
They galloped several blocks before coming to a halt. Glancing around to make sure that they were alone, Rockwood let out a breath. “Is everyone alright?” He knew the question was pointless, given that they’d faced no resistance at all, but he still had to ask.
Shadowvine’s snort was contemptuous. “Of course we’re alright. How could we not be? These ponies are all cowards.”
“That’s not fair!” snapped Breezyleaf. “Just because they couldn’t fight back doesn’t mean they weren’t brave!”
“I concur. I saw several of them trying to help another pony, even though they were clearly scared.” Although Rockwood’s voice was quiet, his eyes pinned Shadowvine in place, and she squirmed uncomfortably.
“Fine, they’re not cowards, okay? They ran away with loads of courage.” Sitting up and crossing her forelegs, Shadowvine frowned. Why was everyone suddenly picking on her?
Rockwood continued to glare at her, until she finally couldn’t take it anymore. “What?!”
“You left several bodies behind you.” Although Rockwood didn’t yell – it was extremely rare for him to ever raise his voice – Shadowvine still flinched at his accusatory tone.
“Shadowvine!” Breezyleaf’s voice was horrified. “What did you do?!”
“Nothing!” she yelled. Wincing at how loud her voice sounded, she glanced around again before she continued. “Look, none of them were seriously hurt. I just bit a few and trussed them up is all. They passed out on their own.”
“And that pony you blinded?” countered Rockwood.
“Why are you getting in my face about this?!” Shadowvine could feel herself starting to lose it. She hated that her eyes were watering but she couldn’t make it stop. “I’m trying to save Brightrose! We’re supposed to scare these ponies, so yes, I’m doing everything I can to act scary! That doesn’t mean I like it, but if we don’t do a good job with this, then we’re going to lose him too…” she broke off, stifling a sob.
Watery-eyed herself, Breezyleaf went over and threw a foreleg around her sister’s neck in a hug, the two of them sniffling. Off to the side, Rockwood sighed, realizing that he’d been taking his guilt out on her. Walking up to the girls, he put a hoof on Shadowvine’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he offered quietly.
Breaking her embrace with Breezyleaf, Shadowvine wiped her eyes. For a moment she wanted to berate her brother, but she let it go. “No, you were right. I just…I just want all of this to be over.”
“We all do,” offered Breezyleaf, her lips curling in a smile of support, albeit a small one. Rockwood nodded as well.
“Yeah…anyway, we should go. We’ve done enough for now.” Shadowvine gestured for her siblings to go ahead, and they began to trot, putting more distance between them and the mayhem they’d caused.
Spending a moment of silent concentration to cancel the blindness spell she’d put on that poor pony, Shadowvine also sent a silent apology before moving to follow.
Two minutes later, Fireflower and Sonata arrived on the scene.
Fireflower didn’t want to believe it at first.
At first glance, the town square didn’t seem like it had suffered an attack. There were benches and chairs that had been knocked over, papers and food and other trash that had been carelessly scattered around, and even some ponies laying about, but you’d find that after a wild party as much as you would a scene of violence.
But then he’d noticed several ponies tied up in silken threads, and he’d known that there was no denying it.
He approached them, three ponies lying on the ground in partial cocoons, and one that was stuck to a wall with sticky strands. The one against the wall was struggling hysterically, and two of the ones on the ground were wriggling weakly, with the last lying still. For a moment, Fireflower just stared, not hearing the panicked breathing or the cries for help.
Hunting wasn’t anything new for Fireflower. He and his siblings had learned from a very young age that they had to eat to survive, and that in order to do that they’d need to spin webs and catch prey. But they’d always limited themselves to the animals in their forest; even if they’d wanted to catch sentient creatures – and they never had – there simply hadn’t been any there to entrap. Moreover, hunting hadn’t been something they’d needed to do all that often. Usually they’d each just check their webs every so often, and whatever small game they’d caught would be enough for a day or two.
But now, seeing sentient creatures bound up in their webs…Fireflower felt sick at the sight.
“Hey,” came Sonata’s voice. “You okay?”
He jumped at the contact, suddenly feeling ashamed that she was seeing this. After she had defended him from her overzealous boyfriend, to see that the rest of his kind had done something like this made him want to curl up and die. “I…yeah. I’m fine.” He could tell from the look on her face that she didn’t believe him, and he quickly returned his attention to the ponies that were tied up. “C’mon, let’s get them out of there.”
Sonata almost protested, seeing that he was clearly upset, but let it go, instead starting to tear at the sticky webbing with her teeth. The material didn’t tear easily, but by the time other ponies started cautiously returning to the area, they had pretty much gotten the victims free. One of them had a hard time keeping his hooves under him, and Fireflower was quick to note the bite marks on his neck. “You’ve been bitten. More than once. You’re going to need to rest for a few days until the poison runs its course.”
“Why are those…those monsters doing this to us?” sniffled one mare. She had been the pony that had passed out in terror, and she was still shaking all over. “We didn’t do anything to them.”
Fireflower’s ears folded back, and he kept his eyes on the ground. Sonata tried to think of something to say that would cheer him up without revealing too much, when a new voice rang out. “Aw! I missed it!”
Sonata, Fireflower, and the remaining ponies looked up as a new mare trotted over to them from the growing crowd, her body language making it clear that she regarded the situation as having as much gravity as a helium balloon. Her coat was a mixture of dark grey and black, and her mane and tail were blonde. With her glasses and her newspaper-and-magnifying-glass cutie mark, it would have been obvious what her occupation was even if she hadn’t immediately whipped out a pencil and notepad as she approached the group.
“I can’t believe this is the third attack there’s been and I still wasn’t on the scene for it!” she groused. “I’m so jealous of you guys, getting to witness news in the making like that!” Sonata and Fireflower shared a glance, neither being sure what to make of this new development. Sonata started to talk, but the mare cut her off. “Oh, where are my manners? I’m Nosey Newsy, and I’m a reporter with the Canterlot Chronicle. Now, please tell me about the monsters.”
“They weren’t monsters,” muttered Fireflower in a low voice, still keeping his eyes on the ground.
Nosey’s hearing was quite good, however, and she turned in his direction. “I’m sorry, would ‘creatures’ be a better term?” She scribbled something quickly. “Nevermind. Now, can you tell me what they wanted? Did they seem like rampaging beasts, or did they actually try and target ponies specifically, or-, hey! Is that a web?!” She peered behind Fireflower, eyes widened as she beheld some of the torn thread on the ground. “Were they trying to eat the ponies here?!”
Fireflower shook his head, and Sonata could see that he was gritting his teeth, but Nosey was on a roll now and there was no stopping her. “Oh my gosh! Bite marks!” She pointed at the shaking mare, who seemed to be even more upset for Nosey’s attention, looking like she was about to burst into tears. “They were trying to eat the ponies here! Oh wow, I can just see the headlines now! ‘Don’t Step Into Their Parlor! Giant Spiders Attack Tall Tale!’”
“STOP IT!” yelled Fireflower, whirling to confront Nosey and drawing all eyes to him in the process. “You don’t know anything, so stop pretending like you do! Maybe…maybe they were scared and just trying to reach out or…or maybe they were under some sort of spell that forced them to attack the ponies here, or…” he faltered, realizing that everyone was staring at him incredulously.
“Is he defending those things?” came an outraged voice from the ponies gathered around them.
“Must have a screw loose,” said another pony.
“I bet it’s not his friends or family that have been hurt, if he can talk like that,” snorted a third.
That was all Fireflower could stand. He knew he had to get out of there immediately, or he’d do something he’d regret. Not looking around, he charged through the crowd, pushing protesting ponies out of the way until he was through. He heard Sonata call his name, but he couldn’t bring himself to face her, running blindly down the streets until he finally stopped in an alley somewhere, letting out choked sobs.
A minute later, he heard soft hoofsteps approaching. He didn’t look up to see who it was. He didn’t need to. “I’m sorry about that,” he said in a strangled voice, struggling to maintain what little composure he had. “I just…I had to get out of there, you know? With what they were saying…I couldn’t listen to it anymore.”
Sonata didn’t answer, instead going up and throwing her hooves around him. Fireflower bit his lip in response, but didn’t push her away. Why was it always like this, with her being the one comforting him? Just once he wanted to be able to do something for her!
“I know how you feel,” said Sonata softly, not realizing the other source of Fireflower’s discontent. “It’s the same way I feel whenever someone says something bad about Lex. I just want to yell at them, to tell them that they don’t really know him the way I do, that if they did they’d realize that he’s not really so bad.”
Fireflower couldn’t help but hiccup in laughter at that, struck by the irony of her sympathizing with him by way of the pony in her heart, whom he desperately wanted to replace. Pushing that thought away, he instead focused only on right now, on how good it felt to be embraced by her.
Sonata let him go a few seconds later. “Listen, how about we talk to those ponies who saw what happened later, after that awful reporter is gone? I saw a doctor in the crowd, so they’re probably going to take them to a hospital. We can talk to them there in a little while, okay?”
Fireflower nodded, giving her a small smile. “I think that’s a good idea.”
“I think so too. In the meantime, how about you go find someplace to rest while I do some more checking. The mayor’s going to give a speech soon and I think Lex might go there too. He usually tries to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather stay with you,” replied Fireflower. Silently he vowed that someday – someday soon – she’d know just how much he meant that.
In the two hours since the attack on Tall Tale’s central plaza, the space had filled up with ponies in anticipation of the mayor’s speech.
Sonata idly wondered if that was odd, that everypony would come back so quickly after something so frightening had happened there. Notwithstanding having been banished so long ago, she hadn’t been in Equestria long enough to know if it was because the ponies here really were just that optimistic, or if they were simply desperate to hear what the mayor’s plan was. That was the purpose of this speech, after all; the announcement had been made in advance that the mayor would address the city with a “comprehensive plan to deal with the current crisis.” Judging from the nervous looks that she saw the ponies in the crowd giving each other, she suspected that a desire for security had motivated the townsponies to be here more than any sense of hopefulness.
Beside her, Fireflower looked nervous as well, but Sonata knew that it was for different reasons entirely. If the mayor was announcing that they’d hunt down and attack the creatures that had been terrorizing them, then the odds of him losing even more of his family would skyrocket. For his sake, she truly hoped that it wouldn’t come to that. Surely the mayor would want to find a peaceful resolution?
But Sonata had to admit that she wasn’t at all sure of that.
Lex would know, she thought to herself. He’d have figured out exactly what they’re gonna do, and why, and what we should do about it. He’s really good at that. The thought of her boyfriend made her heart ache, and not just because she wasn’t sure if she could even call him her boyfriend anymore.
She still felt terrible that she’d left Lex the way she did. Yes, what he’d done had been awful, but demanding that he apologize for it had been exactly the wrong thing to do. That was so clear to her now that Sonata couldn’t believe she’d done that in the first place. She’d lived with him for weeks back on Everglow, and during that time they had argued a lot about his insistence on going to war with the alicorn princesses. During that time he’d never once agreed with her about negotiating instead of fighting, until they’d gotten back to Equestria, at which point he had done exactly that.
That had been when Sonata had realized that Lex was so incredibly stubborn that he’d reflexively resist if you tried to push him, even if he agreed with what you were pushing him towards. It didn’t matter whether the topic was his high-minded theories or what to eat for breakfast; if you tried to make him concede something, he’d refuse to do so as a matter of course, and the more he was pushed the more firmly he’d dig his hooves in.
His attack on Fireflower had been so unexpected and so frightening that it had caused her to lose sight of that. Lex had tried to explain, as well as he was able, that he’d made a mistake – that he’d thought she was in danger and was acting to protect her – but she hadn’t wanted to listen. Instead, she’d told him that he had to admit that he’d been wrong in order to make things right.
The result had been that they’d split up.
It would have been easy to say that it was all his fault, that he should have just stopped being so inflexible in the face of something that serious. But Sonata knew that wasn’t fair. That stubbornness was one of the things that she loved most about him. When he was being all take-charge and can-do about something, firmly taking control of a situation and flexing his authority, then he absolutely took her breath away. Wanting him to abandon that when she didn’t like it wasn’t realistic.
Kara had been the one to help her realize that, and in the privacy of her thoughts Sonata silently thanked the goddess again, alongside a fervent wish that it wasn’t too late to fix things. That was why she had come to listen to the mayor’s address. If she was right then Lex should be here somewhere. Seeking out the local authority to tell them how they were screwing things up was always one of his first actions.
Standing up on her hind legs, Sonata tried to peer over the heads of the crowd. The town square was rapidly filling up, and it was becoming harder to see through the mass of ponies. Surely Lex had to… “There!”
Fireflower jumped at Sonata’s unexpected exclamation. “Huh? What’s going on?”
“I think I saw Lex!” exclaimed Sonata, the excitement in her voice plainly audible. “I caught a glimpse of a red horn!”
“O-oh. That’s great,” smiled Fireflower wanly.
Not noticing her friend’s lack of enthusiasm, Sonata grabbed him by the hoof and started dragging him through the crowd towards where she’d spotted the tell-tale horn. Ignoring the yelps and grunts as she pushed past pony after pony, she felt her heart soar as the red horn came into view again. Nudging aside a yellow earth pony, she stopped as the horn’s owner came into view.
It wasn’t Lex. It was just some unicorn with a red coat.
Sensing the eyes on him, the unknown unicorn turned to look at Sonata curiously.
“Er…sorry, I thought you were someone else.” Sonata somehow managed to smile politely, a feat that took considerable effort given the incredible sense of disappointment welling up in her. Behind her, Fireflower bit his lip, wishing for Sonata’s sake that she’d found who she was looking for, even as he was glad for his own sake that she hadn’t.
“C’mon,” he tugged her towards the edge of the crowd. “It’ll be easier to look around if we’re not in the thick of things.” Sonata nodded, trying to buck herself up. The two had just gotten to the outer edge of the crowd when a voice rang out from the makeshift stage in front of the central fountain, causing both of them to stop and turn to face it.
“Everypony, thank you for coming. Before anything else, I just want to commend all of you for your courage in showing up here today. Just a few hours ago, this plaza was the center for yet another horrible attack on our citizens. But now, seeing all of you here fills my heart with hope for the future. So long as we have brave ponies like you living among us, I know that we can all find a way to continue to live together in friendship and harmony.”
Sonata stood up on her hind legs, again trying to peer over the crowd, which had broken into applause. She wobbled for a moment before she felt somepony steady her, and glanced down to see Fireflower bracing her, earning a quick smile from her in reward before she returned her gaze to the stage.
The pony speaking was a pegasus mare, apparently middle-aged, with a brown coat and red mane and tail. Sonata was too far away to make out her cutie mark, but given her grey business jacket and how two tough-looking earth pony stallions were flanking her, it was pretty easy to guess that this was the mayor.
“In the wake of these unprovoked attacks on our city,” continued the mayor, “I’ve spoken to individuals who have a deep and abiding love for Tall Tale and its ponies, and who are very worried about what these troublesome times mean for us. We’ve discussed many different options for how to proceed in the face of this threat, and we’ve come up with a plan to protect everypony.” Spontaneous cheering broke out at that, and the mayor smiled before motioning for the assembled crowd to quiet down.
Sonata, however, did not cheer. Instead, she stared intently at the mayor. Something wasn’t right… “We have to get closer,” she told Fireflower softly. He sent her a questioning look, but nodded in acknowledgment, sticking close to her as she once again began to push her way through the throng of ponies.
The mayor continued speaking. “Before I go into further details, I want to stress that this plan was designed with one goal, above any others: to make sure that everypony stays safe. That is not just my first priority, it is my only priority. Everything about this is designed to keep you all as far from harm as possible.” The crowd was completely silent, sensing that they were about to be told what was going to happen next.
“Therefore, until this crisis has been resolved, we will evacuate Tall Tale.”
The enthusiasm the assembled ponies had displayed before was nowhere to be found in their reaction to the mayor’s statement. Instead, everyone began to talk at once, with disbelief clearly being the dominant reaction. “Please, everypony, settle down,” called the mayor. It took two more tries before she was able to restore order and continue.
“I know that this decision will come as a shock to many, if not most, of you all. But I firmly believe that this is in the best interests of all of us. If I can’t guarantee your safety here, then the only course of action is to have everypony go somewhere that can, at least until we put an end to this problem. To that end-”
“But the train hasn’t come in! Where will we go?!” yelled a voice from the crowd, causing many to yell in agreement.
“Please listen!” implored the mayor. “It’s true that we can’t take the train out of the city. We’ve received reports that the tracks have suffered some damage, but our plan doesn’t require the use of the train. Likewise, we can’t go north to Vanhoover either.”
Sonata, who by now had reached the foot of the stage, perked her ears up at that. “Even if we could have everypony safely cross the marshlands between here and there, Vanhoover’s situation is too unstable,” the mayor explained, making a placating gesture to indicate that she wasn’t finished. “But there’s another way.”
She paused for breath, and this time no interruptions came. “A dear friend of mine has arranged for us to head south to Las Pegasus. Starting tomorrow morning, we will have groups of ponies go to the dockyards, where a ship will arrive to ferry you south. We will continue to have groups of ponies make this trip there until the entire city has been successfully evacuated, at which point we will focus all of our efforts on containing and eliminating the threat to our city. Once this has been done, we will immediately begin shipping everypony back.”
Voices picked up again, demanding to know how long that would take and who would be evacuated when. “Everypony, calm down! My office has already worked out a schedule for who will be going and when. We’ve printed instructions and have asked the local newspapers to run a special edition containing them. Everything you need to know will be in this paper, which will have copies distributed throughout the city by five o’clock tonight. I promise you, this will answer all of your questions.”
The crowed started to shift, many ponies starting to leave, and the mayor rushed to finish her speech. “I know that this is hard, but I also know that if we keep calm and work together, we will all get through this as a community. I promise you, we will overcome this challenge, and we will all come back home.”
Knowing that they’d just heard the end of her remarks, the assembled ponies quickly began to break up. The square thinned out quickly as ponies raced to find their friends and share the news or simply go home and start packing. The mayor also exited, her bodyguards muscling aside anyone that got in her way.
In a few minutes, the plaza was near-deserted, just as it had been a few hours ago in the wake of the spider attack. To Fireflower, there was an irony in that, though he’d have been hard-pressed to figure out exactly what it was. “This seems kind of overkill, doesn’t it?” He asked Sonata, looking around in mild disbelief. “I mean, we’re talking about less than six of us, and they’re going to just up and quit the entire city?”
No answer came, and he turned to look at his silent companion. “Sonata?”
She still didn’t answer, and Fireflower could see that she was deep in thought, her brow furrowed as she stared at the empty stage where the mayor had been. He waited for her to snap out of it, but after several moments it didn’t appear that she was inclined to do so. Walking over to her, he put a hoof on her shoulder, shaking her lightly. “Hey, Sonata, what’s wrong?”
She blinked, just now realizing that he’d been talking. “Huh? Oh, sorry about that. I, like, totes spaced out for a sec there.”
“I noticed,” he deadpanned. “What’s going on? You seemed like you were thinking really hard about something.”
She nodded. “I was. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I was saying,” concurred Fireflower. “It doesn’t seem right that they’d leave an entire city over this.”
“Yeah, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh. Well then, what did you mean?”
“It’s the mayor,” explained Sonata, looking back at the empty stage. “I thought I recognized it before, and I’m sure of it now.”
Turning her head, she locked eyes with Fireflower. Her voice was completely confident when she next spoke.
Fireflower blinked. “What do you mean, ‘she’s been enchanted’?”
“You remember what I did to the waiter back at that restaurant? It’s like that,” explained Sonata, gesturing to the empty stage where the mayor had been. “Someone’s used magic to mess with her head.”
“I guess that makes sense,” admitted Fireflower. “I mean, her plan for everyone to just up and leave the entire city does seem like an overreaction to…” he trailed off as something occurred to him. “Hang on! Could that be why my family’s attacking the city? Because they’ve been enchanted too?”
Sonata shook her head. “I don’t know. I’d need to see them before I could even try to guess.”
“But they could be, right?” pressed Fireflower. The idea was one that he desperately wanted to be true. “Then, all we have to do is explain that what they’re doing isn’t their fault, and maybe we can fix all of this!”
Sonata gave him an encouraging smile. “Maybe. For now though, I want to talk to the mayor. If we can figure out who enchanted her, or for what, then we might be able to, um…” Sonata paused as she realized that she wasn’t entirely sure what her goal was in pursuing this.
She’d come here to try and find Lex, and help Fireflower find his family, and she couldn’t really see how this would help. After all, she felt totally certain that Lex hadn’t been the one who’d enchanted the mayor. He really hated magic that messed with people’s minds. Likewise, even if this had something to do with the mayor’s plan to have everypony leave Tall Tale, that still wouldn’t tell Fireflower where his siblings were. After all, it wasn’t like they could have done this; he’d told her all about them on the journey there, and according to what he’d said none of them had magic like this.
That meant that the whole thing was a big mystery, and Sonata had always been bad at those.
“Sonata? What’s wrong?” Fireflower couldn’t help but feel concerned, circling around so he was directly in front of her face.
“Oh, um, I’m just not sure this is the best idea, is all,” she admitted. “I mean, we know that Lex and your siblings are in this town somewhere, right? Maybe we should keep searching for them instead of figuring out what’s up with the mayor.”
Fireflower paused, thinking that over for a minute before shaking his head. “No, I think we should try and figure out what’s up with her. I don’t think that searching blindly is going to get us anywhere. Right now we have a lead, so we should follow it, even if we’re not sure where it goes.”
“Huh, I guess that makes sense when you put it like that,” nodded Sonata thoughtfully. A moment later she grinned in approval. “Alright, let’s go check out the mayor!” She held a hoof out towards Fireflower, who looked at it curiously, unsure of what to do.
“Er…”
“C’mon! Hoof bump me!”
Still unclear what she wanted, Fireflower nevertheless lifted a hoof and held it out, letting Sonata touch hers to it with a brief “clop” sound. Putting her hoof down after doing so, she couldn’t help but giggle at the way he looked at his hoof curiously, as though wondering what had just happened. “That was a hoof bump. My friend Pinkie taught me that it’s what ponies do when they’re enthusiastic about something.”
“Oh. I get it.” His face didn’t match his words, and she had to stifle another laugh as she headed in the direction the mayor had gone.
“C’mon. We’ve got a mystery to solve!”
Nosey was grinning from ear to ear as she marched back into her hotel room. “You’re not going to believe what the mayor had to say!”
She had learned from a young age that the best feeling in the world was to have news that other ponies didn’t know, but wanted to. The way it felt when they were eagerly waiting for you to speak, listening raptly to your every word, reacting to each and every little thing you said…it was indescribable.
And that was just doing it face-to-face! Delivering the news in print was ten times better, she had learned, because even though the reactions weren’t quite as immediate, the impact was so much greater. Writing stories could reach an entire city – or more! – of ponies. It was a rush that never got old, no matter how many times Nosey did it.
It was that same rush that she was eagerly anticipating as she waited for her guest to respond to the teaser she’d given him. Except…it didn’t happen. To her growing consternation, he just stayed in the middle of the room, chanting and gesturing the same way he’d been since she’d left that morning, without giving her so much as a glance.
“Ahem. I said, ‘you’re not going to believe what the mayor had to say!’” She waited several seconds, but Lex continued to ignore her, droning on in whatever language that was. Letting out an annoyed snort, Nosey went to make herself comfortable, sitting at her desk. “You know, for a guy I’m letting crash in my room, you’re really not acting very grateful.”
Again, there was no response, and Nosey sighed. Lex had told her that morning that he was going to be busy for most of the day with whatever it was he was doing, and that wouldn’t have been nearly so bad except for the fact that he had flatly refused to explain to her what it was. It was clearly something magical, that much was obvious, but beyond that it was a total mystery.
In that regard, it was a lot like her dour guest. She’d pressed him hard for information during yesterday’s interview, and he’d given her a fair amount, but she was certain that he’d withheld quite a bit as well. She’d find a way to get it out of him, of course – there was no story that Nosey Newsy couldn’t uncover! – but it was going to have to take a backseat to the Tall Tale evacuation story.
Pulling out her portable typewriter, Nosey started making up some test drafts of what the final story would look like. Her newspaper, the Canterlot Chronicle, didn’t have an office in Tall Tale, and with the train out it would take a little while to be able to mail the story in, but it wasn’t a big deal. After all, the evacuation hadn’t started yet, so the story wasn’t fully ready to be reported on anyway. The test drafts were just to start arranging things for when she sat down to write up the completed article.
It was almost a half-hour later when Lex, ceasing his chanting, turned to her. “What did the mayor have to say?”
Nosey pointedly waited until she was done typing up a paragraph before turning to face him. “Oh, now you want to know,” she said sarcastically.
If Lex noticed her tone of voice, he didn’t let it show. “I’ve reached a point where I can temporarily stop what I’m doing. If you have news to share, make it quick.”
Frowning, Nosey glared at him over the top of her glasses. “And what exactly are you doing? You wouldn’t tell me before.”
“And I have no intention of telling you now,” Lex responded flatly. In fact, he had been using the heightened ambient thaumaturgical energies, caused by the equinox, to replenish his primary spellcasting abilities. While it was unfortunate that he had to prepare his spells without knowing exactly what he was going to be facing in the immediate future, the clues he’d gathered so far were enough that he could make enough educated guesses to guide his preparations.
That he needed such circumstances to restore his strongest powers was the fatal flaw in his spellcasting, and his single greatest weakness. He had no intention of letting a reporter spread that knowledge all over Equestria. Even Sonata didn’t know that about him.
Thoughts of his girlfriend – likely ex-girlfriend now – soured Lex’s mood, causing him to snap at the one who had interrupted him. “And for that matter, you are not ‘letting’ me ‘crash’ here. The only reason I’m still here is because there are no other rooms for rent at this hotel and I don’t have time to look and see if there are vacancies at another one.”
Nosey rolled her eyes. She’d had no intention of letting him leave anyway – he’d already given her enough to make it obvious that he was a vending machine of news stories – but wow was he a grouch! “Anyway, the mayor announced her plan for dealing with the crisis. Listen to this.”
Pulling the latest draft from her typewriter, Nosey read off what she had so far, covering both the attacks and the mayor’s response to them. When she finished, she looked at Lex expectantly, waiting for his reaction.
She didn’t have to wait long. Ten seconds hadn’t passed before he responded. “This ‘evacuation’ is a farce. The mayor is either lying, or she’s being played for a fool.”
Nosey’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a pretty serious accusation. Do you have anything to back it up?”
“Don’t be absurd,” snorted Lex. “Her so-called plan doesn’t survive any kind of logical scrutiny. Anypony with half a brain should be able to come to that conclusion.”
Nosey crossed her forelegs, the only outward sign of her irritation with him. “How so?”
“Think about it. She’s using phased evacuations to withdraw from the city, which is exactly the wrong thing to do in this kind of situation.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re afraid of a small group of attackers the best response is to keep everypony gathered together. A larger force, if properly directed, will be better able to deter, detect, and defend against a guerilla assault. Her plan, by contrast, will result in smaller groups breaking off on their own to leave town, which will make them vulnerable while they’re en route. Worse, because these withdrawals are phased, that means that the ponies that remain behind the longest will be more and more at risk.”
Nosey had started taking notes. She nodded to him, not in agreement but to encourage him to keep talking; these were actually some pretty good points! “But maybe she didn’t have any other choice,” she pressed, wanting more of his commentary. “I mean, she made some good points about not having anywhere else to go, what with the trains being cut off and the situation in Vanhoover being so bad. Using ships to get everypony out of here-”
“There are no ships,” interrupted Lex.
That was enough to make Nosey look up from her notes, an uncomprehending look on her face. “Huh?”
“There won’t be any ships arriving to take everypony out of here,” insisted Lex.
Nosey’s expression changed from incomprehension to disbelief. “How could you possibly know that?”
Lex grit his teeth, clearly annoyed that she hadn’t figured it out on her own. “Think about it for a moment. Where are these ships coming from?”
“I don’t know.” Nosey’s voice made it clear that she had no idea where he was going with this. “They’re taking everypony to Las Pegasus, so probably from there.”
“From Las Pegasus?” sneered Lex. “A city several hundred miles down the coast is going to have the first ship in an evacuation fleet arrive here tomorrow morning?”
“What’s so hard to believe about that? If they left in time-”
Lex cut her off. “When was the first spider attack?”
“Um…” Nosey flipped through her notes. “Just under a week ago…” she trailed off as she started to see what he was getting at.
“Exactly. How could such a massive operation have been coordinated with a city hundreds of miles away in such a short amount of time? The only answer is that it couldn’t be. Even if she dispatched a ship, or a pegasus messenger, the instant the first attack happened, there’s no way they could have reached Las Pegasus, hammered out a plan, and gotten word back to her in that amount of time.”
“But maybe the ships are coming from somewhere else,” protested Nosey, furiously scribbling again. “Vanhoover might have sent them.”
“A pegasus messenger could have reached Vanhoover quickly enough,” granted Lex. “But you’ll recall that the mayor said that the situation there was ‘too unstable’ to evacuate to. If that city was in any position to participate in a plan like this, then there’d be no reason not to go there instead of Las Pegasus, since Vanhoover is so much closer.”
Privately, Lex also took the mayor’s commentary on the state of Vanhoover to be a bad sign. It verified what Twilight had told him about the state of the city, and underscored that he needed to get there as soon as possible. But that couldn’t happen until he’d resolved things here; abandoning Tall Tale on the eve of whatever disaster was about to occur would be unconscionable.
Finishing her notetaking, Nosey looked up at Lex. “I hate to admit it, but I’m impressed that you figured all of that out, and so fast too.” Lex frowned, and it was his turn to have a lack of understanding show on his face. How was any of what he just said not immediately obvious?
Nosey continued speaking. “So when those ponies that are in the first evacuation group head out to the dockyards tomorrow morning…?” She let the question dangle, looking at Lex.
“That part of town is non-contiguous with the rest of the city, correct?”
Nosey dug around in her pack, before pulling out a tourist map, spreading it open. She scanned it for a moment before nodding. “Right. It’s about…huh, it’s about seven miles from the rest of Tall Tale. That’s kind of weird.”
Lex shook his head. “No, it’s not. Vanhoover and Tall Tale are neighboring cities. Since Vanhoover is such a major player in maritime commerce, it makes sense that Tall Tale would focus on another area instead of trying to compete with them. That’s why this city focuses on logging, and in order to abet that industry it’s situated a few miles inland, right at the edge of White Tail Woods. But they can’t ignore the sea-trade entirely, because they still need to send exports and receive imports from other coastal communities.”
“Oh! I get it!” Nosey exclaimed. “So they still have to have a seaside presence, even though the town proper is further inland.”
“Exactly. And since they haven’t been destroyed-”
“Whoa, whoa, back up.” Nosey waved her forelegs in a protesting gesture. “Why would the dockyards be destroyed?”
“I told you before about the wrecked train tracks that I witnessed on my way into Tall Tale,” sighed Lex, apparently still holding her lack of comprehension against her. “Whatever did that wanted to isolate the city. If it has that level of reasoning and foresight, then there’s no way it would have overlooked the only other major route into and out of town.”
“Which means…”
“Which means, to answer your earlier question, that when the first group of ponies head there tomorrow morning thinking that they’re going to leave the city,” said Lex grimly, “they’ll be walking right into a trap.”
“So once we talk to the mayor, what are you going to do?” asked Fireflower and he followed Sonata through the city.
“Well, if I can figure out what she was enchanted to do, that’d be totes helpful in determining what’s going on,” replied Sonata after thinking about it for a moment. “We might even be able to figure out who did that to her, which would be doubly helpful. After that, um…I guess we play it by ear!”
“Do you think we should tell her about my siblings? I mean, I’m proof that we’re not bad, and if we can convince her of that and have her make an announcement to call them out of hiding, I bet we could all sit down and figure everything out!” He looked excited at the thought of resolving things, directing a hopeful gaze at Sonata, clearly wanting her to approve his idea.
“Yeah, about that…” Her face didn’t reflect his optimism, and it was enough to make him halt in his tracks. Sonata likewise stopped, turning to face him with a sigh. “Listen, I know you want everything to work out, but…I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
“But why?” protested Fireflower. “If we can just make her listen to reason…!”
Sonata shook her head. “The whole point of enchanting someone is so they’ll do what you want, even if it’s not reasonable. If I’m right and she is under a spell, then that means we might not be able to persuade her to change her mind about all of this.”
The look on Fireflower’s face as she said that could only be described as “crushed,” and it made Sonata wince to see it. She opened her mouth to try and cheer him up, but he rallied on his own, beating her to it. “Then…what about undoing the enchantment on her? Then she could go back to normal and we could explain things to her, right?”
Sonata adopted a guilty expression. “Er…the thing about that is that I’m, like, super awesome at laying enchantments, but not so much at removing them.”
“You can’t-” Fireflower cut himself off, screwing his eyes shut and turning around. Sonata folded her ears back at the sight, feeling like she’d let him down.
Uncertain if she was doing the right thing, she moved up and put a hoof on his back. “C’mon, let’s just talk to her first. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out that she’s been enchanted to hate puppies or love banana bread or something like that.” She doubted that was the case, and didn’t think that Fireflower would think it was either, but she was hoping that would at least get a laugh out of him.
It didn’t get quite that much of a reaction, but he did manage to look up at her with a wan smile. “Okay,” he sighed. “Let’s meet with her and see what we can figure out.”
Giving him her most encouraging smile, Sonata led him towards city hall.
“I think we might need a new plan,” deadpanned Fireflower.
In front of them was city hall, the entrance of which was surrounded by a crowd of unruly ponies. The door was currently being blocked by a pair of large earth pony stallions, while a few equally tough-looking pegasi were shooing flying visitors away before they could land on the roof. Judging from the shouts that could be heard from the crowd, Sonata and Fireflower weren’t the only ponies that wanted a word with the mayor.
“Geez, what’s gotten into everypony?” wondered Sonata as she gingerly approached the back of the crowd, Fireflower following closely behind her.
Slowly pushing her way through the mass of ponies, the pair managed to reach the front, where one of the earth pony stallions held out a hoof. Unlike the friendly bump Sonata had shared with Fireflower earlier, this one was quite clearly a warning to stay back. “That’s far enough, you two. Nopony gets in unless you’re supposed to be here.”
“But we need to talk to the mayor!” protested Fireflower. “It’s important!”
“That’s what every other pony here has said,” grunted the stallion. “‘It’s important that I be on the first boat out of the city. It’s important that I not be on the first boat out of the city. It’s important that I have room to take all of my stuff out of the city with me.’ I’ll tell you what I’ve told all of the other ponies here: just follow the instructions that are in the special bulletin that’s being handed out this evening, and everything else will be fine.”
“This isn’t about that,” pressed Sonata. “It’s super important that we talk to the mayor right away! Can’t you let us through, pretty please?” She batted her eyes, turning so that she was standing slightly more in profile to him.
The stallion glanced over her for a moment before snorting. “Nothing doing, missy. Go shake your flank somewhere else.”
“Hey!” squawked Sonata indignantly. “Oh that does it! In just a minute you’re not going to be able to take your eyes off of this flank, buster!” Raising a hoof, she started to gesture and chant before Fireflower grabbed her, giving the stallion a very fake-looking grin before dragging a cursing Sonata back through the crowd.
Once they were free of the throng, she shook Fireflower off before giving him an angry glare. “Why did you stop me? Another second and I would have had him eating out of my hoof!”
Fireflower cringed a bit. This was the first time that he’d ever made Sonata upset, and it was exactly as unpleasant as he thought it would be. Nevertheless, he stood his ground. “I don’t think it would have been good if everypony there saw you do your thing and make that stallion start kowtowing to you.”
“Hmph! Like they’d even have understood what I was doing.” Sonata put her nose in the air haughtily. She only held the pose for a moment though before she let out a sigh, knowing that Fireflower was probably right to stop her. “I just got frustrated, you know?” she admitted in a quieter voice.
Fireflower let out a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad you’re acting like yourself again. For a minute there you sounded just like Lex.”
He’d made the comment off-handedly, but Sonata’s eyes widened in surprise at the comparison. She’d been acting the way Lex usually did? So then…did that mean the way she’d felt just then – frustrated and angry because she was trying to do something important, while other ponies that didn’t understand what was going on got in her way – was how Lex felt all the time? Was that why he was always in such a bad mood?
Fireflower watched, perplexed, as Sonata slowly sat down, a blank look on her pretty face. “Sonata? Hey, come on…I was just joking. You’re nothing like him.”
“No,” she replied softly, her ears folding down. “No, I’m not.”
Before Fireflower could ask what she meant, she seemed to get over whatever had been bothering her, standing back up. “Okay. That didn’t work, so well need to think of something else.” She looked back over at the crowd of ponies, which was apparently unperturbed by their inability to get inside city hall.
Fireflower pointed. “Hey, look over there.”
Sonata looked where he was pointing, and saw an earth pony mare in a delivery uniform approaching the building. Squeezing her way through the crowd, she got to the stallions guarding the doors and had a brief exchange with them, culminating in the guards nodding their heads and ushering her inside.
“Hmm,” Sonata rubbed her chin with a hoof, feeling an idea starting to form. “They let that courier into the building.” She felt like that was important, and closed her eyes to concentrate. Fireflower’s comparing her to Lex was still fresh in her mind, driving her to look at the situation the way that Lex would.
“Okay, so what we need to do is disguise ourselves as couriers to get inside! That means we need to go buy some uniforms and, no, wait.” She frowned as a wrinkle became apparent in her plan. “We didn’t even have the money to pay for breakfast. Okay, instead we follow one of the couriers back to where they work and ‘borrow’ some uniforms. I’ll create a diversion, and you sneak in and take-” She stopped as she felt Fireflower tap her shoulder.
“Um, Sonata? What are you talking about? I was pointing at that fire escape in the alley.” He gestured to the folded metal ladder connected to a metal walkway snaking up the side of the building. “See?”
“Oh.” Fighting down a blush, Sonata nodded. “Right! Let’s go then!”
Circling the building, they crept down the narrow alley. Despite the ponies massing the front of the building, the two of them were the only ones there. Once they were below the fire escape, which was currently folded up and almost ten feet out of reach, Sonata glanced up at it with a frown. “Now what?”
“Just stand back and make sure that nopony sees us,” grinned Fireflower confidently. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
“If you say so.” Sonata glanced around, even looking upward to be sure that no pegasus was watching them from above, before signaling to Fireflower to go ahead.
Nodding back to her, Fireflower’s form shifted, and suddenly there was a giant white-and-yellow spider where he had been. Quickly scurrying up the wall, it nimbly climbed into the metal ramp before it blurred again, becoming the pony that Sonata had grown accustomed to. With a push, the heavy ladder swung down to the ground.
“Wow! I’d almost forgotten that you could do that!” Sonata grinned up at him, not at all put off by his transformation, before she started to climb.
“If you think that’s something, just wait until my spinneret heals,” said Fireflower as he led her to the fire door, which was up on the building’s fourth floor. “We used to have web-spinning contests among ourselves, and this one time I made a…a…” he trailed off as he tugged on the door handle, only to find that it refused to budge.
“Oh my gosh, is it stuck?” Sonata couldn’t keep her exasperation down. “That’s a fire hazard!”
“I think it’s locked from the inside,” grunted Fireflower, trying futilely to force the door open.
“Oh. You know, come to think of it, that makes sense,” mused Sonata. “I mean, if it wasn’t then it’d be pretty easy for any old pegasus to just land here and walk right in. Or for that matter, for a unicorn to just grab the ladder and pull it down with their magic.”
Fireflower didn’t answer, still trying to force the door. He groaned in effort before finally giving it up. “Okay,” he panted, “brute strength didn’t work, time to try a different tactic.” Stepping slightly back, he waved his hooves and uttered a brief chant before pointing at the lock. Instantly, a small red beam shot out from his hoof and struck it. The lock and door handle slowly grew bright red, sizzling softly. A moment later there was an audible “click” as the door swung open a few inches, the lock having melted.
Fireflower turned to give Sonata a wry grin. “Fire hazard,” he said simply.
Sonata didn’t try to hide her impressed look, and Fireflower pulled the door open, heading inside. He was grateful that he was in front, because he didn’t think that he could hide his ear-to-ear grin at having finally gotten to show off in front of her!
The pair walked down a hallway, hearing a flurry of activity coming from offices all around them. At one point a door opened and a harried-looking unicorn pony scurried past them, not giving the pair a second glance. Apparently it was taken for granted that they were supposed to be there.
The duo stopped as they noticed several important-looking ponies exiting one particular office, all talking to each other as they filed out. Elbowing Fireflower, Sonata nodded towards the door, which read “Ribbon Cutter, Mayor” on it. Waiting until the other ponies had left, the two walked into the mayor’s office.
The mare behind the desk, the same pegasus with the brown coat and red mane and tail that they had seen giving the speech earlier the day, looked up and frowned as the pair walked in. “You’re not my 11:45. Who are you? Did my secretary let you in? Lucy!” She tilted her head as she looked past the duo, shouting at the open door. “I told you not to admit anypony that didn’t have an appointment!”
Sonata closed the door, silently demanding her attention. “Mayor Ribbon Cutter, I presume?” She sat down in one of the chairs opposite the mayor’s desk, Fireflower doing the same. “We have something we need to talk to you about.”
“My name is Sonata Dusk, and this is Fireflower.” Sonata gestured to herself and her companion in turn. “We’d like to talk to you about the evacuation plan for Tall Tale.”
Ribbon Cutter frowned. “Before we get started…I don’t mean to be rude, but who exactly are you?”
Sonata blinked in confusion at the question, shooting an inquisitive gaze at Fireflower, who shook his head to signal that he didn’t understand either. “Er, I just said: my name’s Sonata, and he-”
“I got that.” Ribbon cut Sonata off, making a sharp gesture with one hoof. “I mean, who are you in this city? I’ve lived here all of my life, and I’ve been meeting with all of the important ponies in Tall Tale, and I don’t recognize either one of you.”
“Oh, um…” Sonata paused for a long moment, trying to think of a good answer. What would make them sound like bigshots that could crash a meeting with a mayor during an emergency?
Glancing back and forth between Sonata, who was hemming and hawing, and the mayor, whose frown was becoming more pronounced, Fireflower jumped in. “We’re travelers,” he admitted. “We just came into Tall Tale earlier today. But it’s really important that we speak to you. We have information about what’s going on that you haven’t heard.”
That was enough to make Ribbon raise an eyebrow, and she leaned back in her chair, putting her fore-hooves together thoughtfully. “Alright, I’m listening.”
“Great!” piped up Sonata, glad that she didn’t have to try and come up with a story. “I was wondering, can you tell us how you came up with the evacuation plan that you were talking about earlier this morning?”
An awkward pause fell as Ribbon blinked, tilting her head. “I thought you said that you had information for me?”
“We do!” insisted Sonata. “We just need you to tell us how you came up with the plan to evacuate the city first!”
Ribbon glanced at Fireflower, pausing just long enough to give him a chance to jump in with any additional information about why she had to explain herself before they’d tell her what was so important. When he didn’t, she sighed before speaking. “As I said during my address, the plan was formed as a joint venture between myself and several other parties with a strong vested interest in the disposition of Tall Tale and its ponies.”
Fireflower looked at Sonata out of the corner of his eyes as the mayor spoke, wondering if she was detecting more of whatever had tipped her off that she was enchanted. For her part, Sonata had leaned forward, and was staring at the mayor with a thoughtful look. “Like, who were these other parties? Can you tell us more about them?”
“With all due respect, I’d rather not.”
“How come?” Fireflower had no idea if this was the angle that Sonata wanted to pursue, but if her expression was any indication, they needed to keep the mayor talking about this.
Ribbon sighed. “Because, ultimately, I’m the one who signed off on this idea. While a lot of very dedicated individuals, with a deep and abiding love for this city, were involved, I was the one who made the call. If there’s a problem, I want to be the one who takes responsibility for it, instead of having things dissolve into a blame-game among everypony that tried to help out.”
“That’s, like, totes understandable,” replied Sonata. “But it’s super important that we know who helped you think this idea up.” She was more sure of it now than ever; someone had put a spell on the mayor. It was subtle, and anyone else would probably have missed it, but Sonata had been one of the Sirens, creatures for whom enchanting had been as natural as speaking. She could see the tell-tale clues that popped up whenever the mayor talked about the “other parties” that had taken part in the decision to evacuate the city. She could see how, when that topic came up, her voice flattened ever so slightly, or her eyes would cease focusing on them for just an instant.
One of those people had placed the mayor under a spell. She was sure of it.
“Alright, that does it.” Ribbon stood up, now glaring at the two openly. “You said you had something important to tell me about what’s going on. Either do it right now or get out of my office.”
Fireflower shot another look at Sonata, clearly asking her for direction. Sonata’s response was to bite her lip, not sure what the next move should be. She couldn’t help but realize that there was a total irony in her, who had spent centuries ensorcelling people, not being sure if it was a good idea to tell someone that they were under an enchantment. “You see-”
“The spiders are innocent!”
Sonata’s head snapped around at Fireflower’s outburst, her eyes wide. What was Fireflower doing?! Hadn’t she told him that this wasn’t a good idea?!
Sonata’s incredulity was nothing compared to Ribbon’s, who was gazing at him in flat disbelief. “Are you kidding me? They’ve attacked our citizens multiple times now, without provocation! Several ponies have been seriously hurt, and everypony’s on edge! How could they possibly be innocent?!”
“They’re under an enchantment!” insisted Fireflower. “They’re not fully in control of their actions!”
“That’s the most cockamamie thing I’ve ever heard!” snorted Ribbon. “First of all, even if that were true, that doesn’t make them any less of a menace. Second of all, how could you possibly know that? And third, who would do something like that anyway?”
“‘Cockamamie’?” echoed Sonata quietly. How much of an old lady was this mare?
“A big green dragon, that’s who!” Fireflower could feel himself becoming agitated. He knew he was going further than Sonata had advised him, but he couldn’t help it. This was their chance to maybe do something to help his family; he couldn’t let it go without trying to do something! “I’m sure that awful monster is making them do this!”
“That’s not true!” snapped Ribbon, slamming a hoof down on her desk. “They wouldn’t do something like that!”
For a moment, silence reigned, and then Ribbon realized what she said. Eyes widening, she put a hoof over her mouth, as though she could un-speak the words. Turning slightly pale, she gulped before trying to regain her composure. “I mean…obviously what I meant to say was, um…”
“Y-you know…” Fireflower felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “You know about the dragon. You’re covering for it…”
Shaking her head, Ribbon refused to make eye contact. “I’m sorry, I’m going to need you to leave now.” Walking out from behind her desk, she started towards the doors, clearly intent on showing them out. “Lucy!” she called.
“Hold on!” Fireflower jumped up, not willing to let this go so easily. “You’re going to tell us-”
He stopped as Sonata held out a hoof in front of him. “She won’t. She can’t. That’s what the enchantment is doing; she thinks that dragon is her very best friend.”
“What are you talking about?” Ribbon frowned as she glanced between them and the door, clearly wondering when whomever she’d called would arrive.
Both of her guests ignored her. “So then, what do we do now?” asked Fireflower.
“Leave it to me,” said Sonata, before taking a step towards Ribbon. The other mare opened her mouth, but paused as Sonata started to gesture and chant in an unknown language. It took her only a few seconds to finish, and as she did the mayor’s expression changed. Just like the waiter at the restaurant that morning, her features slowly softened, as though she was suddenly seeing Sonata in an entirely new light…which she was.
“Now,” said Sonata in her nicest voice. “We both just want to help. So why don’t we sit down and try and work things out, ‘kay?”
A second later, the door opened, and another mare stepped in. A pegasus, she was younger than the mayor, looking about Fireflower’s age. Her coat was a light orange, with her mane and tail being a rich chestnut color. On each flank was a cutie mark depicting a goose with a dreamy-looking smile on its face. Glancing between the mayor and the other two, she turned an inquisitive gaze to the former. “You called, Miss Mayor?”
“Er, yes…” Ribbon paused for a moment, caught between what she’d been about to do and what she now felt. Uncertain, she pivoted to try and buy herself a bit more time to figure things out. “Ah, please allow me to introduce my secretary, Lucy Goosey. Lucy, these are Sonata Dusk and Fireflower, they’re here to, um…”
“We’re consultants!” smiled Sonata. She felt a little bad about having to use her magic on a second pony in one day, but it was totally necessary! “We’re helping the mayor out with the plan to evacuate the city.”
“Oh. Oh my.” Lucy produced a planner and flipped through it. “I don’t recall making an appointment for anypony with those names for a consultation.” She turned a distraught gaze to Ribbon. “Did I mess up again?”
“No, not at all,” Ribbon reassured her with a smile. “I brought them in for an unscheduled meeting at the last minute. That’s why I called you. I need you to push my remaining appointments. Oh, and order some lunch for us.” She looked over at her guests. “What would you two like?”
“Whatever you’re having is fine with us, right?” Sonata elbowed Fireflower, who nodded wordlessly. This was the second time he’d actually seen what an enchantment could actually do, and it was even more awe-inspiring – and even somewhat frightening – than the first time.
“Alright then, three salads with all the trimmings.”
Lucy nodded as she wrote their orders down. “Okay, and, um, do you want hay fries with those?”
Ribbon closed her eyes for a moment, the long-suffering look that passed across her face making it clear that this sort of question wasn’t out of the ordinary. “No, Lucy, we don’t want fries with a salad.”
“No fries, gotcha.” Pausing to write that down, Lucy looked up again. “What about cheese? Some salads have cheese on them.”
“Those would be trimmings, so yes.” Ribbon’s smile was tight as she began to nudge her secretary back out the door.
Lucy nodded, writing furiously as she was guided out of the room. “And to drink?”
“Surprise us,” replied Ribbon curtly as she finally pushed her out of the door, closing it sharply. Letting out a sigh, she turned back to Sonata and Fireflower. “You’ll have to forgive her. She’s not going to win any awards for secretary of the year, but she tries hard.”
“It’s alright.” Sonata waved a hoof as though to dismiss Ribbon’s concerns. “It’s really nice of you to treat us to lunch.”
“No, no, it’s the least I can do for how rude I was earlier,” protested Ribbon as she returned to her desk. “I didn’t realize you knew about who had actually sponsored this plan, otherwise I would have been a lot more solicitous when you showed up.” Smiling more broadly now, she spread her forelegs in a welcoming gesture.
“Let’s start over again, like you said. What would you like to know?”
Lex sighed as he finished chanting, placing his forehooves back on the ground now that there was no need to direct the energies any longer. Glancing around the room confirmed what he already knew: that Nosey still wasn’t back, having left some time ago to see if she could chase down why the mayor’s plan to evacuate the city was so full of holes.
Going over to inspect the half-eaten lunch she’d left behind in her rush to “pound the pavement,” as she’d put it, Lex idly wished she’d hurry up and return. It wasn’t that he enjoyed her presence; she was quite clearly an irresponsible moron who cared more about fame than the public good, but now that he’d finished restoring his magic, there was nothing left to do, and nothing to keep his mind from wandering. With only the oppressive silence to share the room with, he could already feel memories of his recent breakup coming to the forefront of his thoughts, with all of the heartbreak that entailed.
Picking up a salad that Nosey had ignored in favor of the dessert portion of her lunch, Lex – having decided that there were no more preparations that could be made for tomorrow and determined to distract himself – dug in even as he pulled a scroll out of his haversack, spreading it on the room’s only desk.
At a casual glance, this scroll was no different from the myriad others that he owned. However, a closer inspection showed that this one was not only thicker, but also more worn than most, with ink spots and lines upon lines of text visible even through the thick paper due to having been written and rewritten on many times over.
Slowly, Lex unfurled it and began to read the text from the beginning. He didn’t need to, of course; like most of the scrolls he carried with him, he was the author of this particular treatise, and had long since memorized its contents to the point where he could recite the entirety of it without a second thought. Nevertheless, he forced himself to consciously and deliberately devote his full attention to each word, each equation and diagram, as he read through the lengthy paper. Maybe this time some new insight would come to him, some new idea or approach that he hadn’t thought of…
Reaching the end, Lex put the scroll – which contained all of his notes, formulas, and details regarding the system of magic that he’d invented – onto the desk. Staring at his own hornwriting, it silently confirmed what he already knew to be true: that although his magic eclipsed the power of the native spellcasting that unicorns used in Equestria, it contained a flaw of crippling proportions, with no obvious solution.
Sighing again at the continued lack of a breakthrough, Lex forced himself to think the problem through from the beginning…
That all living creatures could utilize some magic was a lesson taught in schoolhouses all over Equestria. But while most teachers were content to treat that as being an object lesson unto itself, with only minor follow-ups about the specific ways that different creatures could use what magic they had, Lex had wanted to know more.
After raiding his local library had proven insufficient, he’d eventually managed to badger the staff there to borrow some books from a larger institution. It was only then, with books written by scholars rather than schoolmarms, that Lex had made his first breakthrough: that the process of gathering and directing magical energies was tactile in nature.
Magic, in other words, was gathered and used via the body.
It was because it was so obvious that Lex had never realized it until the book had pointed it out. Of course magic was a physical process! That was why pegasi needed to flap their wings to use their flying magic, or earth ponies could only direct their magic into their limbs. And it was only because unicorns had a special organ – their horn – that they could externalize their magic into specific effects called “spells.” For all creatures, magical ability was quite literally a part of their body.
That knowledge, however, had quickly proven to be bittersweet. It had only taken a few experiments to confirm what his library books had already concluded: that while maintaining a healthy body could slightly improve one’s overall magical competency – or rather, that it could make sure that one’s magical abilities weren’t impeded by poor health – an individual’s magical potential was immutable. You couldn’t make your body channel larger amounts of magic any more than you could make it function without sleep. Once maturity was reached, there was no further growth in magical potential to be had.
Worse, while this total potential was based on physical attributes, the specific nature of those attributes was entirely unknown. Two unicorns could have near-identical physiques, but one might be able to use slightly greater magic than the other, and yet the reason for this was completely unknown. The leading theories had to do with there being some particular aspect of bodily growth, but that was all it was: a theory.
The sole point of differentiation that was known were those ponies that had cutie marks – the secondary magic that boosted a pony’s ability to perform their special talent – related to magic. But even then, that boost was itself static in nature, and not subject to further improvement. As a unicorn, Lex knew that he could expand the range of spells that he knew, but that only allowed for an increase of versatility. Any spell that called for more energy than his body could handle would be forever beyond his ability to use.
Such an unpalatable revelation had been completely unacceptable to Lex. It was one thing to know that he’d never be able to use the magic of pegasi or earth ponies – as far as he was concerned, that was an acceptable tradeoff for the variability that true spellcasting offered – but it was something else again to realize that there were some spells that would be permanently denied to him simply because of the vagaries of physical development.
Despite being a colt who hadn’t even gotten his cutie mark yet, let alone finished growing, Lex had vowed that he would not be so limited. Magic was – despite his parents’ earnest-yet-futile attempts to nurture his social life – one of his few pleasures. The very idea that some of it would always be out of his reach due to factors beyond his control felt far too much like how it felt whenever one of his attempts to make friends collapsed. There was nothing he could do about that in the realm of interpersonal relationships; he’d not let that happen to him with magic as well!
It had taken six months of painstaking research before he’d been forced to admit that he couldn’t isolate the X-factor that tied physical growth to magical ability. Not having the requisite knowledge of anatomy, to say nothing of the lack of any method of safely testing his theories on anypony – not that he had anyone besides himself to test them on, and a single subject simply wasn’t enough – had doomed that line of inquiry before it had even begun.
Most other ponies, let alone foals, would have given up there. But Lex had always been exceptionally stubborn, and after sufficient brooding he’d come up with an alternate line of attack. If unicorn magic couldn’t be revolutionized, then it would simply need to be abandoned in favor of another form of magic instead.
That other forms of magic existed wasn’t in doubt. He’d read enough books by that time to have heard about “dark magic,” even if the details of it were vague and ill-defined. Still, the very fact that a distinction was made between that and “not-dark” magic was enough to convince him that there was an alternate to be had. The problem was figuring out what attributes such an alternate would possess, and how to utilize it.
It had taken more than a year just to come up with the theory, and twice that long to actually put it into practice, but eventually Lex had figured it out. It ultimately hinged upon changing the method by which magical energy was absorbed and stored.
Creatures that used magic didn’t create the required energy by themselves, Lex knew. Rather, it was absorbed from the ambient energy that filled the world around them. For typical unicorns – along with all other living things – that was a function that the body performed. The energy was taken and stored within the full capacity of their corporeal self.
Lex’s revelation had been in figuring out how to do the same thing with his thoughts.
The core of his new method – which he’d named “thaumaturgy” – relied on the fact that thoughts were nonphysical in nature, and so could in theory hold an unlimited capacity of energy. Of course, preparing to utilize that method had required him to change the way he thought. Literally.
More specifically, his research had indicated that he’d need to keep certain conceptual forms – the containers where the energy was retained – distinctly within his conscious mind, but isolated from the rest of his thoughts. Failure to keep them segregated meant that the energy they contained leaked out, at which point it couldn’t be shaped into the specific patterns necessary to form spells and was useless. But so long as they were kept isolated, the energy remained intact until he saw fit to use it.
On paper, it was a magical revolution that would have put anything Star-Swirl the Bearded had ever invented to shame. Because the energies were kept within thoughts, there was potentially no limit to the amount of energy that could be stored. So long as the user had the intellectual discipline to hold more and more complicated thought-forms in their mind, almost anything could be achieved. True, the spells utilized had to be prepared ahead of time, rather than spontaneously formed the way typical unicorn spellcasting worked. But that was a small price to pay for enhanced magical capability.
But as with so many of Lex’s theories, the actuality had turned out to be quite different.
Lex grit his teeth as he remembered the shock and bitterness he’d felt when he’d first attempted to absorb the necessary energy for a spell using his new method, only for it to fail utterly. He’d tried again, and then a third time, only for the magical power to refuse to fill his thoughts again and again. Furious, he’d thrown himself back into his research with frenzied desperation, trying to discover what the problem was. After years of effort to develop a theoretical model, there had been no acceptable alternative but to figure out what had gone wrong.
After several weeks of sleepless nights, of eating the bare minimum to keep himself going, Lex finally found the answer. Doing so, however, brought him no peace. If anything, it was the opposite.
His initial theories about containing energy within thought-forms hadn’t been wrong. Rather, they’d been incomplete.
Lex had assumed that the difference between using his thoughts instead of his body to hold magical energy had been one of containment; that the trick had been to mold his thoughts into receptacles capable of storing the requisite power. But that had been only half of the equation. The other half was the process by which the energy was absorbed from the surrounding environment in the first place. And in overlooking that, Lex realized, he’d made a critical error.
Unlike the body’s natural method of pulling in energy from the surrounding environment, the power that he wanted his thoughts to contain had to be forced into them. Where his body could absorb magical energies as easily as breathing, putting that same energy into his thoughts required that it be compressed to fit into such an ephemeral vessel. And compressing energy…required energy. More than could be found in ambience.
It was, Lex had realized, like trying to fold a book-sized piece of paper. Fold it to a thousandth of its original size, and it’d be much easier to carry, but that would require folding it ten times, which was smaller than it would easily allow itself to become. Doing so would require a method of gathering enough power to overcome the natural resistance that such an attempt would generate.
All those years of work…all of that effort at coming up with the necessary formulas and twisting his thoughts to follow the patterns he’d devised…all of it to invent a style of magic that was utterly unusable.
The despair he’d felt when he’d realized just how futile his efforts had been felt like it had been the end of the world. The memory was enough to make the current Lex snort in derision at his past self, who had gone back to work after a few days of moping.
His new efforts had involved finding a method of compressing the energy he needed, or alternatively coming up with a way to gather larger amounts of energy to begin with, since that way some of it could be converted into a compressive force on the fly. He had also kept trying to absorb the requisite energies each morning anyway; he knew that it was a futile effort, that his thoughts wouldn’t benefit from repetition the way his body would, but doing so had become an act of personal defiance, his way of spiting the circumstances that he’d found himself in.
And thus his surprise had been complete one morning, weeks after he’d begun trying to call the magical energy into his thoughts, when it came pouring in easily.
It had been one of the happiest days of his young life, though now that he’d known a mare’s affection that joy seemed tepid by comparison. Still, at the time he’d been beside himself with excitement, rushing from his room to tell his parents of his accomplishment. The day had passed in a blur as he’d finally been able to cast the spells that he’d prepared, proving once and for all that his new magic worked.
He’d been writing letters to the princesses to let them know of his accomplishments (as well as another, much nastier letter to the instructors at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, having previously attended only to later withdraw in disgust due to their lack of innovation and his antipathy towards the cliquish student body) when the day had come to a close. His mother had later told him that she’d caught him still grinning in his sleep.
The very next day, the energies had again refused to heed his call, leaving him bereft of magic.
Rather than despair at this latest setback, Lex’s reaction had been white-hot rage. It was the sheer caprice with which it had happened that upset him the most; to have things fail was bad enough, but to have them fail for no discernable reason was utterly untenable. It was just like his fickle peers who had thought him weird and rejected him for their own inscrutable reasons.
It was only months later, when his magic suddenly worked again on the morning of the Summer Sun Celebration – held on the day of the solstice – that Lex realized that the first time his magic had worked had been on the day of the vernal equinox. That time he’d run every test he could think of, and invented a few more besides, but all of them had been inconclusive, save for one: the level of ambient magic had swelled.
Why that had happened was unknown – and remained so now, even after years of experiments – but it fell to normal levels the very next day, and remained there until the autumnal equinox, when it again buoyed, rising enough that Lex was able to use it to simultaneously compress and absorb the necessary energy to charge his spellcasting.
Lex had taken little joy in his new discovery. A form of magic that could only be recharged four days out of the year was barely any better than one that didn’t work at all. But there had been one ray of hope: he now had proof that the magic he’d invented could work, if it just had sufficient energy at hoof.
Theorizing that certain major magical artifacts would radiate increased amounts of magical power – artificially creating conditions of enhanced ambient magic in their immediate vicinity – Lex wrote to the princesses, asking that he be allowed to study the Elements of Harmony directly. Surely the relics that had let the princesses defeat the monster Discord would have sufficient energy to let him recharge his magical reserves! And if so, then maybe…maybe he’d be able to find a new breakthrough, some way to overcome this new hurdle.
The reply he received, weeks later, had left ashes in his mouth. Written by a former instructor from Celestia’s School, whom Lex had openly – and correctly, since she had advocated adherence to existing magical doctrine over breaking new ground! – called an imbecile during his attendance and who had since moved over to the royal archives, it smugly made it clear that Lex would sooner become an alicorn than be allowed to access Equestria’s greatest treasures.
With his options dwindling, Lex had made arrangements to visit the Crystal Empire in hopes of being able to study the Crystal Heart. He’d had no idea, at the time, how much that visit would change his life…
But as much as it had, being caught up in King Sombra’s disastrous coup had meant that any chance to study the Crystal Heart had slipped through Lex’s hooves. Moreover, history had repeated itself a few months later with the Tree of Harmony. Discovering it while living like a vagrant in the ruins of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna’s old castle had been the silver lining to losing his home and his parents, but a lack of proper equipment had meant that his examinations had barely gone beyond being cursory, even if it did make for a convenient battery to recharge his magic.
Or perhaps it hadn’t been so fortuitous after all. Had he not been able to – for the first time ever – use as much magic as he wanted, Lex was certain he’d not have been so overconfident when facing that hideous thing that called itself Tirek. It had seemed, at the time, like the perfect opportunity; what better way to showcase what his new magic could do – and, he’d since decided, why he was more fit to rule – than by defeating such a monstrous scourge upon his homeland?
That he’d been so casually defeated, his very ability to use magic ripped from him and eaten by that freakish horror, was a humiliation of irreducible proportions. Worse, it had been the loss of what little he had left. Losing his magic, the magic whose pursuit had indirectly cost him his home and his parents, the only ponies who had ever cared about him, was unendurable. Chopping off his now-useless horn to replace it with King Sombra’s – having found it in a field and having kept it as a macabre curio when he’d seen that it was still magically active despite its amputation – had been agonizing, but proven itself to be a wise decision.
The same could not be said for what he’d done next. In hindsight, it was clear to Lex that he’d been half-mad with pain and shame over what had happened. But even so, attempting to use the dark magic he’d gained to force open that locked box at the Tree of Harmony had been a hideously ill-conceived plan. He was lucky that all that’d happened was that he’d been banished, even if it was to the hellish world known as Everglow.
Everglow…
As much as Lex despised the place, he had to admit, however grudgingly, that he’d been fascinated to discover that the native spellcasters of that world also relied on thought-forms to use their magic rather than crude physical channeling. But whereas he was struggling to come up with how to handle the large amount of energies demanded by his spellcasting, the ponies of Everglow had come up with compensatory techniques designed to not only make it possible, but regular.
The techniques had proven fascinating, but ultimately none of them had lived up to Lex’s strict standards.
The first that he’d come across was utilized by a group of religious adherents. Their method of spellcasting, which Lex had privately dubbed “sacerdotal thaumaturgy” since their name for it – “divine spellcasting” – was too euphuistic to be taken seriously, had initially intrigued him. But some questioning had quickly revealed that they had no idea how their spells actually worked, relying on their “gods” and similar, unspecified divine servitors to prepare and deliver their spells to them.
His next encounter with an Everglow magic-user had seemed more promising. A “sorcerer,” that pony was able to compress the necessary energies on their own, and for a few moments Lex had dared to hope that he’d found his answers at last. But again, it was not to be. The sorcerer-pony had, after a considerable bribe, admitted that their power was entirely innate, rather than something learned. They were able to cast spells because they “just knew how,” and could no more articulate the process than they could articulate the mechanisms which kept their heart beating. Worse, they had virtually no control over what spells they knew; instead, new magical formulas and abilities of random natures came to them at random times, if at all.
But the most promising had been the ones called “wizards.” Unlike in Equestria, where the term was applied to any unicorn that made a career out of magic, wizards in Everglow were a particular sort of spellcaster, ones who relied upon consultation with a book of spells as a method for replenishing their magic. Lex had initially discounted such a method – after all, he had his own set of scrolls with the formulas and diagrams that he’d written when developing his thaumaturgy – but had eventually purchased a beginner’s spellbook on little more than a lark.
On reading it, Lex had realized that he’d been mistaken to discount Everglow-wizardry so easily. While it was filled with formulas as he’d expected, their nature was far more than mere recipes for new spells. Instead, each spell’s listing in the spellbook had – insofar as Lex had been able to understand – externalized the process by which a thought-form would contain the requisite energy for a spell. Essentially, the energy was driven into the proper form within the pages of the diagram itself and then imprinted directly onto the mind reading it. Though the fact that not everyone on Everglow was a wizard proved that there had to be some sort of mental training required to properly receive the imprinting.
Still, Lex had been impressed, despite himself. It was an innovative method to solve the very problem that he was still struggling with. Unfortunately, it was an avenue that was closed to him. He’d tried to make use of it, of course, but accomplished nothing other than to give himself headaches so painful that they’d caused crippling nausea. In the end, he’d come to the conclusion that by reordering his thoughts in order to learn thaumaturgy, he’d closed off whatever pathways were needed to make use of this alternative process. In essence, learning Everglow-wizardry was literally “unthinkable” for him.
Still, investigating wizardry – unlike sorcery and “divine” magic – hadn’t been a total waste of his time. Lex had discovered that, so long as he focused purely on the text in a wizard’s spellbook and nothing else, he could translate its formulas into thaumaturgy quite easily. Even if he couldn’t make use of the energies, he could still expand his repertoire of spells.
It had been small compensation for being exiled from his home for what had been the second time, but that hadn’t been the only way that Lex’s time on Everglow had improved him. On the contrary, that world had forced him to grow in ways that Equestria likely never could have. Its nature as a rougher, more dangerous place demanded that he had become stronger in order to survive, as it demanded of all of its inhabitants. For the first time, he no longer had the luxury of pushing for new knowledge, instead being forced to rely on creative ways to use the knowledge and the magic that he already had.
To that end, he had learned several new tricks, such as how to-
A thump at the door drew Lex from his reverie. Blinking as he was pulled out of his thoughts, he glanced at the window, seeing that the sky was beginning to darken. Apparently he’d succeeded in passing the time, if nothing else.
Going to the door, Lex paused to listen for a moment. The sound that he’d heard had been a single muted thump, as though something had been tossed against the door. But now there was silence. Glancing through the peephole, there was no one in front of it either.
Opening it slowly, the mystery was solved as Lex caught sight of the newspaper on the doorstep. Picking it up with his magic, he quickly turned away and shut the door before some passerby noticed his glowing eyes, letting himself become absorbed in the headline:
TALL TELLER: SPECIAL EVACUATION EDITION
Narrowing his gaze, Lex began to quickly scan the paper. Glancing through the reprinting of the mayor’s speech, a Q&A section, and a breakdown of who’d be evacuated when, he finally found what he was looking for: the instructions for the evacuees. According to the paper, the first batch of them would gather in the town square tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM, and would be led to the dockyards to be loaded onto a ship that would be waiting.
Snorting at the implausibility of that scenario, Lex mentally calculated how long it would take a crowd of ponies to traverse the seven miles between Tall Tale proper and the dockyards. Given that they’d be nervous and in a hurry, they’d probably keep a brisk pace, but the lack of light would slow them down, so…probably around 7 AM or so. At that point they’d arrive, and the dragon, or whatever it was, would make its move. Turning his gaze to the clock on the far wall, Lex grimly noted the current time.
In just over twelve hours, he would match his magic against the might of a dragon.
Sonata and Fireflower were silent as they exited city hall. The hour was getting late, and so the crowd around the building had thinned out somewhat, but there were still enough ponies cluttering around the entrance that the two had ultimately decided to leave the way they’d entered. Closing the fire escape door as best they could, the pair climbed down the ladder and exited the alley.
Following Sonata as she headed onto the street, Fireflower bit his lip. Everything in the mare’s body language screamed dejection: her steps were slow and listless, her ears were folded back, and her eyes were glued to the ground. Although he hadn’t known her for very long, it was still unnerving to see someone usually so peppy being so down.
“So, um, now what?” he ventured, hoping that the question would snap her out of her depression. She’d previously mentioned going to the hospital to interview the ponies that had been hurt in the last attack. With any luck his prompting would remind her of that; at least then he’d see some signs of life from her.
His hopes were dashed a moment later when the only response he received was a noncommittal grunt. Becoming slightly worried now, Fireflower decided that he needed to be more proactive.
“Look, let’s…let’s sit down for a minute.” He nudged her towards a nearby bench, receiving no resistance as he guided her towards it. Hopping onto it and lying on his belly, he was momentarily dumbstruck as Sonata seated herself by turning around and, keeping her hind legs on the ground, rearing up and leaning back. The result was that only her bottom was touching the bench, keeping her upper body upright.
Having had a human alternate form before his unexpected trip to Equestria had replaced it with a pony one, Fireflower recognized that she was using human posture, as odd as that was. He briefly thought of commenting on it, but decided against it. She didn’t look like she was up for smalltalk. Instead, he got straight to the point.
“Alright, look…the mayor wasn’t very helpful-”
“That’s putting it mildly,” snorted Sonata, leaning forward and putting her elbows on her knees (were those even the right terms for a pony, Fireflower wondered) before resting her face on her hooves.
“Come on, we got some useful information,” he insisted.
Sonata glanced over at him, her expression dark. “We got, like, nothing. All she knew was that her city was suddenly being attacked by big spiders with magical powers, and then that same night she’s foalnapped by some ponies she’s never seen before, blindfolded, and taken to a cave where a big green dragon tells her that he’s heard about what’s happening, and will fly everybody out of the city to safety, but since most dragons are all scary and awful she needs to tell everybody that it’s a bunch of ships instead. Whoop-de-do.”
Taken aback by her sudden torrent of negativity, Fireflower nevertheless tried to rally. “Well, from how she described the ponies in question, they sound like they might be Rockwood, Shadowvine, and Breezyleaf.” He was silent for a moment as he considered the lack of anyone who matched Brightrose’s description. Just the thought that he might have lost another sibling…
Shaking off the onset of worry, he kept going. “There’s no way they’d work for that dragon willingly, so it’s obviously forcing them somehow.”
“Uh-huh.” Sonata’s reply was still lacking vigor.
“What else? Oh! She mentioned that the cave was all damp, right? So the dragon’s probably making a lair near water somewhere. So if, I don’t know, if we checked around where there’s water I might see something familiar…?”
He trailed off in hope that she’d run with the idea, and for a moment she seemed to consider it, but then she shrugged helplessly. “Well, where’s there a whole lot of water around here?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t there supposed to be a beach outside of town somewhere?”
Sonata rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, totes great idea. Let’s just go on a beachside stroll. We can ask if anypony has seen a cave with a big dragon in it. In fact, there’s probably a whole buncha signs up and down the place that say ‘Big Dragon Cave, next right’ on them. I can’t believe we didn’t think of that before!”
For a moment, Fireflower gaped, surprised and stung by her sarcastic response. Before he could think to calm himself down, he found his patience breaking. “Well what’s your big idea then?” he snapped. “Chasing down the mayor was your plan, so now what?”
“I don’t know!” she shouted, finally pushed out of her lethargy. “Coming up with plans was always what Lex did! But the mayor said he hasn’t been to see her and he wasn’t at her speech or anywhere else we’ve checked, so I don’t know what to do!” Her anger suddenly petered out, and she slumped in place, sniffling. “For all I know he already figured out where that dragon is and went to fight it by himself and…and he’s…” She couldn’t bring herself to say anymore, lowering her head and rubbing a foreleg across her eyes.
Turning back to Fireflower, she forced a smile onto her face. “I’m sorry, I’m being a super downer. I’m glad you found out more about what’s going on with your siblings, for reals.”
“No, I should be the one apologizing to you!” protested Fireflower. “I wasn’t thinking about how you felt, not having found out anything about your…you know.” He had intended to say “boyfriend,” but the word refused to pass his lips. He hurriedly continued, hoping that she hadn’t noticed his slip. “Besides, he’s caustic enough that I bet that the dragon’s acid breath would just wash right off of him.”
Sonata snorted, this time in amusement. “Well, Lex can be a jerk sometimes, but I doubt that…that…wait, what did you say?”
Fireflower bit his lip, thinking he was about to be rebuked. “Er, sorry. I mean, he does seem kind of severe, but I guess calling him ‘caustic’ was a bit too-”
“No!” cut in Sonata, her voice suddenly thick with worry. “What was that about the dragon having acid breath?”
Fireflower blinked, confused. “Well…yeah.” His tone made it clear that he thought that was obvious. “It’s a green dragon.”
“But dragons breath fire!” she insisted. “I mean, Lex said that they breathe fire. Like, period. He didn’t say anything about that changing if they were green!”
“Whoa, whoa, hang on.” Fireflower hopped off the bench, unable to remain sitting in the face of Sonata’s distress. “I don’t know how it works in this world, but on Everglow a dragon’s color determines what kind of breath weapon they have. Red dragons breathe fire sure, but green ones breathe acidic gas. For that matter, blue ones breathe lightning, black dragons breathe liquid acid, and white dragons breathe freezing cold.” Brightrose, the most worldly of his siblings, had told Fireflower all of that a few years ago, and it had stuck with him.
“That means…” Also climbing to her hooves, Sonata was mumbling to herself as she wracked her brain, trying to think back to what Lex had told her a few days before.
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m beginning to have serious doubts that a dragon is the culprit here.”
“Aw, how come?” Sonata fell back to all fours with a disappointed look.
“You mean besides the fact that dragons breathe fire, and there are no scorch marks around here? Or that the metal tracks have been melted somehow?”
Lex had been sure that dragons only breathed fire, Sonata knew, which was why he’d been suspicious about how the train tracks had been destroyed. But then they’d met Fireflower, and he’d confirmed that there was a dragon.
“We found a cave, and we thought we would hide in it for a while until we figured out where we were and how to get back. We’d barely gotten inside when its owner came back.”
“Its owner?” Sonata tilted her head. “Who’d own a cave?”
Fireflower shuddered. “A dragon.”
Closing her eyes, Sonata concentrated on following her train of thought. If Lex knew that a dragon was involved, and was certain that all dragons breathed fire, then would he realize that was wrong due to how the train tracks were melted?
…no, she realized. He’d talked about what they’d do if they ran into a dragon, and that was after they’d seen the first set of ruined tracks.
Lex rolled his eyes before continuing. “Since they breathe fire, I’ll cast a spell to resist damaging heat on both of us.”
Sonata felt a chill run down her spine as she realized that matched what she knew of Lex. The melted train tracks would puzzle him, but wouldn’t be enough to overturn what he thought he knew, not when somepony as smart as him could doubtlessly, without any further evidence, come up with alternate explanations for why that was so.
And that meant that when Lex faced down the dragon – and Sonata was absolutely certain that he would – he’d be completely vulnerable to its acid breath.
“Sonata? Are you alright?” Fireflower put a hoof on her side, worried by how pale she was becoming.
Her eyes snapped open. “We’ve got to find Lex!”
“Well, yeah. That’s what we’ve been trying to do.”
“No! I mean we really have to find him! He doesn’t know that the dragon breathes acid! He’s going to have the wrong magic protecting him when he fights it!”
Fireflower’s eyes widened as he finally put two and two together. He’d always thought that the red-horned unicorn was mad for wanting to fight a dragon, but he had to admit that Lex’s magic was impressive. But that would make no difference if he went in with the wrong suite of defensive spells prepared. “He’ll be killed!”
Fireflower didn’t like Sonata’s boyfriend very much, but having lost his little sister, he couldn’t imagine wishing that kind of grief on anyone. Even so, a small part of him couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to his relationship with Sonata if Lex was out of the picture.
His attention was refocused on the mare beside him as Sonata, now clearly panicking, whirled and ran down the street, yelling Lex’s name over and over as though he were a lost puppy. Caught off-guard, Fireflower hurried after her, quickly catching up to her as she paused at an intersection.
“Sonata! Wait!” He reared up, putting his forehooves on her shoulders to try and stop her before she bolted again.
She immediately tried to shake him off. “No! We have to find him! Right now!”
“Listen to me-”
Wrenching herself from his grasp, Sonata took off again, succeeding only in drawing stares from passersby. “Lex! Lex, where are you?!”
“Sonata! STOP!” This time Fireflower all but tackled her to the ground.
“Lemme go! Let me go!” Sonata started struggling almost instantly, forcing Fireflower to hold on with everything he had to keep her from running off again.
“Listen to me!” he pleaded with her. A crowd was beginning to form around them, drawn by the spectacle. “We can’t just run around calling his name at random! We need a plan!”
“That’s easy for you to say!” she shrieked, thrashing her limbs as she started to become hysterical. “It won’t be your fault if something happens to him!”
“Huh?!” Her statement was so unexpected that he almost lost his hold on her. “What are you saying?! It won’t be your fault either!”
“Yes it will! YES IT WILL! If something happens and he’s hurt or killed then it’ll be ALL MY FAULT!”
She screamed the last few words, and that seemed to take all of the strength out of her, sagging bonelessly in his grip. A moment later Fireflower felt her start to shake, and realized that she was crying, pressing her face into his chest.
“It’s all my fault! I left him,” she sobbed. “I’m the one who left him and so he isn’t here to hear that he’s got it wrong! If I hadn’t done that he’d know what he needs to do! It’s all my fault!”
Sympathetic murmurs came from the crowd of ponies around them. They didn’t know what she was talking about, but the sight of somepony so distraught was heartbreaking nonetheless.
Feeling his heart pounding in his chest, Fireflower slowly pulled her closer and, taking a moment to try and calm himself, nuzzled her mane gently. “We’ll find him,” he whispered soothingly. “We’ll find him, and we’ll beat the dragon, and we’ll make everything alright again. I promise.”
He meant every word of it. At that moment, it didn’t matter that she was pining for someone else. It didn’t matter that their enemy was a dragon. It didn’t matter that his family was in danger.
All that mattered was making Sonata, the girl whom he now knew he’d fallen in love with, have a reason to smile again.
Sonata had finally cried herself out by the time Fireflower guided her into their room. They hadn’t had any money to pay for it, but when Fireflower had managed to walk her to a nearby hotel, the kindly pegasus at the counter had taken one look at Sonata and had checked them in anyway, quietly lamenting “the terrible times.”
Red-eyed, Sonata had immediately headed into the bathroom, and Fireflower had heard the water running a moment later. Sighing, he moved further into the room…and stopped dead as he realized that it only had one bed, large enough for two. His earlier confidence buckling under a rush of embarrassment, Fireflower was wondering if he should go back and ask them to change their room when Sonata exited the bathroom.
“Hey,” she said softly, giving her companion a wan smile. “Sorry about going all to pieces on you like that.”
“You don’t have to apologize!” he assured her, a little more forcefully than he meant to due to his renewed nervousness. Forcing himself to calm down, he continued. “Really, I should have been more sensitive to how you felt.”
Her smile widened a bit, until it almost resembled her usual grin. “You’re already a really sensitive guy, taking care of me like that.”
Fireflower was going to protest, to remind her that she’d done the same for him in the aftermath of Lex’s attempt on his life, but the words were lost as Sonata suddenly stepped forward and kissed his cheek. The only reason she didn’t see the stupefied look that crossed his face – eyes wide and jaw hanging – that were the results of her actions was because she immediately moved past him, heading into the room.
“Oh hey! Look at this!” Hearing her voice, now having recovered much of its usual vigor, was enough to snap him out of it, mostly, and he blinked as he turned around to see what had caught her interest.
She was flipping through a newspaper that had been on the room’s smaller table. Fireflower could see that its headline indicated that it was the “special evacuation edition” of the paper. Doubtlessly this was what the mayor had mentioned during her speech. “What does it say?” asked Fireflower as he moved alongside Sonata.
“All sorts of stuff. There’s a lotta stuff about who’s going when, and why they have to use ships, and- ah ha!” She grinned in triumph. “And the instructions for what to do when it’s your turn to leave!”
Fireflower tilted his head in confusion. “Why is that helpful?” He was sure the answer was right there in the paper, but he was focused on her rather than the newsprint in front of him.
“Because if Lex is going to be anywhere, it’ll be here,” she answered. Her voice was filled with confidence. “I’m, like, totes certain of it! He’ll want to be there to issue instructions or be on lookout or something. He’s like, super dedicated to helping ponies who need it.” She glanced at Fireflower as she said that, as though wanting to make sure he didn’t disagree.
His pained attempt at a smile seemed to satisfy her, and she went over to the bed, taking the paper with her as she laid down, still reading it. “It says here that it’s gonna start tomorrow at half-past four. Can you set the alarm for then?”
“Sure thing.” Despite his acknowledgment he didn’t move, caught in a bout of indecision. Was she expecting him to climb onto the bed with her? Or was she expecting him to sleep on the room’s small sofa instead?
Shifting on his hooves uncertainly, Fireflower decided that he needed more time to think. “I’m, uh, gonna go get cleaned up.”
“‘Kay.”
Retreating to the bathroom, Fireflower sighed in equal parts relief and disappointment. Glancing at himself in the mirror, he tried to rally. They were going to face a dragon, the same dragon that had killed his little sister. It was no time to be squeamish! Not when they quite literally might not live to regret it!
Jumping into the shower, he kept building up his thoughts as he fiddled with the unfamiliar controls, until his head – and the bathroom – were full of steam. Toweling himself off, he took a deep breath and nodded to himself. No more being too nervous to speak, no more evading the issue. He was going to walk right out there and tell her how he felt, and damn the consequences. Fortune favored the bold, right? Right.
He repeated that to himself for almost three full minutes, glancing at the doorknob that was the last barrier between himself and what he was about to do, before he finally worked himself up enough. Flinging open the door, he practically charged out. “Sonata, I want t-”
Soft snoring greeted him.
Fireflower let out a huge breath as the tension suddenly left him. He knew that if his siblings were there, they’d have been howling with mirth. For that matter, even he couldn’t help but let out an amused snicker at the irony of the situation. It was perfect, absolutely perfect.
Still chuckling softly, he went over and gently pulled the blankets up over her, being careful not to wake her up. Pulling the newspaper out from under her hooves, he laid it on the table before hopping onto the sofa and curling up. He was still smiling as he spent a few minutes watching her sleep, before the exhaustion of the day caught up with him and he drifted off as well.
It was almost full dark by the time Nosey returned to her room. “I’m ba-ack!” She called out in a sing-song voice as she walked in. A gray glow surrounded her horn, matching the aura around the box she was telekinetically carrying with her. “Did you miss me?”
Giving her the barest of glances, Lex snorted derisively before returning his gaze to the newspaper, looking it over on the slight chance that it would have any other information that might be useful to him. “What did you find out about the evacuation plans?” He didn’t bother to look at her as he spoke.
Putting her box down, Nosey didn’t protest his attitude. It was unpleasant, but his whole “dark and brooding” shtick would only enhance the exposé she planned on writing about him later! “Yeah, talk about a dead end! I spent an hour trying to get in to see her, and when that didn’t work I tried to interview some of the office-ponies going into and out of city hall, but apparently all of them were named ‘No Comment.’” She rolled her eyes in exasperation before continuing.
“But I did have one stroke of luck. Check this out!” She lifted her box again, nodding towards Lex, clearly wanting him to open it.
He gave her a level look for a long moment, silently making his irritation with her known. He couldn’t imagine that whatever she’d found was at all useful, and even if it was there was no reason for her not to just tell him instead of playing this ridiculous game. But Nosey was apparently undeterred by his glowering at her, simply floating her box towards him and smiling in anticipation.
For a moment he considered rebuking her more harshly for wasting his time, but decided against it. In just a few hours, he be involved in what would likely be the fight of his life, and conserving his energy, even it was just the mental fatigue of dealing with this twit of a mare, was important. Grasping the box in his own telekinesis, he opened it slowly, peering at the contents within.
After a pregnant pause, he looked back up at her, unimpressed. “It’s a camera,” he declared flatly.
“It’s a camera!” came Nosey’s enthusiastic response. “Normally I have to contract a local photojournalist in order to get a picture to go with my stories, but that’s a no-go with the whole town getting ready to be evacuated, so I’m gonna do it myself!” Pushing her glasses up on her muzzle, she grinned. “I always knew I was an ace reporter, but now I get to show everypony that I’m an ace photographer too!” Her voice made it clear that she was quite impressed with herself.
Lex turned back to the newspaper, letting his lack of a response speak for itself.
Unpurturbed, Nosey took the camera out of the box, keeping up a one-sided dialogue as she did so. “I had to get this one at a secondhoof shop, being a girl on a budget and all, but the clerk assured me that it should work just as good as a new one. Now let’s see…” her voice trailed off into soft mumbling as she removed the last of the components, arranging them on the floor.
For a brief time, silence reigned in their room, broken only by the soft swishing of turning newspaper pages and Nosey’s broken mutterings as she haphazardly assembled her camera. Almost an hour passed, and Lex was just finishing his reading when a bright flash filled the room, startling him. “What?!”
“One operating camera: check,” smiled Nosey. “With a picture to go with this story, it’ll make headlines in every paper in Equestria!”
“I didn’t tell you that you could photograph me,” growled Lex.
Nosey scoffed. “You knew that I’m a reporter, that I bought a camera, and that I’m writing a story on you. As far as I’m concerned, not saying that I couldn’t photograph you meant that you were fine with it. Now,” she continued in her best Photo Finish faux-accent, stepping behind her camera again, “ve’ll get a few more for good measure. You are an evil overlord, yah! You’re going to destroy all zat displeases you!”
“I’m about to,” hissed Lex darkly.
The snarl that crossed her guest’s face, as well as how he extended a hoof – not towards her, but towards her camera – in response to her words was enough to make Nosey realize that she had pushed her luck far enough. A good reporter didn’t badger her sources, and so she quickly stepped back from her camera and began to break it down. “But that’s enough for tonight,” she hurriedly stated, returning her voice to its normal pitch. “Big day tomorrow, after all.”
Lex didn’t soften his glare, but lowered his hoof, apparently mollified by her acquiescence. Once he was sure that she had gotten the message, he got up from the desk and headed over to the corner of the room. Settling down, he pulled a blanket from his haversack and – ignoring Nosey’s grunt of interest at seeing something be removed from a container that looked too small to hold it –draped it over himself, settling the haversack beneath his head as a makeshift pillow.
Rolling her eyes at his curtness, Nosey moved over to the desk that Lex had vacated. Picking up the newspaper, she quickly flipped through it. It didn’t take her long to find the same information that he had earlier, and she glanced at him thoughtfully for a moment.
Her first inclination was to ask him to confirm what she suspected: that he planned on crashing the initial group of evacuees, or at least tailing it to the dockyards, and then fight the dragon that he’d claimed would be waiting there. But for once, Nosey held her tongue. She was sure that if she did, he’d realize that she intended on tailing him and tell her to stay put. There was no way that she’d actually listen to that, of course, but she couldn’t take the chance that he’d back his orders up with magic to somehow force her to stay behind. Which meant that she had to be smart about this…
“Well, I’m going to bed,” she announced.
As she’d expected, there was no reaction from Lex, although Nosey was certain that he was still awake. Going into the small adjoining bathroom, she brushed her teeth and washed up before coming out and climbing into the room’s only bed. She briefly wondered if she should thank him – it had been nice of him to leave the bed to her, after all – but decided against it; he’d been enough of a jerk that one gracious act wasn’t enough to make up for it all.
Pulling the covers over her, she used her telekinesis to turn the lamp off, letting the room fall into darkness. And then…she waited.
Although Nosey knew that few ponies would have ascribed it to her, patience was a virtue that she possessed in abundance. Oh, she didn’t like having to use it, of course, but you didn’t get to be a star reporter without knowing how to wait, whether it was for a subject to emerge from seclusion or for prying eyes to turn away. Or in this case, fall asleep.
Lying in the inky blackness, Nosey paid close attention to the sound of Lex’s breathing. It took a long time – it had to have been well over an hour – but eventually she heard it become slow and regular. She waited a few more minutes, just to be safe, and then climbed out of bed.
Stepping as lightly as she could, Nosey padded over to the clock on the wall. Normally she just would have telekinetically brought it over to her, but she couldn’t risk the glowing aura that would have created waking Lex up. Instead, she reached up with her forehooves and gently pulled it off the wall.
There was almost no ambient light in the room, but her eyes had adjusted to the gloom enough that she could just barely make out the knobs that set the alarm. Clenching her mouth around it, she slowly turned it so that it was set to go off…at 4:35 AM.
Replacing the clock, she carefully crept back into bed. Once she was tucked under the covers again, and after confirming that Lex’s breathing hadn’t changed, she smirked to herself. It was obvious to her that he was planning on somehow waking up by himself at the right time and leaving her there, probably hoping that she’d sleep through everything. But by setting the alarm for just after he left, she’d have no trouble waking up in time to follow him!
Chuckling softly to herself, Nosey closed her eyes. She could almost see the journalism awards she’d get for this story now…
Lex’s eyes snapped open, making the transition from sleep to total wakefulness instantaneously.
For all that he’d embraced austerity in his personal life, waking up so suddenly each and every morning – a byproduct of his nightmare-ridden sleep – was not something he enjoyed. While Lex wasn’t one to start the day by excessively lingering in a state of half-aware drowsiness the way he knew some ponies did, it was far more preferable than the jarring awakening that he always had now.
Still, that was the least of his concerns at the moment. Quietly climbing to his hooves, Lex quietly folded his blanket and tucked it into his haversack, pulling out a large traveling cloak a moment later, which he then donned together with his bag. The soft breathing coming from the bed told him that Drowsy was still asleep, for which Lex was thankful. She had proven to be among the more irritating ponies he’d ever met, and the thought that this was likely the last time he’d ever see her was not an unpleasant one.
Glancing at the clock, he could just barely make out that it read 4:30 on the dot. Giving a perfunctory nod of self-satisfaction at having been able to wake up at precisely the correct time due purely to personal discipline, Lex strode towards the door.
As he crossed the room, his eyes flared green with purple contrails appearing from them. Unlike with his own magic, which required chanting and gesticulating to activate it, the dark magic that Lex had inherited when he’d taken King Sombra’s horn could be utilized with just a thought, with his eyes being the only outward sign of its use. And even that was suppressed a moment later as Lex’s body dissolved into incorporeality, becoming a shadow that passed through the wooden door as though it wasn’t even there.
Outside, Lex headed towards the town square, the location where the newspaper had said that the first wave of evacuees would gather. Utterly silent and almost invisible in the darkness, Lex made sure to stick to the edges of the street to better minimize the chances of anypony catching sight of him. It was fortunate that this form sharpened his visual acuity to the point of having sight that could penetrate even complete darkness, even if it was limited to black-and-white only.
Finally reaching the square, which was already milling with ponies, Lex hung back, glancing around before flowing over to a particularly thick set of shadows clustered around an alleyway. From there, he observed the growing crowd in silence.
Lex’s plan was a simple one. It was a given that there’d be some sort of attendance taken, designed to weed out anypony that wasn’t supposed to be there. In this form, Lex knew that he could avoid that easily enough, and once the assembled group set out, it would likely be simplicity itself to slip back into corporeal form and move among them.
Under ideal circumstances, Lex wouldn’t have bothered retaking solid form, but prudence demanded that he did. It would take a few hours for the group to reach their destination, and while Lex could stay as a shadow that long, it would place a drain on his horn’s dark magic. Not much of one, of course, but he was determined to conserve as much of his strength as possible before the actual conflict began.
Watching as the crowd grew, Lex sneered at them in his mind. How could nopony there realize the trap that they were being led into? Even now, the total number of ponies gathered there was barely more than a hundred. It should have been obvious that trying to evacuate Tall Tale, a city whose population Lex knew was in the low tens of thousands, in groups with such small numbers was a fatally flawed endeavor. And yet there was no sign that anypony there was even remotely suspicious.
For all his disdain, however, Lex never considered changing his current course of action. The ponies there were all in serious trouble, even if they didn’t realize the full extent of it. As someone who did, and who had the capability to do something about it, Lex knew that he was therefore morally bound to help them to the best of his abilities, regardless of what he thought of them personally. Otherwise he would be morally culpable for whatever fate they’d suffer.
Even the thought of abandoning these ponies – of abandoning his entire moral code – was enough to send a shudder of visceral revulsion through Lex. His moral framework, byzantine though it was, was couched in absolute terms and could not be abrogated no matter what it cost him. That was what Sonata had failed to understand.
Sonata…
Thoughts of his ex-girlfriend, for he had no more lingering doubts about her sincerity in ending their relationship, sent a pang through Lex, reminding him again of just how much he’d sacrificed in order to maintain the sanctity of the only way he had for dealing with a world – with more than one world – that steadfastly refused to make sense no matter how hard he tried to decipher it. It was one thing to hold that a principle was inviolable; it was quite another to have to live up to that.
Lex was saved from sinking further into the mire of his regrets as he heard a voice speak up from the nearby crowd of ponies.
It seemed the evacuation had begun.
“Everypony! Everypony please settle down! We’re now going to begin the evacuation!” Breezyleaf’s voice quieted the murmurings of the assembled ponies, drawing all attention to her. Doing her best to put on a smile, she waved a hoof lamely at the crowd.
Inwardly, she felt like she was going to be sick. Not only had she helped terrorize these ponies over the last several days, but now she was pretending to help them while in fact leading them to their doom. Although she knew she was imagining it, she could almost see the silent accusations on the faces in the crowd, asking her what they had done to deserve this.
She wished again that Rockwood was the one who had to address the crowd – nothing ever seemed to get to him – but he and Shadowvine had insisted that it be her. “You’re the most personable,” Shadowvine had told her. “And besides, you’ve even picked up some of the local slang, like calling them ‘pony’ all the time. Just say it like we rehearsed, and walk in front of them, and we’ll do the rest.”
Licking her lips, Breezyleaf kept speaking. “I’m…” She paused, unable to bring herself to tell them her name. Somehow that made it even more personal, the horrid betrayal that she was carrying out.
For a moment, she wondered what would happen if she confessed everything right there. That she was one of the horrible spiders that had been attacking them. That they’d only done it because their brother was being held hostage by a dragon, who’d already killed another member of their family and would do it again if they didn’t do everything it said. That she and her family weren’t bad people, and didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but just wanted to get Brightrose back and find Fireflower, wherever he was, and go home.
She almost said it, but as she opened her mouth she caught sight of her remaining siblings hovering at the edge of the crowd. Shadowvine was staring at her silently, a pleading look on her face. Nearby, Rockwood’s expression hadn’t changed, but he shook his head slowly.
Swallowing, Breezyleaf bit back what she’d been about to say. They were right, of course. Even if she told them everything, nothing would change. All that would happen would be that Brightrose would be killed, and they wouldn’t be far behind. After all, if they didn’t take the ponies to the dragon, it would come to them, and the result would be the same. After all, every time she and her siblings had staged an attack, they’d never met even a token resistance. This world’s ponies were good people, but they were defenseless, and Breezyleaf and her siblings didn’t have the power to defend them.
Resigning herself to what was about to happen, she spoke up again. “I’m going to ask that you follow me to the rendezvous point. Since we’re short on time we’re going to leave right now, but while we go I’m going to ask you to try and form a line behind me so that my si-, my secretary,” she nodded towards Shadowvine, who waved the clipboard that the mayor had given them previously, “can check you against our list of approved evacuees.”
She paused for a moment, making sure to sweep her eyes over the assembled ponies. “If you weren’t on the list for being evacuated at this time then please, please do not try and join the departing group. We will have another official working at the back of the group to make sure nopony falls behind,” now it was Rockwood’s turn to nod towards the crowd, “and we can’t afford to escort anypony back to town if you’re not supposed to be here.”
That was all pointless, of course. While the mayor had furnished them with checklists of individuals for each phase of the evacuation, the araneas knew that those didn’t matter in the slightest, since this was going to be a one-way trip for everypony involved. As such, Shadowvine was just going to ignore any discrepancies that came up and turn in a completed list to the mayor after each group departed.
Steeling herself, Breezyleaf turned around and started walking, hearing the ponies following behind her. She kept up a brisk pace, knowing that her brother’s life would be the first one forfeit if the dragon thought that they weren’t going to show up.
Nosey had always taken pride in getting her work into print, to be able to share her captivating words with ponies all over Equestria. But she knew that the words she was uttering right now wouldn’t make it past any editor worth their salt. Nevertheless, she kept up her steady stream of cursing as she rushed down the street, her surrounding illuminated only by the dark grey glow around her horn and her camera.
She’d been so certain that she’d developed a foolproof plan for following her pugnacious guest, and initially it seemed like everything had worked exactly like she’d planned. The alarm had gone off when she’d set it for, and sure enough Lex had been gone. But as she’d rushed to gather her things, she’d realized that she’d outsmarted herself.
She’d broken down the camera that she’d bought yesterday after Lex had thrown a hissy fit about her photographing him. In hindsight, that had been a huge mistake on her part. The camera was one that had multiple parts to it, and since she’d bought it secondhoof there hadn’t been any instructions about how to set it up. The result had been that it had taken her almost an hour to put it together when she'd first used it.
As such, when she had reached for it after waking up this morning, she’d paled when she realized that she’d need to assemble it again in order to take any pictures. She’d briefly considered just carrying the box and setting it up on-site when something happened, but had immediately discarded that idea; there was no way anything newsworthy would wait around while she figured out how to get everything set up!
With no other choice, Nosey had started to frantically assemble her camera right there. It hadn’t taken nearly as long, since she’s already assembled and disassembled it once before, but it still took her over twenty minutes to get everything put into place! Now she was charging through the dark streets towards the town square, desperately hoping that she hadn’t just missed the story of the century.
But as she charged into the town square only to find it completely empty, it looked like that was exactly what had happened.
“I can’t believe you forgot to set the alarm!”
Sonata’s voice would have been angrier if she hadn’t been panting as she galloped all-out towards the town square. As it was, she had to struggle to speak at all while she was pushing herself so hard, but she couldn’t resist the urge, being extremely upset.
“I’m…sorry…!” came Fireflower’s gasping voice from behind her, struggling to keep up. Sonata risked a glance back and saw that, even with all of his huffing and puffing, he was pretty shamefaced. He’d only said that something had distracted him and he’d forgotten to set the alarm, but for some reason had refused to say what. It made no sense to Sonata; what could possibly have distracted him? The two of them had been all alone in that room without anyone else there! It was a good thing she’d needed to use the bathroom, or they might both still be asleep!
Biting her lip, Sonata pushed thoughts of blame out of her head, instead focusing on pushing herself to get to the square as fast as she could, even though her legs were already burning. Just a little more…
Rounding a corner, she let out a cry of despair as she saw that the plaza was empty. They were too late! Except…no, there was one pony there, a mare carrying a camera, of all things. Ignoring Fireflower’s labored breathing behind her, she galloped over to the other mare, hoping she knew which way everybody had gone.
The other mare, a familiar-looking unicorn with a dark coat, a blonde mane and tail, and glasses, was already heading towards her, and Sonata could already see the same tension on her face. Maybe she had overslept too?
““Do you kno-”” The two of them spoke in unison, then stopped, two sets of eyes widening.
“You’re that mare who was interviewing those ponies that had been attacked! Newbie something-or-other!” Sonata felt hope swell in her chest. Even if she had been too in-your-face – Sonata remembered how she’d made Fireflower angry, which wasn’t easy to do considering what a sweetie he was – she was still quite obviously a newsmare. Maybe she’d know which way everybody had gone.
“Nosey,” corrected Nosey. “And you’re that mare who was with that stallion that was defending them, right? I don’t suppose you know which way everypony went for the evacuation?” She doubted it, since she’d seen her arrive just now, but she had to ask.
Sonata’s face fell. “I was hoping that you knew where everyone had gone.”
“I just got here myself,” answered Nosey, despair written all over her face. This couldn’t be happening! The story of the year, and she was going to miss it! She glanced around again, as though a clue would suddenly make itself known if she just kept looking. The other mare did the same, turning her head back and forth.
“…newspaper…” came a panting voice from behind the pair.
“Huh?” Sonata turned around first, looking over at where Fireflower, still struggling to catch his breath after running there at full tilt, staggered up to the pair.
“The newspaper…the one you were reading last night…where did it say they’d go?”
Sonata screwed up her face in a look of concentration. She’d been exhausted last night when they’d gotten to their hotel room, and although she’d flipped through the newspaper, she’d fallen asleep a few minutes after she’d started. “I don’t remember.” Biting her lip, she made a quick decision. “Okay, we need to run back to our room and get the paper-”
“The dockyards.” Nosey’s voice cut Sonata off in mid-speech. “They’re supposed to be taken to the dockyards, west of the city.”
“Great!” Sonata rounded on Nosey, all smiles again. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
But Nosey was already shaking her head. “It’s not enough to just head in the same direction, we have to take the same route that they’re taking.”
“Huh?” Sonata canted her head to the side. “Why?”
Nosey bit her lip for a moment, her reporter’s instinct to hoard information kicking in before she decided to share what she knew. It was just a hunch, but these two didn’t look like they were going to steal her story. “Because the whole thing with there being ships that are supposed to take everypony to safety is a sham, which means that everypony in that group probably is never going to make it there. If we end up taking a different route there and bypass them, we might miss them entirely.”
Sonata blinked. “‘A sham’? So…you know about the dragon?”
Behind her glasses Nosey’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “There’s a dragon?! Is that what everypony that was evacuated is going to be attacked by?! Does the mayor know that?! How do you know that?!” Even as she spoke, Nosey put her camera down and whipped out a notepad and pencil, scribbling furiously.
Momentarily faltering under the barrage of questions, Sonata answered reflexively. “Er, the mayor knows...”
“So it’s definitely a conspiracy!”
Nosey’s squeal of delight at achieving her personal gold standard for newsworthy material was enough to snap Sonata out of her momentary confusion. “Hold on! The dragon put the mayor under an enchantment! She thought that it was going to help!”
Nodding, Nosey continued writing as fast as she could. “This is great! And you’ve seen this dragon personally?”
“Well, no…”
“I have, and we’re wasting time,” interjected Fireflower, finally having gotten his breath back. “Right now we need to figure out which way everyone went, otherwise a lot of ponies are going to die. What if we just head west until we’re outside of the city, and then look for them? At worst we’ll see them when the sun comes up.”
“But that might be too late! For all we know, sunrise is when they’re going to be attacked.” Sonata bit her lip, wracking her brains. “They must have had lights with them, right? I mean, it’s still dark out, and they’re going a long way, so they have to have some. Why can’t we see them?”
“It’s because of all the buildings,” answered Nosey, stowing her notes now that her impromptu interview had concluded. Gesturing around with one hoof even as she lifted her camera in her telekinesis, she continued. “Even if we’re not that late, they’ve gotten enough of a head start that the buildings are blocking any lights that they’ll have. It’ll probably be the same outside of the city too, since Tall Tale is surrounded by trees.”
“I’ve got an idea,” piped up Fireflower. “If I can get someplace high up, I might be able to see the lights they have from up there.”
“That would work great if we had a pegasus here,” replied Nosey, “but you’re an earth pony. And besides, none of the buildings here are very tall.” She gestured at the buildings around them, all of which were only three to four stories tall.
“It’s still the best idea we’ve got,” shot back Sonata. “What’s, like, the tallest buildings in town?” She directed the question at Fireflower, but his only response was a helpless shrug.
“Hang on, I think I might have something that can help with that.” Nosey dug into a pocket, and a moment later produced a tourist map of the city, spreading it out. “I think…” she trailed off, squinting at it in the poor pre-dawn lighting. “Do either of you have a light?”
The response that she received was completely outside the realm of her expectations. Fireflower chanted a word she didn’t understand, making a quick gesture, and then moved over to touch a hoof to her camera, still held aloft in her grey aura. As soon as he did, it began to glow, shining as brightly as a lamp.
“I-it…that’s, that’s magic!” sputtered Nosey, her jaw dropping. “I mean, real magic, not just the stage kind, right?!” She turned to look at Fireflower, her eyes shining with amazement. “You’re not a unicorn…how did you do that?”
“Nosey! Focus!” Sonata’s agitation was palpable. “Every minute we stand here is a minute they’re getting further away!”
“Oh, um, right.” It was with some effort that Nosey managed to turn her attention back to her map. By itself it was just a map of the city, but tucked around its edges were several blurbs about various attractions and pieces of history. After a few moments’ perusal, Nosey pointed a hoof at one of those. “Here! This says that this lumber mill is the biggest one in Equestria.”
“Great!” cheered Sonata. “Where is it?”
“It says here that it was built at the southwestern edge of the city so that it could be near some of the logging sites, which means that we need to go…” Nosey trailed off as she turned her eyes back to the map, trying to orient herself.
It took almost a minute to figure out, but eventually Nosey nodded and pointed a hoof. “…that way!”
Sonata’s reaction was immediate. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” She immediately took off, Nosey and Fireflower right behind her, the latter giving a groan at having to run again.
Turning to look at the panting stallion as they hurried, it occurred to Nosey to ask something. “Listen, that magic from before was impressive and all, but once we get to the mill how are you planning on climbing it? Another spell?”
Sonata smiled, remembering how Fireflower had turned back into his spider form when he’d needed to climb the fire escape so that they could break into city hall. “It’s something like that.”
Seeing Nosey shoot a curious look her way, Sonata grinned wider as she kept running. “Let’s just say that if you thought his making your camera light up just now was impressive, this will really knock your socks off.”
Carrying a lantern in her mouth, Breezyleaf glanced behind her for what felt like the thousandth time as she led the group forward. Just as they had every other time, the mass of ponies were still there. Several of them, unicorns all, had generated a light at the end of their horns, helping to light the way.
Those wouldn’t be needed for much longer though. They had been walking briskly for well over an hour, by Breezyleaf’s reckoning, and had emerged from the forests surrounding Tall Tale a few minutes ago. Now they were on an open stretch of land, and she could see that the eastern sky, directly behind them, was turning a heavy shade of pink, indicating that dawn was imminent.
Although she couldn’t see him at the back of the group, she knew that Rockwood was there, carrying another lantern and making sure that everyone stayed together. Shadowvine was probably back there with him, since she’d been assigned to act as a go-between, running messages from the front of the group to the back and vice-versa.
As though she’d heard her sister’s thoughts, Shadowvine trotted up to join her. “Rockwood says that it’s time,” she said without preamble.
Breezyleaf blanched. “Right now? But it’s not dawn yet.” Her voice was feeble, knowing that she was just trying to delay the inevitable.
Shadowvine shook her head. “It will be by the time you send your report and it gets here. We’re out of the forest, and out of sight of the city. Zee,” she gave her sister a sympathetic look as she called her by her nickname, “it’s time.”
“O-okay.” Breezyleaf felt her stomach twist in knots as she looked back at the ponies who’d put their trust in her. “Everypony!” she called, forcing her voice to sound steady. “We’re making good time, so we’re going to stop and rest here for a little while. But please stick close together, just to be safe.” A chorus of relieved sighs was her answer as the assembled ponies relaxed, most of them sitting down immediately.
Stepping away from them, Breezyleaf made sure to place Shadowvine between herself and the group. She doubted they’d be paying too much attention to her now that they’d been given a chance to rest, but she didn’t want to take a chance.
As quietly as she could, she chanted her spell, forehooves waving as she made the necessary gesticulations. A moment later a breeze sprang up around her, causing her mane and tail to flutter. “We’ve brought them,” she spoke softly. “We’re on the flatland outside the woods. We’ll use our lanterns to signal you when we can see you.”
As she finished speaking, the wind stopped, or at least it seemed to. In fact, Breezyleaf knew that it was even now speeding its way towards the dragon’s cave, where it would carry the sound of her voice and relay her message.
Sagging as she realized that there was no turning back now, Breezyleaf moved back towards Shadowvine, sniffling as her sister – usually so prickly – hugged her close. A moment later, Rockwood joined them, wrapping his forelegs around the two of them.
It would all be over soon.
Lex glanced around suspiciously for what had to have been the twelfth time. But just like every other time, there was no indication of any threat, imminent or otherwise. Instead, the surrounding ponies continued to relax amongst themselves, as they had ever since this break had been called.
His plan had so far gone off without a hitch. He’d followed the group of evacuees in his shadow form until they’d left the city. After that, when they’d been making their way through the forest with only their pitiful collection of lights to guide them, it had been simplicity itself to change back into his corporeal form and blend in.
Just like he’d expected, nopony had questioned his presence, thinking that he must have been there from the start. With the hood of his traveling cloak covering his horn, and the darkness hiding his shadow, all Lex had to do was refrain from spellcasting so that his eyes didn’t glow, and nopony was the wiser.
Since then, he had been quietly observing the group, eschewing all attempts by anyone else to make conversation. It seemed likely that the three ponies who were leading everyone were likely Fireflower’s siblings, the “spiders” that were the cause of the city being abandoned. That only reinforced Lex’s certainty that they were being led into a trap.
But where was the dragon?
He had expected the creature to ambush them while they were in the forest, since between the darkness and the trees it would have had ample cover to do so, but no attack had come. It was enough to leave Lex disconcerted; he’d prepared his spells for this encounter very carefully, including an array of defensive spells, but their short duration meant that he couldn’t begin casting them until he was certain that combat was imminent.
“What’s that?”
The question was enough to draw Lex from his thoughts, and he looked at the pegasus mare who’d asked it. Her eyes were wide with confusion, pointing westward, drawing the eyes of Lex and several other ponies in that direction.
At first he couldn’t tell what she was pointing at, but then he saw it. There was a shape in the distance, hanging low in the air to the point of being almost level with the horizon. It was moving in a bobbing motion that suggested flight, but any further details were obscured due to its distance and the fact that it was west of them, where the sky was still darkest.
The crowd broke out into a murmur, not sure what they were seeing. To Lex, however, the answer was obvious. Indeed, it was what he’d been anticipating for some time now.
The dragon was about to arrive.
Lex had already raised a hoof and was about to start chanting his first protective spell when he suddenly paused, hearing another voice doing the same thing. Looking over, he saw that one of the ponies that had been their guides – the stallion with the brown coat and dark gray mane and tail – was casting a spell!
For a moment, Lex tensed, thinking that he had been discovered somehow. He didn’t want to attack Fireflower’s siblings – the knowledge of what attacking Fireflower himself had cost him was still fresh in Lex’s mind, and from what Fireflower had said his siblings were almost certainly being forced to do the dragon’s bidding against their will anyway – but he would if he had to. But as he listened to the words that the brown pony was speaking, Lex realized that the spell wasn’t directed at him.
A moment later, the spell went off, and the grass under everypony’s hooves suddenly grew two feet and began waving around in a frenzy, wrapping around everypony tightly. This instantly caused the crowd to descend into panic, shrieking and yelling as they tried to free themselves. Several managed to avoid being immobilized, but the spell had affected a wide area, and nopony got very far before their limbs were entangled, keeping them from moving.
Ignoring them, Lex let his gaze linger on the stallion who’d cast the spell, unconcerned with the grass binding his limbs. There were several ponies between them, but from what Lex could see the other stallion wasn’t casting any further spells. Behind him, a green mare was sitting with her back turned towards them, head lowered in what looked like remorse. Next to her, a purple mare was…waving a lantern above her head? Ah, Lex realized, she’s signaling our location to it.
That settled it then. This entangling spell had merely been to keep them from fleeing when the dragon got closer. Besides that, it seemed unlikely that they’d interfere further. Still, it would be best to make sure of that.
Casting a quick spell – the grass around his foreleg had enough give that Lex had no real problem making the necessary gestures – Lex conjured a force field around the three of them. It was barely big enough to contain them all, and he knew it would only last for a little over ten minutes, but that would be sufficient.
“IT’S A DRAGON!”
The sudden scream drew Lex’s attention away from the trio that he’d just captured, and back to the dragon. In the less than thirty seconds that he’d spent assessing the situation and dealing with the other araneas, it had gotten notably closer, to the point of its identity being discernable as it flew towards them, still only what looked like a few dozen feet off the ground.
Without any further delay, Lex began casting his defensive spells. One to toughen his skin. Another to increase his speed. A third to let him better resist disadvantageous circumstances of any sort. It was closer now, but Lex kept casting. Another spell to toughen his body, this one strengthening his muscles and bones. One that was a literal good luck charm for avoiding wounds in battle. And finally, a powerful ward against fire, one that would completely ablate any fire damage from reaching him until it was expended.
The dragon had almost reached them, and the screams of the ponies around him had turned into full-fledged wails of terror, struggling futilely to escape their bonds. It hadn’t slowed down, still speeding towards them with spread wings, flying low to the ground. In fact, as Lex watched, it flew even lower, opening its huge jaws.
In that moment, Lex realized that it wasn’t planning to stop. It was going to fly right over them and simply grab some of them in its maw as it did. They were going to be devoured without it ever touching the ground.
As the dragon flew to within two hundred feet of them, its open fang-filled mouth approaching at tremendous speed, Lex felt a sudden terror squeeze his heart. For just a moment, the very idea of fighting this…this monster seemed like sheer suicide. The dragon, he could clearly see now, was huge, the size of a large house. It wasn’t the size of a small mountain the way he’d heard that some dragons could be, but it was still far larger than any pony. It was death incarnate, and it was headed directly towards him.
But Lex had faced death before, and he knew how to handle the fear of it.
Forcing his feelings aside, Lex concentrated on the plan he’d come up with days before, back when Fireflower had first confirmed that their foe was a dragon. The first thing he had to do was ground the creature; its flight speed, combined with the limited range of most of Lex’s spells, made that an absolute necessity. Luckily he had just the spell for that.
Smirking to himself despite the dragon being only a hundred-fifty feet away, Lex began casting again. Silently he reflected that Fireflower had done him a good turn: that the aranea had survived this spell had reminded Lex of the danger in relying on any single “sure-kill” magic. Far better to fight smart, rather than relying on brute force.
Completing the spell, Lex felt a burning pain spread through his abdomen that he knew was internal bleeding. The energy that this spell required was beyond what he was capable of encapsulating in a thought-form, and so should have been beyond his ability to utilize. But Lex had learned several new tricks during his time on Everglow, one of which was that the innate ability to gather magical energy through his body – the foundation of the native Equestrian spellcasting that he’d long looked down on – could be used to supplement the thaumaturgy that he’d developed, in this case by using that to supply the remaining necessary energy.
Of course, doing so placed considerable strain on his body, since it wasn’t supposed to use the gathered energy that way, but as far as Lex was concerned that was a small price to pay.
Finished casting, Lex held a foreleg out towards the dragon. Instantly, a thin green beam sprang out. He imagined that he could see the dragon’s eyes widening as it impacted the creature’s left wing…which then disintegrated. The dragon’s scream of pain was lost as it immediately crashed to the earth, tumbling end over end before coming to a stop a few dozen feet away from the collection of ponies.
Ignoring the looks of amazement being directed his way, Lex immediately began casting again, knowing that he’d only wounded the creature. As soon as it got its legs under it, it would be on them in a rage.
But Lex fully intended to meet it head-on when it did, pulling magic in through his body again even as he chanted.
It was time to play his trump card.
After Fireflower had scaled the lumber mill and caught sight of the evacuees’ lights as they were led out of the city, they’d managed to rush after them, a frantic Nosey – now having seen Fireflower’s identity as one of the spiders – peppering them with questions all the while.
Now, as the three of them emerged from the forest, they were just in time to see the dragon be struck down by a green beam.
“That spell…it’s him!” exclaimed Fireflower.
Sonata didn’t have to ask who he meant. “Lex!”
Nosey did a double-take, torn between the incredible spectacle in front of her and what her travelling companion had just said. “Wait a minute, you know Lex?!” It was enough to make her head spin; these two were involved in everything that was going on!
Sonata opened her mouth to reply, but at that moment Lex completed his next spell.
The result caused everyone – the ponies, the araneas, and even the dragon, which had just righted itself – to stop and gape in shock.
But had anyone looked at Sonata’s face at that moment, they would have seen something else:
“GOT THE MUSIC IN OUR HEARTS WE’RE HERE TO BLOW THIS THING APART AND TOGETHER WE WILL NEVER BE AFRAID OF THE DARK”
Trying to get a grip on her confusion, anger, and growing fear as Sunset Shimmer and her friends suddenly mounted a counterattack, Sonata looked at Adagio and Aria, hoping one of them would have a plan. But all she saw on her sisters’ faces were the same feelings of powerlessness and frustration that she was experiencing.
How had this happened? They had been winning! They had finally gotten their full power back, and although those little wannabes in the Rainbooms had challenged them, it hadn’t been any real contest. With all of their powers back, Sonata and her sisters were the true Sirens once again, something they’d proven by summoning duplicates of their original bodies. Although those Rainboom losers had put up a fight, they’d ended up on the ropes.
But then Sunset Shimmer – the least popular girl in school! – had stepped in and started singing, and suddenly the tables had been turned! She’d rallied the others and they’d all started singing again too and then there’d been some big rainbow thingy that knocked the Sirens back and broken their control over the students and everything was going wrong!
“WE’RE HERE TO SING OUR SONG OUT LOUD GET YOU DANCIN’ WITH THE CROWD AS THE MUSIC OF OUR FRIENDSHIP SURVIVES”
Sonata grit her teeth as the students, singing and dancing along to the Rainbooms’ song, ignored the Sirens completely. For beings that wanted to be adored more than anything, that was the ultimate insult. They couldn’t just let this go! They had to do something!
“SURVIVES!”
The sight of something glittering in the sky caused Sonata to glance up…and then flinch, open-mouthed in stupefied horror – and out of her periphery she could see that her sisters were the same way – at what she saw.
Standing on a cloud was an alicorn the size of a building. Its body was a glimmering, translucent white. Its mane and tail were shining rainbows. And its eyes were trained directly on them.
“SURVIVES!!!”
The gigantic alicorn reared up onto its hind legs, and the tip of its horn began to glow. As it came down from its sudden bucking, hooves placed firmly back on its cloud, the light on its horn suddenly shot out in a blast of energy. Sonata opened her mouth to scream, but it was too late. She, along with her sisters and even the copies of their original bodies that they’d created, were engulfed by the beam.
Sonata could feel it as those copies shattered, utterly overwhelmed by the superior force directed against them. She tried to resist, tried to endure the incredible pressure, but it was impossible, and a moment later she felt the gemstone on her chest – the source of her power – shatter into a thousand shards.
As it happened, a single thought went through Sonata’s mind. I can’t believe that they’re this strong…
“I can’t believe it,” whispered Sonata to herself in stunned awe. “Lex is that strong.”
In front of her eyes, facing down the green dragon that was now crouching in uncertainty at the new threat it faced, Lex had conjured up a gigantic pony just like the one that had defeated the Sirens.
Except, Sonata realized, it wasn’t exactly the same. That one had been an alicorn, but Lex’s had no wings, being a unicorn instead. Moreover, that one had glittered beautifully, as if it had been carved from crystal. By contrast, Lex’s creation was a dull grey, the color of smoky glass; even its mane and tail were like that, rather than the rainbows that the Rainbooms’ creation had.
But the single biggest change was that Lex himself was encapsulated within the construct that he’d summoned. Sonata could just make him out, a dark smudge inside its head, right at the base of the horn.
Sonata was snapped out of her reverie by a bright flash going off beside her. Blinking, she turned her head, and saw that Nosey had set her camera up and was already preparing to take another shot, a rapturous look on her face. “Story of the year,” Sonata heard her mutter under her breath.
Turning away from the besotted reporter, Sonata charged onto the open field. There was still a goodly amount of space between herself and where Lex was, and she had to let him know that he’d gotten it wrong about the dragon’s breath weapon! “Lex! It uses acid! Not fire!” She yelled as loud as she could, but if he’d heard her he gave no sign of it.
Her sudden rush towards the battlefield did catch someone else’s attention, however. Fireflower blinked in surprise, tearing his eyes away from where the monster that had killed his sister was facing off against the wizard that had twice tried to kill him. And the girl he’d fallen for was running directly toward them both.
“Sonata! Stop!” he yelled. But she continued forward, and Fireflower began to chase after her in a panic. “It’s too dangerous!” He had to stop her before she put herself in danger. He hadn’t been able to save Waterlily, or find the rest of his siblings. There was no way he was going to lose Sonata too!
Lex could taste blood in his mouth, his limbs felt like he’d run a mile flat-out, and his head was pounding, but none of that could diminish the sense of exhilaration flowing through him. He’d done it! The most difficult, most complicated piece of spell-work that he’d ever devised, and he’d pulled it off on his first attempt!
Using magic to create what he called “astral ponies” was a technique that Lex had utilized several times. The spell was designed to pull raw chunks of material from the Astral Plane, which was highly sensitive to magic, into the physical world while simultaneously shaping and programming them to do his bidding. By allocating more energy into the spell while encapsulating it in a thought-form, more astral matter could be conjured.
Lex typically preferred to use this spell to create a small squadron of normal-sized astral ponies. He’d used that technique when facing down a collection of gem gnolls on Everglow, and again when he’d needed cover to withdraw from Canterlot after his first meeting with Princess Celestia had ended so disastrously. But this time was different; this time he was facing a single foe of considerable power, and so Lex had changed his tactics in response, keeping all of the astral matter condensed into a single, huge form.
Doing so had pushed him to his limits. Just like with his disintegration spell, he’d needed to draw additional energy in through his body in order to fulfill the requisite energy, despite the pain it had caused him. But this time he hadn’t stopped there.
This time, he had kept gathering energy through his body and channeling it into the spell, as much as he possibly could. This titanic construct he’d created was the result, and was the focal point of Lex’s plan to defeat the dragon in front of him. That plan hinged on not only conjuring a creature of equal mass to fight it, but on the fact that having such a huge amount of astral matter gathered into a single form allowed for it to imbued with greater abilities.
And it was time to test those abilities right now.
Lex pointed a hoof at the dragon. “I want that creature destroyed,” he hissed softly. Swinging his hoof down to point at the terrified ponies by their hooves, still bound in place by the enchanted grass, Lex continued speaking. “And I don’t want any of them to be allowed to come to harm in the process.”
“Acknowledged.”
The voice that responded to his orders was a distorted version of his own, and Lex knew that it came from the astral pony itself, which made him grin viciously.
Astral matter was programmed at the time that it was shaped by magic. This programming was typically extremely simplistic, giving it the cognition so basic that it was barely worthy of the name. It was just enough to allow an astral pony to comprehend simple instructions from their creator and perform the basic motor functions necessary to carry them out. But this, too, had been enhanced by Lex when he’d formed this particular astral pony.
In his unending quest to figure out how everything around him worked, Lex had discovered that this programming was the result of the spellcaster’s thoughts being imprinted onto the astral substance as it was being shaped. Such imprinting was little more than a byproduct of the construction process, but it was enough to allow the astral ponies so created to understand who their creator was, what their words meant, and how to move their bodies so as to follow orders.
This huge astral pony, however, had been given a much larger mental imprint to work with. Rather than allowing it to happen as a side-effect of casting the spell, Lex had deliberately pushed his thoughts onto the astral matter as it formed. It was the psychic equivalent of pressing one’s face into plaster in order to create a mold. The result was that this astral pony, unlike all of the others he’d created, had sentient functions. It could not only understand orders, but be given task-oriented goals and figure out on its own how to accomplish them, adapting to new circumstances as it did.
Lex’s juggernaut strode forward in response to his command. The grass at its hooves, still enchanted to try and entangle anything that came near it, attempted to wrap around the astral pony’s legs, but it was a futile endeavor. Building up speed as it charged, the construct hurtled towards the dragon.
Roaring at the challenge, the dragon raised its claws to meet it.
The battle was joined.
Vilzeralixus, known to mortals as Moss, had no idea what had brought him to this world. Even when he had come here was uncertain, as he had slept for some time after gorging himself on a whale that had the misfortune to swim too close to the undersea cave where he’d made his lair. After that, he’d crawled atop his hoard to sleep while he digested his meal.
When he’d awoken, he’d found to his considerable surprise – and consternation, though he’d never admit it – that his undersea cave was now not only above the waterline, but tucked into a forest near an unfamiliar coast! There had been no sign of whatever had brought him there; no foreign scents or lingering traces of magic that he’d been able to determine. Even his hoard, which had somehow made the trip with him, was completely undisturbed, with every coin and bauble accounted for.
Eventually, Moss had decided that it had to have been the gods that had moved him to wherever this was. Nothing else, he felt certain, could have done so without his having detected them. Although he’d never cared much for the gods of dragonkind – he’d always found it vaguely insulting to consider that there could be beings of greater magnificence than his own – he was grateful for this boon that they’d seen fit to give him.
That gratitude came after a small group of vermin had somehow found their way into his cave when he was out getting the lay of the land. At first he’d been furious, certain that they were local mortals attempting to steal from him. He’d killed one of them outright, and the others had scattered in a panic. He’d caught all of them, save for one, and had been considering which of them to eat first when, in their terrified babbling, they’d let it slip that they were also foreign to this world. Unlike himself, however, they had come here through a magical accident, rather than what he was certain was an act of divine providence.
Still, the fact that they had magic had been enough to cause Moss to mentally change their label from “food” to “tools.” After that, it had been simple enough to take one of them hostage – shoving him into a small side-cave and sealing the entrance with a large boulder – and telling the others that if they ever wanted to see their broodmate again, they would serve him faithfully. Naturally, the pitiful beings had capitulated immediately, which had amused Moss to no end; only mortals would be so foolish as to care about another just because you shared parentage.
From there, it had been simplicity itself to make them scout the local area for him and report what they found. And what they’d found had been delightful news indeed.
Unlike in his old world, where the mortals were aware of how insignificant they were and so tried to protect themselves, however futilely – he knew that a few of them could amass considerable power, but surely that was nothing compared to a dragon – the mortals of this world were, according to the reports he’d received, universally weak. It had been enough to make Moss’s mouth water, literally. He’d been tiring of a seafood diet anyway.
But as much as he’d wanted to go and devour the inhabitants of the city that his pawns had found, Moss had restrained himself. Doing so would make his prey scatter, and why should he have to go to the effort of hunting them down in order to satisfy his hunger? Thus he’d used his genius intellect to concoct a scheme whereby the food would come to him. All it had taken was ordering his pawns to stage some attacks to frighten the populace, and then kidnap the city’s leader and bring her to him so that he could ensorcel her, filling her head with lies. Once that was done, he’d destroyed the only overland route out of the city, ensuring that they’d only be able to flee directly towards where he’d be lying in wait.
After that, it had just been a matter of patience.
When the report had come in that the first meal had arrived, Moss had set out eagerly…and then everything had gone wrong. One of the foodstuffs he’d been about to eat had turned out to be some sort of mage! Worse, the miserable creature had actually destroyed one of his wings!
Being injured so badly – by a mortal, no less! – was enough to enrage Moss. But the sudden appearance of a creature equal to his own size, clearly some sort of magical construct, was enough to blunt his fury in favor of caution. It was obvious to him now that his pawns had lied to him when they’d said that this world’s mortals were weak and defenseless, hoping to use this mage to turn Moss’s own trap back on him.
For that, and for the wing he’d lost, they were going to die, and die horribly.
As the construct charged towards him, Moss decided that the first part of their punishment would be to witness their champion torn to shreds right in front of them.
Lex felt a sudden rush of exhilaration as his creation, carrying him within it, barreled towards the dragon ahead of them. The sensation was an alien one; he’d been in fights – even fights where losing meant death – before, but those had always evoked little emotion in him beyond controlled anxiety. The idea of actually enjoying a fight, as he’d heard some ponies on Everglow talk about, had always struck him as incomprehensible.
But now, as his astral pony closed the distance between them and the dragon – a huge creature with fangs and claws, with scales like armor and breath like flames; a creature that could, compared to a pony, rightly be called death incarnate – Lex found himself awash in a rush so heady that it dispelled all of the misery he’d felt for the last few days.
It was a rush that was undiminished as the dragon lashed out, its claw connecting with the neck of the astral pony in a blow that, had it been a living creature, would have opened up a fatal gash. But instead, the creature’s talons found little purchase on the construct, leaving only a quartet of shallow lines without inflicting any real damage.
Another vicious grin crossed Lex’s face. This was the reason he had formed this particular astral pony with himself as the nucleus, rather than making it separate from himself. Because by wrapping it around himself, all of the defensive spells that he’d placed upon himself – both his recently-cast panoply as well as those that he’d long since permanently woven into his own flesh – would resonate through the astral matter, affecting his construct as well.
I’ll tear you apart! The thought was filled with hateful glee, exulting at the prospect of defeating such a strong opponent, rather than being defeated or forced to withdraw the way Lex felt he always had to before. I’ll crush you and show you what happens to those who mess with me!
Lex’s thought was punctuated by his astral pony, its charge undiminished by the light blow it had taken, colliding with the dragon. At the last moment, it lowered its head so that its horn was pointing forward, attempting to gore the dragon. It almost succeeded; the creature realized what was being attempted at the last moment and threw itself to the side, but not before the construct’s horn tore across its side, leaving a deep laceration.
Nor did it stop there. Rather than turning to face the dragon as it moved, it instead turned in the opposite direction, facing away from it. Glancing back as it leaned forward, the astral pony lashed out with both hind legs at once in a powerful buck that caught the dragon directly across the snout, knocking its head back with an audible crack.
Placing both legs back on the ground, it kicked out again, trying to land a second blow, but the dragon was ready for that move now, and only a single hoof managed to land a glancing hit on one of its forelegs.
It was at that moment that Lex finished the spell he’d been casting, letting the magic channel through the astral pony’s horn and go racing towards the dragon. Although it had no visible effect, the spell was designed to create an area of impeded time around the dragon, slowing its movements and preventing it from mounting an effective counterattack. Although the battle was still in its opening exchanges, Lex felt entirely confident that if this worked, then victory would be all but assured. His grin widened at the thought…
And then the smirk was wiped off his face as he felt his spell collapse in on itself as it made contact with the creature.
Lex was caught completely off-guard. What had happened? It hadn’t been that it had shaken the effect off; he knew that intuitively. Rather, it was as though it had somehow negated it entirely before it had ever had a chance to take effect.
Without regard for Lex’s momentary confusion, the dragon launched itself at him. Again claws tore at the astral construct that he’d conjured around himself, but they struggled to find purchase, dealing little more than cosmetic damage. When the jaws closed around the astral pony’s neck a moment later, defeating its attempt to dodge the incoming strike, they had the same meager effect; the dragon’s fangs, despite their wicked sharpness, simply refused to penetrate. Frantically, it even tried to batter the construct with its tail and single remaining wing, but had no more success.
The price for this failure came a moment later, as its insufficient strikes left it with little in the way of a defensive posture. Wrenching its neck free from the creature’s jaws, Lex’s astral pony reared up again, on its hind legs this time, and lashed out with its forehooves.
The first blow connected just below the creature’s sternum, landing with such force that it lifted the dragon off of its forelegs and into an upright posture. The next hit connected in the same area, and Lex could feel the vibrations of bones fracturing under the blow. The dragon staggered back, but the astral pony refused to let it escape, moving with it as it landed a third and then a fourth shot on the creature’s abdomen, causing it to double over and vomit blood onto the ground.
At the same time, Lex cast another spell, one designed to suppress part of the target’s life force, injuring it while bypassing its physical hardiness entirely. This time a black ray flowed from his outstretched hoof to be released from his astral pony’s horn, striking the dragon directly…but again it failed to take effect, winking out just as it touched the creature. Narrowing his eyes, Lex tried to figure out what was going on. Insofar as he was aware, dragons shouldn’t have any sort of special resistance to magic, at least no more than any other being.
His thoughts were interrupted as the dragon regained control of itself from the pounding it had taken. It leapt back, barely managing to duck under another hoof to the face as it did so. Its desperate retreat caused Lex to regain his earlier smirk. So the creature had some sort of unknown ability to overcome magic; so what? It was rapidly becoming clear that it was no match for his astral pony in direct combat, and with its wings clipped it had no chance of retreating. The battle was, as far as he could see, as good as decided.
That was fortunate, considering that his astral construct wouldn’t last much longer.
The nature of the Astral Plane was, by definition, nonphysical. Lex’s magic was able to drag pieces of it into the physical realm and shape it to his liking, but once in the material world the substance would quickly dissipate. When that happened, Lex knew that the situation would immediately reverse itself, since without his astral pony to even the odds the dragon would be the one to enjoy physical supremacy.
Had Lex been able to keep this construct in its current form for an hour, that would have been a purely academic problem. Even a ten-minute duration would have been more than enough time to destroy the enemy in front of him at his leisure. But Lex knew that he didn’t have an hour, nor even ten minutes.
Rather, this construct that he’d expended so much energy to form would only last for a little over sixty seconds. And by his calculation, almost a third of that time had already passed. He would need to finish this quickly, but he was certain that he’d be able to finish it.
Across from him, the dragon seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Its glare was no less hateful, but the caution that had tempered that expression was now replaced with worry. With blood trickling down its side from where the construct’s horn had sliced it earlier, and visible dents in its chest from the beating it had received, it clearly had no intention of repeating its previous strategy.
Instead, it began to inhale deeply.
Realizing its strategy, Lex scoffed. Go ahead, he thought sneeringly, bathe me in flames. See how much it avails you.
“Two entities approaching. Southeast bearing zero-declination mark one-two-seven-point-six.”
“Hm?” At the warning from his creation, Lex glanced behind him in the indicated direction…
…and stopped dead, his eyes widening.
Sonata.
Barely noticing Fireflower running behind her, Lex’s entire world came to a halt as he saw her, charging towards him as fast as she could. A thousand thoughts ran through his mind, all of them trying to answer a single question: what was she doing here?
She was yelling something, but between the din that the battle had raised, the continued yelling of the captured ponies, and her distance from him, it was almost impossible to make out. Straining, he tried to listen as she yelled again, looking closely at her lips as she formed the words, cognizant of the look of alarm on her face.
“Acid! Not fire!”
For a split-second he was confused as to what she was trying to tell him. Then her meaning dawned on him, and Lex felt his blood turn to ice water in his veins. The spell that he’d cast to resist fire could be set to resist corrosion instead, but that determination had to be made when the spell was enacted, and once done so could not be changed. The only alternative was to make use of another casting of that spell, or one like it, to impede acid damage.
But Lex had prepared no other such spells.
“Dodge!” he screamed, turning his full attention back to the dragon. The astral pony moved to obey, but it was already too late. Thrusting its head forward, the creature exhaled sharply, and a billowing cloud of roiling green vapors spilled out to engulf them.
Fireflower had no idea what he was doing, but knew that he had to do it anyway. Sonata was charging into danger, and although he didn’t know what he could do to protect her, he knew that he had to at least try. Her and all of those other ponies who were also in danger from that scaled monster, including those three huddled off to the side.
Frowning as a thought made itself known, Fireflower looked at the unusual trio again. There was some sort of shimmering bubble around them, but that wasn’t what had caught his eye. Rather, it was because they looked just like…like…
Stopping in amazement, all thoughts of Sonata fleeing his mind, Fireflower stared in shock as he realized that the ponies he was looking at were the siblings that he’d been searching for. For a moment he could only stop and stare, completely nonplussed at suddenly seeing them all again. Then he was running towards them as fast as he could. “Guys!” The words exploded from his lips. “You guys!”
“Fireflower!” Hearing his name called, as well as recognizing the familiar voice of Breezyleaf, dispelled any lingering doubts he may have had. Although he hadn’t seen much of his siblings’ pony forms since they had arrived in this world, this was undoubtedly them.
“Are you alright? Where’s Brightrose?” He could make out Shadowvine and Rockwood in there with Breezyleaf, but their other brother was nowhere to be found that Fireflower could see. “What is this?” He reared up on his hind legs and pressed his forehooves against the bubble. It felt as solid as stone.
“Brightrose is being held in the dragon’s cave.” Other than the audible tension in his voice, Rockwood was as unflappable as ever. “We were sealed in this force field by that wizard that’s fighting the dragon right now.”
“Lex put you in here? Why?”
“Who cares why?! Get us out of here!” yelled Shadowvine in frustration. “This is our chance to get away and rescue our brother while they’re killing each other!”
“I…alright, hang on.” For a moment, Fireflower faltered. Using this as an opportunity to escape would mean abandoning Sonata. But he pushed that to the side for the moment. First things first; he had to get his family out of there.
Rattling off a quick chant, Fireflower gestured at the force field, shooting it with the same beam of heat that had melted the door lock on city hall. But whereas the lock had melted immediately, the force field received the attack without so much as a scorch mark to show for it.
Biting his lip, Fireflower tried to think of what to try next. That had been one of his strongest attack spells. With its failure, he was extremely low on options. “I don’t think we can break it. But maybe if we try digging under it-”
A moment later all four of the aranea siblings hit the force field with attack magic. Elemental magic collided with the force field, and for a moment Fireflower was sure that it was going to work. But when their barrage was expended, the force field looked no different than it had before.
Fireflower sagged in defeat. What was he supposed to do now?
“You have to leave us,” Rockwood spoke, as though he’d heard his little brother’s thoughts. “Go back to the dragon’s cave and get Brightrose out of there now, while it’s distracted.”
“Wh-what? No!” Fireflower’s ears folded back. “I’m not leaving you! Besides, I don’t even remember where that cave is!”
“Rockwood’s right.” Breezyleaf looked like she wanted to cry, but her eyes were steady as she looked at Fireflower. “If you run back into the forest, head west-southwest for a mile. There’s a stream there. If you follow it, you should eventually come to the entrance. That’s where I always sent my reports to it on the wind.”
“I…” Fireflower looked from his siblings over to Sonata, who had just screamed another warning to Lex. His eyes widened as he saw that her warning had been received too late, the dragon’s breath weapon enveloping the gigantic pony-thing that Lex had summoned around him, obscuring it from view.
The sight only reinforced Fireflower’s resolve. He didn’t know if Lex had survived that or not, but if not – or maybe even if he had – Sonata was going to be in imminent danger. Brightrose wasn’t.
“I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ve got to go.” Not trusting himself to remain steadfast in the face of the recrimination he was sure was coming, he turned around and galloped away.
The last time he’d faced a dragon, he’d thought only of running away so that he could save himself. Now, as he ran towards where it was, the only thing he could think about was what he could do to save someone else.
Moss had never in his life experienced any sort of opposition that was severe enough to cause him to worry. That was to be expected, of course; dragons in general – and himself in particular – were nature’s success story. Any foe that had dared to bare their fangs at him had paid for the offense with their lives, typically with barely any effort on Moss’s part.
That was especially true for the so-called sapient mortals that had inhabited his old world. Although Moss had heard his parents, and even a few other dragons, talk about ponies or griffons or other creatures that had developed weapons and magic that could injure or even kill a dragon, he’d always scoffed at such tales, thinking them the work of those dragons that had forgotten their pride.
He had encountered mortals before, on the few times when he’d decided to raid some of their pathetic little communities in bouts of hunger, or amusement, or both. The results had not impressed him; most had done nothing other than scream and run or try to hide, no different than the beasts that he typically slaughtered in the forests or the lakes where he usually hunted.
A few had tried to fight back, of course, but the results had been so feeble he’d barely noticed them. Swords and arrows had bounced off his scales, with those few that had bit into him being little more irritating than an itch. Magic had similarly minor effect, as by that time he’d already grown into his natural ability to resist magic. It wasn’t an impervious mantle, he knew; supposedly it could be penetrated by sufficient effort and skill on the part of a powerful enough spellcaster, but Moss had never met one that could overcome his natural defenses with impunity.
But now, as he strained to use his breath weapon to its full effect, despite the terrible ache in his chest from where that gigantic spell-pony had punched him, Moss realized that he was fighting for his life. As his breath finally ran out, he took the opportunity to put some distance between himself and where the miasma he’d exhaled was already beginning to thin.
For an instant, he considered retreating; if he turned and ran as fast as he could, he might be escape into the forest. He felt confident that he could use the trees and undergrowth to his advantage, since he had a natural ability as part of his birthright as a green dragon, to move without restriction in even the heaviest of woodland terrain.
But he discarded that notion almost as soon as he thought of it. The idea of running from mortals, from creatures that existed only to serve as food or tools for him to utilize as he saw fit, was anathema to him. A majestic being such as himself – the great Vilzeralixus – could not, would not be defeated by the likes of one puny pony mage!
Even so, however, that didn’t mean that he was so foolish as to rush back into close combat. If his acid breath hadn’t done the trick, then that would only result in another beating. It was time to try a different strategy instead.
As the last of his caustic vapors dissipated, Moss raised his undamaged arm to trace a gesture in the air as he began to hiss the words of a spell…
“I can see that,” noted Lex grimly as he eyed the damage that the dragon’s breath had wrought.
Unable to see the dragon at the moment due to the green vapors lingering in the air, swirling from around where his astral pony had furiously backpedaled to extricate itself from them, Lex had taken a moment to look over the damage that it had dealt them. He himself was unharmed, tucked away within the folds of astral matter that made up his construct, but that was the only good news that he could find.
Most of his astral pony’s left side, which had been the side closest to the dragon as a result of the failed attempt to dodge its breath weapon, was no longer there. A huge chunk of its abdomen was simply gone, as though scooped away. Its left foreleg was barely still attached, and there was severe melting along the left side of the neck and face, though its horn was only lightly blemished.
The spell that Lex had cast to create this astral pony allowed for a great deal of mutability in how it was constructed. From having the option to create a multiplicity of weaker constructs to a single strong one to being able to choose whether it was optimized to resist damage or deal it, the results could be tailored to a wide degree depending on what was required.
Lex, anticipating that having a dragon as his opponent would mean a harsh fight, had deliberately designed every aspect of this astral pony for offense. Extra astral matter had been layered onto its hooves to maximize the strength of its blows. Its center of gravity had been set lower so that it would be able to more easily rear up onto two legs and lash out. Almost every concession that he could make in favor of greater attack power had been utilized.
Normally this would have resulted in an astral pony that had no defense beyond the not-inconsiderable toughness of its prodigious bulk, but that had been a non-issue for Lex. By building the construct around himself, and so letting it share in his defensive spells, that gaping hole in its design had been more than adequately patched.
Or so he had thought.
Sonata had somehow realized that there was a gap in his knowledge, and tried to warn him that what he thought he knew didn’t match the reality of the situation. But the message had come too late, and now he was all but defenseless against one of the dragon’s strongest attacks. Worse, more than thirty seconds had passed since the fight had started, meaning that he had already expended half of his construct’s duration.
As the last of the caustic gas vanished, however, Lex looked at the dragon and realized that the bad news didn’t end there. The creature was gesturing and chanting in a way that Lex knew could only be spellcasting. Too numb from his sudden reversal of fortune to be shocked, Lex idly noted that he recognized that particular spell. It was one to grant a temporary increase in physical hardiness; although it couldn’t actually provide healing, it would allow the subject to endure greater physical punishment than they otherwise normally could.
For a moment, Lex almost ordered his astral pony to charge in and renew its assault, but bit his tongue. That would only result in it unleashing its acid breath again, with the same results. No, the only viable option left open to him was to try to finish the creature off from a distance.
“Blast him!” ordered Lex with a snarl, trying to shake off the cold shiver going down his spine. First had been that mysterious resistance the dragon had to his spells, then its breath being acid instead of fire, and now spellcasting. There were too many things happening that were outside of his predictions, too many deviations from how he’d planned this encounter out. If this kept up, Lex knew that the not-quite-thirty seconds that his astral pony had left would be how long he had left to live.
And if that happened then the slaughter wouldn’t end with him.
It would have taken a fraction of an instant to look over and see what had become of Sonata, but Lex knew he didn’t have an instant to spare. The dragon’s breath weapon hadn’t been aimed at where the other ponies had been captured, which was near where Sonata had been, and if there had been any threat to them then Lex knew that his construct would have immediately acted on his orders to protect them. That meant, it had to mean, that she was alright…that all of them were alright.
As he began to cast another spell, Lex silently tried to reassure himself that that was the case, despite everything else that he’d gotten wrong so far.
Heedless of its master’s consternation, the astral pony lowered its horn towards the dragon. A moment later, it discharged the single distance attack that it had been imbued with, firing a bolt of lightning at the creature faster than it could dodge. But again, the magic was snuffed out just before making contact, leaving the creature unharmed.
Despite the failure, Lex finished his own spell a moment later, focusing intently as he did so. Instantly, a layer of ice almost a foot thick formed over the creature’s middle, spreading with incredible speed until its entire body was held immobile in an icy prison. Lex’s eyes narrowed at the sight. That time his spell had worked, the same way his disintegration spell had destroyed its wing, whereas the other spells he had used on it had been negated…which meant that whatever ability to resist magic the creature had wasn’t an impenetrable defense.
His thoughts were interrupted as the ice around the dragon gave a loud crack, and then exploded a moment later as the creature burst free with a roar of anger and pain. It hadn’t done so unscathed, however; a large patch of scales on its belly had turned white, with several falling off, and its back legs still had ice covering them, impeding its movement.
The creature staggered forward, trying to close the gap between them as it gulped down a large lungful of air, and Lex realized that it was planning to breathe acid again. A desperate move. At this range we can avoid it for certain. But then the corners of the creature’s maw turned upward in a cruel smile.
For a moment Lex was confused, but then his eyes widened in a look of horrified realization. “NO!”
Even as the word left his lips, the dragon’s head was turning, its neck extending as its jaws opened. But not towards Lex. Instead, it took aim at the group of ponies that were held immobile in the ensorcelled grass, their screams reaching new heights as they realized what was about to happen.
Lex opened his mouth to give his astral pony new orders, but it was already moving, obeying the command he’d given it earlier to protect the trapped ponies. Even as the dragon breathed outward, spewing a new cloud of toxic gas, the construct threw itself forward, its movements far faster than any creature of its size had a right to be thanks to the speed-enhancing spell Lex had used on himself just before the battle had begun.
The astral pony was, ultimately, nothing more than an automaton. Its ability to adapt to tactics and carry out instructions was based entirely on the nature of the intelligence imbued within it by its creator, in this case the unicorn Lex Legis. Seeing the acid mist billow towards the ponies it had been charged with protecting, it reacted the same way that Lex would have reacted, and threw itself in front of them.
The corrosive fumes flowed over its body, billowing out even as it bubbled and began to liquefy. “Warning: physical integrity critically compromised. Corporeal dissolution imminent.” The voice was unchanged, even as the construct began to fall apart. Legs dissolved into nothing under it, sending its bulk crashing to the earth. Even then, it strove to fulfill its mission, spreading itself out as much as it could in order to act as a bulwark.
It’s not going to work, Lex realized with a fresh wave of despair. The deadly vapors had spread out upon their initial collision with the astral pony’s body, but the dragon was still breathing. Lex could already see the expanding cloud flowing over the astral pony’s diminishing form.
Even as it did, the construct’s head turned towards the ponies behind it. Within what remained of its body, Lex started as he realized that in its last moments, the astral pony had turned its gaze directly on Sonata, who had at some point made her way towards the trapped ponies and was even now struggling to fight her way towards him, eyes wide and screaming something that was lost amidst the cries of the others.
“Primary objective: destroy designated enemy. Status: failure,” noted the astral pony as the last of it dissolved under the relentless spray of acid mist. “Secondary objective: protect designated ponies. Status: failure.”
That word, “failure,” resounded in Lex’s mind as the mist reached out to engulf him. It had been what had defined his entire life up until now. He had failed to make friends as a colt. He had failed to stop Tirek’s rampage. He had failed to even reach Vanhoover, let alone help the ponies there. And now he was going to fail to protect these ponies that he’d wanted to save…to protect the girl that, for all that she’d hurt him, still meant more to him than anything.
Lex could already feel a tingling on his back legs where the mist had reached. In a moment, he knew, it would become a burning sensation. And then it would become agony.
It would be the same thing that happened to everypony else here. It would be the same thing that would happen to Sonata.
He had failed. And she and everypony else would pay for it with their lives.
NOOO!!!
Lex’s eyes blazed green and purple as he reached a hoof towards Sonata, concentrating with an intensity so powerful that it left no room for conscious thought. He had never considered trying to enhance the dark magic of his horn by drawing in energy from his body; the thought had simply never occurred to him. But he did it now, willing it to work, demanding that the magic respond to his will and save the ones he needed to save!
In front of his eyes, black crystals erupted from the ground.
The ability to crystallize darkness into solid shapes had been a trick of King Sombra’s that Lex had never fully mastered. No matter how much he’d tried, he’d only been able to create small objects with it, unlike his predecessor. But now it grew from the ground into a thick, massive wall, reaching over two dozen feet high and twice that in length, separating the ponies from the incoming vapors. As the gas reached the barrier he’d created, the black wall hissed and sizzled, but held fast, and Lex had just enough time to realize that he’d done it. He’d saved them.
Sonata hadn’t been particularly concerned with saving any of the other ponies that were on the battlefield. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about what happened to them, it was just that she was more worried about telling Lex about the dragon’s breath attack. She’d charged straight towards the group of evacuees – who were just standing there for some reason – only because they happened to be along the shortest distance between herself and him.
She’d been yelling her head off the entire time, of course, but Lex, contained within the giant magic-pony thing he’d made, hadn’t seemed to hear her. She considered using her magic to enchant herself so that her voice would be magnified and directed towards him, the same magic she’d used to stop him when he’d tried to kill Fireflower in a rage, but even if she’d been willing to use an attack spell – that spell was meant to focus her voice to such a degree that it would injure the recipient – he was too far away for it to reach him.
And so she’d done the only thing she could do, which was keep running towards him while screaming what he needed to know at the top of her lungs.
She’d almost given up hope of getting her message across when she saw Lex suddenly swing his head around, eyes locking onto her directly, somehow alerted to her presence. Feeling hope swell through her, she raised her voice as loud as she could, putting everything she knew about projecting her voice into her words. “ACID! NOT FIRE!”
For a moment he didn’t seem to understand, and Sonata silently willed him to have heard her, to know that she was trying to warn him. Astonishingly, her fervent wish was answered a moment later when his eyes suddenly widened in understanding, a look of alarm crossing his face. In that moment Sonata knew that everything was going to be alright.
Then the dragon unleashed its breath weapon at him.
Sonata could only watch in horror as the poisonous green cloud blotted Lex from view. Calling his name in alarm, Sonata resumed her furious rush towards him. She had no idea what she’d do when she got there, but that didn’t matter right now. The one she loved was in trouble, so she had to get to him, period!
As she reached the crowd of ponies that had been part of the bogus evacuation, Sonata started to push through them, only to immediately fall over with an undignified squawk as her legs suddenly refused to move. Looking down, she saw that the grass under her hooves had suddenly extended and was entangling her, preventing her from moving.
“What the-?! Lemme go!” Sonata cursed as she fought to free her legs and push through the crowd. She had to get to Lex!
“Sonata!”
Turning her head, she saw Fireflower behind her, right at the edge of where the grass had started getting all grabby. He made a beckoning motion towards her. “Come back!”
“What are you talking about?!” she yelled back at him. “Lex needs our help! We need to get to him!”
“Listen to me!” pleaded Fireflower. “You can’t help him right now! Not unless you’ve got magic that’ll let you fight like him!”
The words caused Sonata to flinch, recalling a similar conversation she’d had with Lex a few days ago.
“Do you have any spells that can cause physical harm, or defend against damage?” countered Lex.
Sonata raised her eyes in thought, and after what Lex thought was far too long of a time, finally shook her head “Nope. Pretty much all the magic I know is about messing with someone’s head.”
Sonata could feel tears gathering in her eyes at the memory. At the time it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but at the time she hadn’t been able to imagine what it would feel like to watch the stallion she loved put his life on the line. Gritting her teeth, she shook her head in sudden defiance. There had to be something she could do!
Fireflower watched nervously as Sonata wrenched a foreleg free. He was about to encourage her to turn around and head back over to him, when he saw her turn her head towards the dragon, raising her hoof as she did so. Fireflower’s eyes widened as he realized that she’d taken what he’d said completely the wrong way.
“No! Stop!” he yelled in a panic. Despite his earlier determination, he had no illusions about his ability to protect her. The only thing keeping her safe from the dragon right now, he knew, was that it didn’t consider them to be a threat. If she started casting spells at it, that might change in a hurry. Worse, he still couldn’t see if the giant pony that Lex had summoned had survived the misty solvent that had been breathed on it. If it hadn’t, then there’d be nothing to stop the dragon from turning its attention on them.
Sonata, however, wasn’t paying attention, focusing all of her thoughts as she waved her hoof, chanting a soft lullaby. She knew that the dragon wouldn’t be able to hear her over the general roar of the fight and all of the other terrified ponies around her, but it didn’t need to in order for her spell to put it to sleep.
Completing her spell, Sonata waited for the giant lizard to fall unconscious. But no such reaction was forthcoming. In fact, it hadn’t even seemed to notice her spell, still looking at where the green fog that it had breathed was thinning out, chanting some spell of its own.
Ignoring the revelation that the dragon could use magic too, Sonata tried to figure out what had gone wrong with her magic. Was it immune? She hadn’t felt anything to suggest that her spell hadn’t been cast correctly. It was more like…like it was just too powerful for her magic to work on it.
She had just enough time to start to feel depressed when the last of the vapor dispersed, and she suddenly felt her spirits rise to see that Lex’s giant pony-thing was still there, damaged but still standing. He was okay! She couldn’t help but let a cheer slip as she saw him counterattack, firing a bolt of lightning at the dragon.
“Sonata! Listen to me!” came the voice of Fireflower from behind her. “You need to get out of there!”
“But Lex is okay! He’ll beat that dragon! I know it!” she called back over her shoulder, a confident smile on her face.
Fireflower’s was about to respond when the dragon froze over. The sight was enough to leave him gaping, and for a moment he dared to hope that she was right. Maybe Lex was powerful enough to defeat the monster that had so terrified him. Maybe he-
His thoughts were interrupted as the dragon burst free of its frozen prison, roaring. The sight was enough to shatter Fireflower’s hopes, and he turned his gaze back to Sonata…but she’d already returned her own to the fight, ignoring him again. He bit his lip in frustration. He would have just grabbed her and hauled her away, but he recognized this spell, having seen Rockwood use it countless times, and he knew that if he went inside its range it would…would…
Spinning on his hooves, Fireflower turned back towards where his siblings were imprisoned. “Rockwood!” he shouted. “Undo your spell!”
Even from this distance, he could see his sibling’s eyes widening at the request. “But it’ll kill us if I do!”
“It’ll kill us anyway!” screamed Fireflower in return. “W-”
The rest of what he was going to say was cut off as the ponies behind him suddenly began screaming louder, drowning his voice out. Spinning around to see what had happened, Fireflower’s heart leapt into his throat at the sight that greeted him.
The dragon had turned its face toward them, its jaws wide.
Nearby, Sonata felt the blood drain from her face as she realized what was about to happen. She had thought she’d been afraid before, when she was worried about Lex, but suddenly being brought face-to-face with death was a whole new kind of terror. She had been in fights where she’d been hurt, and a bad train wreck (though her memory of the actual wreck itself was fuzzy), but none had ever caused her to experience the sort of fear that she felt right at that moment.
It was horrible enough that for the first time in her life, she couldn’t find her voice. She couldn’t even look away as it breathed swirling green death towards her. Only a single, odd thought floated through her mind at that moment.
So much for being a dragonslayer.
But all of a sudden there was something between her and the horrible death that had been surging towards her. For a moment she was too shaken to realize what had happened, before understanding suddenly dawned on her, making her gasp.
It was Lex. He’d hurled himself, inside his giant magic-pony thing, between the breath attack and her. He was protecting all of them.
The thought was enough to jolt her out of her terror-inspired muteness. “No! Lex, get out of there!” She could already see that thing he was in melting, the acid mist flowing over it liquefying its substance incredibly fast. He was going to die! Again she tugged at her bonds, filled with that same irrational desire to run to him. He had to have a spell for teleporting or…or stopping time or something to get out of there!
As the last of his giant grey pony that he was using as armor vanished, Sonata saw Lex meet her eyes and thrust out a hoof towards her, the cloud of death already surrounding him, spreading past him towards the rest of them as well. His eyes suddenly lit up the way they did whenever he was using magic, and for the second time Sonata was sure that he was about to somehow make everything okay.
A moment later a gigantic black wall sprang up in front of her from out of nowhere, and Lex was gone.
For a moment, Sonata just stared, again reduced to stupefied incomprehension, which slowly gave way to horrified disbelief. “No…” She didn’t even realize that she’d said it out loud until she belatedly realized that she could hear her own voice, the only thing to be heard as everyone had been stunned into silence for the second time since the fight had started.
A moment later the full weight of what had happened settled over her, and Sonata let out a wail, realizing that she had in all likelihood just watched her most important person die.
Moss smirked as he heard the horrified keening from the opposite side of the wall that the mage had conjured up. No doubt it was the sound of one of the ponies there realizing that their champion was dead, with themselves soon to follow. It was a sound that was quite pleasing to his ears, and he had every intention of making them emit more before he devoured them.
But that was for later. Right now he had to confirm that he’d finally killed the pony that had given him so much trouble. To think that a mere mortal – a creature with no greater purpose than to be his food – had been able to injure him so badly! His breathing was still labored from the hits to the abdomen that he’d taken, and he was covered with bruises, as well as a laceration on his left side and patches of severe frostbite on his belly. He could already feel the pain of his collected wounds beginning to increase as the adrenaline from the battle started to ebb.
Fanning his remaining wing, another severe injury that he’d been dealt, Moss moved forward to look for the pony mage’s corpse. Or at least, he intended to. What happened instead was that he stumbled and fell forward, his hind legs refusing to support him. Glancing back in confusion, Moss blinked as he realized that they were still covered in ice from that last spell he’d been hit with. He hadn’t realized it because they didn’t feel cold. In fact, he realized with growing concern, they didn’t feel anything at all.
Pushing his sudden concern down with a wave of anger, he reached back and raked his talons over the ice covering his legs. It took several scratches to free them, and it was only after he had that he returned his attention to the where the mage’s body should have been…
There was nothing there.
It was enough to make Moss glance around in concern. He had used his breath weapon on plenty of creatures over the years, and he knew that there should have been something left, even if it was just a bloody smear on the ground.
Had he used magic to transport himself away? Moss pondered for a moment, but thought it unlikely. He had turned his acid breath on the gathered ponies because he had remembered how his pawns had been so concerned over their broodmate, and had gambled successfully that the pony mage might feel the same way about his own kind. That made it unlikely that he would have abandoned them. Or perhaps he had seen that death was imminent and decided that the others weren’t worth giving his life for?
Moss took another look around him, uncertain. But his eyes, far sharper than any mortal’s and abetted by the sun now having risen above the horizon, found nothing no matter where he looked. Nor could he smell any out-of-place scents that would have betrayed an invisible presence.
Perhaps he’d transported himself behind the wall he’d created? That seemed more likely, since he knew that mortals were driven to band together to compensate for their inherent weakness. Which made it imperative to hurry there and attack again before the mage could mount a counterattack. With the condition that he was in right now, Moss wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
Indeed, his condition was bad enough that, while he normally would simply have climbed over the wall in front of him – he didn’t dare just stick his head over, in case the mage was there with a spell ready – he knew that he didn’t have the strength to do so in his current condition. He would need to go around instead.
As he started to move towards the edge of the wall, Moss tensed, knowing that if the mage was hiding somewhere else, attacking the other ponies would be certain to draw him out.
He was proven right a moment later as he heard a voice chanting a spell – from behind him!
Whirling, Moss spun around just in time to see three large orbs of lightning form in mid-air and rush in at him. He twisted in time to avoid the first, but the second and third impacted with him directly, getting past his innate spell resistance and causing him to roar in pain.
“I’ll kill you!”
Moss heard the words and forced himself to look past the pain and dizziness, to focus on where the voice was coming from. Slowly, he followed it down to where his shadow was stretching behind him. Except…there was a patch of it that was darker than the rest. And as he blinked, Moss realized that patch was looking back at him, with disembodied eyes that were glowing green and sprouting purple flames from their corners.
“For trying to hurt Sonata, I swear I WILL KILL YOU!”
The pain from the dragon’s acid breath had been incredible. Even though Lex had turned into a shadow after only a few seconds of direct exposure, it had still been excruciating. Worse, becoming incorporeal had only reduced the effects of making contact with the caustic mist, with its touch continuing to burn him.
That wasn’t wholly unexpected, of course. Lex had theorized that magical attacks could still reach him in that form – if becoming an insubstantial shadow was an impenetrable defense then King Sombra would never have been defeated, after all – which was why he hadn’t changed into a shadow as soon as the battle had begun. All living things had some form of magic, Lex knew, and for dragons that was clearly made manifest in their breath attack. While he’d been wrong about its using fire, the results were the same.
Slipping through the roiling vapors, their billowing undisturbed due to his lack of a physical body, Lex had ignored the pain as he’d slipped behind the dragon. Doing so was easy, due to the growing rage he felt settling over him. It wasn’t the bitter acrimony that he always felt whenever an attempt to communicate with somepony else went awry, nor was it the blazing anger that would flare up in response to his expectations being thwarted.
This was a fury that consumed him totally, that blotted everything else out in its all-consuming wrath. The thought that this creature, this disgusting monster, had tried to hurt the one he loved – to take away that which was most precious to him, when he already had so little! – was beyond intolerable. The fact that it was still alive, that it had the absolute gall to think that it had any right to continue existing, was so utterly impossible to countenance, was so wrong on a fundamental level, that every moment it continued to draw breath was a wound in Lex’s heart that brought him agony beyond any mere physical hurt.
It was all he could do to keep any semblance of control over himself. It was only because he knew it was in direct service to killing this abomination that he was able to correctly chant the words to his next spell, a shadowy tendril waving in the proper gesticulations. This instantly alerted the dragon, and it spun around to search for the source of the voice, but by then his spell had already been completed, bringing a trio of electrical globes into being around the creature.
It was the same spell he’d used the last time he’d felt like this, back when he’d mistakenly thought that Fireflower had tried to hurt Sonata. Lex’s anger was such that he didn’t consciously make that connection, however. All he knew at that moment was that his rage had hit the breaking point, causing him to scream his hatred out even as he directed the balls of lightning to attack the creature, two of them making contact.
“I’ll kill you! For trying to hurt Sonata, I swear I WILL KILL YOU!”
Reeling under the renewed assault, Moss stumbled backward, trying to put some distance between himself and the electric globes that were even now moving after him. Snarling, trying desperately to ignore the sudden fear he felt – a sensation that he had almost forgotten, it was so alien – he lunged forward, swiping a claw across the patch of shadow that his enemy had somehow become.
The blow connected, despite the mage’s attempt to dodge upward, and Moss could see a tear opening up in the shadow’s substance, one end of it becoming tatters that flapped like a torn sail. But the green-and-purple eyes retained their focus, their hateful gaze never leaving him.
There was no time to launch a follow-up attack, as the lightning orbs were closing in on him again. They weren’t moving very fast at all, but because Moss hadn't moved away from where they'd initially formed, staying close enough to try and attack the mage, they didn’t need to travel very far. Worse, they were all coming in from different angles, making it difficult to dodge. Moss managed to duck under the first and twist his large bulk to the side to avoid another, but the third one drifted by the base of his neck, delivering another painful shock.
He turned his head towards where the mage had been, determined to rip him to pieces now that he knew his claws could find purchase on his shadowy substance, but saw that he had retreated back just far enough to no longer be within easy reach. Moss tried to prepare his breath weapon, but his lungs burned and his chest ached and he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
Sensing that the creature was weakening, Lex mentally directed all three lightning balls to swoop at it, but this time it avoided them all, falling flat on its belly and letting them pass over it harmlessly. Springing forward from its crouched position, the dragon’s claw darted forward and up. It was clearly a desperate attack, stumbling and clumsy even to the least discerning of eyes, but no less quick for it…too quick.
The effort of moving so quickly in his weakened state was enough that Moss almost passed out even as he lunged, his eyes fluttering for a moment. But he came back to himself when he heard a pained scream coming from right in front of him. Blinking, he saw that his claw had reached the mage, a single talon piercing directly through the center of his shadowy substance.
For a moment, Moss just stared, uncomprehending due to the lack of any tactile sensation from his claw, but then smiled. He had him! Was it a fatal blow? No…he could still see those green eyes staring into his own, but now there was as much pain as there was hatred there. But no matter. If his claws could reach him, then his breath weapon surely could as well! At this range, there was no way for the mage to escape. He just needed to take another breath, just take in enough air…
Through the incredible haze of pain that he was in, Lex heard the dragon’s inhalation. Realizing what was about to happen, his first instinct was to flow over the dragon’s claw and escape – although it had pierced him, his lack of physical form meant that he wasn’t pinned – but he knew that he was too close to the creature to get away before it used its breath attack again. Even if he’d tried to take his intangible body straight down into the earth and let the solid ground shield him, he was just high enough that he knew he’d never make it.
And Lex had no doubt that he wouldn’t survive the dragon’s next shot of acid breath.
Instead, he cast a spell, knowing that it was – one way or the other – the last one he’d cast in this fight.
He almost hadn’t bothered to prepare this spell at all, since he doubted that he’d need it for this battle. Designed to cancel a spell that someone else had used, Lex had readied this one solely in case the other araneas – whom Lex was sure the dragon had pressed into its service – had tried to attack him with their magic. The idea that the dragon itself could cast spells simply hadn’t been a possibility that he’d entertained.
But now, he launched that spell directly at the dragon. An instant later, he felt it take effect, dispelling the spell that it had used to enhance its own physical endurance.
Moss had just finished inhaling when Lex finished his chant. Knowing that he couldn’t afford to let the mage use anymore magic, he started to breathe out…only for his breathe to end in a choke as sudden agony flared from all over him. It was like every wound he’d sustained up until now had just caught up to him, making Moss arch his back and tilt his head back, eyes wide in surprise.
Out of the edge of his periphery, he could see the electrical orbs floating in towards him once again. Dimly realizing that he couldn’t take another blow, he tried to dodge, tried to throw himself out of the way, but his agonized muscles wouldn’t follow his command. Crackling softly, the orbs moved in until they were just a few feet away…then inches…then millimeters…
This isn’t happening! This CAN’T happen! I’m the great Vilzeralixus and that mage is JUST A PONY!
Lex flew straight backward, extricating his umbral form from the dragon’s claw just as the electrical orbs collided with it. The creature spasmed, giving a loud cry as the electricity bit into its body, and Lex felt a sudden burst of hateful satisfaction at the sight.
And then it slumped over and didn’t move.
For long moments Lex just floated there, watching the dragon’s still form. With a thought, the globes of lightning orbited its body, ready to fly in again if it so much as twitched. But it didn’t move at all, not even breathing that he could tell. Finally, after what had to have been less than a minute but felt like far longer, he was convinced.
The dragon was dead.
The thought was a balm for his anger, and Lex gradually felt himself begin to calm down, his tension draining from him. The sensation was exhausting, and he slowly floated back towards the ground, letting the balls of lightning dissipate. He could feel the sense of tiredness weighing him down, getting worse by the moment, but he had to make sure everypony else was okay…make sure Sonata was okay. He didn’t have any healing magic but there were some bandages and first aid equipment in his haversack. He just had to turn back into solid form…
A bright flash at the edge of his periphery made Lex turn around, and he dimly realized that there was a pony with a camera a short distance away, taking pictures. He had just enough time to feel confused by the sight, so incongruous with the grueling fight he’d just endured, when he realized the full extent of his audience wasn’t limited to whoever that was.
Nearby, at the edge of the black wall that he’d conjured, all of the ponies that had been in the evacuation group were gathered. Not a single one of them spoke, eyes wide and staring at him. For a moment, Lex stared back, until one mare pushed her way through the crowd and ran towards him.
Sonata.
He saw her running towards him, heard her calling his name, and for a moment was captivated by just how beautiful she was. Everything about her was perfect. Her face, her voice, her tears…tears? Why was she crying? He’d won…he’d saved everypony. He should turn back to solid form and console her. Whatever was upsetting her, he’d fix it.
Reaching the ground, Lex changed back into pony form…and felt agony explode through him. It hurt so badly, so incredibly badly, even worse than when he’d chopped his original horn off. He tried to fight it down, to push it away and go to Sonata, but his legs weren’t working correctly for some reason and he fell over.
A moment later Sonata reached him, and it was only because his viewpoint shifted that Lex realized that she was cradling his head in her hooves, leaning over him. She was crying worse now, and he wondered if he’d done something to make her upset. If so…he’d have to fix it. To find some way to make it up to her. He didn’t want her to leave him again.
He’d make it up to her, but first he had to rest. He was so tired…had been tired for such a long time. Even sleep didn’t help. He just had to rest for a little bit and then he’d fix whatever was wrong so that she’d smile at him again. She was so beautiful when she smiled.
He loved her so much.
It was his last thought before the darkness claimed him.
Sonata’s horrified wail seemed to reach into Fireflower’s chest and squeeze his heart, jolting him out of the shock and residual terror caused by the near-death experience that he and everyone else there had just experienced. It was enough to turn all eyes towards her as she renewed her assault against the grass entangling her, and she actually started to make some progress, wrenching a hoof free and stumbling towards the edge of the wall that Lex had conjured.
It was enough to remind Fireflower of what he’d been trying to do moments before, and he turned his gaze back to where his siblings were trapped. “Rockwood! The spell!”
He saw his brother wavering for a moment, and then later his lips moved. Fireflower couldn’t hear it from this distance, but the sudden gasps from behind him told him that the binding enchantment had been lifted.
He turned, intending to tell Sonata that they needed to use the reprieve that Lex had bought them to escape, that it was what he’d want for her, but she was already running by him, galloping for the edge of the wall for all she was worth. Fireflower immediately took off after her, knowing that if she did something foolish in her grief he almost certainly wouldn’t be able to stop the dragon’s retaliation.
He wasn’t so heartless that he didn’t glance back at the rest of the ponies that had been released, however. While several were running for the tree-line for all they were worth, much to his surprise more than a few were following him, apparently intent on seeing what was happening. It was unexpected enough that Fireflower momentarily stumbled. Did they not realize that they were missing their chance to escape, quite possibly the only one they’d get?
Turning his attention back to Sonata, he saw that she’d reached the edge of the wall…and stopped, a look of relief crossing her face. A moment later, Fireflower caught up to her, and saw why.
Lex, now changed into a shadow whose only visible feature was a pair of glowing eyes, hung in the air. A short distance away, the dragon was trying to dodge a trio of electrical orbs, only partially succeeding. The sight of that particular spell, along with Lex’s umbral form, was enough to make Fireflower blanch, remembering when he’d been in the dragon’s place.
Next to him, Sonata bit her lip in worry. She’d thought her heart had stopped when Lex had apparently sacrificed himself to save the rest of them, so seeing that he had survived and was still fighting had been an incredible relief, but at the same time she knew that it was too soon to celebrate. Even as she watched, one of the dragon’s claws clipped him, leaving a visible tear at the edge of his shadow-form.
Determined to do more than just stand there and gawk, Sonata started to step forward, but Fireflower darted forward and raised a foreleg to bar her way. “Don’t.” His voice was equal parts pleading and ordering.
Sonata bristled. “Lex needs our help!”
“The best way we can help him is to not get in his way,” retorted Fireflower, not lowering his foreleg. “If we go out there we’ll just end up making him protect us again rather than attacking.” His kept his eyes firmly locked on hers, willing her to listen to him. “We need to trust that he can win.”
Sonata was about to respond when she heard Lex give a cry of pain. Whipping her head around, she saw that the dragon’s claw had struck him again, this time dead-center. A look of alarm spread across her face, and she started to dash forward when the dragon suddenly arched its back in what was clearly an expression of pain, making Sonata stop in her tracks.
Whatever Lex had done, he took advantage of it a moment later as all three of his electrical orbs moved in, impacting the dragon directly. It gave a loud scream as they made contact, and then collapsed and lay still.
The silence that reigned was deafening.
No one spoke, staring at the sight of the fallen dragon, waiting for a twitch or a shudder or any sign that it was still alive...that the fight wasn’t over yet. Lex apparently felt the same way, because he didn’t move from where he was hanging in the air. Only his lightning globes reacted, slowly moving to circle the dragon warily.
Finally, the dark shadow that was Lex began to descend, letting the balls of lightning fade away as he did so. Several ponies, either braver or more curious than their fellows, took a few hesitant steps forward. It was that, as much as anything, that signaled to Sonata that it was over.
It was finally over.
Pushing past the ponies that had moved ahead of her, Sonata broke into a run again. This time Fireflower didn’t try to stop her, watching with mixed emotions as she ran towards where Lex was descending.
“Lex!” she called, causing him to turn his green-and-purple eyes towards her, making Sonata’s heart leap. He’d done it! He’d slain the dragon and now she could apologize for how she’d acted before and they’d kiss and make up and go to Vanhoover and live happily ever after!
Then Lex reached the ground and turned back into his pony form, and it was all Sonata could do not to scream at the sight, even as he immediately collapsed.
It was no mystery why. He was covered in wounds, hideous and gaping, to such an extent that he looked more dead than alive. His entire right side, from the side of his face down to his flank, from foreleg to hind leg, didn’t have skin anymore, the underlying tissue now completely exposed, red and raw and open. Most of his tail was gone, and Sonata could see what looked like exposed bone along his left hind leg. Four long gouges, already oozing large quantities of blood, stretched from his right flank to his sternum. Worst of all was the puncture mark on the left side of his chest, which could be heard rasping wetly with every breath he took.
Rushing over to him, Sonata was shaking as she cradled him in her hooves, trying to stifle the sobs she could feel washing over her as she called out to him. “Lex! Lex, hey! H-hang in there!” His eyes were still open somehow, and vaguely recalled something she’d heard back on Earth about how you weren’t supposed to let really injured people pass out. “Just…just look at me, okay? Just keep looking at me!”
Although he met her gaze, the look in his eyes was vacant, and that scared her more than anything. Lex had always, in all the time she’d known him, looked at everything around him with eyes that were sharp and considering, as though dissecting everything he saw and judging it. But now he looked like he was barely aware of what was going on, and Sonata could feel herself starting to shake.
A moment later his eyes closed, and her trembling grew worse. “L-Lex? Hey! HEY! Lex?! W-Wake up! You have to wake up! LEX!” She shook him, but there was no response, and she was about to shake him harder when she belatedly realized that that probably wasn’t the best thing to do in his current state.
Choking down a whimper, she noticed that he was still wearing his haversack, somehow miraculously intact and tangled in the remains of what looked like a cloak. Ripping the rags away, she tore his bag open. Thanks to its magic, the first aid kit that she was seeking was right on top, and she snatched it out with such haste that she almost dropped it. She was halfway through awkwardly trying to wrap a bandage around him when it occurred to her to ask for help.
“Somebody help me with this!” She turned back to look at the crowd, who were milling about in what looked like various stages of shock. Several of them were looking at Lex and turning green, while others were pale at the sight of him. “I said help me!” she screamed, and this time several of them jumped, but made no move to approach her, glancing at each other with lost expressions.
Near the back of the crowd, a pegasus mare flapped her wings, gaining enough altitude to fly over the heads of the crowd and land next to Sonata, clearly responding to her call for help.
“Are you a doctor?” asked Sonata, her voice full of desperate hope as she looked the other mare over. She didn’t seem like it, being dressed in flannel and having a cutie mark that showed a young tree and a watering can.
“No, but I’ve had plenty of experience patching up my hubby after some lumber accident or other. I figure that’s gotta make me a halfway-decent nurse or thereabouts,” she said, her rapid speech betraying her nervousness as she settled down beside Sonata and took the first aid kit. She swallowed, wide-eyed at the sight of Lex, but took a tube of ointment, spreading it around Lex’s acid burned right side, opposite the wheezing hole in his chest, before wrapping a bandage around his chest so that the puncture was covered.
“He’s going to be okay, right?” Sonata knew how ridiculous the question was, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking it, almost pleading for the answer she wanted to hear. But all she got in return was an incredulous look, before the pegasus seemed to realize that she was being serious.
“We’ve gotta get him to a hospital, but…I think that moving him like this would only make him worse.” Sonata, knowing what “make him worse” meant, shook her head, denying that this was happening. This wasn’t how things were supposed to end!
“Wh-what about healing magic? You guys have some of that here in Equestria, right?” She looked at the pegasus mare, but she just gave her a questioning look back, still wrapping bandages around Lex, most of which were quickly becoming saturated with blood. Sonata turned her head to the crowd, but nobody seemed to know what she was talking about.
Except one.
Fireflower stepped forward, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “There is. I know where it is.” He could see her starting to ask something else, but turned away, starting to run towards the forest. “I’m going to go get it,” he called back over his shoulder. “Just stay with Lex, and I’ll come back with help!”
Fireflower silently repeated Breezyleaf’s instructions to himself as he ran: Head south-southeast for a mile. Follow the stream. Find the cave. That’s where the dragon’s cave was, and that was where Brightrose should be, according to what the others had told him.
Each of Fireflower’s siblings specialized in a different magical element. His was fire. Rockwood’s was earth. Waterlily’s had been water. Breezyleaf’s was air. Shadowvine’s was negativity, although she preferred to call it “nullification.” And Brightrose’s had always been positivity, which brought forth light, removed maladies…and healed.
Now that the dragon was gone, there was nothing to stop him from getting Brightrose out, bringing him back there, and having him heal Lex. Assuming that Brightrose was still alive, or that Lex didn’t die in the meantime, or that he could find the cave or any of a hundred other things that could go wrong. Shaking his head to try and clear away the worries clouding his thoughts, Fireflower focused on making sure that he didn’t veer off course as he charged through the woods, making sure to keep an eye on the shadows being cast through the trees as he maintained his direction.
This was the only thing he could do for Sonata, he knew. For all of his vowing to protect her, for how closely he’d stuck to her during the fight, there had ultimately been nothing that he could do for her. Except this. He could be the one who saved the life of the stallion she loved...the one pony who was standing between Fireflower and her.
And if he failed, then...
It would be so easy, he realized. After I find Brightrose, I could just say that it took longer than I expected to get back, or that we got lost, or something else, and Lex would be gone.
Despite his thoughts, Fireflower didn’t slow his pace, knowing that he could never do something like that. Partially because such betrayal went against how he had been raised, and also because he knew that he owed Lex for slaying the dragon that had killed Waterlily and caused himself and his other siblings so much pain.
But mostly it was because he couldn’t bear to see Sonata’s heartbreak if that happened. She’d cried too many tears already, and the thought of causing her to shed even more hurt worse than the thought of her never returning his feelings.
He was going to keep his promise. She would smile again, even if the one she smiled at wasn’t him.
Nosey sighed wistfully as she stepped back from her camera, smiling at it with an expression of utter contentment on her face. Although she knew it wouldn’t work, she pressed the button on its side again. Sure enough, there was no click of the shutter, nor did the flash bulb go off. She’d taken all of the pictures she could, at least without buying more film.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to be upset. This was turning out to be the single greatest story of her life by far. An exposé on shady baking practices in Canterlot? Hah! That was nothing, less than nothing, compared to this. Shapeshifting spiders from another world! A rampaging dragon! A unicorn with the powers of King Sombra! This one had it all! And she hadn’t even finished conducting all of her interviews yet! Just the thought of what the mayor would say when her part in all of this was exposed was enough to send shivers of delight down Nosey’s spine.
This is a story on the same level as those ones about Princess Twilight Sparkle and her friends saving Equestria! she sang internally. Or at least, mostly on the same level. That dragon might not have been a threat to absolutely everypony the way that Nightmare Moon or Tirek had been, but it was still a big scary monster which had been defeated in a big flashy battle. That was always worth premium column inches.
And she had pictures to boot! Barely noticing as the ponies down below gathered around where Lex had landed, Nosey stood up on her hind legs, wrapping her forehooves around her camera and spinning around with it, as though dancing. She knew that she could paint a captivating tapestry with words, but with these pictures she’d be able to reach heights undreamed of. Being able to actually see the fearsome dragon or Lex’s giant magic-pony armor would ensure that they’d never be able to print enough issues to satisfy the public demand.
In fact…in fact, there was more to this story than any single newspaper article could cover, Nosey realized belatedly, setting her camera down as a new thought occurred to her. This had to be an entire series at the very least. No, wait! Forget the newspapers…this was a book deal waiting to happen!
Flopping onto her back, Nosey’s giggle would have made anypony who heard it think that she’d had too much cider. How had she never thought of this before? This would be a book that would break all sales records! It would be like the Daring Do novels, except real! And with pictures! “Oh, A. K. Yearling eat your heart out,” she purred to nopony in particular.
Finally, she sat up with another wistful sigh. There was still a lot of work to do before she’d be able to spread this story across Equestria. And she should probably at least write something for the papers. After all, her boss back at the Canterlot Chronicle had always been good to her. It wouldn’t be very nice to leave him completely high and dry.
Picking her camera back up, Nosey finally noticed that everypony was crowded around someone, probably Lex. Doubtlessly they were either showering praise on their new hero or peppering him with questions about how he was able to do everything he’d done. Either way, she should get down there and see if he’d give her a proper interview now that he’d won the day.
Smiling, Nosey sauntered towards the crowd, idly wishing that she had one more shot in her camera. From the way that mare, Sonata, had been acting when she ran towards Lex, she was most likely sweet on him. Getting a picture of the victory kisses they were probably having right now would have been the perfect shot to end her book with.
As he stumbled toward the cave entrance, Fireflower honestly thought that he was going to throw up. He had been running since earlier that morning, when he and Sonata had woken up in a panic, and the effort of trying to do so again was enough that he honestly thought that his legs were going to fall off. Even changing back to spider-form hadn’t helped very much, though he’d been pleasantly surprised to find that his spinneret was finally starting to heal.
Of course, the nausea might be from coming back here, he thought as he eyed the cave warily. This had been where he and his siblings had stumbled after they’d suddenly found themselves in this strange new world, with these new pony bodies replacing their human ones. At the time they’d just wanted to hole up somewhere while they tried to figure out what had happened, but in hindsight it was the worst decision they had ever made.
Following the stream entrance that trickled into the cave, Fireflower could almost see it all over again. Their screams as the dragon had returned. Their desperate, terrified attempts to flee, scattering in all directions. Lily…
Squeezing his eyes shut, Fireflower took several deep breaths before he moved further in. It’s dead, he reassured himself. Lex killed it. You watched it die. Now you have to get Brightrose out of here and get him to heal Lex.
Steeling his nerves, Fireflower called out. “Brightrose! It’s me, Fireflower! Are you in here?” He stopped walking as he listened for an answer. After several seconds, when none had come, he tried calling out again. Again, there was nothing.
Before he’d been nervous because of what had happened here previously, as well as worried about whether or not they’d be able to get back in time. But now Fireflower felt a different sort of dread creeping up on him. Did they even know for sure that Brightrose was still alive? The others had said that he was being held here, but had they made sure that the dragon hadn’t eaten him or crushed him or melted him with its acid breath-
Stop it! he cried internally, forcing himself to terminate that line of thought. He had to be alive! He just had to be!
“BRIGHTROSE! Come on, answer me! Where are you?!” He trailed off, hearing his voice echo as he went further back into the cave. It had quickly gotten pitch black, but that presented no hindrance to Fireflower. Like all of his kind, he could see in the dark, although doing so presented a washed-out, black-and-white world devoid of color.
Finally, he stopped, still hearing no reply. “Come on,” Fireflower whispered to himself in desperation. “Do something to let me know you’re still alive. Make a light or call out or-”
Tap.
Fireflower’s head snapped up, listening intently. What had that been?
Tap.
Spinning around, he tried to follow the source of the sound, but it was tricky with how the cave walls were making everything echo.
Tap.
Finally, he managed to find what sounded like the source of the tapping. It was coming from…part of the cave wall? Except, he realized, it wasn’t part of the wall. It was a large boulder set into an opening. He could even see the small gaps around the edges where it didn’t quite fit. Skittering closer to it, Fireflower put one of his eyes up to those holes, but the position was one that didn’t let him see very far inside. “Brightrose? Are you in there?”
Tap. Tap tap.
Now convinced that it was his brother trying to signal him, Fireflower felt his spirits buoy. “Hang on! I’m going to get you out of there!” But as he backed away from the boulder to look it over, he realized that that was going to be easier said than done. It looked like it was firmly wedged in there.
Biting his lip, Fireflower reared up and wrapped most of his legs around the boulder as best he could before pulling with all of his might. Groaning with effort, he strained as much as he could, but the giant stone didn’t move even a fraction of an inch. Releasing it, he fell back, panting.
Okay, that hadn’t worked. What else? Some sort of lever to wedge it out? He swept his eyes back and forth around the floor of the cave, but there was nothing there that looked remotely suitable for such a task. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t have come this far just to fail now! “I’m going to go try and find something to get that boulder out of the way. I’ll be right back!” he called out, not waiting for an answer before he went deeper into the cave.
It didn’t extend back much further, and he was able to reach the end in less than a minute…and it was completely empty. Feeling his frustration building as he looked at the bare walls, Fireflower almost missed the folded piece of cloth in a corner alcove, doing a double-take as he noticed the incongruous sight.
Picking it up more out of a desperate desire to do something rather than curiosity, he nevertheless couldn’t help but wonder what it was doing there. Did the dragon bring this here? Why would it care about a piece of fabric? As far as Fireflower knew, dragons were supposed to hoard gold and jewels. Was it a map? He unfolded it, and seeing that it made a large circle, laid it out on the cave floor.
And very nearly fell into the hole that was there.
Jumping back in surprise, Fireflower tried to figure out what had just happened. Where he’d laid down the scrap of cloth, there was now a large hole in the middle of the cave floor, one that hadn’t been there before. Edging closer to it nervously, Fireflower peeked over the edge…and stopped in shock at the sight.
It was full of coins.
He couldn’t even begin to count the number of them. There had to be thousands at the very least! There were also two long tubes in the middle that he realized were scroll cases. And near the edge, there was a small statuette. It was of a pony, of all things, one that had wings and a horn. Although Fireflower had no experience with art, he could tell by how intricately it had been carved that it had to be valuable.
It’s the dragon’s hoard, he realized numbly, unable to stop staring at the sight. It was keeping it in this, this…whatever this is. It took another few seconds for him to come back to himself. He couldn’t afford to be mesmerized by this right now, he had to find a way to get Brightrose out of there!
Scratching at the edge of the hole, he caught what felt like a seam and pulled upward. Sure enough, the edge of it lifted up, and suddenly the hold was gone, a round piece of cloth in its place. Folding it up, Fireflower carried it in one leg as he hurried back to where Brightrose was.
“Brightrose!” he called. “I can’t figure out a way to get that rock out of there! Can you…I don’t know, can you push or something from your side?”
There was no answer, and Fireflower felt himself getting angry. This wasn’t fair. There had to be some way to get this thing to move! If only he had some other sort of magic besides fire spells! It wasn’t like he could melt the rock or…or…
Stopping as an idea came to him, Fireflower studied the giant boulder more closely. It looked like it had most of its bulk outside of the entrance, which meant that if it was going to roll one way it would be toward him. That’s good. If it’s going to move, I don’t want it to roll inward and crush Brightrose.
“I’ve got an idea!” Fireflower called out again. “Just hang on!”
Stepping back, he chanted a spell, pointing one leg at the rocky ground beneath the boulder. A moment later, a red beam shot from his outstretched leg, striking the ground. It winked out after a moment, leaving a scorch mark but otherwise having no effect. Undeterred, Fireflower cast the spell again. And then a third time.
By now the ground was sizzling, and Fireflower could see the stone starting to bubble slightly, heating up enough that it was actually beginning to illuminate the cave a little bit. He cast the spell again, and could see the ground starting to melt. It was working!
There was a loud rumble as the boulder suddenly moved, and Fireflower jumped back as it rolled out of the entrance, crashing to rest several feet away. It hadn’t fully stopped when Fireflower ran to the entrance, taking care to step past the bubbling patch as he looked inside. “Brightrose?”
There, lying on the ground, was a pony. He looked stark white in Fireflower’s darkvision, though he knew that the mane and tail were actually bright pink. A picture of a rose with a heart-shaped bloom was on his flank. It was him.
“Brightrose!” Fireflower rushed over to his brother. “Are you okay?!”
He knew it was a stupid question, knew that his brother couldn’t possibly be okay after being sealed in here for what had to have been days, probably with no food or water. Nevertheless, Brightrose managed to turn his head toward Fireflower and gave him a weak smile.
“Hey, little brother,” he rasped, his voice barely a whisper. “What took you so long?”
Sonata glanced at the edge of the forest for what had to have been the fiftieth time. How long had it been since Flowerflower had left to go get help? Had it been hours? It seemed like it.
Looking back at Lex, she wondered for the thousandth time if she was making the right decision by not trying to carry him to a hospital. Wouldn’t they be at one by now if they’d left immediately? Or would that have made it worse?
But then, it was hard to see how it could have gotten much worse. After that pegasus mare had finished bandaging the worst of his wounds, she’d told Sonata to find a blanket to wrap Lex in. Luckily there had been one in Lex’s pack. It was only after they’d finished that Sonata had the presence of mind to ask what the blanket was for. The answer – to help keep his body from going into shock – hadn’t reassured her.
After that, the other mare had told Sonata that there was nothing that they could do but wait for help to arrive. Since then, Sonata had done nothing but hold Lex’s head in her lap, listening to his breathing and rubbing his head and glancing at the tree line, over and over and over again.
“I met him before, you know.”
“…huh?” Sonata needed a moment to realize that the mare who’d helped treat Lex had spoken to her.
“I met him,” she nodded at Lex, “a couple of days ago. Me and my hubby and a few friends of ours were on the night-watch for spiders out at the train station, and that fella there just wanders in right out of the dark, bold as brass. He about scared us out of our wits too.” She chuckled at the memory. “Ah, I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? The name’s Tender Tree.”
“I’m Sonata. Sonata Dusk.”
“I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but under the circumstances…” Tender Tree trailed off awkwardly, and for a few moments silence reigned. Then Tender spoke again. “So anyway, I take one look at this fella and I can see that he’s about to fall down, ya know? Looking like he can barely keep his head up and with big old bags under his eyes. I half-thought he was gonna collapse right there, but instead he just looks at us like he owns half of Canterlot and we’re the servants and says that he needs to speak to whoever’s in charge.”
Sonata nodded, drawn into Tender’s story despite herself. “Yeah, that sounds like Lex.”
“Well, my hubby – his name’s Lumber Jack, by the way, but I always just call him Lumber – he starts getting all kinds of suspicious, since we’ve had attacks by magic-using spiders and all, but all I see is a poor thing who needs a meal and a bed real bad. So I start taking him to the nearest place he can get them, and I’m making some conversation on the way, just real friendly-like, you know? And he suddenly flips out on me.”
Sonata gave a wan smile at that. It was becoming clear that Tender liked to talk, and she could see how that would upset Lex.
“He starts going on about how I need to be quiet and answer his questions, which is pretty weird since you can’t answer someone’s questions if you’re quiet and all, but he’s yelling and his eyes start glowing and I’m not ashamed to admit that I got real scared. I start thrashing and screaming like I’m at the gates of Tartarus itself and manage to get away and fly off, sure that I’d just gotten away from some sorta horrible monster.”
Sonata lowered her ears as she looked down at Lex again, suddenly not wanting to hear this. After everything Lex had done, after how badly he’d gotten hurt trying to protect everyone, this awful mare was going to start talking badly about him?
Tender seemed to sense Sonata’s thoughts, because she reached out to put a hoof under Sonata’s chin, gently lifting her head up until they were making eye contact. “I’m saying all this because I want you to know: I don’t think that way anymore. Your boyfriend there…he is your boyfriend, right?” Sonata nodded, hoping that she was right, and Tender kept speaking. “Your boyfriend there, he saved all of us here, me included. If it wasn’t for him doing all of that fancy magic, even if it did look really scary, we’d all be dragon-food right now.”
A murmur of assent came from the ponies around them, causing Sonata to look around in mild surprise. More than a few of them were nodding, with several looking towards the dragon’s body with a shudder. Others were looking at Lex with worry, obviously hoping that he was going to be okay.
It was enough to make fresh tears build in Sonata’s eyes, and she sniffled as she rubbed a forehoof across them to clear them. “Thank you,” she replied to Tender, her voice soft. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she looked down at Lex again. “You hear that, Lex? You’re a hero, just like I always knew you would be. So you have to keep h-holding on, okay?” She could feel her composure breaking down again, and struggled to keep it together. “You have to keep it together until Fireflower gets back, or else…or else I’ll…” She stopped talking, knowing that if she said any more it would set off a fresh wave of tears.
Tender Tree was practically ready to cry herself, and stood up to go over and give the poor girl a hug when she noticed something moving out of the corner of her eye. Looking over, she suddenly gave a shout. “Hey! Where do you all think you’re going?!”
Jumping in surprise, Sonata turned to see what Tender had been yelling at. She was just in time to glimpse a trio of ponies, ones that hadn’t been part of the crowd before, running into the forest.
Brightrose groaned as he wiped his mouth, shakily climbing to his feet and stumbling back towards his brother now that he’d finished being sick.
“I told you not to drink so much water,” sighed Fireflower. He flicked his tail, which currently had the cloth-hole-thingy tied around it, clearly impatient to start moving again.
Brightrose shrugged, a helpless smile crossing his lips. “I was in that cave with no food or water for days. I couldn’t help myself.”
“You can’t ever help yourself.” Fireflower noted wryly, rolling his eyes as he moved to support Brightrose’s weight as best he could, half-carrying him as they made their way back through the forest.
“Ouch,” replied Brightrose with a mock-wince. “Our little Fainting Flower has gotten quite the sharp tongue since he’s been out on his own.”
“Don’t call me that.” Despite trying to sound irritated, Fireflower felt a rueful grin cross his face. “Fainting Flower” was a nickname that his siblings had given him some years ago. He’d earned it after Shadowvine had been telling them a ghost story about a monster that tied spiders up in their own webs and ate their legs off. It had frightened Fireflower enough that when Brightrose, who in hindsight had clearly been in on the whole thing with Shadowvine, had jumped out of the brush just at the scariest part of the story, Fireflower had fainted dead away. His siblings had never let him forget it since.
He’d always hated being called that before. But now, despite the urgency he felt in wanting to get back and help Lex, he couldn’t help but smile, glad to be called by that stupid nickname again.
His smile only lasted a few moments though before his face fell back into a look of concentration. Despite their best efforts, they simply weren’t making very good time. Fireflower felt exhausted, and Brightrose was in poor condition due to his time in captivity. They were basically leaning on each other to keep from collapsing, reduced to stumbling rather than rushing.
Fireflower had been telling Brightrose everything that had happened over the last few days, as much to try and take his mind off of how depleted he felt as to catch his brother up, but now that he’d told him everything there was nothing else to focus on but how badly his leg muscles were screaming at him. Or how much every breath was beginning to ache in his lungs. Or how good he was sure it would feel to lie down and rest, just for a little bit…
No! They had to keep going! They’d already left the stream behind a little while ago, so it couldn’t be much further now. Just a little more and they’d be back. Just keep taking another step. Then another. Then another…
“I see them! Hey! I found them!”
Blinking at the unexpected voice, Fireflower was caught completely by surprise as Breezyleaf ran up to them, followed by Rockwood and Shadowvine a few moments later. The three of them all but tackled Fireflower and Brightrose, embracing the pair tightly even as they all collapsed in a heap.
“Brightrose! Are you okay?” Breezyleaf had tears in her eyes as she buried her face against her brother’s white coat.
“Of course he’s okay!” Shadowvine’s grip was no less strong than her sister’s, despite her confident words. “I never doubted that you’d be fine, unlike these dummies.”
Brightrose chuckled, his voice uncharacteristically shaky due to the emotional weight of their reunion. “It was no big deal. Whenever things got bad, I just remembered how I had a duty to hang on for the sake of pretty girls everywhere.”
That brought snorts of laughter to the entire group, with even Rockwood cracking a smile. He was still wearing it as he turned his head to look at Fireflower. “You did good.”
Blinking watery eyes, Fireflower managed to smile back, giving him a firm nod. A moment later it occurred to him to ask, "How did you guys escape from that force field?"
"We didn't escape. The spell finally expired," replied Breezyleaf, transferring her hug to Fireflower as she answered.
After a few moments, they disentangled and stood up. Seeing how exhausted their siblings were, Breezeyleaf and Shadowvine moved to support Brightrose, while Rockwood moved to help Fireflower. Fireflower was about to encourage them to get a move on, when Shadowvine spoke up. “Okay, I think we should head south. From what I heard in town, this forest expands quite a bit down that way, so we should be able to hide out there for a while if we go far enough.”
Fireflower frowned at that, and it grew more pronounced when Breezyleaf and Rockwood nodded. Only Brightrose didn’t immediately concur, looking to Fireflower with the same confused expression that he knew he was wearing.
Shrugging off Rockwood’s support, Fireflower stepped closer to Shadowvine. “What do you mean ‘go south’? We have to go back!”
Shadowvine blinked, an incredulous look spreading across her face. “You can’t be serious.”
“Of course I’m serious! Lex is hurt really badly! He’ll die if Brightrose doesn’t heal him!”
For a moment, Shadowvine looked confused. A moment later her lack of understanding changed into disbelieving comprehension. “You mean that wizard who killed the dragon? No way! Let him die! It’s better for us if he does!”
Fireflower gaped. “How can you say that? He killed the dragon that killed Lily!”
“He killed the dragon because it was threatening those ponies, which means that he’ll probably kill us for threatening them too! You might not have realized this, but it was keeping Brightrose alive so that we’d have to lead those ponies it almost ate into its trap. I don’t think your wizard friend is going to be too keen to forgive us for that.”
“He won’t do anything.” Fireflower forced steel into his voice, hoping that he was right. He still remembered how Lex had lashed out when he’d thought Fireflower had threatened Sonata. If he was at all inclined to punish the others for their part in what had happened, there wouldn’t be a thing that they could do about it. A spellcaster that could kill a dragon would have no trouble defeating a couple of araneas.
“You don’t know that!” shot back Shadowvine. “We just got what’s left of our family back together. Do you really want to go and risk our lives to help some pony wizard that we don’t even know?” Her eyes narrowed. “Why is this so important to you?” The other three were watching the exchange silently, eyes sliding back and forth as the argument progressed.
Fireflower grit his teeth. He could understand Shadowvine’s position, and he knew that it made sense. The rule of their family had always been “family first,” and one of the ways they’d practiced that was by avoiding anything that could bring harm, even potentially, to the rest of the group. Telling her that he wanted to do this because he’d fallen for a girl, a girl he knew he had no chance with, wouldn’t convince his sister of anything except that he’d taken leave of his senses.
Despite their having just reunited, Fireflower was seriously considering having to fight to make Shadowvine stand down, when Brightrose suddenly spoke up. “He’s right, Shadowvine.”
Her head snapped around, eyes wide with shock. “Are you kidding me?!”
A nod was her response. “Fireflower’s been telling me about what he’s done since we scattered, and about the ponies he’s met.” He glanced over at Fireflower, who suddenly realized that, even though he’d downplayed how he’d felt about Sonata when he’d relayed what he’d been through, his brother had seen right through him. Returning his gaze to Shadowvine, Brightrose continued, “If he wants me to help that wizard, then I want to help.”
Shadowvine looked apoplectic, but before she could speak up Breezyleaf beat her to it. “I think that we should help them.” She bit her lip as Shadowvine’s glare turned towards her, but didn’t back down. “After all of the bad things we did, we owe it to them to try and make up for it.”
Her expression changing into a bitter one as she realized that she was outvoted, Shadowvine turned her gaze to Rockwood in a silent question. A nod was his response, and she let out a disgusted sigh. “Fine. We’ll throw away this golden opportunity to make our escape and go back to help the wizard. I’m sure that he’ll be so grateful that he’ll kill us nice and quick instead of slowly and painfully.” Despite her grumbling, she returned to Brightrose’s side, gathering him up and heading back in the direction they’d come from.
As he moved to follow them, leaning on Rockwood again, Fireflower smiled. Although nothing could fill the hole that Waterlily’s absence left, it still felt good to have his family back.
“Actually, I didn’t know his name at the time. Didn’t know it at all until you told it to me.”
“Er, right. Well, now you do. So, what was it like when you saw Lex fighting against that dragon one-on-one?”
“It was…scary, I guess?”
“Uh-huh. Anything else?”
“Not really, no.”
Nosey smiled politely as she wrote down the responses from the earth pony stallion she was interviewing, even as she groaned inwardly. It was against journalistic ethics to embellish the responses that a subject gave, so there was little she could do except interview someone else. “Well, thank you for your time.”
“Um, do you not want my name?”
“Oh no,” smiled Nosey, trying not to scoff. “Trust me, that won’t be necessary.” There was no way she was going to use lame quotes like that in her forthcoming epic!
Not for the first time, she cast a longing look over at where Sonata was cradling Lex’s mangled form. She’d tried to interview the grieving mare before, but that insensitive oaf Tender Tree – she’d overheard Sonata say her name – had dragged Nosey away before she could get an answer to a single question. That might not have been so bad if Tender had then consented to being interviewed herself, but instead she’d given Nosey an earful about “showing some basic pony decency” before immediately going back to Sonata’s side.
Worse, that seemed to have upset quite a few of the ponies that were hanging around, and most of them were now refusing to be interviewed. It was bad enough that Nosey was honestly beginning to consider trying to track down some of the ponies that had run off as soon as that entangling spell had ended.
She was about to go and try to talk to Sonata again, busybody pegasus or not, when she heard several ponies yell and point towards the forest’s edge. Following their hooves, Nosey immediately broke into a smile as she recognized Fireflower, along with several other ponies, emerging from the treeline, all of them leaning heavily on each other. Now these were worthwhile subjects for an interview! In fact, if those other ponies were “araneas” – the spider-pony siblings that he’d mentioned before – then this might be the cherry on her big scoop!
Nosey was about to run over to them when Tender flew by her, putting herself directly between the approaching group and everypony else. Standing on her hind legs, she held out her forelegs warily, clearly indicating that they should stop or else. “You lot hold on right there!” she declared firmly. “It was your fault we almost got eaten by that dragon!”
Nosey blinked at Tender’s tirade, not sure what was happening. She knew that these ponies were most likely the spiders that had been attacking the city, but there was no way that Tender should know that. But what else could she be mad at them for?
Whatever was going on, Tender wasn’t the only pony who seemed to be upset. Several other ponies, their expressions dark and angry, ran to join Tender, causing the exhausted-looking arrivals to shrink back, clearly nervous. One of them, a purple-coated mare, muttered “told you so.”
But just when it looked like violence was going to erupt, Sonata’s voice cut through the tension. “Stop it! Tender, let them through!”
Tender looked behind her, clearly caught off-guard. “But these are the ponies who led us here! And I’m pretty sure that they used that weird magic to make the grass get all grabby and tie us up!”
Sonata shook her head, still not moving from where she was attending to Lex. “That one,” she pointed at Fireflower, “is a friend of mine, and went to go get help for Lex! Let them through RIGHT NOW!”
Tender immediately stepped back, as did everypony else, allowing the group to stagger towards where Sonata was. Surreptitiously, Nosey crept forward also, making sure she had a front-row seat to whatever was about to happen. Scribbling furiously, she watched as Fireflower nodded towards a white stallion with a pink mane and tail, who then leaned closer to Lex and started chanting…
The return to consciousness was distinctly unlike how Lex usually awoke. Rather than the abrupt shift from sleep to wakefulness, he regained awareness slowly. Dimly, as though through a fog, he realized that he was in a lot of pain, but that it was receding somehow. Rather than gradually diminishing, something was causing it to ebb in regular quantities at periodic intervals. It was an alien enough sensation that he began to actively fight to reach full awareness.
“…aking up!”
The voice was a familiar one, and the realization came with a burst of emotions – all of them unusually warm – that made him fight harder, realizing that he wanted to see that voice’s owner quite badly.
He felt a hoof on his chest, and his pain level lowered again, and now he was able to open his eyes. A teary pair were looking back at him, and for a moment he was captivated by them. Then he remembered everything that had happened, sitting up abruptly.
“Wha-” His attempt to ask what had happened was cut off as Sonata threw her forelegs around him, almost knocking him back over with her embrace.
“Lex!” Her voice was thick with relief, causing a cheer to go up from the ponies around him, all of them laughing and celebrating. Next to him, a stallion with a pink mane was chanting a spell, and that earned Lex’s undivided attention. When he reached out a moment later, Lex knocked his hoof away with a growl, preparing to deal with whatever this new threat was…
“No! No, it’s okay!” Sonata interjected quickly. “He’s using magic to heal you!”
Lex’s only outward reaction to Sonata’s words was that his eyes widened slightly. Inwardly, however, he cringed at the revelation. The fact that he’d been injured so badly that he’d need others to tend to his injuries was a testament to just how badly he’d bungled that fight.
And there was no doubt in his mind that he had bungled it. From mistaking the nature of the dragon’s breath weapon to not knowing that it could cast spells to having no idea that it had some sort of special resistance to magic, a multitude of factors had been outside of his initial projections. The result had been his humiliating need to be rescued from near-death, all while a crowd looked on…and being rescued, to say nothing of dying in combat if not, was unworthy of the strong leader that Lex wanted to be.
True, he had managed to kill the creature and save everypony, despite the numerous gaps in his knowledge, but that thought brought him little comfort. It wasn’t enough to achieve his goals; they also had to be achieved in the proper manner, or they were worthless. Getting a perfect score on a test held no merit if he simply guessed every answer and they all happened to be right, and likewise defeating a dragon meant little if the ponies he wanted to save needed to save him.
The worst part was knowing how close he’d come to the victory he’d wanted. If only he had the realized that the dragon’s breath weapon was a solvent rather than flames! All of the clues had been there. The melted stretches of railroad track. Fireflower and his siblings being spontaneously brought over from Everglow. All of those should have painted a picture that he wasn’t dealing with an Equestrian dragon. But he had lacked the imagination to figure it out, and this new shame had been the price for it, lying helpless on the ground while someone else deigned to rescue him.
Gently but firmly separating himself from Sonata, Lex climbed onto all fours. Doing so very nearly caused him to collapse, as he still had a considerable number of injuries, but he managed it. It was in deference to his wounded pride that he swept a baleful glare across the assembled ponies – which to his considerable irritation had little impact on their spontaneous merry-making – and ended with him looking darkly at Fireflower and the other ponies huddled close to him.
Feeling his siblings tense at the cold look, Fireflower licked his suddenly-dry lips. “Um, these are my siblings…the ones I told you about before,” he started nervously. “This is Rockwood, Breezyleaf, Shadowvine, and Brightrose.” Each sibling nodded in turn, trying to stay calm. A tense silence followed as Lex continued to look them over, and it was clear to Fireflower that he was considering what to do with them.
“Did I mention that Brightrose was the one who healed you, just now?” Fireflower added, hoping that would count for something.
Lex grit his teeth at the reminder. “Do I need to mention that your siblings terrorized Tall Tale for days? Or that they led all of the ponies here into a trap?”
It was amazing how quickly the crowd of ponies around them quieted down to listen to the exchange. All but one.
“Hang on just a moment there,” Tender Tree stepped forward, completely oblivious to the tension hanging in the air. “I get what you mean by them having led us into a trap, but what’s all this about them having terrorized the townsfolk? The only thing we were afraid of was those magic spiders.”
“I can answer that one!” Nosey stepped forward, pleased with how all eyes turned to her.
“Um, Nosey,” began Sonata. “I’m not, like, sure that’s a good-”
“It’s because these ponies are the spiders that were attacking the city! They can change from ponies into giant spiders,” Nosey proclaimed with a flourish. It was clear that the truth was about to come out anyway, so why not score some points with the public by showing that she was a trustworthy news source?
The other ponies glanced at each other, clearly skeptical. But again it was Tender who piped up, her eyes wide with alarm. “You mean like changelings?”
That got a reaction from the crowd, as they started to pull back in fear at the pronouncement. Everyone had read about the dangerous creatures that had attacked Princess Cadance’s wedding not too long ago.
Sonata, seeing that things were going south, stepped forward. “Hold on! I’ve been friends with this guy,” she pointed a hoof at Fireflower, “for a while now, and I can tell you that he’s one of the nicest ponies I’ve ever met! He doesn’t want to do anything bad, and I’m willing to bet that his brothers and sisters are the same!”
“But those attacks in town…” started Tender uncertainly.
“We feel terrible about that,” spoke up Breezyleaf. “Please believe me, we didn’t do that because we wanted to. It was because the dragon had taken our brother hostage,” she waved a hoof at Brightrose, “and said that it would kill him if we didn’t attack your town, and lead you all here. That’s the only reason we did it, I swear.”
“But leaving town was the mayor’s idea,” called one of the ponies in the crowd, clearly having realized that something didn’t add up.
“She was under the dragon’s spell.” This time it was Rockwood who spoke, his level voice carrying across the crowd. “It used magic on her to make her do what it wanted.” Nearby, Sonata nodded confidently.
Nosey’s pencil scribbled over her pad furiously. “Wait, so this dragon could use magic?” Such a thing was unheard of! This just got better and better!
“Yes, it could. It did during our fight,” sighed Lex. He could see which way this was going. The frightened looks that the crowd had been giving Fireflower’s family were changing into ones of sympathy, and as far as he was concerned that was the most appropriate response. Although capitulating to the dragon’s demands wasn’t what he could have done if it had taken a hostage, he couldn’t blame them for having done so. Not when they’d already lost someone dear to them. “It also killed their sister before it took their brother.”
Nopony missed the way the araneas winced at Lex’s words. It was enough to win over the remaining members of the assembled ponies, with every face now registering compassion.
Seeing that was enough to let Shadowvine work up her courage. “We’re…” She trailed off as everyone looked at her, letting her gaze fall to the ground for a moment before forcing herself to meet their eyes and continue. “We’re sorry for everything we’ve done!” Her voice was shaky as she yelled the words, needing to force them out before looking down again as soon as she’d finished speaking.
Tender, somehow having become the crowd’s spokespony, looked over Fireflower and his family, then Lex, then Sonata, then Nosey, and back again. “So…it’s all over, then? I mean, no more dragons or attacks or evacuating the city?”
“It’s over,” replied Lex. His tone was one of finality. “You can all go home.”
The crowd erupted into cheers again, recapturing its earlier jubilation. Tender Tree rushed towards the araneas, who tensed at the sudden approach, but before they had a chance to react she had started to grasp their hooves, shaking them in camaraderie. “Well in that case, let me be the first to welcome you all to our fair city! Of course, you’ve obviously all been there for days, but you haven’t had an official welcome yet, so it’s time somepony made up for that! First, let me give you some tips about the best places to stay while you’re here. My sister runs the nicest bed-and-breakfast this side of Equestria, and you’ll absolutely flip for her flapjacks! Haha, flip for flapjacks. You see what I did there?”
The crowd was starting to make its way back towards town, and Tender didn’t break her stride, keeping up a constant stream of dialogue as she started to herd the siblings back with them. Behind her, Nosey hurried after them, peppering them with questions as she kept her pencil and notepad at the ready.
Sonata and Lex watched them go, the former with a smile on her face, the latter with his usual sour expression. Finally she turned to him, grinning. “We should probably go back there too. I bet they’re gonna have a parade in your honor, Mr. Dragonslayer.”
Lex gave her the barest of glances, and then he began walking towards Tall Tale without another word.
With everypony else having gone back ahead of them, Lex and Sonata headed back to Tall Tale on their own.
The walk was a slow one, mostly because Lex was still hurt badly enough that he couldn’t move very quickly. Sonata had offered to run ahead and retrieve Fireflower’s brother, the one with the healing magic, but Lex had coldly told her not to.
Since then he hadn’t said a word to her. She’d tried to engage him in conversation several times, asking about the magic he’d used in that fight, telling him what her investigations in Tall Tale had revealed, or even just asking if he was hungry, but the only answers she’d received had been a stony silence. He wouldn’t even let her help him when he stumbled, holding out a hoof warningly when she’d approached him.
Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran ahead of him and turned around, placing herself directly in his path. “C’mon Lex! Talk to me!” she pleaded.
“Why don’t you just leave, if you don’t like how I’m acting?”
He regretted the words the instant they came out of his mouth. A hurt expression spread across Sonata’s face, and he felt his heart clench at the knowledge that he’d lashed out at her. But at the same time, there was a sick sense of satisfaction there as well. She had ripped his heart out, so why shouldn’t she be punished for it?
“I…I like, totes deserved that,” she admitted softly, her ears folding back. She had hoped that they could just pretend like nothing had ever happened between them, but that had always been more of a wish than a real expectation. And now that he’d said it, there was nothing to do but face the music.
She took a single step closer to Lex, looking directly into his eyes. “I’m so, so sorry for how I acted before, Lex. I feel terrible about it now.”
“You’re ‘sorry’?” His voice hadn’t warmed in the slightest. If anything it had gotten even colder. “You hurt me more than anypony ever has…I can’t even begin to…and you’re ‘sorry’?!” He could feel his emotions beginning to rage out of control, and tried to clamp down on them even harder. Again he felt the urge to punish her for all of the pain she’d caused him, to unleash the cruelest words he could think of until she was sobbing on the ground. But at the same time he quailed at the thought. He didn’t want to hurt her! She was the last pony he’d ever want to hurt!
The two desires, each overwhelming in their weight, collided with each other, leaving Lex staring at her as he worked his jaw wordlessly. He could feel himself shaking, desperately trying to figure out what he wanted.
Sonata, by contrast, felt only one emotion: guilt. She could feel the intensity radiating off of him, silently underscoring what he’d said about how badly she’d hurt him, and it tore at her. She had to explain herself! She had to make him understand! “I was scared! I’d never seen you like that before and it frightened me! And then when you wouldn’t say you were sorry it scared me even worse but I was wrong! I know you’re not the sort of pony who admits their mistakes,” she gave a thin, apologetic smile to show that she wasn’t trying to needle him, “and I was the one trying to change you into doing that and then left when I couldn’t and I was wrong. I’m so, so sorry, Lex.”
She moved closer to him, until she was close enough to wrap a foreleg around him in a gentle embrace. “Please…please forgive me.”
For a moment he wavered, the desire to hold her close and cherish her surging. But then voiceless, hateful words slithered across his mind. All she does is talk about herself. She doesn’t even want to hear about how much her thoughtlessness made you suffer.
The sentiment was petty and spiteful, but the fear that they contained – the implication that Sonata didn’t really care about him – went straight to the core of his worst impulses and stoked them. In that instant the sudden rush of warmth that he’d felt for her was drowned under a black tide of spite.
“You stupid, stupid mare!” he roared, shoving her away. Surprised, she stumbled and fell.
Lex continued raging. “‘Forgive you’?! Is that some kind of joke?! You think that I can just flip a switch and suddenly make it not hurt anymore when I remember what you did?! That I can just choose to forget how you abandoned me like that?! Well guess what? Saying you’re sorry doesn’t make it better! NOTHING makes it better! Everything we had, all of it, it’s ruined now! YOU ruined it! And you want to be ‘forgiven’?!”
She hadn’t bothered to stand, looking up at him with wide eyes, her expression horrified. Tears were running down her face, her heart clearly breaking with every word. But Lex didn’t stop. He tore his pack open, telekinetically yanking out a blank sheet of paper and a quill, quickly scribbling “Lex & Sonata” on it. He then held the paper in front of her as he growled. “You see this? This was our relationship. And this,” he crumpled it into a wad, “was what you did to it.”
She began to sob then, but Lex was pitiless. He tossed the balled paper at her hooves. “Even if you unfold the paper, it will never be the way it was. That’s what you’ve done.” He turned away from her and started walking. “There is no forgiveness.”
Sonata lay on the ground, shaking with anguish for the second time that day. This was everything she’d feared: she’d ruined things beyond repair, and now she was losing the one person who had ever loved her for her. She had completely destroyed…
Wait… “ever loved her”…
Sonata’s thoughts suddenly flashed back to what Kara had asked her in her dream a few days ago.
Kara’s eyes widened slightly. “You don’t love him anymore?”
Desperate hope suddenly flared in Sonata, and she scrambled to her feet. Looking at where Lex was walking away from her, she called out to him. “Do you not love me anymore?”
The question pierced through Lex as surely as the dragon’s talon had, and he froze in place.
“I-” For an instant he wanted to tell her that he didn’t, purely to keep spiting her. But for some reason the words refused to form on his tongue, and it was enough to make him pause in confusion. Why couldn’t he say it? He was still angry with her, and had said all of those other things, so why not this?
It took a moment for Lex’s thoughts to catch up with his emotions. But when they did, the answer was simple: He couldn’t tell her he didn’t love her anymore because it wasn’t true. He did still love her.
He still loved her.
Suddenly, all of his hurt and his anger were gone, and he realized just how horrible he’d been to the one who meant the most to him.
“I…I do.” Lex turned around slowly, and Sonata gasped with hope at the look of regret on his face. “I do still love you Sonata. I love you so much.”
“Lex…” she could barely speak, new tears filling her eyes as she took a tentative step towards him. He responded in kind, and suddenly they’d closed the gap between them and were hugging each other tightly, as though afraid that they’d lose each other again if they let go.
“I’m sorry.” Lex’s voice was strangled, and he could feel hot tears sliding down his cheeks, his composure breaking down. At that moment he couldn’t think about his code, or his pride, or anything except how close he’d just come to throwing away his beloved. “I’m so sorry, Sonata.”
The enormity of what he was saying wasn’t lost on her, and she could feel herself starting to shake. “It was my fault. It was all my fault,” she whimpered, holding him tighter.
“I didn’t mean what I said.” The words were pouring out of him now, distorted by sobs. “Our relationship isn’t ruined. I don’t want it to be ruined! I don’t ever want to be without you! I love you so much!”
“I love you too, Lex!” He could hear her weeping harder as well, and he wanted to tell her everything else that he was feeling. About how she was the only thing that made him happy. About how grateful he was that she was with him. All of it. But he couldn’t speak anymore, and neither could she, and so they just stood there, holding each other and crying together.
They stayed like that for a long time.
The sun had almost reached its zenith by the time the two of them stumbled into Tall Tale, Lex leaning on Sonata. As they began to walk down the streets, there were already signs that news of what had happened had spread. Colorful banners were hung between buildings and they could see some balloons tied haphazardly around lampposts.
“Wow, I think they really are going to throw a parade,” noted Sonata, looking around at the decorations before turning her attention to Lex. “Wanna head to the center of town? I bet that whatever they do will be at the square.”
Lex shook his head. “I’d rather go see the mayor. The first thing to do is check to see if she’s still under the dragon’s enchantment. Just because it’s dead doesn’t necessarily mean that the spells it cast have expired. After that we need to make preparations to get to Vanhoover.”
“Like, oh my gosh.” Sonata rolled her eyes in mock-exasperation. “Does your huge vocabulary not have the word ‘vacation’ in it? For reals, we beat the dragon, saved the ponies and the ar-, arana-, um…”
“I think the word you’re searching for is ‘araneas’,” noted Lex wryly.
“Right! Saved the ponies and the araneas, so I think that it’s time for us to put in some R & R! Besides, I’m, like, super hungry! I bet they’ll be making all sorts of tasty food as part of the celebration! Ooh! That reminds me: what’s your favorite snack treat?” Sonata looked up at her boyfriend, smiling with eagerness at the thought of learning more about him.
“Prunes.”
Straining to keep her smile in place, Sonata was saved from having to figure out how to reply to that by the sight of a familiar pony approaching. “Fireflower! Hey!” She waved, feeling Lex firm up his stance so that she didn’t need to support him.
“Where have you two been?” Fireflower approached slowly, a relieved look on his face. “We were just about to go back into the forest to look for you!”
Sonata glanced at Lex with a small smile, which to Fireflower’s shock Lex returned. He hadn’t known that Lex could smile! “We were, like, taking care of some personal business.”
“Oh…OH!” Fireflower, misunderstanding Sonata’s meaning, turned red, even as his chest clenched. He’d known that he didn’t have a chance with her, but that didn’t mean that something like that was easy to hear. Hurriedly, he tried to change the subject. “Yes, well, the mayor is going to make a public statement, but she’s made it known that she wants to speak to the two of you privately before she does.”
“Good,” Lex nodded, pleased with the news. “Then we should go speak with her immediately.”
“Wait a second,” Fireflower held out a hoof. “Before you do, I want to give you two this.” Untying what looked like a black ribbon from around his tail, he held it in one hoof. “I found this in the dragon’s cave, but to my mind it belongs to the two of you.”
“Huh? The dragon was keeping a black tablecl- WHOA!” Sonata’s eyes bulged and her jaw dropped as Fireflower spread the black cloth on the ground, letting it change into a large hole full of coins. Even Lex’s brow rose at the sight, causing Fireflower to grin.
Adjusting the circlet he always wore, Lex studied the magical emanations from the cloth-turned-hole. “It’s an extradimensional receptacle,” he murmured, clearly intrigued. The aura was subtly different from the one that his pack generated. But what captured his attention more were the pair of cylinders – clearly scroll cases – lying on the bed of coins. Still, caution was demanded, since a dragon that could use magic might have laid additional defenses on its treasures. “I’m going to check this over for-”
“WOO HOO!” Sonata cannonballed into the hole, landing on the pile of coins. “Look at me!” she yelled as she started making swimming motions. “I’m like that duck from that cartoon!” Neither stallion had any idea what she was talking about, but just watching her was enough to make Lex groan at her obliviousness, while Fireflower chuckled.
Turning to Lex as Sonata began to do the backstroke, Fireflower motioned as if to leave. “I’m going to let the others know that you two are okay. If you need to find us, we’re staying at Busy Bee’s Bed ‘n’ Breakfast.” He didn’t wait for an answer before turning to walk away, but stopped suddenly. Turning back around, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t tell Tender I said this, but she was right: her sister’s pancakes really are incredible.”
Lex snorted, and Fireflower took that as the best response he could hope for, leaving with a cordial wave. After he’d gone, Lex turned his attention back where his girlfriend was playing with their newfound fortune. “Sonata, that’s enough. We need to see what the mayor wants with us.”
“Aww.” Climbing out of the hole, Sonata looked around. “Hey, where did Fireflower go? He didn’t show us how to turn this thing back into a tablecloth.” She nudged the edge of it curiously, and made a slight grunt of surprise as she caught a seam. Lifting it, the hole suddenly turned back into a piece of cloth. “Nevermind! I figured it out!”
“Just make sure that, whatever you do, you never put that thing in my pack, and vice-versa,” warned Lex. “Layering extradimensional spaces on top of each other can put a severe strain on the dimensional fabric in the local area.”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, before comprehension suddenly showed in her eyes. “Oh! This is like that thing when you didn’t want to take your backpack into your magic tree-fort! But didn’t you figure out how to make that work okay?”
One of Lex’s eyes twitched. “I want to examine that receptacle before I try something like that with it. And my rope trick spell is not a ‘tree-fort’.”
“It kind of is,” smiled Sonata. “Now do me a favor? Tie that around my mane.” She presented the back of her head to Lex expectantly.
Blinking at the odd request, he eventually decided that it would probably be fine, since Fireflower had worn it with no ill effects. Still, he couldn’t help but roll his eyes as he complied with her wishes. Wearing an extradimensional container as an accessory, really.
When he was finished, Sonata examined her appearance in a shop window, her mane now pulled into the same shape as her tail. Turning back and forth, she seemed satisfied, nodding smartly to herself before turning to Lex. “How do I look?”
“The same way you always do,” he replied. “Beautiful.”
“Hmm.” Sonata gave him a hooded gaze at that answer, a sultry smile crossing her face. “Next time I’m going to want more details, charmer.” She punctuated her warning by closing the distance between them, stealing a kiss. “Now let’s go see what the mayor wants.”
They made their way through town towards city hall, Lex gently leaning against Sonata again, more to feel her closeness than because he needed assistance. The two took their time, and finally arrived almost a half-hour later.
There was a crowd around the building, though Sonata noted that it wasn’t as large as the last time she’d visited the place. Getting closer, a unicorn mare at the edge of the crowd glanced back and noticed them, doing a double-take. “It’s him!” she yelled.
The crowd turned to look at them, and for a moment the pair tensed, but the sudden cheers that erupted belied their concern. Instead, the mass of ponies parted, clearing the way into city hall even as they stomped their hooves and whooped. Sonata beamed at the attention while Lex just blinked, clearly having no idea how to react.
As they walked through the throngs, they could hear voices calling out. While the overlapping cries were impossible to make out individually, the words “dragon,” “saved” and “hero” were all audible, and Sonata smiled at Lex in vindication.
As they reached the stairs at the base of the building, Sonata waited until they were halfway up, then stopped. When Lex turned to her to see what the holdup was, she leaned in close. “Wave,” she whispered.
“Huh?” His lack of understanding couldn’t have been more obvious, making her giggle.
He might have been able to make all sorts of genius plans, and use magic strong enough to bring down a dragon, but when it came to working a crowd she was the smart one! “Turn around and wave to them.”
He gave her a dubious look, but did as she requested…and a look of wonder spread across his face as the cheers swelled in response. Sonata leaned over and nuzzled him, his joy feeding her own. “You see?” she murmured. “I totes knew everyone would appreciate you if you just let them.”
Lex swallowed heavily, eyes still scanning the jubilant crowd. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.
Sonata smiled. “You don’t have to say anything. That’s my job, remember?” She winked at him, then turned to the crowd. “Let’s hear it for Lex Legis, dragonslayer!” she hollered.
The crowd went wild.
A few minutes later, they were inside the building, being ushered up to the top floor. As they approached the mayor’s office, raised voices could be heard from within, despite the closed doors.
“-might work with your sister, but I can’t bake cookies for the entire city, Lucy!”
“Then what about just saying you’re sorry? I’m sure that everypony will understand that it was a mistake!”
“A ‘mistake’ is too small a word! I can’t possibly-”
The voices quieted as Sonata knocked on the door. A moment later the mayor’s secretary, Lucy Goosey, opened it. “I’m sorry, but the mayor’s not- Oh! Miss Dusk!”
Sonata raised a hoof in greeting, but to her surprise Lucy took it in her own hooves, her face pleading. “Please, you’re a consultant, right? You have to tell the mayor that she can’t resign!”
“I am calm!” yelled Nosey at the pegasus stallion behind the counter. “I’m very calm, so stop worrying about me and start worrying about how to get this envelope to Canterlot so I can get this story published!”
“Miss, I’ve told you: with the trains out we can’t make any deliveries. If you want to wait until the dockyards reopen, we might be able to see about delivering it to Las Pegasus. I’m sure a courier service can deliver it for you from there.”
“That’ll take forever!” Nosey let out an exasperated sigh. “Even after the mayor lifts her emergency decree that the docks are closed, I’d still have to wait for a ship to leave, and then wait for it to make it there, all just to get this sent out! I need it to reach Canterlot ASAP!”
“I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”
“This isn’t an inconvenience, this is a travesty! The news is being suppressed!” She threw her forehooves into the air, the very picture of drama. In the few hours since she’d gotten back to Tall Tale, Nosey had run like mad to get her story ready for publication. Or at least, a truncated version of her story, designed to whet the appetite and stoke public demand for her forthcoming book. To that end, she’d banged out an article about Lex’s fight against the dragon, summarizing the major points while teasing at more details being forthcoming, and managed to find a photography studio to develop her pictures, making copies of two of them to accompany her feature.
Now she had them all ready to go, but there was no way to get them delivered to her editor!
Turning away from the unhelpful pony at the counter for a moment, Nosey rubbed her chin in thought. There had to be some way to get a delivery to Canterlot! After a moment, a lightbulb went off over her head. “You have delivery-pegasi on staff, right?”
“Of course we do. Heck, I’m one of them.”
“Okay,” she grinned. “Then I want you or some other pegasus to follow the railroad tracks to the next town on the line. According to what I heard, that should be past the breaks in the tracks, so the mail should still be running there.”
“Miss, with all due respect, that’s not going to happen. The nearest town on the rail line is a hundred miles away; we only make personal deliveries for items that are staying here in Tall Tale. Having one of our employees fly so far just to drop an envelope off isn’t viable.”
Nosey’s response was to take out her purse and upend it over the counter, letting bits rain out. “Here. Is this enough to make it viable?”
The pegasus blinked, glancing down at the mess of bits. There were a lot more there than a single delivery would normally cost. After a moment he coughed politely. “Yes, well…as I was saying, while we normally don’t perform long-range deliveries, we can make an exception for such an, er, important matter.” He began gathering the bits into a sack. “Just let me get some supplies and I’ll deliver your envelope personally.”
Nosey was all smiles. “Excellent.” Turning around, there was an extra spring in her step as she left the courier’s office. Everything was going great! Oh, she would have loved to have seen her editor’s face when he read her piece over, particularly when he saw those pictures, but she’d have to settle for just writing a story that would launch her career like never before.
Of course, that still left one problem that needed to be solved.
Now that she’d spent all of her money having that envelope mailed, where was she going to sleep tonight?
Sonata blinked in confusion, staring at Lucy blankly. “Huh? Whaddaya mean ‘resign’?”
“She’s going to quit being the mayor because of what happened with the evacuation!” Lucy was almost in tears, clearly very upset by the prospect. “Tell her she can’t do that!”
“Lucy!” Ribbon Cutter’s voice carried a sharp rebuke, but she sighed a moment later. Standing up, she gestured to Lex and Sonata. “Please come in. Lucy, you wait outside, and make sure you close the door behind you.”
“But…!”
“I promise we’ll talk more after I’m done with this meeting, okay?” Ribbon gave her secretary a tight smile, which seemed to mollify the younger mare, since she left without any further protests.
Waiting until the door had clicked shut, Ribbon let out a sigh, gesturing to the seats in front of her. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.” She’d waited until the pair had settled down before continuing. “I apologize for my secretary’s outburst. She’s been with me ever since I took over this office, so she has very strong feelings about what I’m proposing.”
“Are you really gonna quit?” asked Sonata.
“Yes, but…I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.” Ribbon closed her eyes and gave a perfunctory cough, visibly gathering herself as she straightened up in her chair. Opening her eyes she started again. “First, let me introduce myself again. My name is Ribbon Cutter, and I’m the mayor of Tall Tale, at least for the moment.” Cracking a small smile, she turned her attention to Lex.
“Mr. Lex Legis, I presume?” When he nodded silently in response, she continued. “I’ve asked you here because I’ve only heard scattered reports about what happened, and wanted to confirm directly. Would you please tell me what happened this morning with the evacuation group?”
Lex paused for a moment, silently evaluating the mare in front of him, before nodding. “Very well.”
The subsequent explanation took some time. Ribbon sat back and listened intently, occasionally asking a question or for some point to be expounded on. Sonata also chimed in frequently with various details.
Finally, they reached the end of the tale, and Ribbon sat back, a pensive look on her face. Silence fell, unbroken for a long moment until Ribbon got up and turned to look out her office window. “So the dragon really was going to eat everypony?” Her voice was soft, and Sonata wondered if she was genuinely asking or just thinking out loud.
Lex, however, took the question at face value. “Without a doubt. Even if you discount the testimony given by Fireflower’s siblings, which would be foolish as it explains how the dragon knew to coordinate its appearance with their immobilizing everypony, it was already assuming an attack posture when it approached us. There can be no argument that it was hostile.”
Ribbon slumped, seeming to cave in on herself. “I was so sure that it was different…that it wanted to help…”
“Oh, that’s because you were enchanted,” ventured Sonata casually.
That got a more pronounced reaction. Ribbon started, as though she’d received a sudden pinch, and turned around to look at Sonata. “What?”
“You were under a spell that influenced your behavior,” explained Lex, adjusting his circlet as he spoke. “In fact…hm,” his brow furrowed. “I’m not detecting any magical emanations.”
“That’s because it’s worn off now,” said Sonata. “But it was there before.”
“Wait, wait.” Ribbon circled her desk, moving closer to the pair. “The dragon…it used magic on me?”
“Yep!” Sonata nodded. “When I talked to you before, you said you were kidnapped and taken to its cave, right? And that you were talking with it and ‘realized’ how nice it was and that it just wanted to help? That was when it happened.”
Ribbon looked like a drowning mare who had just been thrown a life preserver. “So this…what I did…it wasn’t my fault?”
“It wasn’t,” confirmed Lex dispassionately. “Given the reputations of dragons in Equestria, you would have had to have been unforgivably stupid to have put any faith in such a creature. That’s why it had to beguile you with magic to ensure your cooperation. You’re a victim, not a collaborator.”
“Isn’t that great?” smiled Sonata, springing to her hooves. “I mean, it’s not great that you were duped and made to trick other ponies into almost being the dragon’s breakfast, but it’s great that it wasn’t your fault that you did!” Oblivious to her tactlessness, she went over to Ribbon and raised a foreleg, holding it out towards her for a hoof-bump. “Now you don’t have to quit being mayor!”
“I…” Ribbon started to hold out a hoof in response, but stopped halfway, before shaking her head and lowering it. “No, I’m still going to resign my office.”
“Huh? But why?” Sonata tilted her head, confused.
Ribbon slowly returned to her chair, sitting down with a sigh. “Because somepony needs to take responsibility for everything that’s happened.”
Lex raised an eyebrow, his appraisal of Ribbon going up by a few points. Given how Celestia and her ilk had seemed intent on avoiding responsibility at every turn, apparently being of the persuasion that everything was fine so long as there wasn’t an ongoing crisis, this mare’s insistence on holding herself to a higher standard was a breath of fresh air.
Sonata seemed to think otherwise, moving up to Ribbon’s desk and placing her forehooves on it, leaning forward. “But we just said that it wasn’t your fault! You even said so yourself!”
“I know, but there’s more to it than that,” Ribbon replied. “The very fact that I was able to be manipulated like that in the first place means that I wasn’t able to fulfill my duty to the ponies of Tall Tale. And even if I had known what was going on, I wouldn’t have been able to stop it, which is another strike against me.”
“But that’s crazy!” insisted Sonata. “Nobody could have done that.”
“One pony could have,” replied Ribbon, directing a pointed look at Lex. It was more than enough to clue him in on what she was talking about. In fact, he realized, this was the real reason that she had wanted this meeting. It wasn’t just that she wanted a first-hoof report about what had happened. It was because she wanted to appoint her successor.
Sonata was slower to catch on, but eventually the idea got through to her. “Hang on…you don’t mean…” She sank back into her seat in surprise.
Ribbon didn’t break eye contact with Lex. “Am I right in guessing that, since you have enough magic to defeat a dragon in a one-on-one fight, you can’t be enchanted the way I was?”
Lex nodded. “I have numerous magical defenses on my person at all times, including resistance to mental influences.”
Now it was Ribbon’s turn to nod, clearly having expected an answer along those lines. “And there’s no question as to your strength, or your dedication to helping ponies in need.” She swept her eyes over his wounds. They were, she knew, a testament to just how far he was willing to go for complete strangers. Indeed, from what they had told her just now, he hadn’t even realized that this mare who seemed like his girlfriend had been there until after the battle was joined.
Sonata’s eyes were widening, looking back and forth between Ribbon and Lex.
Ribbon stood up again, and this time Lex did the same, sensing the magnitude of what she was about to say. Belatedly, Sonata did also. “In a few hours I’m going to make a statement about everything that’s happened.” Ribbon’s voice was firm, having made up her mind. “At that time, I’m going to publicly announce my resignation as the mayor of Tall Tale. I’d like to name my chosen successor as part of the announcement.”
She paused, and a pin dropping could have been heard in the ensuing silence. A moment later, she continued.
“Lex Legis, will you become the new mayor of Tall Tale?”
It had been less than five minutes since it had become clear to Lex that Ribbon had been leading up to that question. But in that time his mind had run through myriad different considerations, weighing numerous factors and examining each and every of them, both in isolation and within the context of multiple different frameworks. By the time the question left Ribbon’s mouth, Lex had already decided upon his answer.
Ribbon smiled at Lex’s answer, her shoulders slumping ever so slightly in relief. “Alright then.” Straightening up, she moved on to the next order of business. “In that case, I’d like you to join me when I make the announcement. Word of what you’ve done is already getting around, but this will be a good opportunity to make your formal debut. Is three hours from now alright with you?”
“That should be fine,” replied Lex.
“Hang on,” interjected Sonata. “We-”
But Ribbon was already moving ahead. “I’m sure you’ll want to prepare some remarks of your own for the event. Also, I’d like to formally offer my services during the changeover. I’ve been mayor here for years, and I think that there’s a lot that I can offer to help you get settled in.”
“I completely agree,” nodded Lex. “In fact, I’d like to discuss exactly what I’m going to be expecting from y-”
“HOLD UP!” yelled Sonata. Upon seeing that she’d captured everyone’s attention, she looked at Lex. “What about Vanhoover?”
He raised a brow at her question. “What about Vanhoover?”
Sonata looked confused at that, and she wasn’t the only one. “What’s this about Vanhoover?” asked Ribbon.
“That’s partially what I wanted to talk to you about.” Lex turned back to Ribbon as he spoke. “Immediately prior to my coming here, I struck a deal with the princesses wherein they ceded rulership of Vanhoover to me.” He paused long enough to let that sink in, before adding, “I fully intend to honor that arrangement.”
Ribbon Cutter was clearly taken aback. “But…you just said that you’d take over as mayor of Tall Tale!”
“I did, and I intend to do that also.” Lex’s voice was calm, speaking with quiet confidence that served to heighten the gravity of his words. “I will administrate both cities jointly.”
Both mares’ eyes were wide, clearly not having expected that. Paying their surprise no heed, Lex continued. “My first order of business is to tend to the situation in Vanhoover, which from what I understand is currently still in a state of disaster. What do you know about the situation there?”
Ribbon blinked, knowing that the question was directed at her. “Uh, not very much. Some of its ships came here a few weeks ago, crowded with ponies, saying that the city had flooded and that order had broken down. A few pegasi made the flight here afterwards, talking about how bad things were getting with trying to procure food, and...um…wait, what are we talking about?”
Realizing that she’d momentarily lost the flow of the conversation, Ribbon squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head before looking at Lex again, brow furrowing. “How are you going to be the mayor here if you’re going to go to Vanhoover and try to fix things there?”
“By appointing an interim deputy to run Tall Tale on my behalf while I do.”
Ribbon’s eyebrows rose, an incredulous expression on her face. “And just who’s going to do that? Her?” She gestured to Sonata, who was quite clearly struggling to keep up with what was going on. “Because, and I say this with all possible respect for what you two have done for us, that’s not-”
“No, not Sonata,” interrupted Lex. “I have somepony else in mind. One that knows the city very well, and is known by its ponies, and has experience with governing.”
Ribbon looked baffled. “Who could that possibly be? The only pony that fits those criteria is…oh.” Her expression changed to one of surprise, and Lex nodded.
“Precisely. I want you to run Tall Tale for me while I deal with the situation in Vanhoover.”
“Oh, so that’s what you all are talking about!” exclaimed Sonata with a smile. “Wow, you could’ve just, like, said that from the start, you know?”
Lex rolled his eyes, but Ribbon looked angry, frowning at him. “So this is all, what…some roundabout way of trying to stop me from resigning?” She stomped a hoof. “Because that’s not going to work. After everything that happened, a change needs to be made!”
“I don’t disagree.” Lex’s reply was immediate, giving Ribbon a sharp look. “Things are going to change, because I’m going to change them.”
He slowly stepped closer to Ribbon, his eyes never leaving hers. “You said that what happened before wasn’t your fault, and you were right.” He stopped right in front of her, his gaze pinning her in place. “It was the princesses’ fault.”
Ribbon paused, clearly disturbed by what Lex was saying. “That’s…I don’t know that I agree with that. They’re all the way in Canterlot and Ponyville and the Crystal Empire. I’m sure that they had no idea what was going on.”
“And that is why they’re at fault!” insisted Lex. “Their entire attitude towards governing is to do nothing, to be completely unengaged unless there’s an imminent and obvious crisis.” Now it was his turn to stomp a hoof, his irritation with Equestria’s rulers made clear. “Such a degree of quiescence is unbecoming of a leader, and what almost happened here is the result of their abdication of responsibility!”
“And you don’t think that any blame rests with the dragon?” There was a wry element in Ribbon’s voice.
Lex snorted. “The dragon was simply following its nature, which is to prey on others. It is responsible for its actions to be sure, but the princesses are responsible for not having thwarted those actions.” He pointed a hoof at Ribbon. “You said that the princesses almost certainly had no idea what was happening. I agree. But that does not absolve them of responsibility. It indicts them! They should have known! But that’s not the most egregious aspect of just how completely they failed this city.”
“What is?” This time the question came from Sonata. She wasn’t completely sure what he was saying, but she loved watching him get so worked up. He was so incredibly hot when he was this passionate…when he wasn’t yelling or declaring war or anything like that.
Lex rose to the bait easily. “Their failure to implement a robust series of systems and processes that would have prevented, or at least minimized, this kind of situation from ever happening in the first place.”
Ribbon looked skeptical. “I’m going to be honest. I don’t know what that means, and I work in politics.” Her response caused Sonata to snort with suppressed laughter, and she gave Lex an apologetic smile as he shot a glare her way.
“It means,” he said slowly, trying to keep his temper in check, “that this city’s utter inability to respond to attacks by what turned out to be three individuals, who from what I’ve seen have only modest magical abilities, is a shame that falls squarely on the princesses’ shoulders. It was their lack of leadership that caused Tall Tale to have no defenses in place, no way to investigate what was happening, and no plan for how to respond.”
Ribbon opened her mouth to reply, but Lex wasn’t finished. “If you’re going to say that these circumstances could not have been foreseen, don’t bother. The metric by which the kind of systems I’m speaking of are measured is not by their ability to divine the future, but by their robustness and flexibility in the face of unforeseen circumstances.”
A pensive look settled across Ribbon’s face, in contrast to Sonata’s expression of utter bafflement. After a long moment, the older mare spoke up. “What would you have done differently, if you had been in charge?”
“I would have created a municipal organization whose members were trained and equipped to actively engage with threats. I would have made sure that they knew how to coordinate their efforts with other institutions, both public and private. I would have seen to it that they’d proactively deal with developing situations rather than maintaining a perpetually-reactive position. I would have made sure that they had a way to contact me immediately if the nature of the threat was greater than they could handle. And I would have had all of this in place before there was a need for it.”
“We do have a police force, you know.” Ribbon’s defense sounded feeble, even to her own ears.
“Oh please,” Lex scoffed. “When’s the last time they were able to deal with anything worse than somepony’s party being too noisy?”
Ribbon didn’t answer, looking at the ground, and that was answer enough.
Sonata sighed. “You know, that sounds great and all, but next time can we make a song out of it? That would be a lot more fun.”
Now it was Ribbon’s turn to laugh softly. “That would be a lot more fun,” she agreed. “I apologize, I didn’t think that this would turn into a discussion on policy. I know from experience that those can be rather dry.”
Sonata smiled, springing to her hooves. “Aw, that’s okay! Besides, listening to all of that is something I’m going to have to get used to if I’m going to be his spokespony.”
Ribbon tilted her head. “Spokespony?”
Sonata nodded. “Yep! This guy,” she pointed her hoof at Lex, “talks like that all the time, and especially when he’s going on about government and stuff. So it’s my job to make it easy to understand!” She paused, then tapped her chin. “Though he’s, like, usually a lot grumpier about it.”
“I am not ‘grumpy’,” growled Lex. “I’m simply expressing justified frustration over most ponies stupidly refusing to act in what is quite often the self-evidently most cogent manner.”
“See? Like that!” enthused Sonata. “Except he’s supposed to whisper it to me with a spell so I can filter out the nasty parts and make it easy to understand. Now let’s see…I’m pretty sure he said ‘I get grumpy because I don’t know why nopony gets me.’”
Lex glowered at her, but Ribbon burst out laughing. She rubbed her eyes with one forehoof for a moment before getting control of herself. Her tension dispelled, she favored the two of them with a smile. “Alright, I admit that I was a bit uncomfortable with what you were saying about the princesses, but if you have such a good spokespony to make your ideas more palatable to the general public, you’ll probably be fine.”
Sonata beamed, moving over to nuzzle Lex, who despite his mild exasperation returned the gesture.
Waiting until the two had completed their romantic gesture, Ribbon spoke up. “One last question: are you sure you want me to be the one who does this for you? You’re right that I have the most experience with this, but…” she paused for a moment, then pushed ahead. “But everything you said about the princesses, about them not showing enough leadership, applies to me too.”
Lex was already shaking his head. “It’s not the same. The princesses occupy the highest political position that it’s possible to attain in the current order, and so they bear ultimate responsibility for what happens in their kingdom. They have magic that far outstrips that of ordinary ponies, so they have greater impetus to innovate with it. They have a lifespan that’s potentially endless, so they should be able to draw upon greater experiences when exercising their judgment. All of these are reasons why you can’t be held to the same standards as them.”
“And you can?”
“I always hold myself to the highest of standards,” Lex answered immediately. “I demand nothing less of myself.”
“So I’m the best choice because my failures are smaller than theirs?” asked Ribbon ruefully.
“I wasn’t finished.” Lex moved closer to her again, until he was almost with hoof’s reach of her. “There’s one other quality that makes you the best choice to run this city, my city, for me.”
Ribbon quirked a brow, curious despite herself. “What’s that?”
“You’ve impressed me.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. Had Lex actually just paid someone a compliment?!
“I have?” Ribbon looked only slightly less surprised.
“Yes. You want to take responsibility for what happened, even though the circumstances were beyond your expectations or your ability to control. More than that, your insistence on abdicating in my favor has shown me that you want to do what you think is best Tall Tale, even if that’s not what’s best for you personally. Finally, that we’re having this conversation at all tells me that you’re willing to entertain new ideas based on their merits, rather than any ideological standpoint, also unlike the princesses.” Lex looked her dead in the eye as he spoke. “You’re not just the best pony to run Tall Tale in my name, you’re the only pony.”
Ribbon couldn’t meet his gaze, looking down. Ever since she’d heard what happened earlier that morning, she’d been working to accept the idea that she was going to have to resign in disgrace. Now she was being told, by the same hero who’d saved her city, that Tall Tale still needed her. “…Thank you…”
Lex blinked. Why was she thanking him? Everything he’d said was merely a statement of fact.
Sonata moved up to Lex’s side, whispering in his ear. “Hoof-bump her.”
“Hm?”
“Go on. Hoof-bump her.”
Not sure why she was suggesting that, Lex nevertheless held out a hoof towards Ribbon. For a moment she looked at it, then smiled and pressed her hoof against his with a soft “clop.”
“Alright!” whooped Sonata. “This calls for a toast! Do you have any cider?”
“I keep a bottle for special occasions,” Ribbon replied, going over to her desk and opening a drawer. “Do you two mind if I call Lucy back for this? She’s the only other pony who knows what I was planning, and it upset her pretty badly, so I’d like her to be here for this.”
“You two seem pretty close,” observed Sonata.
Ribbon smiled as she poured four glasses. “I was her foalsitter when she was little, and I gave her this job after I became mayor. Since her sister moved to Manehattan after getting married, I’m basically the only family she has here.” Putting the bottle down, she called out for her secretary.
The door opened a moment later. “Yes, Miss Mayor?” Lucy stuck her head in, her expression still slightly distraught from before.
Ribbon beckoned her inside. “Come join us, we’re having a toast.”
Lucy looked confused, even as she entered the room and let Ribbon thrust a glass into her hooves. She was about to ask what when she saw Lex’s eyes glow as he telekinetically lifted a glass. “Eep!”
“That’s…unusual,” observed Ribbon, unable to help but stare.
“Nah, he does that every time he does anything magical. You get used to it,” said Sonata lightly, taking the last glass.
“It’s a slight side-effect of some of the new magic that I’ve acquired,” added Lex.
“It looks scary,” replied Lucy, looking a bit shaken.
“Lucy! Don’t be rude,” admonished Ribbon. “That’s the new mayor of Tall Tale that you’re talking to.”
“‘New mayor’? So you’re still going to resign?” asked Lucy, crestfallen.
“I am,” nodded Ribbon, “and then I’m going to start my new job.”
“New job?”
“Mm-hmm. As interim deputy mayor of Tall Tale.”
“Interim deputy mayor? Wait, so that means…”
Ribbon smiled. “It means that for right now, I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing...with a few changes being made.” She glanced up at Lex at that last part.
“You realize that these changes won’t happen overnight,” he replied. “What I outlined before was just one example of what needs to be done. There are countless more. This will take years at the very least.”
“Which is all the more reason to get started right away! So less yapping and more drinking!” Sonata raised her glass, looking at Lex. “To Tall Tale’s new mayor!”
Lucy grinned up at Ribbon, raising her own. “To the new interim deputy mayor!”
Ribbon copied the gesture, smiling as she looked at the other three ponies. “To a better Tall Tale.”
Lex raised his glass to gently clink against the others’. “To a better Equestria.”
After their toast, Lex and Ribbon had begun to work on the wording of their statement to the public. While Sonata and Lucy had hovered around, waiting to see if they could offer any insights, it soon became clear that their input wasn’t required. Eventually, the two of them drifted to the other side of the room, chatting as they nursed their drinks.
“So, like, Ribbon Cutter told us that she was your foalsitter when you were younger.”
Lucy nodded, smiling at the memories. “Yeah, she was wonderful. No matter how long it took me to get something right, or how many times I messed up while trying, she was always so nice to me. Even more than my big sister.”
“That’s great.” Sonata smiled, but it was half-hearted as she glanced down at her glass of cider. “My sisters were never nice to me. In fact, they were totes awful. I was the dumb one, and they made sure to remind me every chance they got.”
“Aw, that’s so sad!” Lucy looked downtrodden at the thought, giving Sonata a sympathetic look. “Did they eventually realize how mean they were being and say they were sorry?”
“No,” she shook her head. “I eventually just got tired of it all and left them.” Sonata straightened up, trying to throw off the unhappy feelings that those memories conjured up. “But that was the best decision I ever made. I eventually made some new friends, and met someone special, and I’m a lot happier now.” She glanced back at where Lex and Ribbon were engaged in conversation, smiling.
Lucy, however, failed to make the connection between what Sonata was saying with her look towards the other ponies in the room, drawing a different conclusion altogether. “They do seem to get along well, don’t they?”
“Huh?” It took Sonata a moment to catch up to the sudden shift in topic. “Oh, um, it looks that way. Birds of a feather, I guess.”
“The mayor, er, the interim deputy mayor, I mean, is usually pretty businesslike when she has meetings. But she’s not rude or anything like that! She’s just, you know, eager to get stuff done and move on to the next thing. But now she looks kind of…I don’t know, relaxed.”
Sonata gave a noncommittal grunt, tipping her glass back to drink the rest of her cider.
“I wonder if she likes him?”
Caught completely by surprise, Sonata briefly choked on her drink, coughing as she tried to clear her throat. “Huh?!”
Oblivious, Lucy continued. “Wouldn’t it be funny if they got married? Then they could run Tall Tale together!”
“That’s probably not going to happen,” declared Sonata firmly, “since he’s my boyfriend and all.”
Lucy’s eyes widened, realizing just how badly she’d put her hoof in her mouth. “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry!” She reached out towards Sonata, attempting to make a gesture of contrition, but was so mortified by her faux pas that she completely forgot that she was still holding her glass. The result was that she dumped her drink over Sonata’s head.
“Hey!”
“Oh no! Oh, I’m really sorry! I’ll clean that up right away!” Panicking now, Lucy intended to run back to her desk and grab some napkins from a drawer. However, in her rush she managed to trip over her own hooves, sending her crashing into a large potted fern at the edge of the room. Knocking it over, it managed to brush against a painting on the wall just enough to send it tumbling down. It then, in turn, landed next to a small end-table that had been pushed up against the wall, colliding on the way down with a folder that had been jutting over the table’s edge. The folder then went flying, scattering papers in mid-air to flutter down over both mares.
Sonata had initially been miffed at having cider splashed on her, but in the wake of the bedlam that Lucy had unintentionally caused she could only stand there, open-mouthed.
She wasn’t the only one. On the other side of the room Lex, who had looked up when he’d heard Sonata’s indignant shout, was staring, completely nonplussed by what had happened.
Ribbon, more used to these sorts of occurrences happening where Lucy was concerned, hurried over to where her secretary had tumbled, kneeling down beside her and putting a hoof on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Lucy looked up, eyes watery. “I’m so sorry, Miss Mayor. I messed up again.” She sniffled, too embarrassed to even try standing up. “Maybe I should be the one who resigns. I’m always causing you so much trouble.”
“Absolutely not.” Ribbon’s voice was firm but still gentle as she pulled Lucy to her hooves.
“But…”
Ribbon held a hoof up, and Lucy fell silent, her ears lowering in expectation of receiving a firm talking-to. To her surprise, however, Ribbon smiled at her. “This morning I learned that I’d messed up far worse than you ever have, Lucy. When I realized that I’d helped a dragon almost eat the very ponies that I’ve always wanted to help, even if it was because I was under a spell, I felt so awful that I was determined to quit.”
Lucy’s eyes widened. “You were under a spell?”
Nodding, Ribbon continued. “I was, but that didn’t change the fact that I wanted to run away and hide from what I’d done. I almost did, too. But then I talked to this pony,” she half-turned and pointed her hoof at Lex, “and he reminded me that running away from our mistakes won’t help fix them. Fixing them means that we have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and keep trying.”
Lex blinked. When exactly had he said any of that?
Ribbon turned back to fully face Lucy, looking her straight in the eyes. “I won’t quit. And if I can say that after what I did, then you can’t quit either, okay?”
Lucy sniffled again, but she was smiling now. “Okay, Miss Mayor.”
“That’s not my title anymore, remember?”
“Oh! I mean, ‘Miss Interim Deputy Mayor’!”
“That’s better. Now,” Ribbon swept a hoof out to indicate the debris, “go clean this mess up. Starting with her.” She pointed to Sonata.
“Right away!” Lucy gave a salute, and then ran to get some napkins, coming back a few seconds later and begin dabbing at Sonata intently.
After she’d finished and moved on to the rest of the mayhem she’d caused, Lex approached the other two mares. “The statement seems sufficient,” he said without preamble.
“Are you sure?” asked Ribbon. “We still have another two-and-a-half hours or so before the announcement if you want to keep going over it.”
“It’s fine,” he replied. “I have a few errands I want to attend to before the day is out. We should get to them.” He moved towards the door as he spoke, glancing at Sonata in a silent indication that he wanted her to follow him.
“In that case, I’ll see you at the town square for our announcement,” called Ribbon as the two left.
As Lex and Sonata left her office and started to head downstairs, Lex paused as they neared the building’s entrance. Sonata looked up at him quizzically, and he hesitated for a moment, a slightly uncomfortable look crossing his face.
“What is it?” she asked him, curious now.
He paused before answering, picking his words with care. “Does this building have a back entrance?”
“Oh, um, I think so. The last time I was here the crowd was so thick around front I just figured that it would have to be that way around back, so I didn’t bother checking, but I’m sure there is one.”
“We should use that, then.”
“We should? Why?” His suggestion made no sense to her at all. “I’m sure all of those grateful ponies are still out front.”
“All the more reason to go out the back, then.” He turned and started heading towards the rear of the building, the conversation apparently over.
“How come?” Sonata trotted after him. “You were eating up the attention before, so why- Whoa!” She caught Lex as he started to stumble, almost collapsing. Luckily there was a bench nearby, and she managed to guide him over to that. “Are you alright?!” She asked the question reflexively, since it was obvious that he wasn’t. He was breathing heavily, and she saw that his forehooves were shaking slightly.
“I’m fine.”
His answer made her snort. “You’re not fine. You’re…” she trailed off as she realized what was going on. “You’re still hurt from before, since you wouldn’t let Fireflower’s brother finish healing you.”
“It’s nothing that I can’t handle.” He was already trying to get up, and she moved to support him the way she had been when they’d walked back into town. He glanced at her for a moment, clearly not happy with accepting her help, but she glared back at him in a silent challenge, daring him not to accept her assistance, and he didn’t push the issue.
For a minute she thought about insisting that they go get Fireflower’s brother again, but she knew that he’d already made up his mind on that, and that trying to get him to change it would only make him dig his hooves in. Instead, she thought of a different plan. “So listen, I know you said you wanted to go run some errands, but I’m totes starved. What do you say we go get a late lunch somewhere?”
He looked at her silently again, and she had the distinct impression that he’d seen through her. But to her surprise, he didn’t protest, instead nodding without a word, and she smiled as she guided him out of city hall.
“You can’t be serious.”
Brightrose smiled in the face of his sister’s acerbic response. “Why not?” He leaned back in his chair, waving a hoof at Busy Bee to indicate that he wanted another plate of her pancakes. Silently, he thanked Tender Tree again for convincing her sister to put them up while they figured out what to do next.
“It’s not our home, that’s why not!” Shadowvine retorted hotly. “It’s not even our world! This isn’t where we belong.” She looked around at her siblings. “Right?”
Breezyleaf looked up from the pancakes that she was happily consuming. “I think that anywhere is fine, so long as we’re together.”
Rockwood nodded. “I didn’t dislike our forest, but it was just a forest. Home is where all of us are.”
Everyone then glanced at Fireflower, but he didn’t answer, simply staring down at the table despite the chatter going on around him. He’d been like that for the last several minutes, and it was enough to make Shadowvine frown in annoyance, starting to reach towards him.
Brightrose quickly spoke up before she could. “Also, staying here has certain advantages.”
That got Shadowvine’s attention, and she frowned. “Advantages? What advantages?”
“These pony bodies, for one.”
Shadowvine gave her brother a confused look. “What are you talking about? What’s so great about a form that doesn’t have fingers?”
Brightrose gave her a knowing grin. “It makes up for it elsewhere. Or at least, it does if you’re male.”
For a moment Shadowvine didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then his meaning became clear, and she darkened in embarrassment. “You’re disgusting!” she shouted, throwing her fork at him. He ducked under it, laughing.
“That’s enough of that!”
Setting a new plate of pancakes down in front of Brightrose, Busy Bee, the proprietress of the bed-and-breakfast where they were staying, gave Shadowvine a stern look, causing her to fidget in her seat. “I’m letting you lot stay here because my sister asked me to, but if you get rowdy then you can look for new accommodations. Is that clear?” Her last question was directed towards Brightrose, and he gave her his most charming smile.
“My good lady, we would never dream of disrupting your business. In fact, please allow me to clear our dishes for you. Fireflower?” He stood up, nudging his brother, who blinked as he came out of his reverie. “Help me with these, will you?” Brightrose explained as he gathered up the plates and utensils. Fireflower seemed confused by what was going on, but followed his brother’s lead.
After they’d taken the dishes out to the kitchen, Fireflower started to head back, but Brightrose pulled him aside, pulling him into a hallway apart from the dining area. Once he was sure they were alone, Brightrose looked at Fireflower, his earlier playfulness gone. “What’s wrong?”
“Huh?”
“What’s going on with you?” pressed Brightrose. “You’ve been spacing out most of the day, and you’ve barely said two words in the last hour.”
Fireflower’s brow furrowed. Had he really been that out of it? “Nothing, I just…it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” insisted Brightrose. “The last time you were like this was when you accidently set Rockwood’s hair on fire and were insisting that you’d never use magic again.”
Fireflower flushed at the memory. “I was seven years old then!”
“Exactly. And that’s the way you’re acting now. So I’m asking you, what’s going on?” Brightrose paused for a moment, and when no answer was forthcoming, ventured ahead. “Is this about that mare you told me about before? Sonata?”
Fireflower winced, and Brightrose knew he was right. “You should go see her.”
But Fireflower was already shaking his head. “I saw her earlier today. I don’t have any good reason to go see her again.”
Brightrose smiled softly. “Being in love with her isn’t a good reason?”
“It’s not like…it’s complicated.”
“No, it’s not. It’s incredibly simple. You’re in love with her. You should go to her and tell her that.”
“Why?” Fireflower shook his head, a resigned expression on his face. “So she can tell me that she thinks I’m sweet, and a very good friend, but that she doesn’t feel the same way? I already know that. I don’t need to put both of us through making her say it.”
“You don’t know that she’ll say that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Fire-”
“Yes, I do.” Fireflower repeated, his expression was now one of total certitude. “The entire time we were together, she was thinking about Lex. He was all she talked about, all she thought about. I knew it, but…I didn’t want to accept it. And then I saw how utterly heartbroken she was when she thought he was dying.” He shook his head at the memory. “You remember her expression when you healed him? She never looked at me that way. Not even close. So yeah, I know that’s what she’ll say if I tell her my feelings.”
Brightrose was silent in the wake of his brother’s protest, digesting what he’d said. Seconds ticked by before he replied. “I still think you should tell her.”
Fireflower snorted, but Brightrose kept going. “Look, I’m not going to claim that I understand what you’re going through right now. But I know that even when I get turned down, I don’t regret making passes at pretty girls. I do regret the ones I don’t ever make a pass at to begin with.”
“I think it’s a little different than that.” Fireflower rolled his eyes at the comparison.
“Nah,” grinned Brightrose, his earlier joviality returning. “I think it’s exactly like that, just a lot more intense.” He wrapped a leg over his brother’s shoulders, guiding him back towards the dining area, the conversation apparently being over. “Anyway, in the meantime I’m going to find you a nice rebound mare. For starters, what do you think of Busy Bee?”
“Brightrose…” groaned Fireflower, giving a rueful grin.
“I’m totally serious. I think she was making eyes at you back there.” Pleased that he’d gotten his brother to crack a smile, Brightrose kept laying it on as he led Fireflower back to the others.
The afternoon passed quickly for Lex. While he’d harbored some thoughts about finishing lunch quickly and then making preparations for going to Vanhoover, Sonata clearly had other ideas. While she’d found a restaurant easily enough, some small pasta place with low lighting and large booths that were semi-private, everything after that had proceeded at a leisurely pace.
First she’d taken her time ordering, telling the waiter more than once that they needed more time to make up their minds. Then she’d dawdled over her meal, taking small bites at a relaxed pace as she’d kept up a conversation, largely one-sided, about everything from her time on that “Earth” place (“seriously, it was the pits!”) to some of the friends she’d made since then (“I wonder what Pinkie is doing right now?”). And then she’d insisted on repeating the entire process over dessert.
To Lex, it was obvious that she was attempting to prolong their meal so that he could rest. If it had been anypony else doing that, he would either have ignored their procrastinating and proceeded at his own pace or simply castigated them for trying to slow him down. But having so recently reaffirmed his love for Sonata, the knowledge that she wanted to take care of him filled him with a pleasant warmth, and he couldn’t bring himself to do either of those things.
That wasn’t the only reason, however. The other one was that, once he’d curled up on his side of the booth and felt exhaustion wash over him, it became clear to him just how badly he was struggling just to keep himself going. While he wasn’t in agony any longer, the pain of his injuries was still lingering, and attempting to push through it was only depleting his stamina faster. As it was, it was only when the plate of food – some noodle, cheese, and tomato sauce dish that Sonata had picked out on his behalf – was placed in front of him that he even realized that he was hungry, not having eaten since yesterday.
Availing himself of the time that Sonata was buying to rest, it was only after they’d lingered over a finished dessert for what had to have been a half-hour that Lex reminded his girlfriend that they needed to join the mayor for her formal announcement of her abdication. Sonata had clearly been hesitant to leave, probably still concerned about him, but a kiss was all it took to silence her worries.
The actual statement had been a surprisingly brief affair. Once they’d arrived at the town square, where a massive party was in full swing in celebration of the recent troubles being over, a pair of burly earth ponies had escorted them to a stage where Ribbon and Lucy had been waiting for them.
After calling the crowd to order, Ribbon then told the citizens what she’d learned from Lex and Sonata, about how a dragon had orchestrated everything in an attempt to dupe the ponies of Tall Tale into becoming its unwitting source of food. She had also explained how the araneas that had attacked the city were victims themselves, and pleaded for them to be forgiven. Finally, she had explained her role in the entire affair, treating her having been magically beguiled as an explanation, but not an excuse.
When she announced that she was therefore resigning her office, the crowd had balked, with several ponies yelling their displeasure with her decision. But when Ribbon stated that she was turning her position over to Lex, going out of her way to emphasize how he had been the one who had not only discovered what was going on but had single-hoofedly defeated the dragon in a one-on-one fight, the crowd’s opposition had vanished entirely.
At that point, it had been Lex’s turn to speak. However, he had personally uttered only a few sentences to the crowd. “I am Lex Legis. At the insistence of Ribbon Cutter, and in consideration for all of you, I will be administrating Tall Tale from now on. My spokespony, Sonata Dusk, will now make a statement on my behalf.”
At that point, Lex had stepped aside in favor of Sonata taking center-stage, casting a cantrip that would let him whisper his words to her from a distance as he did so. He then read his part of the statement, letting Sonata translate it into more relatable speech.
Ribbon had initially objected to this arrangement, insisting that it would be best for him to personally appeal to the crowed, but Lex had refused to compromise on this point. The sudden applause that he’d received when entering city hall had driven home that the public was predisposed to like him, and he was determined not to squander that. To that end, he felt certain that it was better to let Sonata, with her natural charisma and overflowing personal appeal, speak for him…even if that meant her saying how he was “totes” going to work “really reeeally” hard to make things “super awesome” in Tall Tale.
The results were what he’d hoped for. While the assembled ponies seemed surprised at how briefly he’d spoken, they warmed to Sonata quickly. By the time she said that he’d be assigning Ribbon Cutter to act in his place while he “fixed up” Vanhoover, the crowd was applauding, happy that their new administrator was effectively keeping their beloved mayor in place with nothing more than a title-change.
After that the party had resumed, but although Ribbon had told Lex that there were several prominent individuals that wanted to meet him, Lex had declined, citing preparations that needed to be made for Vanhoover’s immediate disaster-relief. After that, they had returned to Sonata’s hotel room; for everything he’d told Ribbon, it was clear to him that Tall Tale was going to celebrate through the night. The only preparations he’d be able to make, he knew, would be alone.
Once they’d returned, Sonata had ushered Lex into bed, despite it only being late afternoon. At that point he’d protested her trying to coddle him, and a brief back-and-forth had ended in a compromise, with him getting into bed and her handing him one of the scrolls from the dragon’s hoard to look over.
After he’d determined that the scroll wasn’t trapped or otherwise equipped with any sort of defenses, he’d done just that. As it turned out, it was quite the find, outlining a powerful spell – within Lex’s abilities, though at the limit of what he could cast without needing to focus additional energy through his body – designed to pierce all magic that could fool the eye, letting the spell’s recipient see all things as they truly were.
Lex had been quite taken with the spell effect, and had already been mentally noting the spell’s usefulness and drawbacks – the duration was quite short, and a successful casting required a mixture of several expensive unguents to be spread over the eyelids – when he’d finally succumbed to his tiredness and fallen asleep.
It was the middle of the night when Lex awoke, snapping to alertness as his ever-present nightmares abated. As unpleasant as his perpetual bad dreams were, their awfulness was ameliorated by the sight of his lady-love sleeping next to him, apparently having crawled into bed at some point.
A smile crept over his face as he watched her sleep, and he couldn’t resist gently caressing her mane. Slipping out of bed, he made sure that he didn’t disturb her as he did so. She had made sure that he had rested during the day; he owed her the same consideration now.
Once he was up, it took only a thought to invoke the dark magic of his horn, enhancing his senses to allow him to see in the dark with complete clarity, though only in black-and-white. Still, that was sufficient for what he intended.
After she’d retrieved the scroll from the extradimensional space that she’d been using as a hair ornament, she’d left that space rolled up on a nearby table. Now, Lex unrolled it in the middle of the room, taking care not to let the coins shift as he lifted the small statuette out of the hole, rolling it back up after he’d done so.
Holding it in his telekinetic grip, Lex took a moment to examine the statuette up close. A moment of concentration was enough to confirm again, thanks to his circlet, that it had no magical properties. Still, it was quite clearly an impressive work of art, depicting a beautiful alicorn mare, her wings flared and her mane flowing. If Lex had to guess, he’d have ventured that it was of the Sun Queen – Everglow’s most popular goddess, who was said to move that world’s sun the way that Princess Celestia did Equestria’s – but as he’d paid only scant attention to that world’s gods, he wasn’t entirely certain. Still, the icon was likely to adequately serve for what he had in mind…
Placing the statuette, as well as the scroll he’d been perusing earlier, which Sonata had laid on the room’s single desk after he’d fallen asleep, inside his haversack, Lex prepared to depart. The sole remaining order of business was to leave Sonata a note, just in case she woke up.
Taking a piece of paper and quill from his haversack, Lex paused as he noticed what was underneath them. It was the newspaper that he’d bought on the train that had taken them to Tall Tale, the one with the headline about Princess Cadance dispatching clerics to Equestria’s major cities. Seeing it again made him grit his teeth, and confirmed that what he was about to do was the right decision.
Replacing the newspaper in his bag, he quickly scribbled a note saying that he had gone to run a late errand and would be back soon, placing it on the pillow next to Sonata. Then, with one last lingering glance at his beloved, Lex changed into a shadow and flitted out of the room.
Despite the late hour, Tall Tale was still active, and Lex saw that lights had been strung down the main thoroughfares as ponies continued to make merry. He avoided those, sticking to the darker side-streets as he sped towards the edge of town. Having no legs to carry him nor lungs to be filled in his form, he didn’t need to pace himself, and had soon left Tall Tale behind.
He slowed down only slightly as he entered the woods, checking to make sure that he was going in the direction that he remembered when he’d made this trip with the would-be evacuees less than a day earlier. Confirming that he hadn’t veered from his intended course, he kept going, and after a time reached the edge of the woods.
Overhead, the moon was nearing its zenith. Though not full, its gibbous form was waxing, bathing the open field in a pale light that illuminated the area. Most stark was the corpse of the dragon that Lex had killed, still lying where it had fallen, undisturbed.
Changing back into his solid body, Lex stalked towards the unmoving body, glancing around out of habit as he did so. Other than the area where the dragon’s breath weapon had scarred the ground, there was little evidence of the titanic battle that had been fought here. The black wall that he’d conjured had long since crumbled into nothing, as he’d known it would. Nothing that he’d ever made from crystallized darkness had ever lasted more than an hour before losing its cohesion.
Turning his attention back to the dragon’s body, Lex regarded it with undisguised loathing. Bad enough that it was a creature whose nature was to prey on others, but that it had tried to do so on ponies, the noblest of races, was unforgiveable. That it had dared to try and harm his beloved was far worse. Killing the creature had been the very least it deserved.
But at least it would do some good now…
Taking the statuette out from his haversack, Lex placed it on the ground in front of the dragon, and then stepped back. Standing up on his hind legs, he raised his forelimbs as he looked up at the moon and began to chant.
The central definition of spellcasting was that it involved shaping and directing internalized magical energies to produce external effects. This was true for every magical discipline that Lex had ever heard of. In all of them, without exception, the premise of casting a spell was to absorb energy into one’s self and then release it.
Early on in his attempts to create a new, superior form of magic, Lex had questioned that premise. Absorbing energy only to release it again had seemed, at the time, horribly inefficient due to how it limited the spellcaster to what they could take into themselves. Why not just shape the ambient energy directly, without having to incorporate it first, and directly produce the effects that way?
Experimentation had soon revealed the answer. While it was possible to try and shape magical energy without absorbing it first, doing so was monstrously difficult. Flowing freely throughout the environment, the magical energy writhed and whirled, constantly in motion. Attempting to forcibly direct it into specific patterns and shapes in its natural state, rather than with internalized pieces, was like attempting to build a sandcastle even as the tide came rushing in. It required significant effort not only to construct, but simultaneously had to be defended and reinforced lest it be toppled by the tumult of energy around it, quite possibly to disastrous effect.
Still, Lex had performed this ritual – he could not call it a spell – twice before. It had failed spectacularly the first time, resulting in the creation of the tulpa that had haunted his dreams ever since. The second time it had succeeded against all odds, allowing him to save Sonata from a situation where he had been powerless otherwise. And now he was using it again…
Lex shaped the energy even as he felt it struggling against his control, trying to collapse back into formlessness. Focusing harder, he continued to pile it onto itself, making it take the shape that he needed, directing it into the motions that he required. It surged back against his will, and for a moment he thought that it was going to escape his grasp, but he somehow held on and pushed the final aspects together, even as his chant reached its culmination, roaring an invocation aloud.
A moment later blue fire erupted around him.
The azure flames surrounded him completely, reaching so high into the sky that nothing else could be seen save for the moon shining down on him from above. The space they enclosed seemed small, only a few dozen yards across, but it was hard to be sure. Even with his vision enhanced, the fire seemed to create shadows rather than dispelling them, and the entire area looked murky. It took a moment for him to realize that both the statuette and the dragon’s body were gone. He hoped that that was a good sign.
Across from him, where the shadows were thickest, movement drew Lex’s attention.
“The first time you tried to summon me, I was amused,” spoke a voice. Its pitch was harsh, yet undeniably feminine. It was also brimming with power, enough that just hearing it sent a cold shudder down Lex’s spine, which he fought to keep suppressed. Whether he survived the next few minutes would depend on how well he presented himself, he knew.
“The second time, I was intrigued.” The voice continued speaking as its owner stepped out of the shadows.
A moment later, Lex beheld the imperious form of the Night Mare, Everglow’s ruthless goddess of the night and its creatures.
The Night Mare’s declaration of her anger was no mere pronouncement.
Even as the words passed her lips, Lex felt a sudden pressure settle over him. It was as though the very air had thickened into a heavy weight, and it almost made his knees buckle. Even worse was how the strain went beyond mere physical stress, filling his mind with the force of her wrath.
It was enough to nearly make him collapse, and Lex felt an abrupt urge to prostrate himself and beg for the Night Mare’s forgiveness. But the thought was so alien, so utterly unacceptable, that he immediately rebelled against it. Banishing the impulse, he forced his legs to remain straight, his head held high as he looked at her directly.
The goddess was far larger than himself, larger than even Princess Celestia. Her dark blue form was armored, her back and sides covered in a thick metal coat that, though it was unmarred, did not gleam in the slightest. She wore a helmet that left her face open, and her horn was so sharply pointed that there could be no doubt that it could be used as a weapon. Most notable, however, were her wings. Unlike the feathery limbs that were characteristic of every alicorn Lex had ever seen, the Night Mare’s wings were leathery, like a bat’s.
At his refusal to cower before her, the Night Mare’s eyes narrowed just slightly, and Lex heard her grunt. A moment later the pressure vanished, allowing him to move freely again. The next move, he knew, was his.
“Our last meeting ended with our relationship being dissolved. I was hoping that my gifts were sufficient to open a new dialogue between us.”
Lex had first performed this ritual shortly after his arrival in Everglow. It had been a desperate attempt to locate Princess Luna, since he’d had reason to believe that dreams occupied their own plane equidistant to all others, and use her as a beacon to figure out a way back to Equestria. The ritual had failed, and instead created the phantom that still haunted his nightmares to this day.
But shortly afterwards, Lex had found himself in possession of a small trickle of sarcerdotal thaumaturgy – divine spellcasting, the magic of those ponies who bowed and scraped and prayed to the gods for power. That he was suddenly receiving such magic without formally petitioning the gods for it, even if it was just a small hooffull compared to those who called themselves clerics, was unusual. He had eventually decided that it was because one of them was judging him on an orthopraxic scale; that it was rewarding him for living in a manner that they approved of. He had, over time, guessed who it was, but had never bothered to confirm it.
Eventually, however, events had resulted in his patron’s identity being made explicitly clear.
It was barely more than a week ago that he, Sonata, and several others had blindly stumbled into the realm of Kara, the goddess of love and shapeshifters, while trying to quit Everglow in favor of Equestria. With no way to leave the goddess’s realm without her permission, Lex had desperately summoned the Night Mare, the source of the magic he’d been given, as a last resort. The gamble had paid off, but the Night Mare had been displeased by his reliance on her, and had revoked her gifts to him, making it clear that she was done aiding him…and yet now he had called on her again.
“‘Gifts’? You mean a petty idol to another goddess and the carcass of one half-grown dragon?” she sneered.
“The statuette was an object of great value, given to you so that you could eclipse one of your rivals, even if only in effigy, by making something of hers your own.” The Sun Queen, who Lex was mostly sure had been the subject of that carving, was the nominal leader of Everglow’s pantheon of gods, including the Night Mare, a situation which he was certain she chafed at. “As for the dragon, it wasn’t just its body that I was offering you. Rather, I slew that creature personally, in single combat. I offered it to you in dedication of that feat. Surely that’s sufficient to earn a little of your goodwill.”
“Very little. Sufficient only that if you terminate this summons immediately, I might not drag you with me as I depart and make you the newest slave in my realm.” Her voice had changed to a growl as she uttered her threat, and the sound of it was almost cacophonous, paining Lex’s ears.
He had no reason to disbelieve her intentions, nor did he have any reason to doubt that she was capable of making good on her threat. As a goddess, every indication was that she was more powerful than a thousand dragons. But Lex wasn’t ready to let negotiations end before they had even formally begun.
“No. Not until we’ve parleyed.”
“Then you will suffer!” the Night Mare snarled, baring her teeth as her patience came to an end. The terrible pressure had already returned, stronger than before, and Lex again had to struggle to keep from collapsing. “The beginning of your eternity of suffering!” She reared up on her hind legs, and he knew she was about to unleash her fury upon him.
In the instant before she struck, Lex spoke, unleashing his own counterattack. He had prepared this just in case things had gone this way, and it was his last hope to make the Night Mare back down. It wasn’t a spell – he had no illusions that any magic of his could possibly affect her – but rather a single sentence.
“Then you’ll never be worshipped in Equestria.”
The Night Mare paused, freezing in place, and Lex grinned internally, knowing that his gamble had paid off. On Everglow it was considered axiomatic that gods desired mortal worship, though the exact reason why was unclear; the reason Lex had heard the most was that worship empowered the gods somehow, or gave them some other sort of advantage in their jockeying for position and influence amongst each other, but even that was just a rumor.
Still, there was no doubt in his mind that the adulation of mortals was extremely important to deities. The reason he had ended up in Kara’s realm before was because she had wanted them to lead her to Equestria, which Lex and his companions had been wholly unwilling to do. It was obvious, at least to Lex, why she would have wanted that. Equestria was a realm where religion was unknown, and so presented a vast new swath of potential worshippers for Everglow’s deities. It was a desire that he fully intended to leverage.
“What do you mean, upstart?” Slowly, the Night Mare returned to all fours, the massless weight on Lex’s body receding as she did so. Her expression of anger was now replaced with one of gelid consideration.
Now, Lex knew, was the time to make his pitch, while he had her interest. “Equestria’s ruling princesses have granted me authority over Vanhoover, one of its major cities. Just now, I’ve also assumed power over Tall Tale, another major metropolitan center. With both of them, I have control over a considerable portion of northwestern Equestria. More than that, I’m now in a favorable position to spread my influence south, along the coast. Once I’ve done that, I’ll have enough territory to formally break from Equestria and found my own kingdom.”
“Get to the point.”
Lex took a single step towards her as he spoke, making a show of his resolve. “I am prepared to make you the patron goddess of my dominion. Your church will be part of my state, its clerics part of my institutions, its holy days celebrated by my government. No other god will be formally sponsored by me or my vassals in any area that I control.”
“And in exchange you ask for what?”
“Several things. First, I want you to restore the divine spells you were granting me before.”
The Night Mare snorted. “And you have no desire to receive greater spellcasting from me?”
Lex shook his head. “I don’t. I’ve seen what happens to those who receive sacerdotal thaumaturgy without first conditioning themselves via rites and prayers. The sudden influx of energy warps their bodies.” Hearing how that disgusting hybrid that called itself Soft Mane had been blinded by the power Lashtada had forced on her, Lex had no desire to strain his body further with more magic than it could easily hold.
“What else, then?”
“I require a magical artifact, one of unsurpassed power, so that I can easily replenish my own magic. I don’t care what it is or what it does, so long as it’s easily portable and not debilitating to me. And that’s not all.”
The Night Mare’s eyes narrowed again, but she didn’t respond, so Lex continued.
“I have no doubt that I can manage the affairs of my realm more than adequately, but I have no intention of nurturing your faith only for it to turn against me later. Since I don’t know your gospel and can use only a few of your spells, I’m going to need an inarguable sign of your favor.”
“You doubt your ability to control those under you?” Her lips pulled back in a sardonic grin, but there was a dangerous tone in her voice, and Lex chose his next words carefully.
“No. But I will not allow religious zealotry to foment dissent against me. If I am the head of the government that your church is a part of, then I must have a sign of your benediction. One that will leave no mistake as to my possessing your favor.”
Her grin fell away, to be replaced with her usual scowl. Lex hoped that meant that she was mollified. Still, her voice when she next spoke was scornful. “So in exchange for your promise to spread my worship, despite your admission that you know nothing of it, you would have me grant you all of these extravagant favors up front? I suppose you want me to give you an army of monsters, too?”
Lex shook his head. “That’s everything. I can do the rest on my own.”
“Hm. I thought that you would at least ask for me to lift the tantabus curse that I placed on you.” She raised a hoof, and Lex’s shadow immediately arced up behind him, visible against the blue flames.
It was unexpected enough to make him gape, forgetting himself momentarily. “You did that? I thought…” he trailed off as he reined in his surprise, trying to recover his poise. He had been sure that that thing had been psychic backlash from the first time he’d tried this ritual. That the Night Mare had deliberately inflicted it upon him wasn’t something he’d ever considered.
“I did, both as punishment for your temerity in contacting me directly without an ounce of faith in your heart, and to see if you could overcome this crucible. I have to say that I’m disappointed. You’ve barely gained any control over this fragment of yourself.”
Again, Lex had to struggle to contain his surprise. That thing could be controlled? Gritting his teeth, he tried to deal with this new development. “I’ve had more pressing concerns occupying my time. That…thing is one that I fully intend to deal with, at a time of my choosing.” Her dark chuckle told him how unconvincing he’d been, but she lowered her hoof, and his shadow fell back, lost amidst the murkiness surrounding them.
Eager to get past this derailment, Lex quickly pressed his original point. “Do we have a bargain, then?”
The Night Mare’s face tightened. “I don’t need you in order to gain access to this world, you know. I have several other potentials that I’m evaluating even now.”
“And do any of them have a fraction of my ability or my ambition? Or are they mere malcontents, unable to accomplish even a portion of what I can?” Lex made a dismissive gesture, confident that she’d know that it was with regards to those other “potentials” and not herself. “I ask you again, do we have a bargain?”
After a long moment of silence, the Night Mare answered. “Very well, then. But there’s one additional stipulation that I will have from you, and it is not negotiable.”
Lex tensed, wary. “And that would be?”
Her cruel grin returned as she answered. “Your soul.”
Lex felt a sense of dread wash over him at the Night Mare’s words, but he kept it from showing on his face. “My soul?”
“Yes.” The Night Mare’s expression didn’t change, but Lex had the distinct impression that she was aware of, and enjoying, his discomfort. “And I will have it, if you wish for this pact to be forged.”
Now it was Lex’s turn to narrow his eyes. “Forget it, then. There are other gods that I can traffic with.”
He expected the Night Mare to respond to that with rage, but to his surprise she simply gave him a condescending smirk. “Go ahead. Even if they found you palatable enough to deal with, and I can assure you that few of them would, they would still make the same demand. Only the wording would change.”
For the third time in as many minutes, Lex was caught off-guard. What did that mean? He could understand that there would be other gods who would refuse to deal with him on an ideological basis – he felt the same way about the vast majority of them – but the idea that all of them would demand his soul as part of any bargain struck didn’t seem like a logical conclusion to draw.
And yet, that was what the Night Mare seemed to be implying.
He was going to have to admit his ignorance if he wanted to learn what she meant, he knew. While he prioritized new knowledge, he hated being taught. It was far more reliable, and more soothing to his ego, to discover new knowledge on his own. But right now that alternative wasn’t available to him. “Why?”
Her reply was immediate, lifting a hoof to point at him. “You will be receiving and utilizing power that comes from me. That means that your soul will acclimate to that power, absorbing it and creating a tie between us. Once you die, and your soul has no body to anchor it, that tie will naturally cause it to gravitate to me.”
Lex paused at that, considering the Night Mare’s words. That certainly explained why she’d maintained that any god that would grant him power would necessarily claim his soul, since the process of receiving that power would make such a claim axiomatic. Which meant… “So this happens to everypony who draws strength from you, then?”
“Without exception. All of my faithful know that they give themselves to me after they die. Even the ones whose devotion is too shallow to create a channel between us still mark themselves as seeking my favor in the afterlife, and so have their souls delivered unto me. Either way, I keep them as my own, to endure my rulership and enjoy my protection for eternity. Unless, of course, I choose to reject them.” Her voice, already filled with callousness, turned particularly vicious at that last part.
“And what happens to them if you do?” Lex couldn’t keep himself from asking.
“Presuming I allow them to continue existing?” she snorted. “Then they’re cast out onto the planes, alone and unprotected. Few of them survive very long, as such unsheltered souls are the stuff of nourishment or entertainment for the denizens there.”
Lex fell silent again, digesting what he’d been told. “So should I agree to this stipulation, then you plan on claiming my soul only after I die?”
The Night Mare shrugged, as though the question were beneath her. “I suppose I could strike you down before then, since no other god would have legitimate grounds to protest my doing so, but that would benefit me not at all. Even if you failed me catastrophically, so long as you continue to live you might redeem yourself in my eyes later.” Her gaze became more pointed as she continued. “But that’s not what you meant, is it?”
Lex tensed. If she had seen through him…
But a dark laugh was her only reaction. “Your ambition to circumvent that particular cosmic law by gaining eternal life neither eludes nor concerns me. I’ve seen more capable ponies than you try to attain that particular prize. Very, very few have ever done so.”
Lex growled at her correctly discerning his plans. Was she reading his thoughts somehow? He had protections against mental intrusions in place, as he’d told Ribbon, but he questioned how effective they’d be against a god. Or did her nature as a deity grant her insight enough to make his motivations transparent? Either way, it made no difference now.
One way or another, Lex knew that he needed divine patronage. Even the small amount of sacerdotal thaumaturgy that he’d received before had been strongly oriented towards magic that could be used to protect and sustain others. Creating food and water from nothing. Banishing disease with a touch. Restoring sight or hearing to those that had lost it. All things that a leader should do for his subjects.
Moreover, developing a clerical organization with access to such magic would do a lot to restore order in Equestria. Able to be used by anypony that developed a strong faith in the Night Mare, it would require little direct training on his part. And Lex knew that such magic also had more martial spells as well, which could be used to defend the citizenry from attacks like what Tall Tale had suffered.
The benefits didn’t end there, either. By throwing his lot in with a deity, Lex was certain that it would become much more difficult for another god to take direct action against him. After all, the Night Mare had stated, when she’d pulled them from Kara’s realm, that by bringing the two deities into opposition the way he had, it had risked sparking a divine war. He was certain that would be the case if another deity directly lashed out at him now that he was working on the Night Mare’s behalf.
And of course, having access to the healing magic she’d granted him before, meager though it was, would have spared him the indignity of needing Fireflower’s brother to heal him after he’d slain that dragon. Which reminded him of one loose end that needed to be taken care of.
“Very well then. I’ll agree to your terms, but with one minor stipulation of my own.”
The Night Mare’s amusement died instantly. “You try my patience severely. You are already being granted more than even my most devout would dare ask for.”
“This one is a truly minor thing, not even a trifle.”
He named his remaining request then, and the Night Mare sneered with disdain. “Were that not so insignificant, I would deny you it just to spite you for your temerity.”
“Then I’m glad we can agree that it’s not worth abandoning such a mutually-beneficial arrangement over.”
“Hmph. So be it then.” The Night Mare flared her wings. “I will give you all that you have asked for, and in return you will deliver the faith of your people unto me. If you fail me in this, or try to renege on our bargain, I will be waiting for you to die so that you can endure an eternity of pain and degradation in penance. Succeed, and I might have further use for you.”
“I never break my word once I give it,” replied Lex, giving the Night Mare a level look. “And no matter what setbacks I may face, I never stop until I overcome them.”
“I hope so, for your sake.” She tapped a hoof against the ground lightly. “The magic that I withdrew from you has now been restored.”
She needn’t have said so. Lex could already feel the energy in his mind once again. It wasn’t very much, allowing for perhaps three spells in a single day if he didn’t use any of his energy-manipulation tricks to get more uses from them. But they had the utility that he remembered, beyond what his native magic, or his horn’s dark magic, were able to produce.
“As for your second request…” The Night Mare again lowered her hoof to the ground, but when she raised it she drew, seemingly from nowhere, a large scythe. Releasing it, the weapon hovered in the air of its own accord, before drifting gently over to Lex, resizing itself so as to be an appropriate size for a pony of less gigantic stature than the goddess.
“Allow me to introduce Severance. Continue to live as an example of my creed, and he will serve you well.”
Lex frowned at the odd statement, even as he reached out to grasp the scythe with his telekinesis. The way she was talking about the weapon almost made it sound as if it were-
His thoughts were interrupted as he took hold of the scythe, and felt a greeting slide across his consciousness.
Lex immediately released it and jumped back. “This thing is alive!” he yelled reflexively.
The Night Mare raised a brow. “Of course. The best tools are those that can execute orders without needing to be directly managed or constantly supervised.”
Lex regarded the floating blade warily. He concentrated for a moment, activating his circlet’s ability to let him see the magical spectrum, and looked at Severance…only to immediately wince and avert his eyes, now smarting in pain from how brightly the weapon glowed to his augmented vision. He shut down the magical sight and turned back to the weapon, frowning in thought. “What powers does it possess?”
“I thought you didn’t care, so long as it was able to serve as your battery?” replied the goddess tauntingly.
Lex glared at her reproachfully for just a moment, then tentatively reached out to telekinetically grasp the scythe again. If the goddess wouldn’t be forthcoming, then he’d have to appeal to the living weapon directly. As he grasped it for the second time, its words again came into his mind, and Lex frowned at the message. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he growled.
The Night Mare, overhearing the telepathic conversation, interjected with an explanation. “If Severance is wielded by one that he doesn’t consider worthy of me, he reshapes his wielder’s mentality to better please me. That he approves of you means that he doesn’t consider that necessary. You should feel honored.”
Honored was the furthest thing from Lex’s mind as he digested that thought. Pushing down his revulsion, he instead pulled the scythe to him. He felt a moment of resistance, just enough to let him know that it was there, and then it moved as he directed it, coming to float at his side in the roiling purple of Lex’s telekinetic aura.
“And now for the mark of my favor,” intoned the Night Mare, raising her right foreleg and holding it out towards Lex. “Touch me.”
For a moment, he felt confused. It looked almost like she wanted him to hoof-bump her. But there was no way she could be making such an informal gesture…could she? He moved forward slowly, glancing up at her for some sign of her intentions, but none was forthcoming. Finally he was close enough to make contact with her, Severance floating by his side of its own accord as he released it, and looked at her outstretched hoof again.
With no further instructions to guide him, Lex reached out with his left forehoof, and gently pressed it to hers. But as he did so, he found that he couldn’t pull it away, leaving his limb trapped against the goddess’s.
A moment later, the armor guarding her shin shimmered and flowed, as though it were made of water instead of metal. A fraction of it detached from the rest, formless like a liquid, and flowed down her hoof and over his as though it were alive. As it moved to just above his own hoof, still caught fast against the Night Mare’s, the liquid metal circled his lower leg like a bracelet and began to solidify.
An instant later, they became a coil of jagged iron wires, which then began to tighten around his hoof, still writhing. Bloody furrows were dug into Lex’s flesh, and he instinctively tried to pull his hoof away, but it was futile. All he could do was endure the pain and try not to scream as the iron wires dug deeper into his leg.
“This is the sign of my benediction,” intoned the Night Mare as the jagged metal sliced into him. “You shall contain a fragment of my essence within you, your very body a symbol of my power. As I am the goddess of the fell beasts that dwell in the dark, so shall you be their king. As I am clad in armor, so shall the protective magic you wear be augmented. As I make order out of anarchy, so shall you resist chaos.”
The iron wire dug deeper as she spoke, but the pain was eclipsed by her words. Lex didn’t so much hear them as he felt them, each syllable reverberating through him as though from the inside out. The sensation grew stronger as she spoke, and with each word Lex felt as though his body was being ripped apart from within, about to burst.
“As I will conquer all, so shall you rule this world, my Chosen.”
Suddenly Lex stumbled back from the Night Mare, now free. Glancing at his left foreleg, he saw that the iron wire was now deeply embedded in it, just above the hoof. It only hurt slightly, despite the blood flowing from his fresh wounds. As he stared at it, Lex somehow knew that it was there permanently, that it could never be removed so long as his deal with the Night Mare remained inviolate.
That wasn’t the only sensation making itself known to him though. As he calmed down, Lex realized that the power that had only moments ago felt like it was about to make him explode was now comfortably flowing through him, as natural as if it had always been a part of him. The feeling was heady, as though he was overflowing with vigor.
It was so exciting that it took Lex a moment to realize that something else was different. There were unfamiliar sensations against his skin, and a quick glance showed that there was an amulet around his neck, a cloak over his back, and an anklet around his right foreleg. Frowning as he realized they looked familiar, Lex quickly examined them, using his circlet to check their magical signatures, all of which were defensive in nature. That confirmed what he’d suspected: these were the magic items that he’d sacrificed to the Night Mare back when he’d summoned her in Kara’s realm.
He looked up at her, opening his mouth to ask about her unusual bout of generosity, but she beat him to it. “Lagniappe,” she explained. “Those trinkets mean nothing to me, whereas you have a new order to create.”
“And so I shall,” Lex murmured, more to himself than her. Floating close enough to let its handle touch his side, Lex heard Severance quietly echo the statement as well.
“As for your final request…” the Night Mare punctuated her statement with another stomp of her hoof, and suddenly the blue fire that had surrounded them was gone. Looking around, calling on the dark magic of his horn once again to enhance his sight, Lex could see that they were no longer on the field where he had slain the dragon, but instead deep in a forest.
Walking over to a large patch of dirt that looked like it had been dug up and filled in relatively recently, the Night Mare stood in front of it. For a moment, her horn glowed, the aura surrounding it a brilliant, bloody red. Then the glow was gone, and she looked up, as though already bored.
“With that, our bargain is complete. From this point on, you’ll be-”
In mid-sentence, the Night Mare cut herself off, her head snapping around to look off to her left. “That miserable little trollop!” she hissed, eyes blazing with sudden anger.
“What are-” Lex started to speak, but was interrupted as the Night Mare turned her attention back to him.
“I’ve given you what you asked for, now fulfill your promises to me! Or else!”
With that last outburst, a flash of blue fire erupted over the goddess, and then she was gone, leaving Lex alone in the woods save only for Severance.
But their isolation was short-lived. As Lex looked at where the Night Mare had disappeared, the patch of ground that she examined suddenly began to surge, the dirt displacing as a form rose from it, revealing a young mare. Underneath the soft light of the moon, Lex could see that her coat was the soft blue of a lake, and her mane and tail were a deep green. Shaking as she stood up, she looked around, eyes bright with confusion and more than a little fear. When she noticed him, she stopped moving, tensing up.
“Wh-what’s going on? Who are you? Where am I? Where’s everyone else?” She rattled the questions off rapidly, clearly unnerved.
Lex looked back at her steadily, the very picture of calm. “Your name is Waterlily, correct? I heard about what happened to you from your brother, Fireflower. I am Lex Legis, and it’s by my will that you’ve been resurrected. Welcome back to life.”
Sonata smiled as she glanced over at Lex and saw that he had fallen asleep, shaking her head wryly at the sight. That he would only agree to lie down if he could look at one of those scrolls that was in the dragon’s hoard had made her roll her eyes at the time, since it was clear, at least to her, that he was extremely tired. But she’d let him have his own way, and sure enough, now he was totally catching some Z’s.
Gently picking his scroll up so that it wouldn’t disturb him – she could only imagine the tantrum he’d throw if he rolled on top of it in his sleep and ripped it – she rolled it up and put it on the room’s sole desk. Nodding to herself, she turned back to the hole-thingy, currently spread out in the middle of the floor.
Just the sight of all those coins was enough to make her start giggling softly. She briefly thought about scooping up a few of them and going out on a spending spree, but eventually decided not to. Lex had been the one to slay the dragon, after all, so really they were his. Besides, these didn’t even look like Equestrian bits; she’d probably need to figure out how to exchange them or something, and that just sounded like a hassle.
Sighing, Sonata glanced out a window. It was only late afternoon, still plenty of time to go out and do something, especially with the entire city still partying. On the other hand…Sonata glanced at Lex again, feeling a yawn start to form. Maybe a quick power-nap wouldn’t be such a bad idea. It had been a really long day, after all, what with fighting a dragon and making up with each other and her first official job as a spokespony and everything.
Gently climbing onto the bed, Sonata lay down beside her boyfriend, smiling as she looked at his sleeping face. When he wasn’t scowling all the time, he was super cute. Not as cute as when he smiled, but still easy on the eyes. Of course, that might be because she was still buzzing from them making up earlier in the woods. That had been so romantic! Well, except not really, what with the crying and arguing and feeling guilty and everything, but romantic because they’d both remembered just how much they loved each other. Lex had even apologized!
Sonata silently sent thoughts of thanks to Kara. If it hadn’t been for what the love goddess had said, she might have ended up losing Lex! I totes need to run into her again and tell her that I owe her one. Like, a super big one.
Yawning again, Sonata nodded to herself as her eyes closed. A moment later, she drifted off, curled up next to her beloved.
“Hello Sonata. You seem to be doing much better.”
“Kara?!” Sonata eyes widened. In front of her was the now-familiar form of Everglow’s love goddess…or at least one of them; wasn’t Lash-whatshername supposed to be one too?
Looking around, Sonata realized that she was back in the same place that she’d met the goddess before. They were in a large room with no windows and various furniture, all of which was cushioned, spread out across it. It was a little dark, illuminated only by soft lamps that were strewn haphazardly about. Lounging on a central cushion so large that it was almost a bed was Kara, exactly where Sonata had left her.
“I’m back! But that must mean…oh my gosh, I’m dreaming again!”
Kara nodded. “You are. I brought you here after I heard you call out to me again. You sounded much happier this time, so I wanted to know if everything had worked out between you and your stallion.”
“It did!” grinned Sonata. “It did and it was all thanks to you! I thought that we weren’t going to be able to work things out, and he was, like, sooo mad! But then I remembered what you told me and I asked him if he still loved me and he said yes and then we were both crying and hugging and we totes made up!”
Kara beamed, and the sight made Sonata’s joy redouble. “That’s wonderful!” gushed the goddess. “I’m so happy for you!” She held out a hoof in a welcoming gesture, and Sonata charged in to hug the alicorn deity tightly.
After the embrace had concluded, Kara nudged Sonata to lie down next to her. “Now, tell me everything that’s happened since you were here last. Every single detail. I want to hear all of it.”
Sonata was eager to comply, and started talking effusively, going on at length about everything that had happened, and how she felt about it, since the last time she’d seen Kara. The goddess was an attentive listener, nodding and prodding Sonata along expertly, oftentimes asking for more details or what Sonata had thought of certain things.
Finally, Sonata finished her tale.
“…and then I laid down next to him, and I was thinking about how thankful I was that you helped me out when I totes needed it, and then I guess I must have fallen asleep, because next thing I know I’m here with you!” She paused for a moment, suddenly feeling like she’d spent a very long time talking. “Wow, I guess a lot of stuff happened!”
Kara nodded. “Indeed. You and he went through a lot. But in the end, your love reunited you, just like I knew it would.”
“Aw,” blushed Sonata. “Thanks!”
“Now,” continued Kara, “I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”
“A favor?” Sonata blinked, then smiled, happy to be able to do something for the pony that had done so much for her. “For sure I can! You’ve helped me out with Lex out twice now, first when we were in all those caves in your realm or whatever, and then again when I was here last time. Just name it!”
Kara grinned at Sonata’s eagerness. “Well, it just breaks my heart to think that there might be other lonely ponies out there, having problems finding love. I want to help them, but I can’t.”
“You can’t?” Sonata tilted her head in confusion. “Why not?”
“Because,” explained Kara, “I can’t reach them. I’m too far from your world to make contact with them.”
“Huh? But you’re here with me right now.”
“That’s because you called out to me. By calling my name, both aloud and in your heart, you made it possible for me to find you.” Kara slipped a hoof under Sonata’s chin, raising her head even as she lowered her own to place their faces near each other. “That’s why I need your help, Sonata. I need you to tell everypony about me, so that I can help them like I have you. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”
“Oh, sure. That’s no big deal.” Sonata smiled guilelessly. “I’ll totes tell everyone who’s having love problems to give you a call.”
“Good girl,” purred Kara. “Then-”
What happened next was a blur.
Kara suddenly leapt to her hooves, a look of alarm crossing her face. But no sooner had she stood up than there were two other alicorns there, facing her from either side. Each had a hoof out, pressing Kara’s wings against her sides as though to keep her from spreading them. That was when Sonata suddenly noticed that they weren’t in that windowless room anymore. Instead, the scenery was now a dull grey in every direction, featureless and barren.
“So it was true,” intoned the first alicorn. She was a beautiful dark blue, the color of the night sky when the sun had only recently set. Her white mane and tail contrasted with her golden horn, and silvery bangles decorated her front and her legs. “You dared to intrude upon the realm of dreams.”
“You will pay for trespassing here, harlot,” snarled the other alicorn. Her coat was darker than her counterpart’s, and her wings were like a bat’s, with armor covering her body.
Disoriented, Sonata spoke up. “Like, what’s going on?” She around, not sure whether to focus more on the newcomers or the alien environment. The former won out, and she looked back and forth between the two strange alicorns, except…that one in the armor looked kinda familiar… “Hey! I remember you! You were there whe-”
The armored alicorn swept a wing towards Sonata without glancing at her, the gesture undeniably dismissive, and suddenly she woke up, sitting bolt upright in bed. “Huh?! What was…” she trailed off as her brain caught up to her awakened state, leaving her blinking.
“Wow, that was weird,” she muttered to herself. Belatedly realizing that it was dark outside, she laid back down, looking to her side. “Lex, are you…huh?” Realizing that her boyfriend wasn’t beside her, she blinked as she saw a note on the pillow. Picking it up, she walked over to the window, where the city lights gave her enough illumination to read what was written there.
A moment later, her brow furrowed. “An errand? At this hour? Geez Lex. Workaholic much?” she muttered to herself. Feeling too awake to fall back asleep, she glanced around and noticed that the portable hole was still rolled up on the table. Smiling to herself, Sonata decided that maybe spending some money wasn’t a bad idea after all.
A sudden rumbling from her belly made up her mind, and she turned on the lights, blinking at the brightness. Time to see if this place had room service…
“Night Mare, Moon Princess, to what do I owe the pleasure?” asked Kara sweetly, her sultry grin back in place. “Hopefully because you two are looking for some pleasure of your own?” Still pinned between the two, she wiggled her rump as best she was able. “Who’s up for some hot mare-on-mare-on-mare action?”
Neither goddess responded to her flirtation, maintaining their stern looks. “You’ve always been a troublemaker, Kara,” said the Moon Princess. “But this is beyond the pale, even for you.”
The Night Mare was more direct in her recrimination. “The punishment you face for this crime will not be light,” she hissed. “Dreams are part of my divine portfolio, not yours!”
“Our portfolio,” corrected the Moon Princess, looking past Kara to give her rival a frown. The Night Mare ignored the correction, continuing to glare at their captive.
Kara shrugged, as though the charges being leveled against her didn’t concern her in the slightest. “It’s my nature to step on the hooves of others. I’m the goddess of shapeshifters as well as love, after all. In order to pull off my disguises, I need to be able to copy the abilities of even other gods.” She turned to give each goddess a sad look, the very picture of victimhood. “Surely you won't punish me just for being me?”
“That might have been a convincing argument,” admitted the Moon Princess, “if you had been engaging with that mortal while looking like one of us. But you made no attempt to disguise your identity, so you can’t claim that what you did falls within your purview.”
“The other gods will sanction you quite severely for this.” The Night Mare’s voice was filled with vengeful delight at the prospect. “With both of us bringing the indictment against you, they’ll have no other choice.”
“Indeed,” agreed the Moon Princess. “Now, let’s g-”
“Wait,” interrupted Kara, a little too quickly. “How about we make a deal instead? I’m sure I can offer both of you something…delightful, in exchange for forgetting about this little incident.”
“No deals.” The Moon Princess’s reply was immediate.
“What did you have in mind?” said the Night Mare a moment later, drawing a shocked look from her counterpart.
“What are you doing?!”
“What’s in my nature,” stated the Night Mare calmly. “Taking everything I can get.”
Kara grinned, delighted at her offer finding a recipient. “Oh, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement that you’ll like. Pleasing others is my specialty, after all.”
“There will not be any deals!” The Moon Princess’s voice had lowered, taking on a dangerous edge. “Even if you want to play dirty, I can still bring charges against her to the other gods on my own!”
“No, you can’t,” chuckled the Night Mare darkly. “You don’t have the standing necessary to do that.”
The Moon Princess frowned in confusion. “What are you talking about? Of course I do! The same as you: that she intruded upon my exclusive divine purview as goddess of dreams.”
“You’re even more foolish than I thought you were,” sneered the Night Mare. “Do you still not realize that your claim to that area doesn’t reach this jurisdiction?”
“That’s…” the Moon Princess trailed off, suddenly realizing what the Night Mare meant.
The other goddess of the night nodded, smirking. “Precisely. The pony whose dream she was visiting was on another world at the time, not Everglow. And since it’s a world where you have no worshippers, you cannot claim that she was violating your territory.”
Kara burst out laughing at the revelation, while the Moon Princess looked furious. “You realize that the same can be said of you, then.”
“Untrue.” The Night Mare shook her head. “I have a mortal servitor on this world. He gave me his formal pledge less than an hour ago.”
“You have a worshiper here? But who would…ah.” Kara chuckled as the answer came to her. “So it seems that Sonata’s not the only mare who repaired her relationship with that little virgin.”
The Moon Princess bared her teeth in frustration. “If you knew all of this, then why did you alert me to Kara’s transgression? Why bring me here at all?”
“Leverage,” answered the Night Mare. “Having you here made it easier to pressure her into offering me a boon in exchange for letting this matter go.”
“Oh, well played, Night Mare!” laughed Kara heartily.
The Moon Princess was silent for a long moment, glaring at both goddesses in impotent rage. Finally, she lowered her hoof from Kara’s wing, stepping back. “I will not forget this affront,” she vowed, before vanishing an instant later.
Snorting, the Night Mare lowered her hoof from Kara’s other side. Now freed, the love goddess spread her wings, stretching and giving a low, seductive moan of pleasure as she did so. When she finished the alluring display, she turned her head to the Night Mare. “So, what sort of favor did you have in mind? No, wait, let me guess.” She batted her eyes demurely. “A night together with me?”
The Night Mare’s lip curled in disdain. “Your tawdry nature appeals to me not at all, doxy. The favor that I plan on extracting from you will be much more substantial.”
“Are you sure?” Kara lowered her voice to a throaty whisper, circling the Night Mare languidly, her body swaying with every step. “For an entire night, I would be yours entirely. Your plaything. Your slave. I would beg for you with everything I am, refusing you nothing. All that you desire from me, I would desire to give you.”
The Night Mare’s body stiffened into iron rigidity as her hackles raised, and her face twisted into a deep scowl. Slowly, she moved her head to look at Kara directly, baring her teeth. “Insufficient,” she hissed.
“Aw, you’re no fun.” Kara sighed, her wings drooping as she abandoned her seduction attempt.
“I will have my fun when I’ve brought this entire pantheon to its knees before me.”
“Oh, I have no problem kneeling if that’s what you’d like.”
“Enough!” roared the Night Mare. “No more games! I will have your offer, or I will bring my complaints to the other gods! Don’t think that the Moon Princess would abandon her grudge against you to spite me if I did. She is far too invested in justice to let her personal feelings interfere.”
“You lawful types.” Kara rolled her eyes. “Always so focused on process, rather than pleasure. Fine, then. How about this? I’ll give a blessing to that little virgin you’ve thrown in with.”
The Night Mare frowned in thought. “A blessing of what nature?”
Kara shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” scoffed the Night Mare. “I would never trust you so much as to let you near my champion without knowing all of the details about what you plan to do.”
Kara rolled her eyes again. “Alright already. Honestly, you can make a girl feel so unloved sometimes, you know that?” She gave an exasperated sigh before speaking again. “I’ll offer my blessing as the goddess of love to your champion. From this, love for him shall bloom in those hearts that are receptive to his presence.”
She paused, then grinned. “I’ll also throw in some spells for the bedroom, so that he'll know what to do with the mares he gets…or stallions, if it turns out he swings that way too.”
The Night Mare didn’t rise to the bait, instead cocking a brow. “You’ll give him the power to control the hearts of those around him?”
“Only inadvertently. He won’t know that he’s been so blessed, and those affected won’t know it either.” She shrugged again. “In fact, strictly speaking nothing unusual will be happening at all. All I’ll be doing is actualizing the potential for romance within compatible partners who interact with him. If they could love someone like him, then they will. How they deal with those feelings is entirely up to them.”
The Night Mare was silent for a long moment, considering the offer even as she gave Kara a guarded look. “Don’t think that I don’t see your real motivation in this. You’re hoping that these other romances cause a rift between him and his mate so that she’ll continue to call out to you for guidance, giving you more of a presence in this world.”
“Sure,” admitted Kara. “But it’s not like this doesn’t help you out too. We both know that your chosen representative has all the charisma of a wet blanket by himself. Imagine how much his leadership would suffer if he and Sonata broke up for good for whatever reason. This way, he’ll be surrounded by heartfelt support no matter what, assuming he accepts the love he’s offered.” She paused, then added, “I’d recommend not telling him about this, by the way. He’s the type who’d likely try to squash any other blossoming romances if he knew about them.”
“So be it then.” The Night Mare’s tone was one of finality. “Give him this blessing.” Her eyes narrowed then, and she added one final clause. “Permanently and irrevocably.”
Kara paused at that. “That’s a bit demanding, isn’t it? I don’t need to tell you that an irrevocable blessing takes more power.”
“Only slightly. Far less than what you’ll gain from having even a small following here,” countered the Night Mare. “After all, we’re both going to be active on this world now. And since I'm sure you won't be foolish enough to ever tamper with the dreams of mortals again," she paused to let that statement sink in, before continuing, “I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to bear you any lingering grudges.”
Kara sighed again. “Have it your way then. One irrevocable blessing for a life filled with love, coming right up…”
“What…I was…you…” Waterlily didn’t seem to be reassured by what Lex was saying. If anything, his statement had made her shake worse. Gulping, she looked around before returning her gaze to him, trying to get her thoughts in order. “Resurrected?”
Lex nodded, standing there impassively, Severance floating by his side. “Yes. Do you remember what happened before? With the dragon?” He briefly wondered why she seemed so disoriented. Was it the shock of being brought back to life? Or was she still feeling residual fear from what had been an abrupt and terrifying death? Mentally, he shrugged. Either way, she would most likely settle down once he made it clear that she was safe and would be reunited with her family shortly.
“The dragon…” Waterlily trailed off as Lex prompted her, her eyes losing focus as she thought back to the last thing she remembered, but it was a jumbled mixture of fear and confusion. She remembered wanting to show her siblings a new spell she’d learned, gathering them at the lake near their forest. She remembered casting it and then…then it was like they’d been dizzy, and then they’d been at the shore, but not the shore that she knew so well. Worse, they’d found out that their alternate form had become a pony rather than a human.
After that…after that they’d found a cave to hole up in while they’d tried to figure out what had happened and what to do about it. They’d all been talking when suddenly…
Lily felt her breathing get heavier as she remembered what had happened next. Suddenly a large green creature had entered the cave, and just looking at it had scared her worse than anything in her entire life. She remembered trying to run away, her brothers and sisters scattering in a panic, and she’d looked back over her shoulder, sure that it was right behind her…just in time to see a claw coming down…
After that there was nothing.
I died. The thought caused her stomach to twist itself into knots, and she felt the world begin to sway. I died, and…and just now… She looked over at the patch of dirt that she’d been in when she’d sat up, and numbly realized that it was a grave. That it was her grave…
The unicorn across from her was saying something again, but Lily wasn’t listening. All she knew was that she had to get away. She had to get away from here and whoever this stranger was and whatever had happened and everything that could possibly hurt her even more. She had no idea where she could go to be safe but she knew she wasn’t safe here.
Turning, Waterlily ran as fast as she could.
“Your siblings are staying in a nearby town. I’ll take y-, hey! Stop!”
Waterlily’s sudden flight had caught Lex by surprise, but only slightly. Given her fragile state, he’d half-expected her to do something stupid, but he’d thought that it would be an ill-considered attack like Fireflower had done. That would…wait… Even as he started to run after her, Lex frowned as a memory of that first encounter with Fireflower came back to him. Hadn’t he explained why he’d been so aggressive and terrified back then?
“I’m sorry about that,” piped up Fireflower. “Really. I panicked because, when you started chasing me, I thought you might be another aranea whose territory I’d wandered into. I hadn’t eaten or slept in days. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s still kinda weird, isn’t it?” asked Sonata. “I mean, if you ran into others of your own kind, wouldn’t you ask them for help?”
Fireflower shook his head. “Maybe that’s how it is for ponies, but we’re different. We keep to ourselves in small colonies, and only go into another colony’s territory when we’re looking to, you know…” he turned slightly red, “to meet someone else. Even then, there’s supposed to be some formal way of declaring yourself, or so Brightrose told me. Anything else is an attack.”
Cursing himself for overlooking such a salient detail, Lex picked up the pace as he chased Waterlily. No wonder she was panicking! Whatever trauma her death and resurrection entailed was bad enough, but being greeted by an unfamiliar face had most likely exacerbated the situation.
“Stop!” he yelled again, but though she glanced back at him over her shoulder it was clear that she had no intention of obeying his order. If anything it made her run even faster. Lex grit his teeth. Losing her here would be bad. White Tail Woods was the single largest forest on the continent, and while he did have a spell that could be used to scry on a distant individual, that would only show him their immediate surroundings, which would be useless in such a huge forest where everyplace looked like everyplace else. Worse, even with a major artifact to act as a battery, it would take hours to even prepare that spell.
Glancing at Severance, easily keeping pace with him, Lex considered sending it ahead to apprehend the girl. But he was loath to do that, since he doubted that such a powerful weapon could disable her without hurting her, and hurting her was absolutely out of the question; he’d brought her back, which meant that her safety was his responsibility until she was reunited with her family. For that same reason, he couldn’t bring himself to use any of the remaining attack spells that he’d prepared for when he’d fought the dragon.
Lex could feel his frustration burning inside him, along with the pain of his injuries starting to flare up again from the sudden exertion. It was happening again. Once again his good intentions were being warped during their execution! “I…said…STOP!”
This time, his roar carried more than just his voice.
As the word left his mouth, Lex felt the power inside him, the new strength that the Night Mare had imbued him with, move. It was an indescribable sensation. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that it was a sensation; it was as much a state of mind as it was something tactile. Even as he tried to analyze it, Lex felt that power snap outwards and enfold itself around Waterlily, imbuing his order for her to stop with a command that instantly overrode her will and forced her obedience, making her stop so abruptly that she almost fell over.
Lex stopped also, gaping in amazement at what he’d just done…whatever it was.
Taking a moment to collect himself, Lex realized that he could still feel – or was it perceive? – the energy connecting Waterlily to him, forcing her to remain still. No, forcing her to follow his order. She was twitching, whimpering softly as she did, obviously wanting to keep running but unable to do so. He could feel her trying futilely to struggle against the compulsion, unable to fight back against the overwhelming force of it.
“Come here,” said Lex, as much to test what was happening as to bring her back. When she turned around and began approaching him a moment later, he felt a thrill of exultation. This was incredible! He didn’t need to cast a spell or even focus on what he wanted to happen, he just had to impress his will upon her and give an order, and she’d obey! With this kind of power…with this kind of power he could sweep away any kind of opposition, without hurting them! It was exactly the perfect solution-
Then Waterlily reached him, her eyes wide with stark terror and tears running down her face. “Please,” she sobbed, pleading. “Please…just let me go…”
The sight of her instantly snuffed out Lex’s excitement, replacing it with guilt. Even if the circumstances had made it necessary, using this magic – if indeed this was magic – to take control of her when she was already out of her wits with fear was harsher than he’d wanted to be with her. She was already a victim, so using magic on her without her permission was victimizing her further, something which was unbecoming of a pony who would rule over others. The immediate priority, therefore, was to calm her down so that he could release her without her running off again.
Slowly closing the gap between them, Lex stood up on his hind legs, leaning in to take hold of her face with his forehooves. “Waterlily, listen to me,” he said softly, taking great care to make himself sound as unthreatening as he could, keeping eye contact. “You’re not in any danger. The dragon that…” he trailed off, realizing belatedly that talking about her death might make her panic again. “The dragon can’t hurt you anymore. I made sure of that. Now, I’m going to take you to your siblings. Do you understand? I’m going to take you to see Fireflower, and…” he paused, trying to remember the names that Fireflower had told him several days ago, though it felt a lot longer now. “And Rockwood, and Shadowvine, and Breezyleaf, and Brightrose. I’m going to take you to them right now, and until we get there I won’t let anything hurt you. You’re safe now.”
She gulped, tears still trailing down her cheeks, but the sound of her siblings’ names seemed to do the trick, and she nodded slightly. Letting out a sigh of relief, Lex released her face and stepped away from her, falling back onto all fours as he did so. “Now, I’m going to release you. Don’t run off again, alright?”
Another shaky nod was her answer, and Lex concentrated on undoing whatever he’d done. The power he’d used responded to his mental command instantly, withdrawing from Waterlily. She tensed, and for a moment he worried that she was going to try to run again, but she took a deep breath, letting it out shakily as she regarded him with eyes that were still nervous, but no longer terrified, keeping herself under control.
“Wh…” she started to speak, then stopped, clearly not sure if it was a good idea.
“Hm?” Lex made sure not to make any reaction to her aborted question, wanting her to realize that she could speak without anything bad happening.
“Where are they?”
“You mean your brothers and sisters? They’re in Tall Tale, a city near here, at a place called Busy Bee’s Bed ‘n’ Breakfast. I’m going to take you there right now.” Given her state of mind, it seemed appropriate to repeat that so that she'd be reassured of his intentions.
“I, um…” she paused to take another deep breath, and again doing so seemed to calm her. “Okay,” she nodded slightly, seeming to have made up her mind to trust him, at least a little.
“Good, now…” this time it was Lex’s turn to trail off, as he glanced around and realized that he had no idea which way to go get back. Their brief dash through the forest had managed to completely make him lose his orientation. Or rather, he realized, he’d never had it to begin with, since he hadn’t known exactly where Waterlily had been buried. Either way, they were now completely lost.
Cursing softly, Lex glanced upward. The solution to this problem was easy enough to find, but utilizing it would mean leaving her alone for a moment. If she ran off again, he’d be hard pressed to find her.
For a moment, he considered putting her back under his power, but decided against it. Using magic to control others because of what they might do ran counter to his moral code, and that had to be kept inviolate at all costs. Moreover, doing that would likely shatter whatever faith in him he’d managed to convince her to have. He was going to have to risk it.
Lex kept his voice calm and even as he spoke again. “I’m going to go figure out which way will take us to your siblings the fastest. I need you to stay right here while I do, alright?” She looked uncertain, and he continued. “It will just take a minute. In the meantime, I’m going to leave this,” he gestured to Severance, “here to protect you. You don’t need to touch it or do anything. Just stay right here, and I’ll be right back.”
He turned to Severance, and lowered his voice to a quiet hiss. “Keep her safe until I return. Do not hurt her or allow her to come to harm under any circumstances. Is that clear?” He put a hoof on the scythe’s handle, and heard it respond affirmatively. It then drifted over to begin orbiting Waterlily, spinning slowly as it did so, causing her to blink at the sight.
Not wanting her to have any more time to let the weapon unnerve her, Lex turned and headed into the woods. When he’d gone far enough so that the trees obscured the sight of her, he used his horn’s magic to turn into a shadow. Better not to let her see this, considering how fragile she is at the moment, he thought to himself as he rose upward.
It took only a few moments to clear the treetops. He kept rising, until he’d gained enough elevation to see the lights from Tall Tale. Had he been able to breathe in that form, Lex would have let out a breath at the sight of it. It wasn’t far from their present location at all. At a guess, they’d be there in a little over an hour. Returning to the ground, Lex resumed corporeal form and quickly headed back to where he’d left Severance and Waterlily, hoping that both of them would still be there.
He needn’t have worried. She was right where he’d left her, the weapon still revolving around her casually. The sight was enough of a relief that this time Lex did let out a sigh as he went over to her, drawing her eyes back towards him even as Severance drifted back to his side of its own accord.
“I know the way now. Shall we go?” The question was largely rhetorical, but being asked seemed to put her at ease, earning another cautious nod.
Turning, Lex began to lead her back to her family.
Nosey blinked blearily as she staggered into the street, giving a half-hearted wave to the ponies behind her as they bid her farewell.
Stifling a yawn, she walked with no particular destination in mind, glancing around as she did. The city-wide party that had broken out in Tall Tale had been a great way to forget her current financial problems. Despite her no longer having a bit to her name, there’d been plenty of celebrating ponies who’d been eager to buy food and drink for everyone around them, allowing her to eat better than she did even when she wasn’t broke.
She’d spent the remainder of the day just taking it easy, content to have a mini-vacation from work or pesky problems like figuring out where she was going to sleep. But now it was well after midnight and she felt exhausted, which meant that it was time to deal with those lingering details.
Stumbling over a loose cobblestone, Nosey couldn’t help but chuckle. This had been almost exactly how she had first met Lex. He’d been blundering about in the pre-dawn twilight, and Nosey had been following him, having happened to overhear his altercation with Tender Tree while she’d been out looking to, er, “borrow” an early edition of the local newspaper. It was important to check out the local talent-slash-competition, after all.
That had been a lucky break, and she kept glancing around, sure that there had to be another one forthcoming to solve her current housing situation. After all, a reporter’s instincts were never wrong…although, this didn’t really have anything to do with reporting, so maybe they wouldn’t help now? Yawning, she glanced around again as she passed another group of ponies gathered around what looked like a nightclub-
“Nosey!”
Caught by surprise, Nosey nevertheless grinned as she looked over at the crowd and spotted a familiar face coming out to greet her. “Hi Fireflower. What’s going on?” Inwardly, she rejoiced at her good fortune. Surely one of the main characters in her forthcoming book wouldn’t leave her out in the cold…well, actually it was a rather warm evening, but the principle was the same!
“Oh, you know, nothing.” Despite his feigned nonchalance, Nosey could tell that he was nervous, glancing behind him quickly.
“Hmm?” Her reporter’s instincts flared at the signal, and she reflexively reached for her pencil and notepad. “You sure everything’s alright? You seem a little tense.”
“Wh-what?” he scoffed, or at least tried to. “No. Not at all. I just thought that, um…” he paused to glance over his shoulder again before turning back to her. “I just thought that, ah!” He perked up as an idea occurred to him. “That I should give you an exclusive interview about, um, everything that’s happened since the dragon was killed. Why don’t we go somewhere and-”
“Fireflower!”
The pony in question winced as a voice called his name, and a moment later a pony with a white coat and pink mane and tail came out, throwing a leisurely arm around Nosey’s would-be interviewee. “What’re you doing out here, little brother? The girls were asking about you.”
“Girls?” asked Nosey, causing Fireflower to cringe and the newcomer to look her over. Nosey frowned as he did. He seemed rather familiar…ah! “Hey! You’re that guy that healed Lex! And, wait, hang on.” Through her drowsiness, Nosey put the pieces together. “You said Fireflower’s your brother, so that means that you’re one of those spider-ponies, right?”
“Araneas,” he corrected smoothly, removing his foreleg from around Fireflower and closing the distance between Nosey and himself. “My name is Brightrose. And you are?”
“Nosey Newsy, ace reporter,” she replied, unable to keep a trace of pride out of her voice. “I’ve been following the story with Fireflower and Lex and the dragon for a little while now. In fact, your brother here was just about to fill me in on some key details.”
“Was he now?” Brightrose seemed inordinately pleased with the news, flashing a grin towards Fireflower, who bit his lip at the sight. “In that case, you two should retire to more comfortable surroundings. Why don’t we head back towards Busy Bee’s?” He started to herd the other two down the street, deliberately not pausing long enough to let either get in an objection. “Have you been there before, Miss Newsy? It’s a lovely little bungalow, perfect for the sort of intimate one-on-one you’re looking for.”
Fireflower cringed at that, but Brightrose ignored him as he continued to chat up Nosey. He’d dragged his brother out for some celebrating in hopes of fixing him up with a nice girl that could help him put down the torch he was carrying for Sonata. It had been going rather well, or at least it would have been if Fireflower hadn’t been vacillating between embarrassment and depression. But despite his brother’s attitude, Brightrose had just managed to chat up a cute pair of mares who seemed interested when Fireflower had excused himself in what was pretty clearly an attempt to make a run for it.
Brightrose had gone after him only to find, much to his surprise, that his brother was talking to another mare, not quite as cute but still what Brightrose would call acceptable. Moreover, he seemed more comfortable with this one. Not willing to miss an opportunity to help his brother get over his crush, Brightrose had mentally bid farewell to the pair of pretty ponies he’d been speaking to in the nightclub. Ah, the sacrifices one had to make for family…
Expertly guiding the pair back to their current lodgings, Brightrose led the two of them toward a booth in the dining area. The kitchen wasn’t open at this hour, but that was fine. What these two needed was some privacy.
“Hey! I was hoping I’d catch you here!”
“S-Sonata?!”
Fireflower went rigid in surprise, and Brightrose blinked as he saw a familiar mare waving at them from across the room. What was his brother’s crush doing here of all places at now of all hours? The only reason she could possibly be looking for Fireflower alone in the middle of the night was…was…
Fighting down a grin, Brightrose immediately switched gears, turning to Nosey. “You know, it occurs to me that I’ve never gotten to tell anyone my part in the story of what happened here. It’s really a gripping tale, and I bet it would make for a fascinating story. Shall I tell it to you?”
“Uh-”
“Great! But not here. There’s too many, um, prying ears around.” Ignoring the fact that the four of them were the only ones around, Brightrose forcefully guided Nosey upstairs, pausing just long enough to shoot his brother an encouraging wink, seeing Sonata lead him to an out-of-the-way booth. Finally, Fireflower could put this issue – and that cutie he was pining for – to bed. Of course, there was the whole matter with her wizard boyfriend, but hopefully they were smart enough not to kiss and tell.
And of course, that meant that the blonde mare beside him was his for the evening.
“Wait a sec, if I remember right, didn’t one of your siblings say that you were being held hostage by the dragon to make the rest of them do what it said?” Nosey frowned as she flipped through her notepad, adjusting her glasses in hopes that it would clear up her bleary vision.
Brightrose gave an embarrassed chuckle. “Well, yes, but I was hoping I could give you some background material.” He stopped in front of the door to their room. Busy Bee had given them two, one for the stallions and one for the mares. As he opened the door to the one he was sharing with Fireflower and Rockwood, Brighrose cheered internally at the sight of it being empty.
“Background material?”
“Certainly,” he lowered his voice to a husky pitch that he knew the ladies loved. “For example, have you ever wondered just-”
“There you are!”
Both ponies looked over as they saw a pegasus mare in an apron marching over to the two of them, a peeved look on her face. Confusion crossed Nosey’s face at the sight, but Brightrose looked slightly nervous as he spoke up. “Why, if it isn’t our lovely hostess. Nosey, allow me to introduce Busy Bee, the proprietress of this fine establishment. Busy, this is Nosey Newsy, a reporter.”
Nosey was about to correct him that she was an ace reporter, but Busy spoke up before she could, giving Nosey a curt “hello” before turning her gaze back to Brightrose, her stern expression not softening at all. “You and your siblings owe me some money and the bill is due!”
Brightrose blanched. “But…I thought our bill had been waived after an impassioned plea from your sister, gem that she is.”
Busy leaned in, eyes narrowing. “Tender said that you lot were having a hard time of it, so I agreed to let you stay here for free. But nopony never said anything about letting you all eat for free while you do.” She poked him hard in the chest. “You owe me for all of those pancakes you and your family were scarfing down all day, and I aim to collect!”
Brightrose’s ears folded back, even as he gave a shaky smile, stepping back from the intimidating aura Busy was giving off. “Well, er, I’m afraid to say that our current prospects are such that gainful employment is still proving itself elusive. However, I can speak for my brothers and sisters when I say that we’re all fully aware of just how much we owe you, and we’ll absolutely repay you in full just as soon as our fortunes turn around.”
Off to the side, Nosey was watching the proceedings unfold with an amused look on her face. Flipping through her notepad to where she’d made her notes about the “araneas” – she’d written the term down this time – she quietly scrawled “deadbeats” next to it.
“Oh no,” spoke Busy, continuing to advance on the cringing Brightrose. “You’re going to pay me back right now.”
“But-”
His excuses were cut off as Busy pulled a dishtowel from one of her apron’s pockets and tossed it in Brightrose’s face. “Now get moving!”
“Huh?” Brightrose removed the towel and looked at Busy in confusion, clearly not comprehending what she was telling him to do.
“You’re on kitchen duty,” explained Busy sharply. “I’ve already got most of the rest of you lot scrubbing dishes, and you can get down there and join them. We’re going to start serving breakfast in a few hours, and I want each and every plate, bowl, cup, and utensil to be sparkling clean before then.”
Brightrose sputtered. “But, but I-”
“No but’s!” growled Busy. “The name of this place isn’t Busy Bee’s just because I own it, but because everypony who works here works hard to make sure that our guests have a pleasant and relaxing stay!”
“But we are guests!” protested Brightrose.
“Not until you pay off your debt you’re not! Until then you’re employees! Now get your rear in gear!”
Brightrose was clearly trying to think of a way out of the situation, but Busy didn’t give him a chance, leaning up and biting his ear, earning a yelp from him as she began to pull on it, dragging him towards the back stairs. As Nosey watched them go, he kept up a steady stream of dialogue, his protests and yelps audible even after she’d dragged him out of view.
Snickering at the sight, Nosey looked towards the room that Brightrose had been taking her to, the door still open invitingly. Smiling, she put her notepad and pencil away as she stepped in, closing the door behind her. After taking a moment to wash up, she tossed her things on a nearby nightstand before sliding into the nearest bed, giving a sigh of contentment as she did so.
It was always so nice when these little problems worked themselves out.
Lex was silent as he led Waterlily through the woods.
Since she didn’t know the way, he’d had to lead her, meaning that she was walking behind him. It wasn’t an optimal arrangement, since not having her in his sight at all times would place him at a disadvantage if she ran off again. To compensate for that, he’d quietly ordered Severance to alert him if she fled, since it quite obviously had some sort of sensory apparatus with which to perceive the world around it.
From its place on his back, Lex mentally “heard” the scythe’s compliant response. He’d placed it there despite its ability to move about on its own. Allowing it to fly about unattended could constitute having drawn the weapon – another thing he’d overlooked during his initial meeting with Waterlily – and a drawn weapon was a threat that justified immediate retaliation from those within its threat range, even if no attack had been made. Since he could hardly walk into town that way, he’d stowed Severance, which to his surprise had not protested the arrangement. But then, it wasn’t as though it couldn’t spring up any time it wanted to.
As Tall Tale came into view, Waterlily began to shiver. Looking at her for a moment, Lex paused as something occurred to him. “Have you ever been inside a city before?”
She shook her head in reply, but offered nothing further. In fact, she hadn’t spoken at all since he’d released his control of her. It was enough to make Lex frown, but not enough of a concern to take any action over. Whatever lingering trauma she was dealing with would be handled by her family, rather than himself.
At the moment, he was more concerned with trying to figure out the limits of his new powers. He’d been quietly experimenting with them during the walk back, attempting to use them to ensnare local wildlife that had gotten too close during their trek through the forest. The results had not been encouraging.
While he’d been able to direct that power outward with a few moments of concentration, it had steadfastly refused to affect any of the animals that had crossed their path. Lex had felt it reach out to entangle them, only to be unable to influence them in any way. There hadn’t been any sense of resistance or struggle. Rather, it had been more like…like that power simply couldn’t affect them, any more than a light – no matter how bright – could push a boulder up a mountain.
And yet he’d been able to affect Waterlily so easily…
Putting away his speculations for the moment, Lex turned his thoughts back to his companion. “Stay close to me at all times. No one here will hurt you, but I don’t want you to get lost.”
She looked like she wanted to protest, but bit her lip instead, edging slightly closer to him. Taking that as a sign of her acquiescence, Lex started towards town, keeping a wary eye on Waterlily as he did.
As he entered the city, several of the surrounding ponies noticed him and trotted over, raising friendly voices in greeting. The sight was enough to make Waterlily tense, and Lex quickly waved them off, worried that she was about to bolt again. Cursing under his breath, he quickened his pace through the city, ushering his charge along as he did.
He needed to stop and ask directions several times before he finally found his destination, each time with Waterlily shrinking under the gaze of the ponies he spoke to. Finally, they arrived, and Lex silently hoped that her siblings were inside and not out among the jubilant throngs. He was eager to be done with this errand and move on to other matters that needed his attention.
Opening the door, Lex bid Waterlily to follow him as he entered. Once inside, he walked towards the first doorway he saw…and stopped as he beheld who was inside.
Fireflower and Sonata.
As Brightrose ushered Nosey out of the room, Fireflower shot his brother a helpless look, only to receive a knowing grin in reply. The sight made Fireflower fight down a blush as he turned his eyes back to Sonata. It was obvious that Brightrose thought she was there for reasons that were entirely tawdry, but Fireflower knew her better than that.
…or perhaps not, since he realized he had no idea why she was there. And if Brightrose was right… Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Fireflower focused on the mare in front of him. “What are you doing here?”
Sonata smiled guilelessly. “Looking for you, obviously! I mean, that’s not the reason I’m up and about at this hour, but after finding out that my hotel didn’t have room service I went out to get something to eat, and it occurred to me that if most of the city was still awake, you might be too.”
She moved as she spoke, guiding him over to a booth in the back of the room. “Of course, I didn’t know where to go looking for you, but then I totes remembered Tender was taking you guys to her sister’s place. I asked around, and was finally told to come here!” She smiled, quite clearly proud of her deductive skills. Fireflower nodded idly, noting that they were now quite secluded, the booth not having line of sight to the door.
“That’s, um, great and all, but…why are you here?” Even as he asked the question, Fireflower could feel his stomach tightening into knots. He suddenly recalled that this was the same nervous excitement he’d felt back when they were in that hotel room together and he’d made up his mind to confess his feelings to her. But that made no sense now! He’d realized that she was too stuck on Lex! So why…?
Oblivious to his discomfort, Sonata leaned forward, her smile becoming softer as she did. “I wanted to thank you for everything you did, you and your family. I didn’t have a chance to thank whatshisname who ran off with Nosey just now, but if it wasn’t for you and him, Lex would have died. I can’t tell you h-”
“Why do you love him so much?”
In the silence that followed, it took Fireflower a moment to realize that he’d said that out loud. Across from him, Sonata blinked in surprise, clearly caught off-guard by the question. “Huh?”
For a moment, Fireflower wanted to wave the question off. He felt sure that if he did, they could pretend he’d never asked it, and then-
“I still think you should tell her.”
Brightrose’s words suddenly came to mind, and Fireflower felt his resolve harden. Taking a deep breath, trying to stop himself from trembling, he asked her again. “Why do you love him so much?”
“Why…?” For a moment, Sonata looked confused, unable to fathom why he was asking her this. She almost thought he was joking with her, but the look on his face was entirely serious. It was enough to make her shift in her seat uncomfortably. “Because…there’s a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“You guess?”
The question made her flinch, and she wasn’t sure why. “Look, I know he can be kinda prickly sometimes, but he has a lot of good points too! I mean, he saved all those ponies, including both of us!”
“He’s strong and he’s brave, there’s no denying that,” granted Fireflower, “and he clearly wants to do the right thing. But has he ever made you laugh? Even once?”
Sonata folded her ears back, looking away without answering. But Fireflower kept going. “Has he ever gotten you a gift, just because he wanted to do something nice for you? Has he ever asked you about what kind of future you two have together? Has he-”
“Stop it!” yelled Sonata, clamoring out of the booth. “Just stop it! Why are you saying all this?!” She turned for the door. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you but I don’t want to be around you if you’re gonna be like this!”
“Wait!” Fireflower rushed to cut her off, putting himself between her and the door, his face imploring. “Don’t go!”
“Why not?!” snapped Sonata, giving him a look that was as much hurt as it was anger. “If you’re going to talk this way about my boyfriend for no good reason-”
“I have a reason!”
“Oh yeah? Then what is it?”
“It’s…” he paused, realizing that this was it. This was the moment. This hadn’t been how he’d envisioned it, but here it was. Do or die.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath, holding it for just a moment before slowly releasing it. All of a sudden, his nervousness was gone. Opening his eyes, he took a single step closer to Sonata, bringing him slightly closer to her than he knew was polite.
“Sonata…I love you.”
For a moment, she just stared, as though she hadn’t understood what he’d said, before a look of surprise blossomed on her face. Fireflower could feel his sudden calm shattering in the wake of his confession, and desperately searched her features for any sign of how she felt, but all he could see was shock.
Unnerved by her silence, Fireflower opened his mouth again, having no idea what he was going to say even as he spoke. “I love you so much, Sonata. You’ve always been so kind to me. When I was at my lowest point you were there to help me get back on my feet. No matter how bad things seemed you were never afraid, and seeing you like that gave me strength. I want to spend the rest of my life doing the same for you, and I swear that I’ll spend every moment of every day trying to make you happy, so please…” he trailed off, realizing that he was rambling.
Her expression hadn’t changed, if anything she looked even more stunned, and Fireflower could feel himself starting to become worried. He had to know her answer! He took a half-step closer to her, leaning in to bridge the distance between them. If she couldn’t say how she felt, then this would let him know if she’d accept him or not. Slowly, he brought his face closer to hers…
…at the last moment, she turned her head to the side, moving her lips away from his.
The look on his face as she did so pierced her to the core, but it didn’t change her mind. Biting her lip, she couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye as she spoke. “I’m sorry,” her voice was barely more than a whisper. “I just…I don’t…”
He let out a shaky breath, and could feel his eyes growing moist, but fought that urge down with a sudden fierceness. He was not going to cry in front of her again! “Is…is it because of Lex?”
She nodded wordlessly, and Fireflower felt something inside him clench. “Why?”
Sonata heard the anger and the sadness and the pleading in his voice, begging her to make him understand why she’d just broken his heart. Why she didn’t love him back. Why she loved someone else instead of him. She’d never answered his original question, she realized abruptly: why did she love Lex so much?
But as awful as it was to be asked that by someone she’d just rejected, what was far worse was that she didn’t know how to answer. She was sure that she loved Lex, that what she felt for him was as powerful as it was wonderful. But what it was that made her feel that way…
She didn’t know.
There was an answer. There had to be. But she didn’t know what it was, and realizing that was enough to shake Sonata to her core. If she didn’t know why she loved the stallion that she’d given her heart to, then was that even really love at all?
Fighting down a sense of distress, Sonata looked back up, knowing that she had to tell Fireflower something. But as she raised her gaze, she glanced behind him, and her eyes widened in alarm.
For a long moment, Sonata stood frozen, stupefied at the realization that the worst thing that could possibly happen was happening. Lex was standing right there, and quite clearly had been there for at least a minute or two, which meant that he’d no doubt heard everything…heard Fireflower’s heartfelt declaration of love for her, and the anemic nature of her rejection.
But that wasn’t what worried her the most. Rather, what sent a shiver through her was the look on Lex’s face as he stood there. In the time she had known him, Sonata had seen Lex rant in anger. She’d seen him calmly and condescendingly analyze a situation. She’d even seen him in such a towering rage that he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
But she’d never, not once seen him with the completely expressionless look on his face that he had now. And that frightened her more than anything.
“Sonata? What are y- AAAHHH!!!”
Fireflower leapt into the air as he let out a scream of terror at the sight of Lex. He had no idea how Sonata’s boyfriend had found them – some bit of magic, no doubt – but his sudden appearance here could only mean one thing: death was imminent. After all, this was the wizard who had, when he thought that his girlfriend was in danger, almost killed Fireflower before; only the fact that he’d been mistaken had kept him from finishing the job.
But now…now Fireflower was certain that he’d receive no such mercy this time around.
He might not have been threatening Sonata, but he had no hope that such a distinction would count for anything. After all, he’d been openly trying to replace the other stallion in Sonata’s heart, despite knowing both how much Lex cared for her and how deadly his wrath was. It was enough to make Fireflower briefly wonder if this was some sort of punishment from the gods for his hubris. What had he been thinking, trying to steal the girl of someone so powerful and prone to rage?
Fireflower opened his mouth, even as he realized that he had no idea what to say. But then, it didn’t really matter what he said, so long as Lex listened to it and in doing so let Fireflower have another few seconds of life.
“L-”
“No.”
Lex’s immediate rebuttal, delivered softly in a flat tone that lacked any inflection, was enough to make the blood drain from Fireflower’s face. Next to him, Sonata winced, as though that single word had been a physical blow.
Neither knew that Lex hadn’t been speaking to them. Rather, his soft denial had been in answer to Severance, who had silently asked Lex if he wanted Fireflower dead.
But Lex’s answer hadn’t been borne out of any sense of mercy or calmness. Indeed, at that moment he felt neither of those things. But at the same time, he didn’t feel any sense of rage the way he had when he’d thought Fireflower had been trying to hurt Sonata, back when they’d all been camping in the woods outside of Tall Tale. Instead, as his eyes slid between the two of them, all Lex felt was confusion.
It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what was going on. He had arrived just in time to hear Fireflower tell Sonata that he loved her, followed by an impassioned plea for her to return his feelings, and her soft…or rather, weak, denial. But Lex had also seen Sonata affirm that he was the reason she wouldn’t return Fireflower’s feelings, even as she couldn’t seem to explain why that was.
But as for how he felt in response to having witnessed the entire exchange…Lex didn’t know.
This entire situation was so far removed from his personal experience, or from the conceptual philosophies that he enjoyed contemplating, that he simply had no frame of reference to use to formulate a response. Intuitively, he knew that Fireflower had been trying to take Sonata away from him…but at the same time, Fireflower’s outpouring of emotion had made it clear that he wasn’t trying to leave Lex bereft. Rather, he was simply overcome by his desire to be with Sonata, a feeling Lex was intimately familiar with.
That knowledge – and Sonata’s rejection – had been enough to quash any angry impulses Lex might have had. It certainly didn’t mean that he approved of what Fireflower had done, of course; understanding did not constitute endorsement. But at the same time, that left Lex with no idea how to express his disapproval. After all, however much it had lacked strength, Sonata had said no. Did that mean that the matter was closed, and no input from him was needed? Or was he now supposed to make a show of superiority over the reaffirmation of his exclusive right to Sonata’s affection?
Turning his eyes towards his mate, Lex had no fewer questions when it came to her. Was she completely blameless for Fireflower’s confession, or did she deserve to be chastised for being outgoing enough that he’d developed such feelings in the first place? Should she be praised for staying faithful, or would a statement of relief from himself indicate that he had less that total faith in her fidelity? And why had her refusal been so feeble? Or…had it been? Perhaps that was the proper manner in which to turn down someone’s expression of love? Again, Lex had no basis for drawing a conclusion.
All three stood there paralyzed, two in fear, one in indecision. A moment later, the stalemate was broken as an unexpected sound drew everyone’s attention.
Laughter.
As they’d traveled through the city, Waterlily had been able to feel herself coming down from the pervasive fear that had gripped her.
Although being inside an actual city was overwhelming – the sheer number of people had been daunting to someone who’d grown up around her siblings and no one else – there had been something about it that had been strangely calming. As they’d progressed through the streets, she had cringed away from everyone who’d try to talk to her, but every time she did she felt more and more that it was a pointless thing to do. There was something about the place that, contrary to everything she had expected, had put her at ease.
They’d almost arrived at their destination when she’d figured out what it was: the entire place was suffused with an atmosphere of joy.
Everything about this “Tall Tale” place radiated happiness and goodwill. The streets were lit up with more lights than Waterlily had ever seen, making everything seem to glow. Colorful banners and balloons were all over. Beautiful music and delicious-smelling foods were pervasive. But what struck her even more than all of those were the ponies.
Everywhere Waterlily looked, on every corner and in every building, ponies were smiling. Laughing. Singing and dancing. Hugging. Playing games. Clapping their hooves and cheering.
It was like everyone was one big family.
In fact, the only pony that didn’t seem to feel that way was her companion, Lex something-or-other. She’d seen several ponies call out to him, or try to strike up a conversation with him, only for him to either ignore them or curtly brush them off. At first she’d thought he was doing it for her sake, but then she’d seen him finally stop to talk to some ponies to ask for directions to where he said her family was, and his body language had been unmistakably uncomfortable. It made no sense to her at all.
But as they finally entered a building, she put it out of her thoughts. She was finally going to see her brothers and sisters again! The thought made her chest ache in anticipation.
Then Lex stopped in a doorway, and Waterlily heard a familiar voice from beyond it. Her heartbeat quickened as she recognized it – that was Fireflower!
But what she heard next was even more amazing; he was making a love confession! Overcome with curiosity as to who could possibly have ensnared her brother’s heart, Waterlily tried to peek around Lex to get a glimpse into the room, but the doorway was too narrow for her to catch anything other than a glimpse. She was about to nudge her way past him when she heard her brother’s outpouring stop, and she held still as she realized that she hadn’t heard whoever he was talking to answer back.
Straining her ears, she heard a soft female voice apologize, and give a halting, incomplete explanation. It was enough to make Waterlily gasp, putting a hoof over her mouth. She was turning him down?! Poor Fireflower! Why would anybody turn down such a nice guy? Sure, he was a big goof, but he was a loveable goof, the kind who was so earnest that everything he did was adorable in a hopeless way.
“Is…is it because of Lex?”
Waterlily’s eyes widened at hearing her brother’s question, going back to her companion, who was still standing in the doorway like a statue. No way. No. Way. Waterlily’s jaw fell slack as she instantly put the pieces together. Fireflower was confessing to a girl without realizing that her boyfriend was right there! And worse, he had no idea that her boyfriend had just brought his sister back to life!
A second later, she heard Fireflower give a terrified scream, obviously having just realized that Lex was right there, and that was it. That was all Waterlily could take. She doubled over, clenching her jaw and pressing a hoof to her mouth to try and stay quiet. It was just so incredibly absurd, so absolutely like Fireflower to try so hard and screw up so spectacularly.
Only vaguely aware that Lex was saying something, Waterlily snorted as she tried to stifle her mirth, but it was futile. An instant later her laughter bubbled forth, causing her to almost collapse as she struggled to regain control of herself, tears pooling in her eyes.
Her laughter had turned everyone’s attention to her, and she managed to calm down enough to stumble towards the room, Lex moving aside to let her enter. Still chuckling, she looked at Fireflower, smiling wider. “Wow, I’m just…only you could have messed that up so badly, Fireflower.”
For a split-second, her brother’s face was one of incomprehension, and then it hit him. Bug-eyed, he stared at her, mouth agape as he struggled to make sense of what was right in front of him. It took a few seconds before he managed to speak. “L-Lily…?” he croaked, his voice full of hope, clearly wanting to believe that it was her but not daring to.
She nodded, still giggling, and then he launched himself at her, yelling her name as he hugged her with all of his strength. The force of his embrace almost knocked them both to the ground, and suddenly Waterlily found herself crying instead of laughing as she hugged him back fiercely.
A moment later Shadowvine stomped into the room, clad in an apron and hairnet and frowning severely. “Busy says to quiet…quiet…” she trailed off as she looked at the pair embracing in the middle of the room, her attitude falling away in shock.
Waterlily and Fireflower parted, the former giving her sister a teary smile. “Hey Viney,” she sniffled. “Love the new look.”
Shadowvine’s response was a whimper, her eyes shimmering as she stood there for a moment before bolting from the room. Only a few seconds passed before she returned, however, the rest of her siblings in tow. Joyous shouts filled the room as they immediately dogpiled Waterlily, crying out in disbelief and happiness as they all struggled to embrace her at once, Fireflower included.
None of them could keep from crying as their family was made whole again. In the center of her siblings’ embrace, Waterlily wept the hardest, feeling the last of her tension and fear and grief fall away as she finally felt, on a fundamental level, that she wasn’t alone anymore.
Naturally, none of them noticed Lex and Sonata quietly slip from the room.
Lex watched Waterlily’s reunion with her siblings dispassionately for a few moments before losing interest in them. Their joy at having their sister brought back to them was more than obvious, and spoke to their commitment to seeing to her welfare. As such, he no longer needed to be concerned what happened to her, at least no more than anypony else.
Turning away from where they were embracing in a tangle, Lex directed his gaze to Sonata, who – feeling the weight of his eyes on her – looked up at him. Silently, he gestured towards the exit, waiting just long enough for her to nod before turning and leaving.
Pausing as she reached the threshold, Sonata looked back at Fireflower, still crowding around Waterlily with the rest of his family, tears of joy sliding down his face. The sight was enough to make her smile. She’d felt awful rejecting him like that, so it was really great that he had something so wonderful to focus on instead.
Turning away, she left him behind as she hurried to catch up with Lex.
“Hey,” she started as she moved up next to him. “That was really great what you did back there. Although, come to think of it, what exactly did you do back there? I thought Fireflower said that Waterlily was killed by the dragon.”
“She was,” answered Lex flatly, giving her only the briefest of glances. “I had her resurrected.”
“Resur-, wait, for realsies?!” Sonata’s eyes widened, and she darted in front of Lex, moving in front of him to block his path. “You can do that too?!”
Sonata had been on Everglow long enough to know that magic that could bring dead people back to life was a thing, but it was supposed to be, like, super difficult to do. And something about it being limited to priests or something like that. That Lex could do even that, on top of all the incredible magic he’d used to kill that dragon, was enough to stagger her.
Lex paused for just a moment, then kept walking, moving around Sonata. “No. I wasn’t the one who brought her back.”
Biting her lip for a moment, more at his terseness than his answer, Sonata moved alongside him again. “Okay…” she prompted, her follow-up question hanging in the air, unspoken but obvious.
Lex sighed. “I made a deal…” He trailed off, glancing at the ponies around them. “We can discuss this once we get back to our room.”
The finality in his voice made Sonata’s anxiety rise. Was he upset over what had happened with Fireflower? No, wait, obviously he was upset, but he shouldn’t be upset at her! She hadn’t done anything wrong! Another guy had hit on her, and she’d turned them down. Period. There was no reason for Lex to be acting like…like…this!
“Why do you love him so much?”
The memory of Fireflower’s question, and how she’d been unable to answer, made Sonata wince. Had Lex heard that part? Even if he hadn’t, he’d heard her not answering when Fireflower had asked her why the second time. It wasn’t exactly the strongest defense of their love.
And Sonata was certain that what she felt for him was love. It had to be! So she couldn’t say why she felt that way, so what? That didn’t change how she felt when he smiled at her, or how worried she’d been when he’d been hurt, or how they’d both cried their hearts out when they’d gotten back together just that morning. That was totes love, right? Right.
Nodding to herself in renewed determination, Sonata stepped closer to Lex, pressing her side to his and leaning her head in to nuzzle him gently. He tensed, and for a moment she thought that he wouldn’t return the gesture. Then she felt him relax and nuzzle her back, and she grinned in relief.
The feeling was magnified a moment later when Lex stopped, lifted a hoof to her face, and kissed her. Closing her eyes, Sonata stopped thinking about everything else as she luxuriated in her boyfriend’s affection, letting the kiss go on for long moments before it ended.
“We should talk, after we get back.” Lex’s voice was softer, using the warmer tone that Sonata had come to expect from him during intimate moments. It was enough to make her smile as she nodded, feeling much better than she had a few minutes ago.
With the tension between them diminished, the two returned to their hotel room. Once there, Lex proceeded to tell her everything that he’d done in the last few hours, from when he’d woken up to when he’d brought Waterlily back to Busy Bee’s. It had been enough to make Sonata momentarily forget about what had happened with Fireflower.
“Wow! So the Night Mare gave you super powers, a whole buncha bling, and even brought Waterlily back to life? I totes thought that she was just a grumpy goddess!” Sonata missed how Lex rolled his eyes in response to her summary of what had happened, thinking instead of how the Night Mare had appeared in her dream with Kara. She was about to mention that when a thought occurred to her.
“Hey, you said that you could control Waterlily, but not animals, right? What about ponies? I mean, Waterlily looks like a pony and all, but she’s really a big spider, isn’t she? So maybe that’s different.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” admitted Lex. “I’ll need to run some experiments on the limits of the powers that the Night Mare granted me. The trick will be finding test subjects.”
Sonata blinked. “Seriously? There’s, like, a whole town full of ponies out there,” she said, gesturing to the window. “Just grab one and see if you can make them turn cartwheels or something.”
“Experimenting on somepony without their knowledge or consent is highly unethical, Sonata,” frowned Lex. “Everypony who lives here…no, everypony in this city, whether they live here or not, is my responsibility. I will not impugn their dignity by treating them as resources to be utilized for my convenience.”
A disappointed look crossed Sonata’s face. “C’mon, it’s not like I’m telling you to make them do something awful, or, I dunno, make them into slaves for the rest of their life or anything. Just make one of them dance or wave or something for a second so you know if it works and then let them go.” She shrugged. “I bet if you did it fast enough, they wouldn’t even know what was going on.”
“I would know!” snapped Lex, hackles rising. He was about to launch into an explanation of how ethical frameworks functioned when Sonata cut him off.
“Alright, alright, I’m sorry I said anything,” she relented, holding her hooves up in a gesture of surrender. She had brought it up because the thought of Lex just waving a hoof and making someone else do whatever he wanted was a sexy one, but now she regretted having spoken up, feeling the tension between them starting to rise again.
Lex seemed equally unhappy at how the conversation had gone, scowling as he settled down. An uncomfortable silence fell for a few moments before Sonata sighed, ready to bite the bullet. “About what happened before…with me and Fireflower…”
She trailed off, not sure what to say. But Lex didn’t seem inclined to try and move things along, scowling and looking away in silence, so she forged ahead. “Listen, I had no idea that he felt that way about me. Seriously, if I’d realized that he was, you know…falling for me, I would’ve, um…done something different.” It sounded incredibly lame, even to her own ears.
“It’s fine,” muttered Lex. He was regretting his earlier suggestion that they talk about this. He’d felt confident then, despite not knowing what to say or even to think about what happened, that they could work it out. But now all he felt was awkward and uncomfortable.
Sonata looked at him in disbelief. “‘It’s fine’? Are you kidding me? You’re, like, clearly upset!”
“There’s no reason for me to be upset.” He didn’t meet her eyes as he spoke, looking at an empty corner of the room instead. “No moral abrogation took place that I can determine. Certainly not on your end, at least. Fireflower’s actions might have deviated from conventionally-polite norms, but there’s little to indict his behavior to the point where any sort of sanctions would be required.”
Sonata’s eyebrows rose as Lex spoke, until she was gaping at him. “What the heck are you talking about?!”
“Nopony asked you what you thought!”
Sonata recoiled, but felt surprise more than anger at his response. “What are you-”
Her question died midway through as Lex took the scythe off of his back and tossed it away. But before it was halfway through its arc it stopped, righting itself as it hovered in midair. For a moment, Sonata was confused, before remember what Lex had just told her.
“Oh, you were talking to that thing! Um, Severance, right?”
To her amusement, the weapon turned to regard her…or at least, it looked like it did, rotating so that the point of its blade was turned towards her. It then bent forward until its shaft was almost parallel to the floor before resuming its upright position, and Sonata giggled as she realized that it had bowed to her. “Aw, you’re a real gentleman! I’m Sonata Dusk, pleased to meet you.”
She held out a hoof, but before Severance could move in reply, the roiling purple aura of Lex’s telekinesis surrounded the weapon. Yanking it back to his side, Lex stomped over to the adjoining bathroom, tossing it inside. “Stay in there until I retrieve you,” he snarled before slamming the door shut. He knew that there was no way that a flimsy wooden door could feasibly contain an artifact-weapon forged by a goddess, but he’d be damned if he had to let the thing witness private moments between himself and his beloved, let alone interject its opinion.
“Aw, you didn’t have to do that, he seemed nice.” Sonata wasn’t sure what made her think that the weapon was a “he.” Maybe because bowing seemed like something a boy would do?
“You’ve hung around enough nice guys for one evening,” replied Lex darkly. He wished he could have taken it back the instant the words came out of his mouth, but it was too late. Sonata didn’t hesitate to pounce on his inadvertent admission of displeasure.
“I knew it! You’re totes upset!”
Grinding his teeth, Lex closed his eyes and took a deep breath, fighting to keep calm. “I told you, there’s no reason for me to be upset. No one did anything wrong, so-”
“Stop it! Just stop it already!” Sonata closed the distance between them and took Lex’s head in her hooves, his eyes snapping open as she got in his face. “This isn’t one of your logic puzzles or anything like that! I don’t want to hear some theory about proper behavior or whatever! I want you to tell me how you feel!”
“Fine! I feel awful! There! Are you happy now?!” Lex shook her off and took a single step back from her. For a moment he glared at her, angry that she’d pushed him this far. But then his ears folded back and he resumed his earlier sour look.
“Okay.” Sonata spoke slowly, trying to make her voice as soothing as she could, wanting him to know that it was okay for him to tell her how he felt. “It’s, like, totes normal to be jealous-”
“I wasn’t jealous.”
“Lex…” Sonata couldn’t keep the exasperation out of her voice. He had just been starting to open up to her, and now he was backpedaling.
But Lex looked at her directly, his petulant expression fading into one of earnestness. “I wasn’t jealous, Sonata.”
She blinked in surprise. She was sure that had been it. “Then…” she swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Are you mad at me for not pushing him away harder?”
“That’s not it either.” He moved past her as he spoke, moving to the room’s only window and looking outside, facing away from her.
“Then what is it?” This time she didn’t follow him, letting him have his space.
He was silent for several long moments, trying to figure out that very question. He knew that the thought of Fireflower admitting his feelings for Sonata upset him, but he couldn’t figure out why. Other than a reflexive moment of doubt, he hadn’t been worried that Sonata would leave him again, not after the heartfelt moment they’d shared that morning. Nor did he feel at all threatened by Fireflower; Lex honestly couldn’t imagine that the little twerp could ever come between the two of them.
So then why did the memory of that little brat confessing to Sonata make him want to crawl out of his skin?
“…I hate that he thought he could try.”
“Huh?” Sonata tilted her head, not sure what he meant.
Lex turned back around to face her, and couldn’t keep the discomfort off of his face. “He thought that he had a chance, right then. That if he told you how he felt, you’d see something in him that you didn’t in me. I can’t stand that.”
“Lex, I’m telling you, I would never-”
“I know! That’s not what I mean!” He could feel himself getting agitated. Trying to put his feelings into words was something he’d never been good at. It was what had so often driven him to master esoteric conceptual disciplines, hoping that their exacting methods of thought and communication would give him the tools necessary to better make himself understood by others. But he had to keep trying. He had to make her understand!
He looked her dead in the eye, and the intensity in his gaze kept her pinned in place as surely as the magic vines had before. “He wouldn’t have told you how he felt if he hadn’t thought that he had a chance with you, right? That’s what I can’t stand! I don’t want anyone else to ever think that they could possibly love you more than I can. I want them to see us and know that my feelings for you will forever eclipse theirs. I want them to realize that they could never offer you as much love as I can.”
He advanced on her as he spoke, and Sonata could feel her heart quickening as he did. “I want everyone who sees us to know how much you mean to me, how badly I want you with me, and know that they never had a chance with you. And he didn’t know that, which means that I failed to do as much as I should for you.”
They were standing right in front of each other now, both of them breathing heavily with the intensity of what they were feeling. Lex’s voice has been growing softer as he’d approached her, but the passion in his words had only heightened as he’d gotten closer to her, and she shivered as she looked up at him.
“That’s why I’m upset.”
He almost whispered the words as he leaned in and kissed her again, and the effect was electric, making Sonata gasp as she felt his lips press against hers.
And suddenly she knew.
Sonata was aware that she had never been the brightest bulb in the pack – years of teasing from her sisters had thoroughly driven that point home – but even to her it had been obvious from day one that Lex was a super-genius, his brain running on overdrive all of the time. But now she understood that it wasn’t just that; everything about him was cranked up to the max. Not just his thoughts, but his feelings as well.
Whatever emotion he was experiencing at any given time was amplified to an incredible degree compared to other people. When he was angry, he could barely control his fury. When he was sad, he fell to the very bottom of the world. And when he was swept up in his passion for her, the force of it was greater than anything she’d ever felt before. No matter how many people, humans or ponies, she’d ever controlled with her magic, no matter how many brainwashed thralls she’d forced to adore her, it couldn’t compare to the love directed at her from this one stallion.
For a Siren, a creature whose entire reason for being was to be revered and cherished, it was nothing less than fulfillment on the most fundamental level imaginable. It was enough to make her adore him in return, filled with more gratitude and thankfulness than she knew how to express. It was enough to make her absolutely certain that she’d never leave him again, no matter what happened.
It was why she loved him.
The kiss slowly ended, and Sonata whimpered softly, needing more. Her eyes fluttered open, and she could see that he felt the same, his face flushed and eyes burning with desire. The sight sent a thrill down her spine, ending at the base of her tail, and she felt herself starting to melt. He must have known, because he kissed her again, and this time there was a hunger there, his tongue pushing into her mouth, making her moan again even as he gently but firmly guided her towards the bed.
Breaking the kiss, she panted for air, tilting her head back. “Lex…”
His response was to lower his head to her neck, kissing it once before nipping the soft skin there, making her shudder in excitement. She felt the back of her legs hit the edge of the bed, and stepped back from him to turn and climb onto it, letting her tail brush his face as she did.
“I’ve got an idea,” she gave him a sultry smile as she crawled across the mattress. “Let’s run an experiment, right now.”
He paused only long enough to throw off what little he was wearing, following her onto the bed. “An experiment?”
She grinned as she laid back, letting him move over her. “I want you to use that power you have…and take control of me.”
Lex saw the first rays of light spilling in through the window in silent announcement of the imminent dawn and knew that he had to get out of bed.
Despite that, he lingered, returning his gaze to where Sonata was lying next to him, having passed out in the aftermath of their lovemaking. Lex was no less tired, but had no desire to fall asleep and let his pervasive nightmares ruin his mood, and so had stayed awake. Doing so had been its own reward, allowing him to simply watch Sonata sleep.
He swept his eyes over her again, remembering how incredible she had felt, the sounds she’d made, the way she’d softly begged him…
Of course, that had been after they’d discovered that Lex’s ability to control Waterlily hadn’t worked on Sonata. Just like when he’d attempted to use it on the local wildlife, the energy had simply failed to take hold when he’d directed it towards his beloved. The realization had made her pout, but Lex had simply taken it as a challenge to show her that there were plenty of other ways he could assert himself over her.
Smiling at the memory, he reluctantly disentangled himself from her, making sure not to wake her up as he slid out of bed. Pulling the blankets around her more to compensate for his leaving, he headed for the bathroom, already planning for the day ahead. For all that he’d accomplished here in Tall Tale, Vanhoover still needed his immediate assistance, so he was going to have to expedite-
His train of thought came to a screeching halt as he opened the bathroom door to see Severance floating in the middle of the room. Lex blinked, having forgotten about the weapon after he’d discarded it previously. He regarded it silently for a moment, wondering if he should greet the thing. It was sapient, after all.
The idea of saying “good morning” to a scythe, however, was more awkward than Lex could stomach, causing him to silently wrap the weapon in his telekinetic grip and move it to the side as he entered the bathroom, closing the door behind him. As he did so, he heard Severance’s voice in his thoughts, complimenting him.
He felt his face heating up at the words. “I did not ‘conquer’ her!” he hissed, keeping his voice down since the bathroom door apparently did a poor job of soundproofing. “What passed between Sonata and me was far more profound! To say nothing of being absolutely none of your business!”
The weapon’s reply made Lex grit his teeth, but he refused to get into an argument over how to characterize what he and Sonata had just done. “Enough! I’m going to use you to replenish my magic, so be silent.” Severance made one final comment, which Lex ignored as he started to gesture and chant softly.
He had no doubts that the Night Mare’s assurance that Severance was powerful enough to serve as a battery for his magic was legitimate, but Lex was still eager to put her claim to the test. The thought of being able to make use of his strongest magic, the magic that he had created from scratch, without restriction was a heady one. Of course, it would take nearly an entire day to completely replenish his spells, but he could restore just one or two now as a trial run.
But as the first syllable left his lips, Lex stopped, eyes widening in confusion.
His mental catalogue of spells that he’d learned had some additions. Ones that he didn’t remember acquiring.
Unlike the “wizards” that he’d met on Everglow, Lex needed no external record of the various spells that he could prepare. Rather, when he had the opportunity to replenish them, he simply picked the ones he wanted to be available to him and filled their thought-form with sufficient energy, waiting to be expended via casting. As a side effect of structuring his thoughts that way, he never forgot any spell that he had taken the time to learn, regardless of how long ago he’d learned it or last used it.
Except now he was cognizant of several new additions, almost a dozen in total, to his roster. Each one was more powerful, and/or more complex, than the one before it, he intuitively could tell. In fact, the last few were still beyond his ability to cast at all, at least without taking extreme measures.
Frowning, Lex continued to stare off into space as he tried to figure out where these new spells had come from. The most obvious explanation was that they were yet another gift from the Night Mare, but that struck him as unlikely. She’d already been more generous than he’d dared to hope for when he’d summoned her, and she’d made sure to call out each of her gifts to him so that he’d be aware of her munificence. For her to do even more for him didn’t seem like her.
But what other explanation could there be? Unless he’d begun to spontaneously manifest magical abilities like an Everglow “sorcerer,” which was a far less plausible theory, there was simply no other explanation. And the Night Mare had returned his former magic items to him without being asked, so perhaps…perhaps it wasn’t so unusual after all.
Realizing that there was no more usefulness in guessing, Lex turned his attention to the new spells themselves. He focused on the least powerful of them, one so incredibly minor that he knew immediately that anypony with any spellcasting ability whatsoever would have been able to master it. And its effect…
It was a contraceptive spell.
Lex froze at the realization, nonplussed first by the sudden reminder that what he and Sonata had just shared might have unforeseen consequences, and then by the sense that mysteriously acquiring a spell to deal with exactly that problem was a little too convenient. Trying to fight the cold chill that had settled over him, he examined the spell in more detail.
It was fairly straightforward. It could be cast on a single individual to make them temporarily infertile for several days, with the exact duration depending on the puissance of the spellcaster. It could also be cancelled prior to that if the caster so desired.
Lex glanced in the direction where he knew Sonata was sleeping, silently vowing that from now on he’d use this spell on himself before they did that again. As for now…surely she wouldn’t have any objection to his using this spell on her, would she? She'd certainly understand the need for it, since she might...might become...
Knowing that this was a line of thought that would utterly consume his attention if he didn’t deal with it, Lex grit his teeth and resumed his chanting, pulling in the necessary energy to prepare the spell. Idly, he noted that at least now he’d confirmed that Severance was an adequate battery for his magic.
Once he’d gathered the requisite energy, Lex marched out of the bathroom, leaving Severance hovering in place as he went over to where his beloved was still slumbering. Gently, he reached out and placed a hoof on her, nudging her just slightly. “Sonata?”
There was no response. So he tried again, calling her name and shaking her just a little. He had to repeat the process several times before he got a response, her eyes cracking open blearily as she made an inquisitive grunt.
“Sonata, is it alright if I use contraceptive magic on you?” he asked her quietly. “I want to avoid any, er, unexpected ramifications from what we did.”
“Mmph…s’fine,” she mumbled, closing her eyes and turning over.
“Are you sure?”
“…trus’ you…” she murmured. That seemed to be the sum total of her response, as her breathing settled back into a slow and steady rhythm a moment later.
For a long moment, Lex stood there, unsure of what to do. The degree to which she had been conscious was dubious at best, to say nothing of his lack of certainty as to how much she’d have understood what he was asking even if she had been completely awake. But on the other hoof, she’d not only given him permission, but had stated that she trusted him. That was, in all likelihood, her way of issuing blanket permission for him to do whatever he thought was best, and there was no doubt in his mind that this was the optimal course of action.
He bit his lip for a moment as he stood there, considering. The reasoning wasn’t as sound as he would have liked, but it was still sufficient to pass scrutiny when held against his moral code. Nodding to himself, he quickly incanted the words of the spell and made the requisite gestures, before gently touching a hoof to her, completing the act.
Letting out a relieved sigh, Lex returned to the bathroom, eager to put the last few minutes behind him.
Instead, he turned his attention back to the new spells in his mind. There were still nine more after the contraceptive spell, and he focused on the next-simplest one. It was a spell that could be cast on multiple individuals at once, causing their tactile senses to experience short-term hypersensitivity, but only with regard to pleasure…
Lex could feel the blood rushing to his face as the theme of these new spells became apparent. Although he disapproved of blatant indulgences, he nevertheless couldn't help but imagine what last night would have been like if he'd had this spell prepared then. The thought was tantalizing, particularly since there was no reason he couldn't use it in the future. And there were still quite a few more of these to look over!
It was with a mixture of nervousness and excitement that Lex mentally reviewed a third spell, only to let out a scandalized yelp as he comprehended its effects. The first two had been somewhat embarrassing, but this was lurid! This was…who would ever…why would anypony want to…?!
For all his mortification, Lex could feel that the blood in his face was now flowing elsewhere, to his utter chagrin. Without a word, he turned and leapt into the nearby bathtub, yanking the shower curtain closed even as he turned on the cold water full-blast. As the frigid water poured over him, Lex took several deep breaths to try and calm himself down. But just remembering that spell – and that there were seven more to review, all of them of greater…efficacy – made that rather difficult to do.
Obviously, that would have to be put off for another time. Right now was a time to work hard for everypony in Tall Tale and Vanhoover, not get bogged down in such tawdry activities. However distracting these new spells might be, he had a duty to put them aside and focus on what really mattered. Closing his eyes, Lex repeated that to himself, recalling that he had been thinking about that when he’d run into Severance and gotten sidetracked. No more. From now on, he was going to stop fooling around and maintain his focus.
Even so, it was quite a few minutes before he turned the water off and exited the shower.
Yawning, Nosey rubbed her eyes as she stepped out of her room. Or rather, whatshisname’s room. She could have looked him up in her notes, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was finding a way to get some breakfast when she didn’t have a bit to her name. Luckily, being an ace reporter had taught her plenty of tricks, including the old one about interviewing someone who was in the middle of a meal so that you could pick at their food.
Now she just had to find someone to interview. The most obvious choice would be the guy whose room she’d taken, but given that he’d never reappeared after that angry mare had dragged him to the kitchen, he probably wasn’t in the best mood. In fact, she realized, it was probably better that she slip out the back, just to be sure that the grouchy pegasus didn’t get any ideas about charging her for her impromptu stay.
Exiting the building without seeing anypony else, Nosey smiled at her continuing good fortune. Now if only she could figure out whose breakfast she could crash…
After a moment’s thought, Nosey turned and started walking towards city hall. Today was going to be Lex’s first full day as mayor. As such, it was her civic duty to show him the special relationship that the government had with the press.
The sun had just barely cleared the horizon when Lex and Sonata stepped into the street, the latter blinking her eyes. “Do we really have to be up at the crack of dawn? I mean, this is, like, really the crack of dawn,” yawned Sonata.
“There’s important work that needs to be done, Sonata,” replied Lex, already moving towards city hall. “The sooner that we get started, the sooner the ponies of Vanhoover will receive the assistance that they should have gotten weeks ago.”
“Hm…I guess I don’t mind if we have to work hard.” Sonata quickened her pace just enough to bring her alongside Lex, and she pressed against him lightly. “Just so long as we get to play hard again tonight.” She could feel herself flushing as she spoke, and couldn’t seem to contain the smile that crossed her face as she remembered last night.
Lex’s reaction was nearly identical, coloring even as he felt the corners of his lips turning upward. Reflexively glancing around to make sure that the few ponies that were up and about this early hadn’t overheard her, he leaned in closer to her as he replied in a quiet voice, “If hard is how you want it.”
“Like, oh my gosh!” Sonata squealed in embarrassed laughter, eyes wide and completely taken aback at him actually giving her a playful response. Her reaction was enough to make Lex grin and laugh softly, and she couldn’t help but stare as he did. Lex only smiled on rare occasions, and Sonata honestly couldn’t remember seeing him look at happy and relaxed as he did at that moment. The sight of him like that, and knowing that she was the cause of it, was enough to make her heart flutter.
Lightly whacking his side in mock-admonishment, she couldn’t keep the happiness off of her face as they walked through Tall Tale side-by-side. It was perfect, she realized. They were back together and closer than ever, they were already in charge of one city and would soon have the other one whipped into shape, and there were no more dragons or monsters or anything standing in their way. Everything was absolutely perfect.
Everything except one thing.
“Hey, you think that we can get some breakfast on the way there? I’m, like, totes starving.”
“I can’t believe not one place was open,” grumbled Sonata as they approached city hall. It was amazing how fast an empty tummy could impinge on a good mood.
“It’s most likely because of how late everypony was out last night,” replied Lex matter-of-factly. Looking around, he could see the remnants of confetti scattered about the town plaza, along with patches of discarded paper cups and plates and other debris. “After that much partying it’s not surprising for the city to be so quiet.”
Sonata looked rather put out by his answer, but before she could say anything her stomach rumbled loudly. She pointed to it. “See? I’m, like, running on empty!”
“As soon as we’re done meeting with Ribbon Cutter, I’ll take you out for a meal,” promised Lex, not breaking his stride. Sonata rolled her eyes at his choosing work over her comfort, but kept silent as she followed behind him, not wanting to make a fuss.
The entrance to city hall was unlocked, much to Sonata’s disappointment – she’d been hoping that it would be locked up tight, so she’d have an excuse to pitch looking for a restaurant that was open – but as they stepped inside she perked up, sniffing the air. “Do you smell that?”
“Hm?” Lex paused at her question, glancing back at her before pausing, realizing that there was an unexpected scent in the air. It smelled like…
“Food!” Sonata quickly ran up the steps that were along either side of the building’s main hallway, following the scent. Slightly nonplussed, Lex went after her at a somewhat more sedate pace.
They went up three floors, the smell gradually getting stronger, making Sonata’s mouth water. Something was cooking, and the closer she got the more she could make out the individual scents: Cheese! Eggs! Onions! It was enough to make her lick her lips in hunger.
Following the delectable aroma down a hallway, Sonata turned a corner and found herself in a small kitchenette. As she entered, a familiar pony looked up from where she was tending to a frying pan on the stove. “Good morning Miss May-, oh! Miss Dusk!”
Sonata beheld what happened next in slow motion. Lucy, startled by seeing somepony who wasn’t Ribbon, reflexively jumped. This caused one hoof to come down on the handle of the frying pan, which – just like the folder from yesterday – was jutting out over open air, causing it to launch its scrumptious-looking concoction into the air…right at Sonata.
Caught between the desire to flinch and the desire to open her mouth in hope of some of it getting in there, she tried to do both, closing her eyes. But after a moment, nothing happened, and she cracked one eye open to see what had happened. To her surprise, the food was still hanging in the air, caught in a purple aura, as was the overturned frying pan.
“What just happened?” came Lex’s voice from behind her, causing Sonata to slump in relief as he telekinetically replaced the pan and its contents on the stove.
“Oh! Oh I’m so sorry!” gushed Lucy, putting a hoof to her mouth. “I almost messed up again!”
Recovering, Sonata strode towards the younger mare, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. This guy,” she nodded her head towards Lex, shooting him a smile, “was here to save the day like he always does. More importantly,” she turned her gaze to the frying pan, salivating. “What are you making?”
“Oh, the mayor, I mean, um,” she cast a self-conscious look at Lex before turning her gaze back to Sonata, “the interim deputy mayor, used to skip breakfast a lot when she would come in. My big sister used to tell me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but when I told the interim deputy mayor that, said that she didn’t have time in the mornings to make breakfast. So I started coming in early to make it for her.”
She paused as she noticed how Sonata was eyeing the food and licking her lips. “Um…I could make you some too, if you want.”
A moment later, she was wrapped up in a bone-crushing hug from Sonata. “Thank you so much! So, what’s on the menu for today? It smells delicious!”
Smiling at the compliment, Lucy turned back to the pan as Sonata let her go. “It’s a breakfast burrito. You wrap fried eggs, onions, peppers, beans, and cheese in a tortilla and sprinkle some pepper on it. It’s guaranteed to keep you going through the morning until lunch.” She moved as she spoke, preparing the meal with quick motions that were clearly the product of having done that many times before. In a few moments, she presented her concoction to Sonata on a plate. “Here you go, but be careful. It’s hot.”
Her warning fell on deaf ears, Sonata biting into it deeply before letting out a yelp. Acting quickly, Lucy retrieved some orange juice and poured a glass, passing it to Sonata, who gulped it down quickly before letting out a relieved sigh.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding. But that was, like, super tasty! I can totes see why Ribbon likes you so much!” Sonata grinned at Lucy before going back to her burrito, blowing softly on it before taking another bite.
Lucy blushed at the praise, looking down bashfully. “Oh, I just want to help her out however I can. It’s no big deal.” Despite her modesty, she was smiling as she retrieved more ingredients, looking back over her shoulder at Lex as she did. “I’ll make you one too.”
It took only a few minutes for her to prepare one for Lex, who cautiously sniffed it before taking a bite. Despite Sonata’s continued praise for Lucy’s cooking, he was still suspicious, knowing how different his culinary preferences were from his girlfriend’s. But to his surprise, it was quite delicious, and he dug in without any further hesitation.
Smiling again as she saw that everypony was enjoying her food, Lucy turned back to the stove, preparing another serving. She had just finished getting it all ready when she heard hoofsteps approaching the door. Quickly sliding the burrito onto a plate, she turned to present it, sure that the interim deputy mayor was about to walk in. “Good morn-”
“Morning! Oh, is that for me? Thanks! Don’t mind if I do!” Nosey smiled as she snatched the plate and took a bite of its contents in one smooth motion, letting out a whoop at the heat. “Ith good!” she said said, fanning her mouth with one hoof. “Weh guh anyfin t’drin?” She was already moving to the kitchenette’s fridge as she spoke, ignoring the dumbfounded looks being directed her way as she poured herself a glass of juice and gulped it down.
“What are you doing here, Nosey?” asked Lex, frowning. He’d largely forgotten about her in the wake of his battle with the dragon, and wasn’t particularly pleased to see her again.
“Hm?” Nosey paused, her burrito already halfway to her mouth in her telekinetic grip. “Oh, well, I figured that I should write a story about what you’re doing now that you’re mayor of this place. You know, what your policies and platforms and stuff are.” She paused to take a large bite of her food before continuing. “I’b go’ a nobe foh newh.”
“Um, you really shouldn’t talk with your mouth full,” ventured Lucy. “Everytime I try to do that, I end up either choking or biting my tongue.”
Swallowing, Nosey repeated herself. “I said: I’ve got a nose for news. See?” She grinned as she turned in profile to them, pointing to the newspaper-and-magnifying-glass cutie mark on her flank.
“More like a nose for Lucy’s cooking,” muttered Sonata, putting her plate in the sink. Noticing that Lex was giving her a wry look, she blinked, tilting her head. “What?”
Ignoring the other mare, Nosey scarfed down the rest of her burrito and chugged her remaining juice, letting out a belch before wiping her mouth with her foreleg. Satisfied now that her belly was filled, she whipped out her notepad and pen, pushing her glasses up her face as she turned to face Lex fully. “Okay, so, first order of business: what’s your first act as mayor of…um…”
She trailed off as she took a good look at Lex now that she’d filled her belly. “Why are you carrying a scythe on your back? And, hang on, is that barbed wire around your hoof?!” She stepped closer, peering at Lex’s foreleg before reaching out to prod it, to his considerable irritation. “Did you join a punk band last night or something?”
Gnashing his teeth as he heard Sonata titter at Nosey’s question, Lex fought down the urge to castigate the annoying reporter. Instead, he carefully composed an answer in his head. For all that she grated on him, she was still a useful method for communicating with the general public, and her current line of questioning would serve as a useful method for beginning to spread the Night Mare’s doctrine.
“This is-”
“Lucy? What’s going on in here?”
Lex was interrupted as Ribbon walked in the door, looking around in obvious surprise at finding so many ponies there.
“Oh! I’m sorry Miss M-, Miss Interim Deputy Mayor! I’ll have your breakfast ready right away!” Cringing at having been caught without food ready, Lucy rushed to prepare another burrito.
Nosey immediately shifted her focus, turning towards the new arrival. “Excuse me. I’m Nosey Newsy, with the Canterlot Chronicle. Would you mind if I interviewed you and the new mayor about what you have planned for Tall Tale?” Internally, she cheered. A double-interview with the two of them would be much better than just one or the other!
Before Ribbon could answer, Lex exited the room, pausing as he passed her. “Come to your office as soon as you have your food. We have much to discuss.”
Breezyleaf’s question caused silence to fall among the araneas for the first time in the last few hours. Glancing at each other, no one volunteered any thoughts about what their next move should be. Instead, there was a mute chorus of shrugs and shaking heads.
Leaning back in his chair, Fireflower tried to think about what the future held for himself and his siblings…but he just couldn’t. Not after everything that had happened.
Waterlily’s unexpected reappearance had been a shock that they were all still recovering from. But unlike almost everything else that had happened since they’d come here, this one had been joyous. After they’d finished crying together, the six of them had reluctantly ended their group hug and dragged themselves to a nearby table to sit down and talk.
This had swiftly drawn Busy Bee down on them, both for their having abandoned their kitchen duties and for how much noise they were making (“I’m going to need new soundproofing because of you lot!”). But upon seeing the teary faces of her errant employees and being told that their “long-lost” sister had come back – none of them had felt comfortable saying that Waterlily had actually died – Busy had relented, telling them to keep it down to a dull roar before she returned to the kitchen to let the six siblings continue their reunion.
The next few hours had them all listening to Waterlily tell them the circumstances of her return, before filling her in on what had happened after her…departure. This had then turned into the sort of raucous discussion that they’d always had before, with everyone – even Rockwood – chiming in with their thoughts and feelings on various things, with all of the teasing and laughter that always entailed.
Much to Fireflower’s chagrin, Waterlily had insisted on sharing the story of what had happened between him and Sonata with the others. The reactions had been, predictably enough, mixed. Shadowvine had been horrified (“Are you trying to get us all killed?!”) whereas Brightrose had been proud of him (“That took a seriously big pair, little brother.”). Rockwood had simply put a hoof on his shoulder in a silent show of support. Breezyleaf had been the most sympathetic, angrily wondering how “that awful mare” could do that to him, before worriedly asking if he was alright.
Although she seemed uncertain of his reassurances that he was fine, the funny thing was that he really did feel okay. What had happened with Sonata had hurt, but…somehow, he didn’t feel broken up over it. After all, he had already known going in how it was going to end up, so it wasn’t like he hadn’t expected her to turn him down.
But that wasn’t all of it. The way Fireflower felt right now, it was almost like…relief. Or maybe closure. It was as though everything that had happened in the last few hours, first with Sonata and then with Waterlily, had finally settled things that had needed to be taken care of.
No, not the last few hours. The last few days, he realized. Ever since they had been brought to this strange world, they hadn’t had a moment’s rest, beset by one disaster after another. Losing Waterlily. Being forced to do the dragon’s bidding. Wondering if the wizard that slew it would turn his wrath on them next. All of it had taken a severe toll on them.
It was only now, with the dragon dead, with Waterlily alive again, and with his feelings for Sonata resolved, that Fireflower felt like things had finally settled down to the point where he could start to feel at ease again. Looking around, he could see that same feeling on the faces of his brothers and sisters. That for the first time in what seemed like a long time, it felt like everything was okay.
“Well,” he spoke up, “I think that we should get some rest, and then get something to eat, and then…” He paused, before giving a shrug. “And then we take it from there.”
He couldn’t help smiling as he said it, and he saw that same smile reflected on his siblings’ faces, having heard his subtle emphasis on “we.” Slowly, they all stood up and started towards the stairs.
As they headed back towards their rooms, Brightrose added, “But when we do get some food, can we find a way to eat out? I don’t want to be stuck on kitchen duty with that slave-driver again.”
“Hear, hear!” echoed Shadowvine, bringing nods of assent from Rockwood and Breezyleaf.
Waterlily and Fireflower looked at each other in confusion. It took a lot to get Brightrose and Shadowvine to agree on anything, but surely having to wash a few dishes couldn’t be that bad?
Seeing their expressions, Brightrose shook his head solemnly. “Trust me,” he intoned. “You don’t want to end up as Busy Bee’s employees.”
“Tell me about it,” said Shadowvine with a shiver. “We went from working for a dragon to working for a dragon lady.”
Lex stood in Ribbon’s office, technically his office now, and gazed out the window. Despite the panoramic view of the city it offered, he barely noticed it. His eyes were focused firmly on the future, both immediate and further out.
Vanhoover’s relief was the immediate concern, but Lex had little worry on that front. Now that he had the resources of Tall Tale to draw upon, as well as the Night Mare’s gifts, implementing a large-scale recovery effort would be easier. Without any first-hoof information as to the city’s damage or how badly the local infrastructure had collapsed it was impossible to say how long it would take to turn the place around, but he felt confident it wouldn’t be unduly laborious.
And once he had both cities under his control…
His thoughts were interrupted as he heard hoofsteps approaching. Turning, he saw Ribbon walking in, Sonata following behind her. Lex smiled internally at the sight of his girlfriend; he hadn’t specifically asked her to join them in this meeting, but that was only because he’d presumed that she’d know to do so. That she had pleased him, since it was indicative of their intuition being in sync, as embarrassingly romantic as the sentiment was.
Turning his attention to Ribbon, Lex began to speak. “I want-”
“What do you mean I’m not allowed in?!” From the office’s reception area, Nosey’s outraged voice could be clearly heard.
“The mayor didn’t say that he wanted to see you, and you don’t have an appointment,” came a surprisingly firm response from Lucy. It was enough to make Lex’s eyebrows raise slightly in surprise. He hadn’t thought the klutzy secretary capable of that level of pertinacity.
“What kind of reasoning is that?! He didn’t ask for Sonata either and you let her in!”
“Miss Dusk is the mayor’s girlfriend, which means that she has walk-in privileges. You don’t.”
“Oh come on, he and I go way back! I’m practically family! Lex!” Nosey’s voice increased in volume even further. “Tell her that you want me in there too!”
Growling, Lex telekinetically slammed the office doors shut, letting that be his answer. Nosey’s voice rang out again a moment later, but at least the doors muffled it to a level where she could be ignored. Resolving to deal with that nuisance later, Lex sat down behind the room’s large desk, glancing at Ribbon to see if she’d object to his taking what had formerly been her seat.
Instead, Ribbon sat in one of the guest chairs, glancing at Lex and Sonata with a small smile. “That, right there? That’s why I wouldn’t let Lucy resign. Being a secretary might not be her special talent, but she tries harder than anypony.”
“I guess that makes up for her spilling cider on me,” chuckled Sonata, before turning to Lex with a teasing look. “So you and Nosey go way back, huh?”
“For all of three days,” snorted Lex. “Now, let’s move on.”
Both mares straightened up at that, looking at him attentively. Nodding to himself in satisfaction, Lex fixed his eyes on Ribbon as he began to speak. “I want you to start putting together a large-scale relief operation for Vanhoover. To begin with, you’re going to purchase all of this city’s camping gear.”
Two sets of eyes blinked at that. “Camping gear?” asked Sonata. “You mean, like, for roasting marshmallows and stuff?”
“I mean tents, sleeping bags, blankets, and anything else would be useful if you suddenly found yourself without a home,” replied Lex evenly. If anypony else had said something that ridiculous he would have taken them to task, but he was willing to be more patient with the love of his life. “The flooding likely displaced a lot of ponies, and making sure that they have adequate shelter is a top priority.”
“But won’t they have gone back to their homes already?” asked Sonata. “I mean, when Twilight was telling us about what happened in Vanhoover, she made it sound like the flood had already ended.”
Lex opened his mouth to answer, but Ribbon beat him to it. “Even if the floodwaters have receded, affected homes might still be unlivable,” she said, a grim tone in her voice. “A flooded house isn’t like a giant bathtub. It ruins everything inside, all of the furniture and books and food, and then leaves it strewn around. Not to mention all of the dirt and muck that it washes in from outside. It’s like filling your entire house with wet garbage.”
“And then having nopony come around to clean it up for weeks on end,” added Lex. “Which is why I also want you to buy all of this city’s surplus cleaning and medical supplies.”
But Ribbon shook her head. “We can’t afford that. Even if we spent all of the donation money in the city treasury, we’d be hard-pressed to just buy the camping gear. Throw in the rest of that stuff, and we don’t have anywhere near the budget for something like that.”
Although he had been expecting that answer, Lex still felt his lip curl in disdain. This was one of the central reasons why he had nothing but contempt for Celestia and Luna’s philosophy – if it could even be called that – of political administration. The extremely laissez-faire nature of their government meant that municipal bodies were funded entirely through charitable donations or local fundraising projects, ensuring that they never took in more than a meager amount. Worse, those funds were constantly in danger of being depleted, since regular salaries still needed to be paid to those ponies who worked in government.
The result was that, when large amounts of funds were needed the most, the ponies that were supposed to be taking decisive action found themselves utterly hamstrung by their empty coffers.
Lex knew that, in theory, what was supposed to happen was that local ponies were supposed to pull together in the face of a crisis, generously donating time, money, materials, and whatever else was needed in order to not only overcome hardships together, but strengthen their bonds as a community while doing so. And that worked, for the most part. But in the face of a situation where there was a severe lack of one or more of those things, it was a recipe for disaster.
The only solution for such a situation, Lex knew, was for an authority with sufficient resources – or the ability to procure those resources – to step in, for the common good. That should have been the government, but the princesses’ mismanagement had created a government so anemic as to make that impossible. Vanhoover’s suffering was the result of their neglect.
It was why, after he’d cemented his rule, Lex fully intended to install a system whereby the citizens who lived under him would be subject to a mandatory government surcharge on various goods and services, as well as periodic mandatory payments based on the total value of their assets. That way, his government would never be so broke as to be unable to respond to a crisis. His system of “taxation” would be a way of ensuring his ability to safeguard those ponies that he was responsible for.
“So?” Sonata’s voice cut through Lex’s thoughts. “Just tell them that the new mayor said to turn all that stuff over. If they don’t like it, tough.” She looked at Lex, smiling. “After all, it’s for helping the ponies in Vanhoover, right?”
“That would deleteriously impact the local economy, Sonata,” chided Lex gently. “If we have to confiscate such a large amount of materials without paying for them, then those ponies whom we’ve taken them from will have a hard time making ends meet. Not to mention that they’ll resent my administration for having done that to them.”
“But then how are we supposed to…wait, you don’t mean…” She instinctively reached back, to where the portable hole was tying her mane up.
Lex nodded. “I do. Go ahead and take that off.”
Pouting as she realized that their riches were about to go bye-bye, Sonata nevertheless did as Lex bade her and untied the black cloth from her mane, laying it out on the floor.
Ribbon, who had been watching the exchange in confusion, gaped as the material suddenly turned into a large hole full of coins. For a long moment she just sat there with her jaw hanging open, before finally managing to collect herself, looking between Lex and Sonata in amazement. “Th-this is…!”
“Use this to purchase the supplies I indicated,” said Lex, ignoring her surprise. He paused for a moment to telekinetically remove the remaining scroll case – the one he hadn’t had a chance to read over yet – from the pile, tucking it into his haversack. “Once you’ve done that, reopen the dockyards and have them delivered to that location. On that subject, how many ships are currently moored there?”
“Huh?” replied Ribbon dumbly, still looking at the portable hole full of coins. She edged it with one hoof, still trying to fathom how a hole in the ground could be picked up and rolled like a cloth.
“Ribbon!” Lex snapped, demanding her attention.
Her eyes snapped up immediately, and she blinked as she forced herself to pay attention to him. “Ah, sorry, I, um…” she closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them she was over her surprise. “I don’t know. I’d need to have Lucy contact the harbormaster to pull the records. Why?”
“We’re going to commandeer as many of them as are necessary to transport everything to Vanhoover,” replied Lex. “We’ll use this money to compensate the owners and crew for their trouble.” He’d have preferred to simply use magic to transport everything over there as soon as it was gathered, but that was simply out of the question. The sole teleportation spell he knew allowed only for very short-range movement, meant to be used in tactical skirmishes.
He could, Lex knew, have tried to draw in additional energy to enhance the spell’s range, but he had no idea if that would work or not. Either way, if the teleportation failed, then they’d potentially arrive in the ocean, which would ruin the relief supplies he’d gathered. It wasn’t worth the risk, not when more reliable methods of transport were only slightly slower.
Nodding, Ribbon let her gaze slip back down to the mass of coins again. They’re not even Equestrian bits, she realized. She’d need to figure out how much they were worth before anything else. Across from her, Sonata grinned, leaning in to give a conspiratorial whisper. “Wanna try swimming in them?”
“Finally,” announced Lex, slightly louder than he needed to, “I want you to do one more thing. Go to the local hospitals and clinics, and have them assemble as many doctors and nurses as they can spare. They should keep a skeleton crew, but only those ponies that they can’t do without.”
Now it was Ribbon’s brows that went up, instantly grasping what Lex had in mind. “We’re conscripting them?”
“Yes,” said Lex simply.
Ribbon bit her lip. “Some of them won’t like it.”
“I don’t care if they don’t like it. Their neighbors are in dire straits, and their services are needed.” He gestured to the portable hole again. “They’ll be paid for their work, but make it very clear that they do not have the right to refuse. Take the local police if you have to. If they still won’t cooperate…” he narrowed his eyes as the prospect, “then tell me, and I will deal with them personally.”
Sonata smiled at that. She knew it was a guilty pleasure, but she really hoped that somebody would kick up a fuss. Watching Lex get hooves-on was always enjoyable for her.
“I need all this to happen as soon as possible,” continued Lex. “I want you to be my point-pony on this. I’ll stay here so that I can deal with anything that comes up.”
Letting out a slow breath at the scope of the task in front of her, Ribbon stood up. “Alright, I’ll get started immediately.” She was halfway to the door when something occurred to her, and she stopped, turning back to Lex. “Hang on. We’re getting camping gear, medical supplies, cleaning supplies, and doctors…what about food?”
“Oh yeah, what about food?” echoed Sonata.
Lex shook his head. “No. No food.”
He could see that questions were incoming, so he held up a hoof. “Tall Tale’s railway is still being repaired, and Vanhoover was the coast’s largest food supplier, correct?” He looked at Ribbon, and she nodded in reply.
Sonata tilted her head to the side. “How did you know that?”
“Remember that map of Equestria that Twilight showed us before we left?” asked Lex. “The three major towns on the western coast are Vanhoover, Tall Tale, and Las Pegasus. The latter is on the edge of the San Palomino desert, and is a famous resort town. Tall Tale is situated by White Tail Woods, and is known for its lumber products. Neither has a climate conducive to growing their own food. But Vanhoover is a seaside city at the southern edge of a large area of flatlands, which are themselves tucked between the Unicorn Mountains to the east, the ocean to the west, White Tail Woods to the south, and the Frozen North. It makes sense for that to be an agricultural region, since that area is so isolated that importing food from the breadbasket of central Equestria would be extremely difficult.”
“Oh…” Despite her statement of understanding, Sonata still had no idea how he’d figured all of that out.
Lex turned his gaze back to Ribbon as he continued. “That’s why I don’t want you to purchase any food. Tall Tale is going to need to subsist on what it has, at least until the railway is repaired.”
“Okay, that makes sense,” she admitted. “But what about Vanhoover? If the city's in a bad state, then they won't be getting food deliveries from the local farmers, right? I mean, they have rivers that run from the mountains down into the bay, so water shouldn't be a problem, but other than that...”
“I will take care of that personally,” replied Lex.
Ribbon waited for him to expound on that, but when no further information was forthcoming, she decided to take a guess. “You’re planning to do something with your magic?”
“That’s correct.”
Sonata grinned at his answer, having a good idea what Lex was planning. She’d seen him do something similar in Everglow.
With no further answer forthcoming, Ribbon decided to put it out of her mind for now. For a moment, her eyes darted to what she could see of the scythe on his back, wondering if it had anything to do with why he was carrying such an odd thing around now, despite not having had it yesterday. But he hadn’t brought it up, so neither had she. She believed firmly in having employees do their best at the tasks they were assigned without getting sidetracked, and she fully intended to demonstrate those qualities now.
“I’ll get started right now, but I’m not sure how fast I can pull all this together. There’s a lot to be done.” She nudged the portable hole again as she spoke, and Sonata, picking up on the silent question, got up and made a demonstration out of rolling it up.
“Yes,” nodded Lex in agreement, standing up to look out the window again now that his first round of instructions had been delivered. Looking out over the vista, he once again turned his thoughts to the road ahead.
Looking up from the financial records and lists of municipal activities that he’d been pouring over since that morning, Lex narrowed his eyes at Ribbon’s statement, frowning. It had only been a few hours since he had dispatched her to begin putting his plan to relieve Vanhoover into action, and there were already difficulties coming up? He’d anticipated some obstacles in coordinating an activity this large, but not this early in the process. “What problems?”
Ribbon paused, trying to think about the best way to parse the news she was about to deliver. A moment later she realized what she was doing, and smirked internally. She’d always hated it when somepony – typically Lucy – fretted about telling her bad news. She’d always thought that it was disingenuous; that they were unduly focused on not being blamed for what they were about to say.
Now that the horseshoe was on the other hoof, she understood how wrong she’d been. It wasn’t about trying to avoid culpability, whether rightly or wrongly. Rather, it was because they were worried about disappointing the pony who’d trusted them enough to give them a task. The sudden fear that somepony she looked up to would think less of her was an awful feeling.
Mentally apologizing to Lucy and everypony else she’d ever berated for hesitating, Ribbon forced herself to answer Lex’s question. “I spoke to the manager of Tall Tale’s bank. He won’t exchange the coins you gave me for Equestrian bits.”
“What?” hissed Lex softly, though his tone was no less dire for it.
Wincing internally, Ribbon plunged ahead. “These coins,” she nodded towards the rolled-up portable hole that was tucked under one wing, “aren’t of a make that anypony at the bank had ever seen before. They aren’t sure what they’re worth, and so they can’t change them out for bits. Throw in that there are several different kinds in there-”
“There’s more than one type of coin in there?” interrupted Lex, his frown changing to one of confusion.
Ribbon blinked. “You didn’t know?” When Lex shook his head, she unrolled the portable hole on the floor again, reaching in and digging out a hooffull of the coinage it contained, bringing it over to lay them on Lex’s desk. Once she did, it became immediately apparent what she was talking about. “You see? Some of these are made of gold, and there are quite a few silver coins in there too, but it turns out that most of them are made of copper. So there’s going to be a different value assigned to each type.”
Lex leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t examined the coins very closely at all, having been more interested in the scrolls than the rest of the dragon’s hoard. Still, whether there was one type of coin or three, this shouldn’t have been an issue. “Then have them call a coin collector to assess their value and exchange them based on that.”
“I did,” replied Ribbon. “That’s why this took so long. She examined one of each type of coin and said that, as far as she knew, they weren’t like anything she’d ever seen before.”
“Shouldn’t that increase their value, then?”
“That’s what I thought too, but she said that, and I quote, ‘there’s a difference between something that’s a piece of history and something that has no history.’ Between that and just how many of these there are, she was adamant that they simply weren’t worth anything as currency…” Ribbon trailed off with a helpless shrug.
“Then what about buying them for the metal?” asked Lex through gritted teeth. “Even if these coins aren’t recognized as being money, gold, silver, and copper are still valuable unto themselves.”
But Ribbon was already shaking her head. “I tried, but the manager just said that they were a bank, not a smelting company, and he has a point. If they just bought them for the metal, all they’d be able to do is turn around and sell them to somepony who could melt them down, not to mention having to store and ship them to boot.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “though I suppose that part of it might not be a big deal if you wanted to sell that thing I’m carrying them around in too, but good luck figuring out what it’s worth.”
Lex snorted in derision at the idea. Seeing that no further answer was forthcoming from him, Ribbon picked up the coins on the desk and deposited them back into the hole. The clink as they landed amongst their brethren was the only sound in the room for a moment as Ribbon let Lex digest everything she’d just told him.
For his part, Lex simply stared at the contents of the hole, thinking. He had expected there to be some issues of currency conversion, but he hadn’t anticipated the entire lot of them being effectively worthless. This was a serious problem. If he couldn’t use the contents of the dragon’s hoard as currency, then he had no operating budget for funding Vanhoover’s relief, which limited his options to virtually nil.
That was not acceptable.
Lex looked up at Ribbon. “I want to know how much each of those metals is currently worth. Find that out for me, and then bring the bank manager here.”
Ribbon tilted her head. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make him purchase these coins.”
“How?”
“By leveraging the authority of my administration over this city,” replied Lex without missing a beat. “He’s going to buy them, every single one, because I won’t give him any other choice.”
Ribbon’s eyes widened. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Compared to letting the ponies of Vanhoover suffer because I can’t purchase the supplies needed to help them due to one banker’s cupidity, it’s a fine idea,” retorted Lex flatly.
“But running roughshod over the ponies who disagree with you-”
“-is sometimes what the government is supposed to do, for the greater good!” snapped Lex, his voice rising. “Just because somepony doesn’t like what I’m doing doesn’t mean that their objections are at all cogent, let alone worthy of consideration! Why doesn’t anypony ever understand that?!”
Ribbon gaped at the unexpected outburst, taken completely aback. She’d apparently hit some sort of sore point with him, and she made a mental note of that as she bit her lip, trying to figure out how to reiterate her point while avoiding whatever tripwire she’d just crossed. “All I’m saying,” she said slowly, keeping her voice soft, “is that making the bank buy the coins for the cost of their metals-”
“I’m not going to make them buy them for the cost of their metals,” interrupted Lex. “I plan on giving them a generous discount, one that will allow the bank to turn a profit when they resell them later on, even after the storage and shipping costs are factored in.”
“O-oh…” Ribbon stammered, suddenly feeling very foolish. Of course he’d had a plan in mind. Selling the coins at a discount wasn’t a bad idea at all; in fact, it was probably the best solution possible. Ribbon had known the bank manager for years, and although she knew he’d grumble at the arrangement, he wouldn’t have any serious objections once he realized that he’d make money on the deal. And this way, they’d acquire the bits they needed immediately, rather than having to go through the lengthy process of finding a buyer for all of these.
“What else?”
“Huh?” Ribbon started, drawn out of her ruminating by Lex’s question.
“You said that there were ‘a few’ problems. What else?”
“Oh, um, it’s about the dockyards.” Ribbon paused to gather herself, trying to get past her sudden bout of embarrassment. “I had Lucy send a message to the harbormaster, and the response came in just as I got back.”
“Let me guess,” said Lex with a sigh. “None of the ships there are currently seaworthy.”
“…that’s exactly right. There are currently two ships there, one of which is still under construction, and the other is dry docked for repairs to its hull. Both are going to need weeks before they’re serviceable. How did you know that?” She wasn’t going to ask, but she couldn’t help herself, suddenly overcome with curiosity.
“Your speech, back when you declared that Tall Tale would be evacuated,” answered Lex. He stood up as he spoke, reaching into his haversack. “You said that ships would ‘arrive’ to take everypony to Las Pegasus. The only reason to have ships arriving is if there aren’t any already here. Since this is a major city, even if it only has a modest maritime presence, it wasn’t likely that the harbor would have no ships whatsoever, which meant that there were probably some there, but not serviceable.” As he finished, he withdrew a copy of the “special evacuation edition” of Tall Tale’s newspaper from his pack, folded to the page that had reprinted her speech.
Ribbon was impressed, and it showed on her face. “You got all of that from one word in a speech that I made several days ago?”
Lex shrugged. “It was just a guess. In any event, it doesn’t matter. I can use my magic to repair the damaged ship. Even if it’s too small to bring everything over, Vanhoover is close enough that making multiple trips shouldn’t be any trouble.” One of the spells that the Night Mare had granted him allowed him to repair damaged objects. Unlike when the train he and Sonata had been on had come across a mangled stretch of railroad track, a broken vehicle was now nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. “I’ll go and repair that right now while you arrange things with the bank manager.”
He started towards the door when Ribbon called out to him. “Wait a minute.”
“What is it?” he asked, turning to face her. He’d presumed that she’d told him everything that needed to be taken care of, but reading people had never been his strong suit. Clearly, there was yet another issue that required his intervention before-
“It’s lunchtime.”
Lex raised one brow, his dubiousness obvious. “Are you joking?” He was going to say more, but stopped as he suddenly remembered having a conversation just like this with Sonata several days ago, back when they were on their way to Tall Tale.
Ribbon shook her head. “I’m not. Listen, the bank manager is going to be at lunch himself right now, so I won’t be able to get in to see him for another hour or so. And if you want to talk to him this afternoon then you can’t go to the dockyards right now, since going there and back takes a few hours. So in the meantime, let’s get something to eat.”
Lex frowned, but didn’t object. While he was used to skipping meals, he only did so when there was a good reason for it, such as work that needed to be finished. But from what Ribbon was telling him, there was no other work to be done. He could have spent time looking over that second scroll, but that wasn’t any sort of immediate priority. Finally, he nodded. “Alright.”
“Great!” Ribbon grinned, slightly surprised by her own enthusiasm. “Should we go get Sonata, or…?” She trailed off, looking around the room as she asked in what Lex had learned, after long periods of study, was a silent query as to the location of the person under discussion, in this case his girlfriend.
“She’s with Nosey somewhere. If she’s not back yet, it means they’re not done yet.” Lex was grateful for that, since the irritating reporter had been making a nuisance out of herself, hovering outside of his office and yelling that she wanted an interview every time Lucy had opened the door. Lex had been entirely willing to turn over the remaining bits that he had to Sonata in exchange for her making Nosey go away.
“Well, Lucy likes to eat at her desk, so I guess it’s just you and me then.” Ribbon smiled as she led him towards the door. “Do you like pasta? I know this great little place.”
Sonata grinned as she walked into Lex’s office, amused by actually being able to use that line. Of course, city hall wasn’t really “home,” but who cared? She had someone that she could say that to. That was what mattered.
Lex glanced up at her and grunted in acknowledgment before turning his eyes back to whatever it was he was reading, instantly making her smile diminish. She waited for a moment to see if he’d notice his blunder, but after several seconds it was clear that there was nothing else forthcoming from him. Rolling her eyes, Sonata walked around his desk until she was next to his chair. “Ahem. I said, ‘I’m home.’”
“I heard you the first time,” responded Lex, not even bothering to look up at her as he spoke. Frowning now, Sonata glanced at what he was reading, seeing a lot of numbers and some charts. The sight made her huff; he was ignoring his hot girlfriend in favor of some boring ol’ math?
Fighting the urge to feel insulted, Sonata decided to try a different tack. Lex, she knew, was totes brilliant in a lot of ways, but she’d been with him long enough to realize that, as smart as he was, he didn’t know much at all about how to talk to other people. That was why she’d come up with the idea of being his spokespony in the first place. It also meant that he probably didn’t realize how he was acting right now.
“Okay, hold up a sec,” she said as she put a hoof over the page he was reading, blocking his view of it. When he turned an annoyed glance towards her, she continued. “That’s like, totes the wrong way to greet your girlfriend after you haven’t seen her all day.”
Lex blinked, his expression turning blank. “It’s not?”
Sonata closed her eyes and shook her head, a serious look on her face. Despite that, she was grinning inwardly, pleased that he seemed eager to learn. “Nope. What you’re supposed to do is tell her how much you’ve missed her. Or even better: show her instead of telling her. Like, with a kiss.” She tilted her head just slightly, waiting to feel his lips against hers.
And waited.
After several seconds, she cracked one eye open, wondering what was wrong. What she saw was Lex giving her a look that was a mixture of skepticism and incredulity. “Every time?” he asked, disbelief evident in his voice. “Isn’t that a little perfunctory?”
“…whatever,” sighed Sonata disgustedly. All of a sudden she didn’t want to try and walk him through what he was doing wrong anymore. Walking back around his desk, she sank into one of the guest chairs opposite it. “Can you just hurry up with whatever it is you’re doing so we can go get some dinner? Not everyone likes to skip meals the way you do.”
Lex looked at her with a frown, silent for a moment as he compared her current disposition to how she’d been acting before. It took only a few moments to come up with a tentative conclusion, which he verbalized a moment later, hoping that she would clearly confirm or deny it so that he could build on that knowledge. “You’re upset.”
Sonata rolled her eyes. “Wow, there’s that whole super-genius brain of yours again,” she replied sarcastically, looking away.
Lex paused to consider her response, turning it over in his mind before deciding that it constituted affirmation of his premise. Putting his papers down, he went to stand in front of her. “I don’t think your indignation is called for.”
“Oh well excuse me for my ‘indignation,’ Mister Mayor sir,” she drawled, laying on the sarcasm thicker. “I guess I just don’t like it when my boyfriend doesn’t want to kiss me because it’s too ‘perfunctual.’”
“Perfunctory,” corrected Lex.
“Whatever!” She jumped up and headed for the door, still not looking at him. “Can we just go?”
“No!” snapped Lex. He was trying to hold his own anger in check, but it was beginning to crack in the face of her recalcitrance. “We’re fixing this right now!”
Now she did look at him, giving him a cold glare over her shoulder. “What’s to fix? You made it very clear that you don’t want to kiss me, and that’s totes your choice, so just-”
“I do want to kiss you,” interjected Lex, marshalling the last of his patience to keep his voice level.
“That’s, like, not what you just said!”
“That’s not correct!” Lex snapped. “What I said was that your rule about kissing you as a greeting was excessively cursory. That is what I don’t want to do.”
“Huh?” Sonata’s anger began to be diluted by confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I don’t like the thought of kissing you for the sole purpose of fulfilling some inane social obligation,” explained Lex. He had to struggle to keep his voice down, trying hard not to lose his temper with her. “I don’t want to take something special between us and cheapen it like that. When I kiss you, it’s because the spirit moves me to do so. Anything less than that isn’t a good enough reason.” He waited for her response, feeling himself tensing in anticipation of whatever incomprehensible reaction she’d have next.
For her part, Sonata was stunned. While she was glad to hear that this was all just a big misunderstanding, she couldn’t help but be shocked at how literally he’d interpreted what she’d told him. That anybody could have seriously thought that there was some sort of rule about when to kiss somebody was mind-boggling!
It was crazy enough that she had to double-check. “Lex,” she said slowly, “you do know that I wasn’t being serious before, right? All that stuff I was saying about how you’re supposed to greet me when you haven’t seen me in a while…that wasn’t, like, a rule or anything. I was just trying to say that I wanted you to kiss me.”
The look of confusion on his face was almost funny, his brow furrowing as he tilted his head, clearly struggling to process what she’d just told him. “But that’s…” he trailed off, obviously going back over the last few minutes in his mind.
“Oh. My. Gosh,” Sonata said slowly, shaking her head in amazement. She knew she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack by a longshot, but even she knew that his assumption had been seriously out there. The reminder of just how quirky her boyfriend could be sometimes was enough to completely dispel her anger, and she found her smile coming back as she went over to nuzzle him. “I totes forgot just how awkward you can be sometimes.”
He gave her an unhappy look at that, but didn’t push the issue. This wasn’t the first time he’d misunderstood her – the situation where he’d thought Fireflower had been attacking her came to mind as a prominent instance of that – and the reminder of his deficiency, especially with regard to somepony he loved so much, was enough to make him want to find a hole to curl up in, looking away from her in mild mortification.
Sensing his embarrassment, Sonata gave him a soft smile. “Aw, don’t be like that. Here.” She reached a hoof under his chin and turned his head towards her, leaning her head forward. This time her meaning was clear, and he met her halfway, feeling some of his discomfort vanish as they kissed.
When it ended, Sonata was all smiles again. “Okay,” she grinned, pleased with how everything had worked itself out so quickly and without too much drama. “Now, let’s go have some dinner.” She started to the door, Lex following her, when a thought occurred to her. “Oh, and you’re buying.”
Lex paused at her pronouncement, wondering whether he should inquire as to what had led her to say that or if he should point out the flaw in her reasoning. Deciding on the latter, he gave her a wry look. “I seem to recall giving you the last of the money we withdrew when we left Canterlot.”
“Oh, yeah, I still have that,” she acknowledged, “but you’re the one with all of that loot from the dragon.”
“I gave that to Ribbon.”
“Yeah, but…all of it?”
Lex nodded. “After I convinced the manager of the local bank to exchange the coins in the portable hole for Equestrian bits, I sent Ribbon to collect the money and begin procuring the necessary materials. That’s going to require a significant amount of capital, so it wouldn’t have made sense for me to withhold any of it.”
Sonata rolled her eyes, but was laughing softly as she did. “Alright, I’ll buy us dinner, and you can make it up to me afterwards.”
Lex tilted his head, wondering if this was another area where he was supposed to be able to intuit what she wanted. Better to ask than to risk another misunderstanding. “Make it up to you how?”
She grinned, leaning in to whisper in his ear, her voice turning husky. “Use your imagination.” She punctuated her statement with a soft nip, drawing a gasp from him that was equal parts understanding and delight.
He was blushing slightly as they exited his office. Noticing that Lucy was still at her desk, Lex paused to call out to her. “Lucy, I’m done for the day.”
“Yes sir, Mister Mayor. Oh! I almost forgot,” she added as she pulled out a notepad and pen. “The Interim Deputy Mayor asked if you could write down where you’re staying while you’re here, just in case anything came up and she needed to contact you.”
Nodding at Ribbon’s sensible precaution, Lex scribbled down the address of their hotel before turning to leave. As he did, Lucy called out, “Um, should I make breakfast for you two from now on?”
“Yes!” interjected Sonata quickly.
Lex frowned at her. “Sonata, we don’t need her to do that. Now that I have access to sacerdotal thaumaturgy again, I can create food for us.”
“Oh no, no way.” Sonata shook her head. “I remember what that was like from when you did it back on Everglow, after that train crash. It was all plain water and gruel. No thanks.” She turned to give Lucy a smile. “I’d rather have Lucy’s breakfasts instead.”
Putting aside her mild alarm at the two of them having been in a train crash at that "Everglow" place, Lucy smiled at the show of confidence. She had no idea what kind of food “sacerdotal thaumaturgy” was, but she could sympathize with anyone who wanted to eat more than water and gruel in the morning. “It’s no trouble at all. I’ll have it ready when you come in.”
Lex frowned. “That’s-”
“Totes sweet of you!” Sonata refused to let Lex ruin this, steering him firmly towards the door as she waved goodbye to Lucy. “Night!” As they reached the stairs, Lex gave Sonata a glare, to which she responded with a guilty smile.
Wanting to change topics before he dug his hooves in, Sonata quickly spoke up. “So, where do you want to go?”
Knowing what she was doing, Lex nevertheless let it slide. “Anyplace that doesn’t serve pasta. Ribbon and I had that for lunch.”
“Hmm, you were stepping out on me with another mare, huh?” teased Sonata. She stuck her tongue out at him as she said it, wanting to make sure that he knew she was being playful and not seriously accusing him of cheating on her. “Well, Nosey and I got hayburgers for lunch, so those’re out too. How about a salad place? I saw one when I was out earlier, and it looked pretty tasty. Like, it covers them with cheese and those crunchy little bread cubes and stuff.” Lex nodded, and the two set off at a leisurely pace.
As they approached the restaurant, Sonata spoke up again. “By the way, I almost forgot to say congratulations.”
Lex raised a brow. “For what?”
The smile she gave him then made his heart skip a beat. “For your first day of governing other ponies.”
Coming back from the restaurant where they’d celebrated his first full day of governing other ponies, Lex found a surprise waiting in the lobby of their hotel: Nosey was there, apparently expecting them. He was preparing to chastise her for following them when Sonata started waving and trotted over to her.
“Hi! I’m glad you found the place okay!” she smiled warmly, as though greeting her best friend.
“It was easy,” Nosey grinned back. “You gave great directions.”
“What exactly is going on here?” asked Lex with a frown. He hadn’t asked Sonata about what she and Nosey had been up to all day, and he was beginning to wonder if that had been an oversight on his part.
Sonata turned back to him. “So Nosey and I were talking before, and she let it slip that she ran out of money and had nowhere to stay,” she explained.
Nosey chuckled, raising one forehoof to scratch the back of her head in mild embarrassment. “One of the perils of being an investigative journalist,” she remarked, as though her being broke was a badge of honor.
Lex frowned, not liking where this was going. “And?” he prompted.
“Well,” answered Sonata, “since she was, like, totes helpful when I was looking for you before, I thought it’d be nice if we did something for her now, so I told her that we’d rent her a room here for a few days.”
“It’s just until your big plan to go help Vanhoover is ready,” added Nosey. “Once that kicks off, I’ll be tagging along and reporting on the relief efforts.”
Lex’s frown grew more severe. “You are not ‘tagging along’ with us to Vanhoover! We’re going to be working hard to restore order and prosperity once we’re there, and won’t have time to foalsit you!”
Nosey raised her chin in defiance. “If I want to go to Vanhoover and write a story about what’s happening there, I can. Unless,” she paused to give Lex a challenging look, “you plan on having me detained for some reason.”
Lex growled, knowing that she was baiting him. If he forcibly kept her from going to Vanhoover, she’d immediately write a story that accused him of abusing his power, since the press in Equestria was given free rein to write about whatever they wanted. But there were plenty of ways around that particular problem.
“The boat that I’ve chartered to take everypony there is going to be full of personnel and supplies. There won’t be any room for you.”
“There might be,” shot back Nosey. “Besides, if worse comes to worst, I’ll borrow somepony’s lifeboat and just tie it to the back of the ship so that you can tow me along!”
“Vanhoover is a disaster area,” growled Lex, taking a different tack. “My information says that order has broken down and basic sanitation, shelter, and food are no longer readily available. I won’t be able to guarantee your safety.”
Nosey blinked, as though he’d surprised her, before smiling at him. “Thanks, but I can take care of myself. I may not have slain a dragon,” she winked at him, “but you don’t get to be an ace reporter without learning a little something about courage. But it’s sweet of you to be worried about me.”
“He worries about everyone,” added Sonata, returning to Lex’s side. “That’s what makes him, like, such a great mayor.” She gave him a quick kiss, before turning her attention back to Nosey. “So, let’s get you all checked in!”
The two mares trotted to the counter before Lex had a chance to get another word in, leaving him to stew in his dissatisfaction. Nosey was one of the more irritating ponies he’d ever met. That they were paying for her lodgings while she kept hassling them was bad enough, but now they’d have to deal with her foolishness in Vanhoover too? He’d need to have a talk with Sonata about this. If he’d known that leaving her to deal with that aggravating newsmare would lead to this, he’d have kept the two of them far away from each other!
Huffing, Lex turned to where the pair were talking to the receptionist, waiting for them to be finished. But as the minutes ticked by, the two stayed right where they were, still conversing with the uniformed pony behind the desk. Lex’s brow furrowed, this time in mild consternation. What could be taking so long?
He was just about to go over to them when they apparently concluded their business, Sonata opening her bag and giving quite a few bits to the receptionist with a sigh. Nosey shifted in place, glancing over at him before saying something to Sonata, who put a hoof on her shoulder in what looked like a reassuring gesture as she replied. Then the two made their way back towards Lex.
“So, um, there’s been a little…complication,” said Sonata, trying to grin even as her ears folded down.
Lex narrowed his eyes. “What sort of complication?”
Sonata licked her lips, her eyes darting to Nosey before moving back to him. “Well…see, it’s like this. Remember how I said that I’d rented our room – yours and mine – before?” She paused there, and waited for Lex to nod before she continued. “Okay, so the thing is, I sorta kinda maybe…didn’t pay for it.”
“You didn’t pay for it?” echoed Lex in mild disbelief. “Then how did you…” he trailed off as the obvious answer came to him, and he felt his hackles rising. “Did you enchant the hotel staff?!”
“Wh-, no!” she protested. “Absolutely no way nuh-uh not even a little NO!” The words came out in a jumbled rush of denials, but was enough to make his outrage fade back into suspicion before finally returning to his usual bad mood. Internally, she sighed with relief. She knew that he was all super-against using magic to mess with people’s minds and stuff, so she had no intention of volunteering how she’d used her magic on a waiter to score a free meal for herself and Fireflower when they’d first come to Tall Tale.
“Then how exactly did you get a room here?” pressed Lex.
“Well, um, it was a few days ago, and I’d just figured out that the dragon totes breathed acid instead of fire, and realized that you didn’t know that, so I was kinda freaking out, and, um…Fireflower kinda brought me here and they just sorta let us have it.” She looked down as she finished, suddenly embarrassed about telling him that she’d been sharing a room with the guy who’d had a serious crush on her, even if she didn’t know it at the time.
“Uh-huh,” he replied flatly, no happier at hearing that than she was at saying it.
Off to the side, Nosey was scribbling on her notepad. At least she was until Lex telekinetically yanked the pencil out of her own magical grasp, causing her to yelp in protest. He ignored her as he snapped the pencil in half and tossed the pieces in separate directions, making her pout at him as she put her notepad away.
“So the thing is,” continued Sonata, “apparently the hotel staff is kinda wanting us to pay for the room now, what with the whole ‘evacuate the city’ thing being over, and they wouldn’t give Nosey a place before I did that, and, um…”
Her voice trailed off, but Lex could easily foresee where she was going. “Exactly how much money do we have left, now that you’ve paid the charges we’ve been accruing?”
Giving him a sheepish look, she wordlessly handed him her purse. Taking it from her, Lex glanced at the meager collection of coins inside, knowing immediately that, although they’d be ready to depart for Vanhoover in just a few more days at the rate things were going, they’d be lucky if they could afford to stay here until then.
Sighing, Lex tucked the money away. “We’ll make do,” he pronounced, moving for the stairs.
He had only gotten a few steps when he heard Sonata’s voice say “Great! C’mon Nosey!” It was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks. She couldn’t be serious…
Turning around, he felt his stomach tie itself in knots as he fixed his girlfriend with a steely-eyed glare. “What?” He asked the question around gritted teeth.
Sonata blinked, apparently caught off-guard. “What?” she echoed, blinking. Beside her, Nosey looked equally curious, tilting her head.
“Why are you telling her to follow us?” demanded Lex. The answer was obvious, but he desperately hoped that he was wrong. There was no way that she could possibly be suggesting what he thought she was suggesting.
“Because we’re going to let her crash with us,” explained Sonata, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Duh.”
“No,” responded Lex immediately, shaking his head. “Absolutely not.”
“Look, I get it, it’s totes inconventional,” said Sonata, causing Lex to wince slightly at her poor speech. She’d meant “inconvenient,” he knew. “But she’s a friend of ours, and we can’t just let her sleep out on the street, right?”
“Besides,” piped up Nosey. “You owe me.”
“I owe you?” hissed Lex, his voice a mixture of incredulity and outrage. The only thing he owed this little pain in the flank was a sharp reproach before he showed her the door!
Nosey raised a brow, still unfazed by his attitude. She’d been around him long enough to know that he was all bark and no bite. Sure, he had enough magic to bring a raging dragon down, but in the few days that she’d known him she’d never seen him direct anything worse than a yell towards another pony. The talk she’d had with Sonata earlier in the day had backed that impression up, as the other mare had been quite content to gush about her boyfriend’s good qualities, among which was how he was “all hard and tough on the outside but a totes sweetheart on the inside.” It was why Nosey felt extremely confident in what she was about to say.
“Yep. I seem to recall you collapsing on the street a few days ago, and a certain ace reporter bringing you back to her hotel room, letting you crash there, and feeding you all the while. Ring any bells?”
She smirked as she said it, and Lex ground his teeth at the sight. “You did that solely so you could interview me, which I granted you! I owe you nothing!”
“I beg to differ!” retorted Nosey. “We played tit-for-tat on questions, remember? You answered mine only because I answered yours, which means that you still haven’t made up for my giving you a place to stay and food to eat. I did you a favor and now I’m calling it in.”
Lex looked apoplectic, but Sonata cut in before he could lose his temper any further. “Look, it’s just going to be for a few nights anyway, right? I mean, we’re gonna go to Vanhoover real soon, so let’s just, like, grin and bear it.”
His response to her entreaty was a withering look, but didn’t object. Although he was loathe to admit it, he knew that they were right. Nosey had done him a good turn, even if she’d had ulterior motives, and letting her sleep in their room was ultimately little more than a mild inconvenience…though when he thought about how it would be impossible for him and Sonata to enjoy the newfound carnal side to their relationship with Nosey there, it seemed like a bother of epic proportions.
Not trusting himself to speak in his current mood, he turned and trudged towards the interior of the hotel, hearing the pair fall in behind him. As they did, Nosey’s voice called out to him. “So, I never did get that interview after you assumed office…”
Nosey’s being there had proven to be just as much of a bother as he’d expected, and on more than one occasion he’d found himself needing to muster all of his self-control to avoid lashing out at her. Every word out of her mouth seemed to get under his skin, which was no different than how she normally was, but now her intrusiveness extended to her mere presence, since every night Lex would lie next to his girlfriend, unable to consummate their relationship again due to Nosey sleeping merely a few feet away on the room’s couch.
Worse, however, was how – for all Sonata’s assurances that she was enjoying their involuntary celibacy as much as he was – her reaction to their new guest was exactly the opposite of his own. To Lex’s muted horror, the two mares were quite clearly forming a fast friendship, often going on at length about the most inane of topics, such as popular music or the latest theater productions.
Lex had attempted to intervene, pulling Sonata aside one evening to protest her growing closeness to the annoying reporter. The result had been a brief argument that, to Lex’s supreme dismay, he had lost. “I want to make some new friends,” had been Sonata’s rejoinder. Worse, she had pointed out that being friends with a reporter could be useful in the future, a point so incisive that it had made Lex wonder if Nosey had been coaching her.
The only concession he’d managed to extract from Sonata had been not to talk about his powers or his policies to Nosey. But that had done little to reassure him. As much as he loved Sonata, her personality gave him very little confidence in her ability to keep secrets, and her hanging around a skilled reporter was, in Lex’s opinion, simply laying groundwork for future problems.
Still, her point about using Nosey to their advantage had served to remind him of his plan to use her to begin disseminating the Night Mare’s creed, or at least what he understood of it. That had been enough to quell his objections to Nosey’s repeated insistences that she be allowed to accompany them to Vanhoover – action spoke louder than words, Lex believed, and so the best way to introduce the Night Mare to Equestria was after he’d made a show of using her power, which he planned to do once he arrived at the beleaguered city – much to her delight, and his irritation.
Fortunately, things were going well on that front. Ribbon and her staff had proven as competent as he’d hoped, and were rapidly acquiring the necessary provisions and personnel for the relief operation. The only snag that had subsequently arisen was that it was difficult to figure out an amount to set aside to pay for the doctors and nurses he wanted, since there was no set timetable for how long he’d be making use of them. And that was a detail that couldn’t be overlooked lightly, since buying all of the supplies he’d wanted had cut deep into his operating budget.
To that end, Lex had reluctantly cut down on the number of medical practitioners that he planned on taking with him, reasoning that it was better to have plenty of supplies and fewer doctors to make use of them than vice versa. Luckily, several doctors and nurses had volunteered their services, offering to forego payment entirely, and Lex had accepted their offers. Privately, however, he wondered how long their selflessness would last. Personal fulfillment meant little when faced with a stack of bills and no money to pay them. But then, perhaps they knew that, and had savings they could avail themselves of, or were simply planning on staying for a shorter duration?
Ultimately it didn’t matter very much; their work would be most valuable at the beginning of the operation. The relief effort should, once it got started, eventually allow Vanhoover to begin restoring its infrastructure. Once that happened, the need for external assistance would dwindle, and the ponies from Tall Tale could return home. Assuming, of course, that everything went according to plan, which was always an uncertain proposition at best.
Still, Lex found himself looking forward to getting underway. He put in long hours at city hall, going over various logistics with Ribbon while Lucy did her best to help out, failing as often as she succeeded. He’d repaired the damaged ship with an amplified casting of one of the spells he’d received from the Night Mare, designed to fix significant breaks in inanimate objects. Everything was finally coming together.
And then the day of departure arrived…
Lex, Sonata, and Nosey arrived at the dockyards just as the last of the provisions were being loaded on the ship. Rounding the last corner, the three of them paused at the sight that greeted them. That Ribbon and Lucy were there, directing a large number of delivery ponies and the small crowd of doctors, was expected.
The same couldn’t be said for the larger crowd of bystanders that had gathered nearby. Even as the trio came into view, the gathering of onlookers noticed them and quickly erupted into cheers, causing Lex to share confused glances with the mares on either side of him. “What’s this?” he asked.
Despite his question having been rhetorical, Sonata spoke up. “Dunno. Nobody told me anything about them throwing us a going-away party.”
“There wasn’t anything about it in the local newspaper either,” added Nosey. “I mean, there were plenty of articles about what you’re gonna do for Vanhoover and all, but nothing about the exact date of departure.”
“That’s because we didn’t have the departure date established until near the end of the process,” replied Lex with a frown, eyeing the crowd. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why they were there. Spontaneous celebrations due to a major threat to their city being eliminated was one thing. But standing around just to watch a ship depart? What possible purpose could they have for doing that?
His musings were interrupted as Ribbon, hearing the crowd starting to pick up, noticed them and trotted over, Lucy in tow. Noticing where her boss was looking, Ribbon gave an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Looks like they wanted to watch their new hero set off to do more good deeds.”
“Shut up,” muttered Lex, but there was no heat in his voice. The idea that he was so popular was one that he had very mixed feelings about. On paper, he didn’t want to enjoy the recognition that he was receiving – well-deserved though it was – since that suggested that the motivation for his actions was less than purely altruistic. But in actuality he couldn’t help but acknowledge just how good it felt to be appreciated. The dichotomy was enough to make him vaguely uncomfortable.
He was thankful when Nosey spoke up a moment later…the first time he’d ever been pleased to hear her talking. “How did everypony find out when we were leaving?”
Raising her eyebrow at Nosey’s use of “we,” Ribbon nevertheless answered. “I don’t know, but word probably got out after we’d nailed down the final time. I mean, we did have a lot of delivery ponies bringing the supplies here, and quite a few doctors too. I’m sure somepony talked to somepony else, and the news just spread. Oh, speaking of doctors…” Ribbon trailed off as she pulled a folded black cloth – the portable hole that Lex had given her – out from a pocket and handed it to him. “The remaining money for paying them is in here.”
Lex took it with a nod before passing it to Sonata. “Is there anything else?”
Ribbon glanced back at Lucy, who glanced at a clipboard and shook her head. Satisfied, Ribbon turned back to Lex. “No. Everything’s ready for departure. You can leave as soon as you get on board.”
“Great!” cheered Nosey. “Vanhoover here we come!” Trotting forward, she ascended the gangplank, moving onto the ship and out of view.
“I wonder if she was worried that we’d leave her behind,” mused Sonata as her new friend boarded the ship.
“She was right to do so,” muttered Lex under his breath, despite his previous acquiescence to Nosey’s requests to join them. Putting the reporter out of his thoughts, Lex turned back to Ribbon. “You’re in charge here while I’m away. If anything serious happens, send a pegasus messenger to contact me. Otherwise you’ll probably only receive infrequent contact from me until Vanhoover has stabilized.”
Ribbon nodded, and Sonata stepped forward to address her. “Thanks for everything. You’re, like, totes cool in my book.” Receiving an amused grin in reply, she turned to Lucy. “And I’m really going to miss your breakfasts!”
Lucy blushed, self-conscious at the compliment. Nevertheless, she smiled in response. “I’m glad. I promise I’ll make you more when you get back.”
“Awesome!” Sonata smiled widely, holding out a hoof. Lucy looked surprised for a moment before reading out to press her own hoof against it, her own smile broadening as she did so. Seeing her eyes dart over to him a moment later, Lex gave his secretary a cordial nod.
“Alright,” stated Ribbon in satisfaction, “with that you’re-, huh?” Cutting herself off as she looked to the side, the rest of the group followed her gaze. Over at the crowd, a group of ponies were pushing their way through the throng. She paused, trying to figure out why they seemed familiar. “Those are…”
“The araneas,” answered Lex coldly, eyeing the approaching siblings.
The crowd, seeing other ponies approach Lex and the others, apparently took that as a sign that it was okay for them to do so as well. Frowning at the sight, Ribbon glanced at Lex. “We’ll take care of crowd control. Good luck in Vanhoover.” With that, she trotted forward, raising her voice to try and ward off the other ponies before they got too close. Lucy paused just long enough to give the two of them a wave goodbye before going to help Ribbon.
A moment later the araneas arrived, stopping a few feet from Lex and Sonata. A second passed, but no one spoke, an awkward silence hanging in the air. Several more seconds went by until Shadowvine leaned over and kicked Fireflower, who was staring at the ground. Yelping at the blow, he glanced at his sister before transferring his gaze to the pair of ponies in front of him.
Taking a moment to visibly rally himself, he tried to smile, achieving only limited success as he spoke up. “So, um, I’m glad we caught you before you left…”
“Waitingforthreehours,” mock-coughed Brightrose, which caused Breezyleaf to hiss at him to be quiet.
“…um, so I just…I wanted to say…” continued Fireflower haltingly. His eyes kept making a circuit from Sonata to Lex to the ground and back again. Finally, he sighed. “I wanted to apologize to both of you for…before. I shouldn’t have said what I did; it was stupid.” He paused at that, and then his eyes widened in alarm. “I mean, not that falling for you is a stupid thing to do, because it’s not! It’s just that I was stupid for doing it. I mean, for saying it. I don’t regret doing it.” He paused, and once again he seemed to realize what he’d said, eyes shifting to Lex in fright. “Not that I’m still trying to, you know, do anything about it! I just, I regret my judgment, and my choice of words-, no, wait, I mean my judgment to say, um, those words at all, and I didn’t want you to hear that-, which isn’t me saying that I wanted to hide it from you! I just should have hidden it from everyone, even though saying it seemed like the right thing to do. At the time.”
He punctuated his last statement with a nod, eyes returning back to their usual route of Sonata-Lex-ground. Behind him, Waterlily was sitting up, pressing both forehooves over her mouth, shaking with effort not to let her laughter spill out. The disapproving glare that Rockwood was giving her seemed to be having no effect. The others were grimacing or staring in a mixture of disbelief and mortification.
Fireflower seemed to have settled on looking at the ground again, but before he could start examining it in earnest, Sonata stepped forward and put a hoof on his shoulder. “Thanks for that,” she smiled.
Looking up at her, Fireflower managed to recover somewhat, giving her a weak smile back. “Y-yeah.”
“I didn’t get to answer you before,” continued Sonata. “You asked me why I love him,” she glanced at Lex before looking back at Fireflower, “so much, remember?” He nodded, and she kept going. “The reason why is because…” she paused, trying to figure out how to best phrase it, to say that the intensity of Lex’s feelings for her had completely captured her heart, without making it sound like she was belittling Fireflower’s own feelings in comparison.
Next to her, Lex perked up his ears, his attention focused completely on her. Noticing that, Sonata grinned, looking back at him for a long moment with shining eyes before turning back to Fireflower. “Because he’s the one for me,” she said with a helpless shrug, trying to project the message that she didn’t know how else to say it. That wasn’t true, of course, but it was by far the nicer thing to do.
“O-oh…” Fireflower’s ears folded down, clearly not sure what to make of her answer.
“Don’t worry,” she gave him a friendly pat on the back. “You’re a great guy, and I’m totes sure that someday soon you’ll meet a girl who’ll be, like, super into you.”
“Thanks,” he gave her a wan smile back. It was a lame response, but what else could he say? He glanced at Lex again, but other than a very cool look the dour unicorn didn’t seem to have anything to add, and Fireflower stepped back so that he was among his siblings again, receiving several nudges of support from them as he did.
Lex, for his part, was simply glad that Fireflower’s apology was over. While he’d enjoyed hearing Sonata reaffirm that she had chosen him, everything else about that little exchange had done nothing but call attention to the memory of what he’d witnessed, of how he’d let the relationship between himself and Sonata deteriorate to the point where someone else would dare try to make a play for her. The memory grated on him, and he was eager to get away from it.
Instead, his eyes went over to another member of the group, the white-coated stallion with the pink mane and tail. Another unpleasant memory came to him at the sight, of that particular aranea healing him after his battle with the dragon. But as much as it galled him to recall needing the thing’s assistance, it was relevant now. “You,” he said, pointing.
Brightrose looked up, blinking in surprise. “Me?”
“You have healing magic.”
“Uh, yeah…?”
“Tell me how much magic you can use and what kinds of effects you’re able to evoke,” ordered Lex.
Looks of confusion passed between the six of them, and Sonata as well, but Lex ignored them. A moment later Brightrose replied. “Well, um, not very much. I guess, like, a dozen spells or so in a day,” he gave a nonchalant grin to try and lighten the mood, but it faded in the face of Lex’s continued stony look. “I can mostly just cure wounds, you know? Cuts and bruises, and worse stuff too if I keep pouring it on. Besides that, I can cure someone who’s paralyzed or terrified, and I can do a thing where you can see how bad someone’s hurt just by looking at them. Oh! And I’ve got this whole ‘nonviolent aura’ spell that stops people from trying to attack whoever I cast it on, which is usually me. I’m a lover, not a fighter, after all.” He grinned at that last part, even as his brothers and sisters collectively rolled their eyes.
Lex nodded crisply, considering what he’d just been told. A few seconds later, he fixed Brightrose with an evaluating look. “I could use you in Vanhoover.” From anyone else, that would have been a welcoming statement. From Lex, however, it was quite obviously nothing more than a statement about the allocation of resources.
The tension that ran through the araneas at his pronouncement was obvious, and it made Sonata frown. “Lex,” she said softly, her voice carrying reproach.
He merely raised a brow at her, silently disagreeing with her implicit disagreement, before turning back to the group of siblings, awaiting their response. A moment later, Breezyleaf spoke up. “We were hoping…we wanted to stay here. All of us, together as a family.” Nods and murmurs of agreement came from the others.
Lex silently looked them over, evaluating the proper course of action. He could order Brightrose to join him, he knew. If nothing else, they were living in his city, and the dire circumstances in Vanhoover certainly justified conscripting those with the ability to make a difference. And if his family found being apart from him unpalatable, then they could simply be brought along as well. They’d be a drain on resources, but having a convenient source of healing magic – limited, to be sure, but less so than his own – would more than make up for it.
And yet, despite the degree to which Brightrose’s magic could be utilized, Lex couldn’t bring himself to force him to join Vanhoover’s relief effort. Unlike the doctors that he’d drafted into service, Brightrose wasn’t a medical practitioner, and hadn’t chosen to dedicate himself to healing others as a calling. He was just someone who had happened to develop an inherent knack for healing magic, and although that was a minor distinction, it was still a critical one.
Moreover, to press him into service now, after he’d just been taken hostage by the dragon, would have been tantamount to cruelty, regardless of the reason for it. Doing so might have been for a good end, but Lex had long since come to the conclusion that righteous was only achieved if you accomplished the correct ends by the correct means. And the araneas, who had been not only terrorized, but had been forced to do terrible things under the threat of losing a loved one after another had been slaughtered, had already suffered enough. Lex could not in good conscience force them to do more if they didn’t want to…not this soon, at least.
“Very well then,” he nodded, causing everyone else there to issue a sigh of relief.
He looked at them for a moment longer, vaguely wondering if it was alright to let them to stay in Tall Tale…no, in Equestria itself. They were aliens, after all, and strictly speaking didn’t belong here. But that reasoning rang hollow; they had professed themselves to be community-minded, and although they weren’t really ponies, they deserved a chance to demonstrate that they might be able to transcend the racial limitations that not-ponies labored under. Besides, if they stepped out of line he’d be able to stop them easily enough, thanks to the Night Mare’s power. If it had worked on Waterlily, it would work on the rest of them.
As though she’d heard his thoughts, Waterlily stepped forward. “I wanted to say something too.” Unlike her brother, she looked at Lex directly as she spoke, and he was struck by how different she seemed from the panicky mare she’d been when he’d met her. Apparently she was recovering from the ordeal she’d been through.
She stepped closer to him than was polite, and he was just about to ask her what she thought she was doing when she leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Thank you for bringing me back to life,” she said softly, smiling as she moved back. She gave Sonata, who was currently looking at her with an uncertain expression, an apologetic look before moving back to her brothers and sisters.
Visibly flustered by her actions, Lex wasn’t sure how to react, particularly since he was cognizant that what she’d done had apparently impacted Sonata’s mood. But that didn’t mean that he knew the proper way to acknowledge her gratitude. Finally, he simply decided not to bother, giving her a curt nod before he turned and headed towards the ship without another word.
Seeing Lex’s abrupt departure snapped Sonata out of her mixed feelings at seeing another girl express affection towards him – she suddenly felt like she had a greater appreciation for how he’d felt when he’d seen Fireflower confess to her – and she gave them all a quick wave goodbye as she hurried after him. Catching up to him just as he ascended the gangplank, she nuzzled him, feeling just a teeny bit possessive, and smiled when he responded in kind.
As they walked onto the ship, the crowd of ponies cheered louder, and Sonata had an idea. Tilting her head slightly, she whispered to Lex. “Say something to them.”
He blinked in confusion. “What? To whom?”
“The crowd,” she nodded her head back the way they’d come. “They came here to see you. They’ll love it if you give them some sort of payoff for showing up.”
His response was a long-suffering look, glancing between her and the ponies crowding the harbor. The idea seemed like a waste of time, and he certainly didn’t feel like he owed the assembled ponies anything; they’d taken it on themselves to show up here uninvited, after all. But he knew that Sonata had social acumen that far exceeded his own, and in that regard he trusted her judgment. She’d given him very similar advice when he’d initially returned from slaying that dragon, after all, and she’d been right then. “Fine,” he sighed, “but I want you to deliver it.”
“That’s what I’m here for!” she chirped happily.
A single word and a gesture later, he’d cast his spell to deliver his whispers to her ears, and moved to the edge of the ship, Sonata by his side as he looked out over the crowd, who quieted down in expectation of his words. Licking his lips at the sudden silence, he tried to think of exactly what to say. “We are now leaving for Vanhoover,” he whispered softly, knowing that with the ambient noise of the outdoors and his distance from the crowd, only Sonata would hear him.
She gave a grunt of mild exasperation at his statement, and looked at him as she whispered back. “Come on, say something more than that. Don’t worry about how pretty it sounds, I’ll take care of that. Just, I don’t know…talk about what you want to do and why.”
He pondered that for a moment, looking back over the crowd. As he did, he noticed Ribbon and Lucy near the back of it, both smiling at him. So were the araneas, he realized. So were all of the ponies in the crowd. The sight eased his tension slightly, for reasons that he couldn’t quite understand. “Vanhoover is in trouble,” he began.
“Vanhoover is, like, totes in a bad state,” announced Sonata, her voice suddenly projecting powerfully across the harbor.
“We’re going there to fix things.”
“But right now, help is on the way!”
Lex had to resist the urge to roll his eyes, continuing. “As ruler of that city, this is my duty.”
“As you might have heard, our super-cool mayor, Lex Legis, is also in charge of Vanhoover! And the same way he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to Tall Tale, he’s going to rescue that city too!”
Spontaneous cheers erupted from the crowd, and Lex had to contain his surprise. Was Sonata’s interpretation of his words really that impressive? It sounded thoroughly mediocre to him. Mentally shrugging it off, he continued. “I will personally be overseeing the operation. There’s no set timetable for the city’s recovery, but I’ve made arrangements so that Tall Tale will continue to be administrated while I’m occupied.”
“No matter how long it takes, he’s going to stay there and do everything he can until Vanhoover is saved! But while he does, Tall Tale and its wonderful ponies will remain in his thoughts! His devotion for this great city, and for all of you, will never fade away!”
The crowd was roaring its approval now, and it was all Lex could do to contain his surprise, impressed despite himself. Whatever else could be said about her, Sonata knew how to work a crowd. Not sure what else could be said, he finally settled on the last part of his message. “We’re leaving now.”
“We’re off! Thank you all so much for being such a wonderful audience!” Caught up in the crowd’s adulation, Sonata barely noticed Lex turning away and telling the ships’ crew to cast off. Instead, she stood up on her hind legs and waved to the crowd, blowing a few kisses for good measure. Even as the ship began to move, she kept waving, and it was only after it had pulled far enough away that the crowd had grown indistinct that she managed to tear herself away from the railing.
She was definitely going to like being a spokespony, she decided.
According to the sailors, the trip from Tall Tale to Vanhoover would take eleven or twelve hours, even with the rotating shifts of pegasi making sure to push air into the sails at all times. A little bored, Sonata had gone looking for Lex, finding him at the prow of the ship, looking at the water. If he’d been any other pony, she’d have thought that he was admiring the view, but she suspected that he had simply wanted a place to think about what he’d do once they’d arrived.
Coming up next to him, she leaned against him just slightly. “Hey,” she purred, still buzzed off of the crowd’s enthusiasm from an hour ago. “What’cha doin’?”
“Planning multiple courses of action for when we arrive in Vanhoover, depending on various local conditions,” came his response, making her chuckle softly to herself.
He glanced at her, but didn’t ask about the source of her mirth, and for a few minutes they were silent, simply enjoying each other’s presence. Glancing off to her right, Sonata noted how close the coast seemed. In fact, she could still just barely see Tall Tale in the distance, further inland. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” she murmured softly.
“Hm?” This time Lex’s glance was inquisitive.
“Everything…all of it.” She waved a hoof at the distance city. “That we went to take charge of one city, and ended up taking over another one altogether.” She was silent for a moment, thinking over everything that had happened in the last several days. “You really showed everyone…everypony, why you should be in charge.”
“We,” he corrected her softly. “We really showed everypony.”
Sonata smiled, but shook her head. “I didn’t do anything, except maybe make it harder for you. You were the one who figured out that Tall Tale was in danger, and the one who fought so hard to save it. I was just, like, a big drag on the whole thing.”
“You’re wrong.” Lex’s voice was firm, and he turned so that he was facing her directly. “Everything that happened, the only reason that I was here to save Tall Tale in the first place, is because of you. You bought our tickets here, remember?”
She blinked, and it took her a second to recall that she was the one who’d mistakenly bought train tickets for Tall Tale instead of Vanhoover, back when they’d left Canterlot. “That wasn’t on purpose, though,” she protested. “It was just an accident.”
“That ‘accident’ put us on the course for everything that happened. That ‘accident’ is why I was here to save all of those ponies. If it hadn’t been for that, we’d have gone to Vanhoover and everypony in Tall Tale would have died, eaten by that dragon.” He stepped closer to her, and planted a soft kiss on her lips before speaking again, his voice softer. “This is our victory, yours and mine.”
She blinked, her eyes suddenly watery, and gave a sniffling laugh. “You, like, always do that…suddenly being totes romantic out of nowhere.”
He blinked at that, clearly not understanding what she meant, and the sight made her laugh. That, in turn, caused him to become even more confused, and she laughed even harder as a result, until she could barely stand up. Finally, she regained control of herself, and wiped her eyes before leaning in and kissing him deeply. “I love you,” she whispered softly.
“I love you too.” He smiled back at her, and the two of them leaned against each other as they looked back at the open water. He was still thinking about what would happen when they finally reached Vanhoover, but for the moment he wasn’t concerned about courses of action or potential pitfalls.
For so much of his life, he’d set lofty goals for himself, and just as often failed to reach them, no matter how hard he’d tried. He would expend so much energy, try so hard, only to end up no closer than when he’d started. Any progress that he’d made would ultimately prove itself futile. It had been like wanting to get somewhere, only to find that no matter how fast he had run, he’d only ended up circling his destination rather than approaching it.
That was, he decided, an apt analogy. All of the effort that he’d made before had simply been lateral movement.
But it was different now. Ever since the mare beside him had come into his life, he’d finally started to achieve his goals. It had been difficult, and often painful, but little by little he’d found himself accomplishing things that he felt were truly worthwhile. And he had no doubt that it was all thanks to her. She had pointed him in the right direction, and for the first time ever, he felt hopeful about the future.
Whatever trials Vanhoover had in store for them, he knew they’d be able to overcome them, so long as they were together.
The chief steward at Canterlot Castle stopped just outside the princesses’ private dining area, taking one last chance to inspect that the contents of the cart he was pushing were arranged just so.
Ever since Princess Luna had returned, the two sisters had started a tradition where they’d share a meal together each day. Just before Princess Celestia would lower the sun, and just after Princess Luna had awoken to prepare for raising the moon, the two of them would get together and chat as they ate. Although neither had said so, the steward knew that they liked to be left alone during this time, so that they could focus on their bond as sisters.
Looking over the plates and dishes with a critical eye, he nodded to himself in satisfaction. The food was of a medley that most ponies would have considered unusual, combining dinner entrees with breakfast courses, but that was normal here. After all, for Princess Celestia this was the last meal of the day, whereas for Princess Luna it was the first.
Briefly the steward wondered why the pair had decided to meet during sunset for their daily get-togethers and not sunrise. Probably because more tends to happen during the day, and it’s more convenient for Princess Celestia to inform Princess Luna about the various goings-on and what-to-do’s than the other way around, he decided. Certainly that was why they always wanted the newspapers delivered with their meals.
And they’d certainly have a lot to talk about today! Lowering his eyes to the cart’s second tray, piled high with the evening editions of the local papers, the top-most one was leading with an eye-catching story indeed. On the front page of the Canterlot Chronicle, there was a picture of a dour-looking unicorn with a blood-red horn glaring at the camera, right next to a second picture of what looked like that same unicorn inside some sort of giant glassy-looking pony statue, facing off against a dragon, of all things!
Even more arresting was the headline: “KING SOMBRA REBORN?! UNICORN HERO SAVES TALL TALE!” The steward had heard that the Chronicle had sold through four print runs of that edition of the paper, and that demand continued to remain extremely high. Personally, he thought it was all rubbish, and was sure that the princesses wouldn’t put any faith in such poppycock.
Satisfied that everything was in order, he knocked on the door, waiting just a moment before entering. Bowing to the princesses, he made sure to keep a professional smile on his face as he began serving them.
Line Byline had, in his twenty-five years of working at the Canterlot Chronicle, been to the Royal Castle several dozen times. While most of those had been back when he was a reporter covering visiting foreign dignitaries or holiday celebrations or special events like the Grand Galloping Gala, he’d still had cause to visit the place even after he’d become the paper’s editor-in-chief.
Typically, that had been because Princess Celestia – and, since she’d returned, Princess Luna – had wanted an announcement to be made to all of Equestria, and so relied upon the major newspapers to collaborate in disseminating important stories. There’d been quite a few of those in the last twenty-two months, including the announcement of the Crystal Empire’s return, of the coronation of Princess Twilight Sparkle, and most recently an address regarding the “elemental bleeds” that had caused so much mayhem.
In those cases, Line had been given the rare treat of interviewing the princesses themselves, though he knew that calling it an “interview” was a bit of a stretch. Rather, it was more like he was working with them to carefully help craft the messages that all of Equestria needed to hear. It was, he knew, his most important job as editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, and he took it extremely seriously. It wasn’t just his way of helping to keep harmony in Equestria, but was why the Chronicle was, in his professional opinion, the single most important newspaper of them all.
Everypony knew that “Where the News Happens” wasn’t just the Chronicle’s tagline, but a statement of literal truth.
That was why, when he had received the summons to come to the Royal Castle a short time ago, Line had hurried right over. He had been expecting something like this, of course; Nosey’s story had been just that monumental. A response from the princesses was only to be expected, though he could scarcely begin to imagine what that response would be.
Unable to help but fidget as he sat in the parlor outside of Princess Luna’s private study, Line practically leapt to his hooves when the steward entered. Raising an eyebrow at Line’s eagerness, the steward let his expression linger just long enough to convey his disapproval before speaking. “The princesses will see you n-“
“Right. Got it,” replied Line brusquely, walking right past the stuffy old unicorn and towards the adjoining doors.
Glowering at the lack of formality, the steward nevertheless trotted in front of Line to head down the adjoining hallway, traveling only a few dozen feet before stopping at another door. Opening it slowly, somehow managing to make even that simple act seem like a ritualistic formality, the steward bowed his head to the ground for a long moment before announcing, “Mister Line Byline, of the Canterlot Chronicle.”
“Thank you,” came the gentle voice from within, making Line’s breath quicken slightly despite how often he’d heard it before. That was Princess Celestia! The fact that he’d heard her from inside her sister’s parlor meant that he was meeting with them both, which confirmed his suspicions that this was a formal visit. Not that he’d expected it to be anything else, but a good reporter never took anything for granted.
Moving forward as the steward stepped out of the way, Line walked into the room, hearing the door close behind him. As soon as he beheld Princess Celestia, he bowed, almost touching his head to the floor. “Your Majesty,” he said reverently, before rising and repeating both the motion and greeting for Princess Luna.
Princess Celestia was smiling as he stood up again, and he could just make out the barest hint of wryness there. “Really, Line, you don’t need to do that every time you visit,” she chided gently.
“You’ve been here often enough, after all,” added Luna.
“It seems wrong not to,” replied Line with the slightest hint of defensiveness in his voice, drawing amused chuckles from both alicorns, which in turn drew a smile from him. This had become something of a game between them, with him refusing to drop that initial pretense of formality and them poking fun at him for it. He’d grown to enjoy the exchange, and he knew that they had too.
With their personal ritual complete, Line walked in, moving to a sofa on the far wall, across from the chairs the princesses were seated in. As he did so, Princess Celestia spoke up. “Would you like some cake? I’m having a slice myself, so please don’t hold back on my account.” She was already lifting said cake, along with several dishes and utensils, in the golden aura of her telekinesis, cutting a piece even as she spoke.
“No thanks,” he responded with a shake of the head. “I’ve been trying to cut back. Now that I’m behind a desk all day, I’ve already had to have my tailor to resize most of my clothes. Any more and I’ll need to just buy my whole wardrobe again in a larger size.”
Nodding gracefully at his refusal, Princess Celestia turned to her sister. “What about you, Luna?”
“Really, sister. You know that I had breakfast just a short time ago.”
“I know,” smiled Celestia, “but I wanted to make the offer anyway.”
Luna rolled her eyes in mock-exasperation. “You’re almost as bad as Line, making gestures when you know you don’t have to.”
“It’s not the gesture that counts,” replied Celestia, even as she continued to telekinetically prepare her dessert, the cake slice floating onto a plate as a fork settled next to it before the entire thing moved to hover in front of her. “It’s the thought behind it.”
Line nodded at the statement, more to himself than them. That was a lesson he’d learned over almost twenty years of marriage, and it had served him well in that time. In fact, that reminded him that their twentieth anniversary was coming up soon. He’d need to get something special prepared… As though she’d heard his thoughts, Princess Luna looked back over at Line. “We haven’t asked yet, how is your family?”
The next twenty minutes were devoted to small talk, most of which consisted of Line talking about his wife and children, with the princesses asking questions or expressing their happiness at his family’s antics. Eventually, however, he ran out of things to tell, and as Princess Celestia telekinetically put her now-empty plate down, he sat up straighter, sensing that it was time to get down to business.
“So, about why we’ve called you here,” began Princess Celestia. “You’ve probably already guessed what it’s about.”
Line had. “Today’s lead story, right? The one about the hullabaloo in Tall Tale?” His horn began to glow even as he spoke, lifting a notepad and pencil out of the pocket of the vest he always wore.
“Indeed,” affirmed Luna. This time it was her horn that was enveloped in a glowing aura as she lifted a copy of the paper from a small side-table, holding it aloft. “We were hoping that you could answer some questions for us.”
“Questions? For me?” Line blinked, caught off-guard. This wasn’t how it usually went. Usually they’d explain that they needed to make a statement, and they’d go over what needed to be said and why. Then he’d help them craft the details of the message, and once they had everything squared away he’d send copies to the major local papers in Equestria’s largest cities.
“We were very interested in today’s headline, and were hoping that you could tell us more,” explained Princess Celestia.
“Anything from the…I believe the term is ‘cutting-room floor’?” added Luna.
“Oh, um…” slightly flustered at the unexpected turn of events, Line licked his lips thoughtfully, but shook his head after a moment. “I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing that I can add. We ran Nosey’s story pretty much as-is.” He shrugged apologetically, looking between the two sisters as he spoke. “I mean, I did do some basic editing on it, but that was mostly because she likes to use exclamation points a little too much. That and she keeps putting ‘ace reporter’ after her name, no matter how many times I tell her to knock it off. Other than that, nothing else was changed.”
“What about pictures?” pressed Luna. “These two on the front page were most captivating. We would be delighted to see any others you had.”
“Those were all that Nosey sent in. If she has any others, then she’s sitting on them. Knowing her, she’s probably planning a follow-up or two.”
“She’s still in Tall Tale, right?” This time it was Princess Celestia who asked. She waited until Line nodded before continuing. “What can you tell us about her?”
“About Nosey?” Line frowned, not sure why they were asking. “She’s a good reporter, if a bit overeager. She’s the young-and-hungry type, out to make a name for herself, but she has genuinely good instincts, and once she gets a whiff of a story she never lets go, no matter what. She gets more complaints made about her in a week than all of my other reporters do in a month, but she works harder than anypony else, and it shows.” He paused, then quirked a smile. “She reminds me of me back when I was starting out.”
“You sound like you’re thinking of grooming her for your job,” said Celestia, her tone almost motherly.
“Ha!” Line barked a laugh, “In another ten years, maybe!”
In fact, Line knew that Nosey had the potential to hold his job one day, but she had a long way to go before that potential could even start to be realized. She was still at that stage where she thought that the stories she wrote were ultimately all about her; that the two most important words she wrote in any story were her name. There was no thought given to the consequences of her actions, no recognition that her most important job as a reporter wasn’t to simply put stories out there, but to act in service to Equestria. Until she realized that, Line wouldn’t even think about putting her anywhere near his chair.
“One last question,” said Luna, snapping him out of his thoughts. “Have you already distributed copies of this story to other newspapers?”
“Well…of course,” answered Line. “I sent them to the usual suspects. The Crystal Chronicler, the Manehattan Mirror, the Fillydelphia Intelligencer. All of them.”
That was part of the unwritten agreement between all of the major papers. Not just royal announcements, but anything that was deemed a potential major story was freely shared between the major newspapers of each city, with the understanding that the editors-in-chief of those papers would, if they chose to run them, do so without any alterations save for a notation that they came from the original newspaper. That was how important stories could be spread across Equestria’s major population centers.
But then, the princesses knew that, which was what made it so strange that they would ask. It was enough to make Line’s instincts as a reporter flare up. Something was going on here. Frowning again, he glanced between them, tossing out a question of his own. “…should I not have sent the story for distribution?”
“Of course not,” answered Celestia immediately. “We only asked because we weren’t sure if we should send copies of the Chronicle to some ponies we know who would enjoy this story, or if they’d have a chance to see it for themselves in their local papers.”
“Ah,” Line nodded his head. “Yeah, no, don’t worry. A story like this definitely gets passed around to all of the larger newspapers. Anypony who lives anywhere near a city will see this.”
“Very good,” said Luna in apparent satisfaction. The sisters shared a quick glance, and then rose to their hooves. Surprised, Line did the same. But before he could ask anything else, Luna continued. “Well, thank you so much for coming in like this, Line. As always, it was a pleasure to see you again.”
“Wait, that’s it?” he sputtered. “You don’t want to issue a statement about all of this?” He waved a hoof at the newspaper, now returned to the small table Luna had plucked it from.
“That won’t be necessary,” replied Celestia. “We knew about Lex, the unicorn in this article, before he ever left for Vanhoover. He had a few meetings here with us before he left, in fact. We asked you to come here purely because seeing such an incredible story in your newspaper reminded us that it had been a while since we all sat down together, is all.”
“Oh…” Line trailed off, and for a moment silence reigned. Finally taking the hint, Line managed to smile. “Well, I should get going. Thank you for having me, Your Majesties.” He bowed again, though this time it was little more than a dip of the head. By unspoken consent, their usual game was only for greetings; using it for departures as well would have been too much.
He waved as they bid him farewell, and showed himself out. Barely noticing the steely-eyed steward escorting him out of the castle, Line thought back over what had just happened. Over and over again, the details went through his mind, and no matter how he looked at them, they led to one inescapable conclusion.
The princesses had lied to him.
There was simply no other explanation. That they had wanted to see any unedited versions of the story had been suspicious enough, all the more so when they had wanted to know if Nosey was the sort of pony to embellish or even fabricate what she wrote – he had no doubts that was why they’d asked about her. But they had showed their entire hoof when Luna had asked if he had distributed the story to other news outlets, despite having surely known that they had. Which meant that, in all likelihood, something about the story worried them…but what?
The only thing he could think of was that the headline, as sensationalist as it was, might cause an upset in the Crystal Empire. Line knew that the ponies there got squirrelly at the mere mention of King Sombra, after all. But he was sure that the editor-in-chief of the Crystal Chronicler would exercise good judgment about whether or not the story would be too upsetting to run.
Beyond that, there wasn’t a problem that Line could see. For all that Nosey had made this Lex character sound like something out of a comic book, he hadn’t done anything wrong that Line had been able to determine. Quite the contrary, he was clearly a hero, which was why he’d used that word in the headline. His actions didn’t have the elegance of Princess Twilight and her friends, and he didn’t sound anywhere near as pleasant to be around, but Nosey’s article had made it very clear that he wanted to do good.
So why were the princesses upset?
Line was already wondering where he should start digging to get some answers when he shook his head. What was he thinking? These were the princesses he was talking about, here! Whatever they were doing, it was for the good of all Equestria, of that he had no doubt. Trying to find out things they wanted kept secret would be wrong. Trying to publish those secrets would be downright treasonous. He’d just have to let it go, and put his trust in them to do what they thought was best.
Nodding to himself, Line made his way home. It was already dark out, and he was sure his wife and kids were wondering where he was. By the time he reached his front door, he’d managed to convince himself to put that meeting out of his mind and stop prying into the princesses’ business.
Celestia and Luna were silent after Line left, each digesting what they’d learned from their conversation with the newspaper editor…which hadn’t been very much at all.
Finally, Luna looked over at her sister. “That went about as well as we’d hoped.”
“It was worth a try,” said Celestia with just a hint of resignation. “Even if it wasn’t likely, it didn’t hurt to ask if Line had any additional information that he could have given us.” She picked up the newspaper from the side table, perusing its headline story again.
Luna frowned. “Are you sure about that? He seemed rather suspicious of how we were asking so many questions about that article.”
“I’m sure he was,” admitted Celestia. “He is a very good reporter, after all.” A faint smile crossed her lips as she said that, like a mother talking about her foal’s having gotten an “A” on a school paper.
“And that worries you not at all, Sister?” pressed Luna. “A newspony being suspicious of us?”
Celestia shook her head, not looking up from the paper. “Line trusts our judgment, unlike the subject of this piece. He won’t start an investigation just because he thinks we were acting a little odd.”
“I hope you’re right,” sighed Luna. She sat quietly for a moment before admitting, “I was hoping for some good news, after reading everything in there.”
Celestia looked up at that, giving Luna a look that was equal parts concern and lack of understanding. “There’s nothing in here that we didn’t already know about.” She tapped the newspaper with a hoof. “We knew that he had powerful magic. We knew that he’s very unfriendly, but still devoted to the wellbeing of the ponies around him.”
“We also knew that he’s very ambitious,” countered Luna. “That was why we offered him rulership over Vanhoover, in hopes that it would quell his thirst for power and let him build closer relationships with the ponies there while he labored on their behalf. But now,” this time it was Luna’s turn to point a hoof at the paper, “he’s taken control of another city!”
A pensive look crossed Celestia’s face at that. “You’re certain that he’s become Tall Tale’s new mayor?” That Lex had assumed authority over Tall Tale wasn’t in the newspaper article about him, but there were other ways of gathering information from a distant city.
Luna nodded. “The ponies I spoke to after I quelled their nightmares were quite clear on that subject. He runs the city now, and has for several days.”
A fatigued look crossed Luna’s face as she spoke, and she stepped down from her chair. Crossing the room, she laid down on the couch that Line had recently vacated. Celestia watched her with worried eyes as she did so. “I know I’ve said this before, Luna, but I worry about how hard you’ve been pushing yourself these last few months.”
“It is my royal duty, Sister,” replied Luna. “When our little ponies have nightmares, I am the one tasked with entering their dreams and soothing their fears. That remains true whether the number of ponies that need my help each night is ten or ten thousand.”
The last few months had been difficult for everypony in Equestria. Tirek’s rampage had been bad enough, but that had barely become a memory before the elemental bleeds had rocked Equestria, causing harm on a scale which hadn’t been seen in millennia. Although the planar incursions had been suppressed, a great many ponies were still stricken with anxiety about what had happened and what it meant for the future, and it had resulted in Luna’s constantly needing to go and soothe the troubled sleep of their subjects.
It had only been due to luck that she had, two nights previous, entered the dream of a pony that was having a nightmare about being attacked by a dragon. After alleviating their nightmare, she had spoken to them and learned of Lex’s recent activities…including that he had been offered the position of mayor of Tall Tale, which he had subsequently accepted.
The newspaper article confirming most of what Luna had been told had been a grim portent for both sisters, but right now Celestia was less concerned about that than about Luna. “Be that as it may, there’s no need for you to try and allay every single nightmare you come across. Ponies got along fine…”
She trailed off, realizing that she was about to say something impolite, but it was too late. Luna’s face hardened as she replied. “Ponies got along fine while I was imprisoned within the moon. That’s what you were going to say, weren’t you?”
Celestia closed her eyes, mentally kicking herself for stumbling onto such a sensitive topic. Opening them again, she gave Luna an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, Luna. I didn’t mean to imply that your work isn’t important, or be casual about what happened before.”
Luna’s features softened some, but not completely. “It’s quite alright, and I do appreciate your worrying about me, but have no fear. This is merely another challenge that I must overcome if I am to become a goddess.” Celestia winced slightly, both at the mention of Luna’s desire to undergo divine apotheosis, and the knowledge that she had mentioned it purely to get back at her for being so flippant about sealing her in the moon.
When Twilight Sparkle had returned from her first sojourn to Everglow – inadvertently causing the elemental bleeds, though that information had been suppressed – she had revealed that the ponies of that world acknowledged the existence of powers even mightier than alicorns. These beings, called “gods,” were said to be so strong that, from a pony’s point of view, they were truly omnipotent. And yet, for some reason, they would not or could not walk the world directly, instead dwelling in distant realities, content to remotely encourage ponies to worship them and do their bidding, rewarding their faithful followers with divinely-gifted magic.
For Celestia, the knowledge that these entities were so far removed from that world’s ponies, but still content to impress their own agendas upon them so directly, was enough to put her off of them. Such behavior went against everything she felt that a ruler should be: accessible to those who wanted advice or assistance, without treating them as pawns to be maneuvered for personal gain. Although she suspected that it was possible for her or her fellow alicorns to become gods – after all, every alicorn had once been an ordinary pony that had managed to ascend into something more, and if they had done it once then there was no reason that they couldn’t do it again – she had no interest in testing that hypothesis.
Luna had felt differently.
In hindsight, it had been completely understandable. Luna had always felt underappreciated, since her royal prerogative – to raise and lower the moon and stars – was one that most ponies slept through. Even her shepherding of dreams had garnered her little praise, since Equestria was so idyllic that few ponies needed her to save them from nocturnal terrors. It had been enough to cause Luna, over the years, to more and more consider her job a thankless one, and Celestia still felt guilty for not realizing how much her sister had been hurting until she had openly rebelled against her.
That was why, after her initial shock at Luna’s announcement that she wanted to become a goddess, Celestia hadn’t said anything against it. If that was what her sister felt she needed to be happy, then she wouldn’t try to deprive her of it. But in that initial reaction she had already let her disapproval show, and it had become another sore point between them.
Determined not to make the same mistake twice, Celestia had spoken to Luna at length about her desire to become a goddess. She had listened attentively as Luna had talked about the process of imbuing followers with a shred of her own power in the form of spells – so similar and yet so different from when the two of them and Cadance had given their magic to Twilight – and how it felt to receive their prayers and their worship in return. She had smiled and nodded to her explanations about the differences between what was expected of a princess versus that of a goddess. Even if her efforts had been completely transparent to Luna, who knew her better than anypony else, Celestia had still tried her hardest to be happy that her sister had found something so fulfilling.
But inside, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was losing her sister all over again.
Her expression must have shown on her face, because Luna suddenly got up and approached her, her upset look fading as she did so. “Forgive me, sister. That was spiteful of me, bringing that up when I know how you feel about it.”
Celestia smiled, suddenly feeling relieved. “You don’t have to apologize. I was the one who was being insensitive.” Leaning forward, she wrapped a hoof around Luna, feeling her do the same. “Whether you’re a goddess or not, we’ll always be sisters.”
“Indeed.” The smile was audible in Luna’s voice.
They parted, and Luna glanced at the newspaper again, before looking back at Celestia. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Luna replied, before pausing. “I didn’t want to say anything before because…because I felt slightly ashamed.”
Celestia’s eyebrows rose. “Ashamed? Of what?”
Luna didn’t answer for a moment, going back to the chair where she had originally been sitting. Only after she had seated herself did she reply, not making eye contact as she spoke. “My duty to safeguard the dreams of ponies is one that I take very seriously. I would not presume to do something as intimate as looking into the dreams of another unless I thought that they needed my help…” Celestia nodded silently as Luna stopped talking, giving her the time she needed to make whatever confession she was leading up to.
A moment later she continued. “After that meeting we had with Lex Legis, where we agreed to let him rule Vanhoover…I tried to look into his dreams that night.” She let out a sigh of self-recrimination. “I know it was wrong of me, but I was worried. All I knew of him before that was what you and Twilight Sparkle had told me, and I wanted to know what sort of pony we’d entrusted one of our cities to.”
Celestia reached out a hoof, laying it on Luna’s shoulder in a gesture of support. “You were doing what you thought was best for Equestria,” she said softly. “But what did you mean ‘tried to’?”
Now Luna looked up, meeting Celestia’s eyes. “Exactly what I said, Sister. I attempted to look into his dreams…and I failed.”
There was a troubled look on Luna’s face as she spoke, and Celestia could feel the same expression on hers as she considered this new information. “We know that he has powerful magic; perhaps it was a warding spell? Or maybe some power of King Sombra’s that he’s availing himself of?”
“Possibly…”
“But you don’t think so?”
Luna shook her head. “It…I’m not sure how to explain it. It felt different. It was like…like…” She rolled a hoof, searching for the right metaphor. “Entering somepony’s dream is like walking into a room. I just open the door and enter, without any difficulty. If their dream was warded somehow, that would be like locking the door; I could use my magic to try and pick the lock, but this was different…it was like he had bricked up the doorway.”
Celestia frowned in confusion. So Lex wasn’t using magic to block off his dreams? “So his dreams were completely impenetrable?”
“It seemed that way,” admitted Luna. “I could have tried harder to get in, to knock down the wall, if you will, but doing so seemed…imprudent.”
“I can imagine,” agreed Celestia. “Still, this is troublesome. If it’s not some spell that he’s using, then why is there a wall where the door to his dreams should be?”
“I don’t know. It’s like nothing I’ve ever come across before.”
Celestia stood up, starting for the door. “I’ll send a letter to Twilight asking if she knows anything about this. Maybe she can find something-”
“No!” Luna sprang to her hooves immediately, spreading a wing out to block her sister’s path.
Visibly surprised at the outburst, Celestia stopped in her tracks. “Why not?”
“Because…” Luna licked her lips, “as Equestria’s future Goddess of Dreams, this is another challenge that I would prefer to overcome on my own. And besides,” she shrank a little, “I’d prefer that Twilight not know that I attempted to peer into another pony’s dreams without good cause.”
“Luna, your heart was in the right place,” chided Celestia gently. “Twilight wouldn’t think any less of you.”
“Even so, I would ask that you indulge me in this, Sister.” There was the slightest pleading tone in Luna’s voice, and it was enough to make Celestia nod almost immediately, drawing a relieved sigh from Luna. “Thank you.”
Celestia was about to reply when there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” she called.
Instantly, her personal steward leaned his head inside. Giving them each a perfunctory bow, he fixed her with a stern look. “Please pardon the interruption, Your Majesty, but you’re supposed to have retired to bed an hour ago.”
Having to bite back a laugh at how stuffy her attendant was, she nodded, knowing that he’d become progressively more and more upset the more she deviated from her schedule. He worried about her as though he’d known her since she was a foal, rather than the other way around. Turning back to Luna, she gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll leave things to you, then.”
“I appreciate it. Goodnight, Sister.”
“Goodnight Luna,” nodded Celestia cordially as she exited the parlor, her steward closing the door behind her.
For a long moment Luna stayed there, trying to calm the rapid beating of her heart. That had been too close. She had brought up the issue of Lex’s sealed dreams because she’d been feeling guilty about keeping secrets from her sister and embarrassed that it involved her trying to spy on somepony else’s dreams for political purposes, and the tender moment they’d had earlier when they’d apologized to each other had caused her to suddenly confess what she’d been withholding.
Doing so had been a mistake, and very nearly a costly one. While Luna knew that Twilight had no inherent power over dreams, there was little way of knowing what abilities the new magic she’d picked up on Everglow possessed. If Celestia had told her about the mystery of Lex’s dreams, then it was entirely possible that Twilight would have been able to figure it out, and that wouldn’t do at all…
Luna had, ever since she had returned from her imprisonment inside the moon, punished herself for all of the evil that she had done as Nightmare Moon. She had done so by creating a mental construct, which she had dubbed a “Tantabus,” to fill her own dreams with terrible nightmares. Spending each night reliving the guilt and shame and horror of what she had done was, Luna had decided, a fitting penance for her perfidy.
As an autonomous construct, however, the Tantabus had no ability to care about why it did what it did. Its only directive was to carry out its sadistic duties, period. That was why Luna always made sure to keep her dreams isolated from everypony else’s – only utilizing her ability to dreamwalk when she was conscious and awake – lest the Tantabus slip into another’s dream and torment somepony that didn’t deserve it. That was why she had never once told her sister or anypony else about her nightly punishments, lest she encourage them to dream of her and accidentally make their dreams touch, letting the Tantabus out.
Luna had initially thought that the sealed entrance to Lex’s dreams was to keep her out. But as she’d investigated it, she’d performed the dream-equivalent of pressing her ear against it and listening carefully. Inside, she had just been able to make out his voice, though not the words he’d been speaking. But there had been another presence in there, utterly silent yet unmistakable, at least to her. After all, she’d felt that same silent malevolence countless times in her own dreams for almost two years now.
Lex Legis, she’d realized, had a Tantabus of his own.
Night had fallen by the time they’d reached Vanhoover.
That couldn’t be helped, since it had been midmorning when they’d left Tall Tale, but Lex still regarded the timing of their arrival as an error in judgment on his part. He’d assumed – foolishly, he realized now – that the two dozen or so miles separating the two cities could be nautically traversed in two or three hours. He had been quite chagrined when, speaking to some of the sailors after they’d cast off, he’d been told that it would actually take eleven to twelve hours to arrive.
Lex had briefly considered ordering them to drop anchor and wait, so that they could arrive in the city by daylight, but had decided not to bother. Even if they arrived at night, they’d be able to start unloading the ship and setting up a station from which to begin the relief efforts when the sun rose. That way they’d at least refrain from wasting any more time.
To his surprise, Nosey hadn’t bothered him once during the trip. Instead, she seemed to be interviewing everypony but him. It had been enough to make him suspicious, but he hadn’t wanted to press his good fortune, and so had left her alone in return. Unfortunately, that hadn’t meant that the trip was free of things that had tried his patience.
Specifically, Sonata had spent her free time perusing the ship and generally making a nuisance of herself, or at least that was how Lex would have characterized it. The sailors and passengers, on the other hand, were apparently quite entertained by her antics. First she had oohed and aahed over the various workings of the ship, quite taken with the minutiae of such a large sailing vessel. The crew had seemed to regard her interest with paternalistic amusement, taking the time to tell her what was what.
Then she had overheard some of the crew singing while they worked, and had launched into a musical performance of her own. That had turned into quite the spectacle, as her voice had served to draw more than a few of the passengers above-deck to enjoy her impromptu show. This, in turn, had served to encourage Sonata to launch a full-on one-mare concert, and she had proceeded to sing and dance for quite some time, often with the crowd joining in. It had been, by any measure, an excellent start to their voyage.
Lex, naturally enough, had hated it.
As much as he loved Sonata, particularly the melodious sound of her voice, being stuck in a crowd had strained his ability to mentally review his plans for what to do upon arriving in Vanhoover. He also suspected that more than a few of the stallions in the crowd were enjoying more than just Sonata’s singing, since her dancing tended to involve a lot of shaking and swaying that was, to Lex’s eyes, rather sensuous. However, he couldn’t end her show due to a fit of jealousy; that would only have made him seem petty, and most likely would have upset her to boot.
Instead, he’d simply retreated below deck, taking what refuge he could in the bowels of the ship. With little else to do, he’d settled for reviewing his plans once again and using Severance to prepare spells that seemed likely to be useful upon their arrival. That had eaten up several hours’ worth of time, during which Sonata’s performance had finally come to an end. Lex had emerged from his self-imposed seclusion at that time, and after soothing Sonata’s feelings about why he hadn’t watched her perform, he’d gone back to enjoying a relatively quiet journey.
Now, the trip was approaching its end. Vanhoover had come into sight just as the sun had been setting, and over the last few hours had grown closer even as it had gotten darker. They would be there very soon, now. Except…Lex frowned as he peered at the city, visible in the last vestiges of twilight, the sun having just recently sunk below the horizon.
Something was wrong.
“That’s not a good sign,” came a voice from his left, causing Lex to look over. Standing nearby was the ship’s captain, an earth pony mare with a long white mane, contrasting gently against her green coat. On her flank was a cutie mark depicting a sailing ship resting atop a cresting wave.
“Captain Shells,” acknowledged Lex. He’d met her briefly when he’d repaired the ship, back in Tall Tale’s dry dock. She had been grateful enough for what he’d done that she’d waived her usual fee for transporting them to Vanhoover, since his magic had saved her the money she’d have spent fixing it anyway.
“Just call me C. Shells,” she replied with a nod. “I never saw much point in ranks and titles for a ship’s crew. Everypony has to work together to sail it, after all.” She didn’t notice Lex’s frown of disapproval, looking back towards Vanhoover. “You noticed it too, huh?”
“Yes,” said Lex grimly, likewise returning his gaze to the city. Or rather, what he could see of the city.
Vanhoover was one of the largest towns on the western coast. It was home to tens of thousands of ponies, and was a major hub of nautical activity. Even with all of the damage that a large-scale flood had undoubtedly wrought, and that there had surely been large numbers of ponies that had abandoned the city in the wake of the disaster, there should still have been a sizable presence in the city. Enough so that the city should have been lit up brightly now that night had fallen.
But looking at Vanhoover now, only a scattering of lights were visible, spread thinly across the cityscape. Rather than pushing back the darkness, they seemed only to enhance the feeling of isolation, as though the few ponies who’d lit their lamps were huddled in small enclaves rather than being part of a larger shared environment.
“Drop anchor!” bellowed C. Shells, snapping Lex out of his thoughts. He was about to ask her why she was stopping when they’d barely entered the bay, only for her reasoning to immediately make itself obvious: none of the city’s few lights were at the harbor. Which in turn meant that she was going to need to stop the ship until a crew could go ashore and illuminate the docks.
She had just opened her mouth again when Lex cut her off. “I’ll take care of the lights.”
“Huh?” she started, clearly caught off-guard by his suddenly preempting her. Trying to adjust to the sudden announcement, she fumbled for a response. “I was going to send a few pegasi in with lanterns.”
“Don’t bother,” Lex had already started walking towards the rear of the ship. He’d need to inform Sonata before he left, so as not to worry her. “If law and order has broken down in the city, then it might be dangerous. In that case, it’s better that I go.”
“I should at least-”
“Don’t argue, just do as you’re told,” snapped Lex, not bothering to look at her as he did. Leaving her gaping at his blatant rudeness, he went below deck.
Picking his way between the passengers, he eventually found her sleeping in a hammock, a blanket strewn over her. Or rather, over them; Nosey was asleep next to her, apparently for lack of space elsewhere, and the two were cuddling together as they dozed. In another context it might have looked adorable, but the sight served only to irritate Lex. Bad enough Nosey’s presence had prevented him from being intimate with his girlfriend for days on end, now she was taking his place altogether!
“Sonata,” he whispered, shaking her lightly. His attempt at waking her had no effect save for gently rocking the hammock. Gritting his teeth, he considered just overturning it completely and dumping them on the floor, but then he likely would have had to talk to Nosey again, and that was something to be avoided if at all possible.
“Sonata!” This time his voice was more of a hiss, managing to earn an inquisitive grunt from her as she cracked her eyes open.
“We’re here. I’m going to go ashore and guide the boat in.”
“Mm…’kay,” she replied blearily, closing her eyes again. “Love you.”
They’d been saying those words to each other quite often lately, but hearing them from her still made Lex’s heart jump, dispelling his previous irritation. Instead, a small smile crossed his lips, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek softly. “I love you too.”
She didn’t respond, already asleep again, and he headed back above deck. At the ship’s prow, C. Shells had gathered a few lanterns together, and she gestured at them as she spotted him. “There should be lights at the docks already, but you should take these in case something’s happened to them. Place them so that they follow the general outline of the docks, and we should be able to guide the ship in. We’ve got a lifeboat ready-”
“I don’t need a lifeboat, nor lanterns,” interrupted Lex. “My magic is more than capable of handling such mundane concerns.”
C. Shells rolled her eyes. “Right, sorry. You go ahead. I’ll handle the rest of the ‘mundane concerns,’” she said, not hiding her disgust at his attitude.
Lex didn’t notice, moving towards the side of the ship. Without breaking his stride, he stepped off the edge of it, turning into shadows as he did. No longer bound by gravity, and with his vision enhanced in this form, he flew silently over the waves.
It took a little over a minute to reach the shore, and Lex paused to survey his surroundings as he finally entered Vanhoover proper. The results were disturbing. No matter how he further enhanced his senses, the docks were deserted, and apparently had been for some time. Garbage was everywhere, and he could see vermin running about with impunity. Windows on nearby warehouses were broken, and more than a few doors were broken, hanging from their hinges loosely or simply knocked in altogether.
It was as bad as he’d feared, and could still be much worse. Grimly, Lex invoked one of the simplest spells he knew, creating a quartet of free-floating lights, each the size of a torch. Setting them to hovering over one of the docks, he returned his attention to the buildings along the wharf.
Deciding that it would be wise to check the surrounding area before the ship arrived, Lex flitted towards the nearest warehouse, his insubstantial body passing through the walls without resistance. But the inside was just as barren, consisting of little more than overturned shelves with their contents strewn about, presumably by the flood. Judging by the amount of insects flitting about, Lex was glad that his current form didn’t have a sense of smell.
Widening the area of his search, Lex moved through a second warehouse that was no better than the first. Neither was a third. But it was the interior of the fourth warehouse, one whose door had been smashed in, that made Lex stop and stare at what he found, knowing that if he’d been corporeal at that moment, a shudder would have been working its way down his spine.
There were bloodstains on the floor.
Not just droplets or streaks, but massive patches that could only have come from multiple individuals. Worse, they broke off into trails that led further into the warehouse, which together with the broken door suggested that some sort of horrific battle had taken place here, rather than any sort of accident.
Lex eyed the scene for long moments. The stains were clearly dried, having no flies or rodents near them. Whatever carnage had happened here had obviously been some time ago. But it was just as obvious that this had happened after the flooding, otherwise the stains wouldn’t be there at all, or at least not so concentrated.
What had happened here? No matter how badly order had broken down, Lex couldn’t imagine that things would ever have degenerated to this level of violence. But the evidence was quite clear that violence had occurred. Worse, he had no spells that would let him peer into the past. The only way to learn more would be to investigate directly.
Steeling himself with the knowledge that he had faced more than his share of horrors, Lex ventured further into the warehouse, several attack spells at the ready. A murmur was all it took to bring Severance out as well, floating alongside him at the ready. But although he slowly drifted through the corridors, and found more evidence of bloodshed, along with what looked like discarded makeshift weapons, there were no further clues about who had been fighting or why. In fact, he realized uneasily, there weren’t even bodies to be found, despite the fact that the copious amounts of blood must have resulted in some fatalities.
This changes things, he realized as he moved back towards the entrance. We’ll need to wait until daylight before doing anything else. There was no way he was bringing the ponies from Tall Tale ashore now, not until the sun was up and he could make a better sweep of the surrounding area. Although this made Vanhoover’s need for help direr, Lex had no intention of putting anypony at risk in the process.
But as he exited the warehouse, Lex could see a small lifeboat berthing alongside the lights he’d set, two earth pony stallions jumping out of it as a pegasus fluttered down beside them. Lex cursed as he returned to corporeal form, running over to them. “What do you think you’re doing?!”
The trio looked up at him, surprised, though he couldn’t tell if it was from his sudden appearance, the sight of his scythe floating at his side, or his words. They glanced at each other for a moment before looking back to him. “We’re coming ashore. C. Shells said to start bringing the ship in, and that’s what we’re doing,” replied one of the earth ponies, pointing to a rope that was tied to the back of their lifeboat, which stretched back into the water, its other end obviously attached to the ship.
“Turn around and get back to the ship right now!” ordered Lex.
“But-”
“No buts! This place isn’t safe! Go back to the ship right now and tell the captain that we’re going to remain in the bay until daybreak!” The three sailors exchanged bewildered looks at the new orders, but nodded, the pegasus flying off as the two earth ponies started to climb back into their boat. Lex turned his back to them as they did, sweeping his gaze across the wharf, as though whatever had been in that warehouse would suddenly come charging out of the shadows.
One moment Lex was standing vigilant at the end of the pier, his wary eyes turned towards the wharf, as the two earth pony sailors started to clamor back onto their lifeboat, their pegasus companion already flying back towards the ship. Then everything descended into chaos.
Sudden splashes from the direction of the lifeboat were immediately followed by brief, aborted yells from the sailors. It took Lex only a fraction of an instant to turn his head towards them, but by the time he did there was nothing to see except an empty boat, rocking in the wake of whatever force had pulled those two into the water. Lex’s eyes had just enough time to widen, barely beginning to process what had happened, when another splash reached his ears…from behind him!
Lex whirled, and had just enough time to see a pony-sized creature hurtling towards him, having leapt from the water. It had four limbs, each ending in clawed fins. Its eyes were wide and bulging. Its body was covered with greenish scales. A large tail waved behind it. And worst of all was its mouth, which was wide open, revealing row upon row of sharp teeth. Teeth which were mere feet away from him as the trajectory of the creature’s leap brought it closer…and Lex knew that he wouldn’t be able to cast a spell before it reached him, and that when it did its momentum would carry them both into the water, which was undoubtedly what had happened to the sailors he’d lost sight of just a moment ago.
The thing was mere feet away from him when Severance struck.
In a single motion it spun forward, its long blade dipping down before curving up again in a sharp arc that passed through the creature’s midsection. The thing gave a strangled croak as it was instantly bisected, its top and bottom halves separating and covering Lex in a shower of blood. Finishing its lethal arc without slowing, Severance resumed its upright position, as though it had never moved.
For a moment Lex could only gape, as much due to the sudden turn of events as at being suddenly drenched with gore, before regaining control of himself. Immediately, he returned to shadow-form and plunged straight downward, passing through the wood of the pier and into the water below. Those other ponies that had been taken needed his help!
As he moved below the shoreline, Lex – his immaterial body unimpeded by the water, and with his vision enhanced to see through the gloom – caught sight of the two sailors. Both of them were struggling futilely with their captors, each of which was a creature identical to the thing that had just attacked him. Even as he caught sight of them, Lex could see the scaled monstrosities grappling with the sailors, their claws digging into them to prevent them from swimming back to the surface, causing the two to thrash in pain and terror.
Even as Lex began to cast a spell, one of the creatures leaned its head towards its prey and bit the earth pony’s neck, its sharp teeth sinking deeply into the soft flesh. The sailor screamed, a sound that ended abruptly as both water and his own blood began to fill his throat. An instant later, Lex’s spell went off, firing two beams of dark energy that lanced through the water to hit each of the aquatic creatures.
For an instant, both monsters stiffened, and then went completely still, slain by the necromantic energy that Lex had flooded their bodies with. Or at least, he hoped they were slain, as he had no more time to devote to fighting them, not if he wanted to save the life of the pony that had just been bitten. Already the sailor’s motions were slowing, despite his attacker being dispatched, and Lex could see that his eyes were beginning to close. Sparing the briefest of glances to confirm that the second sailor was currently swimming back towards the surface under his own power, Lex grabbed the dying earth pony in his telekinetic grasp and began to haul him upwards.
A unicorn’s telekinesis was only marginally stronger than what they could do bodily, and Lex – who had always eschewed physical training in favor of more cerebral pursuits – had to struggle to haul the sailor above the water. After what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only a few seconds, he managed to get him above the water and lay him down on the pier, a few feet away from where the other sailor had managed to drag himself, coughing and sputtering.
Resuming corporeal form, Lex immediately wrenched his haversack open…and stopped cold as he looked at the contents. No…no no NO!
“Wh-what just happened?!” coughed the less-injured earth pony, shaking like a leaf.
“What’s going on?!” echoed the pegasus sailor who’d been with them, landing a few feet away. “I just- oh sweet Celestia! Sandbar!” He ran over to the earth pony whose throat had been torn open, his face stricken. “N-no!” Near panicking at the sight of his companion, the pegasus could only stare in horror for a moment before turning frantic eyes to Lex. “Do something!”
“Shut up shut up SHUT UP!” roared Lex, trying not to panic himself. He had a healing spell, thanks to the Night Mare, and although it wasn’t much of one compared to what he’d seen on Everglow, he knew that it would be enough to save the earth pony’s life if he cast it before he died, which would likely be in the next few seconds. But that spell was one that required material components to cast, and when Lex had opened his haversack – which was enchanted to always have the item that its owner wanted right on top – the vial that contained the devil’s blood that he needed to cast this spell was empty.
Forcing himself to remain calm, Lex went over what he knew about that spell. Other than devil’s blood, there was no substitute that would allow it to function, save for “unholy” water, which Lex knew he didn’t have. That was largely because he’d never been completely sure of what it meant to make water “unholy” to begin with, save for the assurances of Everglow’s religious-minded ponies that it was somehow imbued with the power of the deities that they’d deemed to be malevolent.
Deities like the Night Mare.
Inspiration came immediately, and Lex used his telekinesis to scoop some water from the bay, holding it aloft as he stared at it in silent concentration. He’d only performed a few experiments with the limits of the powers that the Night Mare had given him after their bargain, and most of those had served only to establish what it couldn’t affect, but maybe it would work now.
No, not “maybe!” It HAD to work! This pony, Sandbar, was dying as a result of his having joined in to help save Vanhoover, which meant that it would be Lex’s fault if he lost his life. That was not acceptable! After everything he had been through, all of the time and effort and ostracism that he’d suffered in creating his superior philosophy of governance and gaining the strength necessary to enforce it, Lex refused to entertain the possibility that it would lead those ponies that followed him to disaster, so THIS HAD TO WORK!
Even as he hardened his resolve, Lex focused on the water, concentrating on it as he reached out with that power the Night Mare had given him. For a moment, he felt it brush against the liquid, and he feared that it would be like all the other times he had directed it against an incompatible creature. But then he felt it surge forward, entering the water and becoming absorbed by it, and he knew that, against all odds, it had succeeded!
Immediately, he put a hoof on Sandbar and waved another as he chanted the words to the spell, dribbling the newly-minted unholy water over the gash on his throat. As he did so, Lex made sure to silently invoke the power of the circlet he always wore, letting the energy it contained substitute for that of the spell, so that it wouldn’t be expended. Based on what had happened in the last few minutes, there was no way he wasn’t going to keep his only healing magic available at all times.
As the water splashed over Sandbar’s torn neck, scar tissue slowly started to form. Several tense seconds passed by in silence, and then he suddenly thrashed, turning onto his belly as he began to reflexively hack up water and blood. The sight drew relieved cries from the other two ponies, and they crowded around him as he began to gasp, helping him up as he started to draw ragged breaths.
“You’re alright, buddy. You’re alright,” soothed the other earth pony, ignoring his own wounds as he focused intently on his friend. “You gave us one heck of a scare though.”
“What…what happened?” rasped Sandbar, still fighting to draw in enough air. But at least now he seemed to be winning that particular fight, as more scar tissue spread over his neck, fixing his throat.
“You all were attacked,” answered the pegasus. “Thank Celestia, he,” he pointed a hoof at Lex, “was able to save you.”
“No,” interjected Lex suddenly. “Not Celestia. It was thanks to the Night Mare that I was able to save him.” The puzzled looks that he received told him that his statement wasn’t understood, and he knew that this wasn’t the time to try and educate anypony about his divine patron. In fact, it had probably been foolish to bring it up at all considering everything that had just happened, but the very idea of thanking Celestia for anything that he had done, even if the saying was entirely perfunctory with no real gratitude behind it, rankled Lex greatly.
“Nevermind.” He dismissed the matter with a shake of his head. “We need to get back to the ship.”
“How?” asked the pegasus. “Taking the lifeboat back seems like it’d just be asking for more of those…things to attack us again!” His gaze went further down the pier, to where the two halves of the creature that had leapt at Lex were laying in a pool of viscera, shuddering.
“Fly…us…” coughed Sandbar, shakily climbing to his hooves.
The pegasus thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I can maybe carry one of you at a time, but that’d leave the other two alone while I did.”
“What about heading inland?” asked the second earth pony. “If we hole up in a building, maybe wait for daytime…”
“That’s a bad idea,” retorted Lex. “There’s no guarantee that we’ll be any safer there than we would be on the ship. Probably less safe, if what I saw when I was taking a look around was any indication.”
“Then what do you suggest?!” asked the pegasus shrilly, his voice rising in fear.
“I have a spell that will teleport us to the ship,” answered Lex. “It’s short-range only, but it should be close enough to get us all…” his voice trailed off as he looked out into the harbor, his eyes widening in alarm. Turning to see what had captured his attention, the other three gasped as they saw what he was looking at.
When the sun had started to set, the sailors on the ship had begun to hang lanterns off of various locations around the deck. Lex had overheard one of the passengers explaining to Sonata that that was not only so they’d have enough light to see by, but also so that the port would be able to see them arriving. And sure enough, it was close enough now that, by the glow of those lights, Lex and the others could see the ship fairly clearly.
There were more of those creatures, a lot more, clawing their way up its side.
Startled, she reflexively thrashed as she tried to sit up. This succeeded only in overturning the hammock, dumping her to the floor and depositing Nosey on top of her an instant later. Groaning, the two mares struggled to disentangle themselves, finally managing to get their hooves under them.
“What’s happening?” asked Nosey, fumbling for her notepad and pencil. There was clearly something happening; she could see ponies running around in fright, but the source of their panic wasn’t clear.
“I dunno,” replied Sonata. She blinked as she looked around, before reaching a hoof towards a frightened-looking earth pony stallion who was wearing a sailor’s getup. “Hey, what’s going on?”
He didn’t seem to see her at first, so she moved forward and put a hoof on his shoulder, causing him to let out a rather high-pitched shriek and jump, spinning around to face her as he did. Luckily, the sight of a pretty mare seemed to calm him down, and he managed to relax a little as he landed. “Huh? I mean…sorry, what did you say?”
“We’re under attack!” he yelped in response. Just saying that seemed to threaten to make him descend into hysteria again. “Some kind of fish-pony monsters are boarding the ship!”
Nosey’s eyes widened. “‘Fish-pony monsters’? Oh I have got to see this!” she grinned, immediately heading for the stairs.
“No!” cried the sailor. “You can’t go out there! C. Shells said to keep everypony below deck while she and the rest of the crew try to hold them off!”
Sonata’s brow furrowed at that, barely even noticing as Nosey ignored the sailor’s warning and moved to head above deck. “What do you mean ‘she and the rest of the crew’ are holding them off? What about Lex?”
“Who?”
“Lex!” she yelled, suddenly starting to feel worried. “The unicorn who put this entire thing together! Red horn, weird shadow, mayor of Tall Tale, that Lex! Isn’t he up there fighting?”
“He went ashore!” babbled the earth pony. “He was supposed to be getting the docks ready!”
“What, alone?!” Sonata felt a sudden surge of worry. She knew that it was ridiculous; Lex was the pony who had fought a dragon all by himself, after all. But at the same time, she remembered that he had nearly died in that fight. For how smart he was, Sonata knew that he had a tendency to not realize when he’d bitten off more than he could chew.
A fresh round of screams from above deck reminded her that she had more immediate problems to deal with. Pushing her way past the sailor and ignoring his half-hearted attempts to stop her, Sonata ventured above deck.
What greeted her was a scene of complete pandemonium. Just as she’d been told, there were scaly green monsters the size of ponies pouring onto the ship. Most of the creatures had a trident or spear clenched in their jaws, and as they vaulted over the rail onto the deck, they immediately threw themselves at any ponies they saw, jabbing viciously. Those that weren’t armed were no less dangerous for it, lashing out with teeth and claws.
Sonata could see that several members of the crew were trying to fight back – and a few, C. Shells among them, were trying to organize a defense – but they were clearly being overwhelmed. Most of them were fighting with belaying pins or scrub buckets, and there wasn’t one of them that wasn’t bleeding from where they’d been cut, stabbed, or bitten. Worse, they were rapidly becoming outnumbered as more of the creatures – there had to have been almost two dozen now! – kept climbing onto the deck.
Even as Sonata watched, a pegasus stallion that was hovering in the air while he tried to whack some of the creatures with a bucket took a spear through the wing, letting out a pained howl as he collapsed to the deck. Instantly, two of the green things leaped at him, and his eyes widened in terror. Reacting instantly, Sonata muttered the words to a spell before taking a deep breath…
“BACK OFF!”
Augmented by magic, her words were loud enough to create tangible pressure. They lashed out with explosive force, catching the two monsters attacking the pegasus in mid-leap, sending them flying back over the side of the ship as though they’d been shot out of a cannon.
The sheer volume of Sonata’s attack was enough to bring the fighting to a halt, as everyone – pony and monster alike – stopped and stared at what she’d done before looking over at her. From where she’d hurriedly situated herself in the crow’s nest, Nosey blinked in surprise. She’d known that Sonata could sing, but to be able to do that…she had a serious set of lungs!
For her part, Sonata stood tall and gave her best impression of Lex’s commanding glare as she looked at the evil fish-thingies. “Those of you that don’t want to get, like, totes fileted, go back where you came from right now!” she announced. Inside, she felt almost giddy. She hadn’t been able to help when the dragon had attacked, but now she was SO going to redeem herself! Just the thought of Lex’s face when he got back and found out that she’d saved everyone was enough to make her have to struggle to keep from grinning.
“Maa-jik…”
The raspy croaking voice was enough to snap her out of her fantasy, and she couldn’t keep a surprised look off of her face as she looked at its source: one of the scaled monsters. “Huh?”
“Maa-jik…poh-nee…”
“Er, that’s right!” Sonata tried not to feel unnerved at the way those things were trying to talk. That had to be the creepiest thing she’d ever heard! “I’m, like, a super magic pony, so you better go away if you don’t want t-WHOA!” Her speech was interrupted as the scaly creatures charged her en masse, ignoring the other ponies on the ship in favor of her.
For a moment she thought that maybe this was one of those things where the creatures turned out to be misunderstood, and that they had a habit of making magic-using ponies their leader or something. But that theory was shot down a moment later as a spear was hurled at her, missing her head by inches. Giving a yelp of fright, Sonata stumbled backwards as the things threw themselves at her, hissing and roaring in what was quite obviously anger. Clearly magic ponies were NOT their favorite people!
Backpedaling as fast as she could to get away from the onrushing horde, Sonata quickly incanted a spell, waving a hoof at the creatures charged at her, now only a few feet away. Immediately, three of them collapsed, asleep before they hit the ground. But the rest of the crowd barely noticed, surging over their fallen brethren to get to her. “Maa-jik poh-nee!” they howled, their voices ringing with hatred.
Off to the side, C. Shells managed to shake off her surprise, and turned to the rest of her crew. “What’re you standing around for?” she bellowed. “We need to help her!” Picking her belaying pin up in her mouth, she immediately charged towards the back of the crowd, whacking one of the things over its finned head. Several of her crewmembers immediately followed suit. But although they succeeded in causing several of the monsters to turn towards them, the remainder kept their focus directly on Sonata.
Dodging under another spear strike, she then managed to avoid being skewered by a trident, but there was nothing she could do to stop a third creature from raking its claws across her flank, drawing blood. A fourth jabbed at her leg, its spear leaving a deep cut. Crying out in pain, she stumbled back, but felt her backside collide with the railing at the edge of the ship, and her blood ran cold as she realized that she was cornered.
For a moment she considered jumping into the water, but knew that wouldn’t work. These fish creatures were undoubtedly strong swimmers, and would likely get her before she’d managed to get very far. Instead, she muttered another spell, and again yelled out. “I said GO AWAY!” This time, she’d used a different spell, one that used less force in exchange for covering a wider area. It wasn’t enough to send any of the creatures flying, but it was more than loud enough to cause several of them to grab their heads in pain. A few even collapsed, twitching once or twice before falling still, bleeding from their finned ears.
But there were still over a dozen surrounding her, and as they moved in to press their attack, Sonata realized that she wasn’t going to get a chance to cast another spell. “Maa-jik poh-nee!” hissed the nearest creature, rearing back with its trident. Around her, several others snarled that appellation as well, raising their weapons. Sonata closed her eyes, realizing that she wasn’t going to be able to stop it.
A moment went by, and the pain of being stabbed to death wasn’t felt. Cracking one eye open, Sonata looked around. The creatures were all still there, and were screeching in anger, jabbing their weapons forward. But the blows weren’t connecting; instead, they were impacting harmlessly against a transparent wall, a force field, that had sprung up around her, shielding her from their attacks. For a moment, Sonata wasn’t sure what was going on, before the obvious answer came to her, and she slumped in relief.
“Lex…”
“You disgusting…primitive…monsters!” howled her boyfriend from behind the mass of creatures. “You want a magic pony?! Then come and get me!”
What happened then wasn’t so much a fight as it was a massacre. Screaming in rage, Lex flung himself into the mass of fish-creatures, Severance by his side. Each spell he cast unleashed bloody carnage on the monsters; one released a trio of bright red beams that struck three of the creatures, causing them to scream as they were cooked alive. Another unleashed five small glowing darts of light, which proceeded to fling themselves against another creature until they’d punctured its torso. Still another made one of the creatures clutch at its throat, its eyes bulging as it gasped futilely for air before collapsing.
Even as he unleashed death upon the creatures, they didn’t seem to be discouraged. If anything, the flagrant uses of magic seemed to enrage them, and they flung themselves at Lex in a wave of teeth and claws and blades. But only a few of them reached him, as Severance whirled and lashed out at those that came too close. Each such rotation caused blood to spurt or limbs to go flying as it cut the onrushing monsters to ribbons.
Despite this, several of the monsters still reached Lex, lashing out at him with all of the force they could muster. But he seemed not to notice; no matter how often they thrust their tridents or tried to bite at his face, their attacks couldn’t seem to find purchase, defeated by the array of defensive spells and magic items he wore.
Barely more than a minute after he’d arrived, all of the creatures were dead. Standing in the center of their massed corpses was Lex, Severance floating serenely beside him, both of them covered with blood. He looked around, and just that motion was enough to make C. Shells and her crew shrink back, horrified by the slaughter that they’d just witnessed.
Ignoring them, Lex gestured towards Sonata, and the force field around her collapsed. Instantly, he was by her side, looking her over. “You’re hurt.”
His voice was grim, but it made her smile nonetheless. “And you’re late,” she replied teasingly.
“I’ll heal your wounds,” he said, ignoring her banter. “So wait just…” he paused as he looked back at the rest of the crew, as though only just remembering that there were other ponies there. He glanced between them and her, clearly caught between wanting to mend her injuries immediately and checking to see if anypony else was in worse condition.
Sonata lightly pushed him away. “Go on. I’m sure some of them need your help more than me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I can totes handle a few scratches,” she smiled. He lingered for a moment, as though weighing the truth of her words, before nodding and turning towards the rest of the crew, who were still watching him with shocked expressions.
Sonata sighed as she sat down, only to give a start as Nosey leaned over, not having noticed her climbing down the rigging. “I was right about you two,” she smirked good-naturedly. “You’re just one story after another.”
Chuckling weakly as the adrenaline rush began to wear off, Sonata gave Nosey a rueful smile. “Let’s just hope that you won’t need to write another story about us fighting monsters for a while. It’s seriously starting to lose its luster for me.”
The sahuagin slowly opened its eyes as its consciousness returned. For a moment it couldn’t remember what had happened. Then its memory of a loud noise and suddenly being blasted off of the ship by one of those poh-nees returned.
Maa-jik. One of the poh-nees had maa-jik.
Barely noticing that its companion that had been knocked off with it was dead, it started to swim towards the ship to resume its attack. The very idea of the existence of maa-jik filled it with a killing rage; only the holy ones were allowed to have such powers – everything else was an insult to their greatness. They would need to be killed and devoured so as to reclaim that power for the sahuagin race.
But as it swam closer to the ship, it heard roaring and shouting of a different kind than had been happening when they launched their attack. Clawing its way up the side, the lone sahuagin watched as another poh-nee, this one also using maa-jik, killed the rest of its kin, all without taking so much as a scratch. Indeed, few of them even got close to it, thanks to that strange blade hovering at its side.
Releasing its grip, the sahuagin dived back into the water, its reentry barely making a splash as it began to swim away from the ship. For the first time since they’d come to this place, they had lost an entire raiding party. Worse, they had lost without devouring any of the poh-nees.
Lex surveyed the deck of the ship, watching as the doctors he’d assembled to help Vanhoover’s citizens treated the ship’s crew, and cursed bitterly.
It was nothing short of miraculous that nopony had died. Given that they had been taken by surprise by a larger, albeit only slightly larger, force that was more aggressive and better-armed than they were, C. Shells and her crew had fared incredibly well. Lex had asked her about that, and she’d attributed it to little more than luck, and the fact that her crew had focused more on defending themselves and keeping those things from getting below deck than on trying to attack. Lex had been tempted to lecture her when she’d told him that; a purely-defensive posture, with no focus on attacking, couldn’t win. But even he had been able to recognize that this wasn’t the time to be giving lessons.
As it was, there had been myriad injuries dealt to all of the ponies that had been above deck – save only for Nosey, who had somehow managed to scurry into the crow’s nest without being accosted – but only two of them had been so serious as to require Lex to make use of magical healing to assist their recovery. The rest of them were being treated by the grateful doctors and nurses that they had protected.
Lex knew that he should have felt relieved at the outcome. But while he was aware that things could have gone much worse, that knowledge brought him very little comfort. Instead, what he felt was anxiety and self-recrimination that he hadn’t anticipated something like this happening. It was a lack of foresight on his part that was utterly inexcusable.
It wasn’t as though the idea of Vanhoover being beset with monsters had been beyond the realm of imagination, or even plausibility. That had been the case in Tall Tale, after all, so why couldn’t it be true here as well? No matter that Twilight’s briefing about the situation here had made it sound like the monsters had left when the elemental bleed had ended; she had openly admitted that her information was incomplete. And yet he had acted as though what she’d told him had been extremely reliable, with Tall Tale’s situation being completely anomalous.
But it wasn’t that he’d made such a foolish mistake that upset him. Rather, it was what that mistake had almost cost him.
The ponies on this ship had come to Vanhoover under his auspices. That made them his responsibility; if any of them had been killed, it would have directly impugned his ability to defend those whom he had implicitly sworn to protect. That would have struck at the very heart of what he wanted to accomplish most, which was to prove that he was a better ruler than the alicorn princesses.
Those miserable fish-creatures had, in other words, tried to make him into a failure. And because he hadn’t taken their presence into account, they had almost succeeded. That thought made him grit his teeth.
That, and they had actually injured Sonata! Just remembering that made Lex’s blood boil, and he had a vicious urge to swing Severance at something again. He quashed it, however, as he noticed C. Shells walking towards him.
“Well, it looks like everypony’s going to be okay,” she said as she moved to stand alongside him, directing her gaze towards the activity on the deck. “There are still some pretty serious gashes, but nothing so bad that you need to work that magic of yours anymore, according to the doctors.”
Lex gave a grunt of acknowledgment.
C. Shells was silent for a moment, then continued talking. “Ocean Spray probably wouldn’t have been able to fly again if you hadn’t done whatever you did to fix his wing. Same with how badly Scrubby’s hoof was mangled. And Sandbar…” she trailed off for a moment, shaking her head before continuing. “He told me what happened. Wound like that, he should be dead, but now they’re saying that other than a nasty-looking scar and a sore throat, he’s gonna be fine.” She chuckled for a moment, then added, “He’s pretty excited about the scar, too. Says that it makes him look tough.”
Lex was quiet, unsure why she was telling him all this. Was that really something he needed to know? Or was this one of those inscrutable social rituals that he’d never been able to decipher? He didn’t have a chance to ponder that before C. Shells spoke up again, finally turning to face him. “Look, can I be blunt?”
“I’d prefer that you were,” answered Lex, turning to face her in kind.
“I don’t know how to talk to you,” she replied. “None of us – my crew and I – do.” She swept a hoof towards the assembled ponies on the deck. “When I was checking on everypony just now, you wouldn’t believe how many times I heard them say that they wanted to thank you. But not one of them felt comfortable approaching you…and not just because you’re still all covered in blood, by the way.”
Blinking in surprise, Lex rubbed a hoof on his face for a moment. Noting how it came away with dark smudges, he sighed in exasperation. Before he could look for a towel, C. Shells produced one from somewhere, holding it out to him. He took it wordlessly and began to scrub his face.
“They’re really grateful to you,” she continued. “And I am too. Not just for saving us from those things, but for everything…fighting that dragon, fixing my ship. Heck, even coming here to try and help Vanhoover. A lot of the crew have friends and family here, you know. But you make it really hard to tell you that.”
“Get to the point,” muttered Lex as he finished cleaning himself off, tossing away the towel that was now thoroughly stained with dark fluids.
C. Shells snorted at the terse response, but didn’t seem too upset about it. Instead, a rueful smile crossed her lips. “The point is, even if you are rougher around the edges than a patch of barnacles, that we’re all behind you one hundred percent.”
“…we need to figure out what to do next,” said Lex after a moment, changing the subject. It was enough to add a genuine twinge to C. Shell’s rueful grin. Coming from a pony as salty as him, that was about as graceful of an acknowledgment of everyone’s feelings as could reasonably be expected. “Right now we have no idea if there are more of those things or not, so we need to assume there are and work to maintain a defensible position.”
She nodded, turning serious as they focused on the situation at hoof. “Can you fortify the ship somehow? Keep more of those things from getting on?”
Lex thought for a minute, then shook his head. “No. I do have defensive magic that can help to secure a position, but nothing that would stop them from simply climbing up the sides. But that’s not what worries me.”
“No?” C. Shells enquired, raising a brow.
“If they come over the side of the ship again, I can fight them. But if they start attacking the underside of the ship, the potential for catastrophe would increase dramatically.”
“Attacking the…hang on, I’ll admit that those things were scary as anything, but all they had were teeth and claws and basic weapons. Those aren’t enough to put a hole in the hull.”
Lex shook his head. “No, they aren’t, but we don’t know the full extent of what we’re dealing with here. If those creatures have something that we haven’t counted on, we’d be caught completely off-guard.”
“But you have repair magic!” protested C. Shells. “Even if they damage the ship, you could just cast it again and fix everything, right?”
“That would seal a rupture,” admitted Lex, “but you might recall, from when you saw me use that spell previously, that it takes ten minutes to cast. That wouldn't be time I had during a fight. Moreover, it wouldn’t remove any water that we’d take on in the interim. If the initial attack created a severe breach, it could conceivably be enough to seriously damage this vessel’s seaworthiness.”
“…you really think they have something that could do that?” C. Shells glanced around, suddenly feeling far more nervous than she had a few moments ago.
“In all honesty, no,” replied Lex. “I think that if they had something that destructive, they would have used it in their initial assault. But at this point we need to weigh different sets of risks, and remaining out on the water gives those creatures more of an advantage than I’m comfortable with.”
“So we’re headed ashore?”
Now it was Lex’s turn to nod. “Going inland is dangerous, but staying in a place where known hostiles can approach us completely unseen, surrounded by an environment that favors them, is more dangerous. We’re going to need to chance it.”
“And once we dock? Then what?”
“I checked a few of the warehouses while I was on the wharf,” answered Lex. “We’ll move everypony and the supplies there, and once we’ve cleaned and secured it, we’ll settle in for the time being.” Mentally, he made sure to make a note not to use the one that had bloodstains in it.
C. Shells frowned slightly. “That’s pretty close to the water if we want to avoid more of those things coming back.”
“We don’t have any better options,” retorted Lex. “Without knowing the city’s condition, going scouting in the dark is a fool’s errand. And since we’re going to be unloading the ship, having a closer location is easier. Right now, a warehouse is our best bet.” That wasn’t saying very much, he knew. Her point about that still being uncomfortably close to the water was a cogent one. Moreover, the effort needed to clean the place to the point of being fit for habitation would be considerable; worse, it would need to be done immediately, before anypony could be allowed to rest. Otherwise, the unsanitary conditions would become even more of a threat than those fish-monsters had been. “We have a long night ahead of us,” he finished.
“Yeah.” C. Shells let out a slow breath, running a hoof through her white mane as she did so. “Well, we went into this knowing that it wouldn’t be easy, right?”
Lex glanced at her, his approval of her attitude not showing on his face, before he started to walk away. “Let me know when the doctors finish treating the remainder of the crew. As soon as they’re done, we’re going to get started.”
“Yes, sir!” C. Shells snapped a salute, drawing a chuckle from the ponies that noticed. Lex briefly wondered about that, but decided to ignore it, going over to where a doctor was treating Sonata.
“How is she?” he asked without preamble, making the two of them look over at him.
“Very well,” answered the doctor, and older unicorn stallion. “None of her wounds were deep enough to require stitches, so with a little rest and relaxation, she’ll be right as rain in no time.”
“They still hurt though,” interjected Sonata, giving Lex her best dewy-eyed look. “You wanna kiss ‘em and make ‘em all better?” Both stallions snorted, Lex in scorn, the doctor in amusement.
After a brief reminder to change her bandages regularly, the doctor went to look at another crewmember, leaving the pair alone. That fact was enough to make Lex glance around slightly. “Where’s Nosey?”
“She went back below deck,” answered Sonata. “She said something about taking interviews later. And for the record, asking your injured girlfriend about another mare is, like, totes uncool.” She smirked as she said it, letting him know that she was teasing him.
Lex rolled his eyes, but instead moved on to what he’d come over to tell her. “I overheard some of the crew talking about what you did, stopping several of those monsters with your magic.”
Sonata puffed up with pride. “Oh yeah?”
He nodded. “You probably saved several lives, even if you did almost lose your own in the process.”
She gave a guilty grin at his mildly-admonishing tone, rubbing the back of her head. “Yeah, well, who knew those things would be such a tough crowd when it came to ‘maa-jik poh-nees.’ I mean, geez!”
“I wanted to ask you one thing though.”
“Oh yeah? Shoot.”
“Before, when we were heading to Tall Tale, I asked you if you had any spells that could cause physical harm, and you said no. So what were those sonic attack spells you used to fight those things?”
“Huh?” Sonata tilted her head in a show of confusion. “That wasn’t magic for ‘fisical harm.’ It was just me blasting them.”
Lex stared at her, utterly nonplussed by her explanation for a moment, before shaking his head. “Let me try this again. You said that all of your magic was for ‘messing with someone’s head.’ Exactly what part of a wave of concussive sound did that?”
“It’s, like, sound,” said Sonata, her voice making it clear that she thought this was obvious. “You hear it with your ears, and your ears are part of your head. Duh.” She smirked. “I, like, can’t believe I have to explain that to you, Mr. Genius. I…Lex? Hey, Lex? Why are you putting your face in your hooves? Lex?”
Honestly, her boyfriend could be such a weirdo sometimes.
“That was so not what I signed on for,” groaned Nosey, flopping down onto her sleeping bag.
Sonata cast a tired grin at her friend from her own resting place a few feet away. “Aw, come on. I’m sure you can make a fun story out of this. ‘Getting Down and Dirty in Vanhoover,’ or something like that.”
Nosey turned her head to give Sonata a very Lex-like glare. “We just spent eight hours cleaning up garbage. There is no way that anypony would find that to be at all exciting, interesting, or newsworthy.”
“Which in no way diminishes its necessity,” came the voice of Lex himself as he approached them. “There’s a lesson in that: events don’t need to be glamorous to be important.” Nosey’s response was to frown at him, before turning her head away with a loud grunt of disapproval, nose in the air.
She had initially been excited when Lex had announced, in the aftermath of the attack on their ship, that they were going to immediately go ahead and “establish a forward base of operations.” That phrase had instantly evoked images of him having a secret base in the city, or conjuring a castle out of nowhere with his freaky magic, or something equally fascinating. It had been enough to leave her chomping at the proverbial bit as they’d guided the ship up to the pier.
It had been a profound disappointment to learn that he’d meant that they’d be holing up in a warehouse on the wharf. But that had been nothing compared to finding out what the place was like on the inside: Rotting garbage was everywhere. Bugs and rodents were crawling all over the place. Worst of all was the stench, which had set Nosey and several other ponies to gagging when they’d first smelled it.
None of which had deterred Lex in the slightest. Instead, he’d simply began issuing instructions as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him, having the crew break open the cleaning supplies they’d brought with them and get to work. The doctors had then been directed to join in as well, and Nosey had been preparing to go settle back into her hammock on board the ship when Lex’s eyes had fallen on her.
She had flat-out refused to help at first, pointing out that she was a reporter and not a garbage-pony. Lex had shown no sympathy for that particular argument, and had no reservations telling her exactly what he thought of her recalcitrance. Things between the two of them had, at that point, begun to devolve into a shouting match, and even Sonata’s intervention hadn’t helped very much. In the end, it had only been Lex’s threat to teleport her back to Tall Tale if she didn’t help out – she still wasn’t sure if he could actually do that, but she couldn’t risk it – that had made her don a hazmat suit and get to work scrubbing.
They had worked throughout the night, and although it had initially seemed like an impossible task, they had slowly but surely made their way through the structure. Little by little, the garbage had been hauled away, the pests had been chased off, and the smell had been scoured away by numerous applications of disinfectant. Eventually, Lex had declared the place fit for habitation, and despite the fact that everypony looked like they were about to collapse, they had managed a cheer, pleased with what they’d accomplished.
Even Nosey had felt good about the results of her hard work. Not that she’d ever admit it to that insufferable jerk who was leading them. The last thing he needed was to have his ego inflated even more by being told that he’d been right to make her help out.
At that point, Lex had conjured food for everypony, and that had been enough to momentarily make Nosey forget that she was annoyed with him. At least until she realized that he’d created bowls of some mush that looked like wet cardboard, and had tasted about as good, with nothing but cups of plain water to wash it down. She’d meant to complain, but apparently had worked up more of an appetite than she’d realized, because she wolfed her serving down with gusto despite its lackluster flavor.
After everypony had eaten, the final task had been to unload the remaining supplies and bring them into a small interior area that was separated from the rest of the warehouse. Judging from the tables and chairs that had initially been there, it had been used as some sort of rec area. Now that it had been cleaned out, it was serving as a communal living space, with lanterns arranged around it as sleeping bags and pillows were laid out. Naturally, Nosey had been the first to fling herself down onto one.
She’d been all ready to settle in and fall fast asleep when Lex just had to come over and start lecturing her. Sure, he had no doubt come over to see Sonata, but he just couldn’t resist throwing a barb her way before the two of them got all lovey-dovey. Big, stupid jerk.
Keeping her head turned away from him as she settled back down – hoping he noticed how she was ignoring him – she couldn’t help but hear the two of them speak. “I’ve laid down wards to keep this place secure. They should last for roughly twenty-four hours,” murmured Lex softly.
Despite herself, one of Nosey’s ears twitched as she heard that, wanting to know more. Apparently Sonata felt the same way, because a moment later she asked, “Oh yeah?”
“The first is an abjuration designed to impede intruders with a series of effects,” he replied. “Right now, outside of this room, the corridors of the warehouse are filled with a thick fog, which at certain key locations has been set to be noxious. Each intersection has a minor illusion designed to confuse intruders about which direction they take. The stairs to the second level are completely covered by thick webbing. And last of all, all three doors into the warehouse itself, and the one into this room, have not only been magically locked and reinforced, but also covered with an illusion to make them look just like the surrounding wall.”
Although the effects he was listing were interesting, Nosey found herself captivated by Lex’s voice. It had softened to a pitch that she’d never heard him use before, losing the harsh edge that she’d always heard before. He almost sounded…normal.
“Wow. That’s like, super impressive,” giggled Sonata quietly, and Nosey suddenly comprehended what was going on. The two of them were flirting! He was trying to impress her by bragging about what he could do, and Sonata was eating it up! For some reason, Nosey could feel her face heating up as she realized that.
Nosey had roomed with the two of them for days, and she’d never heard them talk to each other like that. Or at least, she’d never heard Lex talk like this; Sonata was bubbly and playful virtually all of the time. Maybe they’d done it after she’d fallen asleep? That would make sense, since even she was surprised she wasn’t asleep already. But even so, they were in a room full of ponies…except that a surreptitious glance around confirmed that everypony else was on the opposite side of the room, apparently trying to give the couple their space.
“That’s not all,” continued Lex, his voice still making that husky purr. “I laid down a second ward to prevent spying. Nobody outside this room can hear anything from inside it. They wouldn’t be able to see inside it either, if there were any windows. Even magic sensors won’t work.”
“Hmm.” Sonata’s grunt conveyed that she was impressed, and Nosey could hear her shifting around on her sleeping bag. Was she making room for him to lie down next to her? “So now that you’ve gotten us all tucked away safely, what are you going to do?” The invitation in her voice was unmistakable, and Nosey could feel her heart starting to beat faster. There was no way they were going to do anything right here, right? No, that was preposterous; they were right in front of everypony! Even so, Nosey held her breath as she waited to hear what Lex was going to say.
“I’m going to go scouting.”
Nosey blinked. What?
“What?” Sonata’s voice sounded exactly the same way that Nosey felt right at that moment.
“I’ll leave Severance here,” Lex continued in the same soft tone, as though he hadn’t just completely ruined the mood. “Since the defenses I set up are based around confounding potential enemies rather than defeating them, it’s better for it to stay with everypony in case they’re breached or bypassed. I doubt that I’ll be gone more than a few hours, but I’m not willing to take any chances.”
“You, like, can’t be serious.” Sonata’s voice was a complete deadpan. Unnoticed, Nosey nodded at her friend’s words. It was one thing to try and impress his girlfriend, but this was going too far!
“Of course I’m serious,” came the entirely-unsurprising answer, making Nosey roll her eyes. “The sun has just risen, so if I head out now I can maximize the amount of time that I can spend searching the surrounding environment before-”
“Oh for cryin’ out loud!” yelled Nosey, sitting up suddenly and causing both of them to jump.
“Nosey? What-”
“Oh shut up! Honestly, I can’t believe you!” Ignoring the way that everypony was looking at her now, Nosey sat up, glaring at Lex with undisguised anger. “What kind of tough guy act are you trying to pull?! You’ve gone almost an entire day without sleeping, you barely touched that tasteless drek you call food, and now you’re going to go wander around a dangerous city, all alone, without your strongest weapon?! Are you trying to get killed?!”
“That’s not-”
“No! You know what? Just no!” Standing up, Nosey clamored out of her sleeping bag. It was the sort that could be unzipped across one side and the bottom, letting it unfold into what was effectively a large blanket, and she did that before dragging it right next to Sonata, who looked at her in confusion.
Lex was about to ask Nosey what she thought she was doing, but didn’t have a chance as she suddenly lunged at him, wrapping her forelegs around his neck and immediately flinging herself down onto her sleeping bag, dragging him with her. Squawking at the unexpected assault, Lex couldn’t avoid being pulled down onto the makeshift blanket. “Let me go!”
“No! Sonata, help me out here!” yelled Nosey as she held onto the struggling stallion.
For her part, Sonata was just staring, dumbfounded at the sudden turn of events…before an idea came to her. Turning away for a moment, she grabbed the corner of her pillow in her teeth and swung it around, right into Lex’s face with a thick whumping sound. “Pillow fight!” she announced with glee.
“Sonata!” yelled Lex. “What are y-” He was cut off as another pillow collided with his face, this time wielded by Nosey. The sight set off a round of laughter among the rest of the ponies watching the spectacle, which was immediately followed by pillows starting to fly in every direction. In a few moments complete pandemonium had broken out, as whoops of excitement and shouts of joy filled the room.
Turning into shadow to avoid the impromptu melee, Lex’s green-and-purple eyes glared at the mares that had started the brawl. “Have you two completely taken leave of your senses?!” he hissed at them.
“Aw, come on, Lex! Change back!” pleaded Sonata. “Everyone else is having fun, so why can’t you?”
“Stop pushing yourself so hard all the time,” agreed Nosey. “Blowing off some steam and resting for a few hours won’t change the city, and it’ll do you a lot of good!”
For a long moment, Lex didn’t respond, staring at the two of them and weighing their words. Then, without warning, he telekinetically yanked Sonata’s pillow away and whacked Nosey with it, returning to physical form as he did so. “You’re both so dead,” he promised darkly, but the corners of his mouth were turned ever-so-slightly upwards.
Fifteen minutes later, things had settled down, and the tension in the room was notably lighter, with the atmosphere now resembling a big slumber party rather than a siege. Several ponies were having hushed conversations, a few had produced a deck of cards from somewhere and were playing a game, while others were swapping stories.
For his part, Lex had fallen asleep, Sonata slumbering on one side of him…and Nosey on the other.
As her subordinate finished his report about what had happened with the poh-nee ship, Sitkra wondered if she should eat him.
A failed raid was shameful, but not necessarily a death sentence in sahuagin culture. But not fighting to the death against creatures – especially weak creatures such as these poh-nees – that dared to use the powers that should, by all rights, be reserved for holy ones such as herself or the Great Lord of the Deep was inexcusable. Death by devouring was a better fate than such failure deserved.
But although her mouth was already salivating at the thought of tasting flesh from her own kind again, Sitkra held her hunger in check. The loss of over twenty sahuagin was not something that could be easily replaced. Although it would soon be time for the most recent communal clutch of eggs to hatch, those spawn that survived the Rite of First Hunger would still need years before they grew into adults. Until that time, it was important that their losses were minimized.
Despite that knowledge, Sitkra never considered taking a less aggressive posture. She knew that if you weren’t devouring another, then you were at risk of being devoured. Even if that hadn’t been true, the existence of poh-nees that mocked her divinely-granted power – the proof of her greatness and exalted status – could not be countenanced, at least not so close to the borders of their new home.
“You will undergo the Rite of Broken Teeth for your failure,” she intoned, watching as the lesser sahuagin shuddered. But he didn’t protest, knowing that having done so would have immediately provoked her to not only kill him, but declare him itkul – filth unfit for consumption. Instead, he bowed his head before turning to swim away and ready himself for the ordeal that he would soon experience.
Left alone, Sitkra pondered what her next move should be. As one of the Mighty Ones, the eldest of the holy ones in their community, she had the authority to make decisions of consequence on her own. But at the same time, such decisions would mean that any subsequent failures would be hers to bear when the Great Lord of the Deep learned about them. And he would learn about them, Sitkra knew. Even if he didn’t find out on his own, it was likely that one of those disgusting creatures that he kept as servitors would figure it out and inform him.
Unless…
Baring her teeth in delight as an idea came to her, Sitkra swam towards the section of the community where the undesirables were allowed to exist. She hated coming here, but the thought of what she’d soon accomplish drove her to put aside her disgust. Soon, with any luck, she’d never need to look upon at least some of these ugly freaks again.
Spotting a shape below her, Sitkra moved towards it, and sneered as it came into view. It was the Cripple. It claimed to have a real name, of course, but Sitkra knew better. Names were for sahuagin only. Everything else was defined only by what it was, even the Great Lord of the Deep.
As she approached, Sitkra had to fight back a laugh as she saw what the Cripple was doing. It was feeding! The sight was hilarious for how pathetic it was; the thing was eating seaweed. Even as Sitkra watched, it bit a chunk of kelp, chewing it for several moments before swallowing and moving to eat more. To Sitkra, the sight was nothing less than further confirmation of the creature’s status as an inferior being. Sahuagin ate only what they killed, and would die before being reduced to feeding on detritus the way the Cripple was.
Swimming in front of the creature, Sitkra grinned at it, pleased to have caught it during such a humiliating moment. “Greetings, Cripple.”
The thing’s features twisted in hate as it saw her. “What do you want, Sitkra?” it hissed, its susurrus murmuring as harsh and grating as ever.
Despite having no desire to remain in the creature’s presence longer than necessary, Sitkra’s desire to demean the thing was greater, and she paused for a moment before making a show of looking between the Cripple and the seaweed. “There’s a situation that requires your attention. But do not cease tending to your hunger on my account,” she said, making no effort to hide her mockery.
“If you have some business with me, get to it. If not, then go away!” The hostility of the Cripple’s words let Sitkra know that it understood that it was being taunted, and she couldn’t help but grin. The creature’s existence was an insult to her, as its abilities debased her possession of holy power – even the name “maa-jik” was an affront to Sitkra’s sensibilities, since non-sahuagin had no right to name anything, let alone something sacred – and so whatever displeasure it suffered was deserved. As it was, Sitkra wished she could just devour the creature, but the Great Lord of the Deep didn’t want that, and so she had no choice but to obey.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t arrange for its demise by subtler means.
“Some new poh-nees have arrived at the feeding grounds. We sent a raiding party to deal with them, but they were killed.”
“Mere ponies killed the mighty sahuagins?” smirked the Cripple, and Sitkra had to fight down a killing rage at the sight, her good humor spoiled by the thing’s insolence.
“Two of them had ‘maa-jik,’” she responded tightly.
Now it was the Cripple’s turn to grin. “How awful,” it rasped, its sarcasm obvious. “For the mighty sahuagin to be killed by ponies, and using the power that should only belong to you…I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”
Forcing herself to remain calm, Sitkra continued. “I’ve spoken to the Great Lord of the Deep,” she lied. “He wants you to deal with these maa-jik poh-nees.”
Surprise crossed the Cripple’s face. “Me?”
Sitkra nodded, then feigned concern. “Of course, I understand that this is a serious task for a creature such as yourself. So I’m going to send Lirtkra with you.”
The Cripple’s eyes narrowed, its expression turning suspicious instantly. “Why?”
“Because the Great Lord of the Deep personally instructed me to relay this task to you, which means that I would bear some responsibility should you fail, which you certainly will if you do not receive my aid,” she said easily, having already anticipated that the creature would be distrustful of her offer of aid; it had been around them long enough to know that sahuagin didn't offer assistance, ever. “This way, I can guarantee that the task will be accomplished, since even you won’t be able to fail with one of our finest warriors at your side.”
The excuse was a plausible one, and Sitkra watched as the Cripple digested the words, weighing them in its mind. It was probably trying to decide whether or not to go to the Great Lord of the Deep directly and ask for confirmation about what it had just been told, but Sitkra knew it wouldn’t do that. To do so would run the risk of angering him, and no creature in its right mind would ever risk such a thing.
The last one to do so had been a sahuagin that had protested having to allow those non-sahuagin undesirables to live in proximity to them, and the memory of that dissident’s fate was enough to make Sitkra shudder. That fool had died slowly and in great agony, held captive in the Great Lord of the Deep’s power and forced to go ashore and lie on the ground, unmoving. Sitkra had been tasked with periodically using her holy power to make sure that the condemned sahuagin could breathe the air, since normally their kind could only hold their breath for several minutes at a time. As such, she had personally witnessed its slow death by dehydration, a process that had taken several days to complete, all within a spear’s throw of the water’s edge.
They hadn’t even been allowed to eat the agitator after his death. Instead, they’d been told to dig up the ground at the shore and bury the body in it! It was the final culmination of the horrors that fool had endured, and from the look on the corpse’s face, it had known what was in store for it before it had finally died. After that, no one had ever questioned the Great Lord of the Deep again.
“Alright,” sighed the Cripple at last, drawing Sitkra from her unpleasant memories. “But I’m not going now. It’s still daylight up there.”
“As you wish,” granted Sitkra with a shrug. “But you will not delay in this task. Find the maa-jik poh-nees and kill them as soon as the shore-realm is dark again, then bring their bodies back to us so that we may devour them.”
With her ultimatum delivered, Sitkra turned to swim away, smirking to herself. But she hadn’t gotten more than a short distance away before she heard the Cripple’s sibilant words again. “I’m taking Monitor with me when I go.”
Cursing internally, Sitkra glanced back over her shoulder, making sure to keep her expression relaxed. “I care not. Take as many more of you freaks as you please.”
“Do NOT compare me to that thing! I’m taking Monitor because I trust you and your kind even less than I trust him!” But Sitkra was already swimming away, mulling that last development as she left.
Ultimately, she doubted that it would change very much; Lirtkra was a powerful enough warrior that killing Monitor in addition to the Cripple should be within his capabilities. And if they managed to find the maa-jik poh-nees before then, so much the better; they would be killed first. Perhaps they’d even kill each other first and save Lirtkra the trouble. However it turned out, in all likelihood some of those loathsome creatures – be they poh-nees or undesirables – would end up dead, which could only improve things for the sahuagin in general and Sitkra in particular. The Great Lord of the Deep had no need to rely on such unsightly creatures, she was sure; only the sahuagin were worthy of his attention.
Sitkra grinned as she made her way back to her living area. Turning her enemies against each other like this, and making sure that she had a capable subordinate there to make certain that things went as she wished them to, was brilliant even for her. Surely the Shark God must have sent her such a brilliant plan! After all, she was one of his greatest holy ones.
She was still pleased with herself even as she prepared her tools and made her way to the center of their community, where the sahuagin she’d condemned earlier was awaiting his punishment. Waiting for the last of the community to arrive – knowing that none among them would want to miss this – Sitkra began the Rite of Broken Teeth. After the ceremonial chants were complete, she hefted her dagger, made of bone and sharkskin, and began to dig the sahuagin’s teeth out of his head one at a time.
His screams were enough to animate the crowd, but it was the cloud of blood that began to billow through the water that truly excited them. The scent of it drove them wild, and they began to circle Sitkra and her victim, swimming in frantic motions as the heady smell worked them into a frenzy.
For her part, Sitkra was able to maintain her composure, though it took a great act of will to be so calm when she was so close to the source of the shed blood. Each tooth took several tries to dislodge, and on more than a few of them Sitkra couldn’t help but take longer than necessary to dig one out, just to cause more blood and screams to be released. This sahuagin would not soon fail her again, she knew. Even after the pain had ended, it would need to struggle to eat until its new teeth grew in, having to rely on claws and weapons alone to bring down its prey and grind the bodies up into a digestible mush.
The blood cloud was thicker now, and Sitkra was practically covered by it. It was enough to make her shudder in pleasure, remembering the stories she’d been told as a new priestess about how the afterlife for devout, strong priestesses was swimming through an endless ocean of blood at the Shark God’s side, killing and feeding as they wished. She wanted so badly to sink her teeth into the sahuagin under her, to live out her fantasies of the afterlife for just a brief moment, but held her urges in check.
She would feed her appetites – both for meat and for power – soon, when she devoured those maa-jik poh-nees.
Sonata awoke gradually, dimly registering her consciousness returning despite her repeated attempts to return to the pleasantness of sleep. Opening her eyes, for a moment she couldn’t figure out why she’d woken up; she didn’t feel cold or hungry or uncomfortable. On the contrary, everything felt wonderful, particularly the sensation of her boyfriend pressed up against her. So why wasn’t she still asleep?
She considered turning over and making another try at slumbering, but for some reason she couldn’t find it in herself to do so. It was almost like she didn’t want to fall back asleep, but that was…actually, that seemed kinda accurate. A moment later it dawned on her why she had woken up: she simply wasn’t tired anymore! That hadn’t happened in forever. Even back in Tall Tale, she’d usually woken up because she felt hungry.
Smirking a little as she suddenly remembered Drowsy, the perpetually-sleepy mare who had run the inn that she and Lex had stayed at back on Everglow, Sonata stretched as she started to get up. Once she’d gotten to her hooves, she turned back to Lex, intent on making sure that she hadn’t dislodged the covers from him too badly, only to stop at the sight that greeted her.
Nosey was cuddling with Lex, pressed up against his other side.
For a moment, Sonata just stared, before a big grin crossed her face. Now this was what she wanted to see: her boyfriend and her new bestie getting along so well! It was the perfect way to wake up after they’d all had so much fun whacking each other with pillows before they’d gone to bed. Hopefully from now on they’d stop getting on each other’s nerves quite so badly.
It was at that moment that Nosey shifted in her sleep, pressing closer to Lex and snuggling him slightly as she did so. I don’t want them to get along THAT well! Sonata decided. Stepping closer to the pair, she gently tried to separate them without waking either pony up.
She accomplished neither goal, as Lex’s eyes snapped open almost as soon as she started. Glancing between her and the mare at his side, he seemed to comprehend the situation instantly, sitting up with a grimace. Nosey, for her part, simply rolled over, taking most of the blanket with her.
Climbing to his hooves, Lex glanced around the room, noticing that most of the other ponies were still asleep. “What time is it?” he asked softly, turning his attention back to Sonata.
She blinked. “How should I know?” The room they’d converted to a living area was completely contained within the warehouse, with direct window to the outside. Nor did it have any clocks that she could see.
“I was speaking to Severance,” replied Lex.
Sonata was about to ask why he’d been looking at her if that was the case, but then paused as something occurred to her, turning around. Sure enough, Severance was floating almost directly behind her, in the exact same spot it had been hovering in since they’d all laid down last night. Pouting slightly as the scythe began to float towards Lex, Sonata moved forward, cutting it off before it could reach him. Lex had just started to open his mouth to complain when Sonata pressed her lips over his, silencing him.
His surprise at her forwardness was obvious, and Sonata broke the kiss, grinning at having gotten some payback for his ignoring her like that. “Just so you know,” she said softly, “you’re supposed to say ‘good morning’ to your girlfriend first thing each morning.” She paused for a moment, remembering the confusion that had resulted last time she’d told him how to greet her, then added, “And that’s for realsies this time. No teasing.” Hopefully, that would be clear enough for whatever weird logic he operated on.
“Oh…um, good morning…” Lex trailed off, confusion written all over his face.
Sighing at his clearly having a problem with what she’d told him, Sonata fought the urge to roll her eyes. “What is it?” When he gave her a questioning look, she tried again. “What is it about what I just said that you, like, don’t get?”
A hint of irritation floated across his face, but he fought it down. “If I’m supposed to greet you ‘first thing’ each morning, due to your status as my girlfriend, does that imply that you have exclusive right to being greeted that way due to your current status? Or is it meant to indicate that you’re supposed to receive such a greeting prior to anypony else who would otherwise be entitled to one? Or is it an indication that being greeted is discretionary for everypony else but mandatory for you?”
Sonata’s response to his multipart query was to let her mouth hang open, and for a moment she wondered if he was playing a prank on her. Even for him, there was no way that anyone could be that…that…precise! But the look on his face was completely earnest, and Sonata realized that he wasn’t kidding. The nuances of what she’d said weren’t obvious to him, and he honestly wasn’t sure how to interpret the finer details.
Even knowing that, she had to fight down the urge to snap at him. For some reason that part of him, the one that insisted on making the simplest things into some sort of big, complicated ordeal, drove her up the wall. She shouldn’t have had to explain something this obvious to him! But even as she thought that, another memory came back to her, one that was more recent.
“I just got frustrated, you know?” she admitted in a quieter voice.
Fireflower let out a sigh of relief. “I’m just glad you’re acting like yourself again. For a minute there you sounded just like Lex.”
He’d made the comment off-handedly, but Sonata’s eyes widened in surprise at the comparison. She’d been acting the way Lex usually did? So then…did that mean the way she’d felt just then – frustrated and angry because she was trying to do something important, while other ponies that didn’t understand what was going on got in her way – was how Lex felt all the time? Was that why he was always in such a bad mood?
Sonata let out a slow breath, feeling her anger leaving her. It suddenly struck her as incredibly sad that some of the times when she understood Lex best were when she felt out of her mind with frustration because she couldn’t make herself clearly understood. She’d always admired him for how much smarter than everypony else he was, but suddenly that didn’t seem like such a great thing to be, since it seemed to isolate him so much.
Looking back at Lex, who was still staring at her, waiting for an answer to his question, it suddenly struck Sonata to what extent he was relying on her. He’d admitted that he wanted her to speak for him so that his big ideas could be understood, but she hadn’t realized the extent to which he couldn’t make himself clear otherwise. Now she felt like she had a much better appreciation for how much he needed her help.
“Sonata?”
“Hm?” She shook her head slightly as his voice brought her back to her senses.
“Are you alright? You looked as though you’d lost your train of thought,” replied Lex.
She cracked a smile. “Well, we were never very good with trains, remember?” His only response was to blink once, making her smile softly. “What I said before, about saying good morning to me. I was trying to say that it makes me feel happy when you do, and that’s why I want you to do it every day.”
Her words were soft and heartfelt, looking directly into his eyes with a dewy smile as she said them, and Lex could feel himself starting to blush. “O-okay then. If that’s what you want.” He could feel himself starting to smile, and no matter how much he tried to keep himself from doing so he couldn’t seem to make it stop, until he was giving her a grin that he knew had to look completely idiotic. But at the same time, he couldn’t make himself look away.
How long has it been since we made love? he suddenly wondered. The thought prompted him to start wondering if maybe there was a way they could now. There wasn’t even the vaguest semblance of privacy in the makeshift living area there were in, but maybe if he used his magic to create some…
Suddenly he felt something press against his side, and Severance’s mental voice slid across his consciousness, informing him how many hours had passed since he’d gone to sleep, and Lex was suddenly in control of himself again. “Alright,” he said out loud, as much to himself as to Severance or Sonata. As enjoyable as this had been, he had work that needed to be done.
Turning his attention back to his beloved, he spoke. “Now that I’ve rested, I’m going to use Severance to replenish my spells and then go explore the surrounding area. You and it will remain here with everypony while I do.”
Sonata frowned, as much at their tender moment ending as in disapproval. “I don’t like the idea of you going out there alone. What about taking me with you, and leaving Severance here?”
Lex shook his head. “That might work from a purely tactical standpoint, but there are other considerations to take into account. Until I’m satisfied that the surrounding area is safe, I need everypony to stay confined to this location. Since confinement tends to induce stress, it will be necessary to keep their anxiety from overwhelming them, which is a task that only you can accomplish.”
“Okay, I think I-, hang on…so you’re saying that you want me to entertain a captive audience?” She smirked, certain that he’d be pleased with her for making such a clever joke.
Instead, a slightly pained look crossed his face. He paused for several seconds, trying to figure out a response, before deciding it would be best to move on. “It’s late afternoon right now, so the wards I raised should last for some time still. Also, you won’t need to worry about food for a while, since the meal that I conjured previously should keep everypony’s hunger sated for at least another twelve to sixteen hours, by which point I’ll return.”
Huffing slightly at his refusal to acknowledge her totes funny pun, Sonata nodded. “Okay. Just be careful, alright? Don’t try and fight another dragon or anything.”
Although Lex knew that she was worrying about him, he nevertheless cringed internally at the reminder of how he’d almost died, the memory of how he’d failed to live up to the level of strength that he demanded of himself making his spine stiffen. He should have won that fight! There shouldn’t have been a need for somepony else to have healed him!
Gritting his teeth as he fought down his injured pride, Lex forced himself to consider the worst-case scenario. “I’ll be careful, but…” He paused for a moment, then continued. “In the event that I don’t come back-”
“Hold on,” interrupted Sonata.
“If I don’t come back,” repeated Lex forcefully, “then these wards will eventually expire on their own. If that happens, take everypony here and immediately head back to Tall Tale. Is that clear?”
“No!” insisted Sonata, unintentionally letting her voice rise. “If something happens to you then I’m not just going to run away! You had better come back, or I’m going out looking for you!”
“I appreciate the sentiment, Sonata. I do. But if worse comes to worst, you’ll have a responsibility to protect everypony here-”
“No, YOU have a responsibility to protect everypony here!” Sonata’s voice had sunk to a furious hiss, and it was enough to take Lex aback, never having seen her so angry. “I don’t have a responsibility to anybody except you, and I will NOT choose a bunch of strangers over the love of my life! I finally, FINALLY found someone to love and who loves me back, and we’re managing to make it work after all of the fighting and misunderstandings and now you’re telling me to just give up on that if something goes wrong?! NO!” She reached out to jab him in the chest with her hoof. “If you’re so worried about everypony here, then you had better come back! Because if you don’t then I’m coming to look for you, PERIOD!”
For a moment, Lex just stared at her, a look of surprise on his face, before he managed to find his voice. “…Alright.”
“I’m really not kidding!” said Sonata, her voice a growl. She was vaguely aware that several ponies had woken up and were looking at her, including Nosey, but she didn’t care, still glaring at Lex angrily. “If something happens to you…!”
“I said alright,” frowned Lex. He wasn’t sure what to do, since his reluctant agreement didn’t seem sufficient to quell her outburst, when he was suddenly shoved from behind. Stumbling forward, he inadvertently embraced Sonata, who wrapped a hoof around him immediately, burying her face in his neck. Glancing back, Lex saw that it was Nosey who had pushed him, a look of exasperation on her face. She mouthed something at him, and it took Lex several moments to understand what it was: “reassure her.”
For a moment he was confused. Reassurance didn’t seem like the proper action to take in the face of her sudden anger. But when he turned his attention back to his girlfriend, he realized that her breathing was shaky and her body was quivering lightly. A moment later she sniffled, and that was when Lex realized that she was crying softly.
Awkwardly, he ran a hoof through her mane, trying to parse the sudden mixture of confusion, guilt, and helplessness that he felt at having apparently caused her such distress. “It’s alright, Sonata,” he murmured softly, unsure of what else to say. “It’s alright.”
It took her a few minutes to calm down, finally letting him go. “You have to come back, okay?” she said shakily. Her earlier anger was completely gone now, leaving only worry on her face.
“I will,” answered Lex, knowing that no other response would be acceptable to her.
“You promise?”
He hesitated for just a moment, then nodded. “I promise. No matter what happens, I’ll definitely come back to you.”
The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time Lex began to explore Vanhoover.
It had taken just over two hours to finish making his preparations to set out, the vast majority of which had been spent utilizing Severance to replenish the spells he’d expended during the battle on the ship. It was fortunate, Lex knew, that he hadn’t needed to use much magic during that fight. While he could renew his primary spellcasting at will now that he possessed a major magical artifact, his full complement of spells typically took upwards of twelve hours to prepare, and Lex was impatient to begin reclaiming the city.
Resuming corporeal form – Lex had turned into shadow so that he could exit the warehouse without breaking the illusion hiding the doors, but knew that he couldn’t remain in that form without frightening off any surviving ponies – Lex glanced at the sky. It was late summer, which meant that he still had a few hours before night fell. Not enough time to do a thorough sweep of the area.
I’ll just have to continue exploring after dark, he decided. There was no reason why he needed to retreat after the sun went down, after all. He could enhance his senses to compensate for the loss of light, and if there were any more dangerous creatures residing in Vanhoover that felt emboldened by the night, then all the better to encounter such things now so that he could dispatch them before they wreaked any further mayhem.
The thought made Lex glance at the docks, eyeing the water suspiciously. There was no guarantee that those monsters that he’d slain had been the totality of their kind, but he had no way of investigating that further. Although he could move beneath the water without difficulty while in shadow-form, the bay alone was large enough to make any attempt to search it a severely daunting task. And if those things were lairing outside of the bay, in the ocean proper…then there’d be nothing he could do about it. Not unless he invented or obtained divinatory magic beyond what he currently possessed.
Putting the matter out of his thoughts for now, Lex turned away from the water, heading into the city. Despite everything that had occurred in the last twenty-four hours, his current goals hadn’t changed. Vanhoover’s surviving population needed to be rescued. Any impediments to that would just have to be dealt with as they happened.
Right now, it was time to begin rescuing his city.
The sun had set by the time Lex realized that he was going to need to change his approach.
Knowing that a methodical search of the entire city was beyond what one pony could readily accomplish, Lex had instead moved across it in a relatively straight line, trying to at least get a basic overview of the extent of the damage that the flooding had inflicted. What he’d discovered had not been encouraging.
Lex had initially hoped that the devastation had been contained to the areas closest to the waterfront, but had quickly found that not to be the case; signs of water damage could be seen everywhere. That made sense; as a seaside town, Vanhoover was barely above the water level. And since the city was just north of the bay, with the already-saturated marshlands to the south having no margin to absorb any further moisture, there was nowhere for the excess water to go but through the whole of the city.
But it wasn’t the extent of the damage that worried Lex the most; it was emptiness. Over the last few hours, he hadn’t come across a single other pony. It was as though the entire city had been depopulated, except that couldn’t be right, because he had seen lights shining from the city the previous night. They had been scattered, and far too few for his liking, but they had still been there. Which meant that there had to be some ponies still living in Vanhoover.
So where were they? And what had happened to everypony else?
Entering a large plaza, Lex looked around. It appeared the same as everywhere else that he’d seen so far, with garbage strewn around and stains on the walls of the buildings marking where the water had come through. Walking to the center, Lex stopped and slowly turned around, examining the area, looking for any evidence of recent habitation. But there was nothing, not even the slightest-
Lex’s head whipped around as he sensed motion out of his periphery. There had been something moving behind one of the windows in a nearby building. Between the fading light and the filth covering the window, it was impossible to say what, but he was sure that he’d seen something.
He stared at the window for a moment, but no further motion caught his eye. Whatever was there had either left, or was holding very still. Lex’s eyes flickered over the rest of the structure; it was an apartment building, several stories tall with no remarkable features. Could somepony still be living there?
Lex was about to call out and ask if anypony was there, but stopped. That would have sounded like he was uncertain, or even afraid; both were too reminiscent of weakness to be allowed. This was his city now, and he needed to act like it. “If anypony is in there, come out,” he yelled, making sure that there was steel in his voice. “I’m here on a rescue mission. I have a shelter set up nearby with food and medical supplies. Show yourself, and I will take you there immediately.”
Direct and to the point, it should have been enough, in his opinion, to bring out any ponies that heard him. But there was no response to his declaration, and within seconds silence had enveloped the plaza again. Frowning, Lex considered his next move for a moment, before striding towards the building. Standing around would earn him no answers; if whoever or whatever that was wouldn’t come out there, then he would go to it.
The entrance into the apartment building was slightly ajar. Lex started to push it open, and then immediately jerked backward as a carefully-balanced cinderblock fell where his head had been a fraction of a second before, hitting the ground in front of him with a heavy crash. For a moment, Lex just stared at it, feeling a shudder going down his spine. That had been no accident; somepony had deliberately rigged such a dangerous trap.
Narrowing his eyes at the implications, Lex abandoned any thoughts of this being a peaceful encounter, which meant that he didn’t need to be worried about first impressions. With a thought, his body dissolved into shadows, and he slid through the door and into the building. Whatever that trap’s architect had in store, it was unlikely that it accounted for incorporeal beings.
Entering the building’s lobby, Lex’s enhanced sight showed him that it was in little better condition than its exterior. Filth and debris were everywhere, but there was one feature that was particularly conspicuous: the staircase leading to the upper floors had been barricaded. Drifting closer to it, Lex could see that a couch, a cabinet, and several other pieces of furniture had been haphazardly stacked on top of each other almost to the ceiling.
For a moment, Lex considered heading through the makeshift barrier and going upstairs immediately, but instead decided to check the remainder of the ground floor, just to be safe. This had been where he’d seen the shape moving, after all. Gliding silently down the hallway, he looked over the doors before selecting the one that seemed to most closely match the location of the movement he’d seen earlier, and slid through the door.
He had been right to become immaterial, he realized immediately. Several feet inside the door, lying on the ground was a small board which had a series of spikes attached to it. Made from broken pipes and bent utensils, they were all pointing directly upward, as though waiting for someone to fall on them. Moving his gaze closer to the door, sure enough there was a thin tripwire just ahead of it. Anypony that entered recklessly would certainly fall and impale themselves.
It was a devious trap, but more disconcerting was that the spikes had dark grime encrusted on them, as though they’d been put to good use already.
Turning his attention to the rest of the small apartment, Lex quickly checked it over, but there was no sign of whatever he’d seen. Indeed, it looked like nopony had been there for some time; the various cupboards were all opened and their contents scattered about, as though the place had been ransacked. The refrigerator hung open, completely empty.
Each subsequent apartment was in a similar state, having been thoroughly tossed. Each was also trapped, ranging from rugs covering holes filled with broken glass to an elaborately-rigged makeshift crossbow designed to launch a paring knife at whoever opened the door. More grimly, more than half of the traps showed signs of having claimed previous victims, being coated with dried gore.
It was enough to make Lex wary, but not because of the evidence of violence that he’d found. Rather, it was because the sum total of what he’d seen painted an ominous picture. All of these traps were defensive in nature, meant to deal severe harm to intruders…which meant that whoever had rigged them had been afraid, apparently severely, for their personal safety. You didn’t set lethal traps unless you thought that your own life was at risk if something got past them, Lex knew.
Almost as bad was how each room had been so thoroughly rooted through. It hadn’t just been refrigerators and cupboards; every cabinet, bureau, and trunk had been opened and their contents haphazardly scattered about. To Lex, it reeked of desperation, as though the culprit had been searching for anything that could possibly be of use, regardless of what it was. By itself that wasn’t too surprising – given what the flood had likely done, it was downright expected – but combined with the traps scattered around, those echoes of desperation took on a much darker edge.
This is worse than a mere breakdown of social order, Lex realized. This is a siege. No matter how bad Vanhoover’s situation had gotten, Lex couldn’t imagine that its citizens would turn on each other to such an extent that defenses like this became necessary. Maybe the ponies of Everglow – who lived in a world where violence was often a common fact of life – could be capable of such savagery, but among Equestrian ponies? No. Even after two months of living in a disaster zone, this kind of violence wouldn’t be in their nature.
The more plausible explanation was that the ponies that had done this were scared of something else…something much worse. But what? Those fish-monsters he’d killed last night were the obvious answer, but Lex had walked away from the waterfront for over three hours, and somehow he couldn’t see those creatures venturing that far inland so blithely. Of course, that was just a guess, but if he was right, then Vanhoover’s problems were even worse than he knew.
Then I’ll just have to ask somepony that does, Lex decided, heading back to the apartment’s lobby. For a moment he debated simply floating directly upward through the ceiling, emerging directly onto the second floor. But he reluctantly decided against it. He still hadn’t found whatever it was that he’d seen, and although it seemed likely that it was a pony resident, that was just a guess. Better to enter the second floor in a way that let him see what was ahead of him, rather than going in completely blind. Anything that was limited to constructing such low-grade traps was unlikely to have any defenses that could seriously threaten him in this form, but there was no reason to take unnecessary chances.
Floating forward, Lex slowly passed through the barricade and went up to the second floor.
Drifting past the barricade, Lex paused at the landing between floors, glancing up the stairwell. It was as dark and empty as the rest of the building, and he slowly ventured up onto the second floor, emerging in the middle of a hallway nearly identical to the one below it. Glances in each direction showed rows of doors that were likewise no different from what was downstairs.
Lex paused, wondering if he should announce himself again, but discarded the idea. He had already given whoever or whatever was lurking here the chance to come out peacefully. Without knowing the nature and numbers of this building’s inhabitants, prudence remained the wiser option in light of the death-traps that littered the downstairs.
Drifting through the nearest door, Lex continued his explorations. At first glance, the rooms on this floor seemed no different from those downstairs, having been torn apart. But there was one crucial difference: each room was missing the deadly traps that had characterized their first-floor counterparts.
It was in the fourth room that he was searching that Lex stopped, hearing a soft sound. Voices. Listening intently, he realized that they were coming from the next room over. Cautiously, Lex moved closer to the wall separating the two rooms, trying to make out the words that were being spoken.
“…telling you, we should try talking to him! He said he has food and medicine!” The voice was male, speaking in low and furtive tones. “These oats aren’t going to last much longer, and I’m really getting worried about Drafty! This might be our chance!”
“I think so too,” said a female voice, similarly hushed. “If we can get her to a doctor now, she might be okay. And maybe…maybe he’s seen Pillow! Maybe he’ll tell us that he’s at the shelter right now!”
“I can’t believe you two!” hissed a third voice, also female. “How can you not see that he’s lying?! One pony showing up completely alone, all by himself out of nowhere, and just announces that he’s here to fix all of our problems? He might as well have written ‘it’s a trap’ on a sign and waved it around!”
“But-” the softer female voice tried to speak again, only to be cut off before it could.
“I’m telling you, he’s bad news! I got a clear look at him downstairs, and he doesn’t look right! His shadow’s all messed up, and his horn doesn’t match his coat.”
“You think he’s one of those things?” asked the male voice.
“With our luck, he’s something even worse,” replied the harsher female voice. “I just hope that one of the traps on the first floor got him, or at least convinced him to pull whatever he’s trying to pull somewhere else.”
“On the contrary,” replied Lex as he slid through the wall and into the room. “My announcement was entirely sincere.”
Three heads whipped around to face him, all of them ponies. The stallion was an earth pony, his coat a light grass-green, with a mane and tail of darker brown, and a cutie mark of a scale weighing what looked like cabbage. One of the mares was a pegasus, having a white coat and a pink mane and tail, her cutie mark showing a house made out of clouds. And the other mare…
An earth pony, her coat was a soft turquoise, with a mane and tail of darker blue. Her cutie mark depicted a heart-shaped bed. But her most notable feature was how her entire body was translucent, sparkling softly even in the dim light.
Lex recognized immediately that she was a crystal pony, and before he had any further time to act, her eyes widened and she began screaming at the top of her lungs.
Her companions, who had begun to draw back in alarm at the sight of the formless black mass with glowing green-and-purple eyes that had emerged from the wall, were visibly shocked by her reaction, jerking back from her reflexively. Even Lex was momentarily taken aback at her unexpected display of fear. As he watched, she threw herself away from him, still wailing in terror, until she had her back pressed up against the wall, her hooves sliding across the floor in a futile attempt to continue distancing herself from him.
Lex’s moment of surprise was enough to let the other two regroup, and the stallion dived for a makeshift spear, constructed from a piece of piping with a kitchen knife tied to the end. Snatching it up, he immediately hurled it at Lex, the missile sailing through his incorporeal form uselessly before hitting the wall behind him and falling to the floor with a clatter. Seeing how useless his attack had been, the stallion turned pale. “We gotta go!” he yelled, trying to make himself heard over the screams of the crystal mare. “Right now!”
The pegasus mare was already moving. Charging across the room, she flung aside a blanket that Lex hadn’t noticed, revealing a fourth pony underneath. Another pegasus mare, this one was brown, with a black mane and tail, her cutie mark showing a group of whorls that looked vaguely, to Lex’s eyes, like the wind. “Drafty, get up!” yelled the white pegasus to her friend, and it was inconceivable to Lex that the crystal pony’s screams hadn’t woken her already. “Please, get up!”
Receiving no response from her friend, the white pegasus bodily threw the comatose mare over her shoulders, glancing back at the stallion. “I’ll get Drafty out of here! You get Cozy and meet us at the rendezvous point!” She didn’t wait for an answer before running towards the door at full speed, intent on escape.
But Lex had recovered by then. “No one leaves,” he hissed softly, and it took only a thought to cause black crystals to grow in front of the door. He didn’t raise them very high, wanting to conserve power, but the visible hinges made it clear that the door opened inward, so even a few inches of black crystals jutting up from the floor was enough to prevent it from being opened. The white pegasus mare demonstrated that a moment later, as she grabbed the doorknob in her mouth and yanked on it, to no effect.
With that settled, Lex turned his attention back to the crystal pony. Her screaming was beginning to grate on his nerves, and he drifted closer to her. “Be silent!” he snapped. If there were dangerous creatures out there, her cries were likely to bring them running. The room’s windows were both boarded up, but Lex had little hope that that would adequately muffle the noise she was making.
Unfortunately, his warning had no effect on her. If anything, his approach seemed to drive her deeper into hysteria, and her wailing reached an even higher pitch as a result. “Get away from her!” yelled the stallion, placing himself between Lex and the crystal mare. He’d grabbed a broom, of all things, in his mouth and started swinging it through Lex’s umbral body, accomplishing absolutely nothing. Despite this, he seemed undaunted, falling back only a step as he glanced over his shoulder at his wailing companion. “Cozy! Snap out of it! You have to get out of here!”
“It’s sealed the door! We’re trapped!” yelled the white pegasus from the other side of the room, panic clearly audible in her voice.
Lex was getting irritated, mostly because he wasn’t sure what to do to take control of the situation. Should he turn back to normal and try and talk them down? Or would a show of power do a better job of making them stand down? He didn’t know; this was the sort of area where he had never been able to adequately judge what sort of action was called for.
Deciding to try and split the difference, Lex remained in his umbral form, speaking to them again. “Listen to me. I know that my appearance is unsettling to you, but I’m here to h-”
“Don’t listen to him!” yelled the stallion, slashing at him with the broom again. “Cloudbank, kick out the windows and go that way!”
“But what about you?!” yelled the white pegasus.
“I’ll figure it out! Just go!”
That was it. Lex felt what was left of his patience come to an end. As the white pegasus started to run towards the boarded windows with her unconscious friend, Lex chanted a spell. Instantly, a small tornado, no bigger than a pony, came into existence. With a thought, Lex moved it around to intercept the white pegasus, who didn’t have a chance to do more than blanch before it collided with her. Instantly, she and her friend went flying back, hitting the floor hard and rolling for several feet before coming to a stop.
“No!” yelled the stallion, before turning his attention back to Lex. Fear and desperation were clouding his features, and Lex could see him trying to think of a way to turn the situation around. But all he did was keep swinging his broom, tears of frustration pooling in the corners of his eyes as he realized that there was nothing he could do. With a snort, Lex redirected the miniature tornado to strike the stallion, and a moment later he went flying, hitting a wall hard before falling to the floor with a groan.
The sight of her friends being so easily dispatched seemed to snap the crystal mare out of her panic. Her screaming cut off abruptly as she raised a hoof to her neck, fumbling with a necklace that Lex hadn’t noticed that she was wearing. Hanging from the front of it was an image of two small hearts next to each other, bound by silver wire.
“L-Lashtada!” she sobbed, her voice sounding like she was barely in control of herself. “Lashtada, please! Help us!” Lex had just enough time to be surprised at her saying that name when a visible wave of light radiated out from her in all directions. It filled the small room, impossible to avoid, and Lex gasped in pain as it washed over him. It didn’t hurt very badly at all – it was little more than a sharp stinging – but after her screaming fit this was the second time in as many minutes that she’d given him an unpleasant surprise. There would not be a third.
Returning to corporeal form, Lex yanked at her necklace as hard as he could with his telekinesis, pulling it off of her neck and flinging it across the room. The crystal mare shook like a leaf, a despairing expression crossing her features, and for a moment it looked like she was going to start screaming again. But Lex was faster.
“You will be silent!” he snarled, a deep purple aura surrounding his horn as he pointed it at her. The crystal mare worked her jaw, but no sound came out, and a hoof went to her throat in panic. Lex let out a breath; he hadn’t been sure that would work. While becoming a shadow and crystallizing darkness were the primary powers that he’d gained from claiming King Sombra’s horn as his own, they weren’t the only ones. Laying curses was another, and though Lex had nowhere near King Sombra’s proficiency with maledictions – being able to place an entire city into stasis for a millennium was far, far beyond anything he could currently do – he could still bestow curses of moderate power. Luckily that included sealing somepony’s voice.
On the opposite sides of the room, the earth pony stallion and the white pegasus mare were groaning and starting to get to their hooves…though, Lex noticed, the other pegasus mare still hadn’t moved, despite having been thrown around quite a bit. If not for the fact that she was breathing, he’d have suspected that she wasn’t alive at all. And the crystal mare was still cowering, looking like she was ready to burst into tears at any moment.
“Now,” said Lex cordially, “let’s try this once again. My name is Lex Legis, and I am here to rescue you.”
Lex glanced around the room as the ponies he’d subdued began to stir. To his right, the earth pony stallion was standing up, giving him a look of controlled fear as he did. In front of him, the crystal mare still looked like she was on the verge of breaking down again, her back still firmly against the wall and one hoof to her throat. Finally, to his left, the white pegasus mare was checking on her apparently-comatose friend.
It was the stallion that broke the silence. “What do you mean ‘rescue us’?”
Lex resisted the urge to sigh in irritation. He knew that this group was acutely hypersensitive to potential threats due to whatever they’d gone through up until now, but there was only so much terror-induced foolishness that he could forgive, and they were rapidly pushing that limit. “Exactly what I said before,” he replied evenly. “I’ve set up a temporary shelter near here, with food and medicine as well as defenses. You’ll be safe there.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll forgive us if we have a hard time believing some shadowy thing that slips in through the walls, beats us up, and then says that it wants to help us,” snapped the pegasus mare from across the room. She had gathered the unconscious pegasus up again, and was eyeing Lex warily.
Frowning at the thinly-veiled accusation, Lex turned his attention to her. “None of which would have been necessary if you had simply answered my initial announcement. Since you remained skulking in here, I had little alternative but to come in and retrieve you.”
“Retrieve us?!” squawked the pegasus mare in outrage. “I don’t know who you think you are, but we’re not going anywh-”
“Yes we are,” interjected the stallion, a resigned look crossing his face.
“Aisle!” hissed the mare, directing a fierce look at the stallion, but his only response was to shake his head, which seemed to infuriate her. “We can’t trust him!”
“We don’t have a choice,” said the stallion. “We’re almost out of food, you’re risking your life every time you go to the river to get water, and Drafty’s getting worse.” He pointed to the unconscious pegasus on her back as he spoke. “If we stay here we’re just going to be prolonging the inevitable…probably not for very long, either.”
The pegasus looked like she wanted to argue, but settled for making a face like she’d bitten into something rotten. Without another word, she started to put her unconscious companion back into the makeshift bed she’d retrieved her from. Meanwhile, the stallion moved to where the crystal mare was still standing in obvious fright. “Cozy? Hey, Cozy? Hey, look at me.”
It took several more attempts at coaxing her before she finally tore her wide eyes away from Lex and looked at the stallion, still very clearly afraid. “It’s going to be okay,” said the stallion in low, soothing tones. “Whatever’s wrong, I promise we’ll get through it together, alright?” He smiled at her, trying to calm her down. It seemed to be working, as her rapid breathing started to slow and her trembling began to taper off. She worked her jaw for a moment, but nothing came out.
The stallion glanced at Lex. “Can you undo that silence spell, please?”
Momentarily wondering if he should correct him about it being a curse rather than a spell, Lex decided not to bother. “It should wear off very soon,” he said. “I set it to have a short duration, but if she begins screaming again, then I-”
“Sombra!” she suddenly spoke, her voice having returned.
“Huh?” replied the stallion and the other mare in unison, turning their attention to her.
“He’s King Sombra!” The crystal mare pointed a shaking hoof at Lex. “He’ll throw us in chains and do horrible things to us! Worse than horrible! He’s probably behind everything that’s happened here! We can’t go anywhere with him!”
Lex rolled his eyes at the accusations. This again. “Listen to me. I am not King Sombra.” He spoke in slow tones, as though talking to a particularly stupid foal. “The reason I can use his magic is because I have his horn.” Lex reached a hoof up to indicate it as he spoke. “Whatever depredations you suffered at his hooves are over. I’m not going to hurt you. Now, we need to get you to safety.”
But she shook her head immediately, moving to the side to try and put more distance between herself and him. “N-no!” Her eyes darted to the necklace that Lex had flung across the room, and she suddenly dived for it, scooping it up. As she did, she started to gesture and chant, casting a spell.
“Cozy! What are you doing?!” yelled the stallion. Across the room, the pegasus mare also let out a cry of alarm at her friend’s actions.
“I won’t let him get us!” yelled the crystal mare, her voice again slipping into panic. Rushing over to a corner of the room, she scooped up a hooffull of debris, picking up a small pebble that had somehow gotten mixed in with the dirt. With a quick motion, she flung it at Lex.
The small stone flew faster than it had any right to, crossing the short distance between Lex and herself so quickly that it was barely visible. Having no chance to move, the magically-enhanced rock hit him dead-center…and bounced off with no effect. Seeing the horrified look on the crystal mare’s face, Lex was unable to keep a superior smirk off of his face. She had no idea that he was layered in protective magic, which had only been augmented by the Night Mare’s gifts.
The memory of what the goddess had done for him reminded him that he owed her converts, and that was enough to decide his next course of action. Ignoring the other two ponies as they ran at their crystal companion and practically tackled her to the ground before she could attack him again, Lex turned his attention to the comatose mare in the corner of the room. He had been intending to help her anyway, but there was no reason not to make good on his promises to the Night Mare at the same time.
Dismissing the small tornado that he’d conjured before, Lex went over to the other pegasus, noting how she was flushed and sweating even though she was lightly shivering. Even without putting a hoof to her forehead to take her temperature, it was obvious that she was extremely sick. Pausing for a moment to consider her condition, Lex glanced back at the other three appraisingly, watching as they wrestled; none of them seemed in the least bit ill. “What happened to her?” asked Lex, pointing at the unconscious mare.
The trio glanced up from where they were fighting, and the white pegasus immediately yelped, leaping to her hooves. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?!” She started towards Lex, clearly angry that he was so close to her friend.
“STOP IT!” yelled the stallion, causing everyone to halt and look at him. “Both of you, just stop it already!” He stood up from where he’d been trying to hold the crystal mare down, and looked between her and the other mare, frustration evident on his face. “This is the first pony that we’ve seen in days, a pony that’s saying he can help us just when we need it the most, and the first thing you two do is go on the attack?!” He grit his teeth as he looked between the two mares, glaring at them. “I don’t care that he has weird magic! I don’t care if he’s King Sombra or not! We need help! Do you not get that?! I swear that the next one of you that attacks him without being attacked first is going to get walloped!”
An uncomfortable silence ensued, and no one spoke for a moment. Letting out a slow breath, the stallion looked back at Lex. “Let’s start over. My name is Produce Aisle. This is Cloudbank, and Comfy Cozy,” he waved a hoof towards the white pegasus and then the crystal mare as he introduced them. He moved next to Lex to look at the unconscious mare before speaking again, his voice softening with worry. “And this is Thermal Draft, but she likes to be called Drafty. She was helping me look for food a few days ago when we were attacked. We just barely managed to get away, but she was bitten in the process. Cozy healed our wounds, but the next day Drafty started saying she didn’t feel well.”
“We thought she was just stressed out at first,” added Cloudbank, joining them. “I mean, that seemed normal enough, after everything that’s happened. But then she started getting feverish.” She put a hoof on Drafty’s head, rubbing her softly. “We realized she was sick, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. We kept hoping she would get better on her own, but every day she got worse…and then, yesterday morning, she wouldn’t wake up at all.”
Lex glanced back at Cozy, the only one who hadn’t joined them, and she tensed at the sight of his eyes on her. “You’re an acolyte of Lashtada. Why didn’t you use magic to cure her illness?” He already knew the answer, of course, but he wanted confirmation.
“I…I can’t.” She looked down, clearly ashamed. “I tried. I prayed so hard for magic that would let me save Drafty, but I wasn’t strong enough, or maybe faithful enough, to receive any.”
“Nopony blames you,” said Aisle softly, giving her a sympathetic look.
“Maybe you should,” said Cozy. “First Pillow, now Drafty…” she trailed off, seeming to remember something before biting her lip. She glanced at Lex for a long moment before blurting out. “Have you seen another crystal pony here? His name is Pillowcase, and he’s emerald green, with his mane and tail being a little darker. His cutie mark is two heart-shaped pillows. Is he…is he maybe at the shelter you mentioned?” She took a single step forward as she spoke, desperate hope showing on her face.
But Lex was already shaking his head. “You’re the first ponies I’ve seen since I came here.” Her face crumpled at the news, ears folding down in sorrow. Lex continued regardless. “As for not being able to cure your friend, you shouldn’t blame yourself. Lashtada is a weak goddess.”
Cloudbank and Produce Aisle both raised their brows at that, but Cozy looked as though she’d been slapped. “Wh-what?!”
Lex nodded. “Her philosophy revolves around love, if I recall correctly. I won’t say that’s not important, but a situation such as this shows the flaw in putting such a thing in a position of primacy. It’s little wonder that her followers on Everglow were wiped out, and now she’s leading you towards exactly the same conclusion.”
“That’s not true!” said Cozy angrily. “Love is the most powerful force there is! It’s the very apex of friendship! Of harmony!”
“That’s right,” interjected Cloudbank. “Cozy’s magic has helped us a lot over the last few days. She’s healed our wounds more than a few times, and those rocks that she enchanted usually knock a hole in whatever she throws them at.”
“And yet right now it’s unable to save your friend, or the rest of you,” retorted Lex calmly. “That’s the inherent limitation of that method of engaging with the world. It fails when you meet a hostile force that cannot be dissuaded. When that happens, you need to be strong enough to defend yourself and those you care about, and Lashtada will never help you find that strength. But there’s another goddess that will.”
Lex didn’t continue, but instead began to cast a spell. Unlike when he’d created the tiny tornado before, the words were notably different this time, being a liturgical recitation. Making the necessary gestures, Lex touched a hoof to Drafty’s forehead, then waited. A moment later she grunted, shifting slightly, and then began to breathe easier, tension visibly leaving her body.
Her eyes wide, Cloudbank reached down to feel Drafty’s forehead. “Her fever’s broken,” she said a moment later, her voice soft with amazement. She turned to look at Lex, and her voice was filled with disbelief. “You cured her.”
“I did,” acknowledged Lex with a nod. “And now I’m going to remove some of the strain that the disease put on her body.”
Chanting again, he brushed a hoof against Drafty a second time, and as he did so she stirred. A moment later her eyes opened, and she looked around blearily. “You guys?” she croaked hoarsely. That alone was enough to make Cloudbank cry out in relief, kneeling down and throwing her hooves around Drafty’s neck in a tight hug.
Lex turned to the other two ponies in the room, seeing that Produce Aisle was watching with unabashed relief, whereas Cozy looked disturbed. “You see?” he said simply.
“You’re saying that your goddess gave you that magic?”
“Aisle!” hissed Cozy.
“I’m just asking!” he shot back.
“Yes,” answered Lex. “She gave me the power to do that, not because I wanted to be strong, but because I already was, and so earned her favor. That is the difference between Lashtada…and the Night Mare.”
Exiting the building, Lex slowly looked in every direction, noting the stillness.
He’d enhanced his vision with his horn’s dark magic, allowing him to see through the pitch blackness with perfect clarity, but that alone didn’t give him the same level of vision he’d have had during the day. For one thing, this form of vision didn’t make out color, reducing the world to black and white. Worse, however, was that it only worked out to about sixty feet. Beyond that, nothing was visible, as though everything farther away was enveloped in a thick, dark fog.
“There’s nothing here,” he called back, looking over his shoulder as he did. With his vision augmented, he could easily see into the building’s lobby, where the four ponies were huddled nervously. Cloudbank was carrying a single sack of oats on her back, representing the last of their food. Produce Aisle was carrying a lantern in his teeth, which had a layer of cloth wrapped around the glass to dampen the amount of light it put out. Cozy held a small kitchen knife in her mouth, nervously rubbing the necklace that was Lashtada’s holy symbol. Thermal Draft was carrying a length of pipe, but it was questionable as to whether it was meant to be a weapon or a cane, since she was leaning heavily on it.
Still, for all their fear, the group seemed resolute. Not one of them was refusing to leave or saying that this was a bad idea. It was a welcome change from how they’d acted initially. Hopefully they’d come around with regards to the Night Mare as well.
Mentioning the name of his divine patron hadn’t prompted awe the way that Lex had thought it would. Instead, the immediate result had been confusion, of all things. The group had initially thought that he’d meant Nightmare Moon, a name that Lex was only passingly familiar with. It had taken several minutes to resolve the misunderstanding, mostly because Lex had started to tell them about his goddess’s attributes, which were apparently similar to those of Nightmare Moon. It had been profoundly irritating.
It was only after that nonsense had been addressed that he’d been able to get back on track, and tell them about his goddess. Cozy had been openly hostile – whether because she still thought he was King Sombra, or because she was still upset that he’d pointed out how weak her own goddess was, or both – but the others had been surprisingly receptive. While they hadn’t wholeheartedly embraced the idea of worshipping the Night Mare, her credo of exalting and abetting those who were strong, and who used that strength to fight or even take control of the creatures and situations that frightened them, had seemed to strike a chord with them.
Or at least, Lex hoped that it had. For all he knew, they were humoring him because they were worried about insulting their would-be savior. Still, he knew that he’d done all he could; if they wanted to take up the Night Mare’s faith, it was up to them now.
After that, it had been time to leave. Although it was still several hours to midnight, let alone dawn, Lex didn’t want to take a chance, knowing that Sonata had been serious about going to search for him if he hadn’t returned by sunup.
“You’re sure you don’t see anything?” asked Cloudbank nervously, her quick glance at Drafty betraying the cause of her worry.
“Yes,” answered Lex curtly. “Now, whatever you do, stay close to me. Until we reach our destination I’ll protect you, but that will be almost impossible to do if we become separated.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and none of those things will show up,” grinned Drafty hopefully, glancing around. None of her friends met her gaze, showing how likely they thought that was, and her grin faltered.
Still, her statement prompted Lex to address the group again. “I know I asked this before, but I want to do so again. If you can tell me anything about these monsters, no matter how inconsequential, it will help me if we do encounter more of them.”
The four of them glanced at each other, but one by one shrugged or shook their heads. Cozy was the last one to do so, turning to Lex with a frown. “Like we said before, we haven’t gotten much of a good look at them. They don’t come out during the daytime. They’re pony-sized and they’re vicious. They can talk, but…”
A collective shudder ran through the group at that. “But?” prompted Lex. They had refused to answer when he’d asked them before, but maybe they would now.
For a moment it didn’t seem like they would, but then Produce Aisle gulped nervously and spoke up. “They…they said what they were going to do. To us.”
Produce Aisle lowered his eyes, apparently unwilling to go any further. Lex grit his teeth, and he considered pressing them for more information – knowing what these unidentified things had said might be a valuable clue – but he decided to let it go. He was about to turn away when he heard a different voice. “They said…”
Turning back, he saw that Cloudbank had taken a step forward, and was quite clearly forcing herself to volunteer more information. “They said…they said that they were going to eat us.”
“Eat you?” Lex’s brow furrowed.
Cloudbank nodded, trembling slightly. “I mean, they were…specific about it. About h-how…about what it would be like for us.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself. “They sounded so…it was like they knew it from experience, you know? Like they’d done it before.”
Drafty moved up next to Cloudbank and leaned against her, spreading a wing over her as she did. Cloudbank pressed against her in return, letting out a breath that was almost a sob. Off to the side, Produce Aisle was shaking so badly that his lantern wobbled, and Cozy was softly reciting a prayer under her breath.
“When was this?” asked Lex.
“A little while back,” answered Drafty, still comforting Cloudbank. “I’m not sure how long, but it was after the floodwaters had receded. We were asleep, but woke up because we could hear what sounded like a bunch of ponies going around the rooms on the first floor.”
Produce Aisle glanced around the lobby, as though expecting those monsters to still be lurking there. “We knew better than to go out. By that point it had already become every pony for themselves,” he said, still trembling. Despite that, it seemed easier for him – for all of them – to talk now, as though they’d only needed some prompting to begin recounting the horrors they’d experienced. It was enough to make Lex tilt his head slightly in consideration; he’d previously theorized that sharing personal histories played a role in social bonding. Was this related to that?
Not knowing what Lex was thinking, Produce Aisle continued. “We heard them come up to the second floor, and when they realized that the door to one of the rooms, ours, was locked, they started trying to break it down. We scrambled to reinforce it, and that’s when they realized that we were there.”
“It got worse after that.” Now it was Cozy’s turn to continue the story. “They pretended to be a rescue squad for a minute, telling us that they were here to take us to safety.” She paused to give Lex a sharp look, making it clear why they had initially been so reluctant to believe his offers of assistance. “But when we didn’t buy it, that’s when they started saying those awful things…”
“They gave up and left after a while.” Now it was Cloudbank’s turn again. “After that, we barricaded the stairway and started trapping the rooms in the first floor. When they came back the next night, we heard them screaming and howling, like they were enraged that we were defending ourselves. When we checked the traps the next morning, there was blood on some of them, but no bodies. After that, we’d hear them sometimes, but they seemed to have lost interest.”
Lex waited a moment for them to continue, but when nopony spoke up, he realized that there was nothing else forthcoming, and that realization made him frown. Other than the fact that their tale made it seem less likely that the monsters that had accosted them were those fish-creatures he’d fought – he somehow couldn’t see those things as having the presence or articulation necessary to perpetrate a deception by pretending to be rescuers – there had been very little useful information in what they’d relayed to him. Whatever those things were, they were in his city; he’d need to face them at some point, and he wanted more information when he did.
“What about your injury?” he asked, looking at Drafty.
“My…? Oh.” Her ears lowered, and she looked away, suddenly uncomfortable.
“Leave her alone,” snapped Cloudbank, before turning to Drafty with a softer look. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay,” replied Drafty, forcing herself to smile at the other mare for a moment before turning back to Lex. “I didn’t see what bit me. Aisle and I were looking for food to scavenge, and I was looking in a basement when something leapt out at me. I screamed and tried to run, but not before it sank its teeth into my leg.”
“I still can’t believe you went down there alone,” muttered Cloudbank, but there was no real heat in her voice.
Nevertheless, Drafty winced slightly. “It was still daytime! We’d never heard those things when the sun was out, so I thought…I don’t know, I thought they were hibernating somewhere or something, and couldn’t come out until it was dark.”
“It was dark in that basement too, since it didn’t have any windows,” interjected Produce Aisle. “As it was, we were lucky to get away. I rushed down there and managed to stab it with a piece of broken pipe, and we ran away as soon as it let Drafty go.”
“And you never saw what it was?” pressed Lex.
But both of them shook their heads. “It was really dark down there, and it happened fast,” explained Aisle. “All I know was that it was pony-sized, and I think it was some sort of equinoid. That means that-”
“I know what ‘equinoid’ means,” interrupted Lex curtly. “A head, a torso, four legs, and a tail.”
“R-right. Sorry,” replied Aisle. “Anyway, that’s as much as we know about them.”
“And what about your group’s missing member?” asked Lex, looking at Cozy. “You said his name was Pillowcase. What happened to him?”
An uncomfortable silence fell, with the other three ponies wincing at his tactlessness. Cozy pressed a hoof to her necklace for a long moment, eyes closed. Lex was about to repeat his question when she answered. “Pillow went out yesterday, around noon, to try and find medicine for Drafty. We haven’t seen him since.” Her voice was flat and emotionless.
“Cozy…” Drafty’s voice was soft and apologetic, but was cut off as Cozy held up a hoof.
“You don’t have to say anything. I know I’ll see him again.” She brought the holy symbol on her necklace to her lips and kissed it gently. “We’re connected by a power that’s stronger than any danger.” Finally opening her eyes, she managed a wan smile. “Besides, I left him a note in our room, telling him that there’s a shelter at the docks, and that if he heads west for three hours at a walking pace, he’ll find it. That’s where it is, right?” She looked at Lex, who nodded in reply before turning back to the doorway.
He had more questions he wanted to ask, but they weren’t related to the immediate circumstances. Finding out more about what happened in Vanhoover during and after the flooding was likely to be a longer conversation than they had time for right now. Once they were back at the shelter, then he’d be able to properly ask them what else they knew.
Facing the darkness, Lex strode forward. “Let’s go.”
The group walked through the dark streets of Vanhoover in silence, eyes focused on what little could be seen through the oppressive gloom.
Lex led the way, with the other four following so closely behind him that they could have reached a hoof out and touched him. Normally their proximity would have made him uncomfortable; now, while still unpleasant, he accepted it as a sound tactical move. He had to be in front of them so as to lead them back to the shelter, which meant that they needed to stay as close to him as possible so as to minimize the risk of being accosted while he wasn’t looking.
The other four were clearly aware of that, and their heads kept twisting and turning, ears perked and alert, trying to perceive their surroundings as best they could. It was a futile effort, Lex knew. Produce Aisle’s lantern had been wrapped with cloth so as to dampen the amount of light it put out, a compromise between their needing to see and not wanting to draw attention to themselves. Now, however, it seemed to do little more than make feeble light that spread heavy shadows all around them, as though the darkness had drawn back with only the greatest reluctance and was eagerly waiting to reclaim them.
They were trying to be quiet as well, but there was little that could be done in that regard. Although they had refrained from speaking, Lex could clearly hear their breathing, and the sound of their hooves – as well as his own – striking the cobblestones seemed unnaturally loud. Although he had magic that could have disguised their presence, it was either of a notably short duration or was immobile in nature, neither of which were helpful now. As it stood, Lex felt that there was little chance of them avoiding anything inclined to hunt at night.
But maybe good fortune was with him, for once. By his reckoning, they had been walking for almost an hour, and nothing had-
Three blocks in front of them, a light flickered on inside a building.
Lex halted immediately, only to almost be bowled over as the ponies behind him failed to stop in time. “What are you idiots doing?” he whispered as he recovered his balance, giving them a harsh look.
“What are we doing?” answered Cloudbank in an angry whisper. “You’re the one who suddenly-, wait, is that a light?”
“It just came on,” murmured Lex in reply, eyeing the building suspiciously. It was further away than he could see with his darkvision, but the faint light was – in conjunction with the glow from the crescent moon and the stars – just barely enough to let him make out what looked like a storefront of some sort. But why would somepony turn a light on in the first place? If there were dangerous monsters around, that was effectively announcing your presence to them.
As though hearing Lex’s thoughts, Produce Aisle whispered nervously. “It’s probably a dummy light.”
“A what?” asked Lex, glancing at the other stallion.
“You know, something to draw attention to a particular place so that another place is left alone.”
Lex’s brow furrowed at that, remembering the lights he’d seen yesterday when their boat had arrived at Vanhoover. If those were meant to act as decoys to draw monsters to them while ponies cowered elsewhere, then maybe the city wasn’t as desolate as it seemed. But that was small comfort, since it also meant that whatever was plaguing it was city-wide. Or worse…
That thought was enough to make Lex frown. None of this made sense; if the city was this bad off, it should have been more than enough to bring the princesses running. Celestia and Luna were fools who had no idea what real leadership entailed, but they weren’t heartless. Far from it; Lex was positive that if they knew that something was preying on the ponies of Vanhoover, they would have immediately taken action. But from what he’d been told when they’d ceded this city to his authority, they had no idea that things had reached this point.
But how could that be? Even if Vanhoover’s maritime activity hadn’t resumed, the city was also a major railway destination, and the trains ran on a much more regular schedule than nautical activity did. Somepony should have seen how bad off this city was – or worse, whatever was plaguing it should have tried to spread beyond the city limits – and spread the word. A crisis of this magnitude should have been virtually impossible to keep hidden…and yet it had been.
“We should just go around it,” whispered Drafty, drawing Lex out of his reverie.
“No,” he replied softly. “Even if it is a ‘dummy light,’ somepony had to have lit it. Whoever it is needs to know that help has arrived.”
“That’s a bad idea!” interjected Cloudbank, her whispering filled with anxiety. “Those things are probably headed this way right now! And whoever lit that probably left as soon as they did!”
“Then we should make haste,” said Lex, and began walking towards the building.
“You can’t be seriou-”
“No, he’s right,” interrupted Cozy. “If somepony’s still in there, they might know something about Pillow.” She turned to regard the others. “And even if they don’t, we should let them know that there’s a shelter with food and medicine.” She didn’t wait for any replies, trotting forward to catch up to Lex.
“When did she become that guy’s biggest fan?” grumbled Cloudbank sourly.
“Nevermind that, let’s go before we’re left out here by ourselves!” hissed Aisle, drawing a nod from Drafty. The three quickly moved forward to join Lex and Cozy as they approached the store.
Lex glanced behind him as he approached the shop, stopping once he was a few feet from the entrance to allow them to catch up to him. It only took them a few seconds to do so, but that was all the time he needed to formulate a plan of action. “You four remain here. I’m going to slip inside-”
“You can’t be serious!” whispered Aisle in protest, his eyes widening with incredulity. “You’re going to leave us out here alone?!”
Lex glared at him, making the other stallion flinch. “If you had let me finish, I was going to say that I’m going to slip inside the door to make sure that it’s not trapped, and then open it for you. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds.”
“Oh. Sorry,” muttered Aisle, ears lowering in embarrassment. Lex resisted the urge to roll his eyes, instead turning his attention back to the shop. It took only a moment to turn into shadow and flow through the front door, stopping as soon as he was inside the building.
Scanning the interior revealed numerous shelves, most of which were still standing, though their wares had been scattered about. A quick glance showed a variety of things, ranging from clay pots to book bags to shampoo bottles. Probably some sort of general store, Lex decided, directing his attention to the door he’d just passed through. He looked at it closely, but there were no traps or rigged mechanisms that he could see. Telekinetically turning the lock, he pushed it open. “Inside, all of you.”
The other four were quick to obey, rushing in. Cloudbank was the last one, and she quickly turned to push the door shut, clicking the lock into place before letting out a breath. “That had to have been the longest six seconds of my life,” she muttered in relief.
Drafty and Aisle were looking around, but Cozy looked at Lex’s insubstantial form and grimaced. “Could you please turn back to normal?” she asked, tension audible in her voice. “You look even more like King S-Sombra when you’re like that than you do normally.”
Lex paused for a moment, considering, and then returned to his material body. “Satisfied?” he sneered, before walking past her without waiting for an answer. He would have preferred to stay in his shadow-form, since it was far less vulnerable than his physical self and therefore the smarter choice for engaging with any sort of dangerous situation. But given how stressful their current situation was, pushing Cozy wasn’t a wise decision; although he doubted that she’d snap and start screaming again, he wasn’t willing to take that chance. Besides, he hadn’t expended very much of his horn’s dark magic so far that day, meaning that it wouldn’t be a problem to change back if necessary. Instead, he looked toward the back of the shop, where the light was coming from. “Follow me,” he ordered them as he started towards it.
They moved slowly, Lex glancing between the rows of shelves as he passed them, checking for any sign of movement, of traps, of anything at all. But there was nothing, and the group finally reached the back of the shop, passing the last of the shelves to find the source of the light.
Perched on a countertop was a fancy-looking candelabra, with a candle burning brightly on its central stand and on each of its four arms. Behind it, the back door of the shop hung open.
“They’re already gone,” cursed Lex softly, gritting his teeth. He’d waited too long, dallying with assuaging the fears of the rest of the group, and now whoever had been here had left without being informed that help had arrived.
“Then we should leave too,” insisted Aisle. “It won’t be long before those monsters see the lights, and we don’t want to be here when they arrive!”
“No kidding!” nodded Cloudbank, giving the open door a worried look. “Let’s get out of here while we still-”
“Five little ponies, looking for the light,” came a sing-song voice. “Didn’t realize bad things lurked in the night.” The words, sung like a foal’s rhyme, came from somewhere outside, floating in through the open door, causing the entire group to stiffen in alarm.
“Five little ponies, lost their way,” sang a different voice. “Maybe they’d like to come out and play?”
Lex didn’t wait for any further rhymes, his horn glowing as he slammed the backdoor shut. Turning, he focused on one of the nearby shelves and, grunting and straining, dragged it in front of the door, blockading it. “Get the front door!” he snapped. Cozy and Aisle nodded, their faces pale as they immediately ran to go push a shelf in front of the other entrance.
“Five little ponies, locked inside,” came a third voice, giggling with undisguised glee, apparently undisturbed by the entrances being sealed. “Poor little things really think they can hide.”
Lex looked around as the voices continued to sing, trying to place their locations, but the voices were coming from different areas outside, the walls serving to make it impossible to get anything more than a general sense of which direction they were coming from. Worse, he realized, was that several of the store windows were broken, and the others didn’t have any shutters or other barriers. Whatever those things were, they weren’t going to have a hard time breaking in.
Signalling to Cloudbank and Drafty to assist him, Lex started to push the remaining shelves over the windows. They wouldn’t hold for very long, but they were better than nothing. He briefly considered conjuring black crystals to cover the windows, but knew that would only buy them a little time. Such materials never lasted more than an hour, and there were enough windows there that trying to cover them all again and again would leave him depleted of dark magic long before the sun rose.
The singing continued. “Their blood quickly pumping, their hearts really beating. Their bodies gonna be so good for eating.”
“Their brains like candies, their eyes like jellies. Taste so yummy when they’re in our bellies.”
“Their muscles so tender, their skin so sweet. Just can’t wait ‘til we get to MAKE YOU SCREAM AND SCREAM AND SCREAM AS WE RIP THE MEAT FROM YOUR BONES AND DEVOUR YOU ALIVE!”
The last line, shifting from an eerie rhyme to a deranged shriek with no warning, was punctuated by the back door suddenly giving a heavy thump, as though something had just crashed into it. Drafty screamed at the sound, and Cloudbank hugged her, despite looking terrified herself. Aisle and Cozy scrambled back, both pale and shaking.
Another thump came, this one from one of the shelves that was covering a window. A third sounded from the front entrance. Then another of the shelves in front of a window. And another. And another. There were more than three of those things out there.
As he looked around, trying to figure out what to do next, Lex realized that Aisle had been right. What they’d seen had been dummy lights. And they were the dummies.
Nosey looked over her cards one more time, before tossing them to the ground. “I fold,” she announced with a sigh.
“And then there were two,” grinned C. Shells, looking over at Sonata. “What about you, filly? Gonna slink away like your little girlfriend, or mare up and move into the deep end of the pool with the grownups?” Her provocative comments caused the ponies around them, a combination of watchers and eliminated players, to over-dramatically gasp and ooh, as though scandalized.
It was enough to make Sonata frown, and she glared at the other mare for a moment before turning her eyes back to her own cards. They were only playing for candies – apparently the crew made sure to stock up on them for exactly this purpose – but Sonata was getting tired of losing. She had to win at least one game!
But unlike the last several rounds, it looked like luck was with her this time, and she smirked as she pushed the last of her candies forward. “Hah! You’re gonna be real salty when I take all of your sweets!” The comment earned several chuckles from around her, and Sonata beamed at the attention. She knew that had to be a good line! After all, she had spent the last ten minutes thinking it up!
“Hmm, I wonder about that,” answered C. Shells with a relaxed smile, before pushing her own, much larger, pile of candy forward. “Well then, I call.”
Sonata was the very picture of confidence as she laid her cards down. “Well, except for this three of…whatever this is…”
“Spades,” supplied Nosey helpfully.
“Spades, right. Except for that, I’ve got four in a row,” grinned Sonata as she laid her cards down. “Six, seven, eight, and nine. All red cards.” She crossed her forelegs with a flourish, noting how everyone was staring at her with shocked expressions. “How do you like me now?” she drawled, barely able to contain her satisfaction.
The line was enough to jolt C. Shells out of her stupefaction, and she gave Sonata a slightly-incredulous look. “I like you just fine, girl. You can play cards with me and my crew any day.” Tossing down her full house, she gathered the last of the candies into her pile, chuckling at her would-be opponent’s confused expression. The crowd was likewise shaking their heads in amusement, already starting to break up.
“Huh? But I thought that was a winning hoof!” Sonata looked around in confusion, not sure what had happened.
Nosey put a sympathetic foreleg around her friend. “Give it up, Sonata. Let’s go do something else.”
Pouting, Sonata glanced at where Severance was floating near the door, wishing for the umpteenth time that she’d gone with Lex. She knew it was silly to be so worried about him – he’d had no trouble dispatching those fish-thingies – but she was still somewhat nervous. His talk about what to do if he didn’t come back had thrown her right back to when he’d almost died after fighting the dragon. If something like that happened again when there was no one around to save him…
Sighing, Sonata tried to push those thoughts away. Knowing Lex, he’d probably zeroed in on some survivors and was giving them all a boring lecture or something like that. He was definitely fine.
“They’re breaking in!” screamed Cozy. The shelves that had been piled against the doors and windows rattled again as whatever was outside continued to batter them, trying to get inside.
“Do something!” yelled Cloudbank, looking at Lex. “You’re supposed to be here to rescue us, right?! Well this would be a good time to start!”
He didn’t have a chance to respond before Aisle ran forward, pressing his hooves against one of the shelves covering a window, trying to brace it. “We have to reinforce these somehow!”
“That won’t work!” snapped Lex. “There’s too many of them and not enough of us!” There were six windows lining the sides of the store, and the front and back doors each had a window on either side of them. That was a dozen points of entry altogether, and the majority of them had the shelves covering them quivering under repeated blows.
Whatever those things were, if they kept this up they’d be inside the building in less than sixty seconds.
Lex hurriedly ran through his options again, but no good solution presented itself. Their current position left them too exposed; if those things came in from every direction at once, protecting everypony would be difficult. A quick glance around confirmed that the shop had no second floor, nor was there any sort of basement that Lex could see. It was just an open space all around. That meant that he’d need to create any cover that he wanted.
He could cast a spell to place them all under a force field, like when those fish-monsters had attacked Sonata on the ship. But that spell would only last for a little over ten minutes; if these things were planning any sort of sustained attack, then it wouldn’t be sufficient to keep everypony safe. Worse, he had only prepared that spell once, and retaining it via substituting energy through his body would be extremely damaging.
He could have created another extradimensional hideaway, the way that he had when he and Sonata were journeying to Tall Tale. But he hadn’t bothered to prepare that spell before he’d set out. He regretted that deeply now, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
He could have cast his short-range teleport spell, since it allowed him to bring passengers along. Its range was extremely limited, but it still would have gotten them outside of the building and at least a block away without leaving whatever was out there any wiser for it. But the maximum number of passengers that he could take along was only three, and since he’d prepared that spell only once – and it was also too difficult to maintain for multiple castings – that would mean that somepony would need to be left behind, and that was unacceptable. Even if he tried to enhance the teleportation spell by drawing in extra energy, that would only increase the distance, rather than letting him bring along additional passengers.
And of course, raising enough black crystals to cover the doors and windows would deplete his horn’s dark magic for only an hour’s reprieve. No matter how he looked at it, Lex knew that there was no way that he could keep these things out, nor get everypony out of harm’s way long enough to wait for sunrise, since these monsters supposedly hated daylight.
“So what’s the plan?!” Drafty’s voice was tight, clearly trying to suppress her terror and only barely succeeding.
“There’s no way to stop them from getting in,” replied Lex grimly. “So the only thing to do is to go on the attack when they do.”
“‘Go on the attack’?! That’s your plan?!” shrieked Cloudbank.
“There’s no defensible position here, and no way to bypass them and escape, so yes!” Lex yelled back. He wasn’t fighting down terror the way that the rest of them quite obviously were, but he could still feel his anxiety rising. The sheer tension of the situation was impossible to ignore, particularly since he was working from such a disadvantageous position.
The one thing he had going for him was that, although he had no idea what he was up against, neither did these things. He intended to leverage that to its fullest.
A splintering sound came from the shelf that Aisle was trying to reinforce, and the stallion fell back with a yelp of fright. Rushing back to the others, he huddled close to them, face pale. Lex narrowed his eyes and pointed a hoof at the shelf, prepared to begin casting as soon as whatever it was came through the window.
Moments later, the shelf was struck again, and collapsed into two pieces, falling to the ground. Instantly, a shape hurtled through the window, landing barely a dozen feet from the group. Turning, the thing snarled at them, giving the ponies their first clear look at what they were facing.
No! It can’t be…!
In that moment, Lex suddenly faltered, feeling his blood run cold.
Lirtkra growled as Monitor leapt down from the ship. It had only been several minutes since it had gone aboard to check for any poh-nees, but that had been enough to tax Lirtkra’s patience.
“Well?” he snapped, uncrossing his lower arms. Unconsciously, he passed his shield to his lower right arm, freeing his upper left so it could join his upper right in grabbing his trident, moving it into a ready position. His lower left arm simply flexed, displaying his eagerness to commit violence.
But the preparation was wasted as Monitor shook its head silently.
Cursing, Lirtkra looked overhead, to where the Cripple was hovering in the air as though it were still underwater. “They’re not here!” he yelled. His voice was accusatory, but that had nothing to do with the lack of prey. Rather, it was because the inferior creature was openly displaying its maa-jik in being able to fly, and the sight enraged Lirtkra. That power belonged solely to the sahuagin holy ones! For such a freakish being to have it was nothing less than an insult to their entire culture!
“And what do you want me to do about it?” rasped the Cripple.
“Find them! Right now!” roared Lirtkra, slamming the butt of his trident on the ground to emphasize his words.
“How exactly do you expect me to do that?” came the hissing answer from the creature, making Lirtkra gnash his teeth at its insolence.
“You’re still alive because the Great Lord of the Deep decided that you were useful. So make yourself useful!” He looked back over at Monitor. “Both of you!” He paused for a moment, thinking of something that they could do, before an idea came to him. “Sink their craft!”
Monitor’s sole response was to blink its bulbous eyes, remaining otherwise impassive. Although he had never heard Monitor utter a sound before, and knew that it could shift from passivity to action instantaneously, the creature’s lack of immediate obedience was enough to make Lirtkra bristle. Maybe he should simply give up on the primary goal of this mission and move on to the secondary instructions that Sitkra had given him…
“That’s a bad idea,” breathed the Cripple, flying slightly lower, though still well out of reach of Lirtkra’s trident.
“Why?” he growled, shifting his grip on his weapon slightly. That monstrosity might be too far away to stab, but it was well within his throwing range, and since he’d tied a rope around the end of his trident, he had little doubt that he could hit it and reel it in whenever he wanted.
“Because then we’d lose the element of surprise,” it countered. “And I’d need to expend magic to damage their boat that much, magic that I’d much rather save for when we find these spellcasting ponies.”
Lirtkra paused for a moment, considering that. He’d been given clear instructions that these two were not to come back alive, but also to kill the maa-jik poh-nees first and foremost. He knew that the best way to accomplish both goals was to have the Cripple and Monitor participate in the battle, and then kill them after it was over and they were weakened. If they lost their fighting edge before then, that would diminish their usefulness when the maa-jik poh-nees were found.
“Fine,” he growled. “Then we’ll go looking for them. They have to be around here somewhere.” He didn’t wait for a reply, turning and walking towards the poh-nee settlement. Maybe taking a more active role in the hunt would earn the Shark God’s favor, and he’d bring their prey within sight.
One way or the other, though, Lirtkra fully intended to taste the flesh of his enemies – be they poh-nee or his so-called companions – before he returned to the water.
Lex couldn’t keep the horror off his face as he looked at the creature barely a dozen feet in front of him.
It was a pony…or at least it used to be. Now its coat was tattered, revealing grey flesh that was itself sloughing off in large patches, showing shriveled muscles underneath. That same musculature was unnaturally thin and stretched tight over its frame, giving it an emaciated look. Most of its mane and tail were gone, though a few wispy patches still clung to its skull.
But as warped as its body was, its face was far worse. Its eyes were yellowed and bloodshot, sunken within their sockets. Its lips had pulled back, revealing a mess of sharpened fangs, and a swollen tongue flicked over them in a display of hunger.
The thing, the pony in front of him was quite clearly dead…and yet it was still standing, still moving in complete defiance of that fact. There was, Lex knew, a word for such a creature. As he stared at it in mute shock, that term floated to the front of his mind.
Undead.
“Five little ponies, lookin’ so sweet” sang the creature, the corners of its necrotic lips turning upwards in a smile that was horrible to see. “No more games, it’s time to eat!” With that, it darted forward, its grin exchanged for a snarl as it rushed at him, jaws opened wide.
Screams came from behind him, but Lex didn’t hear them. Nor did he hear the sounds of splintering as more of their makeshift barricades failed, admitting more of the undead monstrosities. All of a sudden he was back on Everglow, frightened and weak and struggling to understand what was happening as the bodies of what had once been good and decent ponies were corrupted and violated into hideous, unnatural things…
It was all your fault. And now it’s going to happen again.
The voiceless, spiteful words slid through his consciousness, instantly snapping Lex out of his flashback to find that the monster was right in front of him. He reared back, but it was too late as the thing tried to sink its fangs into his face. It was only because of his ever-present protection spells that its jaws didn’t find purchase, raking harmlessly just under his eye.
Lex rattled off a spell instinctively, sharply chanting the words and making the necessary gestures without even thinking about it. “GET AWAY FROM ME!” he screamed as the spell completed, jabbing a hoof against the thing. It wasn’t a sharp blow, and by itself would barely have been a tap. But as he made contact with the thing his spell discharged, releasing a massive amount of kinetic energy into the creature. It was instantly lifted off its hooves, its body bowing from the incredible force as it was launched into the air. The blow sent it crashing into the far wall of the store with a loud crunch, before it fell to the ground, unmoving.
The other creatures seemed not to care, continuing their advance as they entered the store. The sole exception was one of the things whose entry point put it right next to its downed comrade. Instantly, it turned towards it, and for a moment Lex thought that it was going to try and administer some sort of aid. But instead, the thing sank its teeth into its defeated companion, tearing free a chunk of cadaverous flesh with a loud moan of “Delicious!” The sight was enough to make his gorge rise, but a wail of pain from behind him made Lex spin about.
His moment of panic had left the others vulnerable.
Cloudbank had one of the creatures sinking its teeth into her wing, desperately trying to hold it back from Drafty, who was trying to hold off another one with her makeshift cane and failing miserably. A hoof that was more bone than anything else lashed out at her, catching her in the side and almost knocking her over. Cozy was momentarily free of attackers, being covered by everypony else, and was gripping her holy symbol and uttering a prayer to Lashtada, asking her to grant them courage, but if there was any effect Lex couldn’t detect it.
Aisle was the worst off, however. Two of the monsters had ganged up on him and had knocked him to the ground. Even as Lex realized whom he needed to help first, he saw one of the undead ponies strike the other stallion across the muzzle. Aisle reeled under the blow, but only for a moment. An instant later, his entire body locked up rigidly, limbs halting their flailing in mid-motion even as his mouth hung open in a silenced scream. Only his eyes could still move, looking between the monsters in absolute terror of what was about to happen as one of them lowered their fangs to his throat.
Just as it began to bite down, Lex finished his next spell. Instantly, three red beams of light shot out, one striking each of the monsters attacking Aisle, causing them to howl as they sizzled and fell to the ground, the stench of charred meat wafting up from their motionless bodies. A third lanced at the monster assaulting Cloudbank, but their struggling caused it to miss, striking the rear wall of the store and scorching it.
Lex immediately darted towards Aisle, standing over him protectively as he readied his next spell. Looking over at the mares showed that they were holding their own, albeit barely. As he watched, Drafty ducked under the swipe of a rotted hoof before bashing the undead pony across the face with her pipe, staggering it. Cloudbank had managed to free her wing, and had traded places with Cozy, who clumsily swiped at the thing with her knife, missing but buying herself some breathing room. Had they been alone, their situation would have been dire, but Lex could feel his alarm ebbing. So far each of his spells had been enough to defeat these things in one shot. He felt sure that he could put an end to this before they-
It was at that moment that three more of the monsters plunged into the room, replenishing the ones he’d just finished. Worse, the one that had been devouring its companion seemed to have finished its meal, licking its lips as it stood up and turned its attention back to them. Two of the new additions glanced at the charred remains of their fellows, and then lunged…but not towards the ponies.
Instead, one of the remaining creatures knocked over the candelabra, snuffing out the candlelight even as the other smashed the lantern that Aisle had put down when he’d tried to reinforce the shelves. Immediately, the room was plunged into darkness, and Lex heard the three mares cry out as they lost sight of their opponents. With his own darkvision still active, Lex could see that the creatures didn’t seem to have any such problems, and the last two of them immediately charged towards him, thinking they were about to get an easy meal.
Lex knew he only had enough time to cast one spell, and that if he didn’t use it to help Cozy, Drafty, and Cloudbank they would probably die horribly in the next few seconds. But if he didn’t use it to cover himself and Aisle, then the paralyzed stallion would almost certainly be targeted by one of the charging creatures, based on how eagerly they’d devoured one of their own. It was an impossible choice, and he had less than three seconds to decide what to do.
But that was all the time Lex needed.
When he’d set out to explore Vanhoover, Lex had made sure that his astral pony spell was one that he’d prepared, just in case he found himself in dire straits again. It wasn’t just one of his strongest spells, but also one of the most mutable, allowing for the specific parameters of the constructs it created to be varied with each casting. One of those parameters was whether or not to focus the gathered astral matter into a single powerful construct or multiple weaker ones. As the last syllable left his lips, the last gesture completed, Lex made use of the latter option…and instantly five astral ponies sprang into existence, startling the undead ponies as they suddenly found themselves outnumbered.
“Destroy those monsters!” yelled Lex, ignoring the burning pain in his chest; that spell was still stronger than he could cast normally, requiring that his body make up the excess amount. Heedless of their creator’s pain, the astral ponies – having appeared alongside the monsters that were currently besieging them – instantly obeyed. Needing no eyes to see, their hooves lashed out, bowling the undead ponies over and advancing on them mercilessly.
“What’s happening?!” screamed Cloudbank, hearing the sudden escalation of violence but unable to see what was causing it. “Drafty?! Where are you?!”
“I’m okay!” yelled the other pegasus. “I’m right here!” She tentatively reached out and managed to make contact with Cloudbank, who jumped and almost pulled away before she realized who was touching her. Meanwhile, Cozy did the sensible thing and gripped her holy symbol, chanting a short prayer that made it begin to glow. In a moment, it shed radiance as bright as Aisle’s lantern had, and the ponies looked around, gaping at what they saw.
The constructs were making short work of the undead ponies. Although their weakened nature meant that they were taking several blows from the hooves and teeth of the monsters, the constructs didn’t care, mechanically lashing out with their own hooves. As the ponies watched, one of the monsters had its skull crushed by a powerful buck from one of the astral constructs. Another took a blow to the chest, a wet snapping sound accompanying its ribs caving in.
“Fall back!” hissed one of the creatures, immediately turning and running for a broken window, diving through and disappearing into the night. The others made to follow their retreating comrade, and the astral ponies pursued them, intent on following their orders to the letter. In only a few seconds, Lex and the others were alone inside the store, the sudden silence eerie for how quickly it enveloped them.
“Wh…what just happened?” croaked Drafty, looking at Lex for answers.
He didn’t have a chance to answer before Cozy rushed to Aisle’s side. “Aisle! Oh no!” She immediately moved to confirm his condition, before letting out a sigh of relief. “He’s alive! Thank Lashtada!”
“Lashtada had nothing to do with it,” snarled Lex, more sharply than he meant to. Turning back to Drafty he addressed her earlier question. “I summoned reinforcements. But they won’t last for very long. We need to leave before those things mount another assault.” He turned his eyes back to Cozy. “Fix him,” he ordered curtly.
The last time he’d talked to her about her magic, it had been to call attention to her powerlessness. This time he was being sincere, but Cozy’s reaction was the same. Wincing, she couldn’t meet his gaze. “I can’t. I don’t have much magic left, and none of it can cure paralysis.”
“You do it,” said Cloudbank, looking at Lex. Her voice was tense and angry, as though daring him not to. “You said you were going to protect us, so you fix him. That’s the least you can do after you caused this.”
“Cloudy, stop it!” Drafty shot Lex a worried look, as though afraid of his reaction to the other pegasus’s words. “He just saved our lives!”
“From a trap that he led us into!” shot back Cloudbank. “You were the one who said that we should go around it, remember?! But no, Mr. Big Shot here couldn’t stand the thought of not having somepony else to show off to, and look at what almost happened!” She turned back to Lex, her features tightening into a look of controlled anger. “If Aisle doesn’t recover-”
As though he’d heard her say his name, Aisle suddenly groaned. Gasps of relief came from the other three as he started to move, and even Lex couldn’t help but let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Cozy helped the other stallion to his hooves, despite his shaky protests. “I’m okay, really. Whatever that…thing did to me, I can feel it wearing off.”
“Good, because we’re leaving,” announced Lex flatly. He could already hear Cloudbank starting to say something, but he cut her off, looking at Cozy. “How long will that light you conjured last?”
“Not long. About ten minutes.”
“That’s not long enough,” frowned Lex.
Cozy seemed to take that as a personal affront, and looked at Lex defiantly. “It might not be very long, but I can keep casting it over and over! If we hadn’t been worried about staying quiet up until now, I’d have been doing that since we left!”
“Fine, then there’s no reason to delay.” With that, Lex turned away from them and stalked towards the door. He could hear the others whispering behind him, probably Drafty and Cloudbank again, but he didn’t care. Let them say whatever they wanted about him, it didn’t matter. He refused to let it matter. Their petty indictments and accusations meant nothing to him. Less than nothing. He had been right to check this place, and wouldn’t be swayed by their pettiness or small-mindedness.
Continuing to silently reassure himself, Lex led the others back out into the darkness of Vanhoover.
Cloudbank was silently seething as she moved through the streets of Vanhoover at a trot, staying close to the others.
Nopony was talking, but this time it had nothing to do with stealth. Any hope of remaining unnoticed before they reached their destination was gone, thanks to that self-righteous jerk who’d led them into that trap. Now it was just a question of whether or not those monsters would mount another attack before they reached safety.
But at the moment, Cloudbank wasn’t worried about that. Instead, she could feel herself getting angrier and angrier at the pony who was leading them. She wasn’t sure how long they’d been moving, but Cozy had renewed her ten-minute light spell more than once, and during that time he hadn’t said two words to them, and it was beginning to seriously tick her off. No apology for having almost gotten them killed, no asking if they were alright, no nothing! Not to mention how he’d acted during the fight itself; for all his big talk about protecting them, they’d all – save Cozy – gotten hurt during the fight, whereas he was perfectly fine. And that last spell he’d used, the one to summon reinforcements; why hadn’t he done that first instead of last?!
The more she thought about it, the more upset she got. She could see Drafty shooting her worried looks, either out of concern for her or out of worry that she’d upset their wannabe-protector, but she couldn’t bring herself to calm down. Instead, she opened her mouth, unable to remain silent anymore, only for Aisle to start speaking a moment before she could.
“So…what were those things?” he asked, glancing around as though afraid that talking about them would bring them running.
“They were undead,” answered Lex curtly, not bothering to look at him as he spoke.
“They looked like ponies,” added Drafty. She glanced at Cloudbank again as she spoke, apparently relieved that she’d been preempted.
“They were. They’re not anymore.” Lex’s countenance was even more grim than usual as he spoke. “They were ponies when they were alive, but now their corpses have been animated and turned into monsters.”
Cozy spoke up next. “How? I mean, what did that to them?” The words “could that happen to us?” hung in the air, unspoken but clearly understood by all of them.
Lex was silent for a moment before answering. “…I don’t know.”
“Of course not,” muttered Cloudbank, rolling her eyes. Drafty shot her a look that was both warning and pleading at the same time, making her snort in dissatisfaction.
“But we can talk to them, right?” asked Aisle, and his voice was entirely pleading. “We can make them remember that they used to be ponies? That they used to value friendship and…and harmony? In fact…hang on,” he paused as something occurred to him, and then moved in front of Lex, giving him a hopeful look. “Can you change them back to normal?”
Lex gave the other stallion a withering look, as though he felt disgusted that he’d even asked such a stupid question. “There’s no way to reason with those things,” he said, voice dripping with loathing, though whether it was for Aisle or those monsters was unclear. “Whatever it is that transforms somepony into an undead thing warps their mind in the process. They can’t be reasoned with, let alone trusted, and trying will only get you killed. And as far as changing them back goes, that’s not a practical consideration.”
“What does that mean?” snapped Cloudbank, giving him a hard look. Did he actually just suggest that it wasn’t worthwhile to try and save ponies who’d suffered such a horrible fate?! “I thought your whole thing was to try and rescue everypony, so why isn’t it ‘practical’ to try and save them?!”
Her barb apparently got under Lex’s skin, because he came to an immediate halt, causing the rest of the group to stumble to a stop as well. Turning back, he marched up to her until he was right in her face, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he hissed. “Being undead means that they’re already dead! Changing them back to normal doesn’t just mean snuffing out their animating force, it also means bringing them back to life!”
“Which is impossible,” murmured Drafty dejectedly.
“No, it’s not,” spoke up Cozy, causing all eyes to turn towards her.
The unexpected revelation was enough to momentarily make Cloudbank forget her anger. “Wait, so you’re saying…Cozy, can you bring dead ponies back?!”
“Huh? No!” Looking surprised at the question, Cozy shook her head. “I couldn’t even heal Drafty’s sickness, remember? No, what I meant is that Princess Cadance told us that it was possible when she introduced Lashtada to the Crystal Empire. She told us that if we had enough love for Lashtada in our hearts that we could overcome anything, even death.”
“Maybe she was just being poetic?” offered Drafty.
“No.” Lex shook his head. “Sacerdotal thaumaturgy is capable of resurrection.”
“Sacer-what now?” frowned Cloudbank.
She grit her teeth as he heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes, obviously trying to tell her how stupid he thought she was that she needed to ask. “Sacerdotal thaumaturgy is what you’d call ‘divine magic,’” he explained. “It’s spells that you receive from a deity, typically in exchange for faithful worship.”
“Well, you were going on about Nightmare M-, er, the Night Mare, right?” added Drafty. “And you were saying how powerful she was. Doesn’t that mean that you have resurrection magic?”
Lex frowned. “The Night Mare recognizes my strength, and has given me numerous powers accordingly, but that isn’t one of them. Yet.” He added that last part almost as an afterthought. Cloudbank was about to speak up again, when Lex continued. “But even if I did, my understanding is that such magic has severe limitations. I couldn’t just cast one spell and change every undead pony in Vanhoover back to how they were.”
“I bet Princess Twilight and her friends could,” said Cloudbank challengingly. “They restored everypony’s magic after Tirek stole it, so I'm sure they could do this too.” She took a step closer to Lex, and the two of them were practically nose-to-nose as a result. “Maybe instead of running around and trying to do everything by yourself, you should call in the ponies who actually have a track record of saving all of Equestria!”
“Cloudy! Stop it!” yelled Drafty.
But Cloudbank wasn’t listening. Instead, she smirked as she saw the outrage blossom on Lex’s face. Serves you right, she thought spitefully.
“Do you know why Princess Twilight or any of the other alicorns aren’t here?” he growled. “Because their irresponsible, hooves-off style of governance is what allowed things to get this bad in the first place! If they had been actively engaged with helping Vanhoover recover from what happened then the situation never would have degenerated to this level! Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s here actually trying to do something about it!” He roared the last several words at her, his patience having reached the breaking point.
It wasn’t just stress that made him lose his temper, however. Cloudbank’s needling had not only reminded him of his earlier ruminations about how the princesses would never have let Vanhoover get this bad if they’d known about it, but also made him question if he could handle a crisis of this magnitude. If Vanhoover had only needed someone to coordinate a large-scale recovery effort, that was one thing. But the current situation was far worse than mere devastation, as there were multiple groups of monsters attacking what remained of the native population.
And it was becoming increasingly clear that he wasn’t going to be able to handle that on his own.
No matter that he had slaughtered his way through those fish-monsters when they had attacked his ship. No matter that he had destroyed or driven off those undead ponies that had attacked the survivors in his care. Without having more information as to their numbers, their lairs, and their capabilities, he was stuck in a defensive position, reacting to threats rather than proactively eliminating them. And for all the magic he’d invented or acquired, he had only limited methods of gaining that information. All of which led to one conclusion: that he needed help.
But as loath as he was to admit such a thing, even to himself, the subsequent conclusion was a far more untenable one: that the ponies whose help he needed were the princesses. Only they had sufficient magic to simultaneously defend themselves and everypony else while also dealing with the monsters that were overrunning the city. There simply wasn’t anypony else available who had enough magic to make a significant difference.
It wouldn’t have been difficult to arrange, Lex knew. He had a scrying spell that would let him remotely view somepony, and while its efficacy had some variations depending on how well he knew the subject, a single previous face-to-face meeting was more than enough to, in all likelihood, establish a connection. Once he’d done that, it wouldn’t have been impossible to open a line of communication through it, and let them know what was going on. At that point, they would certainly descend on Vanhoover in force.
Of course, such a course of action would be a humiliation of irreducible proportions. If he had to ask for help from the very princesses whom he’d criticized for their ineffectiveness in the past, it would not only make him look like a fool, but it would also seriously undercut the legitimacy of his desire to rule. But at the same time, he knew that not doing so would mean not giving potential survivors the best possible chance of rescue purely to protect his pride, and his code of conduct made it clear that such a thing was completely unacceptable.
There has to be a third option, thought Lex as he continued to glare at Cloudbank, who silently returned his hard stare. If neither choice is acceptable, then reject the underlying premise and come up with a new solution. It was a motto that he’d developed in his youth, and it had always filled him with certitude. But now…now it smacked of desperation.
“Listen,” interjected Aisle nervously. “As, um, interesting as it is watching you guys try to figure out who to blame, maybe we could do this back at the shelter? Because I really don’t think that this is a good place to stop and debate the issue.” Cozy and Drafty nodded silently, the latter giving Cloudbank a disappointed look.
She seemed to notice. “Fine,” she muttered, backing off with a bitter look on her face, eyes locked on the ground. Lex, for his part, simply snorted and turned around to lead the way back to the shelter. They were close now, he could tell.
He had until they made it there to figure out what he was going to do.
Lirtkra looked up as the Cripple flew closer to him, wiping the filth from his last kill off of his trident. Normally he’d have licked the gore off, but this was from one of the walking dead, and so was itkul – too filthy to consume. “What?” he sneered.
“I saw something,” rasped the disgusting creature hoarsely. “A light, moving through the streets nearby.”
Lirtkra didn’t know what a “street” was, but the meaning was clear: their prey was nearby. “It’s about time!” he snapped, but couldn’t keep a leer off his face. The air-breathing spell that Sitkra had placed on him had plenty of time left, he was sure, and he was eager to sink his teeth into warm, bloody meat. "Take us there now!”
The Cripple glared at him, obviously upset by his tone, but moved to obey. It paused long enough to cast another spell, causing Lirtkra to clench his teeth. A moment later its form blurred, becoming smudged and indistinct as it led the way, and the sahuagin warrior snorted in amusement at the cowardly defensive measure. At least its hideousness was less obvious that way. Glancing behind him, Lirtkra saw that Monitor was following them dutifully, skating on the natural oils it secreted.
The hunt was almost over, and very soon the slaughter would begin.
Cozy had just renewed her light spell again when the warehouse came into view.
Lex breathed a sigh of relief at the sight, trying to keep the others from hearing it. Although it meant that he was going to need to make a difficult choice about whether to ask for the princesses' help or not, at least he’d be able to get these four someplace safe. That, and he’d be back by Sonata again.
Just the thought made him feel better. Although they’d only been separated for a few hours, the time apart had been far more stressful than he’d anticipated, and the thought of seeing her again…of touching her, of hearing her beautiful voice…was enough to ease the tension in his chest.
I should talk to her, before I make a decision, he thought to himself. He still remembered how she’d persuaded him, back on Everglow, to change his mind about conquering Equestria by force…to negotiate for a limited rule, rather than putting his life at risk by attempting to overthrow the princesses. The idea had made him bristle at the time, but she’d eventually convinced him to warm to it. Maybe she’d be able to do the same now.
Picking up his pace, Lex nodded his head towards the warehouse. “That’s it,” he announced to the others.
“What, that old warehouse?” asked Cozy, and Lex could hear the surprise in her voice.
“That’s the shelter?” Cloudbank echoed, unable to keep the disbelief off of her face. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but she’d been expecting more than this!
“The shelter is inside the warehouse,” replied Lex. Normally he’d have snapped at them for their implied criticism, but the prospect of seeing his beloved again was enough to make him overlook it. “There’s an interior room where the ponies that I brought with me are gathered. You’ll be safe there.”
“I don’t see a door,” offered Aisle. They were still a few blocks away, but the brightness of Cozy’s light, along with the soft glow of the moon and stars were just barely enough to illuminate their surroundings. “Should we circle around?”
Lex shook his head. “The door is straight ahead. The entrances are concealed as part of the warding I cast to defend against intruders.”
“You can do that t- whoa!” yelled Drafty, almost skidding to a stop.
The others halted as they looked back her. She was gawking at the sky, causing the rest of them to direct their gazes where she was looking, only to turn them back to her when they didn’t see anything there. “Drafty?” asked Cloudbank, brow furrowing in confusion.
“I saw something!” hissed Drafty, pointing upward. “It flew in front of the moon!”
“Maybe it was another pegasus?” ventured Cozy. “Another survivor like us?”
“Another survivor would have joined us,” frowned Lex. “Or at least-”
“Maybe we should stop standing around wondering what it was and get inside the freaking shelter!” interrupted Aisle, his voice a controlled scream. Looking around as though everypony else had lost their minds, he spoke again. “Like, right now!” Nopony contradicted him, and the five of them broke back into a run towards the warehouse.
They were within a block of it when everything descended into chaos.
To his left, Lex saw something out of the edge of his periphery. It was a small light, shedding a soft orange glow as it streaked…right towards them! Instantly recognizing what was about to happen, Lex didn’t have any time to think. He simply acted. A liturgy to the Night Mare flew from his lips even as he lunged, pressing a hoof against each of the ponies around him. With that done, he had just enough time to lay a hoof against himself when the pea-sized bead of light reached them, exploding into flames as it did.
The others screamed, as much from shock as from fear as fire washed over them…and had no effect. For a moment a curtain of flames filled their vision, and a rush of warm air ran along their bodies, and then it was gone, as though it had been an illusion.
Cloudbank stumbled to a stop, her jaw working soundlessly for a moment as she struggled to process what had just happened. “Wh-what just…?!”
Aisle wasn’t much better off. “That…we were…” He looked behind him, wondering if maybe it really had been an illusion. But looking down showed a massive scorch mark on the ground, and around them there were still glowing embers. The fire had been real. So why hadn’t they been hurt?
“Don’t stop!” roared Lex, causing the four of them to look at him. “We’re under attack! Don’t stop moving!” He immediately started to move towards the warehouse, looking behind him as he did so. To his relief, that seemed to galvanize the others, and they began to follow him, their faces blanching in fear as they processed what he'd said.
When he was within twenty feet of the warehouse, Lex reached out with his telekinesis, a roiling purple aura surrounding his horn as he did so. A moment later, a section of the warehouse wall was surrounded in a matching aura, and the sliding door seamlessly opened, revealing an entrance where there hadn’t been one before. “Inside, now!” he hissed, standing to one side as the other four moved through the doorway.
The others were less than ten feet away now, but even as he waited for them to cross the threshold Lex was already processing what had happened. That fireball spell was Everglow magic; it was one of the more popular attack spells there. That he’d been able to save them from it had been nothing short of miraculous. Although he had a spell to protect against damaging energy – he’d used it on himself before he’d fought the dragon, having set it to fire then as well, albeit mistakenly – it could only ward a single individual.
The Night Mare, however, had given him a variant of the spell that could protect multiple people at once. Even then, he’d only had enough divine magic left to cast that because he’d used the energy in his circlet when he’d used the disease-removing spell on Drafty, thinking that he’d use it to conjure more food later. If not for that…Lex’s eyes drifted to the smoldering cobblestones, knowing what would have happened otherwise.
Moments later the other ponies passed into the warehouse. First Drafty crossed the threshold, followed by Cloudbank. Then Aisle ran in, his face twisted in fear. Finally Cozy ran inside, and Lex moved to follow them. Once they were in there, they’d have a modicum of cover, and he could lead them to the interior room before mounting a counterattack on whatever had cast that spell…
But even as Lex turned and started towards the door, he saw something – this time from his right – come racing around the corner at the end of the block. As he turned to look at it, he thought that it was another of those fish creatures that he’d fought on the ship. But an instant later he realized that was wrong. Those creatures had been a dark green in color, with bodies that were muscled, claws at the end of their finned limbs, and thick tails.
This creature lacked those features. Its pale, scaly body was rounded, giving it a pudgy appearance. Heightening that impression was how thin and willowy its four limbs were, and had no claws at the ends of them. Its head was oddest of all, being entirely fishlike in its appearance, complete with perfectly round, bulging eyes. Lex’s first impression of the thing was that it wasn’t so much grotesque as it was ridiculous.
His second impression was that it was coming at him very, very fast.
The thing wasn’t moving its limbs like it was running. Rather, they slid over the ground in a smooth gliding motion, and Lex realized that it was skating towards him, though he couldn’t imagine how that was possible. More than that, it was going to be there in a few seconds.
Lex was standing just in front of the door, less than five feet from the threshold, whereas the…whatever it was, was still several dozen feet from him, and although it was closing fast, Lex knew that he’d be able to make it inside before it could reach him. He took a step forward, still holding the door open in his telekinetic grip…and the fish-thing suddenly accelerated even more, streaking towards him to quickly that its form seemed to blur. Lex tried to throw himself forward, to get inside before it got there, but compared to the incoming creature he was moving in slow motion. He had just enough time to lock eyes with the four ponies already inside the building, looking back at him in a mixture of confusion and alarm, and then it collided with him.
One webbed limb lashed out as it did, hitting Lex dead-center with a kick that, with so much force behind it, sent him flying. Worse, the transfer of momentum meant that the thing came to a stop right in front of the open door, in front of the four horrified ponies.
But with Lex’s concentration broken, he was no longer telekinetically holding the door open, and the wards that he’d laid on the building immediately kicked back in. Instantly, the door tried to snap shut, but the creature reached a limb out with lightning speed, catching hold of it and holding it ajar mere inches before it could finish closing. The sight caused Drafty to shriek, and Aisle and Cozy backed away in horror, shaking their heads in denial of what was happening. Cloudbank was similarly paralyzed, realizing that the thing was going to get inside. And after what it had just done to Lex, there was no doubt that it was probably going to do even worse to them.
But instead of wrenching the door open, the creature’s finned extremity shook with visible strain, and the door slid open only a few inches before it came to a halt. Even as Cloudbank watched, the door seemed to push back, regaining almost an inch of ground before stopping again. It’s trying to close on its own, she realized. But why…?
Lex shook his head. “The door is straight ahead. The entrances are concealed as part of the warding I cast to defend against intruders.”
Lex’s wards! That had to be it! Whatever magic he’d used realized that monster was an intruder and was trying to shut it out! They were going to be okay! But even as she felt her spirits rise, she saw another of the creature’s finned limbs work its way into the gap, bracing against the opposite side of the doorjamb. Slowly, the door started to open again, and this time it didn’t stop…
The urge to run was overwhelming. The thing would be inside any moment, and Cloudbank was certain that their only chance was to run away. Maybe they could lose it in the warehouse, or find someplace to hunker down and wait until it went away, just like they had back in that apartment. Just like…like…
Just like when she’d been helpless to do anything except watch Drafty get sicker and sicker, dying by degrees. Just like she hadn’t been able to escape with her when Lex first showed up. Just like how she hadn’t been able to defend her when those undead ponies had attacked.
Just like every other time she’d let Drafty down.
Cloudbank was barely aware of what she was doing as she flew towards where the monster was struggling with the door. She only distantly heard herself scream as she slammed her hooves on the end of its finned limbs. Each blow came down with as much force as she could muster, driven by anger and shame and jealousy that she’d needed to rely on someone else to protect the pony most important to her.
Again and again she punched the thin strip of scaled flesh that was curled inside the doorjamb, glaring at it hatefully as she hit it over and over. And then, suddenly, it was gone. An instant later, she heard a loud clunk, and it took her a moment to realize it was the sound of the door closing.
She had done it. They were safe.
For a moment, Cloudbank just stood there, staring blankly at the door as she tried to register what had just happened. Slowly, she started to shake all over, and let out a shuddering breath, struggling to keep it together. She had almost succeeded when she felt a hoof on her side. Looking over, she found herself staring into Drafty’s eyes, which were filled with concern. “Cloudy, are you okay?”
Cloudbank wanted to give her a slick answer, to tell her that she was better than okay, she was going to take care of everything and that it was all going to be alright from now on. But her throat suddenly closed, and she felt her eyes starting to tear up, the last of her composure crumbling. A choked sob ran through her, and suddenly Drafty was hugging her, and Cloudbank buried her face in the other mare’s mane as she started to cry, everything that she’d been trying to push down ever since this had all began suddenly bubbling up, unstoppable. Drafty hugged her tighter, and a moment later Cloudbank felt Aisle and Cozy embrace her as well. It was only after her tears had run out that she softened her grip on Drafty, and the others stepped back as the embrace ended.
“You alright now?” asked Drafty. Her eyes were watery as well, but she was smiling as she did, and the sight was enough to make Cloudbank smile too, nodding even as she sniffled.
She wasn’t the only one, Aisle giving her a grin as he rubbed his eyes. “That was really amazing, Cloudbank. You stomped that thing good.”
“Heh, you know it. It’s just lucky that door closed, or I’d have really clobbered it.” Her boast brought a round of chuckling from the others, but it was good-natured, and made her grin wider.
The moment of camaraderie was broken as Cozy looked towards the door, her smile fading. “We should get moving. The shelter’s supposed to be in here somewhere, right?”
Drafty nodded, but glanced at the door again, a worried look crossing her face. “But what about Lex? He’s still out there.”
An uncomfortable silence fell, before Cozy spoke up again. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do. Even if we went back out there, my guess is that we’d just make him need to protect us again.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try!” insisted Drafty.
Cloudbank shook her head. “The door tried to close as soon as he let go of it. I don’t think we could open it even if we wanted to.”
“So, there’s nothing we can do, right?” asked Aisle, his voice hopeful. “It’s not like we’re abandoning him or anything, there’s just no way we can go help.”
Cozy nodded. “He’s powerful enough that he doesn’t need our help. The best thing now is for us to find the other ponies in here and tell them what’s going on.”
“Okay,” nodded Cloudbank, by now having fully recovered her poise. Looking towards the interior of the warehouse, she pointed a hoof. “In that case, I’ll lead the way.” Heading forward, the others followed after her. Drafty was the last to leave, looking back towards the door for a moment.
Silently, she wished Lex luck. Somehow she suspected that he was going to need it.
Lex struggled to breathe again as he went skidding across the ground, the ache in his side momentarily driving all other thoughts from his mind.
That thing’s kick had hurt! It was like being hit with a boulder, and as he managed to finally draw breath again, Lex dimly realized that this thing was different from the other fish-monsters that he’d faced on the boat. This one might actually be a threat.
Even without casting any spells, Lex had several enchantments that were active on his person at all times, some of which were defensive in nature. The Night Mare had augmented those, and added a few of her own. In addition, she had also returned the magic items he’d originally sacrificed to her, which also had protective powers woven into them. The combined result meant that striking him with brute physical blows was exceptionally difficult to do, at least for ordinary foes. It would take an attack of considerable strength, skill, or luck – or some combination thereof – to successfully damage him.
That creature apparently met at least one of those requirements.
Sliding to a halt on his side, Lex groaned as he tried to get his hooves under him, certain that his attacker would be on him in moments. But no further attacks came, and as Lex looked back where he’d been struck, his eyes widened in alarm at the sight of it trying to pry open the warehouse doors. No! He had to stop it before-
“Maa-jik poh-nee!” came a hateful roar from behind him, causing Lex to turn his head around. The sight that greeted him was another fish-monster, this one more familiar; it looked just like the things that he’d slaughtered on the ship…almost. It was half-again larger than those creatures had been, and had six limbs where they’d had four. But where those creatures had walked on all fours like a pony, this one had reared up on its back two legs, making it appear gigantic. Worse, it was carrying a shield in one claw, and a large trident in another other two…which was already coming down towards Lex’s prone form.
Still not having recovered from the hit he’d taken, Lex reflexively tried to scramble out of the way, succeeding only in causing the points of the trident to pierce his torso instead of his neck. Crying out in pain, Lex dimly realized that he’d been kicked in this direction on purpose; that the other monster had been anticipating that its comrade would be waiting here with a follow-up attack!
This wasn’t some sort of unfortunate coincidence. It was a coordinated assault.
Even as he realized that, Lex saw something move overheard. Looking up, he saw…something, large. Its form was impossible to make out, being too blurry to reveal anything definitive, as though it were a painting that had been left out in the rain. But Lex had no further chance to analyze its nature as he heard it whispering something; it was only a second later, when it launched four small darts of light towards him, that he realized that it was a spellcaster, and likely the one who’d cast that fireball before.
The four magic missiles flew unerringly to impact against Lex’s chest, but rather than hammering into his body they each winked out harmlessly as they made contact, causing him to grin slightly despite the incredible pain he was in. Whatever that thing was, it had no idea that one of his defensive enchantments was a thin screen of force calibrated to stop that specific spell, another one that was very common on Everglow. His victory was short-lived, however, as the creature by the warehouse was now skating towards him again, apparently having given up on the doors. Worse, even trying to move told him that the trident was barbed, and that its extraction would compound the damage it had dealt to him.
The thing seemed to intuit Lex’s realization, because it bared its teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Poh-nee,” it growled, its voice guttural and harsh. “You do not deserve maa-jik!” Keeping a firm grip on its trident to hold him in place, shield still at the ready, its free claw reared back. “It belongs to the sahuagin!” With its declaration delivered, it slashed downwards, the tips of its claws aiming to tear Lex’s throat out.
But before the deadly strike could find purchase, Lex’s body dissolved into shadows, which swirled as the claw passed harmlessly through his now-immaterial body. “I’ll give you magic,” he hissed, green eyes glaring hatefully. “The same magic that killed the rest of your kind!” The sahuagin’s eyes widened in alarm as it realized that its prey was no longer caught, and Lex felt a moment of spiteful satisfaction before moving straight down, his lack of physical form letting him pass into the ground without resistance.
He hated having to retreat, especially after issuing a threat, but he knew there was no other viable tactic. Moving underground offered him cover that his enemies would be hard-pressed to overcome, and allowed him a chance to get some metaphorical breathing room and come up with a plan of attack. Although using his astral pony spell against those ghouls meant that he couldn’t call upon it now, and he hadn’t prepared his disintegration spell, he still had plenty of other offensive magic at his disposal.
Vowing to show those aberrant monstrosities the power that had slain a dragon, Lex began to glide through the ground, a plan already forming in his mind…
Lirtkra snarled as he struck his trident against the ground, accomplishing nothing save to dig a few small scratches in the stones. “He’s gone!” he seethed, looking around as though the poh-nee would suddenly emerge at any moment. When that didn’t happen, he cast a frustrated look at his companions. “Find him!”
Losing one’s prey didn’t have any specific connotations in sahuagin culture; the simple fact that you’d starve if you couldn’t bring something down was enough. But even so, Lirtkra hated it when something he’d sets his sights on escaped him. He’d often swam after such errant creatures long after it had ceased to be economical to do so, determined to make his kill. But that wasn’t an option now, and that knowledge was almost unbearable.
“I can track him,” rasped the Cripple.
“Then do it!” roared Lirtkra. “Right now!”
It paused for a moment before it began casting, and Lirtkra – who knew that it had done so just to show its defiance – gripped his trident so hard that for a moment he thought the metal would bend. He felt sure that it could have used its tracking maa-jik earlier if it had wanted to, saving them all from wasting time wandering aimlessly through this airy wasteland! But instead it had waited until the battle was already joined to do so. It was enough to make him grit his teeth. As soon as the poh-nee is dead, you’re next, he decided.
“I have him,” came the Cripple’s sibilant voice. “He’s moving...that way.” It pointed one blurry limb at another building, a smaller one across from the row of warehouses.
“Follow him!” bellowed Lirtkra, starting to head in the indicated direction. “And figure out a way to undo whatever maa-jik he used to escape!” He punctuated his demand with a glare at his aerial companion. This time the Cripple seemed to know better than to test his patience and flew in the indicated direction, Monitor following it dutifully. Lirtkra started after them, but not before he took a moment to lick the bloody points of his trident. The taste made his heart pound with excitement, and he rushed after the other two, his mouth watering with a literal thirst for violence.
Lex raised his eyes above the ground to examine his surroundings. It was impossible to accurately judge distance or direction below ground, so he’d had to guess which direction to head in and hope he was leading them away from the warehouse. For once, luck seemed to be with him; the sight that greeted him was a sign that read “Wavy’s Inn and Restaurant.” Despite the situation, Lex couldn’t help but feel mildly amused at finding what was essentially another bed ‘n’ breakfast, thinking back to when he’d stumbled into Tall Tale so recently.
Pushing the memories aside, Lex glanced around, before almost doing a double-take as he saw the three enemies he’d thought he’d left behind barreling towards him, just a few dozen feet away. How had they found him so fast?! No, he realized, not found. They had already known where he was before he’d come back above ground, which meant that they were tracking him somehow. Despite his mental defenses, and the counter-scrying spell he kept active on himself at all times, they had some sort of magic that he hadn’t protected himself against, and it was letting them zero in on his position, even when incorporeal and underground.
Cursing, Lex turned and rushed into the inn, passing through the front walls and into the main lobby. Not finding what he needed for the trap he was planning to use, he kept moving, emerging into the restaurant portion of the building. The place was in shambles, with overturned tables and chairs all over the place, but in the middle of the room was exactly what Lex was looking for.
Using his telekinesis to push the debris aside, Lex hurriedly made his preparations, moving the necessary item around and casting his spell, before replacing the camouflage for his trap. And not a moment too soon; the sound of splintering wood from behind him alerted Lex to his pursuers entering the building. Moving to the far side of the room, Lex turned and waited.
It took only a few seconds for the three creatures to enter, with the four-armed sahuagin bursting in first, followed by the pudgy fish-thing, with the blurred creature floating cautiously behind them. Instantly, it burst into flame, spontaneously immolating with no warning. Rather oddly, the creature didn’t scream that Lex could hear, even though it began to immediately thrash in pain. Its companions didn’t seem concerned by their comrade’s fate, both of them sparing the briefest glances before apparently deciding that they didn’t care, rushing forward to close the gap between themselves and Lex.
Exactly as he had anticipated.
As they bounded forward, the two creatures ran straight across the center of the room, and Lex’s green-and-purple eyes narrowed as they approached. The sahuagin was slightly ahead of its comrade, and was the first to cross the center of the room, where a large carpet was laid across the floor. As it began to cross it, its footing suddenly gave way, and it plunged into the magically-created hole that the carpet had been hiding. It gave a surprised yell as it plummeted, only for its voice to be cut off with a muted splash as it hit the bottom, which Lex knew was filled with acid. Now if only the other fish-creature would follow suit!
It was not to be. Although it was mere steps behind its fellow, the pudgy ichthyoid leapt just as it reached the edge of the pit. Turning a somersault in mid-air, it landed on its fins, losing none of its momentum as it bounded towards Lex, one limb already drawing back for another blow. Lex mentally smirked at the idea that it could hurt him without a spell or a weapon, but a moment later the thing's strike connected with his umbral body, causing him to release a grunt of pain at the impact. He’d felt that! It wasn’t solid, the way it had been when he’d been kicked, but there had been a definite sense of damage.
Cursing as he realized that – just like the dragon he’d fought previously – this thing had somehow gained enough innate magic that its bodily attacks could hurt him even in his shadowy form, even if only somewhat, Lex fell back, giving ground. The creature lashed out with another kick, but this time Lex was ready, moving to avoid it moments before sliding back through the rear wall of the inn. As he did so, he saw that the blurred creature was rolling on the floor, trying to quench the flames still engulfing it. There was likewise no sign that the sahuagin he’d dumped in the acid pit was emerging from it.
He briefly considered rushing back to the shelter and retrieving Severance, but discarded that notion. Even if they didn’t pursue him into the warehouse, getting Severance and returning would take too long; if his foes had healing magic, Lex didn’t want to give them time to use it. Instead, he started to circle the building, preparing for the next phase of his counterattack…
Cloudbank bit her lip at Aisle’s pronouncement, looking around despite knowing that it was futile. Just like every other time, fog filled her vision, thick enough that she could barely make out her friends. Everything further away was completely blanketed in white.
They’d been wandering around in there for what felt like a brief eternity, though Cloudbank knew that it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. At first she’d thought that they’d find the shelter that Lex had set up in this warehouse right away – how hard could it be to locate an interior room large enough to hold a bunch of ponies? – but they’d barely started to look for it when they’d realized that most of the place was covered in a thick mist.
It was the result of Lex’s wards, Cloudbank knew. That was the only explanation for why there’d not only be fog inside a building, but why it wouldn’t seem to move no matter how much she and Drafty flapped their wings at it. It refused to be pushed or compressed into a cloud either, despite Cloudbank having done that hundreds of times in her old job.
As bad as that was, it still shouldn’t have been enough to seriously slow them down. This warehouse wasn’t that big, after all. But for some reason navigating the interior had become unusually difficult. They hadn’t taken a single turn, but Cloudbank was certain that they’d been this way before…
“Maybe we should try marking our path with some chalk or something?” suggested Cozy.
Drafty glanced at her sides, raising her wings as she did. “That’s not a bad idea, but I don’t have any.”
“Me either,” added Aisle.
When all eyes turned to Cloudbank a moment later, she shook her head, causing the others to sigh with disappointment. “So much for that idea,” she muttered.
“We should keep going. So long as we head straight, we have to hit something eventually,” said Aisle, gesturing forward. Cloudbank frowned, but didn’t have a better idea, and a moment later they began moving again.
It wasn’t very long before Drafty squinted, looking ahead. “I think the fog is thinning out!”
Cozy brushed her necklace at the news. “Lashtada be praised, finally!”
Cloudbank gave a relieved smile, breaking into a trot as she moved ahead of Aisle, eager for the promise of safety to be fulfilled. “Okay! Now that we’re here, we can…can…”
She lost her train of thought as she exited the mist, stopping and staring at the sight that greeted her: the same door where she’d managed to stop that monster from getting inside. A moment later, the others caught up to her and had similar reactions, gaping in stupefaction. This should have been impossible, and yet there it was anyway.
They’d ended up right back where they’d started.
Monitor slammed a finned limb against the wall, but the kill-now enemy had already passed through it. Blinking its bulbous eyes, Monitor held itself ready for another strike in case its foe showed itself again, but after several seconds it realized that wasn’t going to happen. Turning away from the wall, it went to go check on the kill-later enemies that had come there with it.
The larger one had finally managed to snuff the flames that had engulfed it, and Monitor could hear it wheezing and groaning in pain. The other one was still alive also, as it was roaring quite loudly from the bottom of the hole it had fallen into. Monitor briefly considered killing one or both of them now, but decided not to; there was still a kill-now enemy nearby, and they were kill-later enemies. Instead, it simply stood still, waiting for them to either recover or die.
The larger one was the first to recover, slowly winding its way back into the air. The smell of burnt flesh drifted off of it, less unpleasant than the acrid stench coming from the hole where the other one was still splashing around. It paused to survey the surroundings before turning back towards Monitor…or at least, it seemed that way, beneath the blur. Then it moved over the hole, looking down into it.
“GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW!” roared Lirtkra, the anger in his voice not quite able to mask the pain.
“That would require that I use my ‘maa-jik’ on you,” rasped the Cripple, smug disdain dripping from every word. “Otherwise, you’ll need to find your own way out.”
Its answer was enough to make Monitor blink again; couldn’t a length of chain or something else have served to accomplish such a task? Or had the larger one decided that the one in the hole was a kill-now enemy? If so, it would have been wiser to attack it instead of simply talking at it. Otherwise it was just a waste of breath.
A moment later the larger kill-later enemy twisted to the side, frantically dodging the trident that came shooting up out of the hole to lodge in the ceiling, rope dangling from the end of it back down into the hole. A few seconds later the rope went taut, and grunting and cursing could be heard from the pit. The larger kill-later enemy swam through the air, putting some distance between itself and the hole, making Monitor shift slightly so that it could watch both of them at once.
It took a little while for Lirtkra to climb out, barely managing to pull itself above the lip of the pit before swinging over and awkwardly jumping back onto solid ground. Once it did, it yanked sharply on the rope, tearing the trident free from the ceiling, gouging a large hole in the wood as a result. Only after it did that did Monitor notice that Lirtkra was no longer carrying its shield, apparently having discarded it to be able to climb out.
As it was, the sahuagin kill-later enemy had apparently suffered a fair amount of damage from the kill-now enemy’s trap. Large patches of the sahuagin’s body had turned an angry red, and there was blood running down its legs and tail. But it looked more furious than hurt, and even as it retrieved its weapon it cast a glare at its companions, as though daring them to try anything. When neither did, Monitor noticed that Lirtkra’s stance relaxed, though only slightly.
“The pony is currently moving,” came the larger one’s whisper. “It doubtlessly wants us to follow it so it can try something like this again.”
“Of course it does!” snarled Lirtkra. “That’s pathetically obvious!” It flexed its clawed digits over its trident as though barely able to contain its anger, but Monitor knew that it hadn’t resumed an attack posture. “This time, we’re not going to allow it t-”
“Wait,” interrupted the other one, causing Monitor to blink.
“You dare interrupt me?!” hissed Lirtkra, and this time his posture did shift into one that suggested imminent violence.
“He’s coming back!”
“What?” asked Lirtkra in obvious confusion.
“That pony, he’s heading back towards us!” The larger kill-later enemy sounded rather surprised, pointing towards the opposite side of the room. “That way!”
Lex narrowed his eyes as he made a beeline for the wall of the restaurant portion of the inn. He hadn’t been gone very long, so hopefully those things were still in there. It not, he’d need to figure out where they’d gone quickly, otherwise the chances of this working – which were already slim – would worsen even more.
As it stood now, he was going to have to check and make sure, which meant exposing himself to danger again. He had no doubt that whatever magic they were using to track him was still in effect, which meant that they’d know he was coming. But that couldn’t be helped; or rather, if this worked then it would actually be to his advantage. Steeling himself, Lex flew through the wall.
“POH-NEE!” came an enraged scream. Immediately, the points of a trident pierced him, and the pain Lex felt told him that it was magical as well. He kept going though, moving further into the middle of the room. The other fish-thing, the one with the bulging eyes, sprang at him as he moved, lashing out with its bare limbs. Lex didn’t slow down as he flowed around the strikes, heading towards the opposite wall, near where the creature under the blurring magic was hovering. Circling out of the way of his apparent charge, it chanted a spell, and Lex immediately recognized it; it was the spell designed to cancel an active magical effect. For a moment, Lex wondered what it thought it was doing…and then the answer came to him as he felt his body sudden solidify, sending him crashing to the ground.
For a split-second, he felt surprised. Although it made perfect sense now that he thought about it, the idea that his horn’s dark magic could be subject to the same weaknesses and limitations as other forms of spellcasting simply hadn’t occurred to him. But there was no time to focus on that now; he needed to act!
Turning back to where the other two monsters were rushing towards him, Lex looked past them, at where the small, spectral hoof that he’d brought in with him was still hovering by the wall, just above the floor. Smirking at their apparently not having seen it, he cast a spell of his own, pleased that he’d made sure to compress its energy enough that it could be delivered via the spectral hoof. A moment later, he felt his muscles spasm as the spell went off, the price of compression making itself known. But across from him, the ghostly limb pressed against the far wall, and a moment later an aperture opened in it, easily large enough for two ponies to walk through side-by-side. With that done, Lex knew that he had to concentrate and return to shadow-form as quickly as possible, but that thought had barely crossed his conscious mind when he suddenly found the points of a trident in front of his face.
“Poh-nee,” hissed the sahuagin, and Lex could see that it was baring its teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Now I will feed on your flesh! Every last piece of you will be consumed!”
If the thing was expecting him to be intimidated, it was going to be disappointed. “Funny you should mention that,” answered Lex steadily. “Do you know what this building is?”
Lirtkra frowned, confused by his prey’s apparently lack of fear. “What?”
“This building,” repeated Lex. “Do you know what its function was, back when it was in use?” Even as he spoke, his eyes swept over his opponents. The sahuagin was directly in front of him, ready to thrust its trident through his skull, while the other fish-thing was next to it, slightly off to the side.
“It was a restaurant.” The whispered answer came from the third one, with the blur spell still obscuring its features. It was further away, keeping its companions between itself and him.
“That’s right. This is a place where ponies would come to eat food.” Lex couldn’t help but wear a grin of his own – though a part of him wondered how a monster that was almost certainly aquatic would know something like that – at the layout of his foes. All of them were facing him, their backs to the wall where he’d opened the breach, apparently unaware of it even though they’d seen him casting a spell. To think that they’d be so stupid as to ignore magic being used just because they hadn’t noticed an obvious effect.
“So what?!” hissed the sahuagin. “Now you will be food!”
It reared back with its trident, but Lex’s only response was a dark chuckle. “I invited a few other ponies, or should I say former ponies, over for a bite.”
That comment seemed to do the trick, and the sahuagin whirled around just in time to see a horde of undead ponies begin pouring into the room through the hole that Lex had opened.
The undead ponies poured through the hole in the wall, unleashing pandemonium as they flooded the restaurant.
Snarling and howling in hunger, they lashed out at everyone indiscriminately. Three of them immediately flung themselves into the air, rotting wings stretching out as they attempted to bring down the blurred monster hovering in place. Four headed straight for the pudgy fish-creature, and an equal number charged the sahuagin warrior. Two more, seeing that every other available target was taken, charged towards Lex.
Attempting to duck under a rotting hoof failed, but his defensive spells and items caused it to scrape harmlessly over his flank without breaking the skin. Another one leaned in to bite at him, but Lex batted it away with a growl, moving back to buy himself some breathing room. The two undead ponies advanced on him, seeing that he was moving into a corner of the room and thinking him trapped. But their vicious grins vanished a moment later as he dissolved into shadow, and the pair shrieked in frustration as they rushed at him, their teeth and hooves passing through his insubstantial body uselessly.
Lex, for his part, had ceased to worry about his now-powerless assailants, and instead turned his attention to the rest of the brawl. Although he hadn't held much hope that the undead horde – which he had found lurking around the edges of the vicinity, drawn to the sounds of the conflict just like he’d thought they’d be – would be able to bring down the aquatic monsters, he had thought that they’d at least be able to slow them down. But it was rapidly becoming obvious that the unliving creatures weren’t much of a threat at all.
Even as Lex watched, the sahuagin with the large trident – apparently unharmed so far – speared one of the undead ponies through its head, lifting it off the ground and letting it wriggle for a few seconds before it went still, tossing it away with a flick of the weapon a moment later. He didn’t stop there, his lower arms lashing out to tear most of the flesh from another undead pony’s skull, though its reaction was simply to sneer and attempt to bite at him. Its reward for its efforts was that the sahuagin skewered with its trident it just like he had the other one. The remaining two were undaunted, but their strikes just seemed to bounce off the creature’s scales.
The pudgy fish-monster was faring even better. Despite the four undead ponies surrounding it, it was dodging or blocking every attack they made. One leaned in to bite at it, but was repelled by a finned limb catching it by the forehead and shoving it back. The recoil of pushing its opponent away moved the ichthyoid backward just far enough to avoid another pony’s hoof. Continuing with the motion, it bent its body backwards at the knees to avoid a third undead pony’s bite, and for a moment looked like it would fall over. But a single upper limb reached the ground first, catching its fall before it collapsed, even as the other swatted aside another hoof-strike.
Its position left it vulnerable, its back barely off the ground and its belly bared, ready to be torn apart…or at least that’s how it looked to Lex. But rather than trying to right itself, the creature flipped its back legs upward, pushing itself into a headstand, and kicked out. Each leg went in a different direction, striking an undead pony’s head hard enough that Lex could hear the crunch over the din of battle. Wounded, the two undead ponies fell back, which gave the pudgy fish-thing enough room to flip itself back onto its webbed feet and follow up its earlier attacks, one arm hitting an undead pony’s neck in a chop so strong that it tore the thing’s head clean off.
Only the flying creature seemed to be having trouble. Although its blurring magic hid any wounds it might have taken, the three undead pegasi on it were steadily pushing it back into a corner, much as Lex had been. More than that, the two undead ponies that had been on him were headed towards it now, having spotted more tangible prey. Although they weren’t able to fly, the ceiling was low enough that they were just barely able to reach it with their hooves as they jumped.
Lex couldn’t make out its sibilant voice over the noise, but the creature must have cast a spell, because a moment later it was wrapped in flames, a wispy coat of violet fire surrounding it. For a moment Lex thought it had miscast whatever spell it was attempting, but a moment later one of the unloving pegasi tried to bite the creature, apparently undaunted by its burning shield. Its jaws seemed to catch on something, but it instantly drew back, shrieking horribly as its head caught fire. Batting at the flames with its hooves uselessly, it began to careen around the room before crashing to the ground, still burning.
The sight seemed to be the last straw for the undead ponies. Although the conflict had lasted barely more than ten seconds, it was enough to firmly drive home just how outmatched they were. Acting on some unspoken signal, they turned and ran as one, the bulk of them heading for the hole in the wall that Lex had conjured, while others scrambled to reach the doors and windows.
Cursing at how easily they’d been routed, Lex cast another spell, knowing that it was all he had time for before there was nothing left to distract the aquatic trio. He needed to do something to take at least one of them out of the fight; not necessarily kill it, but isolate it so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it before finishing the others off. Making a quick decision, Lex focused on the floating creature, still hovering near the ceiling, and chanted a spell. It seemed to recognize what he was trying to do, because it began to dart away, but it hadn’t moved more than a foot before a spherical force field sprung up around it, just barely large enough to contain its bulk. It thrashed, and Lex could hear it hissing curses, but it was contained, and would be so long as the spell lasted; while it might have countermeasures, such as another dispelling spell, that was an unavoidable risk.
And then there was no more time to worry about the captured thing, as its companions were on him.
A trident flew at him, and Lex barely managed to twist to the side, letting it embed itself in the wall next to him. But immediately, the pudgy fish-thing was there, having covered the distance between itself and Lex – almost twenty feet! – in a single leap. A punch tore through his shadowy form, and although there was no physical impact Lex still couldn’t hold back a grunt of pain, trying to move backwards through the wall and escape.
But Monitor had no intention of letting its prey get away a second time. It let the momentum of its leap carrying it past the kill-now enemy and, rather than falling, reached out to grab the trident that was jutting out from the wall. Taking hold of the shaft, it swung itself back up and perched on it, directly in the path of its enemy’s intended escape route.
Lex immediately came to a stop as the thing interposed itself between him and the wall, narrowing his eyes. The thing wanted to have a showdown? Fine. It took only a moment to cast a spell, one that – as with the dragon – would seal the creature within a prison of ice. But in the split-second between when the last syllable of the spell left Lex’s immaterial lips and the first patch of frost began to spread, the creature dodged out of the way. It shouldn’t have been possible; there was no ray or beam for it to avoid. But somehow it did it anyway, tumbling down and yanking the trident out of the wall, tossing it back over to the sahuagin, who caught it easily.
Worse, at that moment Lex heard the flying creature he’d sealed hiss the words to a spell – that same dispelling spell that he’d half-expected. Luckily his force field spell held, but if that thing could keep attempting to bring it down then there was a real chance it would succeed before it ran out of spells. Which meant, Lex realized, that he needed to take these other two down before their spellcasting ally rejoined the fray.
As he glared down at the remaining pair of enemies, Lex couldn’t help but wish for the thousandth time that he could use the area-effect destructive spells that were so common on Everglow. If he could have, he’d have gladly rained fireballs and lightning bolts down on the pair until they were charred beyond recognition. But that option wasn’t available to him; he had decided, back when he had developed his thaumaturgy, that learning magic that allowed for such a high degree of collateral damage was the height of irresponsibility. So instead, when learning to shape his thoughts so as to be able to contain magical energy, he had deliberately excluded any concept of destructive magic that wasn’t individually-targeted from his mindset. The result was that such magic was quite literally unthinkable for him now.
It was, he’d come to realize later, a decision made purely because he hadn’t been able to conceive of living in a land that wasn’t as peaceful as Equestria. The idea that he’d one day find himself in a world teeming with dangerous monsters and ruthless people, a world where survival was an open question and so would require commensurately dangerous magic, had simply been beyond his imagination. But for all that he’d come to rue his decision, it was too late to change it now; the new thought-patterns had been thoroughly written into his brain by then, and changing them simply wasn’t possible, not without inflicting catastrophic damage to his mind.
And then there was no more time to curse his shortsightedness, as the two monsters rushed at him again.
Cozy groaned, holding her breath and keeping a hoof over her nose until Drafty and Cloudbank settled down, having blown the horrific stench away with their wings. “Thanks, girls,” she coughed, gulping down a lungful of fresh air.
“That wa-, ack! Aw-awful!” gagged Aisle, still looking a sickly green.
“I think it means we’re getting close,” replied Cloudbank. “This is probably another one of the defensive spells Lex put up around the shelter.”
An amused snort came from Drafty. “It’s kinda funny though, isn’t it? I mean, he’s a big powerful wizard and all, so I thought he’d use walls of fire or summoned demons or something to protect this place. Not a rotten egg smell.”
“That was not a rotten egg smell,” moaned Aisle. “I’ve smelled rotten eggs before, in my job at the market. Whatever that was just now was ten times worse.”
“Then we should get moving, just in case it starts to come back,” said Cozy, shaking off the last of her nausea.
“I agree,” nodded Cloudbank. “I think we should try going this way,” she pointed off to the right.
“How come?” asked Drafty, cocking her head to the side.
In response, Cloudbank picked up a pair of loose nails that were on the ground. “Listen to this,” she instructed the others, before tossing one straight forward. Although it was immediately lost to sight thanks to the swirly mist around them, they could still hear the faint clinking as it struck the ground.
“Okay, so?” asked Aisle. Cloudbank gestured for him to wait, then tossed the second nail off to the right, in the direction she’d previously indicated. The group kept their ears perked, but there was no sound to be heard, as though the mist had swallowed the nail utterly before it could hit the ground.
“Huh. That’s weird,” admitted Drafty.
“I heard it – or rather I didn’t hear anything – when we were blowing that bad smell away just now,” explained Cloudbank. “The wind from our wings was sending debris in every direction, but I couldn’t hear anything from over there.”
“Works for me,” said Cozy with a shrug. Behind her, Aisle nodded.
“Alright, let’s see if we can finally get where we’re going!” Drafty smiled, and her obvious attempt to be enthusiastic made Cloudbank chuckle.
Deciding to copy her friend’s attitude, Cloudbank pointed a hoof towards the area of soundlessness. “Alright, everypony follow me. Shelter ho!”
She just hoped that she was right about that being their destination, and not some new disaster.
Lex cast a spell as the pair rushed towards him. Immediately, a geyser of air formed under the pudgy one’s body, and although Lex had seen it move impossibly fast before, its momentum gave it no time to avoid his latest attack. The sudden wind propelled it upward with terrific force, striking the ceiling hard enough to cause an impact crater before the spell terminated, letting it fall to the ground, landing hard on its belly. Lex could already see it starting to get back up, however, but couldn’t spare it any further attention as by that point the other creature reached him.
The sahuagin’s trident stabbed at him from below. Although Lex was still hovering near the ceiling, that only put him barely ten feet off the ground, which was close enough to be within the reach of someone with sufficient athleticism or a long enough weapon, things which his enemies possessed. Managing to pull himself around the strike in time, Lex moved upward, passing through the ceiling and out of their easy reach.
He didn’t retreat any further, though, knowing that if he fled now he’d just be waiting for them to regroup and attack again later. Even taking a few seconds to prepare more defensive spells was time he potentially couldn’t afford, since that would allow their spellcaster more time to try and find a way out of the prison he’d trapped it in. Instead, he moved along the room’s outer wall, until he was facing the opposite side from where he’d been, preparing to move in and attack his foes from behind. But even as he started to pass through the wall, he heard the blurred creature hiss “There!” and realized that even within the force field it was still tracking him somehow, relaying his position to its allies and negating his tactical advantage.
Briefly considering pulling back, Lex discarded the notion, knowing that it wouldn’t change no matter where he attacked from. Instead, he reentered the room, only to find that the pair were already rushing towards him. Worse, their advanced warning meant that they made it before he could even begin to cast the spell he’d prepared. Lex ducked under another kick from the one fish-creature, only for the other’s trident to punch directly through the center of his shadowy form, causing him to groan with pain. But he forced it aside as he cast his next spell, conjuring a sudden blast of extremely pressurized water. He directed it at the unarmed creature, trying to knock it backward into the acid-filled pit that he’d created previously – the caustic trap’s existence was inherently temporary, and would vanish in less than thirty seconds by his count, which meant that he needed to put it to good use before it did – but although the hydraulic spray struck the thing dead-center, it moved only a few feet back before digging its finned extremities into the ground, resisting being knocked any further back. A moment later the torrent of water ceased to flow as the spell ended, and Lex knew that his gambit had failed.
The sahuagin didn’t miss its opportunity, jabbing at him with its trident again. This time two blows slipped past his guard, and Lex barely had time to register the renewed damage before the unarmed fish-thing closed the distance he’d opened up and launched into a barrage of blows, raining two punches and a kick on him before he managed to break away from them, trying desperately to regroup. His head was starting to swim from the sensation of multiple injuries, having to struggle to push them aside and keep thinking clearly, and Lex finally realized that he might be in serious trouble. Worse, although he still had more than half of his full complement of spells, the ones that he’d dedicated to attacking were beginning to run low. He was going to need to finish this quickly, or he’d have no choice but to retreat.
It was with growing desperation that Lex rushed behind the bar at the far end of the room and returned to solid form. Whenever he became a shadow, all of his carried equipment – save for Severance – changed with him, but doing so rendered it inaccessible. In order to retrieve the focus for his next spell, a small dagger that was part of conjuring a force-based replica that could attack on its own, he needed to resume his corporeal form. Moving through a wall to do so wouldn’t work, since the conjured force-dagger wouldn’t be able to pass through a solid barrier, and so wouldn’t have been able to make the return trip with him. Instead, he just had to cast the spell and then change back into shadow-form before they reached him…
But even as he started to telekinetically open his pack, the unarmed fish-monster was already there, having hopped the bar with its uncanny speed and landed right in front of him. Lex had just enough time to grimace in horror at the realization of just how badly he’d erred before it spun in place to build up momentum and lashed out with a kick to his face so powerful that it drove him through the bar itself, wood exploding outward as he went skidding across the floor before coming to rest in a heap. Dazed, Lex fumbled to get his hooves back under him, knowing that to be incapacitated right now was to die.
He had almost succeeded when he felt the points of a trident sink into his side, piercing deeply as its barbs dug into him. The agony was incredible, but it became far worse a moment later. Gripping its trident in all four claws, the sahuagin grunted with effort as it lifted it into the air – with Lex still speared on the end of it – until it was pointing straight up, leaving him impaled on it by his own body weight. The pain was so great that Lex couldn’t even scream, simply twitching reflexively for a moment before passing out. But he regained consciousness a moment later as the sahuagin warrior, with a guttural roar of triumph, swung its trident down in a heavy arc, smashing him against the ground head-first. It was only because he’d gone limp that his head turned slightly to the side, preventing his horn from being crushed by the impact.
His ears ringing from having taken a second heavy strike to the head in the span of a few seconds, Lex only dimly heard a sibilant voice whispering the words to a spell, and managed to look up just in time to see his force field spell – the one containing the flying, spellcasting creature – wink out of existence, freeing it.
You’re going to die here, slid voiceless words across his mind, brimming with scorn. You’ll be killed, your body devoured, and then the same thing will happen to all of the other ponies that you brought here with you.
Lex’s current state was such that he barely registered the words, let alone appreciated them. Instead, they served only to remind him of how the Night Mare had told him that the psychic fragment of his own mind could potentially be controlled. He had made several attempts to do so; trying to concentrate on his happiest memories before falling asleep one time, attempting to strengthen his mental defense magic another. He’d even made a brief, abortive attempt to meditate, an action he normally found unpalatable for its ridiculousness. Nothing had worked. Just like this fight…everything he’d tried had proven to be insufficient for the task.
For a moment he wondered if he should turn back into shadow, but the rational part of his mind informed him that it would do little good; that he was already hurt so badly that the ameliorative effects of incorporeality against magical attacks wouldn’t make much of a difference. But then, he couldn’t think of an option that would make much of a difference. Didn’t he still have a short-range teleport spell prepared? That sounded right…but they had some way of finding him wherever he went, so that wasn’t any good. But he had to do something, otherwise Sonata was going to be so mad at him. He had promised her…something. He couldn’t seem to remember what, but he knew he had promised her something and that he wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping it.
The sahuagin was saying something, but the words seemed to be coming from a great distance. Lex vaguely wondered if he should turn his head to look at the thing, but lifting it off of the ground seemed like an impossibly difficult task. Just drawing breath seemed to require an enormous amount of effort. And even the pain of the trident suddenly being wrenched from his side seemed to be muted, like when a limb had fallen asleep. In fact, sleep didn’t sound so bad all of a sudden; it was all he could do to keep his eyes open. But he forced himself to do so, staring straight ahead at the writing on the ground…
Writing on the ground…?
Blinking, Lex slowly realized that he was looking at a scroll...that it was one of a number of items that were scattered across the floor. But why were they...? Oh. His pack had been open when he’d taken that last hit, and the magic that kept its contents from being jostled only functioned so long as it was closed. It must have gotten dislodged and scattered its contents then. So this was one of the scrolls that he’d had in there. But which one? He had no idea why, but he suddenly wanted to know, trying to concentrate on the words…
His brow creased slightly. He didn’t recognize them. This wasn’t one of the scrolls he’d written, wasn’t one of his treatises on politics or philosophy or magic. Magic…right. This was a spell scroll; the kind that had a pre-cast spell in it that just needed to be read to be activated. But where had he gotten that? He stored magic like that in gems, not in paper. The only spell scrolls he had were those two from the dragon’s hoard. But this wasn’t the one he’d read before, the illusion-breaking spell. So then…it was the other one? But he hadn’t ever gotten around to reading it, so what spell did it have?
As his eyes swept over the words, his brain struggling to untangle their meaning, the nature of the spell suddenly became clear to him…and Lex realized that it was his only chance, not just to survive the next few seconds, but to turn everything around. Without hesitating, he began to read the words out loud, calling on the same discipline that had led him to reorder his very thoughts when he was just a colt to make him pronounce each word correctly, even though his mouth felt like it was full of cotton. His only hope now was that he could finish reciting it before his enemies realized what he was doing.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. He was peripherally aware that the monsters around him were moving. That the trident that had wounded him was descending in a slow arc, its owner determined not to let his kill manage a miraculous escape a third time. The unarmed monster that had battered him was skating towards him as well, apparently not willing to leave the coup de grace to its ally this time. And above him, the spellcasting creature, its true nature still hidden behind its blur enchantment, was swooping closer to him, no doubt with some lethal spell at the ready.
They had almost reached him when Lex finished reading the scroll.
As he finished reading the spell-scroll, Lex’s consciousness suddenly came back into focus, and he immediately took stock of his situation.
The trident was swinging down in a lethal arc. The unarmed fish-creature was rocketing towards him, one limb already pulled back in preparation to strike. The spellcasting thing was diving at him, its sibilant voice already chanting. Death was approaching him from three different directions, only seconds away.
He really couldn’t help the vicious grin that crossed his face. This was going to be fun.
As the sahuagin stabbed downward, Lex kicked out with a hind leg, his hoof catching the trident just below where its head split into three. Already committed to its lunge, the sahuagin couldn’t regain control of its strike, thrown off-balance as Lex redirected the force of its attack, pushing it up and over him…directly into the charge of its unarmed ally. Although the pudgy fish-thing’s expression didn’t change, its surprise was telegraphed by how it stumbled and only barely managed to throw itself into a clumsy jump to avoid the unexpected danger, twisting its body parallel to the floor and passing over the points of the trident by mere inches.
As it did, Lex twisted his body into a crouch, putting his hooves under him before heaving upwards in a leap of his own. Both the sahuagin and the pudgy creature realized what was about to happen, and lashed out in an attempt to stop it, the former with one of its lower claws and the latter with a punch. But Lex ignored both, knowing that neither was positioned correctly to put any power into their blows, and the attacks bounced off of his now-toughened hide harmlessly. A moment later, he reached the apex of his leap and thrust his head upward, letting his horn pierce the torso of the fish-thing as it passed over him. The blood that rained down over his head was cold and oily, but Lex paid it no mind. Instead, he twisted his head to the side sharply, flinging the disgusting creature directly towards the descending spellcaster, causing the two to collide in mid-air and go tumbling to the ground in a heap.
Landing on his back legs, Lex stayed upright as he turned his attention back to the sahuagin, which had just managed to regain its footing. “Poh-nee!” it screamed the word as an insult as it swung its trident wildly, aiming to skewer him again. But Lex was ready, and his right fore-hoof lashed out to knock the thrust wide, before following through with the motion and curling his foreleg around the haft of the enchanted weapon, just behind the head of it, and pulling it against his side, trapping the weapon. The sahuagin gave a single tug on the trident to try and retrieve it, but this served only to pull Lex closer to him.
The creature roared in outrage, swinging its free claws, but they raked over Lex’s flesh harmlessly, his augmented defenses ablating the damage. It tried to lean in to bite at him, but Lex brandished his horn like a dagger, forcing it to abort its course of action lest it be stabbed in the face. Finally, Lex lashed out with a blow of his own, using it to push the two of them apart even as he heaved backwards, wrenching the trident out of the sahuagin’s grasp as they stumbled away from each other.
Lex couldn’t contain his smirk as they separated, a heady sensation rushing through him. That spell was incredible! Its design was a thing of elegance, achieving multiple simultaneous effects all based off of the skillful implementation of an exceedingly simple design. The artfulness of it was enough to earn Lex’s honest admiration for whoever had invented it; they had to have been a wizard – obviously a pony – of extraordinary brilliance.
All living creatures had natural magical channels throughout their bodies; Lex had determined that as a colt, when he had decided that using such channels as a conduit to cast spells was insufficient for what he wanted to achieve. Although he largely ignored his own body’s natural channels in favor of the thought-based spellcasting that he’d invented, they were still there. And the spell on that scroll leveraged them to a greater degree than he’d ever thought possible…but in a way that he had never thought of.
Whereas most living creatures would use their physicality to leverage magical energy, this spell reversed that process, utilizing magical energy to enhance the caster’s physicality. It flooded the caster’s body with so much energy that it back-flowed into the body, heightening its physical prowess. Strength, reflexes, fortitude, coordination, and so much more; all of it was pushed to incredible heights. The result was that Lex now felt that he could trade blows with his enemies on their own terms and potentially come out victorious.
But for all of the spell’s benefits, it still had its deficiencies, he knew. For one thing, the use of such energy was inherently limited. For all the power in that spell, Lex knew that it would only last for a little over a minute before it expired. And although his wounds were no longer paining him, they hadn’t actually been healed; rather, they simply didn’t hurt as much due to the sudden rush of adrenaline that the spell was artificially inducing. Once it wore off, he’d be back in the sorry state he'd been in, if not worse.
But the most severe side-effect was that, while the spell was active, he was unable to use magic.
It couldn’t be helped. Even though his own style of spellcasting utilized thought-forms rather than physical channeling, there was simply too much energy in his body right now to properly shape and direct a discrete amount of it in the form of a spell. It was severe enough that even interfacing with a magic item would have been nearly impossible; luckily most of the ones he was still wearing were self-contained, and didn’t need any sort of activation beyond being worn. And of course, his permanent enchantments were still active. But all other magic was out of reach for the time being.
But that was fine. He had been running low on attack magic anyway. Now he could safely discard the hit-and-run tactics he’d been using up until now, and instead simply rip his enemies apart without restraint. Somehow, that thought was appealing to him.
Chuckling as much to mock his enemies as to express his delight, Lex spun the weapon in his grasp skillfully, as though he had trained with it all his life. He glanced back at the other two to find that they were already picking themselves up, warily starting to circle him as they tried to come to terms with this new development. Turning his attention back to the sahuagin, Lex couldn’t resist the urge to taunt the thing. “You said something about my not deserving to have ‘maa-jik,’ didn’t you?” he sneered. “Would you prefer that I kill you with your own weapon, then?”
The sahuagin shook with anger, its four claws clenching and unclenching as it glared at Lex, its eyes shining with hate, letting him know that his barbs had hit home. “You dare?!” it howled. “YOU DARE?! I am Lirtkra! The greatest warrior of the Red Water sahuagin tribe! I have killed every enemy that I have ever faced and I WILL KILL YOU TOO!”
“You say that,” sneered Lex, “but here I am, still alive.” He lifted the trident, pointing it directly at Lirtkra, clearly intending to bury it in the sahuagin’s body. “That’s more than you’re going to be able to say in a minute.”
Lirtkra crouched down, baring his teeth as he glared daggers at Lex. “Monitor, Cripple,” he hissed, not bothering to glance at his two companions. “If either of you steal this poh-nee’s death from me, I will eat you right here.” No matter that he had been instructed to kill those two anyway. No matter that this poh-nee had insulted the Holy Ones by using maa-jik. No matter that he was hungry, even. This poh-nee’s existence was now a personal insult, one that could only be resolved with its death!
With a howl, Lirtkra threw himself forward, claws and fangs bared. Swinging the trident around, Lex rushed in to meet him. Behind him, Monitor started to charge as the Cripple began to whisper a spell.
“Okay, so…anypony know what the heck this is?”
Drafty’s question was met with a round of mute shakes of the head as the four ponies gazed at the sight in front of them. Just a few feet ahead was an area of fog, but unlike the misty pathways they’d been navigating for the last few minutes, this one was pitch black in color. It was also holding to a definite shape, forming a wall directly in front of them, and refused to change its shape no matter how much air Cloudbank and Drafty stirred up with their wings.
“It’s probably just for show,” ventured Cloudbank, her voice thick with uncertainty. “Some sort of illusion meant to scare off anypony that’s getting too close.”
“If we’re taking guesses, then I’m calling ‘portal to Tartarus’ as mine,” muttered Aisle with a shiver.
“Somepony’s going to have to go through and see what happens,” said Cozy quietly. She didn’t miss the shudder that went through her friends at her pronouncement; she felt the same way. But when no one spoke up, she let out a nervous breath, starting to step forward even as she silently recited a prayer to Lashtada.
But before she had taken two steps, a hoof was thrust in front of her, barring her way. “Hold on! What do you think you’re doing?” frowned Cloudbank.
“Exactly what I said,” replied Cozy. “We can’t just stand here and wonder what to do. We need to find that shelter, and so somepony needs to go through that…whatever that is, and see if it’s behind there, so I’m stepping up.” Despite herself, Cozy’s words were tinged with relief that somepony had stopped her.
“Well I think that’s a bad idea,” retorted Cloudbank. “You’re the only one who has any magic, so if something happens to you and then somepony gets hurt, you won’t be there to heal them.”
“That’s not-”
“She’s right, Cozy,” interjected Aisle. “The only reason we lasted as long as we did when we were hiding out was because of you. You can’t be the first one to head in there.”
The crystal mare frowned, unhappy with the implication that she was more valuable than everypony else. “So I’m just supposed to sit here while my friends go into danger?”
“No,” replied Drafty, moving next to Cozy and putting a hoof on her back in a friendly gesture. “We’re just supposed to sit here while one of us goes into danger. That was your idea, right? That one of us steps up?”
“Yeah,” sighed Cozy, still uncomfortable. “But that wasn’t supposed to mean ‘one of us, but not me.’”
“We should draw straws,” proposed Aisle. “Just me, Cloudbank, and Drafty. That’s the only fair way to-”
“Nuts to that,” scoffed Cloudbank, turning to face the wall of black mist. “I’m going in!” Without another word, she charged forward and vanished into the misty barrier.
“Cloudy!” yelled Drafty, a look of alarm spreading across her features as she rushed right up to the black fog, stopping just in front of it. “Cloudy! Are you alright?!” Long seconds ticked by as she waited for an answer, but none came. Starting to breathe heavier in worry, Drafty shifted nervously. “Cloudy! Answer me!”
Several more seconds went by, and Drafty could feel panic beginning to set in. She turned back to Aisle and Cozy, both of whom looked as worried as her. “I’m going after her! If we’re not back in two minutes, I want both of you to r-AAAAHH!” Her instructions ended in a shriek as she turned back towards the black wall of fog only to almost collide with Cloudbank as her head poked through the insubstantial barrier, flinging herself back and falling onto her rump in fright.
Blinking, Cloudbank frowned at the sight, emerging in her entirety from the black fog as she went over to were Drafty was sitting. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?! What about you?!” Anger and relief warred on Drafty’s features for a moment, but relief won out. Wrapping a foreleg around her friend’s neck, Drafty squeezed her tight for a moment, causing Cloudbank to smile and return the gesture, before Drafty stepped back. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called after you?”
“I did!” protested Cloudbank. “I heard you, and said that I was alright, but you didn’t seem to hear me. I think that,” she pointed to the wall of black fog, “blocks sight and sound, but only in one direction. I could see and hear you guys just fine on the other side of it.”
“That’s great and all,” spoke up Aisle. “But what was on the other side of it?”
“Oh, right.” Cloudbank gave a triumphant grin. “I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I think we’ve found the shelter!”
“Okay,” nodded Drafty. “I think this is probably it, but-”
“Finally!” blurted Aisle, giving a sigh of relief. “So what’s everypony standing around for? Let’s head inside!”
Cozy frowned as she looked left, then right. “Where? There’s no door.”
“That’s what I was trying to say,” added Drafty. “I think this is the place, but I don’t see any way in.”
Now it was Cloudbank’s turn to frown as she looked over the sight in front of them. After passing through the wall of black fog – which, just like she'd said, was completely transparent from the other side – they’d found themselves facing a squat wooden structure. It was pretty wide, and about a story-and-a-half tall, but otherwise had no doors or windows that she could see. The entire structure was freestanding in the middle of the warehouse, and looked like it might have been some sort of interior office, since there were scattered bulletin boards and posters tacked along the sides of it. But why was there no way in…?
“This has to be another one of Lex’s wards,” she decided, voicing her thoughts.
“This again?” moaned Cozy.
That was enough to make Drafty frown, giving Cozy an upset look. “Hey, if these are doing such a good job of keeping us out, then they’ll work against monsters too.”
“Not to mention other survivors who try to make their way here,” retorted Cozy, but her response was half-muttered, lowering her eyes to the ground.
Nevertheless, her comment was clearly heard, and Drafty started to walk towards her with an angry look, but Aisle moved in front of her. “Give her a break,” he whispered quietly.
Drafty turned her angry look on him, lowering her voice in kind. “No! She’s not being fair at all! Lex is out there right now, probably fighting for his life, and she’s complaining about the fact that his protection is too good?!”
Aisle didn’t flinch, making his response short and to the point. “She’s worried about Pillowcase. Lex said he wasn’t here, but she’s been hoping that maybe he was anyway. Now she’s sure that’s not the case, with how strong these defenses are and all.”
Drafty’s anger evaporated instantly, and was immediately replaced by a rush of shame. “Oh geez…I…” she trailed off, then sighed. The fact that she’d completely forgotten about the missing member of their group was unforgivable. She didn’t have the same relationship with the missing crystal stallion that Cozy did, but that was no excuse for being so completely unconcerned with his disappearance. “I should apologize.”
“No, it’s alright,” answered Cozy, clearly having heard them despite their whispering. “I know that if…if Pillow were here he’d b-be happy that we were someplace safe.” Despite her conciliatory tone, she couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice, and it was heartbreaking to hear. Drafty started heading towards her for a hug, eyes already watering in sympathy for her friend, but Cozy shook her head, visibly pulling herself together. “I’m fine. Anyway, we need to figure out how to get in here.”
Cloudbank, who’d been watching the exchange silently, spoke up. “I think I have an idea about that.” All eyes turned towards her, and she continued. “Remember when we were headed towards this place, this warehouse I mean, and we couldn’t see the door before Lex opened it? I think it’s like that.” She pointed at the building in front of them. “It has a door, it’s just invisible.”
“It’s not invisible,” corrected Aisle. “It’s just hidden from view.”
“Whatever, it’s here and we can’t see it.”
“So, how do we find it then?” asked Drafty, looking over the blank walls in front of them.
“Finding it’s not the problem,” interjected Cozy. “Remember what happened when that thing was trying to follow us inside? The door kept trying to close by itself. I’m guessing that even if we find the door in, Lex would be the only one that can open it.”
“Well we can’t just be stuck out here!” protested Cloudbank, throwing her hooves in the air in frustration.
“Actually, I have an idea,” said Aisle. The other three turned to look at him questioningly, and he responded with action, rather than words. Walking up to the side of the building, he reached out a hoof…and knocked on the wall.
“I don’t get it,” frowned Cloudbank. “Your idea is just to knock?”
“Why not?” shrugged Aisle. “Lex said that he brought doctors and other ponies, right? If they’re inside, maybe they’ll have a way of letting us in. At least this way we can let them know we’re here.” With that, he knocked on the wall again.
A pregnant silence fell as he stepped back, the four of them waiting to see if there would be any response…
Nosey’s ears perked up. “Hey, did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked Sonata, taking her blindfold off. She tried to hide how glad she was for the distraction. It turned out that pin the tail on the pony was a really hard game!
“I heard some sort of tapping on the wall just now,” answered Nosey, going over to the side of the room. She paused for a moment, then pressed her ear to the wall. Several other ponies, noticing what she was doing, moved closer out of curiosity.
Behind them, Severance floated closer as well.
A moment later, Nosey shook her head. “It stopped. Maybe I was just-”
The knocking came again, and this time Sonata heard it as well. “That’s, like, totes weird. Who knocks on the wall? Why not just use the door?” She glanced at the exit, fully fifteen feet away from where the knocking was coming from.
That set off a round of murmuring from the surrounding ponies, but Nosey shook her head. “Whoever it is probably can’t see the door, remember? Lex said that he’d covered it with an illusion to make it look like the rest of the wall as part of all that stuff he did to defend this place.”
Sonata blinked. “He did?”
Nosey nodded. “Yeah, remember? Back before we had that pillow fight?” Seeing her friend still having a vacant expression, she kept describing the circumstances. “He was telling you all of that stuff he’d done, and you were…you know…flirting with him.” She mumbled that last part slightly, fighting down a blush at having to admit that she’d overheard that.
Sonata paused then, doing some hard thinking before her eyes suddenly widened. “Oh yeah! I remember that now!”
Rolling her eyes, Nosey kept going. “So anyway, whoever’s doing that probably can’t see the door, so they’re knocking to try and get us to let them in.”
“Hang on.” More ponies had gathered around by now, listening to the exchange, and C. Shells had to push her way through them to reach Sonata and Nosey. “Isn’t that kind of strange that they’re knocking?”
“What do you mean?” asked Sonata, tilting her head.
“Well, if Lex was with them, wouldn’t he just, you know…open the door himself?” She turned to look at Nosey. “If what you’re saying is right, then he hid the door with his own magic. Shouldn’t he be able to lower it and just walk right in?”
“Most likely, yes,” said Nosey, her expression turning grim.
“Wait, wait, hang on…” Sonata furrowed her brow, trying to keep up with what was being said. “If that’s right then…whoever’s out there…Lex isn’t with them.” She paused to digest that, feeling her stomach start to tighten into a knot. “Why wouldn’t he be with them?”
An uncomfortable silence fell then, and the assembled ponies glanced at each other, trying not to make eye contact with Sonata. Nobody wanted to point out the obvious alternative: that he was with them, but was in no condition to do anything. “Maybe they’re bad guys and this is a trick?” ventured a stallion in the crowd hesitantly.
C. Shells licked her lips. “Or maybe they’re Vanhoover ponies, and he told them how to get here on their own.”
Sonata shook her head. “Lex, wouldn’t do that. He really cares about ponies. Like, a lot. If he brought some back here, he would be with them.” She could feel herself starting to become seriously worried, and that fear ratcheted up a moment later as the knocking came again. “I’m going out there!”
She marched briskly towards the door, and the crowd of ponies parted for her immediately. Only Nosey tried to stop her. “Sonata, hang on! We don’t know who’s out there! What if that’s another monster like the ones that attacked the ship?”
“Then I’ll totes kick their scaly butt!” scoffed Sonata, pushing her way past Nosey without slowing down. “And besides, we have Severance here,” she waved a hoof to indicate the scythe, which was hovering overhead as though monitoring their conversation. Even as she spoke, it moved to follow her towards the door. “If it’s something serious he can handle it no problem, so I’m gonna go out there and see what’s what!”
Nopony else tried to stop her as she reached the door, grabbed the handle, and tugged on it…to no effect. “What the heck?! The door’s stuck!”
“I think that’s part of what Lex did,” ventured Nosey. “He said something about the doors being sealed, as well as disguised.”
“Oh well that’s just great!” Sonata glowered at the door, before turning to look at everypony else. “Help me with this!” In response to her demand, several ponies – all of them stallions – rushed forward to begin prying at the door, trying to yank it open. But after almost a minute of grunting and straining, it still resolutely refused to budge.
“That does it,” growled Sonata. “Everyb-, er, everypony back away from the door!” She waited until everyone was clear before she moved directly in front of the door. “Cover your ears.” She tossed the warning out casually, before muttering the few words needed to activate her spell. A moment later, she vocalized a single note, holding its pitch perfectly, letting the magic amplify and direct it towards the door…which exploded outward a moment later, shattering under the force of her magical assault.
A moment later four nonplussed-looking ponies leaned their heads in the doorway, clearly unnerved by what had just happened. “Hello…?” asked one of them, a white-and-pink pegasus mare.
Sonata stepped forward, opening her mouth, but suddenly lunged forward and interposed herself between the unknown ponies and Severance, which had begun to spin in a cutting motion and work its way towards them. “Hold it!” she yelled at the floating weapon. In response, it stopped its descent, but didn’t cease its threatening rotation.
Ignoring how the foursome, along with everypony else, was watching the exchange with wide eyes, Sonata glared up at Severance. “Okay, like, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to back off.” The weapon’s only response was to make no change in its position or actions, making Sonata frown. She’d never actually talked to Severance before, and wasn’t sure what to say to make it settle down.
“Look,” she began. “I get that Lex told you to protect everypony here, but he left me in charge while he’s gone, so I’m telling you to, like, go cool your…curved-blade thingy, and let these ponies in, you got that?” She did her best to look commanding, and was gratified to see that the blade stopped spinning in place a moment later. But it was still hovering uncomfortably close. In response, Sonata stomped a hoof. “If Lex rescued these ponies, I bet he’ll be really sore that you wouldn’t let them come inside.”
That seemed to do the trick, as Severance floated back to the other side of the room. Sighing in relief, Sonata turned back to the four ponies in the doorway. “Okay, you guys come on in. I’ve got something I want to ask you.”
A coruscating ray from the Cripple flew by Lex’s head, just barely missing him as he spun in place to dodge Monitor’s kick. There was no time to launch a return attack, however, as Lirtkra was diving at him, claws bared and howling with rage. Gripping the trident in his mouth, Lex gave ground, parrying the rain of slashes and answering with two of his own, stabbing the trident deep into the sahuagin’s lower claw before tearing it out and trying to do the same thing to Lirtkra’s face, but missing.
The sahuagin was bleeding from over a half-dozen such injuries, but they seemed to be having little effect on the four-armed creature. In fact, the only noticeable reaction he was having to the accumulated wounds Lex had inflicted on him was to become even angrier, howling and cursing as he fought on. In contrast, Monitor was fighting much more defensively, darting in for quick strikes – often while Lex was busy with Lirtkra – and then retreating before he could turn his full attention to the pudgy thing. All the while, the Cripple kept peppering him with spells from afar, never getting close enough to make itself a target. Most of its attacks weren’t anything Lex couldn’t handle, but there were a few that had been painful to wade through, and they were beginning to take a toll on him.
By Lex’s rough estimation, approximately thirty seconds had passed since he’d used that scroll, and the fact that he hadn’t put even one of his enemies down had eroded the bravado he’d felt so recently. Although he felt reasonably sure that none of his foes knew that he was operating under a time limit – only a dedicated spellcaster should have been able to determine that, and the Cripple hadn’t said anything to its comrades about trying to draw the fight out – they were nevertheless making use of a strategy that capitalized on exactly that.
Again Lirtkra lunged for him, and this time his claws found purchase, opening up a gash on the side of Lex’s neck. But before the sahuagin could try and find enough purchase to tear his throat out, Lex thrust upward, spearing the sahuagin’s arm just under the shoulder, preventing him from moving in further. But it was a small victory, as Lirtkra instead focused on the weapon itself, grabbing the shaft and stepping backward, trying to wrench it from Lex’s grasp. Lex immediately dug his hooves in, but a second later a wooden chair, thrown by Monitor, smashed into him from the side.
The attack had little effect on Lex in his current state – between his defensive enchantments, his magic items, and the body-strengthening effect of that scroll, the chair felt like it was made out of paper – but it distracted him long enough for Lirtkra to give another sharp tug, pulling the trident away. Cursing, Lex turned to grab the rope trailing from the weapon in hopes of renewing the impromptu tug-of-war before it was too late, but at that moment the Cripple hissed another spell. Instantly, the ground under Lex became covered in a layer of slippery grease, causing him to stumble as he tried to keep his balance.
That gave Lirtkra all the time he needed to rip the trident out of his shoulder, apparently uncaring of the blood that immediately began to pour from the wound. Snarling, he moved around the now-greased patch of the floor – right through, Lex noted bitterly, where his acid pit spell had been before it had expired several seconds ago – and launched another attack.
With no weapon except his hooves, Lex was forced to fall back under the assault, moving onto solid ground as he parried the trident with his horn. He didn’t have a chance to even attempt to launch a counterattack before Monitor was suddenly there, aiming a punch at his face. Lex ducked under it, and answered with a punch of his own, but the fish-creature’s body was surprisingly solid, and he doubted that the blow had inflicted much damage. Still, it was enough to cause the thing to back off, buying him a small amount of breathing room. Or so it seemed, but a moment later a black ray lanced down from above to strike him directly on his back. Immediately, Lex felt fatigue coursing through him. It wasn’t enough to completely exhaust him, but already he could feel his breath coming heavier, his muscles starting to feel the strain of extended use, even with the scroll’s magic enhancing them.
Moving away from his enemies, Lex realized that unless he changed tactics, he was going to lose.
The magic of that scroll was going to wear off in less than thirty seconds, and he had yet to bring even a single one of his foes down. He had wounded Lirtkra badly, and Monitor somewhat, but not enough to incapacitate either of them, let alone defeat them. Worse, he no longer had a weapon to fight with, and although he’d regain his ability to use magic once the scroll wore off, Lex had serious doubts that he’d be in any condition to do so. He’d already been hurt badly when he’d used it, after all, and he’d taken several more hits since.
Retreat was the only option left, but at the same time Lex knew that it was no option at all. Even if such a thing had been palatable, there was no reason to believe that the Cripple couldn’t continue tracking him. And even if it couldn’t, they knew where the other ponies were residing, and Lex had no doubt that the defensive spells he’d laid on the place would fail to stand up to any sort of dedicated assault. No, the only acceptable option was to find a way to turn this around...without his magic, without a weapon, and in the next thirty seconds.
The reality of the situation was obvious to more than just Lex, however. Lirtkra sneered as he advanced on the retreating pony, baring his fangs in anticipation of what was to come. “What now, poh-nee? More itkul to help you? Another maa-jik power? How will you survive this time?” Behind him, Monitor and the Cripple hung back, remembering what Lirtkra had said about what would happen if they got in the way of his kill.
Gritting his teeth, Lex continued backing up, until he felt himself hit the wall. Except it wasn’t the wall, he realized as he glanced behind him quickly. It was the bar, the one that Monitor had kicked him through barely a minute ago. The gaping hole that his body had made was still there, the ends of the wood dripping with his blood and the contents of broken bottles.
Broken bottles…
The plan came together in Lex’s mind instantly, and he moved back through the hole he’d made so that he was behind the bar again, speaking even as he fell back. “By killing you,” he shot back, filling his voice with disdain. “It should be easy considering what a pathetic weakling you are.” He saw Lirtkra growl at him, and knew he’d need to lay it on thicker for this to work. “You’ve failed to finish me off how many times now? And you’re the best that your tribe can put forward? No wonder I was able to butcher the rest of your kind so easily!” Even as he kept speaking, Lex surreptitiously glanced around, looking for something, anything, that would make this work…there!
“Poh-nee! I will eat you while you’re still alive!” roared Lirtkra, Lex’s goading having worked. Without hestitation, the sahuagin charged at Lex’s position, hopping the bar and landing directly in front of Lex in the narrow space behind it. Instantly, he stabbed forward, but Lex had been anticipating exactly that move. Crouching beneath the wild strike and then springing upward, he knocked the blow aside…directly into the wooden rack holding the bottles that were kept behind the bar, quite a few of which were still there.
Lirtkra’s lower arms shot out, raking their claws over Lex’s face painfully even as he yanked on the trident, trying to retrieve the weapon from where it had sunk into the rack. But the barbed points of the trident refused to let go so easily, and it was with a frustrated grunt that Lirtkra yanked harder, failing to withdraw his weapon but succeeding in ripping the rack off its supports and fall forward, dumping its bottles onto both of them. For a moment the air was filled with the sound of shattering glass, the pungent smell of fermented drinks immediately filling the air.
Even as that happened, Lex flung himself to the ground, ignoring the shards of glass cutting into his body as he reached for the metal serving tray he’d spotted before. He’d no sooner gotten it in his hooves than he heard Lirtkra snarl, and looked up in time to see the sahuagin toss the wooden rack away with his upper pair of arms, even as his lower pair – now holding his trident – stabbed down at his prone position. Bringing the serving tray up, Lex grit his teeth as he interposed it between himself and the descending trident, even as he calculated the angle most conducive to increasing the friction between the two objects. The trident collided with the tray a fraction of a second later, and instantly the tortured scream of metal on metal rang out, producing a shower of sparks. Both Lirtkra and Lex stared at the sight, the former unfamiliar with what was happening, while the latter silently hoped that the ponies of Vanhoover enjoyed drinks that were a lot stronger than cider…
His hopes were answered a moment later as the sparks hit the spilled contents of the bottles, starting a blaze that instantly spread over both of them, setting them on fire.
Lirtkra’s scream was different from his usual howls, being filled with pain and fear. Instantly, he began to flail, thrashing madly and stumbling to try and get away, his trident falling to the ground as his arms slapped at the flames, trying in vain to beat them out. He turned to leap back over the bar and get away from where the fire was spreading, only to step on a large shard of glass, piercing directly through his foot and causing him to stumble and fall back into the flames, screaming louder as they covered him more.
Lex, by contrast, was silent as he moved, despite his entire body being on fire. Although he felt a vague sense of warmth, that was the sum total of the effect the flames had on him thanks to the still-active protection spell he had used back when the Cripple had cast a fireball at him and the other ponies he’d been escorting. That scroll might have prevented him from using magic, but it didn’t shut down the spells he’d already cast! Knowing that the sudden flames had likely caught Monitor and the Cripple off-guard for only a moment, Lex lunged towards Lirtkra’s discarded trident. Although the motion put him well within his enemy’s reach, the sahuagin was too distracted by the pain of its burning body to notice. Grabbing the weapon in his hooves, Lex heaved himself onto his hind legs, raising it high over his head. A moment later he brought it down, unleashing a scream that was equal parts fury and triumph as he plunged it towards his enemy.
It was the roar of anger and victory – one that he’d made so many times in the past – that finally got Lirtkra’s attention, and he looked up…just in time to see his own weapon punch through his chest, pinning him to the floor. The motion brought Lex’s face within inches of his own, and he saw a look of hateful satisfaction that would have been right at home on any sahuagin’s features cross the poh-nee’s face. “Just like I said,” hissed Lex, “with your own weapon.”
Lirtkra tried to snarl a curse, tried to reach up and tear the trident free of his chest, but the pain was so bad that he couldn’t work up the strength to do so, even as the agony grew with each passing moment. Eventually, he abandoned the attempts and instead reached out to try and grab the wretched poh-nee that had done this to him, jaws snapping with the desire to sink his teeth into that miserable thing that simply refused to die. But he couldn’t reach…couldn’t move his claws…couldn’t kill that…poh…nee…
Lex indulged himself for only a moment, watching as Lirtkra’s thrashing slowed and finally stopped. He knew it was unseemly to take any sort of pleasure in killing, regardless of the nature of his enemy, but he couldn’t help but feel a wicked sense of gratification at seeing the creature die. It’s justice, he silently assured himself. This thing has undoubtedly killed ponies. Probably more than a few. Since it was completely unrepentant, and given that there were no other systems or social mechanisms in place to punish it for its actions, that meant that – even if it hadn’t been trying to kill him, justifying using lethal force in self-defense – this would have been an acceptable penalty for what it had done.
Besides, it wasn’t like the thing had been a pony. Those were the only lives that had to be preserved at all costs.
Turning his mind back to more practical matters, Lex wrapped his teeth around the trident, trying to pull it free from Lirtkra’s corpse. But the weapon refused to budge, wedged firmly into the floor underneath the dead sahuagin, and Lex gave up trying to dislodge it, knowing that he only had a little over ten seconds left before the scroll’s magic ran out. To say nothing of Monitor and the Cripple, who were probably about to move in and check on whether or not Lirtkra had succeeded. Instead, Lex turned and quickly sifted through the debris that had been scattered around during the fight, locating a broken piece of wood. It took only a moment to ignite it thanks to the spreading fire, and he gripped the makeshift weapon tightly as he exited the space behind the bar through the same gap that he’d entered.
As soon as he emerged, Monitor raced towards him, not wasting a second. But Lex had anticipated that, and he threw the burning brand, not towards the onrushing creature, but onto the large patch of grease that the Cripple had previously conjured and which now lay directly in Monitor’s path. It instantly went up in flames, forcing Monitor to throw itself to the side to avoid plunging directly into the sudden inferno. At the same time, he heard the Cripple whisper the words to a spell and a moment later felt drowsy, but he shook it off, turning and making for the door, knowing that the scroll’s magic was about to run out. With any luck, the flames would spread quickly and those two would be caught in the blaze, because he didn’t have any plans left for dealing with them…
Lex had hoped to at least fall back to a safer area before the scroll’s magic ended, but he was still fatigued due to the Cripple’s spell, and couldn’t move as quickly as he wanted. He had only just exited the building, the flames that had been covering his body finally sputtering out, when he felt the magic finally give out, and he collapsed on the spot as the burst of vigor it had given him terminated. Immediately, the wounds he’d taken felt as though they’d worsened a hundredfold, the pain making him reel. For a long moment, it was all he could do just to remain conscious, and it was only with the most extreme effort that he managed to get his hooves under him.
He had almost succeeded when he noticed something drifting next to him, and he gave a start – almost falling over – before he recognized it. It was the spectral hoof he’d conjured, back when he’d been intent on creating an aperture in the restaurant that the undead ponies could enter through. After he’d done that, he’d directed it to hover off to the side, hoping to be able to use it to surreptitiously deliver another spell when his enemies weren’t paying attention. But he’d never had a chance to do so, and now that he’d left its immediate presence, it had followed after him.
It was fortunate that it had. The reason that the spectral hoof was able to deliver spells on his behalf was because a sliver of his own life force was embedded in it. As he looked pointedly at it and concentrated on dismissing the spell, Lex felt that life force return to this body, helping to mitigate the collective agony of his wounds, albeit only slightly. Still, it was enough to let him stand without having to put all of his effort into doing so. Now, the next order of business was to return to his incorporeal state…
He had only just started to concentrate on returning to shadow-form when a nearby window shattered as Monitor leapt through it, the Cripple following closely behind. Lex didn’t have time to do anything more than curse his enemies’ tenacity before the Cripple turned towards him and hissed a spell. Despite its voice still not having risen above a whisper, the volume of its sibilant hissing rapidly rose, and Lex had just enough time to realize that it was making a sonic attack before the sound wave reached him.
Or rather, it would have reached him, but at the same moment the attack was unleashed another voice – soft, melodious, and undeniably feminine – rang out, singing the same words as the Cripple and unleashing the same spell at that exact moment. The clash of magically-enhanced noise melded into perfect harmony, and an instant later they both ceased, having negated each other harmlessly.
Blinking at the sudden assistance, Lex looked behind him, where the counter-magic had come from. He already knew who he’d see, though; he’d know that voice anywhere. Across from him, Monitor and the Cripple were also looking at where the newcomer was boldly striding forward. The former had no reaction save to blink its bulbous eyes, whereas the latter had gone perfectly still, its expression hidden by its blurring spell.
Marching fearlessly onto the battlefield until she was standing between Lex and the creatures intent on hurting him, Sonata Dusk glared her enemies down. “Okay you ugly whatever you are’s! If you lay another, um, claw, I guess? Or maybe fin…? Whatever. On my boyfriend, then I’m totes gonna kick your scaly butts right back where you came from! Unless you came from here, in which case I’ll kick them somewhere else!” The complete silence that reigned in the wake of her speech made her nod to herself, grinning smugly. She had so told them!
“Sonata, what are you doing? Get out of here!” hissed Lex.
She looked back at him with a frown. “No way! You made me a promise that you were coming back, and I’m here to make sure you keep it!”
“These creatures are incredibly dangerous! You need to get back to where it’s safe before you get hurt!”
Sonata turned around so she was facing him directly, stamping a hoof in consternation at his attitude. “Forget it! Every other time there’s been a fight, I’ve either done nothing but cry or needed to be rescued by you! This time I’m going to be the one helping you when you need it, and that’s that!”
“Don’t you dictate to me! I don’t need-”
“YOU!” The Cripple’s hoarse whisper was barely adequate to contain the fury in its voice, and it was enough to draw all eyes towards it. “Forget that other pony!” it rasped, pointing a blurry limb at Sonata. “I want her dead, NOW!”
“Huh? What’d I do?” asked Sonata confusedly. But Monitor was already rocketing towards her, even as the Cripple began to hiss another spell. Cursing, Lex cast a spell of his own, moving to stand in front of Sonata as he unleashed a compact gout of acid towards Monitor. But the pudgy creature easily avoided the shot, ducking under it to let the acid hit the ground and sizzle as it ate at the stone. In an instant, Monitor was in Lex’s face, and he had just enough time to grimace in fear – not for himself, but for Sonata – before it lashed out with a punch that sent him staggering away before collapsing, the world spinning as renewed agony exploded through his brain.
But Monitor’s diverted attention gave Sonata the opening she needed. Biting back a cry of concern for Lex, she instead focused on taking the ugly fish-thingy out. Stepping back to make sure she was out of its reach, she sang a quick enchantment, and it had just turned towards her when she felt the magic take hold. Instantly, Monitor’s body stiffened into rigidity, unable to move. “Hah! I told y-” Her victorious declaration was cut off as the Cripple finished its spell, and four darts of light shot out to slam into Sonata, each hit drawing a pained yelp from her.
The Cripple immediately launched into another spell, but Sonata was faster, rattling off an enchantment that ended in a loud scream, but one which was heard only by her enemy. She’d once used this to snap Lex out of his rage, back when he’d mistakenly thought Fireflower was attacking her. Just like then, the amplified sound interrupted the spell that her opponent was invoking, leaving them momentarily overwhelmed by the pain in their ears. “Hah!” she laughed, unable to resist the urge to strike a triumphant pose. “How do you like me now?”
So intent on her victory was she that she didn’t notice that Monitor was beginning to move, its head turning jerkily towards her as it fought against her paralysis spell. But Lex, lying a few feet away and barely able to move, saw the danger. He tried to call out a warning, to let her know that the enemy she’d dealt with was still a threat, but the simple act of trying to speak sent a wave of nausea through him, and it was all he could do not to black out again.
Across from Sonata, the Cripple cast another spell. Lex didn’t hear what it whispered, but Sonata apparently did, because she…started to laugh? For a moment, his brow furrowed at the sight, but as her laughter continued, growing louder and more raucous, his eyes widened, realizing what had happened. A moment later, Sonata collapsed to the ground, peals of laughter making her shake uncontrollably, caught in the grip of the Cripple’s spell.
Cursing as he realized that Sonata was incapacitated for the immediate future, Lex tried to think of what to do. He didn’t have any way of eliminating the magic that was currently affecting Sonata. Worse, he was completely out of attack spells! But even as his mind raced he saw Monitor clench a fist, and knew that he was almost out of time.
Even concentrating hurt, but Lex forced himself to do it anyway, calling upon his horn’s dark magic as he formed a single black crystal. It wasn’t very large, and was crudely formed, roughly the same shape as a kitchen knife. But it would do.
Slowly, Lex wrapped the pointed crystal in his telekinesis, a purple aura covering it as he lifted it towards Monitor. Normally such a thing would have been simplicity itself, but now the strain made him grit his teeth in effort. Even as he heard the Cripple whispering another spell, he forced himself to focus on what he was doing, even as he saw the blurred creature send a cone of flames washing over Sonata, hearing her cry out in pain before her voice dissolved back into artificial laughter.
Snarling as much in exertion as in anger, Lex slowly lifted the crystal to Monitor’s throat. Just a little more! Just a little more and there’d be one less enemy to worry about! But the creature was starting to tremble, visibly straining against the magic keeping it paralyzed, and Lex knew that it was about to break free. Just a little more…!
The very tip of the crystal had just pierced Monitor’s throat, drawing the tinest drop of blood when its arm snapped up and grabbed it, the paralysis magic finally failing. No! Lex tried to push harder, tried to force the crystal to drive further upward and finish the creature off, but succeeded only in finally hitting his limit, the purple aura around the crystal sputtering out as he couldn’t keep the effort up any longer.
It was over. They had lost, and now…they were both going to die.
As though she’d realized that herself, Sonata’s laughter suddenly cut off. It was so abrupt that both Lex and Monitor looked over at her reflexively. Even the Cripple seemed surprised. The only one to act in that moment was Sonata, chanting so fast that Lex couldn’t make out the spell she was intoning. But a moment later she looked towards Monitor and screamed.
“GOTCHA!”
The word contained so much force that it was felt rather than heard. It was the same spell that she’d used on the ship to launch two of the sahuagin overboard, and right now it was directed towards Monitor.
…or rather, towards the crystal that it was holding, still pointed towards its neck.
Propelled by the concussive waves of sound, the crystal was torn free from Monitor’s grip. It shot forward as though it had been fired from a bow, and it pierced the pudgy fish-creature’s head cleanly, exploding out the back of it before flying off to embed itself deeply in a nearby building. For its part, Monitor blinked once, and for the first time Lex could make out a discernable emotion on the thing’s face: surprise.
Then it collapsed, dead before it hit the ground.
Sonata smirked, before directing her gaze at Lex. “Told you I could help,” she grinned. Lex couldn’t help but return the expression, too relieved to do anything else.
But that relief was short-lived as he noticed the Cripple moving. It was flying towards them, and Lex tensed, readying himself for whatever magic it was going to unleash next. Sonata, not hurt nearly as badly as he was, scrambled to her hooves. But their enemy passed over them without stopping, nor did it cast any magic. Instead it simply flew as fast as it could, and it took a moment for the pair to realize that it was running, apparently intent on quitting the field.
“Ha!” whooped Sonata, shaking a hoof at the thing’s retreating figure. “Yeah, you better run!”
“No!” snarled Lex, struggling in vain to get up. “Stop that thing!”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, looking at Lex in confusion.
“It’s heading for the waterfront! If it escapes, it can bring others later!” There was audible anxiety in Lex’s voice. That thing knew where they were taking refuge. If it got away, it would be able to relay that information to whatever other undersea monsters it was in league with, which would severely compromise the shelter’s security. “Stop it before it gets away!”
“But I, like, used all my hold-still magic!”
“No…” Lex looked at the retreating creature, and felt his anger and frustration rising. After all the injuries he’d taken, all of the pain and effort he’d gone through, after having to stand by helpless while his beloved was injured right in front of him, the idea of it all being for naught was utterly unacceptable! That thing could not be allowed to escape! “STOP!” he roared. He didn’t have a plan, didn’t know what to do, simply pouring his frustration out as he demanded that it accede to his will.
And then, to his astonishment, the Cripple obeyed, immediately coming to a halt.
For a moment, he gaped, and he could see Sonata doing the same out of his periphery. Why had- No. He knew why. He just hadn’t realized that he’d known.
“Like, what’s going on?” asked Sonata, going over to kneel down by Lex, glancing between him and the Cripple.
“It’s the Night Mare’s power,” he replied softly, amazed that it had worked. He hadn’t even thought to use it during the fight, having written it off before they’d left Tall Tale due to the numerous failed attempts to have it affect anything besides Waterlily. It hadn’t worked on animals or ponies or anything else other than the aranea, and he’d lost confidence in its effectiveness to the point of having mentally written it off. Clearly that had been a mistake.
“Wow,” said Sonata. “You know, that would have been a lot easier if you’d done that before.”
“Yeah,” acknowledged Lex with a snort that was almost a laugh. Under normal circumstances he’d have been indignant, but at the moment he was too hurt and too tired to bother. Instead, he directed his attention back towards the Cripple. “Come here.”
He could feel it struggling against him, but it was like a fish in a net, powerless to control what happened to it. Slowly, it turned around and floated back towards him, until it was hovering just a few feet away. Sonata bit her lip, tensing at being that close to something that had been trying to kill them less than a minute ago. “You’re sure you’ve got it?”
“I’ve got it,” responded Lex confidently. “I’ll show you. Look.” He focused his will on the Cripple as he gave it an order. “Drop your blur spell immediately.” A moment later, the creature’s distorted appearance smoothed out, revealing itself. Lex was about to give Sonata a self-satisfied look when he heard her give a strangled gasp. “Sonata? What’s wrong?”
She didn’t answer him, staring at the Cripple with a look of total shock on her face, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. Lex was about to ask her again when she managed to regain some control over herself, her jaw working soundlessly for a moment until finally, one word passed her lips.
“I see it,” answered Block Party, looking through the binoculars at where Spit Polish was pointing. The sight of a building on fire near the wharf was clearly visible, but only barely. There were too many buildings in the way and not enough other light sources to see anything going on around it.
“I think that if we have the local pegasi grab some buckets and fly down there, they should be able to put it out before it gets too bad. They’ll be right next to the water, so they shouldn’t have too much trouble, and-”
“No.”
Spit Polish stopped talking immediately, just to be safe. Everypony knew that Block Party hated to be interrupted or talked over, and that the penalty for doing so was severe. Peachy Keen was still limping from the last time she’d made that mistake. It was only after he’d been silent for a few moments that Spit Polish felt certain that Block Party wasn’t going to elaborate, meaning that it was safe to speak again. “Sir, we need to put that fire out! If it starts to spread, there won’t be any way to stop it! The whole city could be at risk!”
“I said no,” came Block Party’s soft reply. He put down the binoculars a moment later, turning to look Spit Polish directly in the eye, and the other stallion had to fight down the urge to back away in fear. Block Party’s expression hadn’t changed, still looking calm to the point of almost seeming bored, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d had that same look on his face while he’d been punishing Peachy, after all.
Seeing that Spit Polish wasn’t about to try and argue with him again, Block Party started to explain his thinking. “That building is on the other side of Vanhoover. Sending a team of pegasi there, having them fight the fire, and then flying back, is too much. They’d never be able to do all of that without stopping to rest, which means they’d be at risk.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Even if they aren’t torn apart by ghouls, do you want to be the one to tell them that we can’t let them leave the city because they might be infected?”
“N-no, but-”
“More than that,” continued Block Party, causing Spit Polish to immediately cease talking, “we have to consider that it might not be so bad if the fire does spread. Doing so would doubtlessly kill a lot of the ghouls infesting the city, which means we wouldn’t be stuck waiting for them to starve or turn on each other.”
Spit Polish’s eyes widened in horror. “But sir! There are still survivors in the city too! We know that! If a fire spreads, they’d be at risk too! We can’t ju-”
“Stop.”
Quieting instantly, Spit Polish felt his nervousness increase as Block Party gave a soft sigh, a look of disappointment crossing his face before it returned to its usual look. “We’ve been through this before. We’ve all had to make difficult decisions, difficult choices about what’s best, not just for ourselves or even for Vanhoover, but for all of Equestria.” Sweeping a hoof back in the direction of Vanhoover, Block Party continued. “We know that whatever this sickness is that’s turning ponies into ghouls is contagious. That’s why we can’t let anything in Vanhoover leave, whether it’s the ghouls or other survivors.”
Spit Polish bit his lip, ears folding back and eyes lowering as he remembered the numerous times that they’d had to force surviving ponies to turn away and head back into the city. They’d begged and pleaded to be let out, many of them asking for them to at least take their foals, or their parents, or their friends. In return they’d received harsh warnings, and when those hadn’t been enough, thrown rocks or blasts of magic or anything else that would drive them off. There’d been one a few days ago, a crystal stallion that hadn’t even asked to be let out, just for them to please spare some medicine for a sick friend of his. The look that he’d given Spit Polish after his rock had hit him was one that still haunted him.
Block Party seemed to sense his unicorn lieutenant’s wavering resolve, because he strode forward and put a hoof under Spit Polish’s chin, making him raise his gaze until they were making eye contact. “We absolutely have to keep this quarantine intact. Say it.”
“That’s right. Not one pony. Not one ghoul. And especially not one word about what’s happening here. If the princesses find out, they’ll want to show up in person, and if that happens and they get infected, it could be the end of everything.”
Spit Polish wanted to protest, to insist that the princesses would be able to fix this the way that they had always fixed everything. But he knew it would only earn him a beating if he tried, and besides, Block Party’s logic wasn’t entirely wrong. There was a chance that the princesses could get infected, even if Spit Polish didn’t think it was a very large chance. And, as much as he hated to admit it, a small part of him didn’t want the princesses to just show up and fix everything. He and everypony else here had done terrible things – had needed to do terrible things – in order to try and stop the situation in Vanhoover from spreading beyond the city. To have the alicorns make it all better in a blast of rainbow-colored magic felt like it would belittle how hard they’d worked and how many of their principles they’d been forced to compromise in order to protect Equestria.
Once again, Block Party seemed to pick up on his lieutenant’s feelings, and lowered his hoof from under his chin, even as the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “Good. Now, I want you to continue keeping an eye on that fire. If it starts to spread, I want to know in what direction.”
Spit Polish nodded, and Block Party turned to leave. But before he had gotten more than a few steps, Spit Polish called out to him. “Sir?”
Stopping, Block Party gave the barest of glances back over his shoulder. The sight made Spit Polish gulp, but he continued. “I, er, didn’t have a chance to tell you before. That ship, the one that we saw entering the harbor yesterday evening…it’s docked at the harbor now. It has been all day, ever since the sun rose.” He paused for a long moment, and the silence was so oppressive that it was almost tangible. “What should we do?”
Block Party turned his head back, leaving Spit Polish unable to see his expression. “Nothing for now.” He started to walk away again, speaking as he moved. “We’re stretched thin enough that we can’t afford to do anything about one ship that’s just sitting there. If it tries to leave, then we’ll take action, but until then just keep an eye on it.”
“…yes sir,” replied Spit Polish, his voice thick with confusion. Block Party’s casual attitude towards that ship seemed completely at odds with how strident he was about maintaining the quarantine around the town. It made perfect sense that they didn’t have any sort of naval presence – all of Vanhoover’s docks were part of the quarantine zone, after all, which made it rather difficult to have any sort of patrol boats – but if whoever had sailed in on that ship decided to get back on board and sail away, they’d be very hard-pressed to stop them. So why was Block Party so unconcerned about that?
Mentally shrugging, Spit Polish turned back to regard the distant fire, hearing the other stallion walk away. Asking for an explanation would only get him a fresh set of bruises, he knew. Block Party doubtlessly had some sort of plan in mind. After all, he was the one who had gotten them together and organized everything after it had become obvious that no help was coming. All that we need to do is follow his orders, Spit Polish silently assured himself. If we just do what he says, eventually everything will go back to normal.
He had repeated that to himself over and over in the last several weeks, almost like a mantra. He was sure that if he kept trying, he’d even start to believe it soon…
Block Party barely acknowledged the ponies that he passed, though they all made sure to step out of his way and nod respectfully as he did. A few approached him, wanting his opinion about some minor matter or another, but he instructed them to take it up with one of the ponies that he’d designated as his primary servants and kept moving. Right now he had more important things to focus on.
Keeping an entire city under quarantine meant that the ponies guarding it had to live outside of the city proper. The result was a virtual shantytown that now ringed the northern half of the city, composed of little more than tents, lean-tos, and poorly-constructed shacks. The only real building was the train station, which was located just outside of the city proper, and which now served as his personal living quarters and base of operations. Of course, the “operations” were a sham, and the knowledge of that always made him have to struggle to keep the smile off of his face. As it was, he was still amazed that no one had figured it out, though he shouldn’t have been. When things seemed hopeless, anyone would believe a sweet-sounding lie, he knew.
Vanhoover, like apparently all cities in Equestria, was a city without walls. Even considering that there was an ocean to its west and a river to its south – beyond which lay miles of impassible marshlands – you could still enter or exit the city anywhere along its northern or eastern edges. True, he had ponies patrolling along those edges, but there was no way that a ragtag group of desperate, half-starved individuals could keep watch over miles and miles of a city’s edge.
What they could do, however, was serve as a deterrent. Ghouls were naturally cowardly creatures, and even the appearance of serious resistance would be enough to keep them inside the city where feeding was less dangerous for them. At least until the food supply, in the form of the surviving ponies, grew too thin to satisfy their appetites; then they’d likely attack en masse, which would probably result in the ponies outside the city being slaughtered, but he didn’t really care about that.
What he did care about was the other function the patrols served, which was to keep the ponies of Vanhoover pitted against each other. The sight of watching friends and neighbors turning on each other, driving their kin back into the filthy, dangerous city, even as they cried and begged for help, gave him a warm glow inside. It was a situation he wanted to preserve as long as possible, before the ghoul plague finally burst forth from this city like maggots erupting out of a corpse. It probably wouldn’t be much longer now, in all likelihood.
But in order to do that, he had to keep up the farce about a quarantine, and a ship blithely sailing into the harbor ran counter to that. As it was, it was enough to make him frown; the sahuagin and their ilk should have taken care of the ship’s crew before they ever reached the docks. That they hadn’t – or worse, couldn’t – was enough to warrant an inquiry as to what was going on.
Entering the station and locking himself in, Block Party quickly checked to make sure he was alone. Confirming that he had the building all to himself as usual, he concentrated for a few moments before he began to speak. “Oh Great Lord of the Deep,” he intoned, unable to resist the urge to roll his eyes at the grandiose title that beast insisted on, “the ship I alerted you to yesterday made it to the docks. I want it destroyed, if you please.”
The magic only allowed for twenty-five words to be sent, but it also laced the words with the power of suggestion, and he knew it would be difficult for that thing to resist. Sure enough, a moment later a guttural voice responded. “I am most displeased. My slaves have failed me, to have let such a thing continue to exist. I will take care of it personally.”
Block Party smiled. The spell was over, meaning that nothing else he said would be transmitted, but he couldn’t resist speaking aloud anyway. “I look forward to your results.”
Lex’s brow furrowed, looking at how his girlfriend was staring at the Cripple in slack-jawed surprise, whereas it was glaring back at her with a look of hatred. A moment later it occurred to him that Sonata was calling the thing by name. “Wait… you know this creature?” Even as he asked the question, his brain was already spinning, trying to figure out how Sonata could possibly know some Everglow monster. Maybe she had met it during her time there, as improbable as that seemed?
But his theory was blown out of the proverbial water a moment later when Sonata turned to him, still visibly shocked. “It’s…this is Aria. Aria Blaze. One of my sisters.”
“What?!” Now it was Lex’s turn to look shocked, turning his gaze back to the monstrous creature, looking it over again.
Over ten feet long, the thing’s bottom half was that of a fish with light violet scales. But its light purple upper body was that of a pony, save for the mulberry-colored fins on its hooves, head, and running down its back. But it was its face that horrified Lex the most, not because it was hideous but because it was beautiful. Even despite the lips pulled back in a snarl and the way its eyes were narrowed in a glare, there was an attractive femininity there that was impossible to deny. Worst of all was that, as much as he wanted to disbelieve his girlfriend’s claim, Lex could see the resemblance between this monstrosity and his beloved. For all that their bodies looked nothing alike, he could see how their eyes were the same shape, how their muzzles resembled each other just slightly. In that instant he knew that Sonata was right; this thing was her kin.
Intellectually, he had always known that Sonata hadn’t been born a pony. She had never hidden the fact that she had been born as a Siren on Equestria – let alone that she had spent time as a human on that “Earth” world – but that had never been anything more than a footnote in Lex’s mind. He had never had much use for the past, whether his own or anypony else’s, save for whatever data could be taken from it that could be put to practical uses in the here-and-now; as such, his girlfriend’s true nature was a detail without any salience, and thus easily ignored…until now.
Now he had no choice but to confront the hard truth that the pony who meant more to him than anyone else…might not really be a pony at all.
Struggling with that thought, Lex only barely noticed as the Cripple – as Aria – surged towards Sonata as though to attack her. But she was still held fast within the Night Mare’s power, and he idly raised a hoof, bringing her to a halt, thrashing uselessly in anger. “Don’t you call me that!” it, no, she rasped. “You don’t get to call me your sister after what you did!”
Sonata stepped back, more under the verbal assault than the aborted attack. “What? What’d I do?”
The question seemed to enrage Aria, and she struggled more, though still without any success. “You abandoned us! No, you betrayed us! We could have won that fight and taken over that castle and made everyone there adore us! It could have been the start of our taking over that world! But instead you turned on me and Adagio and we were all captured!”
Lex looked at his girlfriend. “What is she talking about?” He was only half paying attention, trying to solve the problem of Sonata’s racial heritage, but that was no reason to neglect what was being said.
She gave him a rather helpless look in reply. “She…we’d, like, just gotten to Everglow, and were making trouble again like we always did, taking over some big castle in Viljatown.”
Lex’s eyebrows rose slightly. “You attacked the heart of the imperial capital?” He knew that Sonata had been in some sort of legal trouble when he’d met her, and that it had something to do with causing an incident with the local officials, but he’d had no idea it was for something so serious!
“I guess. But Aria and Adagio were being, like, totes mean to me, just like always.” Sonata seemed to recover her poise somewhat as she remembered that, shooting Aria a frown. “So I decided I’d had enough, and split.” She paused long enough to stick her tongue out at her sister. “Best decision I ever made.”
“You selfish idiot!” raged Aria. “Do you have any idea what they did to me after we were captured?! Do you?!”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t care either,” replied Sonata flippantly, turning her nose up, before something else occurred to her. “And now that I think about it, why are you being all whispery like that? It’s really weird. Just talk normally.”
“I CAN’T!” Aria’s whisper was throat-scratchingly raw, as she leaned her head up and pointed a hoof at the base of her neck. Both Lex and Sonata looked closer, noticing the horizontal scar there. Lex frowned deeply, immediately understanding what he was looking at, but Sonata only cocked her head in confusion.
“What the heck happened to you? Did you get that in the fight just now?”
“They cut my throat, you moron!” hissed Aria. “They took away my voice! I pleaded with them not to! I begged them to stop, but they held me down and put me to sleep and when I woke up, I couldn’t talk anymore! And it’s all because of you!” Tears had begun pouring down her cheeks, and her whispers were ragged, but the look of hate on her face had only grown more profound, and Sonata fell back under its intensity, her face turning pale as she fully realized what had happened to her sister.
“I, I didn’t know…” she sputtered.
But Aria wasn’t finished. “After that they sent me back here, completely alone. I couldn’t sing, couldn’t speak, couldn’t use any magic at all. Do you know how hard it was just to survive? I was reduced to living on seaweed! SEAWEED!” She let that hang in the air, seething for a moment, before she kept speaking. “But I still had my gem,” she said, tapping the jewel on her chest. “And eventually I realized that I could still whisper, even if I couldn’t speak. And you know what I found, Sonata? That even if I can’t sing anymore, there’s still other kinds of magic out there. It’s crude, compared to what I could do before, but it’s better than nothing.”
Lex tilted his head to the side, looking at the gemstone embedded just below the scar on Aria’s neck with an intrigued expression. A mental command was all it took to activate his circlet, and a few moments later he’d confirmed that the jewel was magical in nature. But while it was not-inconsiderable in strength, the actual type of magic wasn’t clear. That might be significant, he decided. Aria didn’t have a cutie mark that he could see, so if he wanted to investigate his new theory – that Sirens themselves were some sort of mutated ponies, which would mean that Sonata had been one of his kind all along – then that gemstone would likely be a salient point.
Satisfied for the moment, Lex turned all of his full attention back to his captive. He could still feel her trying to shake off the power binding her, and mentally reinforced it, crushing her resistance as easily as he would have a paper cup. “What about those creatures you were with? Tell me why you were working with them.”
“The sahuagin and the rest arrived after me,” replied Aria, unable to resist Lex’s command. Only her eyes showed any defiance. “I don’t know where they came from, just that a couple of them appeared out of nowhere one day and tried to kill me. I returned the favor, but more showed up later, armed with nets. They dragged me back to their village and told me that I could either serve or be eaten. I chose to serve.”
Lex narrowed his eyes at the account. She’d provided extremely few details, and he had the distinct impression that she was holding back as much as she was able, purely to spite him. For a moment he considered interrogating her further, but a sudden wave of nausea dispelled that idea, reminding him that he was hurt badly. He’d need to finish pumping her for information later.
Oblivious to Lex’s thoughts, Sonata licked her lips. “Listen, Aria...” she faltered for a moment at the dark look her sister threw at her, but forced herself to keep going. “What happened to you was totes awful, but it wasn’t my fault!” The light from the burning building – which by now was starting to go up in its entirety – highlighted the pleading look on her face. “Even if I had stayed with you guys, it wouldn’t have changed anything for you.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Like, yes I do! Every time we’ve ever caused trouble it’s come back to bite us! We tried to take over Equestria and we got our butts kicked, and then we tried to take over Earth and got our butts kicked! You always called me the dumb one, but when we tried to take over Everglow, even I could see how it was gonna end, and I was tired of getting my butt kicked!”
“So that’s your excuse for stabbing us in the back?”
“Huh? I didn’t stab anybody, I just went over to the other side,” frowned Sonata in confusion, before shaking her head. “Whatever. Look, my point is, we’re no good at trying to take over places that begin with an ‘E,’ and probably not anyplace else either, so I wanted to quit. And you two made it super easy, with how awful you always were.”
“You deserved it,” snapped Aria sullenly. “Having to listen to you struggle to put a thought together was always the worst.”
“Well having to hear you complain all the time was worser than worst,” shot back Sonata instantly, not realizing that she was falling back into old habits.
“Both of you, be quiet,” ordered Lex. The two of them gave him identical pouts in response, but complied. Satisfied, Lex turned to Aria. “You will stay here until I return.”
He’d started to turn towards Sonata, but she spoke up before he had a chance to open his mouth. “What do you mean ‘return’? Where are you going?”
Lex pointed to the burning restaurant behind her. “First, I’m going to go retrieve our gear before the fire consumes it-”
“You can’t go back in there! That place is on fire! Like, you know…a lot!”
“I have an enchantment on myself that protects me from damaging heat,” said Lex, forcing himself to speak calmly. He felt slightly less exhausted than he had a minute ago, and suspected it was because the Cri-…because Aria’s spell of fatigue had worn off, but that didn’t mean that he felt at all more energetic. Quite the opposite, his wounds seemed to hurt worse with each passing moment. But this time will be different, he vowed to himself silently. This time I won’t need somepony else’s help to survive.
Sonata looked uncertain, looking him over in clear concern. “Okay, but-”
“After that,” he interrupted, “we’ll need to think of a way to put this fire out. If it spreads, it could cause severe damage to Vanhoover. Once we’ve done that, then we’ll go back to the shelter and figure out what to do next.”
“What about me?” asked Aria, still frowning at him.
“I’ll deal with you later,” replied Lex grimly. Without another word to either of them, he strode into the burning building, walking right through the flames without the slightest show of concern.
Silence reigned for a moment as the two sisters watched the building burning, before Sonata finally spoke. “So…what does seaweed taste like?”
Aria’s only response was to grit her teeth and bring a hoof to her face in exasperation.
The entire building was ablaze by the time Lex had finished gathering his gear.
Despite the spreading flames, most of it was relatively undamaged, but several small items that were necessary foci for particular spells had already caught fire and were almost totally destroyed. Nevertheless, Lex collected them as well, knowing that the repair spell he had – one of the smattering of divine spells that the Night Mare had bestowed upon him – would be able to restore them. But, practically speaking, that would take some time; due to the extremely small amount of divine magic that he could use per day, and the more pressing issues that required its application, such as creating food or healing the injured, repairing his gear would be a slow process.
Which means that, for now, we’re completely cut off from the rest of Equestria, realized Lex as he picked up the twisted ruins of what had once been an ornate mirror. Although he’d prepared a scrying spell – allowing him to spy on someone from afar, presuming that the magic was able to focus in on them – it required the mirror to function. He had prepared it so that, once a connection had been established, he could try and project his voice through the conduit via the same spell that he used to transfer his whispering to Sonata. In that way, it would have been possible to have an entire conversation with someone in a remote location. The only decision left had been whether or not to swallow his pride and contact the princesses for help once he’d gotten back to the shelter. But that was a moot point now.
He had other long-range communication spells, of course – specifically one that allowed for reciprocal messages of twenty-five words or less to be exchanged with an individual, regardless of their location – but the scrying spell was the only one that he’d actively prepared. Now he’d need to rest and replenish his magic if he wanted to send a long-range message either way. It was another setback in what had been a seemingly endless series of them ever since he’d arrived in Vanhoover…though at least it meant that he had some more time before having to figure out whether or not to call on the princesses.
Giving a sigh as he gathered the last of his things, Lex had just finished shoving them into his extradimensional pack when a burning rafter crashed down a few feet to his left, causing him to start in surprise. Just that small motion was enough to make his head swim, and he felt another bout of nausea start to come on. Fighting it down, he started towards the exit. He might still be protected from fire, but if the building collapsed on him, he’d be in trouble…and the fact that such a thing hadn’t occurred to him before now, to say nothing of not having thought to return to shadow-form before he’d entered, was enough to make him realize just how bad off he was.
Lurching out of the building, Lex had barely stepped out of it when Sonata ran towards him. “Finally! I was getting worried!”
“I’m f-”
“Don’t even try to say you’re fine! You’re, like, totes beaten up!” Despite Sonata’s words, there was no heat in her voice. Quite the opposite, she was still kicking herself for having been so taken with Aria’s unexpected reappearance that she’d forgotten how awful Lex looked. “Come on, we’re going back right now so those doctors we brought can patch you up.”
“No.” Lex started to shake his head, but immediately stopped when just that motion made him sway dangerously. Sonata was by his side in an instant, letting him lean against her, and he didn’t protest her help. She was the one person whose assistance wasn’t an indictment of his strength. “We have to put that fire out first.”
Frowning, Sonata knew better than to protest; that would just make him get all snippy. Instead, she shot a look over at Aria, who had been sullenly watching their exchange. "You do it!” she snapped. It was finally starting to get through to her that Aria was part of the reason that her boyfriend was hurt so bad. “If you’ve got different magic now, you have a spell for that, right?”
“I don't,” snorted Aria, making sure to give her sister a bored look to show just how unconcerned she was with whatshisname. “And even if I did, I used up most of my magic earlier, so nothing doing.”
Sonata scowled. “So you’re, like, no help at all then.”
“I don’t want to hear that from you.”
“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?!”
“Exactly what you think it means,” sneered Aria. “Oh, wait, thinking’s not your strong point, right? Fine, I’ll explain it: it means that you’re still the same useless idiot you always were, needing to be led around by someone else just t-”
“Shut up,” interrupted Lex, glaring at Aria harshly. His voice was soft, but it carried an absolute command that caused her jaw to close with an audible snap.
“Hah! Serves you right!” jeered Sonata. She turned to give Lex a big grin, only to be reminded of why she’d started fighting with Aria in the first place as she again saw how ragged he looked. “I mean, um…let’s, like, totes put that fire out.”
“I’ll do it myself,” retorted Lex, the harsh edge in his voice causing Sonata to wince slightly. Not noticing her discomfort, he moved slightly away from her, standing on his own four hooves as he turned around and faced the burning structure. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he held a hoof out towards the flames and concentrated. Slowly, black crystals began to spread over the structure…
Lex knew that he didn’t have sufficient dark magic remaining to completely cover the place. He wouldn’t have had enough even if he’d been completely replenished. But that was only taking his normal capabilities into account. If he pushed himself the way he had when he’d fought the dragon, when he’d utilized his ability to enhance magic via bodily strain in conjunction with his dark magic, then he felt sure that he should be able to cover the entire building. It had worked then, which meant that there was no reason why it shouldn’t work now.
Holding his breath with the effort, Lex couldn’t suppress a low groan at the level of exertion it required, but he could feel it working. Even as he watched, the black crystals spread further, and where they moved the fire was instantly quenched, being unable to burn the solidified darkness. It was still using up a lot of his dark magic, but the results were far beyond what he’d ever have been able to achieve ordinarily.
Finally, the entire building was encompassed, and Lex lowered his hoof, panting with effort. Next to him, Sonata gave a cheer. “Wow! You, like, made the whole place into a big ugly snow globe! Can I try shaking it?”
Lex opened his mouth to reply, but didn’t have a chance before the world suddenly began to spin. He tried to keep his balance, but the sudden pain in his side let him know that he’d failed, and he heard Sonata call his name in alarm. A moment later he felt her grip him and try to get him back on his hooves, and that made things even worse. Reflexively, he pushed her away, managing to turn his head to the side just before he was violently ill, emptying the contents of his stomach onto the ground.
Sonata recoiled, and it was only after Lex had finished throwing up that she tentatively approached him again. When he didn’t push her back this time, she moved to let him lean on her again, just listening to him pant for breath for a moment before speaking. “Okay, for realsies. Doctor. Now. We don’t have Fireflower’s brother here if you get any worse.”
Aria watched quietly as the two of them began to stagger towards the warehouse, Sonata half-carrying that stallion. Silently, she bit her lip, hoping against hope that he was too hurt to remember her. She felt sure that if she just had a little more time, she’d be able to slip out of whatever it was he’d done to her, and then she’d be able to get away! But they hadn’t even gone a half-dozen steps when he managed to half-glance back at her and softly mutter “follow.” Even as she heard the command, she started to move, floating slowly behind the pair.
As they reached their destination, Lex mentally lowered the illusion covering the door, only to blink in surprise as he saw that said door now had a hole large enough for two ponies to pass through in the middle of it. Sonata chuckled weakly. “Oh yeah, I forgot. So, um, it turned out that the door wouldn’t open, so I kinda had to get a teensy bit medieval on it.”
Lex tried to glare at her, but in his current condition it was little more than a sidelong glance. “This is a major breach in our defenses,” he muttered darkly. But there was little he could do about it in his current state, and the two of them stumbled inside, Aria following a moment later.
Once inside, the pace was slow, but Lex was able to easily guide them through the misty passages back to the shelter, causing Sonata to have to fight the urge to roll her eyes. She’d gotten lost several times while trying to leave, only finding the way out through sheer dumb luck. A moment later they passed through the black mist, and it was Lex’s turn to look disgusted when he saw that the door to the interior office was in the same condition as the exterior door.
Putting the matter out of his thoughts for now, he instead focused on the next thing that needed to be taken care of. Although he could already see several ponies looking at them through the open doorway, he was more concerned about the floating scythe in the air behind them. “Severance,” he called softly, and it floated closer obediently. Turning his head just barely to try and fight down the dizziness that threatened to send him sprawling again, he spoke to Aria. “Go lie down against the outer wall of this office and stay there.” When she moved to obey, he turned back to Severance, gripping it in his telekinesis to establish a two-way line of communication. “That…Siren, is my prisoner. Do not let her leave or cast any spells. If she tries to do either, incapacitate her.”
“Lex...” Sonata’s voice was thick with worry, glancing between him and Severance. “It won’t, I mean,” she turned to regard the scythe directly, “you won’t, like…seriously hurt her, right?”
Lex was silent for a moment, then repeated what the living weapon had told him. “Severance can cut without wounding, apparently.”
Sonata’s head cocked to the side in incomprehension. “What does that mean?”
“It means that she won’t be in any serious danger.” He paused then, and turned to regard Aria directly, knowing that she’d heard what they’d said. Nevertheless, he could feel that his control over her was getting ready to expire, and he wasn’t going to be in a position to renew it this time. So it would be best to make it clear to her what he expected of her for now. “You’re to stay there until I’m ready to deal with you. I strongly advise you not to try anything in the meantime.” His statement was punctuated by Severance moving to hover over the pouting Siren.
“And who exactly made you the boss of me?” Aria shot back sourly.
“The Night Mare,” answered Lex, managing a smirk as he turned away from her and headed inside.
As Lex staggered into the shelter, still being supported by Sonata, the two of them were greeted with open-mouthed stares. The sight made Sonata blink, looking around confusedly. “What’s everypony staring at?” Silently, she congratulated herself for saying it right that time.
“What are we st-, look at the two of you! You’re hurt!” The outburst came, rather surprisingly, from Nosey, who turned to look at the other ponies in the room. “Some of you are doctors, right? Do something!” That was enough to snap everypony out of their stupefied state, and a moment later Lex and Sonata found themselves surrounded before being ushered off to the side of the room, where several stallions and a few mares were already laying out medical supplies.
Sighing, Nosey belatedly took out her notepad and scribbled a few lines, but her heart wasn’t in it. Instead she looked over at where Lex and Sonata were being treated. Since the shelter was one big room, there wasn’t really any privacy there, letting her easily notice that the majority of the medical ponies were focused on Lex, with only two attending Sonata. When she saw the doctors encourage Lex to lie down a moment later, she couldn’t help but bite her lip. Why was she feeling so out of it? After having been cooped up in this place for almost a day with nothing to do, a new story should have been just the pick-me-up she needed. Instead, she felt like…like…
“Think they’re going to be okay?” The voice came from Nosey’s left, ruining her train of thought, and she looked over at the brown pegasus mare with the black mane and tail, recognizing her as one of the group that Sonata had let in before she’d gone charging out after the newcomers had said that Lex was in a fight. She had been meaning to talk to them, but they’d spent the last several minutes getting cleaned up, having a combination of bruises and other minor injuries. Now seemed like as good a chance as any.
Forcing herself to perk up, Nosey managed a smile. “They’ll be fine. Sonata doesn’t look like she’s hurt too badly, and Lex…” she trailed off for a moment before rallying. “I’ve seen him come through worse.”
“Really?” The other mare’s eyebrows rose, and she looked at Nosey for a moment to see if she was joking, and when she realized that she wasn’t her eyes turned back towards Lex with renewed appreciation.
“Oh yeah. You should see the pictures I took of him when he fought a dragon all by himself.” The thought of her forthcoming book made Nosey’s smile more honest, feeling better at just the thought of it, though nowhere near as intoxicating as it had been before.
“Oh come on,” interjected a new voice, and both glanced over as another one of the newcomers, this one a pegasus mare with a white coat and a pink mane and tail, joined them. Nosey blinked at the sight of their new companion; she looked a lot like a female version of whatshisname, Fireflower’s brother who had generously volunteered his room after he’d been made to go wash dishes at Busy Bee’s. Idly she wondered if this mare was a magic-using spider-pony also. Meanwhile, the other mare kept speaking. “Nopony can fight a dragon off single-hoofedly.”
“This one did,” insisted Nosey. “I still have the photographs if you want to see them.”
“I would!” replied the other pegasus immediately, causing her companion to scowl.
“Listen, I once sat through a magic show by a mare who said that she’d defeated an ursa major, and that was unbelievable enough as it was. Saying that there’s a pony who could defeat a dragon all on their own, other than the princesses, is so farfetched that-”
“Here they are!” said Nosey as she fished her photographs out of her bag, holding them towards the pair in the gray glow of her telekinesis. She grinned as she did so, once again feeling the thrill of reporting on something to ponies that hadn’t heard about it yet. It was enough to make her forget about whatever had been bothering her up until now.
“Oh wow!” oohed the brown pegasus as she looked at the photographs. With each one, her eyes seemed to sparkle more, until she looked completely dazzled by what she was seeing. “He’s incredible,” she murmured, casting another look back at where Lex was being treated, though by now he was completely hidden behind the cluster of doctors.
Her friend seemed to be having exactly the opposite reaction, looking at the photos with a mixture of amazement and trepidation. “He really fought a dragon…? And won?” she muttered to herself, but loud enough to be overheard.
“Yep! I took the photos myself. I’m Nosey Newsy, ace reporter, by the way.”
“I’m Thermal Draft, but everypony calls me Drafty,” introduced the brown pegasus, before pointing at her friend. “And this is Cloudbank.” She nudged her friend, but the only response that Cloudbank gave was a grunt, still staring at the photographs.
“You two were part of the group that Lex brought back, right?” Nosey asked, notepad and pencil at the ready. She already knew the answer, but it was always better to get a subject to directly confirm something that she hadn’t personally witnessed.
Drafty nodded. “Yeah, us and our friends.” She pointed to a corner of the room, where a green-coated earth pony stallion was doing his best to comfort a depressed-looking crystal mare. “That’s Produce Aisle and Comfy Cozy.” She paused as Nosey wrote their names down, then added, “We wouldn’t have made it here if not for Lex.”
“About that, you guys have been here since all of this started, right?” Nosey didn’t look up from her notes as she spoke.
Cloudbank returned the photos with a sigh. “Almost all of us have. Cozy didn’t get here until a few weeks ago, but other than that, yeah.”
“Great. Would you all mind if I interviewed you about everything that’s been going on? This sounds like an even bigger story than Lex and the dragon, and I wasn’t sure that was possible.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” responded Drafty, clearly taken by surprise at Nosey’s request. The newsworthiness of everything they’d gone through hadn’t occurred to her before.
Grinning as her earlier malaise evaporated completely, Nosey started to compile a list of questions in her head. “Great! Let’s get started right now!”
“Owie!”
The nurse treating Sonata chuckled at her exclamation. Although she hated seeing a patient in pain, the way she’d expressed it was so cute that she couldn’t help but laugh. “There there now,” she smiled as she finished rubbing the ointment on the burns on her side. “This might sting a little, but so long as we apply it twice a day, you’ll heal right up. You won’t even have a scar marring that pretty flank of yours.”
“But won’t it be really hard to put bandages on after spreading that stuff around?” asked Sonata, glancing from where the nurse was finishing applying the burn cream to the bandages over her front. There were red stains on them, thanks to the wounds she’d received from Aria’s magic missiles.
The nurse shook her head. “We don’t put bandages over a burn. That just irritates it and makes it worse. The cream alone will be enough to take care of it.”
“Okay…” Sonata’s answer was listless, as she tried for the umpteenth time to glance over and see how Lex was doing. He wasn’t that far away from her, but there were enough doctors looking over him that he was almost completely obscured. The fact that there were so many of them, and so active, was starting to make her worry. “So, um, can you tell me what’s going on with Lex?”
The nurse glanced at Sonata, then over at where her colleagues were seeing to the pony that had brought them to Vanhoover, shaking her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know; I’ve been seeing to you since the two of you got back.” Sonata looked ready to protest about the lack of information, and the nurse spoke up again. “But since we’re all done here, let me see if I can get somepony to come and answer your questions, okay?”
Sonata nodded, looking marginally more relaxed, and the nurse trotted towards the gathering of doctors. It took several minutes before a light blue unicorn stallion in a lab coat came over to her. “Miss Dusk? My name is House Call, I’m one of the doctors seeing to Mr. Le-”
“Is he okay?” Sonata blurted the question out, unable to stay silent any longer.
House Call paused for a moment, then licked his lips, buying himself a moment to put his thoughts together before answering. “Mr. Legis has numerous injuries, and while most of them aren’t too dangerous on their own, the total amount of damage he’s taken is rather severe.” He paused to consult a clipboard, reading from it as he spoke. “Just a cursory examination shows multiple contusions, particularly to the cranial area. There are several deep puncture wounds to his upper body, and his chest, stomach, and legs have a large number of lacerations, most of which still have broken glass embedded in them.” He paused for a moment before continuing, a hint of worry creeping over his features. “He’s also exhibiting symptoms of nausea, abnormal pupil responses, and pronounced fatigue, which in conjunction with the head trauma suggests a concussion. There’s also what might be ecchymosis around his abdom-”
“What are you talking about?! Look, I don’t, like, speak doctor! Just tell me if Lex is gonna be okay or not!”
Lowering his clipboard, House Call let out a sigh. “The truth is, if we were back in Tall Tale I’d have him put into intensive care immediately. His life isn’t in imminent danger, but that’s the best thing I can say about his condition. We’re going to do everything we can for him, but he’s going to need to be kept under medical supervision and get as much rest as he can for the next twenty-four hours at the very least, probably longer.” He paused, then glanced back over his shoulder. “None of which he seems to want us to do.”
Sonata frowned. “What do you…” she trailed off as his meaning became clear to her, and she marched towards the mass of doctors. If he wasn’t letting them help him get better, she was so going to give him a piece of her mind! As she got closer, she could hear Lex’s voice ordering the doctors to give him…water? A moment later she heard him chanting something, recognizing it a moment later as him casting that rather feeble healing spell of his.
The sound made her come to a stop as something occurred to her, and she brightened. Looking around, she spotted the pony she was looking for, trotting up to them. “Hey, you. You can use healing magic, right?”
Cloudbank – looking up from where she’d been speaking with Nosey – blinked, her brow furrowing. “…huh?”
Nosey sighed. “No, Sonata, she just looks like Brightrose. She can’t use the same sort of magic that he could.”
“No way!” Sonata sagged in place, her sudden bout of enthusiasm dashed.
“Well, I can't, but my friend Cozy can,” offered Cloudbank. “Cozy!” she called, causing the crystal mare to look up. Seeing that Cloudbank had called her, she said something to the green stallion next to her before trotting over.
“Is everything alright?”
Sonata gave the crystal pony a desperate look. “You have healing magic, right?”
“I have one spell left, which I can convert into healing energy,” nodded Cozy.
“Great! Come on!” Without waiting for an answer, Sonata wrapped a hoof around Cozy and dragged her over to where Lex was. “Lex! I’ve got totes good news! This pony can use a healing spell on you!” The doctors made way for her, and past them Lex looked up as they approached, getting to his hooves with visible effort.
Stopping in front of him, Sonata nudged Cozy forward. “Okay, do your thing!”
Biting her lip, Cozy hesitated for a moment, glancing between the two of them. Swallowing, she lightly touched the symbol on her necklace before turning to Sonata. “If you don’t mind my asking, what relationship do the two of you have?”
“Huh?” Sonata cocked her head in confusion. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just humor me, please?” asked Cozy.
Sonata huffed, but her features softened a moment later. “He’s my boyfriend. I, like, totes love him.”
Cozy smiled slightly, before turning to face Lex. “And you feel the same way about her?”
He was silent for a long moment. His eyes flicked over to Sonata, and for a moment he looked like he was about to answer, but then he flinched just slightly before looking back at Cozy, his features darkening. Unnoticed by everypony, a single drop of blood ran down from the barbed wire around his left foreleg. “You’re asking this because you want to confirm that the weakling goddess you serve would approve of your using her magic to help me, aren’t you?” He didn’t wait for her to answer before continuing.
“Well don’t bother. I don’t need help, from you or from her.”
Sonata’s voice was tight as she spoke, and she didn’t wait for an answer before turning and marching out of the hole where the door once hung. Giving a glare at Aria as she caught her eye, Sonata walked in the other direction, having to fight the urge to stomp her hooves in frustration. Finally, when she was almost twenty feet away, she turned around, ready to give Lex a piece of her mind.
Instead, she paused as she saw him still almost ten feet away, hobbling towards her slowly. Normally, the sight of him in such obvious pain would have caused her anger to dissolve, but now it only increased it, making her grit her teeth as he finished approaching her. “If this is about what I just said…” he rumbled, his tone and expression both threatening.
That was it. The very idea that he had any reason to be mad at her was all Sonata could take, and she blew up. “What the heck are you doing?! Did you get hit in the head too many times in that fight or something?! You go back in there right now and let Cozy heal you!”
“Absolutely not!” snarled Lex. “I don’t need her help, or Lashtada’s, or anypony else’s!”
“So what about those doctors that were looking at you, huh?” countered Sonata. “You didn’t seem to have a problem with them!”
“That’s different!” hissed Lex. “I’m the one who brought them here in the first place! That makes them an extension of my own resources, to be utilized how I see fit! Making use of their abilities at my discretion is therefore not an indictment of my ability to weather a crisis!”
“What does that even mean?! You’re the one who, like, brought Cozy and the others here! Doesn’t that make them ‘resources to be utilized’ too?!”
“Not when her magic comes from such a contemptible goddess it doesn’t, to say nothing of being one with whom I have no working arrangement!”
“Who cares about that?! Do you not get that you’re hurt really bad?! Just go back in there and get healed! I can totes promise you that Cozy and Lashtoodles and everybody else will still think of you as a colossal jerk who treats everyone badly even when they’re really worried about you!”
Lex’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What are you babbling about? First of all, my refusal to compromise on my principles is not ‘treating everyone else badly,’ and second, the Night Mare cares about that! Accepting aid from Lashtada would affect my standing with h-”
“FINE!” yelled Sonata, unable to listen to him anymore. “You know what, just…just FINE! You win! Have it your way!” Not wanting to hear another word, she rushed past him, almost knocking him over in the process, and ran back inside the shelter. Ignoring how all eyes were on her – the broken door meant that much of their conversation had been audible to the others – and practically threw herself onto her sleeping area, Nosey moving over to comfort her a moment later.
For his part, Lex was left outside to sulk, cursing the inscrutable hysteria had come over Sonata. He had explained to her why he wouldn’t accept Cozy’s healing magic, and he was obviously not so injured as to require it to survive, so why couldn’t she accept that? If he was fine with his decision, where did she get off criticizing him for it? Plus she hadn’t even listened to his other reasons.
Holding up his left-front hoof, Lex examined the barbed wire inextricably bound around it, taking note of the drying trail of blood. The very prospect of Cozy using her healing magic on him had caused the gruesome ornament to shift slightly, opening up the smallest of cuts. If that had been ordinary wire, such an injury wouldn’t have been surprising, but this had been placed there by the Night Mare herself, and it had never caused him any discomfort or injury prior to now. It wasn’t a coincidence that it had right at that moment, he knew. Although he suspected that most other ponies would have been upset by such a thing, Lex felt reassured by it. That the Night Mare’s attitude so closely aligned with his own only served to reinforce his confidence that he had been right to forge a pact with her.
Nodding in satisfaction at having reaffirmed the faultlessness of his actions, Lex started back towards the door, but paused as he heard a rasping noise. Frowning, he glanced over at Aria, and realized that she was laughing. Her cruel grin widened as she saw him looking at her. “Very smooth, tough guy,” she jeered. “You really swept her off her hooves.”
Lex frowned, and a moment later his horn’s aura flared, a matching one surrounding Severance as he grabbed the blade from where it was hovering over her head and swung it down near her throat. “Now seems like as good a time as any to deal with you,” he said darkly.
Aria’s laughter was instantly replaced with fear. “H-hey! No need to be so upset!”
“Shut up,” replied Lex calmly, moving closer to her until he was right in front of her. As he did so, he moved Severance so that the blade was pressed to the back of her neck, and then slowly brought it down, causing Aria to lower her head in order to avoid being cut. He kept the motion going until she’d pressed her head against the ground, only then ceasing the scythe’s threatening descent.
“You,” he said in that same calm tone, “tried to kill me. You tried to kill the ponies under my protection. You even tried to kill Sonata.” Despite his display of self-control, his eyes suddenly blazed green, sprouting purple contrails from their corners, causing Aria to gulp at the intimidating display. “And that’s just what I know about. So…the only real question is what sort of punishment you deserve for your crimes.”
“That’s not fair!” she sputtered. “I told you, I didn’t have a choice! It was work with those monsters or be eaten by them!”
“Duress might have been a valid excuse for your actions,” replied Lex instantly, “except that you weren’t in imminent danger of being killed by those creatures during our fight just now. You could easily have flown beyond their reach and fled at any point while I was dealing with them, but you didn’t. Instead, you only tried to leave after they were dead.” Severance’s tip pressed pointedly against the back of Aria’s neck. “Those are the actions of a collaborator, not a hostage.”
Despite the implicit threat, he had no intention of harming her. If his theory about the Sirens being mutated ponies was correct – and he was very invested in the presumption that it was – then killing her was absolutely out of the question, and even lawful punishments couldn’t be cruel. But there was no need to tell her that.
“That’s easy for you to say!” Aria’s whisper came out heavily, strained by her mounting anxiety. “The sahuagin Mighty Ones have magic of their own, and it’s not just them down there! There are other creatures too, ones that they tolerate because the Great Lord of the Deep orders them to! Some of them have their own magic, and I was worried that even if I ran, they’d have found me, and then it would all have been over! That’s the only reason I didn’t take off! It’s not like I wanted to stay there!”
Lex narrowed his eyes, but slowly removed Severance from her, causing a relieved shudder to go through Aria’s body. She was finally starting to reveal some useful information. “I’m inclined to believe you,” he admitted.
“Really?” Aria looked up, hope written all over her face. “So you’ll let me go?”
Lex raised a brow coolly. “Go where? I thought you just said that you were afraid to run because they might find you.” Privately, he doubted that Aria had much to worry about. She had been in relatively close proximity to him during their fight, which meant that if any scrying spells had been focused on her, they likely would have caught him as well. But he knew that hadn’t happened, since the counter-scrying spell he kept on himself at all times hadn’t been triggered.
Oblivious to what Lex was thinking, Aria shook her head, a bitter expression creeping over her features. “I don’t have any other choice now. They punish failure severely down there, especially if you’re not a sahuagin. My only chance is to run far enough away.”
“That’s one option. The other is that you let me protect you.”
Aria blinked, looking at up Lex incredulously. “…Sonata was right. You did get hit in the head one time too many.”
Lex ignored the barb. “I can keep you safe from those creatures,” he insisted.
“Oh please,” scoffed Aria, her belligerence returning now that she no longer felt threatened. “You almost died out there with just three opponents. I’ll admit that Lirtkra and Monitor were a lot stronger than your average sahuagin, but there are several other powerful fighters down there. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t have a lot of faith in your protection.” She glanced around warily. “They’re probably watching us right now.”
“Unlikely,” retorted Lex. “As long as you stay inside of this area,” he waved a hoof to indicate their immediate surroundings, “they won’t be able to detect you with any sort of scrying magic. As far as the rest of their fighting force is concerned, I have Sev-” He stopped talking suddenly, eyes locked on the scythe hovering above her, causing Aria to look at him curiously. A moment later he frowned deeply at the weapon. “What does that mean?” he asked sharply.
Aria couldn’t help but snort in amusement at the sight of him arguing with a weapon. That the thing was apparently alive was weird, but was the only thing that made sense, since he’d already told it to watch her. Besides, if Sonata could get an actual boyfriend, anything was possible. “Do you two need a moment alone?” she asked sardonically.
His eyes slid back to her, and there was anger there, but he smoothed it over a moment later, restoring his mask of calm. “As I was saying, as far as the rest of their fighting force is concerned, I’ll find a way to deal with them.”
“Right,” she drawled. “So let’s just say that you can somehow miraculously pull all this off. Then will you let me go?”
Now it was Lex’s turn to snort. “Don’t be ridiculous. You have magic that far and away eclipses what most ponies are capable of, and everything I know about you suggests that you won’t hesitate to use it to victimize others for your own benefit. You can’t be allowed to go free.”
Aria grit her teeth, and it wasn’t completely out of anger. Queen Iliana, back on Everglow, had said something very similar before ordering her throat to be cut. Why did it always come to this?! “So what, then? You’ll protect me only to kill me when it’s all over? Or find some new way to maim me before throwing me into some other world?”
“Neither. I want you to work for me,” responded Lex simply.
For a moment, Aria just stared at him, then rolled her eyes in disgust. “So I get to go from being the sahuagin’s slave to yours? Gee, thanks so much. How could I ever refuse such a generous offer?”
But she went rigid at what he said next. “Serve me, and I’ll restore your voice.”
“Wh-?!”
“And,” he continued, “I’ll make you into a pony.”
It took Aria several seconds to process that, her mind still swirling with the prospect of getting her voice back. A moment later, his second promise sank in, and she gave him a confused look. “A pony? Why would I want to…oh, I get it.” She grinned at him again, and this time there was a sultry element there. “You want to trade up from your current girl, is that it?”
“Tr-, no!” Lex yelled, and his reaction caused Aria to blink. He had been calm and collected the entire time while talking to her, but that had fallen apart in the face of the tiniest bit of flirting? This warranted investigating…
She shifted her posture lightly, so that she was lying in a more suggestive pose, and gave him her most seductive look. “So you want both of us at the same time, then? You’re pretty bold, trying for a sister sandwich.”
Lex couldn’t help but turn bright red at the imagery. “Th-, I don’t-, do NOT toy with me!” he sputtered, his composure falling apart completely.
It was all Aria could do to hold back her laughter at the sight. All of a sudden his tone-deaf response to Sonata’s worrying over him made perfect sense, and it was hysterical. This stallion, who could take on multiple powerful enemies at once and win, had no idea how to deal with girls! It was hilarious, but even better was that it was a weakness that she could exploit. That it would drive Sonata nuts was a bonus. All that, and he’d fix her voice, too? All of a sudden his offer wasn’t looking quite so bad.
“Alright,” she smiled at him. “We have a deal.”
Lex frowned, not sure if she was being serious or not, but after a few moments he nodded. “So be it, then. Now, I have questions that you’re going to answer.”
“Anything you say,” she nodded back, fighting down a smirk.
For the first time in a while, it looked like she’d be able to have some fun.
Lex was silent as he walked back into the shelter, Severance floating behind him leisurely.
Although he was aware of everypony looking at him as he rejoined them, he ignored their looks and whispers as best he could. Even Sonata warranted only a brief glance in her direction, which resulted in his making eye contact with her for just a second before she sharply looked away, making it clear that she was still upset about their fight. But even that did little more than cause Lex’s perpetual frown to deepen. After what Aria had told him, he couldn’t get worked up about such minor details.
Making his way back to the makeshift medical area that the doctors had set up, Lex glanced at the nearest one of them even as he telekinetically pushed Severance off into a corner. “Finish your treatment,” he ordered the other ponies curtly, moving back to lie down on the hastily-made examination area. He barely noticed as the doctors and nurses moved to obey, starting to wrap bandages around him and apply various topical disinfectants. Even the painful sensations of the shards of glass in his lower body being dug out were distant concerns.
According to what Aria had told him, they were up against a force of significant size and strength. While she didn’t know the total number of sahuagin, her estimate was that their community numbered over two hundred altogether. While Lex didn’t think that individual sahuagin were anything to be overly concerned about – a least so long as they weren’t exceptional specimens the way Lirtkra had been – Aria had indicated roughly a tenth of the population were divine spellcasters, with the strongest four being the so-called “Mighty Ones” who led the community.
That was bad enough, but they apparently had an auxiliary force of other undersea monsters, of which Monitor and Aria herself had been a part, and according to her each member of that retinue was a force to be reckoned with. Certainly, her descriptions of those creatures had been horrifying enough. Intelligent manta rays that were not only spellcasters, but vampires. Gigantic three-eyed tentacle-fish with psychic powers. Some sort of creature whose main feature was a single large eyeball, along with having crab-like pincers, a serrated maw, and two smaller eyestalks sprouting from the top of its body. And those were only a few of them.
But the worst had been the one that led them all, the so-called “Great Lord of the Deep.” Just the thought of that thing…
Resisting the urge to bite his lip at the enormity of the forces arrayed against them, no, against him, Lex’s train of thought was interrupted as one of the doctors, a light blue unicorn stallion in a lab coat, approached him. “Sir? My name is House Call. I need to ask you some questions before we go any further.” He flipped a page on his clipboard before he continued. “First, do you have any allergies or adverse drug reactions that we should be aware of?”
“No,” replied Lex curtly, barely giving the doctor a glance as he tried to resume thinking about what to do about the veritable army of monsters arrayed against him. But a moment later the implications of the doctor’s question occurred to him, and he looked at him directly. “You’re not to give me anything that has debilitating side effects.”
House Call’s brow furrowed as he processed that. “Sir…”
“Nothing that could inhibit cognitive function, impair reaction time, or cause drowsiness.”
“Wh-, that…” House Call struggled for a moment to process the outrageous instructions. “That would limit us to just basic painkillers and…a general antibiotic-”
“That will be sufficient.”
“Sir, please, be reasonable.” House Call frowned, exasperated with how his patient was acting. “This isn’t a ‘take two and call me in the morning’ situation. You’re severely injured and we’re working with minimal equipment already. If you won’t let us give you proper medical care, this won’t just be an issue of pain control. We need to give you stronger antimicrobial drugs to stop any possible infections, to say nothing of possible internal bleeding!”
This was House Call’s preferred way of dealing with difficult patients; outline the worst-case scenario, and let that impress upon them how serious things could be if they didn’t listen to their doctor’s advice. But in this case, his patient just shot him a glare, clearly unimpressed. “I’ve already used one of the Night Mare’s healing spells on myself, so I’m not worried about possible complications,” replied Lex flatly. House Call opened his mouth, but closed it a moment later. What could he say to that?
Lex continued. “Nor does ‘pain control’ concern me. What does concern me is if we’re attacked again and I’m unable to respond to the threat because I’m incapacitated due to your treatment.” Not that there was much that he could do at the moment if that happened. He was completely out of divine magic, was running low on dark magic, and what remained of his prepared spells weren’t suitable for combat.
“Then you should just use that floating scythe of yours.”
Lex glanced up as Nosey approached, frowning at her suggestion. Making use of Severance wasn’t a bad idea at all, but it was one he was wary of utilizing. That was because of what had happened barely fifteen minutes ago, when he had suggested exactly that when speaking to Aria. The words had barely left his mouth when Severance had informed him that, should he come to be dependent on it, it would abandon him. Lex had tried to press the living weapon for clarification – what exactly constituted “dependent” was hideously imprecise – but it had refused to issue any.
It had been a sobering reminder that while Severance might currently be serving him, he was not the weapon’s master. Rather, it was more like the weapon was an attaché or a liaison rather than a servitor, which meant that there was little Lex could do but grit his teeth at the vague warning and try to plan around it as best he could, because the alternative was completely unacceptable. Not only was Severance an extremely powerful weapon, but it was currently the only method he had of reliably replenishing his strongest magic. If it left now, Vanhoover’s future prospects would go from being grim to completely hopeless.
Ignorant of that, Nosey spoke up again as she saw the sour look on Lex’s face. “It can watch this place, just like you told it to before. And we can help. When those things attacked the ship last night, the ponies on board did a great job holding them off. Plus Sonata has really strong magic too. You don’t have to be the one to do everything.”
Lex opened his mouth, ready to tell Nosey in great detail exactly how she was wrong, but before he could another voice cut in. “She’s right. We can do more than sit in here all day and be protected, isn’t that right guys?” C. Shells looked around as she said that, and in response the members of her crew gave a cheer. Smiling, she looked back at Lex. “We might not be dragonslayers or wizards or whatever, but we knew this wasn’t going to be an easy assignment when we took it. If there’s anything we can do to help, then you should tell us.”
“In that case, we need to fix that door,” spoke up Aisle. Seeing several ponies look at him, he licked his lips before glancing at Lex. “You said you put wards on this place, and some of them were on the doors, right? Keeping them closed and covered with an illusion?” He didn’t wait for an answer before turning to face C. Shells. “If we repair the door, I’m guessing those wards would kick back in, and we’ll be a lot safer once they are.”
“Two doors,” added Sonata, heaving a sigh as she stood up. Giving Lex the briefest of looks, she turned to face the rest of the crowd. “I kinda had to blow a hole in the outer door to finish getting outside so I could go help this big jerk,” she waved a hoof in Lex’s direction. “So we’re totes gonna have to fix that one too.”
“Hold on,” Lex tried to interject, but that was as much as he could get out before Cloudbank piped up.
“I’ll help with that. I’ve been through that confusing fog that’s filling the place up, so I’m pretty sure I can help get everypony through it and back again without too much trouble.”
“I’ll go with you,” volunteered Cozy. “I still have some of Lashtada’s blessing left, just in case any of those things have gotten inside.”
“Don’t forget to set some traps after you’re done,” added Drafty. “Even if they just slow them down, they can still make a difference if worse comes to worst.”
“Alright everypony,” said C. Shells, projecting her voice as she looked around. “Let’s get to work! First, I want you to make two teams, one for the inner door and one for the outer door. We’ll start divvying up tools and repair materials so that the outer door group has to make as few trips as possible. We’ll also need some suggestions on traps,” she nodded towards Drafty, “just to be safe. Now hop to it!”
“Ooh!” yelled Sonata, smiling for the first time in a little while. “We can totes make a song out of this!” She trotted forward happily, starting to hum a tune that was quickly picked up by everypony else.
Almost everypony. For his part, Lex was frowning severely as the singing ponies started to get to work, and began to get up. But before he could, Nosey gently pushed him back down, giving him a warm look as she did so. “Don’t. Let them do this.”
“If any of the monsters from outside have gotten into the warehouse…” started Lex warningly.
“Like I said before, have your floating scythe do it,” she responded lightly.
He glowered at her, but knew that his reproach was verging on petulant, and instead glanced at where Severance was floating. As loathe as he was to admit it, Nosey was right; guarding the ponies in his care was something that Severance had done before, without any warnings about overreliance. In theory this should be no different, but Lex couldn’t help but hesitate for a moment, knowing what he stood to lose if he was wrong.
Nosey cocked her head, curious at his hesitation, and that was enough to galvanize him. He would NOT have a moment of weakness, especially in front of Nosey of all ponies! “Severance,” he called out sternly. “Go with the ponies heading for the outer door. Do not let anything harm them!” It immediately moved to obey, and Lex let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
Nosey, for her part, grinned. “You see? Everything’s going to be okay, so you don’t need to worry so much. Now will you let the doctors treat you the way they want?”
Lex didn’t answer her question, instead frowning at her for a long moment. It was enough to make her slightly self-conscious, and when he kept it up she eventually couldn’t help but ask. “…what?”
“You’re acting different,” said Lex plainly.
The statement was incongruous enough to make Nosey blink. “Huh?”
“You’re usually more annoying than this,” he elaborated. “Pestering ponies for interviews or demanding access to information. Not…this,” he waved a hoof at where the repairs were already getting underway.
Ignoring the comparative insult, Nosey looked down, slightly embarrassed at being called out. “Yeah, well…” She paused for a long moment, then admitted in a soft voice. “I had fun, before.”
“Hm?”
“Yesterday, when we were all cleaning out this warehouse. I had fun.”
Lex couldn’t keep the confusion off of his face. What did that have to do with anything?
Sensing that he didn’t understand, Nosey lifted her eyes as she explained. “I hadn’t done anything as part of a group in a while. I missed the last two Winter Wrap-Ups while I was out chasing stories, I didn’t go to my parent’s house for Hearth’s Warming Eve last year because I caught a cold, and I usually work on my birthday. That and, well…” She paused to adjust her glasses, fidgeting slightly before continuing. “A lot of ponies don’t want to hang out with a mare whose special talent is ferreting out their secrets and publishing them,” she admitted.
Lex was silent, trying to figure out what she was leading up to. For her part, Nosey looked away before continuing. “Cleaning this place out was really hard work. It was smelly and gross and awful, not to mention boring and strenuous. But even so…it was fun. I got to work with everypony, and even though it was difficult, we all helped each other out, and by the time it was finished, I really felt like we’d become a group, instead of just a bunch of ponies who happened to be traveling together. And that was because of you, since you made me participate.” She looked back at him then, that same warm smile back on her face.
“It feels nice, working with everypony else to be a part of something,” she continued. “That’s what everypony else is trying to do right now. They know that you’re trying your hardest for them, and they want to do the same for you.” She smiled wider as she came to the point. “That’s what being friends means. You get it now?”
For a long moment, Lex didn’t reply, his eyes shifting back and forth between Nosey’s earnest smile and everypony singing as they worked to repair the doors. Eventually, he licked his lips, and answered her honestly.
Lex’s eyes followed Nosey as she walked away, a deeper frown than usual adorning his face.
She’d been trying to tell him something about social dynamics, of that he felt reasonably confident, but the substance of her message remained maddeningly obtuse no matter how he looked at it. She had, in the space of a few breaths, invoked the principles of reciprocal altruism, burden-sharing, and the axiological merit of industriousness, and then somehow tied all of that back into friendship without any sort of specificity, let alone an explanation of the causal linkage. It was enough to make him very nearly gnash his teeth.
The only thing that made the frustration bearable was how utterly familiar it was. After all, that had been the result of every single attempt he’d ever made to dissect social relationships. Why should this time be any different? As it was, he’d half-expected his shadow to interject with a biting comment, but it had remained silent. As much as Lex wanted to think that it was due to him having developed more control over the thing, he knew that was a lie. This latest failure simply hadn’t been upsetting enough to rouse it.
Sighing as he put the matter out of his thoughts, Lex instead turned his attention to more practical matters, specifically rest. Although it had only been a few hours since he’d woken up, he felt exhausted, and had little doubt that if he laid down right now he’d quickly fall asleep, probably for quite some time. Although he normally hated the prospect, since it meant unpleasant dreams, right now that was preferable to the amount of pain he was in. More importantly, sleep was necessary before he could replenish his magic; once he was well-rested, his divine and dark magic would renew themselves automatically, and he’d be ready to draw power from Severance again to restore his thaumaturgical spells.
Getting up, he slowly made his way over to the sleeping area he shared with Sonata. The thought of her made him instinctively glance around, but she wasn’t to be found…probably having gone with the group that was repairing the outer door, since that was the more dangerous area. Although he approved of her choice, as he laid down he found himself wishing that she’d stayed anyway, if only so they could resolve their current fight…no, so she could resolve whatever insanity had temporarily gripped her. He had done nothing wrong, and so had nothing to feel bad about. Of that he felt entirely certain.
But as he closed his eyes and felt sleep creep over him, that knowledge brought him no comfort.
“Wait, so that thing back there was your sister?” asked Cloudbank, her voice thick with incredulity as she led everypony through the fog maze. “I gotta tell you, I really didn’t see the family resemblance.”
“I know, right?” agreed Sonata. “It’s because she’s, like, always frowning. I bet she’ll totes get lines in her face one of these days ‘cuz of how scowly she is.”
A series of awkward looks were exchanged in response to Sonata’s statement, before Drafty spoke up. “So, um, where did you grow up?”
Sonata shrugged, giving a grunt that sounded like a half-formed “dunno,” before elaborating further. “The ocean, I guess. And then we tried to take over Equestria, but some pony with a really big beard sent us to Earth, and we hung out there for, like, a super long time.”
“I-I see,” lied Drafty, giving a strained grin.
“Well,” interjected Cozy, “maybe you two can try and patch things up now? I’m sure your parents would be upset if you kept fighting.”
“Oh, we don’t have parents,” replied Sonata matter-of-factly. “At least, I don’t remember us having any.” She stopped walking for a moment as she frowned, putting a hoof to her mouth and concentrating with visible effort. “Come to think of it, I’m not even totes sure that the three of us are related.” She pondered that for a second before shrugging the entire matter off. “But we probably are. I mean, I've never heard of any other Sirens, and besides, I think of them like my sisters anyway, so it’s not like there’s any big dif.”
“Did she say ‘Sirens’?” muttered Aisle.
“Hang on. The ‘three’ of you?” asked Drafty.
“Mm-hmm,” nodded Sonata. “Me, Aria back there, and Adagio. I’m not sure what happened to her. Probably causing trouble back on Everglow.” She paused, then added, “That’s the other world we were sent to.”
“I thought you said that it was called ‘Earth’?” asked Cozy, making a pained expression at trying to keep up with what their companion was talking about.
“Oh, it was. Everglow was the other other world.”
“‘Other other world’?” echoed Aisle, unable to keep from looking dazed. He risked a glance behind him, where several other ponies were carrying tools and supplies, wondering what their reaction was to the conversation. Unsurprisingly, everypony made sure to avoid his gaze when they realized they were being looked at.
Sonata, of course, didn’t notice any of this. “The toughest part was getting used to having a pony body. It’s, like, super different from being a human.” She paused, then glanced around conspiratorially. “Don’t tell Lex this – even though he’s a big jerk and I don’t care what he thinks – but sometimes I miss being human.” She put a hoof to her chest, glancing down at herself. “It was really fun having b-”
“We’re here!” exclaimed Cloudbank, unable to keep the relief out of her voice as the fog parted to reveal the broken warehouse doors. Everypony else looked similarly grateful as they immediately started to get to work.
“So, do you think she’s crazy, or just exaggerating?” asked Aisle quietly as he walked with Cozy, who was glancing around to make sure that there were no undead ponies nearby.
“I don’t know,” she murmured in response. “Maybe both. I mean, we are talking about a mare who’s in love with a bad copy of King Sombra.”
“It makes you glad that, even after everything we went through, we came out of it with all of our marbles still in the bag.”
“Hey! You guys!” yelled Drafty, waving at the two of them from near the door. “Come help me make some deathtraps!”
Smiling at the prospect, the two moved to join her.
The blood in the water did little to soothe Sitkra’s anxiety.
“I don’t care how many more eggs were laid today!” she snarled at the underling priestess, who was currently cradling her slashed face. “The important thing is how many of them survive the Rite of First Hunger after they hatch! Now unless you have something important to tell me, get out of my sight before I make a meal out of you!”
The underling immediately fled, knowing that Sitkra’s threat was not an idle one. While members of the Holy Ones were only supposed to devour each other as a result of a duel for advancement – a challenge that in theory only a junior priestess could invoke – lower-ranked Holy Ones who were too openly ambitious or otherwise earned a senior priestess’s ire tended to find themselves “sponsored” for such a duel by another senior Holy One. At that point, their fate was sealed, since they either had to accept that “honor” and issue a challenge to a higher-ranked priestess immediately, or refuse the sponsorship. Of course, refusing would be tantamount to cowardice, which was not only an affront to sahuagin values, but also blasphemy, and so warranted an immediate death sentence. Sitkra considered issuing such a sentence as she watched the junior priestess flee, but let it go, knowing that her underling’s conduct wasn’t what was bothering her.
Lirtkra should have been back by now.
It had been several hours since he’d gone. Although there was still plenty of time before the sun rose, let alone before the spell of air breathing that she’d cast on him wore off, Lirtkra shouldn’t have needed so long. Even if the poh-nees had maa-jik – just the thought made Sitkra growl in anger – their city was overrun with itkul, which meant that they had very likely taken refuge somewhere near their ship. Finding them should not have taken much time; even if they had used maa-jik to hide, the Cripple should have been able to root them out, since that disgusting creature had similar powers of its own, and even Monitor was a hunter of adequate skill.
Just thinking of the other two made Sitkra bare her teeth in hatred. After he’d killed the poh-nees, Lirtkra should have killed both of those freaks before returning. With them dead, the Great Lord of the Deep would have to rely on herself and the other Mighty Ones – and through them, the sahuagin – even more, which was a very high priority for Sitkra and her peers. Even better, their deaths could be attributed to the maa-jik poh-nees, which made this an opportunity that could not be wasted. So what was keeping Lirtkra?
The obvious answer was that he was dead, but Sitkra couldn’t imagine that to be the case. The idea that he had been killed by mere poh-nees – the weakest and most cowardly race Sitkra had ever seen – was beyond ludicrous. Perhaps the Cripple and Monitor had gotten the best of him? Possibly…but they hadn’t returned either, and Sitkra couldn’t imagine them not returning to rub their victory in her face; it’s what she would have done, after all. Besides, where else could they go?
“Sitkra.”
The voice rumbled through the water, so deep and resonant that it was almost tangible rather than audible, and Sitkra’s body stiffened in controlled fear. The Great Lord of the Deep was calling her! Swimming as fast as she could, she exited the shrine at the center of their community and made her way to the Great Lord’s grotto. “Great Lord of the Deep!” she yelled towards the cave entrance, spreading her limbs wide to show her exultation. “I am here, as you have commanded!”
“I have received a communique from that fool on the surface, informing me that the ship which arrived yesterday remains intact.” The voice paused for a long moment, then drolly added, “He made it clear that he’d like me to destroy the thing. Apparently, he still thinks that his missives can compel me.”
“Great Lord, that anything dares speak to you with anything less than praise and fear is the highest insult!” yelled Sitkra. “Such disrespect can only be remedied by rending that infidel limb from limb!” To all appearances, Sitkra was very nearly in the throes of religious ecstasy. In actuality, it was all an act, but a necessary one to secure her life. She would not die the way her one-time comrade had, slowly baking to death in the sun and then being buried – uneaten! – in the dry ground of the surface world.
The chuckle that came in response to her plea made her shiver, knowing that the Great Lord of the Deep had likely seen through her. “I have no doubt that the day that event occurs is fast approaching. But what I want from you is far simpler: were you aware of that ship’s continued survival?” Sitkra froze at the question, and the Great Lord elaborated. “After all, you were the one I initially informed of its existence, and you assured me that you would send a raiding party to slaughter its passengers.”
Sitkra gulped, suddenly very nervous. Inwardly, she cursed Lirtkra again. He was supposed to have successfully returned before now! If he had done so, she’d have been able to take credit both for proactively dealing with the problem and for successfully resolving it! Now she either had to admit failure or plead ignorance, neither of which would make her look good in front of the Great Lord! “I…only recently received such news, and was planning to take action just now, when you summoned me.”
“Then you’re unaware that the Cripple and Monitor are currently missing?”
Sitkra struggled to maintain her outward calm, trying not to panic. One of the other nameless freaks must have reported their fellows’ absence to the Great Lord, but that didn’t mean that there was anything to connect that to her. No one had seen her talk to the Cripple, and that creature was spiteful enough that it wouldn’t share information easily. And of course, Monitor didn’t talk. She should be completely without blame.
She should be…but there was no way to know for certain. Better to offer some information and divert any possible suspicion away from herself. “I had no idea, Great Lord! But in fact, our warrior Lirtkra is also nowhere to be found! Perhaps he and the others heard that the surface-dwellers were still alive, and went to challenge them?”
“Perhaps…” Sitkra tensed as the Great Lord’s voice trailed off, as though considering the thought. After a long moment it issued forth again. “I will be going to destroy that ship in one hour. You have that long to make preparations, and then we’ll depart.”
Sitkra’s relief at the change of topic lasted only for a moment. “‘We,’ Great Lord? You and I?”
The laughter that issued forth from the dank recesses of the grotto was mirthless. “Yes. You and I and everyone else.” Long tentacles emerged as the Great Lord of the Deep exited its undersea home, causing Sitkra to shudder at the sight of her master. “In one hour our full forces will attack the pony city. They must be shown the consequences that they reap for daring to defy a kraken.”
“Okay, that should do it!” Cloudbank smiled as she backed away from the warehouse doors, now repaired. She settled back down to stand with everypony else as they took a moment to admire their handiwork. Other than the fact that the new planks looked a little cleaner than the surrounding wood, the doors were as good as new.
“I have to admit, I’m surprised,” said Aisle, looking at the other ponies. “I didn’t think you guys would have lumber ready to go.”
A pegasus stallion – Ocean Spray, if Aisle remembered correctly – shook his head. “When something breaks down at sea, you can’t just fly to the store and buy some new parts. You have to have everything you could possibly need right there with you, and since the entire ship is made of wood, well…” He shrugged, but couldn’t help but look slightly pleased at getting to show off.
“I just wish we’d been able to set up some better traps,” sighed Drafty, giving the area a mournful look.
Cozy put a hoof on her shoulder encouragingly. “The ones we made aren’t so bad.”
“They’re a deadfall and a tripwire with some spikes in front of it,” replied Drafty flatly, her lack of enthusiasm obvious.
“It can’t be helped,” said Cloudbank, coming over to help buoy Drafty’s spirits. “This place is one big open space, and that’s a lot harder to rig up than a bunch of little rooms off of a hallway. Besides, we haven’t had much time. We just got started on this…what, an hour ago?”
“That sounds right,” nodded Ocean Spray. “But now that it’s taken care of we should go report back.” He looked over at where Sonata was still looking at the doors. “I bet this might make Lex at least a little happy, right?”
He paused, but Sonata didn’t respond, not seeming to have heard him. A round of curious glances was exchanged, before Cozy went over to her. “Sonata?”
“Huh?” She blinked as she turned to face the other mare, before giving an embarrassed smile. “Sorry, I was totes thinking about something else,” she admitted sheepishly.
Cozy smiled softly. “Was that something else a certain stallion with a terrible attitude?”
“…no,” said Sonata sourly, looking away with an unhappy expression on her face. It was enough to make Cozy smile softly. At that moment Sonata didn’t look like a Siren-turned-human-turned-pony that had lived a crazy life on three different worlds. Rather, she looked like an ordinary mare that was having a fight with her very special somepony.
It was enough to remind Cozy of why she’d become a priestess of Lashtada in the first place. Her job selling beds had always been rewarding, but she’d always liked it best when selling them to couples. Knowing that two ponies would look at each other first thing each morning and before they went to bed each night had always struck her as incredibly romantic, and playing a part in that had never failed to lift her spirits.
It had been enough just to help out, until she’d met Pillowcase. It hadn’t quite been love at first sight, but by their third date she’d known that she’d found “the one.” That his passion for pillows and cushions had perfectly complemented her own love of beds had been the icing on the cake. They had gotten married less than a year after their first meeting, and Cozy couldn’t have been happier. She still spent her days helping each and every pony that came to see her about finding a new bed to rest on, and now she got to do it with the love of her life. She had truly thought that she’d been content.
And then Princess Cadance had introduced her to Lashtada’s faith, and Cozy had found out that there was so much more.
Lashtada had shown her that the love that she’d been encouraging up until that point was just a smattering of what she could do. There were plenty of other ways to help ponies come to love each other than involved more than finding a comfortable mattress to share. While some of the more…advanced aspects of her faith were things she only felt comfortable trying with Pillow, she had been delighted to go out and help couples that had hit a rough patch in their relationships.
She’d come to Vanhoover because she’d thought that Lashtada’s work would be needed very badly here, only to find that the city had been far, far worse off than just she’d heard. Encouraging love had been forced to take a backseat to simply surviving. Worse, her husband had disappeared, a situation which made Cozy more and more anxious as time went on. Having a pony that looked and acted so much like King Sombra had been more than she’d been able to take at the time.
But as nightmarish as that encounter had been, Cozy was starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe, it had been the divine hoof of Lashtada at work. Because as much as Lex Legis seemed like King Sombra, there were important differences between him and the former tyrant of the Crystal Empire, the most important of which was that Lex had a girlfriend. To a disciple of the Goddess of Love, that was something that could not be overlooked, as it was evidence of him having love in his heart, something Cozy felt certain King Sombra never had.
Of course, that was only true if Lex actually loved Sonata, and Cozy didn’t feel at all certain of that. He’d never once spoken about her in the short time that she’d known him, and what little interaction she’d witnessed between the two had been terse at best and downright acrimonious at worst, all of which had been Lex’s fault. It was painfully obvious to Cozy that Sonata had feelings for Lex, but so far she’d seen no evidence that he felt the same way.
If that was true then Sonata was being taken advantage of, and certainly it made sense based on what Cozy knew about Lex. After all, he did seem to be making an honest attempt to use his magic to help Vanhoover through its current crisis, and given that Sonata had impressive magical powers of her own – having broken down two doors that Lex had warded attested to that – it made sense that he’d want to recruit her. After all, everypony had overheard his attempting to recruit her sister, even if her responses had been inaudible. It wasn’t farfetched to think that he was either ignoring Sonata’s feelings or just leading her on until she was no longer useful.
The proper thing, Cozy knew, would be to talk to Lex to try and figure out how he felt, but that simply wasn’t going to happen. Even leaving aside the current situation, she honestly couldn’t imagine that stallion ever opening up to her about how he felt. Worse than that, Cozy simply didn’t have it in her to make the attempt, not when he so closely resembled the monster that had terrorized her and all the other crystal ponies. Maybe she’d have been able to find the inner strength to try, but not after all of the fear and worry that she’d endured since coming to Vanhoover. Right now, she just wanted to find Pillow and go home. But for all of that, she couldn’t help but want to at least reach out to Sonata. The poor girl was quite clearly lovesick, and for one of Lashtada’s faithful, there was no turning away from that.
A quick glance around confirmed that everypony else had started to clean up the tools and supplies, giving the two of them some small measure of privacy. Turning back to Sonata, Cozy gave her a soft smile. “Listen, we don’t know each other very well, but if there’s ever anything that you want to talk about, I’m a pretty good listener.”
“What, you mean like about trap-making or something?” asked Sonata, clearly misunderstanding Cozy’s offer. “Because, like, that’s not really my thing.”
“Er, no,” replied Cozy, chagrined. “We just did that because-, no, it doesn’t matter. What I meant was that, since I’m a priestess of Lashtada, I’ve helped other ponies who have relationship problems.”
Sonata tilted her head. “Um, okay…?” What did that have to do with anything? It couldn’t be about her and Lex, since they had a great relationship, except for when he was being a big dumb jerk. Other than that, everything was totes awesome! Though it would be nice if they got to spend some more time in the sack together, but except for that, awesome!
Mistaking Sonata’s confusion for hesitancy, Cozy tried again. “I mean, if you wanted t-”
“Okay, that’s everything!” yelled Cloudbank. “Now let’s head back!”
Sighing as Sonata immediately moved to go rejoin the others, Cozy decided that it couldn’t be helped. If she wasn’t going to be able to try and fix the problem, maybe it was better not to pry too closely. But that didn’t mean that she could let this go; that would be an affront to Lashtada. Instead, Cozy closed her eyes as she touched a hoof to her holy symbol and made a brief prayer. Lashtada, please let us all get through this, and I promise that when Pillow and I make it back to the Crystal Empire, I’ll tell Princess Cadance about Lex and Sonata. She had no doubt that the Princess, Lashtada’s high priestess, would know what to do about the ill-matched pair. Opening her eyes, she moved to join the others as Cloudbank started to lead them back through the fog maze.
“You know, I just thought of something,” said Aisle, wandering over to her side.
“What’s that?” asked Cozy, looking over at him. For the hundredth time, she wondered if he was sweet on her. While everypony in their group had closely supported each other, she was aware that Aisle had been making a dedicated effort to look after her ever since Pillow had vanished. But she couldn’t figure out if he was just being kind, or if it was something more. The uncertainty made her vaguely uncomfortable, not because she thought he was trying to take advantage of her husband’s absence, but because she knew that Lashtada’s faith glorified open relationships. While not viewed as superior, such arrangements were held to best represent the “love without limits” mindset that was at the heart of Lashtada’s religion. As much as Cozy wanted to dedicate herself to living out the ideals of her goddess, that was a step that she wasn’t sure she could ever bring herself to take, and certainly not in the current circumstances.
Heedless of her discomfort, Aisle kept speaking. “If the other ponies were repairing the door to that inner area while we were out here, and Lex’s wards are still functioning, that means that we’re going to get back only to be locked out again.”
The realization almost made Cozy trip over her own hooves. “Wait, so Sonata’s going to have to break the door down again?!”
Aisle chuckled at her reaction. “I doubt it. Since Lex is in there, he should be able to open it no problem, just like he did for the outer doors, remember?”
“Right.” Cozy sighed with relief. “Don’t scare me like that.”
Aisle opened his mouth to say something back, but just before he could, Drafty’s voice rang out. “Everypony stop! Do you hear that?!”
From up ahead, Cozy could hear Cloudbank’s voice reply. “Drafty? What’s going on?”
“Listen!” repeated Drafty.
Everypony quieted down, ears swiveling as they listened intently. Closing her eyes, Cozy did the same. At first she didn’t hear anything, but then she realized that there was some sort of ambient noise, soft but pervasive. It seemed to be coming from…the ceiling?
“Is that…rain?” asked Aisle, his voice thick with confusion.
“It can’t be,” protested Cloudbank. “I was at the cloud depot when everything went down. We lost most of our raincloud supply in the flood.”
“Then what’s happening?” asked Cozy as she looked upward.
Somehow, she suspected that the answer was nothing good.
Keeping her eyes closed and her posture relaxed, Aria tried to make it as obvious as she could that she was ignoring the ponies a stone’s throw away from her. She knew that Sonata was among them, having seen her when they’d left a little while ago, and now that they were back she wanted it to be as clear as possible just how much she didn’t care that she was there. For a moment she wished that whatshisname was with her so that she’d have been able to flirt with him just to watch Sonata’s reaction, but since he wasn’t this would have to do.
Unfortunately, her ploy didn’t seem to be working. Although she’d been gawked at quite a bit by the group when they’d departed – she’d found that rather amusing, even if their expressions of amazement and fear hadn’t been nearly as good as the adoration she craved – they didn’t seem to be talking about her at all now. Instead, their conversations were about…the weather?
From what she could overhear, it was raining outside, and it took Aria a few seconds to remember that unlike on Earth or Everglow, that didn’t happen on its own here. Which meant that someone was making it rain, and to hear them talk it couldn’t possibly have been another pony. But while they seemed completely bamboozled by what was going on, Aria felt reasonably confident that she knew what was happening, and that was enough to make her forget about provoking those idiots, looking up at the ceiling in worry.
It had started.
“Lex!”
Jolting awake as his name was called, Lex immediately leapt to his hooves, feeling the pain from doing so catch up to him an instant later. For a split-second he thought that it was Sonata that had been calling him, but that notion was immediately dispelled as he saw C. Shells looking at him from a few feet away. She didn’t seem to be in imminent danger or otherwise overly panicked, and that was enough to make Lex’s tension ease slightly. “What’s going on?”
C. Shells gave him an apologetic look, knowing that she’d roused him in a rather unpleasant manner, but nothing else had worked; she’d called his name several times, but he’d been too deeply asleep to hear her. Raising a hoof, she pointed at the now-repaired door. “We got the door fixed, but as soon as it was repaired it slammed shut.”
Lex glanced at the door, then back at her. “And?” he asked tersely. That the door had immediately sealed itself was not unexpected, since his warding was still active. So why was she bothering him to tell him what he already knew?
“And the ponies who went outside to fix the outer doors are knocking to be let back in,” C. Shells replied simply.
“…right,” Lex admitted, a disgusted look crossing his face as he silently berated himself for not having come to that conclusion already. Turning to look at the door again, he telekinetically opened it. Sure enough, ponies began to rush back in. First inside was Cloudbank, who whipped her head around before her eyes settled on Lex.
“It’s raining!” she blurted out, rushing over to him.
“What?” Lex’s brow furrowed in confusion as he tried to parse what he’d just been told. If the doors had just been repaired, then he hadn’t been asleep very long at all, which meant that there was no way that Vanhoover’s weather services had been restarted when the city was still in such bad shape.
“It’s true,” said Aisle as he and several other ponies walked towards him. “We all heard it.”
Lex’s eyes looked over the rest of the group, noting that several of them were nodding, and his frown grew deeper. Unable to help himself, he looked for Sonata, and finally found her near the back of them, talking to Nosey. She’s deliberately avoiding you, came the voiceless words in his mind, causing Lex to narrow his eyes, sure that the hateful statement was correct. “I’m going to go see what’s happening,” he announced, making sure his voice was loud enough to reach Sonata.
He felt a burst of spiteful satisfaction as she glanced at him with a frown of her own, and he distinctly heard her mutter “of course you are” under her breath.
Fighting down the urge to give her a superior smirk, he instead looked up at Severance, which had returned with the others. “Come with me,” he ordered, not bothering to see if it was moving to obey before he started for the door. Just that much movement set off an explosion of aches in his body, but he refused to let it show, forcing himself to stride forward without flinching.
He made it halfway there before Nosey moved alongside him. “Lex, I don’t think y-”
“Shut up,” he snapped, not bothering to slow his pace. Ignoring her hurt look, he marched outside of the shelter, letting the door close behind him of its own accord. It was only then that he sagged, taking several deep breaths as he fought to steady himself. If the short amount of time he’d been asleep had done anything for his condition, he couldn’t tell.
“I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but you look terrible,” came a whisper, causing Lex to look over at Aria with a glare. “What? I meant with the bandages and all,” she smirked.
Refusing to rise to her baiting, Lex instead glanced backward, grabbing Severance in his telekinetic grip and moving it in front of him. Closing his eyes, he started to chant, trying to draw in the enormous magical energy that the scythe radiated so he could replenish his magic…but stopped before he’d gotten two syllables out. It was futile; the energy was there, but he was in no shape to draw upon it. It wasn’t that he was too hurt to do so, but rather that the act of drawing energy into his thoughts was such a grueling process that his mind couldn’t do so unless he’d gotten a full night’s rest first, rather than the short nap he’d just had.
He’d known that, of course. But he hadn’t been able to resist making the attempt; he’d spent most of his life being unable to replenish his primary magic except under rare circumstances. Having a battery that allowed him to do so with regularity was such a welcome change that he couldn’t help but try to use it now, when he was once again critically low on magic and in a situation where he needed it badly.
Unable to help but sigh as he put Severance onto his back, Lex started walking. “Follow me,” he ordered Aria curtly.
Scowling at the imperious treatment, Aria nevertheless did as she was told, her hooves clopping against the ground as her lower half swished over the floor in a side-to-side motion to help propel her forward. The sight was odd enough that Lex glanced back at her. “I thought you could fly.”
“My spell to do that wore off,” rasped Aria, fighting down the urge to curse at him. Her natural body was moderately proficient on land, but nowhere near as much as it was in the water. Worse, she knew that she looked ridiculous having to pull herself along like this. Glaring at him, she silently dared him to comment about how she was moving. She took it as a minor victory when he turned away without saying anything else and kept moving.
It took only a few moments to clear the fog-filled passages and come into view of the outer doors, but in that time Lex had ceased to have any doubts about what the others had said about the weather. The sound of rain hitting the warehouse roof was now clearly audible, and a moment later a bright flash of light could be seen around the doors, followed by a loud clap of thunder. Regarding the doors silently for a moment, Lex started towards them, then stopped, considering, before turning to face Aria. “Do you have any ideas what’s going on?”
“How should I know?” She crossed her hooves, looking away from him. “I’ve been here the whole time, remember?”
“Aria.” He said her name softly, in the same cool manner that he’d used when pressing her to work for him, and she flinched without quite knowing why. “We have a deal,” he continued. “I protect you, in exchange for your service. That means that if you know anything about what’s happening, you tell me when I ask. Otherwise,” his eyes narrowed, “I’ll declare our agreement to be null and void, and you’ll be left to fend for yourself.” He paused to let that sink in. “Now, do you have any idea what’s going on?”
For a moment, she grit her teeth, still refusing to look at him. She hadn’t held back because she had anything to hide, but rather because she wanted to mess with him a little. That he’d take it so seriously, to the point of threatening her, was not only unexpected but also humiliating. Did he really need to rub her face in the fact that he was her best chance to survive, let alone get her voice back?
“I don’t know anything for sure,” she muttered, sulking.
“Anything is better than nothing.”
Aria turned to Lex with a sigh. “After I was captured, Sitkra – one of the sahuagin priestesses – was trying to scare me by telling me about the Great Lord of the Deep. She said something about how he’d destroyed a ship that had come here before, and that when several ponies tried to fly away, he’d ‘moved the above-water currents’ to stop them.” She hunched over, looking rather miserable for having remembered that. “The point being that there was no escape.”
Lex narrowed his eyes in thought, glancing back at the door. “Above-water currents” sounded like the wind, and if this so-called Great Lord of the Deep could affect the wind, then he could in all likelihood summon a storm from out of nowhere. What he found more disturbing was the confirmation that another ship had come here, and had been destroyed for it. He hadn’t heard anything about that when he’d been back in Tall Tale!
It had to have come from Las Pegasus, he decided. Tall Tale had received news of Vanhoover’s flooding early, and it would have known not to send any ships towards a flood zone for fear of potential current manipulations making them run aground. But Las Pegasus was much further away, and so had doubtlessly gotten the news too late…and the ponies on that ship had paid the price for it.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, when I told you to tell me what you knew about the aquatic monsters?” he hissed, trying to control his fury at the thought of even more pony lives having been lost.
Aria shrugged. “Like I said, it wasn’t something I knew for sure, just something I’d been told.”
Lex opened his mouth to rebuke her, but before he could say anything a crash so loud that it was almost an explosion came from the outside. Both Lex and Aria tensed, looking toward the doors as if expecting they were about to be knocked inward at any moment. But instead, the only sound were more crashes coming from outside, each one sounding as though a building were being stepped on, or something equally cataclysmic.
Knowing he needed to see what was happening, but not being willing to risk drawing attention to their location by opening the doors, Lex transformed into a shadow, not caring that his reserves of dark magic were now running perilously low. “Stay here!” he yelled at both Aria and Severance, before moving towards the doors. Passing through them, he looked outside...
The scene that was waiting for him looked like Tartarus itself had been unleashed.
As Lex passed through the warehouse doors, another bolt of lightning shot through the sky, illuminating his surroundings for the briefest of moments. Although the exact shapes were blurred by the heavy rainfall, for a split-second he could see everything around him.
What he beheld shook him to his core.
The ship that they’d arrived on had been torn apart, the pieces now clutched in tentacles so gargantuan that even a single one of them could have easily ensnared the dragon he’d fought. And now four of them were curling around the broken pieces of his ship, holding them aloft as though they weighed nothing at all. Numbly, Lex realized that this was the source of the loud crash that he’d heard a few seconds ago: it had been the sound of the vessel being destroyed.
But that wasn’t the only horrific sight that the lightning had made visible.
The waterfront was swarming with monsters. Large numbers of what looked like sahuagin were crawling out of the water, many of them holding weapons as they began to advance towards the city. Scuttling among them were foal-sized creatures that looked like some misshapen fusion of eel and lobster. Several manta ray-like things were whirling overhead, moving through the air as easily as they would through water. And he was sure that there were other monsters there as well…
The scenery plunging back into darkness as the lightning expired, the snapshot the oncoming horde ending as suddenly as it had begun. With the rainclouds blotting out what little illumination the crescent moon and stars had been providing, the lack of light was total. Lex could still see thanks to the darkvision that his incorporeal form granted him, but the sixty-foot limit to its range of vision was enough to cloak the gigantic tentacles and the wreckage of his ship from view, as well as most of the incoming monster army.
For a moment, Lex just stared forward, utterly overwhelmed by what he’d seen. Why was this happening?! Why were the sum total of the horrors that Aria had described suddenly emerging from the sea all at once?! It was as though her simply talking about them had somehow summoned them! Trying to get ahold of himself, Lex drifted back into the warehouse, barely noticing as he resumed corporeal form out of habit. His mind whirling with just how bad their situation was, he started to stumble back towards the shelter, only to stop as a pretty face suddenly blocked his path.
“What’s…” Aria’s question died on her lips as she saw his expression. Although she’d known what the sudden rainstorm had likely meant, she’d nevertheless hoped that there had been some other explanation. But the stricken look on Lex’s face confirmed what she’d feared: that the Great Lord of the Deep had personally come to put an end to them.
“Alright…alright…” Trying to fight down a rising sense of panic, Aria tried to weigh their options. “We have to run! We can go out the back and head inland!”
“That won’t work,” murmured Lex distantly.
“It might! If we can get far enough away from the water, then-”
“That won’t work!” repeated Lex, his voice rising. A moment later he shut his eyes tightly and shook his head, as though trying to physically throwing off his distress. Amazingly, it seemed to work, since when he looked at her a moment later his gaze contained its usual mixture of condescension and disapproval. “Even if we could shepherd everypony out of here and away from that thing, we’d never be able to protect them from the undead ponies infesting this city, let alone the other monsters crawling their way out of the water right now.”
“Forget them!” rasped Aria, clearly starting to panic. “You swore you would protect me! You…wait, ‘other monsters’?” She paused as she processed the rest of what he just said. “He brought the sahuagin with him? Or some of his other minions?”
“From what I saw, both.”
Aria felt the blood drain from her face. “And you’re worried about saving everyone else?! We need to leave immediately if we’re going to save ourselves!” She looked at the warehouse doors in fright, backing away from them as though expecting them to be breached at any moment.
“I am NOT forsaking anyone!” snarled Lex, his exclamation punctuated by another burst of thunder and lightning. Despite the imminent danger, he could feel his equanimity recovering more and more with each moment. Having someone to argue with gave him something to focus on, allowing him to order his thoughts and try and figure out what response he should take.
Aria, by contrast, was clearly struggling to hold onto any semblance of calm. “Well then you better think of something fast!” Biting her lip, she looked around frantically for a few moments before her eyes settled on a grate in the floor. “Th-that’s it! We can take the sewers and slip out that way!”
“No,” replied Lex immediately. “In this rain, the sewers will overflow in short order. Going down there now would only result in everypony drowning.”
“Yeah, well, sucks to be them, but I can breathe underwater!” Aria was already moving for the grate as she spoke, but what Lex said next stopped her in her tracks.
“Also, I suspect that at least some of the undead ponies are lairing down there, which means that you’ll be eaten alive before you get very far.”
She shot him a hateful look in response, and then turned to eye the grate again, as though evaluating her chances, but finally turned away from it with a whispered curse. “Then what about magic? Do you have a spell that could get us out of here?” She could hear the pleading tone in her sibilant words and hated it, but she hated the thought of dying a lot more.
“I have a teleportation spell prepared,” admitted Lex. Aria had just enough time for her eyes to widen in hope before he continued. “But its range is only a thousand feet or so, and can only take two or three others with me anyway.”
“Wonderful!” she hissed sarcastically. “That’s just wonderful!” Overcome with the urge to hit something, Aria looked around. Spotting a twisted piece of metal that might have once been a trash can nearby, she dragged herself over to it before whacking it with her tail, sending it flying into a nearby wall, where it clanged loudly.
Lex considered berating her, since under ordinary circumstances such an act would likely have drawn their enemies’ attention, but with the rain falling outside it seemed unlikely that the noise would reach anything nearby. As it was… He glanced back towards the doors. The wards he’d put up kept them hidden, as well as closed, but according to what Aria had told him before, several of those monsters were spellcasters. If they knew to check for magical emanations, they’d likely notice his protections quickly, and Lex had no confidence that his wards would stand up to any kind of dedicated assault, magical or otherwise.
And of course, that “Great Lord of the Deep” creature would have no trouble smashing the entire building if it wanted. Which meant that their current hideout offered no real protection at all. Whatever they were going to do would need to happen fast, one way or another. Aria seemed to have reached the same conclusion, because she turned to Lex again, and this time naked desperation was written all over her face. “What’re we gonna do?!”
“I’m thinking!” snapped Lex.
“Well think faster!”
“That will be easier to do if you shut up!” Lex telekinetically grabbed Severance – which had remained floating exactly where he had left it before he’d gone outside – to wave at Aria again, but stopped as he took hold of the weapon, looking at it thoughtfully. For a brief instant, he wondered if it might be their way out, but then remembered the scythe’s ominous warning from earlier. Although he still wasn’t sure exactly what constituted being “dependent” on the weapon, he had little doubt that telling it to go out there and kill the assembled monsters while he remained hidden in here would qualify, causing it to abandon him.
But if he couldn’t use Severance, what other resources did he have at his disposal? He had little doubt that Aria was, like himself, running low on magic as a result of their battle earlier. The other ponies in the shelter had some modest combat ability, demonstrated by surviving earlier monster attacks, but nothing that would give them any real chance of overcoming their current enemies. Sonata was the only one with any significant reserves of power left, but Lex refused to even consider sending her into battle all by herself. No matter how bad their circumstances were, such a thing was completely unacceptable!
All of those factors, alongside his own mostly-depleted abilities, and no way to call for help, meant that their available courses of action were…
Nothing.
There was no way to escape from the attack that was about to happen. No way to hide from it or avoid it. No way to effectively defend themselves, let alone fight back, against it. Even negotiating was a nonstarter, as the sahuagin had made it clear how they felt about “poh-nees,” especially “maa-jik” ones, and that had been before he’d slaughtered a number of them. Lex had no doubt that any sort of surrender would mean death for all of them.
Another bright flash and accompanying peal of thunder shook the air, and the sound of the rain grew louder, causing Lex to grit his teeth. As though their current array of problems wasn’t enough, the storm that the kraken had conjured was a threat unto itself! If it kept gaining in intensity like this, Vanhoover would be in severe danger of being flooded again! And if that happened…if…if that…happened…
Something suddenly occurred to him.
Silently sitting there, her tension mounting with every passing moment, Aria was about to yell at Lex again when she noticed a sudden change in his demeanor. His face had gone slack, but unlike before it wasn’t with worry or hopelessness. Instead, he looked almost…amazed? Blinking, she moved closer to him, but he didn’t seem to notice, instead muttering something too low for her to hear. A moment later, he frowned and turned to regard the doors again, his expression changing to a look of consideration, as though not sure what to make of them.
“Hey,” she called, but no response came. Instead, he had pulled his magic scythe off of his back and was glancing between it and the doors, still looking like they were puzzle pieces he hadn’t figured out how to work with. “Hey!” she called again, louder this time.
When he still didn’t respond, her patience snapped. By her reckoning, they had been talking for maybe two minutes since he’d come back inside, and her nerves were completely frayed. She doubted that the sahuagin and the others would start tearing things apart willy-nilly – they were intelligent hunters, and by now they’d all have heard that some of their best fighters hadn’t come back – but if they were already coming ashore then there wasn’t much time left. Raising a hoof, she cuffed him across the shoulder.
That seemed to do the trick, and he stumbled, blinking his eyes rapidly as he focused on her. “What do you think you’re…you’re…” His voice trailed off as he looked at her, and his gaze again turned into one of surprised consideration, as though the sight of her had made him realize something that he couldn’t believe was true.
“You had better be having a brainstorm!” she hissed, not sure if she should interrupt him again or not.
He muttered something again, this time loud enough for her to hear. “That’s it…”
“What? What’s it?”
Coming out of his reverie, he looked her dead in the eye…and smiled. “I have a plan.”
A look of guarded hope blossomed on her features. “A plan? To get us out of here?”
He shook his head, still grinning. It wasn’t a look of happiness, nor mirth, nor even the malicious anticipation she’d seen from him during their fight. Rather, the look on his face was one of complete and total confidence.
“We’re going to take the fight to them. And we’re going to win.”
Sitkra cursed as the coral wand she’d been using crumbled in her grasp, becoming a fine powder that the rain quickly reduced to a wet sludge.
Inherited by Sitkra when she’d devoured her predecessor, the wand’s ability to allow those it touched to breathe above the waves was one that she had used intermittently over the last several years. Although she had known that it would someday be expended, learning how to create another one hadn’t been very high on her list of priorities. After all, the air-breathing spell was one that she could use on her own, so why bother with making another wand?
But now, with it gone and her already having expended her single prepared air-breathing spell on Lirtkra several hours before, she regretted not learning how to create a replacement, since she’d only been able to enchant a fraction of their total forces. She briefly considered ordering the other Holy Ones she’d brought with her to cast the air-breathing spell in hopes of making up at least some of the shortfall, but quickly discarded that notion. That would tip them off that her wand had finally failed, and they’d refuse to help in hopes that her inability to follow through on the Great Lord of the Deep’s orders would get her in trouble. For a sahuagin, especially a Holy One, opportunity always came in the form of someone else’s misfortune.
Still, she had been able to enchant several dozen of their numbers before the wand had run out. The vast majority of those had been sahuagin, of course. That she’d had to commit sacrilege by enchanting any of those other creatures had been bad enough, but even for the Great Lord of the Deep’s sake she couldn’t bring herself to use the Shark God’s holy energies on more of the lesser races than her own people!
Of course, now she had to go and tell him that the majority of his retinue would need to remain very close to the water or risk asphyxiating. Even so, there’s opportunity here, she assured herself as she dived back into the water and swam closer to where the Great Lord was finishing with the poh-nee ship, a mere spear’s throw away from the water’s edge. After all, now we’ll be able to show him that the sahuagin are far more capable than those disgusting freaks he insists on keeping!
“What is it, Sitkra?”
“G-Great Lord,” Sitkra began, unable to suppress a gulp. The prospect of presenting her master with bad news was suddenly far more intimidating when in his presence. “We have…” she paused, trying to figure out how to best phrase what she was about to say, “…reached the limits of how many we can enable to breathe above the water.”
The Great Lord of the Deep was silent for a moment before he spoke again. “And how many is that?” The low rumble of his voice made his displeasure clear, and Sitkra refused to admit that she felt afraid in that moment.
“Over forty sahuagin, Great Lord, including myself! With our might, we will bring this maa-jik poh-nees to you, so that you may personally devour them whole!” Of that she felt absolutely confident, if for no other reason than failure would assuredly mean all of their deaths, one way or another. Although it galled her to admit it, anything that could kill Lirtkra would be a difficult opponent. That thought, she knew, should have stoked her bloodlust. But at the moment, all she felt was a growing sense of wrongness, as if nothing was proceeding as it should.
For a moment she wondered if they had lost the Shark God’s favor, and to her horror she couldn’t refute the possibility outright. Their service to the Great Lord of the Deep had entailed numerous violations of lesser tenets, she knew. But even so they were still receiving spells, and there hadn’t been any signs or omens of their god’s displeasure that she was aware of.
Unless what’s happened with those maa-jik poh-nees is a sign, she realized, and the thought made her entire body tense. It made perfect sense. How else would majestic creatures such as themselves lose to mere poh-nees? Until these new poh-nees had arrived, their race had been the weakest that Sitkra had ever encountered. But if she was right, and the Shark God was angry with them, then…was that why her wand had failed when it did?
“And what others?”
Torn from her thoughts, Sitkra cocked her head. “Others, Great Lord?”
“What others have you used your air-breathing spell on?”
“Two of the aboleths and five icks-, ickits-…the manta ray creatures. But we brought our euryptids and reefclaws as well!” Those creatures, little more than domesticated animals among the sahuagin, were amphibious, and so made excellent additions to a land-bound assault.
This time the Great Lord of the Deep was silent for much longer before speaking. “So you’ve restricted almost all of my strongest slaves to the water, while you, your weakling kin, and your pets will try to succeed at a task you’ve failed at before?”
“WE ARE NOT WEAK!” screamed Sitkra, surprising herself as her rage suddenly boiled up out of nowhere. All of a sudden the myriad humiliations and indignities she and her community had suffered came back to her, and she couldn’t hold herself back. “We are a mighty people, the ones who devour the weak! We are chosen by the Shark God to prey upon everything beneath the waves! We do not need any of your misshapen creatures to go on a hunt, because we can bring our prey down ALL BY OURSELVES!”
Her words hung in the air as she finished her outburst, and as her ire finally cooled, Sitkra realized that the only sounds she could hear were the rain and the occasional thunderclap. Looking around, she realized that all eyes – both above and below the water – were on her, and it began to dawn on her just what she had done. “That…that’s why you don’t need anything else to go onto the land,” she continued lamely. “We’ll defeat those maa-jik poh-nees for you.”
“Like your raiding party did before?” The Great Lord’s voice was even colder now.
“That was a fluke! We didn’t know our enemies' strength then!”
“And do you now that Lirtkra has been defeated?” The question made Sitkra gape, reeling backwards as though a spear had been shoved through her chest, and the Great Lord of the Deep laughed cruelly, causing the water around him to churn. “Yes, I knew that you dispatched him, along with Monitor and the Cripple. Did you really think that I’d be so ignorant of my own slaves’ activities?”
Sitkra couldn’t answer, still struggling to cope with the fact that her secrets weren’t so secret after all. How?! How does he know?! Lirtkra’s absence was too recent for word to have gotten around to anyone except the other Holy Ones, and she couldn’t imagine that any of them would have told the Great Lord of the Deep about it. All of them resented the creature that had taken over their great society; to have revealed her failings to it would have required an overwhelming degree of hatred for her, but who would-
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one sahuagin on the shore that was displaying her teeth in a vicious grin. For a moment, Sitkra didn’t recognize her, but then saw the line of cuts on her face and realized that it was the junior priestess whom she’d berated barely more an hour ago, and she knew in that moment just who had tipped the Great Lord off. Silently swearing that she’d devour that miserable wretch slowly and painfully once they got back, Sitkra turned her attention back toward her master. “Great Lord, Lirtkra’s failures are of no consequence! Where he and the others failed, we will succeed!”
“YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SPEAK TO ME OF SUCCESS!”
The Great Lord of the Deep’s roar was louder than thunder, and the force of his anger made the blood drain from Sitkra’s face. “Grea-”
“SILENCE!” This time his words were punctuated by a mammoth tentacle slamming into the water, causing massive waves that sent the surrounding creatures scurrying. “You have brought me nothing but failure where these ponies are concerned, Sitkra! Your raiders couldn’t take this ship! Your greatest warrior and two of my servitors fared no better! And now your incompetence has crippled my invasion force!” Another tentacle flung the rear of the ship onto the shore, where it collided with a nearby building with a terrific crash. “I will have no more of your bungling!”
“Great Lord, I-”
But Sitkra’s words were cut off as a third tentacle coiled around her. With a diameter greater than she was tall, it had no problem squeezing her until she couldn’t keep any air in her lungs, unable to do anything but thrash weakly in its grip. “I told you to be silent.” The Great Lord’s voice had returned to its icy calmness, though it was no less terrifying for it.
Waiting until her struggling had stopped, the Great Lord brought her closer, until she was right in front of one of its eyes. Uncaring of how her face was turning blue, he kept speaking. “Under other circumstances, I would give you the same treatment as the last one of your kind that challenged me, and leave you here to bake in the sun.” Sitkra’s eyes widened at that, and the Great Lord felt her struggling begin anew. A quick squeeze was all it took to crush her resistance, as well as several bones based on the sharp cracks he felt from her. “You are fortunate, however, that such a punishment takes more time than I currently have at my disposal. As such, I will show you mercy that you don’t deserve.”
The grip surrounding her eased just slightly, and Sitkra gasped for breath, the air made breathable thanks to her wand’s magic. “Th-thank you…Great Lord…” Her words were croaked hoarsely, trying not to choke on her own blood. She could feel that she had been badly injured, but it was nothing that some of the healing spells she’d prepared wouldn’t be able to fix.
The Great Lord of the Deep chuckled darkly. “You’re right to thank me, Sitkra. After all, I remember that your kind put a premium on devouring and being devoured, isn’t that correct? As such, you may consider this my gratitude for all that you’ve done until now.” Sitkra was about to ask what he meant when his tentacle suddenly squeezed her again. Unable to speak once again, she could only scream silently as he brought her towards his mouth, realizing what was about to happen. She tried to thrash, tried to cast a spell, tried to do anything that would save her, but there was nothing she could do.
In her last moments, Sitkra tried to pray to the Shark God to take her and let her hunt by his side for eternity in the endless ocean of blood. But as the large beak that was the Great Lord of the Deep’s mouth closed on her, terror filled her heart, and she tried to scream. She died with none of the bravery or dignity befitting a sahuagin Holy One.
Her last prayer would not be answered.
Silence reigned in the wake of Sitkra’s death.
Satisfied that he had made his point, Tlerekithres, the Great Lord of the Deep, directed his gaze at the rest of his slaves as he spoke. “There are ponies somewhere in this city. Those of you able to breathe air will bring one of them to me, dead or alive. If you don’t, you will suffer the same price for failure that Sitkra did. Now go.”
As one, the assembled horde turned and rushed toward Vanhoover.
Lex’s command – and it was obviously a command – was uttered as soon as he strode back into the shelter, causing everypony to turn and look at him, before glancing back towards her to see what she would do. Not bothering to look at them, Lex moved to the center of the room, his body language radiating authority, as though he expected her to instantly do what he said.
Under different circumstances, she wouldn’t have minded playing along. Heck, she would have found it to be enjoyable, since he was always hottest when doing his whole “take charge” bit. But at the moment she was still sore at him for being stubborn about his injuries, and she wasn’t in the mood to humor him. So instead she just shot him a dirty look, making sure not to move an inch.
Her expression grew even darker a moment later as she saw Aria following him, wriggling in order to squeeze her body through the doorway. What had those two been doing together…? “Sonata!” snapped Lex, drawing her attention back to him. “Come here, now!”
“Why should I?!” She stamped a hoof in agitation.
“Because you’re my spokespony, and we don’t have much time!”
His response set off a wave of murmurs through the assembled ponies, all of whom were now openly watching the exchange…though quite a few gazes had also settled on Aria as she finally entered, pulling herself along until she was behind Lex. Sonata scowled at her sister, absolutely certain that Aria was about to give her a smug look at having had a secret rendezvous with her stallion…but to her surprise, no silent taunt came. In fact, now that she stopped to think about it, Aria looked rather pale, and…hang on, what did he mean that they didn’t have much time?
Slowly realizing that something might have happened, Sonata felt some of her anger dampen, and slowly walked over to him. “What’s going on?”
His answer was to chant the now-familiar words of the spell that would let his whispers reach her ear. “Translate this in whatever manner you think will be most palatable,” he said tersely.
“Hold up, is something happ-”
“Just do what I tell you!” he hissed, and this time Sonata heard the underlying tension in his voice. Although he’d only been gone a couple of minutes to investigate the rain, something had happened out there that had him on edge. Feeling the last of her anger fade as she realized that, Sonata nodded and turned to face the crowd.
Cozy bit her lip as she watched the exchange, growing more concerned by the moment. It wasn’t just the utter lack of affection that Lex displayed for Sonata that had her worried, though. Lex was acting exactly the same way that he had when he was leading them to the shelter, barking commands and giving only the most curt explanations, which served to make everypony else more tense. Even now, she could see everyone starting to glance at each other nervously.
“What do you think’s going on?” muttered Aisle, keeping his eyes on the arguing couple even as he asked her.
Cozy shook her head. “I don’t know, but it-”
“Wait, for realsies?!” yelped Sonata suddenly, causing the two – along with everypony else – to fall silent. In the middle of the room, she was giving him a horrified look, her jaw hanging open and her eyes wide. Cozy saw her glance back at that Siren thing, which gave her a slow nod, before Sonata turned back to Lex, who whispered something else to her.
Gulping, Sonata visibly fought to regain her poise, turning back to look at the crowd. “So, um…nobody panic, but there’s an army of monsters like, right outside of here.” She paused as Lex whispered again, then continued. “And they’re probably gonna attack in the next few minutes.” Another pause. “Plus, there’s no way to escape before they do.”
A pin dropping could have been heard in the silence that ensued.
It was broken a moment later by Lex’s harsh whisper, which caused Sonata to throw her forelegs into the air as she turned to face him. “Well I’m sorry, but there’s, like, no way to make that not sound like super bad news!”
“Th-this is a joke, right?” Drafty’s voice was a croak as she stepped forward, giving them a pleading look. “The rain falling out of nowhere is one thing, but that…we all thought that was…” She trailed off, completely at a loss.
Sonata glanced back at Lex, then started speaking as he fed her an explanation. “So that’s because the…wait, that’s seriously his name? Okay, whatever. Because the leader of the water-monsters, the ‘Great Lord of the Deep,’ is making it storm somehow.”
“But that-”
“Nopony cares about the rain!” yelled Aisle shrilly, cutting Drafty off. He had no idea if that’s what she was going to ask about, but at the moment he didn’t care. There was only one topic that should be under discussion at that moment! “There’s an army of monsters outside and we can’t escape so what are we gonna do?!”
Lex’s response was to whisper again, and the tension in the room was palpable as everyone waited for Sonata to speak. “He has a plan!” she announced a moment later, sagging with visible relief, which was echoed on the faces of the crowd. “And it’s, like, a totes great one, too!” she added, before turning her attention back to him. “So, what’s the plan?”
He paused for a long moment, turning to sweep his eyes across the ponies assembled around them. The expression on his face made Sonata’s brows rise, not because she recognized it, but because she didn’t. Although she had trouble understanding what he was talking about a lot of the time, his face was totes an open book. Nine times out of ten, she could guess his state of mind just by looking as his expression. But as he looked over everyone, she had no idea what was going through his head.
A moment later he began to whisper again, and his spell delivered his words to her ears, but for a moment she didn’t believe them. Then she realized he was being serious – when was he not serious? – and she couldn’t resist the smile that wormed its way onto her face, grinning at him. Although she’d stopped being mad at him when she’d realized that there was something serious going on, she couldn’t help but give him a warm look now.
Although the two of them hadn’t been together very long, they’d had plenty of fights during that time. Sometimes he’d been right, and other times she had been. But during those times when she’d been the one who was right, Lex had never – with one notable exception – admitted that he was wrong or apologized to her, instead “just so happening” to change his mind in a manner that oh-so-coincidentally matched what she had been saying before. That apparently meant that he wasn’t really wrong, to his thinking.
Sonata didn’t care about that, since she understood what he meant even if he couldn’t say it, and it was exactly the same now as she turned to address the assembled ponies. “Okay, so like, this is a totes bad situation. In fact, it’s more than Lex can handle by himself.” She could see him glaring at her out of the corner of her eye, knowing he disapproved of how much she was changing what he’d said, but she ignored him. Making him sound better was part of being a spokespony, after all. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless!”
She paused, and took in how everypony was hanging on her every word. Even in such a bad situation, it felt super good to be the object of everyone’s attention. “Ever since we got here, each and every one of you has, like, totes gone above and beyond. You’ve fought off monsters, helped fortify this place, and always been super brave no matter what happened! You’ve risen to the occasion before, and Lex and I both know that you can again now! That’s why, if we all fight together, we can win!”
The crowd didn’t erupt in cheers the way she’d hoped, but they didn’t begin to protest either. Instead, they seemed to have mixed feelings, murmuring amongst themselves with obvious nervousness. “I know how that sounds,” continued Sonata. “After all, if our hero here,” she swept a hoof toward Lex, who still looked put out by her theatricality, “can’t beat these things, then what hope do the rest of us have, right?” Several nods and statements of affirmation were given in response.
“But don’t worry!” she continued. “We’re not just going to rush out there and hope for the best! Lex has thought up a strat-, strateger-, a plan that we’re gonna to use to send those ugly monsters packing! So long as we stick to that, we’re totes gonna kick their butts!” Another rumble ran through the crowd, and this time it sounded more positive, making Sonata grin. She was getting through to them! Giving Lex a pointed smile, she brought it home. “So what do you say? Are you gonna hide in here? Or are you gonna follow Lex and be known as the heroes who saved Vanhoover?!”
An enthusiastic roar was the response, and Sonata waited for it to die down before she began to explain Lex’s plan in detail.
“Can I talk to you for a moment?”
Although it was phrased as a question, Cloudbank knew that Drafty wasn’t asking. She also wasn’t surprised, given what had happened in the last few minutes. Glancing back at Lex, Cloudbank gave him an apologetic look. “I’ll be right back.”
“We don’t have much time,” he shot back disapprovingly.
“This will only take a moment,” interjected Drafty, before turning and walking to the other side of the room, Cloudbank following behind her. They didn’t really have much privacy there, but with the doors still sealed shut thanks to Lex’s warding, there was no other choice. Once she’d reached the opposite wall, Drafty rounded on the other mare. “What do you think you’re doing?!” she hissed softly.
“Drafty-”
“You volunteered for the most dangerous part!”
“Somepony had to,” replied Cloudbank evenly.
“But it didn’t have to be you!” insisted Drafty fiercely. “Any pegasus would do! Why are you so eager to be the one who puts her life on the line?!”
“We’re all going to be putting our lives on the line.” Cloudbank pointed back towards the crowd, which was currently sorting through the large pile of weapons and armor that Lex had created. She had to admit, the way that he’d been able to conjure them out of nowhere was almost as awesome as the fact that they were all made out of black crystals. Only Cozy had been freaked out by it, refusing to make use of any of them. Everypony else was getting suited up and selecting a weapon.
“You know what I mean! You’re going to be the one in the most danger, just like before!” She’d been trying to keep her voice low and her agitation in check, but Drafty could feel her nerves starting to fray. “All those times you went out to get water when I was sick…I felt guilty every time you left, did you know that? And then when we were headed here, you were the one watching out for us when that thing tried to force the doors open. And now you’re doing it again…putting yourself in danger for everyone else.” She blinked, her eyes suddenly watery, and she rubbed a hoof over them. “You shouldn’t have to be the one to keep stepping up.”
“I never felt like I had to, Drafty.” Cloudbank’s response was as soft as it was powerful, stepping closer and putting a hoof on Drafty’s chest. “I want to do this.”
“Why?”
“Because…” Cloudbank faltered for a moment, her courage wavering, not just because of what they were about to do, but also because their conversation had attracted a few stares as well. Biting her lip, she tried to think of what to say, to explain how she felt, but the words wouldn’t come. Nuts to it, she decided. If this doesn’t work, we’re all done for anyway. Throwing caution to the wind, she decided to let her actions be her answer.
Acting before she could chicken out, Cloudbank leaned in and kissed Drafty full on the lips.
As he watched Cloudbank head off with Drafty, Lex struggled, not just to contain his exasperation, but just to remain upright. It wasn’t entirely due to his injuries, but because of the effort that had gone into creating the pile of weapons and armor for everypony. Doing so had not only forced him to expend the last of his dark magic, but had required that he channel additional magic through his body.
Normally, he’d never have been able to make such a large cache of materials, even if he’d had his full reserve of dark magic ready; he simply couldn’t use it that efficiently. But his fight against the dragon had taught him that he could overcome that limitation by channeling additional magic through his body, empowering his dark magic just like he could his spellcasting. The result was that he’d been able to equip everypony here, which would hopefully make enough of a difference in the battle to come.
Doing so had not been without a cost, however. The further use of that technique had placed even more stress on his body, depleting what little rest he’d gathered. While it hadn’t become so bad as to make his injuries worse, it was all he could do just to walk. Worse was that his entire supply of dark magic had been totally depleted. In the upcoming battle, he wouldn’t be able to turn into shadow, create any more black crystals, lay curses, or any of the other abilities that he’d grown so used to using ever since he’d gained his new horn.
He was as close to powerless as he’d been in a long time. But even without spells, even without dark magic, he could still see the path to victory. So long as everything went according to plan…
Just like it did when you fought the dragon?
The barb made Lex grit his teeth. This time would be different! This time there would be no miscalculations! Unlike then, Lex knew that he wouldn’t be able to turn the situation around if something went awry. But that was fine; if the margin of error was nil, then he just had to make sure that no errors occurred.
This will work, he silently assured himself. This time everything will go exactly how I’ve predicted it.
Of course, it was hard to be confident when the lynchpin of his plan was currently ignoring her instructions in favor of taking a break with her friend!
Sonata glanced at Lex, watching him glare impatiently at where Cloudbank and Drafty were talking in hushed tones. All around them ponies were finishing donning the black crystal armor that Lex had created, and several were taking practice swings with the matching weapons. Only Cozy had refused, an unnerved look on her face as she watched everyone else. “I wonder what her problem is,” she asked, glancing back at Lex. In fact, she didn’t really care about whatever was making the crystal mare uncomfortable; she just wanted to try and get Lex to talk about something so he’d quit being so tense.
“Her problem,” he replied darkly, “is that she’s not taking this seriously enough. We have no idea when those monsters will attack this building. Given how important her job is, she should be giving that her full consideration rather than taking the time to chat with her friends.”
“Chat with her…” Sonata trailed off in confusion before realizing that he’d misunderstood her. “Oh, I meant Cozy over there.” She pointed at the pony in question, and Lex turned to look at her, his scowl unchanged.
“It’s because I remind her of King Sombra,” he corrected himself tersely. “Or maybe some religiou-” He stopped speaking abruptly, and that was unusual enough to draw Sonata’s attention away from Cozy and back to him.
There was a surprised look on his face, directed towards where Drafty and Cloudbank were. Following his gaze, Sonata looked at the pair…just in time to see the two of them breaking a kiss. Even as she watched, Cloudbank said something, the details lost over the general noise of clanking armor and weapons, which caused Drafty’s face to color, clearly caught off-guard. But a moment later she smiled said something back before leaning forward, initiating another kiss.
“Aww, that’s so sweet!” gushed Sonata. When she received no reply, she glanced over and found that Lex was still staring at the pair, blushing. For a moment his reaction made no sense to her, but then the pieces fell into place and she smirked. Leaning in closer to him, she lowered her voice to a husky purr. “Pretty sexy sight, huh?”
“S-Sonata!” He jumped in place, an embarrassed look on his face, and she knew she’d hit bullseye. “There’s no need to be vulgar!”
Her response was to grin, both at how cute his overreaction was, and that she’d successfully broken the mounting tension. It was almost enough to make her want to keep teasing him, but she knew that he’d probably be sore at her if she did. Instead, she leaned in to nuzzle him, murmuring softly as she did. “When we’re done with all this, how about you and me, like, do something even more vulgar.” His response was a snort, but there was no real force to it, and she knew he was mollified.
A moment later they separated, and Lex pointed a hoof towards the other two mares. “Go get Cloudbank back here. As soon as I finish telling her what to do, we’re moving out.”
Two minutes later, everypony had gathered in front of the warehouse doors.
From behind the mass of ponies, noticing how they were nervously shifting and glancing at the thin wooden barrier between them and the monster army, Lex spoke up. “Remember, you don’t need to fight to win! Just keep them away from us! Focus on defense!” He was going to say more, but felt Sonata put a hoof on his side, and when he glanced over at her she shook her head. Letting out a breath, Lex glanced at the other two ponies beside him. Although she was pale, Cozy gave him a nod.
In contrast, Cloudbank looked determined, giving a sharp nod of her own as she clutched Severance tightly in her mouth.
The sight of somepony else wielding the weapon that the Night Mare had given him was enough to fill Lex with worry, but not for himself. Rather, he still remembered what the goddess had said about the scythe altering the mentality of those that wielded it to better suit her liking. Although he had given Severance explicit instructions not to do anything to Cloudbank’s mind, and it had acquiesced on that point, he still felt nervous. Mind-altering magic had always terrified him for how invasive it was, and he had no desire to inflict such a thing on anypony else.
But there was no use thinking about it now. Instead, he glanced behind him, where Aria was huddled with a frown. Although she’d obeyed him when he’d told her to use any enhancement or augmentation spells she’d had left on the assembled ponies, she had balked when he’d ordered her to accompany them to battle, pointing out that her magical reservoirs were almost completely expended. Lex had briefly considered forcing her, since every possible asset needed to be utilized in order to give them a chance at victory, but knew he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on making her obey him once the fighting started. He’d tried reasoning with her, but logic had also failed to sway her. It had only been when Sonata had started heckling her with accusations of cowardice that Aria had grudgingly agreed to take part.
Sonata had likewise laid down some enhancement spells of her own on the assembled ponies, further improving their chances, but her last preparation was one that they’d been waiting until the last moment to unveil...and now it was time. Letting out a breath as he realized that there were no more delays to be had, Lex looked over at her. “Do it,” he said simply.
“Right!”
Taking a deep breath, Sonata held it for just a moment, and then began to sing. “Stand up, ponies! Go and save the day!”
She kept singing, her voice projecting an upbeat song of rampant heroism and aggressive pride. The effect was immediate, as the assembled ponies stopped fidgeting, with several bobbing their heads in time with the quick tempo of her song. A few even began to paw at the ground, as though eager to charge outside. It was enough to mildly surprise Lex, even though he’d believed her when she’d told him that she could sing and make everypony fight better. He’d heard her sing before, and it had never particularly moved him beyond appreciating how beautiful her voice was, but Sonata had assured him that her voice had magic all its own. “I’m not a Siren for nothing,” she had said, and apparently her boast hadn’t been an idle one.
Realizing that this was the absolute most that they could do, Lex wrapped the warehouse doors in his telekinetic aura, and threw them open. “Charge!” he roared, and the assembled ponies flooded outward, giving a loud cheer as they ran to reclaim Vanhoover.
Tlerekithres watched as his slaves rushed towards the pony city.
He had few expectations that they’d accomplish much. Thanks to Sitkra’s bumbling, there simply weren’t enough of them to effectively flush the passengers of that ship he’d smashed out of wherever they were hiding. After all, it was unlikely that they were still residing close to the shoreline; no one with even a modicum of intelligence would make their lair so close to a waterline when they knew that there were aquatic enemies nearby. More likely they had crawled inland somewhere and hunkered down.
But then, finding them had never been the point of this little exercise…
Tlerekithres had initially intended to let his slaves enjoy themselves before he destroyed the city. Given that almost all of them were aggressive predators, and of diverse – and largely xenophobic – species, he knew that they needed to be given outlets upon which they could vent their natural desire to kill, lest it build up to the point where they turned on each other. If that were to happen, it could lead to mass infighting among his slaves, at which point he’d be unable to regain control of them. Better to direct it outward, where it could be put to use keeping potential enemies at bay.
To that end, he’d arranged this little expedition. But now it would serve a different purpose; now the sahuagin would collectively pay for the incompetence of their leader. The forty-some of their number who were in the city when the tornado he was gradually conjuring finally touched down and wiped it off the map would serve as an object lesson to the rest of them as to the price of foolishness. Besides, this city's destruction would also serve as an excellent way to formally announce to the rest of the world that this sea was now under his control, and that those who defied him would pay for it with their lives.
Of course, that would mean they’d need to find a different coastal city to make into their hunting ground, but such a thing wasn’t a major problem as far as Tlerekithres was concerned. Coastlines were always dotted with cities when there were sapient races involved; they’d simply need to head southward, away from the colder waters north of their present location, until they came across another. Once that happened, his slaves would have a new source of both food and entertainment, and he could concentrate more on expanding his undersea dominion-
A sudden commotion from the wharf drew him from his musings. Tlerekithres directed his attention towards the source of it, and couldn’t help but laugh at what he saw. Ponies, a small horde of them, were clashing with his sahuagin. What made it more amusing, however, was that they actually appeared to be holding their own. It was enough that he almost wished he’d let Sitkra live, just to see the look on her face as her “mighty people” were pushed back by herd animals.
Unable to resist indulging his mirth more, Tlerekithres moved closer to the edge of the harbor to watch the spectacle…even as the winds grew stronger.
That was how Sandbar thought of it as he led the charge, short sword clenched tightly in his jaw. In front of him, the fish-monsters – “sahuagin,” Lex had called them – tried to ready themselves, but even through the driving rain the light spell that Cozy had cast on his and everypony else’s armor let Sandbar see that scaly creatures were caught off-guard, having spread themselves too thin to easily repel the mass of ponies rushing towards them. It was enough to make the corners of his mouth turn up. Let’s see how you like it!
The scar on his neck from where one of those things had very nearly torn his throat out less than two days ago still ached. But neither the scar nor the ache bothered him very much; the doctors had assured him that the latter would fade with time and he thought the former was actually pretty cool. A sailor should always have something like that – impressive without being ugly, and had a good story behind it – to impress the ladies, he’d always thought.
The memory of how he’d gotten it, however, had haunted him. The sudden rush of confusion, terror, and pain that he’d felt as one of those things had dragged him into the water and bit his neck had left him shaking ever since it happened. Although he felt sure that, like with the soreness, it would fade with time, less than forty-eight hours wasn’t nearly long enough to come to grips with what had happened. Up until a minute ago, he had been trembling in his ill-fitting armor at the thought of confronting the monsters that had done that to him.
But then, just before the doors were opened, Sonata had started singing.
He’d heard her sing before, of course. She had given an impromptu one-mare concert after they’d cast off from Tall Tale, where she’d proven that she sounded as great as she looked. She’d also had several good lines in their improvised number when they’d all been cleaning the warehouse together. So Sandbar hadn’t been surprised to find himself instantly taken when she’d started to sing a fast-paced tune just now. What had surprised him was just how much her song had affected him. Almost as soon as he heard the first note, his nervousness had vanished, replaced with a heady rush of exhilaration. Suddenly charging into the middle of an army of those sahuagin-things didn’t seem scary; it seemed exciting!
Giving a frenzied cry, Sandbar ran at the closest sahuagin full-tilt, giving a wild swing of his sword as he did so. The creature, which had been in profile to him when they’d begun their charge, tried to correct its footing so that it could bring its spear up to parry the attack, but wasn’t able to shift its posture in time. Sandbar’s blade slid past its guard to open up a deep gash on its chest, and the sahuagin gave a roar of pain as it frantically threw itself backwards, moving parallel to the water’s edge as it tried to put some distance between itself and this new threat.
For a moment Sandbar was ready to chase after it, caught up in the rush of being able to strike back against the monsters that had hurt him so badly. But he’d only taken a single step when he felt a clang against his armor, causing him to jump in nervous tension and swing his head around to see what had hit him.
The sight that greeted him wasn’t that of another monster, but his old friend Ocean Spray, pulling his mace back from where he’d tapped the end of it against Sandbar’s armor. The realization made the latter pony frown. “What are you doing?” he yelled, raising his voice to make himself heard over the downpour.
“What’re you doing?” shouted Ocean Spray in return. Flapping his wings in agitation, he pointed towards the pier. “We have to keep moving, remember? We need to stay together and fight defensively until we can get into position!”
Sandbar flushed, and was about to reply, only for another sahuagin to come running at them from the opposite direction. “Poh-nees!” it snarled, lunging for them with claws extended. Caught unaware, Ocean Spray started to swing his mace, but not before the creature raked its claws over his side. But the dark crystal armor easily withstood the blow, leaving its wearer unharmed.
Giving a curse, Ocean Spray hefted his mace again, bringing it down heavily, but the sahuagin darted to its right, avoiding the blow…only for Sandbar’s sword to pierce its side. Giving a shriek of rage, it turned towards him, leaning forward as it bared its teeth. But before he was bitten for a second time, Ocean Spray’s mace came down on the thing’s head, making a horrible splat as it knocked the creature to the ground, where it shuddered once and then lay still.
“What happened to fighting defensively?” grinned Sandbar.
Ocean Spray opened his mouth to respond, but his words were lost as the battlefield was suddenly illuminated by lightning, the accompanying thunder arriving almost instantly. As though the flash had been a signal, the rain picked up, and the wind began to blow harder. It was nothing short of miraculous, realized Sandbar, that they could still hear Sonata singing over it. A moment later something occurred to him, and he looked at Ocean Spray. “Can you do something about this storm?”
“Are you kidding me?!” yelled his pegasus friend. “I don’t think the Wonderbolts could do something about this storm! We’d need an entire town’s worth of pegasi to take care of one this intense!”
“Then we’ll-, whoa!” Hastily falling back as a crossbow bolt flew over his head, Sandbar looked to his left, further down the wharf, where two more sahuagin were coming to fill in for their fallen comrade. Behind them trailed a pony-sized creature that looked like a lobster with a scorpion’s tail, while nearby three foal-sized creatures that looked like eel-lobster hybrids were skittering forward as well.
“We need to keep moving!” yelled Ocean Spray. “Let’s go!” He didn’t wait for an answer as tucked his wings close to his body – knowing better than to try flying in such dangerous conditions – and ran towards the piers. Sandbar followed behind him a moment later.
“Never give up! Never give in! Don’t stop trying until you win!” sang Sonata, projecting her voice as loudly as she could to make herself heard over the storm and the din of battle. Unlike her spellcasting, which only required her to speak the words out loud, her singing required that people actually hear it to be effective. Although the effects of her song – currently set to evoke aggression – would last for a little bit even after she stopped, that was a limit she didn’t want to push. So she kept vocalizing as much as she could, slowly moving forward behind the charging ponies.
Close by her, Lex and Aria advanced at a sedate pace, the former leaning heavily against the latter. “I still don’t see why I needed to be here,” groused Aria, looking around nervously.
“Shut up and keep going,” growled Lex. Like Aria, he was also taking in the battlefield. The initial charge had gone well, but that was because the sahuagin were spread out along the wharf. Now that the ponies had revealed themselves – their presence impossible to miss thanks to the light their armor was giving off – they were rushing towards them from all sides. It wouldn’t be very long before they were completely surrounded.
“Keep moving!” he yelled, trying to make himself audible to everypony around him. “Stay close and keep them away from us!” It utterly galled him to give that order; he was firmly of the opinion that he was supposed to be the one protecting everypony else, rather than the other way around. But there was no other choice if they wanted to win this. Instead, he took another shaky step forward, succeeding only because Aria was there to support him.
They were making progress, but it was slow going. The weather was steadily growing worse, and it was beginning to impede their forward motion. The only upshot was that it seemed to be hindering their enemies as much as it was them, but that made no sense. Did that kraken not realize that it was making it harder for its own troops to fight? Or did it just not care either way? Although Aria had described the creature as cunning and devious, Lex couldn’t see what it was trying to accomplish by making the weather this hostile.
But ultimately that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they get closer to the thing. Luckily that last burst of lightning had revealed it to still be in the harbor, near the end of the piers. Now if it just remained there until they could close the gap…
Shouts from ahead of him drew Lex’s attention back to their immediate surroundings. In front of them, he could see that their advance had suddenly come to a halt, and felt a surge of panic-fueled frustration. No! They had to keep moving! “Do not stop!” he hollered. “Whatever’s happening, DO NOT STOP!”
But the ponies in front of him didn’t continue to march. Just as he was about to yell at them again, Lex suddenly saw why, and his voice caught in his throat. There were more enemies between them and the water’s edge…but this time it wasn’t one of the sahuagin or their lobster-creatures.
Directly ahead of them, undulating as it slowly wriggled forward, was a twenty-foot long three-eyed fish, waving four long tentacles around.
Tlerekithres watched the battle with aplomb, massive tentacles wriggling in a gesture of amusement that only another kraken would have recognized. The ponies, contrary to everything he’d expected, had not only been hiding in a building right near the water’s edge, but were also making no attempt to hide themselves as they fought with his slaves. Quite the contrary, their magical lighting was causing them to stand out unmistakably. Even more curious, they were apparently eschewing any sort of escape attempt, and instead making a straight line right for him!
It was quite obvious that they intended to challenge him directly, and just the thought was so amusing that he couldn’t help but ease up on the force of the wind ever so slightly. It was still a howling gale, but not quite so bad that the ponies couldn’t move through it, all the better to let them play out whatever farce they were so intent on. On the off-chance that they were able to fight their way through his slaves, Tlerekithres couldn’t help but wonder what exactly they were planning on doing. It wasn’t as though they had any idea what they were up against, after all.
Or did they? Eyes narrowing just slightly as he spotted one of his slaves near the center of their configuration, Tlerekithres revised his opinion of the situation just slightly. If that feckless creature – “Aria,” she had called herself, though the sahuagin had simply dubbed her “the Cripple” due to her ruined voice – had informed them about his nature, then they might actually have a viable plan. But for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what it was. He was utterly immune to any and all poisons, the most numbing of cold, and any sort of magic designed to affect the mind. And of course, his body was a natural war machine, being far larger and stronger than any other creature he had ever encountered. The idea that these ponies could possibly hurt him was not only ridiculous, it was unthinkable.
Which made the prospect of finding out what they intended to do all the more intriguing…
Lex grit his teeth as he saw the front line of ponies falter at the sight of the creature ahead of them. Its appearance was enough that, even with Sonata’s song bolstering their morale, they couldn’t help but be intimidated. Twenty feet long and almost seven feet tall, the giant fish’s three eyes moved independently, looking them over as its tentacles waved in the air threateningly.
“Keep moving!” Lex roared. Even the act of yelling caused his body to ache in protest, but he forced himself to do so. “Go through that thing if you have to, but KEEP MOVING!” The sahuagin and their attendant monsters were rapidly forming up on either side of them, gathering in from where they’d been spread out along the wharf. In his estimation they had a minute, maybe two, before their full forces would be on them.
If that happened, they were doomed. Although everypony was making sure to form a circle around himself, Sonata, Aria, and the few others that he’d kept at their center, Lex knew that their formation wouldn’t hold out for long against a concerted attack. Already, the ponies on either side of them were fighting with everything they had, barely holding their own. None of them were trained in how to wear armor or wield weapons, and it was only due to Sonata and Aria’s magic that they were able to fight effectively even with the advantage of surprise. They needed to end this quickly, or it would quickly be the end of them.
Luckily, his shout seemed to rouse the rest of the ponies around him, and they threw themselves forward, giving a loud cry as they did so. They ran towards the monster…only to skid to a halt as a large stone wall suddenly appeared directly in front of them, blocking the tentacle-fish from sight. The unexpected sight caused Lex to gape, his eyes staring at the sudden barrier in horror, trying to figure out what magic it had used and what to do about it.
The wall wasn’t very long, barely ten feet wide and just as tall, but with the greater numbers of enemies assaulting their flanks, moving their entire group around it would prove extremely difficult…and that was assuming that it couldn’t create more. Even having the pegasi fly over it would prove almost impossible in this wind.
With just one spell that thing had pinned them down, and lowered their chances of victory to almost nil.
Aisle gave a cry as one of the scuttling lobster-eels sank a claw into his foreleg.
For a moment, he couldn’t help but try to kick the disgusting thing away from him, but it only sank its claw tighter into his flesh, refusing to be dislodged. Fighting back the urge to keep trying, he instead brought his axe down on the thing, the weapon making a deep gash in its exoskeleton. Next to him, Drafty brought her heavy pick down on it as well, punching through the opening that Aisle had created in its natural armor and impaling the thing.
Although she’d skewered it right through its center, the creature seemed to be enraged rather than injured, and it flailed its claws wildly at her. Both bounced off of her armor, however, and a moment later it shuddered and went limp. Withdrawing her pick from its corpse, Drafty risked a glance over at Aisle. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” he nodded. But he barely had time to get the words out before another monster was upon them. Whereas the one Drafty had killed had been the size of a foal, this one was as big as a pony, and instead of an eel’s head on a lobster’s body, this one was a lobster with a scorpion-like tail. Gulping, Aisle braced himself, hefting his axe in preparation as the thing stopped a few feet from them, giving a low hiss. He risked a look left and right to see if there was anypony else who could help them, but other than Drafty they were all dealing with opponents of their own.
“C’mon!” taunted Drafty, pointing her pick towards their latest enemy. “I’ll pin you just like that other bug!”
Her show of bravado brought a shaky grin to Aisle’s face. “You still buzzing from Cloudbank’s kiss?” Part of him couldn’t believe that he was bantering in the middle of a fight like this, but he chalked it up to Sonata’s song having revved him up.
Drafty grinned widely. “What can I say? She really-, whoa!” Cutting herself off as her enemy charged forward, Drafty barely managed to dodge the initial swipe of its claw. She swung her pick in response, but her frantic attempt to avoid being hit left her off-balance, and the strike didn’t have enough power behind it to pierce the thing’s shell. Aisle darted in to try and help, but the thing skittered to the side as he swung his axe, dodging the blow.
Cursing, Drafty moved after it, trying a second time to bring her pick down on the thing, but as she moved its tail darted out. Tilting her head instinctively, Drafty only barely managed to avoid the sharp point of its stinger piercing her eye, instead drawing a cut along her cheek. Gritting her teeth, she accepted the hit and swung her pick again, and again the thing managed to quickly dodge out of the way…right towards Aisle.
Grunting with effort as he brandished his axe, Aisle buried it in the beast’s side, causing it to emit a high-pitched shriek that made him wince. Even so, he struggled to tear the axe free from where it was caught in the creature’s body. He paid for that a moment later as its claw struck his chest just above his armor, hitting him right along his collarbone and making him open his mouth in a silent cry of pain.
“Aisle!” Drafty yelled as she lunged forward. The thing’s tail lashed out at her again, but this time she was ready, ducking under the strike and swinging her pick. This time her aim was perfect, and the pointed end of her weapon sank into the creature’s face, piercing it and killing the thing instantly. Yanking her weapon free, she turned her attention to her friend. “Are y-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Aisle’s eyes suddenly widened, looking at something behind her in alarm. Drafty had just enough time to start to turn her head before pain suddenly exploded through her body, her back feeling like it was on fire. Barely noticing that she’d fallen to the ground, she looked behind her and saw the needle-toothed grin of a sahuagin, raising its blood-covered spear to finish her off.
Aisle was faster. Grasping the haft of his axe in his teeth, he wrenched it free of the lobster-scorpion’s body in a single tug. Not stopping the motion, he whipped his head around and released the axe, flinging it towards the sahuagin. Despite the desperate nature of his throw, the arc of its trajectory was perfect, and the sahuagin had just enough time to spot the incoming weapon before it buried itself in the creature’s neck, knocking it onto its back as its head was very nearly separated from its body.
Panting, as much from tension as from effort, Aisle paused just for a moment as he realized that his desperate attempt to save his friend had actually worked. Then he recalled that she was still badly injured, and rushed over to her. “Drafty! Hang on!”
“Nngh…’m ‘kay,” she muttered, trying to get her hooves under her. But just talking caused pain to shoot through her, and she couldn’t seem to stand.
“You’re fine,” nodded Aisle, despite the fact that she obviously wasn’t. “You’re going to be fine.” The words tumbled from his lips instinctively, not knowing what else to do. He needed to get her some help, but where could-
White light suddenly radiated out from behind him, where Lex and the others were gathered in the center of their group, and Aisle had just enough time to look up before it washed over him and Drafty, as well as several nearby ponies. As it did, the pain of his wounds faded, and he heard Drafty give a sigh of relief as she clamored to her hooves, also healed.
Pausing just long enough to shoot a grateful look back towards Cozy – the one who had unleashed that healing energy – Aisle quickly ran over and retrieved his axe. There were already more enemies moving towards them, and he knew that he couldn’t count on Cozy’s healing energy lasting indefinitely. Until Lex could bring the rest of his plan to bear, they were going to need to hold out as best they could.
As two more sahuagin rushed towards him and Drafty, Aisle could only hope that their best would be enough.
“I’m only going to be able to do that a few more times,” warned Cozy, looking at Lex. She could see the question on his face, knowing he was wondering what she’d done, and quickly explained. “That wasn’t a spell. Lashtada lets me radiate holy energy a few times each day. It heals the living and harms the undead. You saw me use it back when you first met us.”
“I-”
“I can pick who it affects,” she continued, not giving him a chance to interrupt her, “and I made sure to exclude you. I knew you wouldn’t want it after all that fuss you made when Sonata told me to heal you before.”
“That-”
“I’ll help keep everypony on their hooves, so you just worry about figuring out what to do about that wall!”
“You-”
Before he could say anything else, Aria spoke up. “Why are we still standing here? That wall is an illusion! Just go through it!” she whispered urgently.
“What?!” hissed Lex, his head snapping around to look at her, Cozy’s impertinence immediately forgotten.
“What do you mean ‘what’? That thing is an aboleth,” she explained. “Making illusions is one of their powers.”
Lex looked back at the wall and immediately activated his circlet, letting him see into the magical spectrum. Sure enough, it had a magical aura radiating out from it that was indicative of illusion magic…which didn’t match what Aria had told him earlier about those ‘aboleth’ creatures. “You said they had psychic abilities, not this!”
Aria frowned at him. “Making people see things that aren’t there is psychic!”
“There’s a difference betwee-, nevermind!” Now was not the time to explain to her the difference between illusions that were the product of mental tampering and those that were the product of magically creating external images and sounds. “The wall is an illusion! It’s not real!” he yelled, causing them to look between him and the wall uncertainly.
The closest pony, a unicorn stallion whose name Lex couldn’t remember, gingerly reached out a hoof and touched the barrier…and passed right through. Giving a sigh of relief, he turned to look back at everypony else. “He’s right!” he announced. “It’s not r-” Before he could finish speaking, a tentacle reached through the wall and curled around him, lifting him into the air before immediately slamming him back down with a sickening crunch. Before anypony could do more than gape, three more tentacles followed suit, smashing three more ponies to the ground with bone-breaking force, causing Cozy to immediately run forward, channeling more healing energy.
Cursing, Lex realized that they were out of time. The aboleth clearly knew how to use its illusions to gain a tactical advantage, and fighting a defensive battle while trying to counter its powers would take too long. They had to get past this thing right now.
The aboleth’s attack had proven that it could see through the illusory wall it had generated, which placed it in an advantageous tactical position. The ideal course of action, Lex knew, would have been to fight a defensive battle until the full spectrum of its powers was known, and then take the appropriate countermeasures. But that would have required time that they didn’t have, as more enemies were closing in on them every second.
The only viable alternative, then, was an offensive maneuver of overwhelming power. But their current forces weren’t capable of pulling off such a thing; even with enhancement magic and armaments, Lex knew that their current band was still just a rag-tag collection of noncombatants who were grossly out of their element. Fighting a brief defensive battle against a mob of pony-sized monsters with, from what he’d seen, no magic of their own was already pushing their limit. Defeating a gigantic monster with magical abilities and the intelligence to use them to greatest effect was completely beyond what they could hope to accomplish.
As though to confirm his evaluation, several ponies – apparently heartened by having seen Cozy heal their comrades – charged forward, giving rousing battle cries as they disappeared behind the illusory wall. But after a moment their brave shouts turned into pained screams, which abruptly cut off an instant later. The display was enough to break the morale of the ponies that made up what was left of the vanguard, who slowly backed away from the wall, fear written all over their faces.
For an instant, Lex could only stare in mute horror at what had most likely been the deaths of those courageous ponies. Deaths that you led them to, came the wordless accusation in his mind. Dimly, he heard Sonata falter in her singing, her voice losing its intensity, and through his shock he realized that unless something happened immediately, those ponies wouldn’t be the last ones to lose their lives.
There was only one chance left.
“Cloudbank, use Severance and kill that thing!” ordered Lex, looking behind him as he spoke. Although he couldn’t actually see either of them, he could make out an odd, blurry image a few feet back where the rain didn’t seem to be falling the right way, the result of the water hitting their invisible forms.
“What?” came Cloudbank’s disembodied voice, heavy with uncertainty. “But you said I shouldn’t attack until-”
“There’s no choice!” hissed Lex, internally cursing Severance. He was sure that if he told it to go and attack on its own, when he was too depleted to do so himself, he’d run afoul of its warning about becoming “dependent” on it, causing it to abandon him. The only remaining option had been to entrust it to another pony to use, for which Cloudbank had volunteered.
He’d been holding her in reserve with an invisibility spell, cast by Aria, for when they made it to the kraken, but that wasn’t an option anymore. “The others can’t beat that thing on their own, which means you-” His words were cut off as he heard several clatters from behind him, Aria’s gasp of alarm punctuating that a new disaster had just happened.
Turning his head, Lex saw that the remaining ponies at the head of their group had all lowered their weapons and were staring upward, mesmerized by a large patch of colorful lights that slowly shimmered and shifted in a steady pattern, clearly visible despite the pouring rain. Even Cozy had been affected, her jaw slack as she gazed upwards raptly, completely defenseless against the threat of the monster lurking behind the illusory wall.
Knowing that she and the others would be the aboleth’s next victims if they didn’t do something, Lex tore open his haversack, pulling out the remaining scroll that he’d taken from the dragon’s hoard. He heard Cloudbank and Aria ask what he was doing, but he ignored them both. It took only an instant to rattle off the contents of the scroll, activating its magic, and another second to toss it aside and lunge towards the watery blur that was Cloudbank. As his hoof made contact with her body Lex heard her give a yelp, knowing that it meant the spell contained within the scroll – a spell designed to let the recipient see through all illusions for a few minutes – had taken effect, and that to her eyes the wall that thing conjured had vanished.
But they didn’t have time for her to be surprised. “Go!” Lex roared. “Kill that thing right now OR WE’RE ALL DEAD!”
“R-right!” Not hesitating another moment, Cloudbank charged forward, brandishing Severance in her mouth. Knowing that nopony else could see her, she dodged and weaved around them as she ran forward, wishing that she could fly but knowing better than to try spreading her wings during such a fierce storm. Trying not to look at the unmoving forms of several other ponies between her and her goal, it took only a few seconds until that “aboleth,” as Aria had called it, was right in front of her.
Not slowing down, Cloudbank tightened her jaws around Severance’s handle. I’m only going to get one shot at this! Aria had told her that, while her spell of invisibility would last for several minutes before expiring on its own, it would immediately end if and when she attacked something else. Moreover, Aria had driven home that she didn’t have enough magic to cast that spell a second time. She needed to make this count!
Throwing herself forward, Cloudbank gave a loud yell as she swung Severance around, feeling it bite deep into the monster, causing it to give a loud, guttural cry of agony…but not of death. Glancing back, Cloudbank saw that her swing had caused Severance to slice right through one of the creature’s eyes and carved a deep gash in its head. But apparently that wasn’t a mortal wound, since its other two eyes were still open…and fixed squarely on her.
Sonata watched as Lex spoke and gestured at an empty space where, she was pretty sure, Cloudbank was. She wasn’t entirely sure what he was saying – although she was only a little over a dozen feet away from him, it was hard to hear anyone else due to the combination of the storm and her singing at the top of her lungs – but he seemed to be gesturing for her to go do something. A second later he pulled out a scroll, then tossed it away and touched what was probably Cloudbank.
Although she didn’t stop her upbeat tune for a moment, Sonata felt her brow wrinkle in confusion. What was he doing? Having Cloudbank go out now wasn’t the plan; she was supposed to wait until Lex was keeping that big squid-thing busy, and then go attack it. But then, the plan hadn’t called for them to be stopped by what looked like the world’s ugliest catfish either. So maybe he was doing something about that?
If he was…then maybe she should change what she was doing too? Lex had just told her to “keep singing, no matter what” before they’d gone out, but he hadn’t told her exactly what to sing, beyond something that would “bolster everypony out there.” She hadn’t really known what “bolster” meant, but it sounded kinda like “booster” or “buster,” so she’d chosen something to make everypony really brave and aggressive. But maybe it was time to change that up? Maybe something totes better for defending, rather than attacking?
Giving a mental shrug, Sonata decided to give it a go. The magic in her voice always took a little while to fade away, even when she switched to another song, so it wasn’t like everyone would lose all those combative feelings right away anyway. This way they’d be able to make the switch from attacking to defending super easy!
Pleased with herself, Sonata smoothly began to sing a song about staying tough and never being beaten.
Aria frowned as she heard Sonata quite literally change her tune, recognizing what she was doing immediately. She glanced at Lex, wondering if he’d caught the changeover, but he hadn’t moved from where he was leaning against her and gasping for breath, apparently drained from his exchange what Cloudface or whatever her name was. The sight worried Aria, not because she cared what happened to him, but because her life would be forfeit if this insane plan fell through.
As though he felt her eyes on him, Lex looked up at her, and she felt relieved to see that his gaze, at least, was still strong. Then he spoke, and she felt her relief fizzle.
“Move…forward…”
“Wh-, are you kidding?!”
“We need to…get everypony moving,” he panted.
“You heard what happened to those other ponies! If whatshername doesn’t kill that aboleth…”
“Then we’re…dead anyway. But if she… does then…no time…to lose.”
Aria glanced at the illusory wall, having heard the initial cry of pain that had doubtlessly been from the aboleth a few seconds previous. But Cloudface hadn’t come back, which meant that there was a chance that she’d already been taken out. Either way, Aria didn’t want to be the one to have to go find out how the battle had ended. “Great, so send somepony else to go check and report back.”
Lex shook his head. “It has to…be me.” He took a deep breath and held it for a moment, exhaling slowly. Although he still felt winded, it was enough to let him speak without having to pause for breath every few syllables. “If everypony sees me pass through that wall, that might be enough to galvanize them to follow me. Otherwise, we’re going to waste the chance that Cloudbank has provided us.”
“You mean if she’s not dead already,” muttered Aria, but she slowly started to shuffle forward, escorting him along.
As they moved forward, the ponies at the front looked at them in surprise, but Lex didn’t return their gazes. Instead, he kept his own eyes fixed firmly ahead of him, moving closer to the wall without showing the slightest bit of hesitation. Behind him, he could hear Sonata starting to follow him…and a moment later he heard the others start to do so as well.
And then he passed through the insubstantial barrier.
Cloudbank grunted as she threw herself to the side, dodging a third slime-covered tentacle in as many seconds.
After her first strike had failed, the aboleth had paused for a long moment as the two of them eyed each other. Nothing had happened, and Cloudbank had the distinct impression that it had tried to do something and failed, surprising it. That opening had allowed her to score a second deep wound on the creature, after which it had stuck to using its tentacles to try and flatten her.
That she’d managed to avoid that so far seemed like a minor miracle, as the aboleth was able to wield its natural weapons with terrifying speed, as though they were living whips. Luckily, she’d somehow been able to not only dodge them all, but strike back, opening up more gaping wounds on the thing. But so far none of them had proven decisive.
Skidding on her hooves, she barely registered something out of her periphery, approaching from back where Lex and the others had been. But she couldn’t afford to turn her head and confirm what it was; there was already a fourth tentacle sweeping in from the side, too low to duck under but high enough that it would catch her if she jumped…but not if she flew.
Leaping into the air, she saw the tentacle change the arc of its swing, angling upward to try and catch her across her belly. But at the last moment she spread her wings, letting the howling wind fill them and drag her upward, over the tentacle’s wild swing. Straining, she pulled her wing muscles with all of her might, struggling to close them again before she was blown any further away.
Miraculously, she succeeded, and started to fall…directly in front of the aboleth’s hideous face. Without thinking, Cloudbank extended Severance as she shot by the creature, letting its blade reach out as her momentum carried her past it. For a moment there was a sensation of resistance as Severance sank into its soft body, and then there was a wet tearing sound as it cut cleanly through it, sending Cloudbank tumbling to the ground. Rolling, she came up onto her hooves, ready to dodge its next attack…only to see that there wasn’t going to be one.
Her last strike had cut the creature’s head cleanly off.
Unable to shake the tension from her body as she struggled to process that the life-or-death battle she’d been in was over – and that she’d actually managed to win – she belatedly remembered the movement she’d seen out of her periphery. Turning around, she saw that Lex and Aria were approaching her, the latter with a shocked look on her face, and even Lex couldn’t hide a relieved expression, causing Cloudbank to grin as she felt a sudden rush of giddiness. She had won! She had fought that gigantic, disgusting monster all by herself and she had totally kicked its fishy butt!
Despite how much of her stamina that fight had eaten up, she couldn’t resist striking a pose, giving Lex a cocky smirk. “Now that’s how you kill some monsters, you know what I mean?”
“That was the easy part,” retorted Lex, his usual frown reasserting itself. “Now we have to actually put an end to all this.”
He pointed a hoof as she spoke, and Cloudbank glanced in that direction, seeing him indicating a pier dead ahead. There were no other monsters between them and it, and it took Cloudbank a moment to realize what that meant. But when she did, her grin grew wider.
They were almost there.
Tlerekithres narrowed his eyes as he watched the scythe-carrying pony suddenly appear from out of nowhere and engage his aboleth slave. More astonishingly, the little herd animal seemed to be holding its own, as difficult as that was to believe. Was that the ponies’ secret weapon?
Intrigued, Tlerekithres activated one of the magical sigils tattooed into its flesh, the runes – drawn with his own ink and imbued with spells long ago by some slaves that had since been killed – flashing a deep purple for a moment as they released their stored magic, allowing him to view nearby magical auras in intricate detail. His eyes now glowing blue, Tlerekithres looked at the scythe again, only to immediately squeeze them shut in pain from how brightly the weapon was shining.
When he opened them a few seconds later, Tlerekithres was no longer amused. That weapon was an artifact of staggering power, enough to make even a herd animal into a legitimate threat. And more than that…
Concentrating his vision on the ponies that were even now approaching him, he quickly found what he’d been expecting: there was a pony down there with a great deal of arcane magical prowess. Not the greatest he’d ever seen in his centuries of life, but still considerable. And it wasn’t the one wielding the artifact…which made sense. The spellcaster would doubtlessly engage him with magic, while the scythe-wielder attacked physically. It was a combination that he’d seen numerous times over the years. But he knew how to deal with that.
As the ponies approached, more of Tlerekithres’s tattoos began to glow.
Nosey grunted as she took a heavy strike from a harpoon-wielding sahuagin, barely managing to turn so that it hit her armor rather than her face.
Although the blow didn’t penetrate, it almost drove the breath from her lungs due to the sheer force of the impact, making her armor chafe painfully against her soaked skin. Digging her hooves in, Nosey telekinetically lashed out with her rapier, stabbing at the arm the sahuagin was using to wield its harpoon. Her attack was less focused on trying to score a damaging blow than with making the creature withdraw its weapon, causing her to grin when it hurriedly withdrew its arm and shuffled backward a few steps.
Bringing her rapier back into a ready position, Nosey kept her eyes firmly on her opponent, not that she could make out very much. The heavy rainfall and the fact that she’d lost her glasses at some point meant that, even with her armor glowing like a lamp thanks to Cozy’s light spell, the sahuagin had a somewhat blurred appearance. It wasn’t a major handicap, but it was enough of one that she already had cuts and bruises all over, despite not having killed one opponent yet.
She had barely gotten her weapon back up when the sahuagin, apparently determined to finish her off, rushed back in again. This time its harpoon was pointed toward her legs, trying to hobble her. Nosey responded by bringing her rapier down sharply, the side of it deflecting the tip of the harpoon. But rather than trying to recover its weapon, the sahuagin instead released its grip, letting her parry knock it from its claws. For a moment Nosey felt elated that she had disarmed her enemy…only to realize that the sahuagin wasn’t aborting its initial rush towards her.
Too late, Nosey realized that she’d focused too much on her opponent’s weapon, rather than the sahuagin itself. She tried to swing her rapier back up, but the sahuagin was already inside her reach, one claw reaching out to grasp her mane as she tried to throw herself backwards. Opening its maw, it leaned down and sank its teeth into her neck, causing Nosey to scream in pain. She tried to shake the creature off, but its grip on her was too strong. Worse, the thing started to thrash back and forth, keeping its jaw tightly clamped, and she suddenly realized that it was about to tear her throat out.
Panicking, she fumbled to get her rapier back into position, but the thing’s thrashing and her poor eyesight were enough to leave her disoriented, unable to align the weapon properly in her telekinetic grip. The fangs in her neck sank deeper, and as its jaws closed tighter Nosey found that she couldn’t breathe anymore, and only dimly realized that she was going to die.
I finally get to be in one of my stories, and it turns out to be my obituary. The thought, tinged with ironic humor, floated through her mind. It was a joke that she’d told herself periodically over the years, usually when she was feeling particularly down. Now it looked like it was about to come true. She wondered if Lex would give a quote about her…
As her vision started to dim and she felt blood running down her neck, Nosey thought of the pony whose story she’d barely begun to write…and suddenly she felt angry. She had no idea why, but rage suddenly poured through her, and it gave her strength as she dug her hooves into the wet ground, surging forward even as she telekinetically moved her rapier, positioning it on the ground just behind the sahuagin, pointing directly upward. With the last of her strength, Nosey threw them both onto the blade.
The sahuagin released its jaws from her throat as the rapier pierced its body, and it spasmed as it slid down the blade, struggling futilely to free itself from its impalement. Above it, Nosey came down on the tip of the rapier as well…which immediately stopped as it hit her armor, leaving her leaning on the point of her sword, watching from barely two feet away as the sahuagin’s struggles slowed and finally stopped altogether. Although she knew that she should be horrified that she’d just killed another living thing, all she felt at that moment was a numb sense of satisfaction at having won the fight. “Read it and weep,” she croaked, barely able to speak with how savaged her throat was.
Rolling the dead creature over, she yanked her rapier free from its corpse and wearily stood up, readying herself for the next enemy. But even as she did, she heard Lex’s voice ring out. “It’s all clear up ahead! Keep moving!” Grinning, she couldn’t wait to tell him that she’d contributed to defeating the army of monsters. He’d have to admit that she was more than just an annoyance then.
It didn’t occur to her to wonder why that thought made her so happy.
“It’s all clear up ahead! Keep moving!” Just raising his voice was a dedicated effort, and Lex had to pause to get his breath back, leaning on Aria.
“What about the others?” Cloudbank pointed towards the wall, forgetting that only she could see through it thanks to Lex’s scroll. “They’re still hypnotized by that thing’s lightshow.”
“That should wear off in just a second,” rasped Aria, struggling to make herself heard over the storm. “I’ve seen them use it before. It doesn’t last very long if they can’t concentrate on maintaining it.”
As if on cue, several ponies began to emerge from the other side of the wall, a few of which were blinking and shaking their heads. Near the front of them was Cozy, who gaped – along with several others – at the sight of the dead aboleth, turning a gaze that was a mixture of confusion and amazement towards Cloudbank, able to tell that the pony with the giant scythe was probably responsible for the thing’s having been beheaded.
But Cozy’s amazement was short-lived. As her eyes moved towards the fallen ponies that were scattered about she gasped in horror, before immediately running over to check on them. The sight made Lex avert his eyes, knowing that he couldn’t deal with the guilt of having led those brave ponies to their deaths. “We need to move on,” he spoke just loud enough to be heard by the ponies closest to him. “We’re almost to the pier, and th-”
His words were interrupted as Cozy unleashed another wave of healing energy, causing him to look at her sharply. “What are you doing?!”
“They’re alive!” she yelled back, and the words made his eyes widen in amazement, not daring to hope that she was right. But even as he looked, the ponies that had been lying insensate around the aboleth were starting to groan and move now that they had been healed. The sense of relief almost caused Lex to collapse, but it was followed immediately by shame. He hadn’t so much as bothered to check their condition because he was sure they’d been killed, and hadn’t wanted to make his guilt worse by seeing their dead bodies up close. If Cozy hadn’t been there…
A loud cry jolted him out of his recrimination, and he looked up to see Cozy backing away from the surviving ponies, a horrified look on her face. The ponies themselves were the ones letting out screams as they looked at themselves, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Their coats were sloughing off in large clumps, and the skin beneath them had turned into a translucent membrane that looked nothing like healthy flesh. Suddenly Lex knew that it was no coincidence that these ponies had survived their charge on the aboleth; it had let them live because it had done...something to them.
But even as his mind reeled with this latest evidence of the horrors that were arrayed against them, more ponies were pouring through the illusory wall, and Lex knew he didn’t have time to be caught up in this latest problem. “Cozy!” he yelled, needing to call her name twice more before she managed to tear her eyes away from what had happened to those poor ponies and look at him. “We’ll fix them later! For now, just keep them close to you!”
She looked ready to protest that last part, but bit her lip and nodded, turning back to the afflicted ponies to try and calm them down. For his part, Lex turned back to Aria and Cloudbank. “We need to get to the pier.” Another flash of lightning ripped through the sky as he spoke, illuminating the kraken that was still waiting for them there.
Lex narrowed his eyes at the sight. “It’s time to end this.”
Tlerekithres watched as the ponies made their way closer. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but that was fine; he had a large number of magical tattoos, and could only activate one at a time, so the respite was advantageous for him. So far he’d only been able to make use of three of them; one to make his position appear to be a few feet off from his actual location, another to increase his speed, and a third to make his flesh as hard as stone.
The first two effects could be invoked three times in a given day, but the third one was different; it could only be utilized once before having to be prepared from scratch. Even as he watched, the sigils on his flesh vanished, confirming that the magic had taken effect. Although the use was a moderately expensive one, Tlerekithres paid it no mind. After all, refusing to make use of resources when the situation called for it, in the name of preserving them for later, was no different than not having them at all. To err on the side of caution was still erring, after all.
As the ponies drew closer to him, Tlerekithres considered his attack options. He could have ordered more of his minions to surge out of the water and attack those herd animals en masse, he knew. Even if they couldn’t breathe in an airy environment, his slaves could hold their breath long enough to rise up and overwhelm the ponies with sheer numbers. But that was an imperfect plan. His slaves would be at a severe disadvantage out of water, since the ponies would only need to fortify their defenses and his slaves would be forced to retreat or suffocate.
The other option was to increase the winds even more. As it was, the brewing storm was already so great that the ixitxachitl that had cast flight spells on themselves had since retreated back into the water, knowing that to remain in the air during the windstorm was courting disaster. But that plan was also discarded; increasing the storm’s power to the point of bringing down a tornado would likely cause that scythe to be flung someplace random. Just the thought of getting his tentacles on an artifact as powerful as that scythe was enough to make Tlerekithres undulate in desire, and the prospect of not getting it because a tornado had tossed it beyond his reach was untenable.
That left only one remaining choice: fight them personally. It was the more dangerous option, but also the one that offered the greatest rewards. Besides, he had numerous tattoos remaining, each one containing magic that he had carefully chosen in order to respond to various circumstances, learned over the course of a life that had spanned over fourteen hundred years and more battles than he could remember.
From behind him, the sound of his ponies fighting was audible over Sonata’s singing, but Lex barely heard it. Still leaning against Aria, his focus was entirely on the open stretch of ground ahead of them, where the wharf terminated and the pier began. Just beyond that, he knew, was the kraken that Aria had called the “Great Lord of the Deep.” Despite the precariousness of how they’d fared so far, Lex wasn’t so unnerved by the thought of fighting the creature that he could resist a sneer at the grandiloquent title. I’ll show you just how great you’re not, he vowed silently.
“I think we’re winning!” yelled Cloudbank, causing Lex to glance over at her, seeing her looking back at where the others were fighting. “There’s still a lot of those things,” she continued, “but we haven’t lost anypony yet! If they can keep this u-”
“That doesn’t matter!” snapped Lex. The rebuke came out harsher than he’d intended, and as Cloudbank turned an incredulous look toward him he quickly elaborated. “Everypony else is fighting to give us – you and me – a chance to end this. If we fail, then they’re all going to die, no matter how hard they fight.”
“Right. No pressure,” replied Cloudbank, her optimism replaced by nervous irritation. Lex ignored her, and a few moments later they reached the pier. The structure was wide, as befitted a city whose livelihood revolved around maritime activity. A half-dozen ponies could easily have walked down it side-by-side and had plenty of room to spare. From the water’s edge, it extended out into the bay, its end hidden as it moved beyond the edge of the light shining from the vanguard ponies’ armor.
“Spread out and cover the sides of the pier,” ordered Lex, and the ponies quickly moved to obey. “Whatever comes out of the water, you have to stop it from reaching me. Whether you kill it or drive it back, you can’t let it get past you.” He knew he’d told them that only a few minutes ago, when they were going over his plan back in the shelter, but he couldn’t help but say it again now to underline just how vital this was. Behind him, he could hear the other ponies slowly falling back towards them, and briefly considered reiterating their orders as well. But even as he turned his head, he saw them move to surround the front of the pier, blocking it off exactly as he’d told them to do before they’d begun fighting.
His eyes briefly flickered to Sonata, who was still singing her heart out, and then over to where Cozy was tending to the ponies whose bodies had been warped by the aboleth, trying to keep them calm. Behind them, the rest of the ponies were still fighting, and he knew that Nosey and the others were among them as well. They were all doing their best, and that had been just enough to get them this far.
They had done their part. Now it was time for him to do his.
“Stay here. Help the others in whatever way you can,” he ordered Aria, pushing off from her so that he was standing on his own four hooves. Ignoring her sarcastic reply, he slowly started forward, silently readying his attack…
Tlerekithres watched as the pony wizard slowly shuffled forward, his approach slow enough that it gave the kraken time to invoke another of his tattoos, activating a powerful ward against electrical attacks. A few other ponies – probably the wizard’s own slaves, considering how they’d arranged themselves to protect him – moved to cover the sides of the pier, while the others stayed behind, holding off the remaining sahuagin and their pets. Even the winged pony with the powerful scythe was hanging back, keeping the weapon at ready.
As the pony wizard came to a stop, Tlerekithres narrowed his eyes. He’d raised enough defenses to feel secure against whatever spell the pony was preparing, but that didn’t mean that he intended to sit back and let the little herbivore attack him with impunity. Even as the wizard raised a hoof towards him, Tlerekithres lashed out, darting forward as he raised a tentacle and began to swing it downward, fully intending to smash the puny creature before it had a chance to act…
Lex knew he was taking an incredible risk by venturing so far forward, but the risk was a calculated one. Although he was completely out in the open if the kraken had any kind of ranged attacks, he was cognizant that it had destroyed their ship with its own tentacles, rather than some attack that could be used from afar. Since he needed to be within a few dozen feet of the creature, he was betting everything that it would try and attack him the same way.
Ahead of him, the murky gloom was only dimly touched by the light from the armor worn by the ponies on either side of the pier, and Lex could just make out a gargantuan mass of shifting shadows illuminated by a pair of glowing blue eyes that he knew was the kraken. Letting out a breath, he slowly raised his left hoof towards the creature. He was going to have to hope that he was within range of the thing…
Suddenly the shadowy mass exploded into motion, and Lex had just enough time to recognize the shape of a tentacle the size of a small mountain hurtling towards him. It had almost completed its arc when he struck, lashing out with the one weapon left in his arsenal, the one ability that he hadn’t completely expended during his fight with Aria and her companions over an hour prior.
“STOP!” he roared as he unleashed the Night Mare’s power.
Tlerekithres had almost completed his strike when he heard the pony shout something at him, as though that would-
The sensation of panic that seized him was as sudden as it was overpowering. Without thinking, Tlerekithres aborted his attack and tried to reverse his forward momentum, flailing as he strained to put some distance between himself and the pony wizard. He had to get away, NOW!
Less than a second later, his intellect caught up to what his emotions were telling him, and struggled to place what had just happened into terms he could understand. Although the pony hadn’t moved, hadn’t done anything except tell him to stop, the impression that he gave off had suddenly become threatening. No, not just threatening…deadly. It was as though there was some sort of terrifying monstrosity lurking just beneath the pony’s skin, waiting to be unleashed.
It had all the hallmarks of some sort of fear-based spell, but that couldn’t be the case. Tlerekithres knew that one of his abilities as a kraken was total immunity to all mind-affecting spells and powers. A spell to create fear should have had no more effect on him than a thrown pebble. Which meant that this had to be something else, some sort of magic that had somehow bypassed his inherent imperviousness to mental powers.
Or…or was it? What if his impression had been correct, and that pony was far more than he appeared? If that was the case, then he needed something else to force him to reveal himself. Fine then, he still had numerous slaves that could be put to use testing that theory.
“Kill him!” Tlerekithres’ sepulchral voice rang out, loud enough to be heard across the bay. “All of you! I WANT THAT PONY DEAD!”
Even before the last echo of his voice had faded, the water around the pier began to churn as his slaves rushed to fulfill his orders. No matter that they wouldn’t be able to last very long outside of the water. No matter that they might very well die in droves. They were resources to be expended, and if they weren’t useful to him then they didn’t deserve to live anyway. Of course, he doubted that they would be sufficient to get the job done, but he had no intention of leaving things solely up to them any longer.
Curling one tentacle around the broken stern of the ship that he’d torn apart, Tlerekithres hefted it in his grasp...and then hurled it directly at the pier.
The warning from Severance made Cloudbank’s head snap up, and she immediately sprinted ahead, the magic scythe that she’d come to think of as her partner clenched tightly in her jaw.
When Lex had loaned Severance to her, she had been awed. She got to wield a major magical weapon that could talk directly into her mind?! How cool was that?! But as it turned out, her enthusiasm had been entirely one-sided. Severance had spoken to her only once before they’d set out, coolly questioning her worthiness to wield it, and remaining quiet ever since.
That had changed after she’d slain the aboleth. Since then, the scythe had praised her, saying that her actions had been worthy of the Night Mare. More than that, it had started relaying information about what was going on around them, apparently able to make sense out of the chaotic melee with ease, which was how she’d been able to tell Lex that they were winning. Now, warned that something was coming and that she should attack it, Cloudbank ran forward, rearing her head back as she prepared to swing Severance-
What looked like a building came flying straight at her out of the darkness, and Cloudbank didn’t have time to think, bringing the scythe down purely on instinct.
The gigantic structure split in half immediately, the two pieces flying to either side of the pier and hitting the wharf with a tremendous crash. For a moment Cloudbank just stood there, before she dazedly turned back to look at the massive piles of wreckage on the shore, dimly recognizing that they had been part of a ship. A moment later her brain started working again, and her jaw fell open in complete and utter shock as she realized what had just happened.
That kraken thing had hurled part of their ship at them…and Severance had cut it in half with a single blow.
For a moment, Lex could only gape at what he’d seen. He’d known that Severance was powerful, but that was FAR beyond what he’d ever seen it do before! But then again, it wasn’t as though the weapon had ever been forthcoming with the full extent of its abilities. Still, to think it was capable of something like that…
For an instant he considered grabbing the weapon from Cloudbank and ordering it to do the same thing to the kraken. But while the scythe’s prohibition on dependency apparently didn’t extend to cutting down what would otherwise be a fatal blow, Lex knew better than to push his luck. If Severance abandoned them now, they would lose.
Of course, that was likely to happen anyway, since the Night Mare’s power wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.
The plan had been that, once he was within range of the Great Lord of the Deep, he’d use the Night Mare’s power to take control of it. He’d been analyzing what sorts of creatures that power worked on, and while he hadn’t been certain, he’d felt confident that the kraken would be vulnerable. Once he’d forcibly bent it to his will, it would have been simplicity itself to have Cloudbank fly up to it and kill the creature with Severance.
But when he’d tried to channel the Night Mare’s power to bind the thing, something had gone wrong. Every time he’d used it previously it had either been completely unable to affect something or made it easily fall under his sway. But this time…this time it had been a struggle. For the first time ever, Lex had needed to strain to envelope a creature in the Night Mare’s power, and even then he hadn’t completely succeeded; he could feel that he had only managed to temporarily cow the thing, rather than dominate it…and he knew that, as with a successful subjugation, that status would only last for sixty seconds.
“Look out!”
A yell drew Lex out of his frantic analysis, just in time to see a crossbow bolt whiz by his head, apparently blown off-target by the wind. Following its trajectory back, Lex just managed to see a crossbow-wielding sahuagin sticking its head over the edge of the pier, before one of the vanguard ponies – the one who’d shouted the warning – kick it in the face and send it tumbling. But immediately another one popped up, jabbing at the pony with a spear. Nor was it alone; all along the pier, the vanguard were fighting frantically to keep the literal rising tide of monsters from boarding the pier.
Gritting his teeth, Lex turned back towards the kraken, its blue-glowing eyes still visible in the darkness. Holding out his left forehoof – the one with the Night Mare’s holy symbol – Lex initiated another attempt to take control of the thing. Again the invisible power flowed around the creature, and again Lex felt that same resistance, gritting his teeth as he tried to push past it. He had to make this work! Just a little more and he felt sure he could-
A series of runes on the kraken’s body suddenly began to glow, shining with a dim purple light that was barely visible in the gloom…and suddenly the resistance Lex felt increased dramatically, becoming impossible to overcome. For an instant, he tried to push past it anyway, but it was like trying to move the sun all on his own, and a moment later he had to abandon the attempt, collapsing in a heap and gasping from overexertion.
Whatever magic that thing had just invoked, it had made it too strong to control with the Night Mare’s power. Worse, Lex knew it had shaken off the rebuke that his previous attempt had dealt it. There was no way to stop the kraken now.
Drafty couldn’t even find the energy to yell as she buried her pick in the chest of the sahuagin in front of her, killing it instantly.
The thing’s body immediately fell to the ground, and it was all Drafty could do not to collapse as well. How long had they been fighting? She knew it couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes at most, but it felt like it had been hours. Her muscles were aching, her breath was coming in gasps, and her armor felt like it weighed a ton.
Risking a quick glance around, she could see that everypony else looked as tired as she felt. But at least they were all still standing, and…was it her imagination, or were their enemies finally starting to thin out? Maybe, just maybe they could-
BOOOOOOOOOM!
Drafty – along with everyone else, friend and foe alike – froze as a tremendous crash rang out. A split-second later she recovered, glancing left and right to try and ascertain what had happened, but what she saw didn’t make any sense. From out of nowhere, two large piles of wooden wreckage had appeared about twenty feet away on either side of them, as though it had started raining houses. The sheer incongruity of what had happened, along with the slow realization that she’d have died if those had fallen in slightly different locations, was enough to momentarily drive all other thoughts from her mind.
Belatedly, she glanced behind her. Barely noticing that Cozy and the others near her were okay, she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding as she saw that Lex and Cloudbank were alright. But her calm was shattered as she realized that the other ponies along the edges of the pier were fighting to repel monsters that were coming up from the sides. Even as she watched, one of them fired its crossbow at Lex, narrowly missing him.
And further back was a monstrous mass of darkness, impossible to get a good look at save only for the bright blue glow of its eyes and the constant sense of motion around it. The sight of it was terrifying, and Drafty had to resist the urge to turn and run as far away as she could. Instead, she looked back towards her front…and immediately ducked, giving a frightened yelp as the tip of a spear thrust right over her head, drawing a painful cut across her scalp.
Their reprieve, it seemed, had ended. Hefting her pick, Drafty tried to put the gigantic monster behind her out of her mind. Hopefully Lex and Cloudbank would be able to take care of it.
Somehow.
Lex tried to get up, tried to put his hooves under him and raise himself off the ground, but his body refused to comply. Fighting down a rising sense of panic, he made another attempt, and it was no more successful than the first. He even attempted to call upon his dark magic to turn into a shadow, even though he knew it had already been completely expended.
“Lex!” Cloudbank yelled as she ran over to him. “What’s wrong?!”
“It…didn’t work…” he gasped. “I can’t…bind…it…”
For a moment, Cloudbank gave him an uncomprehending look. Then her expression turned into one of shock and despair as his words sank in. “No…” For a moment her jaw worked soundlessly as she tried to process what he’d told her, shaking her head in denial that after everything they’d gone through, after how hard they’d fought and struggled, they were all going to die here. It couldn’t end like this! It wasn’t fair!
“NO!” she yelled, her angry denial unable to fully conceal her desperation. “You think of something! Right now you figure something out! We-”
Before she could say anything else, the pier gave a sudden shudder, as though struck by a tremendous impact, and began to sway alarmingly. Cloudbank gave a cry of fright, one that was echoed by the vanguard ponies around them as they struggled to retain their footing. Even the monsters climbing the sides seemed to be surprised, with more than a few falling back into the water. “What’s happening?!” screamed Cloudbank, having to repress the urge to spread her wings and fly away, knowing that she’d be at the mercy of the wind if she did. “What’s happening?!”
“The kraken!” Lex’s response was a wheezing yell. “It’s attacking…the pier!” He wasn’t sure why the monster was trying to knock them into the water rather than simply crushing them directly, but ultimately it made little difference. One way or another, they were going to be killed and there was nothing he could do about it.
This shouldn’t be happening! he raged internally. I was winning! I WAS WINNING! Until that monster had activated whatever those magic sigils on its body were, he had almost been able to take control of it with the Night Mare’s power! Just a little more, and it would have been defenseless and this would all have been over! I can’t lose again! Not when-
Wait…magic sigils? It had impeded the Night Mare’s power, the power that the goddess had directly imbued him with, by using magic? But the Night Mare’s power wasn’t spellcasting, nor was it anything like the dark magic of his horn, or any other sort of magic that he’d ever seen or heard about. So why would a magical effect be able to interfere with it?
“You shall contain a fragment of my essence within you, your very body a symbol of my power.”
Lex’s eyes widened as the words of the Night Mare came back to him. He hadn’t paid much attention at the time, since the sensation of her blessing had made it difficult to think, let alone parse her words, but now he rapidly turned them over in his mind. A second later he came to a conclusion, and a desperate hope formed in his mind…just as the pier shuddered again, and began to list dangerously to the right.
“We’ve gotta get off this thing!” hissed Aria, her face twisted in fear. Normally the water held no terror for her, but right now they were surrounded, and she had no doubt that her former comrades would tear her apart as soon as she was within their reach.
“She’s right!” Cloudbank looked at Lex. “We need to fall back!”
“No…” Lex’s voice was still strained, struggling under labored breaths, but his face had regained its determination, and it brought Cloudbank to a halt. “One…more try…”
“Are you completely out of your mind?!” raged Aria. “If you want to die, go ahead! But you’re not taking me-” Her words were cut off abruptly as the end of a scythe swung around to point directly at her face.
“You go and help the others,” ordered Cloudbank coldly, nodding her head at where the vanguard ponies on the right side of the pier were trying to steady themselves and fend off the monster horde at the same time, leveling Severance at Aria in a silent threat.
“You’re crazy!” Aria snarled, baring her teeth at Cloudbank and giving her a hateful glare. But the pegasus was unmoved, meeting her gaze directly, and a moment later Aria looked away, cursing as she headed towards the embattled ponies. Cloudbank watched her go for just a moment, turning away only after seeing Aria slide next to one of the vanguard ponies and knock some sort of lobster-like creature away with a swing of her thick tail.
Satisfied, she turned back to Lex. “What do we do?”
“Get ready…” He didn’t elaborate as he held his left hoof towards the kraken, clenching his jaw as he concentrated fiercely.
The Night Mare’s power had been impeded by magic, but that meant that it could be empowered by it as well. Since she had imbued his physical self with a shard of her divine essence, then that should mean that it could be heightened by the same overcharging as his other magic was when he flooded excess magic through his body. It was a complete guess, but it made sense…and it was the only hope they had left.
Barely noticing as Cloudbank nodded and slowly moved towards the end of the pier, Severance held in her jaw, Lex looked at the kraken and focused with everything he had…
As Tlerekithres activated his tattoo – invoking the spell resistance it contained – he felt that unknown power that pony wizard was radiating instantly recede. Suddenly it wasn’t some terrible, threatening creature anymore. It was just a small, pathetic herd animal…one that he had allowed to live for too long. Now that he’d managed to shake off whatever it had done to him, it was time to make sure that it couldn’t try anything else.
He reared back a tentacle, ready to smash both the wizard and the pier to pieces, but thought better of it as he saw the winged pony – the one with the powerful magical weapon – move closer to her companion. That scythe had sliced the ship fragment he’d thrown at them in half with a single blow; putting any part of his body anywhere near it would be unforgivably foolish. But how to attack them, then?
The answer came to him a moment later, and had Tlerekithres been capable of smiling he would have done so as one of his tentacles lashed out…under the water. Striking the support beams of the pier, he felt the structure shake under the blow, uncaring that he could also feel that several of his slaves had been caught up in his attack and squished. A moment later he struck the pier again, and this time several of the supports broke, causing the entire thing to begin to tilt. Just one, maybe two, more hits, and they’d all be dumped into the water, where his remaining slaves would-
All of a sudden the pony radiated that unknown power again, far stronger than before. In an instant, Tlerekithres felt it overwhelm him utterly, completely overriding the spell resistance from his tattoo. Fear – an emotion that he hadn’t felt in centuries – washed over him, and for an instant it was all he knew.
“Stop.”
The word came from the pony wizard, and although it was barely a whisper, Tlerekithres felt as though the sky itself had fallen on him. In an instant, his body became unbearably heavy, his limbs weighed down as though they were made of stone. “N-No…!” he raged, but it was useless. An instant later, he saw the other pony, the one carrying the magic scythe, charging down the pier towards him, and Tlerekithres knew that he had seconds left to live.
He couldn’t attack, he couldn’t get away…but he could still think, and a thought was all it took, another of his tattoos glowing as he activated the spell it contained.
Lex felt as though his entire body was on fire.
It had taken absolutely everything he’d had to push the Night Mare’s power to the necessary level, but it had worked. Even as he felt his organs twist and rupture, even as blood filled his mouth, he grinned victoriously. He’d bound the thing, forcing it to stop its movement. For the next sixty seconds, there was nothing it could do. A wet, rattling breath was the closest he could come to laughing, able to relax just slightly now that he’d successfully overcome the creature. His eyes slid to Cloudbank, and for a moment he wondered if she knew that this was her chance.
He needn’t have worried. In her mind, Cloudbank heard Severance tell her what had happened, and she charged forward, ready to end this once and for all. She was a third of the way there…halfway…three-quarters…!
Then another series of magic sigils glowed on the creature’s body, and Cloudbank felt herself come to a halt. Confused and alarmed, she tried to keep moving, but all of a sudden her body wouldn’t obey her. What was-
Kill the pony wizard.
The voice – different from Severance’s – flashed through her mind, and Cloudbank felt her terror skyrocket at the unknown presence. She tried to fight, tried to deny what she’d just been told to do, but even as she did she felt herself turn around. A moment later she charged again, this time right towards Lex. “S-Sev’rance!” she muttered, only barely able to make herself so much as speak. “Hlp meee!”
Severance’s reply was to coldly tell her to help herself. A moment later she felt the weapon’s presence withdraw from her mind completely, and it was as though she was wielding just another lump of unfeeling metal. Panicking, Cloudbank tried to figure out what to do, trying to stop herself in the few seconds she had left before she reached Lex, who was now looking at her with a horrified expression as he realized what had happened and knew that he was powerless to do anything about it.
A second later she was standing over him, and she couldn’t stop herself as she raised Severance high above her head only to immediately bring it down in a lethal arc. In that moment, lightning lit up the sky, thunder pealed across the bay, and Severance cut through the air, through flesh, and through bone.
But not Lex’s.
It took Cloudbank a moment to realize what had happened, and when she did her eyes widened. Someone else had dived in and pushed Lex out of the way, taking the strike that had been meant for him. But it hadn’t been Sonata or Cozy or even Aria that had sacrificed themselves for him. And as she looked at the pony that was currently pinned to the ground via the scythe in her mouth, Cloudbank felt herself begin to shake in horror, and a moment later a scream erupted from her throat.
“DRAFTY!”
Tlerekithres heard his puppet scream, and suddenly felt the magic that he’d used to control her vanish as she somehow found the strength to resist him. That meant that she’d likely be on him in a few moments…which left him with only a single option remaining. It was costly, but it was the only thing he could do if he wanted to survive this battle, let alone win it.
The tattoo he activated then was the only one he had left that could possibly save him now. He had plenty of others, but they were for magical effects such as increasing his physical strength or striking incorporeal creatures, none of which were currently helpful. Only this one – which could only be used once, and then would be expended until he found another slave able to cast this particular spell, which could warp reality itself within certain limits – could still make a difference.
Still held immobile, but able to speak, Tlerekithres invoked the spell. “I wish I was immune to the power binding me.”
Cozy felt her heart leap into her throat as she heard Cloudbank’s scream.
Drafty had broken formation only a few seconds previous, running towards the pier at top speed, but Cozy hadn’t had a chance to look back and see what had caused her to do so. Her full attention was already required to look after the ponies that fish-monster had warped and watch for when any of the remaining defenders got hurt. Not that she could do very much for them now; she’d used the last of her healing-bursts a minute ago. The only magic she had left – besides her light spell, a spell to purify spoiled food, and a spell to detect poisonous substances – was a spell designed to create a fog cloud, which she knew wouldn’t be helpful here.
That didn’t mean that she was completely useless, however. One of her abilities as a priestess of Lashtada allowed her to convert any spell that she’d prepared into healing energy…mostly. The light, purify food, and detect poison spells were all such minor magical manifestations that they couldn’t be converted into something else. They were just too fragile. Only her fog cloud spell could be changed into a healing spell…the same healing spell that Lex had turned his nose up at not too long ago. It was ironic that his stubbornness was the reason she could at least save one more pony now.
But once I do, I won’t be able to save anypony else. The thought was a horrible one, and cast her right back to when she hadn’t been able to do anything as Drafty had gotten sicker and sicker. Please, Lashtada, she prayed silently, touching a hoof to the symbol on her necklace. Please let me save the ponies I care about this time!
That had been when she’d heard Cloudbank’s anguished cry. Now, as she ran towards where Cloudbank was wailing and cradling Drafty’s unmoving form, Cozy could only hope that her prayer had been heard…
Sonata wasn’t sure how much longer they could go on.
Although she was still singing – and she was quite proud of herself for managing to do so even when giant pieces of wreckage came crashing down around them! – she could tell that everypony was getting tired. She briefly considered changing her song back to something upbeat and energizing, but knew that wouldn’t help very much. While feeling pumped could make someone fight off being tired, that could only go so far.
Then Drafty had rushed towards the pier, and Sonata had followed her with her eyes, which widened at what she saw: Lex had collapsed and the pier looked like it was about to. Luckily Cloudbank was walking back towards Lex, and Sonata felt sure that between her and Drafty, everything was going to be alright.
Then Cloudbank tried to kill Lex, with Drafty diving in to take the blow that had been meant for him.
The unexpected turn of events stopped Sonata cold, her song immediately coming to an end as she gaped at what had just happened. She barely noticed as Cloudbank suddenly screamed, yanking Severance out of her friend and tossing it away. Instead, Sonata’s eyes were focused on where Lex was lying a few feet away, completely still. He has to be alright! she thought as she started towards him, breaking into a run. She didn’t hit him, so he must be okay!
She didn’t know what had possessed Cloudbank to do that, but as Sonata ran towards her boyfriend she silently vowed that if he wasn’t alright she’d totes rip the other mare’s head off.
Sprawled on the pier, Lex struggled to remain conscious, desperately trying to process what had happened.
That Cloudbank had fallen under some sort of spell that took control of her had been obvious. Even if it hadn’t been the only rational explanation, her rigid movements and wide-eyed expression had made it clearly evident that she wasn’t able to stop herself. But as he watched her cradle Drafty and sob hysterically, it seemed that she’d shaken off whatever magic had been used on her. That was fortunate, because – as much as he appreciated what Drafty had just done – it wasn’t going to make a difference unless Cloudbank got up and finished off that kraken while it was still immobilized. Otherwi-
A soft gasp was the only sound Lex could make as he felt the Night Mare’s power begin to unravel.
Lex would have screamed in panic and frustration if he’d been able. Why was that monster so impossible to subdue?! Why?! For a moment the fear threatened to swallow him, and the sensation was so horrible that he fought it off the only way he’d ever known how: by burying it under an outpouring of rage. As he felt the Night Mare’s power unwind from around the kraken, Lex mentally lashed out, trying to push back against the erosion of the victory that he’d put everything on the line to achieve. After living such a miserably unhappy existence, after being continually denied everything he’d ever wanted, after having his hopes and dreams dashed over and over and over HE WOULD NOT BE MADE TO FAIL AGAIN!
For a moment, the anger overwhelmed him, blotting everything else out. Then it subsided enough for him to regain his wits, and he slowly realized that the deterioration of the Night Mare’s power had stopped. No, not stopped; reversed. It had completely re-woven itself around the kraken, keeping it immobile.
Lex had kept it intact through pure will alone.
Triumph and spiteful vindication coursed through him as he realized what he’d done, and Lex very nearly laughed. He’d done it! He’d managed to stop the worst-case scenario all on his own! The corners of his mouth turned up as he gave a few ragged gasps – the closest he could come to laughing in his current state – and he felt himself relax…only for the Night Mare’s power to immediately begin to unwind again.
NO! Cursing, Lex concentrated with everything he had, and the invisible bands of power slowly regenerated. But now he could feel them threatening to melt again as soon as he ceased focusing on them, whatever magic that kraken had used still trying to break them down even as he put all of his thoughts towards sustaining them. He was keeping them intact, but as soon as something interrupted him…
“Lex!” At that moment he heard Sonata call his name, feeling her jostle him as she gathered him up in her hooves. “Lex! Like, speak to me!” It was almost enough to break his concentration, and he let out a strangled groan at the rough treatment. “Close enough!” announced Sonata, her voice filled with relief. “Are you okay?! No, wait, dumb question. What happ-”
“Nngh!” Lex’s tension-filled grunt cut her off. He wasn’t going to be able to keep this up forever! She had to tell Cloudbank to attack NOW! “Clhnk…tck…!”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked at the gibberish. He was clearly trying to tell her something, but she had no idea what.
“Clhnk…tck…!”
Sonata looked around desperately, hoping that there was someone else who could figure out what he was trying to tell her. But all around her everypony was busy. Cozy was leaning over an unmoving Drafty while saying something to a crying Cloudbank, Severance floating beside her, while Aria was fighting off the monsters trying to climb onto the pier along with the other ponies. There was no one else who could help. “Lex, I, like, totes don’t understand what you’re saying.” She bit her lip for a moment as she tried to think of an answer, but nothing came to mind. “Don’t you have some sort of magic doodad or something that can talk for you?”
Lex would have snarled if he could. He didn’t have anything that was supposed to talk for him because she was supposed to talk for him! That was why he…wait…she was supposed to speak for him. Of course! The spell that he used to transfer his whispers to her! It was still active from when he’d last used it! Taking a breath, he didn’t try to vocalize this time, simply moving air past his lips as he breathed out. “Cloudbank…attack…!”
Sonata’s blinked, before she gave a determined nod. “Right! I’ll totes kick her butt for what she tried to do to you!”
“No! Have…Cloudbank…attack…it! Now!”
“Ohhh! That makes a lot more sense!”
A twitching eye was Lex’s only response as he turned all of his thoughts back towards keeping the kraken bound.
“Is she going to be alright?” hiccupped Cloudbank, looking at Cozy as the other mare withdrew her hooves from Drafty’s body.
“I used a healing spell, but it can only do so much,” replied Cozy, a grim look on her face. That Drafty hadn’t died instantly was nothing short of a miracle, having been skewered on the end of that magic scythe’s blade. It had punctured the black crystal armor she was wearing as though it were made out of paper, piercing directly between her wings and pinning her to the pier like a bug. Although Cozy knew that Drafty wasn’t in imminent danger of death thanks to her healing spell, the fact that she hadn’t regained consciousness was a bad sign.
“Then use another one!” Cloudbank sounded on the verge of hysteria.
“I can’t.” Cozy shook her head. “That was my last one.”
“No. No no no,” sobbed Cloudbank, looking back at the unconscious mare in her arms. “Drafty…I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I couldn’t stop myself! Something happened and that…that thing got in my head and I couldn’t make it stop and I’m sorry so please wake up!” Her voice dissolved into sobbing. Biting her lip, Cozy wasn’t sure what to do, and started to look around before she caught movement nearby.
It was Severance. Floating closer, the scythe pressed its grip against Cloudbank’s side, only for her to violently push it away a moment later. “I don’t care!” she screamed, her sorrow suddenly turning into white-hot anger. “I don’t care how impressive it was that I broke free! I didn’t do it soon enough!” She bared her teeth as she looked at the scythe, eyes filled with hate. “This is your fault! You could have floated away or…or turned aside or something! You didn’t have to let me do this!” The weapon floated forward again, but Cloudbank waved her wing at it in a warding gesture. “Don’t touch me! Don’t ever come near me again! I don’t want anything to do with you!”
“Hey!” yelled Sonata, rushing over to them, her eyes focused on Cloudbank. “Lex says that you have to attack that thing right now!”
“Forget it!” Cloudbank shook her head wildly. “I’m not using that thing anymore!” She punctuated her statement with a glare at Severance, before turning back to Drafty.
“But-”
“You do it!” snarled Cloudbank. “If somepony has to use that awful weapon, then you do it!”
“Me?” Sonata blinked, the notion not having occurred to her. “You know what? Fine! If you aren’t going to do your job, then I will!” She turned towards Severance and tried to take its handle in her mouth, only for it to float away from her, refusing to let her grasp it and causing her to yell in exasperation. “Oh come on!” Stamping the ground in agitation, she turned back towards Cloudbank. “It apparently has to be you!”
“Whoever it has to be needs to act fast!” yelled Cozy. “I think the storm’s getting worse!” Even as she spoke the wind picked up, howling as it began to blow hard enough to make the rain fall horizontally.
“Cloudbank!” Sonata yelled, but the other mare ignored her, burying her face in Drafty’s chest. The heck with this, decided Sonata, and sang a quick spell. Feeling it work, she went over to Cloudbank and put a hoof on her shoulder. Before she’d have expected Cloudbank to push her away violently, but now that she was under Sonata’s enchantment, she looked up at her miserably. “Cloudbank, listen to me!” Sonata had to raise her voice to be heard, the storm was getting so bad. “What happened to Drafty wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t Severance’s fault! It was that thing’s fault!” She pointed towards the end of the pier, where the kraken’s shadowy form could still be seen. “Right now you’re the only one who can make it pay!”
“But I can’t!” wailed Cloudbank. “What if it makes me do that again?! What if I end up hurting her worse this time?!”
“If you don’t do it, she’s going to be hurt worse anyway! We all will! Lex is holding that thing, but I don’t know for how much longer, and Severance will only work with you! You have to try again! It’s the only way to save Drafty now!”
“I…” Cloudbank trailed off, and seemed to struggle with something for a moment. Sonata knew she was fighting the effects of her spell, but just like the waiter back in Tall Tale, she succumbed a moment later. Swallowing, she gave a nod, and then gently put Drafty down. “Look after her for me!” she yelled, and waited until Sonata nodded before she turned towards Severance. Despite how bad the wind had gotten she paused for just a second before reaching out to grab it with her mouth.
Closing her eyes, Cloudbank took a moment to center herself…and then charged down the pier once again.
Sonata didn’t wait to watch Cloudbank rush towards the big squid-thingy at the end of the pier. Instead, she turned towards Cozy. “You, like, look after Drafty!” she yelled, straining to make herself heard over the roar of the wind. “I’ll take care of Lex!” Cozy nodded, gathering Drafty’s limp form in her hooves as Sonata turned back to her boyfriend.
She had just started to pick him up, intending to drag him back to the wharf, when his whisper reached her ears, guided by magic. “Don’t!”
Blinking, it took Sonata a moment to realize that he was telling her not to move him. “Lex, we’ve totes gotta get outta here! Cloudbank’s already gone to kill that thing, so we should go before the storm makes the pier collapse!” As if hearing her words, the wood beneath their hooves gave a low groan, and dipped even further to the right, its side now dangerously close to the water.
The vanguard ponies fighting at the edge gave a collective cry of fright as they struggled to maintain their balance. Looking over at them, Sonata saw one flail his hooves, dropping his short sword as he desperately tried not to fall into the monster-filled water below. But it was futile, and a moment later he pitched forward…and then was knocked back onto the pier, courtesy of Aria having whacked him to safety with her thick tail. Doing so left her open, however, and instantly a sahuagin lunged out of the water, stabbing forward with a spear that pierced her lower body and caused her to emit a silent scream of pain. An instant later, a manta ray-looking thing crested the water and waved its tail, causing a gout of acid to appear from nowhere and land across Aria’s chest, causing her to thrash in agony.
“Aria!” Sonata felt her heart lurch, her animosity towards her sister momentarily drowned beneath a flood of worry. That worry increased a moment later as another monster – this one looking like a large bipedal lobster with tentacles coming out of its mouth – lunged up towards the injured Siren, as though sensing weakened prey. Aria wasn’t able to retreat in time, a terrified expression on her face as a thick claw closed around her neck. Her hooves scrambled uselessly on the wood under her as she struggled to escape, writhing in panic but unable to free herself as the massive appendage began to close, cutting off her air. In another moment, Sonata knew, her sister’s head would follow.
But that moment was all Sonata needed to chant a spell. A moment later, the lobster-man paused, struggling to process the waves of magically-induced grief that Sonata had filled its mind with. In its sadness, its grip relaxed enough for Aria to wrench her neck free, gasping for air as she hurriedly slipped away from the thing.
Letting out a sigh of relief, Sonata turned back to Lex. “We have to get back on land!”
“No!” he insisted. “If we…retreat now…we all…die.”
“Why?!”
“Have to…be this close…to keep that…thing still.”
Sonata had no response to that, biting her lip for a moment before nodding, a look of determination crossing her features. “Okay!”
“You should g-”
“Don’t you even think about telling me to-, oh! That reminds me!” Sonata paused, then looked over at Cozy. “You should take Drafty and totes get back to solid ground!”
“But what about you?!” Even as the words left her mouth, Cozy was sure she already knew the answer.
Her suspicion was proven right a moment later as Sonata shook her head. “I’m staying with Lex!”
Cozy couldn’t help the expression that crossed her face. Normally seeing such a show of devotion would have warmed her heart, but with how sure she was that Lex didn’t feel the same way for her, the idea of her risking her life for a one-sided love was too tragic for words. “Sonata…”
Mistaking her expression for concern, Sonata gave her a grin. “Don’t worry! We’ll be fine! You just make sure that Drafty pulls through!” For a moment, it looked like Cozy was going to argue, before she gave a reluctant nod, picking up Drafty and making her way back to the wharf. For her part, Sonata held Lex close and looked in the other direction.
It was all up to Cloudbank now.
Tlerekithres strained and struggled as the scythe-wielding pony ran towards him. He could feel the bonds holding him – still as insubstantial as they were unbreakable – wavering, only to restore themselves a moment later. It was a process that had repeated itself more than once over the last few seconds, and that was enough to inform him as to what had happened.
His wish-magic had failed, but only partially. Whatever power that pony was using was still capable of binding him, but now it was struggling to do so. He could almost see the wizard having to concentrate to maintain his hold on him. All that needed to happen was for something to break his concentration, and he’d be free! But although his slaves were fighting to board the pier, and some were even trying to further destabilize its foundations, none of them had reached the wizard yet.
Which meant that Tlerekithres was on his own, even as the scythe-wielding pony flung herself at him.
Tlerekithres had moved closer to the water’s edge when the ponies had launched their attack, the better to observe what he’d thought of as an amusing show. Even when he’d realized that they possessed enough power to constitute a threat, he had eschewed retreating in favor of activating his defenses; the latter was simply prudent, whereas the former would not only have been an affront to his pride, but could have undercut the atmosphere of overwhelming power that he used to keep his slaves in line. The result of that decision was that he was adjacent to the pier jutting out into the harber…and so within range of the scythe-wielding pony charging towards him.
But Tlerekithres wasn’t helpless.
Even before she’d started her mad rush towards him, he had been concentrating on his weather-manipulation magic. He’d left the storm he’d conjured at only moderate power, since he didn’t want the artifact-weapon that pony was wielding to be flung away by the wind. But now that was a far more preferable outcome than being sliced to shreds, and so he focused fiercely on increasing the movement of the air. Whether it kept her from him or blew that wizard away, either result would put an end to the immediate threat! Hopefully the defenses he’d raised should be enough to hold-
But an instant later his focus was disrupted as he felt the blade of the scythe cut into him, and the pain was sharp enough that he momentarily lost his focus. That shouldn’t have happened! Between his stone-skin and visual-displacement spells, she shouldn’t have been able to strike him so easily! But another bolt of agony made it clear just how meaningless those defenses were.
With renewed urgency, Tlerekithres concentrated with all of his might on the weather…
Cloudbank was only barely aware of what was going on around her.
She hadn’t noticed the pier tilting underneath her hooves, correcting her balance unconsciously. Nor did she notice the wind, previously so strong, suddenly die down as she tore into the thing right in front of her. She didn’t even register Severance’s voice in her mind, trying to tell her to place her strikes with precision rather than lashing out blindly, nor her own voice raised in a scream that was as agonized as it was enraged.
Instead, all she could think about was what had happened less than a minute ago, when she had almost killed the mare she loved. Everything about that moment, the feel of Severance sinking smoothly through Drafty’s body, the muted sound of her hitting the ground, the sight of her pinned pinned to the pier by the blade…all of it replayed itself in Cloudbank’s mind over and over, unrelenting. Again and again she struck out, trying to physically attack the memory of what she’d just done, even as she sliced into the kraken’s body with every blow.
She knew what Sonata had said, knew that the thing in front of her was the architect of what had happened, but at that moment Cloudbank was completely at the mercy of the pain in her heart.
Her lack of awareness was such that, when the wind suddenly picked back up – stronger than before – she instinctively opened her wings to catch it, a reflex action born from years of flying, where one of the first rules of staying aloft was to ride the wind rather than try to fight against it. Instantly, she was flung up and away, soaring over the bay and away from her target. Only then did she realize what she’d done…but even as that thought crossed her mind, a second realization made itself known: The breeze she was caught in had begun to rotate.
An instant later, a tornado touched down in the bay, dragging her into it.
As the pony that had attacked him was swept away, along with the ponies’ last hopes for defeating him, Tlerekithres laughed.
Behind him, he could feel the incredible wind, and knew that it had reached its maximum destructive potential. Mentally, he directed the tornado towards himself, knowing that he was large enough that it wouldn’t be able to displace him. The ponies, and their city, would not be so fortunate once it continued past him. It was a shame that he’d probably lose most of his slaves as well, but that was an acceptable loss. He’d find new ones to replace them, ones that would locate wherever that artifact-weapon ended up.
As he felt the tornado approach and saw the water around him begin to surge in violent waves, Tlerekithres mentally grinned. Those little herd animals had proven to be a force to be reckoned with, but in the end they were no match for the power he was able to wield.
He had won.
As water surged up over the pier, Lex forced himself to keep concentrating. Even as the wave broke over them, and he felt Sonata throw himself on top of him to anchor them, he kept all of his thoughts on maintaining his hold on the kraken. Dimly he registered screams from around them, screams that were cut off as the wave passed over them, causing the vanguard ponies – and Aria – to be instantly washed away, but he refused to lessen his focus even for an instant.
“Lex!” Sonata’s beautiful voice was filled with terror. “We have to go!”
“No!”
“We have to! We-”
“NO!”
“But-”
Lex was too distracted to think about what he was saying, and his reply came without conscious thought. “I will never…give up…on my friends!”
Sonata stopped instantly, staring at him in open-mouthed shock. She had never, in all the time that she’d known him, heard him call someone else a friend. That he had spoke volumes about what this place, these ponies, and everything he was fighting for meant to him. In that moment Sonata realized that he’d rather die than lose that. Despite the tornado that was barreling towards them, she couldn’t help but smile, holding him close. “Okay,” she replied softly, her fear completely gone.
If he had that much faith in everyone here, then she would have faith in him.
Cloudbank didn’t panic as the tornado tossed her about. After all, being inside of one wasn’t anything she hadn’t experienced before; if anything, it felt nostalgic.
Before Vanhoover had gone to Tartarus, Cloudbank had been a cloud architect, which made studying wind forces and aerodynamics second nature to her. She had also been a member of the reserves for the town’s weather patrol ponies, and two years ago had been declared third-most valuable flyer when it had been Vanhoover’s turn to supply Cloudsdale with rainwater. Being inside a tornado was no problem.
What was a problem was what Severance was telling her: that Lex was about to lose his hold over that monster. If that happened, then it would be able to strike back the next time she attacked it, and she had no doubt that anything that could rip a ship in half could easily kill her in a single blow. Which meant that she had to finish it off before Lex’s perseverance ran out. The good news was that she’d apparently get her chance; the tornado was moving directly towards it! But as she started to plan for what she knew was going to be her last attack, Cloudbank realized that – on a creature that was larger than the warehouse they’d been staying in – she had no idea where to hit it to strike a fatal blow!
“Severance!” she yelled, not sure if she needed to speak up for the weapon to hear her. “Where’s that thing’s weak spot?” But the only response she got was silence. “Severance!” It was no good. For whatever reason it wasn’t going to help her with this, and Cloudbank could feel her blood boiling. This thing had been content to let her use it to hurt Drafty, but it wouldn’t help her now?! “Fine! I don’t need your help! I’ll do it myself!”
And then there was no more time, as the tornado passed over the kraken.
Taking advantage of the moment when the monster was in the eye of the storm, the one place where there was no wind to throw her off-course, Cloudbank folded her wings tight against her body and surged straight downward. This will work! she assured herself. Everypony’s counting on me! THIS HAS TO WORK! She was four seconds away from the top of the creature’s body…but where to aim?!
Three seconds…
Two…
One…
Directly above Cloudbank’s position, the thick clouds blotting out the sky shifted, and for just a moment the crescent moon was visible. Its light lanced downward, and for an instant the radiance shown on a particular spot on the kraken’s head, slightly above the thing’s eyes. To Cloudbank, it looked like nothing so much as a beacon shaped like a sickle.
…or a scythe.
Not having time to question what was going on, Cloudbank instead reacted on instinct, and swung Severance directly at that spot.
The tornado passed over the kraken, its edge touching the pier, and the entire structure shook. Lex tried to keep his hold over the creature for just a moment longer, struggled to maintain his concentration. But as the entire pier began to break apart, he felt the Night Mare’s power unravel, and he had just enough time to realize what that meant as he and Sonata hit the water. Instantly, a horde of undersea monsters rushed to greet them. Sahuagin, aboleths, giant lobster-scorpions, and more surged towards the two of them, brandishing teeth and claws and tentacles and worse.
And then they were gone.
For a moment, Lex remained tense, floating on the surface of the water limply as he continued to half-expect to be torn to shreds at any moment. But then he heard the wind die down as the tornado dissipated, and he knew what it meant. Unable to suppress a laugh of relief, he sent a mental command to the black crystal weapons and armor that he’d forged, letting them dissipate into nothing so that the vanguard ponies that had fallen into the water a few seconds previous wouldn’t be weighed down by them. The ponies on land would be left defenseless, but that wouldn’t matter now.
The kraken was dead. More than that, with its death the legion of monsters that it commanded were gone as well. Without their anchor to this plane, they had all been sent back where they’d come from.
Cozy let out a scream as everything suddenly turned pitch black.
For a moment she flailed, trying to figure out what had happened. She had been carrying Drafty back towards the wharf and had just reached it when she’d heard an incredible roar – a tornado touching down in the bay! – followed by a loud crash a few seconds later as it tore into the pier. She’d had just enough time to look back and glimpse Lex and Sonata disappearing into the water, and then an instant later everything had gone dark.
For a second she wondered if she’d gone blind, but from what she could hear everypony else was similarly panicked. Cries of “what happened?!” and “I can’t see anything!” were ringing out, along with other yells and shouts, and Cozy belatedly realized that something had snuffed out all of the light spells that she’d conjured. That knowledge brought her no comfort, however; if anything it increased her anxiety. Without being able to see, they were sitting ducks for all of those monsters!
Trying to fight down an overwhelming sense of panic, Cozy raised a hoof to her necklace, touching the symbol of Lashtada that hung from it. The action was partially to help soothe her worry – remembering her goddess’s love for her always helped to calm her down – but had a more practical function as well. Softly murmuring a prayer, she cast her light spell again.
Her spell couldn’t conjure a freestanding light; it had to be cast on an inanimate object, which would then glow like a lamp. Luckily, the holy symbol on her necklace was perfect in that regard, and as she completed her spell it lit up, pushing back the darkness. As it did, the ponies around her, who only moments ago had been fighting for their lives against the horde of monsters, let out further gasps of surprise, turning towards her. Again, a chorus of raised voices rang out, questions and worries and exclamations all mixing over each other in an unintelligible mass of sound. But Cozy wasn’t listening; instead, she was trying to process the sight that greeted her. At least now she knew why the light spells that she’d placed on everypony’s armor had been extinguished.
It was because their armor was gone. The black crystals that Lex had shaped into various forms of protective gear had all, from what Cozy could see, completely disappeared, and with them gone the light spells that she’d placed on them had winked out. The weapons he’d made were gone too. For a moment she wondered if they’d vanished because he’d died, before she realized that she and the others were about to join him, since now they stood no chance of holding off those monsters!
…except, where were the monsters?
“Does somepony…” She trailed off as she realized that no one was listening to her, milling about in confusion and anxiety, voices still raised. Glancing down at Drafty again, Cozy tried to figure out what to do next. “Please! Does anypony know what…” It still wasn’t working. Taking a deep breath, she prepared to try agai-
“EVERYPONY BE QUIET!”
Aisle’s roar was powerful enough to instantly silence everypony else, and an instant later he pushed his way through the crowd, rushing towards Cozy. “Are you alright?” His face was a mask of worry, but he seemed to be in control of himself. The sight was enough to make Cozy reasonably certain that, for whatever reason, they weren’t all about to be killed.
“I’m fine. But Drafty needs help!” She cast a helpless look at the unconscious pony beside her again. “I’m out of healing magic and she’s hurt really bad!” Even as she finished speaking, she remembered that they had doctors right there with them. “Somepony needs to help Drafty! She’s been stabbed!” Her words caused the crowd of ponies to mill for a moment, before several stepped forward to start examining the fallen pegasus, nudging Cozy and Aisle out of the way.
With her friend being tended to, Cozy’s thoughts returned to their current situation. “The monsters-”
“They’re gone,” Aisle replied instantly. “I saw it just before everything went dark. They all just vanished. That tornado’s gone too, hear it?” He paused, and Cozy realized that he was right. The roar of the wind had already died down, and though the rain was still falling, it was no longer coming down in sheets. It was like all of the immediate threats had disappeared. It was like…
“They did it,” she said softly, barely daring to believe it. But this was almost exactly what Lex had predicted: that if the leader of the monsters was killed, then all of the others would instantly be sent back where they’d come from. “Lex and Cloudbank, they did it!” Her words set off a murmur through the assembled ponies. They’d all heard Lex’s assurance about what would happen if his plan worked, and like Cozy could barely believe that it had come true.
Suddenly, Cozy wanted to see it for herself. “Somepony give me something!”
“What?” came a voice from the crowd, and Cozy recognized a stallion with a nasty-looking scar on his throat.
“Anything! I just need things to cast my light spell on!”
The scarred stallion stepped forward, reaching up to pull off his bandana and wordlessly offering it to her. A moment later she’d enchanted it, and it glowed brightly as he tied it back around his head. Then another pony stepped forward, holding out one of her earrings. A third volunteered the bits in his saddlebag, and soon glowing coins were being passed around, restoring the illumination along the wharf.
There were no monsters anywhere to be seen.
“They really did it,” murmured Aisle, looking around in amazement. “Lex and Cloudbank actually took out that giant monster.” Although he didn’t say it, it was obvious to Cozy that he hadn’t thought they’d be able to. She could tell, since she’d had the same doubts.
Slowly, that same realization sank into the ponies around them, and cheers began to erupt. Cries of “we did it!” and “it’s over!” started to ring out, and suddenly the crowd was exuberant. Hugs, hoof-bumps, and pats on the back were being exchanged all around as a palpable wave of relief swept through everypony there.
A splashing sound drew Cozy’s attention, and for a moment her heart leaped into her throat as she whirled around, suddenly sure that they were celebrating prematurely. But what came out of the water was another pony, one that Cozy vaguely recognized as one of the ponies that had been in the vanguard, coughing and panting as she crawled onto the shore. Going over, she helped her climb onto the wharf, where she collapsed, panting for air. A few seconds later another one joined her, then several more.
The last few were dragged onto land by Aria, the large Siren hauling them out of the water with her mouth to flop onto the shore, hacking and coughing. “They swallowed some water, but they’ll be fine,” she whispered, before pulling herself onto the wharf.
“Where’s Cloudbank and the others?” Despite her relief, Cozy couldn’t help but tense as she asked the question. She had been through a lot with Cloudbank, and the thought that she had sacrificed herself for them made her stomach tie itself in knots. The idea that she’d have to tell Drafty that her first kiss with Cloudbank had also been her last was too heartbreaking to consider!
“They’re not here?” Aria’s eyes widened for a moment, then her face sank into its familiar scowl. “Lex better not have kicked the bucket. He owes me!”
“You’re not even worried about your own sister?” Aisle had a disbelieving look on his face.
Aria snorted, waving a hoof dismissively. “Even if she’s a pony now, Sonata’s still a Siren. Even she’s not so dumb that she’d die from taking a dip. It’s her know-it-all stallion that I’m more worried about. I want my voice back!”
“Then maybe you should be out there looking for them!” Cozy couldn’t help but frown. She couldn’t believe how different Aria was from her happy-go-lucky sister. “Cloudbank and the others might need help!”
“I’m injured too, you know!” snapped Aria, pointing to the wounds on her body. “Where’s the concern for me?!”
“You-”
Cozy’s scathing reply was cut off as Aisle suddenly pointed towards the water. “Look!” Looking at where his hoof was directed, Cozy peered out into the bay…and then smiled. She could just make out the form of a familiar scythe floating just above the water line. Beneath it, she could see two ponies – Cloudbank and Sonata – carrying a third one between them as they swam towards the shore. Even as she watched, Sonata waved to them, her lack of concern evident from the casual gesture.
Letting out a breath, Cozy felt the last of her strength leave her as she saw that they were okay, and she leaned against Aisle. Feeling him give a start as she pressed herself against him, she closed her eyes, letting the last of her tension drain away. Although she was still worried about Pillow, and even though Lex had said that the undead ponies would likely still be around, she couldn’t help the powerful feeling of relief sweeping over her. They had done it. They had gone up against impossible odds and somehow managed to win.
It was all going to be okay now.
Spit Polish licked his lips nervously, glancing at his commander nervously for the umpteenth time since the strange activity in the harbor had started. Just as he had for the last several minutes, Block Party remained absolutely still, directing his binoculars towards the edge of the bay in silence. The prolonged wait was enough to make Spit Polish squirm as his tension rose.
Finally, Block Party lowered the binoculars. Spit Polish snapped to attention, but Block Party didn’t seem to notice, giving the bay another long look before turning and heading back towards the train station that now served as his headquarters. Blinking at being so completely ignored, Spit Polish rushed to catch up. “Sir!”
His call received no acknowledgment, and he fell into step alongside Block Party. “Sir, if I can ask, what happened down there?”
“I couldn’t make anything out,” came the terse reply. “It was too dark and too far away.”
“Then…” Spit Polish swallowed as he worked up his courage. Raising a closed issue with the commander wasn’t a good idea, but surely the situation warranted it this time! “Then I’d like to send a few pegasi in to check the situation out.”
Block Party came to an immediate halt, and Spit Polish almost tripped as he struggled to adjust. Getting his footing back, he realized that the commander was no longer ignoring him. Quite the contrary, he was now looking at him with a gaze that was as piercing as it was severe. “We’ve already discussed this,” Block Party said simply, his voice still light and casual in stark contrast to his demeanor.
It was that mixed signal that caused Spit Polish to continue, despite his rising anxiety. “I-I know, sir. But with whatever’s happening down there right now, it might be worth the r-oomph!” His words were cut off as Block Party’s hoof impacted his face, sending him tumbling to the ground. Dazed, he struggled to get up, but had barely lifted his head when another sharp blow sent him back to the ground, groaning in pain.
Nor did the beating end there. Another hoof buried itself in his stomach, causing Spit Polish to curl up as the breath was driven from his lungs. Gasping for air, he couldn’t even whimper as a sharp series of blows landed along his ribs, causing him to close his eyes as agony exploded through his chest. Soundlessly, his jaw worked, trying to apologize, to beg Block Party to stop, but before he had gotten a single syllable out another blow to the face left him reeling, suddenly dizzy and nauseated. Tears of panic fell from his eyes as he turned to look up at the commander, silently begging for mercy, his face pleading.
Then another hoof struck his face, and he knew no more.
Block Party didn’t stop just because Spit Polish had passed out, however, continuing to rain blows down on the unconscious pony until he felt satisfied. Only then did he turn away without a word, ignoring the frightened looks being directed at him from several bystanders. This wouldn’t erode his leadership, he knew. Not when the ponies here were all still wracked with guilt over forcing their friends and neighbors to stay in the ruins of Vanhoover in the name of quarantining the ghoul epidemic. Guilt that only he, as an authority figure, could alleviate for them, which he had judiciously done…all the better to make sure they did it again and again.
It was all textbook stuff, of course. Appeasing their conscience was the carrot, whereas the beatings were the stick. He knew that their self-loathing over what they’d done, and reliance on him to prop up their failing sense of self-worth, would encourage them to blame themselves for being abused. After all, if they blamed him then that would mean that they wouldn’t be able to place any stock in his assurances that their terrible deeds were being done for the greater good. And that would mean that they were horrible people for doing such unconscionable acts, which was a realization that he knew everybody wanted to avoid.
The ponies here were, in other words, degrading themselves. It was beautiful to watch.
But that might be coming to an end soon. Someone had killed that kraken, sealing the planar fissure in the process; that could only have been done by an individual – or a group – of considerable power. Enough so to constitute a significant threat to what he was trying to achieve here, and that was not something he could countenance. Opportunities like this came along once in several millennia, at the very most. Letting this chance be taken away before he could exploit it to the fullest was completely unacceptable.
If these interlopers tried to interfere, there’d be Hell to pay.
Sandbar laughed along with everypony else at Scrubby’s heckling him, waiting for the mirth to die down before he continued. “No, I’m telling you! I was fighting off four of them all by myself at one point! Two of those fish-people, one of their big lobsters, and one of those little lobster-eel things. So there I was, just barely holding my own-”
“That part I remember,” interrupted Ocean Spray, triggering another round of laughter from the assembled ponies, more raucous than before.
“Keep it down, fellas,” admonished C. Shells gently. “Don’t forget that the doctors are still working on Lex and Thermal Draft.” Sandbar and the others looked properly chagrinned at that, and C. Shells couldn’t help but glance toward at the far end of the shelter, where several sheets blocked the view of their makeshift medical area.
They had come back inside after fighting off the monster army about two hours ago. The fact that they’d been able to do so was itself a minor miracle, since Lex had been slipping in and out of consciousness by then, barely managing to open the doors for them before passing out completely. At that point he and Drafty had been whisked away by several of the doctors, Sonata and Cloudbank following after them, while the rest of the ponies were left to recover from their ordeal.
A minor emergency had almost immediately struck, however, when the ponies that had been injured by that “aboleth” thing had begun to complain of severe discomfort less than fifteen minutes after coming back inside. Aria hadn’t known much about it, but a quick exam by some of the doctors had shown that they were suffering from severe dehydration despite having come in from the rain only a few a minutes prior. Utterly lost as to how to treat their condition, the only result anypony could come up with was to keep them moist while they tried to figure out what to do.
That had caused a mild panic, since Lex’s wards prevented them from going back outside where the rain and the harbor could have kept them from drying out. The situation had only been resolved when Cloudbank had come out to take up Severance and literally cut the doors apart, much to everypony’s chagrin; there would need to be another bout of repairs soon. Once that was done, the afflicted ponies had quickly rushed back out into the rain and almost immediately reported feeling better. Eventually, a few of the doctors – along with an assortment of other ponies, including Cozy and Aisle – had decided to stay out there with them, just to be safe.
Despite that, and the presumed severity of Lex and Drafty’s wounds, most everypony was in a state of giddy exhaustion. A few had flopped back down and fallen asleep, but most were gathering into groups and talking or playing games. Despite the apparent joviality in the air, C. Shells knew that they were trying to find ways to deal with the accumulated stress and fear of what they’d been through. Speaking of which…
“Ocean Spray,” she called, causing the ponies in her group to look at her as she stood up. “I need your help with something.”
“Hm?” A curious look on his face, Ocean Spray made his way over to her. “What is it, captain?”
Fully aware of the eyes on her, C. Shells had her response ready. “Our ship is a total loss, so we’re going to have to start coming up with plans to finance getting a new one.”
Ocean Spray blinked in confusion. He’d never once done anything with the ship’s finances; his special talent had always been to see to the rigging. “Well…I’m not sure how much I can help with that. And right now-”
“I just want to go over some options. Follow me.” She didn’t give him time to respond as she headed towards the door, intent on going out into the wider warehouse…where they’d have some semblance of privacy.
“Okay, but…OH!” Understanding blossomed on Ocean Spray’s face, followed instantly by a blush as he quickly trotted after her, grinning. The sound of the others giving knowing chuckles followed him as he left the shelter.
Just before he passed beyond the sound-dampening barrier of black mist, he heard a slightly petulant voice from inside. “She picked him? He doesn’t even have a cool scar!”
Cloudbank sat next to Sonata, silently waiting for the doctors to come out and tell them something about how Lex and Drafty were doing.
Unable to keep from fidgeting, Sonata glanced over at Cloudbank, who was staring into space without moving, Severance hovering several feet away from her. Except for when she’d gotten up to go cut open the doors so those ponies that had been drying out could go back outside, she hadn’t moved, let alone said anything, and the silence was driving Sonata crazy. Finally the urge became too great to bear, and she licked her lips, speaking up a moment later. “So, um, I’m totes sure that Lex is going to want to thank Drafty a lot when he wakes up. He’ll probably, like, give her a big medal or make a proclamation that today will be Drafty Day or something.”
Cloudbank made a sound that might have been a grunt of acknowledgment, or might have been her clearing her throat. Stewing in the non-response for a moment, Sonata glanced back towards the enclosed area where the doctors were seeing to each of their loved ones. “You know, this isn’t even really a big deal. Once Lex wakes up, he can just be all ‘here’s a healing spell’ and he and Drafty will be as good as new. Or even – you know what? – we can just have Cozy do it. I mean, it’ll be no big deal for Drafty, right? And if she does that to Lex before he wakes up then what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. Anything was better than just sitting there and worrying!
She was going to keep talking, when the sheets partitioning off the end of the shelter parted and a familiar doctor – House Call, if she remembered right – exited, walking towards them. “I wanted to-”
“How are Lex and Drafty doing?!” Sonata shot to her hooves, almost bowling the doctor over as she rushed to him. Behind her, Cloudbank had stood up, and was silently fixing him with an intense look.
Letting out a slow breath, House Call tried to look as calm as he could manage. “Right now, both of them are in bad shape.”
“No…” Cloudbank’s voice was soft, her denial sounding more like a plea than a rejection of the bad news.
Sonata, on the other hoof, refused to let her worry overcome her. “How bad?”
“We don’t think that Thermal Draft’s injury is life-threatening, but we’re not working with a fully-equipped hospital here. Apparently the, er, healing spell she received undid a lot of the damage, but from what we can tell one of her lungs is still punctured. We’re making sure it doesn’t collapse, and that it doesn’t fill up with blood, but we think we’ll need to perform surgery to repair the laceration.” House Call didn’t mention the fact that he and his medical team were all in far from ideal shape to carry out such a procedure. That was simply the circumstances that they had to work with, and he felt absolutely confident that everypony would do their best.
Cloudbank’s reaction to the news was to put her face in her hooves, taking deep breaths in an apparent effort to keep from breaking into tears. Sonata gave her a worried look, but turned her attention back to the doctor. “What about Lex?”
House Call’s expression turned grim. “He was in bad shape before, and it’s worse now. The strain he placed himself under-”
“Excuse me, doctor.” Another pony, a mare in a nurse’s uniform, came out from behind the makeshift curtains. “The patient’s awake, and is asking for Miss Cloudbank.”
Hearing her name, Cloudbank’s head snapped up. “Drafty’s awake?!”
The nurse shook her head. “No. Mr. Legis. He wants to see you.”
Matching frowns of confusion appeared on both mares’ faces. “He wants to see her?!” gaped Sonata disbelievingly. She glanced back at Cloudbank to see if she had any idea why, but saw only the same mystified look that she knew she was wearing. After a moment, she shook it off. “Go.”
“Huh? No, I’m sure he meant to ask for you.” Cloudbank shook her head, an uncomfortable look on her face. “He’s probably confused after everything that happened, and-”
“No.” Sonata stomped a hoof, cutting Cloudbank off with a glare. “This is Lex we’re talking about. He never does anything without a plan. If he wants to see you, then there’s a good reason for it. So get going.”
For a moment, Cloudbank looked like she was going to argue, but the look on Sonata’s face convinced her otherwise. “Alright.” Hesitating for another moment, Cloudbank slowly walked towards the medical area, the nurse lifting aside the sheet to let her enter. Behind her, she could hear Sonata demanding that Dr. House Call finish what he’d been saying about Lex’s condition.
The medical area wasn’t that large, and Cloudbank spotted Lex immediately, slowly making her way over to him. Drafty was nearby, and Cloudbank slowed as she spotted her, starting to change direction. But then her eyes took in the tubes running to the bloody bandages around her chest, and the pony in a lab coat working a small pump in rhythmic motions that matched the rise and fall of Drafty’s chest, and she couldn’t bring herself to go any closer, her eyes filling with tears. Fighting down the urge to sob, she made her way over to Lex.
He wasn’t in much better shape, but as Cloudbank moved closer to him she saw that his eyes were open, and were locked onto her. Suddenly nervous for some reason, she gulped as she settled down next to him, momentarily feeling like she was a filly that had been called to the principal’s office out of nowhere. “Lex?” she called softly. “You wanted to see me?”
His lips moved, but he didn’t answer that Cloudbank could hear, and it took her a moment to realize that he was whispering. Lowering her head, she put her ear next to his mouth and listened closely.
Sonata had given up on trying not to fidget, shifting between positions for what had to be the thousandth time since Cloudbank had been called back. That had been a while ago – it had to have been at least an hour by now! – and she still wasn’t back yet. The tension and curiosity had been almost unbearable for Sonata, especially since there was nobody else right there to help take her mind off of it. What was Cloudbank doing back there?!
Her patience had just about reached the breaking point when all of a sudden there was a clamor behind the curtains. Voices were raised in surprise, and Sonata could hear rapid movement going on. It was more than she could take, and aware of how everyone else in the shelter had directed their attention towards the medical area, she rushed forward and yanked the sheets aside, looking inside to see-
Drafty, sitting up and stroking Cloudbank’s mane as the two of them embraced.
Confused by Drafty looking so much better than what House Call had told her, Sonata put that aside as she searched for Lex, finding him a moment later. He was also sitting up, looking at the pair with an expression that was almost a smile. The sight made Sonata’s heart leap, and she practically flew towards him. “Lex!”
He turned his attention towards her just as she tackled him, and he winced in pain as she threw her forelegs around him tightly. “Easy! I’m not fully healed!” he protested.
Sonata ignored him, continuing to squeeze him tightly for a few seconds until she was able to get herself under control. Easing up on her grip, she smiled as she looked at him. “You’re alright!” she exclaimed joyfully. “But how?”
“The Night Mare’s healing magic,” he replied simply. “A single spell wasn’t enough to completely repair my injuries, but it did help with the worst of them.” His eyes slid over to the two mares still holding each other close. Around them the doctors and nurses were clearly still struggling to deal with seeing healing magic up close. “Given that Thermal Draft’s wounds were comparatively less severe than my own, she should be out of danger as well.”
“Hang on. I thought you were all out of healing spells?” Sonata frowned, her brow furrowing.
“I am,” replied Lex. “But she prayed for some just now.”
“Huh? Who?”
Lex was still looking at the two mares – or rather, one mare in particular – as he answered.
It was taking longer than Lex would have liked to deal with the aftermath of the battle.
The number of wounded had been extremely high, but thanks to the combination of Sonata’s singing, Cozy’s ability to radiate waves of healing energy, and the armor he had created, none of the injuries were particularly severe. Moreover, after Cozy had rested, her ability to heal was replenished; she’d simply instructed everypony that was still hurt to gather close to her, and two waves of healing energy later the number of injured had dropped to almost nothing. The doctors had been quite chagrined, as was Lex himself; his own restorative magic seemed quite feeble in comparison, being able to heal only one individual at a time.
Privately, he’d queried Cloudbank if the Night Mare had given her any powers comparable to Cozy’s, but she’d only shaken her head in reply. Although she could pray for healing spells – real healing spells, unlike how his own magic left scars – she apparently hadn’t received anything like what Cozy had. Although disappointed, Lex hadn’t been very surprised. Based on what he knew of her, the Night Mare wasn’t that tender-hearted.
Even so, that Cloudbank could now pray for divine spells from the goddess that he worked with meant that Lex was, in conjunction with his own magic, healing quickly. But her having a relationship with the Night Mare left Lex feeling uncertain how to relate to her. Although so far their interactions had been quick and business-like, Lex knew that he was going to have to pull Cloudbank aside at some point so they could work out what her new status meant. At the moment she seemed to be less concerned about that than she was with Thermal Draft, and that was fine for now – talking to her about the responsibilities, both religious and otherwise, that came with her new status would need to wait until the current crisis was over – but Lex knew that at some point in the near future he’d need to explain to her the full measure of what she’d become involved with.
But in the meantime there were more pressing concerns, chief among which were those ponies whose injuries couldn’t be healed by magic.
The four ponies that had been injured by the aboleth, before Cloudbank had killed it, were still suffering the effects of whatever it had done to them. Even a few minutes out of the water caused their skin – if the naked, translucent substance could even be called that – to suffer from severe dehydration. The doctors were utterly baffled by what happened, and had no clear idea as to how to treat it. Cozy had tried to cure their condition, using both her healing wave and a proper healing spell, but with no effect. Lex and Cloudbank had both used healing magic of their own, with a similar lack of results.
At first that had been a manageable problem. The rain that the kraken had conjured had lasted for over a day, which meant that the afflicted ponies could remain outside the warehouse and be relatively comfortable. That was far from a perfect solution – it required that others be armed and sent out to guard them in case the undead ponies tried to make a meal, though thankfully nothing like that had happened yet – but at least it was a workable one.
Unfortunately, the rain had eventually stopped, and that left the afflicted ponies with no choice but to spend virtually all of their time in the bay. While that was only a stone’s throw away from the warehouse entrance, the greater problem was how to keep them from drowning, since their condition didn’t change the fact that they couldn’t breathe underwater. Fortunately, C. Shells had come up with a solution to that problem, giving them all lifejackets so that they could fall asleep in the water without going under. But Lex knew that was just a temporary solution.
And then there was the other problem…
“You lied to me!”
Aria’s whisper was sharp enough that it sounded as if it could cut the air, with a glare to match as she blocked Lex’s path out of the warehouse, staring him down. Rearing up as high as she could, the Siren towered over him, waving her hooves menacingly. Although the sight was an imposing one, Lex’s only response was an annoyed snort, knowing that he could use the Night Mare’s power to make her fall into line anytime he wanted. “I did no such thing.”
“You promised you would restore my voice!” snarled Aria. “The deal was that if I worked for you, you’d fix this!” She pointed to the scar across her throat. “I kept my end of the bargain, so now it’s time for you to pay up!”
“Aria-”
“No! No more talking! Heal my throat!”
Lex looked at her for a long moment, noting that the injuries she’d acquired during the battle against her former comrades were completely gone. His eyes slid back up to the faded scar across the base of her neck. Finally, he looked up into her rage-filled eyes before nodding. “Fine. Come closer.”
“Finally!” grunted Aria, slumping down and baring her neck towards him.
Quietly reciting the one low-grade healing spell he had, Lex touched a hoof to her neck as he sprinkled the unholy water over her scar, feeling the spell discharge. Aria gasped softly at the contact, and Lex idly noted that she was shaking, most likely in anticipation. Putting the now-empty flask of water away, Lex watched her quietly, waiting for what was about to happen next.
Several seconds went by, and Aria’s expression became one of confusion. She opened her mouth, apparently trying to speak, before closing it again. Putting a hoof to her neck, she tried a second time, and once again no sound came from her. Finally, she looked back at Lex, her face filling with anger. “What’s going on?! Is this some sort of sick joke?!” Her whisper was even harsher than before, twisted to a strangled rasp. “Heal my voice already!”
“I can’t.” Lex’s reply was delivered dispassionately, his face completely calm. “There’s nothing there to heal.”
“What?! What are you talking about?!”
Lex raised a hoof to point at her. “You were hurt during the battle, and yet your wounds are completely gone. Why?”
“Huh? What does that-”
“Answer the question.”
Frowning, Aria tried to figure out what game he was playing. But no matter how she wrapped her head around it, she couldn’t see where he was going with this. Narrowing her eyes, she gave her answer a moment later. “I gathered around when whatshername, Cozy, said she’d heal everypony’s injuries.”
“And yet your voice wasn’t repaired then.”
“That…I thought…” Aria trailed off, a gobsmacked look on her face. For whatever reason, it hadn’t occurred to her to even consider that the healing energy that the crystal mare was so easily throwing around would have fixed her voice. That had somehow seemed too…too casual for an injury that had effectively ruined her life. “I thought that was different,” she muttered sourly. Her stomach had begun to tighten as she realized where this was going.
“Different how?”
“How should I know?! I thought that you could do something more than Little Miss Crystal Flank! You keep acting like such a bigshot so I thought you’d have some sort of…of, I don’t know, better healing magic!”
“That scar on your throat,” Lex continued calmly, ignoring her tantrum, “is it surgical in nature?”
“Who cares?! If you can’t hea-”
“Aria! Is your scar surgical in nature?”
“…yes. That wretched, miserable queen had one of her doctors do this to me.”
“I thought so,” nodded Lex. “The clean nature of it isn’t something that would have happened in a fight. When you said before that ‘they took away’ your voice, that made it fairly easy to guess what had happened.”
“What are you talking about?! What does that have to do with none of you being able to heal my voice?!”
“I’m trying to tell you, there’s nothing there to heal.”
Lex’s pronouncement caused Aria to gape at him, her eyes wide and her mouth open, a horrified look slowly spreading across her face. “That can't... Of course there is!”
Lex shook his head. “No, there isn’t. Your vocal cords weren’t simply cut, they were removed altogether.” He looked away, and his brow creased slightly as he continued. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, healing magic is exceptionally versatile. A single spell releases energy into the body which acts as a reparative agent, able to do anything from repairing torn ligaments to restoring ruptured organs to mending broken bones and more. It can even stimulate blood production to replace any that was lost in the initial injury, or stop any associated complications that would arise during normal medical treatment, at least according to what the doctors told me when I consulted with them.”
He paused, and his frown deepened as he thought through the implications of that. “It’s actually rather strange. A spell with such a high degree of versatility should be much more difficult to use. The sheer amount of information embedded within the spell’s structure so that it can effectively treat virtually any kind of injury should be staggering, and yet Cozy and Cloudbank can use them without any undue problems. My own healing spell is essentially amplifying the body’s natural healing process through the stimulated emission of pl-”
“No one cares!” Aria’s breathing had grown ragged, and her eyes were open slightly too wide. “What about my voice?!”
Annoyed at his musings being interrupted, Lex turned his attention back to Aria. “I was trying to tell you. Healing magic can repair almost anything, but there has to be something there for it to fix in the first place. Your vocal chords are gone, which means that they don’t need to be healed per se; they need to be regenerated altogether, and that’s not something that I or Cozy or anypony here can do.”
“No…”
Aria staggered back, utterly stricken. For a moment she looked as though she were about to faint, but then her features suddenly tightened. Her gaze slid back towards Lex, and even though he had never been very good at reading people, even he could see the murder in her eyes. She started to furiously hiss a spell, waving a hoof in a pattern, and he recognized the words to a fireball like the one she had attacked him with barely a day ago.
But he had been expecting something like this, and held out his left hoof. “Stop.” The Night Mare’s power immediately coiled around her, making her cease her spell against her will. “Hold still,” he ordered as he approached her calmly.
Although she knew she was about to be punished for trying to attack him, Aria didn’t care. She thrashed for everything she was worth as he walked towards her, utterly overcome with rage. “How dare you?! How DARE you?! I trusted you! You said you would give me back my voice and YOU LIED TO-”
“Be silent.” Lex’s command caused her to instantly shut her mouth, unable to even whisper. A moment later he was in leg’s reach of her, and she couldn’t stop tears from running down her cheeks, overcome with frustration and despair at just how utterly unfair everything was. Even so, she did her best to glare at him, trying to silently let him know that she would never, ever forgive this betraya-
“I will fix your voice.” The words, delivered with utter conviction, cut through Aria’s anger and self-pity, causing her to blink as she looked at him.
“I don’t have the magic to do it right now,” he admitted, “and there are more pressing concerns at the moment, but I have every intention of keeping my promise to you. I will fix your voice, and make you a pony, without fail.” He paused for a long moment, trying to judge her reaction, before he silently withdrew the Night Mare’s power, prepared to use it again if she did anything foolish.
Feeling her freedom returned, Aria half-turned away from him, sniffling as she angrily wiped a hoof across her face. Gathering up what was left of her dignity, Aria shot Lex a petulant frown. “You had better mean that.”
“I always keep my word once I give it, no matter what.”
“Yeah, well…hurry it up already.” Aria was already leaving as she spoke, not giving him a chance to say anything else. Getting the last word in was a meaningless victory, but it was still a victory, and she’d take what she could get. Still, at least he’d seemed sincere about living up to his promise. For some reason, the way he’d acted just seemed…reassuring, almost. As though his certainty in himself had bled into her somehow.
After everything that she’d been through in the last few months, that actually felt kind of nice...
It was another two days before Lex managed to figure out how to cure the ponies whose flesh had been warped by the aboleth.
The doctors, to their credit, had given him the idea. Working tirelessly to figure out what was wrong with their fellows, they had come up with a theory. “We think it’s something like a fungal infection,” House Call had said. “That’s what most closely resembles their current condition.” He had then proceeded to babble some medical nonsense about possible analyses and treatments, but Lex hadn’t been listening by that point, instead processing what he’d just been told.
Although the Night Mare had been stingy with giving him healing magic, she had been more generous with other restorative spells. While he could only mend cuts and bruises with modest ability, the selection of divine spells he’d been granted – modest though they were – included numerous other curative spells. One was specifically tailored to curing blindness or deafness, while another could slow, but not cure, poison. There were several others, but the one he was thinking about at the moment was the one he’d used to save Drafty when he’d first met her: the spell that could cure diseases.
Strictly speaking, a fungal infection wasn’t a disease, but given how healing magic seemed to be notably diverse in its applications, Lex had been willing to give it a try. Heading out to where the afflicted ponies were floating in the harbor, Lex had called one of them over and pressed a hoof to their forehead as he intoned the spell. An instant later the puckered, translucent mess that their skin had been smoothed out and became healthy flesh. The pony – a unicorn stallion who looked the same age as himself – had been so shocked that he’d actually started crying, tearfully blubbering about how he’d been sure that he’d never be cured.
Lex had passed the weeping stallion off to the guards to take inside. Since the afflicted ponies were forced to remain outside, several ponies had remained outside at all times – and with numerous torches and fires lit during the night – just in case any more monsters or undead ponies showed up looking for an easy meal. Lex had been uncertain of the merit of that idea, since he saw the ponies around him as still being survivors rather than warriors, but everypony had been surprisingly insistent, so he’d reluctantly allowed it. It meant not using the same wards as before, but there was no helping that; locking the guards outside meant that they’d have nowhere to go if they needed to retreat.
As they’d ushered the newly-cured stallion into the warehouse, the other afflicted ponies had swum close, begging to also be cured. The look on their faces when he’d told them that they would need to wait had been hard for Lex to deal with, but there was no helping it. He only had a small amount of divine magic that he could wield each day, and creating food and water for everypony was already pushing those limits. It was only because of the small reservoir of magical energy in his circlet that he could do that and cure a single pony’s infection in the same day.
Still, this breakthrough meant that the last lingering problems from their battle were finally over, which in turn meant that they could start making forward motion on reclaiming Vanhoover…and not a moment too soon. As the guards hustled the stallion into the waiting hooves of the doctors, eager to examine their miraculously-cured patient, one of them had quietly informed Lex that they’d heard hoofsteps out in the darkness the previous night, but nopony had answered when they’d called out.
Lex hadn’t taken that news lying down, of course. The idea that the undead ponies were sniffing about had sent him out searching the nearby buildings that same day, flitting through walls and floors in shadow-form, only to find nothing. He’d had Aria cast her tracking spell – the one she’d used to track him during their fight – but she had reported that there were no undead ponies for several hundred feet, the apparent limit of her spell's range, in every direction. Lex, still not completely convinced, had ordered her to teach the spell to him, but she’d claimed not to know how it was written since, as with Sonata, her magic was intuitive rather than studied. That didn’t mean that the spell was beyond his reach, of course; with her explaining what she knew of it, he could have reconstructed it independently, but that would take time and resources that he didn’t have at the moment.
But fortunately, there hadn’t been any nighttime attacks by undead ponies hungering for living flesh, and over the next three days Lex had been able to cure each of the remaining patients. When the last one had finally left the water and come back inside, an impromptu party had broken out in the shelter. But although Lex was glad that the hardest-hit ponies had finally recovered, he had little interest in celebrating. Instead, it was time to make some decisions that had been delayed far too long…
“Sonata, I need to speak with you.”
“Just one sec!” she called back before returning her attention to the group of ponies that had gathered around her. Lex irritably noted that almost all of them were stallions, and that their eyes lingered on her as she trotted over to him, cheery as could be.
“There’s a decision that I need to make,” he said without preamble as she reached him. “I want to know what you th-”
“Hey, do you know how to dance?” she interrupted, her eyes shining with excitement.
The unexpected query threw him for a loop, and he stared at her for a moment uncomprehendingly. “What?”
She gestured back towards the ponies that she’d just left. “Some of the doctors and sailors put together some makeshift instruments! Isn’t that great?” She grinned as though that were the best news imaginable. “I can totes use my magic on them to get some music cranked up! This is gonna be sweet!” She stood up on her hind legs on that last word and pumped a foreleg into the air before coming back down onto all fours. “We’re gonna have dancing, and games, and we’re thinking maybe a talent show, and-”
“I don’t care, or dance for that matter,” snapped Lex. “I have more important things to be doing.” He knew he shouldn’t be upset, knew that everypony had earned the right to relax and enjoy themselves after how they’d conducted themselves in the battle, but he couldn’t help it. He could see how this was going to go, and he could feel the old familiar tension that always came when he found himself in social situations.
“Aw, c’mon Lex, you earned this!” Sonata wasn’t in the least bothered by his sourness, being too used to it by now. Instead, she leaned in and gave him a knowing smile. “I bet a lot of the girls here want to dance with you, which I’m totes fine with so long as they do it from across the room.” She punctuated her statement by sticking her tongue out at him, but Lex’s only response was to furrow his brows, not sure how serious she was being. Oblivious to his confusion, she rattled on. “But for realsies, you should probably hang out with Drafty a little bit, since she saved your life and all.”
Lex winced at that. He was keenly aware that Thermal Draft had taken a hit meant for him during the battle, when the kraken had temporarily taken control of Cloudbank. Were it not for her, he would doubtlessly have died, at which point everypony else would have also. But he had no idea how to react to that. Thinking back on it raised a mixture of embarrassment that he’d needed to be saved again, gratitude for her sacrifice, humiliation that he’d been so powerless at such a critical moment, admiration for her bravery, and confusion as to what had motivated her to do that for him. It was unpleasant enough that he’d been trying to avoid her for the last few days. At least with Cloudbank his reticence was due to figuring out how to integrate her newfound position and abilities into his future plans. He simply had no idea what to say to Thermal Draft at all.
Unconsciously, his eyes picked her out in the crowd, where she was talking to C. Shells, a nurse, and that pony with the scar on his neck from where the sahuagin had almost torn his throat out. Lex had just enough time to feel slightly surprised that Cloudbank wasn’t with her – the two had been almost inseparable the last few days – and then she looked over and made eye contact with him. The moment she did, her face lit up with a smile so bright that it was almost glowing, and she raised a hoof to wave at him.
Lex froze, his brain instantly kicking into overdrive as he tried to process her gesture and figure out the appropriate response. It was futile, of course; he’d learned that over the course of thousands of such interactions he’d experienced during his life, but he couldn’t help but try anyway.
The most obvious one was to mimic the gesture in return, but what if she’d meant that to call him over instead of sending a greeting? He’d seen that before, and so couldn’t discount the possibility. Or perhaps it would be better to give her a nod of acknowledgment, to let her know that he was aware of her gesture but nothing more? Or was that insufficient for somepony that had saved his life? But why should it be, since he had saved hers when she was dying of a disease when he first found her? Maybe a verbal response was called for instead, but if that was the case what should be said? Her name alone? Perhaps a general inquiry as to her health? Something else?
It had been less than two seconds since Drafty had looked at him, but in that time Lex considered well over a dozen possible replies. But to his mind, there were justifications for – and against – all of them, which made each choice seem equally good or bad depending on the underlying context of the situation…context which everypony else had always seemed to find as obvious as could be, but which he had never once been able to conclusively isolate. Somewhere in there, he was sure, was the right answer. But figuring out how to arrive at it was a process that he was still, after all these years, no closer to mastering.
“Lex?”
He glanced back at Sonata, hearing the uncertainty in her voice, but it was too late. She was already turning her head to follow his gaze, and a moment later her grin returned. “This is perfect! Drafty!” She stood up on her hind legs again and waved at the mare in question. “C’mere!”
Lex gave Sonata a stricken look. He’d originally called for her to solicit her opinion as to whether or not he should call the princesses and inform them about Vanhoover’s situation now that everypony had recovered. Now he wished that he’d simply made a decision unilaterally. As it was, Drafty was trotting over, and Lex was just starting to resign himself to what was almost certainly going to be an awkward and uncomfortable situation when Aisle suddenly burst into the room. “Ponies!” he yelled, a tense look on his face. “There are ponies outside!”
“More of those undead things?” Lex asked with a frown, but inwardly he felt a rush of relief. He had no idea why those monsters would come out in the middle of the daytime, but he was glad for it. Those things had proven to be sly and devious, but weak and cowardly. Destroying them would be easy, and would save him from having to figure out what to say to Drafty, at least for the moment.
But to his surprise, Aisle shook his head. “No! These are living ponies!” The corners of his lips turned upwards as he looked around. “Some more survivors are here!”
Aisle’s announcement caused a hush to fall over the shelter, but it lasted for only a moment.
“That’s great!” Nosey grinned as she trotted towards Lex, already hefting her notepad and pencil in her telekinetic grip. “I bet they saw us kicking butt and taking names before, and now want to throw in with our group!” She paused as she reached him, an expectant look on her face. She hadn’t wanted to bring up how well she’d done in the battle, knowing it would be crass, but he hadn’t spoken to her – had barely spoken to anypony – since then. Maybe he’d take the hint now…?
The glance that he sent her way contained only disinterest, however. “You will stay here,” he said curtly. Turning away from her, Lex missed the crestfallen look on Nosey’s face. Instead, he looked back towards Aisle. “Did they seem hostile? How many of them were there?”
Aisle’s excited look faded at Lex’s suspicion-filled response. “Three, two stallions and a mare, all earth ponies, but they didn’t look like they meant any harm. They were asking if we had any food we could spare. Scrubby and Band-Aid are out there talking to them now.” As he spoke, he caught sight of Cozy looking at him, her face showing a mixture of hope and worry. “They might know where others are,” he added pointedly, turning back to Lex.
That thought didn’t seem to galvanize him, however. If anything he seemed more apprehensive, narrowing his eyes in consideration. After a moment he seemed to make up his mind, moving past Aisle. “I’ll go and meet them.”
“Um, not alone you won’t,” declared Sonata as she moved to follow him. When Lex shot her a look, she met his gaze firmly. “Spokespony, remember?”
Aisle was also falling him behind them. “I told them I’d be right back. It might make them nervous if I don’t show up again.”
“Fine,” replied Lex brusquely. Giving a cursory glance back, nopony seemed inclined to argue his decision. Instead, he saw several ponies head towards the medical area, already preparing for possible new patients. The sight pleased him; he had been worried that the doctors and nurses would become discouraged by how there were so many ponies that could cure injuries and other ailments instantaneously with magic. But they were behaving like professionals, staying ready just in case. Nodding to himself, he exited the shelter, Sonata and Aisle following him.
He hadn’t gone more than two steps before Sonata spoke up. “It’s not just them, you know.”
“Hm?” Lex glanced back at her inquisitively.
“You were totes glad that they were getting ready in case somepony was hurt or sick, even though you and Cozy and Cloudbank can already take care of that, right?” Sonata’s question caused Lex to blink, surprised at just how accurately she had guessed his thoughts. His expression made her smile, but it was a more strained expression than her usual carefree grin. “Oh don’t look so shocked. You have, like, a super bad poker face.”
Aisle made a sound that was suspiciously like a repressed laugh, but kept his eyes straight ahead, deliberately showing that he was not paying attention to them.
Sonata continued. “But for realsies, it’s not just the doctors that are doing great, it’s everyone.” She stood up and waved a hoof at the shelter. “Nobody who came with us thought that they’d have to fight, but when push came to shove, they totes stood up and did it anyway. They didn’t complain, didn’t run away…heck, they didn’t even ask for a reward! You’ve gotta admit, that’s pretty incredible.”
“No one is disputing that,” shot back Lex, unsure why she was bringing this up.
“But you haven’t actually SAID it to them!” Sonata circled around in front of Lex and stopped. She wasn’t smiling anymore, and the tone in her voice was pleading, desperate for him to understand. “It’s not just Drafty that you haven’t thanked! Nosey never used anything more dangerous than a pencil before she came here, but when you told her to she picked up a weapon and started killing monsters! House Call was so scared that he threw up before we went out there, but not only did he fight, he came right back here and treated you afterwards! C. Shells-”
“Get to the point!” Lex grit his teeth, suddenly feeling defensive. Why was she castigating him all of a sudden? He’d done everything right! He’d come up with a way for everyone to not only survive, but overcome an impossible situation! Now she was telling him that he hadn’t done enough?! It wasn’t like he was expecting any thanks!
But you want it, don’t you? The mocking words slid across his consciousness, as cutting as ever. You wish they were singing your praises and making toasts to you.
The accusation bit deep, and he raged against it. He didn’t WANT to want praise! He wanted to do what he knew was right because that was what moral virtue demanded! Having expectations of accolades served only to undercut the selflessness of serving one’s community, and was too petty for a civic-minded pony such as himself!
Heedless of the inner turmoil she was causing him, Sonata kept speaking. “Look, it wasn’t a big deal the first couple of days. You were worrying about those ponies that hadn’t been cured yet, we got that. But you figured that out three days ago, and since then you’ve barely looked up from those scrolls of yours.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to put this city back together!” Lex hissed. “Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost to put Vanhoover back into any semblance of order?! How much time and effort it will take?!”
“I get that, I do, but this is turning into Tall Tale all over again! You do this incredible thing, and then you lock yourself away instead of letting everyone see what a great guy you are! Lex…” She gave him a helpless look, confused by the pushback she was getting. “Do you not want people to like you?”
“Wanting to be liked is beneath me,” he replied sullenly. “And this conversation is over. Right now there are ponies outside that need our help.” With that he stepped around her and headed towards the warehouse doors, not looking back.
Sonata just stared at him for a long moment, her ears folded back and a sad look on her face as she watched him go. Finally, she glanced at Aisle, who was studying the floor very intently, and muttered “c’mon,” starting after her sourpuss boyfriend. Catching up to Lex, the three of them reached the edge of the warehouse in silence. Without hesitating, Lex telekinetically threw the door open, striding outside…
…and immediately stopping in his tracks as he felt a blade press against his throat.
Piggy Bank laughed to himself as he saw the unicorn stallion freeze in place as he felt the knife press against his neck. He couldn’t believe that there were still ponies in Vanhoover that would fall for the old “we’re scared and hungry” routine. But then, glancing at the other two stallions that the rest of his group were keeping similarly hostage, he couldn’t believe that there were ponies that would just loiter outside, even in the middle of the day.
Glancing upward, he waved at Turbulence. “Anything?”
The pegasus took one last quick swoop over the area, and then quickly landed, knowing not to linger in the air too long. Flying was just asking to be noticed, and while the undead ponies might not like daylight, they weren’t exactly afraid of it either, especially since all of the buildings had shadow-filled interiors with plenty of hiding places. “Nothing,” he reported with a smirk. “Nopony on the roof or around the back or anywhere else. They really weren’t laying a trap at all.”
“Great work, Turbo.” Piggy couldn’t help but chuckle at the news, and his mirth caught on, spreading to the rest of their gang as they looked back at Lex. But unlike the others, Piggy’s voice had an undercurrent of tension in it. Something seemed wrong with this whole setup. After this long, there shouldn’t have been anyone who’d make such elementary mistakes. More than that, the two ponies that they’d already captured were surprisingly calm, despite having sharp kitchen knives pressed up against their necks. If anything, they seemed almost…laid back. It was enough to put him on edge, which was saying something given what he’d had to get used to since his city went to Tartarus.
“Fencer, if he so much as looks at you wrong, go ahead and cut him!” he yelled, causing her to grin and nod as she hefted her own knife menacingly in her telekinesis. Of course, she knew that already; he’d yelled that purely for the benefit of the poor sap that she’d gotten the drop on. Except…he didn’t seem to be afraid either. Quite the contrary, he was glowering at them with an expression that was contemptuous rather than worried. It was enough to set Piggy on edge. They’d run this routine plenty of times before, though not so much recently, and these ponies should have been shaking in their horseshoes!
Shaking off his anxiety, he yelled out again, this time addressing the glowering stallion directly. “Here’s what’s going to happen! You’re going to come out nice and slowly, and those two ponies behind you are going to escort my friends here,” he swept a hoof wide to indicate the rest of his gang, over a dozen strong, “inside your hideout. We’re going to help ourselves to whatever we want, and if anypony gives us any trouble, you three are gonna pay for it.” He drew a hoof across his throat to illustrate his point, grinning to make it clear just who was in charge. “Now, get moving.”
But the stallion in the doorway didn’t move.
Piggy frowned. “Well? Get moving! Or you and your buddies are dead!” He could feel himself starting to sweat, and not just because of the humidity in the air. Every other time they’d done this, the ponies they’d threatened had given up right away. They hadn’t just stood there like that.
“You guys really have no idea what you’re getting into,” chuckled one of the ponies they’d captured, an earth pony stallion with a scrub bucket and mop for a cutie mark. The comment was enough to send a round of nervous looks through Piggy’s subordinates, as well as himself. Only Fencer kept her cool, just like she had ever since he’d met her.
“I’m going to give you to the count of three!” he yelled, trying to make himself sound angry instead of nervous. He wasn’t sure that he succeeded. “After that you’re goners, you hear me?!” He waited, but there was still no reaction. It was then that he realized that the stallion’s shadow was stretching in front of him, despite there being no light source inside the doorway that he could see. Piggy had discounted the weird horn and the barbed wire around his hoof as being affectations designed to make the stallion look tough, but there was no way for a pony to mess with their own shadow like that!
“O-one…!” His voice almost broke, and he caught himself starting to edge backward. The cardinal rule of surviving in what was left of Vanhoover was playing it safe, and everything happening right now told him that this was a bad idea. But there was no other choice, not with their food stores being completely empty. These ponies had to be bluffing! “Two!”
At that moment, the unicorn stallion opened his mouth, and for a split-second Piggy relaxed, thinking that he was about to give up. Then he heard what the other pony said.
As they ushered the last of the would-be thieves into the warehouse, Lex looked them over coldly.
While the presence of monsters in Vanhoover had been beyond what he’d anticipated, he’d known before he’d arrived that social order had broken down. With no relief incoming in the days immediately following the flooding, it had been a question of when, not if, the ponies remaining in the city would turn on each other as their situation worsened and their desperation mounted. Encountering thieves and raiders was therefore entirely unsurprising…and easily dealt with.
Subduing the motley group had been pathetically simple. With a thought, black crystals had grown over their knives and other weapons, rendering them unwieldy and useless. That had been enough to rattle the group, and nearly half their number had tried to flee, including their portly leader. A few others had gathered what little courage they possessed and had attempted to tackle him, presumably thinking that they could bludgeon him unconscious with their hooves. Turning into shadow had defeated the latter, and a spell of slowness had easily kept the former from getting very far. After that, he’d created a miniature tornado – the same spell he’d used to subdue Aisle and his companions when he’d first met them – to knock some sense into the few that still had the will to fight. The ones that had kept trying to run or fly away had black crystals grow around their hooves or wings for their trouble, hobbling them. After that, none of them had been able to oppose him any longer.
It had taken Lex a little over thirty seconds and almost no effort to completely defeat fourteen other ponies.
The victory brought him no sense of accomplishment – after fighting dragons, krakens, sahuagin warriors and more, this was too small to deserve to be called a victory – but to his surprise not everypony seemed to feel that way. Scrubby and Band-Aid had cheered after the fight had concluded, with the latter saying how they “shouldn’t have messed with us.” For a moment Lex had felt indignant, since he had been the one that had done all the work. Then he’d remembered what Sonata had been telling him a minute ago, and wondered if he was being uncharitable before deciding to ignore it for now.
Instead, he’d told the two of them to throw the thieves’ crystal-covered weapons into the bay, and the duo had leapt to obey. Some of the defeated ponies had let out a disheartened cry at that, but a sharp glare from him had quieted them down. Then they’d marched them into the warehouse, letting them huddle fearfully in an empty corner while he considered what to do with them.
Apparently he wasn’t the only one wondering about that. “Wh-what’s going to happen to us?” The speaker was the same fat little earth pony that had been barking demands at him two minutes ago. All of his arrogance was gone now, and he was shaking as he spoke, breathing heavily in fright. His companions were all the same, all wearing their terror openly…except for one. The unicorn mare – the one that the fat pony had called Fencer – was staring at him coldly, her face an expressionless mask. She was one of the ones that had tried to fight back, he recalled, only stopping when she had been knocked down.
Turning away from her, Lex glanced behind him. A quick gesture and a word of magic were all it took to cast the spell to carry his whispers to his beloved. “Sonata.”
“What? Oh!” Apparently something had been on her mind, because she gave her head a quick shake before she trotted up by his side. Behind her, Scrubby and Band-Aid were grinning, apparently still thrilled about the brief fight that they’d witnessed. Aisle, however, looked rather perturbed. Perhaps he was upset at how thoroughly he’d been duped? Or was he worried that the captured ponies would be made to suffer for what they’d done? Either way, he didn’t seem inclined to share his thoughts, and Lex wasn’t interested enough to inquire as to them. Instead, he turned his attention back to his captives, whispering to Sonata as he announced their fate.
“Okay! So, this is Lex Legis,” she announced, grinning guilelessly as she held out a hoof to indicate him, “and he’s totes in charge of Vanhoover now. He-”
“Are you kidding?!” blurted the fat little stallion.
“Huh?” Sonata paused, the interruption breaking her warmup. “No, why?”
“I’m Piggy Bank!” he announced. When he saw Lex glance at Sonata, who just shrugged in reply, he continued. “My mom, River Bank, ran this town! That means that I’M supposed to be in charge now!”
Sonata snickered at that, but it was Aisle who spoke up. “The Banks were one of the most prominent families in Vanhoover,” he explained. “Along with the McNeighs and the Hoofingfords, they were pretty much the ones who oversaw everything.”
“Huh, that sounds kinda familiar,” mused Sonata. She put a hoof to her chin for a moment, then apparently gave up and turned to Lex. “Didn’t Twilight say something about the three big families not doing a good job of fixing things here after the flood?”
“Wait, Twilight?” This time it was a pegasus that spoke up, the one that Piggy Bank had called Turbo before. “As in, Princess Twilight Sparkle? You know her?”
“Oh yeah, are you kidding? We-” She stopped abruptly as Lex’s whispers reached her ear. “Um, she and her fellow princesses formally ceded control of Vanhoover to Lex,” she said, enunciating carefully enough to make it obvious that she was repeating what she had been told. “From now on, this city is under his sole authority.”
“But that-” Piggy Bank’s protest was cut off as Lex glared at him, his eyes flaring green and purple. It was enough to make Piggy’s sudden burst of indignant courage vanish, and he quieted down.
Sonata spoke up again as Lex fed her more lines. “Now, as ruler, Lex is in charge of the well-being of everypony in Vanhoover, and that totes includes you guys!” Another warm smile crossed her face as she looked at them. “He totes understands that you’ve had it super hard, and that you might have had to do bad things to survive up ‘til now, but it’s all gonna be okay from now on. So! You guys are now officially part of our group!” She stood up on her hind legs and threw her forelegs wide, as though welcome them into a theme park. “We have food and shelter and supplies, and we’ll totes share. But no more doing bad stuff! From now on you’re all good ponies again, ‘kay?” She fell back down onto all fours as she finished, and gave Lex a smile, proud of the job she’d done turning his boring proclamation into something that sounded warm and welcoming. For his part, Lex fought to keep from rolling his eyes.
The captured ponies seemed nonplussed, staring at the two of them in frank disbelief. They weren’t the only ones, as Scrubby stepped forward. “Hang on, are you sure about this?” He gave Lex an incredulous look. “These guys were ready to kill us and do Celestia-knows-what to everypony else, and you’re just going to welcome them in with open hooves?”
“W-we weren’t going to kill anypony!” spoke up Turbo suddenly. “We just said all of that stuff to make you guys give up without a fight, honest! We were just going to take your food and leave!”
“You say that now,” muttered Band-Aid, looking at Aisle for support.
But the other stallion was shaking his head. “I disagree. I think that letting them in is the right decision.”
“You can’t be serious!” blurted Scrubby. “Aisle, they had knives to our throats!”
“I saw the look on your face, Scrubby,” countered Aisle quietly. “You weren’t in any real danger and you knew it.”
“That was because he was there!” Scrubby pointed at Lex.
“And he’ll be here now.” Aisle still didn’t raise his voice, speaking plainly. “If we throw these ponies out, who’ll be there for them?” When neither answered, he continued. “I know you guys are worried, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried too, but…” He paused, struggling to find the right words. “But being here when it all happened, and after it happened…being scared and hungry and desperate for so long…” He screwed up his face, feeling tears suddenly welling up. “It…there are no good choices, only bad ones. That doesn-, that can’t mean that you’re a bad pony.” For a moment he seemed to want to say more, but then shook his head and looked away, rubbing his hoof across his eyes.
No one seemed to know what to say after that, and after a long moment Lex whispered again. Sonata gave him a sidelong glance, then spoke up. “Listen, why don’t you guys take our new friends to the shelter? I’m, like, sure the doctors will want to check them out. We’ll be along with food in a few minutes.” As she finished, Lex gave her a sharp look. He’d told her to have the others lead the newcomers to the shelter, but he had NOT said anything about staying behind!
The ponies slowly filtered out. Most of them stole glances at Lex and Sonata as they passed them, still uncertain about their sudden good fortune after the one-sided fight they’d been through, but a few mumbled words of thanks. Fencer, her features still as hard as stone, was the last to leave, giving Lex another long stare before she departed. “Geez, she was really giving you the stink eye, wasn’t she?” frowned Sonata. “I bet she’ll be trouble, for realsies.”
“When I accepted the idea of you being my spokespony,” Lex spoke abruptly, “it was with the implicit understanding that you would parse the phrasing of my words, not their meaning. So why are we apparently hanging back here instead of supervising our new ‘friends’ to make sure they seamlessly reintegrate into civilized society?”
Sonata turned so that she was facing him directly. “You said that word before, you know.”
Lex frowned in confusion. “What word?”
“Friends.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Before, back when we were fighting the kraken.” Sonata smiled gently. “Cloudbank had just been sucked into that tornado, and I was saying that we should retreat, and you said, and I quote, ‘I will never give up on my friends.’”
Lex’s eyes widened, a look of disbelief crossing his face. “I said no such thing!”
“Did too.” Her serene expression didn’t change. “Maybe nopony else heard it, but I did. You think of everypony here as your friend, and you should tell them that, because I’d bet this tattoo on my butt-”
“It’s a cutie mark!”
“-that they’ll say they feel the same way about you.” She continued as though she hadn’t heard his indignant interruption. “And no, that won’t ruin your tough guy, fearless leader image, Mr. Grouchy Pants.” She winked at him as she threw that last line out there, seeing the sour expression that he’d adopted in regards to her advice. She turned away then, knowing he’d need time to stew over what she’d said. She’d learned the hard way that it was better to let him think about something rather than press him for an immediate concession. And she could tell he was thinking about it, the way he frowned and looked away with narrowed eyes. Smiling, she headed back towards the shelter…then stopped, as she couldn’t resist tossing one last thought over her shoulder before she left.
“Also, seeing you kick all those ponies’ flanks without breaking a sweat like that? Super sexy.”
As they were marched through the warehouse, Turbo found himself thinking back to when everything had started.
He hadn’t been very worried when Vanhoover had initially flooded. Sure, it was a disaster, but somepony would definitely come up with a plan and everything would be fixed in a jiff. Maybe, if he was lucky, it would even be one of the princesses; he’d always wanted to meet them! So when a lot of ponies rushed to abandon the city, he’d only chuckled at how panicky they were.
But things hadn’t gotten better; quite the opposite, they’d quickly started to get worse. By the fourth day after the disaster, with the floodwaters still choking the city and food running out, it had started to sink in that no help was coming. But by that point it was too late to leave easily, with all of the serviceable ships having fled and the train service having stopped.
Even so, Turbo knew he could have taken flight and left Vanhoover behind. Although twenty-odd miles was a long way to fly, especially on an increasingly-empty stomach, Tall Tale was looking better and better. Or he could have headed north towards any of the little farming villages scattered throughout the region. But so many of his friends and neighbors were earth ponies and unicorns who didn’t have those options; just abandoning them was unconscionable. So he kept waiting, even as his food dwindled along with his hopes.
It had been at the seven day mark, when he had started getting truly desperate, that the floodwaters had receded. He still remembered the great cheer that had gone up from the remaining ponies as they woke up and realized that the city wasn’t flooded anymore. Despite the fact that everypony was filthy and hungry there’d been nothing but smiles on their faces, sure that they’d gotten through the worst of it.
They had quickly learned just how wrong they were…
And now it’s happening all over again, he thought with a growing sense of dread. Bad enough that they’d been captured by an evil wizard – being a pegasus, Turbo didn’t know much about spells or spellcasting, but everything about that Lex guy screamed “dark magic” – but in the short time they’d been walking he’d seen some sort of giant fish-pony monster moving through the dimly-lit hallways. Even now, as they approached the interior room that they were apparently being led to, he could see a scary-looking scythe, which was floating in midair, outside the door!
Despite everything he’d been through up until now, Turbo couldn’t help but feel terrified, and he wasn’t the only one. Glancing behind him, he could see that Piggy was wide-eyed and sweating profusely, though that wasn’t exactly an unusual sight; their self-styled “leader” had a tendency to go to pieces at the slightest hint of danger. It had gotten to the point where the rest of them had a running joke about how, if worse ever came to worst, they’d see pigs fly because their leader would find a way to turn himself into a pegasus to escape. If not for the fact that he’d made all of them exorbitant promises about what he’d do after Vanhoover was restored, no one would have listened to a word he said.
Now, however, Turbo would have thrown away every one of those promises if it meant that he could be anywhere other than here! That trophy mare that had spoken for Lex said they were going to see doctors, and although she’d tried to make it sound benign, Turbo was already imagining cackling ponies in blood-splattered smocks strapping them down to tables and doing Celestia only knew what to them! Or maybe they wouldn’t be ponies at all. Maybe they’d be demons, or those dead things infesting the city, or something even worse!
As the stallion leading them went up to the door, Turbo’s courage broke, and he clenched his eyes shut. He would have bolted right there, except that he was sure that scythe or that fish-pony thing roaming the place would get him before he could escape. As he heard the door open, he tensed, sure that this was the end of-
“Hi there! I’m Nosey Newsy with the Canterlot Chronicle, would any of you mind giving me an interview?”
Freezing in place, Turbo cracked an eye open. Standing in the doorway was a unicorn mare holding a notepad and pencil at the ready. “I’ve been talking to some of the other survivors we’ve gathered so far,” she continued, “but since they were all together they only had one perspective to share, so I’d really like to hear what you’ve been through so that my readers can get a more accurate pict-”
“Knock it off, Nosey,” came the voice of that other stallion, the one who had spoken up for them when his friends had protested bringing them in. “These ponies just got here. Let’s let them see the doctors and eat something before any interviews, okay?”
Frowning, Nosey flipped her notepad closed. “In a bit of a mood today aren’t you, Aisle?” she noted, but didn’t press the issue as she turned and headed back inside.
“Look who’s talking,” he muttered after she left, before turning back to the group. “Come on. The doctors are right inside. By the time they’re done looking you over, Lex should be back. Then we can eat.”
Although Aisle had stuck up for them before, Turbo hadn’t been convinced that he still wasn’t about to lead them into some sort of torture or brainwashing or some other horrible fate. But now, after seeing the incredibly normal way that those two had sniped at each other, Turbo was wondering if maybe, just maybe, this might not be some new horror after all. Maybe, despite all of the intimidating weirdness around them, this whole operation really was on the up-and-up. But we should have a plan, just to be safe, he decided.
As the rest of their group started to walk through the doors, Turbo hung back until he was alongside Fencer…
Standing by himself at the edge of the warehouse, Lex was sulking.
Sonata was, in all likelihood, right. After all, that was why he’d agreed to her spokespony idea in the first place; for all her intellectual deficiencies, her social acumen was remarkably puissant, even before her magical abilities were taken into account. If she was that adamant that he needed to personally engage with everypony, then there was little cause to doubt her. Except that should be her job, he groused internally. Her official role in this endeavor is to serve as my interlocutor!
But apparently that wouldn’t do, otherwise Sonata wouldn’t have been so emphatic that HE be the one to talk to everyone. Some things, it seemed, could not be delegated. She’d even given him parameters to work with: that he needed to express some mixture of gratitude and admiration to everypony for their conduct in the recent battle. The thought was enough to make Lex fold his ears back, and he glanced at the wall of the warehouse, half-wishing that some other crisis would suddenly appear so as to spare him from this. But after a minute of no new calamity emerging, Lex heaved a resigned sigh, and slowly began walking back towards the shelter.
“You’re looking even more depressing than usual.” Glancing over, Lex saw Aria reclining between two empty shelves, her half-lidded eyes directed towards him. “Normally I wouldn’t care, but I’m so bored that even talking to you sounds good, so what’s going on?”
Lex was about to tell her to coldly mind her own business, but stopped. Aria had been out there alongside everypony else, and had played a not-insignificant role in their victory. As such, she needed to be included in his attempt to follow Sonata’s advice and foster better interpersonal relationships. Now…how to do that?
Aria blinked, then frowned as Lex stopped and stared at her for a long moment. Several seconds ticked by in silence as her confusion mounted. What was he doing? “Hello? Earth or Equestria or wherever to Lex? You reading me?” She briefly thought about teasing him about being smitten with her, but that was only fun when Sonata was around. Otherwise, she didn’t really care-
“I think you’re pretty,” blurted Lex.
“Wh-what?!” Aria’s train of thought derailed immediately, Lex’s unexpected compliment having taken her completely by surprise.
Lex was already regretting his choice of words. He’d been trying to figure out what specific phrasing would be most conducive for the results he was trying to achieve, and had frozen as he realized that he had no idea what to say. But she had already initiated the conversation, and according to the data he’d gathered over the course of his life, there was a limited window in which to respond before he committed a faux paus; a window that she’d already informed him was closing. Realizing that, Lex had blurted out the first thing that came to mind.
That particular observation – a statement that he found her appearance aesthetically pleasing – was a line that had been suggested to him back on Everglow by Willow Leaf née Longtail, a purrsian (a winged cat-person that was one of that realm’s myriad native races) and one of the very few non-ponies to have earned Lex’s respect. It had been just one suggestion that she’d given him during the early days of his and Sonata’s burgeoning relationship, and it had been very helpful. As such, he’d fallen back on it during his momentary panic just now…only to realize how much of a mistake he’d just made.
I’m supposed to be making reference to her actions during the battle! raged Lex internally. Remarks with regards to her comeliness are completely inapplicable here! That he’d so badly deviated from the parameters Sonata had given him was utterly mortifying. He could already feel himself turning red in embarrassment even as he scrambled for what to say that could return the discussion to the correct topic. In pure desperation he looked around for something, anything, that could possibly rectify the situation.
For her part, Aria was completely flummoxed. For a moment she thought he might be setting her up for some sort of put-down or roundabout insult. But an instant later she saw Lex turn red and break eye contact with her, clearly embarrassed by his admission…and suddenly, she was embarrassed too for some reason. Quickly averting her eyes from him, she reached one hoof up reflexively, trying to play with pigtails that she no longer had. “Y-yeah, well…it’s not like you’re ugly or anything either, I guess.” The words were mumbled, and she quickly glanced back at him to see his reaction.
Lex bit his lip as he heard her reply. No no no! This wasn’t what they were supposed to be discussing! Finding nothing on his quick scan of the room to return them to the proper metric for their exchange, he realized he had no choice but to operate blindly. “Um…you did a good job. Before. During the fight. The one against the kraken, I mean. Not the one where we fought each other.” He almost said she had done an adequate job, but given how meager Sonata’s intelligence was, he couldn’t take a chance that her sister would have an equally lacking vocabulary. “Good” seemed like a safer choice.
“Yeah? I mean, yeah! Of course I did!” Aria nodded, forcing herself to straighten up and nod vigorously. “That’s what you’d expect from me, since I’m, you know…me,” she finished lamely.
Lex could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He had no idea what her statement meant, but from what he could tell it wasn’t an expression of anger or discontent, which meant that he had done it! He had successfully completed an instance of social discourse! Sonata’s advice had worked! Now he just needed to disengage without ruining the progress he’d made. “Okay. Well then…”
“Yeah…” Aria tried to stop herself from smiling back at him, but for some reason she couldn’t seem to make herself do so. Flustered, she realized she was grinning at him like an idiot as he turned and walked away. It was only after he left that she started to calm down, feeling almost dizzy as she tried to figure out what had just happened.
For his part, Lex was almost walking on air, his earlier doldrums having completely vanished. That had gone so well! Eagerly, he headed for the shelter, impatient to try and repeat his success. That, and to tell Sonata what he’d accomplished.
“What I still can’t figure out is exactly why the elemental bleed moved in the first place.”
“Mm-hmm.” Sonata nodded in response to Nosey’s statement, not really paying attention. Instead, she was focused on the far side of the room, where Lex was talking to Drafty. He’d spent the last half-hour having conversations with various ponies, and she’d been making sure to keep an eye on him, ready to jump in if he got himself into trouble. Amazingly, she hadn’t had to do anything, though that seemed to be because everypony was making allowances for how awkward Lex was.
From what she could see, it was going well; Drafty had a look on her face that could only be called ecstatic, as though she were talking to her favorite celebrity. Which she might be, now, thought Sonata with a smirk.
“I mean, according to Aisle and Cloudbank and everypony else that I’ve talked to so far, Vanhoover was flooded for a week. After that, the water receded. But Lex told us before the battle that it hadn’t closed, and that it wouldn’t until that ‘kraken’ thing was killed or banished.” Nosey hadn’t looked up from her notes, tapping the point of her quill against her lip in thought.
Sonata’s reply was a noncommittal grunt as she continued watching her boyfriend. He had never been able to keep whatever he was feeling from showing on his face, which meant that – with how long she’d known him – he was even easier for her to read than Drafty was. At the moment, he was nervous and awkward, but also optimistic. Something had happened to turn him around on talking to everypony. Although she had no idea what it was, Sonata was glad for it.
“Also, I can’t confirm this, but I think that the water level in the bay has dropped a little bit since then. The water stains on the supports of the remaining piers seem to…Sonata?” Nosey paused as she looked up and saw that her friend was staring across the room with a soft smile. Following her gaze, Nosey followed her gaze, frowning as she saw where it was directed. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“What?”
“Having him schmooze it up with his fangirl like that.”
“Why not? Telling everyone that he’s totes proud of them is a nice thing to do.” That, and he deserved an adoring public for everything he’d done. Maybe it would even make him relax a little more.
“I’m more worried about what she’s telling him.” Nosey’s voice had lowered to a mutter, and Sonata barely heard it. But before she had a chance to respond, she saw Drafty take a half-step forward – closer than was strictly polite – and say something to Lex, her expression changing from starstruck to something slightly naughtier. An instant later, Lex looked thunderstruck, his eyes widening and jaw dropping. Sonata frowned, and was about to cut in when she saw Drafty back off, laughing as she said something that seemed to mollify Lex, his expression immediately changing into one of relief. A moment later he nodded.
That seemed to be the end of the conversation, as Drafty immediately turned and trotted away. Lex glanced around, and upon meeting Sonata’s gaze headed towards her. Because of that he didn’t notice when Drafty looked back in his direction and giggled, half-shielding her face with one wing. Sonata and Nosey both saw the coquettish gesture, however, and the latter gave the former an “I told you so” look.
Refusing to let Nosey’s suspicions get her down, Sonata kept her smile in place as Lex reached them. “Hey! So, how’s it going?”
Lex came perilously close to smiling. “In the last thirty minutes I’ve spoken to nineteen different individuals. So far none of them have displayed an adverse reaction to the dialogue I’ve been using.”
“That’s great!” Sonata beamed. “I totes knew you could do it!” She stepped forward and nuzzled him, grinning as he returned the gesture.
After they’d finished, Lex continued. “I’ll want to go over the results with you in detail later. So far, the phrases ‘you should be proud’ and ‘you did well’ have received the best response rate, but I’m going to want your input on-”
“Whoa, whoa, time out.” Sonata held up her hooves. “Are you saying that you’re, like, using stock lines on everypony?”
Lex cocked his head. “Of course.”
“Nooo…” Sonata’s jubilation was gone in an instant, and she sagged in place. “Lex, you can’t just, like, feed everybody a line! You have to really talk to them!”
He frowned at her, his confusion evident. “I’m attempting to deconstruct the underlying methodologies of social dynamics in these exchanges. Utilizing standardized dialogue is necessary in order to establish a baseline so that the variables can be properly analyzed. I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t the proper laboratory setting I’d prefer, but that’s not atypical where social engagement is concerned.” He paused, then added. “And the proper term is ‘everypony,’ not ‘everybody.’”
Sonata’s response was to put her face in her hooves and groan.
Nosey, who had been giving Lex the evil eye up until now, finally spoke up. “What were you talking about with Drafty just now?”
Lex shot her a glare, since he wasn’t sure how that was any of her business. Nevertheless, he answered, his eyes turning back to Sonata as he did. “We’re going on a date later.”
“What?!” The response, thick was outrage, came not from Sonata – her only reaction was to freeze in place, her mouth hanging open as she looked at him in utter shock – but from Nosey. The reporter’s lips were pulled back in a snarl, and behind her glasses her eyes were narrowed dangerously. “You…you agreed…to go on a date…with her?!”
“And Cloudbank,” confirmed Lex. His face once again displayed confusion as his eyes flickered back and forth between the two mares. “She assured me that coordinated dates between couples are a standard social convention.”
“Wait, ‘between couples’?” Sonata blinked, the gears slowly turning in her head. “You mean, you and me going out with her and Cloudbank? Like a double date?”
“I believe that is the term she used, yes.”
Sonata almost collapsed with relief, and a moment later started to snicker, before bursting into full-blown laughter. Lex blinked, giving her a look of incomprehension, and just like on the boat ride to Vanhoover, this only set her off more. It was all she could do not to fall down, drawing looks from the ponies around her.
Nosey’s reaction was far less mirthful. Instead, she looked completely chagrinned, her ears folding back as she cringed with embarrassment. “I, uh, I’m going to go see if I can interview some of those ponies you brought in. They should be almost done with the doctors by now.” She didn’t wait for a response before slinking away, looking miserable.
Lex just looked between the two of them, utterly mystified.
Dinner had been a delicious affair for once.
With the addition of the new ponies to their group, the spell that Lex normally used to create sufficient food and water for everypony was insufficient to meet their needs. Although he could have dipped into his magical reservoirs to retain the spell after casting it and then use it a second time, Lex had opted for a different strategy. Instead, he had channeled additional energy through his body – only a small amount, rather than pushing himself to his limits; he had been quite pleased at how doing so hadn’t even caused a twinge of pain, letting him know that he had fully recovered from the battle – as he cast the spell, boosting its effect.
The results had been dramatic. Not only had the amount of food and drink created been much greater than normal, the quality of it had improved considerably. Rather than bowls of bland gruel and simple cups of plain water, there had been some variety to what had been created. Salads of lettuce, carrots, and celery had appeared alongside dry bread, and there had even been small selections of nuts and cheeses as side dishes. The drinks had still been water, but there had been a fruity flavor to it, as though berries had just been squeezed over them.
Needless to say, after days of eating food with virtually no discernable taste whatsoever, the ponies in the shelter had been ecstatic, particularly the newcomers. In an instant, the party that had been in the planning stages before erupted as everypony dug in, and suddenly there were games being played and songs being sung amidst a series of whooping and hollering. There wasn’t a face that didn’t have a smile on it.
Lex, of course, had been the exception.
Taking some food for himself, he’d exited the shelter almost immediately. While he might have made some small advancements on unraveling the mysteries of social interaction today, that didn’t mean that he enjoyed the cacophonous din or meaningless pastimes that everypony else was engaged in. Far better to return his attention to the task of Vanhoover’s recovery.
Noticing Severance still hovering just outside the shelter where he’d left it before, Lex telekinetically pulled it over to him. As he did so, he heard the weapon’s query about the newcomers in his mind, and shook his head in reply. “No. Even if they do something stupid, they’re outnumbered and outclassed. Sonata could handle them on her own if they become a problem.” The scythe’s response made him frown. “I doubt it was a ruse. I scanned them all for active magic before I brought them into the shelter, and none of them registered anything.” It pressed the point, but Lex only snorted. “I am not going to sanction ponies because of what ‘might’ happen. Just because a negative result is possible does not change the moral dimension of a given action.”
As he heard himself he stopped, his earlier dilemma coming back to him. Now that the last of the immediate crises had passed, he needed to figure out whether or not he should contact the princesses about Vanhoover’s situation. The kraken and its minions might be gone, but the undead ponies would be far more difficult to deal with, since there was no elemental bleed that could cause them all to vanish if a particular one were slain. Which meant that the only option was to destroy each and every one of them…and that wasn’t something he could easily do.
It wasn’t that the undead ponies were particularly strong; from what he’d seen during his brief encounter with them they were only marginally more dangerous, at least to him, than those would-be thieves he’d subdued. But with no way of knowing how many of the creatures there were, and no easy way to track them – even Aria’s detection spell was limited to a few hundred feet, and lasted only a little more than an hour – eliminating them all would be an extremely difficult task.
“I bet Princess Twilight and her friends could,” said Cloudbank challengingly. “They restored everypony’s magic after Tirek stole it, so I'm sure they could do this too.” She took a step closer to Lex, and the two of them were practically nose-to-nose as a result. “Maybe instead of running around and trying to do everything by yourself, you should call in the ponies who actually have a track record of saving all of Equestria!”
Sitting down to eat in a quiet corner of the warehouse, Lex mentally winced at the memory of Cloudbank’s outburst. As loathe as he was to admit it, she wasn’t wrong. Although he didn’t know precisely what the princesses were capable of, cleansing a city of a plague of undead ponies sounded like the sort of thing that their magic could do. And while asking for their help would wound his pride severely, that was no excuse for not doing it; if there were other survivors in the city, then he owed it to them to take the course of action that would lead to the quickest resolution. As it was, he knew he should have done this days ago, but had been distracted by curing the ponies that the aboleth had infected. Now he had no more excuses; even talking the decision over with Sonata was pointless now that he had made up his mind.
Sighing as he finished his meal, Lex stood up. At the very least, he wouldn’t contact Celestia or Luna. The very thought of having to admit that he needed the assistance of those arrogant nags was more than he could stomach. Nor had he ever actually met Princess Cadance, and so couldn’t communicate with her via his magic. That left only Twilight Sparkle as the least-unpalatable option.
Although he wanted to curse, to snarl and rant at the cosmic injustice of having to rely on the ponies that he considered to exemplify unreliability, he knew that doing so was beneath him. He could at least keep his composure, even if that didn’t reduce the magnitude of the indignity.
Without further delay, Lex began to gesture and chant.
After thirty seconds went by in silence, Lex knew that something was wrong. Even so, he continued to wait for Twilight’s response. It was only after he’d mentally counted to three hundred that he was sure of it: no reply would be forthcoming.
Although he hadn’t wanted to ask for help, the fact that his message had apparently failed to reach its intended recipient brought him no joy. Quite the opposite, he could feel a cold shudder working its way down his spine, bringing with it a burst of paranoia. Is she deliberately ignoring me? Maybe she heard my message after all and is purposefully choosing not to reply? But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that. He knew Twilight personally, and although he didn’t respect her political ethics, he was absolutely certain that she would never let anypony remain in danger if she knew about it. And besides, even if she was trying to undermine him, it would make more sense for her to show up and promulgate that her powers could do what his could not.
Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Lex put such speculations aside. It would be more useful to reexamine the data that he had and try to figure out the most likely conclusion, rather than guess wildly.
The spell he’d used had been one that he’d acquired on Everglow a few weeks previous. It was quite powerful, able to transmit up to twenty-five words to a particular individual and then return an immediate reply of identical length, regardless of the distance between the speakers. Even planar boundaries were no obstacle to communication. Except… No, that’s not true, Lex realized.
When he had purchased a copy of this particular spell, Lex had studied it very closely. Like all of his thaumaturgical spells, his ability to cast it was based around storing the necessary energy in his thoughts, and that required a detailed understanding of the spell’s nature. Because of that, he knew that its structure was strong, but brittle; being able to encapsulate and flawlessly transmit a specific set of sounds across myriad planes required that its form be set up to withstand the journey across potentially numerous planar divides, as well as whatever local conditions at its destination might interfere with that transmission. But that same resistance meant that a sufficient shock could, in theory, shatter the spell’s composition before it reached its destination.
Such a thing was still unlikely – whoever had designed the spell had clearly tried to compensate for that as much as they could – but it couldn’t be ruled out completely…save for one thing: if the spell wasn’t trying to reach someone on another plane of existence, then none of that would be an issue. So if it had this time… Could Twilight have gone back to Everglow for some reason? It wasn’t entirely implausible; for all that world’s dangers and inconveniences, its advanced magic would have been irresistible to somepony like her.
Or was he overthinking it? In fact, she wouldn’t have needed to return to Everglow for something to have disrupted the spell, he realized. Any major energy output could have done it. If she was visiting the Tree of Harmony, that could potentially have caused his message to fail, or if she had some sort of magical artifact with her…
His eyes widening as that thought occurred to him, Lex turned to look at Severance. Could that have been the reason his spell failed? It was a powerful font of magic, enough so that he was able to replenish his thaumaturgy with it; it wasn’t unbelievable that it could have ruined the spell immediately after he’d cast it. Or maybe the Night Mare herself was…no. Glancing down at the barbed wire around his left hoof, Lex knew that whatever else might have happened, the goddess he’d trafficked with wasn’t behind this. If she had disapproved of his course of action the wire would have drawn blood, and it hadn’t.
Sighing, Lex realized that there was no more ground to be gained with this line of thought. Whether she was on another plane, by a major magical resource, or something else – inside a field of magical silence, perhaps? – Twilight hadn’t received his message. But at least now he knew that, when casting this particular spell, he should distance himself from Severance just in case. He’d need to keep that in mind in the future.
Fortunately, that spell wasn’t his only way of contacting her.
Reaching into his haversack, Lex pulled out an ornate mirror. Leaning it against the wall, he stepped back to regard it critically. Although it had been badly damaged during his fight with Lirtkra, there was no sign of that now thanks to a reparative spell that the Night Mare had granted him. A single casting had been sufficient to restore the twisted metal, for the mirror was entirely made out of polished silver, back to its original resplendent state. Giving a crisp nod, Lex quickly laid a few supplementary defensive spells on himself, and then started his next communication attempt.
Most of the spells Lex knew could be activated in a few seconds; the majority of the work was done when they were prepared, allowing them to be unleashed quickly. In contrast to that, the previous spell he had cast had needed a full ten minutes to invoke, a testament to the intricacies of trying to send a message across distances that were near-infinite. But the spell he was using now was attempting to create a much larger channel through which information could flow, and so required a full hour of gesturing and chanting in order to utilize.
Whereas his previous spell had been to exchange brief verbal messages, this one was intended to create a near-invisible magical sensor in proximity to a target which would allow him to see them and hear what they were saying. Although Lex knew it was meant to be used for reconnaissance, he was betting that once the spell took effect he’d be able to feed a tiny sliver of supplementary magic through, allowing him to whisper to Twilight the same way he did with Sonata, enabling two-way communication.
Of course, it was entirely possible that this wouldn’t work either. Part of the reason for that was because, while this spell’s structure wasn’t as brittle as the other one and so didn’t require that he send Severance away, it wasn’t as strong either. This spell’s efficacy was directly proportional to how well the caster – himself, in this case – knew the target. Although he’d spent enough time around Twilight that he didn’t feel like she was a stranger, neither did he consider her somepony that he was close to. A memento from her would have helped, and something like a lock of her mane would have been extremely useful, but he had neither of those things. Conversely, planar barriers would impede the spell’s effectiveness. That was why he hadn’t used this spell first; it was by far the more likely of the two to fail.
More concerning was the fact that this spell could potentially trigger anti-scrying defenses, if Twilight had the foresight to erect any. Lex always kept such a spell active on himself – something that was much easier now that he could regularly recharge his magic with Severance – one designed not only to alert him to such attempts, but also to retaliate by sending a powerful blast of electricity back through the magical conduit to strike the would-be spy. That Twilight could have something similar was why he’d cast some defensive spells of his own before making the attempt.
After an interminable period – an hour was impossibly long when you needed to carefully recite a lengthy incantation and continually gesture the entire time – he finally finished casting. Feeling the spell take shape and activate, he turned to the silver mirror and waited. For long seconds he held his breath, staring at his own reflection, willing it to change to that of Twilight, wherever she was, even as he tensed in anticipation of a possible counterattack.
Five seconds…ten…fifteen…
Again, seconds turned into minutes, with no results to show for his patience or his spellcasting. The silver mirror continued to show him nothing except his own scowling visage. His second attempt had ended just like the first: in failure. Normally, that realization would have sent him to cursing and snarling, but this time he simply regarded the mirror silently, barely paying attention to his reflection as he tried to think through the ramifications of what this meant.
In point of fact, he knew that this most likely meant nothing. After all, there was no reason he couldn’t simply prepare these spells again tomorrow and then attempt them again. In fact, doing so could potentially offer valuable data; while it was unlikely that both of his spells had failed due to simple bad luck, the probability of that happening two days in a row was astronomically small. If he tried to reach Twilight again tomorrow and still couldn’t contact her, then he’d know that something unusual was going on, either here or with her.
And even if it did turn out that Twilight was impossible to contact, that still left Celestia and Luna as possibilities. The chance of all three of them being beyond his ability to reach was virtually nil. One way or the other he’d be able to let somepony know what was happening here; it was just going to take a little longer than he thought, was all.
Putting the mirror back in his haversack, Lex started back towards the shelter. As he walked, he found that he couldn’t help but contemplate a scenario where he wasn’t able to get in touch with any of the princesses no matter how much he tried. Although he knew that was virtually impossible – any such situation would only be the result of something isolating Vanhoover from long-range communication magic, and he’d seen nothing to indicate that was the case – he was too used to thinking up contingencies to put the thought out of his head. If they had to retake Vanhoover from the undead by themselves…
It would not be easy, he knew, nor would it be quick. They would have to go block by block, building by building, checking every single nook and cranny. Worse, they’d need to find some way to secure a checked building, otherwise the undead ponies could simply flee and return later. But that would require a much larger group than he currently had, and they’d need ways to defend themselves. Lex still remembered how Aisle had stiffened up after being hit by one of those things, as well as how Drafty had fallen deathly ill when one of them had bitten her. Although he didn’t find those monsters very dangerous, other ponies would.
And that was just buildings. Checking the sewers, where he suspected most of them were hiding – what better way to cross large portions of the city without ever having to risk the daylight? – would be almost impossible. Maybe if I had Vanhoover’s entire population at my command, and was able to train, equip, and coordinate their efforts, it might be feasible. But even then, it would still be extremely difficult. Far better to lure the undead creatures out en masse, but that would require some sort of irresistible bait…
Shaking his head, Lex tried to turn his thoughts elsewhere. For now, the best thing to do was sit tight until he could try and contact Twilight agai-
“LEX!”
Looking up as he heard his name called, Lex saw Cozy dashing towards him, a frantic look on her face. Stopping right in front of him, she pointed a hoof back the way she came. “She knows where he is!”
Frowning in confusion, Lex tried to parse what he’d been told, but there was too little information to work with. “Who knows where who is?”
Although she’d caught her breath, Cozy’s eyes were wide, and she could barely seem to hold still, looking like she wanted to go charging back to the shelter and could barely bring herself to wait for him. “My husband! Pillowcase! One of the ponies you brought back, that unicorn mare, Fencer, knows where he is!”
Lex trotted briskly back to the shelter, refusing to break into a run despite Cozy’s repeated urgings that he hurry up.
As the building came into view, he started to walk in – Cozy having already darted ahead to go retrieve Fencer – and stopped dead, momentarily forgetting about everything else. It wasn’t surprising that the party everypony else had thrown was still going on. Nor was it unexpected that Sonata would contribute to the festivities by singing; she had been quite open about that. Even the fact that she was dancing wasn’t too surprising, since he’d seen her do so before when she got swept up in performing for an audience. But this was…!
“So stay with me tonight, keep me close and hold me tight,” she sang, her voice slightly huskier than normal as she carried the melody perfectly. With her eyes closed and her expression rapturous, the sight of her was captivating, and virtually all eyes were glued to her. “If you miss me baby, kiss me baby, make me feel alright.” Without missing a beat, she slowly rose onto her hind legs, her hips swaying sensually as she languidly drew her hooves up over her body before raising them above her head, tilting her neck back just enough to make it look like she was offering herself. “So stay with me tonight, keep me close and hold me tight.” Slowly her eyes opened, looking downward as she tilted her head forward and crossed her forelegs over her chest, a shy smile completing her transition from amorous to demure. “I need your love, sent from above, I’m yours without a fight.”
Lex could only stare, open-mouthed. Desire for her, jealousy that everyone else got to see her like this, and possessive pride that she was his girlfriend all warred for control of him. He was still struggling to put his thoughts in order when he felt a hoof cuff him across the shoulder. Dazedly turning his head, he saw Cozy and Fencer looking at him, the former with an impatient scowl while the latter wore a neutral expression. “If you’re finished drooling, maybe we could get started looking for my missing husband?” snapped Cozy.
Feeling his face heat up, Lex pointed towards the door to the larger warehouse. “Go outside. I’ll be there in a moment.” Cozy looked ready to argue, but Lex cut her off before she could. “Do it!” She paused for a moment to give him a dark look before she obeyed. Fencer likewise lingered, and although her face didn’t change Lex had the distinct impression that she was evaluating him, though for what purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. Then she followed Cozy.
For his part, Lex closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. Once he was sure that he could focus, he opened them again and moved towards the crowd that had surrounded whatever makeshift stage that Sonata was on. Catching sight of a familiar pony, he made his way over to them. “C. Shells,” he started without preamble. “When Sonata finishes this song, tell her I want to see her out in the warehouse.”
She shot him back a knowing grin, nodding. “I don’t blame you. Seeing her like that makes me want to spend some alone time with her, and I prefer stallions!”
“Huh?” Lex frowned, not understanding what she meant. Deciding that it didn’t matter, he turned away and headed outside, though not before casting one last look back at where Sonata was dancing. Just the sight made his heartbeat quicken, and he suddenly decided that they’d need to spend tonight apart from everypony else, preferably by using a spell to give them some privacy so they…they…
Suddenly realizing what C. Shells thought his intentions had been, Lex spun around, wanting to set the record straight. But she was already gone, lost within the shifting crowd of ponies that were beguiled by Sonata’s charm. Sighing at the prospect of having been embarrassed twice in as many minutes, Lex folded his ears back as he slunk through the door.
“Finally!” Cozy practically leapt at him as he exited the shelter. “Now can we please get going?!”
“Not yet,” answered Lex with a glare. Unlike a few days ago, however, the sight didn’t cow her into submission. Instead, she opened her mouth to argue, but again Lex beat her to the punch, turning to look at Fencer. “First, you tell me what you know.”
Fencer seemed to have expected that, because she answered immediately. “Cozy here was asking us if we’d seen a crystal stallion in the last few days. I told her that we had, near the other end of the pier.” She shrugged, as though the matter didn’t concern her. “I don’t know if that’s him or not, but he’s the only one we’ve seen before you brought us here, so it probably is.”
Lex paused as he digested that, taking a moment to look Fencer over as he did so. Slightly taller than himself, she was thin to the point of being lanky. Her coat was a brilliant vermillion, which contrasted sharply with grayish cerulean of her mane and tail. Clad in the dirty remnants of what might have once been a dress, her cutie mark was hidden from view…much like the details of the story she’d just told them. “Where exactly did you see him? How many days ago was it?”
“She can tell us on the way there!” interjected Cozy. “Come on!”
“No. Not yet.” Lex’s response was adamant, and caused Cozy to throw her hooves in the air in frustration.
“What is wrong with you?! You go on about wanting to help ponies, but now-”
“Enough!” snarled Lex, his eyes flashing green and purple as he looked at Cozy, causing her to blanch. Displays of dark magic were apparently still enough to frighten her. “One more word out of you and I’ll silence you again!” He waited a moment to see if she was going to be foolish enough to push him further, but she had apparently realized that she was going too far, since she looked away unhappily. Turning back to Fencer, Lex restated his earlier questions. “Exactly where and when did you see him, specifically?”
“It was three days ago, maybe four. He was near one of the warehouses at the other end of the pier when we saw him.” That he was demanding more details didn’t seem to concern Fencer, supplying answers smoothly. “We tried to talk to him, but he ran away when we did.”
“He ran away from you? How come?” Cozy seemed to have forgotten Lex’s warning, but he didn’t castigate her. He was still keenly aware that Fencer’s group had initially presented themselves as being survivors in need of help, only to reveal themselves as raiders as soon as they thought they had the advantage. He wasn’t about to blindly trust in whatever she said, and if Cozy started looking for inconsistencies in her story too then so much the better.
“I don’t know,” answered Fencer with another shrug. “Maybe he had some bad experiences with some other ponies? We tried to look for him, but it was no good.”
“Did he look hurt?” The worry was audible in Cozy’s voice.
Fencer’s only answer was another shrug. “We just saw him for a moment before he ran off. His clothes looked pretty ragged, I guess; some rips in his cloak and his pants looked pretty dirty, but that’s how it is for everypony that’s still here.” She moved a hoof to indicate her rumpled dress.
“Even if you only saw him for an instant, you should at least have seen the color of his coat,” said Lex, narrowing his eyes slightly.
“Green.” Fencer didn’t look the least bit rattled as she replied.
“And his mane and tail?” he pressed.
“Also green, but darker.”
“And his cutie mark?”
“Two heart-shaped pillows.”
“Look, those are all the right answers,” whined Cozy, her voice taking on a pleading tone as she looked at Lex. “I’m begging you, can we go look for him now?”
“We’ll go as soon as she tells us the truth.” Lex didn’t take his eyes off of Fencer as he answered Cozy, his voice suddenly much colder. His horn glowed as he pulled Severance from his back, setting it aloft. “If she runs or tries to use magic, subdue her. Non-lethally,” he instructed it. The weapon immediately floated around behind Fencer, who had tensed at the sudden shift in the conversation. For his part, Lex moved to Cozy’s side and forced her to step away from the other mare.
“What are you talking about?!” Cozy sounded near-hysterical, and only reluctantly let Lex move her back. “She got everything right!”
“I’m telling the truth,” insisted Fencer, her voice still level even as she tried to move away from Lex and Severance both. The scythe swung around to cut her off, preventing her from gaining any distance.
“That you got everything right is how I know you’re not telling the truth,” insisted Lex. “After all, if you only saw him for a few moments before he ran away, and you said he was wearing pants and a cloak, then how did you see what his cutie mark was?”
Fencer opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again, her jaw tightening. Off to the side, Cozy looked shocked, her jaw hanging slack as she realized what Lex had been getting at. “But…but she knew all those things…she knew the color of his coat and his mane and tail…even his cutie mark! She MUST have seen him!” Her eyes shimmered as she took a step closer to Fencer. “You know where he is, right?! Please, PLEASE tell me!”
Fencer was quiet for a long moment. Her eyes moved from Cozy, to Severance, and finally to Lex. Finally, she spoke up. “If I do, what’s in it for me?”
Cozy looked like she’d been slapped, but Lex was less surprised. He still remembered the expression on her face when she thought she had him hostage. This was not a pony that would be moved by the thought of someone else being in trouble. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen.” There was a dangerous tone in his voice as he spoke. “You’re going to tell us everything you know about Pillowcase, and then you’re going to tell us what you hoped to accomplish by lying about him. Then, once I’m satisfied that you’ve surrendered all the relevant information that you have, I’ll decide what to do with you. The only choice you have in the matter is whether you turn over your information willingly, or if we extract it from you.”
His speech was more than enough to intimidate Cozy, who backed away from him with a look of controlled fear, but Fencer was apparently made of sterner stuff. Her response was to snort and roll her eyes. “Oh please. Before, when we were threatening to kill you and your friends, the worst thing you did was make a tiny tornado to knock us around. After that, you let us in here with just a talking-to.” The corners of her lips turned up in a mocking smirk. “So somehow I doubt you have what it takes to torture me for information.”
“Nopony said anything about torture,” replied Lex with a smirk of his own. “I’ve got somepony who’ll make you want to tell us everything you know.”
As if on cue, the door to the shelter opened and Sonata came trotting out. “Hey! C. Shells said you wanted to talk to me?” Apparently not noticing the atmosphere, she went right up to Lex and nuzzled him. “Does this have anything to do with seeing my show just now?” she asked, grinning.
“No…though I do want to talk to you about that later,” he admitted, causing her smile to widen. “But right now, there’s something else I need you to do.” He pointed a hoof at Fencer. “This mare has information about Cozy’s missing husband, and is refusing to share it.”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “For realsies? How come?”
“That’s what I want you to find out,” replied Lex. “Use your magic and make her talk.”
It was all Fencer could do not to snort at Lex’s pronouncement. His dancing girl was going to make her talk? And with magic? The little airhead wasn’t even a unicorn! What was she going to do, seduce her? The prospect was ridiculous enough that it was almost funny.
But despite her disdain, Fencer could feel herself tense. Lex was the pony that had defeated her entire group by himself, in a manner that made it seem like he was barely even trying. More than that, what she’d seen of him suggested that he was utterly without humor. He wouldn’t have told his mare – and Fencer was sure they were together from the way they’d nuzzled each other – to get information out of her unless he thought she could do it, as unlikely as that seemed. But how?
Despite her inner tension, Fencer kept her face impassive. She’d learned the hard way that no matter how bad the situation got, panicking would only make it worse, and she would never make that mistake again; self-control had saved her before, and it would save her now. Even so, she couldn’t help but curse the rest of her group in her mind. If only they’d worked with me instead of giving up so easily! But apparently a round of medical care, fresh food and drink, and a party had been all that was necessary to make everypony in her group completely give up on the idea of escaping, let alone escaping with something to show for it. Even Turbo, that turncoat. He was talking about escaping before we ever set hoof inside that place, and now he doesn’t want to leave!
If they had all just followed her lead, even just a few of them… But no, they were all content to pretend like they could just go back to their old lives again. Fencer knew better; after what they’d done – what they’d had to do – they could never go back. Even if Vanhoover was completely restored, they had changed, and she had no intention of pretending otherwise. After what she’d been through, being some weak little nopony was unthinkable. Instead, she would keep getting stronger, strong enough so that nothing could ever hurt her or make her afraid again.
And she knew exactly how to do it. Now if she could just find a way to pull it off…
“Seriously?” Sonata’s blinked at Lex’s request. She glanced over at Fencer – still standing there impassively – before turning back to look at him. “What happened to all that stuff about my magic being immoral and everything?”
Lex shook his head. “The circumstances are different. By deliberately withholding information as to the whereabouts and well-being of somepony that’s missing in a dangerous location, and demanding something in exchange for that information, she’s effectively taken Pillowcase hostage. That’s a criminal action, and as the lawful authority over this city, it’s my job to levy the requisite penalties against her for that. As such, I can exercise my administration’s monopoly on what constitutes a legitimate use of force to punish her, even if that violates some of her inherent rights, so long as such an exercise holds to the principles of applying only the minimu-”
“Right, different circumstances. Got it.” Sonata rolled her eyes as she turned away from Lex, knowing that he’d have continued droning on for quite some time if she hadn’t cut him off.
“I’m going to go talk to the other ponies from her group,” announced Cozy. “If they were with her when she saw Pillow, they might be able to tell us where to look.” Lex nodded at her, and she took off back into the shelter.
“She’s wasting her time.” Fencer’s voice was light, despite Severance hovering close by her. “They won’t tell her anything.”
Lex frowned, but Sonata looked confused. “How come? Cozy’s nice, and she’s really worried about her husband, so why not tell her where he is?”
Fencer gave her a thin smile, but her eyes were on Lex. “Because you’ve given them what they wanted most.”
Sonata furrowed her brow. “Huh? What’s that? And wouldn’t that make them more likely to want to help?”
Fencer pointed at the shelter. The gesture was enough to make Severance swing closer, its blade curving in a threatening arc, but she ignored it. “Right now, everypony I was with is in there, acting like the last few weeks have been a bad dream that Princess Luna overlooked. They don’t want to remember what they saw,” she lowered her hoof, and gave Sonata a pointed look, “and they don’t want to remember what they did.”
“What they did?” echoed Sonata, tilting her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Lex darkly, “that this mare and her companions didn’t just catch a glimpse of Pillowcase somewhere. They did something to him.”
“We did what we had to do.” There was a sharper edge in Fencer’s voice. “Out there, the first rule is to survive. Everything else, including harmony, is a distant second.” She paused then, closing her eyes and letting out a slow breath, before opening them and continuing once her equanimity had been restored. “None of them will want to admit to that, least of all to a group that might see fit to throw them out if they knew about it.”
“Unlike you,” noted Lex coldly.
“Unlike me,” nodded Fencer, meeting his gaze directly. “I make no apologies for refusing to be a victim, nor will I ever be one again, no matter what it takes.”
Lex didn’t reply, and he and Fencer continued to stare at each other in silence, neither being willing to look away first. Feeling the tension in the air, Sonata glanced back and forth between the two of them. “Okay, first of all, wow. Secondly,” she looked at Fencer, “why does lending Cozy a helping hoof mean that you’re a victim or whatever all of a sudden. Isn’t it just a nice thing to do?”
This time Fencer did snort. “Your stallion ordered me to tell him what I knew, without making any offers or guarantees about what I’d receive in return, as though he had authority over me.”
“I have authority over everypony in Vanhoover, including you, whether you recognize it or not.” Although he knew that he was in the right, and that Fencer had no choice but to acknowledge what he was saying, Lex couldn’t resist the urge to rub her face in it. “I believe I conclusively demonstrated that before, when I easily crushed your little band of thieves.” Her only response was to narrow her eyes a fraction of an inch, but he took that as a sign that his barb had hit home.
It was at that point that Sonata hit her limit. “Okay, like, that’s enough!” She turned to Lex, exasperation written all over her features. “You wanted me to get her talking, right? So why don’t you skedaddle and let me do my job?” She saw the objection written all over his face, and kept going before he could give voice to it. “I’m not even kidding. I can’t do my stuff when you two,” she nodded towards Severance, still floating close to Fencer, “are here keeping things all doom and gloom, so go back inside and leave this to me.” Her expression softened, knowing that he was worried about leaving her alone with the other mare. “Trust me, I’ll be fine.”
Lex paused for a long moment before nodding. “Alright. But with one precaution.” Turning to look at Severance, he pointed at Fencer. “Remove her clothes.”
Both mares’ eyes widened, but neither had a chance to say anything before Severance swung its blade around in a smooth motion. Instantly, the tattered remains of Fencer’s dress fell to the ground…only to be enshrouded in a roiling purple aura as Lex snatched them away. As he did so, his eyes went to her flank, seeing the image there. “A white picket fence,” he murmured, his lips curling up in a mocking smile. “Fencer. How droll.”
For her part, Fencer was struggling to maintain her calm façade. “How dare-”
“What do you think you’re DOING?!” The angry roar stopped both Lex and Fencer in their tracks, turning their eyes to Sonata, who was currently glaring furiously at her boyfriend. “I can’t BELIEVE you! You can’t just tear a girl’s clothes off like that! That’s, like, the worst thing you can do! Worser than worst!” She stomped a hoof. “You give her back her dress right now!”
For an instant Lex looked surprised, but recovered his poise a moment later. “No. Not until I’ve checked it for additional knives.” The memory of Fencer holding a blade to his throat was still fresh on his mind, and he had no intention of giving her the chance to pull something similar with Sonata, especially after her little speech just now. Without giving his girlfriend a chance to raise another objection, he turned and walked away, the ruins of Fencer’s dress held tightly in his telekinetic grip. Severance followed after him a moment later, leaving the two mares alone.
“Honestly! That was totes awful of him!” huffed Sonata, before turning back to Fencer. “I’m, like, super sorry about that. I swear, I love him more than anything, but sometimes he just drives me crazy.”
“I can imagine,” muttered Fencer, glancing back at her cutie mark uncomfortably. She had changed her name to “Fencer” when she’d decided that she would survive no matter what, since that was a name that sounded powerful while still being a sly reference to the pony she had been. But she couldn’t change her cutie mark, which clearly showed that her special talent was building and repairing fences, rather than fighting with bladed weapons. Covering it up had been the next best thing, and nopony had seen it since she’d reinvented herself… until now. She was so distraught that she only half-heard Sonata sing a quick snatch of something. “What was that?”
Sonata smiled, feeling her charm spell fall into place. “Oh, nothing. Just a little something I do sometimes.” She might be a little miffed at Lex for being totes insensitive, but she hadn’t forgotten that this mare still had information about Cozy’s husband that they needed to get. That and she’d held a knife to Lex before; the fact that he hadn’t been in any real danger was the only reason Sonata wasn’t holding a grudge, but she doubted that she and Fencer would ever be besties…even if her spell was making the taller mare believe otherwise. “So, let’s you and me have some girl-talk.”
“I wasn’t kidding you know,” grinned Piggy as he shoveled another hooffull of nuts into his mouth. “Once my mom gets back and Vanhoover is repaired, I can set you up in whatever job you want. In fact, I’ve actually been looking for a new,” he made a wheezing sound that vaguely resembled a chuckle, spraying bits of food from his mouth, “personal secretary.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Cloudbank struggled to keep a polite smile on her face. The little slime ball had been following her around for the last five minutes, trying to talk himself up to her. She’d dropped every hint she could that she wasn’t interested, none of which he was picking up on. Only the fact that she didn’t want to make a scene had kept her from tearing the little creep a new one, but now she was at her wit’s end.
“Say, Piggy,” she drawled, giving him a sultry grin as an idea came to her. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a little while now, and I think you’re just the stallion for me to…experiment with.”
“E-experiment?” His eyes widened, clearly intrigued.
She nodded coyly. “I mean, I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m a little nervous, but you’ll help me out, right?”
Piggy nodded so fast his head almost blurred. “Absolutely! Whatever you need me to do, I’m your stallion!”
Giving a giggle, Cloudbank batted her lashes at him. “Then, go ahead and close your eyes…”
“Close my…right here, in front of everypony?” He looked around the rest of the shelter, where the party was still going strong.
“Sure, why not? Unless you’re not the stallion I thought you were…” She gave him an exaggerated frown, as though disappointed.
“No no! I’m definitely the stallion you want!” Eager not to let this chance slip away, Piggy summoned up his courage and closed his eyes, breathing heavily in anticipation.
“Now, stay just like that, okay? Whatever you do, don’t open your eyes.”
“R-right!” His heart felt like it was going to pound out of his chest, and he was already starting to sweat. Swallowing nervously, he tried keep himself from trembling. What a wild girl!
Backing up until she was more than twenty feet from Piggy. Cloudbank allowed herself a dark smile as she chanted a prayer to the Night Mare, making the necessary gestures to invoke the fear spell she had prayed for that morning as part of her efforts to learn more about the magic the goddess had given her. An instant later, Piggy’s eyes popped open as he let out a surprisingly shrill screech of terror. His little legs pumping, he ran around the room randomly for a moment before spotting the door and rushing out it, his cries receding into the distance. As everypony stopped and stared blankly at where he’d disappeared, Cloudbank couldn’t resist making a comment.
“I guess he’s going wee wee wee all the way home.”
Lex cursed softly as he tossed aside what was left of the ragged dress that Fencer had been wearing.
As he’d suspected, the garment had contained additional knives. Sufficient shaking had caused them to come tumbling out of the dirty cloth, and the clatter they’d made as they hit the ground had been a testimony to what might have happened if he hadn’t stripped her. Despite having no idea why his girlfriend had expressed such a misplaced bout of righteous indignation over that, he was glad that he had ignored it. While he knew that Sonata was no weakling, just the thought of what could have happened if Fencer surprised her…
Shaking his head, Lex turned to Severance and gripped the weapon telekinetically. He half-expected to hear it express vindication, as it had warned him about giving the newcomers so much freedom so easily, but the weapon expressed no such sentiment. Instead, it asked what he intended to do with Fencer, causing Lex to ruminate for a long moment.
When he didn’t answer immediately, Severance spoke up again, causing Lex to frown. “I am punishing her. Right now Sonata is abrogating her mental autonomy.” Even as he said that, a shudder went down his spine. For someone who utilized intellectual acuity as his only means of interacting with the world, the idea of someone reaching in and altering his thoughts represented a violation of ineffable proportions. But as much as he loathed the very idea of mind-manipulation, he knew that it had its uses, as Fencer had just demonstrated. If she found Sonata’s magic traumatizing she’d have no right to complain, since it had been justly utilized and caused minimal harm to her while still forcing her compliance in an expedient manner. “No further punishment is necessary,” he decided. Severance made its disagreement known, but Lex ignored it as he swung the weapon, reducing Fencer’s knives to so much scrap metal.
He had just finished when he heard a high-pitched shriek coming from the shelter. Alarmed, he started towards the door when he saw that fat little earth pony from before, Piggy Bank, come rushing out. Eyes wide with fear, he barreled down the warehouse before managing to trip over his own hooves and go tumbling. Coming to rest near an empty shelf, he clumsily scrambled onto it and huddled there, trembling.
Looking back at the shelter, Lex could faintly hear laughter and light conversation coming from it, which alleviated his concern that an enemy had somehow gotten in. Instead, he turned and headed to where Piggy was trying to hide, his hooves over his eyes and shaking like a leaf. “What happened?”
His voice made Piggy yelp and jump up, only to hit the shelf above him, causing a loud clang to ring out as his head collided with the metal. Collapsing instantly, Piggy put his hooves to his head and whimpered with pain, cracking one eye open to see Lex gazing at him impassively. “Y-you…” he gulped, his eyes flickering to where the scythe was floating beside him.
Lex tried again. “What happened? Why are you out here?”
“I didn’t do anything!” grimaced Piggy, still holding his head. “I was just talking to Cloudbank, and telling her what I could do for her, and next thing I know she’s telling me to close my eyes and I did and then suddenly I was terrified and ran out here and I don’t even know why!” His voice was thick with self-pity, and tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. He was sure he had to be the saddest, most pitiful little pony in all of Equestria at that moment; his mom had always been able to see that about him when something bad happened, so surely Lex would too?
But the only reaction he got was a disgusted sigh. “Go back inside. Find Cloudbank and tell her that I want to see her immediately.”
“But…!”
“Do it. Now.” A single glare was all it took to make Piggy squeak in renewed fear, and he wriggled out from the shelf and quickly trundled back towards the shelter. Lex watched him go with narrowed eyes. His story made it sound as though Cloudbank had cast a spell on him, which highlighted that he needed to stop putting off talking to her about her new role as the Night Mare’s priestess. She needed to be made to understand what exactly that status entailed. They might be interrupted by Sonata’s reporting what she’d found out from Fencer, but that was no excuse to at least get started.
Now he just needed to figure out exactly what he was going to say to her…
Despite herself, Fencer couldn’t help but feel a flicker of amusement at Sonata’s suggestion. “Girl-talk?”
The other mare nodded, all smiles. “Yeah, mare-to-mare.”
Snorting, Fencer sat down, giving Sonata a condescending look. “Is this the part where you work your ‘magic’ on me?”
Unable to keep from giggling, Sonata nodded. “Oh, totes!” For a moment she couldn’t help but revel in the fact that she had completely pulled one over on someone else. All of a sudden she felt super smart! I bet this is how Lex feels when he’s getting the drop on someone. The thought sent a pleasant warmth through her chest. Normally she only felt like she understood what it was like to be him when she was feeling down or upset; getting a glimpse into his mindset when he was happy was a lot better.
Another snort from Fencer reminded her that she had a job to do, and she settled down. “Okay, so. We need you to, like, tell us where Cozy’s husband is.” She held up a hoof then to forestall any objections. “And I promise, even if you did something bad to him, I won’t hold it against you.”
“Oh really, now?” drawled Fencer.
Sonata nodded, and gave her a smile that was slightly sadder than her normal carefree grin. “For realsies. I know what it’s like to do stuff that you regret later on.”
“No.” The tension had returned to Fencer’s voice. “I don’t regret what I did, any of it, because it had to be done.” Again, she stopped abruptly, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath to center herself. Opening her eyes, she regarded Sonata again. She was sure of it now; this little girl was Lex’s plaything, and her “magic” was nothing more than her magnetic personality. It was almost enough to make her feel sorry for her, since she was in for a rude awakening when that arrogant stallion dumped her for somepony else. “Look, I don’t expect you to understand this very well, but this,” she waved a hoof as though to encompass everything around them, “is a place where there’s no harmony anymore. Questions of good or bad don’t mean anything here, it’s just about whether or not you can survive from one day to the next. I’m not concerned about whether or not everypony back there is upset with me about what happened with that crystal stallion. I’m concerned with what I get in exchange for telling you what I know.”
“But that’s awful,” protested Sonata. “You won’t make any friends like that!”
Fencer shrugged. “So?”
“Aw, come on! I might not be all super-smart like Lex is, but even I know that surviving…or, come to think of it, anything else, is easier when you have some friends!”
Fencer frowned. As much as she hated to admit it, Sonata had stumbled onto a good point. Vanhoover had become a place where trying to survive on your own was tantamount to suicide, and she had just lost her entire group to this one.
As if sensing the other mare’s consternation, Sonata kept going. “So this way, if you helped Cozy out and told us where Pillowcase is, you could be friends with everypony in our group! Then-, ooh! Brainstorm! That’s what you’d get in exchange!” She grinned widely, super pleased with herself.
“I don’t want to be part of this group!”
Sonata deflated instantly. So much for having a brainstorm. “Why not?” A sour look was the only answer she received, and Sonata huffed. For her to be this stubborn and unpleasant even after putting her under a charm spell, Fencer’s personality was seriously awful. It was almost like talking to a female Lex. “Seriously, why not? This place is safe, we have food and medicine, and everyb-, everypony here is, like, totes awesome. Why would you not want to be part of this?”
“Your boyfriend thinks that he can order me around,” Fencer growled, her composure cracking. She didn’t know why, but for some reason she found herself wanting this mare to understand her, and that was getting her worked up. “That he can tell me what to do. You want to talk about making friends? He’s the one not interested in making friends!” Sonata flinched at that, ears folding back as she remembered the scolding she’d given Lex about this barely two hours ago. Now it was Fencer’s turn to push forward. “You see what I mean? He’s only interested in telling others why he’s better than them, that they’re weak, and NOPONY has the right to call me that after what I’ve lived through!”
“You’re wrong!” Sonata stomped a hoof. “Lex is interested in making friends! He’s just, like, super bad at it! And he’s been through a lot of stuff too!” She was about to go into detail about how much Lex had done, but she cut herself off. This wasn’t working. She was supposed to be getting information about Cozy’s husband from this unpleasant mare, not arguing with her. It was enough to make her wish that she had magic that could force her to just tell her what she wanted to know, but she didn’t. The closest she could come was to suggest ideas or manipulate emotions, or even just hold her in thrall like she and her sisters did to the students at Canterlot High, and that wasn’t good enough.
Instead, she tried to think back to when she herself had been convinced to give friendship a chance. What would Pinkie say, if she were here? The pink pony had been the very first pony to give her a chance, and had inspired her to want more out of life than just magically-enforced adoration. C’mon, think! This mare’s like talking to a female Lex, right? So what would I say to convince Lex, besides all the flirting? “Just because he’s strong, doesn’t mean he thinks you’re weak.”
“Hm?” Fencer raised an eyebrow, dubious.
“He barks orders, he’s terrible at giving compliments, and he knows that he’s a lot stronger than anyone else, but that doesn’t mean he thinks you’re weak.”
“If you think you’re stronger than someone, then by definition it means that you think they’re weak,” scoffed Fencer.
“No, it doesn’t!” insisted Sonata. “When a whole army of monsters came out of the ocean a few days ago, Lex was too hurt to fight them by himself. So instead, he came up with a plan and we all fought them together! Each and every one of us did our part, and even when it looked hopeless, Lex relied on everyone else! He had faith that they’d come through and save the day, and you know why?” Sonata looked Fencer dead in the eye, overflowing with conviction. “Because they’re his friends.”
“Somehow I’m having a hard time picturing that,” replied Fencer flatly.
Sonata waved a hoof toward the shelter. “Ask anyone in there if you don’t believe me.” She smiled, her earlier anger gone. “He’s strong, and he’s running the show here, but that doesn’t mean that you’re weak. He wouldn’t rely on weak ponies to kill a monster army. And they relied on him, too, and together we were all even stronger than any of us, even Lex, would have been alone.” She grinned widely as she finished, proud of her speech. Now for the finishing touch. “That can be the case for you, too.”
Her satisfaction grew as Fencer looked away, quiet for a long moment before speaking. “Alright.”
“I’ll tell you what happened with that crystal stallion.”
“Woo-hoo!” Sonata leapt into the air and raised a hoof in triumph. “I mean, thanks!”
“Sure.” Fencer’s reply was curt, but inwardly she was sighing. If he really made those ponies in there strong enough to be able to fight off a monster army, I want to know more about that, she decided. That was far more than her own group had ever been able to accomplish on their own; the best they’d ever achieved was to be able to mount a fighting retreat whenever the undead ponies attacked. And besides, if that didn’t work, then she could always go back to her original plan, the one that she’d come up with after that blonde reporter had started talking about Lex’s adventures while the doctors were treating them.
After all, if he can graft King Sombra’s horn onto his head and gain all that power, then so can I.
Lex still hadn’t thought of what to say when Cloudbank came trotting out of the shelter.
“Hey.” Her cordial greeting was accompanied by a small smile, which momentarily darkened as her eyes slid over to Severance. Ignoring the weapon, she turned her gaze back towards Lex. “You wanted to talk to me?” she asked as she approached him.
“Yes.”
An awkward moment ensued as Cloudbank waited for Lex to continue, but instead he just stood there, an uncomfortable look on his face. It was enough to make her shift her weight, suddenly self-conscious. What was he doing? If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought that he was trying to work up the courage to ask her out on a…oh. “I, uh, I think I know what this is about.”
“You do?” He couldn’t entirely keep the relief off of his face. “Good, that will make this easier.”
She nodded, fighting back the urge to bite her lip. Drafty had told her how she’d asked him and Sonata to go on a double-date with them after things had calmed down, and Cloudbank hadn’t been nearly as thrilled as her new girlfriend was. She’d wanted their first official date to be just between the two of them. But she hadn’t been able to bring herself to protest, not when she’d seen how excited Drafty was at the prospect of the four of them going out together. So she’d pushed down her reservations and smiled and said that she was excited too, which was technically true. After all, she was still going out on a date with Drafty…just not in quite the way she’d wanted. “Yeah…listen, I’m going to be completely honest with you. I don’t know that I’m entirely comfortable with this. I mean, I agreed to it and all, but it just happened really fast, you know?”
She hadn’t been sure what his reaction would be, but thankfully he didn’t seem to be upset. Instead, he gave a rather solemn nod. “I know. But you did agree to it, which is why I was concerned that you were taking this too lightly.”
Cloudbank blinked, then frowned. He must have seen her putting on a front for Drafty’s sake. “I’m not taking it lightly!” she protested. “And I don’t need you to tell me how important this is!” She could feel herself starting to get annoyed. There was no way she’d ever forget what Lex had done for them, and she was extremely grateful, but that didn’t mean that he had any right to stick his muzzle into her relationship with her girlfriend!
“I needed to make sure you knew that,” Lex replied flatly. “This is too serious to let sit undeveloped for long. Right now I have other things that I need to focus on, but as soon as Vanhoover’s situation is stabilized further this will be one of my top priorities. In the meantime, I want you to start coming up with ideas in anticipation of that.”
Cloudbank felt her indignation ebb as her surprise grew. This was one of his top priorities? Was he that into the thought of the four of them going out together, or was he really just that intense about everything? “I…okay.” She let out a breath as she shook off her doubts. She couldn’t let somepony else treat a date with Drafty more seriously than she did! “I’ll start working on some stuff now and get back to you. Sound good?”
“That should be fine.” His tone was dismissive, and sure enough he turned away from her and started walking without another word, causing her to snort at his attitude. Now that she thought about it, it made perfect sense that someone like him would have to try so hard to make a date go well, given his personality. She could only imagine what his outings with Sonata were like!
As he headed back towards where Sonata and Fencer were, Lex couldn’t help but feel exceptionally pleased with himself. That had gone better than he’d hoped! He had been concerned that Cloudbank didn’t fully appreciate what it meant to have a working relationship with the Night Mare. Thankfully, she seemed to have some degree of cognizance of the magnitude of what she was involved in. Hopefully she’d come up with some workable ideas for institutionalizing religious devotion. That would take much of the burden off of him with regards to finding further acolytes. In the meantime, however, he had other tasks that needed to be handled.
Rounding a corner, he almost collided with Fencer as she headed in the opposite direction, causing him to frown. “Where are you going?”
“To find something to replace my dress that you ruined,” she replied coolly as she started to move past him.
He held out a hoof to block her way. “Did you tell Sonata what happened with Pillowcase?”
“Ask her yourself,” she shot back as she went around him, not bothering to look at him as she did.
He watched her go, and for a moment considered forcing her to give him a straight answer, but decided to check with Sonata first. Heading back to where she was, he found her looking down with a miserable look on her face, her ears folded. “Sonata?”
“Huh? Oh, hey…” She grimaced as she saw him, and her lack of vigor was enough to give him pause. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her this down; even when they fought she was more enthusiastic in her demeanor than she was right now.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he demanded. She bit her lip for a moment, hesitating. “Is it Fencer?” he pressed. “Were you unable to make her tell you about Pillowcase?”
“No, no, I got her talking, but...” She licked her lips as she trailed off, then plunged ahead. “Lex, it’s, like, not good news.”
His eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”
Sonata fidgeted, then complied. “She said that she and some of the other ponies in her group were searching along the waterfront a few days ago, and they spotted a crystal stallion in some worn clothes.”
He nodded, and when she didn’t immediately continue he spoke up. “We knew that already. Go on.”
“He didn’t run away when he saw them, though. Instead, he asked them if they were from the shelter…from here.” A pained look crossed her face. “He was looking for us, Lex.”
A confused look crossed his face. “He was trying to get here? How would he have known about-” He stopped speaking as a sudden memory came to him, of when he’d brought Cozy and her group back.
Finally opening her eyes, she managed a wan smile. “Besides, I left him a note in our room, telling him that there’s a shelter at the docks, and that if he heads west for three hours at a walking pace, he’ll find it. That’s where it is, right?” She looked at Lex, who nodded in reply before turning back to the doorway.
“Cozy’s note,” he murmured softly.
“Huh?” Now it was Sonata’s turn to look confused.
“When I brought Cozy and the others here, her husband was already missing. She didn’t want to leave without him for fear that he’d return only to find them gone, so she left him a note saying where I was taking them.”
“But Fencer said that they saw him down at the other end of the wharf, coming out of a different warehouse. Why didn’t he come straight here if she told him where to go?”
Lex shook his head, already having figured out the answer. “Because all she knew was that the shelter I was talking about was in a warehouse on the waterfront. She didn’t know which warehouse. He must have been checking them all one by one and simply hadn’t reached this one yet.”
“Oh…” Sonata seemed reluctant to keep going, but marshalled herself after taking a deep breath. “Well, Fencer told him that they were, even though that was a lie, and she said he nearly collapsed with relief. She thought it was for himself, because he looked pretty awful-”
“How, exactly?” interrupted Lex sharply.
“Exhausted, stumbling, like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a while. She didn’t go into details.” Sonata shifted uncomfortably, deciding to omit the part about how Fencer had characterized him as looking like easy prey. “But the thing was, he wasn’t worried about himself, Lex. When they told him that they would take him to the shelter, he said ‘Thank Celestia. A friend of mine is sick, but I found medicine.’” She paused. “That was Drafty, right? Aisle told me about it a few days ago.”
Lex nodded, grinding his teeth. That Fencer and her group were preying on others wasn’t news to him – it was how he’d met them, after all – but to victimize somepony that was on a mission of mercy expressed an indifference toward others that was depraved. Now he understood why Sonata looked so upset. “What then?”
“Exactly what you’d expect. They brought him into another warehouse, and when he tried to protest that he’d been there before, they beat him up. They, like, took everything he had…his clothes, the medicine he’d found, all of it, and when he tried to stop them they just hit him until he stopped.” She shuddered as she recalled the dispassionate way Fencer had described it, her only visible emotion being a sneer when she’d described how Pillowcase had started to sob when they’d taken the medicine he’d gotten for Drafty, begging them not to. For a moment it had reminded Sonata of how she’d been terrified of Lex when he’d almost killed Fireflower and wouldn’t apologize for it.
“She said this happened days ago?” Lex’s voice brought Sonata back to herself, and she nodded, causing him to frown in thought. “How many days, exactly?”
“She said it was ‘about’ three,” she replied, her voice still miserable. For once, she knew what he was thinking, having already come to the conclusion that she knew he was reaching now.
“Three days…the wharf doesn’t have so many warehouses that he could have kept searching and not been here by now.” There was a grim tone in his voice, the most obvious explanation for Pillowcase’s continued absence hanging in the air, obvious but unspoken.
“I pointed that out to her just now, before you showed up. She, like, said that he was alive when they left him, but…” In that moment Sonata desperately wanted to go over and hug Lex, but the severe look on his face made her hesitate.
“But?” he hissed.
“…when he wouldn’t give up the medicine he had, Fencer said she cut his forelegs pretty bad to make him drop it, and that he…he might not have been able to walk on them. He was bleeding pretty bad when they left.” She paused for a moment, then blurted. “She didn’t even need it! I asked her if one of her group was sick, if that was why she wanted it so bad, but she shook her head and said that she took it because she might have needed it later!”
In response to her outburst, Lex simply stood there, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he turned and walked past her without a word, heading back the way he came. “H-hey! Lex! Wait up!” She rushed to catch up to him. “Where are you going?”
“To retrieve Fencer,” he replied in a voice thick with malice. “And after that, she and I are going out to retrieve Pillowcase from where she left him.”
“But that was three days ago! By now he’s probably-”
“Dead?” Lex spat the word as if it were a curse, his eyes turning the familiar shade of green as they sprouted purple contrails from their corners. Around them, black crystals were starting to sprout of their own accord.
“If he is, then I can assure you that her punishment will make that seem tame by comparison.”
Fencer hadn’t gone very far by the time Lex found her.
He’d headed back towards the shelter, thinking that she’d have gone there to try and find something to replace her ruined clothes. Instead, he caught sight of her down another hallway in the wider warehouse, giving a roll of fabric a critical look as if evaluating it. Then she noticed him stalking towards her and turned to face him, giving a sigh that was equal parts resignation and irritation as her expression hardened. “Here we go,” she muttered, just loud enough to be audible.
“You…!” he hissed, trying to contain his outrage. “What do you have to say for yourself?!”
She raised one eyebrow, and then telekinetically lifted the roll of fabric she’d been studying, holding it in front of her. “You still owe me for that dress you ruined. I’d like to have a new one made before I go back there,” she canted her head towards the shelter, “since I prefer to keep my cutie mark priva-”
“Silence!” snarled Lex. Grabbing Severance in his own telekinetic grip, he gave the weapon a furious swing, cutting the roll of fabric in two and leaving large gashes in the metal shelves on either side of them. “You deserve nothing except an extremely harsh punishment for what you did to Cozy’s husband, and quite likely many other ponies as well!” He knew he couldn’t read other people at all, but even he was cognizant of Fencer’s complete and utter lack of remorse for her actions, and it made him livid. How could she not care about what she’d done?!
Fencer tossed the sliced fabric aside, annoyed. “So what are you going to do? Kill me? If so, bring it on.” She widened her stance slightly, dipping her head just a little to move her horn in his direction. “I’ll defend myself with everything I have. Or will you cut me up like I did that crystal pony?” She paused, pretending to consider that. “Nah, you don’t have the guts. So what then? Tell everypony in that shelter what I did? Go right ahead; I told you, I’m not ashamed.” She smirked at the enraged look on his face. You see? You can’t control me. Nopony can. “So how are you going to ‘punish’ me?”
Despite being apoplectic, Lex somehow managed to keep his temper from exploding. “First, you’re going to show me where you left Pillowcase. Then, I promise you, you’re going to pay for what you did.”
Fencer was unimpressed. “I told you, I don’t take orders from you. If you want me to show you where we left him, you’re going to have to give me something in return.”
Lex’s response was to stand there and seethe. For a moment he’d considered finding Aria and having her use her detection spell to try and track Pillowcase down, but knew that wouldn’t work. She’d shared the details of that spell with him before, when he was looking for ways to pinpoint the locations of the undead ponies infesting Vanhoover, and although that hadn’t been enough to let him learn to cast it, she had informed him that the spell had limits. It could track down specific individuals, but only if the spellcaster had met them before, and Aria was adamant that she’d never seen a crystal pony before Cozy. It could locate particular kinds of creatures instead, but when he’d had her check for nearby undead ponies – “ghouls,” Aria had called them, a name based on how one of the other undersea denizens had referred to them – he’d thought to ask if she could track down a crystal pony as well.
She had tried, but as it turned out, the spell hadn’t been able to; while it could differentiate between pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies, “crystal ponies” was apparently a distinction that it couldn’t make. Although that had been frustrating, it had made sense to Lex. He’d seen crystal earth ponies and crystal pegasi before, which suggested that crystal ponies were an ethnicity rather than a different kind of creature from their non-crystal counterparts. Even so, Lex had been tempted to have Aria simply search for earth ponies – according to Cozy, that was Pillowcase’s tribe – but the spell only found the closest instance of a given creature, which meant that their current group’s earth ponies would generate a false positive. So he had no choice but to have Fencer take them to Pillowcase if he didn’t want to search blindly.
Standing behind Lex, Sonata – who had been quietly watching the exchange up until now – nervously moved forward. She knew that as much as Lex was prone to ranting and shouting when he was angry, his worst fits of rage were when he couldn’t bring himself to speak, and that looked like what was happening now. Between what he’d said before about making Fencer suffer something that would make death seem tame if Cozy’s husband wasn’t alright, and how he’d swung Severance around just now, she was beginning to grow worried. “Listen, it’s not such a big deal, right?” she asked Fencer, her eyes flitting back and forth between her and Lex. “If it’s just one of the warehouses around here, you can point it out to us in a jiff, no problem.”
“I already told you what happened to him,” replied Fencer coolly. She had decided to stick with the ponies here and learn about how Lex had supposedly turned them into a force to be reckoned with, but there was no way she was going to bow and scrape to him in the meantime. “If you want more than that from me, you need t-, WAAAGH!”
Her voice turned into a scream of shock in mid-sentence as black crystals began to sprout from her horn. In a moment they had completely covered it, leaving her horn hidden beneath the dark protrusions. In a panic, she tried to telekinetically pull them off, but it was futile; the crystals thoroughly disrupted her ability to channel magic through her horn. “What is this?!” Her cool demeanor was utterly shattered now, leaving her gaping with horror for several moments before turning her gaze to Lex. “What did you do?!”
“Exactly what it looks like,” he smirked, giving her a look of spiteful satisfaction. “I’ve sealed your ability to use magic. If you want to so much as conjure a light ever again, you’ll take me to where you left Pillowcase immediately.” It was a bluff, of course; he couldn’t make the black crystals remain permanently, but she didn’t know that. While Lex normally detested lies and deception, they were permissible in an adversarial situation, which this absolutely qualified as.
“Y-you…” Now it was Fencer’s turn to have her expression twisted in impotent rage. She glared at him for several seconds, as if trying to make him undo what he’d done through sheer force of will, then turned away. Gritting her teeth, she raised a hoof and then smashed it to her crystal-covered horn, to no effect. Taking a deep breath, she tried again, hitting her horn hard enough to draw a grunt of pain from her lips.
“That won’t work,” chuckled Lex, making no effort to hide his enjoyment as he watched her struggle. “Your horn will break off long before you’ll ever free it.”
Fencer shot him a murderous glare, and struck her horn one more time before she gave up. She tried to think, tried to restore her inner balance and find a way out of this problem, but nothing came to mind. Just the thought of never being able to use magic again, of being permanently crippled, was enough to terrify her. She looked around, trying to spot something that would let her get out of this without giving in, and her eyes fell on Sonata. “I told you what you wanted to know! Do something about this!” she blurted.
Sonata jumped slightly, unable to help a momentary burst of fear as the most callous person she’d ever met focused their attention on her. But a moment later she firmed up her resolve, setting her mouth in a hard line. “What’s in it for me?” she asked, letting her sarcasm speak for itself. Fencer looked ready to kill her, and even took a single step forward until Lex swung Severance back into a ready position, the warning obvious.
Breathing heavily, Fencer looked back and forth at the two of them, and Sonata saw her dig at the ground with one hoof in a clear gesture of aggression. For an instant, she thought that the other mare was going to charge them anyway, but then Fencer let out a breath and lowered her head down, her mane falling over her eyes. “Alright,” she said in a strangled voice. “I’ll take you to where it happened.”
“A wise decision,” Lex sneered, still unable to resist taking joy in her defeat. He mastered himself a moment later as he turned to Sonata. “I’ll search for Pillowcase. You stay here-”
“Are you kidding me?!” yelled Sonata, looking at him in disbelief. “After what happened last time, you’re going to go out there by yourself again?! You’re supposed to be, like, the smart one here!”
Lex frowned. It seemed like she’d been yelling at him a lot lately. “After myself, you’re the most powerful one here. It makes sense for you to stay behind in case something happens while I’m gone.” He tried to keep the peevishness out of his voice, but the look on Sonata’s face made him wonder how well he’d succeeded.
Sonata let out an unhappy grunt, and held back the urge to stamp a hoof in frustration. She loved how big his brain was, but sometimes having him be right all the time was so annoying! “Fine! But you’re taking Severance with you then!”
“That’s really not-”
“You’re taking Severance with you!” This time her voice was a growl, and it was so unlike her usual self that Lex was momentarily flummoxed. For her part, Sonata could barely keep her frustration and anxiety in check. “The last time you went to look for survivors you were totes ambushed and almost died, and that is NOT going to happen again! So this time I’m not going to settle for a promise! Instead, you’re taking Severance with you and I won’t take no for an answer!”
“Fine!” yelled Lex, more from exasperation than anger. Something was definitely up with her; he felt fairly confident of it now. This level of aggressiveness was unlike her usual disposition. He’d need to investigate the cause of it after he returned. “I’ll take Severance with me.” Putting the weapon on his back, he turned towards Fencer and was about to order her to start moving when he heard hoofsteps behind him. Glancing back, he let out a sigh as he saw Cozy running towards them. He’d wanted to leave before she got back, since she’d be safer if she waited in the shelter. That probably wasn’t going to happen now.
Cozy looked mildly alarmed as she approached them. “I heard yelling, is everything alright?! I talked to everypony in there, but they’re all saying that they don’t know anything!” She looked between Lex and Sonata, eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “Did she tell you anything?!” Without waiting for an answer, she looked at Fencer, barely registering what had happened to her horn. “Please! Please tell me where Pillow is!”
“She told us,” answered Lex gruffly. He was preparing himself to refuse her if she asked for details. She didn’t need to know the specifics, not yet at least. “We’re going to retrieve him right now.”
“Oh! Oh thank Lashtada!” Cozy looked like she was about to start bawling, but instead sniffled and wiped her muzzle with one hoof. Managing a watery smile, she looked at Fencer. “Thank you! Lashtada bless you!” Sniffling, she looked at Lex. “So, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
Fighting back the urge to sigh, Lex looked at Fencer. “Go. Now.” She gave him a dirty look, but a moment later turned and headed for the warehouse door, Cozy following closely behind. Lex paused long enough to give a backwards look at Sonata. “I don’t think this will take very long. Have the doctors get ready in case we’re not too late.” Then he turned and left without waiting for a reply.
For her part, Sonata lingered there for a moment, eyeing the space where her boyfriend had been. She knew he was doing the right thing, and that he’d taken his strongest weapon with him this time, but she was starting to get really sick of him throwing himself into danger. At the very least, she wished he’d help her work off her stress from the last couple of times he’d done this. But as blatant as she’d made her last attempt to let him know what she wanted, she still wasn’t sure he’d gotten the message.
That does it, she decided as she turned back towards the shelter. When he gets back I’m gonna drag him off into a corner somewhere and not let him go until we’ve done it, like, five times.
As they emerged from the warehouse, Lex had already begun calculating the parameters of their rescue effort.
A quick glance upward showed that the sun was high in the sky, not quite having reached its zenith yet. Which means that we have roughly eight hours until it sets. The fact that the elemental bleeds had struck during the beginning of summer was one of the few aspects of the disaster that was fortuitous, he knew. The ponies of Vanhoover would have been in even worse shape if they’d been forced to endure freezing temperatures on top of everything else they’d suffered. That, and the ghouls prowling the city would have had even more hours of darkness in which to freely stalk the streets.
“What are we waiting for?! Let’s go!”
Frowning as Cozy’s pleading interrupted his thoughts, Lex glanced over at Fencer. Sure enough, she wasn’t moving, instead standing off to the side and giving him a hateful look. The sight made Lex grit his teeth, not because he cared about her anger, but because she was deliberately being as uncooperative as she could without openly rebelling. “Get moving,” he hissed at her. “Now!”
She lingered for a half-second in another display of petty defiance before she turned and started walking down the waterfront, going no faster than a leisurely stroll. “Faster!” Lex ordered. “Unless you never want to use magic again!” Again her only response was a dark look, but she broke into a trot. Cozy immediately moved after her, but Lex paused just long enough to take Severance from his back and toss it into the air, where it floated lazily. “Stay close to me,” he ordered it curtly before he followed the mares, the weapon trailing after him. As much as Lex hated to admit it, Sonata hadn’t been wrong to insist that he take Severance with him. Although he’d closed the elemental bleed, and the ghouls weren’t much of a threat, having the sapient scythe with him would be invaluable if another unexpected situation arose.
Minutes passed as they made their way along the docks, Fencer leading them. Several times Lex noticed Cozy glancing at him, pursing her lips before looking away. He ignored her as best he could, but after the fifth such instance his patience snapped. “What?” he growled at her.
Cozy flinched, wavering before gulping and plunging ahead. Whispering, she glanced at Fencer before returning her gaze to him. “Did you-, no, obviously it was you, but…her horn…”
“It’s her punishment for trying to bargain with the information on your husband’s whereabouts,” he replied darkly. Even without remembering what Sonata had told him, the fact that Fencer had been unwilling to convey potentially life-saving information – or lead them to Pillowcase’s last known location, for that matter – unless she got something for it upset Lex deeply. It wasn’t just that it flew in the face of his moral values; rather, he’d seen what it was like when attitudes such as Fencer’s were commonplace among the populace, and he had no intention of letting Equestrian society degrade to such a degree on his watch.
His home would NOT become another Everglow. Not if he had anything to say about it.
“When we arrive at our destination, I want you to stay close to me.” Lex didn’t look at Cozy as he spoke, but he could see her frown of confusion out of his periphery. She gave a tentative nod, however, and that was good enough. Although he’d taken away Fencer’s ability to use magic and stripped her naked, Lex still considered her to be dangerous, or at least dangerous enough to potentially pose a threat to somepony like Cozy. Combined with the dangers that were still lurking in this city, and with Cozy’s worry for her husband likely eroding her sense of caution, Lex knew that he’d need to watch over her.
They continued to march in silence, and after what Lex judged to be about forty-five minutes they reached the end of the wharf, where Fencer came to a stop. Pointing at the second-to-last warehouse, she nodded toward it. “There. That’s the one.”
“Pillow!” Cozy started to rush towards the building, but stopped as Lex telekinetically tugged on her necklace, yanking her back. So much for her staying close to him!
“What did I tell you before?” he snarled.
“But Pillow-”
“Will not be helped if you do something stupid while trying to find him! Now stay there and shut up!” Ignoring Cozy’s tearful look and Fencer’s smirk, Lex turned back to regard the warehouse. At a glance, there was nothing to set it aside from any of the others like it that lined the wharf. For a moment he considered circling the building to see if maybe there was anything notable on the other sides, but the prospects of that seemed minimal. Turning to shadow and observing it from above might have been worthwhile, but that would have meant leaving Cozy alone with Fencer, and Lex had no intention of letting that particular scenario come to pass.
Slowly, Lex moved towards the building, hearing the other two keep pace with him. Although he couldn’t imagine why there would be any, he still adjusted his circlet as he looked at the doors in the magical spectrum. Giving a perfunctory nod as he found no magic whatsoever – and seeing no lock – he stood ten feet back from them before telekinetically yanking them open, ready to react in case there was some sort of trap or monster ready to leap out in response to their intrusion.
But no traps activated, nor was there any sort of monster lying in wait. Instead, the doors opened smoothly, revealing the building’s dusky interior. In doing so, Lex saw that unlike the exterior, the inside of the building was very different from where they’d made their shelter; whereas their warehouse was relatively empty, having little more than shelves, this one was full of crates. They were stacked on top of each other almost to the ceiling, and were set in haphazard clusters rather than orderly rows.
Lex glanced back at Fencer. “You go first.”
Fencer gave him a sour look, then glanced at the open doors, obviously not keen on heading inside. “It’s pretty dark in there. I won’t be able to see.”
She wasn’t wrong. Although the open doors allowed some sunlight to creep inside, the near-total lack of windows meant that the gloom had retreated only a little. But as far as Lex was concerned, that was a bonus. No light of her own would keep her reliant on them. “Then you had better not go very far.”
Scowling, Fencer slowly walked into the warehouse. Only after she’d entered the building did Lex go after her, Cozy keeping pace with him. As they crossed the threshold, she chanted her light spell, and a moment later the holy symbol on her necklace flared with radiance. For his part, Lex silently called upon his dark magic to enhance his vision, allowing him to see through the darkness without a light source. It wouldn’t be necessary so long as Cozy could keep making light, but it was always better to have redundancies in place.
“Now,” Lex looked at Fencer, “take us to whe-”
“PILLOW!” yelled Cozy, standing on her back legs and putting her hooves by her mouth. “PILLOW, WHERE ARE YOU?!”
Lex was silent, not because he was listening for an answer but because he was momentarily stunned by Cozy’s overwhelming stupidity. It was only when she tried to call out again that he shook it off. “You idiot! Stop!”
“But if he’s in here-”
“If he’s still in here after several days, rather than having kept searching for the shelter like you told him in your note, then he’s quite clearly not in any condition to respond!” Lex hadn’t wanted to share any of the grim details about exactly what had happened when Pillowcase had the misfortune to encounter Fencer and her group, but Cozy had reached the point where her inability to think rationally about their situation was endangering them. If there were any ghouls or other creatures lurking in here that had somehow missed the doors opening, then they were definitely aware of their presence now. “I know that you’re worried about him, but you need to think before you act if you don’t want to make things worse!”
“What…what do you mean ‘not in any condition to respond’?” Cozy’s voice was muted, a look of controlled fear spreading across her face. “Why wouldn’t he be able to respond? He…” She trailed off as the gears started to turn in her head, finally able to see past her worry and wonder how it was that Pillowcase could have been so close and still not found them. “He’s hurt,” she croaked, her fearful look changing to one of horrified realization. “He’s hurt and you know about it, because…” she turned to look at Fencer, “because she told you.”
“Calm down,” ordered Lex. “We’re going to find him. We just-”
Cozy didn’t seem to hear him, marching towards Fencer. “You did it.” Her voice was almost a whisper, as though dazed. “I can’t believe I didn’t…he’s hurt because you hurt him. That’s why you didn’t want to talk about it before.” She didn’t hesitate, walking up to Fencer until she was nose-to-nose with the other mare. “You did this.”
“Cozy! Step away from her right now!” Lex telekinetically grabbed Severance, and started after her, intent on separating the two mares. I should never have brought Cozy along!
But he had barely taken two steps before Fencer, who up until now had been impassive, suddenly gave Cozy a thin, mirthless smile. “I did,” she admitted. “And I’m not sorry.” Cozy’s eyes had just enough time to widen before Fencer suddenly surged forward, barreling into Cozy and bull rushing her backwards into a stack of crates. The two mares collided heavily with the wooden boxes, and Lex heard both of them grunt from the force of the impact, along with the scrape of wood across the stone floor, and instantly realized what was about to happen.
Cozy, stunned from the impact, collapsed, her vision darkening as she struggled to process the sudden turn of events. A moment later her wits returned…letting her see the crates tumbling directly towards her, faster than she could possibly hope to avoid. A scream tore its way from her throat as she closed her eyes and raised her hooves in front of her face, knowing that wouldn’t do any good but unable to help herself. A second later she heard a heavy splintering and braced herself for the unimaginable pain that she was sure would accompany being crushed to death. Pillow!
…but the pain didn’t arrive, and after a long moment Cozy opened her eyes.
There was debris all over the place, with broken wood and…pencils, of all things, scattered everywhere. But for several feet immediately around her the floor was completely clear, as though the crates and their contents had somehow managed to miss her entirely when they’d fallen. But that can’t be. I saw them falling right towards me. It was almost as though something had interposed itself between them and her.
“Are you alright?!” Lex’s voice cut through her confusion, and she looked over to see him making his way through the wreckage towards her. He reached the edge of the debris-free zone around her and spoke a word she didn’t recognize, and for a moment she saw a dome-shaped flicker around her before it disappeared, letting him come closer.
A force field, she realized numbly. He created a force field around me.
“Cozy, are you injured?!” he demanded as he reached her, and the urgency in his voice brought her back to herself.
“N-no. I don’t think so.” Shakily, she climbed to her hooves, looking over herself just to be sure. When she didn’t spot anything, she finally nodded. “I’m okay.” It was starting to sink in that he’d saved her life, after Fencer had…had… “Fencer!” she yelped as she remembered the pony that had just tried to kill her. She spun around, but the other mare was nowhere to be seen. “Where did she go?” Reflexively, she looked towards the open doors.
But Lex, seeing where she was looking, shook his head. “She didn’t go that way. She managed to grab your necklace and head deeper into the warehouse before I cast that spell.”
“My necklace?” Cozy raised a hoof to her neck, feeling that he was right. “But why?”
“Because,” answered Lex grimly, “she needed the light.”
“No, I mean, why did she head inside instead of running away? She knows we're going to look for…” Her eyes widened as the answer came to her. “Oh no!”
Lex nodded, already having come to the same conclusion. “Fencer’s not trying to escape. She’s trying to get to Pillowcase before we do.”
Fencer didn’t look behind her as she rushed through the warehouse, Cozy’s glowing necklace clenched between her teeth.
Although the trinket – it was quite clearly some minor magical doodad, the sort found in shops in any large town – she’d absconded lit her way, she ran blindly through the maze of crates, not slowing her pace. Just a little further, she told herself as she rounded another corner. Just a little further and I should be out of immediate danger. Just a few more twists and turns…
The first concern was to get far enough away from Lex and Cozy that her light wouldn’t be immediately visible. The large stacks of crates would hide it fairly well, but she’d still need some distance between herself and them in order for it to obscure the light enough to be completely masked. Luckily, she felt fairly confident that Lex wouldn’t rush after her. He’s going to be more concerned about making sure that crystal nag is alright than with chasing me, she smirked to herself. That was why he was going to lose, because he was still acting like this was Equestria, where harmony was all. He didn’t know the hard lesson that Fencer had learned: that Vanhoover had stopped being Equestria after the flooding, and that harmony wasn’t here anymore.
Finally coming to a stop, Fencer looked at her surroundings, seeing nothing but crates in every direction. Even so, swinging the necklace around made shadows twist and lurch wildly around her, and she couldn’t help but wonder if one of them was Lex, having defied her expectations and followed her through the obstacles that she’d been running around. But after several seconds of waiting, she let out a sigh of relief. Wiping a hoof across her brow, she realized she was sweating, and knew it had nothing to do with her mad dash through the warehouse.
For a moment she felt a rush of jubilation, and had to clamp down on the urge to start laughing, knowing that sound would carry much more easily than light. I can still do it! she cheered silently. Even without my group, without my knives, without my HORN, I can still win! That knowledge was exhilarating; for all that Lex had taken from her, in his pompous self-righteousness, he hadn’t been able to break her…and now she had a chance to turn the tables on him! I’ll show you why I’m a survivor! Why NOPONY gets to talk down to me!
Letting out a slow breath, Fencer took stock of her situation. She’d managed to get away from Lex and Cozy, but that was the bare minimum. Now she had to find that crystal stallion, Pillowcase, before they did…but that assumed that he was alive, let alone here. With the injuries he’d received, it wasn’t likely that he’d been in any condition to go somewhere else, but that just meant that he was very likely dead, since she couldn’t imagine those undead abominations not pouncing on a lone, injured pony. But if there was any chance that he had survived somehow, then she had to find him first. That was how she’d win it all.
And if he wasn’t alive, or couldn’t be found, or Lex and Cozy found him first…then she’d just have to escape back out into Vanhoover and take her chances. That wouldn’t be too difficult to do – there were doors at each end of the warehouse, she knew, and they could only cover one – but it would be far from ideal. Without anypony else to watch her back, or a weapon, or even being able to use magic, she’d be hard-pressed to survive. But that was still better than letting Lex catch her; she didn’t know what he’d do to her after what she’d just done, but she had no doubt that he’d do something awful to her now that she’d attacked a member of his group. One way or the other, there was no going back anymore.
Now, how to find an injured pony in this maze…?
“We have to find Pillowcase before she does!”
Cozy’s declaration was full of alarm, but to Lex’s relief she didn’t try to charge after the other mare, though that might have been because of the wrecked crates that had fallen in front of the path Fencer had taken. They weren’t an insurmountable obstacle, but the dangerous fragments of jagged wood combined with the myriad pencils creating treacherous hoofing resulted in a barrier that couldn’t be casually overcome. Still, that wasn’t the only path through the stacked crates, and Cozy was already headed towards another when Lex moved Severance to bar her way, causing her to yelp in alarm. “What are you doing?! We have to hurry!”
“Do you not realize,” hissed Lex in a voice that was full of reproach, “that this only happened because you acted without thinking, despite my repeated warnings?”
Cozy flinched. “But-”
“No! If you had just listened to me, Fencer would never have been able to attack you, let alone get away from us! Now, we have to contend with her in addition to everything else!” He stalked closer to her, his eyes blazing green and purple, and Cozy recoiled. “You say you want to find your husband so badly, but now your presence here has done nothing but jeopardize that possibility!”
“I…” Cozy looked down, and Lex heard her sob. “You’re right. I just…when I realized what Fencer did…” She sniffled, then raised a hoof to wipe her eyes. “I’ll keep my head on straight from now on. No more messing up, I promise.”
“I believe you,” answered Lex flatly, “because you’re going to stay here while I go find Pillowcase and Fencer.”
“Wh-, no!” yelled Cozy, an anguished look on her face. “You have to take me along!”
“You’re a liability.” There wasn’t an ounce of sympathy in Lex’s voice as he turned away from her. “Not having to worry about you will make it easier for me to focus on finding your husband and apprehending that criminal.” He was already struggling to figure out just what sort of punishment would be appropriate for the sheer magnitude of the crimes that Fencer had committed. Balancing criminal penalties against the moral imperative not to engage in cruelty was tricky, but he was sure that he’d be able to find something. In the meantime, Lex glanced over at Severance. “Keep her here. If she tries to leave, stop her without causing her harm. If anything tries to harm her, incapacitate them if they’re a pony, otherwise kill them.”
The scythe instantly moved to obey, floating over to begin circling Cozy in a tight orbit, tumbling end over end as it did so. Distraught, Cozy tried to dart forward, but as she did so the sharp point of Severance’s blade flashed forward, and she instinctively recoiled. Biting her lip, she looked at Lex, but he had already turned his back on her, heading towards another entrance to the crate maze. “Please, take me with you! I can help too!”
“I disagree,” he replied curtly, not even bothering to look at her.
Cozy could feel herself starting to panic. The very idea of the pony she loved most being somewhere nearby and not being able to go to him hurt so badly it was almost a physical pain. And the fact that he was injured as well was-, wait! That was it! “Healing magic!” she blurted. “I have healing magic, remember? If Pillow’s injured, he’ll need that!”
That managed to get a reaction out of Lex, causing him to glance back over his shoulder at her, his expression unimpressed. “I have healing magic. When I find your husband I'll heal him as best I can and then bring him back here so that you can treat him.”
“He might need more than you can provide before he can be moved!” insisted Cozy. “Yours doesn’t do very much, right? That’s why Sonata was yelling at you before about wanting to let me heal you!” She was babbling, desperation making her words pour out without thinking, but she kept going. “I can use a lot of it too, and it’s really strong! That’s why I healed everypony after we fought those sea creatures! And…and that way you won’t have to leave your magic weapon behind! And-”
“Enough.” Lex’s order was followed by a sigh as he came to a stop, and Cozy’s heart leapt with hope. She almost cheered as he telekinetically grabbed his scythe a moment later and pulled it to him. Once he’d retrieved it, he turned to face her directly. “I want to make this as simple as I possibly can: you will do exactly what I say, and only what I say. Is that clear?” She nodded her head rapidly, which served only to make him narrow his eyes, quite clearly not trusting her ability to follow through with what she’d agreed to. “If you try to do something on your own again…if you think you hear Pillowcase or rush to confront Fencer or anything else, then I’ll put you in another force field and leave you there until I’ve finished searching this place on my own. Do you understand?”
Cozy nodded, but that wasn’t enough for Lex, not after how she had been consistently ignoring his warnings. “Say it,” he pressed.
“I understand,” came the immediate response.
You had better, thought Lex, but he didn’t say it out loud. As it was, if she lost control of herself again he wouldn’t be able to make good on his threat, since he hadn’t prepared another force field spell. He could only hope that the prospect of being confined while he looked for her husband would be enough to keep her in line. “Alright. Conjure another light and let’s go.”
Cozy’s ears flattened. “I can’t.”
“…what?”
“I can’t cast that spell without my necklace. Conjuring a light requires me to be touching Lashtada’s holy symbol, or it doesn’t work.”
Lex wanted to unleash a torrent of abuse on Cozy about exactly how utterly useless she was, but they had already wasted enough time. “Can you still heal?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“Yes. Those spells don’t need a holy symbol.” She didn’t mention that that was only true for the actual spells. Channeling healing energy in omnidirectional waves the way she had before did require her holy symbol, but there was no way she was letting him know that, not when she’d only barely managed to convince him to take her along already.
“Of course they don’t,” Lex muttered bitterly under his breath. It made no sense to him that such a minor spell as conjuring a light – one that any unicorn, no matter what their special talent was, could perform with Equestria’s native magic – would require a material representation of a deity to cast, whereas healing magic, which was stronger and more complicated (to the point where Lex still didn’t know how neophytes like Cozy or Cloudbank could use it), needed none. But that was less important than the fact that he had no light spell of his own, not having prepared one with his own magic.
Fortunately, he was saved as Severance spoke to him telepathically. A moment later its blade began to glow a strange bluish-violet, the fluorescence providing a dim light that made everything around it glow weirdly. Lex paused for a moment, then nodded. This would allow Cozy to see without being bright enough to easily give away their position. His own vision, enhanced by his horn’s dark magic, needed no such assistance. For her part, Cozy couldn’t contain a soft gasp of relief. She opened her mouth to thank Lex for making his scythe do that, before deciding that he’d want her to be quiet instead.
Not giving his companion a second glance, Lex started towards the interior of the warehouse. “Let’s go.” With the last of the problems taken care of, and cognizant that their enemy had gotten a head start on them, Lex had no intention of wasting more time. If Pillowcase is in here, I’ll find him, he vowed to himself. And Fencer had better hope that I DON’T find her!
Cozy bit her lip as she followed Lex through the maze of crates, twisting her head every which way in the hope that she’d catch sight of Pillow.
For his part, Lex was also looking around, but more sedately. Every time they turned a corner or came to an intersection, he would pause and spend several long seconds examining the various paths in silence. Once he had, he would then retrieve a piece of chalk from his haversack and make a small mark on the floor, the white image giving off a ghostly glow under Severance’s dim light.
Finally, Cozy’s tension grew too great for her to bear, and she spoke up, needing a distraction. “What are you doing?”
Lex gave her a look that clearly communicated how idiotic he thought her query was. “I’m marking our path, to indicate which passages we’ve been down before.” He considered ordering her to be quiet, but decided against it. Although sound would travel much easier than light in this place, it would still be muffled if she kept her voice low, which she thankfully had. Anything that was close enough to overhear them speak would likely be able to hear the soft clopping of their hooves on the stone floor anyway. Besides, there’s only so much stealth can accomplish now, he knew. After all, Fencer had come in with them and so already knew they were here, and anything else in here would doubtlessly have been alerted by the door opening and Cozy’s subsequent yelling. If talking would keep her from doing something stupid again, then it was worth the risk. “That should be obvious.”
“No, I knew that!” protested Cozy. “I mean, what’s with the way you’re making those marks? Like, when we turned left at that four-way intersection, you made sure to put a mark from the way we came, and one in front of the left-hoof path before we took it. But when it just looped around to come back out from the middle path, you put a second mark in front of the left-hoof path, and then two marks in front of the middle one when we left it, but only one in front of the right-hoof path before we took it.”
Lex raised a brow, slightly surprised that she had noticed the details of what he’d been doing. That she had was encouraging, since it seemed like an indicator that she was calming down. “I’m using a variation on Trotmaux’s algorithm,” he explained. Taking it for granted that she had no idea what that was, he explained. “It’s a maze-solving technique wherein you make use of bidirectional double-tracing to denote clearly-defined passages that don’t lead to an exit.”
“…oh.”
Having heard that particular noncommittal response many times from Sonata, Lex felt reasonably sure that it was a statement of incomprehension. Normally he wouldn’t have particularly cared if Cozy understood him or not, but in this case giving her something to think about other than her missing husband was keeping her in line, which meant that he’d be best served to make it simpler for her. Fighting off the urge to sigh, he tried again. “To put it another way, I’m utilizing a three-symbol code at the entrance or exit from each path. A passage with no mark is one that we haven’t been down yet. A single mark means that we’ve been down that particular pathway once. Two marks means that we’ve been down that particular corridor a second time, and so can conclusively determine that it’s not part of the way out.”
Cozy’s brow furrowed as she considered what she’d been told. “But when we went through that loop at the four-way juncture, you marked the left and middle ones twice even though we only went through them once.”
“That’s because it put us out where we’d begun,” replied Lex, forcing himself to be patient with her. “That’s the functional equivalent of a dead end. Strictly speaking, we should have turned around and gone back down that passage the way we’d come, marking the floor again to represent a second trip down that particular stretch of hallway, but that would have been a waste of our time. Hence why I called it a variation.”
Pausing to digest what she’d been told, Cozy waited as they came to a T-intersection. Watching as Lex marked the end of the path they’d traveled, and then placed another mark at the left passage before starting down it, she managed a wan smile as a childhood memory came back to her. “My grandmare once told me that you should always keep your hoof on the left wall when you’re in a maze, and that as long as you do you’ll eventually find the way out. She learned it from always doing those maze puzzles in the newspaper. She really loved those.”
Not registering the warmer tone in Cozy’s voice, Lex snorted. “The ‘wall-follower’ technique might work for any simply-connected maze, which this warehouse fundamentally is, but it’s not very useful to us right now.”
Cozy’s ears folded back, her fragile calm strained by the scornful tone in Lex’s voice. “How come? My grandmare always swore by it.”
“Leaving aside that the interior of this place is not simply-connected, since it has disjointed obstacles in the form of crate-made walls that are not connected to the outer edge of the structure? That method overlooks that our goal isn’t to find the exit, but rather your husband, and he could be anywhere. As such, our primary goal is to gather the layout of this place rather than find the shortest route to the other end, which means that my method is far superior since it lets me create a more accurate mental map that I can then utilize to better coordinate our search.”
Cozy didn’t answer him immediately, instead following along silently for a few minutes, her head down. Lex wasn’t sure if her silence was a good thing or not, but had decided to put it out of his thoughts when Cozy spoke up again. “Thank you…”
“What?”
Thinking that he was asking what for, instead of expressing that he had no idea what she was talking about, she gave him a strained smile. “For this. For trying so hard to find Pillow. For taking me with you even though you didn’t want to. I just…I wanted you to know that I appreciate it.” She was going to say more, to admit that she didn’t think he was a bad person, but then she remembered how one-sided his relationship with Sonata was and the words stuck in her throat. Lex appeared to be surprised, however, as he came to a dead stop as soon as the words left her mouth. Cozy only barely managed to stop from colliding with him, and her anxiety suddenly returned as she thought he might be angry with her. She couldn’t imagine what she’d done to set him off, but given how…unique his personality was that didn’t mean very much. “Um, I-”
“Be quiet!” hissed Lex suddenly, the tension in his voice making her instantly obey, even as her heart began to beat wildly. Had he found some sign of Pillow?!
From beyond the range of Severance’s meager light, a single pencil came skittering out of the darkness ahead of them. Tumbling across the stone floor, it finally rolled to a stop a few feet in front of Lex’s hooves. He didn’t acknowledge it, simply staring straight ahead into the darkness, and Cozy felt her anxiety spike, knowing that had been deliberate. A moment later, an unfamiliar female voice tittered from somewhere ahead. “Some little ponies have been very ba-ad,” it called, deliberately stretching the last word into two syllables. “They made a mess in someone else’s house and didn’t even try to clean it up.” The words were spoken in an over-exaggerated manner, as though by an adult pretending to be a child.
Cozy shivered, her breathing starting to come heavier. Although this wasn’t a voice she’d ever heard before, its faux-playful tenor was very familiar to her, having had the misfortune of listening to another just like it several nights ago when they’d investigated the dummy lights at the abandoned store. Even if she didn’t know precisely who the poor individual speaking to them had been before, she knew what they were now.
Somewhere ahead of them, cloaked in the darkness, was an undead pony. Which meant that there were probably more circling them even now. Please, Lashtada, she prayed silently. Please don’t let Pillow be among them. She raised a hoof to touch her necklace, but a moment later remembered that Fencer had stolen it, biting her lip as she wondered if her prayers were able to reach her goddess without it.
Oblivious to Cozy’s worries, Lex continued to stare straight ahead. While Severance’s light was too dim to reach very far, he had enhanced his vision with his dark magic, which let him see with perfect acuity in the darkness out to a range of roughly sixty feet. Because of that, he could see the creature standing several dozen yards in front of them. It was – or rather, had been, an earth pony mare. Now, however, patches of her ribs were showing, her mane and tail were tatters that barely clung to her emaciated body, and the right half of her face was mostly gone, stripped down to a blood-encrusted skull that made her look as though she were making a hideous grin…which she was, the remaining left corner of her lip turning up. “How’s about you make it up to us? We’re really hungry, and we could use some food.”
Lex let out a slow breath, not allowing himself to become agitated. The stupid thing could quite clearly see them, but hadn’t realize that he could see it as well; doubtlessly it thought that if it stood outside the radius of Severance’s light then it was hidden. To Lex, that underscored what he already knew: that these monsters weren’t serious threats. But that didn’t change the visceral revulsion he felt, nor the fear that lay beneath it. After all, each of these creatures had once been a pony until their death and reanimation had warped their minds. Just like with mind-affecting magic, something had been done to them against their will which had changed who they were, and the very concept of such a thing terrified Lex. Especially after what he’d seen on Everglow…
“If’n you don’t have any food, don’t be worried about it,” continued the undead mare. “After all, you brought two warm, juicy ponies here to feed us.” The sound of hooves came from every direction, slowly approaching them as more ghouls began to close in.
Letting out a slow breath, Lex felt his loathing for the twisted creatures bubble up inside him, reaching a point where it blossomed into anger, then into a tightly-controlled rage. Ever since he had been a colt, that had been how he’d confronted the things that frightened him, and it had always served him well. Glancing back, Lex gave Cozy the slightest of glances. “I’ll handle this.”
Then he began to cast.
Opening her mouth, Fencer quickly swept the light around before closing it again.
Holding Cozy’s necklace inside her mouth was uncomfortable, but since she still couldn’t figure out how to turn the accursed thing on and off it was the only way to keep the light source muffled while quickly and easily letting her shine it in particular directions before closing it off again. She was sure she looked ridiculous, but that mattered less than making sure she kept herself hidden from Lex and the undead ponies as much as possible. So far she had been successful at avoiding the former, but not the latter.
So far she’d run into the unliving monsters twice. The first time had been a lone undead pony that “hadn’t wanted to share” its attempt to make a meal out of her. Fortunately, even a pencil could be used as a weapon if you gnawed the end into a point and shoved it through an enemy’s head. Then, with confirmation that ghouls were in there with them, Cozy had dragged the carcass of the one she killed around with her. While carrying the corpse on her back had been disgusting, the effort had paid off when she’d run into another group of undead ponies – three, this time – and had dumped it as she’d run off, risking a glance back to see them descending on the body and devouring it with ecstatic moans, as she’d expected. Now, she was walking down another stretch of empty passage, but something was telling her that this was different from the ones she’d wandered through so far. But what…?
It’s the smell, she realized. There’s something really foul here. The realization made her pause. In the few times that she’d gotten close to the undead ponies, they hadn’t smelled particularly pleasant, but they hadn’t been offensive to her nose the way this scent was. Something nearby was really ripe! But as awful as it was, Fencer felt her excitement grow. If she was right, this was either the scent of someone who hadn’t been able to practice proper, or any, hygiene for days…or it was a corpse. Either way, she hoped that she was about to find out what happened to this Pillowcase individual. But where was it coming from…?
Sniffing the air, Fencer slowly wandered down a passageway, then paused as she realized the smell was getting fainter. Moving back up, she repeated the process several times until she was sure: the scent was strongest at the middle of the hallway. Except that there was nothing in the middle of the hallway; the crates formed walls on either side. So what was going on?
Narrowing her eyes as something occurred to her, Fencer opened her mouth to shine the light on the crate to her left. Cautiously, she started to poke at it with her hoof, and almost a solid minute of investigating later she bit back a laugh of triumph as she peeled off the side of the large wooden box, having determined that it wasn’t securely attached. Shining her light again, Fencer’s heart skipped a beat as she looked at what she’d found.
The last ghoul hit the ground hard, its body impacting the stone floor of the corridor with a heavy thud, and then lay still.
When no more of them came rushing out of the darkness, Lex gave a contemptuous snort – as much for their existence as for how easily they’d been defeated – and turned his attention back to Cozy. “Are you alright?” The question was entirely perfunctory; he’d made sure that none of the creatures had been able to get anywhere near her during the fighting. Nevertheless, his moral framework demanded that he ask the question anyway, just to be certain.
“Y-yeah,” nodded Cozy, shaken despite herself. Although being so close to the undead ponies without any weapons – except for a smattering of spells she’d been given by Lashtada that morning, which she knew wouldn’t have been enough to save her if she’d been alone, especially since some of them needed her holy symbol to work – had been unnerving, it hadn’t been the most frightening part of the brief encounter. That particular designation went to Lex himself.
He had taken out the undead ponies in a manner that could only be called ruthless. In stark contrast to how visibly distraught he’d been when he’d first encountered them, back in that abandoned store, this time he’d seemed almost bored. Even as his spells had decimated the initial wave of undead creatures, and sent Severance to cut down the rest, his expression had remained as cold and hard as those black crystals he so often conjured. Even when they’d stopped attacking and tried to flee, he had refused to let them go, tearing through them unstoppably until the undead things were completely annihilated. It had reminded her of when she’d first met him; he’d defeated her and her friends with such casual disdain that she couldn’t help but compare it to when King Sombra had invaded the Crystal Empire.
No, that’s not fair, she decided. Lex has been trying his hardest to protect everypony. He’s nothing like King Sombra. But just like when she’d tried to thank him a minute ago, the thought lacked conviction. As much as she appreciated what he’d done for her, Cozy couldn’t overlook how uninterested Lex seemed to be in Sonata, despite the ex-Siren’s assurances that the two of them were in a loving, committed relationship. I should just ask him about it, she decided. Although she’d been too intimidated to try before, that wasn’t how a priestess of Lashtada should act. She needed to find out if he was taking advantage of Sonata’s feelings…later, after they rescued Pillow.
“He’s not here.” Lex’s voice cut through her thoughts.
“Huh?”
“Your husband. He’s not here.” Although it had disgusted him to do so, Lex had looked over each of the corpses that was scattered up and down the hallway. None of them were a crystal stallion, though their bodies were decayed enough that he had made sure to check their remaining cutie marks just to be certain. The experience had driven home that each and every one of the monsters he’d slain had once been a pony, leaving his stomach tied in knots. Confirming that Pillowcase was not among their number had been cold comfort.
Cozy quite obviously didn’t feel the same, judging by the sigh of relief she gave. “Thank Lashtada.”
“I doubt Lashtada had anything to do with it,” remarked Lex acidly. Not bothering to wait for a reply, he turned back towards the corridor and began to walk down it, pulling Severance to him without missing a beat. Although she knew he wouldn’t leave her behind, Cozy nevertheless hurried to keep up with him, stepping gingerly around the dead bodies as she did so.
It felt like only a few minutes later when Lex turned a corner only to immediately freeze in place. For an instant, Cozy thought that he’d somehow detected another band of undead ponies, but then she peeked around him and realized why he’d stopped: roughly thirty feet or so ahead of them, the passage split into a T-intersection, and Cozy could see light spilling out from around the corner turning right. Knowing they were nowhere near the outside, the light had to be from her missing necklace, which meant that they’d found Fencer! For an instant she wanted to rush forward, needing to see if the other mare had found Pillowcase, but she quashed that urge before she could act on it. Acting without thinking had almost gotten her killed before; it could very well get Pillow killed now if Fencer had found him first.
Instead, she looked at Lex, whose eyes were still on the light spilling from around the corner, narrowed in consideration. Gesturing for her to be quiet, he whispered something to Severance, and the scythe floated over to hover next to her protectively. An instant later, Lex turned into a shadow and slipped through the wall of crates. He’s circling around, Cozy realized.
The next few moments felt like an eternity, and Cozy wasn’t aware that she was holding her breath until her lungs began to ache. She forced herself to slowly exhale, only to give a sudden gasp an instant later. The light was moving! As she watched, it bobbed and bounced as though somepony had picked it up. More than that, it was growing brighter! Whoever had it was coming this way! Torn between wanting to run away and moving forward to meet them, Cozy found herself frozen in place. Her heart was hammering in her chest as the light grew closer, until a second later a figure emerged from around the corner…!
It was Lex. Floating next to him, held aloft in his telekinesis, was her holy symbol. As he reached the intersection, he stopped and looked at Cozy, frowning. “This was lying in the middle of the floor, with nothing around it,” he pronounced grimly.
Not sure if she should feel disappointed or relieved, Cozy walked over to him, Severance floating alongside her. “So Fencer’s nowhere to be found?” she asked as she took her holy symbol, putting it back around her neck. That seemed like an obvious question, but she thought that maybe Lex, with his high intellect, had figured something else out.
He had just opened his mouth to reply when another voice called out. “No. But I’ve found you.”
Cozy stiffened, and Lex did as well, recognizing the voice as Fencer’s. Both of them immediately looking down the darkened passageway that was the left branch of the T-intersection, where the words had come from. From out of the gloom, Fencer’s voice came again. “I have your crystal stallion. If you want him back, you’ll do exactly what I say. Don’t, and all you’ll get is a crystal corpse.”
Cozy felt her heart clench at the words, a wave of panic washing over her. “No…” she whimpered, not in denial of Fencer’s terms, but rather that this was happening at all.
Lex grit his teeth, cold fury radiating off of him. “Fencer, if you don’t turn him over right now-”
“Then you’ll what?” came her voice, its source still concealed by the darkness, “Blast me with your magic? Send your scythe over here to cut me apart? Go ahead.” A dark chuckle punctuated her next statement. “You might get me, but not before I kill your little nag’s husband.” Lex’s only response was to growl, not having a better reply.
This was her plan, he realized. She put the light down at the other end of the corridor, then waited for us to go investigate it so she could observe us from concealment. Worse, she had done so from far enough away that his enhanced sight hadn’t been able to spot her when he’d been returning to the intersection. But there was no way she knew about that, so how…? No, it’s obvious. She simply put enough distance between herself and the light because she wanted to be able to retreat unseen if the ghouls found it before we did. That just happened to put her out of the range of my dark-vision.
“Pillow! Say something!” yelled Cozy, her voice filled with anguish.
But despite her plea, the only voice that answered was Fencer’s. “Yell all you want. Your stallion’s in no condition to reply.”
Cozy bit her lip, shaking with rage and fear. “What did you do to him?!”
“Nothing, this time. He was like this when I found him.”
“I want to see him!”
“Certainly.” Fencer’s reply to Cozy’s demand had a smug undertone to it. “Both of you come forward, slowly. If you or that scythe try anything, it’s all over for your stallion.” Cozy didn’t hesitate, immediately moving forward in a slow walk. Severance followed beside her, with Lex trailing after them. The fact that Fencer had remained out of sight up until now was enough to put him on his guard, wondering what new trick she had in store.
Is she luring us into a trap? Having us walk into some sort of deadly apparatus like the kind that Cozy and her friends had rigged in that apartment building? Or did she cut some sort of deal with some of the ghouls that are here, making us focus on her so that they can get the drop on us? Or what if… A horrible thought occurred to him. What if she found Pillowcase, and he’s already become a ghoul, and took her hostage and is making her say these things? His thoughts continued to swirl as they moved forward, dreaming up various scenarios and responses in the few seconds that they followed Fencer’s voice.
And then she came into view.
Despite everything he’d anticipated, the myriad ways in which he’d tried to expect the unexpected, what he saw – his enhanced vision letting him catch sight of her a few seconds before Cozy’s light washed over her – was exactly what she’d presented: a very-much alive Fencer standing over the prone body of a crystal stallion. The stallion in question was lying on his side, facing away from Lex and Cozy. His crystal coat had lost its luster, looking more like a greenish-brown than the emerald sheen that Cozy had described him as having. Even so, Lex could make out numerous cuts and bruises on his body, along with various smudges and stains from whatever squalor he’d been living in. But most notable of all was the mark of two heart-shaped pillows on his flank, confirming the unconscious stallion’s identity.
Standing just behind him was Fencer. She had also gotten dirty, with some unidentifiable grime in her mane and on her sides, but from the size of her grin she wasn’t too concerned about it. And it was easy to see why she was grinning: her front-left hoof was raised, resting on top of an upright broken board and not allowing it to fall over. But it was the other end of the board that concerned Lex: it narrowed to a jagged point, and was pressed against Pillowcase’s neck.
If Fencer leaned forward even a little, if she placed any weight on her hoof at all, then the broken board would immediately pierce Pillow’s throat.
This isn’t insurmountable, thought Lex, his mind still running furiously. I can disintegrate the board with a spell. No, whatever spell I try, she’ll lean forward before I can finish casting. I could telekinetically yank the board away? No, her body weight is greater than the amount of force I can generate; she’d lean on it to keep it in place and likely stab Pillow in the process, or just stomp on his throat with her hoof instead. Maybe wrap crystals around the jagged edge to blunt it? No, those are heavy; she’d just crush his throat instead of piercing it. If she does, could Cozy use a healing spell and save him? He glanced at Cozy, and wasn’t reassured by what he saw; the crystal mare had gone pale at the sight of her husband’s predicament. While Lex wasn’t entirely certain that meant that she couldn’t save him if worse came to worst, he had no intention of testing that theory. I need to get Pillowcase away from her without giving her a chance to harm him, he knew. But how to do that?
“As you can see,” smirked Fencer, “I have him, and you, dead to rights.” She put a slight emphasis on the word “dead” to underline her threat, her eyes locking onto Lex. “If you try anything, if I see your horn glow even a little, or if your scythe floats in a way that looks even a little threatening, or anything happens that I don’t like, then you’re not getting your crystal stallion back alive.”
“Pillow!” wailed Cozy. But the crystal stallion didn’t move. “What’s wrong with him?” Her voice was almost a sob, looking at Fencer pleadingly.
“He was like this when I found him,” answered Fencer with an unconcerned shrug. “He was hiding inside a crate, and it smelled like he had been there for days, probably ever since we ran across him before. He’s still breathing though, and if you give me what I want, he’ll stay that way.”
“Anything!” promised Cozy immediately. “I’ll give you anything, so please just let him go!”
Fencer shook her head. “Not you.” Her eyes turned to Lex. “What I want, the only way you’re going to get your stallion back, is if you take that scythe of yours,” her eyes narrowed even as her grin widened, “and cut that horn off your head.”
Fencer didn’t try to hide her glee at the look of shock on Lex’s face, clearly caught completely off-guard by her demand. Just the sight of it was enough to bleed off a large portion of the frustration she’d felt up until now. Although she’d only met Lex a few hours ago, everything about him – his arrogance, his self-righteousness, his conceited assumption that he could just tell her what to do and punish her if she didn’t obey – had grated on her nerves severely. After everything she’d been through, no one had the right to assert themselves over her, and the fact that he’d done just that was unforgiveable. Now, she’d be the one to assert himself over him; either he’d mutilate himself at her say-so, or he’d watch one of the ponies that he was so gung-ho to protect die right in front of his eyes!
“What?”
Fencer’s elation grew as she heard the incredulity and outrage in Lex’s voice. “That’s right,” she replied, smugness dripping from every word. “I heard about it from that blonde reporter of yours when we were getting checked out by your doctors. She said she wanted to interview us, but she just couldn’t keep herself from going on and on about you. But in between telling us how you fought dragons and sea monsters, she let it slip that that’s King Sombra’s horn you’re wearing, and how it lets you use his magic.”
Lex’s face changed into a look of bitter comprehension. “And you want it for yourself.”
He hadn’t phrased it as a question, but Fencer nodded anyway. “Exactly. And in exchange, you can keep playing hero and drag what’s left of this pony back to your little shelter.” Not that he’d have much chance of making it there, since without his horn he wouldn’t be able to use any of his magic. Now you’ll get a taste of what it’s like to be powerless in a city where everything’s gone to Tartarus!
Lex narrowed his eyes at her taunting, giving her a dark look. “You don’t seem to understand the position that you’re in.” His voice was soft, but the threatening undertone was unmistakable, his eyes glowing to accentuate his malice. “If you kill him, then you won’t have anything to protect you from me. And I can assure you, what I do to you then will be so horrible that it will spawn legends that last a thousand years.” He paused for a long moment to let the threat sink in. “Step away from Pillowcase and surrender right now, and I will show you leniency. Fail to do so, and I’ll show you none.”
But Fencer refused to be intimidated. On the contrary, she gave a harsh laugh. “Oh, that’s rich! ‘Spawn legends that last a thousand years’? You think this,” she tossed her head to indicate everything around them, “will ever be forgotten?!” She curled her lip at him in a sneer, now completely confident that he was bluffing. “Ever since that flood, it’s been the end of the world! And I’M the mare that’s still standing after everything that this bloated corpse of a city has thrown at me! So if you think that I’m scared of you, then you’ve got another thing coming!” Now it was her turn to be silent for a moment, letting him digest that she wasn’t afraid of him. “Now, are you going to sacrifice your horn to save this pony? Or will you make his pretty little wife into a widow?”
Cozy, who had been watching the exchange in silent terror – worried that something would push Fencer over the edge and cost Pillow his life – looked at Lex as Fencer renewed her ultimatum. Although she’d never seen him be anything but dedicated to the safety of everypony around him, his utter lack of warmth or affection was still enough to make her doubt his intentions. Everything about him seemed like…like this was some sort of personal test that he wanted to pass. Like he wanted to win for the sake of winning rather than because he actually cared. Because of that, the prospect of him giving up his horn – something even she knew was crippling for unicorns – seemed uncertain at best. It was enough that the plea she was planning on making died on her lips, and she instead returned her gaze to Fencer. “Please, don’t hurt him!”
“If I get what I want.”
“Take me instead! I’ll be your hostage!” Cozy knew it wouldn’t work, knew that she was no substitute for what the other mare wanted, but she had to try anyway.
Fencer, however, was already shaking her head. “I don’t want you, I want his horn. Once I have it, I’ll be the one turning into shadow, and getting past the blockade and out of this town will be easy!” She sent a condescending smirk at Cozy. “Trading a whole stallion for just one piece of another one, that’s more than fair, wouldn’t you say?”
Lex started. “Blockade?” he blurted. “What blockade?”
Fencer turned a scornful look towards him, but Cozy spoke up first. “You don’t understand. I love him so much. I can’t lose him.” She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to reason with the crazy pony in front of her, but she knew she had to try. With no idea what to do, she simply opened her mouth and began pouring her heart out. “He…he likes collecting postcards.”
“…what?” That last statement was unusual enough that Fencer couldn’t help but frown, and even Lex sent a confused look her way.
“He likes collecting postcards,” repeated Cozy. A sad, helpless smile crossed her tear-stained cheeks. “Every time we travel somewhere, he always goes to a shop and buys a dozen of them. We take turns writing silly messages to each other and then mail them to ourselves, so that when we come home we have souvenirs waiting for us. We have a big scrapbook full of them.”
“I don’t ca-”
Cozy kept going, unable to stop herself. “The first time we ever had a fight, it was over the silliest thing. We’d just gotten married, and he wanted to impress me by going jousting at the Crystal Fair. He wanted me to tie my scarf around his lance for good luck. I told him that I wasn’t going to let him ruin a perfectly good scarf.” She gave a laugh that was almost a whimper as she remembered how worked up they’d gotten over something so trivial. “A month later he bought me a half-dozen scarves, teasing me that next time I’d have plenty to spare.”
Fencer frowned, bothered for some reason. “That’s-”
“When he found out the Equestria Games were coming to the Crystal Empire, he was so excited. It was all he talked about for two months. He worked a second job so that we could afford luxury seats in the stadium. But when I got sick with a cold right before the games started, he stayed at home to take care of me, even though I told him that he should go enjoy the Games by himself.” Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at Fencer, silently begging. “You know what he said when I told him that? That he couldn’t enjoy them if I wasn’t there with him.”
“Shut up,” hissed Fencer around gritted teeth. Cozy’s anecdotes were sapping her elation for some reason, replacing it with a growing sense of anger. “I don’t want to hear this!” She knew she needed to get Lex’s horn and get out, that the longer they remained there, talking and huddled around the light, the more likely it was that the undead ponies would converge on them. That wasn’t an immediate problem; she had gathered up several pencils when she’d first run into the warehouse, and right now they were scattered across the hallways behind her. If any of those monsters tried to take her from behind, she’d hear them coming. Even so, she knew that time wasn’t on her side, and this stupid mare was wasting it on her useless, meaningless personal stories!
But Cozy kept going. “He nitpicks every time someone says ‘pillow’ when they mean ‘cushion.’ And when Nosey told me how everypony in the shelter had a pillow-fight before we arrived, I almost cried because it reminded me of the story of when Pillow got his cutie mark, during a pillow-fight that he was having with some friends when he was a col-”
“I said SHUT UP!” roared Fencer, her rage suddenly boiling over. She knew that yelling was a mistake, that she had just alerted every undead pony in this place to her location, but at that moment she couldn’t bring herself to care. Her calm was completely shattered as her lips pulled back in a snarl, giving Cozy a look of pure venom. “You stupid, stupid mare! I don’t care about any of that! Why should I?! When this city fell apart, nopony cared about the ponies important to me!”
It all came bubbling up then, everything that she’d endured over the last two months was suddenly flowing out of her, unstoppable. “Oh, it was fine at first, with everypony joining hooves and working together and sharing food and space and everything! But then the food ran low and the space got more and more crowded as buildings kept flooding and then all of a sudden it wasn’t the same! My dad and Cocobolo had been friends since they were kids, but she said he was stealing food in the middle of the night! As if he would ever do that!”
Lex narrowed his eyes, noticing how Fencer had begun to shake, looking at her hoof holding the jagged piece of wood against Pillowcase’s neck. He wasn’t sure if Cozy’s pushing Fencer to this point was a good thing or not. If she lost her composure enough, she might give him the opening he needed to safely get her away from Pillowcase…or she might completely lose her mind and kill Pillow immediately. In his peripheral vision, he could see that Cozy was similarly worried, having turned pale.
Fencer continued to rant. “You know what they did then? They threw us both out! Even though we had nowhere to go, even though we had nothing to eat, nopony cared! We…we tried to go back to our house, but it was a mess.” Her tone softened, regret momentarily overpowering rage. “We tried to stay there, but everything was waterlogged and it smelled terrible and there were bugs everywhere! So we looked around for other groups of ponies that we could stay with, but no one would take us in!” The rage returned to her voice then. “It was always ‘we don’t have enough food for anypony else’ no matter who we talked to! We were starving and nopony cared! And then those monsters came, and my dad, h-he…”
She couldn’t finish, feeling tears gathering in her eyes, and suddenly she hated that crystal mare more than anyone. She hated her for ruining her self-control, making her live through all of that again. She hated her because she was just another pony who only cared about the people important to her, and to Tartarus with everypony else. She hated her for acting like she was the victim here, when she hadn’t lost anyone!
She hated her because, if she got her husband back and went home to the Crystal Empire, she could still be happy.
That was more than Fencer could take. To Tartarus with getting that stallion’s horn; he was almost certainly preparing some sort of trick anyway. Right now the only thing that mattered was teaching that little nag a lesson. She tensed, getting ready to slam her hoof down. “Nopony cared about us, so I don’t care about y-”
“You can have it.”
For an instant, Fencer didn’t understand what Lex meant. “What?”
“My horn for Pillowcase’s safe return. I’ll remove it, but before I turn it over to you I want you to put your weapon down and step away from him.”
For a moment Fencer just stared at him, slowly coming back to herself. What had she been doing? She’d almost thrown everything away in a fit of emotion, and in Vanhoover that was death. That’s right. I don’t need to be the one to teach her a lesson. If her protector loses his magic, then Vanhoover will do it all by itself. I just need to get what I came for and get out of here.
“L-Lex,” croaked Cozy, “I-”
“Be quiet, Cozy,” he ordered, never taking his eyes off of Fencer. “You’ve already said enough.”
“More than enough,” agreed Fencer, eyeing Lex in return. He was planning something, she was sure of it. “Here’s how this is going to go: You have that scythe of yours cut your horn off, and then you give it to me immediately. After that, it cuts off mine, and then, before I attach yours, I’ll back away and give your stallion back.”
Lex narrowed his eyes. “That’s not acceptable.”
“Accept it anyway,” shot back Fencer. “I’m going to attach your horn right now, and that means that mine has to come off first, and if you think I’m letting that happen without a hostage, you’re dreaming. I know that you’d aim for my neck instead of my horn if I let you; this way, even if you try, I’ll fall forward and still kill him.” She shifted her weight slightly, leaning forward just a little to make a show of her threat. “First your horn comes off, then you give it to me, then mine comes off,” she repeated. “Then you get your stallion back, and hopefully we never have to see each other again.”
For a long moment, Lex regarded her silently, his face a mask. Then he nodded. “Very well.” He leaned his head forward slightly, raising his eyes to look at Severance. “Do it.” The blade hesitated for a moment, as if reluctant, then swung in a wide arc.
The sound of Lex’s horn hitting the floor seemed incredibly loud, with nopony breathing as it rolled slightly, leaving a thin trail of blood behind it as it came to a stop.
He did it. He really did it. Cozy managed to tear her eyes from the gory sight to look back at Lex, slightly shocked that he’d actually gone through with it. She suddenly felt guilty that she’d doubted him, especially after everything that he’d already done to save everypony. Even if he didn’t have any love in his heart, even if he was just doing all of this for himself, his dedication was the real deal. It was enough to make her feel ashamed of herself for not having had more faith in him. “Lex? Are you alright?”
He quite clearly wasn’t. Although he’d remained silent as his horn had been severed, she could see him shuddering, his body tensed in pain. Looking at the wound itself, she noticed that Severance had cut exactly at the place where the red had met the grey, leaving none of King Sombra’s horn attached to Lex’s head. The only red there now was the blood flowing from the stump down between his eyes and over his face.
A low chuckle drew her eyes over to Fencer, who looked considerably more relaxed and was wearing a triumphant grin. “I have to admit,” she drawled, “I didn’t think you’d go through with it. I was sure that you’d have some sort of scheme or plan or something.” Then her smile shrank, though it didn’t vanish. “Or maybe you still do.” She nodded towards the horn, lying in front of Lex’s hooves. “Kick it over here.”
“I’ll take it,” volunteered Cozy quickly. The idea of kicking Lex’s horn seemed too callous; after the sacrifice he’d just made, he deserved the respect of not treating his severed body part as though it were some sort of worthless trinket.
But Fencer seemed determined to deny him even that modicum of consideration, shaking her head at Cozy’s suggestion. “No. You stay right there.”
For a moment Cozy just looked at her, somehow still able to be aghast at how horrible Fencer was. Then it occurred to her that the other mare was suspicious of her, thinking that her offering to bring Lex’s horn over to her was some sort of ploy. “I’m not going to try anything!”
Fencer snorted. “Right, you’re just offering to help out of the goodness of her heart,” she replied sarcastically, before turning her eyes back to Lex. “Kick the horn over to me.”
Lex met her gaze evenly, but didn’t respond. Instead, his hoof lashed out, sending his horn skittering across the ground until it rolled against Pillowcase’s unmoving form. Fencer regarded it for a moment, still grinning, and found that she couldn’t resist the urge to gloat. “That’s it? No more dire threats about what you’re going to do to me? No more arrogant offers of leniency or flowery threats about ‘punishments that will become legends for a thousand years’? Come on, let me hear another round of how you’re going to make me pay for everything. Tell me all the awful things you’ll do to me for this.” She paused then, but silence was her only answer, Lex’s face looking like a mask as he stared at her. Fencer snickered at his lack of a reply. “Lose your nerve along with your horn? Well, I don’t care either way.”
“I thought you hated it when ponies didn’t care,” shot back Cozy, unable to help herself. She had never hated anyone in her entire life, but Fencer’s rampant cruelty was pushing the limit for what she could stand. “For somepony who can’t take it, you sure like to dish it out.”
Fencer’s smile dropped immediately, and she gave Cozy a withering glare, remembering the overwhelming antipathy she’d so recently felt towards the crystal mare. “Shut your mouth, nag,” she spat. “I can still go back on our deal if I feel like it.” But her threat was undercut as she glanced at Lex, then at Severance. “Now, have your flying scythe cut my horn off. And I warn you, if I even think that you’re going to try something, I’ll kill your stallion immediately. No warnings, no threats, no questions. He’ll just be dead, you get me?”
Lex’s only response was a grunt, before he looked at Severance. “Give her exactly what she wants.”
Fencer frowned at that, looking at the weapon suspiciously. That sounded like a loaded comment, as though there was some sort of hidden meaning that an outside observer such as herself wouldn’t pick up on. But for the life of her, she couldn’t see what that could be.
From what little she’d observed of Lex’s scythe, it was clearly some sort of major magic item; that much was obvious from how it could fly around under its own power, a fact made clear by its lack of a visible aura when it moved. Even weirder was how he talked to it like it was alive, a thought that she found unnerving; she knew how to deal with ponies, living or undead, but a scythe? It can’t even talk back. Her uncertainty about its nature was what kept her from trying to bargain for the thing, despite it obviously being a powerful weapon. For all I know he created it, and if I take it with me it will wait until I’m asleep and then kill me to avenge him.
Still, as the thing floated over to her, she dipped her head so that her horn – still covered in those ugly black crystals – was parallel to the ground. She also made sure she was leaning forward sufficiently to make it clear that her earlier threat was clear. If this thing tries to kill me, I swear I won’t go alone! Then the blade swung around, and all she could do was grit her teeth and close her eyes and swear that she wouldn’t cry out.
The strike was smooth enough that for an instant she didn’t feel anything at all. Then, just as her horn struck the ground beside Lex’s, the agony burst through her, and it was all she could do not to scream, a muted cry emerging from between her clenched lips. She swayed, and for a moment very nearly pitched forward, only barely stopping herself from falling over and killing her hostage in the process, knowing that if she did Lex would order the scythe to swing again and that this time it would take more than her horn.
“To my side, Severance.” Lex’s voice made her open her eyes, just in time to see the scythe retreating to Lex, hovering next to him obediently. He was still looking at her with that same muted expression, despite Fencer having been sure that he’d be smirking at her agony. “Now, step away from Pillowcase,” he ordered coldly.
Fencer stood still for a long moment, just to make it obvious that she was defying him, and then lifted her left foreleg, letting the jagged piece of wood she’d been holding against the crystal stallion’s throat to clatter to the ground. If he orders that scythe to come after me now… The thought compelled her to move, and she bent over to grab Lex’s horn in her mouth, picking it up and moving backward, not taking her eyes off of the other two.
“Pillow!” As soon as Fencer stepped away from her husband, Cozy raced over to him.
“Is he alive?” Lex couldn’t keep the tension out of his voice. If Fencer had deceived them, if Pillowcase was dead…
Cozy put her ear down by Pillow’s mouth, and a moment later she let out a strangled gasp of relief. “He’s breathing!”
Lex’s own relief was far less pronounced. From the back, the crystal stallion looked entirely motionless, which meant that he was breathing so shallowly that he had to be barely clinging to life. Even as he heard Cozy start to cast a healing spell – one that Lex knew would have little effect, since by now starvation, dehydration, and quite possibly illness would be debilitating her husband more than his wounds – Lex turned his eyes back towards Fencer. Tending to Pillowcase would need to wait.
For her part, Fencer had ignored her own crystal-covered horn, backing away to the edge of Severance’s dim light where she had reared up onto her back legs, holding his horn between her forehooves. She looked it over, as though examining it for something, before twisting it around in her grasp so that the bottom of it pointed upward. “The magic of King Sombra,” she whispered, and Lex could hear the awe in her voice, “all mine.” She raised her eyes to his, and gave him another triumphant smile as she raised the horn to her head. “I’m going to put this to better use than you ever did.”
And then she pressed the horn against the bloody stump on her head.
A second later she took her hooves away…and the horn tumbled to the ground.
For a moment she simply stared at it, uncomprehending, and then the blood drained from her face. “No,” she whispered, and now the awe had been replaced with horror. Frantically, she fumbled for it, picking it up and placing it against the base of her severed horn a second time, but the results were no different from the first, with it falling away as soon as she removed her hooves.
Lex laughed then, and it was a horrible sound, dark and mirthless. “You won’t be putting it to use at all, you fool.” It felt good to be able to release the contempt that he’d been holding back ever since she’d said that she wanted his horn. The look of fear that she gave him then, eyes wide and face turning pale, felt even better. “This is what happens when you tamper with powers beyond your understanding.”
“Why?” Dimly, Fencer realized that she should run, that she needed to get away as quickly as she could, but the full magnitude of what was happening was still dawning on her, and she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Instead, she was overcome with the need to know why this had happened, to understand why the horn that he’d grafted onto himself refused to do the same for her. “Why isn’t it working…?”
“I was in the Crystal Empire when King Sombra attacked,” answered Lex, striding forward as he spoke. Fencer moved backwards in fright, leaving his horn on the ground. “I watched as he fought Celestia and Luna, the princesses backing him into a corner until he cursed the entire realm to be locked in stasis for a millennium, snatching a pyrrhic victory from the jaws of defeat.” The memory was a bitter one for him, both because he’d lost his home and his parents for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because of how the alicorns had allowed Equestria to stagnate over a thousand years. But none of that showed on his face as he kept speaking. “And then I saw the battle continue, as King Sombra threw himself against the shield raised by that new alicorn, Cadance.”
By now Lex had reached where his horn lay on the ground, and he stopped to glance down at it. “At one point, he struck the shield so powerfully that his horn broke off in the process, and do you know what happened then?” He looked back at Fencer then, and now it was his turn to grin in triumph. “The severed piece simply became another dark crystal.” Even as he spoke, the horn at his feet suddenly crackled with energy, flashes of purple playing along its length as it darkened, becoming a black crystal a moment later.
“And his horn,” continued Lex, his voice rising, “grew back!”
His eyes flashed a deep green then, purple contrails sprouting from the corners. The black crystal that had once been his horn was still growing, sprouting more spiky protrusions as it began to spread along the floor before covering the crate walls, moving along the corridor. And on his head a redness grew from the stump of his horn, as bright as blood as it flowed upward.
A moment later it stopped, and Lex’s horn was there again, as though it had never been cut.
“Losing his horn didn’t break King Sombra’s power!” Lex was roaring now, and his voice left Fencer quaking, able to feel the strength it contained. “You were a fool to think it would break mine! And now,” he hissed, “you will PAY!”
Fencer ran face-first into a wall, unable to keep from crying out as the stump of her horn painfully collided with the rough wood of the crate.
The impact was hard enough to knock her onto her backside, causing her to scramble onto all fours in a panic and fling herself blindly to the right, worried that she’d hit the stacked crates hard enough that they were about to fall on her. That had been a useful tactic when she’d wanted to escape into the maze, but now, unable to see what was happening around her, it was a deathtrap waiting to be tripped. It would have been far better, she knew, to slowly feel her way through the pitch-black corridors instead of running flat-out, but that would have minimized what little hope for escaping she had left.
A scattered memory flitted across her panic-filled mind. When she was a little filly, she’d once had a nightmare that she was being chased by a monster. She hadn’t seen it, but she’d somehow known that it was a horrible thing and that if it got her, that would be the end. So she’d run as fast as her little legs could carry her, only to find that for some reason they weren’t working right, her muscles growing weak and uncoordinated, letting the unknown thing behind her rapidly draw closer. She’d woken up before it had gotten her though, screaming loudly enough to bring her dad running. He’d spent a long time reassuring her that it was just a dream, that it couldn’t hurt her, and had stayed right there with her until she’d fallen back asleep.
As Fencer picked herself up, not having hit another wall in her desperate rightward lunge, and started down the connecting passage, she wished with all of her heart that this was all just another nightmare, that any second now she’d wake up and her dad would be there and everything would be okay. But she knew it wouldn’t happen, the same way it hadn’t happened any of the other thousands times she’d wished for that since everything had fallen apart. All she could do was what she’d been doing, which was try to survive.
This isn’t fair! She knew that “fair” didn’t matter here, that it had fled along with harmony and justice and everything else that was good and decent when Vanhoover had flooded, but she couldn’t help but think it anyway. I didn’t do anything wrong! I just wanted to live! To protect myself from everything here! Why is this happening to me?!
Her breath was coming in heavy pants now, each one tinged with a sob, and her legs were burning from continual use. How long had it been since she had started running? It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes since Lex had announced that she would be made to pay, causing her to turn and flee as rapidly as she could, but it felt like it had been hours. Running off into the darkness of the warehouse completely blind had been a foolish thing to do, she knew, but there had been no other choice. With no horn of her own she couldn’t conjure a light, and she’d foolishly let Cozy retrieve her necklace-lamp thing, thinking that it wouldn’t matter once she got Lex’s horn.
She had no idea where she was or where she going, aware that she was completely lost, but surely she’d find the exit eventually! She had to keep moving, had to find the way out before Lex found her…and she was sure he was coming after her. Just like the monster in her childhood nightmare, she could practically feel him behind her, waiting for her to get tired so he could swoop down on her and take whatever horrible revenge he was planning. And it wasn’t just him she had to worry about; she was certain that she’d heard a clattering a few minutes ago that could only be from those undead ponies. She had no idea what Lex would do to her, but she knew exactly what would happen to her if those things got her; the same thing they’d done to her dad. She didn’t know which frightened her more.
She hit another wall, and this time rolled to the left, thankfully not hitting another crate as she did. A second later, she heard a large crash from the space she just vacated, feeling the impact from where it had smashed against the ground, and whimpered in fear and frustration. Shaking, she climbed to her hooves, knowing that she had to get away before the crash brought everyone to her location. Standing up, she started to move…and then stopped dead.
Green eyes with purple flames from their outer corners were staring at her from the darkness.
“There you are,” came the familiar, hate-filled voice.
A scream of pure terror ripped itself from Fencer’s throat, and she immediately turned and ran in the opposite direction. Her hoof came down on a large piece of broken wood, and she howled as she felt it pierce her, but she didn’t stop, lifting her injured leg and trying to move forward with the other three. A moment later she collided with the main piece of the fallen crate, still largely intact despite the fall, and scrambled to get over it, splinters lodging in her belly as she dragged herself across the rough surface.
Any semblance of her old self, the mask of calm she’d forced herself to wear, was completely gone now. The same panic that she’d derided in others, that she knew could only lead to death, had completely taken her over. As she ran as best she could on her three uninjured legs, her only thought was to get away from the monster that was closing in on her, to try and buy herself whatever time she could by putting just a little more distance between herself and those horrible eyes. She hit wall after wall, turning corners and running down corridors completely at random. She didn’t dare look behind her, sure that she’d see Lex closing in on her, knowing that she just had to keep going forw-
Something suddenly struck the side of her face, sending her sprawling.
“Where’s the little pony going in such a hurry?” rasped an unknown male voice.
“She brought us a tasty treat before. Does she not have anythin’ now?” Another voice, female this time.
“That body you tossed us was delicious, but it was barely an appetizer,” whined a third voice, also female but higher-pitched.
Although she’d never heard them speak before, their conversation was enough to clue Fencer in as to who, or rather what, was speaking. It’s the ones from before! The undead things I fed that carcass to! She had left them behind while they were busy feeding, but this time she had nothing to distract them with. Worse, she knew from experience that these things could see in the dark somehow, whereas she could only roughly approximate where their voices were coming from. She had to get away!
But as she tried to climb to her hooves, she found that her body wouldn’t move.
NO! Hysterical, Fencer tried to climb to her hooves, to thrash or kick or roll or do anything! But her body refused to obey her commands, her limbs locked rigidly into place. Nonono oh sweet Celestia please no! She couldn’t even scream in her current state, her attempts coming out as nothing more than a slightly-heavier breath.
Hooffalls marked the things moving closer to her, the only clue to their approach in the pitch blackness. “Nothing to say? Well, if you’re not gonna be all hospitable, then you don’t mind if we help ourselves, right?” asked the male voice with gleeful sarcasm.
“It’d be rude for us not to have a bite or two,” giggled the female, “what with her goin’ to the trouble to lay it out for us like this.”
“I call dibs on her flank!” announced the higher-pitched voice. “Then I-, hey! Her horn’s gone!”
“Who cares?” replied the male voice. “The horn’s almost all bone with no meat on it. That’s why I want first crack,” the sound of a hoof striking the ground hard emphasized that word, “at her ribs. Warm meat on the outside with soft marrow on the inside makes them hoof-licking good.”
The other female snickered. “In that case, I get BOTH of her eyes!”
“You always get the eyes!”
“We’d like some candy for once too, you know!”
“Too bad! You two had your chances when you called dibs first, so her eyes are mine!”
By now the sound of their hooves had moved all around Fencer, and their voices sounded like they were standing right over her. Some part of her knew that they had to be doing this on purpose, deliberately trying to frighten her before they killed her out of some sick sense of entertainment. But it was working, with tears of utter terror falling down her face as she vainly struggled to move. Turbo! Piggy! Sonata! Somepony! Anypony! PLEASE! I need help!
The thought brought an immediate rush of anguish, however, as she knew that no one would come to rescue her. Her friends and family were all dead or missing, she had walked away from her old group after Lex took them in, and she’d turned on him and the rest of his ponies as soon as she could. There was no one left to help her now, and because of that she was not only going to die, but die in agony. She had shut everyone out, and now she was utterly alone when she needed someone the most.
At least, when it was over, she’d see her dad again…
The thought of him brought another memory to mind, this one of just after she’d gotten her cutie mark. She’d been designing an adorable little picket fence around the garden in their backyard, and her dad had come out to look at it. He had been nothing but smiles for days, obviously thrilled that she had continued in the family tradition, but he’d shaken his head when he saw what she’d made. “Sweetheart,” he’d said as he put a hoof around her, “you forgot the most important part.”
The gentle rebuke had left her flummoxed. She’d dug the holes, and had arranged the rails, posts, and pickets all perfectly, with everything set at the proper distances and firmly affixed to everything else. When she protested that she hadn’t forgotten anything, her dad had laughed good-naturedly. “You forgot to add a gate.”
He’d been right, of course, but she had been too embarrassed to admit it, childishly insisting that she didn’t need one. Her father’s smile had shrunk at that, and he’d bent down to look her right in the eye. “Sweetheart, every fence needs a gate,” he’d explained. “You might need to keep some people out, maybe even a lot of people, but there’s always some that deserve to be let in. That’s the way it is for fences, and for life.”
I’m so sorry, Dad. I forgot what you taught me.
“Now then,” came the lower-pitched female, dragging her out of her sudden memory. From the sound of her, she was a few inches in front of her face. “Let’s dig in before she starts thrashin’. I wanna savor this.” Fencer tried to prepare herself for what was about to happen, tried to shut it out or push it away or anything at all but she was so scared so scared don’t wanna die not like this don’t wanna-
“GET AWAY FROM HER!”
Fencer heard the three voices gasp, even as a harsher voice chanted something in an unfamiliar language. A second later a trio of red beams lanced out, illuminating the area to let her see the rotted forms of her attackers as Lex’s attack slammed into them. The undead things howled in pain, thrashing as they smoked and began to blacken. The beams ended a second later, plunging the area back into darkness, but the sound of bodies hitting the floor and the horrible smell that filled her nostrils a moment later told her what had happened.
A shudder of thankfulness worked its way down her spine, but a moment later the green-and-purple eyes that she’d been running from moved into her field of view, looking down on her with malice. For a moment she wondered if she’d avoided a horrible death only to experience an even worse one instead. But a moment later she felt something curl around each of her ankles, and she instinctively jerked her legs. “Wha-?” she started, then stopped as she realized she could move again.
“Get up,” ordered Lex coldly.
Shaking, Fencer moved to obey, almost tripping as she realized that what he’d placed around her legs were cuffs, from the sound of them with links of chain between them. There was just enough slack for her to talk small steps, but not enough to let her gallop, hobbling her. But the fact that he was telling her to move at all was enough to give her hope. “Y-you’re not going to kill me?” she hiccupped.
Lex turned away from her, his eyes looking elsewhere as he started to move through the darkness. A moment later Fencer felt a weight form around her neck, a collar this time, with another length of chain dangling off of it. A moment later it was enveloped in the roiling purple of Lex’s telekinesis as he pulled her after him, making her stumble as he led her along. “I don’t kill ponies,” came the terse response. “Not even criminals like you.”
It was the least reassuring response she could have asked for, but at that moment it was music to her ears.
Having returned to material form, Lex led Fencer back through the maze of crates, yanking on her black-crystal leash every time she fell behind, which was quite often due to her injured hoof, inability to see in the dark, and the shackles around her legs.
Each silent reprimand brought a grunt of discomfort from her lips, and Lex couldn’t help but feel a sense of spiteful satisfaction with every such noise she made. Although he knew it was unseemly to take any sort of pleasure in another pony’s pain, there was nothing wrong with a feeling of gratification at seeing a criminal labor under the punishment for their wrongdoings. And this is just the beginning, you heartless thug, he thought darkly, glancing back at his prisoner. You will regret what you’ve done today for a long, long time.
But as much as he loathed Fencer, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief that he had gotten to her before those ghouls had begun to tear her apart. Taking the time to mark their passing and mentally map out the maze had been more worthwhile than he’d initially thought. If he hadn’t done so, he wouldn’t have been able to find her in time, and that would have been tragic. No matter how much her callous disregard for other ponies angered him, she didn’t deserve to die for it. Nopony did. His moral code was absolutely clear on that: pony lives were utterly sacrosanct, and had to be preserved at all costs.
The chain grew taut in his telekinetic grasp, and he gave it another tug, hearing her stumble as she tried not to fall over. “Keep moving,” he ordered coldly. The slightest glance over his shoulder was enough to make her flinch, struggling to comply. Despite her efforts, however, she was unable to keep up with the pace he was setting, and he soon found himself tugging on her leash again.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to continue doing so for long. Up ahead he could already see the light of Cozy’s spell from around a corner. Turning it, he found her exactly where he had left her, fretfully standing vigil over her husband, Severance orbiting them protectively. As she saw him, she rushed past the weapon and ran over to him, her face riddled with anxiety. “He won’t wake up!” she blurted. “I healed his wounds but he feels feverish and he’s barely breathing and his pulse is weak and he won’t wake up!” She almost yelled that last part, stopping only to take a breath before she continued. “You can fix him, right? Just like you did with Drafty?”
Lex shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do for him right now.”
“But-”
“Be quiet!” snapped Lex. Although he knew that Cozy had good reason for not being at her best right now, he nevertheless found her near-hysterical behavior irritating. She had a predilection for panicking, he knew – that much had been amply demonstrated when she had descended into a fit of screaming during their first meeting – but he couldn’t help but feel contemptuous towards her for it. A crisis was when it was most important to remain levelheaded, and in that regard Cozy had proven herself to be unreliable. That, along with her healing magic, was why he hadn’t wanted her anywhere near the front lines of the battle against those aquatic monsters. “I already used my disease-removing spell this morning, on the last pony that was infected by that aboleth thing,” he explained. “But an illness is the less immediate concern. Your husband’s isolation here has doubtlessly left him dehydrated and starving. That isn’t something my magic can fix.” The words left a bitter taste in his mouth, the same way they always did when he had to acknowledge his limitations.
“But you can create food and water!”
“Which I already did back at the shelter,” he replied as he stepped around her. A quick glance at Severance and a muttered “guard her” sent the weapon to hovering near Fencer, who flinched at the sight of it. Lex had just enough time to enjoy another spate of hateful satisfaction at the sight, and appreciate Severance’s ability to keep troublemakers in line, before he turned his eyes to Pillowcase.
“So just cast the spell again!” insisted Cozy, apparently not finished making a nuisance out of herself.
“Simply shoving food and water down his throat won’t be enough to help him.” That, and he had too little magic left to use the spell again, particularly after expending his circlet’s magic to stretch his available sacerdotal thaumaturgy to the point of being able to create food and cure that other pony’s medical condition both in the same day. “He needs medical attention, professional medical attention. We have to get him back to the doctors at the shelter.”
“Okay,” nodded Cozy, regaining some measure of calm now that there was a clear goal to focus on. She worriedly looked at Pillowcase for a long moment before biting her lip and looking back towards the end of the hallway, wondering about how they were going to carry Pillow out of there while making him as comfortable as possible, only to do a double-take as she saw Fencer, not even having noticed the other mare in her worry.
For a long moment she just stared at her, struggling to process her feelings. She was still hurt and angry over how Fencer had threatened Pillow’s life, treating it as though it were nothing. But looking at her now…she almost looked like a completely different pony. Her ears were folded back, clearly telegraphing the stricken expression on her face, which was further marred with tear tracks as well as blood trails from her severed horn. The way she was favoring her left foreleg was obvious, and there were scratches along her belly as well.
But what was more notable was what wasn’t there. The mare in front of Cozy’s eyes didn’t have any trace of the arrogant cruelty that she’d displayed just a few minutes prior. It had all been completely replaced with misery and anguish. It was enough to make her wonder what exactly had happened during those few minutes when she’d run off and Lex had gone after her.
“When this city fell apart, nopony cared about the ponies important to me!” Fencer’s words came back to her then, and Cozy felt her anger begin to recede as a sudden surge of pity for the other mare washed over her. Fencer had mentioned something about her father, and from what she’d said it was obvious that he hadn’t made it.
Could that have been me? wondered Cozy. If Pillow hadn’t survived, and if I didn’t have Aisle and Cloudbank and Drafty there with me, could I have ended up like her? It was easy to tell herself that she never would have become so horrible, that she would have stayed strong and remained a good pony no matter what happened...but the thought had an undercurrent of uncertainty to it, and that was enough to change her pity to sympathy.
Closing her eyes, Cozy put a hoof to her necklace, touching Lashtada’s holy symbol and drawing strength from its reminder of her goddess’s presence. Take care to show love even to those who wrong you, she recited the teaching she’d learned from Princess Cadance silently, for though you may see them as the least deserving, they’re often the ones most in need of it. Opening her eyes as she let out a slow breath, Cozy knew what she had to do, walking over to Fencer. “I’ll heal your wounds.”
“No,” interjected Lex immediately. “Do not heal her.”
“Wh-, but she’s hurt!” protested Cozy, slightly surprised by the command. She had thought that she was starting to understand him a little more. He’d seemed to lack any sort of personal concern for the ponies around him, but he’d always been keenly interested in their basic physical well-being. Was he so angry at Fencer that he wanted to leave her in pain?
Having paused midway through withdrawing something from his haversack, Lex gave Cozy a flat look. “Can you control precisely what injuries your magic repairs?”
Cozy’s brow furrowed, not sure what to make of the question. “What?”
“Does your healing magic allow for you to selectively restore certain injuries and leave others alone?”
“No,” she conceded, still not sure what he was asking. “I mean, it seems to always fix the worst injuries first, but I’m pretty sure that they all get at least a little better. The magic knows what to do without me telling it.”
“And it can neither regrow nor reattach severed body parts, can it?”
Confusion clouded Cozy’s features. “Severed body parts? What-” Her question was cut off as Lex telekinetically lifted Fencer’s horn, banishing the black crystals from it with a thought. Suddenly she knew exactly what he was talking about. “Oh!”
Lex nodded. “If you healed her, her horn would scab over, ruining any chance the doctors would have of reattaching her horn.”
For the first time since they’d returned, Fencer spoke up. “Y-you’re going to put my horn back?” Her voice almost made Cozy wince, the desperate hope she heard there further driving home her certainty that this wasn’t the same person who had threatened to shove a broken piece of wood through her husband’s throat.
Lex didn’t seem to be similarly moved, giving Fencer a look of disgust. “I don’t believe in killing ponies, nor mutilating them. If the doctors can save your horn, then I’ll have them do it. But don’t think for an instant that means you’re going to be shown any leniency for what you’ve done.” He then turned back to what he was doing, drawing a yellow gemstone from his haversack. Holding it in his hoof, he murmured the words necessary to draw forth the spell contained within it. A moment later the gemstone crumbled to dust, even as a horizontal disk of force three feet in diameter sprang into existence in front of him.
Storing spells inside gemstones was one of the very first compensatory methods he had come up with when he’d initially invented his thaumaturgical spellcasting. It had seemed self-evident that gemstones could be utilized to store magical energy; the Elements of Harmony and the Crystal Heart made that extremely obvious, or so he’d thought at the time. However, although it hadn’t been very difficult to study gemstones to the point of making his theory into a reality – much to his mother’s delight, since being a lapidary was her special talent – the practical applications had left much to be desired.
Since he hadn’t been able to replenish his magic except on solstices or equinoxes, Lex had hoped that imbuing gemstones with magic would let him sidestep that particular limitation. That by using a gemstone to contain a spell, it would act as an amplifier – which he’d theorized was what the Elements and the Crystal Heart were – and so let him call upon the stored magic at will, over and over again without limit. The results of his experiments, however, had been disappointing.
While he could cast a spell into a gem, once invoked the gem would release that single casting, and that was it. If he wanted the gem to release multiple castings, then he had to imbue it with multiple castings first. Rather than acting as an amplifier, the gem was nothing more than a container, offering no greater output than what he’d put into it and so not allowing him to use his new magic any more frequently than he could before. That releasing the stored magic caused the gem to corrode into dust, denying him the ability to even use it again later, was simply an insult on top of the metaphorical injury (as was his mother confirming that the dust was little more than rather coarse sand, and as such utterly worthless).
With little to show for his work, Lex had turned to other ways of compensating for his thaumaturgy’s shortcomings. Still, the use of spell-embedded gemstones hadn’t been entirely fruitless. As they essentially allowed him to externalize his prepared spells, he’d taken to treating them as a sort of auxiliary reserve for spells with particularly specialized applications. A spell to prevent a corpse from rotting wasn’t one that he’d bother to prepare under most circumstances, but could conceivably be required under a particularly unusual confluence of events. By storing such a spell in a gem, he could have it on hoof when necessary without bothering to prepare it directly. As such, his entire reserve of spell-imbued gemstones were filled with spells of limited utility, such as the load-bearing disk he’d just conjured. It was useless in a fight, to be sure, but very valuable when needing to carry an unconscious pony.
Of course, he had no intention of explaining any of that to Cozy. “We’ll transport your husband on this. You stay next to him and make sure that he doesn’t slip off.” Even as he spoke, he grabbed Pillowcase with his telekinesis, straining as he struggled to lift the unconscious pony’s body onto the floating force-disk. It took some effort, but he managed to get the crystal stallion onto the apparatus, though his hooves dangled over the edge in what looked like a rather uncomfortable position. Cozy immediately moved to his side, trying to arrange him in a more comfortable-looking state.
Ignoring her, Lex returned his gaze to Fencer. “In the meantime, you’ll tell me everything you know about that blockade you mentioned before.”
Lex was seething by the time they reached the shelter.
It had taken them only a few minutes to exit the crate-filled warehouse, thanks to his having mapped a large portion of the place during his initial exploration. More fortuitously, they hadn’t been attacked by ghouls on their way out, either because the creatures had learned to keep their distance or because they’d already defeated them all. With Pillowcase being carried behind him by the disk of force, Cozy right by her husband’s side, and Fencer limping along at the end of her chain, Lex hadn’t hesitated in making straight for the shelter once they’d emerged into the daylight.
Their progress had been slower than either he or Cozy had been happy with, however. With her legs chained together and her left foreleg injured, Fencer had kept them from moving at a quick pace. Although he’d threatened to drag her if she didn’t move as fast as she could – a threat that he would have had no problem carrying out, though using his telekinesis to drag an adult mare would have required him to use a physically-taxing surge of magic, and probably wouldn’t have lasted very long anyway – he hadn’t needed to go that far. That was primarily due to the other pony they were transporting, as Cozy had been keeping a hoof on Pillow to make sure he didn’t fall from the disk carrying him. Worse, the disk itself would follow Lex at a speed no faster than a brisk walk; if Lex exceeded that pace, it began to fall behind, and he knew that if he got too far from it the spell would automatically terminate, leaving them with no easy way of transporting the unconscious stallion.
Forced to move at what felt like a crawl, Lex had instead focused on the only other useful activity that could be done in the meantime: interrogating Fencer. Her remark about a “blockade” around Vanhoover had caught his ear before, and it hadn’t taken much prompting to make her talk about it again. What she’d told him had made his blood boil.
“They’re not letting survivors leave?!” he’d raged, his anger covering up his horror at what she was telling him. “What do you mean they’re not letting survivors leave?!”
“Exactly what I said,” Fencer had replied, her ears folded and her eyes downcast. “Whenever anypony gets to the edge of town, the ponies there start throwing sticks and rocks to make us go back. They say they’re worried about us spreading the disease that turns ponies into those undead monsters.”
That had been the point where Lex had completely blown up. “That’s utterly preposterous! Even if they thought that the ghoul-borne illness was communicable between living ponies – and it’s quite clearly not, given that Drafty was in close contact with her friends for days and none of them became sick – then the proper response would be to set up a quarantine area outside of the city to isolate and treat the infected ponies instead of forcing them back into Vanhoover! Making them stay in this wreck of a city not only offers them no support system, it’s completely monstrous!” He’d stopped ranting then, but only to turn a suspicious gaze on Fencer. Despite her newfound passivity, he couldn’t bring himself to rule out that this insane story was some new scheme of hers. “If you’re lying to me…”
“She’s not lying.”
Lex had very nearly come to a complete halt at that, and would have if it wasn’t imperative to get Pillowcase back as quickly as they could. “You knew about this?!”
Cozy’s face had been grim as she’d replied. “We tried to get out of town. Who wouldn’t, when Vanhoover was like this? But when we got close to the city limits we were forced back in, just like she said.”
“Why didn’t you TELL ME THIS BEFORE?!” He couldn’t help but shout the words, overcome with fury. That something so horrific was happening was bad enough, but the very idea that this hadn’t been brought to his attention immediately was beyond unacceptable.
“We didn’t have a chance!” Cozy had protested…feebly, to Lex’s mind. “We met you only to be attacked on our way to the shelter, attacked again when we finally got there, and then attacked a third time later that night! There wasn’t exactly time to sit down and go over everything!”
“Except for this…criminal and her gang accosting us this morning, we’ve had five days without a disturbance! You or any of your friends could have said something at any time!”
“That’s not fair! We’ve been exhausted and stressed and trying to deal with everything that’s happened!” By that point Cozy had been yelling too. “Yes! You’re right! It should have occurred to us to tell you why we couldn’t get out of town! But we’ve just spent the last few weeks struggling to survive only to then have you show up and whisk us off into some even more deadly situations, and that’s not even getting into worrying about those other ponies that you were trying to cure or my husband or all of the other stuff going on, so maybe, just maybe, we’re not at our best right now!”
Anypony else would have been chastised by Cozy’s rebuke, but it only angered Lex more. He hadn’t had a chance to direct anymore of his wrath at Cozy, however, as Pillowcase – perhaps due to his wife’s raised voice – gave a soft groan and twitched slightly, instantly earning all of Cozy’s attention. Unable to unleash more of his vitriol at her while she tended to the injured pony in their midst, Lex had been forced to swallow his venom, instead giving another harsh yank on Fencer’s chain as he led them back to the shelter.
Lex flung the door to their warehouse open with enough force that the wood creaked with the strain. The sound apparently carried, because a moment later Sonata came running up to greet them. “You’re back! Did you-, whoa!” She skidded to a stop, eyes wide as she took in Fencer’s appearance. Then they slid over to the unconscious pony on the floating thingy that Cozy was tending to. “What hap-”
“Not now, Sonata.” Lex marched right past her as he spoke, his voice containing as much warmth as a glacier.
“But-”
“I said not now!”
The sudden flash of rage in his voice was enough to stop her in her tracks, her eyes widening in alarm. Being in a foul mood was normal for him, but right now he sounded seriously ticked off! Biting her lip, she followed him as he led the others towards the shelter proper. Once there, he didn’t even slow down as he yanked the door open and strode inside. “Doctors!” he bellowed. “Get over here and treat these ponies RIGHT NOW!”
For a moment, he was met with dead silence as everypony stopped what they were doing to stare at him in shock. Luckily, Sonata had informed the medical ponies that something like this might happen, and after their initial moment of surprise they sprang into action. Four of them ran over with a makeshift stretcher and quickly loaded Pillowcase onto it, Cozy following them as they quickly carted him off to the medical unit. Two other doctors – one of them House Call – approached Fencer. As they did so, the chains binding her fell away to nothing even as Lex lifted her severed horn in his telekinetic grasp. “Reattach this,” he ordered them curtly. Without waiting for a reply, he turned to Severance. “Keep watching over her. If she tries anything aggressive, or attempts to escape, incapacitate her.”
“S-Sir, I have to protest!” House Call’s voice wavered, but he kept speaking. “Treating a patient while she has a weapon hovering overhead, threatening to cut her down at any moment is-”
“This mare is a threat to you, your other patient, and everypony here!” snarled Lex. “I will not have her left unguarded! Now DO AS I TELL YOU!” The barely-controlled animosity in his voice, along with how his eyes had started to glow again, was enough to make House Call turn pale, nodding as he ushered Fencer towards the medical area.
Lex turned his gaze back towards the other ponies. “C. Shells!” he barked.
“I’m here.” The mare in question stepped forward, a look of forced calm on her face. It was the sort of expression that someone made when they were facing a wild animal and trying desperately not to provoke it.
“I want you and your crew to construct a cage.”
Her only reaction was to furrow her brow and frown. “A cage?”
Lex nodded. “One large enough to contain that…mare, after they get through treating her. Make sure that it’s sturdy, and that the locking mechanism can’t be undone with telekin-”
“Hold on!”
The crowd parted in response to the new voice coming from within their midst, ponies quickly scrambling out of the way so as not to be between Lex and whoever had just stuck their head in the proverbial lion’s mouth. A moment later, a pegasus stallion – Lex recognized him as one of the ponies from Fencer’s group. What had that fat little earth pony called him? Turbo, that’s right. – stepped forward, licking his lips nervously as he stepped forward.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he started, forcing steel into his voice, “but you are not putting her in a cage like she’s some kind of animal!”
Lex slowly turned his head to regard Turbo, and for a long moment he just stared at him. The other stallion gulped, but didn’t back down. Finally, Lex spoke. “Criminal,” he hissed softly. “I’m putting her in a cage like she’s some kind of criminal. Because she is.” There was a dangerous tone in his voice, as though daring the other stallion to disagree with him.
Turbo heard it, but he refused to let this go. After everything they’d been through together, he was NOT going to let this pony who looked like he vacationed in Tartarus punish, completely out of the blue, the pony that had been the rock that kept their group together! “You whisk Fencer away without telling any of us that you’re taking her, then you bring her back in chains, with her horn chopped off, and looking like you…I don’t even know what you did to her but it looks bad, and you’re telling us that she did something wrong?” He firmed up his stance, flaring his wings out. “No. I might not be a unicorn, but even I know dark magic when I see it, and if you think I’m going to let some bad copy of one of Equestria’s worst villains hurt her anymore, you’ve got anoth-”
His speech ended abruptly as a pillow flew through the air and whomped him in the face. An angry female voice followed it. “You can’t talk to him like that!” Once again the crowd parted, revealing an upset-looking Drafty, who marched forward until she was right in Turbo’s face, flaring her wings out to match his angry posture. “Lex has saved all of our lives several times over, and he’s never once done anything worse to us than raise his voice! If he says your mare is a criminal, then she’s a criminal, and he’s giving her what she deserves!”
Turbo’s face darkened, and everypony fell silent as the tension thickened, knowing that this wouldn’t end with another pillow fight. The rest of Fencer’s group had slowly separated themselves from the others, moving to one side of the room. Lex simply narrowed his eyes, apparently willing to let the confrontation play itself out.
“Alright, time out!”
Heedless of the atmosphere, Sonata marched up and inserted herself between Drafty and Turbo. Standing on her hind legs, she placed a hoof on each of them and shoved them apart. “Both of you, cool off!” She looked around, putting on her best no-nonsense expression. “Right now Fencer and Cozy’s husband are both hurt, so can we at least agree that getting into a big fight probably won’t help the doctors fix them?” She gave a pointed look at Turbo, who made a sour expression but reluctantly nodded, and then turned her gaze on Drafty, getting the same response. “Okay! Now, everyone take a breath and calm down. We’ll get this sorted out, so try not to kill each other in the meantime.” She sent exaggerated looks towards the two ponies on either side of her, both of whom were regarding her sourly. But after a pregnant pause, Drafty muttered something and turned away. A second later, Turbo did the same, going over to the rest of his group.
Falling back onto all fours, Sonata sighed, before turning to face Lex. “We totes need to talk.”
Turbo ignored the nurse that was blocking his path, nimbly slipping past her and darting into the medical section of the shelter. Since the entire place was one large room, the only barriers between the general area that everypony was living in and the doctors’ place of work was a large white sheet hanging from several ceiling fixtures. Behind it was the makeshift field hospital, one corner containing the half-dozen cots where he and his friends had been examined – in small groups, due to the limited space – a few hours ago.
Those cots were empty now. Instead, all of the activity was clustered around the opposite corner of the room. It had another large sheet cordoning it off from the wider medical area, but at the moment it was pinned back to allow the attending ponies to come and go. Standing up on his hind legs, Turbo could see that they were moving around the crystal stallion that Lex had brought in, and he caught snatches of medical jargon that didn’t mean much to him individually, but collectively painted a very grim picture. But he was less concerned about that than he was the other pony that had been brought in here a few moments ago.
“Sir! You need to leave right now!” The nurse he’d dodged was back again, a rather pretty pegasus mare with a soft yellow coat and a mane and tail of chestnut brown. He vaguely noted that her cutie mark was a pair of crossed band-aids. But while he normally would have been interested in chatting her up, at the moment he barely heard her, instead looking around until he caught a hint of a vermillion hoof under another sheeted-off section nearby. There!
The nurse put a hoof on his chest and tried to push him back, but Turbo swatted it aside as he moved around her. Squawking with indignation, she interposed herself in his path. Refusing to be denied, Turbo simply spread his wings and launched himself over her, causing a large breeze that ruffled the entire medical area as he rushed towards where Fencer was. He’d almost reached it when a light-blue unicorn stallion came out, investigating the sudden breeze. Although he’d exchanged his lab coat for a set of scrubs, Turbo recognized him as the stallion that Lex had turned Fencer over to. Now with even more confirmation, he made a beeline for the area the medical pony had emerged from.
Seeing Turbo approaching him, the doctor stepped forward, holding a hoof out. “Whoa whoa! You need to stop!”
Turbo grit his teeth as he landed, the continuous attempts to bar his wear beginning to grate on his nerves. He could already hear the annoying nurse coming up from behind him, but he ignored her as he fixed the other stallion with a fierce look. “Get out of my way.” His voice was steady, but with an undercurrent that made the unspoken threat clear: move or be moved.
The unicorn shook his head. “Listen to me. Miss Fencer is being prepped for surgery. We’re already working under less-than-ideal conditions for this sort of procedure; if you go in there now we’ll need to decontaminate the area again, and the longer we have to wait the less likelihood of her horn reattachment being successful.” He punctuated his statement with a pointed look, not harsh but not yielding either.
Turbo froze at that, and a second later the tension drained out of him. For a moment, he sagged in place, his wings and ears drooping as his head lowered. But then he rallied, letting out a sigh before looking the doctor in the eye. “Is there any way I can talk to her first?”
This time it was the nurse that piped up. “Sir, I know you’re worried about your friend, but you’re going to need to wait outside. Doctor House Call is one of our best surgeons, so your friend will be in excellent hooves. I’m sure that as soon as he’s done-”
“I can’t-” Turbo cut himself off, fighting to retain control of himself. Getting angry at the ponies that were trying to help Fencer wouldn’t accomplish anything. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down. “Please, I just want to talk to her for a minute. I-I want to let her know that it’s going to be okay, that we’ll protect her from that…” he trailed off, catching himself before he could start badmouthing Lex, not sure how much the doctors would appreciate it. “That we’re all here for her.” He paused to look at the nurse, who was clearly sympathetic but unmoved, and instead turned to focus on the doctor, who looked pensive. “Please. I just need a minute.”
House Call hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Alright.”
“Doctor!” uttered the nurse, clearly disagreeing with his decision.
“Getting him washed up and into some scrubs. If we give him the whole set, mask and hairnet and everything, it should be alright.”
Turbo let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
House Call nodded, giving him a small smile, before the nurse ushered him away to get him ready. A few minutes later, he was standing in the small enclosure that was the operating theater. Fencer was lying under a blanket on a table, and there was another pony behind her, their form completely hidden under their own set of scrubs, fiddling with some medical device that Turbo didn’t recognize. More upsetting was the scythe hovering just behind Fencer, remaining upright of its own accord, its blade jutting out over her as though poised to sweep down and reap her life at any second. For a moment, Turbo entertained the thought of grabbing the thing and flinging it away, but he couldn’t shake the idea that any such attempt would end with it simply cutting him to ribbons. Instead, he forced himself to ignore it and crept over to where Fencer was laying.
Her eyes were closed, but she cracked them open as he approached her. “Turbo? That you?”
Internally, he winced. The Fencer that he’d known had epitomized the phrase “cool beauty.” The only emotions he’d ever seen from her before now had either been stoic disinterest or dark glee. Her unflappable character had been a source of strength for all of them, since no matter what happened – whether it was another hideout being overrun or Piggy going on about his own greatness for the umpteenth time – she had never lost her composure. The way she’d looked when Lex had brought her back in chains, her spirit quite clearly broken, had been horrifying to witness. Even hearing her now, her voice filled with uncertainty, sent a pain through his heart. But he forced it down, making himself smile even though he was wearing a mask. “Yeah. What gave me away?” he asked lightly, trying to make it sound like they were just having a casual conversation.
The corners of Fencer’s lips turned up slightly, and she closed her eyes as though doing so had caused her great strain. “Heard you ranting a couple minutes ago,” she murmured.
“We’ve already prepped her for anesthesia,” came a female voice, causing Turbo to look up at the only other pony in the room. “She’s pretty groggy right now. She may not remember this later.”
Turbo considered that for a moment, then looked back at Fencer. For a moment he wondered if he was making a mistake, that he shouldn’t tell her any of this when she might not even remember it later on, but then she opened her eyes and looked at him again, and he knew he had to try anyway. “Listen,” he started, then paused, concerned about who could hear him. He glanced at the other pony, then at the scythe still floating above them, before leaning closer to her and whispering. “We’re not going to let that monster stick you in a cage, do you understand? I’ve been talking to everypony else…Granola Bar, Slip ‘n’ Slide, Funshine, even Piggy agrees. As soon as the doctors patch you up, we’re getting you out of here, no matter what.”
“No,” she moaned, and her voice sounded pained. “We all…we did those things, all those terrible things…”
“We did what we had to do,” insisted Turbo softly. “You taught us that. We did what we needed to do to survive.” His voice was calm, but inside he could feel guilt twisting his stomach into knots. Just recently that crystal mare had come through, begging them for information about her husband. Turbo had recognized the description of the crystal stallion they’d roughed up, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to admit to it, having felt ashamed at the time. Now, however, the way he’d acted felt like he’d betrayed the strength Fencer had lent them. She taught us how to survive, to do what was necessary even when it was hard, and we repaid her by acting like it was our dirty little secret. “Don’t give up, okay? We’re not giving up on you, so you can’t give up either.”
But Fencer didn’t seem to hear him, her eyes looking around vacantly. “Knew it was wrong but I just…so angry. I was so angry it was all…it was so bad that forgot how angry I was. You know? I wanted to punish someone for it all.” Her face crumpled at that, a sob escaping her lips as her eyes found Turbo’s again, filling with tears as she looked at him. “I forgot the gate,” she admitted, her voice utterly heartbroken. “I made the biggest fence I could that I didn’t realize I’d trapped myself inside so now it’s too late and I can’t get out! I f-forgot the gate!” She was weeping heavily now, and shifted as though trying to get up. The spectacle was enough that Turbo couldn’t help but stare, shocked into speechlessness.
Fortunately, the medical pony – who had been pretending not to hear anything up until now – came back over and gently pressed Fencer down. “Easy, honey. You need to relax, okay?” Ignoring the whimper she received in reply, she looked over at Turbo. “We have to put her under now, sir. You need to leave.”
“Y-yeah…” Stumbling, Turbo moved back, half of him wanting to run away even as the other half insisted he stay with Fencer in her hour of need. He barely noticed as the nurse from before suddenly appeared at his side and escorted him out, only dimly registering that the blue unicorn stallion was passing by him, heading in to the operating theater where Fencer was.
It felt like a hundred years later when the nurse sat him down on one of the cots, giving him a worried look. “Are you alright?”
Several seconds went by before he came back to himself, looking up at her dazedly. “…what?”
“Are you alright? You’re shaking.”
He nodded, taking several deep breaths. Slowly, he felt himself start to calm down. “I’m fine.”
The nurse gave him a skeptical look, but didn’t push the issue. “Well, we’re going to need you to wait outside. Your friend’s procedure is going to take several hours, and I need to be ready if I’m called in to assist.” She put a hoof on his shoulder, giving him a comforting smile. “But hopefully that won’t be necessary. I heard the doctor say that the cut looked very clean, so there shouldn’t be a problem reattaching the veins and arteries.”
Turbo nodded again, slowly climbing to his hooves. “Thanks. I, um…” He wasn’t sure what to say, but paused as he saw another pony dart from the cluster surrounding the crystal stallion. Rushing as fast as he could, the medical pony reached a large box that was lined up against the back wall and flung it open, rooting around through it to grab a bag filled with some fluid before rushing back towards the gaggle of ponies. “…is he going to be okay? That other pony Lex brought back?” For some reason the fact that he hadn’t even thought to ask that before now bothered him.
The nurse’s face darkened. “It’s too early to tell right now. If the doctors can get him stabilized, I’ll be sure to let you know. Now, I really need you to step back outsi-”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry.” He turned and started walking back towards the large sheet that separated the medical area from the rest of the shelter, only to pause halfway. Turning to look at the nurse again, he called out to her. “What did you mean ‘if’?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said ‘if’ the doctors can get him stabilized. He’s not stable now?” He knew it was a foolish question, with all of the activity surrounding the crystal stallion, but he felt compelled to ask it anyway.
The nurse pursed her lips, looking back at where the doctors were frantically working. Turbo followed her gaze, and noticed something that he’d missed before: the crystal mare that had begged him for information was there too, standing off to the side and watching what was happening with an anguished look on her face. He was still looking at her when the nurse spoke again.
“I mean, really! After everything Lex has done for us, after risking his life to save ours again and again and again, now some pony-come-lately – who wasn’t here for any of it! – is getting in his face and questioning his judgment?!”
“I get it. Really, I do,” started Cloudbank, filling her voice with a calm that she didn’t feel. “But try to think about this from his point of view. All he knows is that Lex is a scary-looking unicorn with powerful magic that went off with his friend for a little while and then came back with her injured and scared. It’s understandable that he’d get a little hot under the collar.” Especially at that part about her being thrown in a cage. She knew better than to say that last part out loud, though. Ever since whatshisname’s squabble with Lex, Drafty had been angrier than Cloudbank had ever seen her, and it was upsetting to watch…and not just because she didn’t like the sight of her girlfriend being so agitated.
“No!” snapped Drafty, rounding on Cloudbank with a frown. “It’s not understandable! He didn’t know anything about what happened, and yet he immediately acted like Lex was in the wrong!”
“That’s because Lex didn’t explain what happened.”
“He didn’t have a chance! He hadn’t finished speaking when that, that…thug started giving him a hard time. And after Lex took them in, too!” Although nopony had said anything when the newcomers had been brought in a few hours ago, word had quietly gotten around about how they’d tried to attack the shelter, and how Lex had casually defeated them. Everypony had gotten a chuckle out of it, but otherwise had overlooked the transgression, being willing to give the new ponies the benefit of the doubt. The only reason we found out about it at all was because the other ponies that were there couldn’t resist gossiping, Drafty knew. Lex was willing to give them all a second chance instead of prejudicing everypony here about what they’d done. He’s so NOBLE!
“That may be so,” came Cloudbank’s voice, “but Lex should have known to lead with his reasons instead of just declaring-”
“I can’t believe you!” Drafty rounded on the other mare, giving her an upset look. “You’re saying this was Lex’s fault?! That other stallion is the one who’s in the wrong!”
For some reason, Cloudbank suddenly remembered how Drafty had been willing to lay down her life to save Lex’s during the battle on the waterfront. The memory made her let out a slow breath. Calm down, she told herself. For all you know, she’d be this upset if someone badmouthed you instead of Lex. Maybe even more upset. Yet somehow the thought wasn’t convincing. “All I’m saying,” she made herself speak slowly, “is that mistakes were made on both sides.”
Drafty was not appeased. “Both sides my flank!” She glared at Cloudbank, her anger having found a new target. “What is it with you? You’ve been like this ever since we met Lex, even though he’s done more for you than anypony else!”
Cloudbank bristled at that. “Excuse me?”
“He picked you for the most important part of that battle! You got to wield Severance!”
Somehow the fact that Drafty knew the scythe’s name only upset Cloudbank more. “He didn’t pick me, I volunteered! And that scythe didn’t do a thing to stop me when that squid monster made me stab you!”
“Neither of which were Lex’s fault!” retorted Drafty hotly. “And besides, he showed you how to use that new magic so that you could save me! You should be his biggest supporter!”
“He doesn’t need me to do that!” snapped Cloudbank before she could stop herself, thoroughly sick and tired of hearing Drafty talk about how great Lex was. “He’s already got you being his own personal cheerleader! You might as well go put on a pleated skirt and some pompoms to make it official!”
Drafty opened her mouth, then closed it again, giving her a withering look. “You can go straight to Tartarus, Cloudbank.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned and stalked off.
Cloudbank took a half-step after Drafty, ready to call out to her, only to realize she had no idea what to say. Great, just great, she thought bitterly. We haven’t even gone on our first official date yet and we’re already fighting. Turning around, she slunk away to find a good place to go and sulk.
“Trouble in paradise?”
Drafty glanced over at the question, seeing Nosey sitting a few feet away. “…you heard?”
Nosey gave a helpless shrug in response. “This place is all one big room. Even with everypony else talking, it’s hard not to overhear what other people are saying.”
Drafty snorted, not liking that her and Cloudy’s business was public knowledge, but knowing that there wasn’t any helping it. “Must be a dream come true for a reporter, huh?”
“Not really,” answered Nosey lightly. “I mean, maybe it would be under different circumstances, but right now? It’s pretty much all gossip, and that’s not what an ace reporter writes about.”
“Oh.” Drafty trailed off at that, and for a moment the two were silent, Nosey scribbling on a notepad and Drafty staring at the ground. Finally, after what felt like an interminably long sixty seconds, she glanced over at Nosey. “So…any good gossip?”
“You mean besides you and Cloudbank fighting?” smirked Nosey. Drafty gave her a wry smile, and Nosey chuckled, flipping a few pages in her notepad. “Well, the big one is that C. Shells and one of her crewmembers, a pegasus stallion named Ocean Spray, are officially together. They’re trying to keep it on the down-low, but the rest of her crew knows them too well to be fooled. Let’s see here.” She flipped another page. “One of the ponies that Lex brought in, a stallion named Piggy Bank, tried to setup an impromptu food-eating contest. Nopony took him up on it, so he just stuffed his face and declared himself the winner.”
“Well, there’s a lot of stuff about what’s going on right now, but besides that, there’s, um…”
Trailing off, Nosey glanced at Drafty with an evaluating look, causing the other mare to blink. “What?”
Nosey licked her lips. “Don’t freak out over this, okay?”
Drafty shook her head in confusion. “Freak out over what? Are people saying something about me?”
“No, no. Not about you. It’s just…” She flipped through her notes again, then sighed. “There’s a betting pool going on about Lex and Sonata.”
“A…a betting pool? About those two?” Drafty could only imagine, from the look that Nosey was giving her, that her face reflected how completely baffled she was. “I don’t understand. What are they betting on?”
“Anything. Everything. Apparently one of the nurses started it when she bet a friend, in a bout of nervousness before we went out to battle, that if they lived through this Lex and Sonata would get married the very next day. When that didn’t happen, she went double-or-nothing that they’d at least announce an engagement. Some of the doctors caught wind of that and got in on it, and things spiraled from there. Now there are all sorts of wagers going on. There’s one that the only reason they’re together is because he got her to drink a love potion, another that he’s just stringing her along so he can take advantage of her magic, that sort of thing.”
“That’s awful!” Drafty glared at Nosey, her anger flaring. “Those are terrible things to say about the pony who saved us all! Not to mention dumb! There’s no way those bets will ever be settled!”
Nosey flipped her notebook closed, giving Drafty a level look as she put it away. “I know that, and everypony else knows that too. The ponies placing these bets aren’t being serious, and I’m pretty sure they don’t actually think any of those things. They’re just restless and nervous and those two are a mystery, is all. It’s just a way for them to talk about them.”
Drafty looked at the ground, giving a halfhearted grunt. She knew that Nosey was almost certainly correct, but it still irritated her. “I guess. I just…I really wish they’d say nicer things about him, after everything he’s done.”
Nosey tilted her head a little. “That really bothers you, doesn’t it?” Of course, the answer to that was obvious, but she knew that leading questions like that were a great way to get someone talking.
She was proven right a second later when Drafty nodded, raising her head to look her in the eye again. “Yeah! I mean, I get it. He’s not the easiest pony to talk to, but so what? His actions speak a lot louder than his words.” She paused for a long moment, and Nosey remained silent, sure that there was more to come. After a long moment, Drafty continued. “When I got sick, after one of those undead ponies bit me, I was scared. Like really, really scared. I tried to put on a brave face for Cloudy and the others, but…I kept feeling worse, and we were low on food and had no medicine.” She paused to look over at the medical area then, a mixture of worry and guilt crossing her face. “…and I was sure I was going to die.”
“That must have been terrible.”
“Yeah.” Drafty’s voice was soft as she looked away, remembering those days when she’d been wracked with pain and fear. “And then, all of a sudden, I woke up one day and I wasn’t sick anymore. I felt better than I had in days, and everypony told me that this stallion showed up out of nowhere and used some magic no one had ever heard of to cure me. He didn’t even ask for anything, he just…showed up here, in the worst place in all of Equestria, and saved me.” She returned her gaze to Nosey then, and the look on her face was one of absolute conviction. “He brought us, brought me, a miracle, when we needed it the most and expected it least. And that was just the beginning.”
“For some of us, it began before that,” added Nosey, a small smile on her face as she thought of her forthcoming bestseller. This was at least one sale that was already guaranteed!
Drafty smirked. “Yeah.” She looked over at where Lex had gone out into the wider warehouse with Sonata. “He does all of that for us, he pushes himself so hard and gets hurt and never expects so much as a thank you…and we still have ponies talking badly about him because he doesn’t make small talk.” She finished her last sentence in a disgusted tone of voice.
Wow. She’s got it bad, Nosey knew. She’s come across ponies who were stricken with hero-worship before, usually for the princesses after they’d beaten some villain, but this was easily the worst case she’s ever seen. It needed to be nipped in the bud, before it got out of hoof; the last thing Lex needed was some starry-eyed little filly following him around. Luckily, the solution was obvious: turn Drafty’s attention back to Cloudbank. And Nosey knew just how to do that, thanks to years of building up her mad interviewing skills. “I completely agree.”
Drafty gave her a grateful look. “I thought you might.”
“Yeah, but here’s the thing though. I don’t think you’re going to change anypony’s mind by yelling at them.” Nosey made sure to deliver the rebuke as softly as she could, keeping a gentle smile on her face.
Drafty lost her smile instantly, and her expression wavered between anger and guilt. “I wasn’t wrong!” she snapped, and Nosey began to prepare herself for having to talk her down. But a moment later guilt won out, and Drafty hung her head again. “…but I guess I was pretty awful to Cloudy, wasn’t I?”
“Yeah, you were,” answered Nosey, her tone lightly teasing to take some of the sting out of it. “But I know a secret that can help you fix things with her.”
Drafty couldn’t help but look up, intrigued despite herself. “Oh yeah?”
Nosey nodded. “You know Sonata and I are close, right? Well, she told me a secret about how she and Lex got together, and I bet it can work for you and Cloudbank too.” Of course, it wasn’t really a secret, since Sonata had apparently been instructed to let everypony know, which meant that Nosey had no trouble letting this little tidbit of information out since she wasn’t really breaking her friend’s trust.
“Tell me.”
“She told me that she and Lex hit quite a few rough patches at the beginning of their relationship, and whenever things got really bad, a love goddess appeared to help her. Apparently, she’ll help anyone who calls out to her with relationship troubles. So all you have to do is ask for her help on patching things up with Cloudbank.”
A doubtful look crossed Drafty’s face. “A love goddess? You mean like Lashtada?”
“I guess,” shrugged Nosey.
“And she’ll help anypony who calls on her?” That part didn’t fit with what she knew. Cozy had been very clear that she’d become a priestess of Lashtada by learning at Princess Cadance’s hooves, and even Cloudy had been instructed by Lex on how to petition "The Night Mare" for magic. But still…if it had worked for Sonata with winning Lex’s heart… “What’s her name?”
Nosey smiled, very pleased with herself. With one stroke, she’d not only kept Drafty from being too focused on Lex, but also helped fix her relationship with Cloudbank. It was a win all around! And to think that all those ponies who’d complained about her over the years had actually suggested that she was a nuisance. This would show them!
“Her name is Kara, and I think she’s just who you need.”
Sonata glanced at Lex out of her peripheral vision as she led him away from the shelter, heading toward a distant corner of the warehouse.
He either didn’t notice her glance, or was ignoring her. It was hard to tell, given the level of anger that was pouring off of him. His eyes were blazing green and purple, but that happened whenever he was upset. What concerned her more was the way he kept glaring forward unrelentingly, as though completely lost in his wrathful brooding. His every breath was heavy, each step he took struck the ground sharply, and she was sure that if she listened carefully she’d be able to hear the sound of his teeth grinding. Scale of one to ten, I’d say this is an eight on the Lex Legis Rage-O-Meter, she decided.
Finally getting far enough away from the shelter that she felt sure that they’d have some degree of privacy, she stopped and turned to face him. His eyes made contact with hers then, and she didn’t miss the way he tensed, knowing he was expecting her to criticize him. But the last time she’d dragged him away for one of these talks – back when he’d refused to let Cozy heal him after he’d gotten injured so badly – berating him had only backfired. It was just like when we broke up, she knew. Kara even helped me realize that getting up in his face didn’t work, and I forgot and did it anyway. She was determined not to make that same mistake again. Instead, she kept her expression soft and her voice gentle as she spoke. “What happened?” A flicker of surprise crossed his face, and Sonata mentally grinned to herself, knowing that she’d avoided starting a fight. At least for the moment.
Lex recovered his ill-humor an instant later, however. “I ordered that a dangerous criminal be kept in confinement once her injuries were treated, is what happened.” His voice was still defensive, expecting his judgment to be challenged. “And it was the right thing to-”
“That’s, like, not what I meant,” she interrupted, not wanting to let him get caught up in some rant about why his way was the right way. Right now she wanted to focus on other things. “What happened with Fencer after you guys left? Why was her horn cut off?”
He bristled, hearing an accusation in her questions. “That was entirely due to her own actions! She could have spared herself that at any time if she’d heeded my warnings!”
Eight and a half, she decided, and that meant that a different approach was called for. Instead of talking, she stepped closer and nuzzled him.
Again, his anger was momentarily replaced by surprise. “What are you doing?”
She looked him directly in the eyes, a small smile on her face. “It’s me, here. I know you did the right thing. You’re Lex Legis. You always do the right thing.”
For a moment his expression didn’t change, as though he was trying to figure out how to react to her statement of unconditional faith in him. An instant later his ears folded back, and he broke eye contact, looking almost embarrassed by what she’d said. More encouragingly, his eyes changed back to their normal color, the sight of which made Sonata let out a relieved sigh in the privacy of her thoughts. “Tell me what happened,” she urged again.
“…alright,” he muttered. Straightening up, he began to tell her what she wanted to know. For long minutes he spoke, Sonata not interrupting as he told her everything from when they’d left to go search for Pillowcase until they had just returned.
By the time he was finished, Sonata’s eyes were wide. “So your horn grows back? That’s, like, totes amazing! Does the rest of you do that too?”
Lex snorted. “If it did, then I wouldn’t require healing magic or medical treatment when I’m injured.”
“Oh yeah,” blinked Sonata in understanding. Given how often he’d gotten himself hurt, it made sense that he didn’t have any sort of fixing-himself powers. Shaking that thought away, she moved onto the next revelation. “And there’s a bunch of ponies surrounding Vanhoover?”
Lex’s features darkened instantly. Just the thought of other ponies turning on their neighbors the way Fencer had was enough to upset him. “Apparently so.”
Sonata frowned in thought. Lex had told her what Fencer and Cozy had said, but something seemed weird about the whole idea. “Something seems weird about that whole idea,” she said after a moment’s thought.
“Calling it ‘weird’ is a gross understatement. If what those mares said is accurate, then whoever’s organizing this blockade is either hopelessly inept or utterly corrupt.” He didn’t mention that he was growing more and more certain that it was the latter. It was the only explanation that made any kind of sense.
Leaving aside that a quarantine would be far more effective if it didn’t send potentially-infected ponies back into a danger zone, there were too many operational faults in such a haphazard operation for it to be taken seriously. The complete and utter lack of maritime enforcement, for example. Or the fact that there hadn’t been any pegasus patrols – a necessity when there were still pegasi in the city – that he’d seen every time he’d gone outside. More than that, Fencer had described the containment effort as simply having ponies throw things at anyone trying to leave the city, and Cozy had confirmed her account. But that was the least efficient manner of keeping a population contained; while pegasi might be necessary to deal with pegasi, a fence or other barrier was still the optimal way to imprison those ponies that couldn’t fly. Having ponies stand watch or otherwise patrol a city was just asking for survivors to slip through, especially at night.
And that was just the beginning. There was also the fact that none of the princesses had mentioned anything like this when they’d granted him Vanhoover. All they had mentioned was that a flood had occurred and that in the aftermath the city’s population, including its three most influential families, had succumbed to infighting due to the scope of the disaster. As little as Lex thought of the princesses, he knew that they’d never withhold such pertinent information if they had it…which meant that someone was deliberately feeding them falsehoods about Vanhoover’s situation. Worse, they were also somehow keeping word of what was happening here from reaching the rest of Equestria.
He’d known that, of course; that had been obvious back when he’d first gotten a good look at the city. But while it had been a mystery before, in conjunction with this so-called “blockade” it painted a much darker picture. In fact…
A cold shudder went down Lex’s spine. I never determined how the ghoul infestation started, he realized. Of course, that didn’t mean anything unto itself, but it was self-evident that those monsters weren’t a product of the elemental bleed that he had closed. And their method of propagating their numbers via a disease whose transmission vector was a bite – at least based on what he’d heard so far – meant that they couldn’t have simply generated spontaneously…which meant that someone or something had introduced them to Vanhoover. But there was no Equestrian magic that he’d ever heard of that could create monsters like that. Which meant that something else had to be responsible. And Lex knew from personal experience that undead creatures weren’t unknown on Everglow.
The ghouls. A quarantine that worsens the situation rather than improves it. Disinformation meant to prevent help from arriving. Someone is trying to destroy Vanhoover. The thought was enough to rekindle his anger. No matter how many enemies he destroyed, there was always another one waiting to undo all of his good work! What did he have to do to save this city?!
“Hello?” came Sonata’s voice. “Earth-, er, Equestria to Lex. You there?”
“Hm?” The scope of what he’d realized was enormous enough that he needed a moment to return his focus to Sonata. “What?”
“I said, what are you going to do with Fencer?”
Lex frowned. “Once her horn is restored, I’m going to sentence her for what she’s done. Harshly.”
“Yeah, about that…” Sonata licked her lips, knowing that she needed to phrase this next part very carefully to avoid tripping over any of Lex’s hang-ups. “She, like, totes deserves to be punished for everything she did, no question there. But I’m a little worried about how everybody, sorry, everypony else will react if you’re too harsh.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed, and Sonata winced internally, knowing she was about to get an earful. But before Lex had a chance to get a word out, a harsh whisper intruded on their conversation. “Maybe you should be more worried about what will happen if he’s not harsh enough,” smirked Aria, emerging from a nearby passage to drag herself over to them. “After all, if whatshername’s not spanked hard enough to behave, she might act up again.”
“Hey! Nobody’s talking to you!” snapped Sonata, the sight of her sister being enough to ruin her calm and make her forget proper Equestrian grammar. “Buzz off!”
“You’re the ones who wandered over where I was napping,” replied Aria. “Besides,” she turned to give Lex a playful smirk, “I couldn’t stay quiet when I heard you giving our stallion such bad advice.”
“Excuse me?!” Sonata stalked over to get in Aria’s face. “He’s MY stallion! And since when did you become a big supporter of harsh punishments, Miss They-Cut-My-Throat-And-It’s-Sooooo-Unfair!”
“That’s different!” snarled Aria. But an instant later she’d recovered her poise, moving over to press herself against Lex – who had been silently watching the exchange up until now, unsure if he should interfere – and nuzzle him before he could move away. “I have total faith in our stallion here, unlike you, since he treated me so well after everything I did.” Aria felt Lex go rigid at the unexpected display of affection, and laughed internally. That’s payback for embarrassing me before. It had taken a little while for her to figure out that him calling her pretty was his way of getting revenge on her for teasing him about wanting her and Sonata both. Now she’d gotten him back for it, but even better…
“YOU GET AWAY FROM HIM RIGHT NOW!” yelled Sonata, rushing over and shoving Aria back. The move had little effect, since Aria’s Siren form contained far more mass than Sonata’s pony body, but she backed off anyway, laughing. Being able to fight with her idiot sister made her feel more normal than she had in a long while. Sonata, meanwhile, continued to rant. “He’s not yours! He’s, like, all mine!”
“Are you sure?” Aria’s smile was mocking. “He was telling me just a little while ago how pretty he thinks I am.”
Sonata whipped her head around to regard Lex. “What?!”
Blinking as his girlfriend suddenly rounded on him, Lex struggled to figure out what was going on and what he was supposed to do about it. “Hold on, that was-”
“And,” interjected Aria, “he’s going to make me a pony, too.” Sonata’s reaction to that little tidbit, turning bright red and tittering with rage, was absolutely priceless. And now to make sure that loverboy takes the fall for me. Knowing she had a few seconds before her airhead sister collected her thoughts, Aria headed back towards the shadowy passages of the warehouse, making sure to give Lex a seductive glance over her shoulder as she left. “If you get tired of her whining, come find me later.” Punctuating her obvious proposition with a wink, she left the pair there, not trusting herself to linger any further before she burst out laughing.
Lex watched her go, trying to make sense of the entire exchange. Frowning in confusion, he turned back to Sonata, only to find that she’d gotten right in his face. “You’re going to make her into a pony?” she hissed.
“I did offer to transmute her body into a proper equine form in order to restore her voice,” he nodded. Hopefully elucidating why he’d made that offer would calm her down.
It didn’t. “And you think she’s pretty too, huh?”
Lex paused, trying to formulate a proper response. What he’d observed of interpersonal interaction, along with second- and third-hoof knowledge he’d gathered over the years, suggested that Sonata was suffering from some sort of envious reaction, likely because she’d misjudged his statement about Aria’s looks as being some sort of qualitative comparison with regards to her own. All he needed to do was let her know that wasn’t the case, and she should calm down. “Anyone would think that. By any conventional standard, she’s quite beautiful.”
The look of fury on Sonata’s face was apocalyptic.
Realizing he wasn’t getting the results he’d hoped for, Lex changed tactics. “Which isn’t to say that your own comeliness is any less than hers.”
“Convince me,” she growled through gritted teeth.
Lex blinked. “Well, the nature of qualitative values is that they defy conventional measurem-”
“No!” She stepped closer, almost nose-to-nose with him now. All of the frustration she’d felt before he’d left to go find Pillowcase had just come roaring back, stronger than ever, and she was tired of it. “Convince me without talking!”
His brow furrowed at the unusual request, before opening his haversack for a quill and scroll. But he’d barely withdrawn them when Sonata, apparently displeased, knocked them away with a snarl. “That’s not what I want either!”
Starting to grow frustrated himself, Lex grit his teeth. “Then what do you want?!”
His answer came when Sonata closed the last of the distance between them. Taken completely by surprised, Lex was practically knocked over as Sonata kissed him aggressively, her tongue slipping into his mouth. Utterly baffled at what was happening, Lex tried to back up and assess the situation, but Sonata moved forward at the same time, and it was enough to cause the two of them to tumble to the ground, Sonata landing on top of him. Even then she didn’t stop, pressing herself against him hungrily. “Convince me,” she demanded again, her voice huskier, and then he knew what she wanted.
As he laid there, feeling Sonata’s legs wrapped around him while he held her close, Lex couldn’t help but revel in how he felt at that moment. Just like the first time they’d made love, the conclusion of the physical ecstasy hadn’t been the end of the joy it had brought him. Instead, the fading pleasure had given way to a powerful sense of…peace. Although he was still fully cognizant of all of his failures and frustrations, as well as all of the problems that still needed to be solved, at that moment none of them bothered him in the least. It was an incredible feeling, the sense of being so completely unburdened. Enough so that he couldn’t help but smile, feeling the corners of his mouth turns upwards.
“That’s, like, a really great look on you,” murmured Sonata, her voice heady.
“Hm?” Lex was only half paying attention as he turned his attention back to her. Her eyes were half-lidded, her face was flushed, and her mane was disheveled, mouth open slightly as she tried to get her breath back. To his eyes, she’d never looked more fetching than she did at that moment.
“Smiling,” she answered, giving him a tired grin. “I mean, like, really smiling. You look totes cute when you do that.”
“It’s because of you,” he murmured lovingly, his sense of peace being replaced-, no, being complemented by a rush of intimacy. “I didn’t have anything to smile about until I met you. You’re the only one who can make me feel like this.” Normally the prospect of talking like this would have been embarrassing to the point of mortification, but right now the words came easily. “I don’t tell you enough how wonderful you are, how every time I look at you I’m grateful that you’re here with me.” He leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “That you’re my dearest. My one and only. My beloved.”
Sonata gasped. “L-Lex!” It wasn’t just what he was saying; he’d used some spell on her to make her super sensitive, to the point where even the sensation of his breath in her ear was enough to send spasms through her body. Then she felt his teeth lightly nip the tip of her ear, and she couldn’t help but cry out. She made herself go rigid as she did, knowing that if she writhed she’d rub against him and then she’d be completely lost to the sensations again. “We, like-, mmmmnnngh! We should get back…” She was panting again, desperately trying to control herself as he leaned his head down and planted kisses along her neck. “Y-you still need to…to fix things about…” She had to pause again, fighting hard to retain the ability to talk coherently in the face of what he was doing to her. “Fix things with e-everything about Fencer…”
“In a little while,” he murmured, running a hoof down her side and causing her to squeal. She could hear the playfulness in his voice, and even if she hadn’t been under whatever spell he’d used on her, that would have been enough to heat her up. “Right now, I just want to watch you squirm for me…”
It was long minutes later before he finally had mercy on her, silencing her last scream of passion with a kiss before slowly disentangling himself from her, making sure to negate the spell he’d used on her as he did. As he stood up, he stretched before gathering up his cloak and other accoutrements that had been scattered when he’d begun their tryst, making himself look presentable again. Behind him, Sonata started to do the same, albeit at a much slower pace. “I thought you wanted to hurry back,” he smirked, unable to resist the urge to tease her.
She gave him a wry look from where she was checking her appearance, having pulled that ornate mirror of his out of his haversack. “Unless you want everyone to know what we were doing, I totes need to freshen up,” she replied, sticking her tongue out at him before adding, “of course, given how smug you look, they’ll probably figure it out anyway.”
“I do not look ‘smug.’ I’m simply…content.”
She chuckled. “Yeah, well, that kind of ‘content’ looks like just one thing, mister, so you might want to do something about that.” His only response was a snort, and a few minutes later Sonata judged that her appearance was suitable to be seen in public, giving him back his mirror satisfied smile. “Perfect.” Nodding perfunctorily, Lex cast a quick spell to dissolve the hemispherical one-way screen around them, and the sight made Sonata grin again. “I’ve gotta say, if I knew that you could conjure up a privacy-thingy like that, we’d have done it a lot more often before now.”
An uncomfortable look crossed Lex’s face at that. He’d prepared both the contraceptive spell – quickly cast on himself before their encounter just now – and the pleasure-causing spell in anticipation of making love to Sonata again. But that privacy screen wasn’t quite as efficacious as she was making it out to be. “About that…that spell creates an opaque hemisphere that blocks sight from the outside, but it doesn’t contain sound. That’s why I haven’t used it before now…for this, I mean.”
Sonata’s eyes widened as her cheeks reddened. “Are you… You mean everyone heard… You knew they’d hear me?!” Lex was relatively quiet when they were in bed together, but it was her nature to be vocal, ESPECIALLY with that spell he’d used on her! Glaring at him, she reared up onto her hind legs so she could start whacking him over the head with her fore-hooves.
“Hold on!” He danced away from her strikes and she pursued him, causing them to play an impromptu game of tag as he tried to calm her. “It’s unlikely that anypony heard you! We’re a good distance away from the shelter, and the intervening walls there also have a muffling effect! That and I made sure to…try to keep you quiet when you were loudest.” It was his turn to blush as he said that last part.
Mollified enough to stop trying to smack him, Sonata still huffed as she settled back down onto all fours. “What do you mean ‘keep me quiet’?”
The redness in his face grew heavier. “Kissing.” When she tilted her head in confusion, he elaborated. “I made sure to silence your noisiest…exclamations, with kisses.”
For a moment she just stared at him, not sure if that was considerate or manipulative, before deciding to let it go. “Fine…” What was done was done, and honestly she didn’t want to fight when she was still enjoying the echoes of their long-overdue time together. Just please oh please oh please don’t let Aria have been anywhere nearby, she prayed silently. Which reminded her… “Listen, are you really going to turn Aria into a pony?”
He blinked, caught off-guard by the sudden change in topic. “Strictly speaking, I believe that Sirens are ponies, albeit mutated versions thereof. My theory is that you yourself had your mutation undone after you were exposed to something on Everglow that acted as a counteragent to whatever caused you to be born as a Siren, and that your cutie mark-”
“I don’t want you to,” interrupted Sonata before he could really get going. Cutting him off before he could get lost in his own head was starting to come naturally to her.
Lex stopped, digesting this new information before coming up with a response. “Sonata, I already told her I would. It was part of the offer I made her in exchange for her obedience, that I’d fix her voice and make her into a pony.”
“Fix her voice,” conceded Sonata. “By all means, fix her voice. I’d be totes miserable if all I could do was whisper all the time. But you don’t have to make her into a pony to do that, right? Just use some super-healing magic or something.”
“I don’t have any such magic, nor any easy method of acquiring any.”
“But you do have an easy way to change what she is completely?”
“I wouldn’t call it easy,” replied Lex, “but I’ve already begun working on a ritual that should remove the non-equine aspects from her body, reconstructing it into a pony form. As a side-effect of that, it should repair the permanent damage done to her vocal chords.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. So why not just conjure up some ritual thingy to fix her voice and have that be it?”
Lex was already shaking his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Magic is just energy; it needs to be instructed with regards to what you want it to do. If I’m right about her being a pony, then her body’s genetics should have all of the information necessary to restructure her into a proper pony shape.” After all, the fact that he was the unicorn child of two earth ponies was all the proof necessary that each pony carried the genetic information of the other tribes. “So if I have the magic permeate her form, it can deconstruct and then correctly reconstruct her body, which will include reforming her throat.” Sonata opened her mouth then, but Lex beat her to the punch. “And no, I can’t simply do that for her throat alone; genetic reconstruction at that level is an all-or-nothing procedure. Her body doesn’t have regenerative properties, so the only way to fix permanent damage is to recreate her physical form in its entirety.” And more than that, it would prove to his satisfaction that Sonata herself really was a pony through and through…something that, in the wake of their lovemaking, suddenly seemed all the more important to establish.
“But why did you offer to make her into a pony in the first-, no. You know what? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” She could feel her good mood souring, and was suddenly sorry that she’d brought it up at all. That’s Aria. She’s not even here and she’s still finding a way to totes ruin things for me. Instead, she decided to move on. “Come on, we should head back.” She started walking back towards the shelter, Lex moving alongside her. “Do you know what you’re going to tell everypony about Fencer?” That wasn’t a topic that was likely to be much better, but at least it was a lot less personal for her than her stupid sister.
To her surprise, Lex nodded. “I plan on having her publicly allocute before I sentence her.”
Sonata’s eyes went wide. “You’re going to hit her with lighting?!”
“What? What are you-” Suddenly her meaning became clear, and he rolled his eyes. “Not ‘electrocute.’ Allocute. I’m going to have her explain to everypony the details of her crimes and her reasons for committing them.”
“Oh, a confession! Why didn’t you just say that then?”
“It’s technically not a confession. She already did that when she admitted to having committed crimes where her culpability hadn’t already been conclusively determined. This is merely to satisfy everypony else that her guilt is beyond all doubt and that her punishment is deserved.”
Sonata glanced over at him then. “So…how exactly are you going to punish her?”
Lex opened his mouth to reply, but just as he started to speak a familiar voice could be heard. “Lex! Sonata! Where are you guys?!”
Lex frowned, recognizing Aisle’s voice, and immediately started to run towards it, Sonata following him. It took only a few seconds to locate the earth pony stallion, as he kept calling for them, his voice tight with worry. Eventually they rounded a corner and he caught sight of them. “There you are! Where were you guys?!”
Lex ignored the question. “What’s happening?”
Aisle pointed back at the shelter, several dozen feet behind him. “The doctors started shouting stuff. I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying, but it sounded like they were talking about Pillowcase.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “It sounded bad.”
Cursing, Lex ran for the shelter, the other two hot on his hooves. Knocking the door open, he immediately made for the medical area, only to find that everypony had crowded around it. Snarling, he had just started to shove them aside when a loud, horrible wail came from behind the hanging sheet. The sound was enough to make everypony gasp, and Lex recognized the agonized voice as that of Cozy. No…
Redoubling his efforts, he pushed his way through the crowd, shoving past the curtain and making for the far corner, where several doctors were beginning to emerge from, each of them with grim looks on their faces. Lex seized the nearest one. “What happened?!” he demanded. “What’s going on?!”
Surprised at the rough treatment, the medical pony hesitated, and Lex shoved her aside with a snarl. Making his way to the alcove the doctors were emerging from, he stormed into it, looking around the small space as he did. Off to the side was Cozy, with a stricken look on her face, while across from her a doctor was…covering Pillowcase with a sheet. A second doctor looked at a pocketwatch as she quietly spoke.
For a long moment, Lex just stared at the scene in front of him, not knowing what he should do. Finally, he came back to himself and looked over at one of the doctors. “What happened?”
The doctor, a mauve-colored stallion with streaks of grey in his black mane, looked up from where he’d just covered Pillowcase’s body with a sheet. “We can’t be certain until we, er…” He trailed awkwardly off as he looked over at Cozy, standing on the other side of Pillowcase’s body. The crystal mare didn’t seem to be aware of what was happening around her, staring at the covered form of her husband with a look of anguished disbelief on her face. The sight of her made Lex’s stomach clench.
This is your fault, came the voiceless words in his mind. You were supposed to gain enough power to save ponies who needed help. Now one of the ponies you were supposed to rescue has paid the price for your failure to do so. The taunt cut Lex deeply, making his spine stiffen. After all, that hateful voice in his mind was absolutely correct. That there was nothing else he could have done to save Pillowcase wasn’t an exoneration; it was an indictment. Ultimately, he had become responsible for the crystal stallion the moment he’d found him in that warehouse, and that he hadn’t been able to save him once he had was a failure no matter what excuses he made. And now Pillowcase and his wife-, no, his widow, were suffering the consequences of his powerlessness.
“Sir?” Forcing his recriminations aside, Lex looked back at the doctor, who nodded towards the curtain keeping them partitioned off from the rest of the medical area. Turning and ushering Sonata – who was staring at the scene in horror, eyes wide and a hoof in front of her open mouth – out of the operating-area-turned-morgue, Lex led her a short distance away, the doctor following them. Outside, the other doctors had already dispersed, doubtlessly informing the crowd what had just happened.
When they’d gone far enough, Lex turned around to regard the doctor again, Sonata doing the same. The other stallion resumed his explanation. “We won’t know the cause of death for certain until we can perform an autopsy, but the initial diagnosis is a sudden case of hypovolemic shock.”
Lex frowned, not knowing what that meant. “Meaning what, exactly?” He hated that he had to ask, but this was too important to let that be an obstacle.
The doctor seemed to have expected that question, answering immediately. “Hypovolemia is when you don’t have enough fluid in your system to maintain blood pressure. Basically, it means that his blood wasn’t pumping efficiently enough to sustain his organs.” He looked down, closing his eyes as a forlorn expression crossed his face. “We were trying to rehydrate him intravenously, but we were too late. He also had signs of malnourishment and heatstroke, and all of it together was just too much strain on his system. There were also signs of wounding on his legs. His wife said that she’d healed them when she found him, but he’d apparently already bled out quite a bit by then.” He lowered his voice then, as though talking to himself. “Maybe if we’d just gotten to him a little sooner…” It was all Lex could do not to wince as he heard that.
“Poor Cozy,” murmured Sonata, looking back at the alcove where they’d left the crystal mare. “I can’t imagine how she feels right now, knowing that she’ll never see…” She trailed off as something occurred to her, before her eyes widened and she rounded on Lex. “Wait a sec! This is just like with Waterlily!” Lex went rigid at that, an alarmed look crossing his face, but Sonata kept speaking heedlessly. “All you have to do is ask the Night Mare to br-mmph!”
His hoof planted firmly over Sonata’s mouth, Lex looked at the doctor. “Leave us.”
“I…of course.” Having seen plenty of unusual reactions to death, the doctor took Lex and Sonata’s odd behavior in stride as he turned and left.
Lex waited until they were alone before uncovering Sonata’s muzzle, letting her take a deep breath of air. “What was that about?” she frowned.
“I can’t bring Pillowcase back to life, or anypony else for that matter,” said Lex quietly, not wanting to take the chance of anypony overhearing them, “and I don’t want anyone to think otherwise.”
“But why not?!” insisted Sonata. “You talked the Night Mare into bringing Waterlily back, and you’d never met her before either, right? So why can’t you just whisk her up again and say ‘do your thing’?”
“It doesn’t work like that!” Lex tried to keep his anger down, hating that she was making him explain why he couldn’t do anything. “Even overlooking the fact that she’s made it exceedingly clear that she dislikes my summoning her in such a manner, the only reason she brought Waterlily back to life was because I cut a deal with her, one that I’m still trying to follow through on. I’m absolutely confident that she won’t want to make another, particularly since I don’t see what else I could offer her in exchange.”
“Come on, you don’t know that for sure!” Sonata frowned, trying to think of another argument. “Just, like, make it a demonstration of how awesome she is. Tell her that it’ll totes amaze everypony here and make them want to bow down to her and stuff.”
“The deal was that I convince them to do that on my own in exchange for all of this power that she gave me,” retorted Lex. “If I have to call her up to do that herself, then it’s an implicit admission of failure on my part.” His eyes flickered down to the barbed wire wrapped around his left foreleg. He could guess what his goddess’s reaction to that would be. “I’m telling you, what you’re talking about is not a viable option.”
Taken aback, Sonata lowered her ears as she looked down, but only for a moment. “Okay, but what about just going back to Everglow and getting what you need from there? I know they have resur-whatchamacallit magic on that world, right?”
“Yes,” sighed Lex, already knowing how this was going to go. “But that’s not a viable option either.”
“Why not?!” Despite herself, Sonata couldn’t help but start to get upset. “You’re the pony who, like, always does what you set your mind to, so why can’t you set your mind to this?!”
“You think I don’t want to?!” snapped Lex. “You think I don’t wish that I could just cast a spell and fix this?! I’m telling you, everything you’re saying entails an unacceptable degree of risk!” He glared at her, struggling to keep from shouting. “Yes, magic is a commodity on Everglow, and I have no doubt that if I went to one of the larger cities I could find a religious outlet that would sell a scroll with a resurrection spell.”
“Then…!”
But Lex was already shaking his head. “I don’t know the full details of what that would cost, but I know it would be expensive, and we’re completely out of bits, not that they take bits on Everglow anyway.” Nor, he knew, was digging up gemstones an option. Equestria might be a land where perfectly-cut gems could be found a few feet underground, but you still had to know where to look to dig for them. Worse, he knew enough about Everglow to know that, while such gems would have some value there, it would only be meager at best. Selling the magic items he’d acquired would be his best bet, but he wasn’t sure that would raise sufficient funds.
But Sonata wasn’t willing to give up so easy. “But you’re some kind of bigwig for the Night Mare, right?” Now it was her turn to look at the barbed wire wrapped around his leg, pointing at it. “Just go to one of her temples over there and say that, like, you’re demanding it in her name or something.”
“I doubt that would work.” Certainly, it wouldn’t work on him if somepony he’d never heard of showed up and started demanding extravagant favors on the basis of religious authority. And given that what he knew of the Night Mare’s credo emphasized personal strength and empowerment, he couldn’t imagine anypony powerful enough to have resurrection magic being so easily cowed. And that wasn’t the only problem. “There’s also the fact that the plane-crossing spell doesn’t allow for precise targeting. It’s entirely possible that I could end up in a remote location, which would require me to spend time journeying to the nearest large city, and that I’d similarly wind up in a remote location when I came back to Equestria. If I’m gone that long while Vanhoover is still in this state, I’d be putting everyone here at risk.” He let out a slow breath, trying to control the bitterness that threatened to swallow him. “I want to bring Pillowcase back, but I am not willing to gamble with the lives of everyone here on such an uncertain venture.”
Sonata paused for a long moment, trying to think of something else, but couldn’t come up with a way to counter his logic. As much as she hated to admit it, everything he’d said made sense. If he’d been gone when that big squid monster had attacked, they all would have died, and given how many disasters they’d already been through, there was no guarantee that another one wouldn’t happen if he left now…especially if he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to get one of those bring-you-back-to-life spells in the first place. That realization made her look down, crestfallen.
Seeing the disappointed look on his girlfriend’s face, Lex assumed that it was directed at him, and felt his tension skyrocket. This was why he didn’t want anypony to think that he could bring the dead back to life. Because for him – who had spent his entire life desperately trying to justify his own existence by saying what he could do for others – having someone ask for his help, hoping that he could do what no one else could, only to tell them that there was nothing that he could do, struck at the heart of his sense of self.
Especially when the one doing the asking was the girl he loved!
Unable to bear looking at her with that expression, Lex turned and started walking away from her, back towards where Cozy, the single remaining doctor, and Pillowcase’s body were. A moment later Sonata’s voice called out to him. “So that’s, like, it? There’s nothing we can do for her?”
Lex paused for just a moment before answering. “I can ward her husband’s body against decay, indefinitely if necessary.” The spell for that would only last for a few days, but he had a few instances of it stored in a gem, and could easily prepare it again before it ran out. “Other than that, the only solace I can give her is to bring justice down on the pony that caused this to happen.” He shot a dark look at the other alcove, where he knew Fencer was still being operated on. He’d had a punishment picked out for her, but now he was going to have to think of something even worse.
“I dunno how much that’ll help.” Sonata sounded heartbroken as she walked up beside him. “Cozy never struck me as the sort of mare that wanted revenge, you know?”
“It’s all I can do for her,” replied Lex, and the words were ashes in his mouth. “After that, we’re leaving.” He started back towards where Cozy was.
“Huh?” Sonata blinked as she kept pace with him. “Leaving? Leaving where?”
“This shelter,” answered Lex grimly. “As soon as I’m done with Fencer, we’re all going to head to this so-called blockade.” Even as he spoke he realized how tired he was of all this, of struggling so hard to accomplish so little, of perpetually reacting to crises instead of improving things.
No more, he silently swore to himself. It’s time for me to exert my authority over this city.
Cozy was on her knees, eyes closed and whispering prayers as she touched a hoof to her holy symbol, when Lex reentered the makeshift operating area where her husband’s body lay.
Across from her, the single remaining doctor – a white-coated mare with a mane and tail striped with alternating bands of green – looked up at him and Sonata as they entered, the awkward expression on her face changing into one of uncertainty as she stepped towards them. “Do you know what she’s doing?” asked the medical pony, clearly not sure what to make of the crystal mare’s actions. “I tried to talk to her a few times, but it’s like she can’t hear me.”
“I’ll handle this,” replied Lex dismissively. “You may leave.”
The medical mare paused at that, not sure whether to bristle at being so casually told to go away or be relieved that she didn’t have to deal with the deceased pony’s widow. The latter won out a moment later, and she started to walk past Lex, only to stop as she remembered something. “Listen, we…” She glanced back at Cozy, then lowered her voice as she looked at Lex again. “We’re going to need to do something about the body. We-”
“I told you to leave,” interrupted Lex, his voice chilly.
“But we don’t have any way to preserv-”
Sonata stepped forward, putting herself in the other mare’s face with a strained smile. “We got this. Like, totes.”
For a moment the doctor looked like she wanted to say something else, but apparently decided against it as she nodded and then walked away without another word, leaving Lex and Sonata alone with Cozy and Pillow’s sheet-covered body. For a moment, Lex simply regarded the crystal ponies, trying to figure out what to say. Sonata, however, found the silence too uncomfortable to bear, and walked over to where Cozy was kneeling. “Hey…” she called softly, trying to get the crystal mare’s attention. When no reply came, she crouched down beside her. “Cozy?” Still no response. Licking her lips, she tried again. “I just…I wanted to say how sorry we are, Lex and me, about Pillow. Um…” She trailed off again, glancing at Lex in a silent plea for help. His only response was to tilt his head at her, obviously not getting why she was looking at him. Huffing slightly, she kept going. “I-if there’s, like, anything at all we can do to help…”
Lex tensed at that, expecting that Cozy would immediately leap at the offer and demand that he bring her husband back to life. But to his mild surprise, no such entreaty came. Instead Cozy simply ignored them, continuing to pray silently. Seeing Sonata bite her lip as she stood back up, he decided that there was no point in his reaching out to the bereaved mare. Instead, he stepped towards Pillowcase’s body, telekinetically pulling the sheet back so that his head was exposed, reaching into his haversack to withdraw a gem as he did so. “I’m going to preserve the body,” he explained, more for Sonata’s benefit than Cozy’s.
That, however, seemed to get Cozy’s attention.
“No.” She didn’t move as she spoke, still kneeling with her eyes shut. But as soon as she word left her lips she let out a sigh and slowly stood up, her face completely devoid of expression as she looked at Lex. “Don’t touch him.”
Sonata gulped, glancing back and forth between the other two before settling on Cozy. “Um…”
“I heard what you said,” replied Cozy, anticipating what Sonata was going to say. Her eyes slid over to the other mare, but there was no warmth there, nor anger, sadness, or anything at all. “I appreciate the sentiment, Sonata. Really I do. But I’m fine.”
Lex’s brow creased just slightly at that. Cozy’s behavior didn’t match how she’d been acting up until now. During their efforts to rescue Pillowcase, she had fretted and cried ceaselessly; that she should be so composed now that he had died made no sense whatsoever. Although he knew that she had no magic worth noting, the juxtaposition between her actions and his expectations was enough to make him tense. “I find that hard to believe,” he said warily.
Cozy looked back at him. “Believe what you like, but leave Pillow alone. I don’t want your magic interfering with Lashtada’s.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed, but it was Sonata that spoke up. “What do you mean? Are you casting a spell?”
“I will be,” answered Cozy, “once Lashtada grants me the magic to bring Pillow back. Or maybe she’ll do it herself. Either way, I don’t want anypony else’s magic getting in the way when it happens.” Her voice was filled with absolute conviction, and she continued to rub her holy symbol as she spoke. “I’m sure it’ll be very soon now. Any minute. I just need to pray a little bit more…” Lex frowned as her words reminded him of something she’d said several days ago, when he was leading her and her friends back to the shelter. The question of bringing the dead back to life had come up, and he’d mentioned that it was beyond his power, but it had been Cozy that confirmed that it was possible at all…
“I couldn’t even heal Drafty’s sickness, remember? No, what I meant is that Princess Cadance told us that it was possible when she introduced Lashtada to the Crystal Empire. She told us that if we had enough love for Lashtada in our hearts that we could overcome anything, even death.”
Snorting derisively as he realized what the crystal mare was thinking, Lex spoke up again. “Cozy, that won’t work. Religious devotion is just a form of configuring your thoughts so as to be receptive to holding divinely-granted magical energy. It won’t increase your ability to actually wield that energy.” In that regard, it wasn’t much different from his own thaumaturgical spellcasting, which also stored spells within thoughts. The difference was that whereas he – and, for that matter, the spellcasters on Everglow that called themselves “wizards,” “arcanists,” and similar titles – bent their thoughts so as to encompass a highly-exacting set of instructions that precisely directed the energy encapsulated in their therein, faith-based spellcasters didn’t even try to understand the deeper workings of the spells they received. Instead, they conditioned their minds to faithfully accept the spells they received, trusting in their deity to program the magical instructions for them. Receiving divine spells without that level of faith, Lex knew, caused severe bodily harm. That disgusting human-pony hybrid he’d met on Everglow, Soft Mane, had learned that the hard way, losing the use of her eyes when Lashtada had seen fit to dragoon her into her service. He himself had only avoided a similar fate due to having inadvertently aligned his thoughts with the Night Mare’s principles as a consequence of how he’d lived his life…and even that was only enough to safely receive a smattering of spells from her.
But that wasn’t all there was to it. Even if you could structure your thoughts rigorously enough to contain energy within them, that energy still needed to be manipulated; otherwise it was impossible to transfer it from within your mind out into the wider world where it would have a tangible effect. Doing so required being able to actively visualize the nature of the effects while simultaneously pushing the energy out of your mind at a controlled rate while also simultaneously chanting the proper vocalizations and/or making precise gestures necessary to direct the spell.
In other words, it wasn’t enough to know what you were doing. You needed to be able to actually do it. And while Cozy had a least a modicum of ability in that regard, Lex had seen nothing to indicate that she was anywhere close to the requisite level of ability required to bring a dead pony back to life. If she developed that level of cognitive-energy direction, and continued to structure her thoughts via religious devotion, and if Lashtada saw fit to grant her the necessary magical energy, then she might someday be able to cast a resurrection spell. But right now that possibility was nonexistent.
And as for Lashtada personally reaching out to bring Pillowcase back… Lex’s own experience with deities suggested that they only showed up if actively summoned, and sometimes not even then. Given that Cozy’s prayers were a far cry from a magical ritual like the one he’d used to summon the Night Mare, he doubted that her goddess would be putting in a personal appearance anytime soon.
But Cozy was already kneeling back down, apparently having lost interest in listening to what he had to say. “You’re wrong. Lashtada is the goddess of love. I know she’ll bring Pillow back to me, I just need to have faith in her.” She closed her eyes again. “Please go away. I need to pray.”
Lex’s frown deepened, disgusted by her abject denial of reality. But that thought was immediately followed by another cutting barb from his shadow. You have no right to look down on her. Not after how you acted when Sonata left you, standing perfectly still in hope that if you didn’t move it wouldn’t be over.
The taunt made his spine go rigid with shame, and he grit his teeth as he turned to regard Pillow’s corpse. “Pray all you want,” he hissed. “I’m using a preservative spell on his body.”
Cozy’s eyes snapped open. “I said no.” Her voice was cold as she rose to her hooves again. “I won’t allow you to-”
At that moment Sonata sang a low series of notes, and a second later Cozy slumped to the ground, unconscious. And then there are some individuals who mold their thoughts to magic subconsciously and direct it intuitively, Lex thought wryly as he watched his girlfriend move the crystal mare into a more comfortable position, trying to push away the unwanted memory of when she’d broken off their relationship and how poorly he’d reacted to it.
Letting out a sigh as she finished with Cozy, Sonata looked over at Lex. “Okay, FYI, talking a grieving pony down when she doesn’t want you to do something is the sort of thing you should probably let your spokespony handle. I’m just sayin’.”
Huffing, Lex turned away from her without comment to regard Pillowcase. Lifting the gem he’d retrieved, he held it towards the crystal stallion’s dead body, chanting the words necessary to release the energies contained therein. There was no outward sign of the magic taking effect, but he felt the structure of the spell release and knew it had worked. Replacing the gem – which, since it had two more castings of that spell contained within it, had not crumbled – in his haversack, Lex covered the body again before turning to leave. “That will preserve his body for approximately ten days. After that I’ll need to use the spell again.”
Falling in beside him, Sonata nodded, silently hoping that by then Cozy would be better by then. Getting into a fight over what to do about her husband’s body would totes make things worse, for her and for Lex. “So, what now?”
In response to her question, Lex marched over to the medical area’s only other alcove. Stopping in front of the sheet that was hanging in front of the entrance, he raised his voice slightly. “Doctor House Call! Give me a status report on Fencer’s condition.”
Sonata winced. “Um, isn’t it, like, a super bad idea to interrupt a doctor when they’re in the middle of doctoring?”
Lex snorted. “Bedsheets have no ability to dampen sound, Sonata. If they’ve already been working with this level of background noise then my asking them for a report shouldn’t be an issue.”
Sure enough, a moment later House Call’s voice came back. “It’s going well. We should be done in another thirty minutes or so.”
“Once you’re finished, I want you to bring her out of anesthesia as soon as you safely can.”
“What? Why?” The confusion in House Call’s voice was plainly audible.
“So she can be sentenced,” answered Lex darkly. He didn’t wait for a response, turning to Sonata. “I want you to inform everypony that we’re going to move out very soon. Have them start getting ready and making whatever preparations they need to. As soon as I’ve passed judgment on Fencer, we’re marching on that blockade.”
It had taken almost three hours before Fencer had recovered enough to be sentenced.
The procedure to reattach her horn had been a success, with House Call reporting that although she’d need to be monitored going forward, it looked like she’d make a full recovery. The news had left Lex feeling particularly bitter; although he refused to begrudge anypony for recovering from a crippling injury, the fact that Fencer would be fine while Pillowcase had succumbed to his wounds galled him deeply.
After that, it was simply a matter of waiting for her to awaken from the anesthesia she’d been placed under. Having left word with the nurse assigned to watch over Fencer to inform him once she’d regained consciousness, Lex had instead busied himself with overseeing the preparations to leave the shelter. But his efforts were half-hearted, barely paying attention to the minor logistical problems of how to transport the various materials they’d unloaded from C. Shells’ ship across town without any sort of wagons or carts.
Instead, he’d spent most of that time thinking about how to punish Fencer.
In theory, criminal justice was a simple affair. All he had to do was hand down a sentence that served three purposes: to deliver proportionate retribution, serve as a deterrent to others, and rehabilitate the offender. But now that the crime was murder – and Lex refused to consider Pillowcase’s death as being anything else – the situation was far more complicated. Given that pony life was absolutely sacrosanct, Fencer could not be executed for what she’d done, which meant that the issue of proportionate retribution would need to be approached obliquely, rather than directly. And that was simple compared to the issue of how to rehabilitate somepony who quite clearly had no remorse for what she’d done.
And that wasn’t even getting into the issues of practicality involved in punishing her. While C. Shells’ crew were almost finished building a rudimentary cage, Lex had no illusions that throwing Fencer in there was anything other than a very short-term solution. Incarcerating her for any length of time simply wasn’t something that could reasonably done under the current circumstances, not when that still required that she be provided some basic level of care that would put a drain on his extremely limited resources.
He was still mulling the issue over, having withdrawn to the wider warehouse where their supplies were being moved, when Sonata came up to him. “Lex.”
“Hm?”
“Fencer’s awake. Well, actually she’s been awake for a little while, but now the nurse is saying that she’s, like, not all grogged out and stuff.”
Nodding, Lex looked over at the medical area, pulling himself out of his thoughts. It was time. “I want you to assemble everypony out here.” The warehouse was a better venue for a public sentencing than the relatively cramped quarters of the shelter. “Make sure the rest of Fencer’s group is up front.”
She nodded, but instead of going to convey his orders lingered for a moment, biting her lip. He was about to ask her what was wrong when she blurted out, “do you want me to enchant the rest of them?”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
Sonata hesitated for a few seconds, as though attempting to speak was causing her some sort of distress, but a moment later found her voice. “Before, when you wanted me to make Fencer tell us where Pillowcase was, she mentioned that she wasn’t alone when she attacked him, right? So…I was thinking that if I enchanted the rest of her friends, I could make them admi-”
“Enough.” Lex held up a hoof, cutting her off before she could go any further. When she stopped talking, he gave a sigh. “I’ve decided not to punish anypony else in Fencer’s group for what happened to Pillowcase.”
Sonata let out a breath she’d been holding, surprise and relief written all over her face. “For realsies?! I was totes sure you were gonna be all ‘you’re all guilty!’ on them! And I mean, they totes are for what they did, but I was worried about how that’d make everypony see you, so I’m really glad you’re not gonna do anything to them and, come to think of it, why aren’t you gonna to do anything to them?”
“Because it wouldn’t be just,” answered Lex, utterly unperturbed by her sudden outburst. “Fencer confessed to having harmed Pillowcase of her own accord. I had you use your magic on her only because he was in imminent danger and we needed the information she had about him.” He had to resist the urge to sigh, since he’d explained that part to her at the time. “What I’m about to do to her is because of that confession, as well as what she did once we arrived at Pillowcase’s location. But the situation with the other ponies that came here with her is different.”
Sonata tilted her head. “Different how? I mean, I’m super glad you’re not going to throw books at them or whatever it is angry judges do, but I kinda thought I’d have to talk you out of it.”
“None of those ponies has given a confession the way Fencer did,” replied Lex, choosing to ignore that “talk you out of it” part of what she’d said; she did NOT talk him out of anything, ever! He simply took her views into account, and occasionally made changes based on the rare nugget of wisdom that she sometimes stumbled into. “According to what Cozy said, they all denied their complicity, and while I have no doubt that many, if not most, of them are lying, there’s no way to conclusively determine who was there and what they did. Criminal punishments can only be handed down on specific individuals for specific acts of wrongdoing; I can’t just punish them all under the presumption that they’ve all done something wrong.” Even though I’m sure they have, he added silently. “Likewise, I can’t convict somepony based on nothing more than magically coercing them to give testimony against themselves. It creates serious ethical problems.”
“Ohhh.”
Her exclamation was enough to make him frown, not sure how much of that she’d understood. Deciding to put it out of his mind, he started walking back towards the shelter. “Once you’ve gathered everypony out here, I’ll bring Fencer out and publicly condemn her for her crimes. After that, we’ll set out.” Although it had grown late, the length of midsummer days meant that there were still several hours before the sun went down. If they made good time he felt confident they could reach the edge of town before nightfall. The sooner I can put an end to whatever madness is going on there, the better.
A few minutes later he was standing in front of Fencer’s cot, staring at her. Severance, he idly noted, was maintaining its vigil, still floating over her diligently before he telekinetically grabbed it and placed it on his back. For her part, Fencer avoided his gaze, looking off to the side listlessly. Outside of the medical area, they could hear the sounds of everypony leaving, and it was only after the sounds of hooffalls faded that Lex spoke, his voice as cold as ice. “Pillowcase died.”
Fencer nodded weakly, still not looking at him. “I know. The nurse told me.” Her voice was soft, and he wasn’t sure if it was because of the lingering effects of the anesthesia or a reflection of her state of mind, before deciding that he didn’t care.
“Get up. It’s time for you to pay for what you’ve done, murderer.”
She winced slightly at that, but moved to obey, weakly crawling out of bed and onto her hooves. Lex started to lead her from the shelter, but a sudden impulse made him turn, heading back to the small alcove where Pillow’s body had been left. That entire area still had yet to be broken down and packed up, and he was suddenly curious what had become of Cozy.
As he drew back the sheet hanging over the area, he saw that the answer was nothing. She was still lying on the floor where Sonata had left her, but now a blanket covered her body. More notable, however, was the other pony in the room, with Aisle looking up as Lex entered. Frowning, Lex glanced at the sheet-covered body of Pillowcase before looking back at Aisle and the slumbering Cozy, unable to help but find their current arrangement odd. “What are you-” He paused as Aisle started frantically gesturing for him to quiet down, scowling as he lowered his voice. “What are you doing here? I gave the order for everypony to gather in out in the warehouse.”
“I know,” murmured Aisle, “but I didn’t want to leave Cozy here all alone. I mean, I didn’t want her to wake up by herself and see…” He trailed off uncomfortably, looking at Pillowcase’s body before looking down at Cozy, one hoof reaching down to gently brush a strand of her mane out of her face. “Can you give her a few more minutes?” He looked up at Lex, his face sorrowful. “Please? Just a little bit longer before she has to wake up and deal with everything?”
Lex was silent for a moment, then turned his back on the pair. “You have five minutes, then I’m sending somepony to come and retrieve the two of you and the body.” He heard Aisle give him a soft thanks as he left, but didn’t bother to acknowledge it. He suddenly wanted this done. A cold look was the only order he gave to Fencer, who fell in behind him as they walked out of the shelter, her head down and ears folded back.
He made his way toward where everypony had gathered, huddled at the open space at the end of the warehouse. Although he could hear the crowd speaking amongst themselves, their voices died off as they noticed him, turning to regard him and Fencer silently. He frowned slightly as he noticed more than a few wearing expressions that seemed to indicate nervousness, but that couldn’t be right. There was no reason for them to be nervous after all. He must have just misread them, the same way he had so many times before.
When he got within fifteen feet the crowd, Lex stopped and surveyed the assembled ponies. Sure enough, he recognized that pegasus stallion that had challenged him earlier at the edge of the gathering. Further down was that fat little earth stallion, and the rest of Fencer’s gang were also there, just as he’d instructed. Glancing back, Lex saw that Fencer herself wasn’t looking at them, her eyes remaining focused on the ground.
Sonata broke away from the others to trot over to him. “Okay! Go ahead and do that whisper-spell thing, and I’ll start translating for you.”
Lex paused, then shook his head. “Not this time, Sonata.”
She blinked. “Huh?”
“I’m going to speak to everypony directly. This is too severe to have what I’m about to say softened by someone else.”
“Oh no.” Sonata shook her head. “Nonononono. Lex, that’s like, a super bad idea!”
“Sonata…”
“I’m really serious! This is, like, a totes heavy situation, I agree, but that’s why you don’t want to do this yourself! You’ve gotta let me make you seem less…less…you!”
“Sonata, I’m doing this on my own.”
She pouted, changing tactics. “Don’t you trust me to do a good job?” Hopefully that’d get through to him; she knew he had a tendency to get seriously ticked when she questioned his devotion to her, but it was a risk worth taking if it stopped him from doing this.
But to her surprise, he didn’t get angry. Instead, his features softened ever so slightly. “I trust you,” he said, his voice lowered enough so that it didn’t carry to the nearby crowd of ponies, still watching intently. “Now I need you to trust me. Step aside.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, before finally closing it and reluctantly stepping to the side. Lex nodded at her once, then took a single large step forward, eyeing the crowd. For a long moment, everyone was silent, and he had the distinct impression that the longer the silence went on the more weight his words would take when he finally broke it. Eventually, he spoke. “As most of you know by now, Pillowcase, a fellow survivor retrieved earlier today by myself and his wife, Comfy Cozy, has died.”
A murmur rippled through the crowd, but fell silent as he spoke again. “His death is not just a tragedy, it’s a crime. It’s a crime because he wasn’t killed by starvation or disease or some monster. He was killed by another pony. This pony.” He raised a hoof to indicate Fencer, who recoiled as though he’d struck her, still not looking up. “For this, she will be punished severely. But before that,” he turned then, looking at Fencer as he addressed her instead of the crowd, “you’re going to tell everyone here why you did it.”
Now Fencer looked up, meeting his eyes with a horrified expression growing on her face. “What?”
“You’re going to stand here and look everypony in the eyes and tell them why you killed Pillowcase,” insisted Lex, his voice leaving no room for argument. “And once you do, I’m going to curse you,” he continued, his eyes turning green as purple contrails sprouted from their corners, “three times over.”
Fencer felt her stomach tie itself in knots at Lex’s order. Ever since her near-death experience in the other warehouse, she’d been forced to confront the brutal truth of the monster she had become in the name of staying alive. Although she’d been fighting for her life ever since Vanhoover had flooded, it had only been then – when she’d honestly believed that she was about to die horribly, with no chance of rescue or survival – that her excuses and rationalizations had fallen away, letting her see that she had become as predatory and uncaring as the ghouls that were about to devour her alive.
That realization, that moment of seeing herself without any lies or deceptions, had completely broken her spirit. All of the guilt and sorrow and despair she’d been avoiding had come rushing back to her then, and the weight of those emotions had been crushing. And they had only worsened when she’d woken up from her surgery to find that the crystal stallion she’d hurt – just the latest pony among so many that she’d wronged – had died of his wounds. The shame she’d felt upon hearing that had been overwhelming enough to make her wish with all her heart that she could find a hole to crawl in and never come out. The thought of hiding away and not letting anypony else see all of the ugliness inside of her was the only thing that made her feel even slightly better.
And now Lex had just ordered her to bare her shame in front of everypony.
This was a thousand times worse than having him rip her dress off. She’d worn that to hide how benign her white picket fence cutie mark looked, as it didn’t match with the heartless personality she’d crafted for herself. But this…
Lex’s eyes narrowed, displeased by her hesitation. “Tell them what you did!” he snarled again.
She backed away from him, shaking her head. Not this! Anything but this! He could lay a hundred curses on her if it meant sparing her this level of humiliation! Unable to help herself, she glanced at the crowd, and immediately squeezed her eyes shut as she saw that everypony was looking at her, unable to bear the weight of their judging gazes. But an instant later she comprehended the details of what she’d glimpsed, and felt a chill go down her spine: Turbo had been pointedly nudging Granola Bar. A few feet away, Funshine had glanced at Slip ‘N’ Slide meaningfully. Even Piggy had been gulping nervously.
In that moment, Fencer realized what was about to happen. They were going to try and rescue her. No! You idiots! I told you not to! But she wasn’t surprised that Turbo hadn’t listened. He’d made it clear, before she’d been put under anesthesia, that they weren’t going to abandon her. Although she’d thought she couldn’t feel worse than she already did, the thought sent a new wave of self-loathing through her. Don’t you understand? I never thought of you as anything except tools I could use to survive! You shouldn’t be doing this for me!
Opening her eyes, she looked at where Lex was still glowering at her expectantly. She knew that he’d crush any rescue attempt the instant it happened. Worse, he’d punish them harshly for it, of that she was absolutely confident. And if that happened, it would be more than she could bear.
“I’ll do it!” The words tore themselves from her throat, her voice raw. Looking over at the assembled ponies, she caught Turbo’s gaze, giving him a pleading look. “I’ll do it, so don’t…don’t do anything.”
The crowd of ponies murmured in confusion, not sure what she was talking about. Across from her, Lex was similarly unsure what she meant. Is she pleading for leniency? If so, she was going to be disappointed. “You have no right to ask that nothing be done to you!” He stamped a hoof for emphasis, and the crowd quieted down. “You showed no compassion for the ponies you hurt, and so you deserve none now!” He could feel himself starting to become angry again, incensed that she was worried about her own fate after everything she’d done.
“I know that. I know it, so…let me do this.” Her eyes were still locked onto Turbo’s as she spoke. She could see the hesitation on his face, knowing that he wanted to come to her aid. But a moment later he bit his lip, giving her the slightest of nods, and she let out a breath. She lowered her head as she did, closing her eyes and taking a long moment to gather her courage. There was no choice now.
Straightening up, she forced herself to look over the crowd, refusing to turn away even as she felt herself quail inside. “My name is…” she trailed off, unable to continue. “Fencer” had been the name she’d given herself when she’d decided that she would survive no matter what. It had represented who she thought she’d needed to be in order to make that happen. But now, trying to say the name out loud made her realize that it wasn’t who she was, or wanted to be, anymore. “My name is Garden Gate. Some of you know me as Fencer, but that’s my real name.” She saw the surprised looks on the faces of the ponies from her group, and suddenly wished she’d told them at least that much about herself before now.
“I’m…it’s my fault that pony, Pillowcase, died.” Saying his name caused a hollow feeling to form in the pit of her stomach. “I h-hurt him, and a lot of other ponies, very badly…” she trailed off, her throat suddenly closing up. “I’m sorry!” she choked out, her eyes beginning to tear up. “I’m so, so sorry for everything I did!” Sniffling, she rubbed a hoof over her eyes. “When Vanhoover fell apart, I thought that harmony didn’t matter anymore, and that it didn’t matter what I did if it meant I could make it through another day, but I was wrong!” Suddenly she couldn’t stop herself, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “What we do, the way we treat other ponies, it always matters! Especially when things go bad! That’s when harmony, when being a friend to everypony around you, is the most important thing of all. I forgot that, and because I did, somepony else paid the price for my mistakes.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I’d give anything to be able to go back and undo what I did, or trade my life for Pillowcase’s, but I can’t. All I can do is say that I’m sorry.” She lowered her head then, eyes closed, feeling wrung out and thoroughly wretched.
In that moment, she hoped that the curses Lex laid on her would be horrible. It was what she deserved.
Lex listened as Fencer, or Garden Gate, or whatever her name was spoke.
Her allocution hadn’t been what he’d expected. He’d taken it for granted that she’d list off her crimes one-by-one, letting everypony see what a monster she really was and that what he was about to do to her was entirely deserved. Instead, she’d made an outpouring of remorse, thoroughly repudiating her actions up until now and tearfully begging for forgiveness. As she finished, her last apology hanging in the air as she bowed her head, the entire warehouse was completely silent. But Lex barely noticed. Instead, he simply stared at the mare in front of him, her words replaying themselves over and over in his mind, until a single thought emerged:
Liar.
Her sudden remorse was too coincidental to be believed. He’d offered her numerous chances to do the right thing, to demonstrate a renewed commitment to the ponies around her, and she’d spurned him each and every time. That she was only sorry now, after she’d already been defeated and dragged back in disgrace, was so incredibly convenient that he couldn’t bring himself to entertain the possibility that she was sincere. It was far more likely that this was just another of her endless, vicious tricks, feigning a sudden crisis of conscience in hope of being given a lighter sentence.
His blood boiling at the thought of her perfidy, Lex telekinetically pulled Severance off of his back, holding it aloft. “As the sole authority over Vanhoover, I hereby find you guilty of assault, kidnapping, attempted murder, and murder,” he intoned harshly, his voice stentorian. “For these crimes, you will NOW BE MADE TO PAY!” He roared the last part, making everypony in attendance jump.
Heedless of the fright he’d raised, Lex stepped closer to Fen-, to Garden Gate, and swung Severance. Several of the ponies watching cried out, convinced that he was attacking her, and Turbo threw himself forward, wings spreading as he raced forward. But he had barely started when Lex, without bothering to turn his head, pointed a hoof at him. Instantly, black crystals spread along his wings, causing him to crash to the ground with a grunt of pain.
“Turbo, don’t!” screamed Garden Gate. “I’m okay!” But even as the words left her mouth, she felt something hot running down her face. Blinking in confusion – she wasn’t in any pain – she touched a hoof to her face, blinking as it came away wet with blood. “What?” She felt again, and a slight tenderness told her that there was a long, shallow cut right between her eyes.
“This is your first curse.” The roiling purple miasma along Lex’s horn flared as he spoke, channeling additional magic through himself as in order to give his malediction the power it needed. “You will wear the mark of your shame openly, and if you come within ten feet of another pony, it will rob you of your strength.” Even as he spoke the blood flowing down her face began to shift, diverting from its path to pool beneath her left eye, where it rippled and spread until it had formed the clear image of a scythe. Garden Gate cried out at the unnatural sensation, bringing a hoof up to rub at her face, but it was useless; the bloodstain remained no matter how much she rubbed at it. An instant later, it began to glow softly, and she gasped as she felt a sudden lethargy seep into her limbs, muscles spasming as she struggled to remain upright. Lex smirked at the sight, knowing that it was because he was within range of the curse’s activation area.
“That’s one. Now for the second.” His horn flared again as he drew in more power. “You committed acts of evil in hope of stealing my magic. As such, it seems only fair that you will no longer be allowed to use magic at all.” A horrified look crossed her face at that, and Lex couldn’t resist the urge to grin darkly. He’d shut down her ability to use magic before, and she’d been very upset by it. Doubtlessly she’d been relieved that he’d had her horn reattached; to be able to take that away from her now brought him no small amount of satisfaction.
He concentrated, and a moment later a purple aura just like his own appeared around Garden Gate’s horn. He felt her struggling against it, trying to keep it out, but her resistance was no match for him, and he forced it to move how he wanted. An instant later it began to flow into her horn, seeping into every part of it until finally the purple glow had been completely absorbed, leaving no trace that it had ever been there. Lex let out a breath as he felt the curse settle over her. The last time he’d shut down her ability to use magic, he’d used black crystals to interfere with her biological ability to do so. That wasn’t an option this time, both due to how directly crystallizing darkness only lasted for an hour, and because he didn’t dare use that after she had just had her horn reattached. Instead, he’d laid a direct damper on her ability to shape and direct magical energies at all, regardless of the type of magic she used. It wasn’t an absolute restriction, either; a spellcaster of great power, such as Sonata or Twilight Sparkle, would have found their spellcasting ability impeded, but not shut down entirely. Garden Gate, however, was nowhere near that level, and so would find herself entirely bereft of the ability to use magic.
“And as for the last curse-”
“That’s enough!” yelled a voice, and Lex glanced over to see that Turbo had climbed back to his hooves, his crystal-covered wings held out awkwardly as he glared at Lex. “You’ve already crippled her! You don’t need to do anything else!”
“She murdered a pony,” Lex replied coldly. “Three curses is the bare minimum that she deserves, and if you think otherwise then see if you can bring yourself to say that to Pillowcase’s widow. Now be quiet, before I charge you for attempting to interfere with justice.” Despite the threat, Turbo looked ready to keep arguing, only for an earth pony mare to hold a leg out in front of him and shake her head, whispering something.
Lex ignored them, turning back to Garden Gate, who was looking at him fearfully. “Now, for your final curse,” he began, unable to keep a hateful smile off of his face. “As the Night Mare is the patron goddess of my dominion, it is only fitting that you will find no peace when you rest. As such, you will re-live your shame and your disgrace every night when you dream.” For the third time, he pulled in additional magic as he began to lay the curse, wanting this to be as strong as he could make it so that Princess Luna wouldn’t be able to undo his justice.
Again he felt her resisting as the aura around his horn flared, and again he crushed it easily. This wasn’t exactly the same as the tantabus curse the Night Mare had laid on him, of course. Garden Gate wouldn’t have a shadow that stretched in odd directions, nor a voice taunting her when she was awake. But she wouldn’t know a night’s peace while his curse persisted, and that was what mattered. A moment later he felt the curse settle into place, and he nodded to himself in satisfaction.
Nosey sighed as she walked away from the crowd of ponies behind her.
After sentencing Fencer, or rather Garden Gate, Lex had curtly ordered everypony to finish making preparations to leave. While several ponies had started heading back to the shelter to collect the last of the supplies there, most were milling about, talking to themselves in hushed voices about what they’d just witnessed. The snatches that Nosey had overheard as she’d left the crowd hadn’t been approving.
What was Sonata thinking, letting Lex do that on his own? Nosey was certain that if Sonata had been the one doing the talking, things would have looked quite different. After all, Garden Gate had openly admitted that it was her fault that Pillowcase had died. For something as serious as that, Sonata would have been able to make it sound Lex was working with Garden to help her atone, that those curses were her penance, her way of punishing herself in a tangible manner for something she couldn’t undo. But now…
“You’ve gotta admit, that was pretty impressive,” came a raspy whisper, causing Nosey to look up at where Aria was lying on a nearby metal shelf. “Not as impressive as him fighting off me, Lirtkra, and Monitor all at the same time, but still pretty intense.”
Nosey frowned. Although she hadn’t talked to the Siren before now, Sonata had told her all about her sisters back in Tall Tale. The picture she’d painted hadn’t been a flattering one, and hearing Aria’s take on what Lex just did wasn’t helping to change that. “He made everypony afraid of him,” replied Nosey flatly. “Right now, they’re all wondering how he could be so cruel.”
“Cruel?” echoed Aria with a sneer, before tilting her head up and pointing to the faint scar on her neck. “Cruel is ripping someone's voice away forever because they enchanted a couple of ponies. What Lex just did was nowhere near as bad, for something much worse.”
“Somehow I’m guessing you weren’t sorry for what you did,” countered Nosey, “but Garden Gate clearly was. She apologized for everything, and he still came down on her so hard.” She shook her head, looking at the ground in discouragement. “Everypony here was really starting to believe in him, to see that he was somepony they could count on. But now…now he’s going to have to work even harder to win their trust back.” The sound of Aria snickering made her look up, indignant. “What? That’s funny to you?”
“Very,” smirked Aria. “I think it’s hilarious that you all are fine with him killing monsters that prey on you, or even helping him do it, but when another pony kills a pony you’re all horrified that he so much as raps her on the hooves.”
“Wh-, that’s different!” sputtered Nosey.
“Whatever you say,” came a flippant reply as Aria turned away. “I don’t really care either way. I just think that it’s funny that you all think that this is him being harsh, when I’ve seen firsthand what he can really do.”
Nosey had no response as the Siren left.
“Can you guys give us a few minutes?”
The other ponies glanced at each other uneasily before one of them looked back at Cloudbank. “Lex said that he wants everything left in the shelter packed up immediately. If we don’t get it done right away…” He trailed off, clearly afraid of what would happen if they didn’t follow the orders they’d been given.
Cloudbank glanced at Drafty, seeing the same uncomfortable expression on the other mare’s face that she knew was on her own. Lex had given them marching orders as well, telling the two of them to go retrieve Aisle and Cozy – along with Pillow’s body – so that the rest of the medical area could be broken down. But Cloudbank knew that before she could do that, she needed to fix things with Drafty, and she was pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. But they couldn’t make up with a crowd of ponies rushing them.
Sighing, she forced herself to look cool and confident as she spoke. “It’ll be fine. If Lex has a problem, tell him that I was the one who held you up.”
“But-”
Cloudbank flared her wings, taking a single step forward. “I’m a servant of the Night Mare, the same goddess that supports Lex. I wielded the living weapon Severance and struck down the kraken in that last battle.” She paused to let that sink in before continuing. “I’m telling you, nothing will happen to you, so please,” she folded her wings back in, her voice softening, “just give us a few minutes.”
“…okay.” The others backed off then, and a few seconds later Cloudbank and Drafty were by themselves.
Sighing in relief, Cloudbank turned to face her girlfriend. “Drafty, about before-”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Drafty. “I didn’t mean to get so upset. I don’t even know why I did, I just…and now Pillow…”
“I know.” Cloudbank immediately closed the distance between them, wrapping a hoof around Drafty and pulling her close, feeling the other mare immediately embrace her in return. “I’m sorry too.” The news of Pillow’s death had completely overridden her hurt feelings, reminding her that a petty fight was not worth getting angry over, not when their lives could end at any minute. Still, it was a relief to know that Drafty wasn’t mad at her anymore either.
The embrace ended a moment later, and Drafty sniffled. “I can’t believe he’s really gone. It seemed like just the other day that he was telling us all about the Crystal Empire, remember?”
Cloudbank managed a small smile. “Yeah.” More than anypony else, Pillowcase had been adamant that they’d all survive, telling them about how they could all come visit him and Cozy in the Crystal Empire once everything had calmed down. “He said he’d treat us to so many crystal berries that we’d be sick of them by the time we left.”
Now it was Drafty’s turn to smile wanly. “And then Aisle asked if crystal berries could be grown here in Vanhoover.”
Cloudbank nodded. “Right, and then Pillow says, ‘sure, but then they’d just be berries,’ and he and Aisle started laughing.” She still didn’t know why that was supposed to be funny, but she grinned at the memory all the same, seeing Drafty smirking also.
But the other mare’s smile didn’t last very long before it devolved into a worried expression. “Do you…do you think she’s angry at me?”
Cloudbank tilted her head. “What?”
“Cozy.” Drafty looked at the ground. “Do you think she’s mad at me for what happened to Pillow?”
“Why would-” Suddenly Cloudbank knew exactly what Drafty was asking, and she took a step forward, lifting Drafty’s chin to make her meet her eyes. “No. Absolutely not. Don’t even think that.”
“But if I hadn’t gotten sick…” Drafty’s eyes were watery, her voice quivering as she spoke, and it absolutely broke Cloudbank’s heart to see. “If he hadn’t gone to look for medicine for me, he’d be here right now.”
“Listen to me.” Cloudbank made her voice as firm as she could. “What happened to Pillow is not your fault, do you understand me? You are in no way responsible, and I know Cozy knows that too.”
“But-”
“No buts. It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t Pillow’s fault, it wasn’t the doctors’ fault. It was…” For an instant she hesitated, the memory of what they’d just witnessed not something she was comfortable signing off on, but the sight of Drafty’s guilt-ridden face pushed her to say it. “It was that other pony’s fault, Garden Fence or whatever. This was because of her. Not you.”
Drafty sniffled and looked away, rubbing her eyes before she turned back to Cloudbank. “Yeah…Lex really brought the hammer down on her, huh?” She tried to keep her voice light, but Cloudbank knew her well enough to hear the uncertainty there. In that moment she knew that Drafty’s admiration for Lex had been shaken by how harsh he’d been with that mare, and that she was asking for her opinion about what had just happened.
Cloudbank bit her lip, hesitating for just a moment. She’d been uncomfortable for a while now with how much Drafty had come to revere Lex; that had been why they’d gotten in that fight, after all. So if she pushed the issue here and said that Lex had gone too far in cursing that mare, it might put Drafty off of him permanently. But if she did that, then Drafty might blame herself for what had happened, and Cloudbank refused to entertain the possibility of her very special somepony carrying that kind of pain around for the rest of her life. I won’t do that to her, she swore to herself. I’d rather she spent the rest of her life thinking Lex can do no wrong than think it was her fault. Even so, there was a bitter taste in her mouth as she spoke. “He was right to do so.”
“Yeah?” The hope in Drafty’s voice, the desire to believe what she was being told, was audible.
Cloudbank made herself appear resolute as she nodded. “Absolutely. For what she did to Pillow, he was absolutely right.”
“Even though she apologized?”
“Even though she apologized. Some things are so bad that saying you’re sorry, no matter how much you mean it, isn’t enough.”
Drafty let out a slow breath. “Yeah…you’re right.”
“Darn right I’m right. And don’t you ever forget it.” Cloudbank stepped closer and nuzzled Drafty, closing her eyes to enjoy the sensation of her returning the gesture before stepping back. Canting her head towards the shelter, the two started walking towards it, sides pressed against each other.
“So what’s her condition?”
House Call sighed as he approached where Turbo and his friends had moved apart from everypony else, hearing the thinly-veiled tension in the stallion’s voice. “From what I can tell, she has some sort of proximity-induced myasthenia. Grade three, I think. It’s hard to say for certain without running more tests.” He held up a hoof to forestall the questions he knew were coming. “That means that her muscles are working enough to let her move around, but beyond compensating for gravity they can’t take much resistance. She can walk, and she can open a door or lift a pencil, but if someone’s put the lid on a jelly jar too tight she’s going to need help with it.”
Turbo grit his teeth, trying to control his breathing. “What about her horn? Can she really not use any magic at all anymore?”
House Call licked his lips slowly. “I’m afraid that I can’t answer that right now. With her being fresh out of reattachment surgery, she needs to let it heal before we examine it.”
Turbo took a step closer to House Call. “Doctor, those curses that Lex put on her-”
“Are completely beyond anything I can treat,” replied House Call immediately. “I’m sorry, but I’m a doctor, not a wizard. I’ll keep monitoring her during her recovery period, and if there’s anything I can do to make her more comfortable then I will, but that’s the limit of what I can do in this situation.”
Turbo was about to make it clear exactly how unsatisfactory that answer was, but Granola Bar put a hoof on his side and shook her head, and he let out a slow breath. “Okay. Let me know if there’s any change.” He waited until House Call nodded and left, before turning back to the others. Each and every one of them looked scared and angry. But worse was how they all looked defeated, as though they’d given up all hope of being able to do anything. He knew how they felt, but they needed to snap out of it if they were going to turn this around. “Alright, look. We’re in over our heads. Up until now we’ve just had to scrounge for food and run away from monsters, but this is different. So we need to try something different.”
“You don’t mean fighting that Lex guy, do you?” squeaked Piggy, blanching at the thought.
Turbo almost rolled his eyes, not so much at the question, but at how this was Piggy always acted whenever the situation was even slightly bad. For all that he liked to boast about being their leader, it was things like this which made him a joke to everyone else. Still, he was part of their group, which meant that they couldn’t just ignore him…and besides, his own wings were still covered in black crystals, serving as a reminder that Piggy’s question, albeit cowardly, was not unreasonable. “No, we’re not gonna fight him. Fencer told me that she didn’t want us to try anything, and we’re going to listen to her.” He knew she’d said her name was something else, but he still couldn’t think of her as anyone except Fencer.
“Now everypony pay attention. Here’s the new plan…”
Lex couldn’t help but feel the corners of his mouth turn upward ever so slightly as he watched everypony finish preparing to leave.
Seeing his response to criminality had apparently encouraged everyone even more than he’d dared to hope; several times in the last few minutes he’d given various ponies instructions, and they’d immediately rushed to fulfill them with all possible haste. Each time it happened he felt a rush of achievement, certain that their eagerness to carry out his directions was both a demonstration of faith in his guidance as well as a statement of gratitude for all he’d done for them. At first he’d pushed those feelings away, finding them to be self-indulgent, but then he’d remembered what Sonata had said earlier in the day about engaging with the ponies that he was responsible for – and how well his earlier experiment had worked when he’d spoken with everyone at the party, before the newcomers had arrived – and he’d reluctantly allowed himself to enjoy the resulting sense of satisfaction. Now he was glad he had.
For the first time in a while, he felt like he’d genuinely contributed something towards the betterment of his fellow ponies’ community. Slaying monsters was a self-evident necessity, of course, but dealing with imminent threats was the absolute lowest level of leadership. After all, anyone could intuitively understand that hostile creatures and dangerous situations needed to be dealt with; actually governing consisted of so much more, such as reinforcing public order by punishing those who transgressed it.
Admittedly, meting out criminal justice was only a minor aspect of the great society he envisioned, but at least now he was making some sort of progress toward it, rather than simply trying to staunch the ongoing damage afflicting Vanhoover. After being unable to implement any long-term policies with regard to Tall Tale, and needing to spend so much time fighting hordes of monsters – to say nothing of being unable to save Pillowcase’s life – it felt good to actually accomplish something, and it had left him hungry for more.
I need to work harder, he decided. There’s still so much more good that I can do for everypony…even that criminal, Fencer. The thought made him glance over at where a pair of medical ponies were gently ushering her into the cage that C. Shell’s crew had thrown together.
As he watched, silently chastising himself for using her old name, they gingerly helped Garden inside, and she almost collapsed onto the blanket that lay on the floor, panting with the effort of straining her curse-weakened muscles. One of the medical ponies said something, probably asking her if she needed anything, and Garden silently shook her head in reply. In response, the pony that had spoken closed the cage’s door, and then adjusted the latch to seal it…causing the smile to immediately drop from Lex’s face. He scanned the crowd, and a moment later found the pony he was looking for. “C. Shells!” he barked, causing the mare in question to jump as she heard him call her name.
Giving a visible gulp, she crept towards him, and Lex saw more than a few ponies stop what they were doing to watch her approach him. The spectacle was enough to make him frown in confusion, but he put it out of his mind as she reached him. “Yeah?” she asked, taking a deep breath.
Lex pointed at Fen-, at where Garden was imprisoned. “Her cage is only sealed with a latch. I wanted you to use something more secure.”
C. Shells licked her lips and swallowed before replying. “That was the best we were able to do. We have some padlocks, but none that were big enough to fit around the bars, so we jury-rigged the latch together.” She paused for a moment, then added. “The spaces between the bars are thin enough that she won’t be able to get her hoof through to get at it.”
“An external latch won’t be any kind of barrier to something that tries to get at her,” replied Lex disapprovingly.
Now it was C. Shell’s turn to look confused. “Huh? Wait, I thought this was supposed to be some kind of…I don’t know, makeshift prison cell. Are you saying you wanted this built to protect her?” There were more ponies looking at them now, and almost all activity had come to a stop as they watched the exchange.
Lex huffed, fighting down the familiar irritation that came with having to explain something he felt was obvious. “We’re about to venture out into a city that’s still infested with ghouls, to confront a group of ponies that will, according to what I’ve been told, meet us with hostility. She,” he pointed at Garden, “is completely unable to defend herself in her current state. A wooden cage might not be much of a barrier if something attacks her, but it’s far and away better than nothing, something that won’t be true if an assailant can simply unlatch the door.”
C. Shells just stared at him for a moment, caught completely by surprise, until she managed to recover her poise. “Okay, um…we could do some quick work on it and move the latch inside. That way she’d be able-”
“No,” interrupted Lex. “I don’t want her to be able to leave at will. Confinement might not be part of her sentence, but I don’t trust her not to do something stupid like fleeing into the city while we’re moving out.” He didn’t think that was likely, of course; Garden had to know that going out alone in her current state would be utterly suicidal. But her conduct up until now had driven home that she was dangerously unpredictable, and he wasn’t going to take any chances. After all, his placing those debilitating curses on her meant that he had a heightened duty of care to her while she labored under them. Since he hadn’t appointed any sort of correctional official to see to her rehabilitation, her well-being was his responsibility.
“In that case, a lock is definitely what you need,” C. Shells admitted. “We’ll need a little bit of time, but we can go adjust it so that one of our padlocks fits.”
“Don’t bother,” answered Lex as he turned away from her. “I’ll do it myself.”
He withdrew a gemstone from his bag as he approached the cage, idly noting the way Garden shrank away from him as he got closer to her. Embedding a spell in a gemstone took enough time and effort that he didn’t like to use them idly, but it was already late afternoon; any further delays would make it difficult for them to reach the edge of the city by nightfall, and Lex had no intention of loitering here another night. If he had to expend a minor resource to avoid another delay, then it was well worth it.
Reaching the cage, Lex placed a hoof on it. Telekinetically raising the gemstone – a small peridot – to eye-level and began to chant. As he released the spell, the peridot crumbled away to nothing, but when Lex removed his hoof from the cage there was a large padlock around the edge of the door, keeping it securely closed. Heedless of the hushed murmurings that were now going on around him, Lex eyed the magically-created lock for a moment before deciding that it would have to do. He would have preferred to have channeled additional magic into it just to be safe, but even if he hadn’t already pushed what his body could handle by enhancing the curses he’d laid on Garden, that wouldn’t have been possible. Once a spell had been stored in a gemstone, it was externalized, and so any additional magic he pulled in through his body wouldn’t be able to reach it.
“Lex?”
C. Shell’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts, and he glanced over at her disinterestedly. Now that he’d taken care of this altogether minor issue, he was ready to move on to other things. “What?”
She flinched a little at the question, and again he frowned at her odd behavior. “Um, I’m sure you’ve thought of this already, but that lock…” She trailed off for a moment, but then seemed to get over whatever was holding her back. “It has a keyhole, but I didn’t see any key when you made it.”
“It doesn’t require one,” answered Lex flatly. Now that he’d confirmed that her question was trivial, he let himself start to concentrate on other things as he spoke, barely paying attention to her. “The lock is a product of my magic, so it will open when I touch it and close when I release it. The only reason it has a keyhole at all is because the spell’s framework was modeled off of normal locking mechanisms.”
“Oh.” Lex heard the half-hearted response from C. Shells, and it was enough – in conjunction with how oddly timid she’d been acting – for him to wonder what was going on with her. Usually he’d ask Sonata what was going on with somepony, but she wasn’t around at the moment, which…come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her since he’d finished handing down Garden’s sentence. Where was she?
“But you gotta admit,” pressed Sonata, trying to keep the pleading tone out of her voice, “Lex totes did a terrific job saving everybod-, er, everypony. Like, a whole buncha times.”
“I know,” answered Scrubby uncomfortably, “but he just…”
He hesitated, giving her a worried look, and Sonata immediately spoke up. “Seriously, I won’t get upset by whatever you say about Lex. Trust me, I’ve, like, heard it all before.”
“And you won’t tell him?”
Sonata shook her head. “Cross my heart, hope to something something cupcake in my eye,” she assured him, using that half-remembered rhyme she’d heard Pinkie say a couple of times.
“Er, okay…” Pausing to glance around nervously – just because they were in the far corner of the warehouse didn’t mean they couldn’t be overheard – Scrubby continued in a low voice. “The way he looked when he was punishing that mare…it was like he was enjoying it! I mean, she looked so sad and heartbroken, but he was smiling while he cursed her!” He shivered at the memory. “It made me wonder, you know? What if he-, I’m just saying, what if he killed all those monsters because he just likes doing things like that? He sure doesn’t seem interested in making friends, so I wasn’t sure what to think before, but now I’m wondering if he’s doing all of this because he gets a kick out of hurting things and knows that monsters and criminals are acceptable targets.”
Sonata bit her lip. In the last couple of minutes, she’d spoken with three other ponies to try and get a sense of just how badly Lex had screwed up his image, hoping against hope that it wasn’t as bad as it had looked to her. But no, it had turned out to be exactly that bad, or maybe even a little worse; Scrubby hadn’t been the first pony to wonder if Lex had been pleased to hurt such an obviously-grieving mare. This is going to be totes hard to fix, she knew. But she had to try. “You know that’s not true,” she said slowly. “Lex healed you after those fish-monster-thingies hurt you, remember? And if he liked hurting things, he totes wouldn’t have worried so much about everyone staying safe when we were all out there fighting together.”
“All I know is, he keeps going on about how this is ‘his’ city, but after what I just saw I know I wouldn’t want to live here if he’s in charge,” retorted Scrubby with another nervous glance around. “Listen, I’m gonna go back. I don’t really want him wondering why I’m having secret meetings with his girl.” Sonata nodded, but he was already trotting back, leaving her to hang her head and sigh.
Sonata knew that, underneath all of his scowly grumpiness, Lex adored her more than anyone else ever could. That was what had caused her to fall in love with him, after all, and it was because she loved him so much that she wanted him to be adored too. But in that regard Lex was his own worst enemy, since he didn’t seem to understand why everything he did made people uncomfortable. That was why she’d volunteered to help him out, and sure enough they’d started to make some progress. But now they were back to square one, and turning this around was going to be even harder than before.
I won’t let him tell me not to help out again, she decided, but that’s not gonna fix things right now. If everypony lost faith in him now, Sonata knew Lex could kiss his dreams of ruling Vanhoover bye-bye. Worse, if the ponies here went back to Tall Tale and started telling everypony there about what had happened with Fencer (whoops, I mean Garden, she reminded herself), he might lose that city too. I, like, totes need to do something! But what? After all, she’d already sang and danced a whole bunch before, but everypony was still turning away from Lex now, so clearly that wasn’t enough.
So what would be?
The last few minutes had shown her that trying to talk people down wasn’t a promising solution. And Lex would completely blow his stack if she tried to enchant everyone. But if entertainment wasn’t enough, reason didn’t work, and magic wasn’t an option, then what was left?
She didn’t know, but maybe there was someone else who would…
Aisle watched as Cloudbank and Drafty slowly carried Pillowcase’s body away.
They’d spent the last few minutes covering him up, wrapping a sheet tightly around his body and then tying it down with a few lengths of rope that Drafty had brought. The entire process had been done silently, with the three of them communicating with nothing more than glances and gestures, both because they didn’t want to wake Cozy – still slumbering a few feet away – and out of a nebulous sense that this was too solemn for words.
Finally, when they’d finished, Aisle had indicated to the two mares that they’d need to carry the body out. Drafty had obviously been uncomfortable with the idea, but Cloudbank had been resolute, calming her girlfriend with a reassuring look. Gingerly, Aisle had moved Pillow’s body so that it was laying across the two mares’ backs, letting the two of them exit the makeshift room before turning back to regard Cozy.
For a long moment, he just stared at her, wishing that he didn’t have to wake her up and reintroduce her to the cold reality of what had happened. I hope you’ve been having a pleasant dream, he thought as he reached a hoof out and gently brushed her mane. Something wonderful, to make what’s happened just a little easier to deal with. For a moment he wished that he could look into her dreams the way Princess Luna could, and then hoped that maybe the princess was in Cozy’s dream right now, gently comforting her and reminding her that there were still ponies that cared about her deeply. But a small part of him, the part that had learned to be cynical after everything that had happened, said that wasn’t likely. After all, the princess hadn’t appeared in his dreams, nor anypony else’s that he knew of, since Vanhoover had gone down the drain. Why should now be any different?
Sighing as he realized that there was no more procrastinating, Aisle put a hoof on Cozy’s side and gently shook her. “Cozy,” he called softly. “Cozy, wake up.”
It took a few more attempts before he finally got a response from her. Slowly, her eyes fluttered open, looking at him blearily. “Aisle? What…?” Her voice trailed off in drowsy confusion, and for a moment she looked around with clear incomprehension. Then her eyes fell upon the operating table where Pillowcase’s body had been, and all sleepiness fled from her instantly, her eyes widening in remembrance as she leapt to her hooves. “Pillow! Is he-”
“No,” interjected Aisle immediately, not wanting her to get her hopes up. He’d lingered close enough to the medical area before that he’d overheard most of what had passed between Lex, Sonata, and Cozy, and what he hadn’t heard was fairly easy to guess. “Pillow’s still…he’s still gone, Cozy.” He could almost see the hope dying on her face as he spoke, and the sight twisted his stomach into knots. “Cloudbank and Drafty and I…we took care of-, of the body.” Pausing as he almost tripped over how to refer to somepony that he’d known that was no longer alive, he kept going. “I mean, we didn’t get rid of it or anything. We just…we wrapped it up and we’ve gotten it ready to move.”
“Him,” said Cozy, her voice turning frigid.
“Huh?”
“You didn’t get rid of ‘him.’ You’ve gotten ‘him’ ready to move. Not ‘it.’” The look she gave him was one of icy disapproval, as though she was trying with all her might to resist blowing up at him for what he’d said.
Although Aisle knew she was speaking out of grief, and that he couldn’t take what she was saying personally, he nevertheless flinched, biting his lip. “I… You’re right. I’m sorry. We’ve moved him out of here.”
Apparently mollified, Cozy’s face softened only a little, turning towards the exit. Aisle watched as she moved towards it, only to stop after she’d taken a few steps. Without turning to look at him, he heard her take a slow breath and then release it before speaking. “Did Lex use his magic on Pillow’s body?”
The question made him flinch a second time. Although he knew he could have pleaded ignorance to what she was asking, the fact was he’d overheard enough to be confident about how things had gone, and she had the right to know what had happened. “Yes.” He momentarily thought of pleading Lex’s case – preserving a body that they quite obviously weren’t going to dispose of was clearly a good idea – but he knew that saying so would draw Cozy’s ire down on him, and that wasn’t something he wanted to experience. Lex would simply have to own up to his own actions.
A spasm ran through Cozy’s body, which quickly turned into a shudder, and her breath grew heavier. “That miserable…” She couldn’t finish, her voice choking as she tried to get a grip on herself. “I told him not to! If he had left us alone, Lashtada would have brought Pillow back! I know it!” She grit her teeth, her thoughts traveling down rage-inspired paths. “He doesn’t have the slightest bit of love in his heart! Not for Sonata, not for anypony! In fact…” A thought occurred to her then, and she latched onto it in a sudden burst of hostility. “He did it on purpose!” A hoof came up then, pressing against her holy symbol tightly. “He knew that Lashtada would bring Pillow back, and he wanted to stop it! He didn’t want everypony else to see that love is stronger than him and his evil goddess!”
Behind her, Aisle’s eyes were widening in growing alarm. “Cozy…”
She didn’t hear him. “He won’t get away with this,” she hissed. “I’ll show him what happens to anyone who tries to keep two soulmates apart!” With that she strode forward, intent on making good on her threat.
For a moment Aisle could only gape in horror. He didn’t know very much about gods, but he very much doubted that Lashtada would suddenly imbue Cozy with unstoppable magical powers. And without that, he was absolutely certain that any confrontation between her and Lex would end with the dour unicorn easily overpowering her, and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. While Aisle felt reasonably sure that Lex wouldn’t be too hard on a mare that was quite clearly out of her mind with grief, he refused to put that theory to the test. Instead, he dashed forward until he was in front of Cozy, turning and putting himself directly in her way as he held out a hoof. “Stop!”
“Get out of my way, Aisle!” She barely slowed down, trying to move around him.
“No!” He darted to the side, making sure to stay in front of her. “Cozy, this is crazy! Lex isn’t responsible for what happened to Pillow!”
“Yes he is!” roared Cozy, her features twisted into a snarl of fury. “YES HE IS! He’s a monster, just like King Sombra was!” Every suspicion she’d had about Lex came rushing back then, flowing out of her mouth in an out outpouring of venom. “He’s a twisted, hateful thing that only wants to control everypony around him! He doesn’t actually care about any of us! We’re all just some, some scoreboard that he’s using to judge how powerful he is! He couldn’t save Pillow, so he doesn’t want anypony else to be able to do so because he thinks it’ll make him look weak! And now I’m going to show him just how weak he really is!”
Aisle quailed, not because of what she was saying but simply because he’d never seen Cozy act like this before. But he refused to back down. “Look…maybe you’re right. Maybe Lex doesn’t see us as friends. But he’s put his life on the line for all of us more than once. I just…I can’t believe that someone would be willing to die for somepony else if they didn’t care about them.”
“You’re wrong!” screamed Cozy. “He’s just trying to hide how warped and ugly his heart is! That’s why he wouldn’t let me bring Pillow back! He knows that love conquers all and he’s afraid that everyone else will see that too!” She pawed at the ground, lowering her center of gravity.
Intuitively recognizing that Cozy was about to become violent, Aisle wracked his brain, trying to think of something, anything, that he could say that would snap Cozy out of her grief-induced rage. A moment later something occurred to him, and he immediately blurted it out. “If Lashtada’s power is so great, then how come Lex’s magic interfered with it?”
Cozy’s brow furrowed, not understanding his question. “What?”
“If love conquers all,” replied Aisle quickly, “if Lashtada’s power is so much greater than Lex’s, then how come that spell he cast on Pillow’s body is enough to disrupt it? Shouldn’t she be able to overpower one spell by somepony with no love in his heart?”
“No! I mean, yes! That just…” She faltered then, and for a moment her aggression wavered. But then she shook her head, pushing the question aside as she glared at Aisle, her rage refocusing. “Why are you doing this?! Pillow was your friend too! Why are you-” She stopped abruptly then, her eyes narrowing dangerously. “Oh, I get it. You’re getting in my way because you want me for yourself.”
Aisle’s eyes widened. “That-”
But she wasn’t listening. “I don’t know why I didn’t see it before! Ever since Pillow left, you’ve been all over me!” The look she gave him then was one of utter loathing. “This must be a dream come true for you, huh? With Pillow out of the way, you’ve got me all to yourself. Is that why you’re the only one here? Because you’re hoping that the priestess of the love goddess will want some physical comfort in her hour of need? Well go ahead!” Turning around, she moved her tail aside and presented her rump to him. “Come on, big boy! Climb on and do me until I can’t even remember my husband’s name! This is what you wanted, right? Be a big, strong stallion and make me yours!”
“Stop it…” Aisle closed his eyes, grimacing as he turned his face away. Her earlier ranting had been upsetting to face, but the things she was saying now were painful to hear. “This isn’t what I want.”
“Liar!” Cozy looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes blazing. “Why else would you be doing this?!”
Looking up slowly, Aisle met her eyes as he spoke. “Because I’m your friend, and I’m worried about you.”
That was more than Cozy could take, baring her teeth as she spun around and got right in his face. “YOU ARE NOT MY FRIEND!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “Friends help each other! Friends support each other! All you’re doing is getting in my way and making things worse! You’ve never done anything useful and now you’re worse than useless! When we leave here I don’t ever want to see you again you miserable, selfish, cowardly-”
She would have kept going, but at that moment Aisle stepped forward and wrapped a leg around her neck, pulling her into a hug. “Hey!” Cozy immediately struggled to free herself, but he tightened his grip, refusing to release her. It was enough to make Cozy lose the last vestiges of her self-control. “Let me go! LET ME GO!” She cocked a hoof back before slamming it into his ribs as hard as she could. “Don’t touch me! I don’t want you! The only one I want is Pillow!” She hit him again, drawing a grunt from him but not loosening his grip. “The only one I want is Pillow and he’s gone and it’s all Lex’s fault and your fault and that awful mare’s fault and I’ll never forgive any of you!” She hit him again, but there was less power in it now, tears gathering in her eyes. “I’ll never forgive any of you for letting me get him back only to lose him again!” This time her blow barely had any power behind it, and although she tried to keep it in a sob escaped her throat. “You made me lose him again even though I got him back but I couldn’t do anything and now he’s gone and it’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not fair!”
And then all of her anger was gone, and she clung to Aisle tightly, burying her face in his neck as she cried. A torrent of sobs came rushing out of her, each one wracking her body as she wailed with grief. Aisle made soothing sounds as he held her, gently rocking her in hope that it would provide even the slightest amount of comfort for her broken heart, wishing he could do more.
Sonata was out of breath by the time she finished explaining the situation. She knew she’d spoken too quickly, her words jumbling together in a torrent of worry, but she hadn’t been able to help it. The gravity of the situation – that Lex might have inadvertently ruined all the progress he’d made – and the fact that they were going to march out in the next few minutes had left her too anxious to speak any slower. “So that’s why I need your help!” she finished. “I figured if anyone knows how to turn things around, it’s you!”
Sitting across from her, Nosey blinked as she spent a moment parsing everything she’d been told. A moment later she bit her lip, shaking her head as a regretful look came over her face. “Sonata…I don’t think I can help.”
“Oh come on!” Sonata’s voice was pure exasperation. “You’re, like, an ace reporter, right? You always said so! So how hard could this be?! Just report on the fact that Lex really does care super deeply about everybody-, everypony or whatever and get them to realize that!”
Nosey stood up, turning in profile so that her cutie mark – a magnifying glass over a newspaper – was visible. “My special talent is uncovering and publicizing the news. That doesn’t apply here; there isn’t any sort of hidden bit of information that everypony needs to know about. This is just Lex being Lex and it frightening everyone.”
“So you’re not going to help me?!”
“No,” answered Nosey quickly, hearing the mixture of panic and indignation in her friend’s voice. “Of course I’ll do everything I can to help; I know that Lex has a good heart, even if he’s terrible about showing it. I just…I don’t think that there’s very much that I can do, at least not right now. After I go back, sure, but that’ll still take a while.”
“But then what do-, wait,” Sonata stopped short as she processed what she’d just heard. “What do you mean ‘go back’? Go where?”
An uncomfortable look crossed Nosey’s face, and she looked down for a moment, adjusting her glasses before giving a sigh and straightening up. Her uncomfortable expression changed to one of resolve as she met the other mare’s eyes. “Home. Back to Canterlot.”
For a moment, Sonata just stared at her blankly. After several seconds she managed to bring herself to speak. “When?”
Nosey licked her lips. “As soon as possible. After Lex gets through the blockade surrounding Vanhoover, we should be able to get to the train station. If it’s running I’ll take the next one back, and if it’s not then…I guess I’ll just wait until it is. Either way, it probably won’t be very long before I go.” After all, even if the rail line wasn’t running, she was sure that Lex would fix that in short order. It was too important to Vanhoover’s immediate future to neglect.
You’re abandoning me? It was what Sonata wanted to say, but somehow she managed to clamp down on the thought before it left her mouth. For a long moment she was silent, struggling to get her thoughts in order, trying to deal with the thought of losing her new best friend even as she choked down an awful feeling of betrayal. How could you leave at such a critical moment? “But…what about all that stuff about how we were a gold mine of stories?”
Nosey managed a small smile at that. “The term I used was ‘vending machine,’ but that’s still true. Everything that you and Lex do is front-page news.”
“Then…!”
Sitting back on her haunches, Nosey raised both forelegs and shook her head in a gesture of helplessness. “Sonata, I can’t just mail my stories in! I mean, I can for a little while, but eventually I have to actually go back.” When she’d been a cub reporter, Nosey had honestly thought that going into her office at the Chronicle didn’t matter very much so long as she turned in a good story. But time and experience had quickly shown her why that wasn’t true. Not being there meant that she couldn’t get in her editor’s face when he made changes to her articles that she didn’t agree with. It meant that she couldn’t look at the proofing copies before they went to press and raise all sorts of issues about what page her work had been placed on or what picture was accompanying it. Not to mention that if she didn’t go into the office she couldn’t get paid, since it was her paper’s policy not to pay the extra expenses involved with sending bank notes.
And of course, if she didn’t go back she’d never be able to sit down and actually start writing her book about everything that had happened. Finding a working typewriter and some paper in Vanhoover right now was about as likely as finding a snowmare on a summer’s day, after all, and that wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. Throw in how what had happened with that “Pillowcase” stallion had suddenly left her wanting to go see her folks, and Nosey felt absolutely sure of her decision. It was long past time for her to go home.
“So that’s it, then? You’re just up and gone and we’ll never see you again?”
“Wh-, no! No, you’ll absolutely see me again!” Nosey took a step forward, the hurt expression on Sonata’s face making her feel terrible. “Vending machine, remember? As soon as I finish everything back home I’ll definitely come right back.” She smiled as she reached out and put a hoof around Sonata’s shoulder. “And I know that when I do Lex will be rebuilding this town and everypony will be grateful that he’s here. You know how I know?” She pulled Sonata closer then, hugging her. “Because he’s got you here with him.”
Sonata was tense for a long moment, then let out a breath and hugged Nosey back. “I’m, like, totes gonna miss you.”
“I’m gonna miss you too. You’re my best friend.” Nosey felt her eyes tearing up, and blinked them back. This was hard enough without her getting weepy!
Sonata hugged her tighter. “Best friends,” she agreed, similarly misty-eyed.
The two separated a minute later, both rubbing their eyes, only to break into sniffling laughter as they realized that they were mimicking each other. “Look at us,” chuckled Nosey, “getting all worked up over nothing. I bet the train’s not even in any shape to make it here. It might be weeks before I go anywhere.”
“We’ve, like, always had terrible luck with trains,” agreed Sonata.
“You told me,” smiled Nosey, before nodding back towards where everypony else was. “We should get back. I’m sure we’ll leave any minute now.”
Sonata gave her a go-ahead nod. “I’ll be right there.”
Nosey trotted off a moment later, leaving Sonata alone to compose herself. Although she felt silly about how something as small as Nosey going home had almost made her cry, she still couldn’t help but feel stricken. Having a friend had been more pleasant than she’d expected, and she’d gotten used to having someone around – another girl, especially – that she could relax and hang out with. Worse, she wasn’t any closer to figuring out what to do about Lex’s failing public image. What else can go wrong?
“She basically admitted that she’s not going to help you at all, you realize,” came a harsh whisper from behind her.
I had to ask, she thought, rolling her eyes as she turned around to look at her sister, who was emerging from the dim light of one of the warehouse’s deeper recesses. “What do you want, Aria?”
Resting her chin on a hoof, Aria gave her sister a sardonic grin. “That blonde mare you were getting all teary-eyed with can’t get everyone to adore your little boyfriend. But I can.”
“Uh-huh,” replied Sonata flatly, clearly not expecting anything helpful. “And in exchange you want what, exactly?”
Aria’s grin widened. “A night with him.” Sonata stiffened in outrage, her bored expression instantly becoming one of anger, and the sight made Aria’s day. Unable to help herself, she kept going. “I mean, after everything I’ve been through I deserve something nice, and with how you were moaning before he must be pretty skilled.”
“You…” Sonata grit her teeth, feeling her cheeks heat up. She wanted so badly to rush forward and wipe that smirk off her sister’s face! But she knew if she did it would start a fight that would get worse before it ended, and that was the last thing she needed to deal with right now. But that didn’t mean she was going to just walk away either! Forcing herself to put on a haughty grin, she snorted. “He wouldn’t want to touch you, since to him you’re just some big ugly fish with a big ugly scar on her neck.” The words wiped the smirk off of Aria’s face, making it Sonata’s turn to feel a thrill of spiteful satisfaction.
“He didn’t mention that when he was saying how pretty he thinks I am,” sneered Aria, but she knew it was a weak comeback. She’d already dangled that one in front of Sonata before, and the first rule of unpleasant surprises was that they were only useful the first time around.
Sure enough, Sonata just waved a hoof dismissively. “Whatever you say, but at the end of the day Lex is totes a one-woman guy, so even if you could help out he wouldn’t-, hey, wait a minute…” Sonata’s eyes narrowed as the obvious question finally occurred to her. “How could you help anyway? You can’t even enchant anyone now with your voice all messed up!”
Aria’s featured loosened. It was time to stop playing around and get down to business, which meant outlining what it was she really wanted. “I can’t when I’m like this. But if you can get your boy-toy to hurry up and turn me into a pony ASAP that won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Are you kidding?” scoffed Sonata. “You really think I’m going to tell him to help you out? If I had my way, he’d toss you back in the ocean and forget all about you. Besides, even if he did change you into a pony, he doesn’t approve of us using our powers to make everyone think what we want them to.”
One corner of Aria’s mouth turned up. “Who says he has to know?”
Sonata frowned, this time in confusion. “Huh?”
“Think about it,” explained Aria. “You don’t want to use magic to make everyone adore him since he told you not to, but if I used my magic on everyone…well, that’s hardly your fault now, is it?” She paused to let that sink in. “And besides, it’s not like I’d be enslaving all the ponies here or anything. I’d just make a suggestion here, use a little charm there, all just enough so that they look past his bad attitude and give his ideas a fair shake. He’d get the recognition he deserves, and you’d keep your hooves completely clean. Perfect, isn’t it?”
It did sound perfect, which was enough to make Sonata frown. For some reason this sounded wrong, but she couldn’t figure out why. “I dunno…”
“Come on,” insisted Aria, having to fight back the urge to berate her idiot sister, “this way everyone gets what they want. You get all these ponies admiring your boyfriend without you having to do anything immoral. He gets to feel like a big hero. I get my voice back. It’s win-win-win.”
Sonata paused, then shook her head. Suddenly she knew why this was making her uncomfortable. “No. You never wanted to let me win at anything. There’s no way you’re suddenly being all helpful now unless it’s a chance for you to do something mean later on.” Without giving Aria a chance to reply, she immediately turned around and trotted away. That was a complete waste of time, she assured herself, not looking back. Totes not worth thinking about. Not even a teensy little bit. Pretty much.
Aria didn’t bother following her. She didn’t have to. She’d known Sonata her entire life and could read her like a book, and right now she was absolutely sure that she was considering her offer. After all, what other choice did she have? With Lex being some sort of natural-born idiot when it came to other people, and Sonata just being an idiot period, Aria was sure that she’d be able to get what she wanted from them. And once she had her voice back…once she could use enchantments again, alongside the new magic she’d learned in the last few months…
Lex fidgeted impatiently as he waited for the last few stragglers to rejoin the group.
He’d anticipated that it would take only a few minutes to get everything together and leave after he’d punished F-, Garden Gate. After all, all that needed to be done was to retrieve Pillowcase’s body and Cozy, along with breaking down and packing the remaining materials in the medical area of the shelter. It should have been done in well under five minutes, especially with how everypony was rushing to do what he told them.
But somehow, the process had been delayed. For whatever reason, it was taking an extraordinarily long time for the ponies he’d sent back to the shelter to return, and Cozy and her husband’s body were nowhere in sight. For that matter, Sonata had all but vanished after he’d laid his last curse, and he hadn’t seen her since. By his estimation, that had been almost twenty minutes ago, and his irritation at the pointless holdup had begun to erode his good mood. Whatever’s going on, it’s costing us time we don’t have! he groused internally. If they were going to get to the edge of Vanhoover before dark, they needed to leave right now!
He paused as Severance made itself known, speculating that something might have happened. It was enough to make Lex frown, finding the possibility hard to take seriously. After all, there hadn’t been any indications of a struggle that he’d heard, and he’d sent enough ponies away that if something had gone wrong, at least a few of them should have been able to run back and alert him. But even so, after everything they’d gone through, he couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility…
After a few moments of ruminating he started walking back towards the shelter, having decided to check on things personally…only to almost collide with Sonata as she stepped out of an adjoining hallway. “There you are!” His voice came out more aggrieved than he’d intended, trying to cover up his relief that Severance’s guess had been incorrect. “Where have you been? We were supposed to have left by now!”
Sonata bit her lip for a moment, looking oddly reticent, though he couldn’t imagine why. “Lex, listen…we need to talk.”
“What we need is to make our way to this so-called blockade at the edge of Vanhoover before nightfall. Taking a group this large outside at night is too risky, and I’m not willing to suffer another delay in restoring order to this city.” He managed to keep his voice level, reminding himself that as much as he loved Sonata, she was nowhere near his intellectual level and so tended to need things explained to her over and over again.
“I get that. I do,” she insisted, “but this is important.”
Her words gave him pause, caught between wondering if she’d uncovered some other imminent danger or if she was being foolish again. After all, whatever she was talking about couldn’t be of any serious magnitude, otherwise she would have immediately brought whatever it was to his attention instead of leading with something as equivocating as “we need to talk.” But on the other hoof, they’d been through enough that he couldn’t immediately dismiss her judgment either.
But before he could make up his mind, he caught a glimpse of something out of his periphery, turning to see Cloudbank and Thermal Draft carrying a large white bundle across their backs. Beside him, he heard Sonata inhale sharply as she realized what they were transporting. The sight was enough to harden his resolve. If whatever Sonata was struggling with wasn’t something that required his immediate attention, then it was going to need to wait. “I want you to go back and let everypony know that we’re about to leave. I’ll be there once I’ve confirmed that the shelter is completely empty.”
“But-”
“Now, Sonata.” He started to walk towards the two mares approaching them, before pausing and calling back to her, “and retrieve Aria as well.”
She winced at that, but he barely noticed, instead turning and walking toward the two mares who were acting as de facto pallbearers. The two were moving slowly, both from the weight of their gruesome parcel and from trying to keep it balanced as they moved in tandem. Still, he was glad they’d had the foresight to wrap the body; although he didn’t think it was likely, he wasn’t completely certain that Pillowcase wouldn’t turn into a ghoul. If that happened, the ropes tied around his sheet-covered body would keep him contained long enough to be dealt with. “Where is everypony else?” demanded Lex without preamble as walked up to them.
Cloudbank nudged Drafty with a wing, and the two came to a careful halt, sighs escaping their lips as they managed to stop without unbalancing the body on their backs. “It took a little longer than expected to get everything ready.” Cloudbank didn’t bother to mention that she’d caused the delay when she’d insisted on getting a few minutes alone to patch things up with Drafty. There were some details that Lex didn’t need to know. “The others should be finishing up right now.” Next to her, Drafty nodded, still slightly subdued after seeing the number Lex had done on that criminal.
Lex nodded curtly. Moving to walk past the two, he didn’t bother looking at them as he spoke. “When you reach the others, I want you to find some earth ponies to transport Pillowcase’s body. They’ll have an easier time of it, and I have other tasks for you once we leave.”
“They won’t like that.” Drafty couldn’t help but speak up, certain that some random ponies that had never even met Pillow wouldn’t be pleased at the prospect of carrying his remains on their backs.
Lex paused then, glancing back over his shoulder at the two of them. “If they have a problem with doing what they’re told, make sure to tell them that I’ll have a problem with them.” He almost smiled as he said it, feeling slightly ridiculous at giving such an ominous-sounding statement after he’d just made a well-received demonstration that he was everypony’s champion, but managed to keep his humor contained as he turned back towards the shelter.
It took less than a minute to arrive there, and upon reaching it he was relieved to see ponies starting to exit the structure, each of them carrying something. Nodding to himself as they quickly marched towards the warehouse doors, Lex waited until the last of them were gone before heading inside the shelter to confirm that everything had been removed…only to find that it was still occupied.
Off to the side, Aisle and Cozy were embracing.
For a moment, Lex frowned at the sight. The two of them were standing perfectly still, eyes closed as Cozy buried her face in Aisle’s neck while he rested his chin on her head. What were they doing? No, I don’t care, he decided. “The two of you, go join everypony else,” he ordered, speaking louder than he knew was necessary.
The two of them jumped, visibly startled as their eyes snapped open, separating from each other. “L-Lex!” exclaimed Aisle, his eyes darting between him and Cozy. “Um, sorry, we just…we lost track of time.”
“And now you’re wasting it,” countered Lex, raising a hoof and pointing at the exit. “Hurry up.” He was already starting to regret having granted Aisle’s request for a few extra minutes with Cozy. While he felt confident that the crystal mare was in a state of grief, and so couldn’t be reasonably expected to be fully cognizant of the consequences of her actions, Aisle should have known better.
“Right,” answered Aisle, a little too quickly. He then went over to Cozy – whom Lex noticed had been looking at him with an unreadable expression this entire time – and whispered something in her ear. She glanced back at Aisle, and murmured something that Lex didn’t quite catch, before shooting him another odd look as she turned towards the door. Aisle followed behind her, giving Lex a smile that seemed oddly pained before the two of them exited the shelter.
Left alone, Lex sighed, knowing it shouldn’t have been this difficult to get everypony ready to leave. But at least now it was done, and they could leave this makeshift excuse for an operational center behind. And good riddance, he decided as he marched towards the door. It was time to stop reacting to the situation in Vanhoover, and start shaping it himself. Leaving this place behind was the next step towards that goal.
Five minutes later, the warehouse doors opened as everypony began pouring out.
The sun was just touching the horizon when a knock came. “Enter,” called Block Party tersely.
A moment later, the door to his office opened and Spit Polish nervously entered. “Sir?” he gulped. “There’s a…situation.”
Block Party didn’t move except to raise his eyes from the scroll on his desk to look at his assistant. Spit Polish’s bruises were only just now starting to fade, and his right eye was still swollen shut from the beating he’d received a few days ago. His split lip had only recently recovered enough that he could talk without lisping, and his foreleg had obviously healed enough for him to walk on it without grimacing. Or maybe he was just trying to hide his pain. Block Party didn’t really care either way.
What he did care about was that Spit Polish hadn’t so much as said anything about what had happened, let alone tried to do anything about it. He’d simply shown up when he was supposed to the next day, not saying a word about his injuries or the fact that he’d been beaten unconscious the previous night. But he was quite clearly thinking about it; the look of shame on his face had been such that Block Party had come perilously close to grinning, knowing that his assistant had to be feeling utterly miserable.
But that urge was gone now, in the light of the current news. “What sort of situation?” he asked evenly.
“There’s a group of ponies at the edge of the city…”
Block Party snorted, lowering his eyes back to his scroll. “You know what to do about that.”
“Y-yes sir, but we, um…we tried to drive them back into Vanhoover but…we can’t.” Spit Polish had to pause to swallow several times as he spoke. For a brief moment he wished he’d taken Peachy Keen up on her offer to fill in for him while he recovered from the last time he’d upset the commander, but he pushed that thought away. It’s just like the commander said. So long as I keep acting like part of the solution, he won’t have to punish me for being part of the problem. Peachy didn’t understand that, and her insisting that the commander was the one at fault had filled Spit Polish with an incredible sense of anger for reasons that he still didn’t understand. I need to talk to her later, he decided. I need to help her understand why things have to be this way. Although she was sweet, Peachy still didn’t seem to understand that keeping the undead plague contained was the absolute top priority, and that the commander couldn’t take any chances. If they made it harder for him to protect Equestria, then they deserved whatever they got.
“You can’t?” asked Block Party, bringing Spit Polish back to himself. “Or won’t?”
“Can’t, sir!” Despite himself, Spit Polish almost choked on the words, rushing to explain. “This group is several dozen ponies strong! And they all look-, it’s crazy, but they don’t look like they’re hungry or thirsty at all, even though there’s so many of them! And their leader…” He trailed off for a moment then, remembering the lead pony who was almost as intimidating as the commander was.
Block Party’s eyes narrowed. “What about their leader?”
“H-he’s some sort of wizard, sir. When we tried to throw things at their group, he…retaliated.” He let that hang there for a moment before continuing, mustering up his courage to say the next part. “He says he wants to speak to whomever’s in charge, so that…so that he can arrest them.”
For a moment, Block Party was silent. Then he gestured to the chair across from his desk. “Sit down.” Spit Polish tilted his head, but knew better than to question what he’d just been told, walking into the room and sitting in the indicated chair. A moment later Block Party slowly rolled up the scroll he’d been reading and tucked it away, before fixing his assistant with a level look. “Now, I want you to tell me, with as many details as you can, everything that’s happened.” Spit Polish nodded, dutifully relaying what had occurred. When he finished, Block Party simply leaned back in his chair, his face a mask of consideration. After what felt like an eternity, he slowly stood up. “Alright then. Let’s go.”
Spit Polish leapt to his hooves at the commander stood up. “Yes sir! Please tell me what to do and I’ll make sure your orders are carried out faithfully!”
“My orders?” echoed Block Party bemusedly.
“…Sir?”
Block Party chuckled softly as he stepped around Spit Polish, heading towards the door. “Why would I be giving anyone orders? I’m about to be placed under arrest.”
Guiding everypony through Vanhoover had gone better than Lex had hoped.
The sun had been low in the sky when they’d set out, and although Vanhoover was west of the mountains, the buildings had still cast long shadows as they’d left the warehouse. While not truly dark, Lex had still been concerned about ghouls attacking them, instructing everyone on what to do to minimize the threat. Unfortunately, that hadn’t included making more black crystal weapons and armor for everypony; doing so required that he channel additional magic through his body to enhance what he could create with his dark magic, and he’d exhausted his ability to do that while cursing Garden Gate. But there were other ways to increase their safety.
Every pegasi had been directed to stay in the air, keeping above the buildings wherever possible while shadowing their progress from the sky, both to stay out of harm’s way and to maintain a lookout. On the ground, Lex had instructed everypony to march in a tight formation, allowing their number to be split into two groups: outer and inner. The outer ponies were lightly encumbered, carrying nothing that would hinder their movement, as well as being equipped with some sort of weapon. Most of those were makeshift, being a wrench or a length of pipe or – in the case of that earth pony with the scar on his neck – an actual board with a single oversized nail through it. For these ponies, their role was to stand firm against any incoming attack and safeguard everyone in the inner group.
Those ponies that were part of the inner group were those Lex had judged to be the most in need of protection, whether because they were more vulnerable than their peers or because they were more useful in a noncombat position. The latter consisted of quite a few of the medical ponies, as well as Cozy; if they were attacked, Lex knew that her healing powers would be invaluable. The former, on the other hoof, were mostly ponies that were overburdened with more than their fair share of provisions. Although they’d needed to leave a substantial amount of equipment behind, sitting in the warehouse for when they could go back and retrieve it – after all, without any wagons or carts, much of it was simply too heavy or too bulky to be easily transported – a great deal of it was being carried on backs, in mouths, and in many cases in telekinetic auras. The sheer degree to which those ponies had been loaded up meant that if they were attacked, they’d be hard-pressed to defend themselves, and so were given safer positions alongside their medical counterparts.
The only pony that had been part of the inner group without being a healer or transporting equipment was Garden Gate, lying limply in her cage due to her curse. Carried along by four members of her old gang – including that upstart Turbo, who had flatly refused to be separated from her (an attitude that Lex countenanced only because he’d decided that one less pegasus in the air would make no substantial difference) – Lex had placed her at the very center of the inner group, where she would be safest.
With the formations arranged, the next priority had been communication. Although Lex typically used the spell that carried whispers at a distance exclusively with Sonata, who was placed safely in the inner group, this time he had included several other individuals within its effect. Cloudbank, who had been given nominal command of the pegasi if things went badly, was one such pony. Others were Aria, who was maintaining the left side of the outer group, and C. Shells on the right. A few others, such as Aisle and House Call in the interior of the group, had rounded things out. He’d wanted to include Cozy as well, but for some reason she had refused to speak to him, much to his frustration.
With everything else in place, Lex had tasked Severance with guarding their rear, ordering it to follow at a short distance and cut down anything that tried to pick them off from behind. That had left only Lex himself, taking up the job of charting the path forward. Doing so meant that he’d spent the entire journey in shadow-form, darting ahead to scout the places that the pegasi couldn’t see. Silent and insubstantial, he had darted between the buildings lining their path, slipping between walls or down into the sewers to make sure that nothing was lying in wait for them.
It was a good thing that he had.
Even though he hadn’t had time to check the entirety of each building, instead just rushing through a few of the rooms that were closest to the street, he still stumbled upon no less than three groups of ghouls – none with more than four members – that were clandestinely watching them pass. Although there had been no indication that the things were planning on doing more than observing them, Lex had nonetheless used his dark magic to make black crystals block off any nearby doorways before quickly dispatching them. Given that undeath was a hideously unnatural state that warped the minds of those afflicted with it, he had no compunctions about destroying the ghouls without provocation. As far as he was concerned, he was releasing them from a torturous existence.
Still, tearing apart the undead ponies he’d found hadn’t relieved Lex’s tension; if anything, it had heightened it, worrying that for every group of ghouls he’d stumbled upon, more were waiting in the wings. It didn’t help that his communication spell was limited; not only could it not transmit or receive whispers if he was more than two hundred feet or so away from the others, it wouldn’t work if he was inside a building due to the intervening walls. But that was a risk that was unavoidable; the threat of a communication breakdown was less than that of an ambush. After all, he, or rather Sonata (she’d been strangely adamant that she relay all of his instructions to everypony on his behalf, no matter how brief), had warned everyone that they absolutely couldn’t break formation; that if they panicked and ran blindly away from the group, they would almost certainly die.
Even so, Lex had been concerned that a large attack, especially if it came from multiple directions simultaneously, would be enough to overwhelm everypony’s courage. Sonata had assured him that if that happened she would sing and keep everyone calm, buying him enough time to get back and reassert control over the situation, but while Lex had to admit that what she’d done during the nighttime battle against the kraken’s minions was a testament to her abilities – no one had broken and run then, after all, and that situation had looked far worse than a daytime march through Vanhoover – he still had no desire to put her assurances to the test. One dead pony on his watch was more than enough; he had no desire to see another.
But in spite of, or perhaps because of, his many precautions, no attack had come.
Instead, the edge of the city now lay before them, the urban sprawl ending abruptly a mere three blocks away. The sight was enough that Lex – returning to corporeal form and moving so that he was marching at the front of the formation – let out a sigh of relief. For the first time in a while, things hadn’t gone as poorly as possible! Hopefully that would be the case from now on.
“Lex.” Cloudbank’s whisper sounded as though she was right at his side, rather than flying above him. “I can see ponies up ahead, past the city. They’re looking this way.”
“How many?” he whispered back. If what Cozy and Garden Gate had said was even remotely accurate, then they were about to meet with hostility that had nothing to do with ghouls.
“Not many, five or six,” replied Cloudbank. “No, wait…one of them is running off somewhere.”
“Good. That means they’re not completely stupid,” Lex snorted, knowing that the pony that was fleeing almost assuredly going to bring reinforcements. Exactly what sort of force showed up, and how quickly, would be telling. After all, the very idea of a half-dozen or so ponies acting as a patrol, or perhaps a token guard, for this stretch of the city limits was laughable, just as he’d thought it would be. A group that size might be able to drive away a few starving survivors, maybe even a ghoul or two, but any larger force would easily overrun them. And unless they had a massive array of floodlights or something similar, nighttime would erase what little efficacy those ponies had anyway. In fact…Lex looked carefully ahead, confirming the complete and utter lack of impediments in their path. Although he’d known that cordoning off an entire city was an impractical task at best, the fact that they hadn’t done anything further confirmed that this entire “blockade” was little more than a farce. But if that was the case, why bother with it at all…?
“Stop right th-there!” came a voice from one of the ponies ahead of them. Its owner was a skinny-looking unicorn stallion with a dark brown coat and a blond mane and tail. Gulping, he lifted a rock in his telekinesis, cocking it back in what was probably supposed to be a threatening gesture, though his tremulous voice and repeated swallowing made it hard to be certain. “You all turn around right now!” he continued, eyes sweeping over the ponies in front of and above him. “You go back in there before you infect us all!”
Lex gave the barest of glances backward, raising a hoof. Although they were less than a block away from the edge of the city now, everypony that saw his gesture instantly came to a halt, with the rest quickly catching themselves. On his own, Lex strode forward, until he came to the very edge of the city limits. As he did, the rock-toting pony took several steps back, his visible nervousness growing, and behind him his companions were doing the same. For a moment Lex marveled at how weak-willed they were, to be so easily intimidated, until he noticed that their eyes were looking down. Following their gazes, he realized that they were looking at his shadow, stretching out ahead of him in a direction that was completely perpendicular to the way all the other shadows were falling in the late light. The sight almost made him laugh, having grown so used to the unusual occurrence that he had completely discounted it. Brushing his humor aside, he took a long look at the five ponies standing in opposition to him before speaking. “I want all of you to listen to me very carefully, I-”
“Wait!”
The frantic whisper in his ear left Lex confused for a moment, only to realize what was happening as he heard the sound of pushing from behind him. “Sonata, stay there! I can handle this on my own!” he whispered back. What was she doing?! They weren’t completely out of danger yet!
“Like, no way! You need me there to help!” A moment later she pushed past the ponies in the outer group and galloped forward, until she was standing alongside him. “Okay!” she exclaimed, using her normal voice again, “spokespony powers activate!” She glanced at the worried-looking ponies in front of them before turning her attention back to Lex. When he didn’t immediately respond, instead giving her a look of exasperation, she elbowed him lightly. “That means you start telling me what to say now.”
For a moment he wanted to berate her, but knew that there were more important things he should be focusing on…and that it would likely be futile anyway. Instead, he gave a long-suffering sigh before telling her to communicate that he was here to help, that he had food and medicine, and that they needed to take him to whomever was in charge so that they could be apprehended for how grossly they’d mismanaged things.
“Okay!” Despite the dour contents of his message, Sonata was practically bouncing with enthusiasm. Now she’d be able to introduce Lex to a whole bunch of people who hadn’t seen him curse Fenc-, Garden! This was great! “So, this guy right here,” she stepped forward and pointed at Lex, “is, like, a super-duper hero who’s totes come here to save everypony! He’s got a ton of supplies and some majorly great ideas for how to turn everything around! Once the big cheese of this place is ‘apprehended,’ whatever that means, Lex is gonna-”
“You’re going to arrest the commander?!” The blond stallion spoke up, eyes widening.
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, not sure where that idea had come from. “Hang on, that-…” She trailed off as Lex whispered something to her, causing her to smile with relief. “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Your commander is going to be ‘indicted’ for what they’ve done. That’s good, right?”
“Get them!” The stallion immediately threw his rock, as did the others, aiming right at Sonata.
“Guess not!” she yelped as she turned and ran back towards her companions.
“SEVERANCE!” bellowed Lex, and the scythe responded immediately. It rocketed forward, tumbling end over end as it moved past the regimented ponies, past Lex, past Sonata, to cut the rocks out of the air, slicing them to pieces as though they were made of snow rather than stone. It was enough to send the ponies that threw them scampering backward, eyes bugging out at the sight of a flying scythe demolishing their attacks.
Between that, the odd-looking pony with the frightening shadow, and how badly they were outnumbered, it was enough to cause their courage to fail completely, and all five of them turned tail and ran. Severance started to float after them, but Lex’s telekinetic aura sprang around it a moment later, pulling it back. “No, let them go. The more of an alarm they raise, the quicker their ‘commander’ will make his or her way here.” It galled him to let anypony go after they’d dared to attack Sonata, even if he’d doubted she’d been in much actual danger. He’d just have to hold it against whoever was managing this operation.
Off to his side, Sonata tilted her head as she considered what had just happened. “Okay, like, mental note. ‘Indictments’ or ‘indictations’ or whatever they’re called aren’t popular in Vanhoover. Maybe they’re more of a Tall Tale thing?”
She blinked at the pained look Lex gave her in response. “What? I’m just saying.”
Fifteen long minutes passed before Lex finally ran out of patience.
“Enough of this,” he growled softly, looking in the direction that the border patrol ponies had fled. “We’re moving out.” He whispered the command, letting his spell carry it to the others. “We’re going to follow those ponies back to wherever they’re encamped.”
Aisle was the first one to reply. “Is that a good idea? If we march right in and cause a panic-”
“We are not going to stand here in the dark waiting for them to get their act together!” replied Lex harshly. Next to him, Sonata winced, but he ignored her, still looking at where the fleeing ponies had disappeared into the distance. Now that the sun had gone down completely, it was murky enough that they could no longer be seen, but that mattered little; in another few minutes it would be dark enough that some sort of light would be necessary to see, and then wherever they were headed would be clearly illuminated.
In the meantime, Lex had waited for them to activate whatever rapid-response plan they had for when they met a hostile force their meager detachment couldn’t overcome. Seeing that would have given him a better understanding of the overall situation among these survivors, and hopefully shed some light on the nonsensical “quarantine” they were trying to enforce. But as the minutes had slowly trickled by and nothing had happened, Lex eventually realized the truth: they didn’t have a plan, or at least not one that could be put into effect with the immediacy that such an occurrence should have warranted. That had been enough to set his teeth on edge; he had his answer about what those ponies would do if their so-called quarantine was in danger of failing, but it had only made things less clear, rather than more.
“I see lights,” came Cloudbank’s whisper, and Lex reflexively glanced up at her before looking around. Sure enough, a few points of light were visible, though it was hard to tell exactly how far away they were, and as Lex watched more started to appear. As he’d expected, they were in the same direction that the border-guard ponies had run towards.
“We’ll head there,” ordered Lex brusquely. “Stay in formation until I tell you otherwise. I want every unicorn that isn’t already using their horn to create a light. Aisle, have Cozy start using her light spell on whatever she can. Cloudbank, have Severance illuminate itself.” He’d dispatched the living scythe back to its position at the rear of the group after the other ponies had fled, refusing to take a chance that some ghoul would rush at them in the encroaching nightfall. Now that they were moving away from the city, they would probably be safer, but Lex had no intention of letting their guard down until he had a better handle on the situation. Speaking of which…
Letting his own horn glow with deep purple light, Lex glanced at where Sonata was lingering next to him. “Go back to the inner group of ponies. You’ll be safer there.”
“Nuh-uh!” She shook her head, keeping pace with him as he led everyone forward. “We’re about to run into a whole bunch of other ponies again, right? That means you totes need me front-and-center to speak for you.”
Lex frowned. They’d had this little exchange several times over the last few minutes, as she’d worried that the ponies that had fled might come back, and on that account refused to leave his side. Her sudden devotion to fulfilling her role as his spokespony was odd, particularly in light of his recent breakthroughs in social interaction. “Sonata, if these ponies turn violent, you could get hurt. We’re heading into a situation where everypony is acting irrationally, based on what we know so far, which means that right now it’s important to-”
“To let them know that you’re a totes reliable guy that everyone can believe in,” she cut in. “And that’s my job, so let me do it.” She was frowning now as well, and there was an underlying tension in her voice that he hadn’t noticed before. He was about to ask her if something was wrong when she spoke up again. “Listen, have you…how’s it going? With Aria?”
He blinked, confused by the sudden change in topic. “What? How’s what going?”
She looked away from him then, keeping her eyes in front of her. “You know. Making her into a pony.”
For a moment he didn’t understand why she was bringing that up, but then the obvious answer came to him: for all her antipathy towards her sister, Sonata was still worried about her. After all, she knew firsthoof how much better a proper pony body was compared to that mutated aquatic form, and so it must have pained her to see her Aria stuck that way even though the two of them had such a tumultuous relationship. The realization was enough to cause a sliver of guilt to run through him; other than some basic conceptual groundwork, he’d made no real progress on designing a ritual to fix Aria’s body, having to deal with too many other things for that to be a priority. But I can’t tell Sonata that. Just the thought that she would be disappointed with him was a knife in his heart. But lying to her was completely out of the question. Luckily, there was a third option.
“The preliminary stages are going well,” he said, which was technically true. Abstract design was an initial step in creating any magical effect, and so far he hadn’t run into any problems with his basic theory. “I should be ready to make an attempt very soon.” Fortunately, “very soon” was a completely relative term, which meant that he’d bought himself some time. He’d have to fast-track this now…all the while continuing to deal with Vanhoover and its attendant problems.
“Oh. I mean, um, great! That’s, you know…really great.” She smiled at him, and he returned the expression, too pleased with himself to notice how strained her grin was.
With that resolved, they walked in silence for a time, making their way towards the lights that slowly grew larger as they neared them. Eventually they got close enough for Lex to see that they were campfires, and he could almost make out the ponies huddled around them. Behind them he could see…it was hard to tell, but they looked like structures of some kind? The sight made his brow furrow, as the shapes seemed wrong for any sort of buildings. But as they marched closer, he saw that his earlier guess hadn’t been completely accurate. What he’d noticed hadn’t been buildings, at least not unless one was extremely generous with the term. Rather, they were a ramshackle collection of rumpled tents and rickety lean-tos, most of which looked dirty and dilapidated, with unpatched holes and sagging supports being a common feature.
And the ponies that were living in such deplorable conditions…
A stone’s throw away from the nearest campfire, Lex stopped in place, deactivating the aura around his horn (and quelling the green-and-purple glow from his eyes, since he knew how frightening it could be) as he signaled the others behind him to come to a halt, spending a long moment looking at the survivors. They’d quite clearly seen the lights from his band approaching – indeed, he knew that they’d be impossible to miss – but although they were backing away with frightened expressions, none of them had run. For a split second he thought that it was because they had nowhere to run to, but then he realized that wasn’t the case either.
One pony, a pegasus stallion with a grass-green coat, was trying to help an withered old pegasus mare with matching colors – his mother, perhaps? – to her hooves, shooting panicked looks at the Lex and company between whispering urgently to her. But the old mare couldn’t seem to get up, legs shaking and wings trembling as she tried in vain to rise. Nopony moved to help the pair…they all had their own problems. An earth pony filly, young enough that she looked like she still should have been in school, was cradling a crying baby, bouncing and shushing it in a futile effort to calm the child. A unicorn mare was coughing so hard that Lex could hear her raggedly gasping for breath between each bout, unable to clear her lungs. An earth pony stallion with both of his back legs bandaged was trying to crawl further back, whimpering in agony every time his injured limbs jostled against the ground. And it didn’t end there, a quick glance showing that every nearby fire had ponies in states of similar misery, all directing terrified looks his way.
Sonata gaped at the scene in horror. “Th-this is awful!” She looked at Lex, barely able to process the sight of so much abject suffering. “We have to help them!”
“I know.” His own face was stony, keeping his emotions firmly in check so that he could focus on what needed to be done. He started to step forward, but caught himself in mid-stride, remembering what Sonata had said before. It was obvious that everypony here was afraid of the new ponies that had just marched into their camp, and in order to implement the relief effort as efficiently as possible, he needed to put his best hoof forward. “Tell them that we’re here to rescue them, that we have food and doctors and supplies.”
“What? Oh! Right!” Shaking off her initial shock, Sonata turned around, gathering herself up as she started to approach the camp. “Everypony! We-”
“Go away!”
The shout came from the green pegasus stallion, stepping away from the old mare he’d been trying to help. Stepping forward, he spread his wings out as he gave Sonata a look that was as much desperation as it was defiance. “Go away! You’re going to make us all sick!”
“Wha-, no! Listen to me!” Visibly caught off-guard, Sonata tried to rally. “We’re, like, here to help!”
“You’re going to make us all sick!” repeated the pegasus stallion. “You’ll spread the disease and we’ll all turn into those things!”
“NO!” Sonata couldn’t believe that people in such dire straits were refusing help. It made no sense! “We have doctors! And this pony here,” she waved a hoof towards Lex, his face still a tight mask of control, “has magic that can cure anyone who’s sick! And, and we have food!" But it wasn’t working. She could hear the fearful murmurs spreading across the camp, the ponies around the fires making renewed efforts to try and get away from them. The sight was enough to bring tears to her eyes. I need to sing! It, it won’t be wrong if I enchant them just a little, for their own good! But she could feel her throat closing up, the reality of the situation being too heartbreaking for her to bring her voice to bear.
She reflexively glanced back at Lex, seeking guidance about what to do, but knew even as she did it that he didn’t have any answers. This was supposed to be her area of expertise, after all, and yet right now – when it was more important than ever – she was failing miserably. Biting her lip in frustration, she took a deep breath, getting ready to try agai-
“Can you help my little brother?”
The question came from the earth pony filly holding the crying baby, and it made everypony in earshot stop, looking at her. She kept rocking the baby as she spoke, looking at Sonata with watery eyes. “He cries all the time and I c-can’t make him stop,” she sniffled. “He doesn’t want to eat anything either, and when I try and feed him he just throws it up and I d-don’t know wh-what to do.” Her voice started hiccupping as she spoke, her composure breaking down. “You can help him, right?”
It was all Sonata could do not to burst into tears at that, instead giving the little girl a shaky smile. “Of course we can, sweety. Just…just come over here and we can have our doctors fix him right up, okay?”
Sniffling, the filly nodded, and started to trot over to her. The green pegasus looked for a moment like he wanted to stop her, but couldn’t bring himself to do so, his wings drooping as she passed him. She kept trying to soothe her brother the entire time, still rocking him as she walked. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Tiddlywinks. Everything's going to be alright.” Reaching Sonata, she held the child out. “Here. Please, make him all better.”
“O-of course.” Hastily wiping her eyes, Sonata gingerly took the baby, giving the little girl another smile, this time warmer. “My name’s Sonata. What’s yours?”
“Fiddlesticks.”
“Well, Fiddlesticks, you don’t have to worry anymore. You see that pony right there?” She pointed at Lex again. “His name is Lex Legis, and even though he looks totes scary he’s really a superhero, and he’s come here to save everyone, starting with you and your brother.”
Having been caught up in the spectacle, Lex came back to himself as he heard his name, immediately whispering. “All of you, break formation. House Call, bring whatever you need and get up here. Aisle, have everypony start unpacking the supplies. Cloudbank, let the pegasi know they can land. We’ll need them to help organize things here. Aria, keep watch in case anyone becomes violent. If they do I want you to subdue them without hurting them.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” came the sneering reply, but Lex ignored her as everyone started to move.
The process of saving Vanhoover had finally begun.
A short distance away, Block Party frowned. Implanting a suggestion into the minds of those ponies that these newcomers would make them sick should have ensured that things ended in hostility, or at least forced that group to demonstrate some of their abilities in quelling the fearful crowd. Either result would have given him something to work with. Instead, that little girl had managed to slip his influence due to that mare’s – Sonata, she’d said her name was – plea reminding her to be more worried about her sibling than herself. Worse, her example had inspired the rest of the crowd to stand down as well; even though his telepathic suggestion used magic to make an idea seem appealing, it was still just a suggestion, and so couldn’t compel behavior that the targets didn’t want to do.
As he watched the nearby ponies begin to crowd around the newcomers, several crying with relief as food was passed to them while others were examined by doctors, Block Party considered what to do next. This had to be the group that defeated the so-called Great Lord of the Deep, and in doing so closed the aperture to the Elemental Plane of Water, but that wasn’t enough information to let him know what he was dealing with. If he was going to keep them from disrupting his plans, he’d need to know more about their capabilities.
Which means, he decided, I’ll need to get involved directly. He’d start by speaking with that pony that the other mare had indicated was in charge, and who apparently had some sort of curative magic. The one who Spit Polish had said was going to arrest him, as amusing as that idea was.
It’s going well, Lex decided as he oversaw the relief effort. For now.
The last few minutes had threatened to explode into bedlam as word had begun to spread that help had finally arrived. Although more than a few ponies had voiced concerns about the newcomers being diseased, those fears had been quickly forgotten as word spread that they had food and medicine. The result had been a horde of ponies surrounding them, and even for Lex it had been obvious that the crowd would turn into a mob in short order if left unchecked. Fortunately, he’d known what to do in the event of such a scenario. Indeed, this had been what he’d initially imagined when he’d set out for Vanhoover, rather than a ghost-city filled with monsters.
The best solution, as with so many problems, was simply to deal with the underlying situation before it became a problem in the first place. In this case, that meant issuing Cloudbank instructions via his whisper-spell, which she in turn passed along to the other pegasi, having them take point with the crowd. Under their direction, everypony began to form an orderly line so that food could be distributed, while those ponies that needed medical attention were helped over to the doctors. He’d likewise tasked Aisle with making sure the doctors had whatever they needed, as well as instructions for putting the other supplies to good use. Fortunately, the camping tents they’d purchased were large enough to hold three or four ponies each, so they could set up temporary shelters for those ponies that needed it most.
Not everything had gone perfectly, of course. A group of four or five ponies had refused to wait to get food, pushing their way past everypony else. When one of the pegasi had tried to stop them, they’d started to become violent. Fortunately, Aria had spotted the altercation before it could escalate, dragging herself towards the quarreling ponies. Although the sight of her had been enough to make the troublemakers stop and stare, she had nevertheless cast a spell on them, unleashing a vivid cone of clashing colors from an outstretched hoof. The bright lights had washed over the feuding ponies – including the pegasi that had tried to stop them – and left them all bowled over, unconscious from the dazzling display. Although Lex heard Sonata mutter something that sounded suspiciously like “showoff” under her breath, he had noted that nopony had gotten out of hoof after that.
Still, for all that things were progressing smoothly, he was already thinking several steps ahead. The number of ponies who were queueing up was quickly growing – in his estimation there were already well over three hundred ponies waiting to be fed or treated – and he knew their supplies were going to be stretched thin. The available food they had was a combination of the stores that C. Shells had unloaded from her ship, most of which were nonperishables, and the remainder of the meals that he’d conjured earlier in the day. Although he knew that he’d be able to create more after he’d slept, the amount that it could create was limited, even if he poured additional magic into the spell. And there was no easy way to create more medicine, which was going to be an issue since he could only use his disease-removal spell on an extremely limi-
“Hey.” Sonata – having just returned from delivering that filly and her sibling to one of the doctors – nudged him, nodding her head in a particular direction. “Who’s that guy supposed to be?”
Following where she was looking, Lex found himself making eye contact with an earth pony stallion. He was taller than the average pony, with a heavy build to match. His coat was a watery blue, with his mane and tail being several shades darker. As he approached, Lex could just barely catch a glimpse of his cutie mark, showing several buildings with balloons and confetti in front of them. It didn’t escape his notice that the newcomer, alone of all the other ponies in the camp, was completely clean as well as lacking any visible wounds or other signs of hardship.
But the most notable thing about the stallion was how everyone else, save for the ponies that had made the trip there with Lex, immediately froze at the sight of him.
The way the crowd suddenly quieted down was enough to make Lex frown, trying to figure out why everyone was reacting like that. It was obvious that this pony was someone important, maybe even the leader of this place, but the sudden cessation of activity made no sense to him whatsoever. Even less explicable was how the pony himself didn’t seem to be doing anything to evoke such behavior. He had a neutral expression on his face, his features completely relaxed and his pace sedate, as though he were going for a stroll. He wasn’t even looking around, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on Lex as he approached.
Lex glared back at him, matching the other stallion’s gaze. He'd never quite understood the etiquette of making eye contact; eschewing it was considered rude, but too long at it became staring, which was also unacceptable. But at the moment he didn't care very much. If this was the leader of this camp, then he deserved a rude look and more for how badly he'd run things. Arresting the imbecile that had so grossly mismanaged this place would be a vital step towards getting Vanhoover back on track.
Out of his peripheral vision, he could see that even the ponies that he’d brought with him were falling silent as well, drawn in by whatever atmosphere that was keeping everypony else quiet. By the time the blue pony had come to a halt in front of Lex, the area had gone completely silent, all eyes turning towards them. For a long moment, the two of them simply eyed each other, each refusing to so much as blink.
The other pony was the first one to speak. “All of you, leave here at once.” The words hung in the air for a moment, and Lex was about to respond when the blue stallion broke eye contact, sweeping his gaze across the crowd. Each of them cringed and looked away when his eyes fell upon them, and Lex belated realized that the words had been directed at them, not him. “We’ve been keeping this quarantine up all this time. Are you really going to let all that we’ve done, all the sacrifices we made, be for nothing?” His face barely changed as he spoke, showing only the slightest hint of disapproval. “Leave, and go to the other side of the camp, right now.”
“Do not,” spoke Lex harshly. He could see a few ponies already starting to slink away, and he fixed each of them with a stern look. It was enough to make them pause, eyes flickering between him and the other stallion, but they didn’t keep walking, and that was enough. He turned his eyes back to the pony in front of him. “Nopony is going anywhere,” he growled.
“Y-yeah! That’s right!” piped up Sonata. She’d gotten caught up in the tension that had enveloped the area, but she shook it off now. If the frightened looks everyone was giving him were any indication, this guy wasn’t the most popular pony around. But that meant that Lex could totes look like the good guy here if he played his cards right, and making sure that he did was her job. “Maybe you didn’t hear the news, but we’ve got everything under control here. Nopony has anything to worry about as long as Lex Legis is in charge!” She paused for applause then, trying to resist the urge to fold her ears back when none came.
The blue stallion regarded Sonata silently for a long moment, then very deliberately looked past Lex. “Does that include her?” he asked lightly, and almost everyone followed his gaze, back to where Garden Gate was still lying in her cage. Cognizant of the numerous eyes on her, she shuddered and turned away. The sight was enough to make Turbo step in front of her, spreading his wings out to try and hide her from view, glaring angrily at the blue stallion that had made her the center of attention, who looked back dispassionately.
“Hold on!” frowned Sonata. “She-”
“What about them?” This time the blue stallion pointed, directing everyone’s attention to the back of where the doctors had unloaded most of their equipment…and the cloth-wrapped body that lay nearby. “Certainly, that pony has nothing to worry about anymore,” he said, and although the wry tone in his voice was light, it was clearly audible to everyone there.
“That’s not fair!” Sonata stamped a hoof. “Lex did everyth-” She paused as Lex’s whispers flowed into her ears, and she paused for a long moment before giving an angry huff. “What about you?”
“Hm?” He raised a brow coolly, his expression now looking almost bored.
“You’re the one who’s been running this place, right?”
“What of it?”
“You haven’t exactly done a bang-up job yourself. Everyone here that I’ve seen is hurt or hungry and they’re all miserable! You’ve got them…” she trailed off as she listened to Lex’s whispers again. “You’ve got them doing these quarantine patrols that make no sense! You’ve been sending out ponies in such small groups that they can barely cover any territory, and if they run into anything more than one or two other ponies then they wouldn’t be able to drive them away! And, um…” She glanced back at Lex, silently asking for more information, which he whispered to her a moment later. The entire time, the blue stallion’s eyes flickered back and forth between them. “And that’s another thing! Why are you sending survivors back into the city?! You should be totes isolating them in another area to see if they’re infected or not, and if not you should let them go!” She pointed at him with a dramatic flourish. “Whaddaya say to all that?”
His response was to look wholly unconcerned. “The threat to Equestria required more extreme steps be taken,” he replied flippantly, giving a shrug as though – despite the gravity of what he was saying – he didn’t care either way. “If those monsters escaped into the countryside, their infection could have spread unchecked. Desperate times called for desperate measures.”
More whispers filled Sonata’s ears with counterarguments. “That, like, doesn’t make any sense. If you really thought this was that bad, you should have called in the princesses.”
“On the contrary, if they had shown up and become infected, everything-”
“Enough.” Lex’s voice rang out with a heavy tone of finality. He was certain that he was talking to the one behind everything that had happened here, but he wanted to be absolutely sure. “Are you the pony responsible for all of this?” He waved a hoof to encompass the whole of the camp.
“Yes,” answered the other pony, his demeanor still completely relaxed.
It was enough to make Lex’s hackles rise. He had thought this would be similar to when he had indicted Celestia for incompetence, where the pony behind all of this would protest that they were right to do what they had done, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. This…utter disinterest that this pony was displaying didn’t make any sense at all, and that was beginning to seriously upset him. “Tell me your name,” he growled.
The corners of the other pony’s mouth turned upward ever so slightly. “Block Party.”
“Block Party,” announced Lex, raising his voice. “You may consider yourself relieved of all authority over these ponies. You’re going to be taken into custody while I work to reverse the harm you’ve inflicted on Vanhoover and its inhabitants, after which time I will have you tried and – in the incredibly likely instance that you’re found guilty – punished harshly for what you’ve done!”
Gasps rang out from the crowd, but Lex ignored them, keeping his eyes firmly on Block Party. Inwardly he tensed, knowing that this was likely to prompt some sort of violent retaliation. But that was fine; defeating such a thoroughly corrupt individual would help to-
Block Party’s smile widened, an amused look spreading across his features. “Certainly," he grinned. "I surrender completely.”
Block Party was still smiling as Lex, Sonata, and a few other ponies led him towards the train station.
After Lex’s dramatic little speech, he had asked the assembled ponies if there was a secure location nearby where Block Party could be incarcerated. Most, to Block Party’s pleasure, had been too afraid to answer, at least when they were within sight of him, and that had quite obviously irritated Lex thoroughly. He’d looked like he was going to berate them for their fear before Sonata had volunteered to find out, taking a few of the nearby ponies aside to speak to them privately. It hadn’t surprised Block Party when she’d come back a few minutes later with information about the train station, situated at the other side of the camp; he felt reasonably sure now that she was the social butterfly of Lex’s little band.
Still, although the train station was the only building outside of the city proper that wasn’t a tent or a lean-to, the very idea that they thought it could contain him was laughably pathetic. It was almost enough to make Block Party question whether this was the group that had defeated the kraken. Although he’d given them no reason to think that he was anything other than what he appeared to be, he was still almost disappointed at how careless they were being.
Or at least, that’s what they want me to think, he smirked inwardly.
Although they – or rather, that Lex individual; judging from the way he’d been feeding Sonata lines, he was not only the group’s leader, but its tactician as well – was doubtlessly hoping he hadn’t seen through it, Block Party was fully aware of what was happening right now. This entire “prison” nonsense was a ploy; the intent behind it wasn’t so much to hold him, but rather to test his capabilities. He wants to see what countermeasures I take with regards to confinement, and so develop a better sense of what I’m capable of. It was an intelligent move on Lex’s part…but doing so had revealed a limit to his capabilities. After all, defeating such a mundane method of confinement would only reveal so much; Lex would have been far better served to utilize a magical method of keeping him imprisoned…but he hadn’t, which suggested that Lex didn’t have access to any such magic.
Oh, he certainly had some. Sonata’s previous remark about his being able to cure diseases, along with his unusual shadow, had made that clear enough. But exactly what it was remained uncertain. It was likely some sort of divine magic; both his off-colored horn and that barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg looked suspiciously like holy symbols, though for what deity Block Party had no idea. But still, he was most likely a spellcaster of some sort. And that made him dangerous.
Lex would doubtlessly notice the active spell around his so-called “captive” at some point. There was nothing that could be done about that, but since most detection spells only revealed the basic characteristics of a spell’s aura, rather than the details of the spell, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. But if he grew curious, and managed to disrupt or dispel it…then the time for games would be over.
If that happened then Lex Legis, and anybody who was with him if and when he did that, would have to die.
Lex glanced around the interior of the train station, moving to check the various doors and windows as he locked them with the key ring he’d taken from the earth pony that had been inside the building when they’d arrived.
Said earth pony – a rather beat-up looking stallion with a deep chartreuse coat and a light grey mane and tail, who’d said his name was Spit Polish – was currently speaking to Sonata in the station lobby, his voice somewhere between indignation and whining. “But why is the commander being arrested?! He hasn’t done anything wrong!”
“Um, yeah, he has,” said Sonata, her tone indicating that she couldn’t believe she had to explain this. “Just one look out there makes it totes obvious that this entire place is wrong.”
“That couldn’t be helped!” Spit Polish’s eyes fell on Block Party, who was standing apart from the pair with that same bemused look on his face. “Sir! Tell them! There was no choice! We had to do what we did, for the greater good!” Sonata frowned at that, about to ask why he’d said “we,” but Spit Polish turned back towards her as he realized that Block Party wasn’t going to answer him. “Everypony knows that this situation is bad, but if the commander hadn’t done what he did, it would have been ten times worse! If the quarantine had been broken or the princesses shown up, then all of Equestria could have been infected! Even shutting down trains-”
“Had nothing to do with this so-called quarantine,” answered Lex coldly as he approached the pair.
“That’s not-”
“Shut up,” snapped Lex balefully, causing Spit Polish to quiet down as he saw the other stallion’s eyes suddenly flare green and purple. “This station is far enough from the city that even if you were dumb enough to believe that the outbreak was airborne, there was no risk of infection if the trains came here. That, and everypony in this camp had been here long enough that you had to know that they weren’t going to change into those monsters if they left.” His glare turned towards Block Party as he continued. “You didn’t isolate Vanhoover to try and protect Equestria. You did it to control the flow of information.”
“You’re wrong!” yelled Spit Polish. His voice rose, but it was fear, not anger, that was audible in it. “He just-, we needed ponies here to keep the city isolated! If everyone had left, then there wouldn’t have been anyone to stop those things from getting out!”
“If you think those anemic patrols were enough to stop…” Lex trailed off as he saw Sonata frantically signaling him from behind Spit Polish’s back. Frowning in confusion, gave her a quizzical look, causing her to roll her eyes and head towards the far end of the lobby, glancing at him as she did. Huffing, Lex moved after her, his eyes returning to normal as he did. “What is it?”
“Listen, you’re, like, totes right and all, but I really think you should lay off that guy,” she answered, glancing at Spit Polish, who was saying something to Block Party with a frantic expression.
The suggestion made Lex frown. “He needs to be made aware of the flaws in his arguments. Otherwise I can’t correct his skewed reasoning regarding what’s happened here.”
“And I think that’s great,” nodded Sonata. “For realsies. But maybe you don’t need to do it right now?” She nodded towards Spit Polish. “I mean, he’s getting pretty worked up about it, so maybe it’d be better to let him chew on what you’re saying for a while instead of making him try to choke it all down at once, you know?”
The look Lex gave her was deeply skeptical. “Failures of reasoning should be corrected without delay,” he insisted. “To allow such errors to persist when you know about them is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst.”
“I know, but…” Sonata took a deep breath, licking her lips as she tried to figure out how to get her boyfriend to understand what she was saying. “When I left my sisters, I wanted to stop losing all the time, but that didn’t mean that I knew anything about friendship. I had to be taught what it meant, and that took me a while to figure out, because it meant that I had to, like, kick everything I knew about dealing with people to the curb.”
“Precisely. You received corrective information, which is what I’m trying to impart here.”
“Yeah, but like I said, it took me a while to figure it out.” She stepped in closer, giving him a gentle smile. “You’ve, like, already taken that guy apart with what you were saying. Let him figure the rest out on his own. I promise it’ll work totes better than trying to make him admit he was wrong right now.”
For a moment Lex thought of arguing, but then remembered that they’d had a conversation like this before. It had been back on Everglow, when she had been insisting that he didn’t need to overthrow Celestia and Luna by force, instead urging him to peacefully negotiate for a smaller piece of the country and go from there. Although he’d vehemently disagreed with her at the time, he’d eventually decided that her views had merit. Maybe…maybe that was the case here as well.
Of course, that wasn’t something he could admit gracefully. Instead, his ears folded back as he gave her a sour look. “You didn’t have to pull me aside to tell me this.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Huh?”
He gestured at her irritably. “My spell is still active. You could have whispered this to me and I’d have heard you.”
“Well, yeah, but I was standing right next to whatshisname. Even if I was whispering, he’d have overheard me.” She smiled slightly, pleased with herself for not making such a dumb mistake.
“In that case, you could have come over here by yourself and whispered to me. You’d have been far enough away from everypony else that no one would have heard what you were saying,” pointed out Lex flatly.
“…oh yeah.” Now it was Sonata’s turn to fold her ears back, reddening slightly.
Holding back the urge to sigh, Lex turned and marched back toward the other ponies in the room. “You,” he started without preamble, looking at Block Party, “will remain confined here until further notice. I’ll see to it that you’re brought necessary food and water. For your own sake, I strongly advise you not to attempt to leave without permission.”
Spit Polish looked ready to protest, but Block Party held out a hoof, instantly quieting his companion. “And what if I need to speak with you, or if something else happens?” he asked, still seeming to be mildly amused by the idea.
Lex frowned, falling silent. A few seconds ticked by, and it was enough that Sonata gave him an awkward look. It wasn’t like that was a tough question, and she’d never known him to space out in the middle of a conversation. “Lex?”
“…I’ll post a guard outside the main entrance. Holler at them through the doors if something happens,” replied Lex at last. The persistent anger in his voice had faded, being replaced with a cool detachment. Abruptly, he turned and headed for the door. “We’re leaving.”
Sonata blinked before moving to hurry after him, but Spit Polish wavered for a moment before firming up. “I’m staying with the commander.”
Lex slowed and came to a stop, before turning around and giving Spit Polish a piercing look, the anger having returned to his face. “No,” he said in a voice as soft as it was threatening, “you’re not.”
Spit Polish quailed, lifting a hoof, but paused then, trying to work up his courage. Fortunately, he was saved from doing so as Block Party pointed at the exit. “Go.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me.”
“Y-yes…” Spit Polish nodded, and although quite clearly reluctant, trotted towards the exit, giving Lex and Sonata a wide berth as he made his way to the doors.
Lex gave Block Party a long look before turning and doing the same, Sonata moving with him. She’d waited until Lex had exited, falling back in with the ponies they’d had wait outside before she couldn’t contain herself anymore. “So, like, what was all that?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, first locking the door and then ordering one of his retinue to stay there before turning and making his way back across the camp. Sonata stayed at his side, the others following closely behind. It was only after a minute or so had gone by that Lex answered, and although they were right next to each other, he still whispered his reply, letting his spell carry it to her ears. “Just now, before we left, I looked him over for active magical auras.”
“Who? Block Party?” whispered Sonata back. Lex nodded, making her eye widen. “He has a spell on him? What kind?”
“Necromancy.”
“Huh? Techno-whatnow?”
“Necromancy, Sonata,” answered Lex darkly. “Magic that manipulates life and death.”
“Manipulates life and-,” Sonata paused in mid-sentence as her eyes suddenly widened. “Wait, you mean he’s responsible for those undead ponies?!” Her surprise was enough to make her forget to whisper.
“Keep your voice down!” hissed Lex, glancing around reflexively. He glanced back at the ponies he’d brought with him when escorting Block Party to the train station – all of them were sailors from C. Shells’ crew, though he hadn’t bothered to learn their names – but fortunately they didn’t seem to have picked up on what Sonata had said. Giving a small sigh of relief, Lex kept marching back towards where everypony else was conducting the relief effort, letting Sonata and the others follow him.
“Sorry,” whispered Sonata, giving him a contrite look. But it only lasted for a moment before fading into concern. “But for realsies, if he’s got a necromania spell on him, and that’s the kind of magic that messes around with death and stuff, then doesn’t that mean that the undead ponies are his fault?”
“Possibly,” admitted Lex, not bothering to correct her slip of the tongue. Nor did he look at her as he spoke, too focused on his thoughts to pay much attention to his surroundings. “What it definitely proves-”
“Hang on,” interrupted Sonata. “How is that not definite? If he does the necromamba, doesn’t that mean he has to be the one who did it?”
Lex shook his head, again overlooking her mispronunciation, though it made one of his eyes twitch for a moment. “No, Sonata, it’s doesn’t.” He glanced at her then, his eyes running down her flank to rest on her cutie mark. “On Everglow, there are a lot of spellcasters like you, who have intuitive magic. The spells they learn often, though not always, reflect an underlying thematic element. But there are other methodologies for learning magic, ones like my own which don’t require the user to limit themselves to a particular category of effects. If we make the reasonable presumption that he cast that spell on himself then it’s certainly suspicious, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate that he knows any other necromantic spells.”
Sonata blinked, a mystified expression on her face. “Huh?”
Fighting back the urge to roll his eyes, Lex tried again. “What that means is that Block Party’s using a necromantic spell doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s responsible for what’s happened with those undead abominations in Vanhoover. Even if we overlook that there were spellcasters among those aquatic monsters we fought, knowing one necromantic spell doesn’t prove that he knows more. And even that spell might be for something else entirely.”
“Like what?” asked Sonata doubtfully.
“There’s a necromantic spell on Everglow that some of the wizards there like to use as a preemptive defense if they think that danger is imminent. It temporarily augments the connection between their body and soul, giving them a better chance to survive wounds that might otherwise be lethal. Block Party’s spell was stronger than that, so maybe it was an enhanced version. Or it could be for something else altogether. My detection spell can’t isolate the specific functionality of the magic it analyzes.” That last admission came with a growl in his voice, his eyes flickering up to the circlet on his head in irritation. In addition to being a minor reservoir of spell energy, it let him look into the magical spectrum whenever he wanted, but doing so didn’t provide him with as much information as he would have liked.
“Ohhh.” Sonata nodded, trying to wrap her head around what she’d been told, when she realized that was the second time he’d mentioned that place. “So, you think he’s from Everglow?”
“I’m sure of it. Even if we overlook the fact that Equestrian magic doesn’t have any necromantic traditions, Block Party is an earth pony, not a unicorn. If he cast that spell on himself, then he couldn’t have learned magic here. That, and whatever spell he’s placed on himself is strong enough that it’s not something Equestrian magic could easily accomplish, at least not unless the spellcaster has a cutie mark related to magic.”
“And that’s not what his cutie mark is,” added Sonata.
“Exactly. Which means that he’s not using Equestrian magic at all. Hence, he’s from Everglow, or at least has spent some time there.”
Sonata started to say something, but then paused as something occurred to her, closing her mouth and glancing back at the train station. Although they’d only walked a short distance from it so far, the building was almost completely hidden in the nighttime gloom, with only a dim light shining from a few of the lower windows. Finally, she spoke up again. “But he could be responsible for the undead ponies, right?”
Now it was Lex’s turn to nod. “The possibility is not inconsiderable.”
Sonata digested that for a long moment, trotting beside Lex in silence as they moved back through the camp. Finally, though, she couldn’t take it anymore and darted forward, planting herself directly in his path and turning to face him. The action was so unexpected that Lex stumbled and almost collided with her before managing to come to a stop. “Sonata?”
She looked behind him, at where the other ponies that they’d brought with them were looking at the two of them in confusion. “Can you guys go back ahead of us? We’ll totes be along in a sec.”
The ponies glanced at each other in confusion, with more than a few of them shooting inquisitive glances towards Lex. Seeing their hesitation, he canted his head back towards the other end of the camp. That was enough, and the rest of the ponies moved past them, heading back towards where they’d left everyone else in their group. Once he was sure they were out of earshot, he looked back at Sonata. “What’s going on?”
Sonata let out a breath, a slightly frustrated look on her face. “Okay, look. I know I’m not the sharpest crayon in the toolshed, and that you’re a super genius and all, but…how does this make any sense?”
“How does what make any sense?”
“This!” Sonata pointed a hoof at the train station, now barely visible behind Lex. In that moment all of the stress she’d been feeling, the tension that she’d thought she’d gotten rid of when she and Lex had fooled around earlier, came rushing back to her. Fencer’s callousness, everyone’s losing faith in Lex, Aria’s needling, the misery that permeated the camp…it was suddenly just too much, causing her to worries to boil over. “Block Party is a bad guy, right? I mean a really bad guy! When you were telling him what an awful job he’d done taking care of everypony here, he didn’t care at all! And I don’t mean that he was being standoffish or anything the way you usually do-”
“Hey!”
“-I mean he looked like he was trying not to laugh, as though all those poor ponies were just some kind of joke to him!” The vision of Block Party’s bemused expression as he’d looked at them, right in the middle of all of that suffering, was one of the worst things she’d ever seen. Although it lacked the immediate terror of almost being killed by a dragon, it was no less frightening for it. It was enough to make her skin crawl at the thought of being anywhere near him. The very idea that he’d been enjoying their anguish was off-putting on a visceral level.
Sonata decided right then to take Aria up on her offer. The thought of anyone treating Lex as though he were anything like Block Party was completely unacceptable.
“No one is denying that Block Party’s administration over this camp has been a disgrace,” spoke up Lex, thinking that Sonata was done. “That’s why I’ve removed his authority, and had him confined while-”
“But that’s not enough!” She shook her head, as much to showcase her disagreement as to try and get her train of thought back. “I’m saying, it was one thing when we thought he was just doing a super bad job running this place. But now he has Everglow magic too? Magic which might have been responsible for causing Vanhoover to be overrun with those undead ponies? If that’s the case then I don’t think locking him up like that is gonna be enough to keep everypony safe!”
Lex was silent at that, looking at her with an unreadable expression. Sonata took his lack of response as an excuse to keep going. “Fencer was a dangerous person that got one pony killed, and you cursed her a whole bunch and tossed her in a cage for it. Block Party is an even more dangerous person that, even if he isn’t responsible for those monsters in Vanhoover, caused all of this!” She swept her hooves around to indicate the entirety of the camp. “And all you’re doing is locking him in the train station.”
“That’s all I can do right now, Sonata.”
“But Fencer-”
“Her name is Garden Gate,” interrupted Lex. She’d said her piece, and now he was going to say his. “And the nature and extent of her crimes didn’t need to be investigated, since she committed them right in front of me. That’s why I could condemn and sentence her immediately. But that’s not the case for Block Party. In order to pass judgment on him, there’ll need to be a public inquiry into the offenses that he’s committed in order to determine their precise nature and scope, as well as his being guilty beyond plausible skepticism. At that point I’ll be able to hand down a harsh penalty. But until then, the conditions of his confinement need to justify themselves based on the minimum requirements necessary to stop him from being a threat to everypony else, and that determination is based on his actions to date, not his potential capabilities…which we don’t really know anyway.”
“I still think you should just curse him so that he can’t use magic, just like you did with F-, Garden Gate,” frowned Sonata. “If it’s too much then you can always undo it later.”
“He hasn’t taken any action to justify that level of intrusive action, and I can’t presume to impose such a thing without sufficient merit,” replied Lex. He walked past her as he spoke, letting her know that this conversation was over. He didn’t mention that in order to use a curse of that magnitude, he’d need to channel additional magic through his body, and he’d already exhausted his ability to do that when he’d condemned Garden Gate. Until he rested, such an option was out of his reach. Even then, that curse impeded spellcasting ability, rather than negated it altogether. If the power of that necromantic spell on Block Party was any indication, cursing his spellcasting – presuming that he wasn’t able to resist it in the first place – would only partially stop it.
But of course, all of that presumed that Block Party would accept the results of his guilty verdict with as much aplomb as he had his incarceration. Although the smirking stallion hadn’t seemed to care about being locked up, somehow Lex doubted that would be the case when it came time to condemn him for what he’d done.
“I really don’t think this is going to work,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide as he laid down.
“If you have a better idea, I’m sure Turbo would love to hear it,” shot back Funshine. “For that matter, I would too.”
“Princess Luna didn’t visit your dreams, my dreams, or anypony else’s dreams that I ever heard about the entire time Vanhoover was falling apart.” Slip gave his brother a flat look. “You really think she’s going to come running just because the boss mare got cursed by that spooky stallion?”
“I think we have nothing to lose by trying,” answered Funshine with a shrug. “It’s not like we weren’t going to sleep anyway, so we might as well give it a shot.”
Slip couldn’t argue with that, so he just snorted instead. Turning onto his side, he looked over at where Fencer had curled up in her cage, her back turned towards them. A short distance away, Turbo was standing vigil, giving her a worried look. For a moment Slip couldn’t figure out what was making the other stallion so anxious – they’d finally made it out of the city! – until he remembered that one of Lex’s curses was to make Fencer have nightmares every night.
Biting his lip at that, Slip ‘n’ Slide laid his head down and made sure to think of Princess Luna as he closed his eyes.
From his position just over a dozen feet away from Fencer’s cage, Turbo watched the mare behind the bars. She’d laid down a while ago, facing the back of the makeshift prison that they’d stuffed her into, and hadn’t moved, leaving him uncertain if she was asleep or not. He would have approached her, maybe even tried to strike up a conversation, but he wasn’t sure if that curse that Lex had placed on her – the one which weakened her if anypony else came within ten feet – caused her any discomfort or not. So instead, he was standing there, watching over her while the rest of the place went about their business.
He wasn’t the only one, of course. Around him, the rest of their gang was settling down. With the doctors having no end of new patients, and the other ponies that Lex had brought with him working to keep the crowd under control, they had been all but forgotten. Now that they were out of the city, it would have been child’s play for them to slip away under the cover of darkness. Even with Fencer stuck in a cage, it wouldn’t have been impossible to simply lift the entire thing and carry her with them; that was how she’d been transported here, after all. They could just quietly pick up what little they had and go…
And do what? he thought bitterly. He’d been asking himself that for the last few hours, ever since Lex had marched them out of the city. But despite having turned the question over in his mind repeatedly, he was still no closer to finding an answer.
Inside Vanhoover, they’d had only one goal: survive another day. While they’d all dreamed of things getting better – Piggy, in particular, had enjoyed talking about what a bigshot he’d been before the flood, and would be again once his mother came back and fixed everything – all of their efforts had been devoted to finding enough food and shelter to stay alive, all the while avoiding the monsters and other survivors-turned-raiders. Getting out of the city had been a pipe dream at best, since the patrols had made it very clear that any survivors wouldn’t be welcomed if they tried to leave, and so thoughts of what they’d do after the ordeal was over had gradually faded away, until-
“Hey.” A gentle voice drew Turbo out of his gloomy thoughts, and he turned over to look at the tan-coated earth pony mare with the black mane and tail that came up next to him. Despite the dim light from the nearby fires barely illuminating her features, he recognized Granola Bar instantly. “How’s she doing?”
“I think she’s sleeping,” he murmured, turning his gaze back towards Fencer. The words were bitter on his tongue, remembering the last curse that Lex had laid on her.
Granola Bar paused for a long moment before replying. “I spoke to everypony else, just now. They’re all going to make sure to think of Princess Luna when they fall asleep.”
Turbo nodded wordlessly. Although he knew she was telling him that to try and encourage him, all it did was remind him of how pathetic his new “plan” was. The half-baked nature of the course of action he’d proposed to everyone just a few hours ago was enough to send a wave of depression through him now, and he suddenly found himself wanting to say it out loud. I didn’t come up with that because I thought it was a good idea. I came up with it because I didn’t want to admit that there was nothing we could do but watch the mare who got us through Vanhoover be punished for helping us survive. Of course, he suspected that everyone knew that; after all, it wasn’t as though they’d had any shortage of nightmares since the flooding. If Princess Luna hadn’t appeared in anyone’s dreams by now, then she wasn’t going to, regardless of how hard they tried to reach out to her.
When it became clear that Turbo wasn’t going to reply, Granola Bar cleared her throat awkwardly before trying again. “So, I was thinking. My cousin has a rutabaga farm north of here. It’d take us a while to get there on hoof, what with the train not coming here, but it’s probably our best bet.”
That was enough to cause Turbo to stir, glancing at her. “The train isn’t coming here?”
“Yeah.” Granola Bar canted her head towards the long lines of ponies waiting for food and medicine. “I asked some of the ponies that have been here a while. They said that Block Party, the pony who was running things here, shut them down a little while ago. He was worried they’d spread the infection around, so he spoke with one of the train conductors a while back, and after that they stopped showing up here.”
“Wonderful…” sighed Turbo.
“And since we can’t really cross twenty-odd miles of swamp to go to Tall Tale, that leaves going north,” said Granola Bar matter-of-factly. “My cousin’s place isn’t really big enough for all of us, but I bet she’ll let us sleep in her barn, and-”
“You think Lex will ever let us get that far?” interrupted Turbo, his voice dark.
“What?” For a moment, Granola Bar couldn’t understand what he was asking, her face screwing up in confusion. “Why wouldn’t he? We’re not his prisoners.”
Turbo couldn’t help the patronizing look he gave her then. “You wanna tell that to Fencer?”
Granola Bar winced at that. “That isn’t…” She trailed off with a sigh, closing her eyes and turning her head away for a moment, before finally looking back at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean how that came out.” She licked her lips for a moment, putting her thoughts in order before speaking again. “What I meant to say was that he didn’t say anything about her being imprisoned as part of her punishment. It was just those curses.”
“And then he threw her in a cage,” growled Turbo dangerously. “And what do you mean by ‘just’ those curses?”
“Turbo…” The look at Granola Bar gave him right then wasn’t scared, nor was it angry. Rather, it was sympathetic, silently making it clear that she understood how he felt.
It was enough to bleed off his anger, causing him to look away, ashamed that he’d almost lost his temper. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, it’s just…getting out of here isn’t enough. We’ve got to find some way to undo what Lex did to her.”
“I understand,” she replied quietly. The two of them were silent for several minutes after that, until Granola Bar eventually spoke up again. “I thought it might all be gone, you know.”
“Huh?”
“Everything. All of Equestria.” She glanced away from the camp then, and Turbo followed her eyes to see that she was peering back towards Vanhoover, a few lonely lights – dummy lights, no doubt – flickering in a smattering of the buildings. “After the first week or so, when it started to sink in that nopony was coming, I thought maybe it wasn’t just Vanhoover. Maybe something had happened and we were all that was left.”
“I didn’t know.” Something like that had never once occurred to Turbo. He’d been too busy worrying about the here-and-now to even think about what had happened everywhere else. The thought that Granola Bar had been carrying around a worry as big as that one, all the while struggling alongside them to make it through, was simultaneously horrifying and impressive. “I can’t even imagine…thinking that we might be the last ones, that there might not be an end to it all, ever.” He considered that for a moment, before shuddering. “How did you keep going?”
“I had a secret weapon.” The corners of Granola Bar’s lips turned up. “You wanna know what it was?” Finding himself smiling back for some reason, Turbo nodded. In response, Granola Bar pointed behind him.
Turning to follow her hoof, he glanced over his shoulder and saw…a very familiar fat little earth stallion, snoring loudly and drooling onto the backpack that was his pillow. The sight was enough to make Turbo’s eyebrows rise up almost to his hairline as he looked back at Granola Bar. “Piggy?! Are you kidding me?!”
Giggling, she shook her head. “Nope. Whenever it felt like it was all too much, that there was no hope for any of us, I’d go and talk to him. And every single time, he made me feel better.”
“How?” For the life of him, Turbo couldn’t imagine how the pompous little pony could have made anyone feel better. He’d been, at best, an amusing buffoon, but a source of inner strength? He just couldn’t see it. She had to be playing a prank on him.
But as Granola Bar looked over at where Piggy was sleeping, Turbo saw her smile warmly, and he realized she was completely serious. “Because,” she said softly, “he never gave up hope.”
Turbo blinked. “He didn’t?”
“No.” Granola Bar shook her head, still gazing fondly at Piggy. “No matter what happened, or how bad things got, he was always completely convinced that it wouldn’t last. That very soon, his mother would sail back into the harbor and somehow fix everything, and that it would all go right back to how it was. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in his mind. He believed it completely, and because he did, I was able to believe it too.” She tore her eyes away from Piggy then, giving Turbo a grin. “He kept me going, no matter how bad things got.”
“I had no idea.”
“I know,” giggled Granola Bar. “That’s why he was my secret weapon.”
“Yeah,” chuckled Turbo, shaking his head. “I’m a little jealous. I wish I’d had someone like that.”
“Oh, Turbo.” Granola Bar’s grin faded slightly, becoming a pitying smile. “You did.” She turned around, canting her head back toward Fencer’s cage. “She’s right over there.”
Turbo sputtered, his eyes widening at the implication. “Wh-, no, hold on.” He gave an incredulous laugh. “That’s not it at all,” he assured her, not even stopping to think why it was suddenly so important to make her realize that she had the wrong idea.
“Yes, it is,” replied Granola Bar softly. “The same way that Piggy was my strength, Fencer was yours.” Her expression faded as she looked back at where the other mare was lying in her cage. “That’s why you’re having such a hard time with what’s happened to her.”
Turbo’s good humor died then. All of a sudden this wasn’t funny anymore. It was just…awkward and uncomfortable. “Look, I don’t know…” He trailed off, running a hoof over his face as he tried to regain his equilibrium. He suddenly wished she’d go away. “I need to think of what our next move is,” he muttered, hoping she’d take the hint.
She didn’t, instead turning to face him directly. “I’m trying to tell you, that’s not what you should be thinking about right now.”
“What?” He frowned at her, not sure if he should be upset by that or not.
Granola Bar gave him an earnest look. “She got us out, Turbo. She kept us together, kept us safe, and led us to the rescue squad that got us out of Vanhoover.” She gestured to the cage, then. “She paid a high price for doing it, but she did it.”
“I know that!” insisted Turbo. “That’s why I’m trying to figure out how to lift those curses Lex put on her!”
“Those aren’t the price she paid.” Granola Bar’s voice was soft. “You heard what she said, right before Lex sentenced her. About how she felt about the things she did. That’s what it cost her to save us.”
Turbo recoiled, mouth gaping as though he’d just been slapped.
“You can get her out of that cage,” continued Granola Bar. “You can take her far away from Lex. You can even get his curses removed. But if you want to help her, I mean really help her, that’s not enough.” She advanced on him then, putting a hoof on his chest. “While we were in Vanhoover, Fencer was your secret weapon. Now that we’re out, Garden Gate needs you to be hers.”
Wide-eyed, Turbo worked his jaw, wanting to say that Fencer had nothing to be ashamed of, that she hadn’t done anything wrong that she’d needed to apologize for, but nothing came out. Satisfied that he’d gotten the message, Granola Bar nodded to herself before turning and walking away. Turbo watched her go, his mind spinning, before looking back at Fen-…
“Halt!” roared Cloudbank as she finished incanting her spell.
The affected pony, a pegasus stallion with an aquamarine mane and tail to go with his butterscotch coat, immediately came to a stop, his limbs locking into place so thoroughly that he almost toppled over. The panicked look on his face was enough to inform the onlookers – of which there were more than a few – that he wasn’t obeying her command of his own free will.
Glowering at her victim, Cloudbank marched up to him and snatched the small sack full of food from his mouth. “I’m going to say this one more time, just in case you didn’t hear me before. We’ve only temporarily run out of food. Lex will make more tomorrow, and you’ll be able to eat your fill when he does. Until then, you do not steal from anypony else!” She gave a quick look around, running her eyes over the crowd to make sure that everypony knew that she was speaking to them as much as to the stupid pony in front of her.
Satisfied, she waved a hoof, and the pegasus pony gasped as his paralysis wore off, stumbling away from her in fear. Inwardly, Cloudbank couldn’t help but smirk. She’d made that gesture to make it look like she’d undone the spell that was keeping him from moving; in fact, it had worn off on its own, not having the power to do more than force a single person to obey one of her commands for more than a few seconds. Moreover, she hadn’t prepared another casting of that particular spell, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to use it again until she’d rested and prayed.
Luckily the ponies around her didn’t know that. “Now get out of here!” she shouted, flaring her wings and pointing at the butterscotch stallion, “before I get really mad!”
The stallion turned and bolted, running as fast as his hooves could carry him. Satisfied that she’d made her point, Cloudbank turned and marched back towards the rest of her group, hearing the hushed voices speaking up behind her, knowing that they were wondering how it was that a pegasus like her had just used what was quite obviously magic. By tomorrow morning everypony in the camp would probably know. It was enough to make her wonder if she’d done the right thing using her newfound magic so openly.
But her doubts faded away as she trotted back to the edge of the field hospital the doctors had set up. Clutching the sack of food – little more than a few hooffulls of nuts, scattered bits of lettuce and sliced carrots, and a few strips of cheese; the sole remains of the food that Lex had conjured for their impromptu party earlier in the day to celebrate the last of their group being cured of the aboleth’s disease – in one wing, she smiled warmly as she offered it to the earth filly holding the crying baby. Fiddlesticks, she’d said her name was. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.” Sniffling, Fiddlesticks rubbed her eyes with one hoof before setting the foal on the ground, gratefully taking the offered food. She immediately opened it and pulled out some cheese, mashing it until it was almost a paste before reaching down to gently place it in the infant’s mouth. Almost instantly, the baby stopped crying, smacking its lips as it started chewing.
“He-he’s eating it!” Fiddlesticks’ voice came out as a sob, but she was smiling. “He’s really eating it!”
“You should eat something too,” added Cloudbank, watching the pair with a smile of her own. “You need to keep your strength up.”
“I will,” nodded Fiddlesticks earnestly. “Just as soon as Tiddlywinks is full.” She was already grinding a carrot to mush between her hooves, her eyes on her little brother. “The doctors said that he’d be really hungry now, and that he needed to eat, so I’ll do that first and then I’ll have some. I promise.”
“I dunno, you look pretty untrustworthy to me,” replied Cloudbank in a teasing tone. “I think I better stay right here to make sure you keep your promise.” That was enough to earn a giggle from Fiddlesticks, shooting the older mare a grateful look before returning her attention to her brother.
A short while later, the last of the food had been eaten and both foals were yawning. Seeing that, Cloudbank had gathered the two of them up in her wings and carted them over to where several sleeping tents had been set up, signaling a nearby pony to lay a sleeping bag down. Although Fiddlesticks had protested that she wasn’t tired, Cloudbank had barely placed her next to her brother before she had dozed off, Tiddlywinks staying away just long enough to nuzzle his sister before passing out as well.
The sight was so heartwarming that Cloudbank couldn’t help but linger at the entrance to the tent, looking at the adorable pair. She was still standing there when Drafty came up to her. “Cloudy, we-”
“Shhh.” Cloudbank held a hoof up to her mouth in a shushing gesture, not taking her eyes off of the foals, wanting to watch over them for just a little bit longer…
Turning her eyes to see what her girlfriend was looking at, Drafty couldn’t help but coo at the sight. “Awww!” she whispered. “That’s so cute!”
“Yeah…” murmured Cloudbank. A moment later, she reached a wing out and wrapped it around Drafty, pulling her closer. The black-coated pegasus didn’t resist, pressing her side against Cloudbank’s and feeling a shudder go through the other mare as she did. That was enough to make Drafty glance at her, silently asking if she was alright.
For a moment, Cloudbank didn’t respond, but then she looked at Drafty, eyes closing and lips parting just slightly as she leaned towards her. Drafty didn’t pull away, closing her eyes in turn as Cloudbank kissed her. Feeling the other mare’s need to be comforted, Drafty spread a wing over her in return, holding her close. When the kiss ended a moment later, Cloudbank didn’t open her eyes, instead lowering her head to rest it against the other mare’s chest.
“What’s wrong?” whispered Drafty, making no move to dislodge the other pegasus.
Cloudbank let out a shuddering breath. “It’s just…this is what we were afraid of?” She raised her head then, holding a hoof out to indicate the sleeping foals. “We spent all that time being angry at those ponies that wouldn’t let us leave the city, scared of what they’d do if we tried to go and wouldn’t take no for an answer…and this is it? A bunch of sick and starving ponies that needed help as much as we did? They couldn’t have kept us out if they’d tried!” Her voice was still a whisper, but it was no less thick with emotion for it.
“Hey, come on, you know it’s not like that,” murmured Drafty, moving her wing so that she was gently rubbing Cloudbank’s side. “You saw how everypony here almost turned against Sonata, and that was with her saying that we’d brought help. Even if we’d run past those ponies that were throwing things at anyone who tried to leave, we wouldn’t have been welcomed when we got here.”
“I know, but-”
“Hey. Listen to me.” Drafty stepped back and put a hoof under Cloudbank’s chin, lifting it so that she could look her in the eye. “We survived long enough for Lex to save us. Then he helped us save ourselves, and now he’s made it so that we can help save everypony else. If things had gone even a little bit different, then we wouldn’t be here making sure these foals are okay right now.” She gave Cloudbank a warm smile then. “We couldn’t have done any better than we have, and if we’d tried then things would probably have been worse, so don’t beat yourself up over what you think you should have done, okay?”
Cloudbank let out a breath that was almost a resigned laugh. “Yeah.”
“Besides,” added Drafty. “You’ve got your own magic now, since Lex introduced you to his goddess and all.”
That last part was said teasingly, but Cloudbank heard the tiny note of jealousy in there. It was enough to make her shake her head ruefully. Apparently her attempt to repair Drafty’s faith in Lex after what had happened with Fencer had been a success. “You really admire him, huh?”
“Of course!” laughed Drafty, barely managing to keep her voice down. “How could anypony not admire him, after everything he’s done? I mean, yeah, some of it might seem a little fearsome to ponies who don’t know him like we do, but once you get past that…” She looked away from the other mare then, gazing at nothing as she let out a dreamy sigh. “He’s the most incredible pony in all of Equestria.”
Now it was Cloudbank’s turn to feel a twinge of jealousy. But it was only a small one, the closeness they’d just shared blunting the impact of seeing her girlfriend so openly revere somepony else. Sighing, she put it out of her mind as she turned and zipped up the entrance to Fiddlesticks’ tent before extricating herself from Drafty’s embrace. “You’re right. This is the best possible outcome given the circumstances, so there’s no point getting upset over what we should have done.” She canted her head back towards the camp. “So we should get back to it.”
She started walking, and Drafty fell in beside her. “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Hm?”
“There isn’t really that much left to do. The doctors have set up shifts so that some of them can sleep now while the rest are still treating patients. And I think we’ve managed to let everypony know that there’s no more food until tomorrow.”
Cloudbank frowned. That did sound rather comprehensive. “I guess we should ask Lex what we should do now. Is he back yet?”
Drafty shook her head. “Not yet. Hopefully he’s really putting the screws to that awful stallion.”
Gritting her teeth at the thought of the stallion who had been coldly smirking while ponies like Fiddlesticks and Tiddlywinks had suffered, Cloudbank silently wished for the same thing. Just the thought of that “Block Party” person was enough to fill her with rage. What could possibly make somepony so uncaring about others?
Nosey trotted through the camp, making sure to pick her way around the edges rather than going through the middle. It was slightly longer, but this way guaranteed that she wouldn’t run into Lex. The last thing she wanted to do was bump into him now and have him ask what she was doing. Knowing him, he’d have forbidden her on some ridiculous principle, and that wouldn’t have done at all.
Although she hadn’t planned on writing any more stories until she got her current queue – all of which consisted of Lex’s adventures – filed, what she’d seen here had changed her thinking. The miserable conditions that the Vanhoover ponies were living in was a pony interest story that needed to be told. Although she would have given almost anything for a roll of film, the written word was still Nosey’s medium of choice, and as she picked her way around the campfires she was already composing an article in her head. Fortunately she still had enough paper in her saddlebags that she’d be able to jot some notes down later on.
Finally coming into sight of the train station, Nosey nodded to herself. All she had to do now was figure out a way to get in there without arousing anypony’s suspicions. Luckily, getting into places that were off-limits was a skill she’d gotten good at over the course of her career. Even now, she had a few ideas about how she’d be able to make her way inside without anypony being the wiser.
After all, she’d met Lex when she’d decided to interview what looked like an obvious bad guy. How could she pass up the chance to do the same with Block Party?
While he had no aversion to extracting data from prior events – a pastime that his numerous experiments on social interaction had required him to partake in extensively – the idea of ruminating on what had already happened simply for its own sake held no appeal for him. Quite the opposite, in fact. Even if it hadn’t seemed like a self-indulgent waste of time, looking back over his experiences invariably left him reliving the times he’d failed, or at the very least brooding over how he could have done better.
But as he made his way back to where the ponies he’d brought with him were carrying out the relief efforts, he couldn’t help but think back over everything that had happened that day. Curing the last of the ponies that had been infected by that aboleth. Conducting an experiment in social discourse that, for once, hadn’t been a complete failure. Meeting Garden Gate and her comrades. Going to retrieve Pillowcase. Making love to Sonata. Sentencing Garden. And now arriving here. It had been, by any measure, an exhausting series of events. It was almost enough to make him want to go to sleep, despite knowing the unpleasantness that was waiting for him when he did…which reminded him of another errand that needed to be seen to.
Not bothering to wait for Sonata or any of the other ponies behind him, Lex strode back towards the far end of the camp. Out of his periphery he could see the camp’s occupants pointing at him, a chorus of unintelligible whispers filling the night air as they did so. For an instant he wondered what they were saying about him before he quashed that thought, annoyed that he cared.
Of course you care, came the voiceless taunt from within his shadow. That’s why you’re doing this, after all. Stop pretending that this is some sort of selfless act on your part. Lex set his jaw, almost grinding his teeth as he waited for his silent tormentor to settle back into silence. You can’t lie to yourself, it continued. Every bit of joy you take in what you’re doing proves that you’re not doing it for anyone but you. Refusing to be baited into replying, Lex nevertheless couldn’t help but glance at his shadow, only to regret having done so a moment later. The campfires he was passing on his way back were myriad, causing his shadow to project at numerous angles as he walked by the open flames, and all of them were wrong, making its warped nature abundantly clear to anypony paying the least bit of attention.
Now he knew why everypony was looking at him.
Indulging himself with a moment of bitterly cursing his continued inability to find a way to control that errant fragment of his mind – he was starting to wonder if the Night Mare had deceived him by hinting that such a thing was possible – he kept striding forward, until he caught sight of his destination. Ahead of him, he could just see the makeshift field hospital that the doctors had set up, the supplies everyone had carried piled nearby. And off to the side was Garden Gate’s cage.
Striding toward it, Lex ignored the few ponies lying nearby, even though several turned to regard him as he approached the caged mare. One of them – he recognized it as being Turbo – started to say something, but before he could get a word out Lex reached the cage. Not pausing, he touched a hoof to the lock on it, which immediately undid itself, and flung the door open. “Get out,” he spat, eyeing the unmoving form of Garden Gate.
When she didn’t leap to obey, he pulled his lips back in a snarl. A moment later a roiling purple aura flared to life around his horn – and his eyes immediately turned green and purple – as he telekinetically grabbed her and began to drag her from the cage. That was apparently enough to rouse her, as she gave a sudden shriek and began to thrash, eyes snapping open as she kicked her legs in panic. Lex immediately dropped her, and for a moment Garden flailed weakly before looking around, eyes wide and uncomprehending as she tried to catch her breath. “Wh-, I don’t-, this…”
Turbo was by her side in an instant. “Hey! Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. You’re safe.”
Her eyes settled on him, and her breathing began to slow. “Turbo?”
He made himself smile, nodding. “That’s right. It’s me.”
Lucidity returned to Garden’s gaze then, and she let out a shudder as she lay on the ground. “I…I dreamed I was back in Vanhoover.” Her voice was filled with anxiety. “I’d gotten you all killed, and you’d come back as those things…”
Turbo made an awkward gesture, like he wanted to reach out to her and had then thought better of it. Instead, he licked his lips, pausing just long enough to shoot Lex a dark glare before returning his eyes to her. “That could never happen,” he replied, forcing confidence into his voice. “It’s because of you that we got out of there. You just had a nightmare, that’s all.”
“The first of many,” interjected Lex coldly, giving Garden a contemptuous look before raising his eyes to Turbo. “Now that we’ve arrived, I don’t need to place her in protective confinement any longer, so I’m releasing her to your custody.”
“Wait, what?” Turbo’s ears flickered at that, instantly suspicious of Lex’s doing something that didn’t seem awful.
Misunderstanding Turbo’s reaction, Lex stepped closer to him, eyes narrowing. “Let me make this exceedingly clear. While we might not be in immediate danger here, the nature of her sentence has left her with a diminished ability to fend for herself. To that end, I’m ordering you to take care of her until such a time as her safety is no longer in jeopardy.”
For a moment Turbo could do nothing but stare, utterly nonplussed by what he was hearing. The sheer level of arrogance Lex was displaying was matched only by his hypocrisy. If he wanted F-, Garden to be safe, then he could just remove those curses from her! And that “order” was nothing less than an insult, the way it implied he wouldn’t protect her otherwise! “Do you actually think-”
“Yes,” snapped Lex, again misreading the situation. “My authority gives me the right to demand compulsory service from members of this community in a time of crisis, presuming that such service is not unduly onerous nor dangerous nor of an unreasonable duration, and I’m exercising that prerogative right now.” He got right in Turbo’s face then, daring him to protest. “Make no mistake. If anything happens to her, you will answer for it. You and yours don’t get to act like a group of thugs anymore.”
When the only answer he received was a hateful glare, Lex turned away, satisfied that he’d made his point. Instead, he marched toward where the food lines had been – pausing just long enough to look at where Severance had been left hovering and telekinetically pull it to him, placing the weapon on his back – and began looking for Cloudbank. It didn’t take him long to find her, returning from where tents had been set up for the ponies that needed shelter the most, Thermal Draft at her side.
“What’s the status of the situation here?” he asked as soon as they were close enough for him not to have to raise his voice. Cloudbank’s frown suggested that he might have violated some sort of social convention in doing so, but at the moment Lex couldn’t have cared less, still smarting over what that rebellious fragment of himself had said earlier.
“The doctors are working in shifts,” answered Drafty. “So they should be able to keep treating ponies through the night.”
Lex nodded perfunctorily. “How are their supplies?”
This time it was Cloudbank that answered. “So far they’re holding up, but they’re not going to last forever.” She glanced back at the line of ponies stumbling toward the field hospital, which seemed unending. The sight made her frown in worry; how many sick and injured ponies did this place have?
“We’ll acquire more when it becomes necessary,” replied Lex, not overly concerned. It was a given that a city as large as Vanhoover had to have a hospital, quite likely more than one. It didn’t seem likely that all of their resources could have been lost in the flooding or depleted since then, and now that he had a large pool of residents to tell him where the hospitals were, it would be a relatively simple task to procure their resources.
“Also,” added Cloudbank, “we’ve run out of the food that we had on-hoof. Other than whatever everypony has here, we’ve got nothing to eat.” She gave him a pointed look as she said that, knowing what his answer would be.
“I’ll create more. Which reminds me, I want you to prepare a statement for when I do.”
Cloudbank blinked. “A statement?”
Lex waved a hoof irritably, thinking she was nitpicking his terminology. “A sermon, then. Just be ready to make a public proclamation about the Night Mare and the strength she grants to those who champion her ideals, as well as how such individuals safeguard their community.”
“Wh-, are you kidding me?!” Cloudbank gave him an incredulous look. “I can’t just come up with something like that on the fly!” Just the thought was enough to make her ears fold back. The nature of her relationship with her new goddess was something she was just beginning to figure out, and it certainly hadn’t reached the point where she felt comfortable recommending her to others.
But Lex only gave her a reproachful look. “I told you earlier to prepare for your role as a religious functionary. This is in accordance with that. You have until tomorrow morning to make ready.” With that, he turned and walked away, not giving her so much as a backwards glance.
Barely hearing as Drafty offered to help Cloudbank come up with something, Lex made a slow circuit around the area, looking for any obvious problems or issues that needed to be attended to. Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be any; no fights were going on, nor was anypony attempting to impede their work or otherwise make a nuisance of themselves. It was enough to let him start to relax just slightly, still not quite ready to believe that everything was finally proceeding as it should.
It was at that moment that he glanced at the edge of the field hospital, near where the supplies had been stacked, that Lex made eye contact with Cozy. She was sitting a short distance from where her husband’s body had been placed, and appeared to be alone. The sight of her made Lex frown; although her husband’s death was a tragedy that she shouldn’t have had to suffer, her healing abilities were enough that she couldn’t be allowed to waste them when there were ponies in need.
He had just started to walk towards her when Aisle stumbled into his field of view, giving Cozy a chagrinned look. “So the doctors say they need all the sleeping bags for the ponies they’re treating, but we can-, um…oh.” His voice trailed off as he followed where she was looking and spotted Lex. He glanced quickly back and forth between them, then trotted toward Lex. “Hey. Is everything okay?”
Lex gave the earth stallion a flat look. “Has Cozy contributed to the doctors’ efforts?”
Aisle paused for a long moment, licking his lips as he tried to formulate a response. “…she’s been through a lot today, and I didn’t want to push her so soon after-”
“There are injured ponies here,” interrupted Lex, his voice dark. “If she still has magic that she can use to provide aid, then she has no acceptable reason not to do so.”
“Lex, please, try to understand.” There was a pleading undertone to Aisle’s voice. “She just lost her husband, and part of the reason for that is because of these ponies refusing to help us when we needed it. I can’t tell her to put that aside and start helping them now that they need us.”
“Then I’ll tell her,” retorted Lex, moving around Aisle and starting toward the crystal mare.
“No!” Aisle rushed to interpose himself between Lex and Cozy, his face panicked.
Lex stopped, but the look he gave Aisle was enough to send cold shivers down the other stallion’s spine. “I’m only going to say this once. Get out of my way immediately.” Lex’s voice was soft, but carried an unmistakable threat.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Aisle almost fainted with relief as he heard Sonata’s voice, spotting her coming up from behind Lex.
Her presence was enough to make Lex glance back at her, though his mood didn’t improve. “What’s going on is-”
“Nothing!” interjected Aisle quickly. Although that made Lex’s head snap back around, he gave him a reassuring look. “Look, forget what I said before. I’ll go talk to her right now, okay? I promise I can fix this.”
“Huh?” Sonata’s brow furrowed as she looked between the two of them, leaning to the side to glance at Cozy, who seemed to have lost interest in the proceedings, glancing at the ground listlessly. “You mean Cozy? Is she doing something?”
“She will be,” nodded Aisle, slowly stepping back. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“See that you do,” replied Lex. “I’ll be checking with the doctors in the morning to confirm her participation.”
He turned away then, and a mystified Sonata went with him. By the time he’d gone a short distance away, he’d managed to bring her up to speed on the situation with Cozy, as well as everything else that he’d checked on. “Wow, so I guess it’s mostly good news for once, huh?” she smiled. “So now what?”
“Now we sleep,” replied Lex, taking a length of rope out of his haversack.
“Ooh, I recognize that! We’re using the magic tree-fort again!” squealed Sonata.
Lex blinked at that. He couldn’t help but remember the last time he’d heard her call it that, just after they’d disembarked from the train and begun making their way to Tall Tale. Although that had been barely two weeks ago, it felt like a lifetime. It was enough to make the corners of his lips turn upward in what was almost a smile.
Maybe some parts of the past were enjoyable to think about after all.
“LEX!”
He sat bolt upright as he heard his name called, immediately registering Sonata doing the same beside him. But whereas she looked confused and panicked, he was already looking around, trying to figure out what was going on. It took the barest fraction of a second to focus on where Cloudbank was poking her head up through the entrance to the dimensional space, a worried look on her features. “What’s going on?” he asked, already climbing to his hooves, mind racing with potential problems and possible solutions.
“It’s Block Party.” Cloudbank’s answer made Lex’s stomach tighten. He’d suspected that pony would be trouble, but he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to focus on him this soon.
“Like, what’s he done?” asked Sonata, frowning as she rubbed her eyes. “Is he causing trouble? Or did he run away in the middle of the night?”
“Neither.” Cloudbank’s face was a mask of tension as she spoke. “He’s dead.”
“Scrubby is keeping everypony from going inside the train station,” warned Cloudbank. “But there’s already a crowd gathering there, and he’s just one pony.”
Lex didn’t answer, continuing to gallop towards the building in question, and for a moment Cloudbank wondered if he’d heard her. His only reaction to the bomb she’d dropped less than a sixty seconds prior had been to grab Severance and ask where Block Party’s body was. When she’d told him that it was still in the train station, he’d immediately rushed out, leaving Sonata and Cloudbank to try to catch up with him.
For Cloudbank that was easily done, thanks to her wings, but Sonata was struggling to match their pace, still drowsily trying to process what was happening. Scrubby had been the pony that Lex had assigned to stand guard at the station last night, so how could he be okay if Block Party was dead? “Hang on a sec,” she panted. “What exactly happened to Bl-”
“I don’t know!” snapped Cloudbank, her tension causing the words to come out more harshly than she’d intended. She shot Sonata an apologetic look a second later, starting from the beginning. “I woke up early to work on my remarks. I’d gone for a walk around this place to try and get some ideas when I heard a commotion near the station. When I got closer, I saw that it was Nosey-”
“Wait, Nosey’s there?” Sonata’s eyes widened in amazement. “She really does have a nose for news!”
“I’m trying to tell you, she was the cause of the commotion,” replied Cloudbank grimly. “She was in front of the entrance to the station, sobbing and wailing that Block Party was dead, over and over. Scrubby was trying to comfort her, but she seemed hysterical. The way she was carrying on, half the camp must have heard her. When I realized what she was saying I came to get you two.”
Sonata’s jaw dropped at that, having a hard time picturing what Cloudbank was describing. Nosey was a consummate reporter through and through, to say nothing of having been there when they’d faced down all of those aquatic monsters. For her to go to pieces like that…had she caught a glimpse of what had happened to Block Party? If so, it must have been something truly horrific. The thought sent a shudder down her spine, and she shot Lex a worried look. He didn’t notice, however, his eyes locked onto the train station. It was just coming into view now, its shape only dimly visible in the pre-dawn light. Rising up behind it, the mountains were backlit by the lightening sky, and the long shadows they cast kept the place in darkness, as though stubbornly refusing to surrender the building and its contents to the light.
Grimacing at the sight, Sonata nevertheless made herself hurry up, knowing that her best friend needed her.
The station had several dozen ponies surrounding it by the time they made their way there, and more were already wandering over. Most were surrounding the front door, but they could see several pegasi clustered around the upper windows, peering within. A chorus of voices hung over the assembled ponies as everyone tried to figure out what was going on. In front of the doors, Scrubby was saying something, speaking around the ring of keys in his mouth as he held out a hoof, apparently indicating that everypony should stay back.
Reaching the edge of the crowd, Lex eyed the mass of ponies between him and his destination disapprovingly. Just pushing through them would be slow and difficult, he knew. So should he change into a shadow and simply go through them, or raise a row of black crystals to make them-
“Hey.” Sonata placed a hoof on his side as she caught up to him. “I’ve got this.” She gave an inward sigh of relief as he nodded, knowing that if she hadn’t been there he would have done something that, while it totes would have been effective, would probably have freaked everybody out. After what had happened with Garden Gate, she wasn’t about to let him make that mistake again. Honestly, it’s like he still doesn’t get the whole spokespony thing, she thought with a brief roll of her eyes.
Backing up a little, she gave her mane a toss before clearing her throat. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and held it for just a moment. This won’t take a full-on song, she decided. All she needed to do was make everypony quiet down and pay attention so that Lex could get to work, rather than something more complicated like helping everyone fight the way she had during the battle against those sea monsters. So that meant she could get away with giving them just a taste of what she could do.
“HaaAAAaaa…HAAaaa…”
It was the same melody she’d done with Adagio and Aria a thousand times or more. A simple, sensual bit of wordless vocalizing, repeated over and over, that had never failed to make everyone who heard it – whether it was a diner full of blissfully ignorant patrons or a lunchroom full of students – do what they wanted. And what Sonata wanted right now was for everyone to stop what they were doing and look at her. Slowly swaying to match the rhythm, she couldn’t help but smile slightly at the thought of being the center of attention. She continued on like that for a minute or two, keeping her ears perked as she did. When she couldn’t hear anything except for her own voice, she finally let her melody trail off into silence.
Opening her eyes, she had to bite back a squeal of excitement as she saw exactly what she’d expected: everyone had stopped what they were doing, staring at her instead. Every face had an expression that was somewhere between wonder and rapture, as though they hadn’t known that anything could sound so beautiful. A quick glance upward showed that even Cloudbank, who knew what she could do, was captivated.
It was enough that, although she was still worried about Nosey, Sonata couldn’t repress a grin as she looked back at Lex. “See? Told you I could handle it.”
“My way would have been faster,” he snorted, causing Sonata to pout at the lack of appreciation. She knew that she couldn't hold it against him, since they were kind of in the middle of a crisis and all, but it was still a bit of a letdown.
She was searching for the proper snarky comment to make when she saw him look back at the crowd and open his mouth. Realizing what was about to happen, she hurriedly tried to cut him off. “Everyb-, everypony, stand aside!” she yelled.
Lex shot her an annoyed glare, but she gave him a firm look in response. “Spokespony,” she intoned quietly, causing him to roll his eyes at her now, turning away with a huff. Satisfied, she looked back at the crowd. “Everypony, stand aside!” she repeated. “Lex Legis is here to figure out what’s going on, so we’re going to need you to make way!” Scattered murmurs broke out from the crowd, but they slowly parted, opening up a path between them and where Scrubby was sitting in front of the doors. Lex immediately moved forward, Sonata following after him, with Cloudbank belatedly landing and moving alongside her.
It took only a moment for them to reach the doors, and Scrubby didn’t try to hide his relief as they approached him. “Thank Celestia you’re here! I don’t-”
“Where’s Nosey?” interrupted Lex. Part of him wanted to chastise the earth stallion for invoking Celestia’s name when she very clearly didn’t deserve any sort of thanks, but he knew that now wasn’t the time.
Slightly chagrinned, Scrubby pointed a hoof at the doors. “She said she was going to be sick and ran back inside. She looked really rattled.”
“She went back in there?” asked Sonata, her voice incredulous. “With the body?” But the only response Scrubby gave her was a helpless shrug, shaking his head.
Giving the crowd a sidelong glance, Lex gestured at Scrubby. “Open the doors. You can tell us what you know inside.” Scrubby looked like he wanted to protest, but Lex had already turned towards Cloudbank. “You stay here and keep things under control.”
“How exactly am I supposed to do that?” she asked, frowning. She had a few spells that could be used if one or two ponies got rowdy, but there wasn’t much she could do if the entire crowd started to get out of hoof.
“Severance.” In response to its name being called, the scythe leapt off of Lex’s back, floating towards Cloudbank.
Horrified, she retreated from the living weapon. “Get that thing away from me!” she hissed. “I don’t want anything to do with it!” Just the sight of Severance was enough to make her remember what she’d done to Drafty, the memory bringing up a horrible mixture of guilt and shame.
“I don’t care,” responded Lex flatly. “I need you to make sure nopony tries to go inside. Use Severance if you have to.” His eyes moved towards the weapon then, touching a hoof to it. “And in the event that she does need your power, I expect you not to hurt anyone.” He paused long enough to hear its reply, then removed his hoof with a nod, apparently satisfied.
But Cloudbank wasn’t finished. “If you just need to keep everypony out of there, that thing can do it by itself. I have to, um…” She paused, trying to find an excuse not to be there, and suddenly inspiration struck. “I have to go work on that sermon!”
Lex had already turned towards where Scrubby was fitting the keys into the lock, trying them one by one, but glanced back at her then. “You haven’t finished that yet?”
Cloudbank grit her teeth. “I told you I was working on it this morning when all of this happened!” she snapped, her voice defensive. “Maybe if you’d told me about this ahead of time instead of dropping it on me last night, I’d have made more progress!”
Lex narrowed his eyes at that, but before he could say anything a voice rose from the crowd. “Wait!”
Stumbling out from the press of ponies was a rather beat-up looking unicorn stallion. His cutie mark was a quartet of shining boots, which stood out brightly against his yellow coat and orange mane and tail. The same could also be said for his black eye and the bruises that were dotting his chest, legs, and flank. Heedless of his injuries, he made his way forward, turning his one good eye from Lex to Cloudbank and back again. “Is it true? About the commander?”
Sonata was the one who stepped forward. “Listen, I know how you feel. My best friend is in there too, but-”
“Is it true?!” he asked again, voice rising in anxiety.
Lex frowned, stepping forward until he was between Sonata and this newcomer. “If you mean Block Party, then I’m about to investigate the situation. Until I’m finished, you-”
“I want to see him!” interrupted the unicorn.
“Out of the question,” snapped Lex immediately.
“You don’t understand! I’m Spit Polish, I was his second-in-command, and-”
“Were you here last night?” demanded Lex.
“No, but-”
“Then stay here and be quiet. I’ll send for you if I need you.” With that, he turned back towards the station, just as Scrubby finally found the right key, opening the doors with a triumphant grin.
“Wait!” yelled Spit Polish, trying to surge forward, only to stop immediately as Severance floated in front of him. “He’s not really dead, right?” When he didn’t get an answer, he slumped in place. “He can’t be dead…”
Lex didn’t answer as he strode into the train station, Sonata and Scrubby following him, before the doors closed with a heavy thud.
The interior of the train station was cloaked in shadows.
The spacious waiting area that made up the bulk of the building’s interior was barely illuminated by a small candelabra that was set on a counter on the other side of the room. Each of the five candles it held were burning low, leaving puddles of wax drying beneath it. The light it spread was feeble enough that large swathes of the place were hidden from view. But Lex was less concerned with the lurking shadows than he was with the implications presented by that sole source of light. Even in the dim conditions, he could still see oil lamps hanging on nearby walls, unlit. Why hadn’t-
“What’s that?!” yelped Scrubby suddenly, pointing upward at a distant corner of the room. Lex heard Sonata gasp at the other pony’s sudden shout, but his only reaction was to look in the indicated direction, his eyes flashing green-and-purple as he called on his dark magic to enhance his vision. The source of Scrubby’s fear immediately became obvious, and Lex couldn’t help but let out a snort of contempt at what he saw.
Clustered around the outside of one of the upper windows were a half-dozen pegasi, all of whom were now gawking at him. “It’s nothing,” he announced irritably, “just a few ponies peering in the windows.”
“Geez, that almost gave me a heart attack!” complained Sonata, putting a hoof to her chest.
“Sorry,” sighed Scrubby, still not completely reassured. “I just saw some movement and it freaked me out.”
Lex let out a disgusted sigh. Because it was still pre-dawn, the open windows blended into the murky surroundings of the waiting area. But there was just enough light from the approaching sunrise to make those windows slightly lighter than the surroundings, enough that the silhouettes of the pegasi trying to look inside were just barely visible to someone with sharp eyes. Apparently Scrubby was one such individual. “I’m drawing the shutters,” Lex announced flatly, before grabbing them in his telekinesis and shutting them a loud snap. He turned to do the same to the rest of the windows-
…and stopped in his tracks, having just found Block Party.
Able to see the entire area clearly now that his vision was enhanced, the former leader of the camp was impossible to miss. His unmoving body was hanging from a noose, the other end tied around a rafter that stretched across the upper portion of the waiting area. Beneath him was an overturned chair, with what looked like a quill and piece of paper lying next to it. The gruesome sight was completed by how Block Party’s eyes – not only open but bulging out – were pointed in their direction.
For a moment he couldn’t help but stop and stare, taken completely aback by what he was looking at. When Cloudbank had informed him that Block Party was dead, he’d never imagined that it was a suicide – the contemptible stallion whom he’d imprisoned had seemed far too self-assured for such a thing to be remotely plausible – but that was quite clearly what this was. No, he silently corrected himself. That’s what this looks like. What it actually was had yet to be determined.
“Um, Lex?” Sonata’s voice was nervous as she reached out to tap him on the flank. “You’ve kinda been staring at the middle of the room for a little while now, and it’s, like, starting to be totes creepy. Say something, please.”
Brought out of his contemplations, Lex glanced at her before looking back at the corpse hanging from the ceiling. “I’ve found Block Party,” he announced grimly.
“Not helping with the creepy,” muttered Scrubby, glancing back at the way they’d come in.
“What about Nosey?” Sonata glanced around, worried that her bestie hadn’t signaled them somehow. This place didn’t look that big from the outside, so surely she’d heard them talking!
“I don’t see her,” admitted Lex as he started to telekinetically close the rest of the shutters.
That wasn’t the answer Sonata wanted to hear. According to every horror movie she’d ever seen back on Earth, Nosey had to be in trouble right now, which meant that they needed to go save her right away! Furrowing her brow as she tried to think of a plan, Sonata glanced over at Scrubby. “You said that Nosey ran back in here because she said she was going to be sick, right?”
“Uh-”
“Then that means she’s probably in the little fillies’ room! So I’m gonna go check-”
“No,” snapped Lex as he shut and latched the last of the shutters. “You’re staying right here. Both of you.”
“I’m okay with that,” muttered Scrubby with a relieved sigh.
“But Nosey could be in trouble!” retorted Sonata.
“We don’t know what the situation here is,” retorted Lex, not looking at her as he changed his focus, lifting the candelabra in his telekinesis now. “If there is something dangerous happening here, then charging in blindly is the worst possible action that we could take, save only for doing so after splitting up. Even then, I doubt Nosey would voluntarily return here if she had any reason to believe that doing so would place her in danger.”
“Huh.” Sonata paused as she digested that. “I guess that makes sense. But I still think we should find her, like, soon.”
“I agree,” nodded Lex, “and the most efficient way to do that is to brighten this place first, so that we can see where to look.” He was already moving the candelabra as he spoke, letting it float gently through the air so as to not cause the candles to sputter. Slowly, he brought it over to the oil lamps on the nearby walls, igniting each one in turn until they lit up the room enough to where it was dim rather than shadowy.
…which was enough to clearly illuminate Block Party’s body.
Sonata blanched, stepping back reflexively at the grisly sight. Scrubby gave a sharp gasp of fright, one hoof going over his mouth as he stared wide-eyed at the corpse before spinning around, taking deep breaths as he started to shake all over. Lex ignored both of them, however, slowly moving towards the body, considering it carefully all the while.
“L-Lex?” Sonata's voice, usually mellifluous no matter her tone, came out as a croak. “What’re you doing?”
“Checking for magical emanations,” he replied distantly, mentally activating his circlet’s power to let him view the magical spectrum.
Sonata had no idea what an “emanation” was, but as he stared at the corpse with a thoughtful frown on his face, she couldn’t help but look away. Glancing around in hope of finding anything else to look at, she paused as her eyes settled on a door with a small silhouette of a pony wearing a dress on it, realizing that it was the restroom. That was where Nosey probably was! Shooting a furtive glance at Lex, he had lowered his gaze from Block Party’s body to the overturned chair beneath it…or maybe he was looking at the paper on the floor. Either way, now was a great time for her to go and try and find Nosey!
She had just started to trot toward the door when she felt a hoof wrap around her back leg, preventing her from leaving. Jumping a bit, Sonata spun around, only to see Scrubby giving her a miserable look. “Where are you going?” he asked anxiously. “Lex said not to wander off!”
“I’m just gonna go check out the ladies room,” protested Sonata quietly. “Nosey should be in there, and I wanna make sure she’s okay.” Privately, Sonata frowned at his attitude. It had only been yesterday afternoon that this same pony had been admitting that he was afraid of Lex after seeing what he’d done to Garden Gate. But now he was all too eager to listen to Lex’s advice when the situation seemed frightening.
Releasing her leg, Scrubby’s hoof went to the side of his head, rubbing it nervously. “Look, I’m worried about her too, but maybe we should let Lex finish what he’s doing first.”
“I already have,” came Lex’s voice, causing both of them to jump. Looking back at Lex, they were just in time to see him create a small black crystal, telekinetically raising it and cutting the rope around Block Party’s neck. The body hit the floor with a sickening thud, its limbs akimbo as it stared upward, sightless and unseeing. Both Sonata and Scrubby watched in morbid fascination as Lex slowly moved the body back into a more normal position before reaching a hoof out and closing Block Party’s eyes.
“Emanations,” corrected Lex without missing a beat as he walked over to join them, letting that black crystal disintegrate. He’d gotten used to her having trouble with any word that had more than three syllables, and although he normally found it irritating, at the moment he was grateful for it. Even if it was necessary, handling a pony’s corpse wasn’t something he found comfortable. “And no, there weren’t any.” The admission made him frown, not pleased that the necromantic aura he’d picked up around Block Party before was gone now.
Of course, the absence of that spell aura meant very little by itself. In all likelihood, the spell had simply expired; most magic that Lex knew of was relatively short-term anyway. Even the fact that he couldn’t find a residual aura on the body wasn’t that unusual. For all that his circlet let him view magic, its abilities weren’t as refined as he would have liked. While it had little trouble picking up aura from active magic – though when there were multiple magical signatures in the same location, stronger ones tended to obscure weaker ones – residual auras from expended magic were different. Such readings tended to decay rapidly, and even the strongest signal would be gone in an hour at the absolute most. If Block Party’s spell had worn off some time ago, then it was normal to find nothing.
But as benign as that explanation was, Lex couldn’t bring himself to accept it. It was simply too coincidental that Block Party had a necromantic spell around him before and just so happened to have died mysteriously a short time later. There was a connection, of that Lex was sure, but what was it?
“So, um, that’s good right?” asked Sonata.
Lex grunted, not bothering to answer as he held up a piece of paper. “What do you think of this?”
Sonata blinked, looking at the blocky print writing on the page. “‘I understand now what I’ve done. I can’t live with the guilt. Please tell everyone I’m sorry. B.P.’” She paused then, turning the words over in her mind, before coming to a conclusion. “It’s, like, a suicide note!”
Scrubby shuddered, looking at the note anxiously before glancing back at Lex. “Listen, you don’t need me here for any more of this, right? I wasn’t even here for most of last night, and anypony can tell you what happened this morning with No-”
“What do you mean you weren’t here?” interrupted Lex sharply. “You were the one I left to guard this place after Block Party was locked in here.”
Scrubby blinked in confusion. “Well…yeah, for a little while. But then you sent Nosey to relieve me.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “No. I didn’t.”
Scrubby’s eyebrows rose sharply. “But…I, I swear, she told me you did! She walked right up to me and said that you’d told her to come and fill in for me, and that I was supposed to come back and switch off with her again right before dawn!”
Lex shook his head. “I didn’t send anyone to fill in for you.”
Sonata cocked her head. “So if you didn’t send her, why would Nosey say you had?”
“Because I wanted an interview with Block Party.”
Sonata spun to face the familiar voice, Lex and Scrubby doing the same. There, in front of the ladies’ room door, was Nosey. For a moment Sonata was surprised, not having heard the door open or shut again, but the sight of her best friend drove those thoughts away. Nosey looked terrible. Her eyes were red, her nose was running, and there were tear-tracks on her face. Her mane was disheveled and even her glasses were slightly askew on her muzzle. “Nosey…” What had happened to drive her to this state? Block Party’s condition was awful, but not enough to reduce her friend to this.
“I wanted an interview,” repeated Nosey, sniffling, “and this is what happened.” She shut her eyes, a mournful look crossing her face, and Sonata saw fresh tears make their way down her cheeks. When Nosey spoke next, her voice was barely audible.
Analyzing a situation from myriad angles and processing the data found therein while simultaneously comparing it to what he already knew in order to extrapolate possible hypotheses had, for as long as he could remember, come naturally to him. So ingrained was that behavior that it had taken him a very long time to understand that everypony else didn’t think that way, and even now he still needed to continually remind himself that virtually everyone else he knew simply intuited their way through life. It was a truism that he found maddening no matter how often he encountered it.
Thus, it was with gritted teeth that Lex held out a hoof to stop Sonata from running to Nosey’s side. She skidded to a halt, almost colliding with his outstretched foreleg as she gave him a baffled look. “Do not approach her,” ordered Lex coldly, not taking his eyes off of Nosey.
“But she-”
“Shut up,” snapped Lex, mentally invoking his circlet again. Based on what Scrubby had just let slip, and what Nosey herself had admitted, she had been in close contact with Block Party shortly before his death. Between his having been in possession of Everglow magic of unknown powers and his unfathomable disposition – both in his lack of concern for the ponies under his care as well as in his purported suicide note – Lex couldn’t help but be extremely suspicious of everyone and everything involved in this incident, especially Nosey. If Block Party had cast some sort of spell on her…
But no magical auras appeared in his vision. Not even the slightest trace.
Frowning, Lex ceased concentrating on his circlet, still eyeing Nosey distrustfully. Just because his circlet hadn’t detected anything didn’t necessarily mean that there wasn’t some sort of magic at work, he knew. His circlet could only visualize spells, rather than magic per se. After all, magical energy was everywhere, contained within every living thing as well as flowing throughout the environment itself. Simply checking for the presence of magical energy would be futile due to that ubiquity, so the circlet’s detection ability focused on the complex construction that shaped that energy into recognizable spell effects. But his time on Everglow had taught Lex that some creatures had innate supernatural abilities that were little more than masses of magical energy, crudely shaped into some sort of effect that was too simplistic to be called spellcasting, and so were invisible to what his circlet could detect. The breath weapon of that dragon he’d killed back in Tall Tale had been like that, he knew. Its magical nature had been conclusively demonstrated by how it had wounded him even in shadow-form, but there’d been no indication that he’d seen of a spell being formulated when it had prepared to unleash it.
Could Block Party have had an ability like that? Lex wondered as he kept his eyes trained on Nosey. Obviously, it would have been something far more subtle than a breath of acidic fog, but if he had then there would be no easy way to detect it. But that didn’t mean that there was no way to investigate the pony in front of him right now…
“What was the name of the restaurant where we first met?”
“…huh?” Pausing in the middle of rubbing the tears from her cheeks, Nosey’s face twisted in confusion.
She wasn’t the only one; beside him Sonata was giving him a look as though she were questioning his sanity. “I thought-”
“I said be quiet!” growled Lex, shooting Sonata a dark look that caused her to recoil, her ears folding back as she stepped away from him. The sight sent a pang through him, but he pushed it away as he turned back to Nosey. “The restaurant where we first met. What was its name?”
“Wh-…we didn’t meet in a restaurant,” replied Nosey slowly, shooting a questioning look at Sonata before looking back at Lex. “We met in Tall Tale. I followed you when I heard you shouting at somepony else, and when you collapsed I took you back to my hotel room so I could interview you.”
“Ohhh!” exclaimed Sonata suddenly, her ears flipping back up as she realized what was going on. “You were checking to make sure that she was really her!” She grinned, pleased with herself, but her smile faltered a moment later as the next logical question occurred to her. “Wait, why were you worried that Nosey wasn’t Nosey?”
“Seriously, do we have to do this in here with the dead body?” murmured Scrubby, but everypony ignored him.
Not bothering to answer Sonata’s question, Lex instead glanced over at the candelabra, whose last sputtering candle had just gone out. Slowly lifting it in his telekinesis, everypony watched as he placed it on the ground in front of Nosey. “Pick it up,” he ordered.
Nosey glanced down at the candelabra, then back up at Lex. “Why?”
“I kinda wanna know that too,” admitted Sonata. “I mean, I get that the last one was to make sure she wasn’t, like, an imposter or anything, but what does this prove?”
“Just pick it up.” Outwardly, Lex’s expression didn’t change as he kept his eyes on Nosey. Inwardly, however, he struggled to hold back from unleashing a torrent of invectives at his girlfriend. Sonata’s insistence on interfering with his verifying Nosey’s identity and well-being, despite the gravity of the situation as well as being told twice to remain silent, was beginning to seriously test his patience.
“Okay…” Still giving him an odd look, Nosey reached a hoof out and easily lifted the candelabra off the ground, raising her eyebrows at him in an exaggerated manner as she brought it level with her head before placing it back on the ground.
As she did so, Sonata actually sat back on her haunches and clapped her hooves together, smiling as though she’d just watched a talent show. “She did it! Now,” she looked at Lex expectantly, “tell us what this was about. Please?”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex silently decided that it was easier to indulge Sonata than to waste more of his energy trying to make her cooperate. Right now he needed to focus on Nosey, and allowing Sonata’s simplemindedness to bother him distracted from that. “Lifting the candelabra proved that she had substance, instead of being some sort of illusion or spectral entity.”
“‘Illusion or spectral entity’?” echoed Scrubby quietly, a disbelieving look on his face.
“Are you kidding me?” Nosey gave Lex an incredulous look.
“Aw, come on, it’s kind of fun!” insisted Sonata, giving Nosey a smile. She wasn’t sure why Lex was suddenly being so paranoid; certainly, she didn’t see anything different about Nosey. From what Sonata could tell, she was pretty shaken up, but she didn’t seem like she was enchanted or anything the way Ribbon Cutter had been back in Tall Tale. So really, this whole thing was like one big ice-breaker. “So, what’s the next test?”
For a moment, Lex couldn’t help but look pained, but quickly recovered. “Hold your breath,” he ordered Nosey curtly.
An uncertain look crossed Nosey’s face then. “For how long?”
“Until I tell you to stop,” came Lex’s reply.
Nosey threw her hooves into the air. “This is ridiculous! Look, I’m me, okay? I’m Nosey Newsy, ace reporter for the Canterlot Chronicle! I interviewed you because I thought you were King Sombra when we first met, I watched you fight the dragon, and I’ve been making notes about everything you’ve been doing since you got here. Now, do you want to talk about what happened with Block Party or not?!”
“I do,” replied Lex flatly. “But first, you’re going to hold your breath until I tell you to stop.”
“You know what?” sighed Nosey. “I’ve had it. I’m exhausted and I’m hungry.” She gave Lex an irritated look. “I’m going to go see if there’s anything left to eat and then go take a nap. I promise I’ll still be me when I wake up, and then we can see about doing whatever this is supposed to prove, okay?”
She started to walk forward then, but only got as far as a single step before a row of small black crystals, each ending in a jagged point, sprouted in front of her. Squawking as she struggled to bring herself to a stop, Nosey just barely managed to avoid stepping on them, throwing herself backwards hard enough that she ended up sitting. “Was that really necessary?!” she yelled, giving him a glare.
“Yes,” shot back Lex. “I take this situation with the utmost seriousness, which means that you do not have the option of not doing the same. You are not going anywhere until I’m satisfied that you’re not a potential threat, which means that you can either comply with my instructions of your own volition,” his eyes flared green-and-purple then, “or I can force you to.”
The exchange was enough to make Sonata bite her lip, watching the back-and-forth. The sudden rise in tension had killed her good mood, causing her to wonder for a moment if she should intervene. Deciding that she should do something before Lex managed to alienate one of the few ponies that wasn’t afraid of him, she opened her mouth…only to catch Scrubby frantically signaling her out of the corner of her eye, shaking his head and mouthing “no” at her. When she gave him a confused look, he crept over to her in response, whispering. “Just let him do his thing,” he hissed. “The sooner he’s satisfied the sooner we can get out of here!” He glanced over at where Block Party’s body lay, still clearly afraid.
Nosey, meanwhile, fixed Lex with an indignant look. But it only lasted a moment before melting into one of resignation. “Fine,” she said tiredly. “Let’s just get this over with then.” Without further preamble, she took a deep breath before sealing her lips, standing still.
Long seconds passed, and Lex, Sonata, and Scrubby all kept their eyes on Nosey. At first she glanced around, making a show of her boredom, but eventually held still, tossing a look at Lex. When he didn’t react, she rolled her eyes, still holding her breath. Several more seconds passed, and now Nosey was starting to look uncomfortable. When Lex still didn’t give her leave to take a breath, she started to twitch, shaking slightly as she pursed her lips.
Both Sonata and Scrubby were shooting Lex worried looks now, but he ignored them, his eyes firmly on Nosey. Several more seconds passed, and Nosey convulsed, before finally opening her mouth and taking a big gulp of air, gasping. She took several deep breaths before finally getting herself under control, sending another glare Lex’s way. “What was that supposed to be? You didn’t tell me to breathe at all!”
“Sixty seconds is the approximate length of time that most ponies can hold their breath before it becomes too uncomfortable to keep going,” replied Lex matter-of-factly. “When they do, they’ll tend to turn noticeably red as a side-effect.”
“Why’s that important?” piped up Sonata, curious despite her earlier misgivings.
“An undead creature would have had trouble figuring out how long to pretend to hold their breath for,” answered Lex. “And they wouldn’t have turned red while doing it.”
Nosey’s eyebrows went up. “Undead? That’s what that was about?” She gestured at herself. “You know you could have just taken my pulse, right?” Lex opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him a chance to answer. “So what’s next? Should I punch a cloud to make sure I’m not really a pegasus that’s hiding her wings? Maybe I could go have Cerberus sniff me to prove I didn’t crawl out of Tartarus?”
Lex didn’t respond to her jibes, instead making a gesture at the black crystals at her hooves, which promptly turned into dust. “That will be all for now,” he declared. Behind him, twin sighs of relief were heard. But Lex immediately moved on to the next topic at hoof.
Nosey closed her eyes, a pained look crossing her face in response to Lex’s command.
The sight was enough to motivate Sonata to try speaking up again. “Listen,” she started, giving Lex an earnest look, “maybe we should wait a little bit. Nosey’s obviously been through a lot and-”
“I want to hear her accounting of what happened now,” interrupted Lex, his tone one of finality.
The complete dismissal caught Sonata off-guard, and for a moment all she could do was blink, baffled at how he was acting. A bad mood was normal for Lex, but ever since Cloudbank had woken them up with the news that Block Party had kicked the bucket, he’d been seriously grumpy! It’s like he’s even more uptight than usual, she decided, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out why. She might have thought he was worried about Nosey, except that she was right here and by all indications was fine. So what was his problem? “Look-”
“It’s alright, Sonata.” This time the interruption came from Nosey, opening her eyes and giving the other mare a tired smile. “This is what I expected him to ask me.” She turned her eyes toward Lex, and her smile fell away as she did. “Can I at least sit down first?”
He didn’t bother to answer her verbally, instead glancing around for a moment before canting his head towards a row of chairs that were lined up against a nearby wall. Following the signal, Nosey made her way over to them, sinking into the nearest chair with a sigh. Lex followed, but only so that he was directly in front of her, remaining standing as he looked at her impassively. Sonata moved after him a moment later, a worried look on her face as her eyes flitted between Lex and Nosey.
Scrubby followed them last, biting his lip as he did so. “Um,” he started uncertainly as he glanced at Lex and Sonata, “I don’t want to jinx anything here, but you two do realize you’re sitting with your backs to the b-body, right?” When all he received were blank stares in reply, he continued. “I mean, that’s just asking for it to, like, get up and start moving when you’re not looking! Or maybe you turn around and suddenly it’s gone even though you didn’t hear anything. Or-”
“Go and fetch the doctors,” ordered Lex curtly.
“-we’ll look back and it’ll be in a different posi-…wait, what?”
“Go and fetch the doctors,” repeated Lex. “Let them know what’s happened here, and tell them that I want them to retrieve the body so that an autopsy can be performed. And make sure that they bring something to cover the body up with. I don’t want them parading the corpse through the camp.”
Scrubby nodded so fast the motion was almost a blur. “Right away! I’ll go and get them right now! On it!” The words had barely left his mouth when he turned and bolted for the door, already fiddling with the ring of keys in his mouth.
“And lock the door behind you!” yelled Lex as the other stallion left. A few moments later the sounds of the door opening, followed by its swift closure, reached their ears, with the click of the lock following a moment later.
Silence reigned for a moment following Scrubby’s departure, until Sonata tilted her head and put a hoof to her chin thoughtfully. “You know, he kinda had a good point about not leaving the body out of sight. In horror movies, that is always when something goes wrong.”
“It’s not out of sight,” answered Lex irritably, wishing they could move on from this inanity.
“Huh?” Sonata’s face screwed up in confusion as she tried to figure out what Lex meant. “Wait, are you using some sort of spell to grow eyes in the back of your head?!” She leaned over, examining Lex’s mane suspiciously, causing him to grit his teeth.
“He means me, Sonata,” answered Nosey quietly. When Sonata looked at her in confusion, Nosey gave her another small smile. “If you guys have your backs to…to the body, and I’m facing you, that means that I have line of sight to it. So if anything weird happens, I’ll see it.”
Sonata’s brow furrowed, and in the ensuing silence the gears turning were almost audible, until finally a look of comprehension spread across her face. “Ohhh! I get it now!” She smiled broadly, pleased with herself. More than that, though, she was pleased with what that meant. If Lex was willing to let Nosey be the one to watch out for Block Party’s body doing anything horror-ish, then he must have finally stopped being so suspicious of her!
“Now that we’ve resolved that nonsense, let’s move on to the matter at hoof,” growled Lex, giving Nosey a sharp look. “What happened?”
Pausing just long enough to give a sigh, Nosey answered immediately. “Last night, I came here so that I could interview Block Party.” A regretful look crossed her face as she spoke. “I mean, I interviewed you, way back when,” she gestured at Lex, “so I thought that I should do the same for him.”
“How did you get inside the building?” asked Lex, his voice having lost some of its edge.
Sonata gave him a confused look. “Um, did you forget what Scrubby said? She-”
“Be quiet, Sonata.” Lex gave her a sharp glare, trying to hold back his anger about her almost revealing what Scrubby had told them. Did she really not understand that keeping Nosey ignorant about what Scrubby had told them was necessary for comparing their stories?
Apparently not. “Fine!” Sonata threw her hooves in the air, finally having reached her limit with how Lex was acting. “I’ll just sit here and not say anything at all! Does that work for you, Mr. Lex Legis sir?”
“Eminently,” he replied flatly. When Sonata turned her face away from him with a loud snort, he looked back at Nosey. “Continue.”
Nosey frowned at him, but obeyed. “It wasn’t that hard. I waited a little bit and then came here, telling Scrubby that you’d sent me to fill in for him, and that he should come back in a few hours. He bought it hook, line, and sinker, turning the keys right over to me. After that, I just had to let myself in.”
Lex nodded, satisfied that her account matched Scrubby’s. “And then?”
“I…” She trailed off, looking down and folding her ears back. But a moment later she got over it, licking her lips. “I interviewed him about what had happened here. About why this place was so awful, and why he thought that he needed to keep Vanhoover guarded the way he did…all of it.” She shook her head, as though trying to push away the memory of what she’d been told. “He did terrible things!” she blurted suddenly, looking between Lex and Sonata. “He ran this place like a prison. Worse than a prison. He would give orders and beat up anyone who didn’t listen, sometimes until they could barely move! And he made everyone go out and patrol the city to keep ghouls or survivors from getting out, even if they were sick or hurt! And anyone who complained too much even after being hit was sent back into Vanhoover!”
Sonata gaped. “That’s awful!”
“That’s not even the worst of it.” Nosey’s eyes were growing watery as she spoke. “The ponies who did what he told them without complaining were eventually given special privileges. They got to eat first, and they didn’t have to go out on patrols. But they also had to give orders to other ponies on his behalf, and that meant that…that when someone else complained…” She blinked back tears, rubbing her cheek before she continued. “That those ponies had to beat them up on Block Party’s behalf, too.”
Sonata’s jaw fell open at that, her hooves going to cover her mouth as she looked at Lex, her earlier indignation forgotten. Lex’s only reaction was to narrow his eyes, his thoughts returning to that pony that had begged to come inside with them, Spit Polish. “And those ponies were fine with this?” he asked, his voice dark.
“He said they weren’t at first, but he convinced them that they had to do it, to protect Equestria,” answered Nosey miserably. “That keeping a barrier around the city was the only way to prevent the disease that turned ponies into ghouls from getting out. That’s why he didn’t want to let anyone know what was happening here. He thought that if the princesses heard, they’d come running, and that they might get sick too. He convinced them, and eventually they agreed…” She looked up, eyes on the ceiling as she sniffled.
“That’s awful!” Sonata turned around to glare at Block Party’s body, thinking back to last night and the sight of a crying Fiddlesticks holding her wailing baby brother. “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d so kick his butt for that!” She turned back to Nosey, her ire still up. “That’s what happened, right? You got in his face about what he’d done, and he tried to start something, and you, um…you had to…defend yourself?” Her anger fizzled out as she spoke, realizing as the words were coming out of her mouth how ridiculous that sounded. There was no way that a fight would have ended with Block Party swinging from the end of a rope, unless Nosey had done something unspeakable…
Fortunately, the other mare didn’t seem to be offended at the implication, giving a snort of bitter laughter. “No, Sonata. That’s not what happened.”
“Then what did happen?” prodded Lex.
“I was upset,” admitted Nosey. “I mean, I know a reporter’s just supposed to get the facts and not get involved in the stories she’s writing about, but...” She gestured with a hoof, as though trying to grab the words she was looking for out of the air. “It wasn’t just what he said. It was the way he said them! Like he didn’t care at all! He was just smirking the whole time, and I just got so angry! I couldn’t just let that go!” She turned to look at Lex then, her expression unreadable. “So I did what I thought you would do.”
His brow furrowed. “Me?”
“Wait, really?” Sonata’s voice was slightly incredulous. “So you, what…laid a curse on Block Party?”
“No.” Nosey shook her head. “I tried to explain to him why what he did was wrong.”
“Huh? That’s it?” Sonata was utterly nonplussed, looking at Nosey before glancing back at the dead pony behind them. If that was all she’d done, then she’d laid the world’s worst guilt trip on him by far!
“You explained to him why he was wrong?” Lex’s voice was also skeptical, not only because her action didn’t match the results they’d seen, but also because he couldn’t imagine Nosey making any sort of credible attempt at even basic moral philosophy.
“Yeah. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?” Nosey snorted self-deprecatingly. “I mean, I know I’m nowhere near as smart as you are, but I just said to myself ‘what would Lex say, if he were here?’ and the words just came to me.” She shook her head slightly, ears folding back again. “I really gave it to him, too. I didn’t hold back even a little from telling him how much of a monster I thought he was and how you’d made it pretty clear that the ghoul disease doesn’t spread like that and that all he’d done was make everyone here miserable for no reason.” She shook her head mournfully, giving another sniffle. “He tried to get a word or two in, but I didn’t want to hear it. I just kept yelling at him, and eventually he just sat there without talking and let me go on.”
She fell silent then, and after a few moments Lex spoke up. “And then?”
Sonata gave him a dirty look for his lack of compassion, but Nosey answered anyway. “After I was done, I realized I was crying, so I went into the ladies’ room to clean myself up. I swear, I wasn’t in there very long. I just needed a few minutes to get myself together and splash some water on my face, and that was all.” She let out another sigh, looking at the two of them with guilt and shame written all over her face.
“When I came out, he was hanging from the ceiling.” Her lower lip quivered. “I drove him to kill himself.”
“Nosey, listen to me.” Sonata took a step forward, putting her directly in front of the teary-eyed unicorn. “This wasn’t your fault.”
Nosey gave her a miserable look in reply. “Yes it was, Sonata. I-”
“No!” Sonata’s voice was unusually firm as she shook her head. “You are not responsible for what happened to Block Party! He, like, did this to himself, which means that you can’t be blamed for it!” She looked back at her boyfriend. “Tell her, Lex!” She was sure that he’d have some super-smart way of explaining how it wasn’t Nosey’s fault that awful stallion had offed himself.
But Lex didn’t say anything. In fact, he wasn’t paying attention at all, glancing back at the dead body with a thoughtful look on his face. Gritting her teeth, Sonata turned away from Nosey and marched over to Lex, reaching out to tap on his side with more force than she knew was necessary. “Lex!”
That got his attention, and he looked back over at her, irritation crossing his features. “What is it?”
“Tell Nosey this wasn’t her fault!” It was all Sonata could do to stop herself from adding “right now” to the end of her sentence, having reached the end of her rope. His worse-than-usual mood was one thing, but he’d been totes awful to Nosey this entire time, despite how upset she obviously was. He had better say something super nice to her right now, or so help me…
But Lex was utterly oblivious to his girlfriend’s building wrath, instead heaving an annoyed sigh before looking at Nosey. “Strictly speaking, it’s difficult to say that your actions and Block Party’s death form any sort of causal chain. Although it’s possible that he committed suicide because of what you told him, the moral implications therein re-”
“What is WRONG with you?!” screamed Sonata, causing both Lex and Nosey to start in surprise.
“What…?” Lex stared at Sonata in confusion, trying to figure out what was going on.
Sonata saw his bewilderment clearly, but rather than dampen her anger his lack of comprehension instead served only to fuel it. A lot of the time Lex’s cluelessness was funny, and sometimes it was even cute, but right now the idea that he could be so unaware of how awful he was being was upsetting beyond measure. “‘It’s possible that he committed suicide because of what she told him’?” she snarled. “That’s what you say to her?! Nosey’s crying because she thinks this is her fault and you say ‘it’s possible’?! Do you not care about her feelings at all?!”
“What are y-, hold on!” Lex was still trying to figure out what had set Sonata off, turning over what she said and analyzing it as quickly as he could. Was she under the impression that he had been indicting Nosey? If so, then it should be relatively easy to clear up her misunderstanding. “I was attempting to explain that, even if he did kill himself because of what she said, the culpabil-”
“SHUT UP!” roared Sonata. “Just…just shut up!” He’d actually said it again! It was enough that she had to put her face in her hooves, closing her eyes because she knew that if she had to keep looking at his perplexed face again she’d lose it completely. Mercifully, he was silent, and Sonata breathed heavily as she tried to get herself under control. She knew this was the wrong way to confront him, knew that getting in his face would only make him act more stubborn, but she couldn’t stop herself. After all of the pain and suffering she’d witnessed last night, seeing all of those poor ponies so miserable and hopeless, seeing that expression on her best friend’s face – her best friend who was going to be leaving soon! – was unbearable. Hearing Lex then trample all over her feelings was more than she could take.
Unfortunately, Lex found his voice before she could calm herself down. “Sonata, listen to me-”
“No, you listen to me!” she snapped. “Nosey is our friend, Lex! Don’t you get that?! She helped us out in Tall Tale, she trusted us enough to follow us here, and she pitched in when we were fighting for our lives! She’s always been there for us, and now when she needs our help you can’t-, you can’t even…” She couldn’t finish, choking on a sob as her anger suddenly turned into an awful, sickening sense of frustration and powerlessness, making her eyes fill with tears.
For his part, Lex could only look at Sonata, having no idea what to do. He’d upset her before on numerous occasions – the most recent being less than a day ago when he’d cut Garden Gate’s dress off – but this was the first time he’d ever seen her this mad. Worse, he had no idea what her anger was predicated on. If he’d had some sort of clear understanding of her objection to what he’d been attempting to say, that would have given him a foundation to work from. But without that, he was operating completely blind. That realization was enough to fill him with a controlled panic. Sonata had always been the one pony for whom his social ineptitude hadn’t been a repellant. If that was no longer true…
She’ll leave you again, came the voiceless words from his shadow. If you say anything else to make it worse, she’ll abandon you again. And this time she won’t come back. That thought was like someone had placed his heart in a vice. It was enough to make him stay silent, not daring to speak until he had figured out some way to turn the situation around without allowing for any possibility of driving her away.
Shuddering as she managed to choke her emotions down, Sonata raised her face to look at Lex, hoping against hope that he’d heard what she’d been trying to tell him, that he’d try and make things right. But the look on his face was carefully neutral, as though he were trying not to let any of his feelings show. And although he met her gaze directly, not a word passed his lips. Several seconds went by before Sonata realized that he wasn’t going to speak, and the realization sent a numb feeling through her chest.
Feeling drained, Sonata turned towards Nosey, who was still wearing a stunned expression. “C’mon.” Gently wrapping a hoof around the other mare, Sonata managed to coax her out of her seat and started to lead her towards the door. But she only went a few steps before stopping and half-turning back so that Lex was just barely within her peripheral vision. “I’m going to take Nosey back to everyone else so she can rest. Then we…” she paused for a long moment, swallowing before she spoke again. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
For a moment Lex didn’t respond, but somehow managed to find it within himself to nod. That appeared to be the correct answer, since Sonata didn’t seem inclined to berate him again. Instead, she just made her way towards the doors, Nosey by her side. Lex let out a breath he hadn’t realized he'd been holding as he watched them go, silently reassuring himself that she was not leaving him. That had been the intent of her saying they’d talk later, right? Right. It had to be.
But for all his anxiety, Lex couldn’t help but wonder – as he watched the two reached the front doors – how they planned on leaving, since Scrubby had locked them in when he’d left. His answer came a moment later as Sonata pounded a hoof on the door. “Cloudbank! It’s me! Let us out!”
A few moments passed, and Sonata had just raised a hoof to knock again when the lock clicked – apparently Scrubby had thought to leave the keys behind before running for the doctors – the door opening a moment later, followed by Cloudbank poking her head in. “Hey, is everything alright?” Her eyes ran from Sonata to Nosey to Lex and back again. “I thought I heard yelling before…”
“We’re fine,” answered Sonata quickly. “Can you let us out, please?”
“Yeah…sure,” replied Cloudbank, her expression openly displaying her doubts about Sonata’s answer. But she moved off to the side, letting the two slowly pass her by.
They had moved out of sight before Lex walked over to Cloudbank, the prospect of focusing on Vanhoover’s troubles managing to draw him, at least somewhat, out of how numb he felt about what had happened. “What’s the situation outside?”
“That one unicorn was making kind of a ruckus,” admitted Cloudbank, surreptitiously trying to peer around Lex to see what the situation was with Block Party. “But he was smart enough not to try anything too dumb.” One corner of her mouth curled up as she met his eyes then, wanting to see his reaction to the more amusing part of the story. “Except for when he tried to grab Severance in his telekinesis. He got a bit of a haircut for his trouble, and ran off after that.”
Lex frowned, less because of Severance and more because he’d wanted to have words with that stallion. If what Nosey had said was accurate, Block Party wasn’t the only one to have committed atrocities against the ponies in this camp. But as much as he wanted to track that pony down and interrogate him, it was going to have to wait. There were too many other, more pressing issues that needed to be dealt with, not the least of which was making sure that everypony here was fed. “Scrubby will be coming back here with doctors in short order to collect Block Party’s body,” he said as he moved past Cloudbank. “Stay here and guard the doors until they arrive.”
“That’s fine,” replied Cloudbank immediately. At least now she’d be able to sneak a peek at what had happened to that awful stallion before the doctors arrived. And as an extra perk, the more work Lex gave her now, the more likely he’d forget about-
“And once they have, wait one hour and then come find me. You’ll be making your sermon then.”
“…right,” sighed Cloudbank petulantly. “Oh, I almost forgot! Aria’s looking for you.”
Lex frowned at that, heading outside. Sure enough, Aria had dragged herself in front of the train station, the crowd of ponies having given her a wide berth, eyeing her with open nervousness. Aria barely seemed to notice, glaring at where Severance was hovering directly in front of her. As Lex exited the building, her eyes snapped over to him. “It’s about time!” she whispered harshly.
Fighting back the urge to sigh, Lex telekinetically took hold of Severance and placed it on his back. He heard gasps from the crowd as he did so, probably due to how even that small act made his eyes glow, but suddenly he didn’t care. Let them spread whatever rumors they wanted; in a short while they’d be filling their bellies thanks to the magic the Night Mare had given him, and then they’d know who their benefactor was. Which reminded him…
Ignoring Aria, Lex swept his gaze across the crowd, barely noticing how almost everypony flinched and refused to make eye contact with him. “As some of you may have heard, Block Party is dead,” he announced flatly. “I’ve launched an investigation into the circumstances of his demise, but so far the evidence points to him having taken his own life.” That should suffice to blunt the worst of the rumors. Hopefully. “Once the investigation is complete, I’ll issue another statement. Until then, no further questions regarding Block Party will be answered.” He paused for a long moment, waiting to see if anypony was going to say anything. When none of them did, he made a dismissive gesture. “Now all of you leave. Food will be distributed near the field hospital in one hour.”
As he watched the crowd of ponies begin to trudge away, Lex couldn’t help but feel mildly pleased with himself. He had done just fine speaking to the people directly, the same way he had with sentencing Garden Gate. Maybe I don’t need a spokespony at all. The thought was tinged with spite.
Thoughts of Sonata made him turn back to the other Siren in his retinue, looking over at Aria. “Now, what do you want?”
“You know what I want,” she hissed. “My voice back!” She thumped her tail on the ground angrily. “You promised me you’d fix it, but so far it’s just been one delay after another, and I’m-”
The sun had barely risen above the mountains by the time Lex made his way back to the other end of the camp.
It had taken him an unusually long time to make the trek back. After Aria had left, satisfied now that there was a firm timetable for her transmogrification, Lex had started to return to the field hospital that had become the de facto center of the relief operations he was conducting, his mind awhirl with what had happened between himself and Sonata. He’d been so preoccupied that he’d made it almost halfway back before realizing that he’d left Block Party’s body completely unsecured.
Horrified that he’d made such an oversight – for all of Scrubby’s cowardliness, he hadn’t been entirely wrong; a pony whose body was the focus on a necromantic spell of not-inconsiderable power, and who then died under mysterious circumstances, right outside a city full of ghouls quite clearly needed to be treated as a potential threat – Lex had rushed back to the train station. Fortunately, Block Party’s body still showed no signs of activity, nor magic that Lex could detect, and Cloudbank had likewise said that things had been quiet.
Relieved that his lapse in judgment hadn’t resulted in any serious consequences, Lex had used his dark magic to create black crystal cuffs around Block Party’s legs. Unfortunately, it was at that point that the doctors he’d requested had arrived on the scene, led by Scrubby. Although the earth stallion had been pleased to see the dead body shackled, the doctors hadn’t shared his enthusiasm, with several insisting that such treatment was tantamount to disrespectful treatment of the dead. “If Block Party animates as an undead pony, your consideration won’t prevent him from slaughtering you,” Lex had countered coldly, shutting down their objections.
As they’d prepared for transporting the corpse back, Lex had left ahead of them, wanting to be alone to think. And now, having reached the other end of the camp, he’d come to a firm conclusion: whatever had prompted Sonata’s temper-tantrum, it was going to have to wait. He had bigger problems to deal with than her fit of pique.
Much bigger, he thought to himself grimly as he looked over the whole of the camp, now illuminated by the rising sun. It had been impossible to make out the full extent of the beleaguered ponies living in the camp’s wretched conditions last night. But now, revealed by the daylight, he could see clearly what he’d only glimpsed before.
There were at least a thousand ponies living here. More than that, in all likelihood.
Even as Lex watched, a veritable town composed of torn tents and ramshackle lean-tos was starting to come to life, with ragged-looking ponies blearily emerging to nudge at the ashes of last night’s campfires or begin to trudge in the direction of the river, dented buckets and dirty mugs clenched between teeth or held in glowing auras. Others were hobbling towards the field hospital, or helping those that couldn’t quite make it on their own, queueing into a line to wait to see a doctor…a line that had only somewhat diminished since last night. A few simply came out and looked upward blearily before heading back into their meager dwellings, as though simply wanting to confirm that the sun had still risen…to confirm that Princess Celestia must still be there to move it, realized Lex.
Normally, thinking about the princess whom he aspired to replace would have filled Lex with disdain and frustration. But now those emotions failed to manifest. Instead, all Lex could do was impotently curse her and her fellow princesses for having given him such woefully inadequate information regarding the sorry state of Vanhoover’s ponies. If he’d realized just how uninhabitable the city had become, and how many of its citizenry had been left displaced and destitute, then he wouldn’t have had to grapple with the new problem that he’d just discovered.
I can’t create enough food to feed everypony here!
“Sonata, really, I’m okay.”
“I know, but we should check just one more.” Frowning as she spoke, Sonata looked around at the gathering of tents spread out around her, each of which contained a patient that the doctors considered too serious to be left without supervision.
Set up beside the field hospital, the small forest of dark-colored tents stood in stark contrast to the threadbare ones that made up the remainder of the camp. In addition to being pristine, they were set up in neat lines that were several rows deep. Further, each one had a small piece of wood – which looked suspiciously like planks from deconstructed crates – with a number penciled on it planted in the ground next to its entrance flaps. The result was an orderly array of temporary dwellings that were easily distinguishable from each other, despite their uniformity.
It was obvious, at least to Sonata, that Lex was responsible for the entire arrangement. The knowledge made her sigh as she tried for what had to be the fifth time to find a tent that wasn’t full to capacity for Nosey to rest in. Given that there wasn’t any food to be had, and wouldn’t be until Lex got around to creating some with his magic, Sonata was determined to at least find her best friend a place to rest. “Maybe…let’s see here.” She peered at the number beside another tent that she’d selected at random. “Number J7. That totes sounds lucky!”
“These tents are for ponies that the doctors need to keep an eye on,” protested Nosey, the same way she had each time Sonata had tried to find a place for her to rest. “I don’t mind taking a nap outside. It’s still summer, after all.”
“No way!” Sonata shook her head vehemently at the idea. “I can at least find you a place to get some shut-eye until Le-, until the food’s ready, and I’m betting this will be a winner!” Unzipping the tent flap, Sonata stuck her head inside. “Excuse me, can we-, whoa!” Immediately, she yanked her head out, looking slightly green. “Uh, sorry!” she called to the occupant as she hastily zipped the flap back up. “You just try and recover from…whatever that is! Nevermind us! I’ll get one of the doctors to come check on you super fast!”
Nosey blinked. “What was-”
“Nothing!” replied Sonata with a rictus grin, nudging Nosey away from the tent. “C’mon, let’s go check somewhere else!”
But Nosey shook her head, planting her hooves firmly on the ground. “Sonata, seriously, that’s enough.”
“But we can just-”
“Hey, listen to me.” Nosey reached up to put her hooves on Sonata’s cheeks, turning her head to make the other mare look her directly in the eyes. “I’m okay. You don’t need to do anything else.” She gave her a tired smile. “Just you standing up for me like that was enough.”
Sonata’s ears folded down as she took a step back, moving out of Nosey’s grasp. “I just…I feel terrible about how Lex was treating you.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” replied Nosey, before smirking. “That’s what you were telling me before, right? Block Party wasn’t my fault, and Lex wasn’t your fault, so let’s both of us stop feeling bad about things we couldn’t control, okay?”
That managed to get a wan smile from Sonata, and she sighed. “I guess. But-”
“No buts,” interrupted Nosey, still giving Sonata a friendly smile. “Now, I’m going to go lie down somewhere and rest, so you go do whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing, okay?”
Sonata looked like she wanted to protest for a moment, but then gave a resigned sigh. “Okay. Want me to come get you when its chow time?”
“How about you save me something for after I wake up?”
“Deal.” Sonata’s smile was a little wider as she trotted off, giving Nosey one last wave before she disappeared out of sight.
Sighing, Nosey slowly picked her way through the rows of tents, exiting them and circling around the central area where the field hospital itself had been set up, before coming around near where the supplies had been laid out. Picking her way through the stacks of materials and sundries, she paused as she saw a certain turquoise crystal mare sitting alone…or rather, near a wrapped bundle that looked suspiciously like a pony. Slowly, Nosey made her way over to her. “Hi.”
Cozy looked up from where she’d been staring at the ground, her face completely passionless, before dropping her gaze again. “If you’re looking for Aisle, he went to go talk to…somepony,” she murmured listlessly.
Nosey shook her head. “No, I was just…” She paused for a moment, her eyes flickering to the sheet-wrapped body beside Cozy before returning to the crystal mare. “I wanted to say how sorry I was about what happened to Pillowcase. I didn’t have a chance to express my condolences on your loss before.”
Cozy didn’t look up at her, muttering something that might have been a thanks.
Another long pause ensued, before Nosey spoke up again. “Did he worship Lashtada, too?”
That was enough to rouse Cozy’s attention, and she met the other mare’s eyes again. “Huh?”
“I mean, you’re a priestess and all, but did Pillowcase share your faith?”
Confusion could be seen on Cozy’s face, pushing past her malaise. “…yeah. I mean, I was the only one who got spells or anything, but we would both pray to her.”
Nosey gave her a tentative smile. “Well then, it’s not like you’ll never see him again, right?”
Cozy furrowed her brow. “What?”
“You know. In the afterlife.”
Cozy shook her head, an uncomprehending look on her face. What was this mare talking about? What was an “afterlife”?
Nosey’s smile fell away. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.” Looking uncomfortable, she started to walk away.
“No, wait.” Cozy climbed to her hooves as she held out a hoof toward Nosey, who stopped in response. “What do you mean we can be together again? What does that have to do with both of us having worshipping Lashtada?”
“Well…before anything else, I want to stress that I don’t know that this is absolutely true or anything. It’s just something that I heard from Lex back in Tall Tale, when I first met him.” Reaching a hoof into one of her saddlebags, Nosey fished through it for a moment before withdrawing a notepad, flipping through several pages before she started speaking again. “Here we go. According to what he said, these ‘gods’ make it so anyone who worships them while they’re alive are reborn alongside them after they die.”
Cozy’s eyes widened, not having heard that before. “What…what does that mean? ‘Reborn alongside them after they die’?”
“Um…” Nosey flipped a page over with her hoof, scanning it quickly before flipping it back again. “I guess it means exactly that. If you worship a god when you’re alive, then when you die you reappear wherever your god lives. I think the implication is that you stay there forever.” She put the notepad away then, giving Cozy another tentative smile. “So that’s at least a little good news, right? He worshipped Lashtada, and so do you. That means that when you die, you’ll be together again.”
Cozy didn’t answer, just standing there with a shocked look on her face.
Several seconds passed, before Nosey bit her lip and canted her head behind her. “Well, um, I’m going to go find a place to rest. You take care of yourself, okay?” Receiving only a vacant nod in reply, she turned around and trotted away.
Cozy barely heard her leave, her mind whirling with what she’d just been told. Long minutes went by before she slowly turned to look at the shrouded bundle that was Pillowcase’s body. She’d been planning on taking him back to the Crystal Empire, hoping against hope that Princess Cadance would be able to restore him to life somehow. It had been a feeble, desperate hope, one that seemed more and more remote with each passing hour, but which she’d clung to simply because she couldn’t bear to face the thought of her beloved being gone forever. But now…
“When I die,” she whispered to herself, “we’ll be together again.”
“Please, I’m begging you! I just need you to do this once, and that’s all! I’ll never ask you for anything again after this, I swear!”
House Call fidgeted uncomfortably as he listened to Aisle’s pleading. He’d already said no to the other pony’s request, but apparently Aisle wasn’t ready to take no for an answer. “Look, I’m sorry, but I just can’t. If I lie to Lex and he finds out about it…” He trailed off, a shudder going down his spine at the thought. After seeing what had happened to Fencer or Garden Gate or whatever her name was, House Call didn’t know what Lex would do to a pony that deliberately deceived him, and he had no intention of ever finding out.
Unfortunately, Aisle was also worried about somepony facing Lex's wrath. “Please!” He looked up from where he had knelt down, pressing his forehooves together. “If Lex finds out that Cozy didn’t help treat any patients last night, then I won’t be able to stop him from punishing her!”
House Call glanced around nervously, worried that somepony would overhear what they were talking about. The central portion of the field hospital, where they were now, was nothing more than several of the larger tents that had been sewn together in the middle of last night’s flurry of activity. Thankfully, a few of C. Shells’ crew were adept at tailoring – another skill that was useful during long voyages at sea, as it turned out – and they’d managed to skillfully stitch the tents into a rough approximation of a larger tent that was subdivided into multiple interior spaces. A few skillfully-applied hanging sheets had helped to create various niches where House Call and the other medical ponies could treat patients individually. Even so, the thin fabric made it frighteningly easy to overhear what others were saying. “I know, but-”
“You just have to tell Lex that she helped heal a few patients last night,” continued Aisle. “That’s all. It’s not like he’d ever know.”
“Are you kidding me? Of course he’d know!” House Call could feel sweat running down the back of his neck. He’d never been the bravest of ponies, and he knew it. When it came to treating injured ponies, he could be as cool, calm, and collected as they came. But even the thought of facing actual violence was enough to make him nervous. He still couldn’t believe that he’d gone out and fought a bunch of monsters just a few nights ago; to him, that entire ordeal felt like some sort of bad dream, and although the memories were enough to make him tremble, at least he knew that it was over now. But the thought of Lex finding out that he’d lied to him was just as frightening. “We have to keep medical records, you know. Even out here, we still have to write down what treatments we’re giving our patients. If he looks through them and doesn’t find any references to Cozy, the jig will be up!”
Aisle refused to let this go. “Then just write some fake records!” he pleaded, wishing for the hundredth time that Cozy had simply done what Lex had told her. Thanks to all of the time they’d spent together before Lex had found them, he knew that she only had a few spells; she could have expended them all in under five minutes, and then Lex would have been satisfied. No, he silently rebuked himself. It’s not fair to blame her.
Ever since she’d cried on his shoulder, Cozy had been extremely depressed, expressing very little interest in anything except standing vigil over her husband’s body. Just getting her to say more than a few words was a struggle; it had taken several hours of gentle coaxing before she’d admitted that she still had something she wanted to do, which had turned out to be bringing Pillowcase back to the Crystal Empire in hope that Princess Cadance could resurrect him. Aisle had no idea if such a thing could be done or not, but so long as Cozy had something that was keeping her going, he wasn’t about to question it.
Unfortunately, everything outside of that had lost all power to motivate her. When he’d realized that she wasn’t going to use her healing magic at Lex’s command, Aisle had been beside himself, trying to impress upon her that Lex would almost certainly not let her inaction go unpunished. When that failed to move her, he’d managed to calm down enough to try a different tact: letting her know that, regardless of how she felt about Lex, there were hurt ponies that needed her help. But even that had failed to rouse her, and she’d simply given him a sullen look before turning her back to him and muttering that she wanted to be left alone. He’d barely slept a wink, hoping against hope that she’d come to her senses before sunrise.
But she hadn’t, and now he was here trying to save her from the consequences of her decision. “It can’t be that hard, right? Just write one or two sentences, and that should be good enough for Lex!”
House Call shook his head. “What if he wants to follow-up with the patients she supposedly helped? If he starts looking for corroboration, there’s no way we’d be able to keep our stories straight!”
Aisle grit his teeth, his exhaustion, anxiety, and frustration starting to turn into anger. “Cozy saved all of our lives when we were fighting those monsters! Now she needs our help, and you can’t even do this one small thing for her?!”
House Call’s ears folded back, looking away in shame, and for a moment Aisle thought he might have convinced the other stallion to help out. But House Call shook his head a moment later. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and before Aisle could reply he pushed past him, trotting away.
For a moment, Aisle just stayed there, staring vacantly into space as he tried to process just how completely he’d failed. Slowly, mechanically, he climbed to his hooves and stumbled towards the door, desperately trying to think of what he could do now. Lex said that he was going to ask the doctors if Cozy showed up, he thought to himself as he thrust aside a tent flap to head outside. So if I-
Lex was waiting on the other side of the flap. “There you are.”
Aisle couldn’t help but let out a yelp, immediately reversing course and almost falling over as he threw himself backward. “L-Lex!”
“Come with me,” ordered the dour unicorn, turning and walking away without looking back.
He knows. Aisle felt like he was going to throw up, a wave of panic-induced vertigo washing over him as he stumbled to his hooves. It was over. Lex must have spoken to one of the other doctors already, and now he knew that Cozy hadn’t done as he’d instructed her. Cozy, I’m sorry, Aisle wailed mournfully in his thoughts. The idea that Lex was going to punish her, to make her life even more miserable, was too unfair for words. It was enough to make tears of frustration gather in his eyes as he stepped out of the tent and moved to follow Lex.
But a moment later he realized that they were headed in the wrong direction.
They should have been circling around, headed towards the far side of the large amalgamation of tents that made up the field hospital, where the supplies and various medical miscellanies had been placed, Pillowcase’s body among them. That was where Cozy had spent all of her time since they’d gotten there, and Aisle had no reason to believe that she wasn’t there right now. But Lex was leading him away from there, instead taking him deeper into the camp. A desperate hope growing in his chest, Aisle quickly wiped his eyes as he trotted behind Lex. His curiosity rose with every step, but he dared not open his mouth, worried that if he asked what they were doing he wouldn’t like the answer.
After what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a minute or two, Lex abruptly stopped, almost causing Aisle to barrel into him. But Lex didn’t notice, instead looking towards a particular group of mangy-looking ponies clustered around a small campfire a few dozen feet away. With a quick glance behind him to make sure that Aisle was still there, he strode towards the group, with Aisle – now completely mystified – following him.
The trio of ponies, two pegasi stallions and an earth mare, looked up as Lex approached, all of their faces tensing as they saw who was headed toward them. All three climbed to their hooves, casting nervous looked at each other before eyeing Lex uncertainly. Aisle saw them glance down towards Lex’s hooves, and belatedly noticed that his shadow was directly underneath him, where everyone else’s was stretching out due to the sun’s low angle. He briefly wondered if that meant anything in particular, and it occurred to him then just how little he really knew about the pony that had saved all of their lives more than once.
“Good m-morning,” stuttered the mare, trying to smile, a gesture Lex didn’t bother to return. “I’m Mi-”
“What are you eating?” spoke Lex. The question made Aisle blink in confusion, and it was only a moment later that he noticed that there were flames flickering in the fire pit in front of them, a dirty frying pan carefully balanced on some rocks above the fire. Inside it was…something black and shriveled, through Aisle couldn’t even begin to guess what it was.
The three ponies shared an uncomfortable look at the question, and the mare, Mi-something, spoke up again. “Breakfast…?”
Lex narrowed his eyes. “Do not be coy with me.” The mare bit her lip and looked away while her two companions edged back, as though preparing to run, but none of them spoke up again. After several seconds, Lex looked at Aisle. “Identify that foodstuff.”
Aisle blinked. “Huh?”
“Tell me what they were planning on eating,” repeated Lex.
For a moment Aisle was utterly baffled. Lex had brought him here for that? Why? He could just taste it himself if he wanted to know what they were cooking. But the weight of Lex’s glare made pointing that out seem like a bad idea, and Aisle instead looked around, grabbing a discarded piece of cardboard and wrapping it around the handle of the frying pan, taking it off of the fire. After letting it cool for a minute, he tentatively leaned over and took a bite of the burnt-looking substance inside. The unknown food had barely touched his tongue before he gave a disgusted groan and spit the stuff out, coughing. That was foul!
“Well?” asked Lex impatiently.
Aisle spit a few times, trying to get the horrible taste out of his mouth, before answering. “I think…that it was lettuce, but,” he paused to rub a leg over his mouth, “but it was rotten. Completely bad.”
One of the pegasi stallions spoke up then, his voice miserable. “We thought it’d be a little better if we cooked it.”
Aisle was about to tell them how ridiculous, not to mention dangerous, that was, but Lex spoke up first. “Where did you get that lettuce?” The trio collectively winced, as though the question was painful for them to hear, and again none of them volunteered an answer. But this time Lex wasn’t willing to tolerate their silence, his eyes narrowing. “Answer me.”
“We…we found it,” muttered the mare, looking like she wished she was anywhere else right now.
Aisle’s brow furrowed at that, her answer conflicting with what his years as a grocer in Vanhoover had taught him. “Found it where? The nearest lettuce farm is miles from here.”
“She means we took it with us when we left Vanhoover, after the flooding,” ventured one of the pegasi. “We found it there, when we were leaving.”
Aisle shook his head, even more confused. “But if you had it since then, why did you wait until it went bad to eat it? Even if you had a bunch of food saved up, you should have given the excess provisions to other ponies before it went bad. It’s useless otherw-”
“I’ve heard enough,” announced Lex, turning to leave.
“You…what?” Aisle blinked, glancing at the other ponies and seeing his own surprise mirrored on their faces. What had all that been about?
At least he didn't ask about Cozy...for now. Aisle bit his lip, knowing that the reprieve was most likely temporary. Desperate times call for desperate measures, he decided. If the doctors couldn't help him, maybe there was somepony else who could.
Lex’s thoughts swirled darkly as he marched back towards the field hospital.
He had known, as soon as he’d seen the sheer number of ponies living in this camp, that they had to be receiving food from somewhere. No matter how intimidating Block Party might have been, or however he’d manipulated them into staying close to the wreck that was Vanhoover, there was no way to keep everypony here if there was nothing for them to eat. For this camp to have been here since the floodwaters had receded, they needed to have food coming to them from somewhere, otherwise everypony would either have starved or abandoned the place by now.
Of course, Lex had instantly come up with a theory, but he’d needed Produce Aisle – a Vanhoover resident whose cutie mark, a scale weighing a cabbage, had made it clear that being a grocer was his special talent – to help him confirm it. And he’d done exactly that, not only when he’d pointed out how irrational their story about having “found” that lettuce was, but also when he’d let it slip that there was a lettuce farm several miles from here. That had told Lex everything he needed to know.
The ponies of this camp were raiding nearby farms in order to steal food.
It was the only possible explanation, Lex knew. There was no chance that they were buying food legally, not when the ponies here barely had adequate shelter, let alone bits to make regular purchases. And he only had to look around to know that there was no real effort underway to grow anything here at the camp, doubtlessly due to a lack of adequate materials to make such a venture even remotely feasible. Since the trio of ponies would have said if the ponies from nearby farms were donating the food to them voluntarily, stealing was the only remaining answer.
But that’s not even the worst of it, Lex knew. After all, it would have been one thing if they had been cooking fresh food. But the lettuce they’d been preparing to eat had been rotten, and that painted a much darker picture.
Vanhoover, like all cities, was fundamentally unable to feed itself, Lex knew. Squeezing thousands of ponies into a dense urban area required that food be brought in from elsewhere. But while central Equestria was the breadbasket that fed the entire continent thanks to the rich variety of grains that grew there, the northwestern area immediately north of Vanhoover had a few hundred square miles of arable land tucked between the Frozen North, the western ocean, the Unicorn Mountains to the east, and the marshlands to the south. It was common knowledge that the area was famous for its vegetable farms, most – though not all – of which specialized in subsurface vegetables.
But unlike the grains grown in central Equestria, tubers and similar vegetables didn’t store well. They had a tendency to rot in a matter of days, and even proper preservation could only stretch their shelf-life out to a few weeks at most, requiring a constant cycle of planting and harvesting. That, in turn, meant that the farmers who grew them needed to sell each harvest quickly, turning their crops into profit before they rotted and became worthless. And since this was the region that specialized in those vegetables, that meant shipping them across Equestria, using the railroad lines that blanketed the continent.
But Block Party had shut down the train service after he’d taken over.
Of course, that was only for this city. The rail line that came here from Canterlot took a sharp northeast turn after reaching Vanhoover, hugging the Unicorn Mountains before slipping through the valley that was nestled between their northernmost peaks and the southernmost edge of the Frozen North, continuing all the way to the Crystal Empire before sharply banking south and returning to Canterlot, making a giant loop. It was extremely implausible that Block Party could have stopped the rail service to the entirety of the northwestern region. But then again…he’d never determined the full extent of what Block Party could do.
And if he had somehow made it so that none of the farms in the area could ship their produce out across Equestria…that would explain why those ponies had been eating rotten food. The lack of train service would mean a buildup of produce that couldn’t be moved, and with no other food products being imported, the farmers in the area would be reduced to eating what they grew, leaving the excess vegetables to rot. And if the ponies in the camp had been stealing food for some time, then the farmers would know to protect the edible food first, leaving the starving and weakened camp ponies to go for the less-protected rotten food. Why else would they have brought back food they couldn’t eat, after all? Why not just go and steal fresher food? The only answer had to be that they couldn’t, because there simply wasn’t any that could be easily taken.
And with every harvest they had to let go spoiled and unsold, the entire region would grow that much poorer. While that wouldn’t be as cataclysmic as what had happened to Vanhoover, Lex knew that it could still inflict severe long-term damage to the quality of life of everypony living in the area. A decline in the local economy didn’t have the same immediacy as a plague of ghouls, but it could still cause massive hardship that could take a long time to recover from.
The rest of Equestria won't even notice it happening until it's too late, Lex knew. With how long it takes to ship goods, local retailers are probably only now noticing that their supplies are growing thin. And with how useless the princesses are, they won't be able to do anything to stop the region's downturn. Although his expression didn’t change, Lex felt a shudder go down his spine. If he was right…if Block Party had somehow found a way to interfere with the train service across the area…then he had been planning something much larger than what Lex had initially thought. But the reason for it, beyond simply spreading misery, remained inscrutable.
The emergence of so many new problems was daunting to consider. But for now, Lex knew he had more immediate issues where food was concerned. Word was already spreading that he'd have more food to distribute, he knew, and time was running out...
Lex glared balefully at the field hospital, staring at the patchwork collection of tents as though it were to blame for his current problems. But it wasn’t the makeshift medical center that bothered him so much as how it seemed to perfectly encapsulate the jury-rigged, barely-adequate solutions that he had managed to implement ever since he’d arrived in Vanhoover. No matter that he had been hamstrung from the very beginning by those imbecile princesses, no matter that the situation had turned out to be far more dire than he had been led to believe, no matter that he’d faced deadly opposition at multiple points…because the end result was that the ponies he’d come here to help were only barely receiving adequate care.
He’d done everything right, he knew, but that knowledge brought him no solace. The same way that improper activities undercut any righteousness that their results might generate, righteous activities that didn’t make a difference were ultimately pointless. Correct actions needed to be paired with correct results in order for an undertaking to be brought to a proper resolution. Anything less was a failure.
And if he didn’t figure out how to generate enough food to feed over a thousand ponies in the next, by his estimation, fifteen minutes, then he was going to fail. Again.
A quick glance behind him underscored exactly what was at stake, as a crowd of ponies were already starting to gather. That they didn’t join the line of ponies waiting to enter the field hospital was more than enough to make it clear that they had shown up in response to his declaration that food would be provided. The sight was almost enough to make him regret his hasty announcement, but he pushed that thought away. Whether he’d announced it or not, the issue of feeding everypony here was one that had to be dealt with.
“Hey.”
The familiar voice caused Lex to look over reflexively, and he gave a silent curse as he saw Sonata coming around the bend of the large medical tent. Reading facial expressions had never been something he was good at, but her lack of her usual carefree smile led him to believe that she was still upset about what had happened with Nosey. Just the thought of it was enough to make his jaw clench, but he knew he couldn’t afford to deal with this right now. Not when he had to figure out how to answer much larger problems. “Go find Cloudbank,” he ordered her, his tone clipped. “Tell her that she needs to deliver her sermon immediately.”
But Sonata didn’t move, except to close her eyes and give a small sigh before opening them and stepping closer to him. “Listen, I know that this totes isn’t the right time, b-”
“For once you’re right,” he replied coldly. The way her ears folded back at his reply sent a mild surge of guilt through him, but it was drowned beneath the sense of bitter satisfaction that he felt at the sight. She had hurt him deeply by lashing out at him out of nowhere, and at that moment he had every intention of making her pay dearly for it. “This isn’t the time. So shut your mouth and do what I tell you.”
Although Lex loved Sonata dearly, as he watched her eyes close and her head droop, turning and slowly trudging away from him without another word, he found himself hoping that she felt utterly miserable. Since that was how she’d made him feel before, it seemed only fair now.
Sonata idly kicked a rock as she walked through the camp, not bothering to look where she was going. Although she was supposed to be looking for Cloudbank, she had no idea where the pegasus mare was and so didn’t know where to look, instead wandering randomly. Not that it mattered very much, since she was pretty sure Lex had said that just to make her go away. Which was fine by her, since if that was how he was going to be then she didn’t want to be around him anyway!
The thought came with a sharp burst of anger, but she couldn’t sustain it, and found herself sighing again. I knew that was a bad idea, she lamented to herself, but no, I just HAD to make sure he was mad about what happened before. Like there was any doubt. She kicked another rock, mad at how Lex seemed completely determined to make everybody – everypony, she silently corrected herself – hate him. First it had been everyone in their group, thanks to what he’d done to Garden Gate. Then it had been Nosey, with how he’d treated her after what she’d gone through. And now it was her turn.
And coming up next, everypony here, she thought grimly. She could see it clearly. Lex would pull off some super-impressive magic and make enough food to feed everyone here, and they’d cheer and applaud and call him a hero, and then he’d open his mouth and call them a bunch of dummies for not knowing proper table manners or something and ruin it all. That was why she’d wanted to bury the hammer with him before he did it, so she could at least be his spokespony for that and make sure he didn’t make even more of a mess of things than he already had. But apparently even that was too much for Mister I-Want-To-Do-The-Right-Thing-And-Get-Absolutely-No-Credit-For-It. Sonata had no doubt that by the time Lex was done, he’d have saved everypony here and made himself into Public Enemy Number One.
Except with Aria, Sonata thought bitterly. Her sister had made sure to crawl by a little while ago, smirking as she’d let Sonata know that Lex was going to change her into a pony in one week, and making sure to give her a big, sarcastic thanks for encouraging him to hop to it. Honestly, the two of them are perfect for each other. They’re both big jerks who-
Her thoughts were rudely interrupted as she collided head-first with another pony.
Barely managing to keep from falling over, Sonata rubbed her sore head as she looked at who she’d run into, needing a second to realize that she knew this pony. “Aisle?”
“Sonata, I’m so glad I found you!” The earth stallion practically leapt to his hooves, a panicked look on his face.
“Why?” blinked Sonata, confused. Had something happened?
Glancing left and right, Aisle gestured towards an empty tent a few feet away, one of the run-down ones that the camp ponies were using. “Can we talk privately?”
Sonata folded her ears back. Oh no, is this another love confession? That was the last thing she wanted to deal with right now. She and Lex might have been going through a rough patch…again…but that didn’t mean that she wanted anyone else! “Listen,” she started. “I’m, like, totes flattered, but I really don’t-”
“What are you talking about?” Aisle was barely listening, craning his neck around as he tried to look in every direction at once before dashing over to the tent. “C’mon!”
Wondering if maybe she’d misread the situation, Sonata followed him, albeit at a much more sedate pace. When she’d crossed the threshold, Aisle reached to undo the tent flaps…only to find that there were none, the entire structure being little more than a blanket propped up on some sticks. She couldn’t help but smirk at the way he looked flummoxed for a moment before apparently deciding to let it go, turning to face her with a serious look. “I need you to cast a spell on one of the doctors,” he declared suddenly.
Sonata’s smile fell away in an instant.
“Okay, how about this?” suggested Drafty cheerily. “‘The Night Mare: she’s like Nightmare Moon, except she gives out candy instead of taking it away.’”
Cloudbank’s only response was a tortured groan, not looking up from where she’d collapsed, her head buried in her hooves.
“Yeah, that’s not that great,” admitted Drafty, though her smile diminished only faintly. “I mean, if there isn’t any candy in that food Lex conjured up, you’ll look kind of silly.”
Cloudbank managed to raise her head at that, giving Drafty an evil glare. “You’re enjoying this,” she said accusingly.
Drafty had the grace to look guilty at that. “Sorry, but can you blame me?” she asked, her grin returning. “You’re really cute when you’re flustered.”
“I’m…really?” Cloudbank couldn’t help but blush slightly at the compliment, her doldrums over not knowing what to say momentarily forgotten.
“Really,” nodded Drafty. “Normally you’re all tough and strong, like you’re ready to take on all of Equestria by yourself. So it’s adorable seeing you fizzle out over having to give a speech.”
“Y-yeah, well, it’s not like it’s any old speech,” muttered Cloudbank, but there was no heat in her retort, unable to help the warm glow spreading through her. It felt great to be the apple of Drafty’s eye for once, instead of having to watch her swoon over Lex! “I mean, this is going to be the Night Mare’s big introduction to everypony here, so I really don’t want to mess it up, you know?”
“Aw, I think you’ll be fine.”
“But what if I’m not?” Cloudbank stood up, starting to pace a little as her anxieties began to return. “What if I do something dumb like…like bite my tongue? What if I call her Nightmare Moon by accident? What if…” Her ears folded back as she thought of the worst thing that could possibly happen. “What if everypony laughs at me?”
“Aw, Cloudy.” A moment later Cloudbank found herself wrapped up in Drafty’s embrace, soothing her worries. “No one’s going to laugh at you.”
“They might.”
“No, they won’t.” Drafty released her girlfriend, stepping back just enough so she was looking at her eye-to-eye. “Listen, I know you’re under a lot of pressure, but you’ve handled things a lot worse than giving a speech. If you can kill a giant squid-monster, you can do this.”
“That’s not the same,” muttered Cloudbank, the comparison making her feeling ridiculous.
Drafty immediately picked up on the other mare’s reaction. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Turning around, she rubbed her side against Cloudbank’s affectionately. “What I meant was that I have total confidence in you. You’ve always come through when you had to, and I know you will now.”
“Drafty…” Cloudbank couldn’t help herself, leaning in to press her lips against Drafty’s, and for a moment nothing else mattered. When the kiss ended a moment later, both of them were smiling.
“Feel better now?”
“Yeah,” answered Cloudbank, before giving a teasing grin. “But I still have no idea what to say though, since you’re distracting me and all.”
“Well, excuse me!” Drafty rolled her eyes, but her good mood didn’t diminish even a little. “Seriously though, say what’s in your heart. Say why you started worshiping the Night Mare in the first place. If you tell them what she means to you, then I bet everypony will start thinking about what she could mean to them.”
“What she means to me…” Cloudbank let out a breath as she turned the idea over in her mind. “That might work.”
“I hope so, because you’re pretty much out of time.” Drafty glanced skyward. She wasn’t an expert at telling the time from the angle of the sun, but she was still pretty good at it. “If I’m right, you’ve got maybe five minutes left.”
“Great…” Biting her lip, Cloudbank forced away the nervousness she could feel threatening to return. Stretching out her wings, she shook her head, psyching herself up. “Okay. Showtime.” Giving a powerful flap, she rose up into the air, looking back at Drafty, who was still on the ground. “You coming?”
Drafty waved in reply. “In a moment, I need to take care of one quick thing first.”
“Okay. Wish me luck!” Wanting to get this over with before her nerves failed her, Cloudbank didn’t wait for a reply, flying off towards the field hospital.
“Good luck!” yelled Drafty, waving some more.
When Cloudbank was out of earshot, Drafty lowered her hoof. She felt bad about keeping this a secret from her girlfriend, but she knew Cloudy wouldn’t exactly approve. While she doubted that worshiping a different goddess was a big deal – Cloudy and Cozy hadn’t been butting heads about their respective faiths, after all – the specific thing that she was praying for would probably have led to a fight. But it’ll be okay, if what Nosey said was right. After all, it had worked for Sonata.
Clasping her hooves together, Drafty closed her eyes and spoke in a quiet voice. “Kara. Please hear my prayer. Help me find a way to be in a relationship with Lex and Cloudy at the same time.”
Despite Drafty’s assurances, Cloudbank could feel herself starting to grow nervous again as she touched down.
Her brief flight had been enough to let her get a good look at the crowd, and the sight had filled her stomach with butterflies. There have to be at least five hundred ponies here! And that wasn’t even all of them; against her better judgment, Cloudbank had glanced back at the rest of the camp as she’d moved to land. Sure enough, there were more ponies – a lot more – headed her way. Even as she watched, several other pegasi were coming in to land nearby.
The thought of so many eyes on her was enough to make her stumble as she landed. Barely managing to get her hooves under her, Cloudbank immediately looked towards the massed group of people, expecting them to already be pointing and snickering at the dumb pegasus who couldn’t even land correctly. But to her intense relief, nopony seemed to be looking at her. Instead, all eyes were turned towards Lex, who was regarding the crowd coolly.
Cloudbank felt a sudden burst of jealousy, and for once it had nothing to do with Drafty. I bet this just rolls right off your back, doesn’t it? she thought bitterly. The idea of Lex being nervous about addressing a crowd – being afraid of anything, really – was beyond her ability to imagine. She was almost tempted to tell him that he could give this sermon or speech or whatever it was by himself, but there was no seriousness behind the thought. After everything Lex had done for them, Cloudbank knew that it would be the height of ungratefulness if she couldn’t do this for him. But still, you think he’d have Sonata do it, she complained internally. This is supposed to be what she does, right?
As though he’d heard her thoughts, Lex suddenly looked right at her. Either ignoring or not seeing her wince as he made eye contact, her gestured toward himself, calling her over. Biting her lip, Cloudbank nevertheless trotted towards him, making sure not to glance back at the crowd of ponies as she did so, knowing that there was no way they weren’t looking at her now.
“It’s about time,” snapped Lex as she reached him. “Are you ready?”
Not even slightly. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed in disapproval at her answer. “Make sure you do this properly.”
If you wanted me to do this properly, you should have said something about this before last night! raged Cloudbank inwardly. But her outward response was to give a crisp nod. “Right.”
Lex seemed almost suspicious, scrutinizing her for a long moment as if expecting her to argue with him. Finally, he seemed satisfied, stepping back a few paces. “Good. Then…begin.”
Blinking at the abrupt order to start, Cloudbank felt momentarily flummoxed. Somehow, she’d thought that there’d be some sort of big…thing happening before she began. Like, he’d make some sort of…of pomp and ceremony or something to gather everypony’s attention, and maybe introduce her before she had to start speaking. The idea that he’d just tell her to start talking left her momentarily reeling. Without thinking, Cloudbank’s eyes slid over to the crowd, and the sight made her limbs lock up.
They were all looking at her.
The large gathering of ponies weren’t quiet, all talking to each other and moving idly as they stood around, but all of the ones who were up front were looking directly at her. A few were pointing at her, and just seeing that made her stomach tighten up in knots. She tried to swallow, but all of a sudden her mouth was dry, and she found herself wishing that she was anywhere but here. Fighting that giant monster was nowhere near as bad as this! Slowly, almost unconsciously, she somehow managed to open her mouth. “I...”
“Louder!” hissed Lex. “Get in the air so everypony can see you clearly!”
That was the last thing she wanted, but somehow Cloudbank found herself nodding woodenly, and without thinking about it she flapped her wings, flying a few feet upward. Looking down, she saw that everypony was quieting down, correctly intuiting that something was about to happen. Cloudbank agreed with them, though to her that something was going to be them watching her throw up, or suddenly forget how to fly, or maybe throw up and then forget how to fly, landing right in her own-
Something caught her eye all of a sudden, making her raise her gaze as she looked behind the crowd.
There was one pegasus that was just now arriving, her wings flapping heavily as she flew towards the gathered ponies. With her back to the sun, the latecomer’s features were hard to make out, and it took Cloudbank a moment to realize that it was Drafty. Wonderful, thought Cloudbank dismally. Now I can humiliate myself in front of her too.
But as she watched, Drafty didn’t land, instead circling lazily in the air behind the crowd. Her behavior was strange enough that Cloudbank couldn’t help but frown, glancing down at the assembled ponies for any hint of why Drafty wasn’t touching down. But there was no clue to be found about why her girlfriend was remaining aloft, as the only thing she saw was the gut-wrenching view of everypony looking up at her. In fact, nopony even seemed to have realized that Drafty was there at all, their eyes glued to Cloudbank.
Wondering if Drafty needed something, Cloudbank raised her gaze back towards Drafty…and saw that she had started dancing.
Stunned by the incongruity of what was happening, Cloudbank could only watch as Drafty started to move her back legs as though she were walking, while she raised her forelegs above her head and waved them back and pumped them up and down, body undulating to a rhythm that only she could hear. A moment later she changed her tempo, bringing her fore-hooves together and moving them around in a circle in front of her, bobbing her head back and forth. This new dance also lasted for only a few moments before she changed it up again, spinning her forelegs in a windmill motion and kicking one back leg out, then the other. But it was only when Drafty looked right at her and gave a wide, carefree grin that Cloudbank understood what Drafty was doing.
She was trying to make her laugh. This entire one-mare show, where Drafty was acting like a complete goofball, was an attempt to get her to relax and forget her tension. It was her way of saying “I’m here for you.”
The realization caused a breathy laugh to escape Cloudbank’s mouth, the corners of her lips turning upward of their own accord. Seeing that, Drafty smiled wider, throwing a wink at her before finally moving to land at the back of the crowd. Cloudbank didn’t take her eyes off of her, knowing that Drafty had misunderstood her having laughed just now. It hadn’t been because she’d found the other mare’s impromptu dance routine humorous, but instead had been an expression of surprise, almost overwhelmed by just how much she loved her in that moment. That Drafty would do something like that for her, that she’d make such a gesture…it filled her with a warmth so strong that for a moment Cloudbank thought she was going to cry.
Drafty…thank you. Rubbing a hoof across her eyes, Cloudbank gave the mare she loved one last look before turning her attention to the rest of the crowd, her fear completely gone now.
“Everypony,” she said loudly, causing the last of the crowd’s murmurs and whispers to die away, “thank you for coming. My name is Cloudbank, and if you’re here because you heard there was going to be food, then you came to the right place.” That sent a ripple through the assembled ponies, more than a few looking around as though wondering where this supposed supply of food was going to come from. “Now, I know you’re all hungry, and I promise that this won’t take very long,” continued Cloudbank. “But I wanted to take a minute to tell you all what’s going to happen.” Turning slightly, Cloudbank pointed a hoof at the red-horned unicorn almost directly below her. “By now I’m sure most of you have heard about Lex Legis, the pony who brought us here to help save Vanhoover. Well, in just a second, he’s going to cast a spell that’s going to make enough food for everypony appear right out of thin air!”
This time the crowd’s reaction was more intense, everypony speaking up with reactions that ranged from wonder to skepticism, and it took Cloudbank a moment to quiet them down. “Now, I know that sounds hard to believe, but it’s true. That’s because Lex knows a new kind of magic, one that can do things that wouldn’t have been possible before.” She momentarily wondered if she should get into the different types of magic Lex seemed to know, before deciding against it. She wasn’t too clear on the differences herself, and besides, she wanted to stay on target while the courage Drafty had given her lasted. “And this new magic is a power that he received from the Night Mare.”
Again, she was forced to wait until the crowd had quieted down before she could continue. “One thing I want to make clear is that the Night Mare is not Nightmare Moon! While their names sound the same, the two are completely different. After all,” Drafty’s joke came back to her then, and Cloudbank suddenly found she couldn’t resist, “Nightmare Moon takes candy away, while the Night Mare is going to make sure we’re all fed.” She couldn’t help but offer a self-conscious smile as she made the joke, and to her relief she heard scattered laughter break out in response.
“But seriously though,” she continued, her face turning somber, “the Night Mare is able to give Lex this magic because she’s a goddess. If you don’t know what that is, then imagine a pony that lives in another world – a world far away from here – but is incredibly powerful. More powerful than even the princesses. So powerful that she can send some of that power to anypony that follows her, giving them the ability to use magic even if they’re not a unicorn.” Knowing that her words would be much more powerful if she backed them up with a demonstration, Cloudbank raised her hooves and began to gesture, chanting as she did. A moment later, a shimmering field sprung into being around her, and she heard gasps from the crowd below.
“This,” she waved her hooves to indicate the glittering aura around her, “is a spell the Night Mare granted me. It works like a shield, protecting me from anything that would try to hurt me. I could cast it on someone else too, if I wanted, so that I can protect the ponies I care about.” She couldn’t help but look at Drafty then, sharing a smile with her before continuing, knowing it was time to wrap it up.
“The reason she gives me magic like this, and gives Lex magic to feed everypony here, is because the Night Mare is a protector. She wants the ponies that follow her to become strong so that they can stand up, not just for themselves, but for everypony that can’t. She gives her magic to those ponies who, when they see something bad happening, are willing to step in and fix it, even if it’s dangerous. Following her…”
What the Night Mare means to me…
“Following her means being willing to step up and do what needs to be done, no matter how hard it is, for the sake of somepony else. If you have it in you to do that, each and every time, then the Night Mare will always be there to help you.”
Finishing her speech, Cloudbank paused for a long moment, not entirely sure what to do now. Just landing and walking away seemed kind of anticlimactic, but what else could she do? It wasn’t like there was a stage she could walk off the side of. Glancing over at Drafty again, the other mare thankfully seemed to read her mind, because she suddenly gave a loud cheer. The ponies around her looked at her in surprise, but Drafty didn’t stop, whooping and clopping her hooves on the ground…and a moment later they took up the call, doing the same. From there the cheering spread like wildfire, and a moment later the entire crowd was applauding, stomping their hooves so hard that several of the closer dilapidated tents collapsed. Smiling in relief, Cloudbank slowly sank toward the ground. But before she got there a sudden burst of inspiration filled her, and she couldn’t resist saying one last thing.
“Thank you all so much! And now,” she swept a hoof back, “take it away, Lex!”
Garden Gate nodded, though Turbo was close enough to her that he didn’t miss how she slowed down slightly as she did, as though trying to walk and nod simultaneously was a strain. “Really, I’m fine. You don’t have to keep asking me that.”
Trying not to wince at how lifeless her voice sounded, Turbo replied a little too quickly. “I know, I just...everypony here would understand if you wanted us to give you some space.” Turbo glanced around, receiving immediate nods from the rest of the group before he turned back to Garden, his face radiating earnestness. “For that matter, it wouldn’t be any big deal if you wanted to go back and rest. I’ll personally guarantee that we’ll be able to bring you some provisions before Piggy eats them all.” That earned a round of chuckles, all of which went unchallenged since the fat little earth stallion had run ahead of them a few minutes ago, worrying that their slow pace would mean they’d miss out on getting any food. Even Granola Bar wasn’t able to suppress a smirk, giving a genial roll of the eyes when Turbo glanced at her.
But Garden didn’t smile; if anything she seemed even less animated than she had a second ago, looking at the ground as she shook her head. “I’d rather go with you all.”
Turbo was about to try and persuade her that she didn’t need to do that – just the thought of her being around so many strangers in her weakened state, the same strangers who had kept them isolated in that deathtrap that Vanhoover had become, was enough to put him on edge – but the words caught in his throat as his eyes lingered on Granola Bar, remembering again what she’d told him last night.
“While we were in Vanhoover, Fencer was your secret weapon. Now that we’re out, Garden Gate needs you to be hers.”
Her message had been extremely easy to decipher; so much so that Turbo had felt embarrassed that he hadn’t put it together himself; they’d all seen Garden break down right before Lex had cursed her, after all. She’d flat-out said how horrible she felt about all of the things she’d done. But I didn’t hear it, he chastised himself ruefully, before correcting himself an instant later. No, I didn’t WANT to hear it. It had been easier to focus on what Lex had done to her than to deal with the mare he’d admired so much having suddenly gone to pieces. Even now, he’d been falling back into old habits, worrying about her physical safety instead of what would make her feel better.
Now if only he knew what would make her feel better!
He was certain she’d had nightmares after falling back asleep last night – he’d seen her toss and turn intermittently throughout the night, and a few times he’d heard what sounded like pained groans coming from her – but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask her about them when morning had rolled around. What was he supposed to say? “So, what horrors did you dream about last night?” At the time he’d thought it was better to let it go; she had to have nightmares while she was asleep, so it was better, he’d reasoned, not to make her think about them while she was awake too. And besides, she hadn’t mentioned them once so far. Surely she’d have said something if she wanted to talk about them, right? He’d thought so before, but now – seeing her downcast eyes and miserable expression – he felt uncertain that he’d made the right call.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter either way, he thought bitterly as they reached the edge of the crowd. However you slice it, I’m not helping her. He knew he was being too hard on himself, that it was beyond unrealistic to expect to completely cheer her up less than an hour after waking up, but he couldn’t help it. The idea she was in pain and that it was his job to help her had left him anxious to take action, even though he had no idea what to do.
“You think they’ll have any pie?” Funshine’s voice interrupted Turbo’s recrimination, making him blink as he looked over at the other stallion.
“Pie?” Slip ‘n’ Slide’s face reflected the mild incredulity in his voice as he looked at his brother. “Who are you supposed to be? Piggy?”
Funshine shrugged. “I’m just saying, if there’s going to be enough food to feed this many ponies, it’d be great if they had some pie as part of it.”
“We were eating wet cardboard at one point,” shot back Slip, looking as though he couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. “As long as what they serve is, you know, actual food, who cares if there’s any pie?”
“I’d love a nice salad, myself,” chimed in Granola Bar.
Slip’s eyebrows went up, his face now showing open disbelief at what he was hearing. “Are you kidding me?”
“Yeah,” nodded Funshine. “Of all the foods you could have after all this time, you ask for a salad?”
Slip ‘n’ Slide put a hoof to his face, giving a pained groan.
“What about you, Turbo?” Granola Bar was smiling slightly as she looked at him. “What are you hoping for?”
“Um…” Turbo glanced at Garden again, barely paying attention. “Anything’s fine, I guess.”
“Thank you!” exclaimed Slip.
“I, um…I’d like a hayburger,” spoke up Hopscotch from her usual place in the back of the group. “One with lettuce, and pickles, and ketchup, but no onions.”
“If they have any onions, I’ll take them,” smiled Granola Bar, before looking past Turbo. “Garden, what about you?”
“….huh?” Garden’s ears flipped up, a surprised look crossing her face, clearly not having expected to be asked. It was the first time all morning Turbo had seen her not looking completely depressed…and then he suddenly understood why Granola was asking her.
“M-macaroni!” he blurted suddenly, causing all of the nearby ponies to look at him. Fighting down a blush, he glanced around self-consciously. “My mom used to make macaroni and cheese for dinner when I was a kid. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. She used to say that I’d get macaroni for a cutie mark because of how much I loved it.” He let that hang in the air for a minute before turning to Garden. “Your turn now.”
“I…I don’t know,” she muttered, looking back down.
“C’mon,” pressed Turbo. “We said what ours was, now it’s your turn.”
“I guess…” Garden paused then, pursing her lips and staying silent for a long moment before speaking again. “I guess I’d like it if they had rolls.”
“Rolls?” asked Funshine.
Garden nodded. “My dad…he would bake these rolls whenever there was a special occasion. He’d always glaze the bread so that it tasted like honey, and when you put butter in the middle of them…it was the best thing ever.” She let out a shaky breath, and blinked her eyes a few times, but the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. The sight made Turbo’s heart soar, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
“Hey, look at that!” yelled Hopscotch, causing everypony to look back at her. Their heads all swung back around as they saw that she was pointing towards the front of the crowd, where a pegasus mare – Turbo’s brow furrowed as he realized that she was one of the ones from Lex’s group – was hovering, looking over them with a nervous expression on her face. As she opened her mouth, Turbo found himself looking away, glancing back at Garden again. If they have even one roll, I swear I’ll get it for you, he vowed silently.
Slightly ahead of him, Slip ‘n’ Slide was pouting as the white-and-pink pegasus mare began talking. “...peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off…”
“No way!” exclaimed Sonata. “Like, absolutely positively no way nuh-uh not gonna happen!”
“Look, this isn’t just for Cozy’s sake!” insisted Aisle. He’d spent the last few minutes telling Sonata what had happened with Cozy, and why he needed her help now. So far she was adamantly opposed to the idea, but Aisle wasn’t ready to quit yet. “I’m telling you this for Lex’s own good too!”
Sonata frowned at that, confusion and skepticism mixing on her face. “How is having me break one of Lex’s, like, most important rules, and doing it to make someone else lie to him, for his own good?”
“Because if he punishes Cozy now, it will make everypony hate him!” Aisle’s look was pleading, though even he wasn’t sure if it was for her to understand or simply to agree. “Think about it. If he finds out that Cozy didn’t help treat those sick and injured ponies, he’ll definitely hold that against her. Now imagine that he decides that she needs to be punished for…I don’t even know what he’d call it.” He waved a hoof in the air, too anxious to keep still. “Dereliction of duty or something. Can you imagine how that will make him look?” He paused for a moment to let that sink in. “A grieving widow, her husband’s body barely cold, and Lex goes ahead and uses his magic to make her life even more miserable just because she wouldn’t follow his orders.”
Suddenly uncomfortable, Sonata shifted on her hooves. “That’s…”
Aisle pressed ahead. “You can’t tell me that’s not something he’d do. Not after what happened with Garden Gate.”
Now it was Sonata’s turn to throw her hooves into the air, very nearly knocking down the tent they were in. “Garden Gate killed a guy! Why does everyone always forget that part?! It’s not like Lex just decided, ‘hey, I don’t like that girl’s face. I’m totes gonna curse her for it,’ you know!”
“She said she was sorry!”
“So that’s all it takes?! You just say sorry, and no matter what awful things you’ve done you’ll totes be forgiven right then and there?! Well gee, I wish me and my sisters had known that before we got tossed into that awful dimension for, like, a gazillion years!”
“That’s what’s important!” yelled Aisle, his voice raising as he reached his breaking point. “That’s what-” He stopped suddenly, sitting back and burying his face in his fore-hooves, and Sonata heard him make a noise that sounded distinctly like a sob.
It was enough to break her out of her anger, ears folding back in guilt. “…listen, I wasn’t trying to…I didn’t mean that Cozy deserves whatever happens to her, I just…it’s not fair that everypony is treating Lex this way. Not after everything he’s done.”
Part of her wondered why she was sticking up for him after what a jerk he’d been, but she didn’t have a chance to figure it out before Aisle spoke up again, lowering his hooves from his face. “I know,” he said, both his face and his voice filled with resignation and despair, as though he just wanted this to be over. “But Sonata…that is what’s going to happen. We both know that Lex will curse Cozy, and everypony will hate him for it.” He took a step closer to her. “We have to be the ones who stop it. You and me. We have to save both of them from themselves. Right now we’re the only ones who can.”
Sonata looked down at that, biting her lip. Maybe…maybe just once would be okay. I mean, Lex said to use my powers if there was ever an emergency, and I guess this is an emergency. Besides, she’d already cut a deal with Aria, hadn’t she? Lex was going to go ahead and make her into a pony in a couple of days, and then Aria would keep up her end of the bargain and enchant ponies to like Lex anyway. So really…this was just keeping everything running smoothly until then. Someday I’ll tell him about this and we’ll laugh, she thought, trying desperately to make herself believe it. Licking her suddenly-dry lips, Sonata lifted her head to look at Aisle.
Outwardly, Lex’s expression didn’t change as Cloudbank ended her sermon, looking up at her for a moment in stony consideration. He had no idea if she’d done a good job or not, but the crowd’s reaction strongly suggested that she had. Although he didn’t care for how she’d made it sound as though the totality of his magic was the product of divine munificence, the continued cheering and stomping of hooves made it clear that the assembled ponies didn’t dislike what they’d been told about the Night Mare. And that was the entire point of this, he grudgingly admitted to himself, letting his eyes fall to the barbed wire wrapped around his left fore-hoof.
His musings were cut short as Severance rose from his back of its own accord, starting to float toward Cloudbank, who had just touched down. Frowning at the weapon’s unexpected liveliness, Lex grasped it in his telekinesis, its movement immediately coming to a halt as his purple aura engulfed it. “What are you doing?” he demanded, voice thick with suspicion. Severance was typically content to follow the instructions he gave it, which made its actions now worrying. If it thinks that Cloudbank did a poor job of representing the Night Mare and wants to punish her for it…
But a moment came Severance’s reply, stating that it only wanted to speak to her. But the answer mollified Lex only slightly. “About what?”
“Um, is everything okay?” piped up Cloudbank, glancing between Lex and Severance with some trepidation. It was only partly due to her dislike of the weapon; a glance behind her showed that the crowd’s enthusiasm was dying down, and more and more eyes were turning towards Lex in anticipation of being fed.
Releasing Severance with a snort as it made its intentions clear, Lex let the weapon continue to lazily float over to her. “Severance is going to work with you on establishing the formal tenets of the Night Mare’s dogma.”
Cloudbank blinked at that, her brow furrowing. “Wait…hold on-”
But Lex was already turning away from her, having noticed that the crowd was focusing their attention on him. “Before you begin promulgating whatever it teaches you, bring it to me for review and editi-” He paused as the barbed wire around his hoof suddenly shifted, causing him to look at it sharply. It hadn’t drawn blood this time, but it had moved in a way that caused the sharp edges to press against his skin dangerously. Narrowing his eyes, Lex continued speaking. “For review and editing.”
The wire tightened, its points pressing into his flesh painfully…but still not enough to draw blood. Considering what that meant, Lex chose his next words carefully, speaking in a low voice that barely made it to Cloudbank’s ears. “The doctrinal canon that she utilized on Everglow will likely require amending in order to find greater acceptance here.”
“Huh?” Cloudbank was only half-listening, the bulk of her attention focused on Severance as it moved closer to her than she was comfortable with before stopping, apparently waiting for her to grasp it. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” murmured Lex distractedly, still looking at his hoof as the threatening pain slowly receded, the barbed wire shifting almost imperceptibly so that it was no longer digging into his skin. Apparently the goddess agreed with his reasoning, though Lex had the distinct impression that her approval had only been narrowly given; any alterations that he made to whatever Severance taught Cloudbank would likely be scrutinized closely. With a sigh, Lex pushed this latest irritation from his mind. He couldn’t afford to worry about that right now, not when he had a much more immediate problem to attend to.
It was time to make good on his promise to feed everypony.
Turning his back to the crowd, Lex faced north, looking over the vast empty plain that spread out in front of him. Of all the logistical problems that he’d faced in the last hour as he’d tried to come up with a plan to make sufficient food for everyone, having enough space in which to conjure the vast quantities of edible materials which would be required to feed the entirety of the camp was the only thing that hadn’t been an issue. But that knowledge was cold comfort in light of the hasty, uncertain course of action that he’d ultimately decided upon. In theory this will work, he was certain. But theory had, when put into practice, let him down far too many times to be reassuring now.
Pushing the last of his doubts away, Lex began to cast…but not the spell that would let him create food and water. Rather, this was a spell that enhanced physical hardiness, pushing its energy throughout the magical channels in the caster’s body and from there radiating out to the surrounding muscles and organs, augmenting them and increasing the strain that the caster’s body could handle. It was the same spell that the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale had used, keeping itself active and fighting in spite of the incredible damage Lex had dealt to it.
Attempting to recreate the spell during the ocean voyage to Vanhoover had been little more than a pastime, and hadn’t resulted in anything useable. Despite having seen that spell even before he’d encountered that dragon – it was, like Aria’s fireball, popular among the wizards and sorcerers of Everglow – simply observing a particular magical effect wasn’t enough for Lex to be able to recreate it from scratch later on. It hadn’t been until he’d utilized that scroll during his fight with Lirtkra that he’d personally experienced the underlying principles that went along with that particular form of magic. It was only then, feeling the energy coursing through him and empowering his physical self, that he’d understood the intricacies involved with that form of spellwork.
Once the remaining monsters from the sea had been dealt with, Lex had finally managed to find enough time to put that knowledge into practice. Although he’d spent the first two days putting the bulk of his attention to the issue of curing the ponies that had been infected by that aboleth, devoting his attention to multiple projects simultaneously had been a trick he’d mastered a long time ago. When he’d finally figured out how to cure them, then he’d been free to spend the few days necessary to engage in active design, and by the time he’d restored the last of the afflicted ponies he’d had a finished spell, prepared in his mind and ready for practical testing. Of course, that had been disrupted by the arrival of Garden Gate and her group, to say nothing of the subsequent developments that had arisen as a result. But now it would be put to the test…and then some.
As he cast the spell, Lex drew ambient energy from the surrounding area, pulling it in through his body’s magical pathways and letting it augment the spell…even as the spell directed that energy back along those same pathways. He could feel himself convulse as the power whirled inside of him, looping upon itself recursively, and the sensation was sickening. It was as though someone had struck a tuning fork and then touched it to his teeth, except throughout his entire body. But he forced himself to finish chanting, made himself complete the last gestures, directing all of his thoughts towards making the spell work the way he’d theorized it should. Because if it didn’t, if his last-minute calculations proved to be wrong, then the energy would likely contort and fold back on itself while trying to move through him, likely shredding him from the insi-
And then Lex felt it all fall into place.
The sudden cessation of discomfort, and the ensuing rush of vigor, was enough that for a moment he felt almost lightheaded. But that paled before the sense of elation that filled his mind a moment later as he realized that he’d done it. It worked! It actually worked! He couldn’t help the smile that split his face then, glad that he’d turned his back on everypony else so they wouldn’t see him grinning like an idiot, feeling almost drunk on the sense of accomplishment.
With an eagerness like that of a foal on Hearth’s Warming Eve, Lex began to cast the spell to create food and water. The spell was an incredibly complex one, requiring ten long minutes to cast, but Lex rattled the words and gestures off easily, barely having to think about them. Instead, he focused on pulling in energy from the surrounding environment again, seeking to augment the spell…
The rush of energy that he pulled into himself was so great that he almost lost control of the spell. The dizzying feeling of massive quantities of power flowing through him was heady, and he only barely remembered to activate his circlet, letting its stored energy substitute for that of the spell’s original quantity so that he’d be able to cast it again, just in case this wasn’t enough. After all, he had no idea how much food the spell could create with such a massive amount of energy channeled through it, so it was still better to be safe than sorry.
Finally, as Lex reached the end of the spell, he held out a hoof before him…and the results were astounding.
Several long tables had appeared where there had been nothing before, each of them having enough chairs to seat scores of ponies. The pristine tablecloths were almost entirely hidden beneath the sheer volume of food that sat atop them. Even a casual glance showed what had to have been dozens upon dozens upon dozens of different dishes, ranging from neatly-sliced loaves of bread set alongside steaming pots of soup to massive platters of diced fruits and simmering trays of baked vegetables. Platters of baked pasta sat alongside sandwiches filled with hay, sprouts, potatoes, and so much more. Cakes and pastries that were covered with confections of every color were to be found with abandon. Spices and sauces were liberally strewn between the various dishes. Ice buckets of monstrous size contained a small army of bottled beverages. And each place had a plate, bowl, glass, and utensils set out in front of them, just waiting to be put to use.
Trying to bite back a roar of triumph, Lex looked around, estimating how many ponies could eat their fill at the feast he’d conjured…and felt his spirits dim only slightly as he estimated that there was enough food for five hundred ponies. No problem! he laughed to himself. I’ll just cast it again! Although his body-enhancing spell was about to run out, he’d prepared it a second time – practical testing often required multiple castings, after all – and this time poured more energy into it, straining to substitute enough energy to retain this second spell even while he enhanced it.
The result left his blood pounding in his ears, again feeling as though he’d touched a lightning bolt and bent it to his will. Barely hearing the jubilant shouting of the crowd from behind him, Lex started to cast the spell to make food and water a second time. He could see ponies already streaming towards the food, some racing ahead of their fellows while others helped nearby ponies to a chair, and the sight heightened his sense of triumph. After this, everypony would know who deserved to govern them, and it wouldn’t be those useless princesses!
In the ten minutes that it took him to cast the spell again, the mass of ponies managed to get to fill the available seats and settle down, starting to figure out that there weren’t enough for all of them. They had just started to look towards Lex when he finished the second casting, making a second set of food-laden tables appear. Another huge cheer went up from the assembled ponies as they realized that there was more, and those that hadn’t gotten a seat already swarmed towards the new set of tables.
Allowing himself a moment to stop and appreciate what he’d accomplished, Lex silently calculated that one more casting should be enough to feed everypony, reaching up to wipe the sweat from his brow. Panting – why was he panting? No, it didn’t matter – he cast the personal augmentation spell again, and this time didn’t bother to try and keep it retained; he’d performed all the field testing he’d needed, and it had been a success beyond his wildest dreams! When was the last time things went so well? he wondered to himself as he started to cast the spell to create food again…only to realize that he’d expended too much of the sacerdotal thaumaturgy that the Night Mare had given him. There was some left, but not enough to cast that particular spell again.
But no matter, he decided flippantly. If I pour even more energy into the spell, I should be able to make up the difference. He could do that now, he knew. With this much power, he could do almost anything. Smirking, Lex started to cast the spell again, drawing in as much power as he could possibly gather…
…and felt agony explode through him.
In an instant, the power that he’d commanded rebelled against his control, ripping through his body with an agony so great he could barely process it. It was as though his blood had been transmuted into razor blades, tearing him apart as they circulated through him in a mass of anguish. Through it, he somehow dimly comprehended that if he let the spell go, the pain would come to an end. All he had to do was stop casting. It would be so easy…most of the ponies had enough food now, after all. Only a few hundred would go hungry, at the very most. All he had to do was let the spell go.
All he had to do was let those remaining ponies down…
The next ten minutes were the most painful of Lex Legis’s life.
Lex felt himself being carried, and tried to thrash reflexively, confused. But he couldn’t seem to move, and the realization frightened him. He had t-
“…-ried a healing sp-…”
The voice was familiar, and he tried to turn his head to see who was there. But for some reason his eyes weren’t working, or…or was it dark outside? But why wa-
“…-ously hurt his cha-…”
An unfamiliar voice this time, one that sounded tense, almost angry. He wanted to know what was going on, and tried to form words, but the attempt made his throat rasp like-
“I’m going to stay with him.”
He felt something – someone – press against him, and for some reason the sensation was soothing. Dimly, he registered that he knew who this was, and that they were safe, but for some reason he couldn’t recall their identity. One of his parents? No…no, that wasn’t right. Someone else. But who…?
Lex slowly opened his eyes, his consciousness hazy in a way that he hadn’t experienced since before his dreams had all turned into nightmares. For a moment he just laid there, unable to help but process the nostalgic sensation of being semi-lucid. Slowly, it occurred to him that he should try to figure out where he was and what was going on, and his thoughts started to organize themselves.
Emotional impressions came back first. He remembered feeling tense about something. Then determined. And then…triumphant. Exultant. More so than he had in a while, but then something had happened, and it had all turned into…
Pain.
Squeezing his eyes shut at the memory, he recalled the incredible agony he’d been in, only to belatedly comprehend that it wasn’t all a memory…that he was still in discomfort even now, a dull ache that spread throughout his entire body, as though every part of him was one giant bruise. It was nowhere near the pain he’d been in before, but it was still enough to make him wonder what was going on, hastening his return to full awareness.
Opening his eyes again, he looked up at a dark ceiling made out of some sort of fabric, and a moment later realized that there was a low level of ambient illumination around him with no apparent source, as though someone had shined a bright light somewhere nearby and then put some sort of barely-translucent covering over it. He felt warm, and it took him a moment to realize that there was a blanket over him, along with something even warmer pressed against his left side. There were voices too, but they were all distant and overlapping, as though there were a crowd gathering somewhere barely within earshot. He could barely hear them at all over the sound of breathing next to him-
Lex’s eyes widened as the realization that someone else was there jolted him to full awareness. He was in a tent right now, one that was dimly lit by the sunlight streaming through the edges of the front flap. The distant voices were almost certainly those of the ponies in the camp, the ponies that he’d been intent on feeding when he’d injured himself. And the person huddled against his side was…
Sonata.
For a moment he couldn’t do anything but look at her, his eyes sweeping over her as she lay there, apparently asleep. For some reason the sight reminded him of their first night together. Not when they’d consummated their love, but the first night they’d ever lay down to sleep next to each other. It was in White Tail Woods, he recalled, just after we’d disembarked from the train taking us to Tall Tale. He ran the dates in his mind, and was shocked to discover that had been well under a month ago. Somehow it seemed like a lot longer.
Pushing the memories aside, he tried to sit up – intent on getting out of the bedroll where they were laying without disturbing her – but he’d barely started to rise when agony exploded through him, causing him to abort the effort immediately. Even then, the pain didn’t dissipate so much as recede back to tolerable levels, causing him to let out a slow breath as he considered what to do. He needed information. More than that, he needed to give orders for what everypony needed to be doing next, and neither of those things would be accomplished by lying there.
He briefly considered changing into shadow-form to move around, certain that becoming incorporeal would minimize – perhaps even negate – the pain he felt, but decided against it. The camp ponies hadn’t seen him in that form yet, and he had no doubt that it would cause a panic if they did now. Instead, he opted for the simpler solution, turning and nuzzling his girlfriend. “Sonata. Wake up.” Even speaking hurt, his throat protesting being put to use, but he ignored it, repeating himself when Sonata didn’t respond.
It took several attempts to rouse her, but finally she began to stir, stretching and rubbing her eyes with one hoof blearily. “Mmm…morning Lex,” she yawned. A moment later she realized what she was saying and sat bolt upright. “Lex! You’re okay!”
“How long have-”
But she wasn’t listening, immediately rolling away from him and making a rush for the tent flap. “Hey!” she yelled. “He’s awake! Lex is awake! Somepony get the doctors back here again!”
Lex frowned, trying to lift his head as she made to leave. “Sonata, wait.” But before he’d finished speaking she was outside, her voice receding as she continued to call for a doctor, leaving him sighing in mild frustration as he laid his head back down. But it doesn’t matter, he realized. She’ll bring a doctor back here and they’ll be able to answer my questions.
But Sonata’s yelling was still faintly audible when the tent flap opened mere seconds after she’d departed. Squinting against the sudden influx of sunlight, he made out the forms of two ponies entering, pegasi by the look of them. As the second one came in, letting the flap fall, he recognized Thermal Draft and Cloudbank. Lex’s eyes lingered on the latter mare, noticing that she was carrying Severance across her back, apparently unconcerned with the weapon’s closeness now.
“Hey Lex,” ventured Drafty softly, giving him a small smile. “How are you feeling?”
“You scared us all pretty badly.” Cloudbank didn’t share Drafty’s smile, her features tense. “The d-”
“How much time has passed?” interrupted Lex, impatient for answers. He could clearly remember casting that last spell now, forcing it to work despite the incredible pain it had put him through, and that was where his memory ended. Now he needed to figure out how much time he’d lost and adjust his plans accordingly.
“It’s been about an hour since you made that last batch of food,” answered Drafty.
“You collapsed right after you finished casting that last spell,” chimed in Cloudbank. “I was right there, and I rushed you to the doctors’ tent immediately. We thought maybe you were just exhausted or something, because you weren’t in there very long before they moved you here, but then we heard what the doctors told Sonata...” She trailed off at that for a moment before continuing. “Lex, what happened to you?”
“I needed to amplify the magic I was using in order to create enough food for everypony,” answered Lex with a sigh. It didn’t even occur to him to wonder why he was explaining himself to them. “The process worked, but when I attempted to increase the power output at the end it went awry.”
“That’s roughly what we figured,” nodded Drafty, making Lex blink in surprise. She clearly noticed, because she started to explain. “I’m no unicorn,” she shrugged, still smiling at him, “but seeing you make that much food out of nowhere, only to collapse right after you did, made it pretty easy to put two and two together. That,” she added, her voice softening, “and doing something as noble as hurting yourself to help everypony else is exactly like you.”
Lex didn’t have time to react to the compliment before Cloudbank spoke up again. “‘Noble’ isn’t the word for it!” The tension in her voice was impossible to miss, but he wasn’t sure if it was from anger or fear or something else altogether. “Lex, the doctors said that you went into some kind of shock! They were talking about possible spontaneous organ failure! You could have died!” She stomped a hoof. “I tried to use a healing spell on you, and it didn’t do a thing! Sonata was beside herself!”
“From what I’ve observed, elementary healing magic doesn’t register even a high degree of physical strain as damage, and so doesn-”
“That’s not the point!” Cloudbank flared her wings then, the ends pressing against each side of the small tent. She looked ready to say more, but Drafty leaned in and whispered in her ear, though not so quietly that Lex couldn’t overhear her telling the other mare that maybe yelling at someone who was injured wasn’t the best idea. Cloudbank apparently agreed, since she folded her wings back in, albeit with a scowl. “Look,” she started again. “I’m going to tell you what the doctors told Sonata. Whatever you did to yourself, you need to make sure you don’t do it again.”
“I don’t intend to,” replied Lex bluntly.
Both mares blinked at that, surprised by his quick acquiescence. “Wait, seriously?” blurted Drafty.
When Lex nodded, the two shared a glance before turning their eyes back to him. “You say that now,” began Cloudbank, “but what happens tomorrow when everypony starts to get hungry again?”
“If it comes to that, then I’ll use that same magic again to create more food for everypony.”
“You just said-”
“Now that I have a better understanding of the threshold to which I can set up a system of reciprocal enhancements, I should be able to avoid the backlash that happened before,” explained Lex. “Hence, I shouldn’t suffer anymore injuries of this magnitude as a result.” Neither mare seemed very pleased with his explanation, however, with Drafty’s smile fading and Cloudbank starting to glower at him balefully, her mouth opening. But before either could get a word out, Lex held up a hoof to forestall them, though doing so was an effort. “However, my creating food with magic isn’t a long-term solution for the situation here. That will require something else.”
His mind was already racing as he spoke. Vanhoover’s current troubles were economic in nature, he knew. With the remaining population rendered destitute by the disasters they’d suffered, they had no way of engaging with the local economy, which in turn had caused the supply of food and other necessities to plummet and, correspondingly, the demand for them to skyrocket. The only way to put the city back on the path to prosperity was to come up with a corresponding economic solution whereby the supply of necessities was restored. But in order to do that, a large influx of capital would be required, allowing the camp ponies to purchase food from nearby farms rather than stealing it.
But Lex was fully aware that he and Sonata had expended what funding they had back in Tall Tale. Without any cash on hoof, a new revenue source would be required, one that could provide a large quantity of bits immediately. And Lex could only think of one possible method by which such a sum could be quickly acquired. But I’m not going to be able to do it myself, he realized bitterly. Even if I changed into a shadow, I can’t use telekinesis effectively when I’m this injured. Whether he was incorporeal or not, that ability was proportional to physical strength, and right now he had almost none. Which meant that, just like when those aquatic monsters attacked, he was going to have to rely on somepony else to get the job done.
Cursing internally as he realized there was no other solution, Lex looked at Cloudbank. “I want you to find a group of ponies who are willing to go back into Vanhoover.”
Both mares’ eyebrows shot up. “Wait, what now?” asked Drafty, looking like she couldn’t believe her ears.
Cloudbank looked no less baffled. “Back into…are you kidding me?! Why?!”
“To acquire the funds we need,” answered Lex. “There should be more than enough in the city’s banks.”
Cozy threw the syringe against the sheet that served as one of the field hospital’s interior walls, trying not to burst into tears as she watched it hit the fabric and fall to the ground.
That was the fourth time she’d tried to take her own life. The fourth time she’d taken the syringe in her mouth, closed her eyes, held her tongue against the injector, and put the end of the needle against her skin. The fourth time that her courage had failed her at the last moment, causing her to fling the drug-filled needle away in a fit of guilt and shame. And now it was the fourth time that she curled up and pressed a hoof against her mouth, biting back sobs as she tried to figure out what to do.
Ever since Nosey had let it slip that those who worshiped a god in life went to that god’s side after death, Cozy hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Although she knew that the other mare had been trying to comfort her by telling her that Pillow’s death was only a temporary parting and not a permanent goodbye, that hadn’t been how Cozy had taken it. To her, Nosey’s words were a course of action that could be – that needed to be – undertaken with all possible haste. All I have to do is die, and we can be together again! The thought had sent a rush of desperate hope through her, her heart aching at the thought of being reunited with her beloved.
But that left her with the uncomfortable question of how to end her own life. Her first option had been to pray, the first time she’d prayed since she’d asked Lashtada to bring Pillow back. But after an hour of silently begging Lashtada for death, praying that the goddess would make her lie down and go to sleep and never wake up, it had become obvious that this was another prayer that would go unanswered. She had even tried praying for a spell that would let her kill herself, but no such magic had been placed into her mind.
Resisting the urge to blaspheme Lashtada’s name at that point had been difficult – why was her goddess so intent on keeping her and Pillow apart?! – but Cozy had forced herself to refrain, worried that if she lost Lashtada’s favor then she wouldn’t allow her into the “afterlife” where Pillow was now. Instead, she’d turned her thoughts towards other ways that she might end her life. Slipping away from the camp and going back to Vanhoover was the most obvious solution. The city was still filled with ghouls that would have been more than happy to kill her, she knew. But she couldn’t bring herself to seriously consider doing that; the thought of being devoured alive, of what it would feel like to be torn apart and eaten by those monsters, was too horrifying to contemplate. She wanted to die, but she didn’t want to suffer in doing so.
Unfortunately, that left extremely few options open to her. The camp didn’t have any tall buildings that she could jump off of, and although Cozy knew that there was a river nearby, the sheer number of ponies using it as a source of water meant that somepony would likely see her – and try and stop her – if she tried to drown herself. She’d heard snatches of conversation about somepony having hanged themselves in the nearby train station, but apparently Lex had sealed the building as a result, and there was no other structure nearby that was sturdy enough to support a noose.
The irony of her current line of thinking hadn’t been lost on her; she and her friends had all spent the last several weeks struggling to stay alive while they were trapped in Vanhoover, and now that they were out all she could think about was dying. But that thought had led her to consider if maybe, just maybe, one of her friends would help her die. That was nonsense, of course, but it had made her think of each of her friends in turn, reminding her of how Aisle had just recently begged her to help the doctors in order to avoid Lex’s wrath…and then the obvious solution had presented itself to her.
The doctors…
Sneaking into the medical field hospital hadn’t been that hard. The building was just a few tents that had been hastily sewn together; finding a seam that hadn’t been completely stitched had been easy enough, at which point she’d worked at the tear until it had been wide enough for her to slip inside. Her heart had fluttered nervously as she’d picked her way through the interior, worried that somepony would find her. Although she knew it was ridiculous, she felt as though her intentions were written all over her face, and that anyone who so much as glimpsed her would know what she was planning.
Fortunately, avoiding the doctors had been easier than she’d expected. Although the field hospital was dimly lit – the only light seemed to be a few lanterns, whose illumination was gently diffused by the hanging sheets that filled the interior – the lack of any real walls meant that it was easy to hear anypony approaching her, letting her duck into an alcove or backtrack hurriedly. After a few minutes of searching blindly, she’d managed to find a small space filled with medical equipment: cotton balls, tongue depressors, band-aids, ointments, and more. But what had caught her eye were the small bottles of liquid and the various syringes.
Unfortunately, it was at that point that the flaw in her plan had manifested. Looking over the bottles had failed to turn up any that were labeled “painless death.” Instead they had unpronounceable names like “ziconotide” or “buprenorphine hydrochloride,” none of which meant anything to Cozy. She had stared at them for what felt like a short eternity before the sound of approaching hooves had jolted her into action, jabbing a syringe into a bottle at random and hurriedly filling it before galloping away, concealing herself in an unused exam area. That was where she had been ever since, trying to find the courage to do what needed to be done, and – so far – failing every time.
I’ll do it this time, she assured herself as she climbed to her hooves, going over to the fallen syringe. Just pick it up and use it before I can think. No delays. Letting out a shaky breath, she dipped her head down and carefully picked it up in her mouth, dipping her head down so that the needle was pointed at her foreleg. Just press it, she silently cajoled herself. Do it right now, and then I’ll get to see Pillow again.
But as she felt the end of the needle touch her skin a sudden burst of terror shot through her, just as it had during her previous attempts, bringing with it a surge of doubts. Would whatever was in the syringe actually kill her? Or would it do something horrible while leaving her alive? What about her original plan, of bringing Pillow’s body back to Princess Cadance and asking if she could resurrect him? Why wasn’t she still following that plan? For that matter, was Nosey even right about this entire “afterlife” thing? Cozy had attended numerous sermons that Princess Cadance had given, and she’d never once mentioned anything about that. So maybe…maybe Nosey had bad information, or had misunderstood something. Maybe the entire idea of being reborn after you died was wrong. Maybe she should wait just a little bit longer, at least until she could double-check what drug she was about to use…
Cozy hurled the syringe away from her for the fifth time, tears spilling down her cheeks as she did. Coward. I’m such a coward. She remembered calling Aisle that only yesterday, when he’d tried to comfort her and she’d responded with abuse, and suddenly found herself wishing that he was there. She didn’t even know why, since he doubtlessly would have tried to stop her, but she missed him all the same. I never even thanked him for yesterday, she realized, and that seemed like as good an excuse as any to delay what she was doing.
Sniffling, she got up and retrieved the syringe again, but this time she placed it in a small bag that was on the exam stand, throwing it over her back as she crept out of the field hospital the same way she’d entered. I’ll just…I just have to do that first. I’ll tell Aisle that I’m grateful for what he did for me, and that I’m sorry. Then I’ll do it.
She had to repeat that thought several times before she could make herself believe it.
Spit Polish sat next to the dying embers of a campfire, looking with undisguised bitterness at the ponies crowding around the food-laden tables that Lex Legis stallion had conjured.
They’re over there right now, he knew. Each and every one of them. Drumroll. Buzzy. Snickersnack. Cellar Door. Although he couldn’t see them, he knew they were there alongside everypony else, gobbling up the food that Lex had made. Although his stomach rumbled at the sight of it all, Spit Polish made no move to go join the others.
The five of them constituted the commander’s most loyal followers, or so Spit Polish had thought. He’d been speaking to all of them just a few minutes ago, telling them about the rumors of the commander’s death and urging them to help him figure out a way to drive the newcomers out before they spread the sickness throughout the entire camp. That such a thing would happen was only a matter of time, Spit Polish was certain, and so they had to keep doing what the commander would have wanted them to do. “Otherwise,” he’d told them, “all of our sacrifices, all of the things we had to do, will be for nothing. Equestria will be lost and it will be our fault.”
The others had nodded and agreed and pondered what to do, only to be caught up in the spectacle as Lex created tons of food out of nothing. Each of them had joined the crowd in rushing toward the first set of tables, leaving Spit Polish to brood alone. We used to have to break down barn doors and fend off angry ponies in order to steal just enough for everyone to survive, he recalled darkly. And now this pony is making all of our hard work meaningless. Worse, there was almost no chance of getting the rest of the camp to help them drive Lex and his band of plague-carriers out now. Not when he could make this much food for everyone when they had been eating too-stingy portions of half-rotted vegetables before. He’s going to keep them complacent with food, right up until some of them get sick and start feeling hungry for the flesh of other ponies.
For a moment he wished he could talk to Peachy Keen; no matter how bad things had gotten, his childhood friend had always been able to make him feel better, even during the darkest days following the fall of Vanhoover. He’d made eye contact with her very briefly just a few minutes ago, when she’d been going to join the crowd to wait for the promised food, and for a second she’d moved to come over to him. Then she’d seen who he was speaking to, and her hoofsteps had stopped.
The look she’d given him then, before turning to go join the crowd, had been one of the saddest expressions he’d ever seen on her face. Just the thought of it made him uncomfortable, and that made him angry. She had no right to look at me like that. I’m the only one who’s taking this seriously. The commander is dead, that Lex pony is going to doom us all, and I’m the only one who sees it!
Spit Polish stood up slowly, letting out a breath. He had done a lot of terrible things, things he wasn’t proud of, over the last few weeks. But they were all things that had been necessary…and now it looked like more would be necessary still. He couldn’t let this Lex pony jeopardize all of Equestria because he was too blind or stubborn or whatever it was that was making him ignore the risk of infection. He still didn’t know why the commander had given up without a fight, but he was gone now…and with everypony else apparently abandoning their duty, Spit Polish knew that he was the only one left to protect Equestria.
“Let me see if I get this straight,” said Cloudbank, giving Lex a look of controlled disbelief. “You want me to find a bunch of ponies who’ll go back into the ruined city that they escaped from, risking their lives in the process, so that they can rob a bank?” She paused just long enough to take a breath before shaking her head. “I’m sure you’ve got some sort of angle here, but I can’t imagine what it is.”
Drafty gave the other mare a look of mild reproach. “Of course he has a reason, Cloudy.” She turned her eyes back toward Lex, smiling again. “I bet it’s something really important, right?”
Lex closed his eyes with a sigh. For a moment a feeling of irritation swept over him, wondering how it was that nopony else could see the problems that he considered obvious, but he couldn’t sustain the emotion, discomfort and fatigue causing it to fall away in a wave of weariness. “We need the money in the bank in order to start putting Vanhoover back together,” he explained. “With it, we can purchase food from nearby farms, as well as building materials that can make this place more livable while we focus on retaking the city proper.” He didn’t mention that – even if all of the ghouls were to simply vanish tomorrow – restoring Vanhoover to its pre-flooding state would take months at a bare minimum. More likely, it would require years. Despite the fact that it was still late summer, worrying about what would happen to this camp when winter arrived was not an unreasonable concern.
Drafty gave Cloudbank a look that was a mixture of smug and triumphant. “Told you so.”
But Cloudbank wasn’t listening. “I get that, but it-” She cut herself off as she glanced behind her, her eyes falling to Severance. Whatever it was saying made her frown. “But it’s not our money!” she said a moment later, looking from the weapon to Lex as she spoke. “You’re right that we need bits, but this shouldn’t be how we should get them.”
Lex frowned at the challenge, because that was what it was. She had just challenged the moral legitimacy of his chosen course of action, and that wasn’t something he could overlook. “First of all,” he replied coldly, “I am absolutely empowered to seize the banks’ assets, by virtue of my being the sole and absolute authority over Vanhoover and all entities – be they pony, business, or otherwise – that reside within it.” He struggled to sit up as he spoke, no longer being content to lie down while Cloudbank and Thermal Draft stood over him. The latter mare moved as though to assist him, but he waved a hoof to ward her off.
Sitting up was a far greater struggle than it should have been, and he almost keeled over at one point, but he managed to force himself upward, breathing heavily from the exertion. “Secondly,” he continued, “my ordering the remaining currency to be appropriated is not only lawful, it’s the morally-correct decision. That much capital has the ability to make a drastic and immediate improvement to the lives of everypony here. Even if you classified our taking it as theft, which would be profoundly spurious not only because I’ve authorized this action but also because that money’s current situation has effectively resulted in its abandonment since at least some of its owners are certainly dead and it’s uncertain that the accounting records have survived anyway, doing so in order to save lives is not only morally acceptable but morally required, as any deontological system worthy of the name will prioritize the saving of lives above the taking of someone else’s property when there’s no alternative to be found!” He was yelling now, causing both mares to wince. “And thirdly,” he snarled, his eyes boring holes into Cloudbank, “there IS no other way to be found! We need large amounts of money and we need it-”
“We understand,” interrupted Drafty. Lex shot her an angry look, but she didn’t flinch, raising a hoof in a conciliatory gesture. “We understand,” she repeated. “You’re right about us using the money.”
Lex glared at her for a moment, as though uncertain about her agreeing with him, before turning his eyes back to Cloudbank. But she didn’t meet his gaze, looking down uncomfortably, her ears folded back. Finally, satisfied that he’d thoroughly refuted the objections that Cloudbank had raised, Lex slowly laid back down.
His head had just hit the pillow when Sonata burst into the tent, a winded-looking House Call following her. “I heard yelling. What’s going on?” asked Sonata, looking around rapidly. “Is everything okay?” The words were barely out of her mouth when she realized how winded Lex looked. “Like, oh my gosh! What happened?” She knelt down at his side, giving him a quick once-over before looking back at Cloudbank and Drafty, her brow furrowed. “Did you two do something?”
Cloudbank licked her lips, still looking chagrined. “We were-”
“-just leaving,” cut in Drafty. Glancing at Cloudbank, she caught her eye and nodded her head toward the tent flap. House Call stepped around them and put his medical bag down, starting to rummage through it.
“Cloudbank,” called Lex just before the pair left. The mare in question paused, looking back as her name was called, biting her lip in anticipation of being dressed down again. “I want you to have those volunteers assembled and ready to leave by no later than noon. This needs to happen as soon as possible.”
Cloudbank nodded once, not meeting his eyes, and then turned and left.
Cloudbank’s eyes were still downcast as she trudged away from Lex’s tent, a dejected look on her face. A moment later, she felt Drafty press against her. “Hey,” came her girlfriend’s voice. “You okay?”
Cloudbank let out a sigh, not sure how much to say. The last time she had criticized Lex Drafty had almost taken her head off for it, and the last thing she wanted right now was another fight. “I’m fine,” she muttered.
“You don’t look fine.”
Alright, if she wants to do this, then we’ll do this. I don’t care anymore, Cloudbank decided. “He didn’t have to yell at me like that.”
“Cloudy…”
“I mean, I get it. We do need that money to fix things up here, and I guess it’s not really stealing because of…whatever it was he was talking about back there, but he didn’t need to cut me off at the knees like that! I was just saying what I thought, was all.”
“I know,” said Drafty softly.
Cloudbank almost tripped, unable to believe what she’d just heard. Whipping her head around, she found Drafty looking at her with a small smile. “Wait, you do?”
“Mm-hmm,” nodded Drafty, still giving her a warm look.
Her girlfriend’s expression didn’t match how Cloudbank felt, however, and that was enough to confuse her. “So…what then?” She wasn’t even sure what she was asking, except that she wasn’t sure why Drafty didn’t seem to be as upset as she should be if she felt that her hero had been unfair.
Drafty didn’t reply right away, the two of them walking in silence for a moment before speaking. “Do you remember when we first met Lex?”
Cloudbank’s face screwed up in confusion. Huh? “Yeah…it was, what, a week ago?” Admittedly, it felt like a lot longer, with everything that had happened.
“You didn’t like him very much then.” It was a statement, rather than a question. When Cloudbank didn’t reply, Drafty kept going. “You really gave him a hard time back when he wanted to investigate that dummy light and it turned out to be a trap, remember?”
Cloudbank’s frown deepened, not sure if she was being scolded or not. “Yeah…?”
“And you said something like he should leave playing hero to the princesses.” Drafty’s statement brought the memory immediately to Cloudbank’s mind:
She took a step closer to Lex, and the two of them were practically nose-to-nose as a result. “Maybe instead of running around and trying to do everything by yourself, you should call in the ponies who actually have a track record of saving all of Equestria!”
For some reason that felt uncomfortable to remember now, and Cloudbank huffed, her patience starting to wear thin. “What’s your point?”
Drafty stopped, and turned so she was facing Cloudbank directly, still giving her a happy look. “My point is look how well you two get along now.”
“Wh-, are you joking?! We don’t get along at all! Did you see what just happened back there?!”
But to Cloudbank’s consternation, Drafty just chuckled. “I did, apparently better than you.” Cloudbank opened her mouth to protest, but Drafty spoke up first. “Cloudy, he asked you to be the one to find ponies who can do what needs to be done. He didn’t ask Sonata. He didn’t ask me. You’re the one he’s counting on.”
“And it wasn’t just then,” continued Drafty. “You’re the one he wanted to give that speech about the Night Mare, because you’re the one he introduced to his goddess.” She pointed to Severance, still laying across Cloudbank’s back. “You’re the one he lets carry around his super-strong magic weapon. And let’s not forget, you’re the pony he trusted to get the job done when we were all fighting for our lives against those monsters.”
“That was because I was the only one who volunteered,” protested Cloudbank feebly. All of a sudden she wasn’t sure what to think.
“And he believed in you when you did. Or do you really think that Lex Legis of all ponies wouldn’t have said anything if he didn’t think you were up to the task?” When no further protests came, Drafty’s smile widened. “I know that he’s really rough around the edges, but he’s not that hard to read if you know what to look for, and I’m telling you, he’s fond of you, Cloudy. Other than Sonata, you might be the pony that he likes the most.” For a moment her smile dimmed, but its intensity rallied a moment later. “And I know you like him, too.”
Cloudbank hadn’t noticed the momentary change in her girlfriend’s demeanor, having looked away as she’d tried to process what she’d been told, but that last part was enough to bring her back to reality. “Hold on…!”
Drafty gave her a pointed look. “If you don’t like him, then why were you so upset about how badly he’d injured himself?”
Again, Cloudbank looked away, biting her lip. Why had she been so upset? “That was…I was mad because he was being irresponsible, messing around with magic he couldn’t control.” Even to her, it sounded like a weak excuse. Lex had hurt himself because he’d been trying to create enough food for everyone. Calling that “irresponsible” didn’t really make sense, and she knew it.
Drafty knew it too. “Uh-huh…” Her sarcasm was obvious.
Cloudbank made one last-ditch effort to refute what the other mare was saying. “But we fight all the time.”
Drafty shrugged. “Whenever my uncle would come over and visit, he and my dad would always fight. It wasn’t any sort of big blow-up or anything, but they’d snipe at each other all the time. I couldn’t understand why he kept coming over to visit, until my mom told me that they weren’t really angry at each other. It was just something they did. I never really got why, but when I got older I could see that they weren’t really upset by what they were saying.” She put a wing over Cloudbank and started walking again, the other mare keeping pace with her. “I know that’s not quite the same for you and Lex, but it sort of is. You might bicker a lot when you’re together, but I know he trusts you, and I know you feel the same way.”
“Yeah, well…I don’t know if I agree,” answered Cloudbank with a sulk.
Drafty couldn’t help but laugh at that, before leaning over and giving Cloudbank a quick peck on the cheek. “Well, maybe I’m wrong,” she teased, “but in the meantime, we need to figure out who to talk to about robbing a bank.”
Relieved at the change in topic, Cloudbank turned to look at the tables where everypony was dining. “I think I have a good idea where to start…”
When the mare sitting across from him gave him a bewildered look, unable to understand him past the mouthful of chocolate cake in his mouth, Piggy waved a hoof at a nearby pitcher of milk. Understanding dawned on her face as she reached out and grasped it, placing it next to him. Giving her a quick “hanh ya,” in reply, he didn’t bother pouring any into a glass, simply grabbing the mug and emptying it directly into his mouth.
Instantly, the ice-cold milk washed over his taste buds, and the flavor of it mixed with the chocolate frosting was enough to make him moan in rapture, chugging it down in large mouthfuls. Nor did he stop there, tilting the pitcher further and further upwards, drinking its contents in great swallows until finally he’d consumed it all. Slamming the pitcher back down, he let out a sigh of contentment as he rubbed his bulging belly. Then, pausing only long enough to let out a loud belch, he reached for a nearby tray of spiced potato wedges, licking his lips. The only thing better than eating dessert is eating dessert first! he giggled to himself.
Of course, he would have liked to have had a bigger dessert to celebrate his finally getting to eat a decent meal, but his mother had taught him not to be greedy. One triple-layer chocolate cake was enough to start with; the other desserts could wait until he’d had some proper food. I bet Mom will be so proud of how grown-up I’m acting!, he nodded to himself as he up-ended the tray, sending its cargo sliding toward his open mouth.
“You really do live up to your name, you know that?”
“Hm?” Lowering the tray even though he’d only gotten half of the potato wedges in his mouth, Piggy looked in the direction of the familiar female voice, sure that it had been directed towards him. As he glanced over at its owner, he almost choked as he saw who it was. Finally managed to swallow the mouthful of food, he panted for air. “You…”
Cloudbank gave him a condescending smirk. “Hiya, Piggy.”
He grimaced at the sight of the pink-and-white pegasus mare, still remembering that awful prank she had pulled on him yesterday for no reason. “Go away,” he frowned sourly. “I don’t wanna talk to you.” His eyes slid over to the other mare next to her, another pegasus, though this one was brown-and-black. She was a cutie too, but she was standing close enough to that pink-and-white nag to make him suspicious. He didn’t want anything to do with anypony who was friends with a bully like her.
“Well, we need to talk to you,” replied the mare. “Your mom was a bigshot, right? Did she tell you anyth-”
Piggy turned away from her in mid-sentence, causing her to let out an indignant squawk that was music to his ears as he started to shovel food back into his mouth. “Oh, so now you want my help?” he drawled between bites. “Well too bad. I gave you the chance to get in good with me before, but instead you did…whatever that was you did to me, something with that magic you got from the Night Nag or whatever her name is.” He knew that wasn’t the name of her whatchamacallit – “goddess” or something – but he threw that out there just to needle her. “So now, you can shove off.”
To his delight, the barb seemed to get under her skin, her eyes narrowing as she glowered at him. “Her name is the Night Mare, and you had better remember it. It’s thanks to her that you’re able to stuff your face like that.”
They were starting to make a scene, with several nearby ponies murmuring to each other as they listened to the conversation, but Piggy didn’t care. It was good to let everypony know that anyone who messed with the Banks would always come crawling back later! “Oh yeah? I’ll have to remember to send her a Hearth’s Warming card later,” he jeered, making sure to grab a muffin from a nearby basket and tossing it into his mouth whole as he did so. “I’ll make sure to write on it that if she ever wants to cook for me again, I’ll hire her.” He burst out laughing at his own joke, not noticing the way he sent bits of muffin flying from his mouth as he did so. The way her face turned red in response was priceless!
A moment later his laughter cut off as the scythe she’d been carrying suddenly leaped off her back of its own accord. The pink-and-white mare took a single step towards him, her wings flaring, and the scythe moved alongside her. “I’m going to give you one chance to apologize,” she hissed, and the sound made Piggy lean back in fright. “Otherwise,” she continued, “my friend Severance here is going to cut off your-”
“Nuts?” interjected a new voice.
Blinking, Piggy glanced over his shoulder, and was startled to find that other mare, the brown-and-black one, sitting in the seat next to him. When did she get there? “Wh-what?” his voice had gone up an octave, certain that he was about to be ambushed.
The mare pushed a bowl of assorted peanuts, almonds, walnuts, cashews, and pistachios toward him. “Do you want some nuts? They’re really good.” As if to demonstrate their flavor, she lifted a few in a hoof and popped them in her mouth. “Mmm…” She gave a low moan of appreciation at the flavor, closing her eyes as she chewed languidly for a few moments before slowly swallowing. Slowly opening, her eyes were half-lidded as she licked her lips. “Delicious.”
“Y-yeah.” Piggy was captivated by the display, and it took him a second to remember the dangerous mare on his other side.
Twisting his head around, he saw that she was staring at the mare on the other side of him, a confused look on her face. “Drafty?” she asked, her voice uncertain.
A brown hoof reached under his chin and turned his head back around so that he was looking at that “Drafty” mare. “Aw, Mr. Bank, are you ignoring me?” she asked with a pout.
“Huh? N-no. Not at all!” He shook his head forcefully before grabbing a hooffull of nuts and shoving them into his mouth, making a show out of eating them so she’d know that he was paying attention to her. Mares always liked that, he knew.
“Yay!” giggled Drafty, clapping her fore-hooves together before giving him a sultry smile. “Did I mention how cute it is the way you chew with your mouth open?”
Now it was his turn to blush, giving an embarrassed guffaw before he got ahold of himself. “Well, you know what they say, you can judge a stallion by the size of his appetites.” He waggled his eyebrows at her as he said the last word, hoping she’d get the double entendre.
He was sure she did by the way she giggled again in reply. “Oh, you’re such a naughty boy!” she gushed, before standing up. “You look a little hot. How about I fan you?” Without waiting for his answer, she spread her wings and slowly moved them, sending a gentle breeze his way.
As a matter of fact, he had been a little warm. Closing his eyes, he took a moment to luxuriate in the sensation of the air cooling him off. He heard whispers from some of the other ponies around him, and quite a few bouts of muffled laughter, and couldn’t help but grin. They’re all impressed by how awesome I am, he knew. That pink-and-white nag must be beside herself! Unable to resist, he looked back over his shoulder and cracked one eye open. Sure enough, she was still there. She’d stowed that scythe on her back again and was looking at him with an unreadable expression, which made the corners of Piggy’s mouth turn even further upward. Read it and weep, honey. Looks like your friend here isn’t as dumb as you were.
He was feeling absolutely on top of the world as he turned back to his new girl. “A little more,” he directed her, and she immediately obeyed, flapping her wings slightly harder. Certain that he was the luckiest little pony in all of Equestria, Piggy looked around the table for something else to munch on. Forget only having one dessert! he decided. Being this fortunate calls for at least four!
But Drafty was one step ahead of him. “Do you like grapes?” she asked, already having taken the stem of a particularly large bunch in between her teeth. Again, she didn’t wait for an answer, leaning forward to offer the grapes to him.
He didn’t refuse, eating a grape directly off of the end of the bunch as she brought it to his mouth. A girl is fanning me and feeding me grapes! he whooped internally, knowing that this was the sort of situation that every stallion had dreamed of. Mom, if you could see me now! “Keep those coming, beautiful,” he said, wishing only that there was a nice couch that he could lie on.
Drafty looked down at the compliment, suddenly bashful. “Anything you say, Mister Bank.”
The sight was so adorable that he almost squealed. “Please,” he chuckled, knowing he had to keep it suave. “Call me Piggy.”
She giggled again, and he was really beginning to like the way she sounded when she did. “Anything you say, Piggy,” she corrected herself as she leaned in with the grapes again.
As he took another bite from the bunch, something suddenly occurred to him. Wait a second. She’s holding them in her mouth. That means…when I get to the last of the grapes we’ll be…we’ll be…k-…k-, k-, ki-…kissing!!! Just the thought was enough to leave him red as a tomato, suddenly feeling faint.
“Hey, Piggy?”
“Huh?” He only barely heard her voice, completely preoccupied with his realization.
“I was wondering if you could do me,” Drafty paused for a fraction of a heartbeat before continuing, “a favor.”
By now his head was almost spinning, but Piggy somehow managed to nod. “S-sure thing, beautiful. You name it and Piggy Bank can get it done.”
“Well…” She twisted shyly, as though embarrassed. “After you fix up Vanhoover, I was wondering if you could help me find a job.”
“Oh, trust me, I can absolutely find you a job,” he grinned, unable to stop from running his eyes over her flank. “There are a bunch of positions I can think of for you.” He laughed, pleased with how witty he was.
She seemed to think so too, judging by how she laughed. “That’s really sweet of you, but I was kind of hoping you’d help me with my dream. You see, I’ve always wanted to work in a bank here in town.”
“A bank?” Piggy frowned at that. It was the first thing she’d said that didn’t fit with what he wanted from her. “You’d be wasted in a bank, beautiful. You’d be much happier as my personal secretary.”
“Aw,” she pouted again, and stopped lowering the grapes towards him, even as her wings slowed down. “But I really wanted to work in a bank.” She looked down, dejected.
Worried that he was about to lose a sure thing, Piggy hurriedly waved his hooves. “No, no! You can absolutely work in a bank!” He let out a sigh of relief as she perked up again. “Trust me, my mom owns all of the banks in Vanhoover, and I’m going to be taking over really soon. Why else would we have them be part of our name?”
Mollified, Drafty started flapping her wings harder, leaning forward to offer him more grapes. “Aw, thank you so much, Piggy! And, if you don’t mind, could you tell me more about the banks here in town? I want to know everything.”
Twenty minutes later, Cloudbank watched as Drafty tossed the half-finished bunch of grapes aside, waving off Piggy’s protests by saying that she had to use the bathroom as she trotted away. Recognizing her cue, Cloudbank got up to follow her, moving alongside her girlfriend as soon as they were out of Piggy’s sight. “What was all that?” she asked, incredulous but unable to keep from grinning.
Drafty smirked. “What? You were the one who said we should ask that guy if he knew anything about the banks here in town. Turns out he did, and now we know it too.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t expect you to put on an entire show like that!” Cloudbank couldn’t help but laugh as she spoke. Watching Drafty manipulate that fat little earth stallion had been hilarious, and she hadn’t been the only one who thought so; everypony around her had been desperately trying to stifle their laughter at how easily Drafty had been playing Piggy.
Drafty gave her mane a toss, pleased with herself. “Well, what can I say? You told me how he treated you before, so I figured I could use that to get what we needed and give him a little payback at the same time. Besides," she tossed a wink Cloudbank’s way, "when a guy’s that hungry, it’s not hard to have him eating out of your hoof.”
“I want you to spend the day recovering. After twenty-four hours, I’ll come back and we’ll see where we are.”
House Call didn’t look at Lex as he spoke, putting his equipment back in his bag. Of course, he didn’t need to look at his patient to know that his advice wasn’t being received well; the disapproval was practically radiating off of Lex. Having treated him before, House Call knew that the only mystery was whether Lex would flat-out refuse or say that he could use his strange magic to heal himself. Though if that were the case, he no doubt would have done so already, so probably the former, he decided.
But to his mild surprise, it was Sonata who piped up. “Wait, for realsies? You just want him to lie down for one day?” She gave him a disbelieving look, glancing at Lex before looking back at him. “Wouldn’t a little longer be better? Like, maybe a week or something?”
“That’s completely out of the question,” snorted Lex. “A day is too much, and a week is absolutely unacceptable. I have other tasks that need to be seen to, for everypony’s sake.”
He was already trying to get up as he spoke, and House Call gave him a flat look in response. Out of his periphery, he saw Sonata looking at Lex also, though her expression was one of worry. For a moment, she looked like she wanted to move over to help him, but then seemed to think better of it, biting her lip as she watched him rise. Just getting his hooves under him was quite clearly a struggle for the dour unicorn, every motion drawing pained groans from him despite his obvious efforts to silence them. Seconds passed as Lex finally managed to stand, and by the time he did he was breathing heavily from the effort, having broken a sweat. “Now…” he panted, giving House Call a cold look. “Stand aside.”
House Call didn’t move. He knew he wasn’t a brave pony – but the thought of getting into another fight like the one he’d participated in against those sea creatures was enough to nauseate him – but when it came to his patients there was nothing under Celestia’s sun that would make him give them anything less than the best care that he possibly could. “You need to lie back down.” His tone was soft, lacking anything remotely threatening. Rather, it was the voice of someone stating a fact, nothing more. “You’re in no condition to move around.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed in response, jaw clenching. “Move,” he ordered coldly. “I won’t tell you again.”
Despite his commitment to his patients, House Call felt a shiver run down his spine, remembering what Lex had done to Garden Gate barely a day earlier. If he did the same thing now… There’ll be nothing I can do about it.
But Lex didn’t have a chance to do anything as Sonata stepped in. “Lex, please, just listen to what he’s saying. You totes did what you needed to do, so why not take it easy for a little bit?” She put a hoof around him, trying to gently guide him back down.
“There’s still more th-, whoa!” Raising a hoof to brush hers away proved to be too much for Lex to accomplish in his current state, and he pitched to the side, falling towards Sonata. Giving her own yelp of surprise, she tried to catch him, but her unpreparedness and his greater weight made it futile, and she accomplished nothing except to cushion his fall as they landed on his bedroll.
House Call shook his head lightly. Although he knew better than to say it out loud, the phrase “I told you so” floated through his mind. Instead, he looked over at the two of them to make sure that neither had been seriously injured in their tumble. Sonata seemed fine, judging by how she was scrambling to make sure Lex was okay. As for him…he was quite clearly still conscious, and the lack of any obvious signs of dizziness or pain meant that he was most likely alright as well. Even better, the fall seemed to have used up the last of his energy, and he didn’t try to rise again.
Figuring that this was as close to listening as Lex was likely to get, House Call started to explain the reasoning for what he’d said before. “The next twenty-four hours are an observation period. You need to let your body rest and recover from the stress you put it through, and we need to chart your progression during this time so we can figure out the best medical regimen to help you do it. After that, you’ll probably need to keep recuperating, but at least then we’ll have a better idea of how long that will take.” He turned to leave then, picking up his bag in the light blue glow of his telekinesis, but stopped midway through opening the tent flap, glancing back as his professional demeanor slipped. “I know you feel responsible for everypony here, but right now getting better is the responsible thing to do. You won’t be able to help anyone if you don’t let us help you.”
Having slid out from under Lex, Sonata nodded as she helped him get into a more comfortable position. “Like, what he said. Doctor’s orders and stuff.”
“No one gives me orders,” replied Lex churlishly, staring up at the tent ceiling in a way that made it clear that he was deliberately refusing to make eye contact with either of them. Sonata shot House Call an exasperated look, to which he shrugged in response, giving her a sympathetic smile before leaving.
Neither spoke after he left, and an awkward silence settled around the pair. After almost a minute, Sonata finally broke it. “So, um, are you hungr-”
“No.”
Frowning, Sonata huffed. “Look, I get that you’re mad at me, and that’s fine. I’m mad at you too. But starving yourself isn’t going to help anybody.” She didn’t even notice that she’d forgotten to use the correct term. “You haven’t eaten anything since yesterday morning, so how about I go get you something from all that food you just made?”
“I’m not hungry,” he snapped, turning his head away from her.
It was all Sonata could do not to scream at him. “Okay, fine,” she replied through gritted teeth. “I’m going to go get something for us to eat. If you don’t say what you want, then you can deal with whatever I get you. Got a problem with that? No? Good.” Without waiting for a response, she turned and left, having to resist the urge to stomp her hooves as she did.
She returned several minutes later, carrying a plate between her teeth and another one balanced carefully on a hoof. “Alright!” she announced, her spirits lifted by the delicious dish in front of her. “Two plates full of blueberry pancakes, topped with maple syrup, powdered sugar, strawberry slices, and a dab of whipped cream!” Placing his plate next to him, she didn’t miss the way he winced at her announcement, unable to help but feel a bit of satisfaction at the sight since she knew he hated sweet things. Serves you right for being such a jerk.
Without further ado, Sonata attacked her pancakes with gusto, only realizing as the food hit her tongue how hungry she was. Maybe that’s why we’re doing so awful this morning, she thought as she practically inhaled her pancakes. Everything’s worse on an empty stomach. In less than five minutes she’d cleaned her plate, giving a contented sigh as she sat back, rubbing her belly appreciatively. “That really hit the spot,” she announced.
For a moment no reply came, and Sonata had just enough time to worry that Lex was going to keep shutting her out, when he finally spoke up. “We need to talk about what comes next.”
It’s about time! It was all Sonata could do not to cheer. Everyone knew that “we need to talk” was code for “let’s have a heart-to-heart.” Now we can FINALLY get past this! Setting her plate down, Sonata smiled as she gave him her full attention. “Okay. You go first.” She could already see how this was going to go, with him trying to let her know that he was sorry without actually saying it, and then she’d explain how she felt, and lead him along as he awkwardly did the same, and then they’d say how they loved each other, and-
“I’m sending you to Las Pegasus.”
Sonata blinked, her thoughts screeching to a halt. “…huh?”
Still looking upward, Lex kept talking. “I’ll use my scrying spell to contact Ribbon Cutter back in Tall Tale. She only opened the harbor when we left, so it’s unlikely that there’s any ships there, but we might be fortunate. Either way, as soon as one arrives I’ll have her divert it here. With the pegasi we have here, spotting it won’t be a problem, and we should be able to get you aboard without any undue difficulty.” He paused as he considered something. “We can probably send some of the most-injured ponies here back as well. Dropping them off in Tall Tale should be no-”
“Hold on!” yelled Sonata, giving Lex a look of wide-eyed disbelief. She had a vague notion of where Las Pony-Vegas was, and it wasn’t anywhere near here. “We had one fight, and you’re sending me away?!”
Lex finally looked at her, frowning. “This has nothing to do with us fighting. I’m sending you there because that’s where I need you to be.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense!” protested Sonata. “We totes just got here, and-”
“-discovered that Vanhoover is in far worse shape than either of us had imagined,” concluded Lex. “Which is why we need a massive influx of capital in order to begin restoring the city.”
“Okay, but can’t you just cast a spell or something to make some, like you did with all that food?”
“If I had something like that, I would have used it a long time ago,” snorted Lex contemptuously. “As it is, I’m having Cloudbank find ponies that are willing to go into Vanhoover to appropriate whatever they can from the city’s financial institutions, but that’s not going to be enough.”
Sonata held up her fore-hooves, already lost. “Wait, slow down. You’re having her do what now? And what does that have to do with me going to Las Pegasus?”
“I’m having ponies collect whatever money they can find in Vanhoover’s banks. In the short-term, and perhaps even the medium-term, that will be enough to procure food and shelter for everypony here. But that won’t be enough for the long-term. For that, we’re going to need a much larger supply of bits, and the best place to get them is Las Pegasus.” Even in Lex’s day, the resort city had been a famous tourist destination thanks to its numerous casinos, as well as the secondary businesses that had grown up around them. It was self-evident that such a place had wealth in abundance, especially since – from what Lex had been able to determine – it had managed to avoid the elemental bleeds almost completely. “As the most comely and socially-adept pony here, I need you to get in touch with as many of the richest ponies as you can in Las Pegasus and convince them to come here and meet with me. It’s important that you don’t use magi-”
“Hold it! Just…back up a second!” Sonata squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head as she desperately tried to keep up with everything she was being told. “You want me to round up a bunch of rich ponies and bring them here?! Why?! This place is still overrun with ghouls!”
“I want them to see how everypony here is being forced to live,” replied Lex matter-of-factly. “Ferrying them back and forth from the camp while avoiding the ghouls shouldn’t be unduly difficult. If it is, I’ll just meet with them on whatever ship you use to bring them here instead. The point is that I need to get in touch with those ponies. They’re our best chance of taking out a loan large enough to rebuild this city.”
Sonata was getting more and more confused. “A loan? Why do-, no-, nnnngh!” Groaning in frustration, she put her face in her hooves, trying to regain her train of thought. When she lowered them a moment later, she gave him a serious look. “No.”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “No? No what?”
“No, I’m not going anywhere.” She sat on her haunches and crossed her forelegs, daring him to argue with her.
Apparently he dared. “This needs to be done, Sonata.”
“Um, hello! Spokespony, remember?! If I’m not here, who’s going to do that?”
Lex waved a hoof dismissively. “It will almost certainly take several days for Ribbon to send us a ship. By that point I’ll have transformed Aria into a pony, so I’ll have her do it.”
“…”
Without another word, Sonata grabbed the plate of pancakes she’d put down by Lex and upended it over his head before turning and storming out of the tent.
Aria sighed contentedly as she pulled herself away from the table.
After spending the last few months being forced to dine on seaweed, and the last few days on that disgusting gruel that Lex normally conjured, being able to eat real food again had been euphoric. Fresh carrots, cold yogurt, salted crackers, diced pineapples; each and every one had exploded with flavor to the point where she would have been moaning if her voice had worked properly. And those had just been the appetizers…after she’d started in on the main courses, she’d almost cried with delight.
The only thing that would have made it better is if there’d been some meat, she smirked to herself as she dragged herself off to go rest. As delicious as those hayburgers had been, they were no substitute for the real thing, and she’d done a double-take upon seeing what had looked like a fried chicken, only for them to turn out to be fried chick peas instead. But with how good everything had tasted, she couldn’t bring herself to be too upset over the omission. She’d even been able to have her favorite dessert: the vanilla portion of vanilla-chocolate-strawberry ice cream! It’s always tastier than normal vanilla, and if you’re lucky you get to see the look on the next person’s face when they realize there’s only two flavors left, she laughed to herself. She had to admit, Lex had really outdone himself that time. Maybe literally, with the way he collapsed like that.
That had been a hot topic around the various dinner tables, from what she’d been able to overhear. Their benefactor’s name had been on everyone’s lips, albeit when they weren’t chowing down, and it seemed like everypony had their own opinion about him. She’d overheard two earth stallions whispering, in between bites of rhubarb pie, that Lex was really a changeling who was trying to cheer everypony up so he could feed on their love. A unicorn mare had overheard and scolded the two, saying that he was clearly a descendent of some old unicorn wizard, Star-Swift the Braided or something (which sounded vaguely familiar for some reason). A pegasus stallion had sagely shaken his head and assured all three that Lex was, in fact, the long-lost son of Nightmare Moon and King Sombra, and had invented this “Night Mare” as part of a plan to try and turn Princess Luna back into his real mother. Even now, the memory of their gossiping was enough to make her laugh-
“Whoa!”
Aria stopped short as a pony – another pegasus stallion, this one grass-green – emerged from a dilapidated tent to her immediate right, recoiling as he almost walked right into her. “S-sorry!” he sputtered, wide-eyed.
“Watch where you’re going,” whispered Aria. But for once there was no heat in her rebuke, being too pleased from the feast she’d just had to feel upset.
“Uh, right,” nodded the stallion. But as Aria started to move past him, he licked his lips. “Hey…”
“Hm?” She glanced back at him, wondering what he could possibly want.
“You, um…you came here with those other ponies, right? The ones that are helping everyone?” Despite his obvious uncertainty, he took a step closer to her, an excited look on his face.
“I did. What about it?”
The green stallion licked his lips, and it was clear to her that he was gathering up his courage for something. Is he about to tell me how captivating he finds me?, she mused, the corners of her lips turning up slightly. The sahuagin and their monsters had been too savage to properly appreciate her, but now that she was back among ponies it only made sense that they’d want to bow down and adore her. Even without my voice, I’ve still got it!
“I…” He let out a sigh, then took a deep breath. “I want to apologize for how I acted last night.”
Aria blinked. “Huh?”
“The reason I acted like that,” he continued, an ashamed look on his face, “was because my mother was right there. I just…her health had been getting worse for a while, and I was scared that if…if something happened and ponies here started getting sick, that she’d be one of the first to go.” He paused then, as though worried that Aria was going to berate him. When she didn’t, he looked slightly relieved. “Can you tell them that for me, please?”
For a long moment Aria was silent, trying to figure out who this guy was and what he was talking about. “Tell who now?” she whispered, the sibilant words still managing to convey her confusion.
“You know, your leaders. That guy Lex and that really pretty mare, Sonata. Please tell them that I said I’m sorry.” Looking visibly relieved at having unburdened himself, the stallion flapped his wings and took to the air, pausing just long enough to wave at Aria as he headed back towards the food tables.
Aria didn’t return the gesture, looking after the departing stallion bitterly. She vaguely remembered that guy now, belatedly realizing that he was the one that had yelled at Sonata last night when she’d announced their arrival. But while he had clearly been struggling with how he’d acted, Aria couldn’t have cared less. What bothered her was something else altogether. My “leaders”? she thought darkly. He thinks that Sonata, of all people, is MY leader?!
All of a sudden her good mood was spoiled, and she snarled as she looked around. She’d been planning on just heading a little past the various tents and fire pits to sunbathe while she digested her food, but now she found herself wanting to be away from everyone. Bad enough he wasn’t enthralled at the sight of me, but to think that little airhead has any authority over ME?! It was utterly mortifying.
For a moment she considered dragging herself over to the river. She’d heard some ponies talking about it earlier that morning, and knew that if she went due south she’d find it easily. I could slip into the water and no one here would be able to follow me, she knew. Or maybe more than that…maybe she could follow the river back into the bay, and from there out into the ocean. Now that the Great Lord of the Deep, the sahuagin, and all the other monsters were gone, it wasn’t like she had anything to worry about.
For a moment she was tempted, glancing southward before turning away with a sigh. Slipping away might work, but even if Lex didn’t have the magic to track her down, abandoning him now would mean losing her chance of ever getting her voice back. That wasn’t something she could throw away easily, not when it was finally within reach!
Or is it? she wondered as she made for the far end of the camp. He told me he’d restore my voice in one week, and I’m holding him to that. If he tries to say that he needs more time because of whatever he did to himself making all that food, I swear I’ll rip him apart right then and there. The thought wasn’t serious, but the worry that fueled it was quite real. Aria had watched plenty of television and movies back on Earth, after all. She knew all about how villains – and Lex looked and acted just like one – would make false promises in order to get people to work for them, only to make up excuses about why they could never fulfill them before finally turning on them. That will NOT happen to me, she swore silently.
Moving across the camp, she slowly made her way to the train station, snarling wordlessly at any ponies that crossed her path. Although Lex had sealed the building, it was at the opposite end of the camp from the field hospital, which meant that she could move to the far side of the building and put it between herself and the rest of this place. It wasn’t the same as being alone, but it was close enough.
But when she finally rounded the building, Aria paused as she saw that someone else was already there, lying up against it with their eyes closed. Frowning, she recognized the black-and-blonde unicorn mare that Sonata had been talking to yesterday about Lex’s unpopularity. Nosey something or other. Sonata’s new best friend, she bitterly recalled, the thought bringing to mind that stallion that had inadvertently insulted her a minute ago. It was enough to dispel any lingering thread of her good mood. “Hey,” she rasped, “take a hike. I want this place to myself.”
The other mare didn’t respond, raising Aria’s ire even further. “Are you deaf or something? I said get lost.” But again, Nosey failed to give any response. Realizing that the mare had to be asleep, Aria moved towards her, intent on giving her a whack with her tail to get her up. But as she closed the distance to a few feet she stopped.
Something’s wrong, she frowned, taking a closer look at Nosey. The other mare wasn’t moving at all, hadn't even bothered to remove her glasses, and only the slow rise and fall of her chest indicated that she was still alive. More than that, her positioning was oddly rigid, lying flat on her back with her limbs all perfectly pressed against her sides. No, it’s more than that, Aria realized. There was a tension to Nosey’s muscles, as though she’d flexed them all and was holding them without relaxing. If she’d been moving at all Aria would have described it as straining, but who ever heard of someone straining while lying perfectly still? It’s almost like she’s concentrating on something…
Frowning, Aria decided that she didn’t care, reaching out and pressing a hoof against Nosey’s side. “Hey!”
Nosey’s eyes shot open immediately, instantly locking onto Aria, but the rest of her didn’t move a muscle. Although she’d been trying to wake her up, the sight was so striking that Aria reflexively pulled her hoof back, starting slightly. For a half of a heartbeat, Nosey regarded her expressionlessly, her features severe and devoid of any emotion. Then she relaxed, her body going limp as she smiled and stretched. “Hey there. You’re Sonata’s sister, right?” She yawned, turning over and climbing to her hooves. “What’s up?”
“I want to relax, and you’re in my way,” sneered Aria, irritated at once again being defined solely in relation to Sonata. “Beat it.”
Nosey tilted her head, and looked like she was thinking it over before eventually shrugging her shoulders. “Okay.” Turning away from Aria, Nosey didn’t hesitate as she leisurely walked away from her, rounding the train station and disappearing from sight without so much as a backwards glance.
Aria waited until she was gone before letting out a huff. Although she’d told the mare to go away, she felt certain that her abrupt departure had been intentionally disrespectful. I’ll make sure to pay her back for that later, Aria decided as she settled down. It wouldn’t be anything too major, but something nicely upsetting so that she could watch Nosey stew in her own frustration. Maybe I’ll steal her glasses.
Of course, that would have to wait. First would be her revenge on Lex and Sonata. Both of them would get what they deserved; Lex for ordering her around like she was some sort of maid, and Sonata for being an irritating little twit who dared to make people think that she could ever be in charge of anything. And it’s all so simple, she gloated to herself as she laid her head on the grass. With Lex’s inability to deal with girls even as he insisted on turning her into a pony, and Sonata on the brink of being persuaded to go behind his back to fix his popularity, they were leaving themselves wide open for being exploited. And then…she’d move in for the kill.
I can’t wait to see the look on Sonata’s face when she realizes that I’ve seduced her boyfriend away from her.
“Yes,” grimaced Cloudbank, not happy at hearing the disbelieving tone in Drafty’s voice. It wasn’t that she disagreed with her girlfriend’s skepticism; rather, it was because it reflected her own distaste at the idea. But Severance had made it very clear that one of the Night Mare’s core tenets was “use that which can be used.” And although she wasn’t entirely comfortable thinking about other ponies in those terms, the pragmatic nature of that sentiment was undeniable, especially in a difficult situation like what Vanhoover had become.
“But we barely know them!” continued Drafty, oblivious to her girlfriend’s inner turmoil.
“We know enough,” replied Cloudbank, looking around. Although almost everypony seemed to have eaten their fill, there was still a not-inconsiderable amount of food left, and most were lingering around to socialize or pick at the leftovers. That meant that there wasn’t really an easy way to find someone except by wandering around and hoping you got lucky, or asking someone else at random and hoping that they knew. But that was a problem that was easily solved for Cloudbank, who paused just long enough to look at Drafty and nod upward before spreading her wings and lifting off, ascending a few dozen feet before hovering in place and looking down. Okay, this should make it easier.
Drafty was beside her a second later, continuing the conversation seamlessly. “We do know enough: they’re friends with Piggy, who’s awful, and their leader is the one who killed Pillow!”
“Which Lex punished her for,” replied Cloudbank, giving Drafty a sidelong glance. Although she’d reassured the other mare that Lex had done the right thing just a day earlier, she couldn’t help but wonder if Drafty had any lingering doubts about his cursing Garden Gate.
Apparently not, as Drafty’s face didn’t show even the slightest hint of discomfort, instead maintaining the same disapproving frown she’d adopted since Cloudbank had let it slip that she wanted to recruit some of that other gang to go raid Vanhoover’s banks. “Yeah, and you saw how well they reacted to that. I really don’t think they’re going to want to help out, since you’re pretty much Lex’s go-to girl now.”
The statement brought a frown to Cloudbank’s face, and she turned her eyes back to the ponies below. “It’s at least worth a shot. They were out there in the thick of it while we barricaded ourselves in that apartment building. So they’ll probably have a better sense of the city than anypony else here.” Her voice wasn’t as strong as she would have liked, distracted by what Drafty had said. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about her girlfriend’s idea that Lex was, as she’d phrased it, “fond” of her. Up until now, Cloudbank had been certain that Lex didn’t like her – or anypony who wasn’t Sonata – very much, with his perpetually-foul disposition being all the proof she’d needed. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that his delegating more and more responsibilities to her could be interpreted as some sort of display of…what? Approval? Trust? Maybe even friendship? Without knowing for sure, Cloudbank was left feeling awkward and uncertain. And then there’s the fact that Drafty’s pretty clearly still gaga over him.
The whole thing was a mess that she didn’t want to deal with right now. Luckily, she had a task to focus on instead, even if she hadn’t found one volunteer so far. But judging by how the sun was nowhere near its zenith yet, she still had a few hours yet. But that’s no reason to delay, since I’m probably not going to get very-, there! She thrust a hoof out. “I see them!”
“Where?” Drafty looked at Cloudbank, then followed the direction her hoof was pointing in, spotting a group of almost a dozen ponies leaving one of the furthest tables. One of them was a mare with a bandage around her horn, and Drafty could see that her pace was more of a slow shuffle than her companions’. “Yeah, that looks like them alright.” She huffed slightly. “Good luck with them.”
Blinking at the implied farewell in the other mare’s words, Cloudbank gave her a surprised look. “You’re not coming along?”
Drafty shook her head. “I’ve distracted you enough already. You need to focus on finding ponies who’ll go back into Vanhoover, and so far it’s just you and me.” She held up a hoof, cutting off Cloudbank as the other pegasus opened her mouth to protest. “Don’t try to deny it. You’re going, and I’m going with you. After all,” she smirked, throwing a wink her way, “we don’t want to let Lex down, right?”
Frowning again, Cloudbank opened her mouth, then closed it, and then repeated the process before sighing. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” She didn’t wait for an answer before flying towards the group of ponies below.
Drafty waved as she left, but it wasn’t until she saw Cloudbank land in front of the group and start speaking that she turned away, looking in another direction. Sure enough, Sonata was still there, speaking with somepony that looked like a doctor, a different one from the unicorn stallion that she’d brought with her when she’d come back to Lex’s tent earlier. Judging by the look on her face, she was rather upset…which meant that there was a better-than-even chance that Lex had upset her.
Returning to the ground, Drafty surreptitiously made her way back to the outpatient tents that had been set up outside the field hospital…
“Lex?” called Drafty as she pushed through the flap. “I was-, whoa! What happened to you?”
His cheeks red with embarrassment, Lex gave Drafty a sour look as he tried to clean up the food that had been spilled all over him. But with nothing except the edge of his blanket to work with, and the way the aura holding it aloft kept sputtering – something Drafty, having had unicorn neighbors all her life, knew had to be a reflection of how debilitated he felt – he wasn’t having very much success. “What do you want?” he asked curtly.
“I wanted to see if you’d gotten any food,” confessed Drafty. Thinking back to how upset Sonata had looked before, she could guess why he had what looked like a plateful of pancakes all over him. “I guess you did, but were you able to eat any of it?”
Lex turned away from her, resuming his efforts with visible frustration. “Go away.”
To Lex’s mild surprise, Drafty obeyed him, turning and leaving without another word. But a few minutes later she returned, a plate of something clenched between her teeth. Placing it down, she hummed softly as she held up a few small packets of something. “Just hang on, and I’ll get you cleaned right up.”
“I don’t need your help,” came the expected answer.
“I know,” answered Drafty without pausing, unwrapping the sanitary wipe from the package and unfolding it. “But I want to do it. After everything you’ve done for us, it only seems fair.”
“My actions are not performed with any expectation of reciprocity,” he protested. But he didn’t push Drafty away as she started to clean him up, instead settling for sulking and fixing his gaze on the ceiling.
A few minutes later she sat back, nodding in satisfaction. “There we go. And now,” she put the plate she’d brought with her down beside him, “dig in!”
Although she’d made sure to get food that she thought he’d like – the plate held some apple slices with peanut butter on them, a plain muffin, and some unsweetened yogurt – he only glanced at it for a moment before looking upward again. “I’ll eat later,” he muttered.
“Do you want something else instead?” asked Drafty, recognizing the deflection for what it was. “There was plenty left, so it’s no problem for me to go get something else.”
He shook his head, and for just a moment he looked uncomfortable, the same way he had when she’d spotted him wearing that plate of pancakes…and suddenly she knew what the problem was: he was too weak to feed himself. That was why he hadn’t even been able to clean himself on his own, why his telekinetic aura had barely been able to manifest at all. She almost said it out loud, but stopped at the last moment. Instead, she picked up an apple slice and held it right in front of him. “Here. Open up.”
He gave her a reproachful look. “I do not require your assistance!”
Drafty smiled, unfazed. “Even though you can barely move?” His eyes widened at that, and she knew her guess had been correct. “C’mon,” she pressed, “it’s not like I can throw myself in front of Severance again, so at least let me do this for you.”
Lex winced at that, remembering how she’d saved his life during the battle against those aquatic monsters, and that he hadn’t acknowledged that fact since it had happened. Although he snorted and looked away stubbornly, the next time she brought the apple slice close he opened his mouth, letting her feed him. Drafty, for her part, grinned silently, waiting for him to chew and swallow before offering him another.
They continued that way for a few minutes, until the apples were entirely gone, leaving her to start breaking the muffin into bite-sized pieces. “So what happened with Sonata?”
Under any other circumstances, Lex would have told her that it was none of her business, but he was still chagrined from her reminding him that she’d saved him before. That, and he knew he needed some sort of insight where his girlfriend was concerned, because no matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t understand what had set her off. Everything he’d said before had been correct, so the source of her anger was a complete mystery to him. Although he’d never stoop to asking for advice, if he told her what happened and she happened to volunteer some…that was something else again. “She took exception to my idea to send her to Las Pegasus.”
Drafty paused at what she was doing. “Send her to Las Pegasus?” she echoed, surprised.
Lex nodded. “I need her to go there and use her social skills in order to arrange for that city’s most affluent ponies to meet with me so that I can take out a loan. Otherwise, this city’s long-term prospects are bleak.” He paused then, looking at Drafty in anticipation of her response.
She licked her lips, her brow furrowing as though in concentration. After several seconds, she swallowed, before slowly speaking. “I think…I think you shouldn’t send Sonata to Las Pegasus. You should send me instead.”
One of Lex’s eyebrows went up. “You?”
Drafty slowly nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I know I’m not the monarch among social butterflies that she is, but I can be pretty friendly when I put my mind to it.” The corners of her lips turned up a little as she remembered Piggy. “I can definitely get a bunch of rich ponies to meet with you, and this way you can keep Sonata here to act as your spokespony, and use her magic if you need it.” Lex frowned, but didn’t say anything, and Drafty took that for a win, resuming feeding him.
A few minutes later he’d eaten everything she brought, and she stood up. “I’ll go ahead and let you rest. Get better soon, okay?” He grunted in acknowledgment, and Drafty gave him a smile as she left. But she had barely gone five paces before her smile faltered. “Are you sure that was a good idea, me offering to go to Las Pegasus like that?” she muttered, looking around to make sure that no one was around to overhear her.
Trust me, answered the sultry feminine voice in her mind. Once Lex sees that you can make a contribution, he’ll start noticing you more. From there, you’ll only grow closer.
It made sense, and Drafty couldn’t help but feel an excited shiver run down her spine at the thought. “Thank you, Kara.”
Lex Legis had never considered himself to be a pony that was unreceptive to new ideas. Quite the contrary, he prided himself on being willing to accept new information when it was presented to him and integrating it into what he already knew. Although there wasn’t anyone whom he’d ever accept as a teacher – that would require submitting himself to their instruction, and he submitted to NO ONE – he was willing to hear and consider any alternative points of view.
Unfortunately, what he’d discovered was that most alternative points of view simply weren’t worth his time to entertain. Again and again throughout his life, the opinions, beliefs, and ideas that he’d heard others spouting were shortsighted, foolish, or completely irrational, and it never failed to enrage him. He knew that he was intelligent – far more intelligent than almost anypony else he’d ever met – but he simply couldn’t bring himself to countenance the horrifying degree of idiocy that virtually everypony exhibited. Just because they weren’t as smart as he was didn’t mean they needed to be stupid, after all.
Still, every so often someone managed to offer an idea or make a suggestion that was worthwhile, and in this case it was Thermal Draft’s idea that she be the one to go to Las Pegasus in Sonata’s place. Given Sonata’s inscrutable refusal, somepony else would have to go anyway, he knew. He’d originally planned on talking Sonata out of whatever obstinacy had seized her – logic and reason would win out in the end, he was sure – but Thermal Draft hadn’t been wrong in pointing out that, while sending someone else would have decreased the overall chances of success, it also allowed him to retain Sonata’s talents here, effectively negating any opportunity cost wh-
“Sir?” A female voice came from beyond the tent flap, one he didn’t recognize. “Are you awake?”
Lex glanced in that direction. “What is it?”
A moment later an earth mare entered, her lab coat clearly denoting her as being one of the medical ponies he’d brought with him. The sight of her mane, with its alternating stripes of green, made Lex frown as he realized he’d seen her somewhere before. It took him a moment to remember that she had been the one that had been there after Pillowcase died, worrying about Cozy’s praying…which reminded him that he needed to find out if the crystal mare had followed his instructions about contributing to the general welfare of the camp.
The doctor, oblivious to Lex’s thoughts, spoke up. “I was told to inform you that we’ve finished the autopsy on Block Party.”
That commanded all of Lex’s attention, and he put the matter of Cozy aside for a moment. “And?”
The doctor shrugged. “The cause of death was asphyxiation. There was also some damage to the esophagus as well as abrasion marks around the neck, all of which were caused by the noose.” She shook her head sadly. “Other than that, he was a healthy adult stallion. There was no indication of disease, trauma, malnourishment, or even any injuries except for, um…a few scrapes on his fore-hooves.” She looked down as she said that last part, her voice lowering.
Lex’s brow furrowed at that. “Why were those there?” The doctor didn’t answer, instead giving him an unreadable look and shuffling in place slightly. “Why were there scrapes on his fore-hooves?” asked Lex again, his tone making it clear that her not answering was not an option.
The doctor swallowed. “Given their location and the lack of any scabbing, it looks like…like he’d been grabbing at the noose before he lost consciousness.” A shudder ran through her as she spoke, clearly unnerved by what she was saying.
Lex, however, was oblivious to her discomfort. “You’re suggesting that his death was murder, rather than suicide?”
“I…this isn’t really my field. I mean, I’ve worked with dead ponies before, but that was always when they’d been in an accident or a surgery wasn’t successful. Something like this…”
But Lex was pitiless, giving her a level look. “I need to know what happened to Block Party in order to ascertain what needs to be done as a result. Since I’m not a medical expert,” he’d always eschewed medical knowledge in favor of more conceptual disciplines, something he was beginning to regret now, “that means I require the services of one, and right now that’s you. Now tell me: are you of the opinion that Block Party was murdered?”
Biting her lip, the doctor folded her ears back uncomfortably, but shook her head. “I don’t think so. I mean, the injuries on his fore-hooves might be because he,” she paused for a moment, swallowing, “because he changed his mind at the last moment, and it was too late…” Letting out a shaky breath, she continued. “And besides that, there weren’t any other injures or marks or anything on him. Since I’d presume that there’d be a struggle if someone was trying to kill him, that would probably rule that out.”
Lex could think of any number of potential exceptions to the sweeping generality she’d just made, but that was beside the point. If there was no concrete evidence to suggest that someone else had killed him, then they were back to the question of why Block Party had taken his own life in the first place. Although Lex knew that he had no skill in understanding somepony else’s motivations, the idea that Block Party would suddenly succumb to a bout of guilt so intense as to induce suicide struck him as incredibly far-fetched, but everything he’d seen and been told so far seemed to validate what Nosey had said. And then there was the mystery of Block Party’s having that unknown necromantic aura around him, which…which…
I overlooked something.
Lex’s ruminations ground to a halt as he was momentarily overpowered by the absolute certainty of the thought. There was something that he’d neglected, a piece of information that he’d missed-, no, that he’d observed but had failed to properly consider. It was there, he felt sure of it, but somehow he hadn’t given it proper analysis, and now the realization was lurking just beyond the edge of his conscious thought, tantalizing him with whatever bit of knowledge he’d picked up but failed to properly comprehend.
“Um, sir?” The doctor, noticing that Lex had apparently spaced out, waved a hoof tentatively to get his attention. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” muttered Lex distractedly. “You can go.”
But the doctor didn’t move. “Um, I know I said this before, when I spoke to you regarding that poor crystal stallion, but we’re not properly equipped for preserving a body…” she trailed off.
Lex – for once able to pick up on what was being intimated – sighed, forcing himself to put the issue of whatever it was that he hadn’t realized aside for the moment. I don’t have the luxury of concentrating on only one problem at a time, he knew. “Bring his body to me. I’ll cast a preservation spell on it.” It was fortuitous that he’d put three castings of that spell into a gemstone previously. Although he could have simply prepared another instance of it – he hadn’t used Severance to replenish his thaumaturgical spellcasting today – at the moment the prospect of going through the hour-long process that was necessary to recharge just a little of his magic sounded exhaustingly difficult. “That should give us enough time to contact any family or friends he may have had here in camp.” It was basic etiquette to turn a corpse over to the deceased’s loved ones, whoever they were.
A relieved look crossed her face at that. “Okay. I’ll have somepony bring it over immediately.”
Lex snorted. It wasn’t like the issue of disposing of Block Party’s remains would be dealt with if he had any relatives here. Although Lex knew he could keep the body from decaying for an indefinite period with repeated castings of his preservation spell, that was hardly a long-term solution. Quite the contrary, it’s a harbinger of what’s to come, though I doubt anypony here has bothered to consider that, thought Lex disgustedly.
While Cozy would doubtlessly be taking Pillowcase’s body back to the Crystal Empire with her, Block Party’s body would need to be dealt with here, and it would be the first among many that would have to be inhumed. After all, every ghoul was a corpse that would need to be disposed of after being put down, and Lex felt certain that there were other cadavers – ones who had died for reasons other than the sickness spread by the ghouls, and so hadn’t risen again – quite possibly a great many of them, scattered throughout the city. All of them would need to be found, identified if possible, and then interred.
And the sheer number of bodies that they would likely need to deal with, some of them likely not completely intact and all of them having started to decay, meant that there’d almost certainly have to be at least one mass grave dug before the city was reclaimed. The thought was enough to make Lex’s stomach turn, the food he’d just eaten shifting uneasily. How many ponies lost their lives here? he wondered. How many didn’t survive the flooding, or the horrors that came after it?
“Um, before I go,” piped up the doctor, again intruding on his thoughts, “I wanted to tell you…that crystal mare, Cozy, came to the field hospital last night to help. She did a good job.”
Giving a grunt of acknowledgment, Lex waved a hoof at her dismissively. At least that was one thing that had gone the way it was supposed to. But in the meantime, he needed to focus on what else he could do to solve the bevy of problems involved with restoring this city’s prosperity. Unfortunately, at the moment that involved little besides recuperating…and trying to unravel the mystery of what it was that had made him feel like he’d missed something about Block Party’s death. Something about that mysterious aura he’d had around him, maybe?
Or was he focusing too much on that? Frowning, Lex activated his circlet; although its store of reserve energy for powering spells had been expended, it could still let him see into the magical spectrum, and he utilized that now as he looked at himself, looking at the overlapping auras from his own magical effects and items. Stronger auras could obscure weaker ones, he knew. Perhaps there’d been some lesser aura around Block Party that the necromantic one had masked? Maybe he’d caught a glimpse of something so faint that he hadn’t even noticed it at the time? If so, that wouldn’t help now, since any lingering aura would long since have faded into nothing, but perha-
“Is there anything else you need?” asked the doctor, half-turned towards the tent flap.
“No,” spat Lex, annoyed that she’d broken his train of thought again. His glanced at her in irritation…and then he did a double-take, his eyes widening as he looked at her again. “Wait! Stop!”
“Hm? What is it?” Halfway out of the tent, the mare turned as she heard Lex’s sudden command, almost falling over as she hurriedly reentered. “Is everything alright?” Lex wasn’t listening, however, instead staring at the magic aura surrounding her. It wasn’t very strong, but it was there, and the type of magic…
Lex grit his teeth so hard that his jaw hurt. “Get me Sonata.”
The doctor blinked. “What? Why?”
“Just get me Sonata. Right now.”
Sensing that something had set Lex off, the doctor turned and all but ran from the tent, leaving Lex seething. Enchantment magic, he snarled internally. She enchanted that mare! He had no idea why she’d done it, but it didn’t matter; that was a severe breach of that mare’s rights! I told her never to do that unless it was an emergency! After all of the grief she’d given him this morning about not respecting Nosey’s feelings, she had done something so unbelievably egregious! The hypocrisy of it was infuriating!
Forcing himself to swallow his mounting rage, Lex took slow and even breaths. He didn’t know for certain that Sonata had laid that enchantment. Auras didn’t have any sort of personalized signature, after all. Aria could have done it, or perhaps even Cloudbank…but Sonata, with her predilection for enchantment magic was the prime suspect. And if she had, and there hadn’t been a justifiable reason for it – and he felt certain that there couldn’t be; after all, if there’d been an emergency, she surely would have told him – then what she’d done was beyond unacceptable. It was criminal.
I’ll give her one chance to explain herself, he decided. But if she’s guilty I swear I won’t show her any leniency!
Cozy rounded the medical tent only to stop and stare at the sight that awaited her.
She’d heard what sounded like a crowd gathering when she’d been praying for death, but hadn’t paid it any mind, too intent on begging Lashtada to let her painlessly leave this life. She’d simply assumed that it was more of the camp ponies showing up to receive medical treatment – though, now that she thought about it, the medical tent had been rather empty – or have more food distributed to them. I guess I was half-right, she thought to herself as she took in the scene before her.
Long tables, each of them piled high with food, had appeared out of nowhere. Gathered around them were hundreds upon hundreds of ponies, all talking and laughing as they ate their fill. More than a few had apparently already finished, and were loitering in groups ranging from two or three to several dozen. While some of these ponies were simply conversing, others appeared to be in a more celebratory mood, having set up some makeshift lawn games that were already going in full swing. Nearby, a small group of ponies were singing “Sunshine Beyond the Mountains,” and several couples were slowly dancing in time with the melody. The sight made Cozy’s heart ache, and she was suddenly very cognizant of the pouch on her back, still containing the syringe full of some unknown drug.
The sensation reminded her why she’d come out here in the first place, and she started to trudge towards the tables. Everypony in the camp looked like they were here, which meant that Aisle probably was too. I want to see him again… She scanned the assembly as she made her way closer to it, but didn’t see the pony she was looking for anywhere. Biting her lip, she turned to the nearest pony, a unicorn mare who was conversing with two other ponies. “Excuse me…”
The mare turned to look at her. “Yes, what is-, oh wow!” Her eyes widened as her mouth fell open, staring at Cozy for a second before she came back to herself, covering her mouth with one hoof. “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear! That was incredibly rude of me! It’s just…I’ve never seen a crystal pony before. I mean, I’ve heard all about the Crystal Empire and everything but…wow!”
Slightly nonplussed, Cozy somehow managed to smile awkwardly. “W-well, um, here I am…”
The unicorn mare tittered, as though Cozy had made a joke. Behind her, her two friends – an earth pony and a pegasus – smirked lightly, though Cozy wasn’t sure if they were laughing at her or their friend. “Oh, you are just a peach!” smiled the mare. “What can I do for you, dear?”
“I’m looking for a friend of mine. His name’s Produce Aisle. He’s an earth stallion, green coat, brown mane and tail. His cutie mark is a scale weighing a cabbage.” She let her eyes wander over the three as she spoke, hoping she’d see recognition cross their faces.
To her disappointment, they simply glanced at each other and shrugged, shaking their heads lightly. “I’m sorry, dear,” answered the unicorn mare, a contrite look crossing her face. “We haven’t seen anypony like that.”
“Oh…” Cozy couldn’t help but look down, her ears folding back in discouragement. She meant to say goodbye then, but when she opened her mouth what came out was, “Where did all this come from?”
“Where...?” The mare looked confused by the question. “You didn’t see that unicorn make all this food?”
“Unicorn?” For a moment Cozy felt confused, before the obvious answer came to her mind. “You mean Lex?”
The unicorn smiled, and her friends nodded as well. “That’s right, dear! He had that other mare-”
“Cloudbank,” interjected the pegasus.
“-Cloudbank, right, give a speech about somepony called ‘the Night Mare,’ and then he did some sort of big magic and FWOOSH!” She waved a hoof to indicate the tables a short distance away. “All of this appeared!”
“Except then he collapsed,” noted the earth pony, losing her smile as she spoke. The other two looked similarly perturbed as well.
“I don’t understand,” admitted Cozy, her eyes flickering between the three mares uncertainly. “He collapsed?” Part of her wondered if she should talk about Lashtada, maybe try to spread the word that the Night Mare wasn’t the only goddess whose followers could help everypony…but the idea somehow made her uncomfortable, as though she were contemplating something extremely unpleasant. It was enough to make her shift her weight awkwardly, wondering why she felt that way.
Luckily, the ponies she was talking to didn’t seem to notice. “I’m afraid so, dear. He made those tables appear in three big groups, and after making the last ones he just fell down on the spot. He was rushed right to the doctors, though, so I’m sure he’ll be okay.”
“I heard he’s a superhero, like in the comic books,” interjected the pegasus mare. “So he’s probably recovered already, and is walking around right now in his secret identity.”
“That’s dumb,” scoffed the earth mare. “Why would he put on some sort of disguise just to come back out here?”
“Okay, first of all,” answered the pegasus haughtily, “it’s not a ‘disguise,’ it’s a secret identity. And second, superheroes have them because they want to have a normal life too. Right now he can walk around and be all ‘hey, doesn’t this hayburger taste great? Pass the ketchup!’ without having everypony go all nuts over him for what he did.”
The earth mare rolled her eyes. “Oh, I think there are some ponies who are definitely nuts where he’s concerned.”
“Hey!”
The unicorn mare shook her head, an exasperated smile on her face as she rolled her eyes. “You’ll have to excuse them, dear,” she smiled at Cozy, gently leading the crystal mare away from the other two as they started to bicker. “I swear, those two are the nicest girls you’ll ever meet, but they don’t have a brain between them.” She glanced back, then leaned in closer to Cozy as she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I have it on good authority that Lex person is actually an escapee from Tartarus, like Tirek was. He’s trying to turn over a new leaf so that the princesses don’t send him back.”
“Ah,” nodded Cozy awkwardly. “Good to know. Listen, I’m going to go look for my friend.”
“Alright. Good luck, dear.” The mare waved before heading back towards her friends, who were still arguing with each other.
Sighing, Cozy halfheartedly returned the gesture before walking away. For some reason that encounter had left her feeling exhausted, despite having only taken a few minutes, and she wondered if she should just go back and lie down. But the idea of resting next to the wrapped bundle that was Pillow’s preserved body sent a wave of discomfort through her, and she suddenly wanted to be anywhere but there. And that thought horrified her. He’s my husband! I shouldn’t be feeling like that!
Fighting back a fresh wave of tears, Cozy went to the next group of ponies to ask if they’d seen Aisle. But they hadn’t either, nor had the next group, nor the one after that. It was at that point that she went to go wander between the tables, thinking that he might have been there.
Although there were numerous seats that had been vacated – their haphazard positioning indicating that they’d had occupants until recently – there was still a great deal of food left over, some of it almost completely untouched. A serving bowl of honeyed pretzels was still half-full, next to which was a vat of potato salad that looked as though it had been completely overlooked. Further down, a chocolate cake had a large section cut out of it, allowing her to see the yellow material that the frosting covered, and off to the side was a large bowl of some pink liquid that had sliced lemons floating in it.
The sight, and the accompany smells, made Cozy’s mouth water, and she suddenly realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. It couldn’t have been more than a day, but she suddenly felt ravenous, and she licked her lips as she eyed an empty seat a few feet away. Slowly, she made her way over to it and sat down, looking around and half-expecting somepony to tell her that she couldn’t sit there. When that didn’t happen, she turned her attention to the feast spread out before her. I’ll just have a little, she assured herself, not stopping to wonder why she felt the need to justify eating something. Just enough to keep my strength up, and then I’ll leave.
Tentatively reaching out, she took a helping from the closest dish – a bowl of mashed potatoes – and took a bite. The taste was so exquisite that for a moment she couldn’t do anything except close her eyes and revel in the flavor, weeks of having lived on scavenged fare making it the best thing she had ever tasted. It was enough that she was already reaching for more before she swallowed what was in her mouth, and in moments she’d cleaned her plate, looking around for the next dish. She had just reached for a slice of a nearby pizza when something occurred to her: this is the first meal I’m having as a widow.
The thought made her freeze in place, crushing her under the weight of its enormity. Here she was, eating what tasted like the best food she’d ever had in her life, and she was doing it all alone. No matter that she was surrounded by ponies; her husband wasn’t there. He’d never be there again, and this meal and every other meal and everything else she ever did would be completely by herself. If we had just found him a little sooner, he’d be here right now, sharing this with me.
Tears started to fill her eyes again, and this time she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself from crying. Lurching backward, she practically threw herself out of her chair, heedless of the stares she drew as she stumbled away, a sob forming in her throat. Blindly, she stumbled between the long rows of chairs, her vision blurring as she started to weep. She could feel herself wanting to sit back down and eat her fill, and she hated herself for that. Pillow’s gone, and all I can think about is stuffing my face! she wailed internally. It’s like I don’t even care!
For long moments she ran, not looking where she was going, until she suddenly felt an explosion of pain as she hit something head-on, causing her to fall backward into a heap. Dimly, she registered hearing another voice cry out right in front of her at the same time, and she realized that she’d collided with someone. The knowledge made her feel even worse. All I’m doing is causing everypony trouble, she berated herself. I should have just killed myself when I had the chance! “I’m, I’m sorry,” she hiccupped, rubbing a hoof across her eyes. “I wasn’t looking where I was going, and-”
“Cozy?!”
Sniffling, Cozy blinked as her vision slowly came back into focus, revealing that the pony she had originally been searching for was right in front of her. “Aisle!”
He leapt to his hooves, immediately helping her up. “Are you alright?! Did something happen?!”
The frantic anxiety in his voice startled her; she’d seen him tense, worried, even scared plenty of times before, but the way he sounded now – as though barely keeping panic at bay – was enough to command her attention completely. He didn’t sound like that even when we first met Lex, she realized. And it wasn’t just his voice, either. His mane was tangled and unkempt. His eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles under them. “You look terrible,” she blurted.
He started, as though pinched. “I-I look…?” He couldn’t finish, trailing off before, a moment later, giving a snort. A moment later it turned into a snicker, and then a full-blown laugh. For a brief instant Cozy felt confused, before she realized that she must have looked dreadful with how she’d been crying so much. For her to say that he was the one who looked awful…it was absurd enough that she started to laugh as well.
That set Aisle off even more, which in turn made her laugh harder, and for long moments neither was able to do anything except shake with mirth, their tension dissipating. Finally, both started to calm down, slowly regaining control of themselves. As the last chuckle died away, both ponies looked at each other, each of them smiling warmly.
Later on, when they looked back on that moment, neither would be sure which of them kissed the other one first.
Turbo didn’t even try to keep the hostility out of his voice, glaring at the pegasus mare that had landed in front of them. She’d touched down just a moment ago, and as soon as he’d recognized her he had instantly darted forward, putting himself between her and Garden Gate. The sound of clopping hooves behind him let him know that the others had followed his lead, surrounding Garden in case this mare tried anything. I knew it was too good to last, he thought bitterly as he glared at the pony not ten feet in front of him.
They’d been among the last ponies to get some of the food Lex had conjured, due to Garden’s being in no state to participate in the mad rush that had ensued when the first two groups of tables appeared. It was only when the third and final set had been conjured that they’d been able to seat themselves. Even better, they’d been close enough to witness Lex slumping bonelessly to the ground immediately afterward, watching in surprise as he was quickly spirited to the medical tent. I hope he dies, Turbo had thought at the time. Maybe if he does, Garden will recover. But either Lex was still alive or Garden’s curses had survived him, because as far as Turbo could tell she was still struggling under them, her motions remaining slow and clumsy and her injured horn useless.
Despite that, the meal they’d all shared had been without a doubt the single happiest occasion they’d had since Vanhoover had fallen apart. It hadn’t been solely due to the food (which he’d been forced to admit was truly excellent, even if it was the product of Lex’s magic), but rather the atmosphere that had settled over everypony. The sheer number of ponies talking animatedly as they’d eaten, the sounds of toasting and laughter, had driven home what Turbo had known intellectually but hadn’t truly understood until then: they’d made it out. The nightmare that they’d been living in for so long was FINALLY over.
Even when they’d first met Lex’s group, it had been impossible to completely relax. They’d all been tense, worried about what would happen to them, and seeing what Lex had done to Garden had only confirmed their worst fears. The subsequent march out of the city and into the camp full of those same ponies that had once thrown rocks at them when they’d originally tried to leave Vanhoover hadn’t helped any.
But at that moment, sitting down to more food than they could possibly eat and surrounded by ponies who were smiling without reservation and making noise without fear, it had all fallen away. All of the coiled tension and persistent anxiety had broken up and disappeared, and the sensation had been enough to take Turbo’s breath away. Looking around at his companions – his friends – he’d been able to see that they all felt it too. Hopscotch had a look of wonder on her face, as though she’d forgotten she could feel that way. Slip ‘n’ Slide had started crying softly, his brother hugging him as he held back sobs. Granola Bar had started shaking, taking deep breaths and putting her fore-hooves on the table as if to steady herself. And Garden…
Garden had simply looked at all of them in turn, her eyes lingering on each of them one at a time, giving a small nod when they met her eyes. She hadn’t said anything; she hadn’t needed to. They all understood.
Turbo had been the last one she’d looked at, and he’d met her gaze evenly. In that moment he’d felt a million different words boiling up inside of him, and had known immediately that all of them were inadequate to describe how he felt right then. Instead, when she’d nodded to him, he’d responded the only way that seemed appropriate, reaching across the table to grab a basket of rolls, offering them to her.
The smile she’d given him then was a sight he’d remember until the day he died.
After that, they’d all eaten their fill before eventually deciding, at Funshine’s suggestion, to go play some of the games that were being set up. Everyone had been excited by the prospect of actually having fun again, and they’d been making their way towards one of the lawn games when a pink-and-white pegasus mare had landed in front of them, a large scythe stowed across her back. It had been enough to spoil everyone’s good mood, and Turbo felt his hackles rising as he glared at Cloudbank.
She, on the other hand, didn’t look to be concerned in the slightest by the angry ponies in front of her. And why should she be? thought Turbo sourly. It’s obvious that she’s in charge while Lex is out of commission. The sight of Lex’s weapon across her back was all the confirmation Turbo needed. He could still clearly recall seeing Lex use it to draw blood from Garden, blood that his curse had then shaped into the dark tattoo of a scythe that was still below her left eye, robbing her of her strength whenever she came within ten feet of anypony. Turbo wasn’t sure if Cloudbank could do something similar, but if she could…
“I want to ask for your help.”
Turbo blinked, not sure that he’d heard right. “What?” He could hear similar grunts of confusion coming from behind him.
“Lex wants me to find volunteers to head back into Vanhoover. I’m going to take some pon-”
“You can’t be serious!” To Turbo’s surprise, the voice was Granola Bar’s. “We just got out of that place, and you’re making us head back in?!”
“Nopony’s making you go anywhere,” snapped Cloudbank, giving Granola Bar a harsh look. “I told you, I’m looking for volunteers to go back into the city. If you don’t want to go you don’t have to-”
“Then why are we still talking about this?” interjected Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“Because,” answered Cloudbank, “you all are the ones who’re most familiar with what Vanhoover’s become.” She swung a wing out to indicate the rest of the camp. “Everypony here managed to get out of the city early on, and me and my friends were holed up in an apartment building most of the time. But you guys were out there, going from place to place, which means that you’re the best choice for getting to the city’s banks and takin-”
“I don’t believe this.” This time it was Turbo who interrupted. “You want us to put ourselves in danger again just so you can go rob a bank?!” The sheer audacity of this mare was unbelievable. Or is this Lex’s idea? Is he looking to get rich now that we’re out of danger? Maybe he thinks he deserves to be paid for everything he’s done?
If Cloudbank’s frown hadn’t telegraphed her anger, the way she literally ruffled her feathers would have. “We’re not going to rob anything! We need that money so that we can buy more food from the farms near here!” She gave a pointed glance at the tables of food before looking back at them. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Lex pushed himself pretty hard making all of that for you. It’s easier on him if we don’t keep making him do that over and over.”
And why should we care what’s easy for him? was what Turbo wanted to say, but he managed to hold his tongue, not wanting to provoke her. “If you want to know about the banks, then you should go talk to Piggy,” he informed her coldly. “His family has had their hooves in the city’s finances for generations.”
“I did,” replied Cloudbank flatly. “He told us all about the banks here,” – Turbo wondered for a split-second who “us” referred to, deciding she must have meant herself and Lex – “but now we need ponies that can actually get there and back in one piece.”
“Yeah, well, best of luck to you,” called Funshine. “In the meantime, we’re gonna toss some bean bags around, so see ya later.” That was good enough for Turbo, and he snorted as he started to walk, intent on going around Cloudbank.
“Wait,” came Garden’s voice, causing Turbo to freeze in place, surprised.
“Garden?” Hopscotch’s voice sounded as confused as he felt right then. “What’re you doing?”
Garden slowly stepped forward until she was right next to Turbo. “I volunteer.”
For a moment Cloudbank looked confused, then she looked mildly upset. “No!”
“We went to one of the banks after Vanhoover fell,” insisted Garden. “I know what the conditions are like inside.” Listening in stunned disbelief, it took Turbo a moment to remember what Garden was talking about. We went there because we thought a place with a vault would be a safe place to hide. Unfortunately, the ghouls had guessed that some ponies would think that way. It had been nothing short of a miracle that any of them had gotten out alive. But she won’t be that lucky a second time, not with how she is now.
He was about to protest Garden’s decision, but Cloudbank beat him to the punch. “I am not taking you into Vanhoover. Not the way you are now.”
“Without me you’ll have a much ha-”
“I’ll go!” Turbo heard himself say.
Both Garden and Cloudbank turned to look at him, as though they’d forgotten that he was there. “You will?” asked the latter.
Garden didn’t give him time to answer. “Turbo, no. I have to be the one to do this.” The frown she gave him then was enough to make him hesitate, old habits kicking in from back when she’d been the one to decide what they did, and for a moment he considered backing down.
But only for a moment. “You’ve done enough,” he assured her. He stepped closer than he knew was polite, his voice lowering until it was just above a whisper. “I know you feel like you need to make up for what you did before…when you were Fencer.” The look of pain that crossed her face in response to that stabbed at his heart, but he kept going, the words spilling from his mouth before he had a chance to think about what he was saying. “I’m trying to tell you, this is how you do that. We are how you do that.” Granola Bar’s words came back to him then. “You paid the price for all of us to make it out, so now I want to do what I can to help you get back what you lost.” He stopped after that, not sure if he was making any sense at all.
He must have been, because Garden was looking at him with a surprised expression. “Turbo…”
Looking past her, he fixed his eyes on Cloudbank. “I’ll go with you to the bank. You just say where and when.”
Cloudbank nodded before pointing back toward the medical tent. “We’ll rendezvous there at noon. This is going to be a quick trip, so as long as you can find a weapon you should be fine.”
“Fine, and one more thing.” He stepped around Garden then, approaching Cloudbank. He saw her tense, but she didn’t flinch as he stopped within leg’s reach of her, again speaking quietly. “After I do this, I want Lex to remove those curses he laid on Garden.”
Cloudbank’s eyes narrowed, a look of disapproval crossing her face, though he wasn’t sure if that had more to do with the request itself or his trying to demand it in exchange for his help. “And I want Pillowcase to come back to life, but I guess we’re both going to be disappointed.”
Turbo let out a slow breath, knowing that getting angry wouldn’t serve him here. “Punishing her like this won’t bring him back either.” He paused to let that sink in. “Lex can curse me instead, if he wants, but she’s suffered enough. If I help you now, I want her to be forgiven.”
Cloudbank looked at him for a long moment before speaking. “I’ll take it to Lex. No promises.” With a flap of her wings, she launched herself into the air. “Be in front of the medical tent at noon,” she repeated before flying off.
Turbo watched her go. Although he was about to run right back into the horror show that he’d been trying to escape from for weeks on end, he couldn’t bring himself to feel upset at the prospect. The last time he’d been in Vanhoover, he’d been struggling to stay alive simply because he didn’t want to lose any more than he already had. But this time would be different.
Ticket Stub winced at the announcement, both because of the words and the resigned tone in the engineer’s voice. But his reaction was mild compared to the angry shouting that immediately erupted throughout the car. Reflexively, Ticket glanced back to make sure that the rear door was closed. He knew it didn’t matter – since this was a cargo train, there were no passengers to be upset by the uproar – but long years of working as an attendant made the action automatic.
“Did they say why?!”
The yell came from the train’s stoker, a unicorn mare with a dark blue coat and a blonde mane and tail. Her cutie mark was a length of railroad track laid down in the shape of a heart. Coal Hopper, he reminded himself. Her name is Coal Hopper.
“The same reason as last time,” sighed the engineer. “They’re making repairs to the tracks, and they’re not sure when they’ll be finished.”
Another round of angry cries broke out at that, and Ticket Stub heard more than one pony bitterly remark how they’d been saying that for over a month. Others were simply cursing, and their choice of language was enough to make Ticket Stub’s ears fold back. This was a mistake, he thought to himself as he slowly moved away from the angriest ponies. Though given the mood in the car right then, there were very few who weren’t angry. I should have stuck to working with passengers, he decided as he opened an exterior door and slipped outside, wanting to get away from the angry mob.
Admittedly, this little expedition had seemed like a good idea at first. He’d been vacationing in the Crystal Empire when he’d heard that several of the local shipping lines had a backlog of cargo for some reason, and were paying extra for any experienced rail-ponies who wanted to lend a hoof with transporting the excess goods. Given that his wallet had been lighter than he was happy with – his own fault, he knew, but that jousting practice center he’d found had just been so much fun! – he’d quickly signed up. How hard could it be? he’d thought at the time.
As it turned out, it had been rather hard. Since he’d spent his career overseeing commuters taking passenger lines, he hadn’t been ready for the sheer amount of physical labor that went into loading a full-to-bursting cargo train. Worse, since they were on a schedule, the pace had been one that he’d only barely been able to keep up with, and by the time they’d gotten the last of the cargo loaded he’d been sweaty and panting, earning more than a few good-natured chuckles from the rest of the crew. The thought that this was only the beginning, since the job called for unloading outbound cargo and reloading inbound cargo from several depot points on the far side of the Unicorn Mountains, had left him groaning as he’d boarded the train.
Still, there was plenty of time to rest on the trip out there. Normally it would have taken just shy of a week for a train leaving the Crystal Empire to round the Unicorns, but Ticket had overheard the engineer ordering that the boiler to be kept “as hot as possible” in order to try and shave time off of their trip. That had made Ticket slightly nervous – he still recalled how, just a few weeks ago, the train he’d been on had come across a broken patch of track in the middle of the night; if they’d been going full speed, they almost certainly would have derailed – but the engineer hadn’t been worried. “The only broken track I’m worried about is the one at the Way,” he’d replied.
That had left Ticket rather confused, until he’d recounted the words to one of the other ponies making the trip. They had informed him that “the Way” was Windigo Way, the name given to the narrow band of track that slid between the Frozen North’s southern border and the northernmost of the Unicorn Mountains. Apparently it was well-known among the ponies who conducted trains throughout the region as a potential danger spot, due to the unpredictable weather of the Frozen North. While not common, it would occasionally surge past its borders, bringing disaster with it: iced rails, deep snowdrifts settling on the track, and fallen boulders dislodged by fierce winds were all problems that had been known to occur.
Of course, he’d been told, there were supposed to be ponies on hoof to deal with that. The railroad company always had some repair supplies and a small group of ponies, no more than a half-dozen or so, on hoof to deal with any problems that came up. Rotated out every few months, the on-site ponies’ only job was to make sure that the tracks along the Way stayed clear, repairing what they needed to and replacing anything they couldn’t fix. While not at the level of a full repair team, they should have had the supplies, know-how, and horsepower to keep the tracks clear under anything short of cataclysmic circumstances.
But as the trip had continued, Ticket had overheard enough snatches of conversation and anxious grumbling to put together that something wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. Apparently, just over a month ago there’d been some sort of persistent string of disasters at the Way, and no matter how quickly they on-site ponies cleaned it up something else happened in short order. As a result, no trains had been able to pass through, hence why there was such a backlog of goods to move. “But that’s not the worst part,” one brakemare had confided to Ticket as they’d passed the halfway point of their journey. “The worst part is that they can’t reroute everything to ship stuff in from the other direction.”
That had been news to Ticket. “What do you mean?”
“You know how the tracks in this region make a big loop, right? From Canterlot, they go north to the Crystal Empire, then sharply west through the plains before squeezing through the Way, and then heading southwest along the mountains to Vanhoover, before turning east and hugging the northern edge of White Tail Woods all the way back to Canterlot?” When Ticket nodded she’d continued. “So think about it: if all this stuff we’re carrying has to get where it’s going, why didn’t they just ship it the other way?”
“I don’t know,” Ticket had been forced to admit.
“It’s because something’s going on in Vanhoover,” whispered the brakemare, glancing around melodramatically, as if afraid somepony would overhear them. “I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason the train operators haven’t been scheduling any trips there for a while now.”
“How come?”
“Based on what I’ve heard, it has something to do with how the three most powerful families there are fighting. My guess is that it’s the Hoofingfords. They’re trying to upstage the railroad in order to make their maritime shipping even more lucrative.” The brakemare had nodded solemnly then, as though she’d just revealed a great secret.
Ticket hadn’t said anything in reply, but he could still remember the shudder that had gone down his spine back then. First the issue with the tracks on the way to Tall Tale, then problems along Windigo Way, and now Vanhoover wasn’t being serviced? What’s going on all of a sudden? he’d wondered.
“Look, this isn’t that hard! Just roll them out of the way!”
The angry voice drew Ticket out of his reverie, and curiosity made his hooves move towards the source. Moving alongside the train, he passed the locomotive and spied Coal Hopper – who, like himself, had apparently exited the train at some point – confronting four ponies that he assumed were the on-site crew. In contrast to their calm expressions, she was gesturing angrily towards several large rocks that were laying on the track a few dozen feet further on. “Those aren’t even that big! Just grab a lever or something and move them so we can get through!”
“It’s too dangerous,” answered an earth stallion in a vest and hardhat.
“You need to go back,” intoned a pegasus mare in a similar attire.
“We need to deliver this stuff!” snarled Coal Hopper. “We’re already over a month behind, and these oats need to be sold! We’ve got tanks of milk that are getting ready to go bad, apples that are at the end of their shelf life, and eggs so old they’re almost ready to hatch! Not to mention cotton, beeswax, peanuts, and lots of other stuff that should have been on market shelves weeks ago! And don’t even get me started on all of the stuff we should have picked up and brought back already! It’s not all potatoes and cabbages, you know!” She stepped forward and jabbed the hardhat-wearing earth stallion in the chest. “If we don’t bring back more gold to mint new bits from, how exactly do you think you’re going to get paid, buster?”
“It’s too dangerous,” he repeated, his tone not changing.
“You need to go back,” echoed another member of the crew, a unicorn stallion who looked like a manager.
“Stop saying that!” shrieked Coal Hopper, her face turning red. “If I hear that just one more time…!”
Worried that she was about to completely blow her stack, Ticket Stub trotted forward. “Listen,” he ventured, trying not to flinch when everypony looked at him. “Maybe we can help.” Reaching Coal Hopper’s side, he pointed at the rocks up ahead. “There’s a lot of us on the train. I bet if we all work together, we can get everything cleared away in a few hours. I’m sure if you’re here to oversee things we’ll be safe, and when we’re done you should be able to replace any dented sections of track. Then we’ll be able to keep going, right?”
He smiled as he finished, but it faltered as he saw that the on-site ponies’ expressions didn’t change. They remained calm, almost stoic, neither smiling nor frowning. Or even blinking, he realized, starting to feel a little nervous.
“It’s too dangerous,” said the fourth member of the group, a pegasus stallion.
Having clapped a hoof over her mouth, Ticket gave the four ponies in front of him a shaky grin. “Right, too dangerous. We get it. We’ll just, um, head back then. See you.” He had to physically restrain Coal Hopper as he slowly pulled her away from the creepy ponies, making sure to keep his eyes on them as he did. It was only when he’d dragged her into the shadow of the locomotive, out of sight from those four, that he let her go, sighing as he let his smile fall.
But he didn’t have time to relax as Coal Hopper grabbed his collar with her telekinesis, yanking him over so that he was nose-to-nose with her. “You have one chance to explain yourself, otherwise I’m going to rearrange your face,” she hissed.
Turning pale, Ticket almost bit his tongue trying to explain. “S-something was wrong with them!”
“No kidding! They don’t realize how serious this is! If we can’t get this stuff through now-”
“No, I mean, something’s really wrong with them!” Ticket struggled to explain. “Like, they’re not blinking, and their eyes aren’t focusing on you when they look at you.”
Coal Hopper frowned deeply, but let Ticket go. “So, what? You think they’re all sleepwalking or something?”
Coughing slightly, Ticket adjusted his collar. “I don’t know. But I don’t think that talking to them will help.”
“I was done talking when you dragged me back here,” snorted Coal Hopper. “So now what?”
Ticket shook his head. “I don’t know. But I think we should talk to everypony else before we try anything.”
Coal Hopper frowned at that, but finally sighed. “Fine. But Celestia help me, we are not turning around before we do what we came here to do!”
“R-right,” agreed Ticket nervously. I just hope we can figure out why those ponies out there don’t seem to want us to do that.
“Nosey. Hey, Nosey. You awake?”
Sonata waited for a moment as her best friend opened her eyes, looking at her blankly for a moment before smiling and starting to stretch. “Oh, hey Sonata. What’s going on?”
Smiling back, Sonata passed her a plate loaded with food. “I know you said that you wanted me to save some food for you for after you woke up, but I was a little worried that everything might be gone by then.”
“Ah. Thank you.” Taking the plate, Nosey looked it over before lifting a hay burger in her hooves and biting into it.
Sonata let her eat in peace for a moment, waiting until she’d swallowed her first mouthful before speaking up. “So, um, are you feeling okay?”
“Hm?” Nosey raised an eyebrow at her as she took another bite.
“Well, you were sleeping kind of weird. You were like, all stiff and stuff, and it looked really uncomfortable.” She frowned in worry. “Is it because of all that stuff Lex said before?”
Nosey paused for a split second before she continued chewing. Once she’d ingested her food, she gave Sonata a small smile, looking vaguely amused. “You’re sweet, but you don’t have to worry about me. I was just thinking about something, was all.”
“For realsies?” Sonata tilted her head. “Must have been something unpleasant, with how tense you looked. Are you sure it wasn’t Lex? You don’t need to spare my feelings. I know what a tremendous jerk he can be.” Her smile fell away at that last part.
Nosey’s eyes narrowed just a fraction, but otherwise her expression didn’t change. “No, it wasn’t about Lex. It was just a random thought.”
“Oh yeah? What was it?”
“Well…” The corners of Nosey’s mouth turned up, as though laughing at a private joke. “Sometimes, no matter how much you train, there’s no Way forward.”
Cloudbank made it almost halfway to Lex’s tent before Severance made it plain that it wouldn’t be ignored any longer.
She’d been surprised when the weapon had objected to Turbo’s terms, but had managed to keep it off of her face at the time. She’d been getting good at that, as the weapon had been ceaselessly inundating her with information about the various rites and tenets of the Night Mare’s religion all morning. But when Turbo had made it clear that he wanted Garden Gate’s curses removed in exchange for his help, Severance had made its displeasure known, displeasure that had only increased when she’d told the pegasus stallion that she’d take his demand to Lex. Now, as the weapon leapt off her back and swung around to hover in the air in front of her, barring her path, it seemed that it was no longer content to simply have its opinion disregarded.
“Look, what’s your problem?” Cloudbank snapped, agitated despite herself. Although she’d decided to try and put her aversion to Severance aside when it told her, earlier that morning, that it wanted to instruct her on how to strengthen her ties to the Night Mare, that didn’t mean that she felt comfortable with it. The memory of driving the thing through Drafty’s body still haunted her. “I’m telling Lex what Turbo said so that he can decide what to do, so what’s the big deal?!” Her shout was enough draw the attention of several nearby ponies, their eyes widening as they beheld her arguing with a floating scythe.
Embarrassed to have made a spectacle of herself, and knowing that she needed to be touching Severance to “hear” its reply, she took hold of the scythe with her mouth. It didn’t resist as she flew upward, high enough that her speaking out loud wouldn’t be easily overheard. When she was far enough up that the ponies on the ground looked like colored dots, she started circling slowly. She would have preferred settling down on a cloud to talk, but the sky was clear in every direction. Huffing, she returned the scythe to its place on her back as she listened to its reply.
Upon hearing what it had to say, Cloudbank couldn’t help but snort. “Of course I know what he’ll say, but that doesn’t-” She stopped as Severance spoke up again, pointing out that since she was already certain what Lex’s answer would be, and since it was the same as her own feelings on the matter, she didn’t need to seek his approval. Instead, the scythe insisted, she should simply exercise the authority that he’d imbued her with and make a decision herself.
That was enough to bring an uncomfortable frown to Cloudbank’s face, reminding her of Drafty’s theory that Lex was putting his trust in her. “Yeah, well...I don’t know,” she muttered uneasily. “It might be that if he finds out that I made that decision without consulting him, he’ll get all upset that I was stealing his authority or something.” But Severance had a different outlook on the situation, arguing that Lex would approve of her upholding the decision that he had made. Moreover, to give in to Turbo’s demand would not only be foolish, but weak. And the Night Mare abhorred weakness.
It had just started to launch into a recitation about how there was no sympathy given to those who showed mercy and were betrayed for it when Cloudbank rolled her eyes. “Okay, look…I get that you want me to learn all this stuff about the Night Mare, and I’m okay with that. Really. But do you honestly think that right now is the best time for all this?”
Severance’s response was to bluntly point out that their situation left them with no “good time,” and so they’d need to use whatever time they had. Although Cloudbank had to admit that the scythe wasn’t wrong in its assessment, she wasn’t quite ready to abandon the argument. “Maybe you’re right, but why are you telling me all this? Since Lex is just going to edit it anyway, shouldn’t you just tell this stuff to him directly and cut out the middlemare?” She gestured to herself at that last word, irritated. Another thought occurred to her then, but this one she kept to herself. For that matter, if Lex has the Night Mare’s favor, why doesn’t he know all this already?
The answer that Severance gave her was so surprising, however, that for a moment Cloudbank forgot to flap her wings: Lex didn’t want to learn about the Night Mare’s religion.
“What…? Hold on, that doesn’t… What?” she sputtered, not sure what to make of what she’d just been told. “The Night Mare is his goddess, the same as me! Why wouldn’t he want to learn about her?” Although she hadn’t known Lex very long, she felt confident that he was the type who’d devour any new knowledge that was made known to him. The idea that he’d turn his nose up at any new information was hard enough to believe; the idea that he wouldn’t want to learn the prayers and rites and tenets dedicated to his own goddess was absolutely insane. And it also contradicted what he’d said about wanting to scrutinize what Severance taught her…didn’t it? “If he didn’t want to learn about the Night Mare’s worship, then why would he want to review this at all?”
But Severance had an answer for that too, asserting that Lex’s only concern with editing the doctrinal canon of the Night Mare’s teachings was how to best utilize them as a tool to strengthen pony society. Worship, the scythe assured her, was not something Lex was interested in. Nor did the Night Mare require it of him.
That last part had left Cloudbank’s head spinning, growing more and more confused as the conversation progressed. “But…I thought that was how all this worked. That gods reward those who worship them with spells.” She’d learned that much before she’d ever even heard of the Night Mare, during those weeks when she, Drafty, and Aisle had been hiding together with Cozy and Pillowcase. It had been the two crystal ponies who had first introduced them to the concept of “gods” and how they could empower devoted mortal adherents with magical powers. Lex had affirmed that when he’d told her to pray to the Night Mare for the power to heal Drafty in the aftermath of the battle at the bay. “If that’s not the case for Lex, then why is the Night Mare giving him so much power?”
For a few moments Severance was silent, and Cloudbank had the distinct impression that it was trying to figure out exactly what to tell her. Finally, the weapon’s voice filled her mind again, telling her that Lex honored the Night Mare and advanced her interests simply because of who he was; that the manner in which he thought, acted, and lived his life served as an example of everything the Night Mare stood for. Because of that, she had elected to reward and empower him so that he could continue to champion her ideals. Cloudbank couldn’t help but frown at that particular revelation. She’d known that Lex had a closer relationship with their goddess than she did, but finding out that the Night Mare apparently held him in such high esteem was discouraging nonetheless. First Drafty and now the Night Mare. Why does every mare I like seem to like him more than me? Out loud, however, all she said was, “Great, so in other words he’s her favorite and always will be, all without ever uttering so much as a prayer, is that it?”
She almost expected Severance to laugh at her, but to her surprise the scythe’s mental voice was almost comforting as it spoke, telling her that there were many different ways to serve the Night Mare. While Lex’s role might be to act as a living example of her tenets, there were ways that Cloudbank could enact the Night Mare’s will that Lex could never fulfill…and goddess-given powers that he would likely never be able to access. But, the scythe assured Cloudbank, she could, if her service was long and faithful.
The words sent a shudder down Cloudbank’s spine. Powers that even Lex wouldn’t have… “What sort of powers?” The thought was tantalizing enough that the question spilled out of her mouth of its own accord.
Spells, came Severance’s answer. Powerful divine spells that Lex – who had already conditioned himself to learn his own magic – was far too poor a channel to be able to use. Spells with enough power to rend the ground asunder, restore life to the dead, or even call upon the Night Mare to directly intercede in the mortal world. And those were only the beginning; there were other powers that she would be able to earn for herself if she devoted herself to working the Night Mare’s will.
For a moment, Cloudbank just imagined what it would be like, to be that powerful. To not feel helpless and afraid the way she had when Vanhoover had fallen apart. To be able to protect the ponies she cared about, and let them know that they didn’t need to be worried as long as she was there. The sensation was enough to make her chest tighten, and for a moment she wanted it so badly that it was almost a physical pain. Then the moment passed and she let out a slow breath. “Tell me what I have to do…”
Turbo was getting ready to toss the horseshoe at the stake when he spotted Cloudbank landing a short distance away. As she touched down she made eye contact with him, nodding her head toward the medical tent before turning and heading over there herself. Frowning, he watched her for a moment before glancing up at the sky, confirming that it wasn’t noon yet. She said to meet her then, so why does she want to talk now? This was obviously about his request that Garden be forgiven in exchange for his helping her raid the local banks, but he couldn’t decide if her getting back to him so quickly was a good thing or not.
I guess there’s only one way to find out. Dropping the horseshoe, Turbo turned to go after Cloudbank. “You guys keep going without me,” he called back to his friends. “I’ll be right back.”
“You sure you’re going to be okay?” asked Hopscotch.
“We can go with you, you know,” offered Slip ‘n’ Slide.
That brought a smile to Turbo’s face, but he shook his head. “I’ll be alright. You guys keep having fun.”
“Just be careful,” cautioned Garden. “And don’t do anything foolish.” The word “again” hung in the air, silent but obvious to everypony.
Smirking a little, Turbo nodded to her. Although she hadn’t been happy that he’d volunteered to work with Cloudbank in her stead, he was sure that Garden knew who the foolish one was. As though you could go on such a dangerous mission in your condition. Even now, she needed everypony to back away from her just so she could toss her horseshoe, using her mouth since her horn was still out of commission.
It took barely a minute to head over to the medical tent, where Cloudbank was waiting for him. Trotting up to her, he decided to get right to the point. “So, what did Lex say?”
“Nothing,” she replied, and Turbo had just enough time to feel confused before she continued. “I didn’t tell him, because I don’t need to. The answer is no.”
Turbo bristled. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” Cloudbank’s face was neither angry nor mocking, instead showing a neutral expression. “Garden Gate’s curses aren’t going anywhere.”
Turbo grit his teeth, flaring his wings angrily. “Where do you get off… I want to speak to Lex about this!”
“You’re speaking to me,” answered Cloudbank coldly. “I’m the one Lex placed in charge of this mission, I’m the one you tried to cut a deal with, and now I’m the one telling you that it’s not going to happen.”
Turbo glared at her and seethed. “Then you can forget about my helping you with anything!”
Cloudbank’s lip curled, giving him a look of contempt. “We’re going to collect money so that we can feed everypony here, including you and Garden both. Whether or not you want to help with that is entirely up to you.” She didn’t wait for him to reply before she turned and walked away, snubbing him.
Turbo growled as he watched her go, knowing that she’d just called his bluff. He’d already told Garden that he’d go in her place, and now he was going to have to endure the additional humiliation of doing so after Cloudbank had shot down his perfectly reasonable request to lift Garden’s curses. Great. Just great, he thought bitterly as he headed back toward his friends.
Now we’ve got a second Lex that we’re going to have to deal with.
C. Shells couldn’t resist the urge to smile as she looked over her crew, each and every one of them having raised a hoof.
Some had been quicker than others, of course. Ocean Spray had been the first to do so, practically leaping up with how fast he’d put his foreleg above his head. Sandbar had had followed suit, wearing that goofy grin that always made him look like a colt. After that the others had all copied the gesture, some with hearty shouts and raucous laughter while others did so more solemnly. Scrubby had been the very last one to raise his hoof, a queasy look on his face as he did so.
“You all did hear me say that I only wanted one of you to go with me, right?” she asked wryly.
“With all due respect, Captain,” said Ocean Spray, “more would be better. If there are a lot of bits left in that bank, then they’re going to be hard to carry. You’ll need a team to get even a fraction of them out of there.”
C. Shells shook her head, the smile still on her face. “Cloudbank and I discussed this. She thinks that a small group is better, and I agree with her. The more ponies that go in, the more will be in danger. We both believe that it’s better to have everypony come back with nothing to show for it than to lose lives trying to make it big.” Ocean Spray didn’t look entirely convinced, but he didn’t say anything, and C. Shells had to resist the urge to grin wider. Although that life-or-death battle they’d all participated in had convinced her to break her own rule about starting a relationship with a member of her crew, she’d still been nervous. She’d heard plenty of stories about how a “workplace romance” between a captain and a crewmate could destroy discipline, erode morale, and in some cases lead to serious disasters while at sea. But Ocean Spray had completely allayed her fears, carrying out orders when she gave them, calling her “Captain” when they were around others, and overall acting like a model sailor. Well, except for the fact that we don’t have a ship anymore.
“We might…” Scrubby barely got the words out before he had to pause, gulping in what looked to C. Shells like an attempt to literally swallow his nervousness before trying again. “We might be able to find a wagon or something in the city. If we load it up, we’d be able to carry out a lot more without taking too many ponies.”
“Forget that!” laughed Sandbar, giving Scrubby a playful shove. “We’re going to be knocking off a bank! You know what that makes us, right?” He looked around, apparently unfazed by the shrugs and blank looks he received in reply. “Pirates!” he whooped. “We’re actually going to be bona fide pirates! Come on, let’s all give a big ‘arr!’”
C. Shells couldn’t help but chuckle at that. Before she’d called her crew over, Sandbar had been telling several other ponies – most of them mares, she’d noted with a roll of her eyes – about what he was calling the “Battle of the Bay.” Naturally, his version had him performing several feats of daring heroism, slaying terrible monsters and saving the lives of multiple ponies as he led everyone to a stunning victory. And of course, he’d made sure to indicate his scar at every opportunity, presenting it as a token of his exploits. While most of the small crowd he’d gathered had looked skeptical, a few were wide-eyed at the tale. I wonder how awed they would have been if they knew how he really got that scar? wondered C. Shells, recalling how Lex had saved the earth stallion’s life when they first landed in Vanhoover.
The thought made her pause, her smile fading as she glanced back at the field hospital where Lex was recuperating. It wasn’t lost on her that he’d injured himself creating food for everyone, an act of self-sacrifice that was hard to reconcile with how viciously he’d cursed Garden Gate yesterday. But that’s normal for him, she thought. He’ll insult us in one breath and then save all of our lives the next. It had been that way ever since they’d first come to Vanhoover, when he’d coldly told her what to do aboard her own ship, only to turn around and protect them when the monsters attacked. She just couldn’t figure him out.
Nor, she knew, could anypony else in the camp. Without knowing anything concrete about their benefactor, rumors and gossip were spreading like wildfire throughout the camp, and had reached a fever pitch in the wake of Cloudbank’s speech and Lex’s demonstration of his magical might. From what C. Shells had heard, everypony had an opinion, and no one knew what they were talking about. At this rate, Tall Tale will need to give its name to this place.
“Captain?”
The voice drew her from her thoughts, and she looked towards the pony that had spoken up. “What is it, Rose?”
Stepping forward, Compass Rose lowered her raised hoof to rub the back of her neck, looking uncomfortable. “Captain, you know I’m not afraid of going with you,” she started, her tone making it clear that she was making a disclaimer. “I fought those monsters, the same as everypony here, and I’ll do it again if that’s what you need.”
“But?”
“Is this really what we should be doing?” Rose adjusted her glasses as she spoke, and for a moment C. Shells couldn’t help but marvel that her pilot had managed to keep them through everything that had happened. “Our ship is gone, we made it out of the city, and Lex looks like he has things well in hoof here.” She waved a hoof at the tables of food, illustrating her point. “Shouldn’t we be thinking of a way to get home?” Several of the ponies behind her nodded and muttered their agreement, with Scrubby nodding his head up and down so fast it was almost a blur.
C. Shells waited for the noise to die down before she spoke, giving Rose a sympathetic look. “Alright.” She ignored the surprised looks she received then, letting her eyes sweep over each of her crew in turn to let them know that what she said next was directed at all of them. “How do we get back to Tall Tale?” When nopony answered immediately, C. Shells pointed a hoof at Compass Rose. “Rose, how do we get back to Tall Tale?”
Despite having been the one to bring the point up, Rose flinched slightly. “Well…I said we should be thinking of a way to get back…”
“And that’s what we’re doing,” nodded C. Shells. “So, what do you think? How do we get back?”
Rose rubbed the back of her head again, needing a long moment before she spoke. “Maybe we figured out why the train wasn’t coming here…”
“And how do we do that?” pressed C. Shells. When Rose looked down in discouragement, it was clear to everypony that she didn’t have an answer. “How do we get back to Tall Tale?” repeated C. Shells, looking around again.
“Maybe we could make it there on hoof?” piped up Scrubby. “It’s not that far away from here.”
“It’s, what, twenty miles of swamps between here and there? Twenty-five?” scoffed Sandbar. “You’d get eaten by a cragadile before you got halfway there.”
“Cragadiles don’t live in those swamps,” noted Rose sourly.
“No, but I bet there’s a lot of snakes and bears and other dangerous animals,” he replied, and this time Rose didn’t contradict him.
“Maybe the pegasi could fly us all there?” ventured Scrubby. His tone of voice was hopeful, but the look on his face was pleading.
Ocean Spray, however, was shaking his head before the other stallion had even finished speaking. “Are you kidding? Pegasi make up a third of our crew; there’s no way that we could carry two ponies apiece for twenty-odd miles.”
“I heard that Rainbow Dash once carried four ponies all by herself,” shot back Scrubby. “They were falling from Cloudsdale, and she caught all of them and flew them back up.”
Ocean Spray gave a helpless shrug. “None of us here are Rainbow Dash,” he said, the look on his face suggesting that he was amazed that he even had to say that.
“Everypony be quiet,” ordered C. Shells, and all talking ceased instantly. She looked her crew over again, and this time her expression was harder. “I want to go home as much as anyone here, but we need to face the fact that that’s impossible right now. The train isn’t running, going by hoof or by wing is impossible, and there aren’t any ships or boats that we can use.” They’d confirmed that last one before they’d left the warehouse shelter, during the few days when Lex had been busy curing those ponies that tentacle-fish thing had infected. Ocean Spray and a few other pegasi had flown up and down the harbor, confirming that there were no serviceable ships to be found. Between the mass exodus that had taken place early in the disaster, and their own ship being smashed by that kraken, it wasn’t hard to figure out why that was.
“I know that’s discouraging,” she continued. “Believe me, I’d much rather be home right now. But don't forget, the ponies here don’t have a home anymore.” She swung a hoof out to point at Vanhoover. “They don’t just have no way to go anywhere, they have nowhere to go. And if I’m stuck here with them, then I want to do everything I can to help them out, because right now that’s what I can do.” She noted that more than a few of her crew were nodding, and even those that weren’t were listening attentively. “Now, I know that this wasn’t what any of us signed up for. We were just supposed to bring Lex and Sonata and all those doctors here, and maybe take some of the worst-off ponies back to Tall Tale, and that was it. Only we got more than we bargained for.”
She couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if they’d tried to turn around right after that first attack, when the sahuagin had boarded their ship. We could have dropped Lex and the others off and immediately headed back. If we’d left right then… She didn’t finish the thought, knowing that it was impossible to say whether they would have made it back to Tall Tale, or if the sahuagin or the kraken or some other sea monster would have caught them before they could. If they did, we all would have died, she knew. She shook the thought off, knowing that she needed to finish her impromptu speech if she wanted to nip this in the bud. Rose wasn’t a panicky pony; quite the opposite, she was one of the most levelheaded members of her crew. If she wanted to abandon the Vanhoover ponies and find a way home, then it was certain that a considerable portion of the crew felt that way also, and C. Shells knew that if she didn’t speak to that right now, there’d be far fewer hooves raised the next time she asked them to do something dangerous.
“We got more than we bargained for,” she repeated, “and each and every one of you stepped up. Whether it was fixing a broken door or fighting a horde of monsters, you never balked or backed down or refused to help. And after all that, after doing more than was ever asked or expected of you, you all raised your hooves just now when I asked you to go back into danger for everypony else’s sake.”
She could see the effect her words were having, now. Ocean Spray was giving her a warm look that he usually reserved for when they were alone together. Sandbar’s grin had faded, and for once he was showing a humble expression. Rose kept her gaze on the ground, unable to look her in the face. Scrubby rubbed his eyes with one hoof, his breathing shaky. The sight of them all made a warm sensation spread through C. Shells’ chest, and she didn’t have to think about what to say next. “I’ve never been more proud to be your captain, because I know I have the finest crew ever to sail a ship. And that won’t change if you decide that you’ve done enough and want to try for home. Celestia knows you’ve all more than earned it.”
“Captain…” Scrubby’s soft cry was echoed by several other members of the crew, and C. Shells found herself blinking back tears all of a sudden.
“But for those of you who don’t,” she quickly continued, knowing she needed to wrap this up before she lost her composure, “for those of you who still feel like you have more to give, I’ll ask one more time. Who here will go back into Vanhoover with me?”
This time, every hoof shot into the air without hesitation.
Controlling his thoughts was something that came easily to Lex.
Learning to contain large amounts of magical energy within purely-conceptual mental frameworks had required him to reorder his thought processes, a task he had been more than up to even as a colt. After more than two years of teaching himself to think in different ways, of expanding his mind to the point where he could store energy within the discrete boundaries of exactingly-structured ideas, manipulating his own conscious and deliberate thought processes had become second-nature to him. Now, he could pursue multiple lines of thought at once, maintain theoretical constructs that wouldn’t decay if he didn’t pay attention to them, and suppress associative links that he didn’t want to maintain.
None of those abilities were flawless, however. The same way that even the most proficient gymnast could still trip and fall, Lex still found imperfections within the structure of his own mind. Stray thoughts and unintentional associations could be banished with ease, but they still happened in the first place (to say nothing of that miserable tulpa the Night Mare had inflicted on him). Integrating new information with the sum total of his extant knowledge and extrapolating subsequent associations was still something that he needed to actively concentrate on, meaning that it was possible to overlook something if he didn’t know what to focus on (which he suspected he’d done with Block Party). Theoretical metrics could still fail when put into practical use due to unforeseen circumstances or insufficient data (such as how he hadn’t anticipated the backlash caused by his recent attempt to set up a recursive feedback loop between physically gathering magic and using that magic to enhance his physicality). Those flaws and more still dogged him, even after years of honing his mind.
But of all his limitations, none bothered Lex more than his inability to control his feelings the same way he could his thoughts. For all the structure and discipline he’d learned, none of it was useful for quieting the perpetual turbulence that his emotions seemed to roil in. The most he could achieve was ignoring his passions in favor of rationality, but he seemed to fail at that more often than he succeeded. It was a source of supreme frustration for him…something he knew to be ironic.
As such, Lex couldn’t help but stew in his own anger as he waited for Sonata to respond to his summons, growing more and more upset with every minute that passed. The fact that he didn’t know for certain that she’d been the one to enchant that mare did little to calm him, knowing that it was overwhelmingly likely that she was the culprit. And if she is, and she can’t cite an exigent circumstance to justify her actions, I’ll make her pay for committing such a heinous act! That was his duty, of course; whether it was killing another pony or abrogating their right to mental autonomy, those who committed crimes needed to be punished, and as the supreme authority in this place that responsibility ultimately fell to him.
“Sir?” came a voice from outside of the tent. “We were told to-”
“It’s about time!” snapped Lex, thinking that someone had finally brought Sonata to him. He was slightly chagrined a moment later, as a pair of doctors came in bearing a makeshift stretcher between them, realizing that they’d brought Block Party’s body.
Setting it down right next to him, the pair – both of whom he vaguely recognized, though he hadn’t bothered to learn their names – moved to stand on the body’s opposite side, slightly cramped due to the small confines of the tent. “We were told to bring this to you,” said one of them, the same one that had spoken to him from outside the tent.
Lex’s only response was a contemptuous snort. As though you needed to verbalize that, he thought scornfully. Why else would you have brought this here otherwise? He didn’t bother to say the thought out loud, however. Instead, he simply reached out with his telekinesis, lifting his haversack from where it had been placed at the far end of his sleeping bag. Even that was a struggle, his purple aura flickering as he held the bag aloft. Gritting his teeth, he maintained his hold on it as he opened the central flap and withdrew the gemstone he wanted, right on top thanks to the haversack’s magic.
Closing the flap, he all but dropped the haversack to the ground, not entirely succeeding in containing a strained grunt as he did so. It was only then that he held the gem – which thankfully was far lighter than the bag – and turned to look at Block Party’s cloth-covered body. “Pull back the sheet,” he ordered. One of the doctors instantly leaned down, taking a corner of the sheet between her teeth and pulling it back far enough to expose Block Party’s head. Lex sat up as they did, not wanting to entertain the notion that he was so weakened that he had to lie on the ground alongside a corpse. Although the effort left him breathing heavily, neither doctor offered him any assistance. A wise decision on their part, Lex decided.
Turning back to look at Block Party, Lex stopped for a moment. As trite as the sentiment was, he looked as though he were sleeping…almost. The doctors had either left his eyes closed or either taken care to close them again after they’d finished their examination. His jaw was closed tight, and although Lex had no formal knowledge of medicine, he knew that somepony had made sure to keep it closed until rigor mortis had set in so that in death Block Party wouldn’t be gaping awkwardly. But for all that, the illusion of peace was spoiled by the ugly rope mark around his neck.
“Show me his fore-hooves,” commanded Lex suddenly.
Both doctors flinched, more at the suddenness of Lex’s command than the specifics. “Sir?” one of them asked, confused.
“His fore-hooves,” repeated Lex. “Show them to me. Now.” The other doctor that was here was the one who told me about the condition of Block Party’s body, he thought darkly. It didn’t seem likely that her being enchanted had anything to do with that, but there were still too many questions about Block Party’s sudden death for that to be discounted. As such, everything that doctor had told him would need to be independently verified.
The two glanced at each other, then one of them bent down to pull back the sheet further. The other one’s horn lit up as he lifted the body’s forelegs and held the ends of them toward Lex. For a split-second he thought that the deceased stallion’s hooves would be unblemished…but no, just as the previous doctor had reported, they were injured. The wounds were awful to see, dark red abrasions that were completely dry without having scabbed over. Which means that they must have been sustained right before he died, Lex knew. So she wasn’t lying about that. Then why enchant her at all?
“Enough,” he announced. “I’ll preserve the body now.” Waiting until the two had replaced Block Party’s legs at his sides and stepped back, Lex chanted the short phrase to activate the spell contained within the gemstone, pressing a hoof against the side of Block Party’s face and letting the preservation magic flow over the corpse. “This will keep his body from decaying for ten days,” he announced. “Between now and then, I want you to find out if there’s anyone here you can release his body to.” He didn’t bother looking at the doctors as he spoke, instead placing the gem back in his haversack. It still had one casting of that spell left, though Lex knew that he’d need to cast it many more times before Vanhoover was habitable again.
The pair glanced at each other again, then back at Lex. “Um…what if we can’t find anyone?” asked the first.
The second one piped up as well. “Even if we can, what would they do with it? Ten days isn’t a very long time, and it’s not like there’s any way to properly dispose of-”
“We’ll start work on properly disposing of the body later,” stated Lex curtly, irritated that he was repeating what he’d already told that other doctor. Even if she was enchanted, having to explain what to do over and over felt hideously inefficient. “Now take that a-away…” He stumbled over the last word, suddenly feeling exhausted. He tried to lay back down, and all but collapsed into a supine position. It was only when the tent ceiling spun for a dizzying moment that he realized how badly he’d overexerted himself just now. Between his fatigue and the food he’d eaten, he could feel his consciousness starting to slip, and struggled to keep his eyes open. There’s still more that I have to do!
The doctors moved to pick up the stretcher, but Lex spoke up before they could leave. “Did Comfy Cozy lend her support at the field hospital last night?” That was the only other subject that he’d spoken to that other doctor about. It seemed less likely that she’d have been enchanted over something so trivial, but nothing could be ruled out.
“Who?” asked the doctor at the far end of the stretcher.
“The crystal mare,” replied Lex, too tired to even be annoyed.
Both doctors shrugged. “I didn’t see her, but there was a lot going on,” offered the one by Block Party’s head.
“I dunno,” offered the other, looking at her counterpart. “We all saw what she could do with those healing spells, remember? I’m pretty sure that if she’d been helping out, we’d have known about it. Certainly some of the ponies here would have made a big deal over it.”
“Hm, good point,” conceded the other. “I guess she wasn’t, then.”
Lex sighed. So that’s it, then. That other doctor had been enchanted to tell him that Cozy had been there when she hadn’t been, which made it even more likely that Sonata was the culprit. After all, Cozy’s helping out at the field hospital was a matter of principle as much as practicality; even if her not being there hadn’t changed anything, she still had a moral duty to help out in situations like this. Given how irrationally petty Sonata had been acting all morning – and that Cozy was completely removed from the mysteries surrounding Block Party’s demise – the odds were likely that his wayward girlfriend was behind this.
She might not be the only one, either. Sonata had walked in on the tail end of his ordering Aisle to inform Cozy that she needed to contribute, but she hadn’t seemed to understand what was going on. Although she might have figured it out on her own, her marked lack of intelligence or analytical skills made that highly unlikely to Lex’s mind. Which means that Aisle and/or Cozy put her up to this, he thought grimly. So now it’s a conspiracy. This would still need to be properly investigated, of course, but in all likelihood they were all going to need to be punished. Worse, news of their crimes would likely affect the camp’s morale. I’m trying to keep this place together, and not only are those imbeciles not helping, they’re actively making it worse! Even as exhausted as he felt, the thought made him grit his teeth. What could they possibly have been thinking?!
His eyes felt heavy, but Lex resisted closing them, knowing that there was nothing pleasant waiting for him in his dreams. At least Cloudbank is getting ready to head into Vanhoover. Now I just need to…I just need to take Severance back so that I can contact Tall Tale and have them send a ship. Thermal Draft can…go to Las Pegasus and talk to the farmers… No…that wasn’t right. The rich ponies and get a loan…get them here so I can get a loan…buy food from the farmers…they’re growing food they can’t use… His brow furrowed as he blinked blearily, his eyes staying shut for a several moments before slowly opening again. No…they’re not…
He was overlooking something again, he realized dimly. Some salient detail that he hadn’t properly processed…just like with Block Party but about the farmers north of here instead. They’re growing too much…can’t sell it here...have to send Cloudbank…Cloudbank to the bank…bank of clouds…clouds… His eyes, which had finally closed, suddenly snapped open. “Clouds!” he gasped, momentarily pushing back his exhaustion.
That was what he’d overlooked! Small communities like the farms to the north only kept a modest supply of rainclouds, replenishing them from the stock that Cloudsdale distributed to each of Equestria’s major metropolitan areas. But with what had happened to Vanhoover, that stock was likely gone, which meant that the farming villages wouldn’t be able to replenish their rainwater after they ran out. The farmers won’t be able to grow anything! There’s going to be a drought! he realized, a surge of horrified panic going through him. We have to contact Cloudsdale! Get them to come here and issue an emergency supply of rainclouds immediately! He tried to sit up, only for the attempt to fail as soon as it began, and this time the ceiling didn’t stop spinning. I have to…warn everypony… It was Lex’s last thought before he fell asleep.
Sonata could only stare at Nosey, her eyes wide at the unexpected advice. “For realsies?!” She had spent the last ten minutes telling her best friend how awful Lex was, going on at length about their latest fight, before finally culminating in a plea for advice. But hearing Nosey actually agree with Lex hadn’t been what she’d expected. “But…but if I go away now, Lex will-”
“-come to appreciate you more,” cut in Nosey. She nibbled on the last of her hay fries as she spoke, giving Sonata a matter-of-fact look. “Listen, I know you’re worried about what will happen to him if you leave, but right now he’s not letting you help him anyway. He’s not taking your advice, not letting you soften his words, and telling you to your face that he can replace you with your sister. If he’s showing you that much disrespect, then drastic measures need to be taken.”
Sonata flinched at the harsh assessment. “But me leaving won’t make things any better,” she protested.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” replied Nosey, pushing her glasses up her muzzle with one hoof. “I know how this sounds, but if you leave now and things here start to fall apart, then Lex will realize just how much he needs you.”
“I don’t know…” Sonata folded her ears back, not liking what Nosey was suggesting. Is this because she’s mad at Lex over what happened before?
“Trust me,” smiled Nosey. “This is an opportunity, and not just for your professional lives. It will improve your love lives as well.”
“Wait, it will?” Sonata perked up at that, interested despite herself.
Nosey nodded, her face showing absolute confidence. “I’m sure of it. Right now you two are fighting all the time, but if you spend some time apart then just imagine how happy he’ll be to see you once you get back.”
Sonata opened her mouth, then slowly closed it again, thinking. “I guess that’s true…”
“You see? A little time apart is all you need.” Nosey balanced her last hay fry on her hoof before tossing it into the air, leaning back and catching it in her mouth easily.
Starting to come around to her friend’s way of thinking, Sonata couldn’t help but propose one final alternative. “I’m still not sure. Maybe I could just go back into Vanhoover with Cloudbank? That way I’d be gone for a little while, but not, like, for a big huge trip or-, ohmygosh, are you okay?!” Leaping to her hooves as she saw that Nosey had started to choke, Sonata whacked her on the back, repeating the motion a second time, and then a third before the blonde mare coughed up a half-chewed hay fry.
“Wha-,” croaked Nosey, her eyes watering. “What did you say?”
Sonata blinked, tilting her head to the side in confusion. “I said ‘ohmygosh, are you okay?!’ Why?” She rubbing Nosey’s back soothingly as she spoke, trying to help her get her breath back.
“No,” coughed the other mare. “Before that. Cloudbank is doing what?”
“Oh. Lex is sending her on some sorta mission into Vanhoover. Something about her and a bunch of other ponies going back into the city to pull a bank heist for, um…” She trailed off, trying to remember what Lex had said. She’d been pretty upset at the time, and Lex had been talking about a bunch of plans, so a lot of the details had slipped by her. “I think he said something about food.” She frowned then. “Huh. I wonder where he’s going to buy stuff from, now that I think about it. It’s not like there’s a store here in camp or anything.” Despite that being self-evidently the case, she couldn’t help but glance around to make absolutely sure that was true.
Doing so caused her to miss the dark look that crossed Nosey’s face at that moment, however, and by the time she shrugged and glanced back at the other mare it was replaced with a more benign expression. “Did he say when they were doing this?” asked Nosey, her voice light.
Smiling now that her friend had recovered from her brief choking fit – and doubly glad that they weren’t talking about her going to Las Pegasus – Sonata shrugged. “Dunno. He made it sound like it was going to happen right away though, so probably really soon.” She paused then as an idea occurred to her. “Hang on,” she said slowly, then circled around so that she was looking her in the eye. “Nosey…?”
Blinking, the other mare looked back at her uncertainly. “Yes?”
“Are you…”
Nosey’s body tensed imperceptibly.
“…thinking about going with them?” Sonata furrowed her brow at the thought, missing the subtle signs as her friend relaxed at the question. “Because you really shouldn’t,” she continued obliviously. “I know that you did, like, a totes great job fighting when we were all hooves on deck before,” she paused then, wondering if she’d made a funny or not. We all had our hooves on that deck during the fight! Haha! That’s funny! Well, except a pier isn’t a deck, but it sort of is! Deciding that it was a great joke, she filed that one away for later. “Um, anyway. You did a great job before, but I don’t think that you should go back out there now. I mean, you’ve already been through a lot this morning, and this might be really dangerous, and-”
“Sonata,” interrupted Nosey.
“Hm?”
“I’m not planning on going with them.”
“Oh.” Sonata let out a relieved sigh at that, wiping a hoof across her brow. “Whew. I was totes worried I was gonna have to talk you out of it.”
“I could tell,” remarked Nosey dryly as she stood up. “But I do think I’m going to go ask around about this mission of Cloudbank’s. I’m sure it will make for a great story later.”
Sonata stood up as well. “Awesome.” And hopefully we won’t talk about me leaving anymore. Despite the fact that Nosey had made a bunch of points that sounded good, Sonata was still very uncomfortable with the idea of leaving Lex alone for so long. He definitely needed an attitude adjustment, but the last time she’d left him after they’d had a fight had almost destroyed their relationship. That’s not gonna happen this time. “I’ll go too. I wanna talk to Cloudbank about maybe joining u-”
“Excuse me,” interjected a female voice, causing both mares to turn and look at the newcomer, and earth mare in a lab coat whose mane was composed of alternating stripes of different shades of green. “Miss Dusk? I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Sonata couldn’t but look confused at that, recognizing the mare she’d enchanted. “You have? Why?” After Aisle had convinced her to use her magic on one of the doctors, she’d persuaded him not to hang around, since the less he was involved the better. It had taken some prompting on her part, but Aisle had finally agreed, wandering away to let her do what she needed to. This particular pony had been the first doctor she’d come across, and she’d sung a quick charm spell on her before anypony could notice. After that, it had just been a matter of “asking” her to do a little “favor,” that involved telling Lex a little white lie.
Even under the influence of her charm spell, however, managing to talk the green-haired mare into doing that had been totes difficult. The impression Lex had made when he’d cursed Garden Gate was strong enough that the mare had been extremely reluctant to lie to him about anything, and since Sonata’s charm spell only made the target regard her as a close friend rather than their absolute lord and master, they could still say no to something if they felt strongly enough about it…which this pony absolutely did. It had taken almost full five minutes of heavy cajoling before she’d managed to talk her into it, and even then Sonata had needed to promise that she’d confess her part in things if something went wrong and Lex found out. The whole thing had been enough to make her feel guilty, but by that point she had already committed to her course of action, seeing the nervous doctor off with a pained smile. But that should have been the end of it. I didn’t tell her to come back and find me after she was done.
The doctor opened her mouth to reply, but at the last moment Sonata remembered that she wasn’t alone. Leaping forward suddenly, she clamped a hoof over the lab-coated pony’s mouth, turning to give Nosey a nervous smile. “Oh, you know what? I just remembered that I, um…asked for a checkup before!” I can’t get Nosey involved in this, she thought, trying not to sweat. Not after everything that happened this morning with Lex. “You go ahead and totes do whatever you were going to do.”
Nosey raised an eyebrow, letting that convey her obvious skepticism. “Uh-huh…”
“Hehe…” Sonata could feel her anxiety starting to mount, ignoring the muffled protests coming from the doctor. Please oh please oh please let her buy this!
Nosey let out a sigh. “Sonata, you know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
Sonata’s insincere expression didn’t change. “I know, but really, this totes isn’t anything suspicious.” She was having to struggle to keep her hoof over the doctor’s mouth now, the green-haired mare trying to free herself with increasing desperation. “You go get that story about Cloudbank. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Nosey looked like she was going to protest for a moment, but then seemed to change her mind, shrugging. “Alright. I’ll talk to you later,” she said, giving a casual wave as she turned and walked away.
Sonata kept smiling after her until Nosey got far enough away to make eavesdropping impossible, only then releasing her hold on the doctor. “Whew! That was super close! Now-, whoa! What happened to you?!” yelped Sonata as the doctor slumped to the ground, insensate.
Several minutes, a harsh scolding, and multiple apologies later, the two of them finally got down to business. “Lex wanted to see me? Did he say why?”
The doctor shook her head, nervousness written all over her features. “No, he just said he wanted to see you right away, but he seemed angry. Do you think he knows that I lied to him?”
Sonata snorted, shaking her head. “No way.” I hope. “How could he possibly know that?” Unless he used some sort of magic thingy, or already asked someone else, or did super-smart detective trick and figured it out. “You have nothing to worry about.” Me, on the other hoof…
The doctor seemed only partially mollified. “So, what should I do…?”
“Just go back to work,” replied Sonata, trying to sound more relaxed than she actually felt. “You did me the favor, and you delivered his message, so now you’re, like, totes done with all of the coat and dagger stuff.”
“I…okay.” The other mare let out a resigned sigh, turning to go, but looked over at Sonata before she did. “You remember your promise, right? If he somehow finds out…”
“Then I’ll totes admit that I put you up to it,” nodded Sonata. Way more than you know, she added in her mind. Fortunately, that seemed to be enough to satisfy the doctor, and she trotted off.
For her part, Sonata simply sighed, wondering what she should do now. It’s not like I need to run just because Mister Big Shot is calling me, she told herself, but the thought lacked conviction. If she didn’t go see what it was that Lex wanted, he’d probably do something dumb like come looking for her instead, and in his condition that would only make things worse. Besides, maybe it’s something completely different. Maybe he realized how awful he’s been and wants to make it up to me. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes at that, however, remembering that the doctor had said that Lex was angry when he’d asked for her. I guess as long as I’m dreaming I might as well wish for the two of us to sing a nice love song together too.
Slowly, she trudged towards the outpatient tent where Lex was recovering. Her pace was slow and meandering, and she frequently stopped to chat with anypony who happened to cross her path, but all too soon she found herself standing in front of the thin flap that separated her from her irritable boyfriend. Here goes nothing, she sighed. “Lex? It’s me.” Silence greeted her, and she wondered if that was a good or a bad thing, before deciding not to bother with it. “I’m coming in,” she called before stepping inside.
Instantly, she saw why he hadn’t spoken to her: he was asleep, his eyes closed and his chest rising and falling softly. “Unbelievable,” she murmured. “You call me here and then take a nap? Honestly.” But her voice was relieved rather than indignant.
For a long moment she watched him, remembering how he’d once told her that he had nightmares every night. It hadn’t been that long ago that he’d confessed that to her, but it felt like a million years now. I wonder if he’s having a bad dream right now? She knew she should have wished one on him after how he’d been acting, but for some reason the thought of him not sleeping peacefully made her sad. Moving carefully so as not to disturb him, she knelt down and lightly kissed his cheek, saying the same thing she did back then. “Sweet dreams, Lex.”
She turned around and left a moment later, never realizing that someone had been listening.
Cozy couldn’t help but smile softly at the thought, gently running a hoof across Aisle’s cheek as she gazed at him. He murmured something unintelligible at the touch, and she held her breath, worried that she’d woken him up, but he settled down again a moment later. Cozy was glad for that; after everything she’d put him through he deserved to rest. That, and there was something mesmerizing about watching somepony she loved sleep.
Somepony I love… She turned the words over in her head, keeping her eyes on Aisle’s peaceful face as she examined her feelings about what they’d done. Only a few hours ago, she knew, she’d have been crippled with guilt and shame over what she’d just shared with him. She could almost hear the recriminations she would have hurled at herself: “My husband hasn’t even been gone for one day, and I’m already with a new stallion.” Or maybe something more direct, like, “There are words for ponies like me, and I deserve to be called every one of them.” But she didn’t feel that way at all now, and the absence of those emotions was a relief in and of itself.
But there was more to it than that, she knew. So much more…
Although she’d accepted Lashtada into her heart months ago, there had been parts of her religion that Cozy had never been completely comfortable with. The emphasis on physical love had embarrassed her, and truth be told still did somewhat, and other ponies asking her for relationship advice when they found out she was a priestess had taken some getting used to. But the most awkward thing had been how Lashtada’s dogma glorified “open” relationships.
Princess Cadance had assured her that wasn’t the case, of course. The one time Cozy had managed to overcome her embarrassment and ask her about it, the Princess had laughed – not unkindly – and explained that Lashtada didn’t hold any type of loving relationship to be better than any other. So long as everypony involved was true to their feelings for each other, it didn’t matter if they were with one pony or many. “Just look at me and Shining Armor,” she’d concluded. “I can’t imagine being with anypony besides him, and I’m in charge of spreading Lashtada’s message throughout Equestria.”
Cozy had smiled and nodded and thanked the Princess for answering her question, but inside she’d still had doubts. Although what Cadance had said made sense, Lashtada’s faith had too many aphorisms and tenets about accepting the love of others to make monogamy – which necessarily involved denying others who wanted to be with you – seem acceptable, or at least as acceptable as polygamy. If principles like “never fail to open your heart to those who open theirs to you” or “love is never diminished when it is shared” weren’t saying that you should accept, and therefore return, love that came from outside of a committed relationship, then what were they saying? She had badly wanted to ask Princess Cadance what she would do if another stallion confessed to having fallen for her, but hadn’t dared.
But now…now Cozy felt like she had greater insight into what those tenets were saying. They weren’t trying to paint a benevolent veneer over something tawdry, the way she’d used to think they were. It was more like they were talking about an ideal, as if feeling that degree of love for more than one person was something to try and achieve rather than justify. Like…it was alright if you could only find it within yourself to love one person, but being able to love more than that was something to be celebrated for what it was, without being a comparative insult toward those who were monogamous.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong, she thought, bringing a hoof to her necklace, brushing it over the two – and only two – heart-shaped loops that were bound together with silver wire, forming the holy symbol of Lashtada. Maybe I just wanted to stop feeling so lonely and sad. But if so, it had worked. Aisle had pushed back the waves of grief that had threatened to consume her, and now she found it impossible not to reciprocate his feelings.
But even so…
Pillow.
Letting out a slow breath, Cozy tentatively – as though unwrapping a bandage – turned her thoughts back toward her deceased husband. Pain instantly filled her heart, and sadness came a moment later, threatening to make her start crying again. No matter what else had happened, Pillowcase, the stallion she’d wanted to share her life with, was still gone, and nothing could make that better. But now…now that sadness didn’t blot out everything else, didn’t feel like it would define the rest of her life. Now she wasn’t clinging to nothing but the slim hope of asking Princess Cadance to resurrect him, or the vague and terrifying plan of ending her own life in order to see him again.
Her eyes glanced at the corner of the small tent they were in, eyeing the crushed remains of her bag. Aisle had been beyond horrified when she’d told him what she’d almost done. He’d instantly leapt up and stomped on the bag several times, breaking the syringe within before lying back down and making her swear to never even think of anything like that again. She, by contrast, had been far more subdued when he’d confessed to dragooning Sonata into getting one of the doctors to lie to Lex for her. She knew that if they were lucky, the dour unicorn would never know that he’d been tricked, but Cozy couldn’t remember the last time they’d been that fortunate. Well, except for right now, she conceded, the corners of her mouth turning up wanly.
Her thoughts were interrupted as Aisle’s eyes fluttered open, smiling as he looked at her. “Hey…” he said softly.
She couldn’t help but smile back. “Hey yourself.”
“How are you feeling?”
Cozy paused just for an instant, knowing that she was nowhere close to being able to answer that question. “I’m…alright.”
Aisle’s grin diminished, and she knew that he’d heard what she hadn’t said. “Listen, about what we did…” He trailed off, and Cozy knew that he was going to try and figure things out, to try and work out what had happened between them and what it meant. And all of a sudden she didn’t want him to.
Reaching out, she gently put a hoof over his mouth, silencing him before he could start. “I love you,” she whispered. His eyes widened at that; they hadn’t spoken initially, and the words that they’d exchanged afterward had mostly been to confess what they’d done over the last few hours. After that they’d both simply fallen asleep, too physically and emotionally exhausted to go any further. But now, Cozy found herself unable to keep from telling him how she felt. “I said all those horrible things to you yesterday, and you still put yourself in danger for me.” She had no doubt that deliberately defying Lex was dangerous. “You were always understanding, even knowing that sometimes what I wanted, what I needed, wasn’t what I was saying. And you never pushed me or asked for anything in return. You just…you did all those things, so many things to help me even when you knew I wouldn’t be grateful…” She felt herself starting to tear up again and sniffled, removing her hoof from his mouth to rub it across her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is…the reason why I’m saying all this…”
She fumbled, suddenly not sure what else to say to convey her feelings. But before she could try again she felt Aisle’s hoof against her lips, copying what she’d just done to quiet him. “I love you too,” he said softly, giving her an understanding smile.
Cozy made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob, smiling. Taking his hoof in hers, she lowered it so that she could lean closer to him, their lips meeting a moment later. The kiss was followed by another, and then another, and suddenly Cozy wanted more. Gently pressing herself against him, Aisle didn’t resist as she moved him onto his back, climbing on top of him…
This time, when they finished, they didn’t separate from each other, legs intertwined as they silently rested. Laying her head on his chest, Cozy spent long moments simply listening to Aisle’s heart beating, her eyes looking vacantly at the wall of the tent they’d commandeered. As peaceful as the moment was, she knew there was something she still needed to say. Just a little longer, she thought plaintively, not sure if she was making a wish or a prayer. Just let us stay like this for a little longer.
When she heard Aisle let out a soft sigh under her, however, she knew the moment was over. “Listen-” he started to say.
“I still love him,” she blurted out, knowing that if he started talking about something else she wouldn’t be able to say what she needed to.
For a moment he froze, and Cozy could almost hear his confusion, but understanding came an instant later. “Pillow.”
She nodded. “I love you, but I still love him too, and I miss him so much. I still…” It suddenly occurred to her that she was talking about another stallion while as close as she could possibly be with Aisle, and she felt her cheeks heating up. But she forced herself to continue. “I still want to ask Princess Cadance if she can bring him back.” She almost sat up then, suddenly nervous about how he’d take that particular revelation.
The answer she received as feeling a hoof slowly brush her mane. “I understand,” came Aisle’s voice, and there was no recrimination in it.
But Cozy heard the subtle undertone of resignation in his words, and instantly knew what he thought she’d meant. That couldn’t be allowed to stand. Shaking her head, she slowly moved off of him, climbing to her hooves. Once she’d steadied herself, she turned to look at him. “No.” Her voice was firm, but contained only the slightest hint of reproach. “Don’t say that.”
He blinked, pausing in mid-motion as he started to get up. “Don’t say that I understand?”
“Don’t say goodbye,” she corrected him. When he looked like he was about to protest, she cut him off. “I know that’s what you meant. You ‘understand’ that my saying that I still love Pillow and want him back means that I’m saying you and I can’t be together, that we’re going to treat this like some sort of fling or that it never happened, and you’ll quietly fade out of the picture. That’s what you meant, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer before shaking her head. “No. I’m sorry, but no. That’s unacceptable.”
“But-”
“Did you mean it when you said you love me?”
“Of course! I j-”
“Good. And I meant it when I said that I love you.” She gave him a look of resolve then, daring him to protest any further. When he didn’t say anything, her expression softened, and she stepped closer, nuzzling him. “I love you, and you love me, and I want us to figure out what that means. Whether…” She faltered then, but rallied a moment later. “Whether or not Pillow can be brought back, I want us, all of us, to figure out what comes next.” She looked him in the eyes then, their faces barely an inch apart. “I don’t know how this is going to work out, but I want us to try. Together.”
She saw him swallow nervously, saw the uncertainty in his eyes, but for some reason that made her feel better than if he’d looked calm and confident. This wouldn’t be real if it wasn’t frightening, she knew and that reminded her of another of Lashtada’s tenets: Loving someone is an act of courage.
Letting out a slow breath, Aisle nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Cozy could feel herself smiling, suddenly filled with a sense of nervous excitement that she hadn’t felt since she first began dating Pillow years ago. She could see the same smile on Aisle’s face too.
His diminished a moment later, however. “Listen…I wanted to say this before, but…if Lex finds out that I tried to pull one over on him, I’m going to take the blame.”
Her own smile died at that. “Hang on-”
“Just hear me out. If he figures out what Sonata did, then he’ll probably know I was involved, even if she doesn’t tell him.” The words “which she probably would” hung in the air, obvious but unspoken. “But if I tell him that I never told you that he ordered you to help the doctors, then he won’t be able to punish you. That’s the sort of pony he is.”
Cozy had more than a few choice words about what sort of pony Lex was, but she put those aside for the moment. “No way.”
“Cozy-”
“I just said we were in this together, right? I know you want to protect me, and I’m telling you, you already did.” She pointed to the crushed bag in the corner, emphasizing her point. “From here on out, no matter what happens, we’re going to face it together, okay?”
He looked ready to protest, but after a long moment let out a sigh. “Okay. But I’m still telling him that this was my idea, since, you know, it actually was.”
She couldn’t help but snicker at that. “Alright, tough guy.” Her mirth faded as she glanced at the tent flap. “You ready to go back out there?”
He nodded, stepping up and nuzzling her. “Ready.”
Pressing her side against his, Cozy opened the tent flap and the two of them strode outside, ready to face whatever came their way.
Cloudbank let out a slow breath as she looked up at where the sun was shining directly overhead. That alone should have been enough to eliminate all doubt about the time, but she couldn’t keep herself from glancing down anyway. Sure enough, her shadow was directly beneath her, further confirming that the appointed hour had arrived. If Lex was here his shadow would be stretched out in front of him, Cloudbank couldn’t help but think.
Standing in front of the medical tent that was the center of the field hospital, Cloudbank glanced off to the side, thoughts of Lex making her look towards the rows of tents that had been set aside for outpatient care. But there was no sign of him, something she had mixed feelings about. Is he not here because he trusts me to handle everything, or is he just resting? She mulled the question over for a moment before abruptly telling herself that she didn’t care, shaking her head and sighing disgustedly. I’m acting like some ditzy little filly, and over a STALLION for crying out loud!
“Hey, Cloudy!”
At the sound of Drafty’s voice, Cloudbank whipped her head around, smiling at the sight of her girlfriend as well as the welcome distraction from what she’d been thinking about. “Where have you been?” she called.
“Oh, I was wrapping some stuff up,” replied Drafty evasively. Without missing a beat, her eyes turned towards the scythe that was floating of its own accord next to Cloudbank. “Hi, Severance!”
Cloudbank gawked as Drafty walked right up to the scythe and raised a hoof, as though about to hoof-bump it. “What are you-, Drafty!” She hurriedly placed herself between the weapon – which hadn’t moved in response to the cordial greeting – and the other mare. “Don’t talk to that thing!”
Drafty blinked. “Why not? I thought it might be nice to say hi to him too.” She paused then, putting a hoof to her chin in thought. “I mean, if Severance is a ‘him.’ I mean, ‘Severance’ doesn’t really sound like a mare’s name, you know?”
“It’s an ‘it,’” scolded Cloudbank, grabbing Severance with her teeth and placing it across her back. She’d taken it off because, as the noon hour approached she’d grown less and less patient with the weapon’s constant proselytizing, to the point where she’d ordered it to follow her around instead of being carried. To her shock, the scythe had obeyed, giving Cloudbank some much needed space. “And have you forgotten that this thing almost killed you?! You shouldn’t be getting chummy with it!”
Drafty frowned, and for a moment seemed like she wanted to argue the point. But instead she paused, her expression slowly changing into mild concern as she looked at Cloudbank. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong! I just don’t like the thought of you anywhere near this thing!” snapped Cloudbank, the words coming out more harshly than she’d intended. In her mind, Severance informed her that she was being unreasonable, since she was the one who had driven it through Thermal Draft. Cloudbank’s response was to glance back at the weapon and snarl at it. “Shut up!”
But the words had barely left her mouth when she felt hooves gently cup her cheeks and turn her head so that she was facing forward again, where Drafty was giving her a reassuring look. “Cloudy, listen to me. It’s going to be fine.”
Cloudbank tensed. “I-”
“I know you’re nervous about going back into Vanhoover. I’m nervous too, but this is going to be different from how it was before.”
Cloudbank flared her wings, taking a step back to escape Drafty’s grasp. “I’m not nervous!” she protested, and even to her it sounded unconvincing. Taking a moment to calm herself down, she glanced around anxiously. Fortunately, nopony was within earshot, but she could already see several ponies making their way toward them. Letting out a breath, she turned her gaze back to Drafty. “I can’t afford to be nervous,” she said in a softer voice. “If I look like I’m worried, then everypony else will lose confidence.”
A surprised look crossed Drafty’s face. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted, the corners of her lips turning upward in a guilty-looking smile. “To me you’re just Cloudy, the mare who kept taking my temperature every half-hour when I was sick. But I guess to everypony else, you’re a spellcasting pegasus who introduced a goddess.” She paused for a moment, then leaned in closer to whisper conspiratorially, “Be honest though, is this really any scarier than having to give a big speech like that?”
That was enough to make Cloudbank chuckle, her tension draining away. “Shut up,” she snickered.
“I can do those dances again right now if you want.”
Cloudbank snorted, rolling her eyes and smiling wider as she mock-shoved Drafty away. But her mirth died a moment later as the first pony walked up to them, causing her to straighten up and give the new arrival a cool look. “I thought you weren’t going to help.”
For a moment Turbo didn’t reply, glaring at Cloudbank bitterly. He’d seen the playful interplay between her and that mare next to her – her girlfriend, according to what he’d heard in his short time with Lex’s group – and it struck him as hideously unjust that Cloudbank could be so happy after she’d refused to help Garden. But he forced himself to push the indignity down, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to carry out Garden’s wishes if he focused on it too much. “Garden Gate wants to help,” he corrected. “You heard her say so. I’m here because I want to honor that.”
“You know this won’t change anything about her curses,” pressed Cloudbank, wanting to make sure that was absolutely clear.
Turbo grit his teeth, and for a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. “Yeah…”
“This is going to go well,” muttered Drafty. But she didn’t have a chance to say anything else as two more ponies approached them.
“Is everything okay here?” asked C. Shells, looking between Turbo and Cloudbank suspiciously. Next to her, Sandbar did his best to look tough, a hoof coming up to stroke the scar on his neck in what was clearly meant to be an intimidating gesture, though it ended up looking more like he was scratching an itch.
“Everything’s fine,” answered Cloudbank, ignoring the sullen look on Turbo’s face. “Are you two ready?”
“Absolutely!” grinned Sandbar. “We’re gonna be the scurviest pirates ever to rob a bank! Arr!”
“Pirates?” echoed Drafty, giving C. Shells a confused look.
“Just ignore him,” murmured the earth mare, a long-suffering look on her face. “I promise he’ll be able to carry a lot. He’s really strong.” Her tone made it clear that the explanation was her way of apologizing for bringing him along.
“Oh, um, okay,” replied Drafty, slightly nonplussed. Shaking her head, she turned back to Cloudbank. “So I guess as soon as everypony else gets here, we’ll just go?”
Cloudbank shook her head. “This is everypony. We’re go-”
“Wait, hold on,” interrupted Turbo. “This is all you’re bringing? Five ponies?” His bitter expression had been replaced by one of disbelief. “I thought you were going to take in a small army or something.”
“I’m a little surprised myself, Cloudy.” Drafty looked hesitant, but kept going. “I thought we were going to do this the same way we fought all those monsters on the docks, you know? A whole bunch of us go out so we can all form up and cover each other.”
“That…” For a moment, Cloudbank felt her uncertainty start to return. Although Drafty had been right about her being nervous about going back into Vanhoover, that hadn’t been the sole reason she’d been anxious. The other part of it was the knowledge that this time, she was responsible for everypony. She hadn’t anticipated feeling like this when she’d started asking for volunteers, but as the appointed time had grown closer, she’d found herself more and more worried that she’d make some sort of mistake or do something stupid and cost everypony their lives. What if they’re right? What if we should be taking a larger group in? It’s not too late to change the plan. Lex would know, she was sure. Maybe if she consulted him really quick…?
But before she could do anything, Severance’s voice flowed into her mind, reminding her that she was one of the Night Mare’s faithful, and as such needed to know the difference between scrutinizing a course of action and doubting it. That’s right, thought Cloudbank, remembering what the scythe had taught her earlier. Examining a plan for flaws is wisdom, but worrying that it won’t work is weakness. And weakness means death. It wasn’t like she hadn’t thought about taking a large group of ponies with her, after all. It was just that she’d decided not to. Now she had to stand by her decision.
“That was a different situation.” Cloudbank forced herself to sound confident, making her voice contain surety that she didn’t completely feel. “What we want to focus on this time is speed and stealth, not defense.” She pointed upward. “We know that the ghouls don’t like sunlight, so our plan is to get in as quietly as possible, grab as many bits as we can, and get out before the sun goes down. We’ll have an easier time doing that in a smaller group.”
“Plus, we had a lot of advantages in that battle that we don’t now,” pointed out C. Shells. Being a ship’s captain, thinking about large projects with multiple components came easily to her. “Lex made all those weapons and armor for us, remember? Not to mention that Sonata was using her magic to help make everypony fight better.”
“And whatshername, that big fish-pony who whispers all the time. She was there too,” chimed in Sandbar. “She’s supposed to have some pretty impressive magic, right?”
“Great! So let’s have them do that again!” snapped Turbo. He gave everypony a look of frustrated exasperation, as though he couldn’t believe he had to say this. “Even if-, no, especially if we’re going in by ourselves, we should look for every edge we can possibly get! Am I really the only one who’s thought of that?”
Sandbar frowned at the other stallion’s tone. “Hey, listen jerk-”
“Stop,” ordered Cloudbank, and to her mild surprise Sandbar did. “It’s a legitimate question.” In fact, it was the entire reason she’d wanted someone from Garden’s gang to come with them. Anypony who could survive the fall of Vanhoover the way they had – being out there in the thick of it instead of locking themselves in somewhere and hoping that help would eventually arrive, which was what she and her friends had done – had to have developed a level of cunning and strategic thinking that would be invaluable for what they were about to do. Well, except for Piggy, she thought, suppressing a smirk.
“Oh it is, is it?” sneered Turbo, suspicious of how she was suddenly being so magnanimous.
Refusing to rise to the barb, Cloudbank nodded patiently. “To answer your question, I spoke to Aria already, and she refused to help.” To put it mildly, she amended silently. She’d spotted the Siren resting behind the train station while coming down from her aerial conversation with Severance, and had gone to talk to her right after she’d spoken with Turbo. Needless to say, the only thing Aria had given her were insults and veiled threats, and Cloudbank – unwilling to threaten her with Severance the way she had during the fight on the pier – had come away with the distinct impression that Lex was the only one who could control her without resorting to violence. Probably because their personalities are so similar.
“And Lex?” asked C. Shells.
This time Drafty was the one who answered, a look of mild discomfort crossing her face. “It would be better if we didn’t ask him. He really needs to rest.”
C. Shells nodded in a way that made it clear she’d expected that answer. Next to her, Sandbar piped up. “What about Sonata?”
“What about me?”
Everypony turned at the voice, looking to where Sonata was trotting towards them from the outpatient tents. “Hey,” she waved. “This is the meeting about the bank heist, right?”
Cloudbank nodded. “That’s ri-”
“How’s Lex?” interrupted Drafty. It was obvious that Sonata was coming from having met with him, and so Drafty couldn’t help but ask, both hoping and dreading that he’d said something about sending her to Las Pegasus in Sonata’s place.
“Asleep,” answered Sonata, before immediately changing the subject. “So listen, if you guys are going back into Vanhoover, I want to go too.”
“That’ll be a huge help,” smiled C. Shells. “Your magic will make a big differe-”
“No,” interrupted Cloudbank. Everypony turned to look at her then, and there was confusion written on every face. But Cloudbank didn’t waver, keeping her eyes on Lex’s girlfriend. “You’re staying here, Sonata.”
Sonata blinked in confusion at Cloudbank’s pronouncement. “I am?”
“She is?” echoed C. Shells, her own face showing disbelief.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” frowned Turbo. “She’s supposed to have powerful magic, and you want to leave her behind?”
Sandbar nodded. “I sort of thought tha-”
“Everypony hold on!” interrupted Drafty loudly. As all eyes turned towards her, she rose onto her back legs, gesturing towards Cloudbank as she cast disapproving looks at the three ponies who had voiced their doubts. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’m surprised by Cloudy’s decision, but I’ve known her longer than anypony here, and I’ll be the first to tell you that she never does anything without a reason. If she says that Sonata should stay behind, then I trust her judgment, and you should too!” She finished by falling back onto all fours, letting the sound of her hooves impacting the ground punctuate her point.
Cloudbank couldn’t help but smile at that, touched by her girlfriend’s faith in her. First my speech, then with Lex, and again now. I really need to do something nice for her once we’re done with all this. There really wasn’t any way to take her on a romantic date in the camp – and besides, they already had plans to go on a double-date with Lex and Sonata anyway – but there had to be some way she could make a nice-
“But I wanna help,” came Sonata’s voice, pulling Cloudbank back to the matter at hoof. “I’ve got a lot of magic that can totes tear those ghouls a new one if they try anything.”
Cloudbank walked toward the other mare, putting a hoof on her chest in a gesture of camaraderie. “That’s part of the reason why I want you to stay here,” she said, giving her a friendly smile. At least, she hoped it was friendly. I need to convince her that I’m right, or this could get ugly, she knew. Lex had never technically designated anypony as being his second-in-command as far as she was aware, and while Drafty had raised some good points about his counting on her to get things done, Sonata – both by virtue of her own strength as well as being Lex’s girlfriend – could make a legitimate claim that she should be the one calling the shots. And as much as Cloudbank liked Sonata, the other mare being both personable and incredibly easy on the eyes, she knew that she was…not very proficient where strategic thinking was concerned. “With Lex out of commission, and me taking Severance along, you need to stay here in case anything happens while we’re gone.”
“Huh?” Sonata frowned, looking more confused. “What could happen here? Block Party’s gone, and I mean that’s sad and all, but it doesn’t look like there’s anything else to worry about.”
“I don’t know,” admitted Cloudbank. “That’s the point. With you here, this place will have someone to defend it if something unexpected happens.”
A skeptical look crossed Sonata’s face. “I guess…”
Knowing that she needed to do more to drive the point home, Cloudbank leaned in closer, her voice lowering to a whisper. “Also, if Lex wakes up while we’re gone, he’s going to need you here to speak for him.” She gave the other mare a pointed look. “He’s done a lot for this place, and right now the ponies here aren’t afraid of him, but they don’t know what to make of him either.” The wild rumors going around were proof enough of that. “You have to be ready to stop him from ruining his chance to make a good impression, otherwise it could be like what happened with Garden Gate all over again.”
Understanding blossomed on Sonata’s face then, but it immediately turned into an irritable look, her ears folding back. “Maybe he should have Aria help him, then.”
Now it was Cloudbank’s turn to look confused, withdrawing her hoof from Sonata’s chest. “Aria? Are you kidding? She wouldn’t be any help. I’m pretty sure she’d actually make things worse.”
“I know, right?!” The vindication in Sonata’s voice was thick with tension, making no attempt to be quiet. “She would totes make the worst spokespony ever! And if Lex doesn’t realize that, then he’s the one who’s dumb!” She reared one of her fore-hooves back like she was going to kick something, only to pause and glance around. “Never a rock around when you need one,” she muttered dejectedly as she put her hoof back down.
For a moment Cloudbank couldn’t respond, caught off-guard by the minefield she’d just wandered into. “Um…” She glanced back at the others, silently asking if they had any insights as to what was going on, but there was no help to be found. Drafty was pointedly looking upward, refusing to make eye contact, while Turbo just gave her a flat look that clearly communicated his disinterest. C. Shells and Sandbar just shook their heads silently, eyebrows raised at the vehemence of Sonata’s unexpected outburst. Great teamwork, guys, thought Cloudbank wryly as she turned back toward the other mare. “Is everything okay…?” she asked tentatively. She knew that they were in a race against time to get to the bank and back before the sun went down, but at the same time she was loathe to leave if there was some sort of problem going on.
Heaving a sigh that seemed to come from her hooves, Sonata closed her eyes for a moment before opening them again, a wan smile crossing her lips. “It’s nothing. Just Lex being Lex.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” nodded Sonata. Her eyes slid over in the direction of her boyfriend’s tent again for a moment before looking back at Cloudbank. “I’ll hold down the fort here,” she conceded.
Letting out a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh, Cloudbank offered her another smile. “Thanks.”
“Sure thing-, oh! I just had a brainshower!”
“I think you mean a ‘brainstorm,’” piped up Drafty. Across from her, Sandbar was snickering despite C. Shells’ attempts to quiet him, while Turbo just rolled his eyes.
“That too!” Sonata’s smile widened, apparently having gotten over her momentary funk. “I may not be able to go with you guys, but I can totes use some magic to help you out!”
“Hot dog!” Sandbar trotted up to Sonata, grinning widely. “Is this gonna be something that makes us super-powerful fighters the way we were in that last battle? Because that was really cool!”
“Got it in one!” beamed Sonata, before singing a brief snippet of an upbeat tune. As it finished, she reached out and brushed a hoof against Sandbar. “There! How do you feel now?”
An excited shudder ran down the earth stallion’s spine. “Fired up!” he whooped. “This is so awesome! I feel like I could take on all those ghouls by myself!”
“You even try to do that and you’ll be pumping out the bilges for a year once we get a new ship,” warned C. Shells.
Sandbar settled down instantly. “I’ll be good.”
“Oh you have got to be kidding me,” moaned Turbo, putting a hoof to his face for a moment before glaring at Sonata. “This is what you meant by helping us out? I was expecting magic, not a magic trick!”
Sonata tilted her head, blinking. “Whaddaya mean?”
“Come on,” scoffed Turbo. “That’s a trick that mothers use on their foals when they’re afraid of the dark. They go ‘I’ll chant a magic spell and bop you on the nose, and when I do you won’t be afraid anymore.’ It doesn’t actually do anything, it just convinces them that it does.”
But Drafty was shaking her head before Turbo had even finished speaking. “You’re way off, there. Sonata’s magic is the real deal. She used that spell, or one just like it, when we were fighting a horde of monsters before, and it’s the main reason we were able to make it through.”
“Yeah, well, forgive me for preferring magic that would, I dunno…make us invisible or super fast or something,” he groused.
“I don’t have any spells like that,” admitted Sonata with a shrug. “And besides, but this is the only one I know that will give you guys a boost that lasts for more than a few minutes.” She moved as she spoke, going over to C. Shells and singing the spell again before touching her side.
The earth mare instantly let out a breath, unable to keep her gooseflesh from rising at the sensation of the spell going through her, the heady sensation of artificial enthusiasm filling her mind. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that.”
Turbo looked over at Drafty, the pony closest to him. “Is this for real?” He’d seen Cloudbank use magic earlier, and he’d overheard bits and pieces of things in the short amount of time that his group had been with Lex’s, but he still had a hard time believing that somepony who wasn’t a unicorn could cast spells.
Drafty shrugged, not even trying to hide her grin. “Find out for yourself,” she replied, nodding towards Sonata, who was already heading toward him.
Turbo’s frown deepened as Lex’s girlfriend approached him, and he had to resist the urge to back away. Although she hadn’t been the one to curse Garden, her relationship with the stallion who had meant that she was guilty by association. Between that, the alien nature of a pony with no horn casting spells, and the ridiculousness of the magi she was (supposedly) invoking, the entire thing left him feeling awkward and uncomfortable. But if there’s even a chance this can make it easier to survive going back there… “Let’s just get this over with,” he murmured.
Sonata nodded, but then said something that sent a cold shudder down his spine. “Don’t try to resist.”
That made him flare his wings out, stepping away from her. “What?!”
Fortunately, Sonata didn’t seem to take any offense. “I said ‘don’t try to resist,’” she repeated. “It might mess the spell up if you do.”
“What are you talking about?” Turbo looked at the others. “What is she talking about?”
“Look, this is totes harmless,” continued Sonata. “And I’m, like, super sure that it’ll work even if you try to fight it off, but there’s a chance that you might be able to resist it if you really don’t want this, and that’d be a waste. So…don’t try to resist, okay?”
Turbo gave her an incredulous look. “You really need to work on your sales pitch.”
Sonata huffed, rolling her eyes. “Look, do you want me to do this or not?”
Turbo hesitated, keenly aware that everyone else was looking at him now. Sighing, he let out a breath as he forced himself to relax. “Yeah. Okay, let’s do it.”
“Great!” Sonata reared up just long enough to clop her fore-hooves together before falling back onto all fours and walking toward him. A short musical chant later, she pressed a hoof against his side…and Turbo’s eyes widened at the sudden burst of excitement that went through him. “Whoa!”
“How’s that?” asked Drafty, smirking wider now.
In his surprise, Turbo forgot to be critical as he answered. “This is incredible. It’s like…like my entire body’s fizzing like soda.” He knew that sounded ridiculous, like something a colt would say, but it was honestly how he felt. It was like he was bursting with excess energy, enough so that moving almost felt unnatural.
A few seconds were all it took for Sonata to cast the spell on Drafty and Cloudbank, and she stepped back to nod in satisfaction. “And there you go! This won’t make you tougher or anything, but you’ll definitely be able to react to stuff faster!”
“You said that this lasts longer than a few minutes?” asked Cloudbank, rolling her shoulders to try and deal with how tingly her skin felt thanks to Sonata’s spell.
“Oh yeah,” grinned Sonata sheepishly, mildly embarrassed that she’d forgotten that part. “This will last for an hour and a half before it wears off.”
“Will we crash once the rush ends?” asked Turbo.
“Nah.” Sonata waved a hoof dismissively. “It doesn’t work that way. Once the spell runs out you’ll just go back to normal. That might feel like you’ve slowed down a bit after being tip-top for so long, though.”
“Got it,” nodded Cloudbank crisply. “Okay, last thing before we go. Does everypony have a weapon?”
Drafty, C. Shells, and Sandbar all froze, their eyes widening as they realized what they’d forgotten. Cloudbank frowned, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Turbo gave an amused snort, taking out a few single-edged knives and tossing them to the ground in front of him. “Use these.”
“Where did you get those?” It was difficult to tell if C. Shells was concerned or impressed.
“You do realize that there are massive tables with lots of utensils right over there, right?” smirked Turbo, pleased to have gotten one back after that minor debacle with Sonata’s spells.
Cloudbank didn't give anypony time to respond to his barb, however. “Alright, everypony take a knife and let’s get moving. We’ve got a bank to hit.”
Blinking as she stepped out of their tent, Cozy couldn’t help but smirk a bit at Aisle’s question, hearing the uncertainty in his voice. “Tell them what? That in my hour of grief you seduced me?”
She could practically feel him go rigid at that. “I didn’t-”
“I was kidding,” replied Cozy quickly, her smirk widening into a smile at his flustered appearance. But her good humor only lasted for a moment before the reality, and the ambiguity, of their current situation chased it away. “But really…I don’t know,” she sighed. “I mean, I don’t want to make some big announcement about us being together or anything, but at the same time I don’t want to hide it either.” She looked at the medical tent that was a short distance away, the mere sight of it seeming to drain her strength. I was in there just a short while ago, trying to kill myself. And on the other side is Pillow’s body. All of a sudden the issue of what to do next seemed impossibly burdensome, and she didn’t want to think about it. “What do you want to do?”
“I want you to be comfortable,” answered Aisle immediately. “I want to make sure that we don’t do anything that you don’t like or aren’t happy with.”
“Thanks.” This time Cozy’s smile was smaller. She knew he was trying to be accommodating, to make sure that he wasn’t being overbearing, and she appreciated his concern for her. But at the same time, she felt a sudden surge of resentment run through her. I don’t want to be the one having to figure everything out, she thought angrily. I don’t want to worry that I’m doing something that you don’t like and that you’re not telling me because you’re worried about me! For an instant she considered telling him that, but her irritation was immediately replaced by guilt at the thought, not wanting to lash out at him for trying to be considerate of her feelings. A moment later it occurred to her that she was overreacting, that suddenly going from playful to tired to angry to remorseful was a bad sign, and she felt a frustrated sob start to rise up in her throat. I don’t know what to do!
“Cozy?” Aisle nudged her gently, worried by how she’d been standing in place for the last few seconds, as though lost in thought. His surprise was complete when she suddenly turned and buried her face in his side, letting out a shuddering breath. “Wh-what’s wrong?!” He frantically tried to figure out what had happened, but couldn’t think of anything that had happened in the last few seconds that could possibly have upset her.
“Nothing,” she whimpered. “Everything. I don’t know.”
Confused, Aisle tentatively put a hoof around her. When she didn’t push it away, he pulled her closer, laying his head over hers, and he felt her shudder in response, pressing against him more. After several seconds she finally backed away, trying to compose herself. “I’m sorry,” she sniffled.
Aisle shook his head, his worried look only somewhat softening. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.” Cozy rubbed her eyes before giving him a sad look. “I think…I think that I’m going to be like this for a little while, you know? Just all…out of sorts.” She gave him a pleading look then, wanting him to understand what she was saying despite not completely knowing herself.
“I…okay.” He straightened up, intuiting that something decisive would reassure her, and moved over so he was pressing his side against hers. “It’s like you said. We love each other. We’ll figure the rest out.”
She let out a breathy laugh then, and it almost turned into more crying, but she managed to keep herself together, leaning against him more. “Thanks.” This time her gratitude was genuine, and it buoyed her mood just a little. “I promise that at some point I’ll stop being such a messed-up mare. Just don’t ask me when.”
“I don’t m-, oh hey, look.” He pointed, and Cozy followed his hoof, looking out past the back of the medical tent to see a group of five ponies heading toward…Vanhoover.
She blinked, forgetting her turbulent emotions as she realized she recognized some of the ponies in the procession. “Wait, is that…it’s Cloudbank and Drafty. Why are they leaving the camp?”
“It looks like they’re going back to Vanhoover, but that can’t possibly be right…” Aisle’s brow was furrowed, confused at the prospect of his friends going back into that deathtrap after everything they’d done to escape it.
“We need to go after them! C’mon!” Cozy didn’t wait for him to reply, taking off at a run, leaving a surprised Aisle to rush after her a moment later.
“So you don’t think we should fly at all?”
Turbo shook his head in response to Drafty’s question. “Not if we can help it. Being in the air might give you a good view of your surroundings, but it makes you easy to spot. Just because those things don’t come out during the day doesn’t mean that they’re not active. They still pay attention to what’s happening outside.”
“Hang on,” protested Sandbar. “If they can’t go out in the daytime, then how could they possibly know you guys are there if you fly? I mean, if they don’t look outside then it’s not like they can hear you flap your wings or anything, right?”
“They can look outside,” explained Turbo, “They don’t like sunlight, but they’re not hurt by it. I think it’s like being caught outside in a thunderstorm for them, unpleasant but not debilitating. So trust me, they’ll be watching us through windows and sewer grates and other dark places. If we keep our hooves on the ground, we can at least cut down on the number that see us.”
“And you’re sure we’ll be spotted right away?” asked Cloudbank with a frown. “I don’t think there’s th-”
“Hold that thought,” interrupted C. Shells, looking behind them. “We’ve got company.”
Everypony spun around, and Cloudbank was sure that Sonata had followed them after all. But a moment later she saw who it was, and her eyes widened. “Cozy? Aisle?” She blinked in surprise as the pair ran up to them. “What are you guys doing here?”
“That’s what we wanted to ask you,” panted Cozy, slightly winded from her sudden sprint. “Why are you heading back to Vanhoover?”
“We don’t have time for this,” muttered Turbo, giving Cozy an uncomfortable look. He averted his eyes as she looked back at him quizzically, not sure how to act around the widow of the crystal pony that Garden had killed. Just seeing her reminded him that he had been there at the time – him and Hopscotch both – and that they had participated also, even if Garden had taken point. That hadn’t bothered him before, but for some reason it did now. And I’m the one who told Hopscotch that we shouldn’t confess to Lex, he thought to himself, remembering the hushed conversation they’d had just after Garden had been cursed. Hopscotch had thought that if they told Lex about their part in Pillowcase’s death, he’d have shown leniency to Garden after the fact. As though he’d ever do anything like that. All he’d do is curse us too, and then we’d be even less of a help to Garden than we are now. “We only have so much daylight, and less time before Sonata’s spell ends, remember?”
“What spell?” asked Aisle as he caught up to them. “What’s going on?”
Drafty licked her lips, glancing at C. Shells, Sandbar, and Turbo. “Can you guys give us a few minutes?”
Sandbar adjusted his bandana uneasily. “We really are under a time crun-” He stopped as C. Shells stretched a foreleg out in front of him, indicating that he should stop.
“Arguing will only make this take longer. We’ll wait up ahead,” she said, turning and trotting a short few dozen feet away. Sandbar followed her, and a moment later Turbo did the same, albeit reluctantly.
Once they had some semblance of privacy, Cloudbank quickly explained what was going on. “…and that’s why we’re headed back to Vanhoover.”
“That’s crazy!” exclaimed Aisle. “Even if you guys find a lot of bits, how are you going to carry them all?”
“It shouldn’t be too hard to find a wagon or some shopping carts or something that we can use,” replied Drafty. “Worse comes to worst, we’ll just make as many trips as we can before the sun goes down.”
“I should go with you,” spoke up Cozy. “Lashtada’s magic could make all the difference if you guys get attacked.” Healing magic, she knew, harmed the undead in addition to mending her friends’ hurts. They’d discovered that when they’d been hiding out, and it had saved their lives on more than one occasion.
But her request was met by silence, as Cloudbank and Drafty shared an awkward look before the latter approached her. “Cozy…that’s not a good idea,” she said hesitantly.
“What do you mean?” Cozy protested. “Of course it is! You’ll need healing magic, and-”
“I have some,” interjected Cloudbank. “Not as much as you, but some.” Well, just one right now, she amended silently, only having prepared a single such spell that morning during her prayers. “Trust us, we’ll be okay.”
“But I can still help! I can-”
Cozy’s protest was cut off as Drafty stepped forward and hugged her. “I’m so sorry about Pillow,” she murmured gently. “I wanted to say something before, but everything’s just been so crazy.”
“I’m sorry too,” added Cloudbank, following Drafty’s example and wrapping a foreleg around Cozy as well. “I can’t imagine how hard this must be for you.” Her parents had retired to a little town on the outskirts of Las Pegasus a few years back, so she’d been fortunate enough not to have lost anypony during the disaster.
The sudden outpouring of warmth made Cozy hesitate. “N-no. It’s not your fault. I just…” She knew they were deliberately changing the subject, trying to move away from the topic of her going into Vanhoover with them, but at the same time she couldn’t bring herself to refute their kindness. “I’m doing okay, so…” The words caught in her throat, knowing that they weren’t true.
“Cozy…” Aisle called her name softly as he joined the hug, expressing his own condolences even though he’d already done so much for her.
That was enough to break the last of her restraint, and she felt tears sliding down her cheeks as she hugged them back. “You guys…” A few moments later they separated, each of them rubbing their eyes, and Cozy knew that she wasn’t going with them. “You be careful, okay? I won’t be able to handle it if I lose anymore ponies I care about.” She tried to smile, to take some of the fear out of her words, but she was sure they heard it anyway.
“Trust us, this will be a piece of cake,” replied Drafty, smiling back. “But just in case,” she added a moment later, “knock on wood for me, okay?”
Cloudbank glanced at where the others were waiting. “We need to get going,” she sighed, before looking back at Cozy. “Don’t worry about us, okay? Right now you just focus on you.” She glanced at Aisle and gave him a light grin. “And you, focus on her too.”
“Ah…” Aisle stiffened slightly, his cheeks warming due to the unintentional double entendre in Cloudbank’s words. “Right.”
Cozy rolled her eyes wryly at that, as Cloudbank and Drafty both blinked at the unexpected reaction. “Hang on,” frowned Drafty. “Did something happen…” She trailed off, knowing it would be wildly inappropriate to ask if she was off the mark.
Cozy stuck her tongue out. “If you want to know, you had better come back safely.” With that, she turned and started back towards the camp, Aisle following behind her. They only went a couple steps before they turned and waved, however, and Cloudbank and Drafty returned the gesture as they started back toward the others.
Despite the seriousness of what was in front of them, Drafty couldn’t help but giggle at what had just happened. “Oh my gosh! Did you see that? The two of them…!”
“We don’t know that for sure,” cautioned Cloudbank. “And even if they are, it’s because of a tragedy. I’m not sure it’s appropriate to be excited about it.” But despite her words the corners of her lips were turned up, glad that there was something good to happen after everything that they’d gone through.
“Love is always something to be excited over,” smiled Drafty. “Especially when it’s a love that triumphs over adversity.” Just like what’s going to happen with you, me, and Lex.
That’s right, came the sultry voice of Kara in her thoughts. And very soon, you’ll be together with both of them.
Spit Polish let out a shaky sigh, trying to calm the trembling of his hooves. It had quieted down outside, and he couldn’t hear even the faintest traces of any nearby ponies. Do it now, he told himself. Don’t hesitate. Don’t even think. Just get up and go do it right now. You won’t get another chance. Despite his reassurances, it took him several seconds to stand up, making sure to grab the pillow in his teeth so that he didn’t make a visible aura around it.
He had been fortunate that the tent right next to Lex’s was unoccupied, the filly and infant colt that had been placed there having gone out to eat their fill. His good luck had continued when he’d heard Lex’s girlfriend say that he was asleep. And now…now there was nopony there to watch over him. It was the perfect opportunity to eliminate him before he got more of them killed…the way he had the commander.
Sticking his head out of the tent, Spit Polish glanced around as surreptitiously as he could. Just as he’d thought, there was nopony around. Gulping, he slowly exited his tent and walked over to Lex’s, every nerve on edge. But no one yelled at him as he reached the flap, and a moment later he was inside.
For a long moment he stood there, looking down at the stallion that had single-hoofedly broken the quarantine around the city…a quarantine that Spit Polish had worked hard to protect. One that the commander had died to protect, he was certain. That thought made his stomach tighten with anger, and he held onto that, using it to push back his fear. I know it was your fault, he thought as he glared at the unconscious pony. I may not know how, but I’m sure he’d still be alive if you hadn’t come here. And that’s what’ll happen to all of Equestria if I don’t stop you right now!
This would work. It had to. He’d overheard the doctors talking about how fragile his condition was, had heard Lex push himself despite that. Once they found his body, they’d just chalk it up to his having taken a turn for the worse. And once he’s gone, I’ll be able to fix everything, he was certain. I’ll remind everypony here of the sacrifices we all made, and we’ll push these newcomers back into Vanhoover, and maybe we’ll be able to stop the disease from spreading to the rest of Equestria. It was what the commander would have wanted him to do, he knew.
Taking the pillow in trembling hooves, Spit Polish moved to stand over Lex. He was suddenly very aware that he’d never killed anyone before. Yes I have, he told himself. I threw rocks at ponies trying to leave the city. Unicorns, pegasi, earth ponies, even that crystal stallion. I made them stay. I HAD to. Sacrifices had to be made, for the greater good. This is no different.
Peachy Keen’s face floated to the front of his mind, and Spit Polish hesitated again, remembering how she’d looked at him when she’d seen him talking to the other lieutenants a little while ago. He didn’t want to imagine how she’d look at him if she saw him right now. But at least she’s alive to look at me, he reminded himself. That was the thought that had made it possible for him to do all of those awful things. Because if he failed and she died…
Closing his eyes, Spit Polish grit his teeth as he leaned over and held the pillow against Lex’s face.
Something was smothering him, preventing him from drawing breath even though his lungs felt like they were burning. Unable to see, he confusedly began to struggle, but there was a heavy weight on top of him. He tried to push it off, at least enough to get his face clear, but his aching limbs couldn’t summon any strength, nor was telekinesis effective in his weakened state. The pain in his lungs was unbearable now, and his fear skyrocketed as he dimly realized that he was going to die and he needed to use a spell to escape but they all required chanting and he couldn’t speak because he couldn’t breathe because he couldn’t get air couldn’t get air couldn’t…get…air!
…-urn…-adow…
His consciousness fading, Lex could barely comprehend the sentiment, and for some reason he thought about his horn…what it could do…and then, suddenly, his awareness snapped back with crystal clarity. The pain in his lungs was gone, and it took Lex a moment to realize that was because he didn’t have lungs anymore. Nor did he have a face that could be covered, or limbs that could be pinned down. Nor any sort of physical form at all, having used his dark magic to turn into a shadow.
Lurching backward, Lex found himself looking at a ragged unicorn stallion, his yellow coat marred by bruises. One of his eyes was swollen shut, but the other was opened wide with shock, his jaw slack as he looked between the now-empty bedroll he was standing on and the shadow in front of him. For a moment Lex couldn’t place him, but an instant later he realized that this was the near-hysterical pony that had showed up at the train station that morning, claiming to be Block Party’s second-in-command…Spit Polish. Then Lex’s eyes traveled down to where the stallion’s fore-hooves were planted firmly on a pillow, and the last of his fear and confusion fell away…to be replaced with a towering rage.
“How dare you!” he roared. “HOW DARE YOU!”
Spit Polish started to back away, his face turning pale at the sight of the formless black shadow in front of him, its only visible features being a pair of glowing green eyes whose outer corners sprouted purple contrails. “Y-you’re some kind of monster!” he uttered, fear turning his voice into a squeak. “I knew it! I knew you were-”
That was more than Lex could stand. First this pathetic, cowardly, treacherous pony tried to kill him, and now he dared to impugn him to his face?! With a wordless howl of outrage, Lex conjured a massive stalagmite of black crystals, the pillar of ebon projecting out from the ground at a forty-five degree angle and catching the other stallion directly in the chest, hitting him hard enough to launch him out of the tent with a cry of pain. Lex immediately followed after him, his rage rising with each passing moment.
Outside, the would-be assassin was laying on the ground, doubled over and groaning as he tried to recover from the blow. “DID YOU REALLY THINK THAT YOU COULD KILL ME?!” screamed Lex as he advanced on him. “I HAVE SLAIN DRAGONS AND TRAFFICKED WITH GODS! WHAT CHANCE DID YOU EVER HAVE?!” Terrified, Spit Polish forced himself to his hooves, trying to run, but he hadn’t gotten more than two steps before Lex made more black crystals sprout from the ground in front of him, these ones short and thin like needles. Unable to stop himself, Spit Polish stepped on them, crying out in pain as they pierced his hooves, causing him to lurch to the side as he fell over, barely avoiding collapsing on the sharp protrusions.
“Get away from me!” he screamed, completely terrified now. Dragging himself across the ground, he fumbled for the peg of a nearby tent, yanking it out of the ground with his telekinesis and holding it up as if it were a weapon, his eyes wide with panic. “I-I’m warning you! I-” But the words died in his throat as the stake suddenly fell to the ground, the aura holding it aloft sputtering and dying as black crystals grew along his horn, disrupting his ability to use magic. “NO!” Wailing in despair, he reached up with his hooves, trying to brush the foreign material off of him, but the crystals refused to be dislodged.
“YOUR PALTRY LITTLE SCHEME FAILED!”
Realizing that he couldn’t use his horn anymore, Spit Polish reached down with his bloody fore-hooves, whimpering in pain as he fumbled for the wooden stake. He knew it was useless, knew that it wouldn’t be enough to save him, but any weapon was better than nothing! He had to come up with a plan, had to figure out some way to escape and-
“YOUR PATHETIC ATTEMPT TO KILL ME FAILED!”
Another black crystal, this one as long and thin as a spear, flew from the green-and-purple-eyed shadow, and before Spit Polish could react it pierced his right foreleg, pinning it to the ground as he screamed in pain. For a moment he couldn’t do anything except thrash, all rational thought swallowed up in a miasma of terror and agony, and it was instinct that made him grip the weapon in his teeth a second later, yanking on it as hard as he could. The pain flared worse, but he didn’t stop, absolutely certain that he was going to be killed if he didn’t run away. A moment later it slid free, and he sobbed as he rolled onto his belly, trying to crawl to safety.
“YOU FAILED!”
Lex continued to advance on the prone stallion, his eyes blazing. Rather than satiate his rage, Spit Polish’s descent into hysterics only made him angrier. This miserable little coward had almost killed him?! This mewling excuse for a stallion had actually caused him to panic?! The shame of it was even worse than when he’d needed help after slaying that dragon! “YOU WILL P-”
“Lex! Stop!”
The voice cut through his awareness, and a moment later Sonata interposed herself between him and Spit Polish.
“Get out of my way, Sonata!”
The harsh words made her wince, her ears folding back for just a moment, but she didn’t move. Okay, okay, baby steps. At least he’s not bellowing anymore, she told herself.
After having waved goodbye to Cloudbank and the others as they’d headed off on their bank heist, Sonata hadn’t been sure what to do with herself. She’d eventually wandered back into the camp, deciding to go look at some of the games that had been set up when she’d heard loud voices coming from the direction of the field hospital. Recognizing one of them as Lex’s, she’d immediately set off running, hearing him scream something about…somebody having tried to kill him?!
Sonata had run as fast as she could, but there had already been a crowd forming – the angry words causing a morbid curiosity that managed to exceed their fear, at least for the moment – by the time she made it to where Lex was. She had just pushed past the last few ponies when she saw him, in his shadow-form, pin a vaguely familiar-looking stallion to the ground through his leg with a spear of black crystal, hearing the ponies around her gasp in horror. She had as well, but for different reasons, and hadn’t hesitated before rushing forward to put herself between Lex and the other pony, desperate to try and salvage things before Lex made this into “Garden Gate Part II: The Worsening.”
Now she just had to figure out how to do that.
“Lex, listen to me, you need to stop this! Y-”
“Absolutely not! That wretched, simpering little cur tried to kill me! I will NOT allow that to go unpunished!”
“I know! But…” She was about to tell him that he shouldn’t lash out like this, that even if he wasn’t wrong he was scaring everybody else, but she knew that wouldn’t get through to him. If anything, it would just make him more likely to go ahead with what he was doing. Think! she told herself. Arguing with him doesn’t work, but I need him to stop, so what do I do?! For an instant she floundered…and then, from out of nowhere, an idea popped into her head, going straight to her mouth before she could even stop to think about it. “But I want to help you do it!”
The glowing green eyes narrowed. “You…what?”
Sonata heard the note of confusion in his voice, and instantly seized on it. “Yeah! I totes want a piece of this action! I mean, after all,” she pivoted in place then, so she was facing the crowd, and raised her voice, “this guy just tried to kill the pony who made all that food! Of course he deserves to be punished!” She pointed at Spit Polish as she spoke, ignoring the horrified look he was giving her. He really does look familiar, though…but where would-, wait a minute! All of a sudden she remembered him from the train station that morning, and she felt any inkling of sympathy for the injured stallion vanish. He was working for that guy who let this place become so awful AND he tried to kill Lex? Oh that does it…
Hearing the confused murmuring from the crowd in response to her declaration, Sonata stepped forward. “Every-, um, pony, listen up! I know this is hard to believe, but that big, scary-looking shadow is Lex Legis, the same pony who injured himself making a meal for all of us! He uses a spell to make himself look like that whenever he’s attacked, but he’s still the same pony on the inside!” She could see that it was working, the faces in the crowd starting to look uncertain, as though not sure what to think. Rearing up on her hind legs, she kept going. “I know you all don’t know him very well, but I can tell you that even though he doesn’t show it, no one cares about ponies more than Lex. He’s been here less than twenty-four hours, and he’s already made food, handed out medicine, and locked up the guy who used to run this place! And he’s done it all without asking for so much as a thank you!” She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed at Spit Polish again. “And instead, he gets somepony who used to work for Block Party trying to kill him!”
“N-no!” Grimacing, Spit Polish held a hoof out towards the crowd, his face pleading. “You don’t understand! I was trying to protect everypony!” He looked back at Lex, who hadn’t moved, then at the crowd. “He’s a monster! He’s a monster and we have to get rid of him before he dooms us all! It’s his fault the commander died, and if we don’t act now, we’ll all-”
“Shut up!”
The words didn’t come from Sonata, but from within the crowd. Slowly, the assembled ponies moved aside, and a unicorn mare strode forward. Her colors were the mirror-opposite of Spit Polish’s, having a bright orange coat and a soft yellow mane and tail. Her cutie mark was a pair of peaches connected at the stem, each of which had a twinkle on their skin. Like Spit Polish, there were ugly bruises dotting her body, and as she strode forward she limped, favoring her back left leg. Despite the angry look on her face, there were tears spilling down her cheeks. “Just shut up, Spit!”
Blinking at the newcomer, Sonata looked back at Spit Polish, and couldn’t help but feel surprised by his reaction. The expression on his face was one of complete and utter devastation, his eyes full of hurt and confusion, his mouth hanging open. Even as she watched, he shook his head slightly, as though denying that this was happening. A moment later she heard him utter one word, his voice desperate.
“It’s quiet,” observed Sandbar suspiciously, looking around the empty streets of Vanhoover. “Too quiet.”
“Well…yeah,” replied Drafty, puzzled by his pointing out the obvious. “The ghouls are all keeping out of the light, and any survivors left are in hiding.” She remembered that very well from when she and her friends had been hunkered down after the floodwaters had receded. Going out in the daytime had been less dangerous than at night, but it was by no means safe. That’s why I made sure to fly whenever I went out, rather than walk, she remembered, glancing at Turbo. But if what he said was right, then I was just making myself obvious to all of the ghouls that were lurking in the area. The thought was an uncomfortable one; she and the others had endured more than a few nighttime attacks by ghouls, to the point where they’d barricaded themselves in a second-floor apartment after trapping the entire ground floor. The idea that they’d been so consistently targeted because she’d lured them there with her flying left her feeling self-conscious and guilty.
C. Shells rolled her eyes, oblivious to Drafty’s distress. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just saying that because he thinks it sounds cool.”
“Well it does,” protested Sandbar. “Honestly, we’re on an adventure! You guys should get into the spirit a little more.”
“Spoken like somepony that wasn't here while this city was falling apart,” replied Cloudbank distractedly, the bulk of her attention being focused on looking around. “Living through that was an adventure too, and I’d be just as happy never to get back into that particular spirit ever again.”
“Will you all please shut up?” murmured Turbo. “Bad enough we had to come back here at all, but your yapping is going to bring every ghoul in the city down on us!”
Everypony quieted down at that, trotting in silence. Even so, their passage through the city wasn’t silent; the soft clopping of their hooves on the road echoed loudly in their ears, and even their breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the silent city. They continued forward like that for several minutes, Drafty leading the way, before C. Shells spoke up softly. “I know it’s a little late to ask this, but where exactly are we headed?”
“The bank closest to the camp is Vanhoover Community Financial,” replied Drafty. She smiled faintly at the name, remembering a time before the city went completely to pieces. “We always just called it Big Banks, which I thought was strange when I was a filly since it was only a three-story building. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was actually ‘Big Banks’,’ with an apostrophe at the end of it, because that was the name of the original owner.”
“Who was Piggy’s great-grandstallion,” muttered Cloudbank, remembering the way the fat little pony had bragged about that when Drafty was hitting him up for information.
Turbo’s eyebrows went up at that. “We’re going to be knocking over Piggy’s family’s bank?” He’d known that Piggy’s family was in charge of the town’s financial institutions, but somehow he hadn’t made the connection that their current mission was going to impact his companion so directly.
Cloudbank shot him a wary look. “Is that a problem?”
“Are you kidding?” scoffed Turbo quietly. “We had to put up with that oversized creampuff’s inflated ego every day. As far as I’m concerned, this is quite literally payback.” Despite his words, Turbo’s smirk wasn’t malicious. Piggy’s completely baseless sense of self-importance had been somewhat annoying to deal with, but prolonged exposure had made it seem more humorous than irritating, to the point where his antic insistence that he was the leader of their group had turned him into something of a mascot. Though I suppose Granola Bar would say something different, he silently conceded.
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to be making a contribution to everypony’s welfare,” snickered Drafty. Her mirth settled down as she looked around again, pointing to a nearby building. “Okay, that’s the theater, so we should only be nine or ten blocks away!”
“We’re lucky the bank is so close to the edge of town,” mused C. Shells.
Drafty shook her head. “It’s not luck. Big Banks’ was deliberately placed at the northeast edge of town in order to be closer to ponies coming in from the farmlands to the north. They’d sell their produce and have a lot of bits that they wouldn’t want to haul all the way back home, so it was safer and easier for them to just deposit them here. That way, whenever they needed to come into town for something, they could just withdraw the money right here.” As unpleasant as Piggy had been to deal with, he was a font of information about his family’s business.
“Huh. That’s pretty smart,” admitted Sandbar.
Drafty nodded, leading them around a corner as they walked. “Yeah, it basically made-, uh-oh.” She came to a halt as she finished rounding the corner, everypony else coming to a stop as well as they beheld the scene ahead of them.
Despite the fact that they were walking down a main thoroughfare, the way ahead was completely impassable due to a large swath of debris clogging the road. Old boxes, busted cabinets, broken bottles, dented cans, bent chairs, overturned carts, ruined books, and other unidentifiable junk formed a barrier that stretched across the street. “Oh, this is not good,” muttered Cloudbank as she surveyed the pile of garbage critically.
“Why?” asked Drafty. “This is a little inconvenient, but we have three pegasi and two earth ponies.” She pointed at C. Shells and Sandbar. “Absolute worst case scenario, it’ll take us two trips to carry both of them across. We’ll have to fly, but as long as we stay close to the ground it shouldn’t be a problem. In fact…” She paused to peer at the garbage pile again, smiling. “I think there are some carts in there! If we can find one that’s not broken and fish it out, we’ll be all set!"
But C. Shells had started shaking her head before Drafty finished speaking. “That’s fine for getting past this now, but what about when we come back? Can the three of you pick up a cart that’s been loaded down with bits and fly it over all this?” Her tone of voice made it clear that she already knew the answer, and Drafty didn’t try to contradict her. “We’re going to need to come back a different way.”
“We could just use the side streets,” ventured Sandbar, waving a hoof at the various intersections around them. “They should be plenty wide enough to fit a cart through, and we’d only have to go a few blocks out of our way.”
“That’s a bad idea,” replied Turbo immediately. “The narrower the streets get less light and have less room to maneuver. Going that way is just asking for ghouls to ambush us. We should stick to the main roads, even if we have to take some extra time and go around.”
Cloudbank frowned. “If we take too much time, then Sonata’s enchantments will wear off, and we’ll be weakened.” She didn’t look away from the massive pile or garbage as she spoke, trying to figure out if it had occurred naturally in the wake of the flooding, or if it had been deliberately constructed. The former was entirely plausible; if the debris had been swept along when the water engulfed the city, it wasn’t unbelievable that some of it had gotten caught on something, catching more trash until it had clogged the entire street. But if this was made deliberately…
Drafty seemed to share her thoughts. “Could this have been put here on purpose?”
“You think the ghouls did this?” asked C. Shells, looking around suspiciously.
“Them, or maybe some other survivors.” Drafty’s eyes scanned the windows – many of them broken or boarded up – of the nearby buildings. “We built a barricade when we were hiding too.”
“It doesn’t matter.” There was an undercurrent of anxiety in Turbo’s voice, his words coming out harshly. “It’s here, and we’ve got to figure out how to deal with it. Standing around and talking about it isn’t doing anything except wasting time and making us a target. We need to decide on a plan and execute it!”
“I agree.” Cloudbank turned to face the others. “We’ll go with Drafty’s idea for now. The three of us,” she indicated herself, Drafty, and Turbo, “will carry C. Shells and Sandbar across. Then we’ll try and retrieve one of the carts in there and take it with us. We’ll figure out what to do about the return trip once we’ve loaded it up.” Nopony objected to her decision, and Cloudbank nodded, unable to help but feel slightly pleased about that. So far so good. If we’re lucky this will be the only obstacle we have to overcome. It took barely a minute to ferry the two earth ponies over the pile of garbage, after which point Drafty and Turbo went to work trying to extricate one of the carts that was entangled in the mess. Cloudbank stayed with C. Shells and Sandbar on the far side of the pile, keeping a lookout.
Holding Severance, Cloudbank quietly whispered to it. “Do you see anyone?” Although the scythe had no eyes or ears or any other obvious way of observing the world around it, it quite clearly had some method of perceiving its environment. Given the potential for danger all around them, she had every intention of making use of that…if the scythe cooperated. Cloudbank was very aware that it wouldn’t help a wielder that it felt was dependent on it, having demonstrated that amply when it had done nothing to prevent the kraken from making her stab Drafty. If it decided that her question now qualified as being dependent…
She let out a relieved breath as Severance answered her query in the negative. She was about to follow up by asking how reliable its senses were – she had no idea if the weapon could see through walls or otherwise exceed the awareness of an ordinary pony – but before she could there was a loud crash as a wooden bookshelf fell over, dislodged by the cart Turbo and Drafty were lifting. The pegasi both winced, and Turbo shot Drafty a dirty look. “You were supposed to catch that before it fell!”
“I didn’t have a chance! You were lifting the cart too fast!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Cloudbank stomped a hoof, certain that if the ghouls hadn’t been aware of them before, they were now. “Just hurry up and get that over here!”
A moment later, the cart was placed onto the ground for their inspection. It was the basic two-wheeled variety, having a relatively small bed set above the axis and a harness allowing it to be pulled along by a single pony. Even better, it turned out to be almost completely intact, the only problem being several of the spokes in the left wheel being cracked. “It’ll have to do,” announced Cloudbank, before pointing at Sandbar. “You’re in charge of the cart. Just remember that it’ll be a lot heavier after we load it up.”
Sandbar smirked. “Don’t worry about that. One of my jobs on our ship was weighing the anchor. A small cart like this won’t be a problem.” He was already moving as he spoke, strapping himself into the harness. After he did he reared up on his back legs for a moment, bucking his fore-hooves in a gesture of readiness. “Okay, time to plunder us a bank and get some booty!”
C. Shells muttered several very choice words about her subordinate’s attitude as they got underway.
A few minutes later they stood in front of the bank. As Drafty had said, it was a three-story building, one that might have looked almost homey if it had been in better condition. As it was, the lower part of the exterior was stained and grimy from the flooding, and a few of the windows were broken. Letters proclaiming the building’s name had been affixed to the outer wall, but several of them were missing, turning the title into gibberish. Trash littered the front entrance, and the front doors were sagging in place, the bottom hinges having come off the wall.
“This is going to be the hard part,” declared Turbo as he looked at the building critically. “Inside it’s going to be cramped and dark, perfect for ghouls to ambush us.” He threw a sidelong glance at the others. “We need to stick together and be extremely careful. Just one bite from those things, or a single scratch, can paralyze you, and you won’t be able to yell for help as they drag you away and devour you alive.”
“We get it,” replied C. Shells anxiously. Despite everything she’d been through, she couldn’t help but feel unnerved by what Turbo was saying. Trying to push that feeling away, she looked at Drafty. “Any idea where we should start?”
The other mare nodded. “According to what Piggy told me, we’ll want to head to the vault.”
“And where’s that?” asked Sandbar.
Drafty’s face was grim as she replied. “The basement.”
Peachy Keen could feel her heart breaking as she looked at Spit Polish.
“You don’t understand!” he had said only a few moments ago. “I was trying to protect everypony!” Those words – his confession that he really had tried to kill that other pony, the one who had given them hope for the first time in weeks – echoed in her ears, replaying over and over. With each remembrance, anger and sadness washed over her, as bad as when she’d lost her parents in those terrible days after the floodwaters had receded.
No, this is worse, she decided. Losing her parents had been awful, but watching her oldest friend slowly turn himself into a monster had been even more horrible to watch. The pony she had grown up with had been funny and kind, always talking about opening his own shoe store one day and rushing to clean up any messy hoofwear that caught his eye. One of her happiest memories had been the time he’d made a set of boots for Sprinkles, her dog, and they’d laughed themselves silly when the beagle had taken one look at them and immediately tried to bury them in the backyard. As recently as six months ago, she’d been teasing him about how it was the nature of boots to always get dirty no matter how often they were cleaned, to which he’d simply laughed and said that was why his talents would always be needed. But now…
“P-Peachy, please…” Laying on his belly few dozen feet in front of her, Spit Polish reached a bloody hoof out towards her, a desperate look on his face. “I did it for you. For you and everypony here. I only wanted-, the only thing I’ve ever wanted is to help-”
“SHUT UP!” she screamed, so loudly that she felt her throat ache. His words tore at her heart, and she couldn’t bear to hear anymore. “I SAID SHUT UP!” She lowered her face to the ground, unable to stop herself from sobbing for a moment, lifting her head only when she’d regained a measure of control over herself. “‘Help’?!” she asked him incredulously. “You want to help?! You just tried to murder somepony!” She pointed at the shadow that other mare had said was Lex. “He came here with doctors and food and was making things better and you tried to kill him! And you say you want to help?!” She felt almost nauseous, as though all the food she’d just eaten was going to come rushing back up, but she didn’t – she couldn’t – stop. “Is this the same help you gave those ponies you threw rocks at when they tried to leave Vanhoover?! The same help you gave those farmers when you stole their food?! What about the help you gave those ponies that made Block Party angry?! Were you helping when you beat them up on his orders?!”
“It was necessary!” Spit Polish’s voice was still begging her to understand. “Desperate times required desperate measures! I didn’t like doing any of those things, but they had to be done!” He waved his injured hoof at the crowd. “If I didn’t help the commander keep discipline here, things would have completely fallen apart, and all of Equestria would have been like this!”
“You’re wrong! Why can’t you see that?!” She wished he’d get angry at her, that he’d scream curses at her and act hateful and cruel like somepony else altogether. That would have been easier than listening to him the way he was now, still recognizably her best friend even as he tried to persuade her that what he’d done was acceptable. “We could have found another way! It didn’t have to be like this!”
“Yes it did!” yelled Spit Polish. “YES IT DID! If there was any other way the commander would have done it! I would have done it, but there wasn’t! We did what we had to do for the good of Equestria, and we weren’t wrong!”
He really believes that… Peachy wanted to scream at him to shut up again, to cover her ears and shake her head and make him stop saying those things, but suddenly she didn’t have the energy. For a moment the world swayed dangerously, and she squeezed her eyes shut as she almost collapsed, a single thought filling her mind then: I can’t do this anymore.
She had been trying to stop Spit Polish from going down this road for a long time. She’d tried many times to reason with him, to tell him that what Block Party was doing was wrong, but he hadn’t listened. She’d tried to comfort him in those increasingly rare moments when he’d admitted to feeling guilty about what he’d done in the other stallion’s service, hoping that she’d be able to persuade him to stop, but it had always been in vain. She’d even offered her own services to Block Party, hoping to replace Spit Polish and so prevent him from having to do anymore awful things. But that plan had failed spectacularly when she hadn’t been able to bring herself to attack ponies trying to leave the city, earning herself a severe beating at Block Party’s hooves. When Spit Polish had found out what happened, she’d briefly hoped that he’d finally see what a monster his “commander” was. But although she’d seen the conflict in her old friend’s eyes, the only thing he’d said to her was “you shouldn’t have made him angry.” It had filled her with shock and disappointment at the time, but that was nothing compared to now.
When she opened her eyes a moment later, her only response to Spit Polish was a mournful look. She wanted to say so many things to him in that moment – that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to save him, that it terrified her that he’d become someone so different from the pony she knew, that it hurt too much for her to keep reaching out to him – but she couldn’t find it within herself to do so. Instead, she turned her gaze toward the freestanding shadow that was Lex Legis. For a brief moment she couldn’t help but appreciate the irony that a pony who looked as unintimidating as Spit Polish would do such grotesque things, while the pony who had changed into such an intimidating form had done so much for them while asking for nothing in return. Maybe that’s what Equestria’s become now, she thought tiredly, though the significance of that was more than she could bring herself to dwell on at the moment.
Instead, she took a single step forward. “Lex Legis,” she called, though she needn’t have bothered, since all eyes were already on her. “My name is Peachy Keen. I’ve known Spit Polish all my life, and I just…I wanted to say-”
“If you’re going to ask me to show him leniency,” interrupted Lex, his eyes narrowing, “then y-”
“No, I’m not.” Peachy shook her head wearily. “I just wanted to say that, whatever you do to him…he deserves it.”
A stricken look crossed Spit Polish’s face at that, but Peachy Keen didn’t see it, turning and walking away. “Peachy!” he called after her, his voice almost a sob. “Peachy, you can’t do this!” He tried to crawl after her, but was barely able to move, dragging himself forward along the ground with his undamaged foreleg. “Peachy, please, don’t! You know me!”
“I used to. I don’t anymore.” Her voice only barely carried to his ears as she walked away, the crowd parting like water before her. “Goodbye, Spit.”
He screamed her name one last time, then, and although she didn’t show any outward sign of having heard it, she knew that the sound would follow her for a very long time.
“Wow…”
Sonata wasn’t sure what else to say as Peachy left, glancing at where the orange mare had disappeared into the crowd before turning her eyes back to Spit Polish. He had buried his face in his forelegs, weeping bitterly. And I thought me and Lex had problems, she grimaced, before turning back to look at her boyfriend. “So, um, what now?”
Lex was silent for a long moment. He wanted to simply curse the wretched pony right there, but as much as he loathed the sight of that pathetic stallion, he couldn’t ignore what he knew was the moral course of action to take in such circumstances. “Use your magic to put him to sleep, and then have the doctors drag him to the medical tent and patch him up. When they’re done, I want him thrown in that cage that we used to transport Garden Gate here. Until then, tell C. Shells to have some of her crew stand guard over him while the doctors patch him up. I won't have him waking up and attacking anypony else before he's imprisoned.”
Sonata blinked at that, tilting her head. “Um, C. Shells isn’t here. She went into Vanhoover with Cloudbank and the others.”
Lex’s eyes widened just slightly, before turning upward, cursing as he noticed the position of the sun. “They weren’t supposed to leave before I had a chance to speak to them again! There were other preparations I wanted to make!”
“Aw, don’t stress out over it,” shrugged Sonata. “They looked super prepared already, plus I used some magic to help them out. And besides, Cloudbank had Severance with her, so I bet they’ll be fine.” She gave him a reassuring smile before singing a brief spell, glancing at the crying Spit Polish as she did. A moment later his weeping trailed off as the tension went out of his body, passing out as her magic took hold. Satisfied, she looked back at Lex, canting her head toward the medical tent. “I’m gonna go fetch those doctors.” She didn’t wait for him to respond before turning and trotting off, humming to herself happily. That all went great! After how bad everything had gone since they’d arrived in the camp, it was about time that things started to turn arou-
“Sonata.”
She paused in mid-trot as she heard him call her name, turning back to glance at him. “What’s up?”
“As soon as the doctors collect this pathetic excuse for a pony, I want you to come to my tent.” He floated closer to her then, his green eyes filled with displeasure. “Spit Polish isn’t the only pony that needs to be punished for what they’ve done.”
She winced at that, biting her lip as she folded her ears back. So much for things turning around.
Nosey watched silently as the crowd began to disperse, talking amongst themselves about what they’d just witnessed. From what she could overhear, virtually all of them were of the opinion that Spit Polish was getting what he deserved. None of them seemed to think that Lex had gone overboard; quite the contrary, the sight of several doctors picking up the defeated stallion and taking him into the medical tent seemed to cement that he wasn’t being unreasonable in his reactions, at least so far.
First the doctors treating everyone here. Then the extravagant banquet this morning. Now this. The atmosphere at the camp was more optimistic than it had been at any time since its founding. For the first time in weeks, the ponies here were daring to believe that their misery was coming to an end, and the despair that had permeated the place was steadily eroding.
That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all. If this kept up, everything she'd worked for would come undone, and that couldn't be allowed to happen. Fortunately, she knew how to manage the situation. After all, hope was a fickle thing; if it was suddenly snatched away, it could result in a sense of hopelessness even greater than if it had never been there in the first place.
A small smile crossed Nosey’s face as she turned her awareness back towards Cloudbank and the others.
“We have to keep moving!” yelled Turbo as he ducked under another wild blow from the ghoul in front of him, stabbing upward with the knife in his hooves. The blade sank into the creature’s chest, but its only response was to leer at him – running its tongue over its decayed lips in a gesture of hunger – before it lunged forward, trying to sink its teeth into his neck.
Its reward for its effort was to have its head bashed in by Sandbar, the monster unable to utter so much as a grunt as the heavy base of the stanchion he’d grabbed upstairs caved its skull in. “We are NOT leaving the captain behind!” he panted, glaring at Turbo.
“I didn’t say we should leave her behind,” shot back the other stallion. “I said we need to keep moving! Just drag her along until she recovers!”
“I’ve got her!” Drafty’s words were strained as she picked up C. Shell’s rigid body. “Let’s go!”
“We should be getting close to the vault,” panted Cloudbank, managing to speak clearly despite her teeth gripping Severance’s handle tightly. “Once we’re there, we’ll have a chance to regroup.” Or at least, I hope we will.
They’d been beset by ghouls almost from the moment they’d entered the bank. They had pushed their way past the sagging front doors and into the dimly-lit interior of the place only for nearly a half-dozen ghouls to rush them as soon as they’d moved away from the entrance. Heedless of the light spilling in from the nearby windows, the undead ponies had poured out from around corners and behind the teller counter, shrieking and gibbering as they’d charged them. Fortunately the living ponies had been prepared, staying in a tight formation and fighting defensively as they’d fought off the sudden onslaught, but the ensuing melee had still been horribly chaotic. Both Drafty and Sandbar had lost their weapons in the initial rush, the latter grabbing a nearby stanchion and wielding it like a club to make up for the loss. Drafty had simply made do with a nearby chair, awkwardly using it as a shield to keep the ghouls away from her.
The fight had lasted less than a minute, but it had driven home how perilous their mission was. Several of them had sustained minor injuries, and Sandbar had been briefly paralyzed at one point. Fortunately Cloudbank had been able to cover him until he’d shaken it off…though she knew that the real credit went to Severance. The weapon was the major reason they’d come through so well; although Cloudbank wasn’t able to wield it well enough to score a hit with every stroke, the two that had connected had killed an undead pony each time.
Despite that, Cloudbank hadn’t been able to bring herself to think of the fight as a victory. Even though three of the ghouls had been destroyed, the other two had retreated deeper into the bank, no doubt to find a place to prepare for another ambush. Worse, they’d all heard the distant sounds of scrabbling and hurried clopping that indicated even more ghouls waiting for them. But that hadn’t been what had bothered her the most. They seem different, she’d thought to herself as they’d hurried toward the entrance to the basement. More feral, almost like they’re desperate. These ghouls hadn’t bothered to taunt them with wicked rhymes or dark promises about what they’d do to them. Instead, they’d simply hissed and snarled at them, using words only to spew curses and snatches of phrases at them in the midst of battle. Even their appearance had seemed different to her, with their skin stretched taut and their stomachs being recessed to an unnatural degree. It’s as if they’re starving.
By the time they’d managed to find the entrance to the basement, they’d been attacked twice more. These had been different from the initial massive push, however. Each time had seen a ghoul leap out from a place of concealment – out of a nearby office the first time and from behind a small kitchenette the second – and, screeching hideously, had lashed out at them, trying to land only a hit or two before falling back. The first time had cost Cloudbank a blow to the face but hadn’t paralyzed her. The second one had occurred only moments ago and had left C. Shells stiff as a board. The ghoul had immediately tried to grab her by the mane and pull her away, and probably would have succeeded if Turbo and Sandbar hadn’t intervened when they did.
All that, and they hadn’t even made it to the basement yet.
“That’s it,” pointed Drafty. “The green door, just like Piggy said. That should take us down to the basement, and the vault should be dead ahead.”
“You just had to phrase it that way, didn’t you?” quipped Sandbar dryly.
“Go shiver a timber, pirate,” she shot back, though the corners of her lips turned up slightly as she said it.
But Turbo was in no mood for their banter, holding his knife at the ready as they approached the door. “There’s going to be more down there,” he warned them. “Someplace that’s dark and cramped is perfect for them.”
Anything else he was going to say was cut off as C. Shells gave a grunt, climbing to her hooves as her paralysis wore off. “That was awful,” she groaned as she stood up. The feeling of being trapped in her own body, aware but completely helpless, had been horrifying.
“Can you still fight?” asked Cloudbank, keeping Severance in a ready position. She’d asked the weapon a moment ago to keep her apprised if it was aware of any movement around them, but while Severance had been amenable to doing so it had let it slip that it couldn’t see through walls, meaning that in the tight confines of the bank’s hallways it was just as blind as they were.
“I could, if I had a weapon.” C. Shell’s voice was frustrated as she glanced around, trying to find anything that she could use in the next attack.
“Here.” Turbo’s flung a wing out towards her, tossing a knife lightly in her direction. When she caught it, he did the same thing for Drafty. “One for you, too.”
Fumbling for hers, Drafty gave him a questioning look. “You picked these up after we dropped them?” She hadn’t seen him do that.
But Turbo shook his head. “I just made sure to take a couple extras from the banquet tables. You can’t afford to be caught empty-hooved in Vanhoover. Just be careful. Those are my last two.”
Both mares nodded their thanks to him, readying their weapons as Cloudbank moved to the door. “Okay, on three…” She glanced around to make sure everypony was ready, then turned her attention to the door.
“One.” She lifted Severance high, ready to slash anything that came out from the door.
“Two.” Drafty and Turbo got on either side of the door, knives at the ready, as C. Shells and Sandbar covered their backs, watching for any ghouls trying to come up from behind.
“Three!” She kicked the door, which immediately swung open. When nothing leapt out at her, she moved toward the lightless entrance-
-and immediately fell back, covering her nose as a fetid stench filled her nostrils. “Ugh! What is that?” she gagged, her eyes watering.
Drafty glanced in the doorway, but immediately yanked her head back as she inhaled the awful scent. “I dunno,” she croaked, her face screwed up in disgust. “I can’t see anything down there.”
“Do we have a light?” asked C. Shells, wrinkling her nose. “Preferably something we can toss down there to see what that is?”
“I saw some oil lamps a few rooms back,” ventured Turbo, “but I have no idea if they’re full or not, and we’d need some way to light them.”
“We’re not going back.” Cloudbank had stepped back from the door in order to get some fresh air, but now moved toward it again, her face determined as her weapon whispered a solution into her mind. “Severance can light the way.”
Sure enough, as she stepped through the doorway, the blade began to glow with a soft fluorescent light. The light didn’t shine as brightly as Cloudbank would have liked, but it managed to push back the darkness enough to show her a single flight of wooden steps leading down, ending at… “What the heck?”
Turbo moved after her. “What’s…? Oh.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the floor couldn’t be seen, hidden under a layer of scummy water that looked pitch black under Severance’s dull light. As still as glass, it stretched from the one corner of the room that was illuminated off into darkness, with no easy way to tell how deep it was. The odor of stagnation was overpowering, and Cloudbank tried to take shallow breaths as she surveyed the scene. This is not good at all, she knew.
“Everything okay?” called Drafty.
“The place is partially submerged,” replied Cloudbank. Despite wanting quite badly to turn and leave – only partially because of the smell – she made herself start down the steps. “It must have been like this ever since the beginning of the flood.”
From behind her, Cloudbank could hear the others starting to follow her. “Oh wow,” muttered C. Shells. “This place needs to be bilged really badly.”
“At least we’ll hear any ghouls splashing around before they get to us,” pointed out Sandbar, trying to be optimistic.
Cloudbank stood on the lowest step that was still above the water level. “Not necessarily,” she replied, her voice ominous. “Undead ponies don’t need to breathe, so they could swim through and attack us without ever breaching the surface if this is deep enough.” There’d be some ripples if the ghouls did that, she knew, but those would be almost impossible to see due to their own traipsing through the water.
“It’s worse than that.” Turbo let out a slow breath as he considered the scene in front of him. “Imagine being paralyzed and then knocked off your hooves while you’re down here. Even if their paralysis doesn’t last very long, you can bet they’ll try and pounce on you to make sure you don’t get up before they use it again.”
“Okay, I’m going to nominate this place as having officially become too dangerous,” interjected Sandbar. “I say we fall back and try a different bank. There’s got to be others that aren’t this bad off.”
C. Shells nodded. “I agree. In this sort of environment, hauling out bags of bits while also having to fight for our lives is going to be impossible. We should try somewhere else.”
“No.” Cloudbank shook her head, dipping the end of Severance’s blade into the water, causing light ripples to radiate out as she felt its tip strike the floor. “Everypony back at the camp is counting on us, and we’ve already come this far. Besides, it’s not very deep, see?” She withdrew Severance and showed them how far the water came up on the curved blade. “A little over a foot. We can handle that.”
“I don’t know, Cloudy.” A worried frown creased Drafty’s features. “We know there’s still more ghouls upstairs. If they corner us down h-”
“All the more reason to hurry up.” Cloudbank strode forward as she spoke, splashing as she entered the knee-deep water. This is how the earth ponies will have to go through it, so I need to do the same. “C’mon. The sooner we reach the vault the sooner we can get out of here.” Wanting to look fearless, she strode forward, knowing that’s what Lex would have done if he were there. The other four shared doubtful looks, but slowly fell in behind Cloudbank, weapons ready and trying not to breathe in too much as they headed towards their goal.
Behind them, the door at the top of the stairs slowly swung shut…
Lex was still in his shadow-form when Sonata entered his tent.
She hesitated upon seeing that, frowning in mild confusion as she walked in. “Lex? Is everything okay?” As far as she knew, he never turned into a shadow unless it was in response to a threat, and always turned back to normal as soon as things calmed down. So why was he still that way now? “The doctors are taking care of Spit Polish, and I totes got two of C. Shells’ crew to keep an eye on him while they do. Ocean Spray and-”
“Did you enchant that mare?” he asked abruptly. “The one who came to inform me about Block Party’s body?” His eyes hadn’t been visible when she entered, but they opened now, regarding her darkly.
The question made her wince. “Look…I can explain.”
“So it was you.”
“Wait, you didn’t know for sure?!” Her eyes widened as she realized that he’d tricked her into giving herself away, and for a moment she felt a mixture of anger, exasperation, and amusement. Hadn’t she seen things like this on TV before, back on Earth? For a moment she could have kicked herself for falling for that – briefly recalling how often Aria and Adagio, and Lex himself for that matter, had called her dumb – before deciding it didn’t matter. I mean, I guess I’d be suspicious of a Siren too, if I were him. It wasn’t like Aria could enchant anyone with her voice all messed up, after all.
“I can’t believe you did that, Sonata.” His voice came out as a growl.
“Lex…”
“I can’t believe you did that!”
She cringed at his shout, her ears folding back. The edges of the shapeless black mass that was his shadow-self had always flickered and fluttered, but now they roiled and thrashed, telegraphing his anger. “Look, can you change back?”
He ignored her request, his green eyes staring into hers as he continued. “I’ve told you over and over that manipulating somepony else’s mind with magic, outside of very specific circumstances, is hideously immoral!” He floated closer to her then, and in the close confines of the small tent, there was no way for her to back away as he moved his eyes closer to hers. “Altering someone’s thoughts is a violation of egregious proportions! It abrogates the most fundamental aspects of who they are! It’s a power that must be used with the greatest of responsibility, and you abused it! And for what?! So that you could cover up Cozy’s own irresponsible lack of assistance for the ponies here?!” His eyes narrowed then. “Was this her idea? Did she convince you to do this?”
Sonata shook her head. “No, she didn’t,” she sighed. “Aisle did.” She felt a twinge of guilt for admitting that, but the feeling was easy to ignore. Aisle was a nice guy, but as far as Sonata was concerned it was his fault that she was in this position in the first place. Besides, it was bad enough that she’d tried to deceive the stallion she loved; doing it a second time, and for a guy who was only kind of a friend, was too much. “He came to me earlier this morning, all freaked out, and asked if I could do that for him. I wasn’t going to at first, but-”
“I’ve heard enough,” snapped Lex. “Bring them here."
“Huh?” Sonata blinked. “Wait, you don’t want to know why I did it?”
“You’ve made it obvious that there were no exigent circumstances that could possibly justify your actions.” He turned away from her then, his eyes disappearing as he moved back towards his side of the tent, apparently done with her. “Beyond that, I don’t care about whatever excuses you have. Go and bring those two here. Now.”
For a moment Sonata simply gaped at the abrupt dismissal, then she frowned – this time in anger – and stomped her hoof. “I did it because he said that you would punish Cozy if you found out she didn’t help. That you’d put a curse on her or something, like you did with Garden Gate.”
“He was entirely correct, as I’m about to demonstrate,” replied Lex coldly. “Now do as I told you.”
“No!” Sonata wished he was solid so that she could grab him and shake some sense into him. “Lex, you screwed up the thing with Garden Gate really bad! That’s why I tried to help Aisle cover for Cozy!”
“What kind of nonsense is that?!” He turned to look at her again, his eyes filled with outrage at the accusation. “The punishment I gave her was entirely appropriate! It inflicted a serious blow to her quality of life as just desert for the life she took, it places severe limitations on her ability to hurt anypony else, it includes a rehabilitative aspect by making her confront what she did every night in her dreams, and it all happened in public so as to both deter anypony who would dare commit similar offenses while simultaneously reassuring everyone else that I will protect them from anyone who would harm them, even if they are another pony! It was justice by any measure!”
“You scared everypony, Lex.” Sonata stated the words in a flat, resigned tone. “What you did to Garden Gate made them all afraid of you.”
For a moment he was silent, and Sonata saw confusion and disbelief in his eyes, followed by a moment of uncertainty before they narrowed again. “You’re wrong. I saw how everyone was acting in the wake of my sentencing her. They were reassured.”
“They were terrified,” countered Sonata. “I spoke to a bunch of them right after it happened, Lex. They all said the same thing: ‘I can’t believe he did something so awful.’ That was everypony’s reaction.” Her anger was completely gone now, replaced with a sick sense of weariness. She knew him well enough to know that this would be a blow to his confidence, and she hated that she had to do this to him. But there’s no other way, she knew. She’d been able to stop him from going all curse-happy on Spit Polish right in front of everyone with some quick thinking, but this was all she could think of to keep him from doing that to Aisle and Cozy. “If you do something like that again, you’ll, like, totes ruin any chance of being seen as a hero. And you are a hero, Lex. You just…you have to let me help you make that clear to everyone.”
“This is preposterous!” His voice was still angry, but Sonata could hear the desperation underneath it. “Garden Gate killed Pillowcase, and everypony is scared of me for punishing her for it?! What kind of sense does that make?!”
“Look…why don’t you just, just turn back to normal and we can talk about it, okay? We need to talk anyway…” The memory of what had happened earlier that morning, when she’d lost her temper over Lex’s treatment of Nosey, was enough to make Sonata shift in place, uncomfortable with the knowledge of how she’d acted back then, even if Lex had been horrible too. Maybe we’ll be able to call that one a draw or something. Just say that we were both wrong and let it go. But, somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to seriously believe there was any chance of that happening. “We’ll talk, and then-”
“No. I refuse to accept this.” His voice had hardened by then, solidifying in that controlled rage that he seemed to spend so much time in. “I just spoke to Cloudbank and Thermal Draft this morning, and they were not afraid of me. Your analysis is flawed.”
Sonata rolled her eyes. That’s because Cloudbank wants to be like you, and Drafty just likes you period. “That’s because they’ve gotten to know you. How many other people here can say that?”
“They don’t need to know me! They just need to know that I did the right thing!”
“Well they don’t!” Sonata was reaching the end of her patience. “They don’t know that because you won’t let me do my job and explain it to them! For the last twenty-four hours you’ve just been ignoring everyone or talking to them on your own or saying you’ll let Aria do it for you! What part about me being your spokespony do you not get?! I keep trying to help you and you won’t let me!”
“If you’re so unhappy with the state of our relationship, then leave.” His eyes, as he looked at her then, were completely full of spite. “Just leave me, the way you did before. You had no problem abandoning me then, so why should now be any different? You think I care about how my ideas sound to everypony? I care about the fact that they’re what need to be done to secure the safety and prosperity of everyone here! I don’t care if these ponies afraid of me, and I don’t care if they think I’m a hero or not! I’ve lived my entire life with everypony thinking the worst of me no matter what I said or what I did even when I was trying to help them! I didn’t care then and I don’t care now because I’m right!” His eyes were blazing then, and his shadowy form was churning so heavily it looked like he was going to tear himself apart. “I don’t need you anyway! You’re a burden more often than you’re helpful, so if you don’t like how I’m doing things here then YOU SHOULD JUST LEAVE!”
As his last angry shout died away, Sonata just looked at him in silence. Long seconds passed before she finally spoke again. “No.”
Fireflower.
Sonata had thought, when she saw Lex lashing out at Spit Polish a few minutes ago, that it was going to be Garden Gate all over again. But the reason she’d thought that was because she was worried about what everypony else would think. But from Lex’s point of view, she was suddenly certain, the sight of her jumping between him and his enemy followed by her chastising him now had seemed like something else. He thinks that this is going to be like what happened when he tried to kill Fireflower and I stopped him. That was ridiculous, of course, but with everything that had happened today – with Block Party’s weird death, her fighting with Lex this morning, his injuring himself, and now that attempt on his life – was it really so hard to believe that he wasn’t at his best, and so was anticipating the worst?
“No,” she said again, shaking her head slightly. “I’m not going anywhere.” She forced a smile onto her face then, even though she felt guilty and sad for how awful she knew he felt right then. “I know I’m dumb. I mean, my sisters told me all the time, like when I tried to microwave my underpants or put our toothbrushes in the washing machine or stuff. But the dumbest thing I ever did was leave you, and I’m totes not making that mistake again.”
He didn’t answer, and she kept speaking, letting the words pour out of their own accord. “You’re the love of my life, Lex. I know you care a whole lot about everypony here, but the one I care about is you, first and foremost. That’s why I want you to succeed at what you’re doing, and I want everypony else to appreciate you as much as I do. But I can’t think up all those super-detailed plans like you can, and I can’t use such incredible magic either. So this is all I can do. Talking to people, getting them to understand what you’re saying and realize why it’s good and being impressed that you thought of so much stuff and can make it all happen…that’s what I can do.” She held out a hoof toward him imploringly. “I love you, and I’m not leaving, so please, just…change back to normal, okay?”
When he did a moment later, she knew that they were going to be alright.
It was mid-afternoon when Sonata came to get them.
Cozy hadn’t wanted to go back to the tent they’d coopted, but at the same time hadn’t quite felt up for playing any of the games that had been set up in the middle of the camp. Although she’d told Aisle that he should go and have fun if he wanted, he had demurred, instead electing to stay by her side. The two of them had eventually settled down a short distance from the banquet tables, just lying on the grass and watching everypony else.
With her belly full, the sun shining down on her warmly, the sound of laughter and cheers filling her ears, and the presence of her new boyfriend – she’d decided that was the right word for what Aisle was to her now – by her side, Cozy had felt almost content. But she’d only had a little bit of time to wonder if it was alright for her to feel that way so soon after Pillowcase had died when Sonata had wandered over to them. “Hey,” she called, and Cozy had heard the tension underlying the greeting.
Apparently Aisle had also, because she felt him stiffen up next to her. “Is everything alright?” he asked, not even trying to hide his wariness.
Sonata sighed as she came to a halt a few feet from them. “Yeah, listen…Lex knows. All of it.”
Cozy felt a shudder go through her, knowing instantly what Sonata meant, but her dread was muted. The emotional rollercoaster she’d been on over the last twenty-four hours had completely drained her, making it impossible for her to feel any sort of anxiety about what Lex would do. Whatever will happen will happen, she decided. So long as she didn’t lose Aisle, she’d find a way to cope.
Aisle, however, didn’t share her stoicism, leaping to his hooves immediately. “What?! How?!” For a moment he looked completely flabbergasted, before giving Sonata an incredulous look as the obvious explanation came to mind. “Did you give us up?!”
Sonata’s usual bubbliness was nowhere to be found as she sighed, a look of mild exasperation crossing her face. “Look, he’d already figured most of it out on his own, okay? He knew what I did and why I did it before I ever even had the chance to open my mouth. You might remember that he’s kind of a genius like that.”
“So you didn’t tell him anything?” pressed Aisle.
Cozy couldn’t help but give a ghost of a smile for a moment, knowing that he was asking that in hope of somehow spinning things in a way that would insulate her from Lex’s wrath. “Aisle, it’s okay. We talked about this, remem-”
“No!” interrupted Sonata angrily. “You know what? No, it’s not okay!” She stomped a hoof, giving Aisle an upset look. “This is all your fault, buster! I knew this was a bad idea from the beginning, but I let you talk me into it anyway, and now instead of just her being in trouble,” she pointed a hoof at Cozy, “all three of us are! So yeah, I totes tattled on you. Get over it.”
“Wh-, that’s not fair!” protested Aisle. “I was-”
He stopped as Cozy put a hoof over his mouth. “Stop, please.” The last thing she wanted to do was get into a big fight over whose fault it was. Just the prospect made her feel almost ill, to the point where facing Lex’s anger and getting it over with was less distressing. Looking at Sonata, Cozy could guess why she was here. “Lex wants to see us, doesn’t he?”
Huffing slightly, the other mare nodded. “Yeah. Like, right now.” She didn’t wait for a response before she turned and started walking away. “Let’s go.”
Aisle’s eyes met hers as Cozy took her hoof away, but she shook her head, silently pleading with him not to make a fuss. She could see the confusion and worry on his face, but thankfully he didn’t try to change her mind, instead falling in beside her as she trailed after Sonata. Smiling a little, Cozy pressed herself against him as they walked, feeling a little of the tension flow out of him at the contact.
It took barely a minute to reach one of the outpatient tents, and Sonata paused only long enough to announce herself and the two of them before heading inside. Aisle gave her one last look before following, his features tightening into a mask of determination. He’s more frightened than I am, and trying not to show it, Cozy knew. It was endearing, and she found herself smiling for some reason as she followed him, as though the knowledge that they were about to go through something awful together made her love him more.
Whatever happens, we can get through it so long as we’re together.
Lex glared coldly at Aisle and Cozy as they entered his tent, paying no attention to Sonata as she moved to stand next to him.
After he had resumed corporeal form the two of them had spoken at length, with her sharing her feelings while gently coaxing him to do the same. Doing so had calmed him down to the point where he felt mortified that he’d all but dared her to terminate their relationship. Only her repeated assurances that such a thing would never happen had soothed him. After that, they had talked about what had happened earlier in the day, though this had left Lex with only an imperfect understanding as to why she had been acting so erratic.
It had also left Lex with a renewed impression that he had missed something important about Block Party…but there had been no time to dwell on that particular mystery, not in the face of what came next.
No matter what her reasons, Sonata had committed a criminal act, and there was no excuse for it. “Punishment,” he’d explained to her, “even if not publicly performed, is imperative.” And Lex had no intention of making this incident public knowledge; to do so would not only have damaged Sonata’s credibility as his spokespony – who, he had explained to her, would trust her if she had a reputation for using mind-altering magic for her own purposes? – but this situation had little value as a deterrent. After all, native Equestrian magic was far too weak to be used for mind control spells by anypony that wasn’t a prodigy among unicorns, and Lex had seen no indication that such an individual was among the camp ponies. Which leaves only Cloudbank, who knows better anyway, and Aria, who’s already under my direct supervision.
Of course, when he’d told Sonata what the price for her actions would be she’d balked, but Lex had been adamant, making it very clear that he wouldn’t just overlook what she’d done. “Nopony under my authority is above the law.” (That he could have simply pardoned her outright was a loophole he felt no need to point out to her; this was a lesson that she needed to learn.) In the end, after much grumbling on her part, she’d acquiesced after he’d promised her that the condition would only be temporary…as though losing her sense of taste would have made her life unendurable otherwise.
In fact, Lex hadn’t been very happy with the curse he’d chosen for her either. It not only didn’t fit the nature of the crime, but was incredibly minor compared to the scope of her offense. But that couldn’t be helped. A stronger curse would have required him to channel additional magic through his body, and he was in no shape to do that after what had happened when he was creating food for everypony. Moreover, he didn’t dare curse her in a way that was obvious to anypony else, or which interfered with her faculties or magical abilities, not when he was still relying on her for various tasks. All that left was to impede her pleasures, and in this lackluster environment, there were few enough of those. He’d chosen food largely on a whim, deciding it was good enough when he’d heard her disheartened moan.
And now it was Aisle and Cozy’s turn…
“I’m going to make this quick, since the two of you aren’t worth my time,” growled Lex, looking up at the two of them. He silently wished he was able to at least sit up, rather than having to lie down like this, but there was no choice in the matter. In his current condition, it was all he could do to move. “You have both-”
“Please wait!” interrupted Aisle. Wincing at the displeased look he received in reply, he got down on all four knees. “I never told Cozy that you wanted her to help the doctors! She didn't know anything about that, or about trying to deceive you, because I didn-”
“Yes you did,” interjected Cozy solemnly.
“Cozy!” He looked at her, aghast.
Turning to face him, the smile on the crystal mare’s face was one of patient understanding. “I told you before. Whatever he does to us, we’ll get through it together.” She knelt down next to him, leaning over to nuzzle him. “So long as we love each other, I’m not afraid of what happens.”
“Wait, hold on.” Sonata, who had been silent up until now, looked at the pair with wide eyes. “What do you mean ‘so long as you love each other’? I thought…I mean…” She trailed off as she looked at Cozy, not quite sure how to ask how this fit in with her having a dead husband outside.
Aisle looked uncertain about how to answer, but Cozy turned to look at Sonata directly, her face calm as she answered. “When Pillow…when I lost my husband, Aisle was there for me. His feelings reached me when I was at my lowest, and-”
“Nopony cares!” hissed Lex. He had been planning on allowing them to speak in their own defense, but they had just admitted their culpability, which was all that he cared about. “If I hear one more word about your nonsense, your sentences will be increased!” His eyes had already begun to glow again, the purple contrails flickering as he looked at the two, silently daring them to continue with this ridiculous charade. When neither spoke up, he continued. “You have both-”
Sonata cleared her throat loudly.
Sighing, Lex closed his eyes and took a moment to get ahold of himself. It was a struggle just to move one hoof, and only the fact that his whispering spell required barely any gestures and a few syllables of chanting made it possible for him to cast it. Looking over at Sonata, he started feeding her the words he wanted her to say.
She shot a quick smile at him before she started speaking. “You’ve both, like, committed totes uncon-, um, unconscionable acts, and should be super ashamed of yourselves! Your selfishness and stupidity have put the welfare of the ponies in this camp at risk, ponies who have already suffered WAY more than they should have. Your offenses might not be as…wait, can you say that again…? As ‘ih-gree-juhs’ as Garden Gate’s, but you both have acted with the same moral turpentine-, er, turpitude that she displayed, thinking only about what you wanted rather than what you could contribute. Wow, this is a lot.” She looked at Lex, making it clear that last sentence came from her.
He whispered something at her, and her eyebrows went up. “Geez, there’s more? Okay…” She looked back at Aisle and Cozy. “Even so, I-, that is, Lex, am cog-, cogniz-, cognizant of your grief regarding the loss of your close friend and husband, and will grant that this partially mitigates the…wait, the what?” Her brow furrowed as she looked back at Lex. “I really wish you’d let me change this up a little more. I think I did a lot better when I was using my own words to send the same message.”
“Nevermind,” groaned Lex. A purple engulfed his horn as he looked at Cozy. “You ignored the suffering the ponies around you were in. So now, whenever anyone around you is in pain, you’ll suffer a moderate amount of sympathetic discomfort.” Cozy immediately let out a gasp, both at the words and at the sudden ache that settled over her, as though her muscles were cramping after she’d exercised too much. It took her a moment to realize that the curse had already kicked in, and she was feeling a reflection of the pain that Lex himself was in.
Lex’s eyes slid over to Aisle next. “And if your relationship is so devoted, then you shouldn’t be overly concerned with it not having any physical fulfillment.” For a moment the other stallion wasn’t sure what Lex meant, but a sneaking suspicion came upon him a moment later, making him turn red in humiliation. Although he wasn’t unduly focused on the physical part of his newfound togetherness with Cozy, taking away his ability to participate in that was invasive and embarrassing.
Looking over the two for a moment, Lex nodded to himself in satisfaction. “Finally, you’re both prohibited from speaking about this to anypony. Do so, and I’ll increase the magnitude of your curses.” Both of them winced at that, their ears folding back in unison. It was enough to bring a spiteful smile to Lex’s face.
Cloudbank whispered the words even though she knew there was no point in keeping her voice down. Even if they hadn’t made an incredible racket fighting to get down here, the slosh of water that sounded every time C. Shells or Sandbar took a step seemed deafeningly loud. And, of course, the light shining from Severance’s blade made them impossible to miss. If Turbo was right and there were more ghouls waiting to ambush them down here, there’d be no way to avoid them.
“I think we’re supposed to go straight,” murmured Drafty, squinting her eyes as she peered ahead. “Piggy said the vault was all the way in the back, so we should be getting close.” Although she didn’t say it, the words “I hope” were understood by everyone. Although they couldn’t have been down there for more than a minute or two, their nerves were all on edge, watching the water closely for any sign of an impending attack. The apprehension was oppressive enough that no one felt the urge to banter anymore, remaining silent unless there was some salient information that needed to be communicated.
The five of them had arranged themselves in the most defensive formation that they could. Cloudbank and Drafty had taken the lead, their wings flapping as they floated above the filthy water that covered the floor. The hallway was just barely wide enough that the two of them could stay abreast of each other even with their wings spread, their hooves dangling just a few inches above the brackish liquid below them. Behind the pair, C. Shells and Sandbar were less fortunate, having to trudge through the mess. With the water reaching up to their knees the two were forced to adopt a slower pace, awkwardly lumbering forward as quickly as they could while still trying to reduce the noise they were making. Even so, every step seemed to echo loudly in the narrow corridors, and each motion that the earth ponies made sent ripples radiating out from them. Further behind them, Turbo hovered over the water, wings beating as he clenched his teeth around his knife, watching their back to make sure nothing crept up on them from behind.
The arrangement had been Cloudbank’s idea, knowing that there was no way that she and her fellow pegasi would be able to carry the earth ponies over the water while still maintaining any sort of readiness for an ambush. Given how certain Turbo had been that there were more ghouls down there, and how there was no way for the living ponies to get through undetected, Cloudbank had decided that for this part of the mission, defense was more important than speed. I just hope I was right.
“Okay,” she whispered as they got to within ten feet of the intersection. “I’ll cover the left passage. Drafty, you take the right. We’ll keep watch while everypony heads straight through. Once you three are clear, we’ll move back out in front again. Everyone got it?” A soft chorus of affirmative grunts rang out, and Cloudbank nodded, more to herself than her companions. “Alright. Here we go.”
Moving up until she was right in front of the intersection, Cloudbank glanced at Drafty, who nodded back at her. Pausing just long enough to return the gesture, Cloudbank held her breath as she made herself turn down the left passage, holding Severance at the ready as she beheld…
Nothing. Just another silent, empty corridor stretching back into darkness.
Despite the absence of any immediate threat, Cloudbank couldn’t help but feel her tension rising. No, she silently corrected herself. Not despite there being no immediate threats. Because of that. Where were the ghouls Turbo had been sure were down here? Could he have been wrong? He might have had the most experience with the creatures, but that didn’t necessarily make him an expert on their behavior. Maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to make it to the vault – perhaps even back out again – without getting into another fight.
“Clear,” came Drafty’s voice from behind her.
Knowing that she needed to give the same signal or the others would think something was wrong, Cloudbank swung Severance low, so that its glowing blade passed within inches of the surface of the water. Despite its proximity, however, almost nothing of the submerged area was made visible; between the grime and filth that it had picked up, the wind from her wings was causing the surface to churn just enough to make any attempt to see through it futile. Still, it was only a foot deep… “Clear,” she called.
Immediately, she heard the sound of splashing as C. Shells and Sandbar started forward. Although she kept her eyes forward, watching the dark hallways ahead of her for even the slightest sign of movement, she tracked the duo with her ears, listening as their splashes moved forward until they were directly behind her, and then started to move past her. Thank the Night Mare, she thought, unable to stop a shudder of relief from moving down her spine. Now we should be abl-
Sandbar’s voice rang out in an agonized scream, and Cloudbank heard a large splash that sounded like somepony had collapsed.
Even as she jerked her head around, Cloudbank felt like she was moving in slow motion. As she looked behind her, the details of the scene slid through her mind one after the other, leaving her struggling to process what was going on: Sandbar lying in the water, his face a mask of pain. C. Shells with a look of fright and confusion on her face as she looked at her crewmember. Turbo saying something as he rushed toward Sandbar. Drafty looking back at the intersection to see what had happened.
…and a bloated, snarling corpse rising from the water directly ahead of Drafty, who now wasn’t watching the hallways in front of her.
Even as Cloudbank’s eyes widened, the ghoul opened its mouth as it leapt, colliding with Drafty in mid-air and sinking its teeth into her left wing viciously. The pegasus mare didn’t have time to scream before she hit the water, the undead pony coming down on top of her. A second later a gurgling wail of pain could be heard coming from under the water.
“NO!” Cloudbank turned in mid-air, angling her body to dart forward even as she started to bring Severance into a ready position, all thoughts of tactics gone. But even as she prepared to rocket to Drafty’s aid she realized that Turbo’s path toward Sandbar had put him directly between her and Drafty and that the ghoul was holding her beneath the water as it kept gnawing on her wing and the thing smelled so nauseatingly horrific that she thought she was going to be sick and Severance was screaming a warning at her about something but there was no time to pay attention to whatev-
A sound of splashing came from behind her and Cloudbank felt Severance yank itself around, and her body involuntarily spun to follow it. Barely comprehending what was going on, it took Cloudbank a moment to process the sight of the scythe’s blade decapitated the ghoul that had leapt at her, dimly realizing that it had saved her from being jumped the way Drafty had. Drafty! Knowing that she only had seconds to save the mare she loved, Cloudbank threw herself across the intersection…
Just in time to see Turbo tackle the ghoul that had pinned Drafty underwater.
The stallion snarled as he collided with the monster, hitting it with enough force to lift it up and knock it back before the two of them collapsed into the filthy water, both cursing and flailing their legs. Not wasting the opportunity, Cloudbank rushed over to where Drafty had fallen, grabbing her and heaving her up out of the water. “Get up!” she screamed, her worry exploding as she felt that the other mare wasn’t moving. “Drafty, you have to get up!”
“She’s paralyzed!” came C. Shells voice. A moment later, the earth mare was there, helping Cloudbank to lift Drafty out of the water. A quick glance backward showed that Sandbar was back on his hooves, cradling his left foreleg as he fumbled for his knife. “I’ve got her,” continued C. Shells. “You go help Turbo!”
But Cloudbank was still reacting on instinct, and rather than thinking things through looked at Severance. “Help him!” she screamed at the weapon, only for her blood to run cold an instant later. I asked it for help! Now it’ll refuse to do anyth- But before she could complete the thought, the weapon floated over to where Turbo was struggling, waiting for an instant before it suddenly swung downward and came back up in a single motion.
A moment later Turbo sat up, panting as he backed away from the slain ghoul. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and he staggered for a moment before he placed one hoof on the wall, steadying himself. “Th-, thanks,” he panted, his uninjured eye looking at Cloudbank. “That w-was-,” But he couldn’t say anymore before turning his head and doubling over as he suddenly threw up, violently ejecting the contents of his stomach until it was empty, leaving him gasping and groaning.
“Here. Take her,” muttered Cloudbank as she passed Drafty to C. Shells. As soon as the earth mare had a firm grip, Cloudbank went over to Turbo, moving one of his forelegs onto her shoulders so he was leaning on her. “Are you okay?”
“Even for a ghoul, that thing was disgusting,” he panted, his voice strained. “Thanks for the help.”
“Uh, sure,” she muttered, unable to help but be surprised by his gratitude. But that isn’t the biggest surprise, she thought to herself as she glanced at Severance. The weapon had responded when she’d told it to help Turbo, even though it had refused to help her when she’d been turned into that kraken’s puppet before. Cloudbank knew that the scythe wouldn’t help a wielder that was dependent on it…apparently this situation was different from back then? That was the only explanation, but Cloudbank couldn’t see exactly how that was.
“Do you hear that?” interjected C. Shells suddenly, still holding Drafty upright.
Everypony stopped, and a moment later they heard what she meant. From the hallway they’d previously come down, the sounds of loud splashing could be heard…as though someone was rushing forward as quickly as they could. Several someones, realized Cloudbank with a chill. The sound of the hurried movement was already growing louder, and she realized that the ghouls – and she had no doubt the noises were being made by more ghouls – would be on them in less than a minute. Already the sounds of their approach were echoing in the corridors.
The next moment she realized that it wasn’t an echo…there were more splashes coming from the left and right branches of the intersection as well. Only the passage ahead, the one Drafty said led to the vault, sounded clear. “We gotta go!” she hissed, dragging Turbo with her as she moved back toward the center of the junction, Severance floating beside her. “C. Shells, can you carry Drafty?”
“I can, but that’s not our biggest-”
Her words were cut off as Drafty suddenly shuddered, a pained whimper escaping her throat. “My wing…”
“Drafty!” Cloudbank almost dropped Turbo right there. “Oh thank Cel-, the Night Mare! Can you fly?”
“I…” Getting back to her hooves, Drafty tried to extend her wing, but barely got it halfway before she grimaced in pain. “No.”
“Then we have to run,” said Turbo grimly as he slipped off of Cloudbank’s shoulder. “If we get to the vault, we can maybe seal ourselves inside. Buy time to think of a plan to-”
“We can’t!” shouted Sandbar, his face drawn tight with fear. “When I tried to move ahead just now, right before those things attacked us, I stepped on some sort of spike!” He indicated his injured foreleg. “I think the whole passage is lined with them! If we tried to cross them on hoof, we’ll be hobbled!”
“No…” Cloudbank’s look of horrified realization – of knowing that they were trapped with no way out – was mirrored on her friends’ faces, even as the approaching splashes grew louder…
“They’re coming!” screamed Sandbar, his head jerking back and forth as he tried to look down three different corridors at once. “What do we do?!”
Cloudbank knew the question was directed at her, trying to fight down a rising sense of panic as she hoisted Severance into a ready position. Instead, she focused on coming up with a plan. Come on, come on, there’s got to be some way out of this! Maybe we could dig in and fight them off right here? But she knew that wouldn’t work. Even if Drafty hadn’t lost her knife when she’d been attacked, and Sandbar’s hoof wasn’t injured, their position was completely indefensible. The splashing was coming from the corridors directly to their left, right, and rear; trying to cover all three directions at once was impossible.
She shook her head. No, we have to retreat! If we can make it to the vault and seal ourselves inside like Turbo said…! But with Drafty unable to fly, that left only herself and Turbo who could make it over the water-hidden spikes in the corridor ahead. Even if the two of them were each able to carry somepony else, that would mean that someone would have to be abandoned, and that was unacceptable. Everypony here trusted me with their lives! I can’t just throw someone away like that! Maybe Severance could carry the third pony? It had just demonstrated that it was willing to be more helpful than she thought, so maybe it would again now? But if I’m wrong…
“Cloudbank! What do we do?!” C. Shell’s voice was thick with barely-repressed fear. The splashing sounded like it was almost on top of them, and Cloudbank knew there was no more time to think.
“I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t-”
“Severance!” yelled Drafty suddenly, her eyes widening in realization. “That’s it! Cloudy! Use Severance!”
Cloudbank gave her a look of desperate incomprehension. “Wha-”
“Fly towards the vault!” explained Drafty hurriedly. “Drag Severance under the water so that it can cut down any of the spikes in the way! Then we can make it!”
For a moment Cloudbank didn’t understand what she meant, before her eyes widened in sudden understanding. “Right!” Instantly, she flew towards the corridor where Sandbar has injured his hoof, rocketing past everypony as she beat her wings furiously, knowing there was no time to waste. Flying as low over the water as she could, she lowered Severance until she could feel its blade dragging along the ground, the sharp edge cutting through the water so easily that it barely reduced her speed at all. Almost immediately, she felt it slice through obstructions as she hurried forward, knowing that it was cutting down more spikes. It’s working!
Slowing down as she realized that she’d leave her friends in the dark if she outpaced them complately, Cloudbank glanced back at them. She could already see C. Shells helping Sandbar along, his injured leg draped over her shoulder as she helped him to run forward. Drafty was moving along behind them, her face tight with fear. And Turbo was the last to follow, walking backward with his knife held at the ready between his teeth.
He had barely moved ten feet when the ghouls arrived.
Hissing and screeching, the horde of undead ponies poured out of the darkness, immediately making their way towards the pegasus stallion. The hallway was wide enough for closest pair to immediately make their way toward Turbo, the rest scrambling over each other with snarled curses and angry hisses, snapping their jaws like wild animals as they collided and pushed off of each other, flooding the intersection. The one directly in front of Turbo threw itself at him, while the ghoul next to it also rushed forward…and then collapsed, howling as its front hooves stopped working correctly.
“The spikes!” Cloudbank heard C. Shells murmur in amazement. “They’re falling for their own trap!”
But that was cold comfort as the ghouls rushed forward, apparently too mad with hunger to care, not hesitating to climb over their fallen companion in their desire to get at the ponies. The ghoul in front of Turbo barely seemed to care as the pegasus stallion darted forward, his knife opening up a gash across the thing’s face. Instead, it lunged forward his neck, its teeth grazing his skin and managing to draw blood before he jerked backward, barely avoiding the lethal strike.
“Turbo!” screamed Drafty, and Cloudbank felt her blood turn to ice at her girlfriend’s cry, knowing why she was afraid. If Turbo became paralyzed now they wouldn’t be able to save him!
But to her relief, he kept moving, moving back and avoiding a hoofstrike from the ghoul. “I’m okay!” he yelled. “Just keep going! We have to get to the vault!”
Biting her lip, Cloudbank knew he was right. But that didn’t make it any easier for her to turn away from her friends’ peril and keep flying forward, slicing down more spikes as she dragged Severance down the corridor. Behind her, she could hear more yelling from her friends – C. Shells telling Drafty to take her knife, Sandbar almost stumbling and falling – and the horrific sounds of the ghouls hooting and splashing as they tried to overtake them. C’mon, c’mon! she chanted silently. The vault’s gotta be just ahead!
And then she was there.
With Severance’s dim light further muffled by the filthy water, she almost flew into it, barely managing to stop in time as the large steel wall with a huge round metal door suddenly came into view directly ahead of her. “We’re here!” she yelled, the words exiting her mouth in a sudden rush of hope. “The vault, we’re here!” She hurriedly dragged Severance across the submerged floor all the way to the door, just to be safe, and then turned around and flew back towards the fray, raising Severance up as she hurtled towards the mass of ghouls.
And not a moment too soon. The monsters were literally crawling on top of one another to reach them now, wriggling and writhing as they clambered over each other in a way that looked more like a mass of ants than things that had once been ponies. Worse, the overflowing mass of undead meant that the underwater spikes had ceased to be a deterrent, the ghouls on the bottom of the horde pressed onto the protrusions and serving as steppingstones for the others. Turbo was frantically trying to hold the tidal wave of rotting flesh and snapping jaws back, but it was clear that he was about to be overwhelmed, his knife making almost no difference against the slavering undead mob.
He was almost overrun when Cloudbank reached his side, swinging Severance with a scream of defiance as she bisected a ghoul that had leapt toward him. A rain of viscera fell on her, but she ignored it as more ghouls rushed toward her, undaunted by their fellow’s sudden demise. “GET IT OPEN!” she roared at the others, not turning her head away from the onrushing ghouls. “GET IT OPEN AND GET INSIDE!” Even as she spoke, two more ghouls threw themselves at her, one going low to try and grab her hooves as the other threw itself into the air in a wild attempt to grab her. Her response was to lift up her hooves and avoid the lower ghoul even as she brought Severance around in an arc that shoved the point of its blade down the upper ghoul’s throat and through the back of its head, killing it instantly.
With Severance as her only light source, the wild swings caused shadows to flicker and dance in the corridor, and it looked to Cloudbank as though the hallway was filled with undead as far as she could see. How are there so many?! she thought, filled with rage and frustration and fear. There weren’t this many of them before! Behind her, she could hear her friends’ voices, but she couldn’t focus on what they were saying. Hurry up, Drafty! Her girlfriend had gotten the combination from Piggy, she knew; now she just needed to get it open and they’d be safe! For a brief instant she wondered how they were supposed to get out after they locked themselves inside the vault, but she pushed that thought away. They’d deal with that later!
And then she heard her friends start to scream.
“You know how to open this, right?!” yelled Sandbar, looking between Drafty, the vault, and where Cloudbank was somehow managing to hold off the mass of ghouls.
“Of course I do!” replied Drafty, making her way toward the combination lock in front of the vault, thankful that Piggy had told her the numbers. “Fourteen-right! Thirty-six lef-”
“Just do it already!” panted Turbo, still winded from fighting for his life.
Drafty reached out a hoof as she reached the dial. “As soon as I unlock this I’m gonna need you to help me pull the d-”
“Yum yum yummy!”
The words, spoken in a mad fit of shrieking, came at the same time as a rotting body surged upward from the water right next to the vault, the ghoul laughing maniacally as it threw itself at Drafty. She had just enough time to realize that they’d missed one, that this ghoul must have been lying in wait, before she felt sharp teeth sink into her neck, followed by indescribable agony as it ripped its jaws – and a large portion of her throat – away.
She dimly heard screaming going on around her, but she couldn’t focus on that, couldn’t focus on anything except how hard it was to breathe all of a sudden. She tried to cough but she couldn’t seem to clear her throat, and she felt sick and nauseous and dizzy all at once, falling down. What was going on? She had to…she had to get up…had to open the vault or they’d all die…
Kara… she thought dimly. Kara, please, help me…
For a moment there was no reply, and then the goddess’s voice sounded in her mind. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I don’t have enough access to your world to help you. Kara’s voice was filled with disappointment. I was hoping you’d make it further than this.
Drafty didn’t have a chance to reply as she felt herself being moved, and she thrashed blindly as she thought it was the ghoul coming back to finish what it had started. But as she was lifted out of the water, she saw C. Shells and Sandbar and Turbo, looking at her with horrified looks on their faces. “D-Drafty…” whimpered C. Shells, her eyes directed at her neck. Next to her, Sandbar looked like he was in shock, as though he couldn’t believe was he was seeing.
Only Turbo was able to shake off his horror, lifting one of Drafty’s hooves in his own. “Drafty! The combination! What’s the last part of the combination?!”
She could feel her consciousness starting to swim as he spoke, and she wondered why he wanted to know that. I…I want Cloudy… she thought hazily. She suddenly remembered when she’d been back in that apartment, getting sicker every day. Cloudbank had always been right there beside her the entire time, never leaving her except to go get water. She had held her hoof too, and it had made her feel better, even when she’d been scared and hurting…just knowing that Cloudy had wanted to save her so much had meant the world to her.
“Drafty!” Turbo’s voice cut through her hazy memories. “The last number! Tap it out! Tap it against my hoof!”
Go away… she thought blearily, closing her eyes. But then she heard him say it again, and felt him shake her, and she would have whimpered if she could. Maybe…maybe if she told him what he wanted to know, he’d leave and Cloudy would come back? That…something wasn’t right about that, but she…she couldn’t remember what…the number…it was the last…the third…three…number three…
She softly clopped her hoof against Turbo’s three times…and then she knew no more.
Her consciousness came back abruptly, and she thrashed as she realized she was choking. Twisting away from the ponies around her, she rolled onto her belly and coughed painfully, retching and spitting up blood before gasping heavily, pulling air into her lungs in great mouthfuls. She repeated the process several times before it felt like her throat was clear, and she slumped bonelessly to the ground.
“It worked!” she heard a familiar voice – C. Shells’ – say.
“So that’s healing magic? I had no idea...” That came from Turbo, she knew.
“Y-you did it!” And that voice was Sandbar’s. “You saved her!”
S-saved me…? Barely able to move, Thermal Draft struggled to remember what had happened. They had been…they had gone back into Vanhoover, to a bank, and then they’d gone downstairs… We were attacked, and…and one of the ghouls…they got me! Her eyes widening, she managed to move a hoof to her neck…and felt that it was whole, the skin tender but unbroken. Somepony had rescued her…
Lex.
It had to be him. He had saved her so many times before; from her illness, from those ghouls in the city, from those monsters that had attacked them…and now he’d done it again. Just the thought made her heart beat faster, and she felt the corners of her lips turn upward. A moment later she felt strong hooves on her sides, gently rolling her over, and in the dim light from where Severance was hovering near the ceiling – surrounded by shelves lined with bags of bits – she looked at the face of her savior…
Cloudbank.
“D-Drafty…” she sniffled, her eyes filled with tears and a smile on her face. “I did it this time…I saved you.” She gave a sob then, leaning down to hug the other mare as she buried her face in her mane. “I saved you…I saved you…”
For a moment Drafty was surprised, and then she smiled, weakly putting a hoof around Cloudbank. “Yeah, you did. You saved me, Cloudy.” She nuzzled her softly, feeling the other mare shudder at the words. That’s right. I have two special someponies watching over me. The thought sent a warm feeling through her chest, and despite what she’d just been through she felt serene. No matter what happened, or how bad things got, Lex wasn’t the only love of her life who’d be there to help her.
Drafty had just climbed to her hooves as she heard C. Shells’ question, leaning against Cloudbank and shaking her head to clear away the last of the cobwebs from her brush with death. “What do you mean?”
“She means we’re trapped,” replied Turbo bluntly. “We all managed to make it here in one piece, but there’s no way out.” Drafty blinked at that, moving away from Cloudbank as she took a better look at their surroundings.
There wasn’t much to see. Although the light from Severance’s blade was dim, it provided enough illumination to make it plain that the inside of the vault consisted of a single large room. The back wall was made entirely of small drawers, each with a number and a keyhole. The left and right walls were lined with shelves, all of which were stuffed with bags that had been stamped with the symbol for bits. And the wall behind her was dominated by the large round door, now closed, and a small bookstand that had been shoved into a corner, a single folio labeled “Records” resting atop it. The only other distinguishing feature to be found was the lack of water in the room, the floor being mercifully dry.
He’s right, Drafty realized with a sinking feeling. The only way out is the way we came in! And those ghouls are definitely still out there… She ran a hoof over her throat as she thought that, unable to help the shudder that went down her spine as she recalled the sensation of sharp teeth sinking into her neck, followed by the incredible pain of them tearing her throat out.
Noticing the look on Drafty’s face, Cloudbank stepped forward and rubbed her side against the other mare. “There is a way out,” she said, forcing confidence into her voice. “We just have to find it.” She turned around then, positioning herself so she could face everypony at once. “Getting here was tougher than we thought it would be, and it was touch-and-go there for a minute, but we did it. We beat the odds and we made it through. Together.”
She paused then, a sudden wave of determination crashing over her. The sensation was heady, and in the wake of all the close calls they’d just endured – which had ended with Drafty’s almost dying – it seemed crazy, but somehow that only served to heighten the feeling. That’s right. We’ve all put our lives on the line for each other, and it’s gotten us this far. We can do it again. I know we can!
Giving a resolute nod, Cloudbank made eye contact with each of her companions in turn. “Drafty, you were the one who came up with the idea for how to get past those spikes in the water. If you hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have made it here to begin with.”
“Well, I do have a knack for traps,” smiled Drafty modestly.
Cloudbank gave her a nod before looking at the pony next to her. “C. Shells, you helped Sandbar when he injured his hoof, and you held Drafty up when that ghoul tried to drown her. If you hadn’t come with us, I know we would’ve lost somepony by now.”
C. Shells waved a hoof, as though to bat the compliments away, but she was smiling. “I didn’t do anything special, and certainly not anything you all didn’t do for me before.”
Accepting the humble response, Cloudbank turned her gaze to the pony across from her. “Turbo…I know we haven’t always gotten along, but I want to say thank you.” She gave him a small, grateful smile. “Since this started, you’ve thrown yourself into danger more than anypony here, and when everything looked hopeless, you were the one who got the vault door open. No matter what you did before, I’m proud to have fought beside you now.”
“I-” Turbo opened his mouth, about to say that if she was so grateful for his help she should talk to Lex about lifting Garden Gate’s curses, but a sudden sense of acute discomfort made the words stick in his throat. He worked his jaw silently for a moment, not sure what to say, before he finally gave up. Instead he looked down, unable to meet Cloudbank’s eyes for some reason, and nodded in acknowledgment.
“And me?” grinned Sandbar as Cloudbank turned her eyes toward him.
He looks just like a puppy that wants a treat, she thought, unable to stop from grinning at the mental comparison. “How’s your hoof?”
“Huh?” He blinked, the question catching him off-guard. “It’s still a little tender. Why?”
“Can you walk on it?”
A nervous look flitted across his face as he gingerly lowered his injured hoof to the ground, leaning his weight on it…and then grimacing as he immediately shifted backward. “…no,” he answered glumly, his ears folding down. But his dejection only lasted for a moment before something occurred to him, looking back at Cloudbank. “Can you use your magic to heal it?”
She shook her head. Between saving Drafty just now, demonstrating that protective spell back during her speech, and using some extremely minor magic to repair a few torn tents for some of the camp ponies when she'd been looking for volunteers to come here, she was almost completely tapped. “I only have one spell left, and it’s not a healing spell.”
“You don’t need magic for a little cut like that,” scoffed C. Shells, moving next to Sandbar. He gave a slight yelp as she pulled his bandana off of his head, spitting on it before lifting his injured hoof in hers and dabbing at it. “You just need to swab it clean, let it rest, and I bet that in ten minutes you’ll be good as new.” She dabbing at his injury as she spoke, causing him to bite his lip in discomfort.
“I hope so,” interjected Cloudbank, “because I’m still counting on him to carry as many of these bits as he can when we get out of here.”
That made Sandbar jerk his head back towards her, a surprised look on his face. “Wait, really?”
Everypony else looked similarly startled at her words, with Drafty speaking up first. “Cloudy, are you serious? I mean, I’m glad that we’re all having a moment here, but at this point I think we’ll be lucky if we can all get out of this place alive.”
“That’s a very big ‘if,’” added Turbo. “The only way out is to open the door and fight our way through those ghouls, and even with your magic scythe,” he gestured towards Severance, still floating silently above them, “I’d be surprised if any of us made it. There’s just too many of them.”
“Then we’ll figure out another way,” replied Cloudbank without missing a beat. She paused then, hoping that her companions would be galvanized by her surety, but the only response she received was an uncomfortable silence. “C’mon everypony, think! I wanna hear some ideas! If we can’t fight our way out, then how do we get out of here?”
For a moment no one replied, until Turbo let out a sigh. “I’m sure you’d have mentioned this already if you did, but do you have any magic that can help? Something that can get us out of here or call for a rescue?”
Cloudbank shook her head. “I only have one spell left, and all it does is boost your sense of courage.”
“That wouldn’t be the worst thing right about now,” murmured Drafty, rubbing her neck again as she glanced back at the vault door.
“You’re just jealous because that healing spell you got didn’t leave you with a cool scar like mine,” teased Sandbar, pointing at his own neck, and the statement was ludicrous enough that Drafty couldn’t help but laugh.
C. Shells joined her a moment later, vainly trying to keep her amusement under control. “You’re such an idiot,” she murmured at Sandbar, her body shaking with mirth.
He snorted good-naturedly, chuckling as the bout of laughter spread to him. “I’m just saying, an awesome scar is the sort of characteristic people remember. Remember that one guy in ‘Daring Do and the Disappearing Diamond’? The museum curator? He didn’t actually steal the diamond, but because he had that nasty scar, he seemed like…like…” Sandbar trailed off, before his eyes suddenly widened. “That’s it!”
“What’s what?” snickered Cloudbank, still enjoying the moment of levity that had spread throughout the room.
“That’s how we get out of here!” The excitement in Sandbar’s voice was enough to command everyone’s attention, quieting down as they looked at him. “Remember what happened in the beginning of that book? When the Diamond of the Wise King was stolen from the museum even though it was locked up tight?”
“I read that,” nodded Cloudbank. “There was no sign of a break-in, so everypony suspected the curator, since he had only taken the job a week before and had the keys to the place.”
“Right, and his scar made him look like a villain,” continued Sandbar. “So the police thought it was an open-and-shut case. But Daring Do knew better, because he’d been talking to her about financing her next expedition during the night of the robbery. So she searched the crime scene-”
“-and found a secret passage,” finished Cloudbank, realizing what he was getting at. “You think there might be a secret passage out of here?”
“It would make sense,” he enthused. “I mean, we’re like Daring Do! We’ve gone into an old ruin, fought our way past traps and monsters, and now we’ve found the treasure! So I bet there’s a secret passage that will get us out of here now!”
Drafty frowned, rubbing a hoof on her chin in thought. “I don’t know, Piggy didn’t say anything about a secret passage when I was hitting him up for information about this place.”
“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t one!” Sandbar went over to one of the shelves, pushing the bags of bits to the side. “Maybe he forgot, or-, no, wait, maybe he never knew! You said that his great-grandstallion built this place, right? Big Banks? If he had a hidden passage and never told anypony about it, then-”
“There’s no secret passage.”
Turbo’s voice was soft, but the absolute certainty in it was enough to make everypony look at him. “You don’t know that,” shot back Sandbar with a scowl.
“Yes I do,” sighed Turbo.
“How?” asked C. Shells.
“Because this entire room is dry.” Turbo waved a hoof to encompass the vault. “Think about it. If there was a secret passage up to the ground floor, the floodwater would have slipped in through it, and there would be knee-deep water in here just like the rest of the basement. But there isn’t.”
Sandbar gaped, looking like a foal who’d just been told that Hearth’s Warming was cancelled. “No way.”
“I guess that makes sense,” muttered Drafty, her ears folding down in discouragement. “I mean, when you think about it someone who owns the bank wouldn’t really need a secret passage into their own vault.”
“That would be a security risk.” C. Shells looked similarly dismayed. Despite the flaws in it, Sandbar’s idea – and his enthusiasm – had been encouraging.
Sandbar sighed, sitting down and hanging his head dejectedly. “I’m sorry, you guys. I got everypony’s hopes up for nothing.”
“No.”
Cloudbank looked up slowly, a smile spreading across her face as she looked at Sandbar. “It wasn’t for nothing. Just the opposite, that’s how we’re going to get out of here!”
He blinked at that, sharing a confused look with everypony else before asking the obvious question. “How’s that? If there’s no hidden passage…”
“Then we make one of our own,” replied Cloudbank firmly. “Severance!” The scythe floated into her grasp obediently.
“You want to cut a way out of here?” asked Drafty incredulously.
Turbo shook his head. “That won’t work either. Cutting down the door won’t be any different than opening it. You might crush a few ghouls if you push it outward, but the rest will just swarm us. And I doubt there are any passages on the other side of the other three walls.”
“Maybe,” smirked Cloudbank, “but there’s one other direction that definitely has a passage we can take to bypass those monsters.”
With deliberate, dramatic slowness, she pointed upward.
Everypony’s eyes widened as they realized what Cloudbank was planning.
“That’s awesome!” grinned Sandbar. “We’ll be able to bypass the ghouls completely and they won’t even know it!”
“Exactly,” nodded Cloudbank. “And we’ll be able to take some bits with us when we do, so we won’t have to go back empty-hoofed.”
“It could work,” mused C. Shells, glancing back at the vault door. “But we should go sooner rather than later. The longer we wait, the more likely it will be that the ghouls will stop waiting for us to give up and come out. If they head back up to the first floor before we’re gone, they’ll see us leaving and come after us.”
“Hmm.” Conscious of what C. Shells had said, Drafty moved over to the vault door, pressing her ear against it. The others stayed silent as she listened, and after several seconds she pulled her head away. “I can just barely hear some noise, so at least some of them are still out there.” She glanced back at Cloudbank. “If you cut through the ceiling, I don’t know how loud the crash will be, but they might hear it when it hits.”
“I might be able to catch it,” volunteered Sandbar.
“Are you kidding me?” Drafty didn’t try to keep the disbelief out of her voice. “I’m pretty sure that a huge chunk of the ceiling would be seriously heavy.” She pointed at the top of the vault. “That’s solid metal, you know.”
“Hey, don’t underestimate me.” Sandbar’s chest puffed up with pride. “I’ll have you know that on our ship, I’m number one at anchor-tossing.”
Cloudbank gave C. Shells a curious look. “Is that-”
“How do we even know that the first floor is above us?” interrupted Turbo, breaking the silence he’d held since Cloudbank had unveiled her plan. He shifted uncomfortably as everypony looked at him, wondering if he was saying too much. “I’m not trying to be a neigh-sayer here, but if felt like we walked a long way to get here. What if we’re not under the bank anymore?” He looked at Cloudbank. “What if you start cutting out the ceiling and all that falls down is dirt?”
She shook her head in response to his question. “We’re still underneath the bank. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“How?” asked C. Shells, and the question was visible on the others’ faces as well.
Turning so that she was standing in profile to them, Cloudbank pointed at the house-shaped cloud that was her cutie mark. “You see this? Before Vanhoover went to Tartarus, I was a cloud architect, so I know all about building structure and design.” She waved a hoof to encompass the vault. “I know this isn’t a cloud building, but you don’t get to be a cloud architect without studying ground-based architecture also.” She turned back so that she was facing them directly. “This bank is in an urban area. That means that the ponies who built it needed to take the nearby buildings into account when drawing up their blueprints. If they tried to build this basement so that it didn’t stay directly underneath the ground floor, then they’d run the risk of digging into a neighboring building’s basement, or the sewers, or something else nearby, which would be a disaster. So I’m completely confident that we’re still directly underneath the first floor of the bank. Make sense?”
“Sounds good to me!” smiled Drafty, “so let’s blow this popsicle stand!”
Cloudbank smirked in agreement, and had just started to flap her wings when C. Shells held out a hoof in a clear gesture to wait. “Hang on. I think we should get everything ready first.” She canted her head towards the shelves on her right. “Once you cut our way out of here, we’ll want to leave immediately. We should start gathering up as many bits as we can first, otherwise we’ll run the risk that a stray ghoul might find us before we’re ready to make our escape.”
“You’re right.” Cloudbank couldn’t help but feel slightly chagrinned, knowing that she’d been too eager to put her plan into action. “Let’s see if we can find any larger bags that we can throw some of these in, maybe some rope to tie a few together, anything that will make it easier to carry a bunch of them at once.”
Nodding, everypony turned toward the shelves to start getting things ready.
“Alright, you sure you’re up for this?” Cloudbank looked down at Sandbar from her place near the ceiling.
He gave her a cocky grin in reply. “Absolutely! See?” He put his injured hoof on the ground, giving a satisfied grunt as he leaned his weight on it without flinching. “Better already, so let ‘er rip!”
Giving the others – all pressed against the far wall, just to be safe – one last glance, Cloudbank let out a breath before gripping Severance in her teeth. Still no objection, huh? she thought to herself as she reared back. She wasn’t surprised; the scythe had made no objection to her plan when she’d voiced it, so there was no reason for it to do so now. So this doesn’t count as “dependent” either. The circumstances which the scythe objected to and those which it had no problem with were still unclear to her, but she was becoming more certain that it had its own criteria for how it determined one from the other. She just had to figure out what those were. Just like with Lex.
Putting those thoughts aside, she turned back to the task at hand as she swung Severance upward with all of her might.
The blade sank through the metal ceiling as though it were made out of cardboard, the blade sinking through the substance to the hilt. Impressed despite knowing what it could do, she flapped her wings harder as she started to pull it in a circle. The going was slower, the ceiling’s composition being thick enough to generate some resistance, but not enough to stop her as she slowly dragged it around, trying to make the hole big enough to accommodate them but small enough to minimize the amount that would be dropped onto Sandbar. Just please don’t let there be any ghouls, furniture, or anything else right here! she pleaded silently as she brought Severance back around to where she’d started cutting.
Below her, Sandbar reared up on his hind legs, raising his fore-hooves upward just as the part of the ceiling inside the circle Cloudbank had cut fell toward him. Bracing himself, he couldn’t suppress a loud grunt as the heavy weight slammed into him, and for a fraction of a second he wondered if he’d bitten off more than he could chew, his knees almost buckling under the force of the collision. But then the moment passed as, straining with everything he had, he managed to keep from collapsing, limbs quivering as he slowly placed the unwieldy mass of metal and stone down carefully, letting out a strangled gasp as he finally released it, looking at the other three ponies along the far wall. “T-told you…I could…do it…” he panted.
“That was incredible!” gushed Drafty, coming over to put a friendly hoof around Sandbar’s shoulders. “You were really amazing, catching that heavy thing!”
“That was pretty impressive,” admitted Turbo.
C. Shells nodded, giving Sandbar a proud smile. “You did great. When we get a new ship, I’m letting you name one of the longboats.”
“Ooh!” Sandbar’s eyes lit up. Now that was a reward!
“Keep it down, you guys!” hissed Cloudbank, sticking her head down from the room above. “We’re all clear up here, but I don’t know how long things will stay that way, so let’s go!”
“Right.” Turbo looked at Thermal Draft. “You ready?”
She nodded, flapping her wing experimentally. The healing spell that Cloudy had used to save her had spent most of its energy restoring her torn throat, but at least some of it had patched up her wing as well, since there was only a slight twinge when she flapped it. “Let’s go!”
Having already worked out the order in which they’d leave, the two pegasi lifted Sandbar, carrying him upward until he could reach the hole in the ceiling, where Cloudbank reached down a hoof to help pull him up. “Huh, so there was an office right above the vault,” he murmured, looking around. For once, they had gotten lucky; Cloudbank’s randomly-placed cut had just managed to miss the desk and overturned chairs in the room. Moving aside, he watched as the winged ponies ferried C. Shells up a moment later. After that, the two of them started bringing up the bags of bits, and less than a minute later they were done, flying up from the hole for the last time before they all started to pick the bags up.
Figuring out how much they could carry had been an exercise in pragmatism. They hadn’t been able to find any large bags, so instead they’d settled for tying the drawstrings on some of the smaller sacks together, turning them into makeshift saddlebags. Each of the pegasi planned on carrying two bags, while C. Shells had volunteered to take four, and he was going to carry eight. That way, even if their cart wasn’t waiting for them once they got outside, they wouldn’t be carrying enough to slow them down.
A moment later they were all loaded up, shooting each other nervous grins as Cloudbank slowly opened the office door. Everypony was tense as she peered out, but a moment later she looked back at them and nodded, making a “follow me” gesture before heading out into the hallway. Silently, the others marched after her, trying to keep their bags from jingling as they set out.
Slowly, the five of them crept through the silent halls, every sense on high alert, ready to bolt for the exit at the slightest indication that they’d been spotted. But no ghouls leapt out at them as they moved, and less than a minute later the ponies emerged into daylight, gasping in relief as they finally left the building behind.
“We did it we did it we did it we did it!” squealed Drafty quietly, looking at the others in amazement.
“Even the cart’s still here!” pointed Turbo, unable to keep a joyful grin off of his face.
“Keep moving!” urged C. Shells. “We’re not safe until we get out of the city!”
Quickly, the others righted the cart and began to load it up. When it was full, Sandbar quickly strapped himself in. “Now let’s get out of here!” he urged, and nopony argued with him.
“Follow me!” Cloudbank pointed back the way they’d come. “We’ll have to take a quick detour around that mess we hit before, but if we’re lucky every ghoul in this part of the city is still in that basement!” Her statement earned a round of subdued laughter, more from nerves than humor, as the five began to run back towards the camp, staying close together with Cloudbank in the lead, Severance at her side.
Barely a minute later, they came upon the street-choking pile of debris that they’d hit before, but this time Cloudbank didn’t even slow down, waving everypony to a side street on the right. We’re going to have to risk it! she knew. With any luck, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The side streets in this part of town weren’t alleys, even if they weren’t exactly large thoroughfares either. We take this one block over, then turn left and keep heading back toward the camp. Easy as- “WHOA!” The cry spilled from her lips involuntarily as she rounded the corner down the side street, stumbling to a stop as she saw what was waiting for them. Behind her, the others skidded to a halt as well, warned by her inadvertent cry, but she barely noticed them.
Barely twenty feet ahead of them, its features obscured by the shadows cast from the tall buildings on either side of it, was the silhouette of a pony.
Cloudbank instantly brought Severance into a ready position. “Back! Go back!” she yelled at her friends, not taking her eyes off of the figure ahead of her. She was certain that it was a ghoul, and while just one of them wasn’t a big deal, the undead things were never alone, which meant that there were more nearby. We can’t get bogged down in fighting these things now! Not when we’re so close! “Circle back around! We can-”
“Stop.”
The voice was that of a mare, and was completely calm, her tone containing none of the insane crooning or screaming that typified the undead ponies. But it took a second for Cloudbank to realize that she knew that voice, the sheer incongruity of meeting its owner all alone in Vanhoover making her frown in confusion. But a moment later the shadowed figure stepped into the light, removing all doubt about her identity, and Cloudbank could only stare in bewilderment.
A tense silence hung in the air as Cloudbank’s question went unanswered.
For a long moment Nosey didn’t move, simply regarding the five ponies in silence. Her expression was stony, with the minute downward turn at the corners of her lips and the slight narrowing of her eyes somehow managing to convey contempt so thick that it was almost palpable. As her gaze slid over each of them in turn they all flinched, tensing up without quite knowing why.
Finally, the silence grew too heavy to bear, and Drafty spoke up. “Nosey, is everything…” She faltered as those eyes locked onto hers, making her shudder. “I mean, whatever’s going on, we should probably get back, you know?” She gave a nervous chuckle. “There are, you know...ghouls all over the place, so we should really, um, get back…” Her words trailed off as Nosey continued to fix her with that cold gaze, unable to speak any further.
“Has something happened back at the camp?” C. Shells took a step forward as she spoke, but froze in place as Nosey looked at her. Forcing herself to keep speaking, she tried again. “Is everypony okay?”
“Everyone at the camp is fine.” Nosey’s words, spoken so calmly that she sounded almost bored, were enough to send a shudder of relief through the others. But then she kept speaking. “That’s the problem.”
“What?” Sandbar frowned in confusion. “Why is that a problem?”
But Turbo had heard enough. “We need to go!” he yelled, backing away from the pony in front of him. He had no idea what had happened to the bubbly reporter that had tried to interview him and his friends when they’d first been brought to Lex’s shelter, but her unnerving demeanor – to say nothing of the fact that she was there all by herself, apparently completely unconcerned with the possibility of being attacked by ghouls – was enough to make it clear that something was very wrong. And Turbo had no intention of finding out what that something was; he’d been in Vanhoover long enough to know that “very wrong” had a way of leading to “dead.” “We need to go now!”
Sandbar, C. Shells, and Drafty all looked at him, uncertainty causing them to hesitate. But an instant later Cloudbank’s voice rang out. “He’s right!” She swung Severance up into a ready position as she backed away from Nosey, not taking her eyes off of the other mare as she spoke. She’d asked the weapon if it knew what was going on, but it had replied only that it saw what she saw: a single pony, and nothing more. Far from reassuring Cloudbank, however, that answer had only made her anxiety rise. “Everypony get out of here! Circle around and get back to the camp!”
She could hear the others moving, the sound of hoofsteps and wagon wheels conveying the others’ retreat, but the sounds receded only slightly before Drafty’s voice rang out. “Cloudy! Come on!”
She waved a wing back at the others, moving backward without taking her eyes off of Nosey, who hadn’t moved. “Keep going! I’ll be right behind you so don’t stop!”
“No one’s going anywhere.”
The matter-of-fact words made Cloudbank tense, holding up Severance in preparation for whatever Nosey was going to do, but the other mare hadn’t moved, making no effort to enforce her statement. It was- “Urrgh!”
Cloudbank couldn’t keep herself from grunting as lethargy washed over her, as sudden as it was profound. In an instant, she felt as though she’d flown across Equestria a dozen times without stopping, her breaths coming in ragged pants while her blood began pounding in her ears. She released Severance, the weapon’s weight seeming to multiply several times over, and it floated beside her as she fought to keep from collapsing. She could hear similar groans from behind her, and risked a look backward. Sure enough, the others were in a similar state, stumbling and wheezing in weariness. “N-no...!” Forcefully pushing through her unnatural exhaustion, Cloudbank grabbed Severance in her jaws, backing away more. “Keep going!” she yelled. Whatever was happening, whatever Nosey – or whatever this was – was doing, they had to get away right now! “Shake it off and keep going!”
“I told you, no one’s going anywhere.”
The soft words sent a shudder down C. Shells’ spine, and she struggled to keep her legs under her as she made for the other side of the street. Her muscles screamed in protest, but she forced herself to put one hoof on front of the other. Ahead of her, she could see Turbo, Drafty, and Sandbar all managing to do the same, the latter valiantly managing to drag his cart behind him as he plodded forward, sweat pouring down his frame. The sight was enough to fill C. Shells with a mixture of admiration and determination for her crewpony, silently swearing that if they got out of this, she’d let him name their new ship, its longboats, and her first-born- “Wh-, NO!” Turbo’s cry of shock and despair caused her to look forward...and her jaw fell open at what she saw.
The side street that they’d been headed toward was no longer there.
A brick wall now connected the two buildings on the other side of the main road, cutting off the entrance to the side street that was opposite the one Nosey was standing in. The sight made C. Shells’ heart sink, and she shook her head in denial. This can’t be happening! There’s no way this could-, oh NO! A fresh spike of panic ran through her as she looked upward, only now catching sight of the iron bars crisscrossing the air over their heads, stretching between the upper portions buildings up and down the block in a lattice pattern.
Fighting down a whimper of fright, she looked left and right, trying to see how far the cage-like bars extended over the main road…only to find that each direction now had brick walls of their own, completely cutting off the street in both directions. She didn’t dare look behind her to see if the side street behind Nosey was still there, not wanting to look at the terrifyingly-calm mare again. “This isn’t fair!” C. Shells muttered, fear and frustration causing her to forget her rule about never letting her crew see her lose her composure in a crisis. “After everything we went through, how hard we all fought…this can’t be real!”
Drafty’s eyes widened at the other mare’s words. “It’s not real!” She looked at the others then, desperate hope written all over her face. “It’s an illusion, like that wall that appeared on the docks when we were fighting those monsters, remember?!”
“Huh?” Turbo’s voice was thick with anxiety, not knowing what she was talking about.
“Just keep going!” groaned Sandbar, the effort of pulling his cart turning his voice into a growl. “If she’s right we’ll be able to pass through it!”
Still facing down Nosey, only Cloudbank saw the mare’s features tighten at that, her eyes narrowing further as her frown deepened. “I’m impressed,” she admitted, though her voice was dark. “I didn’t think you’d be able to see through that.” Slowly, she stepped forward. “I didn’t think you’d be able to make it all the way to the vault without losing anyone. I certainly didn’t think that you’d be able to make it out alive.” She stopped directly in front of where Cloudbank was holding Severance, and her expression darkened further. “I’m tired of being proven wrong by you ponies.”
“Cut without wounding!” yelled Cloudbank as she swung Severance, hoping to catch the thing in front of her off-guard. She had no idea if this was some sort of monster that was disguising itself as Nosey for whatever reason, or if this was the real Nosey and something had happened to her, but either way Severance’s ability to deal powerful damage without causing bodily harm would let her subdue it. Then, after she’d incapacitated it, they could drag her – or it, or whatever – back to Lex and let him figure out what was going on. Just one good hit! thought Cloudbank desperately as she brought the scythe around in an arc, the point aiming at the other mare’s throat. Just one, and that should be enough!
The tip of Severance’s blade was within an inch of Nosey’s neck when the other mare vanished.
The sudden loss of her target caused Cloudbank to stumble, the momentum of her swing almost dragging her off her hooves. “Wh-what?!” For a moment, she could only gape in shock at the empty space where Nosey had been, and for an instant she wondered if she’d somehow obliterated her altogether. Pushing that thought away, she turned to look at her friends, wanting their input about what had just happened. Turning around, she registered two things immediately: the first was that all of them had turned to look at her when she’d yelled at Severance.
The second thing was that Nosey was standing behind them, on the other side of the street from where she’d been. Teleported, Cloudbank realized numbly. She teleported!
Her friends must have seen the look on her face, because in unison they turned around, and frightened cries and shouted curses rang out as they saw who was behind them. Panicking, they tried to put some space between themselves and their adversary, flinging themselves backward as quick as their tired bodies could handle, but it was no use. Almost casually strolling into their midst, Nosey cast a contemptuous look around, her lip curling in disdain. “Your little expedition is ending in failure. Right now.”
What happened next was as brief as it was one-sided.
“You wanted me to give them the what now?”
“The extradimensional repository, Sonata,” replied Lex with a sigh. “The one you’re currently using as an ornament for your mane.”
She blinked for a moment, reaching a hoof up to rub her makeshift scrunchy keeping her hair in a ponytail (and having to suppress a giggle at calling her hairstyle that, what with her being a pony and all), before recognition blossomed on her face. “Oh yeah! The tablecloth-hole thingy!” She nodded for a minute, pleased with herself, before the obvious question occurred to her. “Why’d you want Cloudbank and the others to have it?”
Lex forced himself to repress his irritation at the question, not wanting to get into another fight so soon after they’d put their previous one to rest. “Because large quantities of coins are extremely heavy,” he explained. “By utilizing the receptacle, they would have been able to store and transport an exceptionally large number of them without being encumbered.”
Sonata mulled that over for a moment before her eyes widened. “You know, now that I think about it, that dragon was totes doing the same thing! Remember how this was full of coins when we found it?” She brushed her hair tie again. “Wow, now I feel kinda silly that I didn’t give it to Cloudbank before.”
Lex grit his teeth for a moment before letting out a slow breath. “Just see to it that you rectify that mistake when they return. The more currency they can retrieve the fewer times they’ll need to risk their lives like this.”
“Hmm? So you’re worried about them, huh?” Sonata didn’t try to hide her smirk. “I told you that you called them your friends before.”
Lex shot her a warning look, not wanting to rehash that particular discussion. "Anypony with a conscience would be concerned with sending others into danger, Sonata," he frowned, "and the fact that I needed to send them on my behalf is an indictment of my-"
"Geez, will you relax already?" Sonata rolled her eyes before cuddling up to Lex's side, nuzzling him. Despite his protests, she was sure that he was worried about them. "Cloudbank picked out a bunch of ponies who are all really tough. Plus they've got Severance with them, so they'll be able to handle a few ghouls." She smiled, her face displaying complete confidence.
Lex couldn’t resist giving a soft sigh of relief as she finally dozed off, and not just because she’d been trying to convince him that he should go out and play some games with everypony, apparently as a method of bolstering his public image, once he was feeling better. It had been all he could do to refrain from flatly stating that such a thing would be a complete waste of his time.
No, as much as Lex loved the sound of Sonata’s voice, and the way she was pressing against him even now warmed him in more ways than one, he didn’t want to speak to her right now. Not this soon after the harsh words that had passed between them so recently. Only by focusing on pragmatic issues – bending his thoughts towards concrete problems such as the need for an emergency supply of rainclouds or why Cloudbank should have been given Sonata’s extradimensional receptacle – had enabled him to ignore his emotions and carry on the semblance of a normal conversation with her. Even that had taken a great deal of self-control, and in his current state it had been almost more than he could manage.
Even now, looking at her sleeping face, it was all he could do not to wince. For a moment he tried to push the memory of what he’d said away, but the emotional impression was undaunted, rendering the attempt futile. He ceased bothering a moment later, letting the words replay themselves in his head:
“I don’t need you anyway! You’re a burden more often than you’re helpful, so if you don’t like how I’m doing things here then YOU SHOULD JUST LEAVE!”
This time he did wince, and the shame he felt was so powerful that he couldn’t bear to look at her anymore, turning his head. For a moment he could only lie there and struggle with the feeling, and minutes passed before the recrimination slowly began to ebb, leaving him to wonder how he could possibly have said that to her. What if she hadn’t refused?! he raged at himself silently. What it she HAD left right then?! The thought was enough to send cold shudders down his spine. He didn’t want her to leave; of that he was absolutely certain. Not only did he have no desire to go through another painful separation from her, but the mere prospect of her permanent absence from his life was enough to make the future – no matter what intellectual breakthroughs or political ambitions he might achieve – seem bleak in the extreme. Indeed, that was a recurring theme in his nightmares. So why had he said that?!
But even more maddening was the utterly illogical feeling of relief that underlay his self-reproach over his conduct. As horrible as saying that to her had been, giving voice to those words had felt like a burden being lifted from his shoulders, which made no sense whatsoever. He’d been actively concerned that further upsetting her would drive her away ever since their altercation with Nosey that morning, and he had been trying to minimize the potential for such a thing to happen in his further interactions with her. Openly daring her to leave him ran completely counter to that strategy; it accomplished nothing except make that untenable occurrence more likely.
No, he realized an instant later. That’s not correct. His brow furrowed as he realized that giving voice to that particular anxiety had accomplished something. In fact, goading her to leave him had ended up producing the exact opposite effect, causing her to not only restate her love for him, but to repudiate the very idea of ending their relationship again. Moreover, that had been what had caused them to turn the metaphorical corner just now, with her heartfelt words causing him to want to reciprocate her feelings, and so acquiescing to her request to resume his corporeal form…
Lex was still trying to think through the implications of what had just happened when a soft voice came from beyond the tent flap. “Sir?” A moment later it parted slightly, and he caught a glimpse of a stallion’s face beyond it, making eye contact. Seeing that Lex was awake, the pony stepped inside, faltering as he caught sight of the slumbering mare by his side. “Is now a good time?” he asked softly.
Recognizing the stallion as one of C. Shells’ crew, Lex scowled at the stupidity of the question. As though personal convenience matters during a crisis situation. “What is it?” he asked, though he kept his voice down as well.
“The doctors have finished with Spit Polish. We’re going to put him in that cage like you said, but-”
“But you can’t get the lock open,” finished Lex, causing the stallion to nod in reply.
“He’s barely moved since we dragged him there, so I don’t think there’s any rush, but if you want-”
“Wait outside,” ordered Lex dismissively. For a moment the stallion paused, not expecting to be so abruptly sent away, but turned and left a moment later.
For a few seconds, Lex regarded his sleeping girlfriend, trying to put his thoughts in order. He knew they hadn’t resolved any of the underlying issues that had caused them to fight, and he wanted those dealt with so that they could resume the more pleasant aspects of their relationship. But now…for some reason he suddenly felt optimistic that they’d not only be able to work things out, but sooner rather than later. It was enough to make a rare, gentle smile cross his face as he looked at her. “I’ll be right back,” he murmured quietly, brushing his lips across her forehead. “I don’t want to leave you either.”
With that, he gingerly pulled away from her before calling upon his dwindling reserve of dark magic, changing back into a shadow as he floated through the tent flap, causing the stallion outside to jump in surprise. “Let’s go.”
Spit Polish looked, in Lex’s estimation, like a broken wreck of a pony.
Lying on his back on a makeshift exam table inside the medical tent, all four of his hooves were bandaged. His right foreleg was wrapped further up than the others, and was in a sling to prevent him from using it. A huge bruise marked his front, turning his entire chest yellow and purple. And his eyes, red-rimmed and puffy from crying, were downcast, refusing to look at the green-and-purple-eyed shadow hovering nearby. “What’s going to happen to me?”
His voice was weak and pitiful. Much like that wretch of a pony himself, thought Lex vindictively. “You will remain confined until I formally sentence you for your crimes.” As he spoke, he reached out toward the makeshift cage that had been placed in the corner – the same one that had so recently contained Garden Gate – and brushed the lock with a shadowy tendril. It immediately fell open, and the stallion that had retrieved Lex (Ocean Spray, he remembered now) opened the cage, looking at Spit Polish expectantly.
Spit Polish made no move toward the cage. “What will…” he started, only to trail off. Swallowing nervously, he tried again, still looking at the ceiling. “What will my sentence be?” The fear in his voice was matched only by his despair.
“You’ll find out very soon,” promised Lex darkly, and he didn’t miss the shudder that went down the other pony’s spine at the words. As soon as he’d recovered enough to channel additional magic, he fully intended to punish the miserable worm with a curse so harsh it would make Garden Gate’s fate seem pleasant by comparison. But until then, let him writhe in ignorance and wonder what I’ll do to him, he thought spitefully. Although he didn’t believe in cruelty, letting a criminal worry about their fate struck Lex was being perfectly acceptable. “Now, get in the cage.”
Off to the side, a mare in a lab coat – Lex almost thought it was the one Sonata had enchanted, but she was different – looked up. “He needs to stay off those hooves as much as possible. Even short-term weight-bearing could inflame his injuries.” She hesitated for just a moment as Lex turned to look at her, licking her lips before continuing. “I think we should try to cushion the floor of the cage, in case he does try to sit or stand.”
“Do it,” ordered Lex coldly, and the doctor hastened to obey.
A minute later, she’d spread a blanket and some pillows on the floor of the cage. “This should do.” With that taken care of, she glanced at Ocean Spray. “Help me move him?”
“Right.” Nodding, the pegasus stallion followed her over to Spit Polish. A minute later the pair managed to transfer him to the cage, managing to set him down relatively gently on the floor of it. As soon as they did, Ocean Spray shut the door, setting the lock around it, which immediately sprang closed of its own accord. With that done, he turned to look at Lex. “Um, should we leave him here, or…?”
“I don’t care.” Lex floated over to the cage to peer hatefully at the pony within. Spit Polish still didn’t return his gaze, his ears down as he looked at the ground with a miserable look on his face. After a long moment, Lex spoke up. “Just so long as he’s comfortable.” He punctuated the statement by telekinetically picking up the pillow he’d brought from his tent – the same one that Spit Polish had tried to murder him with – and shoving it through the bars to plant it directly against the trapped pony’s face. Spit Polish let out a muffled cry of alarm, raising his bandaged hooves to try and push the pillow away, but Lex refused to let up…for three seconds. Then the purple aura around the pillow disappeared as he released it, falling to the ground as Spit Polish gasped for air. “He does appreciate a good pillow, after all.”
Spit Polish reflexively turned to look at him then, and while Lex didn’t believe himself to be a petty individual, the sight of the other pony in that moment – clearly terrified, shaking like a leaf as he panted for air, his eyes filling with a new round of tears – was deeply satisfying.
As he left the medical tent, Lex’s good humor was already starting to fade.
Although he’d survived Spit Polish’s assassination attempt, the fact that another pony had tried to kill him was a sobering reminder that he’d been foolish to let his guard down so much. In the wilderness he never would have rested without casting at least a few warding spells, no matter how injured he’d been. But despite the fact that Garden Gate had shown him firsthoof how some ponies could cross lines that would, under normal circumstances, be unimaginable in Equestria, he had foolishly left himself vulnerable. If that wretch had used a knife instead of a pillow… The permanent defensive spells on his body could protect him even in his sleep, but they had their limits.
The obvious solution was to always make sure to place additional protections around himself – and, for that matter, Sonata – before sleeping, regardless of their circumstances. But that ran into issues of practicality, which was why he’d been forced to leave Sonata unguarded just now; he didn’t currently have any such spells prepared, having prepared almost all battle spells in anticipation of leaving Vanhoover. Worse, with Severance currently being used by Cloudbank, he couldn’t rectify that particular oversight…and he knew he needed to rest and recover his strength as soon as possible.
That left only one viable option: to retain the services of a guardian. But such an individual would not only need to be strong enough to serve in such a capacity, but also trustworthy…or at least controllable. Unfortunately, there was almost no one here who managed to fit both criteria; even Severance was ineligible, since Lex felt sure that tasking the weapon to guard his life while he slept would definitely have tripped its warning about overreliance. As loathe as he was to admit it, there was only one viable candidate.
As he flowed through the camp, drawing looks and whispers – but also some smiles and even a few tentative waves, all of which he steadfastly ignored – Lex finally found that candidate resting on the far side of the train station. Stretched out on her back and with her eyes closed, she appeared to be enjoying the same sort of carefree sleep that he had so recently taken for granted. At least, until he approached her; despite making no noise as he slid closer to her she crooked one eye open. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite so carefree after all.
“Now this is a surprise.” Stretching languidly as she rolled onto her belly, Aria gave Lex a naughty grin. “What’s going on?”
“Are you ready to fix my voice now?” whispered Aria, stretching languidly as she moved into a more comfortable position, resting her chin on her hoof. “Or is this just a social call?”
“Neither,” answered Lex coldly. “I have a task for you.”
Sonata’s sister was, he knew, the best suited to guard him while he slept. She had more than enough raw power for the job, and she needed him to restore her damaged voice, giving her a vested interest in protecting his well-being until he made good on his promise to her. More than that, the power that the Night Mare had granted him made it possible to take control of her with a thought. And besides, this will allow me to monitor her more closely as well. That was something that was going to be absolutely imperative going forward, he knew. Even if Aria’s conduct during their fight hadn’t amply demonstrated her ruthlessness – he still found her protestations of acting under duress to be flimsy – Sonata had never been shy about saying how awful her sisters had been. So far Aria had been fairly tame, being content to be left to her own devices once he’d recruited her into his service, but once she got her voice back that could change. Which makes it all the more imperative to remind her whom she serves now.
“Oh?” Oblivious to his thoughts, Aria cocked her head to the side, giving him a smirk. “Something that Sonata can’t do for you?”
“This is an assignment that you’re better suited for.” He hadn’t overlooked the possibility of having Sonata be the one to watch over him while he rested, but he had immediately dismissed the idea for practical reasons. Having her remain vigilant while he slept, and therefore rest while he was awake, would put a further strain on their relationship, and after what had just happened that was something he was loathe to do, especially when there was a viable alternative.
Aria couldn’t help but sit up straighter, taking his words as a compliment. “I’m listening.”
“A short while ago, one of the ponies here tried to assassinate me. I-”
He was cut off as Aria let out a series of rapid breaths, the closest she could come to laughing with her ruined vocal chords. “Is that what all the yelling was about before? Some little pony tried to kill you?” She didn’t try to hide her scorn. The idea that one of the half-dead ponies living in this shantytown had tried to punch the ticket of the guy who’d killed Lirtkra was hilarious. “What did they do, politely ask you to go jump off a building?”
Lex’s eyes narrowed slightly, not sure if she was making fun of him or not. “What matters is that I dealt with them-”
“I bet!”
“-but the fact that they were able to make the attempt in the first place is unacceptable. So from now on, you’re going to stay by my side to ensure my well-being.”
That was enough to bring Aria’s snickering to an abrupt halt, and she looked at him with an unreadable expression. “Really.”
Lex mentally frowned, hearing that she wasn’t asking a question but not otherwise able to gauge her reaction. He floated closer to her, so that only a few feet separated them. “I’m going to make this absolutely clear, so there’s no chance for miscommunication,” he said in a low voice. “Your welfare depends on my well-being. If anything happens to me before I can change you into a pony, no one else will repair your voice. Your only option will be to slither back into the ocean and spend the rest of your days living on seaweed.”
If Aria was intimidated, however, she didn’t show it. “Aw, no need to wave a stick,” she smiled, and her grin was almost…sultry. “I’m looking forward to us working more closely together.” She reached down and patted the ground next to her. “Why don’t you change back and lie down next to me? The sun is warm, the grass is soft, and I promise I’ll stay right beside you the whole time if you want to take a nap.”
The offer struck a pang with Lex. It wasn’t just that he was exhausted; although he couldn’t feel physical fatigue in his shadow-form – indeed, insofar as he knew it was impossible for him to feel anything when incorporeal, save for pain when struck by magical attacks – the memory of the sensory impression was still fresh in his consciousness, and he knew that were he to return to corporeality he’d immediately collapse. Rather, it was because her smiling at him and coaxing him to return to normal was reminiscent of how Sonata had very recently done the same thing. It was enough to make him keenly aware, in a way that he hadn’t appreciated before, that he was talking to the sister of the girl he was romantically involved with.
Suddenly feeling uncomfortable, he turned away from her, not seeing her grin widen as he did. “I’m not sleeping with you here.” He knew that was awkwardly phrased even as he spoke, and he snarled internally as he tried to recover from his poor choice of words. “You’ll accompany me back to my tent.”
Despite having no voice, Aria’s amusement was audible. “I’m fine wherever you want to do it.” The lilt in her words was enough to make him glance sidelong at her, certain that there was some sort of double-meaning to what she was saying. But she gave him an innocent look, and he decided against pressing the issue, instead heading back through the camp.
By the time they made it back to the outpatient tent that he’d claimed as his own, he’d almost managed to push down his feelings of embarrassment. He was certain now that she’d been toying with him again, and he was determined to put an end to it. “You’ll stay out here. If anypony wants to speak with me, you’ll make them wait whi-”
“No,” interrupted Aria, shaking her head. “That won’t do at all.”
“I don’t care about your opinion,” growled Lex. “I am telling you what’s going to happen.”
For a moment Aria’s features darkened, but she kept going. “I need to be in there if you want me to be able to look out for you,” she insisted. “What if someone cuts the back of the tent open and slips in that way? I’d never see them coming.”
Her argument was a cogent one, and that was enough to give Lex pause before he decided that the point was moot. “You won’t fit inside here.”
“Then we just need to get a bigger tent,” answered Aria matter-of-factly. “You should have one anyway, since you’re the one in charge.”
“There are no other tents!” Lex could feel himself starting to lose his temper, making his voice rise. “These and the field hospital are the sum total of what’s available, and they’re all necessary to treat the sick and the injured! I will not take away from that!”
Aria’s eyes narrowed, her good humor falling away in the face of Lex’s tirade. But before she could make a sound a sleepy Sonata emerged from the tent, yawning. “Hey, what’s all the noise?” Pausing as she saw who was in front of her, she blinked several times, rubbing her eyes in a way that made it clear she wasn’t sure she entirely believed what she was seeing. Finally, her gaze settled on Lex. “Did I miss something? Why’re you back to being all dark and billowy? And why’s she here?”
“Your boyfriend and I were just discussing our sleeping arrangements,” answered Aria smugly before Lex could get a word in.
Her bombshell got exactly the reaction she’d hoped for as Sonata’s eyes widened. “What?!”
Lex glared at Aria, knowing she’d done that on purpose, before turning his attention to Sonata. “After what happened with Spit Polish, I’m going to have Aria keep a lookout to make sure nothing like that happens again.”
But for some reason, his explanation failed to reassure her. “Are you kidding me?!” She gave him a look that was equal parts aghast and furious. “How can you be, like, the smartest pony ever and still not get that this is a super bad idea?! And why are you asking her for help when I’m right here?!”
“That’s becau-”
But Sonata wasn’t finished. “And if you’re worried about staying safe, then we should totes just sleep in the train station! It has, you know, walls and doors that lock and stuff! That’s about a bajillion times safer than some old tent!”
“The train station is the site of an unsolved death,” sighed Lex. He could already feel the dark magic that was keeping him incorporeal starting to run out, and knew he’d be hard-pressed to maintain it after how much he’d already expended. More than that, he didn’t want to end up in another fight with Sonata, not after they’d just barely started to resolve what had happened earlier. I need to bring this to an end, quickly. “Sleeping there before we have all the facts about what happened would be unforgivably foolish.”
Aria cut in then, a sly look on her face. “Actually, you’re both right.”
Sonata almost bit her tongue at that. “We-, wait, for realsies?” Her amazement faded into suspicion a moment later. “Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, think about it.” Aria spread her hooves, pointing one at each of them. “The train station is more secure than the tent,” she nodded at Sonata, before looking at Lex. “But since it’s still a crime scene, you’ll want someone else there to keep an eye out while you rest up. So the best course of action is for all three of us to go there. I’ll keep watch, so there won’t be a problem. Everybody wins,” she concluded smugly.
“I dunno,” frowned Sonata. Aria’s idea sounded okay, but that didn’t mean anything. Aria’s last plan – the one about Sonata convincing Lex to make Aria into a pony sooner rather than later, and in exchange Aria would enchant some ponies to say nice things about Lex to everyone else – had sounded good too, but after what had just happened with enchanting that doctor Sonata had decided that Aria’s scheme was a crummy idea. So this one is probably a big mistake too, somehow. But on the other hand, or hoof, or whatever it was now, that did sound like an okay compromise…
Lex apparently felt the same way. “That’s acceptable.”
Aria couldn’t have looked more pleased. “Great! Let’s head back.”
Sonata looked like she wanted to protest, but Lex was already floating back towards the camp’s only permanent structure, Aria immediately moving after him. Sighing, Sonata started to trot after them, still not sure if this was a good idea or not…
The inside of the train station was exactly as they’d left it.
Lex gave the place a cursory once-over, but couldn’t bring himself to conduct a more thorough investigation of the place. He could already feel it becoming more difficult to maintain his current state, and knew that once he changed back merely sustaining his consciousness would likely be beyond him. He’d already pushed himself beyond his limits, and although there were still important tasks that needed to be seen to – contacting Cloudsdale for replacement rainclouds, procuring a loan from the rich ponies of Las Pegasus, and acquiring funds to buy food for the camp in the meantime – none of them were things that he could manage in his current condition with the resources and magic that were immediately available. Right now, resting and recovering were not only the responsible things to do, but the only things he could do.
No. There’s one other thing, he realized. There was still the mystery with what happened here. Again, there was an inexplicable certainty in the back of his mind that he’d missed something. That there was some relevant bit of information that he’d overlooked due to the numerous distractions that had kept cropping up. If he could just figure out what it was…
Sonata was waving at him from across the large waiting area that made up the bulk of the train station’s interior. She was saying something and pointing to the cushions she’d laid down side-by-side, liberated from several nearby chairs. Lex vacantly floated over to them, and just barely made it before his dark magic ran out, collapsing bonelessly onto the makeshift bed.
Lex awoke to the sound of Sonata’s voice raised in anger.
“-ime you try that I swear I will totes knock you into next week!” Her voice was a furious snarl, though even that sounded beautiful to Lex’s ears, and as he turned his head to look at her he saw that she had reared up onto her hind legs, waving her fore-hooves as if she were about to start throwing punches. Several feet in front of her, the object of her ire gave a theatrical yawn.
“You and what army?” Despite only being able to speak in a whisper, Aria still managed to fill her words with condescension. “I seem to recall you losing pretty badly the last time we fought.”
“That was ‘cause I had to deal with Scaly McFishman!” protested Sonata shrilly. “If it had just been you and me, I’d have totes stomped all over you!”
Aria sneered, abandoning the relaxed slouch she’d been in as she reared up. “Let’s go then. By the time I’m done with y-”
“Both of you, shut up.” Both sisters jerked in surprise at the sound of Lex’s voice, their eyes turning toward him immediately. The look he gave them as he climbed to his hooves was one of irritation; although he’d known that the two of them didn’t get along, he hadn’t anticipated that they’d react so poorly to being in one another’s presence. That they’d engage in petty bickering despite the severity of their present circumstances was enough to make him grit his teeth in exasperation. “Whatever it is you’re arguing about, and I d-”
But Sonata immediately interrupted him, falling back to all fours only to immediately point a hoof at Aria accusingly. “She tried to kiss you in your sleep!” she yelled. “Tell her that I’m the only one who gets to do that!”
“I thought it would be a nice way to wake him up,” replied Aria airily. She gave a nonchalant shrug as she crossed her forelegs, as though she couldn’t understand what Sonata was getting so worked up about. “He looked like he was having a nightmare, so I thought a kiss would be a nice way to start the morning. Don’t blame me if you don’t know how to treat your boyfriend right.” That last sentence came out with a sneer, putting the lie to her show of indifference.
Sonata tittered with rage, but Lex’s brow furrowed as he focused on the most relevant part of what Aria had said. “‘Start the morning’?” Frowning, he turned to a nearby window and telekinetically opened the shutters. The angle at which the light spilled in immediately let him know that Aria hadn’t been speaking metaphorically, and he turned back to the other two sharply. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Wh-, that’s what you’re going to focus on?!” sputtered Sonata.
“Almost a full day,” supplied Aria helpfully, unable to resist shooting a smug grin at Sonata as she did so.
But Lex didn’t notice, aghast at what he’d just been told. “A full day?!” He shot an outraged look at Sonata. “You should have woken me up before now!”
Frowning as much at his indignation as the fact that he was apparently going to let Aria’s behavior go, Sonata rolled her eyes. “You needed to rest. Besides, it’s not like anything’s happened.” She gestured toward another window, one that was still shuttered. “It’s all quiet out there.”
Lex frowned, needing more information than that. “Have Cloudbank and the others already used the money they procured to start purchasing food and supplies?” He didn’t look at either of them as he asked, instead telekinetically opening the shutters she’d indicated and heading to the window to peer outside. As he took a step, he felt his muscles seize up in a painful spasm even as the world swayed dangerously. But both the pain and the vertigo were less serious than they had been before, and he forced them aside as he made his way to the glass, looking out at the camp.
The sight that greeted him was little changed from how things had been yesterday. The camp ponies were milling about listlessly, their enthusiasm from yesterday having died down. The sight was enough to make him frown; shouldn’t there be more activity if they’d just received an influx of provisions? Or perhaps they’re still purchasing them, he thought to himself. He hadn’t inquired as to exactly how far away the nearest farms were, and convincing the ponies there that they’d come to make legitimate purchases instead of attacking them could-
Out of his periphery, he saw Sonata shrug. “They’re not back yet.”
Her answer caused him to nod to himself in confirmation before turning to face her. “When did they leave?”
A confused look crossed her face. “Huh? You know when: yesterday, just like you told them to.”
For a moment Lex didn’t understand what she meant. But a fraction of a second later her meaning became clear, and he felt a shudder run down his spine. “Are you telling me,” he asked softly, “that Cloudbank and the others haven’t come back since they went into Vanhoover yesterday?”
“Y-yeah.” Intuiting from how Lex was acting that something was wrong, Sonata couldn’t keep herself from looking worried. “Should they have been?”
Lex didn’t answer, his mind already going into overdrive as he tried to figure out what could have happened. And he was absolutely certain that something had happened. Cloudbank had lived through Vanhoover’s fall; she’d never be stupid enough to remain in the city after dark if she could possibly avoid it. For her and the ponies she’d taken with her to still be unaccounted for…
It could have meant any number of things, he knew. I don’t have enough information. Details such as the specific bank they’d gone to, what they’d taken with them, and other data that might be vital in assessing the situation weren’t known to him. That was unacceptable. More than that, it needed to be rectified immediately.
“Both of you come with me,” he ordered as he marched toward the door. This was not going to be another mystery like what had happened to Block Party. He was going to solve this right now.
By the time they’d reached the other side of the camp, the pair had filled Lex in on several salient details. Aria had told him exactly what bank they’d be headed to, since she’d overheard Drafty extracting that information from Piggy Bank (which apparently had been quite the spectacle). Sonata had told him precisely who Cloudbank had taken with her, what they were armed with, and about the spell she’d laid on them before they’d left. Of course, she’d mentioned most of that yesterday during the brief period between their reconciliation and her falling asleep, but Lex didn’t chastise her; far better, he’d decided, to review redundant information than risk missing anything, no matter how insignificant.
He came to a halt when they reached the medical tent, turning to face both of them. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he announced, in a voice that made it clear he would brook no argument. “I’m going into Vanhoover to search for Cloudbank and the others. Aria, you’ll come with me and use that tracking spell of yours. Sonata, you will stay here and maintain order until I return.” Both of them looked like they wanted to protest his decision, but he didn’t give them a chance. “Stay here while I make one final preparation,” he commanded them brusquely, before turning his back on the two and walking inside the large tent.
A familiar stallion in a lab coat looked up and did a double-take as he saw him. “What’re you…I was just getting ready to come check on you,” blurted House Call, before frowning. “You really shouldn’t be up and about this soon, you might strain your injuries.” He started gathering some medical supplies as he stood up. “There should be some open exam areas in the back. I’ll have a nurse take you to one and we-”
“Where is Spit Polish?” interrupted Lex.
“Huh?” House Call paused in the middle of donning a stethoscope, giving Lex a blank look. “Where’s who, now?”
“Spit Polish,” repeated Lex with a frown. “That pathetic little pony who tried to assassinate me.”
“Assassin-, you mean the pony in the cage?” An uncomfortable look crossed House Call’s face, though whether it was with regard to what Spit Polish had done or what had happened to him for it was beyond Lex’s power to discern. “He’s in the back. There was some concern about possible sunburn if he was left outside…” He trailed off as Lex marched right past him, apparently uninterested in anything else now that he had the condemned stallion’s location. Grimacing at what he was about to do, House Call took a step after Lex. “Sir, we really need to examine your injuries again!”
“Later,” replied Lex dismissively, not bothering to look back at the doctor as he ventured further into the field hospital.
The jury-rigged layout of the place caused him to waste almost a minute before he found Spit Polish’s cage. The pony himself was apparently still asleep, huddled on his side with his back toward the bars. Nearby was the same mare who had examined him, looking up from a clipboard as she caught sight of Lex. “Uh-”
He ignored her, instead reaching out a hoof to touch the lock on Spit Polish’s cage. Just like before it fell open instantly, and Lex telekinetically yanked the door open before looking at the doctor. “Get him out of there,” he ordered her coldly. “Now.”
She hurriedly obeyed, rushing over to the injured stallion and shaking him lightly. Groggily, Spit Polish started to stir, and as she slowly carried him out of the cage – doing her best not to let his hooves touch the ground – he looked around blearily, as though not sure where he was. Then his eyes fell upon Lex and they widened with sudden terror. “N-no!” he whimpered, struggling and falling onto his backside as he managed to slip out of the doctor’s grasp. “Oh sweet Celestia, please no!” He scooted as far away from Lex as he could, shaking his head in terror. “I’m sorry! I swear I’m sorry! I’ll never hurt anypony ever again so please, please don’t curse me! I’ll do anyth-”
“Be silent!” snarled Lex, causing Spit Polish to let out a terrified squeal, tears of fright spilling down his cheeks. Lex couldn’t help but feel another surge of spiteful satisfaction at the sight, but this time he didn’t bother indulging in it, pushing the emotion aside as he looked at the quivering unicorn. Even so, he let him stew in his fear for several seconds before speaking. “Exigent circumstances have made it so that, for the immediate future, you won’t be confined to that cage while awaiting your richly-deserved punishment. But make no mistake, this reprieve is temporary. Once I’ve finished dealing with more pressing concerns, your sentencing is next.” He punctuated his statement by slamming the cage door closed, making Spit Polish jump as the lock clicked into place of its own accord.
Ignoring the worm, Lex looked at the doctor. “See to it that he’s kept under guard. I don’t care how injured he is, this pony is a threat to everyone here and will be treated as such. Do you understand?” The mare nodded quickly, and Lex turned to leave, pausing only at the last minute to glance back at Spit Polish. A thought was all it took to cause more black crystals to grow along the unicorn’s horn, sealing his ability to use magic. They would only last for an hour, of course, but that should be more than enough time for a competent guard to be found.
I should have saved everypony the trouble and simply cursed him now, thought Lex darkly as he headed back toward the medical tent’s entrance. But he knew that it was better to wait. Until he’d found Cloudbank and the others he needed to conserve his strength in case something unexpected happened, as it so often had since he’d come here. And if things take a turn for the worse and I don’t come back, at least now that miserable wretch won’t be trapped in that cage indefinitely. Even for a would-be murderer, that was too harsh a thing to do.
Exiting the medical tent, Lex didn’t hesitate as he turned toward Vanhoover. “Let’s go.”
“Can we slow down? Going this fast is hurting my tail.”
Lex gave no indication that he heard Aria’s complaining, neither slowing his pace nor looking back at her as the two of them strode towards Vanhoover, and his lack of response was enough to make her grit her teeth. She could deal with his having a lousy personality; if anything that made him more fun to tease. But being ignored was, to her, the very opposite of being adored, and after everything she had gone through – having her voice stolen from her, being forced to live like an animal among the sahuagin, and now having to deal with her idiot sister again – Aria had reached her limit for how many indignities she could take. Increasing her speed, and fighting down the urge to grimace as she dragged her tail across the ground faster, she circled in front of Lex, blocking his path. “I said slow down!”
He came to a stop then…exactly long enough to hold out a hoof toward her, the one with the barbed wire wrapped around it, and say, “Move aside, then keep pace with me.”
“I d-, nnnrrgh!” Her statement of refusal was cut off as she felt her body move, drawing a grunt of frustration from her lips as she tried and failed to shake off his control of her. Like a puppet on strings, she slid out of his way, falling in behind him as he strode past her. “This is scraping my scales off!” she snarled as she dragged herself forward, the discomfort from her sore lower body increasing. “Why is it such a big deal that we get there so fast anyway? It’s been almost an entire day since they left. If they haven’t come back after this long then they’re probably already dead, so it’s not like we need to r-”
“Be silent!” hissed Lex as he suddenly turned and rounded on her. The command didn’t have the force of that strange power behind it, but look on his face then – his featured twisted with rage, eyes glowing green-and-purple and teeth bared in a snarl – was enough to make her instantly obey. “I don’t want to hear your idiotic speculations! Unless you have something useful to add, something that’s helpful or insightful or otherwise isn’t a complete waste of my time, then do not speak again! Do you understand me?! NOT! ONE! WORD!”
He all but screamed that last part, and as the last vestiges of his voice hung in the air he continued to stare at her, with Aria only belatedly realizing that he was expecting an answer. Immediately, she nodded her head, her belligerence replaced with meekness in the face of his anger. Even then, he didn’t look away from her for several seconds, and she knew that he was looking for a reason, any reason, to lash out at her again. It was only when he turned and started walking again, her body moving to keep up with him as per his orders, that she let out a breath.
Several minutes passed in silence, and although Aria felt that power he’d used on her fade away she didn’t slow down, biting her lip as she dragged herself after him, her discomfort starting to turn to pain as her scales protested the rough treatment. Sulking, she wished for the umpteenth time she could still use her natural magic. If only she could sing, then she’d be able to absorb negative emotions again, and with that power she could fly as much as she wanted! But now, her only option was to kludge together a flight spell – one which would only last for a few minutes – using the artificial magic she’d managed to cobble together after losing her voice. And that magic was sharply limited in how often it could be used. Not like it matters though, she thought bitterly. I’m sure if I so much as cast a spell without his say-so he’ll lose it all over me again. The unfairness of it all gnawed at her, causing her to glare impotently at Lex’s back. Why do I have to be treated like this? I don’t deserve-
His voice cut through her self-pity. “The evidence suggests they’re still alive.”
“Huh?” Her inquisitive grunt came out before she could stop herself.
But Lex had apparently regained control of himself. “Even if the worst case scenario happened, and Cloudbank and the others lost their lives, Severance would endure.” His voice was clinical to the point of being cold, not looking back at her as he spoke. “If such a thing happened, it wouldn’t simply remain there doing nothing. It would make its way back to me immediately, and since that hasn’t happened it therefore stands to reason that they’re still alive.”
Aria didn’t say anything to that, not knowing how his magic scythe worked and not wanting to step on another landmine. But at the same time, she wasn’t sure if he wanted her to answer him or not. Momentarily plagued by indecision, she instead opted to go with something else entirely. “So what’s the plan when we get there?” The city was a lot closer now, and Aria desperately hoped he’d slow down once they were inside. Cobblestone didn’t seem like it would be any more comfortable than grass and dirt.
“Once we reach the city proper, you’ll use your tracking spell,” replied Lex evenly. “While it’s active, we’ll head toward the bank along the route that the others most likely took. That should maximize the chances of you detecting the subject of your spell.”
Aria rolled her eyes, but knew better to ask what would happen if that didn’t work. After all, that spell only had a range of a couple hundred feet, and while it could detect either certain types of creatures in general or a specific individual in particular, it couldn’t home in on people who were already dead (though the undead were valid targets). More than that, the spell wasn’t all-powerful; running water acted as a barrier against it, as did a thin coat of lead.
Lex knew all of that, of course; she'd told him all back when he’d tried to get her to teach him that spell after they’d fought the Great Lord of the Deep. But I fooled you, didn’t I? Aria smirked to herself. I could have showed you exactly how to cast it, but I said that I didn’t know enough about how it worked to write it down for you. And you bought it! She couldn’t help but smirk at that, pleased to have gotten one over on him. Oh, he’d made her explain it up one side and down the other, telling him all about its range and duration and limitations and various other factors that she couldn’t plausibly claim not to know, but in the end he’d believed her when she said she wasn’t able to diagram its structure. With no other way to make use of her magic except by keeping her around, it guaranteed that he wouldn’t be able to double-cross her so easily.
Even if that was the reason she was out here abrading her tail off right now.
As though to drive that point home, the pain in her lower body suddenly spiked, causing her to gasp silently as she rolled over in momentary agony. After a few seconds it faded into a throbbing ache, and she scowled as she looked down and saw blood on the underside of her tail. The reason for that was made plain as she glanced back at where she’d been crawling: peaking up from between the grass was a small rock, its rough edge still red from where it had broken through her scales to scratch the sensitive skin underneath.
Her good mood thoroughly spoiled by this latest injustice, Aria turned her head to shoot Lex another dark glare, only to find that he was already looking back at her. His head turned just enough to glance over his shoulder, it was the neutral expression on his face that pushed her over the edge. “Are you happy now?!” she snarled, pointing at her injury. “Or do you want me to scrape more of my skin off for you?! It’s no big deal, I’m just out here on your orders to rescue your friends!” The look on his face didn’t change, and that only made her angrier. “It’s not like I’m important at all, not like Sonata or Severance or Cloudbank! After all, I’m just the one guarding you while you sleep! I’m only the one who was right there protecting you on that dock while you fought the Great Lord of the Deep! Who cares what happens to me, right?! So come on, let’s keep going!” She righted herself then, keeping her eyes pointedly on Vanhoover as she dragged herself forward. It hurt, but she refused to let it show on her face, her features twisted in anger as made a point of not acknowledging the heartless stallion in front of her.
She was about to pass him when Lex held a hoof out, barring her path. “Stop,” he said softly. For a moment she thought he was going to use that power again and make her obey him, but to her mild surprise he didn’t, and that was enough to make her come to a halt. Once she did, he spoke again. “Show me your wound.”
She almost didn’t, just to spite him, but for some reason decided not to. Instead, she slowly turned onto her back, unable to suppress a pained grunt as she took her weight off of her injured tail. Moving alongside her, Lex reached up to adjust the circlet he always wore before he began to gesture and chant, reaching out to lightly brush his hoof over her tail as soon as he’d finished. Immediately, the inflamed skin scabbed over, and Aria let out a breath as the residual pain faded away. A second later new scales sprouted to replace the ones she’d lost, with only their coloration – being a slightly darker purple than the rest of her lower body – to hint that they were covering an injury.
When Lex withdrew his hoof and stepped back Aria tentatively rolled back onto her belly, wriggling a bit as she gingerly touched the underside of her tail to the ground. Registering the lack of pain, she let out a sigh of relief before turning her attention back to the stallion next to her. She half-expected him to say something insulting, or maybe just turn away and head toward Vanhoover again, but to her mild surprise he just stood there, looking at her like he was waiting for her to say something. Without quite knowing why, Aria suddenly found herself feeling self-conscious, frowning at the unfamiliar sensation. “What are you looking at?” she snapped, though there was no real heat in her words. “If you’re waiting for me to say thank you, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re the reason I was hurt in the first place, so don’t expect me to be grateful or anything.”
His only response was to blink once, and then he did turn away from her, silently heading toward the city again.
Giving a self-satisfied nod at his standoffish behavior, Aria started after him, only to realize a few seconds later that he was walking slower now. He wasn’t sauntering by any means, but he was no longer moving at the near-gallop that had caused her so much discomfort before. She was still processing that when she saw him glance back at her, silently regarding her for a second before facing forward again, and she knew that he’d been making sure he was traveling at a pace she was comfortable with. It was enough to make her open her mouth…only to close it a moment later as she realized that she had no idea what she was about to say.
In silence, the pair continued forward until they finally reached Vanhoover.
Sonata let out a self-satisfied breath as she looked around the camp, nodding to herself. Order is totes being maintained, she decided.
It hadn’t been very long since Lex and Aria had left for Vanhoover, but in that time Sonata had thrown herself into the job Lex had left for her. First, she’d climbed up on one of the boxes stacked near the medical tent so she could get a good view of the entire camp, which was pretty easy to do since the entire area was so flat. Then, after looking around and seeing that everything was fine, she’d climbed down. Then she’d climbed back up to take a second look, wanting to be absolutely positively sure that everything was A-okay. And after a whole thirty seconds of making sure to peer around extra super carefully, she’d climbed down again. Now she just needed to figure out what to do next.
I suppose I could just go back to sleep, she mused, stifling a yawn at the thought. Although she’d stayed right next to Lex while he’d gotten some much-needed rest, Sonata hadn’t been able to relax at all the entire time. How could she when Aria was right there, just waiting to do something mean? And there’d been no doubt whatsoever in Sonata’s mind that Aria would find some way to be awful; it was what she did. And I was right too. She was totes going to try and make out with him while his guard was down!
The memory was enough to make Sonata grind her teeth as she started walking toward the train station. She was absolutely sure that Aria didn’t actually like Lex – as far as she knew, Aria had never liked anything – and was just doing that to be a jerk, but that didn’t make it any better. The very idea of her sister, of the person whose idea of fun always seemed to involve making her miserable, locking lips with her boyfriend made Sonata want to kick something. And now they’re off having an adventure together, she frowned. She was sure that Lex was a one-woman kind of guy, but as much fun as it was to imagine that he’d curse Aria if she tried anything, Sonata couldn’t help but worry. After all, an adventure is how WE got together…
“Excuse me.”
Blinking as a quiet voice dragged her from her thoughts, Sonata looked over at the orange-and-blonde mare that had spoken. For a moment she didn’t recognize her, but then her eyes drifted to the pair of peaches on her flank and she suddenly remembered who she was. “Oh, hey!” she exclaimed. “You’re the one who told off whatshisname, that pony that tried to kill Lex!”
“Y-yeah.” The mare winced at the description before managing to recover, forcing a polite smile onto her face. “I’m Peachy Keen.”
Sonata blinked at that. “For realsies? Because that looked like the second-worst breakup I’ve ever seen.” The first had been her and Lex, back when they’d been heading to Tall Tale. The memory was still enough to make Sonata wince. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
The other mare gave her a quizzical look for a moment before she started to giggle, holding a hoof up to her mouth as she fought back laughter. The unexpected response was enough to make Sonata wonder if grief had driven the poor girl crazy before the orange unicorn got herself under control. “No, I mean my name is Peachy Keen.”
Still confused, Sonata gave a hesitant nod. “Oh, um, okay.” She paused, waiting for her to say what her oh-so-awesome name was. When the other mare didn’t supply it, Sonata gave her an encouraging smile. “So what is it? Your name, I mean.”
Another round of giggling ensued. “No, you don’t understand. ‘Peachy Keen’ is what I’m called. It’s what I write down when I sign my name on something.”
Sonata’s eyes widened in understanding. “Ohhh! Well why didn’t you say that before?” She smiled, proud of herself for figuring things out. Who says I’m dumb? “I’m Sonata Dusk.”
“I know.” Peachy’s smile faded, but didn’t disappear entirely. “I’m pretty sure everypony knows who you are. You and Lex Legis.” She turned so that she was alongside Sonata rather than in front of her. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”
“Sure,” shrugged Sonata, starting back toward the train station. “What’s up?” Silently she hoped it was some sort of problem that she could solve, then she’d be able to tell Lex what a super good job she’d done keeping this place running!
“I, um…” For a moment Peachy faltered, letting out a sigh before she started speaking again. “Listen, you know Lex pretty well, right? I mean, he tells you what he’s planning on doing, things like that?”
“I’m his girlfriend, and his spokespony,” answered Sonata firmly, puffing her chest out. “We totes tell each other everything.”
Peachy nodded at that, a perturbed look on her face. “Then, has he…I mean, can you tell me if he’s said anything about what’s going to happen to Spit?” Sonata blinked, needing a second to remember exactly who that was, and Peachy seemed to interpret her silence as disapproval because she started to babble nervously. “I mean, I’m not asking because I don’t think he should be punished! I told Lex that Spit deserves whatever he gets and I meant it! What he tried to do was completely unforgivable! I just…” Her ears folded back then, her eyes turning to look down at the ground. “I just want to know, you know? I need to know if…if he’s going to k-kill him.”
She hiccupped at that last part, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to prepare herself for the answer. The sight was heartbreaking enough that Sonata instantly turned in place and threw her hooves around her, pulling Peachy into a hug. “That won’t happen,” she assured her.
Peachy stiffened at the contact, but a shudder ran through her a moment later as she heard Sonata’s answer. “Yeah?” she asked in a strangled voice.
“Absolutely,” answered Sonata confidently. “Lex’s number one goal for everything he does is protecting ponies. He might use some super-awful curses on that guy, but I can totes guarantee you that he won’t kill him.”
Peachy hugged her back then, taking several deep breaths before she finally pulled away from her. “Thank you,” she murmured, wiping her eyes as she tried to regain her composure. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go all to pieces on you. I just…I told myself that I was done worrying about Spit, and I am, but when I thought about what Lex might do to him…and with all the rumors going around who he is and what he’s done…” she trailed off awkwardly.
But Sonata waved a hoof. “Don’t worry about it. And I’ll let you in on a little secret about Lex, but you didn’t hear it from me, okay?” She waited until Peachy nodded before continuing. “He acts all tough and scary, but deep down…like, way way deep down…he’s really a big softy.” She smiled then, and punctuated her statement with a wink. “He just doesn’t show it to anypony except me.”
Peachy laughed a little at that, hearing the note of pride in Sonata’s voice at that last part. “Well, maybe you could let everypony else in on the secret?” The two of them started walking again, and Peachy waved a hoof at the rest of the camp. “The ponies here still aren’t sure what to make of him. One minute he’s making food for everypony, and the next he’s a huge screaming shadow. No one knows what to think.”
“I keep trying to tell him that,” sighed Sonata. “I mean, doing stuff is great and all, but it doesn’t help if you don’t talk to people too. But even when I’m there to turn what he says into words that sounds normal, he hates doing that.”
“So why don’t you just do it yourself?”
Sonata frowned at that, giving Peachy a look of confusion. “Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, you said you’re his spokespony, right?” Peachy shrugged. “So why don’t you just go ahead and make some statements on his behalf?”
“Wait, you mean now, when he’s not there?” The expression on Sonata’s face was one of complete and utter mystification. “Spokesponies can do that?”
Sonata came to a halt, and Peachy did the same, one eyebrow raising as she started to realize that there was a gap in the other mare’s understanding. “Sonata…what exactly do you think a spokespony does?”
“They’re ponies who speak for someone else, right? Like, they have their boss or whoever whisper in their ear, and then they figure out how to say the same thing so that it sounds nicer or easier to understand or whatever.” That was how it had been for her and Lex ever since she had come up with the idea. She had spoken for him when he’d met with the princesses, again when he’d taken over as mayor of Tall Tale, and when they’d gotten on the ship to head to Vanhoover. That things had gone so badly whenever Lex had addressed a crowd without letting her soften his words had cemented that definition in her mind.
But Peachy was shaking her head. “You’re not wrong, but there’s more to it than that. Were you just translating things he said yesterday, when Sp-, when Lex was a shadow?”
“Well…no,” admitted Sonata. “But that was, like, an emergency. I said all that stuff because I knew that everybody would have been scared of Lex if I hadn’t.”
Peachy frowned for a second, mouthing “everybody” to herself in confusion before shaking her head. “So in other words, you knew what he needed you to say to everypony, and said it.” She raised a hoof and placed it on Sonata’s chest. “That’s a spokespony’s job. You shouldn’t say things that don’t represent who he is, or what he thinks or feels, or what he plans to do, but you don’t have to wait for him to stand right next to you and feed you lines either.”
For a moment Sonata looked completely dumbstruck, her mouth hanging open as she processed what she’d been told. But as the seconds passed, her expression slowly changed into a look of excitement. “So you’re saying,” she began slowly, “that if I want to tell everypony here about all the great stuff Lex has done, all the problems he’s solved and the monsters he’s slain and all the other stuff, that’s part of my job too?”
“Definitely,” nodded Peachy. “You’d help everypony see what kind of guy he is, and you’d be putting all those silly rumors to rest too.”
“Oh. My. Gosh.” Sonata slowly turned in place, her eyes sparkling as she looked over the camp again. Despite it having only been a few minutes since she’d climbed on a box to sweep her eyes across the place, she now clearly saw what she’d missed before: a captive audience. “I can’t believe I didn’t know this!” she gushed, her previous tiredness swept away in a rush of enthusiasm. “I’ve gotta get everyone together and do it right now! I bet it’ll be almost as much fun as singing! I can-, I-,” She cut herself off then, her eyes widening as she let out a loud gasp. “I can make a song out of it!” She pranced in place, too excited to keep still. “I can be a songspokespony!”
Peachy couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t think that’s actually a thing.”
But Sonata wasn’t listening, instead sweeping Peachy up in another hug. “ThankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouTHANKYOU! Oh my gosh, this is such a great idea! I’ve gotta go think up some lyrics! This is going to be the greatest thing EVER!” Whooping in delight, she ran toward the train station, intent on making a song – a whole BUNCH of songs! – about her and Lex’s adventures together. Then everyone would know what a great guy he was!
I hope Lex finds everyone soon! she thought excitedly. He’s gonna be so surprised when he gets back!
Aria resisted the urge to roll her eyes. They had literally just crossed into Vanhoover proper a second ago, and although he’d said that he wanted her to use her tracking spell as soon as they got here, she hadn’t thought he’d meant it quite so literally. “Shouldn’t we wait until we get closer to where they were going?” Although she hadn’t given it a lot of thought, that just seemed like the better idea to her.
But Lex shook his head. “We already know their intended destination, so if something has waylaid them there then we’ll find them anyway, since that’s where we’re going,” he explained. “If, on the other hoof, something forced them to deviate from their intended course, whether on their way to the bank or returning from it, that could make finding them much more difficult. As such, it’s better for you to use your spell now while we’re attempting to retrace their route.”
That made sense, but for some reason Aria didn’t feel mollified. “You know I can only cast this spell twice today, right? And that it only lasts for a few minutes each time?”
“Then we’ll need to move quickly and not waste time,” replied Lex curtly. “Now cast your spell.”
“Just don’t blame me if I don’t find anything,” she whispered, only to frown as she realized that the words hadn’t come out with the acerbity she’d intended. Fighting down a sudden feeling of awkwardness, she focused on casting her tracking spell, closing her eyes as she whispered the words and performed the necessary gestures. It took only a few seconds to complete, and she opened her eyes as she felt the effect fall into place. Aware that Lex was watching her closely, she slowly turned her head one hundred eighty degrees, encompassing the entire city.
“Well?” asked Lex impatiently.
Not turning to look at him, Aria shook her head. “I don’t sense her.”
“‘Her’?” Lex shot back, a sharp edge in his voice. “Who?”
“Cloudbank. I cast the spell so that it would find her.”
Lex opened his mouth to rebuke her, only to change his mind and close it a moment later. Given that the ponies they were looking for consisted of three pegasi and two earth ponies, it would have maximized their chances of finding someone if Aria had set her spell to detect pegasi in general. But that distinction will likely make little practical difference. They’d have been beyond foolish to split up, so finding any one of them should locate them all. And since he’d lent Severance to Cloudbank, and it had yet to return, that all but guaranteed that she was still alive to be found.
Nodding crisply to himself, Lex turned into a shadow as he moved past Aria and into the city. “Follow me, and alert me immediately if you detect her or otherwise notice anything unusual.” He was already scanning the buildings on either side of them as he spoke, floating upward until he was several feet off the ground as he passed over the center of the road.
This time Aria did roll her eyes. “Gee Aria,” she whispered sarcastically, “thanks for helping me find my friends. I’d have to spend a lot more time searching this awful place if you didn’t happen to have the perfect spell for this situation. What would I ever do without you?” But if Lex heard her mocking his ungratefulness he gave no sign of it, instead floating into the city at a pace slightly faster than a trot. Heaving a sigh, Aria cast another spell, and a moment later floated up off the ground as well, swimming through the air as easily as if it were water as she followed Lex.
The next few minutes followed a pattern. Lex led the way, flying a few dozen feet ahead of Aria as he followed the main road. He’d proceed several blocks before stopping and turning his green-and-purple eyes – the only part of him currently visible – at Aria silently, who would then shake her head at him, not having detected anything. Then they’d repeat the process.
Minutes passed, and Aria knew that her tracking spell was coming dangerously close to the end of its duration. For that matter, so was her flight spell, but she could renew that one a few more times before she was completely tapped out. Even so, this bank had better be close, she brooded as she noticed Lex come to a halt ahead of her. She waited for him to give her the same questioning look that he had before…only it didn’t come this time. Instead, he hung in the air, his eyes looking at something around a corner, out of her current field of vision.
“No…”
The single, strangled word that came from him then was enough to make Aria stop in mid-air, the horrified tenor of his voice filling her with sudden trepidation. “What is it?” she whispered, making sure to stay well back from where he was. But that plan backfired a moment later as he suddenly rushed forward, leaving her sight entirely as he rounded the corner and left her alone. “Wh-, hey!” she whispered as loudly as she could. “Wait for me!” Rushing forward, she grit her teeth as she prepared herself for what was about to come into view…
An empty, garbage-strewn street.
Blinking at the anticlimactic sight, Aria couldn’t help but frown in confusion. This was what had gotten Lex so worked up? She could see him now, rushing over the debris toward what looked like more rubbish on the far side of the pile. Following after him, Aria couldn’t help but look down at the mess she was passing over. From what she could see, it was all just junk; broken lamps, ruined books, crumpled boxes, tattered clothes, and all of the other trash you’d expect to find in a dump, strewn across the street haphazardly. So what was the big deal?
She got her answer a moment later as she caught up to Lex. He was hovering over the street a little past where the mound of trash ended. Except it hadn’t entirely ended, as there were some things lying on the ground. There was a small cart lying on its side, and several burlap sacks were scattered around. A few of them had opened up, and spilling their contents onto the ground, the sunlight making them glint as Aria flew over to them. Coins, she realized, glancing at Lex. But he wasn’t looking at the coins.
He was looking at the bloodstains on the ground.
Scattered around the cobblestones, the dark brown patches – five of them, Aria noted uneasily – couldn’t have been anything else. She had smelled blood too often when she was living with the sahuagin not to recognize the stench of it now. And while she was no doctor, the sheer size of each stain made it very clear that the ones who’d shed them had lost too much blood to possibly survive. Even if that conclusion hadn’t already been obvious, the bloody hoofprints around each of the dried puddles made it undeniable. The prints were scattered around the puddles in a chaotic fashion, crowding around each of them from all sides as though their owners had been swarming the owners of the spilled blood. It was enough to make Aria shudder, remembering the ghouls Lex had unleashed on her and her companions during their fight. They hadn’t been strong creatures, but they had fought as a pack, trying to overwhelm them with sheer numbers before realizing that it wasn’t working. But apparently it had worked here…
Wonderful, she groused to herself. Those idiots got themselves killed, and now I get to be at ground zero when Lex goes off. A glance to the side showed her that Lex hadn’t moved, simply hovering in place and surveying the scene in silence just like she was doing, and she cautiously put some more distance between the two of them. After how he’d previously reacted to her mentioning the mere possibility that they might be dead, she was in no hurry to see his reaction to what was, to her, incontrovertible proof of their demise.
Maybe I could make a break for it, she thought nervously. Head back to the camp and let Sonata know what happened. She’s his girlfriend, she can take the brunt of his wra- Her train of thought derailed as she felt herself suddenly lose altitude, giving a silent yelp as she hit the ground. The impact wasn’t a violent one; quite the opposite, she touched down as softly as a feather, and it took her a moment to realize that her flight spell had run out, the built-in slow-fall effect kicking in as it expired. Letting out a sigh of relief, Aria looked up…only to find that Lex was looking right at her. Freezing in place, Aria couldn’t help but grimace, waiting for the explosion.
“Did you detect anything?”
“Wh-, um, no,” she whispered frantically, caught off-guard for the second time by his tone. It didn’t have the furious anger she’s been expecting, or even his usual sardonic inflection. Rather, it sounded hollow. Emotionless. As though the only thing he felt was bored. Somehow that frightened her worse than if he’d started screaming. “N-nothing.”
“I see.”
Alarm bells were going off in Aria’s head at how calm he sounded, and she stayed silent and still as he flew back down to the ground, resuming pony form a moment later…away from the dried pools of blood, she noted. A moment later he telekinetically reached into a saddlebag that he’d apparently been carrying beneath his cloak – a different one from that single-strap backpack he always seemed to wear – and pulled out what looked like a crumpled black cloth. The sight was unexpected enough that it took her a moment to recognize the hair tie that Sonata usually wore. That’s right, he wanted her to give it to him before we left. But what’s he want with it now?
She got her answer a moment later as Lex telekinetically moved it over to her. “This is an extradimensional storage receptacle,” he explained in that same unnerving monotone. “Use it to collect all of the coins here, and then go back to the camp.”
“Go back to-, you mean alone?!” She should have been happy to hear that, she knew, but for some reason it only freaked her out more, almost causing her to drop the black cloth as she took it in her hooves.
Lex nodded, heedless of her feelings. “If Sonata asks, tell her that I’ll be back once I’ve uncovered what really happened here.”
Aria’s eyes widened at that, worried that he’d completely lost it. “What really happened here?” she echoed, unable to stop herself.
Nodding again, Lex pointed a hoof at the bloody tableau. “This is an elaborate deception,” he declared. “Someone wants me to think that Cloudbank and the others were killed by ghouls here, but that’s not what happened.”
“R-really?” Then why do you sound like you’re a robot right now?
“Of course,” continued Lex blithely. “Severance’s absence puts the lie to this chicanery, even if it wasn’t highly implausible a majority-pegasus group wouldn’t have been able to grab their comrades and escape into the air if the ghouls had boxed them in. They all knew that these bits,” he swept a hoof out to encompass the fallen coins, “weren’t worth their lives.” He shook his head as he considered the scene again. “No, someone has carefully manufactured this bit of fiction.” He adjusted his circlet then, narrowing his eyes a moment later. “Someone who knew better than to use magic to do it.”
“Okay…” Aria trailed off, not quite sure what to think. What Lex was saying almost sounded plausible, since it was somewhat hard to believe that the pony that slew the Great Lord of the Deep would end up as ghoul chow. But if he’s right, whoever did this did a seriously good job of faking their deaths. “So what’re you going to do?”
In answer, Lex pointed across the street, and it took Aria a second to realize that some of the bloody hoofprints led that way, the markings leading toward a side street before growing too faint to follow. “That seems like the most obvious clue to follow.”
Aria’s eyes slid between Lex and the side street. “You do realize that if you’re right, that’s probably a trap?”
But Lex merely snorted. “I truly hope so. When I break through it, it should be easier to find out what happened to everypony.” He was already walking across the street as he talked; apparently the conversation was over.
For a second Aria chewed on her lip, before blurting, “I don’t think this is a good idea!”
“I don’t care what you think,” answered Lex without breaking his stride. “Now do what I told you.” And then he disappeared down the side street without so much as a backwards glance.
Aria sat there for a moment, staring at where Lex had vanished…and then quickly began to gather up the fallen coins.
The bloody hoofprints hadn’t left much of a trail.
Despite the sheer number of prints that stained the cobblestone, they hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty feet before they began to fade out, with the overlapping marks growing thinner and thinner until they ceased to be visible at all. Even before then, the tracks hadn’t remained cohesive in their direction. Quite the contrary, there were more than a few that split off from the main group to wander off in other directions, while the bulk of them continued down the middle of the street before growing too faint to follow.
It was one such offshoot that Lex was looking at now, consisting of what couldn’t have been more than four or five ponies’ worth of hoofprints. Although the bloodstains faded out before reaching the curb their destination was exceedingly clear, pointing directly toward a recessed stairway that hugged a nearby apartment building, leading down toward what had to be the basement. With a disinterested glance at the other trails to confirm that they weren’t as clear about where their makers had intended to go, Lex started made his way toward the stairs.
Outwardly, his face was calm. Almost bored, even, being bereft of his usual scowl in exchange for a neutral expression that he rarely adopted. Inwardly, however, he struggled to keep his thoughts ordered, fighting to keep them focused in the direction he wanted. With every breath, he beat back his emotions, refusing to allow them to prevent him from viewing what he’d just seen dispassionately and analyzing it rationally. That was all he needed to do right now. The only thing he needed to focus on. The evidence simply needed to be looked at for what it was, and considered logically. He had done that his entire life, and he could do it now. He was in control.
You should have been in control when you were boosting your magic yesterday, came the mental whisper from his shadow. If you had been, you wouldn’t have injured yourself so badly that you needed to send other ponies here in your stead. Then they’d still be alive.
For a fraction of an instant, Lex felt a surge of loathing for that tulpa the Night Mare had cursed him with. But he viciously clamped down on the emotion as soon as he registered it, refusing to allow his mantle of calm to be pierced. Letting out a slow breath, he reassured himself that it was too soon to decide that Cloudbank, Thermal Draft, C. Shells, Sandbar, and Turbo were dead. The evidence was inconclusive.
But highly suggestive. Despite having no voice, the sneering tenor of the words came through clearly. Everything you saw back there indicated that they were devoured by ghouls. To deny that based on one dissonant element-
-was the correct tact to take. Severance’s absence was a major discrepancy in presuming what had happened. Although he couldn’t claim to know the living weapon with complete confidence, Lex had wielded it long enough, communicated with it enough, that he felt certain that it would either have stayed where Cloudbank had fallen – cutting down any ghouls that dared to try and touch it – or made its way back to him of its own accord. For it to simply be gone suggested-
-that the entire scene was a work of fiction? You can postulate something that improbable and still have the utter gall to think that you’re looking at the evidence dispassionately? The mocking edge in the words was harsh enough to make Lex’s spine stiffen as he descended the staircase. They’re all dead, and it’s because you sent them here.
“No,” he murmured, his expression deadening further as he carelessly kicked open the basement door, stepping inside the pitch-black room without hesitating. “I will not allow-”
“One little pony came here alone,” came a sing-song voice from deeper inside the basement. “Flesh so sweet with nice crunchy bones.”
Drawn from his internal conversation, Lex snorted in contempt. Without hesitating, he kicked the door shut behind him, his eyes lighting up as he raised a small black crystal in front of it. He had used this particular trick before, when he’d first met Cloudbank and the others to prevent them from fleeing, and for some reason that thought sent a flash of anger through him now. Again he managed to force the emotion down, idly causing more black crystals to grow along his right foreleg, until it was covered in them almost up to his elbow.
“One little pony, eyes so bright,” crooned another voice, off to his left. “Bet their taste will be a delight.”
This time Lex looked up at the voice, silently calling on his dark magic a second time. Instantly, the interior of the room became visible to him, and he spent a moment to take stock of its contents. An old water heater took up the far right corner, across from which were several overturned boxes, piles of old clothes and tattered toys falling out of them. A table sat flush with the wall to his immediate right, while the corner to his left had nothing except a small drain set in the corner. Several folding chairs were scattered about haphazardly. The only other door was on the wall directly opposite him, which received black crystals blocking its use with another moment of concentration.
And then, of course, there were the ghouls.
Numbering four in all, they were slowly creeping toward him from every direction, licking their lips and smiling evilly. One was almost hugging the left wall, moving forward with deliberate slowness, not making a sound. One was headed directly toward him from the other side of the room with equal silence, while behind it another was clearly trying to overtake it without making any noise, apparently worried it was going to lose a meal. And the last one had somehow managed to climb atop the table to the right of him without being heard, having moved almost close enough to reach out and touch. Not turning his head, Lex regarded the hideous monstrosity out of his peripheral vision.
“One little pony, won’t scream or cry,” it snickered from a few feet away, doubtlessly thinking that he’d jump as how near its voice was, not realizing that he could see it perfectly. “Doesn’t seem to know he’s about to d-”
Lex chose that moment to lash out, swinging his crystal-covered hoof with all the force he could muster. Caught completely off-guard, the ghoul didn’t have a chance to defend itself, and his strike caught it cleanly across its brow with a loud crack, knocking it off the table to land at his hooves with a crash. Taken completely by surprise, the other ghouls froze, their grins dashed as they gaped at him in shock. Lex looked at each of them in turn, his expression not having changed the entire time. “Here’s what’s about to happen,” he informed them calmly. “First, you’re going to tell me everything I want to know. Second,” he raised his hoof again, bringing it to a ready position, “I’m going to kill you all.”
For a moment the other ghouls just stared at him, until the closest one – a unicorn stallion whose horn looked like it had been gnawed on – gave a shriek of anger and rushed at him. It was followed by the other two, galvanized at the sight of their companion’s attack. Even the fallen ghoul began to climb to its hooves, snarling in rage as it began to pick itself up.
It never completed the motion, however, as Lex brought his crystal-covered hoof down on its head in a hard stomp. This time, the sound of the impact was less of a crack and more of a wet splattering, the thing’s cranium crumpling as though its skull had been formed of eggshell rather than bone. Its body spasmed for a moment, legs kicking wildly before finally going still.
Then the others were on him.
The lead ghoul threw itself at him, trying to lock its teeth around his neck in hope of ending things quickly. With Lex recovering from the death blow he’d just landed on its companion, he wasn’t able to move out of the way of the lunging bite, and a moment later its jaws closed around his throat…to no avail, his defensive enchantments kicking in and causing the creature’s teeth to chip as it failed to pierce his skin. A moment later one of the other ghouls came alongside him and brought its filthy hoof up to punch the side of Lex’s face, but the strike bounced off as though it had tried to punch a statue. The third ghoul, moving toward his other side, broke off its attack in favor of the now-headless corpse of its companion, grabbing one leg in its jaws and dragging the body away from the fighting.
Giving a contemptuous snort at the undead ponies’ antics, Lex swung his hoof again, the gore-splattered crystal gauntlet coming down hard between the shoulder blades of the ghoul trying to bite him. He felt bones give under the blow, the ghoul almost collapsing before hurriedly stumbling back, its front legs wobbling unsteadily from the damage it had taken. The other ghoul, whether out of bravery, stupidity, or sheer desperation continued its assault, this time throwing itself bodily at Lex in an attempt to knock him over. Its reward for its efforts was a punch directly to the chest that sent it reeling back, howling in anger at the two-inch deep depression that now marred its torso.
Not bothering to press his assault, Lex looked at the ghouls as they slowly backed away from him, the two injured ones baring their teeth and hissing at him impotently as the third tore a length of meat from the haunch of its headless companion’s body. “Pathetic,” he stated matter-of-factly. “None of you have the power to harm me.” It wasn’t that surprising, really. Despite his initial horror at seeing the undead infesting Equestria, and the visceral loathing he felt for such creatures in general, he’d had plenty of time to observe the undead ponies’ combat potential since he’d arrived in Vanhoover, and now he had their measure.
Ghouls were little more than animated corpses; although they had the ability to potentially paralyze anyone they struck – as well as transmit a virulent disease – their combat prowess was no different than it had been in life. After all, the creatures had possessed overwhelming numbers when he’d brought them against Lirtkra and his companions in battle, and the sahuagin had made short work of them with very little effort. Against the layers of defensive spells that Lex had long since wrapped himself in, attacks from these reanimated townsponies had no real chance of reaching him. Indeed, the creatures were weak enough that he couldn’t even bring himself to consider it worthwhile to expend actual spells against them. With no ability to resist him, he could simply bludgeon the creatures to death at his leisure.
The ghouls seemed to realize that as well, because the two injured ones turned and ran toward the door on the far wall. Grabbing at the handle, they tugged on it to no avail, cursing and gnashing their teeth as they found their escape cut off. The third had dragged the body of its companion away, pulling it behind the water heater in the apparent hope that it could hide, and was feasting on the body, tearing large chunks of flesh away from its ribs as it peeked at Lex warily.
“There’s no escape.” Lex punctuated his statement by banging his crystal-covered hoof on the ground, causing the two ghouls at the door to whirl around and bare their teeth at him like animals, growling at him warningly. Utterly unfazed at the display, Lex slowly strode forward. “Now, you will answer my questions…” He knew he shouldn’t have told the creatures that he was going to kill them no matter what they did, that he should have dangled some sort of false hope in front of them to entice them into cooperating. For a moment he wondered if he could walk that back, to offer them just-
“They’re all dead, and it’s because you sent them here.”
Lex closed the distance between himself and the ghouls until they were less than ten feet apart.
“Now,” he intoned darkly, “why was there so much blood on that street?”
The pair of ghouls directly in front of him cocked their heads, as though not sure what he meant, while the third one – still hiding behind the water heater in the corner – simply continued to devour its fallen companion’s body. His lip curling in disgust, Lex telekinetically grabbed the leg of the half-eaten corpse and dragged it away, causing the ghoul to squawk in displeasure. It started to chase after the body, but Lex snarled at it, and the creature faltered. “Answer me!” hissed Lex angrily. “What happened out there?!”
“Which street?” rasped one of the ghouls in front of him, a pegasus mare whose wings were little more than ragged tatters. “A lot of them are bloody now.”
“Bloody and slick and lovely to lick,” sang the other ghoul in front of her, the unicorn stallion. “Especially when it’s still warm.”
“Especially when it’s still warm!” giggled the ghoul in the corner, an earth pony stallion.
“DO NOT PLAY GAMES WITH ME!” roared Lex, his patience running out. He canted his head to the side, grunting with effort as he telekinetically flung the headless body of the ghoul he’d killed into the overturned boxes against the far wall. The resulting crash sounded unnaturally loud in the enclosed space, the body flopping awkwardly amidst the debris. “There are large puddles of blood less than a block from here, surrounded by bags of bits! NOW TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED THERE!”
But the ghouls’ reaction to his display of rage wasn’t the fear that Lex had expected. Rather than cowering, the undead creatures gave him hateful looks, glaring at him with undisguised loathing. Acting on some unspoken cue, the pair in front of him began to move in opposite directions, circling him until they were on either side of him. Knowing better than to turn his back on either of the creatures, Lex continued facing forward, keeping them both in his peripheral vision. “We had a free meal,” sneered the unicorn ghoul from Lex’s right. “And right now, we’re about to have another!” With that, the creature lunged at him, eyes wide and teeth bared.
Lex didn’t even bother to face the creature as it rushed him, instead simply sweeping his crystal-covered foreleg out to impact the creature’s jaw. The blow knocked it off-course, sending teeth flying as the thing stumbled and almost fell from the force of the strike. At the same time, the pegasus ghoul rushed toward him only to suddenly dive, flinging herself at his legs in an attempt to knock him down. Her reward for her effort was a snort of contempt as Lex reared up onto his hind legs, taking a single step back as the ghoul slid across the ground directly in front of him. Almost casually, he telekinetically grabbed her wing, yanking her upright just long enough for him to sink his crystallized hoof into her midsection, sending her staggering back.
Sensing motion out of his periphery, Lex fell back onto all fours and immediately crouched down, narrowly avoiding the folding chair that the third ghoul – the earth pony one – had thrown at him. Slowly rising back to his full height, Lex slowly turned and regarded the creature coldly, causing it to hiss at him and back away slowly. For a moment Lex didn’t move, wondering what had brought on the sudden display of aggression. Had they found some courage because he’d told them they were going to die? Or had undeath simply warped their minds so much that such threats no longer mattered to them?
I don’t care, he decided. Pushing the matter out of his thoughts, Lex swept his gaze over the other ghouls. “What does that mean?” he demanded. “A ‘free meal’; what does that mean?”
The two ghouls he’d battered slowly recovered their bearings, and the unicorn stallion snickered. “Someone laid out a meal for us.”
“Five delectable dishes, with all the trimmings,” grinned the pegasus mare. “Right there for whoever wanted some.”
“Fur and skin, dig right in,” sang the earth stallion. “Muscles and meat, taste so sweet!”
Lex bared his teeth at the revolting rhyme, fighting to keep his temper under control. “Who were they? Describe them!”
“Aw, were they friends of yours?” cooed the mare. “You have good taste in ponies.” She licked her lips in an exaggerated manner, smiling wider. “That pretty mare with the chocolate-colored fur was delicious!”
Lex went rigid at that. A mare with chocolate-brown fur; that was Thermal Draft! “You…!”
The ghoul, seeing his reaction, laughed again. “I got the yummiest parts of her face,” she taunted. “The lips and nose and ears are dandy, but eyeballs make the sweetest cand-”
Her grotesque rhyme was cut off as Lex let out a wordless scream of rage, his eyes and horn glowing brightly. A stalagmite of black crystal instantly erupted from the ground beneath the pegasus ghoul, shooting upward and piercing her torso, lifting her off the ground. Shrieking in surprise and anger, rather than pain, the creature wriggled uselessly, limbs thrashing as she tried to break free.
Lex didn’t give her a chance, still howling in fury as he threw himself forward, his crystal-covered hoof cocking back. The pegasus ghoul covered her head with her forelegs, trying to ward off the blow, but it was futile. Lex’s first strike crushed the bones in her limbs, driving them back against her head. The second left her forelegs dangling uselessly in front of her, reduced to so much pulp. The third collapsed her muzzle, and she spewed unintelligible curses at him through a shattered jaw. But Lex didn’t slow down, his crystallized hoof rising and falling again and again and again until her head had completely caved in. Even then, he didn’t stop, battering the now-limp corpse until his muscles were aching and his breath was coming in gasps.
When he finally finished pummeling the corpse, his rage had abated only slightly, and he ground his teeth as he stared at the mangled wreck that had once been a pony. It’s not true! he seethed silently. IT’S NOT TRUE! Around him, small black crystals were growing of their own accord, sprouting from the walls and ceiling.
Through the whirl of his emotions, he somehow managed to register the sound of a heavy impact coming from behind him, and he turned his head sharply to see what was happening. Behind him, the two remaining ghouls were hurling themselves at the door he’d entered through, flinging themselves bodily against it in an effort to break it down.
The door was just beginning to crack when Lex made crystals grow over it, the black protrusions covering the wood and filling in the space around the jamb. Snarling in frustration, the ghouls sprang apart and turned to face him, their faces still registering anger rather than fear despite their escape attempt. Growling, the undead ponies lowered their heads and dug at the ground as though threatening to charge.
Lex couldn’t have cared less, still preoccupied with finding a way to disprove what he’d just been told. His eyes locking onto the unicorn ghoul at random, Lex took a threatening step toward him. “What about the scythe?!” He almost shrieked the question, desperately holding onto the last inconsistency with the answer he’d been given. “Where is it now?!”
“What scythe?” spat the ghoul. It started to circle him again, but this time Lex turned to follow it.
“DON’T PLAY DUMB WITH ME!” he shouted. “Severance! The floating scythe that can move on its own! There’s no way it didn’t cut down hordes of your kind!”
“Nope, nope, no big peelers there,” jeered the undead unicorn. “Wish there had been. The neck-scar on that stallion I had was all tough and gamey.”
Lex almost doubled over at that, the words hitting him like a physical blow. “No…” The monster in front of him had just described Sandbar, and in doing so had destroyed the last of Lex’s hope that they weren’t talking about the ponies he was looking for. Because while the brown mare the other ghoul had described might have been somepony else who coincidentally happened to look like Thermal Draft, the odds that there was also another stallion with a distinctive scar on his neck were completely nil.
“It was still better than the bones,” continued the ghoul, leering at the memory. “Once you’ve sucked the marrow out, they’re all crunch withou-”
Not wanting to hear anymore, Lex pointed his crystal-covered hoof at the creature, his eyes glowing as he willed the black mass around his foreleg to grow. Instantly, his makeshift gauntlet rocketed outward into a spear, the point punching through the ghoul’s mouth to burst out of the back of the creature’s head. The creature flailed at the sudden wound, gurgling incoherently for a moment before it shuddered and went still.
Lex stared at the corpse for a long moment before he willed his weapon away, the black crystals crumbling into dust immediately. Putting his now-unclad hoof back on the ground, Lex nevertheless swayed dangerously, trying to process what he’d just been told. How could this have happened? It made no sense. None of the five ponies that had come here had been ignorant of the dangers. On the contrary, they were all well-acquainted with them. Even if something had happened to Severance, for all five of them to have lost their lives…it was unthinkable!
“How…?” Lex’s voice was almost a whisper as he looked at the last ghoul. “How was it that you miserable, disgusting monsters managed to…” He couldn’t continue, couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud. For a moment he struggled with it, but the words stuck in his throat and after a moment he abandoned the attempt, rephrasing what he was trying to say. “All five of them? How?”
“Hair and skin and bones and meat,” crooned the undead earth pony, keeping its distance from him, “every part is good to eat.”
Lex shuddered, the rhyme making bile rise in the back of his throat. “You…”
“Face and hooves and flank and chest, if they’re still moving it’s the best.”
That was all Lex could take, and he began to march toward the creature. The thing snapped at him, its teeth clacking loudly as it growled and hissed, but it retreated as he advanced on it, trying to get as far away from him as it could. But there was nowhere for it to run, and a moment later it was quite literally backed into a corner. And still, Lex advanced on the thing, stopping only when he was within hoof’s reach of the creature. “Now tell me,” he said quietly. “How did those five lose to the likes of you?”
For a moment the ghoul didn’t answer, gnashing its teeth like a trapped animal before the corners of its lips turned upward in a cruel grin. “Mm-mm. Nope. Not like that. No muss, no fuss, just a lip-smacking good time.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed, not sure if the creature was answering him or simply gibbering. “What?”
“Fresh meat is freshest when it’s still moving, but still warm is just as good.”
Lex gave the creature a disgusted look, convinced that this particular ghoul was, for whatever reason, even less sane than its counterparts. He had just decided to simply kill the thing and be done with it when it spoke again. “Those five were only a little warm, but that was fine too.”
His eyes widening at that, Lex reared up onto his hind legs, grabbing the creature and hauling it upright as well. Pressing his hooves against the thing’s shoulders, Lex shoved it further back into the corner, bringing his face within an inch of the creature’s. “What does that mean?! Tell me!”
The ghoul smiled broadly, apparently unfazed by the rough treatment. “We didn’t kill them,” it giggled. “When we got there, they were already dead.”
Lex stumbled as he exited the basement, almost collapsing as he reached the bottom of the exterior stairwell.
It wasn’t physical exhaustion that caused him to lean against the wall, breathing heavily. Although his muscles ached from expending so much effort so soon after being injured, the fatigue wasn’t so bad as to be debilitating. Nor was it due to any sort of injury; although that last ghoul had tried to fight in the final moments of its existence, it hadn’t been able to so much as bruise him before he’d beheaded it with a thin blade of black crystal, killing it instantly.
They’re dead.
It was that thought that made Lex’s steps falter as he slowly climbed the stairs back to ground level. Those two little words, repeating over and over in his brain, caused him to reach the last stair and emerge onto the street with as much effort as though he’d scaled a mountain. Even as he stepped onto level ground, he almost collapsed, struggling to support the weight of the truth he could no longer escape.
They’re all dead. There was simply no other possibility that could be plausibly countenanced in the face of such overwhelming evidence. The number and location of the blood puddles. The bags of bits surrounding them. The physical details that the ghouls had provided. Even the unknown aspects of what happened – both Severance’s unknown whereabouts and all five bodies lying there without a mark on them when the ghouls had found them, according to that last one’s testimony – merely served to obscure how and why this had happened, rather than denying that it had.
For long moments Lex stood there, simply trying to process it. Various lines of thought, each concerning potential implications, ramifications, courses of action, and other consequences floated through his mind, but it was impossible to focus on any of them for more than a few seconds before another demanded his attention. If the ghouls hadn’t killed them, what had? Was it some sort of intelligent entity, and if so was it connected to Severance’s disappearance? Or had the scythe finally found cause to abandon them, and that had contributed to what had happened here? He had arranged for Waterlily’s resurrection; could he do something similar for everypony now? Was it even possible to resurrect someone when there was no body left?
That last question made him squeeze his eyes shut, suddenly reminded of what that ghoul had said about Thermal Draft. “I got the yummiest parts of her face,” she taunted. “The lips and nose and ears are dandy, but eyeballs make the sweetest cand-” Grimacing, Lex violently pushed that memory away, not wanting to think about someone he’d known being defiled like that. The utter lack of dignity with which their bodies had been treated was almost as painful as the knowledge that they were gone, and Lex refused to let his thoughts linger on it.
But his shadow had other ideas. No. You don’t get to ignore what happened to them. Not when you caused this. The words lacked their usual mocking element, nor were they filled with the scorn he’d come to expect. Instead, they were almost seething, as though the tulpa were enraged. You will witness their desecration in your dreams. You will watch as each of them is slowly reduced from ponies that you knew into unrecognizable chunks of meat. You will see it, over and over, and you will know that this is your fault.
The hateful diatribe continued as Lex slowly climbed to his hooves and began to head back the way he’d come. He had no doubt that the thing would make good on its promises, but that didn’t matter right now. Regardless of what nightmares were waiting for him, they were no excuse for not doing what he needed to do.
Rage had always been Lex’s answer to the innumerable failures and disappointments that had come to define his life. Ever since he could remember, anger had galvanized him to persevere in the face of repeated setbacks, and in doing so had blunted the horrifying uncertainty that came from living in a world that consistently refused to make sense. More than that, it had given him a crucial point of stability in his life; even if he couldn’t figure out what the proper response to a particular situation was, anger was ALWAYS the proper response to something that was manifestly senseless.
But Lex had learned, over the last few years, that there were some situations where even his anger couldn’t sustain him. There were some situations of such unremitting horror that even rage was no shield against the despair that threatened to consume him utterly. He had felt that for the first time when he’d come back from the Crystal Empire only to realize that he’d been thrown forward in time, and in doing so lost his parents, the only ponies who had ever truly cared about him. He’d experienced it again on his initial trip to Everglow, where he’d witnessed violence and brutality taken to a degree he’d never thought possible. The third time had been when Sonata had left him. And now…now it was all happening again.
In those moments, when he was at his absolute lowest, the only thing that Lex had left was what he knew – not believed, not theorized, but knew from long years of examining and refining moral philosophy – to be right. So long as he held to that and followed the dictates of what constituted virtuous action, then what he did still made sense, even if nothing else did. Maintaining moral righteousness meant that his existence still had meaning. It meant that there was still hope, no matter how painful things became.
Slowly, putting one hoof in front of the other, Lex forced himself to keep moving forward.
Aria had almost finished scooping the last few coins into the hole when Lex reappeared.
She wasn’t able to resist a sigh of relief as she caught sight of him. Although she wasn’t afraid of ghouls, being left all alone in a completely deserted city had been distinctly unnerving, all the more so when surrounded by large puddles of blood without any bodies. It had been eerie enough that she’d had a spell on her lips as she’d gathered up the fallen money, ready to raise a wall of fire around herself if anything had attacked her. With that protecting her, she’d just cast another fly spell and beat a hasty retreat. Fortunately, that hadn’t been necessary, and now that Lex was back there was no reason to be worried.
Then she saw the stricken look on his face, and felt her relief dissipate in favor of renewed anxiety.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered anxiously. Forgetting the coins, she dragged herself over to him. “What happened? I told you it was a trap!”
His eyes met hers then, and she saw several emotions flicker across his face, too fast for her to identify them before he seemed to settle on stoicism. He regarded her just long enough that it was awkward before he looked over at the coin-filled magic hole in the ground behind her. “You should have been done by now.”
There was no heat in his voice, but Aria still felt irritated. I ask if you’re okay, and that’s your response? “I was doing the best I could,” she snapped. “If you really wanted this done faster, you could have helped-, no, you know what? Forget it.” With a snort, she dragged herself over to the last few coins and brushed them into the hole with her tail. “There, it’s done. Happy now?”
He didn’t answer her, instead looking at the bloodstains on the ground, his features tightening as he stared at them. He was still doing that when Aria picked the hole up – the empty space becoming a round black cloth as it peeled away from the ground – and crumpled it up in her grasp. “So are you going to tell me what happened or not?”
Blinking, Lex looked at her. “What?”
Aria frowned, starting to feel nervous again. What was going on with him? She hadn’t known her idiot sister’s boyfriend very long, but he’d made it very clear that he considered himself a bigshot, always barking orders and acting like he knew everything. Seeing him acting so out of it was starting to creep her out. “You were going on about how this was all an ‘elaborate deception,’ remember? That Cloudbank and the others weren’t really devoured by ghouls?” She waved a hoof at the bloody cobblestones. “So, what’s the real deal with what happened?”
“I-” Lex started to answer, then cut himself off, looking away from her.
But this time she could read his face, seeing him struggling – not to come up with an answer, but to bring himself to say one he already had – and that told her everything she needed to know. “Nevermind. Can we just get out of here already? I hate this place.”
Lex cast one last look around before giving a crisp nod. “We’re leaving.” Almost as an afterthought, he telekinetically took the crumpled material that was the extradimensional hole from her, stuffing it back into his saddlebag.
Snorting, Aria didn’t bother to make a fuss, instead casting another flight spell and hovering several feet in the air. “Finally. Now let’s get g-”
“Cast your spell again,” interrupted Lex.
“Huh?” Aria’s brow furrowed in confusion. “You want to fly too?”
“Not that spell,” answered Lex, a bit of his usual petulance returning to his voice. “Your detection spell. Use it again now, for Severance this time.”
“For Sev-, are you kidding me?” Aria laughed incredulously. “I don’t even think that would work. That spell detects creatures, not things. You’re magic scythe’s not alive.”
“Neither are the ghouls,” Lex countered. “But you didn’t object when I told you to check for them while we were recovering after the battle.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. Based on what you told me, that spell can detect nearby creatures of a particular type or specific individuals. Severance is a specific individual, and if that spell of yours can potentially detect ghouls than it can potentially detect it. Cast it.”
Aria glowered at him. What he was saying sounded good, but she had no idea if it actually worked like that. But the bigger problem was that she didn’t want to try. Using that spell again would exhaust her ability to use her most powerful magic, leaving her with only lesser spells remaining. To be fair those weren’t exactly weak, and she’d recover her strongest magic by tomorrow morning, but she still wanted to hedge her bets. After all, even if they were leaving they were still in the city right now, and wasting what was left of her strongest magic would just be asking for trouble. Except Lex, she was certain, would never accept that.
Which means I’ve got to improvise, she decided. Luckily, she knew exactly how to do that. “Alright,” she nodded, before beginning to gesture and whisper a chant.
Lex looked mollified at her apparent agreement, glancing at the bloodstains again, and Aria mentally crossed fingers she no longer had in hope that he wasn’t paying attention. He’d heard her cast this spell before, and although whispering was by definition hard to overhear, the city around them was notably silent. If he was paying attention, he’d realize that she was faking the chant, altering the syllables just enough so that they were meaningless sounds rather than invoking any magic. It’s a good thing this spell doesn’t do anything that can be seen.
A second later she finished, and Lex glanced back at her. “Well?”
“Give me a second to check,” she growled, making sure to hide her elation. He hadn’t noticed! Slowly looking around, she made a show of concentrating before looking back at him with a shrug. “I’m not detecting anything.”
Lex sighed, before turning and heading back toward the camp. “Let's go. There are hungry ponies that need to be fed.”
Lex had forced himself to pay close attention to their surroundings on the trip out of the city, ready to annihilate any ghouls that were foolish enough to show themselves. Part of him had hoped that the undead things would try and ambush them; the prospect of killing more of them was a soothing one…or at least, it should have been. But in his emotional exhaustion, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to relish the thought overly much. Even if he slaughtered ghouls by the hundreds, it wouldn’t change what had happened.
Once they had reached the edge of the city, however, Lex had let his attention wander. With none of the undead monsters having shown themselves, and Aria’s detection spell finding no hint of Severance – dashing the last of Lex’s hopes for finding concrete answers about what had happened – he immediately turned his thoughts to what needed to happen next. While the immediately priority was still to acquire sufficient food for the survivors, there were numerous other questions that needed to be reconsidered in light of what had happened.
Those thoughts had dominated his awareness as he and Aria had slowly trudged back to camp. Now, with the medical tent that had become the camp’s main feature only a stone’s throw away, there was no more time to consider his next move. Resisting the urge to sigh, Lex looked around for Sona-
Aria slid in front of him, giving him a glower. “Don’t think that what happened back there changes anything,” she whispered warningly. “Yeah, they died. It’s sad. But I’m still here, which means that you have six days left to keep your promise to me.”
Lex met her glare with one of his own, his jaw tightening. “Do not remind me of my promises,” he hissed through clenched teeth. But his anger was more reflexive than anything else. Although it was irking that Aria, who had fought against her own kind on behalf of those sahuagin monsters, would dare to impugn his integrity, in the wake of the others’ deaths it was too small a thing to bother with. “I said I would restore your voice and change you into a pony, and I will.”
“You better,” snorted Aria, before turning and dragging herself away without another word.
Lex didn’t bother to watch her leave, instead resuming his quick scan of the camp for Sonata. But doing so revealed only that she wasn’t among the ponies closest to him, causing him to frown as a flicker of anxiety ran down his spine. Something had killed Cloudbank and the others – and, in all likelihood, was also the reason for Severance’s disappearance – before the ghouls had ever gotten to them. Although he hadn’t been able to fully appreciate that at the time, the salience of that particular revelation became more prominent in his mind as he looked at the nearby ponies and didn’t see his beloved. Could whatever had dispatched the others have somehow snuck into the camp while he was gone and done the same to Sonata?
That’s ridiculous, he silently assured himself. There’s absolutely no evidence to suggest such a scenario. Just because Sonata wasn’t at the edge of the camp waiting for him was no reason to think that she was missing or hurt. In all likelihood, she was milling about somewhere, or maybe lounging inside the field hospital or the train statio-
“Lex!”
Looking over at the familiar voice, Lex frowned as he saw Garden Gate trotting up to him. Several of her followers – Lex couldn’t bring himself to imagine that she had actual friends – were trailing behind her, hanging back far enough to keep from activating the curse he’d laid on her. Even so, she passed within range of a few other ponies as she approached him, causing her to wobble before she managed to move past them and head directly toward him, not stopping until she was standing a short distance from him. Her eyes looked him over before slowly examining the empty space around him, and even Lex – who had no talent at reading people – knew what she was going to ask before she opened her mouth. “Where’s Turbo? No one’s seen him since he left yesterd-”
“He’s dead,” responded Lex bluntly. This had been one of the issues he’d grappled with on the trip back: whether or not to tell everypony what had happened. But it hadn’t taken very long to realize that he had no choice in the matter; those five ponies would be missed, and the public would come looking to him for answers. Denying them that would accomplish nothing except to stir up unrest. More than that, however, was the moral responsibility he had to the ponies they’d left behind. Their friends and families deserve to know what happened. “He and the other ponies that went into Vanhoover were all killed.”
For a moment Garden simply blinked at him, uncomprehending. The ponies behind her, overhearing the conversation, froze in place, shocked expressions on their faces. Garden recovered first. “Wh-what? That’s…” She smiled then, disbelief causing the corners of her lips to turn upward. “Come on. That’s ridiculous. We all got out. Turbo would never-, we all got out! Don’t you understand?” Her smile faded away as she took in Lex’s stony expression. “Turbo wouldn’t go back there and then just…he has something to come back to, now! We all do!”
Her voice was growing louder now, but Lex had no interest in standing around and letting her throw her grief at him. Instead, he started walking, directing himself to move right past her. “My condolences on your loss,” he said flatly, fulfilling what he knew to be the necessarily social ritual regarding bereavement.
“W-wait!” called Garden, moving and putting a hoof on his side. “What happ-”
With a wordless snarl, Lex knocked her hoof away – something that was easily done since he was inside the radius of her curse – and continued forward. That was enough to snap Garden’s companions out of their stupor, and several of them rushed around him to go to her side, while others began peppering Lex with questions. The commotion was enough that several nearby ponies stopped to look at them, curious as to what was happening, and Lex knew that the news he’d just shared would soon spread like wildfire throughout the camp. But at the moment he couldn’t bring himself to care, ignoring Garden’s companions as he made his way to the medical tent.
Thrusting the main flaps aside, he strode in. “Where is Sonata?”
The doctor in the entrance area – Lex belatedly realized that he was one of the ponies that had shown him Block Party’s body yesterday – looked up blankly. “Huh?”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “You heard me.”
Just the threat of his wrath was enough to rock the doctor back on his hooves. “I-, I don’t know. I’ve been here a little while and I haven’t-”
Lex didn’t bother to listen to any further, turning and leaving abruptly. Sonata wasn’t here, and if she hadn’t been for some time then there was little chance she was in one of the outpatient tents either. That meant she was either out mingling with everyone else, or she’d shut herself up in the train station. Since that building and the medical tent were on opposite sides of the camp, all he had to do was make his way over there and he’d find her at some point. Preferably sooner rather than later. Although his rationale for why she was almost certainly fine was logically sound, he still wanted to confirm-
“Excuse me!” called a new voice, this one male. “Sir! Um, Mister Lex Legis, sir!”
This time the flash of irritation that went through Lex was more substantial, momentarily eclipsing his gloom as he saw a grass-green pegasus stallion trot up to him nervously. “This had better be important,” he growled.
Flinching, the stallion bit his lip before rallying, forcing a smile onto his face. “Hi, um…my name’s Disc Jockey.” He turned in profile, giving a bashful smile as he pointed to his cutie mark: that was a silhouette of a pony reaching out toward a perfectly round object, speed lines behind it indicating that it was flying toward the silhouette’s outstretched hoof. “Everypony who hears that thinks I’m a musician, but my special talent is playing Frisbee.” Upon noticing that Lex’s expression hadn’t changed, his grin waned. “Uh…I asked whatshername, the fish-pony lady, to apologize for how I acted back when y-”
“Get to the point.”
His ears folding back at the curt response, Disc Jockey swallowed nervously, his smile completely gone now. “R-right. Um, I just wanted to ask…i-is there going to be more food soon? Everything from yesterday is gone, and even though my mom says she’s not hungry, I can hear her belly growling, so I just, you know…wanted to ask?”
Lex let out a slow breath, reminding himself that the question wasn’t illegitimate. “I’m currently in the process of procuring more provisions for everypony. You’ll have more to eat very soon.”
Disc Jockey let out a relieved breath. “That’s great! Really, great! Thank you so much!”
Lex gave a curt nod and turned away, not trusting himself to keep from screaming at the irritating stallion if he had to listen to his stammering for another moment. This time he all but galloped toward the train station, walking so fast that his legs started to ache after several minutes, and he slowed down only when he barely managed to avoid tripping and falling on his face.
Whether due to the tense look on his face or simple chance, no one else approached Lex as he made his way through the camp, and in no time at all the train station loomed ahead of him. Despite his moderated pace, Lex sped up just a little. Just one glance, to make sure she was alright, then he’d grab somepony and figure out where the nearest farm was. He’d rush there and use the bits that the others had died to acquire, still tucked away in the extradimensional hole, and buy enough food to-
“L-Lex Legis...” called a small, plaintive voice. “Can you help us, please?”
For a split-second he was tempted to just keep walking, but that would have been immoral. A plea for aid didn’t necessarily have to be granted, but it at least needed to be acknowledged and reviewed. Even so, Lex grit his teeth as he turned to look at the voice’s owner, an earth pony filly who was tentatively creeping up behind him, a sleeping toddler cradled in her hooves. Fiddlesticks and Tiddlywinks, he remembered, recognizing the pair from when they’d first entered the camp. “What is it?” he asked, barely able to stop himself from snarling the question. Children deserved more leeway than adults, after all; they couldn’t help but be stupid and annoying.
He apparently didn’t completely succeed in modulating his tone, because Fiddlesticks flinched. “Um…I’m sorry to bother you, but Sonata said that you were a superhero, and I wasn’t sure who else to ask…” She paused then, and Lex felt his nerves fraying as she looked at the ground, idly rocking her brother as she apparently lost her nerve. It was only when Lex gestured at her to hurry up that she gulped and lifted her gaze. “O-our campfire has run out of stuff to burn, and, um, a lot of others have too, and it’s going to be night soon.” She looked down again then, her voice dropping. “If it gets too dark then it’s really scary…” She looked up, her cheeks red. “I mean, not for me, but Tiddlywinks is still just a baby so he gets scared really easily.”
To anypony else, the display would have been adorable, but it was all Lex could do to keep from screaming at her. I shouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense! That he was being interrupted to fix a child’s fear of the dark when things were falling apart so badly was galling beyond measure. At the very least this stupid brat should have bothered someone else about this before making her foolishness into his problem! Especially when it was so easily solved!
Only barely managing to control himself, Lex swept a hoof back toward the rest of the camp. “Just go find some unicorns to help you,” he hissed. “So long as they keep using their horns then they’ll create a luminescent aura.” An idea occurred to him then: there was a unicorn in camp who could make herself useful. “In fact, go find a unicorn named Nosey Newsy. She has a black coat and a blonde mane and tail. Tell her that I said…that I…” Lex trailed off then, his eyes widening as his jaw hung slack.
Ever since Lex had interviewed Nosey about Block Party’s death, something had bothered him. Too many crises had broken out for him to pay it much attention, but the sensation that he’d overlooked something had been recurring, a persistent feeling that he’d witnessed something important but had somehow failed to properly contextualize it. But it was only now that he realized that it hadn’t been what he’d seen; it had been what he hadn’t seen.
Fiddlesticks blinked, not sure what Lex was doing. “Are you okay? Do you want me to go get that Nosey pony you mentioned?”
“No.” Lex slowly shook his head, his look of shock fading into one of grim resolve.
Aisle blinked as he turned his head to regard his girlfriend, Cozy’s question pulling him out of his daydreaming. “I was thinking of how beautiful you are,” he answered, looking over at her with a smile.
“Flatterer,” she smiled back, but it only lasted for a moment before her face turned serious. “But really, what were you thinking about?”
Aisle’s grin faded, and he gave a self-deprecating laugh as he looked back up at the sky. “Saw right through me, huh?”
He had suggested that the two of them get away from the camp for a little while yesterday evening, telling Cozy that he wanted to spend some time alone with her. In truth, he’d simply wanted to get her away from everypony else. Having to watch her wince or flinch whenever one of the injured or sick camp ponies passed too close to her, thanks to Lex’s curse, had been awful. So he’d managed to get a little of the leftover food and a dilapidated old tent and asked her to follow him a few hundred feet north of the camp, close enough to still be in sight of it while far enough away that they had some privacy. They’d spent the night together, and neither had been in a hurry to get back to the camp once the sun had risen, just enjoying the peace, quiet, and company.
Gently, Cozy reached over and turned his chin so he was looking at her. “I didn’t see through you,” she corrected softly. “I see you. All of you. Even before we were together, I noticed you.” Her hoof slowly traced the side of his face, caressing him. “I noticed that you were always kind, no matter how tense or scared you felt. I noticed that you were brave, without needing to show off. I noticed that you were selfless, and never asked for anything in return.” She leaned forward then, nuzzling him as she continued. “And then, before I noticed it, I’d fallen for you.”
“Cozy…”
“So that’s why I don’t want you to hide anything from me.” She raised her other hoof then, gently cupping his face between them as she leaned forward to plant a tender kiss on his lips. “I know you’re worried about me, and I know I’m not alright yet, but when you do that…when you try and hide what you’re feeling, even if it’s to protect me…it feels like you’re leaving me alone.” Her hooves slid down, embracing him, and she laid her head on his chest. “I don’t want to be alone again, Aisle. Not this soon after Pillow…”
He heard the tremor in her voice as she said her late husband’s name, and that was enough to make Aisle’s heart clench, his forelegs encircling her and hugging her back. “I’m sorry.” For a long moment he didn’t say anything else, closing his eyes as he held Cozy before he let out a small sigh, licking his lips. “I was thinking about before,” he admitted.
This time it was Cozy who heard the catch in his voice, looking up at him. “You mean last night?”
“…yeah.”
Hearing the embarrassment in his voice, Cozy gently separated herself from him, wanting to look at him directly. But he didn’t meet her gaze, looking away as his ears folded back. “Aisle…hey, look at me.” For a moment he didn’t seem like he’d do it, but then he slowly raised his eyes to meet hers, a miserable look on his face. The sight made Cozy’s heart go out to him, knowing that he didn’t deserve the humiliation he was struggling with right now. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.” Her voice was soft, but her words were filled with determination, silently willing him to believe what she was telling him.
“It doesn’t feel that way,” he murmured, still looking extremely uncomfortable.
She grit her teeth then, a sudden flash of anger running through her. But it wasn’t directed toward Aisle; rather, it was aimed squarely at the pony responsible for his misery. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” she repeated. “Lex is the one who did that to you. It’s his fault, not yours.” His response was to nod, but his eyes slid away from hers, and she knew she wasn’t getting through to him.
I should have said no, last night, she silently reprimanded herself. I should have told him I wasn’t feeling well, or that I was too tired, or something else. But the thought lacked conviction, knowing that she couldn’t lie to him to spare his feelings while telling him not to do the same for her. Even so, that didn’t make her feelings of guilt go away. We knew what his curse was. Why did we have to confirm it? “Aisle-”
He held up a hoof to stop her. “I know. I just…I know what you’re going to say, and I know you’re right, but…” His jaw worked silently for a moment, and he looked everywhere but at her as he tried to work out how to put what he was feeling into words. But after several long seconds, he still hadn’t figured out what he was trying to say, and he shook his head, frustration clouding his features.
Realizing that she’d pushed him too hard, Cozy almost apologized, but caught herself at the last moment, remembering how unpleasant it had been yesterday when he’d been excessively careful of her feelings. That had highlighted, rather than mitigated, how bad she felt, and she didn’t want to do the same thing to him now. Instead, she blurted out what she’d been thinking about for the last several minutes. “I want you to come see Princess Cadance with me.”
That did the trick, wiping the shame off of his face and causing his ears to flip back up as he looked at her in surprise. “Huh?”
Suppressing the urge to sigh in relief, Cozy kept talking. “I don’t know if she can bring Pillow back, but I’m sure she can remove Lex’s curses.”
Aisle’s eyes widened at that. “Wait, really?!”
Cozy couldn’t help but smile slightly at the hopeful tone in his voice. “Well, I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I have seen her perform some impressive miracles with Lashtada’s power. I bet getting rid of that horrible pony’s evil magic will be easy for her. Besides,” she added as her smile fell away, “I want her to see some of the awful things Lex has done.”
She half-expected Aisle to argue with her about that, since he’d mentioned before how he wasn’t convinced that Lex was a bad pony. But instead he turned so he was standing next to her, gently pressing his side to hers. “I want our curses gone, but I have to ask: are you sure my going back with you is a good idea?” he asked quietly.
Now it was her turn to be surprised, giving him a confused look. “What do you mean? I told you before: I want you with me.” Back when they had been taking shelter in that apartment building, one of the ways they’d all tried to keep their spirits up was by talking about what they’d do when the disaster was over. Aisle’s dream had always been to reopen his grocery store. But now that they were together, Cozy felt certain that if she went back to the Crystal Empire and he stayed in Vanhoover, their relationship would wither. But at the same time, she needed to go home, and not just for herself; Princess Cadance was Pillow’s only chance to be brought back. And even if she couldn’t, he deserved to be laid to rest in the place where he’d grown up. If Aisle didn’t want to come back with her, there wouldn’t be anything she could do about it, and that thought made her chest tighten painfully.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be what he was talking about. “I mean, if I go back with you, you’re going to want me to stay by your side, right?”
“Of course.” The question made her frown; why wouldn’t she want that?
Aisle licked his lips before continuing. “If Princess Cadance can’t bring him back…you don’t think that will be a little awkward when you talk to Pillow’s friends and family?”
The question hit Cozy like a physical blow, and for a moment she just gaped at him. “I hadn’t…” She trailed off, the weight of what he’d just said settling over her.
He was right, of course. As horrible as it was to tell Pillow’s parents that their son was dead, the idea of telling them that he’d been gone for less than a day before she’d found a new boyfriend was even worse. No matter that she truly did love Aisle, or that she felt certain that her new relationship didn’t diminish what she’d shared with her husband. His parents would look at Aisle and see nothing but the stallion that had moved in on their son’s territory before his body had grown cold. Worse than that, they’d think that her finding someone else would mean that she wasn’t mourning Pillow’s death. Just the thought of them reacting like that was almost a physical pain.
That must have shown on her face, because Aisle put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Listen, we don’t have to figure everything out right now. The trains aren’t running yet, so we have some time before-”
Cozy shook her head. “I don’t need time to think about things.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself before moving so she was standing directly in front of him, looking him straight in the eye. “I want you with me when I go back.” There was a challenge in her voice, daring him to try and talk her out of it. When he didn’t, she relaxed, but only slightly. “You’re probably right about what’ll happen, and I understand if you don’t want to go through that. I don’t want to go through that. But I will not act like our love is something to be ashamed of!” She was almost shouting by then, becoming more upset as she went on. “You are not taking advantage of me, and I am not using you to deal with my grief! I’m a priestess of the goddess of love, and I’m more qualified than anypony to say that what we have is real! And if there are some ponies who can’t accept that, that’s their problem!” She glared at him as she finished. Although he wasn’t the target of her anger, she suddenly wanted to lash out at somepony, hating the unfairness of it all.
For a moment Aisle didn’t reply, looking at her with a neutral expression, before a small smile made its way onto his face. “Okay.”
“Darn right it’s okay!” she snapped, still riled up.
“It is,” he agreed, closing the distance between them and hugging her again.
She stayed tense for a moment before she finally started to relax, shuddering as she leaned into him. Slowly, she let out a breath. “Besides, we won’t have to worry about any of that,” she murmured. “Princess Cadance will bring Pillow back and then everything will be fine.”
“Yeah,” agreed Aisle. “Until everypony finds out that you have a new boyfriend in addition to your husband. Then they’ll have a very different reaction.”
Cozy snorted at that, and a moment later began to snicker, before finally erupting in full-blown laughter. Aisle chuckled as well as he held her, hearing the occasional sob mixed in with her mirth. Finally, she calmed down, sniffling. “It’s just…it’s all so hard sometimes, you know?”
“I know,” he replied softly, one hoof stroking her mane. “I know.” They stayed that way for some time before separating, Aisle nodding toward their tent. “Come on, let’s pack everything up and head back to camp.” He smiled as he glanced at the distant forms of the crowd of ponies.
“I’m sure Cloudbank and Drafty are back by now, and I know that they’ll be happy for us.”
What should have been a simple undertaking had proven to be maddeningly difficult. Although the camp was a sprawling mass of haphazard sleeping arrangements, its tents and lean-tos arranged with no organization or pattern that he could see, it didn’t offer much in the way of privacy. Only a few of its makeshift dwellings had flaps in front of them, and those that did offered only imperfect concealment, usually being little more than torn blankets or dirty towels that had been draped in front of the openings. And yet Lex had walked the entire length of the camp without spotting the slightest glimpse of the mare he was looking for.
The obvious conclusion had been that she was either at the train station or the field hospital. But upon returning to the latter’s medical tent, the doctor at the entrance had assured him that he hadn’t seen the blonde mare. Despite his mounting frustration at Nosey’s apparently having dropped off the face of Equestria, Lex nevertheless forced himself to speak to several other members of the medical staff, hoping that they’d caught a glimpse of her while going about their business in the wider camp. None of them had.
Ironically, his visit had brought him face-to-face with Spit Polish once again, the injured pony right where Lex had left him. The sight of the simpering coward had not improved Lex’s mood, and he’d curtly told the doctor watching over him to continue doing so. As much as Lex wanted to curse the little mongrel right then and there, he’d refrained, wanting to conserve his strength in case his suspicions about Nosey were even slightly accurate… Still, the encounter had served to remind him of another contingency that needed to be made in case worse came to worst. Although the doctors had been stupefied at the sight of so many bits, they’d assured him, as he put the extradimensional device back in his saddlebag, that they’d watch over the money until he came back.
The next order of business had been to check the train station, but at that point Lex had faltered, settling for a surreptitious glance in the windows rather than unsubtly barging in. It had proven to be a wise decision; although Nosey hadn’t been there, Sonata was, to his extreme relief. For a moment he’d simply watched her – observing as she’d swayed to a rhythm only she could hear, her eyes closed as she mouthed something – before reluctantly departing without alerting her to his presence. It was for the best, he knew; Sonata almost certainly wouldn’t have left his side if she’d known he was back, and he didn’t want her or anypony else nearby when he confronted Nosey.
Of course, that had still left the problem of actually finding the missing mare. As it was, he’d very nearly gone to Aria to have her use her detection spell, except she’d made it clear that the two times she’d used it in Vanhoover were her limit. Which meant that there had virtually no options left except to start asking ponies at random if they’d seen a pony that matched Nosey’s description.
Doing so had driven home that something was wrong, as the camp ponies near-universally had no idea who he was talking about. Although he knew that there was no way Nosey could have interviewed even a fraction of the camp’s population in the two days they’d been there, for her to be so completely unknown was out of character for the irritating reporter. She should have made her presence at least somewhat known, he’d thought to himself. She’d have asked for interviews and corroborating interviews, and knowledge of her would have gotten around. After all, Lex knew, the rumors about himself had spread like wildfire; Nosey would certainly have made enough of an impression that somepony would have known who she was.
It had only been by dumb luck that, after nearly twenty ponies professed ignorance, one of them had finally admitted to having seen a unicorn mare with a black coat and a blonde mane and tail. That pony had directed him to a small tent at the southernmost edge of the camp, almost completely hidden behind three others and angled so that its interior couldn’t be seen from the center of the place. This was deliberate, Lex knew. She didn’t want to be found. Before, he would have taken Sonata’s word for it that Nosey was upset with him about their exchange yesterday morning. Now his thoughts were far darker.
Brushing aside some unidentifiable rags that were obscuring the entrance, Lex looked down at the tent’s sole occupant. Lying on the ground, they were covered by a dirty blanket, but the golden mane surrounding the black horn made their identity clear. “Nosey, get up. I want to talk to you.”
“Go away,” came the familiar voice. “I’d rather be alone right now, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“I don’t care,” retorted Lex. Grabbing her blanket with his telekinesis, he tugged on it. He could feel it meeting with some resistance, a crease near one end making it clear that she was holding onto it with her teeth, but he yanked on it again and succeeded in flinging it aside. “This is not a request.”
Sighing, Nosey gave him a sour look before slowly rising to her hooves, adjusting her glasses. “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m still not exactly happy with you about before.” She held up a hoof, as though to forestall his replying. “I know you had to interview me about what happened with Block Party, and I get that. Really, I do. But that doesn’t mean that I’m okay with how you did it, you underst-”
“Shut up.” Lex’s voice was colder than ice. “Turn around and start walking, right now.”
“Huh?” Nosey gave him a look that was both angry and confused. “What are you talking about? I thought you said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Not here,” clarified Lex. “Away from everypony else.”
“I don’t believe this,” muttered Nosey, giving a disgusted sigh. “Fine. Where are we going?”
“East. Toward the mountains.”
“But there’s nothing out there,” protested Nosey.
Lex nodded. “That’s exactly the point.”
Rolling her eyes, Nosey gestured melodramatically toward the other end of the tent. “After you,” she said sarcastically.
But Lex didn’t move. “You will walk ahead of me,” he ordered flatly, “and keep walking until I tell you to stop.”
This time Nosey’s look was one of concern mixed with confusion. “Why are you acting like this? Did something happen? Is Sonata alrigh-”
“I said start walking,” growled Lex. “I won’t tell you again.”
Nosey paused for just a moment before turning in the direction indicated, giving him one last look over her shoulder. “You’re starting to scare me, Lex.” But when the only response she received was another glare, she bit her lip and started walking.
Several ponies glanced at them as they made their way through the camp, but neither pony paid them much attention. Nosey glanced back at him several times, but Lex’s expression didn’t change, and she continued marching in silence. It was only when they passed by the train station and started toward the open plain between the camp and the mountains that Nosey spoke up again. “I’d feel more comfortable if Sonata were here.”
“Keep walking,” replied Lex tersely.
Sighing, Nosey didn’t speak again. Long minutes passed as the two of them traveled further from the camp, and now it was Lex who glanced behind him at various intervals. Finally, when the train station was far in the distance, he raised his voice. “This is sufficient.”
“Finally!” sighed Nosey, turning around to face him. “At the rate we were going I was starting to think we were going to start climbing the mountains!” She paused then, twisting her head around to look at the featurelessness of their immediate surroundings. The place was completely flat for hundreds of feet in every direction, without so much as a bush or a rock to break up the monotony. Only the train tracks to the south, and the river beyond it, broke up the featurelessness. “So, why did you bring me out here?”
“Your glasses,” said Lex simply. “Give them to me.”
Nosey blinked. “Huh?”
“Give them to me,” repeated Lex. “Right now.”
“…you can’t be serious,” muttered Nosey incredulously. “My glasses? You dragged me all the way out here for my glasses?!” She stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed, but he didn’t relent. Her eyebrows rising, Nosey shook her head in exasperation. “You know what? Fine. Go ahead.” She reached up with a hoof. “You want ‘em, you got-”
“No!” cut in Lex sharply. “Not like that.”
Nosey froze. “Not like what?”
“Not with your hooves,” snapped Lex immediately. “I want you to use your horn.” He narrowed his eyes then. “Give them to me with your telekinesis.”
For a long moment Nosey made no reply, not moving an inch as she stared at Lex, who simply returned her gaze. Then, slowly, she lowered her hoof to the ground. As she did, her expression changed. Gone were the exasperation, frustration, and incomprehension. Instead, her features relaxed, her mouth settling into a faint frown as her eyes became hooded, seeming almost bored with the sight of the stallion in front of her. For his part, Lex watched the transition with a deepening frown of his own, and when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to speak, he began talking. “In the wake of Block Party’s death, I had you complete a series of tests to confirm your identity. One of them was to lift a candelabra, to prove that you were a corporeal being. And you did,” he paused then, and when he spoke next his voice was thick with accusation, “but not with your horn.”
For a moment Nosey didn’t respond, but then the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. “Which is unusual for a unicorn,” she concluded, a note of mild amusement filling her voice. “But not so unusual that you’d bring me all the way out here before conducting a second test. Something else put you on alert.” Her lazy smile stayed in place, but her eyes glanced upward, to the circlet that peeked out from under Lex’s mane. “And I think I know what it was.”
Lex tensed at that. Once he had confirmed Block Party's death, the very first thing he’d done had been to use his circlet to see if Nosey – or anything in the immediate vicinity of the body – had a magic aura. It was only natural, considering that the earth stallion had been radiating necromantic magic of considerable power when he was alive. But the scan had turned up nothing, and Lex had been forced to conclude that, if there had been any magic involved in Block Party’s death, it had ceased functioning by the time they’d examined the scene. Certainly, there had been no magic on Nosey.
But upon finding the location of her tent just now, Lex had been suspicious enough that he’d called upon his circlet again before approaching her. Unlike at the train station, this time he’d seen a magical aura around the pony inside the tent. By itself, the existence of a magic aura around a unicorn wasn’t that unusual. But the magnitude and type of it had erased all doubt from Lex’s mind that something was seriously wrong. Even now, a mere thought was all it took to activate his circlet and confirm it again.
Powerful necromancy radiated out from Nosey like a miasma.
Gritting his teeth, Lex wanted to demand answers, to know how she – or it, or whatever he was dealing with – had evaded his scan the first time around. But there were more important questions that needed to be asked. “Where is Nosey?” he growled.
The imposter in front of him smiled wider. “Dead,” she answered flippantly. “And now that you know that, so are you.”
Lex had just enough time to go rigid at the imposter’s taunting before she attacked him.
There was no outward warning of what she was doing. She didn’t gesture or chant. Her horn didn’t glow. There was only a split-second sense of magic gathering around her, of energy being shaped and directed, and then her spell took effect. Immediately, he lost sight of her as a fog descended over him, greenish vapors filling his vision.
And then pain enveloped him completely. His entire body was suddenly awash in a sizzling agony as the mist pressed against him from every side, burning him wherever it touched. Reflexively he thrashed, trying to scatter the viridian vapors, but the attempt accomplished nothing. Worse, he grasped through the haze of agony, the mist had a tangible substance to it, being thick like jelly. Acid! he realized then. She created a cloud of semi-solid acid!
“Nosey told me everything about you before I killed her.” The familiar voice cut through the mist, filled with casual mockery. “She went on and on about how you killed a green dragon all by yourself. As such, I thought you might enjoy a bit of nostalgia before you died.” Dimly, Lex registered that the origin of the voice was moving, trying to prevent him from getting a fix on her location to prevent any sort of easy counterattack. “Consider this my reward for your seeing through my disguise.”
But Lex wasn’t listening, knowing that he had to get out of the acidic fog immediately. Rather than trying to push his way through the dense mass, he grit his teeth and forced the pain aside, calling on the dark magic of his horn. Immediately, his body dissolved into shadow…but the pain abated only a little, the magical nature of the acid continuing to eat at him. But that sensation fell away completely as Lex dove straight down, slipping into the ground and leaving the deadly mist behind.
Nor did he stop there, flying through the packed earth toward where he’d last heard the imposter’s voice. If she knows how I fought that dragon, then she’ll know that I escaped its breath weapon like this, he knew, which meant that she’d be expecting him to slip away and counterattack. But first he’d need to use some of his defensive spells.
For a moment he cursed his lack of preparation in not layering himself with protective magic. But he thrust the thought aside; if whatever that was had seen him start layering defensive enchantments on himself, it likely would have attacked immediately. And given the short-term nature of most of those spells, using them before leading her away from the camp would have been futile. He’d just have to do it now…and hope that she didn’t have some way of detecting or attacking him while in this form. Fortunately, he had prepared a large complement of spells meant for a fight, and had only used a few of them back when he’d engaged those ghouls while tracking down Garden Gate back at that warehouse. Now he just had to make sure that the rest were enough to handle whatever it was he was up against…
First, a spell to create a minor probability bend in his favor when dodging attacks. Then a spell to increase his speed. He passed over other spells designed to fortify his physical self, deciding that it was far safer to stay in shadow-form. Instead, his next spell- “Are you just going to hide, Lex Legis?” The voice came from right beside him, making Lex start. But there was nothing there, just more dirt and rocks. Nevertheless, Nosey’s voice continued to speak, sounding as though she were right there, her voice dripping with condescension. “Those ponies you sent to Vanhoover were braver than this.” The words sent a shock through Lex, wiping all other thoughts from his mind. She knew! She knew what happened to Cloudbank and the others! But if she’d been ensconced in her tent, the rumors couldn’t possibly have reached her before he did. Which meant… “Before I killed them all, I mean,” she concluded nonchalantly.
In that moment Lex abandoned all thoughts of defense, surging upward as a scream of rage tore itself from his incorporeal throat. “YOU WILL PAY!” he screamed as he rose above the ground, spotting her a short distance away. “YOU WILL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO THEM!” Her back had been to him, and as he saw her whirl to face him he knew that he’d given up a tactical advantage, but he didn’t care. Instead, he rattled off a magical chant, shadowy tendrils undulating to fulfill the necessary gestures, and a moment later he unleashed a spell at her.
But not an attack spell.
Controlling his emotions had never come easily for Lex. But over the course of his life, he’d found that his anger and frustration were easier to control when he had something to direct them against. So long as there was a concrete problem to be solved or an enemy to be fought, rage could be transformed into perseverance, and frustration into determination. It was why, when he’d seen the array of monsters that the kraken had arrayed against them, arguing with Aria had helped him to focus and come up with a plan that had ultimately led them to victory.
It had been the same when Fiddlesticks had inadvertently helped him realize that Nosey wasn’t who she seemed to be. In the time it had taken him to track her down, he’d bent all of his thoughts toward analyzing and extrapolating everything about his last interaction with her, channeling his rage and grief over the ponies he’d sent back to Vanhoover into fierce concentration. By the time he’d analyzed the magic aura around Nosey, it had confirmed his initial suspicions and led him towards a tentative conclusion…that Nosey wasn’t Nosey anymore.
Everything about Block Party had been a mystery, from how his leadership had almost seemed designed to produce misery among the camp ponies to the necromantic aura that had clung to him. But the greatest riddle had been how, after he’d strangely surrendered the camp without a fight, he had inexplicably committed suicide. Even stranger, the wounds on his hooves had indicated that, in his last moments, he hadn’t wanted to die. None of it had made sense.
But in the immediate aftermath of Block Party’s death, Nosey had started acting strangely as well, being mysteriously reluctant to use the innate telekinesis that came naturally to all unicorns. That alone had been unusual enough to warrant asking her about, but it had been the search for her that had made Lex well and truly suspicious. That Nosey apparently hadn’t interviewed anypony during her time in the camp was very unlike her, and the way that she’d tried so hard to isolate herself had only made him more apprehensive about the peculiar changes in her behavior.
But seeing an aura of the same type and strength as Block Party’s around her had been what drove home the fact that both ponies had changed their behaviors in close proximity to each other. During the time that Nosey and Block Party had been alone, he had committed suicide only to try and live, while she had ceased using her unicorn magic and then gone on to lose interest in interviewing others. And both of them had possessed the same aura…one that reeked of magic that manipulated life and death.
Although Lex had never heard of magic that would let one person transfer their consciousness into someone else, that had been the conclusion that made the most sense. It would explain why Block Party had been willing to die, and then changed his mind…because that personality had fled his body just before the moment of death, leaving its unfortunate host behind to suffer the consequences. That rogue consciousness had then taken over Nosey, causing her to act in a manner that was not in keeping with her true self. And Lex had no doubt that Block Party had been himself a victim of possession; why else would he have had a necromantic aura around him when they’d first met?
Of course, that left the question of how that possessing consciousness’s necromantic aura had evaded his previous scan, back when he’d checked Nosey at the train station, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that, if he was right, Nosey was still alive. If Block Party’s original personality had reasserted itself when the possessing intelligence was gone, then it had still been there all along, which meant that the same was likely true for Nosey…and its saying she was dead had been a lie. Which meant that Lex’s first priority was saving her from whatever it was that had taken over her body, and he only had one idea about how to do that.
Concentrating with everything he had, Lex cast his dispelling spell at the necromantic aura clinging to Nosey. Designed to undo the structure that shaped and directed other spells, it was the same spell that he’d used to undo the magic that the dragon had used to bolster its physical endurance, allowing him to overcome it by the barest of margins during their fight. And it should work on this! he thought to himself desperately. It has to!
An instant later, his magic collided with Nosey’s aura, her eyes widening in realization as it struck her…and for an instant, Lex felt the sheer weight of the magic that he was trying to tear apart. Although he’d known that the necromancy clinging to Nosey was powerful, he hadn’t truly appreciated the degree of strength that it took to generate that level of magical energy. In that moment, he realized that he was dealing with an entity whose ability to wield magic surpassed his own…and that if this didn’t work, he wouldn’t be able to make it leave Nosey, because he didn’t have another dispelling spell prepared. That thought sent a thrill of terror through him.
…-ive…-ck…
Lex didn’t consciously register the voiceless words in his mind, the same way he hadn’t back when Spit Polish had almost killed him. Instead, he parroted them without realizing what he was doing. “Give her back!” Lex growled, focusing everything he had on making his spell work, trying to push it through with sheer willpower. “Give me Nosey BACK!” He could feel the aura around her roiling, undulating as though caught in a hurricane, and he concentrated as hard as he could-
And then the aura around Nosey collapsed into nothing.
Instantly, Nosey fell to her knees, gasping and choking as though she’d just come up from underwater. A moment later a wailing sound emerged from her throat, turning into a sob as her face twisted into a horrified expression, tears immediately running down her cheeks as her eyes locked onto the pony in front of her. “L-Lex!” she choked, stumbling forward as she reached a trembling hoof out toward him. “Help me!”
Lex heard her desperate plea, but at that moment he was incapable of responding. His eyes were directed behind her, his shadowy body roiling in utter revulsion as he took in the sight of the gruesome thing that had just appeared, knowing it was the monster that had taken over her body. It wasn’t surprising for it to be made to manifest directly in the physical world after being forcibly ejected from its host, but Lex had expected it to be something vaguely recognizable; some sort of equinoid, or even one of those humanoid creatures that he’d encountered on Everglow. But this…this was hideous beyond imagination!
“It seems I underestimated you, Lex Legis,” came a chorus of voices from the abomination. “You have managed to do what very few mortals have ever done.”
Despite himself, Lex couldn’t prevent a shiver from going through him as the creature spoke its next words.
“Monster” was too small a word to describe the thing behind Nosey.
Its body was like that of a monstrous slug, the bloated green mass slick with a layer of slime. Fully fifteen feet long and half that in height, the front of the creature had no eyes or tentacles or other recognizable features save for a massive orifice ringed with teeth, like a leech that had grown fangs. But it was the other end of the creature where the true horror lay. Instead of anything that remotely resembled a tail, the thing’s body split into three segments, each of which curled up and over its bulk. At the end of each of those tripartite protrusions, in complete defiance of any sort of biological sense, was a head.
The heads were vaguely equine in shape, but there was no way their appearance could have been mistaken for that of a pony. Lacking a mane entirely, the flesh – if the creature’s outer layer could even be called that – on each of its skulls was shriveled, darkening in color and making the heads look more dead than alive. That appearance was heightened by the way each head’s thin lips failed to completely cover their teeth, giving them a rictus grin. But worst were the eyes, which were missing entirely, showing only the dark hollows of empty sockets.
Although there was no way to be sure, Lex was certain that each of those six eyeless holes were trained on him.
The sight of the thing was grotesque enough that it took him a moment to register movement around its heads, belatedly noticing a group of small gemstones orbiting the thing’s craniums. Nearly a half-dozen in total, they were all gemstones of different cuts and colors, all circling the trio of heads in different orbits, like small asteroids caught in the pull of a star. Three of the gemstones were prisms, one being a pale green, another being a bright orange, and the third a much more subdued rose color. The other two gemstones were a spindle which shined with a rainbow of colors and a sphere of mottled blue and scarlet.
The sight of the flying gems made Lex curse softly. He recognized those from his time on Everglow; the floating stones were all magic items that bestowed defensive or personal-enhancement magic on whomever they orbited. A moment’s concentration was all it took to examine their auras, but doing so showed only that they were all imbued with magic of considerable strength, being too varied for any particular type of enchantment to come through. Resisting the urge to snarl, Lex put the magical gems out of his thoughts; he’d just have to deal with them. Instead, he turned his eyes and his thoughts toward Nosey, knowing that the most important thing was to get her away from that monster as soon as possible. Fortunately, he had a short-range teleport spell prepared, but it would only work on himself and someone that he was touching directly…and if hostilities resumed right now, he was far enough away from Nosey that that thing would get to her long before he ever did.
“I suppose the blame lies with me,” continued the creature. This time, it didn’t speak in a chorus, with only the left head’s jaw moving. The voice that came out was masculine, with a deep pitch, and despite its declaration of anger its tone was conversational. “I initially let you live so that I could evaluate your abilities. Not just anyone could have slain that oversized squid and closed the elemental aperture, after all.”
“But once Nosey here spilled her guts,” continued the right head, its voice a deep, throaty feminine, “I had enough information to get a sense of your strengths and weaknesses. I only let you live because-” At that moment Nosey surged to her hooves, bolting forward as fast as she could, running directly away from the creature and toward Lex, a terrified look on her face.
Reacting immediately, Lex didn’t bother with chanting a spell, knowing that every fraction of a second counted. Instead he simply concentrated, calling on his dark magic to raise a spike right through the middle of the creature’s body, pinning it in place so that it wouldn’t be able to chase after Nosey. Even as he did so, he rushed forward to meet her, pouring everything he had into his magic-enhanced speed. Just a little closer! Just a little closer and he could teleport her to safet-
Then everything went wrong.
The creature shifted its body with a speed that shouldn’t have been possible for a creature of its size, throwing itself to the side and letting the black crystal spike pierce nothing but empty air. It hadn’t even recovered its positioning when the leftmost head glanced over at Nosey and opened its jaw, its tongue snaking out. Perfectly cylindrical with a tip as sharp as any spear, the coal-black organ was almost an inch in diameter and was as dry as pitch, in contrast to the wetness of the monster’s body. With speed exceeding a serpent’s strike, its tongue stretched impossibly far, easily covering the fifteen-foot gap between itself and Nosey, and wrapped around her neck. Jerking to a halt, Nose’s eyes bulged and her mouth fell open, unable to scream as she was hoisted into the air, her legs kicking futilely as the thing yanked her back towards it. “How impertinent,” chuckled the middle head, its voice as mellifluous as it was androgynous. “Clothes are supposed to remain where they’re discarded, until their owner decides to wear them again.”
“No!” shouted Lex, seeing Nosey’s struggles already weakening as she choked, unable to get air. “Let her go NOW!” The words were no simple roar of anger, as he concentrated on directing the Night Mare’s power at the monster. If he could just take control of it the way he had the kraken, then this would be over immediately!
But as the invisible lines of power reached out to make contact with the creature, Lex felt them pass through it powerlessly, unable to take control of it. Whatever it was, the thing wasn’t the sort of creature that the Night Mare’s power had authority over. In his thoughts, Lex silently cursed the goddess for giving him such a fickle power. Why does this only work on some creatures and not others?!
Either unaware or uncaring of what Lex had tried to do, the fanged orifice at the other end of its body made an ululating sound that was only barely recognizable as laughter. “wHy sHOulD I?” In contrast to the dulcet tones from its pony-like heads, the speech emanating from the creature’s fourth mouth sounded as pleasant as hooves being scraped along a blackboard. “i’Ve gROwn tO eNjoY mY noSEy-sUiT. oR WiLL yOU vOLuNtEeR tO tAkE hER pLaCE?”
Lex tensed at that, the very idea of being possessed by this abomination too revolting for words. “You dare-”
“Or is your pride more important to you than this mare’s life?” sneered the female-sounding head. “Is your vaunted moral code really so shallow, that you won’t sacrifice yourself to save one of your precious ponies?”
“This one has feelings for you, you know,” cooed the epicene voice of the central head. “She let it slip when I was extracting information from her. She used to think of you as nothing but a way to advance her career, but now you’re so much more to her. Does that mean nothing to you?”
“I’m willing to enter into a formal contract to guarantee her life. But you should decide quickly.” The left head’s voice was thick with amusement, its words unimpeded by its tongue being wrapped around Nosey’s neck. “With how she’s struggling, she won’t last nearly as long as Block Party did.” A quick glance was all it took for Lex to confirm that the creature wasn’t exaggerating. Nosey’s flailing had already been reduced to little more than a series of spasms, her face turning blue as she looked at him with wide, terror-filled eyes, and he knew that she was silently begging him to rescue her.
Despite that, Lex never considered heeding the creature’s words. This thing had, in the short time since he’d unknowingly encountered it when he’d first marched into the camp, done nothing but try to deceive him. It had hidden its identity in Block Party, whom it had later murdered. It had propagated a false quarantine for what seemed like no other purpose but to sow suffering among the surviving ponies. It had lied to him about Nosey still being alive. There was no reason to believe that it would honor any sort of bargain now.
Lex didn’t bother making a declaration of rejection to the monster’s offer. All that would do is give it a split-second of advance warning for what he was about to do. Instead, he rattled off the words of an incantation as quickly as he could, gesturing with a shadowy tendril before pointing directly at Nosey, even as he channeled as much extra magic through himself as he could, empowering his spell. In slow motion, he saw the creature’s tongue coil tighter around Nosey’s neck, saw the consciousness start to fade from her eyes…and then he uttered the final syllable of his spell.
Instantly, he heard the monster’s voices raise in a shriek of surprise, their chorus now thrown into a discordant wail that was almost painful to hear. But he barely registered that, instead looking at the astral pony that he had just conjured. It was the same type that he’d worn in his fight against the dragon, a translucent unicorn the color of smoky glass and the size of a house. But this time, he wasn’t in the center of it.
Nosey was.
Although the details of her form were hard to make out inside the construct’s body, Lex was sure that he saw her stirring a little. Knowing from personal experience that she’d be able to breathe while inside the thing, he couldn’t help the moment of exhilaration he felt that his sudden, last-second plan had worked. Now to get her out of danger! “GO!” he roared at the astral pony. “Get her back to the camp!”
“Acknowledged,” replied the creature in a distortion of his own voice. Immediately, it began to gallop back towards the distant train station, and Lex quickly turned his attention back to the monster. Now he just had to keep it occupied for a few moments, and then Nosey would be out of danger, and he could kill the thing without having to worry about anyone else.
But even as he turned to look at the creature, it was already taking action. Wriggling, its distended body slid up off the ground without hesitation, undulating through the air with a speed that would have put a pegasus to shame. “And where do you think YOU’RE going?!” snarled its voices hatefully. An instant later, Lex felt magical energies gathering, and he surged toward the creature, calling an attack spell to mind. Got to make it focus on me! he raged internally. Got to buy Nosey time-
A second later, once again without any words or gestures, the creature’s magic discharged, and Lex had just enough time to recognize it as the same dispelling spell that he’d used to force the creature out of Nosey…except much more powerful. The next moment, it struck the astral pony he’d conjured, and the magic holding it together unraveled immediately. In an instant, the giant unicorn winked out of existence and Nosey fell limply to the ground. Lex’s heart leapt into his throat as he watched her bonelessly hit the grassy plain, and it was small comfort when he saw her twitch a moment later.
“I said before that you made me angry,” chorused the monster as it turned back toward him, hanging in the air. “Now, I’m going to show you just what that means.”
Lex had no intention of waiting for the creature to act on its anger.
Murmuring a rapid-fire chant as he waved tendrils of shadow, he unleashed a spell at the creature, firing a pitch-black ray of negative energy at it. The spell would suppress part of the creature’s life force, and while that probably wouldn’t be enough to kill it, it would weaken not only its vitality but its magical strength as well. If what he’d felt when he’d forced it out of Nosey was accurate, then that was an edge he was going to need. He watched as the beam lanced out directly at the thing’s center of mass…and then blinked out of existence just before making contact with it.
Although he didn’t have a physical body at the moment, Lex felt a shudder run through him as he realized what just happened. It’s the same as that dragon I fought, he knew. It has some sort of aura that passively resists spells! Which meant that, so long as he tried to use magic on it directly, he’d have to punch through the thing’s aura to have any chance of hurting it, even before taking into account that it would actively struggle against any hostile magic that reached it.
His odds of defeating this thing, Lex knew, had just shrunk dramatically.
“I think I’ll start,” mused the monster's middle head, “by showing you the difference between your strength and mine.” It gave Lex no time to process that, immediately flying toward him as soon as the words left its mouth. In an instant, it covered the distance between them, moving with incredible speed, and Lex felt its magical energy swirl around it again. He had just enough time to process that it was using the same dispelling magic that it had used to destroy his astral construct, and then the magic slammed into him. For an instant, he struggled to fight off the thing’s magic, but it was like a mountain had been dropped on him, and an instant later he was corporeal again, only barely managing to keep his hooves under him as he fell to the ground.
Nor did the thing’s magic stop there. While Lex’s dispelling spell had only ever been able to undo a single spell at a time, he felt this one keep going after it had undone the dark magic of his shadow-form. Once that was gone, it tore through the defensive spells he’d cast on himself, and Lex was helpless to stop it as he felt both his speed-enhancing spell and the luck-boosting spell he’d used on himself crumble away to nothing. Nor was it done then, knocking out one of the defensive enchantments he’d built into his body so long ago, causing the minor deflection field surrounding him to wink out. Only then did the creature’s dispelling magic come to an end.
Horrified at just how vulnerable he’d been rendered, Lex instinctively threw himself backward, but once again the monster was faster. The tongue from its middle head snaked outward with so much force that it was almost a blur, striking his left foreleg with enough force that the bone shattered under the blow, causing Lex to scream as agony radiated out from his now-broken leg. But the pain grew worse a moment later as the creature’s tongue, still moving with the arc of its swing, wrapped around the mangled limb and squeezed it tight before hoisting him into the air by it. “Pain, of course, is the next stage of your punishment,” the left head announced blithely, its voice as relaxed as though it were discussing the weather. “And by all means, feel free to keep screaming as much as you like.”
It was all Lex could do not to oblige the creature, the white-hot agony in his leg overwhelming his senses so completely that for a moment he could think of nothing else. It was only a lifetime’s worth of personal discipline, of training his thoughts to form in the manner that he wanted and maintaining that mental structure regardless of what happened, that allowed him to push it back, only barely regaining his control over himself. This is…nowhere near as bad…as conjuring all that food! he raged internally, remembering what had happened when his enhancement spell had gone wrong while he was creating food for everypony. Even so, the thoughts that filled his mind now were of retreat, of putting some distance between himself and this monster, if for no other reason than to make the pain stop. But Lex knew that it would make little difference if he did; with the thing’s speed and ability to use dispelling magic repeatedly, it would be on him again in moments.
Instead, he forced himself to go on the attack.
Pointing his right foreleg at the thing, Lex began to gesture, choking out the words to another spell. Knowing that a single mispronunciation or flawed gesticulation would cause the spell to fizzle, he focused everything he had on getting the spell right, fighting back against a renewed wave of pain as the thing squeezed his broken foreleg tighter. He knew there was no guarantee that this would work, that the spell might simply be negated, but there was no viable alternative. Besides, spell resistance wasn’t an all-powerful defense; the dragon had demonstrated that. He just had to keep attacking and hope that some of his magic would be able to force its way through.
A second later, he managed to complete his spell, and despite the torment emanating from his maimed limb, Lex managed a small smile as he swung his free foreleg around to point at the thing’s middle head, the one currently grabbing him. A microsecond later, the green ray of his disintegration spell shot forth. Lex had prepared this particular spell twice over, and although trying to pull in additional magic while simultaneously casting the spell and holding fast against the pain he was in had been too much, even the unenhanced version of the spell had considerable power. If he could just disintegrate the monster’s middle head, it would not only deal it significant damage, it would free him at the same time!
But just like last time, the spell fizzled out before it struck the creature.
Lex had barely registered that his last-ditch effort to fight back had failed when the thing’s other tongues snaked out. The right head’s gruesome organ wrapped around his neck, squeezing tightly and cutting off his air supply, as the left head’s tongue struck his right foreleg. Miraculously, the bone didn’t break this time, but that was small comfort as the creature entangled that limb as well, yanking it wide. “How truly impressive,” cooed the right head, its feminine voice filled with mockery.
“To persist with such futile struggles in the face of overwhelming evidence about how helpless you are is a rare level of stupidity,” laughed the middle head, bending his broken foreleg further in the wrong direction.
“Nosey gushed about your vaunted intelligence,” sneered the right head. “But it seems that she was sorely mistaken to hold you in such a high regard.”
“aLloW mE To bETteR iLLuStrATe tHE pOInT iN a WaY yoUR PuNy mINd CAn cOMprEHenD,” screeched the fang-filled orifice that composed the monster’s other end.
Lex only barely heard the words. The level of pain he was in had escalated, and with no air going to his lungs he could feel his consciousness starting to ebb. Dimly, he felt himself being dragged forward, and then the monster’s leech-like maw filled his vision. His eyes widening as he comprehended what was about to happen, Lex reactivated the minor deflection field around his body with a thought. The enchantment, being one that he’d woven into his person long ago, immediately sprang back into existence…but it might as well not have been there at all, the creature’s ring of fangs puckering before it yanked him closer. An instant later he spasmed as he felt its teeth sink deep into his belly. Instantly, the thing’s orifice contracted as it started to suck the blood from his wounds. A surge of panic filled Lex then, and his eyes glowed as he called on his horn’s dark magic to return him to shadow-form, knowing that attacking was no longer an option; he had to retreat immediately if he wanted to live.
“Oh no you don’t!” barked the creature’s middle head, its tongue unfolding from Lex’s broken leg and lashing towards his horn. Lex tilted his head back as much as he could to try and avoid the strike, and the whip-like blow crashed into him at the exact moment that his body turned immaterial. It wasn’t fast enough to connect, but just barely managed to cut the straps on his haversack and saddlebag before they could follow his body into incorporeality, letting them fall to the ground even as Lex’s now-insubstantial body slipped through the creature’s tongues.
Almost dizzy from the sudden cessation of pain, Lex only barely registered the loss. There was nothing among his belongings that could help him now anyway; the haversack contained a variety of mundane sundries, treatises that he’d written, and gems filled with spells that were useless in this situation. The saddlebag was even less useful, containing only the now-empty portable hole that he’d borrowed from Sonata. There was nothing helpful in either…either…
Suddenly, Lex knew how he could win.
“Just make sure that, whatever you do, you never put that thing in my pack, and vice-versa,” warned Lex. “Layering extradimensional spaces on top of each other can put a severe strain on the dimensional fabric in the local area.” That had been what he had told Sonata back when Fireflower had given them the extradimensional receptacle that contained the dragon’s hoard. Although he’d tweaked the haversack to stabilize being taken into the small pocket dimension that he’d often conjured for them to sleep in, it took only a thought to undo that alteration as he grabbed it and the saddlebag in his telekinesis, allowing its original settings to snap back into place. He hurled himself backwards then, simultaneously thrusting both objects right in front of the creature’s ugly faces, the haversack’s main flap falling open. “How’s this for futile?!” he snarled, shoving the saddlebag containing the portable hole into the haversack.
Lex immediately lost his grip on the two objects as the haversack suddenly imploded, collapsing in on itself until it was nothing but a dot the size of a pinprick, hanging in the air. A moment later a cracking sound filled the air, as though a thousand boards were snapped in half all at once…and then it was like looking at a whirlpool in a funhouse mirror, as everything around the dot – the air, the ground, and the monster – suddenly distorted, swirling and folding in on themselves as they fell into it, a fierce wind picking up as the rent in space pulled everything toward itself. A shrill chorus of screams reached Lex’s ears as he saw the creature fall into the tiny dimensional rift, its body elongating and thinning as it was sucked into the hole and disappeared, and he had just enough time to feel a burst of hateful satisfaction before wondering what would happen if the tear in space was perman-
And then it was over.
The sudden silence as the wind died down was deafening. The pinprick-sized dot that had been the dimensional rip he’d caused was gone. So was the creature. And a fair amount of the ground near where it had been, for that matter.
Lex wasted an entire two seconds hoping that the creature had been torn apart by the planar fissure he’d caught it in, before turning his attention to more important things. “Nosey,” he called, floating toward where she was sprawled out on the ground, unmoving. “Nosey, if you can hear me, respond.” But no response came, and he hurried to reach her.
Her eyes were closed, and for a moment Lex feared the worst, but then he saw her chest rising and falling, a surge of relief going through him. She’s just unconscious, he realized, quickly looking her over for wounds. Other than a large number of bruises around her neck where the thing had choked her, the only thing he could see was a bump on her head, probably sustained in the fall she’d taken when the astral construct had been dispelled. Overall, her injuries seemed comparatively light.
But that’s no reason not to get her medical attention, he knew, looking at the distant camp. Knowing that she was too heavy for him to carry with his telekinesis, he braced himself as he returned to corporeal form. He immediately staggered, lifting his broken foreleg off the ground even as he felt blood rain down from the injuries on his abdomen. He was hurt far worse than she was, he knew, but he’d just have to bear with it until they made it back. He could still walk, so if he draped her over his back he-
“Extremely futile,” came a chorus of voices from behind him.
Then a tongue as sharp as a spear pierced his chest.
Lex could only stare dumbly at the sight of the black, wriggling thing protruding from his chest.
Time seemed to come to a stop as he struggled to put a coherent thought together, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. This…couldn’t be right. He had banished that creature. He’d sent it screaming into a dimensional rift. It shouldn’t be back here. None of this was right. The wound didn’t even hurt. It had to be some sort of illusion, or maybe he was having another nightm-
The tongue suddenly retracted, and Lex immediately collapsed to the ground. All of a sudden he was aware of a terrible pressure in his chest, like when he’d held his breath for too long. He tried to exhale, only to start coughing as something that tasted like blood began filling his mouth. Worse, no matter how much he coughed he couldn’t seem to get his lungs clear, only barely managing to take gasping breaths of air between bouts of choking. The sensation was unpleasant enough that it forced his thoughts back into focus, a sense of alarm filling him as he realized just how badly he’d been injured.
“Pathetic!” laughed the chorus of voices from behind him. “Was that really your big plan, Lex Legis? To throw me through a rift to the Astral Plane?” Another bout of mocking laughter resounded then, and the monster slid around so it was in front of him. Although its skull-like faces didn’t have enough flesh to form recognizable expressions, he could hear the smiles in its voices. “I’m from the Outer Planes! I can cross dimensional boundaries as easily as you’d cross a street! How do you think I came to this world in the first place?!” It paused then, as though waiting for an answer, and when none came it shifted its bulk, curling its trio of heads further over its fanged maw and bringing them closer to Lex’s prone form. “You disappoint me, Lex Legis. I’ve refrained from killing you immediately, giving you a golden opportunity to cast another one of your feeble spells on me, and you can’t even be bothered?” Its middle head opened, slowly extending its tongue down toward where a large pool of blood was collecting under him. “What’s wrong? Cat got your lung?”
Lex couldn’t respond, not when it was a struggle just to breathe. Instead, he did the only thing he could. An aura sprung into being around Lex’s horn as his eyes turned green-and-purple, calling on his dark magic. If he could just change into a shadow…!
The thing’s dispelling magic crashed over him, scattering his dark magic like leaves in a hurricane. A chorus of laughter immediately followed it. “That’s the spirit!” cooed the female-voiced head.
“Keep struggling!” snickered its male counterpart.
“Let me see that dauntless spirit that Nosey admired so much!” sneered the central head, its androgynous voice filled with malicious glee. “Show me another part of you that I can break!”
“yOUr DesPAiR wIlL Be YOuR pENanCe tO Me fOr ThE InDIgnItIEs yOu’VE mAdE mE sUfFeR!” screeched the fanged maw that was the creature’s other end. “oNLy AfTeR yOU’vE GivEN uP CoMPleTeLy WiLl i SEnD yOu tO YoUr GoD!”
Lex grit his teeth, glaring defiantly up at the thing. “Sh-shut…up…!” he somehow managed to rasp, his voice little more than a hoarse croak. “I…will…kill…you…!” The words were torture to utter, each syllable being accompanied by another blood-spattered cough, but he forced them out anyway. Although his reserve of dark magi was running low, he called on it again. I can withstand its dispelling magic! he screamed at himself silently. I know I can! After all, he had overcome the thing before, when he had forced it out of Nosey. Its magic might be stronger than his own, but not so strong that it couldn’t be overcome! If he could just change back into a shadow, back into a form that wasn’t crippled by his injuries, then he could keep fighting!
But the instant his dark magic manifested, the creature dispelled it.
The same thing happened the next time he tried it.
And the next.
And the next.
“How much longer can you keep struggling?” mused the left head.
“I know you can’t use that magic indefinitely.” The middle head’s voice was one of complete confidence. “Nosey told me that you’d expended it all before you faced that imbecilic kraken. That’s why you stayed corporeal during that encounter.”
Unsurprisingly, the right head continued the one-sided conversation. “I, however, can negate your magic endlessly. That’s how I was able to shut down that little trinket of yours back at the train station, you know.” The tip of a tongue darted out to flick the circlet half-hidden under his mane, though Lex refused to flinch at the contact. “It was pathetically obvious that you’d use it as soon as you saw Nosey, so I made sure to dispel its functionality right before I revealed myself. You thought it was showing you that Nosey was clear, but really it wasn’t functioning at all, and you never realized it.”
Although he knew that the thing had tricked him, hearing how it had done it made Lex grit his teeth. No wonder he hadn’t realized what had happened! Unlike freestanding spells, magic items that were affected by dispelling magic weren’t completely unraveled. Rather, they were simply knocked out of commission for a few seconds before their design – being a self-sustaining quantity of magic that was permanently bound into a material form – kicked back in. So his circlet had been inoperative when he’d used it on Nosey back in the train station, only to reactivate itself a few moments later…all without him noticing. That last part gave Lex a microsecond’s pause. Even if he hadn’t realized that his circlet had been deactivated, he should still have sensed the thing using its dispelling magic in the first place. So how…?
As though reading his mind, the thing continued speaking. “a pItY yOU dIDn’T rEaLIzE wHAt i’D DOnE. bUt tHEn, HOw cOuLD yOU? i WaS wATcHiNg YoU fRoM tHE oTHeR sIDe oF aN iLLuSIoN i’D cONjuReD.”
Lex tried to curse at that, but all that came out was a choking sound. He hadn’t known that this thing could create illusions too, but now that he did it all made sense.
Although he needed his circlet to be able to see into the magical spectrum – allowing him to see the approximate power and general nature of extant spells, as well as those that had recently expired – Lex had a limited ability to intuit, without external assistance, when someone in the immediate vicinity was casting a spell. But that sense was just that: a sense, and a dull one at that. The same way he couldn’t see something behind an intervening object, or hear something that was muffled, he couldn’t sense someone’s manipulating ambient energy in the local environment if he couldn’t detect the individual in question.
When he’d entered the train station with Sonata and Scrubby to examine the scene of Block Party’s death, Nosey had been out of sight, holed up in the restroom. Her emergence had caught them all by surprise, as she’d just appeared without any sound of the door opening or closing. That was it, he realized. The door itself was the illusion.
It was the only possible explanation. The real door had been propped open, and this thing, already possessing Nosey’s body, had created the illusion of a closed door in its place. Since an illusion’s caster could see through it without issue – hence why that aboleth had been able to attack them so precisely through the illusory wall it had created – she had been able to watch them all without them seeing her in return. In that position, where she had line of sight to him but he had none to her, it would have been easy for her to wait for a moment when his back was turned, dispel his circlet’s functionality, and then slip through the illusory door with none of them being the wiser for it. Then he’d tried to detect magic around her, just like she’d suspected, and found nothing, not knowing the real cause.
The thing’s strategy had been absolutely perfect.
Snarling at the knowledge of how completely he’d been outsmarted, Lex tried to turn into shadow again, heedless of how little dark magic he had left…and again, the creature tore the dark magic apart effortlessly. “You had no idea at all, did you?” The smirk in the creature’s voices, once again speaking in chorus, was audible. “For all your vaunted intellect, you’re just another minor mortal with delusions of grandeur.” Lex’s only response was a hate-filled glare, causing the thing to laugh again. “Don’t feel too upset,” it taunted, “at least you were slightly more difficult to manipulate than those other ponies back at the camp. Even I was surprised at how easily those rumors I started about you took hold. No matter how many wounds your doctors treated, or how much food you gave them, all I had to do was whisper a few words about how unsociable your demeanor was or how intimidating your magic looked, and the majority of them were ready to believe the worst about you.” One of the thing’s tongues darted out to lap at the blood pooling under Lex, licking it up before retracting back into the thing’s mouth. “It’s a shame I won’t get to see them start to riot when you can’t keep feeding them. I’d have loved to watch them turn on their would-be savior.”
Incensed, Lex was about to try and use what little dark magic he still had – just barely enough to change into shadow one more time – when the sight of something behind the monster caught his eye. It was Nosey! Even as he watched, she lifted her head slowly, eyes fluttering open before they widened in alarm as she saw what was happening. Get out of here! Lex urged her silently. He knew it was pointless, knew that even if she could hear him she had no hope of escaping on her own, but they flitted across his mind anyway. Leave while it’s focused on me!
“That’s why I let you live, you know. It would have been easy to simply kill you in your sleep, but you were much more useful to me this way. You gave those pathetic little ponies just enough reassurances that they actually started to hope again. And when you’re dead, and I tell them that you abandoned them, they’ll believe me thanks to all of the lies I fed them about you. Their hope will plummet, and they’ll fall into depravity far faster than they would have if you’d just let me keep running the place as Block Party.”
The thing’s tongues reached out then, curling around Lex’s neck once again and lifting him into the air. “And since you aren’t trying to use that ‘dark magic’ of yours anymore, it seems that our time together is at an end. So before I rip you into pieces, allow me to say: thank you, Lex Legis. Thank you for helping me achieve my goal. And now, you di-”
“NO!”
Nosey screamed the word as she flung herself at the creature, lowering her head as though intent on goring it. “Let him go!” she roared as she charged. “Let him g-”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” sighed the creature’s rightmost head, unwinding its tongue from around Lex’s neck and almost casually sending it flying toward Nosey. The blow struck her across the face and sent her sprawling, rolling across the ground in a heap before coming to a halt and lying still.
The sight made Lex’s blood run cold, but as much as it pained him he knew what he had to do next. Calling on what little was left of his dark magic, he tried once again to change into his incorporeal form, hoping that Nosey had distracted the monster. It won’t kill her that easily, he tried to reassure himself. It still wants to use her as a disguise, and so far it’s only used living ponies for that. He just hoped he was right; although there was nothing else he could do now, it still felt like he was abandoning Nosey to this thing…if this even worked.
But a second later he felt the monster gather magical energy for its dispelling spell.
“I expected this!” it shouted, its voices triumphant as the spell hit Lex’s dark magic again, and Lex felt his heart sink at the exclamation. But this time, the thing’s magic didn’t scatter his own. For an instant there was an overwhelming sensation, but it felt just a little lighter than usual, as though the thing hadn’t been able to put all of its concentration behind it. Nosey! Lex knew it was her, that although she had only distracted it a little, that small amount had been just enough to keep the thing from focusing the whole of its might on him. It was just enough to encourage him to push back against it with everything he had...
An instant later, Lex turned into shadow and dropped into the ground. The pain and fatigue fell away instantly as he did, leaving him clear-headed and able to concentrate once again. More than that, he could speak again, which meant using his remaining spells…and he had every intention of using them.
Nosey had bought him a chance to keep fighting; it would not go to waste.
It was the most that she was able to move, her attempt to make the world stop spinning failing miserably. If anything, the effort made things worse. Although she knew she was laying still, vertigo overwhelmed her as the world continued to lurch in a nauseating cycle, the sensation powerful enough that she felt herself convulsing as her stomach clenched. She tried to look at something, tried to focus on the distant mountains to regain her sense of equilibrium, but they wouldn’t focus correctly, and she dimly realized that her glasses were gone. For some reason that made her sad…she’d looked all over for them after the battle at the docks…
“Are you running away again, Lex Legis?!” screamed a chorus of voices from behind her. Just hearing them made Nosey whimper, knowing that they belonged to the monster that had used her like a puppet for almost two days now. “Are you planning on saving yourself and leaving this mare to me?!”
No! Just hearing that was enough to bring a sob of terror to Nosey’s lips, and she tried again to climb to her hooves, wanting-, no, needing to get away from that monster before it violated her again. She knew that she couldn’t get away; that even if she could move, it would catch her before she could get anywhere, but maybe if she got to the river she could throw herself in and sink to the bottom. Death was better than going through that again!
Before it had possessed her, when the monster had still been wearing Block Party’s skin, it had used some sort of magic on her to make her tell it whatever it wanted to know. She hadn’t realized it at the time, knowing only that she’d felt exceptionally talkative, and before she’d known it she’d told it not only everything she knew about Lex, Sonata, and everypony with them, but all about herself as well. Her job at the Canterlot Chronicle. Her relationship with her parents. Her dream of becoming the best reporter in all of Equestria. Her fear that her job would always get in the way of making any real friends. Her secret fantasies… The creature had wrung them all out of her, leaving her exposed and vulnerable in a way she’d never felt before. And then it had used her body like a cheap suit.
The sensation of being possessed had been horrible beyond words. It had been like wearing soiled clothes, except the feelings of filth and grime and the utter revulsion they had brought had all been inside her, rather than something she could take off. But that someone else – an intelligent being, capable of speech and reasoning – was doing that to her on purpose had made it infinitely worse. The creature had mocked her the entire time it had commandeered her body, somehow able to speak directly into her mind as it rubbed her nose in her forced submission. The humiliation had been worse than she’d known could be felt.
Nor had the creature’s torments stopped there.
Nosey had always been a pony that loved to watch everyone around her. It had been like a game; figuring out what was newsworthy and what wasn’t, talking to people to find out what they knew and how much they were willing to say, making notes about things to go over later. Not to mention the persistent, low-grade hope that maybe, just maybe, something big would happen while she was right there, giving her a front-row seat to the next major headline. But that was ruined for her now; the monster hadn’t missed the irony between her favorite activity and how it was forcing her to watch and listen as it used her for its purposes, and had made sure to raise the point at every opportunity. “You must be so happy!” it had gushed sarcastically at her on one occasion. “You get to be the only one who knows what’s really going on, and get to see every new development with your own two eyes, just like you always wanted.”
Her one hope had been that Lex would notice what had happened and rescue her, and inside her mind she’d screamed incessantly at him when he’d encountered her at the train station. The terror and despair she’d felt when he hadn’t noticed had been absolute, certain that she was going to be the creature’s slave until it got tired of her and disposed of her like it had Block Party. That thought had almost broken her, and she’d very nearly lost all hope…until a few minutes ago. Her heart had soared when Lex had confronted the monster, and then he’d done what she’d been hoping for ever since it had possessed her: he’d set her free.
At that point, she’d been sure that everything was going to be okay, that Lex would slaughter that monster just like he had the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale, and it would all just be a bad memory. She’d run toward him, knowing that he’d protect her, but then the creature had grabbed her, and she’d been choking, and she’d felt herself passing out, and when she’d woken up…
When she’d woken up, Lex had been defeated.
That had been the only way to describe it. He was lying in a pool of blood in front of the monster, his stomach covered with bite marks, his chest punctured, and one hoof twisted in a direction it shouldn’t have been able to go. The creature, in contrast, had been standing over him with no visible wounds whatsoever. The sight had made Nosey’s blood run cold, and when she’d realized that Lex was still alive, and that the thing was about to deliver the killing blow, she’d acted before she’d been able to remember how scared she was. And it worked, she knew. Lex got away. That’s why it’s yelling. That meant that it knew Lex was going to try something else. He’d come back and keep fighting until he won. He wouldn’t abandon her. He wouldn’t. He’d counterattack and find some way to save her, and he’d kill this monster before it could hurt her agai-
“Fine then.” The creature’s voice had stopped shouting now, and the amused tone made her shudder weakly. “If the easy way won’t work, then we’ll just have to try the very easy way.” There was silence then, and Nosey squeezed her eyes shut, wishing with all of her heart that it would just go away, that it wouldn’t remember she was there, that it would all just be a bad dream. But a moment later she felt something curl around her neck – keeping its grip just barely loose enough that it didn’t choke her – and lift her into the air, drawing an anguished cry from her. A second later she was staring into the hideous faces of the thing, the middle head’s tongue holding her aloft. “Luckily, my Nosey-suit is none the worse for wear.”
“No,” she moaned, kicking her back legs weakly. “No no no…”
“Now now,” jeered the thing’s left head, its tongue extending outward to caress her cheek. “Is that any way for my favorite set of clothes to act?”
“You don’t have to be afraid,” assured the right head, its voice almost sounding sincere. But Nosey could hear the cruel undertone. “I don’t plan on killing you. I need to put you back on when this is all over, after all.”
“I’d do it right now,” spoke the middle head, “but I can’t take the chance that Lex might pull off another fluke and yank me out of you again. Not when I can only put you on once a day.”
“bUt hAVe nO FeAR. wE WiLl bE tOgETheR aGAiN vErY sOoN,” screeched the fang-lined mouth on its other end. “i JuSt NeEd yOU tO dO mE OnE LIttLe fAvOR fIrST.”
Nosey squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as best she was able, both to deny what it was saying and what was happening. In that moment she would have given anything, anything to be somewhere else! But despite her fervent wishing, the sensation of the dry, leathery tongue around her neck remained, and a moment later the voices spoke in chorus. “Call to him. Call out for Lex Legis to come and save you.”
“No…” It should have been an easy thing to do. She was already wishing and hoping for exactly that. But despite that, or maybe because of it, she couldn’t bring herself to do what the thing was telling her to do. Instead, she bit her lip, her eyes remaining closed as she repeated herself. “No…”
“I thought you might say that,” replied the voices, and this time there was no mistaking the malicious glee in them. A second later, Nosey felt the thing moving, carrying her along with it, and she cracked open her eyes, unable to stop herself from trying to find out what new torment the thing was planning for her. A moment later she had her answer.
The creature had slithered over to the churning mass of greenish mist that it had conjured around Lex before he had managed to force it out of her body. The fog cloud had remained where it had been created, the vapors lazily swirling despite the lack of wind. As the monster moved alongside the mist, Nosey could practically taste the acrid gas, remembering what the monster had said about the fog being like the acidic breath weapon of the green dragon Lex had killed. Without hesitation, the monster extended the tongue that was wrapped around her neck, and in an instant Nosey found herself hanging directly in front of the caustic vapors, only a few inches separating her from the deadly fumes. The threat was obvious, but the creature spoke anyway. “Now, call to Lex.”
Terror gave Nosey new strength, and she struggled against the creature’s grip, trying to pull herself from its grasp, but it was futile. “N-no!”
“A pity,” mused the voiced from behind her, though they sounded anything but displeased. “But as much as it pains me to ruin my good clothes, you can still walk with three hooves.” And then another tongue darted out, wrapping just behind the knee of her left foreleg as it lifted it, making her stretch her leg forward.
“S-stop!” The words tumbled out of Nosey’s mouth of their own accord as she renewed her struggles. “Stop it!”
“You should understand by now,” murmured the monster, its voices almost purring in delight. “I am the one who decides what happens to you, regardless of how you feel about it. If I want you to give me information, then you will. If I want you to be my host body, then you will. And if I want you to scream for help, then you will.” With that, the thing plunged her leg into the acid cloud.
Pain immediately exploded through her, and an anguished scream tore itself from Nosey’s throat a moment later. She thrashed again, agony giving her new strength, but with no better results than her previous attempts. The pain grew worse a moment later, and her wail increased in pitch to match, shaking her head as tears rolled down her cheeks, her cries coming as fast as she could draw breath. “Call to Lex!” snapped the monster again, and this time Nosey didn’t even think of disobeying.
“L-Lex!” she wept. “Help me!”
“Louder!” The command was emphasized by shoving her leg an inch deeper into the cloud, burning more of her.
“LEX!” screamed Nosey at the top of her lungs. “HELP ME!” Her words were almost slurred with pain and sobbing. “PLEASE HELP ME!”
“Much better!” snickered the monster. But Nosey barely heard it over the sound of her own screaming. But as bad as the pain was, she could feel everything starting to slip away, her head wobbling as her consciousness began to fade out for the second time since the fight had begun. Dimly, she glanced to the side, noticing out of her peripheral vision that the monster’s heads were twisting every which way, trying to anticipate where Lex was going to reappear.
But it quite clearly didn’t expect what happened next.
For the first time since he’d returned to Equestria, Lex found himself completely without a plan.
In the few seconds that had passed since he’d dropped into the ground, he’d tried to come up with a course of action, but no matter how fiercely he’d concentrated, no effective strategies had come to mind. All of his methods of attack relied on spellcasting, and that monster’s spell resistance was virtually impossible to break through. Nor could he simply cause crystals to grow from the ground to try and impale it again; even if he hadn’t expended the last of his dark magic changing into shadow, the creature’s speed and ability to fly would have made that an iffy proposition at best. Worse, it was smart enough that it would certainly have moved so as to keep him from easily targeting its location.
For the barest fraction of a second, thoughts of retreat flitted across his mind, but Lex knew that was no plan at all. Even if he could have countenanced letting that abomination live, falling back now would have been worse than useless. The entire point of a retreat was to withdraw and regroup, but with Severance gone there was no way for him to easily regain the thaumaturgical spells he’d already expended. Besides, there was nowhere that he could retreat to that this thing, in all likelihood, wouldn’t be able to follow. If it could move so easily between dimensions, then mere physical space would almost certainly be nothing to it.
The only option was to go on the offensive, but doing so offered little hope of victory. He still had several attack spells left, but knew he was only going to get a chance to cast one of them, since he’d have to rise above the ground in order to target the monster. Since it doesn’t know exactly when or where I’ll emerge, I’ll likely be able to finish casting before it can react, he felt certain. But once it does, it will attempt to dispel my shadow-form again. That attempt, he knew, would almost certainly succeed. And once it does, I won’t be able to cast another spell. Not when I can barely breathe with the wounds I’ve taken. Which meant that his next spell would have to either kill or incapacitate the creature. Anything else would be insufficient to stop it from tearing him apart.
He was going to have to bet everything on a single spell which likely would never reach the creature.
The thing’s spell resistance wasn’t an absolute barrier; of that he felt reasonably confident. While he wasn’t completely certain, it was reasonable to presume that if he could dispel the magic it was using to possess Nosey, he could force his way past its spell resistance as well. But even if he was right the odds were decidedly against him, given how he’d failed to affect the monster since then. Worse, although he had more than a few attack spells remaining, almost none of them were powerful enough to have any hope of stopping the creature in its tracks even if they got through. Only three of them had any viability in that regard: a spell to seal the target in a cocoon of ice, an asphyxiation spell, and his remaining disintegration spell. The others might wound the creature if they reached it, but had no hope of incapacitating or slaying it outright.
It took only a moment for Lex to decide on trying to disintegrate the creature again. He had no idea if this thing needed to breathe at all, and sealing it in ice wouldn’t be of much use if the monster could shift through dimensions. I’ll channel as much additional magic as I can through this, he decided silently. If it gets through, it might be enough to reduce that thing to dust, and if that doesn’t work… He tried to push that thought away, but for once he couldn’t do so, not when he knew that the results wouldn’t stop with his own death. That thing would possess Nosey again, then resume whatever machinations it had been pursuing back at the camp, and everypony there would be none the wiser for it. Sonata would have no idea what had happened…
Despite his bodiless state, a cold shudder ran through him then, and Lex found himself casting another spell. It wasn’t a defensive enchantment; given how the thing’s dispelling magic had punched through multiple spells at once, that wouldn’t survive his being turned corporeal again. Instead it was a tactical spell, one that he’d almost certainly not be able to use, but he wanted as many options available as possible, no matter how minor they w-
Then Nosey started screaming.
The sound was audible even through the ground, and it made Lex’s immaterial blood run cold. Instantly, he realized that he’d stayed underground too long, that the thing had turned its attention to Nosey in an effort to cajole him into emerging. The thought was more than he could bear, and it didn’t occur to him to wonder why all he felt at that moment was guilt and fear rather than the righteous rage he would have expected. NOSEY! Surging upward, Lex didn’t have to think to focus on the source of the screams, comparing it to his mental map of the battlefield and realizing that she was right next to the acid cloud, calculating the most likely position for the creature to be in. Chanting and gesturing before he cleared the ground, Lex forced as much extra magic into the spell as he could, maximizing its destructive potential as he emerged…
Right through the middle of the monster’s body.
Lex heard its voices chorus in a shriek of surprise, the sound almost drowned out by Nosey’s screaming behind him. Its body immediately shifted, trying to exit the space he was occupying so that it could target him easier, and even as it moved Lex’s magical sense felt it gather and release its dispelling magic at him. It took barely an instant for the creature to accomplish both of those goals, wriggling to the side with incredible speed, its heads turning to look at him as its magical attack tore his dark magic apart. But even as the shadows that made up his body changed back into flesh and blood and he collapsed to the ground, Lex finished the last syllable of his chant, stretching his one good foreleg out towards the monster as he unleashed the thin green beam of his disintegration spell, the super-charged ray sparkling with a dazzling radiance.
But Lex didn’t watch the beam cross the few inches separating his hoof from the monster. His eyes were already turning toward the mare wailing in agony a few feet away from him, the sound of her screams more painful than any of the wounds he’d taken so far. In that moment, Lex fully appreciated that this wasn’t some random pony whose name he barely knew; that seeing her being tortured like that was more than some abstract violation of his principles.
“Oh come on, he and I go way back! I’m practically family!”
This was somepony he knew personally. Who had been there alongside him almost since he’d come back to Equestria. Who had decided, unlike so many other people, that she wanted to be around him.
“Stop pushing yourself so hard all the time,” agreed Nosey. “Blowing off some steam and resting for a few hours won’t change the city, and it’ll do you a lot of good!”
More than that, she had supported him. She had been the one to convince him to rest and replenish himself before exploring Vanhoover, ensuring that he’d been at his best before he’d faced Lirtkra. She had been the first one to call for doctors when he and Sonata had staggered back in from that fight. He had met her when she’d found him collapsed on the street and taken it upon herself to shelter and feed him.
“I really felt like we’d become a group, instead of just a bunch of ponies who happened to be traveling together. And that was because of you, since you made me participate.”
When he’d first met her, Nosey had been nothing but an annoyance, a self-serving reporter who wouldn’t leave him alone. But somewhere along the line, that had changed. Without his realizing it, she had become important to him, not because of what she could do or what she knew, but simply because of who she was.
Nosey Newsy was his friend.
The realization was enough to completely break Lex’s heart. Nosey was his friend…and he had failed her utterly. Not only had he not realized that she had been possessed before now, but he hadn’t been able to protect her from that monster. No matter the circumstances, no matter the reasons, he had let one of the few ponies who actually meant something to him be injured so terribly…and now, if this didn’t work, she’d have to suffer even more.
Nosey…I’m sorry…
The voiceless words slid through his mind again, and this time he registered them, recognizing that they were from the same source that so often tormented his waking hours and turned his dreams into nightmares. But the maelstrom of emotions going through him didn’t give Lex any time to process that, instead trying to speak through bloodstained lips. “Nosey…I’m s-”
Then the green ray struck the creature…and it voices rose in a scream that drowned out Nosey’s completely.
The chorus of voices rose in a cacophonous wail that was hideous to hear. The thing’s body thrashed wildly as the green radiance of the beam spread to encompass its entire body. Its tongues whipped back and forth, spasming madly as its cries somehow managed to grow even worse, and the one holding Nosey began to uncoil from around her throat. For a brief instant Lex had a horrifying vision of her being flung bodily into the acid mist, but an instant later she went flying in the opposite direction, tossed over the creature’s heads and knocking several of its floating gemstones out of their orbit, scattering them across the ground.
The monster barely seemed to notice, still shaking as though it were trying to physically cast off the spell Lex had hit it with. But suddenly its shaking stopped, and an instant later its screaming did also. For a brief second, the creature held perfectly still…and then a foul black substance began to spray from its mouths. As Lex watched, the substance erupted from the creature’s heads and maw, gushing out with such intensity it was as though the thing had just been stomped on by a giant, invisible hoof. In fact, that seemed like an apt analogy, as the creature’s slug-like body was – for lack of a better word – deflating, its form flattening out as the ichor inside it continued to spew out.
I disintegrated its organs, Lex realized with a sense of grim satisfaction. Whatever guts that thing had, the spell destroyed them. The black substance, therefore, had to be a combination of blood and whatever was left of its innards. I hope it hurts, he thought with sudden viciousness. I hope it’s worse than anything you’ve ever done to anyone else!
After a few moments the discharge of black sludge began to ebb, and the monster collapsed. Its body shuddered as the flow slowed even further, becoming a trickle before finally stopping altogether. As it did, the creature gave one last convulsion and went still, staring upward silently.
For a long moment Lex just stared at it, still fighting to draw breath. It was only after several seconds that he turned and started to crawl away from the creature. “No…sey…” he wheezed, looking toward where the mare had fallen. It wasn’t very far, but he couldn’t seem to get his hooves under him, and dragging his injured chest and stomach across the ground was intensely painful…but he had to know she was alright, had t-
Lex could only stare in horror as the monster began to move.
“dID yOu…REalLy tHInK…yoU CoUlD…sLaY mE?” the thing’s maw croaked, its voice even more twisted than normal. More black sludge oozed from its fang-filled orifice as it spoke, slowly picking itself up. “Did you actually believe,” coughed the left head, its ability to speak apparently less impaired than its other end, “that you could take this opportunity away from me?”
Lex was barely listening, struggling to come up with some sort of plan of action. He tried to cast a spell, any spell, but his chest felt like it was in a vice, making every breath he drew into a painful struggle. In such a state, it was all he could do to gasp a word or two, making the complicated chanting that his spells required – with their exacting syntax and stringent intonation – completely impossible. His dark magic didn’t require verbal components to invoke, but he’d expended it all. He might have been able to gasp the few words necessary to unleash the spells he’d stored in gemstones, but even if the stored spells hadn’t been completely unsuitable for combat, they’d all been inside his haversack, and that was gone now.
As the creature lying mere feet from him picked itself off the ground, surviving what should have been a decisive blow for the second time since their fight had begun, Lex realized that he was completely helpless.
But the creature didn’t look to be in much better shape. Its slug-like body had become emaciated, its skin hanging loosely where it had once been stretched tight around the thing’s bloated form. Its breathing was now audible, with ragged panting coming from the mouths of its equine heads. Most notably, its movement was halting, as though it was struggling to keep moving after the damage it had taken. But for all the damage it had clearly taken, it was still managing to rise, and that was more than Lex was capable of at the moment.
The thing knew it too, and it didn’t rush as the left head extended its tongue – now slick with blood and liquefied organs – to grab him again, coiling around his neck and lifting him into the air. “I’ve waited millennia for a chance like this!” screeched the middle head, its androgynous voice clouded with anger. “To find a world that had completely slipped beneath everyone’s notice! Whose people were so backward, so ignorant of strife or sin, that they were practically crying out to be corrupted! And you think that you, one little mage-ling, have the power to deny me this?!” The creature's rage seemed to give it strength, its movements becoming more sure as it ranted.
The tongue wrapped around his neck whipped downward suddenly, slamming Lex into the ground, driving what little breath he had from his lungs. “I am Xiriel!” roared the creature’s right head angrily. “A belier devil of Stygia, the Fifth Hell! I have manipulated the wisest of mortal archmages and turned pious saints toward heresy, all with nothing more than words and misdirection! I have overthrown kingdoms and subverted nations far greater than anything this pathetic little world has ever known! And you, a nothing that calls itself Lex Legis, dare to injure me?! To wound me?!”
It lifted Lex into the air again, and this time the middle and right tongues snaked out, the two organs curling around his horn. In his current state, Lex could do nothing more than grimace and twitch as he felt one of them wrap around the base of it, preventing him from moving his head as the second tongue grabbed it just a bit higher and began to pull it to the side. “bUt THaT’s tHE bEsT yOu COulD dO, ANd i BaREly eVEn BrOuGHt aNY oF mY eQUiPmeNt wItH mE wHEn i cAMe hErE,” screeched Xiriel’s leech-like craw, apparently having gotten its breath back. “aFTeR aLl, THiS wAs OrIGiNalLY A nOThInG aSSiGnmEnT. fInDinG oNE mISsiNg eRinYEs DeVIl AnD hER EnTOuRaGe oN tHE pLAnE oF fIRe; wHaT A wAStE oF mY tImE!”
Lex felt the devil’s grip around his neck ease then, letting him manage to draw enough breath to remain conscious, even as it pulled harder on his horn. “Imagine my surprise when I found out that they’d been caught in a spontaneous planar rift,” mused the feminine voice of Xiriel’s left head. “Fortunately I had arrived early enough that I was able to follow the lingering traces of it to this world.”
The pain in his horn was getting worse, the thing slowly applying more and more pressure until Lex felt the underlying bone reach its limit. He couldn’t help but struggle then, reaching up with his one unbroken fore-hoof to bat at the tongues grabbing him, but the belier didn’t even seem to notice. “Of course, the other devils were all killed shortly thereafter,” sneered Xiriel, speaking through its middle head now. “I found out later that one of your princesses and her friends dispatched them…but it took everything they had to do it. That was when I knew that this world was ripe,” it suddenly twisted his horn harder, and Lex’s vision swam as agony exploded through him, only distantly hearing the snap of his horn breaking clean off, “for the plucking!”
Somehow, impossibly, he managed to stay conscious, but that was all he could do, hanging limply in the devil’s grasp. Seeing that, the belier brought him closer, until he was hanging right in front of its trio of equine heads. “Can you still hear me, Lex Legis?” taunted Xiriel’s right head. “I truly hope you haven’t lost consciousness yet. We haven’t even gotten to the best part.”
It was all Lex could do just to keep his eyes open, and although he tried to mouth a curse at the thing, even that much proved to be more than he could accomplish in his current state. That was enough to make Xiriel laugh, its four voices snickering in chorus. “You see, Vanhoover has just been a trial run. I wanted to see how your people would react to a crisis, how your leaders would respond to disaster and disinformation, and I must say I’ve never been so pleased. You ponies are weak and cowardly, your leaders foolish and complacent, and that means that your society is just waiting for me to tear it down and rebuild it however I want.”
The tongue holding him by the neck turned, rotating Lex until he was facing away from the creature, looking back toward the camp. “Very soon now, the ghouls are going to come and devour your precious little camp.” The voices were now dripping with equal parts viciousness and smugness. “After that, they’re going to scatter in every direction, spreading their plague to all of Equestria. And when they do, that’s when my job really begins. I’ll be there, wearing the bodies of different ponies, making sure that the people of this world turn on each other in response. Your princesses can offer all the friendship lessons they like; in the face of the dead rising up to devour the living they won’t matter in the slightest. Fear of disease, food shortages, and communication breakdowns will make every village, town, and city embrace self-imposed isolation. And once that happens, it’ll be easy to maneuver each fearful community into adopting a new order: one where the group functions at the expense of its individuals.”
Xiriel turned him back around then, Lex’s body swaying as the belier glanced at the barbed wire wrapped around his broken left forehoof. “You worship a deity, so perhaps you know that the faithful go to their god’s side when they die. But did you know that holds true for secular mortals as well?” When Lex gave no visible response, Xiriel reached out with its right tongue, grasping Lex’s broken leg and twisting it sharply, causing him to spasm. “Do try to keep up,” tsked the devil. “I’m going out of my way to enlighten you as to what’s going to happen to your world once I’m done with it. You see, the souls of dead mortals flow toward the Outer Planes, specifically whichever plane best matches the ethos they held at the time of their death. And when I make your simpering little ponies adopt structured, hierarchical depravity, their souls will all flow straight to Hell.”
The devil brought Lex closer again, this time until he was within inches of Xiriel’s central head, able to smell the creature’s fetid breath. “When that happens, when the souls from an entirely new world are added to Hell’s ranks, I’ll receive what I want most,” murmured the androgynous voice. “Not only will I be rewarded for what I’ve done, I’ll be promoted.”
Xiriel flung Lex downward again, but he only barely felt the impact, his entire body numb. Heedless, the devil continued to gloat. “When that happens, I won’t just be a belier anymore. I’ll ascend even further and become a deimavigga, or an advodaza. Maybe even a pit fiend!” The creature's unoccupied tongues spread widely, as though reaching out to encompass all of Equestria. “This world will take me to the very brink of the infernal nobility itself! And you actually thought that you could interfere with such a thing! You pathet-, hm? What’s this?”
Lex didn’t understand what had happened to cut the creature off, not able to so much as lift his head to look around, but a moment later he understood as he felt one of the belier’s tongues run along his now-restored horn. “Interesting,” murmured Xiriel, speaking through its left head again. “Your horn regenerated. But none of your other wounds have. I wonder why?” It seemed to consider the matter for a moment, before deciding it was of no consequence. “Ah well, it’s not like you have any power left anyway. I’d tear it off again, but in your current state any further trauma might kill you, and I can’t have that just yet. You need to suffer more for everything you’ve done to me.”
“Of course, death won’t release you from your torment,” noted the middle head idly. As it spoke, Xiriel’s right head withdrew its tongue back into its mouth, and then began to bob its head strangely, as though trying to dislodge something that was stuck in its throat. “I would have stopped there before,” continued the central head’s epicene voice, “but now you’ve earned a special level of anguish. Ah, there it is.” As it spoke, Xiriel’s right head stuck out its tongue again, but this time it was holding something.
Dimly, Lex recognized that it was a scroll case. He’d seen wizards on Everglow use them as protective cases for the pre-cast spells that they’d scribed. Apparently devils used them as well. “i oNLy HAvE oNe mORe uNdEAd-CReAtIOn sPeLl lEfT,” continued Xiriel, “bUt i’Ve DeCIdeD tHaT yOu’Ve EArnEd iT. yOu’Re GoINg tO bECoMe eQuEsTrIa’S nEWeSt gHoUL, tO pREy oN tHe pOnIEs yOu cHEriSh sO mUcH.” The belier’s faces were too gaunt to give them much in the way of facial expressions, and its other end had nothing like that at all, but Lex could still hear the smile even in the ear-splitting voice of its maw. “i tHiNK i’LL hAvE yOu dEVouR yOuR pREciOuS sOnATa fIRst.”
That got a reaction of out Lex, and he struggled weakly in the thing’s grasp, anger and fear sweeping over him. Black crystals began to sprout from the ground, and Xiriel’s heads swiveled as it surveyed what was happening. “Fascinating,” admitted the right head. “You’re completely out of power – you must be, or you would have tried something by now – and yet you’re still somehow radiating this ‘dark magic’ of yours. But where’s the energy coming from?” It seemed to ponder the question for a moment speaking again. “An academic question, I suppose. For now, we need to continue your punishment.”
The thing glanced pointedly in one direction, and after a long moment Lex managed to do the same…and his eyes widened as he saw Nosey lying a short distance away from them, eyes closed and breathing shallowly. “It’s a shame,” murmured Xiriel’s left head. “I was quite fond of my Nosey-suit. But I’ll just have to find another pony to wear.”
The devil look back at Lex, savoring the words it spoke next. “When I killed those other ponies of yours, I made sure there were no witnesses. This time, I’m going to do it right in front of you.”
“Would you like to say anything to Nosey before I kill her?”
Lex knew the question was insincere, knew that Xiriel was mocking his inability to do anything, but that knowledge brought him no comfort. Quite the contrary, he renewed his struggles, though it amounted to little more than shakily raising his unbroken foreleg to lightly tap against the tongue coiled loosely around his neck. The gesture was a futile one, he knew; even if the devil had released him, he wouldn’t have been able to cast a spell in his condition. The pain where his chest had been pierced was growing worse, and each breath was growing progressively harder to take. …have to do something, he thought dazedly, trying again to devise some plan or idea or anything that would let him keep fighting, or at least defend himself and Nosey, against the seemingly-unstoppable devil…only to come up, once again, with nothing.
Xiriel laughed, clearly enjoying the sight of Lex’s frustration and helplessness. “Aw, you won’t reassure her that it’s all going to be alright?” laughed the right head, its tone thick with cruel amusement. “Or perhaps make an impotent threat about what you’ll do to me if I don’t leave her alone? I thought you mortals loved doing that.”
The central head’s tongue reached out to flick one of the black crystals that had sprouted from the ground a moment ago. “Or maybe you’re preparing yet another last-ditch effort to win,” it mused.
“In that case,” murmured the left head, “I think I’ll get on with it. I’d hate to miss the opportunity to see the look on your face as you watch her die.”
Xiriel’s words weren’t idle. All three of its head were locked intently onto Lex, and even its leech-like maw was turned toward him. With Nosey directly behind it, the tongue around Lex’s neck lifted him higher into the air, letting him look over the belier at the blonde mare’s prone form. “dID i MEnTiON tHAt ThIs iS tHe sAmE sPElL i uSeD tO kIlL yOuR fRiEnDs yEStErDAy iN vAnHoOVeR?” screeched its fanged orifice. “iT rADiAtEs oUt iN EVerY dIReCtIOn, oVErWhELmiNg tHE sPiRIt rAThEr tHaN tHe bODy. yOuRS iS pRoBAbLy sTRonG ENoUgH tO sUrVivE tHiS, bUt pOoR nOSeY hAs nO sUcH hOpE.”
Lex heard the words, and part of his mind immediately started dissecting them for useful information, trying to figure out what “overwhelming the spirit” meant. But the bulk of his attention was focused directly behind Xiriel, where Nosey was lying on the ground. It was only because he was hurt so badly that he was able to keep the surprise off of his face.
Nosey’s eyes had just opened.
She didn’t groan or shake her head or move at all, simply making eye contact with him, and he belatedly realized that she’d been feigning unconsciousness, waiting for…what? He had his answer a moment later as her horn began to glow softly, a matching aura springing up around several rocks that were scattered nearby. Except they weren’t rocks, they were gemstones…the gemstones that had been orbiting Xiriel heads just a few moments ago, until it had inadvertently knocked them out of their flight paths when – thrashing in pain from Lex’s disintegration spell – it had flung Nosey over itself, scattering them. Now she was gathering them up, but wh-
Suddenly, he knew what she was going to do, and the realization made his heart lurch. No! he screamed silently. Don’t worry about me! Get out of here! The idea that she was going to use her last living act to try and help him, rather than save herself, was enough to renew his struggles, coughing up blood as he tried to yell at her to run. But it was useless, and an instant later Nosey brought the five gemstones together, pausing just long enough to give him a knowing smile…and flung them right at Lex.
Then everything happened all at once.
Lex’s magical sense screamed at him that the belier devil was about to release its magic, even as he heard the devil emit a wordless shout of surprise as the gems entered its field of vision. An instant later, the five of them settled around Lex’s head as Nosey’s aura sputtered out. Immediately, just as they had for Xiriel, the jewels began to orbit Lex’s cranium…and the pain in his chest disappeared, the burning sensation of not being able to breathe vanishing as though it had never existed, even though the wound remained. It was as though one of those gemstones had made it so that he didn’t need air to survive…or to speak.
Reacting before his conscious mind could fully process what had just happened, Lex raised his unbroken hoof and began to gesture as he started to chant, the words spilling past his lips even though no air accompanied them. But Xiriel was also speaking, its four voices rising as they shrieked a phrase in an unknown language in unison, and although the words were meaningless to him they were painful to hear. But Lex didn’t stop his own casting, uttering the syllables as fast as he possibly could, trying to finish before the monster in front of him.
He didn’t quite make it.
The belier devil’s spell went off a microsecond before Lex’s, unleashing an invisible wave of corruptive energy that radiated out from its body like a shockwave. Although he couldn’t see it, Lex felt it slam into him…even as he saw the force field that he’d cast spring into existence around Nosey, the transparent dome shimmering as Xiriel’s magic washed over it harmlessly, and he knew that he’d done it. He’d saved her.
It had been the wrong decision, of course. Strategically, taking the brunt of Xiriel’s spell in order to shield Nosey accomplished nothing. All that would happen was that the devil would simply incapacitate or kill him a moment later, and then dispel the force field around Nosey and do the same to her. As awful as it was, the sound decision was to accept that Nosey couldn’t be saved, and instead use the last chance she had given him to cast an attack spell at the creature and hope that it got through its spell resistance, finishing it off. That was the only logical course of action.
But that was utterly unacceptable. The thought of letting Nosey die when he had the opportunity to save her was one that Lex rejected down to the core of his being. It went deeper than his responsibility to save Equestria from this monster. Deeper than his hate and loathing for the creature that had hurt so many ponies. Deeper than his moral code. Rather, for someone who measured their life only in terms of what they’d lost, who for as long as he could remember had always been excluded, the question of what it would cost him to save her didn’t matter, even if that cost was death.
It was simply that the thought of losing one of his only friends was more than Lex could bear…so much so that it took him a moment to realize that he was completely unharmed.
“What…?” The word slipped from his lips unconsciously, unable to believe that he wasn’t suffering from any new pain or weakness or other debilitating condition in the wake of the devil’s spell. It hadn’t thought it would kill him, but for it to leave him completely uninjured? The gems, he thought to himself. They must have done it.
But Xiriel didn’t seem to share that opinion. “Unhurt?” The shock in its voices was unmistakable. “But that means you’re-”
Lex didn’t wait for it to finish, immediately rattling off another spell as he shook off his surprise. Silently hoping that one of the belier’s gems enhanced magical aptitude, he pointed his good fore-hoof at Xiriel’s left head. He received his answer a moment later as two bolts of darkness burst into existence, crossing the short distance between himself and the belier. The magically-shaped shadow-weapons burst through the devil’s spell resistance, and an instant later burst through the thing’s head, causing it to explode in a shower of gore. Immediately, Lex fell to the ground, the tongue that had been coiled around his neck falling slack now that the head it had been connected to was no more, Xiriel's screams of agony ringing out across the battlefield.
For a moment Lex dared to hope that the sound was the monster’s death cry…and then the thing’s two remaining tongues lashed out, curling around two of the gems orbiting Lex’s head – the iridescent spindle and the orange prism – and flinging them away. Instantly, the horrible pressure around Lex’s chest returned, and breathing was once again nigh-impossible, leaving him gasping and choking on his own blood. No! he wailed in his mind. How can it still be alive?! Across the battlefield, he could see Nosey – still encased within his force field – gaping in horror, her eyes wide at the sight of their enemy’s ungodly fortitude.
Then there was no more time to marvel at the belier’s resilience, as it darted toward Lex in fury. “HOW DARE YOU!” screamed Xiriel’s remaining voices. “HOW DARE YOU DO THAT TO ME!” This time it didn’t lash out with its tongues. Instead, it was the fanged maw that approached Lex, the gnashing teeth sinking into his left hindleg and beginning to draw it deeper, pulling him bodily into the creature’s toothed orifice. Xiriel wasn’t quiet as it began to devour him, continuing to roar. “I’LL KILL YOU!” it howled. “I’LL KILL NOSEY! I’LL KILL SONATA! I’LL KILL EVERY PONY IN THIS CAMP! IN THIS ENTIRE WORLD!”
…I won’t let you…
“I won’t…let you…” choked Lex, barely able to get the words out. He could feel the thing’s fangs sinking down to the bone on his leg, its gullet greedily gulping down his blood. A small part of him marveled at the fact that he could still register more pain after everything he’d already been through.
“YOU WON’T LET ME?!” shrieked Xiriel. “YOU CAN’T STOP ME! NO ONE CAN!”
…you’re wrong…
“You’re…wrong…” This time Lex was aware of it, aware of the words that the tulpa that lived in his shadow was feeding him. It had been doing that intermittently during the fight…and each time it had, it had preceded a sudden success in affecting Xiriel with his magic. First when he had been trying to force it out of Nosey, and then again when trying to disintegrate it. Other than when he’d appropriated the thing’s gemstones, those had been the only times he’d been able to affect it. But now…
“I’M GOING TO DRAG ALL OF EQUESTRIA DOWN TO HELL! THE ONLY FUTURE YOUR PEOPLE WILL HAVE WILL BE TERROR AND SUFFERING AND DEATH!” The belier’s voices were rising, its rage reaching its peak. “I WILL MAKE ALL OF YOUR KIND KNOW THE PAIN YOU’VE INFLICTED ON ME!”
…and you will know mine…
It was all Lex could do to speak. The thing’s maw had drawn him in up to his waist now, and as the fangs dug into his abdomen, he realized that he couldn’t feel them anymore. Distantly, it occurred to him that he was dying, but he had to keep going…had to…do what he could…to keep fighting… “And you…will…know mine…”
As the last words left his lips, Lex felt the familiar sensation of magic being activated. But that couldn’t be right…he hadn’t chanted, hadn’t gestured. But even so he felt a spell take shape…from himself…felt magic coalescing in his one good fore-hoof…and somehow he knew that he just had to reach out…just had to touch the thing… Inching his hoof toward where the Xiriel’s lower mouth was eating him, Lex reached out to touch it…and stopped, unable to keep going.
One of Xiriel’s tongues had grabbed his foreleg, curling just below the knee, preventing him from touching the thing and discharging whatever spell that was.
“DID YOU THINK I WOULDN’T NOTICE THAT?!” it roared. “DID YOU THINK I WOULDN’T BE READY FOR YOU TO TRY SOMETHING ELSE?!” Its tongue slammed his leg down, keeping it pinned uselessly as its teeth continued to eviscerate him. “THIS IS THE END, LEX LEGIS!”
His vision was dimming, and the creature’s shrieking sounded as though it were coming from incredibly far away. Nevertheless, the smile that crossed Lex’s face at that moment was one of triumph. “I…know…”
Lex knew that his remaining life could be measured in seconds.
His vision was already dimming, and everything had gone strangely silent. He could vaguely hear Xiriel’s chorus of voices – with one less vocalization than before – saying something, but the words were unintelligible. At the edge of his vision, he could see the ring of fangs that surrounded the monster’s lower maw tearing into his abdomen, but he couldn’t feel the punctures or scratches. His right foreleg remained pinned to the ground by the belier’s tongue, unable to touch the thing’s body and discharge the unknown spell gathered at his hoof. Despite the creature’s impressive spell resistance, it quite clearly had no intention of letting Lex even attempt to use another spell on it.
It was that determination on the devil’s part that brought a smile to Lex’s face, despite knowing that he was about to die. The thought that he’d be able to confound the thing’s efforts once again brought a spiteful satisfaction to his fading consciousness. He held onto that, pushing everything else out of his mind as he focused on his loathing for Xiriel, and utilized his last remaining tactic.
Although Lex had been unable to formulate an effective plan to combat the belier, he had put the brief lull that Nosey had bought him earlier to fullest effect. In the few moments between when she had managed to distract the thing – giving him just enough space to turn back into shadow-form and drop down into the ground – and when it had begun to torture her in response, he had managed to cast a single spell. It had been little more than an act of desperation on his part; an attempt to lay down groundwork for a tactic that he hadn’t fully formulated, let alone expected to create any worthwhile results at the time…but which was his only hope now.
The single spell that Lex had used had been to conjure a spectral hoof.
He’d used that spell before, during his fight with Lirtkra and his companions, to touch a wall on the other side of the building they’d been fighting in and unleash another spell that had opened up a large hole, allowing a horde of ghouls to come pouring in. That was the point of the spectral hoof spell: it temporarily shaved off a piece of his own life force and used it to create a ghostly, disembodied limb that could deliver touch-range spells at a distance, allowing for greater tactical maneuverability during a fight. Before, it had been instrumental in surprising his enemies, even if flooding them with ghouls hadn’t worked. In this case, he had cast it as little more than an attempt to expand his rapidly-dwindling array of strategic options…and now, it was the sole remaining action he could take.
…I got you…
“I…g-got…you…” Lex couldn’t tell whether the thought came from the tulpa or was his own, could barely remember what was happening, but he somehow managed to force the words out. As he did, he mentally commanded the spectral hoof to rise up from the ground. Normally, it would automatically return to his side if it ever left his sight, so Lex had been devoting a small part of his focus to keeping it under the ground, not wanting the devil to notice it. Now, he let it float into view, and felt the magic transfer from his fore-hoof to the spectral one as it rushed toward the belier…and pressed against it.
An instant later, the spell discharged successfully, punching through Xiriel’s spell resistance as though it wasn’t even there.
But Lex was no longer capable of comprehending what was going on, his head falling back as he let out one last wheezing breath, everything turning black as his awareness finally faded away…and then came rushing back. Shocked, he almost choked as a sudden rush of air filled his lungs, gasping as he was suddenly able to breathe clearly again. Confused, he looked down at his chest, trying to figure out what was happening, but the next moment his confusion turned into complete and total shock at what he saw.
His wounds were moving.
The sight in front of him made no sense whatsoever. The hole that had been punched through his chest was rippling and shimmering as though he were viewing it underwater. Around it, his body was completely solid, and he couldn’t feel any sort of sensation coming from the injury itself…in fact, he belatedly realized, he couldn’t feel the injury at all anymore, his breath continuing to come easily. It was like someone was pointing an image of that injury from a film projector onto his chest, rather than an actual wound he’d sustained. But as surprising as that was, it was nothing compared to what happened next, as the hole in his chest removed itself from his body entirely – leaving his upper chest completely unblemished – and flew across the few feet separating him from Xiriel, attaching itself to the belier devil’s emaciated body.
Instantly, Xiriel let out a cry of pain, and Lex saw black ichor spurting from the new hole on the creature’s body. The wound no longer shimmered, looking like an ordinary injury that the creature had sustained, and it took Lex a moment to realize what had happened: that spell had transferred the damage he’d taken to Xiriel!
Nor did it stop there. A moment later Lex felt the throbbing pain in his left foreleg vanish as the broken bone was suddenly whole again, a corresponding scream ringing out of the monster that was engulfing him. Then the puncture marks on his abdomen were gone, and Lex felt the devil’s throat spasm around him as it took the damage that it had dealt to him moments ago. Then the same thing happened with the deep gouges it had left on his legs. Even the residual soreness where it had squeezed him by the neck was gone. A second later Lex couldn’t feel any pain whatsoever, and he scrambled backwards, pulling himself out of the creature’s maw as the full scope of what had just happened settled over him.
He knew this spell. He’d learned it back on Everglow, as part of his attempts to learn how healing magic worked. It was designed to heal the caster by forcibly transferring the damage they’d taken to someone else…whether or not the recipient was willing. Despite the potential battle tactics that it offered, Lex had ultimately decided that the spell offended his sensibilities; the parasitic nature of making someone else bear his hurts in order to refresh himself ran directly counter to his desire to endure hardship for the sake of others. He had subsequently not bothered to prepare it, and hadn’t given it a thought since. So why had that it activated now, when-
…when he’d repeated the words from his shadow.
Suddenly, he knew what had happened, and the realization was enough to rock him back on his hooves. He hadn’t prepared that spell, but his tulpa – that rebellious fragment of his own mind that the Night Mare had stricken him with, and which materialized in his shadow – had! It all made sense. His thaumaturgical spellcasting was based around gathering and structuring energy within his thoughts, but not all of his thoughts were under his conscious control; the Night Mare’s curse had caused a portion of them to achieve limited independence. Although the resulting tulpa had never once indicated that it was concerned with anything but reflecting his own fears and doubts back at him, there was no reason that it couldn’t hold a small number of spells on its own, at least in theory. But with no independent body, his shadow wouldn’t be able to encode the requisite thought-matrices to require gestures, and even the verbal components would require him to be the one to speak them out loud, since the tulpa couldn’t truly speak on its own. It had effectively fed him that spell!
No, it did more than that, he realized. It increased the efficacy of the other spells I cast too. Forcing his magic past impeding energies, such as the belier’s spell resistance, was a matter of focusing his concentration so as to keep the spell’s structure firm enough to pierce the intervening barrier, rather than shattering against it. Most of his magic had failed against Xiriel’s overwhelming magical prowess, but – notwithstanding when Nosey had given him the creature’s own magical gemstones, at least one of which had doubtlessly been increasing his powers – the only spells that had affected it had been the ones he’d cast immediately after his shadow had spoken to him. It was aligning its thoughts with mine. He felt sure of it. His shadow had, for whatever reason, been working with him instead of against him, letting him bring the full might of his unfragmented mind to bear…and that had been enough to overcome Xiriel’s resistance!
All of those thoughts ran through Lex’s mind in seconds, filling his head even as he put more distance between himself and the thrashing devil. He knew that it was just a theory, that there were still unanswered questions – chief among which was why his tulpa had suddenly become so helpful – but one thing was exceedingly clear. The Night Mare’s curse had saved him.
“DAMN YOU!” screamed Xiriel, its voices filled with rage and pain. It thrashed violently under the transferred wounds, its body whipping back and forth so hard that its remaining heads slammed back into the ground. “DAMN YOU, LEX LEGIS! YOU WILL WATCH EVERyone you care about…suffer and die…” Its threat lost its intensity halfway through, and Xiriel’s thrashing suddenly slowed. It continued to wriggle, but couldn’t seem to lift its equine heads up and over its toothed maw, making its struggling look like that of a worm writhing in the dirt. The sight was enough to make Lex’s heart leap with hope. Had that finally been enough to kill the thing?
A shudder ran through the belier, its body undulating before going still. “yOu tHInK tHIs MEaNs yOU’vE wON?” screeched its lower end. “yOu’VE aCcoMPliShEd nOtHInG eXCePt eArNInG yOUrSelF A fRoNT-rOw sEaT tO wHaT’S aBoUt tO hApPEn.”
The right head turned to look at him. “The ghouls will soon come pouring out of Vanhoover. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They will swarm all over your pathetic little camp and devour everyone there.”
The central head spoke next. “There’s no defensible position. No place to run. Your little ponies will die screaming, torn apart by their former friends and neighbors. And you get to watch it all.”
Lex snarled wordlessly, having no intention of letting the creature continue speaking. Xiriel had proven itself to be incredibly deceptive and phenomenally dangerous; it needed to be exterminated with all possible haste. Lex raised a hoof sharply, intended to chant a spell that would pummel it with concussive force, but the motion made the world sway dangerously, and he had to take a moment to steady himself. Belatedly, he realized that the wound-transference spell hadn’t restored the blood that he’d lost, nor the fatigue that he’d accumulated during the course of the battle.
Heedless of Lex’s distress, Xiriel kept speaking, its voices emerging in unison again. “I know that you’ll stand in front of them, trying to save them. My only regret is that I won’t get to watch…you…fail…” The belier’s words suddenly faltered, and the last of its movements halted, going completely still.
“You’re wrong,” replied Lex coldly, still trying to center himself. “I’ll find a way to destroy the ghouls, just like I did the sahuagin, and the kraken,” his eyes narrowed then, more certain that Xiriel was finally dying, “and you.”
The belier’s voices rose in a shuddering laugh. “Such pride. One day…it will…surely…lead…you to…Hell…”
The last word was barely out of its mouths when the creature suddenly burst into flames. Lex fell back, startled as fire suddenly raged over Xiriel’s body, engulfing it completely. For a moment he worried that this was more of the creature’s magic, but as the seconds passed and nothing happened, he slowly felt his tension start to ebb. Nevertheless, he kept a spell on his lips as he watched the belier immolate.
It was almost a minute later when the flames died down, snuffing out as instantaneously as they’d begun. In their wake, there was nothing but a black scorch mark on the ground, its shape roughly analogous to Xiriel’s body. For a moment, Lex stared at the spot, then glanced around, using his circlet to check for more magical auras, making sure to confirm that it was active and functional before he swept the area. It was only when he found nothing, other than the creature's remaining magic items, in every direction that he let out a breath, almost collapsing with relief.
With his enemy finally slain, Lex turned his attention to the next most pressing matter: Nosey.
A glance to the side showed him that the blonde mare was still inside the force field he’d raised, cradling her mangled foreleg and looking at him with a worried expression. Turning his back on the scorch mark that was all that remained of Xiriel, Lex dismissed the force field with a word, making his way over to her. “Nosey, give m-”
“Is it dead?!” she snapped, looking around anxiously. “Did you kill it?!”
Taken aback by the abrupt question, Lex nodded. “It’s dead. I checked-”
“Are you sure?!” His reassurance hadn’t calmed her. If anything she looked more nervous, her breath quickening. “That monster can teleport! It might have gotten away! Or…or maybe used some sort of illusion! It can do that, you know!”
Lex shook his head. “I checked for magical auras-”
“You tried that before, back at the train station, and it fooled you then!” She half-shouted the words, a hysterical note entering her voice. “It might have done it again now!”
Wincing internally at the reminder of his having been deceived, Lex momentarily considered her words. Twice in the course of that fight he’d thought he’d defeated Xiriel, only for it to come back mere moments later and continue the battle. Could it happen a third time? But a moment later he shook his head, forcing confidence into his voice as he answered her. “Listen to me. That thing slipped past my notice because it shut down my circlet,” he pointed to the small ring of metal around his head, “without my notice, preventing me from seeing into the magical spectrum. This time I’ve confirmed that it’s operational, and the only auras in the area are from the magical items still here and the spells that were cast during the battle. There are none from when Xiriel-”
But hearing the creature’s name seemed to make Nosey’s condition worse, and she stepped away from him, shaking her head in denial. “You don’t know that thing!” she shrieked. “This is exactly the sort of game it’d play! Letting us think we’re safe now only to come back and get us later!” She was shaking as she looked around again, breathing heavier as she descended into a panic. “It’ll come back, and when it does it’ll kill you and take me again! It’ll slip ins-inside me and make me do things, horrible things while I can’t do anything but watch and there’ll be no one to save me and-”
“NOSEY!” bellowed Lex. That seemed to do the trick, making her whip her head back around to look at him. Rearing up onto his hind legs, he reached out to take her face in his hooves. “Listen to me very carefully,” he said slowly, keeping his eyes locked on hers. “I killed it, it’s dead, and it’s not coming back.”
“But-”
“I killed it, it’s dead, and it’s not coming back.”
It was obvious, even to him, that Nosey was experiencing some sort of traumatic breakdown over what had happened, and the sight of it tore at Lex. It was a vivid reminder of just how badly he’d failed her. She, like everypony here, was under his protection, and yet he’d not only let that monster possess her, but also fallen for its subterfuge when he’d checked on her, allowing it to maintain its hold on her. Worse, he hadn’t been able to remove her from the battlefield when he’d finally confronted it, letting Xiriel casually torture her in order to lure him out.
If anypony else (other than Sonata) had been victimized so badly, Lex’s only reaction would have been to castigate himself for allowing such a thing to happen on his watch. After all, with the pony in question having been rescued, his only remaining responsibility to them was to mend their wounds. Unless it drove them to cause some sort of public upset, any lingering stress they felt over what happened to them wasn’t something that concerned his administration.
But this wasn’t some random pony. This was Nosey, one of his only friends, and Lex couldn’t stand to see her like this. It wasn’t just revulsion at the prospect of having one’s spirit broken; the contrast with how vivacious and outgoing Nosey normally was with the terrified wreck of a pony in front of him was somehow painful for him to witness, driving him to try and restore her peace of mind. He had no idea what he was doing, of course, and had he not been physically and mentally exhausted from the fight he’d just had he probably would have thought to turn her over to Sonata – whose social acumen and mind-affecting magic would doubtlessly have be much more helpful in aiding the wounded unicorn’s troubled mind – but at the moment the only thing Lex could think of was to look Nosey in the eyes and try to make her understand that the danger had passed.
“I killed it, it’s dead, and it’s not coming back,” he repeated again. “Say it.”
“I…” She trailed off uncomfortably, dropping her gaze from his.
He felt her shift, trying to pull away from him, but he refused to release her, keeping his hooves on her face. “Look at me,” he ordered her. She reluctantly obeyed, and he didn’t blink as he repeated his earlier command. “Say it.”
“You…” She swallowed, but didn’t look away this time. “You k-killed it…” She paused then, and he nodded at her expectantly. “It's dead…” she continued, and he felt a shudder run through her as she spoke the last part. “And it’s not coming back…”
“Good,” replied Lex, not realizing that was the closest he’d ever come to paying her a compliment. “Now, again.”
For a moment, she looked like she was going to protest, biting her lip, but then her reluctance seemed to melt away. “You killed it…it’s dead, and it’s not coming back.”
“Again.”
Nosey began to cry then. She didn’t sob or sniffle; her eyes simply filled with tears, cascading down her cheeks as she looked at him, the words coming more steadily now. “You killed it. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back.”
For a moment, Lex considered her demeanor. Despite the tears she seemed calmer now, and he reluctantly released her face, lowering himself back down onto all fours. Nosey regarded him silently as he did, taking deep breaths but otherwise not moving, and Lex turned his attention to what he had originally tried to say to her before she’d descended into hysterics. “Now, give me your hoof.”
She cringed slightly, but held out her left foreleg, and it was all Lex could do not to wince at the sight. The acid cloud had damaged her leg severely, and everything below the knee was red and raw and dripping blood, the flesh having melted off in large patches. What looked like bone was visible in a few areas. She has to be in incredible pain, he knew. Fortunately, he still had the healing magic that the Night Mare had given him. Feeble and imperfect though it was, it would still be able to alleviate her wound; fortunately, he’d had the foresight to use the reservoir of magic in his circlet when he’d healed Aria earlier, so the spell was ready to be used agai-
Biting back a curse, Lex realized that he couldn’t use the spell again. Unlike most of the magic that he knew, that one required a material component to activate, specifically a small quantity of water that he’d imbued with the Night Mare’s power. He’d kept several vials of the stuff in his haversack…but that receptacle and all of its contents were gone now, sacrificed in a failed bid to defeat Xiriel. Glancing behind him, Lex regarded the river in the distance. It wasn’t prohibitively far away, but in his exhausted state getting there and back would take some time, and Nosey would have a hard time limping over there with him. The better alternative would have been to use a substitute component, but the only one Lex knew of was…
Devil’s blood.
Snorting at the coincidence, Lex used his telekinesis to gather a drop of the black ichor that Xiriel had spat up after its organs had been disintegrated. Bringing it over to Nosey, she shifted uneasily at the sight, but didn’t pull her hoof away. Letting the foul substance splatter against her side, Lex chanted the words to the spell, making the requisite gestures before touching his hoof to her chest. It was fortunate that the spell simply required him to touch the recipient, rather than their wound specifically. A moment later, she gasped as she felt the spell take effect, her leg starting to scab over. Slowly, over the next minute, the ugly tissue began to thicken and spread, until eventually her entire leg was covered with a single large scar. When the process finished, Lex nodded perfunctorily. “That should do until you can see Cozy.” Normally, referring to the Lashtadan priestess’s command of more efficacious healing magic would have irritated him, but Nosey’s well-being came first. “Are you able to walk on it until then?”
Gingerly, Nosey touched her hoof to the ground, and when that didn’t seem to produce any pain she put more of her weight on it. “I think so.” Her voice was subdued, speaking in a monotone that was quite unlike her usual self. “It feels a little numb, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Good.” Lex was already looking around the area, cognizant of the remaining thing that needed to be attended to before they left: Xiriel’s magic items. While three of its magical gemstones were still orbiting Lex’s head, courtesy of Nosey’s timely intervention – he glanced sidelong at her for a moment, wondering if he should say something about that before deciding that it could wait – the other two had been flung aside by the belier in a rage after Lex had destroyed one of its heads. Fortunately, their auras made them easy to spot with his circlet, and it took Lex only a few moments to telekinetically gather them up, along with the ones still in his possession, and put them in a saddlebag.
That left only the scroll case that it had extracted, lying near where the belier had died. Xiriel had said that it contained a spell to create undead, but looking at it with his circlet, there were multiple magic auras there, not just necromancy. That was enough to make Lex narrow his eyes in suspicion. Did the scroll inside the container have more than one spell on it? Or was the container itself trapped somehow? Examining it would take some time, and right now he needed to get Nosey back…but leaving it there was just asking for trouble. Reluctantly, Lex lifted the scroll tube in his telekinesis, placing it in a separate saddlebag.
“Can we go?” Nosey’s voice was still restrained, lacking any of her usual vitality as she ran her good hoof across her eyes. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Lex started to turn back to her when something caught his eye, and he paused to peer at the small object a few dozen feet away. It took him a moment to recognize the small, mangled piece of metal and shards of broken glass as being what was left of Nosey’s glasses, knocked from her face at some point during the fight. For some reason the sight bothered him, and he found himself telekinetically lifting them up, bringing them closer.
“Lex, c’mon. I wanna leave.” The sight of her broken glasses seemed to make Nosey uncomfortable, folding her ears back and looking away from them.
But Lex didn’t acknowledge her complaint. Instead, he started to cast another of the spells that the Night Mare had given him, calling on the remaining reservoir of magic in his circlet so that the spell wouldn’t be expended. It took a long time to cast, with minutes ticking by as he gestured and chanted, but as he finished the shards of glass came together to form intact lenses, setting themselves into a frame that was no longer mangled and ruined. With the repair spell finished, Lex turned and placed the glasses on Nosey’s face, giving a satisfied nod.
Nosey, however, had a very different reaction. A shocked look crossed her face, her mouth opening and then closing soundlessly. Slowly, she reached up and pushed her glasses further up her muzzle, and the action seemed to trigger something in her, because she began to tear up again, shaking as her expression started to crumple.
Confused at how her composure was breaking down, Lex silently cursed himself. Once again he’d done the wrong thing! He was about to snatch the glasses from her and toss them away, when Nosey let out a wordless cry and flung herself at him, crossing the few feet between them in an instant. Her undamaged foreleg wrapped around him as she buried her face in his chest, holding him close as she started to cry. This time her tears were accompanied by sobs, heavy ones that wracked her body as she wailed.
Her complete breakdown was enough to stun Lex, and he reflexively tried to pull away, but Nosey refused to relinquish her grip on him. With no other choice, Lex stood there awkwardly, letting Nosey cry her eyes out, not sure what to do. This situation was too far outside of his range of experience for him to have any parameters regarding what response to formulate. Frowning in uncertainty, he went with the next-best line of inquiry that he could come up with: What would Sonata do if she were here?
Slowly, tentatively, Lex wrapped his foreleg around Nosey and hugged her back.
It was several minutes before Nosey was able to calm down.
Lex couldn’t suppress a feeling of relief as her sobbing ceased and her shuddering breaths became slower and steadier. He had spent the last few minutes silently trying to figure out what words or actions would best alleviate her suffering, to no avail. Embracing her certainly hadn’t seemed to help, given how heavily she’d been weeping, but he hadn’t dared try anything else; making her condition worse was something to be avoided at all costs. So he’d stayed silent, holding Nosey close as she’d broken down, hoping that she’d recover from whatever she was going through even as he grew more concerned with every minute that went by. But the worst of it seems to be over now, he hoped. If not, he had no idea what to do...
Nosey took several slow breaths then, and Lex felt her grip on him loosen, releasing his own in turn. She didn’t make eye contact with him as she backed up a few steps, turning around and telekinetically lifting her glasses so she could wipe her eyes again. It was only then, having cobbled together the barest facsimile of composure, that she turned back around and offered him a shaky smile. “Thanks.”
Lex opened his mouth to inquire as to what precisely she was thanking him for – repairing her glasses, in all likelihood – but what came out was, “Are you still experiencing any pain or discomfort?”
She shook her head lightly, eyes closing as though the gesture was tiring. “No, I’m…I’m okay…” She trailed off as her eyes opened, and Lex saw them focus past him, to where he knew Xiriel’s shape was still burned into the ground. The fragile smile fell away from her face then. “Listen…we can go back now, right?” There was a pleading note in her voice, as though desperate for him to say yes.
The question struck Lex as rather odd. Nosey had never, in all the time he’d known her, asked him for permission to go anywhere. Whether it was inviting herself into his and Sonata’s hotel room back at Tall Tale, his office in city hall there, or even onto their ship when they’d left for Vanhoover, she had simply presumed that she could go wherever he wanted, becoming almost indignant when he’d objected. That she was seeking his authorization to return to the camp now, and was apparently waiting to receive it, wasn’t like her. Of course, neither was her bursting into tears the way that she had. But that was at least a contextually-appropriate response to what had happened to her. This deferential attitude couldn’t be attributed to the same cause…but what other cause was there?
“…Lex?”
“Hm? Ah, yes.” Drawn from his musings by Nosey’s inquiry, Lex brushed those thoughts away, irritated at himself. This was no time to get drawn into a thought-experiment regarding social dynamics; Nosey was still injured, and needed treatment as soon as possible. “We’re leaving,” he declared, moving before the last syllable had passed his lips. Nosey immediately fell in beside him, not even trying to hide her relief as they started back toward the camp.
It had taken several minutes for them to make their way out here, but it took Lex only a few steps to know that it would take them longer to go back. Just the effort of walking at anything that remotely resembled a brisk pace was enough to make his muscles ache, and he was keenly aware of the fact that he hadn’t finished recuperating before he’d fought Xiriel. Despite the totality of his wounds having been transferred to the belier, Lex knew that making a full recovery would take some time now, particularly with the amount of blood he’d lost. But that was no excuse not to accomplish what he could in the meantime…and right now, there was information that he needed…
“Nosey, what happened to Cloudbank and the others?”
Out of his peripheral vision, he saw her stop in mid-stride, going rigid at the question, and he halted as well. For a moment he worried that it would push her into another breakdown, but that was a risk that he had to take. Although Xiriel had been consistent in saying that it had killed the ponies Lex had sent into Vanhoover – a claim that was upsettingly congruous with what the ghouls had said – that didn’t mean anything definitive. The belier had been cruel and deceptive in the extreme, and so couldn’t be taken at its word. But Nosey could be, so maybe…just maybe…
But whatever hope he had was dashed a moment later as Nosey bit her lip, looking down. “I’m sorry, Lex. Xi-…” A shudder went through her as she tried to say the belier’s name, and she gave a sudden start, one hoof flying up to her mouth as though she were about to throw up. It took her a few seconds to slowly lower her hoof to the ground, taking slow breaths. “It killed them.”
Lex didn’t answer, trying to swallow the sudden wave of bitterness that broke over him then. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t already accepted the likelihood of what he’d just been told, so he knew there was no reason for Nosey’s confirming it to make him feel worse. But somehow it did anyway, and Lex spoke his next question through gritted teeth. “How?”
Nosey needed a few seconds to steady herself before she answered. “Just like it said.” Her voice had returned to the emotionless murmur she’d had just before he’d fixed her glasses and made her cry, looking at the ground. “It used that spell, or whatever it was. The one that it said ‘overwhelms the spirit.’ It was just like that…it said something in some language I didn’t know, and I felt it use its magic…” she shuddered before continuing, “and then they all just…they fell over and didn’t move. They weren’t breathing…” Her voice broke then, and she suddenly lifted her head. “Lex, I’m so sorry! This is all my fault! I-”
“No!” snapped Lex angrily, whipping his head around to look at her. “Do not apologize!” All of a sudden, her misplaced guilt infuriated him. “I do not want to hear any assumption of culpability on your part!”
“But if I hadn’t tried to interview Block Party…” she moaned miserably.
“I said NO!” roared Lex, his anger flaring even higher. Just putting that much force into his words sent a wave of dizziness through him, but at the moment he didn’t care. “What kind of crippling stupidity are you afflicted with that you think your actions had any tangible impact on everything that’s happened?!” He stalked toward Nosey then, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “That thing had powers that surpassed my own! It could possess living ponies and move between dimensions at will! You yourself said that it could teleport and create illusions! And you think that it needed you, Nosey Newsy, in order to accomplish its goals?!” She was wide-eyed and gaping as Lex got right in her face, completely taken aback by his ranting. For his part, Lex’s eyes were blazing green and purple, small black crystals sprouting up around him even though his dark magic was expended. “It’s a failure of logic of obscene proportions to suggest that creature’s plans would have been curtailed if you hadn’t gone there! It’s insanity to suggest that there’s any transference of accountability between it and you! How could you possibly fail so completely at basic reasoning that you think any of this is your fault?! Xiriel is to blame for what happened! Not you! WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!”
His last shout hung in the air, leaving his throat raw and aching. Nosey was staring at him with a look of complete shock, and Lex back glared at her as he watched her slowly recover her wits, daring her to say a word in disagreement. No matter that she’d been traumatized, no matter that he’d doubtlessly violated some inane social decorums, what she’d been saying had been fallacious to the point of being offensive, and couldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged.
“…okay.”
Lex blinked, hackles still raised as he tried to figure out what sort of counterargument she was making, prepared to tear it to shreds. “‘Okay’?” he echoed.
She nodded, the corners of her lips turning up in a small smile. It was different from the shaky one she’d given him a few minutes ago, and it took him a moment to understand why: it was more like how she usually smiled. The intensity was far less than her typical grin, but it was recognizably the same expression. “Okay.”
She walked right by him then, heading back toward the camp, and the lack of any other reaction left Lex so nonplussed that he needed a moment to catch up. Fortunately, she wasn’t moving so fast that he wasn’t able to close the distance between them, moving alongside her with a frown. This also wasn’t like Nosey; while he’d never lost his temper with her quite that badly, they’d had plenty of arguments, and she never backed down so easily as she just had, let alone with a smile. This…passivity was very unlike her, to the point where it was starting to unnerve him.
That feeling skyrocketed a moment later when he felt her press her side against his.
“Nosey?” He couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice as he looked at her, by now having no idea what was going on.
“My hoof is numb,” she murmured in explanation, not facing him. He caught sight of her glancing at him out of her periphery, but as soon as they made eye contact she looked away.
“Ah…” That made sense. She’d mentioned that before, after all, and if it was affecting her ability to walk, then it was logical for her to lean against him for support. I should have realized that, he castigated himself, rather than being concerned with that nonsense she was spouting. But the thought lacked conviction. The very idea that she could blame herself for what had happened to the others…
That reminded him of something else, and, mentally preparing himself for more odd behavior from her, Lex gave voice to the question. “What about Severance?”
Nosey gave a sigh, shaking her head. “I don’t know. It just…got rid of it, somehow.”
Lex frowned, not sure what to make of that. “Explain.”
Again, her eyes flickered over to him before looking straight ahead once more. “After it…dealt with everypony else, Severance attacked it.” She shook her head then. “It made me teleport away, a few blocks down the street, and Severance came after us. Then I felt that monster use some kind of magic, and the next time Severance got close I reached out and touched it…and then it was just gone. Vanished completely.”
Lex was silent as he considered that. From what Nosey had described, Xiriel had either destroyed Severance, or transported it somewhere else. But while the former possibility was unlikely – it seemed implausible that an artifact-weapon forged by the Night Mare could be so easily destroyed, and Xiriel hadn’t used any sort of one-touch destruction power during their fight – the latter possibility wasn’t much better. With no way of knowing where Severance had been sent to, and with no easy way to replenish his strongest magic in the meantime, locating and retrieving the scythe would prove to be a difficult task indeed. Moreover, it was a task that would have to wait; his people’s welfare came first. I’ll just have to deal with it in the meantime, he knew, forcing himself to embrace the thought stoically despite knowing that losing Severance was a major blow to his magical strength.
Nosey seemed to sense his thoughts, nudging him slightly. “C’mon…we’re almost there.”
Lex nodded wordlessly, and together the two of them made their way back toward the camp.
Sonata sat bolt upright as someone pounded on the door.
For a moment, she didn’t know where she was or what was going on, staring ahead blankly as the knocking continued. For a brief moment she wondered if it was Aria or Adagio telling her that she’d overslept again, but the thought didn’t seem right somehow, as though she was forgetting something important. Like, really important. Yawning, she got to her feet…only to go tumbling forward with a yelp, landing awkwardly on all fours. Oh yeah. I don’t have feet anymore, she realized with an embarrassed giggle, glancing down at her hooves. Whoopsie.
The sudden tumble was enough to jog her memory. She’d gone to the train station so that she could work on a song about everything Lex had done up until now. That way, all the camp ponies would know what a great guy he was, and she’d have done her job as a spokespony! Just the thought of it – of all those eyes watching her sing, of Lex’s surprise when he got back and everyone cheered for him, and of how proud he’d be of her for doing such a great job – had been enough to make her prance in excitement before she’d gotten down to work.
Of course, actually coming up with lyrics and a tune had been kinda tough. The melody was easy enough – all she had to do was think of how she wanted her audience to feel, and imagine something that felt right – but the words had to actually tell a story, rather than saying whatever seemed appropriate, and it turned out that was harder to do. There weren’t a lot of things that rhymed with “gigantic astral pony” or “huge squid monster.” Plus, they’d had a whole bunch of adventures! Like, forget one song; there was an entire album’s worth of stuff that they’d done!
It hadn’t helped that she’d started to get super tired partway through. Staying up all night to make sure Aria didn’t try anything sneaky with Lex had totes tuckered her out, and after a little while she’d been yawning more than humming. She’d finally decided to lay down on one of the interior benches and take a quick nap, telling herself that she’d just rest for a little bit and then get right back to it. And now…
Now someone was knocking on the door again.
“Gimme a sec!” she called as she climbed down from the bench, groaning as she stretched her sore muscles. Maybe Lex can invent a spell that summons a hotel or something. A nice one, with a big fluffy bed and wall-to-wall carpeting. Maybe a bubble bath. If it was a really big one, he could even have everyone in camp check in until help arrived! The thought made her grin as she trotted to the door and fumbled with the keys, pleased with herself. She’d totes have to remember to tell him about her idea later. She was still smiling as she unlocked the door and opened it. “What’s u-”
“Finally!” Cozy’s voice was somewhere between frantic and outraged, and she didn’t wait for an answer as she pushed past Sonata, taking a half-dozen steps into the train station before whirling and glaring at the other mare. “Do you know what happened?!
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, her smile falling away in favor of a confused look.
“Cloudbank and Drafty,” answered Aisle, still standing outside the door. Unlike Cozy, his face was unreadable. “And the three other ponies that left with them.”
“Huh?” answered Sonata blankly, not sure what they were talking about. “You mean C. Shells and Sandbar and whatshisname, Turnip?”
“Turbo,” corrected Aisle.
“Right, that’s what I said.”
“Stop with the fooling around!” Cozy stomped a hoof, agitated. “Did Lex tell you what happened?!”
Sonata’s brow furrowed. “Lex went into Vanhoover to go get them a little while ago. He took Aria with him.” She rolled her eyes at that last part, unable to resist signaling what she thought of that particular decision on his part.
But the only reaction that Aisle and Cozy had was to glance at each other, a look of mutual comprehension passing between them. For some reason, the sight made Sonata nervous. Her feeling was validated a moment later as Aisle spoke up. “Sonata…Lex and Aria came back a little while ago. Alone.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “For realsies? Why didn’t he come get me? I did a totes awesome job keeping this place running, and I wanted to…wait…” She put a hoof to her mouth, the gears in her head slowly turning. “What do you mean ‘alone’?” That didn’t sound right.
Cozy stomped her hoof again, but this time her posture was clearly more distressed than angry. “Cloudbank and the others didn’t come back with him. They haven’t come back at all.” She looked like she was going to say more, but suddenly stopped, shaking her head and looking away.
Aisle, still wearing a blank expression, spoke up. “There’s a rumor going around…”
A terrible feeling crept over Sonata then. She wanted to wave a hoof and say that this place had been crawling with rumors, mostly about Lex, ever since they’d gotten there. But the way these two were acting now was enough to stop her from dismissing whatever it was they’d heard. Instead, she asked the obvious question. “What rumor?”
Neither pony answered for a moment, and she canted her head back and forth as she looked between them, her bad feeling blossoming into full-blown worry. “You guys, seriously, what rumor?”
“That they’re dead,” answered Aisle woodenly. “Cloudbank and Drafty, and the other three. They’re all dead.”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up to her hairline, and for a moment she just looked at him in shock. When Aisle’s only response was to look back at her helplessly, Sonata turned her head to look at Cozy, silently asking if that was the case. But the crystal mare’s eyes were glued to the floor, refusing to look up as she bit her lip. It was only after several long seconds went by that Sonata managed to react, giving a snort as she went with her earlier instinct and waved a hoof as though to bat Aisle’s words away. “No way. Nuh-uh. I was totes there when they left, and there’s, like, no way a bunch of ghouls could have punched their tickets.”
“Then why aren’t they here?” Cozy’s voice was heated, but there was too much pain in it for it to sound hostile. “Why did Lex come back, and they didn’t?”
“I don’t-, look, let’s just go ask him!” There was a sinking feeling in Sonata’s stomach, not liking where this was going. Those five ponies hadn’t been bad people; quite the opposite. Sure, she hadn’t liked the way that Drafty had been so obviously crushing on Lex, and Turbo had been part of Garden Gate’s gang, but they were all ponies that she’d gotten to know since she’d arrived here. The idea that they had left and that was it, that they were gone and never coming back was, like, totes ridiculous. Important people don’t just wander off and die like that. They get a bunch of flashbacks first, and then a big dramatic death scene complete with a teary, heartfelt goodbye. That’s how it’s supposed to work. “If Lex is back, then we can just go and talk to him right now.” A lightbulb went off over her head, then. “Come to think of it, how come you guys didn’t just go talk to Lex about this already?”
“He left.” Aisle rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. As much as he wanted to know what had happened to his friends, he wasn’t exactly eager to confront Lex again. Not after how unpleasant their last meeting had been. He suspected that a lot of the camp ponies felt similarly, since news about what Lex had done to Spit Polish, and Garden Gate, had by now thoroughly made the rounds.
“You, like, just said he was back!”
“He was, for a little while.” Cozy’s voice had lost its edge, and all of a sudden she sagged in place, as though all of her energy had fled her. “The ponies here saw him wandering around, like he was looking for someone, and then he and somepony else left the camp together.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean, if he went back to Vanhoover, then-”
“They weren’t going back to Vanhoover.” Aisle nudged past Sonata as he spoke, going over to Cozy and turning to stand alongside her, letting her lean against him. Closing her eyes, she nuzzled him gently, and Sonata blinked at the gesture, knowing what it meant. Heedless, Aisle kept speaking. “The two of them were seen heading east, toward the mountains.”
Sonata gave him an uncomprehending look, closing the door automatically. “Why would Lex go away from Vanhoover, and with some-, no, you know what?” She shook her head then. Normally some gossip was a bit of harmless fun, but this had now gotten officially out of hand. Hoof. Whatever. “This is just another crazy rumor. If Cloudbank and the others had been killed, Lex would have been heartbroken, and as soon as he got back he’d have found me and-”
“He doesn’t love you, Sonata.”
The air seemed to freeze at Cozy’s words, and Sonata turned to stare at the crystal mare, stunned. “Excuse me?!”
Cozy let out a sigh, still leaning against Aisle as she looked Sonata right in the eye. “I know that you’re in love with him, but I haven’t seen anything, not once, that says that he feels the same way about you. Whenever he talks to you he’s always cold and awful, and there’s no indication that seeing you or hearing you or being around you makes him happy.”
Sonata snorted, feeling her hackles rise. “Look, I get that you’re worried about your friends, but-”
“Please, just listen to me. I’m a priestess of Lashtada, the goddess of love, and I’m telling you, Lex is just using you. I don’t know if it’s for your magic or your body or what, but he’s not somepony who deserves your affection.”
Sonata just stared at Cozy, her features tightening as a sudden surge of anger went through her. This was just like what had happened with Fireflower! Except, like, a million times more mean! Who did this meddling little mare think she was?! “I, like, totes don’t know where you get off lecturing me about love, since you went and found a new snuggle-daddy after your husband bought the farm.” Both of them went rigid at that, and Sonata knew she’d hit a nerve. But that was fine; years of being teased by her sisters had taught her that you won these kinds of fights by going after those. Giving her mane a flippant toss, Sonata gave Cozy a condescending smirk. “Are you gonna trade up again now that Lex cursed him? Or are you hoping that Lashtada will help you out this time, since she didn’t when Pillow died?”
Cozy’s eyes widened, recoiling in shock, but she didn’t have a chance to reply as Aisle suddenly stepped in front of her, glaring at the other mare in anger. “You’re way out of line, Sonata!” he snapped. “Cozy is only trying to help! You don’t need to-”
“Oh put a sock in it, Mr. Flopsy,” snorted Sonata. “People who throw glass stones shouldn’t live in houses.”
She was going to add another biting remark, but didn’t have a chance before the train station door suddenly opened. Glancing over, Sonata almost did a double-take as she saw who was there. Lex! Smirking, she started to say something…but the words died between her brain and her lips as she saw who was next to him: Nosey.
By itself, that wasn’t a big deal. If anything, seeing them together should have been a good sign, after how insensitive Lex had been yesterday morning. It would mean that they’d patched things up somehow, which to Sonata would have been a dream come true. The last thing she wanted was for there to be bad feelings between her boyfriend and her bestie. But looking at them now, Sonata realized that there was one thing she wanted even less between them, and that was for them to be getting along too well.
But with their sides pressed against each other now, that was exactly how they looked.
For a moment nopony spoke, each group clearly surprised by the other’s appearance.
It was Lex who broke the silence, his eyes flicking over Aisle and lingering on Sonata for a moment before settling on Cozy. “Do you still have healing magic?” he asked, his tone making it clear that he expected an answer immediately.
The words snapped Cozy out of her surprise, and her features immediately darkened. “Is it true?” she demanded, stepping forward. “Are Cloudy and Drafty d-, ah!” Her accusation was cut off as she suddenly lifted her left foreleg with a hiss, as though in pain.
Aisle was at her side in an instant, a worried expression on his face. “Are you alright?!” But even as the words came out of his mouth he realized what had happened, since he’d seen it repeatedly over the last day or so: Lex’s curse had activated, causing Nosey to feel sympathy pain for somepony that was injured. But it only worked on ponies that were in close proximity to her, and Lex didn’t look like he was hurt. Which meant-
“Lex, what’s going on?” Confusion was written all over Sonata’s face as she stepped in front of Aisle and Cozy, interposing herself in Lex’s line of sight so that he was looking at her rather than them. “These two,” she canted her head behind her, “are saying that Cloudbank and Drafty and those other ponies died! Is that true?! And you got back a while ago but went somewhere else instead of telling me? And how come-, ohmygosh!” Her voice rose in alarm as she finally took a good look at her best friend, seeing that her left foreleg was covered in a mass of angry-looking scars. She rushed forward at that, stopping right in front of Nosey to peer at her wound with wide eyes. “What happened to your leg?!”
Nosey bit her lip, shifting her stance so she wasn’t pressing against Lex anymore. “Lex saved me,” she murmured. “I was…there was a monster, and…” The words caught in her throat, and she closed her eyes as she suddenly felt overwhelmed. Without thinking, she reversed her previous motion, letting her side rest against Lex’s again. Relief coursed through her instantly, and she took a slow breath as she opened her eyes again…only to see Sonata giving her a look of shocked comprehension, apparently having understood what had just happened. The sight made Nosey wince internally.
“Sonata, move aside!” snapped Lex. She did so, giving both him and Nosey worried looks, but Lex had his eyes firmly trained on the crystal mare in front of him. “Cozy, if you have healing magic left, use it on Nosey immediately.” This time his words were unmistakably an order.
But Cozy didn’t comply, instead fixing him with a look that was as harsh as it was desperate. “Where are my friends?!” She screamed the last word. “You tell me what happened to them right now or so help me I will-”
“YOU WILL DO NOTHING EXCEPT WHAT I TELL YOU!” roared Lex, his eyes flaring green and purple as his features contorted in rage, stepping forward in an aggressive motion. It was only because he was completely out of dark magic that he didn’t curse her right then. As it was, just yelling made him feel lightheaded, but that softened his next words only a little. “You will heal Nosey’s injury this instant, or I promise you the next curse I place on you will make your life one of such profound misery that Lashtada herself will recoil in horror!”
That got through to her, with Cozy’s look of anger immediately being replaced with fear, the blood draining from her face. Aisle moved to step in front of her again, but Lex’s eyes locked onto his in silent threat, and the other stallion froze, too intimidated to move. Satisfied that her feeble protector wouldn’t try to interfere, Lex returned his attention to Cozy, who had started to shake in fear. “Do it,” he said, his voice now dangerously soft. “Now.”
For just a moment Cozy didn’t move, trying to fight off the urge to turn and run away from the King Sombra-lookalike in front of her as fast as she could. But a second later she scurried forward, her ears folded back and eyes cast meekly downward as the fear of what Lex would do to her if she kept defying him compelled her to obey. Passing by him in silence and going to Nosey, she gingerly took her injured leg in one hoof and began to gesture and chant, murmuring the words to a healing spell.
Sonata moved at the same time, leaving Nosey’s side as Cozy used her magic, going over to Lex. He hadn’t moved since he’d yelled at the crystal mare, and was still facing forward, taking deep breaths in an obvious effort to regain his composure. “Hey,” called Sonata softly as she tentatively brushed herself against him. “You okay?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Aisle circling around them, the stallion giving Lex a wide berth as he made his way over to Cozy.
He glanced at her sharply, his features still drawn tight as though expecting to be rebuked. But Sonata didn’t say anything, simply giving him a worried look, and a moment later his eyes changed back to normal as he regained control of himself. “I’m fine,” he responded gruffly. “I just need everypony to do what I tell them, and I can…I can manage this.”
The answer didn’t seem to reassure Sonata very much, her worried expression not changing. “Lex…what happened?”
“…they’re all dead.” He couldn’t look at her as he said it, staring forward at a blank spot on the wall as he spoke. “Cloudbank. Thermal Draft. C. Shells. Sandbar. Turbo.” It suddenly seemed very important to say their names out loud. “They all lost their lives.”
He delivered the news in his usual voice, devoid of any emotion, but Sonata knew better. She had been sure, ever since Cozy had told her about the rumor that the others hadn’t made it back, that Lex would be absolutely crushed if the ponies he’d sent into Vanhoover had died there. As much as it hurt to hear him confirm that they were gone, she was absolutely sure that he was beating himself up over it, and that made the news even more heartbreaking. “Listen to me, it-”
“It’s not your fault,” came Nosey’s voice. Approaching them from behind, her foreleg now completely unmarred, the blonde mare moved to Lex’s other side, opposite Sonata. Giving her friend a brief, hesitant look, Nosey gently pressed herself against Lex again. “You told me not to blame myself, so that goes for you too. You’re not responsible for what happened.”
“Yes he is.”
Cozy’s voice was thick with grief and exhaustion, the soft words spoken with all the conviction of someone who no longer cared what happened to them. Beside her, Aisle winced, giving Lex and the mares beside him a worried look. “Cozy, we shouldn’t-”
But she wasn’t listening, continuing to speak in that same toneless voice. “Of course he is. They went back in there because he sent them back in there. We had finally made it out of Vanhoover, away from all of that horror and fear and death, and he told them to go back there, and they died because of it. It’s his fault they died.”
Lex didn’t react to the words, staring at the interior of the train station with his back to Cozy. Nosey looked back over her shoulder, giving the crystal mare a horrified look. But Sonata whirled in place, snarling in anger. “Okay, I’ve had just about enough of you! Lex is the only reason that you all got out of there in the first place! After everything he’s done for you-”
“Like what?” scoffed Cozy. “What has he done for me?” Tears were running down her cheeks slowly, her face a picture of despair. “Rescuing us and getting us out of the city? He sent my friends back inside just so they could die there anyway. Finding my husband? He brought him back just so he could die right in front of me. Running this place? He might have filled everypony’s belly, but when I found somepony else to love all Lex did was humiliate him right in front of me, making it harder for us to console each other.” She shook her head, giving Sonata a tired look. “Don’t tell me I should be grateful to him for what he’s done.”
Sonata sputtered, so completely beside herself that she couldn’t form coherent words, and Nosey took that chance to step in, frowning at Cozy. “You’re not being fair. Lex has fought harder than anyone to help everypony here. You’ve seen him do it.” Inwardly, Nosey knew she should be getting more upset than this, but after everything that had happened she felt utterly wrung out, unable to summon up any further indignation.
“There’s more to helping ponies than just fighting,” sighed Cozy. “I know that making food and giving out medicine are important, but there’s more to it than that.” She shifted her gaze to look at the back of Lex’s head then, addressing him directly. “In the entire time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you do anything nice for anyone. Not one kind word. Not one gentle touch. Not one smile. Do you even care that Cloudy and Drafty and those other ponies are dead?”
“Listen,” interjected Aisle nervously. “Everypony’s clearly on edge because of what happened. Why don’t Cozy and I head out, and you-”
“I regret the loss of life very deeply,” replied Lex, ignoring Aisle as he turned around to face Cozy. His face was the same scowl he usually wore, and his voice was steady and even, giving away no hint that he felt anything at all. That was, of course, by design. A childhood of being taunted and made fun of had taught him that you never let someone else see when their words hurt you if you could at all help it, otherwise they’d only intensify their cruelty. “I consider their deaths to be a tragedy of unmitigated proportions.”
Cozy’s lip curled. “Of course you do,” she snorted sarcastically.
That was all Sonata could take. “You NAG!” She was pretty sure that was a swear word here. She’d heard Lex use it more than a few times when referring to the princesses. “I can’t even-, you horrible, miserable, awful nag! I may not have any curses, but you can bet I’m gonna make you regret saying that! Like, liternally! Litterably! Lit-, for REALSIES!”
She started to sing the words of a spell that would forcibly alter Cozy’s thoughts, intent on filling the crystal mare with the urge to beg Lex for forgiveness, but before she could finish chanting Lex thrust a hoof in front of her face. “Stop, Sonata.”
Sonata almost ignored him, wanting to make Cozy pay for what she’d said, but knew from experience that Lex wouldn’t forgive her if she did, cutting off her chant. “But she deserves it!” she growled.
“No,” he replied flatly.
“But-”
“No. However odious her opinion is, it’s not a crime and so she cannot be punished for voicing it.”
Sonata gnashed her teeth in frustration. “Are you kidding me?! So she just gets to say all that stuff and then just walk away?!”
Lex gave a short, crisp nod. “Yes. That’s her right.”
“NO!” Sonata stamped her hoof, glaring at him. “I totes refuse to accept that she gets to just stay here and, like, have you keep killing yourself to protect her when she’s not even grateful!”
“Then I won’t stay here.” Cozy turned away as she said that, heading for the entrance to the train station, Aisle following behind her worriedly. “I was waiting for the trains to start running again, but I can’t wait anymore.” Pausing as she reached the door, she looked back at Lex then. “You’re a powerful wizard, and I know you’re doing your best to keep everypony here alive, but you don’t know anything about what makes life worth living…and I can’t bear to be around you anymore.”
She pushed the door open then, walking out of the building. “I’m taking Pillow, and going back to the Crystal Empire on hoof, right now.”
Aisle broke into a run as Cozy refused to slow down, and he quickly circled around in front of her, planting himself directly in her path. “Just hold on a second! Leaving like this-”
“Move, Aisle.”
“-is a terrible idea! The distance from here to the Crystal Empire would take, I don’t know, weeks to cross on hoof! You’d have to go around the mountains and then cross the plains to-”
“I don’t care,” she answered wearily. “I can’t stay here anymore.”
Noticing that they were attracting stares, Aisle lowered his voice, stepping closer to her. “Listen, I know you’re upset about what happened to Cloudbank and Drafty. I am too. But you’re not thinking clearly right now.”
She shook her head, still wearing that haunted expression. “My thoughts are completely clear. I need to go home. I need to be someplace where there’s laughter and singing and hope, rather than here. Here the only things to look forward to are hunger and disasters and bad news, and I can’t take it anymore.” She gave him a pleading look then, silently begging him to understand. “I can’t take it anymore. I was happy before I came here. Now, I feel the same way I did when King Sombra was in power, and it’s horrible!” Her lower lip quivered then, and she rubbed a foreleg across her eyes. “I have to leave, before things get even worse.”
“Cozy…” Seeing her like this was enough to break Aisle’s heart, but that didn’t change the fact that what she was proposing simply wasn’t feasible. “I know how you feel, but you can’t just walk all the way back to the Crystal Empire.” He flailed for a moment, trying to come up with something that would stop her from embarking on such a foolish course of action, and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “What about Sonata?”
“What about her?” shrugged Cozy tiredly.
“You said that Lex doesn’t really love her, remember?” Personally, Aisle wasn’t entirely sure about that, but then again he thought it was a bad idea to stick his nose into other ponies’ love-lives to begin with. But that didn’t matter right now. “Would Lashtada want you to walk away before you’ve convinced her?” Silently, he hoped that would never come to pass; he was certain that if Cozy ever managed to talk Sonata into breaking things off with Lex, none of them would escape the ensuing storm unscathed. Keep Cozy from marching off into the wilderness was the more pressing concern, however, and hopefully this would do it.
But it wasn’t to be, as Cozy shook her head again, sagging in place. “I can’t convince her,” she sighed, her eyes vacant. “Maybe I could have before, but now all I’ve done is make her hate me.” Her ears folded back and she seemed to crumple in on herself. “I didn’t want to admit it before, but I’m in over my head. I thought maybe that this was a test from Lashtada, but it’s not…or maybe it is and I’m just not up to the task. I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t do it. The only thing I can do now is go back home and warn Princess Cadance about what’s happening here. Maybe she’ll succeed where I failed.”
“Cozy, you’re not a fail-” But he wasn’t able to finish speaking as she lifted a hoof and gently placed it against his lips, silencing him.
“Will you come back with me?” she asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper, as though it was taking everything she had to continue speaking. “I know we didn’t finish speaking about it before, but…Aisle, I can’t do this without you.” She lowered her hoof from his mouth, looking at him with eyes that were shimmering with another round of tears. “You’re probably right about this being a bad idea. I don’t even…” She trailed off, and for a moment it looked like she was going to break down again, but somehow she summoned the strength to keep going. “I know I’m not strong enough to carry Pillow…to carry his body by myself, and that there’s only so long before…before it’ll start to…” She couldn’t keep speaking then, unable to face the reality that soon, the preservation magic on her husband’s body would wear off and it would start to decay. Instead, she shook her head, pushing past that terrible truth. “That’s why I need your help. Will you come back with me?”
Aisle froze, caught between wanting to do everything he could for her and the knowledge that “everything he could” wouldn’t be enough, not for what she was asking of him. “Cozy, I…”
“Please Aisle. I’ll beg if I have to.”
She actually started to get on her knees then, and that was all Aisle could take, reaching out and stopping her before she could abase herself. “Of course I’ll come with you,” he said hurriedly, blinking as he felt his own eyes starting to water. He’d known she was hurting, but he was starting to realize that he’d underestimated, perhaps severely, just how bad things were for her. It was enough to silently make him wish that Cloudbank and Drafty were here; both pegasi had been more spirited than he was, and had never been afraid to tackle problems head on. If Cozy had told them that she’d wanted to leave, they would have immediately started thinking of ways to try and make it happen, rather than reiterating all the reasons that it couldn’t. The thought sent an ache through his chest, knowing that he’d never see them again now. “How…how about we at least wait until tomorrow morning, okay?” It was already late afternoon, maybe even early evening. One more night would give him some time to think of the best way to proceed.
But even that seemed to be more than Cozy could stand, shaking her head again. “No. We have to leave right now.”
Aisle’s brow furrowed at that, but it was in confusion more than frustration. “Why?”
“Because something else might happen!” she yelled, the sudden increase in volume startling Aisle. “Because every minute we stay around Lex is another minute where we’re in danger!” She glanced behind her then, looking sidelong at the train station before giving a shudder, turning back to him. “Vanhoover was bad when Pillow and I first got here, but ever since we met him everything has gotten worse! That little apartment we were all holed up in was awful, but at least we were all together! Now look at us…!”
Glancing around, Aisle realized that they were starting to draw attention again, with several ponies openly looking at the two of them. “Um, Cozy, we should-”
But she wasn’t listening. “Ever since Lex found us, we’ve been less safe, not more!” Her voice leveled off then, but only so that she was speaking normally instead of shouting, her words still easily audible to everypony around them. Cozy herself didn’t seem to realize that, still looking only at Aisle. “Right from the beginning, he’s been leading us into danger. Remember that trap with the dummy lights that he fell for? You almost died, but he came through just fine!”
Scattered murmuring broke out around them at that, making Aisle wince. “That’s true, but-”
“And then he got us attacked again before we ever made it to that warehouse of his! If Cloudbank hadn’t acted when she had, we’d all have been killed by those monsters!”
More voices broke out among the crowd in response to that, and Aisle felt a cold shudder go down his spine. “You know what, maybe we should go right now.” He nodded toward the medical tent. “Let’s head over and get Pillow’s body, and we-”
“And then Pillow! After everything we did…all the carnage he made us go through against those sea creatures, creatures we wouldn’t have faced if he hadn’t taken us to his ‘shelter’ in the first place, he couldn’t even rescue one pony by himself! And now Cloudy and Drafty are dead because of him!” She stepped forward then, wrapping a foreleg around Aisle’s neck and pulling him close as she rested her head against his neck, closing her eyes as she embraced him. “That’s why I don’t want to be here anymore. Being around Lex cost me my husband. He cost me my friends. I don’t want him to cost me you too.”
Aisle wrapped a foreleg around her reflexively, but his eyes were on the crowd of ponies watching them. Most of them looked moved by Cozy’s display, giving her sympathetic looks while others were hugging or pressing against other ponies dear to them. Quite a few were also casting dark looks at the train station, and Aisle could hear an undercurrent of angry muttering going around. This is my fault, he realized with a shudder. I pushed her too far. I should have just told her what she wanted to hear from the beginning and waited for her to calm down. It was with that thought in mind that Aisle chose his next words carefully. “I understand. Let’s get going, okay?”
She nodded, not letting go of him, an Aisle awkwardly guided her forward, shepherding her toward the medical tent, the crowd parting in front of them. Maybe once she saw the practical issues with trying to leave here, particularly with no provisions and no way to transport a dead body, she’d come around. But until then, pushing her to reconsider would probably only make things worse, since she had apparently decided that Lex was the source of all her woes. Maybe then she’d realize that what she was talking about simply wasn’t realistically possible.
But as he listened to the upset voices coming from the crowd, all of them apparently directed toward Lex, Aisle couldn’t help but wonder if maybe they should just leave after all. He somehow doubted that the red-horned unicorn would appreciate how Cozy had apparently just turned everypony against him. Sharing her opinion was one thing; whipping up an angry mob would probably be something else again.
Aria watched the pair of ponies leave, eyes narrowed in consideration.
She’d heard the raised voice, and had gone to investigate out of sheer boredom, since anything was better than sitting around and waiting for Lex to hurry up and fulfill his promise to her. What she’d found had actually been mildly interesting, as that crystal pony had managed to put together an impressive number of half-truths, making Lex sound like the bad guy instead of the person who’d pulled off a one-in-a-million plan to save everypony from the Great Lord of the Deep. She’d have made a decent Siren, she decided, almost able to see the negative emotions pouring off of the assembled ponies.
Of course, her efforts weren’t going to amount to anything, Aria knew. If Lex could defeat her, Monitor, and Lirtkra all on his own, an unruly mob wouldn’t phase him even slightly; quite the opposite, they’d just make themselves into a target for his anger, since he was no doubt still upset about learning that his friends had died. Which means he’s going to want to tear that instigator limb from limb, she was certain. And if I bring the little upstart to him, then I’ll be able to rub it in Sonata’s face just how much more useful I am than her. That, and Lex might get off his butt about fixing her voice. He might still have five more days before his self-imposed deadline arrived, but the waiting was driving her crazy. Anything that could make him go faster was worth a shot, and if it ticked Sonata off in the process, so much the better. The thought made Aria smile, quite pleased with herself.
Whispering the words to invoke the new magic she’d learned, Aria cast an invisibility spell on herself, followed by a flight spell, and took off after the pair.
Sonata couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so angry.
“Where does she get off talking all high-and-mighty like that?!” she growled, stamping a hoof in anger as she glared at the door where Cozy and Aisle had left. Too furious to stay still, she paced back and forth restlessly. “Like, seriously! We fight off a whole bunch of monsters together, and then we come here and start trying to fix this place up, and she’s all ‘yeah, but you still suck because you don’t smile at anypony enough’?!”
“Sonata-”
But Sonata kept going, ignoring Nosey’s interruption. “I mean, yeah, it’s super awful what happened to everypony that went back to Vanhoover, but where does she get off saying whose fault it is?! I didn’t see her jumping at the chance to go with them! And you know why?! ‘Cuz she was too busy wagging her tail for her new boyfriend! Guess she needed to break him in real quick, otherwise he might have realized what a nag she was! Meanwhile, she thinks I’m the one who’s not in a loving relationship! Like that makes any sense at all!”
That drew Lex’s attention, giving Sonata a sharp look. “What?”
“I know, right?!” She nodded, giving him a look of outraged commiseration. “Just before you guys got here, she and Aisle showed up looking for her friends, and then Cozy was all like ‘oh by the way, your boyfriend is totes playing you for a chump, Sonata. He just wants you for your rockin’ bod.’ And I’m all like, ‘um, nuts to you. You don’t know what we have,’ and she was-”
“Enough,” growled Lex. “I don’t care about what Cozy said.” But his statement was belied by the way his ears had folded back. Cozy’s blaming him for what had happened to Cloudbank and the others had been difficult to hear; that she’d apparently thought he didn’t love Sonata was simply adding insult to injury.
The worst part was that he couldn’t completely dismiss the crystal mare’s accusations, either. Not of his supposed lack of feelings for Sonata – in that regard Cozy was completely wrong – but about his being responsible for the lives that had been lost. Despite Nosey’s attempt at reciprocating for his having previously assured her that she wasn’t culpable for any of Xiriel’s atrocities, Lex knew that the same could not be said for himself. The fact that he hadn’t known that the devil had even existed, let alone that it was going to murder the ponies he’d sent into Vanhoover, meant that he couldn’t be held indirectly responsible for what it had done. But at the same time, that also served as an indictment of his ability to protect the ponies under his care. As one who would rule, it was his responsibility to foresee potential problems and make the appropriate countermeasures before they caused innocent ponies to be victimized. To claim that this couldn’t be considered a failure on his part because he had been taken completely by surprise would, he knew, have made him no better than the princesses.
And it wasn’t as though there were no warning signs, Lex thought to himself darkly. He’d seen the necromantic aura around Block Party almost as soon as he’d arrived, and yet he’d ignored it completely in his haste to start relieving the miserable conditions that the camp ponies were living in. The only precaution he’d taken had been to stick Block Party in the train station and put a guard outside the door, a measure so feeble that even Sonata had questioned if it was sufficient. In hindsight, it was obvious that he should have listened to her. An earth pony with an aura of magic, let alone such a powerful one, should have been immediately investigated as a possible threat; something to be secured before focusing on relief efforts. It would likely have meant forcing a confrontation immediately, but given what a monster Xiriel had turned out to be, that was always going to happen. By avoiding the issue, he’d given the devil time to put a new plan into place, and the result had cost Block Party, Cloudbank, Drafty, and the others their lives, as well as wounding Nosey severely.
I would have had Severance with me if I’d confronted the creature immediately, Lex realized with a burst of recrimination. If I’d dispelled the aura around Block Party the way I did for Nosey, Xiriel would have been forced out, and I could have fought it right then. With the scythe at his side, winning wouldn’t have proven to be so daunting a task, and he likely could have stopped whatever the devil had done to banish Severance. All of this could have been avoided…but there was nothing that could be done about it now. Now the only thing he could do was try to avoid compounding his failures even further.
Letting out a slow breath as he put his thoughts in order and shoved his emotions down, Lex began to walk toward the door, speaking as he moved. “We need to begin fortifying the camp for when the ghouls launch their assault. I want every able-bodied pony to begin digging trenches along the western perimeter. Those who can’t should focus on making obstacles out of whatever materials they have on hoof. Any sort of makeshift fencing or caltrops will do. We’ll also need to move the campfires to create a ring-”
“Wouldn’t it be safer to evacuate?” interjected Nosey. She had kept pace with him the instant he started moving, not letting her side leave his for an instant. “We could have everypony march north to one of the farms and hole up there.”
“That won’t work,” responded Lex immediately. “Those farms are no more defensible than this place, and I don’t want to risk an attack during the evacuation process, especially since the ghouls’ lack of biology means that they have inexhaustible stamina-”
“Okay, time out!” Sonata stood up on her hind legs as she interposed herself between Lex and the door, crossing her forelegs in a T-shape. “What’s all this about the ghouls assaulting us all of a sudden?!” She frowned as she looked at Nosey, causing the other mare to twitch and look down guiltily, before switching her gaze to Lex. “And when exactly did you two get so close? Last I remember, you were treating her like she was a criminal over what happened with Block Party.”
Nosey winced at that, immediately stepping away from Lex. “There was…” But she couldn’t finish, suddenly feeling horribly vulnerable, anxiety washing over her again.
For his part, Lex simply answered Sonata’s frown with one of his own. “I’ll explain everything later, Sonata. Right now we need to start trying to make this place as defensible as possible.”
Huffing, Sonata fell back to all fours. “Oh come on! I’m not asking for one of your big detailed explanations with, like, graphs or charts or anything. Just tell me what happened!” She looked at Nosey again. “Didn’t you say something about Lex saving you from a monster just now or something?”
Nosey felt her throat constrict, breathing suddenly becoming harder. “I…that…” Shudders ran through her, and she felt herself tensing, unable to make it stop. Fighting to retain control of herself, she squeezed her eyes shut. “He killed it,” she muttered, not even realizing she was speaking out loud. “It’s dead, and it’s not coming back. He killed it. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back. He kill-”
“Wha-, Nosey? What are you doing?” Her eyes widening at how her best friend was acting, Sonata felt her concern go through the roof. She’d seen her having what looked like some sort of panic attack before, and that cuddling up to Lex had been what stopped it, but this looked ten times worse, and it was really starting to freak her out. What happened with them?!
As far as Lex was concerned, however, Nosey’s repeating the mantra he’d taught her meant that she was doing fine. Giving her no further thought, he instead focused on Sonata, holding out a hoof toward her. “Sonata, move-”
The sound of his voice was enough to reach Nosey through her barely-restrained terror, and with an anguished cry she flung herself at him, desperate to reestablish contact with the pony that had saved her. Not having expected that, Lex was taken completely unaware as Nosey suddenly lurched into him, and went stumbling in response, unable to keep his hooves under him in his weakened state. The result was that he and Nosey went tumbling to the floor together, her clinging to him as he groaned dizzily, as Sonata watched with wide eyes.
“Okay, for realsies, I need an explanation. Like, pronto.”
Gritting his teeth at the antics of the two mares, Lex forced himself to keep his temper under control. That he succeeded was more due to his exhaustion than anything else. Slowly climbing to his hooves, a process made more difficult by how Nosey continued to cling to him the entire time, Lex decided to take care of two problems at once, directing his attention toward Sonata. “Do you have any magic that can calm her down?”
“Oh! Hey, that’s a good idea!” She thought for a minute, then nodded. “I can sing something that should be able to chill her out. But, um, is that okay…?” She glanced at Nosey again, who had given no indication that she’d heard them, just holding onto Lex and shaking like a leaf. It was pretty obvious, now that Lex had mentioned it, that she needed some serious help, but Sonata had never figured out his rules about when it was okay for her to use her magic on someone and when it wasn’t.
Fortunately, Lex didn’t seem to be in the mood to try and make a lesson out of it, simply nodding and waving a hoof at her expectantly. Nodding, Sonata took a breath before singing a slow, peaceful song, swaying as she let the melody flow through her, her magic imbuing the lyrics with a soothing quality beyond what the music itself could have accomplished. When she finished the last note, Nosey hadn’t moved, but had visibly relaxed, the tension draining out of her. Licking her lips, Sonata stepped forward and gently put a hoof on her friend’s side. “Hey…you okay now?”
Her cheeks red, Nosey nodded, not looking Sonata in the eye as she slowly let go of Lex and stepped back, keeping her gaze on the ground. “Yeah…sorry about that.”
“Do you feel able to recount what happened?” Lex was already eyeing the door. As much as he felt guilty over what had happened to Nosey, securing the safety of everypony here came first. This way, she’d be able to satisfy Sonata’s curiosity while he started implementing plans to try and make the camp more secure. When she nodded in reply, he let out a relieved sigh, turning to Sonata. “Come find me when you’re done here.” He didn’t wait for an answer before turning and heading outside.
As the door closed behind him, Sonata helped Nosey over a chair, sitting her down before parking herself right next to her. “Okay, so what happened between you and Lex? And what’s this about a monster? Tell me everything.”
Taking a deep breath, Nosey still felt a shudder run through her as she nodded, though she recognized that it was nothing compared to how she’d felt before Sonata had ensorcelled her just now. Searching for where to begin, she bit her lip as she realized that for the first time that she could remember, she didn’t want to report an exclusive bit of news. The knowledge made her shift in her seat uncomfortably, glancing at her magnifying-glass-and-newspaper cutie mark.
“I, um…I guess it started here,” she nodded upward, indicating the train station. “That first night, when we left Vanhoover and came here, I snuck in here to try and interview Block Party…”
Lex resisted the urge to sigh as he looked at the group of ponies in front of him. Although he didn’t know their names, save only for Scrubby, huddling in the back, he still knew their faces well enough to know that these were the ponies from C. Shells’ crew. Glancing left and right at how they’d moved to surround him, Lex wondered if this was their attempt at being intimidating. If so, it left much to be desired. “Is what true?”
The apparent leader of the group, a redheaded mare with glasses and a compass cutie mark, frowned at him. “You know-” She cut herself off then, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds before breathing out slowly. Opening her eyes, her voice was level when she spoke next. “You know what. There’s a rumor going around that everypony that you sent into Vanhoover yesterday…that the Captain and Sandbar-”
“It’s true,” interrupted Lex, suddenly wanting this over. It wasn’t just that they needed to start making preparations for a possible mass assault by the ghouls; this conversation was already taking more energy than he felt he could spare. “C. Shells and Sandbar, along with the other three ponies who went into the city, all died there.” He paused for just a moment, not bothering to pay attention to the gasps and stricken looks from the ponies around him, before adding the requisite phrase that was expected when an individual had passed away. “My condolences on your loss.”
The redheaded mare had gone pale, and didn’t seem to be able to respond, and Lex moved to walk past her. But before he could, the mare seemed to rally, swallowing before deliberately stepping to the side, interposing herself in his path again. “Where…their bodies. What happened to them?”
“Rose,” murmured Scrubby from the back of the group, “don’t. He’ll curse you.”
But if the readhead – Rose – heard Scrubby’s warning she gave no sign. “We checked with the field hospital before, and there weren’t any bodies there,” she continued. “So we thought…we thought that maybe it was all just a rumor. But now…” She reached a hoof up, pushing her glasses up as she rubbed one eye for a moment before letting them fall back down. “What happened to them?”
The question gave Lex a moment’s pause. Getting too deep into how Cloudbank and the others had died was a dangerous issue. Although the ponies in front of him now had been at least somewhat battle-hardened by their experiences with the sahuagin, the same could not be said for the rest of the camp ponies. That meant that putting everypony to work on defenses would risk a general panic, since even the dimmest of individuals would be able to figure out that the only reason to take such precautions was that the ghouls were expected to invade. Such a breakdown of what order this place possessed had to be avoided at all costs, lest it cripple any hope of protecting everypony if and when the ghouls did attack. Assuming that Xiriel’s words were true, he thought to himself. But he knew that he had no choice but to assume that they were. The devil had been an adept liar, but had liberally mixed truth with falsehood, such as how it had openly admitted to killing Cloudbank and the others. With no way to be certain, Lex knew that the only acceptable choice was to treat the threat as though it were a certainty.
In the meantime, the knowledge that there had been a body-snatching monster dwelling among the camp ponies, working to ensure their demise, needed to be suppressed. Bad enough that the knowledge of the recent fatalities was quite clearly resulting in a blow to everypony’s morale; Cozy’s reaction had been proof enough of that. Dealing with the possibility of an invasion of undead ponies while simultaneously coping with the horrifying truth about this place’s former leader was, Lex felt certain, more than the camp ponies could handle.
That was only temporary, of course. Once the crisis had been averted, Lex had every intention of making Xiriel’s existence public. He had to. Otherwise, Block Party would be remembered as a monster despite the fact that he had been a victim, as much a casualty of Xiriel’s ruthlessness as Cloudbank or C. Shells, and that was hideously unjust. Setting the metaphorical record straight was the very least that he deserved…but it would have to wait until he’d dealt with everything else first, including the ponies in front of him right now.
It took only a second to process all of that and come up with an answer that was, hopefully, acceptable. “Based on what I witnessed when I went into Vanhoover earlier, the ghouls got them.” It was bending the truth, but still within his ethical guidelines. “Now, I have another task I need you all to perform. Go to the western edge of the camp, and begin digging a trench. Its minimum dimensions need to be at least ten feet deep, five feet wide, and sixty feet long. Make sure you pile the displaced dirt to the east of it, so that it can be shaped into berms, and-”
“What, so that’s it?!” came an anguished cry, and Lex glanced to his right. It took him a moment to put a name to the face of the pegasus stallion there. Ocean Spray, that was it. “We lose our captain, and our friend, and you just shrug and say ‘it’s sad, now get back to work’?!” There were unshed tears shimmering in his eyes, his voice heartbroken.
“I regret the loss of life very deeply,” replied Lex evenly, reusing the same line that he had with Cozy. As with his statement of condolence, it was something he’d learned was standard when the topic revolved around an untimely death. “I consider their deaths to be a tragedy of unmitigated proportions.”
But Ocean Spray didn’t seem to be mollified by the statement. If anything, he seemed to become more agitated, giving Lex a look of open-mouthed incomprehension. “Are you-, is that some sort of-, of…stock line?”
Lex blinked once, unsure why his observance of the proper social decorum wasn’t having the intended results. Ignoring the familiar knot forming in his stomach, he decided to change tactics. Explaining his reasoning in greater detail had a very low rate of success in these situations, but it was still the best option. “I’m attempting to convey that, while their deaths are unfortunate, there are imminent concerns which preclude becoming preoccupied with displays of remorse. Once our situation has stabilized, whatever maudlin sentiments you feel are approp-”
“What are you talking about?!” The words came from Scrubby this time. “The Captain believed in you! She believed in what you’re doing here!” He stepped out from behind Rose, glaring at Lex angrily. “Did you know that, before she went back into Vanhoover, a bunch of us told her that we just wanted to go home? There she was, getting ready to throw herself into danger for a bunch of ponies she barely knew, all on your say-so, and all we could think about was that we’d had enough. And you know what she said to that? She said-” He choked up then, but forced himself to continue a moment later. “She said she was proud of us. We want-…I wanted to leave, to abandon everypony here, and she still said she was proud to have us as her crew.” He took a step forward then, and although he was shaking, he pawed at the ground in an aggressive gesture. “And all you can say is that being upset that she’s gone is a ‘maudlin sentiment’?!” The words caused several of the nearby ponies to rumble angrily. Further out, Lex could see that quite a few other ponies were watching the exchange, their faces dark.
Lex grit his teeth, knowing that he wasn’t getting through to them. “There are tasks that need to be undertaken with all possible haste in order to secure the general welfare,” he growled. Explaining why everypony else was wrong virtually always predicted failure of social engagement, but he didn’t know what else to do. “I understand that grief is making it difficult for you to act rationally, so I strongly recommend that you defer to my judgment until such a time that you’re able to marshal what wits you possess, and-”
“If you want a hole dug,” interrupted Rose, her voice thick with disgust, “then I suggest you go do it yourself. And when you’re done, you should do us all a favor: jump in and pull the dirt down on top of you.” She didn’t wait for a reply, turning her back on him then and walking away. The rest of the crew turned to follow her, shooting Lex dirty looks as they left.
Lex watched them go, seething. Again! Again he was doing the right thing and receiving nothing but odium for it! The unfairness of it all was galling, particularly coming from these ponies who knew better than anyone else in the camp what he’d done to secure everypony’s safety and prosperity. All the monsters I slew. All the times I sheltered and fed them. Bringing medicine and doctors and supplies to this camp. I did all of that, and they’re STILL not willing to trust my judgment! “You wretched, cowardly, stupid fools!” he hissed, and it was only the lingering vestiges of his self-control that managed to keep his voice down to a whisper instead of roaring at the top of his lungs. “You should be tripping over yourselves to carry out my orders!” He didn’t expect a reply, but one came anyone…but not from the departing ponies.
What did you expect? came the voiceless, hateful words into his mind. Lex’s eyes widened as they cut through his thoughts. The last ponies that followed your orders died. Why would anypony be willing to listen to you after that? Unable to reply, Lex slowly sank into a sitting position, almost dizzy from the scathing psychic taunt. But for once, his reaction had nothing to do with the words themselves. Rather, it was from the implication that they held.
During his fight with Xiriel, the tulpa that resided in his shadow had – in complete defiance of its behavior up until then – aided him in battle. Its words had portended not only sudden spikes of magical strength, but even the casting of spells that Lex himself hadn’t realized he’d prepared. In essence, the rogue portion of his mind had temporarily worked in concert with him, rather than against him. Or at least, that was his hypothesis.
But now, with the errant mental construct returning to its old habits, whatever stimulus had caused its aberrant behavior was assuredly over...which meant that, unless he somehow managed to puzzle out the conditions that had caused it become helpful, he wouldn’t be able to count on his assistance in any future conflicts. More than that, it would assuredly continue to torment his dreams from now on. Although Lex had long since resigned himself to dealing with nightmares for the indefinite future, that realization was enough to make his shoulders slump.
After several long moments, Lex slowly stood up, forcing himself to stop thinking about his psychic troubles. There were more important things that needed his attention, like defending the camp. Maybe I should tell them about the ghoul threat right now, he thought to himself. He’d planned on delaying that as long as possible, likely until they’d started to figure it out on their own, but perhaps…perhaps the better option was simply to present that information preemptively, even if it wasn’t completely certain.
But that was no simple matter. Doing so would require that the news be given in a way that minimized the chances of causing hysteria. It would require focus on the manner of presentation as much as-, no, more than the substance of the message. It would require an incredibly high degree of social acumen, with a focus on engaging with a large number of ponies at once.
It would require a spokespony.
Turning around, Lex headed back toward the train station.
Aisle was in a state of controlled panic by the time he and Cozy reached the field hospital.
Okay, calm down, he told himself silently as he followed Cozy around the medical tent, heading toward where Pillow’s body was stored among the boxes of medical supplies. All we have to do is figure out how to make a trek of several hundred miles, with no provisions or equipment, while carrying a dead body. Despite the warm temperature, a shudder rolled down his spine, knowing that their problems didn’t stop there. And we need to get underway as soon as equinely possible, before Lex figures out that Cozy was the one who turned everypony against him.
The thought made him glance backward nervously, half-expecting to see Lex advancing on them in a rage. Although the perpetually-dour unicorn had, to Aisle’s considerable relief, allowed them to leave even after Cozy had all but spit in his face, he had no desire to keep pushing the limits of Lex’s forbearance. Unfortunately, he was sure that was what would happen when Lex finished up whatever business he had with Sonata and Nosey and exited the train station. At that point, he’d come into contact with everypony else, and it probably wouldn’t be long before he heard about Cozy’s tirade…and Aisle had no idea what would happen then. Lex clearly had some sort of code of honor, but whatever rhyme or reason it operated on was beyond Aisle’s ability to figure out, and he didn’t want to take the chance that “potentially stirring up an angry mob” was a punishable offense. Which means we have to go right now, but how t-
His thoughts were interrupted as he crashed into Cozy, who had suddenly come to a complete halt. “Oof!” he gasped, hearing a similar exclamation from his girlfriend as they nearly collapsed. Barely managing to stay upright, Aisle immediately moved to help Cozy up. “Sorry! You suddenly stop-” He cut himself off in mid-sentence as he glanced ahead, seeing what had made her freeze in place.
Lounging amidst the boxes, Aria was looking at them with an expectant smirk on her face.
“Hi there,” she whispered, clearly enjoying their shock. “I heard you guys were planning on skipping out on us. Kinda cold, don’t you think?”
Aisle felt his blood run cold at the words. He hadn’t personally interacted with Aria since she’d joined them back at the shelter, and everything he’d seen of her – along with what Sonata had told them – suggested that had been a wise decision. That she was here, now, could only be a bad thing. What else can go wrong?
His question was answered a moment later as Cozy took a step closer to Aria, her body language radiating malice. “Get away from him,” she growled, her voice threatening.
The statement made Aisle blink, since Cozy was between Aria and himself. It was only a moment later that he realized he’d misunderstood, looking back at Aria and seeing what he’d overlooked before: the cloth-wrapped body of Pillowcase lying on the ground right in front of her. She was close enough that she could easily have reached out and touched it, and Aisle knew immediately that her proximity to Cozy’s late husband was no coincidence. “Listen, we don’t want any trouble,” he said lamely, hating the pleading tone in his voice. But he couldn’t help it: he was at his limit for handling disasters. Trying to be a stabilizing influence on Cozy had left him emotionally drained, and being cursed in such a shameful manner hadn’t helped. He’d had no time to process that two of his closest friends were dead, and now he had to figure out a way to manage an utterly impossible journey that Cozy was dead-set on. He couldn’t handle Aria on top of everything else.
But the whispering Siren’s only response was to laugh at them both, her mouth falling open as she gave a series of rapid breaths. “You mean besides what you already stirred up back there?” she asked sarcastically, glancing at Aisle. Her eyes turned to Cozy a moment later. “I have to say, I didn’t think you had the guts to try something like that. Getting everyone all riled up so that they’ll keep Lex busy while you two make a break for it? It’s a halfway decent plan. Though you would have been smarter to just take off instead of coming back for this.” She snorted the last word contemptuously, one hoof waving toward Pillow’s bound body.
Although her gesture didn’t make contact with the corpse, Cozy nevertheless darted forward with a strangled snarl of outrage. Aisle was about to fling himself after her when the crystal mare came to a stop, aborting her charge as suddenly as she’d started it. “Don’t you touch him!” she shrieked, sounding angrier than Aisle had ever heard her. “I’m taking him back home with me! Princess Cadance is going to bring him back to life!”
Aria’s eyebrows rose at that, but it was amusement, rather than amazement, that colored her features. She glanced at Aisle then, as though silently asking if she’d heard right, before looking back at Cozy. “Well that explains it,” she whispered, still smirking. “I thought it was weird that you’d suddenly be brave enough to try something like this. Turns out you’ve just gone completely crazy.”
“You’re wrong!” Cozy lifted her holy symbol in one hoof and thrust it as far as she could toward Aria, drawing the necklace taut. “Princess Cadance has more of Lashtada’s greatest blessings than I do! She can perform all sorts of miracles! If there’s anypony who can resurrect Pillow, I know it’s her!”
“The dead can’t be brought back to life,” snorted Aria, her look of amusement fading. “Now, I’m taking you two back to Lex. He’s going to-”
“Yes they can!” interrupted Aisle as a sudden, desperate idea occurred to him. He just hoped that what he’d heard about Aria had been accurate. “Lex said so!” He tried to think back to the conversation they’d had on their way back to the shelter, when Cloudbank had all but picked a fight with Lex after the incident with the dummy lights. “He said…I heard him say that divine magic is capable of resurrecting the dead.” He took a step forward, forcing himself to sound confident. “I don’t know if Princess Cadance has that power, but there’s a chance that she might.”
“Hm.” Aria paused at that, a look of doubt crossing her features. But it passed a moment later, and she waved a hoof in front of her face in a dismissive gesture. “Well, I don’t really care either way,” she whispered with a shrug, glancing at Cozy again. “I mean, I get that you want to have two guys hanging off of you instead of just one, but that’s not my problem. All I care about is getting my voice back, and if I drag you two back to Lex, then he might finally hurry up and give me what I want.”
“Or,” countered Aisle, “you could come with us to the Crystal Empire.”
For a moment silence reigned, both females staring at him.
“What?” scoffed Aria, her face screwed up in skepticism, as though wondering if he’d misspoken.
“What?!” gaped Cozy, her features warring between horror and incredulity.
“You should come with us to the Crystal Empire,” repeated Aisle, keeping his eyes focused on Aria. “Think about it. If Princess Cadance can raise the dead, then healing the damage to your voice,” he pointed at the scar at the base of her neck, “should be no problem.”
Another look of uncertainty flashed across her face then, one hoof moving to touch her scar reflexively, and Aisle knew that she was listening. A sudden surge of hope filled him then, and he shot a glance at Cozy, silently willing her to understand what he was trying to do. He immediately returned his eyes to Aria, though. If she caught him sending knowing glances to Cozy, she’d think they were trying to fool her, and that would be the end of her listening to him. I can do this, he told himself silently, thinking of all the times he’d closed deals with ponies in his family’s grocery store. This is just like talking Grapevine into buying peanut butter and celery to go with her raisins, or convincing Grand Pear that it’s okay to have apples and pears together in a fruit salad. Letting out a slow breath, Aisle steadied himself, knowing that this might be the most important negotiation he ever conducted.
Aria was already starting to regroup, frowning as she shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way. She,” she thrust a hoof toward Cozy, “already used her healing magic on me before, after the battle at the docks, and it didn’t do a thing for my voice! You know why?!” She slammed her hoof down in frustration. “Because there’s nothing there to heal! Those butchers didn’t just cut my throat, they cut my voice out of it!” Despite her only being able to whisper, Aisle could hear the undercurrent of anguish beneath her anger. “Can your precious little princess fix that?!”
“She might.” Cozy stepped forward, her features softer than they had been a few moments ago, and it was all Aisle could do not to faint in relief. “I don’t know if she can regenerate your vocal chords, but it wouldn’t surprise me.” She smiled slightly as she spoke next. “I was at the hospital once, donating some mattresses, when Princess Cadance was called there. A baby had been born with a defective heart. The doctors said that there wasn’t anything they could do, and they didn’t think he was going to make it. The parents were beside themselves, and begged the princess to fix their son, and you know what she did?” Cozy’s smile widened at the memory. “She took the baby in her forelegs, and sat down with the parents and told them to pray with her. They all sat down together and closed their eyes, and I saw the Princess’s lips moving, and suddenly that little baby – who had been so quiet and still – started crying at the top of his lungs, healthy and loud.”
She paused then, wiping a foreleg across her eyes. She’d witnessed the entire thing through a hallway window, not just the miracle but the way Princess Cadance had cried with the parents when their baby was healed, embracing each of them in turn. Seeing that had affected Cozy profoundly – more than getting her cutie mark, more than falling in love, more than anything she’d ever imagined – and she’d gone to the Crystal Palace the very next day and asked to become a priestess of Lashtada. “The doctors checked the baby later, and they said his heart was as strong as any they’d ever seen. So you see, if she can fix a newborn’s broken heart, I bet she can fix your voice as well.” Her eyes fell to the cloth-wrapped body on the ground then, her further hope unspoken but obvious.
Aria was silent for a long moment, wearing a pensive look. “…and you really think she’d do something like that for me?”
“She will,” nodded Cozy, pausing for just a moment before adding, “if we tell her you helped us.”
“Yeah, well…if I stay here, Lex will fix my voice in a couple days anyway, without me having to go wherever it is you’re heading.”
“Why a couple days?” This time it was Aisle that spoke up. “If he has that power, why doesn’t he just use it on you right now?”
“That…” Aria trailed off, biting her lip as she looked away. “…this is stupid. Even if I said yes, he might be able to track us down with his magic before we ever got away.”
“Maybe,” admitted Cozy. “But aren’t you tired of living like this? Of feeling terrible for so long that you can barely remember what it feels like to be happy? Of having your hopes dashed over and over again until you can’t keep bringing yourself to hope for anything at all? Don't you want to at least try for something more?” She walked around Pillow’s body then, until she was right next to the crippled Siren, who tensed but didn’t back away. Raising a hoof toward her, this time without brandishing her holy symbol, Cozy looked her right in the eye. “Please, Aria…come with us.”
Both ponies held their breath as they waited for her answer.
“Sonata,” barked Lex imperiously as he marched into the train station. “I have need of your talen-”
“Shh!” Sonata glanced at him just long enough to shush him before turning back to Nosey, who was looking at him with a slightly abashed expression for some reason. “We’re just getting to the good part!”
Being so completely dismissed left Lex momentarily nonplussed, and it took him a few seconds to recover. “Listen to me, there’s a situati-”
But he was again cut off as Sonata let out a loud groan, giving him an exasperated look. “Oh. My. Gosh. Is this something that totes has to be taken care of right now? Like, right now right now?”
Lex frowned at her uncharacteristic obstinacy. “Sonata, this camp needs to begin erecting defensive measures immediately. While the threat isn’t definitively imminent, there’s still a considerable degree of urgency.”
“Okay, I think that means ‘no,’ right?” she huffed. “So just hold your horses for a few minutes while Nosey catches me up.” She gave him an irritated look before turning back to Nosey…only to whip her head around to face him again an instant later, her annoyance suddenly replaced by amusement. “Oh wow, I totes made a funny! Haha! ‘Hold your horses’! Get it?” She grinned at him, clearly expecting a favorable reaction, and her smile dimmed slightly when his only reply was a blank look. “‘Cause we’re ponies,” she explained, her mirth diminishing. Clearly flailing, Sonata turned her attention back toward Nosey. “…and, you know, ponies. Horses. See why it’s funny?” But Nosey’s only reaction was a pained smile, and Sonata sighed in defeat a moment later. “…nevermind. Anyway, keep going.”
“Ah…” Nosey’s eyes flickered between Sonata and where Lex was standing behind her, uncertainty written all over her face. “This can wait until later. If there’s stuff you need to be doing now, I don’t want to keep you.”
“You can’t stop there!” protested Sonata before Lex could say take advantage of Nosey’s hesitancy. “That’s, like, a totes cliffjumper! I wanna know what happened next!” She moved slightly, so that she was blocking Nosey’s view of Lex. “C’mon, keep going! So there you were. Lex had just walked you outside the camp, and asked where you – the real you – were, and that monster, Cereal, said it had killed you…”
Lex considered interrupting again, but he couldn’t muster up the effort necessary to do so. As much as it galled him to waste more time, wasting what little energy he had left was even worse, and as loathe as he was to admit it, Sonata wasn’t wrong. It was unlikely that the few minutes it would take for Nosey to convey what had happened would prove to be critical. Besides, he thought to himself, I can still put this time to good use. Moving to one of the nearby benches, Lex climbed onto it and sat down before turning his attention to his saddlebags, fishing out one of the magical gemstones that he’d taken from Xiriel after the fight. Picking up the scarlet and blue sphere in his telekinesis, he activated his circlet’s ability to view the magical spectrum. Now was as good a time as any to start identifying what these things did…
“W-well, um…as soon as Xiriel,” she shuddered as she said the name of the monster that had hurt her so badly, knowing that she wouldn’t have been able to without Sonata’s magic calming her down, “said that it had killed me, it attacked Lex, using its magic to create acid mist right on top of him.”
“Wait, just like the dragon?!” asked Sonata, her eyes widening.
“Uh-huh,” nodded Nosey. “It even mentioned that, since it made me tell it everything before…” Her ears folded back as she said that, glancing around the interior of the train station. Right there. Right over there had been where Block Party – she hadn’t known that he was just a puppet for Xiriel then – had stood, casually asking her questions and listening as she told him everything he wanted to know, not realizing that he’d enchanted her. The result had been that she’d eagerly offered up not only information about her friends, but even the most personal, intimate details of her own life, not knowing that monster was going to use them against- Stop it! she screamed at herself mentally. Stop it stop it stop it!
Wrenching her gaze back toward Sonata, Nosey could see the concern building on her friend’s face. But for some reason that just made her feel worse, and all of a sudden she didn’t want to be asked if she was okay, quickly plunging ahead. “And, um, it knew that wouldn’t kill Lex. That he would turn into shadow and drop into the ground. But it wasn’t trying to seriously kill him anyway; it taunted him about the others, trying to make him mad. It kept talking to me while it was doing that, saying that Lex didn’t know I was still alive…that it was going to trick him into killing me…”
Lex glanced over at Nosey sharply. He hadn’t known that!
“Go on,” urged Sonata, clearly captivated by the tale. “What happened then?”
“Then Lex reappeared, and he was furious. He cast a spell, and…” She trailed off as she remembered what happened then. Even with Sonata’s magic keeping her artificially calm, the emotions were still fresh in her mind, and recalling them so soon after what had happened was almost overwhelming. “And I thought that he’d been tricked, and that I was going to die. I was so scared, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t even close my eyes. But then…then I heard Lex say something else, and I knew he hadn’t been fooled.”
Sonata couldn’t help but fidget at the dramatic pause, hanging on every word. “What? What’d he say?”
Nosey nodded. “He said ‘give her back. Give me Nosey back.’ And just like that, I was free, Xiriel thrown out of me.” She shifted in place, moving just enough so that she could see Lex around Sonata. “I’d given up all hope, but he’d managed to see through everything and found a way to rescue me.”
“Wow!” Sonata all but squealed the word, glancing back to shoot an excited grin at Lex before returning her attention to Nosey. “What happened then?”
Lex, however, didn’t notice Sonata’s pleased grin. Nor did he see Nosey’s looking at him as she continued to speak, doggedly keeping his eyes on each magical gemstone as he examined them in turn, gritting his teeth all the while. Far from being pleased, Nosey’s recounting of his fight with the belier was instead making him acutely uncomfortable. As infuriating as everypony else’s unjust loathing toward him was, it was still something he knew how to handle, due to how often it had happened to him over the course of his life. Hearing Nosey now, listening to the open admiration in her voice as she described the battle, was an alien experience. The last time anything like that had happened had been when Sonata had proudly proclaimed him to be a dragonslayer in front of the ponies of Tall Tale, and their cheering and applauding had left him similarly dumbstruck.
That Nosey wasn’t in possession of all the facts only made it worse. Between her having lost consciousness during the course of the fight, and her inability to know what had happened with his shadow, Nosey had come away with a skewed perspective on the battle. To hear her tell it, he had brilliantly managed to outmaneuver the devil at every turn, seeing through each of its stratagems and countering them with penetrating insight and unmatched magical skill. There was nothing in her story about his having been panicked or helpless. Her throwing him the creature’s own magical gemstones was barely even mentioned. The injuries he’d sustained had all been calculated sacrifices on his part, endured deliberately so that he could cast the wound-transference spell to turn Xiriel’s own bloodthirstiness back on it in a stroke of poetic justice.
Nosey’s story made him sound like a hero.
That realization brought a wave of guilt with it, and for a moment Lex almost told her how the fight had really gone. How he had wildly underestimated Xiriel’s strength, that his battle plans had all been foiled by the resilient monster, and that he’d won by what amounted to little more than a stroke of good fortune. That because he’d fought so ineptly, the creature had not only been able to injure her repeatedly, but had tortured her practically right in front of him when it had shoved her leg into the acid mist. The very idea that she was grateful to him for just how badly he’d bungled the entire affair was a knife in his gut, twisting with each word of praise that spilled from her lips.
And yet, he couldn’t bring himself to correct her. He had only just realized that Nosey was his friend; that she was somepony who mattered to him for personal, rather than idealistic, reasons. The guilt of knowing that her admiration for him was misplaced was far and away preferable to seeing it be replaced with scorn or disappointment. And he had no doubt that’s what would happen if she knew how that fight had really unfolded; after all, it was how he felt about it.
Besides, it’s not like I’m deceiving her. She came to those erroneous conclusions about me all on her own. There’s no ethical mandate that I correct her mistakes with regard to her evaluation of what happened. The justification was paper-thin, and its nature as a rationalization was utterly transparent, but it was still sufficient to satisfy his moral framework, albeit only barely.
“…and then we came back here, and ran into you, Cozy, and Aisle,” finished Nosey.
For a moment Sonata just stared at her, her eyes wide and her jaw slack at everything she’d just been told. After several seconds she shook her head, blinking rapidly. “I can’t believe all that stuff happened and I had no idea! I mean, I was right here the entire time, but I…wait…hang on a sec…” She frowned as something occurred to her, doing some hard thinking before her eyes widened in horror. “So that devil thing fooled me too?! Like, when I was talking to you that morning when Block Party died, that wasn’t you?!” Nosey didn’t have a chance to answer before Sonata pulled her into a tight hug. “I’m so sorry! I can’t believe I didn’t realize what happened to you! I’m the worst friend ever!”
“Sonata, it’s oka-”
But the other mare wasn’t listening, releasing her and instantly turning around to face Lex. “And I’m the worst girlfriend ever too!” she wailed. “You were trying to figure out something super important, and I totes distracted you for being mean to Nosey when she wasn’t even Nosey!” She practically threw herself at him then, almost knocking him over as she embraced him. “I’m so, so sorry!”
Barely managing to remain upright, Lex gingerly put a foreleg around her as he hugged her back, closing his eyes. His girlfriend’s affection was a welcome respite from how terrible he felt listening to Nosey, and he spent a long moment indulging in it before speaking. “While I appreciate the sentiment, your recrimination is unwarranted. That creature’s deception was unparalleled. You couldn’t possibly have seen through it.” It seemed important to let her know that; as the one in charge, that particular failure was reserved for him and him alone.
“Yeah,” sniffled Sonata, breaking their embrace, “but I-, oops!” The exclamation came from her mouth just as the gemstone she’d accidentally nudged hit the floor, the orange prism clattering as it hit the ground. “Great, and now I’m being a major klutz too. Sorry!” She bent down to pick up the gem, but her hoof had barely made contact with it when she stopped, examining it with sudden interest. “Hey, is this one of those gem thingies that monster had?”
Nosey nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know what exactly they do, but they obviously did something.”
“That one grants mild improvement with regards to the direction and utilization of magical energies,” explained Lex. “Although it can’t imbue magical aptitude where none exists, it can still allow-”
“Hang on a sec,” interrupted Sonata, “I wanna try something.” Lifting the gem in her hoof, she tossed it up slightly…and giggled as the gem began to orbit her head. “Oh my gosh! That’s adorable! It’s like a tiny little moon!” She began to spin in place, trying to keep the gem directly in front of her, causing it to whirl faster as it tried to complete its revolution.
“Actually, its design is intriguing,” noted Lex. “Most magic items that enhance their users need to be in physical contact with them to-”
“Whew whew!” laughed Sonata, making what sounded like an appropriate sound effect as she kept trying to keep up with the gemstone’s orbit. On a whim she reached up to bat at it, and the gem deftly avoided the obstruction in its flight path, adjusting its orbit accordingly and earning a squeal of amusement from Sonata. “Look look look! It wants to keep flying!” Rearing up on her hind legs, she waved her fore-hooves at the gemstone, which began to bob and weave desperately to avoid her fumbling. Lurching forward, Sonata began to stumble around the train station as she pawed wildly at the shiny rock, laughing all the while.
Lex could do nothing but stare, utterly aghast at his girlfriend’s undignified behavior. A snort of amusement drew his attention, and he glanced over at where Nosey was covering her mouth with one hoof, trying not to laugh as she watched the one-mare show. The sight made Lex roll his eyes, putting the other gemstones away.
Lex barely managed to keep himself from flinching as he heard Nosey’s question. Although the content of her query wasn’t unreasonable unto itself (even if he had already outlined what he thought needed to be done), the reminder that she was idolizing him – wrongfully idolizing him – was unpleasant enough that he very nearly winced. Instead, however, he avoided looking at her as he climbed to his hooves. “Now,” he answered, “we take you to be examined by one of the doctors here. Then I’m going to have Sonata allay whatever concerns the local populace has so that they can begin constructing some defenses.”
A perturbed look crossed Nosey’s face. “Cozy’s magic fixed me right up. If anypony should stop in to see the doctors, it’s you.” She stepped closer to him then, her eyes running over his body. “I know that spell of yours made Xi-, made that monster absorb the damage you’d taken, but you were stumbling on the way back here.”
Lex snorted, waving one hoof in a dismissive gesture. “A combination of mild fatigue and some slight blood loss. I’ve dealt with far worse.” This time he did look at her, wanting it to be as clear as possible that this was not a debate. “The same cannot be said for you, and after what you’ve been through in the last thirty-six hours it would be irresponsible not to have a doctor look at you.” In truth, he doubted that Nosey required medical attention; she was likely correct that Cozy’s healing spell had done as much or more than the doctors could. But there was nothing to lose by being thorough, especially since it was his lack of attention to detail that had allowed her to be possessed for so long in the first place. That, and this managed to assuage his guilt ever so slightly.
“Lex…”
The undercurrent of emotion in Nosey’s voice was obvious even to him, though he couldn’t have identified it to save his life. Instead he turned to regard Sonata, who at some point had fallen over and was still giggling as she idly batted at the orange prism that was now flying in a circle above her head like a halo. But her amusement changed to a whine of disappointment as Lex telekinetically grabbed it, his roiling purple aura arresting the gemstone in mid-flight and yanking it over to him.
“Aww! Can’t I play with it some more?” she pouted, slowly climbing to her hooves.
“Sonata, there’s a serious situation that requires your attention,” sighed Lex, shoving the orange prism into his saddlebag with the others.
“Wait, my attention? For realsies?” Her eyes widening as she realized the implication of what she was saying, Sonata started to make her way over to him, only to sway dangerously as she started to walk. Giving a yelp, she careened into a nearby chair and only just barely managed to keep herself from falling to the ground, holding one hoof to her head with a groan. “Whoa, dizzy!” She blinked her eyes in rapid succession as she carefully stood up again. “I guess you were right to take that thing away. It’s, like, so much fun it’s dangerous!”
Lex made a pained expression as Nosey went to go help Sonata up, unable to help but be slightly exasperated at Sonata’s pronouncement regarding the gemstone she’d used. Apparently his attempt to explain to her that it boosted the user’s magical prowess, albeit by a comparatively modest amount, had gone unheeded. I suppose the fault is my own, sighed Lex internally, for not anticipating her reaction. Even so, he’d need to sit her down and talk to her about what these gems could do later, since he intended on giving one of them to her.
Although Nosey hadn’t needed very long to finish explaining the events of his fight with Xiriel to Sonata, the time she’d taken had been sufficient for Lex to properly identify the function of each of the five gemstones he’d taken from the belier devil. As he’d initially suspected, each of them served to enhance the individual whose head they circled, with their functionality ceasing when they were forced out of their orbit. Likewise, each one provided a different benefit.
The orange prism, as he’d tried to tell Sonata, enhanced the recipient’s magical control. The iridescent spindle, by contrast, allowed its beneficiary to function without needing to breathe, making it the gem that had allowed him to cast a spell and shatter one of Xiriel’s heads despite having a punctured lung at the time. The memory was enough to almost bring a spiteful smile to Lex’s lips, recalling the shock and agony that had run through the devil then.
Of the five, Lex had decided that the shimmering gem would go to Sonata. Notwithstanding truly extreme circumstances like the fight he’d just concluded, he could simply turn into shadow if he needed to avoid breathing, whereas his girlfriend relied on vocalizations to cast her spells. Although he had no intention of letting her face danger if he could help it, he still wanted her to be prepared, particularly in light of his ability to protect everypony being impugned.
The magic built into the pale green prism, by contrast, was far more subtle than the first two. From what Lex could tell, it was designed to introduce a very slight stabilizing effect throughout the wielder’s central nervous system, increasing its overall efficiency. The practical impact of that was that it increased the recipient’s general competence overall. While the measurable effect on the user was minor, the results were practically universal, increasing mental acuity, bodily reflexes, concentration, eye-hoof coordination, and more. It was enough to leave Lex mildly impressed.
But it was the last two gemstones that were truly fascinating.
Of them, the dusty rose-colored prism was the less notable of the two, though it was still intriguing for what it could do. Its enchantment was defensive in nature, allowing the recipient to better avoid an incoming attack. What made it so interesting, however, was that unlike the pale green prism, the rose-colored one didn’t operate by increasing personal reflexes. In fact, from what Lex could tell it didn’t enhance the user’s body in any capacity. Rather, it somehow made them better able to anticipate the attack before it made contact. Of course, like all of the other gemstones, the overall power that it conferred in this regard was minimal, and using it conferred only a modest degree of protection. But the fact that it seemed to border on being precognitive warranted further study.
It was the final gemstone, however – the scarlet and blue sphere – that had captivated Lex’s interest the most. This particular gem acted as an external support system for cognitive function, boosting overall intellectual ability by channeling greater amounts of magic through the recipient’s brain. Of course, that offered no real benefit to Lex, since he was already doing exactly that thanks to his capacity to store energy within his thoughts. But that had been less important than the fact that, as a function of its serving as a virtual increase in brainpower, the gem actually contained new knowledge!
That realization had made Lex’s blood race, and for a full fifteen seconds everything else – his fatigue, his guilt over Nosey, his frustration with the C. Shells’ crew – had fallen away as he’d carefully examined the gem to determine what information it held. When he’d realized that it involved magic items, Lex’s heart had leapt into his throat, certain that he was finally going to be told the process by which Everglow’s style of magic items could be constructed! But that hope had turned to ashes in his mouth mere seconds later, as he’d scanned the repository of information implanted in the gemstone and found that it was concerned with manipulating magic items, rather than creating them. By itself, that was still useful information, of course...or at least, it would have been if not for the fact that Lex already knew that!
In Equestria, magic items came in exactly two categories: minor magical trinkets and unique artifacts. The former were responsible for numerous conveniences throughout everyday life, but were only capable of utilizing very small amounts of magical power due to the nature of their construction. Specifically, they were built in such a way as to try and mimic the magical channels found within the bodies of living creatures, drawing in and directing a small amount of ambient magical energy. But those artificial channels were far more fragile than those crafted by nature, however, and even the strongest would break down if forced to handle more than a trickle of energy at a time. The result was that they were good for various appliances and amenities, but little else.
Artifacts, by contrast, utilized a radically different approach to overcome the same problem: they had magical channels built into their very structure, not by ponies but by nature itself. The results were, universally, far more stable than what ponies could produce with artificial magical channels. That meant that, while not alive themselves, such objects were able to produce magical effects of considerable power, oftentimes more so than a living being of comparable size could match, since they had no delicate biology to worry about overloading. But it was extremely hard to deliberately create such things, since it required altering the object’s internal structure without damaging or destroying it…to say nothing of doing so in a way designed to produce a specific effect. The best method known was simply to expose the would-be artifact to areas or instances of powerful magic, and hope that it was suitably altered. Supposedly, Mage Meadowbrook had been a master of that particular technique, but even in Lex’s time she had been such an ancient figure as to be more myth than substance. More discouraging was that, when it worked at all, the resulting artifacts often ended up with unpredictable or even dangerous side effects. Everypony who studied such things knew about the so-called “Alicorn Amulet,” for example, which supposedly granted power on par with the Royal Sisters, but drove the wearer mad.
Lex had studied both techniques as a colt, of course, but after absorbing all of the available knowledge he had quickly lost interest in them in favor of his quest to create a better form of magic. To that end, he’d come up with his method for imbuing pre-cast spells into gemstones, but much like his thaumaturgical spellcasting itself, the initial promise of that technique had not been realized. The spell-imbued gems were ultimately just that, rather than true magic items.
It was only on Everglow that Lex had found what he was looking for. On that world, spellcasters would routinely artificially imbue material items with complex, robust magical channels, allowing them to enchant those items with a considerable degree of magic. All with no side effects or chance of breakdown! Indeed, the natives of Everglow had advanced that technique to such a degree that it had become prosaic to them, and magic items of all sorts were routinely sold as commodities there.
Lex had fallen upon that knowledge hungrily, purchasing several magic items and setting about reverse-engineering them…in vain. For all his vaunted intellect, no matter how many times he’d examined or disassembled a magic item, the knowledge of their construction had eluded him. He’d figured out how to manipulate their functionality; activating, altering, or even enhancing the magical abilities they already possessed came easily to him now, but creating them lay ever beyond his grasp, to his extreme frustration.
That same frustration had gnawed at him as he’d concluded that the scarlet and blue sphere contained nothing he didn’t already know…though there was a certain degree of spiteful satisfaction in knowing that Xiriel had needed such a thing, likely to use its scroll. But examining that particular magic item would have to come later; written materials, he knew, were far easier to trap than most other magic items.
Instead, he waited for Nosey and Sonata to make their way over to him, the latter mare still wobbling a bit as she leaned on her friend. Sighing, Lex got on Sonata’s other side, helping to prop her up as he led her towards the door. “Now, here’s what I need you to do…”
Sonata couldn’t help but grin as she exited the train station, surging ahead of Lex and Nosey and practically skipping down the front steps. Of course, her dizziness quickly made it apparent why that was a bad idea, but she was still beaming as she picked herself up and dusted herself off. “Like, super awesome!”
At that point she was smiling so widely that her cheeks were starting to hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop, whirling in place to look at her boyfriend. Lex was wearing his usual sour expression, but Sonata didn’t let that bring her down for even a moment. He had asked for her help! He had finally, finally gotten it through his head to let her do her job as his spokespony! After all the fighting and hurt feelings, she’d finally gotten through to him! That’s right, she congratulated herself, he just needed to stew over it for a little while, exactly like I thought. Who’s the mare? I’m the mare! She couldn’t help but rear up on her back legs, swinging her hips as she gave in to the urge to do a little victory dance-
“Sonata, stop that at once!” hissed Lex, glancing around self-consciously. “It’s unseemly to be so jubilant in the wake of several ponies having lost their lives!” Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be many ponies hanging around now…though that was likely as a result of what had happened with C. Shells’ crew.
“Huh? Oh! Oh yeah, whoops!” chuckling in embarrassment, Sonata fell back onto all fours, her mirth only slightly diminished. “Sorry, I totes forgot.” She felt bad about Cloudbank and those other ponies; they had all seemed like really nice people. But it wasn’t like she’d known them really super well or anything. And besides, there was nothing they could do about it anyway, so it was better to focus on what they could do, which in this case was the best she could at getting everyone to listen to her! “I just wish I had a chance to finish that new song I was working on.”
“New song?” asked Nosey, sounding relieved to talk about something besides what had happened to her. “What about?”
“Oh, I wanted to do this biiig,” she stood up again, spreading her forelegs widely, before putting her hooves back on the ground, “production about all the adventures we’ve had, so everypony would know that they’ve got a real live superhero here who’ll totes always help them out.” She sent a pointed smile Lex’s way, before giving Nosey a sheepish grin. “But then I kinda fell asleep, so it’s not ready yet.”
“That’s too bad. It sounds like it would have been great.”
Sonata was all set to agree, but faltered as she saw that Nosey’s eyes had slid over to Lex as she’d spoken. The sight sent a flicker of anxiety through her, and it wasn’t the first time she’d felt that in the last few minutes. The first few times had been from seeing how horribly shaken Nosey had looked, acting as though she was going to start sobbing if she didn’t stick right next to Lex. That had been downright frightening; Nosey was one of the most confident, outgoing ponies Sonata had ever met. But then she’d used her magic to calm her down, and Nosey had managed to tell her what happened.
At that point, Sonata had felt a different kind of worry. Nosey hadn’t exactly had a bad impression of Lex before; she’d eagerly talked about how much she wanted to write newspaper stuff about him. But once she’d started talking about how Lex had rescued her, she’d sounded different, like she was really, really grateful to him. And the way she was looking at him now…
“I’m more concerned with immediacy with which this takes place than I am with the specifics,” growled Lex, who for some reason looked uncomfortable, his ears folded back before he stalked in the direction of the field hospital, apparently expecting them to keep up. “Now, as I was attempting to convey before, it’s imperative that both of you avoid mentioning anything related to Xiriel’s existence, subject to reasonable limits. For instance, Nosey, I doubt the doctors will ask you anything that would require that you divulge the truth about what happened to you, but in the event that they do I want you to prioritize your health over everything else. Is that clear?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Sonata stared at the bespectacled mare as she smiled and nodded, searching for any sort of hidden meaning there. A second later Nosey glanced at her, and Sonata just barely managed to jerk her eyes away an instant before they made contact, belatedly realizing that Lex was talking to her. “-ake it clear to everypony that this is for their safety in general, and not a reaction to what happened with Cloudbank and the others.”
Sonata’s ears perked up at that. “Ooh, that reminds me. We should say something about that, right?”
Lex glanced over his shoulder at her, frowning in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Sonata blinked, not sure what he didn’t understand. “Huh? You know. We should clear up the rumors about what happened. Tell everypony that our friends died, and that we’re totes sad about it, especially you, and-”
“No.”
Lex didn’t growl or snarl or hiss the word, but Sonata could feel the force behind it, and she halted as Lex immediately stopped walking and turned to look at her, his expression dark. “Absolutely not.”
Sonata paused, realizing she’d tripped another landmine with him. Great. Two steps forward, one step back. “Lex,” she said slowly, “I really really think we should do this. You said that C. Shells’ crew was-”
“We’ll make a statement about what happened,” spat Lex, his features still tight. “I have no problem in that regard, or in acknowledging that their deaths are unfortunate. But there will be nothing about my being ‘especially sad’ about it.”
“Yeah, but…you are, right?”
“Of course I-, that’s not the point!” He glared at her then, but Sonata didn’t flinch, too bewildered to be intimidated. “Suggesting that there needs to be some display of grief on my part is obscene!”
“Lex.” Nosey stepped forward tentatively, licking her lips before speaking again. “I know how you feel.” Lex’s eyes narrowed dangerously at that, but Nosey kept going. “But Sonata’s right. You need to let everypony know that you care.”
Lex gave her a look of incredulity, as though he was waiting for the punchline. When none was forthcoming, he turned to Sonata, silently seeking a second opinion. Biting her lip at the explosion she knew would result, she nodded in agreement. Sure enough, he erupted a moment later. “Why?!”
Sonata shrugged. “Because that’s, like, how it works.”
But that only seemed to make Lex angrier. “That’s not an answer! Why does it work that way?!” He waved a hoof in the general direction of the camp. “Ever since I’ve arrived here, everything I’ve done has been for the sole purpose of alleviating the deplorable conditions that the ponies here have been forced to live in! My actions in pursuit of that goal have been just by any measure! So why is it that a public display of sentimentality is called for before everypony will recognize my commitment to their welfare?!”
“That’s-” Nosey tried to speak up then, but Sonata held out a hoof in front of her.
Okay. I got this, nodded Sonata. She just had to remember: don’t argue, just point stuff out and let him chew on it. “Okay, look. You’re, like, super-smart, right?”
Unable to follow the sudden shift in topic, Lex’s eyes narrowed again, this time in obvious suspicion. “What?”
“C’mon, humor me for a sec. You’re a real mega-genius, right? Super huge brain, thinks math is fun, can say the alphabet backwards, that sorta thing?”
“Get to the point, Sonata.”
“My point is…” A cocky grin broke out on her face then, sure that she was about to knock his socks off. “That you totes need to treat everyone else like they’re stupid!”
Both ponies regarded her announcement with stunned silence. Lex’s face had lost most of its anger in favor of shifting back to confusion, whereas Nosey looked baffled and a little horrified. “Um, Sonata? I don’t think that’s-”
“No, for realsies!” interrupted Sonata, keeping her eyes on Lex. “Don’t ever forget that everybody-, darn it! That everypony is a big dummy compared to you!”
“I can assure you, Sonata, I’m keenly cognizant of that at all times.” Lex couldn’t keep the wry element out of his voice, giving her a flat look.
“Yeah, but you need to treat them that way! You see?”
Lex’s only response was to blink, and Sonata realized she wasn’t getting through to him. Pouting for a moment, she tried again. “I mean, think about it. You don’t expect a bunch of dim bulbs to do stuff right, you know? So when they do stuff the wrong way, you should just expect that from the beginning and not get angry when it happens. It’s like that, but for this. That’s why you should totes tell everypony how sad you feel about what happened to Cloudbank and the others.”
Lex let out a sigh, frowning as they came back around to the topic at hoof. “Sonata, I don’t understand the point you’re making, and quite frankly I’m beginning to-”
“Wait, I’ve got it!” Nosey’s eyes were wide with understanding. “I know what she’s trying to say!”
“And that is?” snapped Lex testily.
Flashing Sonata a quick grin, Nosey turned her attention to Lex. “What she means is, if you know you’re operating at a higher level than everypony else, you should adjust your expectations of them accordingly.” She took a step closer to him then, almost within foreleg’s reach. “You’re right, you shouldn’t have to tell everypony how you feel about what happened to the others in order to earn their trust. You’ve done so much good since you came here that they should give it to you freely now. But Lex…even if these ponies weren’t already at their wit’s end after everything that’s happened, they don’t have half the wits you do anyway.”
For an instant, Lex just looked at her, completely nonplussed. “That’s not-” Cutting himself off, he returned his gaze to Sonata, remembering that she was the one who had initially advanced this argument, albeit incoherently. “I refuse to hold everyone else to a lower standard of personal conduct than I hold myself! I want everypony to strive to improve themselves, to say nothing of the world around them, and demanding anything less from one who would rule borders on moral turpitude!”
“That’s not what Sonata was saying,” replied Nosey smoothly.
“Yeah!” echoed Sonata, before looking at Cozy. “So, um, what was I saying?”
“You were saying,” replied Nosey, before switching her response to Lex, “that no one is asking you to compromise your standards. She’s just saying that you’re exceptional, and that even if other ponies do push themselves past their limits, they’ll never achieve what you have.” Nosey smiled, taking another step closer to him, putting herself right on the border of his personal space. “She’s saying that you’re special.”
Lex’s face was skeptical then, his eyes darting between the two of them as though expecting them to declare that this was all some sort of joke at his expense. When that didn’t happen, his expression turned pensive. “…this is a waste of time. I want to get this done before the sun sets.” He turned and walked away without another word, his ire quelled. Nosey turned to Sonata and gave her a congratulatory smile before following after him.
But Sonata didn’t return the cheery expression, watching her best friend follow her boyfriend with a renewed sense of worry. Although she’d gotten the point across to Lex, somehow it didn’t feel like the victory she’d thought it would. If anything, it felt like the opposite.
“I really don’t need this, you know. I feel fine.”
Lex ignored Nosey’s protests, focusing his attention on House Call. “Treat her as best you can,” he instructed the medical stallion, who – by now used to Lex’s brusqueness – accepted the orders with a resigned nod. “Also, make sure to examine her overall condition, not just her injuries. I’ll be back shortly to hear your diagnosis.”
He turned away then, heading toward where Sonata was waiting outside the medical tent. He still doubted that the doctor would find anything unusual, but if there was even the slightest chance that Xiriel’s possession was having a lingering effect on her- “Hang on a moment.”
He glanced back at House Call, who, upon seeing that Lex had stopped, stuck his head deeper into the tent, calling for a nurse before he turned to Nosey. “Would you mind going ahead and getting settled? I have to go over a few things with Mister Legis.” He didn’t wait for an answer as a mare stuck her head out from deeper inside the tent, immediately issuing instructions to her. “Could you please wait with Miss Newsy in one of our examination rooms? I’ll be there in a moment.”
Nosey’s eyebrows rose slightly at the transparent dismissal, her eyes making a circuit from House Call to the nurse to Lex before settling back on the doctor. “…sure.” With one last look at Lex, she turned and disappeared past the sheet that separated the reception area from the rest of the makeshift building.
Once the pair were gone, House Call’s polite smile fell away, and he stepped closer to Lex. “Listen…” He paused, trailing off uncomfortably as he tried to think of a polite way to voice what was on his mind.
But Lex was in no mood for politeness. “What is it?” he demanded, tension audible in his voice. It was clear that the doctor had immediately noticed something that had caused him concern, and that was more than enough to put Lex on edge.
House Call bit his lip for a moment before plunging ahead. “I need you to tell me: did she make a suicide attempt?”
Caught off-guard at the unexpected question, Lex didn’t answer, and House Call plunged ahead. “She has bruises all over her neck, as well as several other scrapes. That’s not precisely consistent with Block Party’s wounds, but it is close, and, well…I heard that she was there with him. You know, when it happened?” His ears folded back as he contemplated what that must have been like for her. “Since you didn’t seem to want to tell me how she got those injuries, I thought that maybe she’d tried to do the same thing.”
“It wasn’t a suicide attempt.” The doctor’s misunderstanding should have put Lex at ease. Instead, it had just the opposite effect, making him remember how fragile Nosey had been after what had happened. True, she was acting much more stable now, but he suspected that was because Sonata’s magic was still keeping her calm. If it wore off and she reverted to her previous state…
“Then what happened?” House Call cocked his head to the side, giving Lex an inquisitive look. “The more I know, the better I can treat her.”
For a moment, Lex wavered. Maybe he could just tell him that Nosey had been assaulted, and provide no further details…no, that wouldn’t help. It would simply result in everypony knowing that someone had been attacked here in camp. Worse, when the populace realized that the supposed assailant was still at large, it would cause unrest and suspicion. The only thing to do was continue to deny that there had been an altercation, at least until the situation could be stabilized to the point where the truth wouldn’t cause a panic. “…just do what you can.”
An unhappy expression crossed House Call’s face at that, but he didn’t push the issue, sighing. “Right.” Lex moved to leave then, and House Call quickly spoke up again. “Actually, there are several other things that I need to bring to your attention.”
Gritting his teeth, Lex turned back to the doctor, the expression on his face making it clear that this had better be important. “Go on.”
Faltering for a moment at the angry look, House Call cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Yes, um…we’ve all been taking turns watching him, but we’re not sure what to do with Spit Polish. His injuries are mending well, but he’s still in no shape to be walking around. He’s also displaying acute anxiety about what’s going to happen to him.”
That last part was spoken in an expectant tone, but Lex simply snorted. “Good. Maintain the situation until I’m ready to deal with him.”
“Can you at least tell us when that will be?”
When their aren’t multiple crises demanding all of my attention and energy, you imbecile. “No. What else?”
House Call sighed again, but didn’t voice any complaints, instead moving on to the next issue. “A few ponies have spotted the large mass of bits you dumped on us, and we’ve been getting some questions about them.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed at that. “And what did you say?”
House Call shrugged nervously. “We, you know, we told everypony the truth: that you dropped them off and asked us to look after them.”
That was enough to give Lex pause. Cloudbank’s ill-fated mission hadn’t been a secret; he hadn’t told her not to tell anypony, knowing that she’d need to speak to quite a few individuals in the course of putting her team together. More than that, everypony knew that he’d gone after them earlier in the day…which meant that, in addition to knowing that they hadn’t survived the trip, the public was now aware that he’d retrieved the funds Cloudbank and the others had originally been sent to procure. But how would everypony react to that news? I’ll need to tell Sonata to include this in her statement. “Alright. What else?”
“We’re running dangerously low on medical supplies. Gauze, swabs, band-aids, and generic painkillers to name a few. Also, there’s quite a few drugs that we could really use a resupply of. We have almost no penicillin left, for instance, and we’re running low on metroclopramide and-”
Lex held up a hoof, causing House Call to instantly fall silent. “Write down what you need. When I return to check on Nosey I’ll retrieve the list from you and take care of it.” He’d need to go back into Vanhoover and hope that the local pharmacies or the hospital still had what they needed. Otherwise he’d need to get in contact with Tall Tale and have Ribbon arrange for more supplies to be sent…which would be exceptionally difficult now, without an easy way to renew his spells. “What else?”
“Um…I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I really need to check on your recovery. The damage you suffered yesterday was extensive, and for you to be up and moving around this soon is-”
“Your advice has been duly noted.” Lex’s voice hardened, making it exceptionally clear how little he cared about that particular topic. “You may consider yourself to have done your medical due diligence in this regard. What else?”
House Call wavered for a minute, before straightening up. “I respectfully ask that you reconsider.” Before he could think better of it, he kept going. “I know you’re more concerned about everypony else, but right now it’s my job to be concerned about you. If something happens to you, if you develop a complication or collapse from exhaustion somewhere with no one around to help you, the consequences won’t be yours alone. Everypony here is counting on you-”
“I don’t need you to remind me of my responsibilities to everypony here,” hissed Lex, remembering that House Call had expressed this same sentiment yesterday. It had been irritating then, but now it brought with it a wave of guilt that he had to struggle to push down. It was because he’d decided not to push himself – listening to Sonata and House Call – that he’d delegated the task of going into Vanhoover to Cloudbank! If he had simply ignored that advice, if he had pushed through the pain and the fatigue and gone into the city by himself, then those ponies who’d left in his place might still be alive now! It was a mistake that he would NOT make a second time! “Is there anything else?”
“Please, be reasonable! We don’t even know the full extent of the damage you suffered! If-”
“Is. There. Anything. Else?”
Sighing, House Call slumped in place, knowing that there was nothing more to be gained from pushing this issue. “Just one thing. Nopony has eaten since you conjured all of that food yesterday, and, well, we’re all getting pretty hungry.” He didn’t say anything else, not wanting to recommend that Lex create all of that food again, knowing that was what had injured him so badly the first time.
Lex turned away from him then, already moving on to the next order of business in his mind. “I’ll take that money I dropped off here to one of the farming communities located nearby. The food I’ll purchase there should be enough to last for a little while.” Even as the words left his mouth, however, he was already sorting through the logistical problems that would entail. The money needed to be properly counted, and the food it bought would need to be rationed and inventoried. Transportation would be an issue, since he’d lost both of the extradimensional receptacles he’d possessed, which meant that carrying both the money and the food would be difficult. Not to mention storage would be a prob-
“WHOA!”
The sound of Sonata’s raised voice immediately drew Lex from his thoughts, and despite the ache it caused him he forced himself to dash the last few feet to the tent flap, heading outside. “What’s happening?!” he yelled, half-expecting to find ghouls already starting to overrun the camp, even though the sun hadn’t set yet.
But to his relief, there wasn’t an undead pony in sight. Instead, his girlfriend was staring into the sky, her eyes directed due east. Several other ponies were looking that way as well, and whispers and concerned voices could already be heard. Turning, Lex peered in the same direction as everyone else, trying to see what they were looking at.
Although the late light was beginning to darken that portion of the sky, it took him only a moment to find what had captivated everypony’s attention. Hanging in the air, the shape at first defied categorization, being nothing more than a small, thin line in the sky. But it was quite clearly moving, its position changing as it seemed to grow slightly larger, and Lex realized that whatever it was, it was headed directly for them.
“It’s a bird!” cried Sonata dramatically, drawing a few incredulous looks due to how obviously wrong her guess was. A moment later, she glanced around with an expectant grin on her face. “C’mon! I said, ‘it’s a bird!’ Anypony?” When no one answered, she tilted her head in mild disappointment. “Aw, for realsies? Nopony’s gonna say ‘it’s a plane!’”
“What’s a plane?” murmured a nearby stallion. Next to him, a mare shook her head, keeping her eyes on the sky.
Huffing, Sonata rolled her eyes. “Okay, look, I’ll do the whole thing, okay? Ahem.” Standing up on her hind legs, she pointed dramatically at the odd shape, now noticeably closer. “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s S-”
“Severance,” spoke Lex with a sigh of relief.
“No, that’s not the line,” huffed Sonata, glancing at her boyfriend in mild exasperation before looking upward again. “It’s supposed to-, hey, wait a minute.” Her eyes widened in realization. “It really is Severance!”
A moment later the scythe completed its journey, floating downward until it hung directly in front of Lex, returned at last.
For a moment, Lex just stared at the scythe as it floated in front of him.
Finally. Finally something was going right for a change. With Severance, he could renew his thaumaturgic spellcasting, bringing the bulk of his powers to bear against the problems that were still plaguing Vanhoover. To say nothing of utilizing the weapon against whatever monster threw itself at him next. But in the meantime, there were questions he needed it to answer.
Reaching out to grab it with his telekinesis, Lex pulled the weapon closer. “Where have you been?” His voice held none of the relief he’d felt mere moments ago, not out of any intent to disguise his feelings but because he’d already pushed those emotions away, focusing on what came next. “Tell me everything that happened since I saw you last.”
The weapon’s response had barely begun when Sonata interrupted. “Welcome back!” Heedless of Lex’s aura around the thing, she brazenly walked up to the scythe and threw a foreleg around it in a hug. “It’s, like, totes great to see you again! I-, hey!” She yelped as it suddenly jerked away from her before glaring at Lex, knowing that he was responsible for the abrupt end to her friendly reunion. “What did you do that for?”
“Sonata, do NOT touch that thing!” Lex met her glare with one of his own, remembering the Night Mare’s casual observation that the scythe altered the mentality of those who wielded it to better suit the dark goddess’s liking. He’d ordered the weapon not to do that under any circumstances, and as far as he was aware it hadn’t changed Cloudbank’s thoughts, but there was no reason to take a chance. Especially not when it came to his beloved.
“Aww, why not?” Sonata pouted. “He’s our friend too, right? And after what happened to everypony else, I thought you’d be, like, dancing for joy now that he’s back.”
“It’s not a ‘he,’ it’s an ‘it.’ And it’s extremely…” Lex didn’t finish speaking, forcing himself to stop before he lost his temper. Instead, he took a moment to remind himself that no one but him knew about Severance’s ability to alter its user’s mind, nor about its vague warning about abandoning him if he came to rely on it overmuch. As far as Sonata knew, Severance was a reliable weapon that was also alive, and nothing else. There was no reason to chastise her. Even so, his response came around gritted teeth, exhaustion burning away what little patience he had left. “Just…let me debrief it, alright?”
Her brow crinkled at that, tilting her head in confusion. “Huh? What’s that?”
“I want it to report on what happened in Vanhoover.”
“Ohhh, why didn’t you say so?” Smiling guilelessly, Sonata turned away so that Lex and Severance could catch up. I shouldn’t get in their way, she decided. Lex needs more guy friends. Instead, she turned to regard everypony else. Severance’s return had attracted more than a few ponies, and the crowd itself was starting to draw others over, curious about what was going on. The sight of so many eyes directed at her – or at least, near her – was enough to make her slightly giddy. Now, to start doing her job as a spokespony. “Everypony!” She made sure to get it right that time. “Everypony, listen up! In just a minute, Lex Legis will make an announcement about all the super-tragic stuff that’s happened. And it’s gonna be totes awesome because it’ll be delivered by his hot spokespony: me!” She couldn’t help but jump for joy then, heedless of how her attitude didn’t match what she’d just said, looking over her should to shoot Lex a grin and a wink.
Unable to help but gape at the juxtaposition between her words and her attitude, Lex somehow forced himself to turn his attention back to Severance, turning and walking away from the crowd as he brought the scythe with him. He’d deal with Sonata later. “Now, tell me what happened after I sent you with Cloudbank.”
The scythe’s accounting of the events was short and to the point. It took only a few minutes for it to describe what had happened in Vanhoover, relaying how Cloudbank and her followers had successfully fought their way into the bank, barely managing to get into the bank vault before escaping with the money they’d been sent to retrieve. Despite – or perhaps because of – the dispassionate recounting, Lex felt his chest tighten. The knowledge that they had all struggled so hard, risking their lives to fulfill the directive he’d given them, somehow made the knowledge of their loss even harder to deal with.
That was the reason why, once the scythe reached the point in its report where Nosey appeared out of nowhere and dispatched the others with contemptible ease, Lex suddenly interrupted it. “Why didn’t you save them?” The words came tumbling out of their own accord. “There must have been something you could have done!”
The scythe didn’t hesitate in its reply, pointing out that saving them was Lex’s responsibility, not its own. “Don’t you dare lecture me on responsibility!” hissed Lex, his eyes blazing green and purple. “I lent you to Cloudbank so that you could assist her in accomplishing her mission, the first priority of which was always to come back alive!” When Severance began to blithely reply that Cloudbank was weak, Lex snapped.
Unable to hold back an inarticulate cry of rage, he slammed the scythe to the ground. Immediately, it tried to lift itself back into the air, but Lex lunged forward, stomping on the flat of the blade, leaning his weight on it and pressing the weapon back down into the dirt. “Don’t you dare disparage those ponies who gave their lives in my service! Don’t you DARE!” Incensed, he lifted his hoof only to slam it back down again before Severance could rise. “Those five ponies were the very best of everyone in Vanhoover! In all of Equestria! They all displayed courage and selflessness and acumen beyond all expectations! They deserve to be honored for their sacrifice!” He brought his hoof down on the blade again, not noticing that it felt warmer than it did a moment ago, his voice rising as the feelings he’d been suppressing for the last few hours finally boiled over, black crystals beginning to sprout from the ground. “YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO HAVE COME BACK HERE WITHOUT THEM! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR NOT HAVING DONE EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO HAVE SAVED THEIR LIVES, EVEN IF IT MEANT YOURS! YOU HAD A MORAL DUTY TO PROTECT THEM, AND YOUR FAILURE IS A DISGRACE THAT WILL NEVER GO AWA-”
His ranting was cut off as he suddenly snatched his hoof away from Severance with a snarl of pain, the blade suddenly being too hot to touch. As he watched, the weapon slowly rose back into the air, its blade already beginning to glow a dull red. Slowly, it rotated in place until its blade was pointed directly at him, and although Lex had never been good at reading people, even he could understand the gesture. But far from being intimidated, Lex only felt angrier at the weapon’s defiance. “You think I’m afraid of you?” he growled, holding out a hoof – his left hoof, the one with the barbed wire that was the Night Mare’s holy symbol wound around it – towards the scythe in a threat of his own. “Do your worst! I crushed that monster that slew the others and sent you wherever you were! I can do the same to you! I-”
Suddenly, Sonata was in front of him. Before he could even blink, she stood up on her hind legs, waving at something behind him. “And that’s our fearless leader, Lex Legis, with his, uh, inspirational words of…inspiration! You all are a great audience! Stay right there, and we’ll be right, um, back after…after we get back!” She kept waving as she spoke, a rictus grin on her face as she glanced at Lex, canting her head toward the back of the medical tent in an exaggerated fashion.
Humiliated at his loss of control having been a public spectacle, Lex slunk in the indicated direction, his ears folded back and his eyes once again in their natural state, the black crystals that had been growing now crumbling to dust. But as miserable as he felt right then, he still kept an eye on Severance, which followed him at a slight distance. Fortunately, the scythe seemed inclined to cease hostilities as well, its red-hot glow slowly fading until all traces of its spontaneous thermal reaction were gone.
Sonata was the last one to join them, walking backward on her hind legs as she continued waving to the crowd of ponies. It was only after she’d joined them around back of the medical tent, with it between them and the assembled ponies, that she flopped down onto her back with a loud groan. Turning a critical eye on Lex, she huffed. “You just had to upstage me, didn’t you?”
He bristled at the rebuke. “Sonata, I-”
“I was joking,” she sighed as she climbed to her hooves. Looking at Severance, she frowned. “Look, I know you just got back and all, but could you give me and Lex a sec?” The scythe didn’t move for a moment, and for a moment it seemed like it was going to ignore her request, before it began to float away from them, stopping a few dozen feet further back. Giving the weapon a cordial wave in gratitude, Sonata turned back to her boyfriend, who tensed in anticipation of her chastising him over what just happened.
But no reprimand came. Instead, she walked over and nuzzled him, her happy-go-lucky expression changing into a look of concern. “Listen…it’s okay if you feel like crying.”
Confused and emotionally drained, Lex reverted to type, presuming the worst of her intentions. “Do not patronize me!” he snapped, moving away from her.
But Sonata was unfazed. “I don’t know what that means, but I’m being totes serious. A good cry will make you feel better.” She smiled at him then, a small one of understanding, rather than her usual boisterous grin. “I speak from experience.”
“I do not need to-, this is ridiculous!” Lex stamped a hoof in agitation. “Severance’s failure needs to be addressed! If you had heard the way it referred to Cloudbank and the others, you would have been furious too! You-”
“Lex,” she interrupted, “I’m trying to tell you: you didn’t sound furious just now. You sounded, like, heartbroken.” She could practically see the words striking home, his body going rigid. The sight was incredibly sad, especially after everything he’d already gone through to try and keep everypony safe. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said softly.
He was breathing heavier now, swallowing before he spoke again. “Do not….don’t you dare presume to tell me…” He couldn’t finish, a strangled sound coming from his throat.
Closing the distance between them, Sonata hugged him. For a moment he didn’t react, and she thought he might pull away from her again, but then she felt him curl a foreleg around her and hug her back. They stayed that way for long moments, him breathing deeply as she just held him, feeling tremors of repressed emotion run through his body. When they finally separated, she gave him a sad smile. He didn’t return the expression, keeping his eyes on the ground, but he seemed to be calmer, his breathing having slowed down.
“Listen,” she ventured. “You already told me what you need everyone to do, right? Trenches, fences, stuff like that? How about I go out there and get all that started, and you can stay here and rest for a little bit. No fighting with Severance or anything, just take it easy, okay?” He nodded, but still didn’t make eye contact with her. Knowing that was the most she’d get out of him, she leaned in and kissed his cheek before heading back toward the crowd.
“Sonata.”
“Hm?” Pausing, she glanced back at him. He hadn’t moved, facing away from her now that she’d started to head back. But she heard his next words clearly.
“I think we’re far enough away. Let’s take a break.”
Aisle nodded at Cozy’s suggestion, doing his best to hide how tired he felt. Judging from the look of mild concern she sent him, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. He was already sweating, and his stomach growled in protest at how long it had been empty. Even keeping his breathing even was a struggle, having to fight to keep himself from gulping down lungfuls of air as he spat the rope out of his mouth, glancing at the grim load he’d been pulling.
Pillowcase’s body was still tied firmly to the makeshift sled they’d cobbled together, which was nothing short of a minor miracle, considering what they’d had to work with. The “sled” was in fact nothing more than the side of a wooden supply box that he’d managed to pry loose with a few lengths of rope tied around it. Several lengths of bandages – all scavenged in haste by Cozy from the medical tent, using that same loose seam that had let her filch a syringe in her aborted attempt to kill herself – lashed Pillowcase’s body to the wooden conveyance. Aisle had drawn the entire rigging behind him ever since they’d left the camp, taking a loop of rope in his mouth and plodding forward, dragging the sled behind him similar to how he’d seen some farm-ponies draw a plough.
Aisle had initially been very pleased with himself: throwing together this sled had been his idea. Although he could have carried Pillow’s weight on his back easy enough, the distribution of that weight was unbalancing enough to make that a complete nonstarter. That, and as much as he’d gotten to like Pillow in the short time that he’d known him, Aisle had no desire to carry a dead body on his person. Pulling it had seemed like a much better option.
But once they’d set out, it had taken less than ten minutes for Aisle to realize just how badly he’d miscalculated.
Dragging the so-called sled behind him had been difficult! While Aisle knew he wasn’t the burliest of earth ponies, he was no weakling either, having carried large amounts of produce and other groceries to stock the shelves in his old job. But that hadn’t prepared him for just how hard it would be to drag a flat piece of wood, with its heavy payload, across the rough ground. With nothing to smooth its passage the friction was considerable, making it a struggle to pull the thing even a few feet. Worse, the effort threatened to make furrows in the dirt, leaving a trail that would have let Lex easily track them down. They had avoided that only by hastily retying the ropes under the wood so that the bulk of the weight rested on them.
That, however, had proven to be a mixed blessing. Although the plains spreading out toward the north were flatland, that didn’t mean the ground was completely even. Quite the contrary, it seemed to Aisle like the sled hit a bump or a rock every foot or so. Doing so had continually nudged the ropes, causing them to shift and come loose from the wooden board more than once, forcing them to come to a complete stop in order to fix them.
The result was that he and Cozy had made nowhere near the progress they’d been hoping to ever since they’d left the camp. By his estimation, they’d been gone for maybe an hour – the sun was nearing the horizon now, and the faintest traces of pink and orange could be seen in the sky, heralding the sunset – but the camp was still visible behind them. They were far enough away that they couldn’t make out the features of the ponies there, but it was still closer than either of them felt comfortable with. Despite that Aisle sank to the ground, rolling on his back as he let his sore muscles relax.
“I really wish you’d let me pull him for a little while,” murmured Cozy, sitting down next to him. “I feel terrible making you do all this.”
“Uh-uh,” panted Aisle, managing to shake his head lightly. His jaw ached from biting down on the rope for so long. “I’m the earth pony here. You’d have a much harder time-”
“You do realize that I’m an earth pony too, right?” interjected Cozy with a wry smile.
Aisle sputtered. “Well, yeah, but…I mean, you’re a crystal pony.” He felt the blood rushing to his face as he spoke. He had been so caught up in Cozy’s being a crystal pony that it hadn’t really occurred to him to think of her as being in the same tribe as him.
“So you think that crystal ponies are weaker than other ponies?” teased Cozy. She could already see Aisle starting to protest, and silenced him with a disarming smile. “I’m just kidding. I know what you were trying to say,” she chuckled, before lying down and looking up at the sky.
Aisle kept his gaze on her, marveling at how much her attitude had improved now that they’d left the camp. She really needed to get out of there, he realized. Either she’d really wanted to get away from Lex, or needed to start making some progress toward home, or both. Either way, it was nice to see her smiling again…now if only he could bring himself to share in her joy. Except we’re on a trip that’s incredibly long and already going slower than expected. And we have no food or water. And I’m pulling a dead body. And even if we get there, if Princess Cadance can’t do what Cozy’s hoping to do… He didn’t want to imagine what his girlfriend’s reaction to that would be. Although Aisle wasn’t exactly eager to have to share Cozy’s love, that was no reason to hope that a good pony remained dead, regardless of what it did to their relationship. Right, because we’re doing so great now, he sighed silently, glancing down at himself. He knew it wasn't the top priority, but the sooner he got rid of this emasculating curse, the better.
“It should be easier once we reach one of the farming villages north of here,” announced Cozy, as though she’d read his mind. “Once we do, we can get some food and maybe even a proper cart, and then this won’t be nearly as hard.”
“You think the ponies we meet will do all that for two broke strangers lugging a dead body around?”
For a moment he wondered if he’d been too callous, but to his relief Cozy simply nodded her head. “I do. We’re not in Vanhoover anymore; I’m sure the ponies around here still cherish harmony, and that includes kindness and generosity.” She let her noble declaration stand for on its own for a moment before letting out a breath. “And if they don’t, I’m willing to use my magic in exchange for their help. I’m sure there must be ponies there who need healing or broken farm tools repaired, stuff like that. Plus, it will give me a chance to introduce Lashtada to them.”
Aisle couldn’t help but smirk at that, hoping that she was right about things getting better once they reached a town. “But in the meantime, we need to press on,” he groaned as he got up, stretching his sore muscles. Now he just had-
“What’s the holdup?”
The rasping whisper caused both of them to jump, and it was only after a second of looking that Aisle thought to call out. “Aria?”
There was no warning, no sound or sudden flash of light; Aria just appeared a few feet ahead of them, causing Aisle to yelp and almost fall over. Cozy wasn’t much better, giving a start before catching herself, letting out a calming breath before speaking. “You were supposed to stay at the city limits sign, not come back here. Is something wrong?”
“Are you kidding me?” snorted Aria, glaring at the two of them. “What’s wrong is that you two were supposed to have been there already!” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion then. “I’m warning you, if you were trying to ditch me-”
“We weren’t,” soothed Aisle. “We’ve just had some trouble making progress. We were still heading right for you.”
“Hmph, sure you were.” Aria crossed her forelegs over her chest petulantly, but didn’t press the issue.
After she’d let these two talk her into going to the Crystal Empire with them, the next problem had been getting out of the camp without Lex noticing. For the ponies that was easy enough; they’d already told Lex to his face that they were going and he’d been fine with it. She, on the other hand (or hoof, or whatever they said here), didn’t have that option. Even if Lex didn’t see her leave, she was conspicuous enough that someone would, and when they told him that she’d quit the camp, all bets would probably be off where Lex was concerned. He’d made it quite clear that he didn’t want to let her loose on his precious country, at least not without his being there to boss her around.
So that meant leaving camp without being seen. Fortunately, she still had enough magic left to use her invisibility spell. It would only last a few minutes, but with a flight spell active – though that only lasted a few minutes as well – she’d be able to put some good distance between herself and that wretched place before she became visible again. At that point, the only issue had been setting up a meeting place, and Aisle had been quick to suggest the sign marking the city’s northern limits.
Aria had done her part to perfection, but her co-conspirators had been late in arriving. Enough so that Aria had cast those spells again to go looking for them; luckily finding the pair from the air hadn’t been especially hard. Now they just needed to get their rears in gear. “Let’s get going then. The sooner we get to your Crystal Kingdom, or whatever it’s called, the sooner I can get my voice back.”
With a groan, Aisle started to fumble with the rope to the sled, making Cozy frown at the Siren. She almost suggested that Aria take a turn pulling the sled, if she was so concerned with their speed, but managed to catch herself just in time. Even if Aria was making the right decision by coming back with them, that didn’t mean that Cozy was ready to let her handle Pillow’s body! Instead, the crystal mare let out a slow breath, forcing herself to remember the tenets of Lashtada’s faith that Princess Cadance had taught her. Love begins with compassion. “Aria, I didn’t get a chance to say this before, but…thank you. I know you’re risking a lot by coming with us like this.”
Giving Cozy a sour look, Aria huffed in response. “You just better hope your princess can deliver. If I go through all this and don’t get my voice back, I promise you: you’ll lose more than just a husband.” Cozy opened her mouth to reply, but Aria pointedly turned away before she could, snubbing her. Sighing, Cozy went to go help Aisle re-tie the ropes around Pillow’s transport, reminding herself that there would be other chances to talk to the Siren before they made it home. The Crystal Empire hadn't been built in a day, after all.
For her part, Aria glanced back at the camp. With any luck, she was done with the place. No more having to navigate the multitude of pathetic nobodies living there. No more having to deal with Lex’s overbearing arrogance. No more having to put up with Sonata’s irritating idiocy. Good riddance, she decided, giving a dismissive flick of her tail. I’m better off without you anyway. From now on, I’m a solo act, and this time it’ll be on my terms!
Even so, her gaze lingered on the place before she turned to leave.
Lex didn’t react to his shadow’s taunt, save to let his eyes flick towards the thing. It was currently falling perpendicular to the light from the sun, which was nearing the horizon. For a moment he found himself wondering again what had caused it to assist him during his fight with Xiriel, but his curiosity faded away after a few seconds, unsustainable in the face of the overwhelming languor he felt right then.
He could hear Sonata addressing the crowd of ponies on the other side of the medical tent, but he couldn’t bring himself to pay attention to what she was saying. He knew it was important, knew that lives could very well depend on getting everypony to try and fortify this place as much as possible…but at the moment it was out of his hooves. Sonata would either succeed or fail, and then he’d have to deal with it either way. But right at this moment there was nothing for him to do.
That was what Sonata had wanted, of course. She’d flat-out told him to rest, just like House Call had, not understanding that rest was the last thing he wanted right now. He had almost called her back when she’d gone to address everypony, wanting desperately for her to stay there with him, for her warmth and her caring and her love to push back the despondency that had engulfed him in the wake of his anger. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to do so, knowing that she had an important job to do. Instead, all he’d been able to do was utter a brief statement of gratitude for the moment of respite she’d given him, wondering if she knew just how deeply he’d meant it. But that moment was over now…
Now, there was nothing left to distract him. No half-hearted theories to cling to, no enemies to fight, no injured ponies to attend to or instructions to give. Now there was nothing to do but sit there and face the overwhelming, awful truth.
It’s your fault they died.
Cloudbank. Thermal Draft. C. Shells. Sandbar. Turbo. Block Party as well. Lex sat there and silently recited their names, remembering each of their faces, those ponies that had died because he had been neither strong enough nor smart enough to protect them. No matter that the circumstances had been extreme, or that he had been completely taken in by Xiriel’s deceptions; he had taken on the mantle of responsibility for all of the ponies here, and there was no excuse for not being up to the task.
You were supposed to be better than the princesses, whispered his tulpa silently, spurred on by his despair. After all your talk about their incompetence, what have you accomplished? Right now your people are hungry, but all you’re doing is putting them to work. Nosey was brutalized right in front of you. And there are six ponies dead under your watch. Seven, really, since you couldn’t save Cozy’s husband either. The words were laced with scorn, despite having no voice. You should go crawling back to Celestia and Luna and admit that you’re unfit to govern.
Lex shuddered at the verbal assault, and it was only with extreme difficulty that he tried to look for something else to focus on. His shadow was rarely this loquacious; for it to be so unrestrained in its mockery, even without his interacting with it, meant that he needed to think about something else. Anything else. Doing nothing was no longer viable, there had to be something-
Glancing to the side, Lex saw Severance – still hovering where Sonata had directed it – and quickly took action before he had time to think better of it. “Severance, come here.”
For a moment he didn’t think the scythe would obey, but it slowly began to float toward him despite the altercation they’d had. Despite its seeming calm, Lex still grasped it in his telekinesis when it had halved the distance between them. Reassured when he didn’t feel it struggle against his grip, he pulled it closer, until it was right in front of him. After a tense moment, he decided that the weapon wasn’t going to attack him over what had happened. Probably because it doesn’t want to endanger the Night Mare’s investment in me, he thought cynically. But that was fine. Although he’d lost his temper, Lex felt no remorse for how he’d treated the weapon. Severance’s failure to protect the others, as well as its indifference about what had happened, meant that it had gotten what it deserved.
Instead, Lex turned his attention back to what they had been discussing before he’d lost control of his emotions. “Finish your report,” he ordered brusquely. When the weapon hesitated to respond, he continued. “Everypony was killed. What happened then?”
Another second passed, and then Severance began speaking again. The scythe talked about how it had flown at Nosey then, intent on cutting her down – Lex’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly at the weapon’s choice of words, indicating that it hadn’t recognized that the blonde mare was being possessed even if it had known something was wrong – only for her to get the drop on it, sending it elsewhere. Despite Severance’s words being entirely psychic in their communication, Lex’s ears perked up at its description of what happened next, his misery forgotten.
Xiriel’s attack had sent Severance to another plane of existence, and the denizens there had detected its presence immediately and attacked it aggressively. Although the scythe’s description of the battle it had fought was presented in crisp, clinical terms, it still painted a vivid picture. It described hordes of lesser creatures flinging themselves at it, engaging it with almost fanatical zeal despite how easily it cut them down. Undeterred by the ineffectiveness of their massed assault, they managed to keep it busy long enough for some of the plane’s more powerful residents to notice the commotion, coming to join the fray. By the end of the battle, Severance had apparently engaged with a creature whose power – if the scythe wasn’t exaggerating – eclipsed even Xiriel’s. Disturbingly, Severance apparently hadn’t won that last encounter. Instead, it had fought its last foe to an impasse, using the moment when its enemy had paused to regroup to cut the planar border and return to Equestria. Even then, that had only barely worked, its enemy having engaged magic to try and prevent its escape; the scythe had made it out, but it hadn’t returned directly to Vanhoover as it had intended, reappearing on the other side of the Unicorn Mountains. It had taken it almost a day to physically travel back.
Lex was silent for a long moment after Severance finished, brooding over what he’d just been told. That Severance was able to traverse the planes under its own power was new information, a stark reminder that he still didn’t know everything the weapon was capable of. But there was another aspect to the story that concerned him more. “Could those monsters have followed you here?” he asked grimly, already imagining the worst-case scenario. “Do they have magic that can determine your location?”
The scythe’s answer was the one he least wanted to hear: it didn’t know. That was enough to make Lex bite his lip, cursing softly as he tried to figure out how to respond to this latest unwelcome revelation. Severance was in his grasp now, which meant that if anyone tried to scry on it the anti-scrying spell he kept on his person should have activated, but that offered little in the way of reassurance. Severance had been back in Equestria for almost a full day already, and besides, his spell hadn’t prevented Aria’s tracking spell from locating him, which meant that the protection it offered was less than perfect. If those creatures came to Equestria…
He’d just have to deal with it, then. For all that he’d bungled things with Xiriel, he’d still managed to uncover and slay the creature. He’d do the same to any of those angels that Severance had fought if they came here.
His thoughts were interrupted as Severance requested that he fill it in as to what had happened during its absence. For a moment Lex considered denying it, but he recognized that the impulse was petty, and pushed it aside. Instead, he gave the scythe the same curt recitation of facts that it had given him, telling it how he had gone into Vanhoover to look for the missing ponies before returning and confronting the devil that had possessed Nosey, slaying it.
Saying that reminded Lex that there was one other thing he could be doing: examining the scroll that had been in Xiriel’s possession. Releasing the scythe, Lex telekinetically dug through his saddlebag, pulling the scroll-tube out a moment later. Eyeing it warily, he called upon his circlet again, peering at the multiple magical auras around it. Again, he saw the necromantic magic that was contained there…but now that he could properly analyze it, there myriad other magical auras surrounding the case as well, all of considerable power, some of them incredibly so.
Abjuration magic, which was designed to protect, was there. So was divination, which was the type of magic that gathered information. Transmutation was also present, as was at least one aura of enchantment magic, and illusion magic as well. Evocation, with its direct manipulation of energy was likewise to be found. That’s almost every type of magical aura that this is capable of detecting, Lex realized. Only conjuration magic, the magic that was designed specifically to interact with other planes, was missing…something which was understandable, given that Xiriel had been from the planes itself. After all, Lex knew that it was laborious to store spells in a physical medium, whether it was a scroll or a gem. Xiriel wouldn’t have wanted to embed magic that it could utilize on its own.
Despite the prospect of so much new magic at his hooves, however, Lex regarded the scroll critically. So far there wasn’t anything to indicate that it was trapped or otherwise protected against tampering, but his circlet’s ability to view the magical spectrum was far from the most definitive method for checking such things. One of those auras might very well be an active spell effect, rather than an embedded one, he knew, just waiting to go off if someone other than a designated user unrolled it.
Even so, the temptation was there. New knowledge had long been one of the extremely rare sources of joy in Lex’s life, particularly where magic was concerned. More than that, however, was the fact that the spells in the scroll might be of vital help in combating the ghoul threat. Besides, there was no guarantee that the scroll was trapped; Xiriel had hidden it inside its own body, and the thing had been arrogant enough to believe that no one would ever take it from it. Maybe…maybe a risk was what was called for now. No one was around, besides Severance, and it was strong enough that any potential traps were surely no threat to it. If no one else stood to be hurt-
You always hurt others no matter what you do, came the voiceless words of his tulpa. The rebuke made Lex’s ears fold back, sighing as he lowered the scroll and reluctantly placed it back in his saddlebag. Despite the venom in the words, they weren’t wrong. It wasn’t certain that the ghouls were an imminent threat, which meant that examining the scroll any further without taking the proper precautions was the height of foolishness. Waiting was the more responsible action, and he needed to act responsibly, lest he end up having more lives weighing on his conscience.
Hearing that Sonata was still speaking, Lex found himself with nothing to do again. Frowning at the prospect, he only belatedly realized that he felt terrible. Despite his wounds having been transferred to Xiriel, he still felt sore all over from how badly he’d overextended himself, and the mild dizziness that he’d been fighting off was already starting to come back. More than that, although he’d woken up from an entire day’s worth of sleep a few hours ago, the contents of those last few hours had utterly depleted him. But even so, he had no desire to sleep…not when he could guess what torments would await him in his dreams. Instead…instead he’d just lie down for a moment. That way he’d be able to tell Sonata that he’d been resting when she came back.
Sinking to the ground, Lex cast a weary glance at Severance. “Stay alert for…anything that isn’t a pony,” he muttered. The weapon gave no response except to turn its blade away from him, which he took to be a sign of acquiescence. Now he just had to rest for a short time without falling asleep. He’d think about something else, rather than the ponies he’d let down…
Turning his thoughts toward the projected costs of rebuilding Vanhoover, Lex let the numbers and calculations fill his thoughts. From there he let those segue into what he’d do for the city’s economy, which in turn led to the legal reforms he planned to implement. All of them were thoughts he’d had before, to the point where they were like books that he’d long since memorized, turning the familiar computations and forecasts over in his mind soothingly. He didn’t even notice when he laid his head down, his eyes fluttering shut as exhaustion finally overtook him.
“You have no idea how badly you’ve disappointed me.”
For almost a year, Lex’s sleep had been plagued by relentless nightmares. Ever since the hasty, ill-considered ritual he’d performed during his early days on Everglow – trying to contact Princess Luna in a failed attempt to map the planar distance between that world and Equestria – he hadn’t known a single night’s rest. Instead, sleep now invariably resulted in his not only reliving the worst failures and humiliations from his past, but also vividly envisioning the worst possible outcomes of his hopes for the future. It was abject misery, made all the worse by the knowledge that it was always waiting for him every time he laid down to rest.
Even the recent revelation that the tulpa that tormented him day and night could be theoretically controlled was no comfort. Although he’d initially been hopeful at the prospect of being able to sleep peacefully again, nothing had come of his repeated attempts to master that rebellious aspect of his mind. Instead, his inability to bridge the gap between what he could theoretically do and what he could actually accomplish – as he couldn’t in so many other things, chief of which was social interaction – served to bring Lex only renewed anger and frustration.
But now…now there were no nightmares to be found. No images of his parents mournfully telling him how anguished his disappearance had made their final years. No visions of his ruling over an empty city, its ponies universally having abandoned him because of his incurable unfriendliness. No scene of Sonata laughing at his thinking she could ever have loved someone like him.
Instead there was blue fire in every direction, the flames rising in an unbroken ring around him to an incredible height, blocking out his ability to see anything save the full moon sitting directly overhead. But despite the encircling blaze, the area in which he found himself was shadowy, the fire seeming to absorb light rather than emit it. Even the ground couldn’t be properly seen, utterly black and lacking any sort of definition, as though he was standing on a starless patch of the night sky itself. And across from him…
The pronouncement of disappointment reached his ears then, and a moment later the Night Mare stepped from the shadows, her features twisted in derision as she gazed down at him.
So this is the new nightmare, thought Lex disdainfully. It was a surprisingly banal choice on his tulpa’s part; up until now, all of the torments it had arranged for him had been intensely personal. But this? This had no emotional component for him. A dream wherein he angered the goddess instead of reaching an accord with her would certainly be unpleasant – he knew full well that she had the power to end his life, or worse, in any of a thousand different ways – but he had faced down death too many times for that to be truly frighten-
“On the contrary,” hissed the Night Mare, her eyes narrowing dangerously, “what I do to you will be far worse than anything your tantabus has done up until now.”
There was no signal to accompany her words, but the barbed wire wrapped around his left foreleg suddenly clenched and began to writhe, digging bloody furrows into his skin. Lex gasped at the sensation, taken by surprise both by the sudden pain and the immediate lucidity that it brought. As much as this resembled his last encounter with the dark goddess, Lex knew right then that this was no mere memory.
The Night Mare was really here.
The barbed wire continued its bloody writhing as the goddess spoke next. “Not only will your agonies be unending, but so will your disgrace. You will be among the lowliest slaves in my realm, made to endure whatever humiliations my more accomplished faithful feel like inflicting upon you. You will be stripped of all power, shorn of all pride, forced to live with the memory of everything you’ve lost and the certainty that you will never regain it.” The look on her face was one of contempt then, her lip curling. “Such is the fate of those who fail me as spectacularly as you have.”
“We had a deal!” snarled Lex, forcing himself to keep the pain out of his voice. The wire was digging in deeper now, all but flensing his skin free from the muscle underneath. Lex tried to call upon his dark magic then, trying to turn into a bodiless shadow despite knowing that he had expended it all fighting Xiriel. Sure enough, the power failed to materialize, with the wire continuing to slice his leg to pieces unstoppably.
“You actually have the gall to speak to me of that,” she spat, her voice dripping with scorn. “I gave you power befitting my most faithful, and what have I received in return?” She raised a hoof and brought it down angrily, causing the ground to shudder and almost making Lex lose his balance. “Where are the followers you promised me? The prayers made in my name?”
“Keeping everypony alive comes first!” Lex had to struggle to make the words come out as a rebuke rather than a scream, glaring at the Night Mare defiantly, refusing to let her get the better of him. “I’ll promulgate your religion after I’ve destroyed the monsters infesting my city!”
The Night Mare flared her wings in response. “A poor excuse, considering how feeble your efforts up until now have been!”
That struck a nerve. “‘Feeble’?” he growled, rearing up on his hind legs, furious at how she was belittling him. The despair he’d so recently felt was gone now, swept away in the face of his renewed rage. “FEEBLE?! I have struggled and fought and suffered to bring Vanhoover and its ponies back from the brink of destruction! I’ve faced enemy after enemy after enemy and slain them all while doing everything I can to protect those under my care! I have spared nothing in terms of effort and intellect and power for my people, and you dare call what I’ve done ‘feeble’?!”
All of a sudden, he didn’t care that he was face-to-face with a goddess. He didn’t care that he had no chance of hurting her, much less defeating her, in a fight. All he cared about was the sheer indignity of what she’d said about everything he’d done up until now. Reaching out with his undamaged foreleg, he began to gesture at her, a chant spilling from his lips as he recited the strongest attack spell he had left. He knew it was futile – even if the magic affected her, all it would do would be to seal her in a prison of ice, and he was under no illusion that would do anything more than irritate her – but so what? If she was going to drag him down to her realm for an eternity of torment anyway, then he wouldn’t go quietly!
That was the plan, at least. But before he’d gotten through a dozen syllables a shudder ran through him, one powerful enough to throw off his chanting, causing the spell to fizzle. Alarmed, it took him a moment to realize what had happened: the pain in his left foreleg had stopped, the cessation of agony being so profound that it had interrupted his casting. Confused, he looked back at the Night Mare.
Folding her wings back at her sides, the goddess gave him a cool look, her earlier displeasure no longer apparent. “It’s feeble because you still think you can accomplish everything on your own,” she noted calmly. “That’s why you’ve missed or squandered every opportunity you’ve had to expand your power base.”
Uncertain how to react to the sudden change in her disposition, Lex eyed her warily. “I have missed nothing,” he insisted, his ire still roused. “I have utilized every available aspect of my surroundings and circumstances to restore order!”
“And yet you left those aranea in Tall Tale.”
That caught Lex off-guard, not having thought about Fireflower and his siblings in some time. “Of course I did! It would have been immoral to force them to come here with me, especially after what they’d been through!”
The Night Mare continued as though she hadn’t heard his protest. “You ignored your mate’s sister, rather than nurturing her interest in you, and haven’t even realized that she’s abandoned you.”
“What?!” Lex could only blink at that, taken completely by surprise. Aria had left the camp? When?! More importantly, why?! He was the only means for her to regain her voice! For her to have abandoned that prospect of her own free will was inconceivable! He’d need to track her down, before-
The Night Mare spoke again, breaking his train of thought. “And worst of all, you pushed yourself so hard creating food for everyone that you ended up crippled, which led to those others going into the city on your behalf and dying there.” She paused to let that sink in, and when Lex didn’t protest her assessment, she continued, letting some displeasure creep back into her voice. “Including my cleric, your only success at keeping your promise to me.”
“…get to the point,” spoke Lex through gritted teeth, suddenly sick of this entire exchange. “Are you here because I’m such a disappointment, or are you here to criticize my leadership?”
“I’m here,” answered the Night Mare, “because your complete and utter lack of leadership is the reason for my disappointment.” Her lip curled as she spoke. “You know how to govern, and maybe even how to rule, but any leadership that you might have demonstrated has been entirely accidental. As creditable as your accomplishments are, you should have found it easy to make the ponies of this place revere you, and in turn worship me. Instead, you only managed to convert a single pony, and you were so wrapped up in yourself that you let her die.” She leaned forward then, baring her teeth just a little as she lowered her head toward him. “I’m here to give you a warning: improve your efforts, or next time I’ll make good on my threats.”
Lex glared at her in undisguised enmity. “I’ll spread your religion. Until then, don’t appear in front of me again.”
The Night Mare snarled at that, and suddenly Lex felt like a mountain had been dropped on him, a sudden pressure falling onto his back that knocked him to the ground, preventing him from moving. “Don't think that because I wanted to see what remained of your spirit, you have free rein to address me in whatever manner pleases you!" she hissed. Lex didn't retort, unable to so much as draw breath beneath the incredible force weighing him down, and it was several seconds before the Night Mare released him, straightening up as she did so. When she spoke again, her voice was restrained once more. "Now, I'm not unaware of the hardships you've overcome, or of the difficulty you have in motivating others. So in recognition of what you have managed to accomplish, I'll give you two things."
Lex had barely managed to pick himself up off the ground when she waved a hoof at him, and he felt his saddlebag shift. Giving the Night Mare a dark look, Lex nevertheless telekinetically reached into the bag on his right side, his eyebrows rising as he withdrew a ruby the size of his head. He had learned enough about gemstones from his mother to know that this wasn't like the ordinary gems that could be found throughout Equestria; its size alone made it significantly rare. But that wasn't what made his eyes linger on the gem's blood-red facets: there was a spell inside. A powerful one.
"Use it to bring Cloudbank back to life," instructed the Night Mare casually.
That was enough to make Lex's head whip around, looking at her with wide eyes. "What?!"
"Secondly, information," continued the Night Mare blithely. "The entirety of that city's ghouls will overrun your camp in a little over an hour."
Lex sat bolt upright, his eyes wide with horror at what he’d just been told. “What do-”
But he stopped speaking as he realized that the Night Mare wasn’t there anymore. Neither was the ring of blue fire, nor the full moon overhead. In fact, he’d been standing before, so why was he sitting up now…?
The answer came immediately, supplied by what little he could see of his surroundings. Although only a small amount of ambient light was making its way in, it was enough to let him see that he was inside a small tent, almost identical to the one he’d woken up in the last time he’d unexpectedly lost consciousness. Brushing aside the memory of the injuries he’d inflicted on himself when he’d created food for everypony, Lex lurched to his hooves, ignoring the ripple of pain that went through his body as he kicked off the blanket that had been laid over him. He could hear the distant murmur of overlapping voices, none of them screaming or crying, and that sent desperate hope through him as he lunged for the tent flap. He had to warn everypony that the ghouls were coming!
…or were they?
He slowed to a stop in front of the tent flap, his mind suddenly whirling as he started to doubt the veracity of what he’d been told. Although he’d been certain at the time that his dream had been real, new doubts floated through his mind now. Could that have been some new form of nightmare inflicted by his tulpa? Normally, Lex would have dismissed the possibility out of hoof, since it had never altered its behavior before, but with how strange it had been acting during his fight with Xiriel that was no longer the case. If it could act differently then, why not now?
It’s not impossible, Lex realized anxiously, theories already starting to percolate in his mind. The idea that the spiteful thing in his shadow would torment him with predictions that the ghouls were about to descend on everyone, rather than scenes of intense emotional pain, wasn’t so farfetched. On the contrary, the more he thought about it the more plausible it seemed, and Lex felt his tension starting to ebb. Belatedly realizing that he wasn’t wearing his saddlebags, he glanced around; sure enough, they were lying in a corner of the tent. He grabbed it telekinetically, the auras springing up around the bags and his horn lighting up the interior of the tent as he-
-suddenly froze, the saddlebags suspended in mid-air. Although telekinesis didn’t offer tactile feedback, he could still sense the amount of weight he was lifting, since greater amounts required commensurately greater effort on his part. As such, Lex had been able to immediately recognize that it was taking more exertion than it should have to lift his saddlebags…almost as if they were carrying more weight than they had been before. Turning them over in his mental grip, he opened each bag and removed their contents, extracting Xiriel’s scroll, the five enchanted gemstones…
And a huge ruby.
Lex stared at it grimly, having already guessed that it was the source of the additional weight, before shoving it and the other items back into his saddlebag, donning it before striding outside as quickly as his injured body could move. It wasn’t just a nightmare, he swore silently, his earlier doubts now utterly obliterated. Instead, he started running through various responses to this latest catastrophe, focusing on the logistical and tactical considerations for a number of possible responses. She said that the ghouls will be here in just over an hour. There should be enough daylight left then that we’ll be able to see them coming, so-
But another unpleasant surprise was waiting for Lex as he left his tent: night had already fallen. Slowing his pace at this new revelation, Lex swore the most profane curses he knew as he twisted his head around, trying to find even the slightest bit of light on the horizon, but it was already full dark, with the only illumination coming from the small fires spread throughout the camp. Turning this latest revelation over in his head, Lex suddenly felt a small surge of hope rush through him: if he had slept long enough, then his dark magic should have replenished itself!
But that hope died as soon as it was born, as he turned his thoughts toward his horn’s magic and immediately felt a void where he should have felt power waiting to be tapped. Apparently he had been unconscious long enough for the sun to go down, but not so long that he’d gotten sufficient rest to restore what he’d already expended. It was the worst possible combination of events, and that realization made him gnash his teeth as his anxiety swelled, anger rushing in to drown it a moment later. Gritting his teeth in a silent snarl, Lex stalked toward the medical tent. This is just like what happened with that kraken, he screamed internally, remembering how he’d been similarly out of magic and near-totally incapacitated when the Great Lord of the Deep had attacked. It’s all happening again!
That thought was enough to send him down a quick conceptual analysis of whether or not he could use the same strategy now that had led them to victory then, but it took less than two seconds for him to realize that wasn’t viable. That plan had hinged on everypony fighting a defensive battle so as to let him, Cloudbank, and Severance battle the kraken without interruption, since he’d realized that killing it would send all of the monsters back where they’d come from. But the ghouls had no such weakness; however many there were, each and every one of them would need to be slain in order to put an end to their threat.
Nor would he be able to enlist the ponies here at the camp to fight. Not only were they malnourished and wounded, but he couldn’t conjure weapons and armor for them the way he had for everypony back at the shelter. Even if Sonata could use her magic to enhance everyone, their previous engagement had shown that to have only a limited effect; sending them against the ghouls with nothing but her song to bolster them would doubtlessly result in a huge number of casualties, something which had to be avoided at all costs.
For a brief moment he thought about organizing an evacuation instead, knowing that Sonata’s magic – with its ability to hold large numbers of ponies enthralled – would be more suitable for that, but he discarded that idea immediately. He had previously found that idea to be lacking, and that was even truer now; even if he could have gotten such an endeavor organized in an hour, marching at night would only leave them blind while the ghouls picked them off at their leisure. Besides, where would they even go?
But if he couldn’t empower everypony here to fight off the imminent attack, and couldn’t evacuate them out of harm’s way, then what was left? Desperately, he turned over riskier plans, trying to come up with something, anything that would let him protect everypony here. But there was nothing. He couldn’t invent a new spell that would help with only an hour’s worth of time and no research or testing materials, and even if he’d known a magical ritual that could have helped a single hour wouldn’t have been enough time to enact it. And of course, none of the spells he still had prepared were able to affect a large number of beings at once, whether to attack the ghouls or defend the ponies here. But with no other magic at his disposal, he…wait…
Almost at the entrance to the medical tent, Lex stopped, remembering that he did have more magic at his disposal: Xiriel’s scroll! Glancing back at his saddlebag, Lex telekinetically lifted it, holding the scroll case up in front of his eyes. He’d previously decided not to tamper with it any further before he had a chance to carefully examine it for potential traps, but that was a luxury he could no longer afford. Now, with what was likely an army of the undead headed there way, he was going to have to take a chan-
“Sir?” interrupted a familiar voice. Glancing over, Lex found himself almost nose-to-nose with House Call, who looked surprised to see him. “What are you doing out of bed?”
Lex, however, had no interest in getting involved in another debate about his medical status. “Where is Sonata?” he demanded. The scroll would need to wait at least a few minutes; right now he needed to find Sonata, since she was best suited to giving orders on his behalf to a large number of ponies.
Apparently having expected to be blown off, House Call’s sigh seemed almost perfunctory as he canted his head towards the back of the field hospital. “Last I saw, she was helping everypony get ready with that stuff you wanted. The big holes and things.”
Lex didn’t bother with a reply, turning to circle the tent while cursing himself for not thinking to look there first. Apparently he’d gotten used to thinking of the place’s entrance as some sort of de facto meeting point, and although that had cost him barely a minute it was enough to make him berate himself. Every minute counted now! Forcing himself into a trot, Lex ignored the shooting pains that sent through him as he hurried toward where Sonata hopefully was. He could already see several light sources up ahead, knowing from how they were bobbing that they’d been conjured by unicorns, and he could hear what sounded like shovels digging in the dirt. Picking up his pace, he silently wondered if there was any chance that Sonata’s initiative would meet with his expectations. A long ditch. Some berms. Fencing. Caltrops, he silently ran through the list of potential defenses in his head. Maybe if the ghouls weren’t as numerous as he thought, and if everypony had poured on for the fortifications, this would be enough…
But as he approached the working ponies, Lex saw that he’d been wrong to hope for very much. The sight that greeted his eyes was maybe two dozen holes scattered haphazardly around, none of them looking more than three feet deep in the unicorns’ light. Worse, they were narrow, most being a couple of feet wide and about as long. Of course, that wasn’t surprising, given how – contrary to what Lex had thought he’d heard – there wasn’t a shovel in sight. Rather, the ponies doing the digging were using wooden boards, bent metal rods, and even spoons to displace the earth. Nor did the incompetence on display end there. The dirt from the holes was scattered haphazardly rather than being packed into berms, and there were a few piles of loose pieces of wood that Lex could only presume were earmarked to be put to use later, because in their current arrangement they weren’t any sort of effective defense.
The overall state of the western edge of the camp could be summarized in one word, Lex knew: disappointing. It was enough to make him curse his girlfriend’s misguided efforts, but he pushed that thought away, knowing that he should have been there to guide her instead of succumbing to exhaustion. But it was too late to regret that now; now there was nothing to do but react to the situation at hoof.
If everypony couldn’t be bolstered to fighting form nor removed from the battlefield, then the only thing to do was defend them, Lex knew. But with Aria having fled, Cozy and Aisle gone, Cloudbank and the others dead, and Sonata being too precious to him to let fight, that left only left one pony of note to face off against the ghouls: himself. With how useless these “defenses” were, that meant that he’d have nothing but his remaining prepared spells, Severance, and whatever magic was on that scroll to save over a thousand ponies from an unknown, but likely very large, number of ghouls.
He’d just have to hope that would be-, no…he’d just have to make that be enough.
Hearing his girlfriend’s voice, Lex glanced over and saw her trotting towards him, grinning and waving. “Whaddaya think?” she called, an action which everypony else apparently regarded as a signal to take a break, because they immediately dropped their makeshift tools and began milling about, several shooting glances their way as they struck up conversations with their fellows. Either oblivious or uncaring, Sonata continued to trot toward him. “Just like you ordered: a whole buncha ho-whoops!” Her report was cut off as she almost stepped in one of the tiny pits in the ground, sending her stumbling. Managing to catch herself, she laughed good-naturedly as her mistake. “These’ll totes trip up any ghoul that wanders into them.”
But Lex couldn’t have been less amused by her antics. For a brief instant he considered letting her know just how useless her efforts had been, but there was no time to dwell on that now. “Sonata, I want you to listen to me very carefully,” he spoke softly, making sure his voice didn’t carry. “Take everypony and gather them in the center of the camp. Put the elderly, young, and the sick toward the center, with the healthiest on the outside. Try and make sure the ponies on the outer edge are armed, and instruct everypony to light a ring of fire around the grou-”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down!” Gesticulating wildly to punctuate her gesture, Sonata gave him a confused look. “What’s going on, now? Is this some more anti-ghoul stuff?”
Lex winced slightly at her outburst, glancing around to make sure that she hadn’t attracted too much attention before continuing. “Yes. They’re going to be here in an hour, which means that there’s no more time to focus on fortifications. The only thing everypony can do now is establish the most defensible formation that they can.” He paused to think for a moment, before amending his previous orders. “The ghouls are coming here from the city, so make sure that the most capable ponies are on the western edge of the group. C. Shells’ crew are the optimal choice, since they have combat experience. They’ll need to work with makeshift weapons, but…what are you doing?”
While he’d been speaking, Sonata had reared up on her back legs, holding her left foreleg up vertically while laying her right foreleg perpendicular across her hoof, making a “T” gesture. “Calling for a timeout,” she explained, before falling back onto all fours with a huff, “since otherwise you would have kept rambling.”
“I was not ram-” He cut himself off with a sigh, closing his eyes and taking a long moment to pull himself together. We don’t have time for this! “Sonata, this needs to happen right now.”
“I get that,” she insisted. “I just wanted to ask what you’re going to be doing?”
Lex cast a glance back toward his saddlebags. “Coming up with a plan.”
“Hmm…” She gave him a suspicious look then, before adding. “I’ll go round up the ponies, but then I’m coming back here and checking on you.” Not waiting for a reply, she turned and started to call for everyone’s attention, telling them to head back into camp. The assembled ponies seemed quite happy to call it quits for the day, quickly dropping their tools and trotting back toward the assembled fires. Sonata was one of the last to leave, shooting him a pointed look before disappearing around the side of the medical tent.
She wants to fight the ghouls alongside me, Lex knew. Despite being one of the least intellectual ponies he’d ever met, Sonata had often displayed keen insight into the dispositions of others, including himself. But for once, he felt confident about what she was thinking as well; her pointed question about what he would be doing had quite clearly telegraphed that she was under the impression – correctly so – that he intended to battle the undead horde personally. Worse, her statement about coming back, taken in conjunction with her earlier displeasure that he’d faced Xiriel without her, made her intentions obvious. The thought was enough to fill Lex with low-grade anxiety. Why didn’t she understand that the last thing he wanted was for her to be anywhere near danger? That worrying about her would erode his ability to concentrate on what needed to be done?
He recalled the Night Mare’s words then, chastising him for trying to do everything on his own. The memory made him scowl, but it did bring his thoughts back around to focus on what he needed to do now. Hopefully Sonata would be so caught up with getting everypony together that she wouldn’t have a chance to do anything else. In the meantime… “Severance!”
For a moment he couldn’t see if the scythe was responding to his call; when the work crew had left, they’d taken the light-bearing unicorns with them. With the medical tent between him and almost all of the campfires, he was blanketed in darkness and barely able to see anything. Even so, Lex didn’t move, keeping his eyes on the night-shrouded west. Sure enough, a moment later Severance floated into view, having obeyed the last orders he’d given it: to stay alert for anything that wasn’t a pony.
Slightly pleased that it had been effectively guarding Sonata and the workers from any ghouls that might have gotten ahead of the others, Lex decided to keep his satisfaction to himself. He was still mad at the thing for letting Cloudbank and the others die, after all. Instead, he grabbed the blade in his telekinesis, bringing it alongside him. “Light your blade,” he commanded it tersely. A moment later, the scythe obediently glowed with purplish fluorescent light, and Lex moved on to the next order of business. “Did anything try to approach the camp?”
When the weapon answered in the negative, Lex knew it was time to get down to business. Slowly, he emptied his saddlebags, letting Severance go as he held each item in his telekinetic grip. Silently, his eyes slid over the various gemstones and the scroll tube, considering each one in turn.
His eyes lingered longest on the oversized ruby, letting his circlet examine it magically as he remembered what the Night Mare had said about it. “Use it to bring Cloudbank back to life.” Just the thought that she’d given him a resurrection spell was enough to send a shudder of excitement down his spine, despite the situation he was in. The Night Mare might have meant for him to use it before he fought the ghouls, but Lex had no intention of doing so. Not only was bringing someone back from the dead only to immediately subject them to a life-or-death battle foolish, but if he cast the spell directly from where it had been embedded in the ruby then it would be gone for good, denying him the chance to study it and potentially learn how to cast the spell on his own…and if he could do that, then he could potentially bring anyone back to life! Just that thought was enough to make his mind swirl at the possibilities, and it was a long moment before slowly placing the ruby back in his saddlebag.
It was only after it had been stowed that he turned his attention to the other five gems. Despite their myriad effects, which could be reaped indefinitely rather than only once, Lex couldn’t help but regard them critically in comparison to the promise that the oversized ruby offered. Still, the ruby’s ability to restore the dead to life would be of no help in the upcoming battle, whereas these smaller gems – with their ability to enhance their user – would, even if only a little. But then again, that little had made all the difference when he’d fought that belier devil scant hours ago.
Holding the five gems aloft, Lex released them one by one, each of them adopting a different orbit as they began to revolve around his head. First the orange prism, which would enhance his spellcasting. Then the pale green prism, with its slight boost to his overall competence, followed by its dusty rose counterpart and the modest defensive precognition it granted. The iridescent spindle was fourth, and Lex fought down a shudder as he released it, remembering how it had enabled him to cast a spell without breathing when his lung had been punctured. But with the fifth gem, the scarlet and blue sphere, Lex hesitated. This had been the only one of those five gems that did him no good at all, being filled with knowledge that he already possessed regarding the manipulation of magic items. Utilizing it now would gain him nothing, and it was with a curled lip that he shoved it back into his saddlebag.
That left only the scroll…
Looking at it again via his circlet, Lex confirmed once again the numerous magical auras on it, and that he had no way of conclusively determining if they were from embedded spells or active magical traps. Not without conducting more testing, which would require time he didn’t have and spells he hadn’t prepared. I should just put this away until I can examine it safely, he knew, but the thought had no conviction behind it. It was possible that the magic this contained would aid him in combating the ghouls. After all, the scroll that he’d taken from that green dragon’s horde had proven to be invaluable when he’d fought Lirtkra; there was every reason to believe, with how many auras of powerful magic this scroll had, that the same thing would happen here. Besides, Xiriel had been arrogant enough that it was entirely plausible that it hadn’t bothered to lace the scroll with any further protection. But if I’m wrong…
Frowning as he realized that he was procrastinating, Lex pushed his doubts away. With disaster an hour or less away, there was nothing to do but take the risk! Firmly grasping the scroll tube in his telekinesis, Lex moved it a dozen feet away from himself just to be safe, and then slowly removed the scroll from the casing. Confirming that the case itself had no magical aura, he let it fall to the ground, turning his full attention to the rolled parchment. Gritting his teeth, he unrolled it all at once.
When nothing happened, Lex let out a slow breath. So far so good, but that didn’t rule out other ways that the scroll’s contents might be protected. Tentatively, he took a step closer to the scroll, his eyes squinting as he examined the first line of-
The explosion caught him completely by surprise.
“Look, I know you had to seduce her-”
“Sedate her!” interrupted House Call, fighting down a blush. “Miss Newsy was becoming hysterical, so we had to sedate her!”
“Right,” nodded Sonata, clearly not understanding the difference. “But I totes need to get everyone all together, so if you could just wake h-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish as a huge boom filled the air, as though someone had just set off some dynamite, causing her to jump. She wasn’t the only one, as all around her ponies were crying out in shock. “What the heck was that?!” she yelped, adding her voice to the growing chorus of panic, looking toward the back of the medical tent. That had seriously freaked her out! Lex had probably had it worse though, since that sounded like it had been super close to…to where he…
A moment later Sonata put two and two together, and the blood drained from her face. “L-Lex!” she yelled as she struggled to overcome her shock, lurching forward as she broke into a run, circling the tent. “LEX!”
Rounding the tent, her heart jumped into her throat as she saw her boyfriend lying on the ground, unmoving. Barely noticing Severance hovering a few feet away from him, she ran to his side, shaking him heavily. “Lex! Oh geez! Wake up! C’mon, wake up!” She looked around, and was about to yell for help when he groaned, starting to stir. “Lex!” This time her cry was one of relief, hugging him tightly.
“‘m alright…” he muttered. “The scroll…”
But Sonata wasn’t listening, doing her best to pick him up and drag him back toward the front of the medical tent, barely noticing the crowd that was starting to form. “C’mon, I’ll get the doctor-”
“No!” Somehow, he managed to wrench himself away from her, stumbling as he moved in the opposite direction. “I have to…get the scr-, no…” He stopped suddenly, staring at a patch of ground a few feet away.
Giving an incredulous shake of her head, Sonata glanced back at the assembled ponies. Seeing House Call there, she went over to him and lowered her voice. “Listen, could you do like with Nosey and seduce him a little? He’s not going to-, um, Doctor?” She blinked, wondering why he was groaning and putting his face in his hooves. “What? What’d I say?”
Oblivious to his girlfriend’s conversation, Lex simply continued to stare at the scraps of paper that were all that was left of the scroll.
For a long moment Lex simply stood there, trying to process what had just happened.
He had been prepared for the possibility that the scroll had been trapped, even if the exact nature of it had caught him by surprise. That it might have injured or impaired him had been a risk he’d judged to be acceptable, given the circumstances. But that the scroll would self-destruct in the process was something he hadn’t anticipated. Even now, he was still struggling to fully comprehend the enormity of its loss. How could anyone willingly destroy that much power? That much knowledge? Even as a measure against an enemy making it their own, to willfully entertain the possibility of annihilating everything that scroll contained…it was enough to make Lex’s revulsion for Xiriel sink to a new low.
Even in death that monster has outsmarted you. His shadow’s words were full of scorn, making Lex tense as the taunt hit home. Your failure to comprehend the depths of its spite have cost you your best chance of protecting everypony now.
The hateful barb immediately sent him into denial. There had never been any guarantee that whatever magic was contained within that scroll would have been useful against the ghouls, after all. It was entirely possible that the spells embedded on the parchment wouldn’t have helped him combat the undead ponies. In fact, it could be posited this latest setback wasn’t really a setback at all, in terms of formulating a strat-
“Lex…?”
Sonata’s voice pulled him out of his stupor, and Lex belatedly looked over at where she was peering at him with obvious worry, a crowd of ponies gathered around her. The sight was enough to remind him that he didn’t have the luxury to sit around and try to analyze what this latest disaster meant. He had to deal with it and move on. “…keep gathering everypony together, Sonata.” He saw her mouth fall open before he’d even had a chance to finish speaking, and held up a hoof to stop her, hoping she didn’t notice that he had to strain to do even that much. “I know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it,” he growled. Or at least, he tried to; to his own ears his voice sounded weary. “Just do what I told you.”
For a moment she looked like she was going to protest, giving him an unhappy look, before sighing and starting to usher everypony away. Lex saw House Call arguing with her but ignored them both, turning his attention back to the scattered scraps that were what remained of the scroll. Slowly, he gathered them up with his telekinesis, his horn glowing as he lifted each and every shred of parchment that he could see, gathering them all into a single mass. This will work, he told himself silently, steadying himself before he started to gesture and chant.
He had no idea if the repair spell that he’d used on Nosey’s glasses would also work on this scroll, but he had to try. Using it now meant that his small reservoir of divine magic would be completely expended for the day – since he wasn’t willing to use the last of his circlet’s stored energy to retain it; that would be better spent toward stretching what remained of his attack magic when the ghouls arrived – but if there was any chance that this could undo what had just happened, then it had to be taken. The spell was a lengthy one, and minutes passed as he slowly continued his casting, fighting off the dizziness that threatened to disrupt the process as he continued to form the necessary verbal and somatic components.
After what felt like an eternity, the spell discharged, and Lex stepped back even as he watched with baited breath while it took effect. Slowly, the fragments held aloft in his telekinetic aura began to move about, and he released them as they started to orient themselves, fluttering around chaotically before coming to a stop in mid-air. The pieces that were touching each other immediately began to meld together, tears repairing themselves as scorch marks smoothed over and disappeared. Gaps where the paper had burned irretrievably filled in as new parchment grew to replace what was missing. Best of all, lines of writing could be seen, crisp and clear.
Despite himself, Lex tensed at that, before forcing himself to relax. That particular trap had apparently been activated by the scroll being read rather than simply unrolled, since it hadn’t exploded until he’d started trying to study the writing on the paper. Since the trap had already expended itself, restoring the scroll shouldn’t restore it, while hopefully reconstructing all of the other spells it had contained.
A moment later the scroll was completely whole again, fluttering to the ground as the reparative magic finished. Lex didn’t immediately go over to it – it was unlikely that there was a secondary trap on it, since the first one had been so conclusive in its efficacy, but after what had just happened he couldn’t bring himself to rush in headlong – but instead brought his circlet’s other power to bear, tuning his vision in to the magical spectrum. This would confirm whether or not the spells the scroll had contained had also been rest-
There was nothing there.
“No…” The whisper slid from his lips, his heart giving a lurch as he beheld the total and complete absence of any sort of magical energy radiating from the scroll. For an instant, he seized onto the idea that something had happened to the circlet itself, like when Xiriel had covertly deactivated it, but that suspicion lasted exactly as long as it took Lex to turn his head and look at the magic items on his body, their auras plainly visible to him now. Trying to fight down a wave of desperation, he turned back to the scroll, approaching it heedlessly now as he lifted it in his telekinesis once again, peering at it intently. But no matter how much he gazed at it there was no magical signature there, only the trace echoes of lingering auras to indicate that there had been, and those were already starting to decay.
It took a supreme act of discipline on Lex’s part not to scream at the unfairness of it all. Why do all of my efforts fail?! he raged silently. Why am I always punished for doing the right thing?! He very nearly crumpled the scroll right there, but instead he choked down his frustration and made himself begin skimming the lines of text on the now magic-less parchment.
Lex knew from experience that spell scrolls were virtually identical to his spell-embedded gemstones, in that both essentially stored a pre-cast spell in a physical container, waiting to be unleashed; only the physical medium differed. In the case of his gems, a potential caster merely had to look into one of the crystalline facets and view the geometric diagrams within, which visualized the instructions for how the stored energy would take effect once it was released. For scrolls, the process was virtually identical, except that the instructions were textual in nature rather than formulaic.
Looking over the scroll now, Lex could see almost a dozen different spells outlined in the writing, the majority of which would have pushed him to his limits to cast successfully, but which were useless now. Although the writing which shaped and controlled the spell energy had been successfully reconstructed along with the paper, that didn’t matter because the energy itself was gone! He had restored the ink and parchment, but that was all; like a pitcher that had been tipped over, retrieving the container didn’t serve to put back what had been spilled. As it was now, the text on the scroll was nothing more than instructions for directing energy that was no longer there; that would be useful if he wanted to independently recreate those spells at a later date, but right now they were utterly useless.
But the final insult was that, from what he could make out, almost none of the spells had been combative in nature anyway. Powerful and versatile yes, but not meant for killing or destruction. Instead, they covered a diverse range of effects, ranging from a powerful divination that directly fed the caster information about a named person, place, or thing, to a powerful illusion designed to deceive both empirical senses and divination magic, to a spell that allowed the caster to attempt to make limited alterations to the fabric of reality in their immediate vicinity…though that last one seemed to be markedly unstable in terms of how the effects would actually manifest.
Under other circumstances, the prospect of reverse-engineering these spells would have excited him, but now Lex simply rolled the scroll up and placed it back in his saddlebag numbly. All of that for nothing, he thought tiredly. He had wasted some of what little magic he had left, to say nothing of time he didn’t have, and had nothing to show for it except confirmation that the scroll wouldn’t have helped very much anyway. Putting a hoof to his face, Lex felt a bitter laugh rising in his throat, and he didn’t bother trying to fight it off. The irony of the situation was sublime. It was a microcosm of everything that had happened ever since he came here: struggling with everything he had to secure a victory, only to find out that victory didn’t equate success. And now, everypony here will pay the price for it.
“Lex? You okay?”
He didn’t look up as he heard Sonata’s voice. “I’m as far from that state as can be imagined,” he muttered, his voice flat.
“Oh…” She clearly didn’t know how to respond to that, because the only thing he heard was the faint sound of her shuffling her hooves for a moment, before she started to speak up again. “Listen, I gathered everyone like you asked. They’re all meeting up in the middle of the camp, but they don’t know what’s going on and they’re all starting to get, like, super scared.” She paused for a moment, then added, “I don’t think that explosion just now helped…” When he didn’t reply, she ventured ahead. “I think you need to say something to them.”
He snorted derisively. “And make the situation even worse?” He shook his head, flinging a hoof out toward her dismissively. “You say something to them. That’s what you do.”
“It needs to come from you,” insisted Sonata. “You’re their leader.”
Her last three words sent a wave of bitterness through him, remembering how the Night Mare had indicted his lack of ability in that area. “Apparently I lack competence where leadership is concerned,” he spat, ears folding back as he looked away from her. “So clearly this isn’t a task for which I’m well suited.”
“…well duh.”
The frank acknowledgment of his shortcoming was so unexpected that Lex couldn’t help but look over at her, shocked that she’d kick him when he felt so down. But her response to his surprised expression was to give a long-suffering sigh. “Yeah, you totes suck at, you know…other people, but that’s why I’m here, remember?” She smiled then, trotting over until she was right in front of him, raising a hoof to her chest. “I didn’t mean that you should speak to everyone all by yourself. I meant that they need to see you up there, telling them what’s going on and that it’ll all be okay. I’ll be right next to you, doing the spokespony thing and taking out all the cranky parts and genius mumbo-jumbo.”
She turned around then so that she was standing alongside him, leaning over to press her body against his. “I know you’re sad about what happened to Cloudbank and the others,” she murmured, her smile dimming, “but that totes doesn’t mean you need to do everything all by yourself.” She raised a hoof then, placing it under his chin and gently raising his head so that he was looking into her eyes. “Let me help. With this. With the ghouls. With all of it.”
A denial was on his lips, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Except…no, it wasn’t “for some reason.” It was because her words called to mind the other criticism the Night Mare had leveled against his administration up until now. “It’s feeble because you still think you can accomplish everything on your own.” At the time he’d found the charge to be hypocritical of her, since he knew she championed self-reliance. But now…now he suddenly wondered if he’d misunderstood what she’d been telling him…
"Alright." Sighing, he slowly straightened up, pushing his despair away. “Let’s go.”
The smile she gave him in reply was almost enough to convince him that everything would work out somehow.
By Lex’s estimation, they had maybe forty-five minutes left before the ghouls arrived.
That was an approximation, of course. The Night Mare had said that they’d be there in “a little over” an hour, which left the exact time indeterminate. More important was that her pronouncement guaranteed them a minimum of sixty minutes before the undead ponies would make it here, though he’d already wasted more than ten minutes in fruitless pursuit of the spells that had been embedded in Xiriel’s scroll.
Of course, Lex wasn’t willing to bet the safety of everypony here on someone else’s word, even that of a goddess. To that end he’d left Severance at the western edge of the camp, reiterating his orders that it was to cut down any ghoul, monster, or anything that wasn’t a pony that approached the place. Even then, he planned on heading back there once he made a statement to everyone about their current situation. Not that he knew what to say, besides that they were about to be attacked by what had to be a horde of undead creatures and he had no idea what to do about it…
“Okay, so I just want to make sure that we’re totes on the same page,” spoke up Sonata, glancing over at him with her usual happy expression. But a second later her eyes widened, lips twisting into a grimace. “Oh geez! I’m really sorry!”
Lex frowned, confused by the sudden change in her temperament. “What?”
“I said ‘page.’ You know, like ‘scroll’?” she admitted sheepishly. “Too soon, right? That was super thoughtless of me.” She finished with an apologetic smile then, apparently not understanding that the look he was giving her in reply to that statement was one of incredulity mixed with exasperation. “I won’t do it again. Anyway, we should really book it to-, aw nuts, I did it again!”
Rolling his eyes at her inanity, Lex tried to steer the conversation back towards something less nonsensical. “You wanted to coordinate something with regards to my public address?”
Now it was her turn to furrow her brow. “Huh?”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex tried again. “What did you want to make sure we were ‘on the same page’ about?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, understanding blossoming on her face before her expression reset to its default look of happiness. “Yeah, so listen, we’re gonna do our usual gimmick, right? You use that whisper spell, and tell me what you wanna say, and I’ll totes turn it into stuff that sounds good.”
“Yes,” nodded Lex curtly.
“Because it’d be a really, really bad idea if you tried to do this by yourself.”
“I’m aware of that,” he huffed, glancing at her irritably.
“I mean, you sorta screwed up the whole thing with Garden Gate in a major way, and Spit Polish wasn’t much better, plus you did kinda do a bad job with letting the cat outta the bag about what happened to Cloudbank and the others, not to mention that you never really told everyone what the deal was with Block Party, and-”
“Sonata!” snapped Lex, stopping in place as he turned to look at her sharply, jaw clenched in irritation. For a moment he was ready to lambaste her for rubbing his nose in his previous failures, but his ire fell away an instant later, and he closed his eyes for a second as he let out a slow breath. “We’ll do this the way we usually do,” he confirmed. “I’ll speak, and you translate it into whatever you think is both accurate and palatable.”
Sitting up on her haunches and clapping her fore-hooves together, Sonata gave him a toothy grin. “Right!” she cheered. “Accurate and palpable are my middle names!”
“The word is…nevermind,” sighed Lex. Turning, he continued toward the center of camp, Sonata walking beside him happily.
Despite the relative brevity of the distance, Lex was already feeling winded by the time they approached their destination, his body aching all over. Although the explosion that had destroyed the scroll had been extremely localized, with only the very edge of it catching him, he knew that it had exacerbated his current condition. But right now he didn’t have the luxury of letting that impede him, despite the fact that he had to fight down a grunt of effort with each step he took. Refusing to think about what this meant with regard to his fighting the undead ponies that were likely already on their way here, he instead looked toward the crowd.
Sonata had indeed managed to gather almost everypony together. Although he could see stragglers still coming to join the crowd from every direction, the sheer number of ponies that were already there was considerable. It was impressive that she’d managed to gather so many of the camp ponies together so quickly…then again, considering what she’d just outlined about how he’d provided these ponies with so little information about what had been happening, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that they were hungry for answers.
“I made sure to get everything ready. See?” bragged Sonata, her expression making it obvious that she was exceptionally pleased with herself as she waved a hoof toward the crowd. “I totes remembered that you wanted a ring of fires around everypony, so check it out!” She nodded toward where small campfires – most of them little more than makeshift braziers composed of bowls or buckets with a few burning sticks in them – had been set along the ground at various intervals in a loose circle.
Lex gave a grunt of acknowledgment, not bothering to inform her that he’d been envisioning a single, unbroken ring of fire surrounding the camp ponies on all sides to act as a final barrier between themselves and the ghouls. In hindsight, that had been unrealistic anyway; such a thing would require massive amounts of fuel, and that simply wouldn’t be possible in the little amount of time they had. Worse, there was no indication that the ponies along the outer edge of the group – at least from what he could see – were armed. That was likewise unsurprising, since there were no real weapons to speak of in the camp that he knew about, but it was still disheartening. At the very least, it looked as though the edge of the crowd was formed by healthier ponies, but there was no way to verify that impression…not that it mattered anyway, he knew. With no weapons and no defenses, the composition of the group would be meaningless anyway. One way or another they’d all be slaughtered. The realization of just how helpless and exposed these ponies were was enough to make his stomach clench.
For her part, Sonata pointed off to the side, not even slightly daunted by his apparent lack of a reaction. “Plus, get a load of these! Boxes!” She said that last word in a voice that was practically gushing with enthusiasm, as though she couldn’t get over her excitement at having boxes there. “This way we’ll have something to stand on so everypony can see us! I brought them here ahead of time. Pretty smart, huh?”
Lex paused, not so much to consider her question – he wasn’t sure if it was rhetorical or not – but because he was rapidly reaching the limit of his suspension of disbelief over how she could be so positive in the face of what was about to happen. Normally, he would have suppressed his interest, at least until a more appropriate time, but at the moment he found that he couldn’t hold back his curiosity. “Are you really so unconcerned about the danger everypony here is in?” he asked abruptly.
She tilted her head slightly, her smile turning into an amused scoff. “What, the ghouls?” she snorted, the very picture of nonchalance. “Are you kidding me? We’ve dealt with stuff a bajillion times worse than that. I mean, yeah, you made it sound like there’s going to be a lot of them, but so what? You’re you, and I’m me, and we’re totes gonna fight them together, which means we’re gonna kick their flanks all over the place and look good doing it!” She went over to grab one of the boxes then, planting it right in front of the crowd, who started to murmur as they realized something was about to happen. Oblivious, Sonata looked at him as she went to fetch another one. “So yeah, I’m, like, not worried at all. For realsies. So, let’s give these ponies a pep talk, go school some ghouls, and show everypony that we’re super-awesome heroes!” she grinned as she plunked the second box down beside the first.
Lex wasn’t sure if he should be horrified by her naiveté or… No, he decided silently. Horrified is the proper reaction.
Before he could say anything to her, however, Sonata jumped up on one of the boxes and turned to address the crowd. Taking a deep breath, she began to speak. “Everypony! Listen up, like, please!” she yelled, her voice projecting powerfully. A moment later the crowd’s speaking died down, all eyes turning toward her. Smiling at being the center of attention, she had to resist the urge to prance in place. This is gonna be so sweet! Things were finally getting back on track after all of the stuff that had happened!
“Thank you! Ahem… So, you’re probably all wondering why I’ve asked everyone to gather like this in the middle of the night. Well, I have a special treat for you! The pony in charge, Lex Legis, has a special announcement, presented by none other than me! He’s here right now, so everyone give him a big cheer!” Whooping that last word, she apparently didn’t register that her request earned no more than scattered applause and more than a few murmurs, instead turning to look at her boyfriend, beckoning him toward the box next to her. “C’mon Lex!”
Fighting down a grimace at her jovial tone, he paused just long enough to cast his whisper-spell, before climbing painfully on the box next to Sonata’s. Glancing at her eager expression, he turned his eyes toward the crowd, noting that they didn’t share her excitement. Quite the contrary, more than a few looked perturbed while others seemed confused or suspicious, and a minority looked upset for some reason. Normally he wouldn’t have cared in the slightest, but right now the cold reception made him think back to the list of his communication failures that Sonata had so recently articulated, and he felt bitterness welling up inside of him, suddenly regretting having agreed to this. “This was a mistake,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as Sonata nuzzled him, the open display of affection causing him to go rigid in self-consciousness, his faltering confidence momentarily forgotten, and sending a murmur through the crowd. “Don’t worry about them,” whispered Sonata warmly. “Just say what’s in your heart. I’ll do the rest.”
Lex tried to figure out what that meant, but between the exhaustion of his recent activities, the resurgent bitterness he felt at not knowing what he was supposed to say, the embarrassment of Sonata being so amorous toward him in front of so many people, and the mounting anxiety of the imminent disaster facing everyone, it was all suddenly too much. The maelstrom of emotions that flared up in him then was enough to make a reasoned evaluation impossible, and instead he whispered the first thing that came to mind. “I let them down.”
Sonata blinked, not having expected that. “Huh?”
“I let them down,” he whispered again, turning to face the crowd, forcing his face to remain stoic. If she wanted what was “in his heart,” and that’s what she and everypony else would get. “Cloudbank. Thermal Draft. C. Shells. Sandbar. Turbo. Block Party. Pillowcase.” He recited their names mournfully as he looked out over the crowd, refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
For only the second time in her life, Sonata found herself freezing up in front of an audience.
The first time had been back on Earth, when she and her sisters had their gems smashed by Sunset Shimmer and her lame-oh friends. Unable to fuel their magic without them, the three of them hadn’t been able to so much as carry a tune, and had been forced to quit the stage when the audience had turned on them. Though I guess the whole attempted-brainwashing thing didn’t help very much either, she’d admitted to herself later on, after she’d learned what friendship meant.
But now, she found herself hesitating for a different reason. “Um, Lex?” she whispered, her eyes flitting between him and the crowd, where the assembled ponies were starting to fidget and murmur to each other. From what she could tell, they knew that Lex had said something but hadn’t been able to hear what, and their curiosity was rising. “I know I said you should speak from the heart, but maybe something a little-”
“Tell them what I said, Sonata.” The tone in his voice made her flinch, and she had to fight to keep her ears from folding back. The way he sounded now was nothing like his usual self. Normally, Lex spoke like he was giving orders, his words filled with strength and confidence. When he was angry – which happened a lot – he sounded like was overflowing with furious energy that he could barely contain, growling and snarling and even roaring when it was really bad. And in their most sweetest moments together, which so far had only happened a few times, the passion in his voice had taken lost its usual harsh edge and instead changed into something warm and gentle, the sound of which had absolutely made her melt. But now…
Now he just sounded miserable. All she could hear in his words was exhaustion and regret. It was enough to break her heart, but as much as she wanted to give him a great big hug and tell him that it would all be fine, she couldn’t ignore the number of eyes locked onto them. Despite her enthusiasm from less than a minute ago, she hadn’t missed how tough the audience was. If he had her lead with something like “yeah, it was totes my fault those ponies died,” she didn’t want to think about how they’d react. “Are you sure?” she asked, not because she wanted confirmation, but to buy herself an extra few seconds to think.
“Their lives were my responsibility,” he answered dully, still staring over the heads of the ponies in the crowd. “I didn’t have any magic that could save Pillowcase. I didn’t realize what Block Party really was. I wasn’t there when Cloudbank and the others were killed. Those failures, my lack of strength and intuition and determination when they were needed, are why they died.” He turned to look at her then, his gaze as empty as his voice was. “I let them down.”
“That’s not-”
“Just…just tell them, Sonata,” he sighed, breaking eye contact with her as he resumed facing forward.
Biting her lip, Sonata glared at him in frustration and sympathy, forgetting about the crowd for just a moment. Why was it always about what he hadn’t done, and not what he had? She wanted to grab him and shake him and scream at him over and over that a lot more ponies would have died if he hadn't come here until he got it. Forget about half-empty, he could look at a FULL glass and say that it’ll be empty later! But right now…right now she had to figure out what to tell the crowd. For the moment they still looked interested, their eyes still locked onto them as they chattered among themselves, but she knew that once they decided that answers wouldn’t be forthcoming, they’d start to lose interest. And her gut told her that would happen in the next few seconds if she didn’t say something. But what…?
Then she saw some ponies at the edge of the crowd start to wander off, and she knew she was out of time. Opening her mouth, Sonata said the first thing she could think of. “Lex wants me to tell you that it’s his fault that those ponies died,” she announced loudly.
All conversation ceased immediately. The stragglers on the edge of the crowd immediately reversed course, rejoining the others. Swallowing, Sonata kept going. “By now you’ve, um, probably all heard about the ponies that went into Vanhoover yesterday and didn’t come back. Lex,” she canted her head toward him, seeing that he was still standing there like a criminal being condemned, “says that he’s to blame for what happened. That he shouldn’t have sent them there. That he should have been there to save them.”
She’d gotten their attention back, but she could already see their faces hardening as the rumors were confirmed, taking Sonata’s announcement to be a confession that Lex was the bad guy. Okay, okay, keep calm! she thought to herself frantically. They’re still listening! I just have to walk them around to realizing that Lex is a good guy!
“And Pillowcase and Block Party,” whispered Lex. “Don’t tell them about Xiriel, but everypony deserves to know that I failed those other two as well.”
First I need to convince LEX that he’s a good guy! thought Sonata despairingly. “And, um…and he says that it’s his fault that this crystal pony we found died also, and Block Party too, by the way. Even though he totes killed himself,” she finished lamely. Even as the words left her mouth she knew how bad that sounded, both in terms of what she was saying and how she was delivering it, and felt her spirits wither. This isn’t fair! Now everyone else is going to blame Lex just like he’s blaming himself even though he didn’t do anything wrong! The injustice of it all gnawed at her. If only they knew Lex the way she did, they’d know that he was trying his hardest for them! Then they’d definitely love him! They’d definitely…def-…
Suddenly she knew exactly what to say.
Beside her, Lex started to whisper something else, but Sonata wasn’t listening anymore. “And you know what? He’s right. It is all his fault.” She let that hang in the air for a moment, making sure she had everyone’s attention before she continued. “I mean, he’d met Block Party for, what? A couple minutes? He should totes have known what was going on with him, right?” She did her best to keep the sarcasm to a reasonable level as she continued. “And Pillowcase, that crystal pony that we found in the city? I mean, yeah, he was already sick and injured and mostly dead when we found him, but what kind of excuse is that? Just because Lex immediately rushed him to the doctors is no reason to say that he’s not to blame for his dying.”
“Sonata, what are you doing?” whispered Lex, regaining enough of his vigor to give her a look of vexation.
But she ignored him, remembering what Peachy Keen had told her before: sometimes a spokespony’s job was to say what needed to be said, rather than what she was told to say. “And those other five ponies? The ones he asked to go back into Vanhoover? That was so they could find money to buy food for everyone here. You know, so Lex wouldn’t have to keep killing himself to make it out of thin air, the way he did yesterday? Yeah, the doctors were talking about possible organ failure because he’d used so much magic, but nuts to that, he should have gotten right up and marched into Vanhoover on his own, am I right?”
“That’s no excuse!” raged Lex, still whispering his responses to her. “Neither ignorance of salient facts nor insufficient strength acquits the failures of a reigning authority! If anything, they condemn them!”
But even if Sonata had understood what he’d just said, she was sure she wouldn’t have been swayed by it. Instead, she kept speaking to the ponies in front of her, who now looked far less upset than they had a moment ago, glancing at each other and muttering uncertainly. “I won’t even get into all the times he fought dangerous monsters to protect the ponies around him, while the only ponies he ever hurt were the ones who did terrible things in the first place. Clearly, none of that counts for, like, anything.” That seemed to strike a nerve in the crowd, their chattering suddenly gaining in volume, and she wondered how many of them were remembering what happened with Spit Polish yesterday morning.
“Sonata, if you don’t stop right this inst-”
“And you know what the real kicker is? The cherry on top of the chocolate cake? That he’s standing here right now, telling me to tell you that everything is his fault, while he’s getting ready to go out and fight to protect all of you again.” She swept a hoof back behind her, pointing toward Vanhoover. “Right now, all of those ghouls – the undead ponies in Vanhoover – are on their way here. But-, LISTEN TO ME!” She hollered those last three words loudly enough to grab everyone’s attention despite the panic that had immediately broken out at her announcement. “None of them are going to make it here! So long as each of you stays right here, in this exact spot, you’ll be safe! And you know why?” Her hoof swung around to point at Lex then, who had ceased admonishing her and was now giving her a level look. “Because he’s going to beat them all!”
“Are you crazy?!” called a voice from the crowd. “We have to run!”
“He’s going to beat them all!” insisted Sonata. But the crowd was already starting to scatter, and that was all she could stand. After everything he’s done, everything I just said, you STILL won’t believe in him?! She didn’t even look at Lex then, she just started singing, letting her magic wash out over the crowd and into their minds, smothering their fear and forcing them to return their attention back to her. Screw the rules, she thought angrily. If he wants to curse me, he can. I don’t care.
A moment later the mass of ponies had reassembled, staring up at her dazedly as she finished singing. Letting out a breath to steady herself, she picked up where she’d left off a moment ago. “Lex is going to fight the ghouls, and he’s going to win. I’ve seen him defeat dragons and sea monsters, and I’m not the only one. He always has a plan, and he always comes through. So as long as you all stay right here, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
A pregnant pause ensued as she looked out over the legion of ponies. She had suppressed their fear the same way she had for Nosey, and so far it seemed to be working, with everypony looking at each other uncertainly, but not descending into hysterics again. Now let’s just hope this lasts until we’re done with the ghouls.
She turned to look at Lex then, worry and defiance warring inside her at the thought of his reaction, but to her surprise he didn’t look like he was about to explode. Instead, he was giving her an unreadable look, his face neutral. Deciding to chalk that up as a win, Sonata looked back at the crowd of ponies, preparing to wrap things up. “After it’s all over, after he’s gone out there and risked his life to save everyone – again – you all can totes decide for yourselves,” she glanced over at Lex before continuing, wanting him to know that this applied to him too, “what sort of pony Lex Legis is.”
Without another word, she turned and hopped down from her box, heading back around to the far side of the medical tent without waiting for Lex to catch up. As she walked, she thought back over everything she’d just said, and came to a conclusion.
Lex slowly trudged around the medical tent after Sonata, striving to make his steps appear sure and confident.
He knew that everypony’s eyes were on him after that speech she’d given, and although she’d quite clearly used her magic to influence the crowd, he wasn’t certain that the calm she’d imbued them with would hold if he showed signs of weakness now. As it was, he had his work cut out for him figuring out how to live up to the assurances she’d made on his behalf. But at least she didn’t try to convince everyone to fight as well, he reflected silently.
That had been his biggest worry when she’d started to improvise: that she’d make an effort at convincing the camp ponies to join in the fight against the incoming horde of ghouls. While Lex was fully aware why that wouldn’t work now the way it had against the kraken’s army of monsters, he hadn’t been sure if Sonata was, and when she’d started to extemporize he’d had a moment of panic. Fortunately, she hadn’t tried to treat the camp ponies as some sort of auxiliary fighting force, and disaster had been averted. Or rather, a greater disaster, since I still need to figure out how to actually protect everypony. He was still thinking of how to do just that when he finally rounded the medical tent.
“Hey,” called Sonata, giving him a cocky grin. “So, how was that? Pretty awesome, right?”
Lex gave her a level look for a moment before turning his gaze westward, peering into the darkness toward Vanhoover. “You did a good job.”
Sonata’s grin collapsed immediately, her eyes widening and eyebrows shooting up to her hairline in surprise. “I did?” she asked, not even trying to hide her shock. “For realsies?”
Lex nodded, only half paying attention as he turned more of his thoughts toward how they were going to fight the undead ponies. “You informed everyone of what was going on, while avoiding a panic that would have put them in greater danger.”
She nodded slowly, still giving him a wide-eyed look. “So…you’re totes cool with all that stuff I said? And with my, like, enchanting everyone?”
That was enough to make him glance at her. “Your use of magic was entirely justified due to the circumstances, Sonata,” he frowned, slightly irked that they had to go over this again. Wasn’t it obvious by now that there were instances where using magic to abrogate personal autonomy was the right thing to do? “As for the rest of it…” He hesitated then. In truth he wasn’t happy with the other part of her little outburst, since he was fairly confident that she’d been using sarcasm to try and suggest that his failings were somehow acceptable due to being beyond the limits of his abilities, a sentiment that he felt was utterly disingenuous. But there simply wasn’t any time to worry about that right now; chastising her for such a thing when they were less than an hour away from fighting for their lives was simply not a worthwhile undertaking.
That, and he suddenly didn’t feel like scolding her. Not right now at least. “…we can talk about it later,” he finished.
“Aw yeah!” whooped Sonata, apparently thrilled by his lack of overt disapproval. Rearing up on her hind legs, she wore a grin that was dazzling in its intensity. “Who’s the bigshot who’s hot-to-trot with the sexy voice and the killer plot?” she sang, before licking a hoof and reaching back to slap her rump. “This mare, that’s who!” Falling back onto all fours, she chuckled heartily. “Oh, I wish Aria was here to see this! She’s still a big whispery fish and I’m enchanting ponies by the hundreds! She’s gonna be so jealous!” She paused as something occurred to her then, her smile dimming as a realization slowly worked its way through her brain. “Come to think of it, where is Aria? She wasn’t with the crowd, but I know I told everyone to come gather ‘round.”
“She’s gone,” murmured Lex, still devoting the bulk of his mental faculties to battle plans.
Sonata blinked at that. “‘Gone’?” she echoed. “Whaddaya mean ‘gone’? Like, gone-gone?”
“She abandoned this place a short time ago,” replied Lex absently. “The Night Mare informed me.”
“Aria ditched us?” asked Sonata incredulously. For some reason that thought didn’t bring her the glee that she’d expected to feel. Instead, there was a hollow sensation forming in the pit of her stomach, empty except for a vague sense of hurt that her sister had just up and left without so much as a goodbye. But that doesn’t make any sense, she thought to herself uncomfortably. I’ve wanted her to leave ever since she showed up again, so why…?
Suddenly not wanting to think about that anymore, Sonata shook her head, focusing on Lex again. “So,” she spoke up, slightly louder than she’d intended, “what’s the plan?”
Lex didn’t answer for a moment, and she was about to ask him again when he called out, “Severance!”
The scythe came floating toward him a moment later, and Lex waited until it was within a few feet of him before speaking. “Cut that tent down,” he ordered, pointing at the field hospital behind him. “I want the upper part of the material completely separated from the lower.” The scythe immediately moved to obey, swinging itself through the air and piercing the tent fabric at a low angle, a few inches above the ground. Without hesitating, it started to move around the circumference of the tent, its blade tearing through the material as though it weren’t even there. As it did, he turned back to Sonata. “Once it’s finished cutting the fabric, we’re going to lay it over the ground in front of us,” he explained, nodding back in the direction of Vanhoover.
“How come?” asked Sonata, before her eyes widened a moment later. “Ooh, is this going to be like one of those traps in the cartoons, where they cut across it and then its suddenly pulled upward like a net, catching them inside?”
“It isn’t a snare, Sonata. What would the ropes even be tied to?” He gestured up at the empty sky with a snort. “We’re going to use this to cover the area where you had those holes dug, so that the ghouls won’t see them before they stumble into them. The fabric might even make it difficult for them to find purchase when they try to recover their balance.” But he didn’t hold much hope for that. In fact, the entire trap was a weak one, and likely wouldn’t do anything more than mildly inconvenience the undead ponies, but so far it was the best thing he’d been able to think of, and implementing it was better than nothing.
Determined to keep being helpful after how successful her speech had been, Sonata immediately tossed out another suggestion. “Okay, how about this? When the ghouls come at us, we yank on the tent fabric like it’s a big tablecloth and knock them all down, and then pounce on ‘em!”
Lex sighed in mild aggravation. “The ghouls’ collective mass is going to outweigh what we can effectively displace that way, Sonata. In the unlikely event that we managed to accomplish anything at all, it would only be to tear the material.”
“We grab the edge and roll them up like a big carpet?”
That time a snort of derision was the only reply she received, making her pout as she realized she wasn’t helping. Not wanting to let the silence stand, since she knew she’d only end up thinking about Aria again, she changed topics. “So how many ghouls do you think we’re going to be dealing with?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Lex after a moment’s thought. “Without any sort of estimate as to how many ponies made it out of the city when the elemental bleed started, to say nothing of how many survivors are still in the city, there’s no reliable method for estimating the number of undead in the city.” What he didn’t say was that, using the ghouls he’d encountered so far as a statistical sampling, he’d still drawn up some theoretical equations regarding the ghouls’ potential population. Although there wasn’t enough data to come to anything conclusive, it still allowed for some degree of speculation…and the numbers weren’t to his liking.
“…so, what, like fifty?”
He gave her a grim look then. “I’d be shocked if there was anything less than ten times that number.”
Sonata gave a low whistle of surprise at that. A hundred and fifty! Geez! That was a lot more than she’d originally thought! Sobered at the thought of fighting so many undead ponies at once, Sonata was silent as Severance returned, finishing up cutting away upper part of the medical tent. As the fabric fluttered down, Lex grabbed hold of one end of it in his magic, dragging it forward, only for Sonata to immediately wave him off. “Let me. You just keep thinking of a plan, okay?”
Giving a noncommittal grunt, Lex dropped the fabric, letting her grab it in her teeth and begin dragging it toward the holes she’d had dug. It took her some effort, and he could already hear various things that had been inside the field hospital falling over as she pulled the now-collapsed ceiling off of it, but he ignored it as inconsequential. Instead, he turned and took hold of Severance in his telekinesis, bringing it over to him. “When the fighting starts,” he instructed it, “your job will be to keep the ghouls away from Sonata and me so that we can use our magic without interruption.” That was, he knew, the best use of the scythe’s self-directed capabilities, since unlike in the battle with the kraken there wouldn’t be a particular enemy that needed to be singled out for termination. Moreover, a defensive role would be likely to avoid the scythe’s nebulous prohibition about being relied upon too much. Although it could autonomously attack on its own, ordering it to act that offensively would almost certainly make it abandon-
No, Lex realized suddenly, the thought coming through so clearly that it startled him. That’s not right. Severance could be used to a much more offensive degree without violating its restriction about being depended upon too much. It had before, after all.
During the battle against the kraken, the monster had attacked them at range, picking up a huge piece of the ship it had crushed and hurling it at them. Cloudbank had been wielding Severance at the time, and despite her overall lack of combat prowess had swung Severance at the incoming missile, the result being that it had sliced it completely in half. Lex knew that because he had personally witnessed it happen. The weapon had never done that before, which meant it had quite clearly utilized that level of cutting ability by its own volition, but if that wasn't depending on the scythe too much, then there was no way…
Lex grit his teeth as that train of thought became a cascade. Severance had slain a sahuagin that had taken him by surprise when he’d first arrived in Vanhoover, bisecting the creature as it had leapt out of the water at him. It had removed his horn for him when he'd had no other way of getting the drop on Fencer after she'd taken Pillowcase hostage. It was the only reason he could regain his primary magic! And yet somehow that didn't constitute a form of overreliance?!
A shudder went through Lex as he realized that he'd never fully clarified precisely what Severance's parameters were for being overly depended upon. He'd flat-out told it to tell him when it had first given him that warning, and yet it had been cagey, refusing to provide clear and unambiguous parameters, instead being content to let him blindly navigate its warning without tripping over its threat of abandoning him if he relied on it too much. But now...now that threat seemed like little more than a cruel joke made at his expense. It was enough to make his features twist in fury as he turned his attention back to the scythe.
Lex glared balefully at Severance, the weapon having gone completely still in response to his accusation.
By itself that wasn’t unusual; since it was capable of unassisted flight, it was common for Severance to simply hover in the air when Lex wasn’t holding or carrying it. But now, gripping it in his telekinesis, he could feel the difference. Although it was still aloft, there was a sensation of resistance to it now, as though it were sunk deeply in concrete even though it was currently surrounded by nothing but air. It’s readying itself in case I try to fling it to the ground again, realized Lex, remembering what had happened a few hours ago when he’d lost his temper after Severance had confirmed the deaths of Cloudbank’s group. Despite his fatigue, the scythe’s recalcitrance fanned the flames of his anger. “Your warning was never anything more than chicanery! You had no intention of deserting me no matter how I used you!”
It was only then that Severance spoke up, issuing a cool denial in a voice that was filled with either smugness or condescension, Lex wasn’t sure which. But the scythe’s assurance that it would indeed have left him and returned to the Night Mare’s side if he’d come to rely upon it too much did little to quell Lex’s sense of betrayal. “Liar!” he hissed, his eyes blazing green and purple. “Ever since I received you, I’ve put you to work on numerous tasks of vital importance!” He began to list them off then, punctuating each one with a stamp of his hoof. “Serving as a battery to renew my magic! Guarding me in my sleep! Protecting the backs of the ponies that I brought here from the shelter! To say nothing of the critical role you played in procuring an escape route for the ponies I sent into Vanhoover! All of that, and you’re still here!” He narrowed his eyes then, lips curling back in a snarl. “I demand to know why, if you never planned on leaving, you made that threat in the first place?!”
He kept his voice low, not wanting anypony to hear that Severance was the reason he was able to use his strongest magic so liberally, though the furious tenor wasn’t dampened for it. But if Severance was shaken by Lex’s anger, it hid it well. Its voice was still clipped as it asked in what had to be a rhetorical manner if those tasks constituted overreliance.
The weapon’s reply sounded more like an evasion than an answer to Lex, and had he been able to lift a hoof off the ground for more than a second without falling over he would have pointed it at the weapon. “You tell me! You were the one who refused to provide any sort of parameters or guidelines, even though I inquired as to them!” Despite his anger, Lex was aware of a stirring in the back of his mind, identical to when he’d been pondering the mystery of Block Party’s death, letting him know that there was something salient that he was overlooking, some sort of key connection that he hadn’t made. With regard to Block Party, it had ended up being that Nosey – when he’d been issuing those identity tests to her – hadn’t used her horn to move anything. But now…what was it?
The realization was enough to blunt his anger, and as if it sensed that, Severance spoke up again…this time in acquiescence, offering to describe the conditions of overreliance in full. That was enough to make Lex raise an eyebrow, caught off-guard by its sudden capitulation, but not so much that he didn’t move to confirm it immediately. “You should have said that before,” he snapped. “Now, tell me clearly and precisely what actions and circumstances are acceptable uses of your capabilities versus those you’re proscribing as overly dependent.”
But what Severance said next caused Lex’s brow to furrow in confusion.
“What?” he frowned. “‘Legitimate utilization is the subsumption of another’s capabilities to your will,’” he echoed, his voice filled with disbelief. “‘Overreliance is the opposite’?! You can’t be serious! That’s not a guideline, it’s an axiom! It makes things less clear, not more!”
But Severance disagreed, pointing out how it had ceased to operate for Cloudbank after she had asked it for help when the kraken had taken control of her motor functions. In doing so, she had not only declared that she was powerless, but had presented that powerlessness as a plea for Severance to come to her aid. That, the scythe explained, was her willful abandonment of any pretense of authority over it, and so had declared that there was no reason for it to obey her. Even the most loyal of minions, it finished, would lose faith in a master who openly surrendered control over them.
For a moment, Lex could only gape in reply, utterly aghast at both the reasoning and at the sentiment behind it. “That’s completely absurd,” he scoffed. “Not only is that sentiment completely in the eye of the proverbial beholder, it puts all of its emphasis on disposition and none at all on actual ability! By that logic, someone who conducts themselves imperiously without having the requisite power to enforce their will-” But Severance interrupted him then, asserting that any such individual would quickly find themselves overthrown anyway, since prerogative without sufficient power would make it impossible to keep rebellious or ambitious followers in line. Those who deserved to rule, it concluded, were those with both the power and the desire to impress their will on others.
“Sophistry,” hissed Lex. “What you’re spouting is nothing more than meritocratic determinism, with no conception of justice or moral virtue as integral components!” But Severance’s reaction to this was bobbing slightly in the air, an action that Lex guessed was its equivalent of a shrug. He was proven right a moment later as Severance casually asserted that those were empty words, defined only insofar as they were enforced by those with power. After all, it noted idly, such ideas were entirely the creation of sapient creatures, and so sapient creatures could make them mean whatever they wanted.
“You’re wrong,” shot back Lex, refusing to let this go. He knew that this wasn’t the time for it, that this was a distraction he couldn’t afford, but he couldn’t help himself. Everything the weapon had just said was an insult to the moral framework he had spent the majority of his life developing. It went beyond amorality, straight into moral nihilism, and absolutely could not go unchallenged. “Other people have intrinsic value to them beyond being made to serve as extensions of your will-” He stopped in mid-sentence as he suddenly realized what he’d been overlooking.
This is what the Night Mare was talking about! he realized, a horrified chill going down his spine. When the goddess had appeared in his dream earlier that evening, she had excoriated him for trying to accomplish everything “on his own.” He had found the rebuke hypocritical of her, since although he knew little about her dogma, he knew that self-reliance was a central part of it. Wasn’t attempting to solve the challenges facing him under his own power the very epitome of the beliefs that she championed?
But now, the abhorrent philosophy that Severance had been spouting made it clear that, from the scythe’s standpoint – and therefore the Night Mare’s, since Severance was surely her mouthpiece in this – there was an alternate, warped interpretation of what constituted “self-reliance.” It’s not just personal ability, Lex realized, his eyes wide and staring at nothing as the realization came crashing down on him. “The subsumption of another’s capabilities to your will!” That’s what Severance said! Which means her religion considers those who act in service to another to be an extension of that individual’s power!
It was, he realized, extremely close to his own philosophy regarding the distribution of authority. After all, the proactive government that he intended to build would need a massive infrastructure built, with a great many ponies staffing it, all so they could implement the reforms and changes that he intended to enact. As government employees working to apply the laws and regulations that he would create, and in the course of that duty be ultimately answerable to him, they could be characterized as being subsumed to his will. There’s no such thing as a government of just one individual, Lex knew. Suddenly, the Night Mare’s insistence that he knew almost nothing about leadership was extremely disturbing.
Lex shook his head then, squeezing his eyes shut as he forced his thoughts back into order. “You’re wrong,” he repeated, opening his eyes and looking at Severance again. “The recognition of other members of the moral community is a vital component in ruling-”
“All done!” called Sonata, trotting over happily, brushing some dust from her coat. “I totes spread the tent over all the holes! Those ghouls are so gonna trip over them when they come here!” She knew because she had done that a bunch of times just now. “So, you think of a plan?”
“I would have,” snapped Lex peevishly, “but this miscreant weapon’s continued insistence that…”
Sonata bit her lip at Lex’s angry response, not sure what to make of the way he suddenly trailed off at the end. “Are you guys getting into another fight?” she asked, worried and exasperated all at once. “‘Cuz this really isn’t the time for you two to try and measure who’s bigger.” Not that she’d ever been clear about why guys would want to compare sizes when they got into a fight, but Adagio and Aria had said many times that was what they did. Which is, like, super weird. Can’t guys tell who’s taller just by looking?
But Lex wasn’t paying attention to her, instead tracing back the conversation he’d been having with Severance. If he was right, then there was a salient point that he’d overlooked…one that might be absolutely vital for what was about to happen. “You do realize,” he began, considerably calmer now, “that by your own reasoning, you’re subordinate to me.” He’d presumed that was the case when the Night Mare had presented the scythe to him, of course, but now he wanted Severance to acknowledge it personally.
The weapon did so a moment later, not hesitating to recognize Lex’s strength and his ambition. “And you have no intent to challenge me with regard to either of those factors?” he replied, tensing slightly. He doubted that it did, since the worst it had ever done was threaten to return to the Night Mare; even when he’d thrown it on the ground and stomped on it, the most it had ever done was move to defend itself, rather than fight back. Sure enough, the weapon replied in the negative a moment later, asserting that it was created to assist those who both acknowledged the Night Mare and lived up to her ideals.
Lex frowned slightly at that, but managed to let the philosophical argument lie for now. There would be time to resume it after the current crisis was over. “In that case,” he said slowly, bringing the scythe closer, “I have a new order for you for when the ghouls attack.”
Idly, he swung the blade, letting it cleave through rock that had been dragged nearby when Sonata had pulled the top of the medical tent away from its bottom half. Unsurprisingly, Severance cleaved through the stone as though it was made of butter, but Lex’s eyes were on the ground nearby. The earth around the rock was undamaged, which was unsurprising considering that the blade hadn’t made contact with it. But in his mind’s eye, Lex was comparing it to what had happened when Cloudbank swung the scythe at the ship fragment that the Great Lord of the Deep had thrown at them, completely bisecting it in one stroke.
“When the undead ponies get here,” said Lex, holding the blade out in front of him, “I’m going to wield you, and you’re going to use your full power.”
By Lex’s estimation, it had been a half-hour since he’d awoken, which meant that there was roughly thirty minutes left before the undead ponies arrived at the camp. Even knowing that he could now bring the totality of Severance’s might to bear, Lex couldn’t help but feel more and more tense. I should have confronted Severance sooner, he berated himself silently. If I had, there’d be time to properly test the full scope of what it can do. But with so little time left, that wasn’t possible now, not if he wanted to engage in any other planning, which he knew was going to be absolutely necessary. “Sonata.”
“Huh?” She looked over at him, dragging her eyes down from where she’d been looking at the sky, apparently having gotten bored while he’d reached an understanding with Severance. “Hey, I think I spotted Orion’s belt buckle! See that one star?” She turned her gaze upward again, point a hoof. “The one that’s twinkling? It’s-”
“Sonata!” Her carefree attitude was making his anxiety worse, worried that her lack of concern would lead to her making a mistake at a critical moment. The thought of that was enough to remind him of the ghouls he’d butchered earlier in the day, recalling how they’d laughed and rhymed at having eaten the bodies of the ponies he’d sent into Vanhoover. If that happened to Sonata… Fighting down a shudder, he couldn’t make his voice entirely free of tension when he spoke again. “We need to go over battle strategies!”
“For realsies?” She looked back at him with a quizzical expression. “But I thought we talked about this already. The ghouls will show up, we’ll kick their flanks, do a victory dance, and everypony here will adore us. Easy as peasy-squeezy lemon pie.” She wasn’t sure what kind of pie that was, but it sounded delicious! Speaking of which… “By the way, after we’re done here can I have my sense of taste back? I’m pretty hungry and you’re totes gonna spend those bits you got so that we can chow down after this, right?”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex forced himself to remain calm and ignore her rambling, instead focusing on explaining things in a manner that she would hopefully be able to comprehend. “Sonata, I know you think that the ghouls aren’t a threat to us, and in terms of their individual capabilities, that’s a fairly accurate assessment.”
“Cool! So what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that there are going to be, at the very least, several hundred of them. We need to not only wipe them all out, but do so without letting any of them get past us.” He nodded his head back at he spoke, indicating the camp ponies. Now that the medical tent had been cut down, there was nothing between the two of them and the large crowd. Although they were far enough away that speech conducted at normal volume wouldn’t be overheard, Lex was still cognizant of the crowd’s eyes being firmly locked onto them.
“Oh.” Sonata’s brow wrinkled as she digested that, and her head swiveled back and forth as she looked between him and the crowd of ponies. After repeating the gesture a half-dozen times, she seemed to reach a conclusion. “Huh…you know, that sounds kinda hard.”
“Precisely,” uttered Lex with a sigh of relief. Hopefully now she’d listen. “That’s why we need to coordinate our efforts ahead of time.”
“What does ‘coordinate’ mea-, oh, I get it now!” Her grin suddenly returned in force. “This is where you tell me my part in your super-awesome master plan, right?” She practically bounced in place, almost shivering with excitement. “I knew you had one! So, what do I do?”
It was all he could do not to wince at that. Before he’d met her, he had thought that not living up to the expectations he had for himself was painful. But it was nothing compared to letting down the girl he loved. “Sonata, I-”
“Wait! Don’t tell me! I wanna guess!” Almost squealing in delight, she put a hoof to her chin for a moment, before gasping as inspiration struck. “I’ve got it! When the ghouls show up, I’ll sing and make them all fall asleep, and then you can go around with Severance and whack ‘em all one at a time!” Her smile somehow grew wider. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before! Like, duh!”
“What-, no, that won’t work!” The words came our harsher than he’d intended them to, alarmed at having discovered a critical gap in her knowledge. “You can’t enchant an undead creature’s mind.”
Letting out a groan, Sonata rolled her eyes. “Oh come on! If you were fine with me using my magic on everypony in camp just now, why’s it such a big deal if I use it on a bunch of ghouls?”
“I didn’t say you musn’t,” hissed Lex. For an instant, he felt certain that she was misunderstanding him on purpose, but he pushed that thought away, recognizing that it was borne of tension and frustration. “I said you can’t! It won’t work! Undeath is a state that warps the minds of those it afflicts, and makes their mentality impossible to affect with magic.” He moved closer to her, until his face was inches away from her, wanting to make absolutely sure she understood what he was telling her. “Enchantments won’t work on the ghouls. You need to focus on other types of magic. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.” Her ears folded back as she gave a pout. “But that hardly seems fair.” Sighing, she scratched her head as she tried to think of something else.
Lex could already feel what little patience he had left ebbing, the combination of stress about their situation and embarrassment that she had more faith in him than he deserved eating away at what little energy he had remaining. Fighting off the urge to sink to the ground, he tried again. “When the ghouls arrive-”
“Aw, c’mon! One more guess?” she pleaded. “I promise this’ll be the last one, and if I don’t get it right you can tell me, okay?” Not having the strength to argue with her, Lex didn’t protest, and she bit her lip in concentration. “Alright…you did the whole male bonding thing with Severance just a second ago, so it’s not that.” Lex closed his eyes, a pained look crossing his face at her characterization of what had just happened. “And it’s not some big new spell or something, ‘cuz you were fighting a little while ago and would’ve used it then.” That was enough to make Lex’s eyes flit toward his shadow, wondering if maybe it would come to his aid again now the way it had when he’d fought Xiriel. “Sooo…those floaty gems, right?”
“What?” It took Lex a moment to realize what she meant, and as he did he glanced back at his saddlebag. After the scroll had exploded, and he’d pieced it back together in vain, he’d very briefly checked the gems for damage, grabbing each of them in turn to look them over. It had been habit more than anything else that had made him put them away, just before Sonata had convinced him to address the camp ponies. Taking them out again now, Lex held them aloft telekinetically. “What about them?”
Unable to help but chuckle at the sight of the gems – chasing that one that had been circling her head had been a lot of fun! – Sonata puffed up her chest. “You’re gonna do something awesome with those, right? Like, um, that thing where you super-charged that spell to make food so that you made enough for everyone. Without frying yourself from the inside out, I mean,” she added hastily. “You can boost these things so that they’ll spin around you super fast and chop up any ghouls that get to close to you, right?”
“That…” The rebuke was halfway to his mouth, only to die on his tongue as he thought her idea through. Why couldn’t he charge the magic items in his possession? They all had stable magical pathways built into them, after all. In theory, if he channeled additional magic through his body and into them rather than into a spell he was casting, it should amplify them just the same. It’s not even that different from what I’ve done before, he realized with growing intrigue. Back when he and Sonata had been journeying on hoof to Tall Tale, he had used a similar procedure to tweak his haversack’s functionality so that he could bring its extradimensional space into another such space of his own creation.
“So?” asked Sonata, her tail practically wagging in eagerness. “Did I get it right?”
“…close enough,” muttered Lex, already tuning her out (and missing the cheer and subsequent dance she performed) in order to concentrate on the idea she’d given him.
In all likelihood, the gemstones wouldn’t fly any faster if he channeled additional power into them. But their core functionality, the magical effects that they granted their wielder, should experience some sort of augmentation. It wouldn’t be permanent; the additional energy poured into them would be expended, in all likelihood, in a matter of minutes…and it would need to be done very carefully. Flooding them with power in an uncontrolled rush would most likely damage, or perhaps even destroy, them. But if he did it correctly, timing it so that they kicked in just before the ghouls arrived…there was no way of knowing if it would be enough to salvage the situation, but it might.
It's not just the gemstones, either, Lex realized with a jolt. He was wearing several other magic items already; his circlet, with small reservoir of magical energy and ability to let him visualize magical auras. His amulet was designed to mildly toughen the dermal layer of skin, while his cloak helped to resist dangerous or debilitating circumstances. The ring around his right foreleg protected against weak divinations, defeating attempts to read his thoughts or scan his personal aura. Any one of them, if infused with additional power, could theoretically be enhanced. Nor were those everything.
Looking at his saddlebags again, Lex immediately discarded any thoughts of augmenting the spell-imbued ruby that the Night Mare had given him. The resurrection magic it contained wasn’t something he understood very well, and feeding more power into it without comprehending its underlying structure would, at best, destroy the spell it contained. More likely it would be miscast, with no way of predicting what would happen.
But Lex’s thoughts froze as he turned his attention to the other item he was carrying. The scroll! Moving slowly despite his quickening pulse, Lex pulled the roll of parchment out of his saddlebag, looking it over again. Just a few minutes ago, he had been enraged that it was just ink on paper, with no imbued energy waiting to be released. But now…now that didn’t matter, because he could feed more energy into it! The channels themselves were the writing, which was completely intact thanks to his repair spell; if he just poured the right amount of energy into them, then the spells should take effect as if the scroll had never been damaged! It could work!
It could work…if he could channel sufficient power. But that was a very large “if” in his current condition. With the damage he’d sustained in his disastrous attempt to create enough food for everypony yesterday, compounded by how much he’d exerted himself fighting Xiriel earlier today, he had very little strength left now. With what it would likely take to empower even a single item, let alone fuel the powerful spells that had been in the scroll…
Performing some quick mental calculations, Lex grimaced at the results. He’d been thinking of augmenting all of his magic items, but that had been wildly optimistic. Even if he didn’t bother with the scroll, pouring that much power into everything else would have been exceptionally trying under the best of circumstances. In his current condition, it would kill him for certain. I’m only going to be able to do this a few times, he realized. Probably less than that, considering how badly depleted he already was.
But what other choice was there now?
“Sonata,” he called, releasing all five gems to orbit him again. “Come here.”
“I guessed right!” she sang, somehow making “right” into a two-syllable word. Practically skipping over to him, her eyes were almost glittering with how pleased she was. “Praise me!”
“We need to go over-”
“Praise me!”
Huffing, Lex found that he couldn’t work up his usual ire at her behavior. He was too exhausted, and besides, it was because of her that he had a plan at all now. “Your idea was brilliant,” he admitted, a ghost of a smile tugging at his lips for some reason. “Shockingly so.”
“Woo hoo!” she hollered. Rearing up on her hind legs, she threw her fore-hooves into the air as she turned to face the camp ponies. “Didja hear that?! I’m brilliant!” she cackled, throwing herself back onto all fours as she turned and lunged at Lex, giving him a hug that knocked him down. “I am so gonna write this down later! In fact, I’m signing all my autographs ‘Sonata Brilliant Dusk’ from now on!”
“Sonata, we need to discuss the specifics regarding what’s about to happen.”
“Right!” She bounded off him, still buzzing with joyous energy. “Explain away! Your brilliant girlfriend is totes paying one hundred-ten percent attention!”
Sighing, Lex climbed to his hooves, hoping no one noticed that he needed to lean on Severance to do it. “Now, listen to me very carefully…”
“I can’t believe we’re really just going to stay here like this,” murmured Slip ‘n’ Slide incredulously.
“We heard you the first ten times, Slip,” sighed Hopscotch, shifting her weight from her right legs to her left nervously.
“Seriously,” chimed in Funshine. “You keep saying that, but it’s not like you’re coming up with any better ideas.”
“Here’s a better idea for you: we run away!” The last two words were uttered as a strangled shout, his voice only barely kept at normal volume. Even then, it was still enough to cause several of the ponies around them to glance over at him, interrupting their own conversations to send looks ranging from disapproving to uncomfortable to sympathetic at him. But Slip ‘n’ Slide barely noticed, his attention firmly concentrated on the ponies that he’d grown so close to in the wake of what had happened to Vanhoover. “Seriously, we pick a direction and start galloping and don’t look back! Somepony please explain to me why we aren’t doing that?!”
“What good would it do?” asked Granola Bar morosely, though it might have been exhaustion in her voice instead; they were all aware that she hadn’t slept since they’d found out what had happened to Turbo. “We could run until we couldn’t move anymore, and the ghouls would still catch us. They don’t get tired, remember?”
“Besides,” added Funshine. “Sonata said that Lex is going to waste them all, and I don’t wanna miss that.” He sat back on his haunches, clopping his forehooves together sharply. “It’s about time they all got what was coming to them, especially after what they did to Turb-” He didn’t get a chance to finish as Granola Bar cuffed him on the shoulder, shooting him an angry look before nodding toward where Garden Gate was sitting.
Funshine winced, but Garden didn’t acknowledge his faux paus. Of course, that wasn’t unusual; ever since Lex had told them what happened, Garden had become withdrawn almost to the point of catatonia. She hadn’t said one word to anypony, and had barely moved without being prodded to do so. Even now, she simply stared forward blankly, looking at the empty space where Lex and Sonata had been a few minutes ago.
An uncomfortable silence fell over the group then, but it only lasted for a moment before Slip ‘n’ Slide spoke up again, looking at Funshine. “Lex,” he said slowly, as though his brother were a very young child, “is crazy. Whatever dark magic he’s got has obviously driven him berserk. He’s been looking for fights ever since we met him, and now he’s finally found one he can’t win, and we’re all going to pay the price for it.”
“But he is really strong,” protested Hopscotch. “You remember how easily he defeated all of us, right? Plus all that stuff that newsmare was saying he’d done before we met him. And don’t forget how he made all that food yesterday. Plus, I think Sonata’s going to fight with him. I bet she’s really incredible too.” The hope in her voice bordered on desperation, wanting to believe that a miracle was possible.
But Slip 'n' Slide had no such hope. “They’re just two ponies against all the ghouls. Literally, she said all of them were coming here! That has to be, what, a hundred of them? Two hundred? Three? And the two of them are going to defeat them all, completely on their own, without letting any get past them and reach us?” He paused to let that sink in. “I’m telling you, they’re both going to get eaten, and then we are too.”
“It would serve them right for stealing from my mom’s bank,” snorted Piggy. His face was still twisted in the same scowl he had been wearing for over twenty-four hours, ever since he’d heard about how – and more importantly, why – Lex was sending a team into Vanhoover. “Those awful temptresses too, they got what they deserved for embarrassing me like that and trying to take what didn’t belong to them. Them and those idiot sailors-”
“-and Turbo?” finished Hopscotch, her voice taking on a dangerous tone as she glared at the fat little earth stallion. She wasn’t alone either, with Funshine and Slip ‘n’ Slide giving him dark looks. Granola Bar didn’t, but she pointedly turned her back on him, moving to sit closer to Garden Gate, as though worried about how the unresponsive mare would react to hearing their deceased companion’s name. But the cursed mare continued to gaze straight ahead emptily. “Is that what you were going to say?” continued Hopscotch. “That Turbo got what he deserved too?”
Blanching, Piggy looked around nervously, twisting his head around to glance at everyone else as a look of worry broke through his sulking. Folding his ears back, he lowered his head and shuffled a hoof listlessly. “…those loose mares probably tricked him,” he muttered uncomfortably, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “I’m sure he didn’t know what their plan was.” It was a grudging admission, which was the only kind he knew how to give, and even then only because everypony was suddenly picking on him. If my mom was here, she wouldn’t let any of you talk to me like that! And she wouldn’t have let that awful unicorn even think about taking our money either!
Despite the resentfulness of his capitulation being obvious, the others turned away from him, mollified. “Anyway,” started Slip ‘n’ Slide, only to trail off. For some reason Piggy’s outburst had undercut his anxiety, replacing it with a sense of bitter fatalism. “…nevermind. It’s probably too late now anyway.”
“They’re coming back,” announced Granola Bar suddenly, sitting up straighter as she peered ahead.
“Huh?” blinked Funshine. “Who?”
“Lex and Sonata. They’re coming back.”
“I’m just saying, I think a really big cage would be better.” Sonata’s voice was light and airy as she spoke, as though she were discussing her favorite flavor of ice cream. “Or maybe, like, a super-huge fortress with giant walls and stuff. And a big moat, filled with those fish that eat people.”
“The ghouls would throw themselves against an obvious fortification, Sonata,” replied Lex levelly, holding the scroll in his telekinesis. “They might be insane, and I suspect that a consequence of that is that their sense of self-preservation has atrophied to virtually nothing, but they’re not stupid. The sight of a defensive structure large enough to hold a great number of ponies would inevitably invite a siege on their part. I want them to take one look at this and completely lose interest.”
“Something boring then,” she grinned, determined to be helpful again. “In that case, how about a croquet course? It’s totes a more-boring version of mini-golf. Or maybe cakes that don’t have any frosting on them. It doesn’t get any boring-er than that!”
“…just tell everypony what’s about to happen,” sighed Lex.
“Roger!” Not noticing his lack of enthusiasm, Sonata saluted and trotted toward her box, still sitting right where she’d left it.
But this time, Lex didn’t go with her. Instead, he hung back waited until she’d started to address the crowd before he turned his attention to the scroll in front of him, more specifically to the tenth of the eleven spells it contained. If the theory that Sonata had given him was correct, and he managed to successfully cast this spell by forcing energy through the scroll, then in theory the problem of keeping the ghouls away from everypony would be taken care of, leaving him free to devote the bulk of his efforts to annihilating the undead ponies without needing to keep them at bay.
Ironically, this spell wasn’t even designed to be defensive in nature. There was a defensive spell on the scroll – the very first one, in fact – but it wasn’t suitable for the current circumstances. It relied on enchanting a place or a thing so that it created a powerful sense of antipathy in a particular type of creature, driving them away from it. But that enchantment was mind-affecting in nature, and as he’d told Sonata, the undead had no vulnerability to such things. They wouldn’t even have noticed the magical aversion created by the spell, going right through it to get to everypony.
But the same couldn’t be said for this spell. Although it didn’t actually create any protective elements, it was designed to cover a large area in a powerful illusion. With it, he could effectively make whatever he wanted appear, or disappear, from the affected area, altering sight and sound to his whim. Of course, direct interaction would potentially reveal that something was amiss – a pony made to look like a tree would still feel like a pony if touched – but that was why Lex wanted to cover the place in an illusion that would make the ghouls lose interest immediately.
But that’s purely academic if this doesn’t work, frowned Lex as he raised the scroll in front of him. In theory there was no real danger here; despite the brief amount of time he’d had to review the writing on the parchment, the spell appeared to have safeguards in place designed to prevent the magic from running wild if something went wrong. In the event that the casting was disrupted, it should simply short-circuit and fail to take effect. That would waste the energy involved, but presuming that didn’t completely debilitate him, he would be able to try again since the writing would remain.
But over the course of his life Lex had learned, repeatedly, that theories quite often failed to live up to reality. In this case, he was using the scroll in a way it hadn’t been originally designed for. It was entirely possible that something would go wrong, some unforeseen complication would occur, and that the entire process would produce unintended consequences. But even if it didn’t, a failure would mean that he’d still have to start the casting process all over again, and this spell wasn’t one that could be invoked quickly, not to mention that he’d have pushed himself- Enough! Forcing his anxieties from his mind, Lex let out a slow breath and waited for Sonata to finish informing everypony as to what he was doing and what they should do. Fortunately, it didn’t take her very long to explain; the instructions consisted of letting them know that he was using an illusion, and that they needed to remain within the area of its effect in order for the ghouls not to notice them.
Even as he took a breath and began to prepare to start reading, Lex was already thinking ahead. He’s chosen to do this first not only because safeguarding everypony else came first, but because he wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to endure channeling more energy through himself, and this was the lengthiest of his last-minute preparations. Ergo, it had to be undertaken before he’d depleted his stamina any further. After this, he’d need to balance how much further he could push himself via enhancing his magic items and how much he’d need to conserve his strength for the actual battle. Assuming that this left him with any stamina at all…
Refusing to get drawn into that line of thought again, Lex forced all extraneous thoughts from his mind as he began to read.
Fencer watched silently as Lex started casting his spell.
She idly ran her tongue over the small knife in her mouth, feeling the sharp edge of the blade. Her jaw ached from carrying it there for so long, having managed to swipe it when nopony was looking, but she bore the discomfort silently. She knew that her prolonged silence was worrying her friends, but the thought was distant, as though she was thinking about the weather on the other side of Equestria. It didn’t matter now. Nothing mattered. Not comfort. Not her friends. Not surviving the night. Nothing.
All that mattered was that it was almost time to take revenge for Turbo’s death.
Nosey knew that one of the ponies around her was just pretending, going through the motions of being normal. Slowly, she swept her eyes over everypony in the café, looking at each of them for only a fraction of a second before moving on. She couldn’t stare at any one of them for too long, couldn’t let her eyes linger to the point where they’d make eye contact, or they’d know that she knew. They’d know that she knew what was going on, and then whichever one of them was that monster would come and get her…
Just the thought of that happening made her stomach churn in terror, and she lightly pushed her half-eaten lunch away, the sight of it nauseating her. For an instant she thought of getting up and heading to the bathroom, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t draw attention to herself. Not if she wanted to avoid its notice. Instead, she choked her discomfort down, taking deep breaths and shakily sipping some water as she fought to regain control over herself. Normal. I just have to act normal and it won’t see me.
One of them was that monster in disguise. One of them was another pony, trapped in their own body and screaming silently the way she had been, unable to do anything as they were used for its plans, its enjoyment. Which of them was it? She knew that it was one of them but which one?! She had to know, had to figure out which of them she needed to get away from…
There was an elderly unicorn stallion on the balcony, reading his newspaper as he sipped his tea. Was it him? Had he been staring at the same page too long, just pretending to read? Or was it the mare across the room, talking to some friends of hers? Her smile seemed just a touch too wide, her laughter slightly too loud to be natural. Or maybe the waiter, going around to each table to check on the patrons. Hadn’t he just made his rounds a few minutes ago? Wasn’t he more interested than he should have been, lingering at each table just a moment longer than was polite? Or maybe the colt eating his lunch a few seats away…had he just glanced at her?
A moment later she realized what was happening, and the sense of horror that enveloped her then was so overwhelming that she couldn’t even scream. It was toying with her, and had been all along! It wasn’t just one of the ponies here, it was all of them! They were all under its control, and it was making them pretend to act normal while introducing just enough flaws in their actions to let her figure it out, all for its own amusement!
I have to get out of here! All of a sudden her limbs worked again, primal instincts kicking in as she scrambled to get up. What had she been thinking? She’d deliberately sat down in a booth tucked into the back corner of the café so that she’d have her back to a wall, but now she felt trapped. Cornered. The space around her felt so cramped that she could barely breathe. Reflexively, she reached for her purse, trying not to pant in terror as she hastily drew out some coins and tossed them on the table. She had to go NOW! The door to the stairwell was on the other side of the room, too far to get to, but there was a window nearby. They were only on the second floor; if she leaped out it, she’d be able to get away. Lurching to her hooves, she took a step-
They were looking at her.
Each and every one of them was staring at her. All conversation, all movement, had stopped. Instead they were simply looking at her with blank expressions. Somehow that was more frightening than if they had been frowning or leering, and she froze again even though she knew it was the wrong thing to do. No no no please sweet Celestia no!
“Where do you think you’re going, Nosey?” the elderly stallion on the balcony asked. It took her a moment to realize that he was speaking in the voice of the monster’s left head.
When she didn’t respond, the mare sitting at the table with her friends spoke up next. “We have so much to catch up on,” she said in the feminine tones of the right head, a long black tongue snaking out to lick her lips.
“And once you’re done telling me everything,” smiled the waiter, his voice androgynous just like the middle head, “you know what’ll happen next?”
“No…!” Her sob was one of protest rather than denial. She wanted to lunge for the window, wanted to jump out it and run for all she was worth, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She knew that if she tried it would get her, and she’d give anything to stop that from happening again, even for just another few seconds. She knew it was foolish, knew it wasn’t rational, but rational thought was beyond her now, leaving her unable to do anything but shake and whimper as tears spilled from her eyes. “No no no!”
“yES yOu Do,” screeched the colt, slowly standing and moving toward her. His face wasn’t that of a pony anymore. Instead, his entire head had transformed into a fang-filled ringed maw, the orifice contracting and releasing as it spoke. “yOU rEmeMbEr fROm lAsT tIMe.” It moved closer, until it was right in front of her, leaning in until its teeth were only inches away from her. “aNd nOW iT’S gONnA hAPpeN aGAiN.”
The scream that tore itself from Nosey’s throat then wasn’t that of a pony. It was the sound an animal made when it was trapped and knew that something unspeakable was about to happen to it. She screamed and screamed and screamed, not seeing the other ponies in the café closing in on her, not seeing the colt in front of her transforming into the monster she feared the most, not seeing the sudden and incongruous appearance of Princess Luna, until screaming was all there was in her universe…
Nosey was still screaming as she woke up.
There were ponies all around her, and she thrashed wildly, trying to escape from what had to be that monster’s thralls bearing down on her. “GET AWAY FROM ME!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “GET AWAY FROM M-”
Suddenly something heavy landed on her, knocking her to the ground just as she’d gotten her legs under her, and she struggled harder as she recognized it as a body. “Miss Newsy! Stop!” yelled a male voice, and she only dimly recognized it as being different from the monster’s. She tried to scream again, but a hoof covered her mouth before she could. “Stop! You’re safe now!” yelled the voice of the pony on top of her. “Miss Newsy! You’re safe!” She heard the words, but they barely registered to her. She obviously wasn’t safe, so why was it taunting her like this?!
She put everything she had into breaking free then, wrapping her telekinesis around the stallion on top of her and pushed upward while simultaneously trying to get her legs under her. In response, she felt her attacker struggle harder, trying mightily to stop her from getting up. “Help me hold her down!” he yelled, and a moment later she felt several more bodies press down on her, their combined weight easily forcing her back to the ground. For an instant she kept struggling, trying to scream again, but it was useless, and then she went limp, squeezing her eyes shut to try and block out what was about to happen as sobs began to uncontrollably spill out of her, muffled by the hoof over her mouth.
But as the seconds ticked by, she didn’t feel the horrible sense of something evil slipping inside her, nor the expected loss of control over her body. Instead, the ponies keeping her pinned down just…held her there. “I think she’s calming down,” announced the voice again. “Miss Newsy, can you hear me? Do you know who I am?”
Somehow managing to stifle the pitiful sounds coming from her throat, Nosey – more certain now that she knew this voice from somewhere, and that it wasn’t that monster’s – tentatively cracked one eye open. For a second she couldn’t focus on anything, her vision blurred by tears. Blinking, she looked up at the stallion on top of her, and for a moment didn’t recognize him. But then comprehension came back to her, and she realized that he was the doctor that had been treating her before… House Call she suddenly remembered. Doctor House Call.
Suddenly it all came rushing back. Lex had saved her, he’d killed the thing and brought her back, and then Sonata had calmed her down, and they’d handed her off to the doctors. It had been going alright, just a routine exam like any she’d ever had, until one of the nurses had smiled at her in a way that – because of the bad light inside the medical tent – had made her face look vaguely like that horrible thing. Nosey shuddered as she remembered going into a panic then, everyone telling her to calm down and not understanding that she wanted to calm down but couldn’t! Then House Call had injected her with something and then…
Going limp, Nosey somehow managed to make eye contact with the doctor, giving a small nod. He paused, weighing her response, then spoke. “I’m going to withdraw my hoof from your mouth. Please don’t scream.” She nodded again, and a moment later he uncovered her mouth. “I’m sorry. Normally it’s a terrible idea to obstruct a hysterical patient’s mouth, but we can’t have you screaming under the current circumstances.” He motioned to the ponies around them, and they slowly released Nosey, stepping back to give her a little room.
For a moment, she just laid there, not trusting herself to move. It was only after several seconds’ worth of deep breaths that she started to sit up. “Where am I? What hap-” She couldn’t finish, her stomach suddenly clenching harshly as her adrenaline surge ebbed. Doubling over, she started to dry heave, retching as her stomach tried to expel its contents even though it was empty. It took several seconds before the episode ended, and it was with a pained moan that she flopped onto her side, deciding that standing up was a bad idea right now. “What happened?” she tried again.
“You became hysterical while we were treating you, so we had to sedate you,” explained House Call, making sure to keep his voice as level and soothing as possible.
“No, I mean…” She limply waved a hoof toward the night sky. It had been daytime last she remembered. “What’s going on?”
House Call paused just for an instant before answering. “You shouldn’t worry about that right now. You need to focus-”
“Don’t,” she croaked, giving him a pleading look. “Just…tell me what’s happening right now. Please.”
Biting his lip for a moment, House Call sighed. “Lex Legis announced that the ghouls in Vanhoover are about to attack the camp. He and Sonata Dusk are going to intercept them. They gathered everypony here so that he can use a spell to hide us all in the meantime.”
Lex… Just hearing his name made her feel better, and Nosey felt her stomach unclench just a little. He killed it. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back. Repeating the mantra to herself a few times, Nosey unsteadily stood up. “Where is he? I have to see him.”
“He’s over there,” House Call canted his head behind her, “but you can’t go to him right now. He’s casting the spell to protect us. Listen.”
Turning in the indicated direction, Nosey pricked her ears up. Sure enough, she could hear Lex’s voice raised in a chant. Although the words themselves were in some language she didn’t understand, just the sound of him sent waves of relief through her, making her gasp and shudder as her anxiety lessened. House Call was saying something else to her then, telling her what Sonata had told them about needing to be very still and quiet in order for his illusion to fool the undead ponies, but she barely heard him.
All she could think about right then was how badly she wanted to be by her savior’s side.
“When you told me I guessed right about your plan, I thought that included the part where you didn’t hurt yourself anymore,” complained Sonata, but there was no real irritation in her voice. Though that might have been because she was too busy keeping him from collapsing to the ground, bracing herself as he leaned against her bonelessly.
For a long moment Lex didn’t bother to reply, just trying to process the level of damage that he’d taken to cast that spell. If it had simply been a matter of pain then it wouldn’t have been an issue; he’d simply have borne it and moved it. But while channeling energy through himself to empower the depleted scroll had hurt, it had also debilitated him. That hadn’t been outside of his predictions, but the extent of the damage had been worse than he’d expected. Even now, he could still feel his muscles spasming and twitching uncontrollably, his body refusing to move as he commanded it. “I just…need a moment…” he panted, hoping that he was right. As it was, even standing was beyond him right now.
But it was worth it, he thought defiantly, looking at the space where the crowd of ponies had been up until a moment ago. Strictly speaking, of course, they were still there; it was just that the illusion he’d cast had hidden them from view. Instead, their collective appearance had been replaced by the image that he’d specified during the casting, one which he was sure would not only be utterly uninteresting to the ghouls, but would be avoided by them as well.
Seeing where Lex’s eyes were directed, Sonata glanced at the illusion Lex had conjured. “So…your super-awesome idea was to replace everypony with a really big hole in the ground?” She didn’t try to keep the wry note out of her voice, looking at the massive, empty pit that now appeared to occupy the space where the camp ponies had been less than a minute ago. While she had to admit that the effect was pretty cool – it looked like some invisible giant had reached down and scooped out a chunk of the land – she wasn’t sure exactly how this was supposed to be such a great anti-ghoul measure.
“The merit is….self-evident…” rasped Lex, taking slow, deep breaths. The pain in his limbs was already starting to ebb, which he took to be a good sign; hopefully physical coordination would return shortly. “The ghouls won’t…want to fall in…so they’ll…stay back…” He’d made sure that the illusory hole appeared to be over twenty feet deep, enough that it looked like it would be seriously difficult to climb out of for anyone who fell in. Given that the ghouls were motivated by cannibalistic hunger, the mere prospect of becoming trapped should be enough to make them avoid the gaping pit.
Of course, if they didn’t then the ruse would immediately be revealed. Since no actual earth had been displaced, anything that stumbled into the area where the pit was would not only fail to fall in – creating an incredibly conspicuous spectacle – but would also undoubtedly feel the tightly-packed crowd of ponies that were the actual occupants of that space. Ideally, there would have been some sort of secondary measure in place to prevent such a thing from happening, but that simply wasn’t possible under the current circumstances.
“So listen,” began Sonata. “I’m just gonna pitch a thought here: maybe you should go in there,” she waved a hoof at the illusory hole, “and check on Nosey. I mean, you heard her screaming before, right? It sounded like she had a really bad nightmare. You could go in there and give her a pep talk, or maybe just sit down and let her tell you what she was dreaming about, take a power-nap, something like that.” She held up a hoof then, giving him a solemn look. “I’ll even allow a tiny bit of snuggling, just this once.” More importantly, Lex’s being in there would get him out of harm’s way right now. If letting some other girl nuzzle him was what it took to keep him from going out to fight when he couldn’t even stand up on his own, Sonata was more than willing to pay that price. Besides, I bet me and Severance can handle it on our own.
Of course, the odds of Lex agreeing to any such thing were slim, and he proved her right a moment later as he shook his head. “The parameters of the illusion are immutable after they’ve been set, Sonata.” Just speaking normally was a chore, but at least it was one he felt capable of performing now. Barely. “If you or I went in there, we’d just look like we were floating above the hole. As for Nosey…” He’d intended to say that she’d just have to deal with her problems on her own, but a sudden rush of guilt made him stop before he could get the words out. It was his fault that she was traumatized, and besides, his research suggested that friends were supposed to be invested in each other’s emotional well-being. “…we’ll tend to her after we’ve defeated the ghouls.”
Sonata frowned just a little. Although his agreeing to go relax and not fight had never really been in the cards, she couldn’t help but feel a little miffed at him for it. “Great. Well, maybe next time, make it so that we’re hidden behind the big crazy illusion-thingy too? That way we can attack from inside it without anyone seeing that we’re there.”
“The entire point of this is to keep the ghouls’ attention away from where everypony is, Sonata. Besides, most attack spells possess a clear visual or audial manifestation which typically emanates from the caster to the target, which means that their point of origin is easily traced. The sight of attack spells originating from a point of what looked like empty space would very quickly alert everyone who saw it that something was wrong.”
Sonata sighed. Her good mood from a few minutes ago had been wrecked just now when Lex had pushed himself too far – again – and it had driven home the point that he wasn’t in any shape to fight. Yeah, ghouls weren’t any big deal, and she still didn’t think that even a whole bunch of them would be that hard to deal with, but the plan Lex had described to her before he’d cast that spell had him being right in the thick of it with Severance while she hung back to attack at range. But looking at her boyfriend right now, that didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. So now how do I get him to realize that without pushing his buttons?
Before she could think of an answer, she felt Lex moving away from her. With a strangled groan of effort, he managed to stand under his own power, though the effort left him sweating and breathing heavy. “Let’s move back,” he grunted, already turning back toward where the medical tent had been. “Standing right at the edge of the illusion is just asking for a stray ghoul to stumble into it.”
“Fun fact,” she started as she moved alongside him. “When Cloudbank and the others went into Vanhoover, I used a spell on each of them to give them a boost.” Lex sent a glance her way then, and she kept going. “It, like, makes you feel seriously amped up, you know? Like you’re totes super-charged. I’m gonna cast it on myself in a minute. You want that I should use it on you too?”
Just like she’d expected, he grimaced at the suggestion, shaking his head. “I’ve worked very hard to keep mind-altering magic like what you’re describing from affecting me, Sonata. Besides, you should be conserving your available magic for direct attack spells.”
“Right, sorry,” she gave him an apologetic grin, the very picture of innocence. “I just thought you might want a little pick-me-up for when you’re out there swinging Severance around, but I should’ve known better. Besides, I bet you’ve already got a bunch of spells for that, huh?”
Lex frowned then, but it was in confusion rather than annoyance. “Are you…being coy?”
Not knowing what that meant, Sonata kept going. “I mean, you totes have to have a whole bunch of spells to buff yourself up, right? Otherwise, you’d be hanging back with me while Severance flies out and does its thing on its own. So I’m sure that’s why you’re planning on going out there with it even though you’re, like, super hurt.” She nodded sagely, making sure she had her majorly-serious face on as she did. In her mind, though, she was congratulating herself on steering the conversation so perfectly. Now he’d realize the point she was making, without ever realizing that she’d made it. How’s this for brilliant? she smirked internally.
“For your information,” retorted Lex sourly, “I have several defensive spells that I can still cast, since I never had a chance to utilize them when I was confronting Xiriel.” That, and they would have been futile anyway, since the belier devil would simply have dispelled them. “As for Severance, it’s optimal that I fight in conjunction with it, rather than the two of us operating independently.”
Sonata blinked at that; this wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go! “Huh? But why?”
Lex’s horn glowed as he wrapped the weapon in his telekinesis, lifting it from his back. “Severance will be our primary mode of attack during this conflict. As such, it’s imperative that it not be allowed to be disabled. If it flies into the mass of ghouls on its own, and they manage to overbear it and keep it pinned down through sheer numbers, we won’t be able to retrieve it, at which point our odds of survival will plummet.”
“Wait, for realsies?” She couldn’t help but glance at the scythe, skeptical. “You really think that they could do that?”
“If their numbers are great enough,” replied Lex levelly. Although he knew that the blade could heat itself as a defense mechanism against being grasped, that would only be of limited help if the ghouls tackled the scythe by the dozens. If anything, any nearby undead ponies would be attracted to the smell of burning flesh as Severance cooked those among their brethren that were in direct contact with it, and would likely throw themselves on such a pile-up en masse.
“Okay, but what does that have to do with you using it to fight?”
“Coordinated attacks are more effective than those that are performed without mutual organization,” explained Lex, “and the nature of that coordination is my controlling Severance via telekinesis. That way, I’ll be able to instantaneously direct its strikes for maximum effect rather than having to issue verbal instructions – and be able to hear what it’s saying in turn – while still having the option of releasing it to fight on its own when I need to focus on spellcasting and grasping it again when I don’t. Since I won’t be able to telekinetically grab it if I lose sight of it during the fighting, that requires us to remain in close proximity.”
“I dunn-”
“Shh!” Lex suddenly stopped as they reached the edge of where the remains of the medical tent covered the uneven ground. “Do you hear that?”
“Huh? What?” She strained her ears for a moment, listening for what it was that had put Lex on the alert. For a moment she didn’t hear anything; even the sounds of the camp ponies had been muffled as part of the illusion that he had conjured. She almost gave up when she realized she did hear something, a distant sound with a pitch so low it was barely audible. For a moment she could only wonder what it was; it was almost like the sound of distant rain, but that didn't make sense...the moon and the stars were out in force, making it plain that there wasn't a cloud in the sky. She was about to ask Lex what the noise was when the obvious answer came to her, sending a shudder down her spine: it was the sound of hooves. Many, many hooves. All moving together.
“This again?! She really didn’t pick you for your brains, did she?”
“Don’t talk to him like that.”
“I just think we should put a little more distance between us and Lex. If he comes looking for us now-”
“You think we’d be better off if he found us stumbling around in the dark, exhausted and barely able to move in a straight line?”
“Both of you, please, stop it,” sighed Cozy, feeling her stomach cramp up at Aisle and Aria’s bickering. Though that might have been the hunger pains kicking up again. After having had a good meal for the first time in weeks, the renewed lack of food wasn’t sitting well with her body. “We’ve gone over all of this already, and this is the best option we have right now.”
“That’s her way of saying ‘shut it, loverboy,’” added Aria, somehow managing to imbue her whisper with an audible sneer.
“I understand,” replied Aisle nervously. “I do. I just think that if-”
This time Aria’s reply was an angry hiss. “If you repeat yourself one more time then, so help me, I won’t be the only one here who needs to have their voice box regenerated!”
Giving a long-suffering sigh, Cozy closed her eyes. Although her spirit had been high when she’d left the camp, even in the face of the constant setbacks they’d had to deal with, Aria and Aisle were very clearly not as relieved as she was to be away from that place. By itself that wouldn’t have been a big deal, but each of them was constantly venting their anxieties as they journeyed. While Cozy could have dealt with that, the two of them were completely unable to agree on anything, and those disagreements almost always became arguments. Listening to the two of them go back and forth again and again had been enough to erode Cozy’s good mood.
It would have been easy to lay all the blame on Aria, she knew. The Siren was constantly complaining – about being hungry, about how slow they were going, about having to crawl along the ground (her flying spell had ended just after she’d rejoined them, and she’d insisted on conserving her remaining magic in case there was an emergency) – and her attitude had been enough to make Cozy regret asking her to join them. But there was no backing out of that now, she knew. She’d seen a little of what Aria could do during the battle against the sea monsters, and it was enough to make it very clear that if she wanted, the Siren wouldn’t have much trouble dragging them back to Lex against their wills. In fact, Cozy suspected that was the real reason why Aria was insisting on holding some of her magic in reserve…
On the other hoof, Aisle hadn’t been much better. Although he wasn’t as openly unpleasant as Aria was, he couldn’t seem to keep himself from offering his opinion on every little thing they did. Even that wouldn’t have been unbearable if he’d limited himself to voicing some new or otherwise-pertinent observation and being done with it. But for whatever reason, he seemed compelled to raise the same points over and over again. The number of times that he’d insisted that they put as much distance between themselves and the camp as quickly as they could was impossible to count. It was like he thought they hadn’t heard him or fully comprehended what he was saying, no matter how thoroughly they assured him that they understood him.
Cozy had been content to endure Aisle’s repeating himself – even if it made her grit her teeth, she knew that it was his way of coping with his fears; besides, getting to know her boyfriend’s bad habits was also a part of their relationship – but Aria was far less forgiving. It hadn’t taken long for her to start snarking at Aisle every time he said something he’d mentioned before. Aisle’s replies had never dropped down to her level, of course, but maybe it would have been better if he had rather than trying to explain his reasoning even more in response to her criticism, since that inevitably upset Aria even worse. It had quickly gotten to the point where Cozy needed to jump in as soon as they started talking to each other in order to avoid a fight breaking out.
All of that, plus the fact that the journey itself hadn’t gotten any easier. If anything, it had become harder as they’d continued on. The issues with the makeshift sled that they’d loaded Pillow’s body onto had continued to plague them, and whether due to the effort they were expending or Aria’s complaining, there had been constant reminders as to how hungry they all were. Worse, Aisle’s stamina had rapidly been depleted by the effort of pulling Pillow’s body, and while the pace had picked up slightly when Cozy had taken on that burden for herself (over Aisle’s protests), it hadn’t been long before the effort had slowed her to a crawl as well. Aria, of course, had refused to take a turn pulling at all.
The final straw had been after the sun had gone down. When the last vestiges of twilight had turned into full darkness, the logistical problems had become too much to ignore. While Cozy could have conjured a light, Aisle had practically become hysterical at the idea, insisting that doing so would instantly bring Lex down on them; the fact that Aria had begrudgingly concurred had driven home that it was a bad idea, and Cozy had let it go. But with no light, keeping on anything that remotely resembled a straight line was too difficult to attempt. None of them knew how to navigate via the stars, and while the lights from the camp were still visible behind them – closer than was comfortable – it was too easy to drift off-course if they didn’t stop and glance backward every minute or so. As Aisle had repeatedly brought up, if they drifted even a little bit without constantly checking their course, they could end up heading northwest instead of northeast, which would add to their overall travel time rather than reducing it.
Despite this, he’d wanted to push on, his fear of Lex stronger than his fear of getting lost. That, and he’d pointed out that the more distance they covered, the sooner they could reach a farming village and acquire some food. But Cozy had eventually decided to stop for the night, knowing that they were all at the end of their rope. As badly as she wanted to get back to the Crystal Empire, she knew that Aria was right about them exhausting themselves if they went any further.
At the moment, the Siren had moved on to yet another thing that was bothering her. “You had better be right about there being a place with some food nearby,” she spat, the whispered words quite clearly directed at Aisle. “Even when I had to live with the sahuagin, there was enough to eat every day.”
“I don’t know why we haven’t seen anything,” murmured Aisle. They’d all lain down a short distance from each other when Cozy had called for them to stop, and he was only a few feet from her now. Despite that, he was still nearly invisible in the dim glow of the gibbous moon and the stars. “None of them are big places, but usually there’d be at least a few lights in windows. We should have caught a glimpse of some by now.”
“Maybe they’re hiding from something,” ventured Cozy. She was only half-paying attention, exhaustion and the need to keep the conversation away from the two of them fighting driving her words more than logic. “We didn’t use any lights when we were in Vanhoover.”
“Yeah, but that was because of the ghouls,” answered Aisle, his voice slightly nervous. “It’s not like there are any of those out here. So what would they be hiding from?”
“They’ll need to hide from me if they don’t turn over whatever food they have,” whispered Aria harshly. Her stomach growled angrily then, as if to punctuate her words. “I’m hungry, I’m tired, and I’m hurt, so they better not give us any trouble!”
Cozy frowned at that, blinking for a moment as she fought off sleep, sitting up. “You’re hurt?” That didn’t make any sense; Aria hadn’t been injured when she’d joined up with them, and she hadn’t so much as helped pull Pillow’s sled. How could she be hurt? “How?”
“What do you care?” snorted Aria sullenly.
“Because I might be able to help.” With a grunt, she climbed to her hooves. “I can’t fix things like fatigue or sore muscles, but if you’re wounded I can heal you.”
“Well I am wounded,” came the petulant reply. Cozy climbed to her hooves at that, expecting that Aria would demand that she come heal her…but to her surprise, no such command came. Instead, Aria was silent for several long seconds before whispering again. “I wasn’t just talking about how rough the ground was for fun, you know.” Although it was hard to tell with how the words were whispered, it sounded to Cozy like Aria’s usual acerbity was lacking. “My tail isn’t exactly built for crawling around like this.”
That wasn’t news to Cozy, at least not completely. The ground being uncomfortable had been among Aria's laundry list of complaints, but Cozy had thought she’d been speaking more generally, like in terms of soreness or muscle cramping. But what she was saying now made it sound more like she had cuts and scrapes. For a moment Cozy felt a flicker of guilt, realizing she’d misjudged at least part of Aria’s bad attitude. I was so worried about staying far enough away from them that Lex’s curse wouldn’t make me feel their discomfort that I didn’t think about what it was like for her. “I’ll heal you now,” she declared, starting to pick her way toward the source of the whispered words.
Aria snorted. “Why? What's it to you if I’m hurt or not?”
“Because I care about you, Aria. I wouldn't want to help you if I didn't.”
“And here I thought you were just worried that I’d turn you back in to Lex if you didn’t stay on my good side.”
Cozy flinched at the accusation. Although that wasn’t her reason for making the offer, that thought had crossed her mind. “That’s not true. I’ve done this for you before, remember? After the battle at the docks?”
“What I remember is that you told everyone who was hurt to gather around you, and then you did your healing-aura thing. You weren’t worried about me personally, were you?” When no answer came from the crystal mare, Aria snorted again. “Thought so. Maybe next time try that whole ‘I care about you’ bit when it’s not your best bet for getting something from me. It might sound a little more sincere then.”
Cozy was silent for a long moment, then marched toward where Aria’s voice came from. As she approached her, she gasped as she felt phantom pains suddenly appear along her lower body, as though she was covered with cuts and scrapes. Biting her lip as she almost stumbled across Aria, she gestured and chanted a prayer to Lashtada, before reaching out and laying a hoof on the Siren’s body. Immediately, the phantom pains vanished, and she heard Aria give a grunt of relief. Stepping back, Cozy turned toward where Aisle was already snoring softly. “I know you don’t believe me, but I do care about you, Aria. Right now, we’re all in this together, and that means that no matter what you might think, the three of us are a team. We won’t ignore your problems or abandon you.” She couldn’t help but give a wry smile then, knowing that Aria wouldn’t see it in the dark. “No matter how much you drive us crazy.” With that said, she trotted toward Aisle, intent on going to sleep.
Behind her, Aria was also counting on the darkness to hide her face, her features twisted in a pensive look.
Lex narrowed his eyes as he spoke. He’d done his best to keep track of the minutes after the Night Mare had warned him about the imminent attack, and by his count it was just now approaching the sixty-minute mark. When the goddess had said that the ghouls would attack in “a little over” an hour, she’d apparently been quite literal indeed.
“Awesome! That means it’s almost showtime!” grinned Sonata, though her smile faded as she glanced over at Lex, eyeing him critically. “You’re sure you’re okay to go head-to-head with them like this?” He frowned at that, and she held up a hoof to forestall his response. “I know the plan your super-big brain came up with is probably one of those ‘I’ve predicted everything ahead of time’ things, but I just wanna make sure it’s that and not ‘I’m sacrificing myself for everyone else’ instead, you know? ‘Cuz I’ve seen both kinds of movies and I gotta tell you, that second kind sucks. Like, a lot.”
“I’m implementing the most tactically-sound course of action that the present circumstances allow, Sonata,” replied Lex sourly. “That includes my engaging the ghouls in direct combat. This is not some reckless act where I throw myself at my opponents with no care of what happens to me.” He had to work hard to keep the bitter element out of his voice as he spoke, knowing that he was splitting hairs. The only reason that last sentence wasn’t a complete lie was because he was concerned about what would happen to him. Specifically, he knew that if he died then Sonata would immediately follow, and in all likelihood the camp ponies would somehow be discovered and subsequently lose their lives as well.
That distinction aside, this plan was extremely reckless. But that recklessness was the best that he had been able to come up with. Betting everything on Severance’s currently-unknown full power and his own defensive spells and magic items – with his only other preparations being the tent-covered holes ahead of him and the hastily-weaved illusion covering the ponies at his back – was leaving far too much to chance, but there was simply nothing else to utilize in the upcoming battle. Or at least, almost nothing else…
I order you to provide me with all the assistance you’re capable of, Lex thought imperiously, glancing down at his shadow. The command received no reply, but that was hardly unexpected; he still had no idea why his tulpa – the rebellious fragment of his own mind that had, until a few hours ago, done nothing but inflict misery on him – had suddenly come to his aid when he’d fought Xiriel. The present circumstances had simply moved too quickly for him to devote any serious investigation regarding what stimulus had changed its behavior. He hadn’t even been able to ask the Night Mare about it during their brief meeting. All he could do now was hope that whatever had prodded it to help him before would happen again. But since it hadn’t bothered to do so in any of his other fights, that didn’t seem likely…
“Awesome!” smiled Sonata, oblivious to her boyfriend’s self-recrimination. “In that case, I’m gonna get ready!” She didn’t wait for a reply before singing a quick spell, placing a hoof to her chest as she released the magic into herself. Immediately, she gave a loud whoop at the pleasant tingle went through her, prancing in place at the heady feeling. “This always feels super awesome! You sure you don’t want me to cast this on you too?”
“No.” Lex was only half-paying attention to her, instead turning his thoughts back toward the sound of the onrushing ghouls. He’d delayed casting any of his remaining defensive spells in order to leverage their durations as much as he could for the upcoming battle; every moment that they were in effect before the fight began was a moment that they were wasted, and while several of them were lengthy in how long they lasted, he didn’t want to take any more chances than were absolutely necessary. But based on how loud the sound of onrushing hooves had become, it was time to act. Raising a hoof in the air (which still took far more effort than he was happy about), he started to gesture and chant.
For her part, Sonata tilted her head in mild confusion. “‘No’ you don’t want me to cast it on you? Or ‘no’ you’re not sure- hey!” She couldn’t help but give a mild yelp as Lex finished casting his spell, only to reach out and brush his hoof across her chest. Having done the same thing a moment ago, she instantly recognized what had happened: he’d cast a spell on her! “What’re you doing?!”
“I told you I’d be utilizing defensive magic before the battle began,” he replied simply, before starting to gesture and chant again.
“Yeah, but I thought you meant on you!” she frowned, upset. “Not m-, stop that!” She tried to step backward as he reached toward her a second time, but didn’t manage to avoid his hoof. “If you have spells that can protect somepony, you should be using them on you!”
“These spells won’t work on me, Sonata,” answered Lex calmly. “They mimic the effects of several of the enchanted items I’m already wearing, which makes further applications redundant.” He nodded toward the cloak on his back as he spoke. “Ergo, their most strategic application is on the only other pony on the battlefield, which is you. Now stand still. There’s still one more.”
“Oh,” blinked Sonata as he started casting again, before giving a huff. “Well, geez. Why didn’t you say that before?”
Because I didn’t want you thinking too much about this, he thought to himself as he cast the third and final defensive spell on her. Although the odds of her wondering why he’d bothered to prepare defensive spells that mimicked the properties of items he was already wearing were slim, he hadn’t wanted to take a chance that she’d somehow seize on that thought and follow it to its logical conclusion. He knew she’d have argued with him if she had.
As it was, what he’d told her just now had only been partially true. The first spell he’d cast on her – a transmutation spell that caused the recipient’s bones and muscles to harden, providing powerful resistance to damage – wasn’t one whose effects were replicated by any of the items he was wearing. Moreover, the second and third spells – which toughened the skin into a sort of living armor and which warded the recipient against disadvantageous circumstances in general, respectively – were far stronger than the identical effects generated by the amulet and cloak that he was wearing. Had he used them on himself, Lex knew, his defensive potential would have been heightened by a not-inconsiderable degree.
It wouldn’t even have meant leaving Sonata unguarded, either. He could have cast those spells on himself and then simply passed the amulet and cloak to her, letting her enjoy their protection while he benefited from the spells that eclipsed their functionality. That would have been the smarter choice.
But just like when Xiriel had been about to kill Nosey, this was an instance where the smarter choice simply wasn’t acceptable. Lex had numerous layers of magical defenses wrapped around himself; Sonata had nothing except the single spell she’d used on herself just now…and from what he’d been able to gather, both from what she’d said and from hearing her casting it, all it did was provide a mild adrenaline surge. Between that and how she’d been fretting over him collapsing before, rather than the sheer number of ghouls that were about to descend on them, it was obvious that she was still taking this too lightly. With her not taking adequate measures to protect herself, that meant it was up to him to do so, regardless of the tactical costs. He would NOT risk losing her! “Now, do you remember what you’re supposed to do?”
“Totes!” Her smile was easy, certain that he had everything well in hoof. “I hang back and blast the ghouls with magic while you and Severance go all slash-happy on ‘em.”
Lex nodded. “I’ll do my best to keep them away from you, so focus your attacks on any that get past me. Remember, do not head towards the camp ponies under any circumstances. If you run low on magic or find yourself in a disadvantageous situation, make your way to me so I can cover you.”
Sonata rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Right, I’ll do the whole damsel thing. Promise.”
Lex sighed, but didn’t protest her characterization of his instructions, instead glancing back into the darkness. The rumbling was louder now, easily audible to anyone who wasn’t hard of hearing. “Alright, get into position. It’s almost time.”
“Right!” Sonata threw him a quick salute, then turned to leave…only to suddenly turn back. “Oh! I almost forgot! There’s something super important I need to tell you!”
“Make it quick,” frowned Lex unhappily, glancing between her and the direction the noise was coming from.
“If you’ve got any cool finishing moves, make totes sure to use them! And try to call out the name of each attack when you do it! Oh, and if you can fight in slow-mo, that’d be great too! Audiences totes eat that up!” She gestured back towards the illusory hole behind her as she spoke, shooting him an excited grin before turning to head to her position. “We’re gonna put on such an awesome show!”
For a moment Lex could only stare after her, completely nonplussed, before managing to gather his wits. Turning his gaze back toward the inky blackness that concealed the stampede of ghouls that was rapidly approaching, he shook his head in grim vindication. Deceiving her in order to protect her had definitely been the right choice…
Two minutes later, the ghouls came pouring out of the darkness.
The sound of hooves had grown from a loud noise into a din and finally into a roar, heralding their arrival as they entered the range of the campfires and Severance’s fluorescent glow. There was no organization or cohesion among their numbers, no orderly ranks or configuration. They were simply a loose mob of individuals, each running as fast as they could as they charged at him.
Lex had waited until the last possible moment to cast his ball lightning spell, the same one he had delivered the killing blow to the dragon back in Tall Tale. This time, he’d arranged each of the three crackling balls of electricity ahead of time, placing each one at a different position over the fabric stretched out in front of him. Their locations had been carefully chosen, selected to plug gaps between the holes that Sonata had gotten the camp ponies to dig earlier.
The ghouls cackled and snarled as they rushed forward, desiccated tongues licking filthy teeth as emaciated limbs pumped faster. Even as the first of them stumbled and fell into the concealed holes, letting out shrieks of surprise and rage before their companions trampled them, the horde continued to charge forward, an unstoppable wave of death. At the edge of the light, more of them poured forward, the press of undead ponies growing thicker as they came. Several charged straight into the balls of electricity, unable to avoid them in the tight confines of the throng, and their shrieks were drowned out by a loud buzzing sound as they burned.
Lex watched them come, unmoving except for the five gemstones circling his head. As they crossed the pit-strewn ground ahead of him, his horn lit up, shrouded in purple as he lifted his weapon off his back and held it aloft in his telekinesis. Slowly, he reared it back, eyes narrowing as the ghouls closed the distance between them.
As the first of the undead ponies reached him, Lex roared and swung Severance with all his might.
The ghouls bearing down on him were nothing less than a tidal wave of certain death.
The few sources of illumination on the battlefield were barely enough to provide sufficient light for Lex to see by. The glow from the campfires arrayed behind him barely seemed to reach his position, the three crackling balls of lightning that he’d arranged around the battlefield were already obscured by the mass of undead ponies, and the combined light from his horn and Severance’s own fluorescent shine were all barely enough to make the immediate area visible. It let him see the forefront of the army of ghouls that were charging at him, but not the ones behind them. The result was that there seemed to be an endless number of ghouls pouring out of the darkness…and all rushing directly for him.
The sight should have intimidated him, Lex knew. The vision of hundreds – for that was surely how many were in front of him now – of undead ponies should have been the stuff of nightmares. But that thought brought only a contemptuous smile to his lips as he raised Severance and prepared to strike.
Lex Legis was used to nightmares.
As the first of the ghouls reached him, Lex roared as he swung Severance…and unleashed utter devastation.
Howls rang out as scores of ghouls were obliterated instantly, their bodies reduced to pieces that rocketed away from Lex as though they’d been shot out of a cannon. Despite the single arc of his swing, all of them had been reduced to so much gore, as though sliced multiple times over. More than that, the range of the blow had exceeded Severance’s actual striking area, hitting all of the ghouls that had been closest to reaching him. Had he not seen it before, when Cloudbank had performed a similar feat on the broken ship that the kraken had hurled at them, Lex would have gaped at the sight; as it was, he couldn’t help the shudder that went through him. Incredible! This much power…! This was what the Night Mare had given him?!
Under normal circumstances, Lex would have castigated himself for not having figured out how strong Severance truly was before now. He would have cursed himself for how conservatively he’d pushed the weapon’s boundaries regarding overreliance, worried about losing the only way he had of easily replenishing his primary magic. But right then, regret was the furthest thing from his mind. As he gripped the weapon in the glowing aura of his telekinesis and brought it back to a ready position, Lex was grinning darkly, his eyes glowing green-and-purple as he turned to the horde of undead ponies. I can end it! he thought triumphantly, his anxieties about his injuries and his depleted magic falling away, replaced by a moment of sudden bloodlust. With this, I can finally put an end to the monsters infesting my city!
The plague of ghouls rushed in to congratulate him.
“Is…is this for real?” croaked Funshine, unable to take his eyes off of what was happening.
“It can’t be,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide, shaking his head at the impossibility happening right in front of him. But even as the words slipped out of his mouth another group of ghouls were reduced to body parts, Lex swinging his scythe through the things as though they were nothing more than stalks of wheat.
“We couldn’t…” Hopscotch had to pause, licking dry lips before trying to speak again. “We had to run away if we saw more than two of those things, and he’s…”
“We tried to shake that guy down…?” Granola Bar’s voice had a slightly hysterical element to it, remembering how easily Lex had defeated them all when they’d attacked him. “I knew he was strong, but this is crazy…”
“What’s going on?!” whined Piggy petulantly, straining futilely to see over the crowd. Stomping a hoof in agitation, he reared up onto his hind legs and tried jumping up, though this accomplished nothing except to get him two inches off the ground before sending him sprawling onto his rump as soon as he touched back down. Despite this, he quickly scrambled back up onto all fours, his face turning red in frustration. “Somepony pick me up!” he ordered. “I wanna see what’s happening!”
“Trust me,” murmured Granola Bar, “you don’t.”
“Yes I do!” squealed Piggy, stomping a hoof even harder to show that he meant business. “I’m in charge here and I wanna see what’s going on!” But for some reason, his tantrum didn’t seem to be working; nopony was listening to him! Biting his lip in agitation, Piggy turned toward the pony next to Granola Bar. “Garden, pick me up right-, hey…where’d she go?”
“I’m sure she….wait, what?!” Slip ‘n’ Slide’s voice suddenly became much clearer as he processed what Piggy had said, managing to tear his eyes away from Lex’s battle to look at where Garden Gate should have been. But to his mounting horror, there was just an empty space where she’d been a moment ago. “She’s gone!”
“What?” Granola Bar glanced next to her, then did a double-take as she saw that the pony she’d spent over a day watching had somehow managed to disappear. “Oh no!” She spun around, looking every which way, but all she saw was a sea of unfamiliar faces, almost all of them swept up in the spectacle happening up ahead. “Garden?!”
“Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me!” groaned Funshine. “She ran off?!”
Hopscotch looked ready to faint. “What do we do?! If she goes outside of the illusion, she’ll be seen!”
She looked down as she spoke, peering at the translucent image of a hole on the ground under her hooves. Although it looked fake to her, as if they were standing on a really big picture of a crater or something, Sonata had told them that Lex’s spell would make it look like the real deal from the outside. More than that, it would hide all of them and even let them talk normally…so long as they stayed inside it. “But anypony who leaves,” she’d said, “will totes be exposed, so stay put!”
“We need to split up!” Granola Bar was already moving as she spoke, starting to muscle her way through the crowd. “Spread out and start checking the crowd! She couldn’t have gotten far!” The others gave statements of acknowledgment, but she barely heard them, worried sick about her friend. Garden, please, don’t do anything reckless. We can’t lose you too!
Lex snarled viciously as he swung Severance at a group of ghouls coming at him from his left, lashing out with a brutal upswing that cut them all to pieces in a single blow. But he had no time to celebrate their demise as more of them barreled at him directly from the front, heedless of what he’d done to the last group that had tried that. Cursing under his breath, he spun the weapon around in his telekinetic grasp so that the tip of its blade was facing forward instead of back, and then brought it down in a slash that decimated the ghouls…but there were more already moving in to fill the gap, apparently completely unfazed at having seen so many of their fellows die.
There was no end to the things. By Lex’s estimation, he had been fighting for almost a full minute now, and in that time had to have slain three or four hundred ghouls, all without any of them having so much as landed a blow on him, let alone gotten past him. Yet there were still ghouls marching out of the gloom by the score; he could still feel their hoofbeats shaking the ground as they continued to charge him. How many can there possibly be?! he snarled internally, panting as he brought the blade down in preparation for another wide swing. His earlier enthusiasm was steadily eroding the longer the battle went on, diminishing in an inverse proportion to his mounting fatigue.
Grunting, he swung his head around, telekinetically dragging Severance in the same arc…and immediately realized that he’d done a foolish thing. Telekinesis didn’t require that you moved your horn in a same manner as whatever you were grasping; rather, that was something that unicorns did when using telekinesis while tired, moving their horn physically in an effort to reduce the perceived burden of whatever it was they were magically lifting. It didn’t actually make telekinesis any easier, however. Instead, all it did was telegraph how they were about to move whatever they were holding. Thus, it wasn’t a complete surprise when several of the ghouls managed to avoid Lex’s wild swing, leaping into the air or throwing themselves onto the ground as he swung Severance, barely managing to clear the weapon’s incredible shockwave.
There were only three of them, but they were the first three to survive being targeted by him so far. Shrieking in joy, the ghouls continued to bound toward him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to retrieve the weapon, correct his momentum, and attack again before they reached him. Lex knew it too…and so he didn’t even try.
Instead, he released the weapon completely, his horn sputtering out as he abandoned it to fight on its own and turned all of his attention to the immediate threat. Barely noticing as the weapon sped out of his line of sight, Lex lifted a hoof and began to chant. The trio of ghouls were already mere feet in front of him, rushing toward him with everything they had, and he had no idea if they’d reach him before they finished. But as the lead ghoul bodily flung itself at him, its jaws widening as it aimed right for his face, Lex realized the answer an instant later: yes.
But in the fraction of a second between when he comprehended that and when the ghoul reached him, Lex had already figured out what to do about it.
Not breaking his chant as the ghoul barreled into him, Lex raised the hoof he was gesticulating with…and shoved it right into the undead pony’s open mouth. He grit his teeth as he forced himself to ignore the disgusting sensation of its tongue on his hoof, as well as the way it was futilely trying to close its jaws around his foreleg, his protective enchantments preventing it from finding any purchase. Instead, he made the final necessary gesture, pronouncing the last syllable, and an instant later the undead pony’s head exploded, fried from within by the red-hot beam that he’d unleashed directly into its brain. Two other beams immediately lanced out from the thing’s ruined skull and slammed into the pair of ghouls that were following in their companion’s hoofsteps, and an instant later they fell to the ground, burnt to a crisp.
Not stopping to admire his handiwork, Lex shook the filth off of his hoof as he turned back to survey the rest of the battle. Severance was wiping out another group of ghouls, but more were already rushing in…and as he’d suspected, they were ignoring the scythe completely, trying to make their way toward him above all else. This is exactly how it said they were acting in that bank in Vanhoover, Lex thought, remembering Severance’s report about what had happened to Cloudbank and the others. They’ve become completely oblivious to everything except feeding.
Grabbing the scythe in his telekinesis, Lex brought it back to his side, rearing back to prepare for another swing. Just that motion ached, and for an instant he felt himself teeter dangerously before he got his balance back. It was, he knew, a contest of attrition at this point. Either the ghouls would finally deplete their ranks, or he’d end up collapsing from exhaustion. The winner would be whichever side was able to hold out longer. They’ve lost at least five hundred ghouls by now…they can’t have that many more!
Everyone’s lives, he knew, depended on that guess being right.
Fencer was panting in exertion by the time she reached the front of the crowd.
It hadn’t been easy to get there. The curse of weakness that Lex had placed on her activated if she came within ten feet of another pony, which meant that being in the middle of a huge group like this kept her continuously debilitated. With everypony’s eyes glued to what was going on in front of them, they had barely noticed her feeble attempts to nudge her way past them. In the end, she’d needed to lean forward and practically fall onto whoever was in front of her in order to make them move aside, a process that she’d had to repeat several times and came perilously close to bumping her still-bandaged horn on multiple occasions. But now she’d finally made it…
Ahead of her, Lex was still battling the ghouls. Even as she watched, he sent another pack of the undead ponies flying…but even from here, Fencer could hear the loud grunt of effort he gave as he swung his scythe, the motion made with visible exhaustion. The sight was enough to make her brow furrow slightly; why was he wielding it himself when the thing was able to move on its own?
Pondering that for a moment yielded no obvious answers, and Fencer put the matter aside as she turned her attention to the other pony on the battlefield: Sonata. Standing halfway between Lex and the disguised ponies, the other mare hadn’t done anything since the battle started that Fencer could tell, presumably having been relegated to some sort of backup role. As it was, she was yelling encouragement and cheering whenever Lex dispatched another squad of ghouls, sounding for all the world like an excitable filly caught up in her favorite show.
Fencer considered Sonata for a moment longer before returning her gaze to Lex, watching as he strained to lash out with his scythe again, only barely managing to complete his swing before the latest wave of undead ponies reached him. At this point, it was only a matter of time before he was overwhelmed and the ghouls got past him. That thought made her work her jaw, moving her tongue behind the knife in her mouth so that the tip of it sat between her front teeth, ready to be pushed forward in an instant. That done, her eyes flickered back to Sonata.
It was almost time…
Lex's lungs were burning as he lashed out with Severance again.
It was like he was underwater, his every motion sluggish and struggling to draw breath. Each time he swung Severance it felt like he was trying to lift a mountain. Worse, the aftermath of each strike brought with it a wave of dizziness, the world threatening to spin wildly out of control as he struggled to lift the scythe again.
And still the ghouls rushed toward him, undaunted. Although the ground was littered with ichor and body parts, there was no sign that their ranks were being depleted. If anything their numbers seemed to have swelled, drawn by the piles of rotting meat that were the remains of their comrades. But even those morsels weren’t enough to distract them for very long, most of the ghouls taking only a few bites of whatever gobs of decayed flesh and bone were in their path before turning their attention back to the living pony right in front of them.
Not having the energy to so much as mutter a curse, Lex tried to raise Severance again as the next group of ghouls rushed toward him…and found that he couldn’t. For a moment he struggled with the seemingly-immovable weapon, before aborting the attempt. “Kill them,” he wheezed at the scythe, his telekinetic hold on it sputtering out. It immediately moved to obey, slashing the ghouls to pieces with an aggressive swing.
For his part, Lex turned his attention toward the three globes of lightning that he’d conjured, pulling them back from where he’d spread them around the battlefield. By now, the bodies of trampled ghouls had started to fill in the holes that Sonata had overseen, which meant that trying to use the balls of electricity to funnel the undead ponies toward them was of minimal effectiveness. Instead, he withdrew them so that the three orbs were arranged right in front of him, forming a defensive line. From behind them, Lex watched as Severance continued its attack, swinging wildly at any ghouls that got near it, and for a moment hoped that maybe this would be enough…
No, he realized an instant later. This isn’t going to work!
As if to drive that point home, a lone ghoul managed to slip beneath one of Severance’s attacks, stumbling toward Lex even as it tried to regain its footing. Seeing that it was trying to angle itself between the globes of lighting, Lex mentally adjusted their positioning, bringing them together just as the undead pony started to slip between them. It shrieked as it was electrified, its body spasming uncontrollably while it sizzled before finally going still, collapsing to the ground limply as smoke rose from its charred body.
Lex knew the near-miss was a harbinger. When he had wielded Severance, none of the attacks that he had made had been random. As soon as he’d fully grasped the level of power that the living weapon was able to bring to bear he’d begun placing each strike carefully, analyzing the number of ghouls rushing at him and the speed of their approach, working out the optimal timing and direction of every slash so as to keep the horde from overwhelming him completely. Even when he’d begun to falter, he’d managed to recalculate his attack pattern and somehow been able to hold the line.
But Severance wasn’t attacking with that same level of precision, instead simply lashing out at whichever group of ghouls was closest. There was no greater strategy involved to its swings that Lex could see, no attempt to use the destructive shockwaves of its blows to try and force the oncoming ghouls to move into better positions for follow-up strikes. It’s reacting to the flow of battle rather than trying to control it, he knew, and that wasn’t a sustainable defensive plan...as the two further ghouls that managed to slip around another of Severance’s blows showcased a moment later.
Both of them met their deaths in an instant as Lex maneuvered the orbs of electricity to intercept them, but he knew he was acting on borrowed time. While he could use his magic to attack the ghouls that got around Severance, he only had so many attack spells left. Even these lightning globes wouldn’t last forev-
The three balls of lighting suddenly winked out, their durations exceeded.
Lex had just enough time to stare at the space where they’d been before he registered another ghoul slipping by Severance, and immediately started casting another spell. The undead pony, legs akimbo as it just barely managed to fling itself over a strike that decimated a score of its fellows, shrieked with deranged laughter at its success. Rolling as it landed, the thing barely managed to stay on course as it targeted Lex, leering hungrily as it rushed at him. But it flew backward a moment later as he completed his spell, summoning the miniature tornado that he’d used back when he’d first met Cloudbank and her friends and letting it impact the ghoul head-on. The small vortex of air had no power to actually cause damage, but it could at least fling an attacker away…but only one attacker at a time, and it would only last for a little over a minute at most. His remaining attack spells weren’t much better, and once they were all expended, he’d be completely unable to retaliate against any further ghouls that managed to reach him.
The only viable option was to take hold of Severance and use it directly again…but that simply wasn’t possible right now, not when the simple act of gesturing and chanting his spells felt like a colossal effort. For a moment Lex considered trying to guide the scythe verbally, instructing it on the precise placement of its strikes, but he discarded that idea almost as soon as he thought of it. The split-second nature of the fighting meant that verbal instructions wouldn’t be able to keep up. But with no other methods for plugging the holes in Severance’s attack routine, he’d need to rely on what little magic he had left, and that wasn’t-
Two more ghouls slipped around Severance. Barely able to move, Lex mentally directed the tiny tornado toward one of them, starting to cast a spell that would hit the other with a spurt of acid. But his reactions were too slow, and the first ghoul managed to slip past the small whirlwind while the second one was barely grazed by the stream of caustic liquid.
Lex had just enough time to grimace, eyes widening at what was about to happen before the ghouls barreled into him and knocked him to the ground, their jaws falling open as they leaned down to enjoy their hard-earned meal.
“Lex! Lex! He’s our stallion!” cheered Sonata as she watched her boyfriend use those zappy-ball thingies to kill more of the ghouls, Severance taking care of the rest. “If he can’t do it, no one…um…huh.” Pausing as she tried to think of something that rhymed with “stallion,” Sonata shook her head a second later, abandoning the attempt. “Okay, do-over. Ahem. Lex! Lex! He’s our guy! If he can’t do it, we’ll all die!” A moment later her brain registered what had just come out of her mouth, and she grimaced. “Ew, no! That’s awful! Lemme try again.”
She’d been cheering for a little while now, since there was nothing else for her to do, but she didn’t particularly mind. Although she’d known Lex had some sort of plan to win, she’d still been nervous about how tired out he looked. But looking at him now, he had things under control, and that was good enough for her. This was Lex’s show, and she was used to being a back-up singer anyway, even if part of her still wished that he’d give her a chance to show off just a little. He could, like, let one or two of those things come after me, just so I could blast ‘em. Severance wasn’t the only one that could make bad guys go flying, after all; she’d done that to some of those sahuagin that had boarded their ship back when they’d first gotten-
Her daydreaming was interrupted as she saw Lex suddenly get tackled by two of the ghouls, causing her to freeze in alarm. “Hey…!” she yelled, not sure who she was talking to as she took a half-step forward, her concern skyrocketing when Lex didn’t fling the undead ponies off of him. Instead, he only thrashed feebly as they leaned down to bite him. “Hey! Severance! Do something!” But the scythe didn’t seem to have heard her, continuing to mow down any ghouls that got near it, leaving Lex to struggle on his own. Panicking, Sonata sang a quick spell before sucking in a lungful of air…
“GET LOST!”
The spell, the same one she’d used to finish off Monitor, sent a compressed pulse of sound rocketing towards the ghouls on top of Lex, hitting them with the force of a hurled boulder. Although it wasn’t enough to rip them to pieces the way Severance did, it still knocked them off of Lex and back into the press of ghouls, leaving Lex clear. Rushing over to him, Sonata felt relief wash over her as she saw him struggling to rise. “Are you okay?!”
“I can handle this,” groaned Lex, blood dripping down his right foreleg from what looked like a nasty bite wound. “My defensive enchantments stopped most the damage…” Despite his words, he was having trouble getting to his hooves. As Sonata leaned over to help him, she realized that he wasn’t moving his injured leg, as if it had fallen completely asleep.
She had just opened her mouth to mention that to him when another ghoul slipped past Severance, landing barely three feet from her. Her eyes widened in surprise, and she started to open her mouth despite knowing that she’d never be able to cast a spell before it made it to her. The spells Lex had cast on her, she realized, were about to be put to the tes-
“Protect her!” rasped Lex. Instantly, Severance swung around and speared the ghoul through the chest in a single motion, lifting it up and tossing it away like so much garbage, returning to the horde without any hesitation. But although Severance had left its position for a mere fraction of a second, that was enough to court disaster as four ghouls managed slip by it, rushing toward Lex and Sonata.
One of them was immediately repulsed by Lex’s pony-sized tornado, but the other three were completely unobstructed as they lunged at the pair. Not knowing what else to do, Sonata threw herself in front of her boyfriend, ignoring his horrified yell and gritting her teeth as she felt hooves and teeth strike her hide…but no pain. For a moment she was confused, before realizing what was going on. His spells worked! Grinning in sudden elation, Sonata sang another quick spell before turning and giving another magically-enhanced shout, this one wordless. It wasn’t quite as powerful as the spell she’d used a moment ago, but it was enough to make the ghouls’ bodies quake under the force, their bones splintering at the sonic impact. The sight made Sonata’s chest puff up with pride…until two more ghouls got past Severance to join them.
“We’ve gotta fall back!” she decided, reaching down and heaving as she did her best to scoop up Lex. “We need to put some distance between ourselves and Severance!”
“No!” protested Lex. “If we try to retreat now we’ll be overrun!”
“That’s, like, gonna happen anyway! We have to-” She stopped abruptly as she caught something out of her peripheral vision, blinking as she realized it was coming from the direction she was headed in: back towards the illusory hole. Turning her head, her eyes widened and her jaw dropped at what she saw.
By the time Lex saw Garden Gate charging at them, it was already too late to stop her.
The bulk of his attention was on the two most recent ghouls to have slipped past Severance’s ceaseless attacks. Mere feet away from them, the undead ponies’ voices were raised in howls of hunger as they lunged forward, mouths open wide. Lex was already trying to bring the miniature tornado he’d created back around, hoping to at least knock one of them away, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to make it in time. Although Lex knew that the ghouls probably wouldn’t be able to seriously injure him or Sonata, thanks to the defensive magic around the two of them, his paralyzed foreleg could attest to that protective magic being less than absolute.
But it wasn’t just these two ghouls that he was worried about. It was the ones that would, Lex knew, join them in the next several seconds. To say nothing of the ghouls that would arrive a few seconds after that, as well as the ones that would be there a couple seconds after that. Such a thing was an inevitability at this point; despite the fact that Severance was slaying dozens of ghouls with every swing, it was steadily failing to stop a small number of them from getting past it. And if they’re not destroyed as soon as they arrive, that small number will rapidly add up, thought Lex frantically. If that happens, then it won’t take very long for them to completely overwhelm us!
Those thoughts wove their way through Lex’s mind even as he concentrated on bringing the compact tornado back around, while simultaneously preparing to cast another spell, raising his one good foreleg to make the necessary gestures. As such, he only dimly registered that Sonata had stopped trying to drag him on her ill-considered retreat, and that she had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence. Despite the magnitude of the threat in front of him, Lex’s concern for her was enough to make him turn his head just enough to let his periphery see what had apparently caused her to stop short.
The sight of Garden Gate rushing toward them, a knife held between her teeth, was so unexpected that he wasn’t able to react as she leapt straight at them…
…and crashed into the ghoul that had just started to pounce on him.
Fencer didn’t notice the looks on Lex and Sonata’s faces as she threw herself at the closest ghoul. She didn’t even notice her muscles going slack as she jumped over Lex. The only thing she was cognizant of in that moment was the tip of her knife sinking into the ghoul’s chest as she collided with it, making sure to twist her body so that the momentum of her charge pushed the blade deeper into the undead thing.
They hit the ground a moment later, tumbling end-over-end away from Lex and Sonata, and before they’d even come to a halt she’d already torn the knife free and plunged it back down again, hacking at the monster as fast as she could move her neck. She dimly registered a filthy hoof striking her side, feeling her body start to stiffen up, but she refused to stop, raising and lowering her knife again and again, hacking at the thing under her with such force that pieces of it went flying with every strike. A scream of rage and anguish rang out then, so loud that it hurt her ears, and it was only when the corpse under her had ceased moving that she realized it was coming from her.
I sent Turbo there!
Detecting motion out of her periphery, Fencer looked up as she saw another ghoul go tumbling across the ground, hit by the small whirlwind that Lex had created. A short distance away, Sonata was yelling something, but Fencer didn’t hear whatever it was, already picking herself up and hurling herself at the undead pony that was already starting to rise. He didn’t want to go back! I pushed him!
She didn’t wait for the undead pony to stand back up, running over to it and stomping on its sternum as hard as she could, feeling the bones in its chest break. The ghoul didn’t react to the blow except to hiss at her, leaning up to try and bite her leg. But that succeeded only in bringing its head within range of her knife, and she brought the weapon down as hard as she could, stabbing it in the face. Nor did she stop there, savagely yanking the blade out only to plunge it back in over and over again, each blow punctuated by another shriek of fury and grief. It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!
Her last strike buried her knife to the hilt in what was left of the ghoul’s face, and it shuddered and went still. But the last tremor had barely ceased when Sonata’s voice rang out again, this time in alarm. That was enough to make Fencer yank her head up…and spot the three ghouls that were the latest of their kind to slip by Severance, and were now rushing straight for her.
Under any other circumstance, the sight of three of those things would have made her immediately turn tail and run for her life. But now she ran to meet them, her jaw clenching the handle of her knife so hard that it nearly cracked her teeth. “GIVE THEM BACK!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, eyes blazing. “GIVE ME BACK TURBO!” A hoof that was little more than a lump of bone struck the side of her head, almost colliding with her injured horn, but she refused to be deterred as she slashed at its owner’s face, missing by a hair’s breadth. “GIVE ME BACK MY DAD!” She reared back, barely avoiding the jaws that reached for her neck, bringing her knife down in a strike that sheared a large chunk of flesh from bone. “GIVE ME BACK MY LIFE!” The ghoul in front of her reared up on its hind legs, moving as though it was about to try and tackle her, and she angled her body to prepare to leap aside. “GIVE THEM ALL B-”
…and then a pair of rotted hooves struck her in the side, the ghoul whose neck she’d almost cut hitting her with a buck powerful enough to knock her off-balance. That was all the crouched ghoul needed, and it sprang forward, hitting her dead-center. Now it was her turn to be tackled, falling backward as the undead pony landed on top of her. The impact was enough to make her jaw fall open, her knife tumbling to the ground and out of reach. She tried to struggle, tried to push it away or squirm out from under the monster on top of her, but all of a sudden her limbs were sluggish and feeble, barely responding to her commands, and at the edge of her vision she saw Lex and Sonata nearby, realizing that her curse had activated again.
Then the two other ghouls swooped down on her.
“What are you doing?!” yelled Sonata, unable to believe her eyes as Garden Gate threw herself as the ghouls attacking them. “You can’t fight them all off by yourself! We have to get out of here!” But the vermillion mare didn’t seem to hear her, screaming as she proceeded to tear the two ghouls apart.
Lex wasn’t listening either. Even as he sent the small hurricane to send the other ghoul sprawling, he glanced back toward the illusion he’d conjured, needing to confirm that it was still active despite Garden Gate’s having left it. Fortunately it was, and no more ponies seemed inclined to follow her example and come charging from it. With how single-minded the ghouls were, maybe they wouldn’t put two-and-two together, and-
“GIVE THEM BACK!” Garden’s agonized scream made Lex go rigid, his eyes widening as he snapped his head back around to look at her. She couldn’t possibly be…! But a moment later she screamed again, demanding that the ghouls give her back Turbo, and then her father, and then her life, the words hitting Lex like physical blows.
In that moment, he knew that he’d been completely wrong about her.
Lex had been absolutely certain that Garden Gate felt no remorse for the crimes she’d committed, both before and after he’d met her. No matter that she’d cried and begged for forgiveness when he’d sentenced her. No matter that she’d changed her name. The fact that she’d had such a profound change of heart right before he’d punished her for her misdeeds had struck him as much too quick and far too convenient to be believable. There hadn’t been a doubt in his mind that the entire spectacle had been another one of her tricks. But now…
That’s exactly what I said when I was trying to force Xiriel out of Nosey!
“Sonata! Help her!”
“Huh? But-”
“Help her now! Cast a spell! Sing! Do something!” The words were barely out of his mouth when Garden was suddenly knocked backward, landing a few feet from them as one of the ghouls drove her to the ground, causing her to lose her weapon in the process. The other two were right behind them, cackling as they ran toward her. “DO IT NOW!” Lex roared.
“R-right!” Sonata quickly chanted a spell, and then took a breath…
“SCRAM!”
Her spell hit all three of the ghouls and launched them into the air, freeing Garden Gate instantly…but there were already more ghouls breaking through Severance’s defensive line, not giving the beleaguered ponies a moment’s rest as they moved to vacate where their displaced brethren had been a second before. Lex sent his miniature tornado rushing to hold them back, but knew that it wouldn’t do anything more than slow them down for a moment. But a moment was all he needed.
I absolve you. That thought was all it took to lift her curses, removing the dark magic that he had stricken her with just over two days ago. The effect was immediate, as he saw Garden suddenly leap to her hooves, a surprised look on her face. A moment later she glanced over at her fallen knife, and he saw her wince even as an aura sprung to life around her bandages horn, a matching one surrounding the blade as it rose into the air and moved back to her, sputtering out as she took it in her mouth. She glanced back at him then, but he had already looked away, moving to implement the plan that had come to mind even as the new ghouls were almost upon them. “Sonata, keep casting!”
“Okay, but I’m almost out of attack magic!” she replied nervously.
“No! Not attack magic!” He pointed toward Garden, who was already rushing at the current batch of undead ponies. “Enhance her!”
“Enhance-, for realsies?!”
“Yes! Right now she’s our only chance! Give her everything you’ve got!”
“What do you-, OH! I gotcha!” Smiling, Sonata started to sing another spell, causing Lex to sigh in relief. If this worked, then Garden Gate would be able to hold off the ghouls that slipped past Severance while the scythe dispatched the main force. By his estimate, the ghouls had lost upward of eight hundred of their number, possibly as many as a thousand. They had to be running low by now!
But the undead ponies continued to surge out of the darkness, showing no sign of agreeing with his prediction. Although Severance continued to mow them down, Garden Gate giving another scream as she engaged the ones that got past it while Sonata cast another spell, Lex knew that the odds were still stacked against them. They’d managed to move things back to a stalemate, but their position was just as precarious as it had been when he’d been the one holding off the horde…no, even more than it had been then, since Garden Gate didn’t have any protective enchantments on her, meaning that she’d accumulate damage faster even if she wasn’t paralyzed by an unlucky hit first.
Ocean Spray’s voice was thick with uncertainty, unable to tear his eyes away from what was happening in front of them. Even as he watched, the unicorn mare that Lex had publicly condemned lashed out again, plunging her knife up under a ghoul’s chin and preventing it from opening its mouth as it leaned in to bite her. Nor did she stop there, wrenching her knife to the side and using the leverage to drag the impaled ghoul along with it, making it stumble into the path of another undead pony that was trying to flank her. Even while that was happening, Sonata crept up behind her, singing a quick spell before reaching out to tap the vermillion mare on the rump before turning and rushing back to Lex, who was fumbling with one of his saddlebags.
“You can’t be serious!” sputtered Scrubby, giving Ocean Spray a horrified look. “We’d be killed!”
“Maybe, but…” Ocean Spray grimaced, biting his lip as he watched Garden Gate continue her furious assault. For some reason the sight made his chest ache. “We can’t just do nothing!”
“Nothing is all we can do,” protested Scrubby weakly.
Ocean Spray shook his head, feeling more and more certain as he spoke. “That’s not true. We helped out when those sea creatures attacked a few days ago, remember? If we all rush out now-”
“We would only make things worse,” cut in Compass Rose.
Scrubby let out a relieved sigh at that, but Ocean Spray turned to give her a shocked look. “How can you say that?!” He pointed at Garden Gate. “She ran out there and now she’s fighting off those monsters all on her own! If we back her up-”
“It wouldn’t work,” interrupted Rose again, shaking her head grimly. Ocean Spray opened his mouth to protest, but she didn’t give him a chance. “You heard what Lex said a moment ago, right? How he told Sonata to use her magic to enhance her?” Adjusting her glasses, Rose gave her crewmate a hard look. “That’s why that mare, Garden Gate, is doing so well now. She had the advantage of surprise at first, but once that wore off you saw how she was almost killed. It would be the same for us. We might be able to get the drop on those things for a few seconds, but then they’d turn the tables on us.”
“Yes, I do.” Rose’s voice was calm, refusing to get into a shouting match. “When we fought those other monsters on the wharf, Lex made weapons and armor for all of us, and then he and Sonata used their magic to make us stronger. Plus, we weren’t fighting to try and kill those things; we were just trying to get Lex and Cloudbank far enough to where they could take out their leader, which got rid of the rest of them. None of that’s true here.” She swept a hoof out then, indicating the ponies around them, several of whom had turned an ear toward their conversation. “More than that, if we went out there now we’d be putting everypony here at risk.”
“Yeah!” piped up Scrubby with a vigorous nod.
Ocean Spray shot a glare at the other stallion, frowning. “How?”
“Um…” Scrubby paused for just a second before looking back at Compass Rose. “How?”
She answered without missing a beat. “The ghouls don’t seem to have realized where Garden Gate came from. But if more of us left the illusion Lex conjured, they might. If that happens, they’d stop funneling themselves toward those three,” she nodded toward Lex, Sonata, and Garden Gate, “and start trying to go around them in order to attack the rest of us. If that happened, I don’t think they’d be able to hold them all back.”
Ocean Spray was silent for a long moment, watching the fighting as he digested what he’d been told. Although he knew that Rose was correct, that knowledge didn’t make him feel any better; if anything, it had the opposite effect. “So that’s it, then?” he finally asked, the anger in his voice having changed to bitterness. “Garden Gate gets to go out there and avenge her friend, but we don’t get to do the same for Sandbar and the captain?”
Scrubby winced at that, and a mournful look crossed Rose’s face. But it didn’t prevent her from replying. “No, we don’t. All we can do is stay here and watch them fight.”
“It’s not a fight.”
The new voice cut through their conversation, and an instant later Nosey Newsy emerged from the crowd, standing between Ocean Spray and Compass Rose. “It’s not a fight,” she repeated. “That’s too small a word for this. What we’re seeing right now isn’t a battle, or a conflict, or a war.”
“…then what is it?” asked Scrubby hesitantly.
For a moment, Nosey didn’t answer, her gaze locked onto Lex. “A miracle.”
It was far more of an effort than it should have been, but Lex was finally able to withdraw the scroll from his saddlebag.
Next to him, Sonata had finished casting enhancement spells on Garden Gate, and had started singing. Garden Gate herself was quite clearly benefiting from the magic, her combat prowess having surged compared to when she’s started her surprise assault. Even as Lex watched, she fell into a crouch, avoiding a rotted hoof to the face even as she surged forward, still ducking down. In an instant, she darted underneath the ghoul, emerging from between its hind legs and standing up again as she moved on to her next opponent. Behind her, the undead pony she’d passed beneath trembled, and a second later the bottom of its torso opened up, disgorging a flood of offal and rotted viscera onto the ground. The ghoul took a single, shaky step before it collapsed lifelessly.
In the instant that she’d rushed below it, Garden Gate had jabbed upward with her knife and opened the thing from sternum to groin, letting its innards fall out.
But the flood of enemies was unending, and Lex knew it was only a matter of time before she became exhausted, or lost her weapon, or was finally felled by an unlucky strike. The magic that Sonata was using might hold that off for some time, but with the difference in numbers being weighted so heavily against them, and Severance apparently unable to stop the inexorable trickle of enemies getting past it, their loss was still a question of when, not if. Which meant that he needed to take matters into his own hooves.
Unrolling the parchment, Lex looked over it again. It had originally contained eleven spells, but now there was only a blank space where the words to the illusion spell had been, the writing having vanished as it shaped and directed the energy he’d fed into it in order to hide everypony. Of the remaining magic, none of them had any immediate usefulness that Lex could see…except one.
It was, without a doubt, the single most versatile spell he’d ever seen. Rather than having a strictly-defined effect, its applicability was open-ended, allowing for potentially any outcome to be dictated. But that was only in theory. In practicality, its effects were starkly limited. They had to be; the spell was only able to utilize so much energy, which necessarily meant that it could only do so much. Worse, attempting to achieve an outcome that was beyond what it could easily do would likely result in the energy simply dissipating, or even create a backlash. Even then…directing the magic required issuing verbal instructions – phrased in the form of a wish, for some reason – after the casting was complete, which ran the risk of making a misstatement and causing an unintended result.
It was, in other words, the sort of spell which required careful consideration under the very best of circumstances; to use it in their current situation would be to court disaster. Except disaster is already here, Lex knew, which meant that there was no practical alternative but to utilize this spell before their last chance of victory was completely snuffed out. Which left only one consideration: what should he use the spell for?
The optimal answer was to have it restore his magic, but Lex knew that wouldn’t work. This spell couldn’t do more than its total energy output permitted, and although it was strong it was still just one spell. Trying to have it replenish his full complement of magic was like telling someone to use a gallon of water to fill a swimming pool. Likewise, using it to heal his injuries and exhaustion so that he could take up Severance and return to fighting seemed like a good idea, but was unacceptably risky. He still didn’t know precisely how healing magic worked, which meant that if it only temporarily suspended his injuries, or only healed him enough to fight for a few minutes before he collapsed again, then they’d be no better off than before he cast it.
Lex wasted several seconds thinking through various options, weighing the flaws, risks, and potential gains for myriad potential applications of the spell, knowing that he’d only get one chance at this. Finally, he made a decision, knowing that it was the best chance they’d have. Slowly, he raised the scroll in his telekinesis and began to read the words to the spell, channeling energy through himself and into it as he did so…
“Full power! No mercy! Make them feel your f-fury!”
Sonata very nearly bit her tongue at the last word, only barely managing to keep singing. A few feet away from her, Lex – still lying on his side – didn’t seem to notice her near-slip, continuing to read his scroll, much to Sonata’s anxiety. What’s he doing?! Doesn’t he remember what that did to him before? Just casting that illusion on everypony had hurt him badly enough that he hadn’t been able to stand on his own; using that thing again couldn’t possibly be safe.
Worried, she glanced over at where Garden Gate was still fighting, but the green unicorn was still holding her own. So why was Lex pushing himself if everything was going okay? I swear, if this is because he wants to look good in front of everyone, I’m totes going to smack him, she thought as she glanced back at the big fake hole behind her. She could understand wanting to show off for their audience, but this was ridiculous!
A moment later the scroll fluttered to the ground, Lex’s purple aura winking out. It had barely touched the ground when he started to convulse, a strangled groan escaping his lips as his body shook uncontrollably. “Lex!” Sonata immediately rushed over to him, abandoning her song; she didn’t spare a second thought for Garden Gate, knowing that the magic from her song would last for a little bit even after she stopped. Instead, she knelt beside her boyfriend, who was still thrashing wildly. Not knowing what to do, she laid down next to him and wrapped her legs around him, trying to at least stop him from hurting himself.
It felt like forever before his shaking finally stopped, and she bit her lip as she looked him over. He seemed to have lost consciousness, his eyes closed and breathing shallowly, trickles of blood running from his nose and mouth. “You’ve really gotta stop doing this to yourself,” she muttered, not realizing she was speaking out loud.
The sound of her voice seemed to rouse him, however, causing his eyes to flutter open. The sight caused her to release an explosive sigh of relief. “Hey! Oh wow, you had me, like, seriously worried there for a moment! Are you okay?”
He didn’t reply, his eyes darting to where Garden Gate was still fighting, and then to the illusion hiding everypony, before finally looking up at her. Except, no, he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking up at those magic jewels still circling his head. Slowly, his lips moved.
“I wish…I had enough magic…to empower…those gemstones...”
As she tore her knife from the skull of the latest ghoul she’d killed, Fencer took a half-second to wipe the sweat and grime from her face before it could run into her eyes, not wanting to be blinded at a critical moment.
Even that brief respite cost her. Three more ghouls – a unicorn and two earth ponies – were already rushing at her, just the latest in an endless supply of the vicious, snarling monsters. Behind them were two more, hurrying to join the fray, and at the edge of her vision she saw another slip past Severance, the newcomer’s eyes already locked onto her.
Dimly, she realized that they were replenishing their numbers faster than she could kill them, but that thought failed to make her do anything except snort in derision. Six-to-one or sixty-to-one or six hundred-to-one, I don’t care! The only thing that mattered now was ending it, killing as many of these creatures as she could before they finally took her down. At least this way I’ll have done something good before I die.
Rushing at the trio of ghouls charging at her, Fencer leaped into the air just before the closest one reached her. Placing her fore-hooves on the back of its head as it leaned in to bite her, she pushed off of it as she jumped, vaulting over the creature entirely. Even as she did, she spat out her knife, telekinetically grabbing it before it fell more than an inch and flinging it as hard as she could at the leftmost of the two ghouls that were now directly in front of her. The effort made her injured horn ache, but it paid off as the blade flew through the air almost too fast to follow and sank into the knee of the undead pony’s left foreleg, causing it to collapse and veer into the undead pony right next to it, the two of them going down in a tangle of limbs and screeched curses.
Without pausing, Fencer immediately lowered her head to the ground and kicked backward, bucking blindly. Sure enough, she felt her back legs hit something and collapse it inward as a satisfying crunch reached her ears. Even as she pulled her legs back from the ghoul whose skull she’d just crushed, she was already looking toward the pair of undead ponies she’d knocked over, intent on finishing them off before they could get back up. But she didn’t have a chance as the other two ghouls that had been approaching her from behind – the unicorn and the remaining earth pony from the three that had initially charged at her – moved in to attack.
Luckily for her, both ghouls had their voices raised in shrieks of hunger, giving away their positions as they moved in to attack. It was enough warning for Fencer to immediately abandon her plans to go after the fallen ghouls and instead follow through with her buck, turning it into a leap backward as she pushed off the ground with her forelegs. Barely managing to part her back legs enough to plant them on either side of the ghoul whose head she’d just caved in, she followed through with the motion, rearing back so that she was standing upright instead of on all fours.
Her sudden hop backward happened so quickly that the pair of ghouls were unable to compensate in time. Filthy hooves lashed out and hit nothing but empty air as their momentum carried them forward, leaving the two struggling to reposition themselves to deal with the mare that had somehow slipped by them by mere inches a second time. Both snarled, knowing that if they could just catch her, just grab her and drive her to the ground and pummel her into paralysis, they’d finally have their meal!
But Fencer had no intention of allowing them to do so. Still standing on her hind legs, she gave a cry as she raised both of her forelegs high and brought them down as hard as she could on the cranium of the earth pony ghoul on her right, driving its head down…right onto the horn of the unicorn ghoul, having yanked its head around with her telekinesis simultaneously. The horn immediately sank up through the other ghoul’s chin, puncturing the roof of its mouth, and lodging in its brain, making the earth pony ghoul sputter and flail reflexively for a moment before it went still, falling to the ground and pinning its companion under it, the unicorn ghoul thrashing as it tried to free itself.
Not wanting to waste another opportunity, Fencer raised her forelegs again to stomp on the fallen ghoul’s head…only to be bodily tackled by the most recent ghoul to have joined the fight, the thing having rushed past the pair she’d downed with her knife and who were now back on their hooves and following closely behind it. Turning her head away from the teeth which were suddenly right in her face, Fencer grimaced as she hit the ground hard. Fortunately, the undead pony’s emaciated body didn’t give it as much mass as a living pony would have had, but she still grunted with effort as she pressed her forelegs to the thing’s chest, trying to keep it from biting her as she pulled her back legs up and under it.
Heaving with effort, she kicked out a second later, knocking the ghoul off of her and immediately twisting around to get her hooves back under her. But she hadn’t quite made it when two more ghouls – one of them limping slightly – threw themselves at her. Not gonna make it!
The thought was frustrated, rather than fearful. She’d known when she’d gone out there that she wouldn’t survive going up against so many of those things on her own. But that hadn’t discouraged her; quite the opposite, in fact. After all the terrible things she’d done – getting her father killed when he’d saved her from the first ghouls they’d met, turning herself into a monster as predatory as those things in the name of survival, and then getting Turbo killed in her misguided attempt to atone for her actions – death was what she deserved. All she wanted now was to drag as many of these things down with her as she possibly could.
It was for that reason alone that she concentrated as hard as she could as the pair of ghouls closed in, her horn glowing as a matching aura appeared around the undead ponies. Even with how gaunt their bodies were, she knew she couldn’t stop even one of them; telekinesis was proportional to physical strength, and that had never been her strong suit. But if she could just deflect them a little bit then she might be able to reorient her center of gravity and regain the initiative. It was with that hope, of knocking them slightly off-balance or breaking their momentum, that she telekinetically shoved the ghouls as hard as she could.
Her surprise was complete when she knocked them several dozen feet backward.
It wasn’t a controlled flight by any means, the pair of undead tumbling end over end through the air to go crashing to the ground over sixty feet away from her, leaving Fencer momentarily stupefied. What had just happened? Had she done that? How? Where had that strength come from?
…and how long had there been gemstones flying around her head?
Incredible, thought Lex in amazement. I had no idea it would work this well!
In the minute since he’d empowered the gemstones and transferred them to Garden Gate, she had become a one-mare army, tearing through the ghouls unstoppably while not being hit once. Although Lex knew that some of her heightened combat ability – possibly a significant amount of it – was due to Sonata’s magic (particularly since she had started singing again), it was undeniable that the three gems orbiting her head had augmented Garden Gate on every level by a considerable margin. It was enough that he was starting to have real hope that maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to see this through to the end…if the gems’ increased power lasted that long.
Utilizing the open-ended spell contained in Xiriel’s scroll had, despite all of the potential complications and pitfalls, done exactly what Lex had directed it to do…mostly. In the immediate aftermath of his stating that he wanted sufficient magic to augment the gems, he’d felt a rush of power filling him. It hadn’t been overly much, nor had it eased his injuries in any way; rather, it was like he’d drawn additional energy through the magical channels in his body without straining himself, and had simply been waiting to expend it. But at the same time, he’d immediately known that there hadn’t been enough for all five gems, the energy he’d gained being sufficient to enhance no more than three of them.
That hadn’t troubled him for more than an instant, however. Neither the scarlet and blue sphere, with its embedded knowledge regarding the operation of enchanted objects, nor the clear spindle’s ability to sustain the user without air were particularly helpful under the current circumstances. That made it easy to figure out which of the remaining gems to enhance.
The act of augmenting the gems had been surprisingly easy, enough so that he’d found himself wondering why he’d never thought to do this before. With the magical channels already embedded into the objects, the additional energy he’d fed into them hadn’t needed to be manually directed. While he’d still had to feed it in at a steady rate to avoid overloading the existing enchantments, the entire process had taken barely a few seconds for each gem.
As soon as the process had finished, he’d transferred the gems to Garden Gate, letting her reap their benefits. It had galled him to have to rely on the mare he’d so badly misjudged to save everypony now, but there was no other feasible choice; utilizing the scroll had exacerbated his injuries to the point where he could barely move. Even telekinetically moving the gems over to Garden Gate and releasing them to orbit her had been an act of monumental difficulty, forcing him to move each one individually, rather than all at once. Sonata had volunteered to take them to her, of course, but Lex had forbade it, knowing that she would only have made herself a target in the process. Instead, he’d ordered her to resume her singing, intent on giving Garden every possible advantage.
Even so, those advantages appeared to be considerable. From what he could tell, the dusty rose prism was granting Garden Gate some sort of subconscious situational awareness, rather than just some minor insight regarding incoming attacks. Likewise, the sheer physical coordination that she was displaying could only be because of the pale green prism. Normally it would have marginally stabilized her central nervous system in order to improve her physical reactions, but this was an order of magnitude greater, as though it were optimizing all of her body's neuromuscular transmissions. And the orange prism...it normally provided a slight improvement to the recipient's magical control, but the display of telekinetic power she'd just evidenced made it plain that its current effects were no longer "slight" in any regard.
Of course, all of those were temporary effects. The additional energy that was heightening the gemstones would eventually be used up, with the only question being when. Not having had enough time to have done any tests, there was no way Lex could be certain, but it was axiomatic that the more power the gems were displaying now, the faster they'd use it up. Which means they'll likely be depleted after a few minutes, he realized, feeling his enthusiasm dwindle. With how endless the ghouls had been, it was anypony's guess whether the gems would run out before they did.
If that happened, then Garden Gate's chances of outlasting them would fall dramatically, and so would their odds of survival.
In the end, it wasn’t the limited duration of her enhancements that led to Garden Gate being undone. Rather, it was simple bad luck that made it happen. Bad luck that Lex cursed himself for not having anticipated. After all, he’d seen it happen before.
A trio of ghouls were hurling themselves at Garden Gate, thinking that they might be the ones to succeed where the numerous mutilated bodies around them had failed. Despite the fact that she hadn’t so much as paused to catch her breath in some time, she immediately moved to engage them. A quick sidestep around a bite and a vicious slice sent the head of one of the undead ponies tumbling away as its body collapsed. The second ghoul threw itself at her hooves, thinking to knock her down; that was its last thought, as she somersaulted over the clumsy tackle and – at the apex of her leap – grabbed the ghoul with her gem-enhanced telekinesis and pushed it straight down as hard as she could, instantly crushing the monster to paste against the ground.
It was when she dealt with the third ghoul that it happened. It had gone high where its fellow had gone low, and was already off-target due to not having anticipated how Garden had crushed its comrade to death. But the thing swung its legs anyway, flailing wildly as it passed through the space where she had been just a moment ago…and by pure coincidence, one of its flailing limbs happened to make contact with one of the gems orbiting her head.
Watching from a short distance away, Lex’s eyes widened as he watched the dusty rose prism go spinning away from Garden Gate, immediately becoming lost amidst the corpses piled up around her. No no NO! he cursed silently. That gem was the one granting Garden her preternatural awareness of her surroundings! Without it, her defensive capabilities would suffer…as the blow to the jaw she took a moment later underscored.
The uppercut, delivered by the ghoul that had knocked her gem away, wasn’t a fatal one. Although it snapped her head up, Garden’s body didn’t go rigid, nor did she stop moving. Instead, she fell back, telekinetically waving her knife in front of her in order to buy herself some room. But the ghoul, sensing victory, plunged forward recklessly, seeming not to notice as the knife buried itself to the hilt in its chest.
It was much more cognizant of it a moment later, as Garden focused her telekinesis and shoved the knife all the way through its body in one hard push.
The weapon exited the thing’s backside in a shower of gore, with several bits of viscera still clinging to the blade as the undead pony collapsed, dead before it hit the ground. Bringing the filth-covered knife back to her, Lex saw Garden’s head twist around to look at where her gemstone had fallen. But she had no time to go after it as more ghouls were already on her, forcing her to devote all of her attention to these new threats.
The sight was enough to make Lex whisper the most profane oath he knew (making Sonata wince as she kept singing, since the whisper-spell between them was still active). This was exactly what had happened with Xiriel! A stroke of bad luck had knocked the gems from around its heads and ultimately proven vital to the devil’s downfall, and now it was happening again!
Silently swearing that he wouldn’t let history repeat itself, Lex focused on one of the mangled bodies lying near where the gemstone had fallen, trying to drag it out of the way with his telekinesis. If he could just get line of sight to the fallen gem, he’d be able to pick it back up and place it around Garden’s head himself! But to his complete lack of surprise, he couldn’t move the dead body even slightly, his strength too depleted. For a moment he kept trying anyway, attempting to power through with sheer force of will the way he had done so many times in the past. But after several seconds of sustained effort, all he had to show for it was a headache so painful it was nauseating, forcing him to stop.
Groaning, he tried to think of another way to reunite Garden and the gemstone, but there were no viable options that he could think of. Sending Sonata was completely out of the question – she needed to keep singing, and sending her that close to where Garden was fighting would make her a target for the ghouls – and even if it possessed some sort of ability to grab objects, Severance was too busy annihilating the bulk of the horde. Bringing in somepony else from within the illusion ran the risk of exposing the camp ponies, which left…no one.
Realizing that he was completely out of options, Lex could only lie there and seethe at his own powerlessness as Garden Gate continued to fight. Even the few spells he had left were no help in this situation, nor were the remaining spells on the scroll, not that he was in any condition to utilize them anyway. Which meant that, with no way to get the gem back to her, there was nothing he could do except hope that Garden could either find a way to retrieve it herself or manage to continue fighting without it.
It was all up to her now…
But it wasn’t very long before the next gem was lost. This time, it happened as a ghoul reared up and kicked out with its forelegs, hissing as it tried to land a blow on her. Rather than weaving between the strikes as she would have with the dusty rose prism, Garden fell back, giving ground in order to get out of the ghoul’s range. But as she did, the orange prism came around in its orbit, flying near enough to the undead pony that it growled at the perceived distraction and lashed out with a hoof, batting the gem away as if it were a particularly large mosquito. The blow sent it tumbling end-over-end to the ground, bouncing and rolling before it too was lost amidst the bodies and bad lighting.
The ghoul paid for its action a moment later as Garden Gate brought her knife around sharply, lopping off one of the monster’s forelegs completely. Heedless of its dismemberment, the thing continued to advance on her, only to have its momentum reversed as Garden surged forward, plowing into the creature and shoving her knife through its neck. The hit knocked it onto its back, and the knife blade protruding from the back of its neck sunk into the ground, leaving the creature’s three legs flailing as it tried to get up. Its motions stopped as Garden brought her hoof down as hard as she could, stomping on the thing’s face again and again until the thing’s head split open like an overripe piece of fruit.
Watching from a short distance away, Lex knew that was a bad sign. She’d needed to bring her hoof down more than once in order to kill that thing, despite having only needed a single buck to crush the skull of an attacking ghoul a few minutes ago. But that wasn’t a function of the gemstone being lost; the orange prism enhanced its user’s ability to use magic. Without it Garden wouldn’t be using her telekinesis to fling the ghouls around anymore, but her strength shouldn’t have been reduced. Which either meant that she was getting tired…or some of her other enhancements – namely, the spells that Sonata had cast on her – were wearing off.
Or perhaps it was both. As he watched Garden Gate fling herself at the next group of undead ponies that came at her, he could already tell that she was slowing down. Even as he watched, she didn’t manage to completely avoid a bite to her flank, the ghoul’s face red with blood as its teeth sank into her skin just above her cutie mark. He saw her go rigid then, and the other ghoul immediately lunged for her throat, certain that she was paralyzed. But just before it could land the killing blow, Garden jumped to the side – having been feigning being frozen in place – and lashed out with a foreleg, clocking the ghoul in the back of the head and sending it sprawling into the undead pony that had bitten her.
But it was a short-lived victory. Already, four more ghouls were making their way toward her, and the other two were struggling to get back up even as she fell upon them, her knife plunging into them again and again. By the time the newcomers reached her, forcing her to break off her attack, only one of the downed ghouls had stopped moving, the other one picking itself up as she was forced to engage with the newest undead ponies.
Averting his eyes from what was now less of an even match and more of a battle for survival, Lex looked back at Severance. The ground in front of the scythe was completely hidden from view, buried beneath a carpet of body parts and ichor. Even as Lex watched, it whirled in place and reduced another wave of ghouls to pieces, righting itself as the next group followed them without hesitation. Fourteen hundred ghouls, estimated Lex, gritting his teeth at the apocalyptic number. Maybe fifteen. This was far beyond what he had originally estimated, and painted an even grimmer picture of just how bad things had been in Vanhoover, something he hadn’t thought was possible at this point. Although Lex knew that he needed to worry about their immediate circumstances, he couldn’t help but spare a thought for just how badly the rest of Equestria would have suffered if these things had been allowed to spread across the continent…which they still might, if they failed here.
Failure which seemed to be not only inevitable at this point, but imminent now, as Garden Gate lost the last of the gemstones.
The final one was taken from her as one of the last batch of ghouls, a pegasus whose left wing had been torn to shreds at some point, leaped into the air. Looking almost like it was trying to fly, the thing spread its legs and sole remaining wing wide as it pounced at Garden Gate. The move was far too blatant to catch her unaware, however, and she managed to fling herself back…but by a thin enough margin that the ghoul landed next to her, its body coming down at just the right moment to collide with the pale green prism that was enhancing her physical coordination and knock it to the ground.
This time Lex was ready, and he tried to immediately grab the gem in his telekinesis before he lost sight of it. But in his weakened state, it proved impossible to react quickly enough to snatch the thing as more ghouls moved in to try and finish Garden off. In a moment, the gemstone was lost among the shuffling bodies, hidden from sight before he had a chance to retrieve it.
It took only a moment for the loss to prove devastating. Garden lashed out at the ghouls, but it was impossible to miss how her strikes suddenly lacked the precision that they’d had a moment ago, being noticeably slower and weaker. She still managed to leave a deep gouge in the face of a ghoul that was trying to get behind her as she slipped by it, but even with Sonata’s voice still raised in song it was clear that Garden was now badly overmatched…a situation which grew worse as another four ghouls managed to survive Severance’s lethal barrage of attacks and rushed to join their comrades attacking Garden.
With eight ghouls now arrayed against her, there was nothing Garden could do except conduct a fighting retreat, her knife now being used to defend more than attack as she was steadily pressed back. The sight was enough to make Lex grimace, and although she didn’t stop singing he could detect the panicked undertone in Sonata’s voice as well. At her current rate of retreat, Garden would be pushed back to him and Sonata in just a few seconds, at which point at least some of the undead ponies would realize that there were easier meals closer to them. When that happened, they would both die, and die horrib-
A small, pea-sized ball of orange light suddenly shot down from the sky. Landing behind the pack of ghouls, it suddenly burst into flame, the fireball exploding outward just far enough to cook the ghouls while leaving Garden unhurt. The conflagration lasted only for a second, but when it died a moment later the undead ponies had all been reduced to smoldering corpses, silent and unmoving save for a soft, residual sizzling.
The sight was so unexpected that it took a moment for Lex to tear his eyes away from the spectacle and glance toward the northern sky where the fireball had come from, barely able to make out a dim shape against the starry backdrop. Behind him, he was vaguely aware that Sonata had stopped singing. A second later, her voice rang out in a relieved cry.
The scream pierced the night, waking Aria, Cozy, and Aisle immediately. The two ponies sprang to their hooves before they’d fully woken, the lessons they’d learned from Vanhoover’s fall immediately kicking in. “What’s happening?!” yelled Aisle, his voice one of controlled panic. “Where did that come from?!”
“It was…I think it was from the camp,” muttered Cozy, turning her eyes back toward the distant lights that marked where they were trying to get away from. She frowned as she peered at them, trying to see what could have caused somepony to yell so loud, but they were too far away to make out anything with any certainty… “I think I see movement, but-”
“That was Sonata’s voice,” interrupted Aria, and the frown in her whisper was audible.
Aisle glanced at her. Although his eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, and the curtain of stars overhead provided some dim illumination, he could only barely make her out despite being only a few feet away from her. “Do you think she’s somewhere nearby?” he asked, keeping his voice low in case Lex’s girlfriend was closing in on them, knowing that if she was then Lex himself wouldn’t be far behind. “Is she looking for us?”
“If she was looking for us I don’t think she’d be screaming ‘get lost’ like that,” replied Cozy, though she also kept her voice low just in case.
“Even so, I think we sh-”
“Both of you, shut up!” snapped Aria, keeping her eyes trained on the distant lights from the camp.
Neither pony argued with her, holding still and listening for any follow-up sounds. After several seconds, Cozy let out a slow breath as her heart rate started to return to normal. “Okay, whatever that was I don’t think it’s going to happen again.”
The words had barely left her mouth when Sonata’s voice rang out again, this time in a wordless shout, the sound quite clearly emanating from the distant camp. “She sounds angry,” muttered Aisle. “Did she sound angry to you guys?”
“Yes,” murmured Cozy, hoping the darkness hid the small smile on her face. “She sounds like she’s fighting with someone.” She didn’t bother to say who, knowing that if Sonata was so upset that she was yelling that loudly, then it could only be with one pony. Lashtada willing, she’s finally realized that Lex doesn’t truly love her, she prayed silently, a sense of hope rushing through her as she reached up to touch her holy symbol. Maybe I got through to her, there at the end.
“She is fighting with someone…” Unlike the crystal mare, Aria had a very different take on what her sister’s yelling meant. She knew that in order for Sonata’s voice to cross such a long distance so clearly, it had to be magically enhanced to a significant degree. By itself that wouldn’t have meant anything to Aria, but she’d seen Sonata use a spell to increase the power of her voice in just such a manner a few days ago, when the little ditz had actually managed to punch Monitor’s ticket. But if that was the case, then she was almost certainly in another dangerous battle right now.
Which means I got out of there just in time, Aria decided. The last thing she wanted was to be dragged into another life-or-death fight. Between the sahuagin and then Sonata’s stick-in-the-mud boyfriend, she’d had enough of those. Besides, this was what that little ingrate deserved. All that time on Earth we spent having to put up with your idiocy, and when we got to that Everglow place you ran out on us at the first sign of things getting tough. Let’s see how YOU like it, she thought bitterly.
“I think we should get moving.” Aisle’s voice cut into her thoughts, and for a split-second Aria was grateful for the distraction. “We’re not totally sure what’s happening, so we should change locations just to be extra safe, don’t you think?”
“I agree.” Cozy felt her way over to where Pillow’s body was, grunting as she took the rope in her mouth. “If there is something going on, we don’t want to get caught up in it.”
“Whatever,” snorted Aria. For some reason the idea of ditching Sonata the way that little imbecile had done to her and Adagio wasn’t as gratifying as she’d expected, and that was upsetting her. “Let’s find a farm someplace, get some food, and hurry up and get my voice fixed.”
She could only just make out her traveling companions in the gloom, but that was enough to let her see Cozy starting to drag her husband’s body along, Aisle moving alongside her supportively. Aria rolled her eyes at the sight, before moving to pull herself forward as well, already feeling her tail starting to ache as it rubbed against the coarse and uneven ground. The familiar pain made her grit her teeth, her mood turning even fouler. I hope whatever she’s fighting rips her throat out without killing her, she thought darkly. I hope she can’t talk or sing or do anything except whisper, and that I can meet her again after Princess Whatshername fixes me up so I can rub it in her f-
“SCRAM!”
Sonata’s third scream brought the entire group to a halt, looking backward again. “Wow, something’s really got her cheesed off,” murmured Aisle uncomfortably.
“Yeah, well, whatever it is must be tough if she’s using that much attack magic on it,” snorted Aria. “All the more reason to get out of here as fast as we can.”
“Hang on, attack magic?” Cozy took a step toward Aria, peering at the Siren as best she could in the lightlessness. “Isn’t she just yelling really loud?”
“What are you, some kind of an idiot?” scoffed Aria. “She’s using magic to turn her voice into a weapon. How else did you think it would sound so loud from so far away?”
“I thought she just had really good lungs,” mumbled Aisle.
“Wait…so you’re saying she’s in trouble?” Cozy’s voice was suddenly wracked with uncertainty, a wave of guilt sweeping over her. What if finding out that Lex never cared about her made Sonata attack him? The thought was chilling; Lex had never attacked another pony that Cozy had seen…except for when he was attacked first, like with that Spit Polish guy. In that case, Lex hadn’t hesitated to cut loose, practically torturing the offending stallion in front of everyone. That meant that if Sonata had, in a fit of heartbreak, attacked Lex, then he wouldn’t hesitate to retaliate…and Cozy had little doubt who would win a fight between those two. He’s going to make her suffer, and it’ll be because of me! she realized, her heart giving a lurch as she fully comprehended just how badly she’d erred. Lashtada forgive me, this is my fault!
Cozy took a deep breath, trying to calm down, but it was no good. She knew that she was making assumptions, knew that she didn’t have all the facts, but this was still the most likely scenario. There simply wasn’t anyone else in camp that could drive Sonata to use three attack spells like that, and with how Cozy had made her case about Lex’s cold heart just a few hours ago, what other explanation was there? Which meant that there was an extremely high chance that Sonata was in trouble, because of her! “We have to go back!”
“Wait, we do?” croaked Aisle, flattening his ears at Cozy’s proclamation.
“We are not going back!” snarled Aria. “We’re going to the Crystal Kingdom or whatever it’s called and fixing my voice!”
“What are-, she’s your sister and she needs help!” Cozy couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Don’t you care?!”
Aria blew up then, lashing out with a hoof and only barely missing striking Cozy’s head. “Why should I?! Why should I?! She doesn’t care about me! She doesn’t care about how hard I had to struggle to survive when I was with the sahuagin! She doesn’t care about how I can’t sing or dance or do anything except whisper like this and drag myself everywhere all the time! She doesn’t care that all of this happened to me because she abandoned us in the first place! So why should I care about her?!”
For a long moment, neither pony replied to her outburst. Finally, Cozy went back to where Pillowcase’s body was, picking up the rope again. “If that’s how you really feel, then maybe it’s better if you don’t see Princess Cadance after all,” she said quietly before beginning to turn around, headed back towards the camp.
It took a second for Aria to properly process what Cozy had just told her, but when she did Aria’s jaw dropped, her blood turning to ice water in her veins. My voice…! She grit her teeth so hard then that they almost cracked, starting to breathe heavier. The thought that she had just lost her chance to regain her voice was more than she could bear, and Aria found herself calling an attack spell to mind as she looked at the dark shape that was Cozy.
She didn’t have a chance as another shape moved in front of her, dimly recognizing it as being Aisle. “Listen,” he gulped, quite clearly trying to marshal what little courage he possessed. “We talked to Sonata before, back when we were all hiding in that warehouse, and she told us about how she left you guys…” He faltered then, but managed to rally a second later. “What she did, the way she just up and walked away from you, it was thoughtless, and selfish, and hurtful. But she wasn’t trying to be cruel. She just wanted to stop being picked on all the time.”
“Don’t you dare say that she’s the victim here,” snarled Aria. “Don’t you dare!”
“I’m not,” Aisle assured her. “I’m just saying…” He sighed then, putting a hoof to his head for a moment before trying again. “She’s your sister, Aria. She’s your sister and she’s in trouble. Do you really want to do the same thing to her that she did to you, knowing how much it hurts?”
“It’s because it hurts that I want to do that to her!” She would have screamed if she could, slamming a hoof on the ground in impotent rage. “I want her to know how awful it feels! It's what she deserves!” She turned toward Cozy then, her whispers almost choked on her rage. "I'm the one who needs your help! Me! Not her! Me!" Cozy didn't answer, and neither did Aisle except to shake his head – giving her what might have been a pitying look – before turning and walking away from her, headed toward Cozy's side. The sight just made Aria's rage flare even higher. How dare you?! How dare you do this to me?! I'm better than her AND I'LL PROVE IT!
She was almost too angry to cast a spell, but somehow she found it within herself to gesture and chant, spitting out the words to another flight spell and rising up into the air before casting a second spell, this one designed to increase her speed. With that done, she flew toward the camp with all possible haste, not bothering to give a backward glance at the pair of ponies she'd left behind. Seething, she readied an attack spell for when she arrived, intent on barbecuing whoever or whatever Sonata was fighting. I'll show them! I'LL SHOW THEM! They want to act like she's so great?! Well, if I go back there and save her now, then they'll HAVE to admit that I'm more deserving than she is! I'll rub their noses in it and make them apologize and then they'll HAVE to help me get my voice back! Or so help me I'LL KILL THEM BOTH!
Intent on proving her superiority, Aria sped toward the camp, determined to save her sister out of spite.
“C’mon!” yelled Funshine. “C’MON! Keep it going, Fe-, Garden! You can do this!”
“It’s not like she can hear you,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide, turning his ears down so as not to be deafened by his brother’s bellowing. “Sonata said that this spell would hide us from the ghouls, remember? So if they can’t hear us, then-”
“Let him cheer,” interrupted Granola Bar without taking her eyes off of their friend, watching as Garden Gate tore another ghoul apart, but not before it knocked away one of those jewels that Lex had somehow made fly around her head. “It’s all we can do right now.”
“She’ll win!” Hopscotch tried to make her voice confident, as though she couldn’t imagine Garden losing, but to her own ears it sounded more like a nervous whimper. “She’s beaten so many of them already, I kn-know she can keep it up!”
Granola Bar put a hoof around the other mare, giving her a reassuring squeeze. It hadn’t taken very long for the four of them to realize that Garden had gone out to fight the ghouls all by herself. The sound of her enraged cries, unreasonably demanding the return of everything she’d lost, had made her location all too clear. Fortunately, Granola Bar had been close enough to the front of the crowd that she’d overheard a nearby pony – a redheaded mare with a compass cutie mark – explaining to a friend of hers why they couldn’t go out there and help her. The explanation had been an enlightening one, and had been all that kept Granola Bar from leaping out there herself. She had relayed it in turn to Funshine, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and Hopscotch when they’d arrived at the front of the crowd less than a minute later, each one of them intent on rushing to Garden Gate’s side. Even then, it hadn’t been easy to convince them to stay put. Only the fact that their leader was, impossibly, winning the fight had kept them from rushing to join h-
“Wait, something’s wrong!” yelped Hopscotch, her voice shrill with alarm.
“What?!” Slip ‘n’ Slide practically jumped out of his skin at that, head turning every which way in a panic. “What’s wrong?!”
“GARDEN!” Hopscotch pointed at where the aforementioned mare – now having lost a second gem – took a bite to the flank, going rigid.
“NO!” roared Funshine, already throwing himself forward. Far from trying to stop him, Slip ‘n’ Slide looked like he was about to do the same thing. It was enough to make Granola Bar freeze, torn wanting to go with them and knowing that she had to stop them.
Fortunately, her mind was made up for her an instant later as a pegasus stallion suddenly crashed into Funshine from the side, knocking him into Slip ‘n’ Slide and causing all three to go tumbling to the ground. “Get off me!” snarled Funshine, swinging his hooves at the stallion on top of him. “Garden needs help!”
“You can’t go!” growled the other stallion, and it took a moment for Granola Bar to recognize him as the pegasus that redhead with the compass cutie mark had been talking down a few minutes ago, Ocean Spray. “You’ll get us all killed!”
“If we don’t help her right now she’ll be killed!” snapped Slip ‘n’ Slide, trying to dig himself out from under his brother. “MOVE!”
“I won’t let you!” Despite being outnumbered and outweighed by the two earth ponies, Ocean Spray didn't let up, doing everything he could do keep the pair from getting their hooves under them. “Everypony has to stay here, no matter wha-”
“Look!” yelled Hopscotch again, causing all three to turn their heads instinctively.
They were just in time to see Garden Gate dodge what should have been a death blow, her paralysis feigned, and send the ghoul stumbling away with a blow to the head. The sight caused everypony to sigh in relief, and a moment later Ocean Spray disentangled himself from the other two. Funshine immediately leapt to his hooves, stepping toward the pegasus pony angrilly. “If you ever do that again…” he spat, leaning forward until his nose was pressed against the smaller stallion’s.
But Ocean Spray refused to be intimidated. “You think you’re the only one who wants to run out there?! Well you’re not!” He flared his wings, staring the other stallion down. “Right now your friend is fighting to avenge the people she lost, and it’s killing me that I can’t go out there and do the same, because if I did then I’d put more people at risk!” He grit his teeth then, his inner turmoil showing through. “I want to go kill those things, but not if it means losing someone else that I care about!”
“I’m trying to go out there because I don’t want to lose someone else I care about!” shot back Funshine. “You don’t-”
“Both of you, stop it!” yelled the redhead firmly, stepping forward from behind Ocean Spray and giving the two of them a hard look. “This isn’t helping anypony.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” huffed Slip ‘n’ Slide, keeping one eye on Garden’s fight as he looked at the newcomer. “It’s not your friend that’s out there.”
“She’s right, Slip.” Granola Bar stepped forward then, before things had a chance to escalate. Putting a hoof on his shoulder, she gave him a sympathetic look. “Garden isn’t fighting so that we can get into a brawl like this.” She didn’t show it, but she was relieved when all he did was give her a miserable look in response instead of arguing. Glancing over at where the redheaded mare was speaking softly to Ocean Spray, she caught her eye, and the two exchanged a brief nod.
Managing a group when your leader wasn’t there was an exhausting task sometimes.
“Um, you guys…!”
Hopscotch’s worried voice turned everyone’s eyes back toward Garden, gasps escaping them as they saw her final gem knocked away even as more ghouls came at her, forcing her to retreat. Granola Bar tensed, moving toward Funshine and Slip ‘n’ Slide just a little. Although her stomach was tightening into knots, she swore she wouldn’t hesitate this time; if the two of them tried to run out there again, she’d tackle them herself, no matter what happened. Garden, this is what you’d want me to do, right?
Biting her lip, Granola Bar watched as Garden retreated, waving her knife in a futile gesture to try and keep the ghouls from simply overwhelming her in a wave. She was almost to Lex and Sonata now, and it was obvious that once she reached them the ghouls would turn their attention to the other two. When that happene-
Then a fireball rained down from the sky.
Aria’s spell was enough to turn the tide of the battle.
Momentarily.
With the space in front of her suddenly clear of foes Garden Gate had a moment to catch her breath, panting as she rubbed a hoof across her brow, the telekinetic aura around her knife flickering dangerously. Even so, she brought it back into a ready position, sparing a moment to glance upward at her benefactor, watching with a neutral expression as Aria floated down beside Lex and Sonata. But then the break was over, as another ghoul got by Severance, smacking its lips as it ran for her. Giving a snort, she moved forward to meet it.
Behind her, Lex was already cursing the missed opportunity. Even if she was exhausted, and the reprieve had only been a few seconds, she should have tried to look for the gemstones! Finding even one of them would have increased her combat prowess substantially! But there was nothing that could be done about it now, and he turned his attention back to Sonata’s sister, who had landed a few feet from them both.
As soon as Aria reached the ground, Sonata flung herself at her, forelegs curling around her neck in a hug. “Aria! Oh my gosh! That was, like, super awesome! You totes nailed the whole ‘last-minute rescue’ thing!” She let her go then, almost prancing with delight. “Now, say something kinda mean so you can do the whole ‘I was worried about you, but can’t admit it’ bit!”
The look Aria gave Sonata in response was one of pure loathing. “I wasn’t worried about you, you idiot!” she whispered harshly. “I only came back here to prove that I’m better than you!”
“Perfect!” grinned Sonata, clapping her hooves. “Wow, you’re great at this!”
Aria glared at her sister in pure frustration, feeling ready to explode at Sonata’s dopey smile, and finally couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. Turning to Lex, she pointed at the ghouls. “What’s going on here?! Why are those things all here and not in the city? And where’s everyone else? How come that girl with the knife-”
“There’s no time to explain,” panted Lex, barely having gotten enough breath back to speak in complete sentences again. “Right now you need to back her up with everyone you’ve got. Use enhancement magic on her, and be ready to cast more fireballs if there are more of them than she can handle.”
“Yeah, no,” snorted Aria. “That’s not going to happen.”
“I wasn’t asking!”
“Yeah? Well I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t,” replied Aria with a glare. “I was saying I can’t use that spell again, thanks to someone making me use so much magic earlier today when we went into Vanhoover!”
“You can’t be serious!” snarled Lex.
Behind him, Sonata gave Aria a solemn nod. “I know, right? You cast those spells a couple of times, and then…” She blew a raspberry. “Nothing. Kaput. It’s, like, sooo frustrating!”
“Don’t compare me to you!” Aria’s whisper was so harsh it was barely intelligible. “I’ve still got enough magic to cast a spell that will end this in one shot! Then you’ll have to tell everyone who the better sister is!”
“What spell?” asked Lex, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. He’d fought Aria before, and she’d never shown any magical aptitude sufficient to deal with hundreds, potentially thousands, of enemies at once.
The question was enough to make the corners of Aria’s mouth turn up. “Just watch.” She turned to glance over at where Garden was fighting, now quite clearly hard-pressed just to deal with the two ghouls that were snapping at her. “Call knife-girl back, and then I’ll-”
“What spell?” Lex asked the question slower, making it clear that an answer was expected.
“Actually,” interjected Sonata, raising a hoof as though she were in a classroom, “I kinda wanna be surprised.”
That was all it took to get Aria talking. “I can raise a curtain of fire around us. It only radiates heat on one side, so if I make it a circle with us on the inside and have the heat going outward, we’ll be safe and those things will be char-broiled if they try to get through it.”
“That’s a terrible plan,” replied Lex without hesitation.
“What are you talking about?! It’s perfect!” Aria couldn’t help but slam her tail against the ground angrily before point at Sonata. “It’s better than whatever magic she’s using!”
“It will drive the remaining ghouls away before we can kill them!” Lex kept his eyes on Garden Gate as he castigated Aria, despite knowing that there was nothing he could do about them. “They might be so mad with hunger that they’re throwing themselves against Severance, but they aren’t utter fools. If all they see is a big hole in the ground and a ring of fire they can’t make it through, there’ll eventually decide to go look elsewhere for food, and put every village in the region at risk!”
Aria’s brow furrowed at that, digesting what she’d just been told. “So you’re saying that you don’t want me to use my fire-wall spell because you need to act as bait?!” She shook her head. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I don’t believe it,” muttered Lex.
“No, it really might be,” sneered Aria. “And I say that having spent almost all of my life with Sonata.”
“Hey! I know I told you to say mean stuff, but that’s going too far!”
Aria was about to respond with an even more cutting remark, but Lex jumped in before she could. “The ghouls!”
“What about them?” asked Aria, looking back at the horde of undead ponies in confusion. They looked the same to her, so what was he getting so worked up over?
“They’re running out!”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, tilting her head. “They’re running out of what?”
“Of themselves!” The excitement in Lex’s voice was undeniable, his breath coming quicker in the face of renewed hope. “There aren’t that many of them left!”
That was enough to make both sisters look at the tide of undead ponies ahead of Severance. There were still ghouls rushing out of the darkness, but with Lex’s proclamation, they could see that the gaps between individual ghouls were starting to grow. Dozens rather than scores were advancing toward Severance – though the scythe simply continued to swing itself at whatever came closest to it, making it unable to help let but more slip by it – and the wild shrieks and screeching from the undead ponies sounded less overwhelming now.
By Lex’s estimation, that was how many Severance had cut down so far, and they were still coming. But now, at last, their numbers were thinning out, the undead ponies no longer pressing against each other in a tightly-packed mob as they rushed forward. The earth no longer seemed to shake under the press of innumerable hooves, and the horde’s shrieks and snarls and mad laughter was an unpleasant din rather than a deafening cacophony. Although the creatures were still charging out of the darkness, they were no longer the seemingly-unstoppable wave of certain death that they had been when the battle had started.
The army of ghouls was almost depleted.
Two thousand altogether, Lex decided, fighting to at least sit up as he surveyed the situation, comparing the current numbers charging at Severance with how numerous they’d been a few minutes ago and calculating an approximation from that. It was a staggeringly huge number, one that outlined the scope of just how far Vanhoover had fallen, but at the moment he found it encouraging. We just need to destroy a few hundred more of them! Fortunately, the ghouls seemed willingly complicit in their own destruction; despite their depleted ranks, they continued to charge Severance blindly, their eyes locked onto Garden Gate in naked hunger.
But his optimism was dashed a moment later as he saw another pair of ghouls slip by Severance, the scythe’s attack pattern not having changed. The undead ponies immediately launched themselves at Garden Gate, who had only just managed to finish off her current opponent, wrenching her knife out of the unmoving body’s eye socket as she turned to face the latest threats. Even from a distance, Lex could see her panting, and knew that it wouldn’t be long before she reached her limit the same way he had. If that happened, then even the remaining trickle of ghouls could conceivably still kill them all.
Without preamble, Lex gave Sonata – who had let her song end when Aria had arrived – a sharp look. “Keep singing!” he snapped. “Reinforce Garden Gate immediately!”
But Sonata just blinked at him uncomprehendingly. “Why? It’s not like it wore off or anything.”
Lex’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What?”
“The magic in a Siren’s voice doesn’t quit working the instant we stop singing,” explained Aria bitterly, sending another hateful glare at her sister before looking back at where Garden Gate was still fighting. “It goes on for at least a few minutes, even if we’re not trying to make it last longer.”
“Yep!” chirped Sonata, completely missing the dark look from Aria as she favored Lex with a cocky grin. “And I used two different tunes on Garden, one to get her totes pumped up and another to, like, super inspire her to do her best! That’s pretty much pushing the limit for how much I can make someone into a super-awesome fighting machine with my singing.” She couldn’t help but glance back at the big hole behind them, hoping that the audience there was enjoying everything that had happened so far. Everyone had gotten to show off pretty good now, and Lex said the ghouls were starting to run out, so all that was needed was a big dramatic finish!
“What about the actual spells you cast on her?” pressed Lex. He was fairly confident at least one of them had to have given out. “Are they still active?”
“Um…” Sonata paused then, pursing her lips as she concentrated for a moment. “I used two, one to make her feel brave and the other one to make her mad. The brave one should still be going. The other one-, oh! It ran out!” She raised a hoof and lightly bopped herself on the head sheepishly. “Wow, I completely forgot! Talk about embarrassing, huh?”
“Can you cast it again?” asked Lex through gritted teeth. On his other side, Aria shook her head in disgust.
“Yep!” Oblivious to the others’ reactions to her admission, Sonata nodded her head before singing a brief tune, turning to concentrate on Garden.
Lex didn’t bother to wait for the results to take effect, instead turning to look at Aria. “I gave Garden Gate three magical gemstones to help her fight. Use your tracking spell and locate them immediately.”
“That won’t work,” shot back Aria without missing a beat. “That spell is designed to locate people, not things.”
“Then use your magic to enhance her, or at least attack the ghouls attacking her!” hissed Lex. “Do something useful!”
This is the thanks I get for saving your life? Baring her teeth at what sounded to her like an implication that Sonata was more helpful than she was, Aria forced herself to swallow the bile she felt. “Fine, but like I said, you made me use most of my strongest magic already, so don’t complain if what I’ve got left isn’t exactly impressive.” A moment later she raised a hoof and whispered the words to a spell, sending out four small darts of light out to slam into the ghoul closest to Garden Gate. The creature’s body shook as each hit struck home, and turned its head to send an angry howl at Aria…which proved to be its last mistake, as Garden slammed her knife into the back of its neck, causing the thing to shudder before collapsing.
But the hit left her open to the other ghouls surrounding her, one of them sinking its teeth into the back of her right hind leg, causing her to stumble as a cry of pain escaped her lips. The second one didn’t hesitate to capitalize on the opening, lashing out with a hoof that landed heavily across her ribs. Even from his poor vantage point, Lex could see her body quivering as she fought off being paralyzed, managing to wrench herself away from the undead ponies, limping and favoring her back leg as she brought her knife down in a brutal cut across the face of the ghoul that had just punched her. The creature barely seemed to notice the blow, moving to capitalize on Garden’s apparent weakness, even as two more ghouls survived Severance’s latest slash, rushing toward the injured mare.
Aria was already whispering the words to another spell, but Lex knew just from hearing it that it was another instance of the one she’d already used, which hadn’t been strong enough to bring down a single ghoul. Sonata was still concentrating on maintaining the anger-inducing spell she’d cast on Garden, but Lex was certain that the vermillion mare wouldn’t be able to fight off four ghouls in her current state. She was about to die, and once she did everypony else would as well, starting with him and the Sirens. And this time, he knew, no one else would swoop in to save them.
With one possible exception.
Going against every instinct he had, Lex averted his eyes from the battle, looking down at his shadow, which was huddled directly under him rather than falling away from the campfires. Do something! he silently screamed at it. I know you have magic, so use it!
Precious seconds passed and no response came, causing Lex to clench his jaw in anxiety, glancing back at Garden. She wasn’t so much fighting back now as she was just struggling to survive, desperately flinging herself away from two pairs of snapping jaws and raising a hoof to barely block a strike aimed at her head, using her knife to parry the fourth ghoul that was trying to attack her from behind. Worse, a fifth ghoul was on its way to her now, and Lex knew that would be more than she could handle. She’d last ten, maybe twelve seconds at best before she was overwhelmed and devoured. She had to know it too, and yet she didn’t even try to run away…and that knowledge made Lex feel even worse about how thoroughly he’d impugned her.
Forcing himself to concentrate, Lex shut his eyes as he focused all of his thoughts on his shadow-, no, on the tulpa that inhabited it. You’re a part of me! he mentally roared at it. This can’t be what you want! Garden Gate is going to die defending us even after I condemned her! Aria will die even though she came back to help us! Sonata will die despite how much I love her! Are you really alright with that?! Because if not then you need to DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW!
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Two heartbeats…
Three…
Then, suddenly, he felt the sensation of magical energy moving through him. At the same time, he heard Sonata and Aria both gasp, and behind that a sudden shriek went up from several of the ghouls. Opening his eyes, Lex immediately looked back toward Garden...
…and turned pale at what he saw.
No…
There were a trio of figures surrounding the ghouls that had surrounded Garden Gate, their sudden appearance having startled both her and the undead ponies into momentary immobility. Each of them looked like a pony, but at the same time was quite clearly not one. Rather, they looked like living caricatures of ponies, their edges blurred and indistinct rather than being fully defined. Their sizes and proportions were subtly off, making them look as though they’d stepped out of funhouse mirrors. Their features were warped and distorted, as if they were wearing poorly-painted masks made up to resemble their real faces. Altogether, the figures looked like something out of a bad surrealist painting.
Or a nightmare.
“You’re an embarrassment to ponies everywhere, Lex,” sneered one of them – a unicorn mare with a cream-colored coat and a black mane and tail – as she raised a hoof and lashed out at a nearby ghoul, the blow caving in half its skull and sending it stumbling away. Dazedly, he recognized the voice of View Point, a magical ethics teacher than he’d known, and despised, during his brief time at Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. She’d never actually said that to him, but it was a sentiment that, in his nightmares, she’d expressed many times.
“We’re ashamed to have been summoned by a gutless weakling like you,” jeered a pegasus mare with a grey coat and auburn mane and tail. Even before he heard her voice he recognized Brush Stroke, the first girl he’d ever had a crush on. His clumsy attempts to get closer to her still made him cringe to remember, and he barely reacted as she bucked a ghoul hard enough to knock it off its hooves.
“You were always a rotten child, and now you’ve grown up into an even worse stallion,” taunted his grandfather, because the elderly earth pony couldn’t have been anyone else. The close-cropped mustache was the same grey as the whispy mane and short-cut tail, both stark against his red coat. The words had barely left his mouth when he tackled a ghoul next to him with an agility he’d never had in real life, bowling the undead thing over.
The attacks were enough to snap the other ghouls, and Garden Gate, out of their stupor, and suddenly the fighting was raging again, much more evenly than before. Lex registered that, as well as the confused voices of Sonata and Aria asking what was going on, but he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Not because he didn’t know what had just happened, but because he did.
The Night Mare had told him, when he’d made his pact with her outside of Tall Tale, that she had been responsible for the tulpa that haunted his dreams. Her “tantabus curse,” she’d called it. She’d also let it slip that it could be controlled, which had been a revelation to him at the time and a source of frustration thereafter, since he’d seen no evidence of that prior to his fight with Xiriel, when it had revealed that it could not only abet his spellcasting, but had somehow stored a few spells of its own as well. He’d been expecting something along those lines when he’d demanded its help just now, but instead it had done something completely beyond his expectations.
It had brought his nightmares into the real world.
Lex could only stare numbly as the ghouls did battle with the phantom ponies from his nightmares, all of them figures he’d known in his youth that were now long deceased. Brush Stroke barely managed to duck under a wild punch from a ghoul, retaliating with a blow to its rib cage that caused its chest to cave in as bones snapped. A few feet away, View Point wasn’t quite as fast, getting half her throat ripped out by an emaciated unicorn stallion. But the thing’s howl of triumph changed into one of shock as it looked down as its suddenly-empty mouth, its jaws devoid of blood or flesh. “Not real!” it howled. “They’re not rea-” But its cry was aborted as View Point, paying no mind to the bloodless hole in her neck, reached out to grab the ghoul’s head and begin pulling, trying to tear it from the thing’s shoulders.
A short distance from them, his grandfather was warding off blows from the fallen ghoul under him as he tried to bludgeon the thing to death, his hoof raising and falling in an attempt to reduce the creature’s head to so much pulp…an attempt that ended abruptly as a heavy buck from another ghoul crushed the elderly stallion’s head completely. His body tottered for a moment, and then vanished as quickly as a patch of mist in the morning sunlight. Both ghouls wasted a second gaping at their enemy’s sudden disappearance before snarling, angry at being denied a hard-won meal.
That was all the time Garden Gate needed to strike. Still favoring her wounded leg, she barreled forward into the ghoul that had bucked the phantom pony into nonexistence, sending it staggering forward and tripping over its fallen companion. Snarling curses, both ghouls immediately moved to right themselves, but not before Garden fell on the closer of the two, teeth gripping the filthy handle of her knife as she sank its blade directly into the thing’s ear. The creature screeched, but only thrashed harder, trying to twist its head around to bite at the mare. Garden responded by sawing her knife back and forth, trying to work it through the ghoul’s skull as it struggled. A few feet away from her, the other ghoul was about to pounce, but she glanced at it and her horn glowed, a matching aura springing into being around the undead pony’s right foreleg just before she yanked hard on it, causing it to stumble.
But concentrating on two enemies at a time left her unable to land a decisive blow on either of them. With a hiss the ghoul underneath her managed to draw its rear legs up and under her, and before she could react it kicked out heavily, knocking her off of it. Worse, the blow tore the knife from her teeth, leaving it embedded in the side of the ghoul’s head as she landed heavily on her back a few feet away. Groaning, Garden immediately moved to right herself, but fatigue and multiple injuries made it impossible to move as quickly as she wanted, and she hadn’t gotten even one of her hooves under her when she saw the two ghouls fling themselves at her…
…and then their heads exploded as two darts of light tore through each of them, courtesy of Aria.
The reprieve was short-lived, however. Even as Lex watched Garden telekinetically pick up her knife, the ghouls were quickly dealing with the remaining nightmares. Brush Stroke hadn’t quite managed to finish off the ghoul she was fighting when it swung its hoof at her with enough force that it literally punched through her, the filthy limb sinking knee-deep into her torso and causing her to wink out of existence a moment later. Barely a second after that, View Point succeeded in tearing her ghoul’s head free before she was tackled by a newly-arrived ghoul, landing on her back and digging its filthy teeth into her neck, making short work of her. Behind it, two more undead ponies moved to join the fray, grinning at what looked like imminent victory.
“Lex, whatever those things were, we need some more of ‘em!” muttered Sonata, brow still furrowed as she concentrated on maintaining her spell of anger-enhanced strength on Garden. “Just, you know, maybe without the trash-talking!” She wasn’t sure why those weirdo ponies were being jerks to him – especially since she’d felt him use whatever magic had summoned them – but it sorta sent mixed messages. Here’s hoping no one else heard what they were saying, she thought, shooting a quick glance back at the hole that was hiding everypony.
For his part, Lex almost shook his head in reply, mortified beyond words at the prospect of everyone – especially her – getting a glimpse of the extremely personal torment he went through on a nightly basis. But he knew she was right; despite having been defeated with relative ease by the ghouls, the appearance of those phantoms had managed to turn the tide of the battle for at least a few moments. No matter how humiliating he found it, more reinforcements were needed. Gritting his teeth, he turned his eyes back toward his shadow. More, he thought, pushing down the conflict he felt about calling up more of his nighttime demons. Send more!
There was another hesitation for a second or two, and then he again felt a rush of magic. Biting his lip at the prospect of who the thing would show him next, Lex turned back to the battle. A moment later he had his answer, as two more warped ponies appeared.
“So much for that better magic you were gonna make, know-it-all,” snickered Gloaming Sheen, the unicorn’s voice immediately setting Lex’s teeth on edge. His old classmate had never missed an opportunity to make fun of him when he was alive, and the same was true now. But even as the words left the phantom’s mouth, he threw himself forward to intercept the ghouls that were running at Garden Gate.
“You’re going to fail everyone. Again.” This time Lex couldn’t help himself, wincing and looking away at the accusatory voice of Salt Lick. The earth pony mare had been one of the first ponies he’d met during his time on Everglow, and watching her die had driven home just how savage and brutal that world was. That her corpse had been subsequently defiled by being turned into an undead monstrosity was one of his worst memories, with the knowledge that he’d later released her from that state being cold comfort. Even now, as she waded into the press of ghouls, he felt almost nauseous. No matter that she was just a phantom from his mind and not the actual person, the very idea that he had conjured her up purely for utilitarian purposes the same way those self-centered monsters had was-
“Look!” Sonata’s voice provided a welcome respite from the emotions threatening to overwhelm him, and he immediately turned to look at her. But she didn’t meet his eyes, instead peering ahead. “The ghouls!” Following her gaze, he looked out at where Severance was still fighting, his eyes widening an instant later.
No more ghouls were pouring out of the darkness.
His breath catching at the sight, Lex pushed everything else out of his mind as he took that in. Even as he watched, the last few ghouls followed their brethren toward Severance, with no more undead ponies trailing after them. For a moment he tried to keep his hopes in check, wondering if there was simply a gap in their ranks, or if maybe some of the ghouls had managed to retain their wits enough to circle around Severance instead of charging directly toward it. But as the remainder of the undead ponies failed to appear, he realized that this was it…they’d finally done it! They’d outlasted the ghouls!
After that, it took only a few seconds for the last members of the undead army to exterminate themselves on the end of Severance’s blade. Swinging in its customary wide arc, Severance lashed out once, then again, and then a third time. A fourth and final swing followed, and then there were no more enemies in front of it, the western edge of the camp suddenly silent and still. Slowly, Severance ceased its endless swinging, turning back to an upright position as it hovered in the air, its blade pointed toward Vanhoover in silent vigil.
Garden’s scream of pain drew his attention back to her.
A few more ghouls had managed to engage her in the short period that he’d looked away, and the phantoms had done a poor job fighting them off. Even as Lex watched, Gloaming Sheen dissolved into nothing as a ghoul tore his stomach open. Not far off, Salt Lick was surrounded by three ghouls who quickly knocked her off her hooves before closing in and bludgeoning her until she was no more, the sight making Lex feel sick again. But worst was Garden, who left foreleg was extended outward, trapped in the hooves of a ghoul that was currently sinking its teeth into the meat of her leg with a rapturous moan. Even as he watched, she brought her knife down onto its head, but the blade didn’t penetrate its skull, and it kept gnawing on her, heedless of her attempt to harm it.
“Aria!” Lex snapped.
The Siren unleashed another volley of magic missiles, the darts of light streaming toward the ghoul sinking its teeth into Garden. A second later they pierced the thing, and it instantly collapsed…and so did Garden, her body rigid and unmoving. Lex’s eyes widened as he realized that her luck had finally run out, that last injury having paralyzed her.
The four remaining ghouls realized it too, voices raised in screams of hunger as they rushed to cross the few feet separating them from her.
Off to his side, Lex could hear Aria whispering the words to another magic missile spell, but he knew it would never be able to stop all four of the creatures. On his other side, he was cognizant of Sonata babbling something about not being able to use her only remaining attack spell without hitting Garden too. But he wasn’t listening to either of them, instead reaching out with his telekinesis and grabbing Severance, bringing the weapon around as fast as he possibly could.
In his current state it felt like he was trying to lift every building in Vanhoover at once, but he ignored the strain, arching his back as he swung the blade, silently screaming for it to make it in time. The lead ghoul was galloping toward her as fast as it could, its jaws slavering as its tongue lolled out obscenely, and Lex was suddenly reminded of a few days ago, when a nearly-identical situation had occurred in the warehouse where they’d found Pillowcase. The memory upset him, reminding him of how badly he’d misjudged Garden's reform, and he turned that extra burst of anger into strength, his purple aura around the weapon flaring as he brought Severance to the apex of its swing…
...and cut the last four ghouls to ribbons, less than a second before they reached Garden’s immobile form.
The weapon’s cutting arc, still projecting past the end of its blade, passed over Garden’s prone body by inches, just as Lex had calculated it would. But that left it at the perfect height to hit the ghouls dead-center, causing them – like so many others of their kind that Severance had cut down that night – to be immediately obliterated. What was left of them hit the ground a moment later, and Lex’s aura sputtered out as his last burst of strength ebbed, leaving Severance floating under its own power.
The silence that followed was complete as everypony held their breath, almost afraid to hope that what they were seeing was true. But as the seconds passed, the reality slowly sank in: there were no more ghouls. It was finally over.
The silence that had fallen in the wake of the final ghouls being slain was broken by Sonata’s jubilant cry. Grinning, she reared up on her hind legs and raised her fore-hooves in the air triumphantly, giving a wordless whoop of victory. Falling back to all fours, she turned her attention to the illusion hiding everypony else. “Did you all see that?! I mean, those ghouls were no dragon or anything,” she threw a wink at Lex as she spoke, before turning back to the image of the giant hole in the ground, “but that was still seriously awesome! There were, like, a bajillion of them, but when they came, we saw, and we kicked their undead a-”
“Stop that!” hissed Lex, giving her a baleful glare. “We haven’t confirmed that there aren’t any left!” The last thing he wanted was for some stray ghoul to realize that there were defenseless ponies nearby, and Sonata’s talking to an apparently-empty hole in the ground ran the risk of that, especially if her declaration of victory encouraged the ponies there to exit the illusion. But I can’t tell them to stay where they are, since that would only compound Sonata’s breaking their cover.
“Aw come on!” Oblivious to Lex’s worries, Sonata groaned and rolled her eyes at his attitude. He’s gotta be allergic to relaxing or something.
Ignoring his girlfriend’s indignation, Lex looked at Aria. “Can you use your detection spell again?”
The Siren’s reply was a sneer. “What, that’s all I get? No ‘you saved us all, Aria’? Or ‘we couldn’t have done this without you, Aria’?” The words were meant for Lex, but halfway through she found herself looking at her sister. “It’s not like I had to come back, you know. You could at least show a little gratitude!”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, not sure if Aria was speaking to her or not. “You mean me?” The thought made her scratch her head in confusion. Hadn’t she already told her she’d done a great job with the whole ‘last-second save’ bit?
The befuddled look on Sonata’s face only made Aria angrier. “Yes you, you simp!” The utter lack of recognition on her sister’s part about what had just happened was infuriating. “I came back to help even though you aba-”
“Enough.”
Lex didn’t yell, but his voice carried the weight of an undeniable command, making Aria immediately fall silent as the Night Mare’s power wrapped around her and immediately bent her to his will. Holding his injured foreleg toward Aria – the feeling having only just returned to it after the bite from one of the ghouls had left it paralyzed – Lex struggled to get to his hooves. It was a losing proposition, however, and only Sonata’s sudden appearance at his side stopped him from collapsing back into the dirt. He gave her only the briefest glance of acknowledgment, gratitude and embarrassment warring within him for a moment before exhaustion trumped them both. Securing the area came first, everything else was secondary, especially the feelings of these two squabbling imbeciles. “Aria, you-”
“You ignored your mate’s sister, rather than nurturing her interest in you, and haven’t even realized that she’s abandoned you.”
The Night Mare’s words came back to him then, the message replaying in his mind with such clarity that it made him pause in mid-sentence, unable to help but consider it the current context. As much as it galled him to admit it, the Night Mare’s idea of using others as extensions of his own strength had proven to be insightful. Although he hadn’t empowered Aria the way he had Garden Gate, nor outlined the tactics she was supposed to utilize (apart from a few shouted commands after her return) the way he had with Sonata, the Siren had nevertheless proven herself invaluable during the course of the battle, her spells averting disaster more than once. Her abilities, placed under his direction and utilized with his guidance, had been pivotal in stopping any more fatalities from occurring. That…deserved acknowledgment, if nothing else.
Slowly, he lowered his wire-wrapped hoof to the ground, giving a sigh as he released the power binding her. “We couldn’t have done this without you, Aria.” The words came out quietly, just loud enough for both sisters to hear. “You saved us all.”
Sonata’s jaw fell open, her eyebrows rising to her hairline. Aria wasn’t much better, giving him a shocked look before her expression became smug. “Darn right I did!” she smirked, giving Sonata a superior look. “Unlike a certain someone, I don’t run out on people right before things get bad.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” frowned Sonata.
Aria, still grinning, opened her mouth to reply, but Lex jumped in before another argument could start. “Cast your detection spell again, then circle the battlefield,” he ordered quietly. “I want to know if there are any ghouls that survived.”
The pleased look disappeared from Aria’s face as she glanced at the carnage a short distance away. “If there are, I won’t have enough magic left to fight them off.”
But Lex had anticipated that. “Severance.” The scythe came immediately, floating over until it was hovering beside him. “Go with Aria. Kill any undead creatures you come across, then return to me once you’re finished.” He didn’t bother touching the scythe to hear whatever reply it might have had, and the weapon didn’t seem inclined to give one, floating over to Aria obediently.
Satisfied, she whispered a chant as her hooves gestured, invoking the spell. It took only a moment to finish, and she glanced around before giving a satisfied nod, looking back at Lex. “Nothing so far. I’ll let you know if I find any.” That last part was tossed out with another superior smirk toward Sonata, before she turned and dragged herself westward, moving to avoid the scattered gore as Severance floated alongside her, its blade still glowing fluorescently.
Sonata waited until Aria was out of earshot before turning back at Lex, raising a brow. “You wanna tell me what just happened?” She tried to keep the jealousy out of her voice, not entirely succeeding. “Since when do you compliment anybody?”
“‘Anypony,’ Sonata,” corrected Lex tiredly, taking a shaky step forward. The motion almost caused him to collapse, and Sonata had to hurry to prop him up as he started walking. “The word is ‘anypony.’ And that wasn’t a compliment. I was simply affirming her own estimation of the tactical value of her performance in the battle.”
“You call that a performance?” scoffed Sonata. “Laying down some sweet background music for the fight, that’s a performance...” She didn’t even try to disguise the leading nature of her statement, hoping that he’d pick up on it. “In fact, you could even call it ‘brilliant,’ don’cha think?”
“I-”
“GARDEN!”
His reply cut off by the loud cry from behind them, Lex cursed as he glanced over his shoulder, Sonata frowning as she did the same. Behind them, emerging from what looked like nowhere, four ponies ran out from the illusion, making their way toward Garden Gate with all possible speed. “You idiots!” yelled Lex, his ire resurging. “This area isn’t secure yet!”
But the warning had no effect on the quartet of ponies, and they rushed by him and Sonata both as they made their way to their fallen friend, crowding around the injured mare and fawning over her wounds. One of them, a burly earth stallion with a brown coat and blond mane and tail, looked up and gave Lex an accusing look. “What are you doing?! Garden Gate needs help!”
Lex’s response was a withering look as he, with Sonata’s assistance, resumed walking. With Aria and Severance working to make sure that there wouldn’t be any unpleasant surprises, he’d been heading for Garden Gate when those four imbeciles had decided to take action on their own. “As soon as we know that there aren’t any more ghouls in the area, I’ll have the doctors take a look at her. In the meantime, her injuries don’t appear to be life-threatening,” announced Lex coldly as he moved to join the group over Garden’s prone form, still stricken with paralysis. Although she was covered in wounds, none of them were bleeding overly much that he could see.
“‘Don’t appear to be life-threatening’?!” echoed the stallion, his voice incredulous. “Is that what you say about the mare who just saved everyone here?” He turned to face Lex then, pawing at the ground aggressively. “First you don’t even care that you get one of our friends killed, now you don’t care that another one of them might be dying right in front of you?!”
“Hey! Lighten up, jerk!” Sonata surged forward then, not noticing that in doing so she left Lex behind, struggling to stay upright. Getting right in the larger pony’s face, Sonata glared him down. “First of all, Lex cares super deeply about those ponies that died, which is why he got into that slap-fight with Severance! Second, he’s the reason that Garden Shed here was able to fight as well as she did! So third: shut your ugly face!”
The stallion colored in anger, baring his teeth. “Little lady, if you don’t back off-”
“Funshine, stop it!” ordered an earth mare with a tan coat and black mane and tail, marching over and shoving the stallion away from Sonata. “You’re making things worse!”
Funshine stumbled, giving the mare an incredulous look. “But Garden’s-”
The mare stomped a hoof. “You really think you’re helping her right now?!”
His ears folding back, Funshine opened his mouth, then closed it again, shifting in place anxiously as his eyes moved to his other two companions, asking for help. But when both sent him disapproving looks, he finally let out a breath, lowering his head in shame. “I…you’re right.” He looked at Sonata, then Lex. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…please, help her…” His eyes were watering as he looked back at where Garden was still frozen in place. “We can’t lose her too.”
Had he been in a better state, Lex would have given the distraught stallion a blistering rebuke, but at the moment he didn’t have the energy to deal with the other pony’s petulance. His horn was barely able to light up as he telekinetically fumbled for his cloak, the effort of staying standing while removing it almost too much. “Use this to wrap her up,” he ordered, managing to give it to Sonata. She passed it to Funshine, who gave her a grateful look as he grabbed it in his mouth and rushed back to Garden’s side. “Once Aria gets back,” continued Lex, “we’ll immediately call for the doctors to examine her.” He glanced at the mess that was the remains of the medical tent as he spoke, recalling how House Call had said that they were running out of most of the drugs they’d brought with them. Even so, there was no need to be overly worried; even if the ghouls had managed to infect Garden (or himself, for that matter) with their sickness, a night’s rest would replenish his divine magic, at which point the threat of disease would be easily dealt with. And if Vanhoover was now free of the undead menace-
“No…” moaned Garden Gate, pushing Funshine’s hooves away as he tried to wrap her up. “Don’t…”
Relieved cries went up from the four ponies surrounding her. “Hey, it’s okay,” said the smaller stallion in a soothing manner, trying not to sniffle. “You did it. You beat those ghouls.”
“You were really amazing,” nodded the purple-haired mare next to him, having a much harder time fighting back tears. “You saved everypony here. You’re a hero, Garden.”
But Garden didn’t seem to share her friends’ happiness. If anything, their words seemed to upset her more. “No, I’m not,” she moaned. “I got Turbo killed…I was selfish, just like in Vanhoover, and I got him killed.”
Lex frowned deeply at that, clenching his jaw at her declaration of responsibility. Not noticing his displeasure, the four ponies around Garden Gate shot each other uncomfortable looks. “Garden,” said the black-haired mare, blinking suddenly-wet eyes, “that’s not true. What happened to Turbo wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes it was.” Her words came out as a moan, tears sliding down her cheeks. “I wanted to be Garden Gate again. Don’t you see? I wanted to be her again so badly that Turbo tried to do it for me, and I let him. I let him, and now he’s dead. All because I was thinking about me.” A shudder wracked her body then, heartbroken sobs coming from her throat as she closed her eyes.
Lex’s declaration – delivered flatly and completely devoid of warmth or sympathy – was enough to quiet Fencer, causing her to look up at him with eyes filled with confusion. His tone of voice hadn’t sounded like he was trying to cheer her up, but she couldn’t imagine any other reason for him to say that. She quickly glanced at her friends, but she could see the same expression of incomprehension mirrored on their faces. Returning her gaze to Lex, she hesitated for a brief moment, worried about arguing with him, but the overwhelming guilt she felt wouldn’t let her stay silent. “Yes I am,” she sniffled. “I was the one who sent him th-”
“I was the one who sent him there,” interrupted Lex, his tone making it clear that he wouldn’t hear anything to the contrary. “I might not have chosen him personally, but I was the one who decided that an expedition back into Vanhoover was warranted. I was the one who elected to have other ponies go in my place. I was the one who…” For a second his voice faltered, and his ears folded back as a look of recrimination passed across his face. But then it was gone, and he continued speaking. “I was the one who failed to properly ascertain the full scope of the threat to their safety. The blame for their deaths is mine, and mine alone.”
Apparently that was the end of the conversation, because Lex turned and stumbled away before she had a chance to so much as open her mouth, Sonata immediately moving to support him. That was just as well though, because Fencer had no idea what to say in response. He probably would have cursed me again if I’d said any more, she sighed to herself, still feeling miserable.
“Um, does anypony know what just happened?” asked Funshine in a hushed tone, glancing at where Lex and Sonata were moving away from them. They weren’t headed toward anywhere in particular that he could tell, just walking away from Garden, which was fine by him.
“I think he was trying to be nice,” volunteered Hopscotch, forcing herself to smile as she looked down at their injured friend. “He’s not wrong about what happened not being your fault.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Fencer murmured, unwilling to let the point go but too tired to protest any harder.
“What did he mean, before?” interjected Slip ‘n’ Slide. “That part about ‘failing to properly ascertain the full scope of the threat to their safety.’ Did that sound weird to anypony else?”
“He probably just meant that he didn’t realize how many ghouls there were,” answered Granola Bar off-hoofedly, moving on to what she felt was the more important point. “Listen, Garden-”
“Fencer,” corrected the other mare, somehow managing to slump despite lying on her back. “I’m still Fencer.”
Granola Bar didn’t miss a beat. “Alright, Fencer. I don’t know if you heard, but Lex said that as soon as Aria and that scythe of his get back, he’s going to call the doctors over. In the meantime, is there anything we-, oh geez!” She grimaced as the obvious concern came to her, before backing away from Fencer. “You guys, get away from her! We’re activating her curse!”
The others immediately stumbled backward, Hopscotch actually tripping and falling over in her haste to stop causing her friend any discomfort. It was only after they’d all gotten a safe distance from her that they realized that Fencer was shaking her head slowly and waving a hoof at them. “It’s alright. I’m not cursed anymore.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, with Slip ‘n’ Slide being the first to react. “Say what now?!”
“You mean…?” gulped Hopscotch, taking a tentative step forward.
“I don’t believe it!” Despite his words, Funshine apparently had far fewer reservations than the others, immediately rushing back over to Fencer and grinning down on her, almost prancing in excitement. “This is great! How did you pull this off?!”
“I didn’t,” murmured Fencer softly as the others moved back in. “Lex removed them after the fighting started.” One hoof came up to brush her cheek, where the blood-mark of a scythe had been previously. When she pulled her limb back a second later, there was a dark smudge on the end of it. While she knew that could have been from the copious amounts of gore she’d been splashed with during the fight, that wasn’t what her gut told her, and she turned her eyes up towards the others in a silent question.
“It’s gone,” nodded Granola Bar, a small smile gracing her lips. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize that until just now.”
“A lot of stuff happened,” noted Slip ‘n’ Slide wryly, giving her a sympathetic look.
“So Lex really was being nice,” smiled Hopscotch, this time much more genuinely. “First he took away those curses, and now he was trying to make you feel better.” She pointed to Lex’s cloak covering Fencer’s body. “He even gave you a blanket.”
“I dunno.” A skeptical look crossed Funshine’s face. “I mean, he might have just done what he had to do to make sure Gard-, er, Fencer could finish what he started. Honestly, I’m kind of amazed he didn’t put those curses back just now.”
“I don’t care,” muttered Fencer, closing her eyes. “It doesn’t make any difference to me now.”
“Don’t say that.” Despite the rebuke, Granola Bar’s voice was kind as she sat down next to Fencer. “Turbo wanted those curses removed more than anything. He’d be happy for you if he were here right now.”
“Well he’s not, is he?” Opening her eyes, Fencer looked straight upward, unable to bring herself to make eye contact with anyone else. “Lex can say whatever he wants, but I was the one who wanted to go back, and that’s what made Turbo go in my place. If I hadn’t insisted on that…” She couldn’t go on, feeling a fresh round of tears threatening to start up again.
“…I encouraged him,” said Granola Bar softly. She didn’t meet the other mare’s eyes as Fencer turned to look at her, instead gazing forward, staring at nothing. “The first night we got here, after we left the city...” She swallowed, letting out a slow breath before she continued. “He saw how much you were suffering, and he wanted to find a way to lift your curses, and I told him that wasn’t what you needed. I encouraged him to do something to help with how guilty you felt…about the things you’d done back when we were all trying to survive.” Another slow breath, this time shuddering. “Maybe if I had kept my mouth shut, if I’d just let him think about lifting your curses instead, then maybe…maybe he wouldn’t have…” She couldn’t finish, pursing her lips for a moment before forcing herself to look at Fencer. “I’m so sorry.”
For a second, Fencer didn’t reply. Then she reached out, and Granola Bar had just enough time to flinch before the other mare grabbed her…and pulled her into a hug. That was all it took, and Granola Bar couldn’t hold back anymore, sobbing softly on her friend’s shoulder. Sniffling, Hopscotch took a tentative step closer to the pair, and when Fencer nodded at her she all but threw herself at them, hugging both of them and weeping. Funshine joined next, with Slip ‘n’ Slide following a moment later, both of them already crying.
Together, the five of them began to mourn for the friend that they’d lost.
“So when you’d become Mister Warm and Fuzzy?” asked Sonata, only half-joking as she helped Lex walk away from the others. “I mean, I get letting Nosey hang off of you after what she went through, but then being all nice to Aria, and now ‘Garden Fencer’ back there?” She tried to smile to make it clear that she wasn’t being serious, but for some reason her face didn’t want to cooperate, the corners of her lips barely turning up. “What’s next, you and Princess Celestia become pen pals?”
Lex didn’t answer right away, just walking away from the others, until he finally came to a stop. Even then, he didn’t say anything, and Sonata could feel herself starting to get antsy. After another few seconds, it occurred to her maybe that he hadn’t been listening at all, simply being lost in whatever big, important thought he was no doubt having. It was probably about how to feed everyone now or making a timetable for moving back into the city or something else that was all super serious, not something as dumb as thanking his own girlfriend for everything she’d done-
“I’m just so sick of it all.”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, as much at the despairing tone in his voice as the words themselves. Fortunately, they were far enough away from everyone and he was speaking softly enough that she was sure no one could overhear him. But that only made her feel slightly better as she gave him a worried look. “Sick of what now?”
“This. All of it. Everything.” He nodded in a direction that she thought was toward the city before continuing. “Vanhoover was just supposed to be having trouble recovering from a flood. All we had to do was procure resources and administrate the recovery. That’s all the city was supposed to need, and then we could focus on making it better. Instead, we got this. Monsters and monsters and more monsters. And no matter what I do or how many of them I kill it’s never enough, and my little ponies are the ones who suffer.” The depression in his voice had changed to bitterness then, and Sonata wasn’t sure what to say in response.
It didn’t help when, a second later, the sound of grieving came from the ponies they’d just walked away from. Lex didn’t say anything, but she felt him shudder at the chorus of sobbing, and she saw him glance at his side, fumbling with a saddlebag just long enough for her to get a glimpse of a ruby inside of it before he stopped, closing it with a sigh. The sight of him being so down was heartbreaking enough that Sonata, her jealousy forgotten, said the first thing that came into her mind. “We could leave.”
He gave her an incredulous look then, and she wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not. “Lex, you’ve already done so much. No one would blame you if you said ‘enough.’” She waved a hoof in what she felt pretty sure was the opposite direction of Vanhoover. “You could write to the princesses and tell them what happened here, let them know that they should totes do their jobs, and let them handle the rest. We could go to Canterlot or that Las Pegasus place you mentioned or even back to Everglow if you wanted.” She lowered her voice as she leaned her face closer to his, her raspberry-colored eyes locked onto his brown ones. “No one would blame you.”
“I would blame me, Sonata.” He didn’t hesitate even slightly before he answered. “I would blame me for the rest of my life.” His reply seemed to energize him, and he took a deep breath, straightening up just a little. He looked around then, slowly sweeping his eyes across what was left of the camp. “I’m not going anywhere,” he announced softly, his voice having regained the strength she’d grown used to hearing. “I’m going to fix this city. My city. I’m going to change it back into a place where everyone can be safe and happy, and nothing will stop me.”
“Hm,” she smiled, glad that he was back to his usual self. “Well, if you’re going to stay here, then I guess I’ll have to stick around too.”
“Good.” He looked back at her then, and she almost gasped as he smiled in return. It was a real smile, the kind that actually reached his eyes, something she’d seen on his face only a few times before. It was an expression she’d never seen him give to anyone but her. “That’s what I need to be happy.”
When he leaned forward and kissed her a moment later, Sonata couldn’t remember why she’d ever been jealous in the first place.
Luna smiled at the outburst, trying to make the expression seem kind instead of amused, not wanting her sister’s steward to think she was laughing at him. Still, it was difficult to keep from chuckling at his antics; the degree to which the old unicorn became flustered at even the slightest deviation from “royal propriety” – as he was fond of saying – was so over-the-top as to be funny. It was enough to make her wonder if her sister kept him employed purely for his entertainment value, though only briefly; she knew Celestia would consider such a thing to be mean-spirited. Even so, Luna couldn’t help but appreciate the steward’s inadvertent comedy routine…it served to distract her from thinking about the dream she’d just witnessed. “I appreciate your concern, but I doubt my sister will mind my stopping in to see her, even if it is the middle of the night. She is awake, after all.”
“That’s quite preposterous!” blustered the old stallion, before seeming to remember who he was talking to. “Er, Your Majesty,” he finished lamely. But a moment later he recovered his poise, trying again. “Princess Celestia retired several hours ago!” he insisted, punctuating his statement with a firm nod, nose in the air.
“And yet she wasn’t in the dream realm,” replied Luna easily, continuing past the steward as she strode down the hallway that led to her sister’s chambers. “Therefore, she must be awake.”
“N-no doubt she’s answering nature’s call!” yelled the flustered stallion, rushing forward and planting himself directly in Luna’s path. “She’ll almost certainly have returned to bed by the time you arrive, and waking her after she’s just gotten back to sleep would be-”
“Most irregular?” interjected Luna, giving another slight smile as she came to a stop. Despite her expression, she was finding the other pony’s antics less and less funny.
“…I was going to say ‘imprudent,’” harrumphed the stallion. “But it amounts to the same thing. I’m sure if you return to your chambers, you’ll be able to find Princess Celestia in the dream realm very shortly, and then you’ll be able to converse with her without interrupting her sleep.”
“And yet, my sister’s personal steward is awake and still in his uniform, despite it being past midnight.” Luna’s rebuttal wasn’t unkind, but it made the old unicorn go rigid all the same, sweat beading on his forehead. “So clearly, Celestia is not only awake, but has been for some time and likely will remain so for at least a little while, yes?”
“Er…I…that is…”
Seeing that no clear answer was forthcoming, Luna moved around the steward, who this time made no move to follow her. She was glad for that, as her good humor at how flustered he was had fled now that she knew for certain something was happening. But the fact that something had kept her sister up well past her normal bedtime wasn’t what made Luna anxious; it was that the timing of whatever was going on with Celestia didn’t feel coincidental…not when it was happening on the very same night that she’d just seen one of the worst dreams she could remember one of their little ponies ever experiencing.
Even now, remembering it sent a shudder down her spine. Bad enough that poor mare had been terrified, but the words of her dream-monster had been ominous in their implications. It had said, in its horribly distorted voice, that “it’s gonna happen again,” which had been what set the pony to screaming. While Luna knew it wasn’t a certainty, that suggested that she had gone through some sort of horrific incident in the real world, which was worrisome to consider. But not nearly as worrisome as what Luna had realized shortly after the dream had ended.
The monster in that pony’s dream had called her “Nosey.”
It had taken Luna a few minutes to remember where she knew that name from, but she’d felt her blood run cold once she had. Nosey Newsy had been the pony who’d written the article in the Canterlot Chronicle about Lex Legis – the pony who had King Sombra’s powers, and almost as much ambition – fighting a dragon outside of Tall Tale. That article, along with Luna having found out that Lex had become Tall Tale’s mayor, had been enough to prompt her and Celestia to invite the paper’s editor over to see if he’d had any additional information. He hadn’t, and the two of them had let the issue drop. Now, Luna was wondering if they’d made a serious mistake. It might all just be a coincidence. Nosey might simply have a highly active imagination that was running wild. There’s no proof that this has anything to do with Lex Legis. But her instincts said otherwise.
Luna hadn’t been there when Lex had made his first appearance in Canterlot. She’d heard secondhoof about his having declared himself in rebellion against the Crown. But she’d been present when he’d returned a short time later, during which Twilight Sparkle had personally brokered a deal between the dour unicorn and the princesses wherein Lex would go and manage Vanhoover, one of Equestria’s most distant – and, from what Luna had heard, most damaged – cities. Both Twilight and Celestia had felt that doing so would appease Lex’s ambition while nurturing his apparent desire to help, hopefully while giving him a chance to learn friendship in the process.
Luna, however, had been far less certain about the whole thing. While Twilight had vouched for his ideas looking good on paper, the impetus behind those ideas concerned Luna far more. Even overlooking the fact that he’d grafted King Sombra’s horn onto himself, Lex had radiated bitterness and resentment. His demeanor had come across as somepony who not only felt underappreciated, but was angry about it and wanted to punish those he felt were responsible.
It had been like looking at herself just before she’d become Nightmare Moon.
The comparison had been unsettling enough to push her to try and enter his dreams that same evening, in hope of understanding and perhaps even soothing whatever misfortune had brought Lex to his current state. But to her distress, his dreams had been closed off to her. Finding out that he had subsequently taken over Tall Tale had done little to ease her anxiety, and now this latest development with Nosey…it was all too much to ignore. At the very least, we should send somepony to look in on him, she decided. Hopefully Celestia would feel the same way; perhaps that was the reason she was awake long after she should have turned in.
Striding up to the door to Celestia’s suite – which, she noted, had light spilling out from under it – Luna knocked on it, not waiting for an answer before pushing it open. “Sister? I’m sorry to intrude but I-, OH!” All of her thoughts fled Luna’s mind in an instant at who she saw in her sister’s sitting room. On the far wall, Celestia was looking at her as she rose from a comfortable chair. Across from her was…the phrase “gentlecolt caller” floated through Luna’s mind for some reason, but she knew that was far too ridiculous a term for a visitor of this magnitude.
Sitting opposite her sister was an alicorn. An alicorn stallion. With six wings!
“Princess Luna, I presume?” Celestia’s guest also rose to all fours, crossing the room to greet her and giving her a deep bow when he stood before her. “Princess Celestia has spoken of you in the highest regard. I am honored to find myself in the presence of someone who has not only done so much for her people, but has found the strength and the wisdom to walk the path of redemption after falling from grace. Even across the boundless cosmos, figures of such inspiration are too rare a treasure.”
“…uh, thanks.” Still struggling to process what was going on, Luna couldn’t bring herself to think of anything else to say. The stallion’s voice was mellifluous, with a deep pitch and rich timbre that matched his stature, equaling Celestia in height and with a horn to match, and made his praise – which sounded entirely sincere, lacking even the faintest trace of sarcasm or mockery – sound all the more melodious to her ears. Part of her idly noted that the rest of him looked as good as he sounded, with a silver coat that all but glistened in the light, a mane of matching gold, and eyes that shined like topazes. Each of his wings (she couldn’t stop herself from counting them again, unable to believe how many he had) was pure white, though she couldn’t see if any other parts of him were as well; the rest of his body was completely hidden from the neck down, save for his golden-hued tail, beneath a gleaming suit of armor that seemed as though it had just been polished, shining magnificently.
Hearing Celestia’s giggle drew Luna back to herself, and she turned her eyes to her sister, silently asking for an explanation. Nodding slightly, Celestia stepped forward, grinning. “Luna, allow me to introduce Mihr, a ‘solar angel’ from…I’m sorry, where was it again?” she asked, turning her gaze back to their guest.
“Clarion,” he replied as he rose smoothly to his hooves. “The third realm of Heaven.”
“I see…” replied Luna, though that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Even so, her surprise was ebbing enough that she managed to recover some of her poise, offering a bow in return. “Then, although my sister has no doubt already done so, please allow me welcome you to Equestria, Mihr. I hope-”
“Your Majesty!” The voice of Celestia’s steward came from behind her, and when Luna glanced back she saw that he was red-faced and giving her sister a remorseful look. “My deepest apologies! I know you said you wanted nopony to know about your guest, but I simply didn’t have the authority to turn Princess Luna away!” His horn glowed as he slid an envelope out of a pocket. “Please allow me to offer you my resignation, so that I might wash away the stain of this disgra-”
“It’s quite alright,” interjected Celestia, her horn glowing as she took hold of the envelope and pushed it back towards the old unicorn. “I’d actually intended to summon Luna earlier and lost track of the time, so really you did me a favor by letting her come here.” She smiled warmly, though Luna could detect the hint of amusement in her expression. “I insist that you stay on.”
“If…if Your Majesty wishes it so, then I cannot object,” answered the steward shakily. Tucking the envelope back in his pocket, he stepped backward, horn lightening as he took hold of the door handle. “I’ll see to it that no further interruptions occur.” He didn’t wait for a reply as he closed the door, unable to stop himself from stealing a glance at the alicorn stallion before it clicked shut.
Once it was closed, Celestia gave a soft laugh, raising a hoof in front of her mouth as she looked at Mihr and Luna. “At least once a month, something will happen that will drive him to offer me his resignation. I really should tell him that he doesn’t need to keep doing that.”
“But then you’d miss out on his one-stallion show?” offered Luna with a smile of her own. The steward’s antics had managed to overcome her remaining surprise, and she moved to another chair to sit down, Celestia and Mihr doing the same, though the angel waited until both sisters were seated before doing the same.
Celestia shot her sister a knowing grin before turning back to the matter at hoof. “Mihr was just telling me about what brought him to Equestria.”
“Indeed.” The alien alicorn nodded at Celestia before turning to Luna. “Barely a day ago, I was alerted to an attack on the Threshold, the first realm of Heaven. An weapon of great power and great evil found its way to our shores, and when my brethren went to confront it before it could harm the residents there, it slew them.” His voice was somber then, closing his eyes and lowering his head in silent testament to the fallen.
“That’s horrible,” offered Luna. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Mihr gave her a thin smile then. “I am grateful for your words, though it pains me to say that they were not the only ones to have given the last full measure of their devotion. More angels and archons went to confront this evil device, and all of them fell. By the time I was made aware of the conflict and was able to make my way to the front, a great number of lives had been lost.” His expression turned grave as he spoke next. “But now I fear that Equestria might be in similar danger.”
Luna’s eyes widened. “What?!”
Celestia spoke up next. “Mihr was just telling me that he fought this weapon, which he said was a scythe that could move on its own, and fought it to a draw. When it realized it couldn’t win, it escaped.”
“And came to this world,” continued Mihr. “I was able to follow it here, but to my shame lost track of it.” He spread a wing then, looking back at it mournfully. “It seems this world wishes its residents to adopt equine forms. The transformation caught me by surprise, and in my foolishness I allowed this evil to escape.”
For a moment Luna’s brow furrowed, not sure what he meant by “transformation,” but that wasn’t important right now. “Do you know which way it went?”
“When you arrived, he was just telling me that it flew west, toward some mountains.”
Celestia’s answer came with a knowing look, and Luna felt a chill go down her spine. “The Unicorn Mountains.” It wasn’t a question; that was the only mountain range in the western portion of the continent. And beyond them… “Tall Tale and Vanhoover.”
Mihr cocked his head. “Is there a significance to those places?”
“I’m afraid so,” nodded Luna grimly, before turning to look at Celestia. “And it relates to why I came to see you, Sister.”
The next half-hour was spent with Luna telling Celestia what she’d seen in Nosey’s dream, and both princesses informing Mihr about Lex Legis and the deal they’d reached with him. When it was over, the angel was frowning deeply. “The creature from Nosey’s dream sounds like a bdellavritra, also known as a belier devil. They forcibly possess mortals and use their victims as a disguise while they work to corrupt others. If one of them is here now, then your realm is in graver danger than I thought, especially if it is somehow working with the artifact that attacked the Threshold.”
“Or with Lex,” added Luna.
“We don’t know that,” cautioned Celestia. “Right now we don’t even know if this ‘belier devil’ is really here or not, let alone what it might be connected to.”
Mihr shook his head. “I fear that your sister is more likely to be correct. A belier devil will not overlook a mortal of notable ability within its sphere of influence. If Lex Legis comes to the creature’s attention, it will react to him in one of three ways: as a victim to be corrupted, an enemy to be destroyed, or a potential collaborator to be used until he is no longer convenient. The third option,” he added, “always culminates in the first or second.”
A heavy silence fell then. But it only lasted for a moment before Luna rose to her hooves, Mihr immediately following suit. “We need to go to Vanhoover,” she declared, looking at Celestia.
“I agree.” Standing, the larger princess looked at their guest. “Mihr, will you accompany us?”
But the six-winged stallion shook his head. “Alas, I cannot. The way of Heaven is not to fight mortals’ battles for them, but to help them help themselves. I could only join a battle in this realm under very specific circumstances.”
Celestia was clearly not expecting that answer, and was already opening her mouth when Luna beat her to the punch. “But I thought you came here in order to continue fighting that scythe that attacked you?”
“On the contrary, I followed the weapon here so that I could ascertain its destination and give due warning to the champions of that realm that an artifact of evil was among them.” He smiled at them then, and the expression was apologetic. “And now, I have. With my duty complete, I am obligated to return to Heaven and report to my superiors what has transpired here.”
“Then at least allow us to thank you before you go.” Celestia smiled warmly at the angel. “Your warning might have saved us all.”
Mihr returned her smile with one of equal radiance. “It is I who should be thanking you. I spent only a short time moving among the mortals of this world, disguised as one of them while I sought out those best suited to facing the dark forces seeking to menace them. But in that time, I saw a people whose innocence and purity are akin to the choirs of virtuous souls that populate my realm. Though I have no doubt that the radiance in your hearts will carry you through this trial, I will offer my prayers to the myriad gods of goodness that the two of you will succeed. Until then, you have a friend in Heaven.” His horn began to glow as he finished speaking, and without another word he was gone, vanishing instantly.
Luna hesitated for only a moment, turning to the door as she started thinking out loud. “We should tell your steward to get us on the next train to Vanhoover. I know the railroads are closed down, but they’ll let us through if we tell them-, Sister? Are you listening?”
“Hm?” Celestia looked up from where she’d been staring at the space where Mihr had been. “Ah, yes, of course.”
Despite everything that had just happened, the corners of Luna’s mouth turned up. “Are you certain? Your ‘radiant heart’ doesn’t seem to be in it.”
“Stop it,” chuckled Celestia, making a shooing motion with one hoof. “Hurry up and call the steward.” Her voice turned teasing as she spoke again. “You’re interrupting my beauty rest.”
“You’re blushing, you know,” taunted Luna, throwing the door open and calling for the old unicorn before her sister had a chance to respond. Although it was a shame to cut off their banter so soon, since Luna knew it helped them both to deal with the enormity of everything they’d just been told, it had to be done. If the threat was as dire as Mihr had told them, then every second counted.
It was time to go pay Vanhoover, and Lex Legis, a visit.
Lex’s eyes snapped open, bridging the gap between sleep and total wakefulness in a single jarring instant the way he always did.
It was a horrible way to wake up, which made it a perfect match for the horrible nightmares that plagued him every night, of which last night had been no exception. It was enough to make Lex grit his teeth in bitter disappointment. Although he’d known better than to get his hopes up, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from wondering if maybe, just maybe, he’d turned a corner on controlling that tulpa the Night Mare had inflicted on him. After all, it had come to his aid twice yesterday, and so when Sonata had helped him stumble to one of the outpatient tents last night, he’d found himself daring to consider the possibility that for the first time in almost a year, he’d be able to have a night’s peace.
He hadn’t. If anything, his nightmares were worse now; the events of yesterday had given that spiteful fragment of his mind plenty of new horrors to torment him with, and it had seen fit to use all of them. Just the thought of that being what his nights would be like from now on was almost enough to drive Lex into another bout of despair like the one that had gripped him in the aftermath of the battle, but this time he caught himself, shoving the emotion away before it could envelope him. I was able to control it at least a little yesterday. He let out a slow breath as he held onto that thought. That’s the beginning of being able to control it permanently. Perhaps even reintegrating it back into my greater cognitive framework. This is progress.
Nodding to himself, he put the matter out of his thoughts, knowing that there were more important tasks that needed to be attended to, of which confirming the camp’s current security was the most immediate. Although Aria had reported that she’d found no ghouls last night after she and Severance returned from checking the battlefield, Lex couldn’t help but be suspicious as to whether or not the undead ponies were completely gone, and not just because that could result in another preventable death. Those things reproduce via transmitting a disease. If even one of them is still in Vanhoover, it could start this all over again, he knew.
Nor was that the only situation that required immediate attention. Today marked the second day of everypony going without food, which meant that a solution had to be enacted as soon as possible. Only marginally less urgent was the cleanup in the aftermath of last night’s battle; there was currently a battlefield with two thousand ghouls’ worth of body parts right outside, which in the summer heat would turn into a serious health hazard in very short order if something wasn’t done. (Especially if a disease contracted that way was also capable of turning living ponies into ghouls.)
The rail lines also needed to be reopened. An emergency supply of rainclouds needed to be ordered from Cloudsdale. Restoration of Vanhoover proper needed to begin so everypony could start moving back in. Someone had to be sent to Las Pegasus to negotiate a loan in order to pay for it all. And all of it, as he’d mentioned to Sonata last night while they were waiting for her sister to return from patrolling for surviving ghouls, needed to happen as soon as equinely possible.
The war to retake Vanhoover had been won. Now the city needed to be actually reclaimed.
Despite knowing that, Lex made no move to get up from the bedroll he was lying on. Or rather, he couldn’t get up; there was a body lying on top of him. Despite not being able to see her, he knew who it was immediately, since she’d laid down with him last night. Sonata.
Hidden beneath his cloak, which was now draped over him like a blanket – Sonata having retrieved it on their way to the tent last night, after the doctors had moved to attend to Fencer – Lex couldn’t help but take a moment to indulge in her closeness. She was half-draped over him, her head resting on his chest, and every breath she took made the soft, feminine curves of her body press against him. She was lightly embracing him, clinging to him gently even in her sleep. Her back legs were intertwined with his own in a manner not dissimilar to the aftermath of the last time they’d expressed their love physically, back in that warehouse in Vanhoover.
Despite the impossibility of getting up without displacing her, Lex couldn’t help but try, shifting slightly to try and move out from underneath her. But a stabbing pain through his muscles let him know that he wasn’t anywhere near recovered enough to attempt such a thing, and he abandoned the attempt immediately. “Sonata,” he murmured, unable to bring himself to speak more harshly; the kiss that they’d shared last night in the wake of the battle was still fresh in his mind. “Sonata, wake up.”
Her only response was a quiet grunt and a slight squeeze around his middle, clinging to him tighter and bringing a smile to his lips. “Sonata, wake up,” he repeated, still keeping his voice just above a whisper. Raising a hoof, he gently pushed back the top of his cloak, revealing her beautiful blonde curls and charcoal coat-
-and went rigid as he realized that he’d misidentified the mare on top of him. “Wh-, Nosey?!”
That last word left his lips at a considerably higher decibel level, and it was enough to make the mare in question raise her head blearily, blinking as she looked around before her eyes locked onto his. “Ah…” He felt her tense up then, and the look that crossed her face was uncharacteristically demure, biting her lip before she looked down shyly. “G-good morning…”
Lex reflexively struggled to get up again, her unexpected presence and unusual behavior only unnerving him further. “What do you mean ‘good m-,’ what are you doing here?!” He used his circlet to check for magical auras then, but found only those from his own magic items and protective enchantments. That knowledge calmed him only a little, however.
“Sorry.” She winced slightly as she said it, slowly separating herself from him. She climbed out from under his cloak, but only to the point where she was lying next to him instead of on top of him. “Sonata said it was okay.”
“She said what was okay? Where is she?” With Nosey’s weight gone, Lex managed to sit up, though the effort made his body scream in protest.
Nosey’s horn glowed as she picked up her glasses from the far corner of the tent, taking a deep breath as she put them on. When she spoke next, she sounded more like her usual self. “You were already asleep, so I asked her if it was alright for me to sleep in here with you guys. She said, and I quote, ‘don’t worry about it.’ As for your second question, she left a little while ago to go get food.”
Lex’s eyes widened in horror. “She did what?!” He almost turned to shadow right then – able to feel that his dark magic had replenished itself now that he’d rested – so that he could go outside, struck by a sudden urge to go confirm Sonata’s absence for himself. But he managed to quell that impulse, knowing that Nosey was his best source of information at the moment.
Nosey nodded. “She thought you might freak out, so she woke me up before she left. She wanted me to tell you that she’s going to take some of those bits you gathered and a bunch of ponies and go get food for everyone from one of the farms nearby.” Nosey neglected to mention that Sonata’s exit had also been her cue to move from sleeping across from Lex to sharing his bedroll, having known instinctively that being in contact with him would keep Xiriel out of her dreams.
For a moment Lex couldn’t even react, his stomach clenching so hard that he was momentarily nauseous. “When did she leave?” he croaked.
Nosey blinked, then glanced at the tent flap, where bright sunlight was streaming in from around its edges. “I don’t know. A few hours ago at least. I think it was around dawn. Why?”
Lex didn’t answer, simply staring into space as he tried to fight down a rising tide of panic. If Sonata had left several hours ago, then there was no way to catch up to her, not that he knew precisely where she’d gone anyway. Which meant that, short of preparing and casting his spell to send and receive a short message with someone – the only long-range communication spell he could use now, since his scrying spell required an ornate mirror that he no longer had – there was no way to know if she was alright. Which means if wherever she’d headed has another monster like Xiriel, or some more ghouls, or something else that she can’t handle, she’ll end up just like Cloudbank and the others! If that happened…
It took him only a fraction of a second to locate his saddlebags, set off in another corner of the tent, and he all but telekinetically ripped them open, bringing out the large ruby that he’d gotten from the Night Mare. It was only when it was held within his purple aura that he felt his heartbeat slow down, a shudder of relief working its way through him. Although resurrecting Sonata was far less desirable than protecting her from harm in the first place, it was much better than having her be lost to him forever. No matter that the Night Mare had directed him to use it to bring back Cloudbank; if he had to risk the goddess’s anger to be reunited with his beloved, then so be it!
“…Lex? What’s that?”
Nosey’s voice brought him back to sanity, and Lex licked his suddenly-dry lips as he started to calm down. What was he thinking? There was no evidence to suggest that any of the nearby farms were a danger to anyone, no reason to presume that Sonata was headed into danger.
There was no evidence of Xiriel’s existence either, came the voiceless words from his shadow.
A shudder went down Lex’s spine at that, and he fought to keep his composure intact. There had been evidence about Xiriel’s existence, such as the necromantic aura around Block Party; he had just failed to decipher it in time! The same was not true here! After all, the camp ponies had been raiding those farms for at least a little while, and based on what Lex knew none of them had encountered anything dangerous or even overly unusual. More likely, the biggest issue Sonata would encounter would be transportation problems for whatever she managed to acquire, since there were no wagons or carts in the camp for her to use.
Belatedly realizing that Nosey was still looking at him, he shoved the ruby back in his saddlebag. “It’s nothing you need to be concerned about,” he mumbled, chagrined that he’d let her get a glimpse of it. Despite her unusual behavior (which was doubtlessly a reaction to what she’d been through, even if he couldn’t figure out how), Nosey was still a reporter; it would be a disaster if everypony else learned that he had a spell that was capable of resurrecting one and only one person. The last thing he needed was to be inundated with ponies that wanted someone they’d lost to be the one brought back…which reminded him that there was another item on the list of things that needed to be done: examine the spell embedded in that gemstone in greater detail and see if he could reverse-engineer it.
Because if he could, and could add it to his personal repertoire of spells, then he wouldn’t need to be limited to bringing just one person back.
But that was a project that wasn’t time-sensitive, or at least not as much as other problems that needed to be taken care of. It was with that thought in mind that Lex clenched his jaw, struggling to climb to all fours. “I need to check on things,” he grunted, somehow managing to stand. Now if he could just move without falling over…
Nosey was by his side instantly, pressing her body again his. “Let me help.” Her horn was already glowing, moving to put his saddlebags on him, then his cloak.
“I don’t-” He almost snapped at her, still embarrassed by her having been in bed with him barely a minute ago. But he caught himself at the last instant, remembering what he’d realized yesterday: that Nosey was his friend. And assisting him like this…this was what friends did, right? “…alright.”
She gave him a warm smile in response, and side-by-side the two of them exited the tent.
Blinking as his eyes adjusted to the bright light, Lex turned towards the angry voice – or rather, the angry whisper – that had assaulted him as soon as he’d exited his tent. Stopping in place, he turned to look toward where Aria was glowering at him from a few feet away. “I have better things to do than wait around all morning for you to wake up, you know,” she snapped.
Lex’s brow furrowed, not understanding what she was complaining about, but Nosey spoke up before she had a chance to. “What’s your problem?” Despite shooting Aria an unhappy glare the words came out in a murmur, as though she couldn’t bring herself to say them more forcefully.
Aria’s eyes slid over to the blonde mare, narrowing at the sight of her pressed against Lex. “My problem is that I can’t watch over him when he's asleep the way I’m supposed to if he’s hiding in one of those dinky little tents,” she snorted, before her lip curled in a leer. “But I guess I didn’t need to, since you were in there guarding his body all by yourself, up close and personal, huh?”
Nosey instantly turned bright red. “No!” she blurted. “We didn’t-, I mean, it wasn’t like that!” She glanced over at Lex, but immediately looked away when he made eye contact, suddenly too embarrassed to look at him. “Tell her she’s got the wrong idea!”
“What are you two talking about?” frowned Lex, a look of complete and total mystification on his face as he glanced back and forth between the two.
The question was enough to dispel Nosey’s embarrassment, her head whipping around to look at him in disbelief. For her part, Aria wasn’t much better. You’ve got to be kidding me, she thought to herself, not sure whether to laugh or gawk. I knew he was dense about this sort of thing, but this is a whole new level of clueless! Unable to resist having some fun, especially after everything she’d had to put up with in the last few days, Aria plunged ahead. “I’m just congratulating blondie here on staying so quiet the whole time you two were together. I thought she’d be more of a screamer.”
For a moment Lex didn’t know what Aria meant, but out of his peripheral vision he could see Nosey turning even redder, folding her ears back and cringing as though the Siren’s words had physically hurt, and the obvious answer dawned on him: she was teasing Nosey about the fact that she’d woken up screaming just before the battle with the ghouls. Although Aria hadn’t been there for that, she’d quite obviously found out about it somehow, probably from one of the gossipy camp ponies, and now she was using that information for her own spiteful amusement. It was enough to make Lex grit his teeth; he’d been on the receiving end of that sort of petty cruelty too many times in his youth to have any tolerance for it now, especially directed toward one of the extremely small number of ponies he thought of as a friend. But he knew exactly how to put her in her place. “Where were you last night?”
“Huh?” Now it was Aria’s turn to be confused. “I just told you: I was right here, making sure no one else tried to bump you off in your sleep. Though honestly, after everything that happened I doubt-”
“I meant before that,” cut in Lex coldly. “Prior to when you cast that fireball at the ghouls, where were you?” He knew part of the answer already, of course. The Night Mare had let it slip that Aria had left, although she hadn’t provided any details about why – other than his “failing to nurture her interest” in him, whatever that meant – or where she’d gone. “Sonata looked for you while we were preparing for the fight, and she said you weren’t anywhere.”
“Oh please,” sneered Aria derisively, waving a hoof. “If you told Sonata to find her tail, she’d have to look around for it first. And then she’d make herself dizzy trying to catch it.”
Lex’s response was an ice-cold stare. Normally, he didn’t care about Aria and Sonata sniping at each other; he’d never had any brothers or sisters, and what little research he’d done on the interpersonal dynamics between siblings was even less comprehensible than for unrelated ponies. But between his anger at Aria’s cruelty towards Nosey still being roused, and the warm moment he and Sonata had shared last night making him far less charitable toward criticism of his girlfriend, he was decidedly lacking in tolerance for Aria’s attitude. A number of choice words came to mind, but he pushed them away. First she’d left the camp without his leave, and now she’d insulted two of the ponies he cared about most; a stronger response was called for.
Slowly, Lex raised his left foreleg, fighting to hide how difficult it was to remain standing on only three hooves, and pointed it at her. “Prostrate yourself.”
The Night Mare’s power lashed out, curling around Aria and forcing her to obey as she immediately flopped onto her belly, touching her chin to the ground. “What’re you doing?!” she hissed, unable to so much as thrash. “Let me go!”
Ignoring her demand, Lex lowered his hoof, slowly walking toward her. Alongside him, Nosey only barely managed to move with him, no longer blushing as her eyes darted between Lex and Aria. With her at his side, Lex moved forward until he was directly in front of the bound Siren, looking down on her both literally and figuratively. “Now, where were you last night?”
“What does it matter?! I came back!” Despite the harsh tenor of Aria’s whisper, there was an undercurrent of nervousness to it. “You said it yourself: I saved everyone!”
Lex’s lips curled back from his teeth, and he raised his wire-wrapped hoof again, this time only far enough to point directly at her face, less than a foot away. “I won’t ask you again.”
That was all Aria could take. “Alright! Fine! I left! Are you happy?!” The fight went out of her then, and she heaved a sigh as she looked away in defeat. “I heard Cozy and her boy-toy stirring up trouble before they made a dash for it, and I went to go round them up. But they talked me into going with them.”
“To the Crystal Empire?” interjected Nosey, unable to help but look incredulous at the thought. She’d been there when Cozy had said that she was going to walk back to her home, knowing that was completely ridiculous with how far away it was. “Why?”
“They said their princess could fix my voice,” answered Aria, now sulking like a child forced to confess that she’d stolen a pack of bubblegum.
Lex’s frown deepened. “I already promised you that. In another four days-”
“Oh please,” snorted Aria bitterly. “In four more days, you were going to find some excuse to tell me why I’d need to wait longer.”
Lex flared at the insinuation that his word was no good. “You’re wrong!”
But Aria was unfazed. “After we beat the sahuagin, and you told me that normal healing magic couldn’t fix me, you said that you didn’t have the magic to regenerate my vocal chords.”
“I also said that I had every intention of keeping my promise!”
“Well good for you! In the meantime, I haven’t seen you do anything to make that happen! All day every day it’s some other new crisis, all of which are apparently more important than me! It’s Fencer and Pillowcase one day, then it’s feeding everypony here the next! Then it’s a bunch of your friends kicking the bucket!” She regained a little of her indignation then, glaring up at him. “Have you made any progress on making it so I can talk again?”
Lex met her eyes without flinching, but didn’t answer.
“Didn’t think so,” she whispered with a humorless laugh. “So yeah, I better-deal’d you and split. Sue me.”
Silence reigned for a moment, until finally Nosey spoke up. “So why’d you come back?” Both of them looked at her then, and she kept talking. “I mean, you were already leaving, right? You’d decided that you’d have better luck with Princess Cadance. So why’d you come back when you did?”
Aria hesitated then, but was saved from answering when Lex found his voice. “It doesn’t matter.”
That earned him a surprised glance from Nosey. “Lex?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated, giving her a level look. “The moral dimension of an action is found in the action itself, not the motivation. It doesn’t matter why she came back. What matters is that she did…and that she left without my giving her permission in the first place, despite the fact that my promise to fix her voice was contingent on her working for me.”
Aria tensed at that, though in her immobile state it was little more than a twitch. She could see where this was going; he was about to declare his entire promise null and void. Between that, and that treacherous tramp Cozy reneging on recommending her to Princess Cadance, she’d be left with nothing, no way to ever get her voice back. The thought hit her like a dull thud, and Aria found that she couldn’t even get mad about it, her tension bleeding away in favor of a sense of dejection that made her close her eyes. Everyone always betrays me. First Sonata, then Cozy, and now Le-
“Aria. Look at me.”
The words carried the weight of a command, and Aria had no choice but to open her eyes, raising her gaze to the stallion towering above her. “For disobeying me and leaving without my permission, you’re confined to the train station here. I’ll have Severance act as my guard in your place.” He glanced over at the western edge of the camp, where the scythe was still hovering. After it had completed its patrol with Aria the previous night, Lex had told the scythe to resume its lookout for any other undead ponies, not wanting to take even the slightest chance. “As soon as we procure some food, I’ll see to it that sufficient meals and water are brought to you, but you are not to leave the building under any circumstances that aren’t life-threatening. If you do, I’ll consider it to be an escape attempt on your part, and my response will be harsh. Is that understood?”
Aria hesitated, hearing what he hadn’t said. “Wait, so does that mean-”
“Is. That. Understood?”
“…yeah…”
Lex nodded, and withdrew the invisible power binding her in place. “Then go.”
Swallowing nervously, Aria glanced at Nosey, and although the blonde mare caught the silent question in the Siren’s eyes, she shook her head, silently signaling that she didn’t know. Biting her lip, Aria slowly dragged herself past Lex, heading toward the train station. But she hadn’t made it more than a few dozen feet before the need to know overwhelmed her, and she glanced back at Lex, who hadn’t turned to look at her go. “Will you…I mean…” She couldn’t finish, anxiety reducing her whisper to a croak. “How long will…will I have to stay there?” It was all she could bring herself to ask, afraid of what he’d say if she made the question any more direct.
Lex’s head turned just slightly, enough to let her know that he heard her even though he wasn’t looking at her. In the five seconds that it took him to answer, Aria could almost feel her heart beating its way out of her chest. Then he spoke.
“Four days.”
Aria let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, almost doubling over in relief. “O-okay!” Unable to help the smile that spread across her face then, she turned and quickly started toward the train station, wanting to get there before he could change his mind. As she hurried, she just barely caught the sound of his voice from behind her.
“So, um…the trains will probably start running again pretty soon.”
“…”
“I mean, I don’t know that for sure or anything. It just seems like that’s something that L-, that would get taken care of right away, now that there aren’t any more monsters to deal with, you know?”
“…”
“I’m just saying, in another day or two, we’ll be on our way back to the Crystal Empire.” Aisle forced himself to smile, not letting himself be deterred by Cozy’s unresponsiveness. “We’ll be sitting in nice, padded chairs as the attendant asks us if we want to use the dining car. The scenery will fly by while we get further and further away from here. And in just a few days, you’ll be home.”
That seemed to do the trick, as the ghost of a smile appeared on Cozy’s face. “Home,” she murmured, looking at the ground. Emboldened, Aisle put a foreleg around her, and was rewarded as she closed her eyes and leaned against him. The sensation sent a shudder of relief through the cursed stallion, though he tried to suppress it as much as he could, not wanting to do anything that had even the slightest chance of upsetting Cozy even more. The last few hours had not been kind to her. Mostly because Sonata had not been kind to her when they’d bumped into each other a little while ago.
It had been dawn by the time they’d made it back to the camp. Despite the urgency of the situation – Cozy having been convinced that the attack magic they’d overheard Sonata use was because Lex was attacking her – exhaustion, hunger, and the difficulty of pulling the shoddy sled that held Pillowcase’s body had reduced their speed to a crawl. By the time they’d gotten to within a stone’s throw of the frayed tents and shoddy lean-tos at the outermost edge of the place, they’d barely been able to stay upright as they stumbled forward.
That had been when Sonata, apparently heading out in the company of a few other ponies, had found them. The reunion had not been a pleasant one. Although Cozy had expressed relief that Sonata was alright, the moment she’d mentioned that she’d thought that Lex had attacked her had been all it had taken to set the former Siren off. Sonata had unleashed a barrage of verbal abuse that made her rant at the train station the previous evening, when Cozy had insisted that Lex didn’t love her, seem tame by comparison. No punches had been pulled: Sonata had viciously gone after Cozy’s courage (“you ran away just before things got bad; no wonder your husband was the one who went out looking for medicine while you stayed behind”), her virtue (“we should’ve had you wag your tail at the ghouls, since it worked so well on Aisle”), her faith (“do you think the reason Lashtickles keeps hanging you out to dry is because she’s, like, a big old weakling, or because she just doesn’t care?”), and anything else she could think of. She had concluded her tirade by reiterating that she and Lex were deeply in love (“he told me again last night that he totes can’t be happy if I’m not with him. And then we made out!”) before telling Cozy exactly where she could shove her opinions and trotting off, quite obviously pleased with herself.
Cozy, for her part, hadn’t uttered a word after Sonata began going after her. Aisle had tried to stick up for her, but Sonata had refused to let him get a word in edgewise, holding forth with a level of fervor that Aisle, in his current state, simply couldn’t begin to match. When Sonata had finally moved on, having taken her pound of flesh, he had been left feeling utterly demoralized, and he could only imagine that Cozy was feeling ten times worse. He’d guided her to an empty tent – little more than a filthy blanket strung up on two sticks that had been shoved into the ground – and settled her down there, placing Pillow’s body just outside. Since then, he’d been trying to make her feel better, with little to show for it until now.
“When we get there, we’ll go before Princess Cadance,” he continued. “She’ll bring Pillowcase back to life, and lift that curse on me, and then the three of us will all start building a new life together.” He gave her a slight nuzzle then, and smiled when she returned the gesture. “It’ll be a little awkward at first, but we’ll figure it out. I’ll get a job at a grocery store up there, and you and Pillow will go back to selling beds and cushions, and everything that’s happened here will be just a bad memory that can’t hurt us anymore.” As the words left his mouth, he was surprised by the sudden surge of longing he felt for the scene he was describing. Vanhoover had been his home for his entire life, but now…now he just wanted to find some peace of mind again, and he couldn’t imagine doing that here. Not after everything that had happened.
Even if the city was safe now, Aisle doubted he’d ever be able to truly feel comfortable here again. He’d managed to piece together, from Sonata’s diatribe, what had actually happened here last night. As insane as it was to think that Lex and a few other ponies had been able to defeat thousands of ghouls all on their own, Aisle couldn’t bring himself to disbelieve it. He’d seen bits and pieces of what Lex was capable of in the time that he’d known him, and the idea of him fighting an army of the undead and winning wasn’t unimaginable. But at the same time, that didn’t erase the memories of how things had been before Lex had arrived, or the friends that were no longer here. After so many nights of staying awake, hyper-alert for the slightest sound of a monster in the shadows, of huddling close with friends who hadn’t survived the ordeal, Aisle honestly couldn’t see himself living here without wondering if there was another ghoul lurking somewhere, waiting to lunge out of the darkness.
Vanhoover, the city where he’d grown up, wasn’t a place where he felt at home anymore.
The realization was heartbreaking, enough so that he could feel his eyes growing moist, but he blinked them away, staring straight ahead. He’d lost a lot, but it wasn’t like he’d lost everything. “We have a future together,” he said, needing to hear it out loud. “We have a future, and we’ll be happy together in our new home. So that’s why…” He paused as an idea came to him. It was completely insane, and probably inappropriate, but he rushed forward with it before he could lose his nerve. “So that’s why, even if it makes things more complicated later, I want to ask: Cozy, will you marry me?”
He looked down as he asked-, no, proposed to her, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest. She’d leaned her head against his chest, and he couldn’t see her expression from his angle, not able to judge her reaction. Several seconds went by where she didn’t move or say anything, and he wondered if maybe she’d fallen asleep. “…Cozy?”
“Yes.”
Now it was Aisle's turn to pause for a long moment. “…did you say yes because I said your name just now, or did you mean-”
Cozy looked up at him then, and even before she spoke again her smile told him everything he needed to know. “Yes, I’ll marry you, you silly stallion.”
She leaned up and kissed him then, and he closed his eyes as he stopped thinking about everything that wasn’t her. When their lips finally parted, he found that he was smiling too. More than that, he suddenly found himself feeling a little playful. “You realize, if Pr-, when Princess Cadance brings Pillow back, you’re going to have two husbands.”
Cozy’s cheeks darkened at that, but her smile widened, and she glanced down at the holy symbol around her neck. Lifting it with her hoof, she contemplated it for a few moments before replying. “Lashtada’s okay with that,” she murmured demurely. “And…I think I am too.”
“That’s it there, see?”
“Oh yeah! Awesome work, DJ!”
Disc Jockey grinned awkwardly at Sonata’s praising him for finding the nearest farm, not able to bring himself to say that he hated that abbreviation; it only fed into people misunderstanding what his special talent was. But for a lady like her, it’s fine. It wasn’t just that she was the most beautiful mare he’d ever laid eyes on, but also because she was one of the heroes that had saved them all. Not sweating the small stuff while he helped her out was the very least he could do.
After the battle last night, he hadn’t been able to sleep. He’d seen the entire thing, from start to finish, and it had been incredible enough that he’d known there was no way he’d be able to settle down before morning. That was why he’d been awake when Sonata had come around right when the sun was rising, looking for some ponies to help her out with getting food. Disc Jockey had jumped at the chance to help pay back Vanhoover’s heroes, as had several other ponies, and now here they were. I just wish my mom had seen it that way, he sighed to himself as they approached the farmhouse. Honestly, this isn’t anything like what happened with those other ponies that went back into Vanhoover. He’d been here before, after all…even if it had been under different circumstances, as evidenced by the sack full of bits on his back. “So, what’s the plan?”
“Huh?” blinked Sonata. “Whaddaya mean? The plan is we go and buy food.”
“Well…yeah, but these guys aren’t exactly going to throw the doors open and welcome us in,” answered Disc Jockey awkwardly. “I mean, you know…not after before…”
“Aw, don’t worry about that,” answered Sonata breezily, her voice filled with nothing but confidence…though it would have been more reassuring if her eyes hadn’t been glued to a nearby butterfly as she spoke, giggling as she watched it land on a nearby flower. “I’ve totes got that covered. I’m, like, brilliant, you know.”
“Well, yeah, but-”
“Like, last night after all the fighting was done, Lex had just gone to sleep, right? And Aria was all like ‘I’m totes gonna cuddle up with your boyfriend ‘cause I’m his bodyguard and all.’ And I’m just like ‘nuh-uh! Your fat behind can’t even fit in our tent!’ But she was all ‘I can if I curl up around him reeeally tight, but there won’t be any room left for you.’ And I’m totes about to tell her no way when Nosey comes up to us, and she’s still all freaked out from what happened with Xi-, er…because she had a bad dream, I mean. She had, like, a super bad dream before. So she says ‘hey, can I sleep in your tent with you guys?’ And I’m like ‘sure thing, bestie!’ And then I look at Aria, and I’m all ‘two against one, so ha!’ And so she was the one who had to sleep outside! And best of all, when I left this morning, Nosey was still there to make sure she can kiss-block Aria! So double ha! I mean, yeah, Nosey might be a little clingy herself right now, but that’s just because she’s all shaken like bacon, and once she’s back to normal she’ll knock it off.”
She nodded firmly at that, before glancing over at Disc Jockey. “See? Totes brilliant stuff.”
“Uh…” Disc Jockey blinked, completely lost for words. “Yeah…” He glanced around for help, but everypony else seemed to be just as lost as he was. “Er…so, what do we do about the farm ponies here if they don’t want to sell us anything?”
“Oh, what, that?" She waved a hoof, unconcerned. "Don’t worry. They will.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“I’m a Siren,” grinned Sonata. “I’ll change their minds.”
“You don’t have to worry, you know. Sonata’s going to be fine.”
Nosey’s comment was enough to make Lex pause in mid-stride, stumbling slightly. “How-”
“-do I know you’re worried?” Nosey’s smile was only a shadow of her usual boisterous grin, but the similarity was still there. “Well, besides the fact that you freaked out when you heard that she’d left without you, you’ve glanced northward five times in the two minutes we’ve been outside.”
Lex huffed lightly, feeling vaguely upset at how completely she’d read him. “I was going to ask how you could be so sure she’s alright,” he muttered churlishly. As he spoke, he started moving again, closing the distance between himself and Severance. He could have simply reached out and grasped the scythe with his telekinesis to draw it to him, but he wanted to overlook the site of the battle from last night. Even so, he kept one eye on Nosey, unwittingly betraying his interest in her answer.
Still keeping herself pressed against him, she bit back a laugh at how transparent he was. But her grin faded away a moment later, and her eyes slid to the ground as she spoke. “Xiriel told me.”
Despite the fact that he was less than ten feet from Severance, Lex came to a halt again, giving Nosey his undivided attention. “What?”
Glancing around self-consciously, Nosey confirmed that nopony else was around them before she started speaking again, taking a deep breath. “When…when I was possess-…” She had to stop, and Lex felt a shudder run through her as she closed her eyes. Her distress was obvious enough that he wondered if he should do something to try and ease her anxiety, only to come to the conclusion that he had no idea what to do. But Nosey answered that question for him a second later, when her horn began to glow.
A matching aura instantly came to life around his right fore-hoof, and Lex struggled to maintain his balance as she raised it off the ground, causing him to lean against her more as a result. Even as he did, she pulled his leg around her shoulders, making him embrace her while one of her own forelegs copied the gesture and curled around him. The entire thing barely took a second, and Lex blinked as he found himself in a mutual embrace with the blonde mare. “Nosey?”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, the tension in her voice audible despite her face being buried against his neck. “I’m sorry, just…please let me do this. Please.”
“Uh…sure.” If it had been anypony else, Lex would have shoved them away with a snarl. But coming from one of the few ponies he cared about, and knowing that Nosey’s bewildering actions were the result of what she’d suffered at Xiriel’s metaphorical hooves (even if he couldn’t understand why that was causing her to act like this), the combination of uncertainty and guilt was enough to override his natural inclinations, leaving him feeling awkward and self-conscious as he let Nosey do what she needed to. Glancing around, he felt certain that more than a few pairs of eyes were on them, even if everypony else was keeping well away from the edge of last night’s battle.
It took a minute before Nosey finally released him, and even then she made no move to separate her body from his, simply ending the hug with a soft sigh. “Sorry about that. I’m okay now,” she said with a smile that anypony else would have been able to identify as completely fake.
Lex, however, took her statement at face value. “How do you know Sonata is alright?” he prompted.
Nosey’s smile wavered for a moment, but she nodded briskly. “When I was possessed,” she began, keeping her voice level despite breaking eye contact with him, “Xiriel spoke directly into my mind. Most of what it said was j-just…just to be cruel, but it-” With visible effort, Nosey kept herself from falling apart. “It talked about the other monsters around Vanhoover. It mentioned the ghouls, and it mentioned the sahuagin and Tlerekithres-”
“Who?” Lex interrupted, alarmed at the unfamiliar name.
“The kraken,” explained Nosey. “The Great Lord of the Deep. Its real name was Tlerekithres.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “If it knew that…”
“They were working together,” nodded Nosey. “Not very much; it was more like they were using each other, but Xiriel made it sound like they were coordinating things, at least a little.” She looked back at him then, wanting to make sure her next point was as clear as could be. “But Lex, those are the only other monsters Xiriel talked about. The ghouls and the sea creatures. That’s it.” She waved a hoof toward the north. “There’s nothing out there that’s a threat to Sonata.”
“You’re sure about that?” pressed Lex. “You’re absolutely certain?”
“Yes. The closest it came to anything like that was letting it slip that it manipulated a few other ponies to keep Vanhoover cut off from the rest of Equestria – I don’t know who – but that’s all.”
Lex frowned, not liking the possible implications of that particular revelation, but there was nothing he could do about it now. Moreover, while Nosey’s testimony was informative, that didn’t mean it was necessarily iron-clad. The devil had been a skilled prevaricator and manipulator, and there might be other monsters out there that it hadn’t known about. But still…Lex couldn’t help but feel a tightness in his chest loosening as he weighed what Nosey had told him. Sonata’s going to be fine, he told himself, and although the anxiety didn’t completely go away, it regressed to tolerable levels. “Did it give you any other useful information? Anything at all?”
Nosey thought for a moment, then shook her head. Lex considered pressing her for a moment, but let it go. Nosey was a reporter; her special talent was to find pertinent information and disseminate it. If she didn’t think that she had any other useful information, then she was most likely correct. That, and he didn’t want to do anything that could cause her to break down again.
Instead, he turned his attention to Severance, idly floating a few feet away from him. Crossing the last few feet to it, he telekinetically took hold of the weapon and laid it across his back. “Report,” he demanded curtly. A moment later the scythe complied, though its report consisted of there being nothing to report; there had been no activity that it had detected during the night. Lex didn’t bother replying, instead turning his attention to the site of the pitched battle that had occurred here only a few hours ago.
Now that the sun was out, the full extent of the ghouls’ annihilation was plainly visible, and the sight was a gruesome one. Closest were the bodies of the undead ponies that had gotten past Severance to engage him and the others in battle directly; they were numerous enough that it looked as though someone had exhumed an entire graveyard and tossed the inhabitants haphazardly about. But as macabre as the piles of decaying bodies were, beyond them was far worse.
The field to the west of the camp had been splattered – there was simply no other word for it – with the remains of the ghoul army. Spreading out in a semi-circle that had to be over a hundred feet in radius, the ground was entirely hidden beneath what was left of the undead ponies. Some of them had merely been sliced in half, and Lex could see numerous intact torsos among the carnage. But those were the exceptions; the vast majority simply hadn’t been able to retain nearly as much cohesion in the face of Severance’s destructive force, their rotted bodies having been reduced to pieces. Heads, hooves, shriveled organs, and other body parts were strewn about chaotically, all spread among a layer of offal and gore.
Lex swept his eyes over all of it, inured to the horror of what he was looking at. We need to start the cleanup today, he decided. The stench was already starting to gather, thanks to the summer heat. By this time tomorrow it would be unbearable, and the presence of scavengers and disease would follow in very short order. First, he’d need to-
“Can we go?” murmured Nosey, and it was then that Lex realized she’d closed her eyes, not looking at the field of bodies in front of them. Giving a grunt of acknowledgment, Lex turned around, leading her away from the place. Opening her eyes as they headed back toward everypony else, Nosey gave a sigh of relief. “So, what happens now?”
“Now I put everypony to work,” replied Lex immediately. “The remaining bits will be divided up among teams who will be dispatched to all of the nearby farms in order to buy food. Meanwhile, others will be sent into Vanhoover to acquire more necessities. We’ll take more bits from some of the local banks to supplement our cash on hoof, as well as see what medical supplies can be scavenged.” He glanced backward briefly before he continued. “And shovels. A great many shovels.”
“Can’t you just make those with those black crystals of yours?”
“I could,” acknowledged Lex. “But they wouldn’t last for more than an hour, and recreating them over and over would be unduly burdensome.” Even if he channeled additional magic through himself, trying to make enough equipment to dig a mass grave of the size they’d need would deplete him long before they’d displaced sufficient earth, let along moved the bodies and subsequently filled the hole. Would that I could just invent a spell for this, he thought irritably, knowing that the current circumstances made such a prospect unfeasible.
Inventing a spell to increase his personal fortitude so as to channel additional magic through his body – allowing him to feed everypony the morning after he’d arrived here – had been inordinately difficult. With no materials or reagents to test the practical applications of his research, no supplementary materials besides his own notes to abet his mental calculations, no dedicated work environment in which to perform field testing, and numerous other suboptimal conditions working against him, it had been nothing short of miraculous that he had managed to succeed…and even then, that had only been due to his being personally familiar with the spell effect he was trying to create, having both seen it and experienced it before.
All of that…and it had not only still taken multiple days to complete, but it had resulted in his inflicting severe injuries on himself. To try and create a more powerful spell – one that could displace tons of earth – in less time, with less references and materials, since there was nothing like that on Xiriel’s scroll…it would be a complete waste of time and effort at best; at worst, it would court disaster. More than that, it would require him to ignore virtually everything else in the meantime, and that simply wasn’t acceptable. There were too many circumstances that needed his personal attention. Aria’s transmogrification being one of them. Another was that the ponies being led back into Vanhoover to gather money and supplies would be led by him personally; this time he’d allow no opportunity for some X-factor to injure more of his people-
“Um, Mr. Legis?”
Lex glanced over at House Call as the medical pony called his name, a hesitant look on his face. The sight of him brought something else to mind, another task that needed to be dealt with, and which – unlike so many others – could be taken care of immediately. “Bring Spit Polish to me,” blurted Lex before the doctor had a chance to keep talking.
The order clearly caught the other stallion off-guard. “I’m sorry?” He sent a glance at Nosey in a silent query for more information, but the mare shrugged and shook her head.
“Bring the would-be assassin to me,” repeated Lex. “I’m going to hand down his sentence right now.”
Lex frowned at House Call as the other stallion didn’t immediately rush to carry out his orders. “Why are you hesitating?” he snapped. “Bring him here immediately.”
“I-, alright, but I wanted to tell you that we’ve been treating Miss Garden Gate.” When Lex didn’t immediately snap at him, he took that as permission to continue. “Most of her wounds are fairly superficial. There are one or two that are serious, but nothing life-threatening. A few of them have some mild inflammation, so we’re keeping her under observation in case she develops an infection, but we really need more medicine as soon as possible.”
Lex’s expression didn’t change, but he frowned inwardly, knowing that even the chance that Garden Gate had caught the ghoul’s sickness was too great a risk to be allowed to stand. “As soon as I’m done with Spit Polish, I’ll see to Garden Gate and then go into Vanhoover to find more supplies. Now bring him to me.”
House Call gave a nod of acknowledgment and turned to go, only to glance back at Lex nervously. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to let me examine your injuri-”
“Go!”
The angry growl sent the medical pony galloping away. House Call had no qualms about getting up in an unruly patient’s face in order to safeguard their health, but that courage only went so far. Besides, the events of last night had made obvious what he’d known for a while now: Lex Legis was a pony to whom the normal rules – whether medical, magical, and probably numerous other areas as well – didn’t apply.
For his part, Lex watched House Call leave, his thoughts already ranging further ahead. First he’d punish Spit Polish and cure Garden Gate of any vestiges of disease, then he’d lead a team into Vanhoover. By the time he got back Sonata should have returned; if she reported that nothing unusual had happened then that would be confirmation enough that it was safe to send other ponies to the surrounding farms to buy more food while those that stayed here could start digging-
“What are you going to do?”
Nosey’s question broke his train of thought, and Lex had to make an effort to quell his annoyance as he looked at her. “I told you, I’m going to gather necessary supplies while-”
“No,” interrupted Nosey with a brief shake of her head. “I mean, what are you going to do to Spit Polish?”
Lex didn’t hesitate a moment before answering. “I’m going to curse him, of course. Even overlooking all of the other criminal actions he allegedly committed before I arrived here, his attempt on my life warrants an exceptionally harsh punishment.” Just thinking of how close that wretched, pathetic excuse for a pony had come to actually killing him – and how badly it had shaken him – was enough to make his eyes glow green and purple with anger. “He’ll serve as an example of what happens-”
“You can’t!” Nosey had heard enough, and it was all she could do to keep from shouting. “Lex, you can’t curse him!”
“Of course I can,” he replied easily. “I have more than enough dark magic to do so, and I doubt he’ll find the strength to resist what I’m going to do to him.”
“No, I mean you shouldn’t curse him!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed dangerously at that, turning his head to give Nosey a dark look. Despite the fact that her current condition warranted greater indulgence on his part, he could feel his patience for her antics starting to wear thin. “What?”
But Nosey didn’t flinch, giving him a worried look. “If you curse him, you’ll ruin all the goodwill you’ve gained up until now! It’ll be like with Garden Gate all over again!”
Lex couldn’t help but wince at that. The memory of Sonata telling him that his cursing that mare had frightened everypony else, when he’d been so sure that his display of justice had evoked the opposite reaction, still mortified him to think about. That was compounded by what he’d realized last night, when Garden Gate had selflessly thrown herself at the ghoul army, crying out for the people she’d lost and proving that the change of heart she’d professed when he’d sentenced her had been genuine after all…which had been another misjudgment on his part, since he’d discounted her plea as insincere when he’d condemned her. But rather than weaken his resolve, having that thrown in his face only made him grit his teeth, pushing back against the perceived indictment of his judgment. “I wasn’t wrong,” he hissed.
“Lex…”
“I wasn’t wrong! Garden Gate was directly responsible for Pillowcase’s death! Even if she felt bad about it at the time, her sentence was entirely justified!”
“But it scared everypony! Lex, please! If you forgive Spit Polish now, you’ll show everyone-”
“‘Forgive him’?! Are you mad?!” Lex separated himself from her then, somehow managing to keep his hooves under him as he moved so that he was face-to-face with Nosey, rather than right next to her. “He didn’t make some minor breach of social decorum, he tried to commit murder! A punishment of extreme severity is not only appropriate, it’s absolutely necessary!”
Nosey blanched, whether because he’d broken off physical contact with her or because of the forcefulness of his words. But despite how pale she suddenly looked she didn’t back down, giving him a pleading look as she kept going. “Look, maybe you’re right, but it wasn’t like he just decided that it’d be fun to try and kill you! He was scared, and Xi-, that monster had been messing with his head, telling him all sorts of stuff about how they had to do terrible things to save Equestria! He thought he was helping-”
But Lex cut her off. “By trying to smother me in my sleep? No. He knew what he was doing-”
“No, he didn’t! Don’t you get it?! He didn’t know what he was doing! That’s what I’m-” Nosey abruptly stopped speaking, lowering her head and taking several deep breaths, and it was then that Lex realized that she was shaking. He had just enough time to convince himself that he had nothing to feel guilty about when she lifted her face, making a sound that was suspiciously like a sniffle before she started speaking again, calmer now. “Alright. He knew what he was doing,” she said slowly, as though not trusting herself to stay calm if she spoke any faster. “But he didn’t know it was wrong-, no, he didn’t know why it was wrong. Xi-,” she faltered then, but drew herself up as she forced herself to keep going. “Xiriel got in his head. It didn’t possess him or anything, but it…it confused him. It made him think that he had to do evil to do good.” She paused then, giving him a look of…some emotion that he couldn’t identify before she continued. “He was manipulated. He was a victim too. And if you punish him for that, then it makes you look cruel.”
Lex waited a few seconds, just to be sure that she was finished, before he replied. “I. Don’t. Care.” He said each word slowly, wanting to make this as clear as possible. “I don’t care how I look to other people, and I don’t care if Spit Polish was confused when he grabbed the pillow and held it over my face.” He let that hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “His state of mind is an explanation, not an excuse, and he will pay the price for his actions.”
Nosey seemed to crumple in on herself at his words, her ears folding back as she shook her head softly. She licked her lips but didn’t say anything, and a second later turned as though about to walk away. But she didn’t move, simply standing there with her back to him for a long moment. “There’s so much good in you,” she murmured mournfully.
“What?”
She turned back around, and her eyes were watery when she looked at him again. “There’s so much good in you, Lex. You’re strong and you’re brave and you’re selfless. I’ve seen you risk your life for complete strangers and get hurt really badly in the process, and you never expect so much as a thank you for it. You do so much for so many people, and then you go and act like this…” She bit her lip, reaching a hoof up to rub her eyes. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Spit Polish does deserve whatever you do to him. But Sonata was right too: you shouldn’t hold it against everypony when they fail to live up to your example.”
Lex was about to reply that he wasn’t doing that, but Nosey stepped forward before he could, placing a hoof on his chest. “You have so much good in you, and you think everypony else should have that much good in them too. But they aren’t strong enough for that. They don’t have a heart as dedicated as yours. When something puts them to the test, some disaster or monster or something else, most of them will fail. That’s what happened to Spit Polish. If you punish him now, it won’t be because he did something evil; it’ll be because he was weak. And everypony else will see that, even if they don’t know it, and they’ll wonder why you didn’t have more compassion for a pony who never had a chance.” With nothing else to say, she slowly withdrew her hoof from him, letting it fall back to the ground.
Seconds passed as Lex simply stared at her, turning her words over in his mind, not noticing as his eyes changed back to their normal color. Before he could start to formulate a reply, several ponies stepped forward from the crowd, carrying a struggling stallion between them. But Spit Polish’s thrashing stopped as he caught sight of Lex, his eyes widening and the blood draining from his face as the ponies forcing him forward all but threw him at Lex’s hooves. “No!” he whimpered. “Please, whatever you’re going to do to me, don’t do it!”
The sniveling display drew a sneer of disgust from Lex, and he turned his full attention to the simpering stallion, looking him over. Spit Polish was a mess; his eyes were bloodshot and had dark circles under them, his bandages were handing loosely from around his wounds, and there were several splotches of dirt across his body. Lex sent a disapproving glance at one of the ponies, another doctor, who had carried him over. “Sorry,” murmured the medical pony meekly. “He tried to run away when he saw us coming. Didn’t get very far on those injured hooves of his, but he kept trying anyway.”
Lex’s only response to that was a snort, before looking back at where Spit Polish was lying on the ground. It wasn’t lost on him how everypony else had apparently noticed the spectacle, coming closer to see what was going on. “Spit Polish,” began Lex, pronouncing his name as though just saying it left a foul taste in his mouth. “Given how the nature of your crime has already been made public, there’s no need to reiterate what it is you’re accused of. Nevertheless, I’ll do so now: you attempted to assassinate me in my sleep. Do you deny the charge?”
Lying on his belly in front of Lex, Spit Polish shook like a leaf. “I…I didn’t mean to…”
“Answer yes or no,” growled Lex.
Biting back a sob, Spit Polish shook his head miserably. “…no…”
“Before I pass judgment on you, do you have anything to say in your own defense?”
The prospect of his imminent punishment was the last straw, and Spit Polish began to wail loudly. “I’m sorry!” he sobbed. “Mercy! I didn’t want to do any of those things, I swear! I just-, I thought I had to! To save Equestria!” He turned toward the crowd, hysteria written all over his face. “Please, you have to understand! I’d never would have hurt anypony unless I thought it was for the greater good! But-, but I was wrong! I see that now! I see that now and I’m so, so sorry!” He looked back at Lex as he continued to plead. “So I beg you, mercy! Have mercy on me! I’ll never-”
“ENOUGH!” boomed Lex, making Spit Polish and several nearby ponies jump. “I’ve heard all I need to.” His eyes flickered to Nosey for an instant as he spoke, before returning to the quaking pony at his hooves.
A purple aura flared to life around Lex’s horn as he spoke, his eyes turning green-and-purple to match, and he reached out a hoof toward Spit Polish. The sight was enough to shatter what little self-control the other stallion had left, his eyes going wide as a scream of pure terror erupted from his throat. Desperately, he flung himself backward, out of Lex’s reach, before stumbling to his bandaged hooves and trying to run for it.
He needn’t have bothered. He hadn’t made it more than two steps before black crystals sprouted along his legs, forming cuffs that instantly stretched out and attached to each other, becoming fetters and sending him sprawling into the dirt. Even then, he tried to crawl away, wriggling and rolling along the ground in a futile effort to put more distance between himself and what was about to happen.
Behind him, Lex slowly stalked forward, relentless. “You’re only being sentenced for your attempt on my life,” he said darkly as he advanced on the helpless stallion. “But the things you did here, in this camp, mark you as being among the worst of ponykind.”
“No!” sobbed Spit Polish, still trying to crawl away.
But even in his weakened state, Lex was able to catch up to him easily, and it took only a few seconds before he was standing in front of Spit Polish again. “So now you will be the worst pony here, in every way imaginable.” With that Lex raised his hoof again, and before the other pony had a chance to react, he pressed it against Spit Polish’s forehead.
Instantly, the purple aura around his horn flared as he channeled additional magic through his body, enhancing the curse to the level he needed it to be. The effort sent an ache through him that almost made him sway, but he fought the urge down, striving to eliminate any appearance of weakness. “Every part of you will be debilitated,” he intoned, speaking as much to the crowd – whom he could see out of his peripheral vision, still watching closely – as to Spit Polish. “Muscle tension. Reflexes. Stamina. Cognitive function. Perception. Wit. You will spend the rest of your life with all of them dampened. Only your memories will remain unimpeded, so that you can remember how you brought this upon yourself.”
Lex removed his hoof from the other stallion then, stepping back from him. A thought was all it took to make the black crystals binding Spit Polish’s legs turn to dust, and a moment later the other stallion started to get up, shaking like a leaf. “Wha…wha’d yoo doo ta me?” The words were slurred, as though he’d had too much to drink, and the sound of his own garbled voice caused Spit Polish’s eyes to go wide with alarm. “Wha’d yoo doo ta me?!” He lifted a hoof to his throat, as though the problem could be found there, and that alone was enough to send him sprawling, limbs flailing in a failed attempt to keep his balance.
Murmurs broke out from the ponies gathered around them, and that seemed to remind Spit Polish that he wasn’t alone. “Th-thome pony halp me!” he wailed. “Pweathe!” But no one approached him, and a moment later his eyes filled with tears again. “Th’not fair,” he moaned, making no move to get up. “Th’not fair! I juth…I juth din’ kno wha’da do…I din’ kno wha’da do…” The last part came out even harder to understand, a fresh round of weeping slurring his words even worse.
“I know you didn’t,” replied Lex, his eyes returning to normal. The crowd instantly quieted down as he moved toward Spit Polish again, not that the stallion noticed, having covered his face with his forelegs as he cried. “Look at me.” The words were unmistakably an order, and yet they lacked the harsh edge that he’d had just a moment ago. “Look at me, Spit Polish.”
The sound of his name made the other stallion lower his forelegs, sniffling as he looked up at Lex, who stood over him with a neutral look. “I am not indifferent to the harshness of what you went through, nor to the full scope of the forces that were arrayed against you. While the things you did were horrible, and your punishment is fully deserved…overcoming your circumstances required strength of will that was quite clearly far beyond you. To that end, I have elected to show you leniency.” As he finished, Lex lifted a hoof again, lightly placing it on Spit Polish’s belly.
The earth pony’s eyes flickered between the hoof on his belly and Lex’s face, finally settling on the latter. “What sort of len-” Spit Polish’s eyes widened as he realized that he was speaking normally again. “I-, I’m okay!” He almost laughed with relief, looking up at Lex with eyes full of gratitude. “Oh, thank you thank you thank-” Lex removed his hoof from the other stallion’s body. “-yoo fank yoo fa-, huh? Wha’ happent?! Wy’m I- Noo! Yoo thaid wenienthy! Yoo…yoo thaid-”
“I did,” nodded Lex. “But its application will not be decided by me.” He kept his eyes on Spit Polish, but raised his voice as he spoke again, wanting to be sure everypony nearby heard this. “You are hereby condemned for your crime, and your curse will follow you for the rest of your life. But so long as a living, sapient being is touching you, its effects will be suspended until they cease to do so.” He swept a hoof outward towards the assembled ponies watching them. “How much leniency you receive will be decided by those ponies that you’ve wronged. They will be the ones who determine whether you live as one of them, or as a wreck that can barely function.” With that said, he turned to the crowd as he made his final pronouncement in the matter. “Justice is served.”
Lex deliberately turned and walked away from the crowd then. Despite what he’d said to Nosey about not caring about what everypony thought of him, he couldn’t help but want to glance back and try and gauge their reaction. But he didn’t bother, knowing it would be futile anyway; he’d never been any good at reading others, as his embarrassing misinterpretation of everyone’s reaction to his cursing Garden Gate had so recently reminded him. Instead, he stalked back over to where the newsmare was waiting, trying to conceal just how exhausted he already felt. “Go find out where Garden Gate is being treated,” he ordered her tersely, not wanting to continue the conversation they’d been having. “It’s important that I check on her status before I go into Vanhoover.”
Nosey didn’t immediately reply, looking at him with a small smile, and Lex felt himself tense up. Was she laughing at him? Or was that a look of pity? “What?” he snapped, suddenly feeling defensive.
He was taken completely by surprise when her response was to lean over and press her lips softly against his cheek. It was so completely unexpected – given how acrimonious their previous interaction had been – that it left him nonplussed for a moment, which was all the time Nosey needed to settle back into her place beside him, her side against his once again. “Thank you for listening to me,” she murmured warmly.
It took Lex several seconds to respond, struggling to evaluate and interpret Nosey’s actions. Was she declaring that she’d won the adversarial exchange they’d just been having, and was trying to be magnanimous about it? If so, that made no sense; her position had been that he should forgive Spit Polish, and he had still condemned and cursed him. Or was she attempting to be conciliatory, pleased at the idea that her opinion had been taken into account in any regard? Or maybe she was being congratulatory, and her statement about his listening to her was meant to be ironic in some regard? Or perhaps all three of those ideas were wrong, and something else altogether had prompted her unexpected reaction. There was no way to be sure, especially with how she had been acting since he’d rescued her, and that inability to understand her motivation left him feeling awkward and frustrated. “I’m open to all input regarding the workings of my administration,” he muttered.
“Oh yeah?” grinned Nosey, her voice sounding something like her usual outgoing self. “Glad I could help out, then.” She nodded back toward the series of outpatient tents. “C’mon, Garden’s being treated back there.”
Lex frowned, finding something else to think about and immediately latching onto it. “How do you know that? You haven’t moved since House Call was here.”
Nosey seemed pleased by the question. “Ace reporter, remember? While we were talking before, I was looking around to see where most of the doctors were going, while also listening to nearby conversations to see if I could pick up any interesting tidbits, not to mention sniffing the air for anything with an antiseptic scent.” She paused for a long moment before continuing. “Plus, I saw where they took her last night before I went to go join you and Sonata.” That last part was punctuated by sticking her tongue out playfully.
Lex rolled his eyes. “Of course,” he muttered irritably, upset at not having figured that out on his own.
“Just tell me you’re not going to curse her for not obeying your orders to stay inside your big illusion-thing from last night.” That statement earned Nosey a glare, and she gave him an apologetic smile in response. “That was a joke.”
“I already removed the maledictions I laid on her,” answered Lex humorlessly. “The circumstances were extenuating enough that her actions warranted an act of clemency on my part, both for her sake and that of everypony else. There’s no need to reapply them.”
“You should tell everypony that, you know. You made a big spectacle out of cursing her; after what just happened with Spit Polish, letting them know that you’ve forgiven one of the ponies who helped you save everyone’s life last night isn’t a bad idea.”
Lex glanced at her sidelong. “The implication being that everypony disapproved of the sentence I handed down?”
“Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that,” smiled Nosey, giving a pointed nod back at where they’d left Spit Polish.
His brow furrowing, Lex couldn’t help himself, looking back at where he’d left the criminal. A pair of doctors were around him, changing the dirty bandages wrapped around his hooves. They were both speaking to him, and Spit Polish was shaking his head in response as he said something back. But he wasn’t looking at them as he spoke. Instead, he was looking off into the crowd of nearby ponies, which was already starting to disperse. Following his gaze, Lex saw that he was looking at a familiar-looking unicorn mare with a bright orange coat and a soft yellow mane and tail. For a moment he couldn’t place her, but then he saw her cutie mark – a pair of peaches – and he recognized her as the pony who had been the first to castigate Spit Polish for trying to kill him. Peachy Keen.
As Lex watched, she hesitantly made her way over to where Spit Polish was, saying something. When the doctors lifted him up and started carrying him off a moment later, she kept pace with them. Lex watched them go, before turning a questioning glance toward Nosey, not sure what he’d just witnessed.
She shrugged, but was still smiling. “I don't know if the ponies here will ever forgive him or not, but that's not as important as the fact that you gave them a chance to. Now it's not about you cursing him, or even his dealing with it, but about what everypony else will do, deciding for themselves whether or not they want to help him out."
Adjusting her glasses, Nosey gave him a warm look before continuing to lead him toward Garden Gate's tent. "Now that's what I call justice."
His initial outline for what needed to be done had been simple. After ascertaining the camp’s immediate conditions, he would finishing meting out justice to Spit Polish, remove any threat of disease from Garden Gate (or whatever she was calling herself now), and then personally lead a team of ponies into Vanhoover to acquire money and supplies. Carrying out such a simple set of tasks should have presented no problems.
Meting out justice upon Spit Polish had gone well, at least to his thinking. Of course, he’d thought that when he’d cursed Garden Gate a few days prior, but in this case Nosey had signed off on his punishment being socially palatable. Although he still planned on having Sonata provide him with a second opinion later, he was willing to trust the newsmare’s evaluation. With that matter completed, he’d turned his attention to the next task.
Checking on Garden Gate had been a perfunctory affair. Her tent had been several rows behind his own, and had been immediately obvious once he got close to it, as several of her friends were standing vigil near the entrance. One of them, the larger stallion who’d castigated him last night for not immediately procuring medical attention for Garden – “Funshine,” one of his friends had called him – had the temerity to stand in Lex’s way and inquire as to why he was there. He’d given Funshine a cold stare in reply, insulted by the implicit suspicion of the question, and had been contemplating ways to forcibly move the ungrateful stallion when his companions had intervened, apologizing on Funshine’s behalf and moving him out of the way, ignoring the stallion’s protests that he was only doing what Turbo would have wanted.
Once inside Garden’s tent, the exchange with the injured mare had been brief. He’d tersely inquired about her condition, and she had given him equally clipped answers, thankfully not wasting his time by trying to engage in an extended conversation. With that done, he’d used the disease-removal spell on her and departed, pausing only long enough to instruct her to seek him out if she still showed symptoms of illness. He hadn’t bothered to wait for a reply before leaving, and not just because he was eager to move on to other things; while he’d initially held Garden Gate in contempt for her criminal actions, he’d seen fit to pardon her after the valor she’d shown last night, which had left him uncertain as to how to feel about her now. Far better to simply ignore that problem by being in her presence as little as possible.
But it had been when he’d turned his thoughts toward reentering Vanhoover that Lex had realized that he’d miscalculated.
The night’s rest he’d gotten had been enough to fully restore both his dark magic and the trickle of divine spells that the Night Mare had granted him. It had also taken the edge off of his physical condition; although he still felt debilitated, he was at least able to move around under his own power again, albeit with great difficulty. But it had done nothing to restore his thaumaturgic spellcasting. For that, he knew, he’d need to use Severance.
At least in theory, it wasn’t necessary to go that far before making the trip into Vanhoover. The city should be free of monsters now. All he had to do was turn into shadow – handily bypassing the problem of making such an excursion in his injured body – and lead several ponies in so that they could collect and haul the necessary resources to keep the camp habitable. Based on the data he had, there was no reason to anticipate that being difficult; any danger that was still there would likely be little more than environmental, and nothing he wouldn’t be able to handle with the magic currently at his disposal.
But then again, he hadn’t anticipated Xiriel either.
That thought – and the reminder of how the consequences of his oversight had cost several brave ponies their lives – had been enough to make Lex reconsider his course of action. Although the camp was in dire need of resupply, it wasn’t so dire that he couldn’t take a few hours to replenish at least a minimum of his strongest magic…not when the consequences of making another mistake, the way he had with the belier, could potentially mean more deaths. Nor could he simply take Severance into Vanhoover with him in order to have its power make up the difference; the camp needed a defender to remain here in case of another emergency, and although she’d returned on her own he was still reluctant to trust Aria with something that important.
In the end, the only acceptable choice was to devote a few hours to renewing his spells. It wouldn’t be enough to bring him back up to his full potential, but it would be sufficient to restore at least a modicum of it. With his mind made up, he’d recalled Severance and returned to his tent, sending Nosey away. She’d protested that last decision, but he’d told her to keep an eye out for Sonata or anything else she thought needed to be brought to his attention immediately, getting her to reluctantly agree. For that, he was grateful; despite her recent trauma, Nosey was still a gifted investigative journalist, and had seen him renew his spells back in Tall Tale on the day of the solstice. Although the odds of it were miniscule, Lex didn’t want to take a chance that if she stayed with him she’d recognize what he was doing and start to put together that he needed external assistance to renew his primary spellcasting. That truth had to be suppressed at all costs, lest it find its way to someone who’d use it against him.
With the last distraction out of the way, Lex had started to draw upon the incredible amount of ambient energy that Severance radiated, making the proper gestures and chants to direct the energy as he bound it into the structured formulas of his thoughts, preparing the spells he’d decided were most pertinent to the immediate future. That had been four hours ago, by his rough estimation. Although he’d refilled less than half of his full complement of spells, that was probably enough-
“Lex?” Nosey’s voice came from outside the tent. “Something’s going on.”
He hesitated just long enough to return the scythe to his back, pushing the tent flap open. “What is it? Is Sonata back?” The tremor of relief that went through him when Nosey nodded was strong enough that he had to consciously steady himself for a moment before heading outside. “Good, take me to her.”
“Okay.” Nosey moved alongside him as she spoke, pressing up against him in that familiar manner as though it was the most natural thing in the world for her. “But there’s something else you need to be aware of.”
The statement was leading enough to make Lex glance over at her, instantly on the alert. “What?”
Nosey didn’t respond verbally, instead nodding in a northeasterly direction. He followed her gaze, and for a long moment couldn’t see what she was indicating. But after a few seconds, he spotted something on the horizon, near the mountains. Rising up from the ground, it was a pale column that was slowly rising into the air, its edges indistinct as it slowly billowed out. After a moment, he realized what he was looking at.
Smoke. Something was burning.
For a moment Lex slowed down, thoughts of Sonata temporarily driven from his mind as he tried to process what the unexpected sight meant. It was far enough away that it couldn’t possibly have been within a hundred miles of them, and it seemed oddly thin…but to be seen from this distance, it couldn’t just be a campfire. Unfortunately, its distance and close proximity to the mountains meant that its source couldn’t be seen clearly; it was hidden behind the foot of one of the vast peaks, whatever it was.
“We just saw it a little while ago,” offered Nosey. “It’s been swaying a little bit, like there’s some wind near the base of it. Think it’s pegasi trying to put it out?”
Lex didn’t answer, not having enough data to offer an opinion. He knew that the area north of them was littered with small villages and thorps, and it wasn’t implausible that some of them were at the base of the montains. For a moment he considered turning into shadow and ascending into the sky to try and get a better look, or even sending some pegasi of their own to do the same, but decided against it. As far away as it was, a bird’s-eye view wouldn’t provide much help, and whatever new disaster was brewing – Vanhoover had been too consistent for him to think it was anything else – would have to wait. Sending an expedition to confirm what was going on was less urgent that procuring the camp’s immediate well-being. “Take me to Sonata,” he repeated.
Nosey nodded, and very shortly led him to the northern edge of the camp, where a group of ponies could be seen approaching. Three of them were pulling wagons, each of which was piled with cabbages, with the rest carrying bulging saddlebags and overflowing baskets with even more leafy greens in them. Only Sonata was unburdened, carrying nothing more than a bright smile that grew wider as she spotted him, galloping ahead of the others.
“Check it out!” she whooped as she closed the distance between them. Rearing up on her hind legs, she spun in place, pointing to the vegetable-toting ponies behind her. “When times are savage, grab a cabbage!” she announced in a sing-song voice, before turning back around and dropping to all fours, beaming. “I spent the whole trip back thinking of that! Totes cool line, huh?! I was also thinking about ‘please sign for your cabbage,’ but ‘package’ and ‘cabbage’ don’t really rhyme, so-, whoa! Lex?!”
She was caught completely by surprise as Lex crossed the last few feet to her, throwing a foreleg around her shoulders and pulling her close, eyes closing as he embraced her. His actions were enough to make her blink, not sure if she should be touched or concerned, before deciding to go with touched, hugging him back. “Wow, did you miss me that much?” Silently, she cheered at once again receiving proof that he was totes head over hooves for her, and looked behind him for any sign that Cozy was there, wanting to rub this in her face. But although more ponies were coming to see what was going on, the crystal mare and her lame-o boyfriend were nowhere to be found.
Lex held her close for another few seconds before releasing her, his eyes running over her body as he took a step back. “Are you alright? Did anything happen while you were gone?”
Sonata’s grin somehow managed to get wider. “Aww, were you worried about me?” She basked in that for a moment before straightening up, giving her mane a toss over her shoulders as she presented herself in the full glory of her triumph. “I totes had everything under control the whole time! We found a bunch of farmers, and I was all ‘take my money!’ But they were like ‘um, we’re a bunch of jerks who hate money, so scram!’ And I was all, ‘oh no you didn’t!’ And then I did a song and dance routine that turned into a big musical number, which I totes have to sing for you later-”
“How many cabbages did you buy?” interjected Lex, his normal sensibilities reasserting themselves now that he’d confirmed her safety.
“Like, a lot!” She raised a hoof toward them again. “See? I totes had DJ there do the negotiating,” she pointed to a familiar-looking green pegasus stallion loaded down with saddlebags, “and we got a huge load! Everypony says they're super tasty too, but I sorta had to take their word for it since I can’t-”
“You can now,” interrupted Lex hurriedly, rescinding the ageusia curse he’d placed on her. He'd been planning on lifting it anyway, and it was better to do so before she could inadvertently reveal what had happened to make her earn it in the first place.
“Awesome!” she cheered. “Is it okay if I make a taste test real fast?”
The question prompted Lex to glance back at the results of Sonata’s endeavor. Although there were a considerable number of cabbages there, it was obvious at a glance that she hadn’t procured anywhere near enough for the entire camp. By his estimate, if they were rationed properly, there was enough food for a little over a tenth of the population here. That would keep the most at-risk members of the community alright for a day or so, but they were still going to need to go into Vanhoover as quickly as-
“You hear that?” asked Sonata suddenly.
“Hm?” He glanced at her, not sure what she was talking about. “What?”
But she didn’t meet his eyes, ears twitching as she glanced around. “I thought I heard this noise before, but it was, like, super soft, and now I’m-, there! Right there! Did you hear that?!” She paused, looking in the direction of whatever she’d supposedly heard for a second before speaking up again. “Hey, is that smoke?”
Lex frowned, considering the fact that she’d heard something from the direction of whatever was happening. “What does it sound like?”
Sonata waved a hoof at him, still looking northeast. “Just listen!”
Frowning, he nevertheless did exactly that. Several seconds passed, and for a moment he wondered if this was just Sonata being Sonata, but then he heard something, impossibly faint. Straining his ears, he listened again, willing the sound to become more recognizable. Then it came again, and he was almost able to place it…
It was a whistle.
Suddenly it all made sense. The distant plume of smoke hadn’t been swaying as though it were moving; it had actually been moving, its source following the tracks that paralleled the mountain range. It was thin because it was only coming from a single source, but one that was kicking up enough smoke to be visible even at an extended distance. And now there was a whistle accompanying it.
“Here you go!” chirped Sonata happily as she handed a cabbage to the old grey mare in front of her. “Eat up and enjoy!”
The old mare gave her a warm smile as she hugged the vegetable to her chest. “Thank you so much, dear. And please thank that nice young boy of yours, too. He’s such a brave stallion, that one.”
“I will!” Sonata immediately moved to make good on her statement, twisting her head around to glance behind her. “Hey Lex! This nice lady says thanks! And that you’re brave! Ooh! And ‘nice’ too! Can you believe it?!”
Glancing up from the clipboard and pencil that he’d absconded from one of the doctors so that he could keep track of the food distribution, Lex sent an uncomfortable glance toward his girlfriend before his eyes flickered over to the grey pony beside her. Making eye contact with him, the elderly pony smiled and sent him a cordial wave. Shifting in place uncomfortably, Lex gave her a perfunctory nod before going back to his paper.
“That’s, like, totes his way of saying ‘you’re welcome, and I’m super happy that I was able to help out,’” offered Sonata.
“Oh, the bashful type, is he?” laughed the old lady. “I have a grandcolt just like him. I gave him my spot on the boat getting out of here when the flooding started. He’s the sweetest boy you’ve ever met, but as soon as he meets someone new, he just becomes tongue-tied and can’t-”
“That’s adorable,” interrupted Sonata. “How about you come by later and tell me all about him, ‘kay?” She resisted the urge to glance back at Lex as she spoke; hopefully he wouldn’t mind that she’d been rather creative with the words he’d had for the dawdling old lady – sent to Sonata courtesy of that whisper-spell of his – for holding up the line. “Next!”
Taking the hint gracefully, the old mare meandered away with one last wave, which Sonata returned before looking at the next pony stepping forward. “Step right up!” she smiled at the pegasus colt that was next, a blank-flank who looked like he was barely old enough to start attending school and who was currently sitting there immobile, gazing at her with wide eyes as though dazzled by the sight of her. Unable to help but puff up with joy at the open admiration, Sonata beckoned to him. “Don’t be shy!” she cooed. “We’ve got plenty of food for everypony!”
“We do not have enough food for everypony!” came Lex’s harsh whisper in her ear. “That’s why we’re only passing these out to children, the elderly, and anypony who’s severely debilitated!”
“I meant everypony in line here,” whispered Sonata in reply, resisting the urge to roll her eyes, keeping a smile on her face as the colt regained enough presence of mind to wander over to her. “Seriously, take a chill pill and enjoy being a hero for a few minutes, would ya?”
In the half-hour since she’d gotten back, word about the approaching train had spread through the camp like a wildfire, and the place was brimming with excitement. A large number of ponies were now crowding the train station, anticipating its arrival even as they stared intently at the plume of smoke that was growing steadily more visible in the distance. A few were peering in the windows at where Lex had apparently sent Aria, and as Sonata glanced that way she saw a pair of fillies with their faces pressed against the glass give a sudden shriek and run away, laughing. The sight made her smile, and not just because she liked the thought of Aria’s face frightening small children; those two had been in line five minutes ago, and had refused to take their cabbages before giving a special cheer (one of them had a pom-pom cutie mark, and the other’s was a ribbon-laced baton), getting the nearby ponies to spell out “thank you Lex” one letter at a time.
Of course, Sonata had been expecting something like this ever since she woken up this morning. After she’d headed out to buy some food, letting Lex get some well-earned rest, she’d quizzed the ponies she’d taken with her about what they thought about the battle from last night. They’d initially been reluctant to say anything, worrying her, but after a bit of prodding they’d opened up, and a torrent of adulation had come pouring out. “Amazing,” “incredible,” “heroic,” and other words had been thrown around like they were going out of style, and Sonata had been walking on air the entire trip there and back. They were being quiet at first because they were star-struck, she’d realized, which meant that she and Lex were the stars! About freaking time!
She’d been intent on breaking through everypony’s awe once she got back to the camp, wanting Lex to experience the outpouring of gratitude that was apparently just waiting to be unleashed, but the sight of the train had apparently done that for her. As one old stallion had put it, “seein’ y’all fight like that was like a dream, but now…have’n somethin’ else good happen, s’all suddenly real. Thank ya so much.”
That really didn’t make any sense to her – the fight hadn’t been very dream-like for her – but who cared? The camp ponies finally adored them! And here’s the latest example! she cheered to herself as the pegasus colt stared up at her, eyes wide and jaw open. “Here you go, little guy!” she reached down toward him, a cabbage balanced on one hoof. “A special treat, just for you.”
He took it slowly, gazing at the vegetable as though he couldn’t believe that she’d just given him something, before managing to bring his eyes back up to look at her. Gulping, he licked his lips, clearly trying to remember how to talk. “W-…w-…”
“Hm? What is it?” She made a show of tilting an ear toward him, smiling encouragingly.
“W-will you mawwy me?” lisped the colt, before ducking his head down behind his cabbage, peeking out from behind it bashfully.
A chorus of adoring coos erupted from everypony around them, and Sonata was no exception. “Aww! You are so adorable!” Overcome by how cute the little guy was, Sonata couldn’t help herself, kneeling down and giving him a hug before planting a kiss on his forehead. “Hey Lex!” she called, turning around to grin at her boyfriend. “I’m totes leaving you for this little cutie here!”
He glanced up sharply at that, and Sonata saw him scowl as his eyes took in the scene. “It was a joke,” she whispered as quietly as she could, knowing that quite a few eyes were on them right now. “Just roll with it, and everyone here’ll think you’re super charming.”
Uncertainty flashed across his face then, and Sonata had just enough time to realize that it wasn’t going to work. Even if he knew she was kidding he had no idea what to say in response. She had just started to think up a line to feed him when Nosey – who had been glued to his side the entire time since Sonata had gotten back – leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Lex blinked once, glancing at the newsmare, before looking back at where Sonata still had a foreleg around the colt. “I, um…” He paused, glancing around again uncomfortably before licking his lips. “I can’t bear to go on without you,” he said woodenly. “I’ll curse myself to sleep forever if you’re not here with me.”
For a split-second Sonata felt ill-will toward her friend for butting in – she’d have been able to come up with that! – but let it go as she turned back to the pegasus colt. “Aw, sorry little guy! I can’t let Vanhoover’s hero be taken away from everyone like that! But I’ll, like, always remember you!” A round of warm-hearted chuckling came from everyone watching, and Sonata knew they were eating it up. Standing, she waved goodbye as she stepped away from the little charmer, whose eyes had grown as round as dinner plates as he watched the exchange. Nodding, he stumbled away, walking backward so as not to take his eyes off of her for a minute before an older pegasus ushered him away, sending Sonata a grateful look.
She nodded back, and was already turning to the next pony in line when a loud cheer went up from the ponies gathered around the train station. Turning, Sonata peered at the horizon, and after a moment of squinting saw what they were excited about: the train was visible, coming around the foot of one of the distant mountains as it wound its way toward them. As though it heard everyone, a whistle could be heard a moment later, soft but clear as it cut through the air. The sound sent a new wave of whooping and hollering through the camp, ponies throwing their hooves in the air and hugging each other in joy.
“It’ll be here in approximately ninety minutes,” murmured Lex.
Sonata almost asked him how he knew that, but managed to stop herself just in time. It probably had something to do with math, and listening to Lex talk about math always made her sleepy. “Awesome! You’re gonna be here when it does, right?” She tried to make the question sound casual; if he stayed here for the train, he’d be able to rest up and enjoy everypony’s treating him like a star instead of rushing off to do whatever dangerous thing was next on his agenda.
Thankfully, he nodded. “I want to verify who’s operating that train and what brought them here.”
Sonata blinked at that, confused. “Aren’t the train tracks bringing them here?”
“I mean why they’re here now. The rail service to Vanhoover was shut down, so what’s changed that they’re suddenly resuming it?”
“Um, a lot of stuff, duh,” scoffed Sonata. Had he hit his head or something? “We, like, stomped all over the bad guys and saved the day!”
“And how would whoever’s on that train know that?” pressed Lex.
Sonata shrugged. “I dunn-, oh! Now I get what you mean!” She gave him a sheepish grin, chuckling.
Lex sighed, turning away from the distant train to look back at his clipboard. “We should distribute the rest of these before it arrives. That way we can devote our full attention to the train without worrying about any of this food being misappropriated while we’re occupied.”
Sonata smiled. She had no idea what “misappropriated” meant, but she could tell that he was concerned about the neediest ponies not getting fed. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she chuckled. When he sent an inquisitive look her way, she waggled her eyebrows at him knowingly, and then pointed. A short distance away, the old grey mare that had been trying to talk her ear off a few minutes ago was engaged in conversation with a middle-aged unicorn stallion, who was shaking his head and waving a hoof in a clear gesture of refusal. But the old mare apparently wouldn’t take no for an answer, tearing off a large section of her cabbage and tossing it to him. “She’s not the only one,” continued Sonata. “Almost everypony we’ve handed these out to has been sharing them with someone else.”
“That defeats the purpose of what we’re doing,” frowned Lex, his eyes narrowing. “The entire point of this exercise is to distribute food based on need. Dividing them too much insures that they’ll be insufficient nourishment for everyone here, rather than a sufficient amount for the most vulnerable.”
“Maybe,” shrugged Sonata. “But I bet they’ll be fine.”
Lex scowled, clearly disapproving of her laid-back attitude. “Based on what, exactly?”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “Based on the fact that I know what they know.”
“Which is?”
She shook her head slightly as she closed the short distance between them, nuzzling him. “That they’ve got someone here who’ll do everything in his power – which is, like, a lot – to make sure that they’re taken care of.” Ending that with a wink, she headed back to deal with the other ponies in line, tossing one last comment over her shoulder.
“I, I shouldn’t,” murmured the earth mare weakly, looking at the cabbage Sonata was holding out to her with an expression of trepidation. “There are so many other hungry ponies here…”
“Snap, you need to eat something,” insisted the earth stallion beside her.
It wasn’t hard to see what made him say that. The mare was leaning against him, not so much in a gesture of intimacy, but because she didn’t look like she’d be able to stand otherwise. She was painfully thin, and Sonata was almost sure she could see the other mare’s ribs under her coat, which was notably sparse. Even so, the mare made no move to accept the food she was being offered, instead glancing at the stallion propping her up. “I ate at the banquet Mr. Legis made for us two days ago,” she pointed out, though her tone of voice made it sound like she was confessing something shameful.
“You had a carrot and half of a bowl of yogurt, and I saw you throwing it up later!” The stallion’s voice was tense, making the words come out harshly, but to Sonata it was very obvious that he was worried rather than angry.
The mare flinched, looking at the ground. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, sounding like she was about to cry. “I just couldn’t stop thinking that every bite I took was taking food out of somepony else’s mouth. And with how bad Mr. Legis injured himself to make all of it for us, I felt so guilty…”
“He made that food for you too, Snap. You didn’t need to give it away to other people,” insisted the stallion, and the expression on his face told Sonata that he’d had this conversation – or one just like it – with her more than once. “There’s no reason to feel bad, so please…I’m begging you, just eat the cabbage, okay?”
But the mare, Snap, only seemed to wither under her companion’s prodding. “Maybe we could just carry it around for a while, in case we see someone else who needs it more than me?”
That was all Sonata could take, turning slightly and glancing back at where Lex was still scribbling on his clipboard as she whispered. “You heard all that, right? Can I do my thing?”
She got her answer a moment later, and she looked back at the couple. “Listen, um, Snap, was it?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” cringed the earth mare. “I’m Snaptastic. I already knew your name, so I didn’t think to offer mine.”
“Aw, it’s okay.” Despite the starving pony in front of her, Sonata couldn’t help but grin, taking it as a compliment that the other mare had known who she was. Yep, we’re totes hitting the big time now! she cheered internally before getting back to business. “So listen, your boyfriend is pretty clearly totes worried about you…”
Both ponies cringed at that. “Um, Daybright is my cousin,” offered Snaptastic awkwardly.
Sonata laughed. “Oh wow! Oops! Like, major fox paw on my part!” But the admission didn’t dispel the awkwardness like she’d intended, as the pair simply glanced at each other in confusion, causing Sonata to tilt her head questioningly. “What? What’d I say?”
“Faux pas, Sonata,” called Nosey from where she was still clinging to Lex. “It’s pronounced ‘faux pas.’”
“Really? That doesn’t sound right.” She frowned for a moment, then shrugged it off as she turned back to Snaptastic. “Anyway, how long has it been since you’ve eaten? I mean, like, for realsies eaten?”
The other mare seemed uncomfortable with the question, giving a weak twitch that might have been a fidget. “I don’t know,” she muttered evasively.
“Nine days,” interjected Daybright. “And that was only because I said I’d throw my food away if she didn’t eat anything.”
That was enough for Sonata to glance back at Lex, who nodded at her. Satisfied, she turned back to Snaptastic, holding up the cabbage. “Aw, that’s no good! After that long, you must be totes starving!” Without waiting for a reply, she kept going, added a slight melody to her words. “You shouldn’t waste it, so why not taste it? It’s gonna taste so good, I’d bet you’d enjoy the flavor. I really think you should, you’d be doing us a favor.”
It was only just barely singing, but it was just enough for her to work magic into her words, letting her weave magic into the lyrics, laying a suggestion on Snaptastic to put whatever was bothering her aside and eat the cabbage. As she felt the spell settle into place, she let the song end and gave her an expectant look. “So, whaddaya say?”
Snap hesitated, before swallowing nervously and reaching out to fumble for the cabbage. “I…I guess a little wouldn’t hurt.” Tentatively, she brought it to her lips and bit off a leaf, chewing it slowly. Daybright looked shocked, but his face broke into a smile immediately, helping her to hold the vegetable steady as she went back for a second bite.
“There we go!” beamed Sonata. Not waiting around to watch the other mare eat, she waved to the pair as she turned and made her way back to Lex. He wasn’t that far, being only a stone’s throw away, but she still wiped her foreleg across her brow in an exaggerated manner as she reached him. “Whew! The last one’s always the hardest, huh?” she asked, nodding at the empty wagons and bags scattered about.
When all she got was a noncommittal grunt from him as he kept his eyes on his clipboard, the pencil still scratching away, she changed the subject. “So, the train looks closer now.”
But Lex didn’t respond. Instead, it was Nosey who answered. “He said it was about an hour away, but that was a few minutes ago.” She shifted her weight slightly, as though she was about to separate from Lex’s side, but seemed to change her mind at the last instance.
That was enough to give Sonata an idea, smiling at Nosey. “Hey, you want me to use my magic to calm you down again?”
“Huh?” Nosey blinked, and Sonata had the satisfaction of seeing Lex’s writing come to a sudden halt, his eyes now peering at her instead of whatever he’d been writing.
That’s right, look at me! “Well, I mean, you’re still all over Lex because you’re freaked out about what happened, right? I’m sure that’s gotta be crimping your style, you know?” She waved a hoof at the camp. “Everypony’s excited, big event happening. You must be dying to get out there and interview some people, right?”
But rather than seeming excited at the prospect, Nosey blanched. “Um…I don’t-”
“It’s a good idea,” interjected Lex, his pencil resuming its writing. “You should use this as an opportunity to try and recover from what you’ve been through.”
“Ah…yeah. Of course.” Puffing herself up, Nosey plastered a grin on her face. “I was just going to say, ‘I don’t see why not.’ Hit me.”
Grinning, Sonata sang a quick ditty, and a moment later Nosey was walking away from them. Sonata watched her go, waving when the blonde mare paused and glanced back at them, and after a moment Nosey disappeared into the crowd. Sighing in relief, Sonata moved into the space her friend had vacated, snuggling up against Lex. She could have just taken the other side of him, of course, but this was better; now Nosey could get back to being her old self and she got Lex all to herself again! “So, what’cha workin’ on?”
“I’m diagramming some initial hypotheses for transforming Aria into a pony.”
Sonata couldn’t help but fold her ears back at that. First Nosey, now Aria? You were just hugging me and saying how worried you were if I was okay a little while ago! Why am I old news all of a sudden?! Unable to help herself, she didn't think before she spoke, saying something she knew would get a rise out of him. “So…you seem to be cool with all sorts of brain-twisting magic lately. What’s up with that?”
Again, Lex’s writing came to a complete halt, and he slowly turned his head to look at her. “What?”
The warning tone in his voice was audible, and Sonata knew she was heading toward another fight, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “I’m just sayin’. I mean, you know I enchanted those farmers I met with-”
“In order to facilitate the fair and peaceful purchase of excess food in their possession so as to secure the health and safety of everypony here, when they wouldn’t otherwise have done business with you.”
“And then I heard you totes made Spit Polish into some sort of special-needs pony.”
“Which in no way abrogated his free will or personal identity. The impediments I placed on his cognitive abilities are the mental equivalent of shackling his ankles; they diminish the peak ability that his mind is capable of performing at, but do not create any alterations to its substance.”
“Plus you were fine with me using magic on Snaptastic to get her to eat just now.”
“Of course I was,” snorted Lex peevishly, keeping his voice low. “Her refusal to nourish herself, even when there were sufficient provisions for everypony, was completely lacking in a rational basis and had reached the point of putting her health at risk. Corrective action was necessary, and the invasive nature of having your magic plant a thought in her head was counterbalanced by the overall chance of success as well as the negligible time requi-”
“Also, Nosey-”
He gave her a flat look then, clearly annoyed with this entire conversation. “You asked her before you did that, and she provided you with informed consent. That obviates any sort of moral objection on my part.” He paused for a moment, tilting his head as he regarded her with a frown. “Does that answer your question in a comprehensible manner?”
Huffing, Sonata tossed her mane from one shoulder to the other. “Oh yeah, that’s totes reprehensible.”
“Comprehensib-” His correction was cut off as the train whistle rang out again, and he glanced behind him for a moment before turning back to her. “We need to make some preparations before that arrives here.”
Sonata’s ears perked up. “We?”
He frowned at her again, clearly not understanding why she focused on that particular word. “You and me. Aria’s best kept inside the train station where her unpalatable demeanor won’t be an issue if whoever’s on that train isn’t hostile, while still being a nearby auxiliary force if they are. Severance will obey whatever commands I give it. Everypony else will need to be managed one way or another, so that just leaves the two of us to coordinate our actions.” He paused, then added, “You are my spokespony, after all.”
“I…yeah, I am.” She suddenly felt as dumb as her sisters always told her she was. Lex wasn’t trying to ignore her, he was just acting like he always did: moving from one issue to the next and losing sight of everything else. The problem was that all of a sudden her sister and her bestie were crowding him all the time. Even if he didn't notice, it was pretty upsetting. It was like making a really nice sandwich for yourself for lunch, and then seeing someone else grabbing it and acting like they were about to take a bite out of it.
"Sonata?"
"Huh?! Yeah! I'm paying attention!"
He gave her a long look, clearly not convinced, but pointed away from the camp. "I said, we need to retrieve those gemstones that Garden Gate lost while she was fighting. If whoever's on that train is hostile, they'll be helpful."
"Got it." She smiled, still feeling a little bad about how she'd acted as she helped lead him back to last night's battlefield. She'd need to have a talk with Nosey after the stuff with the train was taken care of. As bad as she felt, having her sleeping in the same tent as them and leaning on him all the time had to stop.
By the time the train arrived, everypony had gathered around the station in anticipation.
The bulk of the crowd had split into two groups, one on either side of the building, watching in nervous excitement as the train slowly pulled into the station. The remaining few were perched on the roof of the place, having flown or climbed up to gain a better vantage point for what was about to happen. Even Aria’s face could be glimpsed peering out from between the closed shutters in the station’s windows.
The one place that wasn’t occupied was the platform out in front, where passengers would normally embark or disembark from the train itself. By Lex’s order, that had remained clear except for himself and Sonata, the two of them standing in the center of the open space. Both were silent as the train came to a stop in front of them, steam hissing as it was released from the engine.
A moment later the door to the engine car swung open, and Lex tensed. Although he knew that it was unlikely that whoever was operating the train was hostile – trains were the major mode of inter-city transit in Equestria, which meant that it was more than likely other ponies on board – there had been too many unpleasant surprises in the last few days for him to take anything for granted. After all, Xiriel had been involved with the trains ceasing to come to Vanhoover in the first place, and the exploding scroll had made it quite clear that just because the devil was dead didn’t mean that its schemes were undone.
To that end, Lex had initially tried to order everypony to stay far away from the train when it arrived. But that had proven to be impossible to do; despite it being a complete assumption on their part, everypony was thoroughly convinced that the train’s arrival could only be a good thing. More than that, Sonata had intervened when he’d tried to press the point, all but begging him not to waste the goodwill he had (to hear her tell it) finally acquired from everypony. Instead, she’d convinced everypony to hang back while the two of them received whoever was on board, an alteration to his order that he’d reluctantly signed off on.
Even so, Lex had taken as many precautions as reasonably could. He’d worked out with Sonata ahead of time that, in the event of a battle breaking out, she’d use her magic to enchant the crowd and get them to retreat in an orderly fashion without leaving anypony behind. Likewise, he’d conferred with Aria so that she’d lash out from her position of concealment inside the station – hopefully catching any potential enemies by surprise – if things went bad. For some reason, that had made Sonata grumble…
As for himself, he’d placed his gemstones in orbit around himself, taking preemptive advantage of their enhancements. Unfortunately, that was the only preparation he’d been able to make. Although he’d managed to renew a few of his defensive spells earlier in the day, he hadn’t cast them; their limited duration meant that using them prior to an immediate outbreak of hostilities would run the risk of them expiring when he needed them most. Likewise, he’d left Severance on his back instead of keeping it readied, aware that a drawn weapon was itself an act of aggression that justified attacking in retaliation. If whoever was on that train wasn’t hostile, there was no need to antagonize them.
His thoughts were drawn back to the present as a unicorn mare with a blue coat and blonde mane and tail exited the engine car. “Alright!” she bellowed. “You guys had better-” Her voice caught in her throat as she looked at Lex, eyebrows rising as she took in his appearance before glancing at Sonata, then at everypony gathered around the station. “…the heck’re you all supposed to be?” Sonata opened her mouth to respond, but the other mare didn’t give her a chance, shaking her head. “No, you know what? I don’t care. You just better be ready to buy all this stuff!” She jerked her head back at the train. “It needs to be sold, and I’m not taking no for an answer!”
Sonata blinked, quite clearly taken off-guard by the belligerent mare. “Uh, what stuff?” Beside her, Lex was silent, having activated his circlet to let him see into the magical spectrum. So far so good; there were no unusual auras on the newcomer.
“I’ll tell you what stuff!” The blue mare’s horn glowed as she took out a shipping manifest, waving it at Sonata aggressively. “Eggs! Milk! Oats! Honey! Corn! Peanuts! And a lot of other things too!” She stomped a hoof on the ground. “We’ve been trying to get this here for over a month, and every time we tried something-” But she didn’t get to finish as everypony suddenly started cheering, stomping their hooves and prancing in place with joy. The sight left her looking around, a dumbfounded expression on her face. “Huh…okay then.”
“That’s good news, right?” came a new voice as an earth stallion timidly peeked out from the engine. But he’d barely gotten the words out when he looked at Lex and Sonata, his jaw dropping even as his eyes widened. “You’re-”
Sonata looked only a little less surprised. “Oh my gosh! You’re the guy we met when we were going to Tall Tale! Ticket Scrub!”
“Uh…it’s, um, Ticket St-”
“Nopony cares,” interrupted Lex irritably, also remembering the annoying train attendant. But there were more important things to focus on, and Lex was already thinking of them as he turned to Sonata. “Have the money I retrieved from Vanhoover brought here.”
“Gotcha!” nodded Sonata, turning toward the crowd to find some volunteers. But she’d barely taken a step before she turned back around. “Wait, what’re you going to do?”
“I’ll inspect the train,” answered Lex. “I want to make sure everything is what it seems like before we start unloading its cargo.”
The words seemed to snap the blue mare out of her surprise at the cheering crowd, and she turned to Lex with a scowl. “Listen buster, I don’t know who you think you are, but-”
“Um, Coal Hopper, can I talk to you for a moment?” interrupted Ticket Stub nervously. Coal Hopper looked ready to argue, but Ticket Stub managed to usher her back toward the engine, where he started talking to her in low tones.
Sonata didn’t miss her opportunity, glancing back at Lex. “Okay, awesome. While they’re doing their thing, I’m gonna go find some ponies to bring all those coins here, and as soon as I do I’ll wait for them right here with you. So don’t go inspecting without me, ‘kay?” She didn’t wait for a reply as she dashed off towards the edge of the platform. “Hey guys! Who wants to do everypony a solid?”
Lex watched her go, fighting the urge to sigh in relief. A train full of food was a welcome change from just how calamitous the last few days had been, particularly since it didn’t seem to be accompanied by any problems or hardships that needed to be resolved. Hopefully that would remain the case for the foreseeable future…
“This isn’t enough.”
Outwardly, Lex showed no reaction to Coal Hopper’s announcement, fighting down another sigh, this time of exasperation. But the unicorn mare seemed to take his lack of a response as some sort of slight, frowning deeper. “It’s not even close to enough,” she reiterated, gesturing to the large pile of bits that had been stacked nearby. “What you have here is enough for maybe one car’s worth of food, but that’s it. All of the other cars still have to be paid for.”
Sonata sent a worried glance at Lex. They’d just toured each and every one of the train cars at his insistence, accompanied by a visibly-nervous Ticket Stub, while Coal Hopper had stayed behind to start counting the bits that several of the camp ponies were bringing onto the platform. The inspection had gone well enough, with Lex staring at the contents of each car for a little while before declaring them to be fine (she’d eventually asked him, via his whisper-spell, what he was doing, with him saying that he was checking them for unusual magic or possible poisons).
The only snag had been when they’d found four ponies tied up in the caboose. That had almost turned into a thing, before Ticket Stub had hastily explained that they were a group of ponies who had tried to stop the train at someplace called Windigo Way, and who had eventually had to be forcibly subdued when they’d refused to listen to reason. The four ponies themselves had spoken up at that point, swearing that they hadn’t been in control of themselves, and that they’d finally snapped out of it sometime yesterday. To Sonata’s mild surprise, Lex had believed them, though she’d started to understand why when they’d said that they’d lost control of themselves after meeting somepony who matched Block Party’s description. Since they didn’t look enchanted to Sonata, and Lex said he didn’t see any lingering magic on them, they’d decided to release the four over Ticket Stub’s uneasy protests.
Everything, in other words, had been going great for a change. Except now Coal Hopper was being a big ol’ Scrooge about things. That was enough to make Sonata uneasy, since she was sure there was no way Lex would let all this food go. “Listen,” she began, hoping to head off a fight before it started. “There’s a lot of really hungry ponies out there-”
“And there’s going to be a lot of really poor ponies at home if we don’t get paid for this,” growled Coal Hopper.
That was enough to make Ticket Stub frown. “That’s a little cold, don’t you think? Miss Dusk was telling me about what’s been going on here while Mister Legis was inspecting the cargo, and it sounds like everypony’s had a really hard time.” Of course, it had been obvious that she was talking up her boyfriend, going on about sea monsters and zombie armies and all sorts of unbelievable things, but just one glance at the crowd of dirty, ragged-looking ponies gathered outside, along with the torn and filthy tent-city behind them, made it clear that something awful had happened here.
“Look, I’m not saying we won’t sell them the stuff,” protested Coal Hopper. “I’m just saying that we can’t walk away empty-hoofed.” She turned back to glare at Lex, since he was obviously the guy in charge here, even if his red horn and wire-wrapped hoof and weird shadow and especially those trick gems flying around him made him look like he was in a weird Nightmare Night getup. “What do you plan on doing about this?”
Lex didn’t hesitate before replying. “Start unloading the food immediately.”
Coal Hopper looked ready to explode. “Are you kidding-”
But Lex wasn’t interested in her temper tantrum, turning to Sonata. “Begin distributing it among the camp ponies. Make sure to only pass out modest portions. This isn’t like what I conjured earlier; this food needs to be carefully rationed. It’s not going to just sustain everypony here; it’s also going to be how we start getting the farmers in the surrounding villages to begin engaging in commerce again.”
“We need to engage in commerce!” howled Coal Hopper indignantly. “You can’t just-”
“Shut. Up.” Lex hissed the words softly, but his eyes changed colors as he did, sending a green-and-purple glare at Coal Hopper, stopping the mare in her tracks. Seeing that she’d quieted down, Lex’s eyes returned to their normal color a moment later. “While the cargo is being unloaded, I’ll retrieve funds sufficient to pay for everything. You’ll have them before the end of the day.”
“Oh… Well, you should have said that before.” Coal Hopper’s response lacked her usual fire, trying to fight down the sudden fear that had gripped her just then. Up until right then, that Lex guy had just looked outlandish. But when he’d rebuked her, her perception of him had changed. All of a sudden his ornamentations and oddities hadn’t looked bizarre anymore; they’d looked like an intimidating panoply of magical might, the sort of thing that only a powerful wizard could wear so casually. His dour voice had suddenly been brimming with strength, as though just the sound of it could flatten her where she stood. And his eyes…
Coal Hopper knew that she was a tough mare. She’d grown up with four older brothers who had seen to that. But the way Lex’s eyes had started to glow when he’d glared at her had been more than enough to make it plain that she did not want to try his patience. As such, it was only after he’d turned away from her that she managed to ask through suddenly-dry lips, “Where are you going to get the money?”
Lex was already leaving the platform, heading westward and not bothering to glance back as he said a single word in reply.
“Take everything in here,” ordered Lex. “Don’t leave a single coin behind.”
The ponies behind him responded with a chorus of affirmative statements, immediately moving around him and heading into the vault. Even so, they looked nervous…though whether it was because of their surroundings or because of his being in shadow-form – hovering in the air as nothing but a mass of darkness with a pair of glowing green-and-purple eyes – was unclear. But the important thing is that they’re here at all, he knew.
When he’d instructed Sonata to ask for volunteers to go into Vanhoover with him, he’d expected very little in the way of results. After all, it was common knowledge among the camp ponies that the last group he’d sent into the city had died there. Plus, the food was already starting to be unloaded and passed out. As such, his surprise had been complete when several dozen ponies, more than fifty in all, had stepped forward, offering their services. It had almost been enough to make him wonder if Sonata had enchanted them, but she’d had a much simpler explanation: “they’re going because I told them that you’d be going with them.”
Her hypothesis had left him feeling awkward, not sure if she was teasing him or being genuine. But at least he’d been able to keep his discomfort from showing, having changed into a shadow as soon as they’d set out. Given that simply going from one train car to the next while he’d checked their contents had left his muscles sore and aching, there was simply no other way for him to make the trek through the city than turning incorporeal.
Fortunately, the volunteers hadn’t been too off-put by his bodiless form, and they’d set off. Lex had them enter the city in a formation similar to when he’d left it a few days ago: with himself at the head of the group and Severance bringing up the rear. He’d almost left the scythe behind, but had reluctantly decided that there was more chance of something going wrong in the city than with the train. Even then, Lex had put caution first and foremost, telling the volunteers to remain close together and stay silent unless it was to bring something to his attention. The Night Mare might have said that all of the city’s ghouls had been in the attack on the camp, but Lex wasn’t willing to trust everypony’s life to her word.
Instead, he’d focused on logistics. He’d questioned several members of the group about the layout of the city, outlining the locations he wanted to head for. By the time they’d reached the city proper, he’d had a general layout of their intended route.
Despite the fact that the bank was closer, Lex had left it for last. With the weight of the coinage they’d need and no transportation immediately available, going there first would have been a waste of time. Instead, he’d directed them to a local hardware store, grabbing what few transportation devices – wagons, wheelbarrows, shopping carts, and even hoof trucks – they could find along the way. Fortunately, the store had plenty of shovels left; digging, unsurprisingly, hadn’t been a high priority for the ponies that hadn’t been able to leave. Several ponies had wanted to grab other supplies as well, and Lex had allowed it; there’d be a need for more work in the future, and the fewer trips they needed to make the better.
The next stop, a nearby hospital, had been a much more tense affair. Unlike the hardware store, the hospital was spread out across several buildings, all of which were divided into numerous small rooms that made it very easy for someone to hide in. Lex’s solution had been to split their group into two, leaving half of them behind to stand guard over what they’d already acquired with Severance to guard them while he led the other half in a quick sweep of the place, targeting any salvageable supplies. Miraculously, they’d managed to find several caches of the drugs that House Call had outlined for him, not to mention numerous hospital beds that – thanks to their wheels – alleviated all of their transportation problems.
The sun had been nearing the horizon by the time they’d made it to the bank, and although there’d been no surprises so far – the worst that had happened had been a false alarm during their passage through the hospital when one of the volunteers had caught sight of an anatomy dummy through a doorway and screamed – Lex still had no desire to keep everypony in the city after dark. Instead, he’d had the group take the same formation that they’d used for the hospital, with half of the volunteers and Severance remaining in the lobby of the bank with what they’d already salvaged and keep watch while the others went with him to look at the vault. Fortunately, that hadn’t been a problem, since Severance had told him ahead of time about the room right above it with the hole in the floor…
“And another one,” grunted a pegasus stallion as he flew back up with a bag of bits, passing it off to a waiting earth mare before wiping his forehead. “These things aren’t heavy, but there’re a lot of them.”
“Just be glad someone cut the floor open,” replied the earth mare as she tossed the bag on her back. “I wouldn’t want to go traipsing around in the basement to get there.” The coins in the bag clinked slightly as she shuddered at the thought.
“Yeah, it’s pretty weird someone’d want to rob this place in the middle of a disaster, but we got lucky-”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” interrupted Lex, causing both ponies to freeze in mid-motion. “This was done by the last group of ponies that came here…that I sent here.”
The pegasus stallion blanched. “Ah…I didn’t mean to-, we just heard that they didn’t come back. I didn’t know this was them…”
Lex didn’t respond, silently staring at the hole in the floor, and the two ponies glanced at each other. Licking her lips, the earth mare spoke up. “You shouldn’t blame yourself,” she ventured tentatively. “They volunteered, right? Just like us. I’m sure they knew the risks.”
“They didn’t know the risks,” replied Lex bitterly, not bothering to look at her. Of course they hadn’t known the risks; he hadn’t known the risks, having overlooked numerous clues as to Xiriel’s presence until it was too late to save those five. And I can’t take the chance that will happen again if we waste too much time here, he berated himself silently, already regretting his having let his recriminations slow things down. “Get back to work,” he ordered gruffly. The earth mare looked like she wanted to protest, but her partner stopped her, shaking his head silently before flying back down into the hole. The mare wavered for a moment, then left, heading back toward the front of the building to drop the bag of bits off with the others.
Lex was grateful that she hadn’t tried to make further conversation. They needed to hurry up and get out of here, and not just because of the late light. He was running low on the dark magic that kept him in this form.
Checking the train cars had taken up more energy than he’d thought it would. While it was easy enough to use his circlet to look into the magical spectrum for each car – unlike the small reservoir of magical power that it housed, its ability to let him see thaumaturgic energy could be invoked without limit – checking each car’s foodstuffs for poison was considerably more difficult. For that, he’d needed to dip into his dark magic, using its power to enhance his senses to such a degree that he could detect even a trace scent of foreign substances. By itself, that was a comparatively minor use of his power, one that didn’t require much energy to invoke. The problem was that heightening a sense that much could only be sustained for a few seconds, and there were quite a few cars on that train. The end result was that he’d needed to utilize that power again and again, each time expending dark magic to do it.
Even then, he’d had plenty left over when they’d headed into the city. But that had been a few hours ago, and while the dark magic expenditure for remaining in shadow form wasn’t great, it wasn’t inconsiderable either. Now, several hours after they’d come here, he could feel that he was running low. An hour left, he decided silently. Maybe less. But they were almost done here. The ponies cleaning out the vault were working quickly, and at their current pace they should be able to just make it back to the camp before he had to change back. Then he’d be able to settle accounts with Coal Hopper, and move on to the next issue at hoof.
He waited impatiently as the ponies continued working, and it took only a short time before the pegasus stallion from earlier gave Lex a nod. “That’s the last of it.”
Lex gave a perfunctory glance at the interior of the vault, taking in the empty shelves, and was about to tell the other pony to rejoin the others when something caught his eye. “Take the ledger as well.”
The other stallion blinked. “Huh? Oh. You mean that book by the door?”
“Obviously.” Only the fact that he didn’t have teeth at the moment prevented Lex from gritting them, but he let go of his irritation a moment later. That book was doubtlessly a record of how much money was here and who it belonged to, which would be useful later. Although he hadn’t formally founded his own state yet, there was no reason not to keep track of the ponies whose money he’d needed to appropriate. Presuming that they were still alive, they’d likely need that money back to start rebuilding what they’d lost in the disaster. Of course, that would require that he find an alternate source of revenue in the meantime, which was why he’d wanted to send somepony to Las Pegasus, which Thermal Draft had volunteered to do…
Stopping himself before he could be overcome with regret again, Lex waited for the pegasus stallion to return with the ledger. “Now, we-”
“S-Sir!”
Lex turned around as another pony, a unicorn stallion this time, came bounding down the hall. “We’ve got trouble!”
Resisting the urge to swear, Lex rounded on the messenger. “What’s happened?!”
Out of breath, the unicorn pointed back the way he’d come. “We saw movement! Outside!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “Go rejoin the others in the lobby, now!” He didn’t wait for them to comply, immediately turning and heading in that direction by the most direct possible route, passing through several walls before emerging in the lobby of the bank, where the other volunteers were huddling around the items they’d scavenged, looking nervous. Turning his eyes to the front of the bank, Lex immediately peered out the broken windows, but only the trash-filled streets of Vanhoover – the shadows stretching and the buildings painted orange by the light of the setting sun – were visible, with no movement that he could see. Lex continued to peer outside for several seconds, but found himself hoping that maybe this was another false alarm, the result of nervousness and-
Then he saw something moving at the mouth of an alley several blocks down the street.
As he watched, several vaguely equinoid shapes emerged from the side-street and scurried closer to the bank, avoiding the fading sunlight and ducking behind cover wherever possible. This time Lex did curse softly, wishing that he had enough dark magic left to enhance his vision to make absolutely sure. But that was a minor problem; it was easy enough to guess what he was looking at.
“Your stallion had better come through with the bits,” muttered Coal Hopper as she siphoned off some milk from the tank car, filling the oral syringe that she’d been given.
“He will,” replied Sonata with an easy smile as she took the milk-filled implement from the other mare, walking over and handing it to a nearby filly that was cradling a baby as she waited. “Now, remember what Doctor House Call said, okay? You don’t need to press down on the end of this. Just let him drink from it like it was a bottle.”
“I will,” nodded Fiddlesticks as she carefully placed the blunt tip of the device in Tiddlywinks’ mouth. For a moment the toddler turned his head away from the foreign object, but a moment later he seemed to realize what it was, because he settled down and started drinking greedily, the milk in the syringe beginning to drain away. In less than a minute he’d emptied the whole thing, and Fiddlesticks had barely taken it out of his mouth when he let out an adorable little burp and closed his eyes. A moment later he was snoring, causing Sonata and Fiddlesticks to giggle and coo softly at the sight.
“Thank you.” Fiddlesticks whisper was quiet, but her smile was radiant as she looked at Sonata, before directing the grateful look toward Coal Hopper as well. The other mare managed to give her a pained smile in response, as though turning the corners of her lips up was difficult, and Fiddlesticks wandered away, gently rocking her little brother as she did.
Sonata waited for the filly to get safely out of earshot before looking back at Coal Hopper, speaking normally now that there was no chance of accidentally waking the baby. “You see now why Lex wanted you to start unloading everything now instead of waiting for him to get back?” She tried not to sound smug as she said it, but she couldn’t help herself. Coal Hopper had complained bitterly the entire time that she and the rest of the train crew had started unloading everything, and even though those complaints had grown fewer and fewer as she’d seen numerous needy ponies filling their bellies, she hadn’t completely ceased her grumbling. Sonata could tell that the grouchy mare was just keeping up appearances by that point, but she couldn’t resist rubbing it in a little bit.
“Hmph.” Coal Hopper’s response was to pout so deeply that it was almost a sulk. She held that expression for several long seconds before she couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “It’s not like we would’ve just left or anything if they couldn’t pay,” she mumbled, her expression softening. “It’s just that a lot of ponies back home are counting on us.”
That was good enough for Sonata, who put a friendly hoof on the other mare’s shoulder. “I know. And Lex knows too. That’s why he didn’t do anything to make sure you guys couldn’t leave before he went into Vanhoover.” She felt, like, ninety percent sure of that.
That was enough to make Coal Hopper’s frown return, glancing at Sonata. “How…” She trailed off as she remembered the dark look Lex had given her when she’d objected to unloading their cargo before he’d paid for it, causing the question to die on her lips. All of a sudden she didn’t want to know exactly how Lex would have forced them to stay.
Instead, she voiced a different question. “What happened here? I’d heard that Vanhoover was flooded during the elemental bleeds, but that was a while ago. Why does everypony look like they’ve been through a war zone?”
“Because they have. Some more than others.”
The voice wasn’t Sonata’s, and both mares glanced over at the newcomer. She was a unicorn like Coal Hopper, but taller and leaner, her grayish cerulean mane and tail contrasting sharply with her vermillion coat. Bandages were wrapped around her, the most prominent of which encircled her horn. The sight of her made Sonata falter for a moment, before plastering a smile on her face. “Hey, Garden.”
“Fencer,” she corrected with a shake of her head. “I’m still Fencer.”
“Okay,” muttered Sonata with a roll of her eyes. Although she knew that the mare in front of her had saved their lives last night, she couldn’t bring herself to feel completely at ease around her. The memory of how Fencer had coldly described crippling and abandoning Cozy’s husband was still fresh in her mind. But I guess I’m not the only one that’s true for, she decided, seeing the uncomfortable look on the other mare’s face.
Letting out a sigh, she decided to try and let bygones be bygones. “So,” she started, making herself adopt a friendly tone. “What’s up?”
Fencer shifted uneasily, seeming to find the ground rather interesting for a moment, before glancing at Coal Hopper awkwardly. The other mare caught the hint, and looked over at Sonata. “I’m gonna go check in with Ticket Stub. It’s been a little while, so I’m sure he’s found something else to lose his cool over by now.” She started walking before she’d finished speaking, stepping into one of the train cars and vanishing from sight.
The abrupt departure left Sonata slightly perplexed, turning her gaze back to Fencer. “Okaaay…”
Wrenching her eyes up so that they met Sonata’s, Fencer licked her lips before she started speaking. “Listen…I wanted to talk to you…”
That was enough to earn a confused blink from Sonata. “For realsies? How come?” She couldn’t imagine what Fencer wanted to talk to her about, unless… Her eyes widened as it all suddenly made sense. “Oh! Wait, I totes get it now!”
Now it was Fencer’s turn to blink. “You do?”
“Yeah…” Sonata’s face turned solemn then, giving a world-weary sigh before finding it within herself to continue. “And I’m, like, totes sorry to say…no.”
Fencer’s ears folded back as she cringed a little. “No?”
“No.” Sonata shook her head sadly. “There’s no fruit punch on the train.”
Seeing Fencer's jaw fall open at that, she nodded in commiseration. “There aren’t even any ingredients to make some. No orange juice, no pineapple juice, no cranberry juice, no grape juice. Though, pro tip: a little bit of grape juice goes a long way.”
A snicker escaped Fencer then, one hoof coming up to cover her mouth. “N-no, Sonata. That’s not what I was going to say.”
“For realsies?” Sonata’s eyebrows raised, having a hard time believing that. It was the very first thing I asked about when we started unpacking the train. “Then, what?”
Fencer’s mirth faded away, but her previous discomfort didn’t return, a look of resolve covering her features instead. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
That hadn’t been what Sonata had expected. “You’re…wait, to me?” Shouldn’t she be saying that to someone else?
But Fencer seemed to understand why she was confused. “I know there are ponies I did worse things to, but Lex isn’t here right now, and I can’t find Comfy Cozy…” She trailed off slightly then, but brought herself back to the topic at hoof. “But they’re not the only ones I owe an apology to.” She put a hoof over her chest as she gave Sonata an earnest look. “I wasn’t very nice to you, back at the warehouse. You were asking me about what happened…about what I’d done to Cozy’s husband, and I treated you like you were my enemy. I knew you were only asking because Lex asked you to, because he wanted to go save him, but I was so wrapped up in not feeling guilty about all the terrible things that I did…” She stopped then, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath before continuing. “I’m so sorry for how I acted back then.”
Unable to keep herself from smiling, Sonata waved a hoof. “Aw, don’t worry about it. My sisters used to be, like, a zillion times worse every single day. I wasn’t even…well, no, I was kinda upset, but it’s all good now!”
“Really?”
“Totes!” Sonata beamed at her then, holding out a hoof. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re A-okay in my book! Plus, you know, the whole ‘running out there and saving everyone’s lives’ thing last night really helped too, even if I was kinda pumping you up with my magic. Also, FYI, Aria was totes nowhere near as cool as you were when she tried the same thing later on.”
Fencer’s smile was small, but genuine. “Thanks.” Reaching out, she touched her hoof to Sonata’s, the two connecting with a soft “clop.” She held the gesture for just a moment before lowering her foreleg, glancing around. “Okay, well…Lex still isn’t back yet, so I don’t suppose you happen to know where Cozy is?”
Grimacing a bit, Sonata shook her head. “I saw her and Aisle in the food line a little while ago, but I think they went to one of the other cars.” For which she’d been grateful, wanting nothing to do with the crystal mare. “You want my two cents-, er, bits. Whatever. She doesn’t deserve an apology.”
Fencer winced slightly at that, her ears flickering. “I killed her husband, Sonata. If I don’t try to make amends for that, or at least tell her how sorry I am, I’ll never get to be Garden Gate again.”
Sonata frowned at that, but didn’t argue. “Yeah, well…you’re going to have to look around I guess, ‘cuz I don’t see her.” She paused to glance to the west, where the sun was almost touching the horizon. “But Lex should be back pretty soon, I bet. He totes wouldn’t want to stay in Vanhoover any longer than-, wait, I think I see something!”
She apparently wasn’t the only one, as several ponies were raising their voices and pointing toward Vanhoover. Squinting against the remaining sunlight, Sonata peered toward the city. There was a mass of ponies headed toward them…and above them, just barely visible at this distance, was an inky black mass. “Lex!”
Abandoning the train, Sonata ran toward the other side of the camp, relief that everything had gone okay mixing with eagerness to see her boyfriend again. In a minute, she was almost at the body-strewn battlefield that was the sight of last night’s debacle. Rearing up on her hind legs, she waved at the returning ponies, barely cognizant of the sound of hooves from behind her as the camp ponies wandered closer, though still keeping a distance away from her (or perhaps from the gory remnants of the ghouls).
But a few minutes later, as the returning ponies grew close enough for their details to be visible, Sonata’s waving foreleg stopped in mid-motion, a confused frown marring her face. Behind her, whispers broke out among the camp ponies, not sure what to make of what they were seeing. Blinking, Sonata rubbed her eyes to make sure that they weren’t playing tricks on her, but when she looked again the sight remained the same.
The ponies in front of the returning group were pushing beds on wheels…and on them were a bunch of ragged-looking ponies that didn’t look familiar at all.
Above them, the black shadow that was Lex surged ahead, moving closer to the ground as it outpaced the group. “Sonata, fetch the doctors!” he ordered as he closed the distance between them. He turned back into a pony a moment later, and almost stumbled, Sonata rushing forward to catch him. Even then, he didn’t cease issuing commands. “Tell them we’ve retrieved the drugs they needed, but several of these ponies are in critical condition, and need immediate-”
“Whoa, whoa, slow down!” urged Sonata. “What happened?! Were you guys attacked?”
“The doctors, Sonata!”
Knowing that she wouldn’t get any more out of him before she did what he said, she turned around and yelled for the crowd to get the medical ponies. With that done, she turned her attention back to Lex. “What was it? More ghouls?”
“Just the opposite,” replied Lex tensely. “More survivors.”
“Okay, so that’s probably enough of an encore for today,” announced Sonata as she helped Lex back toward the camp.
“There’s still more that needs to be done,” he muttered obstinately. He’d meant for the rebuke to come out sharper, but hadn’t been able to muster up the energy. That was little surprise, considering that he was once again leaning heavily on Sonata just to walk.
“Oh come on, Lex. You already led a bunch of ponies back into Vanhoover, got a motherlode of supplies which this place needed super badly, and rescued a bunch of ponies that were still there! Plus, you know, buying all the food on that big honkin’ train. Which, FYI, is the first time we’ve had anything to do with a train that didn’t come back to bite us. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that all that’s no ‘fight off an army of ghouls,’ but it’s still, like, more than enough for one day. Getting everypony to start working on a new project, even if it is just digging a big hole, is a teensy bit overkill, don’cha think?”
Lex’s only response was to sigh.
After covertly observing the suspicious figures he’d seen outside the bank and discovering that they were another band of survivors, apparently drawn by the spectacle of so many ponies openly walking the streets of the city, Lex had elected to send a small contingent of his band out to meet them while he watched from concealment. Given how poorly Aisle, Cloudbank, and Cozy had reacted when they’d caught sight of his shadow-form in their first meeting, Lex knew better than to introduce himself to another group of survivors that way. It had proven to be a wise decision, as the half-dead ponies had been suspicious of the news that the blockade around the city had been lifted, to say nothing of their disbelief that the ghouls had all been wiped out.
In the end, it had been the news that an entire train’s worth of food had been delivered, and was being passed out to everypony even as they spoke, that had convinced the survivors to take a chance on them. But rather than the small group of three that had come to investigate what was going on, they had admitted that they were scouting for a band of almost three dozen ponies hidden in a nearby mattress store. The large number of survivors all in one place had surprised Lex when he’d heard it, but only until he saw the store in question.
The place had been converted into a fortress. Every door was not only boarded up, but locked with the keyholes deliberately jammed (and, as he’d seen later, barricaded from the inside). The windows had been in much the same condition. Anything that could possibly be used to climb the building – drainpipes, gutters, and even most of the windowsills – had been torn off the sides, and the roof access door had been given the same treatment as all the other doors, but also with what looked like glue poured between the door and the frame. The only way in or out had been via a single window on the third floor, which had its glass broken out but had been subsequently sealed by having a mattress far too large for the window frame shoved through it. It had taken significant effort on the part of three ponies to dislodge that mattress from the window before lowering a ladder when the scouting team came back, silently signaling their presence to some unseen watcher in the building. Despite himself, Lex had been mildly impressed; for anyone without his level of magical capability, getting in there would have been extremely difficult.
His appreciation for the fortifications had fallen away when he’d seen the state of the ponies inside, however.
Sprawled across filthy mattresses, huddled in dark corners, or simply sitting and staring blankly at the walls, most of the building’s occupants had looked more dead than alive. All of them had been painfully thin, several to the point of looking more like ghouls than living ponies. In fact, there had been a few that could very nearly have passed for being undead; only the lack of obviously-fatal wounds and the slow rise and fall of their chests had shown them to still be among the living…barely. Others were more active; from a dark corner in the ceiling, Lex had observed several coughing and hacking so heavily that it seemed like they were trying to expel their lungs, burying their faces in their hooves to try and stay quiet, doubtless to avoid attracting attention from any nearby monsters. The rest simply stayed still or shuffled about, listless and glassy-eyed. Even the return of the scouting party had attracted little attention except for a few inquisitive stares.
It had been at that point that Lex had realized the true nature of the building these ponies were in. They might have set it up as a fortress, but it had long since become their prison, and it wouldn’t be much longer before it became their tomb. Action needed to be taken immediately.
Fortunately, the members of his expedition that he’d sent had been admitted into the building shortly thereafter, explaining again that the city had been rescued. Lex had chosen that point to reveal himself, knowing that he’d need to soon, since his dark magic was already running out. To his mild surprise, his shadowy-form hadn’t been met with widespread panic; illness, injury, and apathy had left most of the ponies incapable of that level of activity. Most had simply whimpered or wept quietly, shaking in fear but otherwise unable to take action. Only the scouts – apparently the healthiest of the bunch – had needed to be talked down.
After that, it had been a matter of getting everypony out of there and bringing them back to the camp with them. Knocking down one of the sealed doors had been easy thanks to his magic, but only the fact that they’d acquired so many hospital beds earlier in the day had made it possible to transport everyone; over a third of the ponies there hadn’t been able to move under their own power. A few had become hysterical at the thought of going outside and needed to be forcefully taken. The others had trudged out willingly, albeit fearfully.
It had only been then – barely able to carry all the hardware, medicine, money, and injured ponies – that Lex had led everyone back to camp.
The first order of business had been to immediately hand the newly-found survivors and the medical supplies over to the doctors. The second had been to deposit the money they’d acquired on the train platform and tell Coal Hopper to figure out how much she was owed. The third had been to pass out the shovels that they’d acquired and start working on the mass grave for the ghouls.
Sonata had protested that last one, seeing that he was exhausted and telling him that it could wait until tomorrow, but Lex had refused. “It needs to happen today,” he’d insisted, “and it needs oversight to be sure it’s done properly.” He’d started to explain to her that excavation was a meticulous process, one with issues that ranged from where the displaced earth was put to methods of access for holes that were too deep to easily climb into and out of, when he’d immediately stopped himself, realizing to his shock that he was quoting his father. It had been unnerving enough, so soon after encountering those phantoms from his nightmares last night, that he’d allowed Sonata to lead him away from the dig site, letting the volunteers get to work on their own with Severance to guard them.
I’ll coordinate them tomorrow, he decided wearily. The initial stages of a dig were the easiest anyway. In the meantime… “Head for the train station,” he directed Sonata.
“Right-o!” she cheered as she turned toward the building. “We’ll find a nice spot in there, far away from Aria, and get you all tucked in nice and snug. I’ll get you some real food, and after you’ve eaten and slept, you’ll feel like a whole new pony!”
She continued on like that as they walked, but Lex wasn’t listening. Or rather, he wasn’t paying attention to the words she was using, instead focusing on the sound of her voice. It was the most beautiful part of her; more than her face, more than her mane, more than the curves of her body, just hearing her sent a warm feeling through him. Even when the content of her speech was asinine or flat-out nonsensical, the simple fact that he got to listen to her was pleasant in and of itself, especially when she said his name. He knew there was more that needed to be done, further tasks that required his attention, but just for right now, for this short walk back, he didn’t want to think about anything except her. Just her, and not old memories that he hated recalling…
They got back to the train station far too quickly, but he still felt a little better by the time they did.
“Okay!” announced Coal Hopper as they climbed onto the platform. “Now this’ll do it! You even had some extra here!” She pointed to a few sacks of bits that she’d set apart from the rest. “I stuck a copy of the manifest in one of the bags, and all of the food has been unloaded, so you’re all set.” She was moving as she spoke, turning and picking up one of the sacks of bits from the much larger pile in her telekinesis, levitating it over to another member of the train crew, who grabbed it and carried it inside the locomotive. “We’re gonna head out just as soon as we get this on board. If we keep the boiler going hot and go past the smaller towns without stopping, we can get to Canterlot in three days, and from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump back to the Crystal Empire!”
“Have a safe trip,” replied Sonata with a wave, already maneuvering Lex towards the station doors. “Here’s hoping you don’t run into any broken tracks or anythi-”
“No,” announced Lex suddenly, stopping in place before turning to look at Coal Hopper. “You can’t leave yet.”
The declaration was enough to make Coal Hopper freeze in place, a bag of bits held aloft in her aura. “What?”
“What she said,” interjected Sonata. “Why can’t they leave?”
“We just recovered a group of survivors from Vanhoover.” Lex kept his eyes on Coal Hopper as he spoke. “Several of them were in extremely poor health.” Certainly, using the weak healing spell that the Night Mare had given him hadn’t done anything for the two ponies he’d used it on. But then again, it was solely meant to deal with actual wounds, and those seemed to be less of an issue than disease and malnourishment. Even so, it was enough to make Lex wish that he’d had access to greater healing magic, or even that he’d bothered to study medicine in his youth instead of more conceptual disciplines. But while he was no doctor, he still knew enough to be confident in what he said next. “If the doctors say they’re well enough for transport, then I’ll need you to take them to Canterlot for treatment.”
Coal Hopper’s eyes widened. “Wait, hold on…”
But Lex had already turned to Sonata, his earlier romanticism gone now that he was back to problem-solving. “I need you to go find Garden Gate for me.”
One of Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Her? How come? Oh, and she’s still going by Fencer, by the way.”
“I don’t care. Bring her and her friends here.”
“Fine, but can I tell them why?”
Lex hesitated just for a moment before answering. “I want them to be on board in case any of the ponies we brought back don’t survive the trip to Canterlot, and turn into ghouls.”
“These ponies are critically ill, and need to be taken to a hospital with all possible haste,” replied Lex evenly. He’d somehow managed to keep his temper in check, despite Coal Hopper’s continued opposition to loading the sick ponies onto the train for transport back to Canterlot. Nor was his forbearance entirely due to exhaustion, either. This is an excellent opportunity to put what Nosey and Sonata’s recommendation into practice, he’d decided, resolving himself to treat Coal Hopper like she was an idiot who couldn’t comprehend basic logic rather than demanding she operate at his level. “Your train is currently the only method of delivering them to the treatment they need.”
“But Tall Tale is right over there!” Coal Hopper’s hoof jabbed southward as she frowned at him. “Just put them on a boat and they’ll be there before sunrise!”
“There are no boats available,” answered Lex, fighting down the urge to rebuke her for not realizing that on her own. If that course of action were viable, I’d have taken it!
“Yeah, well, you’re such a big shot, you should have just magicked one up,” muttered Coal Hopper, some of the fire in her voice receding as she sat down.
Lex grit his teeth at the not-so-subtle indictment of his abilities, but there was nothing he could say to that. He had considered trying to repair the boat that C. Shells had brought them here on – he’d met her when he’d used a spell to fix some damage to its hull back in Tall Tale – but had determined that doing so wasn’t feasible. Tlerekithres had ripped the vessel apart, letting half of it sink into the bay while the other half had been thrown at them during the battle at the docks, breaking into pieces on the wharf, most of which had subsequently been blown away by the storm that the kraken had conjured. Since his spell required that all the pieces of a broken object be present in order to repair it, Lex felt certain that even channeling additional energy through it wouldn’t have let the spell fix the ship.
The other course of action would have been to use magic to contact Ribbon Cutter – the deputy mayor that he’d left in charge of Tall Tale in his absence – and have her send another ship to Vanhoover. He could have done it; even if he couldn’t use his scrying spell without an ornate mirror to focus it through, he could have prepared his other long-range communication spell, the one that allowed for the sender and the recipient to exchange up to twenty-five words each. Except that there’s no way that Tall Tale has any ships to send, he’d realized. After all, he’d taken the last viable one when he’d left the city for Vanhoover just over a week ago, and there was no way for Las Pegasus – the only other major city on the western coast – to have heard that Tall Tale’s port was open again (Ribbon Cutter having closed it while she’d been under the dragon’s enchantment) and sent a ship there in that short of a time.
That would change later, of course, but for right now this train was the only thing connecting Vanhoover to the rest of Equestria.
“Look,” piped up Coal Hopper, “I was telling whatshername, Sonata, that we wouldn’t have just abandoned ponies in need, and we wouldn’t, but you have to realize that we’re not set up to carry passengers. Especially special needs passengers.”
She gestured to the train again, as if she thought he hadn’t noticed it before. “All of our cars are either shipping cars or liquid tanks. We only have the one passenger car, right behind the engine, and it’s already full with the crew.”
“The shipping cars-” started Lex.
“-aren’t safe to travel in,” interrupted Coal Hopper, having anticipated what he was going to say. “I know everypony thinks that you can just jump in those like it’s no big deal, but think for a second. There’s no hoofholds to grab onto if you lose your balance, and no cushions if you fall. There aren’t any amenities like beds or chairs or blankets. The only things in any of them right now are tarps, some tools, and a bunch of empty shipping crates. And that’s not even the worst part.” She paused for a moment, giving him a pointed look before continuing. “The worst part is that the coupling for shipping cars doesn’t have any passenger access. Do you know what that means?” She didn’t wait for him to reply, immediately answering her own question. “It means that there’s no way to move between the cars. Not without risking your life by doing something stupid like climbing onto the roof and jumping from one car to another. So everypony in those cars will be stuck there, completely isolated, for the entire three-day breakneck trip back to Canterlot. That’s not exactly the most secure way to travel, especially for a bunch of ponies that are already in bad shape.” She was panting slightly by the time she finished, wiping a hoof across her forehead. “Now do you see why this is a bad idea?”
“I’m aware that the trip will be inconvenient for all involved.” Lex’s answer was given around gritted teeth. He knew he was supposed to be talking to Coal Hopper like she was a complete idiot – which she was rapidly proving herself to be anyway – but there was only so much abject stupidity that Lex could stand before it became intolerable, and right now she was pushing his limit. “But after three days, they’ll arrive in Canterlot, where they can get the treatment they need. That won’t be the case if they stay here.”
“Okay, look-”
“Tada!” Fortunately, Lex was spared any further nonsense as Sonata climbed onto the station platform, grinning as she gestured at the five ponies following her. “Fencer and company, present and accounted for! Plus, I totes explained what’s going on, so you don’t have to! It’s all part of what we offer here at Sonata’s Spokespony Services. Please tip generously: we accept hugs, kisses, and nuzzles.” She trotted closer as she spoke, moving to sit alongside him and leaned toward him expectantly.
Lex cringed, unable to keep his eyes from darting to the other six ponies on the platform with them, fighting down a mild surge of anxiety. Not wanting to embarrass himself by telegraphing that he had no idea how to properly respond to her playful affection, he took the only acceptable alternative he could think of: he ignored it, turning back to Coal Hopper instead. “Go coordinate with the doctors. Make sure they know to transport only those patients who require a functioning hospital, and who are strong enough to travel. We’ll set aside supplies and provisions for them.”
Coal Hopper looked ready to argue, but settled for throwing her forehooves into the air in exasperation before wandering away from the platform, brushing past Fencer and her friends without so much as a word. The other ponies watched her go, before turning their attention back to Lex and a pouting Sonata. Silence hung for a moment, until Granola Bar nudged Fencer, who jumped before taking a tentative step forward. “Listen, um, I want-”
“Sonata said she explained the situation, but I want to make sure there are no ambiguities,” interrupted Lex unceremoniously. “Your job is to stop any threat of a ghoul outbreak before it starts. If any of the ponies being transported expire before they reach Canterlot, then I want you to mutilate their bodies in whatever manner is necessary to prevent them from becoming undead, is that clear?”
A mousy-looking mare, practically hiding in the back of the group, spoke up. “Um, couldn’t-, I’m sorry, I heard what you were saying to that pony that just left. Couldn’t you have the doctors just use one of the hospitals here? I mean, there’s no more ghouls, right? Just, you know…just get them going again.”
“That’s a great idea!” piped up Sonata, looking at Lex for confirmation.
But he was already shaking his head. “That won’t work.”
“Yeah, that totes won’t work,” echoed Sonata seamlessly.
Unable to resist a mild snort at his girlfriend’s antics, Lex kept going. “None of the buildings in Vanhoover are currently fit for habitation. The hospital we visited earlier in the day was still filthy from the floodwaters. Everything was scattered about haphazardly, and while there were plenty of medical supplies left over, a large portion of the actual equipment was ruined. It will take a dedicated cleanup and resupply before it’s fit for actually housing patients again, which is more than our current resources can adequately handle.”
“Oh…” The mare’s ears lowered, a crestfallen look spreading across her face. “Sorry, I should have known that.”
“No no, it was a good question!” Sonata sent the smaller mare a warm smile, before looking at Lex. “Right?”
“Actually, it-”
“See? Even Lex agrees! Oh, and he also says that he’s, like, super grateful that you’re all willing to do this, and that it totes helps out a lot!”
“Yeah, because this worked out so well for the last group he sent somewhere to do his dirty work,” muttered the large stallion of the group, the same one that had berated him last night for not immediately tending to Fencer’s wounds.
Lex felt his features tighten at the comment, but to his mild surprise, Sonata again responded before he could. “What was that?!” she snarled, her features twisting with rage, taking a threatening step closer to the stallion.
Despite the fact that he was a head taller and quite a bit heavier than her, the other pony blanched, waving a hoof nervously. “Nothing!”
“Darn right it was nothing!” growled Sonata, still giving him a glare.
The tension hung in the air for a moment, before Fencer took a step forward, drawing all eyes to her; her own were locked on Lex. “May I ask you something?”
When he curtly nodded, she licked her lips for a moment before going ahead. “Why do you want us to do this? If it’s just disabling ponies that die on the trip, even the doctors could do that.”
“Because-,” started Lex.
“Hey, spokespony, remember?” interrupted Sonata. Doing so earned a glare from her boyfriend, but she’d seen that expression of his often enough that it rolled right off her back. “You tell me, and I’ll tell her.”
“Actually,” interjected Fencer. “I’d like to hear it from him.”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “For realsies?” She glanced back and forth between Lex and Fencer for a moment before heaving a sigh. “Alright…”
Lex frowned at Sonata for another few seconds before turning his attention back to Fencer. “Sending these ponies to Canterlot is extremely risky. If they turn into ghouls, it could lead to an outbreak that engulfs all of Equestria in the undead.”
Fencer tilted her head. “Then why do it at all, if it’s that dangerous?”
“Because,” answered Lex easily. “These ponies’ lives are in danger. I cannot in good conscience deny them a chance to receive the best possible medical care – much better than we can give them here – because of what might happen. Saving them means that the risk must be taken.”
“…even if it means everywhere else possibly becoming like Vanhoover?” Behind her, Fencer’s friends winced at the question, quite clearly horrified by the prospect.
“That’s why I’m sending you.” Lex didn’t hesitate for a moment, looking Fencer dead in the eye as he said that. “You’ve amply demonstrated that you’re more than a match for even a large number of ghouls. With you on the train, the threat to Equestria will be minimized.”
Fencer bit her lip at that, swallowing before she spoke again. “How do you know that I won’t just cut out? That I won’t jump off the train and run away or something if things go bad?”
“Because you’ve been reformed,” answered Lex matter-of-factly.
“…yeah?” Fencer’s voice was so small it was barely audible.
“Yes. You proved that last night.”
But she shook her head. “That wasn’t-…” She sighed, her ears folding back. “I was just angry. I wasn’t thinking about saving you, or my friends, or the camp ponies, or anything else.” She kept her eyes on the ground as she spoke. “I honestly thought that we were all gonna die, and I just wanted to take down as many of those things as I could.” Her shoulders slumped then, eyes closing. “I’m not reformed.”
Under any other circumstances, Lex would have taken her words at face value. But he’d heard what she’d said when she’d attacked the ghouls, demanding that they return the ponies she cared about, the same way he had when he’d demanded that Xiriel return Nosey, whom he’d later realized that he cared about. That had been what led to him realizing that her words when he’d sentenced her had all been true, that she wasn’t the same mare who’d callously threatened Cozy’s husband right in front of her.
“You’re wrong.” The sheer confidence in Lex’s voice made her lift her head, giving him a surprised look. “You’re not the pony you were when I met you.”
Her eyes filling with tears, Fencer tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. “I…”
“You’re reformed,” Lex repeated. “And I’m willing to bet all of Equestria on it.”
Ticket Stub’s eyes sought out Lex when an immediate reply wasn’t forthcoming. “We’ll head for Canterlot now…” His tone of voice made it clear that he was seeking permission, rather than making a declarative statement. Not deigning to acknowledge the deferential pony, Lex instead turned his eyes to the shipping car one more time, mentally reviewing the preparations they’d made.
The last hour had been one of frenetic activity. Of the thirty-four new survivors that Lex had brought to the camp, thirteen had been so debilitated that they couldn’t walk on their own. Of those, the doctors had determined that eight were in bad enough shape that they needed to be taken to a hospital as soon as possible. The others either weren’t severe enough to warrant being subjected to the rigors of travel or, in one case, were so bad off that they were currently undergoing emergency surgery.
The next order of business had been to determine how many doctors would make the trip with them. That had been much more difficult; they’d needed to take into account how many the camp could afford to spare, as well as the logistics of how many ponies could feasibly travel in the car; eight patients plus Fencer and her four companions were already a considerable number. In the end, the medical ponies had elected to send three of their number along with the patients. Lex had expressed skepticism over that small a number, but for once he’d let House Call talk him down, the latter assuring him that unless all of the patients went into shock at once three doctors would be sufficient to treat them. “That,” House Call had said, “and they can always have those other ponies you’re sending along assist them.” That had earned a raised eyebrow from Lex, but the other stallion had assured him that, for basic tasks, they’d be sufficient.
Once all of that had been determined, the next order of business had been to retrofit the shipping car as much as possible in order to ensure the health and safety of the ponies that would be riding in it. Unfortunately, there was only so much that could be done in that regard. The hospital beds that they’d brought back had their mattresses removed and laid on the floor of the car, since the beds themselves were too likely to tip over during the journey, even if their wheels were locked. The train crew had several oil lanterns that they’d attached to the ceiling so that there’d be sufficient light during the nighttime hours. Lex had inspected those personally, aware of the potential for disaster if even one lantern fell during the trip.
After that had been loading sufficient food and drink for everypony. They’d used several of the discarded shipping crates for the former. The latter had initially been trickier, but the train crew had that covered: apparently it was standard procedure to bring along empty ten-gallon liquid containers so that a portion of a tank car could be siphoned off and tested for freshness at its destination. They’d filled six of them, two each of water, juice, and milk, at the doctors’ instructions; that was technically more than they’d need, but they’d wanted to err on the side of too much rather than too little, and Lex had agreed.
It had been full dark by the time they’d been ready to start loading the patients. The doctors had gently brought each of the injured ponies – some groaning at even the slightest motion, others so unresponsive that they looked like they’d expired already – and loaded them onto the train. Now there was nothing left to do but depart.
Satisfied, Lex nodded to Ticket Stub. “Go.”
“R-right!” With one last look at Sonata, still right by Lex’s side, Ticket Stub scrambled back to the engine.
A moment later the train’s whistle sounded, and then its wheels slowly began to turn.
“I still don’t want you to go.”
Granola Bar smiled serenely in the face of Piggy’s pouting, standing at the edge of the converted train car. “I know, but I have to.”
The little stallion had been keeping his distance from them ever since last night, when they’d chastised him for being so blithe about Turbo’s death. Although it hadn’t been much of a rebuke, it had been enough to send him into a sulk for an entire day, with only the train’s arrival – and the subsequent meal – cheering him up. Even then, he’d still been standoffish, quite clearly wanting everyone to know that he was mad at them. That had lasted until a half-hour ago, when he’d seen Granola Bar and the others helping to ready the train. The fat little earth stallion’s curiosity had gotten the better of him then, drawing him closer to ask what they were doing.
Finding out that “his gang” were all leaving had not sat well with Piggy, and he’d ordered them to stay. When they’d all ignored his command, he’d started to throw a temper tantrum, escalating it when they didn’t immediately move to appease him. But when he’d flung himself in front of the entrance to the shipping car, whining and kicking his legs in the air and very nearly disrupting the doctors’ efforts to load the sick and injured ponies, Granola Bar had quickly swooped in to usher him out of the way. She’d seen the look that Lex had given Piggy at that point, knowing that he’d come very close to getting cursed or worse.
She’d spent the last few minutes talking the little guy down, and had made some progress when she’d heard Ticket Stub announce their imminent departure. She’d quickly trotted back to the shipping car, with Piggy following her until the edge of the platform, triggering a new round of whining. “If you leave, I’ll tell my mom on you when she gets back!”
Granola Bar saw her friends roll their eyes, with Slip ‘n’ Slide muttering darkly under his breath, but all she felt was tickled by Piggy’s behavior. It was like watching a small dog yapping at a giant boat in the harbor: so ridiculous that it was adorable. He’s such a little fusspot. “You don’t have to worry, we’ll just be gone for a few days and then we’ll come right back.”
That earned her a few looks from the other ponies in the car with her, but fortunately Piggy didn’t seem to notice, his indignant look changing into one of childish frustration. “You had better!” he huffed. “And buy me something nice while you’re in Canterlot! If it’s really good I might forgive you!”
Barely able to stop herself from laughing, Granola Bar instead smiled widely, nodding as she waved to Piggy. The train had already begun to move, and he trundled down the platform, little legs pumping as he tried to keep pace with it. “Things will be really different by the time you get back!” he yelled. “My mom’ll come home, and we’ll take back all the money that Lex guy stole from us! And then we’ll run this town again!” He was already starting to huff, breaking into a gallop as the train began to accelerate. “So you better come back! You hear me? You better come back or I’ll be really mad at you!”
He yelled that last part as he reached the edge of the platform, almost falling over as he skidded to a stop. Knowing that the words were as heartfelt as could be expected of him, Granola Bar waved one last time, then stepped back into the train car, pulling the sliding door closed with a loud “thunk.” Still chuckling over Piggy’s antics, she gave a rueful shake of her head as she turned around…and stopped as she saw everyone giving her a pained look. “What?”
“Nothing,” started Fencer hesitantly. “It’s just…”
“You’ve got really weird taste in stallions,” finished Funshine awkwardly.
Ticket Stub almost collapsed with relief as the train sped off into the night. He wasn’t the only one, with more than a few of the crew exchanging hoof-bumps and pats on the back. More than a few were talking about taking a vacation after this, and Ticket found himself agreeing. Even though this was supposed to be my vacation from the beginning!
“What was up with that Lex guy, though?” The question made Ticket grimace, glancing at the stallion who’d asked it. “I mean, didn’t he look like the villain out of some fantasy novel, with his weird shadow and scythe and everything?”
“Forget that!” snorted a mare on the other side of the engine compartment. “I wanna know what beauty treatments his girlfriend uses! I’ve spent an entire day at the spa and never looked that good!”
“I’ll tell you what,” spoke up another pony. “Those didn’t look like any flood victims to me. My bathtub overflowed one time while I was out, and I had to move into a hotel while it was being cleaned up, and those ponies looked a whole lot worse than anything I went through.”
“Yeah, but that’s because this was a whole town,” shot back another.
Ticket’s ears folded down as conversations sprung up one after another about everything they’d just witnessed. While he knew it was everypony’s way of relaxing after everything they’d just been through, it was the last thing he wanted to think about right now; just thinking about Lex and Sonata and everypony in Vanhoover felt exhausting, and he was already tired enough that he felt ready to go to sleep standing up. All the more reason to turn in, he decided, making his way toward the back of the engine.
Normally, non-passenger trains were set up with a single sleeping car for the train’s crew. However, this particular voyage had hired so many attendants – necessary for handling such a huge shipment – that one sleeping car hadn’t been enough. Rather than slow them down by adding a second, the decision had been made to use a standard passenger car instead, since those had more padded benches than a sleeping car had beds. It wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement, even with the blankets and pillows that had been passed out so that everypony could lie down and catch some shut eye, but at the moment Ticket Stub found himself looking forward to it as he crossed into the passenger car-
-and was met with the sound of Coal Hopper throwing up.
Fortunately, she’d stuck her head out one of the windows, but it was still enough to make Ticket Stub stop in his tracks, not sure what to do. His years as an attendant told him that he should go over and ask if she needed any help. But from what he knew of Coal Hopper from several days of working with her, she wasn’t the sort of pony who’d appreciate that. Helplessly, he glanced around the train car, but it was just the two of them; apparently everypony else was still relaxing in the engine. Which is probably what I should do, he decided.
But before he had a chance to put that thought into action, Coal Hopper pulled her head back in and turned around, freezing as she made eye contact with him. For a moment neither of them moved, then Coal Hopper let out a sigh, climbing onto the nearest bench. “What are you looking at?” she muttered weakly.
Knowing that he couldn’t leave now, Ticket Stub desperately tried to come up with the least offensive thing he could think of. “Uh…how’re you doing?” He mentally kicked himself as she shot him a dark look. Obviously she wasn’t doing very well! “I mean, um, where’ve you been? I didn’t see you after Lex sent you to talk to the doctors about preparing to move those sick p-”
“Stop.” Coal Hopper grimaced as she said it, closing her eyes and gritting her teeth as though she were in pain, her face taking on a green tint. “Just…don’t talk to me about that right now.”
That was enough to shift Ticket Stub’s disposition from nervous to concerned, and he made his way over to her. “Did something happen?”
He half-expected her to snap at him, or maybe ignore him. But he didn’t expect her to start shaking all over, a fearful expression crossing her face. It was enough to set off alarm bells in his brain, and for a moment he just gawked at the sight of the most belligerent pony he’d ever known looking so terrified, before his attendant training kicked in and he took a nearby blanket and wrapped it around her. That seemed to help, as she let out a slow breath, her shaking starting to fade.
Seeing her calm down reduced Ticket’s anxiety, and he felt curiosity mounting in its wake, but he pushed it away. Asking her if something had happened had been what set her off. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again! Instead, he tried to think of the most considerate thing he could say under the circumstances. “Do you want me to leave?”
She glanced at him then, before her eyes fell to the floor, not answering. He was almost ready to interpret that as a yes when she shook her head. Surprised for the second time in less than a minute, Ticket nevertheless climbed onto the bench beside her. They sat there like that, listening to the clatter of the train, for several minutes before Coal Hopper found her voice again. “I saw something,” she murmured. “Back at that place we were just at.”
Ticket Stub nodded, not wanting to interrupt, and after several seconds went by Coal Hopper continued. “I found those doctors like Lex said, and after I told them to start getting everything ready, I was going to come right back. But then I noticed a bunch of ponies.” She fell silent again, and this time Ticket Stub could practically see her struggling to keep going. “They were digging a hole.”
Ticket blinked, not having expected that. His reaction must have shown on his face, because Coal Hopper glanced at him, snorting at what she saw. “I know, right?” she asked, sounding slightly more like her usual self. “So some ponies were digging a hole in the ground. So what? But there were a lot of them doing it, and you could tell they were making one big hole. Like, really big, like they were planning on burying a house or something. So I asked them what they were doing, you know? What they’d need such a huge hole for…”
She gripped the blanket around her tighter, shaking again. It was enough that Ticket was starting to feel bad. “Listen, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
But she shook her head again. “Just shut up and let me do this, alright?” Despite the words being harsh, her voice had almost no strength to it. Licking her lips, she continued. “So one of the ponies pointed west, toward the city, and I didn’t see anything. So like an idiot, I started walking that way, and after less than a minute there’s this awful smell, and I almost tripped on something because the sun’s almost down, and I looked at it…”
Her stomach gave an unhappy rumble then, and Ticket heard her gag before she took a deep breath. “It was a head. A pony head.”
Ticket’s eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.
“And it wasn’t just that.” Coal Hopper’s voice had lost all its strength now, coming out in tight, wheezy breaths. “There were legs and tails and other b-body parts. They were scattered all over the place, as far as the eye could see. It was like, like hundreds of ponies had been b-butchered. Thousands…”
She’d barely managed to get that last word out before she ran to the window again, emptying her stomach noisily and leaving a horrified Ticket Stub sitting there, remembering what Sonata had so cheerfully told him about Lex’s exploits in Vanhoover…
Aisle let out a deep sigh of relief as he felt the train begin to move.
Even then, his heart slowed only a little, half-expecting that any moment it would suddenly screech to a halt, followed by a furious Lex throwing open the door to the shipping car that they’d snuck onto. But as the minutes went by and nothing disrupted the gentle rhythm of the train speeding over the tracks, it began to sink in that such a thing wasn’t going to happen. “We did it,” Aisle murmured incredulously. “We made it out.”
They almost hadn’t. During the final rush of preparation, when Lex had been readying those sick ponies for transport, Aisle had overheard some other ponies talking. Apparently several groups of ponies, desperate to return to civilization, had approached the train crew about riding back with them. When told that there wasn’t any room in the passenger car set aside for the crew, they’d made it plain that they’d be fine with riding back in an empty shipping car instead.
The train crew had apparently deferred at that, telling them to talk to Lex, since by that point it was clear to the train crew that the dour wizard was running things. Unfortunately, Lex had flatly refused to let anypony else board the train. “He’s worried about the risk,” had been the explanation one pegasus – a green stallion with a frisbee cutie mark – had given to an elderly mare who looked like his mother. Fortunately, he hadn’t overheard Aisle eavesdropping. “He says that if the worst-case scenario happens and some of the patients turn into ghouls, having more ponies on board will put more lives at risk.”
“Horse apples!” had been the old mare’s response. “We’d be in a different car altogether, and there’s no way those undead ponies’d be able to get to us! ‘Sides, isn’t that why he’s sending those other ponies, to be guards?” She’d harrumphed then, stomping a hoof. “We should just go slip on board while he’s not looking, I’ll tell you what.”
“Yeah, well, given that he’s rescued us, fed us, and almost died protecting us, you’ll excuse me if I don’t think that ignoring his judgment is the best idea.” The stallion had ushered his mother away at that point, his tone of voice making it clear that there’d be no attempt to sneak onto the train. The few other ponies Aisle had heard discussing that idea had gone largely in the same direction, though for some of them it had been fear of what Lex would do if they defied him that kept them from making the attempt, rather than appreciation.
Of course, Aisle had been nervous about that as well, but for once that hadn’t been enough to dissuade him. After their disastrous attempt to leave Vanhoover on hoof, it had become clear that this train was their only chance at leaving the city, especially with Pillowcase’s body in tow. He hadn’t even needed to discuss it with Cozy; a shared look had been all they needed to recognize each other’s resolve. They were getting on that train, no matter what.
Doing so had been surprisingly easy, which hadn’t contributed to Aisle’s peace of mind. They’d simply slipped away from the rest of the ponies, carrying Pillowcase’s body between them, and circled around toward the back of the train. Fortunately, it had been hauling a large number of cars, and with the sun having gone down and everypony focused on preparing a single car near the front of the procession for carrying the sick newcomers, there hadn’t been anyone paying attention to the ones in the back. The end result had been that they’d been able to quietly slide open the car door and slip inside without anypony being the wiser for it.
Of course, they’d both known better than to stop there. Once inside, they’d secured Pillow’s body and covered it with a discarded tarp that was still in the car. It was only then that they’d engaged in the most harrowing part of their escape: one of them needed to go back out and swipe some food for the journey. And since Cozy, as a crystal pony, was much too conspicuous, that meant it was his job.
Cozy had told him that he didn’t need to, of course, telling him that their love for each other would sustain them through this last trial, but despite the fact that he really didn’t want to, Aisle had insisted. Three days without food or water – and that was if the train wasn’t delayed – would leave them half-dead by the time they got to Canterlot, let alone the Crystal Empire, and that wasn’t acceptable. Cozy, his fiancé, had suffered enough; she wouldn’t be made to do so again. With that thought burning inside him, Aisle had slipped back out of the train by himself, pushing his fears down as he headed back to the train station, making sure to take a circuitous route so it wouldn’t look like he was approaching from someplace he wasn’t supposed to be.
Of course, his anxieties had come right back once he’d reached the area where the food was being kept. All of a sudden this hadn’t felt like one of those heroic stories where the protagonist braved danger in order to save his lady-love. Instead, it was one of those tragedies where the poor dupe at the center of the tale did something stupid and lost everything. We were already in the train car, he’d berated himself. All we had to do was lay low, and we would have been home free! But I just had to show off for my mare…
The food had been piled up on the edge of the platform, which was still off-limits to everypony except Lex, Sonata, and the train crew. It was, Aisle had been forced to admit, a simple yet brilliant way of keeping the excess provisions protected: not only was it near Lex at all times, but it was in plain view of everypony even though they couldn’t go near it. Anyone who hopped up onto the platform would be instantly visible to everyone else, since most of the camp ponies were still milling around and watching the preparations despite the late hour, and Aisle was absolutely certain that they’d raise an alarm if they caught sight of someone else filching food.
He hadn’t spent more than a minute or two observing the pile of food, so close and yet so far out of reach, from the safety of the crowd, but it had felt like far longer. His first instinct had been to listen to what his anxiety was telling him, and slink away before he managed to bring himself to Lex’s attention. But every time he tried to move his hooves, to head back to the car at the back of the train, he found himself unable to move. Why?! he’d cried internally. Why can’t I ever do anything for her?!
Aisle had no illusions about how much he’d been able to help Cozy during their time together. He’d provided her with as much emotional support as he’d been able to, both before and after they’d become lovers, but that was as far as it went. His attempt to spare her from Lex’s wrath when she’d refused to use her powers at his direction had failed utterly, resulting in both of them being cursed, and he’d been absolutely useless when they’d tried to leave the city on hoof. Even figuring out how to talk Aria out of turning them in when they’d first set out had amounted to exactly nothing. When all was said and done, he’d been little more than a shoulder for her to cry on; actually improving her life in a tangible manner had consistently been beyond him…and now it would be again.
Standing there, paralyzed as what he needed to do warred with what he knew he should do, Aisle had tried to find a solution. Some plan, some course of action that would let him acquire some food for Cozy without getting himself caught. For the briefest instant, he wondered if there was somepony else nearby who hadn’t finished eating their allotted food. If there was, and he could find a way to take- No! He’d actually shaken his head then, as though trying to physically ward the thought away. I won’t do something like that!
But with that possibility ruled out, no other answer came to him. It was in that moment, when Aisle’s frustration and desperation and helplessness reached their peak, that he tried something he’d never considered before. Something that he’d seen Cozy do many times, but had never fully understood until that moment.
He closed his eyes and prayed.
He didn’t have a holy symbol the way Cozy did. He hadn’t memorized any of the liturgies or chants that he’d heard her recite on multiple occasions. He wasn’t even sure that he’d ever so much as said her goddess’s name before then. But in his thoughts he'd called out to her then, begging Lashtada to help him help Cozy. Please! he’d pleaded. I just need a chance! Just one chance! He’d clenched his jaw as hard as he could, concentrating with all of his might on trying to get Lashtada to hear him. Please let me do this for her!
He waited like that for several seconds, and when nothing happened he finally let out the breath he’d unconsciously started holding, his head hanging as he opened his eyes. He hadn’t been sure what he’d expected the goddess to do – presuming that she’d heard him and been willing to respond – but his guesses had ranged from her granting him magical spells to telepathically coaching him on what to do. But instead there’d been no response at all.
It had been discouraging enough that he’d almost laughed at himself, his resolve fading along with his hopes. What had he expected? Cozy was an expert at this, and she’d still been in all sorts of horrible situations where Lashtada hadn’t been able to fix everything. What had made him think that he’d suddenly be given the power to get by somepony as strong as Lex Legis? I should just go back, he decided, ears folding down dispiritedly as he’d glanced one more time at the unreachable stack of provis-
Only to see Lex leaving.
Aisle’s jaw had dropped then, not believing what he was seeing. But sure enough, Lex was walking towards the car that they’d been retrofitting, Sonata at his side. Aisle could just barely overhear him saying something to her about…hanging lanterns? What did-, no, it didn’t matter; this was his chance!
He’d almost run onto the platform then, taking an awkward half-step before he’d forced himself to stop. Calm down, Produce Aisle, he’d told himself as he let out a nervous breath. Calm down. Even if Lex and Sonata are gone, everypony will see you if you go up there. You need to think. You need a plan. How can you go up onto the station platform without it looking suspic-
That had been when somepony had bumped into him from the side, and a subdued-sounding voice had muttered, “Move it.”
A glance to his right revealed the owner of the voice: a blue unicorn mare with a blonde mane and tail, wearing a train uniform. She looked fairly ill, as though she’d eaten something that didn’t completely agree with her, and was stumbling as she made her way back to the train, giving him an unfriendly glare as he looked at her. “What’re you looking at?” she’d growled, though it would have been more intimidating if she hadn’t seemed like she was going to throw up at any moment.
“Noth-, let me help!” The words had flown out of Aisle’s mouth so fast he’d almost bit his tongue, moving to assist her.
She’d protested, but only weakly, and in a moment he’d been helping her up onto the platform, walking her over to the sole passenger car right behind the engine. Despite the fact that she’d disappeared into it without so much as a thank you, Aisle hadn’t been upset. Quite the contrary, his head had been spinning. Lashtada did this! Of that, he felt absolutely certain. She made this happen!
His heart had been pounding in his chest as he’d exited the platform, passing close by the pile of food. He’d known that there had to have been dozens of eyes on him then, but it hadn’t mattered; he’d made sure to walk toward the most distant staircase down, and that put him on a course that put the huge pile of provisions directly between him and the crowd. It had been only for a second, of course – if he’d lingered out of sight, surely somepony would get suspicious – but that had been more than enough time for Aisle, whose special talent had been handling groceries, to reach out and swipe a hooffull of food, shoving them into his saddlebag in a single smooth motion.
It hadn’t been very much: three grapefruits and a box of crackers. But as he’d crept back to the train he’d felt ten feet tall, proudly showing his bounty to Cozy before – on a sudden impulse – kissing her so fiercely that she’d almost swooned. In that moment every bad thing that had happened, from the flood to his being emasculated by Lex, had vanished from his mind, and Aisle had felt almost giddy.
After that, they’d settled down to hide until the train left, and Aisle had felt his euphoria start to dim. There was no way to prove that Lashtada had been behind what happened, after all. It could have, and probably had, just been an incredible stroke of luck. Plus, somepony might have seen him anyway, and could have reported him to Lex in the meantime. Or any number of other things that could still go wrong…
By the time the train had departed, Aisle had gone back to feeling nervous, but even then it had been an excited form of nervousness, scarcely daring to believe that for once everything was going to work out. But now…now the train was underway! It was enough to make his earlier zeal come flooding back. “WE DID IT!” he yelled, leaping to his hooves. He knew they should be quiet, even if they were multiple cars away from anypony else and muffled by the sound of the train, but he couldn’t bring himself to contain his joy. “We made it out!”
“Wow,” laughed Cozy, standing up at a more sedate pace. “And I thought I was eager to be out of there.”
“We’re finally…” He couldn’t finish as he turned to look at her, suddenly struck by how beautiful she was. “We finally get to move forward, now,” he said when he was able to recover his voice. “We’re running toward our future, instead of running for our lives.”
“Yeah,” she smiled, but her voice was sad, and she couldn’t help but glance behind her at where Pillow’s body lay.
Aisle moved forward, placing a hoof on her chest reassuringly. “Princess Cadance will bring him back.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Hope? I thought you were all about having faith?” teased Aisle.
The statement, and his uncharacteristic playfulness, drew a laugh of surprise from Cozy as she looked back at him. “What’s gotten into you?”
He shrugged, still grinning. “I’m just…I’m so incredibly happy right now, and it’s because of you.”
She smiled at that, blushing. “It feels weird to say this, after everything that’s happened, but…I’m happy too.”
He took a step forward, nuzzling her. “I love you, Cozy.”
“I love you too, Aisle.”
They embraced then, the two of them holding each other close as the train sped them away from Vanhoover.
Lex didn’t reply to Sonata’s statement, watching as the train sped off into the night. It didn’t take long before it had vanished from sight completely, the light from the occupied cars receding into the distance before finally disappearing as the train barreled eastward. Behind him, he could already hear the crowd starting to break up, wandering back toward the camp now that the spectacle had ended.
“C’mon.” Sonata nudged him. “There’s, like, nothing left to do.” She canted her head back toward the camp. “Those guys you told to dig are still at it, and Severance is watching over them. The doctors are taking care of those new ponies you brought back. And the train should be alright, since we’re not on it.” She smirked at that, before giving him a light nuzzle. “Whaddaya say we head back to our tent and settle down for the night?”
Even despite knowing the bad dreams that awaited him, Lex couldn’t help but feel tempted by the offer, both because of how exhausted he felt and because he couldn’t help but relish the thought of lying down next to her. But despite that, he shook his head. “There’s one more thing that needs to be done.”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Are you kidding me? What could possibly be left-”
“Hey…”
Turning at the familiar voice, Lex watched as Nosey stepped onto the platform, an uncomfortable look on her face. “I, um…” Behind her glasses her eyes darted back and forth, going from him to Sonata and back again as though not sure which of them to address. “I was talking to a couple of the camp ponies before, when they were waiting for the train to arrive.” She took a notebook out of her saddlebag, holding it up as though worried she wouldn’t be believed otherwise. “They all had very positive things to say about you…” Her eyes settled on him just for a moment, before she jerked them back toward Sonata. “Both of you, I mean.”
“That’s great!” Sonata couldn’t have looked happier. “I mean, it’s great that everypony thinks that we’re awesome, and that you were able to go around interviewing them! You’re totes back to your old self!”
Lex frowned at that, since the timid demeanor that Nosey was currently expressing seemed to make it self-evident that she wasn’t. Nosey herself seemed to feel the same, giving a smile that even he could tell was uncomfortable. “Yeah…for a little while. But, well, then your spell wore off…” Her ears folded back as she trailed off, looking at the ground.
“Aw, I think you’re doing fine,” scoffed Sonata, before turning to look at Lex. “Right? Doesn’t she look like she’s doing great?”
“I don’t-”
“See? Even Lex thinks you’re rockin’ your recovery. In fact, I bet you could totes sleep on your own tonight!”
Nosey flinched at that, awkwardly putting her notebook away as she looked up. “Actually, that’s why I’m h-”
But Sonata seemed determined not to let anyone else get a word in edgewise. “Of course, I’ll totes use that spell on you again so you can, like, ease into it, ‘kay? In fact, how about I do it right now? A one and a two and a three…”
As Sonata took a deep breath, preparing to start singing, Nosey cut in. “I want to sleep with you guys again!”
Sonata let out a whoosh as she practically deflated in place, her good cheer disappearing. “Of course you do…”
Nosey winced at that, looking as though she’d just been slapped. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being a nuisance, it’s just…the last time I went to sleep by myself I had the worst nightmares, and I can’t…” She suppressed a shudder, swallowing. “I just can’t. Not again.” The words were almost a whimper, a pleading note in her voice.
Lex had heard more than enough. “You can-”
“-totes spend the night with Aria!” Sonata nodded frantically at her own idea. “I mean, it’s perfect, right? She’s all into being a bodyguard and stuff, but we don’t need one anymore since everypony’s all, like, super-supportive of us now. Plus, she’s got some serious mojo, so she can totes make you feel all safe and secure and stuff!” Her grin was slightly wider than normal as she looked back and forth between Nosey and Lex. "See? It’s brilliant, right? Right?!”
Nosey bit her lip, looking less than reassured. “Um…”
“Nosey will stay with us,” declared Lex in a tone of finality. “Aria also.”
Both mares sighed at that, one in relief and the other in visible dejection. Emboldened, Nosey stepped forward, giving Lex a warm smile. It only lasted for a moment, however, fading as she looked at Sonata. “I’m really sorry. I know I’m being a burden to you guys. I promise that this won’t be for…”
She stopped as Sonata held out a hoof, shaking her head. “No, I’m the one who should be sorry. I know you have it bad right now, and I’m being, like, super selfish.” She smiled again, this time without the mania she’d had previously. “You can totes stay with us for as long as you want.”
Nosey gave her a grateful look. “Thank you.”
Sonata waved a hoof. “Aw, what’re besties for?”
The two hugged each other then, and Lex couldn’t help but roll his eyes, silently noting the irony at how things had changed since they were all staying in Tall Tale. Nosey had stayed with them back then also, only he had been the one fuming over her unwanted presence while Sonata had pressed for her to stay. The difference being that Sonata was acting on a whim then, whereas I’m actually trying to accomplish something now.
With that thought in mind, Lex turned to the last remaining issue that needed to be dealt with in the meantime. Turning to look at the small mountain of provisions that had been unloaded from the train, he started to chant, only to stop with a soft curse as he realized something. “Sonata.”
“Hm?” She looked up as her hug with Nosey came to an end. “What’s up?”
“I need you to go ask the camp ponies if any of them have a bell and a strand of silver wire I can use.”
Both mares shared a look of incomprehension before turning their gazes back to him. “Okaaay…” started Sonata, clearly wanting to know why he’d made such an odd request.
Lex sighed, regretting the loss of his extradimensional pack when he’d fought Xiriel. Most of his spells didn’t require any sort of material focus in order to work, but a few – such as his scrying spell, with its ornate mirror – did, all of which he’d kept in his haversack. Unfortunately, the same was true for this spell. “I’m going to place a ward around the food, one that will sound an alarm if anyone tries to take some. I need those things in order to cast the spell.” He’d had this spell prepared since before he’d fought the belier; indeed, part of the reason he’d been so mortified by how Spit Polish had almost killed him had been that he’d had this ready but hadn’t used it before he’d passed out from his injuries when he’d conjured food for the entire camp. As such, it was beyond frustrating, now that he was ready to put it to use, that he didn’t have the items necessary to do so!
Sonata shrugged. “Wouldn’t it be a lot easier just to have some ponies guard it instead?”
Lex snorted at the suggestion. “Even if we just fed them, having hungry ponies be the ones to guard a cache of food is an ill-considered idea.”
Nosey piped up then. “What about those ponies you conjured up last night? The scary-looking ones that you had help Fencer fight the ghouls?”
Lex blanched at that, but Sonata didn’t notice, her eyes widening in delight. “Hey, that’s a great idea! With ponies as weird as those, no one will try to snatch anything! But maybe just make them not be so mean this time?”
That last comment caught Nosey’s interest, a glimmer of her old self peeking through. “What do you mean ‘not be so mean this time’?”
“What, you didn’t hear them before? They were, like, total jerks! Every time Lex brought one of them out, they were all like ‘you’re a big dumb dummy,’ or ‘you’re gonna lose, loser.’ It was super awful!”
Nosey’s brow furrowed at that, turning back to Lex. “Why would-”
“That’s enough!” hissed Lex, making no effort to moderate his tone. This was exactly what he’d been hoping wouldn’t happen; bad enough those phantoms that his shadow had brought forth from his nightmares made a lasting impression, they’d made enough of one to invite further questions. It had been hard enough to admit to Sonata that he had recurring nightmares. Admitting that they were caused by a rogue portion of his mind that he had virtually no control over was something he wanted to avoid if at all possible. That was especially true with regard to Nosey, whose special talent was unearthing and disseminating information! That, and learning of his condition might clue her in as to how he’d only managed to defeat Xiriel by luck, rather than heroically overcoming the monster the way she thought he had…
“Conjuring a ward is easier than performing a summons,” he announced flatly. It was technically true, since it didn’t involve cajoling his shadow to take action. Hopefully the girls would take the statement at face value.
But those hopes were dashed a moment later as Sonata cocked her head. “Well, yeah, but not when you don’t have the stuff you need to cast the spell, right?” Lex had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at Sonata, cursing that she had chosen right now of all times to start prioritizing practicality. Oblivious to his growing discomfort, she kept speaking. “I mean, it’s kind of a pain to go around asking everyone if they just so happen to have-”
“I’ll do it,” interrupted Nosey.
“Huh?” blinked Sonata, clearly taken by surprise. Lex was as well, though it was mixed with a large degree of relief.
“I’ll go get them,” repeated the newsmare. “A bell and some silver wire, right? I’ll go find some.”
She’d just started to walk to the edge of the platform when Sonata cut her off. “No, it should be me.”
Nosey paused. “You sure? I don’t mind.”
This time Sonata’s smile was slightly sad. “I know, but I still feel kinda bad.” She threw a quick glance at Lex before trotting toward the camp. “You guys hang tight, and I’ll be right back. Don’t go to bed without me!” An instant later she was gone.
Lex did his best not to sigh in relief, thankful that their troublesome line of inquiry had ended. Sitting down, he didn’t protest when Nosey came and pressed herself against his side a moment later, a shudder running through her as she leaned against him. It had been obvious, even to him, that she hadn’t wanted to go looking for the components that he needed.
A few minutes of silence passed before Nosey spoke up. “Lex?”
“Hm?”
“…you know that I’d never betray your trust, right?”
The statement was so unexpected that he couldn’t help but look at her. “What?”
She didn’t meet his gaze, her eyes closed as she spoke. “I mean, if there was something dangerous or important that you didn’t want anyone else to know about, or even just something uncomfortable or embarrassing, I’d never tell.” She opened her eyes then, looking up at him from just a few inches away. “I wouldn’t say a word, or write about it, or anything else. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Lex tensed, uncomfortable with the implication that she knew he was hiding something. But he forced himself to relax a moment later. Nosey was his friend. This was what friends were supposed to do, right? Awkwardly, he nodded. “Alright.”
A wan smile crossed her lips at that, and she closed her eyes again, the two of them waiting silently for Sonata to return.
It was only a few minutes before Sonata came galloping back, the items he’d requested held in her grinning mouth.
“You weren’t kidding!” she blurted as soon as Nosey telekinetically took the bell and wire from her. “All I had to do was say that Lex needed that stuff and like, a whole bunch of ponies started rushing to get it!” Excited, she pranced in place, shifting her gaze to her boyfriend. “Everypony totes adores you now!”
“Told you so,” smiled Nosey as she placed the objects onto Lex’s waiting hoof.
“Yeah! Oh my gosh, it was incredible!” Sonata sat down, but the joy radiating off of her didn’t diminish in the slightest as she pointed at the items she’d brought back. “Lex, you should’ve heard it. The old lady who gave me that wire said that it was from the jewelry store she opened with her husband after they got married, and that it’s thanks to you that she has hope that she’ll be able to reopen it again. And that bell…” She paused then, her eyes starting to water. “The guy who gave it to me said that it was his daughter’s, and that he hopes it’ll help you protect everyone else the way he couldn’t protect her.”
“Aww!” Nosey couldn’t keep from letting out a heartfelt cry at that, placing a hoof over her heart reflexively as she visibly fought back tears.
But Lex’s only response was to shift in place awkwardly. He knew that Sonata was conveying heartfelt gestures from the camp ponies, but the proper response to that eluded him. Was he supposed to make some sort of maudlin display of, what, gratitude? If so, should he make it to Sonata, as the one conveying the message, or was he expected to track down the ponies in question and personally acknowledge their feelings? Or maybe he was supposed to have Sonata go back to them and do it on his behalf, since she’d already interacted with them previously? There were too many possible permutations and no indicators as to how he should even begin to narrow them down.
This is the last thing I need right now, he cursed internally. He’d just wanted Sonata to collect two simple items so that he could cast a spell and move on to the next thing, and now she’d brought him back another inscrutable social dilemma! I’m already struggling to do what needs to be done, and now I have to deal with this too? The thought was bitter, knowing that finding the right answer was extremely unlikely, and would probably cost him whatever goodwill he’d apparently managed to accrue. Just like every other time something like this had happened…
“Lex? What’s wrong?” He looked up belatedly, seeing that Sonata’s countenance had changed to one of concern. Out of his periphery, he could see that Nosey was wearing a matching expression.
“…nothing.” Mentally, he washed his hooves of the whole thing. Let Sonata figure out what to do; that was her job. Instead, he turned his attention to the collection of food, chanting the spell to place a ward over it. “If anypony gets too close to this, an audible alarm will go off,” he explained. “I trust that will make it obvious to anyone within earshot what’s happening.”
“Yeah, probably,” murmured Nosey, still sounding vaguely perturbed.
“Good. Now, both of you come with me.” Without another word, he turned and headed for the train station.
Nosey immediately followed, moving so quickly that she didn’t break contact with Lex, but Sonata hesitated. “Wait, shouldn’t we be headed back to our tent?”
“We’re not staying there tonight,” replied Lex with a backwards glance. “There’s not enough room.”
“Right. Silly me,” muttered Sonata with a pout before following him.
Aria woke up with a yelp – or rather, what would have been a yelp, if she’d had her voice – as she felt a sharp kick impact her side. Blinking, she looked around before her eyes settled on the smirking face of her sister, irritation immediately replacing her drowsiness. “What’s the big idea?” she whispered, grimacing at the rude awakening.
“Um, hello?” jeered Sonata, her expression immediately making it clear that she was in a bad mood. “What kind of bodyguard falls asleep on the job?”
“Bite me!” snapped Aria as she picked herself up off the floor. Belatedly, she realized that the interior of the place was brighter than when she'd gone to sleep, several of the wall-lamps having been lit. A moment later she caught sight of Lex along the far wall, that blonde mare – Nosey somethingorother – from that morning still clinging to him, watching the exchange. “I did my part,” she continued, whispering as much to Lex as to Sonata. “I kept watch when that train got here and was ready to go if they tried anything funny. They didn’t, so after you finally brought my dinner in I ate it, laid down, and took a nap. That okay with you?”
“Sorry? I didn’t catch that,” taunted Sonata, holding a hoof up to her ear. “You’ll have to speak up. Oh that’s right! You can’t!”
The barb made Aria’s eyes widen in outrage, her lips pulling back in a snarl. “Okay, now I’m mad-”
“Stop it, both of you.”
Lex didn’t raise his voice, but Aria immediately quieted down, still nervous that he’d go back on his promise despite what he’d said that morning. Sonata had no such reservations, pointing a hoof at Aria. “She started it.”
“I don’t care,” answered Lex in a surprisingly level tone. “I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you.” He waited another moment, and when neither replied, he turned to Nosey. “Go stand next to the two of them.”
She blinked, clearly not having expected that. “Why?”
“There’s something I want to try,” was the answer she received.
Reluctantly, she pulled away from him, walking over until she was right next to the others. “Now what?”
Lex didn’t reply, instead closing his eyes as he silently raised a hoof to his head. For a moment he grimaced, as though he had an awful headache, but then it passed, and he slowly lowered his hoof to the floor. Then he opened his eyes…and Aria heard herself, along with Nosey and Sonata, take a sharp breath at the look that came over his face then.
Desire.
The sight was enough to pin all three of them in place. All of a sudden, Lex’s typical expression – the mixture of fatigue, haughtiness, and bitterness that he’d perpetually worn – had vanished. In its place now was a look of hunger, his eyes opening slightly wider as though he was only now appreciating the sight of the mares in front of him, the corners of his lips turning upward in a smile that was at once both reassuring and predatory.
Long moments passed as he silently looked them over, his eyes running over each girl in turn, starting with Sonata. When his eyes turned to Aria, she couldn’t stop herself from shivering at the weight of his gaze. She’d had more men than she could remember look at her like that, and more than a few women as well, but somehow the fact that it was coming from him, from the stallion who’d so thoroughly brought her to heel, was enough to make her…make her…
Then Lex’s eyes slid down to Nosey, and Aria managed to regain a little of her composure now that she was free of his immediate attention. What’s going on? she thought dizzily. The way he was acting right now was completely contradictory to his usual self, and she couldn’t figure out what was happening.
But Lex was already advancing on them.
Slowly, like a lion stalking toward wounded prey, he sauntered up to Sonata first. The other two watched as she shrank back, uncertainty written all over her face. But he didn’t stop, moving closer to her until the distance between the two of them could be measured in inches. Licking her lips, Sonata tried to form a question, but didn’t have a chance as Lex – still not saying a word – reached out a hoof and gently pressed it under her chin, raising her face up for a kiss.
Not wanting to watch but unable to look away, Aria saw alarm, embarrassment, and excitement all flit across Sonata’s face. For a brief moment her sister’s eyes flickered over to where Nosey was, and then she looked up and made eye contact with her, causing both of them to redden as Sonata immediately yanked her gaze away. For a moment she looked like she was going to protest what Lex was doing, but then Lex leaned forward…but he didn’t kiss her. Instead, lowered his head past her face, his lips passing within an inch of her neck, as though taking in her scent.
The sensuous gesture, as provocative as it was playful, was enough to leave Sonata panting, her eyes fluttering closed in silent surrender. A whimper slid past her lips as Lex reached out and gently prodded her body, gently repositioning her as he moved his face within an inch of her chest, then down her side, and then to her flank, pausing for a long moment over her cutie mark, his nose close to her shuddering tail. A soft touch right on the image on her flank was enough to bring a strangled whimper from Sonata’s throat, and she slowly started to lower her head, moving her tail to the side…
And then Lex turned away from her, moving to Nosey.
The blonde mare was shaking like a leaf as Lex rounded on her, but at the same time she didn’t even try to resist him. He gave her the same treatment, looking deeply into her eyes before silently reaching out and positioning her to his liking, making her present herself to him. A soft moan escaped her as Lex made her move how he wanted, baring all of her body for his examination. Aria watched as, just like before, he ended with a long look at her cutie mark, Nosey’s back legs parting more in anticipation of what was about to happen…
Only for him to turn to the last remaining female there.
Aria was only peripherally aware of both mares looking at her, each of them showing disappointment mixed with relief as Lex left them without doing anything else. But she couldn’t process that as Lex slowly circled around behind her. Swallowing despite her throat being dry, she tried to turn in place, refusing to allow him to get the better of her like this, but a single wave of his hoof and a softly-murmured command kept her still, her paralysis sending a thrill of excitement through her that was immediately followed by a sudden bout of shame. But even that wasn’t unpleasant, and Aria could feel herself heating up as Lex moved out of her line of sight.
Even then, she could still feel him. His breath was hot against her as he slowly looked her over. A touch that was as firm as it was gentle moved her just a little. The end of his tail brushed against hers as he circled her. It was enough that she barely realized that she was lying on her back, and he was alongside her. When he reached out to touch her chest, right over where her gemstone was, electricity ran through her, knowing what he would have been touching if she’d still been human. Then he gently traced upward, along her throat and over her scar, pausing to lightly trace the marking, and the shudder that went through her then was enough to erase the last of her resistance, unable to bring herself to move even when the paralysis wore off a moment later.
Like that all three mares held their positions, waiting for their stallion to claim them…
Stepping back, Lex looked them over, a satisfied smile on his face as he nodded.
Then he turned around, went to a nearby bench, and lay down to sleep.
Lex couldn’t help but revel in a deep sense of satisfaction as he closed his eyes. It had worked! He hadn’t been certain that it would, but for once things had turned out exactly like he’d predicted.
It had been painful to channel additional magic through his body and into his circlet, of course, but the results had made the momentary pain worthwhile. With its functionality enhanced, he’d been able to see into the magical spectrum like never before. Far beyond just seeing the energy structure of active spells and magic items, he’d been able to see the innate magical channels in Sonata, Nosey, and Aria’s bodies!
He’d theorized he’d be able to do that when he’d come up with this idea, of course.
Ever since he’d sent Aria to the train station that morning, he’d been working on how to keep his promise to her while he’d dealt with the other issues that had needed his attention. The result he’d come up with had been simple: by enhancing his circlet’s ability to let him see magical energies, he’d be able to examine the channels by which those energies flowed through Aria’s body. By comparing her to Nosey, who was the control group for what a normal pony’s magical channels were like, and Sonata, who was the test type for a Siren-turned-pony, he could develop a working model for a spell that would change Aria’s body.
Of course, actually seeing those channels once he’d enhanced his circlet had been beyond fascinating. The sheer number of possibilities for what he could learn by being able to view the magical pathways throughout a pony’s body had been dizzying, and he’d barely been cognizant of anything else as he’d looked each of the girls over, examining the ways that their innate magic moved through their physical forms. It had been an effort of will to drag himself away afterward, knowing that he needed to keep his priorities straight. Tomorrow, he’d start putting what he’d learned into a practical context and begin designing a spell to make Aria into a pony.
Though that might require examining the girls again.
The lobby of the train station was utterly silent, save only for the sound of heavy breathing as the seconds passed by.
Each of the girls kept their eyes fixed firmly on Lex, lying on a nearby bench, alternately hoping and fearing that at any moment he’d get up and continue what he’d just been doing. But as the seconds turned into minutes with no sign of him resuming his amorous activities, uncertainty began to set in. Each girl began to fidget in place, surreptitiously stealing glances at the others to try and figure out if one of them knew what was going on, making sure to avoid eye contact if at all possible. When it gradually became clear that none of them was sure what was happening, uncertainty morphed into confusion, and the same thought passed through each of their minds: Is that it?
Finally, the not knowing was too much to bear, and Nosey hesitatingly stepped forward. Just the sound of her hoof striking the floor seemed incredibly loud to her, making her wince and fold her ears back. She could feel the weight of the other girls’ stares hitting her from behind, and that was enough to make her lower her tail as much as she could, instinctively trying to cover her backside as she crept toward the stallion who’d so recently caressed her. “L-Lex?” she called, keeping her voice at a whisper for reasons even she wasn’t sure of. “Lex?”
When no answer came, she inched even closer to his prone form, her nervousness spiking as she got to within legs’ reach of him. “Lex…?” Her heart hammering in her chest, she reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.
No reaction came, save for the continued rise and fall of his chest.
Blinking, she tapped him again, whispering his name once more as she moved right up next to him. When he still failed to answer, she felt her nervousness dissolve even as her emotions began to churn in a renewed vortex of confusion. It was enough to momentarily blot out the embarrassment she’d felt a few seconds ago as she turned to look at the other two, her disbelief showing on her face as she reported her findings. “He’s asleep.”
Both of them gaped at her for a moment, Aria recovering first. “What the actual f-”
“Ow!” When she saw Aria and Nosey looking at her questioningly, Sonata lowered her hooves from her ear. “I pinched myself,” she explained, also keeping her voice at a whisper. “I figured this had to be some sort of crazy dream.”
“So that wasn’t, um…how he usually…” Nosey gestured helplessly, turning bright red as she struggled to say what she meant without actually saying it. “…gets things going?”
“Oh, like you don’t know,” sneered Aria.
That was enough to get a frown from Sonata, glancing between the other two. “What does that mean?”
Aria’s lip curled even further. “You really are dumb, aren’t you? You really think they didn’t do anything after you left them alone in that tent this morning?”
Nosey sputtered at the accusation, eyes widening. “Nothing happened!”
“Yeah!” Sonata nodded, a little too deeply. “Nosey wouldn’t do that, and Lex definitely wouldn’t do that! He loves me too much!”
“Uh-huh,” whispered Aria dryly. “And that’s why he was just feeling all three of us up.”
Neither mare could reply to that, and for a moment silence fell, each of them trying to deal with what had just happened and what it meant. Again, Nosey was the first one to speak up, moving away from Lex and toward the other two. “Maybe this was something magical?”
Sonata cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
Nosey shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not a wizard like you guys are. I’m just saying, maybe Lex did something and it, you know, went haywire and that’s why he was acting so…like that.”
She thought it was a plausible explanation, but Sonata and Aria were already shaking their heads. “I wish,” muttered Sonata. “That’d be, like, totes easier to deal with.”
“But it might have been,” pressed Nosey.
Sonata sighed. “Look, I’m not a super-genius about how magic works or anything, but I’m pretty good at telling when someone’s enchanted. It’s kind of my thing.”
“Our thing,” snapped Aria, but Sonata ignored her.
“Yeah, but you…”
“What?”
Nosey hesitated. “…nothing”
“No, not nothing.” Sonata could feel her earlier exasperation, from back on the platform, starting to come back. The whole wilting flower act is getting old! Just hurry up and get back to your normal self already! she cursed internally. A lot of this wouldn’t be happening if you weren’t all weak and clingy now! “I what?”
Nosey wavered for a moment, but then – as if she’d heard Sonata’s thoughts – a flicker of strength found its way into her voice as she spoke again. “You didn’t know when I was possessed.”
“Oh come on!” Sonata had to fight to keep her voice down, glancing at where Lex was still snoozing before turning her eyes back to her best (for the moment) friend. “Being enchanted is, like, totes different from being possessed! One is using magic to mess with your head, and the other is having someb-, somepony else in there instead!”
“You still should have realized that I wasn’t me! Or at least gotten out of Lex’s way so that he could have figured it out sooner!”
“Wait a sec,” interjected Aria, giving the mares a confused frown. “What’s this about someone possessing blondie here?”
“She went to interview Block Party,” answered Sonata coldly, though her eyes stayed on Nosey. “Because of course going to see a bad guy all by yourself in the middle of the night is such a great idea. And when she found out that he was being controlled by some kinda demon, it took over her.”
“Yeah,” continued Nosey through gritted teeth. “And then my own best friend didn’t even notice. Instead, she got in the way and kept Lex distracted for an entire day until he figured out what was going on and rescued me.”
“Well I’m sorry!” Sonata’s tone didn’t match her actions, stepping forward and getting right in Nosey’s face. “I wish I had noticed! Because maybe then I could have saved you and you wouldn’t be hanging all over my boyfriend!”
Aria chuckled spitefully at that, leering at Nosey. “So that’s why you’ve sticking so close to him all of a sudden, huh? Lex saved you, and now you want him inside you like that demon was?”
“Hey, shut up!” Nosey could feel herself starting to tear up at how everyone was suddenly picking on her, but she pushed the urge to cry away savagely, hating how fragile she felt all the time now. “I’m staying with Lex because he makes me feel safe! That’s better than how you’re trying to use him to fix your voice!”
“For realsies,” added Sonata, giving Aria a dark look. “If Lex was going fool around with someone else, Nosey’s a heck of a lot better than you! You’re just messing with him because of what he can do for you, and so you can be mean to me. It’s not like you really like him.”
“I like him plenty!” shot back Aria with a snarl. “He’s strong, he’s loyal, and he appreciates me!”
Sonata blinked. “Wait, what?”
“That’s right,” smirked Aria. “Lex knows what I’m worth. He flat-out said that I saved everyone from those ghouls last night. When I got hurt going into Vanhoover with him to look for his friends, he healed my wound. And he’s still keeping his promise to give me my voice back even after everything that’s happened.” She crossed her hooves over her chest triumphantly. “So yeah, he knows a good thing when he sees it. Guess you’re not the only apple of his eye, huh?”
But Sonata didn’t rise to the bait, instead looking at Aria in surprise. “You like him? Like, like like him?”
“Yes!” It was only a second after the whisper left her lips that Aria realized how much she’d just revealed, and immediately started trying to backpedal. “And, you know…he’s really the only worthwhile guy here anyway. I mean, look at all the others. Aisle might as well change his name to Completely Whipped. Or whatshisname, Disc Jockey, who has to ask his mother before he does anything? Please. Lex is just the best of the batch, is all.” But it wasn’t working; Sonata was just standing there, still thunderstruck by Aria’s inadvertent confession. Growing more uncomfortable with each passing moment, Aria reached for something that was sure to change the subject, plastering a sneer onto her face. “Plus, I don’t mind if he fools around with other girls.”
“Wait, really?” Now it was Nosey’s turn to be wide-eyed, unable to help herself. Growing up in Canterlot, where everypony was very conscious of their public image and social standing, made a statement like that sound scandalous to Nosey’s ears. Under different circumstances, that would have been a headline quote right there!
“Of course,” whispered Aria, waving a hoof nonchalantly as she closed her eyes and put her nose in the air, the very picture of nonchalance. “That’s what every guy wants, you know.”
“Yeah, well, he’s my boyfriend and I mind! So he won’t be doing anything with anyone who isn’t me!” Sonata, now recovered from the bomb that Aria had dropped, huffed as she sent dark looks toward the other two.
“Sure, except for a few minutes ago when he was petting all three of us.” For once, Aria was thankful that she could only whisper. It made it easy to hide her relief that they weren’t talking about her feelings anymore. “And besides, I don’t recall hearing you protest when he was touching me and discount-Adagio here.”
Nosey frowned at that, not sure if she’d been insulted or not, before letting it go as she turned back to Sonata, who was already opening her mouth to reply. “Look, this is getting us nowhere. Why don’t we just wake Lex up and ask him what that was all about?”
“No!”
The word came from Sonata and Aria at the same time, causing the two of them to glance at each other before looking back at Nosey. “He needs to rest,” insisted Sonata. “We can totes ask him in the morning, but for now he needs to let himself recover.”
“That and he might get mad if we wake him up over this,” added Aria. She was already in the doghouse – or rather, train station – with him over her having left with Cozy and Aisle before. There was no way she was going to risk ticking him off enough to go back on his promise to fix her voice, especially not over something as stupid as a fight with her idiot sister and her friend!
Sighing, Nosey shook her head, feeling completely drained by everything that had happened. “Fine. Works for me. Goodnight.” She didn’t wait for a response before turning around and heading back into the lobby.
“Hey! Where’re you going?” Sonata frowned as she trotted after her.
“To sleep,” replied Nosey with a challenging look, detouring just long enough to turn down the wall-lamps before climbing onto Lex’s bench and settling down, pressing herself against his left side.
“Fine,” huffed Sonata. Not to be outdone, she climbed onto the bench also and pressed herself against Lex’s right.
“Good enough for me.” Aria dragged herself in front of the bench, curling on the ground before leaning up to lay her head on Lex’s middle, between the two mares. Long moments passed as the three of them glared at each other, silently daring the others to try something, before they slowly relaxed, too tired to keep up their posturing. Sonata fell asleep first, with Nosey passing out next, and finally Aria.
For each of them, Lex was the last thing they looked at before they closed their eyes.
That wasn’t too unusual for him lately. He’d grown accustomed to Sonata being next to him when he woke up, and Nosey was a recent addition, one which he still had very mixed feelings about. But Aria laying her head on his middle was new, and Lex frowned as he realized that between the three of them, he was pinned down.
For a moment he considered simply jolting them awake, but discarded that idea a moment later. He knew how unpleasant that was from personal experience, and had no desire to inflict it on any of them. Sonata deserved better treatment than that, it might interfere with Nosey’s convalescence, and Aria…he still wasn’t sure what the Night Mare had meant by “nurturing her interest” in him, but the last thing he wanted was her running off again, and she couldn’t do that if she was asleep.
With his course of action decided, Lex turned to the next issue: how to extract himself from the press of bodies without disturbing them. The next-best idea was to change into shadow-form and move through the bench, but that idea was ruled out as well. Too many times in the last few days he’d been forced into a fight while critically low on magic, and although he had no reason to believe that there was another battle in his immediate future, that wasn’t a situation he was eager to repeat, especially since he hadn’t found enough time to renew his full complement of thaumaturgic spells. Power needed to be conserved wherever possible.
Instead, Lex silently engaged his horn. As gently as he could, he lifted Aria’s head and moved it so she was resting on Nosey instead of him. Both stirred for a moment, but fortunately neither woke. Extracting his tail from under Sonata was touch-and-go for a few moments, but he managed to free it without disturbing her slumber. Finally free, he gingerly stepped over Aria as he climbed down from the bench, ignoring the persistent ache in his muscles as he made his way to the door, grabbing his saddlebags on the way.
By the time he’d exited the train station, Lex had put all thoughts of the girls out of his mind, instead turning his attention to what needed to be done today. A glance east showed that the sun had just barely cleared the mountains, but when he glanced in the opposite direction Lex saw that the camp was already up and about. Notably, a few ponies were milling about near the train station, eyeing the small mountain of food…at least until they saw him, at which point they smiled and shuffled forward. Although he knew he wasn’t the most perceptive of ponies, even Lex could figure out what they wanted.
“There will not be any breakfast,” he announced flatly. For a moment he wondered if he should have woken Sonata up after all, but it was too late to change his mind now. “This food needs to be carefully rationed until a more stable supply can be established. Until it is, provisions will be passed out at noon, and not before.”
He let that sink in, watching as the smiles drooped and the assembled ponies spoke to each other. Were they upset by his decision, or were they bearing their disappointment stoically? With no idea, he plunged ahead. “Until then, I’ve placed an alarm on what’s here,” he swung a hoof to indicate the supplies. “If you hear a loud ringing noise, it means that someone is stealing food. In that case, such an individual should be apprehended and brought to me for judgment. The same goes if you see any telekinetic auras around anything there.” It was unfortunate, but there was nothing his alarm spell could do about unicorn telekinesis. Such a thing would have been immediately obvious if it had been done last night, of course, but the glowing aura it manifested would be far less noticeable in the daylight.
It irked him to have to rely on community policing instead of being able to produce a solution with his magic, but it couldn’t be helped. Even if his force field spell had been large enough to contain the gigantic pile of food and drink, it didn’t last long enough to provide worthwhile security, its duration being measured in minutes rather than hours. Ultimately, making a public declaration as a deterrent was the best that he could do; hopefully, it would be enough.
When no one objected or asked any questions, Lex turned back to the food, slowly lifting a box of oranges and placing them a short distance away, outside of the area of his alarm spell. Then he did the same for a tank of milk. Then a bundle of oats. Minutes passed as he kept moving foodstuffs, making a second, much smaller pile of food. When he judged it sufficient, he pointed to it as he looked back at the crowd. “This is for special-needs ponies whose circumstances require immediate attention,” he declared. “The sick, the elderly, the very young, and any other ponies that need immediate nutrition are welcome to what’s here.” Again he paused, his gaze sweeping over the crowd. “Those are the only ones who are. If I hear that someone whose health didn’t require it took some of the food that I’ve set aside here, rest assured that individual will answer to me!” The last four words came out in a snarl, his eyes glowing green-and-purple as he uttered them.
The crowd was deathly silent in the wake of his speech. Satisfied that he’d made his point, Lex stepped down from the platform, and the massed ponies parted instantly to make way for him. None took so much as a step toward the second pile of food that he’d made.
The trip across the camp had taxed his muscles enough that Lex had been forced to stop and catch his breath several times before reaching the rows of outpatient tents. Fortunately, most of the ponies that had been awake had been clustered around the train station in hopes of a morning meal, so there were few around to see just how badly he was struggling. It had been arduous enough that he had seriously considered slipping into shadow-form, despite his earlier vow to conserve his magic where at all possible. Only his stubborn refusal to give in to something as petty as mere physical discomfort had kept him from doing so.
That, and he’d be spending hours in shadow-form anyway when he went back into Vanhoover. Purchasing those supplies had cost him almost all of the funds he’d managed to acquire from the local bank. More was necessary, and delays were intolerable. He needed to get the ponies from the local farming communities to resume coming here to sell what they’d grown, and they’d expect to be paid for it when they did. That would continue to reduce the burden on the immediate food supply, and let him jumpstart the local economy again, starting Vanhoover on the road to recovery.
But it’s only a start, he knew. I still need to contact Cloudsdale and have them deliver emergency rainclouds before a drought takes hold. We’ll need much more in the way of supplies in order to start making Vanhoover’s buildings habitable again. A loan needs to be negotiated with Las Pegasus in order to pay for it all. None of it would be easy, but at least now that everypony wasn’t in imminent danger it could be done.
That was notwithstanding one of the survivors he’d brought in yesterday. That particular pony had been rushed into emergency surgery almost as soon as the doctors had examined him, and the procedure was still going on now. With none of the medical ponies he’d spoken to a few minutes ago being able to forecast whether or not their patient would pull through, Lex had been able to do nothing but grit his teeth, shove his worry down, and move on to the things he could affect.
That had brought him to where he was now, looking over the half-dug mass grave as he returned Severance to his back, the scythe having nothing to report. That, at least, had been welcome news, as had the revelation that the ponies he’d assigned to dig the hole had apparently worked throughout the night, operating in shifts to the light of nearby campfires. The bad news was that, for all their diligence, the work was still going too slow; in Lex’s estimation, it would take another few days at the very least before they’d have it wide enough and deep enough to hold the remains of the ghouls.
At least they found plenty of gems in the meantime, he sighed mentally as he glanced at the pile of precious stones that the diggers had unearthed. He’d need to look them over later; with any luck, some of them would be sufficient for storing spells in. As for the rest…
“It was on a dig just like this one. I’d just unearthed some crystal or other, and I’d tossed it out of the basement I’d been asked to excavate-”
“It was an amethyst, sweetheart, and you were digging a sewer pipeline.”
“Hey now, who’s telling this story, you or me? So there I am, getting rid of yet another shiny rock, when I hear this voice telling me to be more careful. So I look up, thinking that I’d almost hit somepony, and that’s when I see the most beautiful mare in the world looking down at me. All I can do is stare up at her as she starts reading me the riot act about how I’d almost broken that poor piece of feldspar or whatever it was…”
The details of the story had varied with each telling, but the sequence of events had always been the same. It had gotten to the point that by the time he’d been three years old Lex had heard the tale of how his parents had met so often that he’d grown bored with it. Now he would have given almost anything to hear it again.
His father, Big Dig, had loved telling stories almost as much as he’d loved digging holes. The latter had been his destiny, as his cutie mark of a shovel pressing into the ground had shown, while the former had been his hobby. It didn’t matter if it was the story of how he’d met his wife or his own father’s stories about living through the chaos of Discord’s brief but terrifying reign or old tales about Rockhoof, the so-called greatest digger who’d ever lived.
His mother, Jewelia, had seemed to like her husband’s stories to nearly the same degree that she’d liked the gems that he always brought her back after a dig. A lapidary with a cutie mark showing three gemstones of red, blue, and yellow, she’d never failed to embellish Big Dig’s tales with details or corrections or encouraging questions. There had been no question that they’d loved each other deeply, a love surpassed only by their love for their son, despite how little they’d understood him…or he them…
Shaking his head, Lex turned away from the hole, heading back toward the camp as he pushed the unwanted memories away. He could have tailored his thoughts so that digging holes or finding gemstones wouldn’t have reminded him of his parents, of course; manipulating associations of memory was a trick he’d long since mastered. But he’d never been able to bring himself to do so. No matter how much it hurt to be continually reminded that he’d never see his parents again, the prospect of cutting them out of his thoughts – of losing a little more of them, even if it was just an associated memory – hurt even more.
But I have the strength to bear it, he told himself silently. Memories. Nightmares. Monsters. I have what it takes to withstand them all. He had to, otherwise all the hardships and suffering and misery he’d endured up until now would have been meaningless, and a life without meaning was a life that no one would recognize as being worth living.
River Bank didn’t blink as she stared at the image in front of her, eyeing it critically.
In the mirror, her reflection stared back at her, appearing to find her as troubling as she found it. Slowly, she turned around, keeping her eyes on the glass and evaluating what she saw. The middle-aged earth mare with the fuchsia coat and two-toned indigo and cornflower blue mane and tail in front of her eyes wasn’t bad-looking, she knew. That was the problem: “not bad-looking” was the best she could seem to achieve these days.
“It’s not like it’s my fault,” she muttered out loud as she glanced at the rack of cosmetics. All of them were store-bought, instead of being special ordered the way proper beauty products should be. But they were better than nothing. Barely.
“Really, I’m amazed I look as good as I do with slop like this,” she continued. Speaking to herself was a habit she’d developed over the course of her marriage. Her husband, Mounte Bank, had never been the best conversationalist, and the idea of chatting with the servants was simply unthinkable. That had left only her friends, or rather, her “friends,” all of whom were a bunch of petty and jealous nags who simply happened to move in the same social circles as her. Freely speaking her mind in front of them would have been tantamount to suicide for her reputation; there wasn’t one of those girls who wouldn’t have immediately run to the McNeighs or the Hoofingfords with the slightest bit of juicy news if they thought it would have let them crawl even a little further up the totem pole of Vanhoover’s influential ponies.
Heaving a long-suffering sigh, River turned back to the mirror, taking a step closer as she examined her face. It took all of her willpower not to scowl at what she saw, knowing that doing so would only encourage wrinkles. As it was, she could already make out traces of crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, and there was just the slightest puffiness beneath them that her makeup couldn’t seem to conceal. Her mood souring, she raised her eyes to her mane, glaring at it like it was her worst enemy, which in a way it was: the traitor had actually been harboring a gray hair the other day, sending her rushing to the nearest salon in a panic.
“Thankfully, it was one of the good ones.” There wasn’t the slightest trace of that awful color in her hair now. But it hadn’t come cheap, and while normally that wouldn’t have been a concern, her circumstances didn’t allow her to overlook the expenditure the way she normally would have.
Having to flee Vanhoover in the wake of that ghastly flood hadn’t been such a terrible inconvenience, at least at first. She’d been meaning to visit Las Pegasus anyway; the muckety-mucks there tended to forget about the people who’d contributed money to whatever eyesore of a casino or concert hall or theme park they’d built unless you showed up and reminded them. That had been as good a time as any, particularly since Mounte hadn’t been able to make the trip with her, being across town at a some ten thousand bit-per-plate luncheon to raise money for an exploratory commission to investigate the viability of a direct rail line between Vanhoover and Tall Tale, since the only railway access between the two cities at the moment required a long and circuitous trip to Canterlot.
“Ten thousand bits for a plate of fried kelp, buttered biscuits, and a lot of hot air,” she murmured disdainfully as she continued her self-examination. That commission was raised every few years by the McNeighs, trying to find a way to sell the produce they bought from those rustic northern farmers to the ponies in Tall Tale without having to send it there via ships. The Hoofingfords would never allow that, of course; they’d made their fortune by turning Vanhoover into the preeminent maritime city on the west coast, and weren’t eager to see anything chip away at that. All of which meant that the commission would devolve into what it always did: petty intrigue consisting of endless stalling, backbiting, and greasing hooves, resulting in a report that would spend a great many pages saying very little, and nothing more would come of it. That was what those ten thousand bits were really buying.
Despite her muttering just now, River couldn’t have cared less about that. That sort of jockeying was business as usual for Vanhoover’s “Big Three” families. If it wasn’t trying to help the McNeighs bust the Hoofingfords down a peg, then it would have been the other way around, or trying to stop either or both of them from doing the same to her family. What she cared about was that when she’d sent Mounte there, he’d taken their son with him.
Thoughts of Piggy brought another sigh to River’s lips. Her only child was such a disappointment. Despite the fact that she’d paid for him to be raised by the very best servants, tutors, and attendants, he’d still somehow managed to take after his father far more than her. While he hadn’t inherited Mounte’s love of get-rich-quick schemes – the thought of how her husband had frittered away almost all of his family’s fortune on such stupid ideas (“ketchup and mustard in the same bottle!”) still appalled her, even if it had been instrumental in making it possible for a pretty-but-penniless young filly to become his bride – Piggy had taken on most of Mounte’s other vices. He was shortsighted, weak-willed, and half-witted. And fat, just like Mounte had become after he’d realized that his wife’s restoring the Banks’ fortune had also cemented her control over it; that had been why he’d gone along to that luncheon, for the food. But for all his imperfections, Piggy was still her son, as well as the one who’d inherit the Banks’ family fortune one day.
“And I didn’t do all that work just to watch it all crumble to nothing.” River’s words weren’t solely with regard to Piggy’s development, twisting so that she could look at herself in profile. Her middle was still trim and tight, just like when she’d been twenty years younger. The difference was that now, she had to have her personal trainer put her through a punishing morning workout each day in order to maintain her figure, rather than it happening naturally. Worse, the workouts had gotten more difficult over the last few years, requiring more and more effort just to achieve the same results.
Satisfied, she turned in place again, glancing over her shoulder as she reached back and hiked the hem of her dress up over her hips, examining her posterior, barely noticing her cutie mark of a river of coins. “A mare’s beauty is her face, but her appeal is her other end,” she murmured, her mother’s quote coming to mind the way it always did when she did this. Long minutes passed as she swayed her hips to and fro, examining her backside’s appearance from every angle and in every conceivable regard, before reaching back again and giving it a firm smack before nodding in satisfaction. She might have been celibate for years – the thought of being with Mounte the way he was now was unappealing in the extreme, and having an affair was just asking for a scandal – but she was still confident that when viewed from the back, she could turn the head of any stallion she wanted.
“For now, at least,” she amended as she pulled her dress down, turning back to the problem of her face. Even though she was using substandard products, in a few years it wouldn’t matter what she was using; makeup could take the edge off of old age, but it couldn’t undo its effects. That required magic, but getting a wizard to use an age spell to restore her youth had been utterly impossible. For one thing, there were only a hooffull of unicorn wizards who could do that. All of the ones she'd been able to verify lived in Canterlot, which placed them completely beyond her reach: Equestria’s capital city had its own high society, one that was not only far richer than Vanhoover’s, but made it very clear that they didn’t want some “upstart from the sticks,” as one ill-mannered nag had dared to call her, sticking her muzzle where it didn’t belong.
She’d tried anyway, of course, to no avail. Every single one of the wizards she’d spoken to, every single one, made it very clear that they had long waiting lists that were already filled with Canterlot ponies who wanted age spells cast on them, and if she wanted to put her name on them then they might be able to squeeze her in after a hundred years or so, but not earlier. She’d tried to negotiate around that, with no success; no matter what sort goods, money, or “favors” she’d promised, their minds had been made up. Canterlot’s socialites were already keeping them quite satisfied for all of that and more; risking ostracization for a mare with far less money from the edge of Equestria wasn’t tempting to them at all.
“So here I am now,” she grumbled as she turned away from her mirror at last. “Forty-four years old and looking it, coming back from Las Pegasus on a yacht with only two decks and twelve servants because my cash on hoof is running low, and my son has had to spend the last few weeks in the company of his idiot father.” Who knew what sort of bad ideas Mounte had filled Piggy’s head with by now? If it was too late…then maybe it was time to stop thinking about correcting his bad habits, and instead look for a girl for him to marry. A smart girl, with a head for numbers and a sense of how to keep her stallion on a tight leash. They say that you don’t lose a son when he gets married. You gain a daughter, she thought with a smile.
Her musings were interrupted as a knock came from the door to her cabin. Taking a few moments to quickly check her appearance once more, River made sure to drape herself into a pose that conferred nonchalance and confidence before calling, “Come in.”
The door opened to reveal one of her butlers. “Madam,” he said stiffly. “The captain has informed us that we’ll be within sight of Tall Tale soon. He wishes to know if you’d prefer to rendezvous there or continue straight on to Vanhoover.”
“Stop in that dreary little town? I wouldn’t dream of it.” River tossed her mane dismissively, a move she’d practiced years before she’d ever met Mounte. “Tell him that we’re to continue home to Vanhoover with all possible haste.”
“Very good, madam.” With a bow, the butler was gone.
River’s features tightened as he left. Stop in Tall Tale? What good would that do, besides to strain her finances even further? She’d spent weeks in Las Pegasus, living on the cash she’d brought with her and calling in favors and IOUs from ponies whose projects she’d helped fund specifically in order to network with other rich socialites, all the while waiting for word that Vanhoover had fixed itself up. But as the weeks went by with no word coming, she’d gradually used up all the favors she’d called in, and her cash had dwindled. She’d eventually started having to offer IOUs of her own, and sending the servants to three-star stores to shop instead of five. Finally, she’d needed to start letting some of the servants go, and had even sold her yacht for a smaller one in order to drum up some badly-needed cash. That had been when she’d realized that, one way or another, her time in Las Pegasus was about to end.
Determined not to sell off her dignity, she’d set sail several days ago with what assets she still had. Going back to Vanhoover now was dicey, she knew, but there was no other alternative. “An uncertain gamble is always better than a certain failure,” she said quietly, giving a soft laugh. To think she’d be quoting Mounte of all ponies. Still, he wasn’t wrong, even if he’d always been too dumb to avoid getting into such situations in the first place. River had always preferred to go for sure things rather than gamble.
But even so, there was a thrill in taking a risk, especially such a huge one. Going back to Vanhoover now might be a disaster, but it could be the opportunity of a lifetime instead. It all depended on what the situation was…and on how she handled what she found there.
Looking back at herself in her mirror, River smiled.
That hadn’t been for lack of trying, of course. She’d woken up a few hours ago to find that, rather than cuddling her boyfriend in her sleep, she’s been nuzzling Nosey’s flank instead, with Lex nowhere in sight. The yelp of surprise she’d given at that had been enough to wake the other mare, as well as Aria, who for some reason had been curled up around them both as well. Normally Sonata wouldn’t have cared about any of that – she’d shared a hammock with Nosey on the boat trip here, after all – and she doubted the other two would have either. But after last night, it had been the most awkward morning ever. No, scratch that. It had been the Most Awkward Morning Ever!
That Lex had apparently skipped out on them hadn’t made things any better. Nothing about last night had seemed any clearer after getting some shuteye, and the pony responsible for it being gone had only made things more confusing. Was he trying to avoid taking responsibility? Or was this part of whatever game he’d been playing? Or something else entirely?
The prospect of trying to puzzle things out on their own was one that Sonata hadn’t found appealing – they’d tried that last night, and it hadn’t exactly worked out so well – and a glance at the other two had made it clear that, thankfully, they felt the same. Instead, she and Nosey had left the train station (Sonata making sure to use her magic so Nosey wouldn't freak out), with Aria staying behind. Although not a word had passed between them, the mutual understanding had been acknowledged by all: find Lex and get some answers.
But the elusive stallion had already made his getaway.
Or at least, that was how Sonata had thought of it. The truth of the matter was that he’d gone back into Vanhoover, with multiple ponies describing how – after he’d apparently issued instructions about when everyone could eat, and checking in with the doctors and gravediggers – Lex had put out another call for volunteers to accompany him back into the city. As before, he’d managed to gather several dozen ponies, and they’d set off immediately.
On any other morning, Sonata would have felt happy, or at least relieved, at what she’d heard. Lex had not only made a public announcement without alienating everyone too badly (the witnesses to his speech had described it as being “fearsome, but considerate” and “kinda scary, but making sense”), but he’d had a whole bunch of people demonstrate their faith in him by offering to accompany him back into the city. It was more proof that he was making progress getting everyone to see him the way she saw him, as a hero rather than a creepy weirdo.
Except right now, I see him as being all “wham bam thank you ma’am,” except without the bam after the wham, she’d thought darkly, convinced by that point that Lex was deliberately avoiding them. But he’d be back at some point; he’d made that very clear two nights ago, when he’d told her that he had no intention of leaving Vanhoover. Until then, though, there’d been nothing for Sonata to do but settle down and try to cope with her lingering confusion, simmering jealousy, and latent arousal, letting those feelings mingle and mix as the hours passed. She’d said more than a few prayers to Kara in that time, but hadn’t received a response, leaving her hanging until finally…
“There you are!”
Sonata leapt to her hooves as she caught sight of the returning group of ponies, Lex in the lead, and barreled toward him as though intent on tackling him to the ground. She very nearly did, only barely managing to stop herself. “You tell me right now! What exactly was that all about?!”
Lex frowned at her, as though she were the one being unreasonable. “Additional supplies were necessary,” he replied curtly. Then, as though that wrapped everything up, he turned back to look at the ponies he’d been leading. “Those of you with bits, go and deposit them on the other side of the train platform, away from the provisions. Those who gathered shovels and other material supplies, leave them behind the outpatient tents.” He glanced upward then, giving the sun a brief look of consideration. “Food will be distributed in fifteen minutes.”
Everypony nodded or murmured their assent, breaking up to complete their assigned tasks, and it was only then that Lex turned his attention back to her. He must have noticed the look on her face, because he cocked his head slightly and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“YES!” Sonata had reached her breaking point, unable to contain herself any longer. She was vaguely aware that more than a few of the passing ponies had stopped to stare at her in the wake of her outburst, but at that moment she couldn’t have cared less. “Lex, what was last night all about?! I mean, you just…from out of nowhere you were all…” she sputtered, so worked up that for a moment she couldn’t speak properly. “And with all three of us! And then you just went to sleep afterword like it was no big deal! What the heck?!”
More than a few of the nearby ponies’ eyes widened at that, but Lex only furrowed his brow slightly, as though he couldn’t figure out why she was so upset. “I was gathering data-”
“On what?!” she interrupted, not even slightly satisfied with that answer. A small part of her registered that he hadn’t finished speaking yet, but it was drowned out beneath the weight of everything she was feeling. Her need for answers was barely keeping even with her need to let him have it for messing around with the others right in front of her. “On whether or not I’d say anything while you were all over Nosey and Aria?! Because guess what buster!” She stepped forward and jabbed him in the chest, glaring at him. “I was totes about to call foul on you playing with other girls like that!”
By now the assembled ponies had all stopped in their tracks, unabashedly watching the unfolding exchange. Out of her periphery, Sonata could see numerous faces turned toward them as whispers and soft comments were exchanged. Lex noticed also, sweeping his gaze over the crowd irritably. “All of you, disperse! You have your instructions!” He didn’t wait for his orders to be carried out, immediately turning back to her. “Sonata, I was examining the three of you in order to compare the magical channels in your bodies-”
“So you could do what, make another super-sexy bedroom spell?! Is that what that was about?!” She saw Lex wince slightly at that, his eyes sliding back to the crowd self-consciously, and she felt a surge of vindictiveness. Now it was his turn to be embarrassed about something! He started to speak, but she kept going before he could, not nearly finished yet. “Because you know what?! That’s fine! I don’t think you need it, ‘cause that one you used on me before was, like, ‘scream for mercy’-good, but whatever! If you wanna spice things up even more then I’m totes in favor of it! But you don’t need to play doctor with those two for that! You can just use me!”
“Sonata, listen to me!”
“No! You know what?! No! You listen to me!” She took a step forward, getting right in his face until their noses were only inches apart. “I don’t know when you became such a chick magnet, but you don’t need Nosey or Drafty or Aria or anyone else. I’ll do whatever you want, anytime, anywhere, okay? You do that whole ‘alpha dominant’ thing from last night again, and I promise you, I can’t tell you no.” Her voice was quieting as she spoke (causing the crowd to quiet down so that they could keep listening), but the intensity in her words only grew, her anger having changed to passion at some point.
Last night had been, hooves down, the single sexiest night of their relationship. Their first time together had been magical, and the second time had been incredible, but last night Lex had been seductive in a way she’d never known he could be. He’d turned his whole “take charge” bit up to eleven, and it had set her on fire, overwhelming her to the point where she hadn’t been able to object to the others being there too. It had only been after he’d ended things so unexpectedly, denying her the happy ending she’d been craving, that Sonata had calmed down enough to fully appreciate what had almost happened, letting jealousy and confusion set in.
But now she could feel herself heating up again. Telling him just how much she wanted him was reminding her that she hadn’t been fulfilled last night, and it was eroding her anger. Instead, she shifted her weight between her back legs, making her hips sway lightly as she tried to let him know that she was his for the taking. Literally. She needed-
A hoof touched her side. “Sonata.”
“Huh?!” Sonata jumped at the unexpected touch, looking over and seeing that it was Nosey making contact with her. Where had she come from? “What…?”
Red-faced, Nosey canted her head back toward the train station. “Maybe we should go.” She glanced over at Lex. “We need to talk. All four of us.”
Sonata blearily glanced back at her boyfriend just in time to see him nod, his expression perturbed. That didn’t match the other ponies’ faces though; they just looked disappointed that the show was over. It was enough to make Sonata fold her ears back as they started to trudge back toward the station.
“…so that’s what that was all about?” asked Nosey incredulously. “You were doing that to try and figure out how to change Aria into a pony?”
Aria rolled her eyes. “And it didn’t occur to you to actually tell us that before you started getting up close and personal?” Despite the biting tenor of her whisper, the corners of her lips were turned up.
Lex scowled, still blushing now that he knew what his experiment had been like for the girls. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work,” he muttered. “When it did, the amount of data was unexpectedly high. It required my full attention.” It was a poor excuse, and he knew it, but he didn’t have any other.
“Well, at least we know what was going on now,” sighed Nosey, closing her eyes for a long moment before turning back to Lex. “Are you going to need to do that again?”
He hesitated for a moment, before nodding wordlessly. The gesture made Aria grin wider. “Fine by me,” she whispered, shifting so that what curves her body possessed were emphasized, “since it’s for getting my voice back.”
Now it was Nosey’s turn to roll her eyes, before turning to her best friend. “Sonata? You okay?” The other mare hadn’t said a thing since Lex had explained why he’d done what he had, just looking at the ground quietly. It was enough to send a pang of guilt through Nosey; she’d gone to the river to quench her thirst while they’d been waiting for Lex to come back, and when she’d returned she’d overheard Sonata ranting at him. It had driven home just how much everything that had happened had rattled her. And part of that is because of me, she knew. “Listen, this doesn’t mean-”
“I know what it means,” murmured Sonata quietly. “I’ve seen this before.”
That was enough to make Nosey blink, looking around, but both Lex and Aria seemed confused by that. “You have?”
“Yeah.” Sonata looked up then, her expression distraught. “We’re in one of those pervy cartoons!”
“…huh?”
“The kind where all sorts of naughty misunderstandings keep happening! Now Lex is gonna do stuff like walk in on us while we’re changing, or see us when we’re taking a bath, and we’re all gonna be like ‘Lex, you baka!’ and hit him with a big hammer, and that’s when it happens!” she wailed. “That’s when we realize that what we’re saying doesn’t match how our lips are moving!” She put a hoof to her mouth, as though horrified at the thought. “Do you know how dumb I’ll look trying to sing like that?!”
“Oh, I don’t think you need to worry,” sneered Aria. “You couldn’t possibly look any dumber than you do right now.”
“Hey! You take that back!”
“Make me!”
As the two sisters started to bicker, Nosey glanced back at Lex, who snorted at the spectacle and turned to leave. The sight made the blonde mare smile. She’d been concerned that things would be different between all of them after what had happened, but now she felt confident that she’d been worried for nothing.
Fiddlesticks couldn’t help but smile at that, glancing up from where she was watching her little brother playing in the grass to look at Cleansweep. “You think so?”
“Uh-huh!” Fluttering her wings in excitement, the neon yellow filly flew in a loop, grinning as she completed the maneuver. “I asked one of the ponies who went with Lex into Vanhoover this morning, and he said they didn’t see even one monster!”
“Well, yeah, but it was the middle of the morning. Everypony knows that monsters don’t come out in the daylight.” Fiddlesticks circled around as she spoke, making it so that her friend and her brother were both in her line of sight.
“Sometimes they do!” insisted Cleansweep. “Like, Crunchy said that he’d spoken to some of the ponies that kept ponies from leaving the city, and that some of those ponies said that the monsters would jump out at you even during the day if you weren’t careful.”
Fiddlesticks let out a huff. “Since when you do listen to anything that Fruit Crunch says?” She didn’t look at Cleansweep as she spoke – being too busy stopping Tiddlywinks from trying to eat the snail he was watching – but her voice made it clear how she felt about the boy her friend had mentioned.
“I wasn’t listening to him,” Cleansweep protested. “We just happened to sit near each other a few days ago when Lex made that huge feast for everyone. It’s not like I wanted to hear what he had to say.” She fluttered back down to the ground. “Besides, that’s not the point. The point is, if he’s right about that and nopony saw any monsters in the city this morning, that means the city might really be safe again!” She gave a toothy grin, her earlier excitement resurfacing. “I can’t wait to go home and clean everything up! I’ll have everything looking as good as new by the time my mom and dad get back!”
Fiddlesticks kept her eyes on Tiddlywinks, not trusting her face to keep her real feelings hidden if she tried to reply to that. Cleansweep had gotten her cutie mark – a vacuum cleaner – only a few days before the flooding. When the disaster had struck, she’d gotten separated from her parents in the rush to get out of town, losing them in the crowd of ponies heading for the docks. She was sure that her parents had gotten on a ship and were just waiting for the chance to come back. Fiddlesticks was far less confident, but knew better than to say anything; the knowledge that her parents were never coming back hadn’t made things any easier to bear. If Cleansweep still had hope, then Fiddlesticks wasn’t going to take it from her.
“Actually, my dad says we’re probably not going to be able to return to the city anytime soon.”
Both fillies looked up at the new voice, Cleansweep rolling her eyes as she saw who it was, while Fiddlesticks smiled, raising a hoof in greeting. “Hi Straightlace,” she smiled at the off-white pegasus colt, his green mane and tail and cutie mark of a striped necktie identifying him immediately. Her grin widened as she looked at the other colt hiding behind him, a unicorn with a coat the color of burnt tan and a dark blue mane and tail, his cutie mark being a silhouette of a bird with its wings spread. “Hi Feathercap.”
Feathercap gave her a tentative smile before his eyes slid over to Cleansweep, the way he always did when he was around her, holding his ever-present binoculars in front of his face as though hiding behind them. Straightlace’s reply was much more forthright, giving a crisp nod toward Fiddlesticks before turning his attention back to Cleansweep. “My dad says that even if we had enough supplies to sanitize the city, there aren’t enough of us to get it done in a timely fashion, and that it’d probably take months at best, years at worst.”
“No way,” scoffed Cleansweep. “When I got my cutie mark, I ended up cleaning my entire house in just one afternoon! At first I was just sweeping the living room, but when I went to empty the dustpan I realized that the kitchen needed some cleaning too. And then I kept going once I was done there, and the more I cleaned the better I felt because I was making everything shiny and beautiful, and I started singing and cleaning some more, until eventually I’d fixed up the entire house!” She leapt back into the air as she spoke, pirouetting in place with a rapturous expression before returning to the ground, giving Straightlace a triumphant look. “And the whole thing only took a few hours, so there’s no way that cleaning a city would take years.”
Straightlace’s brows furrowed. “My dad said-”
“Put a sock in it, Lacey,” came a new voice. “Nopony cares what your dad said.”
The foals all turned to look at the newcomer, save for Tiddlywinks, who took the chance to eat some clovers without his sister noticing. The pony striding up to them was an earth colt with a dark chestnut coat and bright red mane and tail. Despite his obvious youth, his thick build made it abundantly clear that he’d grow up to be a powerhouse of a stallion. His cutie mark – a hoof squashing a banana, pineapple, and a bunch of grapes – drove the point home. Sneering, the colt casually strode up to the group as he continued to address Straightlace. “I dunno why you think he knows anything anyway. He was just some mid-level clerk at city hall.”
Straightlace, who usually never lost his rigid demeanor, inhaled sharply at that. “My dad is civic functionary,” he replied frostily. “He was appointed to his position-”
“-because he kept Granny Hoofingford’s books for her for years, and she made sure to get him a nice cushy job after he got too old to be eye candy for her anymore,” snickered the colt, chuckling as Straightlace turned red.
Frowning, Fiddlesticks finished pulling the clovers out of Tiddlywinks’ mouth before standing up and marching over to plant herself directly in front of the new arrival (and missing as her brother leaned down to devour a dandelion). “You leave him alone, Fruit Crunch,” she warned, glaring up at him.
Despite the fact that the stallion was almost a foot taller than her and nearly twice her weight, Fruit Crunch – a scion of Vanhoover’s McNeigh family – backed off, holding a hoof up in a placating gesture. “Hey, is that any way to talk to the pony who came here to check on you guys?”
Cleansweep tilted her head. “Check on us?”
Fruit Crunch flashed her a cocky smile. “Yeah. I was worried about you and Fiddleface, since the little creep over there was spying on you again.” He nodded toward Feathercap as he spoke, leaving no doubt who he was accusing.
“I-, I was not!” squeaked Feathercap, looking like he wanted to sink into the ground. Despite his words, the look on his face made it obvious that he’d been doing exactly what the larger stallion had said he’d been doing.
“Oh please,” snorted Fruit Crunch. “You had those dumb binoculars pointed right at them. Your tongue was practically hanging out.”
Feathercap looked like he was about to cry, shrinking down behind his binoculars as much as he could. “I…I thought I saw a grass warbler,” he mumbled miserably.
Fruit Crunch sneered at that, ignoring how Straightlace was glaring at him and Fiddlesticks looked ready to explode. But it was Cleansweep who spoke first. “Hey, come on, Crunchy. Leave him alone. Besides, he probably did see a grass warbird or whatever it was, right?” The last word was directed toward Feathercap, along with a kindhearted smile. It was enough to make the colt flush red, nodding gratefully. “There. See?”
Fruit Crunch shrugged, like he couldn’t believe they were still talking about this. “I was just kidding around, Dust Bunny.” Somehow, when he used a nickname for Cleansweep, it didn’t sound mean the way it did for the rest of them. “Not my fault the little runt can’t take a joke. Anyway, c’mon, I got something I wanna show you.”
Fiddlesticks piped up before Cleansweep could. “She’s hanging out with us right now.”
Fruit Crunch’s lip curled. “Doing what? Listening to Lacey doing his impression of his dad’s echo? Watching you babysit your kid brother? Please. I’m talking about doing something that’s actually fun.”
“Then we should all go,” interjected Straightlace suddenly. “My dad says,” he said those three words challengingly, not giving Fruit Crunch a chance to answer before he continued, “that even here in camp it’s safer not to go someplace alone.”
“That’s right,” nodded Fiddlesticks, trying not to smirk at the sudden scowl that appeared on Fruit Crunch’s face.
Cleansweep clearly saw it too, because she fluttered around in front of him, hanging in the air. “C’mon, Cruncy. There’s no reason we all can’t go do whatever it is, right?”
Fruit Crunch let out a sigh of irritation. “Whatever. Fine. I’ll let you losers tag along too. Maybe this’ll show you just what real fun is like.” Without another word, he turned and stalked off, leaving the others to catch up. Fiddlesticks shot Cleansweep a glare, causing the other filly to give a helpless shrug before she flew after Fruit Crunch. Straightlace and Feathercap followed a moment later.
Frowning, Fiddlesticks wavered for a moment, her worry for her friend warring with her desire not to be around that awful colt. Even if they were childhood friends, that didn’t excuse the way that Cleansweep seemed to forget herself when Fruit Crunch was around, getting caught up in whatever he happened to be doing at the time. Oh, she’d say something…if she was prompted. But even then it tended to be half-hearted, as though she couldn’t bring herself to object too much to what the large colt was doing.
Worse, the stallion had a habit of hanging around “Dust Bunny,” as he insisted on calling her, coming around every day or two as he felt like it. Fiddlesticks had finally asked Cleansweep where the name had come from, and the filly had refused to say at first before eventually confessing. Apparently, she and Fruit Crunch had gone to the same kindergarten, where Cleansweep had gained a reputation for somehow managing to get into the dirtiest spots around, causing her to be covered in dust bunnies by the end of each day regardless of what the teachers did. “And that turned into my name, at least for Crunchy,” Cleansweep had explained.
That didn’t surprise Fiddlesticks at all, considering how much he liked to use awful nicknames for everyone else. It was enough to make her want nothing to do with the mean colt, but Cleansweep was one of the best friends she’d made since coming to the camp. She couldn’t just give up on her to get away from one awful pony, especially if it meant letting that pony influence her more.
Picking up Tiddlywinks, Fiddlesticks gave him a quick pat on the back to get him to spit out the plants he’d eaten before she plunked him on her back and trotted after the others.
“Now, you guys stay quiet,” instructed Fruit Crunch as they made their way toward the river. “Just leave all the talking to me, got it?”
After a few seconds of glancing at each other, the group gave a soft chorus of yesses, causing Fruit Crunch to smile, making his way toward where a pair of ponies were drinking their fill. “Excuse me,” he called, his voice suddenly having become very polite. “Excuse me, Miss Keen.”
Fiddlesticks frowned at that name, feeling like it was vaguely familiar from somewhere. It was only when one of the two ponies at the river’s edge – a yellow and orange earth mare – turned around that she recognized her. She was there when Lex cursed that one pony who tried to kill him! Immediately, Fiddlesticks’ eyes slid toward the other pony by the water, a chill going down her spine as she realized he could only be one person. He was the mirror opposite of his companion in terms of coloration, his yellow coat matching her mane and tail, while his orange hair was the same hue as her coat.
Fiddlesticks felt a chill run down her spine as she saw who Fruit Crunch was talking to.
She hadn’t ever heard of Peachy Keen until recently, but Spit Polish was a pony she’d made sure to steer clear of before now. She hadn’t been alone in that, either; all of the camp ponies had known to stay away from Block Party and his servants if at all possible, and if you found yourself in their presence to do everything you could not to upset them. Fiddlesticks had been fortunate in that regard, since they’d never called on foals to patrol the city or try to raid any of the nearby farms. Even so, she’d lived in terror of the brutal stallion and his minions, scared that Tiddlywinks would start crying when they were around and draw their ire. Block Party, she’d been sure, was the sort of pony who’d hit even a baby.
And Spit Polish isn’t any better, she thought worriedly. After all, the yellow stallion had tried to murder Lex, the pony who’d done so much for them, in his sleep. Only the worst of the worst would try to do something so awful! Fortunately it hadn’t worked, and Lex had punished the stallion severely, which was the only reason that Fiddlesticks wasn’t running in the opposite direction right now. Even then, she couldn’t help but cradle Tiddlywinks tighter in anxiety, making the infant coo happily at the unintentional hug.
The other foals wore expressions that matched her own. Out of her periphery, she could see that Straightlace was frowning deeper than usual, remaining very still. Behind him, Feathercap looked ready to bolt, still shielding his face with his binoculars. Even Cleansweep seemed uncertain, hovering in the air with an uneasy look on her face.
Oblivious to how the others felt, Fruit Crunch smiled. “Miss Keen, somepony asked me to give you a message.”
“A message?” echoed Peachy in surprise. She shot a glance at Spit Polish, still keeping a hoof across his back, but the stallion just shrugged and shook his head. Looking back at Fruit Crunch, Peachy cocked her head. “From who?”
“I dunno their name,” replied Fruit Crunch easily. “But they were a unicorn stallion. They said they wanted to talk to you behind the train station.” He paused for just a moment before suddenly blurting out, “Alone.”
“That’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” murmured Spit Polish, looking at Peachy.
She nodded, frowning as a confused expression passed over her features. “Did he say why? And who-, wait…it wasn’t Lex, was it?” Just the thought of that was enough to make her eyes widen.
She wasn’t the only one. “Wh-, no!” Fruit Crunch grimaced, shaking his head back and forth so fast that it made his mane swing wildly. “No, definitely not Lex! It was a stallion with, um…” He glanced at the grass just for an instant before he continued. “With a green coat, and…” His eyes darted to the river. “And blue hair.”
“A unicorn stallion with a green coat and blue hair,” murmured Peachy Keen, clearly trying to put a name to the description. It apparently didn’t work, because she glanced over at Spit Polish again. “Do you know anypony like that?”
“No. I can’t think of someone who matches that description.”
Fiddlesticks couldn’t help but fidget in place, listening to the conversation. There was something odd about how Peachy Keen and Spit Polish were talking to each other. It didn’t match the way she had her foreleg around him. They were still acting nice to each other, but there was a tension there, like…like they were being too careful to be considerate of each other, trying very hard not to say something the other one would have found upsetting. It wasn’t how close friends acted.
Seemingly oblivious to the atmosphere, Spit Polish turned back to Fruit Crunch. “Did you see his cutie mark?”
The colt shook his head again. “He was wearing saddlebags.”
Spit Polish gave a grunt of acknowledgment at that, but didn’t otherwise respond, and an uncomfortable silence fell. Peachy Keen was biting her lip, looking at the train station in consideration, while her companion did his best to look anywhere else but at her. But a few seconds later, he gave a sigh and nudged Peachy. “You should go.”
Something about his tone was different, as though he’d stopped trying to walk on eggshells. It was enough to make Peachy Keen whip her head around, surprised and maybe a little hopeful. “Really?”
He gave her an insincere smile. “Yeah. I mean, what if it’s a secret admirer or something? You wouldn’t want to miss out on meeting them because you were stuck babysitting me.” His grin changed then, becoming a smile that was somehow cruel and self-deprecating at the same time. “Besides, you said how much you didn’t want to be around me before, remember?”
Peachy stiffened at that, drawing a sharp breath. An instant later, her expression became flat. “Now?” Her voice was suddenly brimming with repressed anger. “You really want to have this discussion now?”
Spit Polish looked away from her, keeping his eyes on the river. “I’m just saying, if you want to go you should go. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“We can go!” The words burst from Fiddlesticks’ lips before she could stop herself. Just being around Spit Polish was bad enough, but seeing grown-ups fighting like this was incredibly uncomfortable. “We can go, and we’ll tell whoever that stallion is that you can meet with him another time.”
Her outburst had drawn all eyes to her, and she could see that her friends looked relieved at the suggestion, quite clearly not wanting to be here either. Only Fruit Crunch looked ticked, glaring at her in silent fury. But it was Peachy Keen who responded first. “No. I’ll go, since that’s what Spit Polish wants.”
The other stallion still didn’t look at her. “It is.”
“Fine.” Peachy withdrew her leg from around Spit Polish, stepping away from him. There was a pregnant pause then, but when Spit Polish had no reaction, Peachy turned and trotted away, her face carefully neutral. In a few moments, she was out of earshot, not looking back as she headed toward the train station.
Fruit Crunch waited a few more seconds before glancing back at the other foals, a cocky grin on his face as he waggled his eyebrows at them in a clear “watch me” expression. A moment later, he walked toward Spit Polish. “So, I got you a little something.”
Blinking as though he’d forgotten they were there, Spit Polish turned to regard the colt. “Huh? Fuh mee?” In contrast to a moment ago, his lips smacked as he spoke, the words coming out slurred. Even when he finished speaking his mouth hung open lightly, as though he’d forgotten to close it, giving Fruit Crunch a confused look.
“Yeah,” grinned Fruit Crunch, digging around in his saddlebag for a moment before withdrawing his hoof. “Check this out! It’s an orange!” Sure enough, the round fruit was there, balanced on the end of his hoof as he held it out toward Spit Polish.
Fiddlesticks’ eyes widened. Oranges hadn’t been part of the lunch that Lex distributed a little while ago! There was only one place where he could have gotten that… “You shouldn’t have that!” she yelled, suddenly worried. “Lex said those emergency rations were only for needy ponies!”
Again, Fruit Crunch sent an angry glare her way, but this time it was accompanied by a mean smirk. “What do you know, Fiddleface? Just look at poor Spit Polish. He’s the neediest pony here, right?” He turned back to the stallion in question. “Go on, take it.”
Spit Polish’s ears folded back, his eyes making it clear that he wasn’t sure what was going on. With a confused expression he swung his head back and forth, looking from Fiddlesticks’ worried face to Fruit Crunch’s grin. “Izzit aw-rite?” he mumbled, looking at the colt.
Fruit Crunch smiled wider. “Of course it is. I got it for you.”
His face brightening, Spit Polish reached for the orange…only for Fruit Crunch to drop it right before the other stallion’s hoof made contact with it. “Oops!” he cried in mock-surprise. “Clumsy me! I’m so sorry!”
“Fruit Crunch,” called Fiddlesticks warningly, not liking where this was going.
But the colt ignored her, and Spit Polish seemed more intent on the wayward snack than anything else. “Aww…” Pouting at the loss of the fruit, the cursed stallion pawed at it clumsily, causing the orange to roll along the ground as he attempted to scoop it up with his hoof.
“Here,” smiled Fruit Crunch nastily. “Let me help.” He moved closer to the stallion and, waiting carefully for when Spit Polish reached out for the orange again, kicked out. His hoof collided with Spit Polish’s foreleg – the one that was still planted on the ground while his other one tried to reclaim the orange – and knocked it aside, sending Spit Polish tumbling to the ground. “Oh no!” exclaimed Fruit Crunch, now openly sarcastic. “I guess I’m not the only clumsy pony here!”
“Hey…Crunchy, c’mon. Knock it off.” But Cleansweep’s protest was half-hearted, signaling discomfort rather than outrage.
“Aw, I’m just playing around, Dust Bunny.” Fruit Punch’s voice was light, still sounding amused as he looked at the fallen stallion. “Let me get that for you.” He reached out toward the orange, lying just in front of Spit Polish’s nose, only to suddenly lunge forward, stomping on it and crushing the fruit to pulp in an instant.
Juice flew everywhere, including onto Spit Polish’s face, who cried out in dismay. “W-wai’d yuu doodat?”
“I can’t help it,” laughed Fruit Crunch. “It’s my cutie mark, see?” He turned in profile, pointing to his flank. “I’m the best there is at making all-natural fruit juice, so when I saw that lying on the ground I just couldn’t help myself.” His smile was openly cruel now, leering at the fallen stallion. “Sorry about that.”
“Yuu geddaway fromee,” mumbled Spit Polish as he started backing up, stumbling as he tried to climb to his hooves.
But Fruit Crunch refused to let him go, advancing on the retreating stallion. “Aw, don’t be like that. Here, you’re all dirty now. Let me clean you up!” The last three words came out as a growl as he suddenly lunged forward again, locking his teeth around Spit Polish’s mane and tugging hard. The stallion cried out in sudden pain, instinctively trying to move with Fruit Crunch to avoid having his hair pulled. The result was that, when Fruit Crunch released him a moment later, Spit Polish went stumbling…right into the river, finally losing his balance and collapsing in the water. Behind him, Fruit Crunch had collapsed also, but with laughter at seeing what had become of his victim. “Oh, this is priceless!” he chortled. “Block Party’s right-hoof pony, all washed up! Literally!”
“That’s enough!”
Pausing only long enough to shove Tiddlywinks onto Feathercap’s back – ignoring the unicorn’s frightened yelp at the sudden burden – Fiddlesticks strode forward and planted herself between Fruit Crunch and Spit Polish, the latter sputtering as he lifted his head out of the water. “You leave him alone, Fruit Crunch!”
“What, like he left us alone?” sneered the earth colt as he picked himself up. “Have you forgotten everything this guy did, Fiddleface?”
“That doesn’t mean that what you’re doing now is okay!” she shot back.
“I’m just giving him a little payback,” sneered the larger foal. “It’s not like he doesn’t deserve it.”
“My dad says…” Straightlace faltered for a moment as Fruit Crunch glared at him, but he rallied a moment later, going over to plant himself right next to Fiddlesticks. “My dad says that good ponies shouldn’t be mean to people, even if those people are mean to them. He-”
“Forget your dad!” spat Fruit Crunch, no longer amused. “What good was he when Block party was running this place, huh?” Reaching out, he gave the other colt a shove, causing Straightlace to back up a few steps. “He was just another weakling who was too scared to speak up, because he knew what’d happen if he did!” He glared over Fiddlesticks’ head, at where Spit Polish was still lying in the river. “Well guess what? Now it’s your turn to be scared!”
But suddenly Cleansweep was blocking his view of the other stallion. “Crunchy, look, let’s get out of here, okay? We can…” She gestured helplessly. “We can go play a game of beanbag toss or tag or something…”
But Fruit Crunch wouldn’t be dissuaded, giving the filly an outraged look. “I don’t believe this! You’re sticking up for him too?! You agreed with me all those times when I said they’d pay, remember?!”
Cleansweep winced, her wings slowing as she landed next to Fiddlesticks. “I know. I know I did, but Lex already did that…” Her voice was pleading. “So please, just…just knock it off, okay?”
“NO!” Fruit Crunch roared the word, pawing at the ground in fury. “This isn’t good enough! He has to feel scared and angry and helpless! He has to cry himself to sleep! HE HAS TO SUFFER FOR WHAT HE DID TO ME!"
Silence hung in the wake of his final outburst, and Fruit Crunch hung his head as though exhausted, drawing ragged breaths. Except, Fiddlesticks realized a moment later, they weren’t breaths. They were sobs. And the reason he was looking down… He’s crying, she realized.
“Crunchy…” Cleansweep took a step toward the distraught colt, holding a hoof out toward him. But Fruit Crunch didn’t look up at her. Instead, he turned and bolted, running as fast as he could away from them. “Crunchy!” She paused just long enough to look at Fiddlesticks and Straightlace and yell, “I’m going after him!” before taking off in pursuit.
And just like that, it was over.
For several seconds nopony moved, until Tiddlywinks' crying broke the silence. That seemed to snap everyone out of their stupor, with Feathercap awkwardly trying to rock the bawling infant. But it was only when Fiddlesticks went and picked him up, shooting Feathercap a grateful look, that the baby quieted down.
Not sure what to do now, she looked back over at where Spit Polish had fallen, and saw that Straightlace had ventured into the river, helping the stallion to his hooves. But once Spit Polish had gotten up – his foreleg still draped over Straightlace’s shoulders – he made no move to exit the belly-deep water, his eyes closed and a look of shame spreading across his face. “…I beat him,” he said softly.
The children all shared a look, but it was Straightlace who spoke up. “What?”
“I beat him,” repeated Spit Polish quietly. A moment later he sighed, opening his eyes but not looking at anyone, keeping his gaze on the ground. “I didn’t recognize that colt at first. He came to see the comman-…to see Block Party a while back. He’d heard about how we were stealing food from the nearby farms, and he was mad. He said we should be asking them for help. That he was a McNeigh and could use his family’s history of working with the farmers to get them to donate enough food for us to hold out until help arrived.”
Having just put Tiddlywinks down to play with some flowers, Fiddlesticks couldn’t help but gawk at the stallion’s confession. “And you beat him up for that?!”
An anguished look crossed Spit Polish’s face. “No! I mean, not at first.” He seemed to realize how that sounded, because he continued. “The comm-, Block Party said that kid’s idea wouldn’t get us enough food. That we had to take what we needed in order for everypony to survive.”
Nopony said anything to that. They didn’t need to; all of them were aware that they’d been starving when Lex had found them. “That kid tried to get Block Party to change his mind,” continued Spit Polish in a miserable voice. “That was when…when he gave me the order.” Nopony replied, not sure what to say to that. Finally, Straightlace tugged on Spit Polish’s leg, and the stallion let the colt lead him out of the river. “I knew it was wrong. I knew it, but I just…I did it anyway and I don’t…I don’t know why…” His voice started to break then, his lips quivering. But it was what happened next that pushed him over the edge.
Tiddlywinks offered him a flower.
It wasn’t anything special, just a daisy that he’d picked, mangling it in the process. But there wasn’t any hesitation or fear on the baby’s face as he held the plant out towards Spit Polish, smiling brightly. It was enough to paralyze the older stallion, unable to turn away from the sight. How long had it been since somepony had looked at him like that, without pity or resentment or fear? How low had he sunk that he’d forgotten what it felt like to have someone do something nice for him? More than that, when was the last time he’d done something nice for someone else?
Taking the flower with trembling hooves, Spit Polish began to cry.
“Dig faster!” Lex yelled at the ponies in the hole. “I want this to be ready to hold what’s left of those ghouls in twelve hours!”
Nosey, at her usual place by his side, nudged him gently. “Putting it that way isn’t exactly going to make them want to give it their all, Lex,” she chided him gently.
But the dour stallion was in no mood for it. “Then Sonata should be here to soften my words for me,” he answered darkly.
“I’m sure she will be,” replied Nosey in a soothing voice, “just as soon as she and Aria are done, er, talking things out.”
Lex snorted. He wasn’t skilled where euphemisms were concerned, but even he could tell that “talking things out” was Nosey’s way of saying that they were still fighting. Normally he wouldn’t have cared, but in this case he knew exactly what they were fighting over, and just the thought of it was enough to make him tense, thinking back to the discussion the four of them had just had…
The realization that the girls had thought he’d been making some sort of sexual advance had been as shocking as it had been mortifying. The very idea that they’d so wildly misread his actions had initially struck him as ludicrous – to the point where he’d briefly wondered if he was the butt of some coordinated joke on their part – but he’d eventually realized that, with no context for why he’d suddenly started examining them so closely, they’d genuinely believed that he was initiating some sort of liaison.
Lex was used to there being a comprehension gap in his interactions with other ponies, but it had been quite some time since it had been that bad. Worse, this wasn’t one that he could blame on the other party’s lack of acumen. In hindsight, there’d been no possible way they could have known what he was doing, but at the time he honestly hadn’t been aware that his intentions hadn’t been plainly obvious. In his mind, there hadn’t been anything else that it could have been. It was an oversight so egregious that made him want to isolate himself from everyone he knew until the event had faded from their collective memory and was never spoken of again. No matter that he’d been exhausted, recovering from numerous injuries, and attempting to manage the city’s recovery all on his own; such a lapse in judgment was as unforgivable as it was humiliating.
But as much as the memory made him want to crawl out of his skin, even that was nothing compared to how confused he felt about his relationship with the girls now.
They would have let me. Just the thought stirred up a maelstrom of emotions in him, ruining any attempt to approach the subject rationally. They thought I wanted them, and none of them said no.
Of course, he couldn’t rule out that they’d given some sort of nonverbal signal of rejection at the time and he simply hadn’t noticed it – at this point, almost nothing about what had happened last night could be conclusively ruled out – but that hadn’t been the premise of the conversation they’d just had. Rather, their questions and statements had all been predicated on them being upset not because his so-called “advances” had been unwanted, but because they hadn’t understood what had precipitated them, nor what had caused him to so abruptly cease. Even Sonata’s complaints earlier this morning had been presented as her being jealous and confused, rather than his having acted in a manner that she or the others had found unwelcome. Which strongly suggested that what they’d perceived as his desire for them had been welcome.
He’d tried to contextualize that, of course. In the short time since he’d left the train station, he’d struggled to integrate what he’d just learned into what he already knew about relationships, both generally and with regard to those three individuals. But it had been futile; nothing about what happened made any sort of sense when compared to what he knew, either as an abstraction or in his interpersonal connections to Sonata, Nosey, and Aria. If anything, it overturned what he’d thought had been reliable data. It was maddening!
Worse, he was now hyper-aware of the girls.
When Nosey had followed him after he’d left the station, eventually catching up to him and wordlessly pressing her side to his, he hadn’t said anything. Intellectually, he’d known that this was consistent with how she’d been acting recently: maintaining physical contact with him in the wake of her trauma as some sort of coping mechanism. But now every aspect of her femininity was thrust violently into his consciousness, constant and visceral and impossible to ignore.
Each breath he took brought with it the scent of her mane. The slightest little move that either of them made caused the curves of her body to rub against him. Every word she said was now compared to the heavy breaths and soft moans she’d made last night, sounds that he’d overlooked at the time but which now came back to him in exceptional detail. And he knew that it would be the same when Aria and Sonata finally rejoined him. Even the fact that he was already in a physical relationship with the latter Siren didn’t reduce his confusion, since he’d still never been confident as to how to initiate a bout of lovemaking between them.
The cocktail of embarrassment, confusion, and arousal was one that Lex wasn’t able to handle, and so he’d dealt with it the only way he knew how: by clamping down on it. Though directionless, his anger was easy to summon, holding his other emotions at bay, barely, as he turned his thoughts back toward the work of restoring Vanhoover. Everything else is too trivial for me to focus on right now, he told himself. It was a message that he’d needed to repeat numerous times.
Still, he had managed to get several things done. A squad of ponies had been given an allotment of bits and told to deliver them to the nearby farming communities; reparations for the goods they’d had stolen from them before, as well as a signal that Vanhoover was once again open for commerce. That was only barely the case, since he was appropriating what remained of the city’s funds in order to buy essential goods, but it was enough to begin resurrecting the local market’s economy. Without that, Vanhoover had only borrowed time instead of a future.
After all, they were likely going to have even more survivors trickling in soon. After dispatching the bit-laden ponies to the nearby farms, Lex had put together a troupe of pegasi, sending them into Vanhoover. Or rather, over Vanhoover; each of them had been told to fly over the city and verbally broadcast, as often and as loudly as they could, that the ghouls were gone and that the camp east of town was now under new management and would accept all ponies. There was no telling how many survivors would hear the message and come looking for aid, but Lex felt certain that the number would be greater that zero.
The next order of business had been corpse disposal. The pile of dead ghouls needed to be dealt with as soon as equinely possible. Already, the field of body parts was beginning to emit a malodorous stench, something which Lex had managed to keep away from the camp by having more pegasi flap their wings at the field, blowing the scent of rot and decay away from the camp. In the meantime, the ponies working to clear out the mass grave they’d need had been increased, thanks to the additional digging supplies he’d brought back from his latest foray into Vanhoover. Now they just needed to actually dig the hole in a timely manner.
For his part, the sole remaining thing that needed to be done was to replenish his long-range communication spell. Even if it only allowed each party to send a single twenty-five word message, that would be enough to let him inform Ribbon Cutting, the deputy mayor of Tall Tale, what had happened. More importantly, it would let him tell her to find a way to contact Cloudsdale and send an emergency supply of rainclouds. The cloud city wasn’t anywhere near here, of course, and it was unlikely that Tall Tale’s rail line had been repaired, but at least this way Ribbon would be able to send a message as soon as possible.
“Nosey, I need to confer with Severance,” Lex stated, not looking at her as he spoke. “Privately.”
He felt her tense at that. “Are you sure I can’t stay with you? I’ll be really quiet.”
“Out of the question!” The words came out harsher than he’d intended; in his mind her saying that she could be quiet was enough to conjure up more memories of her submissive whimpering, and he reached for a greater source of irritation to suppress it. The last thing I need is a reporter uncovering that I can’t replenish my strongest magic without Severance there! “Go find Sonata. Have her use her magic to keep you calm,” he continued, forcing equanimity into his voice.
Her ears folded back, and for a moment she looked like she wanted to protest. “I-, alright.” She took a deep breath, making a motion to step away from him, but stopped before following through, sighing. “Can you walk me back to the station?” she asked in a small voice.
Simultaneously thrilled and annoyed at the request, Lex paused for just a moment before giving a curt nod. He still wanted to reduce her discomfort as much as possible, and taking a little bit of time to personally escort her back wouldn’t impact anything. With one last glance back at the teams of ponies excavating the ground, he turned and led Nosey away.
Even with all the ponies he’d put to work, the camp still had numerous inhabitants, and Lex was painfully aware of the eyes watching him and Nosey as they headed for the train station. That was another thing he had to deal with: Sonata’s little outburst from earlier in the day had made what had happened public knowledge. As they walked, Lex distinctly heard snatches of hushed conversation, phrases like “all three of them” and “that other mare” reaching his ears. The gossip had apparently spread in record time.
Only barely aware that Nosey was turning bright red, Lex clenched his teeth. His immediate instinct was to inform everyone that they had no idea what they were talking about, and that Sonata’s words had been the product of a misunderstanding. But that impulse was immediately quashed. The misunderstanding had been caused by him, and the shame and embarrassment he felt from that wasn’t something he wanted to spread around. And I have no idea if the truth would make things better or worse for the girls, he admitted to himself, giving Nosey a sidelong glance. Besides, there was no compelling public interest with regards to what had happened, which meant that he wasn’t obligated to tell everypony the full story.
That was justification enough, and Lex stoically refused to acknowledge the chorus of whispers and muttered remarks that followed them to the station. Once there, he and Nosey barely said a word to each other before she slipped into the building, the sound of Sonata’s voice and Aria’s whispering leaking out as she did. But Lex was already turning to leave, wanting to focus on something else, anything else, and by the time he had made it back to the other end of the camp, he was thinking that maybe he should spend further time with Severance so that he could replenish more of his spells-
“Look!”
Lex’s eyes immediately turned to the pegasus stallion who’d raised his voice, recognizing him as one of C. Shells’ crew, Ocean Spray. He’d been in the middle of hauling dirt out of the hole, but had stopped in mid-air, a bucket dangling from one hoof as the other pointed out toward the city. Except it wasn’t toward the city, Lex realized as he tracked where the stallion was indicating. He was pointing too far to the southwest, and the only thing in that direction was water...
Lex stopped as he saw what Ocean Spray was pointing at.
Out past the bay, a boat was slowly making its way toward Vanhoover.
It hadn’t taken Cleansweep very long to catch up to Fruit Crunch.
While the colt’s mad dash had initially left her behind, she’d flapped her wings as hard as she could, closing the gap quickly and calling out for him to stop. But Fruit Crunch hadn’t listened, turning his face away from her and continuing to run as fast as he could, and it hadn’t been long before Cleansweep had started to fall behind. While she knew she was a good flyer, a healthy young earth colt had stamina that she simply couldn’t match; she’d eventually needed to land, her wings aching, before Fruit Crunch had even started breathing heavily.
But just because he’d been able to outpace her hadn’t meant that he could get away from her. After all, there wasn’t anywhere for him to go; he’d taken off on a path parallel to the river, heading due east away from the camp. On the open plain, that had left him with no buildings to shut himself in or even any cover to hide behind. Once she’d rested her wings, it had been a simple matter for Cleansweep to fly up into the air and spot his position, his brown coat and red mane and tail standing out easily against the green grass.
The harder part had been waiting for him to stop running so that she could approach him. He had finally slowed to a stop, moving to the river’s edge and huddling there, facing the water. He was still like that when she landed a short distance from him, not sure what to say. With no one else around, the sound of him sobbing was impossible to miss, his ears flattened against his head as his shoulders jumped. The sight made Cleansweep lick her lips before taking a tentative step toward him. “Crunchy?” she called softly. “What’s going on?” He didn’t answer, save for his sobbing to soften, but by the way he was still shaking she knew he was just holding them back rather than calming down. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He didn’t turn to look at her as he replied, his voice a low moan of misery. “Go away, Dust Bunny.”
But Cleansweep refused to be deterred, taking another step closer to him. “Come on, we’ve been friends our entire lives. You’ve helped me out plenty of times, remember? Like when you offered to save all that snow for me during Winter Wrap-Up so that, after it was over, I could cream Maple Leaf with snowballs and she wouldn’t be able to fight back? Or that time I hadn’t finished my homework, and on the way to school you spread peanut butter on it so that a dog would actually eat it? Oh! And when you had that idea to put those clouds in front of my parents’ bedroom windows, so they wouldn’t realize when it was light out, and-”
“I remember,” Fruit Crunch muttered, rubbing his eyes as he sniffled.
The words brought a smile to Cleansweep’s face. He still sounded awful, but at least he wasn’t crying his eyes out anymore. It’s a start, she decided, sitting down next to him. “Okay, then let this be my paying you back. Crunchy…what happened?”
For a long time he didn’t answer, curled up in the fetal position with his chin resting on his hind knees, forelegs wrapped around them and eyes fixed firmly on the river. “I wanted to make him pay,” he muttered finally.
Cleansweep didn’t need to ask who he meant. “For what he did to you before?” she probed gently, remembering what he’d yelled right before he’d started running. A moment later, Fruit Crunch gave the slightest of nods.
Cleansweep didn’t reply immediately, wondering if it would be okay to ask the next question on her mind. But she was still worried about him, and her curiosity was killing her, until she finally couldn’t help herself. “What did he do?”
Fruit Crunch’s response was to send a dark look her way, clearly resenting her asking, but she wasn’t about to back off. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’ll have you know that Straightlace’s dad isn’t the only one who gives good advice. Mine told me that talking about painful stuff is like throwing up: you feel better when you get it out of you.”
“Yeah, well, his dad and your dad are both stupid,” muttered Fruit Crunch with another sniffle. But the hurt in his voice was so obvious that Cleansweep couldn’t bring herself to be upset. Instead, she scooted closer to him and put a hoof around him. He tensed up at the contact, but relaxed a moment later. After that he slowly opened up to her, telling her about what had happened between him, Spit Polish, and Block Party.
When he was done, Cleansweep was blinking back tears. “Oh, Crunchy, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
He still wouldn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on the water. “Would you have stopped me if you had?”
Cleansweep hesitated for a moment before answering, and she saw him tense up again, hearing loud and clear what she hadn’t said. “Listen, I get that you want to pay him back for what happened. I do. But-”
“No, you don’t!” snapped Fruit Crunch, his melancholy attitude vanishing in a sudden burst of anger. “You don’t get it at all!” He leapt to his hooves then, pawing at the ground restlessly. “I didn’t just want to get back at him! I mean, I did, but that wasn’t all! I thought…” His rage suddenly fizzled, and he sat down, turning his face back to the water.
“What?” pressed Cleansweep.
Fruit Crunch heaved a sigh, miserable again. “I thought that if I could smack him around, knock him down until he couldn’t get up, it’d make what happened before go away. Like…like I was still fighting back, even after a little while, instead of just being a loser, you know?” Cleansweep immediately started to pipe up, wanting to tell him that he wasn’t a loser, but he continued before she had a chance. “That way, I would have been someone who kept going even when it hurt, like Lex.”
Cleansweep blinked, thrown by the sudden introduction of the camp’s new leader into the conversation. “Lex?”
“Yeah.” Fruit Crunch finally stopped scowling then, a small smile crossing his face. “He’s really something, isn’t he? I knew he was even before he wiped out all those ghouls, ‘cuz when Spit Polish tried to attack him, he really let him have it!” He stood up suddenly, raising onto his hind legs and holding his forelegs over his head, stretching himself as tall as he could. “He turned into a huge shadow, and he was all ‘I’ve slain dragons! What chance did you ever have?!’ And then he completely crushed Spit Polish like a bug! It was incredible!”
“It was pretty cool,” nodded Cleansweep with a smile, hoping he didn’t notice that she was faking it. In fact, seeing Lex like that had frightened her; at the time, she’d been more reassured by the presence of that Sonata lady talking him down. But right now the more important thing was helping her friend feel better.
“It was better than cool,” insisted Fruit Crunch, falling back onto all fours. “It was great! It was his way of saying, ‘I’m too tough for you!’ and then showing just why he was! Did you know he really did slay a dragon? I asked one of those new ponies that came with him about it.” He looked into the distance with a grin, clearly imagining what that must have been like, before his good mood started to fade. “He got hurt pretty badly in that fight, and in some of the other ones he was in too, but he never quit. No matter what happened to him, he always got back up and kept fighting. Not like me…”
“Hey, come on. That’s not fair. He’s him and you’re you.”
“No kidding,” snorted Fruit Crunch derisively. “He’s Lex Legis, the wizard with amazing powers and a magic scythe and who’s tougher than anypony ever, and I’m just Fruit Crunch, the foal who’s good at making fruit juice and whose great-uncle is a McNeigh.” His ears folded back again as he looked at the ground. “I was an idiot for thinking I could even pretend to be as strong as he is.”
Cleansweep opened her mouth, then closed it again. Telling him that he shouldn’t expect to be able to do the things that Lex did – and that she liked him the way he was – clearly wouldn’t get through to him now. But what would? She frowned as she tried to think of something, and silence fell for a short while until a light bulb went off over her head. That’s right! He might not have a magic weapon or be able to cast spells, but there’s one way that he can be like Lex! “What about the Night Mare?”
Fruit Crunch looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Cleansweep smiled, the gears starting to turn in her head. “Remember a few days ago, when Lex made all of that food appear out of thin air? There was that one pegasus mare who gave a speech right before he did, and she was able to cast a spell even though she wasn’t a unicorn!”
Fruit Crunch paused. “I…yeah. Yeah, I remember her.” He mostly remembered the food that had come afterward. After all, Fruit Crunch hadn’t become a fan of Lex’s until later on, when the red-horned stallion had defeated Spit Polish and then proceeded to take out out all of those ghouls. “She talked about Nightmare Moon, right?”
“No, she was talking about the Night Mare. She said she was a ‘goddess,’ which is like a princess but lives extremely far away, but is so powerful that she can send you some of that power, and that-”
“-that’s where Lex gets some of his magic from!” Fruit Crunch’s eyes widened. “I remember now! She said that the Night Mare is a protector who gives magic to ponies who want to be strong and do what they have to do to protect somepony else!”
“That’s right!” Cleansweep beamed, happy to see her friend perking up. “And that’s one way that you’re just like Lex! So I bet if you ask for help from this Night Mare lady, she’ll totally give you some incredible magic too!”
Fruit Crunch grinned at her, and she was relieved to see that it was his usual grin, the kind he wore just before they got into some mischief. “You really think so?”
Cleansweep nodded firmly. “I’m sure of it! You’ll get your own magic, and just imagine the look on Lex’s face when you show him that you have magic like his!”
Fruit Crunch trotted next to her then, throwing a leg around her neck in a friendly headlock. “You mean when we show him!”
Cleansweep had been laughing as she play-wrestled with him, but stopped when she heard that. “Wait, what?”
“C’mon Dust Bunny, we’ve gotta do this together! We’re best friends!”
Cleansweep bit her lip at that. It was true that they’d done almost everything together for their entire lives, but the idea of working with a pony who did sound an awful lot like Nightmare Moon in order to get strange magic sounded dangerous to her, even if it was done in order to protect other ponies. “I don’t know, Crunchy…”
“C’mon, at least try it out with me! Otherwise I’ll noogie you!” He was quick to make good on his threat, bringing his free hoof around to press against her head and rub it quickly, making her squeal.
“Okay! Okay! I’ll try it!” she laughed, rubbing her head when he let her go a moment later. How bad could it be? Besides, this was her way of protecting somepony. Namely, her best friend, who looked a million times better now than when she’d caught up to him a few minutes ago. But even so, it might be a good idea to hedge her bets. “On one condition?”
“Aww, that’s not fair!”
“Just one condition,” she insisted. “We let the others join too.”
“The oth-, are you kidding me?!” An incredulous look spread across his face. “You wanna let Fiddleface and her two helpers get in on this too?”
“It’ll be more fun if we all do it together! Think about it, we can be like the Power Ponies! A squad of superheroes instead of just one or two of us alone.” More importantly, this would help Fruit Crunch fix things with the others, and let her hang out with everypony instead of having to flit back and forth between him and her other friends.
But he didn’t look completely convinced. “I don’t know. Do you think…do you think they’d want to hang out with me after…” He waved a hoof back in the direction they’d come from. “…everything?”
Cleansweep smiled, glad that he was worried about that. “I bet they will if you explain things to them, just like you did for me.” He fidgeted in place, clearly conflicted, and she nudged him, thinking of everything she knew about superheroes. “Trust me, they’ll forgive you. And after they do, we can get to work on preparing our new super team! We’ll keep it a secret from everypony, and practice getting magic powers when no one’s around, and come up with a name for our group and everything!”
“Alright,” he huffed, starting to walk back toward the others. “But I’ve already picked out a name for us.”
Cleansweep perked her ears, falling in beside him. “Oh yeah?”
“Mm-hmm,” nodded Fruit Crunch. “From now on, we’re gonna be the Night Mare's Knights.”
Lex spent almost ten whole seconds staring at the boat before he took action.
“How long before it arrives here?” he asked, not taking his eyes off of the distant vessel. But when several seconds went by with no answer forthcoming, he tore his gaze away from it, sending an irritated look toward the pegasus who’d first spotted it. “Ocean Spray!” he snapped.
“Huh?!” The pony in question fluttered his wings in surprise as his name was called, almost falling out of the air before he turned to look at Lex. He knows my name? “Er, what?”
“When will that ship reach the harbor?” growled Lex, not liking that he had to repeat himself.
“Uh…” Ocean Spray grimaced, squinting his eyes as he looked back at the craft. “It’s hard to say, but…probably tomorrow morning. I mean, it might be earlier if it can really kick up the speed, but to be able to see it as this distance…” He paused for a moment, brow furrowing. “It’s only a little past Tall Tale right now, so it’s not exactly some little rowboat, which means that there’s only so fast it can go. It doesn’t have sails, so that means it’s using an engine, and if they keep it running all night…” He gave a confident nod. “Yeah, tomorrow morning.”
Which means there’s no need to recall the pegasi, Lex decided as he glanced at Vanhoover. He’d ordered them all to return to the camp by sundown, not wanting to risk them being in the city after dark. Although all available evidence suggested that there were no more monsters, he didn’t want to take any chances where other ponies lives were concerned. Besides, given how the city had been up until now no survivors would be willing to venture outside during the night, so having the pegasi continue to shout that sanctuary was available after nightfall would be a waste of time anyway. “I want you all to spread the word,” he declared in a loud voice, making the nearby ponies look at him. “Nopony is to approach that ship before I make contact with it.”
“Is that really necessary?” piped up a voice, and Lex glanced over in irritation as Scrubby sent him an apologetic look, even as he kept speaking. “I mean, you said that about the train, but there was nothing to worry about there, right? So why can’t we go welcome whoever’s there?”
Lex’s lip curled at the question. Because over a half-dozen ponies have already died while under my watch due to unforeseen circumstances, you simpering imbecile, and I refuse to let it happen again. Intellectualy, he knew that Scrubby’s point was a valid one. Just like with the train, the odds were extremely high that the people on that boat were ponies, which meant that there was almost certainly no danger. But after everything that happened, being drawn into desperate battle after desperate battle, Lex refused to take a chance. The boat would need to be met by someone capable of defending against an unanticipated act of aggression, and that meant him. Nor was that the only reason. “That ship is currently the only means of direct transportation between Vanhoover and the rest of Equestria now that the train has departed. As this place is still in a state of emergency, it will need to be commandeered, which means that I’ll need to be there to quell any potential opposition to that by its crew or passengers-”
“Wait!” yelled a familiar voice. “Totes let me do the talking!”
Lex grimaced as he glanced behind him, just in time to see Sonata smile and wave as she made her way to his side. The nuzzle she gave him then wasn’t anything too intimate – they’d shared that particular gesture numerous times over the course of their relationship, oftentimes in public – but it was enough to immediately send his thoughts back to last night, straining his composure as he fought to keep his eyes from running down the length of her body. Sonata, however, either didn’t notice the effect she’d had on him or ignored it, giving him an easy grin. “Sorry I’m late. I was, like, getting into a super-big argument with Aria about what happened, which I was totes winning even though Aria kept acting like she was winning, which she wasn’t, and then Nosey came in and I realized you were gone and I was like ‘oh hey, I can go hang out with Lex right now while you’re stuck in here,’ – Aria I mean, not Nosey – and then I sang a little to help Nosey calm down, and you could just see that Aria was, like, dying of jealousy that she couldn’t do that, even though she probably wouldn’t even if she could have since she’s too much of a jerk to help other people, and then I just smirked at her and walked out the door before she could say anything which totes means I won!” She beamed up at him, apparently very pleased with herself. “So, what’s going on with you?”
Lex intended to sigh at her inane rambling, but what came out of his mouth instead was a relieved snort that was very nearly a laugh. Seeing her acting like her usual self, going on at length about meaningless nonsense, was enough to make his inner turmoil about what had happened recede. It didn’t vanish entirely, but unlike with Nosey it had faded to tolerable levels, leaving him feeling suddenly grateful that Sonata was here with him now. The feeling was strong enough that when he turned to point out the distant image of the boat, filling her in on what was going on, he took the opportunity to press his side against hers, enjoying the sensation without thinking about what had happened last night…mostly.
Once he’d finished briefing her on the situation, Sonata bit her lip. “Uh-huh…”
Lex blinked. In the light of her recent bout of incessant prattling, her lack of any greater reaction now was extremely conspicuous. “What?”
“Nothing, it’s just…” She let out a breath. “Look, I’m totes sure your plan to go down and meet whoever’s coming into the city and be all ‘hi, I’m Lex and I’m stealing your boat’ is, like, a great plan. I’m just thinking that maybe, just maybe, there’s a different way to go about it. One that doesn’t have you telling them that their stuff is now your stuff, and you’ll curse them or something if they don’t go along with it.”
Lex frowned, feeling his sense of tranquility starting to fray. “Sonata, this needs to happen. Having a method of transportation between here and Tall Tale will facilitate-”
“Look, I get that you need the boat!” interrupted Sonata. “I’m just saying that taking it from them isn’t the best way to do things. It’s, like, a gazillion times better if you make them want to give it to you instead. Which, you know, is kinda my thing.”
She gave him a pointed look then, and his frown deepened. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“Let me go meet whoever’s on board, while you stay here. I’ll head down to the dock-”
“Absolutely not.”
“Lex…”
“Absolutely not,” he repeated. “The situation-” He cut himself off, leading her away from the nearby ponies, walking until they were distant enough that they’d be unheard so long as they kept their voices down. “The situation with regard to who’s on there and why they’re coming here is completely unknown! I am not sending you down there when there’s a chance that something could happen to you!”
“But that doesn’t mean that it will,” she protested. “Look, I get it. We’ve had, like, a really rough time lately. We made one little mix-up getting here in the first place-”
“You put us on a train to the wrong city,” corrected Lex flatly.
“-which led to you fighting a dragon. Then we get here and all of a sudden it’s like we’re in ‘Revenge of the Bad Movies,’ with the fish-people and the zombies and the body-snatcher guy. So now you’re wondering if this boat’s the next disaster – like, if it’ll be run by pirates that are secretly werewolves from outer space or something – and I’m trying to tell you that it won’t be.” She pressed her side to his again. “You don’t have to keep worrying that everything’s about to blow up and something terrible will happen if you’re not there to stop it.”
But Lex was already shaking his head before she’d finished. “That’s my job, Sonata. What you just described, anticipating a worst-case scenario and taking preventive measures to safeguard the general public, is one of the primary functions of governance. To do nothing-”
She stomped a hoof, not hard but with enough force to demand his attention. “Sending me down there isn’t nothing. I know my magic can’t do all the stuff that yours can, but this is right up my back alley.”
The unusual turn of phrase, combined with the events of last night still being on his mind, was enough to give Lex pause, trying to parse if there had been a double entendre there. “…what?”
But Sonata kept going. “Like, think about it. You’re still recovering, right? So you’ll have to turn into a shadow to go down there, and that’ll already be all freaky-looking. So that’ll make things awkward right from the get-go. Then they’ll get off the boat and have you tell them you’re taking it, and that’ll be super-upsetting. Worse, if they say ‘forget you, dude,’ you’ll have to smack ‘em around to stop them from leaving, right?”
She moved away from him then, gesturing as though putting something down on her left. “Let’s call that ‘Plan A.’ Now, the alternative is Plan B: I go down there, and they get to be greeted by a hot little number who’s all smiles. I totes make it sound like they’d be helping everypony here a lot if they let us use their boat, and if they say no, then…this is one of those situations where it’s okay for me to use magic to mess with their heads, right?”
“Yes, albeit-”
“Great! And if things go really bad and it turns into a fight, then I’ve still got a bunch of spells that’ll let me knock some sense into ‘em. Let’s call that ‘Plan B.’” She gestured again, mimicking the action of putting something down on her right side. Then, smiling at him, she stood up on her hind legs, holding her fore-hooves out on either side of her. “So, which one sounds better? Plan A,” she gestured to her left, “where everyone is freaked out right from the get-go and it goes downhill from there, or Plan B,” she gestured to her right, “where I totes charm the stuffing out of everyone, either with magic or without?”
Lex gave her an unhappy look. “This is unusually well-considered for you.”
He hadn’t meant it as a compliment, but she seemed to take it as one, grinning again as she fell back onto all fours. “Just another brilliant idea, courtesy of the best spokespony ever.” She tossed a wink his way as she said that, before giving him an eager look. “So, whaddaya say? Let me handle the meet ‘n’ greet?”
Lex sighed. As much as he hated to admit it, Sonata’s argument was a cogent one. The odds of this being some sort of dangerous encounter – at least on the level of what they’d dealt with so far – were slim, which meant taking defensive measures was less of a priority than securing further resources and assistance for the general welfare of the camp ponies. Given that, Sonata and her outgoing personality were far more likely to secure the voluntary cooperation of whoever was headed for Vanhoover than he could manage on his own. Even so…
“I’m sending Severance with you,” he announced bluntly.
“Wha-, no! No way! Lex, the entire point of this is to not scare whoever’s coming! Having a giant bladed thingy floating around on its own won’t help!” She took a step forward, until she was almost nose-to-nose with him. “Trust me that I can do this on my own, okay?”
“This isn’t an issue of trust, Sonata.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Right. And neither is you rubbing down my sister and my best friend right in front of me?”
“That has nothing to do with this!” All of sudden things were awkward again, and he turned away from her, jaw clenched in frustration. She didn’t say anything, but he could feel the weight of her gaze on his back, and he finally sighed. “I’ll give you until noon, but if you’re not back by then, regardless of what happens with the boat, I’m coming to retrieve you, with Severance, and I won’t care how intimidating either of us looks.”
“Thanks!” she chirped, all smiles again. “Just you wait, I’m totes gonna make this work!”
“Huh!” She jerked her head up at that, blinking her eyes as she glanced around blearily. “I can’t…I can’t go to school now…” she mumbled, trying to put her thoughts in order. “I put my homework on backwards and my lunch ran away…”
“Sonata, it’s almost dawn. You need to head into Vanhoover now if you’re going to be at the docks by the time that boat arrives,” urged Lex.
Sonata stared at him for a long moment, blinking several times before her brain finally started to reboot. “Boat…right. The boat. I’m going down there because…” She paused as a large yawn escaped from her mouth. “Because I’m totes going to…” Another yawn. “To charm the pants off of ‘em.” As if to punctuate her remark, she tilted her head to the side, leaning over as she stretched one hind leg up to scratch her ear, closing one eye as she rubbed it back and forth in short, rapid motions.
A pained look crossed Lex’s face at the display. “If you don’t feel confident that you can do this-”
“Of course I do,” she grinned as she finally climbed to her hooves, groaning as she stretched. Climbing down from the bench where she’d been snuggled with Lex, she let out a deep breath, finally awake. “I totes got this!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” came a sibilant whisper. A moment later, Aria’s head draped across Lex’s flank, taking the spot Sonata had just vacated. “Our stallion here can be charming enough when he wants to be.” The words were sent toward Sonata with a smug smile, before she turned her eyes toward Lex. “If I’d been wearing pants last night, you’d have gotten me right out of them.”
Sonata clenched her jaw, watching as Lex turned red and struggled to come up with a reply. But as much as she wished he’d have just pushed her spiteful sister away and told her to quit hanging off of him from now on, it wasn’t his attitude that bothered her; she knew him well enough to know that flirting was far outside of his comfort zone. Rather, it was the knowledge that Aria wasn’t acting that way just to be mean. Oh, she was playing it up like she was, but Sonata could see through the façade now, since Aria had slipped up night before last and accidentally revealed how she really felt.
She likes him. The thought made Sonata feel like she’d eaten a whole tray of ice cubes, a cold feeling spreading through her gut. She likes him the way I like him. That was a million times worse than if Aria had just been flirting with him out of spite. If that had been the case, then it would have been annoying but nothing to really be concerned about. But now…now Sonata couldn’t help but be genuinely worried. It was that worry that made her lurch forward and shove Aria off of Lex. “Knock it off! I’m his girlfriend, not you!”
Despite the rough treatment, Aria’s lip curled in a mocking smirk. “Well, I think he’s too masculine for only a single girlfriend,” she grinned. Turning her eyes back to Lex, she gave him a coquettish look. “What do you think? You’re stallion enough to handle all three of us, right?”
Ordinarily, Lex had no trouble deconstructing an interrogative statement and examining its underlying premises, context, logical structure, and grammatical formation in order to come up with the optimal response. It had become so second-nature to him that it required no conscious thought, happening instantaneously while the other person was speaking. But at that particular moment, struggling to parse the social variables of multiple interpersonal dynamics even as he tried, futilely, to ignore his instinctive reactions to what Aria was saying, Lex found himself unable to formulate an answer. “I…um…”
“That’s not fair and you know it, Aria,” sighed Nosey, abandoning her attempt to ignore the arguing and go back to sleep. Instead, she opened her eyes from where she was lying her head on Lex’s middle, giving the Siren a reproachful look. “And this isn’t helping anypony right before Sonata’s big mission.”
“Yeah!” added Sonata, sending a grateful look toward the other mare.
“Hmm.” Aria leaned her head down to nuzzle Lex, her eyes flitting between the other two. “Neither of you seemed worried about that last night when he was having fun with us again.”
Now Lex spoke up, turning to glare at the troublesome mare. “That was purely for research purposes,” he snapped, his voice defensive. “I told you that I was examining the magical channels-”
“So you didn’t enjoy touching us?”
Lex’s silence in response to Aria’s question spoke volumes.
“Whatever!” snapped Sonata, turning around and starting for the door. “I’m out of here!”
Unsure of what sort of response was called for in this situation, Lex simply watched her go, barely registering the triumphant look on Aria’s face or of Nosey lifting her head from his side. But a moment later he felt hooves nudge him, glancing at the blonde mare. “Go after her!” whispered Nosey.
Lex frowned. “I’m not certain-”
“I am!” she insisted. “Go after her! Right now!”
For a moment he hesitated, just looking at Nosey. For her to act so pushy was more like her usual self, particularly since she was sending him away without Sonata having used any calming magic on her first. It was, he decided, a good sign. Taking that to heart, Lex turned and galloped after his girlfriend.
“Sonata!” came Lex’s voice from behind her. “Sonata! Stop!”
Sonata ignored him, pushing out the door and marching onto the train platform. She’d almost reached the big pile of food when Lex managed to get ahead of her, blocking her way. “I said stop!”
She came to a halt, but gave him a sour look. “I’m, like, supposed to go smile and make nice with whoever’s on that boat, remember?” Idly she noted that he was breathing heavily, clearly having strained himself in order to catch up with her, but she refused to take that into account. “You should just go back inside and do more ‘research’ with Aria and Nosey, since you’re so masculine that you can have a whole bunch of girlfriends.”
It took him a few moments before he could speak, getting his breathing under control. “Aria was wrong to say that.”
“Really?” Sonata lifted a brow, giving him a look of mild interest.
He nodded. “Masculinity is a conglomeration of attributes which are all qualitative, having no quantifiable metric-”
“Right. Got it,” sighed Sonata, rolling her eyes. “Look, how many more times are you going to have to do that?” she asked, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice. She’d been half-expecting him to make some sort of romantic gesture, to let her know that she was the one – the only one – that he loved, and now she felt like a dimwit for having gotten her hopes up. Of course he’d try and explain the whole thing away. That was who Lex was.
The worst part was that she knew that this whole thing wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t even Aria’s fault, although Sonata still wanted to punch her right in her big dumb face. This had all happened because Lex was trying to fix Aria’s voice, and Sonata had no problem with that. Just the thought of having to go through life without being able to sing was horrible, and she hated the idea that she might be partially responsible for that… I just wish his way of fixing her wasn’t so sexy!
And it was sexy. Incredibly so. Last night had been the second night of Lex’s research, where he had to examine her, Nosey, and Aria together. Sonata had felt deeply conflicted about doing that again, and she hadn’t been the only one: Nosey had hesitatingly asked him if he could at least check each of them separately, out of sight of the others. Sonata had started to voice her support of the idea, at least until she realized that he’d be alone with the others while getting so close to them. But it had been pointless: Lex had shot down Nosey’s request, saying that he needed them all there for the sake of comparison.
When they’d gotten started, it had initially seemed like the steamy atmosphere from the first night might be gone. Lex had quite clearly been uncomfortable now that he knew what it was like for them, and when he’d approached Sonata he’d been hesitant, his motions mechanical. He’d apparently known it too, because after a few seconds he’d stopped, taken a breath, and told all three of them to close their eyes. When Aria had asked why, Lex’s only response had been “because I said so.”
Once they had, Lex had started again…and then things had rapidly become hot and bothersome. Keeping her eyes closed had put all of Sonata's senses on edge, making every touch a surprise. From the feeling his breath tickling her neck to the way his hooves had trailed over her flank, every sensation had been magnified. Nor had it all been touch. She'd heard herself, her breath catching or a low grunt escaping her lips as he'd touched her all over. It had been incredibly sensuous.
It hadn't ended when he was done with her either. When he'd finally released her, things had been quiet for a moment...and then she'd heard Nosey. With nothing else to focus on, the other mare's sounds had filled Sonata's thoughts. Where had Lex touched her to make her breath catch like that? What had he done to draw that groan from her? At one point Nosey had softly called Lex's name, her voice sweet but strained, and Sonata had bit her lip at the sound, wondering just what her best friend and her boyfriend were doing.
Despite that, she'd never even thought of opening her eyes.
When Lex had gotten to Aria, it was obvious that the Siren had gotten into the mood. Where Nosey's breathing had been suggestive, Aria's was unreservedly erotic. Her breathing had been fast and rough right from the beginning, and had frequently caught her breath only to release it, heavy and shuddering, a few seconds later. She'd even let a whisper of “yes!” or “there!” slip a few times. Sonata had been sure, mostly, that she was doing it on purpose; it wasn't like Lex had used that pleasure-touch spell. But the way Aria had sounded, he might as well have.
Once he'd finished, Lex had curtly announced that he was done, and had practically bolted for the bench that had become their makeshift bed, not looking at any of them as he curled up and closed his eyes. Despite the fact that it was the same way he'd so abruptly left them hanging the first time, the sudden end to the experience had jarred Sonata, and she'd known without looking at them that the others had felt the same way. Silently, they'd drifted over to join Lex, draping themselves over him, not saying a word. It had been obvious that he'd still been awake, his body tensing as they'd joined him, but none of them had said anything as they'd taken what Sonata had realized were becoming their “usual” spots. The thought, like most of the rest of the evening, had been unsettling because of how much she hadn't disliked it.
Needless to say, sleep had been a long time in coming.
“One more time should be sufficient,” answered Lex, dragging Sonata's thoughts back to the present. “After that, I should have sufficient data to design a spell that can change-”
“Aria into a pony, I know.” Despite admitting that Lex wasn't at fault, Sonata still felt upset. The thought of going through that again, of knowing that her boyfriend was going to be touching her, Nosey, and Aria together in such an intimate manner was upsetting, but not nearly as much as it was arousing. And that was very upsetting. “Look, I gotta go do this thing with the boat, okay? I'll be back before noon.”
She pushed past him and started walking, only for him to call out to her a second later. “Sonata, wait!”
“What?” She stopped, but didn't turn around.
“There's a chance that you might be headed into danger...”
When he didn't continue, she shrugged. “And?”
“I don't...if you're...” He stopped talking, and several seconds passed. Sonata didn't turn to look at him, instead gazing out over the camp. It was still mostly dark, and nopony was around the train station, giving them a measure of privacy. “When I thought Fireflower was attacking you, I panicked,” said Lex abruptly.
Sonata's face screwed up in confusion. Fireflower? Why's he talking about him now?
Lex continued. “In the second it took me to see what was going on, I thought of all the things that might have happened to you, and I remembered...” He let out a breath. “I remembered that we'd had a fight the night before, and I thought...I thought that, if you had been killed, the last thing I ever would have said to you was how stupid I thought you were.” The words came out in a rush, as if he was struggling to say them out loud. When he finished, another bout of silence ensued, hanging over them until he spoke again. “I don't want to worry about that now...”
He didn't finish, but he didn't need to. Sonata knew what he was trying to say. “Oh, Lex.” Sonata turned around, smiling even as she blinked her suddenly-watery eyes. Looks like I get a romantic gesture after all, she realized as she crossed the distance between him and threw her forelegs around him. He reciprocated the gesture, holding her close.
When the hug ended a moment later, he spoke again. “If you don't want me to examine the others again, I'll make do with the data I've already gathered.”
Sonata shook her head, still smiling. “Mm-mm. It's okay.”
He gave her a skeptical look. “Are you certain?”
“Yeah.” She sniffled, wiping her eyes, before her grin became playful again. “But if you really wanna do something nice for me, how about letting me grab some grub before I go?” She nodded at the food pile.
He paused for a moment, looking between her and the provisions. “Given that the timetable of your expedition is technically indeterminate, a small amount of provisions can be justified,” he nodded. “What do you want?”
“Surprise me.”
He blinked once, then looked back at the mountain of food. After a long moment, he selected a particular item, lifting it with his telekinesis and floating it over to her. “This is largely empty calories, but in the event of a fight breaking out it should give you sufficient energy to conduct a tactical withdrawl.”
“Great! This-” She paused as she saw exactly what he'd selected, fighting the urge to laugh. “Wait, for realsies?” This had to be a joke.
But Lex looked completely serious. “Do you not like this? There are plenty of other-”
“No! No, this is great!” snickered Sonata, moving it away before he could telekinetically grab it again. “Just promise me that you'll never give one of these to another girl.”
“What?” Lex couldn't have looked more confused. “Why?”
“Just promise,” she grinned.
“...alright. I promise.”
“Great! I'll take care of everything with the boat! See you back here by noon!” Still trying to keep her mirth in check, Sonata turned and trotted toward Vanhoover.
On her back, she carefully balanced the cream pie that Lex had given her.
Lex watched Sonata leave, silently reassuring himself that letting her go alone was the right decision.
Intellectually, he knew he had. There was compelling evidence to suggest that there were no more ghouls in Vanhoover, and it was highly likely that the boat’s passengers were harmless. In all likelihood, the worst thing that Sonata was in danger of was taking a wrong turn and getting lost on her way to the docks. There was every reason to believe she would be fine.
That’s what you thought about Cloudbank and the ponies she took with her, and look how they ended up. The taunt made Lex clench his jaw, glancing over his shoulder. The sun was still behind the Unicorn Mountains to the east, its light just barely beginning to spill over the distant peaks. But there was just enough illumination to let him see the outline of his shadow, stretching toward the mountains instead of away from them the way it was supposed to. You’re making the same mistake again, and now it’s Sonata’s turn to pay the price for it.
For a moment, Lex felt his resolve waver, looking back in the direction Sonata had gone. She had thought that the ghoul invasion was no big deal until it had actually happened, showing that she had no ability to weigh risk ahead of time; why was he letting her do this alone? At the very least he should have prepared some defensive spells and cast them on her before she left, or insisted harder that she borrow some of his magic items, or-
Lex terminated that line of thought, refusing to get drawn into doubting himself. He hadn’t cast any defensive spells on her because he hadn’t prepared any yesterday, having found the time only to prepare a single spell which had been needed for other purposes. Likewise, Sonata had refused his offer to let her borrow any of his magical gear. He’d tried to insist on that point, but she’d been surprisingly firm about not doing so. The worn items he’d offered her – his cloak and his amulet – would apparently have compromised her appearance to an unacceptable degree (“they’re kinda ratty-looking” had been how she’d described them), and while she’d been interested in taking some of the floating gemstones, she’d reluctantly decided not to. Apparently, that would have made her look “super weird,” which to hear her tell it was even worse than looking bad for a first meeting. It had all struck Lex as incredibly backwards reasoning…but then, Sonata had more social awareness than he did, so he’d been left with little choice but to respect her decisions.
Even so, it had been difficult to see her go; Nosey had been right, he realized, to send him after her. That he’d been able to soothe Sonata’s unhappiness had made it easier – slightly – to watch her leave. Still, he’d have preferred to send someone else.
Except there is no one else, he knew. This mission was one that required diplomacy while still possessing martial capabilities in case things took a turn for the worse, and individuals with both were in very short supply. Severance was wholly unsuited for the former, and Aria wasn’t much better. Nosey had none of the latter, even if she wasn’t still recovering from what happened to her. Garden Gate would have been able to do so, but she and her band were already performing an important task, and Cloudbank and Thermal Draft were gone now…
The thought made Lex glance at his saddlebag holding the gemstone the Night Mare had given him. Once I’m finished changing Aria back, this is the next priority, he decided. Taking care of the living came first, but with Vanhoover finally starting to make progress there was no more reason to delay investigating how to bring back the ponies he’d lost.
And the situation here was making progress. Once everypony had finished gawking at the sight of a second inbound vessel in as many days, they’d returned to work with notable vigor. The mass grave, which had seemed like it wouldn’t be finished in the twelve hours he’d wanted, had been completed after eight. Sonata had insisted that it had been because everypony had started singing while they worked, a theory that had left Lex rolling his eyes.
Just as importantly, groups of survivors had begun to trickle out of the city. Guided overhead by the pegasi that he’d sent into Vanhoover to broadcast the news about what had happened, they’d come in groups of threes and fours, huddled together and looking ready to bolt at any moment. Several had been clutching weapons, brandishing them threateningly at anypony who came too close to them, leading to a few tense standoffs as each group had surveyed the camp uncertainly. Fortunately, the prospect of food had been enough to convince them all to stand down, abandoning their slingshots and rusty pipes in favor of celery stalks and bran muffins. Once they’d eaten, the newcomers had allowed themselves to be examined by the doctors.
When Lex had retired for the evening, they were all still being kept under observation, with none of them displaying anything that Doctor House Call had characterized as “too serious, considering what they went through.” The good news hadn’t stopped there either: the pony that had undergone emergency surgery from the group that Lex had personally brought back had survived the procedure, and was now being monitored during the recovery period. “It’s not an all-clear, but that was the biggest hurdle,” had been how House Call had characterized it. Lex had inquired again if any of the small healing magic he possessed – either to eliminate disease or to repair minor injuries with scar tissue – could be helpful, but the answer had been the same: only if a secondary infection developed. Still, that was far better than having to use preservation magic on another body.
It had been with that thought in mind that Lex had instructed Aria to use her detection spell again, confirming what he’d already suspected: that Cozy and Aisle had fled the camp, likely for good this time. While she’d only used her spell to try and find Cozy, Lex had no doubt that Aisle was right by her side. Aria had cautioned that if they were on the far side of the camp they’d be out the her spell’s range, but given that they’d tried to flee before Lex had no doubt that they’d made the attempt, most likely by sneaking onboard the train at some point. Even so, he’d had Sonata make some inquiries: sure enough, no one had seen a crystal pony recently. “And I for one don’t miss ‘em!” had been Sonata’s take on the situation. Lex had agreed, but he’d still regretted the loss of Cozy’s superior healing abilities. But there was nothing to be done about it now.
Instead, he’d turned to the one remaining thing he was able to accomplish: procuring more rain clouds for the region.
It had taken some time gathering the requisite energy from Severance, but Lex had finally managed to renew his long-distance communication spell. Casting it, he’d directed the spell toward Ribbon Cutter back in Tall Tale, sending her a terse message of twenty-five words telling her what had happened and to have Cloudsdale send rainclouds immediately. Ribbon had been shocked, to say the least, but she’d managed to convey her understanding and acknowledgment before using up her twenty-five word reply. That had taken a weight off of Lex’s mind; Ribbon Cutter was an intelligent and dedicated civil servant. She’d find a way to get a message to Cloudsdale, even if Tall Tale hadn’t restored its rail line or acquired new ships yet.
Calmer now, Lex nodded to himself. Sonata was off doing what she was able to do, which meant that he needed to do the same instead of second-guessing himself. Deciding to oversee how disposing of the ghoul corpses was going, he set off toward the edge of camp, ignoring the protests from his overtaxed muscles. One he was finished with that, there was still a lot more to be done…
“Okay, fine,” huffed Sonata. “Be like that. But now you’re not getting any of my pie.”
She finished her remark by taking a big bite out of the pastry, the sugary treat making her taste buds dance as she gobbled it down. “Mmm!” she proclaimed, a little too loudly. “Delithuth!” Glancing around, she licked her lips as she put the remaining half of the pie down, glancing around. “Like, for realsies. Last chance.”
When no response came, she sighed, frowning. “Okay, more for me then.” She waited several seconds, but when nothing continued to happen she made no move to finish eating. Instead, she sat down on the overturned desk where she’d placed her pie, kicking a rock dejectedly. “C’mon, Kara. Where are you?” When no answer came, she morosely reached over and scooped up the remaining half of her cream pie, taking a bite out of it and chewing slowly.
Kara hadn’t been answering her calls for help lately. Twice in the last two days, Sonata had taken time to call out to the nice alicorn goddess, asking her for advice about what was happening with Aria and Nosey. But for some reason, Kara hadn’t appeared in her dreams the way she always had before. It was starting to become discouraging, and a little worrying. This wasn’t quite as bad as that time when she and Lex had broken up, but Sonata still needed some relationship pointers pretty badly, before things turned into even more of a soapy opera (whatever that was)!
It had gotten to the point where Sonata had tried to offer Kara the dessert Lex had given her if she’d quit ignoring her and help out. But either Kara hadn’t heard her or she wasn’t the pie type. The first one, decided Sonata as she ate the last of it, unable to help but enjoy the succulent flavors on her tongue. Everyone loves pie. Which meant that the goddess, for whatever reason, wasn’t hearing her prayers. Or maybe she heard her, but couldn’t respond? There had been two other alicorns who’d jumped in and interrupted them the last time they’d spoken, after all. Maybe they’d done something? But I thought one of them was the Night Mare. There was no way Lex’s goddess would stand in the way of his relationship with his one true love, right?
Right, she nodded to herself. But her confidence was short-lived, since that still didn’t answer the question of why Kara wasn’t picking up the prayer hotline. Normally Sonata would have asked Lex, since he seemed to know everything, but that wasn’t really an option here. He’d probably flip his lid if he knew I was telling someone else about our love-life, even if Kara is the goddess of that stuff. But it couldn’t be helped; Sonata needed someone to talk to, and both her best friend and her sister weren’t really good choices for this, since they were the problem.
So that means I’ll just have to figure out how to get in touch with Kara myself, decided Sonata as she rubbed her hooves together, brushing the crumbs off of them. How hard could it be? All she had to do was come up with some new magic spell or something that would let her talk to the goddess. Or maybe a song. As a Siren, magic and singing were pretty much the same thing to Sonata. She’d just have to think up a melody about what she wanted and then, if she tried really hard, she’d make it do what she needed it to. That was probably how it worked.
Smiling, Sonata trotted off, very proud of her idea. Totes brilliant, she congratulated herself. I can get a long-distance plan to Kara, welcome whoever’s on the boat, and eat a whole pie with my hooves and not make a mess! I’m a triple threat!
Deciding not to waste any time, Sonata started humming under her breath experimentally as she trotted toward the docks.
“Madam, we’ve arrived at the harbor. You may disembark at your leisure.”
“Mm-hmm,” nodded River disinterestedly, waving a hoof to shoo the butler away without looking at him. “That’s wonderful, now do run along. I need everything to be perfect before I’m ready to go.” Not hearing the acknowledgment or the retreating hoofsteps, she continued to stare at her reflection, eyes peering over the rim of her sunglasses as she carefully adjusted the wide brim of her hat. “This much?” she asked herself as she tilted it so that it rested at an angle to the ground. “No, too carefree.” The last thing she wanted to do was look flippant in the face of a disaster, and she moved her brim so that it was closer to being parallel with the ground. “Hm. Too somber,” she decided. She needed to look properly respectful without looking depressed about what had happened.
“Begging your pardon, Miss,” piped up one of the maids as she closed another suitcase. “But you look stunning either way.”
Behind her sunglasses, River rolled her eyes. “Thank you,” she murmured, somehow managing to make the words sound like a rebuke. Sound too grateful, she knew, and the servants started to get uppity. Without giving it another thought, she went back to arranging her hat.
But apparently she’d sounded more appreciative than she’d meant to, because the maid kept talking. “Um, Miss? I’m terribly sorry if this is out of turn, but…after we bring everything back to your manor, would it be alright if I went by my house? I’ve been worried sick about my little girl and my husband, and I just need to know that they’re alright. I promise I’ll come back right away.” She added the last part as an afterthought, clearly noticing how the other maids were edging away from her.
River didn’t reply for several moments, making it absolutely clear that replying to the maid wasn’t a priority for her. It was only after a good fifteen seconds that she sighed, tossing her hat on a nearby settee before turning to regard the mouthy mare. “Do remind me, what’s your name again?” She had a vague recollection of hiring this one just before the flooding, which explained why she’d have a house in the city; a new hire wouldn’t have had enough seniority to have family quarters at the mansion.
“F-Feather Duster, Miss.”
River was silent again, looking the nervous pony over. A pegasus mare, Feather Duster had a coat that was a dull, washed-out yellow, with her mane and tail being a deep brown. Nor were her colors complemented by her frumpy maid outfit, with its shapeless gray dress and tasteless lace headpiece, to say nothing of the absolutely awful bun that she, like all the other maids, had been required to wear her hair in. The overall effect turned what should have been a reasonably pretty twenty-something mare into a drab, homely-looking thing. The sight made River smile, and Feather Duster tentatively smiled back, thinking that everything was going to be okay. “Feather, sweetheart, you should absolutely go and check on your family once you’re done here.”
“Really?!” The word came out with an explosive sigh of relief, Feather Duster’s grin widening. “Oh, thank you so much, Miss! I promise that you won’t even know I’m gone! I’ll just stop by to let them know that I’m alright, and then I’ll head right back-”
“Oh no, that won’t do at all,” interrupted River. “Surely you’ll want to spend some time with them, won’t you? After all, I can see just how distraught you are from having been separated all this time.”
Feather’s smile dimmed, immediately realizing that something was wrong. “I…well, yes, but I…I know how valuable your time is, Miss, and I wouldn’t-”
“What’re their names?” interrupted River. “Your husband and daughter?”
“Ah, Tryout, Miss. Tryout and Cleansweep. Respectively.”
“Well, I think you should definitely spend some more time with Tryout and Cleansweep. That’s why I want you to take the rest of the day off.”
“R-Really?” Feather Duster’s grin was shaky, still worried about what was happening. “Thank you, Miss. I don’t know what to s-”
“For that matter,” continued River, talking over the other mare, “you should take tomorrow off too.”
“B-But-”
“In fact, you should take every day off from now on.” River smiled again, but there was nothing even remotely friendly about the expression now. “Do you understand?”
Feather Duster looked stricken, her eyes widening as her mouth fell open in horror. “No! Please, Miss, I need this job! Our daughter’s growing like a weed and Tryout-, he’s a wonderful father but he can’t stick with something for more than a month before he gets bored and quits! Please, I take it all back!”
But River had already lost interest, turning her attention back to her hat. “Go upstairs and tell Trotsworth that you’re no longer working here. He’ll see that you receive your last payment for your services.”
“Please, I beg-”
“Go.”
Sniffling, Feather Duster turned to look at the other maids, silently pleading for their help, but none of them met her eyes, each of them as quiet as could be while they tended to River’s luggage with exaggerated care. Defeated, Feather slunk toward the door, shuddering breaths coming from her mouth as she fought back tears. She was reaching for the handle when River’s voice spoke up. “Feather.”
Looking up, Feather Duster couldn’t help the sudden flame of hope that leapt in her heart. “Yes, Miss?”
“If you break anything on your way out, or throw any of my nice things into the water, or do anything else that I don’t like, I’ll make sure that you never work in Vanhoover again.” River paused in her primping to look at Feather Duster in her mirror, her expression cold. “Are we clear?”
“…yes, Miss…”
Hanging her head, Feather Duster left the room, tears falling from her eyes as she closed the door behind her. For a moment, the sound of her sobbing lingered, until it finally faded away. Sighing, River adjusted her hat again. “Good help really is hard to find these days, isn’t it?”
Ten minutes later, her hat was finally at the perfect angle, and River was ready to go.
“Trotsworth, what exactly is going on here?”
His frown several millimeters deeper than usual, her butler gave her an apologetic bow. “I’m terribly sorry, Madam. She simply invited herself on board and began making a nuisance of herself. I instructed everypony to simply go about their business, but, well…our ‘guest’ is making herself rather difficult to ignore.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” frowned River, looking across the deck where her crew was gathered, the suitcases containing her luggage carelessly stacked to one side. Other than Trotsworth, and that empty-headed little nag Feather Duster, all of her servants were there, their backs to River as they listened to the mystery mare who was singing. River couldn’t see her – there were too many ponies in the way – but she was currently performing a rather operatic piece about some wizard who fought a dragon. It had a rather catchy tune, and whoever was singing it was quite clearly talented, enough so that under other circumstances River might have enjoyed listening to her give a performance, but right now it was distracting everypony from what was really important: her.
As she stalked closer, the song came to an end, its story concluding with the wizard defeating the dragon and collapsing in his true love’s hooves. Adorable, if rather cliché, decided River. But she was apparently the only one who thought so, as everypony else began to cheer, clapping their hooves and whistling in appreciation. It was enough to make one of her eyes twitch, knowing that the raucous display would have disturbed her if she’d been resting.
For a moment she contemplated firing them all the way she had Feather, but decided against it. She’d have to carry her own luggage if that were the case, since Trotsworth was getting on in the years. No, far better to deal with whoever was causing this instead. As soon as the applause began to die down, River cleared her throat loudly. “What does everypony think they're doing?”
The servants collectively jumped at her voice, spinning in mid-air to turn and face her, and River fought down the urge to smile at the sight. Instantly, the air was filled with mumbled apologies as the servants returned to their duties, picking up her luggage and heading for the ramp to the dock. River didn’t bother to watch them go, instead looking for the mare whose singing had enthralled them all. As the last of the ponies trotted off in a hurry, River stepped forward-
And stopped dead in her tracks, going rigid as she got a good look at the pony in front of her. Instantly, the blood drained from her face while a cold shudder ran down her spine. It was only thanks to years of maintaining a public persona that River was able to keep her honest reaction off of her face.
Whoever this other mare was, she was GORGEOUS!
Her coat was a blue-tinged white that looked like snowfall viewed through a tastefully-tinted glass, covering a body that looked like it had stepped right out of a teenage boy’s fantasy of what a supermodel looked like. Her mane was long and free-flowing, somehow managing to her look carefree and uninhibited rather than unkempt. And her face…she was smiling with a youthful exuberance that contrasted pleasingly with her captivating figure, making her enticing without being suggestive. All of that wrapped up in a package that couldn’t have been a day over nineteen years old.
She’s not even wearing makeup! River screamed internally, suddenly conscious of just how much product she’d applied to her own face, mane, and body. Moreover, this other mare wasn’t even wearing anything, a state that should have marked her as bourgeois and drab, but instead came across as forthright and confident, as though she knew she didn’t need clothes to look better than everypony else. All of a sudden River felt mortified at how long she’d needed to pick out her outfit. Even the mystery girl’s cutie mark was elegantly stylish: a jagged musical note over a heart.
River had never in her life been as intimidated as she was at that moment.
“Did you like the song?” grinned the girl, apparently not picking up on River’s reaction. “It’s just, like, the first one so far. I wanna cover all the adventures we’ve had together so far before I can perform the whole thing for Lex. I mean, it’s not really for him because he was there when it all happened, but it’s so that everyone else will know what a super awesome guy he is! But I bet he’ll love it too because he’s told me how much he loves hearing me sing and that’s something only I can do for him unless he changes Aria into a pony and fixes her voice which he definitely will because he’s, like, a genius at everything he does and then she’ll be able to sing for him too and what if he likes her voice as much as mine?!” Her smile, somewhere along the way, had turned into a look of worry, biting her lip.
River blinked. “I…I’m sorry?” The inane comment was enough to throw her for a loop. She’d been expecting some sort of cutting remark about how she was nowhere near as young or as pretty as her uninvited guest – that was what she’d have done if their positions had been reversed – but instead she was talking about…something?
The other mare sighed, shaking her head as though to clear it. “No, I’m sorry, my love goddess hasn’t been picking up lately even though I offered her pie, so I kinda unloaded all over you there.” Taking a step closer, the younger pony regained her easy smile as she held out a hoof.
“My name’s Sonata Dusk. Let’s you and me be friends, okay?”
“-and Lex was all like, ‘I have a plan,’ and then he used his magic to make weapons and armor for everyone, and I totes sang a super awesome song to get everypony pumped, and Lex gave Severance to Cloudbank and had Aria turn her invisible, and even though Cozy’s a super awful nag she made lights on everyone’s armor so we could see, and then we went outside and started fighting, and there were like a gajillion fish monsters, and-”
River nodded absently, having long since tuned the younger mare out as the two of them made their way through the city. She’d sent the rest of her staff to her manor to start unpacking and tidying the place up, letting Sonata guide her to meet this “Lex Legis” character. According to what Sonata had let slip back on the yacht, Lex – who was apparently her boyfriend – was “like, the greatest wizard ever” who was “running the place now.” River couldn’t have cared less about that first part; she’d met plenty of unicorns who’d taken some supplementary magic lessons and thought they were the next Star-Swirl the Bearded. It was that second bit of information that had demanded her full attention.
On paper, Vanhoover’s highest authority was the mayor. In actuality, everypony knew that the mayor was a figurehead, good for little more than passing out trophies at festivals and giving the occasional speech. The real authority was divided up between the Banks, the McNeighs, and the Hoofingfords, with the local government doing little more than trying to stay out of their way. Which meant that this Lex Legis pony, if he was claiming to be in charge now, had to be a puppet that one of the other families had put forward in some kind of post-disaster power-play. That made it imperative that River meet with him so she could figure out whether it was the McNeighs or the Hoofingfords that were pulling his strings. Once I know, I’ll be able to put a stop to whatever it is they’re doing, she’d been certain.
But as Sonata had led her through the city, River had begun to feel less and less certain of herself.
It hadn’t been due to her companion. Although the fact that Sonata was almost supernaturally beautiful was still daunting – River had made sure to get a good look at her from the back, and had been almost overcome by despair at the sight of just how perfectly-formed Sonata’s posterior was – River’s insecurity had been mollified, at least somewhat, upon learning that the younger mare was a complete airhead. She might be a beauty, but I’d like to see her try to balance a ledger, she’d thought smugly.
She hadn’t been sure of that at first, wondering if Sonata was just pretending to be vapid in order to lull her into a false sense of security for some reason. But listening to the girl’s wholehearted belief in the utter rubbish she was saying about her boyfriend – that he had slain a dragon and become the mayor of Tall Tale, for instance – had made it clear that Sonata was all looks and no brains. That, and at one point she’d stopped to chase a chipmunk that she’d spotted, laughing all the while.
Rather, what was bothering River was the state of Vanhoover itself.
When she’d disembarked from her yacht, she’d felt a sense of smug satisfaction at there having been no other ships there. That had doubtlessly meant that the Hoofingfords hadn’t gotten their act together yet, since maritime activity had always been their area. But as Sonata had led her through the streets, River had slowly come to realize just how empty the city was. There hadn’t been anypony anywhere. No ugly little children playing in the street, no businessponies rushing to get to their pitiful jobs, no street vendors hawking their ghastly wares. The entire city was completely silent, with the only noise being Sonata’s running dialogue of whatever nonsense Lex Legis had fed her.
“-and then Lex was all ‘use all your magic on Fencer!’ And I was like, ‘okay,’ and then he-”
“Where is everypony?” interrupted River, no longer able to keep her anxiety in check. They had just reached the town square, and the fact that it was empty of people and strewn with trash had been the last straw.
“Huh?” Sonata stopped in place, cocking her head and giving her a confused look. “I told you, the camp outside of town is where all the survivors are gath-”
“‘Survivors’?” echoed River in horror. “What do you mean ‘survivors’? We had a flood, not some sort of, of…cataclysm! It wasn’t like there was an earthquake or an invasion!”
“Uh, yeah, there was. Weren’t you paying attention?” huffed Sonata. “We had fish creatures and undead ponies and all sorts of monsters here. They’d still be here if it wasn’t for Lex taking care of everything.”
“That’s prepos-” River cut herself off, pursing her lips. Sonata’s stories were simply unbelievable, but at the same time it was equally unbelievable that Vanhoover could be so utterly devastated. The difference was that she could see that the latter was true with her own eyes. But the idea that monsters had invaded and commenced in some sort of wholesale slaughter…no, it was simply absurd. There had to be some other explanation.
She suddenly wished she’d gone home instead of leaving it to the staff. Mounte and Piggy would certainly have gotten out of the city, which meant that they very likely weren’t back yet, but if they were then they’d have headed back to the manor. Maybe they were there right now, in which case a little detour-
River shook her head, clearing her thoughts. I’m acting like that little nitwit I just fired, she scowled. Either Mounte and Piggy would be at the manor or they wouldn’t; her going there wouldn’t make any difference. Right now she needed to focus on getting answers about what had happened so she could figure out what she needed to do. “Nevermind. Let’s go.”
Sonata gave her a worried look. “You sure? We don’t have to be back until noon, so if you wanna sit and relax for a bit, that’s fine.”
Years of practice kicked in as River kept herself from voicing her real opinion of Sonata’s offer, already regretting having let her demeanor slip. Instead, she gave the other mare a polite smile. “That’s very nice of you to say, but I’d really rather keep going if you don’t mind.”
Sonata beamed, and River knew the look would have turned most stallions’ knees to jelly. “That’s great! I’m sure Lex has a lot he wants to ask you.”
“Oh, no doubt. And I have so much that I want to ask him.”
“So what’s your story, anyway?”
Aria opened one eye, glancing at the blonde mare lying on the bench a short distance away from her. For a moment she considered ignoring her and just trying to go back to sleep, just for the fun of spiting her, but decided against it. It was only her third day of house arrest, and now that Lex and Sonata had left she was already bored to tears. But that didn’t mean she’d just roll over either. “What, didn’t your little ‘bestie’ already tell you all about me?” she sneered.
Nosey snorted at the attitude, but didn’t back off. “Journalism 101. Always ask someone about the things that other people say about them.”
Now it was Aria’s turn to snort. “Great, so I get to listen to you parrot what that little ingrate’s been saying about me behind my back?” She waved a hoof. “Pass.”
Nosey grit her teeth at the rebuke, taking deep breaths. With Lex gone, the rising sense of panic that she’d felt ever since he’d rescued her from Xiriel was starting to come back. She’d known that would happen when she sent him after Sonata, of course, but she already felt terrible for what she was doing to her best friend’s relationship, so she’d chosen to stay behind and let the two of them have some space. Now she had to deal with that.
He killed it. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back, she repeated to herself silently. The words helped, but only a little, and she knew that if she was in a crowd she’d be having a complete breakdown by now. Being alone was only a little bit better, and so she needed Aria to keep talking, to distract her from the thought that Xiriel would suddenly appear out of nowhere and drag her back into that nightmare. It was with that thought in mind – along with how unpleasant Aria was – that she reached for the most provocative thing she could think of. “Sonata doesn’t owe you anything, you know.”
That got Aria’s attention. “Excuse me?” she hissed, a dangerous look on her face.
But Nosey refused to be intimidated. “She told me what happened in that other world, when she got sick of you and your other sister picking on her and left. You losing your voice is your own fault, not hers.”
“She doesn’t owe you an apology, she doesn’t owe you her help fixing your voice, and she certainly doesn’t owe you her boyfriend.”
“YES SHE DOES!” rasped Aria, her face twisted in fury. “YES SHE DOES!” She swung her tail, slamming it against the ground hard enough that Nosey felt the vibration from across the lobby. “Everything I’ve had to go through is because of her and SHE OWES ME!”
She lurched toward Nosey then, crossing the distance between them and putting her face within inches of the pony’s. “She thinks we treated her badly?! We were the ones who had to listen to her endless, mind-numbing stupidity all the time! Do you know how annoying that was?! And then she runs out on us, on me, right when we needed her the most!” She thrust a hoof up, pointing at the scar on her neck. “If she had stayed, we wouldn’t have been captured and I wouldn’t have this! I certainly wouldn’t have been thrown back here and run into the sahuagin and made to live like an animal! It’s all her fault!”
She slammed her hoof back down. “And then, to top it all off, she meets a guy and gets to be deliriously happy with him?! Not just any guy, but someone who’s actually, finally, willing to do right by me, without being enchanted?! I didn’t ask him to fix my voice, you know! He offered!” She started circling Nosey then, like a predator cornering a meal. “And he has the power to do it, too! He’s strong enough that he can do whatever he wants, and he wants to help me, even after I tried to kill him! Even after I tried to run away from here! A guy like that, someone strong and sexy and loyal, and you’re telling me that Sonata gets to keep him all to herself, just because she met him first?!”
Nosey didn’t move, didn’t give her any excuse to escalate things, so Aria turned and grabbed one of the nearby benches, lifting it and flinging it across the lobby in a fit of rage. “No! No no no no NO! I don’t care if he keeps doing her too! He’s too devoted to take anyone for granted! But she doesn’t get to keep him all to herself!” She reared back then, raising her face toward the ceiling. “I want him, I deserve him, and SONATA OWES ME!”
Seconds passed as Aria panted, out of breath in the wake of her final declaration. Slowly, she lowered herself back to the ground, and Nosey was wondering if she should say something when Aria looked at her with a bitter expression. “There. That’s my story. Happy now?” Without waiting for a response, she crawled away, curling up in a corner of the lobby with her back to her.
Nosey simply watched her, having no idea what to say in response to such a raw outpouring of emotion. She’d known, generally, what Aria had gone through, but she’d never realized just how deeply it had affected her. Like me, she realized with a start. She went through something awful, and she’s trying to figure out how to deal with it.
Slowly, she slunk over to a nearby chair and sank into it, turning what Aria had said over in her mind.
“Aaand here we are!” Sonata’s voice rose as she reared up onto her hind legs, giving a little twirl as she swept a foreleg out to indicate the sight ahead of them. “Camp sweet camp!”
River barely heard her, staring in horror at the sight in front of her eyes. She’d been able to see it as they’d gotten nearer to it, of course, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe it, certain that it would look different once they’d gotten closer. But now they were here, and she had to accept the reality in front of her. Vagrants, she thought dazedly. Everypony is living like they're vagrants.
There was simply no other way to describe it. The ponies walking around were all filthy, hooves covered with dust and manes unkempt. In a complete reversal of normality, those who had clothes on actually looked worse than those who didn’t, wearing shirts and dresses that were ripped and stained. Nor was the locale any better. The entire place consisted of nothing more than dirty tents and rickety hovels so decrepit that calling them “shacks” would have been giving them more credit than they deserved. The most notable feature was the huge hole to the north, which had a large group of ponies shoveling dirt into it for some reason. Even the ground was ugly, the grass having been trampled down to nothing, leaving everyone to walk over dry, cracked earth. Empty, scorched fire pits completed the dreadful ensemble, making the entire place look like a monument to misery. She couldn’t imagine anyone living here voluntarily.
“It’s pretty great, isn’t it?” grinned Sonata. Thankfully, she was looking toward the place, so she didn’t see the horrified look River gave her. “Just a few days ago, everypony was hurt and hungry. But look at them now.” She gave a happy sigh. “They’ve got someone looking out for them, and they know it.” Smiling, she fell back to all fours, turning to look at River. “Lex is probably at the station. C’mon, I’ll introduce you.”
River nodded, having just barely managed to plaster a smile onto her face in time. “Lead on.”
She found herself regretting the words almost immediately, cringing as she followed the other mare at a trot. No matter how lightly she tried to step, she could see dirt clinging to her beautiful shoes, and she could practically feel the dust in the air colliding with her dress. It was all she could do not to yank her hat off her head and try to fan it away, but she knew that would have ruined her dignity far more than it would have saved her clothes. Poise. I still have my poise, she assured herself, raising her nose in the air.
But her poise almost collapsed as one of the vagrant ponies walked toward them, causing her anxiety to spike at the sight of the dirty stallion drawing near. “Hey, Sonata,” called the green pegasus. “What’s the word about the boat?”
“Hi, DJ!” waved Sonata, as though she didn’t have a care in the world. “It was hers,” she jerked her head back, indicating River. “She totes lived here before, and now she’s come home.” Smiling as though she wasn’t conversing with someone who looked like he’d never heard of shampoo, Sonata turned to River. “This is Disc Joker. He’s been super helpful with getting food for everypony.”
“Disc Jockey,” corrected the pegasus with a pained expression, holding out a hoof. “It’s nice to meet you, Miss…?”
“Bank,” offered River, against her better judgment. I can’t let him think I’m afraid of him. I’m sure his kind can smell fear. “River Bank.” Despite her refusing to back away, she made no move to touch hooves with him, certain that he had to be covered in germs.
For his part, Disc Jockey didn’t seem to notice that he’d been snubbed, lowering his hoof even as his eyes widened. “River Bank? As in, the Banks family’s River Bank?”
River nodded stiffly, and was pleased when the stallion backed away, running a hoof over his mane in a futile attempt to straighten it. That’s right, you derelict, she thought with cold satisfaction. Don’t try to be so casual with me.
“Oh, ah, sorry…I didn’t realize…” Disc Jockey muttered as his ears folded back, eyes falling to the ground.
“Huh? Realize what?” asked Sonata, looking back and forth between the two of them in confusion.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.” River made sure not to take her eyes off of Disc Jockey, making sure to project strength and confidence as he scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. “Now, let’s go see this stallion of yours, shall we?”
“Um, okay…” Still not sure what was going on, Sonata sent a querying look at Disc Jockey. But he didn’t return it, instead turning and walking away, causing Sonata to frown for a moment before shrugging and heading back toward the train station.
For her part, River let her gaze linger on the retreating pegasus. She could already see him starting to head toward another group of dirty ponies gathered around a fire pit, no doubt to tell them who she was. Good, she decided. Make sure everypony knows that River Bank is back, and that things are about to go back to how they’re supposed to be.
They were nearing the station when River heard a familiar voice.
“MAMA!”
The sound made River whip her head around, her eyes widening and jaw falling open as she saw a fat little earth stallion running toward her as fast as his pudgy legs would allow. Lowering her face just enough to peer over her sunglasses, she blinked, wondering if her mind was playing tricks on her. “Piggy?!”
“MAMA!” Too late she realized that the colt didn’t intend to stop, and a moment later he’d bowled her over completely as he hugged her, burying his face in her chest. “Mama mama mama!”
Sonata cocked her head, her eyebrows rising. “Wait a sec, you’re Piggy’s mom?”
Ignoring the inane question, River struggled to get out from under the bawling colt. “Piggy, get off of me this instant! You’re ruining my dress!” Not to mention the fact that her ribs felt like they were ready to cave in under the weight of his bulbous form. “Honestly, what’s gotten into you?! You were raised better than this!”
“S-sorry Mama,” sniffled Piggy as he climbed off of her, smiling as he rubbed his eyes. “I’m just so happy to see you! I knew you’d be back! I just knew it!”
“Of course I’ve come back,” huffed River irritably as she tried to undo the damage her son had so thoughtlessly inflicted on her outfit. “It’s not like I could just stay in Las Pegasus forever.” A moment later she gave up on trying to fix her clothes, sighing as she picked up her hat and placed it back on her head. She’d just need to wait until she returned to the manor to try and freshen herself up again. Speaking of which… “Piggy, what are you doing here with these….other ponies? Why aren’t you at home? And where’s your father?” She looked around, half-expecting to see Mounte giving her his usual sheepish expression the way he always did when he’d done something foolish. “Honestly, even for him letting you run around in a place like this is irresponsible. Just look at how filthy you are!”
“We couldn’t stay at the manor, Mama,” protested Piggy, sounding like he was protesting being grounded. “After it was overrun, we tried to find someplace to hide, but Dad couldn’t-”
“Don’t whine!” snapped River, glancing around self-consciously before looking back at her son. “There’s nothing more unattractive than a stallion who whines. And what do you mean the manor was ‘overrun’? Was there some sort of infestation?” There better not have been, she paid good money to have the exterminators come out and check the place twice a year. If they’d done such a shoddy job that vermin had taken over the place the instant there’d been a disaster then she’d take her business elsewhere.
But thankfully, Piggy shook his head. “No, Mama. It was overrun by the ghouls.”
“Ghouls?” echoed River, blinking.
Piggy nodded. “Yeah, you know. The undead ponies.”
“Duh,” added Sonata helpfully.
For a moment River couldn’t speak. Sonata had told her about those so-called ghouls on the trip in, but River hadn’t been able to bring herself to believe what the little airhead had been saying, certain that she’d tricked by that Lex person, or perhaps was helping him to float a ridiculous story, or even that she’d just mistaken very dirty, uncouth ponies for something out of a cheap horror story. But to hear it from her own son…Piggy was an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid, and he certainly knew better than to lie to her. But that meant… “Piggy, are you certain about that?”
He nodded rapidly. “Yeah. That’s what I was trying to tell you. Dad couldn’t fit through the dumbwaiter, so he pushed me down through it to get away from them and said that he’d get out another way. I didn’t see him after that, but all of the carriages were gone after I got out of the house, so he probably went up to one of the farming villages up north by himself.”
Privately, River was less than certain about that. Mounte had been corpulent enough that just getting into a carriage had meant that a full team of earth pony stallions would be needed to haul it, and even then they’d have had their work cut out for them. The idea of him having gotten all the way to one of the villages in the northern plains was difficult to swallow, which meant, if there had really been cannibal monsters running around…
“Mama, are you alright?” whimpered Piggy, seeing the blood drain from River’s face. “You look pale.”
“No, I…yes. Yes, of course I’m fine,” nodded River, belatedly realizing that she was bobbing her head up and down too quickly. “I, um...I’m sure your father is making a nuisance of himself at one of those awful little towns right now. Probably eaten the entire place out of house and home and told them all to send me the bill.” She fumbled with Piggy as she spoke, trying to flatten his mane and smooth out the wrinkles in his shirt and scrub the dirt off his cheeks all at once.
Piggy fidgeted under the preening, but knew better than to protest, instead moving on to something more important. “Oh! Mama! That reminds me, Lex stole our money!”
River’s hooves instantly came to a stop. “What?!”
“Whoa! Hang on there!” Sonata’s eyes widened at the accusation. “Lex wasn’t stealing anything! He was doing what he had to do to-”
“He had a bunch of ponies go to one of our family’s banks and cut open the vault! Then he took all the money there and spent it on food,” Piggy waved a hoof to indicate the huge mountain of food on the train station platform, “all of which he's just passing out to everypony for free! And then he robbed another one of our banks yesterday! And then he had a bunch of ponies just go and give away some of the money to those farm ponies nearby! He didn’t even ask me if he could!”
Outwardly, River’s expression didn’t change, but she grit her teeth at the news, latching onto it and pushing everything else away. The McNeighs, she realized. If he’s taking our money and using it for food and farmers, then the McNeighs are behind this. Agriculture and farming had always been their business, and now it looked like they were using the flooding to try and take over, using this Lex pony as a tool to do it. But I’m going to put a stop to that. “You did well to tell me about this, Piggy. Mommy will take care of it from here.”
“I’m telling you, it’s not like that!” protested Sonata.
“I’ll be the judge of that, thank you very much,” rebuked River. She fixed Sonata with a harsh look, her earlier dislike of the mare suddenly coming back in force. “Now, take me to Lex Legis, if you’d be so kind.”
“Yeah!” grinned Piggy, clearly eager for his mom to give Lex what for.
Sonata looked ready to protest some more, but when she saw the look on River’s face she sighed, then shrugged. “Okay, if that’s how you want to play it.”
“I do indeed,” replied River firmly as Sonata turned and started walking.
“You go get ‘im, Mama!” cheered Piggy.
The cry was enough to stop River in her tracks, and she turned and advanced on her son. “Piggy.”
He flinched, not sure what he’d done. “Y-yeah, Mama?”
Piggy’s surprise was complete as River reached out and wrapped a foreleg around him, pulling him close. “I’m glad you’re alright.”
At first glance, Lex Legis wasn’t what River had expected.
Of course, she hadn’t been entirely certain what she should have expected. After telling Piggy to stay put (and silencing his whine of protest with a sharp look) and following Sonata toward where Lex was, River had mentally reviewed everything the other mare had told her about her boyfriend. But there had been precious little useful information there. Sonata’s anecdotes had an unfortunate tendency to rely on comparatives (“For realsies, the doctor said that another pony would need to stay down for like, a week, but Lex was running around in a day!”), superlatives (“It was, like, the biggest tornado ever, but Lex just stared it down!”), and onomatopoetic effects (“Then Lex cast a spell, and the ghoul was all like, ‘shprak!’ And then he zapped another one, and it went ‘znrap!’ And I was all ‘squee!’”). Between that, and how clearly besotted the brainless little filly was, there’d been nothing for River to use to prepare herself for the impromptu meeting ahead of time.
For now, the primary objective is just to learn what I can, she’d decided. Long years of moving through Vanhoover’s high society had taught her to always keep a goal in mind when engaging in business, something to focus on. Otherwise it was too easy to find yourself adrift and floundering, not sure if you were making progress or not. The secondary goal is to figure out if I can make him turn on the McNeighs, or if I’ll need to squash him. The former was infinitely more preferable, but the latter wouldn’t upset her much at all if it came to that.
Then Sonata had let out a yell – “Lex!” she’d called. “I brought the boat lady!” – waving at a particular stallion standing with a small group of ponies, and River finally got a good look at the pony she’d come here to see.
He was far more shabbily dressed than she’d expected. Rather than garbing himself like someone who’d presume to govern an entire city, his appearance was only somewhat better than the vagrants filling the camp. His plain brown mane was cut messily, as though he’d hacked at it himself rather than having a proper stylist attend to it. His outfit was a mish-mash of items: a weathered cloak spread over his back that didn’t quite cover the saddlebags he was wearing, and on top of which rested a scythe, of all things. A rather garish-looking amulet hung around his neck, and what had to be some sort of cheap anklet was around his right foreleg. And around his left foreleg…River blinked. Was that barbed wire?
But as outlandish as his ensemble was, it was nothing compared to his features. His horn was a gaudy red color that didn’t match his coat, obviously the result of a slap-dash application of paint since the base of it was still his natural grey. His shadow was stretched out wildly behind him despite the fact that the sun was nearing its zenith, an ostentatious display that was clearly the result of some minor spell. And his face…
The sight of Lex’s features gave River pause. She’d expected him to look either haughty and full of himself, or ingratiating and servile; the former would have fit an opportunist with an inflated sense of his own self-importance, either because he thought he was a powerful wizard or because of the mare he was with, or both, while the latter would have been what she’d expected from a patsy put up by another of Vanhoover’s Big Three families. But Lex’s face registered neither of those things. Instead, he was frowning deeply, his brown eyes fixed in a glare that made it look like he was restraining the urge to berate the pony speaking to him.
A moment later those eyes turned to regard Sonata, and for a moment his features softened, a relieved sigh escaping him. Then he turned to look at River, his face returning to its look of disapproval before he apparently lost interest in her, returning his attention to the small group of ponies in front of him. The exchange was over in a second, but it was enough to make River’s eyes narrow behind her sunglasses. He’d been concerned about Sonata having gone to get her…another clue that the monsters Piggy had mentioned were real? And the look River herself had received either meant he wasn’t happy to see her, or that was just his default expression. Let’s find out, she decided.
Seizing the initiative, she strode past Sonata as she approached Lex, taking off her sunglasses as she put on a warm smile. “Lex Legis?” she called. “Sonata’s told me so much about you! My name’s Riv-”
“Shut up,” snapped Lex. “I’ll deal with you in a moment.” The venom in his voice stopped River in her tracks, utterly shocked by the blatant rudeness. Lex didn’t seem to care, turning back to the pony in front of him. “What do you mean they wouldn’t take the money?” he hissed.
“I tried to give it to them!” protested the earth pony stallion in front of him, flinching at Lex’s accusatory tone. “But every time I got close, they’d throw pumpkins at me! Not even good ones, old rotten ones! I told them why I was there, but they didn’t stop!”
“Then you should have left the bits in a conspicuous area and returned without them, you simp-”
“Ah ah ah!” tsked Sonata as she trotted up and moved alongside Lex as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “How about letting your spokespony handle this, ‘kay?”
Lex let out a breath, but rather than protest the suggestion made an odd gesture and muttered something River didn’t quite catch. A moment later he started whispering – not into Sonata’s ear or anything, just whispering out loud – and after a few seconds Sonata began speaking to the stallion Lex had been dressing down. “Okay! So first, Lex says that you did a great job!”
“Really?” asked the stallion uncertainly, his eyes moving back and forth from her easy smile to Lex’s glare and back again.
“Totes!” nodded Sonata. “Trust me, he just looks mad because he was worried about you.” She lightly nudged her boyfriend at that, earning a reproachful look in return, but Lex didn’t contradict her, continuing to whisper. “What’s really important is that you made it there and back in one piece. Go you!” She cheered that last part, punching the air, causing the stallion to give a goofy grin and half-heartedly copy the gesture. The sight made Sonata smile wider. “So, just one teensy little suggestion for next time. Since you just had to drop off the money, maybe do like the mailman-, wait, what now?” Sonata paused as she looked at Lex, blinking in confusion. “‘Mailmare’? What’s a mailmare-, oh! I get it!” Throwing Lex a wink that couldn’t have been more obvious, she turned back to the stallion. “Ahem. Instead, maybe do like the mailmare and just leave it there for them to get later, like a package.”
“Huh. You know, that’s not a bad idea.” The stallion nodded thoughtfully, brow furrowed as he turned the idea over. River didn’t miss how Lex seemed to be grinding his teeth at the display, though everypony else seemed to. “Should I go back later and try doing that?”
Sonata paused for the barest fraction of a second, letting Lex whisper before she responded. “Absolutely! That’s the spirit!”
Heartened, the stallion nodded, and Sonata looked at the other ponies gathered around. Ponies who were giving my money away to those hick farmers, realized River angrily, recalling what Piggy had told her. But she held her tongue, still not sure how to proceed.
“In the meantime, all of you guys take a powder,” continued Sonata. “We’ll be having lunch soon.” The assembled ponies seemed glad to hear that, offering thanks and waves as they walked away, leaving River alone with the other two, both of whom seemed content to ignore her as Sonata turned to face Lex. “I’m back!” she announced.
“I’m aware of that,” answered Lex flatly, already looking in River’s direction.
“Aw, that’s it?” pouted Sonata. “No welcome back kiss?”
Lex frowned at that, not in displeasure but in confusion, as though Sonata had started speaking a foreign language. He seemed to think on it for a moment, before finally giving a stiff nod and pressing his lips to hers. The gesture brought a pleased grunt from Sonata’s throat, her eyes closing in happiness.
River had to struggle not to gawk at what she was seeing. She’s the one coaxing affection from HIM? Despite the fact that River had only known Lex Legis for all of sixty seconds, she could already tell that he was nowhere near Sonata’s league. The idea that a mare that attractive would be with someone as rude and disheveled-looking as him boggled the mind; that she’d be the one pressing herself to his side and fishing for kisses was completely unthinkable. That she was so smitten with him while he seemed almost annoyed by her wasn’t just incomprehensible, it was the sort of thing you’d never expect unless…
Unless it came from a love potion, she realized. It made perfect sense; she’d thought about using one of those on Mounte when she’d been trying to worm her way into the Bank family. But unlike Canterlot – where Sonata had said she and Lex had come from – magical curios were harder to come by in Vanhoover, and she hadn’t been able to purchase one. She’d even tried to brew one herself, but she hadn’t been able to get all the ingredients, and so she’d been forced to abandon the attempt lest her love potion become a love poison instead. In the end, she’d needed to win Mounte Bank’s affection the old-fashioned way. But if Lex had managed to get his hooves on such a potion…
Suddenly all the pieces fell into place.
A love potion to win a girl out of his league. A spell to move his shadow and a dab of paint to make his horn look more striking. Convincing his mare that he was a powerful wizard despite his leaving Canterlot, the foremost city for magical studies in all of Equestria. Even his bad attitude made sense now.
River had to fight to suppress a smirk. So that’s it, then. Some little unicorn has a talent for magic, and heads to the big city thinking that he’s going to be greatest thing they’ve ever seen. Instead he finds out that he was just a big fish in a little pond somewhere, and that Canterlot is full of unicorns more talented that he is. So he leaves in a huff, using some spells to make himself look how he thinks a big important wizard should, and sets up shop out here in the middle of nowhere to lick his wounded ego. Plus a love potion for the prettiest girl around as his own personal consolation prize. No wonder the McNeighs picked him, he’s the sort of dupe that’s practically begging to be manipulated.
This time River didn’t resist the urge to smile. Now that she knew what she was dealing with, it was time to move on to her secondary goal. “Allow me to introduce myself again,” she announced, her voice polite but carrying an edge to it. “My name is River Bank, of Vanhoover’s Bank family.”
Lex sent another rude look her way, whispering something under his breath. Sonata stirred a moment later. “Huh? Oh, yeah.” She turned to River then, smiling guilelessly. “Lex says-”
“No,” interrupted River. “Don’t translate for him. I want us to speak to each other directly.”
“I-, huh?” Sonata blinked, cocking her head. “For realsies?” She glanced at Lex, then back at River, her smile slowly wilting. “I’m not sure that’s, like, a great idea.”
“Oh, I insist,” replied River with a calculating smile. Her eyes were on Lex as she spoke next. “You see, that’s my money that you’ve been giving away.”
She took a step toward him then, moving in a deliberately aggressive manner. “And now, I want it back.”
River had planted herself right in front of him, slightly closer than was polite, her features set in an imperious frown as she waited for Lex’s response to her ultimatum. Out of her periphery, she could see Sonata biting her lip, a worried look on her face. It was enough to make River smirk inwardly, certain that she’d been right to take this approach.
That little performance these two had just put on in order to manipulate those other ponies had been very well done. Lex acted like he was about to start berating somepony, leaving them nervous and defensive, at which point Sonata stepped in and smoothed things over. With him using that little ventriloquism trick to tell her what to say (doubtlessly disguised as some bit of magic, hence the whole gesturing and whispering act), she’d then take advantage of the fact that they were grateful to have been spared his wrath to get them to comply with whatever Lex was having her say. It was a smart tactic, and it quite clearly got results.
Except now you can’t use your little inamorata for that one-two routine, laughed River silently. All she’d had to do was insist that they speak directly, and that was the end of that; even if Lex was rude enough to ignore her polite request, his “tough guy” routine would make it harder for him to insist that he hide behind his girl now that he’d been called out. Which means that you’ll have to deal with me yourself. Now, show me what you’re made of. His response would make it clear how he responded to adversity, and since he had already fled Canterlot after finding out that he wasn’t able to play with the big boys, River was betting that he’d-
“Your finances have been seized as part of the recovery efforts for this city. They’ll be returned when the situation permits, and not before.”
River’s brow furrowed. Lex’s response had been delivered in a cold, matter-of-fact tone, stated while looking her dead in the eye with that irritated glare of his. That hadn’t been what she had expected; based on how he’d been conducting himself before, she’d expected him to either fly into a rage in an attempt to intimidate her, or he’d have backed off since Sonata wasn’t able to act as his shield. Instead, he’d riposted.
Nor, it seemed, was he done yet. “I’m also commandeering your watercraft. Until such a time as the state of emergency on this city can be lifted, I will be administrating its use, along with any other material goods or possessions you might have that can be used to facilitate Vanhoover’s recovery.”
River couldn’t stop herself from letting out an incredulous laugh at that, her eyes widening as she glanced at Sonata in disbelief. Who does this little twerp think he’s talking to? “Oh, I don’t think so,” she chuckled, still unable to believe what he’d just said. “I think what’s going to happen is that you’re going to apologize to me immediately for your rude conduct, and then we’ll discuss my lending you certain funds and provisions, and what you can do to pay me back for what you’ve already stolen.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” muttered Sonata from the side, her eyebrows arched as she watched the exchange.
“Otherwise,” continued River without missing a beat, “you’re going to have a very hard time doing much of anything around here.” She let that hang in the air for a moment, making it clear that she wasn’t playing around. “You might not realize this, since you’re new here and all, but my family-”
“-is irrelevant,” interjected Lex. His voice was filled with scorn now, talking to her in the same tone that she’d used when Piggy was misbehaving. “I have assumed total authority over Vanhoover, which means that my declarations are absolute. Whatever influence you had here now exists solely under my auspices, and are dependent on your compliance with the laws and regulations that I promulgate.” He took a step closer to her then, putting himself practically nose-to-nose with her. “This city and its ponies have endured catastrophic hardships, and now that all of the immediate threats to their existence have been dealt with, no effort will be spared in repairing the damage and restoring an acceptable standard of living for everypony. As you are in possession of things which can facilitate that process, they are hereby confiscated until such as time as the circumstances permit them to be returned or recompensed. You do not have the right to refuse.” With that, he stepped past her, curtly calling out to Sonata as he started to walk away from her, the other mare trotting to catch up with him.
For her part, River just stood there, openmouthed as she felt her blood begin to boil. The last time anypony had spoken to her like that, she’d been a filly who could only dream of one day becoming someone important. Even those selfish snobs in Canterlot had maintained an air of sophistication when they’d rebuffed her attempts to find a wizard to use an age spell on her. For this, this…nopony to talk to her like that…it was utterly insufferable!
“I won’t.”
Behind her, she heard the pair’s hoofsteps come to a halt. “Listen, River,” came Sonata’s voice. “I’m really thinking that you don’t want to say anything else. I mean, I’m getting that you didn’t really listen to me before, but if you talk to Piggy-”
“I won’t give you anything,” continued River, turning around to look at them. Sonata was giving her, of all things, a look of pity. Lex still had his back to her, but as she watched he slowly turned around, and River’s eyes widened as she saw his face. It wasn’t the look of severity on it that made her flinch, however; it was that his eyes had changed. The white parts had turned a brilliant green, and even under the bright sunlight she could tell that they were glowing. More than that, from the outer corner of each eye sprang a spectral contrail of purple, flickering slightly as he moved.
For just a moment the display left River feeling unsure of herself, wondering if maybe she had miscalculated. After all, there apparently really had been some sort of cannibal zombies roaming the streets of the city until recently. If everything else Sonata had told her about was true, then… No, decided River. That’s just not possible. This is some ridiculous bit of legerdemain that he’s using to try and look frightening, that’s all. He’s in over his head and trying to act like he’s in charge, but he’s really just some brat who can’t do anything except bloviate and use a few small tricks.
Having reassured herself, River looked at Lex steadily as she spoke. “I’m going to have two of my staff take my yacht to Tall Tale, where you can’t reach it. That will be after I load as much of my family’s money and valuables on it as I can. Then I’m going to have the rest of them come here and collect the food that my money purchased, so those vagrants out there can work for me if they want to eat. I’m also going to instruct everypony who lives or works on any property my family owns not to do business with you unless they want to find a new residence or place of employment once they move back into the city. And that’s just for starters.” She shot a triumphant sneer at him then, her lip curling. “When I’m through with you, the only way you’ll be able to earn any bits in this town is if you fish them out of the fountain in the square.”
It was a shame that she wouldn’t be able to turn the McNeighs’ little pawn against them the way she’d hoped, but it probably wasn’t much of a loss. It was clear now that Lex was either arrogant beyond all belief or completely delusional, but either way one thing was clear: the McNeighs wouldn’t support him after this. None of the Big Three families had wanted any sort of open conflict between them – that would have done nothing but turn the public against all of them, and at worst would have brought the Princesses down on them – which meant that they’d never stand up for Lex now. Instead, they’d cut their ties with him, and their losses as well. He’ll run back to them now, telling them what I’m about to do and demanding that they support him with whatever retaliation he’s probably already dreaming up, and they’ll have no choice but to end things. The thought made the corners of her mouth turn up. It was such a shame she wouldn’t be there to see the epic temper tantrum he’d have when he realized that he’d been outmaneuvered. Then you and your little trophy mare can run along to some other city and try agai- “Ouch!”
Lifting her foreleg off the ground, River peered down at what had just pricked the underside of her hoof. There, growing out of the ground, was a small black crystal. Even as she watched, it continued to grow, sharp points springing out from it and reaching upward like a flower. Nor was it the only one. All around her, from the ground and even from the back wall of the train station, more black crystals were sprouting. “What the…?”
“Oh, you are so in for it now.” The wry note in Sonata’s voice made River look up, confused as to why neither of them was alarmed by what was happening. Instead, Lex was still glaring at her, while Sonata sent her a surprisingly cruel-looking smirk. “Spoiler alert,” she jeered, “this only happens when he’s, like, really mad.”
“What are you…?” River trailed off as she realized what Sonata was implying, feeling the blood start to drain from her face. She didn’t know very much about magic, but even she could figure out that this wasn’t some piddling little prestidigitation. And if Lex was doing this…
“You misbegotten, wretched, pathetic excuse for a pony.” Lex didn’t shout the words, but although it was tightly constrained, the fury in his voice was still audible as he stalked toward her. “You were told what happened in this city. You saw the conditions that everypony here has to live in. And your response is to threaten to interfere with their assistance unless your own situation is guaranteed?!” His control seemed to snap then, the last few words coming out as a snarl. “You will suffer the consequences for your perfidy!”
River had been confident that whatever magic Lex had was inconsequential, only slightly more notable than the average unicorn possessed. But the crystals growing around her now suggested otherwise, and she had no desire to find out exactly how wrong she’d been now that Lex had reached the point of screaming at her. Turning, she bolted between the black crystals, making a break for it. If she could get back to her manor, she could instruct her staff to grab whatever they could and hurry to the yacht. Piggy would be fine here, he had been so far-
“Severance!”
A moment after Lex’s odd cry rang out, the huge scythe that Lex had been carrying swooped down in front of her, causing River to cry out in alarm as the blade swung right in front of her face. It didn’t make contact, missing her by inches as it cut a huge gash in the ground. Then, in complete defiance of common sense, it picked itself up again and hovered in place, turning to point its blade at her all by itself. There’s no aura around that thing, thought River in a panic, so why is it moving on its own?! But there was no time to figure it out. Instead, she turned and ran in another direction, trying to get away-
Only for a shadow with green-and-purple eyes to rise up out of the ground directly in front of her.
River couldn’t help the scream of terror that she gave then, falling to the ground as she skidded to a stop, barely noticing as her dress was stained and her hat fell from her head. Shaking, she started to crawl backward, trying to put more distance between herself and that…thing that Lex had become. But it was futile, and a moment later the free-floating shadow was hovering over her, those eyes seeming to pin her in place. “W-wait!” she pleaded. “We can make a deal!”
“You have nothing to offer me!” hissed Lex, the edges of his shadowy body writhing in agitation. “You already had an obligation to lend me your assistance in helping everypony, and you abrogated it! That level of moral turpitude requires a curse of equal magnitude!” He moved in on her then, and she felt another scream rising in her throat. But Lex’s angry roar drowned it out.
There hadn’t been a single day when she hadn’t been painfully aware of just how poor her family was, and just how unpleasant things were when you didn’t have money. She’d figured out quickly that the stuff that bothered her on a daily basis were things that other ponies didn’t have to worry about, just because they had more bits. There hadn’t been one part of her life that poverty hadn’t found a way to touch.
Her home had been the most glaring example. Her family’s house had sat adjacent the dockyards, and the stench of fish and salt had been there year-round. Worse, the entire place had been in constant need of repair, the damp air and sea spray serving to warp the wood in short order. River – or rather, Gold Bit, since she hadn’t changed her name until after getting married – had learned to be embarrassed of her living situation from a very young age.
Nor was her house the only thing she’d had to be ashamed of. While going naked was perfectly acceptable, polite functions typically called for something to wear, and for Gold Bit, that had meant whatever her parents had been able to sew on their own. More than once she’d been humiliated by having to go to a party or formal gathering in cheap garments that had been hoof-sewn the night before.
School had been the worst. On the very first day, some of the other foals had seen the lunch her parents had packed for her – dried seaweed, some crackers, and a few carrot slices – and they’d immediately figured out that her family was virtually destitute. From then on, she’d had to live with the nickname “Little Bit.” It had sent her home in tears that first day, and more than a few after that.
Nor had her parents helped. If anything, they were the source of the problem. Her mother and father had been blissfully unconcerned with how poor their finances were, telling her at every opportunity how the most important things in life weren’t bought with money: things like family, friendship, and love. “Apparently good food, nice clothes, and other ponies’ respect aren’t important things then,” she’d shot back once she’d gotten older, before storming out of the house.
In fact, that fight with her parents had been what led her to her destiny.
Desperate to make money, but still too young to get a job, she’d walked along the bay, fuming at how clueless her parents were, until she’d come to the river that fed it. Back then, the place where the river met the bay had been a popular picnic spot for couples and families, and she’d stumbled onto what was left of somepony’s lunch, abandoned on the sand. That had been where she’d found her purpose in life.
She’d started collecting the discarded utensils and plates, thinking she could sell them at a secondhoof store. That never made her very much pocket change, but it beat recycling cans or trying to swipe bits out of the fountain in the town square. But when she’d pulled the plate out from where it had half-sunk into the water’s edge, what she saw then changed her life: there was gold on the plate!
That had been when she’d learned what “panning for gold” was, and the prospect of being able to find gold – potentially a lot of it – simply by digging through the riverbed had filled her with so much hope for the future, so much joy, that she’d felt like her heart had been about to burst from her chest. It had only been later that she’d realized she’d gotten her cutie mark, the image of a river overflowing with gold proudly emblazoned on her flank. Even better, the money she’d made that day had been enough to buy her a beautiful new dress for her cute-ceañera. In the wake of the party, she’d decided: when she grew up, she’d be rich, no matter what.
But that’s over now. The thought made her sniffle, another round of sobs threatening to start up as she lay on the grass outside her manor, gazing up at the stars. It’s all over, all because of Lex Legis…
“Madam?” The voice was one River would have known anywhere, even if the tinge of worry it contained wasn’t something she’d ever heard in it before. “Is there anything I can bring you? One of the maids found some of the tea you like. The imported brand, Earl Dapple Grey. I could put a pot on…”
“No, Trotsworth,” moaned River, not bothering to look at him. “Just go away.”
“...I understand, Madam.” Trotsworth’s voice had returned to its usual, unflappable form. “Before I go, please allow me to report that young Master Piggy has taken to his room now that we’ve restored it to a semi-habitable state. As per your request, we’ve relayed to him that you’d prefer not to be disturbed for the time being.” A pause then, and when she didn’t answer, the worried tone began to creep back in. “I’ve taken the liberty of leaving a blanket and several cushions for you on the veranda. There’s also a small bell so that you can summon one of us if you need something during the night. Due to the state of the servants’ quarters, the maids are currently resting in the solarium, so one of them should hear if you-”
“I don’t care, Trotsworth. Just go.”
“…very good, Madam.” After a moment, she could hear the faint sound of hoofsteps crossing the lawn, before the louder clops announced that he’d returned to the porch a short distance away. When the door opened and shut, River sighed, knowing that he’d left. The quiet enveloped her then, as she stared into the night sky vacantly, thinking back to what Lex had done to her…
“NOW, YOU WILL PAY!”
River closed her eyes at Lex’s angry roar, unable to look as the monster he’d become – a shadow with glowing eyes – moved toward her. Unable to help but scream in terror, she raised her forelegs over her face, attempting to ward off whatever he was about to do to her. But she hadn’t quite gotten them all the way up before something whizzed past her head, and although there was no pain she couldn’t help but flinch, feeling blood begin to trickle down her cheek.
Certain she was about to die, River didn’t open her eyes, silently pleading that whatever he was about to do to her wouldn’t hurt too much. But as the seconds ticked by and nothing happened, she slowly opened her eyes. What she saw reassured her, albeit just a little bit.
Lex had returned to his pony form, and although he was still glaring at her hatefully, his eyes had changed back to their normal color. His scythe was once again slung across his back, and the barest hint of red along the edge of its blade was all the confirmation she needed that it had been what cut her. Even the black crystals were starting to recede, collapsing in on themselves and turning into dust.
“Your punishment had been levied,” Lex intoned darkly. “For making a credible threat to interfere with Vanhoover’s recovery and the well-being of its citizens, all for the sake of your own greed, you shall be unable to partake in any material comforts, conveniences, or amenities.”
“What?” River felt her skin crawl at the words, shakily climbing to her hooves. “What do-, nngh, do you mean I-, hnrgh, I-, I won’t-, gnnrgh!” She couldn’t finish, realizing that it wasn’t what he’d said that was making her skin crawl. Rather, it was her dress! For some reason, the gentle garment’s silk felt like it was made out of sandpaper, and the sensation was getting worse by the moment!
Nor was it only the dress, she realized a moment later. The fashionable shoes she’d worn now felt like they were filled with sharp pebbles. Her hat felt like it was an anvil. Even her makeup was like mud for how it felt on her face now. The numerous unpleasant sensations assaulting her all at once were horrible enough that she felt her gorge rising, nauseated from the overwhelming discomfort.
“Wow,” remarked Sonata as she trotted up to Lex, watching as River nearly collapsed, moaning weakly. “What’d you do to her? I mean, I see the scythe-mark on her cheek, like you did for Fencer, but this is different, right?”
“As I said,” replied Lex, a look of grim satisfaction on his face as he watched River’s anguish. “I made it so that she won’t be able to enjoy the trappings of wealth.”
Sonata’s brow furrowed. “Wait, she enjoys setting traps? You mean the way Drafty and Aisle and those other ponies did?”
Lex gave a long-suffering sigh at that, but River was barely conscious of it. Instead, she weakly pawed at her ensemble, trying to get it off. Going around unclad was unbecoming for a lady of her station, and disrobing in front of someone else was doubly shameful, but she couldn’t bear to stay like this any longer! Her head was pounding as she gave it a toss, almost falling over as her hat fell from her head. Instantly, she felt better, and went to work on her shoes. Once they were discarded, the discomfort was down to the point where she no longer felt like she was going to heave her guts out. Instead, she just felt like she’d been rolling in an ant swarm, knowing that her dress and her makeup were to blame.
“Hey, wait a sec. How come she’s taking her clothes off?” This time Sonata’s frown was one of disapproval, giving Lex an unhappy look as River began to peel her dress off. “What’s that have to do with traps?”
“Let me make this easier to understand. I made it so that she can’t use nice things. She can’t wear nice clothes, eat nice food, or be in nice places without it causing her physical distress.” The smile that Lex gave then was a small one, but was no less cruel for it. “The more opulence she partakes in, the worse the effects will be.”
“Right,” drawled Sonata unhappily. “So basically, first you cut Fencer’s dress off her, then you had those sexy rub-downs with me, Nosey, and Aria, and now you’re making River here get naked for you too.” Even as she said that, River finally got her dress off, immediately wadding it up and using it to wipe her makeup off her face.
Lex finally turned his gaze to Sonata then, incredulous. “You’re placing undue emphasis on an incidental aspect of each of those situations, Sonata."
But River had heard enough by that point, throwing her ruined dress to the ground before turning and running away from the pair as fast as she could. The humiliation of having to disrobe in front of her tormentor was bad enough, but now that she was completely divested of ornamentation, the full weight of what he’d said had settled over her mind, and panic had followed. “I made it so she can’t use nice things,” he’d said. That thought formed a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach, knowing what her life would be like if he was right, making her run as fast as she could as she headed for her manor…
Of course, Lex’s curse had worked exactly as advertised.
Just setting hoof inside her manor, despite how it had been marred from the flooding, had left River reeling. Being in there had been like having a severe illness, as her sinuses had flooded, her head had begun to pound, and her stomach had once again begun to heave. It had been all she could do to stumble outside before she’d collapsed again.
The maids had tried to calm her down, serving her an afternoon luncheon that they’d brought from the boat, but the caviar spread had tasted so foul that she’d reflexively spit it out as soon as it touched her tongue. Despairingly, she’d tried the rest of the food – the sautéed onions, the stuffed peppers, and the raspberry tartlets – and found all of it utterly inedible. She’d begun to honestly panic, thinking that she’d starve to death, when she’d pressed something into her mouth that hadn’t tasted horrible. Quite the contrary, after what she’d just had in her mouth, it had tasted extraordinary. It had only been when the Trotsworth had informed her that she’d just eaten a cheese-and-pickle sandwich, made out of preserved foodstuffs that the maids had found in one of the manor storerooms, that she’d realized the flipside to Lex’s curse: she couldn’t enjoy luxuries, but the fare of ordinary folk was still available to her.
She’d made sure, of course. She’d explored a nearby shed where the garden tools were kept, and had been able to walk inside of it without so much as a shiver. Later, she’d ordered one of the maids to doff her uniform, taking the frumpy grey dress back to the shed with her and trying it on where nopony could see her. Sure enough, the ugly outfit didn’t bother her in the slightest. At least, not physically. Mentally, however, it had strained her to the breaking point.
Lex had taken away the things that she’d spent her childhood dreaming about. He’d made it impossible for her to enjoy the things that she’d spent her adulthood acquiring. With a single spell, or curse, or whatever it was, he’d taken away what she enjoyed most in life.
He’d robbed her of her destiny.
With one stroke of his scythe, he’d changed her from being River Bank – matron of the Banks family and one of the major power-players in one of Equestria’s largest cities – back to being “Little” Bit, the nopony who had nothing. It was beyond intolerable. It was a loss that negated her entire life.
“So what do I do now?” she whispered sadly, staring upward.
“So, what’s tonight’s sexy-fun-times activity going to be?”
Lex let out a slow breath around gritted teeth, not looking back at her. “Sonata…”
“What? I figured you had to have thought about it, since you have so many hot girls around you. I mean, the way River took it all off wasn’t exactly the sexiest thing around, but it must have gotten you going for tonight, right?” She paused for just a moment, then continued. “Oh wait! That’s right, you didn’t mean for her to put on a show for you! Why did I think that you cursing her to not be able to wear her clothes would mean she’d get undressed? Gosh, I’m so dumb! Tee-hee!”
Lex didn’t bother responding this time, just heading toward the train station in silence. Sonata had been like this all afternoon and into the evening, and his patience for it was running out. He had explained to her multiple times that River’s having taken her clothes off wasn’t meant to be for his or anypony else’s viewing benefit, but was an aspect of how she could no longer indulge in luxuries. But for some reason Sonata hadn’t seemed to comprehend what he was telling her, continuing to harp on the fact that he’d still ended up with another pretty mare putting herself on display for him due to his actions, and no matter how he tried to explain that she was being illogical, he hadn’t been able to get through to her.
Eventually, Lex had given up on trying to understand why she was upset and turned his attention to other things. Food still had to be distributed, after all. More ponies with money needed to be dispatched to nearby farming communities. Preparations needed to be made for when more survivors inevitably drifted out of the city. Most importantly, the vessel that River had returned to Vanhoover in needed to be taken control of. Although Lex was sure his curse would debilitate her if she set hoof on it – she’d called it a “yacht,” after all, so it had to be luxurious – that wouldn’t prevent her staff from piloting it.
To that end, Lex had sought out C. Shells’ remaining crew, dispatching them to the dockyards to seize the boat. Nor had they gone alone; once again, he’d ordered the doctors to prepare the patients most in need of hospital care for transport, this time to Tall Tale. Severance had completed the ensemble, being ordered to protect them until they were on the boat, and then return to the camp and resume guarding the western edge of it just in case something unexpected was still lurking in the city.
Despite the precautions he’d taken, however, the entire endeavor had left Lex nervous. It wasn’t so much that he thought any of the patients might turn into ghouls; with the most at-risk patients already having been sent to Canterlot via the train, the ones being sent to Tall Tale now weren’t in imminent danger of death. Only the recent surgical patient was still under intensive care, and they were too weak to travel. Rather, his unease came from the thought of what would happen after the patients had been delivered.
Although he’d instructed Compass Rose – the redheaded mare who was apparently C. Shells’s second-in-command – to come right back once the doctors had returned from delivering their patients to the hospital, there was no guarantee that they would. If anything, it seemed more likely that they’d simply deposit the medical ponies and their patients at the Tall Tale dockyard and then leave. Lex still remembered how badly they’d reacted when he’d informed them that C. Shells and Sandbar had perished.
But there was nothing to be done about that. Although he could have placed a conditional curse on them if they disobeyed his orders, or told Sonata to enchant them so that they’d want to follow his instructions, neither of those actions were acceptable. He’d cursed River for making a credible statement of criminal intent; Compass Rose and her companions had made no such statements that Lex was aware of, ergo the only thing he could do was explain that their presence was still needed here – there were likely to be more survivors coming out of Vanhoover every day, and with how strained the camp doctors already were, it was inevitable that more of the sick and injured would need to be ferried to Tall Tale – and hope that they did the right thing. If not…then he’d just have to deal with it somehow.
The thought wasn’t a reassuring one, and Lex was still brooding over it as he entered the train station. Oblivious to his worries, Sonata continued prattling as she followed him. “So since we don’t have any clothes that we can take off for you, what’s tonight going to be? Group make-out session? Or maybe a little hair-pulling to go along with the touching? I mean, I don’t mind but Aria doesn’t really have any-”
“There won’t be any touching this time!” The words came out harsher than he’d meant for them to, as well as louder, filling the lobby. Sonata fell silent, for which Lex was grateful, while Nosey and Aria looked up from where they’d both been nestled against the far wall.
The latter pouted as she stretched, dragging herself over to them. “Aw, no slap-and-tickle tonight? I was looking forward to it.” Her usual sardonic sneer reemerged as she glanced at her sister. “So what’d you do to ruin this for me?”
Sonata opened her mouth to retort, but Nosey jumped in before she could, trying to head off another fight. “So what’ll we be doing, then?” she asked, looking at Lex.
“Spellcasting,” he replied flatly. “You’ll each use your magic, one at a time, while I observe you.”
All three girls waited for him to say what else would be involved. When no further explanation came, Aria frowned. “Seriously? That’s all?”
Sonata seemed equally skeptical. “It doesn’t have to be, like, we try and cast a spell while you poke and prod us like before, and if we can’t do it we get some sort of sexy punishment?”
“I don’t really know many spells,” murmured Nosey uncertainly. “I’m not a wizard the way the rest of you are.”
Lex shook his head. “I just need to see how the magic flows through your bodies when it’s being actively utilized. Precisely which spells you use are immaterial. Just don’t cast anything dangerous or destructive.”
“And after this we’re done?” asked Sonata, remembering what Lex had told her that morning. “No more ‘experiments’ with all three of us?”
Lex nodded. “That’s correct. If this gives me even a fraction of the data I think it will, I’ll have everything I need to generate a spell to change Aria into a pony.”
“And how long will that take?” Despite the fact that she could only whisper, the anticipation in Aria’s words was audible.
“Not long at all.” Lex’s answer came easily, his confidence clear. “Once this is over, I should be able to make a spell to change you into a pony in less than twenty-four hours.”
“I dunno if this is a good idea,” murmured Feathercap as he followed the others.
Straightlace nodded, glancing around nervously. “My dad says it’s bad to go wandering around at night, even here in the camp.”
Fruit Crunch rolled his eyes, not looking behind him as he led the way. “Look, you guys said you wanted to be part of the Night Mare’s Knights, right? Well this is what it takes.”
“I thought you said that we were going to be practicing being superheroes, going on missions and helping people who’re in trouble,” frowned Fiddlesticks, carrying a sleeping Tiddlywinks on her back. “So how come we’re creeping around the edge of the camp like we’re running off to do something bad?”
“And why does it have to be in the middle of the night, Crunchy?” yawned Cleansweep. “If my mom wakes up and finds out that I’m not there, she’ll freak.” Her mom, Feather Duster, had flown into the camp earlier that afternoon, out of her mind with worry. She’d broken down into tears when Cleansweep had flown up to her, hugging her so tight that the filly was sure her ribs were bruised. Since then, she hadn’t let her go the rest of the day, eventually falling asleep with her hooves around her. When Crunchy had woken her up to say that they were headed out on the Knights’ first mission, she’d barely been able to wriggle out of her mom’s grip without waking her up. “We’ll be back before morning, right?”
“Oh for crying out loud, you guys.” Fruit Crunch gave an exasperated sigh as he stopped in place, the others coming to a halt as well. Turning, he looked them over as well as he could in the dim light; they were currently making their way along the northern edge of the camp, just barely within range of the campfires. “Look, when I told you about the Knights, I said this wasn’t just some big game of pretend. We’re really going to gain magic powers so that we can help people the way Lex does, and in order to do that we’re going to need the Night Mare to give them to us.”
“But we don’t know anything about the Night Mare!” protested Feathercap.
“Exactly!” snapped Fruit Crunch. “That’s the whole point of this mission: we’re going to talk to someone who does.”
“Wait, so we’re going to talk to Lex?!” Straightlace sounded panicked at the idea. “My dad says we should just leave him alone unless he talks to us first!”
“Shh! Keep your voice down!” hissed Cleansweep. When it became clear that no one had heard them, she turned to Fruit Crunch. “Seriously though, if we’re going to talk to Lex, why are we doing it in the middle of the night?”
“And why are we headed away from the train station?” added Fiddlesticks. “That’s where he goes to sleep every night.”
“We’re not going to talk to Lex,” replied Fruit Crunch with a cryptic grin, before turning and walking again, the others scurrying to follow him.
“But if not Lex, then who?” pressed Cleansweep. “The only other pony who ever said anything about her was that pegasus friend of his, and she’s, you know…gone now.”
“What about Miss Sonata?” ventured Fiddlesticks. “She’s his girlfriend, so she probably knows.”
“No, she’s in the train station too,” said Feathercap quietly. “I saw her go in with Lex a while ago.”
Fruit Crunch nodded. “For once, Featherbrain, you’re right. It’s not her either.”
“Then who?” asked Cleansweep, the curiosity clearly getting to her.
“You’ll see,” smirked Fruit Crunch as he kept leading them through the darkness. Long minutes passed as they trudged along, always staying just outside of the camp without ever venturing further away from it. Finally, Fruit Crunch slowed down, nodding toward something. “There.”
Fiddlesticks frowned, and was about to protest that she didn’t see anyone when she realized what Fruit Crunch was talking about. “You can’t be serious!”
Straightlace was already shaking his head. “My dad says we shouldn’t ever go near that thing.”
“This…this is definitely not a good idea,” croaked Feathercap, clearly terrified by what Fruit Crunch is proposing.
Even Cleansweep seemed unsure. “I dunno about this, Crunchy…”
“Well I do!” Stomping a hoof, Fruit Crunch glared at each of them. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m tired of being some weakling nopony. I want to be strong the way Lex and his friends are, and since I’m not a unicorn this is the only way I can see that happening. Now, I’m going out there. The rest of you can do whatever you want.” Without another word, he turned on his hoof and marched forward, the others staying where they were as they watched fearfully.
Forcing a smile onto his face, the colt held out a hoof as he walked toward the scythe floating in front of him. "Hi. Your name's Severance, right? I'm Fruit Crunch." The weapon's only response was to rotate slowly in midair, its blade pointing toward him intimidatingly. Gulping, the foal made himself to keep going.
"I have a favor to ask: please tell me everything you can about the Night Mare."
For Aria, the next twenty-four hours alternated between passing at lightning speed and painful slowness.
She’d known for a while that the deadline Lex had set for himself to restore her voice was coming up fast, but up until now she hadn’t been able to fully bring herself to believe that he’d actually do it. Anxiety at the possibility of him coming up with some technicality or excuse to push back when he’d fulfill his promise had loomed large in her thoughts over the last few days; maybe there’d be some new disaster that would eat up his time, or another monster would show up that would leave him injured and unable to work his magic. The most terrifying prospect had been that she’d trip over some rule of his and he’d use that as justification for reneging on his word. After all, that had been what Cozy had done, after the little tramp had pretended to care about her.
But now…now she was one day away from having her voice back! The nearness of it, the reality of hearing Lex confirm that he was truly going to do it, had swept away her doubt and left her in a giddy state, unable to focus on anything else. She’d barely been paying attention during the little spellcasting session he’d convened, not realizing it was her turn to cast something until Sonata had kicked her and told her to get her rear in gear. Even then, she hadn’t been able to recall what magic she’d used afterward, too enamored of regaining what had been so cruelly taken from her all those months ago to concentrate very much.
After they’d finished, Lex had announced that he was going to start working on the spell immediately, and Aria would have squealed if she’d been able to. Although all he’d done was go into a corner and stare off into space, Aria had watched him like a hawk, her heart fluttering with excitement that maybe, just maybe, he’d look up and announce that his big, beautiful brain had put all the pieces together and finished the spell early! That hadn’t happened, of course; instead, he’d simply stopped and settled down after what she’d thought was only a few minutes. It had only been when she’d complained about how quickly he’d quit working that Nosey had incredulously informed her that Lex had been quietly concentrating, with the injured Siren staring at him all the while, for almost three hours.
Sonata had snickered at that, and Aria had felt her cheeks heating up, but for once she’d held back from berating her idiot sister, not want to take even the slightest chance of messing things up this close to her goal.
When they’d all settled down to sleep, snuggling with Lex in what had started to become routine, Aria had been too excited to close her eyes. Instead, she’d just quietly gazed at the stallion that held the key to her future, imagining what was going to happen tomorrow. Not only would she have her voice back, but she’d be a pony, just like him… That thought was still with her when sleep had finally overtaken her.
Lex and the others had been gone by the time she’d woken up, sunlight streaming in through the gaps between the shutters. She’d peeked out the windows, spying Lex – Sonata and Nosey flanking him closely – giving orders to the camp ponies, and hadn’t been able to bring herself to move, just watching him and waiting for the moment when he'd turn to get her, telling her that it was finally time. But unlike the previous night, time had suddenly slowed to an interminable crawl, with every minute creeping by at the pace of a sleepy sea snail (which she’d once watched ooze by while listlessly passing the time in the sahuagins’ realm).
Eventually, Lex had moved out of her line of sight, and there’d been nothing to do but sit back and wait. She’d tried to make herself go back to sleep, knowing it would make the time pass by in a flash, but that had proven impossible; she was completely wired now. Finally, after what had to have been a thousand years, the doors to the station had opened, and Aria had practically thrown herself at the pony walking inside. She’d very nearly screamed in frustration when it turned out to be Nosey, delivering her lunch.
Aria, however, couldn’t have cared less about the food. “What’s Lex doing?!” she’d demanded. “Is he still working on the spell?! Is it almost ready?! When’s he going to fix my voice?!”
But Nosey had only shrugged apologetically. “Sorry. He hasn’t said anything about it.” She must have seen the look on Aria’s face at that, because she’d given her a reassuring smile as she’d placed the simple meal of two oranges, a muffin, and some cheese on a nearby bench. “Don’t worry. He’s Lex. He’ll come through for you. That’s what he does.”
To Aria’s surprise, that had calmed her down somewhat, but only a little. Nosey, apparently realizing there wasn’t anything else she could do to help, had left with a murmured platitude about hanging in there. Aria hadn’t bothered paying attention, knowing that the words were empty and sulking at having to wait even more. Lex said he’d fix her voice today, and Nosey hadn’t been wrong about him being so reliable – in the face of how chaotic and horrible her life had been recently, it was one of Lex’s more attractive qualities – but somehow, not knowing exactly when he was going to fix her voice made the last bit of waiting all the more unbearable.
She had been reaching her breaking point by the time it was sundown. Despite knowing that it was one of the worst things she could possibly do, Aria had found herself seriously contemplating going outside and finding Lex to demand satisfaction. She’d already used her tracking spell multiple times earlier in the day, just to get a fix on his position. Now she didn’t have enough magic left to use it again, and as day slowly turned into night, she could feel her self-control starting to slip. If he doesn’t come here and make good on his promise in the next five minutes, I swear I’ll-
That had been when the door had opened again. Aria’s heart had leapt into her throat as she turned her head so fast that she felt her neck muscles strain. That had to be…!
“Aria,” intoned Lex from where he was standing in the doorway. “It’s time.”
“It’s time,” announced the engineer. “Everypony knows what that means?”
Ticket Stub nodded blearily, seeing several other ponies do the same as wearied voices of affirmation rang out inside the passenger car. But despite the general agreement, the engineer didn’t look satisfied. “Listen, I know you’re all tired and wrung out. We knew that we’d have some trouble getting to Vanhoover, and despite things getting a little rough,” he glanced at Coal Hopper as he said that, and Ticket Stub overheard the mare snort in response. The engineer either missed it, however, or chose to ignore it, continuing. “We figured it out. But none of us was prepared for how bad off Vanhoover itself was.”
The train car had fallen silent by that point, everypony listening to the engineer’s words. “That’s why I want to say just how proud I am of each and every one of you. You all kept it together and performed as admirably as any rail crew I’ve ever served with. Even with all the confusion about what was going on, and that…unusual, pony running things, you kept your heads in the game. Because of that, we not only managed to offload the cargo that desperately needed to be shipped, we also managed to assist several sick ponies who needed a helping hoof. You should all be patting yourselves on the back for handling things so well.”
He smiled at them then, and Ticket Stub felt the corners of his lips turn up in response. Out of his periphery, he could see he wasn’t the only one. Encouraged, he glanced over at Coal Hopper, but her sour expression didn’t change save to roll her eyes. That was enough to put a damper on Ticket Stub’s enthusiasm, but he didn’t have a chance to dwell on it before the engineer kept speaking. “Now, the last couple days have been tough. We’ve all been working double and triple shifts in order to keep the engine fired up so that we can get to Canterlot as fast as possible, and I know you’re all worried about those ponies back in that passenger car. So that’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we’re not going to drop the ball at the eleventh-”
He was cut off as the train’s whistle sounded, shrieking out a particular series of long and short blasts. Despite how loud it was, Ticket Stub perked his ears up, knowing that the pattern wasn’t random; train whistles were always blown in accordance with a series of signals that all rail ponies learned as part of their job, with each combination of long and short blasts indicating something different. It only allowed for simple messages, such as “all is well,” “mechanical trouble,” or “disregard previous message,” but those were enough to get the basics across to any rail ponies within earshot.
Now, as they started to slow down, Ticket knew that the signal they’d just sent had been the one for “emergency.”
“Alright folks, let’s get ready to move!” bellowed the engineer. The brakes were already starting to squeal, and Ticket knew that they’d be at the train station in a few minutes. “Remember the plan! You two,” he pointed at a pair of pegasi, “as soon as we come to a stop take off immediately for the hospital and let the doctors know what’s going on. See if they can get some personnel down here to help with transport. At worst, they’ll meet the doctors on the way. While they’re doing that, I want the rest of you to be ready to help those doctors we’ve got back there.” He pointed to a group in the back of the passenger car. “Remember, they’re probably a lot more tired than we are, and they had to remove those mattresses from their hospital beds, so they won't be able to transport their patients too easily. Just do what they say and get those ponies to the hospital as quick as you can.”
“And Coal Hopper and I are on troubleshooting,” piped up Ticket Stub, knowing what came next from the last time they’d gone over this. “We’ll handle anything else that might come up.”
“Right,” nodded the engineer. “Good job, kid.”
“Why’s he acting like he came up with everything?” muttered Coal Hopper under her breath, soft enough that only Ticket Stub could hear her…or at least, he hoped so. “We all worked it out on the trip here.”
“He’s the engineer,” replied Ticket Stub in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “With the conductor in the engine at the moment, he’s the ranking pony present.”
“‘Ranking pony’?” scoffed Coal Hopper. “It’s not like we’re in the Royal Guard.”
But any further bickering was cut off as the train finally came to a halt, stopping with one last jolt. “Alright everypony!” bellowed the engineer. “Hop to it!”
He was already moving as he spoke, heading back to the exit at the front side of the passenger car and throwing it open. “Look alive!” he bellowed. “We’ve got sick pon-erk!” His eyes bulged as his jaw suddenly snapped shut, freezing in place. The sight was enough to cause everyone else to stop what they were doing as well, looking at the stupefied engineer in confusion.
“What’s going on here? Is everypony alright?”
“Y-Your Majesty!” croaked the engineer in response to the mellifluous, feminine voice floating into the car from outside. “I, um, er…” For a second his jaw flapped, but nothing came out except more unintelligible grunts. After a moment, he looked around the interior of the passenger car wildly, clearly out of his depth. When he locked eyes with Ticket Stub an instant later, he managed to find his voice.
Aria practically bowled Lex over as she rushed toward him, flinging herself across the lobby with a joyous expression on her face. “Give it to me!” she whispered frantically, her eyes wide with glee. “Hit me with it right now!”
Mildly annoyed at her antics – he’d always found that level of anticipation to be undignified – Lex shook his head. “The application of this magic is more complicated than that. Follow me.” He didn’t bother to say anything else, instead turning and walking out of the building.
“What does that mean?” In contrast to how she’d sounded a moment ago, Aria’s whisper was sharp as a knife now. “Can you fix my voice or what?”
“Of course I can,” snapped Lex peevishly. “But a transmogrification of this magnitude is ill-suited for instantaneous utilization. Forcing your body to retrace its original pattern of physical development to a more mutable state and then reversing the process while correcting for the X-factor that caused your mutation into your current form so that you’ll have a proper pony body instead is difficult enough. Trying to make it happen in a few seconds would place your system under extreme strain, and compensating for that to the point where your life wouldn’t be in danger would require further-”
“But it’ll work, right?” interrupted Aria, not being able to wait any longer. “I don’t care if it takes a few minutes-”
“Hours,” shot back Lex, leading her around toward the back of the train station.
“A few hours?!” repeated Aria, mildly horrified that she was going to have to wait even longer, before managing to recover. Eyes on the prize, she reminded herself. “But it’ll work, right?” she repeated. “When it’s done, I’ll be a pony with a working voice?”
Lex nodded. “Yes. With the information I’ve gained from you, Nosey, and Sonata over the last few days, I’m confident that I can induce the formation of the proper physiothaumic structures when the alteration part of the process begins, including your vocal apparatus.”
“You had me at ‘yes,’” grinned Aria, shivering with excitement.
A moment later they rounded the train station, and Aria wasn’t too surprised to see Sonata and Nosey waiting for them. The four of them had been spending so much time together lately that it would have felt weirder if they hadn’t been there. In spite of that, she frowned at the sight of them, not wanting those two to think that she actually wanted them there or anything. “What’re they here for?”
“I’m gonna totes knock you out!” Sonata’s grin radiated self-satisfaction, waggling her eyebrows in a smug manner. “Just like, boom, and then you’re on the ground chasing sheep!”
“Counting sheep, Sonata.” Nosey let out a breath that could have been a sigh or a stifled giggle. Possibly both. “The expression is counting sheep.”
Sonata’s smile faded in favor of a look of confusion. “I…huh. You know what, that makes more sense. I mean, it’s hard to chase sheep if you’re snoozing. Not that you can really count them either-”
“What are you two idiots talking about?!” snapped Aria, too wound up to put up with their stupidity any longer.
Nosey seemed to have expected that response, stepping toward her. “Sonata is going to cast a spell to put you to sleep before Lex starts casting the spell. After that, she and I will be working crowd-control, to make sure that anypony who sees what Lex is doing won’t have a chance to interrupt.” She glanced at Lex then. “I still think we should do this inside, if you’re worried about that.”
“For something this delicate, I want as few potential obstructions or hazards in the vicinity as possible. You two can keep everypony back far easier than you could move the walls of that building. Now, let’s begin.” Lex pointed to a nearby spot on the ground. “Aria, lay down there, and Sonata will-”
“No! Absolutely not!” Aria shook her head, backing away as she shot a baleful glare at her sister. “I won’t let her do that to me!”
“Then this won’t happen, and you won’t be able to speak again.” Lex’s tone was one of finality, making it clear that this wasn’t a point that was open to negotiation.
Aria, however, wasn’t ready to let it go, turning to give him a desperate look. “Look, I don’t care how painful this’ll be! I can handle it!”
But Lex only shook his head again. “This isn’t a question of pain. I made certain that one of the initial effects will be to deaden your tactile nerves, making it impossible for you to feel anything until it’s over.”
“So what’s the deal with me having to be asleep, then?!”
“The deal,” intoned Lex darkly, clearly losing his patience for her recalcitrance, “is that this is extremely delicate and invasive magic. If you try and resist it, even for a moment, it will fail. Possibly with catastrophic consequences for you. Being unconscious voids that risk, and Sonata’s magic is the easiest way to make that happen.”
“Then I just won’t resist!” There was a slightly crazed tint to her words now, obvious despite them being whispered. “I’ll let whatever happens happen, so there’s no need to make me sleep through it!”
The sight of Aria breaking down was enough to cause Sonata’s smile to fall away again, but this time it was replaced with a look of concern at how much of a fuss her sister was making over this. This isn’t right, she knew. Aria had wanted this too badly for too long to start protesting this much at the last second. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you care?!” hissed Aria, baring her teeth at her. “It’s not like you were ever concerned about me! You’re probably hoping that something goes wrong and I kick the bucket, then you’ll be rid of me all over again!”
“That’s not true, Aria.” Nosey’s voice was soft as she moved closer to her again. “I know you two bicker a lot, but Sonata does care about you. So do I. So does Lex.” She gestured to each of them in turn as she said their names, giving Aria a soft smile. “We’re doing this right now because we know that having your voice back will make you happy, and we all want that.”
“Yeah, Cozy gave me that same shtick, going on about how we were a team and she’d have Princess Whatshername fix me,” spat Aria, her whispered words now dripping with venom. “Then she ditched me, just like Little Miss Doofus here did. So forgive me if I’m not willing to let her,” she jabbed a hoof at Sonata accusingly, “or anyone else put me to sleep so they can mess around with me while I’m helpless again!”
Nosey’s ears perked up. “‘Again’? What do you mean, ‘again’?”
“Nothing!” hissed Aria, shoving Nosey away. “Leave me alone!” She turned back to Lex. “Look, can’t you come up with some other way to-”
“No.” Unlike Sonata and Nosey, Lex’s face showed only irritation. “A total physical transformation that’s permanent and has no deleterious effects on your mind is an inherently fragile operation. If you experience even a moment’s hesitation or doubt or reluctance, that could cause your body’s extant magical channels to tense up, interfering with the process, and I don’t know what will happen to you then.” He paused to let that sink in, before adding one more thing. “And given the manner in which you’re acting now, I have no confidence that you could maintain the requisite level of calm necessary to undergo this procedure while conscious.”
“This isn’t fair!” growled Aria, slamming her tail on the ground angrily. “If you had told me that I’d have to lie down and make myself helpless-”
“Aria.”
“-like this I would have told you that wasn’t acceptable! Bad enough that you want me to be at the mercy of someone who’s ruined-”
“Aria!”
“-my life once before, but now you’re telling me that it’s the only way to get my voice back?! That there’s nothing you can-”
“ARIA!” Her last shout seemed to get through, causing her sister to look at her, and Sonata took a tentative step closer to her. “I’m sorry.”
Aria went rigid at that, her eyes widening and her lips pulling back from her teeth in a snarl. “What?!”
“I’m sorry,” repeated Sonata, her ears folding back. She looked at the ground for a moment, before raising her eyes to meet Aria’s. “I don’t regret that I left you and Adagio when I did, because it’s what brought me to where I am now, but I’m sorry that you went through…all the stuff you went through, because of it.”
“‘All the stuff I went through’?” Repeated Aria, shaking with rage. “‘All the stuff I went through’?! You don’t even know what I went through! You think that having to live like an animal with the sahuagin was awful?! They were monsters, but at least they didn’t want to be around me as much as I didn’t want to be around them! But those ponies back on Everglow…that heartless, miserable, evil queen…”
She couldn’t finish, too overcome to keep whispering, squeezing her eyes shut as she clenched her jaw. Seconds passed by as Aria stayed like that, no one saying anything, until her eyes flew open, and the look in them wasn’t anger as she looked at Sonata again, having changed into something much more raw. “I begged her not to do this to me!” she rasped, shaking worse now. “I cried and I sobbed and I begged her not to take away my voice, and she did it anyway! I humiliated myself and she still…!” She was still snarling, but there were tears pooling in her eyes now, the words spilling out uncontrollably. “She got the wife of one of the guards we enchanted, pointing her out like we’d made her into a freaking widow or something, and said that she was a doctor and she’d be the one to cut my voice out of my throat, and I pleaded for her not to do that to me, that I didn’t deserve it, for anything else but that…”
Again she had to stop, breathing so harshly she was almost gasping. Across from her, Sonata looked horrified, holding one hoof over her open mouth, while Nosey’s face was tight with forced composure, not letting herself break down. Only Lex looked to be unaffected, gazing at Aria dispassionately.
Almost a minute later, the Siren found it within herself to keep going. “But that pony queen wasn’t completely merciless, though. Oh no, not at all. She decided, after seeing me demean myself like that, that she’d show me mercy. And you know what that was?” She shot Sonata a look of pure bitterness then. “She used her magic and put me to sleep before she had that quack cut my voice out.” She sniffled then, and rubbed a hoof across her nose savagely. “So now you understand why I’m not letting you or her or anyone else ever do that to me again!”
Sonata had tears running down her cheeks, a stricken look on her face. “I-I didn’t know. Aria, I-”
“Do it anyway.”
Lex’s statement, delivered casually and quite clearly directed at Aria, caused all three girls to turn and regard him with wide eyes. “Lex, you can’t be serious!” gawked Nosey, horrified at how insensitive he was being.
Aria seemed much the same. “Did you even hear everything I just said?!”
“I heard you,” replied Lex flatly. “Now you hear me. Lie down,” he pointed to the ground in front of her, “and let Sonata use her magic to put you to sleep.”
“Why?!”
Although the question had been directed at Lex and not at her, Nosey couldn’t help but wince. In that one word, she could hear everything that Aria was asking him. It wasn’t just “Why should I do what you tell me?”
It was “Why would you say that to me after what I just told you?”
It was “Why should I trust you?”
It was “Why do you care?”
It was Aria at her at her most vulnerable, her most honest, and if Lex said something mean or callous like “because I said so” to her now, or worse, used that mysterious power of his to force her to do what he wanted without even answering her, Nosey knew that Aria would never trust him again, even if he fixed her voice.
Lex, please, she begged silently. Please, just this once, focus on what’s meant and not on what’s being said.
The response to her silent plea came a moment later.
“Because I’m going to fix you,” answered Lex.
Aria blinked. “You’re…what?”
“I’m going to fix you,” he repeated evenly. “And not just you. The ponies here. Vanhoover. Everything. All of it. I’m going to repair all of the damage that’s been done to my world and my people, whether from monsters or disasters or negligent leadership, and then I’m going to make sure it never happens again. And I’m going to do it all on my terms, without sacrificing anyone or anything.”
He didn’t smile as he spoke. He didn’t try to hug her or dry her eyes. He simply looked right at her, his face and his voice brimming with absolute conviction. “Right now,” he continued, “that means restoring your voice, and turning you into the pony you always should have been. If that’s not what you want, if you’d prefer to stay the way you are right now, that’s your choice. But if you want me to fix the parts of you that are broken, lie down and close your eyes. I’ll do the rest.”
“You…” The look on Aria’s face at that moment was completely unlike her usual self. Gone were all traces of snide derision or smug superiority. Instead, she looked like a terrified little girl, desperately trying to muster up what courage she possessed. “You mean it?”
“I do,” answered Lex without hesitation.
Aria swallowed, before the barest trace of a smile touched her lips. “Okay.”
Lying flat on the ground, she took a long look at Nosey, then Sonata, and finally Lex before shutting her eyes. She could still feel herself shaking a bit, but she had it under control now. The last time she had done this, her life had taken a turn for the worse, but now she had a reason to believe that this time things would get better.
Because now, there was finally someone who cared about her.
Ticket Stub felt his thoughts grind to a halt as he tried to figure out what to do.
According to what the engineer had just said, one of the princesses was right outside the passenger car’s front door. Simply hearing that had been enough to throw everypony – including Ticket Stub himself – completely for a loop. Despite the fact that they’d all spent the last day figuring out exactly what they were going to do once the train arrived in Canterlot, even making sure to create a troubleshooting team that was supposed to take care of anything unexpected while everypony else went to work, a princess being present was enough to make them all hesitate. How could it not? Not only were the princesses alicorns, commanding powerful magic, but they were also heroes, having guided Equestria through numerous bouts of hardship and disaster. Ticket Stub could practically hear the same thought going through everyone’s mind: should we wait for her to tell us what to do? Surely she’ll have a better plan than what we came up with, right?
Or rather, almost everyone.
“WHAT ARE YOU GUYS STANDING AROUND FOR?! GET A MOVE ON!” boomed Coal Hopper, causing Ticket Stub and everypony else in the car to jump. Standing up, Coal Hopper frowned severely as she pointed at the groups that they’d designated. “You two! Get flying to the hospital right now!” With a yelp of acknowledgment, the pair of pegasi rushed out the passenger car’s rear door, wings flapping before they’d even cleared the threshold. “And you guys, get back there and help those doctors with their patients!” Nodding, the other ponies quickly rushed out the back, heading for the converted car where the doctors and their patients were. “And you!” Coal Hopper’s final target was the stupefied engineer, still blocking the doorway where the princess’s voice had come from. “Make yourself useful or get outta the way! RIGHT NOW!”
Wide-eyed, the engineer nodded and slunk quietly to the side, and Ticket Stub couldn’t help but compare his demeanor to how collected he’d been just a few minutes ago. By contrast, Coal Hopper had been sullen and withdrawn on the trip back, though that wasn’t surprising given what she’d seen in Vanhoover, and yet now she was the one pushing everyone to take action. Just like when we were going to Vanhoover, he remembered. The engineer and the conductor and everyone else weren’t sure what to do when those ponies told us we couldn’t go forward, but Coal Hopper wouldn’t be deterred. It was actually rather impressive how she was able to push through a crisis, he decided. Now if only she was a little bit nicer.
An elbow to the ribs interrupted his musings. “What’re you acting so spaced for?” came Coal Hopper’s irritated voice. “There’s a princess waiting! Get a move on!”
Despite the fact that maybe fifteen seconds had passed since the engineer had called on him, Ticket Stub felt himself blanch at the idea that he’d kept royalty waiting. “R-right!” Despite the butterflies forming in his stomach, he quickly trotted toward the front of the passenger car, trying to figure out what he’d do once he got there. But the only thing he was able to think about was whether it was Princess Celestia or Princess Luna that had come to meet them.
But a half-second later, an alicorn stepped through the doorway and into the train car, revealing that it was neither.
Concern written all over her face, Princess Cadance looked between Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper. “Shining Armor told me that this train gave the emergency whistle,” she announced. “And I overheard somepony yelling something about doctors and a hospital.”
The statement was very clearly a leading one, and Ticket Stub fumbled a bow, barely managing not to fall over in the process. “Yes, Your Princessness, er…” Feeling his face heating up at the slip, he tried to course-correct. “Your Majesty. We’re bringing several sick ponies-”
“Take me to them.”
Cadance’s voice was firm without being harsh, and it made Ticket Stub start to nod instantly, pointing behind him. “They’re a few cars back. We’ll have to go outside-”
“Your Majesty,” interrupted Coal Hopper, not bothering to bow as she moved next to Ticket Stub. “We sent some ponies ahead to alert the hospital here, and right now the rest of our team is going to help the doctors transport them there. If we stop to let you examine them, it’ll take longer for them to get help.” Alongside her, Ticket Stub’s eyebrows rose, never having heard his traveling companion speak so politely. Even so, he couldn’t help but fold his ears back a little, worried that she’d just insulted the princess.
But Cadance didn’t look upset. In fact, a small smile made its way across her lips. “It’s alright. I think I can help.”
“Alright, then we’ll see you guys at the hospital!” With a firm nod at Funshine, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and Granola Bar, Fencer turned and set off at a gallop, Hopscotch at her side. Ahead of her were the eight sick ponies that they’d been sharing a car with for the last three days, carried on mattresses that were being treated as makeshift stretchers by members of the railway crew. Fencer kept her eyes focused on the ponies being carried, silently counting them to make sure that they were all there, despite not having taken her eyes off of them for an instant. This was too important to be anything less than one hundred ten percent certain, she knew. Not when Lex had entrusted her and her friends with the fate of all Equestria.
The train ride to Canterlot had been rough, but compared to what they had gone through during Vanhoover’s fall, neither Fencer nor her friends had found it unduly difficult to deal with. They’d slept in shifts, making sure that there were always at least two of them awake in case any of the patients suddenly expired and became a ghoul. They’d also helped out the doctors as needed, assisting them with various minor tasks while they watched over their charges. Even the relatively modest provisions hadn’t been a problem; compared to the weeks they’d spent scavenging for food, none of them had found a reason to complain about their current fare.
Unfortunately, the patients – to say nothing of their doctors – hadn’t fared quite so well. Whether it was discomfort brought on by how the train would sway on the tracks and make them all shift whenever it took a turn, or because they were getting worse, several of the injured ponies were prone to moaning or whimpering at even the slightest disturbance. But those hadn’t been the ones that had worried the doctors the most, explaining that it was the patients who weren’t responsive that were a greater concern.
The medical ponies themselves were only marginally better, clearly aware of what would happen if worse came to worst. Fencer had observed one of the doctors taking each of the sick ponies’ pulse every five minutes for what had to have been six or seven hours straight, clearly unnerved that one of them would expire and become a flesh-eating monstrosity when he wasn’t looking. Slip ‘n’ Slide had also reported that another of the doctors had been “joking” about jumping from the train when it had slowed down to take another curve. Fortunately, the doctor in question hadn’t been a pegasus, and Slip had been able to talk him down, saying that the “punchline” would not only be serious injury, but Lex being told about it afterward. No other jokes had been floated after that.
Now that they’d finally arrived, the doctors had practically collapsed with relief. Funshine, Slip, and Granola Bar were going to carry them to the hospital so that they could brief their colleagues as to what had happened, while Fencer and Hopscotch stayed with the patients being taken to the hospital, just to be safe. After all, thought Fencer, the worst possible time for one of them to die and turn into a ghoul would be right now, when we’re in the middle of Canterlot and surrounded by ponies who don’t have any idea what they’d be in for if that happened. The idea was horrif-
“Everypony stop!”
The voice that cried out wasn’t one that Fencer knew, but as its owner exited the passenger car up ahead of them, followed by the remaining rail crew, her eyes widened as she saw who it was. “Princess Cadance?!” she blurted, recognizing the pink alicorn from the pictures of her recent wedding that had run in the local newspaper. The event had captured all of Equestria’s attention for weeks, and that was before the wedding itself had been attacked by changelings. But that’s not important right now, Fencer knew, feeling her sense of alarm spike as the railway crew in front of her slowed to a halt, glancing at each other in confusion. We need to keep moving! “Princess Cadance!” she called. “I’m sorry, but we have to get these ponies to a hospital! They’re all-”
“I know,” replied Cadance, walking toward them sedately. “I heard from the ponies in the front car.” She nodded towards the ponies being carried. “Let me see them.”
Hesitating just for a moment, the railway crew lowered the sick ponies to the ground as gingerly as they could before stepping back, allowing Princess Cadance to approach them. The sight made Fencer bite her lip. Beside her, she heard Hopscotch swallow nervously. “Should we do something?” asked the smaller mare.
Fencer didn’t answer, just watching as Cadance knelt down by the sick pony closest to her, a middle-aged unicorn stallion. He was pale and sweating as Cadance approached, shivering despite the warm air. “P-Princess…” he intoned weakly.
“Shhh, don’t try to talk,” she rebuked gently. “I’m going to use a healing spell on you.” With no further preamble, her horn lit up, and she lowered her head as she touched the tip of it to the stallion’s chest. “Does that help?”
“I…no…” The unicorn shook his head slightly, even that small motion making him grimace. “I don’t feel any different.”
Cadance frowned at that, her brows furrowing in anxiety. “Let me try a different one.” Again her horn glowed, and this time she concentrated for several seconds before leaning down to touch it to the stallion. “How about now?”
“A little bit,” he murmured. “Not very much.”
Fencer took a step forward then. “Your Majesty, the wizard we were with had healing magic too, and he couldn’t help these ponies. Their condition is serious enough that they need to be taken to a hospital right away.”
“I want to try one more thing.”
Fencer couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Princess!”
But Cadance was already kneeling down, not looking at her as she responded. “My husband is on his way here with the Royal Guard. The best thing to do right now is wait for them to arrive and let them transport everypony to the hospital. In the meantime, I’m going to ask Lashtada for help.”
Fencer’s eyes widened at that, and she glanced at Hopscotch, who looked equally surprised…and worried. “Lashtada” had been a name that Pillowcase had called when they’d beaten and robbed him, and she’d heard later that same name in conjunction with his wife, Comfy Cozy, as well. Apparently it was their “goddess,” sort of like with Lex and the Night Mare, but that was all Fencer knew. The fact that Princess Cadance was using that name sent a chill down her spine now, not liking the implications…
Still kneeling by the stallion she’d tried to treat, Cadance closed her eyes and bowed her head, looking as if she were prostrating herself before someone. Fencer waited for her horn to start glowing, but this time no aura appeared around it. Instead, Cadance suddenly lifted her head, her eyes snapping open, and the white light emanating from them was bright enough that her pupils and irises couldn’t be seen. Fencer heard herself gasp, the sound being echoed by everypony around her, and she was only dimly aware that Funshine, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and Granola Bar had caught up to her, along with the doctors they’d been supporting, all gawking at the sight in front of them.
Her eyes still glowing pure white, Cadance rose to her hooves, her wings spreading majestically. “Lashtada,” she breathed softly. “Please, let your love renew this pony.” As she spoke, she reached out and gently, almost tenderly, touched her hoof to the stallion’s chest, who gasped as it made contact.
A moment later Cadance withdrew her hoof, letting out a heavy breath as she placed it back on the ground, folding her wings as she closed her eyes. When she opened them a second later they were back to normal, her pupils and purple irises visible again and directed down at the pony in front of her, smiling. “How do you feel?”
“I…I feel great,” he said slowly, the surprise audible in his voice. Slowly he sat up, his hooves gingerly feeling over his body. “No headache, no dizziness, no nausea…I…I can’t believe it!” He climbed to his hooves, looking up at the princess with an expression of wonder. “Thank you.”
But Cadance shook her head, smiling. “It wasn’t me. Lashtada, the goddess of love, is the one who healed you. I just helped out a bit. Now, let’s take care of the others.” She was already moving to the next of the sick ponies as she spoke, kneeling down beside them and closing her eyes again. Again, the spectacle repeated itself, and again a pony that looked like they were fighting for their life was up and about, turning cartwheels in joy. The same thing happened with the next pony she treated. And the next. And in barely a minute, all of the sick ponies that they’d brought to Canterlot were healed, each of them looking like the very picture of health.
It was enough to make everypony erupt into cheers, whooping and prancing in joy. All except for Fencer, who was still in shock at what she’d just witnessed. I don’t believe it. Lex sent those ponies here because his magic couldn’t help them, and she was able to completely restore them all in just a few seconds? It was enough to leave her completely flummoxed, trying to make sense of what she’d just witnessed.
But a few seconds later a voice rang out from behind them, loud enough to make itself heard over the celebrating.
“PRINCESS!”
Everypony turned, and Fencer’s surprise reached new heights at who she saw.
There, with tears spilling down her cheeks, was Cozy.
Fencer felt her blood run cold at the sight of the weeping crystal mare.
The other cars, she realized dimly. I was looking for Cozy so that I could apologize to her before we left, and Sonata said she and her new boyfriend had gone to one of the other train cars. She’d intended to go look for her at the time, but the words had barely gotten out of Sonata’s mouth when Lex had returned with a large group of survivors. That had been enough to make Fencer completely forget about Cozy, instead focusing on whether or not there was anyone she’d known before – any of her old friends or neighbors – among the ponies that Lex had retrieved. By the time she’d figured out that they were all strangers, what Sonata had told her had completely fled from her mind. Until now.
For an instant Fencer considered acting on her previous intentions and stepping forward to tell Cozy how sorry she was for what she’d done to her husband. But she found herself faltering. Cadance was here, a pony who was not only a princess of Equestria but also a worshiper of Lashtada, and that made Fencer hesitate. If she confessed to having killed Pillowcase now, how would Cadance react? Lex had already punished – and ultimately forgiven – her for what she’d done, and the princesses were renowned for being compassionate toward those who genuinely felt bad about their misdeeds, but this wasn’t some minor crisis of friendship. It was murder…
“P-Princess Cadance,” wept Cozy. For a moment she faltered, as though about to collapse where she stood, before bolting forward. Rushing past the gawking, confused crowd of ponies – both the rail crew and the sick ponies that had just been healed – she hurled herself at the pink alicorn, burying her face in her chest as she began to sob heavily. “Thank Lashtada! Oh, thank Lashtada you’re here!”
“…Cozy?” It took Cadance a second to react, staring in shock down at the disheveled pony bawling her eyes out against her, before instinct kicked in and she reached a foreleg around to hug her close, giving the crystal mare a gentle squeeze. The embrace lasted for only a few seconds before Cadance ended it, stepping back just enough so that she could look Cozy in the eye. “Cozy…what happened to you? The last time I saw you was a few weeks ago when you and Pillowcase left for Vanhoover. What are you doing here?”
“We should go.” Fencer almost jumped at the soft murmur from Granola Bar, the other mare having put down the doctor she was carrying and quietly crept up so she was alongside Fencer and Hopscotch. A quick glance at the other mare’s face made it clear to Fencer that her friend had figured out what was about to happen. “Right now,” she urged.
“I…” Fencer’s eyes darted to the rest of her friends. Hopscotch looked worried, but nodded silently. A glance in the other direction showed similar expressions on Funshine and Slip ‘n’ Slide’s faces, the brothers also having gently lowered the doctors they’d been carrying to the ground so that they’d be able to make a dash unimpeded.
The sight made Fencer’s chest tighten. You guys… Granola Bar and the stallions hadn’t even been with her when she’d attacked Pillowcase. Hopscotch had, but the younger mare hadn’t so much as thrown a punch, instead having been the one to root through the belongings they’d stolen from the crystal stallion. Fencer had been the one who’d beaten him savagely, with Turbo helping her do it…and he’d already paid for her selfishness with his life. The only pony left who was responsible for Pillowcase’s death, Fencer knew, was herself. But despite that, her friends – without saying a word – were telling her that if she wanted to make a break for it now, they’d be right there with her.
The thought kept her hooves rooted to the ground.
“P-Pillow,” hiccupped Cozy. “You-, you can bring him back, right?!” Desperation was written all over her face, her words spilling out in a rushed jumble. “I prayed to Lashtada for a miracle, but it didn’t happen, but she’ll bring him back to me if you ask her, right?! Please, I love him so much!”
“Cozy, calm down.” Alarm was starting to register on Cadance’s face, but she didn’t let it control her, instead reaching out with a wing to gently brush the tears from the smaller mare’s face. “Take a deep breath, okay? In…” Cadance modeled the action she wanted, inhaling deeply even as she lifted a foreleg and touched her own chest with her hoof, Cozy mimicking her clumsily. “And out…” Cadance exhaled slowly as she stretched her leg forward, as if pointing. Still blinking back tears, Cozy copied the gesture. “Good,” encouraged Cadance. “Now, one more time. In…and out…” It took a few more repetitions before Cozy’s breathing finally slowed down, a look of coherence returning to her face. Nodding, Cadance tried again. “Now, what happened?”
“Pillow, he-”
But she didn’t get a chance to finish as a new voice – that of a stallion – rang out. “Is everypony alright?”
The question was accompanied by the march of hooves, both coming from behind Cadance, in the direction of Canterlot. All eyes turned toward it, revealing its owner: a handsome white stallion with a mane and tail of sapphire blue streaked with cerulean, a cutie mark of a shield on his flanks. His horn was lit up as he galloped toward them, lighting the way for the members of the Royal Guard following behind him, their golden armor gleaming in the reflected glow. Fencer instantly recognized the lead stallion from the same articles that had covered Cadance: her husband, Shining Armor.
“Garden!” Granola Bar’s whisper was filled with urgency, her eyes taking in the sight of the members of the Guard that had just arrived. “C’mon!”
But hearing her old name only hardened Fencer’s resolve, and she shook her head softly. Running now would mean that her friends would become fugitives for a crime they hadn’t committed, all for her sake. That was the kind of selfishness on her part that had cost Turbo his life. The thought of making that same mistake again, even if the alternative was Cadance handing down a punishment worse than what Lex had done to her, was more than Fencer could bear.
Oblivious to the quiet turmoil nearby, Shining Armor moved alongside his wife, the Royal Guard starting to spread out behind him to better contain the situation. “Sorry I’m late,” he murmured with a smile that was somehow dashing and self-deprecating at the same time. “It must be nice to be able to fly over buildings rather than go around them.”
“It has its advantages,” replied Cadance with a coy smile. But the flirtatious atmosphere between the two of them ended as abruptly as it had begun, Cadance’s smile falling away as her look of controlled anxiety resurfaced. “Several of the ponies on the train were seriously ill. I healed them with Lashtada’s grace, but I think something even worse might have happened…”
She nodded her head toward Cozy at that, causing Shining Armor to look at her. It took a second for recognition to blossom in his eyes, but when it did his jaw fell open. “Cozy? Comfy Cozy? What happened to you? And where’s Pillowcase?” He glanced around, as though expecting to see her husband in the crowd, and Fencer found herself flinching as his eyes passed over her. Even so, she didn’t take a step, not even when Hopscotch nudged her, looking like she was about to cry.
She wasn’t the only one. “Pillow was…he…” Cozy took another deep breath, copying the gesture that Cadance had shown her as she visibly prepared herself to say the words. “He was killed.”
The train crew broke out into murmurs at that, while the ponies that had been sick looked sympathetic. Cadance looked heartbroken on Cozy’s behalf, pulling her into a hug, while Shining Armor eyes widened. “How?!” he blurted. “What happened?!” Cadance shot Shining Armor a disapproving look at that, making him wince as he realized that he’d been crass. “I’m sorry. I didn’t-”
“I killed him.”
Gasps rang out from the assembled ponies, the loudest of them coming from her friends as Fencer stepped forward. “I’m the one who did it,” she repeated. It’s strange, she thought to herself as she let her eyes move from Shining Armor to Cadance to Cozy. It doesn’t feel so hard to admit now. When Lex had forced her to confess her crime, it had been a gut-wrenching experience, the words tearing themselves from her with such force and emotion that she’d felt almost sick. But now…now she felt resigned. Almost peaceful. As if this was how things were supposed to be. At least this way, my friends won’t have to sacrifice themselves for me. Now there was only one thing left to say. “Cozy, I’m so, so sorry for what I did to your husband. I know there’s no way I can ever-”
“I did it!”
The new voice caused Fencer’s eyes to widen as she looked at its owner. “Funshine!”
“I did it!” repeated the stallion, stepping forward. “She’s just trying to cover for me! I was the one who k-killed him…”
For a moment no one could speak, looking back and forth between him and Fencer, who was equally shocked. So much for her friends not sacrificing themselves for her. “You-”
“M-me!” piped up Hopscotch. She looked like she was going to throw up, but that didn’t stop her from speaking. “I’m…I’m the killer!”
“No, you’re not!” snapped Fencer, a note of anger entering her voice.
She was going to say more, but Granola Bar beat her to the punch. “She’s not,” she declared, her voice firm. Fencer let out a relieved sigh, glad that at least one of her friends hadn’t gone mad, but an instant later Granola Bar kept speaking. “Because I am. I’m guilty of causing Pillowcase’s death.”
A few feet back, Funshine nudged his brother, causing Slip ‘n’ Slide to groan. “Really? This is really how it’s going to be?” When Funshine shot him a nasty look, Slip sighed, rolling his eyes. “Fine.” He took a step forward, letting out a huff before he raised his voice. “Forget what those other guys said. I’m the one who did it. They’re just saying it was them to protect me.”
“You idiots!” raged Fencer, pawing at the ground in rage as she whirled to face her friends. “I didn’t want this! I didn’t want anypony else to pay for my mistakes! You all just…” Her voice failed her then, her throat closing up as her vision began to blur, feeling hot tears running down her cheeks. “You all just keep doing things like this. Nopony asked for your help.” She raised a foreleg to her face, wiping her eyes viciously before turning back toward Cadance. “I did it. Alone. Pillowcase’s death was my fault.”
But her friends weren’t ready to give up just yet. “No, it was me!” insisted Hopscotch.
“Me!” countered Funshine.
“Me!” Granola Bar.
“Me…” Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“All of you, stop it!” The righteous anger in Cadance’s voice was enough to make everypony else flinch, quieting down as the alicorn glared at each of them in turn. “Can’t you see what this is doing to Cozy?” She glanced downward pointedly, at where Cozy had buried her head in Cadance’s chest again, crying softly. The sight was enough to make Fencer fold her ears back, suddenly ashamed without quite being certain why. Her friends all looked the same.
Seeing that everyone was properly chastised, Cadance glanced back at her husband. “Shining Armor,” she prompted.
He immediately understood what she meant, giving a crisp nod before turning back to the ponies he’d brought with him. “Guards!” The armored ponies saluted as one, and without any further instructions a detachment of them moved forward, splitting off into pairs that surrounded Fencer and each of her friends. Although they didn’t grab any of them, they moved in closer than was polite, flanking them on each side and slightly behind, ready to subdue them in an instant.
With that done, Cadance turned her attention back to the distraught mare holding her. “Cozy,” she called softly. “I know this is hard, but I want you to be brave for me, okay?” Cozy sniffled, and managed a small nod, but made no move to withdraw from the princess. Cadance smiled, looking proud of her as she continued. “What happened to Pillow’s body? Do you know where it is now?”
Cozy didn’t answer verbally, instead throwing a foreleg out to point at the back of the train. Cadance peered in that direction for a moment before glancing at Shining Armor. Nodding, he signaled to the Royal Guard again before he started off in that direction, a half-dozen stallions falling in behind him.
They weren’t gone for very long before the soft clopping of hooves announced their return. Shining Armor trotted back into view a moment later, a nervous-looking green-and-brown earth stallion beside him, Fencer belatedly recognizing him as Cozy’s new boyfriend, Aisle. A few seconds later the guards rounded the corner as well, each of them holding the edge of a small tarp in their mouths, pulling on it to keep it taut. In the middle of the tarp rested a pony-shaped form, wrapped in a sheet.
As the group returned, Aisle spotted Cozy and tentatively stepped forward. “Cozy?” he called worriedly. He seemed to only notice Cadance a moment later, blanching a little as he gave her an awkward bow. “Your Majesty,” he murmured. “I, uh, I’m sorry I didn’t get here until just now,” he offered, looking uncertain as to whether he was speaking to Cozy or Cadance. “I was staying with the body, and it’s hard to unload it without dropping it…” He hesitated at that, but when no chastisement came, he stepped forward until he was next to Cozy, giving her a soft hug. Sniffling, the crystal mare turned away from Cadance, transferring her embrace to Aisle.
Cadance looked at them for a long moment, then her eyes returned to Fencer and her friends. Seconds passed in silence as her purple orbs looked each of them over in turn, before she finally moved her gaze to Pillow’s body. “Put him down,” she ordered softly, and the guards were quick to obey, gently lowering the tarp and its load to the ground.
The action was enough to get Cozy’s attention, and she looked at Cadance again, making no move to separate herself from Aisle. “Your Majesty, please…” she moaned.
For a moment Cadance didn’t answer, looking at the wrapped body in silence, her face pensive. “How long has he been gone?”
Aisle saved Cozy the trouble of answering. “A few days. Almost a week, I think.”
Cadance nodded at that. “Alright.” Her horn lit up then, a cornflower blue aura flaring around it as a matching one surrounded Pillowcase’s body, the sheet unwrapping under her telekinesis until Pillow’s unmoving body was laid bare for all to see.
“Cadance,” called Shining Armor, and there was a note of concern in his voice that hadn’t been there before. It was enough to make Fencer take another look at the alicorn princess, belatedly realizing that she looked…tired.
No, not tired. Winded. Cadance looked she had just finished a workout, with sweat beading on her brow and her breaths being deeper than they had been when she’d arrived. It was that healing, Fencer realized. She didn’t look like that before she restored those ponies. The thought made a memory cross her mind then, remembering how Lex had collapsed after he’d made food for everyone. The difference was that Cadance didn’t look anywhere near that bad, seeming like she was only a little worn out.
That didn’t stop her from kneeling down beside Pillowcase’s body and bowing her head, however. “I need to pray,” she announced, before her voice fell to a near-whisper, intoning words that Fencer couldn’t quite make out.
But she didn’t need to understand them to know what was being attempted, and she found herself holding her breath. She can’t be serious. Healing is one thing, but this… It was beyond belief that she’d even seriously be trying something like this. The very notion was inconceivable. She had to be praying for his memory, or whispering a goodbye, or something else. That was the only explanation. As a unicorn, Fencer was fully aware that magic could do incredible things, but there were some things that were simply not possible. Not even Lex could do that!
The seconds ticked by, and Fencer could hear awkward mutterings and whispers being exchanged, but she didn’t take her eyes off of Cadance. The passing moments seemed like an eternity, and despite herself Fencer couldn’t help but wonder… What if it was possible? If so…if so then maybe all of the ponies in Vanhoover could have a second chance. Maybe her father-
“Lashtada!” called Cadance, rising to her hooves and flaring her wings. Her back was to everypony else, but Fencer was sure that her eyes had turned pure white again. “Let your love guide this pony back to the one he shared his life with! Let the two of them be as one once more! Let him live…” She placed a hoof on Pillow’s chest, right over his heart, before pressing down in a sharp motion. “Again!”
And then Pillowcase opened his eyes.
Fencer’s jaw dropped, unable to believe what she was seeing. It’s a ghoul, she thought dizzily. It has to be.
But Pillowcase didn’t look like a ghoul. Although thin, his body wasn’t emaciated, nor did his flesh look ragged and putrefied. Instead, he looked…alive. Filthy and weary, but alive, a state that seemed more true as he started coughing, pulling air into his lungs in great mouthfuls, breathing heavily in a way that no ghoul Fencer had ever seen had. After a moment, he had his breathing under control, and looked around dazedly, his eyes stopping when they met Cadance’s. “Princess…?” he croaked. “What hap-”
“PILLOW!”
Cozy’s scream was ragged as she threw herself at her husband, tackling him heavily as she threw her legs around him, sobbing and laughing and nuzzling him in joy and relief. “C-Cozy?!” he cried, clearly taken by surprise. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?!”
“Cozy, don’t be so rough with him,” called Cadance, taking deeper breaths now. Despite the gravity of what she’d just accomplished, she looked only slightly more tired, as though she’d finished a heavy workout instead of a light one. “Coming back to life takes a toll on the body. I’ll need to use more magic on him later to erase the lingering strain.” If Cozy heard her, she didn’t give any sign, still holding Pillow with all of her might as she poured her heart out on his chest.
But hearing the phrase had a more dramatic effect on Fencer, causing her to shake as if struck by lightning. That alone was enough to make the Royal Guards flanking her tense, preparing to tackle her if she tried to move, but she barely noticed. “Y-Your Majesty!” she cried, unable to stop herself. “Please bring my dad back! And my friend Turbo! And-, and all the other ponies in Vanhoover!” Hope, a sensation that she’d almost forgotten, was suddenly surging through her. “I’ll do anything!”
“Vanhoover?” Princess Cadance turned to face her then, her expression troubled. “How many ponies-” She cut herself off, shaking her head as her expression turned somber. “Are their bodies here? Have they been deceased for a while?”
Fencer shook her head, the hope she’d been feeling falling into a pit that had suddenly opened up in her stomach. “I…no. No, they’re all back at the city. It’s been weeks for almost all of them. Does that mean…?”
Cadance shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t bring somepony back unless there’s an intact body, and even then they can’t have died more than a few days ago.”
“No…” Fencer collapsed in place, crushed under the weight of what she’d just been told. Out of her periphery, she could see that her friends were struggling to deal with it as well, grimacing at the knowledge that their loved ones couldn’t be brought back. The other ponies – the rail crew and the sick ponies Cadance had restored – on the other hoof, still looked awestruck, their gazes vacillating between the princess and the pony she’d brought back. Only Shining Armor and Aisle seemed to be in possession of their faculties, the latter looking at Cozy with a sad smile while the former looked at his wife with a concerned expression.
Finally, Shining Armor spoke up. “We should take everypony to the hospital,” he announced, “just to be safe.”
Cadance nodded, but her eyes were on Fencer. “I’d like to take these five back to the castle with me.” She nodded to the guards, who started to prod Fencer and her friends back to their hooves.
Nosey winced at how Sonata was speaking at her normal volume, shooting a glance at where Aria was lying on the ground, drawing slow and steady breaths with her eyes closed. “Shouldn’t we be a little quieter?” Nosey whispered, looking up at Sonata before sending a questioning expression toward Lex. “It’ll be a disaster if we wake up her before you’re done, right?”
But Sonata was the one who answered, shaking her head slowly. “It’s fine. Unless we put on a rock concert or something, she won’t wake up because of a little noise.” Her voice lacked its usual chipper tone, and she rubbed a foreleg across her nose a moment later, sniffling a bit.
Concerned, Nosey made her way over to her, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Lex spoke up. “I’m going to begin the ritual now,” he announced, before giving each of them a sharp look. “I want to reiterate how important it is that this process not be interrupted. If anything interferes – if something prevents me from performing the necessary words or gestures, or does anything to Aria – then the consequences could be catastroph-”
“Yeah, we get it,” interrupted Sonata, her voice weary. “Don’t let anything happen to mess things up. We know.”
Lex frowned at her, clearly unhappy with her attitude. “Once I begin this process, it can’t be aborted. It can only come to its intended conclusion or be interrupted. If the latter happens, Aria’s life will be in severe jeopardy, and mine will be at risk also. That’s the best case scenario.”
“We understand.” Nosey’s voice was soothing as she nodded, making it as clear as she could that the message had been received. “We’ll go stand guard and make sure nothing happens.” Gently, she turned Sonata around and walked her away from Lex and Aria before any more feathers could get ruffled.
A moment later she heard Lex starting to chant, and knew that he’d begun, but at the moment she was less concerned about him and Aria than she was with her best friend. “You okay?” she asked softly, despite already knowing the answer. Hearing what had happened to Aria when she’d lost her voice had quite clearly done a number on Sonata: the tear-tracks were still visible on her cheeks.
Even so, Sonata nodded, wiping her face with her foreleg again. “Yeah, no, I’m fine,” she sighed. “I’m fine, I just…” She let out a slow breath before she started speaking again. “I knew she’d had it rough and all, but I didn’t realize it was that bad for her, you know? I mean, I’d have gone nuts if I’d lost my voice, and living with those creepy-fish people couldn’t have been a barrel of laughs, but the way she sounded just now…it was like, like…”
“Like it was still painful to think about,” murmured Nosey, unable to help the shudder that went through her then. “Like it never stopped hurting, even after it was over.”
“Exactly! How did you…oh.” Sonata’s ears folded back as she looked at Nosey, seeing the look on her face. “Sorry. I guess I’m a terrible friend just like I’m a terrible sister, huh?”
“Hey, come on. Don’t say that.” Nosey put a hoof on Sonata’s back, forcing herself to smile. “Aria and I are both lucky to have you, even if she doesn’t act like it.”
“Yeah,” laughed Sonata humorlessly, “except I totes ruined her life, before I came here and made it harder for Lex to save you from that Cereal guy.”
Nosey bit her lip, remembering the fight they’d had a few nights previous where she’d not only blamed Sonata for not realizing that she’d been possessed, but had accused her of impeding Lex from figuring out what had happened. “I shouldn’t have said that, before. Xi-” She cut herself off, her throat closing up as she tried to say the name. An instant later, a surge of anger flowed through her, furious that the monster that had tormented her still had so much power over her even after it had been killed. “Xiriel,” she forced the name out, “was able to fool even Lex. There was no way you could have known. I was wrong to say that any of what happened was your fault.” The anger went out of her then, and she suddenly felt tired, looking down. “The truth is, you were right. I was stupid, going to interview Block Party all by myself, without taking any precautions or telling anypony what I was doing. I was practically asking for something bad to happen to me.”
Hearing the guilt in her friend’s voice was enough to cut through Sonata’s self-pity, and now it was her turn to put a hoof on Nosey’s back. “If Lex and I couldn’t have known, you couldn’t have known either.”
“It was still stupid,” lamented Nosey. “I just…I did the same thing with Lex when I first met him, so I thought I could do it again.” The memory threatened to drag her down into a place she didn’t want to go, so she forced herself to think about something else. Shaking her head, she straightened up and looked back at Sonata. “What happened to me wasn’t your fault, and neither was what happened to Aria.”
Sonata grimaced, glancing back at where her sister was lying on the ground, Lex standing over her and making complicated gestures as he chanted, his voice harsh. It looked to her like he was trying to conduct a band, yelling at its only member as she slept through his instruction. The thought brought a wan smile to her lips, but failed to appreciably lift her mood. “It might be. If I hadn’t cut out on her and Adagio when I did-”
“-then for all you know, you’d have lost your voice too,” finished Nosey. “You told me that every time you guys tried to take over some place, it didn’t work, right? So that means that even if you’d hung in there with your sisters, it probably wouldn’t have changed what happened to Aria, and you would have gone through something just as awful.”
“I know. I said I don’t regret leaving them, and I don’t, it’s just…I didn’t want them to have to suffer like that, you know? They’re still my sisters. I just hope Adagio’s okay, wherever she is.”
“The important thing right now is that once Lex is done, Aria will be alright again.”
“Yeah.” The word came out as a sigh, but was immediately followed up by a snort of dissatisfaction. “And if I just let her sleep with my boyfriend, she’ll let bygones be bygones.” She kicked a small rock, thankfully away from where Lex and Aria were.
Nosey didn’t immediately reply, her thoughts turning back to the angry ranting Aria had unleashed the other day when she’d prodded her on this very topic. While there had been a lot of rage and jealousy in there, she’d recognized the kernel of genuine affection that Aria had developed for Lex…one which, in all likelihood, would only grow when he repaired her voice. And it’s not like I’ve been making things any easier, she knew. Although she’d been getting better lately, that had only been when she was with a small group of people she knew very well. Being in a crowd, or totally alone, or trying to sleep without Lex there…they all threatened to send her back into a panic. That, in turn, kept her close to Lex, which she knew was only making his relationship with Sonata more complicated. “Listen, about what’s been going on…”
But having vented her guilt, Sonata was already moving on to her frustrations. “I wish Kara would help me out. She hasn’t been answering me lately when I’ve called on her.”
Nosey cocked her head at that. “The love goddess you told me about?”
“Yeah,” nodded Sonata. “She’s not showing up in my dreams anymore, no matter how much I ask her to. I even offered her pie!”
Nosey blinked at that, unable to stop the corners of her lips from turning upward. “Wow. Something must be up if she won’t come running for pie.” It was a struggle to keep the wry note out of her voice – the prospect of finding something to laugh about being incredibly tempting in the midst of all this drama – but she managed.
“I know, right? So that’s why I’m gonna make a spell to get in touch with her and ask her what’s what.” That last part was said with a huff, as though she were talking about tracking down a friend who hadn’t come to her birthday party.
Nosey’s eyebrows rose as her smile faded. “You’re going to make a spell?” Her eyes flickered back to where Lex was performing the ritual. Although there were no visible effects of it yet, he was still gesticulating and speaking, every motion sharp and deliberate, each word crisp and clear. It was the very image of a specific, methodical process, one that Nosey knew firsthoof had taken him days of…intense, research to come up with. And he’s a magical genius, she knew, whereas Sonata… “Are you going to have Lex help you?”
Sonata shook her head. “Nah. He’d get all up in his head about me talking about our love life to someone else. I’ll just come up with one myself.”
Nosey worked her jaw for a moment, trying to sort out the best way to phrase what she was thinking. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Frowning, Sonata gave her an odd look. “Um, yeah. Kara’s been a big help to me before, so why wouldn’t-, oh!” Understanding blossomed on her face. “Hey, listen, I’m not gonna complain to her about you or anything. I know that you’re just hanging all over Lex because of what happened to you.”
“Listen, how about I help you with that spell?”
The words came out of Nosey’s mouth in a panic, suddenly desperate to change the topic despite having been about to broach it herself. Intellectually, she agreed completely with everything Sonata had just said: she was her best friend, and Lex was her best friend’s boyfriend, and that was that. Lex was someone she respected and admired, and she was more grateful to him for saving her than she knew how to say, but that was as far as it went. Other than him helping her to recover from what had happened to her, there was nothing else between them, simple as that.
Except it wasn’t that simple at all…
“This one has feelings for you, you know,” cooed the epicene voice of the central head. “She let it slip when I was extracting information from her. She used to think of you as nothing but a way to advance her career, but now you’re so much more to her.”
Just remembering how casually Xiriel had revealed that to Lex – taunting him while choking the life out of her – made Nosey want to crawl into a hole and die. Fortunately, Lex didn’t seem to remember, since he hadn’t mentioned it once since then, and he didn’t seem tactful enough to be ignoring it for her sake. But even if he had forgotten it, the memory still made her want to writhe in shame.
One of the worst things Xiriel had done to her was make her admit, back when she’d been interviewing “Block Party,” some of her most personal fantasies. Looking back, it had clearly used some sort of magic on her, but at the time she hadn’t known that. All she’d known was that she found herself opening up about her most private dreams and desires in a way she never had to anypony else before.
Under Xiriel’s coaxing, she’d admitted – she’d been forced to admit – that she was starting to see Lex in a new light. That while he’d seemed like a curmudgeon with incredible powers whose heart was in the right place when she’d known him in Tall Tale, Vanhoover had shown her that there was more to him. She’d already been getting glimpses of the part of him that only Sonata got to see – the way his features would soften just a little when he looked at her, or how he’d brush up against her sometimes when they were walking – and to a mare who had never so much as been kissed in all of her twenty years, let alone been in a real relationship, the romantic allure of it had been tantalizing.
And then Lex had started to pay attention to her, too.
It hadn’t been anything tawdry on his part. Quite the opposite, really: he’d forced her to participate in cleaning that warehouse that they’d holed up in once they’d gotten to Tall Tale. To Nosey’s own surprise, the grueling work had actually brought her closer to everypony else; when they’d started, they’d all been strangers to her, but by the time they’d all finished she’d been talking and laughing with the rest of them, as if she’d known them for years. It was like they’d all forgotten that she was a reporter who pried into other ponies’ business, and it had felt wonderful…all because of Lex.
He’d had no idea, of course, but Nosey had still felt grateful to him all the same. But it had just been that: gratitude. It hadn’t been until they’d gotten into that pillow fight a little while later – seeing Lex cut loose and have some fun with her and Sonata in an extremely rare moment of relaxation – that she’d realized that he was her friend. It was borderline unprofessional for a subject that she was writing about, but she hadn’t cared. Lex and Sonata were her friends, and she was glad for it, and even if she was going to write the book on them, she didn’t want to mess it up.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t fantasize a little…
There were lots of plays and books and stories about love triangles, after all. Girl meets boy meets girl’s best friend. It was practically a cliché. Just thinking about how it would go was completely harmless, even if it was a lot of fun to imagine. It wasn’t like she was being two-faced, either; in her idle musings Sonata was happy for them, and they stayed good friends even after things were resolved. And sometimes…sometimes she thought about a more scandalous arrangement between the three of them…but it was all just a fantasy, something that she knew couldn’t ever really happen. Good reporters dealt in facts, not fiction, and Nosey had no intention of jeopardizing her newfound friendships. Fantasies were enough.
And then Xiriel had happened, and now…now Lex's body was pressed against her when she woke up each morning. Now he was gently caressing her while she held still and tried not to moan. Now he was being suspiciously silent when Aria teased him about having three girlfriends.
But no, Nosey had reminded herself, good reporters dealt in facts, and the facts were telling her that her emotions weren’t trustworthy right now. They were telling her to stick with what she’d been doing and not interfere with her friends’ relationship. They were telling her to ignore what Aria had been saying. They were telling her to just stick to her fantasies and not confuse them with reality….even if maybe, just maybe-
“For realsies?”
“Huh?!” Nosey almost jumped in place at Sonata’s voice, coming back to herself. “I mean, uh-huh! I’d be happy to help you, um….develop that spell,” she finished lamely, barely remembering what they’d been talking about as she was speaking.
“Aw, thanks!” Managing to smile, Sonata threw her forelegs around Nosey, wrapping her in a hug. “You’re such a good friend!”
Fighting down the sensation of guilt, Nosey gingerly hugged Sonata back.
“In all the cosmos, only two types of beings exist.”
Fruit Crunch’s voice was solemn as he recited the words, his eyes closed as he kept his hoof on Severance. Nor was he the only one; arranged around the weapon in a radial pattern, Fiddlesticks, Cleansweep, Straightlace, and Feathercap were in similar positions, eyes closed and holding a hoof out to touch the scythe. “The strong, who do as they wish,” intoned the other four in unison, “and the weak, who suffer what they must.”
“While both can be mighty, the power of the strong flows from their own self, while the weak have only what power they’re allowed to borrow,” continued Fruit Crunch.
“Thus the strong do as they wish,” repeated the others, “while the weak suffer what they must.”
“And in the darkness, when all light is gone, the truth between the strong and the weak is made known, for, um…for the…the…” Sweat gathered on Fruit Crunch’s brow as he struggled to remember what came next. The words hovered on the tip of his tongue, but refused to make themselves clear as the seconds ticked by. Eventually, he shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he muttered, shamefaced.
The others opened their eyes, sharing worried looks as they slowly lowered their hooves from Severance. “Crunchy...” started Cleansweep, a pleading tone in her voice.
He shook his head in response. “Don’t, Dust Bunny. I’m the leader. I volunteered for this.” Letting out a slow breath, refusing to let himself feel afraid, Fruit Crunch steeled himself as he opened his eyes, looking up at Severance. “I volunteered for this,” he repeated, before nodding at the scythe.
Slowly, the weapon drifted away from him just a little, tipping its blade downward until the tip of it touched Fruit Crunch’s foreleg, still outstretched. Trying to stop himself from shaking, Fruit Crunch bit his lip, holding his foreleg steady as the razor-sharp tip of the Severance’s blade pushed down and pierced his skin. The puncture wasn’t deep, not even a quarter-inch, but it was intensely painful. The pain grew worse as the metal began to heat up, the blade beginning to glow a dull red, and Fruit Crunch couldn’t suppress a moan of agony, now trembling all over as he fought the instinct to snatch his foreleg back.
After several seconds Severance began to move again, drawing the tip of its blade down the length of the colt’s foreleg, the scorching-hot metal easily parting the flesh as it moved. No blood flowed from the cut, the heat from the blade cauterizing the wound instantly. Finally, Severance reached the end of Fruit Crunch’s hoof, pausing for just a second before tilting upward, removing its sharp edge from his leg, the red glow fading as it moving back to its upright position. For his part, Fruit Crunch wasn’t able to suppress a gasp as the excruciating pain began to fade, almost falling over.
Instantly, his friends were at his side, doing what they could to support him.
“We should stop,” whimpered Feathercap, looking like he was going to be sick as he helped the others hold Fruit Crunch steady, guiding him down into a sitting position.
“N-no.” Fruit Crunch’s face was pale as he forced himself to take deep breaths. “I can keep going.” He closed his eyes again, licking his lips as he thought back over the words that Severance had repeated while it had cut him. “And in the darkness, when all light is gone, the truth between the strong and the weak is made known, for the strong revel in the darkness, while the weak fear it.”
But this time no one repeated the refrain, causing him to frown as he opened his eyes. “Guys, I’m serious…”
“So are we,” snapped Fiddlesticks from where she’d gone to check on her sleeping brother, though her face registered worry more than anger as she gently lifted Tiddlywinks onto her back. “You’ve already done that three times tonight! That’s enough!”
“Crunchy, please,” begged Cleansweep, blinking back tears. “Let’s call it off for now. You look like you’re really hurt!”
But she could already see Fruit Crunch’s face settling into that stubborn expression of his, the one that said he wouldn’t stop until he had his way. “You think Lex wasn’t really hurt when he fought all those ghouls?” he shot back, though his injury made the words contain far less force than they normally would have. “Or when he killed all those other monsters he fought before he even got here? I told you I asked some of the other ponies here in camp. When he slew that dragon-”
“You’re not Lex!” Cleansweep almost shouted the words, only getting herself under control at the last second.
For a split-second a hurt look crossed Fruit Crunch’s face, before it was swallowed by anger. “And I never will be if we keep taking things slowly! I asked Severance what the fastest way was to earn the Night Mare’s favor, and it starts with this! Not to mention that I’m the one doing the hardest part, so I don’t know why you all are complaining so-” He stopped speaking abruptly as Severance floated over, touching the end of its shaft to his side. He let out a low breath, but nodded. “We’re done for tonight,” he announced wearily, all the fight going out of him at once.
The others breathed a collective sigh of relief, with Cleansweep giving Severance a grateful look before she flew to Fruit Crunch’s side, gently taking his injured foreleg and laying it across her shoulder. “C’mon. You need to go lay down.”
“He should go to the river first,” added Straightlace. “My dad says to always wash a cut, even if you don’t have any soap.”
Fruit Crunch gave a noncommittal grunt at that, no longer hiding his exhaustion now that Severance had said that they were done. Cleansweep nodded, turning her attention back to her friend. “C’mon Crunchy. The river’s not far away from here, okay? We’ll just splash some water on this, and then we’ll get you all tucked in.”
She led him toward the water, while Fiddlesticks, Straightlace, and Feathercap trailed after them, leaving Severance behind. But after a few minutes, Fiddlesticks held out a foreleg, causing the two colts who’d been following her to stop. Both of them shot her inquisitive looks, but she waited until Cleansweep and Fruit Crunch had continued forward, not wanting them to hear what she was going to say. Once she was certain they’d moved far enough ahead, she turned to the other two. “Should we keep doing this?” she asked bluntly.
“What do you mean?” murmured Feathercap, looking vaguely nervous…though Fiddlesticks was starting to wonder if that was his default expression.
“This!” she repeated. “All of this! The Knights, Severance, everything we’re doing!” She nodded toward where the other two members of their group were headed toward the river. “This is only our second meeting, and look at what’s going on!”
“You think we should quit?” asked Straightlace.
“You don’t?” she shot back.
He bit his lip for a moment, looking past her at Fruit Crunch and Cleansweep as he replied. “I’m worried that if we quit, Fruit Crunch will keep doing this on his own. I don’t want him and Severance alone together without somepony there to step in if things go too far.”
Fiddlesticks frowned. It wasn’t an unreasonable point. But it wasn’t the only option, either. “Then we should just tell Lex about-”
“No!” Feathercap’s eyes were round with fright, his whole body shaking like a leaf at her idea. “We can’t tell him we’ve been using his magic scythe without his permission! He’ll curse us!”
That was enough to stop Fiddlesticks in her tracks. She wasn’t sure that Lex would do that to them, but she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t, either. And she’d been bringing Tiddlywinks with her, too… He wouldn’t curse a baby, would he? Tiddlywinks didn’t even do anything with us, he just slept through it all! She didn’t think Lex would do that, but if she was wrong there’d be nothing she could do about it. The thought took the wind out of her sails, leaving her shuffling her hooves uncertainly. “We could at least tell Miss Sonata,” she muttered.
But Straightlace shook his head. “She’s Lex’s girlfriend. She’d tell him right away. Besides,” he added after a moment, “even if we stop going now, Severance could tell Lex what we’ve been doing anyway.”
Fiddlesticks blinked, not having thought of that. “But…but it’d get in trouble too!”
Straightlace shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m guessing it could handle it better than we could.”
Letting out an unhappy huff, Fiddlesticks stomped a hoof, but there was no real force behind the blow. “So that’s it, then?” she asked unhappily. “We can’t quit, and we can’t tell anypony, so we just keep doing what we’re doing and hope it all works out okay?”
“Maybe it’ll be alright?” ventured Feathercap, looking like he wanted someone else to assure him that it would be. “I mean, if Fruit Crunch is right, we could all gain magic powers if we make the Night Mare proud of us. Then we can stop doing this and we won’t have to tell anypony, right?”
Fiddlesticks couldn’t help but roll her eyes at that. Feathercap was the most timid pony she’d ever met; trying to reconcile him with everything Severance had been telling them about what it meant to be strong was completely impossible. If anything, he seemed like the perfect example of what “the weak” were like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she thought guiltily. Even if he wasn’t the toughest pony around, he was still a perfectly nice one.
But according to Severance, that was irrelevant, which was what made her so uncomfortable with what the scythe was teaching them all. None of its lessons so far had included anything about friendship, or love, or harmony. It was all about strength, and power, and control. It was nothing like the values that her parents had taught her to live by, something she’d pointed out when Severance had begun instructing them yesterday.
The scythe’s answer was to ask her how well those values would have protected her against the horde of ghouls if Lex hadn’t been there. It had then followed up by asking how well they would have protected her little brother. It bothered Fiddlesticks greatly that she hadn’t been able to answer that at the time…and still couldn’t now.
Upset, Fiddlesticks fell back on the only argument left to her. “I still don’t see how any of what we’ve been doing is supposed to convince the Night Mare that she should give us magic powers,” she groused. “We can memorize a bunch of stuff about whatever, and Fruit Crunch can let Severance hurt him when he messes up, but what good does any of that do?”
Both colts shrugged. “I dunno,” admitted Straightlace. “But my dad says-”
“What’s going on?” interrupted Feathercap, suddenly pointing back toward the camp. Blinking, Fiddlesticks and Straightlace followed the line of his hoof, which was directed toward the distant train station. In the light of the campfires, they could just barely see a crowd beginning to form, ponies gathering to look at something behind the building.
“I don’t know,” admitted Fiddlesticks. “But we should-”
“Go check it out,” came Fruit Crunch’s voice.
All three turned to see him limping toward them, Cleansweep at his side. “Something might be going on,” he added. “If it is, it’s our job as the Night Mare’s Knights to head over there and help.”
“With what?” snorted Fiddlesticks. “We still don’t have any magic powers yet.”
Fruit Crunch scowled at her. “And we won’t ever, if you keep acting like that. Weren’t you paying attention to anything Severance told us?”
“I was, and I don’t remember anything about rushing in blind whenever something happens,” she countered.
Cleansweep moved between the two, giving Fiddlesticks a pleading look. “Let’s compromise, okay? We’ll get closer and see what’s going on, and if it’s not an emergency we can figure out what we should do, or if we even need to do anything at all, okay?”
Fiddlesticks rolled her eyes. “Fine by me.”
“Fine by me too,” snapped Fruit Crunch, turning and starting toward the station. Despite how much of a drag Fiddleface was, he felt a smile tugging at his lips. “This could be our very first mission guys, so let’s make it snappy!”
Raising his injured hoof, he pointed it toward the crowd of ponies. “Time for the Night Mare’s Knights to save the day!”
Lex did his best to ignore the crowd of ponies as he continued to gesture and chant.
They’d formed a little while ago, drawn by the sound of his upraised voice as he’d known they would be. Fortunately, none of them seemed particularly inclined to try and get a close look at what he was doing, allowing Sonata and Nosey to keep them at a safe distance. Still, their presence put Lex on edge, making him briefly regret his decision to do this outside and not in the train station.
He pushed the thought away, knowing that he’d made the correct decision. In terms of managing the risk of the ritual being interrupted, being outside carried a greater level of exposure, but less chance of something unexpected happening. Out here, there was no possibility of a lantern being kicked over and starting a fire, or a pipe bursting and flooding the place, or some other freak accident occurring. That was unlikely in the extreme, of course, but Lex had no intention of taking any chances where he could possibly avoid them, regardless of how improbable they were. Out here the only issue was crowd-control, and Sonata and Nosey were on that.
Of course, Lex knew that something truly unforeseeable was always a possibility – the way he’d been so completely blindsided by Xiriel was still fresh in his thoughts – but there simply wasn’t anything else he could do to control the local environment. Virtually none of his defensive spells had a duration sufficient to see him through the hours-long ritual, and the few that did were impractical for this particular circumstance. Placing an alarm around himself or Aria in case anypony got too close, for instance, would have been pointless, nor would placing a ward against scrying on her do anything. As much as it galled him, Lex had been forced to admit that there wasn’t anything he could do should a truly dedicated adversary (for whom the walls of the train station, he knew, wouldn’t have been an impediment anyway) decide they wanted to interrupt the ritual.
If that happened, only Sonata would be able to provide any sort of serious obstacle, something Lex had found less than reassuring. He’d almost offered her some of his magic items, but reluctantly decided to keep them for himself; if someone attacked him from a distance, they’d help prevent a ranged attack from making contact. That, and he didn’t trust Sonata not to become distracted if he gave her the floating gemstones again.
Severance, he knew, would have been a far more potent guardian, but Lex had elected to have the scythe where it was, watching the western edge of the camp just in case there were any lingering ghouls or other horrors slithering out of Vanhoover. The possibility seemed increasingly remote now, but Lex was determined not to compromise the only other defender the camp would have while he and Sonata were preoccupied. That…and he couldn’t rule out the possibility that Severance’s very presence might disrupt the ritual. The sheer amount of magical energy that the weapon radiated was intense, and might have been enough to affect how Lex would be bending the ambient magical energy around Aria, making a difficult process even harder. Better, he’d decided, for it to remain on the other side of the camp.
Of course, none of this would have been an issue if he’d designed this as a spell in the first place, rather than a ritual.
That was only to be expected, of course. Although the alternative format wouldn’t have changed how long this procedure would have taken, the consequences of disrupting a spell were far, far less prone to catastrophe than a ritual was. Lex had made sure, when designing his thaumaturgical spellcasting, to account for the possibility of something going wrong while a spell was being actively utilized. Specifically, when constructing the thought-forms that contained the magical energy within his mind, he’d made sure to conceptualize their structure in such a way that if they were breached or otherwise improperly actualized, they’d collapse in on themselves. The magical energy would be released in a diffuse scatter too widely distributed to have any actual effect. At least, that was what was supposed to happen; in theory a miscast spell could still have unintended consequences, but it was highly unlikely. Like a building undergoing a controlled demolition, the risk to himself and others was minimal.
But a ritual was different. The procedure manipulated the magical energy in the surrounding environment directly, without being contained within a conceptual structure. If he lost control of it, there was no telling how all of that power would manifest before it dissipated back into the local environment. But since Aria was at the center of it, she would almost certainly bear the brunt of whatever happened, and Lex knew that he’d likely be affected as well.
In spite of all that, Lex had still decided to enact Aria’s transmogrification as a ritual, rather than a spell, due to what he’d learned over the last few nights of examining the girls.
The most notable aspect of what he’d discovered had been when he’d looked at the magical pathways in Sonata’s body. With Nosey serving as a control specimen, he’d been able to examine the subtle differences between how her body and Sonata’s utilized magical energy. On their own, those differences were negligible, and could have been chalked up to the fact that Nosey was a unicorn and Sonata wasn’t, except that he’d been able to take what he’d observed and compare it to how the magical channels in Aria’s body functioned. That had been sufficient to let him hypothesize how Sonata had gone from being a Siren like her sister into being a pony like Nosey. Even better, that hypothesis tacitly endorsed his theory that the Sirens were themselves a type of pony, due to the gemstone in Aria’s chest having magical pathways that were startlingly similar to those in Nosey and Sonata’s cutie marks.
But what had been most notable had been what Lex hadn’t seen. Specifically, there had been no remnant – not even a ghost of a clue – as to what had changed Sonata’s body in the first place. He hadn’t expected to find an extant spell actively keeping her in her current form, certainly. But he had expected to find something, some trace of whatever magic had changed her from looking like Aria into how she was now. Certainly something more helpful than “it just happened,” which was the singularly unhelpful way that she’d described her transformation. But there’d been nothing, or at least nothing that he could detect with his enhanced circlet.
While that had been vexing at the time, Lex had come to realize that there was an unexpected benefit to the mystery: if he couldn’t figure out how Sonata had been changed into a pony, then it was virtually impossible that anyone else would ever be able to undo that transformation. Certainly, some other polymorphic magic could be leveled against her, but such things could be countered in their own right, returning her to her original body…which for all intents and purposes was the body she had now. Whatever had changed her into her current state was not only permanent, in other words, it was irreversible.
That was a status that Lex had decided needed to be procured for Aria as well.
That, however, ruled out using a spell in order to change her. Spellcasting – the act of internalizing magical energy before directing it in a controlled release – was dependent on molding the gathered energy in such a way that its utilization made it take a specific effect. It was why a spell to create light, when cast, resulted in a source of illumination rather than creating a fireball. For most unicorns the process was physical, figuring out how to move the energy through their body’s magical channels and out of themselves via their horn. For Lex, it was conceptual, employing advanced thought-forms that were far more intricate than what his physical body could replicate. Sacerdotal thaumaturgy – the divinely granted magic that Cozy and Cloudbank had used – operated on a similar principle, albeit with far less understanding of what they were doing, since the energy was arranged by their deity and not themselves. But in all cases, the energy was configured in a specific way.
Once the spell discharged, that configuration lingered as a remnant in the local environment’s ambient magical energy. Like a hoofprint in the sand, it manifested in the form of an aura, still registering in the magical spectrum even after the spell had been discharged. Also like a hoofprint, it eventually faded over time, washed away as the magical energy that pervaded all things eventually eroded it down to nothing.
Except Lex wasn’t certain that last part was completely true. While an expired spell’s lingering aura eventually faded beyond what he could see, when he used his circlet to peer into the magical spectrum, his recent experiment with the girls had confirmed that it was possible to increase the acuity of what could be detected that way. This meant that – in theory at least – it was possible to detect an expired spell’s aura even after a significant amount of time had passed; not just minutes or hours, but days or even weeks, if not longer. Not just detected, but examined, studied…and undone. After all, if there were spells specifically designed to act as universal counterspells – like the spell he’d used to undo the physical enhancement spell that green dragon had used on itself, or, Lex knew, the more powerful version Xiriel had used against him during their fight – then it wasn’t impossible to create a spell that not only countered extant spells, but analyzed a trace aura and shaped itself accordingly to undo what the now-faded spell had done.
But Sonata had no such trace aura in her body’s magical channels, no matter how hard Lex had looked.
That was why he’d gone with making a ritual for changing Aria into a pony. Rituals, which were never internalized and were shaped on-the-fly to produce the desired effects, left no lingering aura. While that effect might leave a detectable clue – a ritual to set something on fire would still leave scorch marks – the direction of the energy itself didn’t result in any sort of magical signature. If spells were hoofprints in the sand, then rituals were waves that were simply a little bigger than other waves. There was no aura left to examine, and no way to formulate any sort of after-the-fact reversal. Aria’s transformation would be like Sonata’s: irrevocable.
After everything she’d gone through, she deserved that much from him, Lex knew. Her outburst before he’d begun had made it quite clear that she’d suffered greatly because of what had happened to her, and as far as he was concerned her sentence had been disproportionate to her crime. Deliberate mutilation was cruel, and cruelty was not just, even when presented in the guise of a criminal conviction. This alteration to her body, and the restoration of her voice that would be as a side effect of that, should be as stable as he could possibly make it. It would mean a period of heightened risk during the actual procedure, but that was acceptable. He’d be here, along with Sonata and Nosey, to minimize that risk, and once it was over Aria wouldn’t ever have to be afraid of going back to how she was now.
This was the right course of action. Lex was certain of it.
With a sharp gesture, he moved the ritual into its next phase, his voice rising. In front of him, Aria’s body slowly rose into the air of its own accord, the crowd gasping at the sight. Lex ignored them, continuing to direct the energy as Aria began to glow softly, light enveloping her until she was shining, unable to be seen beneath the radiance. More than a few of the nearby ponies turned away or shielded their eyes, but Lex kept his gaze on her now-luminous form, knowing that the light was a byproduct of the energy he was directing into her body, making it roll back her physical growth. Focusing intently, he made sure that every motion, every word he said was clear and precise, knowing that if he faltered even a little-
“Make way! Make way for the princesses!”
Years of discipline kept Lex from so much as flinching at the pronouncement, but it didn’t diminish the shock he felt. The voice wasn't one he recognized, but out of his periphery he could see several ponies in the crowd moving, parting to make room for an unfamiliar pair of pegasus stallions. Or at least, somewhat unfamiliar; their golden armor was unmistakeable, identifying them as members of the Royal Guard. And judging from how they weren’t crystal ponies, how they’d said “princesses” rather than “princess,” and that he’d never witnessed nor heard of Twilight Sparkle having a detachment of guards of her own, it was easy to tell who they were announcing.
Lex had known that something truly unforeseeable was always a possibility, and now it was happening.
Lex fought down a surge of panic as he continued the ritual.
Celestia and Luna showing up now, at the worst possible moment, couldn’t be a coincidence…and yet, it had to be. His anti-scrying spell hadn’t activated, which ruled out the possibility that they’d been magically spying on him. Likewise, the train that had left here for Canterlot had only departed three nights ago, and should only be arriving at the city now, thus ruling out that somepony on it had directed them here. Plus, he hadn’t told anyone on board what he’d be attempting tonight anyway. But what other possibility was there?
Could someone on board have told them about what’s happened, and they teleported straight here? It wasn’t impossible, at least not in theory, but it was still unlikely in the extreme. Native Equestrian spellcasting, with its reliance on physical modes of manipulating magical energy, had teleportation as one of the most difficult spells a unicorn could learn. Even when done correctly it was typically only used to transport one’s self short distances. Taking another person along and/or increasing the distance traveled would have been taxing in the extreme, to the point where it would – by Lex’s calculation – have required both prodigious training and a cutie mark in spellcasting. Even then, to have teleported halfway across the continent and brought multiple guards with them….
No, even they can’t be that strong, he decided. There had to be an alternative explanation. But whatever it was, he’d need to find it later; for now, he had to deal with the fact that they were here, and they were in a prime position to disrupt the ritual he was conducting if they felt so inclined. The thought made him want to grit his teeth, but he knew he didn’t have that luxury, continuing to chant as he made the proper gesticulations in time with his words. Even then, he couldn’t help but analyze the current situation, weighing the options he had if worse came to worst…only to conclude that he had none.
As much as he hated to admit it, it was all up to Sonata now.
“Hey, is your armor made out of chocolate?” Sonata peered at the golden armor the pair of burly stallions in front of her were wearing, looking for a seam. “I mean, if you get hungry can you peel back the foil and nibble on it a bit?”
Neither of the guards seemed to appreciate her question. “Miss, please step aside immediately,” ordered the one on her left.
“The princesses wish to speak with Lex Legis at once,” added the one on her right. “Clear a path for them.”
Sonata glanced over her shoulder just once, looking back at where Lex was still chanting and gesturing, the glowing form of Aria hovering in the air in front of him like a big nightlight. When he didn’t pause or give any indication that he’d heard what the guards had said – despite being close enough that she was sure their words had reached him – she turned back to the armored pegasi. “Yeah, sorry. That’s gonna be a big no-go. Lex is in the middle of something right now, and totes can’t quit now.” The two stallions frowned deeply at that, but Sonata stood her ground, completely unfazed; Lex’s normal expression had more glower-power than either of these guys.
Nosey, however, seemed a bit more worried, gulping slightly as she made herself stand next to Sonata. This is no big deal, she reassured herself silently. I’ve interviewed plenty of Royal Guards before, this isn’t any different. Except for the part where she was deliberately defying their princess-given orders, because if she didn’t they could cause severe harm to her hero and her best friend’s sister. Right, no pressure. Fortunately Sonata had used her calming spell on her before now, otherwise Nosey felt sure that she’d be fighting the urge to throw up from anxiety. “Listen,” she piped up, drawing both guards’ attention, “she’s not kidding. Right now Lex is casting a really powerful spell to help her” – she nodded her head toward Sonata – “sister. If something interrupts him before he’s finished, they could both be seriously hurt.”
Both guards registered hesitation at that, glancing at each other uncertainly, and Nosey felt the tightness in her chest loosen. “But our orders…” murmured the rightmost stallion, clearly not sure what to do.
Nosey had no intention of letting them make up their minds. That’s right. This is just like interviewing a reluctant source. I’ve just got to make my way sound more reasonable than what they’re thinking. “Look, you said to make way because the princesses are headed here, right?” When both of them nodded, she continued. “So how about we wait here until they arrive, and then explain the situation to them then? I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to hurt anypony, right?” The guards hesitated for just a moment, then nodded slowly, making Nosey sigh in relief.
“Great!” cheered Sonata, rearing up and clapping her hooves before falling back to all fours. “So, can I have some of your chocolate armor in the meantime?”
Nosey resisted the urge to laugh, glancing around past the guards. The crowd was still watching the exchange, but it wasn’t them that Nosey was focused on. The guards had emerged from around the side of the train station, which meant that the princesses would almost certainly be coming from that direction also. But it’ll be okay, she was sure. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna won’t want anything bad to happen to anypony. I’m sure Sonata and I can fill them in on whatever they want to know while Lex finishes his spell. She wasn’t sure if it was because of Sonata’s spell, or because she’d witnessed the princesses so often – albeit always from afar – from having grown up in Canterlot, but the thought of talking to them was only the tiniest bit intimidating, and Nosey found herself standing up straighter as she heard hoofsteps approaching.
Too many hoofsteps.
She had just enough time to feel confused, before a half-dozen guards rounded the corner, marching in unison. There wasn’t a princess with them, however; rather, at their head marched an earth stallion who was also wearing the armor of the Royal Guard…except that it wasn’t gold, but rather a deep purple. Set against his pitch black coat and his white mane and tail, he cut quite a figure. But that wasn’t the most notable thing about him: that particular distinction went to the way his right hind leg was gnarled, the limb shriveled and twisted as though some monster had used it for a chew toy.
“I don’t think that’s one of the princesses,” Sonata stage-whispered to Nosey.
The strange stallion’s leg was clearly as bad as it looked, causing him to limp slightly as he led the other six members of the Royal Guard forward. Despite that, he didn’t seem to be in any particular pain, his features collected as he reached the two guards that had preceded him. Both snapped a salute, holding the pose and making it clear that whoever the newcomer was, he outranked them.
Nosey found herself holding her breath as the purple-clad stallion looked at her. It would have been easy to mistake his unsmiling expression as being like Lex’s, but she could see the difference. Lex’s perpetual scowl was one of disapproval, as though he was passing judgment on whoever he was looking at and found them wanting. It had taken her a while to realize that was his way of indicating that he cared about the ponies around him; he expected them to hold themselves to the same level of personal excellence that he strived to meet, and couldn’t understand why they not only fell so consistently short of the mark, but seemed to be uninterested in trying to do better. That wasn’t an attitude you had unless you were invested in other people, even if Lex was terrible at expressing that.
The unsmiling stallion looking at her now, however, didn’t give her the same impression. Whereas Lex was brimming with restrained passion, this pony felt cold. No, not cold, she corrected herself a moment later. Disinterested. That was it. His eyes looked at her the same way he would have looked at a pothole in the street: she was only worth noticing because she happened to be in his way. His eyes moved over to Sonata after a moment, and Nosey saw her frown at the look on his face, knowing that her best friend – who wanted to be adored – wouldn’t appreciate being looked at like that.
Then the newcomer looked past them. His brow furrowed slightly as he gazed at the glowing form that was Aria, before turning to look at Lex. It was only when his eyes fell on the latter pony that Nosey saw a flicker of genuine emotion appear in his eyes: anger.
“Report,” he snapped, not bothering to look at the pair of guards still holding their salute.
“Yes sir, Commander Silhouette sir!” chorused the guards, before the one on the left continued speaking. “We were attempting to clear the way for the princesses, but these ponies refused to move.”
“We ordered them to stand aside,” added the guard on the right. “But they said that Lex Legis is performing a delicate spell on somepony, and interrupting it could cause injuries.”
“Mm,” grunted Silhouette, not taking his eyes off of Lex. Nosey bit her lip, not liking the vibe she was getting off of this guy. Apparently Sonata didn’t either, because she was glaring at him, and Nosey had the distinct impression that she was about to give him a piece of her mind. Fortunately, she caught Sonata’s eye first, and silently shook her head. Please don’t! she thought as hard as she could, trying to will Sonata to understand what she was trying to say. If we start a fight, this will go from bad to worse in an instant, especially for Lex and Aria! Fortunately, Sonata seemed to read her mind, giving a huff but no longer looking like she wanted to tell this guy exactly what she thought of him.
“Our orders have changed.” Silhouette’s voice dragged Nosey’s attention back to him, seeing that he’d turned his attention back to the guards. “I have beseeched the goddess to leave this task to me, so that I may prove myself worthy of continuing to bask in her presence, and in her boundless mercy she has granted me this.” Again, Nosey could see an emotion working its way onto his face as he spoke, and this time it was rapture. Whoever his “goddess” was (and that he knew that term was surprising in and of itself), he was quite clearly enthralled with her. “She and her sister will remain at their present location,” he continued, “and we shall bring Lex Legis to them.”
“Um, guess again, Limpy,” sneered Sonata. “I dunno which goddess you’re talking about, but you and she can take a number, ‘cuz this guy,” she raised a hoof over her shoulder, pointing at Lex, “isn’t going anywhere.”
Silhouette gave Sonata another glance, his lip curling ever so slightly, before he returned his attention to Lex. “Fall in,” he ordered softly, and the two stallions immediately gave a grunt of affirmation, turning and trotting back to join the six Royal Guards that had accompanied him.
Alarm bells were going off in Nosey’s head, and she licked her lips – now completely dry from anxiety – before speaking up, trying to avert what she knew was coming. “Those guards weren’t kidding! If Lex’s spell gets interrupted, then the consequences could-”
“Lex Legis,” announced Silhouette, cutting Nosey off as he spoke in a loud voice. “My name is Silhouette! I have been given orders by the Mother of the Night, known to you as Princess Luna, to bring you into her divine presence and that of her sister immediately! Cease whatever sorcery you’re performing at once and submit yourself to the will of the goddess, and you will be treated gently! Fail to do so…” He smiled thinly at the prospect of that. “…and we will take you to her by force!”
An anxious murmur ran through the crowd at that, more than a few ponies backing away from Silhouette. Sonata was also increasing her distance from him, moving to place herself directly between Silhouette and Lex as she widened her stance. “Trust me, you really don’t wanna do this,” she growled.
Silhouette waited, just long enough to make sure that Lex wasn’t going to respond to his declaration, and then glanced back at the guards under his command.
As Silhouette gave the order for the guards under his command to move in, Sonata began to sing.
The golden-clad stallions had already started moving toward her when she tilted her head back, eyes closed as she began to vocalize softly. In contrast to the harsh chanting coming from Lex, Sonata’s melody was slow and wordless, the sound almost unearthly in its beauty. As one, the guards stopped in their tracks, jaws slack as they were captivated by what they were hearing. For a brief moment they hesitated, then moved toward Sonata again, but without the determination they’d had mere seconds ago. Now, their movements were sluggish, their eyes glazed as they came to within a few feet from her and stopped, simply standing in place and gazing at her with stupefied expressions.
Nor were they the only ones, as Nosey joined them a moment later, caught up in the magic of her friend’s voice. A small part of her insisted that she tear herself away from what Sonata was doing, that she needed to be taking action to secure their situation, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Sonata’s song was too wonderful, too rapturous for her to do anything but bask in it, literally spellbound by what she was hearing. She barely noticed as several members of the crowd, ponies of all ages and tribes, joined her, forming a small gathering around the singing mare.
Further back, Lex’s eyes flared green-and-purple as the dark magic of his horn rose to his defense of its own accord, thwarting the magical enchantment of Sonata's song before it could even attempt to ensnare his mind. That was exactly as he'd expected, of course; so long as the power in his horn wasn’t expended, it would automatically protect his mind against all forms of intrusion. Even if it hadn’t, Lex was certain that he would have been able to continue the ritual anyway, overcoming Sonata’s magic through sheer force of will.
Which was apparently what Silhouette was doing right now.
The stallion was gritting his teeth, cradling his head in his hooves with a look of intense concentration on his face, clearly fighting the effects of Sonata’s magic. A second later, he let out a shaky breath, lowering his hooves as he raised his head, directing a hateful look Sonata’s way. “You…” he breathed angrily. “What are you doing?!” When she didn’t bother to answer him, continuing to sing, his eyes turned the Royal Guard members around her, still staring at her in a blissful stupor. “Pull yourselves together!” he yelled. “She’s using magic on you! Fight it!”
But his shouting had no effect, save to make Sonata open her eyes and look at him, the corners of her lips curling upward in a triumphant smirk.
Silhouette’s nostrils flared at the sight, but he gave no other expression of his anger save to glare at Sonata coldly. “You are not the one we came here for,” he announced. “So I will give you one chance. By the grace of Luna, goddess of the night, I swear that if you release your spell and stand aside immediately, you will be forgiven for this transgression. Fail to do so, and you will share the fate of Lex Legis for defying the divine will.”
He paused then, waiting for Sonata’s response, but her only reaction was to give an exaggerated roll of her eyes and keep singing. Silhouette’s eyes narrowed dangerously in response. “So be it then,” he intoned darkly. “Your foolishness has sealed your fate. I was saving this to deal with that traitorous stallion, but it should work just as well on you.” Then, with no further preamble, he raised a foreleg and began to gesture and chant.
Lex, still performing the ritual with absolute precision, couldn’t help but frown as he heard Silhouette begin casting a spell. It wasn’t effort that made him scowl; performing the exacting ritual while simultaneously paying close attention to Silhouette’s own words and gestures was something that came easily to him. Rather, it was because the spell the other stallion was casting wasn’t one that he was familiar with. Nevertheless, the verbal and gestural components almost made it seem like the spell was designed to…to…
His eyes widening in alarm, Lex immediately began backing away from Silhouette. He could only go so far, however, since the ritual required him to remain a fixed distance away from Aria; any further and he wouldn’t be in a position to control the magical energies being directed into her body. Still, he put as much distance as he could between himself and the other stallion, mentally screaming a warning at Sonata that he knew she couldn’t hear.
A moment later, Silhouette finished his spell…and Sonata instantly stopped singing.
Her silence quite clearly wasn’t voluntary on her part, her lips continuing to move even as a shocked look crossed her face, one hoof reaching for her throat as though she could figure out what had happened by touch. Around her, the ponies that had been held in thrall by her voice started blinking, shaking their heads as they came out from under her spell. Several raised their own voices in confusion, or at least they tried to; none of them made a sound either. Nor was anything else they did audible. The shuffling of hooves, the impact of metal on metal as two guards bumped into each other, and every other bit of background noise were all completely absent.
The entire area around Silhouette had fallen supernaturally quiet.
Taking advantage of the confusion, Silhouette strode forward boldly, his crippled back leg slowing his movements only slightly. Pushing his way past the confused ponies from the crowd of bystanders that had been caught in Sonata’s spell, he made his way to the closest member of the Royal Guard, cuffing him across the flank to get his attention. When the guard looked at him, Silhouette scowled and twirled a hoof, giving the other stallion a knowing look. Nodding shakily, he turned and nudged the next guard over, repeating the gesture.
The other ponies that had gathered around Sonata were moving away from her now, either intimidated by the silence or realizing that the guards were about to do something. As they hurried back toward the crowd of onlookers watching the unfolding debacle, Lex – far enough away from what had happened that he was able to continue chanting without his words being muffled by Silhouette’s spell – heard as their hooffalls suddenly became audible again. That confirmed it; Silhouette’s spell was proximity-based. It was actively silencing a particular area, and anypony who exited that area ceased to be affected by it.
Get out of there! he raged silently, his eyes locked onto Sonata. Fall back, and you’ll be able to use your magic again!
But Sonata wasn’t even looking at him, her face screwed up in confusion as she tried to figure out what had happened. Even as he watched, she raised a hoof to her ears, checking for any sort of obstruction that might be impeding her hearing. Next to her, Nosey was still looking around, bewildered. A second later her eyes met Lex’s, and he stared at her intently, desperately trying to will her to understand what she needed to do. He had no idea if she got the message or not, but he felt a sliver of hope as he saw Nosey’s face become clouded with worry, her hoof reaching out to nudge Sonata…
And then it was too late, as the Royal Guard fell upon them.
Both mares instantly went down as they were tackled by three stallions each. Unable to do anything, Lex could only watch as the two of them were easily wrestled to the ground, kicking and thrashing futilely. Ropes were produced, and although the girls didn’t cease struggling, they were helpless to stop themselves from being tied up, the guards working together in quick, efficient motions. It took only a few moments for them to be completely subdued, forelegs bound to their sides as the guards continued to pin them down for good measure.
Watching the entire affair with a look of immense satisfaction, Silhouette tapped one of the two guards that wasn’t occupied with Nosey and Sonata. When the other stallion looked at him questioningly, Silhouette motioned to his own mouth for a moment, then pointed at Sonata, shaking his head. The guard nodded, taking a length of cloth from an inner pocket and approaching the captive mare. Her lips were moving wildly in what was either an attempt to cast a spell or a series of profanities, but which served only to give the guard an opportunity to shove the cloth in her open mouth, making her eyes widen as she shook her head, trying to dislodge the gag. It was no more successful than her other struggles had been, however, as the guard – a unicorn – telekinetically yanked the ends of the cloth around the back of her head and tied them off.
With that done, the guard returned to his position flanking Silhouette, leaving the two mares completely overwhelmed. Lying on her back, Sonata was still trying to thrash for all she was worth, but with one guard pressing down on her back legs, another keeping a hoof firmly on her middle, and the third holding her head securely, she was unable to do much more than twitch. Nosey was in much the same position, except face-down in the dirt, one of the guards making sure to keep a hoof on her horn so that she couldn’t use any magic.
It had taken less than thirty seconds for the girls to be completely defeated.
“I warned you,” chuckled Silhouette, making both mares start in surprise as they realized that the magical silence had been lifted. Indeed, Sonata’s muffled grunts and the clatter of the guards’ armor were now all clearly audible. The guards themselves didn’t seem surprised, continuing to focus on keeping their captives immobile. “Needless to say, you’re both under arrest.”
“HNGH HOOGH!” growled Sonata through her gag. “NIGHM GNNGH HRLL HOOGH!”
“L-Lex!” sobbed Nosey. “I’m sorry! I-”
“Be quiet!” ordered the guard holding her down, before his voice softened slightly. “Just make it easy on yourself.”
“They had their chance to make it easy on themselves,” snorted Silhouette. “But they failed to heed the will of the goddess, so now they’ll pay the price.”
The guard who’d spoken looked uneasy at that, but didn’t contradict him. “Yes, sir.”
Silhouette didn’t bother to reply, seeming to have lost interest in the girls. Instead, he focused his gaze back on Lex, his smirk widening at the look of abject hatred the other stallion was giving him. He stepped past the mares, the remaining two guards flanking him as he approached his next target. “I don’t know if you remember, but we’ve met before,” he began, his voice conversational. “It was a few months ago, in Canterlot. You were having an audience with Princess Celestia, telling her why she and the Mother of the Night were unfit to rule.” His features darkened at that last part, spitting the words out as though even the act of speaking them disgusted him. “Even if the goddess herself wasn’t there at the time, I was. I heard you speaking that blasphemy about how you – a no one from nowhere – thought that you were more worthy of ruling than she or her sister were.”
He came to a stop then, separated from Lex by no more than ten feet, the two guards standing behind him. “I knew right then that you were a traitor to Equestria, and worse, an apostate as well. So I stepped forward, using the magic the goddess had given me to empower the guards that were on duty at the time. I wanted to make sure that they had what they needed to bring you to justice, because I knew that for all your self-aggrandizing garbage, you were nothing more than a petty tyrant, cloaking your tyranny under a blanket of lies and misdirection.”
Silhouette managed to regain his smile then, but it was a cruel expression, filled only with spite. “And I was right, too. When you realized that you wouldn’t be given all of Equestria on a silver platter, you attacked Princess Celestia. And when that didn’t work, you turned and fled. Like a coward. The same way you let those mares do your fighting for you just now, while you do,” he gestured up at the glowing form that was Aria, “whatever that is. Some evil magic, no doubt.”
He paused then, watching as Lex continued to gesture and chant, and his eyes narrowed. “You can’t stop, can you? Those mares said that whatever you were doing was delicate…and that there might be injuries if you were interrupted.” His grin widened. “But then, that’s the way with evil magic, isn’t it? You try to do something horrible, and all it does it come back to bite you once the forces of righteousness show up and disrupt it.”
“No!” wailed Nosey. “He’s trying to turn our friend Aria into a p-”
“Silence her,” snapped Silhouette. The guard holding Nosey seemed to have expected that, pulling out a piece of cloth and gagging her just like Sonata.
Nodding, Silhouette turned to the two guards with him. “I want you to move all of these other ponies back,” he ordered, waving a hoof at the wide-eyed crowd, still watching the exchange. “They don’t deserve to be caught up in whatever happens when I disrupt this one’s spell.”
The pair glanced at each other, but hesitated, one of them speaking up. “Sir, is this a good idea? We were just supposed to bring him to the princesses, not…all this.”
Silhouette’s expression turned icy. “Would you rather bring the goddess,” he hissed the word, “and her sister here, where this malcontent is casting a spell of unknown effect, and which could injure them when it’s interrupted?”
Both guards cringed at the rebuke. “…no,” answered the one who’d objected a moment before.
“Good,” snapped Silhouette. “Then carry out my orders, before I decide when you’re being insubordinate or blasphemous.”
Nodding, the two ran off toward the crowd, starting to usher them back. Behind him, the remaining guards started to drag Nosey and Sonata away, leaving Silhouette standing across from Lex. “For what it’s worth,” commented the earth stallion, his tone conversational once again, “you’ll at least serve Equestria in one way. Whatever horrible fate you suffer from having this spell broken will serve as an object lesson about what happens to those who turn against the Mother of the N-”
“HOLD IT!”
Tensing at the voice from the crowd, Silhouette glanced over sharply as he saw a pony break past the guards and start running toward him. But he relaxed a moment later as he realized that it was just a child, the earth colt galloping over – or at least, trying to, since one of his forelegs seemed to be injured – and placing himself directly between him and Lex, defiance written all over his face. “You better back off right now if you know what’s good for you!”
Silhouette snorted at the display of bravado. “Get lost, kid. I’m here on behalf of Luna, the goddess of the night, to put a stop to whatever evil magic this traitor is casting. Don’t get in my way.”
But rather than looking intimidated, the colt bristled, pointing a foreleg – one that had several new-looking scars on it – at him. “My name is Fruit Crunch, and I’m the leader of the Night Mare’s Knights!”
Silhouette frowned. “The what?”
“And on behalf of the real goddess of the night, I’m taking you down!”
Silhouette’s eyes narrowed dangerously as he glared down at Fruit Crunch. “The ‘real’ goddess of the night?”
But if Fruit Crunch was intimidated, he didn’t show it. “The Night Mare!” he declared defiantly. “The goddess whose ponies were actually here helping us when we needed it!” The anger in his gaze easily matched Silhouette’s as he pawed at the ground, his voice rising. “Where were the princesses when Vanhoover flooded, huh? Or when the monsters came? Where were they when we were living in fear under Block Party?” He paused just long enough to make it clear the questions were rhetorical before continuing. “So yeah, I’m going with the goddess who actually cares about ponies!”
Several angry murmurs came from the crowd at that, and the pair of guards that were tasked with keeping them at a distance shared a nervous glance, looking back at Silhouette for directions. But he wasn’t paying attention to them, his eyes locked onto Fruit Crunch. “You listen to me, you little brat.” His voice had fallen, the words coming out just above a whisper, loud enough only for Lex and Fruit Crunch to hear them. But it wasn’t discretion that had caused his voice to lower; just the look on his face was enough to make it clear that he was struggling to hold back his wrath. “I don’t hold the foolishness of children against them, but there’s only so much blasphemy I’ll allow. Turn around and go back to the others this instant, and I might find it within myself to forget what you’ve said. Otherwise, what happens next will be your fault, not mine.”
Fruit Crunch’s lips drew back in a snarl. “You think I’m scared of you?!” The pony in front of him now was different, and the threats he was uttering weren’t exactly the same, but Fruit Crunch barely made the distinction. In his heart, he was in front of Block Party and Spit Polish again, the larger ponies preparing to beat him to a pulp for getting in their way. Fear and anger surged through him, and Fruit Crunch found himself shaking as he looked up at Silhouette. “You think you can just walk all over me because I’m smaller than you?!” He stomped his scarred hoof, not caring at the pain that radiated up from it. “Well come on, then! Do your worst! I’ll cut you down to size and then we’ll see who’s smaller!”
“Have it your way.”
Fruit Crunch tensed at Silhouette’s words, his heart hammering in his chest as the other stallion raised a hoof. But the punch he was expecting didn’t fall. Instead, Silhouette began to gesture as he murmured the words to a spell.
Behind Fruit Crunch, Lex tensed as well. He recognized the words to that spell; it was the same one he’d cast barely a minute ago to subdue Sonata. That’s what he meant, Lex realized instantly. Silhouette had warned Fruit Crunch to leave, or that “what happens next will be your fault, not mine,” and now the meaning of his words was clear. He intended to invoke another spell of silence, stopping Lex from finishing the ritual and letting the gathered power collapse in a backlash…and Fruit Crunch was close enough that he might very well be caught up in it, all because he’d inserted himself into the conflict.
Of course, Silhouette was close enough to them that he’d likely be caught in whatever happened as well, but the earth stallion – his eyes burning with fanaticism and self-righteous rage – didn’t seem to care.
Silhouette couldn’t help but smile as he neared the end of his spell. This is what you deserve, both of you. The fury of the goddess will smite you with your own wicked magic. And to think, you could have avoided this fate if you’d simply given the Mother of the Night the respect she deserv-
A hoof impacting the side of his jaw cut him off in mid-thought. Stumbling backward, Silhouette nearly lost his balance as his weight transferred to his withered leg, automatically lowering his foreleg to the ground…and failing to make the final gesture necessary for invoking his spell, causing it to harmlessly fizzle before it could take effect. Momentarily stunned as he tried to come to grips with what had just happened, Silhouette could only stare in shock.
Fruit Crunch had punched him right in the face.
The blow hadn’t hurt very much; Fruit Crunch might have been an earth pony, but he was still just a foal. Rather, it was surprise that made Silhouette hesitate. Until just a moment ago, he’d been sure that the colt’s words were nothing more than bravado and a childish inability to fully comprehend the magnitude of what he was doing. The idea that he’d back up his words with violence – and against somepony who was not only an adult, but a member of the Royal Guard, no less – wasn’t something Silhouette had seriously considered. But now…now that little brat would find out what it meant to cross him!
“How do you like it?!” snarled Fruit Crunch, still shaking lightly as he watched Silhouette get up. The armored stallion’s face was already changing from surprise to towering fury, but Fruit Crunch refused to back down. “Not so fun when the person you’re picking on can fight back, huh?!”
“Let’s see if you can fight back after this!” Silhouette’s words were snarled around clenched teeth as he began to cast another spell. The goddess hadn’t given him much in the way of attack magic, but she had still given him spells that could be used to take down somepony who tried to defy him, and the one he had in mind now would be more than enough to put this little interloper in his place!
Of course, Fruit Crunch didn’t intend to give him a chance to do that. He leaped forward again, hoof cocked back, but this time Silhouette was ready. Even as he made the intricate gestures and spoke the necessary words, he shifted his stance, turning his body in preparation for the colt’s wild swing, and Fruit Crunch’s hoof landed on his armor instead of his face, bouncing off and causing no damage. Sneering, Silhouette continued his spellcasting; this was one of the most complex spells he knew, and it took several seconds of dedicated effort to make it come to fruition. Time enough for that stupid boy to make another attempt to disrupt it, he knew.
He was proven right as Fruit Crunch flung himself forward, forelegs reaching out as – instead of throwing another punch – he attempted to tackle Silhouette head-on, doubtlessly hoping to make it impossible for him to finish his spell. But the attempt was easily defeated, with Silhouette sidestepping the attack with contemptuous nonchalance. It was with immense satisfaction that he saw the colt land on his belly in the dirt.
But that satisfaction vanished an instant later, as he saw Fruit Crunch glance at something out of his field of vision and whisper “C’mon, c’mon!” under his breath. It was enough to make Silhouette look backward, peering in the direction where the colt’s eyes had lingered. It wasn’t at the crowd; rather, it was just near them, where the remaining half-dozen guards had taken Lex Legis’s mares.
He was just in time to see two more foals fling themselves at the guards.
“Comin’ through!” yelled a neon yellow pegasus filly as she crashed bodily into the guards restraining Nosey. Despite the fact that she was a fraction of their size, she’d apparently built up quite a bit of speed, because the stallion she hit stumbled backward. That, in turn, carried him directly into his fellows, causing them to go tumbling in a heap.
“My dad says you should treat ladies with respect!” The second shout was delivered almost simultaneously with the first, another pegasus foal – this one a colt with an off-white coat – slamming into the guards holding Sonata down. Just like their counterparts, they were caught off-guard and sent stumbling, losing their grip on the bound mare.
In the split-second Silhouette beheld that happening, he knew that he’d been tricked. The colt who was attacking him was nothing but a distraction! His real goal had been to keep him occupied while his friends got Lex’s mares free! Although the pair of foals that had ambushed the guards were still tangled with the larger stallions they’d rammed, Silhouette could see what was about to happen: with her horn clear, that blonde unicorn mare would use her magic to yank the gag out of that enchantress’s mouth, letting her use her spells again. But that won’t work! I can cast another silence spell on them! Silhouette knew.
But the thought was tinged with worry. If that enchantress wasn’t a complete fool, she’d anticipate his doing that, and make her first spell one that could take him out before he could silence her again. Which meant he had to stop her before she got a spell off.
All of that went through Silhouette’s mind in an instant, even as he tried to figure out what to do. His first instinct was to abandon his current spell – despite it being mere syllables away from completion – and cast another silence spell as quickly as he could. But despite that only taking a few seconds, he knew he’d never make it. The blonde mare’s horn was already lighting up, a matching aura surrounding the gag in the enchantress’s mouth!
A fraction of a second later, Silhouette finished his spell.
Instantly, a huge mastiff – its coat the same silvery-white as the moon itself – appeared from out of nowhere, standing right behind the bound blonde pony. She clearly saw it out of her periphery, because she reflexively turned to look at it, her eyes widening in surprise. “Get her horn!” roared Silhouette. The dog didn’t hesitate, immediately lowering its head and taking the blonde’s horn in its jaws, causing the aura around it to sputter and go out before she could undo her friend’s gag. She yelped at the contact, and started to thrash, but the dog growled a warning and she immediately went still.
Silhouette couldn’t help but laugh in relief. The beast he’d summoned wouldn’t last very long before the magic keeping it here went out, but that was fine. The guards those other children had rammed were already recovering; they’d be able to regroup and restrain those two again before it vanished. Now certain of his victory, Silhouette turned back to Fruit Crunch with a triumphant smirk. “Nice try, brat. But you and your friends failed, and now you’re going to pay the price for it.”
But Fruit Crunch was wearing a smirk of his own. “Funny. I was just gonna say the same thing to you.”
Silhouette’s brow furrowed, but he didn’t have a chance to ask what the colt meant before he caught sight of a unicorn’s aura lighting up in his peripheral vision. Immediately, he whipped his head around. That couldn’t be! His summoned creature had that unicorn mare’s magic contained!
But the glow, he realized an instant later, wasn’t coming from her.
Peeking his head around the side of the train station, a nervous-looking unicorn colt with a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck was biting his lip as he concentrated. His horn was lit up with a pale blue aura that matched the one around the enchantress’s gag. Silhouette had just enough time for his eyes to widen, his mouth already starting to shout an order to the hound he’d summoned, when the colt yanked the gag away completely.
Her mouth now clear, the mare lifted her head and looked right at him as her lips started to move, and the look in her eyes told Silhouette that the spell she was about to cast would be the end of him. This time, Silhouette didn’t hesitate, legs already tensing; if he could just get around behind where Lex Legis was still chanting, he might be able to avoid whatever she was about to do! He took a step-
And fell flat on his face, Fruit Crunch having grabbed him by his withered leg. “Gotcha!” he snarled triumphantly. “You’re not going anywhere!”
“No!” Silhouette couldn’t keep the fear out of his voice as he glared at the colt, before he looked back at where the enchantress was already starting to sing…just in time to see one of his guards fling himself on top of her, the impact driving the air out of her lungs with a whoosh and disrupting her spell.
“No!” This time Fruit Crunch was the one giving the desperate cry of denial, his grip on Silhouette slackening as he saw Sonata get tackled. “You guys! Get her clear!”
But there was no way for them to do that. The remaining guards were picking themselves up, easily keeping the foals that had tackled them restrained. Almost as an afterthought, a unicorn guard telekinetically grabbed the colt with the binoculars, lifting the boy up before he could run away and bringing him close enough to grab. The sight made Silhouette chuckle, his earlier rage and anxiety swept away by the giddy feeling of a narrow victory. “Not a bad plan, brat. But it takes more than some upstart children to overcome the Royal Guard, let alone a servant of the goddess Luna!” He yanked his leg away from Fruit Crunch as he spoke, climbing to his hooves. “Now, you will suffer the consequences of your-”
“What is going on here?”
The voice made Silhouette gasp, turning toward it and immediately falling to his knees, despite how that made his bad leg ache. “Goddess!”
There, having just rounded the corner of the train station, stood Celestia and Luna. In front of them, Silhouette belatedly noticed an earth filly, her body language and position relative to the Royal Sisters suggesting that she brought them here. Rather oddly, she was also cradling a baby in one foreleg.
Not bothering to get up, Fruit Crunch gave an exhausted laugh. “Took you long enough, Fiddleface.”
Luna couldn’t keep the puzzlement out of her voice as she took a step forward, surveying the bewildering scene in front of her. Across from them was the unicorn they’d come here to meet, Lex Legis, in the midst of casting some sort of spell. The words he was chanting were unfamiliar to her, and a quick glance at her sister – who shook her head wordlessly – showed that she wasn’t clear on what he was doing either. It quite clearly had something to do with the luminous figure hanging in the air in front of him, obviously the source of the light they’d seen as they’d flown in, but beyond that she had no idea.
Equally baffling was the rest of the scene before her. A half-dozen of their Royal Guards were standing over a trio of foals and a pair of bound mares, one of whom was gagged and had a large hound (which Luna recognized as being the product of her worshiper’s magic) holding her horn in its jaws. Another two guards were arrayed in front of a crowd of ponies watching from a short distance away, as though keeping them back for some reason. That alone was cause for concern, especially with what they’d just been told…
Luna hadn’t been sure what to expect when that filly, Fiddlesticks, had come rushing toward them, her baby brother cradled protectively in her hooves. Her alarm had risen sharply, however, when she’d begged them to hurry and “stop that crazy guard!” That she was talking about Silhouette was certain, but Luna had hoped that the child had simply misunderstood the nature of her worshiper’s faith in her. Now she was less confident of that being the case, her eyes turning back to where her most devoted pony was still touching his nose to the ground as he spoke up.
“Goddess,” he called, his voice filled with rapture. “Forgive me. I was attempting to bring Lex Legis to you, as I swore I would, but these ponies interfered.” Still without looking up, he raised a hoof to point at the group surrounded by the guards. “When I insisted that we bring him along, they became violent, and we were forced-”
“YOU LYING SACK OF-, MMNNNGH!” screamed the bound mare who wasn’t gagged, though her words were cut off as the guard that had been holding her down shoved his hoof over her mouth. She immediately began to thrash, a series of muffled curses filling the air as two more guards worked to stop her from getting a word in.
“It’s alright,” called Celestia, causing the guards to pause in their efforts, allowing the mare – whom Luna now recognized as the pony that had spoken on Lex’s behalf when they’d last met – to yank her head away and take a deep breath. “This mare is a spokespony,” continued Celestia, “let her up-”
“Belay that!” snapped Silhouette, raising his face at last to glare at the guards Celestia was addressing. “Do not let her speak!” Celestia’s eyes had just enough time to widen before Silhouette turned his gaze to her. “Your Majesty, I apologize, but this mare is an enchantress, able to weave dark magic with her voice. I cannot allow her to endanger the Mother of the Night.”
“I’m not a danger to her! I’m a danger to YOU!” yelled the furious spokespony. “If I had an egg right now, I’d say that it’s your brain, and then I’d fry it up and say that it’s your brain when I’m done with you! You won’t-”
“ENOUGH!” yelled Luna, causing the mare to quiet down and Silhouette to lower his head. Luna kept her eyes on the latter as she spoke. “Silhouette, while I appreciate your concern, I’ve met this mare before, and I don’t believe that she’s a threat to me.” She turned to the pony in question. “Isn’t that right…Sonata, was it?”
“Yeah, no, you’re fine,” snorted Sonata. “Like I said, it’s that jerk I’m gonna silly-slap.”
“I’m afraid there’ll be no silly-slapping for the time being,” interjected Celestia, the corners of her lips turning upward for a moment, before a more serious expression returned to her face. “For now, Sonata, can you tell us what Lex is doing?” She gestured to the guards as they spoke, and after hesitating for just a moment, they undid the ropes binding Sonata’s forelegs.
Huffing, Sonata shot another angry glare at Silhouette as she climbed back to her hooves before turning to look at Celestia. “He’s casting a spell to turn my sister, Aria, into a pony. But it’s, like, super delicate, and if anyone messes it up, they’ll both, I dunno, blow up or something.”
Celestia’s eyebrows rose slightly at that. “I see.” Her eyes made a circuit of the ponies around her, before returning to the mare in front of her. “Sonata, would you mind accompanying me for a few minutes? I’d like to ask you some more about what’s happened here.”
“Um, yeah, no.” Sonata shook her head. “No offense, but I’m not going anywhere. Crazy McNutbar here,” she pointed at Silhouette, who was still bowing before Luna, “almost hurt my boyfriend and my sister, to say nothing of what he did to me and my best friend-” She pointed at Nosey, just in time for the silver mastiff holding her horn in its jaw to vanish, dissolving into a glowing mist that faded away a second later, leaving no trace of the animal. Blinking, Sonata frowned before whirling to face Silhouette. “Oh don’t even try to act like you’re suddenly being Mister Generous all of a sudden!”
“My summons ended because its duration reached its limit,” answered Silhouette, somehow managing to sound haughty despite remaining prostrate. “Not because I thought your companion’s treatment was ill-deserved.”
Sonata bared her teeth at him. “I’ll ill-dessert you!”
“I have a better idea,” interrupted Luna before another fight broke out. “Silhouette, please come with me. I’d like to hear your side of things.”
“Yes, Goddess!” The joy in Silhouette’s voice at that was unmistakable.
“Meanwhile,” continued Luna, looking at the other guards. “I want the rest of you to release these ponies,” she nodded toward the blonde mare that was still tied up, as well as the nearby group of foals, “and wait here for further instructions. Do not interfere with Lex Legis or the spell he’s casting, is that clear?” When the guards nodded, she turned back to Sonata. “Do you feel better about talking with my sister now?”
Sonata frowned, not looking completely mollified. “I dunno…”
“It’s okay,” croaked the blonde mare, licking her lips as her gag was removed. “You go.”
Sonata gave her a worried look, going over to her and helping her up as the guards removed the ropes from around her. “You sure, Nosey?”
Neither mare noticed Luna stiffen as she heard that name. Nosey? From that dream?! Blinking, she peered at the blonde mare more closely now, trying to remember the details of that horrifying nightmare that she’d stumbled onto a few nights previous. She’d only been in there for a few seconds, barely having enough time to get a look at its occupant, but from what she could remember this mare looked similar: glasses, a dark coat, and a brightly-colored mane. Yes. Yes, that must be her!
For a split-second, Luna considered pulling Nosey aside and asking her about the monster from her dream. Was it something she’d come across in the waking world, a “belier devil” like what Mihr had informed them about? Or was it nothing more than a figment of her resting mind, a night terror that just happened to resemble a monster that the angel knew about? The latter would still have been cause for concern, of course – Luna took her duty to protect her little ponies from nightmares seriously, especially in the wake of the elemental bleeds – but it would have been far more preferable than knowing that such a creature was actually in Equestria.
But if it was, if their world had been invaded by a body-snatching creature, Luna knew that she needed to be careful how she investigated it. Her eyes slid over to Lex, and to the glowing form of what was presumably Sonata’s sister floating in the air in front of him, remembering what Mihr had said. “If Lex Legis comes to the creature’s attention, it will react to him in one of three ways: as a victim to be corrupted, an enemy to be destroyed, or a potential collaborator to be used until he is no longer convenient.” Even now, she could see the chanting unicorn’s eyes locked onto them, taking in their every move. If the belier really existed, and Lex was working with it – or was possessed by it – then tipping their hoof that they knew about the creature would be the worst thing that they could do. Especially since they knew for certain that there was an evil artifact of great power on the loose somewhere…
I’ll need to come up with some sort of benign excuse to talk to Nosey later, Luna decided. After I come up with a way to make sure that it’s not hiding inside of her. Fortunately, one of the spells that she was able to grant Silhouette was capable of doing exactly that. But for now, she’d just have to watch her closely.
Oblivious to what Luna was thinking merely a few feet away from her, Nosey nodded in response to Sonata’s question. Swallowing, she adjusted her glasses from where they’d been knocked askew on her face during the altercation. “Yeah. Really. I’ll be-, we’ll all be fine. I promise.”
Sonata gave her a worried look, and it wasn’t hard to see why. The other mare was shaking slightly, obviously unnerved by what had just happened. Nevertheless, Sonata didn’t push the issue, instead giving her friend a quick hug, humming a snatch of a tune in her ear as she did. Almost immediately, Nosey seemed to calm down, letting out a breath as her shaking ceased. Luna cocked her head slightly at that, reminded of what Silhouette had said about Sonata’s voice being magical; had that been a spell? If so, did that confirm that Nosey wasn’t possessed?
But there was no further time to ponder what had just passed between the two mares, as Silhouette made his way over to her. “Goddess, I am yours to command,” he murmured reverently.
Luna didn’t answer immediately, sending a quick glance to Celestia, and saw her sister return the look. The eye contact between them lasted only a fraction of a second, but that was enough to let Luna know that her sister hadn’t missed Nosey’s name, or the significance of what it meant. That knowledge made Luna fight down the urge to smile, reassured. No matter what monsters came their way, so long as the two of them were united, they’d find a way to overcome them.
“Come then,” she said to Silhouette. “I wish to know of everything that happened after you left us. Leave nothing out.” She turned as she spoke, leading him back the way they had come after they’d touched down. Hopefully this would be enough to put Sonata at ease, and she’d offer her version of what had happened to Celestia. Comparing her account with Silhouette’s would be important, and not just because it would help to resolve whatever fighting had broken out. If they were very fortunate, they’d be able to uncover a clue regarding the possible existence of the belier devil, or even the magical scythe that they’d come here to find.
Of course, that was just a precursor. At some point, they’d need to talk to Lex Legis and figure out what he knew about both of those topics. Luna had no doubt that Mihr was right, and that he was involved somehow; everything she knew about him suggested that he was too powerful and too intelligent not to be. The only question was if he was working against the dark forces, or with them. If it was the former, then she and her sister would gladly aid him. But if it was the latter…
Then he’d need to be stopped, for everypony’s sake.
Everypony was quiet as Princess Luna led Silhouette away. A few seconds later, after a moment of quiet conference, Princess Celestia and Sonata headed off in a different direction, the latter pausing to give a worried look back at Lex before she let herself be ushered off. With no other orders, the remaining members of the Royal Guard stood down, moving out of the way to wait for the princesses’ return. For several long moments the tense silence remained, until it was shattered by a jubilant cry.
“We did it!”
Fruit Crunch didn’t even try to moderate joy in his tone, almost giddy as he made his way over to his friends. “How awesome are we?!” he laughed. “We really did save the day!”
“That was the coolest thing ever!” cheered Cleansweep, flying a quick loop-de-loop in excitement. “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe we did that! Can you guys believe we did that?!”
“No,” muttered Feathercap dazedly, sinking to the ground as his tension finally started to ebb. “I didn’t think our plans would work.”
“Aw, c’mon,” smiled Fiddlesticks, giving him a friendly nudge. “Those were your plans after all.”
“And they were good ones, too,” added Straightlace. “The way you had a backup plan and a backup backup plan? That was brilliant!”
Feathercap turned red at the praise, an embarrassed smile coming to his lips. “Ah, no. I didn’t really do anything. I just thought that we should use everyone’s ideas together, was all.”
Fiddlesticks shook her head at that, unable to help but admire the little guy’s modesty. When Silhouette and his guards had moved in, clearly intent on disrupting Lex’s spell, the Knights had started arguing about what they should do. She’d wanted to run and get the princesses, while Fruit Crunch had been eager to run right out there and go after Silhouette, and Straightlace and Cleansweep had thought they should try and rescue Lex’s girlfriends (the word in camp being that the blonde mare was his girlfriend now too, for some reason). Feathercap had been the one to turn all that into a real plan of action, adding in him trying to yank Sonata’s gag off if Cleansweep and Straightlace failed. We wouldn’t have been able to do anything if he hadn’t put all the pieces together the way he did, she knew. Who’d have thought he’d be able to do that?
A moment later, her thoughts were echoed aloud by the last pony she would have expected. “Don’t sound so humble, you did a really great job with that!”
Fiddlesticks blinked owlishly, turning her head to look at Fruit Crunch. Had he actually just said something nice?! She wasn’t the only one who was shocked either; Straightlace was open-mouthed, and Feathercap looked nonplussed. Cleansweep, however, was grinning so wide that it had to be making her face ache. “I…I did?” stuttered Feathercap, clearly not sure if the other colt was being serious.
Fruit Crunch nodded, his joyous expression undiminished. “Absolutely! We all did!” He held out a hoof then, the same one that Severance had scarred earlier in the evening. “Night Mare’s Knights forever!” he yelled happily.
“Night Mare’s Knights forever!” echoed Cleansweep, touching her hoof to his. She did so at an angle, rather than meeting it directly, giving an expectant look at the rest of them.
Feathercap was the first one to recover, climbing to his hooves as a shaky grin crossed his lips. “N-Nightmare’s Knights forever,” he offered tentatively, touching a hoof to Cleansweep and Fruit Crunch’s.
The sight sent a warm feeling through Fiddlesticks’ chest, and she couldn’t have stopped smiling even if she wanted to, transferring Tiddlywinks to her back as she went over to clop hooves the others. “Night Mare’s Knights forever.”
Straightlace was smiling too as he reached out to do the same. “Night Mare’s Knights forev-”
“CLEANSWEEP!”
The filly in question had just enough time for her eyes to widen before a pegasus mare swooped out of the air and snatched her into a crushing hug. “Are you alright?!” fretted Feather Duster, turning her daughter every which way to examine her for injuries. “I should have been here sooner but I fainted dead away when I saw you doing something so dangerous! Does it hurt anywhere? Do you need a doctor? I don’t have any bits, but I’m sure we could-”
“Mo-om!” yelled Cleansweep, imbuing the word with two syllables before finally managing to extricate herself from her mother’s grasp. “I’m fine!”
“You should probably be asking those guards if they’re okay, Mrs. Duster,” laughed Fruit Crunch. “The way she tackled them was enough to knock all three of them down! Just boom! Like bowling pins!”
But Feather Duster wasn’t amused by the comparison, glaring at the jovial colt. “And I can guess whose idea it was to make my daughter into a living bowling ball, Fruit Crunch!”
The colt in question wasn’t fazed by the rebuke, however, having received this particular lecture more than once. “Actually-”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” came a new voice. “But if it wasn’t for your daughter and her friends, we might not be here right now. They saved us all.”
Feather Duster and the Knights turned to regard the pony speaking, the former frowning as she did so. “You’re…?”
“Nosey Newsy,” smiled the blonde mare cordially, silently thanking Sonata for using her calming magic on her again before she’d gone off with Princess Celestia. “I’m a reporter for the Canterlot Chronicle. And I have to say, these five are the bravest foals I’ve ever met. If they hadn’t stopped that Silhouette guy, he’d have disrupted Lex’s spell, and that would have caused a disaster for sure. It’s thanks to them that we’re alright.”
Each of the Knights lit up at the praise, with Cleansweep shooting her mother a hopeful look. “You see, Mom? Crunchy didn’t-”
But Feather Duster cut her off before she could finish. “We’ll discuss this later, sweetheart.” Her mother’s tone made Cleansweep wilt, knowing full well that they wouldn’t discuss it later. Oblivious to her daughter’s distress, Feather Duster frowned at Nosey. “Miss Newsy, I apologize for asking something so personal when we’ve just met, but do you have any children?”
The question caught Nosey by surprise, making her blink. “Wh-, me? I-, no. No, I’ve never even-, no.”
“Well,” replied Feather Duster frostily, “if you ever do, then you can lecture me about how I should treat my little girl. But until you know what it’s like to see your only child…your precious baby fling herself into danger…” She choked up, tears gathering in her eyes as her lip quivered.
“Mom…” This time Cleansweep’s voice was a mixture of guilt and exasperation.
Sniffling, Feather Duster fought to keep her composure, wrapping a foreleg around her daughter in a protective hug. But even as she did so, she turned her face to Fruit Crunch, her features darkening. “And as for you, I don’t want you hanging around my daughter anymore.” The colt’s eyes widened at that, and Cleansweep gave an alarmed grunt, straining against her mother’s grasp again, but this time Feather Duster refused to let her go. “You’ve always been a bad influence, but this went way beyond your usual pranks or antics! Until you shape up, I don’t want you anywhere near Cleansweep!” With that, she turned and flapped her wings, flying back toward the camp, her daughter’s wails of protest fading in their wake.
Fruit Crunch watched them go, his jaw slack. “You’ve gotta be kidding me…”
Nosey and Feathercap both seemed at a loss for words. For her part, Fiddlesticks grimaced, feeling unexpectedly sorry for Fruit Crunch. “Look…she probably didn’t mean it.” But it sounded lame even to her.
Thankfully, Straightlace had some words of wisdom to share. “My dad says that when somepony’s upset, sometimes the best thing you can do is give them some time to calm down. I bet that if you go talk to her tomorrow-”
“Ahem.”
The faux-cough, and the masculine voice it belonged to, made Straightlace freeze in place, his eyes widening. A moment later, he turned around. “Dad?!”
Nosey and the other foals turned, seeing a pegasus stallion with the same off-white coat as Straightlace, his plain brown mane and tail looking like a darker reflection of his son’s green hair, and his cutie mark was of a rather drab-looking black bowtie. Frowning behind his mustache, his words were nevertheless gentle as he spoke. “Son, we need to talk.”
“Hold on!” Nosey couldn’t help but take a step forward, aghast that another one of these kids’ parents was going to chastise them for saving everypony! “Your son is a hero! He-”
“Miss Newsy,” interjected the stallion. He smiled, not unkindly, at her obvious surprise that he knew her name. “I overheard everything you said a minute ago while I was talking to the guards,” he said with a nod back at where the golden-clad stallions were standing. “I’m Straight Arrow, Straightlace’s father. I’m grateful that you want to stick up for my son and his friends, but at the same time I have to add that that filly’s mother wasn’t entirely wrong.” He turned his attention back to Straightlace then, giving him a look of mild disappointment. “Son, what were you thinking, attacking members of the Royal Guard?”
“But they were putting everypony in danger!” protested Straightlace. His other friends nodded at that, moving to stand next to him. “You always told me that if we see somepony in trouble, we should try to help!”
But Straight Arrow’s expression didn’t change. “I’ve also told you that fighting is what happens when you’ve run out of good ideas. Instead of tackling those guards, why didn’t you try talking to them?”
Straightlace looked ready to protest, but Nosey beat him to the punch. “We tried talking to them, Sonata and me! It didn’t work! Even if they were willing to listen, that Silhouette guy wasn’t! He cast a silence spell to make sure we couldn’t!”
Straight Arrow gave her that same disappointed look that he’d given his son moments ago, shaking his head sadly. “He did that after your friend used her magic to try and force everyone to do things her way. If she hadn’t escalated the conflict, he might have been more open to listening to what you had to say.”
For a second Nosey couldn’t even come up with a response, flabbergasted. “You can’t be serious!”
“I’m very serious. Ever since the three tribes of ponies came together, we’ve worked to resolve our differences with harmony, not violence. Everything that’s happened since Vanhoover flooded has shown us that we need to work together, not fight amongst ourselves.” He turned his sad gaze back toward Straightlace. “While you all were congratulating each other, I spoke with the members of the Royal Guard. They’ve agreed that since nopony was hurt, and the princesses don’t seem to be upset, they’re not going to charge anyone. But if things had gone even slightly differently, you could very well be a criminal right now, Straightlace. Is that the sort of pony you want to grow up to be?”
Recoiling at how let down his father sounded, Straightlace struggled to come up with an answer. “I…I was just trying to save everypony…”
But he didn’t get a chance to say anything else as Fruit Crunch moved in front of him, glaring at Straight Arrow. “You know what? Nuts to you, pal! Those guys were putting us all in danger, and Straightlace helped us stop them, and the only thing you can do is talk down to him for it?!” He sneered up at the older stallion then. “I don’t know why he quotes you all the time, because you quite clearly don’t know anything. Sometimes getting your hooves dirty is the right thing to do!”
Straight Arrow gave him a look of pity in response. “I’m sorry that you’ve been raised to believe that.” Then, with one last look at his son, he turned and walked away, heading back toward the camp.
A stricken expression spread across Straightlace’s face. “Listen, thanks for saying all that, but I gotta go,” he muttered, before breaking into a gallop. “Dad! Dad, wait up!” But the older stallion didn’t so much as glance back at his son’s pleading, leaving Straightlace running after his father.
Hanging his head, Feathercap’s mournful statement perfectly captured what had become of the formerly-jubilant atmosphere. “So much for forever…”
“…and that was what happened, Goddess. In your name, I swear it.”
Luna was silent for a long moment as she mulled over what Silhouette had told her. She had no doubt that he was telling the truth; his devotion to her was far too great for him to ever be anything less than totally honest with her. Rather, her hesitation came from how she knew that he filtered everything through the lens of that devotion, to the point of potentially coloring his perceptions.
Even now he’d returned to his prostrate position, his eyes closed as he touched his nose to the ground. Luna knew from experience that he’d stay like that all night if she let him, patiently waiting for her to declare whether he’d been right or wrong. Or rather, whether his actions had pleased or displeased her.
“Silhouette,” she said gently, letting only the barest hint of reproach creep into her voice. “When I accepted your offer to bring Lex Legis before my sister and me, I did so with the understanding that you wouldn’t bring harm to anypony.”
He flinched at the words, as though she’d delivered them in an angry shout rather than a soft rebuke. “Goddess, I beg your forgiveness! I thought that if I used the least amount of force possible to accomplish my task, it would still please you!”
“And yet you were told that if Lex Legis’s spell was interrupted, it could cause disaster.”
He let out a shuddering breath then. “…yes, I was.”
Luna arched a brow at his answer. “And you didn’t see fit to alter your course of action once you knew that?”
She half-expected him to try and come up with some excuse, to say that he’d thought Sonata had been lying or that he’d be able to use the magic she’d given him to fend off whatever catastrophe Lex’s disrupted spell would have caused. But his answer surprised her. “Goddess, I made certain to move everypony away from Lex Legis before I attempted to interfere with his spellcasting.”
“That is not what I asked you, Silhouette.” Again the admonition in her voice was softer than a feather, but still made him tense up. “Why did you not stop what you were doing once you learned the consequences of interrupting Lex’s spell?” She paused, and when several seconds of silence went by, she gently reached down with one wing, placing it under his chin and lifting his eyes to hers. She heard him gasp softly at the contact, his face rapturous as he looked up at her. “Was it because you couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to fulfill your pledge to bring him to me?”
A stricken expression passed across Silhouette’s face then, only to be replaced with a look of shame a moment later. “No…” he whispered, his eyes falling from hers. But before she could say anything else, he swallowed and resumed eye contact with her, resolve – or perhaps resignation – filling his voice. “Forgive me, Goddess. I did wish to please you, but that was not why I persisted with my efforts to ruin Lex Legis’s spell.”
“Then why?” Luna prodded softly.
Silhouette closed his eyes then, and through her wing under his chin she felt him clench his jaw, his features darkening. “Because I wanted him to pay.”
Luna pulled her wing back then, frowning. “Pay? For what?”
“For treating you with such disrespect!” His entire body quivered with repressed rage then, his teeth grinding so heavily that it was almost audible. “That so few ponies pay homage to you for all that you do is outrageous, but for him to dare to blaspheme your name…to stand in your own throne room and say that you’re unfit to rule…!” He had to stop then, trembling with fury, and it took several seconds before he was able to continue. “I wanted his spell to fail at my hooves, so that it would be your righteousness laying him low.” He let out a slow breath then, returning his nose to the ground. “Knowing what would happen didn’t dissuade me from interrupting his spell, Goddess. It encouraged me.”
Luna knew she should have been angry at what he said. Furious even; he’d deliberately sought out a confrontation where none needed to occur, and he’d done it in her name. But the emotion refused to come.
Instead, all she could do was stand there and revel in the feeling of just how deeply Silhouette worshiped her.
His faith in her, his belief in her divinity, radiated off of him like heat from a fire, flaring higher in reaction to the perceived slight against her. The feeling of knowing that he thought so much of her, that she was the most important thing in his world and that any insult to her was unbearable for him, was a pleasure that defied description. It was more delectable than the finest cuisine, more potent than the most skilled lover. It pierced straight through a lifetime of knowing that, compared to her sister, she was always second among equals, affirming her in a way she’d never felt before.
It soothed the bittersweet knowledge of how everypony had always appreciated the bright warmth of Celestia's daytime more than the gentle darkness of her own night. Although she’d put those feelings aside since Twilight Sparkle and her friends had redeemed her, Luna still couldn’t deny how the balm of another pony’s reverence eased the pain of those memories. If I’d been worshiped like this a millennium ago, she’d thought to herself repeatedly over the last few months, I never would have become Nightmare Moon.
Nor, she knew, was the effect of Silhouette’s worship limited to her own psychic satisfaction. There was a genuine energy to it, a power that bolstered and uplifted her, filling her with a sense of strength and vitality as soothing as it was exhilarating. She’d never felt anything like it before in her life; even becoming an alicorn hadn’t prepared her for how it felt to be empowered by genuine religious veneration. It was that power that she called upon when she returned some of that strength to her small stable of worshipers, granting them spells that they otherwise never would have been able to attain. And when she used that new power for her own benefit, flexing it for her own sake rather than granting it to others, she could-
“I beg your indulgence, Goddess,” came Silhouette’s voice, snapping Luna out of her unintended reverie. “I did not mean to raise my voice in your presence.”
Pushing away a feeling of mild embarrassment that she’d gotten so caught up in her servant’s adulation, Luna forced herself to return to the matter at hoof. No matter how wonderful it felt to be worshiped, she needed to deal with what had almost happened. “Lex Legis would not have been the only pony who suffered if you had confounded his spell. The mare he was casting it on, Sonata’s sister, would have been affected as well. As would that colt who defied you.”
“…yes.”
“And that was acceptable to you? Or rather, you felt that such a thing would be acceptable to me?”
Now the excuses came. “Goddess, that boy chose to be there of his own will, after I’d repeatedly told him to stand clear!”
Luna sighed. “Silhouette…”
“Worse, he denied your status as Mother of the Night, according that honor to some other goddess he called ‘the Night Mare’!”
Luna frowned. When Silhouette had mentioned that during his report, she’d presumed that the colt had said “Nightmare Moon” in order to be provocative; now she wasn’t so sure. But it was something she’d need to deal with later. “Even so…”
“And he alluded to having an entire troupe that held such blasphemous beliefs! Such heresy needed to be struck down before-”
He had just gone too far. “I have no wish to strike down another pony, least of all a foal!”
Flaring her wings, Luna smacked one hoof against the ground, the impact heavy despite the soft grass under her hoof, the last vestiges of the euphoria she’d felt from his worship falling away as she focused on what needed to be done now. “Silhouette, while your actions might have been borne of righteous intent, they were not in accordance with my wishes!” She let that sink in, watching the blood drain from his face before she spoke next. “For this, you will need to be punished.”
To anypony else, the way Silhouette was shaking would have looked like fear. But Luna knew better. His tremors were the result of recrimination rather than terror, no doubt already castigating himself far more harshly than she ever would have. “Stand, Silhouette, and face me directly.”
“Yes, Goddess.”
Trembling, he rose to his hooves, almost collapsing as his shuddering almost caused his bad leg to go out from under him. The sight took the edge off of Luna’s disapproval, remembering that she was the one who had inadvertently withered his limb. It had been her first experiment with transferring some of her worship-gained power to another pony, and she had passed too much to Silhouette, the power overflowing and causing his leg to atrophy. Despite the fact that he’d worn the wound with pride, claiming that it was a gift to wear “the mark of the Mother of the Night’s touch” openly, Luna had nevertheless felt guilty about it.
She’d been planning on demoting him, but as he rose onto all fours, she quickly changed her mind. Instead, she decided to go with a different idea, one that she’d been considering for some time now. “Hold still,” she commanded.
He didn’t answer verbally, instead stiffening into near-total immobility at her command. Luna’s horn glowed a moment later, wrapping around his purple armor and slowly removing it, until a moment later it was piled on the ground at his side. “As of this moment, you are no longer a member of the Canterlot Royal Guard.”
The horrified look on his face told her exactly what he thought she meant, and she held up a hoof to forestall any outbursts on his part. “You are not being expelled from my service, nor do I plan on sending you away,” she stated, knowing from how he almost collapsed in relief that she’d been right. “Instead, you will assist me in founding a new organization, one which will be the formal body devoted to my worship. It will establish guidelines and protocols for how I wish the ponies dedicated to me to conduct themselves, so that a situation like this will never happen again.”
Surprise passed across Silhouette’s face, then understanding, and finally awe. “Yes, I understand, Goddess! I’m honored that my foolishness could be the root of such a grand design!” His eyes were wide, and Luna could see him already imagining what her new religious institution would be like. “I will devote myself wholeheartedly to this effort, so that every aspect of it will properly reflect your glory throughout Equestria-, no, throughout the world!”
Luna nodded, pleased that he seemed to have forgotten that this was technically a punishment. This will be a school like my sister’s, except instead of teaching gifted unicorns it will teach ponies the proper way to honor me. Of course, it wouldn’t be a literal school; the Equestria Education Association would never approve of that. But it could borrow at least a few of the structural elements without stepping on any hooves.
All of that would come later, though. Right now, there were more immediate things to attend to.
“I’m glad for your enthusiasm,” smiled Luna. “But in the meantime, I’d like you to do something for me. Think of it as a demonstration to prove that you’ve learned your lesson.”
“Yes, Goddess! Anything!”
Luna pointed back toward the other side of the train station. “I want you to bring that mare, Nosey, to me. And I want you to do it in a manner that I would approve of.”
“…and that’s when you two showed up,” finished Sonata grumpily.
Princess Celestia nodded, needing a moment to digest what she’d just been told. There had been complaints about Silhouette before – mostly from other members of the Royal Guard, who had earned his wrath for not being sufficiently reverential toward her sister – but as far as she knew he’d never done anything that had actually endangered somepony else. That he’d go so far now, even after being told that disrupting Lex’s spell could place ponies in harm’s way, was disturbing.
But she’d need to trust that her sister would recognize that and take care of it on her own. Right now, she had other concerns that needed to be attended to, the first of which was calming the pony in front of her. “Sonata, please allow me to apologize for Silhouette’s actions. While he may be devoted to my sister, he’s still a member of the Royal Guard, and I thought he would conduct himself better than that.”
Sonata paused at that, looking at her as if trying to determine if she was being serious or not. A moment later she let out a sigh, apparently convinced that her apology was genuine. “Thanks...but if you really don’t want any more trouble, you’ll get him outta here, pronto.”
Celestia tilted her head at that. “I’m certain that Luna will explain to him why he was in the wrong, and I’ll make sure to speak to the other guards about why they shouldn’t blindly follow orders, even from a superior officer. There won’t be another incident like that again while we’re here.”
“No no no, you don’t get it.” Sonata gestured back at where her boyfriend was still chanting at the glowing form of her sister. “After what that jerk pulled, Lex is totes going to turn him inside out. Trying to hurt other ponies is the fastest way to set him off, especially when one of those ponies is me.” The corners of her lips turned upward at that, either pleased at the thought of Lex being enraged at someone trying to harm her, or at the thought of Silhouette getting what was coming to him. Possibly both.
Celestia licked her lips at that. Sonata’s warning was disheartening, but not entirely surprising. More than that, though, it led into the next thing they needed to talk about. “Sonata, do you remember what my sister and I said back in Canterlot, when we expressed concern about sending Lex Legis here to Vanhoover?”
“Huh?” Sonata looked almost comically confused by the sudden change in topic. “When you said what about what now?”
“Back in Canterlot,” pressed Celestia. “We were negotiating ending Lex’s hostility towards us in exchange for his governing a city. There was a point of concern that Luna and I had. Do you recall it?”
“I guess…gimme a sec…” Celestia did just that, patiently waiting as Sonata tried with visible effort to think back that far. After several seconds of furrowing her brow and tapping a hoof to her head as though trying to physically jar the memories loose, Sonata looked up at her uncertainly. “It was something about his horn, right? You guys were worried because it used to belong to whatshisname…King Bad Guy.”
“King Sombra, yes,” answered Celestia with a gentle smile. The expression hid the mild feeling of relief going through her, now sure that the mare she was talking to wasn’t possessed by the monster that Mihr had warned them about. But that didn’t mean that the threat wasn’t still there, which meant that the next point was to steer the conversation in that direction without giving too much away. “We were concerned because a unicorn’s horn is the focus of their magic. To graft the horn of such an evil pony onto himself, we were worried about what that might do to Lex.”
Sonata’s look of confusion persisted for a moment, before her eyes suddenly widened. “Wait, you mean like in one of those horror movies? Like, the one where the guy loses his leg and has to have the doctor sew a new one on, but it turns out to be the leg of a guy who kicked puppies, and so now the new guy with his leg goes around kicking puppies too?!” Horrified, Sonata looked back toward Lex, clearly afraid that he was about to go on a puppy-kicking rampage. “We have to get that thing off him! No one adores a guy who does stuff like that!” She turned back to Celestia, wild-eyed. “Quick! How did that movie end?! I only heard about it from Adagio, and I can’t remember how the rest of it went!”
“That wasn’t quite what we were afraid Lex would do if some fragment of King Sombra’s spirit were to take possession of him,” noted Celestia, fighting down the urge to giggle.
“Wait, possessed? You mean that’s how that works?” Rather oddly, the thought seemed to calm Sonata down. Letting out a sigh, she held a hoof to her chest, trying to calm her beating heart. “Geez, don’t scare me like that.”
That was enough to make Celestia’s eyes widen just a little, intrigued. “What do you mean?”
Now looking much more relaxed, Sonata waved a hoof back at Lex again. “Trust me, when it comes to monsters that possess ponies, Lex totes stomps all over them. Just a little while ago, there was this creature that-, oops!” Her eyes suddenly widening, Sonata held a hoof over her mouth for several seconds. “I forgot, that’s supposed to be a secret!”
Certain that she this was related to what they’d come here to investigate, Celestia took a step closer to Sonata. “It’s alright, you can tell me.”
But the other mare shook her head, still keeping a hoof in front of her mouth. “I can’t! Lex’d be super mad at me! He said that we needed to keep it a secret until things here weren’t so bad so it wouldn’t make everypony panic when he told them!”
Celestia paused for a fraction of a second, an idea forming in her mind. “Well, now that my sister and I are here, things aren’t so bad anymore.”
“…they aren’t?”
“Not at all.” Celestia shook her head before giving Sonata a reassuring smile. “We came here because we were worried, and wanted to do whatever we could to help.” That was true, even if she was leaving out a few pertinent details. “So you see, it’s alright if you tell me about what happened with that creature a little while ago.”
“I dunno…” Sonata bit her lip. “I mean, I don’t want to rub starch in any wounds, but Lex doesn’t really like you guys very much.”
“How about this: I promise that I won’t repeat what you say to anypony else except Luna. That way, there’s no chance that a panic will be caused.”
“I…” Wavering, Sonata glanced back at Lex again, then back at her. “Alright, but only because Kara hasn’t been talking to me lately!”
Not knowing who that was, Celestia simply nodded, smiling warmly. “I understand.”
“Okay, you see my friend Nosey over there? A little while ago, she was possessed by this monster named Cereal…” Over the next several minutes, Sonata relayed everything Lex and Nosey had told her about the monster that had possessed her best friend, and how it had managed to fool them for almost an entire day before Lex had realized what was happening and dragged it out of her, killing it after a brutal battle. “And now Nosey’s all freaked out all the time and clinging to Lex twenty-four-seven even though she knows he’s my boyfriend and I know it’s not really her fault and I feel bad that I keep getting upset about that but Aria keeps saying all three of us should be his girlfriends now,” she finished in a rush.
Celestia’s eyes were wider now, momentarily struggling to process everything she’d just been told. “That’s astonishing...”
“I know, right?! Just because we’ve all been sleeping together, and had a couple of nights where Lex was touching the three of us all over, doesn’t make Nosey and Aria official girlfriends!” Huffing, she lifted a foreleg and looked around for a moment before putting it back down, scowling. “Never a rock to kick when you need one,” she muttered, before sitting.
Celestia barely heard her. “And Lex did that all by himself?”
“Pretty much,” shrugged Sonata. “I mean, we were there, but he was the one who told us to hold still and stay quiet. Then he got started with the petting, and we-”
“Ah, no, that’s not what I meant,” interrupted Celestia, giving her a rather uncomfortable smile. “I mean, Lex defeated that monster completely on his own?”
“Oh, yeah. I mean, I wasn’t there or anything, but that’s what he and Nosey said. Besides, it’s not like he had Severance with him.”
Celestia tilted her head at yet another unfamiliar name. “Who?”
“Lex’s magic scythe thingy,” answered Sonata casually. “He’s around here somewhere. Lex has him on guard duty, I think…are you okay?”
Having gone rigid at the cursory reference to the other major threat that she’d come here to confront, Celestia forced herself to relax. “I’m sorry. You said that Lex has a magic scythe?”
“Uh-huh. His name’s Severance. He’s a pretty cool guy, and he’s helped us out of a jam a bunch of times now. I mean, he wasn’t able to save Cloudbank and her friends when Cereal bumped them off, and he and Lex got into a fight about that, but they’ve totes buried the hammer since then. You want me to go and introduce you?”
For a moment Celestia almost said yes, but caught herself. The item Sonata was describing was clearly the same one that Mihr had told them about, but the easy way she was referring to it – talking about it like it was a reliable friend rather than an engine of devastation – was causing her cognitive dissonance. I need more information, she decided.
Since Lex and Sonata had left Canterlot, Celestia had received only bits and pieces of information about their activities. First had been the article in Line’s newspaper of him using disturbingly powerful magic – including what had to be the dark magic of King Sombra – to slay a dragon outside of Tall Tale. Then there had been the report from Luna about the mare who’d written that article having such a terrifying dream. Now Lex had apparently destroyed the monster that had tormented Nosey, while at the same time becoming friends with the dark artifact that had attacked Mihr’s realm. Viewed together, it all painted an incomprehensible picture; a series of contrasts that made it even harder for her to know what to make of Lex Legis. Fortunately, there was somepony here who could hopefully offer her some greater insight…
Smiling politely, Celestia shook her head. “Actually, I have a better idea. I just realized that I haven’t heard about all of the adventures that you and Lex have had since I last saw you. Since his spell is apparently going to take a few hours, would you mind telling me-”
“Princess Celestia!”
The interruption made both of the turn their heads, following the voice to where a middle-aged earth mare was trotting up to them. Her fuchsia coat was dirty, and her two-toned indigo and cornflower blue mane and tail looked like they were in need of brushing, but the smile on her face gleamed almost as brightly as the river of gold that made up the cutie mark on her flanks. “Princess Celestia!” she beamed, as if she were greeting an old friend. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see you again!”
Marching right up to the princess, she gave a deep bow, holding it for only a moment before standing up again. “You probably don’t remember me. River Bank, of the Bank family. We run the financial institutions here in Vanhoover.” Not pausing for breath, she threw the barest glance at Sonata before turning her attention back to the princess. “I was hoping I could borrow a moment of your time.”
“Hang on,” interjected Sonata. “She and I were gonna-”
But River cut her off with a dismissive wave of her hoof. “Yes, yes, you'll have a chance for that later. But right now...”
River's grin took on a sharper edge as she spoke next. “I'd like to talk to you about the current state of Vanhoover under Lex Legis's leadership.”
Sonata’s angry exclamation was enough to make Celestia’s eyes widen slightly, glancing between her and River. “Is everything alright?”
River opened her mouth, but this time Sonata beat her to the punch. “Like, no! Everything is not alright!” She glared at River as she spoke. “Ever since he got here, Lex has done everything he possibly can to try and help people! I’ve been right with him the entire time, watching him plan and fight and get really hurt, all to protect everypony! And Miss Prissy Pants here,” she thrust her hoof forward, pointing the older mare accusingly, “is going to slink back now that Lex can’t speak for himself, and say that he’s-”
“Vanhoover’s hero,” interjected River.
“Vanhoover’s hero!” echoed Sonata, her voice still angry. “All because she got what was coming to her when she…she…wait, what?” Blinking as she finally registered what River had said, Sonata gave her a blank look, her confusion evident. “You think he’s a hero?”
“Of course I do!” River made sure to keep her smile in place, shaking her head ruefully at Sonata. “He sheltered and protected my son, after all!”
“I…well, yeah, I guess he did. But when you first got here, you were all-”
“Confused,” interrupted River again, before turning her attention to Princess Celestia. “I only recently got back from Las Pegasus,” she explained. Her smile dropped then, turning her eyes downward as a pained look crossed her face. “It was horrible, being the only member of my family to escape the flooding, not knowing what happened to my husband and our son. I was positively sick with worry the entire time.” She looked up then, her eyes filled with remorse. “When I came back and found out that my husband hadn’t made it, my dearest Mounte…” She choked back a sob, putting a hoof to her face. “I’m so ashamed of how I acted. I took it all out on Lex, saying such horrible things to him. I’m sure he hates me now…”
Princess Celestia moved to stand in front of River then, a sympathetic look on her face. “We all say things we don’t mean sometimes,” she offered gently. “Even I’ve found myself speaking words I’ve come to regret later. But as long as we’re able to recognize what we’ve done, and find the courage to apologize to the ones we’ve hurt, it’s never too late to try and make amends.”
River sniffled, looking up at the princess through watery eyes. “Do…do you really think he’ll forgive me?”
“That’s up to Lex.” Celestia’s reply wasn’t unkind, one wing reaching out to gently turn River’s chin toward Sonata. “But if you want to know if he’ll accept your apology, there’s somepony here who knows him much better than I do.”
“Oh, uh, yeah!” Suddenly finding herself put on the spot, Sonata tried her best to sound convincing. “Lex is just, you know…super forgiving! Heh heh…” One hoof came up to rub the back of her neck, forcing herself to smile as she nodded. She very nearly mentioned that he’d go ahead and get rid of her curse, but managed to catch herself at the last second, belatedly realizing that it might not be the best idea to tell the princess that Lex had done that in the first place. “Yep…super forgiving,” she finished lamely.
Princess Celestia smiled at that, and so did River, though hers was far shakier.
It was all she could do to keep from laughing.
Step one, complete, she thought to herself. With any luck, Lex’s little plaything would be able to get him to lift that curse he’d placed on her. After that, the real work would begin:
The seduction of Lex Legis.
When River had woken up that morning, the first thing she’d done was confirm that it hadn’t been a nightmare; that that horrible stallion had cursed her to be unable to enjoy her wealth. Of course, that hadn’t really needed confirming; that she’d been sleeping naked on the grass had been all the proof she should have needed. Nevertheless, she had to be sure.
After venturing back inside of her manor and immediately feeling like she was about to throw up, River had lurched back outside, depression threatening to consume her the way it had yesterday. She had almost given into it, almost lost herself in another round of tears and self-pity. But something had held her back, preventing despair from overtaking her.
Instead, as the sun had just started to peak over the mountains, she’d found herself wandering toward the river, making sure to avoid Lex’s camp full of vagrants as she made her way to the water’s edge. The sight of the flowing watercourse had brought a thin smile to her lips, remembering how often she’d come here after she’d discovered her destiny. She’d gained her cutie mark the first time she’d ever panned for gold, but she’d come back many times after that, up until she’d finally convinced Mounte to marry her. A proper lady didn’t do such things, but now…
As luck would have it, she’d almost tripped over a makeshift pan. A few minutes of walking along the bank had let her find a skillet with a broken handle near the water’s edge; apparently one of those camp ponies had been trying to clean it when it had broken, leaving it there. The stroke of good fortune had inspired her, and River hadn’t been able to resist sitting down and indulging herself.
It had been a few minutes later, as she’d stared at the sparkling gold flakes shining up at her from the bottom of the broken skillet, that everything had clicked.
Lex’s curse had reduced her to a state of poverty. No matter that she still legally owned a large fortune; if she couldn’t personally enjoy it, then it might as well not have existed. In essence, he had reduced her back to when she’d been a poor filly. He’d made her into “Little” Bit again.
But so what?
I overcame poverty before, River had realized. I made myself into River Bank, one of the most powerful ponies in all of Vanhoover! If I did it once, I can do it again! A new confidence swelling in her chest, River had dumped the skillet right there and galloped back to her manor, her mind whirling as plans began to take shape.
The first thing was information. Vanhoover today wasn’t the same place she’d grown up in, which meant that everything she thought she knew needed to be reevaluated. To that end, she’d given her staff the day off as soon as she’d gotten back, telling all of them that they were free to go check on their friends and families, so long as they were back by sundown. They’d been shocked at her generosity, but had been quick to capitalize on her offer, thanking her obsequiously as they’d left. Only Trotsworth had refused, the old stallion insisting that his place was there by her side.
The next order of business had been to have Piggy – who by that point had just been waking up, his belly already rumbling – tell her everything he knew about Vanhoover’s current situation, particularly when it came to Lex. Her son had been rather hesitant at first, quite clearly confused by her slovenly appearance and refusal to come inside, let alone that she was eating the simple breakfast of dried oats and sliced carrots that Trotsworth had made her, in contrast to his own extravagant meal of seasoned fruit fritters topped with maple syrup. Fortunately, a sharp word from her had been all it had taken to make him ignore his confusion and tell her what she wanted to know. That was another way Piggy was like his father: he was easy to control.
She’d spent quite a bit of time extracting information from her boy, him stuffing his face all the while, before she’d let him go. After that she’d ruminated for some time, comparing what he’d told her to everything Sonata had said when she’d first led her through the city. But it hadn’t been until the staff had begun to trickle back that she’d finally obtained enough information. As she’d expected, the help were all shameless gossips, and most of them had spent time with the other lowlifes in Lex’s camp, absorbing the news and rumors flying around the place, virtually all of which had been centered on him.
Most of what she’d learned had matched with what Piggy and Sonata had told her. Chief among what she'd confirmed was that Lex was arrogant and domineering, but had the power to back it up. But for all his fearsome persona, he did seem to want to help, working diligently to try and turn Vanhoover’s flagging fortunes around. It was just that he quite clearly intended to do it with force – cementing power around himself – rather than friendship, and woe to anypony or anything that stood in his way, as River had experienced firsthoof.
But as unusual as Lex was, there were other ways in which he was quite a bit more relatable. For instance, he apparently had a ravenous appetite where the opposite sex was concerned. From what River had been able to gather, he’d apparently instigated some sort of tawdry episode with Sonata, her sister, and her best friend all at once! That had been a particularly juicy bit of gossip, as virtually all of her servants had been tittering about how Sonata had thrown a fit about that after it had happened. “But they all spent the next night together,” one maid had confessed with a squeal of embarrassed delight. “And the one after that, too!”
Hubris. Ambition. Lust. All traits that Lex Legis shared with her late husband.
Of course, Mounte had also been weak and stupid whereas Lex was neither of those things. More than that, she was already on his bad side; one conversation gone awry had been enough for him to lay a curse of horrible proportions on her. If she were to call down his wrath a second time, her life might get even worse.
The safe bet, River knew, would be to simply cut her losses. If she took everything she still had – her servants and her son and what was left of her money – it wasn’t inconceivable that she’d be able to set herself up somewhere else. Lex’s curse wouldn’t let her enjoy anything extravagant, and she doubted she’d be able to liberate too much money from the family coffers with the state Vanhoover was in anyway, but it was entirely probable that she’d be able to get enough to arrange for a…tolerable life somewhere else. Maybe she’d even be able to find a wizard who could break Lex’s curse, or perhaps she’d take a side trip to visit one of the princesses in hopes that they’d be able to do it.
But even if she could remove Lex’s curse, she’d never be able to go back to Vanhoover as long as he was there, which meant that her prospects for the future were dim at best. Every other major city (and why would she want to live anywhere else?) had their own high societies, and none of them were eager to see a new competitor join their ranks. Without a substantial fortune to her name or access to Vanhoover’s resources – those being the only things that would let her marry herself or Piggy into the ranks of a new city’s elite – there were no prospects for her to advance in whatever metropolitan area she settled in.
Normally, River preferred safe bets. You knew what you were in for with them, and could plan accordingly. But in this case, the safe bet was a loser. It wasn’t the kind of life she wanted for herself, especially after how hard she’d worked to acquire everything she’d had before Vanhoover had been razed.
Which left only one alternative: to ingratiate herself into whatever new order Lex was building here. She’d need to work hard to get into his good graces after what had passed between them, but that wasn’t a deal-breaker. She’d managed to make Mounte fall for her after all. Of course, she doubted that Lex would ever want her that way; he had Sonata (whom the rumors said had a bit of a jealous streak to her) and several other sweet young things around him to satisfy his baser desires. But with her knowledge of financial planning, her experience with local government, and her connections to the elites of Tall Tale and Las Pegasus, she was sure she’d be able to make herself useful to him. And if he did want a more…personal relationship, well…she’d been willing to offer herself to those Canterlot wizards; why not him?
After all, if this worked then the rewards would be just as sweet. She knew now that she’d been wrong in her initial estimations of Lex’s magical capabilities; he was quite clearly a wizard of prodigious strength. If he didn’t know how to use an age spell already, he would at some point, and that would be her best – and likely only – chance at having one used on her. That, and since he intended to sweep away Vanhoover’s old order, she wouldn’t need to worry about the McNeighs or the Hoofingfords undermining her ever again. She’d just need to make sure she stayed useful to Lex, and her position would be secure.
River preferred safe bets, but they weren’t always the best ones. Her last attempt to gamble big had been coming back to Vanhoover before she knew the situation there, and it had blown up in her face. But leaving now would only guarantee that she’d never recover from the bad hoof she’d been dealt. Going double or nothing had the potential to win her back everything she’d lost and more. It was risky, incredibly so, but right now it was the only way to get everything she wanted.
Night had fallen by the time River had made up her mind, and she’d begun heading back toward the camp, preparing to abase herself before Lex. But she’d barely started when there’d been a bright light from that direction, clearly some sort of magic. By the time she’d arrived, she’d spotted Lex casting some sort of spell on a glowing figure even as a fight had broken out between…some members of the Royal Guard and a group of foals? What…?
She’d dimly recognized the maid she’d fired come and pick up one of the foals after it was all over, but that had been secondary to the rush that had filled her when she’d realized why the guards were here. The princesses had come to Vanhoover! River’s eyes had practically lit up, realizing that this was a golden opportunity to ingratiate herself to Lex. After all, if she gave the Royal Sisters a glowing report about what he was doing here, it was sure to get her into his good graces.
And so far, it was going very well indeed.
Now, to move this along, thought River as she wiped her eyes, seemingly consoled by Sonata’s assertion that Lex would forgive her. “I’m so glad. But I want to do more than just apologize, I want to help with everything Lex is doing here.”
She’d thrown that line out as a lure, and she wasn’t disappointed as Princess Celestia spoke up. “Actually, we were about to begin discussing something similar when you joined us, River.”
“Oh?” River tilted her head, not having been aware of that.
Sonata nodded eagerly, clearly glad for the change in topic. “Yeah! I was going to tell her about everything Lex and I have done since we came here!”
“That’s right, I interrupted you, didn’t I?” River looked down, the picture of self-consciousness. “I’m sorry, I’ll let you two get back to your conversation.”
Sonata looked pleased at that, but Princess Celestia immediately jumped in. “Actually, I was hoping you could join us, River. It would be wonderful to hear from both of you about everything that Lex has done for the ponies of Vanhoover.”
A pout crossed Sonata’s lips, but she shrugged. “Fine by me, I guess.”
River, by contrast, smiled widely. “Thank you, Your Highness. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
“So you guys did all that even though the Night Mare hasn’t given you any magic?”
Nosey deliberately played up the awestruck tone in her voice, but it wasn’t completely fake. The fact that those kids had stood up to Silhouette and the other members of the Royal Guard the way that they had was impressive. Or at least, she thought so; the fact that the parents of two of their group had been so upset by what their children had done was still hard for her to swallow. She could understand being afraid for them or wishing that it hadn’t come to that, but the complete lack of recognition as to how those five foals had saved Lex and Aria and potentially quite a few other ponies struck her as completely unfair.
“That’s right!” nodded Fruit Crunch, looking pleased at the praise. “There’s no way the dumb old Royal Guards could be tougher than the Night Mare’s Knights! Even without magic, that was a piece of cake!”
“Tougher and smarter,” chimed in Fiddlesticks. “If it hadn’t been for Feathercap, we wouldn’t have been able to pull that off.”
The colt in question turned beet red, but his smile betrayed how he really felt. “I didn’t really do anything,” he mumbled, scratching the back of his neck in embarrassment. “I just helped out a little bit. You two did a lot more important stuff than me, you and Cleansweep and Straightlace…”
The mood soured a bit at the mention of their absent friends, and Nosey felt her heart ache as all three foals looked down, saddened. They don’t deserve this, not after everything they did. They should have ponies lifting them into the air and shouting hip-hip-hooray. But the assembled crowd of ponies had made no move to embrace the foals after the princesses had called Silhouette and the other guards off, and Nosey knew that they wouldn’t. It wasn’t just because the eight remaining members of the Royal Guard were still right there, waiting for the princesses to return, either (though she was sure that didn’t help).
Rather, Nosey knew that they were all intimidated. It was written all over their faces, in the way they kept glancing at where the princesses had gone before looking back at Lex, still gesturing and chanting. Everypony looked uncertain, and more than a few were trading whispers and nervous looks. They think there’s going to be a fight, she was sure. They know that Lex is going to be furious about what happened, and they don’t want to get caught in the middle. It made the fact that those foals had jumped in when they did even more impressive, in her estimation.
“I bet Lex will want to reward you,” she said suddenly.
All three looked up at that, eyes widening. “Wait, really?!” gaped Fruit Crunch, his surprise already giving way to obvious joy at the thought.
“What sort of reward?” Fiddlesticks looked slightly nervous, but there was definitely interest there.
“Do you…” Feathercap gulped, but mustered up his courage. “Do you think he’d-”
“Miss Nosey.”
The familiar voice of Silhouette made a shudder run down Nosey’s spine, and she spun in place, her eyes narrowing behind her glasses at the sight of the earth stallion who had caused her and her friends so much trouble. “What do you want?” she spat.
She wasn’t the only one to be unpleasantly surprised. Feathercap gave a rather high-pitched shriek, tripping over his own legs in a panic and going tumbling. Fiddlesticks yanked Tiddlywinks off her back and into her forelegs – body tense and preparing to run – so quickly that the baby stirred at the motion, beginning to cry at the rude awakening. Fruit Crunch ran forward, putting himself in front of Nosey as he glared at Silhouette. “You didn’t get enough before?!” he growled, standing on his hind legs and putting his fore-hooves up in a fighting stance. “C’mon! I’ll knock you straight back to Canterlot!”
Silhouette didn’t respond immediately, instead giving the three children a cold glare. The guards that had been waiting nearby started to head toward him, but stopped as Silhouette held out a hoof. “Stay where you are,” he ordered, before turning his attention back to Nosey. “The Mother of the Night wishes to speak with you.”
Nosey frowned, pausing as she digested that. Belatedly, it occurred to her that Silhouette wasn’t wearing the purple armor that he’d had on earlier. Now he was completely unclad, giving her a good look at how his coat was utterly black while his mane and tail were pure white. His irises were the same, she realized, matching the blackness of his pupils and contrasting sharply against the whites of his eyes. Even his cutie mark was as stark as the rest of him, showing a featureless white silhouette of a pony.
He was completely black and white. Just like how he saw the world.
Suddenly feeling intimidated, Nosey licked her lips. “Princess Luna wants to see me?”
“Yes,” answered Silhouette simply, before turning around to lead the way. “Follow me.”
“She’s not going anywhere with you!” Fruit Crunch had returned to all fours, but looked no less aggressive for it. Pawing at the ground, he looked ready to charge at any second. “And if you try to take her, you’re going to have to go through me first!”
“Th-th-through u-us,” stuttered Feathercap, his face pale as he moved up alongside Fruit Crunch.
“I…” Fiddlesticks looked stricken, glancing between her friends and Tiddlywinks, whose crying wasn’t quieting no matter how much she rocked him.
Turning back around, Silhouette let out a slow breath as he looked at the two colts between himself and Nosey. For a moment he stood completely still, and Nosey had the impression that he wasn’t entirely sure what to do. A moment later he raised his eyes to her, and she felt her skin crawl as she saw his gaze travel over her body, coming to rest on her flank. “You’re a newsmare, aren’t you?” he asked after a moment.
“Huh?” For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. My cutie mark, she realized a second later. He was looking at my cutie mark. “Yeah…so?”
“So, the goddess wishes for you to tell her the news of what’s happened here.”
His voice was almost bored, as if he were reading the words off a script, but Nosey could hear the underlying tension in them. He’s trying to be diplomatic, she decided. He’d rather force me to come along, but he can’t for some reason. Was this related to why he wasn’t wearing his armor anymore?
A lifetime of honing her reporter’s instincts kicked in then, leading her to ask a probing question. “And if I don’t want to come with you, will you use your position as a Royal Guardspony to force me?” His face didn’t change, but she saw anger flash in his eyes, and knew she’d been right. After several seconds passed with him not answering, she pressed forward. “You’re not a member of the Guard anymore, are you? That’s why you’re not wearing your armor.”
The other guards gasped at that, their eyes widening. Feathercap’s fear was momentarily swallowed by amazement, and even Fiddlesticks couldn’t help but gape, though she kept rocking her brother in a futile attempt to calm his wailing. But it was Fruit Crunch who recovered first, his features changing into a vicious smirk. “Well well well,” he drawled. “So Luna kicked you outta the Guard, huh? Was she mad that you got your flanked kicked by a couple of foals?”
If looks could have killed, the stony expression on Silhouette’s face would have been deadlier than all of the disasters that had hit Vanhoover combined. “You will refer to the Mother of the Night by either her royal or her divine titles,” he hissed through clenched teeth.
“Or you’ll do what?” sneered Fruit Crunch, having sensed that he’d hit a nerve. “Ask me a second time? I-”
He stopped as Nosey put a hoof on his side, looking back at her questioningly. Giving him a quick shake of the head to let him know he should stop antagonizing the older earth stallion, she looked back at Silhouette. “Alright. I’ll go with you.”
“Are you kidding me?!” blurted Fruit Crunch.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea!” added Fiddlesticks, having to raise her voice to be heard over Tiddlywinks’ crying.
“No, it’ll be fine.” Nosey kept her eyes locked on Silhouette as she spoke, silently daring him to disagree with her even as she spoke to the foals. “The fact that Princess Luna kicked him out of the Royal Guard proves that she’s not happy with how he acted before. That’s why he’s not using threats or spells to try and make me come along now: because he knows it would make her even angrier with him. That means it’s safe for me to go with him now. He won’t want to upset his goddess more than he already has.”
Silhouette’s eyes were full of malice, but when he spoke next his voice was kept carefully polite. “If you’ll please follow me.”
He turned to lead the way again, and this time Nosey moved to follow him, only for Fruit Crunch to again interpose himself between her and Silhouette. “I’m going with you,” he announced. “I don’t trust that guy, so I’m tagging along to watch your back.”
“You dare invite yourself into the goddess’s presence?” This time Silhouette’s voice wasn’t able to fully contain his growing anger, and Nosey flinched, not wanting to provoke another attack. Now when there was still a chance that something could disrupt Lex’s spell.
Wanting to prevent that from happening, but also not wanting to upset those children that were braver than the adults quietly watching the exchange from afar, Nosey thought fast. “I need you to stay here, Fruit Crunch.”
“You do?” he asked skeptically. “Why?”
Leaning down, Nosey lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Because right now, you’re the only one who can make sure nothing else interferes with what Lex is doing.” She pointedly glanced at Lex as she said it, not missing how his eyes were locked on them as he continued to gesture and chant.
Turning her eyes back to Fruit Crunch, she could see her remark was having its intended effect, the colt drawing himself up with pride. “I…guess I am, aren’t I?” He was trying not to smile, and doing a bad job of it, but Nosey made sure to keep her expression solemn as she nodded.
“I could go,” offered Fiddlesticks, having been close enough to overhear what was being said. “Just as soon as I get Tiddlywinks calmed down…”
“He’s probably hungry,” offered Nosey. “Go get him something from that food that Lex set aside for emergencies and see if that helps.”
Knowing she was being dismissed, and that it was because the older mare wanted her to put her brother first, Fiddlesticks gave Nosey a grateful look. “Are you sure?” When Nosey nodded back, Fiddlesticks mouthed “thank you” at her before turning and trotting away.
Two down, one to go, noted Nosey as she turned toward Feathercap. “I want you to stay h-”
“I’m going with you,” announced Feathercap bluntly. The statement might have been more convincing if he wasn’t shaking like a leaf, glancing back at where Silhouette was giving them an impatient look.
Nosey shook her head. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Y-yes I do,” gulped the colt. “I’m a member of the Night Mare’s Knight, and we…” He faltered for a moment, before mustering up his courage. “And we help ponies when they’re in danger.”
“But I’m not going to be in danger,” explained Nosey. “Silhouette won’t do anything now, and I’m not afraid of meeting with Princess Luna. So you see, it’s okay for you to stay here.”
“I…” For a moment, Feathercap looked like he wanted to let out a sigh of relief. But a pained look crossed his face, and he swallowed nervously before shaking his head. “No. It’s too dangerous.”
Surprised at the fearful-looking colt’s unexpected stubbornness, Nosey tried to think of an idea that would make him change his mind. While she didn’t particularly mind the thought of him accompanying her, the last thing she wanted was anything that could set Silhouette off. And having someone who worshiped a different goddess of the night than Luna was just asking for trouble. “Feathercap-”
“I’m going too.” Feathercap’s announcement was directed not at her, but at Silhouette. Despite the fact that he looked like he was going to faint at any moment, Feathercap nevertheless met the older pony’s eyes. “I’m going too, and if you don’t like it, then that’s…then that’s…too bad?” His strength petered out halfway through, and the statement came out as a question rather than a declaration.
It was likely because of that lack of strength, rather than in spite of it, that Silhouette didn’t object. “Have it your way. Now hurry up.”
“Good work, Feather!” cheered Fruit Crunch. “Remember, you’re one of the Night Mare’s Knights, and we kicked that guy’s butt before, so we can do it again!”
Giving the other colt a nervous smile, Feathercap looked up at Nosey. “Um, Miss Nosey? Before we go, can I have part of my reward now?”
Nosey blinked at that, needing a second to remember what he was talking about. “Lex is a little busy right now. Just wait a little bit and I’ll make sure he recognizes what you and your friends did, okay?” She glanced back at Silhouette, who was again giving them a look of impatience. “We should get going.”
But Feathercap shook his head, face registering embarrassment. “It’s not from Lex. It’s…from you…”
He muttered the last part so quietly she barely heard him. “From me?” She knew they needed to hurry, but her curiosity was piqued. “What is it?”
Feathercap’s lips moved, but she couldn’t hear anything. “What was that?” Again, he mouthed words but couldn’t actually bring himself to speak them, causing her to lean her head down. “One more time?”
Gulping, he tried again, managing to put the barest whisper into his words. It was enough, and Nosey felt the corners of her lips turning up as she heard what he wanted. “Alright, that seems fair. Are you ready?”
Swallowing nervously, Feathercap nodded, eyes directed firmly at the ground.
Leaning in, Nosey granted his wish, planting a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you for saving me.” She paused for a moment to enjoy the sight of the little guy turning as red as a tomato, a grin so wide that it nearly reached his ears spreading across his face. “Now, let’s go.” She started forward, suddenly feeling much better about things, even with the unamused look Silhouette was giving her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Feathercap rushing to keep up with her.
Those foals deserved something nice for what they’d done, and right now Feathercap’s nervous pace had transformed into a strut, the little guy looking like he suddenly felt ten feet tall.
“Goddess, I’ve brought the mare named Nosey, as you commanded.”
Silhouette’s report was punctuated by his lowering himself to the ground, pressing his nose to the grass once again. The sight made Nosey’s eyebrows go up slightly. He’d done the same thing when Luna had told him to stop trying to interrupt Lex’s ritual before; did he do that every time he was in her presence?
“Very good, Silhouette. And did you do so in a manner that would meet with my approval?” Nosey was cognizant of Luna looking her over as she spoke, as if to make sure she hadn’t been coerced into coming along. A moment later her eyes moved down to Feathercap, looking slightly puzzled by his appearance.
“Yes, goddess!” The enthusiasm in Silhouette’s voice was as naked as he was, as if he couldn’t wait to tell her about what a good job he’d done. “I brought her here with neither force nor threat, telling her only of your wish to speak with her!”
I knew it. That was why he wasn’t being so heavy-hoofed this time. In the past, Nosey would have preened herself in the privacy of her thoughts over her theory being correct, telling herself what a skilled reporter she was. Now, she only felt a tepid sense of self-satisfaction, one that faded quickly as she turned her attention back to the princess. “Your Majesty,” she murmured, dipping her head in a polite nod. “I’m Nosey Newsy, and I-”
“Bow down!” hissed Silhouette, his voice suddenly furious. Startled, Nosey looked back at him, seeing him glancing up at her from where he was still keeping his face in the dirt. “Both of you, get on your bellies before the goddess!”
“Er…” Nosey froze, her realization that she’d committed a faux paus by not bowing before the princess warring with her desire to spite the pony who was already one of her least favorite people.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could already see a pale-faced Feathercap starting to lower himself to the ground when Luna spoke up, causing the foal to jump back to his hooves. “It’s alright, Silhouette.”
“But goddess…!”
“No.” Luna’s face was solemn as she shook her head. “I have no right to demand that they make a show of respect for me. Not after how you bullied them in my name.” She sighed then, turning to look at Nosey as a sad look crossed her face. “That, and how poor of a job I’ve done protecting this mare’s dreams.” She strode forward then, until she was standing in front of Nosey. “Before anything else, please allow me to apologize for the nightmare you had several days past. I should never have allowed such a horrifying dream to trouble you. You have my word as a princess that it will not happen again.”
For a moment, Nosey wasn’t sure what Luna meant. Then she recalled the terrifying nightmare she’d experienced the night after Lex had rescued her from Xiriel, waking up confused and screaming. Just the thought made her blanch, the intensity of the memory threatening to overwhelm her. “I…I don’t want to talk about that,” she murmured, fighting to stop herself from trembling. Dimly, she wondered if Sonata’s calming spell had worn off, or if that nightmare was so awful that even the memory of it was more than her friend’s magic could quell.
Luna paused for just a moment, and Nosey knew that she was doing a bad job of keeping her composure, judging by the worried look on the princess’s face. “I understand,” she said at last. “But I need to ask you one thing: the monster in your dream, was it real?”
Nosey’s eyes widened, her anxiety suddenly spiking. She knew about Xiriel?! How?! “That-, it-, I don’t-” She sputtered, years of experience at keeping a lid on juicy leads and exclusive stories suddenly useless as she struggled to process how the princess could possibly have known about the monster that had tormented her.
“S-stop it!” Feathercap’s voice, quivering as much as the rest of him was, made both mares look down as he planted himself between Luna and Nosey, the latter dimly realizing that he was copying what he’d seen Fruit Crunch do a few minutes ago. “She said she d-doesn’t want to t-talk about that, so you-, um…you change the subject. Please?” He added the last part almost as an afterthought, holding up his binoculars to shield his face, peeking up over them at Princess Luna as it afraid that he’d upset her.
But if anything, the princess seemed to have the opposite reaction, smiling gently down at the colt. “You’re one of the foals who stood up to the Royal Guard just now, aren’t you? I’m told that you were very brave.”
Lowering his binoculars just a little bit, as though only slightly reassured that she wasn’t mad, Feathercap blinked. “Really?” When the princess nodded, he slowly lowered his makeshift shield. “Th-that’s right,” he gulped. “We’re the Night Mare’s Knights, and we’re not afraid of anything.”
Luna’s smile didn’t fade, but Nosey saw her expression grow slightly more interested then, crouching down so that she was more level with Feathercap. “What’s your name?”
The question seemed to surprise the colt. “Uh…F-Feathercap.”
“Well, Feathercap, would you mind doing me a favor?” Luna waited until the boy gave a hesitant nod. “I’d very much appreciate it if you and your friends could tell me all about this Night Mare that you mentioned. Do you think you could do that?” Another hesitant nod came, making Luna smile. “Excellent. In that case, would you mind running back to them and telling them that I’d like to speak with them after I’m done talking to Nosey here?”
But this time, Feathercap shook his head. “Uh-uh. I’m Miss Nosey’s protector. I’m not leaving without her!” The last part came out forcefully, obviously the result of him making himself say the words against his better judgment.
Luna blinked once at that, pursing her lips, and Nosey could see that she was trying to hold back the urge to laugh. “I understand.” She glanced up at the other mare then, and Nosey could see her eyes sparkling with repressed amusement. “You’re fortunate to have such a brave pony looking after you.”
The words were completely devoid of mockery, and Nosey felt some of her tension easing. “I know.” She sent a grateful look toward Feathercap as she spoke, glad that he’d been able to change the topic of conversation.
But her respite ended as Luna stood up, her expression turning serious. “Nosey, I know this must be hard for you, but I need you to tell me about the monster from your dream.”
“Hey!” Feathercap’s cry sounded put out more than outraged, but this time Luna didn’t pay him any mind.
Not taken completely by surprise the way she had been a moment ago, Nosey grit her teeth as she clamped down on her feelings, refusing to let her emotions get the better of her. Lex said not to tell anypony about what happened to me, and I won’t! “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But Luna was undeterred. “Nosey, please. The creature in your nightmare – that giant worm-like thing with the three heads – it’s called a belier devil, and it’s extremely dangerous. My sister and I came here because we’re worried about everypony; if you have any information about this creature, it’s imperative that you share it with me.”
“Don’t you care about the good of everypony in Vanhoover?” growled Silhouette, still lying on the ground. “Tell the goddess what she wishes to know!”
Momentarily paralyzed as she wondered what to do, Nosey felt her emotions flare up again. But instead of anxiety, it was anger that ran through her now. Lex had been the one who had been here from the beginning, fighting sea monsters and undead ponies and Xiriel, putting himself on the line again and again in order to save everyone. Now Celestia and Luna were showing up out of nowhere after everything had already been taken care of, and were acting like they were the ones who were going to save the day? The sheer indignity of it made Nosey momentarily consider disregarding what she’d been told about keeping Xiriel’s existence a secret, suddenly wanting the princess to know just how right Lex had been to hold them in such little regard. “You both-”
“Lex destroyed it.”
Nosey almost bit her tongue in shock, looking down at Feathercap. Nor was she the only one, Luna’s eyebrows rising. “I’m sorry, would you repeat that?”
Fidgeting under the intense looks he was receiving, Feathercap telekinetically lifted his binoculars so that they covered the lower half of his face again, looking at Luna. “That thing you’re talking about, the monster that looks like a big worm with three heads. I saw Lex fight it. He won.”
Feeling almost like she was about to faint, Nosey just stared at the colt, completely taken aback. “How could you possibly know about that?” she murmured.
Feathercap gave her a guilty look, then hoisted his binoculars a little by way of answer. “You saw it with those?” pressed Luna, wanting to be sure.
“I didn’t mean to,” admitted Feathercap. “I was watching-,” his eyes flicked to Nosey for a split-second, then went back to Luna. “I mean, I thought I saw some meadowlarks, and while I was looking for them, I caught sight of Lex and Miss Nosey. They were talking at first, and then…” He paused for a moment, but under Luna’s gentle prompting began to relate what he’d seen.
For her part, Nosey could only stand there, completely stupefied. The reporter in her noted that he was mentioning a few parts of the fight that she’d missed due to being intermittently unconscious from Xiriel’s abuse. But the rest of her mind was occupied with how utterly bizarre it felt to hear someone else – someone who was otherwise completely uninvolved with what had happened – talk so easily about something that was so monumental to her. I wonder if this is how everypony else felt when I wrote articles about them? she wondered.
“…and then it just burst into flames, all by itself. After that, Lex fixed Miss Nosey’s glasses and brought her back,” finished Feathercap.
Luna hesitated for a second, an uncertain look on her face, before turning to Nosey. “Is this correct?”
Numb from having listened to an outside perspective of what had happened to her, Nosey nodded. There was no point in trying to deny it now, not when Feathercap had already told her everything. Even so, the knowledge that what had happened wasn’t limited to her, Lex, Sonata, and Aria made her feel uncomfortable, like she was exposed in a horribly personal way. She suddenly wished that she was wearing something, some outfit that covered most of her up. “Did you tell anypony else about this?” she asked. “Your friends or a grownup or anyone?”
Dreading the answer, she felt a shudder of relief go through her when Feathercap shook his head. “No. I was too scared. I couldn’t look away when it was happening, but afterward I just wanted to forget that I’d seen it.”
“Which makes you even braver for having told us about it now,” added Luna with a grateful look, before turning back toward the pony still lying prostrate on the ground. “Silhouette, what you’ve heard here is not to be shared with anyone. Is that understood?”
“As you command, goddess,” murmured Silhouette reverently.
Suddenly feeling even more uncomfortable as she realized that one of the ponies she liked least in the world had heard about what happened to her, Nosey folded her ears back. “Listen, are we done here? We should be getting back…” She trailed off as she realized she had no particular reason to leave, trying to come up with an excuse.
But she didn’t have a chance before Luna spoke up. “I’m sorry for having pressed so hard about this. Would you be willing to stay if I told you that my remaining questions have nothing to do with that creature?”
“You have more?” moaned Nosey, looking back the way they’d come. She suddenly wished that Lex would come around the corner, tell Luna off, and escort her back. She knew it was impossible – the light from Aria’s body was still visible – but she found herself wishing she could see him again all the same, rather than answering Luna’s questions.
“Um…I have a question, if it’s okay,” ventured Feathercap timidly.
Silhouette gave an outraged snarl, Luna smiled. “Of course. After everything you’ve told me, you’ve earned it.”
Feathercap hesitated for a moment, gulping before he asked, “Where were you and Princess Celestia all this time? Why didn’t you help us when the city was flooded and the monsters came?”
Luna blinked. “Monsters?”
The situation suddenly reminded Nosey of when she’d first met Lex, the two of them alternating questioning each other…and she suddenly realized that was what she should be doing. Right. I can either run back to Lex, who’s busy anyway, or I can at least try and get some information to help him out after he’s done. Luna had known about Xiriel, even though she apparently didn’t know about the other monsters that had been besieging Vanhoover. It was time to find out how.
“How about we make a deal?” she offered, suddenly feeling a little better as she took the initiative. That’s right. I’m not a pony who gets interviewed. I’m the pony that interviews others. “We get to ask you a question, and then you get to ask one in return. That sounds fair, right?”
This time Silhouette jumped in before Luna could respond. “You dare bargain with the Mother of the Night?! You should be thanking her-”
“And he has to leave!” added Nosey, pointing at Silhouette.
Luna sighed. “I accept your terms.”
“Goddess!” Silhouette’s voice was like that of a child who’d just been told that they wouldn’t be getting any dinner tonight.
“Silhouette, I want you to go and retrieve the Royal Guard. Take them and wait by the pegasus chariots for myself or my sister to return.” Luna didn’t issue her command harshly, but there was no doubt that it was a command.
“…as you wish, goddess.” Grunting slightly as he rose up, his bad leg shaking from the strain, Silhouette gave Nosey a dark look as he passed by her, heading around the train station to carry out Luna’s order.
Once he’d rounded the corner, Luna turned back to the other two, her eyes settling on Feathercap. “I’ll start by answering your question first…”
“I must confess, I’m completely at a loss for words. To think that Vanhoover was in such a state and we didn’t know…”
River nodded solemnly at Princess Celestia’s admission, making sure that her expression was one of commiseration. It wasn’t very hard; she’d practiced making that face, like so many others, many times over her years of integrating herself into the upper crust of Vanhoover. The downcast expression, the slightly vacant look in her eyes – as though she were lost in sad memories – the hunched posture. All of it perfectly presented the appearance of controlled grief, matching how the princess looked at the moment.
“Yeah, even Lex had no idea it was this bad when we got here. I mean, I thought fighting a dragon was something, but this place?” Sonata shook her head in mild amazement. “This place was like…krakens and zombies and devils, oh my!” She paused for a moment, then added. “They weren’t really zombies, but it just sounds better, you know?”
River fought the urge to roll her eyes. Read the mood, you dimwit. The princess feels shocked and guilty. If you show her that you feel the same, she’ll be more inclined to regard you favorably, which means it’ll be easier to get her to do what you want. That was, after all, the entire point of this little encounter.
They’d spent the last few hours telling Princess Celestia about Lex’s adventures. Or rather, that’s what Sonata had spent the last few hours doing. River, relegated to a supporting role since she only had second- and third-hoof knowledge of the events in question, had done what she could to make Sonata’s storytelling more slanted in Lex’s favor. She’d made sure to ooh and aah over his tactical insights and grueling fights, ask pointed questions about his efforts to help everypony around him, and shoot pointed glanced at the princess whenever Sonata mentioned some act of self-sacrifice that he’d made, as if silently saying “now do you see what I see?”
It hadn’t all been that simple, of course. There had been two or three points where Sonata had gotten too wrapped up in recounting their adventures, fixating on something that she found upsetting to remember and starting to rant. One of those had been about some mare named Fencer. Another had been how one of the ponies here had made an attempt on Lex’s life. It had only been because River had heard about those incidents via the gossip that her servants had picked up on that she’d recognized that Sonata was about to blunder into admitting Lex had cursed both of those ponies for their transgressions. Fortunately, River had been able to steer the conversation to less dangerous areas, but she wasn’t sure if she’d managed to do so without making the princess suspicious.
That was something that needed to be avoided if at all possible. River had only met Princess Celestia once before – having managed to acquire an invitation to the incredibly exclusive Grand Galloping Gala several years back from an elder statesmare in Las Pegasus in return for funding her plans for a new hotel – but the elder alicorn’s kindly disposition was well-known to everypony. If she finds out that Lex is using his magic to curse anypony who steps out of line, she won’t let that go, River knew. She’ll definitely confront him over it, and if he refuses to back down, things could get bad in a hurry.
River didn’t want to imagine what would happen if things between Lex and the Royal Sisters degenerated to the point of magical conflict. But even if it didn’t get that far, Celestia and Luna could make his life difficult very easily. Lex might be a local hero after everything he’d done, but the alicorns occupied the very top of Equestria’s social structure. If they publicly denounced him, he’d very quickly become a pariah among everypony that wasn’t already close to him. He might be able to hang on to some of the goodwill he’d acquired among Vanhoover’s indigents, and maybe even a smattering of the popularity he’d accrued in Tall Tale, but he’d never be able to parley that into something more.
And if Lex’s star didn’t ascend, River knew that her own wouldn’t rise again either.
“Once we return to Canterlot, Luna and I will provide all the help we can with the recovery effort,” continued Princess Celestia. “We can host fundraisers, encourage other cities to start charity drives. Maybe even ask Sapphire Shores or Countess Coloratura to come here and hold a concert to raise money and awareness of Vanhoover’s plight.” She looked out at the remnants of the crowd as she spoke, most of the ponies having wandered back to the camp as the night had dragged on, before turning her eyes back toward River and Sonata. “We’ll do everything in our power to encourage all of Equestria to help out.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” murmured River, making a deep bow. “As someone who’s lived here all her life, I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”
“Ooh! If they’re holding a concert I could sing too!” Sonata’s eyes sparkled at the thought. “In fact, I could totes do a show all by myself! I’ve been working on some songs about me and Lex’s adventures, and that’d be the perfect way to debut them!” She was practically bouncing in place, clearly thrilled at the prospect.
“Yes, about that…” Princess Celestia’s tone made River tense, not liking the sound of it. “I have something I’d like to ask you about.”
“Hm? Sure,” grinned Sonata, clearly not having heard the catch in Celestia’s voice. “What?”
“You’ve both been telling me about what Lex has done since he left Canterlot, but I can’t help but notice something that you haven’t mentioned.”
Sonata blinked, clearly having no idea what the princess was talking about, and River made a similar gesture. But while she was sure Sonata’s confusion was genuine, River felt herself growing nervous; Celestia had quite clearly found some sort of discrepancy or notable omission in what they’d told her, but what? River knew that she wasn’t overly familiar with Lex’s exploits up until now, but she was sure she knew more about them than Celestia did. What could she have noticed that had raised her suspicions? “What would that be, Your Majesty?” River said, making sure she sounded only idly curious.
When Celestia looked at her then, her expression hadn’t changed, but River had the distinct impression that her eyes had somehow become more penetrating. “That you have a scythe-shaped mark on your face.”
River froze, feeling her blood run cold.
Across from her, she saw Sonata’s eyes widen, and she mentally cursed the little airhead. You’ve been sitting across from me all night! How could you have forgotten that I have this?! How could I have forgotten that I have this?! But she knew how. She hadn’t looked in a mirror since before Lex had cursed her, all of the ones she owned being inside the manor that she couldn’t set hoof in without feeling sick to her stomach. She’d only known the mark was there because Trotsworth had mentioned it when he’d been doting on her when she’d first come back, and she’d barely thought about it even then. After sleeping outside, panning for gold at the river’s edge (the sun having been too low in the sky to let her see her reflection in the water), and coming up with a plan to win Lex’s favor, the scythe blood-mark on her cheek had been the last thing on her mind.
Knowing that she couldn’t stay silent, that she had to think up some benign excuse, River wracked her brain. But before she could think of something, Celestia spoke up again. “When we met before, at the Grand Galloping Gala, you struck me as a very fashion-conscious mare,” she prompted.
“I did?” uttered River dumbly. A small part of her was amazed that the princess remembered that encounter; it had to have been over ten years ago now! The rest of her, however, was vaguely aware that she had lost all control over the conversation, fighting to keep the panic off of her face.
“Very much so.” Celestia was smiling again, but that didn’t make River feel better at all. “You described your ensemble in detail for me, and then remarked on how it was nowhere near as radiant as I was despite not wearing an outfit at all. So I was wondering why somepony with such a taste for appearances would have such an unusual design on her face.” She paused, letting that statement sink in. “Especially one that looks just like the weapon Lex has been using.”
She knows, realized River with a wave of despair. She might not know the specifics, but she knows that Lex did something to me. A surge of black humor ran through her then, and she had to fight down a mirthless laugh. Here she was panicking about failing to hide a horrible curse from one of the few ponies who could have done something about it. Maybe I should just tell her, she thought suddenly. Maybe I should just abandon this entire plan. It was still possible to back out of supporting Lex. It would mean giving up her dreams of living the high life, but that was better than him losing everything after she’d tied her fate to his. It wouldn’t be hard. I could say that I was only supporting him like this because I was afraid of what he’d do to me, or to my son, if I didn’t. I-
“It’s a show of solidity!” blurted Sonata.
Celestia blinked, looking over at the other mare. “A what?”
“You know! One of those things people do to show they’re on board with the program! They show solitaire-ity!”
Celestia’s smile returned, though smaller than before. “I think you mean ‘solidarity,’ and that’s-”
“-completely correct!” exclaimed River.
A look of mild surprise crossed Celestia’s face then. “It is?”
Sonata nodded so hard that it must have rattled what few brains she had. “Totes! See, River was all like, upset that she got in Lex’s face, so she-”
“-used my, er, lipstick to draw this on my face!” finished River in rush. Seeing the princess’s skeptical expression, she kept going. “After all, I wanted Lex to know how serious I am about atoning for how I acted before. This is just one of the ways that I’m trying to show that I’m supporting him with everything I have now. In fact…” Inspiration struck then. “In fact, I’ve taken a vow that, until Vanhoover is restored, I’m giving up all the benefits of my wealth!”
That seemed to do the trick, as Celestia’s eyes widened slightly. “And Lex motivated you to do this?”
“Indeed,” nodded River, her confidence coming back as a new narrative settled into place. “His selflessness served as an example for me. Here I was wearing fancy clothes and eating fine food and living in a manor staffed with servants while my friends and neighbors were living like animals!” She swept a hoof toward the camp. “For their sake, I’ve not only foregone all of those things, but also elected to wear this mark on my cheek – the symbol of Lex’s weapon – to show my support for his efforts.”
“Yeah, what she said!” added Sonata.
“I understand,” smiled Celestia. This time the expression reached her eyes, and River had to struggle not to heave a sigh of relief. “It takes a kind heart and a generous spirit to sacrifice your own comfort for the sake of others. But what you gain in return is more precious than any dress or dessert. I’m proud of you for finding it within yourself to make such a vow.”
River smiled back, mentally cheering that she’d managed to step back from the brink of disaster. “Thank you, Your Majesty, I-, oh! Look!” River pointed, and both Sonata and Princess Celestia turned to see what had caught her attention.
It wasn’t hard to spot. Near the back of the train station, the luminous figure that was Aria was slowly lowering back toward the ground, the light radiating from her noticeably-smaller body beginning to dim. Standing nearby, Lex’s chanting had taken on a softer edge, his gesticulations slowing.
Lex didn’t allow himself to relax as the ritual neared its conclusion.
Rather, he sharpened his focus, refusing to allow the anticipation of reaching the end of the procedure to dull his attention to the remaining details lest he make a mistake. In his current condition, he knew, that would have been all too easy. His throat ached from hours of chanting, and the soreness in his muscles had returned with a vengeance, reminding him of how many times he’d ignored Doctor House Call’s advice that he rest and recuperate. All of it contributed to the fatigue that hung over him, lethargy and discomfort threatening to erode his concentration if he didn’t fight them off.
Instead, he kept his thoughts fixated on the task at hoof. Long minutes passed as he continued to gesture and chant, his eyes firmly focused on the luminous form that was Aria’s body, noticeably smaller now. The light shining from it had grown dimmer as well, the energy that he’d needed to channel through it lessening now that most of the major physical alterations were complete. As a side effect, her unmoving form slowly floated down toward the ground, no longer caught in the groundswell caused by having so much power rushing through her.
A few minutes later, the procedure came to an end. Lex pronounced the final word of the incantation, a single motion from his hoof accompanying it, and then it was over. The last of the light faded away from Aria’s body as she gently touched down, unmoving save for the gentle rise and fall of her chest.
Murmurs went up from the few ponies that had stayed to watch the entire thing, several of them nudging companions that had fallen asleep at some point. The only illumination came from several unicorns that were using their magic to conjure lights from their horns, the eastern sky still showing no hint of the coming dawn. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to let him see the results of his magic.
The pony lying unconscious on the ground in front of him was a vision of beauty. Like Sonata, her body was perfectly sculpted, having a trim frame that was replete with generous curves. Her coat was a pale, light grayish fuchsia, the color accenting the soft yet brilliant aquamarine highlights in her moderate purple mane and tail. On her flank was her cutie mark: a five-pointed star superimposed over a musical note. Nor did he miss what wasn’t there: her neck was now smooth and unblemished, with no trace of the scar that had been there before.
But what struck Lex most of all was her face. Even in her original form, he’d been able to glimpse a slight resemblance to that of Sonata. Now, that resemblance was more pronounced, catching his eye and making him pause as he mentally compared her looks to that of her sister…
“Oh my gosh, it worked!”
Sonata’s voice made Lex start, embarrassed as he realized that he’d been staring. The feeling skyrocketed a moment later as he looked up and realized that Celestia and Luna had returned from wherever they’d gone off to, standing apart from the crowd as they looked back at him. Nor were they alone, with Nosey and River Bank nearby. The latter made Lex narrow his eyes, realizing that she must have been talking to one or the other of the princesses. The prospect of that was unsettling enough that he barely noticed one of the foals that had stood up to the Royal Guard – the small colt with the binoculars – going over to where Fruit Crunch and Fiddlesticks were sleeping, quietly rousing them.
Heedless of all the eyes on them, Sonata galloped over to them, stopping just a few feet away from Aria as she examined her with great interest. “Oh wow! You really did it! She’s really a pony now!” She grinned, looking up at him. “Is it okay for me to try and wake her up? I don’t want to mess things up if you’re not done! Come to think of it, are you done?”
A look of uncertainty crossed her face then, and despite being barely ten feet away from him, Sonata reared up on her hind legs and waved her forelegs in the air, as though trying to signal him. “Lex!” she called, her voice louder now, enunciating each word carefully. “Lex! Is the ritual over? Can you talk and stuff normally now? If you can’t, give me a signal-, no, wait.” She looked down then, her voice changing to a mutter as she frowned in thought. “If it’s not you totes wouldn’t be able to signal me. Oh! I got it!” She looked up, all smiles again. “If it’s not over, sit there and keep doing nothing like that!”
For a moment, Lex wasn’t sure if he should be annoyed by Sonata’s antics or grateful that the spectacle she was making of herself was overshadowing how he’d been momentarily caught up in Aria’s looks. Instead, he put the matter out of his thoughts, knowing that there were more important things he needed to be doing. Not bothering to answer Sonata, he instead stepped forward, crossing the few feet between himself and the unconscious pony in front of him. “Aria,” he called imperiously. “Wake up.”
When she didn’t immediately respond he felt a flutter of anxiety. The spell Sonata had used to render her unconscious should have worn off by now, but he didn’t dare reach out and try to jostle her awake. The ritual had ended without any problems or irregularities, but he’d still never done this before, and so wasn’t willing to take it for granted that she was alright.
But there’s one thing I can do now, he realized. Gritting his teeth, he channeled magic through himself and into the circlet on his brow, ignoring the burning pain the effort sent through him. Instead, he called upon its magic, utilizing its ability to let him see into the magical spectrum as he looked Aria over, kneeling down beside her as he began examining the magical pathways in her body.
He was barely cognizant of Sonata circling around and moving to crouch beside him. “So, like, is she okay?”
Lex didn’t immediately answer, his eyes moving across Aria’s body again – spending several seconds staring at her cutie mark – before giving a crisp nod. “From what I can tell, the ritual was a success. She-”
“Great!” gushed Sonata. “Now let’s get her up and at ‘em! I bet she can’t wait to start singing again!” Springing to her hooves, Sonata scooped up Aria in her forelegs and started shaking her like a ragdoll. “HEY ARIA!” she bellowed right in her face. “WAKE UP ALREADY! LEX SAYS YOU GOT YOUR VOICE BACK!”
Aria’s eyes snapped open. Instantly, her legs began flailing as she struggled to extricate herself from Sonata’s grasp. “Get off me you idiot!” The words – spoken rather than whispered – made Sonata freeze, giving Aria the opportunity she needed to wrench herself free. Stumbling, she lurched unsteadily before falling over, glaring at her sister. “I swear, I’m gonna pound you for th-”
“It worked!” Suddenly teary-eyed, Sonata couldn’t help but smile. “You sound like you again!”
“Of course I do,” groused Aria. “Who else would…would…” She trailed off as she suddenly realized that she was speaking out loud, her eyes going wide. One hoof went to her throat, rubbing it softly. “My voice…” she murmured, as if afraid to speak too loudly lest she lose it again. “I can…my voice…” She took a shuddering breath, blinking her eyes. “It’s really back. I’m really back!”
“You sound totes like you did before!” nodded Sonata. “I’m, like, super happy for you!”
But Aria wasn’t listening. Instead, she slowly climbed to her hooves, legs wobbling as she figured out how to distribute her weight. Once she was steady, she closed her eyes and tilted her head back, opening her mouth as she began to sing. The melody that came out of her mouth was wordless, her pitch rising and falling as she scaled through a variety of notes and back again, moving rapidly through some while holding others for several seconds. She stopped only when she ran out of breath, immediately inhaling to start again.
“That’s enough,” ordered Lex, holding out his left foreleg toward her, the one with the barbed wire around it. At the command, the Night Mare’s power lashed out toward her…to no effect. It passed right through her as if she wasn’t there, and Aria didn’t respond to him as she began to sing another wordless tune.
Frowning, Lex put his leg back down. This hadn’t been unexpected; he hadn’t been able to take control of Sonata like that either, so it made perfect sense that Aria would become immune to it once he’d changed her into a pony. But although that did give him some small insight into why this power only affected certain creatures and not others, the more immediate concern was that Aria was now back at her full strength, and he’d just lost his primary method of controlling her. No matter, he decided after a few seconds of consideration. If she tries to challenge me, I’ll just find another way to subdue her.
Having confirmed his resolve, Lex moved over to where Aria was still vocalizing. He was about to tell her to stop again, only for her to quiet down on her own, turning to look at him. “You kept your promise.”
“I told you I would,” he replied flatly, vaguely irritated that she’d apparently still had some doubts. “Now, you’ve confirmed that your voice works, but there are a few other things I want to make certain of. First, I want to make sure that your ability to perceive tactile sensation was properly restored after your body was reconfigured. Are you able to feel a sense of touch?”
“Hmm?” Other than the mildly inquisitive grunt, Aria didn’t answer. Instead, she was just looking at him, her eyes hooded as she smiled.
For some reason the sight seemed to put Sonata on edge, her own smile diminishing. “Um, Lex, maybe you can ask Aria about her taco-tile whatever later?” She moved to put herself between him and her sister, trying to usher him away from her. “You’re probably really tired, right? I bet some rest would totes hit the spot right about now. We can go back to the train station, lay you down on a nice, um…hard bench, and pick this up later.”
But Lex refused to be moved. “I want to verify that the ritual worked as intended with no side effects, Sonata. Even a small imperfection could have grave consequences.”
Fidgeting, Sonata bit her lip. “Yeah, but-”
“You heard him,” interrupted Aria, pushing Sonata to the side as she stepped closer to Lex. “Now get lost. Lex and I have some unfinished business to take care of.” She turned back to him then, smirking. “You were saying?”
Lex found himself tensing. He’d only heard Aria’s voice for a few seconds now, but there was a tone in it that hadn’t been there a moment ago, a tension that he couldn’t place. Was she getting ready to attack him? If so, I’ll make her regret it! he swore silently. “Your sense of touch,” he repeated. “Are you able to feel things normally?”
Aria took another step closer to him, closer than was polite, and this time her voice was practically a purr as she spoke. “Let’s find out.”
Lex had been expecting her to use magic, to quickly sing or chant a spell at him from extremely close range. As such, he was caught completely by surprise when she lunged forward and pressed her lips against his, kissing him with a passion that made it clear she was thinking about the bedroom rather than a battlefield. Barely hearing Sonata’s outraged cry over Aria’s hungry moan, Lex realized that he’d only been half-right about Aria’s intentions.
She fully intended to go on the attack, just not at all in the way that he’d anticipated.
Ticket Stub heard Coal Hopper sigh as she, along with him and the rest of the crew, turned to regard their engineer. It had only been a few minutes since Prince Shining Armor and several members of the Royal Guard had escorted the ponies that Princess Cadance had healed – as well as the doctors that had come from Vanhoover with them, those two stowaways, and that pony that she’d actually brought back to life (something Ticket Stub was still having trouble wrapping his head around) – to Canterlot General. The train crew had followed them there, though for the life of him Ticket Stub wasn’t certain why they had. It wasn’t like Shining Armor had said he’d wanted to talk to any of them, after all. And yet, not going after them had just felt wrong somehow…the idea of staying behind and not seeing things through feeling vaguely unsettling in a way he couldn’t define.
“I just want to say that that was some really good effort back there!” continued the engineer. “Even though the Princess and the Royal Guard showed up and took care of everything, you all still did a great job!”
“This from the guy who froze up as soon as he saw Princess Cadance?” snorted Coal Hopper. Although her voice was soft, it still managed to carry through the waiting area of the hospital, causing several members of the train crew to snicker softly. A few shot amused glances her way, all of which she ignored.
“That would have surprised anypony,” murmured Ticket Stub apologetically, something he’d gotten used to doing over the last few days. He hadn’t told anyone about the carnage Coal Hopper had stumbled onto at the edge of Vanhoover, knowing instinctively that something so upsetting shouldn’t be treated like gossip, but her sullen and withdrawn attitude had made it clear to everypony that something had happened to her. As the only one she’d confided in, Ticket Stub had taken it upon himself to support her however he could, which often meant smoothing over the hackles she’d raised.
Which, at the moment, quite clearly included their engineer. “A-anyway, you guys should all feel proud of yourselves! You showed a lot of heart tonight! A lot of spirit! A lot of-”
“Hustle?”
This time Ticket Stub wasn’t able to smooth things over on Coal Hopper’s behalf, too busy trying to stop himself from laughing at the mare’s sarcastic quip. But it was an uphill battle; in one word she’d completely skewered the engineer. He really does sound like a coach trying to give his team a pep talk! After the stress and tension of the last few days, the comparison was so absurd that it seemed hysterical, and Ticket Stub had to bite his own tongue to keep himself under control. Nor was he the only one, as he could see several other ponies choking back laughter.
The engineer, however, was not one of them, instead turning red as he tried desperately to maintain his failing poise. “So, um, now that we’re, uh, all here…” He paused for a moment, rallying himself with almost visible effort. “Now that the crisis is over, I just want to say that you should all pat yourselves on the back! You did good, so now you should-”
“Go and hit the showers?” asked Coal Hopper sarcastically.
That was all it took, and Ticket Stub doubled over, laughing uncontrollably. Like a dam bursting, his reaction destroyed everpony else’s self-control, causing the rest of the train crew to collapse into howls of mirth, several of them laughing so hard that they fell over. The only two that weren’t howling were Coal Hopper – surveying the scene with a smirk of satisfaction – and the scowling engineer, his face darkening in embarrassment. “Everypony quiet down!” he yelled. “Quiet down!”
But it was hopeless. Ticket Stub could practically feel the weight of the last few days falling off of him with every laugh that shook his frame, and it was glorious. Tears fell from his eyes as he slid to the floor, his legs no longer able to support him. All around him, ponies were in a similar state, slamming their hooves onto the ground or kicking their legs in the air in hilarity.
Finally giving up the ghost, the engineer shot a dark look at Coal Hopper. “You’re on cleaning duty tonight!” he snapped. “We’re heading back to the Crystal Empire first thing tomorrow morning, and I want that train spotless before we go!” When her only reaction was a snort, he turned to the others, still howling. “As for the rest of you!” he yelled. “We’re leaving the station at eight o’clock sharp! Be there and be ready to work!” With that, he turned and stomped out of the waiting area, face still red.
After he left, it took almost five minutes for the laughter to die down. Even after several nurses came by to scold them for making a ruckus in a hospital so late at night, the uproar only gradually subsided. But as soon as it did, the entire train crew started to head for the doors, breaking off into groups as they chatted with each other about what they were going to do now.
It didn’t take long before Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper were the only ones left, the former still chuckling as he rubbed his eyes. “Well, that was something,” he murmured.
“I guess,” shrugged Coal Hopper.
Normally her recalcitrance would have made Ticket Stub feel uncertain about what, if anything, he should say, but the lingering remnants of his mirth were enough to keep his insecurities at bay. Instead, he found himself looking after where the rest of the crew had wandered out into the night. “It’s funny,” he mused. “When Princess Cadance and Shining Armor and everypony just left the train station, I felt…I don’t know. Lost. Like I couldn’t stop being involved in everything that was happening, even though it was all nerve-wracking and awful, you know? But now…” He shook his head, letting out a slow breath. “Now it’s like I can let it all go and get back to my normal life.” He turned to look at her. “Does that make sense?”
“Closure,” she answered simply, keeping her eyes trained on the front doors of the hospital where everypony else had gone. “You couldn’t let it go because you needed closure.”
Ticket Stub blinked. What she’d said was interesting, but not nearly so much as the fact that she’d just said an entire sentence without being biting or sarcastic! “What do you mean?”
Coal Hopper shrugged, still not making eye contact with him. “It’s something my dad told me, after my mom passed away. I was just a little filly at the time, and I was so upset that I ran away instead of going to her funeral. Afterward I couldn’t…” She sighed, giving him a sidelong glance, looking as though finishing the story was a drag.
Ticket Stub was about to say that she didn’t have to go on if she didn’t want to, when she started talking again, returning her gaze to the glass doors. “I was pretty bad off for a while, until my dad sat me down and told me that until I dealt with the fact that she was gone I wasn’t going to feel any better. Of course, I didn’t want to hear it, so he grabbed me and took me to her grave, kicking and screaming, and made me tell her goodbye. I cried my eyes out at the time, but he was right: after that I started feeling better.” She shrugged, as though she hadn’t just told him something incredibly personal. “When something awful happens, some big, terrible thing that’s more than you know how to deal with, you need something to let you know that it’s finally over. Then you can move on.”
“And that’s what just happened?” Ticket Stub waved a hoof at the waiting area. “Our engineer tries to make a speech and you make us laugh and suddenly we know it’s all over?”
Coal Hopper shrugged again, turning and slinking over to one of the chairs in the waiting area. “You’re the one who said you could go back to your normal life now.”
Ticket Stub was pretty sure he’d just been dismissed, but he didn’t move. “What about you?”
“What about me?” The acerbity he’d come to expect from her was back then, suffusing her words as well as the look she gave him.
But for some reason, even though the levity he’d felt before had completely evaporated by now, he still didn’t feel put off. “How do you feel?”
She snorted, turning away from him in favor of looking at an empty hallway. It became clear after a few seconds that she wasn’t going to answer him, but Ticket Stub didn’t take his eyes off of her. Eventually she turned back toward him, her jaw clenching. “You really don’t know how to take a hint, do you?”
“You said that we all have closure now,” replied Ticket Stub, moving to sit in the chair across from her. “But you don’t look like you do. Why?” She just glared at him in stony silence, and part of Ticket Stub was flabbergasted that he didn’t feel the slightest bit intimidated by her the way he had so recently. The rest of him was focused completely on her. “This is because of what you told me before, isn’t it?”
He didn’t have to specify what he was talking about, Coal Hopper immediately rolling her eyes. “Gee, whatever gave you that idea?” she snorted, her voice thick with sarcasm. “You’re a real detective, you know that? A regular Shadow Spade.”
“Coal-”
She held out a hoof, and he stopped talking immediately. “Look,” she growled. “I’m going to wait here until Prince Shining Armor comes back, and then I’m going to tell him what I saw, okay? That’s what I need to do to put all this behind me. After that, I’m going to grab a bite to eat and head back to the train. I’ll catch a few hours’ sleep, and then start cleaning it up so our engineer-turned-hoofball-coach doesn’t blow his stack. Satisfied?”
Ticket Stub paused for a second, then nodded, leaning back in his chair. “Okay.”
Coal Hopper frowned. “Yeah, no. You see, when I said all that, I meant that I’d do it by myself. As in: without you here. Get me?”
Ticket Stub nodded, making no move to get up. “Completely.”
Coal Hopper leaned forward dangerously. “Do you want me to beat you up? Because if you do, I can oblige-”
“Why don’t you just go to the castle?”
“…what?”
“Why don’t you just go to the castle?” repeated Ticket Stub. “Princess Cadance is there. You could tell her what happened.”
“What kind of stupid question is that? I’m not going there for the same reason that none of us followed her there when she left with those other ponies: because we’re not allowed there.”
“You would be if you told the guards that you had information about what happened,” pointed out Ticket Stub. “Which you do.”
“Look, we’re already here!” Coal Hopper sat back on her haunches, throwing out her forelegs to indicate the waiting area. “It’s easier just to wait for the prince to come back-”
“What if he doesn’t come back?” interrupted Ticket Stub. Inwardly, he marveled at the fact that he’d voluntarily interrupted her. He had no doubt that she could beat him up if she wanted! “This is a big hospital, it has more than one entrance. He’s probably going to want to rush back to his wife since she’s accompanying a bunch of ponies who said they killed the pony she, you know…resuscitated.”
“That’s really how you’re going to refer to it?” snorted Coal Hopper.
“So he might take a different way out,” concluded Ticket Stub, pretending he hadn’t heard that last part.
Coal Hopper glared at him for a long moment. “What’s your point?” she spat.
Ticket Stub took a moment to put his thoughts in order before speaking. Despite whatever weird confidence had gripped him, he felt his stomach clench slightly, knowing that if he messed this up she’d mess him up. “I’ve never seen you be the sort of pony who waits around for someone else,” he began. “When those ponies stopped us up at Windigo Way, you got in their faces about it. When you thought that Princess Cadance was going to hold us up from getting those injured ponies to the hospital, you told her so. So the way you’re just sitting here waiting for Prince Shining Armor right now…”
Narrowing her eyes, Coal Hopper scoffed. “What? You think I’m lying, is that it? That I’m not really going to tell him what I saw in Vanhoover?” She leaned back in her chair then, giving him a condescending smirk. “Let me tell you something: if that was the case, I wouldn’t have bothered lying about it to begin with. I would have just walked right out of here with everypony else. So chew on that.”
“Coal Hopper…”
“Or, you know what? Since you don’t think I’m being honest, maybe I’ll just leave right now and let you tell them for me. Since you can’t seem to keep your nose out of my business-”
“Listen to me-”
“For that matter, I could write down what I saw and mail it to them instead of saying it face-to-face!”
Ticket Stub bit his lip, wondering if she even heard herself. If you were serious about either of those options, you’d already be doing them, he knew. The fact that she’d not only told him that she needed to tell either the prince or princess what she’d seen in order to move on had been one thing, but for her to then tell him that story from her childhood, when she was acting so much more passive than she usually did…it couldn’t be a coincidence. It just couldn’t. I hope I’m right about this… "Coal Hopper!"
“What?” she snapped, looking ready to bite his head off.
Licking his lips, Ticket Stub plunged ahead. “You said…before, you said your dad had to drag you kicking and screaming in front of your mom’s grave and make you do what you needed to do…” He trailed off, letting the point stand on its own.
Coal Hopper’s eyes widened, and she practically leaped to her hooves. Ticket Stub didn’t get up, trying his best not to faint; the look on her face was one of controlled…fury? Shock? Fear? He couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t sure she could either, one foreleg raised like she was either about to take a swing at him or start running.
After several tense seconds, she slowly lowered her hoof back to the ground, letting out a slow breath. “Alright…here’s what’s going to happen,” she said in a strangled voice. “You are going to accompany me to the castle and watch me tell Princess Cadance to her face what I saw, and then you’re going to get down on all fours and admit you were wrong about me trying to avoid telling them about it, got it?”
Gulping, Ticket Stub nodded, certain that he’d regret it if he did anything else besides agree wholeheartedly.
“And then you’re going to apologize for being such a colossal jerk about all this.”
She turned and started walking as she spoke, forcing Ticket Stub to get up and stumble after her. “R-right!” he called, his previous confidence being replaced by jittery relief.
“And then you’re going to buy me dinner. And if I even think you’re thinking that you’re going to get lucky afterward, I’m going to clobber you and dump you off this mountain.”
“Okay.” Hearing her usual surliness returning to her voice, Ticket Stub smiled as he followed Coal Hopper toward the castle.
Granola Bar shot Slip ‘n’ Slide an exasperated look, one foreleg pausing in mid-motion as she reached for the basket of fruit on a nearby table. “Nopony’s going to Tartarus.”
“We all just confessed to murder,” shot back Slip, his voice overflowing with cynicism. “What do you think Princess Cadance is going to do? Make us all write ‘I will not kill other ponies’ a hundred times each?” He threw himself into a large chair, his expression despairing as he sank into the cushions. “No, we’re all going straight onto the express train to the bottom of Tartarus, where we’ll spend the rest of our lives dealing with the freezing cold and the giant spiders.”
Across the room, Hopscotch sat up from where she’d been reclining on a couch lined with red velvet. “There are giant spiders in Tartarus?” she asked, eyes widening in horror.
“It’s what our mom used to tell us when we’d misbehave,” answered Funshine, cutting off Slip ‘n’ Slide before the other stallion could reply. “If we wouldn’t go to sleep after she’d tucked us in, she’d get mad and say that rowdy little colts who wouldn’t settle down got sent to Tartarus.” He corners of his lips turned up at the memory, and he tore himself away from the magnificent view of Canterlot that was out the window to look at Hopscotch. “Slip always hated the cold, and I was scared of spiders when I was young-”
“Right,” interjected Slip ‘n’ Slide with a sarcastic snort. “When you were young.”
“I don’t want to hear that from a guy who still bursts into tears if he gets hit in the face with a snowball,” retorted Funshine.
“Hey!”
Ignoring his brother’s yell of indignation, Funshine continued with his story. “So anyway, our mom put the two together, saying that it was a place where it was always freezing and was full of giant spiders. But it was just something she made up to get us to quiet down and go to sleep; it’s not really like that there.”
“Oh.” Hopscotch started to settle back down, a relieved look on her face, before something occurred to her. “So, what is it like in Tartarus?”
Slip ‘n’ Slide smirked, watching as Funshine froze in place, trying to come up with an answer that he didn’t have. “Er, well, um, it’s…it’s bad, obviously. I mean, even without all the monsters imprisoned there it’s still, you know…bad.”
Funshine’s last word was uttered in conjunction with a glance at Granola Bar, silently asking for help. Taking pity on him, the other mare sighed, swallowing a mouthful of grapes before going and next to Hopscotch on the luxurious couch. “Nopony knows what Tartarus is like, except for the princesses and maybe some of the Royal Guard. And we’re not going to know what it’s like either, because Princess Cadance isn’t going to send us there, so you don’t need to worry about anything.” She punctuated her declaration by reaching out and tousling the younger mare’s mane, causing Hopscotch to giggle lightly.
“Maybe she should.”
The statement, uttered by Fencer, was enough to draw all four of her friends’ attention. In the ten minutes since Princess Cadance had dropped them off in an extravagant waiting room in one wing of Canterlot Castle, Fencer hadn’t uttered a word nor helped herself to any of the amenities available to them. Instead, she’d gone to a corner of the room and silently brooded, her expression downcast. “Maybe Tartarus is where we belong,” she continued. “Or at least, where I belong.”
“Oh, not this again!” snapped Funshine. “Look, Fencer, I get it. It’s awful that Princess Cadance can’t bring back Turbo, or anypony else from Vanhoover, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep beating yourself up like this!”
He was going to say more, moving toward her, but Granola Bar reached out and extended a hoof, barring his way. Giving him a warning look, her features softened as she turned back to Fencer. “I think what Funshine’s trying to say is that you’ve already made all the amends you possibly could. You publicly apologized for everything you did when Lex sentenced you, and you apologized to Cozy just now. You bore those horrible curses with more grace than anyone else could have. You guarded all of those sick ponies on the way here. And do I need to mention your heroics against that horde of ghouls?” Sliding off the couch, she made her way over to the taller mare’s side and put a foreleg around her. “Fencer-, no, Garden, you’ve worked incredibly hard to redeem yourself. I’m sure that Princess Cadance will see that.”
“That’s right!” piped up Hopscotch, following after Granola Bar and moving around to Fencer’s other side. “Even Lex forgave you, remember?”
“And even if we do get thrown into Tartarus, at least we’ll all be together.” Slip ‘n’ Slide’s voice was flippant, but the look on his face made it clear that the sentiment was genuine.
“You guys…” Fencer shook her head ruefully, but she couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “I hope you’re right, but if it goes the other way-”
“Garden…”
Holding up a hoof as Granola Bar started to protest, Fencer kept going. “Look, I don’t…maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve done all that I can do to try and make up for what I did back in Vanhoover.”
“What we did,” corrected Funshine.
“But even if that’s the case,” continued Fencer, “I’m not going to protest if Princess Cadance says that I still deserve to be punished, and if that happens I don’t want you guys to do what you did back at the station, do you understand me? I don’t want anypony else to sacrifice themselves for me.” The words “like Turbo did” hung in the air, unspoken but obvious.
“No,” protested Hopscotch. “If she-, if Princess Cadance asks us who was responsible for what happened to that stallion, I’m still going to say it was me.”
“So will I,” added Granola Bar.
“Me too,” chimed in Funshine.
“…eh, once you’ve confessed to murder once, what’s a second time?” sighed Slip ‘n’ Slide, before putting his face in his hooves and giving a low moan of despair. “Sweet Celestia, we’re all gluttons for punishment.”
His melodramatics were enough to earn a brief chuckle from Fencer. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m sure that by now the princess knows you all were lying.”
Hopscotch frowned, tilting her head in confusion. “What do you mean?”
Fencer’s smile took on a resigned edge. “Where do you think Princess Cadance is right now?”
“Well, she looked pretty worn out after using all that magic,” offered Funshine. “Maybe she’s taking a power nap or something before she gets around to questioning us?”
“I’d guess that she wants to make sure that Cozy is okay, along with…” Granola Bar stopped speaking suddenly, her eyes going wide as she realized what Fencer had been getting at. “Oh no!”
Her sudden exclamation made Slip ‘n’ Slide sit bolt upright. “What?! What is it now?!”
“She brought him back to life!” moaned Granola Bar.
Slip ‘n’ Slide looked confused for a moment, then his eyes widened as well. “Oh…”
“Hang on? You mean that Pillow guy, Cozy’s husband?” Funshine blinked, trying to figure out what was going on. “So the princess brought him back. Isn’t that a good thing?”
“Yes,” admitted Granola Bar. “But now it doesn’t matter that we all confessed to killing him. Princess Cadance can just ask him which of us it was!”
Now it was Funshine’s turn to have his eyes go wide, with Hopscotch doing the same an instant later. The latter threw both of her forelegs around Fencer, as though worried she was going to be snatched away at any second. “That’s not fair!”
“It’s more than fair,” replied Fencer gently. “This is what’s supposed to happen. I’m the one to blame for his-, for Pillow’s death.” She forced herself to say the name of the pony she’d killed. “I appreciate what you all were trying to do for me, but now that it’s been undone I’m telling you: please don’t try anything else like that. I don’t want to avoid what’s coming to me, and I don’t want any of you to get caught up in it.”
“What do you want?”
Slip ‘n’ Slide’s sudden question made Fencer blink, not having expected that. “I’m sorry?”
“What do you want?” he repeated, climbing out of his cushioned chair. Walking toward her until he was almost within foreleg’s reach, he gave her a serious look. “This whole time you’ve been talking about what you don’t want to happen or what you think you deserve, but you haven’t said what you actually want for yourself.”
Fencer actually recoiled from the words, shrinking back as though they were painful to hear. “I…that doesn’t matter,” she protested.
“That’s all that matters,” countered Funshine. “Right now, this moment, what do you want to do?”
“Don’t think about Princess Cadance, or where we are, or anything else,” added Granola Bar. “If you could do anything you wanted, without worrying about the consequences, what would you do?”
Hopscotch, still holding Fencer around her middle, didn’t say anything, but she gave her a gentle squeeze, smiling up at her.
For a long moment, nopony said anything. Fencer’s ears folded back as she looked at each of her friends in turn, knowing from the expressions that they wore that they weren’t going to let this go. That knowledge made her heart ache, and before she could stop herself the words came tumbling out.
“I want to go back to Vanhoover.”
Another pregnant pause ensued, as each of Fencer’s friends had a different reaction. Granola Bar wore a smile. Hopscotch looked curious. Funshine’s jaw was hanging open. Slip ‘n’ Slide was biting his lip, a pained look on his face as one eye twitched madly.
Granola Bar was the first to speak. “Okay,” she said simply. “Why?”
Fencer slumped in place, as though admitting to something shameful. “Because I want to help everypony there.” Heaving a sigh that seemed to come from her hooves, she picked herself up, forcing herself to make eye contact with the others. “I don’t know if I’m just trying to make myself feel better, or if I’m still trying to atone, or something else, but these last few days…when we were guarding those sick ponies on the train…when Lex said that he wanted me to do this, to protect Equestria…then everything, all of this…it didn’t feel so bad. If I can still help everypony there, if I can do anything to try and make things a little better for everyone still living there, then that’s what I want to do.”
She watched nervously as the other four glanced at each other, knowing looks passing between them. “Alright,” said Hopscotch at last, disentangling herself from Fencer before proceeding to a nearby window and peering out it. “I’m not sure,” she said after a moment, “but I think the train we came in on is still there.”
“We’ll need to make sure we don’t alert any of the guards.” Funshine glanced at the room’s only door as he spoke. “I didn’t hear any hoofsteps outside the door after the princess left, but there are probably some at the end of the hall.”
Fencer blinked. “Hang on…what are you talking about?”
“How to get back to Vanhoover, obviously.” Granola Bar’s voice was matter-of-fact, as though the answer was a foregone conclusion. “We’ll need to get moving fast, before Princess Cadance comes back. Maybe we could make some sort of diversion, draw her attention elsewhere?”
“What are you-, no!” Fencer stomped a hoof, agitated. “This isn’t what I wanted!”
“You literally just said exactly the opposite,” pointed out Slip ‘n’ Slide, going over to another window and looking up. “I don’t see any pegasus guards outside, but it’s pretty dark.”
The calm retort made Fencer sputter. “Yeah, but-, no! Listen to me! There’s no need for us to break out of here! Princess Cadance isn’t going to punish you guys for anything! You just said that she might not even punish me for anything!”
“And you said she might,” replied Funshine. “That’s not a chance we’re willing to take, so we’re doing this.”
“But…!”
“Garden.” Granola Bar put a hoof over her mouth to keep her from protesting. “The reason we’re here is because of you. You got us out of Vanhoover safely. You fought off the undead ponies. You suffered alone for the things that we all participated in. If you say that going back is what you need to try and be happy again, then we’re going to get you there. That’s all there is to it.”
Through her tears, Fencer saw the others nod, the sight leaving her unable to speak. “I…”
“C’mon,” urged Slip ‘n’ Slide, “less yapping, more planning! We need a quiet exit strategy on the double!”
“We’ll figure it out,” smiled Hopscotch. “We gave those ghouls the slip plenty of times, the guards should be easy!”
“We’ve been in worse spots and come through,” agreed Funshine.
Granola Bar nodded, her eyes fixed on their leader. “What do you think, Garden?”
Fencer – or was it Garden now? – sniffled, wiping a foreleg across her eyes. All of a sudden all of her doubts were gone, melted by the incredible warmth spreading through her. “I…” I love you all. “I have an idea…”
It wasn’t until he felt Aria’s tongue slip between his lips that Lex realized she had no intention of stopping.
Belatedly, he took a step back, trying to extricate himself from the unexpected affection that Aria seemed intent on showering him with. But the motion was half-hearted, already second-guessing himself as he tried to figure out exactly what was happening and how he should react to it. The result was that, when Aria took a corresponding step closer to him in an attempt to maintain the kiss, her forward motion caused her to collide with him, sending both of them crashing to the ground.
Lex landed heavily on his back, with Aria coming to rest on top of him an instant later. But the sudden tumble didn’t seem to diminish her enthusiasm. Quite the opposite, she grinned down at him, her sultry expression still in place. “Atta boy,” she purred, wriggling her hips and making it quite clear to him that her new body felt as good as it looked. “Just lie back and let Aria ride the po-”
“Get off him!”
Sonata’s angry yell was punctuated by her throwing herself at her sister, slamming bodily into her and knocking her completely off of Lex. The two of them went rolling across the ground, a chorus of grunts and curses now coming from them both. Nearby, the murmuring from the onlookers swelled, despite the crowd’s reduced size.
It was that reminder that they had an audience that brought Lex back to his senses. His embarrassment flared as he realized that more than a few other people had witnessed what had just happened…not the least of whom were the princesses! Climbing to his hooves, Lex grit his teeth as he turned toward where Sonata and Aria were fighting. “Both of you, stop!”
Neither of them listened to him. Instead, they continued fighting, each of them having gotten to their hooves and clenched their teeth around a portion of the other’s mane, tugging on it as they slapped ineffectually at the air near each other, shrieks of pain and anger coming from both of them. “Ow! Leggo my hair!” yelped Sonata in response to a particularly vicious tug from her sister.
“You let go first!” snarled Aria, one eye closed as she tilted her head to the side, fending off Sonata’s flailing hooves with her own.
“Fine! Just admit that I’m Lex’s only girlfriend!”
“You don’t get to keep him all to yourself! Sharing is caring!”
“You’ve never shared anything in your life! You won’t even share a lousy bag of potato chips!”
“I told you! I like to savor them!”
“ENOUGH!!!”
Lex’s roar was accompanied by a large spike of black crystal erupting from the ground in between Sonata and Aria. It didn’t so much as graze either of them – he’d placed it too carefully for that – but it came close enough that they both immediately let go of each other, instinctively backing away from the dangerous object. In unison, the two of them blinked, turning their eyes toward Lex. “Er…whoopsie?” offered Sonata timidly.
“This was all her fault for interrupting,” added Aria, one foreleg pointing at Sonata.
“Hey!”
“I said enough!” In the dim light, the green-and-purple shine of his eyes gave Lex’s snarling visage an even more intimidating look than usual. The fact that smaller black crystals were growing from the ground all around him only added to the effect. “How dare you two embarrass me like this! I should curse you both!”
Aria and Sonata each grimaced at that. A single shared glance was all it took for them to come to an agreement: put their disagreement aside for now, before things went from bad to worse. “We’re sorry,” announced Sonata, her voice contrite.
“We can save the fun times for later,” agreed Aria, sounding notably less apologetic.
Lex glowered at the pair of them for a moment longer, as if waiting for either of them to give him an excuse to unleash more of his anger on them. But neither said anything, both of them avoiding his gaze. Finally, he let out a slow breath, his eyes returning to their normal color as he black crystals around him ceased their growth and began to disintegrate. “I’ll deal with the two of you later. I have more pressing matters to attend to right now.” He turned to regard Princess Celestia and Princess Luna – both of them having watched the exchange in silence – as he spoke, leaving no mistake as to what he was referring to.
Standing near Princess Luna, Nosey realized that this was her chance to share what she’d learned. “Ah, Lex?” She started forward, glancing around awkwardly as all eyes turned toward her. Trotting up to Lex, she lowered her voice. “Listen, I’ve been talking to Princess Luna for a little while, and there’s some stuff you need to know. Maybe we should all take a break for right now?” She couldn’t help but glance at Aria as she spoke, her face slightly red from how incredibly forward the other mare had been.
Aria, however, wasn’t paying attention, frowning as she looked back at Celestia and Luna. “Is it just me, or do they look familiar?”
Lex shot Aria a questioning frown at that, but his attention was called back to Sonata as she let out a yawn. “Actually, I could totes use a nap. We’ve been up all day and now most of the night too.” She gave Lex a hopeful smile. “C’mon, whaddaya say we get some shuteye before getting into whatever nitty-gritty stuff you’re gonna do with the princesses?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” announced Princess Celestia, apparently no longer content to simply observe the proceedings. “It’s been a very long night for us all, and I believe some rest would do everypony a world of good.”
“I agree,” concurred Luna. “We could all use a chance to recup-”
“Holy freaking crap!” exclaimed Aria suddenly, her eyes widening as she looked at the alicorns. “I recognize you two now! You’re those dimwit principals from back on Earth!”
“Oh yeah. I forgot about that,” muttered Sonata, before nudging her sister. “They’re not them. I mean, they are but they’re, like, the local flavors or something.”
“So what? They’re a big deal here?” Aria’s voice made it clear that she wasn’t impressed. “Because I remember how we dealt with them before…”
“Don’t do anything to them,” hissed Lex. He wasn’t sure exactly what the two of them were talking about – clearly something to do with their time in exile on that human world, since Sonata had mentioned the name of the place – but he had no intention of letting whatever it was cause even more chaos now. “No singing. No spellcasting. No magic. Do you understand me?”
“Aww.” Aria pouted, but didn’t seem inclined to push her luck, sitting down with a huff.
Looking faintly nonplussed, Princess Celestia nevertheless spoke up. “…yes, well, I propose that we meet back here at noon, if that’s alright with everypony?” Despite how she’d phrased the question, her eyes were on Lex as she spoke.
He didn’t immediately reply, glaring at her as though she’d just said something insulting. But a moment later his eyes slid toward Luna, speaking around gritted teeth. “That guard of yours. Silhouette-”
“Noon would be great!” interrupted Sonata, throwing herself in front of Lex and cutting off his line of sight to the princesses. “I can totes say that Lex thinks that plan is a great idea and wants to roll with it because I’m his spokespony,” her voice rose as she said those last three words, glancing back at him over her shoulder to drive the point home, “and he, like, completely trusts me to make these decisions!”
The look on Lex’s face suggested otherwise. “That’s-”
“Wonderful,” added Luna, a little too quickly. “We’ll see you all here again then.”
“Your Majesties, if I may?” River’s voice caused the princesses to jerk, as though having forgotten she was there. “My manor is near here. I would be honored if you and your entourage would partake of my hospitality while you’re here.”
Princess Celestia smiled. “Thank you, River. That would be most lovely.”
“Then please, follow me.” With another bow, she started to walk away, Princess Celestia walking behind her as Luna flew in the other direction to collect Silhouette and the Royal Guards.
But Lex wasn’t ready to let them go. “I’m not done-”
“Lex, please!” begged Nosey. “I wasn’t kidding about that stuff that you need to know!”
“Yeah,” added Sonata. “And we totes have to think of a reward you can give those kids who helped us out!” She turned and looked at where Fruit Crunch, Feathercap, and Fiddlesticks (Tiddlywinks once again asleep on her back) were looking at them from the edge of the crowd, giving them a happy wave.
Aria shrugged, as though she couldn’t have cared less either way. “I say just slap those princesses or principals or whatever they are around if they’re giving you trouble…but I’d rather you and me pick up where we left off first.” She licked her lips as she spoke, the motion slow and deliberate.
Lex looked at each of the mares surrounding him in turn, almost grinding his teeth at how they seemed determined to stand in his way. But as badly as he wanted to go and confront the princesses, to rub their noses in how badly their misguided governance had cost Vanhoover – to say nothing of what he intended to do to that wretched, miserable excuse for a pony that called himself Silhouette! – Lex forced himself to swallow his bile. “Fine,” he growled. “But when we meet with them later, I will set the agenda, and none of you will derail it!”
“Absolutely!” nodded Sonata, not bothering to hide her relief. “Now, let’s go back to the train station, okay?” Nosey and Aria nodded in agreement, and the three of them started to usher Lex back around the building.
They had almost gotten him around the corner when he froze in place. “…Lex?” called Sonata, suddenly nervous.
But Lex didn’t hear her, his eyes widening as he realized the opportunity that he’d almost – in his exhaustion and upset – missed. But it wasn’t too late…a thought was all it took to confirm that the additional magic he’d channeled into his circlet was still active, his vision slipping back into the magical spectrum, its enhanced functionality showing him the channels running through the girls’ bodies. But it wasn’t them he was interested in now…
Spinning in place, Lex turned and looked at Princess Celestia, currently following River toward her manor.
What he saw made his jaw drop.
River tried her best to keep herself calm and composed as she led Princess Celestia and Princess Luna – the latter having returned with the Royal Guardponies they’d brought with them (including one who, rather curiously wasn’t wearing any armor, possibly due to that ugly lame leg of his) – toward her manor, keeping up a stream of inane chatter about the place’s amenities. She knew she should have been talking up Lex’s accomplishments and her role in the grand scheme of things, but it was easier to keep spouting meaningless drivel like how many bathrooms her residence had. The way she felt right now, concocting anything more substantive was impossible.
Just like me, she thought to herself for the hundredth time, trying to keep herself from shaking. That mare looked just like me! That wasn’t exactly true, of course; Aria – as Sonata had called her, with River recognizing the name as the one her gossipy servants had said was that of Sonata’s sister – had a coat that was a slightly different shade of fuchsia, and her mane and tail were aquamarine and purple rather than indigo and blue, but that barely mattered. River had taken one look at her, at that young and shapely body that looked so similar to her own, and had barely been able to keep from salivating.
Whatever lingering doubts she’d had about throwing her lot in with Lex had vanished when she’d seen that. If he could use his magic to change someone into a beauty like that (the servants had said something about Aria’s body having some sort of irregularity) then River had to get close to him, no matter what it cost her. Just the thought of having her youth restored and her looks enhanced was enough to send shudders through her body, the excitement giving her goosebumps. I have to change his view of me. Now. Tonight.
She was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she barely noticed a pair of ponies at the northern edge of the camp, glimpsing them out of the corner of her eye…and then coming to a complete stop, whipping her head around to peer at them. That’s it!
Princess Celestia moved up alongside her, giving her a quizzical look. “Is everything alright, River?”
“I, uh…yes, Your Majesty.” Collecting her thoughts, River gave the princesses an apologetic bow. “Forgive me, I’ve just spotted somepony I know, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t check up on them.”
The princess smiled. “I completely understand.”
“Concern for others is a noble thing,” added Luna. “We don’t mind waiting while you make sure they’re alright.”
“Oh, no, that’s quite alright!” River had already anticipated that, turning to point to a few lights in the distance. “My manor is right over there, just north of the city proper. Please head there at your leisure, and if you inform my head butler, Trotsworth, that I’ve sent you, I’m sure he’ll give you every consideration.” As an afterthought, she added, “Oh, and my son Piggy is there as well. I’m sure he’ll welcome you too.” At least he better if he knows what’s good for him, she swore silently. “After coming all this way, I insist that you not wait for me.”
Princess Celestia gave her a grateful nod. “Very well then. We’ll see you there.” River returned the gesture, watching as the princesses and their troops passed her by, the unarmored one giving her a judging look for some reason.
But River put it out of her mind as she turned and headed toward the pair of ponies she’d spotted before, a mare and a filly, pegasi both. From the way they were moving, they seemed to be having some sort of disagreement, and as she got closer River could hear that her guess was correct. “....-your friends! Real friends don’t lead you into danger!”
“It was already dangerous, Mom!” shot back the filly. “We were trying to protect everpony!”
“That’s not your job! You’re-”
“You!” snapped River, all trace of warmth gone from her voice. “Servant mare!”
Both ponies turned to look at her, the older pony’s eyes widening…for her sake, River hoped that it was in surprise at her sudden entrance and not because of how slovenly Lex’s curse made her look. “M-Miss?!” blurted the mare. “What’re you doing here?”
The younger one glanced at her mother, frowning in confusion. “Mom? Who’s this?”
River shot the impudent filly a disapproving look, but answered anyway. “I’m your mother’s boss.” She turned back to the older mare then. “Your name is Feather Duster, right? Am I right to assume you wish to return to my employ?”
The filly cocked her head, looking back at her mother. “Huh? Mom, what’s going on?”
Feather Duster’s eyes were wide, clearly having been taken by surprise. “I, um…Cleansweep, darling, can you give us a minute?”
The filly, Cleansweep – A servant’s name for a servant’s daughter, thought River amusedly – gave her mother a confused look, but didn’t seem ready to argue the point, turning and flying back toward the camp.
“And don’t go near those friends of yours!” called Feather Duster after her, before turning back to River. “I’m so sorry about that, Miss! And for upsetting you before, too! I promise it won’t ever happen agai-”
“Be quiet,” ordered River, and Feather Duster immediately complied. “Now, I want to retain your services once again, and I’m even willing to double your salary.” She let that hang in the air for a moment, watching the servant mare’s eyes fill with hope before she continued. “But your new job will be a bit different from what you were doing before.”
“It…it will?”
River nodded. “Our new friend Lex Legis needs a pretty young maid to wait on him.” A cold smile crossed her face as she saw Feather Duster blanch. “And you, my dear, are it.”
Feather Duster’s eyes widened, clearly horrified by what she’d just been told. “Y-you’re sending me to work for that, that, that…scoundrel?!”
River snorted. “Don’t try and talk as though you’re sophisticated, it’s an insult to those of us who actually are. And yes, you’re going to serve as his personal maid from now on.”
Feather Duster shook her head, a motion that came easily as the rest of her was already starting to shake. “No! I don’t want to be anywhere near him! He’s some kind of monster, I’m sure of it!” She pointed back toward the train station, her hoof trembling. “I don’t know if you saw, but that magic he was using just now? The one that made the all the light? He was changing some sort of, of…creature into a pony!”
“He certainly did,” murmured River, glancing back in the direction indicated. Just the thought of how ravishing Aria had become was enough to make her fantasies take flight once again, imagining herself in the other mare’s place. Certainly, that was a far more enjoyable use of her time than listening to some little nitwit having a panic attack. “And I-”
“Don’t you see?!” cried Feather Duster. “If he can change her into being a pony, then that means that he must be something else too!” She shot a fear-filled glance at the building, as though worried that Lex would hear what she was saying and come after her. “He’s some sort of creature that only looks like a pony! That’s why his magic is so different from a normal unicorn’s! Why he’s so awful to be around!” She shivered, turning a pleading glance back at River. “Please, Miss, don’t send me to work for him! No one here has seen Tryout, and if he’s gone, then I’m all that Cleansweep has! The foals she’s hanging around with now-”
But she couldn’t continue as River took a step closer to her, the expression of icy fury on her face making Feather Duster flinch. “Now you listen to me, you empty-headed little nopony. First, don’t you ever interrupt me, do you understand? While I’m speaking, you are to remain silent until I’m done, no excuses! Second, I don’t care if Lex is a horror from the bottom of Tartarus, you are going to go to him and give him whatever he wants from you.”
The phrasing made Feather Duster’s eyes widen, picking up on the undercurrent. “Wh-whatever he wants from me…?” she echoed.
River smiled, and the expression was cruel. “That’s right. If he tells you to lick the mud from his hooves, you’ll do it for him. If he wants to pluck the feathers from your wings for a spell he’s working on, you’ll give them to him. And if he tells you to bend over and raise your tail, you’ll do that too.”
Feather Duster took a step back, lowering her tail over her rump protectively as she gave River a look of horror. “N-no! I won’t!”
River didn’t let her get away, moving forward as Feather Duster backed up. “Yes,” she replied softly. “You will.”
Feather Duster’s eyes watered, her lip quivering for a moment before she suddenly seemed to find her courage. Mustering herself up with visible effort, she straightened her posture, set her jaw, and furrowed her brows. “No I won’t!” she repeated, her voice louder now. “I don’t work for you anymore, and I don’t have to do what you say!” She licked her lips, breathing deeply as though it had taken everything she’d had to force those words out. “I’m taking my daughter and I’m leaving Vanhoover. We’re going to go live someplace else, and there’s n-nothing that you can do about it!” She flared her wings at that, giving River a look of resolve before turning and marching away, head held high.
River knew that the smart decision was to let her go. If that lowlife was afraid of Lex to the point that it made her so recalcitrant, then she wouldn’t make a good plaything for him anyway. Far better to let her remove herself from the picture entirely. There were still several maids in her employ back at her manor; surely one of them would be more amenable to her plan. It was the smart, logical course of action.
But at that moment, logic was the furthest thing from River’s mind.
“Who exactly do you think you’re talking to?” The words were spoken at a normal volume, but the sheer vitriol in them made Feather Duster jump, turning and looking back at River in alarm. She was right to be concerned: River was slowly stalking toward her with a look of utter fury twisting her features. “I am not some shopkeeper that you can just turn your back on, you miserable little ingrate! You don’t just say you’re taking your business elsewhere! I’m River Bank! I buy and sell ponies worth a dozen of you in an afternoon! You think that you can say no to me? You think that you can just walk away from ME?!”
Feather Duster’s wings spread, but she couldn’t bring herself to fly away. She knew she wasn’t the bravest of ponies – that was part of the reason she’d been so attracted to Tryout, since he’d never seemed to be afraid of anything – but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this frightened. Terror kept her rooted in place, unable to move as River advanced on her like a serpent about to devour a mouse.
River saw the other mare’s fear, but it wasn’t nearly enough to assuage her anger. Weeks, she thought to herself in a rage. Weeks of having to cut corners and stretch funds in Las Pegasus, with everypony there knowing it and laughing at me behind my back! Just the memory was enough to make her bristle, remembering each snide remark and knowing glance. She knew that in their eyes it had marked her as a pretender, a low-class pony with pretensions above her station, and the memory was like a knife in her spine. Then I come home, and what do I find? Everything I’ve spent my life building, gone! That had been bad enough, but she hadn’t even had time to process it before the next disaster had struck. And THEN Lex curses me to not be able to enjoy what little I have left, only to turn around and start parading my heart’s desire right in front of me! And now this piece of gutter-trash, this weak-willed little failure of a pony who isn’t fit to grovel in my presence thinks that I’m so beaten that she can refuse my orders?!
It was the last straw, the final insult that was more than she could bear. It wasn’t about giving Lex a pretty girl to play with anymore; it was about putting this little upstart in her place. And River knew just how to do that. “If you leave,” she hissed, “I will do everything I can to make you suffer for it. You and your little girl both.”
The way Feather Duster’s eyes widened still wasn’t sufficient to soothe the rage coursing through River’s veins, and she kept going. “I have friends and associates in every city in Equestria, and I can ruin you with just one letter to them. I’ll tell them that your work was sloppy, that you were unpleasant and unreliable, and that I fired you because I caught you stealing. And I won’t stop there, either. I will drag your name through the mud across all of Equestria, until everypony knows that Feather Duster is someone they don’t want to be around!”
Feather Duster’s eyes filled with tears. “But, but that’s not…!”
“True? Trust me when I say that I’ll make it true!” growled River, now nose-to-nose with Feather Duster. “I’m a pillar of this community, and you’re somepony that no one’s ever heard of! And I promise you, I will ruin you before you can even arrive at another city, and you’ll find it impossible to work as a maid ever again by the time I’m done.” River didn’t bother to entertain the idea that Feather Duster would ever bother trying a different line of work; her cutie mark made it very clear that she was meant to be a servant. “What do you think will happen to your little girl then, hm? She’ll spend the rest of her childhood living just like she is now, homeless and hungry because her mother can’t find work. And she will know that it’s because of you, and she’ll grow to hate you for it.”
Uncertainty was written all over Feather Duster’s face now, and River knew that she was thinking about the fight she’d just been having with her daughter. “N-no, she…”
Seeing her wavering, River moved in for the kill. “How long do you think it will take before she never wants to speak to you again, hm? How long before she starts wishing that her father was still here and you were the one that hadn’t made it? How long,” she leaned in closer, putting her lips next to Feather Duster’s ear as she whispered the final threat, “before she decides that she has no mother, and you never see her again?”
She could almost hear the little nag’s heart breaking, a sob escaping Feather Duster’s lips. But there was still a flicker of defiance in her eyes as she backed away from her. “I’ll tell the princesses,” she whimpered. “I know they’re here. I’ll tell them that you threatened me-”
River laughed in her face. “Go right ahead. They’re staying in my manor,” she gestured back toward the building. “Of course, when I tell them you’re unhinged and a liar, who do you think they’ll believe? Me, a famous pony who spent the last few hours telling them how I want to do everything I can to help restore my home? Or you, the hysterical mare that’s carrying a grudge against me because I fired you?”
The light of hope in Feather Duster’s eyes died then, drowned by a fresh wave of tears. “How can you do this?” she hiccupped. “How can you be so horrible like this?”
A shudder of satisfaction ran down River’s spine. She’s broken. The despair and hopelessness in the other mare’s voice was what she had been waiting to hear. It settled over her like a warm blanket, reassuring her that she was still the strong and powerful pony that she’d built herself up to be over the years. “You’re the one doing it. However awful Lex is, a real mother would jump at the chance to sacrifice herself if it meant securing a better future for her child. Your selfishness in trying to run away is what’s to blame, not me.”
She leaned back then, having to fight the urge to smile as she saw the tears running down Feather Duster’s cheeks. “B-but I don’t want-”
“You see?” cut in River. “Your home has been devastated, your husband is gone, your friends and neighbors are homeless, and your daughter barely has enough food to eat…and all you can do is talk about what you want.” She let that sink in, giving River a look of righteous condescension for several seconds before she spoke again. “Go work for Lex. Take the money. Do what a mother is supposed to do and provide a better life for your daughter. Or be selfish and suffer the consequences. It’s your choice.”
Feather Duster slumped in place then, continuing to cry softly. River didn’t press her for an answer, able to find it within herself to be magnanimous now that she’d won. Her patience was rewarded a minute later when Feather Duster looked up, all signs of resistance gone from her face. “Alright,” she sniffled meekly. “I’ll do it.”
“Good girl,” purred River. “Now, let’s get you cleaned up before I present you to your new boss. And while we do, I can tell you what you’ll be doing for me in the meantime…”
Celestia waited patiently as Luna considered the question, her sister looking out a nearby window in silence. After several seconds her horn lit up, her eyes fixed on the night sky, and Celestia knew that she was making an adjustment to the position of the moon. It was only when the sparkling aura faded that Luna turned to look at her, sighing. “I don’t know. Based on everything Sonata and River told you, and what Nosey and that colt relayed to me, Lex Legis has performed many valorous deeds in service to the ponies here. And yet…”
“It feels like there’s something they’re not telling you?” When Luna nodded, Celestia returned the gesture. “That’s how I feel too. Sonata seemed to become nervous several times while we were speaking, and River looked surprised when I mentioned the mark on her face…” She could still see the other mare’s expression in her memory, the way her eyes had widened in sudden alarm when she’d pointed out the scythe-shaped mark on her cheek. It hadn’t been the look of someone who’d painted the design on their own face as a show of support.
“Maybe you should speak with her again?” offered Luna. “If you think that she’s holding something back, it might be because she was nervous about speaking while in close proximity to Lex, or perhaps to Sonata, since she’s his spokespony. She might say something different if you talk to her while she’s here at her estate, away from them.”
“Perhaps.” But Celestia didn’t think so. Unlike Luna, who spent very little time dealing with social functions since her royal duties required her to stay awake at night and sleep during the day, Celestia spent a large chunk of her waking hours entertaining various members of high society, and in so doing had gained some insight into how such ponies acted. In her estimation, River’s attitude had more closely resembled somepony desperately trying to hide something unpalatable rather than being afraid for her safety. If that were the case, then her story wouldn’t change just because she was back at her manor.
There certainly hadn’t been any such fear among her staff, at least as far as Celestia had been able to determine. Of course, suddenly having two princesses and a squadron of guards drop in unexpectedly in the middle of the night hadn’t exactly given her the best chance to make any inquiries. Their arrival had prompted a flurry of nervous activity among the sleepy servants, and when Celestia had relayed River’s message about them staying there, the assorted maids and butlers had flown into a full-on panic trying to prepare rooms for them. Only the head butler, Trotsworth, had remained calm, steadfastly directing the others and turning what would otherwise have been a messy and drawn-out scene into an organized and efficient effort. Under his direction, suitable arrangements had been prepared for everypony – with Celestia and Luna offering to stay in a single room together (something that they’d procured only after repeatedly assuring Trotsworth and Silhouette both that they not only didn’t mind such an arrangement, but found it preferable) once it had become clear that there was only barely enough space to house everypony, apparently due to the manor having suffered some damage either during or immediately after the elemental bleed that hadn’t been repaired yet – and a light meal had been arranged for everyone.
It had been after the food had been laid out that a fat little earth stallion had arrived, with Trotsworth announcing him as River’s son, Piggy Bank. Celestia had been looking forward to talking to him, River having previously let it slip that Piggy had remained in Vanhoover after the flooding, but that hadn’t happened. Piggy’s jaw had hit the floor as soon as he’d seen who the food was being laid out for, and Celestia hadn’t even had a chance to open her mouth before he’d turned and run back into the manor as fast as his little legs could carry him. “Star-struck, I’m certain,” had been Trotsworth’s explanation.
Celestia herself hadn’t been hungry, but she’d nibbled lightly at the servings in order to be polite while Luna and the guards helped themselves. Once everypony had finished, the staff had shown them all to their rooms, gathering up the luggage that the guards had brought with them as they’d whisked them all off into the inner part of the manor. Trotsworth had personally carried Celestia and Luna’s things as he’d brought them to “the manor’s finest guest-quarters,” as he’d called them – a suite of rooms that could have easily come straight out of a fancy hotel – and after assuring them that some of the staff would remain awake throughout the night in case they needed anything, the old butler had bid them goodnight.
By that point, Celestia had been more than ready to turn in, but had resisted the urge to sink into the large bed in the main room of the suite. Instead, she and Luna had caught each other up on what they’d learned, informing each other of the conversations they’d had and what they’d been able to glean from them. That had taken almost an hour – according to the clock on the wall – and now they’d arrived at the question of what to do with what they’d learned.
“I’m also concerned about what Lex said before,” added Luna, bringing Celestia’s attention back to the present, “when Sonata and Aria were having their disagreement.”
“That’s one word for it.” Moving into a nearby chair, Celestia couldn’t help but chuckle at the memory of the sisterly squabble.
Luna smiled as well, but the expression disappeared from her face after only a few seconds, replaced by a look of concern. “He said ‘I should curse you both.’ I know he might have been speaking metaphorically, but the way he made all of those black crystals grow around him while he said it, and the way his eyes changed color, it was just like-”
“King Sombra,” finished Celestia softly.
Silence fell over them then, but it didn’t last very long before Luna spoke again. “Sister, you told me about what happened when you first met Lex, at that disastrous meeting where he demanded you abdicate for both of us in favor of him.” Celestia nodded, already knowing where this was going but too tired to interrupt. “You recognized him as having King Sombra’s power then, but when Lex attacked you it was with his own magic, not the dark magic of the evil king’s horn.”
“He did become a shadow in order to escape,” noted Celestia.
Luna came and sat down across from her then. “I know, but he still relied more on his own power than on the dark magic he’d acquired. But now…now he’s using those black crystals so easily and possibly dealing in curses as well. All of that after only having King Sombra’s horn for a few months.” A look of concern spread across her features then, as she finally said what Celestia knew she’d been leading up to. “He’s growing stronger, sister. His command of the dark magic alone is beginning to approach King Sombra’s level of ability, and with his other powers-”
“I know, sister,” interrupted Celestia with a sigh, closing her eyes wearily.
Luna’s concerns weren’t groundless, she knew. When they’d originally gotten word of King Sombra’s depredations in the Crystal Empire, she and Luna had been away from their castle. Thinking that their foe was a mere rebel unicorn, they’d elected to head straight there and confront him, rather than going to collect the Elements of Harmony. It was a decision that had very nearly led to disaster…in fact, it had led to disaster, since without their strongest weapon the victory they’d attained had been pyrrhic.
Even that achievement had been very hard won. King Sombra’s dark magic had been mighty enough to allow him to meet them on the field of battle as an equal. Against a foe that could wield magic on a scale to match their own, only the fact that it had been a two-on-one fight had let them prevail, barely managing to seal him within a prison of frozen time that they’d known would one day come undone. Worse, their foe – unable to stop them from confining him – had actually expanded their final spell, causing it to envelop the entirety of the Crystal Empire and bring it into stasis with him. All of that with his dark magic alone.
That Twilight and her friends – with a little help from Cadance, Shining Armor, and Spike – had been able to do what she and Luna hadn’t been able to and finally destroy King Sombra once and for all was something Celestia still considered to be a miracle. But it was a miracle she’d been willing to bet everything on, even if the decision to stand aside and allow her student to face such a powerful foe had caused her a great deal of guilt and anxiety at the time. In hindsight it had been the right decision, but at the time she’d barely been able to hide how nervous she’d felt, worried that she might have doomed one of the ponies she cared most about.
Fortunately, it hadn’t turned out that way, and Twilight had fulfilled the destiny that by that point had been very clear to Celestia and Luna, becoming an alicorn herself shortly after saving the Crystal Empire. But Twilight wasn’t here now, having returned to that other world – Everglow – on another adventure. And if Lex Legis, a pony who had openly stated that he wanted to rule all of Equestria, gained complete mastery of his predecessor’s dark magic in addition to the other powers he’d already attained while Equestria’s greatest defender was away…
As if hearing her thoughts, Luna continued. “Sister, we came here because we were concerned about the evil artifact that Mihr alerted us to. But now we know that Lex is wielding it, apparently on the behalf of this ‘Night Mare’ goddess of his.” Celestia heard the catch in Luna’s voice as she said that name, and could guess what it was about, but let it go. The last thing she wanted was to touch on the topic of Luna’s own desire for godhood again. “First dark magic, now a weapon of great power and great evil. We can’t simply ignore this.”
“And what should we do, then?” asked Celestia tiredly, opening her eyes and giving Luna a resigned look. “Publicly condemn him for the crimes of defending Equestria from monsters, feeding the hungry, and healing the wounded?” She shook her head. “We sent him here because we were hoping that it would appease his ambition, and that he would make good friends in the process. Based on what we’ve been told, it sounds like it’s working; we know he was devastated when those ponies he sent into the city didn’t come back…”
She stopped speaking then, overcome with a wave of guilt at how horribly Vanhoover had suffered while she and everypony else had carried on, ignorant of what was happening. The desperation, the fear, the death. So many innocent lives lost, or worse, twisted to become monsters that preyed on the ponies that had been their friends and neighbors. It was enough to make her wonder if perhaps Lex was right, and he was better suited to rule.
Luna gave her a sympathetic look. “I hope you’re right, sister. Truly, I do. But if not, then we might be allowing him to become the greatest enemy we’ve ever faced. And we still don’t know what to do when we meet with him in a few hours.”
Sighing again, Celestia stood up, walking over to where Trotsworth had placed their luggage, sifting through the bags and suitcases until she’d found what she was looking for. “The surest way to destroy an enemy is to make them your friend. I’m certain that Lex wants to do good. If we could just find out why he keeps turning to darkness to do it, then maybe we could convince him that he doesn’t need to.”
Luna walked over to her, looking at the papers held aloft in Celestia’s telekinetic aura. “And you still think that the answer is in there? You’ve been reading those the entire trip here.”
Celestia nodded. “I know, but we still have a little time, and I can’t think of any other way to try and learn more about him.” She shuffled the pages as she spoke, her eyes skimming their contents in search of new insights.
“I hope you’re right,” admitted Luna as she went back to the window, looking out it as she made another minute adjustment to the moon’s position, “for all our sakes.”
Celestia didn’t answer, her attention completely focused on the records of the brief time that Lex Legis had spent at her School for Gifted Unicorns as a colt.
Cadance couldn’t help but smile slightly at the relieved tone in Pillowcase’s voice. Cozy had apparently been unwilling to let go of Pillowcase since he’d been brought back, vacillating between weeping, laughing, and being amorous. It had been easy to see that Pillow was unnerved by her behavior, and although she knew it would be tasteless to say it out loud, Cadance couldn’t help but find it sweet that the pony that had died and come back to life was more worried about his hysterical wife than about what had happened to him. “Are you sure?” she asked softly from where she was standing in the doorway. “I can come back later if you want to rest, too.”
“No, really, it’s okay,” insisted Pillow. From where he was reclining in bed in the dim light of the elaborate guestroom, Cozy curled up by his side with her forelegs wrapped around him, they easily could have been any other couple about to turn in for the evening. But his tone suggested that he wasn’t just being polite, sounding almost eager to talk. “As long as we’re quiet, I think we’ll be fine. She seems really exhausted.”
“Alright,” nodded Cadance. But instead of immediately turning and entering, she glanced behind her. “Are you sure you don’t want to at least see her?”
Standing in the hallway next to Shining Armor, Produce Aisle shook his head, keeping his eyes on the ground as he gave a self-deprecating smile. “Cozy’s been lost since Pillow died. Now that he’s back, I’d only get in the way.”
“Aisle?” called Pillow from within the room, apparently having heard his voice despite how softly they were speaking. “Is that you?”
Cringing, Aisle stepped to the side, trying to make sure he wasn’t in line with the open doorway the princess was occupying. “I should go.”
“Where?” Shining Armor’s tone made it clear the question was rhetorical. “I’m guessing you haven’t exactly made any hotel reservations.”
Aisle squirmed in place, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here. “You don’t understand,” he mumbled, lowering his voice even further. “After Pillow died, Cozy and I…we were…”
“Together,” finished Cadance gently. “I know.”
Aisle’s eyes widened, looking like a foal who’d just been caught with their hoof in the cookie jar. “You do? How?”
Cadance smiled again, understanding his surprise. After she’d brought Pillowcase back to life at the train station, they’d split into two groups. While Shining Armor had escorted Aisle, Cozy, Pillowcase, and everypony else to the hospital, she’d taken a detachment of the Royal Guard and brought those ponies who’d all confessed to being responsible for Pillow’s death back to Canterlot Castle, intent on interviewing them to try and figure out exactly what had happened in Vanhoover.
But doing so had been put on hold by a more immediate concern. Vanhoover, Cadance knew, was where Celestia and Luna were currently headed; their sudden departure being what had prompted them to ask Cadance to come to Canterlot in the first place to temporarily fill in for them while they went to check on “a situation of some uncertainty,” as Luna’s letter had described it. That had been mildly concerning at the time, but after what had just happened – seeing one of the missionaries she’d sent to Vanhoover coming back deceased and the other severely traumatized, along with how that unicorn mare with the white picket fence cutie mark had alluded to there being numerous other dead ponies in the city – the thought of her fellow princesses heading there was downright alarming.
To that end, Cadance had rushed to get word to them, writing a hasty letter describing everything that had just happened. Although she knew it would have been far more helpful if she’d gotten all of her facts straight first, she was equally aware that Celestia and Luna might very well arrive at Vanhoover in the time it took her to figure things out. Better that they have at least some idea of what they were heading toward, Cadance knew, than having a detailed report arrive too late. Once it had been completed, she’d instructed one of the pegasus Royal Guard members to take it and fly straight to Ponyville, not stopping until they’d given her letter to Spike. Once the little dragon had it, a single breath would be all it took to send it to Celestia.
Shining Armor had arrived almost immediately after that, with Cozy, Pillowcase, and Aisle in tow. “The doctors said that they were all exhausted, with these two,” – he’d indicated Aisle and Cozy then – “needing some food. I figured we could do better for them here than subjecting them to what they’d get in a hospital.” He’d said that last part with that dashing smirk of his, the one that always made her heart flutter, but his eyes told Cadance that wasn’t the only reason he’d brought them back here. Like her, Shining Armor had known Comfy Cozy and Pillowcase before they’d left for Vanhoover, and had been shocked at seeing what had become of them. She had no doubt that he wanted them in the castle with them, where they’d have an easier time watching over the two of them. That Aisle had tagged along – despite how he’d been hanging back from the crystal ponies, as though afraid to approach them – hadn’t surprised Cadance in the slightest. Not after what she’d seen at the train station…
“It was obvious,” she explained, her voice warm. “The way the two of you held each other when you brought Pillowcase before me made it very clear.”
Aisle sputtered for a moment, as though not sure if he should try and deny it or explain what had passed between him and Cozy. But after a second he looked down again, biting his lip. “Pillow doesn’t know,” he said in a tiny voice. “He doesn’t know and he shouldn’t have to hear that. Not after he’s just been brought back.” He looked at the open doorway, a miserable expression on his face. “He’s my friend, and I don’t want to tell him-”
“I already know.”
Aisle gave a yelp, jumping in place as the door swung wider, Pillowcase taking a halting step out. “Aisle, I already know. Cozy told me just now, before she fell asleep.”
The blood drained from Aisle’s face, and he backed away from Pillow as though expecting the other stallion to slug him at any moment. “Pillow, I wasn’t-, I swear to…to Lashtada herself that I wasn’t trying to steal her-”
“Aisle, stop.” There was no malice in Pillow’s voice, the only tone being a soothing one, as though trying to calm a frightened animal. “I know you wouldn’t do something like that. Like you said, we’re friends.”
Ears folding back, Aisle couldn’t look Pillow in the face. “…I didn’t think it’d work…”
Pillow glanced inquisitively at Cadance and Shining Armor, and when the two of them shook their heads in incomprehension he turned his gaze back toward Aisle. “What do you mean?”
Shamefaced, Aisle seemed to shrink in on himself. “I didn’t think that Princess Cadance would really be able to bring you back.” He shuddered as he spoke, as though admitting that made him physically ill. “Cozy was getting worse. The longer we stayed there, the more miserable she got, and the more things fell apart. She started fighting with Lex and Sonata. She tried to walk back to the Crystal Empire. I couldn’t even distract her with…you know…” He fidgeted in place, uncomfortable. “…doing it, anymore, after Lex put a curse on me, and-”
“Wait, someone put a curse on you?” interrupted Shining Armor, his brow furrowing. “An actual curse, like in a fairytale?”
Aisle nodded miserably. “So I couldn’t…perform,” he admitted, sounding as though he couldn’t possibly feel any more humiliated than he did at that moment. “He put one on Cozy too, so that she’d feel phantom pains that copied the pain of anypony near her.”
Everypony gaped at that, with Pillowcase scowling as his surprise immediately turned into anger. “That’s horrible! What kind of pony would do something like that, especially to someone who was already so distraught?!”
“You said this person’s name was Lex?” asked Cadance, worry shooting through her as she glanced at Shining Armor, seeing the same expression on his face. She’d seen the article that the editor of the local paper had brought to her only a few days ago, talking about a unicorn with that name who had borne an eerie resemblance to King Sombra. That he’d apparently defended Tall Tale from a dragon hadn’t made anyone feel any easier, and after much deliberation they’d decided not to run the story. That this Lex person was now in Vanhoover – where there had apparently been numerous deaths, and where he was apparently using curses – was a bad sign, she knew. All of a sudden the “situation of some uncertainty” that Celestia and Luna had gone to investigate seemed much more dire.
Oblivious to all of that, Aisle nodded. “Lex Legis, yes. We…I did something stupid, and we both paid the price for it.”
Walking over to him, Cadance gently wrapped Aisle up in a hug. “I promise you, as soon as I’ve gotten some rest, I’ll call upon Lashtada’s blessing and remove your curses.”
That was enough to make Aisle momentarily forget his self-recrimination, hope blossoming across his face. “You can do that?” A moment later he seemed to remember who he was talking to, his chagrinned look returning. “What am I saying? Of course you can. You can bring the dead back to life. Even Lex couldn’t do that.”
That seemed to remind Aisle of what he’d been talking about before they’d gotten sidetracked, and his eyes briefly flickered up to Pillow’s before returning to the ground once again. “Lex had a lot of magic, but he couldn’t raise the dead, and I guess I thought that no one could. But the thought of you coming back was the only thing keeping Cozy going, so I…I played it up. I told her that the three of us would all start a new life together, that she’d…” He sighed, before making himself continue. “That she’d have two husbands, you and me.” He shook his head sadly. “I told her everything she wanted to hear, because I was afraid of what she’d do if she lost all hope. I didn’t think it would actually happen.”
Everypony was silent in the wake of Aisle’s confession. Because that’s what it is, Cadance knew. A confession. Her eyes moved toward Pillowcase, knowing that what happened next depended on him.
But he seemed to think otherwise, his face having regained its earlier equanimity. “So what are you going to do now that it has?”
Aisle seemed to take the question as a rebuke, cringing again. “I’ll leave,” he answered immediately. “I just need money for the train, and I can go-”
“And what will that do to Cozy?” interrupted Pillowcase. His voice wasn’t harsh, but there was a slight edge there that hadn’t been there before.
Blinking, Aisle finally looked up at Pillow, confusion written all over his face. “Huh? It…it’ll let her go back to her old life. She can go home and it’ll be like it never hap-”
“But it did happen.” Pillowcase took a wobbly step forward, moving closer to Aisle, who tensed up again. “It did happen, and Cozy and you and I have to all deal with that.” He raised a hoof, and Aisle squeezed his eyes shut, expecting a blow to fall. But what happened an instant later wasn’t a punch to the face, but a soft poke to the end of his nose. “That’s why you can’t leave.”
Aisle couldn’t have looked more flabbergasted. “But…but…!”
Pillow smiled slightly as he put his hoof down. “Aisle, think for a second. If Cozy fell apart when I died, what do you think she’ll do when you just vanish without so much as a goodbye? After everything she’s been through, do you really want to do that to her?”
“No, but…we can’t…I mean…we’d have to…that…” With visible effort, Aisle forced out a coherent sentence. “You mean you’re okay with…this?”
Fortunately, he didn’t need to define what “this” was, as Pillowcase heaved a sigh, his smile dimming. “Look, I’m not going to say that I’m jumping for joy over finding out that my wife fell for another stallion while I was…away, but…it’s not like this is completely out of the blue, either. Cozy and I both worship Lashtada, and she…” For the first time, Pillow looked somewhat uncertain, shooting a helpless look at Cadance.
“Lashtada’s religion teaches that love, when it’s mutually shared, should never be denied,” explained Cadance. “Hearts that yearn for each other are meant to come together, even if that yearning is shared with more than one other pony.”
“So it’s not like we weren’t aware of the possibility,” finished Pillow, now sounding rather awkward. “Even if we didn’t think it’d ever really happen.”
“You mean…you're willing to let me and Cozy be…together?” Aisle looked like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
As if in response to that, Pillow made himself resume his earlier calm. “I mean, we should talk about what happens now. All three of us, like grownups. Running away won’t make things better, so let’s all sit down and figure out what will, okay?”
“I…” Pausing for just a moment, Aisle looked at Cadance and Shining Armor in turn, as though asking them for permission. The latter just gave him a smile and a shrug, while the former gave him an encouraging nod. “…okay.” As if dizzy, Aisle let Pillowcase usher him into the guestroom.
Moving aside to let the two stallions pass, Cadance silently let her eyes move over each of them before looking at Cozy, still asleep on the bed. She hadn’t been lying before; it had been obvious from the way that Aisle and Cozy had clung to each other back on the train station that there had been something between them. But even if they hadn’t, Cadance would have known that there was.
Having the power to see the bonds of love people shared – to be able to visually behold it, manifesting in her sight as a brilliant red cord that stretched between them, with the shade, thickness, and brightness all telling her the details of the type of love that they felt – was another of the gifts that Lashtada had given her. Even as the two stallions settled down, Cadance’s eyes traced the cords connecting each of them to Cozy, both glowing pink with romantic affection. The sight made her smile, silently praying to Lashtada that they’d find a way to make things work.
Shining Armor gently rubbed his side against hers. “Should we let them have some alone time?” he asked softly.
As much as she wanted to say yes, Cadance shook her head. “We can’t right now. They’ll have time to work things out later, but right now we need answers about what happened in Vanhoo-”
“Your Majesties.”
The new voice caused Cadance and Shining Armor to glance to their left, where a guard was saluting them, a pair of ponies in railway uniforms bowing behind him. “These two were insisting that they be allowed to speak with you immediately.”
Cocking his head, Shining Armor looked at the pair, an earth stallion and a unicorn mare. “Is everything alright?”
The two slowly stood up. “It’s about Vanhoover,” admitted the stallion, before giving the mare a nudge.
She shot him a dirty look at that, before heaving a sigh as she faced forward again. “I saw something while we were there…”
Of all the things about himself that Lex hated, the insufficiency of his own power wasn’t the worst – that particular designation went to his inability to perceive and interpret whatever nonverbal undercurrent of communication accompanied interpersonal interaction, especially since everypony else apparently regarded it as so elemental that it defied easy description – but it was still considerable. He knew that sounded preposterous, of course; with multiple types of powerful magic at his command, Lex knew it wasn’t conceited to say that he far surpassed any of Equestria’s professional wizards. But that wasn’t the standard by which he measured his strength.
Rather, he judged his personal power by whether it was sufficient to meet the seemingly endless challenges that he’d encountered since he’d realized that Equestria needed new leadership. By that metric, his overall strength was lacking. Although he’d managed to overcome numerous difficult battles, virtually all of them had been won only by the thinnest of margins…and even then, he’d needed outside assistance. Despite his grudging acceptance of what the Night Mare had told him about utilizing others as extensions of his own strength, it still bothered Lex deeply that he wasn’t strong enough to win without needing anyone else.
But right now, letting the girls lead him back to the train station, it wasn’t his own weakness that was at the forefront of Lex’s thoughts.
It was Princess Celestia’s.
Her magical power is weaker than mine! The thought left him feeling almost giddy, excitement and disbelief causing him to stare blankly into space as he mentally reviewed what he’d just seen. He was vaguely aware that Sonata was asking him if he was alright, but he ignored her, too caught up in this new revelation. Considerably weaker!
Logically, he knew that the few seconds’ worth of information he’d gotten about Princess Celestia’s magical capabilities were tentative at best. While his circlet, with its ability to let him see into the magical spectrum enhanced thanks to the additional power he’d poured into it, had let him view the magical channels in the alicorn’s body, it had only been for a few moments at a distance. That was the equivalent of spending a couple of seconds glancing at a newspaper being displayed in a stand across the street; he might be able to read the headline, but that didn’t offer nearly as much information as going over and taking the time to read the entire article would have.
But that didn’t mean he’d read the headline wrong.
“Hey, Lex, c’mon,” pleaded Sonata, brushing up against him. “You’re worrying me. What’s going on?”
“It all makes sense,” he murmured. He wasn’t in the habit of thinking out loud. Rather, the small part of his mind that was paying attention to his surroundings had decided that vocalizing his thoughts was the least-intrusive way of potentially assuaging whatever was bothering Sonata, allowing him to devote the bulk of his thoughts to processing what he’d just learned. “How could I not have realized this before now?”
“Realized what?” asked Nosey, taking her place on his other side as they led him toward the station platform. “Is this something about Princess Celestia?”
Lex nodded absently. “Equestrian magic is physical, depending entirely on moving energy through the body and externalizing it via the horn. No matter how long she’s lived, or how much practice she’s gotten, or how large she’s grown, there’s only so much power she can use!” That limitation had been why he’d created a new form of magic, one that contained the requisite energy in thoughts rather than in the body. It had been extraordinarily difficult – and it was still imperfect, since compressing the magical energy to the point of where it could be contained within a purely-conceptual matrix was still too difficult for him to accomplish unaided – but it offered potentially limitless advancement, so long as he could conceive of ever more complex theorems and fill them with sufficient power. He’d known that meant that there’d be a point where he could eclipse the alicorns, but he had never dreamed that he’d already reached it…
“Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that sounds, like, totes awesome! Now let's get to bed, okay?” Sonata’s voice was patronizing as they guided him toward the station entrance, returning to normal as she looked at Nosey. “I’ll get the door.”
“I can do it,” protested the other mare, her horn lighting up.
But Sonata was already turning the knob, pushing the door open as she glanced back at her friend. “It’s okay, I-, hey!”
From where she’d taken Sonata’s place at Lex’s side, Aria shot her sister a triumphant smirk. “You snooze you lose.”
Seeing that Sonata was about to make it clear what she thought of that, Nosey jumped in. “Are you two really going to start fighting again? Do you want to get cursed?” When both of them hesitated, she let out a sigh of relief before giving Lex a nudge. “Lex? Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you really should get some sleep. Noon isn’t that far away.” She glanced eastward, toward the mountains. “I’m not sure, but I think Princess Celestia’s going to raise the sun soon, so you should try to rest now while there’s time.”
Lex heard her, but gave only an absentminded grunt of acknowledgment, his thoughts already spiraling off in a new direction. She’ll raise the sun, he echoed silently. That’s what her cutie mark helps her do. That’s ALL it helps her do.
That wasn’t surprising, of course. From what he’d been able to see of her body’s magical channels, Lex could estimate that Celestia’s ability to use Equestrian magic was roughly on par with a high-level unicorn wizard in terms of raw energy output, and perhaps somewhat higher with regard to fine control. But there were no wizards, regardless of their power or their control, who could move the sun the way she could. That particular feat was something she could do because her cutie mark was boosting her power, but only in that specific regard. Of course, that she was otherwise able to match Equestria’s best unicorn wizards – all of whom, Lex knew, had cutie marks related to spellcasting and magic manipulation – was impressive unto itself. Doubtlessly her stature, as well as having the musculature of an earth pony and the wings of a pegasus, played a role in that, since they gave her greater physicality through which to move magical energy.
But that’s nowhere near what I’m capable of bringing to bear, he knew, and the thought made his pulse quicken as he took it to its logical conclusion. I could win. If it came down to a fight between myself and them, I could win! It wouldn’t even require assistance from anyone else, the way so many of his recent battles had. At their level of strength, Celestia and Luna – and Lex felt certain that the other princess’s strength was comparable to that of her sister – wouldn’t be overly difficult to defeat. Which meant that if he hadn’t erred on the side of caution all those weeks ago, when he’d openly declared himself in rebellion against Celestia after she’d refused to abdicate on his behalf…if he’d stayed and fought rather than fleeing, certain that he’d be overmatched…
I would be the ruler of all Equestria right now!
The thought made him stop in his tracks, causing Aria to stumble forward, with Nosey only barely catching herself in time. Not missing her opportunity, Sonata rushed in to fill the spot at his side that Aria had just vacated. “Hah!”
Aria glared, but didn’t have a chance to respond before Nosey, rolling her eyes, separated herself from Lex, hopping onto the bench that the four of them had been using as a bed for the last couple of days. “So here’s what I think we should do,” she began as she settled down. “We’re all pretty out of it-”
“Some of us more than others,” noted Sonata, giving Lex a nudge and proving her point when he gave only a mild grunt of acknowledgment in reply.
“-so it wouldn’t be very useful if we went over everything now. Instead, we’ll get some sleep, and then we can talk about everything that happened tomorrow-”
“You mean later today,” interrupted Aria, the petulance returning to her voice.
“-before our meeting with the princesses,” concluded Nosey, refusing to let herself become derailed.
“Ooh! Ooh!” Sonata’s eyes widened as an idea came to her, raising a hoof in the air and waving it excitedly as she gave Nosey an expectant look.
It took the other mare several seconds to realize that her friend was waiting to be called on, as if she was a student in a classroom. “Uh, yes, Sonata?”
“Can we have an early lunch before we go meet with them?” asked Sonata, putting her hoof down. Turning her eyes toward Lex, she explained her reasoning. “I know you’re not giving out breakfasts right now, but I really don’t want to miss eating because you got into some big discussion with those two.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” admitted Nosey. “Lex, what do you think?”
“I don’t care,” answered Lex honestly. He barely heard Sonata’s whoop of delight or Aria’s sarcastic reply, not even bothering to protest as the girls led him to the bench and began jockeying for position around him. Right now such trivial concerns were the furthest thing from his mind.
Lex had long since taken to heart Sonata’s suggestion – back when he had sought her out in the wake of his declaration of rebellion against the princesses – that it was better to achieve his goal in a piecemeal fashion, without resorting to force. That was why he had elected to meet with the alicorns a second time, negotiating for ruling over Vanhoover rather than following through on his earlier vow to forcibly remove them from power. But now he was having second thoughts.
It wouldn’t be inappropriate of me to challenge them openly at the meeting tomorrow, he knew. My original declaration of rebellion is still extant, and Vanhoover’s current state is already an illustration of how their leadership has failed. They might even agree, now that they’d had a chance to see just how damaging their incompetence was to their subjects. But if they didn’t…if they refused to stand down… I’d need to have them arrested, and that would precipitate a fight. Of course, their guardponies – and that miserable worm Silhouette – wouldn’t stand by idly while that happened, but Lex wasn’t concerned about them. Severance could…wait…
Thoughts of the scythe made Lex realize that even if his magic was stronger than the princesses’, he had barely renewed any of his spells since he’d fought the horde of ghouls. Doing so would require that he spend several hours using the scythe, which he’d be hard-pressed to do between now and noon. More than that, he was still injured and extremely fatigued, not having given himself a chance to rest. Even if he mitigated that by using his dark magic to go into shadow-form, the prospect of expending it and being forced to turn corporeal again in the course of the fight couldn’t be ruled out.
It was at that point that Lex realized he was seriously considering fighting the two alicorns.
Not knowing what her boyfriend was thinking, Sonata gave him a sleepy smile as she laid her head on his chest. “Night Lex,” she yawned. “Don’t let the bedbugs…no, wait, they’d be bench-bugs now, wouldn’t they?” Pausing as she considered that, Sonata didn’t have a chance to finish her thought as a knock came from the front door of the station, making her blink as she lifted her head. “Huh? Who could that be?”
Her question was answered a moment later as a familiar voice came from the other side of the door. “Lex? Sonata? Are you in there?”
Aria frowned, lifting her head from Lex’s flank to glare at Sonata as though the unexpected guest was her fault. “Tell whoever it is to buzz off. Some of us need our beauty rest.”
“How about I get this one?” Nosey didn’t move from where she was cuddled up against Lex’s back, her horn lighting up as she unlocked the door and pulled it open.
A moment later, River Bank stepped inside. “I apologize for the interruption,” she smiled, a pegasus mare following her in. “But we need to talk.”
Lex narrowed his eyes at River’s declaration, taking it as a challenge. Heedless of the girls cuddled up to him, he rose to his hooves and stepped down from the bench, turning so that he was facing River head-on. “I have nothing to say to you,” he rumbled. “Now leave, before you try my patience further.”
“No, wait!” Rushing to place herself in front of Lex, Sonata frantically tried to calm things down. “River’s cool now! She, like, totes regrets how she acted before, and wants to help out!”
“That’s entirely correct,” added River smoothly. Stepping forward, she moved to within a few paces of Lex, waiting for Sonata to step aside before she continued. “I feel terrible about how I acted the other day,” she began, her smile fading into a look of remorse, “and want to apologize for the things that I said. I never should have insulted you the way that I did, and I shouldn’t have threatened to disrupt the good work you’re doing here.”
She paused then, taking a moment to gauge how Lex was receiving her apology. But the stallion’s face hadn’t changed, regarding her with cold dispassion. Not allowing herself to become discouraged, River continued. “I’m sure you’re still mad at me, and I don’t blame you. Even so, I hope that you’ll give me a chance to make up for things.” She touched a hoof to her chest then, giving him a look of earnest determination. “As of right now, I’m placing everything I have at your disposal. My fortune, my manor, my servants. All of it, yours to use as you see fit for as long as it takes for Vanhoover to recover.”
Despite her impassioned exterior, River couldn’t help but feel nervous. While she hadn’t yet given him Feather Duster to play with – an idea that she felt more certain of now that she’d caught a glimpse of him cuddling with his bevy of beauties – the mouthy little mare was never supposed to be anything more than the icing on the cake. This was her trump card for getting into Lex’s good graces.
But other than a single, slow blink, Lex’s expression didn’t change, and River could feel herself starting to sweat. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? she thought to herself anxiously. It’s what you told me before! She could still hear Lex’s angry shout from when he’s cursed her – “You already had an obligation to lend me your assistance in helping everypony, and you abrogated it!” – and now she was giving him everything she possibly could to fulfill that so-called obligation. She hadn’t expected that it would be enough for him to remove her curse, but with how he’d already been knocking off the banks she owned she’d felt sure that he’d accept her offer, and in so doing let her get at least a little closer to him. But if she was wrong and he didn’t accept-
Her thoughts were interrupted as a sneering voice cut through the silence. “Hang on, what’d this old lady do that she’s trying to buy her way out of the doghouse?” smirked that mare that Lex had transformed less than an hour ago. “I gotta hear this.”
A lifetime of practice allowed River to keep her poise. “We haven’t been introduced,” she noted cordially. The little sexpot was as abrasive as she was attractive, but anything was better than standing there waiting for Lex to react to her offer. “I’m River Bank, and it’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss…?”
The other mare snorted, clearly not liking how River hadn’t risen to her taunting. But her smirk returned a moment later as she climbed down from the bench, sauntering over to Lex and pressing herself against his side, showing off how she, unlike River, had his favor. “Aria Blaze,” she drawled. “And for somepony begging for forgiveness, you’re really going light on the begging, don’t you think?”
“Knock it off, Aria,” frowned the third mare, the one with the glasses and curly blonde mane. Walking over to River, she gave her an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry about her, she’s-”
“A huge nag,” interjected Sonata cheerily from her spot on Lex’s other side.
“-been under a lot of stress lately,” finished the blonde mare quickly, her smile turning strained. “I’m Nosey Newsy, by the way.”
“I thought so.” River smiled as though greeting an old friend. “Sonata spoke very highly of you when we were talking to Princess Celestia, so I feel like I know you already. Apparently you’re an ace reporter for the Canterlot Chronicle?” The question came easily, knowing that the more of Lex’s little girlfriends she could butter up, the more likely they’d be to help convince him to forgive her. “You’ll have to tell me all about that sometime, it sounds fascinating!” she lied.
Nosey smile turned more genuine then, apparently taking the compliment at face value. “It can be a real adventure sometimes, especially lately…” For some reason she trailed off at that, her features darkening for a moment as though remembering something unpleasant. Not that River found that surprising; given what she’d learned from Sonata, Nosey had apparently been through quite an awful experience. But the bespectacled mare forced herself to keep talking, glancing over River’s shoulder for a second before looking back at her. “So, who's your friend?”
River couldn’t have asked for a better cue. “Oh, I almost forgot!” Turning, she glanced back at the pony she’d brought with her. “Feather Duster, come here.” She made sure to keep her voice light and casual, but in the instant she turned around to look her servant, her gaze hardened into steel, sending a silent message the other mare’s way: don’t you dare screw this up. Since her big effort to win Lex over wasn’t going as well as she’d hoped, giving him his own pet maid was her last chance to try and win his goodwill.
As it was, River wished she’d been able to doll the little twit up more. If only there’d been enough time to take her back to her manor, she would have been able to have the other maids give Feather Duster some makeup and a fetching dress to wear. Nothing too suggestive, just enough to make sure that her appeal was on display. But making her pitch to Lex tonight meant that was out of the question, leaving River with no choice but to present Feather Duster in her natural state, without clothes or cosmetics to enhance her looks. That, River admitted silently, and I don’t want her anywhere near the princesses, just in case she has another bout of rebelliousness.
Fortunately, Feather Duster didn’t seem to be inclined to do anything stupid now, stepping forward slowly until she was standing next to River, who smiled radiantly as she looked at Lex again. “Allow me to present Feather Duster, a maid from my household staff. I brought her here because I’d like to loan her to you, as a gesture of friendship on my part.”
River shot a glance at Feather as she finished, and the other mare gulped as she took a step forward, giving a halting curtsy. “I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to assist you,” she said, the words coming out just a little too quickly. “If you’ll h-have me, I’ll gladly do…do w-...w-…”
Standing less than a foot from the sputtering pegasus, River could feel her tension returning. She’d told Feather Duster exactly what to say when she introduced her, and the words she was currently tripping over were, “I’ll gladly do whatever you want me to.” It was a perfect line, being suggestive while still plausibly innocent, except now she was messing it up! Get it together! snarled River internally, even as she kept her smile plastered on her face. I won’t have my chance at grasping my dreams be undone by some weak-kneed little girl!
But the words that came out of Feather Duster’s mouth a moment later weren’t the ones that River had told her to say.
“…do windows!” she blurted.
River felt her smile waver, since she was now grinning around a clenched jaw, but she didn’t have a chance to do anything else as Sonata jumped back into the conversation. “Oh wow!” she gasped, eyes widening. “That’s, like, super high-level maid stuff!”
Aria snorted, peering around Lex to give Sonata a scornful look. “How would you know? The only thing you’ve ever cleaned is your plate at dinnertime.”
“For your information,” shot back Sonata, raising her nose in the air as though disdainful of her sister’s ignorance, “whenever they introduce a maid character in cartoons, she always says, ‘I don’t do windows.’ So if Feather Duster here does do windows, then she’d gotta be, like, totes skilled.” She stuck her tongue out at Aria then, before adding, “Duh.”
Nosey, however, seemed more skeptical. “I don’t know.” She paused, looking back and forth between River and Feather as though not sure who to address. She finally settled on River as she continued. “I mean, this is a nice gesture and all, but…” She waved a hoof at the empty lobby. “There’s really not much here for a maid to do. It’s not like we have any furniture that needs polishing or anything.”
Fortunately, Sonata’s outburst had given River time to recover, her features relaxed once more. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. Feather Duster here is a mare of many talents. She can wash your clothes,” she nodded toward Lex’s ratty old cloak as she said that, “carry your things,” this time she sent a pointed look toward his saddlebags, resting next to that bench he’d been laying on, “cut your hair,” her eyes slid up to Lex’s rather unkempt mane then. “Really, she can do…whatever you want her to. Isn’t that right, Feather?”
“…yes. That’s exactly right, Miss.”
“Works for me,” announced Aria. “After everything we’ve done for this place, it’s about time we got someone to dote on us.” The words had barely left her mouth when shot a condescending look at Feather. “Alright, maid-girl, it’s a little hot in here. Start putting those wings to use.”
“Ah, of course.” Stepping to the side so she was clear of River, Feather began to flap her wings gently, sending a soft breeze washing over Aria, as well as Lex and Sonata beside her.
Closing her eyes, Aria let out a pleased groan. “I like her already.” She cracked one eye open, giving Feather an unfriendly grin. “Now, keep doing that all night.”
“Stop teasing her, Aria,” scolded Nosey lightly before giving Feather a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, she’s not being serious.”
“This is kinda nice though,” admitted Sonata, before looking up at her boyfriend. “Whaddaya say, Lex? Can we keep her?”
As all eyes turned toward him, Lex knew that he’d run out of time. Although the girls’ bantering had given him several minutes to think, he still hadn’t been able to reach a decision. Even as everypony waited, he found himself still struggling with the question that he’d had ever since River had made her apology.
Should he remove her curse?
His instinct was to say no. Having punished her barely thirty-six hours ago, he found it hard to believe that her behavior could have changed so much so quickly. Far more likely, to his thinking, that she was being insincere and simply presenting a remorseful appearance in hope of clemency.
Except that was what he’d thought about Fencer at first.
Of course, Fencer had earned her reprieve through exemplary supererogatory actions during a crisis, but the same could conceivably be said for River Bank now. After all, he’d cursed her for making what he’d decided was a credible threat to his recovery operation. For her to place the sum total of her apparently considerable assets at his disposal was something else again. He’d planned on confiscating what he’d needed as circumstances demanded, of course – to be repaid or returned once the recovery was over – but having her cooperation could potentially make resource acquisition much easier, at least in the short-term. And if she really had been rehabilitated, then her contribution in the face of an ongoing crisis might very well warrant a commuted sentence.
Of course, justice demanded more than just her reformation. It also required that her punishment fit the crime (of which duration was a factor), and that it serve to deter further infractions among the public. But the cases for each of those were weak; even if she still had her manor and her staff, the state of Vanhoover was such that River wouldn’t be enjoying the same level of luxury as she would normally, especially with him drawing upon her resources as he saw fit. Likewise, her role as a public deterrent was mitigated by the fact that her crime had been committed in moderate seclusion; even now, it was uncertain how many ponies knew what she had even done.
But more notably, Sonata, Nosey, and even Aria seemed to be responding to River’s entreaty positively. Given how Sonata and Nosey had both tried to tell him that he’d misread the situation with Fencer, whereas they’d responded positively to his cursing Spit Polish, that meant that their reactions here were likely insightful as well. If they were all in agreement that River’s apology was legitimate, then given the comparatively lighter nature of her crime compared to Fencer and Spit Polish, removing her curse wasn’t necessarily inappropriate here.
His mind made up, Lex nodded once before he strode toward River, closing the distance between them. “I accept your apology. And…”
A thought was all it took as Lex reached up and wiped the scythe blood-mark off of River’s cheek. “I absolve you.”
“A field of body parts…?” she whispered weakly, unable to bring herself to picture such a thing. She’d known the situation in Vanhoover had been bad – Pillowcase’s death had driven that home, even if that mare with the picket fence cutie mark hadn’t alluded to further fatalities – but what Coal Hopper was describing was an atrocity on a scale so grand as to be unimaginable. Twilight needs to know about this, she realized. I can send another letter to Ponyville…Spike will get it to her. Then she and her friends-
Shining Armor’s voice cut through her half-formed thoughts. “Coal Hopper, are you absolutely sure about this?” The mare in question gave him a dirty look, causing him to hold up a hoof in a placating gesture. “I’m not saying you didn’t see a body-”
“Parts of a body,” she corrected, tension making her voice terse.
“I believe you,” replied Shining Armor quickly, his voice soothing. “But you said that it was already dark when this happened, right? And the only light around was from the stars and the campfires, which were behind you. Is it possible that you stumbled across…that, and it freaked you out enough that your brain played tricks on you? Like how tree branches outside your window at night can look like the claws of a monster trying to get in?”
The oddly-specific example brought a smile to Cadance’s face, despite the macabre subject they were discussing. A little while after they’d started dating, Shining had told her about the time that just such a tree branch had left Twilight – who never would have told that story voluntarily, even (or rather, especially) to her favorite foalsitter – too scared to go to sleep at night. Shining Armor had only found out about it because he’d been going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and happened to hear Twilight whimpering when he’d passed by her door. When she’d tearfully confessed what was frightening her, Shining Armor had volunteered to stand guard next to her bed to keep her safe, even if that meant staying there all night.
He’d made good on his promise, despite how exhausted it had left him by the time Princess Celestia had raised the sun. “But it was all worth it when Twily woke up and saw that I was still there,” he’d recounted with a warm smile. “She jumped out of bed and hugged me as tight as she could, and I remember feeling absolutely certain that was what I was meant to do: protect ponies. I didn’t even realize that I’d just gotten my cutie mark until Twily pointed it out a second later.”
It had been, and still was, an incredibly sweet story. If Cadance hadn’t already been infatuated with Twilight’s big brother when she’d heard it, that would have done it. As it was, hearing reference to it now was enough to restore a measure of her calm.
But the reference was lost on Coal Hopper, who scowled back at Shining Armor. “I know what I saw,” she snapped irritably. It was only a second later that she seemed to remember who she was talking to, flushing in embarrassment as she looked down. “Your Highness,” she added lamely.
Shaking off the last of her reticence, Cadance took a step forward. “Did anypony else on the train staff see this?” she asked, her eyes turning to Ticket Stub.
But the earth stallion was already shaking his head. “No ma’am, er, Princess. But I completely believe Coal Hopper,” he added quickly. “If she says that’s what she saw, then that’s what was there.”
Cadance nodded. “I understand. Thank you both for coming to us with this.”
Shining Armor cocked his head at her, hearing the implicit dismissal and clearly not having expected it. But he didn’t object as Coal Hopper and Ticket Stub gave them polite bows before turning and walking away. “So, where do you want to go for dinner?” asked the latter as he looked at his companion.
Coal Hopper shook her head. “Uh-uh. No way. I’ve done my part already. Everything else is on you now. You’re going to choose the place, you’re going to hoof the bill, and you had better believe that you’re taking me to a separate dessert place afterward.”
Ticket Stub tried to smile as he trotted after the irascible mare, though it came out as more of a worried grimace. “Heh…whatever you say,” he mumbled, reaching back and glancing nervously at a pouch on his belt that looked like it couldn’t have contained more than a dozen bits.
“And don’t think that I’ve forgotten about that apology you owe me either, buster.”
Cadance couldn’t help but smile as she watched the two of them leave. She could see a thin red thread connecting Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper, the equitable distribution of its soft glow indicating that it was mutual. It wasn’t anything definite, but the potential was there.
But her enjoyment of a possible budding romance was cut short as Shining Armor moved alongside her. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to let them leave without telling us more?” he asked quietly. “If we want to verify what somepony else from that train tells us-”
“Then we shouldn’t ask those two,” interjected Cadance. “Or any of the train staff. They weren’t in Vanhoover very long, and from what they told us Coal Hopper was the only one who did more than unload cargo and help retrofit one of the cars. If we want answers we need to talk to everypony else.”
Shining Armor nodded. “Right. In that case, you should go talk to Pillowcase and Produce Aisle. I’ll go back to the hospital and talk to those ponies that you cured. The doctors might not have found anything wrong with them, but they still wanted to keep them for observation.” He couldn’t keep the wry tone out of his voice; it was easy to forget how, unlike in the Crystal Empire – where Cadance had personally trained a small but significant number of ponies in Lashtada’s worship to the point of receiving spells from the goddess – healing magic wasn’t really known throughout the rest of Equestria. When the doctors at Canterlot’s hospital had heard that the eight ponies that had just been brought in had been healed via magic, there’d been a rush to examine them.
But rather than paying that any mind, Cadance was glancing back at the guest room where Pillow and Aisle were now conversing quietly, Cozy still deeply asleep in the nearby bed. After a moment she sighed. “Alright. As much as I hate to make them relive what they went through, especially right now when they’re just starting to figure out how to make their new relationship work, we need to know what happened, for everypony’s sake.”
She felt Shining Armor place a comforting hoof on her side. “If you’re worried about Celestia and Luna, don’t be. Even if that Lex guy does turn out to be another King Sombra, they’ve won against a pony like him before. Besides, maybe he’s not really that bad? Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper said he was fearsome, but he didn’t sound like he was hurting anypony.”
“Except for Cozy and Aisle when he cursed them.”
There was nothing Shining Armor could say to that, and an uncomfortable silence fell for a few seconds before he spoke up again. “Listen, Celestia and Luna will probably send a reply letter as soon as they get yours. That guard you sent to Twily’s castle will probably come running back with a message from them saying that they’re both fine real soon. In the meantime, just focus on Cozy and her stallions, okay?”
Finally tearing her eyes away from the open door of the guest room, Cadance gave Shining Armor a tired smile. “Okay. Once you’re done interviewing the ponies at the hospital, and I’ve talked to everypony here, we’ll meet back up and compare notes. Then I can send Celestia and Luna a follow-up letter, and if things look really bad we’ll send one to Twilight too.”
But Shining Armor didn’t look reassured by her plan. Quite the opposite in fact, as a perturbed expression settled onto his face. “Wait, Cadance, are you planning on meeting with those other five ponies too? The ones who said they were responsible for what happened to Pillowcase?”
“I don’t think they were all involved,” noted Cadance. “The way they were acting made it look like they were covering for each other. I’ll need to ask Pillow about it, if it’s not too painful, but-”
“Cadance,” cut in Shining Armor. “You can’t.”
The flat statement was enough to make Cadance blink. Although his tone wasn’t imperious or overbearing, it was still rare for Shining Armor to be that abrupt with her. “What do you mean?”
“You should just focus on these three ponies. I’ll come back after I’ve talked to everypony else at Canterlot General, and then we can compare notes. After that, I’ll talk to those other five.”
“But that’ll take a lot longer,” Cadance protested, still not sure what had brought this on. “This way we’re each interviewing eight ponies, with yours at the hospital and mine here.”
“I know,” admitted Shining Armor. “But based on how tired you look, you’ve used most of your alicorn magic, haven’t you? And at least one of those other ponies is a murderer. It’s a lot safer if I be the one to talk to them.”
For a moment Cadance wavered between mild exasperation at her husband’s sudden bout of paternalism and feeling warmed by how worried he was for her. But neither emotion changed the fact that he’d been spot-on in his summary of her current condition. She didn’t think that those five ponies would try anything, but if they did…
Cadance had never been particularly magically-gifted. Unlike Twilight, she’d been a pegasus before ascending to become an alicorn, meaning that she hadn’t had the early education about spellcasting that ponies with a horn typically received. Even after she’d become a princess, the only type of unicorn magic she’d put much practice into was using telekinesis, which was too convenient not to learn. Besides that, she’d been far more focused on fulfilling her destiny of bringing out the love in ponies around her.
In hindsight that had been a mistake, one that she’d needed to learn the hard way. Her lack of even the most elementary combat magic had left her helpless against Queen Chrysalis, and nearly so against King Sombra. Although love and friendship had carried the day against both villains, Cadance had still vowed to learn at least the basics, just in case. It had been a wise decision, since a short while later when Discord had (inadvertently?) caused her and Twilight to get into a fight with a tatzlwurm, she’d been able to fight back instead of having to let her sister-in-law handle everything.
When she’d met Lashtada and entered her service shortly thereafter, a pivotal point in her life that Cadance now considered to be akin to when she’d become an alicorn, the goddess had blessed her with numerous new abilities. But none of them were combat-related. She could see the bonds of love between individuals, and cast a number of divinely-granted spells of healing and purification and enhancement, and even invoke Lashtada’s blessing directly, the way she had to heal the sick ponies at the train station and bring Pillowcase back to life – though doing so required her to use her own alicorn magic, the special “magic that enhanced magic” (as Princess Celestia had referred to it) which only alicorns possessed, in order to channel the goddess’s unfiltered power – but directly attacking or defending hadn’t been among the repertoire of powers she’d gained.
And she’d already expended virtually all of her alicorn magic a short while ago anyway, leaving her fatigued. She’d regain it after a short rest, she knew, but for the moment there was no time for that. But that meant that if Shining Armor’s fears came true, and those five ponies attacked her…
Her worries were interrupted by the sound of hooves. Somepony was rushing down a bend in the hallway, causing both her and Shining Armor to turn toward the sound. As an afterthought, Cadance closed the door to the guest room where Cozy, Aisle, and Pillow were, not wanting whatever was happening to draw them into it.
A moment later, a stallion in Royal Guard armor turned the corner, rushing toward them until he was only a few feet away, skidding to a stop even as he snapped a salute. “Your Majesties!”
Shining Armor’s time as Captain of the Royal Guard immediately came to the fore, as he gave a matching salute automatically. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
The guard hesitated for just a moment. “We have a situation…”
The guard struggled not to flinch at Shining Armor’s tone. “Exactly that, sir. When I went to go see if Spearhead had anything to report, I noticed that he wasn’t at his post at the end of the hallway. Since it’s not like him to go on break without reporting it first, I decided to check the room where the, er, ‘guests’ were being kept. There was no response when I knocked, and when I entered the room-”
“They weren't there,” finished Cadance grimly.
The guard nodded. “Yes, Your Majesty. And there was no sign of Spearhead either.”
Cadance shared a worried look with Shining Armor, who let out a slow breath as years of training came back to him. “Alright. Who else knows about this?”
“Sir, I alerted the nearest two guards as to what had happened before I came here. They’re searching the room for clues right now.”
Shining Armor nodded crisply, mentally reviewing patrol routes and checkpoints that the guards on duty would be keeping at this time of night. While he hadn’t been Captain of the Royal Guard for a little while now, he’d been back in Canterlot long enough to see that things hadn’t changed since he’d left. Which means that the two guards in that room right now are the closest ones to our current position. That made it easier to decide what to do. “I’m going to head there now,” announced Shining Armor. “Cadance-”
“I’m coming with you,” she said immediately. “I still have some healing spells left. If we find Spearhead and he’s hurt, I’ll be able to help him.”
A flicker of relief went through Shining Armor at that, nodding. He’d been worried that Cadance would want to stay with Pillowcase in case those five ponies that had killed him before were trying to finish the job now. But while Shining Armor was worried about that too, his first concern was that they’d hurt Cadance if they came across her. Even if she was an alicorn, combat wasn’t his wife’s forte, and those ponies apparently had some experience where attacking their own kind was concerned. Far safer for her to remain with him, where he could protect her.
Splitting up during a crisis was a mistake that they’d made during the elemental bleeds, after all, and it had cost them dearly…
Pushing the morbid memory away, Shining Armor made himself focus on the crisis at hoof. He’d already determined what both he and Cadance needed to do. Now he just had to secure the safety of everypony else in the immediate vicinity.
But Cadance was one step ahead of him. “You stay here,” she ordered the guard, pointing at the door to the guest room where Cozy, Pillow, and Aisle were. “Don’t let anypony in, and don’t let the three ponies in there leave until things calm down.”
The guard immediately straightened up at the royal command. “Yes ma’am!” He was already moving as he spoke, placing himself in front of the door protectively.
Catching his wife’s eye, Shining Armor shared a nod with Cadance, not needing words to confirm that everything was ready. Turning, the two of them galloped down the hallway side-by-side. Shining Armor eyed every corner nervously, half-expecting the killer ponies to leap out at any second, but each intersection was clear, and after a few minutes they arrived at their destination.
Slowing down as they approached the guest room, its door now hanging open, Shining Armor stopped a few feet from it. Despite knowing that the guards were in there searching the place, he glanced back at Cadance, suddenly cautious. “Let me go first.”
Having already been tired before they started running, Cadance didn’t reply verbally, too busy trying to get her breath back. Instead, she nodded, motioning him to go ahead with one wing. With one last glance around to make sure the hallway itself was clear, Shining Armor moved into the open doorway. “What’s the situation? Is there any sign of Spearhead?”
“Sir! No sir!” answered a unicorn guard with a brown coat, looking up from where he’d been checking underneath the rug in the center of the room. “No sign of anyone at all, sir!”
“But we haven’t finished checking the premises yet,” warned the other guard, an earth pony with a white coat, before turning a suspicious gaze back to the large potted fern in the far corner of the room that he’d been examining. “They might still be lurking about somewhere.”
While their report wasn’t unexpected, Shining Armor couldn’t help but clench his jaw anxiously. He’d gotten to know Spearhead pretty well during his time as a captain, and he was a good guy. While not the most disciplined member of the Royal Guard, Spearhead more than made up for it with his camaraderie and easy sense of humor, to say nothing of his outgoing attitude. He’d never once thrown his weight as a member of the Guard around that Shining Armor had seen, being much more likely to help someone out than to berate them.
That must have been how they got him, Shining Armor realized grimly. If one of the ponies that was in here had leaned out into the hallway and said they needed help with something, Spearhead would have come running. And then the other four… He couldn’t finish the thought, instead turning to look around the room. He knew they didn’t have time to search the place, that they needed to put out an alert so that all of the guards in the castle would know what had happened, but if there was just one clue…one bit of evidence about what had happened to his friend…
Having heard the exchange between Shining Armor and the guards, Cadance was already looking around as she entered the room, pausing as she looked at a nearby armoire. “What about here?” she asked as she focused her telekinesis on the handles.
“Your Majesty, be careful!” yelped the unicorn guard. “We haven’t checked there-”
Cadance yanked the armoire open, causing the unmoving form of a pony to come spilling out and tumble to the floor.
“-yet,” finished the guard, blinking in surprise. “Huh, you know, we probably shouldn’t have saved that for last, what with it being big enough to hold a pony and all.”
But Shining Armor was less concerned with the guards’ oversight than he was with the identity of the pony his wife had just found. “SPEARHEAD!” In an instant, he was at his friend’s side, looking him over nervously. “Hang on buddy…!” Tied up and missing his armor, the pegasus stallion didn’t reply, and for a moment Shining Armor found himself fearing the worst. But a second was all it took to confirm that Spearhead was still breathing, causing Shining Armor to let out a sigh of relief. “He’s alive!”
Cadance was already kneeling down next to the unconscious stallion. “Hurry and get him untied. I’m going to try and revive him.”
“Right away, Your Majesty!” The earth pony guard moved in to start undoing the bindings around Spearhead’s limbs, only to pause, eyes widening as he realized what had been used to secure his fellow guard. “They tied him up with leaves from that fern!” He turned his head, glaring accusingly at the plant. “I knew it had something to do with this!”
“Just get them off him.” Shining Armor held Spearhead steady as the guard went back to work, Cadance already gesturing and murmuring a liturgy to Lashtada. Looking at the sole remaining guard, Shining Armor nodded towards the open door. “Go let the rest of the Guard know what’s happened. Make sure they know that there are five criminals in total, three mares and two stallions, and that they’re to be considered extremely dangerous. Don’t try to apprehend them unless you have overwhelming numbers, otherwise fall back and sound an alarm.” He looked back down at his friend as he finished speaking. “Spearhead was lucky. These ponies aren’t afraid to kill.”
Finishing the words to her healing spell, Cadance didn’t say anything else as she reached out and touched a hoof to Spearhead’s brow, seeing the guard salute and rush out of the room to carry out his orders. But privately, she wondered if Shining Armor was right about that last part. Once Spearhead regained consciousness he’d be able to tell them exactly what happened, but it seemed to her that those ponies could have killed him if they’d wanted to, rather than knocking him out and tying him up. And we still don’t know exactly what happened that led to Pillowcase’s death, she remembered. Things had been moving too fast for them to sit down and get a proper accounting from everyone. And now this…
It simply didn’t make sense to her that those five could be murderers. It wasn’t just that they’d all confessed to that crime in what had obviously been an attempt to cover for each other, which by itself was an act of friendship that she couldn’t see cold-blooded killers doing. It was also that she’d seen the bonds of love between them. The two stallions had shared a deep purple thread, the color of familial love, and the rest of the group had connections that were dark red, indicating friendship that had grown so strong that it had grown into love akin to family. In all cases, the light from the threads had glowed brightly and with uniform distribution, indicating that their feelings were strong as well as reciprocated between each of them. If she’d had to guess, she’d have said that they weren’t bad people at all.
And yet they’d done this to Spearhead, whose eyes were just now fluttering open as Cadance’s healing magic flowed through him. “Ugh…what…?”
“Easy, buddy,” said Shining Armor soothingly. “You’re alright.”
“I am?” Spearhead blinked, lucidity returning to his eyes as he pressed a hoof against the side of his head gingerly.
“You should be,” confirmed Cadance. “I used a healing spell on you. How do you feel?”
“I…huh. I feel great.” He slowly climbed to his hooves, still marveling at his apparent lack of pain, glancing back at his left hind leg as he confirmed something. “Wow, even my trick knee feels better! That stuff’s topnotch!” He gave Cadance an appreciative smile, as though commenting on an exercise routine instead of a miraculous new type of magic.
Cadance blinked, nonplussed at the casual thanks, but Shining Armor was more used to his friend’s easygoing attitude. “Spearhead, focus. What happened to you?”
“Oh, right.” Spearhead put a hoof to his chin, thinking back. “I was guarding that hallway like you said, watching in case any of the ponies in here tried to go anywhere or do anything. For a while nothing happened, but then the door opened and one of them – that earth mare with the whole ‘kid sister’ vibe to her – said that one of her friends had fallen and he couldn’t get up. I went to go see if I could help, and when I walked in the door…” He frowned, cocking his head. “Huh, you know, I’m not sure what happened after that. I guess I must’ve gotten clobbered, because the next thing I know, I’m here with you guys and those other ponies are gone.”
Shining Armor rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s about what I figured.”
But Cadance frowned, realizing something. “You were still wearing your armor when this happened, right?”
Blinking, Spearhead nodded. “Yeah, why-, whoa! My armor’s gone!” He glanced back at himself, turning in a circle and checking under each wing to be absolutely certain. “What the heck happened to it?”
“They took it.” Shining Armor traded a look with Cadance, having another moment of perfect understanding with her before turning to look at the remaining guard. “Go amend the alert that’s being passed around,” he ordered.
“One of the escaped ponies is disguised as a member of the Royal Guard.”
Peering around the corner nervously, Funshine glanced right for several seconds before looking in the opposite direction, fidgeting in his ill-fitting suit of armor before shaking his head. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?!” hissed Slip ‘n’ Slide quietly. “How hard is it to see if there are any stairs down or not?!”
“All the doors are closed!” protested Funshine softly, turning away from the T-intersection and glaring at his brother in irritation. “I don’t have X-ray vision!”
“This is bad,” frowned Granola Bar. “Even if only a few of the rooms on this floor are occupied, if we start opening doors at random then it’ll only be a matter of time before we stumble into one with somepony in it. But if we take too long, they’ll figure out that we’re missing.”
“Well great! That’s just great!” Slip ‘n’ Slide threw his forelegs upward in exasperation. “We survived Vanhoover and all its monsters, only to be done in because we couldn’t find our way out of one lousy castle! That’s not exactly how I envisioned our adventure coming to an end!” He shook his head in disgust, stomping a hoof. “We should have just gone out the window.”
“That would’ve been too dangerous,” replied Fencer evenly. She didn’t begrudge Slip for complaining, knowing that it was his way of trying to steady his nerves. “Even if it is nighttime, we would have been much too exposed. Not to mention that a fall from this high up would have been very dangerous, if not deadly.” She paused for a moment, desperately trying to recall the route they’d taken when they’d been brought into the castle. It shouldn’t be that hard to remember, she knew. It was barely an hour ago. But she hadn’t been paying close attention at the time, too shaken from what had happened with Princess Cadance and Pillowcase. Nor had she been the only one, as her friends had all exchanged sheepish glances when she’d asked if any of them remembered the way out. “Let’s head right and keep moving. If we’re lucky we’ll find something that looks familiar.” She didn’t mention what would happen if they weren’t lucky, knowing that Granola Bar was right about time not being on their side.
With Funshine leading the way – “guarding the prisoners,” at least in appearance – the five of them turned right and kept walking, trying to act like they weren’t tense. “I still say that fern’s leaves would have held us,” muttered Granola Bar. “We would have had to go one at a time, but if we’d tied them all into one long rope and climbed down it we could have made it.”
“Making a rope out of all those leaves would have taken forever, and they probably would have snapped anyway,” groused Slip ‘n’ Slide, conveniently forgetting that he’d just been in favor of climbing out the window a few seconds ago. Instead, he frowned at how Funshine was fidgeting again. “Stop that! Real members of the Royal Guard don’t do that!”
“Yeah, well, I bet real members of the Royal Guard have armor that fits,” complained Funshine. “I still don’t see why I have to be the one to wear this.”
“Because that armor is made for a pony with a heavy build, which rules Slip out,” answered Fencer. “And we can’t do it, since there are no female members of the Royal Guard.”
“I’ve always wondered why that is,” muttered Granola Bar, glancing around for anything to help orient themselves. “It’s weird to think that the princesses would only want big, burly stallions surrounding them.”
“Right, because you’d rather have short, fat little stallions,” smirked Funshine.
Granola Bar cocked her head to the side. “What does that m-, hey!”
Fencer, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and Funshine all chuckled at their friend’s uncharacteristic sputtering, but Hopscotch didn’t join them. “I feel bad for that guard we attacked,” she lamented softly, ears folded down. “He was just doing his job.”
Quickly latching onto a chance to change the subject, Granola Bar gave the smaller mare a reassuring smile. “He’ll be alright. He’ll wake up in a little while with nothing worse than a headache. And since those ferns we tied him up with aren’t too tough-”
“Told you,” snorted Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“-aren’t too tough individually, he should be able to get out of that wardrobe just fine by himself.”
But Hopscotch didn’t look reassured. “I know, but I still feel bad.”
“We all do,” admitted Fencer.
“To be fair, most of what happened was his own fault,” noted Funshine. “I mean, yeah, we lured him in there and threw that blanket on him to blind him. But he was the one who panicked and tried to fly, banging his head on the top of the doorframe so hard that he knocked himself out.”
“And to think, those guys are supposed to be the toughest ponies in Equestria,” scoffed Slip ‘n’ Slide. “If this had been Vanhoover, being caught unaware like that would have-, oof!” His bellyaching was cut off as Funshine came to a sudden stop, causing Slip to collide with him. “What’s the big idea?”
“Shh!” Stepping back from the four-way intersection he’d almost walked through, Funshine held up a hoof in warning, causing the others to fall silent.
“What is it?” asked Fencer after a tense moment.
“There’s a guard to the right,” whispered Funshine. “Just one. Earth pony. He’s standing in front of a doorway.”
“Did he notice us?” Hopscotch couldn’t keep the fright out of her voice.
Fortunately, Funshine shook his head. “I don’t think so. If he did, he’d have either come over here or asked if somepony was there.”
“Well he’ll definitely notice us if we try to cross the intersection,” noted Slip ‘n’ Slide nervously. “Even if we go straight, he’ll definitely see us! We need to go back!”
But Fencer shook her head. “No. This is an opportunity.”
Both stallions blinked. “It is?” asked Funshine, confusion written all over his face.
Fencer nodded, but it was Granola Bar who answered. “She’s right. Funshine, if you go and talk to him, you can get him to tell us the way out of here!”
Funshine’s eyes widened at the prospect. “Huh?! Why me?!”
“Because you’re dressed like a member of the Royal Guard,” explained Fencer patiently. “Listen, just go out there and say that you’re a new recruit and that you’ve gotten lost. He’ll tell you where the exit is, and you’ll say thank you and head back toward us. You’ll be fine.”
But Funshine didn’t seem reassured by Fencer’s instructions, turning pale beneath his ill-gotten helmet. “I don’t know about this. I’m really not good at acting.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide put a hoof on his brother’s flank, his voice reassuring for a change. “Just think of it like that play we did when we were foals, remember? You even played a member of the Royal Guard then.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t have any lines in that play!” whimpered Funshine. “I just had to carry a spear!”
“And now you don’t have to carry one, and you can write your own lines,” retorted Slip, “so this should be even easier. Now get out there!” Knowing that his brother would only freeze up the more he thought about this, and that every second wasted brought them closer to being capture, Slip ‘n’ Slide reared up on his hind legs and gave Funshine a shove, sending him stumbling into the intersection.
The earth pony guard’s reaction was immediate. “Who goes-, oh.” Upon recognizing what looked like another member of the Guard, he made a salute. “Anything to report?”
His eyes widening in panic, Funshine made a return salute, his hoof snapping up to his brow with such force that it made his helmet rattle, almost knocking himself senseless. “Ow! I mean, no! Sir! Nothing to report, Your Sir-ness, sir!”
The other guard frowned, blinking in confusion as he lowered his hoof. “Uh-huh…” An awkward silence fell as both stallions stood there, one in growing perplexity and the other in awkward fright. “…so,” began the guard after a moment, “what are you doing here then?”
Funshine tried to think, to remember what Fencer had told him to say just a few seconds ago, but the information wouldn’t come, leaving him paralyzed as thoroughly as if he’d been struck by a ghoul. “Uh…I, um…” Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see his friends gesturing frantically at him, his brother mouthing something, but without turning to look directly at them he couldn’t make out any specifics. “Er…that is…”
“Come to think of it,” added the guard, his brow furrowing, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before. What’s your name?”
Breathing so hard he was almost lightheaded, Funshine found himself speaking unconsciously. “Fun-” In his peripheral vision his friends went bonkers, shaking their heads madly. Somehow, the message got through, and he managed to change the rest of what he was saying as the words left his lips, his mind flashing incongruously back to the play he’d participated in as a child. “…-damentally…background…character…”
Through the haze brought on by how he was starting to hyperventilate, Funshine was aware of just how ridiculous that sounded, and he could feel himself starting to grow faint. It didn’t help as the guard frowned deeper. “I see…” he said, in a voice that made it quite clear that he didn’t. Worse, his eyes slid over Funshine’s armor a second later. “And did you forget your wings when you changed into your uniform?”
“Huh?” In his current state, Funshine was too far gone to even realize what the guard was talking about, only realizing that things were going very, very badly. This is it, he thought despairingly. We’re going to get caught, and it’ll be all my fault! I’ve doomed us all! I’ve-
But his recrimination was cut-off as the guard, for reasons beyond Funshine’s understanding, suddenly brightened up, chuckling. “Easy there, fella. Try to breathe. You’re not in any trouble.”
The sudden easing of tension was enough to make Funshine calm down, no longer feeling like he was going to collapse as his eyebrows rose. “I’m not?”
Still laughing, the guard shook his head. “Look, we’re in a tense situation right now, so I’m sure those first-day pranks are rattling you, but they’re just that: pranks. I mean, the armor?” He pointed at the empty wing-holes on Funshine’s armor. “I got that one pulled on me too, except in my case it was that they gave me a helmet meant for a unicorn.” He pointed to his head, indicating his lack of a horn. “And let me guess, they told you to say that ridiculous name if somepony asked, like it was protocol to be self-effacing and not to upstage the princesses or something like that?”
Once again, Funshine took his cue from where his friends were nodding at the edge of his vision, copying the gesture. The guard rolled his eyes, smirking. “Thought so. They told me to say that the Royal Guards have no names, because guards are who we are.” He shook his head, nostalgically. “So if there aren’t any new developments to report, what’re you here for then?”
“I-”
“No, wait, don’t tell me!” Seemingly having great fun now, the guard grinned. “You wanted to know where the bathroom was, and they told you it was the room with the green door?” Mechanically, Funshine nodded again, and the guard snorted in amusement. “Those guys, they never change. Listen, there is no green door. You need to go down this hallway, take the second left, and it’s the last room on your right, just before the staircase.”
“S-staircase?” wheezed Funshine, seizing on that word.
“Yep,” nodded the guard. “Can’t miss it. Also…” He lowered his voice, suddenly solemn. “At the end of your shift, the guys’ll probably offer to throw you a small party for completing your first night on the job. Take my advice: don’t drink the punch.”
By now having recovered enough to perform basic speech and motor functions, Funshine managed a wooden grin. “R-right. Punch bad.”
The guard nodded again. “Exactly. Also, if your armor starts to chafe, I like to use a nice herbal balm-”
“Excuse me.”
The door that the guard had been standing on opened suddenly, a crystal stallion poking his head out. “Is everything alright? We heard voices, and I wanted to check-”
“YOU!”
The word left Funshine’s lips before he could stop himself, recognizing the pony that Princess Cadance had brought back to life barely an hour ago. The one that Fencer had killed. Immediately, he brought a hoof up to his mouth, but the damage was done, as both the crystal stallion and the guard looked at him in confusion. “Um, yes?” asked the crystal stallion curiously. “Do I know you?”
Shaking his head so rapidly that it almost made him dizzy, Funshine backed away. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect, as the crystal stallion opened the door wider. “Are you alright?” asked the crystal stallion, apparently concerned with Funshine’s reaction. “You look terribly pale.”
For a moment, Funshine thought he was saved. Then he locked eyes with another pony – a non-crystal stallion standing behind the first one – and his eyes widened in recognition. Although he’d never actually spoken to him, he’d seen that pony back at the camp in Vanhoover, doting on the crystal mare who’d lost her husband because of Fencer. Fortunately, the other pony wasn’t wearing a matching expression of recognition, but rather a frown of uncertainty, as if not sure whether or not he knew who he was looking at.
Trying to get his legs to work, Funshine lurched backward. “I, uh, I gotta go!”
“Wait,” started the crystal stallion, taking a step forward. “If something’s wrong, I might be able to help. I’m a follower of Lashtada, and-”
“Sir, you need to stay in your room.” The guard placed himself in front of the crystal stallion. “By order of Princess Cadance.”
But the crystal pony refused to step back, frowning. “Princess Cadance would want me to help somepony in need, and so would Lashtada.”
“Sir,” started the guard again, his tone taking on a firmer edge.
“I’m afraid I have to insist.” The crystal pony pushed past the guard, starting toward Funshine. “If you tell me what’s troubling you, I-” But he couldn’t bring himself to finish, having walked far enough into the intersection that he could now see around the corner, freezing in place.
Five feet to his left was the mare who had killed him.
Unable to contain herself any longer, River let out a heady laugh of triumph, prancing in place.
Fortunately, there was nopony around to see her undignified behavior. Halfway between her manor and the refugee camp that abutted the train station, her only companions were the night sky and the grass beneath her hooves, and neither said anything as River flopped carelessly onto her back, rich chuckles still escaping her throat. I did it! she cheered silently. I got what I wanted, and then some!
Intellectually, she knew she shouldn’t feel as giddy as she did. She’d given Lex everything that she’d worked her entire life to achieve, all so that he’d forgive her for their disastrous first meeting. That he’d seen fit to remove the curse he’d laid on her – which had been more than she’d dared to hope for – only meant that now she was truly back to square one in his eyes. By any measure that was a bad bargain, and that she’d needed to sacrifice so much simply to earn a second chance with Vanhoover’s new overlord should have left her feeling bitter and resentful, she knew.
But instead, she felt exhilarated in a way she hadn’t in years. And she knew why…
“I seduced you,” she whispered, and hearing the words out loud sent a shudder through her. Lex wouldn’t have removed her curse if she hadn’t taken action, of that she felt sure. Which meant that he had removed it because she’d convinced him to. I had something I wanted you to do, and I was able to make you do it. The thought made her grin wider, wriggling on the grass.
That was a completely ridiculous proposition, of course. What had just happened was nothing more than a business transaction, one where the other party had simply seen fit to be more generous than she’d expected. But the fact that she’d be able to engage in such a transaction with someone like Lex – someone who was at least as powerful as any of those stuck-up Canterlot wizards, if not even stronger – was an incredible boost to her self-esteem. He had the power to steamroll her completely, but she’d still been able to tempt him, to capture his interest and entice him into giving her what she wanted in exchange for what he could otherwise have taken.
And if I can do it once, I can do it again. Of that she felt certain. True, figuring out how to make him restore her youth and beauty would likely be monstrously difficult – somepony who demanded such great sacrifices for a mere apology would undoubtedly require far more in order to grant such a hefty favor – but River found herself positively gleeful at the challenge. Fighting the McNeighs and Hoofingfords to a standstill had long since become unfulfilling, and her life at home had grown disappointing and bland. But now greater gains were within sight, and even if they would be extremely hard to win – with the consequences for failure being catastrophic, as her brief time being cursed had made clear – she knew that attaining them was possible. Tonight had proven that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Still, the irony of how she was embarking on such a dangerous path wasn’t lost on her. “Is this how you felt when you made all those risky bets, Mounte?” she murmured softly, looking up at the stars. She’d known that her late husband had gotten a thrill out of high-risk, high-reward enterprises, but she’d never understood why. Far better, to her thinking, to stick to more reliable endeavors, even if they required more time for less payoff. But now that she had no real choice but to gamble everything on a slim path to victory…she found herself appreciating the rush that Mounte must surely have felt when he’d done the same all those times.
Of course, he had almost ruined the Banks family in pursuit of that thrill. But that’s because he let it control him, River told herself as she climbed to her hooves. I won’t make that same mistake. No matter how good it felt to live on the edge, she wouldn’t forget why she was doing this, rather than engage in risk-taking for its own sake the way Mounte had.
“And now,” she sighed, “I’m going to go reward myself.” Since her curse was lifted, a nice hot bath was in order. One with scented candles and a tall glass of something smooth, to be enjoyed leisurely while her servants washed her hair and scrubbed her coat. Maybe with a nice massage afterward. She’d need to do it all quietly, of course, to avoid disturbing the princesses-
The thought made River freeze in mid-stride, eyes widening. “The princesses!” she moaned, an anguished tone filling her voice. She’d told Celestia that she was giving up the benefits of her wealth voluntarily in order to hide the fact that Lex had cursed her, not wanting him to get into a conflict with the alicorns before she’d found a way to convince him to give her everything she wanted. And now I have to keep living like that, since Celestia and Luna are staying at my manor! Biting her lip, she rubbed her cheek where the blood-mark had been, knowing she’d probably need to have it painted back on since she’d told Celestia it was a symbol of solidarity with Lex’s efforts.
Worse, River had no doubt that Lex would quickly move to capitalize on everything she’d given him. Although she’d quickly removed herself from his presence after he’d “absolved” her – not wanting to risk ruining everything she’d accomplished by wearing out her welcome – Lex had called out to her as she’d left. “Be prepared to make a full accounting of your assets in the morning,” he’d warned her, and his intent to put them to immediate use had been quite clear.
At the time River had simply smiled and nodded, but now she could feel herself deflating, certain that her manor would be one of the things Lex took control of. Between that and the alicorns, it meant that her impoverished lifestyle was going to continue for a little while now. The realization made her heave a sigh, her earlier giddiness now completely gone. Slowly, River started walking back toward her manor, shaking her head at her circumstances.
There was probably quite a bit more hardship in her immediate future, she knew. Likely more sacrifices too. “But it will be worth it,” she vowed softly.
“I’ll make sure of that.”
Cleansweep smiled as she watched Fruit Crunch describe their recent fight to Severance.
“And then I was all like, ‘do your worst! I’ll cut you down to size!’” recounted the colt, scowling ferociously at an imaginary Silhouette. “And you could see that he wasn’t taking me seriously, because he started casting a spell, so you know what I did then?” He paused, grinning toothily at the free-floating scythe. Severance made no response that Cleansweep was aware of – and she was sure that had to be true for Crunchy as well, since he wasn’t touching it – but the tip of its blade remained pointed directly toward her friend, who apparently took that to mean it was paying attention, because he continued a moment later. “I leaped forward, and wham!” He jumped up and swung his hoof savagely. “I punched him right in the face!”
“It was really impressive, Crunchy.” Her compliment made the colt blush, and the sight warmed Cleansweep’s heart. Less than two days ago, he’d been tormented by what Block Party and Spit Polish had done to him, but now he looked the way she’d remembered from before the city had flooded, upbeat and carefree. It’s funny how getting into another fight made him feel better, she mused. That would have been the last thing she’d have thought would help, after how he’d bullied Spit Polish before.
“Aw, you were pretty awesome too, Dust Bunny,” Fruit Crunch smiled. “The way you charged into those guards and knocked them all down? You were unstoppable!”
“I know, right?” she smirked, deciding that maybe she understood why Crunchy felt so good after all. But her good mood was spoiled as she remembered what happened after that. “I just wish my mom saw it that way…”
“She’ll come around,” insisted Fruit Crunch, walking over to her and giving her a friendly pat on the back. “Like, remember that time we tried to build a submarine out of a barrel? I’d never seen somepony as angry as she was then, but after you were done being grounded, it was back to business as usual.”
“To be fair, we did mess that up pretty badly,” pointed out Cleansweep. “I mean, we accidentally caused all those other barrels to roll into the harbor, and you had to wash all the saltwater off each and every one of those apples that were in them, remember? Not to mention the submarine never actually worked.”
Fruit Crunch waved a hoof, as though he couldn’t be bothered with the details. “I’m just saying, your mom will calm down eventually.”
Cleansweep sighed. “I hope so. My dad was usually the one to calm her down about that stuff, but he’s still not back yet. I wish he’d hurry up.”
Shifting uncomfortably at his friend’s certainty that her dad had survived, Fruit Crunch was saved from replying as Severance floated over, the bottom of its haft touching his side, causing the colt to blink. “Huh? Oh, right! So then, Silhouette got back up, and he gave me this incredibly wicked glare, but I was just like ‘how do you like it?...”
The story continued to unfold, with Fruit Crunch giving the blow-by-blow of what had happened, Cleansweep adding in salient details every so often. But when he got to what had happened afterward, she fell silent. After her mom had hauled her off, she hadn’t been able to see the end of Lex’s ritual, and she was still ticked about that. That she’d apparently missed a bunch of really cool stuff only made it worse. “Wait, so Aria kissed Lex?!”
“Yep!” grinned Fruit Crunch. “Right in front of Sonata too! And let me tell you, she was mad! They actually started fighting over him!”
Cleansweep gave a girlish shriek of delight at the news. “Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh! And Feathercap got to go talk to Princess Luna in private?!”
“With that mare, Nosey. They were back there for a long time!”
Too energized to sit still, Cleansweep flew in a quick loop, emitting another whoop of excitement. “I’m so jealous!” Of course, she would have preferred to talk to Princess Celestia, but getting one-on-one – or rather, two-on-one – time with a princess was still huge! But there was still one thing to look forward to. “And that Nosey lady said that Lex would reward us?”
“Uh-huh!” Fruit Crunch’s eyes shone at the prospect. “I don’t know if we’re supposed to think of stuff we want, or if he’ll give us medals, or something else altogether, but I can’t wait! Especially since that’s not our only reward!”
Cleansweep stopped in mid-air at that, turning to look at her friend with wide eyes. “It’s not?”
“Nope!” Smiling so wide that it had to have hurt his cheeks, Fruit Crunch beckoned her over. “I know we should wait until the others are here, but I can’t help it!” He reared up on his hind legs, kicking his fore-hooves in excitement as Cleansweep trotted over. “We’re finally going to get magic powers from the Night Mare!”
Her eyebrows shooting upward, Cleansweep almost tripped. “W-we are?!”
“Yeah! I’m sure of it!” Turning to look at Severance, Fruit Crunch stated his case. “I mean, we won that fight and protected everypony all on our own. We showed that we have what it takes. So now the Night Mare will reward us, right?” Moving forward, he reached out with a hoof, touching Severance’s hilt. A moment later, Cleansweep did the same, both foals gazing up at the weapon’s blade in silent expectation.
A moment later, the scythe’s answer flowed into their minds.
With a sigh, Luna snatched the papers away from her sister, her cobalt blue aura wrapping around the pages, replacing the light golden glow of Celestia’s telekinesis as she drew them to herself. “Enough, Sister. You need to rest.”
But Celestia shook her head, blinking blearily. “No. We don’t have much time before our meeting with Lex, and-”
“Precisely,” interrupted Luna. “Which is why you need to sleep now. It’s already been hours since you lowered the sun, and it won’t be long before you need to raise it again. If you don’t rest now, I’m afraid that you’ll be too tired to achieve the breakthrough you’re looking for when we speak with Lex later.” A look at the conflicted expression on Celestia’s face made it clear that she hadn’t completely convinced her, so Luna kept going. “There’s still a few more hours of nighttime left. Let me review these, and I’ll-”
She ceased speaking as a flurry of sparkles suddenly flew into the room, entering through the window she’d opened earlier to get a look at the moon. Luna had just enough time to realize what she was seeing when the glittering motes of light gathered in front of Celestia and merged, transforming into a rolled piece of paper. Reflexively, the elder alicorn caught the missive and unrolled it. “It’s a letter,” she exclaimed, though Luna had already guessed that much, recognizing Spike’s signature method of sending messages.
But that he was sending one now, in the middle of the night, was a cause for concern. “From Twilight?”
Celestia shook her head, not looking up from the page. “No. Twilight didn’t take him with her when she went back to Everglow.”
Luna’s brow furrowed, not having known that. “Then that letter…?”
“Is from Cadance.” Celestia’s answer came in the form of a sigh, a troubled look on her face as she passed the letter to Luna. “The crystal ponies that she sent here to spread word of Lashtada’s religion just arrived in Canterlot.”
Luna’s frown deepened at that, looking the hastily-written message over. When she was finished, she looked up at Celestia. “This is a bad sign, Sister.”
“We knew that a lot of ponies died here.” But Celestia’s protest was weak, though Luna wasn’t sure if it was because she was tired or because she knew it was flimsy.
“Yes,” admitted Luna. “But we thought that was from the disaster, or from the monsters that followed it, not because they were murdered by other ponies!” Realizing that she’d inadvertently raised her voice for the last few words, Luna took a moment to calm herself before continuing. “Neither Sonata nor Nosey told us anything about the ponies here killing each other. They barely even mentioned that they’d sent sick ponies to Canterlot and Tall Tale for treatment.” She paused for a moment to let that sink in. “You said that you thought that they weren’t being completely honest with us before. Now we know for sure. And if they were holding back important information, it’s because Lex told them to.”
Celestia was silent for a long moment. “We’ll ask him about this when we speak to him later,” she said at last.
“We should do more than ask, Sister,” pressed Luna. “Even if Lex does have the welfare of everypony in mind, he’s been nothing but hostile toward us. I don’t think it would be out of line if we required him to turn over that evil artifact of his, or perhaps give up King Sombra’s horn, as a gesture of good faith on his part.”
She almost added a third suggestion: that he renounce that “Night Mare” goddess of his, but thought better of it at the last moment. Her time with Silhouette and her other worshipers made it clear that anyone who’d go so far as to injure themselves for the sake of their religion – as Lex had with that horrible-looking barbed wire wrapped around his hoof – would only be antagonized by such a demand. Worse, even suggesting such a thing would send the wrong message to her sister, making her think that Luna was motivated by some sort of personal jealousy rather than honest concern. Far better to suggest that he give up something like his horn. She and Celestia had asked Lex for that particular concession a few weeks previous, when they had originally agreed to allow him to administrate Vanhoover’s recovery. He had balked at the prospect then, but Luna thought it was worth reiterating now, since Lex was apparently gathering so much dark power around himself.
But her sister apparently disagreed. “While displaying no such faith ourselves?” Celestia’s tone made it clear her question was rhetorical, even if she hadn’t been shaking her head. “We don’t have the full story about what happened here, and Cadance’s letter says much the same thing about what’s happening in Canterlot. Rushing to judgment won’t help anypony.” She nodded toward the other papers that were still held aloft in Luna’s aura. “Just now, you were saying that I should sleep and that you would review those records of Lex’s time at my school while I did. I think that’s a good idea.” She walked toward the large bed in the corner of the room as she spoke, telekinetically drawing back the covers. “Once it’s time for me to raise the sun, you’ll be able to get a few hours’ rest yourself. That way we’ll both more composed when we meet with Lex later.”
Luna huffed, but recognized that the conversation had reached its end. There was just one other point to settle. “You don’t think we should write back to Cadance in the meantime?”
“Not until we know more,” answered Celestia as she laid down. “She has enough to deal with right now, and worrying her with half-informed reports about what’s happening here will only distract her.”
“Very well. Goodnight, Sister.”
“Goodnight, Luna.”
After Celestia doused the light by the bed, Luna returned to her position beside the window, the moon’s soft light and the glowing aura of her telekinesis illuminating Lex’s old school records. But she didn’t begin reading them immediately, instead turning the events of the last few hours over in her mind. While she knew her sister wasn’t wrong about them having incomplete information, Luna felt certain that whatever new revelations they uncovered wouldn’t allay her fears about the dour unicorn.
After all, Luna had firsthoof experience with this sort of thing.
He really is just like the old me, Luna decided as she reviewed what she knew of Lex. The thought was tinged with regret, remembering how she’d felt in the years leading up to her transformation into Nightmare Moon. The jealousy, the frustration, the bitterness...Lex Legis had all the same qualities about him now that she’d had back then, and Luna felt sure that it was leading him down the same dark road. The only difference was that Lex was poised to become a worse monster than she ever had.
Of course, Luna had suspected that for a little while now. But she hadn’t shared it with Celestia, knowing what her sister would say. She’d tell me that I should reach out to him, sharing what I’ve learned from making the mistakes that he’s making now. Just the thought made Luna sigh, knowing that Celestia would never understand why that wouldn’t work.
Her sister, who had always lived in the light, had no conception of how insidious that kind of negativity was. She couldn’t comprehend how, when you felt unappreciated for a long enough time, you started to think that perhaps it was because you deserved it. Once that happened, it was only a matter of time before self-hatred set in…and at some point after that you eventually became so filled with hate that you couldn’t contain it anymore, unleashing it upon the world. There were no words, no friendship lesson or catchy song, which could break through that mindset.
Changing somepony’s heart, Luna knew, wasn’t that easy.
She herself had been fortunate. Not only had her sister never given up on her, but she’d arranged for Twilight Sparkle and her friends to discover the Elements of Harmony. Composed of the most selfless and caring of emotions, the Elements had uplifted her spirit, letting her see through the veils of anguish and self-deception that she’d surrounded herself with to realize the truth: that she was the cause of her own misery, and that in succumbing to it she had only made it worse for herself. That realization had allowed her to change back into Luna, and fortunately for her Celestia had been there to forgive her, a memory that still brought tears of thankfulness to her eyes even now.
It was that thankfulness that had led Luna to create the Tantabus, her psychic contruct that haunted her dreams with the horrible memories of her time as Nightmare Moon. The nightmares not only served to punish her in a way that Celestia never would, but also doubled as a reminder of what it felt like to go down the path of corruption, keeping her vigilant against it ever happening again. But although he had a Tantabus of his own, Lex Legis didn’t seem to be wary of the mistakes he was making. If anything, he seemed to have been making them for a long time, according to his old school records.
Shuffling the papers, Luna looked them over again. That records from over a thousand years ago were still in such good shape wasn’t surprising. Minor preservation magic was a staple among unicorns with cutie marks in archiving, record-keeping, librarianship, and similar fields. What was more impressive was that her sister had managed to find them after all this time.
Somehow, after their disastrous first meeting – the one where Lex had originally declared himself in rebellion against them – Celestia had recalled an old student from her school that matched Lex’s name and disposition. Luckily, she’d never been able to bring herself to throw away her student files, and she’d dispatched her steward to search through the archives. Of course, Luna knew full well that “the archives” was a mountain of unorganized boxes shoved into the abandoned mines beneath Canterlot, and so it was no surprise that the poor stallion had needed weeks to find the right one.
The records themselves painted a grim picture of the unicorn in question, at least to Luna’s mind. To say that Lex Legis had been a brilliant student was a severe understatement; he had achieved perfect scores on literally every single assignment, project, or exam that he’d been given, a feat that only Twilight Sparkle had replicated. But his teachers’ remarks lacked the praise that such accomplishments should have brought. “Difficult” was a word frequently used to describe him. “Rude,” “disrespectful,” and “argumentative” also made frequent appearances.
The most expressive notes came from View Point, a teacher of magical ethics who’d possessed a penchant for treating her records almost like a personal diary. “Lex Legis disrupted class again today,” read one entry. “While I wasn’t surprised that he already knew ‘The Tale of Sparkler’ – the story of a unicorn filly named Sparkler who conjures a light while walking through the woods alone one evening, only to be chased by monsters – I still can’t believe that he objected so strongly to it! While the other foals were captivated by how Sparkler was finally cornered by the monsters, only to realize that they just wanted her to put her light out so that they could go back to sleep, Lex was scowling angrily. At the end of the story, where the now-friendly monsters escorted Sparkler home through the dark after she doused her light, I started to explain the tale’s moral about considering how our magic might affect other people, but Lex became incensed and kept interrupting. He called the story ‘a paean of consequentialist gibberish’ that ‘purported that moral agency was a stochastic process utterly lacking in normative ethics.’ It was the strangest thing I’ve ever heard a five year-old say! I’m still not sure exactly what he meant, but I told him that if he keeps causing a commotion he’ll have to be punished.”
That was one of the last records; according to the remaining paperwork, Lex had withdrawn from Celestia’s school shortly thereafter. Frowning, Luna shuffled through the pages again, but after a few minutes found herself coming back to that one. It was, she realized, Lex in a nutshell: brilliant but bitter, already having a mindset that not only isolated him from others, but drove him to lash out when he disagreed with them. Even as a child he’d been pulling away from others while simultaneously trying to assert himself over them, and he was still doing it now.
In which case, Luna realized, View Point had been more correct than she’d realized at the time.
If Lex kept causing a commotion, he’d have to be punished.
Glancing over at Sonata’s smiling face, Lex frowned in mild irritation. He felt vaguely confident that she was referring to his accepting River Bank’s act of contrition and subsequently removing her curse – given that Sonata had responded positively to the exchange, that seemed like a reasonable inference – but he couldn’t help but feel slighted by her choice of words now. After all, for her to say that she was “proud” of him carried the connotation, as he understood it, that his actions had exceeded her expectations. Which means she was expecting me to misread River’s sincerity the same way I did with Fencer.
That was an upsetting thought, mostly because he knew that Sonata’s lack of faith in him in that regard was warranted. Just remembering how pleased with himself he’d been after cursing Fencer sent pangs of embarrassment through him now. He’d been so confident at the time that everypony’s rush to obey him immediately after he’d done that had been because they’d perceived his rejection of her apology as righteous, when in fact they’d simply been afraid of him. In hindsight, it was clear that he never should have thought that he’d read everypony correctly, but at the time he’d been buoyed with self-confidence, having successfully utilized several platitudes in conversation with the ponies he’d lead into battle against Tlerekithres. While he doubted that Sonata was intentionally trying to highlight his previous failings by comparing his actions with River now to how he’d acted then, he couldn’t help but tense at the implication. “My pardoning River was entirely consistent with previous instances where I’ve dispensed justice,” he snapped defensively. “The curse I laid on her was meant to be punitive, not coercive, which means that her voluntary abdication of the totality of her resources, both material and otherwise, was entirely supererogatory in nature, warranting-”
“Huh?” Sonata tilted her head, giving him a blank look. “What’re you talking about?”
Lex’s frown deepened, not sure if she didn’t understand his explanation or if he’d misread her initial statement. “What are you talking about?”
Sonata scoffed, as though she couldn’t take his question seriously. “Um, duh. That River can get dressed and stay dressed now, instead of having to make a show out of taking her clothes off. Which reminds me,” she added, smiling guilelessly as she gently elbowed Lex, “no more undressing girls who make you mad, okay? If you really wanna do that, tell me. I’ll find something that you can cut off or magic off me or whatever you like.” She said that last part in a slightly heavier voice than normal, punctuating her statement with a wink.
Lex could only stare at her.
“Hmm, so that’s what you like, huh?” smirked Aria, pressing up against Lex’s side again. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Look, can we just go back to sleep, please?” interjected Nosey, though the look on her face made it clear that she was trying to fight down a blush. “There’s an important meeting in less than twelve hours, and we have a lot of stuff to go over before then, so I really think we should turn in.”
“Suit yourself,” replied Aria, her voice now much cooler as she gave Nosey a dismissive look. “I’d much rather stay up and play.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause you were sleeping while Lex was making you into a pony,” snorted Sonata. “The rest of us are pooped.” Her eyes slid over to Feather Duster then, smiling as something occurred to her. “Hey, do you have some sort of maid magic where you can, like, conjure up a nice soft bed out of thin air? Maybe one that’s just big enough for two?”
Feather Duster, who had been staying as still and quiet as possible in the hope that maybe, just maybe, everypony would forget about her, gulped as all eyes turned to her. “I…um-”
But she didn’t have a chance to reply as Aria snorted. “‘Maid magic’? Really?”
Huffing, Sonata gave her sister an indignant look. “What? We’ve seen all sorts of other magic, so why can’t maids have their own too?”
“Both of you, be quiet,” growled Lex, the banality of Sonata and Aria’s fighting having finally eaten away at his patience. Turning his back on everypony else, he made his way back to the bench that had become their de facto resting place. “Nosey was correct in her assessment. Settle down and go to sleep.”
Alternately pouting, sighing, or rolling their eyes, all three mares made their way over to where Lex was already lying down, taking their usual spots around him. It was only after they’d all settled down that Sonata realized that Feather Duster still hadn’t moved. “Oh, hey,” she added. “You should probably get some rest too. Just, you know, not here with us.”
She tried to say that last part gently but firmly, wanting to make absolutely sure there was no chance that the new girl would try to get in on the Lex-action too. Just need to make sure that’s clear right from the get-go, she told herself. Though she was probably worrying over nothing; everyone knew that maids were always prim and proper, which was why no one ever thought of them as doing anything naughty.
Proving her right, Feather Duster immediately shook her head. “Of course not!” she blurted, before catching herself. “F-forgive me. I meant, uh, I’ll s-simply retire to, um…” She looked around the lobby, trying to figure out the furthest distance she could place herself from whatever indecency the four of them were about to engage in without seeming rude about it, not wanting to give them any excuse to lash out at her. Something far away, preferably out of sight, but without making it seem like I’m trying to stay away from them…
But she didn’t have a chance to think before Nosey spoke up, giving her a sympathetic look. “You can go back outside if you want. I’m sure you’re still worried about your daughter.”
Feather Duster didn’t hesitate to take the offered out, having to stop herself from immediately galloping toward the door. “Thank you, Miss Newsy!” Immediately trotting toward the door, she didn’t dare look backward as she slipped outside, breathing a sigh of relief as she immediately spread her wings and flew away.
Blinking, Sonata watched the maid leave before looking back at her bestie. “She has a daughter?”
Nosey nodded, her instincts as a reporter – recently stoked back into some semblance of normalcy after her conversation with Princess Luna – kicking in at the request for more information. “Cleansweep. She was one of the foals that saved us from that Silhouette guy.”
Sonata’s eyes widened at that. “For realsies? Wow, that’s awesome! How did I not know that?”
Nosey smiled a little, laying her head back down. “You’d already gone to talk to Princess Celestia when she came to,” she paused slightly, choosing her next words carefully, “collect her daughter.” As good as it felt to be reporting the news, there was no need for her to make Feather Duster look bad in the process.
But her good mood was interrupted as Aria let out a snort, not bothering to lift her head from where she was resting it on Lex’s middle. “Oh yeah? Well if you know the new girl so well, how come you acted like you’d never met her before when what’shername was here?”
Nosey blinked, not knowing what Aria was talking about. “Huh?”
“That rich lady. The one who looks like the older, less hot version of me,” explained Aria. “You were being all ‘oh how kind to make your acquaintanceship’ or whatever, and then you asked ‘who’s your friend?’ about the maid.”
Rolling her eyes as she realized what Aria was asking, Nosey didn’t bother to keep the wry tone out of her voice. “I was being polite, Aria.” You should try it sometime, she added mentally before continuing. “River Bank is an important pony in this city, so I wanted to give her an opportunity to introduce someone that she’d obviously brought with her.”
“And now that River knows how important Lex is, she was totes polite too,” smirked Sonata. “And I bet the princesses will be the same when we talk to them later. At least, so long as that Silhouette jerk isn’t around.”
This time Aria did turn her head, glancing at where Sonata was curled around Lex at the end of the bench. “Okay, that’s, like, the third time somebody-”
“Somepony,” interrupted Sonata with a smirk.
“-has mentioned a guy with that name,” finished Aria, ignoring her sister’s verbal jab. “Did I miss something?”
“It’s one of the things we can go over tomorrow,” yawned Nosey. “We really should go to sleep, right Lex?” Soft breathing was her only answer, causing her to glance his way from her position opposite of Sonata. “Lex?”
“He’s asleep,” confirmed Sonata a moment later, her voice now coming out as a whisper. Taking that the signal that they were done for the night, she laid her head back down. “Goodnight Nosey. Goodnight Aria.”
In his dream, Lex couldn’t do anything but watch, powerless and humiliated, as the mares in his life were brutalized right in front of him.
With no choice but to keep casting, Lex could only look on helplessly as Silhouette smirked, signaling the other guards with one hoof as Nosey and Sonata tried to back away. But they didn’t make it two steps before large, strong members of the Royal Guard pounced on them, driving both mares to the ground. Only a stone’s throw away, Lex had a perfect vantage point as powerful hooves took hold of the girls’ smaller bodies, spreading their limbs and holding them down as they struggled impotently.
Lex…
Both of them were looking at him, mouths open in silent cries for help. But there was nothing he could do, knowing that if he stopped gesturing or chanting for even a moment, the gathered energies of the ritual would lash out indiscriminately, putting everyone at risk. They knew that too, they had to know that, but they were still looking at him with eyes that were begging for him to save them, to use the powers that had overcome dragons and devils to rescue them now. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even explain to them why he couldn’t.
Lex.
The Royal Guards were smirking as they looked down at their captives, and although Lex couldn’t interpret expressions he somehow could detect the lascivious undertone to those smiles, the guards fully cognizant of their captives’ beauty. The sight made Lex’s blood boil, wanting to howl in fury at the sight of other stallions treating his mares like that. But he couldn’t, not without losing the other girl that belonged to him, and that was equally unacceptable…
Lex!
Lex knew that his desperation was obvious as Silhouette, the architect of his misery, strode toward him. It was written all over the black-and-white stallion’s spiteful grin. That grin grew wider a moment later as he raised a hoof and began to cast a spell, one that Lex knew would disrupt the ritual. The knowledge brought with it a surge of panic, knowing that he had to do something, had to find a way to fix things in the next few seconds or he’d lose them all…
LEX!
Lex awoke instantly.
In the time it took for his eyes to fully open, he’d already completed the jarring transition to full wakefulness, processing that he was still in the train station, still lying on the bench where he’d lain down before, and that someone had been whispering his name with greater and greater urgency. An instant later, he identified the one who’d been calling out to him, looking at Aria. “What is it?”
“It’s about time!” she whispered harshly. “I need to talk to you!”
“Has something happened?” He kept his voice at a whisper to match hers, idly noting that both Nosey and Aria were still asleep. He was already imagining possible emergency scenarios and countermeasures that would need to be taken in response. But if no one else had woken up…
“It’s my body!” The tension in Aria’s whisper was audible. “Something’s wrong!” Without any preamble, she got up and started walking away from him, snatching up a lantern and lighting it as she headed deeper into the lobby of the station.
His heart lurching as he thought back to his nightmare, Lex got up after her, only barely managing to disentangle himself from Nosey and Sonata without waking them. “What is it?” he hissed, moving after her. He had been sure that he hadn’t made any errors during the ritual, but if he was wrong…if he’d mispronounced a word or made a gesture wrong…
Trying to keep his tension down, Lex let Aria lead him to an area at the far end of the lobby, heading into a recessed alcove that had been set aside for tourist information, brochures and leaflets still tucked into a rack on the far wall, above a small table. “Aria!” hissed Lex. “What’s wrong with your body?”
Standing facing away from him, Aria put the lantern down on the table before she glanced back over her shoulder…and her sultry grin was back in place. Slowly, she widened her back legs, letting her front half sink toward the floor as she lifted her tail, showing him everything her new body had to offer. “It’s still a virgin,” she purred, her voice turning husky.
Frozen in shock, it was all Pillowcase could do to speak. “You…”
“Who?” Aisle leaned out the door.
“Shoo.” But the guard tried to wave him back inside.
“Oh poo,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide weakly.
“My crew!” squeaked Funshine.
“We’re through…” moaned Granola Bar.
“What do we do?!” whimpered Hopscotch.
“Withdrew! I mean, withdraw!” yelled Fencer. “Run for where the stairs are! Go!” She darted into the intersection as she spoke, intent on making a hard right and rushing past Pillowcase. It’s not like I’m trying to avoid him, she swore silently as she dashed forward, trying to ignore how the crystal stallion was already attempting to lurch backward in an effort to keep away from her, babbling incoherently as his features twisted in fear. I just need to get my friends out of here before more guards arrive!
Except, she realized an instant later, Pillowcase wasn’t babbling incoherently. He was calling out to Lashtada in some sort of liturgical chant, similar to what Princess Cadance had done in her initial, unsuccessful attempts to heal the ponies they’d brought here via the train, before she’d used Lashtada’s power directly. He didn’t do that when we attacked him before! But there was no time to think about that now; she was already in the middle of the intersection – only a few feet from Pillowcase – and was just starting to lean her body in favor of turning, hearing the hoofsteps of her friends behind her-
At that moment Pillowcase’s chant finished, and he immediately shrieked a command. “Approach no closer!”
Fencer had just enough time to think that he’d phrased that rather oddly as she started leaning into her hard rightward turn…and then, completely contrary to what she’d intended to do, she flung herself in the opposite direction, hurling herself toward Pillowcase in an off-balance lunge. Her eyes widening in confusion and alarm, she had just enough time to see the same expression on his face before she crashed bodily into him. It was only blind luck that kept her from smashing her injured horn against his face, and Fencer was helpless to control her momentum as the two of them hurtled into the guard – who hadn’t had enough time to do anything other than glance back at them in surprise – sending the three of them into the half-open door where Aisle was waiting, slamming it open and knocking him to the ground, all four of them collapsing into the room in a heap.
The four of them had barely hit the ground when Funshine skidded into the room, making his way over to Fencer’s side. “Garden! Are you okay?!”
“What’re you doing?! We gotta go!” Slip ‘n’ Slide was clearly struggling not to scream, glancing between where his brother was helping Fencer to her hooves and the open door. But he turned his full attention to the door a second later as Hopscotch and Granola Bar rushed in, the latter slamming the door closed and leaning against it. “What’re you doing?! We need to leave!”
“It’s too late for that!” snapped Granola Bar. “We need to-, oh no!”
Following her gaze to the room’s only bed, Slip ‘n’ Slide’s eyes widened as he saw a familiar crystal mare sitting up and rubbing her eyes blearily, a pained expression on her face. “Ow. Whaz goin’ on?” muttered Cozy, looking around the room blankly. But when she saw Funshine helping Fencer off of Pillowcase, her eyes suddenly grew to the size of dinner plates, blind panic replacing her sleepiness. “PILL-”
But she didn’t have a chance to finish wailing, as a cerise-and-maroon blur leaped at her, knocking her back onto the bed and holding her down. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry please don’t scream please don’t scream please don’t scream!” whispered Hopscotch, looking like she was about to cry. But despite the fact that she was smaller than the struggling crystal mare, she was managing to hold her down and even keep a hoof over Cozy’s mouth. Barely.
Meanwhile, the guard was groaning as he climbed to his hooves. “My head,” he moaned. “These helmets do noth-, wait…hang on.” Blinking, he finally put two and two together as he looked at the mass of ponies now occupying the room. “You’re those guys who went missing!” Turning, he gave Funshine a look of resolve. “Rookie, go get help, quick! I’ll hold them off!” He punctuated his statement by grabbing Slip ‘n’ Slide in a headlock, the smaller stallion caught completely off-guard as he was seized.
But Funshine was still helping Fencer get up, giving the guard a blank look. “Huh? You mean me?”
Now freed from where the guard had been lying on top of him, Aisle immediately focused on how his most important pony was being attacked, rushing toward the bed. “Let go of Cozy!” he roared.
But he hadn’t taken more than two steps before he found his path blocked, Granola Bar standing in his way. “Calm d-” But she didn’t have a chance to say more before Aisle plowed into her, the two of them collapsing in a tangle of limbs next to the bed.
“Please, don’t do this!” Lying on the ground, Pillowcase didn’t even try to get up, giving Fencer a look of terror. But his voice was pleading as he spoke. “Let Cozy and Aisle go, I’m begging you!”
Her heart wrenching as she realized that he’d been afraid for them and not himself all along, Fencer shook her head, trying to tell him that he had it all wrong, that she wasn’t the same pony anymore. “No, I-”
But that was enough for Cozy. “Pillow, run!” she screamed, managing to get her face clear of Hopscotch’s flailing hooves. “Leave us and run!”
Fencer clenched her eyes shut, trying to stop her feelings of guilt from overwhelming her. “Stop! I don’t-”
“Cozy!” yelled Aisle from where he was fighting a pitched battle with Granola Bar, neither of them able to gain an advantage over the other. “Hang on!”
“Everypony stop!” muttered Fencer, the words coming out along with a strangled sob. But nopony listened; even Funshine started toward the guard, clearly intent on freeing his brother. Realizing the brawl was about to get worse, Fencer wiped her eyes, taking a deep breath before yelling at the top of her lungs. “EVERYPONY STOP!”
In the close confines of the room, her voice was deafening, and everyone reflexively came to a halt, pausing in mid-motion and turning their eyes toward her. Breathing heavily for reasons that had nothing to do with her yelling, Fencer looked back at Pillowcase, trying to put her feelings into words. But what could she say? “Sorry I killed you”? “I feel really bad about having tortured you and left you for dead”? Nothing seemed appropriate, and after several seconds she gave up, her shoulders slumping as she turned to look at Hopscotch. “Let her go,” she muttered weakly.
Giving Fencer a sympathetic look, Hopscotch complied immediately, sitting up and releasing Cozy. The crystal mare instantly sprang into action, leaping out of the bed and flinging herself at Pillow, holding him close even as she placed her own body between him and Fencer. “Please don’t hurt him anymore,” she begged, looking at Fencer with tears in her eyes. “I can’t lose him. Not again.”
A shudder ran through Fencer, remembering how Cozy had said almost the exact same thing a few days ago, when she’d held Pillowcase hostage in exchange for Lex’s horn at the warehouse on the docks. The memory made her want to throw up now, horrified by how callously she’d acted. I would have done it, she realized with a detached sense of revulsion. I would have killed him if Lex hadn’t stopped me. The fact that he’d later died anyway, of the wounds she’d inflicted on him before that, only made the memory worse, and she swayed on her hooves, suddenly dizzy.
“Garden…” murmured Granola Bar, her voice pained as she realized that her friend was going through something awful. Intuiting what seemed like the best course of action, she pulled back from Aisle, letting the stallion get to his hooves.
Glancing at the mare he’d been fighting just long enough to be certain that she’d let him go on purpose, Aisle made his way to Cozy and Pillow’s side. But he didn’t join their embrace, instead standing close to them protectively as he let out a slow breath. “Let’s everypony relax,” he announced, his voice tense. “Take a deep breath. Calm down.” When no one contradicted him, he seemed to heed his own advice, swallowing audibly before looking at the guard. “Let him go,” he instructed.
The guard frowned, his forelegs still wrapped around Slip ‘n’ Slide’s neck from behind. “But-”
“Please,” insisted Aisle, giving the guard a firm look. “Just…let him go, okay?”
Huffing unhappily, the guard seemed to realize that they were outnumbered, releasing the smaller stallion. Coughing, Slip ‘n’ Slide moved away from him, Funshine helping his brother stand while he got his breath back (and earning a look of confusion and disapproval from the guard as he did so). “Thanks,” wheezed Slip as he shot Aisle a brief nod of gratitude.
Returning the gesture, Aisle looked at Fencer. “Okay,” he said slowly, the word carrying audible relief that things were going as well as they were. But there was still more that had to be dealt with. “Why’re you here?”
The question wasn’t an accusation, but Fencer flinched anyway, still struggling under the weight of what she’d done. “We weren’t…this wasn’t…”
“We’re going back to Vanhoover,” piped up Hopscotch, still sitting on the bed.
Aisle frowned a little, not having expected that. “What?”
Still on the ground, Cozy and Pillow looked slightly surprised as well, but neither said anything, nervousness still radiating off of both of them.
“It’s true,” nodded Granola Bar. “We’re not sure what Princess Cadance is planning on doing to Gar-, to Fencer, so we’re taking her back to Vanhoover before she has a chance.”
“At least until we ran into you guys and she charged in here,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide hoarsely.
Pillow winced at that, a look of regret mixed with embarrassment crossing his face. “That was my fault…” Cozy gave him a worried look, as though just by speaking up he was placing himself in danger, and he petted her mane soothingly. Glancing up at Fencer for just a second, he returned his eyes to the ground as he sighed. “When I saw you, I panicked. That spell was one that I’d prepared back before…before.” No one needed to ask what he meant by “before,” and he kept going. “It lets you issue a single command to whoever you cast it on, and although it only lasts for a few seconds, they have to follow it.”
Funshine’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Yeah, but you said ‘approach no closer.’ I heard you.”
Pillow nodded, not looking up. “Yeah, and that’s where I messed up. The spell only lets you give a one-word command. So when I said ‘approach no closer,’ the spell latched onto the word ‘approach,’ and made her move toward me.” He rubbed his face with his free hoof, sighing again. “It was a stupid mistake. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
An awkward silence fell at that, as everypony glanced at each other, uncertain what to say or do next. The silence was finally broken by the hesitant voice of Hopscotch. “I, um, didn’t know you could use magic,” she ventured timidly. “You didn’t…” She trailed off, but the words “when we attacked you,” hung in the air, unspoken but clearly understood.
Surprisingly, the corners of Pillowcase’s lips turned up slightly at that, a self-deprecating smile crossing his face. “I did, actually.” He gave another fleeting glance at Fencer. “I’d prepared two uses of that spell, and I tried to use one on you…back then.” He shook his head, sighing again. “It didn’t work.”
Both Fencer and Hopscotch blinked at that, ignoring the surprised looks from their friends. “You did?” Fencer didn’t even try to keep the surprise from her voice, the new information distracting her from her bout of self-loathing. “But I don’t…” Her protest died partway through, remembering the way Pillow had called out to Lashtada as she was tormenting him, right before he’d yelled at her to stop. At the time she’d thought it was just some sort of weird religious mania, attributing the sudden twinge she’d felt to disgust for how weak he was. But now…
“The spell doesn’t always work,” confirmed Pillow. “Even against the same person, it can be resisted if they marshal their will. I guess you were just feeling out of sorts this time, huh?” The lilt in his voice made it clear he was making a joke, but nopony laughed. For her part, Fencer recalled how off-balance she’d felt when she’d tried to run away just now, the way she’d tried to turn her thoughts away from how seeing Pillowcase made her feel. Was that why his spell had affected her now when it hadn’t before?
“But…” Granola Bar glanced around self-consciously before speaking up again. “But if you can use magic, why didn’t you heal yourself after Garden and the others left?”
Cozy gave the other mare an upset look, indignation momentarily overcoming her trepidation. “You say that like it was his fault he couldn’t save himself.”
Granola Bar held up a hoof defensively. “That’s not what-”
“It’s okay,” cut in Pillow, stroking Cozy’s mane some more. “It’s okay.” When his wife had settled down, he looked at Granola Bar. “Cozy is far more devout than I am, and has more of Lashtada’s favor because of that. She can spontaneously generate curative power all around her, or even convert other spells she’s prepared into healing energy. But I can’t do that. If I want healing magic, I have to pray for spells that do that, the same way I would for any other spell.”
Despite his answer, Granola Bar didn’t look satisfied. “Okay, but then why didn’t you? After you...were injured, couldn’t you have done that?”
She’d been worried that the question might upset him, but Pillow was calm as he shook his head. If anything, speaking like this seemed to ease his anxiety rather than stoke it. “I couldn’t. In Lashtada’s religion, you’re supposed to pray for spells right after sunrise, and it was the middle of the day by then. Not to mention that it requires an hour of comfortable and relaxed focus, neither of which were available when I was hiding in that warehouse from all the ghouls.” He shuddered, but otherwise maintained his composure as he continued. “By that time I was in and out of consciousness, hungry and thirsty and hurting, with no idea what time it was or how long had passed…I couldn’t replenish my magic like that.”
No one said anything in response to that, and silence fell over the room for long moments.
Sensing that the conversation had reached another turning point, Aisle licked his lips, looking at Fencer. This next question, he knew, was the most important. Fighting down a sudden resurgence of nerves, he sent a silent prayer of his own to Lashtada and spoke.
A pregnant pause filled the overcrowded room, everypony looking at each other as they considered Aisle’s question.
It was the guard who spoke up first, stomping a hoof and causing several of his fellow occupants to jump as he frowned, glaring at Fencer and company. “You should turn yourselves in,” he declared. “If you give up right now, I bet Princess Cadance and Shining Armor will let this go. Tell ‘em, rookie.”
That last part was said with an expectant nod toward Funshine, who let out a groan. “Oh for crying out loud, I’m not actually a guard,” he sighed, taking off his helmet.
Across from him, the real guard’s jaw fell open at the news, eyes widening in shock. “Whaaat?!”
Slip ‘n’ Slide gave his brother a sour look. “You just had to tell him, didn’t you? We could have said we were going to give ourselves up, and that you were going to take us to the princess while that guy stayed here to protect these other ponies, and we would have been home free. But no, you couldn’t let that happen.”
Coloring at the criticism, Funshine grimaced. “I’m sorry, but I just felt bad for him! It was becoming pathetic!”
“Hey!” protested the guard, a hurt look on his face.
Ignoring the boys’ comedy skit, Granola Bar gave Aisle a look of resolve. “We’re going back to Vanhoover,” she announced. “We don’t want to hurt anypony, and we’re not trying to threaten you, but we won’t let anypony stop us.” The words were said matter-of-factly, as though it was a forgone conclusion that they’d get back there, one way or another.
Aisle couldn’t help but give her a look of incredulity in response. “You really want to go back there? After everything that happened?”
“It’s what Garden wants,” replied Hopscotch, climbing down from the bed and making her way over to the mare in question. “Right, Garden?”
But Fencer’s ears were folded back, a look of uncertainty on her face. Although she’d resolved herself to see this through before they’d started their escape, being here with the ponies she’d so grievously wronged was undermining her certitude. Maybe I should turn myself in? she thought, looking at how Cozy was clinging to Pillowcase, burying her face in her husband’s chest as he continued to stroke her mane. If I ask Princess Cadance not to punish my friends, to let me be the only one who pays for what happened, she might agree. I was able to bear all those curses that Lex gave me, and I bet the princess wouldn’t do anything nearly that harsh…
As though hearing her thoughts, Cozy glanced back at her, frowning as they made eye contact. “You should be punished,” she whimpered, sounding like she was still afraid that violence would break out at any moment. Nevertheless, she didn’t cower, sniffling as she spoke. “For what you did to Pillow, you shouldn’t just be allowed to go around doing whatever you want. You should have to pay for it.”
“She did pay for it!” Granola Bar’s words came through clenched teeth, uncharacteristic anger filling her voice. “Lex punished her for what she did and everything we did! You know that!” She took a step forward, as though preparing to throttle the crystal mare. “So how can you-”
Suddenly, Aisle was in front of her. “Back. Off.” The look on his face made it clear that if she didn’t comply, he’d make her.
Sensing the sharp rise in tension, Fencer knew she didn’t have the luxury of indulging in her self-loathing any longer. Even if she wasn’t sure what she should do, letting her friends and her former victims get into a fight simply wasn’t an option. Opening her mouth, Fencer started to call out to Granola B-
“Cozy.”
Pillowcase’s voice was tender, sounding more like a father talking to a recalcitrant daughter than a husband talking to his wife. “You don’t mean that,” he admonished gently, as though completely unaware of the combative ponies only a few feet from him. “You aren’t the sort of pony who wants to see someone else hurting.”
Cozy didn’t look up at him, keeping her face pressed to Pillow’s chest. “You don’t know what it was like,” she protested quietly. “S-seeing you like that…lying there injured and unconscious, knowing that I couldn’t save you…” She shuddered, her breath shaky. “And when you…when I lost you…knowing it was her fault…”
Cozy’s words were daggers in Fencer’s heart, hurting worse than every injury she’d taken while fighting the ghoul army, but she didn’t try to block them out. On the contrary, the pain came with a paradoxical sense of relief, as though she’d needed to hear Cozy say that. It made no sense, but it kept her rooted in place, not acknowledging the worried looks her friends were giving her as she stared at the crystal ponies.
“I don’t want her to get what she wants,” continued Cozy, still speaking in that weak voice, as though she were holding back tears. “I want her to be unhappy. I want her to be miserable. I want her to spend the rest of her life hating herself as much as I hate her.”
Aisle’s face was twisted in a grimace, as though he couldn’t bear to hear Cozy talk like that. But Pillow’s expression was one of sadness rather than pain. He was silent for a few seconds, still stroking her mane, before speaking again. “What does your faith tell you?” he asked softly.
Nopony missed how Cozy tensed at that.
“That’s not fair,” she murmured, hunching her shoulders as though trying to disappear into herself.
“I know,” he replied with a wan smile. “But what does your faith, our faith, tell us about hating somepony?”
Cozy didn’t answer immediately, and for a moment it looked like she wasn’t going to, but finally she spoke in a voice just barely above a whisper. “That we never really hate others. We hate how they make us feel about ourselves.”
“And when we hate who we are…?” prompted Pillow.
“…then we forget how to love ourselves. And if we can’t love ourselves, we can’t love anyone else.”
Pillow nodded, his smile widening just a little. “So when someone else hurts us on purpose?”
“We…” Sighing, Cozy lifted her head from his chest, giving a sniffle as she wiped her eyes. “We need to remember that they’ve forgotten how to love themselves.”
“And that’s why we need to love them, so that they can remember,” finished Pillow, before leaning down and planting a light kiss on her forehead. “I love you more than anything in the world, Comfy Cozy. I don’t want you to forget how to love me back.”
“Pillow…” Cozy met his eyes, and though the look she shared with him only lasted for a moment before she looked down again, her inner struggle was written all over her face. “I just…it’s so…”
“Loving someone is an act of courage. You taught me that too, remember?” He didn’t wait for a reply, gently lifting her chin so that she was looking at him again. “You’re the most courageous pony I know, and you have more love in your heart than anyone I’ve ever met. And the way I know that is because of this pony, here.”
Aisle almost jumped as Pillow looked over at him, feeling horribly voyeuristic all of a sudden. “H-huh?! You mean me?” He quickly rubbed his foreleg over his eyes, his composure having been compromised by the strength of the emotions radiating out from Cozy and Pillow. He wasn’t the only one; no one in the room had dry eyes at that moment.
Smiling, Pillow beckoned Aisle over, and the earth stallion hesitantly shuffled closer until he was kneeling down, level with the crystal ponies. “Aisle…” murmured Cozy softly, giving him a guilty look.
“Hey Cozy.” Aisle fumbled for the right words, now feeling boorish and crude as he tried to come up with something as soulful as what Pillow had been saying. “Just…just hang in there, okay?” He cringed inwardly as soon as the words left his mouth, biting his lip at the flippant phrasing.
But neither of the crystal ponies seemed to mind, with Pillowcase turning his attention back to Cozy. “Even when things were at their darkest, when you were alone and in so much pain, you still found someone who loved you. And, you found the courage to love them back, even after what happened to me.” A hoof came up to gently caress her cheek, looking deeply into her eyes. “So many other ponies wouldn’t have been able to do that. They would have been too stricken with grief to feel anything else or been paralyzed with fear of being hurt again, but not you. Never you. You found love again, and that’s what saved you.” He looked at Aisle then, smiling warmly even as he kept speaking to Cozy. “That’s why I’m glad that we’ll both be your husbands from now on.”
Aisle gawked. He couldn’t help it. They had spent the time that Cozy was sleeping talking about numerous things – what had happened after Pillow’s death being a prominent topic – but the crystal stallion hadn’t given any indication that he was alright with Aisle joining their marriage. “A-are you sure?” he sputtered, and then it was his turn to give Cozy a guilty look. “I mean, I know I said before that we’d all be married together but I didn’t think-, I wasn’t lying or anything, I just didn’t, you know…all of us…” he finished weakly.
But Cozy didn’t seem to be upset with him. Instead, she was giving him a heartfelt look. Slowly, she reached a hoof out, wrapping it around him, and a moment later Aisle felt himself drawn into their embrace. Still unable to believe that this was really happening, he remained tense for a moment, before slowly relaxing into the hug.
The fond moment was suddenly interrupted as the guard began to bawl loudly. “It’s so beautiful!” he wailed, tears pouring from his eyes. Whimpering, he turned to look at the escaped ponies. “I love you guys!” he declared, walking over and scooping up Slip ‘n’ Slide in a bear hug.
“Hey!” yelped Slip, struggling unsuccessfully to free himself. “Hey! You better not be looking for a husband of your own, fella!”
Dabbing at her eyes, Hopscotch was trying to keep it together, despite the tear tracks already staining her cheeks. “I wish Turbo was here to see this,” she gulped.
Granola Bar reached out and pulled the younger mare into a hug of her own. “It would’ve made him incredibly happy,” she agreed. But her eyes weren’t on the trio embracing in the middle of the room. Rather, they were on Fencer, who had been watching the three ponies with a look of wonder on her face.
Sniffling, Funshine let out a slow breath. “So, um, what do we do now?” he asked quietly.
But Granola Bar shook her head. “Just watch.”
Oblivious to the conversations going on around them, Cozy held Aisle and Pillow close, basking in the stallions’ warmth. She felt calmer now…calmer than she had in a long time. It was like waking up from a terrible dream, the way the bad feelings were suddenly receding. In their place was a wonderful sensation of peace and togetherness filling her up, lifting her spirits and making what only a minute ago had felt impossible now seem appropriate.
“Thank you,” she whispered, the words not only for Aisle and Pillow, but also for Lashtada, knowing that the love she felt for these two stallions was the goddess’s grace.
Slowly stepping back from them, everypony quieted down as Cozy turned and walked toward Fencer. There were only a few feet between them, but the distance felt much larger to her. In the few steps she took, she saw the other mare across time…the way she’d sneered and roared at her as she’d held Pillow hostage. The way she’d wept and shivered when Lex had brought her back after her plan to take his horn had failed. The way she’d openly confessed to what she’d done earlier that evening. And the way she was looking at her now…
As she stopped in front of Fencer, Cozy felt the last of the shackles that had bound her heart for so long fall away, and the words came to her lips of their own accord.
Lex hesitated as Aria began to wag her hips back and forth lightly.
“C’mon,” she teased, her voice silky. “Climb on and show me what a stud you are.”
The suggestion seemed to bypass his brain entirely, and Lex found himself taking a half-step forward before he realized what he was doing and arrested the movement, stopping in mid-motion. Even then, it was unusually difficult to make himself stop, leaving him wanting badly to follow through and take what Aria was offering him. But it was that same overwhelming desire that made Lex hesitate, the emotion clashing violently with what he knew he should do.
Or rather, with his uncertainty as to what he should do. While there was no mistaking Aria’s intentions – she was being unsubtle enough that even he could understand what she wanted – Lex felt conflicted as to how he should respond, a conflict made all the more disconcerting by how his libido was intruding on his attempts to organize his thoughts. He’d met beautiful mares before, and while none of them had been anywhere near as alluring as Aria, nor tried to proposition him, Lex felt confident that his self-control would easily have overridden any sense of temptation that he’d have felt if they had. So why was he having to struggle to resist the urge to mount the mare in front of him now?
For a moment Lex wondered if Aria had enchanted him somehow, finding a way around his defenses and using her magic to make him want her. Although the idea of someone tampering with his thoughts was loathsome on a visceral level, he found himself almost hoping that was the case, as it would have allowed for an easy resolution to the cognitive dissonance he was experiencing. But it wasn’t to be; a thought was all it took to activate his circlet, letting him glance at himself and see that the only magic active upon him was his own. Having confirmed that, Lex forced himself to take a step back, putting a little more distance between himself and the amorous Siren…and was shocked at how difficult it was, his instincts screaming in protest. What was going on?
But he didn’t have a chance to collect himself as Aria’s tail smacked him in the face, dragging his attention back to her. “What’s the holdup?” A note of irritation had entered her voice, changing her sexy purr into a sneer as she glanced over her shoulder at him. “Your equipment not working right or something?”
For a moment he wasn’t sure what she meant, only for understanding to come a second later. Coloring in embarrassment and anger, Lex clung to the latter emotion, trying to drown everything else he was feeling beneath it. “Don’t you dare mock me,” he hissed, voice thick with malice.
“Hm.” Aria didn’t seem intimidated in the least, eyes narrowing as she spun around, turning so she was face-to-face with him. “Or you’ll what?” she drawled, the corners of her lips turning up in a taunting smile.
He didn’t have an answer to that, now that he couldn’t use the Night Mare’s power to control her, but he was determined not to back down. “Or I’ll put you in your place,” he growled.
But again, his threat seemed only to encourage her. “You know what I think?” she leered, leaning in closer to him. “I think you’re all talk.”
Lex grit his teeth. “Aria…”
“I think you’re gonna run away with your tail between your legs,” she snickered. Their noses were practically touching now. “And I’ll be laughing at you the whole time.”
“I’m warning you…”
“And I won’t be the only one,” she kept going. “I’ll let everypony know that Lex Legis can conquer dragons and kill devils, but he’s just a scared little boy when it comes to girls. What do you think those princesses will think of that?” Despite her jeering, her voice was slowly turning back into the husky murmur she’d had when she’d lifted her tail for him. “Or…”
She leaned her head forward, putting her lips right by his ear.
“…you can put me…”
She was whispering now, her voice as passionate as when he’d touched her a few night ago.
“…in my…”
One hoof came up, caressing his chest before moving further down his body.
“…place…”
Her last word was punctuated by soft lips pressing against his neck, and that was all Lex could take.
He surged upward, rising onto his hind legs as he reached for Aria, hauling her into a similar position as he barreled forward and slammed her into the back wall of the alcove. She collided with the rack of leaflets, the impact making her eyes widen and drawing a gasp from her as she fell onto her backside on the small table, sitting upright. She belatedly raised her forelegs, only for him to reach up with his own and pin them to the wall on either side of her head, leaning in closer until his chest was pressed against hers. Having trapped her, Lex didn’t hesitate, his head darting forward…
And kissing her passionately.
It wasn’t what he’d intended to do. He’d only meant to get right in her face and deliver another warning about pushing him too far. But in the fraction of an instant after he’d started to close the last little bit of distance between them, his anger had suddenly changed back into passion and now he found himself crushing his lips against hers. He heard a muffled grunt of surprise come from Aria then, and the immense satisfaction that he felt at having turned the tables on her drove him to seek more, his tongue pushing between her lips and demanding access.
He felt her body tense then, and he pressed himself against her tighter in response, silently daring her to defy him. She must have received the message, because it took only a moment for her to relax in his grasp, her eyes fluttering closed as her mouth opened, letting his tongue enter and entwine with her own. The next grunt that came from her was much more pleasured, and had his mouth not been occupied Lex would have howled in triumph at hearing it.
But it wasn’t enough.
He wanted more of her. No, he wanted all of her! Simply showing her who was in charge was insufficient; he had to dominate her until she cried out in submission, acknowledging him as her lord and master. Nothing less would satisfy him.
And he knew just how to do that.
Breaking the kiss, Lex heard Aria gasping as she leaned her head back, all strength gone from her body now. But he had no intention of showing her leniency, and leaned his head down toward her neck, nudging her chin upward and making her bare her throat to him. She didn’t even try to resist, and leaned forward to bring his lips to her neck. But unlike the teasing kiss she’d given him before, he brought his teeth to her soft skin now, biting down with just enough force to leave a mark. Caressing her had made her tremble before, and Lex had no doubt that this would work even better.
He was proven right an instant later as he felt Aria shudder, a whimper escaping her lips. “L-Lex…!” All the arrogance was gone from her voice now, but he didn’t stop, marking her flawless body again and again. When he got to the portion of her neck that matched where her old body had been scarred, he bit down with slightly more force, holding it longer than he had with the others. The spasm that ran through her body then made her hips jump, and the wordless sound that came from her throat made it clear that she was begging, but not for mercy.
He let her forelegs go then, and wasn’t surprised when they came to rest lightly on his shoulders, her hooves curling around behind his head. He felt Aria’s tongue slowly trace over his horn a moment later, her breathing heavy as she slowly licked it from base to tip, moaning softly as though the act aroused her. A second later she closed her lips around the end of it, sucking softly, but Lex wasn’t content to passively receive her affection.
Instead, one of his hooves came up to stroke her cheek, feeling her lean against it adoringly as he caressed her, moving it around to the back of her neck, winding it through her silken hair…and then yanking it backward. Aria’s mouth left his horn with a gasp of mixed pain and pleasure, eyes widening at the sudden stimulus. Lex straightened up then, raising his face until it was above her own, drinking in the heady combination of fear and anticipation radiating off of her. But she didn’t even try to resist him, neither struggling nor uttering a word of protest at the rough treatment.
Lex felt another wave of savage satisfaction go through him at that, and he kissed her again, rewarding her surrender. His hoof in her mane slowly unwound from it, holding the back of her neck again as he ravaged her mouth before sliding lower, down past her shoulders and lingering at the small of her back before traveling further, stopping just above the base of her tail. His other foreleg wound its way around her body a moment later, sliding over her cutie mark and pulling her hips against his own, letting her feel him pressed against her lower belly, telling her without words that it was time.
The look on her face was one of both trepidation and rapture as she leaned back, parting her hind legs and wrapping them around him. But Lex had no intention of taking her as she sat there. Instead, his hooves dug into her backside as he lifted her up – he could have used his horn, but the moment demanded a show of physical strength, rather than magical – and held her against him, very nearly taking her right there. He could see the confusion on her face, but he ignored it as he pivoted and, suppressing a grunt of effort, lowered her gently to the ground. Once he’d put her down, he took a step back, looking her over.
Her face flushed and panting lightly, Aria bit her lip, suddenly shy as she looked away from his gaze. Her forelegs were crossed over her chest, conveying her worry, but the way her lower legs were still spread wide showed that she had no intention of denying him. For his part, Lex spent several moments just looking at her and silently reveling at the sight of the mare he’d conquered…or rather, was about to conquer. His lust and dominance reaching their peak, Lex stepped forward slowly, intent on making Aria his in the most primal way possible. Standing over her, he slowly began-
“Lex? Aria? Are you guys back h-, erk?!”
Nosey’s nervous question died unfinished on her lips as she rounded the corner and looked into the alcove, her body going rigid in shock.
Freezing at the unexpected interruption, Lex and Aria could only stare at the unicorn mare, who stared back at them. Or rather, at where they were almost connected. “I, uh…I h-heard a noise, and…and, um…” she stammered. “You two were, ah…gone, and Sonata was still s-sleeping…”
Sonata.
Hearing his girlfriend’s name made Lex blink, suddenly free of whatever madness had come over him, causing him to stagger away from Aria. What…what was I doing? In an instant, he felt his blood cooling, the erotic atmosphere falling away as confusion and embarrassment and guilt rushed in to replace it.
Lurching forward, he stumbled out of the alcove, barely noticing Nosey fling herself out of his way or Aria’s soft plea for him to wait. Almost galloping into the lobby, the sight of Sonata – still curled up on the bench where they’d been before, her sleep undisturbed – made him feel worse, and he kept going. He had to get away from here, had to figure out what had almost happened and what to do about it before he spoke to any of them again.
Reaching the door, Lex Legis flung it open, leaving all three mares behind as he fled out into the night.
As the seconds ticked by and Lex failed to return, Aria realized that she wasn’t going to get the happy ending she’d wanted.
The thought was bitter, and she silently cursed Lex for running away. She’d taunted him about doing exactly that, but contrary to how she’d said she’d react if he did, she didn’t feel like laughing at him now. Quite the opposite, she wanted to cast her tracking spell and go after him, but she knew it would be pointless if she did. Lex wouldn’t let himself get carried away like that again. Not this soon, at least, and maybe not ever again where her coaxing him was concerned.
Which meant that Nosey might very well have cost her the only chance she’d ever have of being with the guy she wanted.
“Did you do this on purpose?” growled Aria as she climbed to her hooves, sending a death glare at where Nosey was still lingering near the entrance to the alcove.
“What? No!” Flinching at the accusation, Nosey stepped back, her face still bright red from what she’d just witnessed.
But Aria wasn’t willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “You didn’t decide to do your ‘bestie’ a favor, stopping her boyfriend from getting it on with another girl?” Still breathing heavily from how worked up she’d gotten, Aria stepped toward Nosey angrily. “Or maybe you were jealous, and didn’t want me getting some of that action?”
“What’re you-, no, listen, I didn’t know what was happening!” protested Nosey, falling back further as Aria stalked toward her. She glanced to the side quickly, clearly worried that they were going to wake Sonata up, before looking back at the furious mare in front of her. “I wasn’t lying before!” she babbled frantically. “I woke up, saw that you and Lex were gone, heard a noise, and went to investigate! I’m a reporter, it’s what I do!”
Oddly, Aria found herself believing the four-eyed imbecile, and that only made her angrier. “Do you have any idea how badly you just messed things up for me?!” she hissed. Every time she moved one of her back legs, she could still feel the unfulfilled ache between them, making her grit her teeth. “Lex was going to bang me like a drum! And when it was over, he would’ve had no choice but to make it official between us, no matter what Sonata said!” Of that she felt absolutely certain. Lex was far too serious to do anything less. And now it might not happen at all!
“L-like a drum…?” muttered Nosey, the lewd phrase somehow managing to make her turn even redder than she already had been.
As much as she wanted to cast a spell and fry the dimwit mare in front of her for ruining her shot with Lex, Aria held back, knowing that doing so would only upset him and make it harder for her to try and get in his pants again later. Instead, she settled for just embarrassing her some more. “Tip for the future,” she snorted as she exited the alcove and headed back toward the lobby. “When you spot the guy you like about to plow another girl, either offer to join in, or spy on them and play with yourself. Don’t just interrupt and ruin things for everyone.”
The sound of Nosey fainting dead away behind her comforted Aria only a little.
Tomorrow, she knew, she’d need to deal with Sonata’s outrage. Even if Lex didn’t confess what had almost happened, the bite marks he’d left on her neck would make it very clear. Worse, while Aria had no idea how Lex would treat her from now on, she doubted that his fleeing the scene was a good sign. All in all, things were probably going to be bad for a while now.
“This stinks,” she muttered as she laid back down on the bench.
“This stinks,” muttered Fruit Crunch as he turned over for what had to be the twentieth time.
There was no response, but that wasn’t surprising, since everypony else was asleep. He should have been asleep, but despite how tired he felt he couldn’t seem to make it happen. No matter how much he tossed or turned, he couldn’t get what Severance had said out of his mind. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, preventing him from relaxing, and he found himself thinking back a few hours, to when he and Cleansweep had asked the scythe if the Night Mare would reward their heroism.
But Severance’s answer hadn’t been a yes. Nor had it been a no. Rather, it had told them to come back with their entire group, and not before.
Even now, the memory made Fruit Crunch bite his lip in frustration. It was like when Hearth’s Warming was a week away, knowing that the gifts he was going to get were so close and yet still out of reach. The sense of anticipation, of wanting something so badly but still having to wait for it, was maddening! He hadn’t been able to stop himself from protesting Severance’s decision at the time, and when his whining hadn’t moved it he’d started to get angry. Only Cleansweep’s hasty interference had kept him from trying to badger the weapon into giving him what he wanted, and even then she’d had her work cut out for her, only barely managing to talk him down and lead him back to where everypony else was sleeping.
But that wasn’t the worst part. No, the worst part – the single most upsetting thing about Severance’s non-answer – was that no matter how badly Fruit Crunch wanted to believe otherwise, he knew that the scythe’s response hadn’t been unfair. After all, the five of them had worked as a team to stop that Silhouette guy and save everypony. They’d won that fight as the Night Mare’s Knights, so it made perfect sense that they’d have to reap the rewards that way too, instead of just two of them getting what they wanted while the rest of their friends were dealing with their own problems.
Of course, knowing that didn’t make it any easier to deal with, and Fruit Crunch had been eager to go and get Straightlace, Feathercap, and Fiddlesticks immediately. But Cleansweep had vetoed that idea, pointing out that she needed to get back before her mom realized she was gone. Fruit Crunch had protested, but again it had been to no avail. While Cleansweep had initially been more than happy to stick it to her mom by slipping away with him to see Severance, her defiance had turned into guilt by the time they’d headed back, remembering how her mother had burst into tears after they’d beaten Silhouette. While Fruit Crunch could usually talk his best friend into going along with his schemes, she’d put her hoof down this time, giving him an apologetic promise that they’d figure out how to get the full Knights together and go see Severance real soon before rushing off.
Standing at the edge of the camp and watching her fly away, Fruit Crunch had briefly considered trying to get the others anyway. But he’d known that it was futile. Even if he’d woken up Feathercap and Fiddlesticks (enduring the nagging the latter pony would surely level at him), he’d still have to get Straightlace and Cleansweep away from their parents. And besides, he was exhausted from being up so late. So instead he’d just marched through the camp and laid down near a relatively uncrowded campfire, ignoring the other ponies curled up by it.
But sleep had refused to come, leaving him wondering what magical powers the Night Mare would give him once he got the rest of the Knights together.
Maybe I’ll be able to turn into a giant, just like Saddle Rager. She’d always been his favorite member of the Power Ponies, able to turn into a hulking force stronger than any earth pony. I’d love to see that Silhouette guy’s face if he asked for a rematch and then I did that! The thought of his victory over the black-and-white bully brought a smile to Fruit Crunch’s lips, easing the frustration of not yet having magic powers of his own. Or maybe I’ll gain the power to see a few seconds into the future! One of the Power Ponies’ enemies had been able to do that: the Palomino Predictor. She’d given the Power Ponies a really hard time, since she’d been able to see their every move before they’d made it. I’ve already seen how this ends, he quoted silently, imagining himself saying the villain’s signature line to Silhouette. And you’re going to lose! The thought made him chuckle, and he was so lost in his fantasy that he almost missed seeing somepony come racing out of the train station, the door hanging open as they ran out into the night.
Almost.
What the heck? Blinking, Fruit Crunch sat up, looking at the building in confusion. Had he just imagined that? Except, no, the door to the place was still open. So somepony had come running out of there. Somepony who looked like they’d been wearing a cloak. Was that Lex?
Wondering what could possibly have sent Vanhoover’s savior running out into the darkness, Fruit Crunch found himself grinning. If there was some sort of new enemy, then Lex might need help! And even if there wasn’t, then this was a great opportunity! After all, that Nosey lady said that he’d definitely want to reward them for what they’d done. I bet he won’t tell me to come back with everypony else the way Severance did, Fruit Crunch told himself silently, conveniently ignoring that he had no real rationale for thinking that. Besides, even if he does, I’m no worse off than I am now! Plus, it would be really great to be congratulated by the pony who had saved everyone. Fruit Crunch could practically see how it would go…
Lex looked sharply over his shoulder at the approaching hoofsteps. “Who’s there? Identify yourself, or face my power!”
Slowly, Fruit Crunch stepped closer, his body language cautious and yet respectful at the same time. “Mister Legis? My name’s-”
“Fruit Crunch.” Lex’s stern look instantly became one of warm regard, giving the younger stallion a friendly smile. “You think I don’t know the name of the heroic young pony who saved me and everyone else here?”
Fruit Crunch rubbed the back of his neck, his face the very picture of modesty. “My friends did most of the work,” he protested selflessly. “I was just the distraction.”
“You were more than that.” Lex’s expression was one of big-brotherly pride as he stepped closer. “The way you stood up to Silhouette showed more courage than anypony I’ve ever seen. And the only reason your friends were there to back you up is because you brought them together in the first place. This was your victory.”
Fruit Crunch straightened up at the words, smiling gratefully. It was only his humble and noble nature that kept his ego from inflating at the praise. “I was just following your example, Mister Legis.”
But the other stallion shook his head. “Call me Lex,” he insisted.
Fruit Crunch’s eyes widened. “Is that really okay?”
“Of course!” laughed Lex, holding out a foreleg. “It would be weird if you called me ‘Mister Legis’ every time we worked together, wouldn’t it?”
His bright eyes widening at the words, Fruit Crunch looked at the outstretched hoof. “‘E-every time we worked together’?” he echoed softly, not daring to hope…
Lex nodded, his face showing that he knew exactly what the other stallion was thinking. “That’s right. From now on, you’re my apprentice. That is, if you want to be.” That last part was thrown out with a knowing wink.
His heart almost bursting with joy, Fruit Crunch could barely contain himself as he reached out a hoof and pressed it to Lex’s. “Yes, absolutely! I absolutely want to be your apprentice!”
Lex looked almost as happy as Fruit Crunch. “I’m glad. If you’d said no, I’m not sure I’d ever have found somepony as strong and brave as you to help me protect Equestria.” Lowering his hoof, he nodded back toward the train station. “Now come on. I’m going to teach you everything I know.”
“Okay!” Practically walking on air, Fruit Crunch followed Lex back toward the building…
…already looking forward to his first lesson, finished Fruit Crunch as he brought his fantasy to a close. Grinning up at the stars, he held onto his imaginary reward session for a little longer before shaking his head. This was no time to be daydreaming! His future was waiting!
Climbing to his hooves, Fruit Crunch ran after Lex.
Charging through the darkness, Lex ran until he collapsed.
It didn’t take very long for that to happen, of course. Although he’d recovered enough to be able to engage in light activity without undue strain, the stress that he’d placed on his body over the last few days was still relatively fresh. But running full tilt was enough of a strain that it took less than a minute to leave him completely spent, particularly since it had only been a few hours since he’d completed the ritual to change Aria into a pony.
Aria…
Just thinking of her sent a shockwave of emotions through him, as lust, shame, anger, embarrassment, and confusion all warred for primacy in his mind. Each feeling was explosive in its intensity, threatening to overwhelm him completely and making it impossible to think rationally about what had just happened. Instead, all he could do was lie there and try to ride them out, barely able to keep himself quiet as he endured the onslaught of half-formed fantasies and ill-conceived reactions brought on by his out-of-control feelings.
He wanted to attack Aria with all of the magic at his disposal, annihilating her utterly for doing this to him.
He wanted to confess everything that had just happened to Sonata, urging her not to leave him because of it.
He wanted to go back there and finish what he had started, rutting Aria as harshly as he could until she passed out or begged him for mercy.
He wanted to scream at all three of the mares back in the train station, imprecating them for their myriad inscrutable behaviors and contradictory actions.
He wanted to dig a hole down to the very bottom of the world and bury himself in it, not emerging until another thousand years had passed and this moment had been long forgotten.
Lex could do nothing but lie there until – after what felt like hours but surely had been only a few minutes – he felt himself begin to calm down. The surge of emotions hadn’t ended, but their magnitude gradually diminished until he was finally able to regain a measure of control over himself. Groaning softly, he managed to climb into a sitting position, still trying to get his breath back after everything that had just happened. The combination of physical exertion, emotional exhaustion, and the knowledge that he now had to deal with things between himself and the girls in addition to preparing for his meeting with the princesses all combined to leave him feeling utterly wretched. But there was nothing he could do except-
Admit that you’re not up to the challenges facing you.
The voiceless words made Lex grit his teeth, squeezing his eyes shut as he tried to will that rebellious aspect of his own mind away. He had been able to make it obey him, even if only a little, on two separate occasions now. If he could just make it do so a third time…!
Aria was right to mock you, continued his tulpa, undaunted despite his concentration. You ran away just like she thought you would. She and Nosey are doubtlessly laughing at you even now. Lex knew better than to respond to the thing, but the image it conjured up was almost physically painful to consider. But that’s nothing compared to how Sonata will react when she finds out what you did. You forgot about her completely in your rush to mount Aria, didn’t you? So much for your so-called love for her. Maybe she should go back to Tall Tale and let Fireflower know that he’s the better choice for her after all.
The words cut deep, and Lex almost physically recoiled from the barb. “The implication of hypocrisy on my part is not accurate,” he muttered, unable to keep silent in the face of the tulpa’s condemnation of his actions. “Sonata has given inconsistent reactions to the idea of my being in a physical relationship with other mares!”
She’s become upset at every instance of your sharing anything that could plausibly be considered an intimate moment with a female that wasn’t her. She’s been jealous of Nosey for clinging to you, tackled Aria for kissing you, and was upset at you for causing River Bank to strip naked in your presence, among many other precedents.
“She didn’t object when I was making what she thought was a sexual advance on Nosey and Aria right in front of her!” Lex struggled to keep his voice down, staring away from the camp as he continued the ill-advised conversation. “Even if I corrected her misperception later, at the time she raised no objection!”
For a few seconds, no response came, and Lex dared to hope that for once he’d been able to argue that part of himself into submission. But his hopes were dashed a moment later. And yet she subsequently renewed her objections, suggesting that the singular instance you’re citing was little more than a lapse of judgment on her part, brought about by her desires temporarily confounding her reasoning.
Sensing an opening, Lex immediately pounced on what looked like a chance to claim victory in the debate. “If that’s the case, then she has no right to censure me for the same conduct!”
But the tulpa’s response was immediate. And yet you claim to be superior to her?
The question rocked Lex back on his hooves, and he realized immediately that he’d fallen into a rhetorical trap. He couldn’t claim, as he so often had, to far surpass Sonata in all qualitative measures – save only in regard to social interaction – while simultaneously suggesting that they were equal in their failures. If Sonata had erred in not objecting to what she thought was him attempting to become intimate with Nosey and Aria a few days ago, then he had necessarily erred far worse in trying to do exactly that with Aria just now. This was a setup! Lex realized, eyes widening as he figured out too late that the rogue portion of his consciousness had just outmaneuvered him. It was trying to get me to contradict myself!
“No!” Despite knowing that he’d brought this on himself for arguing with the thing, rather than ignoring it and reining in his emotions until it fell quiescent, Lex couldn’t help but look for a way out, refusing to let this stand. “No, this falls within the milieu of interpersonal communication. I cannot be held to a higher standard with regard to my singular area of deficiency.” The words were tinged with desperation, knowing that he very much on the defensive.
Is that what you plan on telling Sonata? mocked the voiceless words. That this was a communication failure on your part?
Lex couldn’t bring himself to say yes. Aria’s proposition had been so blatant that there had been no misunderstanding her intentions, and she had likewise clearly comprehended and accepted his actions in turn. To suggest that this was akin to the numerous other times where he had missed some sort of invisible social cue was disingenuous, and Lex knew it. But if he hadn’t responded to Aria so strongly because of some sort of misinterpretation, then why…?
Frowning, Lex suddenly recalled that he’d been asking himself this exact same question right before he’d lost control of himself: why had Aria’s salaciousness aroused him so much?
He’d already ruled out magic. Nor was he inclined to believe that he was simply the sort of stallion whose passions reliably overrode his self-control. He knew he was a pony of strong emotions – the last few minutes being only the most recent example – but to be so completely swept away by concupiscence like that…it wasn’t like him.
Or was it? A cold shudder went down Lex’s spine as he realized that, despite how sure he felt about his ability to resist feminine wiles, he had no real basis for making that determination. After all, no mare had ever come onto him as strongly as Aria just had, save only for several days ago in the dockside warehouse when Sonata had all but demanded his affection. Which I eagerly gave her, he recalled uneasily. Was he really the sort of guy who’d jump on any mare who offered herself to him?
Unwilling to tolerate that level of uncertainty – bad enough he didn’t understand others, not understanding himself was completely unacceptable – Lex closed his eyes, mentally going back to that alcove in the train station. But instead of Aria, he turned his thoughts to some of the other comely females that he’d met. What if it had been, say, River Bank who’d so eagerly invited him to mount her…?
Despite how much she resembled Aria, the thought of River in that position was only mildly enticing, conjuring up nowhere near the same level of maddening lust that the Siren had.
Nodding to himself, Lex tried again with another mare that he knew, picturing Fencer that way. As before, the results were muted, and Lex felt a sense of relief run through him. Even so, he kept going, imagining Thermal Draft. That time, the subdued appreciation for her physical attributes was accompanied by a strong sense of guilt, and he banished the thought with a silent curse. Once he was done with the princesses, studying that resurrection spell that the Night Mare had given him was next on his agenda. In the meantime, just one more mare, in order to be absolutely certain. This time he thought of Nosey-
And stifled a gasp as he felt his libido immediately roar to life.
For a moment Lex could only sit there, shocked and dismayed. Nosey was one of the few ponies that he considered to be a friend, to say nothing of the fact that she was still recovering from the horrors that Xiriel had inflicted on her. The very idea that he’d want to take her the way he almost had Aria, to make her submit to him and then claim her for his own…
Cursing under his breath as he felt himself begin to react to what he was imagining, Lex savagely pushed those thoughts away, trying instead to figure out why he was apparently lusting after his girlfriend’s best friend as well as her sister. Unless…unless that was the reason. Both Nosey and Aria had unique relationships with Sonata; could that have had something to do with why he apparently wanted them both so badly? He didn’t see how it could, but then again he hadn’t expected to feel that way toward either of them to begin with, either.
Several seconds passed as Lex turned that thought over. Examining that theory gave him time to physically calm down, but yielded no new revelations or insights, and he eventually sighed as he abandoned that line of inquiry. But that left him right back where he started: searching for the reason why he wanted those two so much. The answer still eluded him, and when the mare he loved asked him why he’d almost shared an intimate encounter with somepony that he didn’t love, “I don’t know” wouldn’t be an acceptable answer-
Wait…do I love them?
Lex froze at the thought, almost afraid to explore the question further. Unbidden, the memory of Fireflower confessing his feelings to Sonata came to mind, and Lex could only imagine how he would have felt if Sonata had reciprocated them. But it was the simplest answer to why he wanted Nosey and Aria so badly. After all, he knew he felt that same degree of lust for Sonata, and that he loved her. If A equaled B, and B equaled C, then A equaled C as well.
In which case, he had his answer as to what had come over him before…
Shaken, Lex almost didn’t hear the sound of somepony clearing their throat behind him. It was only on the third attempt that he realized that he wasn’t alone, spinning around so quickly that he almost fell over. It was one of the girls, of that he felt absolutely certain-
“We’ve searched the castle top to bottom,” announced Shining Armor as he moved to stand next to his wife. “They’re not here.”
Cadance gave only a soft grunt of acknowledgment, staring out the window at Canterlot’s nighttime cityscape. While Shining Armor could appreciate the view – like most of Equestria’s major cities, Canterlot never truly slept, and on a clear night like this its bedazzling array of colored lights was a sight of behold – he doubted that Cadance’s mind was on the scenery. “I’m keeping most of the guards here just to be safe, but I’ve sent a squadron to the train station,” he continued. “They’re going to perform a manual search of every train there, and inspect all passengers before they board. The air-docks are going to be a bit harder, but I’ve sent messengers to post notices at each of them asking that takeoffs be delayed at least until morning. If those five try to leave Canterlot, we’ll find them.”
“Maybe it’s better if we don’t.”
Shining Armor frowned at Cadance’s reply, but in worry rather than consternation. Regret wasn’t something he heard in his wife’s voice very often, but it was there now. “What do you mean?”
Finally dragging her eyes away from the window, Cadance gave him a mournful look. “I think we…no, I think I handled this all wrong.”
Shining Armor didn’t say anything in reply, letting Cadance proceed at her own pace as she turned around and slunk over to the couch in the middle of the room. A glance from Shining Armor was all it took to make the guard that was by the exit nod and leave the room, closing the door and giving them some privacy. While it was slightly disconcerting to be in the same room that those five ponies had escaped from, the guard had checked it thoroughly – going so far as to remove the potted fern that had been in the corner – and declared the place secure. It was a small comfort, one that Shining Armor hoped marked the beginning of the end of the turmoil that had by now gone on for far too long.
While he’d initially felt optimistic about tracking the fugitive ponies down quickly, it hadn’t happened. At first they seemed to have vanished entirely, only for a report to eventually come in that they’d been spotted exiting the castle. But he’d barely started to formulate a plan when the guard they’d left with Cozy, Aisle, and Pillowcase had come rushing in, saying that the fugitives had actually broken into where those three were being quartered…but that they hadn’t done anything to them. It had taken a few minutes to calm the guard down to the point where he’d been able to clearly explain exactly what had happened, since he’d started getting blubbery every time he’d tried to explain.
Eventually, they’d managed to get the whole story out of him about how the ringleader of that gang had some sort of heart-to-heart moment with Cozy at Pillowcase’s urging, something which Cadance had been happy to hear. But once it had ended, those five had apparently slipped out again, still intent on sneaking back to Vanhoover, of all places. That had been enough to inflame Shining Armor’s suspicions; why, after all, keep trying to escape like that if their victims had forgiven them? It just didn’t make sense.
To that end, he hadn’t called off the search. Instead, he’d personally taken command of it, while Cadance had stayed behind to talk with Cozy and her stallions some more. Worried that the reports of those five leaving the castle had been some sort of feint, and not wanting to take any chances where Cadance’s safety was concerned, he’d made confirming the castle’s security the top priority, sparing only modest resources toward trying to stop those ponies from potentially escaping Canterlot. It had been a frustrating decision, but there had been no helping it, not after what had happened to Cadance during the elemental bleeds…
As it was, those five ponies didn’t have any pegasi in their group, and since Canterlot was built on top of a mountain that meant that there were only a few ways for them to leave the city. The most obvious was the train station, which was why he’d sent what guards he could spare there. The air-docks were another story. Made to receive zeppelins and airships, there were several of them scattered around the city, and unlike the train station they had no real oversight since they weren’t meant for the general public’s use, being owned and operated either by companies – mostly shipping outfits and cruise lines – or rich ponies who owned aircrafts as luxury items.
Leaving the air-docks unguarded was a risk, but it was a calculated one. Shining Armor wasn’t a fan of flying (not that it made him airsick or anything, because it didn’t), but from what he knew piloting those things required a crew with specialized knowledge. That made it unlikely that the escapees would be able to hijack one and use it to escape, which was a good thing since there weren’t enough members of the Royal Guard to secure every aircraft at each dock. If everypony obeyed the notices and suspended any nighttime departures, that would eliminate the risk of them stowing away on an outbound flight, at least for a little while.
Of course, another option was for him to use his magic and raise a force field around the city. But while that would have made any chance of their escaping the city nil, Shining Armor didn’t need to ask Cadance’s opinion to know that course of action was completely out of the question. Not only would such a thing have panicked the populace – Canterlot’s residents still remembered quite clearly how, the last time he’d done that, the changelings had broken in and attacked shortly afterward – but there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that the escaped ponies would immediately go to ground if they saw that. Canterlot was a big city, and the Royal Guard weren’t a large force; trying to flush them out would have been only slightly better than trying to find five needles in a haystack.
All of which meant that, as frustrating as it was, the best bet was to watch the trains and wait for those five to make a mistake. Once they did, the guards would drag them back, and they’d be able to get some answers. On paper, it wasn’t a bad plan, but Shining Armor couldn’t help but feel slightly anxious all the same.
A plan that relied on your opponents making a mistake was a plan that was guaranteed to fail if they didn’t.
But he put that out of his mind as he sat down beside Cadance, waiting for her to say what was bothering her. It wouldn’t be very long, he knew; it wasn’t in her nature to hide her feelings. He was proven right a second later as she gave him a sad look. “I don’t think I treated those ponies with enough compassion,” she confessed.
Shining Armor couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows at that. “‘Enough compassion’?” he echoed. “Cadance, you treated them with more compassion than anypony else would have. They confessed to murdering somepony, and not just anypony but somepony that we both know, and the worst thing you did was raise your voice to them. After that you had them wait in a place that could hardly be called uncomfortable,” he waved a hoof to indicate the extravagant room they were in, “and they still attacked a guard and ran away as soon as they could. None of this is your fault.”
But Cadance was already shaking her head. “I didn’t try to convince them that everything was going to be alright. They told Cozy that they weren’t sure if some or all of them were going to be thrown into Tartarus or worse for what they did to Pillowcase, and that’s why they were escaping. I should have assured them that I’d never do that. But I was so worried about Cozy that I didn’t even consider their feelings.”
Shining Armor put a foreleg around her. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself. Cozy’s a friend of yours, and she needed help calming down, so of course you put her first. And it’s not surprising that those five would be worried about what was going to happen to them, after what they did.”
“You didn’t see the bonds of love between them.” Cadance leaned against him lightly as she spoke, still sounding remorseful. “Those ponies care about each other deeply. That’s why they were jumping in front of each other to confess: they were protecting each other.”
“Or,” interjected Shining Armor, his voice gentle, “all five of them really are guilty.”
“They aren’t. Not all of them.” Cadance heaved a sigh before explaining how she was so certain. “Pillowcase told me what happened to him.”
“Oh…”
“They were trying to protect each other when they all confessed,” repeated Cadance. “I knew it at the time, with how they were acting, and I could see how much they meant to each other. I should have known that they’d be afraid.” She gave another shake of her head. “This is all happening because I handled it wrong.” She finally looked over at him. “I’m not sure why they’d want to go back to Vanhoover after what Cozy and her stallions told me, but if that’s where they feel safest, maybe we should let them go.”
Shining Armor was silent, taking a few moments to digest that before he spoke up again. “Have you heard anything from Celestia or Luna?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Then that means you’re in charge. If you think that letting them go is the right thing to do, then I’m with you one hundred percent.”
“…and what if everything I’ve been saying is wrong?”
There it is. It had been obvious to Shining Armor for a little while now that something was bothering Cadance. His wife wasn’t the type to mope like this; she was a pony of action. If she thought that she’d done something wrong, her instinct was to go out and try to fix it, not stare out the window in depression the way she had been when he’d come back. But while he’d had a pretty good idea about what was bothering her, he hadn’t been sure until just now. If she’s second-guessing herself about this, especially after everything she just said, then that means she’s thinking about before…
Shining Armor licked his lips, letting out a slow breath. He didn’t want to revisit this; it was a painful memory for him, even if he knew it was worse for her. But he couldn’t stand the sight of his wife doubting herself like this. “Cadance, listen to me. This isn’t like what happened during the elemental bleed.”
He felt her go rigid then, and counted it as a good thing when she didn’t pull away from him. “It might be.”
“No, it’s not,” insisted Shining Armor. “You weren’t wrong to try and talk with those creatures. I was the one who should have done a better job protecting you when that didn’t work. If you want to talk things out with these runaway ponies now, I won’t make that same mistake again if they become hostile.” The intensive training he’d thrown himself into after what had happened would make sure of that. He’d worked harder to hone his physical and magical skills over the last few weeks than he had in the last several years, and he knew it wasn’t conceited to say that the results had been impressive.
The next time something tried to attack his wife, nothing would stop him from placing himself between her and danger.
“You didn’t fail to protect me,” murmured Cadance, her voice thick with emotion. She hadn’t found Lashtada until after it had happened, and it was thanks to the goddess’s love that she was able to talk about it at all now. Even so, the memory still tore at her heart, and she knew it was the same for Shining Armor. Neither of them had been able to bring themselves to confide in anyone about what had happened until recently; it had been that painful to recall. “I was the one who told you to focus on getting everypony to safety while I tried to resolve things peacefully.”
“I still should have been there.” Shining Armor reached a hoof over, gently placing it on Cadance’s lower belly. “For both of you.”
The colt paused, trying not to read anything into the fact that he’d gotten that sentence out without Lex reacting. In his fantasy, the older stallion had immediately been glad to see him, smiling and praising him as soon as he’d recognized him. But now that he was actually speaking to him, Lex was simply giving him a blank look, as if not sure how to react. I probably just surprised him, Fruit Crunch reassured himself. Any second now, he’s going to grin and say he remembers me.
But as the seconds dragged out, Lex’s silence became more pronounced, and Fruit Crunch found himself growing more and more nervous. Why isn’t he saying anything? He shifted his weight for a moment before realizing he was fidgeting and forced himself to stop, not wanting to look dumb in front of the pony who had saved everyone. Hopefully Lex hadn’t seen that; they were far enough away from the lights of the campfires that maybe he’d missed it in the gloom. “I, um…I was there when Silhouette attacked,” he started, not wanting to sound like he was bragging. “I was the colt who-”
“I know who you are,” interrupted Lex, his voice flat. “What are you doing out here?”
Fruit Crunch couldn’t help but grin, taking Lex’s recognition as a compliment. “Oh, well, I saw you run out this way and thought maybe there was something wrong. Because if there is, the leader of the Night Mare’s Knights is here to help!” He crouched slightly, making it clear that he was ready to quite literally leap into action at Lex’s say-so. Although there wasn’t any sort of visible enemy or emergency happening that he could see, he’d heard Lex mumbling something to himself as he’d approached him. He hadn’t been able to make out the words, but he just knew that if a big, powerful wizard like Lex was out here in the middle of the night talking out loud, then it had to mean that something major was happening!
But Lex only scowled in reply. “Nothing is wrong,” he snapped, eyes narrowing. “And I don’t require any assistance. Go back to the camp and go to sleep.”
“Aw, c’mon!” Despite Lex’s words, Fruit Crunch didn’t lose his excited grin, his imagination working overtime as he thought of all the awesome magical stuff that Lex might have been doing. “I bet I can do something useful!” Numerous stories and comic books filled his mind with all sorts of possibilities that he could help with, making him almost prance in his enthusiasm. “Like, like, if you’re going to cast a spell to change some animals into powerful guardian monsters, I could catch some for you! Or if you need to draw a magic circle on the ground to open up a mystic portal to another realm, you could direct me and I’ll do it for you! Or if you were going to use a drop of blood in order to summon the spirits of the dead, you could use mine instead! Or-” His eyes widened as another possibility occurred to him. “Oh wow! Were you communicating with the Night Mare herself?!” The thought dazzled him, and he felt his heartbeat quicken. “Because me and my friends are-”
But he didn’t get a chance to finish as Lex suddenly took a step closer, his head leaning down to put his face right in front of Fruit Crunch’s. “I’ve heard enough of your nonsense,” he growled, his voice overflowing with displeasure. “Be quiet this instant.”
Fruit Crunch recoiled in shock, his excitement falling away as his ears folded back so hard they almost touched his head. “I…I’m sorry,” he whimpered, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong. “I just wanted to help.”
“I don’t require help,” snorted Lex dismissively. “Least of all from a child.”
The way Lex said “child” hurt worse than anything Spit Polish had done to him, and Fruit Crunch felt his eyes starting to tear up. “B-but I stopped Silhouette…”
Lex’s lip curled, as though the memory angered him. “Your intervention should never have been necessary. That Silhouette was able to present as much of a threat as he did is a testament to my having failed to take the proper precautions, and nothing else.”
“So…so you’re not…proud of me?” It was all Fruit Crunch could do to get the words out, feeling as though he was trapped in a nightmare.
“Of course not!” Lex looked outraged by the prospect, glaring at Fruit Crunch as though he was insulted by the idea. “Children don’t belong on a battlefield! The fact that I couldn’t do anything while you and your friends fought on my behalf is a source of shame for me, not pride! The very idea that you’d think otherwise-”
Fruit Crunch couldn’t bear to hear anymore. His heart breaking, he turned and ran away from Lex as fast as he could, sobbing.
Lex frowned as Fruit Crunch lurched away from him, irritated beyond all measure. This is the last thing I need right now! He already had to deal with the mess that was his relationship with the girls, to say nothing of his upcoming meeting with the princesses; disciplining an unruly colt wasn’t a priority at the moment.
But the little brat had insisted on pushing the issue, refusing to leave after Lex had told him to go back to the camp. Instead, he’d started spouting those ridiculous ideas about how he could be of assistance, something which the events of the last few hours had left Lex with no patience for. Fine, he’d decided, I’ll rectify his misperceptions right now!
The way Fruit Crunch had cited how things had ended with Silhouette as justification for further involving himself in potentially dangerous scenarios was exactly what Lex had been afraid of. The stupid child actually thought that it was okay for him to place himself – and likely his friends as well – in danger again for no other reason than because they’d all turned out fine last time. Worse, he expected that Lex would actually encourage that sort of behavior! That was an attitude that needed to be firmly dispelled before he learned the hard way just how wrong it was.
Otherwise, Fruit Crunch might very well end up the same way that Cloudbank, Thermal Draft, and the others had.
Lex had fully intended on driving that point home later, once the more pressing issues had been dealt with, but Fruit Crunch’s insistence had given him little choice but to begin imparting it now. It was a bother, but at least it’d give him something else to focus on besides how much of a mess he’d likely made of things with the mares in his life. That and completing a task – even one this unimportant – would be a source of mild satisfaction in and of itself.
Except now the colt was fleeing before he’d been able to confirm that the point had been sufficiently driven home. With a sigh, Lex focused on Fruit Crunch, his horn glowing purple as a matching aura wrapped around the colt, lifting him up off the ground and carrying him back toward Lex. It was difficult – the child was heavy and kept thrashing impudently – but the distance was short, and Lex managed to suppress a grunt of effort as he plopped the earth colt on the ground in front of him. Fortunately, the fight seemed to go out of him when he touched down, crouching in place and facing the ground as he shuddered for some reason. “Now,” Lex began sternly, intent on making sure the child knew to run away from danger in the future, rather than toward it, “look at me.”
For a moment Fruit Crunch didn’t obey, and Lex was about to repeat his command when the boy finally looked up, and the abject misery written all over his face gave Lex pause. Tears were running down his face, and his body shook again with what Lex realized now were sobs, his ears still folded back. “I’m s-s-sorry!” he hiccupped. “I’m r-really s-sorry, Lex!” The outburst was accompanied by a fresh round of sobbing, Fruit Crunch burying his face in his forelegs.
The sudden change in the colt’s attitude was enough to leave Lex reeling, trying to figure out what was happening. He’d expected Fruit Crunch to be recalcitrant and surly at the suggestion that he’d done something wrong – after all, that was how he’d always reacted to criticism when he’d been young – and so the subdued attitude and even the sudden attempt to flee hadn’t been surprising. But this was something else again. “Stop crying!” he ordered, a little too quickly. “Stop it right now!”
“I c-can’t!” wailed Fruit Crunch.
For a moment, Lex was completely at a loss, just staring at the weeping foal. He briefly wondered if he was faking it, trying to elicit sympathy in order to escape a lecture, but the flood of tears coming from the colt's eyes didn’t seem like something that could be done on command. Which meant that in all likelihood, he was crying as a result of being rebuked.
The thought sent a spike of guilt through Lex, the emotion particularly sharp in the wake of the knowledge of how Sonata would react when she found out what had happened with Aria. Why does this keep happening?! raged Lex silently as he listened to Fruit Crunch’s pitiful cries. Why does every attempt I make to relate to somepony else always go wrong?!
But he didn’t have time to indulge in self-loathing as Fruit Crunch’s sobs slowly tapered off. “I’m really sorry, Lex,” he moaned again, rubbing his eyes. “I swear I didn’t mean to make you so mad.”
For a long moment Lex was afraid to speak, certain that he was only going to make things worse if he did. But he knew he had to, otherwise there was no way he’d ever figure out why this had happened. “What…” he began slowly, before pausing and trying again. “Why were you under the impression…” Another pause as he tried to phrase things correctly, “that I would be pleased that you fought Silhouette?”
A flash of confusion crossed Fruit Crunch’s face. “B-because I won,” he stuttered. “Because I protected everypony. I thought…I thought that’d you’d like me if I was brave like you are…”
It was almost a full minute before Lex spoke again. “Fruit Crunch,” he said slowly. “My prerogative…my purpose here is to safeguard everypony. To keep them away from danger. That includes you. If you’re in situation where you could get hurt, regardless of whether or not you actually do, that means that I’ve failed.”
He stopped again, trying to think of how to further explain his reasoning, but he didn’t have a chance as Fruit Crunch slowly stood up. “W-wait…” he said, voice wavering. “So…so the reason you’re so mad is because you were worried about me?”
“Yes.” How was that not obvious?
A shaky smile crossed Fruit Crunch’s face then, and he wiped a foreleg across his nose before he continued. “And…and you don’t hate me?”
“Of course I don’t!” Lex almost shouted the words, unable to help but become upset at the implication.
Fruit Crunch started to take a step forward, hesitating and leaving one foreleg raised as he swallowed. “So does…I mean, I know you said that you want to be the guy who protects everypony, and I get that. I do. But, besides that…do you think…” His eyes watered, and he bit his lip before he continued. “Was I…against Silhouette…did I do a good job…?”
Lex silently turned the question over, replaying the last few minutes over in his mind before answering. “I think that the way you conducted yourself was admirable,” he admitted.
That was all Fruit Crunch needed to hear, and he threw himself forward, wrapping his forelegs around Lex and hugging him as hard as he could.
“And here you go,” smiled the waitress as she put the bowl down. “One scoop of plain vanilla, and five spoons to go with it.”
“Thank you very much,” smiled Granola Bar, hoping that the waitress would take the hint and leave.
But she didn’t. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything else? For just a few bits more, we can add sprinkles on top.”
Granola Bar kept her smile in place, shaking her head politely. “No, no, this is fine.” Out of her peripheral vision, she could see her friends shifting in their seats, trying to look casual and relaxed despite being neither of those things. She noticed Funshine picking up his spoon, and the sight made her strain to hold her smile. If he ate the ice cream – which wouldn’t be hard, since a single scoop was barely a mouthful – then they’d have no reason to keep hanging out here…
Fortunately, he seemed to know that, instead holding it up and peering at the back of it, as though trying to use it as a mirror. Resisting the urge to sigh in relief, Granola Bar returned to trying to shoo the waitress away. “We’re just, you know, going to savor this.”
The waitress cocked an eyebrow, her smile turning playful, and Granola Bar realized with a sinking feeling that she’d apparently taken her brush-off as a challenge. “Don’t say that before you know about all the choices we have in our sprinkle selection,” she teased. “Most places only offer chocolate or rainbow, but we have an entire line-up of colors and flavors! Bubblegum sprinkles can make even the plainest ice cream into a party for your palate, while cream-filled sprinkles give you all of the benefits of whipped cream with none of the mess! And then there’s our ‘sprinkle surprise,’ where every sprinkle has a different flavor!” She leaned in, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “I got the recipe for that one from a pony in Ponyville. There’s this place there, Sugarcube Corner, and the mare who works-”
But that was all Slip ‘n’ Slide could take. “Oh for Celestia’s sake, will you just take a hike already! Nopony wants your stinkin’ sprinkles!”
The waitress gaped, stunned by the outburst, and Granola Bar hurried to salvage the situation, already seeing other ponies turning to look at them. “Uh, you’ll have to forgive him,” she soothed, leaning over so she was blocking Slip’s line of sight to the waitress. “He’s been, um…”
“Worried about me,” spoke up Fencer, pointing to her bandaged horn. “I was in an accident earlier, and my friends have all been really stressed out over it.”
“Y-yeah,” piped up Hopscotch. “That’s why we’re all eating this ice cream together.”
Funshine nodded, his lack of acting skills somehow managing to make even that seem wooden.
Fortunately, the waitress didn’t seem to notice, giving Fencer a sympathetic look. “Oh, I understand. You all enjoy your ice cream.” Giving them a friendly wave, she turned around and trotted off.
The others waved back until she’d gone back inside, before collectively sighing in relief. With no need to further the deception, Funshine found his voice, shooting his brother a glare. “Real smooth, Slip. What happened to ‘just lay low and be as forgettable as possible’?”
“Oh shut up,” groused Slip ‘n’ Slide. “She would have gone on for ten minutes if somepony hadn’t stopped her. Besides, after the way you handled things with that guard back at the castle-”
“Please don’t fight,” cut in Hopscotch, pouting. “We just had a beautiful moment with Cozy and everypony else. Let’s not ruin it.”
The mention of what had happened with the crystal mare was enough to calm everyone’s nerves, causing them all to fall silent in remembrance. But it only lasted for a few seconds before Fencer looked up. “I want to say this again-”
Granola Bar was already shaking her head. “We’re not splitting up, Garden.”
“You guys don’t need to run anymore,” insisted Fencer. “With Pillow being brought back, and Cozy having forgiven us, I’m sure that Princess Cadance wouldn’t want to punish any of you.”
“Cozy forgave you, Garden,” corrected Funshine gently. “I’m sure she meant it for the rest of us too, but it was you she said it to. If you’re right about Princess Cadance not wanting to pass judgment on us, then I’m sure that’d go double for you.”
Fencer shifted uncomfortably in her seat, looking down at the untouched bowl of ice cream sitting in the middle of the table. “I know. I know you’re right, but I just…” She bit her lip, trying to put her feelings into words, but it was impossible to explain.
Being forgiven by Cozy and Pillowcase – the crystal stallion having offered his own forgiveness after his wife – had been a wonderful feeling, but one whose intensity had left her reeling. Having her guilt and her shame unexpectedly uprooted in an instant had left Fencer grappling for something to hold onto, and the loss of her emotional equilibrium had been so dizzying that she’d almost found herself wishing she still had those negative emotions to provide her with some stability, which had thrown a whole new level of confusion into the mix. Even her name had become a source of renewed uncertainty for her, once again unsure whether she should call herself Fencer or Garden Gate.
The thought of going through anything like that again was simply too much. Even if she didn’t have any sort of personal connection with Princess Cadance, the mere possibility that the alicorn princess – who in the few moments Fencer had known her had demonstrated incredible acumen where feelings were concerned, immediately realizing how their confessions were upsetting Cozy – might be able to further upend her already-turbulent sense of self was something Fencer found herself instinctively shying away from. It had only been a few days since Lex had forced her to realize what a monster she’d become, and now her victims had forgiven her. She simply couldn’t take any more shocks to her system.
Instead, she found herself craving familiarity, and right now familiarity was Vanhoover, making it easy for her to stick to her original decision to return to the ruined city. And although she’d tried to talk her friends out of it, she couldn’t deny that she was happy that they’d refused. Being apart from them was the last thing she wanted right now.
“Can I just say that I think Garden’s making the right decision?” chimed in Slip ‘n’ Slide, bringing Fencer out of her attempt to sort out her jumbled emotions. He glanced around the table, as if inviting anyone to challenge his statement. “Seriously, I don’t think the princess is in a forgiving mood.”
“She might be,” argued Hopscotch. “She seemed really nice when we saw her earlier.”
“Yeah, well, I’m looking at nearly a half-dozen guards watching the entrance to the train station,” retorted Slip ‘n’ Slide, peering over the edge of the patio. “And I still don’t see the others that went to inspect the interior of the trains that’re there.”
“Maybe she sent them out to tell us that all’s forgiven?” offered Hopscotch.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” sighed Granola Bar. “You don’t use that many guards for something like that.”
“At least I don’t have to pretend to be one of them anymore,” joked Funshine.
Slip ‘n’ Slide frowned at that. “I still think we should have kept that armor, instead of ditching it.”
This time it was Fencer who answered. “No, getting rid of it was the right decision. By now the Royal Guard probably all know that we took a suit of their armor. If they’re looking for that, then not having it is smarter. Besides, outside of the castle the guards are too noticeable anyway.”
Hopscotch smiled. “It was nice that we could drop it off at that all-night cleaners. That kind of makes up for how we made that poor guy bump his head, don’t you think?”
“Only until he gets the bill for that wax-polish Funshine ordered,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide under his breath.
Funshine snorted. “Trust me, after how badly I was sweating while I was talking to that guard, it needed it.”
“So.” Granola Bar’s voice was just a little louder than it needed to be. “What’s our next move?”
“Right now, it’s to stay here as long as we can without eating this ice cream.” Fencer didn’t need to explain her answer. “If we’re lucky, the guards will leave the station after a little while. If not, then we’ll think of something else.”
Even in her distraught state, Fencer had known better than to rush straight for the train station after they’d left the castle. Once they’d dropped off Funshine’s ill-gotten armor, they’d instead looked for a place to hole up, preferably one that offered a good view of the city while they made plans. The bad news was that all the best locales for that were eateries, and they were all flat broke. The good news had been that after the five of them had scoured the sidewalks, sewer grates, and alleyways for loose change, they’d managed to come up with enough bits for a small ice cream at The Delectable Dessert Den, which featured patio dining that offered an excellent view of the train station. Now they just had to make sure they made their time there last as long as possible…
Funshine idly played with his spoon. “I still think we should try slipping onto an airship. If we sneak onto one of the ones that makes deliveries, we could board ourselves up in a big box-”
“We are not flying!” Granola Bar made sure to keep her voice down, but the way she turned pale made it clear that this wasn’t negotiable. “Whatever we do, we’re keeping our hooves on the ground.”
“They can’t keep guarding the trains forever, right?” Hopscotch twisted around in her seat to look down at where the guards were still checking everypony that wanted to enter the station. “At some point they’ll have to stop.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide shrugged. “Somehow I doubt that they’ll leave before we run out of excuses and have to eat this ice cream.”
“I still don’t see why we couldn’t have ordered the fudge swirl,” grumbled Funshine.
The complaint brought a smile to Fencer’s lips. “I like strawberry, but only when it comes from neopolitan ice cream.” It had always tasted better to her, despite everypony else swearing it was exactly the same.
The thought reminded her of when they had sat down to that sumptuous feast that Lex had created a few days ago. She had barely been able to get excited, still laboring under her confession and Lex’s curses, and her friends had started talking about their favorite foods to cheer her up. Funshine wanted pie, she remembered fondly. Granola Bar hoped there was some salad. Hopscotch was looking forward to having a hayburger. Slip wanted a peanut butter sandwich without the crusts, and Turbo… She stared into space for a moment, remembering the pony who wasn't with them anymore. His favorite food was macaroni…
Staring at the small bowl of ice cream, Fencer found herself wondering how that could only have been a few days ago. It feels like a year, at least. To think that so much had happened in such a short amount-
“WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR LOUSY SPRINKLES ALREADY?!”
Fencer jumped at the angry roar, and she wasn’t the only one. “The heck was that?!” sputtered Slip ‘n’ Slide, twisting in his seat to look back at the interior dining area.
Sitting in a booth, the waitress they’d had earlier was slowly backing away from an irate unicorn mare, an earth stallion doing his best to soothe the latter pony as she glared balefully at the waitress. “Sorry!” murmured the stallion. “It’s been a stressful night and neither of us have gotten much sleep. Can you just bring her a bowl of plain vanilla? No sprinkles,” he added quickly.
“Darn right no sprinkles!” growled the mare, somehow making the words sound like a declaration of war.
Slowly, Fencer and her friends exchanged looks. They didn’t say anything about what they’d just witnessed. They didn’t need to, all of them thinking the same thing.
Both of those ponies were wearing railway uniforms.
Ticket Stub fought back the urge to sigh as he watched Coal Hopper eat her ice cream.
Or rather, his ice cream. After the waitress had brought out the ice cream he’d ordered for his companion – a task she’d done silently, making no mention of sprinkles or any other toppings – Ticket Stub had quietly paid her, only to discover that he’d had just enough money left to order a bowl for himself as well. Since plain vanilla had always been his favorite, he’d decided to indulge himself, spending the last of his money on a second bowl…only for Coal Hopper to snatch it from him as soon as it was brought to their table, digging in without so much as a word and leaving Ticket Stub bereft.
The brazen dessert-napping had been surprising, but not too much. I should have expected this, he’d decided as he’d watched her devour the tasty treat. It’s kind of par for the course so far.
Despite her making it clear up front that he was taking her out as an apology for needling her about telling Princess Cadance and Shining Armor what she’d seen in Vanhoover, and that romantic overtures would be violently rejected – with an emphasis on violently – Ticket Stub had still found himself nervously excited as he’d taken Coal Hopper out to eat. They were on a date! Sure, she’d never have called it that, but he was a guy taking a girl out on the town for an evening! That was the textbook definition of a date!
The thought had left him feeling unusually giddy. He hadn’t been on a date in quite some time, and the last time he had he’d been so nervous that he’d managed to bite his tongue a painful twenty-three times over the course of the evening. But despite Coal Hopper being the most belligerent mare he’d ever met, he hadn’t felt the least bit anxious around her.
At least, until he’d had to choose where to take her for dinner. His meager funds had placed all of Canterlot’s fancy restaurants (denoted by how they advertised their favorable reviews from noted food critic Zesty Gourmand) completely out of reach. With no other choice, he’d taken a gamble, reasoning that somepony as unpretentious as Coal Hopper wouldn’t want to eat at some fancy upscale place anyway.
Instead, he’d taken her to Burger Princess.
He’d held his breath waiting for her reaction when she saw where they were headed, half-expecting her to twist him into a pony pretzel, but she’d simply grunted at the sight with no further comment. That had been about the time that he’d realized that she’d been unusually quiet the entire evening, and for the first time he’d started to become a little nervous, worried that she wasn’t having a good time. She deserved that much, after the last few days.
But when their order – a plain veggie burger (hers with extra ketchup) and hay fries for each of them – came in, Coal Hopper had dug in with gusto. The sight had relieved Ticket Stub quite a bit, and he’d started to dig in…at least until he’d noticed Coal Hopper swiping his fries. She hadn’t even finished her own, but as he’d watched she’d telekinetically helped herself to one of his, then another, and then a third, acting as though it was completely normal. The sight had baffled him, but he’d known better than to protest, and by the end of the meal she’d eaten half of his fries in addition to her own.
After that it had been time for dessert. Since she’d made it plain before they’d left the castle that she expected to be taken to a specialty outlet for that, he’d led her back out into the Canterlot night. It had been a stroke of good fortune that he’d stumbled across The Delectable Dessert Den, a place whose focus on made-to-order treats had been obvious even if the waitress hadn’t leaned on them to try the sprinkles. But while going to a specialty dessert store and ordering plain vanilla ice cream might have been gauche, it was affordable and Coal Hopper seemed to like it…or at least, she didn’t hate it. That was what mattered.
Though I really would have liked some of that, he admitted silently as he watched his date eat the last scoop of the ice cream that had been intended for him…
Except suddenly there was a fresh bowl of the stuff on the table in front of him.
“You look like you want this more than we do,” came a voice that sounded vaguely familiar. But Ticket Stub didn’t have a chance to so much as glance over before somepony – a unicorn mare with a vermillion coat and gray mane, her horn bandaged – sat down on his left, closer than was polite. He barely had time to process that before another mare, this one with a tan coat and black mane, flanked him on his right.
“Who’re…” The question died on his lips as he reflexively glanced toward Coal Hopper and saw that she was also being flanked by a pair of ponies. On her left was an earth stallion with a brown coat and a blond mane that was slightly lighter than her own. To her right was another earth stallion, this one more powerfully built, with a burnt orange coat and deep brown mane. Coal Hopper herself slowly glanced at each of them, her features darkening as she quietly put her bowl and spoon down, the telekinetic glow around them fading to nothing.
“What do you want?” growled his date softly, the most that she’d spoken since they’d left the castle.
“We’re not threatening you,” piped up a third mare, this one a tiny little earth pony with a cerise coat and maroon mane and tail. Unlike her friends, this one wasn’t trying to pin them down, sitting a normal distance away and giving them puppy-dog eyes. “We just want to talk.”
Coal Hopper laughed mirthlessly at the statement. “I can tell,” she snorted, not bothering to hide her sarcasm. “Is that what you said to that crystal stallion before you offed him?”
Ticket Stub blinked at that. “Crystal stallion?” he echoed. “What do you-” Understanding suddenly poured over him, as he realized that these were those five ponies who had confessed to killing that crystal pony back at the train station, right before Princess Cadance had done the impossible and breathed life back into him. And now they’re here with us! The thought made Ticket’s stomach clench, and he was suddenly glad that he hadn’t eaten very much tonight, because he could feel it already threatening to come back up.
“Please listen,” urged the mare on his right, the one with the tan coat. “We’re not going to hurt anypony. If the two of you want to get up and walk away right now, we won’t stop you.”
“We didn’t approach you normally because we were worried you’d recognize us and freak out before we had a chance to say anything, that’s all. We’re not bad ponies,” explained the bulkier of the two stallions next to Coal Hopper, his voice having a pleading tone to it.
“Oh yeah? Then prove it. Let Coal Hopper go.”
It took Ticket Stub a second to realize what he’d just said, his eyes widening as he realized that he’d just mouthed off to five ponies who’d confessed to murder. The realization sent a paroxysm of terror through him, not wanting to be alone with these dangerous criminals. What if I made them angry? he thought in a panic. I bet they were just saying all that stuff about letting us go to keep us from screaming, and my calling them on it probably ticked them off! He could feel his blood running cold as he realized that he might have just doomed them both. I shouldn’t have said anything! Maybe if I apologize and beg for mercy, they’ll-
“Are you kidding me?” Coal Hopper’s incredulous voice dragged Ticket Stub back to his senses, looking across the table to where she was giving him a look of disbelief. “You’re really going to do the whole ‘let her go, take me instead’ routine for me?! ‘Cause let me tell you something, buster: from where I’m sitting, you’re not anywhere near macho enough to pull it off.”
Ticket Stub’s ears folded back, embarrassed by the rebuke. He wasn’t the only one, as the blond stallion on Coal Hopper’s left gave her a scowl. “Geez lady, the guy was thinking of you first. What’s your problem?”
Coal Hopper’s horn lit up, telekinetically lifting the spoon from her bowl of ice cream and waving it in the blond stallion’s face. “Do you see this?” she snarled. “Do you see this spoon? I will make you eat this if you say another word. I’m not even joking, I will literally shove this in your mouth and make you chew it up and swallow if down if I hear one more word out of you.” She learned forward then, nose-to-nose with the uppity stallion. “You got that?”
Apparently he did, because he leaned back and nodded his head quickly. The sight brought a satisfied snort to Coal Hopper’s lips, and she glanced back at Ticket Stub. “You see? That’s what you’re supposed to do: make them realize that they’re messing with the wrong ponies, not give up and try to negotiate for someone else to leave.”
The unexpected lecture, combined with the way Coal Hopper was nonchalantly threatening the ponies that had gotten the drop on them, was enough to erode Ticket Stub’s fear. Instead, he folded his ears back, chagrined by what the blonde mare was telling him. “S-sorry.”
“You better be,” she huffed. “We were having a perfectly nice evening until you had to go and do that.”
“…we were?” Ticket Stub blinked at that, unable to help the corners of his lips turning up despite their situation. “I mean, you were so quiet all night, I thought…”
“I was enjoying the ambiance,” she muttered, her voice losing its harsh edge. Even odder, she looked down as she said it, and Ticket Stub’s eyes widened as he saw her cheeks darken. Was she blushing?!
An awkward silence fell, as the five ponies surrounding them looked at each other uncertainly. Finally, the mare with the bandaged horn gave a perfunctory cough. “Ahem. Maybe we should get back to the business at hoof.”
“Fine,” agreed Coal Hopper, putting her spoon down. But the metal had barely touched the table when she glared at Ticket Stub. “Just so you know, tonight doesn’t count now. You’re going to have to take me out again when we get back to the Crystal Empire.”
Ticket Stub blinked. “I…really?”
“What kind of question is that? Yes, really!”
Despite the fact that they were surrounded by killers, Ticket Stub couldn’t stop his involuntary smile from turning into a completely goofy grin. “O-okay. It’s a date!”
“It-, it is NOT...” sputtered Coal Hopper, before telekinetically lifting the bowl of ice cream the injured unicorn mare had brought them and practically shoving it against his chest. “You know what? Shut up and eat your ice cream. Let me do the talking.” She didn’t wait for his reaction before shooting a glare at the unicorn in question. “So what’s your deal?”
Clearing her throat in a way that sounded suspiciously like a repressed laugh, the injured unicorn kept herself composed as she began to speak. “You two are railway workers, right?” she asked, nodding toward Coal Hopper’s uniform.
A roll of the eyes preceded the other mare’s response. “What, you think these are Nightmare Night costumes or something? Yeah, we work on a train.”
“I just wanted to be certain,” answered the vermillion unicorn, apparently unperturbed by Coal Hopper’s attitude. “There were a lot of ponies on the train platform when we met Princess Cadance, and I couldn’t remember if you two were there.”
“We were.”
“Okay,” nodded the mare, before letting out a deep breath. A moment later she spoke again, and said the last thing Ticket Stub would ever have expected.
Fruit Crunch didn’t say anything as he hugged Lex, not wanting the moment to end.
He doesn’t hate me. He was just worried. That’s all it was. The knowledge that he hadn’t ruined things with his hero was heartwarming, eroding the misery that he’d felt barely a minute ago when he thought that Lex despised him for what he’d done.
But it wasn’t just that. He cares about me. That was something that Fruit Crunch knew for sure. You didn’t get angry at someone for worrying you unless you cared about them.
As if hearing his thoughts, Fruit Crunch felt Lex’s foreleg curl around his shoulders and squeeze gently. Taking that as confirmation of his feelings, Fruit Crunch wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry, and ended up doing both. The older stallion’s returning the hug wasn’t an offer of apprenticeship, but somehow that was okay. Better than okay, even.
Finally, Fruit Crunch ended the embrace, stepping back and rubbing his nose as he fought the urge to sniffle again. “Sorry,” he murmured, giving Lex an embarrassed smile. “I didn’t mean to go to pieces like that.”
Lex didn’t respond immediately, and Fruit Crunch had the impression that he was picking his words carefully. “Do you feel better now?” he finally asked.
The colt nodded quickly, blushing a little at the considerate question. “Yeah, thanks. And thanks for, you know, saying that other stuff. It really means a lot to me.”
Lex blinked once, and started to say something, then stopped. He glanced away for a moment, looking in the direction of the train station, before returning his gaze to the foal. “I want to reiterate that you and your friends should avoid danger if at all possible. Your conduct with regard to Silhouette might have been admirable, but it is not a mandate for further such activities, is that clear?”
His smile fading into a look of contrition, Fruit Crunch nodded again. “I understand.”
“Good. Now, return to camp and go to sleep.”
“Alright. Goodnight Lex.” Not wanting to take the chance that he might upset the older stallion again if he protested, Fruit Crunch immediately turned and started walking, holding onto the feeling of warm relief that things had worked out. Admittedly, he hadn’t gotten a chance to ask Lex about the reward Nosey had promised them, but he could bring that up later. Now that he knew that Lex cared about him – and probably his friends too, come to think of it – he felt sure the stallion wouldn’t mind.
More importantly, he’d confirmed that the reason that Lex was so upset was because he’d been afraid for their safety. Which meant that all they had to do was get strong enough so that Lex wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore; then he’d be okay with them helping out the next time something bad happened! Which meant that he had to hurry up and get the Night Mare’s Knights back together as soon as possible, so they could meet up with Severance again and get their magic powers!
Definitely first thing on the agenda, thought Fruit Crunch as he returned to the campfire he’d been huddled up next to before he’d gone after Lex, stifling a yawn as he settled down. Just gotta get a little shuteye first, and then I’ll get right on that…
Laying his head on his hooves, it took only a few seconds for the exhausted colt to fall asleep.
“And so my Knights have gathered at last.”
The voice made Fruit Crunch throw himself to the ground, his instincts reacting before his conscious mind had a chance to process the words that were spoken. Even as he landed on his belly, he could already feel his heart pounding in his chest, his senses operating on overdrive. The only thing that stopped him from gasping for air was the absolute knowledge that he needed to be as quiet as possible, lest he draw attention to himself.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he could see his friends – Cleansweep, Straightlace, Fiddlesticks, and Feathercap – were spread out around him, all of them in a similar position. He could practically see the fear radiating off of them, their eyes wide as they looked at each other in silent confusion, not knowing what was happening. But that wasn’t all they were looking for, he knew. Just like him, they were scanning their surroundings, trying to find the owner of the voice.
It was a futile effort. Around them, the entire world was shrouded in darkness. The ground beneath his hooves was impossible to make out, and turning his gaze upward showed Fruit Crunch neither moon nor stars. And yet, he somehow felt certain that he was seeing the sky clearly, knowing without being sure how that he was outdoors. More than that, the gloom surrounding them wasn’t uniform; instead, shades of blackness intermingled freely, just different enough to suggest that something was there while still being too subtle to reveal anything clearly. Rather than looking like an impenetrable void, it gave the impression of a darkness that was crowded, as if filled with so many things – or perhaps creatures – that the shadows could barely contain them all.
The only things they didn’t cover were Fruit Crunch and his friends. Despite the fact that no light fell upon them, they were clearly visible, the colors of their bodies standing out undimmed in sharp contrast to the murkiness around them. No matter that they all lay as still and as quiet as they could; simply by being there, they stood out clearly.
All five of them were completely exposed.
“Now, I believe you five pledged yourselves to me in hopes of a reward, did you not?”
The voice made Fruit Crunch squeeze his eyes shut, shudders running through him. It wasn’t the words themselves that made him wrestle with a wave of anxiety, but rather the tenor of the voice. The sound of it carried a weight, conveying a force that was palpable, as if someone had just rung a tuning fork and then touched it to his teeth, putting his entire body on edge. It was only distantly that he realized that the voice was female in pitch.
“And yet you all have so little to offer me, even if your victory over that crippled acolyte of the one who claims dominion over your world’s night was well-earned.” A low chuckle came then, and the sound made Fruit Crunch’s goosebumps rise. “Though it was amusing to see that pathetic mare’s disciple be laid low by foals with nothing exceptional about them. Still, my own champion offered me much in exchange for my favor, and despite his slowness in fulfilling his promises, he maintains fidelity and makes progress. Even his adherent, now slain, demonstrated the ability to surpass her limits when she truly needed to. Can any of you say that you’ve truly done the same?”
Fruit Crunch could barely keep up with the words, keeping his eyes on the ground as he struggled to process what was going on. He knew, more from inflection than from what was said, that they’d been asked a question. A real question, not a rhetorical one. But he couldn’t force himself to speak up, his instincts still screaming at him to do everything he could to erase his presence in the hope that whatever super-predator was nearby would overlook him and leave.
“No,” sneered the voice a few seconds later. “I thought not. Children though you may be, I see nothing to suggest that time would find you striving to become more than you are. Instead you offer yourselves blindly, pleading for those who are strong to imbue you with that which you haven’t earned.” Another dark chuckle came then, this time laced with scorn. “But that is as it should be, after all. The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Fruit Crunch felt like he was going to pass out. He knew whose voice he was hearing now, but couldn’t figure out how this had happened. Severance had said that they’d all need to be together first! But they hadn’t gone back to it together; instead they’d all gone back to camp and gone to sleep, so why-
Wait… Sleep. Dreams. Nightmares. That was it. They were all asleep. This had been what Severance had meant!
“Still,” continued the terrifying voice of the goddess. “I find myself inclined to accept your servitude. It would be petty of me to refuse the new followers that my champion has brought me, even if he did so inadvertently.” There was a pause, and when the voice spoke again, it contained a harsher edge that nearly made Fruit Crunch throw up from fear. “I will give you the power that you seek, but never forget to be grateful to me for this indulgence. You will live by my doctrine, further my dogma, and demonstrate my tenets, or you will know my wrath for your disobedience.”
There was a sense of movement from up ahead, as though something gigantic was striding forth from the shifting shadows. Out of his periphery, Fruit Crunch barely glimpsed his friends covering their eyes, unable to bring themselves to look at the form of their goddess, just before he did the same. A moment later, he felt himself begin to shake uncontrollably, somehow knowing that she was right in front of him…
“In accordance with my divine portfolio, I hereby claim mastery over your totemic incarnations. These aspects of yourselves will be augmented and externally manifested, so that you may exercise them in pursuit of my will. Master them, and find your own strength reflected in mine.”
There was a sound of movement, and Fruit Crunch heard a gasp from somewhere to his left. “Feathercap, yours is the owl, facet of the Third Eye. It brings sight and wisdom, knowing the end of the battle before it begins.”
Another shuffling, and this time the strangled breath he heard was that of a filly. “Cleansweep, yours is the serpent, facet of the Healer. It brings renewal and rebirth, turning its poison on those who would do it harm.”
There was a pause then, and Fruit Crunch found himself wondering who would be next. Intellectually, he knew that they were being given what they wanted, but at the same time he couldn’t help but feel fearful of when the goddess would come to him. Even so, he couldn’t help but bite his lip as he heard another grunt come from his right.
He found out who it was a moment later. “Straightlace, yours is the eagle, facet of the Righteous. The sign of nobility, it maintains steadfastness in the face of opposition, looking down on all others.”
Fruit Crunch held his breath now, unable to take much more anticipation. Yet somehow, he knew he was being saved for last, and was proven right a moment later as he heard a sharply drawn breath. “Fiddlesticks, yours is the badger, facet of the Den Mother. Nurturing and protective, its viciousness has no equal against those who would harm its kin.”
And then it was his turn. Given no further warning, Fruit Crunch couldn’t help but gasp as he felt something being drawn out of him, as though pulled from his chest without harming his body. “Fruit Crunch, yours is the wolf, facet of the Guardian. In defense of its territory it can be vicious alone, but fights best as part of a pack.”
Dizzily, Fruit Crunch opened his eyes, the sensation of…whatever had just happened being so unusual that it momentarily overrode his fear. But if the goddess had been visible before, she wasn’t any longer. Instead, the most he could make out was a single large shadow in front of him, its shape stable against the intermingling shades of black behind it.
“It is done,” intoned the voice. “Learn about the gifts I’ve given you, and use them to honor me. Follow the example that my champion has given you, and through him learn to revere me. Fail me in this, and you shall come to fear me.”
The words sounded as though they were coming from further away now, as though the goddess was leaving them. Fruit Crunch tried to look around at his friends, but all of a sudden he felt so tired, his eyes closing of their own accord. Slowly, he felt himself drifting off, the goddess’s last words reaching his ears just before he lost consciousness.
Lex watched as Fruit Crunch trotted back towards the camp, considering the exchange he’d just had with the child.
The most important thing, he knew, was that the colt had indicated understanding that he wasn’t to engage in any further dangerous antics. It was one thing if he and his friends wanted to name their little group after the Night Mare – something Lex suspected they’d done as a result of hearing Cloudbank’s sermon a few days previous – and play games about going on adventures, but actually putting their safety in jeopardy was quite another. It was fortunate that Fruit Crunch had come to comprehend and accept that, hopefully meaning that there’d be no more instances of them deliberately placing themselves in harm’s way.
But as for the rest of their conversation…
Lex glanced down at his chest, where the boy’s tear-stained face had been pressed just a few minutes ago. He’d hugged the child back in an attempt to be soothing, but that didn’t answer what had prompted the embrace to begin with. That the foal had apparently been so moved by his confirming things that were, as far as Lex was concerned, blindingly obvious – namely that his anger had been motivated by worry for how the safety of the colt and his friends had been imperiled, as well as how Fruit Crunch’s conduct toward Silhouette had been, shorn of any concerns about potentially being seen as legitimizing further activities in the same vein, meritorious – suggested that those things hadn’t been obvious to Fruit Crunch. That was certainly plausible; even discounting that most children lacked the faculties of adults, Lex was more than used to the ponies around him needing even simple concepts explained to them. But usually when he did that, it engendered more bad feelings instead of dispelling them. Why had this time been different?
Lex silently reviewed the last several minutes he’d spent talking to the boy, mentally dissecting everything that had passed between them in hopes of identifying the salient aspects that would let him answer that question. But the process yielded no more insights now than it ever had, frustrating his hopes of gleaning any greater understanding of whatever subtleties of communication he still couldn’t fathom. Just like every other time, there were plenty of data points, but no way of conclusively interpreting them. Although the failure was unsurprising, it was still discouraging.
Or rather, it should have been. But the emotion was blunted by the memory of how, contrary to his expectations, things with the colt had ended on such a positive note. Not only had he somehow managed to alleviate Fruit Crunch’s crying, but he’d done so with such proficiency that the child had expressed overwhelming gratitude for it as well, something that he’d confirmed when he’d asked if the colt had felt better.
Intellectually, Lex knew that there was no particular relevance to any of that. That he’d achieved such profound results with nothing more than some minor points of clarification, explaining things that were obvious to the point of self-evidence, and a few platitudes was meaningless if he couldn’t figure out the underlying dynamics as to why those had worked. Otherwise he’d never be able to adapt that knowledge so as to be able to utilize it correctly with regard to the specificities of future conversations. Serendipity, by itself, wasn’t helpful.
Lex knew that, and yet he couldn’t help but feel heartened by how his interaction with Fruit Crunch had gone. In the face of what had happened with Aria and what Lex knew would be an uncomfortable – at best – conversation with Sonata, the affirmation that things ending badly wasn’t a foregone conclusion was reassuring. Even if it was purely by happenstance, and even if the odds were decidedly against him, the chance of not only avoiding disaster with the mares in his life but actually working things out was still greater than zero. Given how miserable he’d been feeling just a few minutes ago, that was a welcome reminder.
His spirits buoyed, Lex turned and started back toward the train station.
Entering the lobby, Lex wasn’t surprised when Aria immediately moved to confront him. Despite the fact that she’d been curled up next to Sonata on the bench they’d all been sharing, the Siren’s eyes had opened in immediate reaction to the sound of his hoofsteps. By the time he’d closed the door to the station behind him, she’d already climbed down from the bench and was sashaying toward him.
“Well well well, look who’s back,” she drawled, a lopsided smirk on her lips. “Looking to pick up where we left off? Or are you going to run away like a coward again if things get hotter than you can handle?”
The taunt made Lex narrow his eyes, but he kept a tight rein on his emotions, refusing to let Aria goad him into losing control of himself a second time. “Neither,” he answered bluntly. “We’re going to have a clarifying meeting.”
“A ‘clarifying meeting’?” For a moment Aria’s face was incredulous, but then she sneered at him. “You know, I’m starting to think that the only reason Sonata puts out is because she knows you’d never get laid if she didn’t take pity on you.” She leaned in closer, her lip curling as she put her face inches from his. “Do you have to have a ‘clarifying meeting’ with her before you two get it on, or does she just push you down and do all the work herself?”
Lex grit his teeth, forcing himself to maintain his equilibrium. He could feel his anger rising in response to Aria’s ridicule, and with it his desire. It wouldn’t take much to shut her up, he knew. He’d imposed his will on her and made her submit to him once, he could do it again…
This time, however, his discipline held, and he kept his voice even as he continued. “The four of us are going to sit down and formally determine what our relationship is.” He made himself move past her as he spoke, walking further into the lobby. “We’ll do this in the morning, before my meeting with the Princesses, and…” Glancing at the bench where only Sonata was sleeping, Lex turned back toward Aria with a frown. “Where’s Nosey?”
Aria shrugged. “What am I, her babysitter? Last I saw, she was right where you left her.”
Lex frowned at that, glancing back at the alcove before returning his gaze to Aria. Had she done something to her? “She’s still back there? Why?”
“We were having a bit of girl talk, and she didn’t take it too well,” answered Aria snidely.
Lex almost demanded that she give him a straight answer, but decided that doing so would be more trouble than it was worth. Instead he turned and made his way toward the alcove. It took only a few seconds to round the corner and spot Nosey, lying on the floor in a heap, legs akimbo. The sight made Lex hurry, invoking his circlet as he examined her for magical auras. If Aria had used her magic on her…
But no, there were no active spell auras on her that he could see, nor any lingering traces of residual magic. That wasn’t conclusive, of course; the trace remnants of a weaker spell might have simply faded beyond what his circlet could have detected. But short of feeding more magic into his circlet – something he knew would have injured him further to do – there was no way to be sure of that.
For a moment, Lex almost did it anyway, but reluctantly decided not to. His physical recovery was far from complete, and worsening his condition before he met with the princesses was highly inadvisable considering that he was still weighing the feasibility of forcibly removing them from power. Also, he found himself reluctant to believe that Aria would do something like that to Nosey, despite her petulant behavior to date.
Instead, he placed a hoof on Nosey’s side, shaking her gently. “Nosey. Nosey, wake up.”
It took only a moment for her to begin to stir. “Mmph. Lex? That y-, gah!” Behind her glasses, Nosey’s eyes suddenly snapped open. Her face immediately turned red as she looked at him, and a second later she scooted backward as quickly as she could, her hooves scrabbling at the floor wildly. She didn’t stop until she’d struck the far wall, panting for breath. “Wh-what’re you doing?!”
Nonplussed by her behavior, Lex hesitated to answer. She’d been clinging to him for security before, and now she was afraid of him? “Aria told me you were back here, and I wanted to make sure you were alright.” He frowned, wondering if he’d been wrong to give Aria the benefit of the doubt. “Did she do something to you?”
For some reason, the question made Nosey turn even redder, and she shook her head with such force that it made her mane whip back and forth. “No! No she didn’t!” She gave a nervous laugh. “I mean, why would you even think that?”
“…because you were passed out on the ground.”
“I was?” asked Nosey, blinking owlishly. “I mean, uh, yeah! I was!” It seemed to take her a second to realize that wasn’t a satisfactory answer. “No, um, that was because it was, you know, too, uh, hot.” She nodded then, before suddenly going rigid. “I mean, the temperature was! The actual, atmospheric…thing! Not, you know, what h-happened…before…”
Lex sighed, having no idea why seeing him in a compromising position with Aria was apparently a source of such overwhelming distress for Nosey, nor caring enough to bother attempting to figure it out. Instead, he decided to try soothing her, the same way he had for Fruit Crunch. “Nosey, I want you-”
“Really?!” she yelped, looking like she was about to pass out again.
“-to calm down and listen to me,” finished Lex, pretending he hadn’t heard what she’d just said. “I’m going to do-”
“M-me?!” squeaked Nosey.
“-what I should have done before,” Lex continued, fighting down a surge of irritation, “and take-”
“Please be gentle,” whimpered Nosey, covering her eyes.
“-control of the situation-, stop that!” Finally losing his patience for her histrionics, Lex marched over to her and used his telekinesis to haul her upright. “Will you get ahold of yourself?!” Ignoring her renewed cries at the rough treatment, Lex planted her firmly on her hooves before giving her an annoyed look. “Let me make this as clear as I possibly can: in a few hours, before I meet with the princesses, there’s going to be a discussion between you, me, Sonata, and Aria. We are going to figure out exactly what we are to each other and resolve this…tension, between us once and for all. Until then, nothing is going to happen. Is that clear?”
Nosey blinked, as though struggling to fully comprehend what she’d just been told. “Oh…oh, okay then. That’s…that’s okay.” But for some reason, she didn’t seem entirely relieved.
Still, she’d ceased being hysterical, and that was enough for Lex. Giving a crisp nod, he turned and headed back toward the lobby. “Now, come with me-”
“Huh?!”
One of Lex's eyes began to twitch. “Back out to the lobby to go to sleep!” he growled.
“Oh…”
Silently kicking himself for having felt optimistic about communicating with the girls without it turning into a disaster, Lex wondered if this meeting was a bad idea. Based on Nosey’s current disposition, to say nothing of Aria’s sardonicism and Sonata’s capriciousness, it might very well be a recipe for disaster. But ignoring the issue was impossible after what he’d almost done with Aria, and he had no better ideas about how to resolve things.
Trudging back out to the lobby with Nosey in tow, Lex saw that Aria had already returned to the bench, glancing over at them as they approached. “That was pretty fast,” she snickered. “A little too quick to the finish line, huh Lex?”
Nosey started to sputter a half-formed denial at the implication about what they’d been doing, but Lex was in no mood for any of it. “Not one more word, either of you,” he ordered darkly as he returned to his usual spot. “Lie down and go to sleep, before I lose what’s left of my patience.”
Aria snorted, her expression defiant, but didn’t push her luck as she curled up beside him. A moment later Lex felt Nosey gingerly settle down on his other side. Sonata, despite all the talking and movement going on around her, barely twitched at the commotion, for once the least troublesome member of the group.
Closing his eyes, Lex silently reassured himself that he was making the right decision. Ignoring how things had been progressing with the girls had only led to things escalating, rather than the problem solving itself. Far better to deal with it directly and resolve it, one way or another.
In a few hours’ time, the question of how many girlfriends he had would be settled.
The only answer she received was a stunned silence. The earth stallion that she and Granola Bar had flanked was simply staring at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, very clearly having a hard time digesting what she’d told him. On the other side of the table, the blonde unicorn – Coal Hopper, the stallion had called her before – wasn’t much better. She’d managed to keep her jaw from hanging open, but her face still had shock written all over it.
Fencer couldn’t blame them. In an effort to convince them that they were ponies worth helping, she’d told them everything that had happened since Vanhoover had flooded. What she’d done to Pillowcase, being subjugated and cursed by Lex, fighting the horde of ghouls, and the drama they’d run into here in Canterlot; she’d left none of it out. Her friends had also chimed in frequently, adding numerous details and explanations. More than a few times, they’d broken in to tell her that she was being too hard on herself. The entire story had taken some time to relate, and now that it had there was nothing left to do but hope that these two would see fit to help them, otherwise they’d need a new plan. “So…”
The leading question shook the two railway ponies out of their stupor, with Coal Hopper quickly shaking her head as if to clear her thoughts. “You guys are messed up,” she declared a moment later. “I mean, I get that it’s because you all went through so much bad stuff, but even so…a dozen freight cars couldn’t carry all of your baggage.”
Fencer bit her lip, not sure what to make of that assessment but not liking where it was going. “I can’t say that you’re wrong,” she admitted. “And if both of you wanted to walk away right now, none of us would blame you for it.”
“Says you,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide under his breath. At the same time, he surreptitiously moved the empty bowls of ice cream – and the spoons they held – away from Coal Hopper.
“We’re not bad ponies,” added Funshine, repeating what he’d said earlier. “We’re good ponies who got caught in bad situations. We just need a little help.”
Across the table, Coal Hopper’s date put his hooves to his head, as though dizzy. “I just…I can’t even…” He stared down at the table, clearly not seeing it. “Regenerating his horn? Using curses? Fighting off an entire army of monsters all on his own? I knew that guy was bad news, but all that…”
Granola Bar frowned, looking between the sputtering stallion and Coal Hopper. “Is he okay?”
The other mare shrugged. “Ticket Stub told me that he met that Lex guy on a train a little while back. He said he looked like trouble.”
Ticket Stub gave a hollow laugh at that, his expression haunted. “‘Trouble’ is him making everypony else too uncomfortable to share a passenger car with him. But taking on, what,” he turned his gaze toward Fencer, “two thousand monsters by himself? And winning?” He looked back at Coal Hopper. “That’s not ‘trouble.’ That’s a catastrophe in the form of a pony!”
Hopscotch gave Ticket Stub an unhappy look. “Lex didn’t fight those ghouls off all by himself,” she corrected. “Garden did a lot of the work too. Weren’t you listening?”
The correction didn’t seem to ease Ticket Stub’s distress. If anything, it seemed to make it worse. “Right, well…” He shakily stood up. “I think we’ve heard enough. Thank you all for a very, er, memorable evening. We’ll just be going n-”
“Sit back down,” snapped Coal Hopper.
Ticket Stub’s eyebrows shot upward. “Sit ba-…are you kidding?”
“Not even a little. Now park it, buster!”
Slowly sinking back down into his seat, Ticket Stub gave Coal Hopper a horrified look. “You can’t really be thinking of getting mixed up in all this,” he pleaded, waving a hoof at Fencer and her friends to indicate what “this” was.
Fencer held her breath as she waited for Coal Hopper to answer, idly noting the hopeful looks on her friends’ faces. Ticket Stub had clearly made up his mind about them. Now their hopes hinged on his date having a different opinion.
“Look,” started Coal Hopper, before pursing her lips and giving a sigh. Her gaze fell to the tabletop, and she idly pushed one of the empty bowls of ice cream around (making Slip ‘n’ Slide wince slightly). “…you were…me…” she muttered quietly.
A round of uncertain glances were exchanged. “I was…what?” asked Ticket Stub.
Coal Hopper raised her eyes long enough to give him an irritated look. “I said…” Her eyes dropped from his. “You were…about me…”
“Sorry, I still didn’t quite catch that,” chuckled Ticket Stub nervously.
Coal Hopper slammed a hoof down on the table, making the empty bowl – and everypony else – jump. “I said you were right about me, okay?! You were right to push me to go talk to Princess Cadance and Shining Armor about what I saw in Vanhoover!”
Fencer could see Funshine starting to open his mouth, either to complain about how Coal Hopper had startled him or to ask what she was talking about, and quickly held up a hoof in a gesture of restraint. He blinked at that but didn’t object, closing his jaw and leaning back a little. Fortunately, no one else seemed to be keen to interrupt the surly mare, and Fencer waited with baited breath for her to explain her strange statement.
Huffing, Coal Hopper looked like she’d just eaten a lemon rather than two bowls of ice cream. “We talked about this before, remember?” she groused. “About closure?”
Ticket Stub licked his lips before he answered. “I don’t understand.”
Coal Hopper shot him a dark look, making him flinch, but she kept her temper in check. “That’s what this is about. It’s why these ponies are talking to us. The difference is that their stuff is bigger, so it’s harder to deal with.”
Glancing at the other five ponies questioningly, Ticket Stub turned back to Coal Hopper when none of them answered. “It is?”
“That’s how it works.” Coal Hopper went back to fiddling with her empty bowl then, her voice conveying her resentment that she had to say this out loud. “Vanhoover was just a misadventure for you; drop the stuff off and deliver the sick ponies to the hospital. Once you did all that, it was over, and you could move on to the next thing. No biggie.”
Ticket Stub rubbed the back of his neck, not sure he agreed that it was “no biggie,” but he knew better than to argue. “Okay…”
“My thing was worse,” continued Coal Hopper. “I just got a glimpse of what everypony in that camp went through, and it was horrible.” Her voice turned bitter then, slouching in her seat. “And just like when I was a filly, I ran away from it, not wanting to do what I had to do to get past it because I knew that it would be awful. The only difference was that instead of my dad pushing me to do it…” She didn’t finish, instead looking up at Ticket Stub.
He gave a bashful smile at that. “I wasn’t trying to treat you like a foal or anything. I just, you know…you told me that story, so I thought that you needed some help the way you did then.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what these guys are saying,” she huffed, nodding at the other ponies around their table. “Except that just talking to the Princess isn’t good enough, so they’re going back.”
Now it was Ticket Stub’s turn to look at the other five ponies around their table, and while the reluctance hadn’t disappeared from his face, Fencer could tell that he was reconsidering what to do. Granola Bar must have sensed it too, because she gave him a thin smile. “All we really need is to get on board a train out of Canterlot. We’re not going to make you two come back to Vanhoover with us or anything. If you can sneak us past the guards and onto a train car, that’d be enough.”
Ticket Stub shifted in his seat, wavering. “Are you guys sure you can’t just talk to Princess Cadance?”
“We just want to go home.” Hopscotch’s voice was plaintive as she answered him. “We’re not running away from the Princess. If she wants to come talk to us in Vanhoover, that’ll be fine, but right now we just want to go back and figure out how to move on.”
Ticket Stub turned that over for a moment before sighing, glancing down at his flank. “When I got my cutie mark, it was because I loved how trains could bring so much happiness to so many ponies. I never thought that would involve sneaking some ponies onto them right under the Royal Guard’s noses.”
Fencer perked up at that. “So you’ll help us?”
Giving Coal Hopper a long-suffering look, Ticket Stub nodded. “Yeah.”
A chorus of relieved sighs went around the table, as everypony relaxed. “Okay,” smiled Funshine. “Now we just have to think of a plan, and we’re as good as home-free.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide nodded towards their new friends. “How about we have one of these guys run up to the Royal Guard and say that they saw some ponies who looked like us in a nearby alley. The guards will all run to check it out, leaving the way in unguarded.”
“That’s your plan?” snorted Coal Hopper derisively. “Just run up and say ‘they went that way!’? No wonder you guys need help.”
“It’s not too bad,” countered Granola Bar. “If one of us tried that, there’s a chance we’d be recognized immediately, and it’s not like we could ask some random pony on the street to go and lie to the guards for us.”
“Yeah, except the guards might not go running and leave the station wide open just because someone says they saw something suspicious,” pointed out Ticket Stub. “I mean, they’re not stupid.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide gave Ticket Stub an incredulous look. “Okay, listen, I know you're freaked out by all that stuff Lex did, but did you really not hear that part about the guard we ran into when we were escaping from the castle a little while ago?”
Ticket Stub flinched a little at that, looking like his feelings had been hurt, but Fencer jumped in before he could say anything. “You’re both right. If somepony goes out there and tells the guards that they saw ponies matching our descriptions, some of them will most likely go and check it out. But at least one or two will probably stay behind. So what we need is a way to distract those guards while the others are off on the wild goose-chase.”
Hopscotch tilted her head. “So what can we use to do that?”
“Ice cream!” announced the waitress, making everypony jump as she began to pass out bowls of the stuff to everyone. “I wasn’t sure what you all liked, so I put different flavors in every bowl and I brought you our sprinkle sampler platter! I figured that way you can trade your ice cream around and sprinkle them however you want!”
“Oh that does it!” snarled Coal Hopper, starting to get up from her seat.
Luckily, Fencer was faster. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t order any of this.”
But the waitress waved a hoof in a gesture of refusal, giving them all a warm smile. “It’s on the house. I overheard your story while I was cleaning up, and it was incredible. You guys went through so much together! I know this isn’t a lot, but I wanted to do what I could to help you guys out. You all enjoy, okay?” She didn’t wait for a response, smiling as she went back to work.
“That was really nice of her,” admitted Funshine, already reaching for the desserts. “I don’t know about you guys, but after the night we’ve had this is just what I needed.”
Fencer blinked at that, glancing toward the edge of the nearby patio where they’d been seated previously. It was still the perfect vantage point to observe the guards, who by now had been guarding the station in the hot summer evening in their stifling armor for quite some time. Slowly, a smile formed on her face.
“Be quiet!” hissed Slip ‘n’ Slide. “It’ll look suspicious if we walk faster than this!”
“Maybe it’ll be okay if we just trot?” Despite her voice being steady, Hopscotch’s breathing was coming quicker than her relaxed pace warranted. “We’d just look like some ponies who were running late.”
Granola Bar shook her head. “We’d still stand out too much. If the guards come back-, eyes forward!” Her sudden rebuke made Funshine wince, giving Granola Bar an apologetic look before returning his gaze to the entrance of the train station – currently unguarded, thanks to their new friends – several dozen feet ahead of them. “If the guards come back after we arrive, they might think to ask somepony if they saw anyone matching our descriptions. We want to stand out as little as possible in case that happens.”
“Presuming they don’t come back right now and spot us trying to walk in,” snorted Slip ‘n’ Slide, his voice brimming with nervous tension.
“We’ll be fine.” Fencer’s voice, in contrast to those of her friends, was calm and confident. “Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper won’t let us down.”
I hope, she added silently.
In theory their plan was a good one. First, Ticket Stub would offer the guards at the entrance to the train station some ice cream, using the freebies that they’d been given. Of course, he wouldn’t bring any of it to them, instead telling the guards that they just had to head around the corner to The Delectable Dessert Den where their frosty treats had already been procured.
Nopony expected that to be enough to make all of the guards leave their post, but Fencer had guessed that it would be enough to tempt a few of them. Once they were gone, Coal Hopper would rush to inform the remaining guards that she’d spotted five suspicious-looking ponies in a nearby alley, giving just enough details to make it obvious who she was talking about. That would lure the remaining guards away, giving Fencer and her friends – who would be waiting in an alley across the street from the Dessert Den, exiting once they saw the guards enter the building – enough time to slip into the train station unnoticed.
Compared to dodging undead ponies that could see in the dark and whose strikes caused paralysis, this should have been a walk in the park, especially since they wouldn’t be horribly butchered if things went south. Even so, Fencer had held her breath – and had heard her friends all do the same – when they’d spotted Ticket Stub leading a pair of guards into the eatery they’d just vacated. Once the door had closed behind them, she’d led her friends out onto the street, turning the corner onto the street that led to the train station…just in time to see three guards rushing down an alleyway, Coal Hopper following them and shouting directions.
Leaving the entrance to the station completely open.
We’re going to make it, Fencer told herself silently as she led her friends toward the entryway. We’re going to walk right in like anypony else. No guards are going to come rushing back at the last second and catch us at the worst possible moment. We’re going to go in and move to the far side of the lobby, no problem. That was the next phase of the plan. Since there were guards going around and checking every train for them, it was better to wait inside the lobby until Ticket Stub and Coal Hopper caught up to them. Those two could then check the train they’d come in on without raising any suspicions, letting the rest of them know when it was clear. We just have to get inside, and the rest of this will be cakewalk.
They couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away from the entrance now, and the guards were still nowhere in sight.
Twenty-five feet.
Twenty.
“This is always when something goes wrong,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“Shut up, Slip,” grunted Funshine.
Fifteen feet.
“Don’t look around,” reminded Granola Bar. “Eyes ahead, nice and casual.”
“R-right,” gulped Hopscotch.
Ten feet.
Five.
Fencer had just reached the entrance to the building when a voice rang out.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE’S NOTHING HERE?!” came Coal Hopper’s angry roar, recognizable from when she’d lost her patience with the waitress back at the dessert place. “I’M TELLING YOU I SAW THEM! ARE YOU CALLING ME A LI-, HEY! GET BACK HERE!”
The shouting caused several ponies to stop in place, turning to look at the nearby alley where the raised voice was coming from. But Fencer wasn’t one of them, continuing doggedly forward. “Keep going,” she muttered under her breath, low enough that she hoped only her friends could hear her. “Keep going!”
Walking into the station, she strained her ears listening to the hoofsteps of her friends following behind her, fixing her eyes on the far corner of the lobby. Tension made her clench her jaw, waiting to hear an angry shout for them to stop, followed by the thundering of hooves running toward them. If that happened…
But it didn’t. As Fencer reached her destination, no commotion was raised, and she lifted her head as though examining the large map of Canterlot on the wall in front of her, keeping her back to the station entrance. Seconds later, four sets of hooves moved alongside her, and she closed her eyes in silent relief. Fighting down the urge to let out a heavy sigh, she plastered a smile on her face as she glanced at her friends. “Told you we’d make it.”
“Alright, you guys should be in the clear now,” declared Coal Hopper as she helped Hopscotch climb into the freight car. “Just stay in there and don’t make any noise, and you’re home free.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide didn’t seem convinced, glancing around as if he expected the Royal Guard to come lurching out of the shadows at any second. “And you’re sure the guards already checked this train?”
“We’re sure,” answered Ticket Stub. “This train, the train we all came in on, was the first one they checked when they started. When I told them that we needed to start getting it ready for our morning departure, I made sure to ask if they needed to check it again, and they said no. So you guys should be okay.” Despite his words, he was pale and sweating, mopping at his brow with a handkerchief.
Nor was his anxious disposition lost on anypony else. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Granola Bar couldn’t keep the concern out of her voice. It wasn’t just for Ticket Stub’s sake either; she knew that if he was having second thoughts, they were all in danger. “You really don’t look so good.”
“I’m alright,” nodded Ticket Stub, though he punctuated the words with a nervous swallow, glancing around before returning his gaze to where Fencer and the others were sitting inside the freight car. “I just haven’t gotten over that close call back at the dessert place.”
“Aw, but you did great!” smiled Funshine, remembering what Ticket Stub had told them back in the lobby. “I mean, there you were, the guards about to take all the ice cream and head back immediately to share it with their friends instead of eating their portion right there, and the waitress about to spill the beans by asking where all your friends went. Everything’s going wrong, with only seconds to spare…and that’s when you have a brainstorm!”
“Y-yep…” Ticket Stub managed a weak chuckle, though it might have been a rictus grin instead.
“Asking the waitress to recommend what sprinkles should go with what ice cream was a pretty smart move,” smiled Fencer. “You should be proud of yourself, you managed to think on your hooves even under extreme pressure. A lot of ponies couldn’t do that when Vanhoover fell, and it cost them everything.”
Ticket Stub’s cheeks colored a little at that, helping out his complexion, but Coal Hopper just rolled her eyes. “Yeah, it was inspired, now can we get out of here before somepony spots us talking to a freight car that should be empty, or do you need us to assure you that the guards aren’t coming for a fourth time?” She glared at Slip ‘n’ Slide as she finished talking, already at the limit of her patience. Fortunately, he didn’t test her again, slinking backward deeper into the car.
Instead, it was Hopscotch who came forward, smiling. “Thank you both so much for helping us. I don’t know if we would have made it this far without you.”
“We definitely owe you two big time,” added Funshine.
Granola Bar nodded at that. “If you ever need anything, you know where to find us.”
With one last glance around, Ticket Stub raised his hoof in a wave. “Take care, and remember: you have to get off the train when we stop in Ponyville, otherwise you’re going to end up going all the way to the Crystal Empire with us.”
“We will.” Fencer paused, one hoof on the sliding door. “Thank you again for taking a chance on us. I promise, we won’t make you regret it.”
“You better not,” huffed Coal Hopper. “Now shut the door and go to sleep or something. We’re not going to leave until a little after sunrise, and it’s several hours from here to Ponyville. After that, you’re on your own.” She stepped back from the freight car, turning back toward the passenger cars near the engine, with Ticket Stub falling in beside her after one last glance backward.
A second later the sound of the freight car door closing could be heard, signaling the parting of ways for both groups.
The two railway ponies walked in silence for a moment, almost halfway to the passenger car before she finally glanced over at Ticket Stub. “Spill it,” she ordered tersely.
He blinked, almost missing a step. “I-I’m sorry?”
“You will be if you don’t tell me what’s going on with you,” she snorted, giving him a sidelong look.
The sight made Ticket Stub shake his head. “I don’t know-”
“Stop.” There wasn’t any magic in her voice, but Ticket Stub froze anyway, grimacing as Coal Hopper turned to face him. “Normally I can’t stand it when somepony tries to pull one over on me, even when they’re really bad at it the way you are, but I figure I owe you after how you got me to talk to Princess Cadance and Shining Armor. So just this once, I’m going to give you a chance.” She paused then, making sure she had his full attention before she spoke again. “You come clean with me about whatever it is you’re hiding right now, and I won’t hold it against you.”
For a moment Ticket Stub looked ready to protest, then all at once he seemed to deflate, sagging in place. Lowering his gaze to the ground, he gave a deep sigh. “I lied before,” he mumbled, “about how it went with the guards back at the dessert place.”
Coal Hopper’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean? Did you,” her voice changed to a harsh whisper. “Did you sell them out?! Is that why you’ve been so nervous?!”
“No!” Ticket Stub’s head shot up, giving her a horrified look. “Of course not!”
“Then what happened?”
“I…” Rubbing his forehead, he glanced away, not able to look her in the face. “I didn’t have any brainstorm about distracting the guards.”
“Hm?” Coal Hopper tilted her head, still looking suspicious.
“That waitress wasn’t about to ask where everypony was,” Ticket Stub explained. “She wasn’t even there. I think she went on her break or something. And the guards weren’t about to just pick everything up and bring it all back to their post right away. They sat down and dug in instead.” He finally looked back at her, his expression miserable. “The whole thing went smoothly, without any sort of last-minute drama.”
Coal Hopper arched a brow. “So why lie about it, if things went perfectly?”
Ticket Stub gave a self-deprecating laugh, followed by a helpless shrug. “Because I wanted to impress you.”
Coal Hopper’s eyes widened incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”
Shuffling a hoof, Ticket Stub looked back toward the passenger car. “We should really get going…”
“Don’t even think about trying to change the subject!” snapped Coal Hopper. “You were trying to impress me?”
“I just…I remembered how, when those ponies first showed up, you got so mad at me for trying to do the whole self-sacrificing thing, telling me that I should have gotten up in their faces like a tough guy instead of, you know, the other thing. I thought that if I did some big, heroic thing you’d…like me.” The last two words came out so softly that they were almost a whisper.
For a long moment Coal Hopper was silent. “Wow,” she said at last. “You have got to be the single stupidest pony I’ve ever met. I mean, I can’t even begin to describe just how dumb you are.”
Squeezing his eyes shut, Ticket Stub put a hoof to his face. “Yeah, well, I definitely feel like it right now,” he muttered. “Listen, we really should go-”
“I was trying to impress you,” announced Coal Hopper bluntly.
“-and clean those…wait, what?” Blinking, Ticket Stub opened his eyes, giving Coal Hopper a blank look. “You were…me? What?”
Now it was Coal Hopper’s turn to look away, one hoof coming up to play with her mane idly. “…that whole thing I did, getting in those guys’ faces and telling what’s-his-name that I’d make him eat a spoon. I wanted you to think I was tough.”
“But, but I do think you’re tough,” protested Ticket Stub, unable to believe what he was hearing.
“Right,” snorted Coal Hopper sarcastically. “Because I’d been heaving my guts out on the trip here, then I had to have you talk me into talking to the Princess, and then I was quiet all night tonight because I was nervous. Yeah, I’m really resilient.”
Ticket Stub could barely keep his jaw from hanging open. “You were nervous going out with me tonight?”
“This might not have occurred to you, genius, but I don’t exactly have a lot of stallions beating down a path to my door, you get me?” Stomping a hoof in agitation, Coal Hopper frowned. “So I thought that if I did some big, dramatic thing you’d forget all that other stuff and just remember that I wasn’t intimidated by those guys.” A pause, and then she spoke again, her voice quieter. “I didn’t mean to jump all over you when I did it, though. It was kinda nice the way you tried to be all noble and stuff…”
Ticket Stub was quiet for a moment, then started to snicker, bringing a hoof to his lips.
Coal Hopper’s eyes widened. “Don’t you dare laugh! I’m being serious here!”
“I’m sorry!” giggled Ticket Stub, “but it’s funny! I was trying to impress you, and you were trying to impress me, and neither of us noticed!”
“It’s not funny!” growled Coal Hopper. “You keep laughing and I’m gonna wallop you!”
“Okay, okay, I’m not laughing.” But it was a near thing, with Ticket Stub only barely able to swallow his mirth, suddenly feeling ten times better. “But really, I already do think you’re a tough pony. The toughest I know. You don’t need to prove it to me.”
“That’s just because you haven’t met my brothers, or my dad,” huffed Coal Hopper. But despite her attitude she seemed mollified, turning and resuming her walk toward the passenger car. “Now c’mon, we’ve still got to get everything cleaned up.”
“Okay!” Ticket Stub hurried to catch up to her, matching his pace to hers once he had, grinning. Tonight had been the single weirdest date he’d ever been on, but for all the awkwardness and nervousness and misunderstandings, he couldn’t help but feel happy about how it was ending. So much so that he forgot to be apprehensive as he leaned over slightly, pressing his side against Coal Hopper’s.
She didn’t say anything, she didn’t even glance at him, but Ticket Stub’s heart soared when she pressed against him in return.
With the door closed, the interior of the freight car was pitch black.
Fencer let out a slow breath as she settled down, her back pressed firmly against the far wall of the car. Nearby, she could hear the soft breathing and shuffling of her friends getting themselves situated. None of them said anything; they all had too much experience with hiding in dark places to make any unnecessary noise. Once the train started moving, eliminating any possibility of someone outside the car hearing them, they’d have a chance to strategize their next move. Until then, it was time to rest.
It’s a good thing none of us snore, thought Fencer ruefully. Before Vanhoover’s fall, she wouldn’t have thought that sleeping silently was something you could deliberately teach yourself to do. But when your life depended on it, she’d discovered, it was actually an easy skill to pick up. Sort of like how she’d taught herself to fight with knives, quickly gaining sufficient prowess to be able to dispatch a ghoul easily. Or one unarmed crystal pony.
That last thought made her tense. Stop it! she ordered herself savagely. Pillowcase forgave me! He and Cozy both forgave me! But although the memory of the crystal ponies making peace with her was still fresh in her mind, Fencer could still feel her thoughts turning back to the horror of when she’d maimed Pillow and left him for dead, as well as when she’d held him hostage later in her foolish attempt to take Lex’s horn. Both felt more visceral, more real, than the unexpected compassion that Cozy and Pillow had shown her just over an hour ago. It was like she was still back there, hiding from the ghouls and not caring who she hurt…
That’s it, she realized grimly. That’s why I feel like this. Raising her head, Fencer looked around despite not being able to see anything in the gloom. Right now, she and her friends were all hiding out in an enclosed space with no light, not daring to make a sound in hopes of avoiding detection. It’s just like when we were hiding out from the ghouls.
The thought was an unpleasant one, doubly so for the fact that her friends were doubtlessly struggling with the same anxiety that she was right now. All because she’d wanted to go back to Vanhoover in the first place. And now I’m getting my wish, she thought bitterly, unpleasant memories and all. For a split-second, she considered making a soft light with her horn, hating the thought that she’d led her friends into a circumstance that mirrored the worst part of their lives. But she fought the urge down, not wanting to get them caught after everything they’d already done for her. Besides, she sighed to herself as she laid her head back down, my horn hasn’t completely recovered yet. Hadn’t one of the doctors said something about not using too much magic? Not that it mattered very much now, after how she’d attacked that army of ghouls back at the camp. But Lex and Sonata had augmented her then, so maybe it was better to leave it alone after all? I should have just asked Cozy or Pillow to heal it.
It was her last thought before she finally drifted off to sleep.
Fencer’s eyes snapped open immediately, her entire body on alert as she sprang to her hooves. “You guys!” she hissed, her voice a sharp whisper. “You guys! Wake up!” She wasn’t sure what had happened, but she knew with absolute certainty that something had. Something very bad. “We’re not safe!”
But nopony answered her.
Terrified by the silence, it took Fencer a moment to process that the lack of sound was absolute. She couldn’t hear her friends’ breathing. Which meant that they were either gone, or-
A hoofstep fell nearby.
Managing to choke down a scream, Fencer turned toward the sound. She opened her mouth to ask who it was, but the words wouldn’t come. As quietly as she could, she started to back away, moving in the opposite direction from where it had come-
Another hoofstep. This one from somewhere behind her.
Immediately coming to a stop, Fencer belatedly realized that she couldn’t feel the wall against her back anymore. No! she thought in a panic. No no no, I didn’t move that far! Carefully, she tried to make her way back-
This time the hoofstep came from right next to her.
“Pony can’t run,” came a sing-song voice next to her ear, “pony can’t hide, pony can’t see though her eyes are wide.”
This time Fencer did scream, throwing herself in the opposite direction from the voice. Galloping full-tilt despite not being able to see where she was going, she could already feel her body stiffening, muscles refusing to respond and turning her wild rush into a slow shuffle. No no they didn’t hit me they didn’t get me why can’t I move gotta get out!
“Pony can’t flee,” came another lilting voice, “pony can’t fight, pony can’t make it out to the light.”
Almost sobbing with terror, Fencer tried to force her legs to move, to carry her further away from the monsters chasing her. She could feel them working, but it was like they’d fallen asleep, barely able to move. Even so, she kept lurching forward, turning in random directions in a vague hope that she’d be able to get away-
There was a door ahead of her.
Plainly visible despite the darkness, Fencer ran for it, throwing herself through it…and emerging into a long hallway, completely shrouded in darkness. The only visible feature was a distant staircase, leading up toward an open doorway, the distance making it into an upright rectangle of solid white. Without hesitating, Fencer plunged forward, knowing that it was her only chance.
But she had barely taken a step when the darkness on either side of the long corridor began to roil, seething with the shadowy figures of ponies. Their voices were raised in a cacophony of horrible rhymes, reaching out for her with hooves and teeth. In an instant, Fencer knew that they’d never let her make it to the door.
Screaming in frustration as much as fear, Fencer didn’t question where she found the knife. “GET AWAY FROM ME!” she bellowed as she swung it, her telekinetic aura doing nothing to brighten the hallway as she slashed at the dark horde. Amazingly, the wild attack seemed to drive them back, the path in front of her somehow staying open as the twisted shapes of her enemies went flying.
It’s the gems, she realized disjointedly, spotting the sparkling jewels orbiting her head. They’re giving me strength! I can make it! With a renewed surge of desperate hope, she flung herself forward, breath heavy as she lashed out wildly, sending group after group of attackers flying. She knew they were hitting her – they had to be, despite her not feeling anything – but somehow she wasn’t slowing down, her body moving quickly now as she tried to cross the endless distance. Just a little more…just a little more…
Suddenly she was there.
Bounding up the staircase, Fencer flung her knife at the last of her attackers, sending them careening through the air as she plunged through the doorway, emerging into the plaza at the center of Vanhoover. Despite the night sky hanging overhead, the full moon lit up the square brightly, letting her see clearly as she stumbled forward, panting for breath and not even noticing that the floating gemstones were gone now. I did it! I made it!
“What have you done?!” roared a familiar voice from behind her. “How dare you!”
Turning, she saw Lex a few feet from her, glaring at her in righteous rage. His floating scythe was by his side, its tip pointed at her menacingly. The sight made her shrink back, shaking her head. “What are you doing? I saved everyone!” she waved a hoof at the crowd of ponies that was behind him now, all of them looking at her with pity. “I saved them all!”
“Liar!” boomed Lex. “You killed him!” One hoof raised to point behind her. “Look at what you’ve done!”
Feeling her stomach twisting as a horrible suspicion came over her, Fencer slowly turned to look at the last of her enemies she’d dispatched on her way into the plaza. But there was only one there now…a crystal stallion, his legs slashed as he lay on his side, unmoving. Woodenly, she marched over to her victim, not wanting to see what she’d done to him but unable to stop herself.
Pillowcase’s eyes were still open, and they turned to look at her as she moved to stand over him. “F-forgive you…” he rasped. “I…forgive you…”
The words brought Fencer no comfort. If anything, they condemned her, and she stumbled back. “No…please…I just wanted to live…”
“Pillow…” called Cozy mournfully, moving to kneel down by her fallen husband’s side, looking up at Fencer with tears in her eyes. “How could you?” she asked sadly. “How could you do this?”
“I’m so sorry!” sobbed Fencer. “I was wrong! What we do, the way we treat other ponies, it always matters!”
She didn’t have a chance to say anything else as Lex strode forward, raising his scythe in his purple aura. “You will be MADE TO PAY!” he howled, swinging the scythe straight at her face.
The blow flung her across the plaza, landing in a heap by the fountain at the center of it. She barely had a chance to pick herself up when she heard another familiar voice. “You forgot the most important part,” intoned her father sadly, standing across the fountain from her. Despite the distance being less than a stone’s throw, it somehow felt like she was a million miles away from him. “You forgot the gate.”
The sight of him made her struggle to rise. “Dad!” she called, managing to get her legs under her. “Dad, don’t go!”
But she’d barely started to move when she heard screaming, looking around to see her friends backing away from her, terrified looks on their faces. “Run!” shrieked Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“She’ll kill us all!” wailed Hopscotch.
“Save yourselves!” hollered Turbo, desperately waving at them to run away. “It’s too late for me! Save yourselves!”
“Wh-what are you doing?” moaned Fencer, trying to get her hooves under her. “It’s me. It’s G-, Gard-” The words wouldn’t come, the name getting stuck in her throat and causing her to choke. With a sickening feeling, she tried to speak again. “Fencer,” she whimpered. “I’m still Fencer.” Hanging her head at the admission, she caught sight of her reflection in the water of the fountain…and recoiled.
Her mane hung about her in tatters, clumps of it having fallen off of her. Her coat was filthy, with large parts of it having sloughed off entirely, leaving bare patches of skin, muscles, or even bones. Her legs were nearly skeletal, the flesh dried and clinging to them like old rags. Worst, however, was her face: her eyes were sunken and yellow, her teeth filthy and pointed, and her horn was broken near the base.
She had become a ghoul.
“This…this isn’t me,” she wept. “This isn’t who I am anymore!” But she could already feel them circling around her, all the ponies she’d wronged. Pillowcase. Cozy. Turbo. Lex. They and so many others were all there, waiting to show her how she had become as monstrous and evil as the creatures she hated. “This isn’t why I wanted to come back!”
“ENOUGH!”
The female voice that rang out wasn’t one that Fencer was familiar with, but it resonated with power. In an instant, everyone around her was gone, blown away like mist in a hurricane by the force of that one word. Blinking, Fencer belatedly realized that her appearance had changed back to normal, but she was given no time to contemplate that as the moon overhead rippled like a reflection on the water. An instant later, a pony emerged from it.
Although they’d never met, Fencer immediately recognized the alicorn that slowly landed in front of her, wings folding at her sides as she touched down. How could she not? Her return had been among the most important events to happen in the last several years, with every newspaper carrying her picture at the time and on many occasions since. More importantly, her presence here explained everything, including where “here” was.
A dream, realized Fencer, suddenly feeling more lucid than she had a moment ago. This was all a dream. No, it was all a nightmare! By itself that wasn’t too unusual; she’d had many nightmares since Vanhoover had fallen, and she knew that her friends had as well. She’d had particularly bad ones every time she’d slept during the brief period when Lex had cursed her. But this had never happened before.
“Forgive me for being so late,” said Princess Luna. “The dream realm is vast, and recent events have left many of my subjects in desperate need of my attention.”
“You’re really here,” murmured Fencer, still unable to quite believe it.
“Indeed,” answered the princess solemnly. “But while I cannot tarry long, I wish to speak with you regarding these events that haunt you…”
As the fear from her nightmare slowly wore off, it took Fencer a moment to remember that Princess Luna’s sudden appearance might not be a good thing.
Before tonight, she’d never so much as seen any of the alicorn princesses in person, knowing them only from what was in the newspaper or whatever snippets she’d heard from other ponies. But everything she knew about them agreed that they were all very close; Celestia and Luna were sisters after all, and she was fairly sure that Cadance and Twilight were like family to them as well. Which meant that if Cadance had somehow gotten word to Luna about a certain group of five ponies that were on the run…
“From what I saw of your dream, you’re a survivor of the catastrophe that befell Vanhoover, are you not?” asked Luna.
“I…am, yes.” Fencer couldn’t help but stumble as she answered the question. Trying to parse what it indicated about what Luna knew and formulate her answer appropriately, all without giving anything away in the process, was more than she was capable of at the moment. The emotional weight of the nightmare she’d just gone through – on top of all the stress she’d experienced that evening – was simply too much.
Fortunately, Luna didn’t seem to notice the catch in her voice, shaking her head slowly. “I cannot imagine the horrors you must have experienced. The glimpse I saw just now, of your fear of turning into one of the monsters who hunted you, was more grotesque a fate than any I’ve ever witnessed. To think that so many ponies were forced to endure such a thing…” Fencer wasn’t sure what to say to that, but didn’t have a chance as the Princess stepped closer to her. “Your name is Fencer?”
The question made Fencer freeze up for a moment, unable to remember if she had said her name out loud in her dream. If she hadn’t, then that would mean that Luna had just given away that Cadance had told her who she was. But if she had, then acting suspiciously would only serve to alert Luna that something was amiss. Or was there a third option? Maybe Luna had some sort of magic that let her read minds? Wasn’t entering someone’s dream sort of the same thing anyway? Or was it completely different? Despite being a unicorn, Fencer hadn’t learned any magic besides basic things such as telekinesis or conjuring a light. Maybe the smarter thing to do was to change the subject instead. She could-
Suddenly, it was all too much. Despite knowing that she was doing this for the sake of her friends, Fencer couldn’t bring herself to go any further with her suspicion and mistrust. Not when she’d just had it rubbed in her face how unbearable a life based around those vices truly was. “…it is now,” she said simply, not able to bring herself to look Princess Luna in the eyes.
“I see,” replied Luna, her tone suggesting that she didn’t. But rather than asking for an explanation, the princess sighed. “Then, Fencer, please allow me to apologize for all of the pain and hardship that you went through.”
“What?” Taken by surprise, Fencer raised her gaze, seeing that Luna had placed a hoof over her heart and was giving her a look of regret. “I mean, why? You weren’t even there.”
Luna winced, as though stung by the words. “Which is precisely why I must ask for your forgiveness. My sister and I were deceived into believing that Vanhoover’s situation was far less dire than it actually was. Because of that, we took no action while our subjects suffered and died without our knowledge. I know that is a poor excuse for all that you were made to endure, but I wanted you to know why we weren’t there for you when you needed us.”
But Fencer was less concerned with the princess’s apology than with the revelation that she’d just offered. “Wait, deceived? By who?”
“A creature most foul, from what I’ve been told,” grimaced Luna. “But you needn’t worry. I’ve been assured that it has been punished, and will never trouble Equestria again. Right now, my greater concern is you.” She gestured toward Fencer. “Do you still fear becoming a monster like those you faced?”
The question brought Fencer up short. For just a moment she said nothing, then slowly nodded. “Yes, I do.”
She knew that she should have stopped there, that she should have just let Luna think she was worried about becoming a ghoul and let that be the end of it. But she didn’t even try to stop herself as her real feelings spilled from her lips. “…because I already was one.”
Luna cocked her head. “I don’t understand.”
Fencer turned away from the princess. Though the two of them were alone now, the scenery hadn’t changed, and she walked over to the fountain at the center of the town square. Her reflection in the water was back to normal now, but that brought her only a little comfort, and on an impulse she lashed out with a hoof, striking the water and letting the ripples free her from having to look at herself. “When Vanhoover fell, I became a monster. Not like those undead ponies, I mean. I was still me but I wasn’t me. I changed. I stole from people and hurt them and didn’t care at all, telling myself that the only thing that mattered was improving my chances of survival, even if that meant hurting somepony else’s.” Unable and unwilling to stop at that, she turned around to look at Princess Luna directly. “One of the ponies I hurt didn’t survive: a crystal stallion named Pillowcase.”
Luna’s eyes widened. “You’re one of the ponies Cadance wrote to us about!”
Somehow that didn’t surprise Fencer at all, and she laughed humorlessly. “She was worried about what my friends and I would do, huh?”
Luna didn’t speak, giving Fencer a penetrating look. Finally, after long seconds had passed, she let out a slow breath. “It is appropriate that of all the ponies that need me to safeguard their dreams this night, I should venture into yours.” Again she stepped closer to Fencer, who tensed as the princess drew near and raised a hoof. But when the limb reached out a moment later, it was to touch her chest in a gentle gesture.
“I, too, know what it is like to become a monster,” confessed Luna. “To be, as you said, me but not me, and do horrible things to the ones I care most deeply for. Like you, I carry those regrets with me, along with the fear that I might someday fall victim to the same mistakes again.”
For a second Fencer didn’t know what she meant, only for the obvious answer to come to her a moment later. “Nightmare Moon. I almost forgot.”
“There are some days when I wish I could forget, but to do so would not only be a grave injustice to those I wronged, but would make it possible for me to become her again. That’s why I’ve taken measures to ensure that I will always remember what I’ve done, and what the consequences were.”
Finally realizing that she was talking to the one pony in all of Equestria who could truly understand how she felt, Fencer felt her lip quiver. “How do you deal with it? Knowing that you did something terrible that you can never take back? Pillowcase and Cozy both forgave me, but it’s like…it’s like I don’t want to believe them! What kind of sense does that make?!”
“It makes perfect sense,” smiled Luna wanly. “They forgave you so that they could let go of what happened, and move on with their lives unburdened by what they went through. But as the ones who fell to darkness, you and I must always carry the burdens I mentioned – of responsibility and remembrance – so that we never make those mistakes again, even when we’re forgiven for them. That’s why you feel confused in your heart: because you want to move on as they have, but know that you cannot, at least not completely.”
Fencer looked down. “…so it never stops feeling like this?”
This time Luna’s smile was more compassionate. “It grows easier to bear with time, as you remember that while the blemishes on your spirit will always be a part of you, they need not define you. And it helps to have people in your life who care deeply for you to remind you of that.” Placing a hoof under her chin, Luna slowly raised Fencer’s face. “You mentioned that you have friends. Never forget that they are your strength, because they see the very best parts of you. My sister’s friendship was what brought me back from being Nightmare Moon; would I be wrong to assume that it was your friends that brought you back from your dark side?”
Pursing her lips, Fencer nodded her head. “Yes, actually.”
Luna blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“My friends didn’t remind me of my better self.” Fencer’s voice was equal parts bitterness and resignation. “The opposite happened: I dragged them down with me, making them as selfish and awful as I was.”
Luna frowned, confusion written all over her face. “But your dream and everything you’ve said now demonstrate that you regret what happened to you. If it wasn’t your friends who saved you, then who did?”
A wry look crossed Fencer’s face then. “Believe it or not, it was a pony we tried to rob, named Lex.”
Luna’s jaw dropped. “Lex?! Lex Legis?!”
Fencer’s eyebrows rose at the princess’s reaction. “You know Lex?”
“Indeed!” Luna’s wings flared. “I saw him in your dream, but I didn’t think…you say he was a source of inspiration for you?” Her voice dripped with incredulity, making it clear how difficult she found it to believe that.
In another circumstance Fencer might have laughed at how shocked the princess looked, but now she simply nodded. “I know it sounds crazy, since he’s so harsh and unfriendly all the time-”
“To put it mildly,” interjected Luna, slowly folding her wings.
“-but that was what I needed. The way I was, a speech or a party or anything normal wouldn’t have reached me, and he didn’t try any of that. Instead, he forced me into a situation where I had to acknowledge all the evil I’d done. It was like,” she rolled a hoof in the air, as though the words were just out of reach, “it was like he knew I needed to be snapped out of it. And it worked. I mean, being punished so harshly was awful, but it felt like I deserved to be cursed for everything that-”
“Wait, cursed?!” Luna’s wings snapped back out again. “Lex cursed you for what you’d done?!”
“Three times over,” nodded Fencer. “He said it was justice for what I’d done.”
“I knew it!” Luna stomped a hoof, giving an angry snort. “I knew he’d been using his dark magic on the ponies under his care!”
“But he was right to do so!” protested Fencer. “That’s what brought me back! And when he lifted the curses later, and said that he was sure I was reformed, it felt-”
“I understand,” interrupted Luna, “but I need to inform my sister of what you’ve told me.” Without waiting for a reply, she flapped her wings, rising effortlessly toward the full moon still hanging in the sky. “I wish you well, Fencer. Remember that your burden is one you must bear, but you need not bear it alone so long as you have friends by your side.”
“Wait!” Feeling certain that she’d just done something she shouldn’t have, Fencer reared up on her hind legs, fore-hooves stretched out after Luna in a futile gesture. “Princess Luna!”
But a moment later Luna flew into the moon, vanishing into the glowing orb as though it were a cloud, and was gone.
Navigating the dream realm with all haste, Luna headed for her sister’s dream. Now that they had evidence that Lex was using his dark magic to curse the ponies he was supposed to be taking care of, Celestia would have to admit that something needed to be done. Using his powers to cause misery and suffering in others, even if he cloaked it in righteousness by claiming that he only used it on ponies that had performed misdeeds, wasn’t something that could be allowed to continue. On that, Luna felt certain that her sister would agree.
Spying the doorway to Celestia’s dream, Luna dived into it-
-and immediately came to a halt, eyes widening.
Unlike herself, Celestia’s magic had no affinity for dreams. For all her power, her sister was just like anypony else when it came to the dream realm, but there was one important exception to that. Celestia had a single talent when it came to dreams, though “talent” might have been the wrong word, since she had no ability to consciously invoke or control it.
Perhaps that was for the best, however; the power to see into the future was not something that should be used lightly.
It was exceedingly rare for her sister to have a prophetic vision in her dreams, but Luna had been present when Celestia had experienced them before. Such visions felt nothing like normal dreams, being completely outside of her ability to alter or manipulate. Moreover, they always came true. Which was why Luna felt herself turn pale as she looked at the scene before her.
It was daytime in the camp outside of Vanhoover, the sun shining down upon Silhouette’s unmoving form, completely still despite the ponies panicking and running in all directions nearby. Lying in a pool of his own blood, a dark scythe sheathed in a purple aura hovered over him, red liquid still dripping from its blade. A few feet away, Luna could see herself – the Luna that was part of Celestia’s vision – lying on the ground, sprawled out in a manner that suggested that she had just been pushed out of the way by Silhouette.
As she watched, the scythe reared back for another strike, the aura around it churning furiously. A few dozen feet away, a matching aura surrounded Lex Legis’s horn. Shining almost as brightly was the green glow of his eyes, purple contrails sprouting from their outer corners.
“I’LL DESTROY YOU!” screamed Lex, his features twisted into an expression of apocalyptic fury. Around him, black crystals erupted from the ground with explosive force, stabbing upward viciously. “I WILL WIPE YOU OFF THE FACE OF EQUESTRIA!”
Dimly, Luna realized that she didn’t need to worry about convincing her sister that Lex was a threat to them. This was far worse than his simply using dark magic on the ponies of Vanhoover. It was what she’d feared the most.
“That should do it,” sighed River, putting her pencil down.
Despite her words, she made no move to get up from the comfortable chair that the servants had brought outside for her. Instead, she stayed hunched over the matching table, double-checking the updates she’d made to the ledger that kept track of the total worth of the Banks family. While she’d been able to account for what she’d spent in Las Pegasus, and the money that Lex had already appropriated from one of her family’s financial institutions, the full impact of the flooding and subsequent disasters had been much more difficult to estimate, forcing her to work in outlines rather than hard figures. Even then, she’d had to resort to considerable guesswork. “What a headache,” she muttered scornfully.
From behind her, Trotsworth took a single step forward. “Shall I fetch you more coffee, madam? Or perhaps another serving of eggs?”
The question made River glance at the empty mug and plate nearby, both casting long shadows from the lanterns set on the table. As much as she wanted another sip of the steaming Saddle Arabian blend she’d been nursing, she shook her head. “No, it’s almost dawn, and I can’t take a chance that Lex was being literal when he said he wanted to see an accounting of my assets first thing.” A brief look west confirmed the time, with the moon already more than halfway below the horizon.
The sight reminded River how the pony that moved it, as well as the one that manipulated its solar counterpart, were staying in her manor even now. Not so long ago that would have been a huge victory for her, flaunting to the Hoofingfords and McNeighs how the princesses were guests in her home rather than either of theirs. Now, however, it was just another complication she had to factor into the upheaval that her life had become. “Which is why I need to make sure this ledger is as accurate as possible,” she murmured as she turned back to the folio in front of her, eyeing it critically.
“Very good,” answered Trotsworth. Normally, that would have been all he said, but a moment later he gave a slight cough, the sort that was used to break the ice rather than clear the throat. “Madam, before you head out, there’s something I wanted to bring to your attention.”
That was unusual enough that it warranted River turning to look at him, one eyebrow rising. “Did something happen with the princesses?”
Trotsworth’s face showed only the barest hint of consternation as he shook his head. “Not at all. Rather, we’ve received a rather unusual request from Master Piggy.”
Snorting, River turned back to her ledger. “Tell him that whatever exotic dish he wants prepared is going to have to wait. This isn’t the time for his extravagances.”
“His request wasn’t for food, madam. It was about a girl.”
This time River’s head whipped around so fast she nearly fell out of her chair. “What?!”
Expression unchanging, Trotsworth elaborated. “Yesterday evening, prior to the arrival of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, Master Piggy said that he’s expecting a Miss Granola Bar to arrive in the next few days, and that we should promptly inform him when she does.”
It took River a minute to process that. While it wasn’t unusual for her son to show interest in mares, she’d never known him to fixate on any particular one. Rather, he’d usually make a crude pass at whatever reasonably-attractive girl was closest – thankfully, his unflattering physique and boorish attitude meant that he failed almost all of the time, making it easy to identify the gold-diggers who pretended to like his attention and chase them off – and forget about them by the time he had his next meal. For him to start asking about a specific girl by name was something else altogether, and River didn’t like the implications. “And who exactly is this ‘Miss Granola Bar’ to my son?”
Anypony else would have withered at the tone in her voice, but Trotsworth remained steadfast as he answered. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure. Master Piggy didn’t elect to clarify the nature of their relationship, and it wasn’t my place to ask.” He paused for a moment before adding. “In the name of discretion, I thought it best to check with you before passing his instructions along to the rest of the staff.”
“I’m glad you did.” Despite her words, River couldn’t bring herself to sound pleased. If “Miss Granola Bar” was looking to sleep her way into the family the same way that River herself had, then that needed to be quashed immediately. But if she’d already let Piggy have his way with her – and it was hard to imagine that her idiot son would be asking about her for any other reason – then she might already be carrying a baby in her belly…
“I can’t deal with this right now,” decided River abruptly, climbing out of her chair. Slamming the ledger closed with more force than necessary, she didn’t bother looking at Trotsworth as she spoke. “If this ‘Granola Bar’ turns up, I don’t want Piggy told. Have her brought to me instead. And not a word of this to anypony else, is that clear? I don’t want the rest of the servants to know about this.” Trotsworth could keep his mouth shut, she knew, but the rest of the staff were inveterate gossips; that was how she’d gained most of her information since she’d come back, after all.
Trotsworth was already nodding. “Of course, madam. But if Master Piggy should repeat his request to another member of the staff, there won’t-”
“Just do the best you can, Trotsworth!” snapped River, before catching herself. Letting out a slow breath, she forced herself to calm down. “Just do the best you can,” she said again, keeping her voice level.
“As you wish.” As unflappable as ever, Trotsworth moved on to the next topic. “Are there any particular arrangements you’d like us to make with regards to the princesses?”
Pursing her lips, River spent only a few seconds considering the question. “Tell them I’m sorry I missed them this morning, and that they’re welcome to stay as long as they like.” The words were begrudging. As long as they were here she needed to continue to deny herself the hard-earned fruits of her labors, having told the alicorns that she was voluntarily foregoing them in sympathy for what had happened to Vanhoover in order to cover up how Lex had cursed her. Now that the curse was removed, she had no choice but to keep up appearances…by not tending to her appearance. At least I don’t have that hideous bloodstain on my face anymore, she thought as she started walking towards the camp. I don’t care if the princesses ask about that. I’ll just say I changed my mind. She knew it was a petty bit of pointless retaliation at the alicorns for imposing on her when she was already trying to navigate a precarious situation, but it made her feel better nonetheless.
Only a little, though. The pleasant sense of accomplishment that she’d felt last night, when she’d celebrated having manipulated Lex into forgiving her and removing the curse he’d laid on her, had already faded away in the face of the next set of challenges. While that couldn’t be helped, it still left her feeling frustrated and mildly resentful. But she knew she needed to bury that before she dealt with Lex. A single misstep could be catastrophic where he was concerned, and River had no intention of losing the ground she’d gained with him.
Hopefully, that pegasus mare I gave him helped with that. The thought made her smirk, her mood lightening as she imagined Lex putting the little nag through her paces all night. Maybe I can find some way to pawn this Granola Bar mare off onto him, too, she mused. It wasn’t likely, of course, but a girl could dream.
River was still chuckling to herself as she neared the camp, making a beeline for the train station. There was no guarantee that Lex was awake yet, and if he wasn’t River had no intention of waking him up, but she had little doubt that he’d want to start reviewing the Banks’ finances sooner rather than later. Being helpful now would lay the groundwork for-
The sound of screaming made River immediately freeze.
For a moment she couldn’t move, paralyzed with fright as she heard a mare’s voice cry out in terror. The scream tapered off a moment later, and River managed to turn her head toward one of the nearby campfires where the sound had come from, the flickering embers just barely managing to illuminate a pegasus pony scrambling to her hooves. “CLEANSWEEP!” screamed the figure. “NOOO!”
A sickening feeling spread through River’s gut as she realized that she recognized that voice. Biting her lip, she changed course and charged toward the hysterical mare, recognizing her as Feather Duster, the maid she’d given Lex just a few hours ago. What’s she doing out here?! cursed River silently, ignoring the nearby ponies who’d been awoken by the commotion and were also making their way over to see what it was about. If she skipped out on satisfying Lex, I swear I’ll make her regret it for the rest of her-
But she wasn’t able to finish the thought as she got within a few steps of Feather Duster, seeing what had caused her to scream. A short distance away was a bright yellow pegasus filly that River remembered seeing last night when she’d drafted her mother into Lex’s service. In contrast to her hysterical mother, the little filly was sitting there silently, wide awake and unmoving.
Coiled around her middle was a giant snake.
Feather Duster could feel her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest. “Cleansweep!” she shrieked, “don’t move, baby! Mommy will save you!” The words came out despite her having no idea what to do. But she had to do something before that horrible serpent killed her daughter!
The thing was huge. It had to be at least six feet long, and it was currently coiled around Cleansweep’s middle, just behind her wings, with its head extended forward almost to the filly’s ear. Alternating bands of red and yellow covered its body, and while Feather Duster wasn’t sure, she had a sickening feeling that the markings meant it was poisonous. Or was it not poisonous and it was just the type that squeezed its prey to death? Either way, her daughter was in danger! “Just…just hold very still, honey! You can do that, okay? Just hold still and I promise everything will be alright!” She didn’t know it that would be true, but right now keeping Cleansweep calm and not accidentally provoking the thing was top priority. “I bet there’s somepony here with a cutie mark related to snakes, or maybe it’ll spot a mouse and go chase it, or maybe it’ll fall asleep after a little while and you can-”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
Her daughter’s voice was completely calm, and it was enough to make Feather Duster pause. “Wh-what?”
Cleansweep smiled at her then, her expression completely unafraid. “Venin won’t hurt me. She’s a part of me, aren’t you girl?” Then, not hesitating in the slightest, she reached a hoof up and rubbed the snake just behind its head. Amazingly, that didn’t seem to upset the creature, having no reaction save for its tongue darting out and retracting in the blink of an eye, tasting the air.
Feather Duster almost fainted on the spot. “Sweetheart, be careful! That thing’s not a pet!”
Cleansweep just giggled, still petting the snake affectionately. “You’re right about that, Mom. She’s not a pet. She’s my spirit animal.”
Straightlace, awaken. Our convocation is beginning to gather.
Groaning at the voice intruding on his sleep, Straightlace rolled onto his side, curling up and covering his face with one wing. “G’way,” he muttered blearily. “Still dark out…” He could vaguely hear some noise in the background, but paying more attention to it would have meant waking up more, and he was so tired. After how late he’d stayed up trying to change his dad’s mind about what he’d done with those guards, getting up before sunrise was just too much.
Straightlace-
“Jus’ gimme five more minutes,” he muttered, moving his wings so they covered his ears.
Are you content for us to be the last to arrive, then? This time the voice had an exasperated edge to it. The others will soon converge, and tardiness will impinge on our presence when we greet them.
“Ugh.” Straightlace groaned again as he began to stir. For some reason covering his ears wasn’t working on that voice. The background noise yes, but the words were still coming through loud and clear. It was enough to make him wish he had a pillow to pull over his head so he wouldn’t have to listen to…to…
Cracking his eyes open as he realized he couldn’t identify who was speaking, Straightlace stumbled to his hooves. For some reason that voice felt incredibly familiar, like he should know who it was, but at the same time he felt certain he’d never heard it before. The sensation was weird, and it was that bit of cognitive dissonance that made him rub the sleep from his eyes as he stood up, looking around-
Directly into the eyes of the bald eagle standing a few feet away from him.
The bird gave a soft screech as it saw him stand up, flapping its wings in what he somehow knew was a pleased gesture. Good, now let us make haste. The others will need us there to inspire them for when we present ourselves to the First Convoker, and-
“Wait, wait, hang on!” Rubbing his eyes again, Straightlace gawked at the three foot-tall bird that was almost as big as him. “What’s going on? Who needs us and why? For that matter, who’s the ‘First Convoker’? And you, come to think of it.” Even as the questions came spilling from his mouth, the sense of familiarity grew stronger, as though he knew he should know all of this already. The sensation was maddening, like having an itch he couldn’t scratch.
The eagle in front of him gave another soft screech, and somehow Straightlace could hear the bemusement in the sound. Do you not know me? Are you perhaps not the one whose soul I share? How curious, since our hearts are able to hear each other like this. But no matter, I must make my way to my partner’s side at once then! With no further warning, the eagle spread its wings, and a moment later it was skyward, speeding away into the night.
“W-wait!” Not knowing what was happening, Straightlace felt his heart lurch as the bird left. Immediately, he started flapping his wings, but he could already tell that he wouldn’t be able to catch up. “Come back! Altaer, come back! I-, wait, what did I just say?”
My name. Circling easily, the eagle sailed back around toward Straightlace. I knew that you knew it, for we are one.
“Y-yeah…” Slowly sinking back to the ground, Straightlace found that surprisingly easy to accept. “You’re-, the Night Mare sent you to me, right? In that dream I had.” Just remembering it sent shudders down his spine, recalling how overwhelmed he’d felt at the barest glimpse of his goddess. But at the same time, there was a growing sense of excitement. He’d really been there! He and his friends all had! The Night Mare had actually called them forth and given them a reward!
Indeed, confirmed Altaer, landing next to Straightlace. The Supreme Predator is our benefactor, drawing forth and incarnating your noblest self in the form of me. So long as you live, I shall always be by your side, guiding and strengthening you with the power she has lent us. Shuffling closer on its talons, Altaer fixed Straightlace with a serious look. We now stand at the beginning of our journey together.
Despite the portentous words, Straightlace could feel himself grinning. “Oh wow! Oh wow, this is so cool! I’ve gotta tell my friends!”
Altaer bobbed his head in an approximation of a nod. Indeed. As I said, we should move to where the others will be. It extended one wing, looking in that direction, and Straightlace followed its gaze. Blinking as he realized that the noise he’d heard before was the murmuring of ponies, he could just barely make out some sort of commotion going on in the distance, the gathering ponies illuminated by dim campfires. He couldn’t tell precisely what was going on, but there were enough ponies talking that he could just make out snatches of conversation, the word “snake” being mentioned several times. Our convocation is gathering, and they will need us to encourage them.
“Convocation,” repeated Straightlace slowly. “That’s…that’s the word for a group of eagles, right? So you mean the rest of the Knights? Fruit Crunch, Fiddlesticks, Cleansweep, and Feathercap?”
Altaer bobbed his head again. Our convocation.
Nodding, Straightlace took to the air again, slowly putting things together as he flew toward where everypony was converging. “So if they’re all our ‘convocation,’ and the Night Mare is ‘the Supreme Predator,’ then that ‘First Convoker’ you mentioned…is that Lex?”
He is the one beyond us, who stands within the Supreme Predator’s shadow without fear, answered Altaer from where he flew leisurely alongside Straightlace. We will all need to endeavor mightily if our power is ever to approach his.
“Wait, so does that mean we really do have magic powers now?!” Straightlace couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, a talking eagle is awesome, but if there’s more…!”
But of course, replied Altaer, as though that were obvious. Your strength is found in your integrity, and so-
“Straightlace!”
“Huh?!” Stunned by his father’s voice ringing out of nowhere, Straightlace came to an immediate halt in mid-air, Altaer surging ahead of him. Looking down, Straightlace tried to trace where the voice had come from, and a moment later he spotted its owner rising up from the crowd of ponies gathered below. “Dad? What’re you doing here?”
“I heard screams, and I came to see what was wrong,” answered Straight Arrow. “You slept through them, and I didn’t want to wake you in case it was something dangerous.”
In another context, the words would have sounded protective, but Straightlace knew better. During the “discussion” he’d had last night with his dad – they never called it “arguing,” since his dad always said that arguments were about winning, and he “wasn’t available” for that – the older stallion had reiterated how violence, no matter what it was used for, was always wrong. “Every time Princess Twilight and her friends have saved Equestria, it was with harmony, not violence,” he’d said with that sad look he always had when Straightlace had disappointed him somehow. “If you don’t understand that, then how am I supposed to respect your judgment about anything else?”
That’s why he didn’t wake me up, Straightlace knew. He thought that if something dangerous was happening, I’d do something to make it worse. The thought tore him up inside, almost as much as seeing the wary look his father was giving him now. “Dad, I-”
Remain firm, Straightlace! Altaer’s mental cry made Straightlace start a little, having momentarily forgotten that the bird was there. Behind his dad, he could see it winging around, circling back toward him in what looked like a casual motion. You cannot be of assistance to others if your heart falters!
Licking his lips, Straightlace managed to change what he was going to say at the last moment. “I must have woken up just after you left.” He peered past him, wanting to change the subject. He was still too far away to get a clear view of what was going on due to the dim light, but given that Altaer had pointed in this direction when talking about their “convocation,” he could guess. “Is everypony alright?”
Straight Arrow glanced back as well, before returning his gaze to his son. “A big snake has wrapped itself around one of your friends, that Cleansweep girl. She’s remaining remarkably calm so far, but no one’s quite sure what to do.” Straightlace didn’t miss how his dad subtly moved to position himself between himself and the crowd below. “You should go back. The grown-ups will take care of things here.”
But Straightlace shook his head. “No, Dad, you don’t understand. That snake isn’t a threat to Cleansweep. It’s her spirit animal.”
Straight Arrow frowned. “She was saying that before. Is that some sort of game you all have been playing, raising pets in secret and calling them that?”
“They’re not pets, Dad.” Turning so that he was upright, Straightlace held out a foreleg parallel to the ground. A moment later Altaer landed on it, and Straightlace could tell the bird was trying not to dig into his arm too deeply with its talons. “See? This is Altaer. The Night Mare sent him to me, just like she sent that snake to Cleansweep.”
But rather than seeming reassured, Straight Arrow’s eyes widened in alarm. “Son, be careful! You don’t have a cutie mark related to taming wild animals! That thing is dangerous!”
Straightlace grit his teeth. “No, he isn’t! I just told you!” The words came out harshly, and he could feel his chest tightening. “Why don’t you ever listen to me?!”
Altaer extended a wing, letting the downy feathers brush against the back of Straightlace’s head. Peace. Losing yourself to anger is no better than losing yourself to doubt.
Choking down his frustration, Straightlace nodded. “I know. I know.” Letting out a slow breath, he gave his dad a firm look. “We can talk about this later. Right now I need to meet up with the rest of my friends.”
He started to fly past his dad, only for the older stallion to move in front of him again. “Son, you can’t go down there. Even if you have tamed that thing somehow, eagles and snakes are enemies. ‘Spirit animal’ or whatever, just the sight of it will agitate the snake and put Cleansweep in danger.” Another pitying look crossed his face then. “We will talk about this later, I promise, but right now I need you and your bird to turn around and let the rest of us deal with things here. Don’t make another mistake the way you did with those guards.”
The rebuke made Straightlace cringe, and he felt his eyes water. “Dad…”
Another soft touch of feathers came, this time wiping his eyes. The Supreme Predator believes in you, came the soothing voice of Altaer. She recognizes your nobility, as do I, even if your sire does not.
Sniffling, Straightlace made himself keep his composure. “No, Dad.”
Straight Arrow’s brows furrowed, not in anger or consternation but in resignation. “Son-”
“You’re wrong.” Getting those two words out made him feel like he was throwing up, but Straightlace kept going. “You were wrong about what happened with the Royal Guard before, and you’re wrong now.”
Straight Arrow sighed, shaking his head sadly. “I see…”
“No, Dad, I don’t think you do.” Despite how he’d felt just seconds ago, Straightlace suddenly couldn’t keep himself from talking. “I’ve spent my entire life trying to be just like you, because I look up to you more than anypony else. But you know what? I don’t want to do that anymore. If being just like you means not standing up to ponies doing bad things, or staying away from my friends because you’re afraid of what’ll happen even though I’m not, then I’d rather not be like you after all. Instead…” He glanced at Altaer, a smile crossing his face. “Instead, I’m going to try and be more like me.” Then, without giving his dad time to respond, Straightlace flew past him, heading for where Cleansweep was.
Very well said. The words were accompanied by a victory screech, causing nearby heads to turn. That is the steadfast nature that will keep your friends strong in even the bleakest of situations. You should be proud of yourself, Straightlace.
“Thanks. And thanks for before, too.” Shooting Altaer a quick smile, Straightlace turned back to where he could see Cleansweep coming into focus. Nearby, he could see a few other ponies converging on her also, recognizing his friends.
The sight made him grin. “Now c’mon! We’re getting the Night Mare’s Knights back together!”
“Cleansweep, honey, if you could just have your, er, ‘spirit animal’ move away from you, that would be best, alright?”
Sighing at the transparent anxiety in her mother’s voice, as well as the crowd that her hysterics had drawn, Cleansweep shook her head. “Mom, will you please calm down? There’s nothing to be afraid of. Tell her, Venin!” She gave the red-and-yellow serpent a hopeful look. Once her mom heard that Venin could talk – even if it was in that same weird “mind-to-mind” way Severance had – she’d realize that this wasn’t just an ordinary snake and maybe then she’d stop being so afr-
She can’t hear me, Cleansweep.
That hadn’t been the answer she’d expected. “Huh? How come?”
The Supreme Predator created me by drawing upon your own essence, explained Venin. Her power is a fundamental part of what I am, and it sustains our connection, allowing our hearts to communicate with each other. While our bond will resonate with those who likewise make use of her power, those who do not cannot perceive our discourse. The snake bobbed its head in what Cleansweep somehow knew was a sorrowful gesture. I’m sorry. I know that isn’t what you wanted to hear. I hope this doesn’t cause you distress.
Despite the discouraging news, Cleansweep couldn’t help but smile at Venin’s apology. The snake’s mental voice was soft-spoken and overflowing with gentleness, making it impossible for her to stay upset. “Aw, don’t worry about it,” she replied soothingly, reaching up to gently rub Venin’s scales. “We’ll just figure something else out.”
“Cleansweep!” A few feet away, Feather Duster was still having a nervous breakdown. “Sweetheart, please, get away from the snake!”
Stomping a hoof, Cleansweep flared her wings as she glared at her mother. “Mom, will you knock it off already?! You’re going to hurt her feelings!”
She was going to say more, but a sudden tickling inside her ear made her squeal with laughter, realizing a moment later that she was feeling Venin’s tongue darting over her skin. It only lasted for a few seconds, but when it ended Cleansweep was still giggling. You’re kind to worry about me, but I’m alright, Venin assured her. The rest of our nest will be here soon, but until they arrive, I don’t think yelling is the best way to calm your progenitor down, she noted softly.
Still snickering a little, Cleansweep nodded. “Alright. Point taken.” Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she took a moment to relax before looking at her mother again. “Mom, I need you to trust me, okay? Venin isn’t going to hurt me, or anypony else. She’s really nice.”
But she could already see that she wasn’t getting through to her. It was written all over her mother’s face, the way she was still wide-eyed and breathing quickly, her gaze darting back and forth between her and Venin. It was just like every time she’d gotten into trouble with Crunchy; even if it was just them getting a few bruises or scrapes her mother had always acted like she had narrowly escaped death, and it had always led to days of well-intentioned smothering that invariably drove her crazy. And she wonders why I keep hanging out with Crunchy all the time, she thought sourly, the calm that Venin had given her already crumbling. At least he knows how to have fun!
“Sweetheart, please! You have to let me protect you!” As if trying to physically make herself clear, Feather Duster held out a foreleg, almost sobbing now. “We already lost each other once when we were trying to get out of the city and now I can’t find your father anywhere; you’re all I have left! I can…” For some reason, her eyes darted toward the train station for a split-second. “I can bear whatever I have to, so long as you’re safe, but you can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep putting yourself in danger just for fun! One of these days your luck is going to run out and then…then you’ll…” She couldn’t finish, tears running down her cheeks as she collapsed, her strength leaving her as she put her hooves to her face and began to weep.
Taken aback by her mother’s outpouring, Cleansweep bit her lip, looking around self-consciously. Several ponies in the crowd noticed and looked away politely, while others appeared to decide that this was nothing more than a family drama, starting to leave and ushering others to do the same (save for a single mare who hung back, watching the proceedings through narrowed eyes). Murmurings of “poor mare” and “I know how she feels” floated out from the assembled ponies as the crowd began to break up, making Cleansweep wince.
This is my fault. Venin’s voice was thick with guilt, and Cleansweep felt the snake uncoil from around her middle, winding down one of her back legs until it reached the ground, slithering a few feet away from her. My presence here is causing her pain in her heart.
“No,” admitted Cleansweep, folding her ears back. “You didn’t do this. I did.” Pursing her lips, she thought back to what she and Venin had been discussing before her mother had woken up, about what role the Night Mare had recognized her for. “If I’m going to be a healer, then I need to start here, with my mom.” Her mind made up, Cleansweep gave Venin an apologetic look. “Do you mind hanging back for a minute?”
Of course not. Take as much time as you need. I’ll be right here.
“Thanks.” Knowing what she had to do, Cleansweep stepped forward slowly, until she was right in front of her mother. “Mom? Mom, I’m sorry.” Reached out, she gently touched a hoof to her mother’s head.
Looking up at the touch, Feather Duster’s eyes widened with relief, and she sprang up to pull her daughter into a bear hug. “My baby!” she cried. “Oh my precious, precious little girl! Are you alright? Did that thing bite you anywhere?” Lifting Cleansweep up bodily, she turned her over, inspecting her for puncture marks.
Frowning, Cleansweep flapped her wings hard, yanking herself out of her mother’s grasp before touching back down in front of her. “No, Mom. She didn’t. I told you, Venin won’t hurt me.”
Calmer now, Feather Duster wiped her eyes. “I know, sweetheart. But it’s still a wild animal. Just the thought-”
“Mom! Listen to me!” Cleansweep could feel her guilt evaporating. This was what always happened; her mother would go to pieces, she would try to calm her down, and doing so would require her to sit back and let her mother fret over her until it became unbearable. Not this time, Cleansweep vowed silently. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I never meant to worry you, and I hate seeing you so upset.” Stepping forward, she reached up and gently took her mother’s face in her hooves, forcing herself to smile. “But I need you to believe me when I tell you that I’m going to be okay.”
“Yes I do,” insisted Cleansweep, filling her voice with conviction. “Did I ever get seriously hurt when I was playing with Crunchy? I don’t mean cuts and bruises, but hurt badly enough that I needed a doctor?”
Lifting her head from her daughter’s grasp, Feather Duster couldn’t help but look uncertain for a moment. “Well, no, but you could h-”
“And even when the city flooded and everything went crazy, I’ve been fine.” Hovering in mid-air, she turned upright and indicated her unblemished torso with her hooves. “See?” Dropping back down, she beamed at her mother. “Not so much as a scratch.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t-”
“And now with Venin,” interrupted Cleansweep again. Glancing back at the snake, she tilted her head. Catching the signal, the red-and-yellow serpent slithered over to her, easily winding its way up her leg and around her torso, head leaning forward alongside her own. Feather Duster immediately recoiled, but Cleansweep didn’t let her get away, moving forward until she was barely an inch away from her mother. “See? She’s really friendly.”
“B-but-, but-”
“C’mon, just try patting her.” In demonstration, she rubbed Venin’s scales, giving her mother an encouraging look when nothing bad happened.
Hesitating, Feather Duster swallowed before slowly reaching forward, grimacing as her hoof barely brushed up against the serpent. But when several seconds passed and nothing happened, she slowly started to relax. “I…I guess she’s friendly…”
“There you go!” cheered Cleansweep, grinning toothily. “I knew you’d like her if you just gave her a chance!”
“I suppose I might have overreacted a little.”
After spending a minute patting her daughter’s pet snake, Feather Duster stepped back. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I know I worry over you more than I should, but sometimes I can’t help it. Your father was always-, has always loved trying new things, and you have that same spirit.” She winced internally at the slip, hoping her daughter hadn’t noticed. Unlike herself, Cleansweep was certain that her father, Tryout, had gotten out of the city and would be back very soon. “He got hurt plenty of times when he’d try some new stunt like typhoon waterskiing or blindfolded parkour or full-contact checkers.” The memories still made her blush a little. Tryout’s fearlessness, and his nonchalance about the injuries he sustained in pursuit of his next adrenaline rush, had always been what she’d found most attractive about him. But those same qualities in her daughter terrified her. “I just don’t want that to happen to you.”
The smile Cleansweep gave her then looked almost exactly like the one Tryout had always given her when she’d expressed worry, being warm, self-assured, and just a little bit cocky. “I know, but I’ll be okay. And I’m not just saying that either. Thanks to Venin, I have magic healing powers now.”
Feather Duster blinked. Tryout had never said that. “Magic healing powers?”
“Yup!” nodded Cleansweep, clearly thrilled by the prospect. “It’s not much now, but she says that I’ll get better at it with practice-”
“Then we should hurry up and get some, shouldn’t we?”
Cleansweep spun around at the familiar voice. “Crunchy!”
About twenty feet back from her, Fruit Crunch grinned, though whether it was because he was happy to see her or because of the large grey wolf perched right next to him was hard to tell. Nor was he alone. At his left stood Fiddlesticks, her baby brother asleep on her back and a large badger next to her. On his right was Feathercap, a large owl blinking at her from where it was perched on his back. And hovering in the air was Straightlace, an eagle sitting on one outstretched foreleg. “C’mon Dust Bunny! The new and improved Night Mare’s Knights are ready to go!”
“Woo hoo!” Punching a hoof in the air, Cleansweep gave her mother another broad smile. “That’s another reason you don’t have to worry about me, Mom. I’ve got really great friends!” Darting over, she planted a quick kiss on her mother’s cheek before turning and rushing toward the other foals. “You guys! Let me introduce you to Venin!”
Smiling a little as she watched her daughter run off to go play with her friends, Feather Duster couldn’t help but feel bittersweet about what had just happened. She’s growing up.
But her parental musing was cut short as she felt a hoof across her back. “If you’re quite finished with your sappy little display,” sneered a familiar voice, “you have work to do.”
Feather Duster tensed up in an instant. “M-Miss?!”
“You better have a good explanation for why you’re fooling around out here and not fawning over Lex,” frowned River Bank. Her eyes then traveled over her, her expression critical, before glancing at the horizon in consideration, eventually giving a perfunctory nod. “And you can give it while we go back to my manor and freshen you up. The way you look right now would send any stallion running for the hills. Honestly!”
Hanging her head, Feather Duster didn’t argue, remembering what she’d just said about being able to endure what she had to for the sake of her daughter. “Yes Miss…”
“So I’ll go first,” grinned Fruit Crunch as he led them in the direction of Severance. “This is Lyden,” he gestured to the wolf walking alongside him, “and he’s unbelievably awesome! He says that no one who doesn’t follow the Night Mare can overhear him when he talks, which he does with telepathy, and-”
You should tell them that my name means “pack leader,” noted Lyden. Also, we should make sure to learn everyone’s powers as quickly as possible so that we can begin coordination training. The sooner we do, the quicker we’ll be able to impress the High Alpha.
Cleansweep tilted her head. “Who?”
The Lord Sovereign, added Venin helpfully.
“They mean Lex,” volunteered Feathercap. “At least, I think they do. Ulespy calls him Grand Vizier, for some reason.”
Because he is the one who wields unparalleled temporal authority over this sphere of existence, as nominated by the Supreme Predator herself, answered the owl.
“Huh. Altaer calls him the First Convoker,” added Straightlace. “But he still calls the Night Mare the Supreme Predator.”
Rightly so, as it honors their status, added the eagle.
“That’s basically what Nemel said when I asked her,” added Fiddlesticks with a glance at the badger trundling next to her. “But she calls Lex ‘Exalted Primogenitor.’ It’s kind of a mouthful.”
Be that as it may, chuckled Nemel, he is the one who made it possible for us to exist in this world by bringing the Supreme Predator here. He deserves our respect.
“Which is why we’re going to work hard and show him that we can be useful,” finished Fruit Crunch as Severance came into view. “Now, let’s start by going over everypony’s powers.”
Lex was in a foul mood from the moment he woke up.
His nightmares had been worse than usual, revolving heavily around Sonata abandoning him after he informed her what had happened with Aria. That had been followed by subsequent breakdowns of everything he was trying to achieve, both professionally and personally. While none of those scenarios were particularly new – the disintegration of his relationship with Sonata was one that he experienced quite frequently – the knowledge that a difficult conversation was looming in his immediate future had lent his nightmares vividness beyond what they usually possessed. Nor was that the only reason that Lex had to be upset when he opened his eyes.
The sun was shining in through the windows, and the smell of food was filling the lobby of the train station. Nor were Nosey, Aria, or Sonata next to him, their voices instead coming to him from a short distance away, chatting amicably with a fourth mare whose voice he identified a nanosecond later as River Bank’s. Despite the entire scenario being unexpected, Lex had already figured out what had happened as he sat up, and the knowledge served only to irritate him further, frowning deeply as he looked at where the voices were coming from.
On the other side of the lobby, a large blanket that had been spread out on the floor. All four mares were sitting on it, partaking of various foodstuffs that had been laid out; even as Lex watched, Sonata took a large bite of a piece of bread with some sort of blue spread on it, while Nosey sipped from a bottle of something. Aria was nibbling on a frosted confection of some kind, while River gestured without looking at the maid she’d brought last night – standing silently off to the side, and now clad in a traditional black-and-white outfit (though the skirt seemed a bit short, flashing a glimpse of her cutie mark as she moved) – who immediately trotted forward and shelled a walnut for her, stomping on it just hard enough to break it open without harming the edible part within.
His eyes narrowing at the sight, Lex rose to his hooves, causing Sonata to look over at him. “Hey sleepyhead!” she called cheerily. “Guess what? River brought us a picnic breakfast! Isn’t that nice?” She punctuated her statement with another large bite of her jam-covered bread, getting some of the blue substance on her face. “Ith weawwy gooh!” she cooed.
“We saved some for you,” added Nosey with a timid smile. “There’s bread, blueberry and raspberry jam, yogurt, oat and raisin cereal, t-tarts…” That last one made her stammer, turning red, and Lex could only imagine that she was thinking about last night, though he had no idea why a pastry would have reminded her of that.
Aria, by contrast, looked no different from her usual self, save for the fact that she was a pony now. “There would have been more,” she sneered, glaring at Sonata, “but somebody – oh, excuse me, somepony – just had to eat all the crepes.”
“Huh?” Sonata tilted her head at the accusation, baffled. “What’re you looking at me for? All I had were those really thin pancakes.”
“It’s quite alright,” chuckled River. “I can send Feather here back to my manor for some more. It’ll just take a few minutes to-”
“What do you think you’re doing?!” hissed Lex, baring his teeth as he stalked toward them.
All four mares froze, glancing at each other uncertainly. Even the maid, hanging in the background silently, went rigid at the furious tone in his voice. Sonata, however, recovered a moment later, finishing her jam-covered bread before climbing to her hooves and trotting over to him, all smiles. “Aw, did the bench-bugs bite somepony while they were sleeping?” Leaning in closer, her voice lowered to a whisper. “They totes got Aria! Just look at her neck!”
The comment – audible to all present despite Sonata’s attempt at discretion – made Aria smirk, giving her mane a toss so that her neck was plainly visible. Sure enough, the bite marks he’d left on her last night were still there, causing Lex’s stomach to tighten at the sight. Off to the side Nosey winced, and when Lex glanced at her she gave a pointed look at Sonata before shaking her head a little. Oblivious to what was going on around her, Sonata tried to pull him toward the blanket. “C’mon, you’ll feel, like, a bajillion times better once you’ve eaten something.”
But Lex refused to move. “The ponies in this camp were starving a few days ago!” he seethed, shoving thoughts of last night away in favor of focusing on the travesty that was happening right in front of him. “Our current stockpile of food is limited to the point of rationing, we’ve barely managed to convince the surrounding farms to start coming here to sell their produce again, to say nothing of how difficult it’s been just to procure funds to buy what they are willing to sell, and if we can’t get them a new supply of rainclouds soon there’s going to be a drought throughout the entire region! So what,” he boomed, almost shouting now, “are you idiots doing?!”
Nosey winced, as did Sonata, backing away from him with a guilty look on her face. River bit her lip, shrinking back as though preparing to bolt. But Aria only snorted, and as Lex looked at her, she met his gaze without flinching. “We’re getting what we deserve, that’s what,” she sneered. “Yeah, everyone outside has it rough. Boo-freaking-hoo. We fought a zombie army and they didn’t, so they can stick to the cheap seats until they start working as hard as us.” She followed her statement up by tossing the last bit of her pastry in the air, leaning back and catching it in her mouth an instant later.
Or at least she would have, had Lex not caught it in his telekinesis first, slamming it back down onto the plate in front of her. “You’re entitled to exactly as many privileges as I say you’re entitled to, and nothing else,” he growled darkly. Normally Aria’s blatant defiance of his wishes would have fanned the flames of his anger, but after last night he didn’t dare let her provoke him again. Clamping down on his rage, he turned to the mare that had brought all this here. “River-”
“I was trying to help!” she blurted, rising to her hooves. Licking her lips, she gave him an earnest look. “I know that you’re rationing food here, and I thought that if I could bring a little extra, that would save you whatever portions you were going to use for yourself and everypony here, so that there’d be more to go around for everypony outside.”
“A wasted gesture,” pronounced Lex. “I can create more than enough food for the four of us with my magic that we don’t need to partake in our stockpile.”
“Ugh,” groaned Sonata, rolling her eyes. “You mean go back to that gruel and water stuff you make? Like, thanks but no thanks.”
“If you’re going to do that,” added Aria. “You should at least go all-out and create a banquet again.”
“Aria!” yelped Nosey, horrified. “How can you say that?! You know that almost killed him!”
Ignoring the girls, Lex kept his attention on River. “You’re going to give me a full accounting of how much more food you have at your manor,” he ordered, “as well as all other assets at your disposal. I’m giving you until the end of the day-”
“Don’t need it!” announced River, her nervous expression turning into a pleased smile. Another quick nod was all it took to make Feather Duster trot forward, handing River a small folio. “I’ve prepared-”
“Have you eaten any of this?” interrupted Lex, his gaze turning toward Feather Duster.
The pegasus mare froze in place, her eyes going wide. “N-no! I swear!”
“She hasn’t,” added Nosey. “She just stood there and served us the entire time.”
Sonata nodded. “She’s been, like, a really awesome maid! Except she didn’t ask me if I wanted fries with my order.”
Feather Duster blinked at that, giving Sonata a distressed look. “But, but that’s not-”
But she was cut off by Aria’s groan of exasperation. “Don’t bother. She thinks that question’s the mark of good customer service. She once asked the mailman why he didn’t say that when asking people to sign for packages.”
Nosey blinked. “What’s a mailman?”
But Lex had heard enough inanity. “All of you, be quiet!” All conversation immediately ceased, and he turned his attention back to River. “Continue,” he ordered her. Off to his side, Feather Duster slowly crept back toward the wall, still pale from her sudden interrogation.
Trying to regain her equilibrium, River coughed into her hoof. “Er, yes. As I was saying, I’ve prepared a fully itemized statement regarding my available wealth, both liquid and otherwise. I had to make some educated guesses due to the current state of the city, but I believe you’ll find this to be an excellent summary of everything I can help with.” Her smile was firmly back in place by the time she was finished, holding the ledger out toward him.
Lex grunted at that, taking the book in his telekinesis and bringing it over to him. Flipping through the pages, he skimmed them only briefly before closing it again, storing it in a saddlebag. “We’ll go over this in depth later. For now, there’s another issue I want to address.” He glanced out the window as he spoke, judging the time from the angle of the sun. His noon meeting with the princesses was still several hours away from the look of it, but he knew he needed to ask the girls what they’d spoken to the princesses about last night before he moved on to more personal topics. At least that way he’d have the relevant information if he upset one or more of them enough that they stormed off.
Turning to Nosey, he decided to start with her. “After you spoke with Princess Luna last night, you said there was information that I needed to know…”
By the time Nosey, Sonata, and River had finished filling him in, Lex’s eyes were blazing green and purple. Although there had indeed been several salient pieces of information, there was only one in his thoughts at the moment. “Fundraisers and charity drives?!” he snarled. “That’s the extent of what they’re going to do for Vanhoover?! They saw with their own eyes what’s happened here, they had you give them firsthoof accounts of what these ponies have been through, and that’s all the action they’re willing to take?!”
“They also might hold a concert!” cheered Sonata, sitting on her haunches and clapping her fore-hooves together. Grinning, she turned to Aria. “Wouldn’t that be great? I totes bet we could go on tour!”
Aria rolled her eyes, but didn’t have a chance to answer as Lex kept ranting. “There’s no excuse for this level of negligence! If they lack the will to use their authority to step in and command the resources necessary to fix what’s happened here, then they don’t deserve to have any authority at all!” His jaw clenched, Lex found himself returning to his earlier speculation about arresting Celestia and Luna for how depraved they’d become in their dereliction of their duties to their people. It would mean a fight, of course, but the very fact that they’d fight to retain their positions as princesses while refusing to use those mantles for anything other than mere celebrity influence, even after learning what had happened to Vanhoover, was enough to make Lex’s blood boil. I should never have agreed to limit myself to just this city! he raged silently. I should have gone with my original plan and overthrown them!
But that was a mistake that he could rectify now. In just a few hours’ time, he'd have the opportunity to make sure that Equestria wouldn’t have to suffer under Celestia and Luna’s mismanagement any longer. But for now…
“Hey, Lex? You’re making crystals grow all over the place again. You mind knocking that off?”
Sonata’s voice reminded him that there was another topic he needed to deal with. For a moment he considered putting it off, but decided against it. He wanted this done, so he could give his full attention to what was about to happen. Forcing himself to choke down his righteous anger, Lex turned his attention to the others. “River, you may leave. I’ll contact you about utilizing your wealth later. And you,” he glanced at Feather Duster, who flinched in response, “wait outside.”
River nodded, but neither mare said anything, perhaps realizing that in his current mood, the less of his attention they commanded the better. Once they’d exited the lobby, Lex let out a slow breath, readying himself for what was about to happen before turning to the other three. Or rather, to one of them in particular.
“Sonata, I need to talk to you about something that happened last night…”
Still wearing a carefree smile, Sonata tilted her head in curiosity. “Sure. What happened last night?”
Lex hesitated. Although he knew that this was a conversation he needed to have, he nevertheless found himself suddenly questioning his current course of action. I should postpone this, he decided suddenly. Something this tumultuous shouldn’t be broached right before a major political event. There’d be plenty of time to tell Sonata about what had happened after he’d dealt with Celestia and Luna, when the potential fallout had no chance of affecting-
“What he’s trying to say,” announced Aria with a spiteful grin, “is that we-” Her words abruptly cut off, despite her lips continuing to move. For an instant Aria looked confused, and her lips moved again, quicker this time. When nothing happened, her expression changed to one of horror, one hoof flying up to her throat in panic. Terrified, she looked at the others, her eyes pleading for help-
Only to stop as she looked at Lex, who was glaring back at her with naked hostility in his gaze, something clearly communicated by the way his eyes glowed green and purple, the latter color sheathing his horn as well. “I have reached my limit for your persistent antagonism, Aria,” he rumbled. “From now on, further attempts by you to cause trouble will not be tolerated.” The colorful aura surrounding his horn suddenly winked out, his eyes returning to normal. “Consider this to be your last warning.”
“You can’t do-” Stopping as she realized she could speak again, Aria squeezed her eyes shut, humming to herself as she took several deep breaths. She quieted a moment later, opening her eyes and giving Lex a look of pure malice. “I can’t believe you did that to me,” she hissed softly. When Lex’s only response was a derisive snort, she stalked over to him. “I can’t believe you did that to me!” This time the words were louder, her voice rising into an angry shriek as she raised her forelegs and lashed out with a shove.
But Lex turned into shadow a moment before she made contact, sending her stumbling through his incorporeal form. “I did, and I’ll do it again if you can’t control yourself.” In contrast to Aria’s rising anger, Lex’s voice was colder than ice.
Shaking with rage, Aria lifted a hoof and began to gesture, her voice rising in a chant. But before she’d gotten two syllables out, black crystals began to sprout around her, the sharp points pressing dangerously close. “If you even think of attacking me magically,” declared Lex softly, “I promise you your voice won’t be the only thing you lose.”
For a second it looked like Aria might try it anyway, her foreleg held aloft as she glared at Lex hatefully, still quivering with repressed emotions. But after several seconds she lowered her hoof to the floor, and the black crystals around her receded in response. “You,” she breathed, “are a miserable, heartless, evil piece of…” She couldn’t finish, a choked sob cutting off her string of invectives, and she turned her back to him, taking shuddering breaths.
Standing behind Lex, Nosey couldn’t bear to watch what was happening any longer, taking a step forward. “Aria-”
“Stay back!” Her voice was a snarl, and her features were twisted with bitterness, but when Aria looked over her shoulder at them there were tears in her eyes. “Don’t any of you come near me!”
Biting her lip, Nosey turned to the only person left who had yet to say anything. “Sonata, do something!”
But Sonata’s only response was to shrug, a small smile on her face as she watched the exchange unfold. “Why? Lex has her totes under control.”
She made no attempt to hide what she was saying, and Aria’s expression turned even uglier in response, teeth bared as she glowered first at Sonata, then at Lex. “I hope those princesses kill you,” she spat, before turning her attention back to her sister. “And I hope you watch it happen, because when it does you’ll both wish I was there to save you, and then YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU TREATED ME LIKE THIS!” She didn’t wait for a reply, stomping over to the door and wrenching it open so hard that the hinges almost tore. Stalking outside, the wordless scream of rage she gave a moment later was clearly audible even inside the station.
Unimpressed at her temper tantrum, Lex’s lip curled as he returned to his physical form. “Childish nag,” was all he said as his horn lit up, telekinetically closing the door before returning his attention to the two remaining mares.
Nosey could only stare at him, wide-eyed at how callous he’d been. “Lex, you have to go after her and apologize!”
“I disagree,” he replied curtly.
“What do you mean you disagree?!” Clearly unable to believe what she was hearing, Nosey could only gape. “You know how badly losing her voice hurt her! She told you last night, when she broke down right before you started that ritual! And then you go and do something like that to her just a few hours later…!” But Lex’s expression made it clear that he was unmoved by her pleading, and in desperation Nosey switched tactics, turning to the only other pony still present. “Sonata, tell him!”
But Sonata just shrugged, the corners of her mouth still turned upward. “Eh.”
Nosey gave her an incredulous look. “Are you serious?! You were in tears when she told you about what she went through!”
That was enough to make Sonata’s smile fall away, but the expression that replaced it was one of irritation, rather than kindness. “Yeah, I was. Then she, like, totes threw herself at Lex and started saying that she was dating him too. Well guess what?” Her smile came back then, and this time it was clearly mean-spirited. “She wants to kiss and cuddle with my guy, then she can deal with all the awful parts of him too.”
That earned her a sour look from Lex. “I find that line of reasoning difficult to appreciate.”
“Aw, you know what I meant!” Giving him an apologetic smile, Sonata moved to nuzzle him. “I’m just saying, we worked really hard to get where we are, you know? We fought and cried and made up, and it was really tough a lot of the time, but it was totes worth it to get where we are now. If Aria thinks that she can just waltz in and make kissy-faces at you and that’s it, then she’s not getting the full Lex Legis experience.”
“She was about to have ‘the full Lex Legis experience’ last night!” Nosey stomped a hoof, angry now. “That’s what she was trying to say before!”
Lex’s head snapped around to glare at her. “Nosey!”
“What?” Disappointment and anger clouded her face as Nosey met his gaze evenly. “Are you going to silence me too now? Maybe something even worse?” She could almost taste bile in her throat now, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. “Go ahead, we both know I can’t stop you, just like I couldn’t stop Xi-”
“Whoa, whoa, time out!” Moving to stand between Nosey and Lex, Sonata gave her best friend a shocked look. “That’s going a bit too far, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for an answer before turning to look at Lex. “Why’s everyone freaking out over last night, anyway? Did something happen?”
Lex didn’t respond immediately, giving Nosey a dark look for several seconds before focusing on Sonata. There was no point in postponing this now. “Aria and I had an…a liaison last night.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “Wait, for realsies?”
Feeling a shudder running down his spine at her reaction, Lex nodded stiffly. “Yes. But we didn’t finish!”
“Only because I walked in on you,” muttered Nosey.
“You were there too?!” Sonata twisted her head back and forth, looking at Nosey and Lex in turn. The disbelief in her voice made both of them flinch. When neither of them said anything, Sonata turned to look at Lex, her brow furrowing. “Okay, you’ve got, like, some serious ‘splaining to do!”
The words felt like blows from a hammer, and in that moment Lex would have preferred to be facing Xiriel again than having this conversation. “Sonata, listen to me-”
“No! You know what? No! I’m super mad now!” Walking up to him, one hoof shot out to jab him lightly in the chest. “You get all up in everyone’s face about eating the food that River brought, and it turns out you and Aria and Nosey all had a lasagna last night! Why didn’t you come and get me?! I love pasta!”
Lex just stared at her.
In another circumstance, Nosey would have giggled at Sonata’s misunderstanding. But at the moment she was too upset to find the humor in the situation. “No, Sonata. A liaison. It means…it means that they, you know…did it. I mean, they were going to do it, before I…you know…interrupted…”
Sonata just tilted her head. “Wait, so you didn’t eat any of the lasagna?” She looked back at Lex, still upset. “You guys didn’t even share it with Nosey?”
“It means lovemaking, Sonata.” Lex’s voice was flat, his face having no expression at all. “Last night Aria and I almost had intercourse.”
Now it was Sonata’s turn to stare at him, visibly stunned. Then, slowly, she smiled. “No way,” she chuckled. “C’mon, is it August Fool’s Day or something? I mean, maybe if you weren’t, like, the most upright guy ever I’d have fallen for it, but this-”
“It’s true, Sonata.” Nosey forced herself to look her friend in the eye as she spoke. “I saw them. They didn’t go all the way, but they probably would have if I hadn’t interrupted.”
But Sonata just laughed it off. “For realsies, knock it off you guys. You can’t really think I’ll buy this, right?” She looked back and forth between them, her smile becoming strained at how somber they both were. “Right…?”
A pregnant pause followed, and Sonata felt the inside of her mouth turning dry as she looked at Lex. When the silence became unbearable, she spoke up again. “So…okay, so, it was just, like, her being all over you, right? Like after the ritual? She threw herself at you, maybe did a sexy dance or something, and you didn’t have a chance to push her away?”
Unlike Nosey, Lex couldn’t look her in the face. “…no.”
Sonata’s eyes lit up with hope. “No, you didn’t have a chance to tell her to back off?”
Lex sighed. “No, it wasn’t her being forward. She initiated the encounter but I…reciprocated.” He knew she wouldn’t know that word as soon as it left his mouth, trying again. “I kissed her back. I did more than that. Those marks on her neck were from me.” Once again, the words were toneless, delivered without emotion or feeling behind them.
Sonata might as well have been a statue for how much she reacted. After what felt like an eternity, she licked her lips, struggling to get her next words out. “Are you in love with her?”
Lex didn’t even consider answering her question, instead pivoting to the most closely-related tangent he could think of. “I wanted us all to figure out what our relationship was, to put all of this,” he waved a hoof aimlessly, still not looking at her, “to rest instead of lingering in this uncertainty. That’s what was supposed to happen now.”
Sonata slumped in place, looking down. “…that’s what you say? I ask you if you’re in love with Aria, and you say you ‘wanted us to figure out what our relationship was’?”
The chill that fell over Lex then was a familiar one, able to pick up her implication that he’d made some sort of misstep. But the answer he’d given her had been the best one he’d had, and if it was indeed insufficient, he had no idea why. He forced himself to look at her, desperately searching for any sort of clue as to what she’d been expecting him to say. “What do you mean?”
But Sonata made no attempt to answer, instead starting to fidget. “I, um…I need to go.” Lex’s eyes barely had time to widen before she started walking. “I just need some space right now, okay? I have to...to think or…do whatever…” She stumbled toward the door, and he made no move to stop her. In the few seconds since the words had left her lips he’d parsed them in every manner imaginable, and they suggested that she was only leaving his immediate proximity and not severing their relationship entirely. He didn’t dare do anything that could exacerbate the damage.
Sonata was halfway to the door before she called out. “Nosey?”
To Lex, the interrogative lilt in her voice had no greater meaning, but Nosey apparently didn’t agree, nodding immediately. “Yeah.” With no further inquiry, she trotted past Lex without so much as a glance in his direction, moving up to Sonata’s side and pressing against her, putting a foreleg around her shoulders and giving her a gentle squeeze as she helped her toward the door.
As they walked away from him, Lex thought back to how optimistic he’d felt after he’d spoken to Fruit Crunch last night. How he’d wondered if things might work themselves out the way they had with the colt. But now, as he watched Nosey and Sonata get further and further away from him, he realized just how foolish he’d been. That things had ended so well with Fruit Crunch had been a freak accident, an anomaly that had no greater significance. Thinking that it would happen twice, after the innumerable failures he’d previously experienced, had been hubris of the highest order, bordering on madness.
But you still accomplished what you set out to do, came the voiceless words from his shadow. You wanted to clarify your relationship with those three, and now you have.
A moment later, Sonata and Nosey reached the door, and left without a backwards glance.
None of them want to be around you anymore.
Nosey didn’t try to steer Sonata in any particular direction, letting her lead them wherever she felt like. Her earlier indignation at Sonata's blithe reaction to Lex's cruelty toward Aria had dissipated in the wake of how obviously heartbroken she was. The important thing now, Nosey knew, was just to be there for Sonata when she inevitably broke down. Even so, it wasn’t in her nature as a reporter to remain silent. “Sonata?” she spoke tentatively, knowing better than to ask if the other mare was okay. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Letting out a slow breath, Sonata nodded. “Actually, yeah.”
Slightly relieved at her answer, Nosey managed a sad smile. “Name it.”
But Sonata’s next words wiped the expression from her face.
“Help me work on that spell to contact Kara. Right now.”
“Listen, Sonata, I’m not saying this is a bad idea or anything…”
“Darn right! If anyone knows what to do about my awful sister and my two-timing boyfriend, it’ll be Kara!”
“From what you’ve told me about her, I’m sure you’re right about that. And you know I’m willing to help out however I can…”
“I know, and I totes appreciate it.”
“Yeah, but the thing is…should we really be doing this here, of all places?”
Nosey punctuated her question with a nervous glance around. Although nopony had seen so much as a single ghoul since the climactic battle a few days ago, being in Vanhoover still made her nervous. If not for the fact that Sonata had used her calming spell on her a little while back, she was sure she would have been shaking. Although the sun was shining down on them, making the plaza they were in brightly illuminated, the nearby buildings still cast heavy shadows that left the alleys between them darker than she would have liked.
Sonata, however, didn’t seem to be concerned in the slightest. “It’ll be fine. This way we can make that spell without anyone getting all up in our business.”
Nosey bit her lip. “I…guess that’s a good point.” Sonata hadn’t been paying too much attention to their surroundings during their walk toward Vanhoover, but Nosey hadn’t missed the sight of Princess Celestia among the camp ponies. While a small crowd had gathered around her, Nosey had gotten a glimpse of the pair of ponies she was talking to, and had felt a shudder go down her spine when she’d recognized them as Spit Polish – the pony that Lex had cursed for trying to murder him in his sleep – and his friend Peachy Keen. Given that Nosey had gone out of her way not to mention Lex cursing anyone when she’d spoken to Princess Luna last night, and knowing that Sonata and River had done the same with Princess Celestia, she really wasn't eager to be asked why they’d withheld that bit of information.
They’d also passed by those foals that had saved them last night. They’d been gathered around Severance and, for some reason, had a small zoo’s worth of animals with them. Feathercap, the unicorn colt who’d insisted on accompanying her when she’d spoken to Princess Luna last night, had spotted them, waving and starting towards them. But his friends had called him back; whatever they were doing, they were apparently quite caught up in it.
It’s just as well, Nosey had decided at the time. It’d be more than a little awkward if they started asking about those rewards I said Lex would want to give them. She’d said that because she’d wanted to raise their spirits, since everypony hadn’t seemed to recognize how heroic those foals been. Now it was just one more uncomfortable conversation that needed to be had regarding the camp’s unsociable leader. Which is why we’re out here in the first place.
“I mean, normally I like an audience,” continued Sonata, drawing Nosey back to the present. “But it’s not like I wanna wash my dirty dishes in front of them.”
Despite herself, Nosey couldn’t help but smile at little. “It’s ‘air my dirty laundry,’ Sonata.”
“Right! That too!”
Rolling her eyes, Nosey nevertheless felt her tension ease thanks to Sonata’s antics, though it didn’t vanish entirely. “I just worry that if we have an audience here, it might not be other ponies.” Seeing the blank look Sonata gave her in response to that, Nosey gave her a pointed one in reply. “Not living ponies, I mean.”
“What? You’re worried about more ghouls? Oh please.” Scoffing, Sonata waved a hoof. “We, like, totes took care of all of them. And besides, even if there are some left, I’ll just blow ‘em away.” She paused for a second before adding. “Actually, the way I feel right now kicking some butt would feel kinda nice.” Turning around, she directed her attention to the nearest dark alley. “Heeere ghoulie ghoulie ghoulie ghoulie ghoulie ghoulies! Aunty Sonata’s got a nice surprise for you!”
“Sonata!” Worried that her friend would find what she was looking for, Nosey quickly ran over and interposed herself between Sonata and the entrance to the alley. “We should, um, probably get started! I mean, if we want to get back before that noon meeting and all.”
“I’m not going back until I get in touch with Kara,” huffed Sonata. “We’ll skip lunch if we have to!”
Nosey’s eyes widened, and not at the prospect of missing a meal. She had little doubt that Lex speaking to Celestia and Luna without anyone there to soften his words would quickly turn into a disaster, especially now that Celestia knew he’d been cursing ponies. Despite how horrible Lex had been to Aria, Nosey wasn’t anywhere near ready to abandon him to his fate like that. “Then let’s get to work,” she repeated, a little too quickly. “I definitely don’t want to miss that.”
“Right! It’s spell-making time!” Her declaration made, Sonata reared up onto her hind legs…and began doing a series of stretches.
Nosey could only blink, completely nonplussed. But as the seconds went by and Sonata continued her unexpected exercise routine, Nosey somehow managed to find her voice. “Sonata…what are you doing?”
“Warming up, duh!” answered Sonata easily, giving Nosey a look that suggested that was a really dumb question. “You might wanna loosen up too. We’re gonna give this, like, a hundred and ten percent!”
“R-right…” Not at all sure what was going on, Nosey decided to just go with it. She’s a sorceress, so she must have done this before. I’ll just follow her lead and do what I can to pitch in. Letting out a breath, she copies Sonata’s motions, standing on her back legs and twisting her torso.
Several minutes passed as they worked out, both girls grunting and panting as they worked the kinks out of their bodies. Finally, Sonata sat back down, breathing a little heavily. “Whew! Okay! That felt good, right?”
“I think I pulled my tail,” groaned Nosey.
“C’mon! We gotta get fired up!” cheered Sonata. “One more time: that felt good, right?”
“R-right!”
“Now, are we gonna give it our all?”
“Yes!”
“Are we gonna do our very best?”
“Uh-huh!”
“And are we gonna win?”
“Yeah!”
“Alright!” Punching the air, Sonata gave Nosey a grin of pure confidence. “So, how do we actually make a spell?”
“Oka-, wait, wait, what?!” If she hadn’t already been sitting down, Nosey would have fallen over. As it was, her jaw dropped and her eyes bugged out, staring at Sonata in complete and utter bafflement. “You’re asking me?!”
Now it was Sonata’s turn to blink. “Well, yeah. I mean, when you offered to help me do this right out of the blue like that, I figured it was because you must have done this before.”
Nosey winced at that, thinking back to last night. Right after Lex had started his ritual to turn Aria into a pony, Sonata had been weighing her guilt over how much her sister had suffered against her exasperation at Aria’s repeated romantic overtures toward Lex. That had been when she’d declared her intention to make a spell to contact Kara, wanting to complain to the love goddess about how awful Aria was for horning in on her territory.
Looking back, it had been considerate of Sonata to then assure Nosey that she wasn’t going to complain to Kara about her as well, since after all Nosey was only sticking close to Lex due to her anguish over what Xiriel had done to her. But for Nosey, who wasn’t quite so sure of her own feelings anymore, her friend’s sympathy had filled her with guilt and a sudden desire to change the subject. That had been when she’d blurted out that she’d help Sonata make her spell to contact Kara. She’d known as soon as she’d said it that it was an ill-considered idea, but it wasn’t like she could take it back once she’d made the offer. Even so, she’d thought that Sonata would just want her to act like her assistant or something; someone to bounce ideas off of or provide basic support. That she’d apparently thought she’d actually invented spells before was completely beyond Nosey’s expectations.
And now there was nothing for her to do but admit that she was in over her head. “Sonata…no, I’ve never made a spell in my life.”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “For realsies? But you’re a unicorn! I thought you could all, like, shoot death rays and pull hats out of rabbits and stuff!”
But Nosey was already shaking her head. “Sonata, most unicorns aren’t wizards. That’s why you didn’t see anypony fighting with magic when we fought all those sea monsters on the docks. We can do little things like use telekinesis or make a light or something, and some of us might even learn a self-defense spell or two, but that’s it except for the magic in our cutie marks.” Turning, she pointed to the image of a magnifying glass over a newspaper on her flank. “And mine is for being a newsmare, not spellcasting.” Knowing what question she’d be asked next, Nosey kept going, her ears folding back. “I know I said I’d help, and I want to, I just…I’m not sure how.”
But rather than seeming disappointed or upset, Sonata just waved a hoof. “Aw, that’s okay. We’ll just do it my way then.”
Relieved at how easily Sonata had accepted everything she’d just said, Nosey found herself perking up, leaning forward. “Okay. What’s that?”
“We’ll sing a song!”
For an instant Nosey wasn’t sure what to make of that, before the obvious answer came to her. “Oh right, because you sing to cast your spells! Okay, so, how does that work?”
“I have no idea!” smiled Sonata brightly. “I just know that if I sing a certain way it does certain stuff.” She paused for a moment, brow furrowing a little. “Come to think of it, I’m not even sure how I know that.” Another long pause followed. “I think I remember Lex talking about this, back on Everglow. Something about how some people didn’t have to study to do magic, they were just born with it somehow and figured it out as they went along.”
Not sure what to make of that, Nosey nevertheless tried to think through what she’d just been told. “Alright, well…if you can make magic by singing, maybe you just need to come up with the right kind of song to get in touch with Kara?”
“Hmm.” With visible effort, Sonata thought about that. “That sounds like it might work.” Brightening up, she smiled at Nosey. “See? You’re really helpful after all! Now, go ahead and sing something!”
Caught off-guard, Nosey couldn’t help but feel confused. “You want me to sing?”
“Just to help me out. You know, for perspiration?”
“Perspir-…you mean inspiration? I…suppose that makes sense.” Shifting in place, Nosey suddenly felt self-conscious despite them being alone. “So, um, what should I sing?”
Sonata shrugged. “I dunno. Something about Kara, I guess.”
“But I don’t know anything about her,” protested Nosey, rubbing the back of her neck. “I mean, I know what you’ve told me, but that’s it.”
Completely unfazed by her friend’s hesitation, Sonata walked over to her and put a foreleg around her shoulders. “Look, I’m not expecting you to just belt out a hit like it’s no problem. Honestly, it’d be pretty weird if anyone could just start singing a whole song out of nowhere, you know?” Withdrawing her hoof, she chuckled at the thought, backing away from Nosey again. “You’re just trying to give me some ideas, so don’t try so hard and go with whatever you can think of.”
Letting out a sigh, Nosey nodded. “Okay. Whatever I can think of…”
“Exactly! I won’t laugh or giggle or anything, so just cut loose!”
Sitting silently for a few moments, Nosey licked her lips nervously. “Alright, here goes…” Not giving herself time to feel embarrassed, she began to slowly, hesitantly sing the first thing she thought of. “Kara Kara bo bara. Banana fana fo fara. Me mi mo mara.” An awkward pause ensued, before she finally finished. “Kara.”
A pained look crossed Sonata’s face. “Okay, good first effort. Maybe step your game up a little more next time, though? Something like…I don’t know…Kara Kara Kara Kara Kara chameleon? Because she’s goddess of changing shape, you see?”
“What? You mean like the changelings?” Nosey shook her head as if to clear it. “I thought you said she was the goddess of love?”
“That too. Oh hey! Maybe we should try singing songs about those!” Sonata clapped her fore-hooves together. “I bet that’ll do it! Quick, do you know any songs about shapechanging or love?”
“I do about love,” admitted Nosey. “Not so much for the whole ‘shapechanging’ thing.”
“Great!” squealed Sonata. “Let’s try those! I’ll go first, and if nothing happens, then you try one, okay?” Not waiting for an answer, Sonata took a deep breath before starting to sing…
“Sonata, this isn’t working.”
“Aw, c’mon! There’s a lot more love songs we haven’t tried yet!”
Nosey shook her head, rubbing her neck gingerly. “We’ve been at this for I don’t know how long – at least an hour now? – and nothing’s happened except my throat aches. We need to change what we’re doing.” Or go back, she added silently, glancing at the shadows the buildings were casting. From how much smaller they’d grown, the sun hadn’t reached its zenith yet, but it was getting close. Lex is going to meet with the princesses soon!
Slumping down, Sonata’s discouragement was written all over her face. “I don’t get it. Kara doesn’t show up for songs. She doesn’t show up for pie. She won’t come into my dreams anymore since those weird alicorns appeared that last time. What’s the deal with her? Does she just not want to help me out anymore?”
Hating to see her friend so down, Nosey trotted over and gave her a quick hug. “I don’t believe that. Maybe…I don’t know, maybe we’re doing this all wrong?”
Sonata gave her a skeptical look. “What do you mean? We’re trying to invent a spell that’ll let us talk to her. How is that all wrong?”
Moving so she was in front of Sonata rather than alongside her, Nosey let herself think out loud. “Well, you said before that she would show up in your dreams when you and Lex were having a problem and you needed her help. So maybe the trick isn’t to make a spell at all. Maybe it’s that you just have to do something that’ll catch her attention the way you did before.”
“Maybe,” admitted Sonata. “But Lex and I are already having a relationship problem now! So what else can we do?”
“I don’t know,” frowned Nosey. “But if she’s a love goddess, I bet it’s something to do with love.” Or shapeshifters, she added silently. But there was no point in mentioning that part.
“Something to do with love,” echoed Sonata, before giving an angry snort. “I should go enchant some guys and be all lovey-dovey with them right in front of Lex, so he can know what it feels like. I bet that’d get Kara’s attention.”
Nosey grimaced, before forcing herself to smile. “Let’s not go with that one just yet, okay?”
“I know,” grumbled Sonata. “I wasn’t being serious. But I bet it would get her attention.”
Not wanting her friend to get fixated on an idea that would only make things worse, Nosey tried to ease her away from that thought. “Well, let’s think along those lines, but maybe a little more focused on, you know, actual love instead of jealousy.”
Groaning, Sonata laid down on her back, spreading her forelegs. “Fine. Like that, but with actual love. Except the guy I would be all lovey with is a cheating jerk. So that really cuts down on…on…” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Wait a sec…wait, that’s it! I’ve got it!” Springing to her hooves, she rounded on Nosey with an excited grin. “I know what to do to get Kara’s attention!”
Nosey smiled, the enthusiasm in her friend’s voice being contagious. “What?”
Beaming, Sonata pointed a hoof at her. “You and I should totes make out!”
In the wake of the girls’ departure, Lex found himself feeling surprisingly numb.
It wasn’t how he’d expected himself to react. Having alienated all three of the people that were most important to him, he would have thought that he’d be seething with indignant rage or drowning in self-loathing. But while both of those emotions were there, they were strangely muted, as if conjured up purely by force of habit rather than being authentic reactions. Even his bewilderment at his own indifference was anemic, to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to care very much one way or the other. His attempt to clarify his relationship with the girls had failed, the consequences for it were almost exactly what he’d expected, and now it was time to move on to other things.
Even his shadow seemed to agree, or at least it didn’t disagree, since the tulpa that dwelt within it was completely silent as Lex made his way toward the door. Of course, that was no surprise at all. Without his usual cascade of negative emotions to feed it, and with him refusing to rise to the few barbs that it had thrown at him immediately after Nosey and Sonata had left, the spiteful thing had quickly fallen quiet. I might not know what made it come to my aid before, Lex noted, but at least I know how to starve its antipathy. That was enough for now.
Stepping outside, Lex was greeted by a sudden yelp of fright. Glancing to his left, he saw the maid that River had left him – Feather Duster, he reminded himself – sprawled out on the ground in a rather undignified position. The sight earned a frown of disapproval from Lex. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry!” Scrambling to her hooves, Feather Duster frantically tried to fix her uniform, smoothing her skirt down from where it had ridden up almost to her waist. “I didn’t hear you come out, and then I saw, er…” She trailed off, her eyes looking nervously at where Lex’s shadow was stretched out along the platform in its typical defiance of how the light was falling, its path taking it right past where she was now. “I, um, I wasn’t trying to stand on it, I swear,” she whimpered. “Please don’t be mad. I promise it’ll never happen-”
“Shut up,” ordered Lex flatly, not so much as bothering to look at her as he moved toward the edge of the platform. His own shadow notwithstanding, the angle of the sun made it clear that he still had a few hours left before his noon engagement with the alicorn princesses. That gave him enough time to retrieve Severance and prepare a few more spells for when he declared Celestia and Luna criminally negligent in their duties and arrested them both. The thought brought a thin smile to Lex’s lips, pleased at the thought of indicting those two fools for how they’d mismanaged-
“Um, sir? Mister Legis, sir?” came Feather Duster’s voice from behind him.
Ceasing his stride, Lex turned his head just enough to glance back at her. “What is it?”
Taking a hesitant step toward him, Feather Duster gulped, needing a moment to find her voice before she continued. “Y-you, um…you know the Night Mare, right? I mean, you’re her friend?”
Lex let out a snort that might have been a humorless laugh. “My relationship with the Night Mare is nothing so sanguine,” he replied darkly. Still, the query was unexpected enough that he turned back around, giving his maid his full attention. “What of it?”
Cringing, Feather Duster swallowed before answering. “I just…I’m not complaining or anything, but, well…did she really give my daughter a pet snake?”
Lex frowned, eyes narrowing. “What?”
“She said it was her spirit animal,” continued Feather Duster. Apparently deciding that the die was cast, she plunged ahead, the words almost jumbling together in her haste to get them out. “And that it could talk to her but only she could hear it, and how the Night Mare made it for her, or from her, I think? And that it was making her a healer, with magic powers-”
“What are you babbling about?” interrupted Lex harshly. “Your daughter is one of those foals who defied the Royal Guard last night, is that correct? The so-called ‘Night Mare’s Knights’?” He remembered seeing Feather Duster throwing herself tearfully at one of the fillies in that group after the hostilities had ended.
“Y-yes.” Biting her lip, his maid nodded. “Her name’s Cleansweep.”
“I thought so.” Lex rolled his eyes, certain that he knew what was going on now. This was the same nonsense that Fruit Crunch had been taken with, being so thrilled with how their adventure had ended that they were already looking for more. But whereas the colt was itching for another dangerous situation to intervene in, this Cleansweep girl was doubtlessly playing with some of the local wildlife and engaging in an elaborate game of make-believe in order to pretend like she was on some sort of goddess-given quest or something equally insipid. “The idea that the Night Mare would have any interest in your daughter is one that I can’t bring myself to take seriously,” announced Lex. “Nor should you.”
“R-really?!” Feather Duster almost gasped the word, slumping in relief. “Oh, I’m so glad! I mean, I knew it was preposterous, but she was so insistent! And that snake really was obedient too! It must have escaped from a pet shop in the city…”
“You should know better than to entertain a child’s fantasies,” snapped Lex, no longer considering this conversation to be worth his time. “Now, when noon comes, I’m going to be otherwise engaged, so I’ll need you to distribute food to everypony,” he added, turning back around as he nodded toward the large pile of food near the end of the platform…and stopped in his tracks, realizing that wouldn’t be viable.
His noon meeting with Celestia and Luna was here, at the train station. Having everypony come right up next to the same building where he planned on battling the two alicorns – as well as their guards, if they decided to bring them – would put them unacceptably close to harm’s way. While he planned on confronting them inside the building, and the food he’d purchased was outside on the platform, that left only a single wall between everypony and danger. All it would take would be a single spell of sufficient power, dodged or deflected or otherwise sent toward the wall, and the conflict could very well spill over and engulf innocent ponies.
But there was an easy solution to that. I can just delay passing out food, decided Lex. Except, he realized a second later, that wasn’t a acceptable solution. Even if nopony was near the train station when the battle occurred, the food itself still was, and it remained a resource of critical importance. With the nearby farms only just now starting to engage in small-scale commerce again, Lex knew they couldn’t afford to lose even a small portion of the food that he’d purchased from Coal Hopper. Their situation was still too close to the precipice of disaster to make any such risk justifiable.
That left only moving the food that was here to a more remote location – which, Lex knew, would take too long, considering how much of it there was – or changing the venue of his meeting with the princesses. The latter was a feasible decision, but tactically unsound; he’d wanted to battle Celestia and Luna indoors so as to prevent them from using their wings to the fullest extent. But if he declared the train station unsuitable, that left no other building in the immediate vicinity that he could use. Certainly, River’s manor was unacceptable, since she’d made it plain that her staff was currently living there, and he couldn’t even begin to think of how he could lure the princesses into some building in Vanhoover…
“Sir?” Feather Duster’s voice was back to its usual timid tone. “You said you wanted me to be the one handing out the food to everypony?”
“Be quiet!” hissed Lex, his unusual calm beginning to crumble. The realization that his plan to confront the Royal Sisters carried unacceptable risks to the ponies in his care was enough to make him clench his teeth in frustration. I can fix this! he swore silently. There has to be some way of negating the danger to everypony else, at least long enough for me to subdue those two! Once they’re defeated, they won’t be able to exercise any further influence over Equestria because they’ll…they’ll be…
Lex’s eyes widened as he realized he wasn’t able to finish that thought. Once he’d successfully defeated the alicorns in the inevitable altercation, then what exactly would he do with them? It wasn’t as though he planned on killing them. Celestia and Luna were severely misguided in their approach to rulership, but they weren’t evil; and even if they had been, they were still ponies, which meant that their lives were sacrosanct.
Nor could they be easily imprisoned. Lex couldn’t imagine that any of the local buildings would be able to contain them once they’d recovered from the battle; the glimpse of Celestia’s magical abilities that he’d gotten last night might not compare to his own, but by Equestrian standards it was still formidable. Even if she couldn’t teleport, he had no doubt that she and Luna would likely be able to find a way out of almost any jury-rigged prison. Tartarus was likely the only place that could hold them, and its only entrance was at the base of the mountain on which Canterlot sat, many hundreds of miles from Vanhoover. There weren’t even any guards that could keep them in line; Severance probably could, but he’d need to withdraw it from them eventually in order to recharge his magic.
A curse, then. Something to limit their power, like I did to Fencer. But no, that wouldn’t work either. Any curse that inhibited their capabilities would likely cripple their ability to move the sun and the moon. Even if his magic outstripped Celestia’s, Lex had no illusions that he could move the heavens the way she and her sister could, not when they had cutie marks that were quite obviously providing them with additional power devoted solely to those tasks.
But I haven’t tested that theory yet, he thought grimly as he looked over his shoulder. Glaring up at the sun, Lex ignored the confused look Feather Duster was giving him as he reached out with his telekinesis, gritting his teeth as he forced additional magic through his body and into his horn. Straining, he pushed against the glowing orb, grunting with effort as he tried to change its position even just a little-
Only to abandon the attempt a few seconds later, realizing it was futile. While telekinesis didn’t provide tactile feedback, there was always a commensurate strain involved when attempting to move objects. In this case, the strain had easily exceeded the motive force he was capable of bringing to bear, even after he’d augmented his telekinesis with additional magic. For all his power, he hadn’t come close to performing the feat that Princess Celestia did every day; pushing himself further would likely have injured him before he came anywhere close to succeeding. The boost she’s receiving from her cutie mark must, he realized, be considerable. That, or the glimpse of her magical prowess that he’d gotten had been more incomplete than he’d thought.
Or both.
Or something else altogether.
There was simply no way to be certain, not without studying their magical abilities further. He could do that, of course; boosting his circlet with additional magic would make it easy, but it wouldn’t be a quick process. Certainly, not something that could be done in a few minutes, particularly since he doubted that Celestia and Luna would let him physical manipulate them to get a better view of their bodies’ magical channels the way he had Sonata, Nosey, and Aria…
Lex winced, and not only because the thought of the girls suddenly brought forth the regret he’d expected to feel earlier. His plan…no, it couldn’t even be called a plan with how little thought he’d put into it. His hasty, haphazard decision to confront Celestia and Luna overly relied on incomplete information, would put too many ponies at risk, and had no appreciation for the long-term consequences. There was no choice, Lex knew, but to abandon it.
Ignoring Feather Duster's confused call, Lex trudged down from the edge of the platform, going to retrieve Severance. He could still prepare a few spells between now and noon, but it would be purely as a precaution. The meeting he was about to have would be just that: a meeting, and nothing more.
There'd be no violence when he met with the alicorns.
I’m going to kill him! Aria swore to herself. No, first I’m going to kill Sonata right in front of him, THEN I’ll kill him!
She’d made a dozen such promises to herself over the course of the last few minutes, living out each one in the privacy of her thoughts as she stalked through the camp, too angry to remain still. In one of her rage-fueled fantasies, she’d simply confronted Lex directly and blew him away with her magic. In another, she’d enchanted Sonata – that treacherous nag who again, AGAIN had done nothing while she’d lost her voice! – in order to make her attack Lex, forcing him to strike her down in order to defend himself. Still another had her enchant the camp ponies into turning on Lex en masse, shattering his dreams of being a leader when no one would accept him anymore. But for all the different scenarios she’d envisioned, they all ended the same way: with Lex regretting from the bottom of his heart that he’d betrayed her.
Because he had betrayed her. After all of the trust she’d put in him – telling him about all of the shame and degradation she’d gone through when she’d lost her voice back on Everglow – Lex had turned around and used it to hurt her just a few hours later. And for what?! Because I was annoying him a little bit?! Sonata says stuff that’s a thousand times more irritating every single day! He’s never taken HER voice away! But then, Sonata was his special little girlfriend, wasn’t she? Her feelings had to be protected at all costs.
And that was the worst part about what had happened. It wasn’t just that Lex had stabbed her in the back; it was that he’d done it because he hadn’t wanted to look bad in front of Sonata. We didn’t even go all the way and he was STILL ashamed of being with me!
The thought made Aria’s chest tighten to the point of actual pain, and she felt her eyes growing wet. Shaking her head, she savagely wiped them, furious with herself for being brought to the point of tears by Lex’s selfishness. He’s not worth it, she decided. Besides, with how jealous Sonata had been acting, once she found out what happened – that blonde four-eyes would probably tell her sooner or later, since her cutie stamp (or whatever it was called) apparently meant that she loved to gossip – she’d probably chew Lex out anyway. That thought brought a dark smile to Aria’s lips, imagining Sonata and her little friend walking out on Lex and leaving him completely alone. It’s what he deserves. That and the revenge I’m going to bury him under. And once I do, I’m out of here. There was no reason to stay in this pathetic little backwater anymore now that she had her voice back. Now that she could sing again, and with the new magic she’d learned during her time without her voice, she could go anywhere and do anything.
Except that there was no easy way out of here.
Calmer now, Aria slowed to a stop as she considered that. Trying to get out of here on hoof was a losing proposition; her little trip with Cozy and her whipped boyfriend – before they’d also betrayed her – had proven that much. Nor were there any plans for boats or trains to start showing up anytime soon that she was aware of. Even swimming along the coast until she came to another city was out of the question now, since her new pony body couldn’t breathe underwater the way her old one had been able to. If only my flight spell lasted longer, I could-
“Hey. Aria, right?”
Looking up sharply at the male voice calling her name, Aria found herself looking at a smiling pegasus stallion with a grass-green coat. His flank tattoo had a silhouette of a pony catching something round with speed lines behind it. She had a vague sensation that she’d seen him before, but nothing concrete came to mind, and with how she felt right now she wasn’t in the mood to put much thought into it. “Who’re you supposed to be?” she asked bluntly.
The stallion’s grin faltered. “I’m, uh, Disc Jockey. We met a few days ago, remember? When Lex conjured all that food?” When Aria simply frowned, he gave an uncomfortable chuckle. “We bumped into each other when you were leaving the banquet, and I wanted you to tell Lex and Sonata that I was sorry for how I acted when they first arrived.”
“Right,” drawled Aria unhappily as the memory of who this was came back to her. She’d deliberately not passed along his message due to how insulted she’d been at his assumption that Sonata shared Lex’s authority over her. Just being reminded of it – to say nothing of how she felt toward Lex himself right now – made her glare at the idiot pony in front of her. “I remember you now. What do you want?”
Cringing a little at her tone, Disc Jockey’s ears folded back as he took a half-step back away from her. But he seemed to recover a moment later, straightening up as he shuffled one hoof nervously. “I was, you know, just wondering. I mean, I know this isn’t any of my business, but, well, there are a lot of rumors going around and I figured that instead of listening to what everypony else has to say I should just ask you, and then I saw you coming this way and-”
“Will you just spit it out already?!”
“Sorry! Um, are you Lex’s g-girlfriend?”
The question sent a jolt through her, and found herself having to resist the urge to fry the little worm right then and there. “NO! You listen to me!” She darted forward, getting right in Disc Jockey’s face. “I am not Lex’s girl, I am not his friend, and I am definitely not his girlfriend! You got that?!”
Disc Jockey nodded frantically. But the look on his face wasn’t one of fear; at least, not completely. Rather, his cheeks were turning red and his eyes were having a hard time maintaining contact with hers, darting down to look her over before coming back up. It was a look she’d gotten thousands of times before, back when she’d been living on Earth with her sisters, and she recognized it instantly.
Suddenly Aria knew exactly why the bumbling stallion was talking to her.
“Well, in that case,” Disc Jockey gulped. “I was just coming from checking on my mom here.” He waved a hoof toward a small number of tents off to the side, and Aria glanced at them, belatedly realizing that she’d made her way toward the opposite end of the camp in her angry march. “She’s been feeling really run down lately, so I insisted she go here, and the doctors are keeping her for observation right now even though they think it’s just dehydration, but, um…” His nervous grin returned then. “Sorry, I’m rambling. But I was wondering, um…since you’re here and all…d-do you want to go see Princess Celestia with me?”
“Hmm?” Still not sure exactly how to make use of the stallion fawning all over her, Aria only half-heard his question. “Which one is she again?”
Disc Jockey blinked at that, clearly not having expected that question. “Uh, the big white one? She’s right over there.” He pointed behind her, and Aria turned to follow his hoof. Sure enough, in the distance there was a large, white, winged unicorn, her multi-colored mane and tail waving in a non-existent breeze as she spoke to several ponies gathered around her while a second group – wearing golden armor – hung back and watched the proceedings. “She got here a little while ago, and she’s been talking to everypony about what’s happened. I thought maybe we could go join the crowd? It’s not every day that a princess comes to town.”
But Aria was no longer listening, her eyes locked onto the princess as an idea began to form in her mind. This is perfect, she realized. I don’t need to enchant Sonata or the camp ponies in order to get back at Lex. I just need to enchant the princesses! It was absolutely perfect; “I hope those princesses kill you,” had been what she’d told Lex. And now, one of them was right here to help make it happen!
“Um, Aria?” Wandering around so he was in her line of sight again, Disc Jockey waved a hoof awkwardly. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, everything’s wonderful,” she grinned, pleased with herself. Enchanting Sonata would have been troublesome anyway; her sister was an idiot, but she was still a Siren, and if Lex could hold off an army of ghouls then the camp ponies wouldn’t be much of a challenge. But maybe Big White over there could get the job done? “Hey, is Princess Whatsherface strong? I mean, does she have a lot of magic?”
Again, Disc Jockey looked like he wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. “Well…yeah. I mean, I’m no wizard or anything, but Princess Celestia moves the sun all by herself. Plus, she runs a school that teaches magic to the best and brightest unicorns in Equestria. Not to mention that she’s fought off a lot of monsters, like Discord and Nightmare Moon.”
“And her sister’s the same?” The other princess wasn’t here, but that wasn’t a big deal. Even if she could only enchant one of them, Aria felt sure that she could get them into a fight with Lex. After all, once the spells started flying it wouldn’t really matter how the battle started; the other princess would see her sister in a fight with Lex and immediately move to help her out.
Disc Jockey glanced back at Princess Celestia, as though curious what had prompted these questions. “Princess Luna? I’m pretty she is, yeah.” He looked back at Aria again. “Why?”
“Oh, just curious,” mused Aria, the corners of her lips still turned upward as she thought through the logistics of what she was about to do. I’ll need to get close enough for her to hear me singing. That part might be tough; the princesses almost certainly knew she was a Siren, since Sonata had apparently spent most of last night blabbing her head off to her, and so might recognize that her singing was an attack. But if I’m lucky and she doesn’t, or she’s too slow to react, then I’ll be able to get in there and put the thought in her head that she should attack Lex! There was no chance that the princess would be able to resist her enchantment; Aria still remembered how easy it had been to brainwash her human counterpart back on Earth. This big dumb mare could probably be ensorcelled just as easily. That just leaves everyone watching, but they won’t know any better anyway. Even if a lot of people were listening to her song, it was easy to enchant just certain individuals so long as she knew where they were. So no one in the crowd would even know that anything had happened.
Oblivious to what Aria was planning, Disc Jockey shifted his weight between his legs. “So, um, do you want to go?”
Slowly, Aria turned her head to look at him, and this time the smile on her face was the same sultry look she’d given Lex last night. Her plan to sic the princesses on Lex was perfect, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t get back at Lex in another way too. Besides, she was still feeling unsatisfied after Lex had rejected her last night. Time to fix that. “I do,” she purred. “But first, can I ask you for a favor? I just got this body last night, and I was hoping you could help me…break it in.”
Disc Jockey quite clearly picked up on what she was saying, because he was already turning bright red, his eyes widening. “Really?! I mean, s-s-sure!”
Moving so she was alongside the little dupe, Aria pressed her side against his, nuzzling him as she gently directed him toward the rows of tents. “There’s probably an empty one over there we can use, right?” she murmured huskily, her lips brushing his ear. “Just don’t be too rough with me, otherwise I won’t be able to keep my voice down.”
Almost tripping over his hooves, Disc Jockey was grinning like an idiot. “Whatever you say, milady!” Aria had to fight to keep from rolling her eyes at his ridiculous choice of language, but didn’t let her disdain outwardly show. After all, this guy was just a means to an end.
“And then, when we’re done,” she cooed, “you can take me to see the princess.”
“A lot better,” sighed Pillowcase, the look on his face one of deep relief before he smiled again. “Thank you so much, Your Highness. I didn’t even realize I was feeling so…so…I’m not even sure what the word is. It wasn’t like being fatigued. More like…like I had weights on all over. None of them were very heavy, but it was just enough that I felt sort of…impaired? Does that make sense?”
Cadance nodded. “One of the blessings Lashtada’s given me is the ability to bring the recently departed back to life, but even though it only works if the soul is willing to return, it’s still extremely hard on the subject. Reentering this life can be almost as stressful as leaving it, and it puts a strain on the soul’s connection to the body.” The words sounded almost rote, and Shining Armor knew that she was reciting one of the lessons she’d learned about how Lashtada’s magic worked. But a moment later Cadance’s tone regained its usual playful element, the corners of her lips turning upward. “Fortunately, another of her blessings is the ability to remove that strain. You should be completely restored now.”
“Oh Pillow, that’s wonderful!” Trotting over, Cozy threw her forelegs around her husband, squeezing him tightly as she nuzzled him.
Aisle’s response wasn’t quite so affectionate, but his smile was genuine as he held out a hoof. “Congratulations on recovering.”
Pillow grinned in return as he touched his hoof to Aisle’s. “Thank you both.” Closing his eyes, he spent a long moment nuzzling Cozy before opening them again. “I want you to know how much I appreciate everything you two went through to bring me back.”
Cozy planted a soft kiss on his cheek. “I love you, Pillow. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you.”
Aisle, however, looked a little shamefaced, rubbing the back of his neck. “You don’t need to thank me. I didn’t have Cozy’s faith that everything would actually work out. I was just putting it on for her sake.”
“Which is exactly what I needed,” pointed out Cozy. Leaving Pillow’s side, she went over and nuzzled Aisle. “You kept me going when I would have given up, and that’s what got us here.” She reached up with a hoof, caressing his cheek as she turned him to look at her and planted a kiss on his lips. “You saved me, and that was what made me able to keep trying to save Pillow. You’re the reason we’re all here right now.”
“She’s right,” smiled Pillow, his face showing not even the slightest hint of upset at the sight of his wife kissing another stallion. Quite the contrary, he went over and cuddled against Cozy’s other side. “You had strength, Cozy had faith, and you both had love. That’s how you made it here. That’s why I’m alive right now. And that’s why I want to spend the rest of my life making the two of you as happy as I can.”
Silent throughout the exchange, Shining Armor surreptitiously glanced at his wife. Sure enough, she was watching the three ponies with a look of contentment on her face. The sight eased a knot of tension that he’d had in his stomach since last night; talking about the tragedy they’d suffered during the elemental bleeds was part of the healing process, he knew, but he hated the way it always left Cadance morose afterward. Last night had been no exception, and Cadance had still been depressed when they’d finally gone to bed. Although she’d been somewhat more animated when they’d woken up this morning, it was only now – meeting with Cozy, Aisle, and Pillow in their guest room – that she looked like she was back to her usual self.
Hopefully that’s a sign of how the rest of the day will go, he wished silently. Breakfast had been a subdued affair, and not just because of Cadance’s lingering regret. The fact that the guards had nothing to report with regard to the fugitive ponies wasn’t a good sign, he knew. The longer they went without catching them, the more likely it was that they’d find a way out of the city, if they hadn’t already. Especially since the various aircrafts around the city wouldn’t wait much longer before they started business as usual again, despite his written requests that they wait. But at least if they’re gone, they’re not a threat to Cadance, he decided, sneaking another look at her.
Except she was already looking back at him, and the playful gleam in her eye made it clear that she knew that he was worrying over her. Unable to muster a response, he settled for giving her his most roguish grin and shrugging, earning a snort of laughter from her. Stepping forward, she gave him a playful nudge with her wing as she looked at the trio still cuddling in front of her. “Alright, so, which of you is next?”
Drawn out of the little world they’d been in, all three earth ponies – two crystal and one not – blinked. “Sorry?” asked Aisle. “Next?”
Cadance raised a brow. “I restored the vitality that Pillowcase lost, but you and Cozy are still cursed, aren’t you?”
Aisle’s eyes widened. “Oh yeah! I completely forgot!” Nervous excitement was written all over his face as he stepped forward. “You can remove our curses, right?”
“I can try,” cautioned Cadance. “The blessing that I used on Pillowcase should be able to remove the curses placed on you, but this isn’t the same as healing a wound. Dark magic won’t just sit back and let itself be removed so easily.”
The three ponies glanced at each other at that, uncertain looks on their faces. Nor were they the only ones, with Shining Armor stepping forward so he was facing his wife. “Cadance, is this dangerous?”
Fortunately, she shook her head. “I don’t think so, but if this Lex Legis pony is as strong as what we’ve heard, it might be difficult.”
“I know you can do it, Your Highness!” Cozy took a step forward, her hoof rising to touch the holy symbol around her neck. “Lex might be a powerful wizard, but you’re Lashtada’s representative here on Equestria! There’s no way his malice could be stronger than your love!”
Shining Armor wanted to believe the same thing, but while he hadn’t sat down with Cozy and her stallions last night to ask them about what Vanhoover and the pony now in charge of it were like, he had heard a little bit from Cadance this morning. One of the tidbits she’d shared was the troubling revelation that Lex Legis apparently had his own goddess, one who sounded like Nightmare Moon’s evil twin. Given that Lex himself sounded like a reborn King Sombra, it hadn’t been heartening news, and while Shining Armor believed in the strength of his wife and her goddess, he wasn’t eager to put them to the test like this.
Aisle, however, looked nervous for a different reason. “Wait, so if you can’t get rid of them, then we’ll have to live with these curses forever?”
“She will.” Pillow’s voice was filled with quiet confidence. “We’ve made it this far already. Our destiny is to be happy together. I’m absolutely certain of it.”
“So am I,” smiled Cadance. “So, which of you will go first?”
“Definitely Aisle,” replied Cozy immediately, backing up enough to get behind Aisle and nudge him forward.
“Hey!” he yelped. “Why me?!”
The protest was enough to make Cozy stop, giving him a frown. “Because your curse is worse than mine, that’s why. You shouldn’t have to live with it any more than you already have.”
Realizing he’d misjudged why she’d volunteered him, Aisle flushed bright red. “O-oh. Thanks. But, um, are you sure you don’t want to go first, then? I mean, I don’t want you to suffer any more than you already have.”
“Trust me,” stage-whispered Pillow. “You don’t want to fight her when it comes to her securing someone else’s comfort.” He nodded his head at Cozy’s cutie mark, giving Aisle a pointed look.
“I…okay.” His ears folding back, Aisle stopped resisting, letting Cozy usher him forward. “I’m ready when you are,” he gulped as he stood in front of Cadance. A moment later he asked in a small voice. “Will this hurt very much?”
Unable to help herself, Cadance giggled. “I think you’ll be fine. Now, just close your eyes and try to relax. I’ll handle everything else.”
Waiting until Aisle had done as she’d asked, Cadance knelt down, almost touching her nose to the floor as she closed her eyes. She remained like that for several seconds, before standing up suddenly, her eyes snapping open to reveal them glowing bright white, blotting out her irises and pupils. “Lashtada,” she called softly, her voice reverential. “Restore this soul so that their love might once again fully flourish.” Her prayer completed, she reached out and pressed a hoof to Aisle’s chest.
It was the same procedure that she’d performed twice just a few minutes previous to refresh Pillowcase. But both of those times had ended with Cadance lightly touching the crystal stallion and immediately proclaiming success. This time would prove different.
The instant she touched Aisle’s body, Cadance tensed up, a grunt escaping her lips. Concerned, Shining Armor took a step forward. “Cadance…?” he called worriedly. “What’s happening?”
“It’s…fighting me…” she murmured. Biting his lip, Aisle kept his eyes closed, not moving. Cadance, for her part, shuddered, and another pained grunt escaped her lips. Even as everypony watched, her body began to sink down, as though a huge weight had settled on her back. Even so, she kept her hoof on Aisle’s chest, breathing heavily. “I think…I think maybe I can…almost…!”
A second later she gave a sharp cry and suddenly stumbled backward, the white light fading from her eyes as she reeled. But she’d barely started to flail when Shining Armor’s telekinesis wrapped around her, arresting her momentum and setting her down safely as he ran up to her. “Cadance! Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” she panted. “It didn’t hurt me, I was just surprised. It was a lot stronger than I thought it would be.”
Aisle – having opened his eyes when Cadance was hurled away from him – gulped, having turned pale. “I don’t suppose there’s any way that yelping and suddenly being knocked backward means you did it, right?”
“I’m sorry, no.” Sweating lightly now, Cadance stepped back up to Aisle. “But I want to try again. I think this time I might be able to do it.”
Shining Armor didn’t try to hide how worried he felt this time. “Are you sure this is a good idea? What if this is some sort of trap? What if this Lex guy cursed these ponies because he wanted them to come here? Maybe those curses can, I don’t know, jump from them to whoever’s trying to get rid of them?” He had no idea if that was possible or not; that kind of magical knowledge was Twily’s special talent, not his. But if there was even a chance…
Cadance, however, didn’t seem worried. “It didn’t feel like that. Just the opposite, it was pushing me away, trying to stop me from removing it from Aisle. I don’t think it’s a danger to me.”
Although not entirely convinced, Shining Armor could already hear the decision to try again in his wife’s voice. Sighing, he gently stepped back, knowing that he couldn’t overrule her on this. “Alright. Just please don’t push yourself too hard.” He knew that, unlike the spells Lashtada had granted Cadance, the blessings were more direct, requiring that Cadance use her alicorn magic to properly make use of them. She couldn’t utilize them otherwise, but doing so put stress on her body, even if no more than a light workout. So it was with a frown as he watched Cadance recite the incantation again before pressing her hoof to Aisle’s chest a second time.
Again her muscles strained as she groaned. But this time she dug her hooves in, gritting her teeth as she fought to remain upright against whatever force was bearing down on her. “Just…a little more…” she panted. “Almost there…almost…THERE!” As soon as the word left her lips, there was a tremendous cracking sound, as though a hundred wooden boards had split all at once, and Aisle gave a gasp, stumbling backwards before falling over.
Cadance slumped to the ground, rolling onto her back as she tried to steady her breathing. Shining Armor was by her side immediately, but his concern was mollified as he saw that his wife was smiling. “I did it,” she announced wearily.
“I knew you could,” he smiled back. A quick glance at Aisle showed Cozy and Pillow helping him up, the earth stallion stumbling over to grab a plate off the nearby table and press it between his back legs modestly even as he grinned, making it plain that Cadance’s declaration of victory was well-founded.
The sight was enough to earn a chuckle from Shining Armor. “But how about we take a break before you try that with Cozy, okay?”
Ten minutes later, Cozy’s curse had been removed as well. It had been more difficult than Aisle’s, requiring no less than three attempts, but Cadance had ultimately triumphed. Although it had left her surprisingly exhausted, she was still on her hooves, performing one last rite for the ponies in front of her. It wasn't glamorous by any means, but they hadn't wanted to wait any longer, saying that they'd go through with the more ornate ceremony once they got back to the Crystal Empire. Cadance had been more than happy to oblige them, smiling as she finished her pronouncement.
"Then, by the power invested in me by Lashtada, I do hereby declare you mare and colt! You may kiss the bride."
Aisle needed no further prompting, pressing his lips to Cozy's.
Although he recognized the voice of Princess Celestia, Lex didn’t so much as turn his head in response to her calling his name. Almost as soon as he’d left the train station he’d seen her in the distance, talking to a group of ponies that were gathered around her, and the sight had made his lip curl in contempt. No doubt she’s regaling them with some banal aphorism on the merits of cooperation rather than actually taking action herself, he’d thought darkly. But there was no point in chastising her about it now, not when he’d have the chance in a few hours. He might have been forced to abandon his plan to arrest the alicorn sisters for their disgraceful conduct, but there was no reason he couldn’t castigate them for it. Besides, with the misery that he’d expected to feel over his alienating the mares in his life beginning to make itself known, he wasn’t in the mood for Celestia’s self-righteous hypocrisy right now anyway. His decision made, Lex had put her out of his thoughts and instead focused on going to retrieve Severance.
But Princess Celestia had other plans, apparently. Only a few seconds after she’d called his name, there was a fluttering of wings, and a moment later she alighted on the ground a stone’s throw in front of him, blocking his path. “I need to talk to you.”
“We’ll talk at noon,” snapped Lex curtly. “I have other tasks that require my attention right now.” But despite his words he made no move to go around her. The ponies Princess Celestia had been addressing were already turning their eyes toward the two of them, and Lex had no idea if his adjusting his course to avoid her – rather than having her make way for him – would be interpreted as a sign of weakness on his part. But it might not matter anyway, he realized; several of the ponies from the crowd that Princess Celestia had left behind were members of the Royal Guard, now rushing over to position themselves on either side of her. Going around her wouldn’t be something so easily accomplished now.
Celestia herself barely seemed to notice the guards. “I need to speak with you before our conference,” she pressed.
Lex didn’t answer for a moment, wondering if he should use this opportunity to augment his circlet and examine Celestia’s magical capabilities again. But it took only a moment for him to decide against it. Channeling additional magic through his body always resulted in considerable physical strain; forcing that magic into a magic item, whose functionality wasn’t designed to receive the increased power, was even harder to do. Given that his injuries weren’t fully healed yet, and that he’d already exerted himself in his failed effort to move the sun just a few minutes ago, it was more economical to wait until Celestia and Luna were together before going through the effort of heightening his circlet’s functionality again. With that decided, he turned his full attention back to whatever petty emergency the princess was having, his curiosity about whatever was upsetting her warring with his irritation at her insistence. “You have thirty seconds,” he growled.
The guards surrounding the princess glared at him, clearly not liking his disrespectful tone, but Princess Celestia herself didn’t seem to care. Instead, she took a step forward, a reserved look on her face. “I don’t understand you at all,” she admitted. “You openly advocate that it’s better to govern with force and control instead of harmony and compassion. You’re more comfortable with the dark magic of King Sombra than the magic of friendship. You’re arrogant, belligerent, and I know that you’ve used the evil magic of that horn to curse some of the ponies under your care here.”
Lex grit his teeth at Celestia’s unmitigated gall. This failure of a princess thought she had any right to criticize him?! Narrowing his eyes, he managed to swallow his bile, refusing to act as though he had to justify himself to her. “You now have twenty seconds left to get to whatever point you’re making.”
Celestia didn’t reply immediately, looking at him in silence as though studying his face before letting out a soft sigh, her features softening slightly. “I’ve spent most of the morning talking to the ponies here, and while they told me about the uglier parts of your rule that Sonata and River Bank glossed over, they also confirmed all the good that you’ve done. About how you fought bravely to protect everypony, worked diligently to provide for them, and mourned for the ones you couldn’t save.”
Lex went rigid at that last part, clamping down on the surge of grief-fueled rage that went through him then. Don’t you dare mention Cloudbank and the others to me! he screamed internally. Don’t you DARE! The shame and the anguish he felt over what had happened to them were still raw enough that, although she’d been considerate, the mere prospect of Celestia – one of the ponies whom he respected the least – throwing their deaths in his face was almost more than he could bear. “Ten seconds,” he announced stiffly.
Closing her eyes, Princess Celestia shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand you,” she repeated. Opening them, she moved toward him again, stepping forward until she was almost close enough that she could have reached out and touched him. “But I truly believe that you want to protect Equestria and its ponies, just like I do. Even if we agree on nothing else, we can agree on that.”
She smiled at him then, but Lex didn’t return the expression. “Five seconds.”
Apparently unperturbed by his continued obdurateness, Celestia kept speaking. “You’ve also always been forthright about your beliefs, never using deception or trickery to try and get what you wanted, even when it might have served you better. Because of that, I’m willing to believe whatever answer you give me when I ask you this.” Her smile disappeared then, her expression becoming unreadable, at least to his eyes. “Are you planning on attacking my sister and me at our meeting later today?”
Lex couldn’t keep his surprise from showing on his face. How did she know I was considering that?! For a split-second he wondered if any of the girls – in a fit of pique over how he had mishandled things with them earlier – had warned Celestia about his intentions. But that couldn’t be the case; he’d never informed them, nor anypony else, that he’d briefly decided to arrest the alicorns before he’d thought better of it. Was she using some sort of divinatory magic? He knew she couldn’t be spying on his thoughts; he had too many countermeasures in place for any such magic to possibly reach him, at least not without alerting him of what was happening. Or did she have some spell that would let her look into the future directly? If so, then the fact that she’d asked him if he was going to undertake a course of action he’d already decided not to follow was a perfect example of why using such spells was a fool’s errand.
Lex had heard about spells that could predict the future during his time on Everglow, and the practical and metaphysical implications of such magic had intrigued him enough to open an immediate line of inquiry into them. He had terminated it shortly thereafter, however, when he’d learned that such spells all – without exception – had some inherent degree of fallibility in their forecasts, returning results that would prove to be correct most of the time, but not all of the time. To Lex, that was enough reason to discount such spells in their entirety; to do otherwise was to place his trust in information that might well turn out to be wildly inaccurate, with no way to tell until it was too late. That was more uncertainty than he was willing to countenance. If such spells can’t be completely accurate each and every single time, he’d decided, then they’re nothing more than guesswork.
Which was, almost certainly, what Princess Celestia was engaging in right now. There was no evidence that he was aware of to suggest that she had any sort of precognitive abilities, after all. It was far more plausible that she was remembering the first time they’d met, where violence had broken out when their dialogue had broken down. In fact, if she was concerned enough about that to seek him out ahead of time and inquire about his intentions… Then it means that she’s afraid of me, he realized. The thought sent a flash of twisted pride through him, and he almost smiled, pleased at the idea. No doubt the tales of his escapades that she’d heard from everypony had made her realize that his magical strength exceeded her own, to her anxiety. That’s right, you nag, he thought spitefully. I’ve already surpassed you, not just in moral virtue and governmental aptitude, but magical ability as well. Look upon me, and see your own obsolescence made manifest!
All of that went through Lex’s mind in less than a second. Outwardly, his initial expression of surprise at Celestia’s question had lapsed back into his usual sardonic look, and he didn’t hesitate to reply. “No,” he answered coldly. “I have no intention nor expectation that our meeting will involve violence of any sort. Now get out of my way. Your thirty seconds are up.”
Out of his peripheral vision, he could see several of the guards bristling angrily at his words, but none of them moved to challenge him. Celestia herself had no reaction save to look at him silently, and Lex locked gazes with her. Utter silence fell as the two of them stared at each other, and Lex made certain not to so much as blink, determined to win what he felt certain had become a contest of wills. He was rewarded a moment later when Princess Celestia nodded, stepping to the side. “Very well,” she said at last. “Until noon, then.”
Lex’s only answer was a derisive snort, the corners of his lips turning upward in a vindictive smile as he strode past her.
Princess Celestia watched Lex leave, her expression pensive.
Her question had taken him by surprise, that much had been obvious. What was less certain was why. Had he been caught off-guard by her asking if he’d planned on attacking her and Luna because he’d found the idea to be ludicrous, or because he’d been planning on doing exactly that? Although Celestia hoped it was the former, she couldn’t bring herself to be completely sure.
Still, the important thing is that he said he wouldn’t, she knew. Whether because he’d never planned to, or because her asking about it had unnerved him enough to abandon any plans to do so, Lex had been quite clear about not fighting them. As wary as Celestia felt toward him, she hadn’t been lying when she’d said she was willing to believe him. Whatever else could be said about Lex Legis, his code of honor – warped though it might be – was something that he very obviously held dear. Now that he’d declared his decision not to take action against them, he’d stick to it.
Which meant that something else would be what caused her vision to come true.
Although she’d lived for well over a millenium, Celestia hadn’t had very many prophetic dreams. On average, she’d had less than one per century. But when they happened, the things that she saw always came to pass. Always. Right now, that meant that something was going to cause Lex to go on a rampage in a short while, and while nothing might be able to prevent that – or the grim fate that awaited Silhouette, her sister’s worshiper – finding out what caused it might give her an edge in bringing the conflict to a swift end before anypony else was hurt.
But if Lex wasn’t the one who initiated hostilities in a few hours, then who – or what – was?
The sense of victory that Lex felt in the aftermath of his encounter with Princess Celestia faded far too quickly for his liking. While he initially couldn’t help but smirk at the memory of how she’d been the one to acquiesce to his framing the scope of their conversation – the part where she’d broken eye contact first and moved out of his way was particularly enjoyable – it took only a few mental replays of what had happened before he came to realize how meaningless such a victory was. After all, he’d ultimately gained nothing of substance from the exchange, meaning that his mental gloating was not only petty, but pointless as well.
That was all nothing more than a warm-up, he decided, less than five minutes after his impromptu discourse with Celestia had ended. The real challenge will be when our formal meeting begins.
The actual parameters of their meeting hadn’t been laid down ahead of time, but Lex still had a fairly good idea of what they would entail. The princesses’ agenda would, he felt confident, revolve around three points. The first would be making sure they had all the information about what had happened here. The second would be their inevitable criticisms of how he’d used dark magic in dispensing justice; Princess Celestia had tipped her hoof when she’d mentioned that in their brief discussion just now. The third would be to reiterate their utterly pathetic offers of assistance by raising awareness of what had happened here throughout Equestria, as though that was all they could do to promote Vanhoover’s welfare.
Lex, of course, had his own agenda. He had no objection to informing the princesses about the full scope of Vanhoover’s woes – save only for the parts that would have informed them about the nature, extent, and (most importantly) limitations of his powers; that information needed to be closely safeguarded, lest it be used against him – since the full extent of the threat to Equestria was something that needed to be stressed in the strongest possible terms. While Lex doubted that it would galvanize Celestia or Luna into action, he was morally compelled to make the attempt. That, and he wanted to make sure they understood just how catastrophic their negligence had been for the ponies here.
No doubt they’ll assuage their consciences by telling themselves that their encouraging the public to contribute to Vanhoover’s restoration is them helping, Lex felt certain. That was utter sophistry, of course, but at least it would do some good for everypony here, and Lex had no intention of refusing it. Quite the opposite, he fully intended on castigating them for not offering to help more; he had no intention of letting them congratulate themselves for offering so little to Vanhoover’s recovery.
I wonder if Cloudbank would be surprised? he wondered, the thought sending a renewed twinge of melancholy through him. Princess Celestia’s mention of his mourning the ponies he hadn’t been able to save, combined with the princesses being here in the first place, was enough to remind him of when he’d first met the mare whom he’d later come to rely on…and whom he’d failed so spectacularly. She’d initially berated him for not calling on the princesses, saying that he’d been foolish for trying to deal with the monsters infesting Vanhoover on his own. The indictment had stung, to the point that he’d later tried to contact Twilight Sparkle despite how much it had injured his pride to do so.
But now he felt no particular shame at accepting Celestia and Luna’s offer to aid Vanhoover’s reconstruction. After all, why would I? It’s not as though I asked them for help. Unsolicited assistance in no way impugned his abilities, and so long as it came without any strings attached then he had no compunctions about utilizing it. But if those two expect me to thank them for their altogether insufficient action in the face of this disaster, they’re going to be disappointed.
The real challenge in this meeting, Lex was certain, wouldn’t be with the alicorns’ feeble offers of support. Nor would it be with regard to telling them precisely what happened here without revealing any of his own weaknesses. No, the problematic area will be their complaints about how I’ve handled criminal justice. That was an area where Lex knew he had to tread extremely carefully.
It was highly unlikely that Celestia and Luna would let his use of curses to punish ponies who had committed serious wrongs go unchallenged. Of all the areas where they were lax, failing to use their authority to levy penalties against injustice was among the most egregious. It took, Lex knew, nothing less than existential threats to Equestria as a whole to make them actually use force to maintain peace and prosperity. Anything less than total disaster saw them merely encouraging others to get along regardless of the nature of the offense in question, and while Lex believed in rehabilitation, the Royal Sisters had taken it to a dangerous extreme. Punishment was needed to make ponies realize the consequences of their actions, which could then be translated into behavior modification.
Fencer, of course, was the prime example of that.
But if Celestia and Luna didn’t accept that line of thinking, and Lex doubted that they would, that would be where things became dangerous. If they demanded that he remove the curse that he’d placed on Spit Polish, he’d have no choice but to refuse, throwing into sharp relief his rejection of their authority. If that happened, it would severely jeopardize his medium- and long-term plans.
Lex knew full well that the arrangement he’d made with Celestia and Luna, where they agreed to let him rule Vanhoover, was highly ambiguous in its details. That was to be expected, when something as important as a transfer of authority over an entire city was conducted with nothing more than an oral agreement rather than in writing. But that was exactly how the Royal Sisters operated, and Lex fully intended to use it against them. Because while he felt certain that they thought that the agreement was that he administrate Vanhoover under their sponsorship, Lex interpreted the accord they’d reached differently. As far as he was concerned, they’d done nothing less than cede all political jurisdiction over the city in favor of him.
That was a perfectly reasonable interpretation; after all, he’d never rescinded his original declaration of rebellion against them.
But as much as he was certain that Celestia and Luna would have balked at his telling them that they had given Vanhoover completely over to him, it wasn’t something he needed to worry about at the moment. The vagueness of their agreement would keep the alicorns mollified, thinking that he’d accepted their patronage, all while he not only worked to establish an unbreakable political hold over the city, but expanded it to the surrounding environs. Tall Tale was already his, and once he cemented his control over the hamlets to the north and Las Pegasus to the south, then he’d have enough territory, people, capital, and material resources under his rule to be able to formally and unambiguously declare himself king of his own country. Once he did that, it would be too late for Celestia and Luna to do anything.
But if they attempted to pull rank during their meeting and ordered him to remove Spit Polish’s curse, then he’d have to tell them directly that he didn’t recognize their authority, revealing how there hadn’t been a meeting of the minds over their agreement that he rule Vanhoover. Once that happened, Lex knew that Celestia and Luna would begin moving to check his ambitions. The Royal Sisters were indolent and irresponsible, but they wouldn’t do nothing in the face of his actively attempting to carve away part of their country for himself. And while he had no expectations that they’d attack him, there were plenty of other ways for them to frustrate his plans.
The most obvious would be to prevent him from making any inroads into Las Pegasus. Vanhoover’s current state would require a massive influx of bits to repair, far more than could be easily gathered even if economic activity were to resume in full. Worse, he’d already helped himself to what little municipal funds Tall Tale had, and the northern villages were already hurting for cash due to the indirect effects of Vanhoover’s fall. The only way to generate a large sum quickly would be to turn to Las Pegasus – the resort town on Equestria’s southwest coast – and take out a loan from several of the richest and most influential ponies there. Once he did that it would be easy to start leveraging control over the city, since if his government failed then those ponies would never make their money back.
But if Celestia and Luna were to exercise the enormous social influence that they wielded, that would never happen. It would be easy for them to convince everypony of consequence to have no dealings with him, making a loan impossible to obtain and leaving his fledgling government cash-strapped for the foreseeable future. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to recover from a setback like that. Which meant that, somehow, he needed to make sure the issue of cursing ponies didn’t become a point of intransigence during the upcoming meeting.
And for that I need Sonata there to serve as my spokespony. Her easygoing nature and guileless mien meant that, even if she took some liberties with the precise phrasing of his statements, she’d be able to make whatever point he instructed her to in a way that was far more likely to be palatable to others than if he’d attempted to do so himself. In all likelihood, she’d be able to dance around the issue of his cursing ponies in a manner that would somehow mollify the alicorns without making any concessions to them.
But Sonata wasn’t available at the moment, having stormed out when he’d predictably – in hindsight – botched his attempt to resolve his romantic entanglements earlier that morning. Nor had he seen her on his walk through the camp, leaving him with no indication of whether or not she’d be back for the noon appointment with the Royal Sisters. As much as Lex found himself hoping that she’d return in time, he knew he couldn’t count on it. For all he knew, she wouldn’t be coming back at all…
No. He shook his head, forcing that thought away before it could gain traction in his mind. She swore she would never leave me again. That had been a key point of the talk they’d had right after he’d fought off Spit Polish’s attempt to assassinate him, when he and Sonata had resolved one of their not-infrequent fights. She’d sworn that she’d never again break up with him, no matter what happened. Just remembering that made him feel more at ease, even if it didn’t solve the immediate problem…
But that calm was blown away a moment later as Lex came to a dead stop, staring at the sight in front of him.
Severance was right where he’d left it, hovering a few feet off the ground at the western edge of the camp. He’d taken to leaving it there as a precaution, in case the Night Mare had been wrong about the entirety of the ghouls attacking in the horde from a few nights ago. But while there were no body parts scattered around to suggest that the scythe had cut down an undead intruder, it wasn’t alone the way it should have been.
Arranged around it were Fruit Crunch and his friends from last night. The foals were each pressing a hoof to Severance, and Lex could see Fruit Crunch himself saying something. Nor were the children alone, as each had an animal near them; at a glance he could see a wolf, an eagle, a snake…
“She said it was her spirit animal,” continued Feather Duster. “And that it could talk to her but only she could hear it, and how the Night Mare made it for her, or from her, I think?”
A chill went down Lex’s spine as he remembered what Feather Duster had told him. At the time it had been easy to dismiss her report about her daughter’s new pet as childish antics; after all, there was no way that a group of foals could have managed to make some sort of pact with the Night Mare. He’d done so only because he’d had enough magic to traffic with her directly, and Cloudbank had needed his personal instruction to make a connection to the goddess. Fruit Crunch and his friends had no mentor to give them any such guidance…or so he’d thought.
But now, as he grimly made his way towards Severance, Lex realized that they might have found one on their own.
Fruit Crunch was the first one to see Lex approaching.
The colt’s face lit up with a smile, taking his hoof away from Severance and galloping over as the dour unicorn stalked towards the group. “Lex! I’m so glad you’re here! Remember how you said you didn’t want any of us having to fight because you were worried we might get hurt? Well guess what? You don’t have to worry anymore because we have magic powers now!” That last part was punctuated by his rearing up on his hind legs and waving his hooves excitedly, quite clearly overcome with joy.
Lex, however, didn’t share in the foal’s enthusiasm, a stony expression on his face as he strode toward Severance without giving a reply. But Fruit Crunch was too enraptured to notice. “The Night Mare gave them to us last night!” he continued gushing. “We’ve been meeting with Severance for a little while, and after we won that fight with Silhouette it said we should all gather together and I totally thought it meant we should all meet with it but it actually meant that it was waiting for us all to fall asleep and then- OW!”
His rambling was abruptly cut off as the large gray wolf that had been hanging back with the rest of his group padded forward and lightly nipped his flank. Restrain yourself, came a rich, masculine voice a moment later. The High Alpha has no use for a yipping pup.
“Aww,” pouted Fruit Crunch, barely noticing that Lex had come to an immediate stop in response to the mental rebuke. Instead, he turned back to the older stallion, his grin coming back in full force as he did. “Sorry. But you’ve gotta admit that this is way cool, right?”
But Lex didn’t respond immediately, his eyes focused intently on the wolf standing behind Fruit Crunch before turning to sweep over the other animals fifteen feet away. Barely noticing the nervous expressions of the foals alongside them, he looked each creature over carefully. To his eyes they looked no different than any other members of their species. But there had been no mistaking that voice just now, nor how it fit with what Feather Duster had said about her daughter’s new pet. Which meant…
Holding out his foreleg – the one with the barbed wire wrapped around it – towards the animals, Lex called upon the power the Night Mare had given him. “Genuflect!” he snapped.
The word had barely left his mouth when he felt the invisible bands of power lash out, wrapping around the animals – or whatever they really were, since he’d practiced with this power back in Tall Tale and knew that it couldn’t affect ordinary fauna – and causing them to immediately abase themselves before him. The wolf behind Fruit Crunch fell to its belly, placing its chin on the ground as it lowered its eyes deferentially. High Alpha, came its voice again, soft and gracious.
The other four were the same. Lord Sovereign, acknowledged the serpent beside Cleansweep, its voice female and surprisingly dainty as it coiled itself and raised its head up before lowering it in an elaborate bow.
Grand Vizier, murmured the owl resting on Feathercap’s back, fluttering down to the ground before holding its wings open and leaning forward, the closest to kneeling it could come.
Exalted Primogenitor. Like the serpent, the voice of the badger next to Fiddlesticks was female, but deeper and more mature. Its show of obeisance was barely noticeable, flattening itself out as much as it could.
First Convoker. Hopping down from its perch on Straightlace’s outstretched foreleg, the eagle’s pose was almost identical to the owls, spreading its wings out and lowering its head awkwardly.
For their part, the foals’ eyes widened, looking at their animals in with mixed reactions. “Should, um, should we be doing that too?” muttered Feathercap.
“I can’t really kneel while carrying Tiddlywinks,” protested Fiddlesticks, one foreleg curling around her baby brother as he giggled and tried to eat a dandelion.
“You should just do the best you can,” offered Straightlace, starting to bend down before stopping in mid-motion, giving Lex an uncertain look. “Is there some sort of special name we should call you, too?”
“I thought we should each call him what our spirit animal calls him,” interjected Cleansweep, already kneeling as she looked back at Lex. “Or is that too confusing?”
“Ooh! Ooh! I’ve got the best idea!” cheered Fruit Crunch, the nip to his flank already forgotten as he grinned at his friends. “We can call Lex ‘Super Sorcerer!’ That’s such an awesome name!” Eyes sparkling, he turned back to his hero. “And you can give us all superhero names too, based on our abilities! Like, Dust Bunny here can heal people just by touching them! And Straightlace has these amazing defensive powers! And I can summon-”
But his explanation of everypony’s powers came to an abrupt halt as Lex suddenly reached out with a hoof, grabbing Fruit Crunch’s foreleg from where he’d been waving it around as he’d gotten worked up again. His eyes narrowed as they looked over the fresh scars on the child’s limb; he hadn’t noticed those last night, but in the daylight they were plainly visible. “Where did you get these injuries?” he rumbled dangerously.
High Alpha, came the voice from the recumbent lupine, those scars are Fruit Crunch’s pride. He-
“Silence,” ordered Lex, not so much as bothering to look at the creature, which complied with his wishes instantly thanks to the Night Mare’s power. Instead, he kept his eyes on Fruit Crunch. “Tell me how you sustained these wounds,” he said again.
Lex’s voice was toneless, his expression showing neither anger nor excitement, and the marked lack of reaction was enough to punch through Fruit Crunch’s exuberance. Hoping he wasn’t about to get a repeat of the dressing down he’d received last night before they’d worked things out, the colt swallowed nervously before answering. “F-from Severance. We were learning lessons about the Night Mare, reciting stuff that Severance told us, and every time I got a line wrong I got one of these,” he nodded toward his scars. Seeing Lex’s expression darken at that, he quickly pressed ahead. “But it’s okay, because I volunteered for it! Severance said the Night Mare would be impressed if I showed bravery and accepted the consequences for when I messed up! And, you know…and now we match.” A hopeful smile punctuated the end of his explanation, glancing between the wounds on his foreleg and the barbed wire wrapped around Lex’s.
Lex didn’t answer immediately, save to let go of his hoof, and Fruit Crunch felt his heart pounding as he waited for his hero’s reaction to everything they’d just sprung on him. A glance out of the corner of his eyes showed that his friends were similarly tense, watching Lex’s face with nervous expressions. But when Lex didn’t say anything after several seconds, Fruit Crunch couldn’t stand to wait anymore, and was just about to ask him what he thought when the older stallion spoke up first.
“Why did you do this?”
“Why?” echoed Fruit Crunch, not having expected that question. Wasn’t it obvious? “Because…I want to be like you! We all do! You’re strong and you’re brave and you help everypony and you never give up, no matter what happens! And you said…” He had to pause, swallowing his nervousness. “You said that it was admirable, the way I…the way we fought that Silhouette guy before.” He gave Lex a pleading look, desperately wanting him to understand. “I know you don’t want anypony else to be in danger, but we can help now! So just…just…” Faltering, he struggled to come up with the right words. “So just give us a chance! Give me a chance!”
“Crunchy…” murmured Cleansweep, her heart aching at just how badly her friend needed Lex’s approval. Please, don’t say anything cruel to him, she prayed silently as she looked at the older pony. It had become common knowledge throughout the camp that Lex wasn’t the friendliest of ponies, but if he said something awful right now, she had no doubt that it would break Fruit Crunch’s heart. Just like my mom…
“Th-that’s right!” she blurted suddenly. “We did this…I did this because I want to help.” Catching Fruit Crunch’s eye as he turned to look at her, she gave him a smile that came from the bottom of her heart. I’m not just going to stand here and do nothing while my best friend is hurting, she decided. I’m a healer! When she looked back at Lex a moment later, her face was one of conviction. “I want to help the ponies who are important to me, however I can.”
“So do I.” Straightlace stomped a hoof lightly. “I want to figure out what I can do to make things here better, instead of just doing what my dad…or anypony else says!”
Clutching Tiddlywinks to her chest, Fiddlesticks nodded. “I thought my little brother was the only family I had left. But now, I feel like we’ve both found a new one. I want to be there for all of them…” She made herself look over at the others then, meeting their eyes one by one. “I want to be there for all of you.”
“I, um…” Shaking slightly, Feathercap shielded his face with his binoculars. But a moment later, he let out a slow breath and put them down, mustering up his courage. “I was really happy last night, when everyone said how good my plan was.” Gulping, he drew himself up to his full height. “I thought…I used to think that it was enough to just watch everything from far away, but now…now I want to try and do more. To help out and make a contribution.”
“You guys…” Looking back at his friends, Fruit Crunch didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or cry, and very nearly did both. Barely managing to maintain his composure, Fruit Crunch turned back to Lex, his expression now one of pride rather than desperation. “So there you have it,” he beamed. “That’s why we became the Night Mare’s Knights.”
There was nothing more to do then, Fruit Crunch knew, except wait for Lex’s reaction. But for some reason, the prospect of the stallion’s disapproval no longer worried him the way it had a few moments ago. He still wanted it, of course, but now it didn’t seem like it would rip his heart out if Lex didn’t appreciate everything that they’d done. Even so, Fruit Crunch leaned forward slightly as he saw Lex start to open his mouth…
“I wasn’t talking to any of you.”
Fruit Crunch blinked, completely nonplussed by that answer. He wasn’t alone, as he saw his friends all glance at each other in confusion. “I…what?”
“I was talking,” continued Lex, “to Severance.”
He hadn’t even finished speaking when his horn lit up with a churning aura of deep purple, a matching one surrounding the floating scythe instantaneously. A second later he yanked the weapon toward him, catching it with one hoof. “Why,” he repeated, glaring up at the blade dispassionately, “did you do this?”
Fruit Crunch could only guess at the scythe’s answer, but it didn’t seem to please Lex, his lip curling. “I’m the one who makes that decision,” he growled. “Not you.” Still holding the scythe in his telekinetic aura, he turned and started walking back toward the train station without so much as a backwards glance.
Despite his newfound confidence, Fruit Crunch still took a step after him. “Lex…?”
To his mild surprise and relief, Lex stopped, glancing back at him. “I’m speaking with Princesses Celestia and Luna at noon in the train station,” he announced. “When I’m done with them, I want all of you to come find me. We’ll discuss what’s happened to you then.” Without another word, he resumed walking.
For a moment, Fruit Crunch didn’t move. Then, with a smile so wide that it almost hurt his cheeks, he jumped up and punched the air.
“Once I’ve finished conferring with Celestia and Luna,” intoned Lex darkly once he’d gotten far enough away from the foals and their creatures that they couldn’t overhear him, glaring at Severance as he spoke, “you’re going to kill those animals and break whatever connection those children have forged with the Night Mare.”
Unsurprisingly, the scythe objected to that, pointing out that such a course of action would run directly counter to the Night Mare’s interests. But Lex only sneered; that had been Severance’s answer when he asked it why it had facilitated a link between those foals and the goddess: that it was what the Night Mare wanted. “I don’t care about the Night Mare’s interests,” replied Lex without a second’s hesitation. “Her wants and desires don’t matter to me in the slightest.”
The barbed wire around his left foreleg reacted immediately to the statement, tightening sharply enough to draw blood. Similarly, Severance immediately came to a stop. Lex had been carrying it out in front of him in his telekinetic aura, wanting to look at the weapon as he spoke to it, but now it refused to be moved. Instead, it turned so the point of its blade was facing toward him, pointing out that he’d sworn to bring followers into the goddess’s fold.
“Do not remind me of my promises,” hissed Lex softly, stepping to within a foot the weapon’s sharp point. “I’ll give the Night Mare the worshipers I said I would, but in the time and manner of my choosing. Mine. Not hers and not yours. And those worshipers will not include children who lack the ability to appreciate what they’re getting involved with!” He could feel his anger starting to flare up then, upset by how Severance had taken advantage of the naiveté of Fruit Crunch and his friends, and he desperately tried to fan his displeasure into a familiar rage. But the towering fury and righteous indignation he wanted to feel wouldn’t come, and his burgeoning anger faded into bitterness a moment later.
That was sufficient to send a pang of worry through Lex. He knew himself well enough to know that bitterness was the forerunner of despair, and despair was the gateway to giving up. That was something that had to be avoided at all costs; the absolute nature of his convictions, the convictions that he’d spent his life rigorously formulating and examining and refining, was what allowed Lex to keep going in the face of a world – or rather, a world full of other people – that steadfastly refused to make sense, no matter how often he tried to understand them. If a bout of hopelessness ever caused him to abandon his principles, to stop striving to live up to the ideals that he knew were right, then it would be the end of everything. No matter that there were stories, both testimonial and fictitious, of people succumbing to despair only to shake it off later (usually because of some maudlin display of friendship or something similarly trite). If something failed once then it could conceivably fail again, and Lex refused to entertain that level of uncertainty about his ability to conduct himself correctly; that he had to do so with regards to how everyone else conducted themselves already bordered on unbearable.
And yet that level of confidence in himself was becoming harder and harder to sustain. Bad enough that he’d had to struggle so much to accomplish so little since coming to Vanhoover; at least progress had been made. No matter how incremental they might have been, and how immensely he’d had to struggle to achieve them, things had been advancing. But now…now it was all threatening to come apart. His relationships with Aria, Nosey, and worst of all Sonata were all fraying, if not already in tatters. The princesses had shown up with the apparent intent of throwing even more obstacles in his way. And now some of the most vulnerable members of the population he was ostensibly protecting – a group of innocent children who had already put themselves in situations of unacceptable danger – were trafficking with powers that they couldn’t possibly comprehend. It was like he couldn’t complete one task without some new problem cropping up, hindering his ability to build on what successes he’d had and lay the foundations for more.
Even now, Severance was still daring to try and justify what it had done, pointing out how those children had come to it of their own accord and asked for instructions on finding favor with the Night Mare. “Then you should have refused them,” retorted Lex. “Only adults of sound mind have the cognitive maturity to fully fathom what it means to enter into an agreement of such significance, and even then the matter is alien enough that the ponies here would still need the particulars explained to them by someone experienced in such things. That’s why I conferred with Cloudbank privately before instructing her on how to petition the Night Mare for spells.”
The weapon’s rejoinder made Lex frown. “Of course I needed no such instruction,” he scoffed. “I’ve spent time on Everglow, and was able to observe and analyze such arrangements directly. Nopony here can…say…the same…” Lex hadn’t planned on ending his counterarguments there, but found himself unable to continue speaking, his attention captured by what was happening a short distance away.
Aria was exiting one of the outpatient tents…with a stallion.
The sight sent Lex's thoughts whirling, but he clamped down on them immediately. There was absolutely no reason to presume anything about why the two of them had been in there together. For all he knew, that stallion was an acquaintance of hers who was ill and she’d simply been checking on him. Or perhaps they’d simply been discussing something and wanted to get out of the sun. There was no reason to think that anything untoward had happened between them.
But Aria is spiteful and untrustworthy by nature, Lex told himself as he turned and started toward the two of them, barely noticing that Severance was letting him telekinetically pull it along again. She tried to kill me when I first met her, and later attempted to flee to the Crystal Empire with Comfy Cozy and Produce Aisle. There’s no basis to assume good conduct on her part. It wasn’t implausible that Aria had enchanted that stallion for some reason, particularly with how acrimonious she’d been when she’d stormed out of the train station before. Really, checking on the two of them was imperative, for everypony’s safety.
The pair were speaking animatedly, and as he got closer Lex could make out snatches of their conversation. “-again later?” asked the stallion, a green pegasus that Lex vaguely remembered as one of the ponies who’d protested their initial arrival at the camp, thinking that they’d spread the ghoul plague.
His question, whatever it was, made Aria roll her eyes. “Look, let’s just go see Princess Whatsherface, and then maybe-” She abruptly stopped talking as she caught sight of Lex. For a second she scowled, but then a vicious smile crossed her lips.
“Aria?” The pegasus stallion cocked his head. “What are you looking aAAAHHH!” Leaping almost a foot in the air at the sight of Lex Legis heading toward them, stony-faced and scythe drawn, the stallion immediately spread his wings, but didn’t have a chance to flap them as Aria’s foreleg shot out and wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him back down and pulling him against her.
“Well well well,” drawled Aria. “Look who’s here. Lex, meet Disc Jockey. My new boyfriend.” The last three words were accompanied by a self-satisfied grin, her voice dripping with smugness.
“H-hi,” squeaked Disc Jockey, his ears folding back and his face pale.
Lex barely glanced at the shivering stallion, his eyes trained squarely on Aria. “What are you doing, Aria?” he growled. The anger that he’d wanted so badly a minute ago was coming easily to him now, but he didn’t notice.
Aria, however, did, and the sight made her grin wider. “Oh, I’ve been doing this guy right here,” she purred, nuzzling Disc Jockey even as his eyes widened. “He just got done popping my cherry, and I have to tell you, it was incredible.” She almost moaned the last word, eyes fluttering closed as if still enraptured by the memory.
“Uh…” Disc Jockey’s eyes flitted between the beautiful mare complimenting his masculinity and the frigid-faced stallion holding the magic scythe in front of him. “We, uh…w-we should really get go-”
“I meant,” hissed Lex, and there was no mistaking the menace in his voice now, “why are you intent on seeing Princess Celestia?”
“Hm?” Slowly opening her eyes, Aria smirked at him. “Oh, DJ here said he’d take me to meet her. But now I’m thinking we might just to spend the day in bed together.” Stretching languidly, she kept her foreleg wrapped tightly around Disc Jockey, defeating the stallion’s attempt to back away slowly. “I mean, he was on me like a panther just now, so long and strong and…thick.” She ran her tongue over her lips then, leaving no doubt what she meant.
His jaw clenched, Lex turned his gaze to the stallion by Aria’s side, calling on his circlet so that he could examine the stallion and make sure that he hadn’t been enchanted. But Disc Jockey had no way of knowing that, seeing only that Lex was glaring at him silently, and the sight made his shaking grow worse. “N-no…” he whimpered. “It’s not…not like that…”
“Aw, no need to be so modest,” smirked Aria, her eyes still firmly planted on Lex. “I’m just happy I found a real stallion here, who’ll take what he wants instead of chickening out at the last minute.” Leaning over, she planted a kiss on the side of Disc Jockey’s head.
Lex’s eyes turned green, purple contrails erupting from the outer corners as he turned his gaze back to Aria then. There hadn’t been any magic on Disc Jockey, but that was the last thing on his mind now. “I’ve heard enough-”
But he wasn’t able to finish as Disc Jockey – unable to take the rising tension any longer – doubled over and threw up noisily. Barely avoiding the frothy deluge, Aria flung herself away from him, shrieking in disgust. It was only after he’d completely emptied his stomach that Disc Jockey looked up at Lex, tears in his eyes as he coughed and sniffled. “Nothing happened!” he gasped fearfully. “I swear!”
“Hey!” yelled Aria, all pretense of affection gone now. “Shut up!”
But Disc Jockey kept going. “She said she wasn’t your girlfriend! I just asked if she wanted to go see Princess Celestia, but she said we should go into one of those tents and d-d-do it! But on my mother’s life, we didn’t!”
“Only because you finished before we even got started,” jeered Aria, her voice mocking and cruel. “Honestly, what kind of guy blows his load just from a little tongue-kissing? You should change your name to Quick Shot so that girls know what to expect from you.”
She might have said more, but Lex – his eyes now back to the normal color – spoke up before she could. “Leave us,” he ordered Disc Jockey. “Now.”
The pegasus stallion didn’t need to be told twice. Still sniffling, he flapped his wings and unsteadily lifted off, heading south toward the river. “Yeah, go ahead and run away, loser!” taunted Aria as he fled. “And by the way! It’s small! Really, really small!”
“And you’re pathetic,” snapped Lex. “I’m not surprised that you tried to engineer some sort of petty revenge, but even for you this was feeble.”
Sneering, Aria sauntered over to him. “Right, because that’s why you looked like your head was about to explode when you thought I slept with that guy. But you know what? You’re right. That was feeble. I think instead I’ll just go have a nice long chat with that princess instead. I bet we'll be able to find all sorts of things to talk abou-” She stopped suddenly, giving a frustrated cry of surprise as she looked behind Lex. Turning his head, he easily spotted what had gotten that reaction from her.
Princess Celestia had taken flight, leaving a crowd of waving ponies behind as she headed back towards River's mansion.
Her face frozen in a rictus grin, Nosey struggled to wrap her head around what Sonata had just said. “…huh?”
“You and I should totes make out!” repeated Sonata, smiling widely. “That’s, like, absolutely guaranteed to bring Kara running!”
“But…but we’re…I mean, why would…that’s…” sputtered Nosey incoherently. The fact that Sonata had even proposed such an idea was embarrassing enough, but the way she was being so casual about it somehow made it even worse. “W-we can’t do that!” she managed at last.
Blinking, Sonata cocked her head. “Why not?”
“Because…” With no answer coming to mind, Nosey went with the first thing she was able to think of. “Because it won’t work!”
“Aw, sure it will!” Her smile returning, Sonata took a step closer to her. “You said that we could catch Kara’s attention if we did something that has to do with love, and this is, like, perfect! You’re my best friend, and I really love you for that, so if we start going at it then we can totes kick things up a notch! We can be, um…” She paused for a moment, putting a hoof to her chin. “Hm. What comes after besties? Oh! I know!” Her eyes lit up with excitement. “We can be besties with benefits!”
“‘Besties with…b-b-benefits’?” stammered Nosey, her face almost aching from how red she’d become. Does she even know what “with benefits” means?! Swaying dizzily, she suddenly found herself remembering some of the more lurid fantasies she’d had since coming to Vanhoover. Inspired by romance novels, they’d mostly revolved around Lex giving up on Sonata and pursuing her instead…mostly. A few of them had explored more scandalous territory, where Lex – a stallion who was as dominant as he was demanding – didn’t choose between them but instead decided that he wanted them both. And while Nosey was under no illusions that she was knowledgeable about the details of such an arrangement, even she knew that when three people went to bed together, it was unrealistic to expect two of them not to touch each other…
But it was one thing to engage in some titillating fantasies in the privacy of her thoughts, and another to suddenly be confronted by them in broad daylight. Hence why Nosey found herself backing away from Sonata, shaking her head so hard she felt almost dizzy. “No, no way, nuh-uh, not happening!” she babbled, panic causing the words to spill from her lips in rapid succession.
“Aw, but you said you’d help me out!” pouted Sonata, a crestfallen look on her face as her ears folded back. “Please Nosey, I really need to talk to Kara!”
A flash of guilt made Nosey bite her lip, trying to figure out some way to avoid what Sonata was proposing without going back on her offer of assistance. “Look, there has to be something else we can try…”
A helpless shrug accompanied Sonata’s expectant look. “Okay. What?”
“Um…” Nosey wracked her brain, hoping against hope that a flash of inspiration would strike. But as the seconds ticked by, the only thing that came to her was an upswing of nervous tension.
Sonata frowned at the silence. “Look, if you have a better idea I’m, like, all for it,” she huffed. “But if you don’t then I say let’s make with the smooches and see if it works. Now pucker up!” With that she strode toward the blonde mare, clearly intent on locking lips with her.
Nosey immediately began backing up, her heart once again hammering in her chest. “W-wait a second! Sonata, wait a second! We can-, oof!” Her protests were cut off as her back leg hit the edge of a cobblestone that was slightly higher than the ones around it, sending her tumbling to land heavily on her back.
Momentarily dizzied by the fall, there wasn’t anything she could do as Sonata moved to stand over her, planting her hooves on either side of her to prevent her from escaping. “There we go!” cheered Sonata. “Now just relax and enjoy. I don’t wanna brag or anything, but I’m, like, super good at this.”
With that she started to lower her head, and Nosey didn’t have time to think, instead blurting out a half-formed thought. “This is why you’re mad at Lex!”
The words made Sonata stop in mid-motion, her face only a few inches away from Nosey’s. “Huh?”
“Er, I mean…” It took Nosey a few seconds for her brain to catch up to what her mouth had just said. That was made all the more difficult by how close Sonata was; the blue shades of her mane were tumbling down around them, framing a face that she knew belonged to one of the most beautiful mares in all of Equestria. But while she’d never paid too much attention to her friend’s looks before (besides a combination of mild admiration and even milder jealousy), now it was impossible for her to think of anything else, swallowing nervously as she couldn’t help but compare the soft pink of her lips to the raspberry hue of her eyes, both of them set against the gentle bluish white of her coat and oh sweet Celestia what was she thinking about?!
Desperately forcing her brain back on track before Sonata got impatient and closed the last little bit of distance between them, Nosey spoke up. “Think about it,” she gulped. “You’re mad at Lex because he was, you know…g-getting closer to Aria.” That was the best way she could phrase it; right at that moment, saying anything even slightly more explicit was more embarrassing than she could bring herself to do. “So if w-we…you know…do s-stuff, won’t it be the same thing that you’re mad at him for?”
“Pfft, of course not,” scoffed Sonata. “We’re just two best friends kissing a little, but he was gonna go all the way with my sister. That’s, like, totes different!”
“I don’t know if that’s true…” murmured Nosey, unable to meet Sonata’s eyes at the frank description of what was apparently about to happen.
But to her surprise Sonata didn’t try and push things, instead giving her a sympathetic smile. “Hey,” she said gently. “I get it.”
Nosey’s eyebrows went up, not at all sure what Sonata meant by that. “You do?”
“Uh-huh. This is part of how you’re all nervous about everything all the time now because of what happened to you, right?”
It took Nosey a moment to realize that Sonata was talking about Xiriel, mostly because the idea that the devil was the reason she was uncomfortable right now made no sense whatsoever. But Nosey knew better than to give up on a potential exit from the extremely awkward position she was in. “Y-yeah. That’s right.”
“Thought so,” grinned Sonata, quite clearly pleased with her powers of observation, before giving Nosey a warm look. “Well, don’t you worry, I totes don’t want you to do this if you’re feeling freaked out by it.”
A shudder of relief – at least, she was pretty sure it was relief – ran down Nosey’s spine. “Oh. Oh wow, thanks. That’s-”
“So it’s a good thing,” chirped Sonata breezily, “that I’ve got just the spell to get your motor running!” Without further ado, she began to sing a quick tune, her voice turning provocative as the syllables left her lips.
Nosey’s eyes widened in shock, realizing she had just made a serious mistake. She had always accepted Sonata using magic to help her out whenever she’d been overcome with trauma-induced anxiety before, and now Sonata thought she was asking for her to use it on her again! A protest immediately sprang to her lips, but Sonata was faster, finishing her spell before Nosey had a chance to utter a sound.
“There we go,” purred Sonata as she felt her spell take effect. Smiling down at the mare under her, she pitched her idea again. “So, feel like making out with me now?”
Her answer came in the form of Nosey slowly reaching upward – one hoof gently tracing the cascade of soft blue hair upward to caress Sonata’s cheek, before moving further up and curling behind her head – and pulling her down into a passionate kiss.
As soon as Sonata’s lips touched hers Nosey’s eyes fluttered close, a sensual moan escaping her throat. All of her hesitation was completely gone now, replaced by a driving need for the mare standing over her. A second later Sonata leaned down further, deepening the kiss, and Nosey felt herself heat up, a pleasant tingling in her lower belly making her shiver. Then Sonata laid down on top of her, pressing every inch of that soft, perfect, feminine body against hers, and Nosey couldn’t stop herself from bucking her hips upward against her, the sudden spike of pleasure so intense that it made her throw her head back and gasp, eyes wide and staring at nothing as her mind tried to deal with what her body was telling her.
“Atta girl,” murmured Sonata, leaning down to nuzzle her neck. The sensation of Sonata’s tongue on her skin made Nosey cry out in need, but the other mare stopped after a second to speak quietly, her breath hot against Nosey’s throat. “You see this, Kara? You wanna come talk to me now?”
The delay, as Sonata called out to the goddess, was only for a moment, but for Nosey it bordered on agony. She could already feel herself starting to cool down, and the frustration from being brought to such a high only for it to recede was a torture great enough that she didn’t hesitate to beg. “Sonata,” she whimpered. “More! Please!”
Giggling softly, Sonata lifted her head back up. “Sure. We have to try our very best to get her here.” She didn’t hesitate to make good on that, shifting forward enough to rub every inch of herself across Nosey’s body as she resumed kissing her. Almost spasming from the renewed sensations, Nosey found herself moaning into the kiss, and a moment later felt a thrill rush through her when the other mare’s tongue entered her mouth, running over her own and sending shudders down her spine, pooling below her waist. The sensation was enough that for a moment Nosey forgot how to breathe, and that was when Sonata’s lips left hers again, whispering another message to Kara. She might have been encouraging her to call out to her as well, but Nosey was beyond caring. Who needed Kara when there was already a sex goddess right here?
Fortunately, Sonata’s lips found hers again an instant later, and for several long, glorious moments the world was made up of nothing but ecstasy, each wave of pleasure rising and falling in conjunction with the press of their bodies against each other. But eventually, the sensations began to taper off, and Nosey almost cried as the bliss she’d been reveling in began to recede. No! she screamed silently. I want more! I NEED more!
Almost mad with unfulfilled desire, Nosey rolled them both over, holding Sonata close as she moved the other mare onto her back. The move was enough to earn another giggle from Sonata. “Oh wow! You’re, like, really into it, even though my spell’s already worn off!”
But Nosey was beyond paying attention to what was being said, as years of frustrated urges and desperate cravings roared through her, driving away all thoughts except the need for gratification. Hungrily, she leaned down and captured Sonata’s lips again, panting hotly as she bucked and writhed against the soft body underneath her. But it wasn’t enough, and it was a combination of instinct and half-remembered imaginings that made Nosey start to move lower, kissing down to Sonata’s neck, then her chest, then her belly…
Panting from how unexpectedly heated the make out session had become, Sonata only belatedly realized what was about to happen. “Nosey? Nosey, hey, what’re you-, oh!” Her eyes widened and her body shuddered as the blonde mare reached her destination. “OH!”
As it turned out, this wasn’t so different from what Lex and Aria had done after all.
A little while later, Sonata was still on her back, staring up at the sky as she tried to get her breathing under control. Licking her lips, which still tasted of Nosey – in more ways than one – she tried to process what had just happened. “I think,” she began after several seconds of careful consideration, “that it was, like, a really good thing we did all that stretching first.”
No response came, and Sonata glanced over at Nosey. The other mare was close enough to touch, and like Sonata was lying on her back and breathing heavily, draping one foreleg across her eyes and obscuring her face from view. Without meaning to, Sonata found herself watching Nosey’s chest rise and fall, the motions matching the sound of her slightly-labored breathing, so similar to how she’d panted when Lex had touched her during his research sessions to change Aria back…
The thought of her boyfriend and her sister made Sonata frown, looking upward again as she tried to deal with the sudden rush of guilt and confusion about what had just happened with Nosey. Did she still have any right to be mad at Lex and Aria now? Or was this payback, getting even with them for what they’d done? Neither option made her feel better, and she couldn’t help but groan. “Listen, I’m not trying to say anything about what just happened,” she sighed, “but I really wish this had gotten through to Kara. I seriously need to talk to her now.”
“Poor dear. What’s happened that you need my help so badly?”
“Huh?” Blinking, Sonata sat up. The voice had been Nosey’s, and looking over she saw that the blonde mare had shifted, lying on her side and giving her a bemused look. “Uh, Nosey?” asked Sonata tentatively. “You feeling okay?”
“Oh, Nosey’s doing just fine,” answered the other mare, stretching languidly. “She panicked a little bit when I arrived, something about a devil doing this to her before, but I’m talking her down now.” Glancing down between her hind legs as she sat up, the smirk that appeared on her face was very unlike Nosey’s usual smile, chuckling as she turned back to Sonata. “We’re lucky the rules are so different here. Usually it takes a literal death to call me like this, rather than a few ‘little deaths.’”
“Wait, what’s going on?” Climbing to her hooves, Sonata couldn’t keep her confusion off of her face. “Oh geez, did I accidentally blow your mind, too?”
A mellifluous laugh came from Nosey’s lips. “Oh Sonata, I’ve missed you.” Putting a hoof to her chest, she gave her a knowing look. “It’s me. Kara. Thanks to you, I’m able to borrow Nosey’s body for a little bit.”
Sonata’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “Wait, Kara?! For realsies?!”
“In the temporarily-adopted flesh,” chuckled the goddess. “Now, tell me what’s troubling you.”
River sighed as she closed the door to Piggy’s room, rolling her eyes for what had to be the twentieth time in as many minutes.
After Lex’s abrupt dismissal, she’d returned to her manor, having barely made it in the door when Trotsworth informed her that her son hadn’t come down to breakfast. That had been plenty unusual in and of itself; Piggy never missed a meal unless something was wrong. But the fact that he’d apparently barricaded his room had been enough to leave the staff at a loss, which explained why Trotsworth would bring something as mundane as a simple parenting issue to her attention.
In another circumstance she would simply have told him to have some of the servants force their way into the room and deal with whatever tantrum her son was having, but under the current circumstances that would have been a bad idea. While River had seen Princess Celestia out and about on her way back to her manor, Trotsworth had confirmed that Princess Luna hadn’t left. If the staff had to break down the door or if Piggy made a ruckus then the princess might be disturbed, and that was something River wanted to avoid if at all possible. Even with Vanhoover’s old power structure gone, it was still prudent to save face in front of the alicorns if at all possible, especially since she didn’t want them looking too closely at little things like why she didn’t have the scythe-shaped mark on her face anymore…
So she’d resigned herself to personally dealing with whatever problem Piggy was having. She’d known that it wasn’t really a waste of time; since Lex had dismissed her, she was basically just waiting for him to call on her again so that they could go over the ledger of the Banks’ family finances. But it had still been irritating that she’d needed to deal with such a minor inconvenience all by herself.
That feeling had been compounded by how it had taken nearly five whole minutes of coaxing to get Piggy to let her in, and then another ten to get him to open up about what was bothering him. “The p-p-princesses are g-gonna throw me in-T-T-Tartarus!” he’d wailed, before recounting how he’d apparently fallen in with some kind of street gang after the floodwaters had receded. River hadn’t known whether to be horrified at the knowledge that her son had apparently become some sort of thug in her absence or burst out laughing that he thought that Celestia and Luna had come here specifically to punish him for it.
Of course, she knew better than to do either; after all, his staying in his room like this nicely kept him from being underhoof while the princesses were here. That, and this was a chance to remind him of who the most important mare in his life was, in case that Granola Bar tart dared to show her face here again. Thus, she’d gently reassured him that the princesses wouldn’t do anything to him so long as she was here, wiping his eyes and tousling his hair and asking a few pointed questions about the ruffians that he’d fallen in with. She hadn’t been able to learn much about Granola Bar though, since she’d avoided asking about her directly; she’d already intercepted and countermanded Piggy’s order to the staff to tell him if that mare ever showed up again, so there was no reason to broach the issue otherwise.
After a few minutes she’d managed to calm Piggy down to where he was no longer trying to turn his room into a fortress, but was still too intimidated to venture outside, instead asking for food to be sent up to him until the princesses left. That was an arrangement that River had no problem with, since it kept him from being underhoof while she tried to manage things. “Speaking of which…” she muttered to herself as she caught sight of a nearby grandfather clock. Looking at it for a moment, she turned down a nearby hallway and made her way toward the guest quarters. Her manor was spacious enough that it took her a minute to reach her destination, but as she rounded the last corner she came to a halt.
A black-and-white stallion with a withered hind leg was standing guard outside of the princesses’ room.
Slowing her pace just for a moment as the two-toned pony looked at her, River plastered a smile across her face as she strode up to him. “Hi there,” she began, her voice warm and easy thanks to years of practice. “You’re Silhouette, right? I’m River Bank, and-”
“Keep your voice down,” interrupted Silhouette. “The goddess is resting, and I won’t have you disturbing her.”
River chuckled in a manner that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with showing him how little she thought of his warning. “That’s the thing. You see, it’s going to be noon in a little while, and Princess Luna has an important meeting then.”
“I’m fully aware of the time,” replied Silhouette, the disinterest in his voice making it clear that “fully aware of” meant “couldn’t care less about.” “Now,” he continued, “if you have no other business here, you’ll need to leave.”
If things had been how they were before Vanhoover had flooded, River wouldn’t have hesitated to tear the little twerp a new one for thinking that he could order her around in her own home. But she had already made the mistake of thinking that way with Lex, and it had resulted in her being cursed horribly. She wasn’t about to make that blunder a second time. “You’re not concerned that she’ll be late for her appointment?” she asked, putting just enough of an edge into her words to make clear the implication that if that happened, it would be his fault.
But Silhouette merely snorted. “She is the goddess Luna. If others have to wait for her to grace them with her presence, then they should do so thankfully. Anypony who thinks that she should inconvenience herself for their benefit…” He turned so that he was facing her directly then, taking a single step in her direction, “…will have to answer to me.”
A single, mocking laugh was River’s response. She had learned her lesson about throwing her weight around so carelessly, but that didn’t mean that she needed to roll over either. “And I’m sure you’ll do a very good job of it, unless you have to deal with a group of unarmed children.” She hadn’t seen last night’s debacle, having arrived shortly after it had ended, but Sonata and Nosey had been happy to tell her all about it over breakfast that morning.
Silhouette stiffened in indignation, the barb quite clearly striking a nerve. “You need to leave,” he growled. “Right now.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Putting a hoof to her chin, River pretended to consider his words. “I certainly wouldn’t want to defy a member of the Royal Guard.” She looked him over then, slowly and deliberately. “I mean, you are a member of the Royal Guard, aren’t you? You were wearing that armor last night…”
The look of outrage that crossed his face then was priceless, pearly white teeth appearing as his lips curled back in a snarl. “You…!”
“I suppose I’ll be off, then. Do give the princess my regards when she wakes up, won’t you?” Her voice was sweet, but the smirk that River gave Silhouette was one of pure triumph as she turned around and began walking away. She didn’t think that he’d actually use his magic on her – Nosey had emphasized how Luna had taken him to task for going too far last night, hence why he wasn't dressed like a member of the Guard anymore – but it was better to play it safe. Besides, even if he had kept her from scoring any points with Princess Luna by making sure she was able to get to her conference with Lex on time, River knew full well that she’d won the exchange they’d just had. I might not have any magic, she congratulated herself silently, but I’m still somepony you don’t want to take lightly.
She was still smiling about what had just happened as she walked through the hallways, turning a corner-
And almost colliding with Princess Celestia.
Her eyes widening at the near miss, River immediately bowed. “Your Highness, forgive me. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
Princess Celestia’s smile was genuine, rather than the belittling smirk that River so often used. “It’s perfectly alright, River, I'm just as much at fault. I admit that I was having a little trouble finding my way back to the room you so generously lent to Luna and me.”
That was enough to make River frown slightly. “I apologize. One of the servants should have offered to show you the way. I’ll have a word with Trotsworth about this.” Someone, in all likelihood, would lose their job over this.
But while she hadn’t let her emotions show on her face, Princess Celestia seemed to know what she was thinking, a look of mild concern crossing her face. “Actually they did, but I said that wasn’t necessary. I didn’t want to take them away from what they were doing.” Her expression changed into one of mild embarrassment then. “Though I suppose that’s why I got lost.”
“I understand,” replied River diplomatically. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that the princess had just indicated that she didn’t want anypony disciplined over this incident, and River had no intention of denying her such a small indulgence. “Your room is down this hallway,” she pointed behind her, “and to the left.”
It didn’t escape Princess Celestia’s gaze that River was pointing out the hallway she was coming from. “Is everything alright with Luna? I thought she was sleeping.”
“Oh, she is. I thought she might need to be woken up, but Princess Luna’s, er…retainer, Silhouette, is there and, well…apparently I’m not welcome.” River made sure to give a pained smile at that, wanting to make sure that Princess Celestia picked up on the impropriety of one of her entourage denying her access to her own house.
Apparently she succeeded. “Please allow me to apologize for Silhouette,” insisted Princess Celestia. “He cares about my sister a great deal, but he can get a little…overzealous at times. I’ll have a word with him.”
River bowed again. “Thank you, Your Highness.” She kept her head dipped until she heard the princess pass her by, glancing back just in time to see the princess turn the corner. For a moment River was tempted to hang back and listen to the exchange between the Princess Celestia and Silhouette, but she pushed that urge away. There was no need to be petty in victory, and besides, if Princess Celestia told Silhouette to get lost, she didn’t want him to bump into her in the hallways, at least not without plenty of witnesses around in case he tried something.
Now all that’s left to do, River decided as she headed back toward the dining room in search of an early lunch, is to figure out if I should ask Lex if I can join in this noontime conference of his. He’d woken up in a bad mood for whatever reason, and the last thing River wanted to do was tick him off more, but at the same time this was quite clearly going to be an important meeting. Missing out on it would be missing an opportunity to make herself relevant in Lex’s future plans. But I probably shouldn’t attend unless he asks for me, decided River. Now that I’ve repaired my relationship with him, it’d be smarter to play it safe for the time- Her train of thought came to an abrupt halt as she walked into the dining room and saw the scene in front of her.
Sitting at the head of the table – the space that was reserved for River herself – was a very familiar-looking mare. Sitting back with her hind legs up on the table, a half-dozen servants dancing attendance on her, making sure that her every need was met and then some. One was massaging her shoulders over the back of the chair. Another was gently rubbing a file over one of her fore-hooves, giving her a hooficure. A third was combing her mane, while three others concerned themselves with the meal set out in front of her, making sure the food was cut into bite-sized chunks and spiced correctly before carefully raising the fork to her mouth. Altogether, it was the very picture of opulence…and it was happening to somepony who wasn’t her, in her own house.
“What exactly is going on here?” River snapped. Her irritation skyrocketed when the servants barely seemed to hear her, continuing to lavish attendance on the pony seated in their midst. The only one who paid attention to her was that pony herself, opening her eyes and giving her the same mocking smile that River herself had so recently given to Silhouette.
Or at least, they weren’t coming back in time for his meeting with the alicorns. Of that much, Lex felt certain. By his estimation, there was roughly an hour to go until he conferred with Celestia and Luna, and with each minute that passed the chances of Nosey, Sonata, and Aria coming back in time seemed more and more remote.
They’d have to return at some point, Lex knew. Even in the worst-case scenario, where they all decided to cut ties with him permanently (despite Sonata having assured him that she’d never do that again), there was simply nowhere else for them to go. With the trains not having resumed regular service to the city yet, and no boats available besides River’s, which he’d sent back to Tall Tale with the ponies most in need of hospitalization, Vanhoover was still very much an isolated city. Even the princesses had only arrived by taking a train to Tall Tale – apparently Nosey had sent in an article about his exploits there which had caused the repairs to the tracks to be expedited, particularly since she’d included what Sonata had told her about how the tracks had been broken three times over – and then having their guards pull pegasus chariots over the swamp between the cities in rotating shifts. The only way for the girls to leave now would be if they asked the princesses to take them along when they left, and that would at least be easy to monitor; Celestia and Luna couldn’t seem to go anywhere without a full complement of guards and more than a few ponies following them around and gawking. One way or another, Sonata, Aria, and Nosey were stuck here with him, at least for now.
Nor was Lex overly worried that the girls’ continued absence was due to some sort of threat to their safety. As much as he still felt responsible for having overlooked Xiriel’s presence, and had heightened his precautions accordingly, there were no indications of any further threats that he’d been able to find. Utilizing his circlet at random points when he’d looked around the camp over the last few days had turned up no unusual magic auras, River’s safe arrival and his using her boat to send injured ponies to Tall Tale lent further credence to there being no more seaborne threats around the city, and Severance hadn’t seen anything unusual during the times when he’d posted it at the edge of the camp…though it’s deliberately omitting how Fruit Crunch and his friends had been visiting it had left Lex more than a little skeptical of how much stock he could put in the weapon’s assurances. But with no remains around it to indicate that it had cut up any straggling ghouls, he’d let the issue go for the moment.
Which meant that the girls weren’t here now for only one reason: they didn’t want to be, despite knowing how important this conference was.
That wasn’t at all surprising where Aria was concerned, of course. The spiteful nag had, after seeing Princess Celestia head back to River’s manor, paused only long enough to throw several choice insults at him before trotting off in the same direction. Lex still had no idea why Aria was so intent on talking to the princess; most likely she’d either try and offer her some damaging information about him or would ask her for transportation out of the city. Neither possibility worried Lex overly much; Aria had no sensitive information to share when it came to him, and he planned on raising the issue of the princesses taking some ponies back with them when they left anyway. There were still sick and injured ponies here that, despite being labeled low-risk by the doctors, could benefit from being in a real hospital. And if that left no room for Aria to leave with them, well, that was just too bad.
Unless, of course, she tried to enchant the princesses. But Lex found it hard to believe that Aria would be that stupid. Even if she succeeded – which, based on the glimpse he’d gotten of Celestia’s power, seemed less than certain; the elder alicorn didn’t have his level of magical might, but she was still far stronger than the average unicorn – she had to know that he’d look Celestia and Luna over for magical auras once they were in his presence, and that her magic would immediately stand out. That was how he’d ferreted out Xiriel, after all, and Aria was one of the few ponies here who knew about the devil’s existence.
But if she did try and do something that foolish…
No, he decided at length. Aria will make a nuisance of herself, but that will be all she does. After all, she’d shown her entire hoof with that little stunt with Disc Jockey.
The memory of seeing the two of them together was still fresh in Lex’s mind, and it made him want to break something. He’d done his best not to telegraph how he’d felt, of course, but Aria had made it clear that she hadn’t been fooled. That was hardly surprising, since the jealousy he felt at the thought of her being with someone else was upsetting enough to make him snarl. Dark thoughts of cursing every stallion who so much as looked at Aria with the same impotence that he’d inflicted on Produce Aisle were still lurking in the back of his mind, and Lex found himself hoping that Disc Jockey was telling everypony about what had happened, warning them not to touch Aria – or Nosey or Sonata – lest they incur his wrath…
Thoughts of Nosey and Sonata filled him with a different sort of negativity. While Aria’s tantrum was no great surprise, Lex had held out hope that Nosey and Sonata would put aside their personal feelings about what had happened this morning and come back. But he hadn’t seen even a hint of them on his trip to retrieve Severance, and even though he’d known that there was very little chance that they’d have returned to the train station during his brief absence – since they’d left before he had – he’d still asked Feather Duster if she’d seen them in the time he’d been gone. That she’d answered in the negative hadn’t been unexpected, but it had been discouraging nonetheless.
Lex had briefly considered dragooning the pegasus maid into being his spokespony for the meeting, but he’d discarded that idea almost immediately. The simpering mare still shook when she looked him in the eye, giving him no confidence whatsoever that she could have performed Sonata’s duties adequately. But then, Lex doubted that anypony could have; as badly as she tended to mangle the precise phrasing of his statements, Sonata’s presence radiated such a vivacious conviviality that she was still able to communicate his sentiments to others despite her imprecise manner of speaking. Against all logic, she’d gotten others to listen to and accept his ideas without using the meticulous language that in theory should have accomplished the job better…even if it almost never had.
After all, Sonata had been the one who’d helped him broker his original deal with the alicorns for him to rule Vanhoover.
As for Nosey, what she lacked in charm she made up for in insight. While River and Sonata had eagerly told Princess Celestia most of what had happened in Vanhoover, Nosey had taken a different tact with Princess Luna, only offering information in exchange for information. It was because of Nosey that Lex knew about the angel that had informed Celestia and Luna about Severance's existence, for instance, and how that had been what finally convinced them to make the trip out here. While she might not have made the best interlocutor, she could have stood in for Sonata in a pinch.
But he’d apparently offended both of them badly enough that neither could countenance assisting him now, when it mattered most. It was the most stinging rebuke either mare could have made, and as much as Lex wanted to rage against them for letting their feelings interfere with something that was larger than either of them, he simply couldn’t summon up the righteous indignation to do so. Instead, all he felt was bitterness and regret that, when it counted most, this was what he inspired in the people closest to him.
Sighing, Lex moved to the center of the lobby and let Severance hang in the air in front of him. With barely an hour to go before his meeting with the alicorns, there was no longer any time to lament over what had happened. Instead, he’d prepare what magic he could in the time he had left, and then simply make do as best he could when the princesses arrived.
Beginning to gesture and chant, Lex put everything else out of his mind as he started to replenish his primary magic.
Once he was done, it would be time to face Celestia and Luna.
“…and then I returned here.”
Luna blinked blearily as Celestia finished relaying the events of her morning visit to Vanhoover’s refugee camp. Being a heavy sleeper meant that it was difficult for her to process so much information so soon after waking up, even when she knew it was important. Fortunately, her sister knew better than to press her for an immediate reaction, sitting back silently and allowing Luna some space to think. Seconds ticked by before Luna finally managed to make a reply. “So you still think that Lex Legis can be a force for good in Equestria?”
“I have to, Sister,” replied Celestia without hesitation. “I believe that he truly wants to help. Even if he’s going about it all wrong, his heart is still in the right place.”
Luna sighed. “You say that, Sister, but we both saw what’s going to happen.” She pointed to the door, having been told that Silhouette was standing guard on the other side of it.
Celestia didn’t need to ask what Luna meant. “Yes, but we don’t know what causes it, nor what happens afterward. That might make all the difference.”
“Do you think it will make a difference to Silhouette?” countered Luna.
Celestia had no answer for that, and Luna continued. “If Lex truly wished to help, he wouldn’t deal out misery so freely. Not to the ponies he’s cursed, and not to Silhouette, regardless of what sort of provocation he might face a short while from now.”
“I don’t agree with his methods,” answered Celestia softly, looking down. “But I worry that showing him hostility will only drive him further away from harmony.”
Luna was silent again, before getting up and wrapping a wing around her sister. “You showed me nothing but love and kindness, and I still turned into Nightmare Moon.”
Celestia looked up at that, her surprise at the comparison written all over her face. “Luna, that’s different!”
“No, it’s not,” replied Luna. “It’s exactly the same. I think that Lex Legis is exactly like how I used to be, and I don’t think that we can stop him from becoming a monster any more than you could have stopped me.”
“Luna-”
“But I know you don’t agree, and I don’t want this to become a point of friction between us. And…” She sighed before continuing. “And if there’s even the slightest chance that I’m wrong, then he deserves an opportunity to prove it."
That was enough to bring a smile to Celestia's face. "Thank you, Luna."
Luna, however, didn't return the expression. "You said that you saw that evil artifact of his at the edge of the camp, surrounded by a group of foals?"
"Yes." Cocking her head slightly at the abrupt change in topic, Celestia nodded. She'd gone back to the camp on hoof, wanting to enjoy the walk, and the crowd of ponies that had seen her coming had kept her from spotting the floating scythe and the children around it until taken to the air to fly back to River's manor. By that point, it had been too late to ask Lex about why there were children gathered around a weapon that had slaughtered legions of angels. But she'd intended to bring it up at the conference, and had told Luna as much, so why was she bringing it up now?
Her answer came a moment later. "Children shouldn't be anywhere near such a thing. Given that Lex is allowing them to get so close to it, and because we know that he's going to use it to attack Silhouette, I think that – if we can resolve what happens in your vision peacefully – we should ask him to surrender that scythe. If he's willing to do that, then I'll agree to support you in trying to reform him peacefully." Taking her wing from around Celestia, Luna stood up and turned so she was looking at her directly. "But if he won't do this, if he insists on keeping that weapon with him even after what happens to my worshiper, then I can't accept giving him another chance." Knowing how Celestia would feel about issuing an ultimatum, Luna gave her a pleading look. "Sister, I don't think this is too much to ask, not when we've seen what he's going to do."
This time it was Celestia's turn to be silent, weighing what Luna had said. After a long, heavy silence, she made up her mind. "Alright, Luna. If we can talk Lex down, then we'll ask him to give up his scythe. If he does, then we'll keep reaching out to him. And if he doesn't..."
Sighing, Celestia made herself say the rest of it out loud. "...then he's our enemy."
“Oh my gosh!” squealed Sonata. “Kara! I’m so glad you’re here!”
Grinning, Kara tossed her mane – or rather, Nosey’s mane – over her shoulder. “Of course I am. You know I’ll always be there for you when you need help with your love life.”
“Yeah, but…” Her smile faltering, Sonata looked down for a moment before raising her eyes back to Kara’s. “How come you didn’t answer me when I called you all those times before? I mean, I’m super happy that you’re here now, but I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a while. You never show up in my dreams anymore, and I asked for your help a whole bunch of times when I was awake and you never answered, and I even offered you pie! I thought…” Her ears folding back, Sonata looked at the ground again. “I thought maybe you didn’t want to be my friend anymore…”
“Oh, Sonata.” Wearing an expression as though she’d just spied a homeless kitten in the rain, Kara closed the distance between them, hugging Sonata close and pulling her head to her chest. “How could I ever not want to be friends with somepony as sweet as you?” One hoof came up to gently stroke Sonata’s mane. “I know you’ve been having a hard time of it, and I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me. It’s just hard for me to manifest in this world right now. Just showing up like this took you and Nosey…well, you know.”
“But can’t you just appear in my dreams like you used to?” asked Sonata plaintively.
Kara shook her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that anymore.”
That answer earned a pout from Sonata. “But why n-”
“The important thing,” interrupted Kara smoothly, “is that I’m here right now. But I can’t stay like this for very long.” Gently disentangling herself from Sonata, Kara gave her a serious look. “Nosey’s filling me in on a lot of what’s been going on,” she explained, bringing a hoof up to tap her brow gently. “But I want to hear what’s happened from you.”
Sighing, Sonata nodded. “Okay, well, it all started a little while back when we ran into my sister, Aria…”
“…and so me and Nosey came out here and brainstormed how to get in touch with you and, well…I guess you know the rest.” Sonata managed a smile as she finished telling Kara what had happened, but it was a small one. She’d thought that getting all of that out would make her feel better, but instead she felt more discouraged now than she had before she’d started. “I just don’t know what to do…”
“So basically,” mused Kara, “you’re upset because Lex is cheating on you with your sister, right?” Shrugging nonchalantly, she gave Sonata an easy smile. “That’s not that difficult of a problem to solve. Just go tell Lex that he has to make a choice: Aria or you.”
Wincing at the idea, Sonata couldn’t look Kara in the face. “I guess I could do that…”
Raising an eyebrow at the other mare’s reticence, Kara cocked her head to the side. “But?”
“But what if he chooses Aria?” whimpered Sonata in a small voice.
This time both of Kara’s eyebrows went up. “You really think he’d do that?”
The question seemed to touch a nerve, making Sonata throw her forelegs up. “I don’t know!” she yelled, her ire clearly not directed at the goddess. “Aria’s, like, the worst! Worser than worst! But she and Lex are a lot alike! They’re both growly and angry all the time, and Aria knows, like, a bunch of super-dangerous magic spells the same way Lex does! Not to mention that she’s just as pretty as me! I mean, not exactly as hot as I am, but really close! And now that she’s got her voice back, she could even be his spokespony too!” She started pacing then, too worked up to remain still. “You know he actually thought of having her do that, once? When he wanted me to go to Las Papayas or whatever it’s called, I asked him who would be his spokespony then, and he said Aria could do it.” A small smile crossed her face as she remembered what had happened next. “I totes dumped a plate of food on his head for that.”
Giggling, Kara held a hoof in front of her mouth. “Well, you could try doing that again now, but I don’t think that will fix things.”
“I guess,” sighed Sonata, sitting back down. “It’s just…Aria has everything that makes me special, and then some. So if I tell Lex to pick one of us, then he…he might…” She couldn’t finish, sniffling. “I don’t wanna lose him…”
Sitting next to Sonata, Kara nudged her gently. “You forgot to list what you have that Aria doesn’t: that Lex loves you dearly.”
“Yeah,” snorted Sonata sarcastically. “He loves me so much that he totes got all hot ‘n’ heavy with Aria right after he changed her into a pony.”
“Even so, I bet that if you were to go back to him and demand that he choose, he’d choose you, and then Aria would be the one out here all alone, crying her eyes out.” Kara let that hang in the air, and when Sonata didn’t so much as smirk at the thought, she smiled softly and nudged her again. “But that’s not what you want for your sister, is it?”
“…she loves him,” admitted Sonata, her voice miserable. “I mean, I’m pretty sure that she just started out being all flirty with him to try and be mean to me, and I didn’t like it, but that was just Aria being Aria. Now it’s the real deal. She’s not just crushing on him or anything; she for realsies loves him.” She was silent for a long moment, and when Kara didn’t say anything, she eventually kept going. “Nosey said I don’t have anything to feel bad about, and I don’t regret leaving Aria and Adagio when I did, but when I think about everything that Aria went through…all that stuff she said last night when she didn’t want to let me put her to sleep for Lex’s ritual…it was really awful.” Her voice was strained, and she rubbed her eyes a little. “I don’t want her to have Lex, but I don’t want her to be miserable anymore, either.”
“You could try setting her up with someone else,” suggested the goddess lightly.
Sonata gave her an incredulous look. “Are you kidding me? Aria would totes walk all over any other guy who tried to get close to her! Like, she’d just have to hum a few notes and they’d be her willing slave, laterally!”
“Literally,” corrected the goddess. “And I suppose you’re right. She does need someone who’ll keep her on a short leash, doesn’t she?”
“And preferably chained up in a yard somewhere,” added Sonata. The thought made her wonder what her sister would look like if Lex had turned her into a dog rather than a pony, and the thought made her giggle. That’s kinda perfect, she thought to herself, since Aria’s such a b-
“Listen, I have an idea, but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”
“Huh?” Blinking as she was pulled out of her thoughts, Sonata looked over at Kara. “What is it?”
Kara didn’t answer immediately, looking out over the empty plaza for a second before she spoke again. “If you don’t want to take even the chance that you’ll lose Lex, and you don’t want Aria to be unhappy…then maybe you should consider sharing him.”
For a moment Sonata just blinked uncomprehendingly, but then her eyes widened. “Wait…you mean, like, letting him have more than one girlfriend?!”
“…yes…” Kara’s reply was soft, still looking at nothing.
“No way!” Sonata jumped to her hooves, giving Kara a look of disbelief. “That was Aria’s idea! I wanted you to help me fix things with my boyfriend, not help my sister get together with him!”
Kara sighed. “I’m a goddess of love, Sonata. I want you and Lex to be happy together, but I can’t just pretend that Aria’s feelings don’t matter either. This way gives you all a chance to learn to be happy together.”
“No no no!” Sonata shook her head so furiously that her mane whipped back and forth. “I don’t want Lex to be with anyone besides me!”
Kara gave her a flat look then. “You mean like how you were ‘with’ Nosey just now?”
Upset with the goddess for the first time since she’d met her, Sonata stomped a hoof. “That’s not the same! That was just, like, some fooling around that went too far!”
A shadow went across Kara’s face at that, and she stood up abruptly. The motion made her mane shift, and Nosey’s blonde curls fell across her eyes, obscuring her face from view. “…she was happy…”
“Huh?” Sonata blinked, her anger blunted by Kara’s unexpected reaction. “Who was?”
“Nosey,” answered Kara, her voice emotionless. “When you and she were together just now…when the two of you made love, she was happy.”
“But…but that was just because I put a spell on her and it worked too well,” stammered Sonata.
Kara brushed her mane out of her face, turning away so her back was to Sonata before she spoke again. “You’re wrong, Sonata. Nosey…she’s never been with anypony else. She’s never been kissed or gone out on a date or even had someone ask her out. No one wanted to be with a mare whose special talent was gossip, and she was really lonely.”
Sonata bit her lip, remembering Nosey saying something about that back when they’d been getting to know each other in Tall Tale. “Yeah, but she didn’t seem that broken up about it,” she protested, wondering why she suddenly felt so defensive.
“She was hiding it,” said Kara in a soft, sad voice. “She threw herself into her work, telling herself she didn’t need anything else to be happy.” She gave a hollow laugh then. “She might have even convinced herself of that, the silly girl. And then she met Lex…”
Furrowing her brow, Sonata tried to follow what she was being told. “Wait, hang on, Nosey was just following Lex around because he was a good story. You’re saying she lied to me?”
“She didn’t lie!” snapped Kara, before continuing in a more somber tone. “She didn’t lie, but things changed the more she stayed around him. She saw that there was more to him than big magic and a bad attitude. She saw that he had a softer side to him, one that he only showed to you, and she started…” Kara paused for a moment before continuing. “She started fantasizing. Wondering what it would have been like if he decided he wanted to be with her instead of with you…” She swallowed then, her voice softening. “Or be with her in addition to being with you.”
Sonata just stared, open-mouthed at what she was being told. “You’re saying that Nosey…my best friend…is in love with Lex?!”
“No, Sonata.” Turning around, Kara was smiling, but her eyes were sad. “After what just happened, she’s in love with you and Lex both. That’s why I think the sharing option is best…it might have been Aria’s idea to begin with, but it gives all of you a chance to be happy together.”
Sonata could only stare at her, completely speechless.
“I have to go,” announced Kara suddenly, averting her eyes from Sonata’s again. “I can’t stay any longer.”
“W-wait!” yelped Sonata, running forward and grabbing the other mare as though she were about to disappear. “You can’t go yet! I still don’t know what to do!”
But Kara just shrugged weakly. “I’m sorry, Sonata. I don’t know what else to say, except that I wish all the best for you, and for the other ponies in your life as well.” Leaning forward, she gently pressed her lips to Sonata’s forehead. “Good luck.”
“Wait, Kara!”
But the other mare’s eyes fluttered shut a moment later, and a shudder ran through her. A second later her eyes snapped open again, and Nosey jerked backward out of Sonata’s grip, a shaky smile on her face. “Oh! Ah, wow, that, uh, that was really something, huh?” she chuckled, her eyes slightly too wide.
Sonata bit her lip, suddenly feeling awkward. “Nosey…”
But the other mare didn’t give her a chance to speak. “Oh geez, just look at the time!” She pointed upward, to where the sun was almost at its zenith. “We better get going if we want to be there for Lex’s meeting with the princesses!” Her horn lit up as she picked up her glasses from where they’d fallen off during her encounter with Sonata, sitting them awkwardly on her face. “Better get a move on!” she called as she started to trot towards the far end of the plaza.
“Yeah…” Behind her, Sonata walked much more sedately, thinking back over the conversation she’d just had.
“I hope you don’t mind my making myself at home,” drawled Aria, the smirk on her face making it very clear that her words weren’t sincere in the least. “I just figured that since you turned all of your stuff over to Lex, that meant you wouldn’t mind if I helped mys-, ow!” Yanking her head away from the pony who’d been combing her hair, she glared up at him. “Work the tangles out gently, idiot!”
“So sorry, madam,” murmured the comb-wielding pony, eyes downcast.
Aria didn’t look the least bit mollified by the apology. “Do that again and I’ll make you pluck the hairs out of your tail one at a time,” she growled.
The threat was enough to make all of the servants dancing attendance on her go pale, with the pony in question swallowing nervously. “O-of course, madam.”
“Hmph.” Turning back to River, Aria’s scowl morphed back into her usual mocking smirk. “What’s that old expression? Good help is so hard to find?”
But that little exchange between Aria and the help had given River enough time to regain her poise. “It is indeed,” she nodded, giving her unexpected guest a warm smile. But the look instantly changed to one of stark disapproval as she looked at the servants. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves, treating such an important guest in such a shabby manner!” she snapped.
Despite having ignored her previous outburst, the staff all flinched at that, and River saw them stop what they were doing as they exchanged nervous glances. The sight made her smile inwardly, but not nearly as much as the confused frown on Aria’s face, though to her credit she managed to recover fairly quickly. “That’s right,” huffed Aria, glancing around quickly. “You all should…” Her eyes fell on the platter of beet, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches that three of the servants were preparing in front of her. “Cut the crusts off those!” she snarled. “Honestly, who doesn’t know to do that?”
But River was already several steps ahead of her. “Oh come now, somepony of such importance deserves so much better than this pitiful arrangement,” she scoffed, before giving the servants her usual stony expression. “Go prepare the hot tub right now!”
Again, the servants exchanged worried looks, before one of them cleared their throat. “Begging your pardon, Miss, but the hot water still isn’t working.”
“Then use cold water and heat it up,” said River slowly, as though explaining things to a rather stupid child. Or Piggy, since that was about the same. “And go pick some blueberries from the garden out back. I want two bowls full of them, along with some cream, by the time that water is ready! And a bottle of Chardonneigh!”
The servants hesitated again, this time directing their eyes toward Aria, as though waiting for her to sign off on the orders they’d just been given. The sight made River’s self-control strain, certain now that Aria had ensorcelled them. They would never have dared to disrespect her so openly otherwise. But I have my own way of making people do what I want, she thought darkly. “Do it now,” hissed River, “or none of you will have jobs tomorrow!”
It was with vicious glee that she watched the servants scatter then, rushing for the doors with a flurry of murmured apologies as they ran to carry out her orders. Whatever magic Aria had used to compel their obedience wasn’t so powerful that they didn’t know to be afraid of her. But River knew better than to openly gloat, changing her expression back to an easygoing smile as she looked at Aria. “I was just going to go for nice soak,” she lied. “Why don’t you join me? We can enjoy ourselves and talk about what brings you here before you have to get to Lex’s meeting.”
“Screw Lex and screw his meeting, that’s what brings me here,” sneered Aria, stretching as she got to her hooves. “And you better get more than just one bottle of whatever that was, because I’m not in the mood to share.”
River raised an eyebrow at that. She wasn’t this angry at him when we were all having breakfast together earlier. “Trouble in paradise?” she asked, keeping her voice casual as she turned to lead her guest toward the manor’s specialized bathing areas.
“Lex wouldn’t know paradise if she laid down in front of him, spread her legs, and said ‘do me baby,’” muttered Aria darkly. “Instead, he’d just tell her to shut up and then take her voice away.”
Coloring slightly at the lewd phrasing, River didn’t have to fake the interested look she gave Aria over her shoulder. “Okay, now I’m intrigued,” she admitted. “What happened?”
“…none of your business,” huffed Aria after several seconds, her face sullen.
“Of course,” agreed River, knowing that the other mare would almost certainly volunteer the information on her own sooner or later. She’d had more than enough experience with gossipy socialites to know that you didn’t drop a hint like that unless you wanted to go on about it at length, and even if Aria had the willpower to hold back the wine that was waiting for them would almost certainly loosen her up. Instead, River changed topics. “Do you have any preferences for aroma oils? I find lavender quite relaxing, but there are days when a touch of vanilla is just what the doctor ordered…”
Keeping up a stream of idle chatter, River made sure to take the most circuitous route towards her destination. It wasn’t just to make sure the servants had enough time to heat the water up; the path she was currently taking was one that kept them well away from where the princesses were staying. That was no coincidence; although she had yet to volunteer the particulars, Aria had quite clearly had some sort of falling out with Lex. Given what River had heard about Aria from Sonata, as well as what she’d seen of her this morning, the sulky Siren was almost certainly the sort of girl who’d want to get some payback…which she likely hadn’t gotten already, since she was still pouting at the mention of the stallion who’d upset her.
That was enough to let River make an educated guess as to why Aria was here, and she didn’t like the answer she came up with. And even if Sonata’s sister wasn’t out to somehow sabotage Lex’s conference with the princesses, just the thought of her running into Silhouette was enough to make River cringe. Even if Aria didn’t care that Luna’s pet fanatic almost disrupted the ritual that made her into a pony, they’re both arrogant enough that they’d hate each other on general principle, she felt certain. If the two of them met, they would most likely come to blows – or rather, magical attacks – and River didn’t want that to happen in her manor. Hopefully a tub of warm water, something pleasant to drink, and a sympathetic ear would be enough to make Aria forget about everything else long enough for the meeting to begin without her realizing it.
Besides, mused River as she snuck another glance at the brooding mare following her, there might be an opportunity here…
“…so then I came here,” finished Aria, pausing long enough to take another swig of the bottle sitting on the rim of the hot tub before continuing. “Tell ya what though…I shoulda told ‘im exac-,” a small hiccup cut her off, and she tried again, “exactly where he can shove his dis-a-pro-val,” she sounded each syllable out in a sing-song fashion, “except he’d have to reach waaay back and take the stick out first!” She snickered at that, leaning back and closing her eyes.
Sitting across from her in the bubbling water, River pouted in righteous indignation. “I can’t believe he took your voice away like that! He knows how much that means to you!”
“I know!” Aria’s eyes opened a little too widely as she nodded in outraged commiseration. “But apparently my feelings don’t matter as much as Little Miss Sonata’s.” The words came out bitter, and for a moment Aria looked like she was going to hurl the bottle away. Thankfully she didn’t, instead tipping it back to take another drink from it. A second later it was empty, and Aria stood it back on the rim of the tub next to the two others that she’d polished off.
“Lex owes you an apology,” declared River. “And I don’t just mean saying he’s sorry. He needs to make some sort of significant gesture to show you that he wants to make up for what he did.”
Aria gave a breathy laugh at that. “Yeah, ‘cuz that’ll happen.” Lazily, she reached out for the nearby bowl of blueberries, scooping a few up and managing to get them into her mouth after only two tries. “He’s gotta be allergic to sayin’ he was wrong,” she snorted as she gulped the berries down. “Besides…s’not like he even really cares about me. I was just some experiment. The only girl he wants is Sonata…” Her voice had grown steadily more depressed as she’d spoken, and by the time she’d finished her ears were folded back, eyes downcast, and her expression one of heartbreak.
“He does care about you,” insisted River. “If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have responded so strongly when you tempted him before.”
Aria shrugged, still looking depressed. “Not strongly enough…”
“Even so, it’s proof that he cares.” River took a sip of her own drink – pouring it into a glass first, like a civilized pony – before continuing. “He’s just doing what stallions do, getting so wrapped up in his big plans that he can’t see what he’s doing to the mares in his life.” River couldn’t keep the wry note out of her voice, thinking about how Mounte had always been excited about one harebrained scheme or another. “But if we figure out how to nudge him in the right direction, he’ll realize how much he needs you.”
Across from her, Aria glanced up, lips curling into her usual smirk. “Heh. ‘We,’ huh?” She unsteadily slid around the edge of the tub, giving the other mare a hooded look as she closed in on her. “I see right through you, y’know. You’re one of those whatchamacallems…gold miners. ‘Cept you don’t want gold, right? Because you’ve got all this,” she waved a hoof at the room they were in. “So what’re you after? Hoping he’ll win it all ‘n’ make you Queen of Canterlot or something?”
Alarmed at Aria’s sudden bout of insight, River nevertheless refused to retreat. “You’ve got it all wrong,” she insisted. “I want to help Vanhoover because this is my home, and I want to help you because, well…I think of you as a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” drawled Aria. “Yeah, you wanna help out so much that you gave Lex some pretty little pony in a short, short skirt, prancing all around.”
“That was-”
But Aria didn’t let her finish, shrugging. “Hey, I’m not complainin’. I think watchin’ him go all Big Bad Wolf on her would be hot.” She grinned, her expression turning lewd. “Heck, I’d wanna join in. She’s the sorta chick that makes you wanna bully her.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” protested River.
“Nah, I think ya do,” chuckled Aria, close enough now to grab River’s liquor bottle and take a long pull from it. “But if you really wanted to rope Lex in, you shoulda done it yourself. He’s the sort who makes a big deal out of bangin’ someone, and if I almost got ‘im you could too, since you look like me ‘cept for the sag and the wrinkles.” She laughed at that, downing the rest of River’s bottle. “You should ask Lex if he has a spell that’ll fix that for you…” Yawning, she laid her head back on the rim of the tub, her voice growing softer. “If he doesn’t, bet he can make one…he can do anything…s’part of why I fell for ‘im…”
River frowned as Aria’s words trailed off, replaced with a soft snoring a second later. For an instant she contemplated pushing the mouthy mare’s head under the water, but the urge wasn’t serious. Still, as she got out of the tub and leaned out the doorway to signal some servants to retrieve Aria and put her in a nearby guestroom, River couldn’t help but feel unnerved by how completely Aria had seen through her. Hopefully she won’t remember this conversation when she wakes up, she thought uneasily. Or at least, how it ended. Helping Aria patch things up with Lex offered too many advantages to pass up; it would be delicate work, but repairing his relationship with the Siren would definitely help her get in good with him.
And best of all, she’d already made some progress on that front: as she stepped back into the hallway, one glance at a nearby clock confirmed that Aria wouldn’t have any chances to interfere with the princesses now.
Lex’s meeting with the Royal Sisters would begin in less than five minutes.
Lex had been able to replenish his magic only marginally by the time noon came around.
That wasn’t unexpected, of course. Although the massive amount of magical power that Severance radiated was sufficient for him to be able to renew his thaumaturgical spells, it still took Lex an hour at minimum to compress and configure that energy into a format that his thought-matrices could contain. Even then, a single hour was only enough for a few spells; if he’d wanted to renew the full complement that his mind could hold, it would have taken well in excess of a day to prepare. The fact that it had been several days since he’d managed to overcome Xiriel and the ghoul horde should have provided him with sufficient time to do exactly that, Lex knew. But despite how much time had passed, he’d only managed to restore a small number of spells, leaving him far short of his total capacity.
In theory, that was unforgivably negligent of him; it meant that if another threat to everypony’s safety showed up he’d be ill-prepared to deal with it. But in reality, deprioritizing replenishing his thaumaturgical spells in favor of spending time on other matters had been the only acceptable choice. Faced with the very real tasks that required his attention on a day-to-day basis – including managing the acquisition and distribution of provisions, overseeing the health and well-being of the sick and injured members of the population, and creating the ritual to turn Aria back into a pony (since postponing it would likely have precipitated her becoming dangerously unruly…more so than she usually was, at least) – Lex had been forced to conclude that what would happen if he ignored those issues, even for a short while, was worse than what might happen if he didn’t.
It wasn’t a decision he’d reached lightly. Only the fact that repeated scrutiny, heightened in the wake of what had happened with Xiriel, had turned up no potential threats to everypony’s safety had convinced him to consider the idea. It was possible to go too far with defensive measures, after all; he’d witnessed that on Everglow…
Unlike how the Royal Sisters – and their fellow alicorns, now – ruled Equestria, Everglow’s ponies were governed by a single leader, a queen named Iliana. The ruler of that world’s Pony Empire, she was also its founder, having led a successful campaign of conquest to unite all of Everglow’s ponies under her dominion. Once she’d solidified control over her new state, her reign was one of peace and prosperity, protecting her subjects from civil strife and foreign aggression without oppressing them via harsh taxation or onerous regulations.
When Lex, in the course of acclimating himself to that world, had learned about Iliana’s achievements, he had been heartened. Here, at last, was somepony who shared his philosophy of governance! While Everglow might have been a harsh world – seemingly fecund with monsters, replete with meddling divine agencies, and saturated with dangerous magic – Iliana’s Pony Empire served as an example of what a strong, proactive government was able to achieve, able to stand strong in the face of so many threats. To Lex, it was nothing less than a testament to the correctness of his ideals.
But the more time he’d spent there, the more Lex’s appreciation for what Iliana had wrought had begun to fade.
He had learned early on, for example, that the Pony Empire’s society had distinct social strata between certain categories of ponies: specifically, those who were part of the aristocracy and those that weren’t. While Lex was familiar with the concept as part of Equestrian pre-history – the tribes of pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies had also engaged in that nonsense before they’d come to Equestria and joined as one people, rightfully abandoning it once they had – the fact that Iliana had seen fit to not only preserve such an archaic system, but legally codify and enforce it, had puzzled him. After all, it was self-evident that there was no virtue to be found in exalting individuals based on their lineage rather than their personal achievements.
It had been only later that he’d found out the answer: Iliana allowed such institutions to exist because she had to. If she were to try and tear down the privileges that nobles families enjoyed – privileges that had allowed them to attain vast excesses of land, wealth, magic, and power – then they would have collectively risen up against her in wrath, potentially fracturing the Pony Empire itself. Indeed, he’d later stumbled upon evidence to suggest that the Empire was already fractured in all but name: distant cities and townships apparently operated with little more than token Imperial oversight, their local rulers apparently being allowed to do virtually whatever they wanted so long as their taxes and levies were paid on time.
That Iliana – by all accounts of sorceress of peerless aptitude – had allowed her powerbase to be so thoroughly eroded had horrified Lex. Although he felt confident that he’d never allow his own reign, once he conquered Equestria, to be so horribly neutered, Lex nevertheless began researching the Empire’s history, intent on finding out where Iliana had gone wrong. When he’d eventually found the answer, it had been chilling.
Shortly after she’d crowned herself queen, a group of dissident ponies had made an attempt on Iliana’s life. Caught completely off-guard, Iliana had only barely managed to escape, and the experience had apparently left her deeply shaken. Effectively abandoning her capital city, she’d sealed herself up in an impregnable magical fortress, its location undisclosed save for being rumored to be hidden among the foothills near the capital. That, however, had created a power-vacuum that the nobles – already a burgeoning class, having effectively bargained for hereditary special privileges in exchange for helping Iliana with her wars of conquest – had rushed to fill. The end result had been that by the time Iliana had (reluctantly and belatedly, by the accounts Lex had read) emerged from her self-imposed isolation, she’d effectively been reduced to little more than a figurehead. While still nominally in charge of the apparatus of governance, her actual control extended only slightly further than foreleg’s reach.
Lex would have found such a state of affairs unbearable, and endeavored to retake control or die trying, but Iliana apparently had no such scruples. Rather, she’d effectively acquiesced to the new status quo and retired back to her hidden stronghold, putting in only the occasional appearance in her capital city – such as when she’d sat in court to condemn Aria – and more rarely elsewhere in the Empire. While rumors abounded among the populace that she’d taken to traveling among the people in secret, taking in current affairs and righting wrongs incognito, there’d been little to substantiate such folktales. Lex felt far more certain that she’d simply holed up in her lair, abdicating her position as queen in all but name. As a result, her Empire had limped along over the years, its centralized control growing weaker, its society growing more stratified, and its infrastructure stagnating…that last one having bothered Lex the most, as he’d seen firsthand how ponies that the government should have helped had been left to fend for themselves, infuriating him.
But although he’d grown disgusted with the state of the Pony Empire by the time he’d returned to Equestria, Lex had come to view Everglow’s only major pony society as a case study in what not to do. Specifically, that an overabundance of caution became paralysis all too easily, and that a ruler that focused obsessively on defense at the expense of civic engagement ended up becoming a prisoner in a jail of their own making. It was a fate that Lex was determined to avoid, hence why he’d focused on improving the camp’s living situation rather than on restoring his spells with all possible haste.
He was sure it was the right decision. After all, that same line of logic had been in his thoughts when he’d accepted Sonata’s offer to be his spokespony. Lex was certain that he had no equal where civics was concerned, but Sonata was the one who had the “engagement” part of the equation covered.
Not that it does me any good now, Lex thought sourly as he placed Severance on his back, turning and making his way toward the door. I’ll simply have to deal with Celestia and Luna on my own-
His musings were interrupted as a question from Severance intruded on his thoughts. That was enough to make Lex stop in place, frowning as he glanced back at the weapon. He hadn’t had the scythe very long, but it had been enough time for him to know that it was unusual for Severance to initiate a conversation of its own accord, much less with such a pointed question. “Yes, in a few minutes,” he replied, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “Why?”
The weapon’s response made him scoff. “I have no plans to discuss that with either of them, and I doubt they’ll bring it up either.” He paused again as Severance voiced its objection, his lip curling. “Because I don’t care, that’s why,” he snapped. “And even if I did, that isn’t an area where I can dictate what others-” The scythe didn’t wait for him to finish, dissenting strongly, but its recalcitrance only hardened Lex’s position. “I disagree,” he said coldly. “And I don’t want to hear anything else about this from you. Your job here is to advance my goals, so that I can turn my attention to giving the Night Mare the worshipers I promised her once the more pressing issues have been settled, is that clear?” The question being rhetorical, he didn’t wait for an answer before he kept speaking. “You’ve already overstepped your bounds with what you did to Fruit Crunch and those other foals, and the only thing keeping me from sanctioning you for that is that I plan on having you undo it once I’m done with the princesses. Don’t try my patience any further.”
He waited for several seconds, but Severance didn’t reply, and Lex grit his teeth as he resumed heading for the door. Why was everypony determined to interfere with him lately? First the princesses, then the mares in his life, then Fruit Crunch and his friends, and now Severance. It was like there was some sort of conspiracy to make it as difficult as possible for him to do what needed to be done!
Stepping out onto the platform, Feather Duster managed to bite back a yelp at the sight of him, instead swallowing nervously. “Um, sir? Sh-should I start passing out the food like you told me?”
“Yes,” muttered Lex, turning his eyes to the crowd of ponies milling around the platform’s edge. Celestia and Luna weren’t among them. Nor were Sonata, Nosey, or Aria. “Make sure to do it exactly as I told you.”
Gulping again, Feather Duster tentatively called out to the crowd, asking them to form and orderly line so food could be passed out. But Lex barely heard her, instead turning his gaze past the crowd to the northwest, in the direction of River’s mansion. For a moment he couldn’t see anything, since the medical tents were in the way, but after several seconds the sight he was looking for came into view, stepping around the obstructions as they approached the train station.
Celestia and Luna were walking side-by-side, and they hadn’t come alone. The full company of guards that they’d brought with them was marching in formation, spread out in front of the alicorns in a loose semicircle. Slightly behind and to the side from Luna was Silhouette, moving in a half-trot to compensate for his withered hind leg. All of them had their eyes fixed firmly on him.
To somepony else, the procession might have been intimidating, but Lex simply stepped forward to meet it, the crowd of ponies around the platform’s edge parting like water as he stepped down. He could hear everypony chattering around him, their voices rising with excitement as they looked back and caught sight of the approaching princesses. But Lex couldn’t have cared less, stepping forward just until he was past the crowd, coming to a stop and waiting for Celestia and Luna to arrive.
A few seconds later they did…and then disaster struck.
When Lex had decided that it would be imprudent to try and forcibly subdue Celestia and Luna, he had felt certain that meant there’d be no chance of a violent altercation during his meeting with the alicorns. After all, the Royal Sisters had a history of refusing to take any sort of decisive action until a crisis was already underway. The idea that they would preemptively attack him was a possibility that Lex had dismissed completely; if they’d wanted to do that, they could simply have done so when he’d been performing his ritual on Aria. It would have been simplicity itself for them to herd everypony to a safe distance and then simply fire beams of magic at him from a safe distance away while he was powerless to defend himself.
But they didn’t, which means they won’t now, Lex knew. That knowledge made the pair’s approach, which might have seemed aggressive in another circumstance – the alicorns’ wings were held open while the Royal Guard members they’d brought, save for Silhouette, formed a perimeter around them – come across as pathetic. They’re either posturing, or Celestia thinks that I’m going to attack them even after I said I wasn’t. Both possibilities were encouraging; it meant that the alicorns were wary of him. But either way, it’s a wasted gesture. He knew that there’d be no fighting during their meeting.
That was why what happened next took Lex completely by surprise.
The Royal Sisters and their entourage had just come to a stop a few dozen feet away from him. Behind him, Lex could hear the crowd of ponies that had lined up for their noontime distribution of food turning their attention to the arrival of the princesses…and to him. For his part, Lex didn’t say or do anything, wanting the public to see Celestia and Luna being the first ones to speak, since that would emphasize how they were the ones coming to him rather than-
Without warning, Severance flung itself up from its position on Lex’s back. Exploding forward as though it had been launched from a canon, the scythe spun end-over-end in a deadly arc, just barely clearing Lex’s head as it rocketed through the air. The weapon’s action was so fast, so unexpected, that Lex couldn’t react in time as it flew…directly toward Princess Luna.
Luna’s thoughts were a jumble as she watched death rush toward her in the form of Lex’s weapon.
She’d known that this was going to happen, had personally witnessed her sister’s vision that Lex was going to attack them, and yet she’d still been taken by surprise. Celestia had told her about Lex’s promise that he wouldn’t attack them during their conference, and while they’d both known that it would happen anyway, Luna had found herself believing Celestia’s theory that Lex’s peaceful intentions were sincere. That something else would be the impetus for his lashing out at them.
But there had been no such catalyst. Instead, Lex had attacked them without cause and with no warning, even being so bold as it do it in front of everypony here. Liar! she thought wildly, watching as his weapon rapidly continued to close what little distance remained between it and her. I knew you couldn’t be trusted! But that thought was just one of several rushing through her head, trying to make itself known even as her instincts screamed at her to dodge the incoming strike, making her tense her legs and raise her wings higher in anticipating of a powerful upward burst that would move her out of the way in time even as she tried to think of a spell that would stop the incoming blow from landing all the while knowing that it wouldn’t hit her anyway because she’d seen this happen in Celestia’s dream and it wouldn’t hit her it would hit Silhouette because he was going to save her at the cost to himself and it couldn’t be stopped even though she’d warned him about what she saw she had to stop him had to tell him not to had to look at him and order him not-
“GODDESS, NO!”
But before Luna could translate any of those thoughts into action, a strong jolt hit her from the left, knocking her off-balance and sending her stumbling. Panicking, Luna tried to catch herself, tried to concentrate enough to use her telekinesis to pull Silhouette out of the way, tried to do anything before the inevitable happened. But inevitable was exactly what it was, with the scythe now mere feet away from Silhouette…
No! I won’t let this happen! Time seemed to slow down as Luna’s confusion suddenly fell away, replaced by righteous indignation. I am walking the path to godhood! I cannot, I will not be bound by my sister’s visions! Her horn glowing as she called upon her magic, Luna reached out a wing as she fell. I will not allow one treacherous unicorn to slay my most devoted worshiper right in front of me! Straining, Luna poured everything she had into the spell she cast, calling upon her alicorn magic to augment and strengthen the spell above the considerable power she already poured into it. I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN! Reaching out with everything she had, the tip of Luna’s wing barely managed to brush against Silhouette, discharging her spell.
The effect was immediate. The air around Silhouette grew murky as thick shadows, independent of any source, enveloped him from head to hoof. Though an observer would have thought that she’d simply cast a spell to obscure him from sight, Luna knew better. The darkness conjured by this spell was the very essence of the night itself, distilled and refined to the point that it impeded not only the flow of light around it, but motion itself. Though not solid, it nevertheless created a powerful defense that deflected incoming attacks as reliably as any armor, and that was before Luna had used her alicorn magic to augment it. Now that she had, it should have been a force capable of defeating Lex’s attack, and Luna felt a surge of hope run through her. This will do it! she cheered silently as she hit the ground. I know it will! I can change the fate that Celestia foresaw!
A split-second later, the scythe completed its strike, punching through the armor of darkness, through Luna’s hopes, and through Silhouette in a single unbroken motion.
Lex could only stare in horror at the scene playing out before him.
The entire attack had taken less than a second from start to finish. In that time, Severance had flung itself at the princess, only for Silhouette to knock her out of the way at the last possible instant. Luna had somehow managed to cast a spell on him as she’d fallen – wrapping him in shadows in what had to be some sort of protective enchantment – but it had done no good, and now…now Lex could only watch as Silhouette wavered for a moment, looking down at the scythe that was currently buried in his chest, its tip protruding from his back. He lifted a hoof weakly, as through intending to try and push the thing out, but before he could make the attempt Severance suddenly yanked itself from his body, a fountain of blood erupting from where it had pierced him.
As though that had been a signal, screams erupted from everypony around him, and Lex saw everypony that had been gathered around the train station begin running in all directions. Cries of “he killed him!” and “he’s gone mad!” and similar shrieks of fright reached his ears as the crowd scattered, but Lex barely heard them. Instead, he simply continued looking at the unreal scene in front of him, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
Luna, he thought dazedly. Severance tried to kill Luna. That the scythe had done something like this was inconceivable…and yet, at the same time, was entirely plausible. After all, the weapon had asked him just a few minutes ago – when he was leaving the train station for this meeting – what he planned on doing about Luna’s “heretical” endeavor to become a goddess of the night. Lex, of course, had made it clear to the weapon that he couldn’t have cared less about such a thing, but Severance had held forth that Lex had a duty to prevent Luna from challenging the Night Mare’s divine hegemony over the darkness. Naturally, Lex had disagreed with that, making it clear to the weapon that his only concern was fulfilling the letter of his bargain with the Night Mare and nothing more.
The consequence of which was that Severance had apparently decided to deal with Luna on its own.
“What have you done?” whispered Lex as he watched the scythe hover above Silhouette for a moment, as though admiring its handiwork. A second later Luna screamed Silhouette’s name, and the sound was enough to shock Lex back to full awareness. Reflexively, he wrapped his telekinetic aura around the blade, barely feeling the strain that coursed through him as he poured additional power into his magical grip, yanking the scythe upward and away from the pony that it had likely just murdered. “What have you DONE?!” This time his voice was a roar.
Now that he was grasping it again, Severance’s voice flowed into his mind clearly, calmly stating that it had struck down a worshiper of a heretical would-be god…and that said would-be god would follow in a moment. The answer was punctuated by how it pulled against his grasp, trying to turn toward Luna, who was still calling Silhouette’s name as she grasped him, heedless of the blood she was getting all over herself. Off to her side, Celestia was shouting instructions at the guards, a pair of them rushing forward to assist Luna. The rest of the guards split into two groups, one trying to direct the crowd while the other moved to surround Lex himself.
But he didn’t care.
The only thing that mattered to Lex right now was making Severance pay.
“Don’t move in!” yelled Celestia to the guards forming a circle around Lex. “Hold your positions until I say otherwise!” The instructions were for their own safety more than anything else; Celestia had no doubts that if they tried to move in before she engaged Lex personally, they wouldn’t last very long at all.
Turning her attention to where the others were trying to prevent the crowd from trampling each other, she took a deep breath as she slipped into her Royal Canterlot Voice. “EVERYPONY! HEAD SOUTH, TO THE RIVER, AND REMAIN THERE!” There was no particular significance to sending everypony there, except that it was an obvious landmark that was far away enough that everyone would be out of immediate danger.
Sparing a glance for the two guards that were in the process of lifting up Silhouette to rush him to the nearby medical tents, Celestia could only hope that he was still alive. If not, Cadance will hopefully be able to bring him back, but we'll need to get him to her as quickly as possible. Putting that out of her thoughts for now, Celestia looked back at her sister. Luna was climbing to her hooves, her face marred with blood and tears as she watched them carry her worshiper away. Of more concern was the scythe still rising into the air for what had to be another attack, held aloft in Lex’s purple aura.
Why did he do this?! She had been so sure he wouldn’t, so certain that he’d been honest when he said he hadn’t intended to attack them. But he’d done it all the same, flinging that scythe of his toward Luna, and then screaming “what have you done” at Silhouette in obvious frustration when he’d interfered. Except… No, wait. His aura wasn’t around the scythe when it flew forward. That means-
Lex isn’t trustworthy.
Those three words ran through her mind then. That had been what that pony, Aria, had said – or rather, had sung – when she’d run into her back at River’s manor. It had seemed like an odd thing to say at the time, since she had simply sang those and smirked at her before leaving, but now…now it seemed like sound advice. She was trying to warn me, decided Celestia. It didn’t matter that Lex’s aura hadn’t been around the scythe. Mihr had told them it could fight on its own; Lex had simply ordered it to attack, and now that it had missed he was taking control of it himself. Luna was right. He’s another King Sombra.
As if to prove her correct, at that moment Lex gave a scream of utter fury. “I’LL DESTROY YOU!” he howled. Around him, black crystals exploded out of the ground, scattering the guards that had been surrounding him. “I WILL WIPE YOU OFF THE FACE OF EQUESTRIA!”
The scream caught Luna’s attention, and she bared her teeth as she glared at Lex in utter hatred. “No,” she swore softly. “You won’t.”
Luna looked at her then, and Celestia knew that her sister was asking her if she had any more reservations about fighting. Shaking her head, Celestia moved to stand next to her. “I’m sorry, Sister. I should have listened to you.”
Another scream of rage from Lex turned both alicorns’ attention toward him. More black spikes were shooting up from the ground, and his eyes were solid green as the purple contrails sprouting from their corners fluttered madly. Overhead, the scythe spun in his aura, as though he were eager to bury it in both of them.
Celestia grit her teeth as she banished the last of her doubts. “Let’s go.”
Howling in wordless rage, Lex struggled to maintain his telekinetic grip on Severance.
The depression that he’d been struggling with all morning was completely gone now, swept away by a tidal wave of fury at how the Night Mare’s weapon had betrayed him. This thing killed a pony! he seethed inwardly, certain now that Severance had dealt Silhouette a mortal wound. While he was no doctor, Lex couldn’t imagine how the black-and-white stallion could possibly have survived; the blood loss alone had to have been fatal. This thing KILLED A PONY!
Severance had just done the very thing that Lex had set out to prevent ever since he’d returned to Equestria. All of the hardship he’d endured, all of the pain he’d struggled through, all of the setbacks and sacrifices…he had borne them all for the sake of safeguarding his people. And now Severance, having known full well the premium that Lex placed on pony lives, had just murdered a pony right in front of him. That it had done so for the greater glory of the Night Mare was no excuse; as far as Lex was concerned, any sort of hegemony that required shedding pony blood wasn’t worth achieving.
And yet Severance had not only done such a thing without hesitation, but it was trying to do it again! The weapon thrashed and shook, struggling to shake off his magical grasp and lunge downward toward Princess Luna; only the fact that Lex had poured additional magic into his telekinesis let him maintain his grip on it, and even then only barely. In his mind, the weapon’s voice urged him to release it, to let it strike down the pony that would dare to usurp the Night Mare’s rightful domain over the night. But the twisted urgings only caused Lex’s anger to soar higher, and he couldn’t hold back another wrathful scream. “I SHOULD NEVER HAVE OVERLOOKED YOUR FAILURES!”
Severance had failed to protect Cloudbank and the other ponies he’d sent into Vanhoover. It had introduced Fruit Crunch and his friends to the Night Mare despite them being quite obviously too young to appreciate what they were getting into. And now it had just killed a pony and was intent on killing another. No matter that it was the only easy way for him to restore his spells. No matter that it had proven instrumental in defeating the ghoul horde. The scythe had proven itself to be a threat to the people he wanted to protect.
Severance had just forfeited its right to continue existing.
His hold on the weapon already starting to slip, Lex raised a hoof and began to snarl the words to a spell.
Celestia and Luna sprang into the air, giving the scythe in the purple aura a wide berth as Lex began casting. Both of them had seen the new magic that Twilight had brought back from her time on that other world, and recognized Lex using it now. Not needing words to coordinate their actions, both alicorns moved in opposite directions, winging around until they were on either side of him, looking down at the treacherous unicorn from above. Without waiting for him to finish whatever spell he was casting, the pair pointed their horns at him and silently called upon their own magic, each of them sending a brilliant beam of energy lancing downward.
Despite having given no indication that he’d been paying attention to either of them, Lex clearly saw the attacks coming. An instant before Celestia’s beam would have struck him, he ceased to gesture and chant and instead threw himself to the side, the brilliant ray of energy cutting a deep groove into the ground where he’d just been. But the crossfire that the alicorns had put him in meant that he’d only managed to dodge one attack at the expense of another, and Luna’s beam struck him in the side a half-second later. The impact drew a cry of pain from his lips, sending him stumbling, but to both sisters’ surprise he managed to keep to his hooves. Even his hold on the scythe didn’t give out, the purple aura remaining in place around it. If anything, it seemed deeper now, though neither could guess why that was.
“What are you doing?!” Lex roared, craning his neck as he looked back and forth at each of them before pointing at the scythe. “I’m trying to protect you from that treacherous thing!”
“The same way you ‘protected’ Silhouette?!” screamed back Luna.
For a moment Lex looked almost confused by the statement, before his eyes widened in understanding. “You think I wanted that to happen?! Severance acted of its own accord!” He focused on Celestia then. “I told you that I wasn’t going to attack you!”
“You’re not trustworthy!” The words came easily to Celestia’s lips, remembering again what Aria had told her. “You revealed your real feelings when Silhouette saved my sister at the cost of his own life! You won’t trick us again now!”
If looks had the power to injure, the expression on Lex’s face would have sent both alicorns tumbling from the sky. “You fools! My words were for Severance! Not you!”
“LIES!” Luna’s eyes blazed with righteous condemnation as her horn began to glow, calling on her alicorn magic again, determined that her next attack would be one that Lex Legis wouldn’t shrug off so easily. “YOU ARE A BLIGHT UPON EQUESTRIA! AND YOU WILL NEVER HURT ONE OF OUR LITTLE PONIES AGAIN!”
Then she pointed her horn directly at him…
Lex swore under his breath as the alicorns made it clear that they wouldn’t listen to reason. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he couldn’t help but be livid at the unfairness of it all. The two ponies that he respected the least, and were his biggest obstacles to uniting Equestria under his rule, were now the ponies that he had to protect, even as they attacked him! In another context the irony might have been humorous, but right now it was anything but!
At least he’d been able to finish casting his spell before the Royal Sisters’ attacks had reached him. That was fortunate; if he hadn’t been able to complete it in time, then he would have already lost his grip on Severance. As it was, he’d be able to hold onto it for a little while longer now…but only barely.
The spell Lex had utilized – one of the complement that he’d prepared among the few that he’d had time to renew – had been the stamina-enhancing spell that he’d created a few days ago, in the wake of Tlerekithres’ defeat. He hadn’t used it since his disastrous attempt to conjure food and water for everypony in the camp, when he’d come close to killing himself by channeling more magic through his body than he could safely handle. But that was different from now, he knew. That had happened because he’d channeled additional magic into this spell as he’d cast it, enhancing the physical hardiness it granted him and then using the increased endurance that had granted him to channel even more magic through his body. It had created a positive feedback loop that had led to him moving more power through himself than his body had been able to handle. This time he hadn’t augmented the spell, letting it operate within its normal parameters. It was still granting him greater endurance, letting him push his physical limits and in turn increase how much supplementary magic he was able to channel through his body, but now it should be safe. It was thanks to that spell, for instance, that he’d been able to take Luna’s attack spell without being overly injured.
It was also the reason that he’d been able to maintain his hold on Severance. While the scythe was still struggling to break out of his telekinesis, it was no longer in imminent danger of escaping. Thanks to the spell increasing his endurance, Lex was currently able to channel more magic into his telekinesis, keeping the scythe from getting away. But this is still only temporary, cursed Lex silently. Worse, while I’m holding Severance like this I won’t be able to channel any additional magic into anything els-
Then Luna unleashed her next attack.
Unlike the thin ray she’d just fired at him, this one was a massive burst of energy, the beam measuring feet in diameter instead of millimeters. Lex wasted a half-second staring upward in stupefied horror, before his survival instinct kicked in and he transformed into a shadow, surging backward just before the alicorn’s spell struck the spot where he’d been standing, reducing the ground to a smoking crater. He didn’t stop moving, and that was what saved him from Celestia’s follow-up strike, as a beam of similar intensity to Luna’s came hurtling down at the place he’d just vacated. Like her sister’s, the magic scorched the land, reducing terrain where it struck to a smoldering pit.
The heavy bombardment was enough to throw Lex for a loop. This is wrong! Celestia shouldn’t have this much power! The examination he’d made of her before had been cursory, but it should have detected this level of strength! And Luna should have been the same, or even weaker from a millennium of imprisonment in the moon! But apparently nopony had told the alicorns that, and the next pair of magical blasts they sent at him were also intensified. But this time Lex was ready, and a thought was all it took to raise a dome of black crystal around himself, pouring dark magic into it in order to thicken the structure against the impending assault.
The solidified darkness that he could conjure was many times stronger than steel, and practically impervious to damage. But as the alicorns’ attacks slammed into the hastily-erected dome, Lex felt it shudder under the assault, cracks spiderwebbing through it as small pieces began to fall from the ceiling. Another four or five hits will bring it down, Lex decided. He could reinforce it with more dark magic, but producing that much material would be severely taxing, and since he couldn’t channel additional power into his dark magic while he was holding Severance, it would likely only delay the inevitable.
Lex’s next thought was to drop into the ground the way he had against so many other foes when he’d needed to take cover, but he didn’t dare do that now. While he felt confident in his ability to retain his awareness of where to direct his telekinesis even while moving blindly underground, there was still a chance that he’d lose track of his positioning relative to Severance. If that happened, the scythe would break free, and Lex had no doubt that it would cut down Luna – and quite likely Celestia, if she moved to protect her sister – in short order. That couldn’t be allowed to happen!
But at the same time, Lex knew that if he went out there now, in all likelihood his current array of defensive enchantments wouldn’t do very much against the level of magic that the alicorns were currently throwing around, and he’d only prepared a few more. Worse, their assault meant that he couldn’t devote his attention to dealing with Severance. There was one – and only one – spell in his arsenal that Lex felt had any chance of destroying the scythe, and it would require him to channel as much magic as he could into it in order for it to have any chance of working. But that would mean releasing Severance before he cast it, and if the alicorns attacked him and disrupted his casting before he could unleash it-
“LEX LEGIS!” bellowed Luna. “YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE! SILHOUETTE WILL BE AVENGED!” Her statement was followed by another heavy strike to the dome a second later, causing more cracks to spread through it.
I’m going to have to deal with them first, concluded Lex grimly. There was no other choice; the alicorns wouldn’t be talked down, and he couldn’t go after Severance while they were attacking him. That left no choice but to take them out; he’d just have to hope that they’d be more inclined to listen to him afterward.
But for now, Lex swore to himself as he began casting the few defensive spells he’d prepared, if it’s a fight they want, then that’s what I’ll give them!
When the dome of black crystal that Lex Legis had conjured around himself failed to crumble after her and Luna’s second strike upon it, Celestia broke off her attack, considering.
Luna, however, had no such restraint, and threw down another augmented blast of magical energy. The massive beam slammed into the dome, but while the earth around it was pulverized by the hit, the hemisphere of black crystal stubbornly refused to fall, having only a few more cracks to show for her effort. Undaunted, Luna reared her head back, the aura around her horn already glowing brightly in preparation for another assault, when Celestia flew toward her. “Luna! Enough!”
Her admonition was enough to draw her sister’s ire, and Luna glared at her, teeth bared. “What are you saying, Sister?! Just a little more and we’ll break through!”
But Celestia shook her head. “I think that’s what Lex wants us to think!”
She’d chosen her words for maximum effect, and her gamble paid off a moment later as Luna managed to swallow her wrath, the prospect of doing anything that Lex wanted being repulsive enough to make her sister calm down. “Explain,” demanded Luna bluntly.
Celestia wasted no time in doing just that, knowing that even if she’d mastered her rage for the moment her sister’s patience was likely to be extremely short. “Other than his initial attack, Lex has yet to take any offensive action,” she pointed out. “Why do you think that is?”
Luna’s eyes narrowed. “Celestia, if you’re implying that you think his claims of innocence have any merit to them, then so help me…”
“No, I know now that I was wrong to give Lex the benefit of the doubt,” admitted Celestia, before pointing at the dome below them. “That’s why I think this is a ploy on his part. He wants us to exhaust ourselves trying to bring down that shell he raised around himself, and then when we have he’ll launch his counterassault against us.”
“But we’re almost through!” retorted Luna angrily. “A few more shots will bring it down, and then we’ll have him!”
“It looks that way now, but I think that’s a feint on his part.” Celestia looked at the dome again. It was pitted and lined with cracks, and did indeed seem to be on the verge of falling apart. But… “Remember when we fought King Sombra? How much of that dark crystal he could create?” She gave Luna a knowing look then. “Remember what those mares, Nosey and Sonata, told us about how Lex created a huge wall of that same black crystal when he fought that dragon? And yet he’s only made such a small barrier around himself now?”
Luna scowled, but didn’t reply immediately, her eyes thoughtful as she turned her gaze back toward where their enemy was hiding below.
“Lex can repair that dome whenever he wants,” insisted Celestia. “Trying to break through with brute force will likely deplete us far faster than it will deplete him, and when it does he’ll come at us with all of his evil magic.”
Seconds passed before Luna spoke again. “Then what do you suggest we do, Sister?” She glanced around, and her eyes stopped on the scythe that had struck down Silhouette, still twisting in the roiling purple aura a short distance away. “Assail his weapon, perhaps?”
Celestia didn’t answer, not wanting to venture a course of action when she wasn’t sure what they were up against. The aura surrounding the scythe was clearly Lex’s, so why hadn’t he attacked them with it? Doing so would have been tactically sound on his part, since a physical assault would have allowed him to conserve stamina that spellcasting would otherwise have drained. Not to mention what Nosey and Sonata – to say nothing of Mihr – had said about the weapon’s destructive potential, something Celestia had seen personally when the weapon had effortlessly punched through the protective spell Luna had cast on Silhouette. There was simply no reason for Lex to be holding something so potent in reserve, and yet he was doing exactly that. But why?
The question was enough to raise a flicker of doubt in her mind. Mihr had confirmed that the artifact was capable of self-direction; it had attacked his brethren angels without anyone directing it, according to what he’d told them. And, she suddenly remembered, Lex’s aura hadn’t been around it during the attack that had wounded Silhouette. The realization made Celestia bite her lip. Had Lex been telling the truth after all? Had the scythe attacked of its own accord, against his wishes? If that was so, then-
Lex isn’t trustworthy.
Celestia put a hoof to her head, a grunt escaping her lips as her thoughts suddenly reversed course. What had she just been thinking? She already knew that Lex had betrayed them; doubting herself now would only result in more ponies being hurt, her sister likely foremost among them. The incongruities surrounding Lex’s use, and non-use, of his scythe were likely part of some byzantine stratagem on his part and nothing more. In fact, her uncertainties were quite likely exactly what he was attempting to evoke; he’d hold his strongest weapon back for seemingly no reason, and when she faltered because she thought it was a gesture of peace, he’d swoop in and attack with it. Scowling as she realized she’d almost fallen for it, Celestia glared at the weapon. No, she vowed silently. I let you deceive me once, Lex Legis. There will not be a second time.
“Sister?” called Luna. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” answered Celestia curtly, angry at herself for having very nearly been taken in despite having just witnessed one of her little ponies being cut down right in front of her barely a minute ago. Instead, she turned her attention back to the battlefield. Lex still hadn’t emerged from his damaged shelter. Everypony else was in the process of fleeing the battlefield, save for the guards that had tried to surround Lex only to have been knocked back when the treacherous unicorn’s black crystal stalagmites had erupted from the ground, proof of his rage when his surprise attack on Luna had been foiled by Silhouette’s sacrifice.
Taking it all in, Celestia turned back to Luna. “I have a plan…”
Having changed back to physical form, Lex hastily dug through his saddlebags, not knowing when the alicorns would resume their assault on the dome he’d raised.
When they did, he knew, he’d be in trouble. He simply didn’t have enough dark magic necessary to continuously restore its structural integrity in the face of a dedicated bombardment, not without channeling additional magic into it, which wasn’t an option so long as he needed to maintain his grip on Severance. Instead, he’d focused on using what spells he could to bolster his defenses, and had changed back into his corporeal self in order to access the items in his possession.
Changing into shadow caused everything on his person to make the transition with him. While magic items that were functioning at the time of his transformation would continue to operate normally, everything else was rendered inaccessible, including possessions that were stored or otherwise not in active use. Including these, noted Lex as he withdrew the five gemstones he’d recovered from Xiriel. All the more reason to put them to use now.
Changing back into his shadow form, Lex levitated each of them in turn, allowing them to begin rotating around his insubstantial body. Two of them had little to offer him in his current state: the iridescent spindle’s ability to let its user ignore the need to breathe was pointless when he was in this form, and the scarlet and blue sphere’s stored knowledge of magic item manipulation was even more useless, but Lex didn’t care. If nothing else, they would present more targets for the princesses to waste their attacks on if they decided to try and attack the gemstones or remove them from him. While Lex didn’t relish the thought of losing any of his magical gear, that couldn’t be a consideration now.
Having completed his preparations, Lex glanced at the dome. Even with the damage dealt to it, the thickness was enough that it muffled sound fairly well; anything short of more screaming would have been difficult to hear, making it hard to tell what was happening outside. This is a bad tactical position, Lex knew. His enemies knew his location, while he couldn’t pinpoint theirs without exposing himself. But there’s nothing to be done about it now.
With no more reason to delay, Lex mentally ordered the dome to dissolve into nothing, immediately surging straight upward as soon as it did. An elevated position would give him the best vantage point to note his enemies’ positions, and-
“LEX LEGIS!” screamed Luna, the cry accompanying a beam of magical energy lancing at him from his left.
The beam would have struck him, but a combination of quick reflexes, luck, and magical protection caused it to strike him off-center, his defensive enchantments managing to repulse the ray and send it careening harmlessly into the distance. Idly noting that she’d used an unenhanced spell for some reason – the beam having been thin rather than the massive shots she’d been throwing before – Lex immediately rattled off the words to a spell. An instant later, a trio of red rays shot towards Luna.
Or rather, toward her horn.
Fighting the alicorns, Lex knew, was ultimately no different than fighting a powerful unicorn wizard. If their horn was damaged, they’d be unable to cast spells until it was healed, nor could they physically attack him while he was in shadow-form. Then, with the princesses powerless to threaten him, he’d be able to turn his full attention to Severance.
For her part, Luna quite clearly knew what Lex was attempting, as she ducked her head and fell into a controlled dive, but Lex had anticipated exactly that move, angling his rays accordingly. The first went harmlessly over her head, and the second almost grazed one of her wings…but the third struck her horn directly, causing Luna to let out a scream of pain as she struggled not to plummet. That’s one down, Lex knew. While there was a slight chance that Twilight Sparkle had shown the Royal Sisters how to cast spells without using their horns – a trick that was common to unicorn spellcasters on Everglow, and which Lex himself had mastered a long time ago – he found that unlikely. The fact that they don’t use gestures or chants strongly implies their using native Equestrian spellcasting, he thought as he turned around to scan the rest of the battlefield. Which means that all I need to do now is hit Celestia’s horn…
Except Celestia was gone.
Confused, Lex turned in a full circle, rising higher upward, but there was no sign of Luna’s sister anywhere. For a moment, Lex struggled to make sense her absence, running through a laundry list of possibilities in the span of a second. Then the answer came to him, and he hurriedly started to cast another attack spell, knowing where he had to aim-
But it was already too late.
“Got you!” Celestia’s smirked to herself as she flew directly downward.
Having positioned herself high overhead, Celestia had made sure to keep herself directly in front of the sun, an easy feat for her since she was able to adjust its position. With Luna’s attack commanding Lex’s attention – she’d guessed right that Lex would go for her horn – he hadn’t been able to examine his surroundings as carefully as he doubtlessly would have otherwise, giving Celestia time to get the drop on him.
Let’s see how you like this! she thought as she focused as much of her alicorn magic as she could into her next spell. According to what Nosey had told Luna, that monster named Xiriel had used this tactic to great effect against Lex during their fight, and with any luck it would work again now. I hope, she added silently. Lex’s dark magic would surely be harder to dispel than Twilight’s “want it, need it” spell…
Focusing with everything she had, Celestia cast her spell, trying to strip away the dark magic that kept Lex a shadow. For a moment there was a sensation of intense resistance, and she could almost feel the sickening presence of his evil magic rebelling against her spell, fighting her attempt to unravel it. Closing her eyes, Celestia poured more of her alicorn magic into it, reminding herself of all of the innocent ponies who would suffer if Lex defeated them here. I won’t let that happen! she swore to herself as she concentrated as hard as she could. I’ll stop him here!
And then she felt the dark magic come undone.
Gasping in relief, Celestia opened her eyes in time to see Lex change back into a pony, a shocked look on his face as he began to plummet. At least, until Luna collided with him in mid-air, wings flapping heavily as she drove them both toward the ground at high speed, far faster than if he’d been falling normally. His hooves flailing, Lex didn’t have a chance to react as Luna released him less than a foot above the ground, letting him slam into it even as she swerved and veered off, avoiding the same fate.
For anypony else, that hit would have been crippling, if not fatal. But Celestia could already see Lex, lying on his back in the center of a large blood spatter, nevertheless struggling to get up. Worse, his horn was still glowing, somehow still holding onto his scythe even though he wasn’t using it. Not wanting to give him a chance to do so – or enact whatever other counterattack he was doubtlessly planning – Celestia pointed her horn at him again, sending another huge blast of augmented energy at him. This should put him down for the count! And even if it didn’t, she could already see Luna circling back around, ready to do with her hooves what she couldn’t with her horn…along with a half-dozen members of the Royal Guard who had recovered and were eager to join the fight.
Except suddenly Lex wasn’t alone. There was a foal – a pegasus colt – hovering just above him. The sight made Celestia’s eyes widen in horror, realizing that the child was going to take the attack she'd intended for Lex!
Then the massive beam of energy hit…and was deflected, being knocked up into the air and almost hitting Celestia on its path. Gawking, she could only stare blankly at where the colt was looking upward at what he’d done in awe, his jaw hanging open before he gave a loud whoop of joy. “I can’t believe that worked! Oh wow, did you guys see th-, er, I mean, that’s one problem solved,” he smirked, clearly trying to clamp down on his enthusiasm.
“That’s great, but Lex is still really hurt here!” came another voice, this one a filly, and suddenly there was a yellow pegasus filly crouching over Lex, putting her hooves to his chest, a snake by her side. “Buy me a few seconds!”
“We’ll buy you more than that, Dust Bunny!” Another colt’s voice, and suddenly one of the Royal Guards that had been closing in on Lex suddenly stumbled, only to be knocked off his hooves a moment later, stumbling backward into two of his fellows, all three of them going down in a heap in front of an earth pony foal who was suddenly there, with a wolf next to him. “Go get ‘em, Fiddleface!”
“Don’t call me that!” The angry shout came from an earth mare as she appeared on the colt’s other side, along with a badger. Her cry was accompanied by her picking up one of the fallen guards and flinging him at Luna like he was a hoofball, the guard giving a trailing yelp of fright as Luna barely managed to avoid the collision, the guard sailing over her head to collide with the remaining guards in a heap as she flapped her wings and veered off, trying to evaluate this new threat.
“You guys,” muttered another colt, this one a unicorn who was suddenly standing near the two pegasi foals. “You do realize we’re not invisible anymore right? I mean, we were, but we’re not now.”
“Don’t need it!” announced the earth colt. “When you make a grand entrance, you’re supposed to make it big and flashy,” he grinned. “Like this!”
Looking up at Celestia, the colt pointed a hoof up at her. “We’re the Night Mare’s Knights!” he announced, smiling broadly.
“Oh no!” croaked Nosey, her voice hoarse. “No no no!”
Sonata, by contrast, was much less concerned as she trotted up to where her best friend – or was she more than that, now? – was crouching, having almost collapsed after her brief sprint. In the distance, the tiny figures trying to zap each other had stopped for a moment, the sight making Sonata roll her eyes. “Looks like Lex did it again, huh?”
Still panting, Nosey gave Sonata a wide-eyed look, clearly horrified at how casual she sounded. “How can you be so calm?! Lex and the princesses are fighting! He could end up being sent to Tartarus, or banished to the moon, or…or even…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. “We have to get back there and make them stop!”
“Eh, it’ll be fine,” shrugged Sonata. If anything, she felt relieved by the fact that Lex had gotten into a fight with the princesses. It meant there’d be something else to focus on besides whether or not she needed to share him with Nosey and Aria now. And besides, it wasn’t like this was any big deal anyway. “Lex has, like, whooped a whole bunch of monsters up to now. Those two pampered princesses aren’t going to know what hit ‘em.” Of that much she felt certain; Lex had spent a lot of time ranting about how useless those two were.
But Nosey didn’t seem to agree. “Sonata!” she groaned. “You’re not hearing me! These aren’t like the monsters we’ve fought before! These are Celestia and Luna! They’re the protectors of Equestria! They defeated Discord when he tried to take over! They put Tirek in Tartarus! They’re the ones who sealed away King Sombra! You know, the guy whose horn Lex has now?! They’re not going to go down easy!” She glanced fearfully back at the camp as she spoke. It was still a considerable distance away, enough so that making out who was where was difficult. It looked like Princess Celestia was hovering above the field, and there was…something being held aloft in what looked like Lex’s aura, but it was impossible to tell what. Beyond that, other than what had to have been Princess Luna having flown low a moment ago, there wasn’t anything else she could make out for certain; although the camp’s furnishings were sparse, they were still enough to obscure the what was happening on the ground. “This is our fault,” murmured Nosey, her voice miserable. “We should have come back sooner!”
“Look, I’m telling you, you’re making a big deal out of nothing,” insisted Sonata. “I bet Lex has come up with, like, ten different plans for cutting those two down to size. Oh!” Her eyes widened as she remembered something. “And he has Severance with him! I bet they’re totes saying a bunch of tough-guy lines right now. ‘You go high, I’ll go low,’ or something like that, you know?” she chuckled.
But Nosey didn’t seem reassured, taking a deep breath as she stood up straight. “Sonata, we have to get there as fast as we can. We might still be able to stop this before it gets any worse.”
Sonata snorted. “The only way things could get worse is if we get back and find that Lex is playing kissy-face with those two, since he’s apparently got a thing for sisters.”
That was all Nosey could take, rounding on Sonata furiously. “What is wrong with everypony today?!” she shrieked. “Lex lashes out at Aria, she completely loses it as a result, and now you’re just going to sit back and act like this when I’M TELLING YOU HE’S IN DANGER!” She screamed the last few words, turning and pointing at her flank. “I’m a newsmare, my special talent is gathering information, so when I say-” She cut herself off abruptly, squeezing her eyes shut as she put a hoof to her face, visibly struggling to regain control of herself. It was several seconds before she won that particular fight, making herself remain calm as she looked at Sonata again. “Do you remember when Lex fought that dragon, back in Tall Tale?”
The question made Sonata frown, confused. “Huh? Yeah, sure. Why?”
“When that happened,” explained Nosey, “you were frantic with worry for Lex. You charged out to meet him even though Fireflower kept telling you that it was dangerous. But you couldn’t stay away, because you knew that Lex might get hurt and you wanted to help.”
Sonata winced a little, hearing the implicit accusation. “Hang on, that was because I knew that Lex was wrong about the dragon breathing fire-”
“And while you were doing that,” continued Nosey, as if Sonata hadn’t said anything, “all I did was set up a camera nearby and take pictures.” She paused, letting that sink in. “I was so wrapped up in myself, in what I thought I wanted, that I couldn’t bring myself to care about anypony else.” The expression on her face then was one of deep regret. “Lex was fighting to save everyone, you went out there to try and save him, Fireflower was looking for a way to save his family, and everypony else was struggling to save themselves…and I just took pictures of it all, because I was selfish.”
Sonata couldn’t meet her eyes, looking down as she flattened her ears.
After a pregnant pause, Nosey kept speaking. “When I think about how I acted back then, I feel ashamed of myself. And if you keep acting like this now – pretending that you’re not helping because you’re sure Lex will win, when you’re really just angry at him – then I promise you, you’ll look back on this, probably someday soon, and you’ll feel ashamed of yourself too.”
“Are you really in love with me and Lex both?” blurted Sonata.
The question caught Nosey visibly off-guard, her eyes widening and her mouth falling open, and even Sonata felt a little surprised. Why did I ask her that? She’d been trying to avoid thinking even thinking about that, so why was had she suddenly brought it up out of nowhere like that…?
“Ask me…” Nosey’s voice brought Sonata back to herself, blinking as she looked at the other mare. Nosey didn’t return the look, making a point to keep her eyes fixed on the camp ahead. Even so, Sonata could see that she was shaking a little. “Ask me again after we make sure Lex is okay.” Before Sonata could utter a word, Nosey galloped forward. But to Sonata, it didn’t look like she was rushing toward Lex so much as she was running away from her.
For some reason that made Sonata feel even worse, and she stomped a hoof in frustration. Love was supposed to be a super-terrific thing! All the movies she’d seen back on Earth had said so! So how come, now that she was finally living out her own love story, it was so freaking hard all the time?!
But Kara wasn’t here anymore, leaving her with no answer. Not that the goddess’s answers this last time hadn’t been very helpful anyway, and even just calling her had made things more complicated. It’s like there’s no easy way to figure all this stuff out, thought Sonata unhappily.
Not knowing what else to do, she started to gallop after Nosey.
Luna could only stare at the ponies that had come to Lex’s aid, horrified. Children. He’s actually using children to fight his battles!
They had to be mind-controlled. That had always been King Sombra’s preferred way of fighting, using innocent ponies to do his foul bidding, and now Lex was following in his predecessor’s hoofsteps. Or perhaps he’d had one of those Sirens he’d beguiled do it for him. But one way or another, those foals had to be his victims.
Except mind control didn’t explain the powers that those children had just displayed.
Luna looked each of the five foals over, her eyes lingering on the unicorn colt, Feathercap. She’d spoken to him just last night, when he’d insisted on accompanying Nosey Newsy. The child had looked adorable then, mustering up his courage even though he’d quite clearly been out of his depth, like a kitten fluffing up its fur in order to appear more fearsome than it actually was. And yet now, he had somehow made himself and his companions invisible, something only an accomplished wizard should have been able to do. And his friends had performed even greater stunts: flinging grown ponies away like toys, deflecting a magical attack that should have overwhelmed them utterly, healing Lex Legis…
That last one made Luna realize that she had no time to be surprised, and she flew forward, intent on separating the pegasus filly from Lex before she could finish mending his wounds. I don’t have to hurt her, I just need to get her away from Lex. The filly was laying her fore-hooves on his chest, and all of the healing magic that Luna had seen – both from the spells she’d granted to her own worshipers and in the miracles that Cadance had worked – required touching the pony being treated. I can grab her and pass her over to some of the guards, have them get her out of here until the battle’s ov-
“Dust Bunny, look out!” yelled the earth colt that had so brazenly declared his intent to gain victory a few moments ago. Nor was his warning idle, as he raced forward with speed Luna wouldn’t have thought a foal capable of, intent on intercepting her before she got to his friend.
But his charge was heavily telegraphed, and Luna was ready for it before he’d so much as closed half of the distance between them. Just as he’d committed himself to his leap, she flapped her wings hard, gaining a few feet of altitude and sending him careening harmlessly beneath her, a surprised cry spilling from his lips at the sudden miss. Despite herself, Luna felt the corners of her mouth turn up slightly as she lowered her flight path so she was just above the ground, at the perfect height for scooping up that filly. Inexperienced, she concluded. They might have these powers, but they’re not familiar with using them. That would explain why Silhouette hadn’t mentioned them before. But in that case, that would mean they’d only gotten them in the last few hours, which made no-
Her thought was cut off as a burst of pain erupted through her middle, driving the breath from her lungs and sending her sprawling into the dirt before she could get any closer to Lex and the filly. Instinctively tucking her wings close to her sides as she went tumbling, Luna tried to figure out what had happened. Something had struck her from below, but what-
“S-sorry Princess Luna!” fretted Feathercap, rubbing his sore horn. “I really didn’t want to do that, but I had to stop you somehow!”
Blinking, it took Luna a second to realize what he was talking about. Invisible. He turned invisible again and moved so I’d fly over him, then jumped up and headbutted me when I passed over him. Fortunately he was young enough that the tip of his horn was too blunt to cause more damage, but he’d still managed to knock the wind out of her. Groaning, Luna looked back at where Lex was already starting to sit up, the yellow filly still keeping her hooves pressed against him-
Just before she was surrounded by a golden aura, and lifted into the sky, causing her to yelp in surprise. The sight made Luna smile, looking upward. Celestia! Her sister had quite clearly figured out what Luna had been trying to do, and was taking action before Lex could be fully restored. Now they could-
“Oh no you don’t!” shouted another of the foals, the earth filly who had tossed the guard around before. “Let Cleansweep go!” she yelled as she picked up a rock, of which there were plenty thanks to how the ground had been cratered in the battle’s opening exchanges. The stone wasn’t very large, barely the size of a golf ball, but when the filly reared back and flung it, the makeshift missile flew upward as a fantastic speed. Fortunately, Celestia saw it coming, which was the only reason she was able to dodge it, tucking her head and rolling in mid-air as the stone streaked past her. Unfortunately, the near-miss rattled her concentration enough that when the other foal – the pegasus colt that had deflected Celestia’s attack before – yanked on Cleansweep’s tail, he was able to pull her out of the telekinetic aura, the two of them falling onto their bottoms before the filly rushed back to Lex’s side.
Grunting, Luna immediately got to her hooves, only to leap backwards as that earth colt that had tried to tackle her before jumped in front of her, barring her way. Meanwhile, the rock-throwing filly continued to take aim at Celestia, who was obviously unwilling to return fire as she dodged. And Lex was already starting to climb to his hooves again…
They’re actually holding us back, realized Luna uneasily. True, that was largely because neither she nor her sister could bring themselves to fight children, but it was still a sobering thought. A few foals shouldn’t have been able to have such an outsized effect on the course of the battle like this. It’s because of how prodigious their powers are, Luna knew. But how did they acquire such abilities in just a few hours? It wasn’t spellcasting; they weren’t gesturing and chanting the way Lex had to. Nor was it like his dark magic. Even their cutie marks didn’t match what they were doing now.
That left only one possibility that she could think of. The Night Mare’s Knights. Are they drawing power from their goddess directly, like how Cadance can call upon Lashtada for miracles? Except Cadance needed to use her alicorn magic to facilitate that level of power, something these foals didn’t have. If that’s so, then there has to be something else to it. Some secret behind how ordinary foals can use such extraordinary abilities.
Winning this battle, she knew, might very well depend on figuring out what that was in the next few minutes.
Fruit Crunch was so excited he was almost shaking.
This is it! This is really it! Grinning, he looked back at where Cleansweep was healing Lex, the stallion climbing to his hooves with a groan. We’re gonna fight together with him, and take down the princesses! The thought made him want to prance in place, and he was only barely able to keep the urge down, not wanting to look ridiculous in front of his hero. After this, he’ll HAVE to take me-, er, us as his apprentices! In the meantime, the most important thing was that they all made a good showing of themselves so that Lex didn’t chastise them later.
“Everypony, form up around Lex!” he yelled, making sure to keep his eyes on Princess Luna as he walked backwards, stepping carefully until he was right in front of Cleansweep. A moment later Straightlace, Fiddlesticks, and Feathercap joined him, along with their spirit animals…save only for Ulespy, Feathercap’s owl, who was currently circling high overhead. Looking back at Lex, Fruit Crunch tried not to grin like an idiot as he spoke. “Are you alright?”
“What are you doing here?” growled Lex, a baleful look on his face. “I told you I didn’t want you putting yourselves in danger anymore!”
One hoof still against his side as she channeled more healing energy into him, Cleansweep rolled her eyes. “Sorry we came to rescue you,” she muttered sarcastically. “You can chew us out after we’ve helped you win.”
Venin twisted around Cleansweep’s belly, moving so her head was near the filly’s ear. Respect, she chided gently. The Lord Sovereign’s words are borne of concern for you, not scorn.
Straightlace shot Lex a grateful look. “In that case, you don’t need to worry. I’ve made everyone a lot harder to hurt, and Fiddlesticks did this thing so that we’re all a lot tougher than normal.”
The proper term, corrected Nemel, Fiddlesticks’ badger, is that she infused you all with a supply of vital essence, so that-
“Princess Celestia’s moving!” whispered Feathercap. He wasn’t looking up as he said it; in fact, his eyes were closed, and Fruit Crunch knew that he was looking through Ulespy’s eyes, surveying the battlefield from above.
Sure enough, Celestia landed next to Luna a second later. “Are you alright, Sister?”
“I won’t be using my horn anytime soon,” admitted Luna, “but otherwise I’m fine.” Despite her words, one hoof came up to rub at her stomach gingerly. Even so, she kept her eyes on the half-dozen ponies standing across from them. “Something’s wrong with those children, though. They have powers they shouldn’t be in possession of.”
“I’d noticed,” murmured Celestia as she glanced at Fiddlesticks. But her gaze hardened a moment later as she raised her head. “ALL ROYAL GUARDS!” she called, her voice suddenly stentorian, “TO MY POSITION!”
Lex tensed, as did the Knights. “We’ve got incoming!” whispered Feathercap, his eyes closed again. “There’s six…ten…twelve guards heading this way! And those ones you guys knocked down before are getting back up!”
But it was at that moment that Cleansweep took her hoof away from Lex. “Okay, you’re all patched up!”
“Yes!” Fruit Crunch pumped a hoof in triumph before looking at Lex expectantly. “Okay, so what’s the plan?” When Lex didn’t answer immediately, Fruit Crunch followed his eyes to where he was looking, seeing Severance held in his aura high above them. “Ooh! Is it time to call down the thunder on them?!” He wasn’t sure why Lex was holding Severance in reserve, but he had no doubt that there was a good reason for it, and that when the time was right he’d bring it out and totally take Celestia and Luna out! And then, after we’ve won, he’ll sit down and talk things out with them and everything will be A-okay! After all, that was how it always went in the comic books whenever new heroes met each other. They always got into a fight for some reason, and then worked things out afterward.
There was no further time to ponder the matter as Lex suddenly spoke up. “Both of you,” he roared at Celestia and Luna, “stand down immediately!” He pointed a hoof at Cleansweep. “This filly has healing magic! If Silhouette is still alive, she might be able to save him!”
Luna’s reaction to his proposal was immediate. “DON’T YOU DARE SAY HIS NAME!” she screamed, suddenly furious.
The bizarre exchange was enough to make Fruit Crunch look at his friends, seeing the same confusion on their faces that he knew was on his. “Wait, what’s going on with Silhouette?” he murmured, looking back at Lex. He intended to ask a follow-up question, but didn’t get a chance as he caught something out of his peripheral vision, looking down to see a trickle of blood running down Lex’s foreleg from where the barbed wire was wrapped around it. Huh? But Dust Bunny said she healed all his wounds…
Oblivious to the foals’ confusion, Celestia stepped forward, her face hard as she glared at Lex. “You’re not trustworthy,” she announced, even as members of the Royal Guard started to form up around her, all of them sending hateful looks Lex’s way. “You pledged to meet with us in peace, only to make a cowardly attempt on my sister’s life. You brought children onto a battlefield to fight for you when you realized you couldn’t defeat us alone. Do you truly expect us to believe that you have noble intentions now?”
The answer made Lex’s eyes flash, the green and purple flaring brighter in reaction to his mounting anger. “You idiots!” he roared. “This is more important than your petty animosity! We have to act now, while there’s still a chance of saving an injured pony’s life!”
But Celestia appeared unmoved. “You-” She stopped talking as the last of the Royal Guard joined her, the stallion moving in close and whispering something in her ear before joining his fellows. The message made Celestia close her eyes for a moment, a look of grief crossing her face before she composed herself. “There’s no chance of that now,” she announced sadly. “The doctors here just pronounced Silhouette dead.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed at the news, and he looked upward at Severance again, a hateful expression on his face. His lips parted, but he didn’t have a chance to say anything as Luna took a single step forward, tears in her eyes and fury in her words. “You,” she proclaimed in a voice replete with dark judgment, “are a murderer, unfit to live in the presence of good and decent ponies, let alone rule over them!” She pointed a hoof at Lex, and all of the Knights flinched at the gesture, though Lex didn’t. “Now you shall face justice for what you’ve done!”
Celestia moved forward so that she was standing alongside her sister. “For all your pretensions of grandeur, you’re no better than the last pony who possessed that horn of yours. But we are.” She copied Luna’s gesture then, pointing at him ominously. “Send those children away, and surrender that weapon you’re holding, and you’ll be allowed to live out the remainder of your days in Tartarus. Continue resisting, and I cannot guarantee what will happen to you.”
Fruit Crunch gulped. All of a sudden this wasn’t fun anymore. But it was Feathercap who spoke up, looking at Lex nervously. “What’re they talking about, Lex? What’s going on?”
That doesn’t matter! came Altaer’s sharp rebuke, causing the foals to flinch. Have you all so little faith in the First Convoker that you would allow your hearts to be shaken so easily?
Indeed, added Lyden gruffly, the wolf padding over to stand in front of Lex both physically and symbolically. After having proven his honor so many times, the High Alpha deserves your trust.
Cleansweep bit her lip, looking between Lex, the alicorns, and back at the train station uncertainly. “Yeah, but-”
“I can bring Silhouette back!” shouted Lex. The statement was enough to make everyone around him fall silent, the foals’ eyes widening in amazement at the claim. Across from him, Celestia and Luna were quite obviously far more skeptical, wearing matching frowns. But Lex was undeterred, reaching back toward one of his saddlebags. “I have a magic item in my possession that can-, NNNNGH!!!” But his explanation was interrupted as, moments before he touched the fabric of the bag, the barbed wire on his foreleg began to rotate quickly, the sharp points slicing through his skin as easily as if it was paper, sending gouts of blood flying.
Fruit Crunch cried out in shock at the sight, and he wasn’t the only one. All of his friends were equally horrified, and across from him he was peripherally aware of almost all of the Royal Guards gasping and watching in wide-eyed horror. Even Celestia and Luna looked stunned, jaws hanging open at the gory display.
“L-LEX!” yelled Fruit Crunch, running toward him only to stop as he realized he had no idea what to do. Desperate, he looked around until his eyes fell on Cleansweep. “Dust Bunny! Do something!”
“Huh?” She sent him an uncomprehending look, clearly still struggling with the shock of what was happening.
“Heal him!” yelled Fruit Crunch.
“N-no!” Lex’s refusal was given around gritted teeth, his eyes blazing brighter as he forced himself to stand up straight. “I…can bear this!” he snarled. “My will…takes precedence here…! Not that…miserable nag’s…!” Breathing heavily, he reached back and dug through his saddlebag, the cloth immediately turning red as the wire sped up its rotation around his leg. But Lex wouldn’t be deterred, and although his expression was one of controlled agony, he slowly withdrew a large ruby, holding it out toward the princesses shakily. “With this…” he rasped, “I can bring…Silhouette back…to life…!”
Celestia and Luna shared a look, the two of them visibly unnerved at the display. But a moment later they’d regained their resolve, and Luna spoke up. “Whatever game you’re playing…whatever trick this is, it won’t work. Silhouette will be restored to life, but by Cadance, not you.”
“For the last time, stand down,” added Celestia. “We won’t warn you again.”
Lex held his position for a moment, as if silently confirming their positions, and when neither alicorn said anything else, he slowly lowered his hoof. As soon as he did, the barbed wire ceased to move, but the only sign Lex gave that he’d noticed was a quiet grunt. Instead, he put the ruby back into the bloody bag before giving the Royal Sisters a dark look. But his next words weren’t for them, being spoken quietly enough that they didn’t carry more than a few feet. “I want all of you to leave here immediately. Go hide in the train station until-”
“No way.”
Looking over at Fruit Crunch, Lex scowled. “What did you say?”
The question was quite clearly a warning rather than a query, but although the colt was still pale because of what had just happened, he met Lex’s gaze straight on. “A little while ago I asked you to give me a chance, to give all of us,” he waved a hoof at his friends, “a chance. But right now, those two,” he pointed at Celestia and Luna next, “aren’t giving you a chance.” He took a step closer to him then. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I’m not going to run and hide while you’re out here fighting for your life.” He stomped a hoof then. “Even if you yell at me again later, I’m staying right here and fighting alongside you!”
Well said. A smile could be heard in Lyden’s mental voice as he moved to stand next to Fruit Crunch. That’s the spirit that earned the Supreme Predator’s recognition.
Lex glowered at the pair, but before he could say anything, Fiddlesticks stepped forward. “It’s thanks to you that my little brother is okay now. When he grows up, I don’t want to tell him that I didn’t do anything when the pony who saved us was in trouble.”
Nemel trundled forward, coming to a stop between the filly’s forelegs as she looked up at Lex. When any one of us makes a stand, the others will always come to their aid, especially when it’s you, Exalted Primogenitor.
“E-even if you use that power of yours to send our animals away, w-we’ll just come back as soon as it wears off,” added Feathercap timidly, half-hiding his face behind his binoculars even as he stepped forward.
As it sensing the importance of the moment, Ulespy fluttered down and settled on the colt’s back. We’re resolved to see this through to the end alongside you, Grand Vizier, ventured the owl.
Fluttering her wings enough so that she was hovering in the air, Cleansweep gave Lex an helpless shrug. “Well, if my friends are staying, then I guess I’m staying too.” She stuck her tongue out at him playfully then. “Just don’t curse us for this later, okay?”
Coiled carefully around Cleansweep’s middle so that she didn’t interfere with her wings, Venin leaned her head forward. You are our benefactor, Lord Sovereign. Even if it means being disobedient, we would never abandon you.
Straightlace smiled, the expression not diminishing his look of resolve. “I was always quoting my dad before, but from now on I’m going to make some quotes of my own, starting with this one: the Night Mare’s Knights don’t run. Ever.”
From his perch on one of Straightlace’s outstretched forelegs, Altaer fluttered his wings. These young ones are your disciples, First Convoker. Please allow them to honor you now.
Lex didn’t respond immediately, looking at the foals and their animals, then the alicorns – who tensed in readiness, the guards alongside them doing the same – and finally up at Severance before returning his gaze to the Knights. “This isn’t what I wanted,” he growled bitterly. “And if I had the ability, I’d force you all to leave right now…” His gaze lingered on Feathercap, clearly remembering what the colt had said about them returning even if he used the Night Mare’s power to make the animals chase them away. Finally, he sighed, turning back to the alicorns even as he kept speaking to the foals.
“You all focus on the guards. Leave Celestia and Luna to me.”
“It’s okay,” murmured Feather Duster nervously as she rocked the crying infant in her forelegs. “It’s okay, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
But the baby didn’t seem convinced, continuing to cry loudly. Feather Duster couldn’t blame him; nothing seemed fine at the moment, and it was all she could do to stop from crying herself. Even now, she didn’t want to watch what happened next, but couldn’t tear herself away from where she was perched in front of a window inside the train station, biting her lip in terror. Please, Cleansweep! Please just get out of there! You’re going to get hurt! But her daughter didn’t seem inclined to leave, standing with her friends alongside Lex as they faced off against the Royal Sisters and their guards.
Feather Duster would have gone out there and personally retrieved her daughter – even though that would assuredly have meant facing Lex’s wrath – but she knew that even if she had, Cleansweep wouldn’t have gone with her. After all, Feather Duster had confronted her just a few minutes ago, right after Lex had killed that poor pony in cold blood. Everypony had been screaming and running away, but Feather Duster couldn’t bring herself to leave without Cleansweep, not when she’d been separated from her once before when Vanhoover had flooded. Miraculously, she’d managed to catch sight of her, racing toward the battlefield with her friends, and Feather Duster had flown straight for her, intent on taking her somewhere safe.
But she’d never had the chance. Cleansweep had seen her coming, and had barely glanced at her long enough to say “Not now, Mom!” before running right past her.
Of course, Feather Duster had been prepared to take matters into her own hooves…only for another filly, whom she vaguely recognized as one of her daughter’s new friends, to shove the baby she’d been carrying into them instead. “Please take care of my little brother!” called the filly, before turning and running after Cleansweep and her friends, their collection of animals in tow.
That one sentence, and the precious little bundle she’d been given, had been all it had taken to keep Feather Duster from her daughter. As badly as she wanted to go out there, to put herself between Cleansweep and danger, she couldn’t. Not while she was responsible for another beautiful little child, even if it wasn’t one that she’d given birth to. She’d desperately looked for somepony else to pass the baby off to, but by that point the Royal Guard had cleared the area. Nor had the idea of leaving the child alone someplace occurred to her; regardless of how safe an area was, infants needed constant supervision.
In the end, unable to put the wailing baby she’d been given in danger and equally unwilling to abandon her daughter, Feather Duster had done the only thing she could: she’d retreated to the train station. From there, she could at least watch Cleansweep while still keeping the child she’d been given safe…even if she couldn’t do either task very well. But there was nothing else she could do, except hope that the princesses would bring an end to the monster that was using her and her daughter both for his own nefarious purposes.
Please, Your Majesties, she prayed silently, blinking back tears. Please get rid of Lex Legis once and for all.
“I want all of you to focus on subduing those children,” ordered Princess Celestia, not taking her eyes off of Lex even as she spoke to her guards. “Don’t hurt them if you can possibly avoid it, but don’t think that they’re ordinary foals either. They’re very dangerous, and they won’t go down easily.”
“And whatever you do, don’t try to engage Lex Legis in battle,” added Luna, her voice still thick with rage and grief. “Leave him to us.”
The statement was enough to make Celestia glance at her sister, worried for her. Nor was her concern mere sisterly affection; if Luna lost control of her emotions now, she might end up making a mistake that Lex Legis would capitalize on. It hadn’t escaped Celestia’s notice that he was still telekinetically holding that scythe above their heads, as though just waiting for the right moment to bring it down on them again. “Once you've gotten those foals away from Lex,” she added, more for Luna’s benefit than the guards, “we’ll move in and take care of him.”
The additional instructions caused Luna to scowl at her, letting her know without words that she hadn’t needed the reminder. Celestia’s response was equally silent, a half-second look being all she needed to convey feelings of apology, concern, and love to Luna. The younger alicorn turned her eyes back to Lex with a huff, but that was enough to let Celestia know that she’d begrudgingly accepted her explanation. The intimate communication was enough to bring a ghost of a smile to Celestia’s lips, glad that she and Luna could still understand each other so well after a thousand years apart. That’s also part of what we’re fighting for, she knew, remembering how Lex’s first strike had been an attempt to kill her sister right in front of her. Luna and I are still just beginning to make up for all the time we lost. We need to protect that, as well as everypony in Equestria, from Lex Legis’s evil. That thought gave her strength, and without further hesitation Celestia pointed a hoof at Lex.
“Forward!”
“Here we go!” yelled Fruit Crunch as the guards around the princesses charged at them, bellowing wordless battle cries. Grinning, he rushed forward to meet them. “Lyden, you go low! I’ll go high!”
Understood! came the reply as Lyden rushed ahead of him, sprinting toward the earth pony guard that was at the front of the charge. The guard’s eyes widened at the sight of the snarling wolf bearing down on him, but he held his course, apparently trusting that his armor and greater mass would carry him through. He might have been right…but as they came within a few feet of each other, Lyden suddenly veered off-course, charging past the guard rather than straight into him. As they ran by each other, Lyden ducked his head low and locked his jaws around the guard’s leg, biting down even as he yanked his head back. The guard barely had time to give a cry of pain before he went tumbling, the wolf releasing his leg as the guard collapsed and rolled a few times before coming to a stop, dazed. The attack arrested Lyden’s momentum, however, and two more guards – a pegasus and a unicorn – rushed toward him, intent on taking down the creature that had just throttled their friend.
But both were so focused on the wolf that they’d neglected to take notice of Fruit Crunch, who had been following directly behind Lyden’s headlong rush. Not breaking his stride in the least, the earth colt instead made a powerful leap that carried him directly over the wolf’s head and crashing hooves-first into the unicorn guard. The impact sent the guard crashing heavily to the ground, Fruit Crunch landing on top of him with a smirk. “Hah! I wonder if I should change my name to Guard Crun-, whoa!”
Fruit Crunch had no time to finish his boast as the pegasus guard suddenly tackled him. A pair of thick forelegs wound around his torso and squeezed tightly, crushing him against the older stallion’s chest even as the guard brought his wings to bear, flapping them powerfully and taking them both into the air. Pulling his hind legs up in time to avoid a leaping bite from Lyden, the guard grunted as he started to turn in away from the battlefield. “By order of the princesses, you’re in timeout, kid!”
Fruit Crunch wasn’t able to reply, grunting as he tried to extricate himself from the guard’s grasp before they got too high, when another voice rang out. “Pick on someone your own size!” yelled Cleansweep, rushing by the pegasus guard as one of her hooves lashed out, hitting the armor on his flank. “Or, you know, me!”
The pegasus guard frowned at the filly, but didn’t bother to respond. His armor had easily absorbed the force of her punch, and she didn’t look like she was able to do much more than that. At most she’d be a nuisance, and if she followed him then it’d just mean one less foal on the battlefield, not to mention he’d be able to turn around and grab her after, after he’d taken care…of this kid…
Grinning, Cleansweep watched as the guard began to wobble in mid-air, his wings suddenly having a hard time flapping. “Wow!” she gushed. “I didn’t think it’d work through his armor!”
No matter what they’re clothed in, your magic can reach anyone that you can touch, commented Venin matter-of-factly from where she was still wrapped around her torso. That’s as true for your poison as much as it is for your healing.
“But he’s gonna be okay, right?” She couldn’t help but ask as she watched Fruit Crunch finally slip out of the guard’s grasp, dropping five feet to the ground and landing on his hooves. The guard’s landing was much less graceful, his wings seizing up and dropping him the last few feet to the ground, where his legs were doing the same, leaving him shuddering and twitching spasmodically.
He should recover gradually over the next few days. Venin’s voice was noticeably less warm than when she’d consoled Cleansweep about her distraught mother earlier that morning. Now, we should make sure to hang back in case any of our companions require us to heal them-
“Dust Bunny!” yelled Fruit Crunch suddenly. “Look out!”
Alarmed, Cleansweep spun in place, trying to see what Fruit Crunch was talking about…just in time to see another unicorn guard firing a blast of energy from his horn at her. Yelping, she reacted on instinct, closing her eyes and shielding her face. Except the expected pain didn’t arrive, and a moment later she cracked them open to see what had happened.
Straightlace was right in front of her, his foreleg still outstretched from where he’d knocked the beam of energy away. “You alright?” he asked, glancing back at her.
“Y-yeah,” she answered, letting out a relieved breath. “Thanks.”
Maintain vigilance! cried Altaer, rushing past the pair and swiping at the unicorn guard with his claws, forcing the armor-clad pony to abandon a follow-up attack, ducking and weaving to avoid being slashed by the eagle’s talons. Our enemies are not yet taking us seriously, but they will soon!
“Thanks for the encouragement!” grunted Fiddlesticks from where she’d climbed on the back of another earth pony guard. The stallion was currently bucking back and forth trying to fling her off, but Fiddlesticks refused to be dislodged. Instead, she grit her teeth in concentration as she reached down to the edge of the guard’s armor…and pulled. The metal instantly folded, bending in her grasp as she ripped it off the guard like a wrapper off a candy bar. The guard instantly came to a stop, shock written all over his face as he glanced at the tiny filly on his back. Fiddlesticks smirked in response, and then brought the twisted hunk of metal down on his head, clobbering him with it.
He’s right, added Nemel, looking up from the burrow that she’d been digging, which had tripped up the now-defeated guard long enough for Fiddlesticks to initially get on his back. A short distance away, the remaining members of the Royal Guard were hesitating, speaking in low tones as they looked at the foals warily. We should regroup and prepare to repel another sortie.
“You guys!” yelled Feathercap, the only one among them who hadn’t raced forward. Instead, he was standing a short distance away from Lex, his eyes closed as he looked over the battlefield through Ulespy’s eyes high above. “Fall back! I have an idea!”
Sharing a look, the others turned around and made their way to Feathercap’s side.
Luna’s battle cry was a powerful roar of fury as she rushed forward, preparing to unleash a punch directly at Lex.
But he had already returned to his shadow-form several seconds prior, and didn’t so much as glance at her now. Instead he kept his eyes trained on where Celestia was hovering several dozen feet above him, knowing what was about to happen. That trick won’t work a second time!
Sure enough, just as Luna was about to make contact with him, Celestia’s horn lit up with what Lex knew was another attempt to dispel his dark magic and make him substantial again. But this time he was ready for it. In the instant that the elder alicorn’s horn began to glow, Lex rattled off the words to a spell so quickly that it was almost a single long syllable, a shadowy tendril at the edge of his incorporeal body waving with the necessary gesticulations. Immediately, five small points of light – none of them larger than a marble – sprang into existence around him, shooting towards Celestia as though fired out of a high-powered slingshot.
Having just enough time to see what was about to happen but not enough to do anything about it, Celestia didn’t have a chance to finish casting her spell as the tiny projectiles slammed into her, the aura around her horn fading out harmlessly. Letting out a grunt of pain, she started to plummet, only to barely catch herself before she’d fallen more than a dozen feet. For her part, Luna was unable to correct her momentum in time, plunging right through the mass of shadows that was Lex’s body. She tried to make the best of it, grunting as she swung her hoof at one of the gemstones orbiting Lex, but wasn’t able to properly coordinate her attack in her unbalanced state, the swirling jewels easily darting out of the way of her wild swing.
Gnashing her teeth, Luna flapped her wings as she moved away from him and started to circle around, preparing for another pass. Celestia, however, didn’t seem inclined to wait for her sister, lowering her horn and firing a beam of energy – a smaller, unenhanced one – at Lex. But her eyes widened as the mass of shadows that was her enemy didn’t try to dodge glistening ray, instead flying up toward it! At the last possible instant, just before the beam would have struck him, Lex’s immaterial form contorted in mid-air, bending and twisting in ways his physical body never could have, and the ray of magic passed by him without making contact, missing him by less than an inch. Even the strange gemstones that were circling him adjusted their orbits, not letting themselves be struck by the magical attack, which lanced downward and hit the earth harmlessly.
Not letting his opportunity go to waste, Lex was already casting as he moved, bridging the distance between himself and Celestia in less than a second thanks to the speed-enhancing spell he’d used on himself before he’d exited his black crystal dome. Grimacing, she pulled her wings close and fell into a dive, angling her body to try and get away from him, but it was too late. A single wisp of shadow reached out to touch her back as she fell, and that was all it took to unleash the spell that Lex had just cast.
The concussive force that struck Celestia then was heavy enough that it drove the air from her lungs, her eyes going wide with shock and pain as she was knocked out of the sky. Your turn, sneered Lex darkly to himself as he watched her plummet, striking the ground not far from where she’d done the same thing to him not even a minute earlier. She landed hard on her back, going limp as her eyes fluttered closed, and Lex felt a surge of triumph rush through him. She was down! Now all he had to was disable her horn before she regained consciousness and the battle was as good as over!
Luna seemed to have realized the same thing, because she was already racing back toward her fallen sister. “Celestia! Get up! Get up!”
Luna was closer to Celestia’s position than he was, enough so that even with his boosted speed she would have reached the fallen alicorn before Lex did. But I have more than enough magic left to finish this from here! Using his dark magic from this distance was inefficient, but still possible, and Lex narrowed his eyes as he focused on forming black crystals that would strike at the optimum angle to wound Celestia’s horn to sufficiently incapaci-
“All of you give up right now or this guy gets it!”
Fruit Crunch’s voice made Lex glance over at the foals…and stopped cold at what he saw.
Fruit Crunch and his friends were gathered around a fallen member of the Royal Guard, a pegasus stallion who was lying on the ground and twitching uncontrollably. But what was far more noticeable was how the wolf that was Fruit Crunch’s new pet had its jaws locked around the shuddering guard’s throat, making the colt’s threat abundantly clear. The remaining members of the Royal Guard that were still on their hooves, about a dozen stallions, all froze in place, glancing at each other with looks of worry. “Hold on there, son,” started one of the guards with a gulp, “you let him go right this instant, or-”
“Or what?” jeered Fruit Crunch. “Or you’ll surrender right now?” Grinning smugly, he hoof-bumped Feathercap. “I gotta say: Best. Plan. Ever. This way, we-”
“RELEASE HIM AT ONCE!” screamed Lex, his voice loud enough that had he been corporeal he would have tasted blood.
The foals – as well as the Royal Guard – all froze, looking at him with wide eyes. None looked more shocked than Fruit Crunch. “L-Lyden! Let him go!” he squeaked, his face turning pale. When the wolf immediately complied, Fruit Crunch turned back to Lex, cringing. “It was just a bluff,” he whimpered. “We weren’t really going to hurt him.”
But Lex was far from mollified, so angry that his vision nearly swam. “You think that’s an excuse?!” he roared. “You think it’s okay to threaten the lives of helpless ponies just because you don’t mean it?!” After what had just happened with Silhouette, the mere thought of seeing the same thing happening again was enough to leave Lex beyond enraged, his shadow-form churning so heavily it looked like black, flickering fire. Beneath him, black crystals erupted from the ground, punching up through the dirt randomly…and none of them hitting Celestia. But Lex was too beside himself to notice. It’s happening again! First Severance and now them! It’s all happening again! The thought was like a knife in his heart, driving all other thoughts from his mind. “PONY LIVES ARE TO BE CHERISHED!” he screamed. “THEY’RE TO BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS! NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT, AND THERE’S NO EXCUSE FOR WILLFULLY THREATENING THEM!” Seeing his most important ideals be so casually violated by his supposed allies for the second time in the last few minutes was maddening enough that Lex found himself calling an attack spell to mind, and it was only because the ponies in question were children that he forced himself to stop, knowing that there was no acceptable reason for harming foals, that they couldn’t possibly appreciate just how egregious their behavior was, even if they desperately needed to be taught a le-
A bright flicker of light below him was all the warning Lex had, and it was pure instinct that made him lurch to his left. That, and the magical defenses he’d woven around himself were all that stopped the beam of energy – one of the larger, enhanced ones, fired by a now-recovered Celestia who was climbing to her hooves with her sister’s help – from hitting him. Instead, the beam rocketed upward into the sky, where it hit nothing…
Except for the owl circling high above the battlefield.
The bird didn’t have a chance to so much as open its beak before the attack hit it, and in an instant it was gone, completely vaporized by the blast. Immediately, a tortured scream rang out, and all eyes went to where Feathercap was doubled over in agony. His friends were looking between him and where the bird had been, horrified looks on each of their faces.
And on the ground, Luna’s eyes widened in understanding. “The animals…”
“U-Ulespy,” moaned Feathercap. “He’s gone…I can’t feel him anymore…”
“Just…just hang in there, buddy,” muttered Fruit Crunch helplessly, not knowing what else to say. “We’ll figure something out.” The words were nothing more than platitudes, as he had no idea what to do. Feathercap’s body language suggested that whatever pain he’d felt when Ulespy had been killed was already fading, but Fruit Crunch knew that was the least of their problems at the moment, since-
“ALL ROYAL GUARDS! TARGET THE CHILDREN’S ANIMALS!” came Luna’s sudden yell.
“NO!” screamed Fruit Crunch, looking at Luna in horror. How did she know?!
Each of the Night Mare’s Knights had gained a small number of magical abilities. But those abilities didn’t come from them; rather, they were made possible by their spirit animals, the physical incarnations of their most notable qualities. So long as their spirit animals were by their side, each of them not only gained a special power of their own, but could also use one kind of magic on their entire group. Fiddlesticks, for example, gained great strength as well as the ability to boost the vitality of all of the Knights, allowing them to withstand damage that would have crippled an adult. Straightlace had gained the ability to deflect magic, and could grant protection from physical damage to everypony on their team. Cleansweep could use a poison touch or a healing one. Feathercap had the ability to see through Ulespy’s eyes, and could turn all of them invisible for a short period of time. And Fruit Crunch himself could summon what Lyden had called “the essence of an alpha wolf” into himself; he wasn’t quite sure what that was, but it made him feel faster, stronger, tougher, and a whole lot fiercer. Not to mention he could do the same thing for the rest of the Knights, although Lyden called those “beta wolves.”
But all of those powers were unusable if their spirit animals weren’t there with them. They’d learned that this morning, while discussing what they could do, and none of them had needed to be told that they needed to keep that a secret. But now Princess Luna had somehow figured it out.
Nor were the remaining guards waiting to act on her orders, swooping in on them as a single unit!
Panicking, Fruit Crunch yelled the first thing he could think of. “Scatter!” He immediately rushed to his left, Lyden following him. We can draw them off, Fruit Crunch told himself. They’ll split up to chase us, and when they do we’ll beat them down, just like before.
But the Royal Guard didn’t seem to be inclined to follow that plan. Instead, four of the guards – all unicorns – came to a sudden halt, pointing their horns upward in unison at where Straightlace and Altaer were flying. A second later, they began shooting, filling the air with multicolored lights as they unleashed a fusillade of magic at the eagle. Straightlace immediately moved in, smacking one beam away and almost managing to hit a second, but there was nothing he could do about the remaining shots. One grazed the bird’s wing, and it wobbled in flight…before another shot tore right through the center of it.
“Altaer!” yelled Straightlace, his voice hoarse with pain. But the bird didn’t respond, falling limply toward the earth. Its body shimmered as it plummeted, as though it were a painting that had water splashed on it. Just before it would have hit the ground, its body grew so indistinct that it vanished from sight completely, fading away like a patch of mist being burned off by the morning sun.
But Fruit Crunch had no time to think about what had just happened, turning to look at Fiddlesticks…only to duck as she hurled a guard through the air. But the remaining earth pony stallions weren’t impressed, crowding around the badger trundling by her legs. Screaming in anger, Fiddlesticks tried to knock them back, but there were too many. A second later Nemel had been tossed upward, and two powerful stallions turned around and bucked their legs at the same time, catching the animal between their hooves. The damage was too much, and the badger turned into nothing instantly, Fiddlesticks slumping over with a pained sob as she did.
Cleansweep was next, the pegasus members of the guard surrounding her and tearing her snake away from her as she shrieked and lashed out. She managed to drop two of her attackers with her poison, but not before they’d gotten Venin off of her, throwing the serpent down to the ground and following after it in a crushing stomp. Like Nemel, Venin was defeated instantly, leaving Cleansweep bereft of powers.
Skidding to a halt as he saw his friends lose their companions one by one, Fruit Crunch swallowed. The guards weren’t even bothering to try and round up his friends now that their animals were gone, apparently having figured out that they were just a bunch of ordinary kids without them. Instead, the remaining guards – over a half-dozen of them – turned toward Fruit Crunch. They took a moment to reform their ranks, lining up side-by-side as they stood a short distance from him and Lyden.
“Just give up, kid,” called one of them, a unicorn. “It’s over.”
Fruit Crunch swallowed, and for a moment felt himself waver, realizing that the guard was right. There was no way he could take that many guards by himself, especially now that the magic the other Knights had used to empower him was gone! But Lyden was at his side immediately. Remain steadfast, the wolf urged him softly. To fall in battle alongside your pack is no disgrace. Focus instead on making your enemies pay dearly for their victory.
For a moment, Fruit Crunch wanted to run anyway. This wasn’t like when he’d fought Silhouette. Back then he’d had a plan. He’d had a way to win. He’d had friends right there to help him. But now…
“He’s right,” came Cleansweep’s voice. Her eyes were watery, but the strength in them was undiminished as she landed next to Fruit Crunch. “Whatever happens, we’re going to face it together.”
“Like I said before,” added Straightlace darkly as he touched down on Fruit Crunch’s other side. “The Night Mare’s Knights don’t run, and they don’t give up either.”
“I won’t let you!” growled Fiddlesticks fiercely as she moved alongside her friends. “I won’t let you take away anyone else I care about!”
“We’re not afraid of you,” came Feathercap’s voice as he joined the rest of them, the little guy holding his binoculars like a weapon.
For his part, Fruit Crunch found himself overcome with emotion, filling him with strength that scattered the despair that had threatened to drown him just a moment ago. It was the scared little boy who hadn’t been able to do anything except cry when Spit Polish had beaten him that closed his eyes then. But it was the leader of the Night Mare’s Knights who opened them a second later, and the weight of his gaze was enough to make the guards flinch. “What do you kids think you’re doing?!” yelled one of the guards, his tone making it clear that he was unnerved. “Just make it easy on yourselves!”
Quick glances to his left and right were answered with nods from his friends, and Fruit Crunch smirked as he looked back at the guards. “Trust me, there’s not going to anything easy about this.”
Then, rearing up on his hind legs, he gave a roar of defiance before rushing forward, leading the Night Mare’s Knights on their last charge.
Celestia only barely managed to dodge the spike of black crystal that burst out of the ground, aiming for her horn.
Landing awkwardly on her side, she struggled to fight off the dizzying sense of vertigo that swept over her as she rolled back onto her hooves, still reeling from the damage she’d suffered when Lex Legis had knocked her out of the sky. Knowing she couldn’t afford to lose consciousness again, she instead concentrated, her horn glowing as she called upon her alicorn magic to temporarily enhance the earth pony stamina she possessed. Doing so wouldn’t heal her wounds, she knew, but it would at least make them easier to bear for a time.
Even as she did so, she kept moving, knowing that to remain still would be the same as asking Lex Legis to target her again. Spreading her wings, Celestia flew parallel to the ground, not bothering to try and gain altitude. It was a wise decision, as another spike of black crystal shot up from the space she’d just vacated, again placed carefully so that – had she not kept moving – it would have struck her horn. Gritting her teeth at the near-miss, Celestia glanced up at the dark spot in the sky that was Lex and returned fire, pouring more alicorn magic into the ray of energy she unleashed toward him. But this time he saw the attack coming, dodging the beam with almost contemptuous ease. Compared to how she was struggling to stay ahead of his attacks, the sight sent a rush of trepidation through her.
The battle, Celestia knew, was going badly.
Already she could feel herself growing tired. Even after boosting her endurance, the constant use of her magic was heavily taxing her fortitude. Worse, augmenting so many spells had used up a considerable portion of her alicorn magic. While she wasn’t nearing her limit just yet, it had been a long time since she’d used this much of it at once…which made it all the more disconcerting that she had so little to show for it now.
All of the early gains that she and Luna had made against Lex Legis had been erased, the wounds they’d managed to inflict on him in the opening exchanges of their fight having been healed by that filly. Fortunately, Luna had managed to uncover the secret behind the magic powers those foals had gained, so that wouldn’t be a problem anymore. A quick glance behind her confirmed that the Royal Guard seemed to be in the last stages of subduing those foals. But even that victory would likely prove costly, since it looked like only about half the guards were able to keep fighting, and those that were still standing when they finished overcoming those children would likely have their hooves full keeping them contained.
And that was the good news. Much worse was that, with Luna’s horn being injured and Lex remaining a shadow, there was no way for her sister to meaningfully oppose him any longer. It was a fact that she knew wasn’t lost on Lex Legis, as his malevolent eyes stayed firmly locked on her as he began to chant again. An instant later he finished, and three bolts of pure darkness shot out from the edge of his shadowy body, streaking toward her.
Banking sharply to the right, Celestia managed to avoid the first one entirely, but the inertia of her turn left her unable to do that again as the second one streaked toward her. Instead, she rolled over in mid-air, desperately leaning to the side as she did. It was only by sheer luck that she managed to avoid both the dark bolt and the ground, the former shaving a few feathers off of one wing while the tip of the other brushed the earth, but somehow she managed to remain aloft. But now the third one was heading directly for her, and she realized too late that there was no way she could possibly correct her flight path in time to avoid it. Gritting her teeth, there was nothing Celestia could do except brace herself for the impact…
And then Luna was there, flying directly into the path of the bolt.
Her eyes widening, Celestia didn’t even have a chance to call her sister’s name as Luna took the hit that had been meant for her. The dark bolt struck her on the side of the head, causing her to cry out with pain. But the dark material from Lex’s attack didn’t disperse, instead erupting like water from a balloon, and Celestia saw Luna squeeze one eye shut as the black substance spread over the side of her face. Incredibly, Luna somehow managed to keep flying throughout the ordeal, turning to look at Celestia with her other eye. “Don’t stop, Sister!” she yelled. “Take him out! I’ll cover you!”
“What do you m-, Luna, no!” Realizing that Luna intended on using herself as a shield, Celestia immediately protested her sister’s decision. “You can’t!”
“We have no choice, Sister! We must defeat Lex Legis, for everypony’s sake!” Turning her one good eye back toward the shadow hanging in the air above them, Luna set her mouth in a firm line. “I couldn’t protect Silhouette, but I can at least protect you!”
Celestia knew that her sister was right, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to accept. “Luna…”
“I’ll block his magic for as long as I can. Signal me when you need me to move so you can counterattack.” Glancing back at her, Luna managed a small smile. “I love you, Sister.” Celestia’s heart lurched at that last part, hearing the implicit goodbye, but she didn’t have a chance to so much as reply in kind before Luna turned her attention back to their enemy. “LEX LEGIS!” she shouted. “TRAITOR! COWARD! YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PALE IMITATION OF KING SOMBRA, AND YOU’LL MEET THE SAME END THAT HE DID!”
Her heart breaking as she heard Lex begin chanting another spell in response to Luna’s taunting, Celestia forced herself to steel her resolve. If Luna was determined to place herself in harm’s way, then there was nothing she could do to stop her. The best way to protect her sister now, Celestia knew, was to finish Lex Legis off as quickly as possible, before he did the same to them.
If she couldn’t, then she’d lose Luna a second time.
Had he been corporeal, sweat would have been pouring down Lex’s face.
Severance was growing increasingly agitated, struggling harder in his telekinetic grasp as its voice resounded in his head, louder than ever. While he was still able to keep hold of it, the effort necessary to do so was growing progressively more taxing, and Lex knew that he couldn’t continue to do so for much longer. Just one shot at her horn! he swore to himself as he tracked Celestia’s movement. That’s all I need, and I’ll be able to deal with Severance without any interruptions!
But Celestia, and now Luna, seemed determined to deny him that chance. The former had managed to stay just barely ahead of every attack he’d thrown at her so far, and the latter was placing herself quite deliberately in the line of fire, shouting provocations as though daring him to attack. But Lex had no intention of firing haphazardly, not when he was already running low on attack spells. Worse, the few he had left either didn’t allow for the level of precision targeting necessary to aim for a specific body part, or were too lethal to use against other ponies. That left him with extremely few options, as well as very little time to decide what to do.
Narrowing his eyes, Lex focused intently on the Royal Sisters, trying to formulate a strategy. Celestia was staying just above the ground, clearly wanting to keep him at a distance after how he’d hit her with that concussive force spell before, while Luna was staying above her, continuing to hurl epithets at him. That left Celestia vulnerable to his creating more black crystal stalagmites, but she’d already proven twice now that hitting her with those while she was flying was unlikely to succeed, and doing so from this distance would deplete his remaining stores of dark magic rapidly. Nor was trying to close the distance between them advisable; he could have done it, thanks to his speed-enhancing spell still being in effect, but that would have left him hard-pressed to avoid her energy blasts that she would surely have thrown at him. Even if the damage would be reduced by his currently being incorporeal, the risk was too great.
Which means that I need to take them out from here, using my thaumaturgical magic, he decided. But doing so would mean that there’d be no chance of hitting Celestia’s horn by itself. He’d simply need to use his remaining spells to inflict enough damage on her that she lost consciousness, without killing her in the process. All while Luna was in the way, with Celestia counterattacking at the same time, and before he lost his grip on Severance. It was an unworkable set of restrictions, coupled with an unreasonable timeframe, with the cost of failure being unacceptable.
It took Lex almost two whole seconds to come up with a plan.
Without hesitation, he began chanting and gesturing. Below him, he saw Luna grimace, clearly thinking that she was about to be subject to some sort of powerful magical attack. The sight made Lex smirk, though his shadow-form gave no indication of that, and he finished his spell a moment later.
Instantly, two globes of electricity appeared, one each in front of Celestia and Luna. Each of them was five feet in diameter, floating in the air with one directly above the other, both positioned at the perfect height for the alicorns to fly directly into them. The sight made both sisters cry out in alarm, and they broke from their formation in order to avoid them, Luna heading upward as Celestia swung to the left.
I knew you’d go that way! thought Lex triumphantly. Sandwiched between her sister and the ground, and going too fast to stop in time, Celestia’s only choices had been to go left or right, and the latter decision would have taken her closer to his position, something she likely thought he was herding her toward. Now, she was flying further away from him, still hugging the ground as he mentally directed the electrical orb to chase after her, idly sending the other one after Luna as well. Neither had any chance of actually catching them; they were too slow for that. But that wasn’t what they were meant to do…
But Celestia quite clearly didn’t know that. Instead, she kept ahead of it, gaining enough of a lead on it to turn her head around and fire another huge blast of energy at him. But it didn’t even come close to hitting Lex, who avoided it with minimal effort. I know what you’re doing, he thought with dark satisfaction. That blast hadn’t been intended to hit him. Instead, it had been a distraction…
An instant later, Luna passed through his incorporeal body from directly beneath him, surging upward before looking down triumphantly, clearly expecting him to be hit by the very globe of electricity that he’d conjured. But her grin turned into a confused frown a moment later when the orb stopped before it hit him. Idiots, laughed Lex to himself. The spheres’ movements aren’t automatic, it’s because I’m controlling them. But he didn’t bother to brag, instead chanting the words to another spell. Celestia was almost in position now, swinging back around now that she thought that Luna was in trouble. Her flight path was taking her by one of the larger black crystal stalagmites that he’d conjured before. Almost there…
A second later he finished his chanting, and Celestia tensed as she flew closer…just as a third electrical orb floated out from behind the stalagmite, directly into her path. Her eyes widening, she darted in the opposite direction, dodging the glowing globe by inches as she managed to pull away from it. Luna screamed a warning then, but Celestia didn't look away from the spell she'd just avoided, undoubtedly thinking that Luna was giving a belated yell about what had just happened.
Celestia was thus caught completely by surprise as the tiny tornado Lex had just conjured hit her dead-center.
You didn't know that my first spell had conjured three electrical orbs, gloated Lex silently as he watched the small whirlwind reverse Celestia's direction, bowling her right back towards the electrical sphere she'd just dodged. I hid one from sight while you and Luna avoided the other two. But I knew that wouldn't be enough, so while you were helping your sister futilely trying to hit me with my own attack, I cast another spell. You thought it was to summon a third electrical orb, and so you were wary enough to dodge it when it appeared, but you didn't realize that it was to summon that miniature whirlwind. And since your eyes were on the trap you thought you'd avoided, you didn't even see the real one before it hit you. And now...
Unable to stop herself in time, Celestia collided with the sphere of electricity. Going rigid as the voltage discharged into her body, her agonized scream rang out across the battlefield. It was only when Lex – easily calculating how much damage was sufficient to incapacitate her – mentally pulled the orb away from her that her wail of pain came to an end. She immediately collapsed, smoke rising from her body...but her chest rose and fell, indicating that he'd calculated correctly. Lex allowed himself the luxury of a laugh at the sight. I win.
Ignoring Luna as she screamed her sister's name and raced toward where she'd fallen, Lex turned his attention to Severance. And now for you.
His grip on Severance was becoming tenuous. The weapon was thrashing harder now, as if sensing that it was almost free, and in his mind it was still clamoring noisily for Luna to be vanquished in the Night Mare’s name. And if his single, untested plan to destroy the thing didn’t work, then there’d be very little he could do to stop it.
But despite all of that, Lex found himself experiencing a rush of confidence.
How could he not? After all, he had just defeated Celestia and Luna! No matter that he’d previously determined that he wouldn’t be able to use this victory to take over the whole of Equestria, just the knowledge that he’d managed to overcome the Royal Sisters in combat was heady in its own right. It served as validation of what he’d always known to be true: that he was stronger than them. That he was smarter than them. That he was a true-
“MONSTER!”
Luna’s scream of impotent fury earned only a perfunctory glance from Lex, more to confirm her position than because he cared about what she was saying. Whatever threats or promises she made now were meaningless, since her current inability to cast spells left her unable to back them up. She was already beaten, whether she was willing to admit it or not.
But Luna either didn’t recognize that, or didn’t care. Standing next to where Celestia had fallen, she glared up at him with a look of pure loathing. “YOU’RE A MONSTER!” she screamed. “AND I WON’T LET YOU HURT ANYPONY ELSE!” She had barely finished when she leaped into the air, wings flapping as she furiously as she soared upward.
Lex snorted as she surged directly toward him, apparently intent on trying to pummel him with her hooves again. Stupid, Lex scoffed. Hasn’t she realized that she can’t touch me while I’m in this form?
He received his answer a moment later, as Luna stopped her vertical charge before she’d completed it. Instead, she levelled off before she’d reached his height, hovering in the air as she turned over so her back was to the ground as she began flapping her wings harder. The result left her hovering in place upside down as she sent stronger and stronger gusts of wind up toward him, as if trying to quite literally blow him away. But the movement of the air had no effect on his incorporeal form, and Lex didn’t even feel the breeze that she was sending at him.
The futility of what she was doing was enough to make Lex narrow his eyes in confusion, unable to believe that she thought that would work. It was only when she adjusted her position slightly, placing the orb of electricity hovering below him – the one he’d left hanging there after Luna’s failed attempt to make it collide with him – directly between himself and her that he realized what she was attempting. She’s still trying to attack me with my own spell.
It was such a pathetic plan that he very nearly laughed. The sphere, being composed purely of magically-conjured electricity, had no mass to speak of, and so couldn’t be moved via gusts of air any more than his shadow-form could have been. She’s either desperate, or even stupider than I thought, he decided wryly. Most likely both. But his amusement was cut short as he felt Severance give another sharp tug against his telekinesis, very nearly freeing itself. Tightening his grip on the thing, Lex turned his attention back to the scythe, pausing only to spare a thought to make the orb move down toward Luna.
His intent hadn’t been to strike her – the sphere moved too slowly to have any real chance of accomplishing that – but to demonstrate that her efforts were fruitless. With that firmly established, Lex was certain that she’d break off her attacks and instead focus on extracting Celestia from the battlefield. He was thus caught off-guard when Luna instead winged upward, deftly dodging the descending orb, and placed herself directly between him and Severance. “You imbecile!” snapped Lex, no longer amused by her antics. “Get out of here! You’re in danger!” Being as close to the scythe as she was meant that if he lost his grip on it now, it would attack her before he could use his spell!
Luna, however, didn’t seem inclined to listen to his warning. Instead she looked at him and seethed, her lips twisted in a rictus snarl of fury and pain as her she pointed her horn at him, clearly trying to channel her magic through it despite the injury she’d sustained. “You cursed the ponies here who wouldn’t obey your tyranny!” she shrieked. “You’ve injured my sister, killed my worshiper, tried to kill me, and now you dare to act as though you’re concerned for my welfare?!” Visibly straining, an aura flickered into being around her horn, only to fade out a second later. But Luna didn’t stop, and her eyes began to glow as she pushed herself harder.
“What are you doing?!” roared Lex. A unicorn himself, he knew full well that trying to use Equestrian magic with a horn injury was like trying to run on a broken leg. It would only compound the damage, potentially seriously. “Stop!” He didn’t move, instead directing his thoughts towards the electrical orbs…
“I WON’T!” screamed Luna. Her eyes were glowing brighter now, having turned a solid white as she kept straining. The aura faded back into being around her horn then, thin and sputtering, but sustained. “I AM LUNA, EQUESTRIA’S GUARDIAN GODDESS OF THE NIGHT! I WILL NEVER-”
“YOU ARE NOT A GODDESS!” roared Lex. He could only hope this would work, needing to keep Luna distracted while he moved the spheres into position. Her tantrum couldn’t be allowed to continue; not only was she at risk of seriously injuring herself, but he could feel his grip on Severance reaching its limit. If she wasn’t incapacitated immediately, protecting her would be impossible, and at the moment the only way to do that was to hit her with the same power that had knocked out Celestia. Now if he could just keep her occupied long enough… “THE NIGHT MARE IS MORE WORTHY OF THAT TITLE THAN YOU’LL EVER BE!” Closer…closer… “SHE’S STRONG, WHILE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU IS WEAK!” Move them into her blind spots… “SHE EXALTS THOSE WITH THE COURAGE TO LEAD THE WORLD RATHER THAN RUN FROM IT!” Almost there…just a little more… “SHE’S A TRUE GODDESS, AND YOU’RE JUST A PRETENDER!” Now!
Incensed beyond all reason, Luna’s eyes glowed like lanterns, shining brightly enough that they were painful to look at. Her horn was emitting sparks, the aura around it pulsating and strobing dangerously. She opened her mouth, but what she intended to say was lost as all three of Lex’s electrical orbs moved in and made contact with her at once. Coming from beneath, behind, and above her, Luna wasn’t even able to scream as they collectively discharged their power into her, her limbs spasming as her body jerked and trembled under their combined current. Lex only kept them in contact with her for a moment, knowing that hitting her with all three at once was a dangerous risk, but that she had to be taken out of commission before she could make things any worse.
As the orbs moved away from her, Luna managed to hang in the air for just a moment – her horn no longer shrouded in an aura, and her eyes having changed back to normal – before she went limp and began to fall. Lex made no move to catch her, but instead mentally directed his miniature tornado to position itself under her. The whirlwind arrested her fall, tossing her a few feet back up into the air, bleeding off the momentum she’d accumulated before it moved out of the way, letting her hit the ground with a soft thud.
Lex was already moving, floating down after her and returning to physical form as he went over to check on her, certain that she wasn’t anywhere close to consciousness now…if she’d survived. Stumbling as the full strain of holding Severance back fell on him, he struggled to maintain his enhanced telekinesis for just a little longer as he made his way over to Luna, pressing a hoof gently against her neck. He couldn’t suppress a sigh of relief when he felt a pulse a moment later, confirming that she was still alive.
But there was no more time to focus on that. Looking up at Severance, Lex released his telekinetic grip on it, fighting back the urge to gasp in relief. Instead, he immediately started casting, forcing his tortured muscles to bear it as he poured as much power as he could into his spell…
“I don’t believe it…” whispered Nosey as she came to a stop, too shocked to continue running.
“Hah! Told ya!” grinned Sonata, her discomfort from a few minutes ago forgotten. “Those princess ponies totes got owned! Lex-, wait…” Furrowing a brow, she put a hoof to her chin as something occurred to her. “Hang on…that means…” She put her hoof down with a triumphant stomp a few seconds later, her smile returning in full force. “They got powned!” Visibly pleased with herself, Sonata elbowed Nosey. “Get it? Ponies? Owned? Powned!”
But Nosey wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she dazedly took her glasses off, rubbing them to make absolutely sure what she was seeing wasn’t the result of the lenses being smudged. But the view was the same when she put them back on.
Having just reached the edge of the camp, the full scope of the battle was now readily apparent. Near the train station, the landscape itself had been altered by the titanic clash that had just concluded, with the ground being pock-marked by scorch marks and holes, while black crystals of varying sizes jutted up from the earth intimidatingly. But that was nothing compared to the sight of Lex standing over the fallen princesses.
He really did it, thought Nosey dizzily. He actually defeated Celestia and Luna, all by himself. Part of her knew that she shouldn’t be as shocked as she was. Sonata hadn’t been wrong about Lex defeating powerful monsters before, something Nosey had seen up close and personal when he had rescued her from Xiriel. Likewise, she’d read all about how, when the changelings had invaded Canterlot, Princess Celestia had fought and lost a duel against their queen, Chrysalis. Neither Lex’s might nor the Royal Sisters’ fallibility should have surprised her…and yet it did.
“Lex Legis is now the most powerful pony in the entire world,” she murmured, her bottom hitting the dirt as the full weight of what she was saying settled over her, that realization being too momentous for her to remain standing. Sure, Princess Twilight and her friends were also pretty strong, having defeated monsters like Tirek and Discord, but Nosey had just finished telling Sonata how Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had once performed those exact same feats…and they had just lost the fight against Lex now. If he could defeat those two, then there was no reason to think that Princess Twilight and her friends would do any better if they challenged him. “He can remake Equestria however he wants now.”
“Hold on a sec,” frowned Sonata as she tapped Nosey on the shoulder. “So you’re saying I don’t even get a chuckle for my ‘powned’ joke?”
Nosey gave the other mare a wide-eyed look. “Sonata…do you not understand that Lex basically just overthrew the princesses?”
Sonata tilted her head. “For realsies?” For some reason that sounded familiar to her, reminding her of stuff that she’d talked to Lex about back when they’d been dating on Everglow. “That’s…a bad thing, right? I think I remember him talking about that before, and me telling him it was a bad thing.”
“I don’t know,” admitted Nosey. The entire situation was too big for her to wrap her head around, especially in conjunction to what had just happened with her and Sonata. It was like this morning was the culmination of all the craziness of the last couple of days, with everything she thought she knew suddenly being turned completely upside down. For a moment it was enough to make Nosey just want to run away from everything, feeling as lost and uncertain as she had right after Xiriel had used her…
Her anxiety must have shown on her face, because Sonata suddenly gave her a worried look. “Nosey? You okay? Do you need me to use my calming spell on you again?”
For a moment Nosey almost said yes, but took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before she let out a breath. “No. No, I’m alright.” The first rule of being a newsmare came back to her then: when in doubt, gather facts and talk to people. That would make her feel better. “C’mon. We need to meet up with Lex.”
“Okay!” nodded Sonata, striding purposefully forward, before pausing to look back at Nosey. “So…we’re totes gonna ask him about that whole ‘conquered the world’ thing, and not about the ‘whole buncha girlfriends’ thing, right?”
A pained look crossed Nosey’s face at that. “Er…” But she was saved from answering as a sudden movement in the distance drew her attention.
Sonata saw the look on her face, and turned to see what she was looking at, smiling as she caught sight of something rushing down from the sky toward Lex. “Aw, look!” she cooed. “Severance wants to go say congratulations!”
“He did it!” breathed Fruit Crunch softly, watching with wide eyes as Princess Luna fell to the ground. “Lex did it! He won!”
The sight was electrifying, enough so that he momentarily forgot how much it had hurt to lose Lyden, the wolf having been buried under several members of the Royal Guard and pummeled until he had dissolved into nothing. With his spirit animal gone, the last of the magic empowering Fruit Crunch and the other Knights had faded away, along with any lingering chance of them overcoming the remaining guards. Despite them having taken out almost all of the armored ponies by that point, the last few members of the Royal Guard had easily overcome the now-powerless Knights, forcing them to line up against the back wall of the train station while they’d stood watch over them, waiting for the princesses’ battle with Lex to end. But judging from the looks on the guards’ faces – eyes wide and jaws hanging open – this wasn’t the conclusion they’d expected.
“N-no way…” murmured one of the guards, an earth pony with a dark brown coat that didn’t fully hide the cuts and bruises he’d sustained. “The princesses lost?!”
“Should we do something?” asked the only other guard still standing, a pegasus with a bright white coat that was now dirty and scuffed. “We should be doing something, right?”
The earth pony guard looked at his companion, his face suggesting that he was on the edge of hysteria. “What’re you asking me for?! I’m not in charge!”
The pegasus wasn’t much better, blinking as though he were trying to wake up from what was happening. “So…who is, then?”
“That’s easy,” smirked Fruit Crunch, making both guards glance at him. He didn’t return their look, instead nodding at where Lex was descending toward the fallen Princess Luna. “He’s right over there. His name is Lex Legis.”
The declaration, along with the sight of the dark mass of shadows descending toward Luna’s insensate form, was enough to set both guards to shaking. “W-we need a plan!” yelped the earth stallion, breathing in and out rapidly as he looked at the pegasus. “Quick! Think of a plan!”
“I can’t!” wailed the other stallion. “I’m not in charge either!”
“Yeah, well, congratulations!” shouted the earth pony guard. “I’m officially granting you a field promotion! You’re now, um…temporary…honorary…captain!” Each word seemed to come with great difficulty, as though simply thinking of them was straining his overtaxed nerves, though the increased pace of his breathing might have had something to do with that. “Now think of something!”
The pegasus, despite already being white, somehow managed to turn even paler at that. “But…but if you can do that, doesn’t it mean that you were already in charge?!” he whimpered.
“I DON’T KNOW!” cried the earth stallion.
“You better think of something fast,” added Cleansweep, unable to keep a smirk off of her face, nodding pointedly toward where Lex had a hoof at Luna’s neck.
“Otherwise what happens next will be your fault,” intoned Straightlace ominously.
“T-training…” moaned the pegasus, covering his eyes with both wings. “Gotta remember my training…”
“We weren’t trained to deal with the end of the world!” croaked the earth stallion, his voice now sounding as though he was choking. “Equestria has fallen! We’re doomed! We’re doomed! We’re doo-” His voice ended abruptly as Feathercap telekinetically brought his binoculars down sharply on the guard’s head. The impact clanged loudly against his helmet, making the guard’s eyes cross as he swayed unsteadily for a moment before slumping over, unconscious.
“Wh-what was that?!” yelped the pegasus, his wings still covering his eyes. “What happened?! Did something happen?!” Too distraught to think straight, it didn’t occur to him to move his wings so he could see again, and he started galloping blindly forward. “Give me a status report! But that doesn’t mean I’m in char-, oof!” His babbling came to an abrupt end as Fiddlesticks stuck out a hoof, tripping the guard and sending him sprawling face-first into the back wall of the train station, the resulting impact leaving him on the ground, unconscious.
Everything was silent for a moment as the foals glanced at each other, before Straightlace shook his head. “I can’t believe these guys actually wiped out all our spirit animals,” he sighed.
“I hope Lex curses all of them,” announced Fiddlesticks bitterly, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “For what they did to Nemel and the others, I hope he does something really awful to them.”
Cleansweep was at her side in an instant, wrapping her forelegs around the other filly in a hug. “I bet he will,” she assured her. “Besides, maybe they’re not really gone?” Ending the hug, she looked at the others hopefully. “I mean, the Night Mare gave them to us before, so maybe she can bring them back?”
“I hope so,” sniffled Feathercap, cradling his binoculars sadly. For a moment it seemed like he wasn’t going to say anything else, but then he swallowed and looked up at the others. “But…but if she can’t…” He faltered for a moment, but managed to keep going. “If she can’t…we’ll still be the Night Mare’s Knights…right?”
“We’ll always be the Night Mare’s Knights,” declared Fruit Crunch firmly. The words brought a smile to the faces of the other four, and the sight made a warm feeling well up inside him. “I want to thank all of you,” he said suddenly. “I know you weren’t sure about doing this with me, because of how I acted before, but…I’m really glad you did.”
“Aw, we should be thanking you, Crunchy,” replied Cleansweep. “This whole thing was your idea, remember?” She shot him a cheeky grin then, the same one that she’d used whenever they’d gotten into trouble together. “This has been way more exciting than just gluing all of our teacher’s chalk sticks to their tray.”
“I don’t know if I ever would have stood up to my dad if I hadn’t joined the Knights,” admitted Straightlace. “It’s funny. Looking back, you were the only one who ever told me to stop trying to follow in his hoofsteps. I’m really grateful for that now.” He nodded at the other colt then. “Thank you.”
Fiddlesticks spoke up next. “I always thought you were a troublemaker,” she confessed. “And I still think that.” Her smile turned wry then. “But only a huge troublemaker would think of doing something as crazy as attacking the Royal Guard. Twice.” The wry note disappeared from her smile then. “But if Silhouette had disrupted that ritual, it would have hurt the ponies that helped my little brother. Thank you for letting me help stop that, Fruit Crunch.”
“I want to say thank you too!” piped up Feathercap, before blushing a little as the others turned to look at him. “I mean…we’ve already done all sorts of incredible stuff, meeting princesses and dream-goddesses and talking scythes. It’s been a lot more fun than just watching stuff without ever actually doing anything.” He rubbed the back of his neck as he held his binoculars up self-consciously. “So, um, thanks for leading us on such great adventures.”
Now it was Fruit Crunch’s turn to be teary-eyed, and he had to swallow a lump in his throat. “You guys…” Not trusting himself to speak, he instead held out a foreleg tentatively. The others needed no further prompting, and a moment later he was surrounded in a group hug. “Do you know,” he murmured shakily, “you’re all my very best friends.”
The foals stayed like that for a long moment before Straightlace suddenly spoke up. “Oh hey! Lex is bringing Severance back down!”
Separating from each other, the Knights turned to look back at the stallion that had just defeated the princesses. Sure enough, Severance no longer had Lex’s aura around it, and was rapidly shooting downward toward the stallion, who was waving a hoof at it in what looked like a series of gesticulations. The sight made Feathercap lift his binoculars to his face, peering at Lex. “I think he’s casting a spell.”
“What, on Severance?” blinked Cleansweep. “I wonder why.”
“You think it has something to do with why he didn’t use it to fight the princesses?” ventured Fiddlesticks.
“Maybe,” shrugged Fruit Crunch. “How about we go ask him? C’mon!” Without a second thought he trotted forward, the others falling in behind him as they made their way toward the pony that had defeated the princesses.
Lex silently called upon the reserve energies of his circlet as he began casting. Although its reservoir of power was meager, it was enough to substitute for the energy that was carefully contained within this spell’s thought-matrix, allowing him to retain the spell’s mental structure by feeding the substitute energy in as he utilized what was already there. In essence, he’d be able to use this spell again immediately if the first casting didn’t destroy Severance.
At least, in theory he would. In actuality, the scythe would almost certainly cut through him, or Luna, or both of them before he’d be able to try and cast it again. But on the infinitesimal chance that something happened to prevent it from doing that – a possibility that Lex couldn’t conclusively rule out, given how many other wildly improbable events had come to pass since he’d returned to Equestria – there was no reason not to take the precaution.
At the same time, he pulled in additional magic through his body, feeding it into the spell alongside the substitute energies from his circlet. The fatigue he’d accumulated from holding Severance back made the process grueling, and Lex knew that if it wasn’t for his stamina-enhancing spell he’d likely have been in considerable pain, but he ignored it in favor of pouring as much additional power into the spell as he could, knowing he’d need as much as he could possibly gather. He was even making sure to make the requisite gesticulations for its casting with his right foreleg – the one that didn’t have the barbed wire wrapped around it – just in case the Night Mare made her displeasure at what he was about to do known again, preparing himself to resist what would most assuredly be agony when the razor wire around his left foreleg began to shred him again.
But the wire around his leg remained completely still.
Already halfway through the casting, even as Severance closed in on where he was standing above Luna’s prone form, the fact that the Night Mare hadn’t tried to interfere with what he was doing was enough to make Lex slightly concerned. He was attempting to destroy one of her personal weapons…was she not at all upset by that prospect? Surely this had to be more egregious than his offering to use the resurrection spell she’d given him on the worshiper of an ostensible competitor to her. Or perhaps this was permissible under her dogma; her credo of "the strong dominate the weak" taken to its logical conclusion. That, or she’s simply not concerned because she knows this won’t work, he thought grimly.
That was entirely possible. On paper this idea – which he’d been developing for some time now, simply as a matter of course; as far as Lex was concerned, any power that wasn't under his absolute control was a power that could conceivably turn against him one day, and so countermeasures needed to be prepared – was sound, but there’d been no way to put it to the test. Not without alerting Severance that he was researching ways to destroy it.
The plan that he'd eventually come up with relied on the fact that Severance was ultimately just a magic item. True, its power was phenomenal, but it still operated according to the same underlying principles. Specifically, it still had magical channels in itself that allowed it to function. If those channels were disrupted, then its functionality would be similarly impaired; likewise, if those channels were critically compromised, then Severance would be unable to function at all, effectively destroying it. Its physical form would still exist, but it would be nothing more than a mundane scythe, albeit one of masterful construction.
Lex’s dispelling spell wasn’t, by itself, capable of wreaking that level of havoc on even an ordinary magic item. He’d tested it out before, and when it worked at all – since the magical channels, much like the structure of a spell, naturally resisted being tampered with if sufficient power wasn't used – it never did anything more than shut the item's magical properties down for a few seconds. Permanently destroying an item's magical properties was far beyond what his dispelling spell could do.
But that was before he fed massive amounts of magical power into the spell. More power than his body could normally handle, thanks to his stamina-boosting enchantment that he'd cast on himself. If he was right, then pouring so much power into his dispelling spell would super-charge it to the point where it would be able to do more than just disrupt Severance.
It would completely disjoin it.
Making the final gesture as he pronounced the last syllable, Lex unleashed his spell at the descending scythe.
He felt the magic race upward as he completed the casting, bridging the distance between himself and the descending scythe so fast that it might as well have been instantaneous. Then the amassed energy of his spell collided with the incredible power stored within Severance, and Lex held his breath, knowing that the contest would be resolved in a fraction of a second. Even so, that was enough time for him to silently will his spell to work, aware of what would happen if it didn’t…
And then his spell shattered.
Its structure broke apart as soon as it made contact with Severance, the gathered energy dispersing harmlessly as the scythe went right through it, none the worse for his attempt to destroy it. The weapon hadn’t even made a counterattack; it had simply received the spell without trying to defend itself, going through it with no more damage than a falling rock would have sustained if someone threw a pane of glass in front of it. Unimpeded in the slightest, the scythe continued its downward trajectory.
His one plan to deal with Severance having failed, Lex’s mind went into overdrive. With unimaginable speed, he weighed and analyzed every option, every variable, every piece of relevant data as he searched for an alternate course of action. Casting the spell again was immediately out; there was no chance of completing the requisite verbal and somatic components – for that or any other spell – before Severance closed the distance between them. Calling upon the tulpa in his shadow was unlikely to produce any response, since he still didn’t know what made it respond some times and not others, and even if it did react there was no telling if its response would be adequate or not. Creating more black crystals to block Severance’s path would be futile, since the weapon had already demonstrated that it could go through them with no trouble whatsoever. Grabbing it with his telekinesis again would only stop it if he channeled additional magic through himself, and the physical effort required to do that would take more time than he currently had. All of those possibilities and dozens more ran through Lex’s brain then, and all of them had no chance of stopping the scythe from slicing through himself and Luna.
All except two.
The first option was to simply abandon Luna. After all, she was the one the scythe was aiming for; he was simply in its way. Although Severance was now too close for him to dodge it completely, Lex felt certain that if he hurled himself to the side he’d be able to avoid a fatal strike. It was an option that would guarantee his survival if he simply admitted that he couldn’t save Luna, and instead cut his losses.
But just like when Xiriel had forced him into this same circumstance, where he’d needed to choose between saving himself or Nosey, Lex couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice someone else. It wasn’t that he cared about Luna the same way he’d realized he did for Nosey. Luna was an incompetent fool who had once betrayed her sister and her people, whose return had been notable only in how she’d wallowed in the same self-indulgent indolence as Celestia, and who had repeatedly refused to listen when he’d tried to talk her down from this fight. As far as Lex was concerned, Luna was an example of everything wrong with Equestria today. It was just that right now, however, none of that mattered. Regardless of how he felt about her personally, Luna was still a pony. That fact alone meant that her life had immeasurable value, which Lex was morally obligated to protect to the best of his ability even if it meant putting his own life at risk to do it. Which meant that his only choice was to use the second plan that he’d come up with.
Severance had closed to within a few feet of him when Lex made his move. Muscles heaving, he threw himself…not out of Severance’s way, but further into it as he moved from standing over Luna to being sprawled out on top of her, shielding the fallen alicorn with his own body. There was no guarantee that this would work, especially given that he’d just tried to destroy Severance, but the barbed wire around his left foreleg was still unresponsive as the scythe flew down…
And came to a complete stop a few inches away from him.
Lex didn’t let his chance slip away, casting his dispelling spell again as he strained to pull more magic into himself. The burn in his muscles was worse now, but he ignored it as he hurriedly gestured and chanted. He knew that Severance could easily cut him apart before he finished, that there was no way he could have stopped it if it tried, but the scythe remained still, making no move as it hovered over him. That’s right, Lex thought viciously. I’m still the Night Mare’s representative on Equestria! If you kill me, her interests won’t be served!
That was conjecture on his part, of course. Given that Severance’s overriding motive was to act in accordance with its understanding of the Night Mare’s wishes – wishes that Lex knew he’d been sidelining, such as his refusal to heed Severance’s insistence that he deal with Luna, or ignoring, such as when he’d offered to use the resurrection spell in the gemstone to bring back Silhouette despite how badly the barbed wire around his foreleg had reacted – it wouldn’t have been surprising if the scythe, and by extension the Night Mare herself, had decided to terminate both his relationship with the goddess as well as his life. But Lex had been willing to make a calculated risk that Severance wouldn’t do that. After all, he hadn’t formally renounced his connection to the goddess, nor reneged on his promise to gather worshipers for her. I simply haven’t made it a priority yet! smirked Lex as he continued casting. It was a technicality, but one that he suspected Severance – which as a magic item had an artificial personality, and so likely lacked anything that resembled a survival instinct or sense of self-preservation – would adhere to even at the risk of its own destruction.
A second later he finished casting the spell, murmuring the final words around clenched teeth as he poured as much power as he could into it. The ache was worse now, and he knew he wouldn’t have been able to do this at all if his stamina-enhancing spell hadn’t still been active, but there was no other choice. He wouldn’t be able to cast this spell a third time if this didn’t work. Although he could have used the energy he’d gathered physically to retain the spell, feeding it into the mental construct that housed its energy in a process similar to the reserve energies stored in his circlet, that simply wasn’t possible when he was already pouring everything he had into the spell’s overall power. Whether he succeeded or failed, this would be the last time he’d be able to try this.
Again, Lex unleashed his dispelling spell at Severance.
Again, it collided with the scythe in a split-second contest of power.
And again it didn’t work, the spell breaking apart as it tried and failed to disjoin Severance’s magic.
Breathing heavily, Lex could only glare at the weapon as it hung there, its continued existence mocking his efforts to destroy it. Slowly, Severance began to circle around them, and Lex knew that it was looking for a way to strike that would allow it to kill Luna without killing him. His heart racing, Lex flattened himself out, trying to cover as much as he could of the mare under him, but he knew it was no use. Luna was larger than he was anyway, and Severance’s speed and precision would be more than adequate to find an opening sufficient to inflict a mortal wound on the alicorn without doing the same to him. Once it did, Luna would die, and there’d be nothing he could do to stop it.
But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. Reaching out with his telekinesis, Lex wrapped the scythe in his aura, not having the strength to augment it again. “Don’t…you…dare…” he rasped, despite knowing that the scythe wouldn’t be intimidated. No one would have been, he knew, since it was obvious that he was nearing his limits, and Lex couldn’t help but note the bitter irony that – at least after that filly had healed him – his attempts to destroy Severance had depleted him worse than his fight against the Royal Sisters.
Worse, he realized an instant later as he spotted movement out of the corner of his eye, said filly and her friends were now on their way there! He could see them trotting toward him, their faces relaxed and their movements unhurried, clearly having no idea of what was occurring with Severance right now. But while none of them looked worried, the prospect of their imminent arrival made Lex’s anxiety skyrocket. If those foals realized that there was a conflict between himself and Severance, they’d try to interfere; after how they’d insisted on joining the battle against the alicorns, Lex had no doubt of that. And while he wasn’t sure if they’d side with him or Severance, either prospect would increase the chances that they’d be injured, or even killed. That could not be allowed to happen, and it was with resolve borne of rising panic that Lex turned his attention back to Severance. “Luna’s already beaten!” he snarled. “Stand down!”
But as sharp as Severance’s blade was, its reply – that mercy was a sin – was blunt. As if to prove the goddess’s approval of her weapon’s words, the barbed wire around Lex’s foreleg twisting ominously, the sharp edges pressing against his skin without cutting. The sensation made Lex grit his teeth, the unsubtle warning being-
Wait…
A warning. The barbed wire hadn’t actually injured him just now; it had only threatened to do so, which meant that he hadn’t actually run afoul of the Night Mare’s ire just yet. But Severance seemed dead-set on finishing Luna off. So if his protesting that was only warranting a warning from the goddess…
Suddenly Lex knew what he had to do.
“Luna has been beaten,” he rumbled again as he stood up, the tension in his voice having been replaced with conviction. Out of his periphery he could see Fruit Crunch and his friends getting closer, close enough that he knew they could hear him now, but he didn’t dare stop. “Her loss isn’t just my victory. It’s also the Night Mare’s.”
His telekinetic grip on Severance was enough to let him hear the weapon’s reply as it denied his claim, saying that he had only laid her low because she’d attacked him first. “That doesn’t matter!” snapped Lex. Off to the side, those five foals had come to a halt, watching the one-sided conversation curiously. “I struck her down while exalting the Night Mare’s name! I demonstrated that Luna isn’t worthy of godhood, while proclaiming that the Night Mare is! I made it clear for everyone to see that Luna is weak, and the Night Mare is strong!” He let that hang in the air for just a moment, and when Severance didn’t reply, Lex continued. “And I have no intention of showing her mercy.”
Turning his back on the scythe, Lex focused his attention to Luna. He had little doubt that if he didn’t levy a serious penalty against her right now, the scythe would do so on its own, and its attempt would be fatal. As much as Lex resented having his hoof forced like this, it was an outcome he could live with; although he hadn’t intended to levy any further penalties against the Royal Sisters for what had happened here – particularly since Severance had instigated this conflict – their refusal to back down despite his calls for peace made punishing them acceptable. Besides, the Night Mare doesn’t seem to care what happens to Celestia, so Luna can be the one to bear the brunt of the consequences for both of their actions.
Pointing his horn at the unconscious mare, Lex called upon his dark magic. At the same time, he made himself begin drawing in additional energy through his body. He knew he had already passed his limit, and that he could only even make the attempt due to the spell he’d cast on himself to boost his vigor, but there was no other choice but to do this. Not if he wanted this curse to work…
Fighting back a scream of pain as he pushed himself further, Lex pulled in more and more power as he concentrated on Luna. The agonies that raced through him then were familiar, feeling as though his organs were on fire even as his head throbbed so badly it felt as though he was being bludgeoned to death. But Lex didn’t stop, focusing even more intently on Luna as he kept pushing himself further. Sombra cursed an entire city and everypony in it! he silently screamed at himself as he kept going, pouring more and more power into his dark magic, directing it at the unconscious alicorn. If he could do that, I CAN DO THIS!
Slowly, her body still hanging limp, Luna rose into the air. Even as she did, a black aura manifested around her, causing the foals around them to cry out in surprise as it thickened and congealed around her body, until she was completely obscured within a dark cocoon. Not letting his concentration lapse, Lex abandoned any semblance of restraint, using everything he’d learned from his sessions examining Sonata, Aria, and Nosey as he forced the dark magic further inward, invading every part of Luna’s body. The blackness surrounded her further, compressing and sinking inward as he forced it into her, not willing to stop until he’d made her absorb it all.
The process took only a few seconds, rather than the hours he’d needed when he’d performed a similar – and yet very different – process on Aria. As soon as it was completed, Lex released power he’d been directing all at once, and collapsed to the ground in a heap, gasping for air. At the same time, the last of the dark magic sank into Luna’s body, and she fell to the ground, still unconscious. Barely noticing as Fruit Crunch and his friends helped him up, each of them peppering him with questions, Lex instead glanced back at Severance, weakly taking hold of it with his telekinesis. “Satisfied?” he spat.
The scythe didn’t answer for a moment, and Lex had just enough time to think that it was going to kill her anyway, before it admitted that it was. Outwardly, Lex’s only response to the thing was to release it from his telekinetic aura with a snort. Inwardly, however, he felt a wave of relief, only barely managing to suppress it as he looked back at what he’d done to Celestia’s sister.
She was smaller now, having lost a few inches of her stature. Her mane and tail – which had previously continued to flutter in the nonexistent breeze of their own accord – had become still, and their sparkling radiance had faded to a plain, dull blue. Most notable, however, were her sides, which were now smooth and lacking in the feathered limbs that had been there before. Compared to how she'd looked previously, her transformation was dramatic enough that Lex, despite the nauseating level of pain assaulting him from how badly he’d strained himself, couldn’t help but feel a flash of perverse pride at what he’d just accomplished.
Sonata couldn’t help but smile as she and Nosey trotted toward where Lex was, humming a happy tune to herself.
Lex beat up the princesses! she sang in her head. He’s really made a mess of things now! Just the thought threatened to make her break out in a grin. Now that Lex had done something way worse than just get hot ‘n’ heavy with Aria, the fact that she had fooled around with Nosey was no big deal! Since he’s done the whole “I’m taking over the world, for justice! Mwahaha!”-thing all over them, I bet he won’t even care about anything else! I can be all “Hey, while you were slapping those two around, I did some slap-and-tickle with Nosey,” and he’ll be like “I don’t even care, ‘cuz I’ve gotta coagulate some new plans now, for justice!” And then I bet he’ll totes need his spokespony to help him out, and everything will go back to nor-
“Lex!”
Blinking as Nosey’s yell brought her out of her daydream, Sonata belatedly realized that they’d finally made it. Barely thirty feet ahead of them was Lex, struggling to his hooves as those foals from last night helped him up, Severance hovering nearby. Following behind Nosey as the blonde mare broke into a gallop, Sonata found herself slightly worried by how Lex looked like he was barely able to stand. Did he overdo it again? The thought sent a twinge of guilt through her, remembering that she and Nosey were supposed to be there to stop exactly that from happening, but she pushed it away. It’s good that Lex messed things up, she reminded herself, because now that makes what we did less bad. But for some reason the thought didn’t seem quite so reassuring now…
“Lex, are you alright?!” fretted Nosey as she reached his side. “What happened?! We saw that you were fighting the princesses, but-”
“He wasn’t just fighting them,” gushed Fruit Crunch – at least Sonata was pretty sure that was him; Nosey had mentioned those kids’ names a whole bunch this morning over breakfast – from where he was helping to prop Lex up. “He put a major smack-down on them! I mean, we couldn’t see too much of it,” he grinned, “since we were fighting the Royal Guard and all-”
“And we won, too!” chirped Feathercap, despite bashfully concealing the lower part of his face behind his binoculars.
“Not all of us,” added Fiddlesticks sadly. Walking over to Sonata, she sniffled as she threw a foreleg around her in a hug. “Our spirit animals didn’t make it,” she whimpered.
Sonata tilted her head, hugging Fiddlesticks back automatically. “Wait, your what now?”
But Nosey cut in before any of them could answer. “Listen, I want to hear all about what happened, I really do,” she began, her eyes sweeping over to the conspicuous sight of Princess Celestia’s unmoving figure a stone’s throw away. “But shouldn’t we do something about the princesses fir-” She came to an abrupt halt as she stepped around Lex to look at Princess Luna.
For a moment Nosey’s brow furrowed, quite clearly not sure who she was looking at. Shaking her head, she glanced around, but when she didn’t see any other defeated ponies, she looked back at Luna. Slowly, her confusion faded into understanding, and the blood drained from her face. “L-Lex,” she gulped, her voice a whisper. “What have you done?”
“It was really incredible,” answered Straightlace, his eyes wide. “It happened just a minute ago. Lex was talking to Severance about something, and then he – Lex, not Severance – said ‘I have no intention of showing her mercy.’” He growled the last part in a passable imitation of Lex’s own voice. “And then this black aura surrounded Luna, and when it vanished-”
“She looked like that,” added Cleansweep, who looked a bit unnerved by what she was saying.
Tilting her head, Sonata gently separated herself from Fiddlesticks and walked over to see what everyone was talking about, blinking as the unconscious unicorn came into view. “Wait a sec…so, Lex made whatshername’s wings vanish?” She tilted her head in thought, before smiling as she realized what was going on. “Ooh! So this is, like, one of those optimum illusions, right? Her wings are behind some mirrors somewhere?” Reached a hoof down, she poked Luna’s sides, looking for the trick that was keeping her wings hidden.
“No, Sonata,” moaned Nosey. At some point, Feathercap had gone over to lend her a helping hoof, patting her gently on the back, though she barely seemed to notice. “You don’t understand. Luna’s not an alicorn anymore. Her wings are gone.”
“They are?” Blinking, Sonata tried to figure out where a pair of wings would go, slowly turning her head to look up in the sky. “So…should we, like, get one of those nets with a really long handle and go try and catch ‘em?”
Despite herself, a giggle escaped Nosey’s lips, though it had a slightly hysterical tenor to it. “The Chronicle will never print this,” she muttered. “Even if they did, nopony would believe it.”
“All of you,” rasped Lex as he let go of Fruit Crunch, taking a step forward. “Be quiet.”
Everyone immediately fell silent, except for Sonata, who rolled her eyes as she walked over to him. “Aw c’mon!” she teased, eager to keep this particular topic going. After all, the more they talked about it the less chance there was that he’d ask where she and Nosey had been. “This is, like, a super big deal! Tell us more…” She trailed off as got closer to him, realizing that her initial impression had been more correct than she’d realized: Lex had overdone it again. Badly.
His face was pale, but unlike Nosey it was quite clearly from pain and exertion rather than anxiety, his jaw clenching as he forced himself to take another step. Even that seemed to require a titanic effort, his legs trembling as he shifted his weight forward, sweat already starting to run down his face. It was only when his foreleg touched down that he released the breath he’d been holding, exhaling audibly before taking several heavy breaths. “Hurry and…” he gasped, looking at Sonata, “fetch…the doctors…”
“R-right!” she nodded. “Just hold on, I’ll have them come here and fix you up in no-”
“No!” he snarled. Or at least, he tried to; his voice came out sounding more like a croak. “Not…for me! For the…princesses…and guards!” He moved his left foreleg – the one that looked like he’d stuck it in a shredder, being covered with cuts and dried blood – as though to point at the fallen ponies. But his leg only twitched a little, and Lex swayed dangerously as though about to collapse.
Sonata started forward, alarmed, but Fruit Crunch beat her to it, appearing at Lex’s side in an instant to steady him. “I’ve got you!” he called, worry having replaced his previous excitement. “Just…just hang on, okay? Dust Bun-, er, Cleansweep can’t heal you without her animal, but we’ll get the doctors here right away!”
Sonata’s eyes lit up then. “Hang on! Lex, you have healing magic, right? Like, when you cured whatshisname, when our ship was attacked by the sea-hooligans, or whatever they were called? That pony who kept bragging about the scar he got from that?”
“Sandbar,” muttered Lex, the reproach in his voice barely audible with how he was struggling just to speak. “His name…was…Sandbar…”
Sonata nodded. “Right, whatever, Sandbar! Go ahead and use that on yourself now!”
Despite looking like he was going to collapse at any second, Lex’s ears managed to fold back. “I can’t…” A look of shame crossed his face then. “Used it up…this morning…”
“No way!” Sonata couldn’t have looked more shocked. “Why?”
“Does that really matter right now?!” cut in Nosey, giving Sonata an incredulous look. “Look, I’ll go get the doctors, okay? Just stay here and don’t let him try to do anything else!” Her eyes were filled with worry as she looked at Lex then. “For once, let someone else take care of you, okay?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she turned and galloped off, heading toward the medical tents.
But Lex was intent on answering Sonata’s question. “After the three…of you left…I was getting ready…to meet the princesses,” he groaned. “I had decided…that I’d fight them…” A shudder went through him then, and Fruit Crunch had to adjust his stance to keep Lex from collapsing. “So I…used those…healing spells…on myself…” His jaw clenched as he kept going. “And then…a few minutes later…after I’d used them…I changed my mind…I decided that…fighting the princesses…was pointless…” He gave a sharp exhalation that might have been a self-deprecating laugh. “Those spells…were wasted…”
“Hang on!” protested Sonata. “That, like, doesn’t even make any sense! You were totes still hurting this morning, so fixing yourself up wasn’t wasted! If you hadn’t done that, you’d be even more hurt than you are now!” She looked at Fruit Crunch. “Tell him!”
Not sure what was going on, and slightly intimidated by the serious nature of the conversation, Fruit Crunch nevertheless nodded. “She’s right, Lex! I mean, so what if you decided that fighting Celestia and Luna was pointless? You still got into a fight with them anyway, so it’s a good thing that you healed up first!”
“…If I had…kept one…I might have…been able to…save him…” murmured Lex.
Feeling completely lost now, Sonata could only shake her head. “Huh? Who?”
“…Silhouette…”
Tilting her head, Sonata grimaced at the name of that awful black-and-white stallion. “That jerk? What’s he got to do with you using up your healing spells?”
But Fruit Crunch’s eyes had widened. “Oh geez, I forgot!”
His friends had similar looks on their faces. “Now I remember!” blurted Cleansweep. “When we got here, after I healed Lex he started trying to talk Celestia and Luna down, telling them that I could-”
“Go heal Silhouette,” finished Feathercap, starting to tremble a little.
Fiddlesticks nodded. “But it was too late then, because one of the Royal Guard ponies came back and said that Silhouette had died.”
“And the princesses blamed Lex for it,” finished Straightlace quietly. “But then he started to say something about bringing him back, and that’s when that wire around his hoof went crazy.”
“Yeah.” Fruit Crunch cringed at the memory. “What was up with th-”
“Whoa whoa whoa!” interrupted Sonata. “Time out! What happened to that Silhouette guy?! And why were those two blaming Lex for it?!”
“It was…my fault…” mumbled Lex.
He tried to take another step, and very nearly knocked Fruit Crunch over in the process, the colt grunting with the effort to keep him upright. “We’ve gotta get him someplace where he can lie down!” he grunted.
“Let’s go inside the train station,” suggested Straightlace.
“Nuh-uh!” Sonata’s reply was immediate. “I want the doctors to be able to go, like, right to him when they get here! Let’s, um…” She twisted her head to and fro, looking for someplace that wasn’t completely torn up from the fight. “Let’s go put him on the train station platform, next to all that food.” It was a little ways away, but better than being inside the building.
Fruit Crunch nodded, and started to guide Lex over there, practically carrying the stallion now. His friends and Sonata quickly moved to assist him, each of them working to bear some of Lex’s weight. It was an awkward procession, but it only took them a few seconds to reach the platform and gently lay Lex on it, making sure to spread his cloak out like a blanket under him. As soon as that was done, Sonata immediately settled down beside him, biting her lip. “Listen…I know I should have been here-”
Lex’s eyes, which had been turning unfocused, snapped over to her. “No,” he breathed, a little bit of vigor returning to his voice now that he wasn’t pushing himself just to stand. “Better that…you weren’t…”
That hadn’t been what she’d thought he'd say. She’d been sure that he’d have gotten mad at her for letting him talk to the princesses alone. The unexpected kindness was enough to kick her guilt into overdrive, and Sonata found herself floundering, suddenly wanting to make up for how thoughtless she’d been. “Is there, like, anything I can do for you now? For realsies, anything at all?”
Numbly rocking the snoring baby in her forelegs, Feather Duster couldn’t remember how long she’d been sitting there staring at the wall of the train station. Had it been a few minutes, or a few hours? Or maybe a few days? She didn’t know, and even the sunlight shining in from outside was no help in figuring out how much time had passed. After all, the sun only moved if the princesses moved it, and the princesses couldn’t do anything now. They couldn’t move the sun, and they couldn’t save everypony. No one could…
Feeling herself shaking, Feather Duster started to rock the baby a little more, humming a soothing tune even though the infant was fast asleep. The lullaby made her think of Cleansweep, and it dimly occurred to her that she needed to go check on her, to make sure she was alright, even though she knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do to protect her anymore. Not against that monster that had not only casually slaughtered that black-and-white stallion that had offended him before, but had also crushed the princesses when they’d tried to stop him. Crushed and crippled, turning Princess Luna from a regal, resplendent alicorn into an ordinary-looking unicorn.
Having been a pegasus her entire life, Feather Duster couldn’t imagine the level of cruelty it took to rob somepony of their wings like that. But Lex Legis quite clearly had no such compunctions; for him, killing or maiming other ponies came with no hesitation whatsoever. And if he was willing and able to do that to the princesses and their guards, then he wouldn’t think twice about doing it to a mere maid who displeased him, or even to her daughter…
“Hello? Is anypony-, oh! There you are!”
Blinking at the familiar voice, Feather Duster turned her head as she heard hooves clopping on the floor, watching dumbly as the earth filly that had given her that baby before – one of her daughter’s friends, who had fought the Royal Guard alongside her – trotted up to her now with a small smile. “Hi. Sorry about shoving Tiddlywinks on you before. I didn’t-” Her smile fell away as she got within a few feet of her, stopping in place and giving her a worried look. “What’s wrong?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer as she hurried forward and took the sleeping baby from her hooves. Looking the child over worriedly, a look of relief crossed her face when she found nothing wrong. But that relief turned back into concern as she looked back at Feather Duster. “Are you alright?”
Her thoughts still sluggish from trying to process the enormity of what she’d witnessed and what it meant for her and her family, Feather Duster could only blink, not sure what the filly was talking about. “What?”
The girl nodded towards her, still looking worried. “You’re crying.”
Confused, Feather Duster put a hoof to her face, and was surprised when it came away wet with tears. When had that started? “I…”
When she didn’t finish speaking, the filly’s worried look got worse. “Listen, you’re Cleansweep’s mom, right? Do you want me to go get her?” She pointed back toward the door. “She’s right outside with Fruit Crunch and Lex and everypony.”
A surge of tension went through Feather Duster at that. They’re right outside. She felt like her chest was in a vice, squeezing all of the air out of her lungs. The monster and my daughter are right outside. If she did anything wrong, if she upset him in anyway, it could very well be Cleansweep who lost her wings, or worse, next. It was enough to make Feather Duster long for even one day ago, when all she’d had to fear were River Bank’s threats; after what she’d just seen, the other mare’s promises of ruining her reputation to the point where she’d never work again if she didn’t serve Lex Legis now seemed positively merciful. “Is Cleansweep alright?” she heard herself ask, a cold feeling settling into her gut at the possibility of a negative answer.
The filly gave her a wan smile. “I think so. I know she’s sad about losing Venin, but she’s putting on a brave face. Braver than me, at least. She was telling us that the Night Mare might bring our spirit animals back.” She sniffled, but made herself keep smiling as she glanced down at her brother, holding him protectively. “I don’t know if I believe that, but I figure that even if she doesn’t, Lex might be able to ask her to as our reward.”
It took Feather Duster a moment to process that. “Your…reward?”
The filly nodded. “Yeah. After we saved Lex from that Silhouette guy and those other guards last night, Miss Nosey said that Lex would want to give us a reward.” She shifted her weight between her hooves, clearly anxious. “I really hope he can make it so Nemel and the others come back! I know I only met her this morning, but I already miss her so much…”
But Feather Duster wasn’t listening, still trying to process the notion of Lex Legis giving rewards. In the short time since she’d been introduced to him – though “sold” was a better word for it, since she’d been given to the dour unicorn along with all of River’s possessions as part of her apology – Feather hadn’t ever seen him so much as smile, let alone do anything that could be considered kind. It was far easier to believe that he’d simply use his magic to punish anypony who disobeyed him rather than rewarding them for-
Wait.
River had apologized to Lex…and he’d accepted her apology. Feather had seen it herself, although she’d been too petrified to fully appreciate what had been happening at the time. River had offered Lex everything he had, and his girls had been making their opinions known, but Lex himself had been silent for a long moment, leaving River fidgeting nervously. Then, he’d gone up to her and quietly said that he’d accepted her apology.
Lex Legis had done something that wasn’t callous.
The realization was enough to rock Feather Duster back on her hooves, and she held out a hoof as she heard the filly call out to her again in a worried tone. Lex Legis had shown that he could be something other than monstrous last night. And, she realized a moment later, that hadn’t been the only time. Although River Bank had introduced her to Lex Legis, she’d seen him before that, when he’d been performing that “ritual” thing, which according to Cleansweep had been to change that Aria mare into a pony instead of…whatever she’d been before. And then there were all those stories going around about how he’d saved everypony from zombies and sea monsters, protecting ponies even when it had gotten him terribly injured.
The vice that had been around her chest a moment ago had disappeared, and Feather Duster took several deep breaths, feeling almost dizzy. Was I wrong about him? The thought floated through her mind, tantalizing her with the possibility that maybe things weren’t as bad as she’d thought. He might be gruff – he yelled at everypony this morning just for having breakfast, for Celestia’s sake – but he…he… The use of the princess’s name made Feather Duster glance back toward the window that she’d been looking out earlier. Moving between the jagged stalactites of black crystal and the craters dotting the ground, teams of doctors were picking up fallen ponies. Several were gathered around the princesses, with the ones surrounding Luna exchanging horrified looks as they all spoke at once, clearly having no idea what to do for her.
The sight hit Feather Duster like a bucket of cold water, immediately dousing her hopes that Lex Legis was simply misunderstood. How could he be? She might have seen him accept River’s apology, but she’d also seen him kill that black-and-white stallion, as well as hurt Princess Luna so badly after he’d already defeated her. Was he just insane, being cruel one moment and kind the next with no rhyme or reason?
“Listen,” said the filly, drawing Feather Duster out of her reverie, “I should get back. I’ll tell Cleansweep you’re here, okay? I’m sure she’ll want to come see you.” Giving her an uncertain smile, the filly turned and headed for the door.
“What’s he like?” murmured Feather Duster, still looking out the window.
“Huh? I mean, I’m sorry?”
“Lex Legis.” Swallowing nervously, Feather Duster made herself look at the girl directly. “What’s he like?”
Clearly not sure what the make of the question, the filly paused for a moment. “Well, um…I don’t really know him very well.”
“But you must have some idea, right? You and Cleansweep and your friends, you’re all in his fan club that you started.”
“We’re the Night Mare’s Knights,” corrected the girl. “And Fruit Crunch is the one who knows Lex the best, though I guess he is kind of a fan.” She managed a smile at that, rolling her eyes a little. But that fell away as she considered the question again. “But to me, Lex is…he’s like a dragon.”
Feather Duster’s eyebrows went up. “A dragon?” she repeated. The association escaped her, save for overhearing someone in camp say that he’d killed one of those.
“Yeah,” nodded the filly. “I mean, he’s got his hoard, and he’s really serious about protecting it, but instead of being made out of gold or gems it’s, well…us. Other ponies.” She looked like she was going to say more, but at that moment the baby she was cradling began to stir, and a moment later the sound of crying filled the lobby. Wincing, the filly started to rock him back and forth, the motion doing nothing to calm the upset child. “I think he’s hungry,” called the filly, raising her voice to be heard over her brother’s wailing as she started to head back toward the door. “I’ll make sure to tell Cleansweep you’re here.”
Feather Duster nodded absently, already turning the filly’s description over in her mind as the girl left. Lex Legis is a dragon, guarding his hoard of ponies. The analogy seemed to fit, but that wasn’t a comforting thought. Although she didn’t know very much about them, Feather Duster knew enough about dragons to know that she didn’t want to be anywhere near them. She’d even skipped going to see the once-in-a-generation Great Dragon Migration last year, worried that one of them might glance down at her while flying and decide it wanted a snack! And now there was a pony of similar temperament ruling over them. And my daughter and I are part of that hoard.
The thought sent a bitter laugh through her, one which threatened to turn into a sob as it left Feather’s throat. She doubted that Lex would try to hang on to everypony in Vanhoover the way a dragon would every coin they’d collected – she’d heard he’d already sent some sick ponies to Tall Tale for treatment (though some ponies were saying he’d taken over that city also) – but there was no way he’d let her or Cleansweep go. Not when he’d already accepted her as part of River’s payment for her misdeeds, to be added to his collection of mares to play with. Not when her daughter was already part of his group of would-be followers, fighting beside him and praying to that “goddess” that he seemed to admire. Through their own bad luck and poor choices, both of them were now firmly part of the group of ponies that he’d collected.
And there’s no way out, she knew. Running away wouldn’t work – with magic as strong as his, Feather Duster couldn’t imagine that it would be hard for Lex Legis to find them – and rebelling against him would be suicide or worse. The only ones who could have liberated them were the princesses, and that hope had died with the Royal Sisters’ defeat. Both of those options would serve to do nothing except call down his ire to such an extent that apologizing, as River had done, probably wouldn’t save them. But if there was no escaping Lex Legis, no defying him, and no being rescued from him, then that left only one option…
Slowly, Feather Duster climbed to her hooves, heading to the nearby restroom to splash some water on her face. Then she smoothed the wrinkles in her maid outfit as best she could, making sure her hemline showed off her flank. Finally, she ran her hooves through her mane and tail, making sure they were free of tangles. Looking herself over one last time, she let out a slow breath before she turned and headed for the door, her earlier panic having faded into a dull sense of resignation.
It wouldn’t do to keep her lord and master waiting.
“Lex, please,” pleaded Nosey from her place at his side. “Those foals weren’t hurt as badly as you are, and you told them that they should have the doctors look them over anyway. This is the same thing.”
But Lex shook his head. “There’s a heightened level of responsibility when it comes to ensuring the care of children,” he pronounced stiffly, his voice still pained, “and my injuries aren’t so serious as to require that resources be diverted away from the other ponies that are hurt.”
“Yeah, I can tell by how you’re actually able to speak without having to gasp for air after every third word now,” shot back Nosey, her guilt rapidly eroding her ability to deal with his stubbornness. “Back me up here!” she snapped at Feather Duster, the only other pony on the station platform with them at the moment. “Tell Lex that he needs a doctor!”
Blanching, Feather Duster dragged her gaze away from where she’d been watching Cleansweep be fussed over by one of the doctors. In an instant, her eyes darted between Nosey and Lex before turning back toward Nosey. “I…I think that Master Legis knows what’s best,” she stammered.
Her eyebrows rising in disbelief at both the answer she’d received and the way the maid was referring to Lex, Nosey just gaped at Feather Duster for a moment before looking back to the stallion in question. He was obviously still in a great deal of pain, and the fact that he hadn’t even attempted to sit up yet – despite how much she knew he hated looking weak – was telling. The sight made Nosey bite her lip, feeling worse by the second. We should have been here, she berated herself silently. I knew Sonata was taking too long, but I let her get carried away anyway. The result was that Lex was severely injured, Celestia was unconscious, Luna had lost her alicornhood, and Silhouette – as she’d discovered when she’d fetched the doctors – was dead.
Intellectually, Nosey knew that she was jumping to conclusions, and that she should have been doing what she’d decided to do a few minutes ago and interview everypony about what had happened here. But the thought of leaving Lex lying there in agony while she chased down a story was too similar to how she’d acted back when he’d fought that dragon in Tall Tale, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that again. Not that I’m doing anypony any good now, she thought miserably, watching as Lex took more shuddering breaths.
I should never have stayed here this long, she decided. I should have insisted on going back with those ponies on that train when they left. Or maybe she never should have come to Vanhoover in the first place. After all, what had she really accomplished since she’d gotten here? She’d ended up being Xiriel’s hostage, interfered with Lex’s relationships with Sonata and Aria both, and now made it so that Sonata hadn’t been present at a meeting where she’d been desperately needed. But hey, I got some great stories out of it, so who cares who else got hurt in the process? The thought was a bitter one, knowing that it wouldn’t have been sarcastic even a few weeks ago. But now-
“All done!” announced Sonata. Trotting back up onto the platform with a grin, she sat down on Lex’s other side. “I made sure that nopony is totes going near Severance!”
Lex turned his head to look at her, and even that action produced a grunt of effort on his part. “How?”
Sonata’s chest puffed up with pride. “I said, ‘stay away from Severance’ to all of the doctors, and they said ‘okay.’” Her grin faded after a moment though, and she put one hoof to her chin in thought. “Well, actually they mostly said stuff like ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere near that thing even if you paid me’ and ‘Miss, please, we’re trying to work,’ but that’s pretty much the same thing, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer as her eyes suddenly widened. “Oh yeah! And whatshisname, House Call, wants to talk to you!” Without waiting, she turned and waved a hoof toward the doctor in question.
Following Sonata’s gaze, Nosey looked at where the doctor in question was speaking to a pair of his colleagues. Catching sight of Sonata’s signaling him, he sent a brief wave of acknowledgment in return before looking back at the other two, nodding at them as he turned toward the train station. But he hadn’t gotten more than two steps before one of the medical ponies he’d been talking to, seeing where he was going, moved to block his path. Her eyes wide, the mare glanced fearfully toward Lex before she looked back at House Call, shaking her head as her lips rapidly moved, quite clearly telling him not to go.
The sight sent a burst of rage through Nosey, knowing full well what was happening. Although it hadn’t taken her more than a few minutes to collect the doctors and come back here, several of them had still peppered her with questions about what had happened to Silhouette. More specifically, they’d asked her if it was true that Lex had killed him. At the time Nosey had scoffed, knowing full well that Lex would sooner kill himself than another pony, even someone he hated. But now she was seeing red. What does that nag think she’s doing?!
She had just climbed to her hooves, intent on teaching that interfering mare a lesson, when House Call pushed past the pony in his way. Frowning deeply at her, he said something that made her recoil before trotting by her without another word, approaching the edge of the train platform and climbing the stairs. “Mr. Legis,” he began. “I wanted to-”
“Lex is in a lot of pain,” blurted Nosey. “Can you do something about that?”
Sonata winced at the exclamation, her ears folding back as she looked at Lex. “Is it really bad?”
But the stallion in question was too busy glaring at Nosey to answer. “I told you, I can handle this!” He didn’t wait for her to reply, instead looking at House Call. “Whatever treatment you think I need, I’m refusing it,” he spat, though by now it was clear that even speaking that much was pushing his limits. “I want you to…prioritize everypony else…”
“I knew you’d say that,” sighed House Call. Despite how unhappy he looked, he didn’t push the issue. “I came over here to say that we don’t have enough tents for everypony. We’re going to need to move them inside the train station, and it’ll likely take up most of the available space, so if you have any…I don’t know the term, ‘wizardly things’ in there that need to be moved…”
Sonata tilted her head. “What, you mean like those flying gems? ‘Cuz he put those away already,” she noted, pointing to where Lex’s saddlebag had been set beside him. “And Severance is already out here, so I think that’s everything.”
“Hold on!” Nosey stomped a hoof as she glowered at House Call. “So that’s it?! You just ignore somepony that needs help just because they say they’re fine, even when they’re very clearly not?!”
House Call’s answer came with a helpless shrug. “We can’t treat people against their will. And even if we were willing to do so, I really don’t think it would work where Mr. Legis was concerned.”
“It wouldn’t.” Despite how raspy it was, Lex’s voice was full of malice. “And you can’t use the train station.”
A surprised look crossed House Call’s face. “Mr. Legis, we can’t leave everypony exposed to the elements, especially since Princess Celestia is in no condition to move the sun from its current position.” He pointed upward, where the sun was still at its zenith. “Since we don’t have enough tents for everypony, this is the next best thing.”
“You can’t use the train station,” repeated Lex, baring his teeth in what was either a snarl of anger or a grimace of pain. “If Celestia or those idiot guards insist on fighting again after they wake up, our supply of food might be damaged.” He had to stop speaking then, taking several seconds to get his breath back before he continued. “Take them all to River Bank’s mansion.”
The instructions made House Call blink. “I don’t know where that is.”
Just the feeling of his gaze on her was enough to make the pegasus maid jump. “Y-yes!” she sputtered. “I can take everypony there!”
“I…alright.” Realizing that there was no point in arguing, House Call turned and started walking back down the stairs that connected the station platform to the ground, but stopped midway. “Mr. Legis, some of my colleagues are…concerned, about what happened to that pony, Silhouette. His wounds are consistent with a curved blade-”
But Nosey didn’t let him finish. “Not now,” she growled from between clenched teeth.
House Call paused for just a moment, glancing from her to Lex to Sonata and back again. “Alright,” he said at last, turning back toward the stairs.
This time it was Lex who interrupted him. “Keep the foals separate from your other patients.”
“I’m sorry?” House Call tilted his head, confusion written all over his face.
Sighing in irritation, Lex started again. “Those foals are also your patients, so they’re going with you to River’s mansion. Keep them away from wherever you put the princesses and the guards once you get there. I don’t want them being attacked if those imbeciles try to start another fight.”
“Ah, of course.” When no further instructions came, House Call resumed leaving, Feather Duster in tow. A moment later his raised voice could be heard as he explained the change in plans to the rest of the medical ponies.
Sonata was the first one to pipe up once the three of them were alone. “So, it was the princesses fault, right? They picked a fight, and…I dunno, Silhouette tripped and fell on Severance or something?”
Lex was silent for a long moment before answering. “No. What happened was…”
“…that was when you two arrived.”
Both mares were silent in the wake of Lex’s explanation, for which he was glad. After their fight earlier that morning, the last thing he wanted to hear was more recrimination from them. Because he knew that would be their reaction. How could it not? Not when another pony had died on his watch, because of a weapon that he’d brought into this world and supposedly had under his control.
And it’s still there, came the voiceless words from his shadow, free and unharmed. You swore that your reign would be more just than Celestia and Luna’s, but look at you now. That murdering weapon is openly defying your authority, and you’re powerless to stop it.
The words were more painful than his injuries, and Lex grit his teeth as he tried to rise. Just turning over was an act of titanic effort, the strain on his muscles so great that for a moment all he could hear was his blood pounding in his ears. But he kept going, planting his hooves on the ground and trying to force his weight onto them, feeling like his back was going to break as he struggled to stand-
“Stop! Lex, stop!” Nosey’s voice was near-hysterical, and the gentle hoof she put on his back to make him lie back down felt as though she’d dropped a building on him. “What are you doing?! You need to stay down!”
“For realsies, Lex,” added Sonata, a worried look on her face. “You really looked like you were gonna rent the farm there for a second.”
“Sh-shut up…both of you…” groaned Lex. He didn’t try to move again, too dizzy to make another attempt to get up. “I want…you two to…go get the rest…of the camp ponies.” It took several seconds of deep breathing before he could get another sentence out. “Bring them…back here and…distribute food for…their mid-day meal…” Somehow, he managed to turn his head enough to look at Severance, an aura sputtering around his horn for a moment as another one flashed into being around the scythe. “Come…here…”
His aura gutted out a moment later, but the command had already been transmitted, and Severance began to float lazily toward him. The sight made Sonata cry out, rushing to place herself between Lex and the weapon, while Nosey shot Lex an angry look. “Is that why you’re calling Severance over?” she asked, her voice dark. “You’re going to wait until we’re gone so you can try and fight it again?”
Lex frowned at Nosey’s guess, but knew better than to let her know she wasn’t completely wrong. “Severance…can’t remain…unsupervised,” he muttered. “I’ll…take it…with me…while I go…rest…”
Still keeping herself between Lex and Severance, Sonata glanced back at him. “Like, really rest?” she asked. “Not, you know, Lex-rest, where you only work on three or four things instead of, like, twelve?”
“Sleep,” Lex admitted.
Both mares glanced at each other, Sonata slowly standing down from where she was keeping Severance away from Lex. “I guess that’s okay,” she murmured uneasily.
“You better be serious about sleeping,” sighed Nosey as she leaned down to help Lex up, Sonata moving his other side to do the same. Together, both mares carried him into the station, Severance floating leisurely after them.
Once inside, they managed to get him to the nearest bench, laying him down gently. “Go and…get everypony…else…” he muttered as they put him down.
“I will,” assured Sonata quietly, shooting a look at where Severance had stopped several feet back. “Just, like, as soon as I’m sure you’re snoozing.”
“I’m staying here,” announced Nosey. “Somepony needs to make sure you don’t try and do anything else.” Driving her point home, she climbed on the bench as well, curling up next to him. The look on her face made it obvious that if Severance tried to attack him, it would need to go through her first, the same way Lex had for Princess Luna.
But Lex didn’t answer, already having passed out.
“An impressive display of dominance, my champion. And performed in my name, no less.”
Lex wasn’t surprised by the large and shadowy figure opposite him, nor by the ring of blue fire surrounding them. On the contrary, he had expected exactly this. After what had just happened, it would have been stranger if she hadn’t appeared this way.
“And yet,” mused the Night Mare, her voice sinister in its silkiness, “I can’t help but notice how you struck down that pretender, as I believe you called her, only after you had been left with no choice in the matter. It was almost as though you didn’t care that her claims of divine authority over the night were an insult to me, and an obstacle to the church you swore to found to my glory.” She bared her teeth then, and although the corners of her lips turned upward, no one could have called her expression a smile. “Especially since you offered to use the resurrection spell that I so generously gave you on her worshiper, rather than mine.” Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “An act of disloyalty, some might say. Particularly in light of how you then sought to destroy Severance, even though such a thing is far beyond your feeble powers.”
Lex remained silent, not bothering to respond.
His lack of reaction was enough to make the Night Mare frown, all pretense of restraint falling away. "Well, my champion? How do you account for yourself?"
Lex waited just long enough to make it clear that he wasn't intimidated, meeting her gaze without flinching when he finally spoke. "Take Severance back."
The Night Mare's helmet couldn't fully hide the way her brow furrowed at that, her lip curling at the unexpected answer. "What?"
"Take Severance back," said Lex again. "I want it removed from Equestria, no, from this plane of existence. Permanently."
Lifting his left foreleg – the one with the barbed wire wrapped around it – Lex pointed his hoof at the Night Mare imperiously. "From now on, that thing is pony non grata in this world."
The Night Mare’s answer to Lex’s demand came in the form of ominous laughter.
“Do you truly believe that you’re in a position to request anything of me?” she chuckled, and the humor in her voice didn’t hide the underlying malevolence. “Especially after how poorly you’ve kept your promise to spread my religion thus far?”
“I am not ‘requesting’ anything,” shot back Lex. “Severance is here as part of the bargain we struck. Since I was the one who stipulated that I be provisioned with an artifact of sufficient power to restore my primary magic, I am now moving to obviate that part of our accord.”
Again the Night Mare bared her teeth at him, the corners of her lips turning upward. “Is that so?”
Lex didn’t have a chance to react as her horn glowed, a deep blue aura that flickered like fire surrounding it and him in the same moment. Then he was flying backward at an incredible speed, only for his back to slam into the ring of azure fire that was surrounding them both an instant later. Rather than heat, his body was immediately wracked by intense cold, the flames more frigid than the worst chill he’d ever felt. He reflexively tried to pull away, but the goddess’s aura held him fast, keeping him pressed against the freezing fire. “I used to find your arrogance amusing,” announced the Night Mare casually as she stalked closer to him. “But lately, it’s begun to irritate me.”
Lex’s own horn glowed, trying to counter the Night Mare’s telekinesis with his own, but it was futile. Even a moment’s effort was enough to make it clear that he had even less hope of moving the goddess’s aura than he did of moving Equestria’s sun. The Night Mare, however, didn’t even seem to notice the attempt, stopping once she was right in front of him. “Why should I bother removing Severance from your world?” she hissed, her countenance no longer amused. “It brought those five foals to me. It cut down that worshiper of a false god. And it drove you to overthrow and humiliate that charlatan as a testament to my glory, something you wouldn’t have done if it had left you to your own devices.”
She yanked him away from the cerulean flames then, slamming him painfully to the ground on his back right in front of her. The goddess’s aura winked out then, but Lex didn’t have a chance to move before she brought a hoof down sharply on his chest, pinning him to the ground. “But you would have me remove it, and place all of my faith in you alone?” She leaned down, bringing her face closer to his, and this time when she bared her teeth at him it was a snarl. “Do you really think your actions warrant such consideration from me?”
Lex’s answer was to lift a foreleg and begin gesturing. The Night Mare’s hoof felt like it was caving his chest in, but not so much that he couldn’t draw breath, and he managed to rasp out the words to one of the few offensive spells that he had left, one that he hadn’t dared use against Celestia and Luna. An instant later the thin green beam of his disintegration spell shot upward, striking the Night Mare right between the eyes only to wink out of existence a second later, unable to damage her in the slightest.
For her part the goddess didn’t even seem to notice the attack, save to lean even more weight on her hoof, driving the breath from Lex’s lungs as his ribs creaked dangerously. “I have generously given you everything you’ve asked for and more, and yet you have repaid me with nothing but scorn. I gave you the power you wanted, and you’ve barely used any of it. I gave you guidance on how to lead others, and you’ve followed it only reluctantly. I gave you the means to bring Cloudbank, the one pony you actually brought into my fold, back to life, and not only have you not done so,” her hoof twisted sharply then, making the pain in his chest rise to agonizing levels, “you volunteered to use it on that pretender’s devotee instead!”
Unable to speak but still able to think, Lex tried to call upon his dark magic. Instantly, he felt a wave of lethargy run through him, signifying just how deeply he’d tapped his reserves in his battle with the alicorns, but there was enough left to let him transmute his body into shadow. That change, however, brought him no freedom; the Night Mare’s hoof was still keeping him pinned in place despite his being incorporeal. He couldn’t even sink into the ground, the pitch black substance beneath him still feeling as solid and impenetrable to his incorporeal form as it had for his physical body. Even the pain of the goddess’s hoof pressing down on him was persistent, defying his attempts to escape from her anger.
“I think,” continued the Night Mare casually, “that it would benefit me more if I simply had Severance kill you. After all, those foals seem quite receptive to its teaching them my dogma, unlike how you,” she narrowed her eyes, “wanted to slay the totems I’d granted them, rather than encouraging them to strengthen their bonds. Not that you could have killed them anyway. Not permanently. But that you wanted to at all speaks poorly of your willingness to honor our deal.”
She paused then, as if waiting for another attack to come, but Lex had no more magic to use against her. “So tell me, my champion,” she said after several seconds, raising her hoof and releasing him at last, “after how you’ve neglected your end of our bargain, why should I listen to this latest proposal of yours?”
But Lex would neither cower nor compromise. “Severance,” he hissed, changing back into physical form in order to conserve what little power he had left, “killed a pony!” Raising his foreleg, he pointed it at the Night Mare again. “Remove it from my world!”
“I CARE NOTHING FOR YOUR SILLY PROHIBITION AGAINST KILLING YOUR OWN KIND!” roared the Night Mare, her patience seemingly at an end. “YOU HAVE DEFAULTED ON YOUR DEBT TO ME!”
“Then kill me!” Rearing up on his hind legs, Lex spread his forelegs wide, presenting himself as a target. “Smite me where I stand! Drag my soul off to an eternity of torment!” He looked the goddess right in the eye, defiant. “I’m still your best chance of ever being worshiped in Equestria! You think those children will continue learning from Severance after I’m gone? That thing murdered somepony else in cold blood! Once they find out what it did, they won’t want anything to do with it! Nopony will, even if you have it twist their minds!” Lex felt certain of that, since he’d already told Sonata and Nosey the truth about what had happened. They’d make Severance’s callous disregard for pony life known if he died. And those five foals who’d insisted on fighting with him weren’t killers; when he’d yelled at Fruit Crunch for threatening to kill a guard during the fighting, the colt had shamefacedly admitted that he’d been bluffing. “There’s no one else who will exalt your name the way I did when I cast down Luna! There’s no one else who will introduce other ponies to your faith the way I did for Cloudbank! There’s no one else but me!”
The Night Mare glared at him then, an ugly look crossing her face. “You underestimate what Severance can do to the mentality of those that wield it. It can easily bring ponies to worship me with far more zeal than that fool it killed.”
“No one will wield it after what it did,” retorted Lex, falling back onto all fours. “Especially since the princesses will tell everyone about how it’s an ‘artifact of evil.’ At least I have Sonata and other ponies who’ll work to clear my name. No one will do that for Severance.”
Now it was the Night Mare’s turn to stare at him in hateful silence. “I could just kill you anyway, and write this world off as a loss,” she snarled at last.
Lex snorted. “Go right ahead. But we both know that the other gods from your pantheon are trying to spread their influence here. If they succeed, their power will increase, and you’ll be at risk of losing your position in the divine hierarchy.”
The Night Mare’s frustration was almost palpable, and Lex had to bite his lip to keep from smirking. Rubbing her nose in her own impotence like this was what she deserved for daring to attack him. But as satisfying as it was to remind the goddess that she needed him more than he needed her, Lex knew that he couldn’t let this encounter end on such an acrimonious note.
His relationship with the Night Mare was, ultimately, a political one. She was effectively a foreign government that his nascent administration had signed a treaty with. While Lex fully intended to attain absolute dominion over the territory that he ruled – which would be all of Equestria, and quite possibly beyond – he had no illusions of attaining a universal empire. Unless he could somehow cut Equestria off from the wider multiverse it now found itself open to (an undertaking of such scope as to be unimaginable), there would always be foreign groups that he’d need to deal with, as the influx of monsters and deities from Everglow was aptly demonstrating. While some of those would need to be met with military force, it wasn’t feasible to respond to all of them that way, which meant that positive relationships would need to be formed and maintained.
Of course, that had always been Lex’s weakness. But while he had Sonata to help compensate for that, she wasn’t here now, which meant that he had to repair his relationship with the Night Mare on his own. But this isn’t like trying to form friendships, he reminded himself. This is a transactional relationship. Which meant that he simply needed to incentivize the goddess into acquiescing to his proposal. That was irritating, since as far as Lex was concerned he was the one who was ultimately going to walk away from this with less than he’d started with, but Severance needed to be removed from Equestria before somepony else died.
“Remove Severance from this plane of existence, permanently,” repeated Lex, “and in exchange, I will prioritize my efforts to promulgate your religion.”
The Night Mare’s response was a sneer. “How tempting,” she spat, her sarcasm thick enough that even Lex could pick up on it. “In exchange for acceding to your latest entreaty, you’ll give me what you already owe me, and in such vague terms. How could I ever refuse such a generous offer?”
Lex let out a slow breath, reminding himself again that it was in his best interests to placate the goddess. “Then what, precisely, do you want in exchange for taking back your own artifact?”
The Night Mare’s smile came back then, with a cruel glint to it. "I want a sacrifice, from you."
The words made Lex tense. "What?"
"You will hold a ceremony in my honor," explained the goddess. "One conducted by you personally. Not Cloudbank, if you bother to bring her back, and not any of those foals. You. And you will publicly acknowledge your failure to accord me the respect I've earned from you up until now. And as part of your atonement, you will make a sacrifice to me."
Lex grit his teeth. "Of what?" If she just wanted money or jewels, that wouldn't be too difficult to arrange, but there was no way he was going to kill somepony else just to mollify her.
But her answer was neither of those things. "Of something valuable to you," replied the Night Mare. "Something you'll miss."
This has been a lousy day, decided Sonata as she trudged toward the river.
Hopefully things would start to turn around once she got all the camp ponies to come back and start eating something, but somehow she doubted it. After all, nothing else had gone right so far. First Lex had yelled at them just for eating breakfast. Then he’d admitted that he’d gotten hot ‘n’ heavy with Aria last night. Then she’d accidentally done the same thing with Nosey. Then Kara had been all “you should totes share your boyfriend with other girls.” Then Lex had gotten into a fight with those princesses and hurt himself badly – again – and left her feeling guilty about not having been there to prevent it.
It’s not like it’s my fault though, she groused to herself sullenly. Severance was the one who started it. That’s why Lex said he was glad that me and Nosey weren’t there, since we might have gotten hurt… But knowing that Lex had been worried about them while she’d been off making a bigger mess of everything only made Sonata feel worse. More than that, it left her wondering if she could have stopped things from turning out like they had. After all, Lex had said that he’d tried to tell Celestia and Luna that Severance had gone berserk, but they hadn’t listened. I could have said it better than however he did. And even if that didn’t work, I could have used my magic to MAKE it work. Then that fight wouldn’t have happened at all. But nooo, I just HAD to go play “Mares Gone Wild” with Nosey so that Kara would get her flank down here. And she didn’t even have any good advice! That was the part that bothered her most; not only had she made things weird with her best friend and not been there for her boyfriend, but she’d done it all for nothing. Kara had always known just what to say to make her feel better before, but her perfect record was definitely over now.
“It was like talking to someone else altogether,” huffed Sonata as she kept walking, wishing that there was something she could kick to make herself feel better. But a casual glance around showed a complete lack of rocks-, no! There was one!
Giggling with wicked glee, Sonata trotted over to the small stone poking up amidst the grass. “Oh, I’m gonna send you flying!” she cackled, winding up for a kick before lashing out hard. “Welcome to the school of hard r-, OW!” But contrary to her declaration, the rock didn’t budge as her hoof made contact with it, leaving Sonata cursing and rubbing her now-bruised leg.
“Aw c’mon!” she shrieked, positively seething now. Glaring at the stone – which continued to sit there smugly – it took Sonata several seconds to recognize that it wasn’t so much lying on the ground as it was jutting up from it, leaving the majority of its mass buried. It was just pretending like it was a kicking-rock! she realized furiously.
A small part of Sonata’s mind knew she was being irrational. That this was all due to the guilt and confusion and frustration she felt over everything that had happened that morning. That small fraction of her brain told her that the best thing to do would be to forget what had just happened and keep heading toward the camp ponies. Moreover, that small part of her brain told her that once she’d gotten something accomplished she’d feel better about herself, and maybe even calm down enough to where she’d be able to have a serious, adult conversation with Lex and Nosey and Aria about everything that had happened and what they needed to do about it.
Then the rest of her mind pointed out that she’d just been outsmarted by a rock.
It took only a few seconds for her to sing the necessary harmony to activate her spell. Then, taking a deep breath, Sonata let out a wordless scream of pure frustration, bending her face down close to the offending stone. Amplified many times over by her magic, her shout – which she’d previously used to pulverize ghouls and fish-monsters – sent cracks spreading through the rock, and a moment later it shattered into pieces, sending shards everywhere.
“HA!” laughed Sonata victoriously. “Betcha wish you’d just let me kick you now, huh rock?!” Seeing no reason not to indulge herself, Sonata didn’t resist the urge to do a little dance to celebrate her victory. “You thought you’d just be tricking ordinary ponies,” she jeered, “but you didn’t realize you’d be up against a Siren! Who’s smarter now?”
Letting out a satisfied breath, Sonata turned her back on her vanquished enemy and started toward the river again. It had been a bad morning, but she felt sure that things were finally starting to turn around. Now, to get all those camp ponies back!
Still reveling in her victory, Sonata was all smiles as she trotted up toward where the camp’s population was spread out along the edge of the river. Her grin grew a little wider as she saw that all eyes were on her as she approached, loving being the center of attention. “Hey everypony!” she announced, waving as she approached them. “I just wanted to let you all know that Lex says that everything’s A-okay now, so let’s all head back and get some lunch-”
“Are the princesses dead?”
The question came from somewhere in the crowd, choked out by a voice that sounded like they’d been sobbing. It was enough to throw Sonata off her game, making her frown in confusion. “What? No! Of course not! Lex would never kill a pony!”
“He killed that one guy,” came another voice. “That stallion with Princess Luna!”
“It’s true! I saw it!”
“Me too! He used that scythe right out of nowhere!”
“Whoa! Whoa!” called Sonata, “everyone calm down, okay?” For a moment it seemed like the assembled ponies were going to ignore her, but slowly they quieted down. “Lex didn’t kill that Silhouette guy,” she continued. “Severance, his flying scythe-thingy did that all on its own. Lex totes didn’t sign off on that. Like, for realsies.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re one of his girls!”
“Excuse me?” Sonata’s eyebrows went up at the plural usage, and it took her a moment to realize that she recognized that voice, looking over at where a green-coated pegasus stallion was trembling. “Wait, DJ? Is that you?”
Gulping nervously, Disc Jockey was shaking all over. “You’re just trying to cover for your boyfriend, aren’t you?” he whimpered. “Lex killed that guy because he ticked him off, didn’t he? And if we go back there now, he’s gonna kill anypony who’s ever made him mad…” He couldn’t finish, somehow managing to turn an even deeper green as he doubled over, looking like he was going to be sick.
“Hey, c’mon,” protested Sonata. “You know that’s not true. You were there when Lex showed up in camp that first night. Block Party got all up in his face and Lex didn’t do a thing to him!”
“Yeah, and then Block Party died the next day!” called another voice, as anonymous and panicked as the others had been.
“Lex didn’t kill Block Party!” shot back Sonata indignantly. “He killed the monster that killed Block Party! He just didn’t say anything about it because…because…” All of a sudden Sonata realized what she’d just done. “Oopsie…”
“Did…did you just say a monster killed Block Party?”
Sonata could feel a cold chill running down her back. Lex had been serious about wanting to keep Xiriel a secret for some reason. He’d been plenty mad when he found out she’d spilled the beans to Princess Celestia, and only the fact that Nosey had told him that Princess Luna had already known about that monster had calmed him down. Even then he’d made sure to tell them not to tell everypony else, worried about how they’d take it. “Okay,” she sputtered, desperately trying to figure out a way to put the genie back in the toothpaste tube. “Okay, listen-”
But it was already too late. “There was a monster here in camp?!” shrieked a mare somewhere. “Since when?!”
“How did it kill Block Party with no one knowing?!”
“Did Lex let it come in on purpose to do his dirty work?!”
“ALL OF YOU, STOP IT!” Even without magic, Sonata’s voice was a shriek. “Just stop it already!” She wanted to be so angry right then. She wanted to be a towering pillar of rage the way Lex so often was. She wanted to scream at them for how unfair they were being. But at that moment she just didn’t have it in her. Knowing that she’d just done something that would make Lex mad at her – on top of everything else – was her last straw, and this time she was the one trying not to sob as she spoke. “Why don’t any of you ever want to give him a chance? After everything Lex has done, after how hard he’s worked and all the times he’s gotten hurt protecting everyone here, why can’t you all just believe in him?”
Her eyes scanned the crowd, and the earnest expression in them made everypony look away, uncomfortable. But a moment later she caught a pair of familiar faces, and she walked toward them. “This guy here,” she continued as she approached Spit Polish, “tried to kill Lex in his sleep. And yes, he was angry about that. Like, super angry. Wouldn’t you be?!” Turning, she looked at Peachy Keen, who was right next to Spit Polish with one foreleg around him. “What would you do if somepony tried to do that to you?”
The orange mare shuffled in place, not able to meet Sonata’s gaze. “I…I don’t…”
But Sonata didn’t wait for her to try and answer. “Because you know what Lex did? He put a curse on him.” She pointed at Spit Polish, looking around with a helpless expression. “He didn’t kill him, he didn’t banish him to Tartar Sauce or whatever that place is called, he just cursed him. And it wasn’t even a curse that made him, like, really ugly or forget the letter ‘E’ or some other awful thing. It was a curse that only made him dumb and clumsy so long as nopony else helped him.” She moved her outstretched foreleg then, pointing at Peachy Keen. “Lex wanted him to pay, and maybe that’s harsh, but he didn’t want him to be miserable forever. This is the guy who kicked the stuffing out of other ponies on Block Party’s orders, and who tried to kill Lex, and Lex still wanted him to have a reason to try and get everypony to forgive him!”
She could feel her eyes starting to water, but she didn’t stop, pouring her heart out. “Lex tries so hard. He just…he tries so hard, and he doesn’t even realize that a lot of the time he’s trying too hard, and he keeps making all these mistakes and he gets frustrated and angry, but he never gives up. He always keeps trying, and you know why? You know why he keeps working so hard and never asking for anything in return?” She looked back and forth, silently inviting anyone to venture a guess. When none did, she kept going. “It’s because he’s lonely. I saw it the very first time I met him. He’s so, so lonely and he just wants to be accepted and he doesn’t know any other way to do it.”
She had to stop then, knowing that if she kept going she’d completely break down. Sniffling, she wiped her eyes, and that gave enough time for Peachy Keen to speak up. “But…if all he wants is to have friends, why doesn’t he act nicer?” Sonata looked up at her, and Peachy flinched but kept going. “I mean, why doesn’t he ever smile or laugh or, or play some games with us once in a while?”
Sonata gave a hopeless laugh, shrugging as all eyes turned back toward her. “I don’t know. He just can’t. It’s like…it’s like how I’m not smart enough to figure out why people always say that an open door somehow becomes a jar. I’m not good at math problems like that, and Lex isn’t good at friendship. I know he wishes he was, but he isn’t. So instead he does what he is good at, which is taking care of other ponies.” She swept her eyes over the crowd again, silently begging them to understand. “He’s not as nice as those princesses, and he probably never will be, but he’s more dedicated than anyone else, and he would never, ever let somepony die – let alone kill them – if he could help it. So please, please…just give him a chance…”
Uncertain looks were exchanged among the crowd, and Sonata knew it was the best she could hope for. Slowly, she turned around and started walking back toward the camp. For the first few steps her heart was beating loudly, and she bit her lip. Then, when she’d gotten a dozen paces away from everyone, she heard it.
The sound of a large number of hoofsteps, all following behind her.
When Lex woke up, Nosey was staring into space with a shocked look on her face.
The return to consciousness had been as abrupt and jarring as it always was, leaving him fully aware in an instant, and he immediately tensed when he saw her expression. “What’s wrong?”
The question made her jump, springing back from where she’d curled up next to him so quickly that she nearly went tumbling off the edge of the bench. “Huh?!” Gulping, she tried to calm down, licking her lips as her eyes darted between him and the place behind him where she’d been looking. “I mean, um…how are you feeling?”
Lex didn’t bother answering, instead turning his head to see what she was staring at. But even that motion felt like a monstrous effort, and the best he could get was a quick glance out of his periphery before he had to lay his head back down, breathing heavily. He started to try again, but Nosey was by his side in an instant, gently pressing her hoof against him to stop him from making the attempt. “Lex, don’t,” she said, and he couldn’t figure out if she was begging him or warning him. “You’re still hurt really bad.”
“Then tell me what’s happening.” He couldn’t put much force into his voice, but there was enough there to make it clear that he wasn’t asking.
Even so, Nosey bit her lip, her eyes again flickering between him and whatever was behind him. “Don’t freak out, okay?” she started. “You have to promise me you won’t get upset or try to do anything. You’ll only hurt yourself worse if you do.”
“Nosey…” His eyes changed colors then, flashing green-and-purple.
“Severance is gone,” she admitted, wincing preemptively in anticipation of his reaction. “It was just hovering there, doing nothing, and then all of a sudden it spun around, and…” Her voice failed her for a moment. “And I thought it was going to k-kill you. But it swung around and it…there was this…” She waved a hoof, as though trying to gesture the words into existence. “This rip in the air, and inside the rip it was all dark, and then it just floated into the tear it made. Then the rip just sort of closed up, like it had been sealed with invisible stitches or something, and it was just…” She shook her head, helpless to come up with a better explanation. “Gone.”
But Lex’s only response was a sigh of relief, laying his head back down. “Good.”
Nosey’s eyebrows rose. “Good?” she echoed, her voice incredulous. “You’re okay with that?”
Lex snorted. “You’re the one who said you didn’t want me to ‘freak out.’”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think you’d actually listen to me!” she admitted. Lex didn’t answer, and several seconds passed in silence, with Lex already thinking about what to do next as Nosey simply stared at him, before she finally spoke again. “You knew that it would be gone, didn’t you?” she said at last. “That’s why you’re not upset that Severance isn’t here, even though it killed somepony. You were expecting it to vanish like that.”
Lex’s eyes shifted, glancing at the newspaper and magnifying glass that was her cutie mark, knowing that this was her special talent manifesting itself. But there was no reason to keep the nature of Severance’s departure a secret; quite the contrary, announcing its banishment would help restore public order after what had happened. “I returned Severance to the Night Mare,” Lex admitted. “That thing doesn’t belong in Equestria after what it did.”
Now it was Nosey’s turn to give a sigh of relief. “Good,” she announced, before realizing she’d just echoed Lex. Smirking a little, she laid back down, giving him a warm smile. “Maybe next time do that before all Tartarus breaks loose?”
Lex didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The sight of her lying so close, smiling like that, sent a sudden rush through him, and Lex suddenly found himself remembering all of the intimate contact that the two of them had shared over the last few days. Waking up to the feeling of her pressing herself against him the morning after he’d saved her from Xiriel. Softly caressing her, making her breath catch and her body shudder when he’d been examining her magical pathways. Confirming his attraction to her when he’d imagined how he’d have felt if he’d had a liaison with her instead of Aria.
Suddenly embarrassed, Lex looked away from her. “How long have I been asleep?” he asked gruffly.
Confused at his change of attitude, Nosey blinked. “Huh? Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s been very long, but there’s no clock in here and the sun, you know, isn’t moving,” she finished awkwardly. But she kept going, nodding toward the door. “Sonata came back with everypony else a little while ago. I heard her passing out food before. I think she’s probably finishing up now.”
“I should oversee her progress,” muttered Lex, still not looking at Nosey as he tried to get his legs under him. “If she passes out too much before more farm ponies arrive, we could have a crisis on our hooves.”
Nosey’s reaction was immediate. “What? No! Lex, you need to rest!”
“I’m fine,” hissed Lex, but the tension in his words was from exertion rather than anger, his breathing already labored as he tried to step down from the bench. Just that action required intense concentration, and the mere act of shifting his weight between his legs without losing his balance threatened to overwhelm him.
Nevertheless, he was intent on trying anyway, at least until Nosey grabbed him. “You’re going to hurt yourself again!” she protested, pulling him back toward her.
Already having been teetering precariously, Lex tensed as he felt himself start to fall backward. “Nosey! Let go!”
“NO!” Her shout filled the lobby as she yanked at him with all of her might, sending the two of them falling back onto the bench in a heap. Landing on top of Nosey, Lex heard her let out a whoosh as his weight drove the air from her lungs, and he immediately scrambled to get off of her, more worried that he was hurting her than concerned with going outside. But he’d barely managed to turn so that his chest was pressed against hers when she wrapped her legs around him, trapping him as she held him close. “Just stop it already,” she whimpered, and Lex was surprised to see tears at the corners of her eyes. “You don’t need to do everything by yourself all the time. We can help. I can help. Even if I don’t have powerful magic, I can at least do little things for you. So please…just stay here and let me go check outside, okay?”
Lex heard what she was saying, but couldn’t bring himself to respond, captivated by how she looked right then. Lying on her back, eyes moist and mane disheveled, her voice filled with the soft lilt of a girl who was begging as she clung desperately to him, Nosey had never looked more attractive than she did at that moment. All of a sudden Lex didn’t feel embarrassed anymore, his earlier discomfort completely gone as he looked at the mare under him.
His feelings had to have been written all over his face, because Nosey suddenly turned red, her eyes widening before she looked away. It was like she’d taken the embarrassment he’d just discarded, and Lex felt her legs around him suddenly slacken and fall away, feeling her wriggle slightly as she tried to move out from under him. “So, uh…I should go,” she murmured.
“No.” That one word arrested her movement completely, and she looked back up at him timidly. “I want you to stay here with me.”
He saw her breath quicken then, her tongue darting out to run over her lips. “I-”
He managed to raise one hoof up and gently place it over her lips then, stopping her from speaking. Barely noticing the strain the motion caused him, he let it move over to caress her cheek. The touch was gentle, but it was enough to make her breath shudder, and he felt her shaking lightly beneath him. But she didn’t utter a word of protest, didn’t try to escape from him as he slowly leaned his head down towards her. Instead, her eyes fluttered closed, tilting her head upward in anticipation of what was about to happen. Lex did the same.
And then their lips touched, and it was right.
What Lex felt then wasn’t the deep affection that he felt for Sonata, nor the wild lust that Aria had somehow roused in him. Rather, it was an abiding sense of certainty, as though kissing Nosey was the most natural thing in the world. And, he realized belatedly, it was. He’d already decided what he wanted from her, and she’d accepted it. He just hadn’t known it before.
Nosey had been there with him almost from the beginning of his return to Equestria, slowly inserting herself into his life despite his every effort to push her away. Selfish and straightforward, she’d nevertheless stuck by him in complete defiance of how his personality pushed everypony else away, an incomprehensible act that only Sonata had previously pulled off. It had only been when he’d been about to lose her that Lex had realized just how much Nosey’s presence had meant to him. That she was his friend.
But he wanted more from her than that, and as he felt her forelegs reach up and wrap themselves around his neck in a gentle embrace that was nothing at all like the way she’d grabbed him a minute ago, he could tell that she felt the same. He wanted more than just being comfortable around her, he wanted her to be a source of comfort for him, the way he had been for her after he’d rescued her from Xiriel. He wanted her to be a part of his life in every way imaginable, to be with him permanently. And as he heard her moan softly against his lips, Lex felt absolutely certain that she wanted that too.
That was when the door suddenly burst open behind them, a cheerful voice ringing out to the sound of hooves trotting in. “Okay!” announced Sonata with a cheery whoop. “I’ve passed out food for every-, WHOA!”
"S-SONATA!" Her eyes shooting open as she broke their kiss, Nosey surged to her hooves in a panic. This caused Lex to be hurled to the floor, a pained grunt escaping his throat as he landed on his back. But Nosey barely noticed, shaking her head frantically as she looked at Sonata with wide eyes. "This, this isn't why I said I'd stay here with him while you were out there! I swear, I didn't mean for this to happen! We were just talking and then Lex was trying to get up again and then I grabbed him and pulled him on top of-, I mean, I pulled him back and he just kinda landed on me and then, then w-we, we kind of maybe started, you know-, but I w-wasn't-"
"It's okay."
Sonata's words, delivered in a resigned voice, made Nosey freeze in place. "It...it is?"
"Yeah." Giving a small, rueful smile, Sonata trotted over to where Lex was struggling to stand, moving to help him up. "You alright?"
"Sonata," groaned Lex in a pained voice. "Listen to me. I-"
"Let me guess," she snorted, maneuvering him back toward the bench. "You've decided to do the whole 'bundle of girlfriends' thing, right? Her, me, and Aria?"
Both of them opened their mouths, but Sonata beat them to the punch. "Because I'm in."
Nosey, who had been gingerly making her way toward the pair in order to help, stopped in mid-motion. "You...you're what?"
Managing to climb back onto the wooden supports of the bench with Sonata's assistance, Lex looked more skeptical than surprised. "We should all discuss this," he said slowly, quite clearly wary of Sonata's sudden announcement. "The four of us-"
"Nah, it's fine," shrugged Sonata. "I mean, you and Aria and Nosey all pretty clearly want this, and I, um...I got some advice," she threw a not-so-subtle look at Nosey then, "that I should go along with it too. And besides," she turned back to Lex, giving him a sad smile then, "I realized something while I was talking to all those camp ponies. You," she lightly jabbed him in the side, "need, like, all the help you can get to not be so unhappy all the time. Which means that I need to call in the cute girl brigade to back me up." She managed a chuckle at that, but when no one else laughed she cleared her throat instead.
"So," she continued after an awkward pause, holding out a foreleg in a helpless gesture. "Here's to the new arrangement, I guess."
The words were like pinpoints of light against an utterly black backdrop, dimly reaching out to her as if from a great distance.
“…cess…lesti…”
She knew the voice wanted her to follow it, that it was calling out to her to make the effort to head toward it. But the very idea was upsetting, knowing that the journey would be difficult and painful. It would be so much easier to keep resting.
“…incess…lestia…”
But she couldn’t. The voice was growing louder, more insistent. Worse, she was starting to remember that something had been going on. Something important. Something frightening. Something that she needed to know, because not knowing was unbearable.
“…rincess…elestia…”
This time she fought to follow the voice. It was hard, like trying to fly upward through murk so thick it was almost solid, and the more she struggled the more she became aware that she was in pain, deep aches making themselves known all over her body. But she didn’t stop fighting, knowing that the answers she needed would be found if she could just follow that voice that was calling her name…
“Princess Celestia!”
Her eyes snapping open, Princess Celestia drew in a sharp breath as she returned to consciousness. With it came her memories of what had happened. Lex Legis’s surprise attack. Silhouette’s death. Those foals interfering. The guards moving to hold them off. And then…and then the battle had taken a turn for the worse, and Lex had gotten the drop on her, and after that there was nothing. Which meant- “Luna!”
Panic surging through her at the thought of what had become of her sister, Celestia tried to sit up, only for pain to explode through her as soon as she made the attempt. At the same time, a multitude of hooves pressed themselves against her body, forcing her to lie back down. For a second, she struggled against them, trying to get up so she could find out what had happened to her precious little sister, but the pain grew so bad that she couldn’t find the strength to resist as she was pressed back down onto the bed-
Wait. The bed?
“Princess Celestia, please calm down!”
Letting herself go limp, Celestia didn’t fight the ponies around her as they held her down, instead looking around. She was in an opulent-looking bedroom, lying on a four-poster bed that had been stripped to the sheets. A glance down at herself showed that she had bandages covering large portions of her body. Gathered around her were several ponies that she didn’t immediately recognize, all of them wearing lab coats or medical scrubs, as well as worried looks on their faces. Doctors, she realized belatedly. They’re the medical ponies from the refugee camp that I spoke to earlier.
Relaxing, Celestia managed a small smile. “My apologies,” she murmured, her voice slightly hoarse. “I’m alright now.” That was true in more ways than one; if she was here, being treated by a group of doctors, then it could only mean that Luna – despite the odds being so heavily against her – had somehow managed to defeat Lex Legis. There wasn’t a doubt in Celestia’s mind that, if Lex had won the battle, she’d be waking up in far less hospitable circumstances…presuming that he’d have let her wake up at all. Lex’s original goal had been to kill Luna, after all, and Celestia felt certain that if he’d succeeded, she’d have been next.
But that didn’t happen, she reassured herself. Luna won, and Equestria is safe once again. The thought was uplifting, and not just because Lex and his evil artifact had been eliminated. Luna had needed something to feel proud of for a little while now. Despite assuring her multiple times that she’d been completely forgiven for what she’d done as Nightmare Moon, Celestia had been able to tell that Luna still felt guilty over what had happened, and the thought that her sister was still privately torturing herself over her mistakes – mistakes that Celestia still considered to be partially her own, since she’d been blind to just how badly Luna had felt unappreciated – was painful to consider. I’m sure that’s why she started overcompensating by trying to become a goddess. But now, hopefully, she’ll realize that she doesn’t need to be anything other than Luna to make a positive impact on Equestria and its ponies.
With that established, Celestia turned her attention to other considerations. “Where am I?”
A blue unicorn stallion – Dr. House Call, Celestia recognized – stepped forward. “You’re in one of the guest rooms in River Bank’s mansion, Your Highness. We brought everypony here after…after the fight was over.” He paused for a moment, before continuing. “One of the nurses here said you groaned when she was checking up on you, so I started calling your name in hopes that you’d regain consciousness.”
He put a smile on then, but Celestia hadn’t missed the way he’d hesitated before, her own smile falling way under a sudden rush of concern. She and Luna hadn’t been the only ponies out there. “Is everyone else alright? Our guards and those foals?”
“They’re fine,” replied House Call with a reassuring nod. “We’ve put those foals in another bedroom. They have some scrapes and bruises, but honestly it’s not much worse than anything you’d see when children roughhouse.” He gestured to a nearby mare in scrubs, and she passed him a few sheets of paper, which he telekinetically took and started to glance through. “We’ve converted one of the downstairs dining rooms into an area for the Royal Guard members to recover. Several of them have notable injuries, but nothing particularly serious. There are a few concussions, some deep bites, and a few of them have been poisoned due to what look like snake bites, apparently…” he ruffled through a few pages, “from one of those foal’s pet snake. Unfortunately, she says that the snake in question is gone now, so she can’t identify its type so that we can look for the proper antidote in Vanhoover’s remaining medical supplies. The good news is that it seems like it’ll run its course in due time without any permanent injuries.”
Celestia closed her eyes in relief. “So everypony’s going to be fine,” she murmured.
Unseen by Celestia, the medical staff shared a round of uncomfortable looks. House Call cleared his throat. “Yes, well…”
“Except for Silhouette,” sighed Princess Celestia. “I know.” She glanced at the room’s window, where sunlight was streaming in. “We’ll need to get him to Cadance immediately, and…” She paused as she glanced at the angle of the sunlight coming in, realizing something. “What time is it right now?”
House Call, able to guess why she was asking that question and what she’d do with her answer, opened his mouth to tell her not to worry about it. But he didn’t have a chance before another pony, quite clearly looking to score some points with the princess, pulled out a pocket watch. “It’s quarter to three, Your Highness,” he chirped.
The answer made Celestia groan. That wasn’t quite enough time for everypony in Equestria to notice that the sun was still directly overhead, but it was getting close. It would need to be taken care of before all of Equestria fell into a panic. “I need to move the sun,” she grunted, trying to climb out of the bed.
But House Call was already there. “Your Highness, you need to lie down! Your entire body received considerable blunt force trauma from that fall you took, and you’re showing symptoms of heightened intraluminal pressure in several of your internal organs! You also have multiple contusions to your ribs, spine, and pelvis, and while your electrical burns haven’t caused too much epidermal damage, the musculature in all six of your limbs are still suffering from periodic seizures due to involuntary contractions! And if we had proper diagnostic equipment I’m sure we’d find a lot more injuries as well!”
Princess Celestia’s smile was understanding but firm at the same time. “Then I suppose I should ask if you’d mind helping me up, because this needs to be done.”
House Call rolled his eyes. “One day I’m going to have patients who’ll listen to me again,” he muttered ruefully, but found himself already trotting forward to help the princess up, several other members of the medical staff doing the same.
It took a few minutes for them to lift the princess and gently ferry her to the window. Once she was there, she looked up, considering the sky for a moment before her horn began to glow. Taking it extra slowly so as not to strain herself, and hopefully to cut down on the number of ponies who’d notice the sun’s accelerated movement to a new position in the sky, Celestia let out a breath once she was finished. “Thank you. That should do it for now.”
Taking their cue, House Call and the others brought her back to the bed, laying her down and looking her over to make sure she hadn’t exacerbated her injuries. For her part, Celestia simply watched them fuss over her with a bemused smile. “I’m a little surprised that Luna didn’t move the sun herself,” she remarked idly. “Since I moved the moon while she was gone, I thought for sure she’d want to see if she could move the sun on her own. Or is she too busy making arrangements for us to hurry back to Canterlot?”
The question caused a new round of uncomfortable looks to be passed between everypony, but this time Celestia saw them, frowning. “Is everything alright?” Several ponies winced in response, and none of them were able to look at her. It was enough to make a knot of tension form in her stomach, and she found her breath quickening as she looked around the room. “Somepony, please tell me what’s going on.”
“Your Highness, you should try and get some rest,” pleaded House Call.
But Celestia was having none of it. “Doctor, if you want me to rest then please tell me why everypony is acting as though they’re hiding something from me. Is it about Luna? Did she get hurt defeating Lex Legis?”
A confused look crossed House Call’s face. “Defeating?” he echoed dumbly, before he seemed to realize something, turning pale. “Y-Your Highness,” he stuttered. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake…Lex Legis was the one who ordered that you and your sister and everypony else be given medical attention. He personally gave me the order to bring you all here a few hours ago.”
Celestia felt her blood run cold. “What do you m-” No, there was a more important question that needed to be asked right now. “Where is Luna?”
Several members of the medical staff had already begun creeping toward the door, but Celestia ignored them, keeping her eyes focused on House Call. “Where is Luna?” she asked again when he hesitated.
Swallowing, it took House Call another few seconds to find his voice. “Princess Luna’s injuries were considerably worse than your own,” he managed to say. “We’re doing our best to treat them, but…” He shook his head helplessly. “The worst of her…wounds is, well…it’s not something we can do anything for.”
Fighting down a surge of panic, Celestia forced herself to stay calm. Whatever had happened to Luna, Cadance would be able to fix it. She could even bring the dead back to life, and according to House Call Luna was still alive, so there was nothing to be worried about. But despite knowing that to be true, Celestia could feel herself breaking out in a cold sweat. “Take me to her.”
“Your Highness,” protested House Call weakly, “you shouldn’t-”
“Take me to her.” The look on Celestia’s face now was a far cry from the warm smile she’d had a minute earlier. “Now.”
“A-alright,” gulped House Call, grabbing a few of the medical ponies who hadn’t managed to make it out the door yet. Together, they managed to get Celestia on her hooves, shouldering as much of her weight as they could as they helped her out of the room and down the hall.
Their destination was only a few doors down, and inside revealed another bedroom almost identical to the one she’d been in. There were several more medical ponies there, all of them looking up with wide eyes as Celestia and the others came in. But she ignored them, focused on the bed; unlike the one in her room, the curtains had been drawn, obscuring the sight of the pony within. “We thought it would be best to keep her out of sight as much as possible in her…condition,” muttered House Call. “Word is already getting around about what happened to her.”
The words made Celestia’s worry peak, and she pulled away from the ponies supporting her, telekinetically yanking the curtains aside as she stumbled toward the bed.
A moment later her despairing wail echoed throughout River’s mansion.
Cadance’s question caught Shining Armor by surprise, not having heard her return. She’d left a few minutes ago to check on why the guard she’d sent to Ponyville to have Spike send a letter to the princesses hadn’t come back with a response yet. “Hey, I wasn’t expecting you back so soon,” he answered with a forced smile, trotting over and giving her a nuzzle. “Did you find out anything?”
The wan smile that Cadance had adopted as she’d nuzzled him back fell from her face as she shook her head. “Spike hasn’t received a scroll from Celestia or Luna yet. The guard thought we’d be nervous if we didn’t hear anything, so he sent a telegram. It just arrived a few minutes ago.” Reaching back with one wing, she produced a folded piece of paper, opening it and reading its contents out loud. “‘No response yet.’ That’s all it says.” Sighing, she put it away. “I’m really starting to get worried, Shining Armor. What if Lex Legis has done something to them?”
As much as he wanted to reassure his wife that Celestia and Luna together would be able to handle anything this Lex character threw at them, Shining Armor couldn’t bring himself to be that cavalier. Not when the memory of how hard Cadance had needed to struggle to remove the curses that Lex had laid on Produce Aisle and Comfy Cozy was still fresh in his mind. If Lex Legis really is another King Sombra, and he has that “Night Mare” goddess backing him up the same way Cadance has Lashtada… The thought was an unsettling one, and Shining Armor had to fight down the urge to grimace. “Let’s give them a little more time,” he said at last.
A skeptical look crossed Cadance’s face at the suggestion. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“That telegram needed a little while to get here,” pointed out Shining Armor. “The guard probably sent it this morning. For all we know, he’s just now received a message from Celestia or Luna and is on his way here with it as we speak.”
“Maybe,” admitted Cadance. “But if we don’t hear something soon, I think we should have Spike send a letter to Twilight. We’ll need her help if something’s happened to the other princesses.”
Although he wasn’t happy at the prospect, Shining Armor nodded. But he didn’t have a chance to ruminate on the possibility of another disaster so soon after the elemental bleeds and Tirek, due to Cadance’s follow-up question. “What about you?”
“Huh?”
“Is there any particular reason you’re standing out here in the hallway with a frown on your face?” asked Cadance, before giving him a playful smirk. “Or were you just practicing your ‘big strong stallion’ look?”
He couldn’t help but grin at that. “Well, I do have to work hard in order to keep up with my amazing wife.” But his smile faded away a moment later. “Spearhead was just here. He got his armor back.”
Cadance’s eyes widened. “So that means…?”
Knowing she was asking if they’d caught those fugitives from last night, or at least found a clue, Shining Armor shook his head with a sigh. “He got it back because a bill was sent to the castle from a local cleaner's, letting us know that a guard uniform that was dropped off last night was ready to be picked up.” He rolled his eyes then, deciding to omit the part where Spearhead had complained to him about how high the bill had been. “When he went down there to get it, he had the presence of mind to ask for an explanation. According to the shopkeeper’s statement, five ponies that matched the descriptions of Fencer and her friends turned it in, but they apparently didn’t say anything about where they were going or what they were doing.”
Licking her lips at that, Cadance was silent for a moment. “I saw that several airships were taking off just now,” she began gently.
“Yeah…” confirmed Shining Armor with another sigh, this one seeming to come from the bottom of his hooves. “I couldn’t get everypony to hold off on launching them anymore. Too many business were complaining about how much money they were losing because of the delay, and apparently we were ‘disrupting several very important soirees,’ as Fancy Pants put it. Once zeppelins from other cities started arriving, there weren’t enough air-docks available, so a few of the shipping companies just started launching on their own to make room for them, and when that happened everyone else just started ignoring my request for them to stay grounded.”
The miserable look on his face made Cadance move alongside him, brushing her side against his. “We don’t know that Fencer and the others were on one of those aircrafts,” she offered, her voice gentle.
“We don’t know that they weren’t, either,” muttered Shining Armor. But his upset expression faded into a look of defeat a moment later. “I just ordered the guards patrolling the train station to come back. If we can’t keep the skies under control, then it’s pointless to keep watch on the ground routes out of the city.” He gave her an apologetic look then. “I’m sorry, Cadance. They’ve escaped.”
One of her wings went around him then, pulling him against her gently. “Don’t be sorry. I would’ve liked to apologize to them for making them think that they needed to run away in order to protect themselves, but I’m glad that they had a chance to reconcile with Cozy and Pillowcase.” She smiled as she looked at the door further down the hallway, which led to the room where she’d recently married Cozy and Aisle with Pillow’s blessing. “Maybe things were supposed to happen this way. If Fencer and her friends hadn’t escaped, they never would have run into Cozy and Pillow, and they wouldn’t have been able to forgive them for what happened.” The thought that last night’s craziness had been part of something beautiful, something that led to forgiveness and healing, eased Cadance’s worries and brought a smile to her face. “Maybe this was all because of Lashtada’s love.”
“Maybe,” murmured Shining Armor, his voice making it clear that he wasn’t convinced. “I’m just glad that they didn’t hurt anypony else when they escaped.” That we know of, he added silently. Spearhead’s injury had turned out to be his own fault, but that had comforted Shining Armor only a little.
But Cadance seemed determined not to let him brood anymore. “C’mon,” she nodded toward the door leading back to where Cozy and her husbands were. “Let’s get back in there.”
“Actually, I have a better idea,” interjected Shining Armor. “How about I go back and talk to them some more about what happened, and you go to our room and take a nap?”
The suggestion made one of Cadance’s eyebrows rise. “A nap?”
Shining Armor nodded. After marrying Cozy and Aisle, five of them had settled in for an early lunch, during which Cadance and Shining Armor had asked them for more information about what had happened last night, as well as in Vanhoover. The description of what had happened to the city, as well as the fearsome demeanor of the pony who now ruled it, had been what had unnerved Cadance enough that she’d gone to check for any word from Celestia and Luna. Given how peaceful she looked right now, contemplating how Fencer and Cozy had made up, the last thing Shining Armor wanted was for her to lose that tranquility again by hearing more about how ominous Lex Legis was.
But as much as he wanted to protect Cadance, he knew she wouldn’t let him keep her away from something just because it was unpleasant. Fortunately, he had a plan. “Hear me out. We were both up pretty late last night, and it only takes one of us to ask those three about everything that they went through. Besides,” this was his trump card, “what if Luna’s trying to contact one of us in our dreams right now?”
This time both of Cadance’s eyebrows rose, and Shining Armor mentally cheered, knowing that she hadn’t thought of that. Sure enough, she was quiet for a long moment, before glancing at the door back into the room where Cozy and her stallions were. Finally, she turned back to him, a suspicious look crossing her face. “You’re sure this isn’t some plan of yours to keep me away from something upsetting?”
Unable to fight down a chuckle at how well his wife knew him, Shining Armor gave her a roguish grin. “Would I do that?”
The corners of Cadance’s lips turned up, even as her eyes became hooded. “Yes,” she smiled, “you would. It’s one of the things I love about you.”
She nuzzled him again, which halfway through somehow turned into a kiss. Which became a second, longer kiss. When their lips parted, Cadance gave him another smile. “You’ll wake me up if you hear anything from Celestia or Luna?” she whispered.
“I promise.”
Cadance’s response was another kiss, one that left Shining Armor’s knees feeling weak as she finally pulled away from him and headed down the hallway back to their room. Unable to help himself, Shining Armor watched her go, his eyes tracing over her curves as he contemplated the feasibility of blowing everything else off and just following her back to bed. It was a pleasant fantasy…one that was interrupted as Cadance reached the end of the hallway and glanced back over her shoulder, smirking at him as she caught him eyeing her. Flushing, Shining Armor could only give her a guilty grin in response, causing her to giggle and wink at him before she finally turned the corner and disappeared from view.
Taking a moment to calm himself down, Shining Armor turned his thoughts back toward less amorous subjects. Even so, he needed several seconds to make sure he wasn’t still flushed and grinning like a lovesick colt. It was only when he was certain that he had himself under control that he went back toward the room where Pillow, Aisle, and Cozy were waiting.
“Sorry about that,” announced Shining Armor as he walked inside. “I just had to take a quick report.”
“Is everything alright?” asked Aisle, one foreleg curled around Cozy, who was leaning against him, her muzzle pressed against the side of his neck. It didn’t escape Shining Armor’s notice how Pillowcase – sitting on Cozy’s other side – seemed completely at ease with how his wife was nuzzling the other stallion, glancing at the two of them with a relaxed smile.
The sight was enough to completely dispel Shining Armor’s good mood, making his stomach tense. How can you act like that? he thought to himself as he glanced at the recently-resurrected crystal pony. How can you be so comfortable while your wife is all over another stallion? Even if she was also the wife of that other stallion now, the way Pillowcase seemed so undisturbed by Cozy taking a second husband bothered Shining Armor to no end. Despite – or perhaps because of – the tender moment that he’d just shared with Cadance, he could see himself in Pillowcase’s place all too easily, shuffled off to the side while Cadance nuzzled somepony else…
But he knew better than to let those thoughts show, keeping a neutral expression on his face. “We think that those ponies from before, Fencer and her friends, have made it out of Canterlot.”
Cozy looked up at that, smiling. “I’m glad for them. I mean, I know that they’re technically still fugitives, but I don’t want anything bad to happen to them anymore. If going back to Vanhoover is what they need to find fulfillment, then they should go there.”
Pillowcase’s eyes flickered to the door behind Shining Armor, noting how no one else came through it. “Is Princess Cadance alright?”
“She’s just a little tired,” replied Shining Armor. “She’s going to get some r-”
“SHINING ARMOR!”
The sound of Cadance’s voice raised in distress immediately sent him into fight-or-flight mode, causing Shining Armor to fling himself back out into the hallway where her voice had come from, scanning for possible threats to his wife even as he saw her come rushing around the corner. “Cadance! What’s wrong?!”
She thrust an unrolled scroll toward him, and he belatedly realized she’d been holding it in her telekinesis. “I just got this from Spike!” She pointed to the back of the scroll, which had a line of hasty instructions scrawled across it. “Celestia sent it to him with instructions for him to immediately send it to me!”
Dimly recognizing that whatever was going on was probably something other ponies shouldn’t hear, Shining Armor’s legs were already moving as he took the scroll, turning it over to read what Celestia had written even as he went back into the room, barely noticing as Cozy, Aisle, and Pillow were looking on in nervous tension. Cadance followed him inside, and she must have read his intentions because she shut the door behind her even as she kept talking. “She and Luna confronted Lex Legis and a fight broke out!”
Shining Armor was listening even as he read the scroll, knowing that it would be bad even before he got to the end. Celestia’s normally-impeccable hornwriting was sloppy, as though hastily scrawled, and the lines of text weren’t perfectly parallel. Words were crossed out and replaced with other words, and there were blotches from where she’d used too much ink before continuing to write. It was the letter of someone who was extremely upset when they wrote it, a state of mind that Shining Armor couldn’t imagine applying to Princess Celestia, and yet the proof of it was undeniable even without looking at what she’d actually written.
As he read the words and listened to Cadance’s summary, Shining Armor could feel his blood run cold. One pony dead. Celestia injured. And Luna…
Despite his coat being as white as snow, Shining Armor knew that he’d turned pale by the time he reached the end of the scroll. Nor was he alone, with Cadance, Aisle, Cozy, and Pillowcase all looking the same. In the wake of such catastrophic news, there was only one thing that Shining Armor could think to do.
“So far so good,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide nervously as he and his friends walked toward Ponyville. “No guards on patrol, no wanted posters that I can see.” A loud whistle made him glance back at where the train was pulling out of the station. “Nopony staring at us wondering why we just climbed out of a freight car.” He let out a slow breath. “I think we’re in the clear,” he pronounced, before adding, “you know…for now.”
As the train pulled away, Hopscotch stood up on her hind legs and waved at it. “It was really nice of Coal Hopper and Ticket Stub to help us out,” she murmured as she fell back onto all fours. “I really hope we can see them again later and thank them properly for everything they did for us.”
“I’m sure we’ll get the chance,” smiled Granola Bar, reaching a hoof out to hug Hopscotch gently. “They’re railway ponies, so it’s probably just a matter of time before they’re on another train to Vanhoover.”
That earned her an incredulous look from Slip ‘n’ Slide, who started to open his mouth in reply, but thankfully Funshine beat him to the punch. “Okay, so…we made it this far. Now what do we do, Garden?”
Garden Gate – or rather, Fencer – didn’t answer immediately, thinking back to the dream she’d had last night. Princess Luna’s appearance in her nightmare had been beyond unexpected, but while her advice had been helpful, the way their meeting had ended had left Fencer deeply concerned. If I’d known that she knew who Lex was, and already had a negative opinion of him for whatever reason, I never would have mentioned that he’d cursed me. No matter that Fencer now appreciated Lex’s actions, since they’d snapped her out of the dark path she’d been on; upon hearing that Lex had cursed her, Princess Luna had grown visibly upset, vacating her dream with all possible haste.
After she’d woken up – finding that dawn had already broken, and that the train that Coal Hopper and Ticket Stub had helped them stow away on had begun to move, minimizing the chances of them being caught – Fencer had told her friends what had happened. While all of them had shared her worries about what her dream meant, along with some general grumbling about Luna finally appearing in their dreams after they’d already made it out of Vanhoover and no longer needed help, none of them had been able to determine anything conclusive from it. “Lex, the princesses, and everypony else are all going to do what they’re going to do,” had been how Granola Bar had put it. “So we should just focus on doing what we’re going to do.”
It was sound advice, but even so Fencer couldn’t help but feel apprehensive. The way Princess Luna had spoken had made it sound like she had been looking for a reason to condemn Lex, and if that happened Fencer felt sure that he wouldn’t take it lying down. And if worse came to worst and a fight broke out between him and the princesses…
“Garden?”
Funshine’s voice brought her back around to their present circumstances. “We stick to the plan,” she said at last. She’d kept walking while she’d been ruminating, and the others had followed her, the result being that they were already walking through downtown Ponyville. “We look around and try to find work that will get us enough bits to buy five tickets to Vanhoover.” Fortunately, there wouldn’t be any problems with that last part; as they’d walked by the Ponyville train station, one of the ponies who worked there had been putting up a hastily-written sign announcing that service to Vanhoover was up and running again, apparently having heard it from the railway ponies on the train they’d come in on.
“I know I said this before,” ventured Hopscotch hesitantly. “But if it’s really important that we get back to Vanhoover as quickly as possible, we could just stow away on another train.”
But Granola Bar was already shaking her head, surreptitiously glancing around to make sure that nopony was listening to their conversation. “This isn’t a big city like Canterlot, Hopscotch. You saw how small Ponyville’s station was, right? They don’t have a big train yard that we can sneak around in. They just receive one train at a time, which means all eyes are on it. We’d have a hard time sneaking on board.”
“Besides,” chuckled Funshine, “the next time we get on a train, I’d rather have it be with cushioned seats and complementary meals.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide rolled his eyes at that, before looking back at Granola Bar. “Hang on. Cozy and her boyfriend were able to sneak on board that train we took to Canterlot. And Vanhoover only had one station too, even though it’s a big city.”
“That’s because Vanhoover always focused more on its ports than its railways,” interjected Fencer. “The Hoofingfords didn’t want overland shipping to threaten how much influence their monopoly on maritime trade gave them over the city, so they made sure to shoot down any plans to expand Vanhoover’s rail services.”
Hopscotch’s eyes widened a little. “I didn’t know that.”
A nostalgic smile crossed Fencer’s lips. “My father did. He explained it to me when I asked him why nopony ever built a train line through the swamp between Vanhoover and Tall Tale.”
Granola Bar raised an eyebrow. “If the Hoofingfords knew that expanding the city’s access to trains would have diminished their influence, I’m sure the Banks and the McNeighs knew it too. How come they never made a push to make that happen?”
“They probably did,” shrugged Fencer, glancing around. So far none of the stores that she’d seen had posted help wanted signs. “But you know how politics are. I’m sure some of the McNeighs worried that more trains would mean more imported food competing with local farmers, or maybe the Banks balked at how much building a proper train yard would cost. Either way, it didn’t happen.”
The conversation tapered off after that, as the five of them wandered through Ponyville, looking for any place that seemed to be in need of new employees. But after a few minutes of no luck, Slip ‘n’ Slide let out a breath. “Okay, look, I know that everypony shot this idea down before-”
“Oh not this again,” groaned Funshine. “Let it go, Slip.”
“I’m just saying,” protested Slip ‘n’ Slide. “She lives right here in Ponyville. If we go to her place and say that we need some help, I bet we’ll have five tickets to Vanhoover faster than you can say ‘Element of Generosity.’”
“She’s also best friends with Twilight Sparkle,” pointed out Granola Bar. “The princess whose brother married Princess Cadance, whom we just ran away from. You really want to risk that?”
“Maybe we should all split up?” ventured Hopscotch, wanting to change the subject before a fight broke out. “We could cover more ground that way.”
But Fencer immediately shook her head. “We’re sticking together. I know this isn’t Vanhoover, and that going off alone isn’t a death sentence the way it was there, but splitting up while we’re still on the run would just be asking for trouble.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that bakery needs taste-testers then,” sighed Funshine, pointing at a nearby building whose sign read “Sugarcube Corner.” “Because right now I’m so hungry I could eat-”
“-a helping of deep-fried gems for me. Now we just need to pick up dessert and- OOF!”
Having been looking at the bakery instead of where he’d been going, Funshine stumbled as he felt someone walk into him as he rounded a corner. Fortunately, whoever they were had been small enough that they had bounced off of his bulk, and Funshine gave an apologetic smile as he came to a halt, holding out a hoof. “Sorry about that! I wasn’t…uh…”
The rest of what he was going to say got lost as he stared at the trio in front of him, only vaguely aware that the rest of his friends had come to a halt and were also looking at the people he’d just literally run into. Despite everything he’d seen in the last few weeks – the ghoul ponies in Vanhoover, a princess who could bring the dead back to life, and the fearsome power that Lex Legis commanded – the three individuals in front of him were some of the most bizarre things he’d ever seen. Or at least, two of them were; the green earth-mare with the cutie mark of a patch of grass looked fairly normal.
The same couldn’t be said for the pint-sized purple dragon that was currently picking himself up off the ground, a picnic basket – of all things – clutched in one talon. The remaining member of the group was even weirder. Standing upright, her lower half looked like a pony, her back legs and tail having the same green color as the mare standing next to her. But that was where the resemblance to anything equine ended, as her upper half was clad in dusky-colored skin rather than a coat. Her upper limbs weren’t hooves either, the appendages ending in several digits that looked like talons without the pointy bits at the end. And her face was lacking a muzzle entirely, being more flat than a pony’s. She still had a mane, albeit one whose color didn’t match her tail, being a chocolate brown instead of green. Clad in a skirt (which covered her cutie mark, presuming she had one) and blouse, it took him a moment to notice that there was a film over each of her eyes, leaving them near-totally white and giving the impression that she was blind…which made it all the more disconcerting that she was staring right at him with a scowl.
“Uh…” sputtered Funshine, continuing to stare as he tried to figure out just what he was looking at. “I…I…uh…”
“Why don’t you take a picture?” snapped the part-pony thing in front of him, her voice angry. “It’ll last longer.”
“Aw, c’mon Soft Mane, he doesn’t mean anything by it,” soothed the tiny dragon as he stood up. Dusting himself off, he checked his picnic basket for a moment before picking it up with a relieved smile, looking up at Funshine. “Right?”
But Funshine’s brain was still trying to reboot. “Uh…”
“That’s right,” offered Granola Bar, managing to smile as she took a step forward. “He’s just surprised, is all. We all are.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s okay to gawk at me like that,” huffed Soft Mane, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Sweetheart, calm down,” chided the green mare gently before looking at Funshine and company. “You’ll have to forgive my daughter. It’s been a bit of a stressful day for her.”
Funshine’s eyebrows rose. “Daughter?”
Soft Mane frowned sharply, but Hopscotch spoke up before she could, looking at the tiny dragon. “You’re Spike, right? Princess Twilight’s assistant?” She smiled shyly. “I read about you in the newspaper a while back. Is it true that you saved everypony at the Equestria Games?”
Spike’s chest puffed up. “Aw, that was nothing,” he chuckled, clearly pleased to be recognized. “You should hear about how I saved the Crystal Empire from King Sombra.” He seemed ready to start in on the tale, when a gentle cough from behind him made him blink. “Oh, uh, and this is Grass Patch,” he pointed to the green mare, who smiled at the polite introduction, “and her daughter Soft Mane,” he pointed to the half-pony creature, the proud look reappearing on his face as he did. “My girlfriend.”
Funshine’s eyebrows were in danger of being lost in his mane. “Girlfriend?”
“It’s very nice meeting you.” This time Fencer was the one to jump in, giving the three a polite smile. “But we really should be going.” None of her friends missed that she didn’t offer their names in return.
Grass Patch didn’t miss it either, cocking her head, but fortunately didn’t push the issue. “We should too. The treats at Sugarcube Corner are best when they’re fresh out of the oven.”
“We’re going on a picnic,” added Spike helpfully, holding up his picnic basket as if to prove his claim. “When you’re helping everypony plan for how to deal with an emergency, it’s important to find time to relax and de-stress.”
“I don’t see why you’re not more stressed,” groused Soft Mane. “You’ve been sending scrolls back and forth the whole afternoon, all about that awful stallion and what he did to Princess Luna.”
Fencer’s ears perked up. “Wait, what?”
“I’m sorry, we really shouldn’t say anything,” replied Grass Patch with pained smile.
But Spike was more focused on his girlfriend, reaching up to put a claw on her side reassuringly. “It’ll be fine. Twilight’s the Princess of Friendship, remember? And she and Lex even went on that date one time. She’ll come back, talk some sense into him, and work everything out.”
Now it was Slip ‘n’ Slide’s turn to gape. “Lex?!” he echoed. “Did you say L-, ow!” Wincing, he rubbed his sore shin, shooting a hurt look at Granola Bar.
“We should really get going,” repeated Grass Patch. She wasn’t smiling anymore, instead giving the group a look that was tinged with suspicion. “Come along, you two,” she insisted, ushering Spike and Soft Mane toward Sugarcube Corner.
But she didn’t get more than two steps before Spike suddenly stopped. Letting out a loud belch, he barely missed a beat as a scroll accompanied the release, grabbing the paper out of the air with deft ease and unrolling it with a flourish. “It’s from Twilight!” he announced a moment later, apparently uncaring of who was around.
“What’s she say?” asked Soft Mane, moving around to peer at the unrolled paper despite the condition of her eyes.
Grass Patch, however, was looking back at the five ponies they’d been speaking to. “I think we should-”
But Spike wasn’t listening. “She says she hasn’t been able to find Pinkie Pie, Diamond Tiara, or Silver Spoon yet, but she’s coming back anyway.” His eyes moved left and right as he scanned the rest of the letter.
“She, Rainbow Dash, and Applejack will be back tomorrow.”
Lex could only stare at Sonata in the wake of her announcement, trying to figure out what was happening.
Nor was it only bewilderment that made him hesitate. He was keenly aware of how, a scant few hours ago, his previous attempt to have a discussion with Sonata, Nosey, and Aria about their collective relationship had ended in disaster. In hindsight that wasn’t surprising; he’d approached the situation without any sort of plan, nor with a concrete goal in mind. He’d simply been intent on the four of them sitting down and having a conversation in order to dispel the ambiguities – for lack of a better word – that had developed between them.
That he’d approached the situation with such unpreparedness was mortifying to him now. No matter that he’d managed to stumble into the correct answers to ameliorate Fruit Crunch’s breakdown last night. No matter that he’d been struggling to control his emotions after realizing just how badly he wanted Aria. That sort of unfocused, indecisive attitude was the enemy of accomplishment, and it was utterly unbecoming in someone who would wear the mantle of leadership. He didn’t need to figure out what his relationship was with the mares in his life; he needed to figure out what he wanted it to be and then make it happen!
And what I want is to be with all three of them. Lex knew that now. Just like with Sonata, his feelings for the other two had grown without him realizing it. It had only come to his notice when he’d responded so strongly to Aria, and his kiss with Nosey just now had confirmed it, leaving him sure. He was in love with three different mares; one amorous and cheerful, one wild and passionate, and one tender and warm. Now he simply needed to make all three of them his, in a way that wasn’t unfair to any of them.
And now Sonata had just announced that she was no longer opposed to the idea.
Lex knew he should have been overjoyed at the news. Prior to now, Sonata had been violently opposed to the idea of his being affectionate with anypony except her, in sharp contrast to Aria’s openly pushing the idea and Nosey’s continually avoiding taking a position. Now that Sonata had reversed her stance on the issue, their four-way arrangement was essentially fait accompli. It should have been a weight off of his shoulders. And yet, as Sonata climbed onto the bench and cuddled up next to him, Lex couldn’t help but feel apprehensive for some reason.
Sonata, however, seemed entirely at ease, her usual carefree smile back in place as she beckoned at Nosey. “C’mon. Now that we’re all a couple, we…wait…hang on…” Her expression suddenly darkened, causing Lex’s anxiety to skyrocket as Sonata frowned. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw Nosey bite her lip, turning pale.
Oblivious to their reactions, Sonata’s brow furrowed. “If all four of us are together now…” she began slowly.
Lex held his breath. Nosey gulped loudly.
Sonata finally looked up at them. “If all four of us are together now,” she repeated, “does that mean that we’re a ‘couple’? Shouldn’t we be, like, a ‘triple’ or, no, wait…what comes after triple? A triple-plus-one’ll? Something like that?”
Lex felt the tension leave his body all at once, not sure if he was relieved or annoyed by Sonata’s antics. For her part, Nosey tittered nervously, her horn lighting up as she adjusted her glasses. “I, uh…I don’t think there’s a word for this,” she muttered as she crept toward them, still looking unsure if it was okay for her to approach them despite that having been their sleeping arrangements for the last several days.
Sonata cocked her head. “Does that, like, mean that we can make one up then?” Her grin suddenly came back. “Like, instead of just being a relationship, we can call this a relation-pirate-ship! You know why?” She looked at each of them expectantly.
The last of Nosey’s tension melted away as she climbed onto the bench, settling on Lex’s other side. “Because of all the booty?” she asked wryly.
“Aw, how’d you guess?” pouted Sonata playfully. “Okay, how about a relation-treasure-ship, because, um…” Trailing off again, her brow wrinkled as she tried to think.
But Lex had heard enough, the inane turn the conversation had taken eroding his hesitation. It was time to get back to more serious topics. “Sonata-”
“Wait, hang on a sec,” she murmured. “Ship…ship…oh!” She lifted her head then, her eyes widening. “Now I remember! I was supposed to tell you that a ship’s coming here!”
Nosey’s eyes widened, and Lex turned his head as much as he could to look at Sonata. “What?”
Nodding enthusiastically, Sonata nodded in the direction of the harbor. “Yeah! I saw it when I started passing out all that food to everypony.” She paused again, concentrating. “I think it was River’s boat. You know, the one she came here in? Or at least, it looked a lot like it.”
Now it was Nosey’s turn to cock her head. “You mean the one the rest of C. Shells’ crew used to ferry the ponies in worst need of help back to Tall Tale so they could be hospitalized?”
“It’s about time they came back,” growled Lex softly. He’d sent them off more than seventy-two hours ago. Even considering that they’d have needed to carry the sick and injured ponies in their care into Tall Tale proper – since its dockyard was non-contiguous to the metropolitan area – there was no reason for them to have been gone this long. But he was less concerned with whatever had delayed them than he was with what to do now. “Nosey.”
The blonde mare blinked, sitting up slightly. “Yes?”
“Go and bring River Bank here. I need to speak to her.”
Confused at the abrupt change in topic, Nosey shared an uncomprehending look with Sonata. “Right now?” But she didn’t wait for an answer to the question, realizing that Lex delegating that task to her rather than trying to do it himself in his current condition was progress; after all, she’d been the one to ask him to rely on her more right before they’d kissed. Standing up, she carefully climbed down. “Can I tell her why?”
“As soon as that ship arrives, I’m sending her to Las Pegasus,” answered Lex.
Nosey wasn’t sure what to make of that, but didn’t have a chance to ask a follow-up question as Sonata stood up. “Actually, I’ll go. That way you two can get back to kissing.”
Flushing at that, Nosey shook her head. “I don’t mind. I could-”
“Nuh-uh-uh!” chastised Sonata, nudging her back toward the bench. “We’re in a relation-treasure-ship now, so it’s all good.”
“We are not using that designation,” huffed Lex.
“Then I’ll think of a better one!” promised Sonata as she headed toward the door.
She’d almost reached it when Lex called out to her. “Sonata.”
She spun around, slightly too quickly. “Yeah?”
“If you find Aria, bring her back here as well.”
“R-right.” Making sure to keep her smile in place, Sonata nodded before turning and heading outside. It was only after she’d closed the doors behind her and walked out onto the platform that she folded her ears back, letting out a deep sigh. Glancing back at the doors leading into the station, she lingered for just a moment shaking her head. “Right,” she muttered to herself again as she started walking…
After standing awkwardly next to the bench for a few moments, Nosey slowly climbed back onto it, taking her place next to Lex again. For a moment she wondered if he was going to take Sonata’s advice and kiss her again. The thought sent butterflies through her, and she couldn’t figure out if they were from apprehension or anticipation. But as the seconds rolled past she realized that she was being silly. Lex can barely move! He’s not going to…do that, again. Even so, the silence was still wearing down her nerves, so she said the first thing that came to her mind. “So…what’s in Las Pegasus?”
“Money,” answered Lex. “River’s going to bring several of the city’s richest ponies here. Once she does, my administration will negotiate for a loan so that we can purchase the materials necessary to rebuild the city.”
“Oh.” Nosey wasn’t sure what to say to that. The obvious thing would have been to ask him how he planned to do that, especially once word of what he’d done to the princesses got around, but she knew better than to give voice to that particular question. At least he hasn’t asked me what Sonata and I were doing while we were away this morning! She felt sure she’d die of embarrassment if he found out about that!
She was so wrapped up in that thought that it took her a minute to notice that Lex’s horn was glowing. Sitting up, she was about to rebuke him for not asking her for help again when she saw the matching aura surrounding his saddlebags. As she watched, one flap opened and – to her amazement – a huge ruby floated out, surrounding in the purple glow of his telekinesis. “Whoa!” she couldn’t help but exclaim. “Where did you get that?”
She hadn’t expected him to answer the question, so she was surprised when his spoke up, voice a murmur. “The Night Mare.”
That was enough to make her eyes widen a little. “It’s a gift from your goddess?” She looked at it with renewed appreciation, watching as Lex laid it on the bench a few inches from his face, peering intently at it. “Are you going to use this to help get that loan from Las Pegasus?”
Lex shook his head, though only slightly. “No. This has a far more important purpose.”
Nosey waited, but Lex didn’t expound on it. Her first instinct was to ask him what it was, but she held that in check. Whatever he was doing, interrupting him would probably only make it harder, and he was already a wreck as it was. Hopefully he’d relax enough while staring at the ruby that he’d fall asleep. Certainly, she felt like she could; the day was barely half-over, but she felt exhausted from all of the craziness that had happened. And Lex had the worst of it, as usual, she sighed to herself as she laid her head down. Maybe he’ll realize that a nap would be really helpful…
The thought was punctuated with a yawn, and a few minutes later Nosey was deeply asleep.
Lex barely noticed as Nosey drifted off to sleep, his eyes locked onto the ruby that the Night Mare had given him.
Just like the gemstones that he’d stored spells in, the arrangement of the magic within the gem was visible in its facets. It would have been easy enough to simply actualize the energy it held, casting the spell and resurrecting a pony of his choice. Cloudbank had been the one the Night Mare had designated to be brought back, but a casual examination of the spell contained within the ruby made it clear that its recipient wasn’t hard-coded, which meant that he could resurrect whomever he wanted.
But as incredible as it would be to bring a dead pony back to life, Lex wasn’t content with that prospect. Not when he could study the uncast spell stored inside the gem and unravel the secrets of how its resurrection magic worked. If he could decipher the structure and arrangement of the spell inside the ruby and reverse-engineer it, then he’d be able to add it to his mental catalogue of thaumaturgical spells, and even without having Severance to act as a battery, the prospect was a thrilling one for what it would let him do.
After all, he’d been able to achieve incredible results by feeding extra energy into spells and magic items thus far. Which meant that, whether from learning and casting the resurrection spell himself or by activating the instance of it stored within this gem, he could potentially augment its ability to bring the dead back to life. In that case, there would be no need to determine precisely who among Vanhoover’s fallen should be given a second chance at life.
River was quite pleased with how well she was handling everything.
Sure, it had been a shock to come home and find that her city was in ruins, her husband was dead, and her son had quite possibly knocked up some gold-digging nag. And certainly, she had made some missteps when she’d met the irascible wizard who’d declared himself overlord of what was left of Vanhoover, resulting in her needing to give him everything she’d spent her life acquiring in order to get back on his good side. But now she’d acclimated to the situation, which was why word that Lex had actually defeated the princesses in battle – to say nothing of what he’d done to Princess Luna – had thrown her not at all.
Though, come to think of it, all the liquor she’d had with Aria a little while ago might have helped with that.
“No,” decided River after a moment’s consideration. “It was all me.” The thought made her smirk in self-satisfaction, and she leaned back in her favorite chair, eyes closing as she savored the beautiful music coming out of her phonograph. She’d originally started listening to Ponygliacci shortly after she’d married Mounte, figuring that an appreciation for high art was expected of her now. To her surprise, she’d come to enjoy the opera quite a bit, and now she listened to it whenever she felt the need to relax. It always did the trick, and even now she felt the grandeur of the music wash over her, calming her down to the point where River could remember the sight of Princess Luna – lying there battered and bruised and no longer an alicorn – without feeling herself start to shake.
“I can handle this,” murmured River quietly as the music reached a crescendo, filling her study. “I can handle him.” Certainly, this latest demonstration of Lex Legis’s power was terrifying, but what did it really change? She’d already known that he was a wizard of prodigious might and wrathful temperament, having experienced both of those firsthoof. But she’d still managed to seduce him, stroking his ego with gifts and flattery and apologies until he’d given her what she’d wanted.
Really, it wasn’t any different than it had been when she’d been forced to take her little extended vacation to Las Pegasus after Vanhoover had flooded. Just like Lex, the rich stuck-ups in that city were ponies that she couldn’t boss around. Except in their case, it was because they were outside of Vanhoover’s social structure, rather than because they had enough magic to defeat both of the Royal Sisters at the same time and were willing to use it on anyone who displeased them…but other than that, it was exactly the same. Everything would go her way so long as she said and did the right things to make herself invaluable to the pony that had, for all intents and purposes, declared war on Equestria…a war that he could conceivably win.
All of a sudden Ponygliacci wasn’t as soothing as she’d hoped. River had just gotten up to look for a different opera when a knock came at her door. The sound made her jump slightly, and she scowled at herself as she turned the phonograph off. There was no reason for her to be so anxious; she was the one who’d asked to be informed of any developments. Sitting back down, River let out a slow breath. “Come in.”
The door opened a moment later, and Trotsworth stepped inside. “Miss Sonata Dusk to see you, madam.”
He moved to the side as he spoke, revealing the mare in question, who trotted inside with a casual wave. “Hey River,” smiled the little bumpkin. “Totes swanky place you got here!”
Ignoring the compliment – though it really didn’t deserve to be called that, having less depth of appreciation than her fat son describing his favorite flavor of ice cream – River plastered a smile on her face. “Sonata!” she squealed happily, years of practice making her voice sound natural. Trotting over to the mare in question, River air-kissed each of her cheeks. “How are you? How’s Lex? I was so worried when I heard about what happened with him and the princesses!” She tossed a glance at Trotsworth, and that was all it took for him to nod, leaving the room and closing the door behind him.
Looking a little put-off by the affectionate reception, Sonata rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly. “Aw, I’m okay. I wasn’t even there for what happened. Lex is pretty out of it though.”
“Is he alright?” Unlike her happiness at seeing Sonata, the worry in River’s voice now was entirely real. If Lex’s victory over the Royal Sisters had been a near thing, then he might not be so lucky if and when the other princesses came looking for revenge. And if he went down, River didn’t want to consider what would happen to everypony who’d supported him.
Unsurprisingly, Sonata didn’t seem to have thought that far ahead, adopting a look of exasperation rather than trepidation. “Honestly, he’d be a lot better if he hadn’t gone overboard making that Luna lady’s wings disappear since, the way he said it, that apparently hurt him worse than the actual fight itself, but going overboard is kind of what Lex does. That and not resting afterward, even when he really needs it,” she snorted.
River knew she was supposed to commiserate, but instead she merely nodded absently as she considered what Sonata had just let slip. According to her, Lex had sustained the majority of his injuries after the battle had ended, as a consequence of whatever backlash he’d suffered changing Princess Luna from an alicorn to a unicorn. Which means, she realized, that it wasn’t a close fight, not if he injured himself worse than Celestia and Luna did. The thought was actually somewhat comforting; it meant that Lex would probably win if he found himself in a fight against the two remaining princesses.
Reassured, River made herself smile again. “Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”
“Thanks. That’s kinda why I’m here, actually. Lex wants to talk to you.”
“He does?” It took River a moment to figure out what he could possibly want to see her about. “Oh, about my finances?” She’d given him the ledger containing the Banks’ family assets that morning, with him stating that he’d summon her to go over them later. It seemed a little odd that he’d want to do that now, but she couldn’t imagine any other reason he’d have to summon her.
But contrary to her guess, Sonata shook her head. “Nah. He wants you to go to that Las Pegasus place.”
Completely thrown for a loop, River could only blink. “Las Pegasus? Why…?” For that matter, how was she even supposed to get there? Were the trains running again?
Sonata grunted an approximation of “dunno.” “He said something about that to me a while back, but I don’t remember what it was about. Just that he wanted to send me at the time, and that he’d have Aria by his spokespony while I was gone.” The memory made her snicker a little. “I was, like, so mad at him for saying that that I totes dumped a plate of food on his head.”
“I see…”
“Oh, speaking of, have you seen Aria at all? I’m supposed to bring her back too.”
River suddenly found herself wishing she hadn’t drunk quite so much before, having trouble keeping up with how fast the topic of conversation was changing. “She’s here. She’s sleeping in one of the guest rooms.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “For realsies? All this stuff happened and she slept through it?”
“She needed to, she was rather heartbroken. Apparently she and Lex had some sort of fight?” The question was purposefully leading. Fixing whatever relationship problems Lex was having with his little playthings was another way that River intended to stay in his good graces, and although Aria had already told her everything about what had happened, another perspective was always useful.
But for some reason, the little ditz didn’t rise to the bait. “More like she got what was coming to her,” she scoffed, heading for the door. “You mind having your butler show me where she is? I would’ve gotten lost just coming to meet you if he hadn’t led me here.”
Slightly chagrinned at how Princess Celestia had said much the same thing when she’d bumped into her earlier, River moved alongside Sonata. “How about I take you there myself? That way all three of us can head back to Lex together.”
“That’s okay,” smiled Sonata politely as she opened the door, Trotsworth standing at the ready on the other side of the hallway. “She and I have some stuff we need to talk about anyway.”
For a moment River wondered if Sonata was purposefully trying to avoid telling her what had happened between Lex and Aria. Mulling that over for a second, River considered prying but decided against it, not wanting to take the risk of upsetting the one member of Lex’s mares who was well-disposed toward her. “I understand. In that case, I’ll go see what Lex wants me to do in Las Pegasus. Trotsworth.” At hearing his name, the dutiful old stallion stepped forward. “Take Sonata here to Aria, would you?”
“Of course, madam. Right this way Miss Dusk.”
“Awesome! Thanks River!” Throwing a foreleg around her neck, Sonata pulled her in for a quick hug, as though they were just two girls discussing a sleepover rather than events that were shaping the course of Equestria. “I’ll see you later!” she waved, heading toward Trotsworth, who dutifully started leading her toward Aria’s room.
“Take care,” replied River, waiting until Sonata was out of sight before rolling her eyes, having found another reason to be jealous of the empty-headed mare. Not only was she a sorceress, and had a body to make a supermodel weep, but her vacuous nature quite obviously insulated her from things like stress or anxiety. After all, that little exchange had made it quite clear that Sonata wasn’t shaken in the slightest about how Lex had defeated the princesses.
For her part, River fully planned on packing her opera records when she went on whatever errand Lex had for her in Las Pegasus.
“Princess Luna has regained consciousness!”
Sonata blinked, not sure what the significance of that was as she looked at the younger stallion – also dressed like a butler – that had run up and blurted out that message to Trotsworth. For his part, the older stallion nodded solemnly. “I see.” Turning, Trotsworth gave her a polite bow. “Miss Dusk, do forgive me, but I must liaise with the doctors regarding the princess’s condition. You’ll find Miss Blaze’s room down the second hallway to your left, third door on your right.”
Smiling, Sonata trotted in the direction indicated. “Thanks! Oh, and tell the princess not to be sore about what happened, because it was totes her fault!” Not noticing the blank looks she received in reply, she headed toward Aria’s room.
Except, after heading down the third hallway on her right and checking the second door on her left, Aria wasn’t there, the door opening into a closet. Blinking, Sonata had tried doubling back, going down the second hallway on her right and opening the third door on her left, but that hadn’t been it either. Neither had been the third hallway on her left and the second door on her right.
By now hopelessly lost, and not having run into anypony who could help her out, Sonata instead decided to make a game of it, checking doors at random as she trotted through the place. It was actually kind of fun, like on those game shows where you had to pick what was behind the door. Giggling, Sonata found herself singing a cheery tune as she trotted down the hallway, one that she’d learned from her friend Pinkie Pie back on Everglow, substituting her own lyrics for the pink party pony’s as she turned a corner.
"My name's Sonata Dusk, and I am here to say, I'm gonna crash into that maid, because she's in my wa-a-a-ay…"
Her brain caught up to her mouth a second later, but by that point it was too late, and Sonata's eyes widened just as she collided with the maid in question, who had been exiting a room backwards, talking to someone within. The two of them went down in a heap, and Sonata groaned, rubbing her head as she looked at the mare underneath her, grimacing as she realized that the maid's skirt had ridden up rather provocatively. Geez, first Nosey falls under my spell way too much, then River's all with the cheek-kisses, and now this. Maybe Lex isn't the chick magnet after all. Maybe it's me. Sighing, she started to climb off of the pony she'd run into.
"Sorry about that-, oh hey! It's you!"
Red-faced, Feather Duster smoothed her skirt back down. "Y-yes, Miss."
“So…what exactly is this?” asked Fruit Crunch suspiciously, alternating between poking at the purple stuff and the green stuff on his plate.
“Steamed shallot with faux grass,” replied Feather Duster, her voice curt as she gave Fruit Crunch a look that dared him to complain about the food.
But he didn’t have a chance to test her patience as Straightlace spoke up instead. “What’s a shallot? And foie gras too, for that matter.”
“Faux grass,” corrected Feather Duster. “It’s green beans that have been marinated in onion juice squeezed from the shallot before it’s steamed.”
Cleansweep took a bite of the vegetables in question, only to grimace at the flavor. “Mom, I know we said that we were getting hungry, but don’t they have any peanut butter sandwiches or something?”
Feather Duster glowered at her daughter, but Fiddlesticks chimed in before she could say anything. “Don’t complain,” she admonished gently, slowly feeding a long green bean to Tiddlywinks, the baby cooing happily as he gnawed on the vegetable. “Back when Block Party was in charge, we would never have eaten this well.”
“Just so long as you realize that,” murmured Feather Duster, finishing the last of the food on her own plate. She hadn’t been around back when this place had been run by that Block Party fellow, but from what little she’d heard food had been even scarcer than it was now. Fortunately, Trotsworth had been quite amenable to her request that the foals Lex had sent here be given something to eat. The kindly old stallion had also made sure to give her a helping of food too, refusing to take no for an answer when she’d tried to turn it down. After everything that had happened, the unexpected show of compassion had almost brought her to tears, and now that she was finished Feather Duster knew that she needed to get back to work.
“I’m going to head back and see if Master Legis needs anything,” announced Feather Duster as she stood up.
Fruit Crunch’s reaction was instantaneous. “We’ll come too!”
But Feather Duster was just as quick. “No, you won’t!” Even if Lex was an unstoppable monster, and even if she and Cleansweep were inextricably bound to him now, she could at least try and run some interference for her daughter. It might not be much, but it might stop her from getting into another fight, since the next time she did she might lose more than just her pet snake. “You’re going to stay right here!”
“But we’ve already had some doctors look at us,” muttered Feathercap timidly. Despite having faced members of the Royal Guards only a few hours ago, the little guy looked completely intimidated by Feather Duster now, hiding behind his binoculars again. “They said we were fine.”
“I’m aware of that,” replied Feather Duster, keeping her eyes on the foals as she made her way toward the door. “But right now Master Legis is, er, resting, and you all shouldn’t bother him.” She nudged the door open with one leg, her back still to it. Cleansweep and Straightlace both seemed ready to object to what she was telling them, and Fruit Crunch had gotten to his hooves, looking like a cat that was trying to dart outside. “If he calls for you, I’ll be sure to let you know,” added Feather Duster – it was true enough, since defying Lex would likely mean a fate worse than death – and she was mildly relieved when that seemed to mollify the children. Backing out the door slowly, Feather Duster somehow managed to refrain from voicing a sigh of relief. “Now, I want you all to stay here and try not to make a ruckus-”
“-because she’s in my wa-a-a-ay…”
Feather Duster had just enough time for her eyes to widen before the owner of the familiar voice plowed into her, knocking them both to the ground. The breath went out of her lungs in a whoosh as the other mare fell on top of her, and by the time she’d gotten her wind back, the voice’s owner was climbing off of her. “Sorry about that-, oh hey!” exclaimed Sonata. “It’s you!”
Feather Duster’s annoyance at being knocked down was immediately drowned beneath a wave of embarrassment and mild panic as she realized that the collision had ridden her skirt up, and she hurriedly pushed it back down. “Y-yes, Miss,” she squeaked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. While Sonata was acting like what had just happened had been an accident, Feather Duster couldn’t bring herself to trust her. After all, this was the mare who had willingly become Lex’s girl. Or rather, one of them; it was already well-known that Lex was in a lurid relationship with several mares, and although Feather Duster had resigned herself to one day being ordered to join in their depravity, the prospect of it still terrified her.
“Hey! Sonata!”
The voice made Feather Duster jump, almost sending her to the floor again as she stood up, but Fruit Crunch didn’t seem to notice as he galloped up to Sonata with a huge grin on his face. “What’re you doing here?! Did Lex send you to get us? Has he said anything about how we handled those guards? I know he was kind of mad at us for threatening that one pony,” his smile faded a bit, but he recovered a moment later, “but we still did great, right? Even…even if we lost our spirit animals…” Again, his smile wavered, and he suddenly had to blink several times. Nor was he alone, as the rest of his friends walked up behind him – save only for Fiddlesticks, still feeding her brother – looking up at her expectantly.
Sonata blinked at the rapid onslaught of questions, before giving the children a smile. “Oh, yeah! Absolutely! I was just with Lex, and he couldn’t stop talking about you guys!”
“Really?” The look on Fruit Crunch’s face right then wasn’t just joy, but also relief. Behind him, Straightlace and Feathercap smiled at each other, bumping hooves. Even Cleansweep looked pleasantly surprised, giving a cheer and leaping into the air, her wings fluttering to hold her there. Only Fiddlesticks looked skeptical, one eyebrow raised high.
“Totes!” nodded Sonata, bobbing her head up and down vigorously; slightly too vigorously, in Feather Duster’s estimation. “He said that you guys did really well, and that he was, like, super proud of you, and, um, that he was all impressed and stuff!”
“So…” Feathercap took a halting step forward. “So he’s going to ask the Night Mare to bring Ulespy and the others back?”
Sonata licked her lips, but Feather Duster didn’t give her a chance to say anything, putting herself between Sonata and the foals. “Children, settle down. I’m sure that Miss Dusk is here on an important errand.” She glanced back at Sonata, forcing herself to smile politely. With any luck, she’d forget all about what the colt had asked; the last thing Feather Duster wanted was for her daughter to be hanging around that awful snake again, even if – no, especially if – it gave her magic powers. “Isn’t that right, Miss Dusk?”
Sonata looked around at the empty hallway, before pointing to herself in bewilderment. “You mean me?”
Trying to keep her expression from becoming pained, Feather Duster nodded. “I’m sure Master Legis sent you here for a reason…?”
“Yeah, I was supposed to go talk to River, and then, um…” glancing upward in thought, Sonata tapped her chin for a moment before gasping. “Oh right! I’m trying to find Aria! She’s in one of these rooms somewhere, but I got kinda lost looking for her.” Her last sentence ended with a giggle, though Feather Duster couldn’t imagine what she found funny about that.
Fruit Crunch’s eyes lit up, turning around to look at his friends. “Alright you guys, you heard her! Our mission is to find Aria, who’s somewhere in this mansion! Let’s locate her quick and keep showing Lex how helpful we are!”
Feather Duster’s eyes widened. “No, wait!”
But it was already too late, as Fruit Crunch rushed by her, followed by Straightlace and Cleansweep, the latter yelling “don’t worry, Mom!” over her shoulder as she flew down the hallway.
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” cooed Sonata, waving at the foals as they charged down the hallway, yelling plans and instructions at each other before splitting up.
“Nooo!” wailed Feather Duster, giving the retreating children a horrified look. “Come back!” Desperate, she looked at Feathercap and Fiddlesticks. “You said you have magic now, right?! Call them back!”
“W-we can’t,” muttered Feathercap. “Without our animals, we don’t have our powers. But, um…” He managed a tiny smile, looking at Sonata. “We could go with you, if you want…”
“Tiddlywinks is still hungry,” added Fiddlesticks, “so I’m staying here.”
“You’re both staying here!” yelled Feather Duster, before turning a pleading look toward Sonata. “Miss, please, help me find them!”
Sonata took a step back, slightly unnerved by Feather Duster’s descent into hysteria. “Whoa, like, what’s the big deal? They’re just gonna go around and help me find Aria. Once they figure out where she is I’ll drag her back with me, those kids can come back here and hang out, and everything’ll be good.”
But Feather Duster only seemed to grow more panicked. “What if they run into some of the Royal Guard ponies?! Or worse, the princesses?!” Just the thought threatened to make her faint. “If they run into Princess Celestia now, after what they helped Lex do to Princess Luna, she…she might…!”
Feathercap and Fiddlesticks traded an alarmed look, but Sonata couldn’t have been less worried. “Look, take a breath, okay? I’ve talked to Big White a couple of times now, and she seems pretty chill. I really don’t think she’s going to pick on a couple of kids. I mean, sure, Lex kicked her huge marshmallow butt, but according to him it was all her and her sister’s fault anyway, so she’ll probably be totes cool about the whole thing.” She paused for a moment, then added. “I dunno about those guards, though. They really seemed like jerks.”
“But…!”
“And besides,” added Sonata, “if she does do something dumb like pick on those kids, Lex’ll totes be all over her like hot fudge on a sundae. And I bet she knows it, so she won’t wanna do anything that’ll make Lex clip her wings too.” She threw a foreleg around Feather Duster then, giving her a friendly hug. “So don’t worry so much. You’ve got a hero on your side!”
Feathercap and Fiddlesticks seemed reassured by that, but Feather Duster opened her mouth…only to close it a moment later. As bizarre as it was to consider, what Sonata had said made sense. Even if Princess Celestia blamed Cleansweep or her friends for what had happened to Princess Luna, what could she do about it? Lex was a monster, but he was a monster who would fight to defend what was his, which included Cleansweep and the rest of her group. Fiddlesticks had been right about Lex; he was like a dragon that jealously guarded its hoard. But that’s still protection, she admitted to herself silently. Lex Legis is going to protect my daughter from the wrath of the princesses… The thought was like something out of a fever dream, but that was her life now.
“Anyway,” continued Sonata casually, “it won’t be a big deal if we find Aria first. C’mon, I bet we’re getting close!” Her foreleg still around Feather Duster, she turned to lead her away, glancing back in the room. “You guys be good! I’ll talk to Lex about your animals!” Feather Duster bit her lip at that, but it was too late to say anything as Sonata led her down the hallway.
“Okay,” grinned Sonata, oblivious to her companion’s discomfort, “I was singing a song before, so let’s you and me take a new one from the top! Ready?” She didn’t wait before she started up with a cheery tune. “Ninety-nine rooms in the mansion to check! Ninety-nine rooms in the…no, wait, that doesn’t fit. Ooh! I’ve got it! Check check check the rooms, quickly in the…um…huh, this is kinda hard.” She frowned in thought, before giving Feather Duster a contemplative look. “Hey, is there any way that rooms can have ears that hang low?”
Biting her lip, Feather Duster could only hope they’d find Aria soon.
“Lex?” called River softly as she poked her head into the station lobby. “Sonata said you wanted to see me?”
She didn’t wait for an answer as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. Despite the fact that she already knew what she'd been called here for – even if she wasn’t entirely sure why Lex wanted to send her to Las Pegasus – she couldn’t help the feeling of butterflies in her stomach. She’d assuaged the memory of her first, disastrous meeting with Lex by reminding herself of how quickly she’d been able to convince him to rescind her punishment, congratulating herself on having figured out how to manipulate him. But seeing what he’d done to the Royal Sisters had punched a hole in her burgeoning confidence, reminding her how he would almost certainly react if he ever suspected that she was trying to exploit him.
But her worries suddenly fled as she stepped further into the lobby and spotted Lex, with one of his inamoratas lying alongside him, staring at the largest ruby she’d ever seen. The sight made River’s eyes widen and her mouth water, unable to help but gawk at the gemstone. She’d worn enough jewels since she’d married into the Banks family to know that was no mere ornament! The size of it alone made it unlike any of the common jewels that could be dug out of the ground, and the luster-
“I’m sending you to Las Pegasus,” announced Lex, not looking up from where he was studying the ruby.
“Huh?” grunted River, before shaking her head, trying to regain her equilibrium. Losing her composure around Lex ran the risk of far worse than mere embarrassment. “I mean, yes. Sonata mentioned that you wanted me to go there, but she didn’t say how, let alone why.”
“Your-” Lex cut himself off as the mare behind him – River belatedly recognized her as that reporter pony, Nosey something-or-other – grunted softly in her sleep, fidgeting for a moment before settling back down. That was enough to make Lex tear his eyes away from the gem, flickering back toward Nosey before regarding River for a moment.
Heaving a sigh, Lex slowly rose into a sitting position. The process took several seconds, and it didn’t escape River’s notice that he had to go about it in stages, taking brief rests between each motion before attempting the next one. When he was finally upright, he gingerly got onto all fours, and it was only then that he levitated the ruby back into his saddlebag, concentrating with visible effort on getting it there. Even when he did, the action left his breathing labored. But River didn’t say a word, suspecting that Lex wouldn’t appreciate an offer of assistance.
She must have been correct, because his only reaction to her silence was a glance. “Follow me,” he ordered, heading for the far end of the lobby. His pace was slow, being more of a shuffle than a walk, but River matched it without comment, trailing behind him. It was obvious by now that Sonata had been correct that Lex had injured himself quite badly; there were no wounds or injuries on him that she could see, and yet he was moving like he’d just crawled out of his deathbed.
For a moment River found herself wondering if Lex could even defend himself if somepony attacked him now. But she hurriedly pushed that thought away before it could lead to any ill-considered ideas. Even if she hadn’t been cursed herself only recently, she’d heard about what Lex had done to that pony who’d tried to ambush him in his sleep. That wouldn’t be her fate, not again.
When Lex finally reached the corner of the lobby he sat down, and River did her best not to notice how fatigued he looked. “Your yacht is currently en route back here,” Lex began unceremoniously. “Once it arrives, I want you to head to Las Pegasus immediately. Upon reaching the city, I want you to assemble as many of its richest personages as you can and bring them here, quickly.”
River’s eyebrows rose. What Lex was talking about was no small feat. She had left Vanhoover almost three weeks ago now, and her social capital had been at its nadir at the time. Everypony who was anypony had known that her money was running out by that point, and with it her ability to participate in the glamorous lifestyle that Las Pegasus’ elite regularly engaged in. Although she’d managed to leave with her dignity only slightly bruised – having elected to take her chances returning to Vanhoover before poverty had been able to turn her into one of the riff-raff – River knew she’d be hard-pressed to receive any favors from the city’s richest ponies if she were to return now.
Licking her lips at the enormity of the task Lex had just given her, River tried to find something she could use to her advantage. “Can I tell them why?”
Lex was silent for several seconds, either not wanting to answer her question or because he was still trying to get his breath back. River was about to withdraw her question when he finally spoke up. “My government intends to negotiate with them for a loan in order to acquire sufficient funds to rebuild Vanhoover.”
If River had been daunted by what Lex had said before, she was downright dismayed now. “A loan? From those ponies?” More than any other city in Equestria, Las Pegasus’ upper crust were ruthless when it came to matters of finance. Whatever loan they made – if they even agreed to make one at all, which was by no means guaranteed – would no doubt have terms so punishing that it would make a griffon blush. Having spent her entire life trying to amass money, the thought was enough to send chills down River’s spine. “Lex, borrowing money from those ponies isn’t-”
“Just,” interrupted Lex, the faintest trace of an angry hiss filling his voice, “bring them here. That’s all you need to worry about for now.”
River swallowed a mouthful of objections, her throat having suddenly gone dry. “R-right.” Forcing herself to simply consider how to get several of Las Pegasus wealthiest ponies here, River knew the task would be difficult, but not impossible. It’s not like they need to know about the loan ahead of time. I can just make this sound like I’m inviting them to come vacation at my mansion, or maybe say something vague like “there’s a business opportunity we can discuss.” That could work, at least for a few of them. And as for the rest, I can just lure them onboard and cast off before they have a chance to leave. What’s a little kidnapping when you’re working for the pony who crippled the princesses?
As if he’d heard her thoughts, Lex gave her a cool look. “And River, since you’re acting on my behalf, I expect you to hold yourself to a level of conduct that I’d endorse. That means that you’re not allowed to bring them here via underhooved means.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “If you use blackmail or threats, if you bribe them, if you bring them here against their will, if you do anything that I don’t approve of…” His eyes turned green then, trailing purple from their corners, and it was all River could do not to shriek at the sight, wondering how she’d ever entertained the slightest notion that Lex was too hurt to be dangerous. “I’ll be very upset.”
“I won’t!” Somehow, she didn’t scream the words, and she forced herself to muster her courage. “I won’t do anything that will make you regret sending me there. I’ll bring them here, and then we can figure out how to make them loan us – loan you – the money.”
Lex nodded, his eyes returning to normal. “Good.”
River slowly counted to ten, making sure to keep her breathing steady and regular, reminding herself that this was all going very well. Lex was confiding in her, making her part of his plans; he hadn’t objected when she’d said “we can figure out” how they’d acquire the loan he wanted. This was progress. Now, instead of bolting out of here like a scared little filly, she needed to build on it. “Would you like to go over the Banks’ family finances now?”
“There are more important things that require my attention,” replied Lex dismissively, already heading back toward where Nosey was still asleep on the bench. “Your ledger indicated that you have enough liquid wealth to sustain this camp for the immediate future, which is the most pressing concern. We can review the rest of it after you return.”
“Of course,” nodded River. But she didn’t head toward the door. There was one more topic that needed to be discussed, if for no other reason than it was an opportunity to further integrate herself into Lex’s life, one that would vanish if she waited until she got back from Las Pegasus. “I should tell you that Aria’s currently at my mansion.”
The words made Lex miss a step, and it was a miracle that he managed to avoid falling over, catching himself before slowly turning and looking at her, his expression neutral. “…and?”
“We spoke for little while.” River paused there, knowing that this was her last chance to abandon this topic and leave. Any further than this would plunge her deep into personal territory for Lex, a pony whose temper already seemed volatile at the best of times. If she crossed a line here, it was entire possible that she’d be heading to Las Pegasus with a new curse or three. But if she didn’t…then this might very well be the best that she could hope for: being Lex Legis’s errand mare rather than his confidante, or even closer. It was a risk – another high-risk, high-reward scenario; just the sort that her late, idiot husband had loved – but one that she knew she’d already decided to take, back when she’d decided to throw her lot in with Lex. This was simply part-and-parcel of what she’d already signed on for.
Hoping that she was making the right choice, River chose her next words very carefully. “She’s heartbroken, Lex.”
She’d tried to make that sound as non-accusatory as possible, but clearly it hadn’t worked, because the look on his face darkened. “Her continual belligerence crossed the line into misconduct, and the reprimand I gave her was entirely warranted.”
“I’m not saying she didn’t deserve what happened to her,” replied River, forcing herself to say the words slowly so as to not sound combative in the least. “Believe me, I fully understand that calling her ‘unpleasant’ is an understatement. I’m just trying to communicate that she doesn’t see it that way.”
Lex’s frown deepened, but to River’s relief there was an element of confusion there now. “What do you mean?” he snapped. “She misbehaved, and I punished her for it. What other way is there to see it?”
“Lex, Aria is in love with you, and she thinks that you don’t love her back.”
The look of shock and incomprehension that crossed Lex’s face at that told River that she’d gotten through to him. The tension flowed out of her then, and she kept going. “Taking away her voice like that hurt her deeply. It wasn’t just because of what she went through, but because you were the one who did it. She thinks that means you were trying to be hurtful, and that the only reason you’d be that hurtful is because you don’t have feelings for her-”
“Stop!” snarled Lex, suddenly agitated. “Just-, stop!” He moved as if to start walking again, but aborted the motion before he’d moved more than an inch, one hoof lifting only to come down sharply. He was breathing heavily again, teeth clenched, and this time River knew it had nothing to do with how tired he felt.
She stayed silent, waiting for him to ride out the wave of emotion that he was quite clearly in the grasp of. “She said all this to you?” he demanded sharply a few seconds later. “She said all of those things about…heartbreak, and…everything else?”
“Yes,” replied River simply. It wasn’t a lie; while Aria hadn’t used those precise words, that had quite clearly been what she’d meant.
Lex turned away from her then, staring at the far wall of the lobby with his face twisted in a scowl, and River fell silent again. This was quite clearly a major revelation for Lex, and she could see him struggling to figure out how to react to it. Ideally he would have asked her what he should do to make it up to Aria, but River knew that was hoping for too much. Instead, she started toward the door, knowing that he’d probably be considering this for a while. “I’ll go get packed for Las Pegasus,” she murmured.
Lex’s only reply was a grunt, not even bothering to look at her. That was fine though. She’d already proven that her usefulness went beyond money management.
In over a thousand years of life, Princess Celestia had accumulated more than a few regrets.
Never finding out what had happened to Star-Swirl, the great unicorn wizard who had tutored her and her sister when they’d been fillies, was a notable one. So was their failure to stop King Sombra from dragging the Crystal Empire along with him when he’d been sealed away. But for a millennium, her single greatest regret had been Luna’s transformation into Nightmare Moon.
As much as she knew that Luna had made her own choices, Celestia couldn’t help but feel guilty over what had happened. The realization of how blind she’d been to Luna’s suffering, of how she’d felt so unappreciated for so long, was her failure as both a sister and a princess. The culmination of which had been the day she’d been forced to banish her sister to the moon, which had for so long been the single worst day of her life.
Until now.
Now, watching her sister lying there, battered and bruised and…despoiled, Celestia knew that she’d failed Luna again, worse than before. The knowledge that she hadn’t been able to protect her sister from that monster that called itself Lex Legis was bad enough, but the fact that Luna was the only one to be stripped of her alicornhood like this was somehow infinitely worse. That she had gotten off so lightly compared to what had been done to her little sister left Celestia feeling sickened and somehow ashamed, and she knew that the memory of it would stay with her for the rest of her life.
But she also knew that she couldn’t dwell on that now. She had to be strong, for Luna’s sake. It was with that thought in mind that she forced herself to smile, gently reaching out to lay one hoof over Luna’s. “Sister,” she called softly. “I’m right here. I promise you, I swear to you that everything’s going to be alright.”
Luna didn’t say anything, simply continuing to stare upward blankly, still wearing the same stricken look on her face that she’d had for the last several minutes.
Just like Celestia, Luna had woken up in a blind panic. But although Celestia had done her best to soothe her sister, there’d been no way to lessen the shock of what had happened to her. Even through the considerable amount of pain that her injuries had left her in, Luna had realized immediately that something had happened to her. At first she’d thought that she simply couldn’t feel her wings, before realizing the awful truth. A glance at her tail – now a lackluster blue that hung limp and still – confirmed her transformation, causing Luna to lay back and stare upward, quite clearly in shock.
She had stayed like that as House Call, his voice quivering, had quietly read off the extent of her injuries. By far the worst was her horn, which had sustained massive damage from her attempt to force magic through it after it had already suffered a considerable burn. Although House Call had said that the extensive nature of the wound couldn’t be fully measured without going to a hospital, the phrase “permanent injury” had hung in the air, unspoken but impossible to miss…as was the implication that she might never cast spells again, as though the loss of her wings hadn’t been enough. After that, hearing about the massive electrical burns she’s suffered across her lower body and the internal damage she’d sustained – which also couldn’t be properly measured without special medical equipment that wasn’t on hoof, but were phrased in such a way as to try and avoid saying that they looked bad enough that a full recovery might be impossible – almost made a horrible sort of sense. It was like Lex hadn’t been content to just take Luna’s wings from her, wanting to make sure that she’d lost what made unicorns and earth ponies special also.
But Celestia had choked that down as well, instead politely thanking House Call for his report and asking if he and his team could give her and Luna a moment alone. Unsurprisingly, they’d been more than happy to do so, practically fleeing the room. Now it was just the two of them, and Celestia was desperate to try and let Luna know that all wasn’t lost.
“Everything will be alright,” repeated Celestia, her first entreaty having gotten no reaction from her sister. “Cadance will be able to undo everything that Lex has done to you. You’ve seen her ability to heal injuries, and I know that she’ll be able to undo this…” She faltered, unable to bring herself to even attempt to verbalize what Lex had done to her. But she rallied a moment later. “She’ll be able to undo this. And I’ve called Twilight back from that other world. She’ll be back in Equestria tomorrow morning; I’ve already told her to go to Canterlot Castle and meet us there.” She didn’t mention how she hadn’t found Pinkie Pie, which meant that even if they removed the Elements from the Tree of Harmony they wouldn’t be able to use them. The last thing Luna needed right now was more bad news.
“The guards were hurt,” she continued, trying not to be discouraged by how Luna was still refusing to react to what she was saying, “but the pegasi contingent are already making preparations for us to leave.” Fortunately, they’d brought the chariots with them when River had invited them all to stay in her mansion. “We should be able to leave toni-, in a few hours.” Silently berating herself for the slip, Celestia swallowed nervously, but Luna still showed no sign that she’d heard a word she was saying. It was somehow even worse than if she’d gotten mad at her for almost saying something so insensitive. “We’ll have them fly us back to Tall Tale, and take the train back to Canterlot. Cadance and Shining Armor are still there, standing by to receive us as soon as we arrive.”
Still nothing. It was enough to send a cold stab of fear through Celestia’s stomach, and she held Luna’s hoof tighter, squeezing it gently between two of her own. “Luna, please…please, talk to me.”
For a moment Luna still didn’t react. But just as Celestia was beginning to wonder if she should call the doctors back Luna drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes stayed glued to the ceiling, but now they filled with tears which spilled down her cheeks a moment later. Slowly, her expression crumpled, and when she finally looked over at Celestia she had a tortured look on her face. Then, her lips parted and she said the worst thing that she possibly could have.
“I’m sorry.”
The words hit Celestia like a punch in the gut, very nearly causing her to double over. “No!” Feeling her own eyes growing wet, Celestia fought to stay in control of herself. “Luna, no. You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
But Luna shook her head miserably. “I couldn’t beat him,” she moaned. “I thought that if I gave it everything I had, I could be like Twilight. Like you. But I couldn’t.” A sob escaped her throat then. “I let you down. I let Silhouette down. I let everypony down.”
That was all Celestia could take, and she leaned forward and wrapped Luna in the tightest hug that she could without aggravating her injuries, her own tears overflowing now. “No!” She could barely get the words out, fighting down the urge to weep alongside her sister. “Some of the guards were still conscious, and they told me what happened. You fought bravely. You stood up to that monster even when you knew you were outmatched, and you never gave up.” Breaking their embrace, Celestia cupped Luna’s cheeks in her hooves, looking at her from a few inches away. “I’m proud of you, sister. More proud than I’ve ever been.”
“Celestia…” That was all Luna could take, and she buried her face in her sister’s chest, crying her eyes out. This time Celestia joined her, resting her chin on Luna’s head as she cried with her.
Several minutes passed before they finally ran out of tears, sniffling as they separated. Wiping her eyes, Celestia managed to give her sister a wan smile. “Do you feel any better?”
Luna tried to copy the expression, but it was clear her heart wasn’t in it. “Not really, no…”
The corners of her lips fell as Celestia nodded, and she pursed her lips for a moment before giving Luna an earnest look. “Cadance will be able to fix everything,” she said again.
“…what if she can’t?” Luna’s voice was barely above a whisper, looking upwards again…as though she couldn’t bear to look at herself, Celestia realized.
The insight made her chest ache. “She will,” she insisted. “She has a goddess on her side.”
She wished she could have taken the words back the instant they left her mouth, but it was already too late. “So does Lex,” murmured Luna, before forcing herself to look down at her wingless body. “Not like Silhouette.”
Licking her lips, Celestia tried again. “Cadance will be able to fix everything,” she repeated. “She’ll bring Silhouette back. She’ll heal your injuries. And she’ll undo what Lex did to you. And if she can’t, then Twilight will. She’s been studying that world’s magic, and it’s more powerful than ours. And if for some reason she can’t, then we’ll ask Mihr if he can help us.” She wasn’t sure the angel would be able to, though. He’d alluded to being able to aid them only under certain circumstances. But it was a possibility that Celestia refused to dismiss; even if helping them hunt down a weapon of evil was out of bounds, helping someone who was hurt had to be acceptable. More importantly, it was another source of hope, something she knew both of them needed right now. “You’ve got a lot of powerful friends who are going to do everything they can to help you, sister. Don’t forget that.”
Luna let out a shaky breath, and Celestia could see another round of worries and anxieties on the tip of her tongue. But somehow, Luna managed to keep from speaking them aloud, instead swallowing and taking several deep breaths. “Alright,” she said at last. “Then what do we do?”
Celestia hadn’t been lying about how proud she felt of her sister, and that pride shot through her again now at how brave Luna was being. It warmed her from the inside, filling her with the resolve to see this through. “Then we gather all of our friends together, and we make a plan. And once we have, we come back here to Vanhoover, and we stop Lex Legis once and for all.”
She was going to say more, but the door suddenly rattled, as though something had impacted it. The sound caused both sisters to look over at it, but the sound wasn’t followed by a proper knock, nor a voice, nor somepony opening the door. Celestia spared a moment to glance at Luna, noting the grave look on her sister’s face, before turning back to the door, her horn glowing as she wrapped the door in her telekinesis. A moment later she flung it open…to reveal nothing.
It was probably one of the maids eavesdropping. Or maybe one of the doctors listening in to see if we needed any help. But after everything that had happened that morning, Celestia was in no mood to take chances, pausing just long enough to give her sister a warning glance before she got up and painfully crept toward the open door. Her condition made it take a few seconds longer than it should have, and she winced as she finally reached the entrance to the hallway. A glance to the left revealed nothing, and to the right-
The tip of pony’s tail disappeared around the corner of an intersection.
For a moment Celestia just stared at where the unknown pony had vanished. She couldn’t go after them, not in her current state. Moreover, the intersection hadn’t been near a window, so there hadn’t been enough light to make out even the color of the retreating pony’s tail. Whoever they were, they were gone now…and a second later Celestia realized the full scope of what that likely meant, her blood running cold.
Somepony had been listening to them, somepony who had stumbled when she’d said that they’d come back to finish Lex Legis off, as if upset by that. And now they were gone…almost certainly to tell Lex what they’d overheard. And while Celestia had no idea why the monstrous unicorn was having them treated for their injuries instead of doing something far worse to them, she doubted that would remain the case if and when that unknown pony told him that she and Luna were already plotting his downfall. Which meant that waiting even a few more hours to head back to Tall Tale was no longer an option.
“How big is this place?” groaned Cleansweep, closing the door to what had to be fourteenth or fifteenth empty room she’d checked.
No answer came, which wasn’t unexpected since she was all by herself. Even so, the silence made her feel a little sad, causing her to glance back at where Venin used to coil around her middle. Even though she had only met the colorful snake that morning, Cleansweep still missed her dearly. I really hope Lex can help us get our spirit animals back, she thought mournfully. While Miss Sonata had made it sound like it was practically a done deal, since Lex was apparently really happy with how much they’d helped out, Cleansweep knew she’d keep feeling anxious until Venin was wrapped around her again. And I bet the others feel the same way. After all, at least she still had her mom, and she was sure that her dad had gotten out of the city. Most of her friends hadn’t been so lucky…
Shaking her head, Cleansweep forced herself to focus on her current task. Right now, finding Miss Sonata’s sister was priority number one. “And priority number two is tidying this place up!” she murmured, unable to help but smile a little at that. Speed-cleaning was her special talent, after all, and thanks to this place having been abandoned for the last few weeks almost every room she’d been in so far had been too dirty for her to ignore. Even so, there were just so many of them, and all empty. “Guess I’ll try the downstairs,” she decided. After all, Miss Sonata hadn’t said anything about her sister having to be up on the second floor.
Having passed a staircase a little while back, Cleansweep turned around and headed back in the direction she’d come from. But as she made her way through the maze of hallways, she paused as she caught sight of a familiar pony peering around the corner that led to the stairway, his back to her. “Crunchy?”
Fruit Crunch jumped at the sound of his name, immediately pulling back from the corner and whipping his head around. He let out a sigh of relief when he saw her, only to immediately raise a hoof to his lips a second later. “Shh!”
Blinking in confusion at being shushed, she landed and crept toward her friend, lowering her voice. “What’s going on?”
“The princesses are on the move,” whispered Fruit Crunch, gesturing at the corner. “Take a look.” He didn’t wait for her to follow his advice, sticking his head just far enough into the intersection to glance down the adjoining hallway. Flapping her wings just enough to let her hover slightly above him, Cleansweep did the same.
She’d been right about this hallway having the stairs that led to the first floor, and at the other end of the hallway a small horde of ponies were slowly making their way toward them. In the lead were several guards, still looking worse for wear after the fight earlier that morning; all of them were sporting cuts and bruises, several had notable dents in their armor, and at least two of them were walking with a pronounced limp. But despite their injuries, they all wore looks of determination, glaring suspiciously at every door they passed.
Towards the middle of the group were a number of doctors, most of them wearing nervous expressions on their faces. But unlike the guards, their fears were directed towards the two ponies in the center of the pack. “Princess Celestia, I really must protest this,” murmured one of the doctors, a unicorn stallion with a blue coat. “Traveling in your current condition carries a high risk of exacerbating your injuries, and your sister…”
“I appreciate your concern, Doctor House Call.” Standing in the center of the cluster of ponies, Princess Celestia managed to keep her voice pleasant despite the obvious pain she was in. Her steps were slow and halting, and several ponies were on either side of her, making an effort to steady her and prevent her from stumbling. “But I believe you yourself said that we both required greater treatment than the facilities here are capable of providing. So leaving now is the more responsible course of action.”
Celestia didn’t look at House Call as she spoke, her eyes locked onto the pony beside her. Unlike her sister, Luna wasn’t walking at all. Instead, she was lying on a mattress which was held aloft by the golden aura of Celestia’s telekinesis. Tucked under a blanket, her head lying on a pillow, it was hard to tell if Luna was conscious or not, but even from a distance Cleansweep could see that she looked pale and was breathing shallowly.
“Then at least let us carry you and Princess Luna,” objected House Call again. He was apparently the only one with the courage to do so, despite the other doctors universally wearing grimaces of worry. “The more stress you put on your system right now, the harder it’ll be for your body to heal later.”
“Thank you,” murmured Celestia, still keeping her gaze fixed on Luna. “But I have to do this.” House Call opened his mouth, clearly not willing to let the issue go, but Celestia didn’t give him time to say anything else. “Are the chariots ready?”
One of the guards at the front of the assemblage looked back at her, nodding sharply. “Yes, Your Highness!” One wing came up in a crisp salute. “The pegasus contingent will get everypony back to Tall Tale, guaranteed!”
“Thank you.” This time Celestia did look away from Luna, turning to give the guard a grateful smile. But it only lasted for a moment before her expression turned somber. “And the other arrangement?”
A pained look crossed the guard’s face, and Cleansweep saw him struggle to keep it together. “We’ve…” He faltered for a moment, before making himself continue. “Captain Silhouette’s body is ready for transport, Your Highness.” This time Celestia didn’t respond verbally, simply nodding before returning her gaze to Luna, who still hadn’t moved beneath her blanket.
The procession continued toward the stairs, but Cleansweep had seen enough. She didn’t regret standing with her friends to help Lex, but seeing everypony like this made her feel sad. She hadn’t liked that Silhouette guy, but his death – the circumstances of which, she realized uncomfortably, Lex had never clearly explained to them – had obviously hurt everypony there a lot. It reminded her too much of how she felt about what had happened to Venin. “Crunchy, c’mon,” she whispered, pulling back around the corner. “We should go.”
Fruit Crunch likewise stepped away from the corner, but only to give her an incredulous look. “What do you mean ‘go’? The princesses are trying to escape! We need to let Lex know!”
Cleansweep cringed at the thought of what would happen if Lex decided that the princesses needed to be forcefully stopped. But she knew better than to say that to Fruit Crunch, instead taking a different tack. “But what about finding Aria?”
“Sonata and your mom can do that,” scoffed Fruit Crunch. “Besides, it won’t make any difference if we find her now or in a little while. But if we don’t act now, the princesses might get away, not to mention all those guards!” He ground his teeth, glancing back at the intersection. “Like I’m gonna sit back and do nothing after what they did to Lyden and the others!”
That was enough to make Cleansweep bite her lip. “Crunchy, I know how you feel, but-”
“Hey, what’s going on?”
The voice – spoken at a normal volume, in sharp contrast to their whispering – made Cleansweep give a shriek of fright, but her cry was cut off as a larger pony suddenly swept her and Fruit Crunch both up in her hooves, squeezing her tightly. For a split-second Cleansweep felt herself start to panic, before she realized that the voice that had spoken had been Sonata’s, and the mare grabbing her right now wasn’t trying to hurt her, but was instead hugging her tightly. “M-Mom?”
“Oh, I’m so glad you two are safe!” whimpered Feather Duster, hugging both foals to her chest. “I was so worried about what would happen if the princesses found you!”
“They’re here!” croaked Fruit Crunch, his voice muffled by how hard Feather Duster was squeezing him.
Sonata tilted her head. “Who’s what, now?”
“The princesses!” whispered Cleansweep, pointing to the intersection directly in front of them. “They’re right over there!”
The announcement caused Feather Duster’s eyes to widen, and she backed away from the adjoining hallway as though it was the entrance to Tartarus, her grip on the foals tightening. Sonata, however, simply smiled. “For realsies? That’s great! Maybe they’ve seen where Aria is.”
Feather Duster shot her a horrified look. “Miss Dusk, you can’t-”
But Sonata was already moving, leaving her companions to watch, completely aghast, as she casually trotted around the corner. “Hey there!” she called cheerfully. “How’s everypony doing?”
Okay, this has got to be some sort of lead, decided Straightlace.
The room was empty, just like all of the others that he’d checked. But unlike the other guest rooms he’d looked in – not to mention the parlors, washrooms, and closets – this one bore signs of recent occupation. The bed wasn’t made, various books and toys (of all things) were scattered haphazardly around, and several dirty dishes were piled on a tray in one corner. Most strange was how the furniture had been shoved into a pile next to the door, as though whoever had been here had barricaded themselves inside, only to change their mind and leave.
Had Aria done this? If so, Straightlace couldn’t imagine why, despite his having crept around looking for clues for the last few minutes. But then, he realized, he had no idea why Sonata’s sister was even in the Banks’ family mansion in the first place.
I wish Altaer was here, sighed the colt to himself. The eagle might not have known what to look for, but he would have been a comforting presence all the same. His encouragement had made Straightlace feel confident and decisive, which was exactly the opposite of how he felt right now, standing in the empty room not knowing if it contained a clue that he had somehow missed or if he was completely wasting his time.
I should at least go get the others, he decided at last. One of them might know what to look for. Feathercap was a really smart colt; he might take one look at this and figure out exactly where Aria was. Or maybe Fiddlesticks-
“H-hey!”
Lost in his brooding as he exited the room, it took Straightlace a moment to react to the unfamiliar voice, blinking as he turned to look at its owner. “Huh?”
“Who’re you and what were you doing in my room?!” demanded an earth stallion roughly ten feet away from him. Despite his voice sounding like it belonged to a young adult, his short legs and chubby physique made him look rather childlike, and his beady little eyes darted between Straightlace and the door nervously. In fact, “nervous” was the perfect way to describe him; the fat little stallion was sweating and breathing heavily, shivering despite how warm it was. “You better answer me right now,” he bleated after a second of silence, “or I’ll tell my mom on you!”
His brow furrowing in confusion, Straightlace tried to figure out what was going on. “Wait, this is your room? Then you’re…?”
“Piggy Bank!” snapped the corpulent pony. “So you better watch out if you know what’s good for-” His threat was cut off as his stomach gave a loud rumble, causing Piggy bank to grimace and put a hoof to his gut. After a moment he looked back up at Straightlace, the suspicion in his eyes replaced with desperation. “Y-you’re one of the new servants here, right? Go and get me something to eat! And make sure the princesses don’t follow you when you come back here!” He glanced around, clearly anxious.
Straightlace couldn’t help the skeptical face he made then. “Why would the princesses be after you?” After everything that had happened that morning, it struck Straightlace as highly unlikely that the pony in front of him now was one of the people that Celestia and Luna were concerned about.
“Because I’m a really dangerous pony who did a lot of really dangerous stuff after the city flooded!” snapped Piggy, trundling toward his room. “And because I overheard their super-secret plans just now while I was looking for something to eat!”
Straightlace raised one eyebrow, finding all of that very hard to believe. “Uh-huh…”
But Piggy either didn’t notice or didn’t care, hurrying into his room and slamming the door closed. “Now hurry up and go get me some food!” he yelled through it.
A second later the sound of him barricading the door again filled the hallway.
Celestia came to an immediate halt at the familiar voice, and only the cadre of doctors surrounding her kept her from falling over. The mattress that she was carrying Luna on wobbled dangerously as well, her telekinetic aura flickering as she almost forgot to concentrate on it. Several of the medical ponies rushed to steady airborne bedding, but in the time it took them to raise their hooves toward it Celestia had already recovered, giving the pony across from her a neutral look. “Sonata.”
It was a simple statement of acknowledgment, delivered in a guarded tone that constituted the bare minimum of what could be considered polite, but Sonata didn’t seem to be at all bothered by it. “That’s me!” she called, her expression carefree as she waltzed toward them. “I heard you two were up and about, so I wanted-”
“STEP BACK!” snarled the guard at the head of their group, flaring his wings in a threatening gesture. Nor was he the only one, as the other armored stallions had all become tense, preparing to launch themselves at her. “DO IT! DO IT RIGHT NOW!”
Sonata stopped moving, but didn’t back away, scoffing as she gave the guards an indignant look. “Um, wow, rude much?” she snorted. “I just wanted to talk, geez.”
“YOU-”
“Enough!” ordered Celestia sharply. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Luna twitch at the sound of her voice. Fortunately she didn’t wake up; between how exhausted she’d been and the painkillers the doctors had given her, she likely wouldn’t, but the last thing Celestia wanted was to disturb her sister.
The guards quite clearly knew that, since they all winced, the tension leaving their bodies as they glanced back at her fretfully. “But, Your Highness,” protested the lead guard, now sounding more like a wounded puppy than a vengeful warrior, “this mare has magic in her voice! Even listening to her speak could give her a chance to cast a spell on you!”
“Um, hello?” called Sonata sarcastically. “Siren here, remember? I use my magic when I sing, not just talk. Duh.” She shot Celestia a commiserating smile then, as though the two of them were sharing a laugh at how dumb the Royal Guard ponies were.
But Celestia didn’t return the expression, keeping her eyes on her guards. “I’m grateful for your diligence, but right now I need you all to stand down.” Although she kept her expression steady, Celestia couldn’t help but internally sigh in relief when the stallions gave a collective nod. Although the guards were clearly crestfallen at the rebuke, that was the least of her concerns at the moment.
Sonata had advanced just far enough forward that she was right at the top of the stairs, putting herself directly in front of where they were trying to go. While Celestia hoped that was just a coincidence – she’d spent quite a bit of time talking to the ponified Siren last night, and Sonata hadn’t given her the impression of someone who was, to put it mildly, well-versed in the art of subtlety – she couldn’t afford to give the mare in front of her the benefit of the doubt. If Lex sent her here to finish what he started, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop her and protect Luna at the same time. Hoping that she was wrong, Celestia forced herself to remain calm. “You said that you wanted to talk,” she began, still keeping her voice neutral. “What about?”
“Oh yeah!” exclaimed Sonata, eyes widening as though she’d forgotten that she’d said that. “So River says that Aria is here somewhere, but this place is, like, totes huge! Have you seen her anywhere?”
Celestia blinked once, nonplussed by the question. Of all the things that she’d expected Sonata to say to her, that had been nowhere near the top of the list. “I’m sorry,” she replied slowly. “I haven’t seen her.”
“Aww, for realsies?” groaned Sonata, hanging her head. “Great, just great. The one time she totes makes herself scarce is the one time I’ve gotta find her.” Heaving a sigh, she turned her attention back to Celestia and Luna, managing to regain her smile. “Anyway, I’m, like, super glad you guys are up and about already, but FYI, you probably want to wait a little while before you go apologize to Lex. He’s resting right now, and it’s usually better to let him cool off before-”
“Apologize?” echoed Celestia, incredulous. “You think that we should apologize to him?”
Sonata blinked, tilting her head. “Well, yeah. I mean, he probably won’t give your sister her wings back or anything, but it’s worth a try. He totes forgave River when she asked him to. And what happened was kind of your fault, anyway.”
Celestia couldn’t believe what she was hearing, the casual statement knocking her façade of calm out from under her. “Our fault?! You think this is our fault?!” She knew Sonata had to be doing this on purpose – she wasn’t so simpleminded that she didn’t understand provocation – but Celestia found herself unable to let that statement go. Not when she was still roiling with guilt over how she’d been intent on giving Lex a chance despite having been given a vision of his perfidy. Not when Luna had been sobbing against her chest just a few minutes ago. “Lex gave me his word that he intended to meet with us in peace! But when we approached him, he murdered Silhouette in cold blood, brutalized my sister and me, and then cursed Luna!” She could see that the guards were cowering now, giving her fearful looks at the sight of her rising anger, but she didn’t care, unable to contain herself in the face of such coldhearted prodding. “And you think that’s all our fault?!”
But unlike the guards, Sonata didn’t look intimidated in the slightest, instead wearing a vaguely annoyed expression. “Um, yeah,” she snorted. “I mean, first of all, can we stop pretending that Silhouette was such a great guy? Boo-hoo, so he got killed. I know that you and Lex and everypony are, like, totes broken up about it, but come on! He was a world-class jerk who tried to screw up Lex’s ritual to make Aria into a pony! If it hadn’t been for those kids stopping him, Lex and Aria might have both died! So yeah, as far as I’m concerned he totes got what he deserved.” She paused to stick her tongue out at Celestia before continuing. “And besides, Lex wasn’t even the one who bumped him off anyway. He told me how Severance did that all on its own.”
“Lex,” seethed Celestia, “isn’t trustworthy!” Despite knowing how bad of an idea it was, and just how much it went against her values, Celestia found herself seriously considering attacking Sonata right then. If she started talking about Luna the way she’d just talked about Silhouette, then she-
“Whoa! Hold up!” blurted Sonata, her eyes suddenly wide. “Say that again!”
Celestia barely blinked at the sudden change in Sonata’s attitude, her anger too great. “Lex isn’t trustworthy!”
Sonata’s response was just to gape at her, her jaw hanging open as she fell into a sitting position, her bottom hitting the floor with an audible thump as her back legs gave out. “Oh geez,” she murmured, running a hoof through her hair, her gaze turning vacant. “Oh wow. Okay, this is…” Dazed, she put her hoof to her mouth, staring into space for several seconds. Finally she seemed to collect herself, giving Celestia a look of mild disbelief as she stood back up. “I gotta go find Aria,” she muttered, before turning around and galloping back the way she’d come from.
Celestia very nearly tried to grab her with her telekinesis, not wanting to let her get away with all of those horrible things she’d said. Only the fact that she needed, in her weakened state, to exert all of her concentration to keep Luna aloft prevented her from making the attempt. Even then, all she could do was stare down the hallway where Sonata had disappeared, rigid with anger. Seconds passed in silence before one of the guards coughed quietly. “Your Highness…?” he called timidly.
It was a thousand years’ worth of practice that allowed Celestia to swallow her anger, pushing it down to where she could manage it with her usual poise. “Let’s be on our way,” she murmured at last. The command brought a sigh of relief from the ponies around her, and they started forward again, heading for the staircase.
Celestia couldn’t relax as they made their way down the stairs and through the mansion, waiting for Sonata or somepony else to show up and waylay them again. But to her great relief the only ponies that they ran into were a few of River’s servants, who were more than happy to stay out of their way as they passed. In a matter of minutes they were outside the mansion, where the remaining members of the Royal Guard were finishing preparing the chariots.
Setting Luna’s mattress down, Celestia gingerly walked over to their transportation home, allowing the doctors to perform one last check on her sister, confirming her condition again before they helped the guards lift her up, still wrapped in her blanket. A moment later Luna’s sleeping form was huddled against Celestia in the back of their chariot, who wrapped her wings around her sister protectively. Just a little bit longer and we’ll be home, Luna. Once we are, I promise you, things will start to get better.
Around her, the guards were piling into the remaining chariots. The pegasus guards that weren’t hitched to the front of them were given preferential treatment, with several of the unicorn and earth pony guards squeezing along the sides in order to give their winged fellows room to stretch out and make themselves comfortable. Celestia knew it was because those same pegasi would need to switch out with their colleagues in mid-flight later on, since pulling fully-loaded chariots all the way from Vanhoover to Tall Tale with no rest breaks would have been too much otherwise. The only chariot where that wasn’t the case was where several guards were holding the tightly-wrapped bundle that was Silhouette’s body.
She was still looking at that, bitterly recalling what Sonata had said, when the pegasus guard hitched to her chariot spoke up. “Princess Celestia, we’re ready to depart at your command.”
Celestia almost nodded, then caught herself at the last moment. If Lex had sent Sonata there to pick a fight, then he might very well have some other treachery prepared as a backup in case she failed. After what he’d done, Celestia wouldn’t put it past him to try and shoot them out of the air with more of his evil magic. In that case…
“One moment,” announced Celestia, before looking upward. The sun was still hanging high in the sky where she’d left it after waking up. It was still mid-afternoon, too soon for it to need more than a minor adjustment, but Celestia still held her breath as her magic took hold of the glowing orb.
And then lowered it below the horizon.
Several cries of alarm rang out from the ponies around her, but Celestia ignored them as she turned to look eastward. It was with a pang of regret that she used her horn again, reaching out to take hold of where Luna had left the moon when she’d lowered it this morning, raising it up to its zenith. Only a few years ago, Luna had resumed this particular job, and Celestia had been overjoyed to return it to her. Now she was forced to take up this duty again, since without being an alicorn there was no way Luna would be able to do so. This will hurt her deeply when she wakes up and realizes that, if she hasn’t already, Celestia knew. It was yet another way that what Lex Legis had done to her was unforgivably cruel.
But at least this will prevent him from easily targeting us as we leave. And hopefully he hadn’t expected it, which would give them the window they needed to leave without being attacked. “Now,” she called, “to Tall Tale!” To their credit the guards managed to put aside their confusion and take off, running forward and flapping their wings, pulling the chariots into the air behind them as they began to gain altitude.
Despite herself, Celestia couldn’t help but look down as they made their way south, still nervous that Lex would try something. The sudden nightfall had left the camp without any fires to mark their position, but the moon and stars provided enough light to make out the vague shape of the train station, which the guards had previously told her was where Lex had elected to stay after the battle. If he was anywhere, it would be there, and Celestia scanned the area nervously…only for her heart to leap into her throat an instant later.
Down below, she could see a pair of green-and-purple eyes looking back up at her.
Celestia tightened her wings around Luna as she waited for the attack that would knock them out of the sky. But as the chariots sped forward, nothing happened. No hateful chanting reached her ears. No spire of black crystal shot upward to strike them. Nothing happened except the sight of Lex’s eyes grew smaller and smaller as they receded into the distance.
Then they were gone, as the Royal Guard carried them out of Vanhoover and into the night.
Lex didn’t allow himself the luxury of relaxing as he watched the princesses’ chariots speed off into the night.
Or rather, as he watched several indistinct shapes fly through the air, barely visible against the starlit sky. Lacking enough dark magic to enhance his senses even slightly, there was no way for him to be certain that what he’d seen were the princesses’ chariots. But he felt certain that was what they were, since they’d appeared almost exactly where and when he’d expected them to.
The sudden transition from day to night had surprised him, but only momentarily. Knowing that it was Celestia’s doing, the tactical nature of her actions was readily apparent to him: she wanted the cover of darkness, which in turn meant that she was either about to launch an assault on him, or she was preparing to flee Vanhoover. Given how badly he’d injured her – and there’d been no doubt in Lex’s mind that she had no immediate access to healing magic, since not only was that beyond what Equestrian magic could accomplish, but if she’d somehow acquired any she would doubtlessly have made use of it on Luna when the latter’s horn had been injured during their fight – Lex had felt comfortable ruling out the former possibility.
Mostly.
Knowing that there’d be very little that he could do to fight back if he was wrong – between his dark magic being depleted and his injuries making it hard to move, his only remaining method of attack was a single thaumaturgical spell among the few he still had prepared, and it was far too deadly to use against another pony – Lex had nevertheless done what he could, placing all five of his magical gemstones in orbit around his head and staggering for the station door. The gems would provide him with a modest boost if worse came to worst and he had to fight Celestia again, but more important was that he be outside if it came to that. He’d have less cover, but Nosey was still asleep on what had become their usual bench, and Lex couldn’t bear the thought of her being caught up in another of his battles if Celestia entered the building in search of him. Even considering it was enough to send anger mixed with dread through him, causing his eyes to shine green-and-purple.
Thus he’d gone outside and looked upward, waiting for Celestia to make her move. Now that he’d seen what he’d expected to see, he resisted the urge to celebrate, forcing himself to remain vigilant. She might have sent those chariots as a decoy to draw my attention, he told himself, glancing around warily. The real signal of Celestia’s intentions would be when she raised the sun again, which he felt sure she would soon; it was one of the very few responsibilities that she took seriously, far too much so to leave it down in the middle of the afternoon for very long. If she didn’t attack him before she brought it back up, it would mean she’d been on those chariots, having chosen to flee instead of trying to fight again.
Five minutes later, he was proven right as the moon and stars suddenly set, the sun immediately rising to take their place. It was only then that he let out a breath, slumping in place as the strain of standing for several minutes made itself known. But despite how badly he ached, the corners of Lex’s lips were turned upward in a grim smile, enjoying the sense of vindication flowing through him as his victory over the princesses was once again confirmed, this time uninterrupted by Severance’s murderous rampage.
I defeated Celestia and Luna in battle. Lex held that thought in his mind for a long moment, savoring it like a fine wine. As much as he hadn’t wanted things to come to this, and knew that there would be fallout, potentially severe, as a result of it, he couldn’t help but bask in the significance of what he’d accomplished.
It wasn’t so much a confirmation of his strength – several of the monsters he’d recently vanquished had been far more powerful than Celestia and Luna – but rather the political symbolism of the deed that pleased him. One of the central pillars of sovereignty was force; a government too weak to enforce its laws wasn’t a government at all, and so a state couldn’t countenance any military challenge to its sphere of authority. By publicly triumphing over Celestia and Luna in a fight, Lex had just demonstrated to them, himself, and everypony else, that he possessed one of the essential qualifications to rule…and that the Royal Sisters didn’t. That would, Lex felt certain, not only cause a public loss of confidence in the alicorns’ so-called government (one that was long overdue), but showcase the dependability of his own when he founded his own nation.
That thought gave him the strength to turn and head back into the train station, a smirk twisting his lips. Celestia and Luna wouldn’t sit simply allow their powerbase to be eroded, he knew. As lazy and irresponsible as they were, even they were able to react to a clear challenge to their authority. But it would take them time to return to Canterlot, lick their wounds, and come up with a new plan of action. Time enough that, though it meant accelerating his plans, he’d be able to solidify his hold on Las Pegasus, and in so doing bring all of western Equestria’s major cities under his authority. Once that happened, he’d be on the cusp of forming his own kingdom.
And once he had his own nation of ponies, Celestia and Luna wouldn’t dare attack him again. Taking unilateral action against a sovereign nation – one that was legitimately working to serve the welfare of its people, rather than oppressing them the way King Sombra had the crystal ponies – ran counter to their altruism-based ideology. Such a thing would make them into the aggressors, leading their nation into a war for no greater purpose than their own personal animus toward him, which was why they’d never do it.
Though hopefully they won’t anyway, decided Lex as he slowly climbed back onto the bench, fighting to suppress a groan of effort as he laid down next to Nosey again. There was, he knew, a chance that Celestia and Luna would try to regroup immediately once they returned to Canterlot, marshalling everything they possibly could before coming back and attacking him again. But Lex didn’t find that possibility to be likely. As little respect as Lex had for the Royal Sisters’ intellect, even they would have to admit – once they calmed down and rationally reviewed everything that had happened during their time in Vanhoover – that he had acted benevolently. After all, he’d defeated the monsters preying on everypony here. He’d begun rebuilding the city’s basic infrastructure, slow-going though it was. He’d not only openly repudiated Severance for its murder of Silhouette, but had offered to bring the slain pony back to life, making no mention of Silhouette’s unprovoked attack on him the previous night. He’d even gone out of his way to make sure that both alicorns and their guards were given medical treatment after the fight, rather than levying any criminal charges against them, even though he’d have been entirely warranted in doing so since they’d continued attacking him even after he’d explained that Severance hadn’t acted with his approval. Despite their continued aggression, he'd let them get away with their attempt on his life, notwithstanding the curse that he’d placed on Luna, of course…
They’ll most likely attempt to negotiate clemency for her once they realize they can’t remove it, he decided, focusing on his saddlebag once again as he carefully pulled out the spell-infused gem that the Night Mare had given him, bringing it back over to him so that he could resume studying it. But he didn’t immediately turn his attention to it, instead frowning as he considered whether the curse that he’d placed on Luna would hold up against the magic that the alicorns and their allies – such as that so-called angel that Nosey had found out about – would doubtlessly use to try and remove it. As much as he wanted to believe that his magic was beyond their ability to undo, he couldn’t help but feel a sliver of doubt.
The cursory glimpse that Lex had gotten of Celestia’s magical abilities prior to their fight had shown that her capabilities were weaker than his own, which made it unsurprising that their fight had ended like it had. But while he’d always been cognizant of the limitations of what he’d seen, their battle had demonstrated a major gap in what he’d thought he’d known. Specifically, that both Celestia and Luna had been able to augment the spells they’d cast, pouring more power into them as they’d used them in order to increase the magical output several times over.
In theory, it was the same technique that he’d regularly utilized. But Lex was far from certain that was actually the case. After all, his method of amplifying his spells was by combining the energy from two disparate sources, with the actual casting done via utilizing thought-forms that contained the requisite energy in the proper arrangement while he simultaneously overcharged it with additional energy gathered physically. The alicorns, by contrast, were already casting their spells via physical processes, gathering and shaping the energy via their bodies’ magical channels and releasing them through their horn. Hence why disabling Luna’s horn had been such a decisive blow.
But in that case, where had they gotten the additional energy with which to augment their spells? The obvious answer was that they’d stored it in their thoughts, feeding it into their physical spellcasting in a reversal of the process he used, but Lex found that difficult to believe. Even if Celestia and Luna had somehow managed to learn the incredibly difficult process of creating conceptual matrices that could contain energy – and found a way to compress the necessary amount of energy to the point where it could then be forced into the thought-based constructs – catalyzing those required gestural and/or verbal activation triggers. In theory those could be compensated for, enabling purely mental activation, but those required a fundamentally more complex conceptual model, and Lex had never seen the point of engaging in so much extra effort for such a minor benefit.
And besides, if Celestia and Luna were capable of using native Equestrian magic and thaumaturgical spellcasting both, why use the latter to supplement the former instead of the other way around? Unlike how Equestrian magic’s potential was physically determined, thought-based spellcasting theoretically had no upper limit; so long as you could properly diagram and hold the thought-form, and fill it with the requisite energy, there was no inherent boundary to what could be accomplished. Relegating that much possibility to being merely a backup for something far more limited was so asinine Lex couldn’t seriously countenance the idea.
Another possibility was that their bodies were somehow more conducive to gathering energy than an ordinary pony’s. After all, their larger frames and wings gave them more physicality to work with. Perhaps they were able to draw in more power than any particular spell needed, and they were able to add the excess to the final product? But that was a poor theory, Lex knew. The sheer degree of difference between the spells they’d used ordinarily and the ones they’d augmented had been extreme, far more so than the comparatively small degree of difference in mass Celestia and Luna had compared to ordinary ponies. Moreover, they’d been able to make use of them over and over, numerous times in a row while apparently being little the worse for wear for having done so. Given how augmenting just two or three spells in a day strained his body severely, Lex couldn’t imagine how Celestia and Luna were able to use the same method to such greater effect.
If only I’d been able to study their bodies’ magical channels more closely, lamented Lex silently as he turned the problem over in his mind, running through another half-dozen possibilities only to dismiss them all due to lack of sufficient information. It was irritating to leave that mystery unsolved, but there simply wasn’t enough data to make any further headway. Ultimately, the only thing he could do for now was remain aware that the Royal Sisters – and probably the other alicorns as well – could augment their spells, and leave it at that. And if they were able to somehow remove the curse he’d placed on Luna…then he’d just have to deal with it.
Putting those issues out of his thoughts, Lex turned back to the large ruby in front of him. For now, there were plenty of other matters to hold his attention. He had ponies to resurrect. Relationships to repair. An irate goddess to placate.
Aria’s eyes snapped open as cold water poured over her, gasping as she sat bolt upright in bed.
“Wakey wakey!” grinned Sonata, making no move to hide the bucket in her hooves. “Eggs and toast!”
Normally her sister’s butchering a rhyme that even a three year-old could have gotten right would have set Aria’s teeth on edge. But at the moment she barely registered Sonata’s presence. Her brain was too busy trying to process how her sudden rise into a sitting position had left the room spinning, making everything lurch in a nauseating manner. The only distraction from the disorientation was the pounding pain in her head, drawing an agonized moan from her lips as she gingerly put her hands-, no, her hooves to her head in an effort to make the hurting stop. “Wha…” The sound of her own voice was comforting, though it didn’t help with the pain, and she licked her lips before trying again. “Where…?”
“You’re in one of the guest rooms in River’s mansion,” answered Sonata, the smirk audible in her voice. “And it was totes hard to find, let me tell y-”
“Loud!” rasped Aria, her voice wracked with misery as she squeezed her eyes shut. “Too loud!” She moved her hooves over to the sides of her head, only to feel around in confusion when she couldn’t find anything there. A second later she remembered again that she was a pony now, and moved them upward to the top of her head where her ears had already flattened, pressing them down further to try and block out the agony that was her sister’s voice.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” bellowed Sonata, her smile making it clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. “YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP! I TOTES CAN’T HEAR YOU IF YOU MUMBLE!”
The pain spiked so hard that Aria’s eyes opened wide as she spasmed, the motion sending her tumbling from the bed. Landing heavily on the floor, she felt her stomach give a dangerous lurch, causing her to look around the room wildly. Spotting an open door beyond which a tiled floor was visible, she crawled toward it, barely managing to make it inside and reach the toilet before she began heaving her guts out. It was only after she’d completely emptied her stomach – retching several times with nothing to show for it in confirmation that there was nothing left for her to disgorge – that the nausea finally settled down to bearable levels. Groaning in misery, she managed to flush the consequences of her overindulgence away before hauling herself over to the sink, rinsing her mouth out several times before gulping down the water in large swallows. Her stomach gurgled unhappily at being refilled so quickly, and she forced herself to drink slower, knowing that the water would help.
It was only after she’d forced herself to guzzle enough water that she felt vaguely bloated that she turned to the medicine cabinet, sending a silent prayer to whatever gods were listening that there’d be some painkillers there. But apparently no one heard her, the shelves being completely bare and earning a weak curse from Aria as she closed the cabinet. Settling for splashing some water on her face, she turned around and trudged back to the bedroom, giving Sonata a withering look as she crawled onto the part of the bed that hadn’t been soaked by her sister’s rude awakening. “Go away,” she spat miserably.
Sonata’s response was a snort. “After how long it took me to find this place? No way! It even got all dark and creepy outside when I started getting close! I’m amazed there wasn’t a moat around the door, one filled with robots, or tigers, or robot tigers! I bet that they’d roar and shoot missiles out of their mouths and-”
“Go away now,” growled Aria, covering her ears again, “or I swear I’ll use my magic-”
“-like you did on Celestia?” interrupted Sonata, giving Aria a pointed look.
For a moment Aria didn’t respond, her anger turning into bitterness as she was reminded why she’d come here in the first place. “That’s right,” she finally spat, her voice turning petulant.
Sonata’s amusement died away at her sister’s admission of what she’d done. “Aria…”
“Don’t even start with me, Sonata. I don’t want to hear it right now.”
But Sonata ignored her warning. “Do you have, like, any idea what just happened because you did that?”
The upset tone in her sister’s voice made Aria’s lip curl in a sneer. “Let me guess. Those two principals or whatever they are decide that Lex was too awful for them to want to work with? Maybe a fight broke out and they beat the stuffing out of him?”
“Yes!” huffed Sonata. “Well, except for the stuffing part. Lex totes kicked their butts, but he went overboard doing it, and-, you know what? Nevermind. The point is that we’re gonna go find Celestia, like, right now and you’re gonna undo that spell you put on her!”
Aria’s sneer morphed into a full-blown scowl then. “Make me.”
Sonata rose to all fours, stomping a hoof. “You think I can’t?”
“I know you can’t.” Her voice filled with scorn, Aria raised a hoof to point at Sonata threateningly. “I have more magic than you now, remember? You’re still stuck with enchantments and sound-magic, while I can do all that and use those other spells I learned while I was trapped with the sahuagin. So if we fight, I win.”
Sonata narrowed her eyes. “Oh I really don’t think so.”
“You don’t think at all,” shot back Aria, managing to give a mocking snicker despite how horrible she still felt. “If that spell I put on Princess Wavy-Hair hasn’t worn off by now, then it’s about to.”
“Huh?” Her angry expression falling away in favor of a look of surprise, Sonata blinked. “What does that mean?”
Aria took a long moment to roll her eyes at how stupid her sister was. “I used an enchantment on that pony princess to make her think that Lex wasn’t trustworthy,” she said, making sure to say each word slowly in order to make it clear how little she thought of Sonata’s intelligence. “When’s the last time any of our enchantments ever lasted longer than a few hours? Even when we met their human counterparts during the Battle of the Bands back on Earth, we needed to refresh the spell every so often, remember?”
Frowning, Sonata tilted her head. “Oh yeah…” she said at last. “We did do that a couple of times, didn’t we?”
Aria shook her head in exasperation, only to stop with a grimace when it threatened to make the room spin again. “No kidding, you dimwit. I cast that spell on her when I ran into her here a little while ago, and now it’s…” Pausing as she realized that there was no clock in the room, Aria eventually decided she didn’t care. “And now it’s later, so it’ll expire on its own if it hasn’t already.”
Her brow furrowing as she thought that through, Sonata shook her head. “Hang on. Doesn’t that mean that she won’t know she was enchanted if we don’t tell her?”
“Probably,” shrugged Aria. “She seemed somewhat suspicious of Lex already, so I doubt she’ll wonder why she suddenly didn’t trust him at all. So?”
“So that means that she’ll totes think those were her own thoughts even after the spell ends,” snapped Sonata with an angry huff. “She’ll still keep thinking Lex isn’t trustworthy, especially after what happened!”
Aria managed another mocking laugh, getting comfortable at the foot of the bed. “I’m a little curious now, what did happen? You said he fought those two, won, and went overboard doing it?” The corners of her lips curled up in a leer. “Did he make them put on a little ‘show’ for him in front of everyone? One where he got in on the action too?”
A confused look crossed Sonata’s face. “What, you mean like a concert? Because Lex doesn’t sing.”
Aria couldn’t even come up with a response, just giving Sonata a nonplussed look.
“Just tell me what happened,” sighed Aria disgustedly.
Huffing, Sonata quickly recapped what Lex had told her, along with her brief encounter with the alicorn princess in the hallway a few minutes ago. “…and Celestia seems, like, super upset about the whole thing, even though it was kinda her and her sister’s fault, except I guess not her because you put the whammy on her, but her sister and that Silhouette jerk still totes got what they deserved.”
Aria shrugged, not impressed with what Lex had done. So he’d chopped the wings off of one of those princesses. It’s not like he took away her voice, she thought bitterly. But she managed to keep that thought from showing on her face. “Great, whatever, so what’re you bothering me for if they all got what was coming to them?”
Sonata’s answer came immediately. “Duh. You’ve gotta go take that spell off of Celestia so that she’ll know that Luna and Silhouette got what they deserved! That way, she won’t think that Lex is a bad guy, and everypony wins! Well, everypony who deserves to, I mean.”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Aria didn’t bother looking at Sonata as she spoke, instead reaching a hoof out to touch her pillow. Grimacing as she felt that it was still wet, she turned it over, sighing when she felt that the bottom was damp too. “Those princesses are already gone.”
“What?!” Sonata was ready dash out the door, but managed to catch herself, biting her lip as she realized that if she left now she might not be able to find her way back here again. “No way! I was just talking to them!”
“You talked to them while they were leaving here, right? Where exactly do you think they were going?”
“T-to apologize to Lex,” stammered Sonata. She’d just assumed at the time that Celestia had been taking Luna along because she was hoping that Lex would fix her the way he’d fixed River when she’d apologized, and the guards and doctors were tagging along because they were worried. But looking back, Celestia hadn’t said anything of the sort, and had gotten angry when Sonata had mentioned that idea…
Aria had already come to the same conclusion. “You really think she’d apologize to him while she’s under a spell that makes her think he’s not trustworthy?”
“But…but…”
“They’re gone,” stated Aria flatly. Normally she’d have smirked while driving the point home, but for some reason her heart wasn’t in it anymore. Lying down, she turned so her back was to Sonata. “You saw them getting ready to run back to wherever it is they came from, and now they’re already on the move.”
“So that’s it then?” Sonata’s voice was incredulous. “They’ve, like, already left, and now Celestia’s going to think that she made up her own mind that Lex is a bad guy?” Her bottom sank back to the floor as she sat down. Celestia and Luna weren’t what she’d call tough, but she knew that a lot of ponies listened to them, and if they went around telling everyone that Lex was a some sort of monster… “This is awful.”
“Oh don’t act like you’re not happy about this,” snorted Aria, still facing the wall. “It’s exactly what you wanted.”
Completely flabbergasted, Sonata could only stare at her sister. “Say what now?”
“Now you get to run back to Lex and tell him what your worser-than-worst sister did.” Curling into the fetal position, Aria’s voice was subdued as she spoke. “When he finds out about this, he probably won’t stop at just taking away my voice. He’ll probably turn me back into how I was and throw me back in the ocean at the very least. Or maybe he’ll banish me to some other world instead. Then you just have to scare off blondie and you can have him all to yourself again, just like you wanted.” She gave a hollow laugh at that. “You’re welcome.”
Sonata was silent for a long moment, thinking that over. She’s probably right, she realized. Lex hates it when we enchant anyone without his say-so, let alone to make a fight happen. And he definitely wouldn’t pull his punches where Aria’s punishment was concerned. The thought made Sonata bite her lip as she looked at where her sister was curled up on the bed, the picture of misery.
After a long moment, she let out a sigh. “No.”
For a moment Aria didn’t say anything, but after a second she turned just enough to glance back over her shoulder. “What do you mean no?”
“I mean no.” Meeting Aria’s gaze directly, Sonata gave her a small but genuine smile. “I won’t tell Lex what you did.”
Aria’s response to Sonata’s announcement was a disbelieving snort, turning her head back to face the wall again.
“Aw, don’t be like that,” pouted Sonata. “I’m really serious. I won’t tell Lex what you did. Pinkie promise!” She tried to remember the rhyme that her friend had taught her. “Cross my eyes, hope to cry…no, wait, that doesn’t sound right. Cross my flies, cupcakes high, er…I, like, really promise!”
“Yeah right,” muttered Aria dejectedly.
Huffing, Sonata stomped a hoof. “Why are you being such a jerk about this? I’m trying to be nice here and let you know that you don’t have to worry about Lex getting mad and punishing you!”
“And I’m saying I don’t believe you.” Turning over as she realized that Sonata wasn’t going to let this go, Aria gave her a dark look. “Ever since you realized that I was into your heartless jerk of a boyfriend, all you’ve done is try to keep us apart. But now, when you have the perfect way to get me out of the picture forever, you’re suddenly saying you’re not going to use it?” Her voice practically dripping with contempt, Aria gave Sonata a look of loathing. “Please. You already ruined my life once when you abandoned me back on Everglow, so yeah, I have a hard time believing that you’re not about to do it again.”
Eyes wide, Sonata gaped at the harsh words. “Oh! My! Gosh! I apologized for that already! Do you not remember last night, right before Lex changed you into a pony, when I said how sorry I was for what you went through?!”
“You saying sorry wasn’t enough!” snapped Aria.
“I know that!” shot back Sonata. “That’s why I wanna help you out now!”
“So you think that makes it all okay, is that it?!” Her face twisted in a look of complete and utter hate, Aria climbed off the bed, stalking toward Sonata. “You just walk out on me and let my life turn into a living nightmare, but now you’re taking pity on me so suddenly it’s all fine and dandy like it never even happened?!”
“That’s, like, not even fair!” protested Sonata. Her ears folded back at the look on Aria’s face, but she somehow managed to stand her ground. “You keep saying how what happened to you was my fault, but if I’d stayed I bet things would’ve turned out just the same! We still would’ve lost that fight, you still would’ve gone through all that horrible stuff, and nothing would be any different! So why are you so mad at me?!”
“BECAUSE WE’RE SISTERS!” screamed Aria. “DO YOU NOT GET THAT?! IT WAS ALWAYS THE THREE OF US, TOGETHER!”
The words, hollered so loud as to be deafening in the small room, rocked Sonata back on her hooves. “Wait…hold on…”
But Aria wasn’t nearly finished. “You and me and Adagio! That was the one thing that never changed! No matter what world we got sent to, no matter if we were Sirens or humans or ponies, the three of us were always there for each other! Yeah, you couldn’t open your mouth without saying something mind-numbly stupid, and yeah, Adagio was completely full of herself, and you know what? I’ll even admit that I was probably no picnic either, but WE! WERE! TOGETHER! The two of you being there, whether I liked it or not, was the one thing I could always count on! The only thing that never changed! I was never alone because the two of you were always there! And then…” She choked up then, her hateful look marred by the tears that began to fall from her eyes. “And then you betrayed us!”
“Aria…”
“How could you even do that?!” It was impossible to say whether anger or grief was more prominent in Aria’s voice then. “We’d stayed together for over a thousand years, and you threw it all away like it was nothing! Like we were nothing! Do you know how that made me feel?!” She started to turn away then, only to stop in mid-motion and turn back, getting right in Sonata’s face, her voice dropping to a growl. “Every day, when I was down there at the bottom of the ocean being bullied by those monsters, I thought about how much I hated you for abandoning me like that. And even then I still wished you and Adagio were there with me, because I hated going through all of that alone even more! How pathetic is that?”
Utterly heartbroken by what she was hearing, Sonata’s own cheeks were wet with tears. “Aria, I never meant-”
But she didn’t have a chance to interrupt. “And just when I was sure that I was going to have to spend the rest of my life like that, living like a slave, that’s when I ran into you again. And you know what I saw? That you were perfectly fine with how things had turned out. You’d gotten yourself a hot boyfriend and were having an adventure with him and didn’t care even a little about what had happened to me.”
“That’s not true! I-”
“And when I thought that maybe, just maybe, that Lex might care a little about me even if you didn’t, you had to try and ruin that too, didn’t you? Even though I was miserable and he was the only person that wanted to do something about it, you just declared ‘finders, keepers,’ and did everything you could to keep me away from him. Because apparently I don’t matter at all to you.” She made a sound that could have been either a hollow laugh or a sob. “But hey, he didn’t like me all that much either since he took my voice away as soon as I annoyed him. So yeah, now that you know he doesn’t want to be me with, you’ll keep my little secret safe and I can sit on the sidelines and watch you two be lovebirds together. At least until the next time you decide you want to ruin my life-, HEY! LEMME GO!”
“I’M SO SORRY!” wailed Sonata, keeping her forelegs wrapped around Aria as she pulled her into a hug. “I’M, LIKE, SUPER DUPER SORRY! FOR REALSIES!”
“Liar!” retorted Aria. But her voice was weak, as were her struggles to escape from Sonata’s grip. “You don’t care about me! You never cared about me! You and Lex both!”
“Yes we do!” sniffled Sonata. “We both do!”
“Then why did you leave us?” The question seemed to rob Aria of what remained of her strength, her struggles to get away from Sonata ceasing entirely. “Why did Lex do that to me?”
Sonata gave her the only answer she had. “Because I’m dumb.” Feeling that Aria wasn’t fighting anymore, Sonata slowly let her go, managing to give her a tentative smile even though they were both still crying. “C’mon, you know that better than anyone, right? I’m, like, the dumbest person who ever lived. I must be, if I didn’t even realize h-how much…how much I hurt you…” Needing to take a moment to stop herself from sobbing, she kept going before she lost her composure completely. “And Lex…” She gave a helpless shrug. “He’s dumb too. I mean, he’s, like, a super-mega-genius, but he’s really dumb when it comes to figuring out other people.” She gave a laugh then, which turned into a hiccup as she bit back a sob. “Maybe that’s why we got together in the first place. We’re both dumb in, like, matching ways or something.”
“So, what?” muttered Aria dejectedly, her ears folded back and her eyes on the floor. “It’s all okay just because you both didn’t mean to rip my heart out like this?”
Sonata shook her head. “No, it’s not. I get it, it’s really not okay.” Pausing as she tried to think of how to do that, it took Sonata a moment to realize that there was at least one thing she could do right now. Slowly, she reached out and took Aria’s cheeks in her hooves, lifting her head up so that she was looking into her eyes. “You’re my sister, and I love you, and I’m so sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you. I swear I’ll never do that to you again.”
Aria’s lip quivered, and a fresh round of tears filled her eyes. She pulled away before they could start falling, turning her back to Sonata and rubbing her foreleg over her eyes as she sniffled loudly. “F-fine,” she muttered, her voice brusque. “What about Lex?”
Sonata managed a smile then. “Oh wow, I actually forgot for a moment! I totes gave Lex the blue light on the whole ‘three girlfriends’ thing.”
Aria just looked at her for a moment. For some reason Sonata’s butchered idiom didn’t bother her nearly as much as it usually did. “You mean the green light?”
“Er, I think so?” Sonata tilted her head. “Is that the one that means go? Because that’s the one I meant.”
“Fat lot of good that does me now,” sighed Aria, trudging back over to the bed, completely drained from the last few minutes.
Sonata followed her, sitting down next to her. “I bet if you told Lex how hurt you were, he’d say he was sorry.”
Aria couldn’t help but give her a cynical look then. “We’re talking about the same guy, right? Because Lex doesn’t exactly seem like the ‘sorry’ type.”
Sonata shrugged. “He said it to me, once.”
Aria’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
Smiling at the memory, Sonata nodded. “Yeah. It was a little while ago, right after Lex almost died fighting that dragon in Tall Tale. We’d been broken up for a little while-”
If Aria had looked surprised before, she was completely shocked now. “Wait, what?!”
“Yeah.” Sonata’s smile changed to a grimace then. “We’d gotten in a fight. We’d met this nice guy, and Lex thought that he was attacking me when he was really just showing me some magic tricks, and he tried to kill him for it. I was pretty angry over that, and when Lex wouldn’t say he was sorry for it, I…kinda walked out on him.” Sonata bit her lip then, the memory taking on a whole new dimension in light of everything Aria had just said.
“Hmm. So he apologized for it later?”
Slightly amazed that Aria hadn’t needled her about having left Lex the way she’d left her, Sonata shook her head. “No, I was the one who apologized. I’d talked to this love goddess I know – that’s a secret by the way, so now you have one on me – and she helped me realize that although Lex went overboard, that’s kind of what he does. Plus he’d listened to me and stopped before he went too far anyway, and he was trying to protect me, and, well…I was the one who’d overreacted, breaking up with him like that.”
Putting the “love goddess” thing aside for later, Aria gestured at her to keep going. “So what did he apologize for?”
“For not accepting my apology.”
“Huh?”
Sonata shrugged again, her smile back in place. “I asked Lex to take me back, and he got really mad at me. He said that I’d ruined everything, and that it was over for us, and all sorts of awful stuff. And just as I was thinking that the entire world had, like, totes come to an end, I realized something.”
Despite herself, Aria was captivated, leaning forward a little. “What?”
“He hadn’t actually said that he didn’t love me anymore. So I asked him if he didn’t, and that…that was all it took.” She sighed, remembering the tender moment they’d shared then. “He just turned back around, and it was like something out of a storybook, you know? He came back to me and started crying-”
“Seriously?!” Aria was open-mouthed at that. “He cried?!”
“Yep!” grinned Sonata. “He started crying and saying how much he loved me and that he was sorry, and just like that we got back together. It was a little bit later that we had our first time, you know…together.”
“Wow.” Sitting back to process all that, Aria hesitated for a moment before giving voice to the question that came to her then. “So…you think he’d have that kind of moment with me?”
“I dunno,” admitted Sonata as she climbed to her hooves, turning to Aria and holding out a hoof once she had. “But I think you should find out. C’mon.”
Aria hesitated for a moment, looking at the outstretched hoof for a moment before meeting Sonata’s eyes. “You’re really sorry about what you did?”
“For realsies,” affirmed Sonata solemnly. “I am.”
“And you’re okay with sharing Lex?”
“Yeah. I’d be lying if I said I was turning cartwheels over it or anything, but this is for the best.”
Aria nodded, and then slowly reached out and took Sonata’s hoof, climbing down off the bed. Sonata smiled at that, leading her back out into the hallway. Now they just had to figure out how to get out of-
“You do realize,” noted Aria idly, “that means that if we ever meet back up with Adagio, we’ll probably have to share Lex with her too, right?”
She couldn’t help but snicker at the horrified expression that crossed Sonata’s face then.
No apology was complete without a little bit of payback.
The barbed wire encircling his left foreleg was growing tighter.
At first Lex had thought he was imagining it. After all, he still hurt all over from how badly he’d overextended himself in cursing Luna. But as he’d studied the resurrection spell stored within the ruby that the Night Mare had given him, the sense of constriction around his leg had slowly increased. It hadn’t reached the point of pain yet, the wire not having contracted enough for the barbs to pierce his skin, but as he begrudgingly turned his face away from the ruby and examined his leg, Lex could see that the wire had indeed clenched ever so slightly harder than normal.
Rather than being alarmed, Lex’s first reaction was to feel irritated at the Night Mare’s warning. Because he had no doubt that it was a warning. As unskilled as he was at understanding the motivations of others, the goddess’s intent was nevertheless clear to him now: the longer he waited to placate her, the tighter the wire would grow.
There was no clock in the station lobby, and Celestia’s manipulating the sun to cover her retreat made him wary of using the angle of the light shining in the windows as a means of measuring time. But Lex could still estimate how long it had been since he’d spoken to the Night Mare in his dream. For the wire to have tightened as much as it had since then... About thirty hours, he decided. If he hadn’t made a public sacrifice to the Night Mare by then, the wire would reach a point of contraction sufficient to cut his leg off completely.
The underlying message was obvious: he could either choose what he forfeited to the goddess, or she would take his leg in payment.
The thought made Lex’s lip curl, acrimony for the Night Mare filling his mind. He was sorely tempted to simply allow her to cut his leg off, simply to make it clear that he couldn’t be bullied – the fact that the last few hours would be agonizing bothered him not at all; he had gone through several instances of intense pain, and had no doubt that he could handle such a thing again – but he felt certain that if it came to that, the goddess wouldn’t stop there. She had made it clear, during their most recent encounter, that she was on the brink of giving up on him altogether. If he spurned her again, Lex had little doubt that she would, at the very least, completely withdraw her favor from him. In all likelihood, she’d also make good on her threat of killing him immediately.
Neither option was acceptable to Lex. While he’d still be able to walk with only three legs – and even cast spells, since the gestures needed for his thaumaturgical magic only required a single hoof to make – the loss of divine patronage would put him at a disadvantage in the future. Worse than merely losing access to the smattering of divine spells that the Night Mare was already granting him or the power to command certain creatures, he’d be in no position to exert any influence, let alone control, over the spread of religions that would inevitably make their way to Equestria now that Everglow’s deities knew of this world’s existence. Even less desirable was how he’d have no protection against the depredations of those other gods; as bad as it was to have the Night Mare’s threats hanging over his head, Lex knew that no other god would dare act against him directly so long as he had her backing, lest doing so start a war. Without that he was completely exposed, since he knew he couldn’t hope to fight a god…not with his current level of power.
And that was the better option. If the Night Mare did decide to simply strike him down, then all would be lost. Not only would his life be over, but Equestria would at best remain stagnant under the irresponsible “guidance” of those feckless alicorns, and at worst would soon fall to ruin now that it had come to the attention of various gods and monsters from other realms.
Which meant that he needed to make a sacrifice to the goddess. But of what? “Something valuable to you, something you’ll miss” had been the Night Mare’s demand, but Lex had to admit he was hard-pressed to think of something that met those criteria. He valued his intellect, certainly, but giving up even a fraction of that was completely out of the question. His mental acuity was a fundamental part of his identity, and changing that was utterly anathema to him. Even if that wasn’t true, compromising his intelligence would cripple his ability to lead, and he doubted the Night Mare would want him to give up something that would enable him to continue making good on his promises.
His horn then? He placed high value on the dark magic it granted him, and since it was something he’d gained only recently it wasn’t as though his sense of self depended on it. But no, that was unacceptable as a sacrifice as well. With Severance having been banished, Lex knew his ability to use thaumaturgical magic was crippled, meaning that he’d need to rely on his horn’s dark magic even more. Losing it would leave him near-totally incapacitated insofar as magical ability went, and that would render him unable to face the next threat to his rule. Given that he’d just been congratulating himself on how his defeat of the Royal Sisters established his monopoly over the use of force that was necessary for a government to sustain itself, losing his horn was also completely out of the question.
“Then what else of mine do you want, you impatient nag?” murmured Lex as he looked at the barbed wire around his leg. The question wasn’t an idle one, since he wasn’t in the habit of talking out loud to himself. Rather, he’d been genuinely asking the Night Mare, since he had no doubt that she was aware of his actions. But despite her eagerness for a sacrifice from him she was apparently unwilling to be more specific about what she wanted, since no response came that he was aware of.
At least, not from the Night Mare. Nosey, however, began to stir at the sound of his voice. “Mmm…” she groaned, her eyes fluttering open. “Lex? Did something happen?”
Sighing, Lex telekinetically put the ruby he’d been studying back in his saddlebag, knowing that he’d have little chance to study it between now and tomorrow night. “No,” he murmured as he did. “Go back to sleep.”
But Nosey sat up, yawning as she telekinetically lifted her glasses to rub a hoof over her eyes. “How long was I out?” she muttered groggily. “Did you get any rest?”
“I’m fine-”
“This again?” interrupted Nosey with a groan, letting her glasses fall back down onto her muzzle as she frowned at him, still bleary-eyed. “You remember what happened the last time you said you were fine? You tried to get up, and I had to tackle you to stop you from hurting yourself, and you, er…” The last of her sleepiness disappeared as she suddenly flushed.
Nor was she the only one, as Lex recalled the kiss that they’d shared – no, the kiss that he’d given her – after she’d pulled him back down. Even now, the memory of it sent a flutter through him, though he fought to keep it from showing. But at the same time, he felt a surge of excitement, wanting to share that moment with her again. Despite that, he still found himself hesitating. Although Sonata had dropped her objection to bringing Aria and Nosey into their relationship, that didn’t make broaching the subject any less awkward for him. “Nosey-”
“Lex-” began Nosey at the same time.
An awkward silence fell as each of them quieted down, waiting for the other to speak.
For Lex, the lull in their conversation was acutely uncomfortable. He hated feeling so uncertain, knowing that there was a proper combination of words and/or actions that would make this encounter proceed the way he wanted it to, but having no idea what it was. Maybe it would be better to let her begin, he thought uneasily. But that didn’t sit well with him either; passivity was unbecoming of somepony who wanted to lead, and he’d decided earlier that he needed to be more decisive with the girls. At the same time, if she just gave him some indication of what she was thinking…
“You go first,” murmured Nosey shyly, still red-faced and looking down, as though she suddenly found the bench they were lying on fascinating.
So much for that, then. “Alright,” replied Lex, trying to remain calm despite how quickly his thoughts were flowing, trying to figure out what to say to her. “I…” Knowing he was out of time, Lex reached for the topic related to his feelings for Nosey that he felt most certain of. “I’m aware that…I never expressed my regret for not having done a better job protecting you.”
“Protecting me?” For a moment she looked mystified. Then she winced, her ears folding back. “Oh. From Xiriel.”
For his part, Lex felt encouraged by how easily she was able to say the devil’s name. Not too long ago that would have sent her to pieces. “I know that you suffered horribly during your captivity, and I wanted to make it clear that, as the pony in charge of securing everyone’s safety, I take full responsibility for that.”
“…as the pony in charge of everyone’s safety?” echoed Nosey faintly, a crestfallen expression on her face. Lex had just enough time to feel confused before Nosey seemed to rally, giving him a smile that seemed oddly pained, as though she were forcing the expression onto her face. “No, it was my fault. I’m the one who snuck in to see Block Party all by myself.”
Lex frowned at that. “That doesn’t mean-”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” Standing up, Nosey climbed down from the bench, sighing before she turned to look at him. “I appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s really fine.” She smiled again, but Lex knew the expression was a mere shadow of her usual grin. “You rescued me, the same way you would have done for anypony that was in trouble, right?”
Lex blinked, finding it odd that she would seek confirmation for that. “Of course.”
“Right. Right…” Her smile wavered for a moment, but then she fixed it back into place. “Well, don’t worry about it anymore, okay? I don’t blame you for what happened. All I feel is grateful for your help.” She turned away before he could formulate a reply, heading toward the door. “I’m going to go make sure everything’s alright with everypony else.”
Lex watched her go with a sinking feeling, certain now that his attempt to initiate another intimate moment with her had been a failure. Watching her leave, he replayed the conversation in his mind, paying particular attention to her responses. There had to be some sort of clue there, some hint as to why things had turned out like this.
“No, it was my fault. I’m the one who snuck in to see Block Party all by myself.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, but it’s really fine.”
“All I feel is grateful for your help.”
That last one sounded oddly familiar, and it took him a moment to figure out why. Cross-referencing Nosey’s feelings with what had happened during the fight with Xiriel brought to mind something from during the fight. Something that the devil, rather than Nosey, had said.
“This one has feelings for you, you know,” cooed the epicene voice of the central head. “She let it slip when I was extracting information from her. She used to think of you as nothing but a way to advance her career, but now you’re so much more to her. Does that mean nothing to you?”
“It means something to me.” Lex groaned the words as he stood up, forcing them past his lips as his body protested being made to move. “It means a great deal to me!”
“Lex?” Not understanding what she was hearing, Nosey turned back around, her eyes widening as she saw him getting to his hooves. “What are you doing?!” In the blink of an eye, she was by his side again. “Lay back down!”
But Lex wouldn’t be deterred, giving her a determined look. “Xiriel said that you have feelings for me,” he declared, daring her to deny it.
Nosey went rigid in response. “Y-you remember that?”
She slapped a hoof over her mouth an instant later, but it was too late. The look of mortification that crossed her face then was total, and she turned to run, but Lex grabbed hold of her before she could. In his condition, however, there was nothing he could do but overburden her, and the two of them went tumbling to the ground in a heap. Groaning at the rough landing, Lex couldn’t help but note that at least things were proceeding in a more positive direction now; the last time he’d kissed Nosey had been preceded by a fall just like this one.
Nosey didn’t seem to recognize that herself, however, already scrambling to get up. Although his muscles were screaming at him, Lex managed to keep her pinned down. “Nosey, stop!”
“Lemme go!” she yelled, looking on the verge of tears for some unfathomable reason.
He could already feel his grip on her slipping, and Lex knew that he had seconds before she escaped. Not wanting her to go, he said the first thing that came to mind. “I have feelings for you too!”
Nosey’s struggles stopped immediately. “Wh-what?”
“I have feelings for you too,” he repeated. “Romantic ones,” he added, just to be sure.
Once again blushing bright red through her coat, Nosey couldn’t meet his eyes. “What…what about all that stuff about rescuing me because you’re in charge of everypony’s safety, and you would have done it for anyone, and all that?”
“That’s all true,” admitted Lex. “But when I was fighting Xiriel…when I was losing the battle, and I heard you scream, I realized…” He trailed off then, suddenly feeling embarrassed. What if he was saying the wrong thing again?
But Nosey didn’t seem to think so, looking up at him. “Realized what?”
“…nothing,” he murmured, starting to pull away from her. He had to reevaluate this properly, he couldn’t just-
“Lex!” Now it was Nosey who refused to let him go, wrapping her legs around him. “Realized what?”
Hesitating for just a moment, Lex plunged ahead. “I realized how much I cared about you. I thought it was friendship, but…” Again he couldn’t go on, feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness making him suddenly unable to speak.
Nosey, however, seemed captivated. “But…?”
Not knowing how to put into words how he felt, Lex could only fall back on the moment that had passed between them earlier, and brought his lips down to Nosey’s.
He felt her tense under him and then suddenly relax, her eyes closing as a low moan came from her throat, and all of a sudden his hesitation was gone. Just like before, everything suddenly felt perfect, his indecision evaporating to be replaced by absolute certitude that this was right. When the kiss ended a few seconds later, Lex had no trouble saying what he was feeling. “But now I know that it’s more than that,” he murmured.
“Lex…” Nosey’s voice was just as heated as his own, looking up at him rapturously.
“I care about you deeply,” he continued. “Having you here with me is one of the most important things in my life. Being with you is more valuable to me than anyth-”
“Something valuable to you, something you’ll miss” had been the Night Mare’s demand.
“No,” whispered Lex, his eyes widening in horror. “No no no!”
“Lex?” called Nosey, a worried tone in her voice. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
But he didn’t answer her, too overwhelmed by what he’d just realized.
All of a sudden he knew exactly what the Night Mare wanted him to sacrifice.
“No way,” scoffed Sonata as she and Aria walked back toward the train station. “The songs should totes start with me and Lex going to Tall Tale, since that’s where our adventure began.”
“That’s just the prologue,” snorted Aria. “Things don’t really get interesting until I enter the picture, so if you want to make a bunch of songs about everything that’s happened we should start there.”
“Sure,” snickered Sonata. “We can totes do one about that fight where Lex was kicking you and your fish friends up and down the block, and then I came in to finish the job.”
“Really?” sneered Aria. “Because I remember you losing that fight until lover boy came to your rescue.”
“As if!” This time Sonata’s response came with a full-blown laugh, but it was a genuinely happy laugh, rather than the mocking one she usually used when fighting with Aria.
In fact, this didn’t feel like fighting at all, something Sonata couldn’t help but feel giddy about. And although she knew her sister would never admit it, she could tell that Aria felt the same way too; not only was her characteristic frown completely absent, but even the smirk that she was wearing instead lacked its usual cruel edge. It had been like this the entire way back, with their banter somehow not turning into their usual sniping at each other, and Sonata couldn’t help but revel in it. The only times she could remember feeling like this were when she and Lex were sharing an intimate moment, or when she and Nosey were out having fun. The very idea that she could feel like this with Aria, of all people, was mind-boggling. It was like…like…
Like we’re really sisters, she realized with a start.
“What’re you grinning about?” came Aria’s voice, and Sonata couldn’t help but smile wider at how her sister sounded bemused rather than irritated.
“I’m just, like, super happy right now,” she replied, giving Aria a knowing look. “Aren’t you?”
Aria rolled her eyes, but her lopsided smile stayed in place. “I guess it’s nice being able to style my hair again,” she admitted, one hoof going back to brush the scrunchies pulling her mane into pigtails.
“Oh come on!” giggled Sonata. “You know that’s not what I meant!” Despite herself, she gave her mane a toss, making her ponytail (though it was still totes funny to call it that!) shake back and forth.
After she and Aria had finished making up, they’d eventually managed to meet back up with those kids and that one maid who was taking care of them, Feather Duster. While Sonata had been listening to the kids tell her that Celestia and Luna had indeed left – apparently Feathercap and Fiddlesticks had been able to see them take off from outside their window – and that they’d messed around with the sky when they’d taken off for some reason, Aria had asked that maid for some scrunchies for their hair. Fortunately, Feather Duster had known where the clothes were, and had rounded them up with no real trouble. Aria had been quite pleased to have her usual pigtails back, and Sonata had been happy to have a ponytail (still funny!) again, since she hadn’t been able to pull her hair back since Lex had lost that magic tablecloth-hole thingy she’d been using while fighting Xiriel, though Sonata still wasn’t sure how that had happened, despite Lex’s explanation.
It’s like everything’s finally turning around, Sonata decided as they climbed onto the platform and headed for the station door. Sure, things had gone badly with Celestia and Luna, but that was their fault anyway. And according to Lex, Severance had gone totally bonkers there at the end. But now that they’d all been sent packing, things were going great! Although she knew the camp ponies were still a little upset about Lex fighting the princesses, Sonata was sure they’d come around. After all, those kids thought that Lex was a totes rock star! As they’d left River’s mansion, Sonata had barely been able to stop those foals from going with them to see him, knowing that Lex still needed to rest. In the end, she’d needed to promise them that she’d talk to him about bringing their animals back, the kids only then allowing themselves to be ushered back into the mansion by Feather Duster, giving Sonata and Aria some alone time as they’d headed back.
Time enough to prove that Kara was right after all, Sonata thought warmly as she reached for the doorknob. I guess I owe her super big apology. At the time, she’d thought that sharing Lex with other girls was the worst thing in the world. Worser than worst. But while she still wasn’t completely happy with the idea of him having tender moments with someone else, she was starting to realize there was more to it than that. If it meant that she and Aria could really be sisters, and if it meant that she could have a deeper relationship with Nosey, then maybe…maybe it wasn’t such a bad deal after all. Besides, what she’d told the camp ponies was correct; Lex really did need all the love he could get. And that whole “stand still and try not to moan while I feel you up” thing he did with all of us was super sexy, she admitted silently.
Yeah, she definitely owed Kara an apology.
“Hey Aria?” Sonata paused as she opened the door to the station, looking back at her sister. “What kind of pie best says ‘you were right about letting my boyfriend do it with other girls after all-’ OOF!”
Her question was cut off abruptly as she suddenly went down in a tangle of limbs, somepony from inside the station having come galloping out and colliding with her. “Ow…” groaned Sonata. “How come this keeps happening?” First Feather Duster and now… Opening one eye to see who had run into her, Sonata frowned at the mass of blonde curls in front of her face. “Nosey? What’s going on?”
“Nothing!” whimpered Nosey, her ears folded back as she disentangled herself from Sonata. “I mean, I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.” Standing up, she reached up to adjust her glasses, only to realize a moment later that they were no longer on her muzzle. “My glasses,” she croaked, looking around. “Do you see them anywhere?”
“Yeah,” snorted Aria, stepping forward and reaching a hoof out. “On your head.” A single flick was all it took to knock Nosey’s glasses back down onto her face from where the collision had pushed them up onto her forehead.
“Oh.” Flushing at the obvious answer, Nosey nevertheless managed to give Aria a grateful smile. “Thanks.”
But neither mare looked reassured. “Is everything okay?” Sonata didn’t try to hide the concern in her voice, looking between her best friend and the open doorway that she’d come barreling out of. “Did something happen with Lex?”
“Of course something happened with Lex,” answered Aria with a frown. “Just look at her. Watery eyes, downturned ears, running out of there at full tilt.” Huffing, she clenched her jaw. “What did he do this time? Did he threaten to take away your voice too?”
“I…” For a second Nosey looked ready to protest, then she sighed, looking at the ground. “No…”
“Then what happened?” Unlike Aria’s indignant expression, Sonata was completely perplexed. “I thought you two were getting all hot ‘n’ heavy.”
“We were,” admitted Nosey, her voice miserable. Slowly, she sat down, glancing back at the open doorway. “I mean, nothing much happened at first. I was really tired so I was napping for a little while, and Lex was studying one of those gemstones of his. And then I woke up and we…talked.”
Aria raised a brow, somehow making the gesture seem suggestive without losing her baleful expression. “Just talked?”
“He…” Nosey shifted in place, biting her lip for a moment before continuing. “He started saying how bad he felt about what I went through. You know…with Xiriel.”
“Aww,” cooed Sonata. “That’s sweet!”
But Aria was far less impressed. “Oh please. I bet he’d say that to anyone who got hurt on his watch.”
“That’s what I thought too at first,” admitted Nosey. “And I was, you know…kind of disappointed…” She said that last part with a worried look at Sonata, and it was only when the other mare gave no indication of anger that she kept going. “So I got up to leave, but Lex wouldn’t let me go…”
She couldn’t go further. Embarrassment, guilt, and joy all warred for primacy on her face, causing her to turn an even brighter red as she studied the ground. Sonata opened her mouth to urge her to go on, but to her surprise Aria beat her to the punch. “What happened then?”
Also looking slightly surprised at who was egging her on, Nosey recovered quickly. “And then…he remembered what Xiriel told him, about how I had feelings for him, and he…” She hid her face in her hooves, her next words coming out in a squeal. “He said he had them for me too!”
Sonata was surprised at how easy it was for her to smile at that, lunging forward to hug Nosey. “That’s great!” Stepping back, her smile dimmed a moment later. “So if things went so well, why’re you out here?”
The question caused Nosey to visibly deflate, lowering her hooves. “I don’t know! After…after he said that, he kissed me…” She smiled again, but this time it was clearly melancholy. “It was great, or at least I thought it was, but I guess he didn’t think so, because he…” She stumbled then, swallowing before she continued. “He got this awful look on his face, like something terrible had just happened, and he started whispering ‘no no no,’ and then he just…started ignoring me.”
“Are you kidding me?” Aria looked like she wasn’t sure whether to be confused or ticked off. “He kissed you and then acted like it was horrible for him?”
“But that’s, like, crazy!” protested Sonata. “You’re a great kisser!”
Nosey bit her lip at that, her eyes widening as she looked around nervously. “Sonata…”
“What? You are!” In the face of how joyous she still felt over how well everything was going, Sonata couldn’t remember why she’d felt so uncertain about what she’d done with Nosey earlier that morning. “The way you did that thing with your tongue, I totes never would have believed it was your first time! And that was just-, what?” Blinking at the look Aria was giving her, Sonata glanced back and forth between her and Nosey for several seconds. “What’d I say?”
“Hmm, I was wondering why you’d changed your mind about sharing Lex with the rest of us so suddenly,” grinned Aria, before turning and giving Nosey a look that set her to squirming. “So you’ve been stepping out with blondie here on the side, huh?”
“No! That was-, we just-, I mean…it was just once…” stammered Nosey, her voice growing smaller with each word.
“Then I guess I shouldn’t be too jealous,” purred Aria as she started to circle Nosey, grinning like a shark that smelled blood in the water.
“J-j-jealous?” squeaked Nosey as Aria moved behind her.
“Mm-hmm,” murmured Aria, before leaning in and whispering. “Next time, invite me to the party.”
The last word was accompanied by her hoof coming down sharply on Nosey’s backside, making the mare give a yelp as she leaped into the air. “S-Sonata!” she shrieked, stumbling away from Aria. “Say something!”
But Sonata’s response was simply to tilt her head, a puzzled look on her face. “Why?”
Aria snickered, but her expression calmed a moment later. “But right now, I think we need to teach our boyfriend a lesson.”
Sonata’s quizzical look instantly became one of wariness. “What does that mean?”
“What do you think?” smirked Aria. “You saw what he did to me this morning, he’s just done the same thing to blondie now, and you told me that he was horrible to you before.”
“The important part of that story was that he said he was sorry,” countered Sonata.
“You don't get it. You said that he could barely move after fighting those princesses, right?” When Nosey and Sonata both nodded, Aria chuckled darkly. “Then I say we go make him say he’s sorry right now.”
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” muttered Nosey. “No one can make Lex do something he doesn’t want to do.”
Aria shrugged, looking completely unperturbed. “Maybe.” She gave the other two a leer, before turning and heading inside. “But I bet we can have a lot of fun trying.”
Eyes widening, Sonata and Nosey looked at the doorway into the station, then at each other, and finally back at the entrance again.
Slowly, both mares – one nervous, the other curious – crept forward into the building, shutting the door behind them.
The sun was just touching the horizon as everypony flopped down into their seats, dropping their bags and releasing sighs of relief as they sat down.
“My poor hooves,” whimpered Slip ‘n’ Slide, reaching down to gingerly rub his back legs. Even that was enough to make him wince.
“I don’t suppose there’s a pair of tweezers anywhere?” asked Funshine, examining his rear hooves with a grimace. “I think I have splinters.”
“That’s because you were trying too hard,” chastised Granola Bar.
Funshine gave her a sullen look, hearing the self-satisfaction in her voice. For whatever reason, she’d picked up on the intricacies of their job the fastest out of all of them. “Well maybe if that guy had given us better instructions…”
“I thought it was kind of fun,” offered Hopscotch with a tired smile, before hefting one of the bags that they’d carried on board with them. “And we got all this food.”
“We’re just lucky that family needed help so badly,” murmured Fencer, directing her attention out the window. “We were able to negotiate for enough money for all five of us to buy tickets to Vanhoover, and take a cut of their crops as well.”
“Yeah, except for the part where they got to pick which ones we got,” groused Slip ‘n’ Slide. As if to demonstrate his point, he reached down and picked up an apple from the bag next to him, biting into it. A moment later he grimaced. “Muthy.”
Granola Bar frowned slightly. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
“And don’t complain,” added Fencer. “It wasn’t that long ago that we would have been ecstatic to have discovered a bag of mushy apples.”
Her voice was gentle, but the rebuke was still enough to make Slip ‘n’ Slide wince, and he ate the rest of his apple in silence. The sound of his chewing acted as a signal, and the others all dug out apples from their own bags, eating quietly as other passengers filled up the train car, taking the seats around them. It was only when they’d all finished that Hopscotch spoke up. “I feel bad for those apple farmers.”
Funshine paused in examining his rear hooves to her a quizzical look. “Why? That Big Mac guy seemed like he could have kept bucking those trees without getting so much as a bruise. Not like – ow! – us.” Wincing as he pulled a splinter from his hoof, he tossed it out the window with a sigh.
“They just seemed so desperate, since there were more trees than he and his family could handle on their own.” Hopscotch’s ears folded back with guilt. “And we used that to take advantage of them.”
“After how hard they worked us, I think it was a fair deal,” scoffed Slip ‘n’ Slide.
Granola Bar put a hoof around Hopscotch reassuringly. “They’ll be fine. Remember what we heard Spike say when he read Twilight’s letter? Big Mac’s sister will be back tomorrow. She’ll be able to help them turn things around.”
But Hopscotch didn’t look like she felt any better. “We could at least have told him that. He seemed really worried about how they hadn’t been able to buck enough apples with her having been gone for so long, and I know I overheard that poor old lady say something about how they were in danger of losing the farm. They would have been relieved to know that she was coming back.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide snorted. “Yeah, and then they would have asked us how we knew that, and we would have had to mention how we were eavesdropping on Twilight Sparkle’s pet dragon.”
“We weren’t eavesdropping,” frowned Funshine. “We just happened to bump into him when he got that letter, and he was the one who read it out loud anyway.”
“And Spike isn’t a pet,” added Hopscotch with a frown of her own.
Slip ‘n’ Slide huffed. “Yeah, well, I’m just saying I still don’t get why asking Rarity for help would have been too dangerous, but going to Applejack’s family farm was apparently fine.”
“We’ve been over this, Slip,” sighed Granola Bar. “Nopony else had any better ideas, and since Twilight’s letter to Spike let us know that Applejack herself wasn’t there, it was the best we could do.”
“And it worked,” added Funshine. “We got enough money for the train, and enough apples for all of us for the trip.”
But Slip ‘n’ Slide’s response was to paw at the cushion-covered seat beneath him. “Yeah, well, getting enough money for a sleeping car would have been better, instead of having to spend the entire way there in coach.” When nopony replied to his complaint, he heaved a sigh. “How long is it going to take us to get to Vanhoover anyway?”
“Five days.”
The answer came from Fencer, looking away from the window at last. “I asked the attendant as we were getting on,” she added. “It’s a five-day trip from Ponyville to Vanhoover.”
Funshine cocked his head, looking confused. “But we got to Canterlot from there in almost half that time.”
“That was because it was an emergency,” explained Granola Bar. “We were carrying injured ponies who needed medical attention, which was why Lex told the train to get to Canterlot as fast as it could. It didn’t slow down at any other stops or try and conserve fuel. But that won’t be the case now.”
“Maybe it should be, with how the sun fell out of the sky for a couple minutes,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide.
The comment sent a shudder through Fencer, nor was she the only among them to react that like. There’d been more than enough clues for them to put the pieces together. First was how neither Princess Celestia nor Princess Luna had been in Canterlot, with Princess Cadance and her husband having come down from the Crystal Empire to watch over the city in their stead. Then there’d been Fencer’s meeting with Princess Luna in her dream, and how agitated the princess had become at Fencer’s inadvertent admission that Lex had been cursing ponies. Then there’d been Soft Mane’s comment about “that awful stallion and what he did to Princess Luna,” to which Spike had mentioned Lex in response.
That Twilight Sparkle – the pony who had, with the help of her friends, saved Equestria from monsters such as Nightmare Moon, Discord, and Tirek – was apparently hurrying back in response to whatever had happened had been enough to tie Fencer’s stomach in knots.
But it had been the incident with the sun that had truly worried her.
That the sun had, earlier that afternoon, suddenly set had taken everypony by surprise. But while most ponies had apparently been relieved when it had returned to its previous position a few minutes later and gone about their day with an “all’s well that ends well” attitude, Fencer hadn’t been one of them. For her, it had served as the final confirmation that something had gone horribly wrong.
The princesses had gone to Vanhoover, encountered Lex, and something terrible had happened as a result.
And it might be my fault. From a rational point of view, she knew that wasn’t a fair assessment. Based on her reaction when she’d let slip that Lex was cursing other ponies, it was obvious to Fencer that Princess Luna had already been suspicious of him. Moreover, Lex had never tried to hide his use of curses as instruments of punishment against those ponies that had committed terrible misdeeds, which meant the princesses would have learned about it soon after arriving in Vanhoover anyway. Thus, in her head, Fencer knew she had nothing to feel guilty about.
But in her heart, she couldn’t help but worry that this was like when she’d unwittingly sent Turbo to his death all over again. That thought was bad enough on its own, but with how much had happened to her over the last few days, the mere prospect of even more guilt made Fencer want to scream. Not because of the pain that thought brought her, but because it was yet another shock to her system. Having gone from being a heartless criminal to being punished and forced into repentance, only to then be declared reformed and subsequently forgiven by the ponies she’d hurt most, had left her reeling. The prospect, no matter how remote, that she had more to feel guilty over was quite simply more than she could handle right now.
The one bright spot had been that all indications of disaster had been related to the princesses, rather than Lex. Princess Luna had apparently had something bad done to her, and the incident with the sun had been an ominous sign about Princess Celestia. But as for what had happened to Lex himself, there had been no indication.
That thought had been a source of hope for her, enough so that Fencer had been surprised at herself. While she still felt a lingering resentment at the princesses for never having come to their rescue when she and her friends had been trapped in Vanhoover, to say nothing of their failure to prevent the city from falling in the first place, that had been weak even before Luna had apologized to her in her dream. It certainly wasn’t enough to explain why she was apparently more worried for Lex than for them. But eventually, she’d come upon the answer.
Lex Legis was someone she admired.
The thought had been shocking enough that, when she’d first had it, Fencer had managed to miss her apple tree completely, instead bucking her empty bucket through the air and onto Slip ‘n’ Slide’s head. But she’d barely heard Slip’s indignant yells or Granny Smith’s peals of laughter, too thunderstruck to do anything but figure out why she apparently idolized the pony that had cursed her.
In fact, the answer had been quite simple. Lex wasn’t just the pony that had cursed her; he was the one who had redeemed her. If it hadn’t been for him, she’d still have been the monster she was, cruelly preying on others for her own sake.
But Lex had forced her to change, for the better. He’d had the strength to not only resist everything she’d thrown at him, but to push back with even greater power, driving her to such desperation that it had shattered the walls she’d built around her heart, letting her hear her father’s voice again. He’d refused to accept the remorse that she’d shown, cursing her for her crimes instead, which in turn had made his subsequent declaration that she’d been reformed – and that he was willing to trust her with other ponies’ lives – feel worthwhile because she’d earned it. And he’d kept her alive until she’d been able to do that, saving her even when she’d been intent on throwing her life away in a suicidal charge against the ghoul horde.
Lex Legis had excised the darkness within her, saved her life, and given her back her self-respect.
And just like that, Fencer had known the real reason why she’d wanted to go back to Vanhoover so badly. The stability she’d wanted wasn’t the stability of a familiar place; it was the stability of the pony whose spirit, unlike her own, had never wavered no matter what had happened. The help she wanted to give wasn’t directed towards the ponies still at the refugee camp; it was directed towards the pony who had been the one to help her.
Lex had been there for her when she’d needed someone, and now she wanted to be there for him. I might be too late for whatever’s happened with the princesses, Fencer vowed as she felt the train begin to move, barely hearing the blare of the whistle, but there’s one thing I can do right now. It was nothing more than a symbolic gesture, but right now it seemed like the perfect way to express her appreciation for the second chance she’d been given. After all, Lex hadn't worked so hard to help her just so she could remain the pony she'd been when he'd found her...
“I’ve decided.”
“Hm?” Granola Bar blinked, sharing an uncomprehending look with the others before turning back toward her. “Decided what?”
“On my name.” Banishing the last of her doubts, she took a deep breath. “I’m going back to being Garden Gate. For good.”
The transition from nightmare-filled sleep to wakefulness was as jarring as ever, but this time the unpleasantness of his awakening was ameliorated by his current circumstances. Namely, the sleeping mares cuddled up against him. On his left was Sonata, still grinning widely despite being fast asleep. On his other side was Nosey, her hooves wrapped around his foreleg as though unwilling to let him go. And Aria was draped over his lower body, her face in his lap as if about to continue her earlier activities…
The memory made the blood rush to his face, but despite his embarrassment Lex couldn’t help but feel vaguely pleased with himself. After what River had told him, Lex had known that he’d needed to find a way to make things right with Aria. Fortunately for him, Aria hadn’t wanted to have a conversation about what had happened the way Nosey or Sonata would have, affording him no opportunity to make things worse the way he so often did. Instead, she’d been intent on a contest of wills, and that was something that Lex was far better equipped to handle.
Even if the actual contest had been on her terms…
“Hey boyfriend,” announced Aria, a malicious grin on her face as she strode into the station lobby. Or rather, strutted in, because there was no other word for the casual swagger she was carrying herself with, her hips swaying with every movement as she advanced on him. “Guess who’s back?”
The declaration made Lex frown. Although he’d asked Sonata to go and retrieve Aria, he had no time to deal with whatever mischief she was keen on now. Not if he wanted to figure out how to deal with the ultimatum that the Night Mare had given him. “This isn’t the time-”
“I’m making it the time.” Her pace didn’t slow as she moved toward him, still smirking. “You owe me an apology, and I’m here to collect.”
Lex’s frown deepened. Even without the mantle of supreme authority that he’d assumed, no one had the right to demand anything of him, especially for something he hadn’t done wrong. While he was now aware that he’d unintentionally hurt Aria’s feelings, her actions had warranted the harsh rebuke he’d given her. The fact that he felt bad about that now in no way validated Aria’s insistence that he give her a statement of contrition, and he fully intended to make sure she understood that, struggling to rise to his hooves. “Aria-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as Aria reached out a hoof and casually pushed him over.
Landing on the bench that had long since become their bed, Lex couldn’t help but be momentarily stunned, less by the fact that Aria had done that than by the fact that it had worked. While the additional magic that he’d used to bolster himself during his fight with the princesses had long since worn off, his array of permanent defensive spells were still active, as were the protective magic items that he was wearing. While they all functioned in slightly different ways, their collective capacity was to make it easier for him to avoid or resist incoming attacks, and that applied to attempts to knock him off balance as much as it did to strikes or blows. For him to be so easily shoved in spite of all those, Lex knew, was a testament to just how badly he was injured.
Aria seemed to realize that as well. “Wow, Sonata and Nosey weren’t kidding. You are out of it!” Her grin widened then. “Oh, this is gonna be so much fun!”
The statement was enough to make Lex grit his teeth. Despite having no real way to fight back – the only offensive magic he had left was his spell to encase an enemy in ice, which was far too deadly to use on another pony, let alone someone he cared about – he immediately moved to get up, despite how badly it made him ache to do so. If Aria thought she could push him around just because of his injuries, she was sorely mistaken!
But he’d barely started to rise before Aria made her move, climbing on top of him and sitting on his lap, easily pinning him to the bench. “Now,” she purred, “let’s see how tough you are when you can’t go on the attack.”
“Aria.” Nosey’s voice made Lex and the mare in question both look over at her. Frowning as she walked into the lobby alongside Sonata, Nosey nervously adjusted her glasses, her uncertainty written all over her face. “What are you doing?”
Completely unperturbed by the appearance of the other two, Aria didn’t miss a beat. “Exactly what I said I was gonna do. Lover boy here owes me an apology for taking away my voice.” Her grin turned knowing then. “And he owes you one too, for kissing you and then tossing you aside. Don’t you want to wring them out of him?”
The innuendo was enough to make Nosey blush, sputtering, but it was Sonata who spoke up. “I dunno. This really doesn’t seem like how I got Lex to say he was sorry to me that one time.”
“Yeah,” drawled Aria, turning back to the stallion in question. “Sonata told me that you and she had a really sweet heart-to-heart before, that you turned on the waterworks and everything. And I’ll admit, I was a little jealous. I started wondering how I could get you to say sorry like that to me. But then I had a much better idea.” She leaned closer to him then, her voice lowering into a husky murmur as she put her lips by his ear, much like how she had last night. “I don’t want you to tell me you’re sorry. I want you to beg me for forgiveness.”
Lex’s pride flared at that, his eyes shining green-and-purple in anger, but he didn’t have a chance to voice his outrage as Aria…began to gyrate on top of him.
The pleasant sensation of her hips rubbing against his own was unexpected enough that Lex’s anger was immediately replaced by confusion, his eyes returning to their normal color. What was she doing…?
Above him, Aria straightened up and grinned as she continued to dance in his lap. “That’s right,” she cooed. “Just lie back and enjoy it.”
Flustered, Lex reached a hoof up to her chest, intent on shoving her off of him. But between his injuries and the lack of leverage afforded him by his current position, he couldn’t muster the force necessary to do so, accomplishing little more than roughly caressing her. Seeming pleased at the touch, Aria caught his hoof between hers, bringing it up to her mouth and slowly dragging her tongue across the bottom of it. The entire time her eyes never left his as she continued to grind against him in slow, languid motions that left him struggling to control himself.
“W-wait, this is what you meant?!” Nosey couldn’t have sounded more shocked, but apparently not enough to avert her eyes, instead gaping at the erotic spectacle in front of her.
The sudden reminder that they had an audience made Lex’s embarrassment skyrocket, unable to help but glance over at the other two. Nosey was still staring, turning redder and redder while Sonata was glancing between him and Aria, biting her lip and looking like she was trying to make up her mind about something. Neither seemed inclined to interfere with what Aria was doing, and for some reason that made Lex feel even more self-conscious.
Desperate to try and regain some measure of control over the situation, he snatched his hoof back. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he growled, forcing himself to sound irritated, “but I’m not in the mood.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” chuckled Aria, before pressing her lower body against his just so, leaving Lex barely able to hold back a grunt. “You will be.” She didn’t stop her sensuous wriggling as she turned to look at the duo watching them. “Hey Sonata,” she called casually. “Why don’t you show Lex what you and blondie have been getting up to in your free time?”
“Huh?” Nosey blinked, dazed from how caught up in the show she’d been. “Wait, what’d you say?”
“Hmm…” Sonata hesitated for only a moment before shrugging, a carefree smile sliding across her lips. “Kay!”
Lex was about to ask what they were talking about, but the words got lost between his brain and his mouth as Sonata turned to Nosey…and kissed her deeply.
The sight was enough to shatter any pretensions of disinterest on his part, and he watched in utter shock – and rising appreciation – as the blonde pony flailed at first, squealing into Sonata’s lips and almost falling over, only to be slowly pacified as Sonata advanced on her as hungrily as Aria was on him. It took only a matter of seconds before Nosey was allowing herself to be moved onto her back, shaking and breathing heavily but not resisting as Sonata nuzzled her and slid one hoof down between her hind legs…
“There we go,” snickered Aria as she felt what she’d been expecting. Changing her motions accordingly, she was rewarded as she heard Lex's breath catch. “Now,” she purred when his eyes slid back to her a moment later, “let’s see if I can get you to beg…”
But you weren’t, were you? smirked Lex to himself as he glanced down at the sleeping Siren. As skilled as Aria was – and, he’d found out, she was very skilled indeed – she hadn’t been able to break Lex’s self-control. Thankfully, his injuries had actually helped in that regard, since the pain from his overtaxed muscles had given him something to focus on besides how exquisite Aria’s body felt. That, and once they’d finished Sonata had started pestering Aria to let her take a turn, dragging Nosey along with her…
Despite her loss (as Lex preferred to think of it), Aria hadn’t seemed too upset about not getting what she wanted, draping herself over him after they’d all finished with a murmur about “next time it’ll just be you and me.” While he wasn’t sure if that meant she was still holding a grudge about his temporarily removing her voice, he couldn’t bring himself to be too worried over it. If anything, he found himself looking forward to it.
But it might not happen now. The thought made him grimace, raising his left foreleg. The dim light from the campfires outside, barely able to get in past the shuttered windows, offered scarcely enough light to see it by. But he could still feel how much tighter the wire had become, wrapping around his leg tightly enough that it was now distinctly uncomfortable. By morning he knew the pain would become much worse, and by tomorrow night…
Lex held back a sigh of frustration. The Night Mare would have to have her sacrifice by then, he knew. And if he went through with it, then what he’d just shared with the girls would never happen again.
He’d realized it before, when he was confessing his feelings to Nosey: while he considered things like his intellect and his magic to be intrinsic facets of who he was, as well as necessary components for implementing his goals, what he found valuable – what brought actual joy to his life – was his relationship with the three mares that he’d come to love. That was what the Night Mare was demanding that he give up.
It made perfect sense. Ending his relationship to the girls wouldn’t impair his abilities, nor would it prevent him from retaining their services, whether as spokesponies or newsmares or any other professional capacity. It would just mean that he couldn’t be with them romantically. And Lex knew he could do it, too. He’d proven that to himself when Sonata had left him on their journey to Tall Tale. Ending his relationship with the three of them would consign him to a state of perpetual misery, but Lex knew he wasn’t so weak as to be unable to live that way.
Even so, it was something he wanted to avoid if at all possible. Which meant that he had roughly twenty-four hours left to figure out some sort of alternative. Some way to make the Night Mare rescind her threat, or offer her an acceptable alternative that he could live with sacrificing, or something else.
But so far he hadn't been able to think of anything.
The problem was one of information. Any solution he came up with would need to be one that the goddess would find satisfactory, and Lex had been forced to conclude that he simply didn't know enough about her to be able to make that particular judgment call. His information about her had come from what he'd learned on Everglow, but that had been before he'd struck his deal with her; at that point, he'd made only a passing study of the various religions there, more interested in that world's magical advancements. It was an oversight that he regretted now, but there was nothing he could do about it. The only people in Equestria who could have told him more about the Night Mare were Severance – whom he'd had banished – or possibly Cloudbank, who had briefly studied the Night Mare's dogma under Severance's tutelage. But she wasn't available either, and what little Lex had studied of that resurrection spell he'd been given had made it clear that he'd never be able to decipher it in only one more day. Which meant that there was no way to learn more about the goddess before he had to make his choice.
No, he realized a moment later. There's one.
It wasn't an option that he liked, and it carried some risk with it, but Lex knew that there was no other viable choice available to him in the time he had left.
Slowly, doing his best not to disturb the girls, Lex started to get up…
Things had gone awry before Lex had so much as made it out of the lobby.
Even the process of extricating himself from the girls had proven to be extraordinarily difficult. His aching body protested every movement, particularly in the aftermath of his recent bout of recreational time with Aria, Sonata, and Nosey. While he’d managed to get some rest after they’d all finished, he could immediately tell that he’d expended himself far more than he’d managed to rest (though he couldn’t bring himself to regret what they’d done). Worse, the rest he had gotten hadn’t been enough to replenish his dark magic. Had he been able to turn into a shadow there would have been no problem, but at the moment that was still beyond him.
The most obvious course of action was to lie down and go back to sleep, so that he’d regain at least some of his powers. But he knew better than to follow through with that option. Time was not on his side, and if he fell back asleep now Lex felt certain that in his current state, he’d remain that way for a considerable period. Nor, he suspected, would the girls be inclined to wake him; they’d likely let him sleep as long as possible in order to recover his strength, not knowing that he was up against the Night Mare’s – quite possibly literal – deadline.
Which meant that he needed to take action now. But that was far easier said than done; while Sonata was simply cuddled against him, Nosey was actually gripping his foreleg, and Lex didn’t dare use his telekinesis to extricate himself, lest the purple glow prove luminescent enough to wake them up. So instead, he spent long minutes fighting both her unconscious grip and his own weariness as he slowly worked himself free. That he managed to do so without waking her was nothing short of miraculous.
But his luck deserted him when it came to Aria. Sitting up while simultaneously lifting her head from his lap and also sliding himself backward proved to be more than he was capable of doing all at once, and the rough motions caused her eyes to flutter open. “Mngh. Huh? Lex?” she muttered sleepily. “What’re you doin’?”
“Nothing,” whispered Lex, still trying to pull away from her. “Go back to sleep.”
But rather than obey him, she only stirred more, sitting up with a yawn and inadvertently freeing him, causing him to curse under his breath as he suddenly fell back and very nearly off the bench entirely. Rubbing her eyes, Aria frowned at him in the dim light, watching as he struggled to his hooves. “Where are you going?” she whispered, making no effort to hide her suspicion, though he could also hear what sounded like mirth in her voice, likely from the sight of him fighting so hard just to stand up. “Hot date?”
“I have an errand I need to take care of, one that doesn’t concern you.” At least not if it succeeds, amended Lex silently, making his way toward the lobby door. Ordinarily the mere act of exiting the station would have taken him a few seconds and no effort whatsoever to accomplish. Now it would be a hard-won victory, one that would only be more difficult if he had to deal with Aria at the same time.
“Hmm.” For a moment Aria didn’t react, and Lex held a fleeting hope that he’d convinced her to leave well enough alone. But a moment later she climbed down from the bench, stretching before trotting alongside him. “So, where’re we going?” In the dim light, Lex could just make out her grinning at him.
Her contrariness was so transparent that he found himself more exasperated than irritated. “Out.”
The curt reply made Aria’s grin disappear. “You know, you’re pretty grumpy for a guy who just scored with a girl who’s a twelve out of ten on the hotness scale, not to mention sampling those two almost-sevens on the side.”
Frowning, Lex glanced at her, and then back at where Nosey and Sonata were still asleep before looking at her again. “Precisely what unit of measurement does that scale utilize, and how is it quantified?”
“…you know, I’ve never quite understood how you and Sonata got together in the first place, but now I think I’m starting to get it,” answered Aria dryly.
The statement was cryptic enough that Lex didn’t bother trying to decipher it, instead focusing on the door. Modulating his pace so that he didn’t push himself to the point of collapse, he was still short of breath by the time he made it there. Despite matching her pace to his, Aria made no offer to help, not even bothering to get the door after he’d made it there. Lex briefly wondered if she was being standoffish by withholding her aid or considerate by not implying that he needed it, and finally decided that he didn’t care as he got the door open and stepped through.
Just making it outside had been an ordeal, and Lex wasn’t looking forward to the next leg of his journey. But for once things took a turn for the better, as he noticed Feather Duster curled up only a few feet away, sleeping. Nor was he the only one. “Well well well,” snickered Aria, “what do we have here?”
“Wake her up,” ordered Lex. “I have use for her.”
Aria waggled her eyebrows at him in an exaggerated manner. “Wow. You do three girls after getting beaten up, and you’re still rearing to go? Someone’s out to prove something.”
Lex let out a slow breath. Aria’s poor attempts at humor were beginning to grate on him. It was one thing to enjoy her needling in the context of an intimate encounter, but outside of that context he found it progressively irritating. But the last time he’d let her get to him he’d very nearly ruined their relationship, and he wanted to avoid that again if at all possible, particularly since the Night Mare had already placed their relationship in jeopardy. “Just wake her up, Aria.”
“Sure thing.” Reaching a hoof out, she gave Feather Duster a shove. “Hey, maid brigade. Rise and shine.”
Feather Duster’s eyes fluttered open, looking around blearily until her gaze fell on Lex. Gasping, she bolted upright, fully awake in an instant. “M-Master Legis, forgive me!” she yelped. “I mean, I do apologize for being asleep when you had need of me! And, and…” She looked almost frantic, wings flared as she began to babble. “I took the foals to Miss Bank’s mansion like you said, and the doctors examined them all and said they were fine, but Miss Dusk said it was better for them to stay there and let you rest, so I stayed behind to put them to bed early, but then I thought it would be better if I came back myself in case you needed me, and, um, oh! And I made sure to pass out food at dinner time, because I thought that’s what you would have wanted me to do, and, then I was waiting to see if you needed me for anything and I guess I passed out…”
Despite himself, Lex was mildly impressed. Feather Duster’s execution of her duties had been both flawless and diligent, carrying out not only the orders he’d given her, but also anticipating his needs. That she’d thought to pass out the evening rations was-
“So, did you enjoy the show?”
Despite the knowing grin on Aria’s face, Feather Duster looked confused. “I’m sorry?”
“Me, Sonata, and Nosey all getting it on with Lex,” drawled Aria, nodding towards the interior of the station. “Did watching us turn you on?”
“Wh-, no!!!” Feather Duster shook her head rapidly, backing away from Aria as though the other mare had the plague. “I mean, I didn’t spy on you! I didn’t even know what you were doing!”
“Aria!” snapped Lex. “That’s enough!”
But she didn’t seem to hear the rebuke, advancing on Feather Duster like a cat on a mouse. “Oh come off it. I bet you had one hoof under your skirt the entire time.”
She reached out then, as though to grab the maid and physically examine her for evidence of prurient activity, but her hoof stopped as it got within an inch of the quivering pegasus, Lex’s purple aura keeping it in check. “I said enough!” he growled, his eyes shining brightly now.
Aria gave him a sour look, relenting as she lowered her hoof. “What’s your problem? I’m just-”
“My problem,” hissed Lex through gritted teeth, “is that you’re harassing someone who works for me!” Now he was the one advancing, slowly stalking toward Aria, and although his steps were faltering she still backed up as he slowly strode toward her. “This mare is serving me in a professional capacity! That means that visiting an indignity upon her is a slight against me! And even if that wasn’t true, she’s still deserving of basic considerations of respect as a pony!”
A bitter look crossed Aria’s face then, and she came to a halt. “Right, so where were those ‘basic considerations of respect’ when you took away my voice?”
Lex stopped moving at that. For a long moment he just stared at Aria, and she met his gaze evenly. After several seconds Lex ended the staring contest, looking over at Feather Duster. “Fetch Fruit Crunch and the rest of his friends. I want them brought here immediately.”
“Y-yes!” Looking relieved to be allowed to leave, Feather Duster flapped her wings. But she only rose a foot into the air before stopping, biting her lip as she looked back at Lex. “I, um, forgive me for asking, sir, but are they in any trouble…?”
“No,” replied Lex, hoping that he was correct. He couldn’t imagine that the Night Mare would take offense to his asking those children what Severance had taught them so that he could find a way to subvert her demand of him, but even the possibility of it was enough to make Lex deeply uncomfortable. The risk was miniscule to the point of being nil – particularly since the wire around his foreleg hadn’t reacted to the order he’d given Feather Duster just now, and hopefully wouldn’t (save for its continued slow tightening) while he interrogated those foals – but Lex still hated that he had to keep involving those children in potential danger. But once again, he’d been placed in a situation where he had no real choice in the matter. “I just want to talk to them about their activities over the last few days.”
A relieved look crossed Feather Duster’s face at that. “I understand.” She didn’t hesitate any longer, flying off in the direction of River’s mansion.
The silence that fell in the wake of her departure was heavy as Lex turned back to where Aria was still glaring at him. “To answer your question…” he began.
Sitting up on her haunches, Aria crossed her forelegs, still giving him an indignant look.
Lex took another deep breath, but this one had nothing to do with how enervated he felt. He’d thought that their lovemaking had been in lieu of having to revisit this topic, but apparently he’d been incorrect. As such, he had little choice but to proceed with the line of reasoning that he’d worked out in the short time he’d had since River had explained Aria’s reaction to what had happened. “With regard to what happened this morning…if my actions seemed harsh, it was purely because I was attempting to communicate in no uncertain terms that your behavior was inappropriate.”
Aria bared her teeth at that. “You-”
“However,” cut in Lex before she could finish. “In hindsight, I didn’t appropriately gauge your level of trauma. As such, while my actions were not incorrect in and of themselves, neither were they optimal given the circumstances. To that end, I regret whatever anguish you might have felt as a result of what happened.”
“‘Whatever anguish I might have felt’?” scoffed Aria. “Are you kidding me?”
Lex didn’t reply for a long moment, processing her response before trying again. “It’s my hope,” he said slowly, “that in acknowledging that a more appropriate response would have better served everyone’s interests, you’ll recognize my desire to redress whatever wrong you perceive me to have committed-”
“Oh, well, thank you very much, good sir,” spat Aria, her voice thick with sarcasm. “Such a fine proclamation would surely move the heart of any fair maiden. I’m pleased beyond measure that you want to ‘redress’ whatever wrongs I perceive were done to me.” Giving him a disgusted look, she stalked towards the door to the lobby. “You know what? I’m sorry I brought it up again. Just forget the whole thing.”
But again, Lex’s telekinesis grabbed her foreleg, bringing her up short as she tried to pass him. Maybe it was the knowledge that his relationship with her, along with the others, was in danger of coming to an end soon. Maybe it was the lingering echoes of pleasure from when they’d consummated their relationship earlier. Maybe it was the memory of what River had told him about how badly Aria had taken what he’d done to her. But whatever it was, he couldn’t bring himself to let this go unresolved, even in the face of the very real possibility that he’d make it worse if he kept talking. “Aria, listen to me.”
She snatched her hoof out of his telekinesis. “Why should I?”
“Because…” Lex took a half-second to choose his words, hoping they would be the right ones. “I’m trying to express remorse for hurting your feelings.”
Her expression shifted then, losing its harsh edge, but for the life of him he couldn’t place the look she gave him at that moment. “You took away my voice, Lex.”
“I know. I-”
“My voice. You were the only person who cared about what happened to me, the only one who wanted to fix me – your words, not mine, remember? – and then you snatched it right back again the first time you got angry at me.”
“In hindsight-”
Aria rolled her eyes. “Right, this again.” Sighing, she walked past him. “Thanks a bunch for the non-apology. I’m going back to bed.”
The flippant response made Lex grit his teeth. The sheer disingenuousness of her reducing what he’d just said to being a “non-apology” was galling in the extreme. He’d gone out of his way to make it clear that while his punishment had been ethically sound, he still regretted that she’d taken it so hard! And yet that miserable ingrate had no appreciation-
For your treating the pain you caused her like an inconvenience rather than a source of unbearable guilt?
The voiceless words from his shadow made Lex’s spine stiffen. That wasn’t true at all! Finding out that he’d inadvertently hurt her had been upsetting in the extreme! It was just that other pressing issues had come up! Not to mention the very idea that Aria was upset because his statement of remorse didn’t have enough emotional intensity was ridiculous. If that had been the case she should have said so…
“Sonata told me that you and she had a really sweet heart-to-heart before, that you turned on the waterworks and everything. And I’ll admit, I was a little jealous. I started wondering how I could get you to say sorry like that to me.”
Lex grimaced, his indignation gone as quickly as it had come. “Aria, wait.”
For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to, but she stopped just in front of the door. “What is it? I’m tired.”
Lex paused again, not to think of what to say, but because he was suddenly struck by the symmetry of what was happening. He’d ended up apologizing to Sonata after he’d almost thrown her away in a fit of childish pique. He’d apologized to Nosey – first in his mind and then verbally – for not being able to protect her from Xiriel. It seemed almost appropriate that he apologize to Aria now, like it was some sort of rite of passage for being in love.
He couldn’t bring himself to cry the way he had with Sonata, nor even make a small gesture the way he had in restoring Nosey’s broken glasses. So, not knowing what else to do, Lex slowly made his way over to Aria, and wrapped a foreleg around her, pulling her close. “I’m sorry for hurting you,” he murmured.
He felt her tense up, and then relax with a shudder a moment later. “Why?” The word was almost whispered, her voice barely audible.
The question should have been an inscrutable one. She could have been asking why he’d done it, or why he’d waited until now to say what she’d wanted to hear. But somehow, he knew that wasn’t the case, that she was asking him why he was sorry at all.
It had taken a while for Fruit Crunch to finally fall asleep.
After everything that had happened – waking up to find that he had a spirit animal, helping Lex fight the princesses, exploring River’s mansion – he’d been far too wound up to rest and relax, despite what Cleansweep’s mother had told them to do when she’d escorted them back to the guest room where they’d already spent the early afternoon. If it hadn’t been for Sonata insisting that they needed to let Lex rest and recuperate after everything that had happened, and that she’d talk to him about bringing Lyden and the others back, Fruit Crunch would have snuck out a while ago. After all, Lex was probably communing with the Night Mare right now! Or maybe doing some sort of secret magic ritual with Severance to boost his powers! Or summoning genies to spy on Celestia and Luna! Or some other way cool thing like in the comic books!
Fortunately, Cleansweep’s mom had left after a little while, saying that she had to go back to work, giving Fruit Crunch space to express what he was feeling to the rest of his friends without being chastised. That had actually been kind of fun, since once he’d gotten started the rest of the Knights had joined in too, and they’d spent the afternoon going over all of the stuff that they’d done. Together, the five of them – well, six with Fiddlesticks’ baby brother there, but he didn’t count – had laughed as they’d recounted how awesome they’d been in that fight, sniffled and hugged each other as they confessed how much they’d missed the mystical companions that had been with them so briefly, pondered what they’d all seen as they’d explored the huge mansion they were staying in, and more.
By the time the afternoon had turned into early evening, Fruit Crunch had realized that he actually did feel a bit tired after all. Nor was he the only one, as nopony could seem to get more than a sentence or two out without yawning. Fortunately, the guest room they were in had a pair of beds, each of which was big enough for two of them. The girls had taken one, with Cleansweep and Fiddlesticks carefully keeping Tiddlywinks cuddled between them, while Straightlace and Feathercap had taken the other. Fruit Crunch had needed to insist on that second part, since the bed wasn’t big enough for all three of them and both colts each offered to be the one to take the floor. But Fruit Crunch had put his hoof down, saying that he was the leader so he’d be the one to give up his space.
I bet Lex would be really proud of me! Fruit Crunch snickered to himself when the other two had finally given in. Of course, he had accepted them giving him a blanket and pillow, but that didn’t make his gesture any less noble right? Right, he’d decided with a nod. He’d still been assuring himself of that as he’d laid down and closed his eyes, the last one of his friends to do so.
Barely a minute later, he’d fallen asleep.
In his dream, Fruit Crunch was back in the camp with everypony else. It was nighttime, and they were all huddled together as Lex fought the massive horde of Block Party zombies trying to eat them. Except Fruit Crunch wasn’t huddling with the camp ponies, he was being held back by Silhouette! Struggling, the colt tried to escape from the black-and-white stallion’s grasp, knowing that he had to go help Lex, who was killing the zombies as part of a ritual to change Cleansweep’s mom into a maid.
“I’ll help!” yelled Fruit Crunch, punching Silhouette right in the nose. “I can help!”
But the blow only made Silhouette smirk, unfazed by the hit. “You and your friends failed, and now you’re going to pay the price for it.”
“I was just gonna say that to you.” His anxiety gone like it had never been there, Fruit Crunch grinned as Cleansweep and Straightlace suddenly barreled into Silhouette, knocking him over. Instantly, Lyden was there, wrapping his strong jaws around Silhouette’s throat. Grinning at the other Royal Guardponies – who had joined the Block Party zombies fighting against Lex – Fruit Crunch gestured at the downed stallion. “All of you give up right now or this guy gets it!”
But the words made Lex suddenly look up, dropping Severance as he glared at Fruit Crunch in rage. “RELEASE HIM AT ONCE!” he bellowed. “PONY LIVES ARE TO BE CHERISHED!”
Fruit Crunch felt his eyes fill with tears. “I…I’m sorry,” he whimpered, gesturing for Lyden to back off. “I just wanted to help.”
“I don’t require help,” snorted Lex, suddenly cold and distant rather than enraged. “Least of all from a child.”
Fruit Crunch felt his heart breaking at that, and he couldn’t bring himself to move as he was tackled by a bunch of the Royal Guard. He tried to call for Lyden, but the wolf was gone, and Fruit Crunch realized with a sinking heart that he hadn’t made it. Wriggling out from under the guards, he tried to run toward Lex, wanting to ask him to please bring Lyden back, but the mansion he was in now was just so big that he kept getting lost…
Turning a corner, Fruit Crunch immediately backpedaled as he almost ran into Celestia and Luna, darting around the intersection and peeking out fearfully as they marched down the hallway with their guards. It was their fault, he realized. It’s their fault that Lyden’s gone. It’s their fault that Lex is too tired to talk to me. It’s their fault that I can’t protect Sonata for him. Even as he thought that, Lex’s beautiful girlfriend stepped out from behind him, smiling as she walked towards the princesses. The sight made Fruit Crunch gulp, his knees knocking as he told himself that he should go out there and stand in front of her the way Feathercap had stood in front of Nosey when she’d gone to see Princess Luna. But he just couldn’t make his legs move…
Calm yourself, Fruit Crunch. You already demonstrated your strength when you saved her the previous night. You did nothing shameful in allowing her to demonstrate hers here.
The words made him glance over at Cleansweep, standing right next to him. What was she talking about? Sonata was going to be attacked, and Lex would blame them for not being able to save her, just like how they hadn’t been able to protect their spirit animals!
Your recrimination is misplaced. You fought valiantly, and with your pack defeated a force larger than your own, allowing the battle between greater powers to be concluded without interruption. You should feel proud of your victory.
The voice wasn’t coming from Cleansweep, making Fruit Crunch shake his head as he looked behind him, at where Feather Duster was standing. “But Lyden-”
Worry not, Fruit Crunch.
Suddenly, Feather Duster stepped forward. Taking a large helping of faux grass out of her pocket, she began to rub it on Fruit Crunch’s face. The strands of green beans were so intertwined that they formed a single warm, wet mass, making him squirm to get away from them. But Feather Duster wouldn’t let him escape, rubbing the stuff against his face again and again in long, persistent strokes.
So long as you hold on to your dreams, I will always be with you…
Fruit Crunch’s eyes fluttered open as his face was licked, making him sputter and flail as he rolled over to get away from the soggy assault. Blinking as he stumbled to his hooves, he only barely registered that it was completely dark, save for the dim light of the stars shining in through the window. Instead, his attention was completely focused on the large, dark shape next to him that had woken him up.
He couldn’t make it out completely, but there were a few details visible. It was too big to be any of his friends. The muzzle was longer than a pony’s, the legs looked like they ended in pads rather than hooves, and behind it he could make out a blurry motion that even in the darkness looked an awful lot like a wagging tail. And, reaching out with a trembling hoof, he felt a soft coat of fur unlike anything a pony had.
Tears filling his eyes, Fruit Crunch managed to swallow the lump in his throat on his third try. “L-Lyden?”
As I said, came the familiar voice. I will always be with you.
That was all it took, and Fruit Crunch gave a cry as he rushed forward, throwing his forelegs around the wolf and burying his face in his fur. Lex did it! he realized, love and gratitude for the stallion filling his heart so much that he felt like it would burst at any moment. He really did it! He brought them back somehow!
His joyous yell was enough to wake the others, and Fiddlesticks’ sleeping voice called out. “Quiet down, will y-, HUH?!” Her sudden exclamation was accompanied a second later by a burst of light as she turned on the lamp by the bed. Wincing at the brightness, she shielded her eyes with her foreleg as she looked next to her…where a badger was perched on the edge of the bed. The sight made her jaw drop. “NEMEL?!”
Indeed, came the familiar voice, audible to all of the foals. I’ve missed you, Fiddlesticks, along with this little one here. The smile in her voice was audible as she waved her tail for Tiddlywinks, cutting off the infant’s unhappy cry at the rude awakening and turning it into a coo of delight as he pawed at the waving appendage happily.
Similar scenes were playing out around the room. Straightlace, Cleansweep, and Feathercap all blinked their eyes and sat up groggily, only to discover that their spirit animals were next to them, alive and whole as though never hurt in the first place. The next several minutes were devoted to the joyous reunion, the foals all fighting back tears – most of them unsuccessful – as they celebrated their companions’ return.
The ruckus was enough that none of them heard the knock at the door, nor were aware of it opening a moment later. “What’s all the noise?” asked Feather Duster as she stepped inside. “Why are all the lights-” Her question ended in a scream as she looked at her daughter, seeing the snake wrapped around her middle. But thankfully she seemed more dazed than terrified, looking around in horrified stupefaction. “What…? Cleansweep, honey, what’s…?”
“Mom, look!” Sniffled Cleansweep, her grin so wide it made her cheeks ache as she fluttered over to her mother, indicating the colorful python coiled around her chest. “Venin’s back! And not just her! We all got our spirit animals back! And our powers with them! Isn’t that great?!”
“I…y-yeah.” Barely managing to force a rictus grin onto her face, Feather Duster managed to nod weakly. “That’s great. Just…great…”
None of the foals noticed her lack of enthusiasm, however, being too focused on the animals’ return. “We should fill you in on what happened while you were, um…gone,” offered Straightlace, blinking his eyes quickly. He’d managed to keep from crying so far and was clearly intent on keeping it that way, since he couldn’t rub a hoof over his eyes in his current state, with one foreleg held out as a perch for Altaer.
“Wh-while you’re, um, doing that, would you mind coming with me?” interjected Feather Duster weakly.
Fortunately, everypony had calmed down enough by that point that they heard her, even if the bulk of their attention was still focused on their animals. “How come?” ventured Feathercap, smiling at Ulespy, the owl resting comfortably on his back.
But her next words caught everypony’s attention, along with that of their spirit animals. “Master Legis wants to see you all. Right now.”
Together, the Night Mare’s Knights frolicked and laughed as they trotted toward the train station.
They would have galloped the entire way there, but Feather Duster had forbidden it, worried about them running around in the dark. Even after Feathercap had conjured a faint light at the end of his horn Feather Duster had sternly told them to stay together and go slowly, hovering above them to make sure they didn’t leave her sight. Even then, the foals were so overjoyed at their animals’ return that the warning had little impact on their mood; the fact that Fiddlesticks couldn’t really run while carrying her baby brother (who had already fallen back asleep) did more to slow their pace than anything else, happily conversing among themselves as they hurried to go meet with the pony who had brought their beloved companions back.
“I think we should all give him a kiss on the cheek,” giggled Cleansweep, spinning around in midair. “That’s the most heartfelt way to say thank you.”
Altaer ruffled his feathers at the suggestion. Perhaps a more dignified gesture is in order, in accordance with the First Convoker’s eminence?
“No kidding,” chuckled Fruit Crunch. “Besides, that’s okay for you and Fiddleface, but us guys don’t do that, Dust Bunny.”
Fiddlesticks rolled her eyes. “You’re right. When boys are happy to see each other, they tackle one another and roll around in the dirt, the same way they would if they were fighting.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “And don’t call me that!”
I’m sure whatever form your gratitude takes, the Exalted Primogenitor will be pleased to receive it. Nemel couldn’t have sounded happier as she trundled alongside Fiddlesticks. The joy of the young is always a delight to those who’re grown, even if they don’t show it.
“I still think we should do something bigger,” added Straightlace. “I mean, bringing all of our spirit animals back deserves something more than just saying ‘thank you,’ don’t you think?”
While I concur with your sentiment, I feel obliged to point out again that your premise is flawed, noted Ulespy. The Grand Vizier is a being of many talents, but he was not the one who brought us back to you. Should our physical forms be destroyed, we will always return when next you dream.
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say thank you anyway,” offered Feathercap timidly. “I mean, Lex is the reason we were able to meet you guys in the first place, since he brought Severance here. So it is kind of thanks to him that you’re back now.”
The best way to show your appreciation for the High Alpha is to continue making him proud of you, asserted Lyden confidently. Don’t forget that we’re answering his summons now, which means he likely has a task for us.
“Or maybe he wants to give us our reward!” grinned Fruit Crunch, the mere thought being uplifting enough that he couldn’t help but give a little hop of excitement as they reached the back of the train station, his fantasies from a day ago coming back to him now in full force. “I bet he’s going to want to take us all on as his apprentices!”
Even if he does, you should temper your expectations, chided Venin gently. Your guardian – she looked upward at that, where Cleansweep was coming in to land as they neared the station platform – made it sound as though the Lord Sovereign’s victory left him enervated. Once he states his wishes, you should let him rest.
“Aw, if he’s still hurting after that fight, then I can just use my powers to fix him up again!” grinned Cleansweep. While she normally found Lex’s demeanor rather menacing, getting Venin back had left her feeling exceptionally magnanimous. “In fact, that’d be a great time to put a kiss on his ch-, ERK?!”
Rounding the corner of the train station, Cleansweep came to a dead stop in midair, eyes wide as jaw hanging open at the sight that greeted her. Nor was she the only one, as each of the Knights had a similar reaction as they caught up to her, stunned by what awaited them on the platform. Their animals, by contrast, seemed far less concerned, quieting down as they looked at the spectacle and waited to be addressed. Feather Duster’s reaction was somewhere between both extremes, turning the corner and grimacing at what she saw.
Lex and Aria were kissing.
Far heavier than the chaste kisses that Cleansweep had been proposing, the two of them were locked in a passionate embrace. Eyes closed and forelegs around each other, neither seemed aware of anypony else as they pressed their lips together. Aria’s soft moan was faintly audible as she tilted her head, clearly wanting more.
“Okay, that’s enough! Let’s go!” whispered Feather Duster, landing beside the foals and trying to shoo them back around the side of the station.
But none of the Knights responded, eyes locked on the spectacle in front of them. “Wow,” muttered Cleansweep. “No wonder he’s so tired.”
The comment was enough to make Feathercap glance at her. “What do you mean?”
“Kissing that hard is really exhausting,” Cleansweep explained, nodding her head towards her mother without taking her eyes off of the amorous duo. “Whenever Mom and Dad did that, they’d end up going right to bed a few minutes later.”
“Cleansweep!” yelped Feather Duster, mortified.
The sound of her embarrassed shriek was enough to alert Lex and Aria that they weren’t alone, the former pulling away from the latter instantly, red-faced. For her part, Aria looked mildly annoyed before giving a sardonic smirk as she glanced at their audience, her eyes flickering from Cleansweep to Feather Duster. “Well, looks like watching runs in the family, huh?”
The jab earned her a dark look from Lex, his features having already settled back into their usual scowl. “That’s enough, Aria.” He didn’t bother waiting for her to acknowledge his warning before looking at Feather Duster, clearly blaming her for what had just happened. “From now on, announce yourself before entering my presence.”
“Y-yes, Master Legis,” gulped Feather Duster.
Only slightly mollified, Lex turned his attention to the rest of the foals. “As for the rest of you-”
“Is she your girlfriend too?” blurted Feathercap suddenly, earning surprised looks from the rest of the Knights. “Her and Miss Sonata and Miss Nosey?”
You’re being impertinent! snapped Altaer immediately. Show the First Convoker respect!
Lyden moved forward. High Alpha, please forgive these pups. Our return has made them forget themselves.
But Aria couldn’t hear the animals’ telepathic entreaties, and sauntered forward, grinning as she looked at Feathercap. “That’s right, kiddo,” she answered, her voice full of mirth. “We’re all Lex’s girlfriends. And as you can see, he takes really good care of us.”
The foals’ eyes widened at that, and Feather Duster bit her lip, but Lex was the one who spoke next. “All of you, be quiet.”
The words weren’t shouted, nor did his expression change, but the bright green-and-purple light that radiated from his eyes then made it clear that Lex’s patience had run out. Looking at Aria, she made a placating gesture in response and slunk off to the side, leaning against the wall of the station in silence acquiescence. Once he was satisfied that she’d stay silent, Lex turned his eyes back to the group in front of him, looking over each of the animals in turn. “How were those creatures revived?” he demanded.
“It happened on all by itself,” answered Fruit Crunch. Although he’d been remembering the fantasy he’d had the previous evening about becoming Lex’s pupil, he was suddenly reminded of how the actual encounter had gone. Shaking his head, he forced that memory down. This isn’t like that. Just play it cool and it’ll be fine. Lyden had told them to focus on being useful, and Fruit Crunch trusted his spirit animal’s judgment completely. “They said that even if they, um, die, they’ll always come back after we go to sleep and dream for a little while.”
Lex appeared to chew on that for a moment, and Fruit Crunch was pleased to see his eyes change back to normal a few seconds later. “I want you five to tell me everything that Severance taught you with regard to the Night Mare,” he said at last. “Right now.”
The request caught Fruit Crunch by surprise, and he exchanged confused glances with his friends. The same question was written all over their faces: this was what Lex had called them up in the middle of the night for? Tilting her head slightly, Fiddlesticks cleared her throat before giving voice to their confusion “Can’t you just ask Severance about that?”
Lex’s expression darkened at that, but it was Nemel that spoke up. The Exalted Primogenitor is asking all of you. Perhaps rather than question why that is, you should be pleased that he wishes to hear this from all of you, rather than another.
The foals winced a little at that, and it was Straightlace who stepped forward then. “Well,” he started. He glanced over at Feather Duster, who had a look of mingled worry and curiosity on her face, and faltered for a moment. But he rallied quickly, drawing himself up as he looked at Lex. “The first thing we learned were some prayers to the goddess…”
“And in the darkness, when all light is gone, the truth between the strong and the weak is made known, for the strong revel in the darkness, while the weak fear it.” Fruit Crunch finished the last verse, before giving Lex a tentative smile. “And that’s it. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.”
Outwardly, Lex was perfectly calm, giving a curt nod in response to the colt’s statement. Inwardly, however, he was seething, and not just because of the paucity of useful information that he’d gained from them relaying Severance’s lessons to him. Rather, it was the content of those lessons that had him gritting his teeth in anger.
The foals had learned little more than several basic prayers and a few aphorisms, which collectively comprised only the most basic teachings about the Night Mare’s religion. That wasn’t unexpected, of course; those children had only spent a small amount of time with Severance over the course of a few days. And while Lex had gleaned a few new insights into the Night Mare’s dogma from what they’d told him, none of it was useful with regards to figuring out how to outmaneuver the ultimatum she’d given him.
But what bothered him far more was how those foals had blindly accepted what they’d been told, with no deeper examination of the underlying philosophy of what they’d been taught nor any attempt to integrate it into an existing moral framework. By itself that wasn’t surprising; Lex was fully aware that – save for exceptional individuals like himself, who had been autodidactic his entire life – the nature of children was to require adult guidance and supervision. But now that those foals had magical abilities of their own, granted to them via those “spirit animals,” which were effectively immortal thanks to their ability to be endlessly restored whenever the children slept, the lack of such supervision was a state of affairs that could not be left unattended. Simple lessons about how “the weak suffer what they must” and “mercy is a sin” had led to them, thanks to their newfound abilities, not being afraid to take a pony hostage on the battlefield, casually threatening him with death in order to make his companions surrender. And while they’d been bluffing this time, it was all too easy to imagine that the day would come when they wouldn’t be insincere in their threat. Which meant that corrective action needed to be taken…
“So, um, is that helpful at all?” asked Fruit Crunch, the colt’s voice pulling Lex out of his thoughts.
Apparently his voice roused Feather Duster as well, because she suddenly shivered. “I can’t believe that scythe taught you such horrible things!” she huffed, giving Cleansweep an angry look. “There are more important things about someone than whether or not they’re strong or weak! Things like kindness! Or generosity! Or loyalty! Or-”
“Actually, loyalty was in there,” noted Straightlace. “The part that says ‘and the strong shall keep the weak as their own,’ implies-”
“No no no!” yelled Feather Duster. “That’s not how good ponies should think of each other!” She looked at Lex then, desperate. “Master Legis, please! Tell them!”
“Yeah Lex,” chuckled Aria from where she was still leaning against the station, apparently amused by the entire exchange. “Tell them.”
Lex didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he let his eyes glance over each of the children and their animals in turn, his gaze coming to rest on Fruit Crunch. As much as he didn’t like it, there was only one acceptable choice. “All of you go back to River’s mansion and rest,” he ordered, turning around.
The foals sagged in place at the dismissal, disappointment written all over their faces. But they perked up a moment later as Lex spoke again.
“Starting the day after tomorrow, I’ll be personally instructing each of you from now on.”
“We…we’re going to be your students?” breathed Fruit Crunch softly.
Lex’s response came with a curt nod. “It’s clear to me that you all require further instruction with regard to the proper manner in which your abilities should be utilized. Since there’s no one else here capable of providing that level of guidance, I will-”
“OhmygoshohmygoshOHMYGOSH!” squealed Fruit Crunch. Prancing in place, he turned to his friends, eyes shining. “We’re Lex’s apprentices! We’re Lex’s apprentices! Do you guys know what this means?!”
“YES!” Leaping into the air, Fruit Crunch let out a whoop of pure joy, too excited to contain himself. Nor was he alone in his elation, as Cleansweep cheered and flew in several tight loops while Straightlace and Feathercap hoof-bumped each other. Even Fiddlesticks was giggling as she rocked Tiddlywinks.
Their animals, by contrast, were far more subdued. This is undignified in the extreme, groaned Altaer, putting a wing over his face.
Relax, chuckled Nemel. Just look at how much fun they’re having.
Recreation is necessary for reducing stress and maintaining good health, agreed Ulespy.
Maybe slow down just a little? called Venin, clenching tightly around Cleansweep’s middle as the filly completed another fast loop. I’m really starting to feel dizzy!
Letting out a breath that sounded suspiciously like a sigh, Lyden padded over to the flying filly and, with a deft motion, caught her tail in his jaws as she swooped down for another pass. Play is good, but it should be done in moderation, he chastised as he pulled Cleansweep down gently.
Chuckling and rubbing the back of her neck as she landed, Cleansweep glanced between the wolf and where Venin was uncoiling herself from around her chest, the snake’s motions unsteady as she slithered back down to the ground. “Sorry about that.”
It’s alright, Venin assured her. Just…warn me the next time you’re going to do that.
Cleansweep was about to promise that she would, but her mother was suddenly there before she could get the words out. “Sweetheart, are you sure this is a good idea?” Feather Duster murmured the words, clearly concerned about Lex hearing her.
But she wasn’t quiet enough, and Fruit Crunch was the one who answered. “Are you kidding?” he laughed. “Of course it’s a good idea!” Rearing up on his hind legs, he pointed a hoof at Lex, who had watched the spectacle with a neutral expression. “We’re going to be studying under Lex Legis! The pony who saved this entire place! The pony who defeated both princesses at once! The pony who-”
“Is going to fall over if this goes on much longer,” interjected Aria, pushing off from where she’d been leaning against the wall of the station. Lex gave her a sour look at that, which she answered with an impatient glare. “Look, this has been fun, but can we wrap it up already? Bad enough this interrupted our make out time, but I don’t want to have to drag you back inside if you collapse.”
Lex scowled, but didn’t have a chance to say anything as Cleansweep suddenly gasped. “Oh yeah, I forgot!” Flapping her wings, she zipped over next to Lex. “You’re still hurt, right? Now that Venin’s back, I can heal you.” She held out a hoof, but paused before she made contact with him, silently asking for permission.
But rather than look grateful for the offer, Lex shook his head. “If you’ve regained your healing magic, then I want you to report to the nearest member of the medical crew immediately. We still have sick and injured ponies here. They’re the ones you should be offering to help, not me.”
“Great. The selfless tough guy routine again,” muttered Aria, rolling her eyes.
Cleansweep retracted her hoof, an uncertain look crossing her face. “Are you sure? You really don’t look so good…”
“Consider this your first lesson,” snapped Lex. “Those who have the ability to administer to the common good have a moral duty to do so, so long as such actions do not place an undue burden on others nor cause them impermissible harm. Given that there are ailing ponies who have neither my resilience nor my magical resources, the common good is therefore best served by you helping those least able to help themselves.”
Cleansweep blinked. “Oh, um…”
Behind her, Fruit Crunch squealed quietly into his hooves. “That’s so cool!”
Fiddlesticks raised an eyebrow at their team leader. “You understood that?”
“No!” Fruit Crunch shook his head, his eyes still sparkling. “But he looked so cool when he said it!”
Feathercap, by contrast, was starting to turn pale. “Is this going to be on a test? Should we be writing this down?” He looked back and forth, gulping. “Is somepony writing this down?!”
Cocking his head, Straightlace lifted the hoof that Altaer was perched on, setting the eagle to flying before he tentatively approached Lex. “Excuse me,” he called. When Lex’s eyes fell on him, he gulped, but stepped forward. “Wouldn’t it serve the common good better if you were the one who was healed? I mean, what if something else attacks this place and you’re too hurt to stop it?”
Despite himself, Lex couldn’t help but feel mildly impressed. That was almost an intelligent question! “What you’re asking,” he replied easily, “is what factors should be taken into account when a particular resource – in this case magic used for medical purposes – in lacking in quantities sufficient to meet the current level of need for them. Although the optimal answer is to find a solution that rejects that premise outright, while still taking into account the previous stipulations regarding undue burdens and impermissible harms, practical circumstances will often conspire so as to make this option unavailable. Given how this would apparently result in no choices whereby all moral duties are fulfilled, such instances demonstrate the need for a moral framework that’s structured based around tiers, so that when an unavoidable conflict occurs between competing impetuses you have an inherent method whereby their ranking is determined, guiding you to the least-wrong answer. In order to do that with regard to your question, we must first examine the situations that would arise from each scenario wherein someone goes without timely medical attention and cross-index them with the likelihood of each situation occurring based on our current awareness of the present circumstances as well as-”
“Kill. Me. Now.” Aria’s tortured moan was punctuated by her sinking to her belly and pantomiming banging her head on the floor. Nor, Lex realized a moment later, was her reaction exaggerated; everyone else was simply staring at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
Wincing as she saw Lex’s expression darken, Feather Duster slunk forward. “I’m, um, sure you’ve given everypony a lot to think about, Master Legis.” Forcing herself to smile, she nudged Cleansweep and Straightlace back toward their friends. “Why don’t you let the children sleep on that for a little while, and I’m sure they’ll have some more questions for you when, uh…when classes start.” Turning, she started ushering the foals back toward the edge of the platform. “Come along, children! We’re heading back! Say goodbye to Master Legis!”
A chorus of dazed goodbyes came in response to her call, and a moment later the foals – their animals in tow – were led out of sight, leaving Lex and Aria alone again.
“My brain hurts,” griped the latter pony as she climbed back to her hooves. “You really couldn’t have given the kid a simple answer?”
“That was the simple answer,” huffed Lex.
Aria just rolled her eyes. “Right.”
Silence fell then. Seconds passed by as Lex simply stared out into the night, while Aria kept her gaze fixed on him. Finally, after several minutes, she let out an annoyed grunt. “Alright. That does it. What’s going on with you?”
“As I said, those children need guidance,” answered Lex. “Without it, they’re prone to misusing their powers, which-”
“Yeah, you’re gonna teach them. I got that part.” Aria didn’t try to hide the annoyance in her voice as she walked over and planted herself directly in front of him. “And if that gobbledygook you were spouting is any indication, I’m sure your lessons are going to be a barrel of laughs, but that’s not what I’m asking.” She raised a hoof then, lightly poking him in the chest. “What I want to know is what’s going on with you.”
Lex narrowed his eyes just a little, not liking where this was going. “If you’re bored by what I’m doing, then you should feel free to go back to sleep.”
Aria, however, didn’t rise to the bait. “What exactly are you doing, huh? Why aren’t you going back to sleep? Those kids told you what you wanted to know, so…come to think of it, why did you want to know all that stuff in the first place?”
“I needed to know what Severance had told those children about the Night Mare’s teachings,” explained Lex. If this were Sonata, that answer would probably be enough to mollify her.
But Aria wasn’t her sister.
“In the middle of the night?” she scoffed, raising a brow at him. “You can barely move. Why was this so important that it couldn’t wait until the morning?” When he didn’t answer, she gave him a level look. “What’s this all about, Lex?”
Cursing inwardly, Lex’s mind raced, looking for an answer that he could give Aria without telling her the whole truth. Because he didn’t dare let her know what was really going on. He had no doubt that if Aria found out about the Night Mare’s demand that he end his relationship with her and the others, she’d tell Nosey and Sonata immediately, and the three of them would hound him about how this had happened and what he planned on doing about it, making it even more difficult for him to actually figure out a solution. And that was the best-case scenario. More likely, Aria would fly into a destructive rage, Nosey would fall into a deep depression, and Sonata…just the thought of how she’d react to the prospect of his leaving her made his heart clench painfully, as though the barbed wire were wrapped around it rather than his leg.
Fortunately, he’d already come up with an answer. “I’m planning on holding a ceremony in the Night Mare’s honor tomorrow evening,” he explained slowly. “In order to do that, I needed to know more about her religious practices, and I was concerned that I’d be too busy overseeing the camp’s functions to be able to devote sufficient time to that once the sun rose.”
“Hmm.” Aria tilted her head, examining him as though looking for the truth on his face. “A ceremony in the Night Mare’s honor, huh?”
“Yes.”
Aria was quiet as she looked at him again. Not knowing what else to do, Lex simply returned her stare. After several seconds, Aria let out a sigh. Sitting back on her haunches, she crossed her forelegs over her chest. “Well?”
Lex had no idea what she was asking. “Well…what?”
“Did those kids tell you what you needed to know?”
It was better than if she’d asked him why he was so intent on doing this tomorrow, but it was still a penetrating question nonetheless. “No,” he admitted.
“Well, sucks to be you, I guess,” replied Aria flippantly. She raised a hoof and examined it idly, as though she’d lost interest in the whole affair. “So what’re you gonna do now? Magic yourself to Everglow and ask someone there?”
Lex grimaced. He had a spell to do that, but even if he’d had a method of recharging his thaumaturgical magic now that Severance was gone he wouldn’t have been able to use it. “The material focus for that spell was destroyed in my fight with Xiriel.” That item, a tuning fork made of specific materials, set to a precise vibratory frequency, and attuned to that realm’s unique planar energies, was not something that could be constructed easily here on Equestria.
Aria shrugged, still looking at her hoof. “Then just cast a spell to bring someone from there here.”
“That’s not…” Lex paused, Aria’s words sparking an idea. He couldn’t cast a spell to summon someone from Everglow. He didn’t know any summoning spells to begin with – the closest that he had were to gather and shape astral matter into crude constructs – and even if he had he wouldn’t have been able to prepare them now that Severance was gone. But a summoning ritual was different…after all, he’d been using one to speak to the Night Mare directly for some time now.
Of course, that ritual was designed specifically to contact her, but that wasn’t anything he couldn’t modify. It would take only a few minor alterations to make the ritual summon, say, one of her lesser servitors, some denizen from her realm that had nowhere near her level of power, but still possessed an intimate understanding of her nature and disposition. That would guarantee that he’d be able to acquire all the knowledge he needed to find a way out of his current dilemma.
“You’ve gotten all quiet,” noted Aria, glancing up at him. One corner of her lip curled into a mocking grin. “Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought of that?”
Normally the needling would have annoyed him, but now Lex felt almost as jubilant as those foals had earlier. Slowly, he turned and walked toward Aria, who moved back onto all fours as he approached her, her smirk fading into a look of confusion. “What’s up with y-” Lex didn’t give her a chance to finish, pressing his lips against hers. He felt her body tense up in confusion, only to relax a moment later as she kissed him back. When it ended a moment later, her grin was far less mocking. “Wow. Was my idea that good?”
“How much longer is this going to take?” groaned Aria.
Lex didn’t answer her, simply continuing to stare off into space. Of course, that wasn’t surprising; she’d asked that question two or three dozen times now, and he had yet to respond. Giving a sigh of frustration at how long she’d been ignored, Aria again entertained the notion of walking up to Lex and making him pay attention to her. It would be easy, she mused to herself. All it would take would be a few well-placed amorous touches to start getting a reaction out of him, she felt sure. Or maybe something rougher was in order… Like shoving him off the edge of the platform, she groused to herself, her playful impulse turning sour in the face of her boredom.
But she knew better than to seriously entertain any of those ideas, instead lying on her back and staring upward listlessly. Lex would get angry at her if she interrupted him, she knew, whether she made it enjoyable for him or not. And while she felt sure that he wouldn’t do something awful like take away her voice again, she didn’t want to push him. Not when things had been going so well.
That kiss…
If Aria had still possessed toes, they would have curled at the memory of how Lex had kissed her before. Even though they’d gotten it on a few hours ago, and then made out heatedly just before those kids had arrived, that kiss had been different. It hadn’t been the lusty, “call me daddy” type of kiss that he’d given her every other time they’d locked lips. Instead, it had been something much more intense, as though Lex had been caught in the grip of feelings so strong that mere words couldn’t express them.
Feelings for her.
They’d enjoyed each other’s bodies earlier, and he’d told her that he loved her after that. But as wonderful as those had been, neither could compare to what Aria had felt in that moment. Because in that single instant, she’d experienced what it was like for Lex Legis to adore her, and she wanted more.
That yearning had kept Aria out here with him after he’d pulled away from her and said that he was going to start working on a summoning spell. Or ritual. Whatever. The mere chance that he’d kiss her like that again was enough that she couldn’t bring herself to go back to sleep. So while Lex had simply turned and begun staring out into the night, apparently able to invent the spell he needed completely in his head, she had sat down to wait for him to finish.
And waited.
And waited…
“How much longer is this going to-”
“It’s done.”
Lex’s voice made Aria jump, a flutter of excitement running through her chest. “Great!” A second later she came back to herself, forcing herself to adopt a scowl and she stood up. “I mean, it’s about time! It’s been, what, a couple of hours at least?”
“I told you before that if you were bored, you could go back to sleep,” countered Lex, his usual irritated look back in place.
“Yeah, yeah,” huffed Aria. “So what do we do now?”
Lex paused, and Aria watched as an uncomfortable look flickered across his face. The sight made her eyes narrow, knowing exactly what he was thinking. Her new boyfriend might be an intellectual and magical powerhouse, but he was terrible at hiding his feelings. In this case, he’d heard her say “we,” indicating that she wasn’t going anywhere, and he wasn’t happy about it.
That wasn’t surprising, since Lex had been unusually cagey when she’d asked him what was going on before. While he hadn’t looked like he’d been lying about wanting to hold a ceremony in the Night Mare’s honor, Aria felt sure that there was more that he wasn’t telling her. Even if he didn’t have a terrible poker face, the very idea that Lex would throw some sort of party to thank that goddess of his struck her as odd to begin with. This entire time, he’d been so focused on keeping everyone safe and fed that his doing anything else, let alone something as…impractical as a ceremony was unusual. That he apparently felt like it needed to happen immediately, to the point of preparing for it in the middle of the night despite how tired he looked, was downright suspicious. And the fact that he wasn’t happy about her being there while he went looking for the proper way to hold that ceremony only clinched it further for Aria: there was more going on here than Lex was telling her.
It bothered her that he apparently didn’t trust her enough to tell her what was really going on, but at the same time she couldn’t help but feel a little excited. She’d helped him out once already and he’d been so overjoyed that he’d given her the sort of kiss that songs were written about. If she could keep the help coming, then maybe he’d give her some more!
It was with that thought in mind that she smirked at him, silently daring him to try and send her away. Maybe you could have done it when I was in my Siren form and you had that power over me, she chuckled inwardly. But not anymore!
Lex seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he let out a slow breath. “My saddlebags are still inside,” he nodded toward the station. “Bring them to me.”
Aria raised a brow, instantly suspicious. “And what’ll you be doing in the meantime?”
“Waiting for you to retrieve them!” snapped Lex. “Now go!”
Although that was quite clearly a command, Aria nevertheless lingered, wondering whether he really needed his bags or if this was another attempt to get rid of her. He can barely walk, and I’ll only be gone for a few seconds, she knew. But if he turns into a shadow or casts a teleportation spell or something else, that would be all the time he needs to make a getaway. But if he really did need his bags, then this was her chance to make herself useful again…
“I’ll be right back,” she said at last. “And if you’re not here when I do, I swear I’ll wake up this entire camp and have them start looking for you.” Not waiting for him to respond, she turned and trotted toward the station, smirking to herself. You’re not the only one who can come up with brilliant plans, lover boy.
Slipping inside the station, Aria paused, taking a second to confirm that Nosey and Sonata were still fast asleep. Getting out of here as quickly as she could was still a priority, but she’d seen enough movies to know that rushing right now would cause her to make a stupid mistake that would wake those other two up, and that was the last thing she wanted right now. She’d shared Lex with both of them earlier; right now he was all hers!
Once she’d confirmed that neither mare had moved, she began inching her way toward Lex’s saddlebags. It took longer than she would have liked, thanks to the near-total lack of light and her making certain to walk softly, but it still took her less than a minute to locate them. Slinging the bags over her back, she turned and made her way back toward the door, holding her breath as her tension mounted. This was the part where something would go wrong, she knew. Either she’d trip over something and wake up one of those two idiots, or Lex would be nowhere to be found when she opened the door, or something else would happen that would ruin things…
But no disasters struck as she reached the door, and when Aria opened it a second later, Lex was still sitting in the exact spot that she’d left him in.
Sighing in relief, Aria stepped outside and shut the door quietly behind her. “Here.” She tossed the saddlebags at his hooves, or at least she meant to, but he caught it with his telekinesis before it hit the ground. “What’s in there that’s so important, anyway?”
Lex gave her an irritated look, probably because of her threat from a minute ago, but turned his attention to the bags a second later. “These.” His remark was punctuated as he opened one of the bags, telekinetically lifting over a dozen small gemstones of various shapes and colors out of it.
Aria tilted her head, not sure what to make of that. “A bunch of jewels? Wait, let me guess. Those are more of those things that circle your head and enhance your powers, right? Or are those the kind where you put a spell in them so you can cast it later?”
“Neither.” Not bothering to look at her as he spoke, Lex began examining each jewel in turn, looking them over with a critical eye. “These gems are completely non-magical. They were unearthed while the mass grave for the ghouls was being dug.” He frowned again, but this time not at her. “They don’t have much potential for storing magical energies, either.”
He was doing it again, giving her an answer without actually telling her what she wanted to know. “Okay, let me try this again. Why did you want those right now?”
His eyes darted over to her, just for a moment, and then back to the jewels. “I’m planning on summoning a denizen of the Night Mare’s realm in order to acquire the information I need. If they’re anything like the Night Mare herself, they won’t give something for nothing. These should be sufficient payment for what I want to know.”
Aria’s brow furrowed, not liking the sound of that. “And if they’re not?”
He didn’t bother looking at her this time. “The knowledge I want isn’t anything particularly esoteric. In the event that whatever creature I summon finds these to be insufficient, then I’ll simply dismiss them and try again with a different creature. One of them will be willing to trade information for profit.”
Aria opened her mouth, but Lex must have anticipated what she was going to say, because he kept speaking. “And in the unlikely event that worse comes to worst and none of the entities I summon find these gems to be satisfactory compensation, then I’ll offer one of the magical gemstones instead, though I’d prefer not to.” He telekinetically put the jewels back in his saddlebag, placing it on his back as he slowly stood up. “And don’t ask what will happen if that should prove to be inadequate payment. The magic imbued in even one of those gems is far and away greater than what all of their mundane counterparts together could hold. Someone will be willing to make a deal.”
Nodding mutely, Aria tried to fight down the sudden wave of nervousness flowing through her. Everything Lex was saying made sense, but it was what he wasn’t saying that made a shudder roll down her spine. She knew he was still trying to keep things from her, feeding her tidbits of information while leaving the important parts out, but this time she’d gotten a glimpse of what he was hiding.
He’s desperate.
It felt wrong to think of Lex Legis that way, but there was no other conclusion that made sense. Whatever information Lex wanted, it was something that he had to have, and soon. Far more than just pushing himself when he was tired, or working on a new spell for hours in the middle of the night, for him to be so adamant that he’d find a way to make a deal was telling. He needed this to happen, to the point where he was willing to trade away even one of his magic items to make sure he found whatever it was he was looking for.
Lex’s voice broke her out of her thoughts. “Now, I’m going to head outside of camp to perform the summoning ritual. I want you to stay here-”
“No way.” Aria’s response was immediate. “Uh-uh. I’m going with you.”
“Absolutely not.” Lex glared at her. “I need to be able to perform this ritual with no interruptions-”
But again Aria didn’t let him finish. “Then I better come along and make sure that there aren’t any.”
Lex glared at her, his eyes glowing green and purple now. But Aria didn’t flinch, staring right back at him. “Let me make this clear,” growled Lex, his voice brimming with anger. “I don’t want you there.”
That hurt, but Aria refused to let it show. “Yeah, well, I want you to come clean about whatever it is you’re hiding. So I guess we’re both going to be disappointed.”
Black crystals began to grow around her as Lex’s eyes flared brighter. Punching upward with notable force, several of them only missed her by inches. But although Aria could feel her heart pounding in her chest, along with the sensation of sweat running down the back of her neck, she kept her eyes locked on Lex. She felt confident that he wouldn’t do anything to her, not after the moments they’d shared.
But at the same time, she’d never thought that he’d take away her voice the way he had, either…
Lex began to approach her then, and Aria found her courage failing. Maybe I could just pretend to give in. I could follow him at a distance, and-
She didn’t have a chance to complete that thought as Lex’s eyes suddenly changed back to normal, the black crystals crumbling into dust. “Have it your way,” he said coldly, moving past her as he walked toward the far edge of the platform.
Aria wanted to make a snide remark, but her mouth was too dry to get anything out. Even so, she felt certain that this was for the best. There was no way that Lex would be giving her those swoon-worthy kisses anytime soon, she knew, but now more than ever she was convinced that he was in some sort of trouble.
And if it was as bad as she was starting to think, then he might not have a chance to kiss her ever again.
He could hear Aria’s hoofsteps behind him, and although he knew it wasn’t the case, he couldn’t help but imagine that she was deliberately stepping loud enough for him to hear, letting him know that she was still following him. The thought was a bitter one, washing away the recent affection he’d felt toward her and replacing it with antipathy. Sonata would have obeyed me, he thought angrily. Nosey would have obeyed me. But Aria apparently felt no particular compunction about disregarding his wishes, with neither his long list of accomplishments nor all of the things he’d done for her nor even their current relationship being sufficient to convince her that she should do what he told her as a matter of course.
It was enough to make his jaw clench, but beneath his frustration was a growing sense of anxiety. Aria had flat-out stated that she knew that he was keeping something from her, and it was quite clear now that she was intent on finding out what. And unless he figured out some way of dissuading her, she would. This summoning was his last chance to figure out a way to circumvent the Night Mare’s ultimatum, which meant that he’d need to speak candidly with whatever creature he brought forth about the sacrifice the goddess expected him to make. And when Aria overheard that…
It’s not her anger that you’re worried about though, is it? Despite their voicelessness, the words from his shadow carried a mocking overtone. You’re worried that she’ll find out the truth: that if you have to, you won’t hesitate to give her and the others up.
The gibe stung like poison, making Lex tense up so badly that he almost stumbled. But even if Aria hadn’t been there, there was no response that he could have made. As badly as he wanted to keep his relationship with the girls intact – especially now when things were finally working out – if he couldn’t find a third answer to the binary choice that he’d been given, then he’d have no other alternative but to let Aria, Nosey, and Sonata go. As deeply as he cared for them, their relationship was entirely personal, which meant that it absolutely could not be placed above the good work he was doing here.
If Lex had to choose between love or duty, the latter would win every time.
“Where are we going?” came Aria’s voice from behind him.
But Lex remained silent, still fuming over her refusal to stay behind. He heard her give an exasperated sigh, and despite the fact that he was trying so hard to find a way for them to stay together, he couldn’t help but take a measure of spiteful satisfaction at the sound of her exasperation. It served her right for being such an intrusive nuisance.
They’d nearly reached the river when Lex finally stopped, his body already aching from the brief march. But he paused for only a few seconds before turning and heading west, toward Vanhoover. Fortunately, they’d gone far enough south that they were well beyond the range of the few campfires that were still burning, and nopony seemed to notice them.
The walk into Vanhoover was slow, despite Lex’s best efforts. The city proper was a considerable distance from the camp, and while Lex knew he was in no condition to make such a journey, he forced himself to keep moving. Since there had been no signs of ghoul activity as of the battle, and the outflow of ponies that had managed to survive the city’s fall had slowed to a trickle in the last few days, Vanhoover was the best venue for what he was about to attempt. Its distance from the camp and the intervening buildings would serve to keep everypony away so that there was no one to watch, nor potentially interrupt, the ritual. Or at least, almost everypony, he thought bitterly, glancing back at where Aria was still doggedly following him.
That proved to be a mistake, however, as taking his eye off of the starlit path in front of him caused him to miss the small stone in his way. His hoof caught against it, and while he normally would have had no trouble catching himself, in his current state Lex was unable to correct his balance in time, sending him crashing to the ground. The fall was only mildly painful, but the blow to his pride was severe, and Lex’s face burned with humiliation at knowing that Aria had witnessed him suffer such an indignity. Expecting to hear her snide laughter at any moment, he immediately started to get up…only to find that his body refused to cooperate, his lungs and legs both feeling like they were on fire as he again tried, and failed, to rise.
But the expected laughter didn’t come. Instead, Aria reached out with her hooves, picking him up and helping him to stand. Her unexpected assistance did nothing to improve Lex’s mood. “Oh get over yourself,” Aria snorted in response to the dark look he gave her. But her expression softened a second later. “Besides, I still owe you for the last time we came here, remember? I scraped my tail and you healed it.”
“Hmph.” Lex’s answer came with a sullen look, but he didn’t push her away…even if he petulantly told himself that he would have if he’d had the strength to do so.
They continued on like that until they made it into the city. By that point Lex had regained enough strength to walk unassisted, leading Aria deeper into Vanhoover until they finally came to a plaza of sufficient size for him to perform the summoning. “Conjure a light,” he ordered Aria curtly, the first words he’d spoken to her since they’d left the station. The light from the stars was barely sufficient to see their way around; for actually holding a conversation with whatever he summoned, more illumination would be necessary.
Aria rolled her eyes, but chanted for a moment, touching a hoof to a crumpled tin can lying on the ground. Immediately, it began to shine like a torch, bathing the area around them in light. But the edges of the plaza remained cloaked in gloom, the connecting streets and alleys leading off into darkness that seemed even deeper now. Lex’s own shadow, previously invisible in the darkness, was now markedly obvious, falling perpendicular to the shadows around it.
Lex, however, was less concerned about that than he was with what was about to happen, and not just because of Aria’s presence. The barbed wire around his leg had continued to gradually grow tighter, to the point where it was now a source of constant pain. Time, he knew, was running out. He looked at Aria one last time, trying to think of some last-ditch method of preventing her from hearing the exchange that would happen shortly…but just like before, he came up short. She’s going to find out, he realized with a sinking feeling.
Aria seemed to be thinking the same thing, giving him a defiant look. “If you’re going to tell me to take a hike, you can forget it.”
Already depleted both physically and emotionally, Lex couldn’t even find the strength to stay angry at her any longer, instead resigning himself to his secret being found out. “Just make sure no one interrupts the ritual,” he ordered her woodenly.
“Fine.”
With no further preamble, Lex raised a foreleg – the one without the Night Mare’s ever-constricting wire – and began to gesture and chant.
This ritual required far less power than the one he used to call upon the Night Mare herself, and so required commensurately less time to enact. But as he called out the words in the proper sequence, making the matching gesticulations, Lex could feel himself struggling to control and direct the ambient energies into the proper configuration. Each breath made his chest ache, and his foreleg felt like it had weights attached to it. Every minute that went by was like an hour, threatening to drag his consciousness down into a hazy morass of lethargy. It was only the absolute knowledge of the consequences of failure – not only in terms of what he’d lose if he couldn’t evade the Night Mare’s demand, but also how the ritual would produce unknown results if he miscast it – that kept him focused, making sure to chant every syllable exactly, each gesture precisely. Finally, after what felt like hours of casting but he knew couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes, he finished.
The final word of his incantation had barely left Lex’s lips when he felt the accumulated power suddenly fulminate outward. The effect was dizzying, as if gravity had suddenly reoriented itself in a different direction for a split-second, and out of his peripheral vision Lex saw Aria sway a little, also feeling the effect. A guarded look crossed her face as she glanced around, stepping closer to him. “Did it work?”
The words sounded almost muffled somehow, as though the very air had become reluctant to allow for any noise. But Lex knew it was an aftereffect of the ritual, caused by the fabric of space stretching and snapping back as a consequence of the brief planar conjunction that he’d just created. “It worked.”
Aria looked around again. “So where is…whatever you called?”
Lex was wondering that too, but suspected that they’d find out soon. “Just wait.”
Aria clearly wasn’t happy with that answer. She opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out there was a sound of…something. It was too brief and too faint to identify, but one glance at Aria’s face made it clear that she’d heard it too. Then it came again. Then again, and by now the sound was recognizable.
It was hoofsteps.
Something was approaching them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lex saw a brief flicker, and turned toward it, with Aria positioning herself slightly behind him as she did the same. There, in the alleyway furthest from the light, a brief flicker lit up the darkness, a small burst of flames appearing as though someone had just struck a flint to a tinder, the fires guttering too fast to provide any hint as to what was causing them. But another flame appeared a half-second later, and Lex realized that they were occurring concurrently with the hoofsteps, as though whatever was heading toward them were causing flames to spark with every step they took.
It was clearly meant to be intimidating, and it was the very recognition of that fact that made Lex snort. Parlor tricks, he thought derisively, his eyes alighting in irritation.
The hoofsteps grew closer, each one still accompanied by a burst of yellow and orange flames, until they neared the mouth of the alley. But now there was another sound as well, a soft continuous crinkling, as though paper were being crumpled into a ball. That was enough to make Lex’s brow furrow slightly. The hoofsteps were obvious, and the sparks were clearly legerdemain; what was that other sound?
But there was no time to contemplate it as the sounds and sparks suddenly came to a halt just before they reached the edge of the light. A moment later, a voice slid out of the darkness. “A red horn,” it rasped. “Green and purple eyes. An incongruous shadow.” The voice, clearly male, was gravelly, as though its owner had gargled acid. “To think that I’d be summoned by Lex Legis himself.”
Lex tensed at that, but it was Aria who spoke up, looking at him with a nervous expression. “How does that thing know your name?”
“Oh, it’s on everyone’s lips where I come from,” the shadow-clad creature laughed, and the sound was like sheets of sandpaper being rubbed together. “You’re the one who received such generous boons from Our Dark Lady, and yet now you’re falling out of her favor, and are on the verge of losing everything.”
Again, Aria was the one who responded. “What does that mean?”
She could have been talking to either of them, but Lex wasn’t interested in rehashing how he’d gotten to where he was. “Enough,” he ordered, his eyes locked onto the darkness in the alley where the creature he’d summoned was hiding. “I brought you here to answer my questions, not tell me what I already know. Now,” his eyes narrowed, and his voice dropped to a threatening rumble, “step into the light and identify yourself.”
Another coarse laugh came from the darkness. “If you wish.” A second later the creature stepped into the plaza. Lex heard Aria gasp at the sight, and although he kept his reaction tightly controlled, he couldn’t blame her for her reaction to the horror in front of them.
Wingless and hornless, the equinoid that emerged was twice as tall as Lex and white from head to hoof. But nopony could have said that the creature resembled Princess Celestia in the slightest. Where the alicorn’s coloration came from her flawless coat, this creature’s entire body was one huge white-encrusted scab. Not one patch of unblemished skin could be seen anywhere, and as it moved the source of the crinkling they’d heard earlier became clear: it was the creature’s scabrous tissue flexing and flaking as it moved, bits of it falling off only to regenerate immediately thereafter.
The grisly state of its body was only heightened by how stark the rest of it was. No mane adorned its head, nor did its tail have any hair. Its eyes were a solid orange, lacking irises or pupils entirely. Nor could a cutie mark be seen on its flanks, though whether it had never possessed one or it was simply covered by the full-body scabbing was impossible to tell. But there was clearly more to the creature than its revolting exterior; its every exhalation produced smoke from its nostrils, as if its stomach were a furnace, and flames continued to spark with every step it took.
“My name is Harrowing Ordeal,” announced the creature with a wide grin, clearly enjoying their reactions, “and I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be here.”
Lex’s answer to the creature’s statement came with a sneer of contempt. “I couldn’t care less if you’re pleased to be here or not. I summoned you in order to serve my purposes, not yours.”
But rather than looking upset by the statement, Harrowing Ordeal only grinned wider. The sight was off-putting in the extreme, as the scabs surrounding its mouth cracked and tore, only to regrow a few seconds later. “Come now, there’s no reason why we can’t reach an arrangement that’s mutually beneficial,” it chuckled, before glancing around the plaza. “Is it true that you were given one of the Umbral Regalia?”
“The what?” asked Aria. Unlike Lex she wore her disgust openly, looking at Harrowing Ordeal with an expression that clearly conveyed her revulsion for the scabrous equine.
Again, the creature seemed to enjoy how repulsed she was, giving an exaggerated shrug. “One of the goddess’s personal implements of divine authority,” he answered, before turning its attention back to Lex. “Severance, wasn’t it?” He waited a few moments, and when Lex didn’t say anything, Harrowing Ordeal’s smile turned coy. “There’s been a new rumor going around lately, though. I only just heard it myself. Something about how you lost control of the weapon, and had to beg Our Dark Lady to take it back?”
The goading was obvious, but Lex still felt his spine go rigid. “I don’t beg!” he snarled. “Ever!”
“My deepest apologies,” answered Harrowing Ordeal, though its tone and expression made it clear that it felt anything but apologetic. Despite that, it gave a bow, and the motion sent more wrinkled white flakes falling to the ground. “I asked only because I’d hoped to nominate myself to fill the vacuum left by Severance’s absence.”
This time it was Aria’s lip that curled. “If Lex wanted a new pet, he wouldn’t get one that sheds everywhere,” she snorted. “Besides, Severance was able to slice and dice an entire army of zombies or ghouls or whatever they were. But you?” She made a show of looking Harrowing Ordeal over, then gave a derisive snicker. “You look like all you’re good for is being a professional chew toy.”
The corners of Harrowing Ordeal’s lips barely twitched, but his smile was suddenly far less pleasant. “You think these scabs mean that I’m weak?” he asked, and there was a dangerous tone in his voice then.
But Lex couldn’t have cared less. “Yes,” he answered flatly. “And so you have no value to me other than answering my questions. Do that, and if the answers are satisfactory,” he telekinetically opened his saddlebag then, taking out several gems and holding them aloft, “you can have these.”
For a moment, Harrowing Ordeal didn’t respond, simply regarding the two of them in silence. The sight was enough to make Aria smirk, knowing that he was upset at them calling him a weakling, but that there was nothing he could do about it now that Lex had already changed the subject. He might look like something out of a B-grade horror movie, she decided, but he’s just a windbag who’s completely full of himself.
Or at least, she hoped that was the case. Because if that walking mass of scar tissue figured out just how badly Lex was injured, Aria strongly suspected it would try something. And if it did, it’d be up to her to take care of it. And she had no idea what sort of powers it had…
But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, since Harrowing Ordeal had turned its attention to the gems Lex was holding. “Well then,” he began, casual smile back in place, “what would you like to know?”
Despite having pushed the conversation in this direction, Lex hesitated for just a moment. But knowing it was pointless now, he plunged forward. “Part of the bargain I struck with the Night Mare was that I’d propagate her religion in this world,” he began. “I fully intend to keep my promise to her, however…” He couldn’t help but grit his teeth here. “She’s recently become…dissatisfied with the pace at which I’m working.”
“Ah, so that’s why she’s been so angry with you lately,” mused Harrowing Ordeal, tone playful once again.
“Wait, so you said you’d become some sort of preacher?” asked Aria, her voice disbelieving. “Because I don’t know if you know this, but you’re not exactly great when it comes to the motivational speaking department. Although, come to think of it…” She put a hoof to her chin, frowning. “I’m not sure I’ve heard you talk to anyone about that Night Mare goddess of yours at all.”
“There have been more pressing issues!” snapped Lex. “Matters of faith are of secondary importance when basic amenities are in short supply!”
“Let me guess,” responded Aria dryly. “She called you and wanted to know why you hadn’t been talking her up, and you said exactly those words to her, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer, rolling her eyes. “I’m starting to see why you want to have this ceremony for her right away.”
Lex clenched his jaw, but forced himself not to respond any further, knowing there was no use in dragging this out. Instead, he turned back to Harrowing Ordeal. “The Night Mare has demanded that I honor her publicly in the next few hours. As part of this observance, she wants me to make a sacrifice.”
Harrowing Ordeal cocked his head at that last word. “Interesting…of what sort?”
“Her precise stipulations were that it be something valuable, something I would miss,” answered Lex. He turned his head just enough so that Aria was no longer within his field of vision as he spoke. “It’s self-evident that it would be counterproductive for me to give up something that would make it more difficult for me to fulfill my duties, either temporal or religious,” he said that word as though it left a bad taste in his mouth, “in nature. Likewise, I know that she’s fully aware that I will not, under any circumstances, harm someone else simply to satisfy her regardless of the consequences. Ergo, she can only mean that she wants me to give up something that I find personally fulfilling.”
“Wait, hold on.” Despite his attempt not to look at her, Aria moved in front of him now, a concerned look on her face. “What exactly are you saying?”
With no other choice, Lex looked her in the face, hardening his heart as he replied. “In a little over twelve hours, I’m going to have to break up with you, Aria. You and Sonata and Nosey.”
For a moment she just stared at him, eyes wide and open-mouthed. But when he didn’t tell her it was a joke, she slowly came back to her senses. “Are you kidding me?” she asked in a low, dangerous tone.
“No.”
“Are you kidding me?!” She was snarling now.
“Aria-”
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!” she shrieked. “NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! NOT AFTER EVERYTHING I WENT THROUGH!” She raised a hoof then, and Lex had just enough time to prepare to receive the blow, widening his stance and lowering his center of gravity, before it impacted his ribs. Even then, his defensive enchantments were the only reason she didn’t knock him over the way she had back in the station. “All those times we fought!” Another blow hit his chest. “Watching those other two monopolize you!” A third strike. “Having to share our first time with both of them!” The fourth punch made him bite back a grunt of pain, barely able to keep to his hooves. “And now you’re going to pump and dump me?!”
“Aria, calm down!” snarled Lex. “This isn’t what I want either!”
“Isn’t it?!” she roared. “Because if that goddess of yours is telling you to kick me to the curb, and your response is to hold some ‘ceremony in her honor,’ that sounds an awful lot like you’re telling her ‘okay!’” She narrowed her eyes then, stepping closer until they were practically nose-to-nose. “So you ditch us and then what?” she hissed, her voice now low but no less furious. “Next week you’ll be banging that maid of yours instead? Maybe that River chick? Or those little girls in your fan club?”
Lex had known that Aria would be enraged by what the Night Mare was demanding of him, but she had just gone too far. “THAT’S ENOUGH!” he roared, the green and purple light glow in his eyes flaring brightly. The display was enough to make Aria back up a step, but only barely. That was all Lex needed, however, and he nodded toward Harrowing Ordeal, who was simply watching the exchange with a smirk. “I summoned that creature because I’m trying to figure out a way NOT to lose you! He might know some way that I can subvert the Night Mare’s demand!”
But Aria seemed far from mollified by that. “Well that’s just great, Lex!” she yelled. “But I’ve got a better idea! Just tell the Night Mare that she can take her demand and shove it straight up her a-”
She was cut off by the sound of Harrowing Ordeal’s coarse laughter, apparently unable to hold back his mirth any longer. Her hackles rising again, she rounded on the scabrous equine. “What’s so funny?” she asked darkly, her tone making it clear that the wrong answer would precipitate an attack.
“Pardon my laughter,” snickered the summoned stallion. “It’s just that I found your lovers' quarrel adorable. But as for your ‘better idea,’” he added quickly, seeing that Aria was quickly becoming incensed again, “I’m afraid that he can’t do that if he wants to survive.”
Her eyes narrowed, looking between Harrowing Ordeal and Lex before settling on the former. “Explain.”
“It’s very simple,” shrugged the stallion, one hoof coming down to scratch at his flank idly. The motion dislodged a long flap of tissue, which cracked into several pieces as it fluttered to the ground. “The Night Mare doesn’t tolerate disloyalty. If she’s decided that your stallion has broken his word to her, she’ll most likely strike him dead on the spot if he doesn’t do what she wants.”
Aria gave an angry huff at that, but had no response.
After several seconds of silence, Harrowing Ordeal spoke up again, looking at Lex with a smirk. “Of course, if you’re looking for a loophole, there might just be one.”
Lex’s eyes changing back to normal was his only outward reaction to the news. Inwardly, however, the words made him once again turn the problem over in his mind, only to again find no solution that would fit the Night Mare’s criteria while still letting him continue to be with the mares he loved. The idea that the monstrosity in front of him was able to think of a solution and he wasn’t bothered Lex almost as much as the situation he currently found himself in. “Well?” he snapped at last. “What is it?”
“Actually,” drawled Harrowing Ordeal, “before we get to that, I’d like to renegotiate my payment. After all, if I’m going to help you keep what sounds like several mares all to yourself, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to lend me one, wouldn't you agree?”
Lex’s eyes flared again, brighter than before, and although his voice shrank almost to a whisper, it was brimming with malice. “Choose your next words very carefully, creature.”
Harrowing Ordeal bowed again. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of asking for any of the females you’ve laid claim to,” it replied smoothly. “Just perhaps one of the others that you’re less enamored of. That maid your girl here mentioned, or perhaps that ‘River chick.’ I promise I’d return them after they gave birth to my brood.”
Aria made a retching sound. “Lemme guess,” she spat, clearly disgusted at the idea. “Your name’s Harrowing Ordeal because that’s how girls feel at the thought of you touching them.”
Lex’s answer was more direct, taking the gems from his saddlebag and tossing them to the ground contemptuously. “You’ll have these for your payment, or you’ll have nothing.”
Harrowing Ordeal’s smile didn’t waver, but his eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you’re in a position to drive such a hard bargain? Your mare must love you very much to be so upset at the thought of losing you. It would be a shame if you had to throw her away just to survive.”
Aria glanced back at Lex then, but although she still looked upset there was no missing the uncertainty in her eyes. But Lex didn’t so much as glance at her. “This is your last chance,” he intoned darkly. “Tell me what I want to know and take the gemstones, or I have no further use for you.”
This time the silence that fell was tense, with Aria watching as Lex and Harrowing Ordeal stared each other down.
The summoned stallion was the first one to blink. “Very well,” he sighed. “I’ll take the gems.”
“A wise decision,” replied Lex. His horn was surrounded in a purple aura as he lifted the gems off of the ground. “But first, tell me the loophole.”
“Certainly.” Despite not having gotten what he wanted, Harrowing Ordeal’s smile seemed far too self-satisfied. “It’s…”
“Certainly,” smiled Harrowing Ordeal. “It’s not something that should be shared in front of an outsider, however.”
The comment came with a pointed look at Aria, who narrowed her eyes dangerously. “Excuse you?”
But Harrowing Ordeal didn’t seem intimidated in the slightest, giving a helpless shrug that caused the scabs around his shoulders to crinkle again. “I’m one of Our Dark Lady’s faithful, as is your stallion.” He glanced back at Lex, pausing then. “Even if he’s not in her good graces at the moment. Your hoof is bleeding, by the way.”
That last statement was clearly directed at Lex, causing him to glance down; sure enough, the barbed wire had constricted tightly enough that it was now penetrating his skin, causing rivulets of blood to run down his leg. But when he displayed no reaction except disinterest, Harrowing Ordeal kept speaking. “Given the sensitive nature of what we’re discussing, what with the goddess having such a personal interest in this, I’m afraid it simply wouldn’t be proper for the details of what I’m about to say to be disclosed to someone who isn’t a follower of her religion.”
“So what?” The words were accompanied by a chuckle, but there was no humor in Aria's voice. Slowly, she sauntered toward Harrowing Ordeal. “Lex admitted all of that stuff about his deal right in front of me, and you didn’t seem to have a problem with it. But now you expect us to believe that all of a sudden you two have to have your little powwow in secret?” She kept advancing, until she was right in Harrowing Ordeal’s face. “I don’t think so.”
Harrowing Ordeal’s response came in the form of a sharp exhale. While his every breath had been accompanied by tendrils of smoke before, the oily black fumes poured from the scabbed stallion’s nose and mouth heavily now, billowing out in plumes that engulfed Aria completely. Alarmed, she leapt back, but in doing so inhaled the some of the noxious cloud. Her lungs immediately rebelled, causing her to gasp and cough as she stumbled backward, her eyes stinging and watering from the acrid smog enveloping her. Her distress was so acute that she only barely heard Harrowing Ordeal’s mocking laugh. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go rest for a bit and let your betters sort things out?”
“Y-you…!” coughed Aria. The haze from the summoned stallion’s breath was already clearing out, but she didn’t feel any better. Even so, she struggled to get her breathing under control. “I’ll k-kill you!”
“Enough, both of you.”
It was the measured calm in Lex’s voice that caused Aria to freeze, shocked at how unconcerned he sounded, as though the prospect of her being excluded – let alone the fact that she was still fighting to breathe – didn’t bother him in the slightest. Apparently Harrowing Ordeal heard it too, because he chuckled audibly as he sat back and scratched at his haunch, sending another flurry of scabs falling to the ground. But it was what Lex said next that floored her. “Aria, go wait on the other side of the plaza.”
Scarcely believing what she was hearing, Aria strode toward him, fighting down another coughing fit as she did. “Are you kidding me?” she wheezed. “Lex, you can’t possibly trust that pony-”
“That thing isn’t a pony,” pronounced Lex flatly. “He doesn’t have a cutie mark.”
His eyes flickered over to Harrowing Ordeal as he said that, and Aria turned to follow his gaze, her eyes looking to where the summoned stallion had scratched his haunch. Although the scabs were already growing back, she could still see that there was nothing on his flank. But the significance of that discovery eluded her, and she turned back to Lex with a growing sense of incredulity. What was he thinking? “Okay, great, not a p-pony,” she had to stop as she started to cough again, needing a moment to catch her breath. “That just makes him even more unreliable, right? His whole thing about n-needing to talk to you alone sounds c-completely made up!”
Lex gave her a cool look as he raised one brow, as though he didn’t think very much of her take on the situation. “Maybe,” he admitted. “But maybe not. Either way, I want to hear what he has to say, and if he won’t say it with you around, then I need you to go wait on the other side of the plaza.”
Aria could only stare at him, before turning her head to look at where he was telling her to go. The plaza wasn’t that big, and she’d only be a few dozen feet away from the two of them. But she was fully aware that Lex was in no position to defend himself, and she was growing more certain with each passing second that Harrowing Ordeal was aware of that too. If he closed what little distance remained between himself and Lex before launching an attack, Aria wasn’t certain that she’d be able to get a spell off in time.
Especially, she realized with a sudden shudder, with how hard it was for her to catch her breath now.
“You have to realize,” she said slowly, dropping her voice to a whisper and fighting down the urge to keep coughing, “that this is a trap. This guy acts like a sleazy buffoon, gets you to think he’s no big deal, and then pounces. It’s a ploy.”
“If it is, I’ll deal with it,” replied Lex dismissively. “Now go.”
Aria knew she should have been angry. She should have been absolutely furious. First he revealed that he was seriously considering breaking up with her, then stood idly by while that disgusting monstrosity all but spit in her face, and now he was treating her like a nuisance when she was looking out for him?! She should have cut him down to size with a torrent of insults, slapped him across the face, and then left not just the plaza but the city altogether, leaving Lex to his fate. Heck, if that was how he wanted to be, then she should just save him the trouble and break up with him first!
But those emotions wouldn’t come. Even when she tried to summon them, all she got was a bout of nervous tension rather than the towering rage she wanted, causing her to stamp a hoof in anxiety. “You had better know what you’re doing,” she croaked, telling herself that it was that creature’s bad breath that made her voice catch like that.
Then she turned and, with one last glare at Harrowing Ordeal, trudged toward the other side of the plaza.
Lex watched Aria go, waiting until she’d covered most of the distance before he turned back to Harrowing Ordeal. “Satisfied?”
“It would be better if she left altogether,” replied the other stallion flippantly. “But I suppose so long as we keep our voices down, it will do.”
“Good. Now…” Lex lifted the gemstones that he’d offered in payment in his telekinesis, holding them in the air next to himself. “Tell me what I want to know.”
Smirk affixed firmly in place, Harrowing Ordeal glanced left and right dramatically, even looking upward in a brazen show of secrecy. “Alright,” he began, lowering his voice as he moved slowly toward Lex. “The way to escape from the conditions that have been imposed on you is simple…”
Despite the stallion’s approach, Lex didn’t so much as tense. Not that he could in his current state; just remaining upright was already a considerable strain. “Go on.”
“All you have to do…” Harrowing Ordeal smiled again, and this time the expression had a menacing cast to it. “Is pass the mantle of authority that the Night Mare has given you to someone else.”
Frowning sharply, Lex narrowed his eyes. “What?”
Harrowing Ordeal was right in front of him now, but the scabbed equine didn’t stop moving, starting to circle him slowly. “Isn’t it obvious? After all, your current predicament is predicated on you being Our Dark Lady’s champion. If you surrender that distinction, then the entire burden falls away. It becomes the responsibility of whomever receives it. And fortunately for you,” Harrowing Ordeal stopped right behind him then, but Lex didn’t bother turning to look at him, facing forward as the taller stallion leaned in close, “there’s someone right here who can take it from you.”
Lex’s answer came with a snort of contempt. “I find that answer lacking, and certainly not worth recompense.” With a thought, the gems he’d been holding were dropped back into his saddlebag. “I have no intention of giving this power away.”
“A pity,” answered Harrowing Ordeal, moving back from where he’d been leaning over Lex’s shoulder.
“I disagree,” shot back Lex, still not bothering to turn around. “And if you have nothing else to offer, then we’re done.”
“Oh, but you misunderstand,” came Harrowing Ordeal’s voice, now a silken purr. The sound was enough to finally get Lex to glance back over his shoulder at the creature. “When I said you should give that power to me, I wasn’t saying that you should do it voluntarily.”
The words were immediately followed by the scabbed stallion turning his head to the side and breathing another cloud of roiling black smoke. But the vapors didn’t fall over Lex; instead, they were directed off to the side, forming a thick patch of smog just wide enough that it cut off his view of Aria…and her view of him. No, Lex realized a second later. Her view of both of us. That had been why Harrowing Ordeal had circled him; it had been calculating the positioning it needed to obscure Aria’s view of them both. He knew that she wouldn’t dare use any area-affecting spells when we’re this close, and that the smoke would make it hard for her to use any single-target spells. But he’d also seen that the cloud of smoke wouldn’t last very long – it had dissipated just a few seconds after he’d breathed it into Aria’s face – which meant that it was planning to act quickly…
Sure enough, a glance back showed that Harrowing Ordeal had already fallen into a crouch, preparing to leap at him, one hoof raised in preparation for a punch that was clearly meant to cave in his skull. “Don’t blame me for this,” snickered the stallion. “It's your fault for bringing me here when you’re too weak to defend yourself!”
Across the plaza, Lex could hear Aria calling his name in alarm, followed by the sound of her coughing as she tried to force herself to sing. Her hooves could also be heard, frantically pounding the cobblestones, and Lex knew that she was trying to move so that she could get Harrowing Ordeal back in her sights. He also knew that there was no way she’d be able to make it before the creature threw itself at him, and that in his current state there was no chance that he’d be able to fight the larger equine off; even casting his remaining attack spell – the one to seal a target in a prison of ice, letting the supernatural cold freeze the victim to death if they were unable to break free – would take too much time to enact before the scabbed stallion reached him.
Lex had let himself be cornered, and now he was completely out of options. But as Harrowing Ordeal started to move, Lex did the only thing that he could.
He laughed.
Aria struggled to keep her voice steady as she chanted the words to a spell, fighting down the rising urge to cough as she made herself rush laterally across the plaza, trying to get Lex and Harrowing Ordeal back into view. Her magic missile spell wasn’t very strong, but it was guaranteed to always hit the target, but only if she could see the person she was aiming at! I just need to get his attention, she told herself, fighting down a rising tide of fear. If he sees that I’m the bigger threat, he won’t have time to hurt Lex! Unless he had some way of resisting her magic, or had used his own to turn invisible, or-
The sound of Lex’s laughter – his voice filled with confidence – stopped her in her tracks, a sudden sense of hope and relief rushing through her. She barely noticed as her spell died on her lips, the cloud that Harrowing Ordeal had breathed dissipating a second later. As it did, she could see that neither stallion had moved, with Lex still glancing back over his shoulder at Harrowing Ordeal, who was still tensed, as if poised to leap.
Except…something was wrong with the scab-covered stallion. As Aria watched, his limbs shook lightly, and a low groan of effort came from his throat, as though from exertion. A second later he relaxed his posture with a grunt, stumbling away from Lex. “Wh-what’s going on?!” he yelped, and all of the posturing was gone from his voice now, replaced with fear and anger. “What did you do to me?!”
Lex laughed again, turning to face the larger stallion directly. “I summoned you, you fool. You’re only on this plane because my magic brought you here. Did you really think I hadn’t made use of any safeguards when I did?”
He took a step forward then, and Harrowing Ordeal took a corresponding one back, a look of panic crossing his face. “What safeguards?” he spat. “You didn’t summon me into any containment spells or magic circles!”
“I didn’t need to,” scoffed Lex. “I simply made sure that the ritual I used to bring you here built restrictions into the nature of your summons. While you’re here, you can’t make any vigorous motions. You can’t use any magic. And you can’t leave the immediate area.” The smile that crossed his lips then was wholly mocking. “Of course, building such heavy restraints into the spell meant that there was only a little power left for the actual summoning, assuring that only a pathetic weakling would arrive. Hence why you were the one to answer the call.”
“Bastard!” Harrowing Ordeal’s invective was filled with impotent rage and mounting horror. “You tricked me!”
“You brought it on yourself,” shot back Lex scornfully, continuing to advance on the retreating stallion. “Everything you just said about escaping the Night Mare’s demand by turning the power she gave me over to another was a lie, wasn’t it?”
“It would have been true enough after I killed you!” Harrowing Ordeal was rapidly running out of room as he continued to retreat from Lex, already nearing the edge of the plaza. “Once you were dead, you wouldn’t have had to worry about it anymore, and I’m sure Our Dark Lady would have let me take your place!”
“I suppose death would have relieved me of my obligation to the Night Mare,” agreed Lex, “but you’re even stupider than I thought if you actually believe that she’d give a cowardly imbecile like you anything.” He stopped moving forward then, and Harrowing Ordeal likewise came to a halt, his back almost against one of the buildings ringing the plaza. “And since I seem to recall that the Night Mare holds mercy to be a sin,” continued Lex, “and I have no wish to antagonize her even further, I believe it’s time to bring this conference to an end.”
He looked over at Aria then, his face as casual as if he were reviewing the camp’s food supply. “Kill him.”
Maybe it was a coincidence, but Aria felt the persistent cough that had been plaguing her suddenly clear up, and she grinned evilly as she looked at Harrowing Ordeal. “With pleasure!” she chuckled, before raising her voice in musical chant…
“No, wait! WAIT!” wailed the larger stallion, all pretense of defiance gone now. Almost panting in fright, he looked back at Lex. “We can still honor our original agreement! There really is a way you can give the Night Mare what she wants and still keep your mares!”
“Lies,” snorted Lex.
“It’s not a lie!” yelled Harrowing Ordeal, his voice shrill with fear as Aria continued to chant. “I swear it! I swear it in the Night Mare’s name!”
Lex held out a hoof toward Aria then, and knowing what he wanted from her, she cut off her chant with a sigh of disappointment, having badly wanted to kill that disgusting piece of garbage. “Speak,” ordered Lex, giving Harrowing Ordeal a baleful look. “Quickly.”
“Slavery!”
“Hm?”
“The answer is slavery!” Harrowing Ordeal looked between Lex and Aria, making sure that the former hadn’t given the latter the go-ahead to resume her spellcasting. “The Night Mare wants you to give up your relationship with your mares, right? So all you need to do is replace it with a different type of relationship! You’re already lovers, so you can’t just marry them or call them concubines or some other designation that subsumes that same bond. But if you strip them of their personhood and make them your property, well, owners can value their possessions however they want, even to the point of using them for personal gratification! So you make the sacrifice the goddess wants, you can still enjoy your girls, and you’re even demonstrating her tenets of how the weak are dominated by the strong! It’s the perfect solution!”
Silence fell over the plaza, with Lex and Aria staring silently at the cowering stallion. Finally, Aria looked over at Lex and spoke. “Please say I can kill him.”
“Hey, come on!” Harrowing Ordeal’s voice took on a slightly indignant tone, though it might have been to cover up a whimper as he looked back at Lex. “I gave you the answer you wanted!”
Lex hesitated for a moment, and Aria licked her lips in anticipation. But she couldn’t help but give a groan of disappointment a second later as Lex – his visage darkening as he gave the scab-covered stallion a hateful glare – telekinetically opened his saddlebag and withdrew the gemstones from before. With a careless toss, he threw them at Harrowing Ordeal’s hooves. “Take them,” he snarled. “And be glad I’m allowing you to live.”
“Yes! Of course!” Almost collapsing with relief, Harrowing Ordeal immediately began to gather up the gems, holding them in a small pile against his chest. Now that the threat of imminent death had passed, his poise began to recover, his smile returning as he looked back at Lex. “You know, I think we can work well together, you and I. It’s clear to me now that my power is nothing compared to yours, and since I’ve learned my lesson you’ll find that I can be a reliable-”
He didn’t get a chance to finish, as Lex made a single sharp gesture, barking a word of power. Instantly, the space around Harrowing Ordeal warped and bent, and in an instant the stallion – and the gems he’d been cradling – were gone.
Aria let out a huff. “You should have let me kill him.”
“You couldn’t have,” answered Lex after a few seconds, absently staring at where the monstrous equine had been. “The magic I used to summon him here wouldn’t have allowed for that to happen.”
Frowning, Aria cocked her head. “Say what now?”
“I distorted the facts about how the ritual I used to bring that creature here worked, in order to convince that treacherous thing to answer my question honestly,” replied Lex, his voice distracted.
Despite herself, Aria couldn’t help but feel curious. “Distorted how?”
The question seemed to bring Lex back to himself, and he sighed as he glanced over at her. “I knew that any entity from the Night Mare’s realm would be dangerous to interact with, particularly in my present condition, so I made sure to take that into account when designing the summoning ritual back at the train station.” He gestured idly toward where Harrowing Ordeal had been. “Specifically, by introducing multiple flaws into the ritual’s functionality.”
Aria raised a brow. “Flaws?”
Lex nodded. “In addition to deliberately reducing the amount of energy utilized by the ritual, therefore making it unable to summon anything truly powerful, I likewise compromised the ritual’s functionality so that whatever creature was called would only barely be able to maintain its presence in this realm.”
“Okay,” said Aria slowly, starting to become lost. “So what does that have to do with why I couldn’t kill that ugly creep?”
“I just told you,” replied Lex. “The ritual only barely brought that creature here. Any disruption to his mode of existence on this plane would have immediately sent him back where he came from. Hence why he couldn’t move vigorously, use whatever magic he had, or even move very far from the local region of space-time where he was called. That was why he couldn’t leave this area and why the summons would have expired on its own in a few minutes if I hadn’t sent that thing back. Naturally, this also applies to any damage that he might have suffered. Whatever you did to that disgusting creature would have accomplished nothing except to return him to his home realm.”
Aria processed that for a moment. “Okay, I think I get-, wait…so you’re saying that Fugly Grossout there could have left whenever he wanted if he’d just done some pushups or something?”
“Fortunately, he was too stupid to realize that,” snorted Lex. “He felt the strain against his existence here when he tried to attack me, but didn’t understand that if he’d kept pushing against it, he would have disrupted the magic and sent himself back where he came from.” He scowled then, a sour look crossing his features. “It was just one of several ways in which he was an utter imbecile.”
“Right.” Aria rolled her eyes, remembering Harrowing Ordeal’s “solution” to Lex’s current dilemma. Most guys, she knew, would jump at the idea of having their own harem of sexy slave-girls. But Lex? He’d never do it, not in a million years. But that meant…
“We’re going back,” announced Lex, an audible the note of dejection slipping into his voice. He didn’t bother to look back at her as he started trudging back toward the camp.
If he had, he would have seen the thoughtful look on Aria’s face as she followed him.
Lex turned the word, in all its myriad implications, over in his mind as he trudged back toward the camp. That he was able to do so in peace was mildly surprising; he’d fully expected Aria to make her opinion on Harrowing Ordeal’s “solution” known to him, loudly and repeatedly, during the trip back. But save for the soft sound of her hooffalls behind him, the former Siren was silent, leaving him to his thoughts.
There was, Lex knew, no reason to take Harrowing Ordeal at his word. The scabrous equinoid had, in the few minutes that he’d known him, shown himself to be utterly untrustworthy. It wasn’t unthinkable that he had been lying – or perhaps omitting pertinent information – when he had said that enslaving the girls would fulfill the Night Mare’s demands while still allowing for a relationship with them. But Lex had to admit that, if it was a lie, it was a compelling one; as Harrowing Ordeal had noted, that course of action not only satisfied all parties’ interests, but it was also perfectly in line with what Lex knew of the Night Mare’s tenets about the relationship between those who ruled and those who were ruled.
In fact, it lined up with her dogma of dominance a little too well, leaving Lex with the uncomfortable notion that the goddess had deliberately engineered this very outcome. For all that he’d done a poor job evangelizing her religion, Lex was aware that the Night Mare saw him as some sort of living embodiment of the virtues – or at least some of the virtues – that she extoled, similar to how he saw her as epitomizing the mindset and disposition necessary to be an effective leader. For him to dominate others to the point of owning them outright, the same way he did his cloak or his circlet, would no doubt bring him further into alignment with that.
But that was a condition that Lex simply couldn’t bring himself to accept. Even if he hadn’t been concerned about demonstrating his legitimacy to rule, that would have been true. Because although the commoditization of people had, at the macro level, numerous benefits – the economic advantages of a workforce that didn’t need to be paid, for just one example, were enormous – it was also hideously immoral.
A foundational aspect of the ethical framework that Lex had devised was the concept of the moral community, a classification whereby a sapient entity was understood as having personhood. That designation entitled all who fell under it to the recognition that they had certain inherent rights. While some of those rights could be abrogated by a legitimate authority, though only under extremely specific situations and in extremely specific ways, others could not be justly violated under any circumstances. One of the latter rights was that, once an individual was recognized as belonging to the moral community, that recognition could not be rescinded…not unless their fundamental mode of existence had undergone such an extreme alteration that they were, for all intents and purposes, a different being altogether. Hence why slaying the ghouls had been acceptable even though killing ponies could never be allowed.
Certain races were automatically part of the moral community. Others, such as the sahuagin, were not, though in theory exceptional individuals could potentially earn that recognition. But whether by circumstance of birth or demonstration of merit, another inviolable right accorded to those who were recognized as people was that they could not be considered property. That was because property was understood to carry a quantifiable economic value – having a price that could be measured in terms of goods, services, and/or currency – that measured its worth, whereas people were necessarily held to be manifestly beyond what any such scale could assess.
Of course, Lex knew what the Night Mare would say to that. To her, the only salient consideration with regards to moral philosophy was that it – like all other aspects of a society – needed to be imposed and enforced by those with the strength to do so in order to function. As far as she was concerned the demonstration of that level of might was sufficient; what it was used for didn’t matter. The orthogonal relationship between her amoral view of rulership and his own morally-righteous take on the issue was, Lex knew, the major point of friction between them…but it was still far better than the irresponsible principles that Equestria’s princesses adhered to. The Night Mare held that his philosophy was, unto itself, no better or worse than anyone else’s; Celestia and Luna, on the other hoof, rejected it outright.
But he had already dealt with the latter two. Now he needed to find a way to deal with the unreasonable demand that the former had placed on him. The wire around his hoof was still growing tighter…
For a brief moment Lex was tempted to try another summoning. It wasn’t implausible to think that calling up another creature from the Night Mare’s realm could yield a new insight into the situation. But after a few seconds’ consideration, Lex discarded that idea. With no mundane gems left to spend in exchange for answers, he’d be forced to trade away one or more of his magic items instead. By itself that wasn’t unacceptable, but in conjunction with how there was no guarantee that a better answer would be received, it began to seem less and less like a good idea, not when he felt sure he’d need those magic items in the future.
But worst of all was the level of risk involved. Another summoning ritual would require another half-hour of precise gestures and chants, and Lex knew full well that it he was in no condition for such a thing, not when he’d tripped over a rock just getting here. That he hadn’t botched the ritual that had called Harrowing Ordeal had been nothing short of astonishing, as well as being the only thing that had saved him from that creature’s perfidy. To make another attempt now would be to do more than merely court disaster. It would all but guarantee it.
Which meant that there was no other alternative but to work with what he had…
Lex continued to brood the entire way back, with Aria remaining uncharacteristically silent the entire time. It was only when they’d made it, not just back to the camp, but all the way to the train station when she finally spoke. “You should get some rest.”
Lex frowned at that, but didn’t argue. The statement struck him as being uncharacteristically sentimental of her, but he was in no position to say that it was bad advice. Not when he’d been forced to conclude the very same thing. At the very least, it would allow him to recover his dark magic, as well as the smattering of divine spells that the Night Mare had granted him.
Even so, Lex glanced around before answering. The eastern sky was only just barely beginning to lighten, indicating that dawn was still a little while off. And while it was difficult to see, Lex felt fairly confident that the dark spot in the harbor was River’s boat. The ponies piloting it had put the anchor down in the harbor rather than docking at night. Given how the waterborne monsters plaguing Vanhoover had been decisively sent back to their own plane, whereas the ghouls were still only presumably exterminated, Lex didn’t blame them for their caution. But it still meant that they wouldn’t be here for a little while. “I agree,” he said at last.
Aria muttered something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “no kidding,” but Lex didn’t bother to say anything as he dragged himself inside the station.
To his mild relief, Nosey and Sonata hadn’t awoken in his absence, the pair lying exactly where he’d left them. It was with no small sense of bitterness that he slowly climbed back onto the bench – an effort that felt only slightly less difficult than scaling a mountain – and lay back down, doing his best not to disturb either of the slumbering mares. Unless some epiphany came to him when he woke up, this would likely be the last time the four of them would do this.
A moment later he felt Aria settle on top of him, and Lex let out a sigh. He knew his dreams would be as unpleasant as ever, or perhaps even worse, and that his left foreleg would be hurting even more by the time he woke up. But with how tired and hurt and demoralized he felt right now, that was still an improvement.
Closing his eyes, Lex immediately fell asleep.
Two hundred ninety-eight…two hundred ninety-nine…three hundred.
Having counted out five minutes, Aria lifted her head from Lex’s chest, waiting to see if he reacted to her moving. When his breathing didn’t change, she slowly climbed off of him, stepping carefully down off the bench when he continued to show no sign of stirring. She hadn’t thought that he would, with how hard he’d been pushing himself, but she didn’t want to take any chances.
Carefully, she reached out a hoof. “Blondie,” she whispered, poking Nosey lightly. “Wake up.”
It took two more tries before the unicorn mare began to stir. “Nngh…huh? What’s-”
“Shh.” Putting a hoof over Nosey’s lips, Aria shook her head. “Be quiet. You might wake Lex up.”
Blinking, Nosey nodded once, waiting for Aria to withdraw her hoof before sitting up slowly. “What’s going on?” she whispered. “Is everything alright?”
Aria ignored the question. “I need to talk to you. Help me with Sonata.”
Frowning in confusion, Nosey climbed down from the bench and followed Aria as the former Siren went over to her sleeping sister’s side. “What do you…”
But her question fell by the wayside as Aria grabbed Sonata under her forelegs and began to bodily haul her off the bench. “I said help me,” she grunted quietly, nodding toward Sonata’s hind legs.
More confused than ever, Nosey nevertheless did as she was told, grabbing Sonata’s lower half and lifting her up. “Shouldn’t we just wake her up?”
Aria snorted. “She doesn’t wake up easy, and when she does she’s isn’t quiet. Now c’mon, let’s get her outside.”
A minute later the two of them were on the station platform, carrying Sonata away from the door after Nosey gingerly closed it. “Now what?” asked the newsmare.
Giving her a pointed look, Aria abruptly released Sonata, letting her hit the platform with a thud. The impact caused her eyes to open immediately. “Earthquake!” she yelped, limbs flailing and causing Nosey to let her go as well. “Watch out! There’s runaway slinkies and exploding sodas! We-”
“Be quiet!” snarled Aria, getting right in Sonata’s face. “You’re going to wake everyone up!”
“Well yeah!” huffed Sonata, her thrashing legs pausing as she gave Aria an indignant look. “There’s, like, an emergency going on!”
“Sonata, it’s okay,” giggled Nosey. “There’s no earthquake.”
Blinking, Sonata looked around, slowly getting to her hooves. “There isn’t?” She poked the ground suspiciously, waiting for several seconds. “Huh. I could have sworn I felt a big thump before.”
Aria rolled her eyes, looking at Nosey. “Give her another minute or two and she should get around to asking why she’s outside now.”
“Oh that is like, so false,” retorted Sonata automatically. “For your information, I, like…hey, wait a second…” Her sister’s words seemed to reach Sonata’s brain then, her eyes widening and turning her head to and fro as she realized she’d woken up in a place other than where she fell asleep. “Why am I outside now?”
“Aria brought us out here,” answered Nosey, fighting down the urge to laugh.
“Oh.” Sonata blinked, needed a few seconds to digest that. “How come? And come to think of it, how come Lex isn’t out here with us?”
The question was enough to make the last of Nosey’s humor at Sonata’s antics fade, turning to look at Aria. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“About that.” Aria let out a sigh, sitting down. “I need to tell you two about what just happened…”
Closing her eyes, River took a deep breath and silently counted to ten before exhaling. “What problem, Trotsworth?”
“I’m afraid that we don’t have sufficient provisions to stock your yacht for the journey to Las Pegasus,” replied the old stallion apologetically.
This time River had to count to twenty before she trusted herself to speak. “We’ve been preparing for this journey since yesterday evening,” she muttered darkly. “How did nopony realize this before now?” She didn’t look at Trotsworth as she spoke, instead glancing out the window of her master bedroom again. The sun was still at a low angle, having only recently cleared the mountains, but the fact that it was still up and she wasn’t ready to leave filled River with a vague sense of dread. Looking in the direction of that ghastly camp, she half-expected to see Lex Legis stalking toward her manor, his eyes glowing with rage over her not having left for Las Pegasus yet. This is my chance to prove myself, she hissed inwardly, and it’s already going wrong!
“The fault was mine, Madam.” Even without looking at him, River could almost hear Trotsworth bowing. “I was preoccupied with making sure the staff fulfilled your instructions regarding the accoutrements you needed for your errand. It was only after those tasks were completed that I had them focus on more quotidian preparations, at which time we noticed the shortage.”
Despite her displeasure, River couldn’t help but give a wry smirk at Trotsworth’s consummate professionalism.
After Lex had ordered her to go to Las Pegasus and bring several of its richest ponies back to Vanhoover, she’d rushed back to her manor – stopping only to gawk in horrified fascination when the day had turned into nighttime for several minutes – and ordered her staff to start making preparations. Naturally, those preparations had focused around what she’d need in order to complete the task she’d been given. Outfits and accessories needed to be prepared. Jewelry needed to be polished. Her cosmetic supplies needed to be examined to see which of them were still viable after so many weeks of neglect. And that was just to start…
If she’d had her wish, River would simply have taken whole of her ensemble with her and spent the journey figuring out what she’d need most. But that simply wasn’t possible. Even if she hadn’t sold her original yacht back in Las Pegasus – buying a smaller one and using the leftover bits from the sale to maintain her lifestyle there for a little while longer – there wouldn’t have been enough room for all of her “implements of elegance,” as she liked to think of them.
That meant that she needed to choose what she did take with extreme care. None of her finery existed in a vacuum; not only were certain items only appropriate for certain situations, but they also needed to account for what other items would complement them, and she needed to tailor them to the specific tastes of each pony she’d be trying to convince to come back with her! All of which meant that the limited space on her yacht gave her almost no margin for error. Wearing her coquelicot dress without bringing the currant perfume and diamond earrings both would make it utterly impossible for her to show her face at the Palace of Prance, for instance, and River knew full well that’s where she’d have the best chance of meeting with Razzle Dazzle, since the old nag loved to watch everypony oohing and aahing over her showgirls there. But if she ran into her on one of her outings at the Emerald Feather, then River knew she’d have to be wearing her eburnean gown with her onyx necklace and essence of lilac. Anything else would make her look like a rube, putting her at a disadvantage right from the start…or at least, even more of one, considering she’d had to withdraw from Las Pegasus’ social scene a few weeks prior when her money had begun to run out. And everypony knew it, too, she remembered bitterly. Hence why it had been absolutely necessary to have her staff spend most of last night helping her figure out what to take.
And there was Trotsworth, graciously blaming himself for the fact that her preparations had resulted in such a glaring oversight only being discovered at the last minute.
Never one to let a servant show more poise than her, River forced herself to calm down, making sure her features were composed as she turned away from the window to regard her head butler. “Would reducing the size of the staff that I’m taking with me compensate for the lack of provisions?”
Trotsworth maintained his bow. “I’m truly sorry, Madam, but I fear it wouldn’t. The bare minimum you’d need to pilot the yacht and see to your needs would be a half-dozen ponies, and even that would require more food than we can supply for a journey of that length.”
River held back a wince at that. Showing up with so few ponies in her service would make her a laughingstock in the eyes of Las Pegasus’ elite. Not to mention it would be almost impossible to keep the ones she convinced to come back with her adequately staffed with such a small number of servants. Especially given that the trip from there to Vanhoover wouldn’t be a quick one, since a yacht was built for comfort rather than speed.
“We’ll withdraw some bits from one of my financial institutions before we leave,” decided River after some hesitation. That wasn’t something she did lightly; even if there was a considerable chance that the ponies whose accounts she was raiding were no longer among the living, River hated the thought of borrowing money against herself like this. Not to mention that it would throw off the figures in the ledger that she’d given Lex. But there was no other alternative, not if she wanted this mission to succeed. “I’ll use them to buy supplies in Tall Tale,” her lip twisted in a grimace at the name of that hick town, “and then again in Las Pegasus for the trip back.”
Trotsworth nodded, rising from his bow at last. “Very good, Madam. In that case, the preparations are finished. With your permission, shall we begin carrying your things down to the wharf?”
Despite herself, River glanced toward the window again. From this angle she couldn’t see the harbor, but she couldn’t imagine that whatever yokels Lex had let commandeer her yacht hadn’t arrived yet. “Yes,” she said at last. “Be ready to set out immediately after everything’s been loaded. I’ll take some of the staff with me to make a withdrawal from one of the midtown institutions.” Those were on the way to the harbor, so it wouldn’t take much time to pop in there and take what she needed.
Trotsworth nodded, but didn’t immediately leave, which was all the signal River needed. “Is there anything else?”
“Master Piggy has emerged from his self-imposed isolation.”
It was all River could do not to snicker, and although his expression didn’t change she felt sure that Trotsworth was doing the same. “Oh?”
“Indeed. He’s apparently realized that Princesses Celestia and Luna have elected to take their leave, and is quite pleased with himself for having evaded their notice.”
River rolled her eyes. He really was Mounte’s boy through and through. “How nice for him.” But her humor fell away as she remembered the lingering issue of that mare her son was apparently taken with. “If that Granola Bar tart, or anypony associated with her, shows up here…”
“I’m sure that Master Piggy will be indisposed should that be the case,” replied Trotsworth smoothly.
River nodded, only somewhat mollified. As disappointing as her son was, he could work up a head of steam about something when he had the mind to. Trotsworth might be able to play a shell game with anypony who tried to visit the manor while she was gone, but he was far too class-conscious to take more direct action. If her son was intent on going out to rendezvous with his little tramp, then there wouldn’t be much that her butler could do to stop him. But there simply wasn’t anything that could be done about that; taking Piggy with her to Las Pegasus was completely out of the question. When it came to operating in high society, her disappointment of a son was a liability through and through.
“However,” continued Trotsworth, dragging River out of her thoughts. “Master Piggy seems to have noticed all of the activity this morning, and is quite distressed at the notion that you’re leaving again.” He paused for just a moment before adding. “Perhaps you’d care to allow him to see you off?”
River almost dismissed the notion immediately, hesitating only because Trotsworth’s suggestions were always thoughtfully given. And, she realized a moment later, this time was no exception. At the speed her yacht traveled, the round trip to Las Pegasus and back would take a few weeks to complete, not counting the time she actually spent in the city itself. This would be her last chance to see Piggy until then…and despite how much of a letdown he’d become, the thought still sent a twinge through her chest, remembering how she’d felt when she’d realized that he could have died while she’d been gone. Besides, she told herself, shaking off the unwanted sentimentality that had gripped her, this will be a good chance for me to remind him why he shouldn’t fool around with some gold-digging nag from nowhere. “Very well,” she replied crisply. “Have him meet me in the foyer in ten minutes, along with a retinue to accompany us to the bank.”
“At once,” replied Trotsworth with another bow before turning and leaving.
River sighed, glancing out the window again. As before, there was no sign that Lex or somepony sent on his behalf was being sent to chastise her for her tardiness in departing. Taking that as a sign that she needed to calm down, River took another slow breath.
“With any luck,” she murmured to herself, “Piggy wanting to see me leave will be the only surprise I have to put up with on this little adventure.”
“Did we make it? Is everypony okay?”
“I think so. Gotta say though, that was more dizzyin’ than fallin’ off a crate of cider blindfolded in a thunderstorm.”
“Are you kidding? The Dizzitron at Wonderbolts Academy was worse than that!”
“I’m just glad it worked. That was my first time casting that spell to move between dimensions, and I couldn’t have pulled it off without using my alicorn magic. If something had gone wrong…”
“Now don’t ya start with all that frettin’ again, sugarcube. Ya ain’t never run across a spell ya couldn’t get a handle on before, and this time wasn’t any different.”
“Seriously! After everything we went through on Everglow, it’s kind of late to start doubting yourself now!”
“I know. I just wish that we’d been able to find Pinkie, Diamond Tiara, and Silver Spoon.”
“You ‘n’ me both…”
“Oh come on you two! I keep telling you, they’re fine! Knowing Pinkie, she’s probably taking them on a whirlwind adventure to try and find native Everglow cupcakes or something and that’s why they never met up with us.”
“I hope so…”
“Look, I feel more responsible than anyone for what happened to those three, but right now worryin’ ain’t gonna help nopony. Instead, we gotta trust that Pinkie can take care of herself and those fillies, while do what we can to help Princess Luna.”
“Now that’s what I’m talking about! So how about teleporting us straight to Vanhoover so we can kick Lex Legis’s butt and make him change her back!”
“I don't think that's a good idea. I've never been to Vanhoover before, and trying to teleport somewhere without a clear mental image of the location and layout of the destination is risky. Besides, Princess Celestia’s letter said that we should meet her and Luna in Canterlot. If we can figure out what Lex did to her and then undo it, we might not have to fight.”
“I hope you’re right, sugarcube.”
“Trust me, it’s going to come down to a fight. And when it does, Lex isn’t going to know what hit him!”
“…and so they were all like ‘no, this is our food!’ But I was like, ‘Nuh-uh! We saw it first, so back off!’ And Turbo was all ‘we should fall back ‘cause it’s gonna be dark soon’ and I was like ‘don’t be such a wimp, we can deal with these guys before the ghouls get here.’ And you could see that he was a big fraidy-cat, which is why I was the leader. So then those other ponies said that we should just split the oats, and Fencer was like, ‘no way!’ Which was because she knew I’d already said no, because I knew we could take those other ponies since even though they outnumbered us, a bunch of them were just a little older than foals, and-”
“You were very brave, sweetheart,” cooed River, fighting the urge to roll her eyes as she marched through Vanhoover’s barren streets. In truth, she found Piggy's stories about that pack of thugs he’d fallen in with after the city had flooded to be abhorrent. But letting him run his mouth about it kept him happy, which made him easy to deal with. This little detour to collect more bits was already putting her further behind schedule; if she reprimanded him he’d likely throw a tantrum about it and slow her down even more. Of course, that will probably happen anyway once I tell him to stay away from that no good Granola Bar nag, River knew. But there was no helping that; he couldn’t be allowed to ruin his future prospects by dallying with some ill-bred doxy.
Not that his ghastly tales helped those prospects either. “I know you’re very proud of how heroic you were, my little pumpkin, but remember that most ponies aren’t as courageous as you, so you shouldn’t tell such scary stories around them.” The words came out syrupy sweet, but her face was twisted in a glare, the expression directed at the pair of servants accompanying them, silently letting them know what would happen if they ran their mouths about Piggy’s antics. Servants lived for gossip, she knew, but when that gossip was about the ponies they worked for they needed to be reminded of what could happen if their lips ever became too loose.
Both stallions – dressed in butler uniforms reminiscent of Trotsworth’s and pulling the cart that River had ordered them to bring in order to transport the bits she’d be withdrawing – clearly received the message, gulping and making sure to keep their eyes straight ahead. The sight made River’s lips curl in a satisfied smile. She felt sure that most of Piggy’s stories were exaggerated, perhaps even made up entirely (though she doubted he had that vivid an imagination), but while she was sure that most ponies who knew her son would be inclined to dismiss his tales as the ravings of a blowhard, it was still better to keep his little anecdotes under wraps in the first place.
Riding in the back of the cart that the butlers were pulling, Piggy grinned, cognizant of nothing but his mother’s compliments. “You’re right, Mama,” he chortled. “It’s not everypony who can overcome so many dangerous things that the princesses start getting worried about them.”
River bit back a snort. Just yesterday her son had been hiding in his room, quaking in terror at the thought of Celestia and Luna punishing him for what he’d gotten up to after Vanhoover had fallen. Now that they’d left, Piggy was wearing that as a badge of honor, praising himself for not only having outfoxed the princesses by avoiding their scrutiny but bragging about what a dangerous pony he’d become that they’d personally come to investigate him. It was hilarious, especially since he apparently had no idea what had happened between Lex and the princesses, his isolation having left him completely ignorant of the fact that Luna had lost her status as an alicorn or even that Celestia had lowered the sun when they’d left the city. The bliss of staying locked in your room with the blinds drawn and hiding under the bedcovers, she thought sarcastically.
“But I can still tell you all my stories, right Mama?” Piggy didn’t wait for an answer before launching into another tale. “Like, there was this one time when we had to go looking for a new place to hole up in, and I was the one who found a great one! See, we were walking through this store, and dumb old Hopscotch walked across some floorboards and nothing happened, but when I walked across them I could tell they were hiding something by the way they broke underneath me…”
He kept going, but River mentally tuned him out, her long years of experience with self-important members of high society letting her react on autopilot, nodding and making approving grunts or short statements of praise without really thinking about it. Instead she turned her thoughts back toward her imminent trip to Las Pegasus, mentally calculating how much money she’d need to borrow from her bank. Idly, she couldn’t help but note how this was the first fiscal investment she’d be making in the nascent regime that Lex was surely forming. It was yet another mark of just how thoroughly she’d entangled herself with his plans, and how much her own fortunes now depended on his success…
Lost in her own thoughts, it was only when one of the butlers gave a loud cough that River looked up. The stallion nodded toward the building in front of them. “We’re here, Madam.”
“Good,” nodded River, walking briskly toward the front entrance. “Now come along, we’re already running late.”
“Wait Mama!” Jumping down from the back of the cart, Piggy trundled out in front of her. “Ghouls can hide in places like that! We should send these two inside to make sure it’s safe first!”
Ignoring the horrified looks on the butlers’ faces, River scoffed. “Sweetheart, Lex disposed of all of those ghoul creatures. You told me the story of how he did it yourself, remember?”
Piggy pouted, both at being contradicted and at his Mama complimenting someone who wasn’t him. “He might not have gotten them all,” he frowned. “Besides, Lex didn’t really do anything in that fight! That big magic can opener of his did most of the work! He just sorta collapsed and let his mares take care of the ones it missed-”
“Piggy!” River’s sharp rebuke silence her son immediately, much to her relief. Although she knew it was unacceptable to show fear in front of her servants, River couldn’t help but glance left and right nervously. To her, Lex’s wrath was far more frightening than some zombies or whatever they were.
Satisfied that Piggy hadn’t brought the unicorn wizard’s wrath down on them, River turned her attention back to her son. His lip was already quivering from being chastised, his eyes filling with tears. Sighing internally, River made herself smile gently at him. “Sweetheart, you shouldn’t say such bad things about Lex. He’s worked very hard for our city, and I’m planning on working with him very closely in the future. He’s Mama’s very important business partner, understand?”
“But-”
River’s smile tightened. “Understand?”
“…yes, Mama.”
“That’s my good little boy. Now, Mama needs to take out enough bits for her business trip, so why don’t you come inside and oversee the butlers while I check the bank ledgers, alright?”
“Okay,” huffed Piggy.
Giving a satisfied nod, River turned and trotted into the bank. Clicking her tongue at how distraught the interior was, with trash and debris strewn about haphazardly, she waited for the servants to unhook themselves from the cart and follow her inside, her son trailing them with a pout. “First I’m going to review the ledgers and account records,” she explained to the butlers, “then you two will begin unloading the vault at my direction.” She narrowed her eyes. “And if I even think that you’re helping yourselves to any of the bits here, then…” She paused for a moment, then smirked. “Then I’ll turn you over to Lex Legis, and let you see how he deals with thieves.”
Both stallions turned pale, quickly shaking their heads and quietly muttering assurances that they wouldn’t take anything. Even Piggy seemed a bit upset, though that might have been because he thought her threat meant that she didn’t trust him to oversee the help. Which I don’t, she thought wryly as she turned and trotted down a hallway.
River had made it her business to visit all of her family’s financial centers at regular periods, and had long since grown familiar with all of them. While the vault ledger would be stored in the vault itself, the account records would be in the bank manager’s office. Electing to start there, she grimaced at the foul odor permeating the hallway, raising a hoof to cover her nose as she found the door in question and indicated for one of the butlers to open it. It took him several tries, the flooding having warped the door in the frame, before he finally got it open.
The smell was worse inside, and River winced as she slowly stepped into the dark room. “Someone open that window,” she croaked.
“But it’s boarded up,” protested one of the butlers, looking like he was having a hard time keeping his lunch down.
“Then un-board it!” snapped River. “You’re a strapping young stallion, aren’t you?” Not waiting for a response, she stepped in, searching for the account records.
“What should I do, Mama?”
“Go find something to keep yourself occupied, Piggy. Mama’s busy right- aha! Here they are!” Finding what she was looking for, River lifted a small book from a pile of debris in one corner, paging through it intently as the butlers began went to work on the window.
Left with nothing to do, Piggy sat down at the desk in the corner. It took barely a minute for him to start becoming bored, and after five minutes – during which time the butlers managed to pry only a single plank from the window – the tedium became unbearable. In desperation, he started rooting through the desk drawers in hope of finding something to play with, or maybe even a snack, but there was no such respite to be found, as they contained only more books.
Fighting back a whimper, Piggy looked at his mother, but she was still engrossed in what she was reading, and he knew that they’d probably be there for a while. For a moment he thought about asking her when she’d be done, but he suspected that’d only make her angry at him. Ears folding back at the situation he was stuck in, Piggy picked up one of the books – a particularly thin folio – from the drawers, flipping through it.
A moment later, his eyes widened. “Hey, Mama,” he called. “Mama, listen to this. ‘June 15th. I don’t think help is coming anytime soon. It’s already more than a week, and even though the water’s gone back down, the city is still a disaster zone. Good Fortune went down to the harbor to see if there were any boats left. There weren’t, but he said he kept hearing small splashes in the water underneath the docks, as if something was swimming right beneath him…and that they followed him while he went up and down the wharf. He got spooked and ran out of there as fast as he could. I think the lack of food is getting to him.’ Ha! I bet that was one of those sea monsters! Did I tell you about them?”
River’s response was a noncommittal grunt, eyes still glued to her ledger. The butlers weren’t much better, focusing on getting the boards loose. Huffing at being ignored, Piggy flipped through the journal. “July 26th. We lost Past Tense today. We thought that those things wouldn’t attack while the sun was up, but two of them got him when he went into an alley to look for food. One minute he was there, looking at an old suitcase someone had dropped, and then suddenly the door in the side of the alley just burst open, those things rushing out and snatching him, carrying him back inside before we could do anything. I can still hear that last scream he made when they took him…”
Gulping a little at the vivid imagery, Piggy regarded the journal warily for a moment, not sure he wanted to keep reading. But a glance around showed that, while his mother was still glued to her accounts, both butlers were looking at him now, looks of fascinated horror on their faces. Not wanting to look like a wimp – he’d lived through this, after all – he flipped a few more pages and kept reading.
“August 6th. Me and Popup are the only ones left now. We’re taking refuge at the bank where I worked. I wanted to hide in the vault, but forgot until after we already got here that we’d be trapping ourselves inside with no air. Popup is angry at me. He’s angry all the time now. I think he blames me for Past Tense, but what could I have done? If I’d tried to save him, I’d have been killed too. It’s not fair. None of this is fair. I wish those ponies at the edge of town would let us leave. Why are they making us stay here like this? Why aren’t they helping us?”
At least that one hadn’t been so creepy. Going a few pages further Piggy tried another entry. “August 8th. My leg hurts so bad. I’m glad I got away from that monster, but I’m really starting to get worried by how deep this bite is. Popup says he can’t find any food, but I think he’s keeping it all for himself. I hate him. I hate this city and everypony in it. I feel sick-”
“These records are incomplete!” announced River suddenly, making Piggy jump. River barely noticed, however, instead giving the stallions an imperious glare. “Look for the rest of them, they should be here somewhere!”
“Um, Madam?” gulped one of the butlers, now thoroughly unnerved. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea? It sounds like-”
“Did I ask you for your opinion?” glowered River dangerously. When the butler gulped again and shook his head, she pointed to the other side of the room. “Search that closet. I’ll go through the rest of the papers in this pile.”
The butlers moved to obey, and Piggy sighed. Watching his mom punishing the help would have been a lot of fun. But since that wasn’t going to happen, he turned back to the journal, deciding to turn to the last entry, which was- “Hey!” he called, eyebrows rising. “This is from yesterday! Listen to this! ‘Popup left. I hope he dies. I hope the monsters get him, and he screams just like Past Tense did when they eat him. I’m getting worse. I feel sick all the time now. Everything hurts. I’m so hungry. I’m sleeping in the closet now in case the monsters break in. I-’ Wait…” Piggy blinked, looking at where the butlers were trying to open the closet door, then back at the journal, his beady eyes furrowing in confusion.
A second later he realized what was about to happen.
Before Piggy had a chance to open his mouth, the butlers wrenched the closet door open…and yelped in shock, stumbling backwards.
There was no mistaking that the stallion lying on the floor of the closet was dead. His complexion was sallow. His body was emaciated. His chest was still. His eyes stared upward at nothing…and then snapped over to peer at the ponies that had just freed him. “Hungry…” rasped the dead pony.
That was all it took for the butlers’ courage to break, and they both turned and ran for the door, screaming in terror. Piggy would have gladly joined them, but out of his peripheral vision he could see his mother was frozen in place, staring at the animate corpse with a look of uncomprehending horror on her face. Panicking, Piggy rushed over to her, grabbing the hem of her dress and tugging. “Mama!” he pleaded. “We gotta run!”
But she didn’t seem to hear him. “It…it’s true…” she croaked, staring at the dead pony – the ghoul – as it rose to its hooves.
The sight of the thing getting up prompted a very different reaction in Piggy. “WE GOTTA RUN!” he screamed. Running around to the opposite side of his mother, he shoved her toward the door with his head, sending her stumbling toward the exit as he kept pushing her. Just a few more feet…
“Hungry!” howled the ghoul suddenly. “I’m hungry!” Its declaration was followed by a surge of motion, barreling forward with a scream. It raised a hoof as it did so, and Piggy let out a scream of fright. Realizing that they weren’t going to make it in time, he reacted on instinct, grabbing River by the mane and yanking her backward, away from the charging monster and the way out.
But the ghoul’s attack hadn’t been aimed at them. As it brought its hoof forward, it struck the open door, slamming it closed and trapping the two of them in the room with it. “Hungry…” it hissed again, turning to face them.
River seemed to recover her senses then, turning pale as her eyes darted to the door and then to the monster between her and it. “No,” she muttered, starting to shake. “No no no!”
Piggy was already twisting his head around, wheezing as he looked for another way out. A second later, his eyes fell on the boarded-up window that the butlers had been trying to open. They’d only gotten a single plank removed, but there was no other exit, and it was with a frisson of desperation that he launched himself at the opening, grabbing the lowest of the planks covering the window and pulling with all of his might.
River, however, couldn’t take her eyes off of the monster barely ten feet in front of her. “Please,” she whimpered, backing up until her bottom hit the wall. “I-I can get you food. Fruits, vegetables, dairy products. Whatever you want…”
The ghoul’s smile was fiendish, licking cracked and bloodless lips with its desiccated tongue. “What I want,” hissed the undead pony, “is YOU!” The last word heralded an attack, springing forward and closing the distance between them in an instant. River’s scream barely got out of her mouth when a hoof cuffed her across the face, sending her staggering. Raising her forelegs in a reckless defense, she somehow managed to ward off a second blow, but the ghoul simply moved in closer, shrieking with joy as it sank its teeth into the soft meat of her leg.
This time River wasn’t able to scream. Nor was she able to wrench her leg away from the monster, despite the incredible pain as it clenched its jaw tighter. In blind panic, she tried to back further away from the creature, despite knowing that she was cornered, but her hind legs wouldn’t move either. Unable to move a muscle, River couldn’t do anything but watch in silent agony as the ghoul dug its filthy teeth deeper into her leg. Its bloodshot eyes shining with delight, she realized with a jolt of horror that it wasn’t going to kill her quickly. Despite being ravenous, it was clearly intent on savoring its meal, and tears spilled down her cheeks as she realized that it was going to devour her alive. Unable to bear the thought, River silently prayed for someone, anyone, to save her-
“MAMA!!! NOOO!!!”
Abandoning his attempts to pry the window open, Piggy reacted on instinct to the sight of his mother in trouble. Scooping up the one plank that the butlers had managed to pull loose, he threw himself forward, swinging it as hard as he could at the ghoul’s face. To his surprise, the blow struck home, tearing the monster’s teeth free of River’s leg and sending its head snapping around as it stumbled backward…by one step. Then, regaining its balance, the creature slowly turned to regard him, eyes narrowing as it bared its bloodstained teeth at him in a furious hiss.
His ears folding back in fright, Piggy shook all over as he raised his board in front of him. If it had been anypony else, he would have just let the ghoul devour them and used that opportunity to escape. Everypony in his old group would have done the same, he knew; no matter how bad they’d all felt about it afterward, that was just what it took to survive. But this was his mother. The one pony who had always believed in him. Who had always been nice to him. Who had been the first pony to come back to Vanhoover because she was worried about him. He couldn’t abandon her! “G-go away!” he yelled at the ghoul in what he hoped was a threatening voice. “Go away or I’ll…or I’ll clean your clock!”
But the ghoul didn’t look intimidated in the slightest. Instead it smacked its lips. “You,” it sneered, slowly stalking toward him, “look delicious.”
Piggy barely had time to blanch at that before the undead pony sprang into action, hurling itself at him with a snarl. Almost sobbing with terror, Piggy fell back, clinging tightly to his board as he used it to fend off the ghoul, abandoning all thoughts of attacking in favor of keeping it from getting him. It was more due to luck than skill that he managed to succeed, batting away the first hoof that came toward his face and managing to barely duck under a second, stumbling backward as the thing leaned in to try and bite him.
Giving ground, Piggy continued to retreat from the thing’s barrage, knowing that he couldn’t keep this up forever but not having any better plan. All he could do was wait for his mother’s paralysis to wear off – having learned during Vanhoover’s fall that it never lasted for more than a few seconds – and then hopefully they’d be able to run away. It was still daytime, so if they could make it outside the thing probably wouldn’t follow-
The ghoul’s next attack sent the board flying from his hooves.
Piggy had just enough time to take in the ghoul’s toothy smile, realizing that it had been deliberately aiming for his weapon in order to disarm him, before its other hoof struck him right in the face. For a moment he felt his limbs start to stiffen up, and it was with energy borne of terror that he thrashed, managing to stay in control of his body as he stumbled backward, somehow avoiding a snap of teeth that would have torn his throat out had it connected. Even then, he knew the monster would be on him in a moment.
Panicking, Piggy ran for the only cover he could find, scurrying around the large desk in the middle of the room where he’d been seated barely a minute before. Snarling, the ghoul started to follow him, and Piggy hurriedly moved opposite it, keeping the desk between them. Furious at how its meal was eluding it, the ghoul tried to dart the other way, but despite how he had already broken a sweat and was panting in between sobs of terror, Piggy refused to let it close the gap between then.
The ghoul came to a halt then, glaring at him, and Piggy belatedly realized that it was on the far side of the room again, near the closet where it had emerged from, leaving him standing almost right in front of his mother and across from the door back out into the hallway. C’mon, Mama! he pleaded silently, not daring to turn his head to see how she was doing. We’re both closer to the exit than the ghoul is! If she regained control of herself, she might be able to yank the door open and let them run before it could get to them!
But the only sound from behind him was River’s terrified breathing.
Wanting to cry at the unfairness of how long it was taking his mother’s paralysis to wear off, Piggy felt his heart freeze up at the evil grin that suddenly crossed the ghoul’s face. Worried that it was simply going to climb up onto the desk, Piggy’s brows furrowed in confusion as the thing began to leisurely move around it instead. Circling to keep the desk between them, Piggy tried to figure out what it was doing, until the ghoul turned its eyes back toward River’s immobile form. Piggy’s blood ran cold then, realizing that the ghoul knew exactly how to stop making him run away: it just had to go after his mother again!
This time, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to stop it. The piece of wood he’d been using as a weapon was on the far side of the room; trying to retrieve it would mean turning his back on the monster, which would either give it more than enough time to finish his mother off, or let it have a golden opportunity to get him from behind. But trying to stop it from hurting his mother bare-hoofed would be suicide. I need a weapon! he screamed silently. Something big! Something heavy! Something like…like…
Like a desk.
Not giving himself time to think, Piggy surged forward, throwing his weight against the heavy piece of furniture. It was a solid mass of wood, but Piggy was a heavyset stallion, slamming his rotund bulk against it with everything he had. Immediately, a loud scraping sound filled the room as the desk slammed into the ghoul, causing its sneer of triumph to dissolve into a look of shock as it was shoved backward and knocked into the wall, Piggy continuing to press against the desk to keep it pinned there. It worked!
But the ghoul was already struggling to free itself, and Piggy felt it push back on the other side of the desk. Gritting his teeth, he dug his hooves into the floor, straining to keep the undead pony contained. C’mon Mama! he thought desperately. I can’t hold this much longer! He could already feel his muscles straining, not used to this much activity. But a glance to the side showed that River was still unmoving.
Knowing it couldn’t be more than a few seconds before she was free, Piggy strove to keep the ghoul trapped. But although the creature’s body was gaunt it was still putting up a fierce struggle, and he clenched his teeth as the effort became more and more painful. Just a little longer! He just needed to keep going for a little longer!
But it was no use, and the ghoul broke free a second later.
Shoving the desk just far enough away to give itself room to maneuver, it clamored up on top of it with a roar of victory, flinging itself toward the fat little earth stallion that had caused it so much trouble. Exhausted and out of options, Piggy could do nothing except stumble backward, trying again to put some room between himself and the enraged monster. But his legs refused to work right after all the work he’d put them through, and he instead lurched to the side, colliding with the desk chair that he’d been sitting in before and knocking it over as the ghoul leapt at him. Barely able to scream, he tried to swing the chair up to hit it in mid-leap, but in his overtaxed state succeeded only in pulling wooden seat on top of himself, the ghoul landing on it a second later.
Piggy screamed as he felt the impact, writhing in a desperate effort as he tried to shake the thing off, knowing that it wouldn’t do any good-
“Piggy!”
“M-MAMA!” he shrieked. He wanted to scream for her to help him, certain that he was about to die, but for some reason that wasn’t what came out when he opened his mouth. “RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY NOW!”
“Pig-”
“RUN AWAY RIGHT NOW!”
“PIGGY! STOP!”
It was the first time he’d ever heard his mother raise her voice, and he obeyed the command without thinking. A second later it occurred to him that if he stopped struggling the ghoul would be able to reach around the chair between them and get him! Except…except it hadn’t done so already. Why…?
Cracking one eye open, Piggy shrieked as he saw the ghoul’s face mere inches from his own, and heaved the thing away, chair and all. Scrambling backward, it was only when the monster made no move to follow him that he looked at thing, trying to figure out what it was doing. What he saw made his eyes widen, coming to a halt as his jaw fell open in disbelief.
The ghoul was dead. Its wild leap had carried it directly onto the chair, causing three of the legs to pierce the thing’s torso. For a moment Piggy couldn’t believe it, certain that at any moment it was going glance at him, say something nightmarish, and start getting up. But as the seconds passed and it didn’t move, it slowly sank in that it was over.
“Piggy.” His mother’s voice made him jump, not having seen her move. Cradling her injured leg, she knelt down next to him, smiling shakily. “It’s okay. You got it. You won.”
“I…I did?” Dimly, as if through a fog, he tried to process what that meant. But he didn’t have a chance as he felt his mother reach out with her undamaged hoof and draw him into a hug.
For some reason, the gesture made his throat close up, his eyes filling with tears. “M-Mama!” he sobbed, hugging her back. Burying his face in her chest, he couldn’t keep himself from crying, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t remember the last time his mother had held him like this. “Mama!”
“It’s okay,” soothed River, despite the fact that she was crying too. “It’s okay. You did it. You saved me.”
Looking over at the monster her son had killed to protect her – the same son who had been too scared to sleep in his room for a week after he thought he’d seen a mouse under his bed, even after the servants had confirmed that it was just a crumpled wrapper from one of his candy bars – River couldn’t help but suddenly feel ashamed. Piggy had been trapped in a city full of monsters like that for weeks, while she had been relaxing in Las Pegasus the entire time barely giving him a second thought. He wouldn’t have survived without that gang of his, she knew. Whatever sort of ponies they were, they had kept her son alive, the same way he had kept her alive just now.
“Piggy?” She called softly when the worst of his sobbing had abated.
“Y-yeah, Mama?” he sniffled.
“When that mare you told me about, Granola Bar, gets back…I want you to introduce me to her.”
“Forget it, Sonata. It’s not like it’s a problem for us if blondie here isn’t on board with the plan. She’ll be the one who has to live with the consequences.”
“Aria, can you please stop being the worst for, like, ten seconds? Nosey, listen, I know this idea sounds kind of crazy, but if we don’t do this-”
“No, Sonata, crazy is a city filled with monsters! Crazy is the stallion I like beating the Royal Sisters in a fight! Crazy is having my first time be with him and my best friend and her sister all at once! This-”
“And here I thought Sonata had broken you in before Lex and I got to have a go at you.”
“Y-you know what I meant! That was all…that was one thing, but this…what you’re talking about doing…it’s just too much. I’m not like you two.”
“You-”
All conversation ceased as the door to the train station suddenly swung open, the motion heralded by the deep purple aura that surrounded the handle a half-second before it turned. A moment later Lex stepped through the opening, only to come to an immediate stop as he saw Aria, Nosey, and Sonata all frozen in place – the latter still with her mouth open in mid-sentence – and staring at him. Under other circumstances he would have wondered about the unusual degree to which they seemed cognizant of his presence, but at the moment he found it easy to make an educated guess as to the cause of their behavior. There had never been any chance that Aria would keep what she’d learned last night from them, after all.
But just because they knew what was about to happen didn’t mean that he knew what to say to them. Defying the Night Mare was a non-option, and enslaving the three of them was out of the question, which left only a single course of action, a conclusion that he was sure they had to have reached on their own. It was a subject that Lex had no idea how to broach, even though he knew he had to. “I want to elucidate-”
“Hey, look girls!” yelped Sonata, her voice slightly too loud. “It’s Lex!” Plastering a cheery smile on her face, she strode toward the stallion in question. “Did you sleep okay? You were so tired, I bet you feel like a million b-, WHOA!” Her grin was replaced by a horrified expression as she suddenly came to halt. “What happened to your leg?!”
Despite being glad for the change in subject, Lex’s expression darkened. Although the few hours of sleep that he’d gotten had ameliorated the worst of his physical impairments – and, more importantly, replenished his dark magic and divine spells – the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg had continued to constrict, to the point where the damage it was doing to him was now impossible for anypony to miss. His limb had become visibly constricted, the flesh bulging from between the loops of wire, and the blood running down his leg had reached the point that he now left a red hoofprint wherever he took a step.
But although it was both hideous and painful – his leg was now a source of constant agony, one which spiked whenever he put any weight on it – Lex’s pride demanded that he give those things only the barest acknowledgment. That, and downplaying the seriousness of his condition allowed him to spite, however barely, the goddess that had forced this situation on him. “A temporary condition brought about by the Night Mare’s impatience,” he snorted dismissively. “It will be gone once she’s been placated.”
“It still looks really bad,” murmured Nosey. For some reason she seemed to be having trouble meeting his eyes. “You should at least wrap some bandages around it or something.”
Lex frowned at the suggestion. “Our medical supplies are limited. Wasting them on a condition that’s both temporary and untreatable is-”
“Better than having everyone wondering why you’re walking around with your leg like that, isn’t it?” interjected Aria, her voice taunting. “I bet those kids from last night won’t hesitate to ask you what’s up with that.”
The withering look Lex gave her in response to that was about to be accompanied by a scathing rebuke, but he wasn’t given the chance as Feather Duster suddenly flew down onto the platform, her face pale. “M-Master Legis! There’s an emergency!”
Everything else fell away as Lex turned his full attention toward the distraught mare. “What’s happened?”
Feather pointed a wing toward the western end of the camp, where the medical tents were set up. “Miss Bank is hurt! She and her son were heading to their yacht, but they stopped to run an errand and were attacked by those ghoul things!”
“Wait, for realsies?!” gasped Sonata.
“Is she okay?” asked Nosey.
“I thought we destroyed all the ghouls?” frowned Aria.
But Feather Duster barely heard any of them, their questions reduced to so much background noise compared to the intense focus that Lex was currently directing toward her. Almost as oppressive as his anger, the sheer weight of the look on his face at that moment made her quail. “Give me River’s current location,” he demanded.
“With the doctors,” she responded immediately. “On the other side of camp.”
She had barely gotten the words out when Lex transformed into a shadow, causing her legs to tremble as the eyes pinning her in place became green and purple, peering at her from a mass of turbulent darkness. “Fetch your daughter,” he commanded her. “Have her meet me at the medical tents. Now!”
“She-” But Feather Duster didn’t have a chance to finish as Lex flew westward, the maid giving a shriek and flinging herself to the side as his insubstantial form passed within a few inches of her.
Watching him go, Aria could only snort. “Well, at least no one’s going to ask about his leg when he’s like that.”
“Should we go too?” Sonata glanced back and forth between Aria and Nosey, uncertainty written all over her face. “I mean, he didn’t say anything, but it kinda feels wrong to just hang out here until he comes back, you know?”
“You two should,” replied Nosey. “If there are more ghouls, Lex might need your help finishing them off again, especially since Severance isn’t here anymore.” Without waiting for them to say anything, Nosey went over to where Feather Duster was still cowering. “Listen, you seem pretty shaken up. How about you stay here and get ready to pass out food to everypony for lunch, and I’ll go get your daughter and bring her to where River is, okay?”
“Th-thank you,” gulped Feather, trying to control the cold shivers running down her spine. “But she’s already there.”
Nosey tilted her head. “She is?”
Feather nodded. “That’s what I was trying to say when Master Legis left. He spoke to her and her friends last night-”
Sonata perked up. “Oh yeah! Aria told us about that! He’s going to make them all into appendixes, right?”
Aria rolled her eyes. “Apprentices, you moron.”
“Right! That too!”
“Er, yes,” answered Feather hesitantly, before turning back to Nosey. “During the conversation, Cleansweep offered to use the magic her, um, spirit animal gave her to heal him. Lex refused, saying that she should save it for other ponies that were hurt. Since he’s not going to start teaching them until tomorrow, Cleansweep decided to follow Master Legis’s advice and go see if the doctors needed her help. Her friends went with her, and I followed to chaperone them. That’s how I knew that Miss Bank had been injured. We saw her being brought in.”
“Wow, so Lex totes called wanting her to save her magic, huh?” Sonata couldn’t help but give Aria a smug look, remembering how her sister had referred to Lex’s decision in less than glowing terms. “Guess we better hurry up and get there before he runs out of I-told-you-so’s.”
“Sit down you idiot,” snapped Aria. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Sonata blinked. “We’re not?”
“Of course we’re not,” huffed Aria. “Remember the plan?”
Feather Duster shifted nervously in place, not liking the sound of that. “Plan?”
Grimacing, Nosey forced a polite smile onto her face, looking at Feather. “Listen, lunch won’t be for a little while, and if your daughter is already where Lex needs her to be, then how about you, um…” She glanced around for a moment, before spotting the bloody hoofprints where Lex had been. “How about you clean up inside the station? It shouldn’t take very long, alright?”
Knowing that she was being dismissed, Feather Duster was only too happy to comply. “Of course. I’ll get started right now.” Needing no further prompting, she practically fled into the building, closing the door behind her without being asked.
Sighing, Nosey turned back toward the other two. “Aria, this really isn’t the time.”
“Yeah, it isn’t the time,” echoed Sonata as she looked at Aria.
“It’s going to be,” shot back Aria. “One way or another, Lex has to do that ceremony for the Night Mare, and soon. He can’t ignore that.”
“Right, he can’t ignore that,” nodded Sonata as she looked at Nosey.
“He will if there’s another ghoul invasion,” pressed Nosey. “You know he’d do it, no matter what the consequences. That’s why you two should be there, to make sure he doesn’t get carried away with doing the right thing. ”
“He might get carried away with doing the right thing,” admitted Sonata as she looked at Aria.
“Except the ghouls don’t come out during the day, remember?” Aria gave Nosey an unamused look. “So there’s no chance that he’ll need to deal with another huge army of them right now. And don’t repeat that!” she added, glaring at Sonata.
“Yeah, don’t repeat that!” repeated Sonata as she looked at Nosey.
“I am gonna pound you,” growled Aria, taking a threatening step closer to her sister.
Sonata just blinked. “What? What did I do?”
Normally her best friend’s antics would have set her to giggling, but at the moment Nosey wasn’t in the mood. “You do realize that Lex might just hold whatever ceremony he’s planning without coming back here first, right? If you’re serious about this you’re better off sticking close to him.”
“We’re better off doing this inside,” retorted Aria, pointing at the station, “where there’s no one else around to get in the way. And I seriously don’t think he’s going to try and pull some big speech or whatever off all by himself. He’s awful at talking to people and he knows it, which means he’ll come to us before he gets the ball rolling.”
“He might not,” insisted Nosey, before letting out a sigh of defeat. “Which means I better go make sure that he does, just in case.”
Sonata perked up, a hopeful look on her face. “Wait, so does that mean you’re on board?”
But Nosey shook her head, already heading towards the edge of the platform. “No. I’m sorry, but…no.”
“Fine,” snorted Aria. “Whatever. That’s on you, then. But you better not mess this up for the two of us, got it? If you tell Lex what we’re going to do…” She stamped a hoof, leaving the threat unspoken.
But Nosey didn’t give any sign that she was intimidated, not looking back. “I won’t.” Then, without another word, she hopped down from the platform and started galloping toward the medical tents.
Aria watched her go for several seconds before turning away from the retreating mare. “Stuck-up little nag,” she muttered, giving her mane a toss. “We should’ve put a spell on her to make sure she keeps her mouth shut.”
“I can’t believe she said no,” pouted Sonata mournfully.
“Oh please,” scoffed Aria. “She’ll change her mind, probably at the last possible second.”
But Sonata was still watching as her best friend galloped away. “No,” she murmured softly. “She won’t.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WERE THAT STUPID!” roared Lex.
Lying on the floor of her tent, it was all River could do to keep herself from shaking. The last time Lex had been this angry at her had preceded a curse that had utterly destroyed her quality of life. “I didn’t think-”
“I KNOW YOU DIDN’T THINK!” he screamed. “THAT’S PATHETICALLY OBVIOUS!” The roiling black cloud that was his body moved closer to her then, causing River to shrink back in fear. “Not only did you endanger yourself,” he hissed, his voice no less furious for its reduced volume, “to say nothing of the ponies you brought with you, but you put everypony else’s safety at risk as well! Did you not realize that each and every ghoul is a disease vector which could conceivably create a new plague?! That even a single bite can turn ponies into more of them, potentially starting a cascade like the one that destroyed this city?! Did you not realize that?!”
River felt her stomach twist at that, glancing down at her hoof. Although the bite marks from that undead monster were gone now, thanks to that pegasus filly with the snake – whom River had belatedly recognized as being, in a bizarre twist of fate, the daughter of that maid she’d browbeaten into serving Lex – the thought that she’d turn into a monster like that was still enough to terrify her. Fortunately, that didn’t seem likely now; the first thing Lex had done upon entering her tent (apparently having interrogated one of the doctors outside about the nature of her wound) was chant some sort of weird prayer to the Night Mare and then reach out to brush a tendril of shadow against her. He’d tersely explained that he’d cast a spell designed to remove an infection, before demanding that she tell him what had happened…and promptly blowing up once she had. “I…I thought that all of the ghouls were gone,” she whimpered. “You told me to take my yacht, and that meant going through the city, and you didn’t say to be careful or to take any escorts or-”
“OF COURSE I DIDN’T!” howled Lex, his voice stentorian again. “It’s one thing for you to make your way through the city’s most open thoroughfares in broad daylight! It’s another thing to go inside a building, which you’re apparently too dull-witted to realize is a high-risk area due to offering those monsters cover against the sun and plenty of places to hide!” His eyes glowed brightly enough that the green threatened to swallow his irises and pupils entirely, the purple contrails sprouting from the corners leaping higher. “I expected you to be smarter than this! That you could actually operate on your own without needing supervision! Instead, you’ve managed to court disaster before you even left Vanhoover! What do you have to say for yourself?!”
Despite how hard she was fighting to maintain her composure, River could feel herself breaking down. The terror and pain of what she’d gone through was still fresh in her mind, combined with the lingering fear of catching whatever horrible disease those ghouls had. The abuse that Lex was heaping on her now, combined with the fear of whatever punishment he was going to inflict on her, was simply too much, and she felt hot tears begin to slide down her cheeks. “I didn’t want to ask for help,” she sobbed, turning her face toward the wall of the tent. “I didn’t want to look like I couldn’t get the job done by myself.”
But far from calming Lex down, her weeping only seemed to enrage him more. “DO NOT CRY!” he thundered. The order was punctuated by a spike of black crystal erupting from the ground right beside River, the shock causing her to scream, much to Lex’s anger. “DON’T YOU DARE-”
“LEX!” Stepping into the tent, Nosey gave him a pleading look, making no attempt to hide that she was trying to placate him. “I think she gets the point.”
As gentle as the rebuke was, Lex still rounded on her in a fury. “Don’t even think to presume to tell me-”
“Everypony can hear you.”
The non sequitur threw him off. “What?”
Nosey gestured at the sides of the tent. “Everypony can hear you. The doctors, those kids, her son…everypony.”
“GOOD!” he snarled. “Since it’s apparently not obvious that Vanhoover is still a danger zone, then this should serve as-”
“That’s not what they’re hearing,” interrupted Nosey. “They’re hearing you picking on a helpless mare that almost died, and is already scared out of her mind.”
Lex’s eyes widened, and although they were his only visible features, the outrage and disbelief filling them was impossible to miss. “You can’t be serious!”
Nosey didn’t answer, instead giving him a helpless shrug before gesturing toward River. The mare in question had curled up into a ball, facing away from them both and shaking like a leaf. Her sobs filled the tent, audible despite how she’d buried her face in her hooves.
Long seconds passed before Lex finally broke the silence, looking at River. “I’m suspending your mission to Las Pegasus until the doctors give you a clean bill of health,” he snapped, voice still thick with anger. “Once that happens, you will clear any and all special preparations that you need to make with me prior to your departure. Is that understood?”
“Y-yes,” sniffled River pitifully.
With that, Lex turned and gave Nosey a dark look, as though upset with her for interrupting. “I have preparations to make,” he snapped, before turning and exiting the tent abruptly. Outside, the sound of hooves could be heard as everypony that had been listening to him dress River down suddenly scattered, not wanting to make it obvious what they’d been doing.
One set of hooves, however, came closer. “Mama?” whimpered Piggy, sticking his head past the tent flaps. “Are you alright?”
“Ah.” Hastily wiping her face, River managed to sit up slightly, giving her son a shaky smile. “I’m…I’ll be fine, my little butterball. I’m just tired, is all.”
Piggy nodded, but didn’t look particularly reassured. “I was gonna come in and tell that Lex guy to back off,” he offered timidly. “I mean, he’s nowhere near as scary as fighting one of those ghouls head on. But, um…” He paused, face scrunching up as he tried to come up with an excuse for why he hadn’t been there.
But River sat up, a serious look crossing her face. “Piggy, listen to me. I don’t want you to ever speak with Lex if you can help it, do you understand me? Don’t talk to him, don’t be in the same room with him, don’t ever have anything to do with him if you can help it. Is that clear?” She had a little more respect for her son after he’d saved her life, but that didn’t change the fact that he was an uncouth lout…and that Lex had a volatile temper.
“Good boy,” smiling wearily, River laid back down. “Now go tell Trotsworth that my business trip is going to be postponed for a few days. You can do that for me, can’t you?”
“I will, Mama! Right away!” Without another word, Piggy withdrew from the tent, and the sound of his hoofsteps could be heard receding into the distance.
Nosey, who had watched the entire exchange silently, gave River a smile. “Your son is a good boy.”
River’s reply came with a hollow laugh. “My son is a fat, crude boor.” She sighed a second later. “But he’s braver than I thought…even if he did use up all of his courage facing that ghoul.”
“When he’s mad, Lex is scarier than an army of ghouls.” Nosey’s smile turned wry. “Trust me, I say that having seen both.” She licked her lips before continuing. “That’s why I know what I’m talking about when I say that Lex isn’t mad at you.”
River turned to regard Nosey, incredulous. “Excuse me?”
“He isn’t mad at you,” repeated Nosey. “I know how it sounds, but it’s true.”
“Of course,” snorted River sarcastically, running a hoof over her tear-stained cheeks. “Between all the screaming and telling me how I put everyone in danger, it seems obvious that he wasn’t really all that upset.”
“He was afraid.”
When River gave her an incredulous look, Nosey kept going. “He covers it up with fury, but I’m telling you: what you just heard was Lex trying to deal with being frightened very badly by what happened to you.”
Under other circumstances, River would have found the idea that Lex was concerned for her welfare heartening. But at that moment she could only snort in disdain. “You don’t say?”
Nosey, however, seemed entirely unperturbed at River’s disbelief. “Did Sonata ever tell you about Cloudbank?”
River frowned. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but although she’d twice listened to Sonata give an unabridged accounting of Lex’s adventures – first when they’d met at the harbor, and second when Sonata had recounted Lex’s exploits to Princess Celestia – she couldn’t recall who that particular pony was. “I’m afraid I can’t quite recall.”
“What about Thermal Draft? Or C. Shells, Sandbar, or Turbo?”
“I’m sure I heard her mention those names, but I can’t remember the details.”
A wan smile crossed Nosey’s face. Even now, it felt good to be the one sharing information with someone else. “Before you arrived, Lex was concerned with the food supply here. He wanted to reestablish trade with the outlying villages, buying food from them. But in order to do that he needed money, and at the time he was too hurt to go collect any himself, so he sent those five into Vanhoover-”
“To take some from one of my institutions,” finished River. “I remember this now.”
“That’s right,” nodded Nosey, her smile falling away as she recalled what had happened next. She could still remember how it felt, being trapped in her own body as Xiriel toyed with those five, watching them try to work together to escape as she’d pleaded with the merciless devil to stop. But its only response had been to taunt her, making her watch as it used its magic-.
Swallowing, Nosey forced herself to stop thinking about that, taking a deep breath. Lex killed it. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back. “They all died there,” she croaked.
River blinked. “They did?” She couldn’t remember if she’d known that part; all she’d been focused on before was that Lex had succeeded in taking some of the bits from her bank vault, something which had upset her a great deal when she’d first heard about it.
“Yeah.” Reminding herself why she was telling this story, Nosey looked back at River. “They all died, and Lex blames himself for it. Not just because it happened on his watch, but because he was the one that sent them there.” She paused, letting that sink in. “They died after he sent them into Vanhoover in order to get money. And now you almost died, after he sent you into Vanhoover and you stopped to get money.”
River looked down, digesting that.
Satisfied that she’d gotten the message across, Nosey turned and left.
Still in shadow-form, Lex flew back toward the train station, his thoughts racing as he did. River’s brush with undeath made it clear that he needed to step up his efforts to reclaim Vanhoover. Although the Night Mare had told him that the ghoul army he’d slaughtered a few days prior had been the entirety of the city’s ghouls, there was clearly a loophole in that assurance: namely, that ponies who were still alive at the time she’d made that proclamation could – and, according to that journal that River’s son had found, at least one had – subsequently turn into those undead monsters.
That such a thing had happened was a damning indictment of his efforts to reclaim the city, Lex knew. Although he’d sent pegasi to fly over the city each day with instructions to loudly and repeatedly announce that the monsters infesting Vanhoover had all been dispatched and that the camp was now welcoming survivors – leading to a steady, albeit small, stream of ponies coming in from the city – it was clear now that there were some that were unwilling or unable to respond to those proclamations. That was not acceptable!
I need to send out a search and rescue squad, Lex decided as he approached the camp’s sole permanent structure. The thought was a bitter one, knowing that he couldn’t undertake that particular task himself. Aria was the only one with a spell that could locate particular types of creatures, be they ponies or ghouls, and she hadn’t been able to show him how it worked…though even if she had, without Severance he wouldn’t be able to prepare that spell anyway. That meant that she would have to be the nucleus of any team he sent into Vanhoover. And it would have to be a team. While Aria was a powerful spellcaster, sending her into the city alone was completely out of the question; for all her power, a single strike from a ghoul could still render her helpless, to say nothing of any number of things that could go wrong, ranging from simple accidents in crumbling buildings to running out of magic if she ended up in a prolonged conflict.
No, what she’d need would be a group of ponies who were experienced in countering the threats that Vanhoover in its current state presented. Who knew the layout of the city and where survivors would likely take refuge. Who could be counted on to faithfully perform such an important task.
But he’d sent the only ponies like that to Canterlot, almost certainly never to return.
Not that it matters, he cursed silently as he flew through the wall of the station, entering the lobby. Given that I’m about to end our relationship, I doubt Aria is of a mind to be cooperative-
A rapid chant pulled him from his thoughts, and he instinctively dodged to the side as he saw a small, orange orb streak toward him. An instant later a fireball erupted, the flames flashing over his shadowy form. Despite the fact that he had no physical body to burn, pain still washed over him, and Lex pushed it down as he traced back the trajectory of the spell, his mind already racing through various scenarios and contingencies, cross-indexing them with the resources he had at hoof that would best let him annihilate whoever had-
“Woo hoo! You got him!”
Sonata’s cheer stopped Lex cold, staring at the far end of the lobby. There, standing next to a grinning Sonata, Aria smirked as she lowered her hoof. “I’d say that was a warning shot,” she sneered, “but I really don’t like giving my enemies warnings.”
Lex could only stare at them. Enemies?! “What are you doing?!” he shouted, his voice filled with disbelief.
Sonata's eyes widened in excitement. “Dibs on telling him!” she yelled, before rising up on her hind legs. “We,” she announced, pointing at Lex dramatically, “are totes revolting!”
Aria rolled her eyes with a groan. “Rebelling, you idiot. We’re rebelling.”
Sonata tilted her head in confusion. “I thought it was revolting.”
Aria sighed. “If you say that we’re revolting, it makes us sound like-, you know what? Forget it. Either way…” She turned her attention back to Lex, giving him an unpleasant smile.
Lex had no time to process the insanity that Sonata and Aria were spouting before the sisters pressed their attack.
Chanting at the same time, the pair’s voices blended together in perfect harmony as they slowly started to circle him in opposite directions. Lex had just enough time to realize that they were casting the same spell before they finished, their voices rising to a magically-amplified crescendo. The waves of sound hit Lex from both sides, striking him with enough force that had he been corporeal his eardrums likely would have shattered from the strength of their voices. As it was, even the featureless shadows that made up his incorporeal body wavered and shook under the onslaught. Pain lanced through him despite his lack of tactile nerves, but it was eclipsed by shock. They were serious!
Fortunately their spell ended only a moment after it began, but neither mare hesitated, voices rising again as they started to chant anew, this time singing different spells. But Lex knew how to put a stop to that. The curse of silence that he’d previously used to quiet Aria couldn’t, unto itself, interfere with the vocal aspect of activating a spell; it simply kept the vibrations of the vocal chords from leaving the throat, rather than preventing them from functioning altogether. But if he channeled additional magic into it, he was confident that he could silence them so thoroughly that their voices would be completely sealed, making it impossible for them to cast-
“You took away my voice, Lex.”
Aria’s words, only a few hours old, caused him to falter.
“My voice. You were the only person who cared about what happened to me, the only one who wanted to fix me – your words, not mine, remember? – and then you snatched it right back again the first time you got angry at me.”
Hesitation wasn’t something Lex was accustomed to, but it gripped him now, causing him to lose a precious second as the Sirens continued to chant. But even knowing that they’d need only a moment to finish invoking whatever magic they were going to use to continue their attack, he couldn’t bring himself to act. This entire situation was so unexpected, their stated rationale for their actions so utterly incomprehensible, that he couldn’t bring himself to lash out at them. At least, not in any way that he knew would seriously injure them. There had to be some other explanation for how they were acting-
Aria finished chanting first. Smirking, she darted forward, closing the distance between them until she was right in front of him. Rearing up on her hind legs, she held her fore-hooves out in front of her, close enough that they were almost touching. Instantly, a cone of flames erupted from them, the enchanted fire engulfing him whole. Although his incorporeal state again blunted the worst of the damage, he still felt the searing heat of the attack, lurching backward.
Directly toward Sonata.
Her own intonation finished right on cue, and Lex barely had a chance to reorient himself before she unleashed another sonic scream at him. This time the effect was far more pronounced, and despite being having no physical presence he felt the full force of her magic smash into him like a freight train. The impact sent him hurtling away from her, careening across the station, and it was all he could do to regain control over his momentum, lurching upward as he fought to bring himself to a stop.
“Aw, what’s the matter Lex?” cooed Aria, her lips curled in a mocking sneer. “Can’t slap a girl around after you’ve taken her for a ride?”
“Gotta admit,” chirped Sonata cheerfully, “this is, like, totes easier than I thought it’d be!”
Still reeling from the pummeling he’d taken, Lex desperately tried to figure out a strategy. But there was no strategy to be had if he didn’t understand what was happening! “What do you two think you’re doing?! Cease this and explain yourselves at once!”
Sonata’s smile turned quizzical. “Um, rebelling, duh. Did you not hear that part?”
“I told Sonata all about what happened last night,” chimed in Aria. “About how you’re going to either dump us or enslave us on your goddess’s say-so.”
“And we’re, like, super ticked off about that!” huffed Sonata, pouting now. “So we’re not going to let you do either one!”
“Exactly,” nodded Aria. “So right now you have two choices: either you promise right now that you’ll keep being our boyfriend – boyfriend, not master or owner or whatever you call it – or we make you promise!”
Both of them fell silent then, waiting for his answer, but Lex didn’t reply, his eyes narrowing as he simply glared down at the two of them in silent consideration. That they were lying was obvious by virtue of the fact that both mares were overlooking the most salient part of their demand: if he refused to sacrifice his relationship with them to the Night Mare, the goddess would bring him to a swift end. Aria had been there when Harrowing Ordeal had revealed that particular tidbit, and Lex found it impossible to believe that she could have overlooked that detail now. Nor would Sonata; as much of a simpleton as she was, if Aria had relayed to her the entirety of what she’d witnessed, Lex felt certain that Sonata wouldn’t try to force him to take an action that would result in his death. Which meant that they were either lying…
Or they were under some sort of malevolent influence.
Despite his bodiless state, Lex felt a chill go through him as he considered the possibility that someone, or something, was making them act this way. He couldn’t imagine who the culprit could be – the only possibility that seemed remotely plausible was Harrowing Ordeal, but Lex felt sure that his summons had prevented the creature from doing anything of the sort – but at the same time, he was extremely cognizant of how similar this situation was to the last time he’d ended up in a fight with someone he cared about. Specifically, when Nosey had been possessed by Xiriel. If something similar was happening now…
The quickest way to rule that possibility out, Lex knew, was to examine the girls in the magical spectrum. Viewed that way, any evidence of hostile magic on them would quickly become clear, the same way that Xiriel’s had on Nosey. But that presented a problem: in order to do so, he’d need to activate his circlet, and he couldn’t do that while incorporeal. Although all of the items on his person transformed with him when he became a shadow, only magic items that had passive functionality – such as the defensive benefits bestowed by his cloak, his amulet, and the ring around his right foreleg – continued to operate normally. Those that required deliberate activation, such as his circlet, couldn’t be used when they’d been turned into a shadow with him.
But if he turned back to normal now, Lex had little doubt that Sonata and Aria would quickly renew their attack. Even if he channeled additional magic into his circlet so that it would return a detailed result instantly, rather than requiring several seconds of concentration the way it normally did, Lex had no doubt that they’d each be able to get off at least one spell – perhaps more – before he’d be able to examine their auras and change back into a shadow. Given that he hadn’t fully recovered from his fight with the princesses, and how he’d already taken not-inconsiderable damage from the Sirens’ attacks so far, Lex knew that placing himself in such a vulnerable position was extremely ill-advised.
I’m going to have to subdue them first, he decided. But if that was the case, then there was no reason not to strike at their greatest point of vulnerability and silence their voices. Upsetting them was far better than having to hurt them.
“Here’s my answer,” replied Lex darkly, calling upon his dark magic even as he poured additional magic into his curse…and only barely succeeded, the strain he’d placed on his system yesterday making itself known as he released his augmented curse onto Sonata. He immediately felt her struggle against it, and was surprised at the intensity of the pushback he felt. It was more than he’d expected from her, almost as if she’d boosted her resistance to deleterious magic somehow…such as the spells she’d used on everypony before the battle against the aquatic monsters, or on herself and Fencer during their fight against the ghoul army.
No sooner had that realization set in than Sonata, with a surge of effort, fought off the dark magic he’d thrown at her, his curse failing to take hold.
Nor did she stop there, immediately raising her voice in a lyrical chant, Aria accompanying her. But Lex didn’t wait to see what spells they were using, instead rushing upward as fast as he could, aiming to slip through the station’s ceiling before either mare could target him. This was going to be close…
He made it a split-second before another fireball hit, passing through the roof of the building and into the sunlight just as he heard the explosion impact inner side of it only a few inches under him. It was followed by another shout a split-second later, the ceiling shaking under the vibrations for several seconds before the sonic assault died off. But the narrow escape brought Lex no relief, both from the residual pain from his wasted effort to augment an attack that had ultimately failed and from the worrying awareness that Sonata – and likely Aria – had taken the precaution of using her magic to enhance her capabilities before their fight had started. They knew, he realized belatedly. They knew I’d try to silence them, and were prepared for it.
And if they had been ready for that…then they had likely made other preparations as well. In fact, he was suddenly sure that they had. Aria had attacked him the moment he had entered the station, even though he had come through the wall instead of the door. Which meant that she’d used her tracking spell ahead of time, the same one she’d used to follow his movements when he’d fought her, Lirtkra, and Monitor a little over a week ago. So she’s aware of my position right now, Lex realized uneasily. He’d planned on circling around and attacking the two of them from behind, but that wouldn’t work now; all that would happen would be that they’d get the drop on him instead.
Not that he had many avenues of attack left anyway. The strain he’d felt when he’d augmented that curse had made it clear that he’d already taxed the magical channels in his body, whether corporeal or not, to their limit. Although he’d recovered somewhat from yesterday, he was nowhere near full strength, something that Sonata and Aria were likely also counting on. And since his thaumaturgical and divine spellcasting abilities were no help here – the former had only a single attack spell left, one far too lethal to use against anypony, let alone the mares he loved, while the latter had no attack spells at all – that left only his dark magic to fight them with.
But other than minor curses, his dark magic’s only real method of attack was in creating dark crystals. Normally he’d have them thrust up from the ground to pierce his enemies, but that was a poor option here. Creating larger crystals could potentially mean impaling the girls, which was utterly out of the question, and smaller ones might hurt their legs but wouldn’t cripple their ability to retaliate with their song-based magic. Maybe forming crystals on their bodies directly, covering them from head to hoof and trapping them? So long as they could still breathe that would serve as a viable, if temporary, prison…unless they could use their sonic attack spells to potentially shatter his crystals, something which was a distinct possibility given how unusually prepared they seemed to be.
Nor, he realized, could he even avoid fighting them. Simply retreating in order to deal with them later would only make him run up against the time limit the Night Mare had set for him to perform the ceremony. And if he held it anyway and they interrupted it, Lex felt sure that the Night Mare would hold that against him. Aria and Sonata were supposed to be under his control, after all.
But with his magic running low, his options limited, his movements tracked, his adversaries prepared, and no options for avoiding this fight, what could he do?
Staring down at the roof of the building, Lex bent all of his thoughts toward coming up with a plan.
Just over a minute later, Lex knew what he had to do to win.
That knowledge brought him little comfort, however. Instead he felt vaguely appalled, not only because of how long it had taken him to come up with a course of action – he had successfully developed a strategy to take down Celestia and Luna in a fraction of that time – but also because of the major concession he’d been forced to make in order to formulate a viable strategy: there was no path to victory that didn’t involve injuring Sonata and Aria, quite possibly severely. That was the main reason that he’d needed so long to come up with a plan, and although doing so didn’t violate his ethical code of conduct – the girls’ unprovoked assault, combined with his inability to avoid this situation since he couldn’t chance them disrupting the ceremony he needed to hold in the Night Mare’s honor, meant that this was quite obviously a case of self-defense – the prospect of deliberately harming the mares he loved nevertheless made him feel ill.
But there was no other viable course of action now that he’d determined that they most likely weren’t being magically manipulated.
He had confirmed that after returning to corporeal form on top of the train station. Doing so had been a calculated risk, but a comparatively small one; although Aria’s fireball and Sonata’s magical scream had dealt enough damage to the roof that it could be seen from the outside, it hadn’t been enough to completely punch through it. And since he’d seen no evidence that either of them had any sort of magic that would let them fly or walk up walls or otherwise easily follow him up here, Lex had put the cover his current position had given him to good use, returning to physical form and activating his circlet, peering down into the station lobby.
Fortunately, the roof wasn’t of sufficient density to block his line of sight in the magical spectrum. Had it been made out of stone instead of wood and tiling Lex would have needed to find another vantage point, but instead he’d been free to concentrate on what magical auras were radiating from within the building. The results had been simultaneously heartening and discouraging. Heartening because there’d been no obvious evidence of them being under some sort of malign influence; there had been no auras of necromantic magic clinging to them like there had been around Nosey. Discouraging because he didn’t entirely trust what he was seeing; the combination of what had to be the enchantments that he’d presupposed the girls had cast on themselves in preparation for this fight, the lingering emanations of the various attack spells that they’d been using, and the radiant coronas of the various gemstones in his saddlebags – which were still tucked away near their sleeping bench, apparently forgotten by the girls – meant that the area inside the station was a mess of auras. Like smoke in the air, they billowed out and bled into each other, making it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. Worse, there was the very real possibility that they were obscuring telltale signs of subtler magic, making his conclusions less certain than Lex would have liked.
But there was little that could be done about that. Without channeling additional magic into his circlet, there was no way to sharpen the view of the magical spectrum that it granted him. Doing so, however, was out of the question; he’d already expended what little energy he’d regained in his ill-fated attempt to silence Sonata’s voice. Channeling additional magic through his body now was out of the question.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t.
Although the Night Mare hadn’t given him much in the way of divine magic, the little bit that she’d granted him included a spell that relieved physical strain, alongside the weak healing spell that he more typically used. Indeed, those had been the primary reason that he’d turned down Cleansweep’s offer to heal him last night; although the filly’s newfound powers to alleviate harm easily surpassed his own, having another pony with curative magic in the camp meant that Lex could more readily use what little he had on himself, without needing to worry that he’d be devoid of medical magic at a critical moment.
He’d made use of both of his restorative spells in the last sixty seconds, fully aware that he couldn’t take another series of hits like the ones Sonata and Aria had subjected him to. Moreover, he’d cast them both in conjunction with his circlet’s secondary function, drawing on its miniscule reservoir of magical power in order to preserve both spells even after he’d made use of them, allowing him to immediately turn around and cast both spells on himself a second time. The results had been dramatic: although he still felt the pain of the girls’ attacks on him, and his body still ached from all of the abuse that it had endured, he still felt worlds better than he had before. It was enough that he felt confident that he could channel additional magic through his body anew…though only twice, he decided, before he’d overtax himself again.
His first instinct had been to feed more power into his circlet so that he could better ascertain the situation below, but he’d put that idea aside. With so few attack modes left open to him, it was self-evident that any battle tactics he came up with would require judicious use of his ability to throw more power around. Given the overall unlikelihood of finding any more useful information, Lex knew that he’d simply have to make do with what data he had.
With that having been determined, his next idea had been to continue trying to silence the rebellious mares. Two additional uses of empowered magic meant two enhanced curses, after all: one to take each of their voices away. But that was a poor idea as well. Such a plan left him with no margin for error, and after how Sonata had managed to resist his attempt to quiet her there was a very real chance that one or both of them would pull that off again, leaving him right back where he’d started.
Instead, he’d formulated a different strategy. It was one he felt confident would turn the situation around, but it would still carry a not-inconsiderable cost, even aside from how much it would damage it would inflict on both of them. But with no alternatives coming to mind, Lex knew that he had to act; the barbed wire around his foreleg – alone among his numerous injuries – had showed no improvement despite his liberal use of healing magic. If anything, it felt even worse now, as though the wire had contracted to the point of being wrapped around the bone.
Without further ado, Lex called upon the dark magic of his horn and changed back into a shadow…
“Anything yet?” sighed Sonata.
Aria’s breath came around gritted teeth, not taking her eyes off of the ceiling. “Like I said before: I’ll tell you when he starts moving.”
The answer earned an unhappy huff from Sonata, but she didn’t press the point. Even so, only a few seconds went by before she spoke up again, her voice small. “You think maybe we went at him too hard?”
“Sonata, he’s fine.” Aria forced certainty into her voice, refusing to acknowledge any other possibility. “He might still be a little worn out from yesterday, but so what? We let him sleep in, which means that he had plenty of time to rest up and restore all of his magic. We caught him by surprise just now, but any second he’s going to come back down and then we’ll be dealing with force fields and floating balls of lightning and acid-filled pits and whatever else he can do. That’s when the real performance begins.”
“I guess. He’s still gonna be really mad when all this is over, though.”
“That’s the point.” Risking a look over at her sister, Aria fought down a rising sense of irritation with how half-hearted Sonata was being. “Look, I know how you feel, but even if she’s not going along with it blondie still said this might work, remember? All we have to do is ambush Lex, tell him that we’re trying to overthrow him-”
“And then he beats us up,” chimed in Sonata smoothly. A smile crossed her lips as she recited the next part. “And when he goes to punish us for being totes naughty-”
“He’ll sentence us both to serve him, probably for the rest of our lives,” finished Aria, also grinning at the prospect. She felt absolutely certain that’s what would happen, since Lex had done something very much like that before.
Aria could still remember how, after he’d dragged her back to his warehouse hideout in the wake of his victory over Lirtkra and Monitor, Lex had ordered her to work for him. He’d left her no real choice in the matter, but had still seen fit to sweeten the deal by telling her how he’d fix her voice and make her into a pony. Promises that he’d ultimately kept, paving the way for everything that had happened between them since, culminating in all of the passion they’d shared last night. This, she felt certain, would be just like that. “Lex isn’t the sort of guy who’ll take slaves,” she mused, “but give him an excuse to call it something different, and he’ll jump at the chance.”
“This is gonna be so much fun!” giggled Sonata, prancing in place. “You think he’ll do, like, a sexy strip search on us?”
Aria blinked, before slowly turning her head to give Sonata an incredulous look. “We’re already naked! How could he possibly-” She didn’t have a chance to finish as she suddenly whipped her head around. “He’s moving!”
Sonata tensed. “Where?”
“Downward.” Pointing a hoof at where her spell was telling her Lex was, Aria slowly followed his movements. “He’s coming down on the other side of the far wall, between the windows.” She narrowed her eyes, preparing the next spell she was going to throw at him. “Remember, he’s probably going to come at us with everything he’s got, so be sure to-, huh?!”
Glancing between her sister and she spot she’d indicated, Sonata tried not to look as alarmed as she suddenly felt. “What’s wrong?”
But Aria was already recovering. “He’s still descending.” She pointed again, and this time her hoof was at a low angle, indicating that Lex was below ground level. “And now he’s getting closer!” She stepped back as she felt Lex moving toward the center of the lobby, still beneath the ground. “Get ready! He’s probably going to come up right in the middle of the place!”
Sonata had already moved in the opposite direction, positioning herself so that she and Aria could catch Lex in the crossfire. “Right!”
Spells at the ready, both Sirens waited for their target to make his appearance…
And waited…
Waited…
“Where is he?” muttered Sonata, shifting her weight between her legs anxiously. “Why isn’t he coming up?”
“I don’t know!” snapped Aria. “Maybe he’s trying to get in our heads, make us nervous before he suddenly jumps- WHOA!”
Aria nearly fell over as five feet to her left, a sudden stalagmite of black crystals erupted from the floor of the lobby. The spike was several feet long, aimed at a forty-five degree angle, and punched upward with devastating force. Thankfully, its aim was off, shooting over her head and missing her but striking one of the lobby’s central columns, shattering the wooden beam easily. Nor was it the only one…
Across the lobby, similar scenes were playing out as massive black spikes shot forth from the ground. In seemingly random spots around the lobby, more dark stalagmites were lancing upward, and each time they did a column or a doorway or a portion of the wall was struck, splintering under the assault. Yelping, Sonata stumbled toward Aria. “What’s going on?!”
“I think he’s firing blind!” yelled Aria, trying to make herself heard over the bedlam. “He’s aiming for random spots and hoping he gets lucky!”
“That really doesn’t sound like Lex!” yelled back Sonata, looking around as more of the lobby was demolished.
“I’m telling you, he-” But Aria’s protest died on her lips as she glanced over and saw Lex’s saddlebags. Or rather, saw where a smaller, smoother series of black crystals were spreading over it, enveloping the bags in what looked like some sort of protective dome. Given how that was happening nowhere else, but only to the one thing of Lex’s that was here, Aria felt her thoughts grind to a halt. “It’s not random,” she murmured, looking around again. The black crystals were still inflicting heavy damage all over the lobby…something which now made a horrifying degree of sense. “We need to leave…”
“Huh?” Turning back toward Aria, Sonata blinked in confusion. “We what now?”
“We need to leave!” yelped Aria, turning and moving to push Sonata along with her, headed toward the platform exit.
But she hadn’t gotten more than two steps before the entire building began to collapse.
The sound of Sonata and Aria’s frightened screams signaled to Lex that it was time to begin the second stage of his plan.
The first part was had been to bring the building down around the girls, trusting that whatever magic they’d used on themselves in preparation for this fight would keep them from being hurt too badly by any debris that happened to fall on them. That was the riskiest part of his strategy, he knew. Although he’d been in the station lobby often enough that he’d long since memorized the layout of the place, structural engineering – like medicine – was an area where he’d never bothered to educate himself. Thus it was impossible for him to predict exactly what parts of the building would fall where, leaving the possibility open that some of it would strike Sonata and Aria as they tried to escape. Even with the magical precautions they’d taken, the risk to their well-being was not minimal, much to Lex’s consternation.
Hence why, from his position a few inches beneath the floor of the lobby, Lex focused all of his attention on what he could hear happening above him. The splintering of the walls as his spikes of black crystal tore into them. The shattering of the windows as their frames bent and warped under the strain of the building shuddering. The ceiling groaning under its own weight as the support columns were struck down. None captured his attention the way the pair of fearful shrieks did, letting him know that Sonata and Aria had realized that the entire place was coming down around them; now they’d be more focused on escaping than fighting, giving him his window of opportunity.
Fighting down the ugly memory of how Xiriel had driven Nosey to scream for similarly utilitarian purposes, Lex sprang into action. There was no chance that Sonata and Aria would be able to make it out of the building in time. He could hear their hoofsteps heading in the direction of the door to the platform, which was exactly where he’d predicted they’d go. But they were stumbling, slowed by the combination of rubble that had already fallen, the debris that was continuing to rain down around them, and the shudders going through the floor as the building began to collapse in earnest. They would, he knew, never make it in time…which was what made him rise up out of the ground directly in front of them.
Both sisters stumbled to a halt, eyes widening at the billowing mass of darkness that suddenly appeared in their path, apparently cutting off their escape route as a familiar pair of green-and-purple eyes locked onto theirs. “L-Lex!” yelped Sonata fearfully.
Aria, having ignored what her tracking spell was telling her about Lex’s location in her rush to escape, was just as dismayed. “What are y-” A crack louder than thunder echoed through the lobby as the ceiling began to cave inward. “We give!” yelled Aria shrilly. “WE GIVE, OKAY?! YOU WIN!”
“A foregone conclusion,” noted Lex darkly, already calling upon his dark magic. “Now hold still if you want to come through this unscathed.”
He didn’t give them a chance to respond as more dark crystals rose up from the floor around them. But unlike the massive spikes he’d raised before, these were a series of thin, cylindrical bars, each of them an inch thick and spread out at matching intervals from each other. They grew around each of the girls in a square formation, lancing upward to a height of five feet before they ceased growing vertically, instead making a perpendicular shift and going over their heads, joining with the bars that had been growing from the other side of them and completing the process.
In less than a second, Sonata and Aria were sealed in cages made of black crystal. Neither of them seemed very grateful for his consideration, however, giving their enclosures horrified looks. Both of them opened their mouths, whether to say something or cast a spell Lex wasn’t certain, but neither had a chance to get anything out as another thunderous crack filled the air.
This time it was followed by a second, and then a third as the ground began to heave even more forcefully than before. Each mare flung themselves against the bars of their cage – Sonata because she lost her balance, Aria in what looked like a futile effort to escape – but neither could go anywhere as the ceiling finally gave way. A second later it was raining debris as the station finally succumbed to the damage that had been inflicted on it, the entire building falling in on itself with a mighty crash.
It seemed to take forever for the din to die down. After her ears finally stopped ringing, Sonata gingerly opened one eye. Near-total darkness greeted her, with only a few pinpricks of sunlight making their way through the huge mound of wreckage that was apparently covering her completely. Gulping, Sonata took a breath…or at least tried to, immediately coughing as she inhaled a lungful of dust that had been churned up by the station’s collapse.
“S-Sonata?” croaked Aria’s voice from a few feet away. “Are you alright?”
Needing a second to clear her throat, Sonata sat up gingerly. “I think so,” she wheezed. A moment later she realized exactly how true that was. Despite the fact that she’d been buried alive, she wasn’t in any pain; the dust in the air was more of a problem than anything else. And she could guess why that was. Reaching upward, her hoof touched the bars over her head. Sure enough, she immediately felt the rough edges of what had to be a ton of rubble, all held up by the roof of her enclosure. “Nothing got through the cage. What about you?”
“The same,” rasped Aria.
Slumping down in relief, Sonata couldn’t help but chuckle, somehow managing not to cough again as she did. “Lex saved us.”
“From a disaster that he created,” groused Aria exhaustedly.
“You both deserved it.” Lex’s voice caused Sonata to jump, and she heard Aria do the same. A moment later his green-and-purple eyes appeared, the only things visible in the darkness. “Be glad I didn’t simply leave you both to be buried after that stunt you pulled.”
“Like you’d ever let anything hurt us,” snorted Aria weakly.
“Gotta admit though, we totes didn’t see this coming,” confessed Sonata. “I mean, we were, like, super sure that you were gonna win, but we never guessed you’d drop a building on us.” She gave another soft laugh. “And we thought we were being so smart doing that inside, since it’d make you fight up close and personal.”
The green that made up Lex’s eyes narrowed. “You started that conflict despite thinking that you were going to lose?”
Aria let out a groan. “Real smooth, Sonata. Real sm-” Her rebuke was cut off as she started coughing, needing several seconds before she could clear her lungs. “Ugh, would it have killed you to put up a force field instead of these cages? I feel like I’ve got my face in somebody’s dustpan.”
“The dust is a precaution in case you tried to continue singing,” snapped Lex coldly. “And since I seriously doubt either of you have the intelligence to realize this, let me state outright that if you use your sonic attack spells in your current situation, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll end up destroying the cages that you’re in, burying you both alive.”
“No kidding,” muttered Aria sourly.
“Heh, we were gonna do this big thing with using our super-loud-voice spells on those crystals of yours,” grinned Sonata. “I mean, I don’t know if it would have worked, but we were, like, making strategies and tic tacs,” – Aria let out a long-suffering groan for some reason then – “and we guessed that we might be able to shatter those if we hit, like, the perfect pitch. It was gonna be really awesome! I was betting that you’d try and trap us in those things, and be all like, ‘Hahaha! No one can escape from my crystal prison!’ And we’d smile at each other, and then use our magic to hit the perfect note to blow them away, and you’d be all like ‘Nooo!’ And the background music would reach, like, a really big moment with the chorus going ‘DA-DA-DADADADA!’ And then we’d-”
“For the record,” sighed Aria. “All I said was that we might be able to shatter those crystals of yours if we used the right amount of magic in our voices. The rest of that is her being an idiot.”
“You’re both idiots!” hissed Lex. “Now tell me what you were up to! I know you were lying before! Why did you attack me, especially if you didn’t think you were going to win?!”
An awkward silence fell, neither mare saying anything. Finally Sonata spoke up. “Um, how about we tell you that after you punish us for all this?”
“That’s probably for the best,” added Aria. “You should probably decide what you’re going to do to us for daring to rebel against you before anything else, don’t you think?”
“No,” answered Lex without missing a beat. “The guilty party’s allocution allows for their circumstances to be taken as a salient factor when deciding their sentence, better ensuring that the punishment – subject to the principles of justice – fits the crime. Now, explain yourselves!”
Another silence fell, and this time it remained unbroken.
“So be it then,” announced Lex, his voice thick with anger. “In that case, you can both stay here and consider just how foolish your reticence is. I’ll be back to see if you’ve reconsidered after I’ve finished the Night Mare’s ceremony.”
“NO!” Sonata couldn’t keep the panic out of her voice. “Wait wait wait!”
Fortunately, Lex didn’t ignore her, the glowing eyes turning in her direction. “Why should I?”
“Because…” For a second Sonata struggled to come up with a reason, before the obvious one came to her. “Because you’re going to need your spokespony there!”
Lex regarded her for a long moment. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
Sonata gave an indignant huff. “Um, yeah! I mean, you’re going to be talking to all the ponies in the camp, right? You totes need me there to help you out with that. Oh, and I guess Aria too, because…yeah. So you should totes punish us now so we can go out there and make sure your thingamajig is a big success!”
“And you actually think I’m going to trust you two to do anything after what just happened?” The anger in Lex’s voice was diminishing now, replaced with incredulity.
“No.” The smirk in Aria’s voice was audible. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t need our help. So maybe you could do something about both of those problems at once? Some way to punish us for what we did here while also making sure that we can keep making ourselves useful to you?”
Sonata rolled her eyes. “Oh now who’s laying it on too thick?”
“You moron!” growled Aria. “Don’t say that!”
“Oh come on!” protested Sonata. “You totes just gave the whole thing away!”
“No, I didn’t! If anyone’s giving it away it’s you, right now!”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-huh!”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-huh!”
“Nuh-”
“BOTH OF YOU SHUT UP!” roared Lex.
The yell made Sonata wince, and she could almost feel Aria doing the same. “Any louder and you’d break those crystals yourself,” she heard her sister mutter.
Fortunately, Lex apparently missed the remark. Instead, he was glaring at both of them, his eyes shining so brightly that they were almost solid green. “In the last twenty-four hours, I have had my authority challenged by everyone around me! First Severance, then the princesses, and then that monster that called itself Harrowing Ordeal! And in every instance I’ve been forced to suspend my duty to the ponies here in order to answer these confrontations! And now you two…you brainless imbeciles…orchestrated yet another problem for me to deal with…all because you want me to enslave you?!”
“There, see!” Sonata grinned, looking in Aria’s direction. “Told you you’d given it away!”
“C’mon, Lex! We did it for you! This way we can still be together!”
“You know, a lot of guys would be grateful that they had a bunch of hot girls willing to fight to be with them! Ever think about that?”
“Would it help if we say that we’re sorry? Like, really reeeally sorry?”
“It’s not like you had a better plan! You were just going to dump us because your nagging goddess said so! You should be thanking us!”
From within their cages, Sonata and Aria continued to pepper him with their torrent of pleas, assertions, and accusations. It was a litany that had continued unbroken for the past several minutes. But Lex continued to ignore them, focusing instead on the spell he was casting.
This particular bit of divine magic – the last such goddess-given spell he’d be able to use today, after the healing magic he’d used on himself – was a reparative enchantment. But unlike the restorative spells that he’d used on himself prior to defeating Sonata and Aria, this one was meant to be used on inanimate objects. He’d last used it to restore Nosey’s broken glasses after he’d vanquished Xiriel, but the instance that was on his mind at the moment was from earlier, when he’d made use of it to repair the broken hull of C. Shell’s ship back in Tall Tale.
That particular undertaking had been large enough that he’d needed to channel additional power into the spell in order to make it function at the capacity he wanted. But in that case he’d simply needed to repair a crack that ran the length of the ship. What he was attempting to do now was several orders of magnitude greater: repairing an entire building.
Carefully feeding more power through himself and into the spell as he finished the necessary chanting and gestures, Lex touched a shadowy tendril to the wreckage surrounding them. He felt the augmented power discharge into the rubble, and a moment later he heard it shift, as though trying to pull itself together. In silent anticipation, he waited…
And then felt the spell break apart, extended too thin even with the additional power he’d given it.
For a moment, Lex simply regarded the unmoving debris in the wake of his failed attempt to undo the train station’s collapse. It wasn’t entirely surprising that it hadn't worked; his efficacy with the spells that the Night Mare had given him was far less than with the magic that he’d created for himself, or with the dark magic of his horn. He’d grown more proficient with it over time, of course – when he’d initially received his first smattering of divine magic back on Everglow, he’d struggled to handle the unusual new magic he’d been granted, to the point of occasionally losing control of it, resulting in a painful backlash as the magic had dispersed – but it was still by far the type of magic that he was least skilled with. Throwing additional quantities of raw power into the mix could only mitigate his lack of aptitude so much.
“And, you know what? You can totes have us work as maids too! Wouldn’t that be great? I bet we’d look, like, super cute in those uniforms!”
“This is mostly your fault anyway! If you’d just kept that Night Mare nag of yours happy, we wouldn’t even be in this mess! You owe us!”
Sighing, Lex knew that he couldn’t afford to dwell on the loss of the train station any further. Even if the pain in his leg – which was still there despite his incorporeal state – hadn’t been getting worse, the two idiots behind him needed to be dealt with. But first things first. Looking upward, Lex focused his telekinesis on removing the debris above them, starting to dig the girls out…
“Okay, so, I think that all went pretty well,” grinned Sonata as she climbed onto the station platform, the only part of the building to have survived.
“Of course you do,” muttered Aria, rolling her eyes as she flopped down next to the giant pile of food.
Sonata tilted her head, looking confused. “You don’t? Because I thought it all went according to plan. I mean, yeah, we didn’t expect him to totes drop a building on us, but you can’t make a sandwich without breaking some eggs, right?”
Aria sent a tired glare Sonata’s way. “Sometimes I swear you mess those sayings up on purpose,” she groaned. “And do you actually think Lex looks like he’s going to give us what we want?” She gestured to the far side of the ruins of the train station, where Lex – still in shadow-form – was digging his saddlebags out of the rubble. After he’d realized exactly what they were up to, he hadn’t said two words to them, which Aria took to be a bad sign.
Sonata apparently felt differently. “Aw, I bet he’s just mad because he didn’t think of it first,” she scoffed. “So yeah, he’ll do the whole ‘I sentence you both to be my love-slaves’ thing, and everything will be just fine.”
“Tell that to all of them,” snorted Aria.
Sonata blinked. “Huh? Who?”
Raising a hoof, Aria pointed behind Sonata. “Them.”
Turning, Sonata’s eyes widened as she beheld the crowd that had gathered the western edge of the ruins, drawn by the destruction of the camp’s only permanent structure. Slowly scanning the sea of faces, she couldn’t help but frown at how many of them were openly afraid. But at least this time they aren’t running away in terror, she sighed, remembering how only yesterday everypony had thought that Lex had totes lost it when that fight with the princesses had broken out. Focusing on that, she gave the crowd her best smile. “Hey everypony!” she called. “So, like, good news! What you just saw wasn’t, like, any sort of disaster or anything! It was just us – me, my sister, and Lex – all having a lovers’ quarrel!”
“I can’t believe you actually got that expression right,” muttered Aria from behind her.
Pausing just long enough to stick her tongue out at her sister, Sonata turned back to the crowd. “So, yeah, things might have gotten a teensy bit out of han-, er, hoof, but everything’s totes okay now!” She beamed, waiting for everyone to start chuckling and giving sighs of relief.
Except that didn’t happen. Instead, everypony just sort of glanced at each other, causing Sonata to frown again. “For realsies, you guys, it was just a little fight. I mean, who here hasn’t lost their temper and flattened a building before?”
Everypony in the crowd raised their hoof.
“Okay, okay, bad example,” admitted Sonata, before taking a deep breath. C’mon. Spokespony time here, she admonished herself gently. “Listen,” she started again, her voice taking a more serious tone. “We’ve all been here before. Something scary happens, it looks like it’s Lex’s fault, and I get up here and tell you that he’s not really a bad guy. And I know, you’re all getting tired of it. But this time…this time’s different because…because…” For a moment she floundered, only for a complete flash of inspiration to come out of nowhere. “Because Lex himself is, like, totes going to hold a celebration in honor of everypony who’s helped keep this place together!”
That got the reaction she was looking for. All of a sudden the downcast and anxious looks were replaced with surprise and curiosity. Seizing on the moment, she kept going. “It’s going to be just like when he made all that food for everypony, except completely different! Because this time instead of just making a lot of tasty treats and then not doing anything, Lex himself is going to say how much everyone here means to him! From all of you doctors who’ve helped out to River Bank and her serving ponies to those awesome kids and their animals” – she scanned the crowd for those foals then, sure that they’d boost what she was saying, but for some reason they didn’t seem to be there – “and, especially the Night Mare!” She nodded for emphasis. “Yeah, because, like, the Night Mare has been, like, super supportive of everything Lex has been doing. So she’ll totes get a super big thank you from him, along with all of you!”
“Sonata…”
“And it’s going to happen today, too! Real soon! Like, clear your afternoon plans!”
“Sonata.”
“In fact, you know what? You should all totes make, like, a holiday out of it! For realsies, break out the beanbag toss and some cards! Also, first dibs on the card games, because I’m not nearly as bad at that as everyone thinks! Come to think of it, we should have a contest-”
“Sonata!”
“Geez, what is it?” huffed Sonata as Aria’s nagging became more insistent. “I was just getting into-, oh.” Her complaints died as she turned around and saw Lex, still a shadow and telekinetically carrying his saddlebags, hovering over the platform and glaring at her, much to Aria’s consternation. Suddenly losing her enthusiasm, Sonata turned back to the crowd, somehow managing to keep her smile in place. “So, um, yeah! Go get ready, ‘cuz it’s gonna be great!”
Ending on what she hoped was a high note, she turned back to Lex and Aria, forcing herself to grin as she lowered her voice. “Okay, so, I know what you’re thinking, but I totes had this great idea-”
“Both of you,” interrupted Lex coldly, “follow me.” Without waiting for a reply from either of them, he turned and moved away from the crowd, toward the eastern end of the platform.
“Just so you know,” muttered Aria as she fell in beside Sonata, “if that little idea of yours made things worse, I’m throwing you under the bus.”
“Joke's on you!” snorted Sonata. “This place doesn’t even have buses!”
Aria rolled her eyes, but there was no time to reply as they followed Lex down off the platform and to the other side of the rubble. It wasn’t the same as being inside, or even putting an intact building between themselves and everyone else, but it at least afforded them some semblance of privacy. Turning back to them, Lex finally changed back to his normal body – bloody hoof and all – but although his eyes changed back to their normal color they didn’t lose their hard glare as he slung his saddlebags onto his back. “I can’t find the words,” he began abruptly, “to adequately describe how utterly ill-conceived, irrational, and dangerous your idea was.”
“Aw come on!” whined Sonata. “I think everypony here would be super happy if you said something nice to them!”
“I meant your idiotic plan to launch a rebellion and lose so that I’d enslave you!” hissed Lex furiously. “What could possibly have made you think that was a good idea?!”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” huffed Aria. “You did almost the exact same thing to me before, remember? When you brought me back after defeating Lirtkra and Monitor? You said-”
“I know what I said,” cut in Lex sharply. “And those two situations couldn’t be more dissimilar!” He took a step toward Aria then, and her unconcerned expression faded as she took a step back. “Since it wasn’t obvious,” hissed Lex, “let me make this clear: the reason I gave you a place here, despite your attempt on my life, was because you made it clear that you were acting under extreme duress and so could not be held responsible for your actions. That is not an excuse that either of you have now!”
“It is too!” protested Sonata. “I mean, doesn’t the fact that we’re both, like, head over hooves for you count for something?” She took a step closer to him then, heedless of the severe expression on his face. “We both love you, Lex, and we don’t want to lose you. That’s why we did what we did.”
For a moment it looked like her heartfelt plea wasn’t going to work, as Lex’s expression remained stony. But all of a sudden his anger seemed to evaporate, and he closed his eyes, his ears folding back. “I know,” he admitted. “And I love you both also.”
Sonata felt her heart soar with hope, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the same feeling written all over Aria’s face. “Then…!”
“But I can’t forgive what the two of you did.”
Lex’s words, delivered in a sorrowful tone, hit her like a punch in the stomach. “N-no way…you’re kidding, right?” A small voice, somewhere in the back of her mind, wondered if this was how he’d felt that time when she’d broken up with him, back when they were heading to Tall Tale.
“I’m not,” answered Lex, looking at the two of them with an unreadable expression. “This is serious, Sonata. It has to be. I can’t give Luna such a severe punishment for trying to overthrow me and then, the very next day, give my girlfriends a punishment with no real force or effect for what's essentially the exact same crime.”
“So what exactly are you saying?” sneered Aria. Or at least she tried to; her voice came out sounding stricken instead. “You’re going to go ahead and dump us, then?”
Lex shook his head slowly. “The two of you have proven to be reckless enough and dangerous enough that more drastic action is necessary. The very harshest that my government can legitimately inflict on another pony.” Letting out a slow breath, he drew himself upright, his expression hardening as he looked at them.
“As punishment for your crimes, I sentence you both to be permanently turned to stone.”
Feathercap shivered, hugging his binoculars to his chest as he glanced at the buildings lining the street, trying to walk as silently as he could on the cobblestone road that was one of Vanhoover’s main thoroughfares. It was no use, however; no matter how quietly he stepped, the sound of his hooves hitting the ground seemed to echo loudly between the buildings, to say nothing of the hoofsteps of his friends. “If there are any ghouls around, there’s no way they’re not going to notice us,” he murmured uneasily.
“If there are any ghouls around,” echoed Fruit Crunch with a smirk, “they’ll think twice about attacking us if they know what’s good for them.”
“Those things weren’t afraid to charge Severance, even when it kept cutting them down,” noted Fiddlesticks sourly. “If they didn’t think twice about that, there’s no way they will about attacking us.”
Perhaps not, admitted Altaer from his perch on one of Straightlace’s outstretched wings. But that’s no reason for any of us to succumb to fear ourselves. If danger finds us, then we’ll simply need to overcome whatever threats we face.
You’re being callous, chided Nemel gently. Fiddlesticks is simply worried about what will become of her sibling if something should happen to her.
The explanation made Cleansweep come down from where she’d been flying a few feet off the ground, landing next to Fiddlesticks and giving the other filly a reassuring smile. “You don’t have to worry. You saw how my mom was smiling when she offered to take Tiddlywinks back to River’s mansion and give him a bath, right? She loves that little guy. If something happens to us, I promise you she’ll take good care of him.”
“It’d be more reassuring to say that nothing’s going to happen to us, so there’s no need to worry,” pointed out Straightlace, before turning to Feathercap. “You can borrow Ulespy’s vision, right? Why not send him up to scout the surrounding area from above?”
That would be a poor tactical decision, responded the owl on Feathercap’s back. Right now, it’s only possible for him to see through my eyes for a few minutes each day. It would be far wiser to hold that power in reserve in case something does go wrong and you need to chart a clear path through the city.
“I don’t mind checking things out,” offered Cleansweep with a shrug. “It can’t hurt to just fly up and take a quick look around.”
Are you sure that’s a good idea? interjected Venin, coiled around Cleansweep’s middle. You’re the only healer here. Going off on your own means that if something happens to you, there’ll be no one to alleviate your friends’ wounds if a fight breaks out.
“It’s just up in the air and circling for a few blocks,” protested Cleansweep. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Feathercap and Straightlace groaned in unison. “You did not just say that!” moaned the latter colt.
Huffing, Cleansweep turned toward Fruit Crunch. “Crunchy, back me up here!”
But Fruit Crunch only gave her an apologetic grin. “Sorry, Dust Bunny. Everypony knows that saying ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ before going off on your own is a surefire way to make sure the worst really does happen.” His grin faded a little as he took on a more serious look. “Besides, none of us should split up, no matter how short the distance.”
“You didn’t seem to mind when Straightlace said Ulespy could scout for us,” pouted Cleansweep.
But Fruit Crunch was saved from answering as Lyden jumped in, the wolf’s head still swiveling back and forth as it glanced at every alleyway they passed, nose twitching and ears at the ready. That’s because he, like myself, would not truly be at risk from such an endeavor. So long as each of you survives, we cannot truly die, but the reverse is not true.
“That doesn’t mean that you guys should put yourselves in danger either!” Feathercap reached a hoof back to gently stroke Ulespy’s feathers. “We were all really sad when we thought we lost you guys.”
“And,” added Fiddlesticks, “we can’t use our powers if you’re, you know, gone. So you shouldn’t do anything too risky…unlike certain ponies.”
That last remark was quite clearly directed at Fruit Crunch, who rolled his eyes. “Will you relax already? We’re making sure to stay in the middle of the widest streets, in the sunlight, and sticking together as a group. So long as we keep this up, we should be fine.”
“Yeah, you might as well ask what’s the worst that could happen,” grumbled Cleansweep sarcastically.
“The worst that could happen is Lex finding out about this.” Just the thought made Feathercap shiver badly enough that Ulespy had to flap his wings a little to keep his balance.
“Oh come on you guys!” Stopping, Fruit Crunch turned to regard his friends with an exasperated look. “Listen, Lex agreed to take us on as his apprentices! That means that he wants us to use our powers to help everypony here! You heard what River said-”
“You mean before Lex started screaming at her for running off into danger?” snorted Fiddlesticks.
Fruit Crunch glowered at her for a moment before continuing. “River said that she’d already sent some of her servants to that boat in the harbor to load all of her stuff onto it. But after she and her son were attacked, they immediately went back to the camp. That means those other ponies she sent down to the harbor are probably still there, all alone and having no idea what’s happened. If the city isn’t safe, then it’s our job to go and make sure they make it back okay.”
“But Lex-”
Not letting Feathercap finish, Fruit Crunch kept going. “Lex wasn’t angry at River for going into the city like we are now. He was angry at her for going inside one of the buildings, since that’s where those ghouls hide during the day. That’s why we’re not going to do that. We’re going to head straight down to the boat, escort everypony back safely, and then, when we start training under Lex tomorrow, we can let him know that we’re already doing our part to protect this place!”
“You have to admit, he has a point,” shrugged Straightlace.
Fiddlesticks gave Lyden an unhappy look. “You really think this is what Lex wants us to do?”
It is not my place to speak in the High Alpha’s voice, answered the wolf.
“C’mon, Fiddleface,” pressed Fruit Crunch. But although he’d directed the statement towards Fiddlesticks, he looked around at the others as he spoke. “Lex wouldn’t leave somepony behind if he thought they might be in danger, and neither do the Night Mare’s Knights! What if some of the ponies on that boat get worried about River and go looking for her? They might stumble into the same trouble she did, and it’d be our fault for not being there to rescue them! Is that the kind of superhero that you guys want to be?”
“No way!” Straightlace’s agreement was quick and wholehearted.
“No…” admitted Feathercap with a sigh.
“It’s not like I can just turn around and leave you guys here,” shrugged Cleansweep, the corners of her mouth turning up.
“I guess since we’ve already come this far,” muttered Fiddlesticks grudgingly.
Indeed, added Altaer. Once a course of action has been decided upon, you should remain resolute and see it through.
While still being able to change strategies in response to new information, chimed in Ulespy.
Never forget that it’s your unity that makes you strong, not the powers you’ve gained from us. Although her expression remained the same, the tone in Nemel’s telepathic voice was kind. Division amongst yourselves weakens you.
So let’s hurry! cheered Venin. Right now, there are people counting on you!
Giving an eager nod, Fruit Crunch turned and resumed heading down the center of the street, his friends falling in behind him as Lyden took his place at the colt’s side. You did very well, came the wolf’s voice in his head.
Grinning, Fruit Crunch tried to play it cool. “Aw, I didn’t do anything. I just reminded everyone why we became the Night Mare’s Knights to begin with.”
Even so, you should be pleased with yourself, insisted Lyden. Your pack was unsure of their course, second-guessing themselves, and you soothed their fears by reminding them of their better nature, like a true leader would. It might not be my place to speak for the High Alpha, but I would be surprised if he wasn’t proud of you for that.
“I really hope so,” smiled Fruit Crunch as he led his friends deeper into the city.
“You’re telling me that Lex Legis sent a bunch of children, along with their petting zoo, through Vanhoover – which is apparently still incredibly dangerous – all by themselves just to tell us that our departure has been postponed?”
Fruit Crunch resisted the urge to scream at the pegasus stallion standing across the deck from him. It was an urge he would have succumbed to if not for Lyden’s praise earlier. I’m the leader of the Night Mare’s Knights, he reminded himself. I’m not going to start yelling and screaming like some little kid. “No,” he forced himself to speak slowly. “That’s in fact not what I’m telling you.”
Everything had been going so well up to this point. They’d made it through the city and found the boat without a single thing going wrong. There had been two stallions on deck – a pegasus named Ocean Spray and an earth pony named Scrubby – who, although surprised at the sight of them, had nevertheless invited them on board. But things had turned sour as soon as Lex’s name had come up. Neither stallion, as it turned out, was a fan of his.
“How can there be more ghouls in the city?” whimpered Scrubby, looking at the row of warehouses along the wharf nervously. “I thought Lex killed them all. Did he just decide ‘close enough’ or something?”
Straightlace frowned. “Now hold on. According to what we heard Piggy say, that ghoul that attacked him only just turned into one of those things.”
Far from being mollified, however, Scrubby only looked more nervous. “Which means that there might be more ponies holed up all over the city, about to turn into those things!” He shot Ocean Spray a look of vindicated terror. “I told you we shouldn’t have come back here! We should have thrown in the towel after we delivered those sick ponies to Tall Tale’s hospital!”
“We had to return this yacht, Scrubby.” The voice belonged to a new pony, a redheaded unicorn mare with glasses coming up from below deck. “It doesn’t belong to us and we’re not thieves.” With her mild rebuke delivered, the mare turned her attention to the children, eyes glancing over them and their animals analytically before adjusting her glasses. “I’m Compass Rose, the acting captain of this vessel. And you all are?”
“We’re the Night Mare’s Knights!” answered Fruit Crunch proudly. “And we’re here to escort you guys to the camp!”
“River Bank, the lady we were waiting on, ran into a ghoul,” explained Ocean Spray, giving Compass Rose a bitter look. “She’s okay, but Lex apparently decided that rather than coming down here and getting us himself, it’d be better if he sent a bunch of kids to do it for him. Because that worked out so well when he sent the Captain and Sandbar and those other ponies into the city to do his dirty work.”
Fruit Crunch could feel his temper fraying, but didn’t have a chance to say anything as Lyden bared his teeth and began growling. It was with no small satisfaction that Fruit Crunch watched as Ocean Spray stumbled backward in alarm. Nor was he the only one. “Whoa! Geez kid, put a leash on your wolf!” yelped Scrubby.
“How about you muzzle your friend here instead?” shot back Fruit Crunch with no small amount of satisfaction.
Compass Rose frowned deeply, adjusting her glasses again, but before she could do anything else another voice floated up from the stairs leading below deck. “Is everything alright up there? I just got those two butlers from before calmed down, and the other servants are with them now, but you all are getting a bit loud-”
The pegasus mare that had been speaking stopped as she ascended the stairs, eyebrows rising as she beheld the collection of children and animals on the deck of the ship. Middle-aged, her mane and tail were a deeper red than Compass Rose’s, contrasting with the deep brown of her coat. Taking in the scene slowly, she eventually looked over at the other redhead. “What’s going on here?”
“These foals are saying that River Bank’s been hurt, and they’re here to escort us to Lex’s refugee camp safely,” replied Compass Rose evenly.
“I see.” Taking a moment to digest that, the older mare put on a smile that was quite clearly practiced as she walked toward Fruit Crunch, stopping when she was right in front of him. “You’re the one in charge here, right?”
“Darn right!” Happy to be talking to someone who finally got it, he felt his chest puff up a little. “I’m Fruit Crunch, Lex’s apprentice and leader of the Night Mare’s Knights!” He was quite pleased that the mare’s smile didn’t turn patronizing at that, instead remaining polite.
“Nice to meet you, Fruit Crunch. My name’s Ribbon Cutter, the interim deputy mayor of Tall Tale.”
The stunned silence that reigned in the wake of Lex’s pronouncement was finally broken by the sound of Sonata’s laughter.
“Oh wow!” she chuckled. “Okay, you totes had me for a second there! I mean, I actually thought you were serious! Whew!” She punctuated that last part by wiping her hoof across her forehead in an exaggerated manner. “Who says this guy doesn’t have a sense of humor, right?” she snickered, nudging Aria.
But unlike Sonata, Aria wasn’t laughing. “Y-yeah…right…” The cause of her concern wasn’t hard to figure out: despite Sonata’s attempt at levity, Lex’s expression was devoid of anything that remotely resembled mirth.
Nor was he content to allow Sonata to misinterpret his statement. “I’m in no way joking, Sonata.”
“Oh come on!” she giggled. “Don’t say that!”
Lex sighed. “Sonata…”
“Don’t say that,” she repeated, her grin smaller now.
“For what you’ve done,” Lex continued, “the two of you-”
“Don’t say that…” interrupted Sonata, and this time all trace of disbelief was gone from her voice, openly pleading now.
But Lex was pitiless. “The two of you will be permanently turned to stone,” he finished.
Blinking back tears, Sonata swayed in place, looking like she was about to collapse. “Lex…come on…y-you can’t-”
“So that’s it then?!” In contrast to her sister’s growing heartbreak, Aria’s expression was a mixture of fear and anger. “We mess up one time – one time! – and you’re going to kill us both, just like that?!”
“This is not the first time either of you have made serious errors in judgment,” shot back Lex immediately. “Only the most egregious. Moreover, petrification is not death. Being turned to stone does not compromise your body’s functionality; it merely arrests it, placing you in a state of suspended animation. From your perspective, it will be no different than entering a dreamless, never-ending sleep.”
“But…but…” Making no attempt to hide her distress, Sonata flailed for something, anything, to change Lex’s mind. “But what’ll you do without us here? Who’ll be your spokespony without me? Or guard you at night without Aria? Or…or…”
“I’ll navigate whatever issues come up in the wake of your sentence being carried out,” replied Lex evenly.
“So that’s what losing us means to you?” hissed Aria, her face now twisted with hate. “That without us here, you’ll just ‘navigate whatever issues come up’?! Last night you were telling me how much you love me, how sorry you were that you hurt me, and today you’re not just getting ready to throw me and Sonata away, but kill us altogether – oh, excuse me, ‘put us in a state of never-ending sleep’ – and your only reaction to losing us is that there’ll be ‘issues that come up’?!” She raised a hoof then, pointing at him balefully. “I thought that wretched queen who took my voice away was a cold-hearted monster, but you’re worse! At least she didn’t make me fall in love with her before she got rid of me!”
Lex’s response was to simply look at her impassively.
Somehow, that infuriated Aria more than if he’d said something heartless or cruel. “WELL?! SAY SOMETHING ALREADY!”
His eyes alternating between where Sonata was starting to sob quietly and Aria’s towering wrath, Lex’s composure didn’t waver. “The sentence will be carried out at the earliest available opportunity.”
Almost choking on her fury, Aria called the deadliest spell she knew to mind. “You’re not going to get that opportunity, you-”
“W-wait!” hiccupped Sonata, throwing herself at her sister when Aria began to sing the words to a spell. “Aria, wait!”
“Lemme go, Sonata!” roared Aria. “If he thinks I’m just going to stand here and let him turn us to stone then he’s got another thing coming!” Struggling to get out of her sister’s grasp, Aria shot Lex a vicious look. “Last time I wasn’t being serious, but this time will be different, do you hear me?! THIS TIME WILL BE-”
“ARIA STOP!” Holding onto her sister for dear life, Sonata lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think he’s being serious!”
The words made Aria freeze in place, paralyzed by the sliver of hope that her sister’s words sent through her. “What…?”
“I don’t think he’s being serious!” repeated Sonata, voice still a whisper. Risking a look back at where Lex was continuing to watch them calmly, she swallowed nervously before continuing, desperately hoping that she was right. “Look at him! He already said a bunch of times that he was going to turn us to stone, but he hasn’t actually done anything! None of that chanting or waving a hoof in the air or anything! His eyes haven’t even changed color!”
“I…” Aria’s rage began to ebb as she realized Sonata was right. “S-so what’re you saying?” she whispered back, glancing between Lex and Sonata. “That this has something to do with all of those weird rules he has about everything?”
“I don’t know! But there’s got to be some sort of reason for it! Lex, like, never hesitates when he says he’s going to do something!” Sonata’s voice was frantic, desperately clinging to the idea that maybe there was some way out of their current predicament.
“Or maybe he’s just waiting for us to let our guard down,” muttered Aria, no longer sure what to believe. “Maybe this is all just some vicious, spiteful game he’s playing.”
“Lex doesn’t play games!” Desperately searching for some sort of clue, Sonata looked back at Lex, raising her voice back to normal levels. “Why stone?” she asked abruptly.
His brow furrowed slightly. “What?”
“Why stone?” repeated Sonata. “I mean, I know you don’t kill ponies, but why not – I dunno – why not banish us to some other world or take away all our memories or change us into muskrats or something?”
“Because petrification is the apex of responsibly confining someone without causing them to suffer,” answered Lex, the reply coming easily now that he knew what she was asking. “Banishment means being sent to a remote location, which impedes the state’s duty of care to prevent unforeseen dangers from befalling someone so condemned as well as keeping third parties from interfering with their sentence. Likewise, removing someone’s memories is not only a grotesque violation of an individual’s sense of self, but does nothing to remove their intrinsic capabilities, and so accomplishes comparatively little in terms of mitigating whatever danger they pose to themselves or others. Similarly, polymorphing someone is both cruel and irresponsible; even leaving aside the potential conservation of non-physically-dependent magical abilities, the effect on their identity-”
“Great, wonderful, so you think that turning people into rocks is the best way to punish them whenever they do something wrong,” snapped Aria. Lex’s arcane explanation had done nothing to calm her nerves. “I’m amazed this place isn’t full of statues already!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “It’s far from an ideal punishment. The total inhibition of cognitive function means that its use as a method of reform is completely nil. Hence why the use of petrification as an instrument of criminal justice is only allowable when the subject in question cannot be put to death but is too dangerous to be allowed to retain any autonomy whatsoever.”
Sonata bit her lip, trying to parse what Lex was saying. There was some sort of clue in there, she felt sure. Some sort of hint that he was trying to give them about why he was talking about turning them to stone without actually doing it. But even though she was already thinking so hard that she could feel her brain starting to hurt, nothing was coming to her. It was in desperation that she threw another question out there, just trying to keep him talking before he decided to act on what he was saying. “So, um, do we get to choose what pose we’ll be in when you do it?”
Aria gave her a look of disbelief. “What does that matter?!”
Sonata threw her forelegs in the air in exasperation. “I’m just asking! It’s not like you’re helping any! Besides, if we’re going to become statues or whatever I’d like to at least look good!”
“Well I’d rather look like I went down fighting!” snarled Aria.
“Great! Then you can…can…” Sonata couldn’t finish. “That’s it,” she murmured, her eyes going wide. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?” snapped Aria nervously. “What are you talking about?!”
Sonata didn’t answer her, turning her attention back to Lex. Wiping her eyes, she let out a breath, forcing herself to stay calm. “You know what?” she began. “You keep talking about turning someone to stone when they’ve, like, done some totes horrible thing. But that’s not all you can use it for, right? You could also use it in a fight. Like, if you’re fighting something like a dragon, or a devil, or a big ugly squid monster, you’d want to use a spell that can one-shot ‘em by turning them into stone, wouldn’t you?”
“…or a princess,” murmured Aria, eyes widening as she suddenly saw what her sister was getting at.
Sonata nodded vigorously. “That’s right! You said that what we did was just as bad as Luna, but you didn’t turn her to stone! Or Celestia! In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do that! Lex…” She took a step closer to him, hope written all over her face. “Do you actually have a spell to turn people to stone?”
“Or a curse?” added Aria. “Or some ritual thing?”
Lex gave the latter mare a response first. “Curses are designed to impact an individual’s quality of life, which requires that they be cognizant of the condition that they’re afflicted with, and so necessarily rules out petrification as something they can accomplish,” he explained. “As for a ritual, those aren’t well-suited for carrying out criminal justice. Utilizing ritual magic is an inherently fragile undertaking, and a condemned individual is likely to do everything in their power to disrupt the process. Moreover, since there’s no way to tell how a disrupted ritual’s energy will manifest – and because the individual so condemned will be the one to bear the brunt of whatever happens – that subjects them to a level of risk of such a degree that it violates the state’s duty of care toward its people, which includes the criminal population.”
Sonata nodded impatiently. “Right, so that’s a ‘no’ to both of those, isn’t it? What about just casting a plain old spell? Can you turn someone to stone that way?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, instead looking at her in silence. Several long seconds went by as both mares waited for him to reply. Finally, he opened his mouth.
“No.”
Sonata collapsed with a cry of relief, smiling even as her eyes started watering again. “For realsies?”
Aria could only stare at him. “‘No’? That’s it? Just ‘no’?” Her eyes narrowed, remembering how he’d thought up that ritual to call Harrowing Ordeal in just a few hours last night. “You’re not working on one right now, ready to spring it on us tomorrow morning?”
Lex shook his head slowly. “I can assure you, I’ve looked into that particular venture before, and developing a petrification spell would require significant time and material resources, neither of which I have in abundance at the moment. And even if I did…” He stopped then, and Aria had the impression that he was choosing his words carefully. “Such an instance of thaumaturgical development would be necessarily proximate to preparations for allocating the requisite energies involved in actualizing the cognitive structures required to transcend the immanent-transeunt divide.”
Before Aria could even begin to try and wrap her head around what he’d just said, Sonata threw herself at Lex. Throwing her forelegs around him, she buried her face in his chest. “I knew it,” she sniffled. “I knew you wouldn’t do that to us!”
Any lingering doubts she had were wiped away as she felt Lex gently nuzzle the top of her head, one foreleg pulling her close.
But the same couldn’t be said for Aria. “So you deliberately gave us a punishment that you knew you couldn’t carry out?”
“Strictly speaking, your sentence is suspended due to difficulties with practical implementation,” answered Lex softly, not looking up from where he was still holding Sonata.
Aria felt herself start to shake, the tension of the last few minutes starting to flow out of her. “But wh-” She had to stop, licking her lips and taking a deep breath before trying again. “What about all that stuff about how you couldn’t just let us off the hook? That we did the same thing as that Luna lady so you couldn’t do something with no force or effect?”
“This has force and effect, Aria.” He looked up at her then, still embracing Sonata. “Your sentence is suspended, not revoked. When I acquire petrification magic – which I will, since I determined that it was a necessity for dealing with extremely dangerous criminals long before I’d met either of you – I will use it on the two of you.”
Sonata lifted her head, looking up at Lex with a gentle smile. “You say that now, but there’ll be some other loophole or something that’ll come up then, won’t there? Like, you’ll find some reason to forgive us the same way you forgave whatshername, Fencer.”
Lex made sure to keep his expression neutral. “The possibility of my granting the two of you clemency prior to implementing your sentence of petrification remains entirely hypothetical.”
Now it was Aria’s turn to throw her forelegs up. “So this was all just one big show! You could have told us right from the beginning that you weren’t going to do anything to us, but instead you completely ambushed us out of nowhere with a bunch of crazy-talk and let us flail around trying to figure out what to do even though you were never…never going to…”
By the time she realized what she was saying, the irony was so obvious that it made her blush, her ears folding back. For his part, Lex simply gave her a flat look, while an embarrassed giggle escaped Sonata’s lips.
“Alright. I get it,” admitted Aria in a small voice. At long last she trudged over and stood in front of Lex, shamefacedly looking down. “Payback’s a nag, and so am I.”
“You are,” admitted Lex, even as he reached out with his other foreleg, pulling her to him alongside Sonata. “But that doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
It was with a sense of profound regret that Lex slowly released Sonata and Aria, ending their romantic embrace.
Although he’d never considered himself to be sentimental, Lex nevertheless found himself wishing that he’d been a better boyfriend to the mares that had come to mean so much to him. Even if he had little idea of precisely how he might have done that, he still found himself lamenting that he hadn’t done more for them. No matter that Vanhoover’s ponies had needed his attention more. No matter that they’d been beset by monsters and enemies time and again. The fact that he’d taken their love so completely for granted made his heart ache with sorrow now.
It had been Sonata and Aria’s ridiculous scheme to make him enslave them that had made Lex realize just how badly he’d neglected them. As ill-conceived as their plan had been, it had still been their way of fighting to preserve their relationship with him. In their own way, the two of them had been willing to assume a great deal of risk in hope of staying with him, even more than he had when he’d summoned Harrowing Ordeal. While Lex had been prepared to sacrifice love in the name of duty, having seen no other alternative when the scabrous stallion’s advice had proven unusable, seeing Sonata and Aria go so far in order to protect their relationship had driven home the full cost of what he’d be giving up.
Just like the Night Mare had said: this was a sacrifice of something valuable to him. Something he’d miss.
“Is there any chance she’s bluffing?”
Aria’s question made Lex blink, not understanding what she meant. “What?”
“The Night Mare,” she explained tersely. “I mean, we weren’t being serious about trying to overthrow you. You sentenced us to be turned to stone even though you can’t actually do that. Maybe she’s just bluffing about making you dump us.”
Sonata jumped in, already grinning at the idea. “Yeah! Like, maybe you’re supposed to get up in her face and be all, ‘Do you’re worst, lady, ‘cuz I’m fighting for love!’ And then she’ll be like ‘Ha! That was the right answer all along!’ And you won’t actually have to break up with us after all!”
But Lex was already shaking his head. “I can assure you, her demand was entirely forthright.” Of that much he felt certain. The Night Mare had made it more than plain that she had reached the end of her patience with his lack of progress in promulgating her religion. As much as she lionized perseverance in the face of adversity, Lex was positive that she would make good on her threat to kill him and collect his soul if he defied her now.
Aria shrugged. “Then we’re back to that ugly freak’s love-slave idea.”
“No.” Despite the melancholy enveloping him, Lex didn’t hesitate. “That’s not something I’m prepared to do.”
“Why not?” whined Sonata. “We want it, you want it, so what’s the problem?”
“My government does not turn people into property, Sonata,” replied Lex. “There’s no way-”
“Yes there is,” interrupted Aria.
Lex frowned, giving her a reproachful look. “No, there isn’t.”
“Yes,” Aria insisted, stomping a hoof in agitation, “there is! You just haven’t figured it out yet!” Huffing, she glared at him. “You defeated that hideous thing you summoned by weakening the magic you used to bring him here! You sentenced the two of us to be turned to stone and then got us out of it on a technicality! So why can’t you do the same thing here?”
“Strictly speaking, you didn’t ‘get out’ of being petri-”
“There! That right there!” Pointing a hoof at him, Aria continued ranting. “Every time you run into a problem based on what you can’t do or aren’t allowed to do or aren’t supposed to do, you come up with some sort of loophole in order to do it anyway! So just do the same thing now! Your rules don’t let you keep slaves? Fine! Then what’s another way you can do the same thing without actually calling it that?”
“The terminology isn’t the problem!” Frustration crept back into his voice then, as Lex tried to explain it in a way the two of them would understand. “The formal structure of our relationship as it exists now is based on romance. That’s what the Night Mare is demanding that I give up. Any alternative relationship would need to be predicated on some other arrangement, one where physical and emotional intimacy are not unusual but also not the basis for us being together.” Just saying it out loud was discouraging, causing his momentary upset to change back into ennui. “But what few such arrangements exist aren’t ones for which my government is willing to set a de jure precedent, which is what would happen if I agreed to them.”
Sonata rubbed her chin in thought. “Okay, so like, what’s another relationship that we can all be in where you still get to love us up?” The words were barely out of her mouth when her eyes suddenly lit up. “Wait! I’ve got it! We can be prosti-”
“Absolutely not!” snapped Lex.
“Aw, c’mon!” pleaded Sonata, clearly quite pleased with her idea. “It’d be totes classy!” Like, you’d be our one-and-only client, and pay us by buying us fancy dinners and beautiful dresses, treating us like really elegant ladies the whole time!”
“At least until nightfall,” smirked Aria, picking up on the narrative seamlessly. “Then you’d use us like we were cheap thrills that you picked up on a street corner. Just imagine what that’d be like.” She started circling him slowly, moving until she was pressed up against him, with Sonata mirroring her movements perfectly on his other side. “You’d have the two most beautiful girls in Equestria with you every day…”
“Everyone admiring how fancy and stylish we looked,” purred Sonata.
“And then you’d take us to bed and tell us that we need to earn our keep,” whispered Aria huskily.
“Which means doing whatever you tell us…”
“Reminding us that we’re not allowed to say no…”
“Because we belong to you,” they finished in unison.
The erotic fantasy made Lex shudder. But as much as the sexy suggestion stirred his desire for the two of them, he couldn’t bring himself to seriously consider it. “I can’t possibly legitimize the practice you’re suggesting.”
Both mares sighed, with Sonata pouting and Aria rolling her eyes. “Why not?” complained Sonata, dropping her seductive attitude as she moved to stand across from him again. “It’s not like we’d be slaves that way, and it fits with all that stuff you said about needing a different kind of relationship where we can still be together.”
“The commodification of people-”
“Too many syllables,” interrupted Aria. Like Sonata, she’d dropped her flirtatious mien, separating herself from Lex in order to look him in the face. “Keep it to ordinary words, if you don’t mind.”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex tried again. “All people are inherently worth more than any amount of money, no matter how great. They therefore cannot be treated as property, which includes renting them, because the defining characteristic of property is that it has a set monetary value.”
“Right, we figured that you wouldn’t be down with the whole slavery thing,” huffed Aria. “Hence why we tried to go the criminal route instead.”
The reminder earned her a glower from Lex. “Which was incredibly foolish of you. Criminals have some of their rights abrogated as part of the penalties they face for their offenses. But that does not include being compelled to participate in an intimate relationship, nor does it allow for them to be considered goods. Furthermore-”
“Wait, I’ve got it!” Sonata grinned as another idea came to her. “We can be, like, massage girls who work just for you! So when you want to relax at the end of the day, and you totes come to us to give you a rubdown, and-”
“Forget it, Sonata,” sighed Aria. “He said it has to be a relationship where pleasure is part of business, and I don’t think that counts. Besides, I don’t even want to know how you’re going to butcher that ‘happy ending’ joke.”
“But there’s got to be something!” Sonata’s whine was accompanied by a dramatic fall onto her back. “Like, can’t we just give up our right to not be property?”
Lex shook his head again. “Inherent rights cannot be forfeited, Sonata. That’s part of what makes them inherent. Violating them under any circumstances, even with the consent of the individual, is wrong.”
“It’s more wrong to just throw us away like this!” snarled Aria. “I can’t believe you can’t think of some way to…wait…” Her brow furrowed as a sudden memory came back to her then, something he’d said last night…
Sonata scrambled to her hooves, giving Aria a hopeful look. “Ooh! Are you having a brainshower? Please say you’re having a brainshower!”
“Brainstorm, you idiot,” muttered Aria. But her heart wasn’t in the insult, putting all of her effort into remembering what Lex had said during their escapade last night. She felt sure there’d been something in there about what to do when there was no right answer. It hadn’t been when he’d been talking to that hideous stallion that he’d summoned; it had been before that, when he’d been lecturing those foals. But it hadn’t been about there being no right answer; he’d phrased it differently. It was more like…like… “The least wrong answer,” she murmured at last.
Sonata tilted her head. “What?”
Aria ignored her, looking at Lex. “You told those kids last night…something about how your morals worked in…what was it? Levels?”
Lex blinked once, not sure why she was referencing that. “You mean tiers,” he corrected. “Specifically, the ranking of deontological imperatives as a method where, in the event of an irresolvable moral conflict, you have an intrinsic method of determining the least-wrong course of action.”
Slowly, a grin grew across Aria’s face. “Right. That.”
With no further explanation, she walked over to Sonata and began whispering in her sister’s ear. A second later Sonata’s eyes widened. “Wait, what?! We should-” Another bout of whispering from Aria silenced her for several seconds, before her eyes slid over to Lex. “He would, but-” More whispers followed, causing to bit her lip. But eventually, her pensive look faded into one of resolve, nodding. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Frowning, Lex watched the exchange with a growing sense of trepidation. “I’ll remind you that the last time the two of you came up with a plan,” he warned them, “it was not only a spectacular failure, but was necessarily doomed from the start.” He almost shifted back into shadow-form, just in case they’d decided to attack him again, but the thought warred with his sense of guilt over not having treated them well enough before, and he couldn’t bring himself to go through with it…but neither did he relax, waiting for them to explain whatever harebrained scheme they’d come up with this time.
A moment later Aria finished whispering in Sonata’s ear, and both sisters smirked at him. “So Lex,” began Aria conversationally. “Your whole moral tier thing, it puts saving pony lives at the top of the list, right?”
“That’s a gross oversimplification of one of the most important of the positive duties,” snapped Lex, already not liking where this was going.
Sonata nodded, as though pleased by his answer. “So is it more important than all that other stuff you were saying about how you can’t turn people into property?”
Lex’s tension skyrocketed. Were they suggesting that they’d go on some sort of rampage throughout the camp if they didn’t get their way?! “What exactly are you saying?”
“Oh, nothing much,” answered Aria, her voice casual. “Just that if you don’t agree to own the two of us, then we’ll kill ourselves.”
Lex could only stare at the smirking mares in front of him, utterly aghast. “What?!”
“If you don’t agree to keep us,” answered Aria, speaking slowly to make sure the message got across, “then we will kill ourselves.”
“What she said,” added Sonata helpfully.
For a moment Lex couldn’t even bring himself to respond, simply looking back and forth between the two of them. After their ludicrous plan to try and secure their relationship with him by staging a fake coup, he’d thought they’d learned their lesson. The three of them had started a dialogue about what they were up against and what to do about it, and even if they hadn’t been able to come up with any viable strategies, they had at least been going about exploring ideas in the proper manner. And yet now, with no preamble, Sonata and Aria had gone back to another absurd scheme! “Your bluff is in exceptionally poor taste,” he spat, voice filled with disdain. “A lot of ponies have died here, and-”
“There’s going to be two more unless you figure something out,” finished Aria.
“Because it’s, like, totes not a bluff,” chimed in Sonata. “If you don’t make us your slaves or pets or call girls or whatever, then schlk!” The last exclamation was accompanied by her drawing a hoof across her throat.
Despite her nonchalance, the gesture sent a visceral rush of anger through Lex. If it had been anyone else talking that way about Sonata, he would have thrown himself at them in a rage. Only the fact that the ones holding her and Aria hostage were themselves kept his ire in check. That, and the fact that he had no practical measure for stopping them; their magic would make using what mundane restraints the camp could supply an exercise in futility, and the only magic he had that might have prevented them from harming themselves was a curse. But a quick check of his circlet indicated that the spells they'd used to bolster their resistance to his magic was still active. Worse, Lex had used his dark magic enough to know that a malediction of that degree would require him to channel additional power through his body, and he had exhausted his ability to do that until he’d rested again…which there was no time for now, leaving him gnashing his teeth in impotent fury. “The two of you,” he hissed, “are not serious! This is nothing more than a ploy!”
“Maybe,” shrugged Aria, before giving him a devious grin. “But are you really willing to bet on that?”
But rather than sharing her sister’s taunting demeanor, Sonata actually looked a little upset by Lex’s accusation. “You don’t think we’re being serious?”
“I know you’re not!” snapped Lex. “The idea that you’d take your own lives just because we couldn’t continue our relationship isn’t just preposterous, it’s unthinkable!”
“Maybe for you,” huffed Sonata. “I mean, yeah, when I broke your heart back when we were headed for Tall Tale, you were still able to pick yourself up and go do what you knew you needed to do, but we’re not like that.”
Aria nodded, giving Lex a standoffish look. “Unlike you, some of us-”
But Sonata wasn’t finished. “Did I ever tell you that I don’t even remember most of my time on Earth? I mean, I do; it’s not like I have that thing from those stories where you hit your head and forget your entire life. But it’s all just sort of blurred together. And you know why?” She gave him a pointed look then, not waiting for him to try and answer. “Because it was boring! Actually, you know what? That’s not even the right word for it. It was like…” She twirled a hoof in the air. “Empty. Like watching the same movie over and over again, and not even a good movie! But you can’t fall asleep because you were already asleep, and so there’s nothing to do but just watch it again, you know?”
“I can assure you I don’t,” answered Lex, his incomprehension written all over his face.
Pouting, Sonata tried again. “I’m saying it was like having waffles every morning, but never any syrup. Like every day was Tuesday, and the weekend never rolled around. Like…Like…” Concentrating with visible strain, Sonata finally looked over at Aria. “A little help here?”
To her credit, Aria only spent a second rolling her eyes. “You’re trying to say that the time we spent on that world was meaningless.”
“Right!” Relieved to have been put back on track, Sonata flashed her sister a grateful grin before turning back to Lex, her expression turning serious. “We were there for, like, more than a thousand years, and that entire time was totes meaningless. And you know why?” Her ears folded back then, grimacing as though it hurt to even think about that part of her life. “Because over there absolutely nothing mattered. At least, not to us. We could get just enough power from the people in that world to make anyone who came near us fall under our spell, which meant that we could do anything to anybody. And if you think that sounds fun, trust me, it got real old real fast. Just putting an enchantment on people isn’t the same as having them really adore you.”
“And don’t ask ‘why didn’t you just not enchant them and talk to them like normal?’” added Aria. “When you have the power to make people do whatever you want, you can’t help but use it whenever someone does something you don’t like. And since we could only recharge our powers – which we needed to do all the time – by making people upset, that’s what we used everyone there for when we weren’t making them fawn over us. Throw in the whole ‘immortality’ thing, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that no one in that awful world ever really made an impression.”
“And it just went on and on,” groaned Sonata. “And even when things finally changed, all that happened was that everything got worse! We lost the Battle of Bands and ended up with no magic at all for a while, then we went to Everglow and got our butts kicked for the second time in a row, and then…” She paused, shooting her sister a guilty look. “And then we split up.”
Aria frowned, but didn’t say anything.
Licking her lips, Sonata turned her attention back to Lex, giving a helpless shrug. “And that’s how it was. Things were either long and boring and filled with nameless nobodies, or there were a bunch of super-strong enemies slapping us around and not caring how unhappy they made us.” Despite how dreary her story was, she smiled then, stepping forward and placing a hoof on Lex’s chest. “That was just how life was for us…until we met you.”
Suddenly feeling awkward, Lex shifted in place. “Sonata…”
“Everything about you was different,” she continued. “Instead of a world where nothing mattered, you saw a world where everything did. Everyone we’d ever met who had magic used it to fight us; you used it to fight for us. You want to be adored by everyone, but only if you’ve actually earned it. You’re too strong to be enchanted, too tough to be intimidated, and too smart to be tricked. And you never, ever give up.”
She slowly slid her hoof up, until she was gently caressing his cheek. “I don’t just want to be adored. I know that now. As much as I like it when everyone smiles and cheers and claps when they see me, that’s not enough for me anymore. I want to be loved, and I want to be loved by you, Lex. Because I know that when you smile at me, when you kiss me, when you touch me, it’s not because of my magic, or because I’m pretty, or because you think it’s funny when I say the wrong thing. It’s just because I’m me, Sonata Dusk. The girl who makes you happy. And that’s…” She had to stop then, wiping her eyes. “And that means so much more to me than even if everyone in this world, and that world, and that other world all adored me. And if that can’t happen…if you can’t be with me anymore…then yeah, I don’t want to go on living.”
A moment after Sonata finished, Aria stepped forward. In contrast to her usual bravado, her face was bright red, eyes downcast. Even as Lex watched, she risked a quick glance up at him, and when they made eye contact she immediately lowered her gaze, her face burning even more. She didn’t look at him again as she crept forward, staying silent as she meekly pressed herself against his side.
Lex was silent as well, having no idea how to respond to such a heartfelt statement. A cascade of emotions ran through him, ranging from joy that Sonata felt so strongly for him to fear that she really would take her own life if he didn’t find a way out of their current predicament. But with no solid foundation on which to ground his thoughts, he couldn’t even begin to formulate a response, let alone a plan.
It was in an effort to stabilize his feelings that he bent his thoughts toward the data points that Sonata had outlined, focusing on them in hopes that focusing on something rational would let him regain his equilibrium. But even those were more emotive than informative. Just the thought of spending over a thousand years in a state of perpetual ennui, brought on by being trapped in a realm with no magic of its own and populated by nothing but humans, was so maddening that…that…
Suddenly everything fell into place.
“The full scope of the hardships the two of you have endured is clear to me now.” Neither mare missed the tone of finality in Lex’s voice, causing them to share a nervous look before turning their attention back to him. “The mutated forms you were born with,” he continued. “Being thrown into that alien world. Enduring over a millennium with only each other for meaningful contact. What you went through on Everglow. I didn’t fully appreciate the effect that it all had on you before. But I do now, which is why I can confidently say…” He paused then, looking each of them in the eye to make sure they fully understood what he was about to tell them.
“The two of you are not of sound mind.”
“…huh?”
“…what?”
“What you’ve gone through has clearly compromised your mental competence, leaving you with a diminished capacity to function as rational beings,” explained Lex. “As such, your personal agency can therefore no longer be recognized as being sufficient to allow you to function as autonomous agents in Equestrian society.”
Aria frowned. “Wait…are you saying we’re crazy?”
Sonata scratched her head. “Okay, not exactly the ‘I love you too’ that I was expecting, unless-” Her eyes widened. “Ooh! Does this mean you’re throwing out the whole ‘turn you to stone someday’ thing?!”
Lex grimaced slightly at that. “No. Despite your impaired faculties, both your magical capabilities and your actions to date have made it clear that you present a danger to the ponies around you. Hence, your sentence – though suspended – is still in force.” That was a standard that had to be upheld. While diminished mental capacity could be grounds for leniency when administering a criminal sentence, doing so here could lay the groundwork for establishing that that same leniency should have been granted to Luna, since it was possible that her millennium-long imprisonment in the moon could have had a similarly deleterious effect on her mind. That was speculative, of course; Lex had previously heard rumors that she had spent that time in stasis, similar to what had happened to him and the rest of the Crystal Empire under King Sombra’s curse. But even if that wasn’t the case, Lex had no intention of creating even the flimsiest basis for Luna, or some representative of hers, to argue that he had been too hard on her.
“Then what exactly are you saying?” asked Aria impatiently.
“I’m saying,” replied Lex with a pointed look, “that the two of you are hereby placed under the care of the state – as represented by myself – until such a time as you’re able to function autonomously again.” He allowed himself a thin smile then. “Though given the duration of the torment you went through, that will likely be a long time indeed.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “Oh my gosh! So you mean you’re, like, going to take charge of us? Like, even if we can’t be boyfriend and girlfriends?” She gave him a toothy grin, eyes sparkling. “We’ll still be able to fool around though, right?”
Lex raised a brow. “It would be unseemly for the person in charge of your well-being to take advantage of you in that way.” Sonata’s face had just started to fall when Lex continued. “However, rehabilitative instructions on carrying out relationships will be necessary.”
Sonata let out a whoop of joy at that, and she wasn’t the only one. “So we’re going to be playing doctor instead of harem girls?” snickered Aria. “I can go for that.”
Lex opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t get anything out as a fresh wave of agony suddenly went down his foreleg. Looking down, he could see that the wire had contracted again. Now the barbs weren’t just wrapped around his leg to the point of scraping on the bone, but were beginning to gouge it. Despite that, he still made himself bear the pain, refusing to cry out. But even as he forced himself not to let on just how badly it hurt, he knew that it was futile. Regardless of whether he expressed it or not, the Night Mare’s patience was almost up.
Unable to put any weight on his foreleg, Lex didn’t bother answering Sonata’s question, knowing that he’d be hard-pressed to keep the pain out of his voice if he did. As much as he’d been able to make himself ignore how the barbed wire around his foreleg had been shrinking, slicing through his flesh in a slow laceration of agony, it had grown far worse once it had reached the bone. Now it was beginning to tighten enough that the barbs were digging into the osseous matter, and Lex knew that it wouldn’t be very long before the bone splintered altogether.
Once that happened, it wouldn’t take the wire much time to finish contracting and sever his leg completely. And that, Lex knew, would be the end of him. He’d known ever since the Night Mare had placed the coil of jagged metal around his leg that it was the symbol of his pact with her. Once it cut off his leg it would no longer be a part of him, signifying that their bargain was null and void. When that happened, he had no doubt that the vengeful goddess would immediately make good on her threats to not only end his life, but whisk his soul off to an eternity of torment.
But that won’t happen, Lex swore silently. He wouldn’t allow it. Not when he’d finally figured out a way to still be with the mares he loved. Not when he still had to secure the futures of everypony in the camp. Not when Equestria still needed his leadership. This was simply another hardship that needed to be overcome in order to make all of that happen.
“It’s time,” he rasped, doing the best he could to keep his voice steady. “The two of you go call everypony in the camp to attention. I’ll address them once you’ve finished.”
“I’ll do it!” offered Sonata helpfully, before looking at Aria. “You find something to wrap his leg up with.”
Aria’s lip curled. “How about you stay here and do the dirty work and I’ll go out and make everyone look at me?”
The pain made it more difficult than normal for Lex to keep his irritation in check. “Both of you go!” he hissed. “My leg doesn’t need tending to. I’ll simply change back to shadow-form before I-”
“You can’t!”
“That’s a really dumb idea.”
The united protests were enough to make Lex bite back his urge to rebuke them. He knew he didn’t have time for their recalcitrance, but he was equally aware that his life was on the line with this ceremony. Performing it to the Night Mare’s satisfaction meant making a good showing of her religion. That meant that he needed to listen to Sonata and Aria’s opinions; despite the former’s ignorance and the latter’s pettiness, the two of them were sociable creatures with a great deal of insight into the intricacies of communication, unlike himself. “Explain.”
Sonata gave him an incredulous look. “Um, news flash! Turning into a big swirly black cloud with the glowing eyes and all is just a little bit scary-looking! And by ‘just a little bit’ I mean ‘a lot!’ You can’t expect anyone to listen to you if they’re shaking in their horseshoes!”
“And your leg being all covered with blood isn’t much better,” added Aria dryly. “Even if it doesn’t look like it’s bothering you – and just so you know, it looks like it’s bothering you a lot right now – it’ll make everyone else uneasy. You want them paying attention to what you’re saying and not how you look.” She paused then, giving Lex a suspicious glance. “I’m guessing there’s a reason why you haven’t asked for that filly with the healing magic already?”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “Ooh, that’s a good idea!”
But Lex knew otherwise. “Healing magic won’t help with this.” He’d proven that beyond all doubt when the weak healing spell he’d used during his fight with the girls had done nothing about the wire’s constriction. But there was no time to explain that to them now. “One of you go out there and get everypony’s attention. The other can find something to wrap my leg with if you think it’s so important.”
“As spokespony, I call dibs on that first one!” Sonata didn’t wait for Aria to object, pausing just long enough to give Lex a quick kiss on the cheek before trotting around the ruined remains of the train station, her voice already raised as she called out to everypony.
That just left Aria there with him, the purple-and-aquamarine-maned mare scowling. “Fine,” she muttered, going over and poking at the wreckage of the building for a moment before looking at Lex. “I don’t suppose you have something in your bag that you can use for this?”
He wasn’t sure if she meant something to wrap his leg or to help her dig through the wreckage – she’d doubtlessly realized that crossing the camp to ask the doctors for bandages would take too long – but the answer was the same either way, and he shook his head. “Wonderful,” she snorted, kicking at some of ruins idly. “Maybe if I dig around in here enough we’ll get lucky and find some sort of portable hospital or something that we never noticed before.”
Lex doubted that, but he had other things on his mind at the moment. While he knew he should have been thinking about what he was going to say to everypony once he went out there – Sonata wouldn’t be able to help him with this, since the Night Mare had made it clear that he needed to do this personally – there was another question that had been weighing on his mind for a little while now. “Aria.”
“Hm?”
“Where’s Nosey in all of this?”
For a split-second Aria froze, then went back to kicking over bits of wood and plaster. “What do you mean?”
Lex frowned, not understanding why she was suddenly being evasive. “I mean, what was her role in that ridiculous scheme of yours to pretend to try and overthrow me?” There was no way she’d been unaware of what Sonata and Aria had been planning, of that much Lex felt certain. While it wasn’t conclusive, he couldn’t imagine what else they could have been discussing when he’d caught them all talking outside the station after he’d woken up. But whereas Sonata and Aria had stayed there to lie in wait for him, Nosey had followed him across the camp to talk to River, and as far as Lex knew she was still there. So what had her part in their plan been? “Is she going to make some half-hearted attack on me while I’m distracted? Or is she performing some other action that she thinks could be considered treasonous? Either way, while I’m dealing with everypony, I want you to talk to her and let her know that your idea failed miserably, and she-”
“Blondie’s doing her own thing,” cut in Aria, not bothering to look at him as she said it.
Lex’s frown deepened, not liking the sound of that. “In what regard?”
Aria shot him an irritated look. “What am I, her babysitter? She wasn’t part of our idea to make you punish us. I mean, yeah, we talked with her about it, and she even said she thought it might work, but she didn’t want to join in. If you want to know what she is doing, you can ask her yourself.”
Lex didn’t reply, silently digesting that. That Nosey had apparently elected not to be involved in Sonata and Aria’s ill-considered scheme was heartening, but only to a limited degree. After all, she was still the mare who had brazenly tried to interview him despite thinking that he was King Sombra reborn, convinced that her press pass would shield her from harm if that were true. To say nothing of what had happened because of her desire to interview Block Party. It was likely that she’d turned down participating in Sonata and Aria’s plan because she’d formulated her own. He could only hope that it was based around something more intelligent than trying to get herself sentenced to belong to him.
But then, it didn’t really matter anyway. Although the basis for it was less certain than for the Sirens, Lex still felt reasonably certain that the torture Xiriel had subjected Nosey to gave him sufficient basis for declaring her to be mentally incompetent as well. Although she’d been making notable progress in her recovery already…
“Here we go,” announced Aria, pulling Lex out of his thoughts. Glancing over at her, he saw her struggling to pull a battered metal container out of the wreckage. A thought was all it took for him to grab it in his telekinesis and help her yank it out.
Once it was free, Lex turned it over in his aura, an eyebrow rising as he looked over at her. “A paper towel dispenser?”
“They’re clean and you can wrap stuff in them,” shrugged Aria. “That’s pretty much the same as a bandage, right?”
Rolling his eyes, Lex began to telekinetically tie the flimsy bits of paper together. Equating them to bandages was far too generous in his estimation, but if dressing his leg was so important than this was probably the best that they’d be able to do. Besides, this was a purely cosmetic exercise anyway.
But apparently Aria didn’t think so, because she crept closer to him as he started to wrap the mass of paper towels around his leg. For some reason, she was having trouble meeting his eyes again, the same way she had when Sonata had been declaring why she loved him so much. “You’re doing it wrong,” she mumbled, grabbing them out of his aura.
The indictment earned her a dirty look. “I am not doing it wrong.”
“Yes you are!” Aria looked up at him then, meeting his eyes defiantly before dropping her gaze again a moment later. “You’re the one who said that we’re playing doctor from now on, so just shut up and let me do this for you,” she muttered, wrapping the bundles of paper around his leg with surprising gentleness.
Resisting the urge to point out how her description of their new relationship was not only overly reductive but had also reversed exactly which of them was the “doctor,” Lex let her bandage him, instead trying to figure out what had prompted the abrupt change in her attitude. But if there were any clues to be found as to why she was suddenly acting so demure, they were beyond his ability to discern, and Aria briskly finished wrapping his leg.
“It’s not pretty,” she announced after she’d tied the last of the paper towels together around his mangled limb. “But it’s better than it was.”
“I suppose,” concurred Lex. At least he wasn’t going to be leaving bloody hoofprints everywhere now.
But Aria didn’t seem to be finished. “Listen…” It was another oddly reserved action on her part, since she was usually more demanding of his attention. Even stranger was how she bit her lip when he looked at her, looking down again so she didn’t meet his eyes. “If you screw this up, then that’s it for you, right?” she asked at last. “The Night Mare will…I dunno what, just reach down and destroy you?”
The question made him tilt his head. Why was she asking him this? She’d been there when Harrowing Ordeal had let that particular bit of knowledge slip. “Essentially, yes.”
Aria looked up at him then, opening her mouth…only to close it a second later, lowering her eyes again. But she’d barely finished the motion when she squeezed them shut, letting out a slow breath, and then gave him a determined look, trotting toward him. Lex was about to ask what she was doing when she leaned in and planted a soft kiss on his cheek, the same way Sonata had a minute prior. “Then don’t screw it up,” she whispered, her face reddening for some reason.
But Lex didn’t have a chance to try and figure out what was going on with Aria, as Sonata chose that moment to trot back around the demolished building. “Okay, everypony’s ready and waiting!” she announced, before giving an excited grin.
“But before you go out there, you’re not gonna believe the totes brilliant idea I just had!”
“And now, the pony you’ve all been waiting for! Lex Legis!”
Sonata was the only one who clapped her hooves after announcing him. Everypony else simply sat there silently or muttered something unintelligible to their neighbor. For all his inability to anticipate or understand people’s reactions, Lex knew the lack of enthusiasm on the crowd’s part was a bad sign. But there was nothing he could do about it now.
Taking a deep breath in order to control the rising pain coming from his leg, Lex stepped forward, doing his best not to limp as he moved to the edge of the now-wrecked station’s platform, the only part of the building that was still intact. Sonata smiled as she passed him, moving to stand with Aria at the far end of the platform behind him. “Don’t be nervous,” she whispered. “Aria and I will totes make sure you charm them so much, they’ll go put socks on just so they can be knocked off by how great you’re gonna be!”
The mangled euphemism made Lex roll his eyes, once again doubting the wisdom of Sonata’s “great idea.” But whereas her two previous epiphanies – staging a fake rebellion and threatening suicide if she couldn’t be with him – had been irrational to an unparalleled degree, this one had actually possessed some merit. Enough, at least, that Lex had stowed his reservations and gone along with it.
“Now remember,” came Sonata’s whisper again, reaching his ears clearly despite the fact that she was currently over a dozen feet away from him. “The first thing you want to do is thank everyone for showing up.”
Lex frowned as he reached the edge of the platform. Up until now, he’d used his whisper spell to transmit his ideas to Sonata so that she could relay them to others in a palatable manner. But Sonata had convinced him to do exactly the opposite this time: she – and Aria, since the other Siren had insisted that listening to Sonata alone was a bad idea – would use his spell to surreptitiously tell him when he was conducting himself in an off-putting or incomprehensible manner. “It’s perfect!” Sonata had insisted. “This way you can still be you, but we’ll be able to help smooth out the rough parts!” She’d then declared herself to once again be the best spokespony ever, and made a joking comment about her idea being “crazy good,” in an apparent reference to his finding her mentally incompetent that had left Lex feeling very dubious about her idea.
But knowing how much was riding on this being a success, he’d decided that accepting Sonata and Aria’s help couldn’t possibly be worse than refusing it. Otherwise he’d simply have to hope that he’d somehow say the right things the way he had with Fruit Crunch a few nights previous. And given how badly he’d subsequently messed things up with the girls after he’d let that entirely random success go to his head – to say nothing of how much worse the consequences of failure now would be – Lex knew better than to make that mistake again.
Standing on the edge of the platform, Lex looked out over the assembled ponies, who fell silent as they waited for him to speak. “Thank you all for being here,” he announced, making his voice as stentorian as he could. Inwardly, however, he cringed, and not just because simply being present didn’t strike him as something that should be considered praiseworthy. Letting someone else dictate his words made him feel like he was being manipulated; it was distinctly unpleasant.
“It has come to my attention,” he continued, “that I have been remiss-”
“What’s that mean?” came Sonata’s whisper.
“Shut up you idiot,” hissed Aria, her answering whisper also reaching Lex’s ears clearly. “You’re going to mess him up!”
“Geez, it means all that?” replied Sonata. “He totes shouldn’t say it then!”
Grimacing, Lex forced himself to keep speaking. “…in acknowledging the contributions that everypony else has made to Vanhoover’s recovery and restoration thus far. To that end, I will be taking this opportunity-”
“Say that you’d like to take it,” cut in Aria. “It makes it sound like you’re doing this because you want to instead of because you have to.”
“I would like to take this opportunity,” echoed Lex through gritted teeth, “to-”
This time it was Sonata’s voice that interrupted him. “Don’t say it all growly like that! Try to sound happier! Or at least not like you’re about to start shouting at someone!”
Despite the fact that he very much wanted to start shouting at two particular someones, Lex somehow summoned the strength to keep his irritation out of his voice. “To rectify that oversight,” he finished. “Once I’ve finished recognizing everypony’s efforts, I’ll then speak to the events that have occurred since my assumption of authority over this place.” That had been Aria’s idea, pointing out that it would be helpful if he explained his side of what had happened with things such as Block Party’s death – which insofar as everyone else knew was still unsolved – why the ghouls had attacked en masse, and especially yesterday’s debacle with the princesses.
But as much as Sonata had turned this into a celebration of everyone here, and Aria had convinced him to expound on recent happenings, Lex knew he had to keep sight of what this was really about: appeasing the Night Mare.
A sudden wave of fresh agony from his leg drove that point home a second later. Lex could hear several ponies near the front of the crowd gasp, followed by murmurs breaking out, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. Even without looking, he could tell that the paper towels that Aria had wrapped his leg with were turning red. Worse, he could feel the bone straining now, threatening to crack under the increased pressure, and knew that he’d run out of time.
“First,” he stated loudly, silencing everypony, “I want to express my appreciation for the Night Mare. While Cloudbank…while other ponies have spoken to you about the goddess, I should have done so before now. The Night Mare…”
His brief hesitation brought Sonata and Aria rushing in. “Just say all the nicest things you can think of about her!”
“Talk her up however you have to so that she’s satisfied with you dumping us!”
Closing his eyes, Lex did his best to ignore the two of them. As much as he’d referred to this as a ceremony, there was no formalized structure to what he was doing now, which meant that there was no way to be certain of what precisely he needed to say to placate the goddess. And as much as his mares were trying to help, Lex knew that he couldn’t rely on them for this…especially since he’d already moved to undercut the sacrifice the Night Mare had demanded of him.
That thought sent a sudden pang of uncertainty through him. Would the Night Mare be mollified by his “sacrifice” if he’d already acted to circumvent it? Or would she be offended by it? Although Lex saw a great deal of practical impact in his decision to declare Sonata and Aria as being unsound of mind, and therefore placed under the authority of the state as embodied in himself, there was no guarantee that the goddess would take the same view. After all, the entire point of his new arrangement with the girls was that they could still have intimate contact, nullifying the most obvious point of loss in what he was forfeiting. But on the other hoof, Harrowing Ordeal had been certain that enslaving the two of them in lieu of a romantic relationship would be acceptable to the Night Mare. Surely this new arrangement, while still distinct from taking ownership of them, had the same overall effect due to his appropriating their right to make decisions for themselves-
“Lex! Say something!”
“What’re you just standing there for?!”
The girls’ voices brought him back to reality, causing Lex to silently curse himself for hesitating. The fact that there’d been no time to review his decision to declare the girls mentally incompetent was his own fault; if he’d had sufficient imagination to think of that option more than a few minutes ago, he wouldn’t be questioning its viability at the last minute. But he hadn’t, which meant that it was too late to review it now. All he could do was go with it and reap the consequences, for good or for ill.
“The Night Mare,” he began again, “has saved my life, and the lives of everypony here, on multiple occasions.” That earned a few wide eyes and a renewed murmuring, but Lex didn’t let that distract him. “If not for the accord I reached with her, I would never have been able to restrain that monster that led the attack on the harbor. It was the magic that she gave me which allowed me to treat the ponies that had been disfigured by one of those aquatic creatures in the course of that same battle. And it was that same magic which allowed me to conjure food for everypony here mere days ago.”
“That’s great!” Sonata’s encouraging whisper flowed into his ears as soon as he’d paused. “You’re doing a super-awesome job! Keep it up!”
“So far so good,” admitted Aria.
But Lex couldn’t bring himself to feel encouraged by their words; the barbed wire hadn’t ceased to squeeze his foreleg. He had to keep going. “And while I condemn Severance – the autonomous magical scythe that I oversaw until recently – in the strongest possible terms for its unwarranted and unsanctioned killing of the Princess Luna’s retainer Silhouette, I would be negligent to overlook that it still played a vital role in fighting those marine creatures, as well as defending this place from the depredations of the undead. That, too, was the result of the Night Mare’s munificence.”
This time Sonata’s whisper was a bit pained. “Okay, maaaybe it’s not the best idea to remind everyone how Severance killed a guy while you’re trying to tell them how great the Night Mare is.”
Aria was more direct. “Have you lost your mind?! Don’t talk about that now! Save it for afterward when you’re explaining what happened with that fight!”
“And you’re using too many big words again,” added Sonata. “Like, just keep it to one or two sylla-thingies.”
“The word is ‘syllables,’ you idiot. And by the way, if he isn’t supposed to use three or more of them then he won’t be able to say ‘Sonata’ anymore. Which, come to think of it, is fine by me.”
“Hey! He won’t be able to say ‘Aria’ either you know!”
Knowing he was on his own as the two started to bicker, Lex forged ahead. “As a goddess, the Night Mare champions a creed of self-improvement, perseverance in the face of adversity, and loyalty to those in your care. These are qualities whose virtues are not only self-evident, but vital to anypony who would don the mantle of leadership. I continually strive to uphold these values so that I might better see to the welfare of everypony here, and in doing so honor the Night Mare.” He had no idea if he was saying the right thing or not, but not wanting to take the chance that he was babbling, decided to bring the paean to the goddess to a close. “I encourage all of you to look to the Night Mare as an example of strength. Those who forge a relationship with her, as I have, will find that she helps those who help themselves.”
Now there was only one thing left to do. For an instant Lex felt his doubts about whether or not he’d undercut the nature of the sacrifice he was about to make resurface…and he made a split-second decision. There was still a way to make sure his offering had substance, even with the loophole he was pursuing.
“As a demonstration of my devotion to the Night Mare and what she represents, I now make an oath.” Telekinetically undoing the makeshift bandages around his left foreleg, Lex held the bloody limb above his head. “This wire represents my commitment to the goddess. So long as I wear it, I will take no wife, no girlfriend, no significant other of any kind, foreswearing all others in the name of duty. This, I vow.”
The crowd was absolutely buzzing now. So were Sonata and Aria, his spell carrying their whispered opinions directly to his ears. But Lex paid no attention to any of them.
Instead, he looked at his upraised leg and waited for the Night Mare’s answer.
When it came, the goddess’s answer was more dramatic than Lex had thought it would be.
That it was delivered via the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg was no surprise. Either she’d find his ceremony and its attendant offering lacking and have the metal cord finish its slow amputation of his limb, or she’d be mollified and make its continual contraction relent. That much was obvious.
As such, when the wire ceased to squeeze the bone in his leg Lex couldn’t help but feel a rush of relief. His leg was still a mess, of course; deep, grisly furrows had been dug across every inch of it, and in several spots the bone was visible. But with the wire having ceased its agonizing ministrations, there was every reason to believe that healing magic would work n-
Before he had time to complete that thought, the wire began to move again. Everypony gasped at the sight – including Sonata and Aria behind him – and even Lex was shocked as the metal cords began to writhe vigorously, rushing across his leg as quickly as the teeth of a chainsaw. For a split-second Lex felt a rush of panic, expecting to see his leg go flying. But then he realized that he wasn’t in any pain. In fact, his leg hurt less now than it did before the wire started tightening…
The mystery was solved a second later as Lex watched the barbs pass through the lacerated substance of his leg. Rather than aggravating the wounds they’d already dealt him, the jagged metal edges closed the torn meat in their wake, knitting flesh back together without leaving so much as a scar. Like a filmstrip played in reverse, the wire reversed all of the damage it had dealt him over the last day, until it at last came to a stop, painlessly wrapped around his now-repaired leg.
Lowering his hoof from where it had been raised the entire time, Lex could only stare at the undamaged coat covering his equally unhurt skin. Even the echo of the pain he’d been enduring was already fading, as though it had all had been an illusion. But a glance down showed that the bloody paper towels were still there.
The feeling of relief returned then, but Lex couldn’t bring himself to feel any sense of gratitude toward the Night Mare. Rather, it was the same sense of exhausted satisfaction that he felt whenever he’d solved a particularly difficult problem. The irritable goddess had been pacified at last. Now he could get back to more important th-
“Whew! Alright!” This time Sonata’s voice wasn’t a whisper, but was raised in an exuberant cheer, one accompanied by applause as she sat on her haunches and clapped her fore-hooves together. “Did you guys see that?! Let’s all give it up for the Night Mare!”
Lex shot her an incredulous look, vaguely appalled that she was treating this like some sort of spectacle. “Sonata, what are you doing?” he whispered. For all that he didn’t like the Night Mare, he still respected her, and treating what had just happened with all the gravitas of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat struck him as undignified in the extreme.
But apparently Aria didn’t share his view, because she was also applauding, giving the crowd a confident smirk. “You all see that?” she called. “You see what Lex’s goddess can do? Now just think of what she could do for you if you impress her like he has!”
Lex was about to order her to shut up when he heard hooves clapping in the crowd. Stunned, he turned back toward everypony in time to see smiles start to break out among the gathered ponies, hooves coming together faster as they began to applaud in earnest. It wasn’t shared by everyone, but even as he watched the applause began to spread, with more and more ponies clapping or stomping their hooves. A few even cheered, and Lex was shocked to hear not only the goddess’s name being called in what sounded like adulation, but his own as well.
Sonata’s whisper almost made him jump when it reached his ears. “Raise your hoof again.”
“Huh?” Lex could barely focus on what she was saying, still trying to figure out what had just happened. Why had Sonata and Aria’s applause carried so much weight with everypony?
“Raise your hoof again,” repeated Sonata. “The one with the wire around it.”
Having no idea why she was recommending that, Lex nevertheless raised his foreleg into the air again. Sure enough, the cheering swelled in reply, the applause growing louder. Lex could only stand there, utterly nonplussed by what was happening.
“Now say something triumphant.” This time the whisper was Aria’s.
“Huh?” Lex glanced back at her, confusion written all over his face. “About what?”
Aria looked at him like he was an idiot. “About what just happened! Say something like…like…‘the Night Mare takes care of her own.’ Say it like you’ve just won a major battle.”
Absolutely nothing about that made sense to Lex. Even leaving aside how crass her suggestion was, the idea that this should be characterized as some sort of achievement rather than a transaction was mind-boggling; he’d made an oath to the Night Mare, and she’d responded positively. What about that was like winning a battle?
But while Lex found her suggestion no less absurd than staging a fake coup, he couldn’t deny that she and Sonata had been successful in working the crowd so far. That, and his own curiosity about what was happening, made him turn back toward everypony. Licking his lips, he took a deep breath. “The Night Mare,” he called a moment later, “takes care of her own!”
It was all he could do not to gape when the crowd went wild. By now, the ponies that were cheering definitively outnumbered those that weren’t, showing no sign of stopping as he stood there with his hoof raised. What was going on?
“See?” Although she was still whispering, the joy in Sonata’s voice was unmistakable. “See what happens when you give everyone a reason to like you?”
“Yesterday they were all afraid of me,” he whispered back, remembering what Sonata had told him about how everypony had reacted to his defeating the princesses. According to her, she’d practically needed to beg them to come back. And yet now they were celebrating him over something that was – from their point of view – an altogether minor event. “Why does this change things?”
Her answer came without hesitation. “Because no one’s forgotten everything you’ve done for them, you big goof! Saving them from Block Party. Bringing doctors and medicine. Making all that food. Buying more from the train. Defeating the ghouls. I mean, yeah, the princess thing scared them, but it’s not like those two were their favorite ponies anymore since they weren’t around when everything fell apart. Now that you’re actually talking to everyone, they’re totes ready to give you the benefit of the doubt!”
Lex wasn’t so certain of that. There were still a not-inconsiderable number of ponies in the crowd that weren’t cheering, or that only seemed to be doing so reluctantly. Still, the fact remained that the majority of the camp ponies seemed to agree with what she was saying.
“You can put your hoof down now,” came Aria’s whisper. “It’s time to move on to the next part of the show.”
Trying not to grimace at her insouciant way of referring to what he was doing, Lex lowered his foreleg. The crowd’s cheering immediately began to ebb, though it took several seconds to die out completely. That, however, gave Lex more than enough time to listen as Sonata and Aria offered advice about what to say next.
“At this point,” he announced after they finished, “I would like all members of the medical staff who aren’t occupied with patient care to come up front.”
Renewed murmurs went through the crowd, as everypony started turning to look for any doctors and nurses in their midst. Several, almost all of them near the back, slowly began to make their way forward. A few rushed back to the medical tents, calling for their colleagues. A few minutes later, a collection of ponies in lab coats and scrubs were standing in front of the platform. It didn’t escape Lex’s notice that more than a few of them were among those ponies that hadn’t been applauding before. But that wasn’t something he could focus on now, as Sonata and Aria were whispering in his ears again.
This time, however, the lines they fed him made his jaw clench. Only the fact that the last few minutes had gone so well kept Lex from eschewing their advice completely, and he forced himself to remain calm as he turned to face the assembled medical practitioners. “If everypony would direct their attention toward these ponies,” he called, indicating the doctors and nurses in front of him. That was completely unnecessary, of course, since everypony present was already watching the proceedings. But Sonata and Aria had insisted that he call for everyone’s recognition.
But it was the part that came next that made his stomach churn.
“I am…” The words wouldn’t pass his lips, almost causing him to choke as he couldn’t bring himself to go on. But barely a second had gone by when Sonata and Aria started whispering to him, all but pleading for him to continue. Taking a deep breath, Lex tried again. “I am…pleased and proud…to congratulate…”
He couldn’t go on. Every word felt like acid in his throat. Although he’d practiced saying something very much like this in the wake of the battle on the docks, telling the ponies involved in the fighting that they should be proud of themselves, that had been in the context of another of his innumerable social experiments, trying to measure the differences in their reactions to the perceived praise. And it had only been “perceived” praise; Lex had at no point said that he was proud of them.
That, however, was exactly what Sonata and Aria were telling him to say now. “It’s, like, a totes good idea to let these guys know that you think they’ve done a great job,” had been Sonata’s position. “Since, you know, they have.”
Aria’s take had been more straightforward. “They did everything you told them and didn’t get killed in the process, so just throw them a bone already.”
But Lex couldn’t bring himself to do so. It was one thing to have a spokespony that rephrased his words into something that the masses found easier to understand. Or even to have two ponies help him to read the mood of a crowd. But it was something else altogether when those two started telling him to say something that was completely contrary to his actual opinion. Regardless of whatever accolades it might win him, Lex Legis did not pander.
Looking back at everypony, Lex abandoned the script that his mares were telling him to follow. “No,” he said finally, in a voice that swept across the crowd. “I’m not.”
Confused murmurs broke out, and not just from the assembled masses. “Lex?” called Sonata nervously. “What’re you doing?”
“Get it together!” hissed Aria. “Everypony here is ready to adore you! Don’t you dare screw it up now!”
“The two of you are here to assist me,” whispered Lex coldly. “Not to dictate my words. Your job is to find a way to make what I say understandable and palatable without compromising its message, not to decide what the message is. If you can’t do that, then be quiet.” Neither replied to that, which was all that Lex needed. Turning back to the doctors again, this time Lex said what was in his heart.
“Disregard what I said earlier,” he announced loudly, bringing all eyes back to him. “I am neither pleased nor proud to be up here lauding your efforts like this.” That got a round of confused muttering from the crowd, but Lex kept going.
“The truth is, when I consider all that you’ve done since you came to Vanhoover, I feel ashamed.”
“The truth is, when I consider all that you’ve done since you came to Vanhoover, I feel ashamed.”
Lex’s words left Sonata gaping in horrified disbelief. What was he doing?! He’d just seen everyone here clapping and cheering for him, and his reaction was to say that he was disappointed in everypony? Didn’t he want everyone to like him?
That thought was familiar, and Sonata suddenly found herself flashing back to a few days ago, after the battle at the docks. They’d all gone back to their warehouse hideout to rest and recover, but while everyone had been celebrating their incredible victory, Lex – the one who had made it all possible – had ignored them. At first no one had minded, since he was trying to figure out how to cure those ponies that had turned all icky because of that big tentacle-fish-thingy. But even after he’d finished with that he’d completely neglected everyone in favor of working on some new spell instead of acknowledging their success.
After two or three days, Sonata hadn’t been able to take it anymore, confronting Lex and trying to tell him that he was taking everyone for granted and that even though he’d done something amazing, no one would like him if he kept acting like that. But Lex had dug his hooves in. “Wanting to be liked is beneath me,” had been his response.
Even when she’d finally cajoled him into talking to everyone a little while later, he hadn’t congratulated them. Not really. Instead he’d just repeated the same insincere “you did well” line over and over instead of really appreciating how brave everyone had been. And yet he’d been shocked to find out that no one had given him the benefit of the doubt when he’d punished Fencer so harshly a little while later. The entire thing had left Sonata sad and confused and frustrated, unable to understand why Lex kept sabotaging himself.
Just like how he was right now.
“He’s ashamed?!” groaned Aria, her eyes wide. Her voice was soft enough that the words didn’t carry, but loud enough to be above a whisper, which Sonata knew meant that Lex’s spell wouldn’t relay what she was saying to him. “He’s ashamed to be saying congratulations to a bunch of doctors that’ve been helping everyone here?!” She looked at Sonata then. “Does he not realize how bad that sounds?!”
Sonata gave a helpless shrug. “You heard what he told us,” she murmured. “We’re not here to tell him what to say, just to make it sound better.”
Aria’s response came with a derisive snort. “There’s no making this sound better!”
Sonata sighed. “Maybe…maybe he’s got some sorta plan?” She desperately wanted to believe it, even though she knew this was the one area where Lex was dumber than her. “Maybe he’s just, like, setting everyone up for a big surprise. Like, they’re all thinking what we’re thinking right now, but in a second he’ll say something that’s totes the opposite of how that last bit sounded. Something like…like…”
“I feel ashamed because your actions deserve greater recognition than I’m able to confer.”
Sonata blinked, her despair suddenly giving way to confusion, then to hope. Was he…? Did he just…?
“Am I dreaming right now?” muttered Aria. “Did Lex Legis actually say something nice about someone?” She glanced at Sonata then, still looking like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “Has he ever done that before?”
Slowly, a smile blossomed on Sonata’s face. “Yes. He has.”
A different memory came back to her then, of when she and Lex were on the boat taking them from Tall Tale to Vanhoover. She had been feeling down about the role she’d played during the first leg of their adventure, having broken Lex’s heart when she’d left him and then been absolutely useless while he’d fought that dragon. But Lex had insisted that she’d been vital to what had happened – calling it their victory rather than his victory – because she had bought the wrong tickets for the train, sending them to Tall Tale in the first place. “If it hadn’t been for that,” he’d said, “we’d have gone to Vanhoover and everypony in Tall Tale would have died.” The words had gone straight to her heart at the time, and even remembering them now made her chest ache in the most wonderful way. And now, from out of nowhere, he was doing it again, except this time it was for the ponies that had followed him here instead of just her…
Licking her lips, Sonata started to whisper, letting Lex’s magic carry her words straight to his ears. Just like he’d said, the words were advice on how to say what he obviously wanted to say, but she couldn’t fight down a bout of sudden nervousness that he’d ignore what she was telling him. Silently, she sent out a plea to Kara, and the Night Mare, and whoever else was listening that Lex would pay attention to her now. Please Lex! Please trust your spokespony!
Apparently, one of those gods was listening to her, as the words Lex spoke next proved that he was too.
“I had no idea that Vanhoover was so far gone before we arrived,” admitted Lex somberly. “If I had, I never would have subjected all of you to such danger by bringing you here. But despite the fact that all of you were thrust into a situation where your lives were placed in continual jeopardy, where you were forced to fight in order to survive, not one of you abandoned your duty. In the face of overwhelming need, inadequate supplies, and relentless hostility, each and every one of you persevered. You continued to minister to the wounds and illnesses of everypony as best you were able, never complaining nor asking to be sent home. And you all saved numerous lives that would otherwise have been lost.”
Spontaneous cheers erupted from the crowd then, forcing Lex to stop as the noise temporarily drowned everything else out. For her part, it was all Sonata could do not to join them, feeling so giddy that she wouldn’t have been surprised if she suddenly started floating. Lex was listening to her! He was listening and he was winning everypony over! She could practically feel the adoration pouring off of the crowd now. The fact that it was all directed at him and not her was utterly unimportant; seeing the stallion she loved finally getting the recognition he deserved was more intoxicating than any concert or performance or show that Sonata had participated in during her millennium on Earth, leaving her feeling like she was about to swoon.
Aria was quite clearly feeling the effect also, as a glance to the side showed Sonata that her sister was smiling, for once without any sort of sneer or mocking edge to her grin. It was enough to make Sonata wish that Nosey was there with them, so they could all share in Lex’s long-overdue reward for everything he’d done. But even her bestie’s absence wasn’t enough to bring her down, leaving Sonata to revel in how she was feeling. A second later she heard Aria whisper more guidance to Lex, smiling as she waited for him to run with it.
He didn’t make her wait long, starting once the crowd’s cheering began to die down. “Some of you are here because I conscripted you,” he began again. “Others of you are here because you volunteered to be. All of you, however, were promised compensation for your efforts before you embarked on this voyage. Looking back, I find that promise mortifying now, because although I fully intend to keep it, I have no choice but to acknowledge how utterly inadequate it is in light of everything you’ve done.”
His gaze swept over the assembled doctors then, and Sonata didn’t miss how his eyes stayed on House Call a second longer than the others. “You all deserve more than a bag of bits for what you’ve gone through,” he said after he’d looked at all of them, his expression remorseful. “And you deserve more than a short speech from me for all that you’ve done. But these things, wholly inadequate, are all I can give you. Even so, I hope that you’ll continue to endeavor to perform so admirably for the sake of your fellow ponies.”
This time the crowd’s reaction was more subdued, not for a lack of enthusiasm, but out of respect for the gravity of Lex’s feelings. It was for that same reason that Sonata struggled to rein in her grin, which was currently so wide that it was making her cheeks hurt. But she forced herself to do it, not wanting anything to ruin this. “Hoof-bump them,” she whispered.
Lex turned his head just enough to glance back at her. “What?”
“Hoof-bump them,” she insisted. “Or shake hooves! Or whatever! You, like, totes did a super-awesome job wrapping that up, but now you have to bring it to a close!” When he didn’t respond, she kept going, sensing his reluctance. “It’ll just take a second for each of them, I promise! They’ll shake your hoof, maybe say something, and head back. You don’t even have to reply! You can just, like, nod or grunt at them or something and that’ll be good enough! Trust me!”
For a moment he looked like he wasn’t, but to Sonata’s profound relief he stepped down from the platform and moved toward the assemblage of medical ponies, stopping a few paces from them and holding out a hoof toward them. Sure enough, the next minute played out exactly as Sonata had predicted, with each pony moving forward to shake or bump his hoof before going back to the crowd, some taking a moment to say something to Lex, which he answered with a stiff nod each time. Several times she caught him glancing at her, clearly baffled by her having been able to guess how things would go. The sight made her giggle.
“Okay,” whispered Aria, looking equally pleased, “now let’s do that again for the other ponies who’ve helped out.”
Both mares heard Lex’s sigh, but he didn’t protest as he climbed back onto the station platform and faced the crowd again.
The next hour or so was filled with Lex calling out various groups of ponies for their achievements and contributions. The ponies who had fought with them at the docks were mentioned. So was River, and by extension the ponies who worked for her, for the assets she’d contributed to recovery effort. So was Fencer and her group, currently absent as part of their task to bring critically ill ponies to Canterlot for treatment.
In each case, Lex managed to phrase their achievements in terms of failure. Their triumphs were all highlighted in the context of the tragedies that they’d endured, all while he excoriated himself for not having been able to do more to protect and provide for them. Sonata knew that if she and Aria hadn’t been there to help, his words would have come across as scornful and condescending rather than poignant and appreciative.
Finally, they came to the last group to be lauded. At Aria’s suggestion, that was going to be those foals that called themselves the Night Mare’s Knights, since that way Lex would be able to get in a few more good words about his goddess, just to be safe. After that, Sonata reminded herself, they’d fill everypony in about what had happened with Block Party, and Lex’s side of the story about that fight with the princesses, and then maybe a little Q&A, and then they’d be done! And it’s all because of my super-brilliant idea! I’ve finally got this whole spokespony thing down! Sonata couldn’t help but preen a little, already thinking about how she’d want Lex to thank her after they were done. So long as there aren’t any more surprises out of right field, we’re home free!
It would, she knew, be just like with Tall Tale, where everypony had cheered for Lex after he’d become mayor. The memory was still quite a happy one, remembering how Ribbon Cutter had announced that he’d take over, leaving everypony celebrating. She could almost see the redheaded mare now…in fact, she could see her again now, approaching the back of the crowd with several familiar-looking ponies, including those kids!
It took Sonata a moment to realize that Lex must have seen her too, since he’d fallen silent, staring at Ribbon. The rest of the crowd was starting to murmur in confusion, several ponies glancing behind them to see what Lex was looking at. The sight made Sonata bite her lip, trying to figure out what was going on that Ribbon was suddenly here. Hadn’t Lex left her back in charge in Tall Tale?
Ribbon Cutter’s unexpected arrival brought Lex’s speech to a sudden halt as he tried to figure out what her being here meant.
The obvious course of action in that regard was to eschew finishing his public address and go speak to her immediately. But Lex had just barely started to turn toward the steps down from the station platform when Aria’s frantic whisper reached his ears. “What’re you doing?!” she hissed. “You need to congratulate those kids and then tell everyone here your version of what happened with the princesses like you said you would!”
Lex barely glanced at her as he whispered a reply. “There’s a situation-”
“I’m sure it’s fine!” cut in Sonata. The assurance was so absurd that Lex couldn’t resist shooting her a sour look. He’d already mollified the Night Mare. Was the rest of this public accounting of his myriad failures and inadequacies really necessary?
Apparently Sonata thought that it was. “Listen! I’m, like, totes surprised Ribbon’s here too, but we both know she’s no dummy! If there was some kind of big emergency she wouldn’t come strolling into camp like this! She’d be running at top speed and yelling ‘Hey! There’s some kind of big emergency!’” She gave him a pleading look then, not even trying to pretend that she wasn’t begging. “Lex, you’ve got everypony right where you want them! You need to keep going! Please!”
Indecision made Lex grit his teeth. Under any other circumstances he would have discounted Sonata’s take on the situation, but her social acumen wasn’t something he could easily dismiss, not when the suggestions that she and Aria had been giving him – as unpleasant and arbitrary as he’d found them – had been going over so well with everypony. That…and there was the fact that Ribbon Cutter hadn’t arrived alone. Several ponies whom Lex recognized as the remnants of C. Shells’ crew were with her, as were Fruit Crunch and his friends. As Sonata had said, Ribbon Cutter was no fool; if there had been some sort of dire situation in Tall Tale, she wouldn’t have kept it to herself. The fact that the ponies around her – all of whom had seen battle one way or another – were casually leading her toward the back of the crowd, talking in what looked to him like a relaxed manner, suggested that whatever had brought her to Vanhoover wasn’t something that required urgent attention.
Of course, that was entirely presumptive. Lex could easily think of numerous circumstances where it would be appropriate for Ribbon to withhold information from the ponies around her, exhibiting a calm demeanor despite a dire situation. But there was no evidence for or against any of those possibilities, leaving him with nothing to go on…except Sonata and Aria’s judgment. Letting out a slow breath, Lex turned back toward the crowd. Ignoring the twin sighs of relief coming from behind him, he began speaking again, fighting down the urge to grimace as Sonata quietly insisted that he use that grandiloquent name those foals had chosen for themselves. “Finally, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Night Mare’s Knights…”
Ribbon couldn’t help but giggle as she watched those foals, and their animals, rush toward the front of the crowd, squealing with excitement. The serious demeanor that they’d adopted on the trip through the city – warning her to stay in the sunlight and away from nearby buildings, marching in a perimeter around her and everypony else, and even reassuring the traumatized butlers from River Bank’s household (at least until they’d gotten outside of the city proper, when those butlers had immediately fled back to her manor) – all fell away in an instant at the recognition from their hero. It was an adorable sight, and one that made her feel better about everything she’d heard in the last few days.
But her opinion apparently wasn’t shared by her companions. “I can’t believe they’re buying this,” muttered Ocean Spray disdainfully.
Ribbon raised an eyebrow, glancing around. They were at the back of the crowd, far enough that a quiet conversation wouldn’t disturb anyone. “You don’t think Lex is being sincere?”
The pegasus stallion gave her a dark look. “Lex offered us his ‘condolences’ about what happened to the captain and Sandbar a few days ago. I’ve heard waiters apologizing for spilling a glass of orange juice who sounded sorrier than he did then. This is just him stepping his game up a little.”
“Everypony was applauding him just now,” pointed out Compass Rose, her voice making it clear that she was neutral on the issue. “Clearly some of them think he’s being genuine.”
“He might have threatened to curse them if they didn’t,” ventured Scrubby, mopping his brow for the third time in ten seconds. “And why’s the train station a pile of rubble now?”
“I heard it was a lover’s spat,” came a new voice.
Ribbon glanced over at the mare heading toward them, a guarded smile crossing her lips. “River.”
“Ribbon,” replied River Bank without missing a beat. “Still coloring your mane, I see.”
“I’m impressed your eyes are that sharp, given how wrinkled their corners have become,” shot back Ribbon easily.
Ocean Spray arched an eyebrow at the exchange, glancing at Ribbon. “Friend of yours?”
The mare who’d approached them gave him a look that most ponies would have reserved for a cockroach they’d found in their kitchen. “My name is River Bank, and if you’re one of the bumpkins who’ve been using my yacht, then I hope for your sake you made sure to scrub the hull free of barnacles before you disembarked. Otherwise you’ll have a hard time finding work in this city from now on.”
Looking like he’d just been slapped across the face, Ocean Spray was already starting to turn red. But he didn’t have a chance to answer before Compass Rose spoke up. “Our priority has been speed, as per Lex’s directions.” She nodded toward the platform, where the stallion in question was still speaking. “I assume you’re not saying we should have ignored his instructions?”
River snorted at the blatant deflection, but knew better than to answer the question. “The trip to Tall Tale and back should have taken a day at most, even for a crew of middling ability. But it’s taken you several days to return from ferrying those poor injured ponies to the hospital there, something Lex has been quite frustrated about. Did you have trouble operating a vessel that doesn’t need to be rowed?”
Ocean Spray opened his mouth to reply, but Ribbon cut him off before he had a chance. “Actually, River, I’m the reason that they’re late coming back. I wanted to talk to them about everything that’s happened here. Of course, I’ll take full responsibility if Lex is upset.” Without missing a beat, she turned to look at the Ocean Spray, Compass Rose, and Scrubby. “Would the three of you excuse us, please? River and I haven’t seen each other since the last Sister Cities Cooperation Council meeting, and we need to catch up.”
For a minute Ocean Spray looked ready to tear River a new one, but Compass Rose gently but firmly nudged him back, and the two of them moved away, Scrubby following behind them anxiously. “That old nag needs someone to scrape the barnacles out from inside her-” The rest of Ocean Spray’s insult was lost as the crowd began to applaud another of Lex’s platitudes, leaving River and Ribbon alone as they disappeared into the throng of ponies a moment later.
Ribbon waited until the clapping died down before turning back to River. “You better hope they don’t run into one of the Hoofingfords,” she teased lightly. “Otherwise they might find out who actually runs the dockyards here.”
But River didn’t return her relaxed expression. “If any of the Hoofingfords made it out alive, then those louts can appeal to them if and when they turn up.”
The smile slowly slid off of Ribbon’s face. “It’s really been that bad?”
River raised a brow. “You saw the state the city was in on your trip here, didn’t you? I imagine those three had plenty to say about it.”
“They did,” admitted Ribbon. “But they didn’t try to hide that they hate Lex, the same way those kids up there obviously love him. I tried speaking to the ponies those three brought back on your yacht, but they weren’t in any condition to talk…”
“I’m not surprised,” muttered River darkly, cradling her foreleg.
The gesture made Ribbon tilt her head a little; from what she could see there was nothing wrong with the other mare’s leg. After a moment she licked her lips, hesitating before asking what she knew she needed to. “Mounte and Piggy…?”
“Piggy’s back at my manor,” replied River after a tense moment. “But Mounte…” She shook her head.
Ribbon bit her lip. “River, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.” The words were delivered emotionlessly, and an awkward silence fell as the two of them listened to Lex talk about how those foals had shown dedication beyond their years. This time River was the one to break it, sighing after several seconds had gone by. “So are you going to tell me exactly why you’re here? I doubt you showed up in person just so you could review that proposal for an inter-city logrolling team at the next Equestria Games.”
The corners of Ribbon’s lips managed to turn up a little at that. “Well, I still think that we have a few things we could teach your town about that,” she quipped. But this time she turned serious almost immediately. “I came here because people are starting to get worried. When those injured ponies arrived, word started to spread about how bad things were here, and…” She paused for a moment, grimacing a bit. “Lucy accidentally let it slip that I contacted Cloudsdale about sending emergency rainclouds to Vanhoover. That didn’t help.”
River snorted. “You really should fire that little twit.”
“She’s family to me.” Shaking her head, Ribbon moved on. “Then the princesses showed up. At first everypony thought they’d come because of what happened with the dragon – everypony is already saying that they were there when Lex fought that thing, or that they had a neighbor or a relative or a best friend who was – but Celestia and Luna had barely arrived when they had their guards fly them up here. I didn’t even have a chance to go out and greet them! And then with the sun setting for five minutes in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, you can’t believe the rumors I’m hearing!”
The ghost of a wry smile tugged at River’s lips. “Well, your town is called Tall Tale.”
Ribbon gave her a grim look. “I’ve got a dozen ponies willing to swear on their cutie marks that they saw the Royal Guard touch down in the train station yesterday and commandeer a locomotive back to Canterlot. Now if it was just one or two I might be inclined to think that they were just pulling a few legs, but they’re all telling the same story, saying how the princesses were rushing back home like their tails were on fire. And some of them…” She paused, leaning closer to River as she lowered her voice. “Some of them were saying that they were carrying a body. Others were saying that the princesses were injured. A few aren’t sure Princess Luna was even there. Everyone’s nervous, so I came here to find out for myself what’s been going on.” She paused for a long moment, giving the other mare a penetrating look. “And in all the time I’ve known you, you’ve always had your hoof on the pulse of what’s happening in your city. So would you care to clue me in?”
“And now, I’d like to avail myself of this chance to expound on the events of the last few days.”
River chuckled dryly at Lex’s announcement. “It looks like I won’t have to. Get comfortable,” she advised. “This is going to be a lot to take in.”
His public address finished at last, Lex resisted the urge to fold his ears back and bolt from the station platform as fast as he could.
As it was, he descended the steps down to ground level – barely noticing Feather Duster falling in behind him silently – feeling thoroughly wretched. Despite the fact that the majority of the crowd was smiling and nodding at him as he passed, platitudes and praises spilling from their lips, none of it brought Lex any comfort. Quite the opposite. Although Sonata and Aria had assured him that everypony was appreciative of the fact that he’d taken the time to recognize their contributions and explain his side of what had happened over the last few days, Lex’s instincts were insisting that wasn’t the case. Nor were they alone in doing so…
They’re not pleased because you took the time to congratulate them for everything they’ve done, hissed the voiceless words from his shadow. They simply enjoyed watching you confess to your numerous shortcomings and limitations. Your presence offends them so much that the only thing about you they like is seeing you humiliated, just like when you were a colt.
Lex struggled to keep his feelings in check as he moved past the crowd, doing his best to ignore everypony’s plaudits and his tulpa’s vicious taunts in equal measure as he made his way toward where he’d seen Ribbon Cutter. Silently, he reminded himself that he’d always intended to delegate various tasks to competent agents, since an active and engaged government needed a large staff in order to function at optimal capacity. He forced himself to remember that the Night Mare had previously told him that he was trying to do too much on his own. Clinging to those thoughts, Lex tried to convince himself that they were what his address had been in service to.
But in his heart, he knew it was a lie.
The ponies he’d congratulated hadn’t been personnel carefully selected for jobs whose scope had been known ahead of time. Rather, they’d been the ponies who’d stepped up when he’d lacked the strength or the foresight or resources to do what needed to be done, something which they never should have had to do in the first place. He’d assumed authority so as to better secure the welfare of everypony, not put them in a position where they needed to take action to buttress his own inadequacies. Because of his lack of ability, doctors had been forced to take up arms against monsters, children had needed to face down the trained guards, and everypony was still living in squalid conditions. The ones who were still living at all…
His thoughts swirling with recrimination and self-loathing, Lex almost walked right into Ribbon Cutter before he noticed her. Oblivious to his inner turmoil, she smiled at him, raising a hoof in greeting. “That was an impressive speech. I didn’t-”
“What are you doing here?” he snapped. “Has something happened in Tall Tale?”
Taken aback at the harsh tone, Ribbon’s smile fell from her face. “N-no. Everything’s fine. I just wanted to see how things were going here. A lot of the ponies in Tall Tale have friends and family in Vanhoover, and rumors are starting to spread about what’s been happening, especially after what happened with the princesses.”
Although her explanation was completely innocuous, Lex couldn’t help but feel defensive, his eyes narrowing. But he didn’t have a chance to say anything as River – who had apparently been conversing with Ribbon when he’d arrived – cleared her throat pointedly. “Maybe this isn’t the best place to have this discussion,” she noted. “Why don’t we give everypony here a chance to digest everything you’ve said and retire to my manor for now?”
As if sensing her cue, Feather Duster stepped around so she was just inside of Lex’s peripheral vision. “Should I fetch Miss Dusk and Miss Blaze?” she asked quietly, keeping her eyes on the ground.
The question made Lex’s frown morph into a pained grimace, glancing back over at the train platform…
After he’d finished acknowledging the deeds of Fruit Crunch and his friends, Lex had proceeded to explain the events of the last few days to everypony, holding very little back. He had started by telling them the truth about Block Party, about how the maligned former commander of the camp had actually been the victim of a body-snatching monster, one that Lex had subsequently tracked down and destroyed…although too late to save the five ponies that he’d sent into Vanhoover. Pointedly, he’d omitted how Nosey had also been a victim of possession, not wanting to make a public spectacle out of her now that her recovery was improving.
After that, he’d moved on to what had happened with the princesses. As much as it had galled him to do so, Lex had confessed to how Severance had murdered Silhouette of its own accord, condemning the weapon’s actions even as he made no mention of its connection to the Night Mare. He then stressed how he’d tried to talk Celestia and Luna down, offering to make amends for what had happened – he made sure not to specify that he’d offered to bring Silhouette back to life; even so, he’d felt the barbed wire around his foreleg twist unhappily at his unrepentant reminder of how he’d offered to use the Night Mare’s gift on the worshiper of a competing would-be deity – and how they’d spurned his call for peace. Lastly, he told everyone how he’d cursed Luna both for her relentless aggression and her more general failure to secure everypony’s safety and well-being (leaving out the part where Severance had pushed the issue, lest it slay her) after which he’d banished the scythe from Equestria for what it had done.
Once he’d let all of that out, Lex had offered to receive anypony’s questions, making sure (at Sonata’s direction) to assure them that he would take no offense and offer no punishment regardless of what was asked of him. He’d expected the first question thrown at him to be how he could have been so irresponsible as to let his own weapon murder somepony. Or perhaps what his timetable was for securing better living conditions for everyone.
He hadn’t expected it to be about his love life.
“Did you really just dump those two?” called a teenage pegasus from the crowd, her wings flapping in agitation. “Right here in front of everypony?”
“What about that other mare? The mousey-looking one with the glasses?” called a rather heavyset unicorn mare at the back of the crowd, giving him a disapproving look. “Did she know that you were going to do that to her?”
“Does that mean you don’t mind if someone else asks them out?” That one came from an older-looking earth stallion, grinning openly at the prospect.
“That’s gross, Potboiler,” called an orange mare that Lex belatedly recognized as being Peachy Keen, idly noting that Spit Polish was right next to her, her hoof around his middle. “You’re old enough to be their dad!”
“Actually,” called another unicorn mare, this one having a reedy frame and frizzled mane. “If they really are the Sirens, that would make them even older than the princesses.”
“Whaddaya mean ‘if’ they’re the Sirens?” snorted a rickety old pegasus mare. “You saw that fella there do a big magic lightshow to make a beauty outta that one with the pigtails!”
The exchange had continued from there, leaving Lex utterly aghast at where everypony’s attention was focused. But perhaps sensing that he was regretting having assured everyone that he wouldn’t take offense at their questions, Sonata had strode up next to him. “Don’t worry,” she’d assured him with a wink. “I totes got this.”
Lex hadn’t been given a chance to ask what she meant before she plunged ahead. “We knew,” she announced, instantly turning all eyes toward her. “And we’re okay with it.”
“Really?!” gasped the teenage pegasus that had asked the initial question, her expression rapt.
“Absolutely,” purred Aria, sauntering up on Lex’s other side. “After all, just because we’re not boyfriend and girlfriends doesn’t mean we can’t have any fun.” She punctuated the statement with a swing of her hips, lightly nudging him.
For some reason, that had gotten a big reaction out of the crowd, complete with whistles and catcalls, leaving Lex mystified. But he’d shaken off his shock quickly, giving Aria a reproachful look and a harsh whisper. “Do not impugn the sanctity of my vow!” His rebuke was only partially out of worry about what the Night Mare would do if they made his pledge look empty; no matter how reluctantly he gave them, or how unpleasant they were, Lex took his oaths extremely seriously.
Fortunately, his spell had still been active, carrying his words to Sonata as well. “But we’re totes not acting like nothing’s changed,” she assured everyone. “We’re just, like, in a different arrangement now.”
Quite a few pairs of eyes widened at that. “What kind of arrangement?” called that stallion, Potboiler.
“I dunno if we should tell you,” pouted Aria, suddenly coquettish. “It’s not really the sort of thing you can talk to just anypony about.”
At that point large swaths of the crowd had started talking at once, practically falling over themselves to assure Aria and Sonata both that they were perfectly trustworthy and deserved to be taken into her confidence. But rather than looking disgusted at how shallow everyone was being – which was Lex’s reaction – Sonata and Aria had hopped down from the platform in unison, moving forward to meet with them. “Leave this part to us,” Sonata had whispered to him a moment later. “You did a super-awesome job. We’ll do the rest.”
“And don’t worry,” came Aria’s whisper a moment later. “We’ll make sure everyone knows that your vow is plenty serious.”
Needless to say, that had left Lex feeling less than reassured. But by that point his misery had been reaching its peak, and he hadn’t been able to find it within himself to keep addressing everyone. If they were more interested in gossip and salaciousness than in anything substantive, that was their prerogative. For his part, Lex had been more than happy to bring the entire sordid affair to a close…
The crowd had already begun to thin out in the few minutes since then, with ponies breaking off into smaller groups and heading back to their tents and lean-tos. The doctors made their way as a group back toward the medical tents at the far end of the camp. And Fruit Crunch and his friends waved at him before heading south, apparently intent on going to the river. But Lex kept his eyes on the group of ponies – mostly mares, for some reason – surrounding Sonata and Aria now.
Even as he watched, Aria, now too far away for him to hear her, said something – his spell was still active, and she and Sonata were still within its range, but she was apparently speaking above a whisper now, which meant it wouldn’t transmit her words to him – and a second later there was a series of scandalized squeals from the mares surrounding her. More than a few glanced around until they saw him, their cheeks red as they nudged their neighbors and pointed in his direction.
Grimacing, Lex turned away. “Wait until they finish with…whatever they’re doing. Then tell them where we’ve gone.”
Feather Duster nodded demurely. “Yes, sir.”
Suddenly finding himself eager to be away from all of this, Lex looked back at River. “Let’s go,” he ordered her curtly. He would have simply started walking, but he’d never actually been to her residence before.
“Of course,” she replied immediately, turning and heading northwest. “I’ll have the servants prepare a room for you, since that wreck of a station isn’t useable anymore. Oh, and I suppose you’ll be needing one too, Ribbon.”
“Thanks for noticing,” chuckled the other mare with a roll of her eyes, before turning her attention to Lex. “Listen, if you don’t mind I wanted to ask a few more questions about what happ-, Lex?”
But he wasn’t listening anymore, having suddenly stopped in place. “The two of you go ahead. I’ll be there shortly.”
Ribbon blinked at the abrupt dismissal. “But-”
“Certainly,” cut in River. “I’ll have a meal prepared for when you arrive.” Turning, she all but shoved Ribbon, leading the other mare away despite her protests.
Lex, however, didn’t even hear them go. At that moment his complete attention was focused on a nearby lean-to containing a single occupant. Slowly, he made his way over to it. “There you are.”
Smiling slightly, Nosey adjusted her glasses. “Hey, Lex.”
Slowly climbing to her hooves from where she’d been reclining beneath the lean-to, Nosey took a moment to brush the dirt from her coat. “That was a really great speech,” she offered, not meeting his eyes as she said it. Instead she moved on to her tail, examining it for a moment before shaking the dust out of it. But she only did so for a moment before giving a resigned sigh, turning to look at him at last, her wan smile still in place. “I didn’t take anyone’s opinion, but I think it went over well.”
The praise made him want to grimace, but he fought the reaction down, instead focusing on her. There was an odd cadence in her voice that he couldn’t decipher, making him pause before replying. Nosey hadn’t been a participant in Sonata and Aria’s foolish attempts to try and save their relationship, which left him wary that she was preparing to enact her own plan. “So it would appear,” he ventured at last.
Nosey nodded at that, and there was a pause that seemed to go on for several seconds too long before she spoke again. “So, you broke up with all of us, huh?”
The question struck him as odd. But then again, all confirmation-seeking statements struck him as odd when they were inquiring as to answers that had already been made plain. “Yes.” He wasn’t planning on adding anything more, before it occurred to him that whatever reason Nosey had for asking that might be require more information. “I’ve foresworn all relationships based on romance so long as I continue working with the Night Mare.”
Nosey nodded slowly, looking past him. Following her gaze, Lex saw that the group surrounding Sonata and Aria had yet to diminish, despite the rest of the crowd having broken up into smaller gatherings of ponies. It took Lex a moment to realize that from Nosey’s current position under the lean-to, she had a direct line of sight to where everypony had been gathering, but not to the actual station platform itself. The realization made Lex acutely uncomfortable, reminding him far too much of when he’d realized that Nosey had been possessed and had searched the camp to find her. Eventually he’d found her – or rather, Xiriel, wearing her body as a disguise – hidden away in a small, one-pony shelter, not dissimilar to this one.
The similarity to now was enough to make Lex silently activate his circlet as he turned his eyes back toward Nosey. Seeking confirmation of something already known might have been a pointless endeavor, but alleviating suspicions was something altogether different. But where a powerful necromantic aura had betrayed Xiriel’s presence then, Nosey had no unusual magical signatures surrounding her now that Lex was able to detect. Even so, the knowledge made him relax only a little, pushing him to wonder why she’d hidden herself out here. “Nosey-”
She jumped in before he could say anything else. “So, did you do it?”
Lex blinked at the abrupt question. “Do what?”
“Enslave the two of them?” She waved a hoof toward Sonata and Aria’s gossip-circle, finally turning her eyes back toward his. “I mean, Aria said you guys were still ‘having fun,’ so I assume their plan worked?”
“I can assure you, it didn’t,” huffed Lex, recovering some of his earlier irritation. “My government does not take slaves, and quite honestly they should have known better. So should you, for that matter.”
But the rebuke seemed to bother her not at all. Instead, her eyebrows went up slightly, curiosity coloring her features. “Really? So, what’d you do, then?”
Noting that her voice had reverted back to her typical lilt, Lex tersely explained how he’d found Sonata and Aria both to lack the mental competence necessary to be allowed their own agency, requiring him to assume authority over them. “Which will include relationship therapy,” he concluded.
That last part made Nosey giggle. “‘Relationship therapy’? Really?”
“The arrangement is completely legitimate,” protested Lex. “As the authority figure in charge of their rehabilitation, instructing them in how to properly integrate into Equestrian society will require that they be taught how to form and maintain close connections to others.”
“Well, I think you’re just the pony to handle that,” snickered Nosey, her voice lilting in a way that he was moderately certain was sarcasm.
That made him frown, but there were more pressing issues than her sense of humor. “They’re not the only ponies who require that degree of assistance,” he murmured softly.
Her laughter died instantly, her gaze falling to the ground as her ears folded back. “Lex…”
“What happened to you was more than you could bear,” he continued. “And while you’re getting better, you’re not anywhere near fully recovered. Which means…” Lex took a step closer to her then, leaving barely an inch of distance between them. Reaching out a hoof, he placed it under her chin, gently but firmly lifting her face upward until she was looking at him again. “You also need me to assume authority over you, to properly guide and care for you, until such a time as I decide that you’re recovered.”
He could feel his mood improving even as the words passed his lips, all of the bitterness and frustration he’d been accumulating evaporating like mist in the morning light. It was the same effect that Nosey’d had on him the first time they’d kissed, creating a feeling of calm, of rightness, that had been soothing in the extreme. Just like Sonata’s wholehearted belief in him, or Aria’s wicked seductiveness, the relief that he felt from Nosey when she basked in the certainty that he’d protect her eased his troubled mind in turn. As he leaned forward to kiss her, he let the feeling wash over him, and knew that so long as she, and Sonata, and Aria, were all with him, then he’d be able to get through-
Nosey turned her head to the side at the last moment, preventing his lips from reaching hers. “Don’t,” she whispered, the words coming out strained. “Please, don’t.”
The next few seconds lasted for an eternity as Lex tried to figure out what was happening. But then the obvious answer came to him, and he let out a sigh of relief, dropping his hoof from her chin before giving her a patronizing look. “Nosey, whatever scheme you’ve concocted…whatever alternative you came up with to Sonata and Aria’s ill-considered ambush, it’s irrelevant now. I’ve already made a determination that allows for us to…”
He trailed off as Nosey shook her head sorrowfully. “It’s not like that, Lex.” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, examining a spot on the ground intently. “I knew I couldn’t participate in the plan those two cooked up. I don’t have strong magic like they do. But I didn’t come up with any sort of alternative either.”
“And now you don’t have to!” He almost raised his voice, catching himself at the last moment. Right now everypony was either off entertaining themselves, or was clustered around Sonata and Aria. But the lean-to offered no privacy if anypony decided they wanted to know what he was doing. “Even if we’re technically no longer in a romantic relationship, we can still be together!”
“…I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Lex could only stare at her, trying to comprehend what was happening.
When it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she tentatively raised her gaze to his, only to immediately wince and lower it again when she saw the look on his face. “I swear…Lex, I swear I don’t want to hurt you. That’s the last thing I want. I just…I can’t do this…”
His mind churning so furiously he almost felt dizzy, Lex tried to process what she was saying. His brain dissected and cross-indexed the words coming out of her mouth, the expression on her face, her body language, every interaction he’d had with her over the last several days, every interaction he’d witnessed her having with others over that time frame, what he knew of her personal history, the opinions she’d expressed, and several million other potential variables to try and come up with an understanding of how he’d gotten here and how to fix it. But the data refused to organize itself into any recognizable pattern that would explain her behavior now, and no matter how desperately he altered it or what parameters he utilized, he couldn’t make what she was saying make sense.
“I don’t understand.”
He hated admitting it. It went straight to the core of what he knew was the defective part of himself. But he had to know. “Nosey, I don’t understand. I thought…” He couldn’t say anymore, but in his mind the words were loud and clear.
I thought you’d be happy.
I thought you wanted to be with me.
I thought you loved me.
Although it was impossible with the layers of mental defenses that he’d cultivated, she almost seemed to hear what he hadn’t said, giving him a pleading look. “This isn’t because of you. I mean, it sort of is, but it’s not your fault. Everything’s become so big so fast and it’s only getting…I didn’t even know the word for it! But now it’s all just snowballing and I feel like it’s out of control and I don’t know-”
“What are you talking about?!” Lex could feel his shock slowly starting to wear off, anger and frustration creeping back in. She was ending their relationship and she couldn’t even explain why?! “Nosey, why are you-”
“This isn’t my life!”
The words seemed to tear themselves from her throat, uttered in a strangled pitch that made it sound like she was struggling with everything she had to keep from screaming them. Nor was she finished. “Less than a month ago all I cared about was finding an interesting story to write about for my paper! Now I’m living my own version of ‘Love-Slave of the Shadow King’ and it’s all too much! In just over a week, I’ve fought sea monsters, been possessed by a devil, and had an orgy with a pair of thousand-year old witch sisters and the dark wizard who defeated the Celestia and Luna! And now you’re telling me that you want to make me into your slave, or something that’s pretty much the same as a slave even if you call it something different, like it’s no big deal?!”
She seemed to calm down then, but only to the point where she was no longer shaking as she spoke. Her face was still twisted in desperation as she kept going. “How do I keep working my job if you’ve declared me too crazy to be allowed to make decisions on my own, huh? How am I supposed to look my parents in the face when they find out that, instead of a boyfriend, I have a guy who’s keeping me and a couple other mares as his own personal sex kittens?”
Nosey slumped in place then, her nervous energy suddenly gone. “I want to go home. I’ve wanted to go home since before we left that warehouse. I want to struggle with that window in the back of my apartment that always sticks. I want to listen to my dad talk about how a high-citrus diet will cure anything, and my mom complain that Vanity Mare is a rag even though she reads it cover-to-cover every month. I want to argue with my boss at work about the way he edits the pieces that I write.”
She gave him a helpless look then. “I love you, Lex. I swear I do. But I’m not like Sonata and Aria. They’re happy to share your life because they don’t have ones of their own to go back to, but I do…and I want it back. I’m sorry.”
For a brief moment she lingered there, waiting to see if he had anything to say. But Lex couldn’t even begin to compose his thoughts in the wake of Nosey’s outburst. All he could do was sit there and watch, a horrible sense of déjà vu creeping over him as Nosey slowly turned around…
“Miss Dusk and Miss Blaze finished their, er, conversations. I directed them to Miss Bank’s manor as you instructed me.”
Nosey never really loved you. She simply needed you in order to feel safe after what that monster did to her. You were the one who thought it was more than that.
“I didn’t see that you were still here until after I’d already told them where you wanted them to go. Should I see if I can still catch them?”
Now that she’s recovered her strength, she simply pointed out what you should have known all along: that you have nothing to offer her. Before she met you, she had a career that she was passionate about, family and friends who cared for her, and no shortage of comfortable amenities. And you expected her to give all that up just for you? The loathsome, abhorrent pony that pontificates about building a better Equestria but still can’t reverse the flagging fortunes of this small camp? Who ignored her except to use her as an outlet for your lust, when you weren’t doting on other mares right in front of her? You’re a fool. She probably resents you for the fact that it was your negligence that led to her being possessed in the first place. Her assurances that she still cared for you were given only to stop you from throwing a tantrum and cursing her.
“…Master Legis…?”
Slowly, struggling to concentrate despite the malevolent voice in his head, Lex turned around to face Feather Duster. “…no.”
Blinking, she tilted her head to the side. “Sir?”
“No,” he repeated. “Do not retrieve Sonata and Aria.”
“Oh. I mean, as you wish.”
She fell silent then, but the voice in Lex’s mind continued unabated. If anything it grew more aggressive, and he found himself wishing for the millionth time that he’d figured out how to control the thing, the way the Night Mare had told him he could. But it was pointless to think about that now. Now…now he suddenly found himself looking for something else to direct his attention toward. Anything else.
Fortunately, Feather Duster had more to report. “Um, some of the ponies here are setting up some games to play. A few of them told me to ask if you wanted to join them. I didn’t think you’d want to, but I thought it would be presumptuous of me to speak on your behalf…”
It took several seconds for Lex to answer, and when he did it came as a whisper, as much to himself as to her. “No. No more games.”
Not sure what to make of that answer, Feather Duster nodded hesitantly. “Yes sir. I’ll tell them-”
“Take me to River’s manor,” demanded Lex suddenly. “Now!”
Startled, Feather Duster nodded immediately. “Y-yes sir!” She was already moving before she’d finished speaking, stumbling into a nervous trot.
Lex stalked after her, his eyes already starting to glow in anger. But not at her. Indeed, at that moment his jittery maid was the furthest thing from his mind.
Instead, he thought about games. Or rather, the games that he’d been forced to play ever since he’d gotten here. Appeasing a petulant goddess was just the latest in a long line of distractions and hostilities that had made him waste time and lose focus about what needed to be done. As a consequence of that, while he’d been slaughtering ghouls and fighting princesses and wasting time on inconsequential nonsense like romance, what little headway he’d made in restoring Vanhoover had completely stalled. But no longer.
NO LONGER!
Keeping one eye on Feather Duster as she hurried through the camp at a trot, Lex turned his attention toward his saddlebags, ignoring the friendly calls from nearby ponies. Instead, he pulled out the ledger of the Bank family accounts that River had given him, opening it and starting to read. Even as he devoured the facts and figures on each page, plans began to coalesce in his mind, slowly starting to drown out the hateful words of his tulpa.
By the time they were halfway to their destination, Lex had finished going over the account book and decided on a course of action. It was drastic, and more than a little risky since he had yet to secure a steady source of revenue, but it offered the best chance of creating the groundwork necessary to restore Vanhoover to a livable state. More importantly, it would quickly alleviate the miserable conditions that everypony here was still laboring under.
There were myriad details that needed to be worked out, of course. But Lex was already working through them, leaving nothing overlooked. By the time they approached River’s mansion, he had completely forgotten about what had happened with Nosey.
Almost.
“You want me to do what?” croaked Ribbon Cutter, not sure that she’d heard correctly.
“Announce that Vanhoover has right of first refusal on all of Tall Tale’s lumber exports,” repeated Lex.
Ribbon could only stare at him, before looking around the room at everypony else, wordlessly asking for help.
“Everypony else,” in this case, referred to Sonata, Aria, and River. Alongside herself and Lex, the five of them had sequestered themselves in River’s office, dismissing the staff that had been serving tea and sandwiches when Lex had finally arrived. With that old butler, Trotsworth, promising to wait across the hall if they needed anything, and Lex’s maid excusing herself to go check on her “daughter’s friend’s baby brother,” Ribbon had thought that she’d have a chance to ask Lex for some more details regarding what had happened with Celestia and Luna, and what it meant for Tall Tale…and Equestria as a whole.
Instead, Lex had immediately launched into some bold new initiative that he’d thought up. Though “bold” wasn’t the word that Ribbon Cutter would have used for it, considering what Lex had just told her to do. But looking around the room, Sonata didn’t seem to understand what Lex had just said, Aria (whom Ribbon had just met, but could already tell had a bad attitude) didn’t seem to care, and River didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
Licking her lips, Ribbon Cutter tried to figure out how to protest what Lex was telling her to do without upsetting him. “Lex, my city-”
“Your city?” asked Aria pointedly, a mocking smirk on her lips. “I thought that you gave it to Lex after he killed that dragon that made you its plaything?”
Taking a deep breath, Ribbon counted to five before trying again. “Of course. Your city,” she corrected, making herself focus on Lex. “But Lex, Tall Tale’s exports are only just now getting ready to resume now that the train tracks have been repaired, and we’re still waiting for ships to start returning to port. Every single lumber company has unfulfilled orders on their books, and they’re all worried that if they don’t meet them soon their customers will simply cancel and get their lumber from somewhere else, if they haven’t already. Telling them that they have to offer to sell their goods to you first-”
“Is necessary,” interrupted Lex sharply. “And I will not allow-”
He stopped speaking as Sonata whispered something, putting a hoof over her mouth as she did. Even so, Ribbon heard the words “explain,” “understand,” and “want to help” pass the other mare’s lips. Confused, she was about to ask what was going on – it almost seemed like Sonata was whispering something to Lex, but he was standing across the room from her – when Lex gave a sigh and started speaking again. “I understand that this will cause a disruption to Tall Tale’s business community, and that they’ll be…distressed by it,” he said slowly.
“That’s putting it mildly.” Ribbon smiled as she said it, trying to encourage whatever had prompted Lex to remain calm. But she couldn’t keep her tone light in the face of what he was describing. “Lex, what you’re proposing will put a strain on Tall Tale’s timber industry at a time when the city’s businesses are already hurting from having been cut off from the rest of Equestria.”
Lex didn’t answer right away, and Ribbon could tell that he was trying to figure out how to say what he wanted. “That,” he began at last, “will happen no matter what.”
“But-”
“You saw the condition Vanhoover is in,” continued Lex, cutting off Ribbon’s protest. “How much of Tall Tale’s business is this city normally responsible for? How much commerce do you think it’s fit to engage in now?”
The questions made Ribbon wince. As the closest city, Vanhoover and Tall Tale had always had a strong economic partnership, even if they hadn’t had a direct overland connection. “Okay, point taken, but if you’re going to resume buying stuff from Tall Tale…” She paused as the obvious question occurred to her. “Um, I’m sorry to ask this, but how exactly are you planning on buying lumber? When you left, you’d used up all of your cash-on-hoof…”
She half-expected him to be angry at the question, but Lex’s face remained impassive as he glanced over at River. Recognizing her cue, the other mare set down her teacup. “I’ve turned the entirety of my family’s assets over to Lex,” she announced. “That should be enough to cover whatever purchases he wants to make in the short-term.”
Ribbon’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t help it; everypony who knew River Bank knew that she was a mare who lived to make money. The idea that she would so casually turn her fortune over to Lex and let him spend it as he saw fit was staggering!
Finally, when she was able to close her mouth, Ribbon looked back at Lex. As stunning as it was that River would be so generous, it still didn’t speak to the underlying problem she had with Lex’s proposal. “Okay, if you have the money to start buying from Tall Tale again, why do you need right of first refusal on our timber? I’m sure a lot of our businesses have unfulfilled orders from here that you can appropriate.”
“That’s too unspecific,” declared Lex flatly. “It doesn’t help everypony here if there are open orders for miscellaneous wood products. The ponies at that camp don’t need easels or drum sticks or birdhouses. We need building materials suitable for constructing temporary housing so that everyone can stop sleeping on the ground, and we need them before the summer ends.” He made a motion toward a window that faced Vanhoover’s city proper. “We can scavenge enough minor materials to perform the actual construction and outfitting from what’s left of the city, and what we can’t can be purchased from the farm ponies north of here. But a major supply of building materials can only come from Tall Tale.”
Ribbon bit her lip. What could she say to that? That everypony here should keep living like animals just so everyone in Tall Tale could save a few extra bits?
“Tall Tale will lose some money because of this,” admitted Lex. “But that was a foregone conclusion from the moment Vanhoover fell apart. You can’t have a major city be effectively wiped off the map and not have it cause an economic downturn across the region. Doing this will help to blunt the worst of the impact, and set Vanhoover back on the path to recovery.”
“I…I understand,” said Ribbon at last. For a moment, she slumped in place, imagining the angry business leaders that would flood her office after she announced this. But she shook it off a moment later, forcing herself to sit up straight and smile. “If Vanhoover’s this bad off, it’s our duty as their neighbors to lend them a helping hoof however we can.”
“Just so,” nodded Lex gravely, before turning to Sonata. “In the meantime, I want you to go on a tour of every hamlet, village, or other farming community north of here and let them know that Vanhoover is open again.”
“Aw, this again?” pouted Sonata. “I already delivered a bunch of money to the ones near here to make up for how everyone was stealing food before.”
“And as a result, the number of ponies coming here to sell their produce has turned into a trickle,” replied Lex immediately. “We need more than that. So now I want you to go to every community that sold food here and spread the word that Vanhoover’s markets are once again open. Use your magic if you have to, but make sure they know that if they have food to sell, we have ponies who will buy it.”
“That will take her a while to do,” chimed in River. “There are a lot of little communities north of here, Lex. None of them are too far away, if you make good time traveling, but going to all of them will take a while, and I’m not sure we need that much food anyway. There aren’t that many ponies in that camp.”
“There will be.” Lex turned to Ribbon. “After you let Tall Tale know that we have right of first refusal for their timber, I want you to make it clear that Vanhoover is hiring. If somepony is willing to work hard, my government will pay them a decent wage for their efforts.”
“Workers?” echoed Ribbon. “For what?”
“A number of tasks,” replied Lex. “Not the least of which will be helping to reclaim the city.” He turned his gaze to Aria then. “That’s what you’ll be doing.”
Her answer came with a suspicious look, clearly not liking where this was going. “And by 'helping to reclaim the city,' you want me to do…what, exactly?”
“To begin with, you’ll be guarding the ponies that go into Vanhoover to find materials or start the cleanup, using your tracking spell to detect if there are any more ghouls still lurking about. If there are, find them and destroy them. Other than that, you’ll be using that same spell to locate any remaining survivors that haven’t come out yet.”
Aria looked ready to protest, but Sonata beat her to it. “Back up a sec, you’re sending me away?” She got up from her chair then, walking over to Lex. “I totes don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Lex grimaced, but remained resolute. “This has to happen, Sonata. Vanhoover can’t survive in its current state otherwise, and you’re the best pony for the job.”
“But what about you?” she pressed. “Will you be okay without me here?”
In any other instance Lex would have snapped at her for asking him that, but after just having had another girl he cared about announce that she was leaving him, Lex’s indignation was blunted by pain, and he instinctively moved into damage control, repressing his emotions as best as he could. “I’ll be fine,” he reassured her, his voice neutral. “I have other projects that I’ll focus on while you’re gone.” He looked over her shoulder then, at River. “And I won’t be the only one.”
River nodded, knowing he was talking about sending her to Las Pegasus. The initiative he was talking about would require far, FAR more money than her family fortune could provide, meaning that he was placing a lot on her ability to bring rich ponies here so that he could get a loan from them. But there was one problem. “Lex, if Ribbon Cutter here is going to be moving timber products and workers from Tall Tale, which I assume you’ll want as soon as possible, then how am I supposed to get to Las Pegasus? Without my yacht…”
“I know,” answered Lex with a frown. “There’s no choice now but to wait for another train to arrive. Once it does, you’ll have to make your way there and secure passage back with as many-”
He was interrupted by a knock at the door. Before anyone had a chance to react, Trotsworth stepped inside. “My deepest apologies for intruding,” he answered with a bow. “But there’s a situation that I judged it prudent to make everyone aware of at the earliest opportunity.”
River frowned, standing up. “What situation?”
But in contrast to her alarm, Trotsworth smiled slightly. “I believe you’ll see it if you look out the window, Madam.”
That was odd enough that everyone shared a confused look, save for Lex, who didn’t hesitate before striding over to the window in question and looking outside. For a split second he couldn’t see what the old butler had been talking about…and then he looked upward and spotted it. His breath catching in his throat at the unexpected sight, Lex gave a grunt that was almost a laugh.
“What is it?” asked Ribbon.
“Do you recall that message I told you to send several days ago, when I contacted you with my magic?” asked Lex, still looking upward.
Ribbon nodded. “Yeah. Your voice came out of nowhere, telling me that Vanhoover had lost their raincloud depot and to contact Cloudsdale for some more.” She didn’t add that she’d had no idea if the message had actually gotten through or not. Smoke signals weren’t exactly the most reliable method of long-distance communication, especially since Lucy had been the one to send it, claiming she still remembered how from when she’d gone to camp as a filly.
“It worked,” announced Lex as he moved back from the window, gesturing for them to take a look. “Cloudsdale is here.”
The rest of the day was spent dealing with the shockwaves of activity generated by Cloudsdale’s arrival.
The camp ponies had begun celebrating wildly at the sight of the cloud city, cheering and stomping their hooves so loudly that it had been audible in Cloudsdale itself, much to the surprise of the pegasus delegation that brought down the first bundle of rainclouds. Landing in the middle of the camp, their surprise was magnified several times over when they got a good look at the conditions that everypony was living in, to say nothing of the state of Vanhoover itself. Upon asking everyone what had happened, they were left completely nonplussed at the wave of answers they received, leaving the rainclouds (floating nearby in a large net) completely forgotten.
Fortunately, that had been when Lex had arrived on the scene, his entourage – Sonata, Aria, River, and Ribbon – in tow. At his direction, River had stepped forward to meet the Cloudsdale delegation, making the camp ponies step back with a shouted command that managed to overcome their excitement. As glad as everypony was to see Cloudsdale, they still knew that River Bank was somepony not to cross.
Of course, that only went for the ponies that were still on the ground. By the time River had started making plans to store the relief supply of clouds in her mansion (an arrangement which was far from ideal, but nevertheless necessary, since rainclouds tended to drift off in random directions if left unsecured), nearly the entire pegasus population of the camp had taken flight, winging their way up to Cloudsdale. The mass exodus had worried Sonata, leading to her asking Lex if it was okay for so many ponies to just up and quit the camp like that, since he’d just come up with a big plan to turn the place around.
“They’re not prisoners here,” had been Lex’s reply. “If they want to leave, they have every right to do so. But it doesn’t matter. Most of them will be back by nightfall.”
That had earned him a disbelieving look from Sonata. “For realsies? You think they’re going to want to come back here?”
“They won’t have a choice,” answered Lex cryptically.
Sonata had been visibly skeptical, but it only took a few hours for Lex to be proven right. By the time the sun had started to sink towards the western horizon, the pegasus ponies that had fled the camp in favor of Cloudsdale began to slowly fly back down to it. At first the unicorns and earth ponies had watched in amazement, not understanding why their winged counterparts were leaving a prosperous city to come back to such squalid conditions.
But very shortly the answer was made clear: it wasn’t that they’d wanted to. They had to. While Cloudsdale wasn’t without hospitality services, there weren’t nearly enough to support such a large influx of ponies. Even the ones that had waived their room fees out of pity for the poor refugees could only afford to accommodate a few ponies, having to turn the rest away.
“Cloudsdale is a city that needs to maintain close proximity to ground-based municipalities at all times in order to survive,” Lex had explained to Sonata when she’d asked him how he’d known most of the pegasi would come back. “Unlike Las Pegasus, which maintains a fixed location so that its cloud-based activities can receive logistical support from the terrestrial facilities beneath it, Cloudsdale is a city that’s aerial in its entirety, allowing it to move from place to place. But because of that, it’s impossible for it to be self-sufficient. Other than small residential gardens, its ponies can’t grow anything, let alone enough food to feed their entire population. If they were ever cut off from the ground, the entire city would begin to starve within a week.”
Sonata’s brow had wrinkled at that, leaving her scratching her head as she tried to take all of that in. “Okay, I think I get all that,” she’d said after almost a full minute of contemplation. “But what’s it got to do with the city not having a lot of hotels?”
Somehow, Lex had managed to resist sighing. “It’s an issue of supply and demand, Sonata. Because Cloudsdale needs to remain so close to terrene cities, ponies from whatever locality it’s in proximity to don’t need to worry about lodgings. They can fly or take a balloon or employ some other mode of short-range transportation to go to Cloudsdale, and once they’ve finished their business they can turn around and return home just as easily. Because travel time is such a non-issue, there’s little need for accommodations. And given that food is more expensive due to the additional expense of shipping it there and the comparative scarcity, most tourists wouldn’t find a prolonged stay to be economically worthwhile anyway, let alone a group of ponies who are completely destitute the way everyone here is. It’s the same reason the city has so few restaurants or other eateries.”
Sonata had been quite obviously losing her grip on the conversation by that point, staring up at the cloud city with a dazed expression on her face. Finally, though she’d managed to collect her thoughts enough to ask another question. “So…why did you have Aria and those other ponies go and collect all of that money, then?”
“Because River’s going to need it.”
The money in question was an immense pile of bits that had been piled into several large trunks courtesy of River’s staff. It had been retrieved earlier that afternoon by Aria, leading a team of ponies to collect it from another one of the financial institutions that River’s family controlled. The sardonic Siren had complained about being sent to perform the errand, but Lex had made it clear in no uncertain terms that she had better get used to it, since he’d already told her she’d be in charge of maintaining everypony’s safety when the process of reclaiming Vanhoover got underway.
That had almost led to another fight, but Sonata had quickly taken advantage of the fact that his whisper-spell was still in effect and told him to “love her up a little.” Thankfully, after Lex made it clear that he had no idea what she was talking about, Sonata gone into more detail. The result had been that Lex had pulled Aria aside and, nuzzling her gently, told her how she was the only one he could count on to oversee this, since only she had the magic and the acumen to pull it off. When he’d finished, Aria had huffed and pouted and accused him of “not playing fair,” but hadn’t hesitated to go find several ponies brave enough to go into Vanhoover with her.
“Just do it like that if she gets cranky while I’m gone,” Sonata had said after her sister had trotted off, a notable spring in her step.
After spending more than a few seconds contemplating what she was telling him, Lex had finally zeroed in on what seemed like the biggest danger in her suggestion. “And if she figures out that I’m using affection to manipulate her into being more compliant?”
Sonata had given him an odd look then. “Huh? Whaddaya mean? She knows that’s what that was. Heck, I’m pretty sure she knew I was coaching you through it. She just didn’t care.”
After what had happened with Nosey, Lex hadn’t been able to bring himself to think about Sonata’s answer in any greater detail, instead turning his attention to other things.
One of those other things was preparing for River’s departure. As much as Lex wanted to keep her under observation for a few more days to make sure she hadn’t caught ghoul fever, he and River had both known from the moment Cloudsdale had arrived that it was the best bet for getting her to Las Pegasus in a timely manner. But even then, there were various factors that needed to be taken into consideration.
The major one was how Cloudsdale would facilitate her journey to Las Pegasus. In theory, that should have been as easy as finding an available airship to rent – hardly a difficult task in a town that needed to have everything air-mailed to it – but River had informed Lex in no uncertain terms that if she was to have any chance of making the proper impression on the ponies she needed to sway, she’d have to make her entrance into the city in a conveyance of exactingly particular style. But finding one that matched her exacting criteria would apparently take time, which was something they didn’t have: the delegation that had delivered the emergency rainclouds had made it clear that Cloudsdale had gone out of its way to deliver them, and needed to return to its usual route as soon as possible. So there had been no choice but for River to send Trotsworth up in a hot air balloon (something else that Cloudsdale had in abundance) to procure a reservation in one of the city’s few hotels for her and several members of her staff.
Said staff had been frantically retrieving all of the luggage that they’d spent the morning loading onto her yacht, a process that had almost failed before it had begun, since several of River’s servants had expressed severe reservations about going into the city where she, her son, and two of their colleagues had been attacked by a ghoul a few hours earlier. River’s answer to that had been to call up the two butlers that had abandoned her and Piggy when the ghoul had attacked, and in front of the rest of her staff had proceeded to excoriate them for their cowardice so viciously that the stallions – both of whom outweighed her by fifty pounds or more – both broke down in tears, at which point she formally fired them. After that, she’d assured everypony else that so long as they stayed in the sunlight, away from buildings, and were finished before sundown, everything would be fine. Nopony had dared to disagree with her, and the yacht had been unloaded in record time. Now the various pieces of luggage stood alongside the trunks full of bits, waiting to be loaded into more hot air balloons to carry them up to the Cloudsdale.
Those had been only a few of the issues that had occupied Lex’s afternoon. Others had involved managing the transfer of more sick and injured ponies to Cloudsdale’s hospital, going over the floating city’s records of how many clouds went to what villages in the area, purchasing several sundries that the camp desperately needed and which Cloudsdale was able to spare, and numerous other tasks. Fortunately, Ribbon Cutter had proven her worth there, stepping in and handling most of the needed activities at Lex’s direction. She had even made an impromptu speech to the camp ponies – seeing how many of them were disappointed that Cloudsdale wouldn’t be able to simply spirit them away from their ruined city – about the plan that Lex had come up with to breathe new life into Vanhoover, telling them all about how very soon there’d be food and workers and lumber all pouring in. It had served, Sonata had told him later, as a great follow-up to his speech earlier in the day, and by the time Ribbon had been done the mood in the camp had been jubilant.
By the time the sun was sinking below the horizon and Cloudsdale was getting ready to leave, there was a palpable sense of exhaustion throughout the camp, one that Lex shared. Between fending off Sonata and Aria’s idiotic coup that morning, appeasing the Night Mare and subsequently explaining himself to everypony, and then managing Cloudsdale’s sudden appearance, a lot had happened. Though this was far less taxing than fighting Celestia and Luna, he couldn’t help but note. At least now he was making some semblance of progress with restoring Vanhoover…
His thoughts were interrupted as Sonata moved up alongside him. “Hey,” she smiled as she pressed her side against his. “Been a crazy-busy day, huh?”
Seeing no need to confirm the obvious, Lex simply moved on to the next order of business. “I want you to leave for the farming communities north of here tomorrow morning. Find a group of ponies who can accompany you, primarily pegasi. That way you can take those clouds with you when you go, and accomplish two things at once.” He paused to give her a chance to react to all of that, and to his mild surprise she just nodded, looking up at Cloudsdale. “We’ll go over this again in the morning in greater detail,” he added, just to be safe.
“Sure thing,” she replied.
For a moment the two of them simply sat there, before Sonata broke the silence. “So, Ribbon’s already gone back to River’s mansion. She totes wanted to head back to Tall Tale tonight, but those ponies from C. Shells’ crew said it was safer to leave in the morning.”
“They’re right,” noted Lex.
But Sonata kept speaking as if he hadn’t said anything. “She had a whole bunch more questions about what happened with Celestia and Luna. I tried to answer them, but you might wanna talk to her before she goes. Aria’s back there too. I think she’s eager to have you all to herself for a little while. And River’s already gone up to Cloudsdale, even though the rest of her stuff is still being loaded.” She pointed to where a few hot air balloons were parked near the wreckage of the train station. “There are a couple of other ponies leaving too. Not many, but a few that managed to meet up with a friend or a relative who’re letting them crash on their couch or something.”
When Lex’s only response was a noncommittal grunt, Sonata took a deep breath, as though preparing herself for what came next.
Sonata waited for Lex to say something else, but no further response came. Instead, he turned and started walking in the direction of River’s manor, directly away from where the last of the hot air balloons were boarding. Feeling her heart sink, Sonata broke into a gallop, moving directly into his path and forcing him to stop. “Lex! C’mon, don’t be like that! Go say goodbye to her!”
A dark look crossed his face then, but didn’t turn into a big swirling shadow and go right through her, which she tried to take as an encouraging sign. “We spoke earlier.”
The bitterness in his voice made Sonata wince, her ears folding back. “Look, she told me what happened,” she admitted quietly, wondering if that would set him off. But other than narrowing his eyes a little, he didn’t respond except to stare at her. Telling herself again that any response that didn’t involve him storming off was an accomplishment, she kept going. “I was talking to her before I came to get you just now, and she brought it up. Lex, she feels terrible about what she said.”
He raised a brow, his stony expression thawing just a little. “She regrets her decision to terminate our relationship?”
Although he’d tried to hide it, Sonata could clearly hear the hope in his words, and it made her feel even worse than if he’d said something nasty and awful. “No, I mean she feels bad about how she told you. That she, like, ranted and raved and stuff.”
She could see the disappointment in his eyes, watching as his face twisted into an ugly mask of hurt and anger. “Then there’s no longer any obligation for me to be concerned about her feelings,” he spat coldly, moving past her and walking towards River’s mansion again. “That’s what it means to sever a connection with someone.”
“So that’s it?” Despite how frustrated she felt at how he was acting, Sonata knew better than to get upset. Lashing out at Lex would only make him dig his hooves in. Besides, she’d seen him do this before, when she’d begged him to take her back after she’d broken up with him back in Tall Tale. It was just as awful to see him do it to someone else now as it had been to be on the receiving end of it then. But fortunately, she’d learned what to say to snap him out of it. “You don’t love her anymore?”
The words caused Lex to whirl in place, eyes flashing green and purple as he turned to confront her. “OF COURSE I STILL LOVE HER!” he bellowed, before regaining just enough self-control that his next words came out as a hiss rather than a scream. “But that doesn’t matter to her, does it?! She’d rather go back to that pathetic, pitiful little life that she carved out for herself in Canterlot than stay here with me! With us!” The last word was punctuated by a jagged stalagmite of black crystal punching up out of the ground behind him.
Despite the intimidating display, Sonata sighed. This wasn’t the reaction she’d been hoping for, but at least he was being honest now. “Nosey loves you too, Lex. That’s why you shouldn’t let her leave like this. If you stay all mad and don’t tell her goodbye, you’ll totes regret it later.”
Her advice earned her a bitter look from him. “I expected you, of all ponies, to be more upset about this. Aria told you how badly she was wounded when you abandoned her back on Everglow, and now you’re willing to sit back and let Nosey do the same thing to us?” His lip curled in a mocking sneer. “But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I know how casual you can be about ending relationships.”
That comment left Sonata utterly speechless, unable to believe what he’d just said. She tried to remind herself that he was seriously upset, that he was still engaging with her rather than just walking away. But even so, to say something so awful, and when she was trying to help him…
Seconds passed, but Lex didn’t walk his statement back, simply standing there with that cruel smirk on his lips. Finally, Sonata composed herself. Closing her eyes, she let out a deep breath before opening them again, walking toward Lex until she was right in front of him.
Then she slapped him across the face.
Whatever magic he was using to protect himself kicked in just before the blow landed, stealing the force from her swing at the same time as it hardened his body, leaving him completely unharmed. But she had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes widen in surprise, the green and purple light guttering out. Getting angry at Lex might not make things better, but that didn’t mean she had to let him walk all over her either.
“I’m totes heartbroken that Nosey’s leaving,” she said softly, looking him right in the eye as she did. “And I know that you are too. That’s why I wanted to help you out, because I figured if I couldn’t do anything about how much I was hurting, I could least do something about how much you were. And I thought maybe if I did, you’d want to do the same for me.” She took another slow breath, fighting down the urge to cry. “But I guess I was wrong.”
Then it was her turn to move past him and walk in the direction of River’s manor. She held her breath as she did so, hoping against hope that Lex wouldn’t just let her walk away. As much as he knew he hated apologizing, she also knew that he was capable of saying that he was sorry, even if he didn’t actually say it out loud. If only he’d do it now…!
But only silence followed her as she trudged back toward River’s place.
Lex watched Sonata leave, trying to choke down the overwhelming resentment he felt for her, for Nosey, and for everypony else in the entire world at that moment.
The unfairness of it all galled him. He had no doubt that Sonata, the melodramatic little nag, would hold this exchange against him despite the fact that he’d done absolutely nothing wrong. If anything, he was the aggrieved party here; Nosey was leaving him, leaving all of them, and Sonata thought it was important that he make sure that Nosey didn’t feel too bad about it?! What kind of sense did that make?! Acrimony was what she deserved for abandoning them like this! Sonata’s suggesting otherwise was not only insane, it was utterly callous, making a mockery of how hurt he felt. And then she had the utter nerve to claim that she was just trying to make him feel better.
Those thoughts and a thousand others like them surged through his mind – alongside the hateful recriminations from the rogue part of his consciousness – as he watched Sonata retreat, the lengthening shadows cast by the recent sunset making her disappear from view in short order. Fortunately he wouldn’t have to see her for a while once she set out on his errand tomorrow morning. He still needed to give her further instructions on what to do before then, but that was no matter; he could easily write them down and have Feather Duster give them to her on his behalf. Maybe once Sonata had left she’d think about how uncaring she’d been-
“Lex?”
The voice made his head whip around, cursing himself for his carelessness. Since he hadn’t seen fit to use his dark magic to enhance his vision, the same shadows that had obscured Sonata when she’d stalked off had also concealed Nosey’s approach. Now the bespectacled mare was within a stone’s throw of him, tentatively moving closer. “I’m sorry,” she murmured awkwardly. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. I just…I heard you yelling, before, and I wanted to see if everything was alri-”
“Have a safe trip home, Miss Newsy.” The words were as bilious as Lex could make them, and he took no small amount of spiteful satisfaction in seeing her flinch. His only regret was that he couldn’t turn his back on her and make a point of walking away, since the only place he had to go now that the train station had been destroyed was River’s manor. But going back there now would make it look like he was chasing after Sonata, and Lex would rip the barbed wire from his leg with his teeth before he’d do that.
But despite how clearly he’d dismissed her, Nosey didn’t move. Quite the opposite, she managed a thin smile. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” she began conversationally. “I got in touch with a photographer for Cloudsdale’s newspaper. We’d never actually met before today, but we knew each other by reputation, and she’s willing to let me use her guestroom for a few days. I should be back in Canterlot in a few-”
“I don’t care,” interrupted Lex. If she was dragging this out because she wanted some sort of absolution from him, she was going to be disappointed. “You’ve made your decision, now live with it.”
He half-hoped that would send her running off in tears. It would be what she deserved, certainly. But although her ears folded back and her lip quivered, she didn’t break down. Instead, she slowly walked over to him. Lex braced himself for another slap, but when Nosey got within leg’s reach of him, she did something he didn’t expect.
She hugged him.
“I wish I could be like you,” she whimpered, burying her face in his neck. “You. Sonata. Aria. You’ve all lost so much and still managed to keep going. To stay true to yourselves. But I can’t. I don’t have your strength. I’m sorry.”
Lex had been about to shove her away, but the sorrowful confession kept him from moving. The words pierced through all of his anger and resentment and hurt, reaching down to the deepest level of what he was feeling and letting it bubble to the surface, the words coming to his lips unbidden. “…you should never have had to try.”
And just like that he wasn’t angry anymore. Instead all he felt was sad, and guilty, and so very, very tired. Slowly, hesitantly, he reached a leg up and hugged Nosey back. He felt a silent sob go through her as he did, making her body shudder before she hugged him tighter. Had she always felt so small and fragile?
“Promise me you’ll make up with Sonata, okay?” she sniffled. “I can’t bear the thought of you guys fighting because of me.”
“I promise.” At that moment he would have said anything to make her feel better.
She relaxed against him, and several seconds passed before she straightened up, ending their embrace. Taking a breath, she plastered a smile onto her face, adjusting her glasses. “I’ll make sure that all of Equestria knows the good you’re doing here. After what happened with the princesses, there’s probably going to be a lot of bad press about you going around, but you can count on me to make sure that everypony gets the real truth. Besides,” she added after a moment, “I know you’ll do something else amazing really soon, and I’ll have to come back to report on it. So it’s not like this is goodbye…”
“Nosey, I…” Seeing her falter, and knowing that she had to go, Lex searched for something to say. Something that would make her feel even a little better. But unlike a moment ago, nothing came to him, and he was left trying to string together the best sentiment that he could, with no idea how appropriate it was. “…I hope that you’ll be happy in Canterlot.”
She smiled at him again, sadly this time, and he had the distinct impression that he’d said the wrong thing. But then it was too late, as a loud cough came from the operator of the final hot air balloon, causing Nosey to look over and wave before turning back to him for the last time. “Take care, Lex.”
She didn’t wait for an answer before she turned and galloped away, leaving him watching as she climbed into the basket of the balloon.
Leaving him watching as it rose into the air.
Leaving him watching as it passed out of sight.
It was only when Cloudsdale drifted back east, the city passing carefully between two of the mountains and moving out of view, that he finally turned around and headed back toward River’s manor. To find Sonata and fix the mess he’d made with her. But he knew that in his dreams, that night and for many nights to come, he’d be right back there, watching as one of the ponies he loved ceased to be a part of his life.
The train ride back to Canterlot felt like it took a thousand years.
In actuality it had only taken three days. But for Princess Celestia, who had previously spent a millennium privately mourning what had happened to her sister, the anguish she felt at seeing what Lex Legis had done to Luna made those three days equal to what she’d gone through over the last ten centuries. Or perhaps it was even worse now, since she had to watch Luna suffer in a way she hadn’t before.
Part of it – the only part that Celestia could truly share with her sister – was the sheer amount of pain that Luna’s injuries had left her in. Although she’d barely moved since the train had departed Tall Tale, remaining in the luxurious bed in the sleeper car that Celestia had designated as theirs, Luna was still quite clearly in agony. Every time the train jostled or shook her, which seemed to be almost constantly, a muffled whimper or stifled moan would fill the car, making Celestia’s heart ache. She wasn’t in much better condition herself; simply walking hurt, leaving her fighting down the urge to wince with every step she took. More than once she’d found herself sweating just from the effort it took to stand for more than a few minutes, and in one instance her legs had simply collapsed beneath her without warning, sending her tumbling to the floor and badly frightening the pair of guards she’d been speaking to at the time. And she’d been far less injured than Luna had been…
What little she’d been able to coax Luna into telling her about how she felt hadn’t been encouraging. She’d described how her hind legs and tail felt numb and only partially responsive, as though they’d fallen asleep. She could still move them, but only slowly and very, very weakly, to the point that standing under her own power was currently beyond her. She was also suffering periodic bouts of dizziness as well as nausea, making it hard for her to keep down what little she was eating.
But it was her horn that was causing Luna the most discomfort. Unable to cast even the simplest spell in her current state, she’d eventually admitted that her horn felt like it was burning – a statement that had been especially worrying, given how feverish Luna felt – causing Celestia to command the guard to bring bags of ice. But Luna had refused them, saying that touching anything to her horn made the pain spike to unbearable levels. She’d even asked to be arranged in bed so that her horn didn’t touch the pillow when she slept…which wasn’t very often. When she did, she had a distressing tendency to cry out, calling for Celestia or, at times, Silhouette. More often her cries were simply wordless moans of terror, and all Celestia could do was hold her as gently as she could without hurting her more until she calmed down.
Those were what frightened Celestia the most. As bad as Luna’s injuries were, her sleep terrors hinted at wounds that went deeper than mere physical damage.
In turning her back into the unicorn she’d been born as, Lex Legis had struck at the very heart of Luna’s deepest insecurities. Celestia knew that her little sister had long felt overshadowed by her, leaving her struggling with feelings of being unappreciated. Now that she was no longer an alicorn, and almost certainly unable to move the moon and stars, Celestia had no doubt that those feelings – which she had no doubt were behind Luna’s recent push to try and become a goddess – would come back with a vengeance. Especially since Lex had also gone out of his way to slay Luna’s most devoted worshiper as well as loudly indict her as being inferior to his own goddess, shaming her before he’d maimed her.
It was like he’d gone out of his way to be as cruel as possible.
But he won’t win, Celestia assured herself silently, looking out the window as the train neared Canterlot station. Cadance will be able to undo his curse. And if she can’t… If she couldn’t, then they’d find another way. Celestia firmly believed that they would.
She had to. Because if they couldn’t… If there was no way to change Luna back into her true self…
Pushing that thought away, Celestia instead waited for the train to stop. She’d sent several brief letters to Spike on the way back – and had received quite a few in turn – letting everyone know what had happened and what they needed to do. The result was that, if everything had gone the way it was supposed to, Shining Armor would have cleared the station ahead of their arrival, deploying the Royal Guard to keep everypony out. Only Cadance and Twilight would be inside the station, waiting for them; the former ready to use the miracles given to her by her goddess, Lashtada, in order to reverse what Lex had done, and the latter ready to help however she could, since she had firsthoof knowledge of both the stallion that had done this to them as well as the new magic of that other world.
This will work, Celestia silently assured herself, glancing over at where Luna was fitfully sleeping. The train was already slowing down, and with a thought Celestia wrapped her sister’s bed in her telekinesis, keeping it steady before the train’s deceleration caused it to shake a little. Luna will be restored, and then we can all concentrate on taking the fight to Lex. That would need to be the next order of business, before the power-mad unicorn whom she’d so foolishly trusted carried out whatever diabolical scheme he was planning next…
Then the train came to a stop, and there was no more time to worry about Lex.
Immediately, the door on the far side of the car flew open, admitting a frantic-looking Twilight Sparkle. “Princess Celestia!” she cried, immediately rushing to where her senior princess was gingerly climbing to her hooves. “Are you alright?! I mean, I know you’re not alright, but I’ve just been so worried about you and Luna ever since I got Spike’s letter! I was going to teleport Cadance and me onto the train, but not knowing its precise location made it too difficult to compensate for the conservation of inertia-”
Unable to keep from smiling, Celestia lowered her hoof from Twilight’s muzzle. Giving a pointed look at where Luna was sleeping, Celestia felt a familiar warmth grow in her chest as she saw Twilight blush. No matter what happened, her former student never changed, and right now that gave her a great deal of hope. “I’m glad you’re here, Twilight,” she murmured as she pulled her into a soft hug, before looking at the second pony that had entered the car. “And you as well, Cadance.”
“I just hope I’m able to help.” Nervous tension lined Cadance’s face as her eyes settling on Luna’s reclining form. “I know I said this in one of the letters I had Spike send you, but I had a hard time removing the curses Lex put on Comfy Cozy and Produce Aisle, and this sounds far worse than what he did to them.”
Celestia felt the same way, but she didn’t let it show. Knowing that a display of confidence was what was called for, she gave Cadance a gentle smile. “The same way you have faith in Lashtada, I have faith in you. You and your goddess are both dedicated to love, a power far greater than any evil magic.”
Cadance smiled at that, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Thank you. But there are some things that even love can’t do…”
“Which is why I’ve come up with a backup plan!” announced Twilight, drawing surprised looks from Celestia and Cadance both. Before either of them could ask what she was talking about, her horn lit up, a matching glow surrounding the book that she lifted out of one of her saddlebags. “Right before I came back, I asked Under Score, one of the new friends I made in Viljatown – that’s the Pony Empire’s capital on Everglow – what he knew about removing curses. As it turns out, you can’t just use your standard ‘dispel magic’ spell to negate them even though they’re a continuous magical effect. Apparently it has to do with how-”
“Twilight,” interrupted Celestia, “I’m sure this is all very fascinating, but you said you had a backup plan?”
“Oh! Right.” Giving an embarrassed grin, Twilight flipped her book open to a certain page, pointing at it. “Well, as it turns out there’s a special spell specifically for removing curses! He was able to point me in the direction of a local wizard who knew it, and was willing to let me copy it into my spellbook in exchange for a small fee. It’s not guaranteed to work, but I’ve spent the last few days going over it, and I’m ready to give it my all in case we need it now.” Belatedly, she gave Cadance a sheepish look. “Not that I don’t think you can do it, I mean.”
But rather than looking insulted, Cadance had a relieved expression on her face, as did Celestia. “Then I’m sure that between the two of you, we have nothing to worry about.” She had to sit down as she said it, her legs already starting to ache from standing for so long.
The strain must have showed on her face, because Cadance gave her a worried look. “I’ll heal Luna right now. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ll heal you next, then-”
“No.”
Luna’s voice, audibly quivering, caused all three princesses to freeze for a moment, before Celestia’s eyes closed in sadness. “She’s been having sleep terrors ever since we left the city,” she explained. “Right now, she-”
“No, sister,” came Luna’s weak and tremulous voice again. “I’m awake.” Her eyes fluttering open, Luna managed a small smile as she looked at each of them in turn. “I appreciate that you want to relieve me of this with all haste, but Cadance, I want you to bring Silhouette back to life before you see to me.”
Just the sound of her was enough to make Cadance’s ears fold back, a concerned expression spreading across her face. “Luna, I understand why you’d say that, but right now-”
“Please, Cadance, don’t argue with me. Bring Silhouette back to life. Once he’s back I promise to stop being obstinate, but I beg you: indulge me in this.”
Celestia stepped in before anyone else could say anything. “Of course, sister. Twilight, if you could have the guards bring Silhouette’s body here from the next car?”
“Right.” Immediately turning and galloping off, it took Twilight less than a minute to return, two guards carrying a wrapped bundle in tow. No sooner had they lowered it than Celestia dismissed them with a nod. In the time it took them to leave she’d already telekinetically unwrapped the sheet that had served as his shroud.
The sight of the black-and-white stallion’s body – with a huge, bloodless puncture wound in the center of his torso – made Twilight bite her lip and look away. Celestia closed her eyes mournfully, and Luna gave a breath that sounded very much like a sob. But Cadance’s only reaction was to kneel down by the corpse, closing her eyes as her lips moved in silent prayer. Long seconds passed before she suddenly rose back onto all fours, wings flaring as her eyes shot open, now glowing pure white.
“Lashtada!” she intoned loudly. “Let your love guide this pony back to the one to whom he offered his devotion! Let him walk by her side once more! Let him live…” She placed a hoof directly over the puncture wound on Silhouette’s chest. “Again!”
An instant later, Silhouette gave a loud gasp, convulsing beneath Cadance’s hoof before his eyes shot open, alive again. “Goddess!” he yelped, looking around wildly. “What…where is this? Where’s the Goddess? Lex Legis attacked her, and then-”
“It’s alright, Silhouette,” answered Celestia as Cadance backed away from the resurrected stallion. “Everything’s going to be alright. You-, Luna! Calm down!”
But Luna wasn’t listening, biting back a cry of pain as she attempted to crawl out of the bed, reaching a foreleg out toward Silhouette despite the agony it was clearly causing her. “S-Silhouette!” she croaked, tears running down her face. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! What happened to you was my fault! I wasn’t strong enough!”
His head snapping around to look at the source of the familiar voice, Silhouette froze at the sight that greeted him. “G-Goddess…?” he asked, the horror in his voice abundantly clear as he got a good look at what had become of Luna. “Is…is that you? What happened…?”
“Something that Cadance is about to undo,” prompted Celestia.
Nodding, Cadance stepped forward, climbing onto the bed alongside Luna and kneeling beside her. “Just hold still,” she murmured, before she closed her eyes and began to pray silently.
But Silhouette wasn’t content to be brushed aside. “Someone tell me what’s happening!” he demanded as he started to rise. “What’s-, ngh!”
His grunt marked his starting to stumble as his legs suddenly gave out from under him, but before he hit the ground Twilight’s aura wrapped around him, moving him to a nearby seat. “You shouldn’t push yourself,” she murmured, keeping her eyes on Cadance and Luna. “Being brought back to life puts a strain on your body, one that needs further magic to fix. Believe me, I speak from experience.”
Silhouette opened his mouth to reply, but before he could Cadance rose to her hooves, wings spread once again as her eyes shone white. “Lashtada,” she called, and this time her voice was a gentle plea rather than a loud invocation. “Please let your love renew this pony.”
Then she reached out and placed her hoof on Luna’s side.
Everypony watched with baited breath as Cadance touched her hoof to Luna.
The effect was immediate.
The bruises covering her body disappeared, leaving the skin beneath her coat unblemished. Her horn was once again unmarked, free of the burns that the battle had left it with. Her posture, which had been tense with pain, suddenly relaxed. Nor could Luna hold back a soft grunt of relief as the suffering that she’d been forced to endure over the last few days came to an abrupt end, the sudden lack of agony being an ecstasy all its own.
But the pleasure of no longer having to bear the wounds from her battle with Lex Legis lasted but a moment. Even as she opened her eyes, she could see that the faces of everyone around her were grim, and even before she turned to examine herself she knew why. As much as she couldn’t help but enjoy the cessation of pain, she was also acutely aware of what else she couldn’t feel.
Her wings.
Even so, she had to look anyway. Had to confirm that her hopes were dashed. And indeed they were: her sides were still smooth and lacking in feathered appendages. Her mane and tail remained a dull, lusterless blue. Even her stature, she could tell from looking at her legs, was still shorter than it had been as an alicorn.
For a moment no one said anything, unable to speak through the oppressive air of disappointment that hung over them all, until Twilight spoke up. “Alright, based on what Cadance said before, we expected that this might happen.” Giving a nod, as though to convince herself that this wasn’t anything to be upset over, she looked at her former foalsitter. “Cadance, you take care of Princess Celestia and Silhouette. Luna, I’m going to try that anti-curse spell I mentioned. Wait just a moment, okay?”
Luna forced herself to smile, fighting down the sense of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. “Of course. Thank you Twilight. And you too, Cadance.”
The latter alicorn seemed to sense her distress, reaching out and placing a hoof over hers. “Don’t give up,” she urged, her voice no less strong for how gentle it was. “No matter what happens, we’re all here for you, and we won’t stop trying until you’re whole again.” She paused just long enough for Luna to nod, and then made her way over to Celestia, her lips already moving in another quiet prayer to Lashtada.
Twilight was also speaking, voice raised in a chant in an unknown language as her hoof traced arcane patterns in the air. The sight made Luna’s stomach clench, remembering how Lex had done much the same before he’d struck her down…
Fortunately, Twilight finished a second later, marching over to her with one foreleg held out. “Okay, spell cast. At this point I just need to make physical contact with the afflicted individual, and it should discharge automatically.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, Luna found herself smiling just a little. The procedural nature of Twilight’s narration was absurd enough that she couldn’t help but feel somewhat tickled by it. The sensation was a welcome one, after everything that had happened over the last few days, and it pushed back her malaise enough that a sudden surge of hope ran through her. Her sister’s student had worked wonders all on her own before. If anypony could remove Lex’s dark magic now, it was Twilight Sparkle.
Heedless of Luna’s thoughts, Twilight approached her slowly, holding her hoof off the ground but not reaching out just yet. Instead, she took a deep breath. “Now for the tricky part,” she announced. “I’m going to try to use my alicorn magic to enhance the spell.”
From the other side of the car, Princess Celestia – now recovered, thanks to Cadance’s prayer – took a step forward, a concerned look on her face. “Twilight, are you sure that’s wise? You’re still learning how to handle that power, and to use it in conjunction with an entirely new type of magic…”
“I know,” admitted Twilight. “But I’ve been studying how to combine Equestrian magic with the magic I learned on Everglow. If I can use the alicorn magic inside of me to intensify this spell’s strength and precision, then it’ll have a much better chance of breaking through Lex’s curse.”
“It’s alright, sister. I trust Twilight.” Celestia still looked nervous, but Luna felt just the opposite, the hope inside of her growing. This was it. This was the sort of marvel that Twilight had so frequently pulled off before. Combining two different styles of magic was something that Lex Legis could never have anticipated, and Luna felt certain that it would overcome his malevolence now. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Twilight needed no further confirmation. Squeezing her eyes shut, her horn immediately lit up, glowing with a brilliant raspberry-colored aura. Gritting her teeth, Twilight gave a strained groan, as though struggling to make the magic do what she wanted it to do.
At first her efforts seemed to have no effect, as Twilight continued to grunt and strain, the aura around her horn flaring brighter but otherwise doing nothing. But then Twilight reached up with her outstretched hoof and touched the bottom of it to the shining radiance she was manifesting, making sure not to make contact with the horn itself as she did. Instantly, her aura began to churn violently, thrashing and seething as though struggling to get away from the appendage touching it. It was with another, louder groan of effort that Twilight withdrew her hoof…taking her horn’s aura with it.
Luna’s eyes widened at the sight, and she could see that Celestia and Cadance looked the same, watching as Twilight physically held the aura that only a second ago had been around her horn. Still thrashing as though it resented being removed from its proper place, the aura nevertheless remained stable, held on the end of Twilight’s hoof. Letting out a shaky breath, the youngest princess opened her eyes just a sliver. “A-alright,” she grunted. “Here…goes…nothing!”
The last word was punctuated by her practically diving forward, lunging and pressing the aura in her hoof – and, Luna realized, the invisible substance of the spell that it was surrounding – directly into the cursed princess’s chest.
Luna let out a gasp as the energy of the spell spread through her. The thrashing aura grew in size, engulfing her entire body in an instant and lifting her slowly into the air. Her eyes widening, she nevertheless turned her head so that she could look at her sides, where her wings had once been silently willing the spell to succeed.
“I think it’s working!” came Celestia’s voice. “Look!”
But no one needed to be told what to look at, least of all Luna herself. Still held within the roiling aura, she watched as her body slowly began to blacken. Or rather, as a black covering appeared around her. Clinging to her like a second skin, the substance was already darker than pitch, the color of a night sky that had never known the moon or stars. It covered every part of her, turning her tail, her coat, and even her cutie mark into a featureless darkness, causing Luna to cry out in alarm as she realized the stuff had engulfed her completely, from head to hooves.
And then it began to grow even darker.
“I think that’s what you said the guards saw!” came Twilight’s voice, directed at Celestia. “Remember how the ones that were still conscious said they saw Lex’s magic lift Luna up and wrap her in some sort of black aura, and how it seemed to sink into her? I think that’s it! That’s the magic of his curse!”
By this point, Luna would have known that even if Twilight hadn’t said anything. The inky substance had grown even darker, and a growing tactile sensation accompanied it as it did. It wasn’t painful, but still evoked an intense sense of distress. It was like she was wearing the most uncomfortable set of clothes she’d ever felt, their sizes and proportions not only wrong but also made out of fabrics that irritated her skin, all while hobbling her movement and leaving her off-balance.
But that was just the start of it. Barely a second later the black covering had thickened, growing more substantial around her, and the feeling became more pronounced in turn. Suddenly it was no longer just uncomfortable, but unbearable. The black stuff wasn’t just discomforting her, it was imposing itself on her, forcing her to accommodate it in a way a mere set of clothes never could. Nor, she realized, was it just covering her; it was within her as well, twisting every part of her body to conform to the shape, the abilities, the existence that it – that Lex Legis – wanted her to have, rather than her own. The feeling was revolting in the extreme, and Luna flailed wildly at her torso and her face, trying to scrape the stuff off, ignoring the cries of her sister and her friends as she realized with a growing sense of panic that her efforts weren’t doing anything to dislodge the foul stuff that was the incarnation of Lex’s curse.
And then the raspberry aura surrounding her gave a particularly strong pulse, and Luna gasped as the dark substance was suddenly tugged away from her body.
It wasn’t enough to separate the black stuff from her, however, only causing it to stretch upward toward the edge of the aura for a moment before snapping back into place around her. It looked for all the world as if a giant, invisible hand had reached down and pulled on part of the black veneer covering her before letting go. In her panic, it took Luna a moment to realize that impression wasn’t far off; the aura surrounding her was Twilight’s enhanced spell, having forced Lex’s curse to manifest so that it could try and tear it off of her. Except it had failed…
But the spell didn’t seem content to let things end so easily. Again it gave a strong pulse, and again the black substance was yanked toward the edge of the aura, stretching out like rubber as it stubbornly clung to Luna’s body. For a second it stayed there, the aura surrounding it shaking violently before calming again, the dark material again snapping back to surround Luna in a skintight covering.
“It’s not working!” yelled Cadance.
Celestia’s voice was no less alarmed. “Twilight, it needs more power!”
“I-I can’t!” Twilight’s voice was fearful. “I was barely able to keep the spell intact with the energy I already gave it! If I add any more, it’ll completely break apart!”
“Then what if we add our own alicorn magic to it?” came Cadance’s voice again. “Or maybe I could try Lashtada’s power again now?”
“That won’t help! This isn’t like our native magic; arcane spells are carefully designed to function in specific ways. Adding more power or some other magical effect to them has to be done with careful precision, or all it does is make them collapse. If we try to do anything to it now, the best thing that will happen is that it’ll have no effect! At worst, it could cause the spell to go haywire!”
Celestia’s reply was thick with anguish. “But if we don’t do something…!”
But there was no need for her to complete that sentence. In the brief time that the three of them had been conversing, Twilight’s spell had tried another half-dozen times to rip the ebony material of Lex’s curse off of Luna. Each time it had tugged it sharply away from her, and each time it had failed to tear it off, the darkness resisting the pull and snapping back around Luna with suffocating closeness.
Having watched it all from within the aura, Luna couldn’t even bring herself to protest as the pinkish nebula surrounding her began to fade. As it did, the black substance began to seep back into her body, and she could only groan in revulsion as it sank into her, the feelings of aversion it had brought with it fading. Except they weren’t fading, she knew now; they were simply sinking so deep into her that they were beyond being consciously registered, like an ache that had grown so familiar that it ceased to be noticeable. Those sensations were still there, making themselves a part of her everyday existence whether she recognized them or not.
As the last of Twilight’s spell faded into nothing, Luna landed on the bed, the dark covering having vanished back into her entirely.
Just like when Cadance’s attempt to free her had failed, nopony said anything in the wake of what had happened. But although she knew it was her own mind playing tricks on her, Luna felt certain that if she listened carefully enough, she’d have heard the sound of Lex Legis’s mocking laughter.
In the wake of what had just happened, Luna couldn’t lift her face from the bedspread, feeling utterly wretched.
The last few days had been the most miserable of her life, eclipsing even the years prior to her becoming Nightmare Moon when she’d allowed jealousy and bitterness toward her sister to fester in her heart. For the last three days, she’d drifted in and out of a sea of agony, tormented both by her injuries and by the knowledge that she’d not only failed to protect one of the few ponies that worshiped her, but hadn’t even made his sacrifice worthwhile. Lex Legis had won the battle, and in doing so had made a mockery of Silhouette’s saving her from being cut down by the villain’s magical scythe. But that hadn’t been enough to satisfy the dark wizard, and he had then seen fit to humiliate her like this, turning her back into the unicorn she’d been in her youth.
Maybe it had been because she’d been unconscious when he’d done it, or maybe it had been because she’d been too wracked with pain from her wounds and guilt over what had happened to Silhouette to dwell upon it, but although Luna had thought she’d understood the nature of what Lex had done to her before, she knew better now. The vigor with which Twilight’s spell had fought his curse, drawing it out in its attempt to rip it from her, had shown her the truth. But that truth brought her no comfort; far from it…
“Luna?” Celestia’s voice made Luna shudder, suddenly wishing that she was alone so that no one would have to see her like this. “Luna, are you alright?”
“The spell shouldn’t have hurt her,” murmured Twilight, her voice thick with worry. “Even with all of that extra power I put into it, there shouldn’t have been any deleterious effects.”
“I don’t think this is your fault, Twilight.” Cadance’s voice came from right in front of her. “Luna, did Lex’s curse do something to you just now? Some sort of retaliation for trying to lift it?”
The question almost made Luna laugh. The evil magic hadn’t done anything to her in response to Twilight’s spell, it was just that she now comprehended the full scope of her condition. She’d known that the pony whom she’d already come to despise most in the world, who embodied all of the horrible traits that she’d displayed as Nightmare Moon and then some, had not only defeated her in a fight but had then decided to change her body against her will to suit his whims. But now she understood, on a visceral level, that Lex Legis’s magic was still inside her. That knowledge made her stomach churn and her skin crawl; it wasn’t that Lex had done something horrible to her. He was still doing something horrible to her! Her body wasn’t her own anymore; it was the body that he wanted her to have: an outward, unmistakable mark of his power over her. The shame of it, the sense of violation, made her want to curl up and die…
But Luna knew she didn’t have the luxury of doing that. Quite the opposite; if she didn’t respond right now, she knew that her sister and the others would only become more persistent in their attempts to verify her condition, and the last thing that Luna wanted right now was to talk about how she felt. It was that anxiety alone which gave her the strength to lift her head up at last. She almost winced when she saw that Cadance, Celestia, and Twilight had gathered around her, filling her field of vision. But she pushed that impulse down, somehow managing to give a thin smile. “No,” she murmured at last. “No, I was just…disappointed, is all.”
Twilight grimaced at that. “I don’t understand why it didn’t work. Lex is a strong spellcaster, but based on what I saw during our time together on Everglow, he isn’t that strong.”
“He might not need to be, if he has a goddess supporting him now,” noted Cadance grimly.
“We should discuss that later.” Celestia’s voice was polite, but left no room for argument as she turned back to her sister. “Luna, do you feel up for trying again?”
“I have another casting of that spell prepared, and some alicorn magic left,” added Twilight. “Based on what Cadance said about how she needed more than one try to break Lex’s other curses, I think that there’s still a high probability that we’ll overcome this over the course of our next few attempts.”
Luna could feel the blood drain from her face at that, hoping that her dark coat hid it. Just the idea of going through that again, of having her face rubbed in how Lex’s invasive, unwelcome magic was still keeping her body in the shape that he found pleasing made her want to throw up. As much as she wanted this curse gone, the thought of how another failed attempt would make her feel was more than she knew she could bear right now. “I’m…I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I’m very tired at the moment. Perhaps we could try again later?”
“Of course we can,” answered Celestia without hesitation. “Whenever you feel ready.” Luna had just enough time to feel grateful for her sister when Celestia looked over at Twilight. “In the meantime, we should try and get everyone together as soon as we can.”
Luna paused at that, a sinking feeling washing over her. “Everyone?”
Cadance was the one who answered. “It’s one of the things we’ve been discussing through Spike’s letters. There might be some other people who can help, like that angel you and Celestia met, Mihr.”
“I’ve sent for Zecora also,” added Twilight. “She might know something about lifting curses that we don’t. And the rest of my friends are coming too, except for Pinkie, I mean…” Biting her lip for a moment, Twilight shook off her malaise a second later. “Fluttershy even said she’d try to get in touch with Discord. Hopefully he’ll be more helpful than he was with Tirek.” That last part was said in a wry voice, before she glanced over at Princess Celestia. “Spike and Soft Mane haven’t sent you anything about Willow, have they?”
The taller alicorn shook her head. “I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything about the ‘purrsian’ they said they were going to talk to.”
Twilight frowned at that, putting a hoof to her chin. “I should tell them to talk to Rarity. Willow’s son is pretty close to Sweetie Belle and the Crusaders, so she might know-”
“When is this…assembly, going to take place?” asked Luna, doing her best to make the question sound casual and not something she was already dreading. Just the thought of having to appear in front of so many people and have them see what Lex had done to her was already making her stomach tighten in anxiety.
She must have succeeded, because Celestia gave her a look of resolve rather than concern. “As soon as possible. Even if we can’t figure out a way to break Lex’s curse, this should help us figure out more about him for the next time we face him.”
Luna felt her heart start to pound in her chest. “The next time?”
Cadance jumped in then, clearly sensing her distress. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said quickly. “Right now we’re just getting everyone in one place. Hopefully, Mihr or Discord will be able to lift Lex’s curse without too much trouble, and then we can all figure out what to do next. In the meantime, I’ll finish relieving the stress that Silhouette’s resurrection placed on his body-” She stopped abruptly as she looked behind her. The other princesses turned to see what had startled Cadance, and as they moved Luna, overcome with morbid curiosity, looked as well. But, she realized a second later, it wasn’t what they’d seen; rather, it was what they hadn’t seen.
Silhouette was gone.
“Really now, Shining Armor! This is just too much!”
The crowd of ponies behind Fancy Pants appeared to agree, breaking into a chorus of angry shouting. But Shining Armor didn’t flinch, and although he didn’t show it outwardly, he was proud of how the half-dozen members of the Royal Guard backing him up didn’t either. After what had happened with those escapees from a few days ago, he’d been worried about the standards among the Canterlot guard, and had put them through a few remedial drills while waiting for Celestia and Luna to return.
But just showing everyone that they weren’t intimidated wouldn’t solve the situation.
Holding up a hoof in a ‘quiet down’ gesture, Shining Armor waited until the yelling had turned into disgruntled muttering before looking at the mob’s apparent ringleader. “Fancy Pants, I know this is inconvenient-”
“‘Inconvenient?!” bristled the elegantly-coiffed stallion. “My dear boy, missing opening night at the opera house because the balcony seats are being reupholstered is inconvenient. This,” he pointed a hoof at where Shining Armor and his guards were blocking the entrance to the train station, “is a travesty! Worse, it’s a travesty that we’ve already had to endure!”
“I understand that,” nodded Shining Armor. “Really, I do, but-”
“There’s no ‘but’ about it,” huffed Fancy Pants. “It was bad enough when you closed down the station a few days ago, to say nothing of all of the sky-ports. But now you’re doing it again!”
“The sky-ports are still open,” noted Shining Armor diplomatically.
“And the trains aren’t,” shot back Fancy Pants, “much to the consternation of myself and the other good citizens of Canterlot!” Another round of angry shouting broke out then, with more than a few ponies calling out what they were missing out on because of the latest shutdown.
“I understand that,” repeated Shining Armor, raising his voice in the most non-hostile manner that he could. “But this came directly from Princess Celestia herself.” That was always a winning move in situations like these, Shining Armor knew. The ponies of Canterlot were incredibly proud that their princess – both princesses, now that Luna had returned – lived among them, and the Royal Sisters were even more popular here than in the rest of Equestria because of it. He could already see more than a few faces in the crowd softening at the revelation that Celestia had ordered this.
Fancy Pants appeared to be among the mollified, at least partially. “Did she at least tell you how long the station is going to be closed? I’m expecting several guests for the inaugural meeting of our new Monocle and Top Hat Appreciation Society, and I…oh my, is that fellow alright?” Fancy Pants’ question came with a curious glance over Shining Armor’s shoulder, looking back into the lobby of the train station. Several voices in the crowd were likewise curious, sending a ripple of uncertainty through the assembled ponies.
Turning, Shining Armor’s eyebrows raised, and he turned back to Fancy Pants just long enough to say “please excuse me” before turning and ducking inside, rushing over to the pony in question. “Silhouette!”
Shining Armor had never actually met Luna’s worshiper before, but he’d heard all about him from the other guards since coming back to Canterlot. He’d joined right after the Elemental Bleeds had concluded, and had quickly earned a reputation, not all of it good. Although he’d thrown himself into his role as a guard so thoroughly that he’d earned a quick promotion, his zealotry toward Luna made him difficult to get along with. But Luna had apparently been pleased by his attitude, and had gone so far as to create a new style of armor for him, denoting that he was assigned to her specifically rather than her and her sister jointly the way the rest of the Royal Guard was.
The other thing he’d heard about Silhouette had been that Lex Legis had murdered him. So the fact that he was here now was, Shining Armor had briefly hoped, a good sign regarding what was going on in the train car where Twily and his wife had gone. But now he was less confident…
The black-and-white stallion wasn’t wearing his armor. That alone was unusual, and the way his jaw was clenched, along with how stiff-legged his gait was – even taking into account his withered foreleg – spoke volumes about his state of mind. But worst were his eyes, which were bloodshot and focused doggedly in front of him. It was enough to make Shining Armor glance nervously at where the princesses were, wondering if something was wrong. “I’m Shining Armor, and-”
“I know who you are,” snapped Silhouette around clenched teeth, not slowing his stride in the least. “Now leave me alone!”
Shining Armor frowned. He might not technically be Captain of the Royal Guard anymore, but he was married to one princess and brother to another, which technically made him royalty as well. “Wait a moment,” he said firmly, planning himself in the other stallion’s way and putting a hoof on his chest. “Report on the current disposition of-”
“I said LEAVE ME ALONE!”
Shining Armor hadn’t been lax in his training since leaving the Royal Guard. Moreover, he had stepped it up after the tragedy of the Elemental Bleeds. But Silhouette’s hoof lashing out caught him completely by surprise, the punch catching him directly across the nose and sending him stumbling back.
By that point, they were close enough to the crowd that everyone else saw the blow land, gasps ringing out among the throngs of ponies. The guards stationed at the entrance saw it as well, their fierce expressions melting into ones of shock and confusion. But Silhouette didn't seem to care, resuming his loping march forward before Shining Armor had even hit the ground, his eyes slightly too wide and blazing with an intensity that made it clear he’d show no mercy to anyone who impeded him. Fancy Pants hurriedly moved to the side as Silhouette strode through the entrance, the rest of the crowd quickly parting in front of him as well, making no move to stop the furious stallion as he entered the city.
Rubbing his nose, Shining Armor got back to his hooves, watching him go with a sinking feeling. What had happened in that train car?
A moment later one of the guards at the entrance seemed to recover, looking at Shining Armor. “Sir, should we go after him?”
Shining Armor paused for just a moment, glancing down at the hoof he’d just wiped his nose with, seeing blood on it. Silhouette, he knew, had some of that strange new magic from that world that Twily had been to, which had something to do with his worshiping Luna. Sending a few guards after him when he was apparently upset enough to be casually violent was just asking for trouble. But that was the same reason he couldn’t just let him go either. “Have a pegasus trail him from above, but don’t talk to him or try to interact with him unless he looks like he’s going to hurt somepony. Everyone else is to remain at their posts.”
The guard saluted. “Yes sir. And what will you be doing?”
Turning back to the train car, Shining Armor came to a quick decision. “Getting some answers.”
Silhouette stumbled blindly through the streets of Canterlot.
He turned corners at random, hurrying down every avenue with a sense of urgency despite having no destination in mind. Where he was going didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered right now was putting as much distance as he could between himself and the train station.
But his efforts were in vain. Even now, he could feel his thoughts turning back toward what had just happened, to the things he’d seen and heard after Princess Cadance had brought him back to life. That he’d been resurrected by the servant of a different faith was mortifying enough, but that had been nothing compared to the sight that had awaited him then.
Whereas Cadance’s goddess had given her the power to perform a miracle beyond anything Equestria had ever known, his own was in no state to do any such thing. Far from it; he had barely been able to recognize the unicorn in the train car, surrounded by the other princesses. Had the cutie mark not been unmistakably that of the pony he worshiped, he never would have thought it was the same person. But once he had seen it, once he’d realized just who the mangled mare was…
His foreleg, the one that had withered so badly after he’d begun receiving divine magic, suddenly gave out under him. Having broken into a run without realizing it at some point, Silhouette couldn’t recover his balance in time, hitting the ground hard and going tumbling. It was only after several seconds that he came to a halt, lying in the middle of the street in a daze.
He could hear several voices whispering, and others were raised in offers of help or questions as to whether he was alright or not. But Silhouette ignored them all, his brain filtering them out as unimportant. Instead he looked at his mangled foreleg, the symbol of his devotion. He’d been so proud of it, so pleased to wear the proof of his faith – of how the one whom he revered had bestowed her power upon him, of all ponies – upon his very body. But now…now he found himself seriously considering tearing the offending limb off completely, hating the sight of it.
She tried to apologize for this, too, he suddenly remembered. She hadn’t meant to twist his foreleg like that; it had been an accident, an unintended consequence of her bestowing the tiniest fraction of her power on him. She’d started to say that she was sorry for it, but he hadn’t wanted to hear it. Transcendent beings didn’t apologize. That wasn’t how it worked. By their very nature, they existed beyond such petty concerns, surpassing and exceeding the mundane problems that mortals had to deal with. They didn’t worry about what others thought of them, and they certainly didn’t feel the need to express remorse for their actions!
And yet he couldn’t block out her voice from mere minutes ago…
“S-Silhouette!” she croaked, tears running down her face. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! What happened to you was my fault! I wasn’t strong enough!”
The memory made Silhouette clench his teeth so hard they almost cracked, and he could feel a scream welling up inside him. Knowing that he wouldn’t be able to keep it in, he looked around wildly. But he’d stumbled into one of the plazas that dotted downtown Canterlot, and there was nowhere that offered any sort of seclusion. So instead, he did the only thing he could. Loping toward the plaza’s central fountain as fast as his three undamaged legs could carry him, Silhouette threw himself at the edge of it, dunking his head beneath the water just as the last of his self-control snapped and a wild cry escaped his lips.
He screamed and screamed and screamed, until his lungs were burning and his ears felt like they were going to pop. Even then it wasn’t enough, and he thrashed wildly, banging his head on the bottom of the shallow pool around the fountain again and again. It was only when he couldn’t make himself utter even the most strangled of gasps, blood clouding the water, that he lifted his head out of the pool and fell back, collapsing next to the fountain.
Dimly, he noted that his demonstration had caught the attention of everypony nearby. They were all looking at him with wide-eyed expressions, ranging from complete shock to abject horror. For their sake, Silhouette hoped that none of them approached him, because he felt not at all mollified, his attempt to release the agony in his heart having failed. The only difference was that now he found it even harder to stave off the memories of what had driven him to this…
Of that mewling, defeated wretch of a mare back in that train car, bleating apologies at him like a squealing pig.
Of what had been left of Luna, his beautiful, elegant Goddess after Lex Legis had finished with her.
Hacking and coughing, Silhouette somehow climbed to his hooves, stumbling away from the plaza. It was too open here. Too exposed. He needed someplace where his memories couldn’t get at him, couldn’t make him see that image of the mare he’d once worshiped in his mind’s eye anymore.
His hooves dragged along the ground as he trudged through the city. Several times he stumbled, and once he threw up, spewing water in great lungfuls until he could barely breathe. But somehow he made it to the edge of the city, almost collapsing down the stairwell that led to the basement entrance, fishing the key out from behind the loose brick to the left of the door.
Having been built into the side of a mountain, space was always at a premium in Canterlot. Even the tiniest apartment cost more to rent than a spacious loft would have in Manehattan. That was why almost every member of the Royal Guard lived rent-free in the castle barracks. But after one week there, Silhouette had known that he needed his own place. The other guards lacked the proper respect for the Goddess, their games and carousing interrupting his prayers. Worse, some of them were prone to speaking lightly of her, or daring to mention her time as Nightmare Moon with fear or disdain, instead of recognizing it as a holy expungement of her mortal imperfections, allowing her to return from her thousand-year cleansing ready to look within the darkest of dreaming minds and be unsullied by the filth she found there. It had been maddening.
The breaking point had been when one guard had dared to speak of the Goddess in a lustful manner, as though she were some ill-bred tart rather than a savior. Silhouette had put a stop to that quickly enough, however. After that, everyone knew to speak respectfully of the Goddess in his presence if they didn’t want to spend their meager salary having their teeth replaced.
But although his compatriots had restrained their iniquity, it had been clear to Silhouette that he couldn’t worship in peace in that place. So he had found somewhere else to dwell, trading proximity to the Goddess for a place where he could pray to her without interruption. It wasn’t much of a dwelling, being a dingy little basement apartment with only two rooms (a living/dining area and the bathroom) and an equal number of windows, but at the time he hadn’t cared. Quite the contrary, he’d turned the far wall of the living area into a shrine to the Goddess.
It was composed of a series of shelves that he’d repurposed, all filled with trinkets that he’d dedicated to the Goddess. Pictures of her clipped from the local newspaper. Figurines of her that he’d carved and painted. A now-withered bouquet of lavender that she’d placed in the wall-sconce of the guard barracks while he was there (and which those ungrateful mongrels hadn’t even noticed). A spoon that had touched her elegant lips at a repast she’d shared with her sister. And his most prized possession, a few strands of her beautiful hair, which he had secreted away after noticing them on her pillow.
It didn’t amount to much, but it was the very least he could do after all that she’d done for him. In the wake of the Elemental Bleeds, when he’d been tormented by nightmares every night about what had happened to his brother, Luna had been the one to come into his dreams and soothe his pain. Thanks to her, he’d no longer seen Manehattan burning each time he’d fallen asleep, no longer witnessed what had become of his brother after he’d gone back to the kennel, insisting on making sure all of the dogs there had been freed from their cages. He’d succeeded, but not before the monsters that had come with the flames had found him…
Luna had saved him from the torment of those memories, her resplendent presence protecting him as he slept, mightier than any nightmare. And he had known then that he’d survived for a reason: to love her and worship her and make her benevolence known throughout Equestria. But the reminders of his devotion for her assaulted him now, and he felt a new surge of anger flowing through him at the sight of them, hating them for daring to ambush him when he was trying to recover! Despite what Princess Twilight had said about the strain on his body, and despite what he’d put himself through on the way back, Silhouette was still an earth stallion, and he lunged across the room in sudden anger, lashing out at the shrine in fury.
The collected baubles went flying now, crashing to the floor as he tore the shelves from the wall in a rage, hurling them across the room. Nor did he stop there, smashing the sole chair he’d bought for himself to splinters, before turning his wrath on the cot that he’d set up for himself. At one point someone knocked on the door, but that merely resulted in him turning his wrath against the offending portal, throwing a lamp against it as hard as he could. It had very nearly knocked the door off the hinges, sending whoever had been there scrambling back up the stairs in a panic, which was just as well. Silhouette still didn’t want to see anypony. It was only when there was nothing left to destroy that he slumped down into the corner, thoroughly exhausted and utterly miserable.
Once again, that fatigue allowed the events of earlier to come back to him, hearing the words in his mind even when he covered his ears.
“I think that’s what you said the guards saw! Remember how the ones that were still conscious said they saw Lex’s magic lift Luna up and wrap her in some sort of black aura, and how it seemed to sink into her? I think that’s it! That’s the magic of his curse!”
That had been what Princess Twilight Sparkle had said. Those words, combined with that horrifying imagery of Luna held aloft in that pink aura, tugging ineffectively at that horrific black substance had clung to her like a second skin, told him everything that had happened since he had been slain. And although the knowledge felt like someone had poured acid on his very soul, there was nothing he could do to stop it from sinking into his mind now…
His sacrifice hadn’t saved the Goddess from Lex Legis’s wrath. The sorcerer had fought her, and he had won, and he had been merciless in his victory. If his Goddess had met her end in battle, spitting in the evil sorcerer’s face in defiance and fighting him to the last, then it would have been far kinder a fate. That would have allowed her dignity to remain intact, so that she might remain in his heart and the hearts of all those who revered her forever, unblemished.
But Lex Legis hadn’t wanted to kill her. He’d wanted to ruin her. To desecrate her. And he’d done exactly that, reducing her from a transcendent being to a fallen one. By making her less than she was, Lex Legis had turned her from being a Goddess into being a victim, and victims by their very nature were objects of pity.
You couldn’t worship someone you pitied.
That was the inescapable truth that Silhouette struggled with as he sat there rocked back and forth amidst the wreckage. As badly as he wanted to continue worshiping Luna, to keep revering her as the Goddess of his heart, he couldn’t. The awe he’d felt for her had been ruined now, the memory of what had become of her spoiling what had formerly been a sense of rapture. Even if the other princesses succeeded in changing her back, the knowledge of how Lex Legis had sullied her would, he knew, never go away.
And so there was nothing Silhouette could do but sit there and let that horrible memory eat away at the most important thing in his life. Devouring the one thing that had given his existence meaning. Until all that was left was hatred for the pony that had done this to him.
Her girlfriend’s voice came out of nowhere just as Applejack kicked out with her back legs, startling her and causing her to relax her forelegs right as she made contact with the tree. The result was that, rather than transferring the force of her kick through the trunk and up the branches, she ended up knocking herself forward into a somersault. Rolling end over end, she finally came to a halt lying flat on her back, staring up at the snickering face of Rainbow Dash. “Dagnabbit, Rainbow…!”
But the pegasus wasn’t the least bit concerned by the fallen farmer’s ire. “Gotta admit,” she smirked, “that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a tree buck back!”
“You’re a regular laugh riot, sugarcube,” groused Applejack as she climbed back onto all fours. “But if you don’t mind, I gotta get back to buckin’ these apples pronto. At the rate I’m goin’, I’m not liable to have everythin’ done before nightfall, and every second wasted is that much later I’mma hafta be up finishin’ them, makin' it even harder to get up in time to start on tomorrow’s harvest.”
Rainbow frowned at the not-so-subtle dismissal. “Whaddaya mean ‘wasted’? I’ve been all over Ponyville looking for you!”
This time Applejack hit the tree dead-center, watching the apples fall into the buckets she’d laid out beneath the tree before turning to give Rainbow Dash a wry look. “And you didn’t think to check here first?”
“We’ve been back for almost three full days now!” countered Rainbow. “I thought you would have caught up on your chores and been in town letting everypony know about all of our awesome adventures on Everglow!”
“Figured you had the braggin’ covered, sugarcube,” replied Applejack, already moving to the next tree. “And these ain’t just chores I’m takin’ care of. Big Mac did a good job keepin’ things goin’, but that don’t mean there ain’t still a lotta work that needs to get done.” She paused to buck another tree. This time, when the apples fell into their baskets, Applejack didn’t pick them up right away. Instead, she fished out a small vial of a liquid from her saddlebag, working the cap off with her teeth and rearing up on her hind legs as she poured a drop out, slowly gesturing as she carefully chanted the proper words.
The drop of liquid disappeared before it hit the ground, consumed by the spell at the exact moment she finished casting. Instantly, a glowing disk three feet wide appeared behind her, hovering parallel to the ground at eye-level. Replacing the cap on the vial and stowing it, Applejack casually tossed the baskets of apples onto the glowing disk, letting it carry the load as she headed toward the next tree. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Big Mac that you saw me usin’ magic to help with the harvest. He still don’t care for it, thinks it’s a shortcut for an honest day’s work.”
Rainbow snorted, having heard about this particular point of friction between the Apple siblings before. “He’s still on about that? I thought you’d have set him straight by now. What have you been doing the whole time you’ve been back?”
“I told you: workin’.” Another tree was bucked, its apples falling free. “So what was so important that you were lookin’ all over Ponyville for me, anyhow?”
Rainbow sighed. “Spike just got a letter from Twilight. She and Cadance tried to change Luna back to normal, and it didn’t work.”
That bit of news was enough to make Applejack stop what she was doing, lowering her hind legs from where she’d been preparing to make another tree give up its bounty. “…well ain’t that a kick in the teeth,” she murmured, “‘specially after Twilight went and got a special curse-breakin’ spell and all.” Her ears folding back at the unpleasant news, she shook her head before giving Rainbow a concerned look. “How’s Luna doin’?”
Rainbow shrugged. “The way Twilight made it sound? Better than I was when I lost one of my wings. And that’s saying something since she can’t just go somewhere and pay someone for a potion that will make them grow back like I did.”
Although she rolled her eyes, Applejack couldn’t help but smile a little at that. “Maybe that’s ‘cuz she didn’t bring this on herself, not like a certain pegasus we all know.”
“Aw come on!” Leaping into the air, as if to remind herself that her wings were fine now, Rainbow hovered a few feet off the ground, giving Applejack an indignant look. “Spike and I were just trying to make a little extra money fighting in those underground matches, and we were awesome up until the end! How was I supposed to know that last guy was going to go completely berserk and tear my wing off?!”
“Maybe by realizin’ that an outfit that shady might not attract the most wholesome folk? Like you, for instance.” With a snicker of her own, Applejack added another basket of apples to the floating disk, carefully arranging them so that they would all fit. “So what’s Twilight plannin’ on doin’ now? Takin’ Luna on a trip to Everglow so she can try and get her straightened out?”
“You mean like we did with you after Severance messed with your brain?” asked Rainbow Dash, still snarky after Applejack’s ribbing. But she let it pass a moment later, shaking her head. “Nothing like that. At least, not yet. For now she wants everypony to get together in Canterlot so we can all try and figure out what to do.”
Nodding as she headed for another tree, it took a second for that to register, causing Applejack to freeze in mid-motion. “Wait, ‘everypony’? Includin’ you and me? Meetin’ in Canterlot?”
“Duh.” Not waiting for a follow-up, Rainbow Dash nodded her head toward the farmhouse then, rising up further into the air. “I’ll go find Big Mac and tell him he needs to finish up out here for you. That should give you enough time to put away that magic disk thingy and head to the station. Last one there’s a rotten apple!”
“Wait a second! Rainbow Dash, hold up!”
But the speedy pegasus was already flying away, leaving a rainbow contrail in the air behind her…for all of fifteen feet, before Applejack’s lasso sailed over her head and tightened around her middle. Instantly, Rainbow Dash emptied her lungs in a whoosh as her forward momentum was suddenly arrested, barely able to keep herself aloft. Irritated, she looked back down at where Applejack was holding the other end of the lasso in her mouth, tugging on it with all her might. “Hey! What’re you doing?!”
“Darn it, Rainbow, will you come back down here?!” yelled Applejack as best she could with her teeth clenched. “I can’t ask Big Mac for help!”
Frowning, Rainbow Dash made no move to land. “Fine, Apple Bloom then!”
“I can’t ask Apple Bloom to take care of this either!”
“Then just…I dunno, write a letter to Braeburn or something!”
“Consarnit all, I can’t ask nopony for help with this! I have to get it done by myself!”
“AJ, what are you talking about?!” Fuming, Rainbow Dash finally touched down, stalking over and getting right in Applejack’s face. “Princess Luna’s in trouble, and you’re suddenly too proud to ask for a favor so that we can go help her out?!” Huffing, she leaned in further, until her nose was pressed against Applejack’s. “You remember what happened the last time you couldn’t ask anypony for help? Because this is a lot worse than a bunny stampede or some ‘baked bads’! I know what Luna’s going through and she’s going to need all the support she can get!”
Applejack shrank back under the verbal assault, looking away guiltily. “Look, I understand what you’re sayin', and this ain’t just me bein’ stubborn again. I want to go and help Luna out more than anythin’, but there just ain’t nopony I can ask to do all this work for me while I’m gone.”
Rainbow stomped a hoof. “What is going on with you all of a sudden?! First you don’t even bother to tell anyone that you’re back – the only reason Rarity knew was because Apple Bloom told Sweetie Belle who told her, and Fluttershy didn’t know at all before I stopped at her cottage! – now you’re acting like you can’t rely on them for help, even when-”
“I HAVE been relyin’ on them for help!” yelled Applejack at last. “Don’cha get it, Rainbow? I have been relyin’ on them and a whole bunch’a other ponies for help! That’s why I can’t ask ‘em no more!”
Rainbow tilted her head, baffled. “What’re you talking about? We haven’t even been here!”
“That’s what I’m talkin’ about.” All the fight seemed to sink out of Applejack then, and she sat down with a sigh that seemed to come from her hooves. “I haven’t been here, so everypony needed to pitch in to help Big Mac and Granny Smith keep Sweet Apple Acres up and runnin'. And that was okay while I was just on Everglow for a little while helpin’ to get Twilight brought back to life and all. But then I ended up gettin’ stuck over there again with Apple Bloom and her friends, for a couple weeks that time.”
Rainbow Dash shrugged. “So?”
Applejack gave her a flat look. “So imagine askin’ the ponies you’ve already asked for help to come back and do it again, for longer. For nothin’ in return. Big Mac didn’t even know where I’d gone or when I’d be back. I ain’t surprised he kept mum about it and tried to do everythin’ himself rather than risk lookin’ like he was takin' advantage of ‘em. Instead he just worked himself half to death while I was gone, tryin' to do all of my jobs and Apple Bloom’s on top of his own, since he didn’t want to make Granny Smith push herself.”
“Okay, but-”
But Applejack kept going before Rainbow could interrupt. “And then, after we all got home that last time, I did just like when I was a filly and decided that I had a bunch of great new ideas to run everythin’ smarter. All on account of that 'helpful' new magic item I’d gotten over there.”
Rainbow frowned. “Severance.”
“Eeyup,” nodded Applejack. “I know we’ve talked about this before, but…I was the one responsible for sendin' Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon to Everglow, not to mention Pinkie. I had to go and look for ‘em. And Big Mac, he…he’s been doin’ the best he can, but it ain’t enough anymore. It’s gotten so bad that he actually hired some help the other day, a couple a strangers that were just passin’ through. I only know ‘cause Apple Bloom told me about it. He did it even though he knew we couldn’t afford it, because we couldn’t afford to let the harvest go unpicked even more. Now we’re in danger of losin’ the farm again, plus I wasted all that time for nothin’ since we couldn’t find Pinkie and the others, and Twilight’s tellin’ me to go gallivantin’ off to Canterlot?” She shook her head. “I can’t do it, Rainbow. I just can’t. My family needs me here.”
For a long moment Rainbow Dash didn’t say anything, before finally nodding. “Okay, I’ll take care of it, then.”
Applejack let out a relieved sigh. “Thanks for understandin’. Tell Twilight and Princess Luna that I’m mighty sorry I can’t make it. But if they want me to send ‘em letters or-”
“Um, Applejack? What are you talking about?”
Brought up short, Applejack blinked. “Whaddaya mean? I’m talkin’ about not bein’ able to go because I hafta help out here.”
Rainbow tilted her head. “Did you not hear what I said? I’ll take care of it. That means you can go to Canterlot no problem.”
“Wait…” Applejack’s eyes widened as she realized her misunderstanding. “Wait, now hold on just an apple-pickin’ minute, Rainbow! You don’t know the first thing about buckin’ trees!”
“Oh come on, how hard can it be? Just kick and collect.” To demonstrate, Rainbow flew at a nearby tree hoof-first, striking the center of its trunk…causing the leaves to fall, while the apples remained firmly on the branches. “…huh.”
“Listen, I appreciate the thought-”
But Rainbow Dash wasn’t ready to give up. “Okay, forget bucking! I can just pick them by hoof! Watch!” In a burst of speed, Rainbow took off before Applejack could utter a word of protest. In a rainbow-colored blur she circled a nearby tree, only to stop an instant later with a few dozen apples cradled in her forelegs. “Hah! How do you like these app-, whoops!” Her cocky rejoined was lost as the apples, far too many for her to easily carry, went tumbling to the ground now that the G-forces were no longer keeping them tucked securely in her forelegs.
Cocking an eyebrow, Applejack picked one up and examined it critically. “I like ‘em without bruises all over ‘em, sugarcube.” Sighing, she dumped the damaged product back on the ground. “Look, Dash, I know you wanna help-”
“Darn right I do! The same way I know you wanna help Luna!” Landing in front of her girlfriend, Rainbow Dash gave her a determined look. “Look, I’ll get better at the apple-picking. If only one of us can go to Canterlot, it should be you. Remember, Princess Celestia told Twilight that Lex has Severance now. Since you’ve actually used that thing before, and you’ve met that jerk more times than I have, you can be a lot more helpful. That’s why you should go and I’ll stay here.”
Applejack bit her lip. “I dunno, it still feels like I’m runnin’ out on my family again…”
Rainbow extended a wing, wrapping it around Applejack and pulling her close. “Take it from the Element of Loyalty: you’re not.”
Applejack wavered for a few more seconds, before closing her eyes and leaning against the other mare with a grateful smile. “Thanks Rainbow.”
The pegasus in question grinned, clearly pleased. “Aw, what are friends for? Especially when they’re also your totally awesome girlfriend.”
Applejack couldn’t help but chuckle. “Awesome indeed.” Leaning her head up, she closed her eyes as Dash reciprocated the gesture, and a moment later their lips touched.
The kiss ended a moment later, but neither mare moved, just leaning against each other. It was several seconds later when Applejack finally spoke again. “He predicted this, you know.”
Rainbow blinked. “Huh? Who? Big Mac?”
Applejack shook her head. “Lex.”
That was enough to make Rainbow’s eyes widen, giving Applejack an incredulous look. “He predicted you and me getting together?! He couldn’t even figure out that Sonata wanted him to ask her out on a date!”
“Not that,” snorted Applejack. “I meant with the farm and me bein’ gone so long.” She sighed. “It was that second time I went to Everglow, with the Crusaders. We’d just met up with him and Sonata in Viljatown, and I’d stepped out of the room to talk to Willow, that purrsian lady we’d met on our way there, and Lex started lecturin' Apple Bloom about how our farm was probably at risk without us there, and if he were in charge he’d’ve made sure we wouldn’t lose it if somethin' like this happened.”
“Seriously?” Rainbow Dash didn’t even try to keep her doubt in check. “We’re talking about Lex Legis here, right? The pony who looks like his goal in life is to be a bigger bad guy than King Sombra ever was?” When Applejack nodded, she couldn’t help but scoff. “Okay, I’ll bite: what was his big plan? Cursing the trees so that the apples would fall off all by themselves or something?”
Applejack shrugged. “I’m not sure. I mean, Apple Bloom tried to tell me, but she didn’t understand very much of it. Something about takin’ money from other ponies and givin’ it to us. But he said it wasn’t charity. More like some sort of investment, except he wouldn’t have wanted anything back.”
Rainbow gave a dismissive toss of her mane. “Sounds more like he was trying to pull one over on her to me.”
Applejack didn’t say anything for a moment, then slowly nodded. “You’re probably right.” Sighing, she slowly extricated herself from under Rainbow’s wing. “I’m gonna go get Big Mac. He should hear that I’m leavin' from me instead of just havin’ me disappear on him again.”
Rising a few feet into the air, Rainbow matched her pace. “I’ll go with you. But one thing first?”
Applejack paused in mid-step. “What’s that?”
Rainbow Dash pointed to the glowing disk carrying the baskets of apples, still trailing behind the earth mare. “You might want to get rid of that before you go talk to him.”
Applejack's face darkened a few shades in embarrassment, before suddenly turning pale. "Um, Rainbow, can I ask you for another favor?"
Although she was curious, Rainbow shrugged nonchalantly. "Sure, what?"
Applejack fidgeted a moment before answering. "Would you mind runnin' to Spike real fast and havin' him send Twilight a letter askin' if there's a way to turn this spell off early? It normally lasts a few hours, and I haven't figured out how to make it go away any quicker than that yet."
Rainbow was, of course, happy to help out...once she finally stopped laughing.
Line Byline had known that something big was going on even before he’d been summoned to the castle.
That wasn’t unusual, of course. Being the editor of the Canterlot Chronicle meant that every reporter in the city wanted to be the first one to let him know about the latest piece of juicy gossip, the newest salacious rumor, or the most recent hearsay of note. It was their way of marking their claim, letting him know that they were the one to have gotten the jump on whatever bit of news they were chasing. That way, if it turned out to have some substance to it, they’d be able to say that it was “their” story when the others invariably started following up on it. Of course, it was ultimately the editor’s pick who got to write the final story for publication, but “first come, first served” was still how that shook out more often than not.
It was a game that Line himself had played more times than he could remember, back before he’d traded being a reporter for being the editor of the Chronicle. But once he’d taken over running the paper, he’d gotten a new perspective on things. Now, instead of jealously guarding each new tidbit of information he’d uncovered while trying to rush it back to the office as quickly as possible, he was receiving the reports of all of the Chronicle’s reporters, inundating him with breaking news.
The result had been – once he’d learned to filter out the obvious exaggerations and wild speculation – his being able to connect the dots on disparate pieces of information far faster than he’d ever been able to before. With everyone turning over their jealously-hoarded findings to him, he’d been able to see patterns and intersecting areas of investigation before any of his reporters could. And when multiple ponies came to him reporting the same story, trying to let him know some new break or developing angle, it had become easy to determine when something important was going on.
That had been what had happened yesterday. It had barely been mid-morning when notes and messages had started flooding in from the city’s train station. An unscheduled train had arrived. Prince Shining Armor and the Royal Guard were blocking everypony’s access to it. Princess Cadance and Princess Twilight had been seen entering one of the cars. An unknown pony had exited one of the cars (possibly the same one) a little while later before apparently going berserk and slugging Shining Armor before disappearing into the city. And then there’d been the latest rumor, that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had been on that train, and were now gathering VIPs (Very Important Ponies) and other individuals of note for some sort of meeting, the details of which were entirely hush-hush.
Things had calmed down by the afternoon, but sporadic reports had continued to come in through the day and into the evening. Some of Princess Twilight’s known associates had arrived in the city. Several members of the Royal Guard had investigated a basement apartment near the edge of town, turning up a lot of wreckage and little else. The castle staff was buzzing about Princess Luna apparently having sealed herself in her quarters and refusing to see anyone except her sister and the other princesses.
By themselves none of those tidbits were particularly notable. Interesting, certainly, but since most of his reporters only had an incomplete picture of what was going on, they weren’t overly concerned. But having access to the larger picture, Line had known better, and so when he’d gone into work this morning he hadn’t been surprised to find himself receiving a royal invitation to the castle before he had a chance to so much as sit down.
That had been barely a half-hour ago, and now Line found himself being led through the castle by the same stuffy old steward that always escorted him to the parlor where he knew he’d have to wait for the princesses to be ready to see him. Except now… “Where are we going?”
The steward glanced back at him, raising a brow and pursing his lips in a disdainful manner. “I beg your pardon, sir?”
Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Line canted his head at a nearby staircase that they’d just passed. “We’re still on the ground floor.”
“How very observant of you,” noted the steward dryly, before turning and continuing to walk down the hallway. “This way, if you please.”
Frowning, Line fell in behind the old goat. He knew the old stallion was as tight-lipped as they came, but while Line hadn’t been an active reporter for several years, his instincts from those days hadn’t dulled in the slightest, and while he might not get any answers, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. “I’ve been called here to speak to the princesses a couple dozen times over the course of my career. Every time, it’s been in one or the other of their parlors, which are in their respective towers.”
“I’m quite familiar with the castle layout, sir.”
“But this time we’re still on the ground floor. So where are we going?” Line moved up then, walking alongside the old stallion instead of trailing behind him, looking him in the face as he kept the questions coming. “Does this have something to do with the meeting that the princesses are rumored to be holding? Or with how an unscheduled train arrived at the station yesterday and was cordoned off by members of the Royal Guard?”
“I’m afraid I really couldn’t say, sir,” answered the old steward, his expression unflappable.
“Well then what can you say?” countered Line.
“Just one thing, sir.”
“Oh?” Line arched a brow. “What?”
“We’re here.” Without further ado, the old steward came to a stop, and Line did the same a second later. It was a good thing he had, because if he’d kept going he would have walked face-first into a set of double doors. Biting back a retort as he saw the old coot smirk, Line stepped back as the door handles were wrapped in the glow of the steward’s horn and pulled open. “Please wait inside.”
“And what’s…”
The question died on Line’s lips as he looked into the large conference room. Because that was what it was, being a sizeable area dominated by a large table surrounded by chairs. But it wasn’t the space that captured his attention, but the people inside. Off to one side, Princess Twilight was talking to several of her friends, whom Line had never formally met but were nevertheless still famous enough in their own right that he was immediately able to identify them as Applejack, Fluttershy, and Rarity. Also nearby was a tiny dragon who could only be the Princess’s assistant, Spike. But there was also a middle-aged earth mare with a grass-green coat, mane, and tail whom Line didn’t recognize, though she was far less notable than the strange bipedal creature standing next to her. It was vaguely reminiscent of a minotaur, being a pony from the waist down and some sort of...hairless monkey-like thing from the waist up, though that description was entirely for lack of a better term. Even stranger, the creature was apparently blind, having cataracts in its eyes.
By contrast, the far side of the room had personages that were only somewhat less notable. Princess Cadance and her husband were huddled together, talking in low tones with a pair of crystal ponies – one mare and one stallion – and well as an earth stallion who was also a deep green in color, though unlike the mare on the other side of the room his mane and tail were dark brown. The stallion’s plainness was highlighted not just by the crystal ponies he was standing next to, however, but also by the black-and-white-striped mare on his other side. Although he’d never seen one before, Line knew she had to be a zebra, likely the one that lived in the Everfree Forest near Ponyville.
Like Princess Twilight and her friends, Princess Cadance’s group didn’t seem to notice Line’s entrance, being too engrossed in whatever conversation they were having. The only one who glanced over at him was the room’s sole remaining occupant, already seated at the table. Just like with the zebra, Line had never seen an Abyssinian in his life, but could only conclude that this was one, being a pony-sized feline, though he’d never heard of them possessing wings the way she did. With fur that ranged from tawny to deep brown, particularly on her wings, she cut an exotic figure. But her bored expression was a sharp contrast to that, and she seemed to lose interest in him a second after looking at him, turning her attention to a small door across from the one Line had entered from, as if waiting for it to open.
Which, he realized a moment later, she probably was. Because with so many notable individuals gathered here, the only ones missing were the ones to whom this castle belonged: Princesses Celestia and Luna. The reason everyone was clustered into groups and talking in low tones was because they were all waiting for them to arrive.
The realization made Line’s heart beat slightly faster. When he’d gotten the summons to come to the castle, he’d thought it would be for the princesses to give him a statement to put in the paper about what was going on. Explaining what had happened with their unusual arrival yesterday, or announcing whatever this meeting was about. But now Line knew better. He hadn’t been called here to cover whatever important discussion – and it had to be important, if so many distinguished people were here – the princesses wanted to have.
He’d been called here to take part in it.
But before he could even consider what that meant, the door across from him had a golden glow suddenly wrap around its handle. A moment later it opened, and Princess Celestia stepped inside. Line immediately bowed, though not so low that he didn’t take note of everyone else’s reactions. The trio with Princess Cadance and her husband all bowed immediately, as did all of Princess Twilight’s friends, though Princess Twilight herself looked unsure if she should do the same. She was saved from her awkwardness as she glanced over at Princess Cadance and her brother, eventually copying the deep nod that they gave their senior monarch. The only one who didn’t move was the Abyssinian, save for sitting up a little straighter in her chair and giving a sigh, as though irritated to have been kept waiting.
That earned her a disapproving glance from Princess Twilight, but Princess Celestia didn’t seem to notice, smiling as she looked around the room. “Thank you all for coming here, especially on such short notice,” she began, moving toward the head of the large table. “Although a few other guests were invited, we’re not certain that they’ll be able to attend, so if no one has any objections I’d like to begin.”
Line cocked his head slightly at that, noticing how the princess seemed to glance at Cadance and Twilight in turn during that last part. Was she referring to the other ponies that represented the Elements of Harmony, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash? Or was she alluding to her sister not being here? He couldn’t imagine who else she might have meant, but at the same time knew better than to make any assumptions with so many unusual individuals gathered in one place, making a mental note to request a copy of the guest list from that old steward later.
For her part, Princess Celestia sat down, gesturing for everyone else to do the same. “For those of you who aren’t already aware,” she continued once everyone was seated, “there are two separate but related challenges facing Equestria at the present time. Each of you has been asked to be here because I and my fellow princesses believe that you might be able to help us figure out the best way to face these difficulties.” She paused then, looking around to see if anyone had anything to add.
When no one said anything, she turned and gave a nod to Twilight. “The first challenge is this pony, Lex Legis.” No sooner had she said that then Twilight had opened one of the saddlebags she was wearing, telekinetically withdrawing a large picture of the stallion in question and some tape, affixing it to the wall behind Princess Celestia. The picture wasn’t a very good one, having been artificially enlarged and cropped, showing Lex’s face from the side, his features slightly obscured, as though he was inside some sort of transparent enclosure. The result was that the image was blurry and somewhat indistinct, and it took Line a moment to realize it had originally come from the picture Nosey had sent him along with her article from Tall Tale, showing Lex Legis inside what looked like some sort of giant pony made of smoky glass, facing off against a dragon.
“The other situation…” Celestia faltered for a moment, licking her lips before opening her mouth to try again.
But she didn’t have a chance.
“Is me.”
The voice came from the same doorway that Celestia had entered from, its owner emerging through it an instant later. But although Line had recognized it as Princess Luna’s, the mare that he saw then didn’t match the pony he’d grown accustomed to meeting, and he felt his thoughts screech to a halt as he tried to reconcile the conflicting data. A second later he realized what he was looking at, what had happened to her, and he felt his jaw drop in utter astonishment. Nor was he the only one thrown for a loop, as gasps and horrified exclamations filled the room.
Her face carefully composed, Luna closed her eyes at the reactions, opening them only when they’d tapered off a few seconds later.
“The other situation is what Lex Legis has done to me.”
By the time lunch was being served, Aisle had completely lost his appetite.
The beginning of the meeting had been innocuous enough. While Luna’s appearance had been a bombshell, Princess Celestia had quickly gotten order restored. After a brief round of introductions – with everyone saying who, and in a few cases what, they were – the senior princess had promptly gotten down to business.
The next several hours had been one big sharing session, as – at Princess Celestia’s direction – they had gone around the room, with each person volunteering what they knew about Lex Legis. Princess Celestia had gone first, describing her initial meeting with the stallion in question and how it had concluded with him attacking her and fleeing Canterlot when she had refused to turn Equestria over to him, their second meeting where she and Luna had reached an agreement to send Lex to oversee Vanhoover, and then their disastrous third encounter only a few days ago. That last one had left Aisle reeling, and he hadn’t been alone in his shock and horror: Cozy, who had been sitting between him and Pillow, had pulled both of them close, shaking like a leaf.
Others had similar reactions to the story. Shining Armor had a grim look on his face, surreptitiously looking between Luna and Cadance, clearly imagining his wife in the fallen alicorn’s place. Line Byline had looked positively green at Celestia’s description, though the pencil in his telekinetic aura continued to scribble in his notepad. Spike, Princess Twilight’s dragon, had openly stared at Luna with wide eyes, until Soft Mane had sharply elbowed him.
Luna herself, however, had remained perfectly composed while her sister had described what had happened to her. Remaining silent until Celestia had finished, her only contribution had been to add that Lex’s dreams were sealed somehow, preventing her from intruding upon them.
After that, the spotlight shifted to each of them in turn. Princess Twilight had described meeting Lex on Everglow, talking about how he’d helped her and her friends liberate a group of slaves from bondage…and the date he had insisted on taking her on afterward. Soft Mane had angrily relayed how Lex had belittled her at every turn, calling her a freak right to her face and ridiculing Lashtada, her goddess. Spike hadn’t had much to add after the two mares, saying mostly that while Lex had acted like “a real grouch” he hadn’t seemed like that bad of a guy (something which earned him an angry glare from Soft Mane). Applejack had confessed to being unsure about Lex’s true nature, saying how he’d been “meaner than an Appleloosan rattler with a headache,” but had fought hard to protect everyone when she, her sister, and her sister’s friends had been pulled into the realm of the dark goddess, Kara.
Not everyone had something to add, of course. Rarity and Fluttershy had never met Lex before. Neither had Grass Patch, Soft Mane’s mother. Line Byline had briefly recapped what had been printed in his newspaper before apologizing for not knowing anything else, since the story had been submitted by one of his reporters who had yet to return to Canterlot. Zecora, the zebra who for some reason always spoke in rhyme, had likewise nothing to contribute. “Each of these tales is quite a surprise, but upon this dread pony, I’ve never laid eyes,” as she’d put it. Princess Cadance and Shining Armor had been in the same boat.
By the time all eyes had turned in their direction, Aisle had largely worked out what he was going to say. It had been encouraging to hear that there were others here who didn’t think that Lex was evil incarnate, an opinion which matched Aisle’s own. Lex had been dour, humorless, and intimidating, to be sure, to say nothing of being incredibly harsh with anyone who crossed him…but he had still used his powers selflessly for everyone’s sake, putting himself at risk time and again to protect the ponies of Vanhoover and never asking for anything in return. As humiliating as it had been when the uncompromising stallion had cursed him, Aisle was quite aware that the only reason he was alive right now was because of Lex.
Pillow had stood up first, adding himself to the list of attendees who had never actually met Lex, and Aisle had taken a second to glance at Cozy. He’d long been aware that she had a far less charitable opinion about Lex than she did, but maybe she’d be different now? After all, she’d forgiven Fencer for what she’d done to Pillow; maybe she’d found it in her heart to forgive Lex as well? Especially after how Pillow had reminded her about what Lashtada said about hating people…
But that hope had died a dramatic death a few seconds later, when Cozy had leapt to her hooves as soon as Pillow had sat down.
“Lex Legis is a monster!”
“Cozy…” The disappointed sigh had come from Pillow; Aisle himself had been too busy feeling surprised by the vehemence in his wife’s voice.
“I’m sorry, Pillow,” Cozy had continued then. “I know that Lashtada tells us to find it within ourselves to love those who wrong us, but…I just can’t. Not for him. Not after seeing him act so cold and so cruel to so many ponies. Lashtada forgive me, but I can’t.” Ignoring everyone else watching them, she’d given her first husband a pleading look then, as though begging him to understand. “Did Aisle tell you that Lex wouldn’t even let me mourn you the way I wanted when you died? How I tried to pray for a miracle over your body and he wouldn’t let me, telling me it was hopeless?”
“He actually said that?!” asked Soft Mane, her voice outraged.
Cozy nodded miserably. “He disguised it with some babble about how god-given magic works, but that was what he meant. When I wouldn’t stop, he had Sonata use her magic on me to make me fall asleep.”
“What an atrocious thing to do!” Rarity’s face had been a mixture of indignation and sympathy. “I can’t believe anypony could do something so cruel to a mare in mourning! You poor dear, you must have been absolutely shattered!”
“I was,” admitted Cozy, before turning and giving Aisle a look. “If it hadn’t been for Aisle, for my other true love being there for me when I woke up, I would have taken my own life shortly after.”
Gasps rang out at that, and Aisle felt like he needed to say something then, but Cozy hadn’t been finished, turning to look at Princess Celestia. “That’s how I know Lex is a monster. Aisle was always there for me, even when I didn’t appreciate him for it. Even when I lashed out at him for it. And that made me realize how much I love him. But Sonata…Lex uses and manipulates that poor mare, making her do his bidding, and he doesn’t show her the slightest bit of kindness in return.”
Princess Twilight had winced at that, her ears folding back as a guilty look had crossed her face. “They looked like an okay couple to me,” she’d murmured.
But Cozy had simply shaken her head again. “Did you ever hear him say anything nice to her, instead of just barking commands or insulting her intelligence? Did he ever bring her flowers, or write her a poem, or even just say that he loves her?”
“I don’t think Lex is a poetry kinda guy,” had been Spike’s response, his voice wry.
“He doesn’t care about her,” Cozy had insisted, “or anypony else! I’ll admit that he’s a good protector and a decent provider, but he uses other people for his own goals and desires. The way he treats Sonata is a sin against Lashtada, and the way he treats everyone else is an affront to basic pony decency. He gave me orders to work only a few hours after Pillow died, and when Aisle convinced Sonata to tell a little white lie to spare me that horrible stallion’s wrath when I wouldn’t, Lex found out about it later and cursed all three of us, just like he did to Princess Luna!” She’d pointed at the mare in question then, and Aisle had winced, seeing the way Luna closed her eyes at that, and how Princess Celestia’s had narrowed. But Cozy had kept on going. “I know some of you think that his actions make him a good pony, but if you saw what was in his heart the way I have, you’d know that he’s not! He’s-”
“Thank you, Comfy Cozy,” Princess Celestia’s voice had cut in then. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“But-”
“Thank you.” There had been steel in the princess’s voice that time, and Cozy had sunk into her seat at last. “I think for now we should break for lunch,” continued Celestia, “and then we can hear from everyone else and move on to the next topic for discussion.”
Unsurprisingly, there had been no objections.
Lunch had been a tense affair. Although the castle staff had laid a magnificent feast by any standards – containing a wide selection of vegetables, various dairy products, eggs, oats, fruits, an array of spices, seasonings, and sauces, and a dessert selection with every sort of cake imaginable – nearly everypony had eaten in silence. Aisle hadn’t bothered to eat at all, instead concentrating on soothing Cozy, who seemed to have finally realized that she had gone too far, while Pillowcase had spent the majority of the meal talking to the princesses, trying to smooth things over. Aisle could only hope that he’d managed to succeed; the last thing he wanted was for this conference to end with their wife being thrown in the dungeon.
Out of the corner of his eye, Aisle saw Pillow stand up and – after one last smiling exchange with Princess Celestia – trot back over to them, sitting on Cozy’s other side. He’d barely had a chance to put a foreleg around their wife before Aisle spoke up. “How did it go?”
“Everything’s fine.” Pillow’s response came with an easy smile, giving Aisle a reassuring nod before turning to Cozy. “Sweetheart, everything’s fine,” he repeated. “The princesses aren’t angry at you.”
“They should be,” murmured Cozy, unable to raise her head. She’d spent the entire meal too embarrassed to take her eyes off of the carpet. “I went completely overboard.”
Aisle slowly stroked her mane. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”
Pillow nodded. “The princesses understand that you went through a very tough time, and that pressuring you to talk about it so soon after it happened wasn’t a good idea on their part. If anything, they’re the ones who feel embarrassed right now.”
Cozy shook her head. “I didn’t-”
“Everypony,” began Princess Celestia suddenly, rising from her chair. “If everyone’s finished, I’d like to resume our discussion. However, before we proceed, I want to make something clear.” Her eyes flickered over to Cozy then, and Aisle saw her ears flick down for just a moment before she continued. “As much as this is a situation of grave importance, no one here should feel pressured to participate if you don’t feel comfortable doing so. Your presence here is voluntary, not mandatory, and-”
“In that case, I’d like to excuse myself.”
Everyone stopped and stared as Willow, the purrsian, stood up from her chair and bowed to the princesses. “I appreciate the hospitality, Your Highness, but I need to go back to Ponyville. It’s a long journey and my son is going to be home from school soon.”
“Are you sure you need to go?” ventured Fluttershy hesitantly. “I know Miss Cheerilee wouldn’t mind watching him for another night.”
But Willow shook her head. “I’d prefer not to impose. Besides, there’s no reason for me to be here.” She nodded at the pony next to Fluttershy. “Applejack was present for almost all of my interactions with Lex. There’s little I could add that she hasn’t already covered.”
The mare in question frowned. “Now hold on there, sugarcube. I understand bein' concerned about your little one, but you ain’t even said two words since you got here. Don’t’cha at least wanna offer some advice on what you think we should do about Lex?”
“That’s easy,” replied Willow, already turning for the door. “You should kill him.”
Willow’s casual suggestion sent shockwaves throughout the room.
“Now that’s colder than an ice cube in a blizzard!” exclaimed Applejack angrily, leaping to her hooves and stalking toward Willow until she was right in the purrsian’s face, blocking her path to the door. “Lex saved your life more than once back on Everglow, and now the first thing outta your mouth is that we should end his?!”
But Willow didn’t look the slightest bit phased by the orange mare’s anger. “You asked me for my opinion, and I gave it to you. If you want to stop Lex Legis, then he needs to die. It’s as simple as that.”
“Darling, you can’t be serious,” laughed Rarity uncomfortably. “I mean, this Lex character sounds absolutely beastly, but surely that’s going too far.”
“I’m not so sure,” interjected Shining Armor, his expression grave. “After what Princess Celestia and Cozy said, it’s clear that he’s a threat to Equestria. If we want to keep him from hurting anypony else, Willow might have the right idea.”
That statement earned Shining Armor a horrified look from Twilight. “This isn’t some monster we’re talking about here, Shining Armor! Lex Legis might not know very much about friendship, but he’s still a pony! A pony I know! A pony I went out on a date with once!”
“I know, Twily, and that’s what scares me!” Shining Armor’s expression was a mixture of fear and frustration. “What if you’d come back from that date with an awful curse of your own?! Or worse, what if you hadn’t come back at all?! If I lost someone else…”
Cadance put a hoof over Shining Armor’s then, whispering something to him that made him close his eyes and let out a slow breath. For her part, Twilight’s ears flattened, looking confused. “‘Someone else’…?”
“Lex wouldn’t do that.” Aisle couldn’t be quiet anymore, giving Shining Armor an apologetic look. “I’m sorry if I’m speaking out of turn, but I don’t believe Lex would do that. In fact, I know it for sure.” He gave Cozy the same look of apology then. “I’ve said it before, but I just can’t believe that someone who would risk their life for strangers can really be bad.” He glanced around self-consciously, before sinking back into his seat, giving Cozy a tentative smile. “Please don’t be mad at me for that.”
Cozy’s smile was small, but genuine. “I’m not.”
But the romantic moment was ruined as Line Byline’s voice interrupted them. “You say you know it for sure that Lex Legis wouldn't do something so monstrous,” he asked pointedly. “But Princess Celestia told us how he murdered that Royal Guardpony, Silhouette.”
Aisle bit his lip, not sure what to say to that. “I…I don’t know-”
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” Soft Mane crossed her arms over her chest, frowning bitterly. “Lex hates anyone who’s different from him. It was probably just a matter of time before he started treating other ponies that way.”
“Sweetheart,” murmured Grass Patch sadly, reaching a hoof up to rub her daughter’s back gently.
“Um, I’m sorry for interrupting,” stammered Fluttershy, despite the fact that no one else had been talking. “But do we know for sure that Lex Legis is a pony? I mean, when Manehattan caught fire during the elemental bleeds, there were…there were c-creatures there that…that looked like ponies, but…but also did t-terrible things…” She couldn’t finish, shuddering and taking deep breaths.
Rarity winced at that, remembering how one of those monsters had briefly captured the gentle mare and sadistically tortured her before being defeated. “Darling, I’m sure this isn’t like that. Twilight and Applejack must have verified that Lex is a pony just like us.” She finished with a questioning look toward her friends.
Twilight nodded quickly. “We did, and he is. Equestria’s planar-”
“No, he’s not.” Princess Luna’s voice was soft, but it cut through the commotion as she shook her head. “Lex Legis might be a pony, but he isn’t like us.” She looked at Twilight then, her expression carefully composed. “Neither was King Sombra, and no one shed tears when the Crystal Heart destroyed him after you helped retrieve it. There are some villains who cannot be redeemed.”
Spike blinked. “Wait, King Sombra was destroyed?” He looked at Twilight, confused. “You told me he was dispelled into the ether.”
His comment made Twilight cringe, Rarity grimace, Fluttershy wince, Applejack sigh, and Soft Mane roll her eyes. Across the room, Cadance giggled a tiny bit, knowing that her sister-in-law had been trying to protect Spike’s innocence. Grass Patch seemed to sense that too, leaning down to whisper to the little dragon. “Focus on the big picture, Spike. Girls like bad boys who don’t get preoccupied over little details. ”
Spike blinked at that, glancing up at where Soft Mane was pretending she hadn’t heard anything, before smiling and giving Grass Patch a sage nod. “Bad boys who don’t sweat the small stuff, huh? I mean, I don’t wanna brag or anything, but that does describe me. Just the other day, I realized I misfiled one of Twilight’s checklists, and I still haven’t gotten around to fixing it.”
A shudder ran through Twilight at that, but she forced herself to let it go…for now. “Luna, I understand that Lex has done something horrible to you, but listen to what you’re saying! You yourself were a pony who lost their way, but Princess Celestia never gave up on you, which is why my friends and I were able to change you back into who you really are! That same compassion just might be the key to solving everything now! If our magic can’t break Lex’s curse, then maybe our best hope is to convince Lex himself to undo it, but he can’t do that if he’s dead!”
“You may very well be right, Twilight,” admitted Princess Celestia. “But everything that we’ve heard here, both from those who believe in Lex and those who do not, suggest that he’s someone who never changes his mind once it’s made up.”
From where she was still barring Willow’s path to the door, Applejack frowned. “Beggin’ your pardon, Your Highness, but that don’t mean it ain’t worth tryin’. It’s like that there stallion said,” she nodded at Aisle. “Somepony who goes so far outta their way to help others can’t be all bad, even if some of the people he’s helped ain’t exactly grateful for it.”
But Willow ignored the barb, instead fixing Applejack with a steely glare. “Your princess said that I don’t have to be here if I don’t wish to be, so I’m going to tell you one last time: get out of my way, or-”
“Or what?” huffed Applejack. “You’ll kill me?”
“Or I’ll be late for my train,” answered Willow evenly.
“Actually,” came the voice of Line Byline, “the next train to Ponyville won’t leave for almost an hour.” When the purrsian and the mare glanced at him, he nodded pointedly at the pocketwatch in his hoof before putting it away. “Fifty-six minutes, to be exact. You tend to memorize the train schedule pretty fast when you work in the news, since quite a bit of it revolves around who’s coming and who’s going.” He gave Willow an even look then. “Of course, if you’re in that much of a hurry you could always charter an airship, but those are expensive even if you give them plenty of advance notice. And I wouldn’t recommend trying to make the journey on wing, since it’s a long way.”
“Applejack, please. This isn’t helping.” Cadance’s words were without reproach, and that was what made the apple farmer huff and slink back to her seat, though not without giving Willow one final glare. “Thank you,” smiled Cadance, before turning her attention back to the purrsian. “Willow, since there’s no need for you to rush, could you tell us more about why you think we should use such a…permanent, solution with regard to Lex?”
Willow paused for a long moment before sighing, turning around and looking at Cadance. “My son, Sunflower, never knew his father. He left me when he found out I was pregnant, and that I wouldn’t sell our child into slavery.”
Cadance’s eyes widened, and hers weren’t the only ones; everyone in the room looked sickened by what they’d just heard. “Y-your people-”
“Yes,” answered Willow simply. “And after I made it clear I wouldn’t do such a thing, he decided that the financial burden of raising a child would impose on his dreams of forming a business empire, and wouldn’t be conducive to attracting more wives, so he abandoned me.”
“Wait, ‘more’ wives?” blinked Spike, before glancing between Soft Mane and Rarity. “As in, more than one?”
“Don’t. Sweat. The details,” growled Soft Mane dangerously.
“Er, r-right,” gulped Spike.
Looking distinctly uncomfortable, Cadance cleared her throat. “Willow, I’m sorry for what you went through, but what does that have to do-”
“He admires Lex.” For the first time, Willow's mask of indifference slipped, allowing a flicker of concern to leak through. “I never dated anyone else after Sunflower was born, so he’s never had someone to look up to-”
“He has you,” interrupted Twilight. “The mother who always put him first, even now.”
But rather than looking flattered by the compliment, Willow waved a wing dismissively. “He’s never had someone male to look up to. A boy needs his father, and if he doesn’t have one, then he finds someone else he can idolize like one.”
“And for Sunflower, that someone is Lex?” asked Princess Celestia.
Willow nodded. “As Applejack said, the first time we met him, he saved my life when our train crashed. Sunflower saw him lead me back with the other survivors he’d rescued, and Lex didn’t stop there. He took charge of the situation, using his magic to create food and shelter and tend to everyone’s wounds, even fighting off local predators when they came to investigate the crash.” She shook her head, remembering. “It all made a powerful impression on Sunflower. He didn’t see someone with a bad personality and a need to control everything. He saw someone who was brave and strong and fearsome, without being cruel or greedy. That we met Lex again, and the way he saved us a second time by calling on a goddess, of all things, cemented Sunflower’s awe.” A rueful look crossed her features then, and she glanced at Line. “He’s cut out and framed that article from your newspaper. It’s hanging on the wall in his room.” She rolled her eyes. “Now he’s saying he wants to learn magic. He claims it’s because Sweetie Belle is studying how to cast spells, but I know the real reason why.”
Twilight couldn’t have looked more confused. “But why would you want us to kill Lex if your son admires him so much?”
Willow scowled at her. “Because Equestria is a paradise! Because I’ve never seen Sunflower as happy as he is now! He smiles and laughs more in one day here than he did in a week back on Everglow. He can go outside and play with his friends without me needing to worry that he’ll be attacked by a monster or touched by some pervert or grabbed by a slaver looking to make some quick cash. When he gets into trouble here, no one tries to hit him or take his money or throw him in jail. His biggest worry now is figuring out what to do for the school talent show. And this is the society that Lex thinks is being mismanaged so badly that he needs to conquer it for everyone’s own good.”
She seemed to deflate then, finally padding back over to her chair and sinking into it. “I’ve known bad people all of my life. They don’t just prey on others, they enjoy it. Lex Legis doesn’t do that, he doesn’t like how asserting himself over others makes him feel…but he doesn’t seem to like anything else, either. He doesn’t just want to be in charge, he needs it, and he won’t stop until he is. And if anyone gets in his way, well…” She waved a paw at Luna. “He’s not a bad person, but he’s not a good one either, and I’m worried about what will happen to Equestria if he takes control of it. I’m afraid that it won’t be the same place it is now, where my son can grow up safe and happy.”
She scanned the room then, silently asking if anyone else had any questions. When no one said anything, she let out a slow breath. “So yes, I think you should kill him before it comes to that.”
Once again, Applejack was the first to raise her voice in objection to Willow’s call for Lex’s death.
“So you’re just a lovin’ mother worried about her boy, is that it?” she snorted, giving the purrsian a disgusted look. “You know, you talk a mighty good game about how Equestria’s such a great place for Sunflower to grow up, but you don’t seem to get that that’s because we don’t go around killin’ folks just because we’re afraid of ‘em.”
“Except for King Sombra, the last pony who tried to conquer this world,” noted Willow flatly.
“That ain’t the same!” Applejack’s angry shout was punctuated by her pounding a hoof on the table, making it shudder under the force of the blow. “We weren’t sittin’ around talkin’ about ways to ki-, er…” Almost biting her tongue as she saw Rarity gesturing frantically at her from behind Spike, Applejack hurriedly tried to amend her words. “To ‘dispel him into the ether,’ we were just tryin’ to save the Crystal Empire! Everythin’ after that happened on its own!”
Zecora rubbed her chin at that, a thoughtful look on her face. “If King Sombra was undone by the Crystal Fair, perhaps the answer for dealing with Lex Legis lies there.”
Line Byline raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re suggesting that Lex’s dark magic is so much like King Sombra’s that he might react the same way to the power of the Crystal Heart?”
“Or maybe his magic would!” exclaimed Twilight, her eyes widening. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before!” She looked at Celestia and Luna, excited. “If Lex is using the same dark magic as King Sombra, and the Crystal Heart was able to overpower that, then it might be the key to breaking his curse now!”
Luna’s breath caught in her throat at that, her eyes widening as though she were afraid to hope. Celestia, by contrast, couldn’t have looked prouder. “That’s brilliant, Twilight!” Sparing a second to give her pupil a radiant smile, the elder princess turned to Cadance. “What do you think? Could it work?”
Cadance nodded, a determined expression on her face. “I think so. It’s definitely worth a try. But we’ll need as many of the crystal ponies there as we can. It’s their light and love that gives the Crystal Heart its power. The more of them there are, the better the chance that it’ll be able to undo Lex’s curse.”
She glanced at Pillow and Cozy at that last part, smiling as both crystal ponies immediately nodded. “We’ll do everything we can to help,” offered Pillow.
“This must be Lashtada’s will!” smiled Cozy, looking almost as relieved as Celestia. “I’m sure that everyone’s love, together, will prove stronger than that pony’s hateful magic!”
“Then there’s no reason to delay!” Twilight was already performing calculations for their departure in her head, murmuring to herself. “The Crystal Empire is pretty far. Teleporting myself, Luna, and two more ponies there will be difficult, even using my alicorn magic. Maybe a series of shorter teleports? Except that might still be dangerous if I can’t visualize each destination point. Maybe if I can build in a failsafe for if we accidentally arrive off-target-, ow! Hey, what’s the big idea?”
Rubbing her head where the muffin had hit her, Twilight glared at Shining Armor, who offered her an apologetic smile in return. “Sorry, sis, but I needed to get your attention before you went completely Twilynanas.” Twilight sputtered at that, but before she could protest Shining Armor’s expression turned grim again. “If we need as many crystal ponies as we can get for this, then we have a small problem,” he explained, glancing at his wife and then Celestia and Luna in turn.
Cadance frowned, only for her eyes to widen a second later. “Oh no! The missionaries!”
Applejack tilted her head. “The what now?”
“Missionaries. Ponies who go on a journey to tell everyone about their god.” Surprisingly, it was Fluttershy who spoke up, cringing as everypony looked at her. “It was in the newspaper a few weeks ago, while you and Twilight were gone. I, um…I saw it while I was using the paper to help some birds build their nests,” she confessed, giving Line Byline a guilty look.
“It’s quite alright,” chuckled the newspony. “There’ve been plenty of days when I think that everything we publish should be used that way.”
Fluttershy smiled back, clearly grateful that he wasn’t angry, but Princess Celestia was more focused on the issue at hoof. “Cadance, how many missionaries did you dispatch?”
“I asked everypony who’d begun receiving spells from Lashtada if they’d go, and almost all of them said yes,” admitted Cadance, her expression telegraphing how much she regretted that decision now. “Including Cozy and Pillow, there were thirty of them altogether. They were sent out in pairs, each to a different city in Equestria to spread word of Lashtada’s teachings.”
“Well, that’s not so many, is it?” Rarity’s voice was hopeful as she glanced at Twilight. “Surely thirty ponies out of the entire Empire won’t make that much of a difference.”
“I…don’t know,” conceded Twilight. She sent a questioning look at Cadance, but received an equally uncertain look in reply. Trying not to feel discouraged, she glanced at Line. “How long would it take to put a notice in the newspaper asking all of the crystal ponies to return to the Crystal Empire?”
“If I sent word to my deputy editor, we could get the message out by today’s evening edition,” replied Line, after glancing at his pocket watch. “But the problem is that it’ll take time to coordinate with other cities’ newspapers so that they’ll reprint the announcement.”
Celestia fought back a grimace. “How much time?”
Line sighed. “For a high-priority message like this, we send proofing copies out via express courier to every other major city’s local paper. Those won’t take too long to get to nearby cities like Baltimare or Fillydelphia, but for someplace like Las Pegasus, it could take almost a week. And there’s one other problem as well.”
“There would be no way to keep what we’re doing a secret.” Luna’s voice was soft, almost as though she were mourning the topic under discussion rather than celebrating it. And her next words made it clear why. “Even if we don’t say why, putting out word all across Equestria that we want the crystal ponies to return to their homeland would alert Lex Legis to what we’re doing.”
“How?” Spike scratched his head, giving Luna a puzzled look. “I mean, I thought that you guys said Vanhoover was almost leveled. Are they still printing newspapers?”
“Spike’s right, there’s no need to send anything to Vanhoover, especially since the crystal ponies we sent there are already back here with us,” noted Cadance, looking at Cozy and Pillow meaningfully. “And the missionaries we sent to Tall Tale came back a little while after they left because of how that dragon closed the city off. So we wouldn’t have to send word to the newspaper there either.”
Soft Mane still looked dubious. “But wouldn’t word still get around?”
“It might,” acknowledged Celestia. “Lex seems intent on opening up Vanhoover for trade as soon as he can, and from what little we saw in Tall Tale, it looks like that city is on the verge of restoring its connections to the rest of Equestria. But I don’t believe that word will spread quickly enough for Lex to take action to stop us.”
Shining Armor’s features tightened. “We should still put the Empire on alert, just in case he figures things out faster than we’re expecting. If he’s going to try and stop us from curing Luna, he’ll definitely come after the Crystal Heart.”
“If he does, I hope it'll do to him what it did to King Sombra,” added Cozy darkly.
“Sweetheart, please,” murmured Pillow, stroking her mane gently.
Aisle winced at his wife’s statement, but seemed to come to a decision, clearing his throat pointedly. “Maybe there’s another way.”
“You think that the possibility of provoking Lex’s wrath makes using the Crystal Heart on Luna too much of a risk?” asked Celestia, making sure to keep her face calm and her voice even.
She wasn’t sure if she’d succeeded at masking her feelings, however, because Aisle’s eyes widened and he immediately shook his head. “No! That’s not what I meant at all!” Grimacing, he took a moment to collect himself. But it was Luna that he looked at a moment later. “Your Highness, I said before that I don’t think that Lex is a monster, and I meant that. But I don’t approve of what he’s done to you. He cursed me and Cozy before we left Vanhoover as well, and I had no problem seeking to have them removed then, nor with helping you remove yours now. I just…I thought there might be an easier way to bring the crystal ponies back without telling everyone what’s happening…”
The ghost of a smile crossed Luna’s lips then. “I understand, Produce Aisle.” Her expression dimmed then, changing into one of resignation. “Please, ask your question. I believe I know what it is anyway.”
With one last nervous glance at Princess Celestia, Aisle started again. “I just thought that it might be easier if you contacted each of the crystal pony missionaries in their dreams and asked them to come back that way.”
Twilight and Cadance winced at that, and Celestia gave Aisle a cross look, but stopped as Luna touched a hoof to her side. “Do not chastise him, my sister. His question is neither prying nor insensitive.” Celestia gave an unhappy sigh, but nodded, closing her eyes and visibly calming herself. For her part, Luna looked around the room, and though her eyes settled back on Aisle she was clearly addressing everyone when she spoke next. “As a result of my…condition, it has become more difficult for me to use my powers within the dream realm. Although I can still touch the minds of sleeping ponies, not being able to call upon my alicorn magic to augment that power has left me struggling to perform feats that I found effortless before. As I am now, I fear that it would take me more time to reach out and touch the dreams of nearly thirty slumbering strangers than it would to alert them through the newspapers. And in truth, I question how much more secure communicating using dreams would be, as I suspect the dark goddess that Lex Legis is beholden to also commands some authority over the dream realm as well.”
That sent a visible wave of uncertainty through everypony, none more so than Celestia. “Sister, are you sure about that?”
Luna shook her head. “I confess that this is only my suspicion. But as things stand now, I believe that there is little to lose should we alert the crystal ponies through more traditional means. Particularly since…”
No one missed Luna’s hesitation, and Twilight stood up. “Er, I don’t know about anypony else, but that fruit punch always goes right through me,” she announced with an uncomfortable laugh. “Maybe this would be a good time to take a bathroom break?”
“No.” Her voice firm, Luna visibly gathered her resolve. “I appreciate your concern, Twilight, but please let me do this.”
For a moment Twilight hesitated, shooting an uncertain look at Celestia, but when the older princess nodded, Twilight did the same, sitting back down. Giving both of them a brief smile of thanks, Luna took a deep breath before she started speaking again. “There’s another reason why it would take longer for me to contact Cadance’s missionaries in their dreams. It’s because I’m already endeavoring to contact another group of ponies that way, in order to inform them of a decision I’ve made.”
Line couldn’t help himself, his reporter’s instincts kicking in. “What decision, Your Highness?”
Luna hesitated again, gathering her strength for what she was about to say. “The curse that Lex Legis has placed on me…it’s horrible. Although I’m not in any pain, not physically at least, the way it feels…the knowledge that his magic is within me even now, keeping my powers and my body restricted to suit his will rather than my own…it’s more repulsive than words can describe.” Her voice almost broke at that last part, and she took a moment before continuing. “But if there’s one bright side to what’s happened to me, it’s that I have a better sense of myself now than I did before.”
“Luna?” Celestia couldn’t keep the worry out of her voice.
“Yes…Luna,” sighed the pony in question, giving her sister a sad smile. “I’ve spent a very long time wishing I could be more than just Luna, princess of Equestria. And each time I’ve tried to act on that wish, it’s left me with less than I had before. First I tried to become the only princess of this land, and for that I spent a thousand years sealed within the moon. Then I endeavored to become a deity, and as a result I’ve lost my status as an alicorn.” She shook her head again, her expression rueful. “I’ve made the same mistake twice now. There will not be a third time. To that end, as of last night I began contacting my worshipers in their dreams, letting them know the same thing that I’m about to tell all of you now.”
A pin could have been heard dropping as everyone waited for what Luna to finish speaking.
She didn’t keep them in suspense.
“I’m renouncing my claims of divinity. From now on, I will neither seek to become, nor present myself as being, a goddess.”
No one was sure what to say to Luna’s announcement, resulting in a round of uncertain looks being shared as another awkward silence fell.
This time Celestia was the one to break it. “Luna, are you sure about this?”
Luna’s eyebrows rose ever so slightly. “You surprise me, Sister. I thought you would have been relieved to hear that I’m relinquishing my pretensions of godhood. You made no secret of how uncomfortable you were with the idea when I first announced it.”
Celestia winced slightly at that. “I was, yes. I’m just worried about…you said that you’re making this decision because of what Lex Legis did to you, so…”
A sharp frown crossed Luna’s face then. “So you’re worried about my ability to make important decisions while I’m struggling to cope with what’s happened to me, is that it?” The tension in the room spiked, with everypony holding their breath as Celestia sputtered, trying to come up with a response…only to stop as Luna’s stern expression melted into gentle laughter. “Forgive me, Celestia,” she chuckled softly. “Seeing you that nervous made it impossible for me not to tease you.”
“Luna…” Celestia meant for her voice to be reproachful, but all that came out was relief.
Her laughter petering out, the former alicorn gave her sister a warm smile. “I understand your concern, and I know that it comes from a place of love, but I’m sure that this is the right decision. And the way I know is it’s your idea, since you were against me presenting myself as a goddess in the first place.” She shook her head ruefully, her smile turning sad. “You’ve always been wiser than me, and this is simply another example of it. Even if I can’t trust my judgment right now, I know that I can trust yours.” Stepping closer, she put a foreleg around Celestia, pulling her close. “I love you, Sister.”
Blinking back tears, Celestia returned the embrace. “I love you too, Luna.”
This time everyone knew exactly how to react, as happy smiles, tears of joy, and several cries of “aww!” filled the room. Only Willow didn’t seem to be moved, her mask of indifference slipping just enough for her to roll her eyes.
With the tension now gone, Line Byline immediately gave voice to several follow-up questions, his pencil scribbling furiously over his notepad. “Princess Luna, can you tell us how those worshipers of yours that you’ve contacted so far have taken the news? And does your decision have anything to do with that guard going berserk at the train station yesterday morning? Will you encourage the ponies who thought of you as a goddess to join Lashtada’s religion instead, or-”
“Really now, darling,” cut in Rarity with a huff, “don’t you think that’s a little crass, bombarding her with questions like that?”
“I’m asking on behalf of the public,” responded Line indignantly, only for his features to soften as he looked back at the Royal Sisters. “But if I’ve overstepped my bounds…”
“It’s perfectly alright,” Luna assured him. “I know that being a reporter is your destiny, Line. I just don’t think I can give you very many satisfactory answers right now. I’ve only spoken to two of my worshipers, my former worshipers now, in their dreams.” Her features fell then, a look of regret crossing her face. “It would be a betrayal of their trust to go into further detail, so I’ll say only that they took it as well as can be expected. I hope that will hold true for the others as well. As for directing them to Lashtada’s religion…” She glanced at Cadance then, looking slightly uncomfortable.
Fortunately, Cadance was able to guess what she was trying to say. “I completely understand. A goddess isn’t something that can be replaced casually.”
Surprisingly, Pillow spoke up then. “I agree, Your Highness, but if they’re having a crisis of faith, we might be able to help.” He looked at Luna then, his expression earnest. “Princess, I don’t mean to pry, but if you think that any of the ponies you’re releasing from your service could benefit from spiritual counseling, I’d ask you to let them know that I’m more than willing to listen to them in their hour of need.”
“We both are,” added Cozy…only for Aisle to place a hoof on her side a moment later.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he murmured, not trying to hide his concern. “You’re still recovering from what happened in Vanhoover.”
Cozy frowned, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Pillow jumped back in. “He’s right, my love. I might have been the one who died there, but we’ve seen that the scars that place left on your heart are far worse than mine.”
Flushing at the reminder of how she’d lost her composure at the mention of Lex, Cozy nodded. “I know, I just…I want to try and help someone, the way I couldn’t when I was there.” She looked back and forth between Pillow and Aisle then. “Maybe we could do it together, the three of us, like when we spoke to Fencer?”
Aisle blanched at that, but Pillow smiled. “Maybe we should.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” added Cadance, also looking pleased. “But only if Luna’s comfortable with it.”
“I shall keep it in mind, should any of my now-ex-faithful seem particularly distraught,” acknowledged Luna.
“Does that include…” Line flipped through his notepad, consulting it before continuing. “Silhouette, I believe his name is? He’s supposed to be one of your most devoted worshipers, as well as a member of the Royal Guard, and yet eyewitnesses say that he was extremely agitated when he left the train station yesterday, even taking a swing at Prince Shining Armor. Now I’m hearing that his apartment was searched, but-”
“We’re still investigating the situation with Silhouette,” broke in Shining Armor, his voice tense. “And nothing about that is ready for the press yet.”
Line raised a brow, before looking at Princess Celestia. When she nodded, he did the same, putting his notebook down. “I understand.”
“Good,” retorted Shining Armor, “because I think we’re getting off-track. We’ve got a plan for how to remove the curse Lex placed on Luna, but we don’t have one for dealing with him yet.”
“Well, why not just take the Crystal Heart and the crystal ponies and go to Vanhoover?” Spike’s question came around a mouthful of chocolate cake, having cut himself another slice. “Just load them all onto a train, ride it straight to Vanhoover, and then have the crystal ponies do their thing. Problem solved.” Swallowing the mouthful of chocolatey goodness, he shot a toothy grin at Pillow and Cozy. “No need to thank me, helping out with saving the Crystal Empire is what Spike the Brave and Glorious does.”
Grass Patch giggled, Soft Mane pinched the bridge of her nose, and Twilight gave her assistant a patronizing smile. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that, Spike.”
Blinking, Spike stopped with another forkful of cake halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean?”
Telekinetically removing the dessert from his grasp before he could give himself a stomachache, Twilight nodded toward her sister-in-law. “I did some more research about the Crystal Fair after we defeated King Sombra. While the Crystal Heart is able to collect the light and love of the crystal ponies, the Crystal Empire itself is what allows for the transfer of energy.”
Nodding, Cadance continued. “The Crystal Empire’s foundations are made out of a unique substance that resonates with both the Crystal Heart and the crystal ponies. Without that, there’s no way for them to transfer their energy to the artifact, and it can only operate at minimum power. So we can use it against Lex if he attacks the Crystal Empire, but not anywhere else.”
“Plus the Crystal Heart has to stay there to keep the weather under control,” added Shining Armor. “Remember how snowy it was when you guys first went there? That was because it’s power was at an extremely low ebb after King Sombra had kept it hidden for so long, and it wasn’t able to push back the Frozen North.”
“Oh…” Looking crestfallen that his idea wasn’t viable, Spike didn’t reach for any more desserts. Taking pity on her boyfriend, Soft Mane reached over and gabbed a cookie, handing it to him the moment Twilight’s attention was elsewhere. The gesture had the desired effect, Spike’s smile returning as he gave her a grateful look before chowing down.
“That’s why we need to come up with a different plan for dealing with him,” continued Shining Armor. “We don’t necessarily have to kill him,” he noted, giving Twilight a look. “But I think we can all agree that he’s too dangerous to be allowed to go free, so unless he does try to attack the Crystal Empire when we’re undoing the curse he placed on Luna, we need to figure a way we can fight against his magic, and well as that scythe of his.”
Applejack sighed. “Listen…this ain’t easy for me to talk about, but if y’all’re really serious about pickin’ a fight with Lex, I guess I gotta…”
Twilight licked her lips. “Applejack, you don’t-”
But Applejack wouldn’t be deterred. “Now don’t you try and stop me, Twilight. Princess Luna was able to be honest with us about what happened to her, so I’ve gotta do the same.” Her ears folding back were the only sign of the discomfort she felt as she forged ahead. “That scythe’s name is Severance, and it’s alive. More than that though, if you try to use it, it can get in your head and twist your thoughts around. I know because it happened to me…and that’s why I ended up sending Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon to that other world, and then Pinkie Pie after ‘em.”
“They know, AJ.” Twilight’s voice was quiet. “Or at least, Celestia, Luna, and Cadance do. I told them about that yesterday evening.”
“Even after Rainbow Dash helped me get rid of that thing, I still needed…wait, you did what now?!” Cringing at the realization that she’d just confessed for nothing, Applejack looked around guiltily, almost wilting under the surprised looks she was receiving.
But none of those looks turned into condemnation. Rather, most of them morphed into sympathy a second later. “Darling, you were under the control of some sort of dark magic?” asked Rarity. “You poor dear! That must have been positively dreadful!”
“I wondered why you were carrying that thing around with you all the time,” murmured Fluttershy, her voice thick with guilt. “I didn’t realize it had put a spell on you. I’m really sorry.”
“Wow, I had no idea what had happened,” admitted Spike, looking equally chagrined. “But you’re okay now though, right?”
“I am now, Spike,” admitted Applejack, trying not to get choked up as she smiled at her friends. “I am now.” Rubbing her eyes for a second, she made herself get back to the topic at hoof. “But the point is, if that thing could make me into a right awful version of myself, it’s probably done the same thing to Lex, and-”
“I’m not so sure,” admitted Twilight in a small voice.
Applejack’s eyebrows went up. “Now hold on just an apple-pickin’ minute, Twilight. You saw how Severance made me all ruthless and uncompromisin’, and that sure sounds like Lex to a T don’t it? So why would you say that?”
“Because Lex was that way before he got Severance,” replied Twilight without hesitation. “Believe me, I wish this was as simple as him having turned into somepony completely different because of Severance altering his personality, but that’s just not what it seems like. Remember how he acted when we first met him on Everglow? Does that really sound different from what we’ve been told he’s like in Vanhoover?”
“Sure it does! Lex wasn’t killin’ ponies when we met him before,” protested Applejack. “If he’s doin’ that now, then it must be ‘cuz Severance’s makin’ him!”
“Maybe,” admitted Twilight. “But don’t forget that when you had Severance, it almost killed Rainbow Dash all on its own, and according to what Princess Celestia told us, Lex said the same thing when it killed Silhouette-”
“Which was almost certainly a lie,” interjected Celestia. “Lex isn’t trustworthy, Twilight. We can’t take his word for it that he didn’t know his weapon would cut somepony down right in front of him.”
“Silhouette had almost interrupted a magical ritual that Lex was carrying out the previous night, disabling several of his followers and infuriating him,” added Luna. “It makes sense that he would want revenge.”
“But you told us that Severance was originally aiming for you, not Silhouette,” pleaded Twilight. “If it acted on its own, then this is all just one big misunderstanding.”
“It’s no misunderstanding, Twilight. Lex has been very consistent in his hostility toward us, even before he acquired his weapon. Remember when he attacked me in this very castle after I wouldn’t surrender Equestria to him then and there, swearing to cast myself and Luna down? He was yelling similar statements about how much he hated us right after he cut Silhouette down.” Celestia gave Twilight a sorrowful look. “I know you want to believe that there’s good in everypony. It’s why you’re such an excellent Princess of Friendship. But Shining Armor is right. Lex is a threat to all of Equestria. We can’t simply ignore him after everything he’s done.”
And just like that, the decision had been made. “He needs to be stopped. And we need to come up with a way to stop him.”
Twilight’s ears folded down at her mentor’s decision, her wings matching the motion as they drooped in dismay. “Princess Celestia-”
“She’s right, Twily.” Shining Armor’s expression wasn’t without sympathy, but was firm just the same. “Even if that weapon of his did kill Silhouette against his wishes, there’s no excuse for what Lex did to Luna. We don’t have to kill him – we could turn him to stone or throw him into Tartarus or something else – but we do have to take him out of commission, one way or another.”
Biting her lip, Twilight scanned the room, looking for allies. But there were precious few to be found. Applejack looked bitter, and Produce Aisle looked demoralized, but that was it. Fluttershy and Rarity both seemed uncomfortable, but not truly upset at what was being considered. Zecora had a light frown on her face, but didn’t seem inclined to object to the idea of dealing with Lex permanently. Even Cadance’s expression of mild concern, Twilight realized, was for her, clearly worried more about her sister-in-law’s state of mind rather than having any personal reservations of her own about what had just been decided. Everyone else either looked indifferent to the prospect of Lex being treated as an enemy to be defeated, or pleased by it.
Swallowing her objections, Twilight didn’t say anything else, sitting back down.
Upon seeing that his sister wasn’t going to push the issue, Shining Armor turned his attention to Princess Celestia. “I think we should review everything that’s been said here about Lex’s capabilities, so we can try and get a clearer picture of what he’s capable of.” When Princess Celestia nodded, he turned his eyes to Luna. It was only after she also inclined her head that he directed his eyes back to a certain individual among the assemblage. “Willow.”
“Hm?” One of the purrsian’s eyebrows rose in mild curiosity.
“You said before that Lex used his magic to create food and tend to everyone’s injuries. Can you expound on that?” Shining Armor was less interested in the former ability than he was the latter, but it was better to leave no stone unturned. Even so, he couldn’t imagine how someone as evil as Lex could possibly have healing magic, not when that was a province of the holy powers his wife had been given.
Although she’d been the first one to suggest that Lex should be put to death, and had made it clear how invested she was in the idea, Willow’s expression of indifference was firmly back in place as she shrugged. “They were fairly modest divine spells. ‘Create food and water’ and ‘infernal healing,’ from what I saw.”
“‘Infernal healing’?” he repeated. “So this was dark magic?”
Willow cocked her head at the term. “Infernal healing does draw upon malevolently-aligned energies,” she admitted. “But it’s well-documented that repeated use causes no long-term moral corruption. The primary manifestation of its baleful nature is in how it can’t heal wounds caused by silver weapons or holy powers. That and it leaves scars, unlike normal healing spells which use positive energy.” She shrugged again, looking bored. “Honestly, the most notable thing was that he was apparently using it as a divine spell. Infernal healing is usually used by arcane spellcasters, since their divine counterparts have access to more efficient curative spells.”
Luna’s eyes were among several pairs that widened, the former alicorn suddenly more animated than she’d been during the entire meeting. “So you’re saying that Lex cannot restore injuries caused by such things? The touch of silver and the application of holy magic?”
A slight frown crossed Willow’s face. “I didn’t say that. I just said he used a spell that can’t heal injuries caused by those things. If he has access to any other types of healing spells-”
“But you’ve never actually seen him use any other types of healing spells?” asked Shining Armor insistently.
Willow’s response came with a shake of her head. “No, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.”
“If he did he would have used it,” announced Cozy, a thoughtful look on her face. “Even though he never once acted like he actually cared about the ponies he saved, Lex did still try and protect everyone. But he almost never used that ‘infernal healing’ spell that I saw. Instead he mostly relied on me when he needed someone healed with magic.”
“Needed someone…” Line flipped through his notepad suddenly, his brow furrowing deeply. “Needed someone…” He turned several pages over, scanning them quickly before looking back up at Cozy. “Did he ever ask you to heal him?”
Cozy blinked, clearly not having expected that question. “Huh?”
Line glanced at his notes again before looking back at her. “We never actually got your account of what you witnessed Lex do during the time you knew him. Can you tell us if he ever directed you to use your powers to tend to his wounds?”
“I…” Cozy’s eyes widened as she realized he hadn’t. “No…no, he didn’t. In fact…” She paused, trying to remember. “He got into a fight with some monsters while he was bringing me and Aisle and some of our friends back. Afterwards he was really injured, and Sonata asked me to use my magic on him. I was going to, but he refused to let me.” She could feel a tingle of excitement going down her spine then, realizing what was being suggested. Her eyes widened slightly, glancing between Line and the princesses. “You don’t think…?”
“That’s Lex’s weakness!” Cadance sounded as excited as Cozy looked. “That’s why he doesn’t have the ability to use anything besides that twisted healing spell of his! Because true healing is a holy power, the same kind of power that Lashtada granted me, and he’s vulnerable to that!”
“It’s just like what happened with King Sombra,” offered Pillow. “He used so much dark magic that when the Crystal Heart channeled the power of everypony’s light and love, he couldn’t withstand it.”
“And Lex is using King Sombra’s horn,” finished Celestia, looking at Cadance. “That means that not only is the Crystal Heart likely to be the key to undoing his evil magic, but the power your goddess has given you might make you the only one who can stop him now, Cadance.”
Her excitement could be seen changing to determination on her face, but before Cadance could do more than nod, Shining Armor cut in. “In that case, I think that I should be the one to take point on whatever plan we come up with.”
A complex interplay of emotions ran across Cadance’s face then. Worry. Gratitude. Exasperation. Love. Guilt. “Shining Armor…”
“This is what I’m supposed to do, Cadance.” He gave her a look that was part demanding and part pleading. “Whenever you’re in danger, I’m supposed to be there to shield you from it.”
The words almost broke Cadance’s heart, knowing what he was really talking about. Despite the fact that they were in front of everyone, she wanted to tell him – the way she had so many times already – that what had happened during the elemental bleeds wasn’t his fault. That she had been the one who ordered him to focus on getting everypony else to safety. That she had been the one who, despite being pregnant, had decided to try and negotiate with the strange monsters that had appeared, convinced that she could end things peacefully. That she had been the one who’d been wrong, resulting in her being injured so badly that their baby…
“It doesn’t work like that.”
Willow’s statement, delivered in a flat tone of voice, drew all eyes back to her. “I’m sorry?” asked Cadance, trying to figure out what the purrsian was talking about.
Twilight stood up, an awkward look on her face. “I think what Willow’s trying to say is that-”
“You’re making a dangerous number of assumptions,” finished Willow. Once again, her expression of indifference was marred, this time by a look of mild pique. “The major one being that healing magic and holy magic are the same thing. They’re not, and if you go in trying to heal Lex to death, you’ll probably wind up with a curse of your own, or worse.”
Shining Armor scowled, not liking the way she was so casually referring to something horrible happening to Cadance. “You’re the one who said Lex’s dark magic didn’t use normal healing powers, and-”
“No,” interrupted Willow sharply. “That’s not what I said. I’m not even sure what ‘dark magic’ is, but all I said is that Lex used a spell with a few particular limitations on what it can heal, and that’s a little odd since normally there are better alternatives available. But those alternatives use positive energy, which stimulates the life force of all living things regardless of whether they’re good or evil, rather than anything particularly sacred.”
Cadance frowned. “But the power that Lashtada gave me-”
Twilight stood up, trying again. “Maybe before we go any further, we should have an overview about how the magic that most people use on Everglow is different from the magic that ponies use here in Equestria?”
“That’s a wonderful idea, Twilight.” Perhaps realizing that a description from Twilight where magic was concerned would take some time, Princess Celestia immediately launched into an explanation of her own, looking at Willow as she began. “I don’t know if it’s the same on Everglow, but in this land all living things have some magic within them. But while plants and animals use theirs instinctively, the innate magic of ponies and other thinking creatures is shaped by their emotions.”
“This is the ‘magic of friendship’ that I keep hearing about?” asked Willow.
Celestia nodded. “Indeed, and in this world it’s the strongest kind of magic that there is. Whether they’re earth ponies, unicorns, or pegasi, ponies whose hearts are filled with generosity, kindness, loyalty, honesty, and laughter – the elements that make up true friendship – can join together in a power that surpasses all others, though some, such as the magic of love,” she nodded at Cadance then, “can come close.”
“And this 'dark magic'?” prompted Willow.
A solemn look crossed Celestia’s face. “’Dark magic’ is the term we use for the magic that comes from negative emotions. If somepony’s heart should be filled with anger, for example, or sinks into hopelessness, their magic will soon change accordingly. In some cases it might be as mild as being followed around by an angry-looking cloud, or finding their colors graying to match their mood. But in worse cases-”
“It can turn you into a monster,” murmured Luna, closing her eyes as a mournful expression crossed her face. But she seemed to recover a moment later, dispelling her sudden bout of melancholy with a sigh. “Forgive me, Sister. Please continue.”
Despite Luna’s insistence, Celestia hesitated, giving her sister a worried look. But she was saved as Spike suddenly spoke up. “Wait, so Lex’s powers come from his being in a really bad mood all the time?”
Unable to help but smile a little, Celestia shook her head. “Not exactly, Spike.” Her smile fell as quickly as it had come as she continued. “You see, the dark magic that Lex wields is the same as what King Sombra used: the magic of isolation.”
“Isolation?” Soft Mane couldn’t help but look skeptical. “If Lex got his magic from being alone, then why would he go to a city full of ponies? Wouldn’t he want to hide out somewhere all by himself?”
Again, Celestia shook her head. “Isolation isn’t a state of being alone, but rather feeling alone. For someone who doesn’t care about others, and rejects bonds of trust and understanding, then even if they’re surrounded by people they’re still cut off from everyone around them. It’s very nearly the polar opposite of friendship, which celebrates and cherishes the bonds that ponies share with each other.”
“That’s Lex alright,” murmured Cozy with a shiver. “He was so cold, even when he was trying to help everypony.”
Applejack reached a hoof up to scratch at her head. “I don’t know, Your Majesty. I’m not saying you don’t have the right of it, but it sounds like you’re sayin’ that Lex looks at the world the same way King Sombra did. But I’m not sure ‘isolated’ is the word I’d use to describe that evil pony we saw when we went to go help save the Crystal Empire.”
This time Celestia’s smile was much smaller. “The same way the magic of friendship is made up of different elements, so is the magic of isolation. Some ponies might feel isolated because they think that they’re better than everyone, and don’t want to relate to people they consider beneath them. Others are afraid of forming bonds, and let that fear keep them apart from those who would otherwise accept them. A few simply can’t figure out how to share their life with others, and so go into self-imposed emotional exile rather than keep trying.”
Twilight gave her mentor an imploring look then. “But if the reason Lex can use King Sombra’s magic so well is that he feels so alone, shouldn’t we keep trying to reach out to him and let him know he’s not?”
Surprisingly, another voice spoke up before Princess Celestia could answer. “Um, maybe Twilight has a point, Your Majesty?” offered Fluttershy timidly. “I mean, I can’t think of anything more isolating than being a creature of pure chaos, and you trusted us to be able to make friends with Discord.”
“Oh honestly, it’s not as bad as all that. For instance, I bet everyone will love it if I lighten up this boring old meeting.”
The voice – male with a wry lilt – came from a disembodied mouth that suddenly appeared near the door, grinning. Before anypony had a chance to react, a fluffy white cat suddenly climbed out of a half-eaten pie, brushing itself off before pulling out a violin and bow that were far too large for its body out from behind its back and began to play a jaunty tune. As though reacting to the sudden music, everyone utensils got up and began dancing, and a large cow crawled out from under the table before it began bouncing everywhere as though it had springs attached to its hooves.
The entire scene was so utterly unexpected that everyone was momentarily frozen, just staring at the wildly chaotic scene, barely noticing as the owner of the grin faded in around it, revealing the figure of a familiar draconequus.
“Besides, as I recall she was mostly trusting you, Fluttershy.”
The name was shouted by nearly a dozen voices, most of them raised in surprise. A few were tinged with annoyance, such as Rarity, who was trying to shield herself from where a set of forks and spoons – now sporting stick-thin arms and legs – were using their bodies as makeshift catapults to launch a barrage of blueberries at her, forcing her to duck behind Applejack in an attempt to prevent her coat from being stained. Others yelled his name in worry, such as Shining Armor, who quickly positioned himself in front of his wife, raising a shield around them both…but not in time to avoid being hit in the face by a tray of custards, overturned by the cow leaping wildly around the room, opening its mouth and giving a loud cock-a-doodle-do as it did. The only person who sounded happy to see him was Fluttershy, though her joy was muted by how the violin-playing cat on the table in front of her was somehow managing to produce an entire orchestra’s worth of music, the cacophony making her cover her ears.
Flying upward so that he was hovering over the conference table, Discord laughed wildly. “There now! Isn’t this so much more fun? Honestly, I don’t see how anypony can sit through one of these things without me there to make it bearable.” On saying the last word, he snapped his fingers, and all of a sudden a large grizzly bear appeared behind Fluttershy, smiling happily as it reached down and scooped her up in its paws, giving her a big hug.
Princess Celestia, however, was far less amused. “That’s enough, Discord,” she said firmly, flapping her wings and placing herself directly in front of the meeting’s newest arrival. “We invited you here because we’re in a crisis, but after what happened with Tirek-”
“Oh are you still upset about that?” moaned Discord dramatically. “I gave you flowers afterward and everything! Honestly, I thought that when you invited me to this little get-together that you were willing to let bygones be bygones, but you just can’t seem to lighten up.” Again he snapped his fingers, and Princess Celestia’s eyes widened as her balance was thrown off, causing her to plummet…up to the ceiling, where she landed with a crash, sprawling out as though gravity had suddenly reversed for her.
“Celestia!” yelled Luna, alarmed.
“C’mon, Discord,” pleaded Spike. “No one’s mad at you for what happened with Tirek, so can you knock all this off already?”
Already having leapt to her hooves in alarm, Soft Mane gave Spike an incredulous look. “You know this thing?!”
But Spike didn’t have a chance to reply before Discord turned to look at the half-pony. “Well now that’s just downright rude,” he huffed. “Honestly, when it comes to appearances, you’re the last one here who should be pointing fingers.” A snap was all it took, and suddenly Soft Mane was surrounded by a swarm of disembodied hands, which began to poke her in the face, shoulders, arms, belly, and back, causing her to shriek and start swatting at them, her mother running over to join her a moment later.
Spike stomped a foot, glaring up at Discord. “Hey! Quit messing with my girlfriend!”
Discord blinked at that, a surprised expression crossing his face. “‘Girlfriend’?” he echoed, before bursting into another round of raucous laughter. “Oh that’s adorable! This time the dragon is rushing in to save the fair maiden! Now all we need is a knight in shining armor to be the bad guy!” Another snap of his fingers, and suddenly Shining Armor was teleported out of his force field, appearing five feet above Spike and immediately falling on top of him, sending both of them to the ground on a tangle of limbs.
“Discord, that’s enough!” This time Twilight was the one to get in Discord’s face, giving him a fierce glower. “Put everything back to normal right now! We’re trying to have a serious discuss-ACK!” Twilight only barely managed to dodge out of the way as a cheetah – its coat a radiant silver and its spots a deep shimmering blue – suddenly appeared out of nowhere, leaping at the two of them with its claws out and fangs bared, causing both her and Discord to duck out of the way. “Hey! That was dangerous!”
But rather than give a flippant response, Discord gave the large cat a curious look. “Odd. That one isn’t one of mine.” Snapping his fingers, a selection of tomato slices in a nearby salad bowl suddenly pieced themselves back into a whole tomato, which Discord grabbed and began bouncing like it was a ball, the fruit behaving as though it were made out of rubber. “Nice kitty,” he smirked. “Here’s a little something that you can munch on.”
“Discord!” Wriggling free of the bear hug she’d been caught by, Fluttershy put herself between the draconequus and the cheetah, giving the former a worried look. “You can’t! Tomatoes are toxic to cats!”
“Well he started it!” protested Discord.
Twilight was about to go back Fluttershy up when a whispered voice reached her ears. “Twilight,” came the voice of Willow, though the purrsian was nowhere to be seen. “You’re a spellcaster of considerable ability, aren’t you? Hurry up and banish that protean. I don’t know how long that cheetah I summoned will keep its attention.”
“Huh? Protean?” Trying to keep a handle on what was happening, Twilight looked at where Willow had been seated. But the purrsian’s chair was empty now, and her place at the table was currently occupied by some animated silverware, a trio of knives cutting off pieces of the tablecloth while a half-dozen forks and spoons folded the fabric into origami shapes…which then came to life in turn. Even as Twilight watched, a just-finished cloth crane suddenly flapped its wings, quacking like a duck as it flew over and tried to make a nest in Aisle’s mane. Shaking her head, Twilight closed her eyes and cast a quick spell designed to let her see things that were invisible.
Sure enough, when she opened them again a second later, Willow could be seen hovering in the air nearby a few feet away, giving her an impatient look. “You’re wasting time,” she murmured, shooting a nervous glance at Discord. “Proteans might seem whimsical at first, but their love of anarchy can turn dangerous in an instant.”
Shaking her head again, Twilight looked at where the silver cheetah was trying to paw at Discord, who was now juggling several tomatoes while Fluttershy attempted to intervene, before turning back toward Willow. “Listen to me! I’m not sure what a protean is, but this is Discord! He’s a draconequus, as well as the Lord of Chaos, and while he can be hard to get along with sometimes, he might be our best shot at fixing everything! So please, make that creature you summoned go away before it makes things worse!”
Willow gave Twilight an unhappy look, but only for a moment before she sighed and closed her eyes, holding a paw out in the direction of the cheetah. A second later it vanished, just before several tomatoes impacted where it had been. “You better be right about this,” she murmured once it was done.
Giving Willow a grateful smile, Twilight turned her attention back to the chaos that had engulfed the meeting room. Taking a deep breath, she held it just for a second before raising her voice again. “Discord! We need your help!”
That did the trick, and Discord looked over from where Fluttershy was attempting to chastise him. “What’s that, you say? You need help from moi?”
“Yes,” nodded Twilight earnestly, “that’s why we invited you here to begin with!”
“Oh do go on,” cooed Discord happily, his body suddenly becoming entirely composed of corn on the cob. “I’m all ears.”
“Princess Luna has been placed under a curse!” Twilight pointed at where Luna was attempting to use her telekinesis to bring Celestia down from the ceiling, only for the elder princess to start drifting back upward as soon as her sister released her.
Tilting his head, Discord peered at Luna. “A curse? Hm, I’m not sure I see what you-, wait a minute! She’s not an alicorn anymore!” Discord’s surprised exclamation was accompanied by his every kernel suddenly exploding, showering the room with enough popcorn to leave it piled knee-deep. His body now back to normal, Discord sighed. “Well this is just completely wonderful,” he announced, voice thick with sarcasm. “I was going to have Bessie here jump over her, it would have been sublime,” he explained, indicating where the jumping cow had paused in its leaping to eat some popcorn. “But now the entire joke’s ruined.” Looking over at the conference table, Discord clapped his hands, making all of the animated silverware look at him. “Sorry, but the plan’s a no-go, boys. There’s no need to try and help the spoons run away with the dishes after all.”
The silverware all looked dejected at that, ceasing what they were doing and slumping in place. The white cat looked similarly depressed, ceasing its fiddling with the sound of a needle scratching a record. Only the cow seemed fine with that, scooping up another mouthful of popcorn. “I know, I know,” nodded Discord sympathetically. “We’ll just have to try again another time, maybe with the actual moon, but for now…” He snapped his fingers, and suddenly everything was back to normal, with the silverware all back in place, the popcorn being gone, the animals having disappeared, and everyone back in their proper places.
With that done, Discord turned his attention back to Twilight, his expression turning coy. “So am I to assume that you want me to change Luna here back to her usual self? Because while I can do that, it might be more fun to make a few improvements while I’m at it. Before you say anything, consider this: flippers instead of hooves!” A snap of his fingers was all it took to put Luna in a set of swimfins, causing her to gasp in surprise.
“No, Discord,” snapped Celestia, clearly not amused.
Discord gave her a confident look. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t ask for any upfront payment, I’d just add it to her bill.” This time a duck’s bill appeared on Luna’s face, though thankfully it was made out of cardboard and attached with a rubber band.
“Um, Discord?” piped up Fluttershy. “I appreciate that you want to, um, try and make Princess Luna better than new-”
“More like a living crime against fashion,” huffed Rarity, giving her mane a toss.
“-but we’d really just like for you to change her back into how she used to be, if you don’t mind,” finished Fluttershy.
“Oh fine,” huffed Discord, snapping his fingers again and making the accoutrements he’d placed on Luna disappear. “But if you want me to do this then I want something in return.”
“If this task it will help you do, then tell us what it is that we can give you,” urged Zecora.
But Discord’s answer was directed at Celestia rather than the zebra. “If I turn Luna back into an alicorn, then I want everyone here to let the whole thing with Tirek go,” he answered, crossing his arms as his expression turned indignant. “No more bringing up that one little mistake I made every time you see me.”
“‘One little mistake’?!” snapped Shining Armor. “You betrayed us to the enemy we sent you to stop!”
“See?” Discord pointed at Shining Armor accusingly. “That right there is what I'm talking about! I was tricked by Tirek the same way you were tricked by Chrysalis, but no one’s rubbing your face in it all the time!”
Shining Armor’s nostrils flared. “That’s not-”
“We accept,” announced Princess Celestia. “In exchange for returning Luna to normal, we will all forgive you for your past transgressions with Tirek. Is this acceptable to everypony?” She looked around the room then, and while there were some skeptical or indignant looks, no one objected. Satisfied, Princess Celestia turned back to Discord. “There you have it. Now,” she extended a wing toward Luna, “if you would?”
“Certainly,” replied Discord, his expression smug as he snapped his fingers.
Everypony’s eyes widened as Luna’s wings were restored.
But no cheers filled the room. No one cried out in joy or relief. Every face was bereft of smiles, instead displaying expressions of shock or confusion or anger. Chief among that last group was Princess Celestia, a dark look crossing her face as she turned her eyes back toward the draconequus in their midst. “Discord! This isn’t funny!”
The source of her anger was abundantly clear: Luna’s wings had been returned to her, but nothing else had. Her body hadn’t recovered the several inches of height that it had lost as a result of Lex’s curse. Nor had her mane regained its sparkling luster and gentle billowing, remaining the same drab blue it had been a moment ago. But the most peculiar change, as well as the most unnerving, was located on her head.
Her horn, there only moments ago, was now gone.
Whereas before she had looked to be no different than an ordinary unicorn, Luna now appeared to be an ordinary pegasus.
Zecora was the first to echo Princess Celestia’s sentiment, looking away from where Luna was examining herself with a distraught expression to give Discord an irate glare. “What you’ve done was not the deal. All her losses you said you’d heal.”
“Honestly,” chimed in Rarity, her voice dripping with disdain. “You’ve always had a terrible sense of humor, but this is really just too much.”
“Even for you, this is low,” agreed Shining Armor.
Fluttershy, however, seemed more disappointed than upset. “Discord, how could you? Can’t you see that Princess Luna is suffering?”
But rather than laughing or waving the harsh words away, Discord just stared at Luna with a look of incomprehension on his face before glancing down at his hand. “That’s strange,” he muttered at last. “I distinctly wanted to change her back into her alicorn-y self again. So why isn’t she?”
“You’re sayin’ you didn’t mean for this to happen?” Applejack didn’t even try to keep the skepticism out of her voice, raising one eyebrow as she gave Discord a disbelieving look.
“I’m telling you,” protested Discord with a huff, “I was trying to turn her back to normal!”
“So why didn’t it work?” Unlike her friends, Twilight’s face showed concern rather than anger, not liking what Discord was implying. That both she and Cadance had failed to remove Lex’s curse had been strange, but this was even more so. It had always taken the Elements of Harmony to rein in Discord’s magic. The idea that somepony could cast spells of similar power all on their own was disquieting to say the least. Which is all the more reason why picking a fight is a bad idea, she knew.
Oblivious to her thoughts, Discord scratched his head. “That’s a bit of a thinker,” he admitted, sitting down and propping his chin on his first in a display of deep consideration, his body turning into a statue a second later. But the pose lasted for all of two seconds before he suddenly stretched, the rocky covering cracking and flaking off as he hopped back up and gave a shrug. “I suppose I’m just so chaotic I surprise myself sometimes. Don’t worry, this next one should do it.” Without waiting for any further commentary, he snapped his fingers one more time.
This time Princess Luna regained the stature she’d had before, a few inches taller once again. But just like before, that was the only part of her that was fixed. Not only was her horn not restored, but her wings were gone once more, and her hair stayed dull and unmoving. Frowning in consternation, Discord snapped again. This time Luna returned to the state she’d been in before he’d shown up, having her horn but lacking the characteristics of pegasi or earth ponies.
A half-dozen attempts followed, causing Luna to change in rapid sequence. But each change manifested the features of only a single tribe of ponies. A horn, or wings, or a larger build, but never more than one at a time. And in none of those forms did her mane and tail regain the flowing effulgence they’d previously possessed when she’d been an alicorn.
After the final attempt, leaving her once again as a unicorn, Discord stopped. For a few seconds he simply looked at Luna again, his expression nonplussed, before he turned to face everyone else – particularly Fluttershy – with a nervous grin. “Alright, so I don’t seem to be able to turn her back, but the important thing is that I tried, right? So we’re still good where the whole Tirek thing is concerned?”
Licking his lips, Line Byline gave Twilight a nervous look, his face pale. “So…does this mean that Lex Legis is more powerful than Discord?”
The draconequus in question frowned at that. “Excuse me, Lex who?”
“Lex Legis,” moaned Cozy, looking vaguely ill at this latest testament to Lex’s power.
“The pony who cursed Princess Luna,” added Pillow.
Sighing, Twilight stepped in, giving Discord a brief rundown of who Lex was, what they knew of his powers, and what he’d done to Luna. Her explanation ended with her giving a worried look back at the Royal Sisters. Luna looked to be in a state of mild shock, staring down at the floor sightlessly, though whether it was from having another possibility of being restored be so thoroughly dashed or because she’d just had her body changed several times in a row was unclear. Princess Celestia, by contrast, looked deeply worried about her sister, one wing around her in a silent gesture of support.
Discord also glanced at the pair when Twilight had finished, but unlike the princesses the only emotion on his face was indignation. “No no no, this won’t do at all,” he announced. “Some bargain bin knockoff of King Sombra overshadowing the Lord of Chaos? I can’t think of anything more embarrassing!”
“Good to see your heart’s in the right place,” muttered Soft Mane sarcastically.
“We still have our original plan,” pointed out Cadance, walking over to gently place a hoof on Luna’s side. “Once the crystal ponies that we sent out make their way back to the Crystal Empire, we’ll be able to use the Crystal Heart at full power. That should be able to undo Lex’s curse.” That seemed to do the trick, causing Luna to take a deep breath, swallowing before giving a shallow nod, the corners of her lips turning up in a wan smile. The sight made Celestia smile as well, along with most of the room’s other occupants.
But not all of them. “Oh please,” scoffed Discord, crossing his arms over his chest. “There’s no way some piddling little piece of crystal jewelry could do more than I could.”
“I seem to remember the Elements of Harmony doin’ a number on you,” drawled Applejack.
Twilight’s eyes suddenly lit up, an excited gasp escaping her lips. “That’s it!” Smiling, she turned to Discord. “I know a way you can help after all. Pinkie Pie, along with two fillies named Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, are currently lost on another world called Everglow. Can you bring them back to Equestria?”
Discord’s response came with a roll of his eyes. “Honestly Twilight, I thought you were supposed to be the smart one. With my powers you think you’d be able to come up with something a little greater than having me act as a glorified dogcatcher.” The words were barely out of his mouth when he snapped his fingers, appearing in a white uniform and cap with a long-handled net in one hand, complete with a yipping puppy inside.
“C’mon Discord, give them a break,” urged Spike. “Twilight, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash went looking in that world for a really long time and couldn’t find them. It’d be really great if you could bring them back now.”
“Those girls’ parents ain’t worryin’ yet, but I dunno how much longer it’ll be before they realize that their daughters’ve been gone too long,” added Applejack, looking down guiltily.
“We had Spike send messages to Pinkie telling her to meet us at an inn we know in a city called Viljatown over there,” explained Twilight further. “We waited and waited, but she never showed up. And since she can’t cast the spell to send a message back to Spike, we don’t know why. So if you can bring her and those fillies back now, that would really help us out a lot.”
“I could do that,” admitted Discord. “Or, just a thought: I could summon that Lex fellow here instead, and we could all show him what for.” A snap of the fingers made Discord’s dogcatcher outfit disappear, puppy and all, to be replaced by a sign splattered with several images of the number four as well as multiple question marks, all in various sizes and colors. “I bet he’ll change Luna back all on his own when he sees that I can bury him beneath the world’s largest sandwich if he doesn’t, and then everypony will know that I was the one who saved the day!”
“No!” shrieked Cozy.
“That’s a terrible idea!” snapped Shining Armor.
“Bring that monster here? Now?” Rarity’s eyes widened in horror. “You can’t be serious!”
“Tut tut,” admonished Discord, still looking supremely pleased with his idea. “You haven’t seen the size of this sandwich.”
“And if his sandwich turns out to be bigger than yours?” murmured Grass Patch nervously, her glances at her daughter betraying what, or rather who, she was worried about. Soft Mane didn’t look much better, wrapping her arms around herself as though the very thought of Lex appearing in front of her made her feel a chill.
Discord’s eyes narrowed at the comment, but he didn’t have a chance to speak before Fluttershy flapped her wings and moved right in front of him. “Um, Discord?” she began hesitantly. “I know you feel bad that you couldn’t fix everything with Princess Luna, but you really don’t have to try so hard to make it up to us. We’re all really worried about Pinkie Pie, and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon too, so if you could just bring them back, I’m sure everypony here would be really grateful. And I bet they’d all be willing to forgive you about what happened with Tirek too.” Twilight, Rarity, and Applejack all nodded at that, with Cadance, Zecora, and several others joining in as well.
Princess Celestia did one better. “Fluttershy is correct.” Her voice was calm, but her usual understanding mien was gone, giving Discord a steely look. “Lex Legis needs to answer for what he’s done, but any attempt to bring him to heel will involve a conflict, and this is neither the time nor the place to engage in such a thing. Right now we need to focus on undoing the effects of his evil magic and reuniting Pinkie Pie with her friends, so that we can marshal all of our strength in preparation for when we face him again.”
Discord’s expression turned sour before giving a resigned sigh. “Oh fine. If that’s what you all really want.”
And then he snapped his fingers.
The sound hadn’t even begun to fade before everypony started looking around, necks craning as they glanced to and fro. Rarity even lifted the tablecloth so she could peek under the conference table, her horn lighting up as she swiveled her head back and forth. But a moment later she came back out from under it, looking at Twilight and shaking her head. Nearby, Spike glanced at a tray of cupcakes suspiciously, having seen Pinkie pop out of the most unusual places before. But when he glanced between them, there was no pink party pony to be found, even after he ate a few to make absolutely sure that she wasn’t hiding among the sugary treats.
“Discord…” Celestia’s voice was thick with warning.
The knocking cut off as abruptly as it had begun. But before the echoes of the quick, casual rapping had even started to fade, the voice of an irritated filly could be heard from the other side of it. “What is wrong with you?! You find a huge set of double doors standing upright in the middle of nowhere and your first instinct is to knock on them?!”
“Well yeah,” giggled a familiar voice. “It’d be rude to just stroll right in, silly. Besides, what if whoever’s on the other side is getting ready to throw us a surprise party? We’d need to let them know we’re here so they can all get ready and hide and turn out the lights and then when we walk in they can all yell ‘surprise’ and shower us with confetti from their party cannons!”
“I think you’re the only one with one of those,” came the amused voice of another filly.
“Alpha horse or beta horse please make crazy horse stop talking.” Unlike the others, this voice was male, having an oddly squeaky pitch to it. “Is making hard for Gneech to check magic door for traps.”
A third filly’s voice answered. “I don’t think anybody would trap something like this, Gneech. It’s too unusual for anyone not to be suspicious.”
“I’m the leader, I’ll be the judge of that!” snapped the first voice testily.
“Ooh! Ooh! What if we’re supposed to throw a surprise party for whoever comes through here?! Quick! We need cake! And streamers! And balloons! And more cake! And-”
That was all Twilight needed to hear. A single flap of her wings was all it took to send her rocketing toward the double doors at the end of the room. Her horn lit up before she was even halfway there, a matching glow surrounding the handle on each door, turning them and yanking as hard as she could, pulling the doors open to reveal…
“PINKIE!”
Tears filling her eyes, Twilight yelled out her friend’s name as the pink pony came into view. Although the mare in question was outfitted in a mishmash of equipment – wearing a gaudy green tabard which didn’t fully conceal the chain shirt poking out around the collar, as well as a pair of puffy pantaloons around her hind legs, slippers on all four hooves, an amulet around her neck, and a headband across her forehead, to say nothing of the collection of luggage on her back – there was no mistaking the mare that she’d spent weeks searching for. Barely registering the other figures around gathered around her, Twilight barreled into her target at full speed, sending luggage flying as the two of them went tumbling end over end, Pinkie’s companions scattering with yelps of alarm. They finally came to a stop several feet back, with Pinkie flat on her back and Twilight on top of her, fighting back sobs as she hugged her long-sought friend.
“Twilight?!” gaped Pinkie, her eyes widening almost to the size of dinner plates before a huge grin split her face, beginning to tear up as well. “Oh my gosh! This is the best surprise party EVER!” She looked ready to say more, but didn’t have a chance as Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy all suddenly threw themselves at her, joining Twilight in burying her beneath a mound of warm hugs and cries of joy.
“Princess Twilight?!”
The happy reunion was interrupted by the incredulous voice of a nearby filly, currently staring at the pile of ponies in shock. Sniffling, Twilight nodded as she slowly extricated herself from her friends. Although the filly in question was someone she’d only interacted with a few times, and was also outfitted appropriately for Everglow – wearing a button-down blouse over a chain shirt just like Pinkie’s, a skirt over her lower half, and most notably, a single-headed axe slung over one shoulder – the jeweled headpiece atop her mane would have been a dead giveaway even if she hadn’t recognized her. “Diamond Tiara! You’re alright! So that means…”
“You found us!” Silver Spoon’s voice was the only thing that made her identifiable, being completely covered from head to hoof in her full plate armor. The sight almost made Twilight giggle, the filly looking absolutely adorable as she raised a mailed hoof and lifted her visor, revealing a pair of bespectacled eyes that were currently blinking back tears. “Thank Luminace, you found us!”
“Beta horse know winged horse?” The question came from the creature peeking out from behind Silver Spoon. Although its face was shrouded by the hooded cloak it was wrapped in, enough of it was visible to see that it bore a vague resemblance to Spike, being a reptile that walked on two legs. But that was where the similarities ended. Almost three feet tall, this creature was thin to the point of being gaunt, with a snout that was a mottled dark green, matching the color of the gangly pair of legs that could be seen below the hem of its cloak. Peering at Twilight with beady yellow eyes, it made no move to come out from behind Silver Spoon. “Is friend?”
“She’s definitely a friend, Gneech.”
The certainty in the voice made Twilight blink, turning to the last member of Pinkie’s group. The filly grinning at her had a vibrant blue coat, with her mane and tail being a slightly darker shade of the same color. Unlike the others she wore neither armor nor clothes, being clad in just a cloak, a belt around her middle, and a ring around her right foreleg, allowing for her cutie mark – a cage whose bars had been broken – to be easily seen. More notable than that, however, was the prominent bulge in her lower abdomen, making it clear that despite looking no older than Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, she would soon become a mother.
For a moment Twilight could only stare at the unknown filly, torn between being shocked that such a little girl was pregnant and the unexpected feeling of familiarity that suddenly swept over her. She was certain, absolutely certain, that she’d seen this girl before, but she couldn’t remember where, too overcome with having finally been reunited with her missing friend for her brain to readily supply her with the relevant facts. “You’re…”
The filly giggled at her baffled expression. “You and your friends freed me, and my mother, from the gem gnolls, remember? After that, you brought us back to Yi Sheng, and then to Viljatown, where you asked the clerics at the Temple of Luminace to look after us.”
“Blue!” The name came to Twilight’s lips unbidden, suddenly recalling the circumstances where she’d met the smaller pony. It also made the girl’s pregnancy a little less shocking; Blue, Twilight recalled, was a member of a peculiar tribe of ponies that didn’t seem to age, spending their entire lives looking like they were children regardless of how old they actually were.
“That’s right!” Laughing happily, the filly reared up and clapped her forelegs together in delight before falling back onto all fours, trotting over to Twilight and giving her a quick hug before letting go, almost bouncing with excitement. “I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve been wanting to tell you everything I’ve learned since you set us free! Like that big torch in the sky?” She pointed upward. “That’s called the sun!”
“Yes, it…” Twilight’s delight at the unexpected reunion was wiped away by confusion as she glanced upward, realizing that the sun was plainly visible in the sky. But…that wasn’t right. The conference room was right behind them, and doorway she’d just gone through led to a hallway, not the outdoors.
Blinking, she glanced around, belatedly taking in that the hallway was nowhere to be seen. Instead she was standing in an open field, a warm breeze carrying the scent of grass and wildflowers as it washed over her. But that wasn’t right either; Canterlot was situated on top of a mountain, the only one around for hundreds of miles. Except there were several mountains visible in the distance now, and a village that had none of the familiar landmarks of Ponyville could be seen some ways away as well.
Fighting down a sense of panic at the thought that she’d been whisked away from Equestria again, Twilight whirled around to look back the way she came. Thankfully, the doorway she’d passed through was still there, and through the entranceway she could see back into the conference room, where everypony else was looking through with a mixture of shock and relief, with several individuals – including Zecora, Line Byline, Soft Mane, and Cadance – walking right up to the entranceway cautiously. Only Spike came through, however, rushing up to Twilight’s side without hesitation. “Whoa! Is this…Everglow?” he whispered.
“I think it must be,” replied Twilight in a hushed tone. “How else could everypony we’ve been looking for be here?”
Not noticing the whispered conversation, Blue kept going, looking around as she eagerly rattled off everything she’d learned. “And that big thing that’s blue like me that the sun’s in is called the sky! It even changes colors when the sun moves, and gets all dark like a cave when it disappears! Isn’t that amazing?! And this green stuff we’re walking on is called grass, and it’s a plant, but there are other kinds of plants that are green too! And-”
“That’s all mighty interestin’, sugarcube,” cut in Applejack, looking around in confusion now that the group hug had ended. “And I’m right pleased to see that everyone’s alright-”
“You should be, considering it’s your fault we were sent here in the first place!” Diamond Tiara stomped a hoof, giving Applejack a glare so fierce it made the orange mare step back in fright. “Do you have any idea what we’ve gone through because of you?!”
“Aw, c’mon!” Bouncing back to her hooves, Pinkie casually tousled Diamond Tiara’s mane, making the filly scowl harder and bat Pinkie’s hoof away as it knocked her headpiece askew. But Pinkie’s enthusiasm wasn’t diminished in the slightest. “We’ve had all sorts of fun adventures!”
She turned her attention back to Twilight and the others then, bouncing in place. “I know you sent us notes saying we needed to get to Viljatown in a hurry because some big bad guy was doing big bad things and you needed our help, but we kept running into other people on the way there who needed our help too! Like when we ran into these two fillies who were close as sisters and made a magic pact to be together forever and when one of their families was going to move away and take her with them they both got so sad that it made their entire forest sick! Ooh! Or when we helped put the ghost of a pirate-queen to rest since she was actually a really nice pony who felt super-guilty about an accident she'd caused when she was alive! Ooh! Ooh! Or a little while ago when this baker asked us to help gather ingredients to make the tastiest dessert ever for a baking competition, and we ended up going to a cloud village where this group called the fluffalo live! They’re like the buffalo we have on Equestria except they’re all fluffy like sheep and they have wings and they make the most delicious-est milk that makes even more delicious whipped cream! We got to try some after we got back to the baker’s place and were attacked by a candy monster-”
“Which you ate,” snickered Silver Spoon.
“Yup! And it was delicious! Oh I wish we’d been attacked by more of them!” Licking her lips, Pinkie’s eyes took on a dreamy look before she shook her head, continuing. “And then we were going to keep going to Viljatown but we saw these freaky-looking double doors standing up in the middle of a field all by themselves and so we went to investigate and guess what?! It was you guys!”
“It certainly was.” Rarity’s agreement came with a bright smile, looking back at the open doorway. “I have to say, for once Discord has positively outdone himself.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” announced Discord smugly, even as he split right down the middle, his two halves separating a few inches before he literally pulled himself together.
Still in the conference room, Princess Celestia raised a brow. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” grinned Discord, “that any third-rate wizard can manage to manage to figure out how to visit another dimension, but it takes a Lord of Chaos to open up a permanent portal to one, and without needing to wait thirty moons for it to open either!”
Several sets of eyes widened at that. “Permanent?” chorused Cadance, Shining Armor, Celestia, Luna, and several other ponies.
“Indeed!” Discord chuckled, making no effort to hide how pleased with himself he was. “Think about it. No more having to go on these adventures because someone accidentally sends themselves and their friends to that other world and can’t figure out how to get back! Now you just have to make your way back to wherever that field on the other side is and presto! You’re home! And you don’t even have to click your hooves three times,” he added, as a pair of ruby slippers appeared on his mismatched feet.
“But…right here in the castle?” murmured Luna uneasily.
Rolling his eyes, Discord huffed. “Oh honestly, if you’re worried about it disrupting hoof traffic here in the palace you don’t need to be. Both sides of the doorway on that world are connected to both sides of this one. If you really need to get back to that hallway outside this conference room you can just go into that field, walk around to the other side of the door there and go through, and you’ll be in the hall. No muss no fuss.”
“Just thinking about how that works hurts my brain,” murmured Grass Patch.
“The important thing,” continued Discord, “is that I held up my end of the bargain and then some, all without any complications or misadventures or side effects. You’re welcome.”
The voice, and its owner, came from out of nowhere. One second everyone in the conference room was gathering around the portal Discord had created, peering in wonder at the doorway to another world. The next, there was an unknown creature in their midst, causing everyone to freeze in shock and confusion.
The conference room the princesses had chosen was an ornate chamber, with a vaulted ceiling over twenty feet high. But the thing that suddenly appeared was only barely able to fit inside of the place, its head brushing the top of the room despite it hovering just a few inches off the ground. Its size, however, was the least bizarre aspect of its appearance.
Its abdomen and head were humanoid, similar to Soft Mane’s, but rather than being made of flesh it was formed out of slate-gray stone, sculpted to display an impressive set of muscles below an impassive face. From its back sprouted wings made of metal, socketed joints moving soundlessly as keen, glittering feathers spread to catch the air. Six powerful arms jutted from its shoulders, each one of them thicker than an ordinary pony’s torso. The topmost pair wielded a sword in its left hand, the blade more than ten feet from hilt to point, whereas the right held a long metal shaft that terminated in a spiked ball that was almost the size of Princess Celestia. The middle set of arms both gripped a spear so heavy that a log looked like a toothpick by comparison. But most intimidating were the thing’s lower arms; rather than wielding any weapons, its hands gripped – or rather, were attached to – metal spheres. The sphere in its left hand radiated flames so intense that it was like it held a small sun, whereas the right one crackled with enough electricity that filled the entire room with a low, droning buzz.
Most unusual of all, however, was the creature’s lower body. Below the waist, it had no legs or tail or anything that even remotely resembled a normal creature. Instead, its lower half consisted of a series of large metal rings, easily half-a-dozen or more, all of them eight feet in diameter, whirling rapidly in different configurations, somehow managing to avoid striking each other despite moving through the same orbit. Just as baffling was how a dim blue glow radiated out from the creature, tinting the entire area a gentle azure despite the light having no obvious source.
Then, while everyone tried to figure out what was happening, the thing raised the sword it was carrying and pointed it menacingly at the double doors where Discord had created the portal to Everglow. Instantly, an emerald field sprang into existence, spreading out to cover the far end of the conference room. As soon as the green emanation reached the open doorway, the sunny field that lay on the other side of it was gone, instantly replaced by the castle hallway once again.
Just like that, the portal to Everglow had been closed…with Twilight, her friends, and the ponies they’d been trying to rescue still on the other side of it.
“Twilight!” yelled Princess Celestia, eyes widening in horror.
“Spike!” Soft Mane’s voice was no less shocked, her clouded eyes staring at where the portal had been.
“Whatever you are, bring them back this instant!” Shining Armor’s threat was accompanied by his pointing his horn at the unknown creature, a brilliant rose-colored aura appearing around it.
“Now really, this is the absolute height of rudeness.” As he said the word “height,” Discord’s size increased until he was just as tall as the metal-and-stone monstrosity, floating over so that he was right in the thing’s expressionless face. “I don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to be, but first you show up trying to look even weirder than I am, and then you close the gateway that I made?! You’re lucky I’m such a good sport,” he huffed, suddenly clad in a hoofball uniform, “or I’d take it personally. Besides, it’s not like I can’t just make another one.”
That last part was accompanied by another snap of his fingers, and this time the door at the other end of the room – the smaller, single door that Princesses Celestia and Luna had entered from – suddenly flew open. Once again, the sunny pastoral scene was visible, as were the collection of ponies (and two reptiles) looking around wildly, their eyes widening as they saw the way home suddenly reappear. For his part, Discord sneered at the statue-like newcomer. “How do you like them apples?” he snickered, snapping his fingers again…but this time, nothing happened, making his smug look turn into one of confused annoyance. “Strange, that should have turned your weapons into apples. Is everyone around here chaos-proof all of a sudden?”
The creature’s stone eyes turned to examine Discord. “Originator of nonvolatile planar aperture located. Running multi-spectrum analysis. Analysis complete. Entity class: five. Meta-type: para-mortal. Numinous mode confirmed: anarchic gradient. Magnitude: category four. Classification: not found.” Its posture shifted then, bringing its weapons into ready positions. “Conclusion: terminate with extreme prejudice.”
It gave no further warning before it attacked.
Instantly, the arm holding the spiked mace lashed out with an overhead swing, the weapon punching through the ceiling with no more resistance than if the stone had been made out of paper. Ignoring the debris raining down on its head, it brought the mace down on Discord before the surprised draconequus had time to react, smashing him down onto the conference table. The wood splintered instantly, the ends of the table jackknifing into the air as Discord was driven down through the table and into the floor, the stonework on the ground faring no better against the force of the blow than the ceiling had, instantly cratering as a torrent of dust exploded throughout the room.
Pandemonium immediately descended, screams of fright filling the room as everyone started acting at once. Shining Armor grabbed his wife in both hooves and literally flung her toward the far side of the room, away from the thing. Aisle immediately turned and knocked Cozy and Pillow to the ground, throwing himself over both of them as chunks of wood and stone came raining down. Zecora grabbed the insensate form of Line Byline, knocked senseless by the end of the table catching him across the head, and began dragging him toward the exit. A second later she was joined by Grass Patch and Soft Mane, the latter murmuring a healing spell before reaching out to touch the dazed stallion.
Shielding herself and her sister with one wing, Celestia hurriedly issued instructions. “Luna, have the castle evacuated! Make sure the guards get everyone outside!”
“But what about you?!” Even as the words left her lips, Luna knew what Celestia’s answer would be.
She was proven right a moment later. “I’ll make a stand here and buy you some time to escape. If we can’t stop this thing and Canterlot falls, then head south, beyond the Badlands, and get help from the queen of the hippo-”
“No! Don’t try and fight it!”
The voice made both sisters jump, gasping as Willow – the purrsian who had abruptly vanished when Discord had initially appeared – suddenly reappared right in front of them. The unexpected sight was enough to bring both of them up short, with Celestia recovering first. “What do you mean?! That thing’s attacking us!”
Willow shook her head. “That ‘thing’ is a lhaksharut!”
Luna's brows rose, uncomprehending. “A what?”
“A lhaksharut!” repeated Willow. “It’s one of the inevitables, the beings who enforce the natural order! I studied them before I left home! It came here because it picked up on the permanent gateway that Discord creature made between this world and Everglow! Since he practically spit in its face by opening another one, it’s only focused on him! If we don’t interfere, then after it kills him and closes that second portal, it should leave!”
“‘Should’?!” repeated Luna incredulously, looking past Celestia. The lhaksharut hadn’t ceased its attacks. Although the debris had completely hidden Discord from view, the inevitable was continuing to attack where he had fallen, bringing its sword down in a slice that not only took out more of the ceiling, but landed so hard that the impact could be felt through the ground. Nor did it stop there, stabbing downward with its spear in a brutal strike that buried more than half of the massive weapon in the smoke-hidden ground.
“If you go to his aid,” stressed Willow, “you’ll only be making yourselves targets as well! These things are incredibly powerful! If you couldn’t even defeat one dark wizard then you have no chance against this! Just let it kill him and-”
“Leave him alone!”
Twilight’s voice rang out as a lightning bolt shot from her horn, lancing across the conference room and striking the creature dead-center as she and her friends rushed back through the portal, joining the battle.
“Let me go! We have to help them!”
Blue struggled to make her way toward the freestanding door in front of her, digging her hooves into the ground as she tried to follow Twilight Sparkle and the others. “Gneech, let me go!”
But the kobold refused to relinquish his grip on her tail, yanking on it with all of his strength as he tried to keep her from her destination. “Blue horse no go there! Big stone monster is big and stone! Blue horse be killed!”
“So what should we do, just stand here and watch?!” She kept trying to make her way forward, but despite Gneech’s thin frame, his persistent tugging was – in conjunction with her gravid state – enough to stop her from making any forward motion. “Diamond Tiara, tell him to let me go!”
“Why?” snorted the other filly, making no move to follow the adults into the fray. “He’s got the right idea.”
Diamond Tiara's answer was enough to shock Blue into stillness, slumping backward as her lack of resistance allowed Gneech to pull her back into a sitting position (and sending the kobold stumbling). “You can’t mean that!” Searching for allies, her eyes fell on the last member of their group. “Silver Spoon, tell her she can’t possibly mean that!”
Staring at the battle raging in the conference room, Silver Spoon gulped before turning her attention to the other two fillies. “I…I think we should go help them! Princess Twilight and her friends came here to rescue us, so we should-”
“Are you kidding me?!” Diamond Tiara’s snarl was punctuated by her slamming her axe into the ground in frustration. “It was her friend Applejack’s fault that we got into this mess in the first place, remember?! Now they’re getting us into an even bigger one, and you want to go charging right in?!”
“Alpha horse smart,” chimed in Gneech, dusting himself off as he stood up. “Know not dying is better than big reward. That why alpha.”
“Darn right I-, wait…big reward?” Diamond Tiara cocked her head, giving Gneech a suspicious look. “What big reward?”
Gneech blinked, cocking his head as though unsure why it needed to be explained. “Well, alpha horse say winged horse is princess, yes? Save princess, shower with treasure and magic. But only if survive. Much better not die and get treasure and magic somewhere else later.”
Diamond Tiara didn’t say anything to that, and Silver Spoon shared a bemused look with Blue, the two of them almost able to see the gears in their leader’s head turning. Sure enough, a second later Diamond Tiara grabbed her axe and pointed it dramatically at the portal. “Alright everypony, change of plans! We’re going to charge in there and turn that big statue into a heap of rubble! Then Princess Twilight and the others will owe us big!”
“Eh?!” Gneech’s eyes opened wide with horror. “Alpha horse go crazier than crazy horse! Gneech not go! Just say is better survive than die trying!”
“Gneech,” growled Diamond Tiara, “I want you to ask yourself right now, who are you more scared of: that monster,” she stalked toward the kobold then, giving him her darkest glare, “or ME?!”
Withering under the threat of the filly’s wrath, Gneech’s defiance crumbled faster than a sand castle at high tide, and he prostrated himself in front of her, shaking like a leaf. “Gneech follow alpha horse!”
“Darn right!” snapped Diamond Tiara, before giving the other two a look. “Anyone else got a problem with my plan?” When Blue and Silver Spoon shook their heads, she hoisted her axe again, turning back toward the portal. “Then ch-, WHOA!”
Diamond Tiara’s shock robbed her of her momentum, making her stop before she’d moved more than five feet toward the doorway back to the conference room. Behind her, Silver Spoon, Blue, and Gneech were much the same, wide-eyed at what had happened during their brief delay…
Clad in her armor, her friend’s magic, and her own protective spell, Applejack bellowed a wordless battle cry as she charged toward the stone monstrosity.
The armor was Twilight’s doing, teleporting the enchanted chain shirt that Applejack had originally acquired back on Everglow, and had since left back at Sweet Apple Acres, right onto her once they’d exited the portal that Discord had made. For her part, Applejack had supplemented that with one of the spells she’d learned, wrapping herself in a thin shield of force. Finally, Pinkie had cast a spell that made all of them faster than normal, allowing Applejack to cross the distance between herself and the lhaksharut – as she'd overheard Willow call it – in the blink of an eye, reaching its side just after Twilight’s lightning bolt struck it dead-center.
Neither Twilight’s spell nor her headlong rush earned the creature’s notice, however. The lightning impacted its titanic body to no effect, tendrils of electricity crawling over it before flickering into nothing without leaving so much as a scorch mark. Her loud roar, designed to draw the thing’s attention away from Discord – and hopefully away from where Fluttershy was trying to slip in to pull the draconequus out of there – was likewise ignored, the gigantic thing instead peering at the dust-shrouded impact crater it had made, apparently concerned only with confirming that it had downed its enemy and not what was going on around it.
That’s a mistake it ain’t gonna make twice, smirked Applejack as she spun around and shifted her weight forward, winding up with both of her hind legs.
Her most recent sojourn to Everglow, taken with Twilight and Rainbow Dash, hadn’t been the same sort of adventure as her last few expeditions there. Having used magic to let Pinkie Pie know that she should head to Viljatown once she located Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, Twilight had recommended that they make for the city in question and wait to meet up with them there. Although Applejack hadn’t been happy at the passive approach – and Rainbow Dash had complained bitterly about it – she knew that Twilight had been right. With no idea where to even start looking, it was better to stay in one place and let Pinkie come to them. So the three of them had settled in at Viljatown, limiting their searching to patrolling the city to see if their missing friend had arrived yet.
It had been on one such outing that Applejack had met Burly Brawl.
With muscles that made Bulk Biceps look like Pipsqueak, the mercenary had been just about the rudest pony she’d ever met in her life. That he’d flipped up her skirt (everypony wore clothes in Viljatown) for his own amusement had been bad enough. That he’d gotten a look at her cutie mark and laughed that he’d “love to stuff your tight little apple pie with my cream filling” had been worse. But the most humiliating part of the exchange had been how she hadn’t been able to make him eat his words. Despite being the strongest pony she knew, and having studied magic with Twilight’s friends at the Seekers guild, Applejack hadn’t been able to do more than give the brawny earth stallion a bloody nose during their subsequent fight, something which had only made him grin wider before he’d knocked her through a building. The last thing she’d heard before she’d lost consciousness had been him wandering away, chuckling about how she’d been “cheaper than a whore and lasted almost as long.”
Twilight had been horrified when she’d heard what had happened, and Rainbow Dash had been furious. But while the former had pleaded with her to report what had happened to the city guards, and the latter had suggested that the three of him track the offending stallion down and beat him within an inch of his life, Applejack had made them Pinkie Promise not to do anything. This was her fight, and she wouldn’t let anyone else handle it for her.
The next day – after a trip to a nearby temple to have her wounds magically healed – she’d asked around, finally managing to locate Burly at a basement tavern so filthy and decrepit that the entire place looked like it should have been condemned. Casting every battle spell she knew on herself beforehoof, she’d called him out right in the middle of the place, letting him finish his drink and get to his hooves before she’d charged him. This time her blows had at least gotten a grunt out of him – though that might have been indigestion from that foul-smelling brew he’d been drinking – before he’d pummeled her into submission, ending the fight by bucking her upward so hard that she’d exited through the roof of the two-story building above the place.
At least the new skylight had improved the décor.
Still, Applejack had refused to take her defeat lying down, making another trip to the temple to heal up and going to fight Burly again the next day, despite how Twilight and Rainbow Dash had both pleaded with her not to. She’d ended up losing that fight too, as well as the one after that. And the one after that. And the one after that.
She still wasn’t exactly sure when their daily fights had turned into training, but by the end of the first week Burly had already started giving her tips. By the end of the second she’d been grudgingly asking for pointers. By the end of the third she’d already started making noticeable improvement, being able to buck hard enough to pulverize rocks into dust, a feat that she'd never been able to do before and had been quite proud of before she’d seen Burly do the same thing to a diamond at a shady-looking wizard’s request.
Of course, none of that changed her opinion of the musclebound stallion. If anything, it got worse over time. Burly couldn’t get two sentences out without making some disgusting comment about her body, his prowess, or some other repulsive remark. But he knew how to fight, making it no surprise when she found out that his cutie mark (or “brand of destiny,” as they called them on Everglow) was two hooves slamming against each other.
What had been a surprise was his take on the spellcasting she’d been using to supplement her fighting style.
“You’re doing it wrong,” he’d said bluntly.
“I’m doin’ it just fine!” she’d snapped back at him, barely having managed to finish casting her force shield spell while avoiding his punches. She knew from experience that it wouldn’t be enough to stop him from landing any blows on her, but it would at least add another layer of protection that he’d have to get through, cushioning the impact a little. “I got my spell off without you stoppin’ me, didn’t I?”
He’d given her that infuriating smirk then, the one that she’d sworn to wipe off his face before going back to Equestria, but never had. “Oh, I’d never stop you from getting off, Applesnatch.” That was his favorite nickname for her, despite – or probably because of – how much she hated it. “But you’re an earth pony. You should be using that magic, not crooning and waving your hooves around like some pansy-ass wizard.”
“I am usin’ my earth pony magic!” Ducking under a left hook that she knew would have rattled her brain if it had connected, Applejack put two jabs into Burly’s chest, though she suspected that doing so hurt her hooves more than it did his ribs. “I’ve been usin’ it every day since I first bucked a tree back when I was a filly! And don’t call me that!”
Burly had snorted at that, darting forward and planting a hoof in her gut that left her doubled over. “You see? If you were really using your earth pony magic, you’d have shrugged that off instead of bending over like a bitch in heat.”
Struggling not to throw up, Applejack had only been able to glare up at the larger pony, trying to figure out what he was talking about. “How?” she’d croaked. “What’s that got to do with earth pony magic?”
Instead of answering, Burly had wandered over to a marble bench that was nearby (they’d been fighting in a park this time), casually lifting it and swinging it down hard towards Applejack’s head. Alarmed, the mare had forced herself to straighten up, punching upward with a hoof before Burly’s swing was completed. Fortunately she’d been successful, her hoof shattering the stone furniture before it could impact her skull. “You see? When we’d first met that would have knocked your head in. Earth pony magic.”
Wary of another attack, Applejack had stumbled backward, shaking her head. “That…that’s ‘cuz I’ve gotten stronger.”
Burly had rolled his eyes then, making no move to go after her. “Stronger how? All you’ve done is get your juicy ass kicked over and over again. You really think that builds strength?”
Applejack could still remember how confused she’d felt right then, realizing that Burly had been right. She’d gotten a lot stronger in the short time she’d been training with him, but now that she thought about it there was no real reason for it. It made sense that she’d gotten more skilled at fighting, but why could she suddenly smash rocks now when she’d never been able to before?
“Earth pony magic,” Burly had continued, seeing her confusion, “is physical. It’s in your muscles. Your bones. Your cooch. It’s not some spell that you memorize or whatever wizards and priests do. You use it the same way you use your body. You can build it up, train it, strengthen it, and make it do a lot more than you think.”
“But…” Applejack hadn’t been sure what to make of that, struggling to come to terms with what Burly was telling her. Everypony in Equestria knew that, in addition to the magic of their cutie mark, each of the three tribes had their own magic, and for earth ponies that was being strong and durable. But that magic was passive, serving as a supplement to whatever strength they had from simple muscle power and that was it. If some ponies were stronger than others, it was because they were simply bigger or worked out more, like Big Mac, or had cutie marks that also offered a physical boost, like Maud.
But if Burly was right and that wasn’t the case…
“So that’s why you should quit with that other kind of magic,” Burly had continued, apparently oblivious to his having overturned one of the most fundamental aspects of what Applejack thought she knew. “You don’t want to be crooning and waving your hooves when someone’s right up in your face anyway. I mean unless they’re sticking it to you,” he added with a leer. “Now, let’s go again…”
It had taken some time for her to get the hang of it after that, but Applejack had eventually figured out how to consciously invoke her earth pony magic. Just like Burly had said, it could be used to incredible effect, allowing for remarkable feats of physical prowess to be performed. But against his advice, she’d also continued studying the magic that Twilight had helped teach her; earth pony magic could push your physical limits in all sorts of ways, but beyond that it was extremely limited in what it could do. And unlike the spellcasting Twilight had taught her, it was tiring to use, putting a strain on your body that could leave you depleted in short order, unlike the chant-and-gesture magic that you memorized from a spellbook.
And if you could use both of them together, the way she could? Smartly relying on book-learned spellcasting where it was most useful, while also relying on consciously-directed earth pony magic to do what it was best at?
The results of that were something that this monster attacking them now was about to experience firsthoof.
Grinning, Applejack kicked out with her back legs, striking the creature with everything she had.
Applejack’s kick landed with enough power that it would have smashed any of the trees in Sweet Apple Acres to splinters instantly.
Augmented by a strength-enhancing spell that she’d studied under Twilight’s tutelage and cast just before she’d charged, as well as amplified by a concentrated burst of her natural earth pony magic that she’d learned how to use from Burly, and delivered with the muscles that she’d developed over a lifetime of working on her farm, Applejack’s hooves impacted hard against one of the rotating rings that made up the lhaksharut’s lower body. The thick metal instantly deformed under the force of the blow, folding inward with a heavy clang. The noise was immediately followed by several similar clashes of metal on metal as the damaged ring impacted the others that it had been so carefully avoiding, causing the lhaksharut to stagger, its wings stretching wider as it tried to keep its balance.
“Yee-haw!” whooped Applejack, unable to help but feel giddy at the impressive result of all her training. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see Fluttershy creeping toward where Discord had fallen, and hoped that the thing would be too focused on the new threat to notice. “Now if you know what’s good for you, you’ll hurry up and get, ‘cause there’s plenty more where that came from!”
The question had barely left her mouth when it was answered. Right in front of her eyes, the ring that she’d damaged returned to its original shape, the indentation that she’d made in it fading away as smoothly as if she’d punched a pillow, rather than a substance that felt harder than steel. Instantly, the collection of rings resumed their unbroken orbits, once again spinning rapidly without impacting each other as the lhaksharut regained its balance, turning to look at her. “Secondary target recognized. Commencing termination procedures.”
Her shock turning into resolve as she realized that this was going to be tougher than she’d thought, Applejack tensed at the thing’s announcement that she was a target. But at the same time, she knew she couldn’t back off: out of her periphery, she could see that the dust obscuring the crater was thinning out, being dispersed by the flapping of wings. A second later, the image of Fluttershy became visible, her forelegs wrapped around an unconscious Discord as she dragged him out of the rubble. Twilight’s plan was working! Now she just had to buy Fluttershy some more time…
I can do this, Applejack reassured herself. Backing off wasn’t an option, but she didn’t intend to simply stand there and take the hits if she could at all dodge them. Still, some of them would almost certainly get through; despite the creature’s size, she’d seen how fast it had moved when it had unleashed its wrath on Discord, and knew that she’d be hard-pressed to avoid all of its attacks. Even so, she felt certain that between her armor, the force shield spell she’d used on herself, and using her earth pony magic to toughen her body – another trick she’d learned from Burly – she could stand up to whatever punishment it dealt out.
For a little while, at least.
But instead of moving to bash, slice, or pierce her with its collection of armaments, the lhaksharut extended its lowest pair of arms, the ones that had metal orbs affixed to their hands. The one with the flaming sphere was pointed straight at her, and the one that was crackling with electricity was aimed…directly at Fluttershy and Discord! Applejack had just enough time to realize that she hadn’t distracted the creature after all; she had simply made it split its attention.
And then a torrent of fire, which she knew she wouldn’t be able to block the way she could a physical attack, rushed toward her at the same time as a massive surge of electricity shot toward her friends.
“Please wake up!” whimpered Fluttershy, barely able to keep her voice down as she tried her best to get Discord away from that monster. “Please wake up! Please wake up! Please, Discord, wake up!”
But the draconequus didn’t comply, lying still in a way that made her heart hammer. In the time that she’d known Discord, Fluttershy had never once seen him actually get hurt before. Although he’d been drained of his magic by Tirek only a few months previous – and turned to stone prior to that when she and her friends had used the Elements of Harmony against him – anything less than that had never seemed to do anything but amuse him. It had been enough to make her think that, notwithstanding some sort of super-powerful magic being used against him, he simply couldn’t be hurt. Certainly not by simply hitting him with giant weapons!
But he looked hurt now, dirty and covered with cuts and bruises. One of his mismatched wings, the feathery one, was hanging at an odd angle that was painful just to look at, as was his hoofed leg. One of his horns, the antler, had broken off completely, and part of his lower torso was crushed in a way that didn’t look at all like cartoonish way he’d sometimes contort his body.
The sight of him right now made her want to cry, all sorts of horrible feelings coming to the fore. Fear was the most prominent, the sudden battle causing her to remember the last time they’d been attacked by monsters from another world, back in Manehattan during the Elemental Bleeds. Not only had Twilight died in that attack – being brought back to life later by a powerful spellcaster on Everglow – but Fluttershy had been tortured by a monster that they’d encountered, an encounter that still left her trembling when she remembered it.
But even worse than the fear was the sudden guilt that squeezed her heart. Discord had been trying to help, to really, genuinely help. He didn’t deserve this…especially since all he’d wanted was to be forgiven for what happened with Tirek. Just thinking about that made Fluttershy feel horrible now, recalling how she hadn’t invited him over for tea even once since he’d betrayed them. She hadn’t meant to push him away…or at least, that’s what she’d told herself. Instead she’d just found excuses not to ask him to come over. It was always because Angel was being too fussy or she needed to help Doctor Fauna with a sick animal or she was feeling too fragile because of what had happened to her in Manehattan. She’d even decided that when the Grand Galloping Gala came around in a few months, she’d invite her new friend Tree Hugger to come with her instead of Discord, telling herself that he wouldn’t like a stuffy old gala anyway.
It was only at that moment that Fluttershy realized that she’d completely cut Discord out of her life…and now she might never get the chance to tell him how much she regretted that now.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try. “Discord,” she sobbed, wings still flapping as she kept trying to pull him to safety. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry! I never meant to stop being your friend! I-, oh!” She bit back a yelp as she almost dragged his broken bat wing across a chunk of the now-shattered conference table, doing her best to move him around it so that she didn’t accidentally hurt him any worse than he already-, wait, his broken bat wing? But…but it had been his feathered wing that was broken…and it still was. And yet his other wing was hurt now too…
For a split second she thought it was one of Discord’s pranks, that he was just pretending to be hurt in order to get her to forgive him and had decided to make himself look even worse in order to feed her guilt. But there was no telltale smirk at the corner of his lips. No cracking his eyes open to see if she was falling for it. He looked just as hurt as he did before…no, worse than before! Even as Fluttershy watched, new bruises seemed to appear on his body, and several of his cuts seemed to grow deeper. He’s getting worse! she realized, a sinking feeling developing in the pit of her stomach. Somehow, that statue-like monster had not only injured him, but was somehow making his wounds worse even now! She had to find someone who could treat him, who could-
A crackling of electricity made Fluttershy look up, her eyes widening as she saw that the stone-faced monster was holding out its lower arms. One was pointed right at Applejack, the sphere it was carrying awash with flame. The other was buzzing with electricity…and pointed right at her.
And at Discord.
Her instincts screamed at her to run, to get out of there and save herself. But she couldn’t. Not when she’d already run away from Discord so many times before. Instead, giving a whimper of terror, she hugged him close and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the end to come. A second later there was a deafening reverberation, and Fluttershy tensed, certain that agony would follow it an instant later.
But when no pain arrived, she opened one eye just a little…only for both to widen at what she saw.
The beam of electricity, which had to be at least five feet in diameter, wasn’t able to reach them. It abruptly terminated just a few feet away from her and Discord, creating a roar like a dozen chainsaws as it impacted a transparent blue wall of force that had suddenly sprung up in front of them. And standing between them and it, teeth gritted and grunting with effort as his horn glowed brightly, fighting to keep the wall from collapsing, was Twilight’s brother, Shining Armor.
The rush of relief almost made Fluttershy swoon, before she remembered that Applejack had been in the same position as her. Whipping her head around, she looked for the farm pony…just in time to see a flash as Applejack reappeared at the other end of the room, courtesy of a teleportation spell cast by Twilight in the nick of time. It was a good thing too, as the floor where Applejack had been was currently bubbling, nearly liquified from the fiery attack.
“Are you alright?!”
Fluttershy nearly leapt out of her skin as Princess Cadance suddenly appeared at her side. “Y-yes! But Discord’s hurt badly, and I think he’s getting worse! I-”
But Cadance wasn’t listening, having knelt down and begun chanting a soft prayer to Lashtada as soon as Fluttershy had said yes. Simultaneously, Fluttershy could see Princess Celestia hovering overhead, firing a beam of energy from her horn at the stony creature, impacting it to no apparent effect. Behind it, Fluttershy could just barely glimpse Luna and Rarity helping to usher Zecora, Line Byline, Pillowcase, Produce Aisle, Comfy Cozy, Willow, Grass Patch, and Soft Mane out the other door. Although the green field that the monster had use to shut down Discord’s portal was still blanketing that part of the room, it didn’t seem to prevent anyone from physically exiting the conference room-turned-battlefield, letting them rush out into the adjoining hallway without restraint.
There was one person who refused to leave, however. Soft Mane smacked her mother’s hooves away, doing the same thing when Rarity tried to usher her out a moment later, pointing at the far end of the conference room. A look in that direction revealed what she was pointing at, Fluttershy’s eyes landing on Spike. From his position right next to Twilight, the little dragon breathed onto the rolled-up scroll in his claw, the paper turning into twinkling smoke as it rushed out a nearby window.
But Fluttershy had no time to ponder exactly who Spike was sending a letter to in the middle of a battle, as Princess Cadance finished her prayer and reached out to lay a hoof on Discord. Instantly, his cuts and bruises disappeared, his wings righting themselves and his crushed middle filling out again. Even his horn was fixed, with his yellow eyes popping open a second later, blinking in confusion. “Did anyone get the number of that truck that hit me?” he asked, sitting up woozily, tire tracks suddenly appearing across his middle.
“Discord!” Despite knowing that it wasn’t the time for it, Fluttershy couldn’t help herself, throwing her forelegs around his neck and hugging him tightly. “Thank goodness you’re okay! I was so worr-”
But she didn’t get a chance to finish as the surge of electricity abruptly ceased impacting Shining Armor’s shield. The stallion couldn’t hold back a sigh of relief, sinking to his knees and panting as the strain of stopping such a huge attack caught up to him. Cadance rushed to his side, but before she could get a word out, the monster spoke again.
Fluttershy had no idea what that meant, but she knew in an instant that Twilight did, feeling her blood turn cold at the look of sudden horror spreading across her friend’s face.
Twilight fought down a surge of panic at the lhaksharut’s announcement, knowing she had only seconds to act.
An axiomatic numinous field. Those words immediately sent her back to her time on Everglow, when she’d studied that world’s magic beneath the watchful eye of an old earth pony wizard by the name of Under Score. He’d taught her a great deal, ranging from the differences between arcane and divine spellcasting to the nine thematic categories that all spells were catalogued under, such as conjurations or illusions or necromancy. And one of his lessons had dealt with what one particular type of spells could do…
“I still don’t understand why you don’t want me to learn that ‘infernal healing’ spell,” huffed Twilight, frowning at Under Score. The old wizard was normally quite generous with sharing the spells that he knew – at least among those ponies who had proven themselves to be both competent and trustworthy, which Twilight felt sure she had – but there were some that he flatly refused to teach her, and this was one of them. “Wouldn’t it be better if I knew one of the few curative spells that you don’t need to be a divine spellcaster to use?”
“Clerics and other spellcasters of faith can, in fact, cast that spell too, Miss Sparkle.” Under Score always insisted on a degree of formality when he was lecturing her, which he apparently was now. “They simply tend to eschew it in favor of more effectual spells that utilize the life-restoring properties of positive energy as a method of healing, and you should eschew it so as not to become comfortable with casting spells that call upon profane forces. There’s a reason why the name of the spell is ‘infernal’ healing.”
“But it’s still a healing spell,” protested Twilight. “It helps people. How exactly does that use ‘profane forces’?”
“It’s not in the effect where such energies typically leave their mark,” explained Under Score. Looking at Twilight, he canted his head and started walking, indicating that he wanted her to follow him. It was only when they were back in his office at the Seekers Academy that he continued. “The infernal healing spell leaves only the faintest trace of malevolence upon those it’s used on,” he admitted once they were both inside and he’d closed the door. “That mainly manifests in it leaving behind scars rather than unblemished flesh, since any lingering aura from the spell itself fades away in a matter of seconds.”
Twilight’s ears perked up at that, wondering if she’d just won the argument. “Then-”
“But even if the recipient of the spell is at no risk of moral corruption, the same cannot be said for the caster,” noted Under Score pointedly. “Miss Sparkle, do you remember what you told me about your native world’s magic? About how, while its utilization is a physical process, an individual’s disposition – if maintained at a substantial level for a sufficient duration – can color the effects that they’re trying to produce?
“That’s oversimplifying it a bit, but-”
“What I’m describing to you now is exactly the opposite. Rather than your state of mind affecting the magic you use, using spells like infernal healing can affect your state of mind, the same way that what you take into your body can affect your health.” Opening a drawer in his desk, Under Score took out a vial filled with a powdery yellow substance, placing it in front of Twilight. “Powdered sulfur,” he noted. “Even a little irritates the skin and eyes, inflames the lungs and throat, and upsets the stomach.” He then opened one of his saddlebags, withdrawing an apple and a thin wedge of cheese, placing them alongside the vial. “My lunch,” he explained, before giving Twilight a pointed look. “Now, which one would you rather eat?”
Now it was Twilight’s turn to frown, finding the simplistic analogy a bit insulting. “I understand the principle,” she noted testily. “It’s the application that I’m confused about. A lot of the spells you’ve taught me have been attack magic, but I don’t feel like attacking anyone. What makes spells like infernal healing different?”
Under Score didn’t answer her immediately, instead putting the vial of sulfur away and repacking his lunch before replying. “In theory, they shouldn’t be,” he said at last. “The thought-forms that we use to store magical energies in our minds are built to shape and direct those energies when we draw upon them, only utilizing them according to the highly-specific arrangements into which they’ve been composed.”
“But…?” prompted Twilight.
“But nothing is one hundred percent efficient,” sighed Under Score. “There’s always some energy lost in the transfer, and where do you think that goes?”
Twilight’s eyes widened. “Into us?”
Under Score nodded. “Us, and also the surrounding environment. For the most part, however, the thought-forms we use are built to provide outlets to handle the safe diffusion of lost energy, which is why casting a sleep spell won’t make you drowsy, or casting a shield spell won’t make you feel defensive. But there are certain energies that we’re more sensitive to than others. Are you familiar with the concept of numinous modes?”
When Twilight shook her head, he kept going. “There are certain planes of existence where particular metaphysical concepts are less abstract than they are here. Where ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and similar ideals such as ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ aren’t merely abstract concepts, but fundamental modes of existence, as important as gravity or magnetism. For whatever reason, the energies of these realms resonate strongly with the spiritual – or ‘numinous’ – aspect of sapient beings. The result is that repeated exposure to those energies, such as via spells that make use of them, can start to affect an individual’s temperament, changing who they are in ways far deeper than any mere physical alteration.”
Twilight’s eyebrows had been steadily rising during Under Score’s explanation. “Wait, so you’re saying that people are only good or bad because they’ve become…saturated with these planar forces?”
To her great relief, Under Score shook his head. “While that idea has yet to be conclusively disproven, the evidence that our best sages have gathered suggests that isn’t the case. Rather, it seems to be a case of like calling to like. If you’re already a good person, then you’ll have a greater inclination for planar energies that match your moral alignment. We think that’s why, presuming you haven’t pledged yourself to any particular deity during the course of your life, your soul goes to whatever plane of existence best matches your metaphysical gradient after you die.”
“Or you could just refuse to go,” murmured Twilight uncomfortably, remembering what had happened to her when she’d met an untimely demise during the Elemental Bleeds. Soft Whisper, Everglow’s goddess of death, had attempted to shepherd her toward the afterlife. But Twilight, not wanting to leave, had clung to the living world with everything she’d had, becoming a ghost. It wasn’t an experience she was eager to repeat, and not just because dying had been awful; the highly-negative feelings that had prompted her to refuse to pass on – intense fear, overwhelming loss, profound regret, and others like them – had been all that sustained her as a ghost, since it required profound emotional resonance for a disembodied soul to will itself to remain in the physical world. But those same intensely negative feelings had slowly started to warp her personality, which in hindsight hadn’t been surprising; you couldn’t remain in a perpetual state of intense trauma and not have it twist who you were. Just the thought of anything like that happening again was enough to snuff out Twilight’s curiosity about the infernal healing spell.
Her feelings must have shown on her face, because Under Score gave her a concerned look. “In the interest of full disclosure,” he said slowly. “I should mention that confirmed cases of individuals whose identity was altered because they used too much numinous magic are extremely few and far between. The conventional wisdom is that, so long as they’re used in moderation, the chances of your metaphysical alignment being altered due to casting those spells is virtually nil.” He gave her a kindly smile then, dropping his professorial mien. “I just didn’t want to take the chance that you might end up being the exception that proves the rule.”
“No, it’s alright.” Twilight couldn’t fight the shudder that ran down her spine at the thought. “If there’s any chance that spells like that could cause some sort of…of spiritual contamination, they’re definitely not something I want to use. The magic of friendship is special because it’s something that’s created by what my friends and I all feel for each other, not the other way around.”
Under Score nodded, looking satisfied. “I understand, though I’ll repeat what I said about moderate amounts of numinous magic being safe to use. Still, I’m glad to see that you have a healthy respect for what such spells can do now. Therefore…” He stood up as he spoke, walking to a nearby shelf before withdrawing a book, opening it to a particular page and placing it on the desk in front of her. “Here’s a copy of the infernal healing spell. If you want to scribe it into your spellbook, you’re welcome to.”
Her eyes widening, Twilight glanced from the spell to the old stallion and back again. “So this…it was all a test?”
“More like an evaluation,” admitted Under Score with a shrug, though Twilight didn’t miss the way the corners of his lips turned upward. “I hope that doesn’t offend you.”
Still staring at the spell, Twilight shook her head. “Testing their students is what teachers are supposed to do. I’m just…I know you said that almost no one is changed just by using these, but if there’s even a chance of it happening, why would anyone ever take that risk?”
“You already know why.” Under Score tapped the open book as he sat back down. “As you said, this is still a healing spell. If someone you cared about was dying, and there was no other curative magic available, what would you do?” He leaned back in his chair when Twilight didn’t answer. “Others have different uses, such as summoning planar denizens of matching metaphysical gradients, or even attacking those of different spiritual persuasions.”
“Wait, attacking?” This time Twilight’s frown was one of incomprehension. “How could spells like this be used to attack? I thought you said the only danger was that they could change someone’s personality gradually over time?”
“That’s the only danger to the person using them, Miss Sparkle. But there are certain spells that deliberately concentrate a particular numinous gradient to such a high degree that, when cast, cause severe spiritual damage to everyone in the local area who doesn’t share the same metaphysical inclination. I once saw a colleague of mine use such a spell, unleashing a powerful burst of axiomatic, or ‘lawful,’ force with a single word against a group of over two dozen gem gnoll marauders that had surrounded us, since he felt certain that none of them were of that particular persuasion whereas we all were.”
Twilight wasn’t sure that she wanted to know, but couldn’t stop herself from asking anyway. “What happened to them?”
“One of them, the leader, was tough enough that he was able to stay standing, although he looked like he’d just taken a heavy blow to the head. Three or four of the others were paralyzed, at least for a short time.”
Just from his tone of voice Twilight could tell that there was more to the story. “And the rest?”
“They were all killed instantly.”
Twilight had, in the time since that conversation, never tried to measure the “spiritual alignment” of any of her friends. Just the thought of doing so made her feel uncomfortable, like she was contemplating reading their diaries without their knowledge. But now…now she wished she had, if only so that she knew exactly who was in danger from what the lhaksharut was going to do. Pinkie would definitely be affected, she knew, and so would Discord, but as for everyone else here, she couldn’t be sure. Was Spike “lawful” in temperament? Was Fluttershy? Was Princess Celestia?
Gesturing and chanting so quickly that she almost bit her tongue, Twilight poured her alicorn magic into her dispelling spell, hoping that she’d be able to finish casting it before the lhaksharut deployed its axiomatic numinous field. Hoping that she’d be able to negate it. Hoping that she wouldn’t have to find out which of her friends were lawful by watching the ones who weren’t die right in front of her…
A second later both her and the lhaksharut’s spells went off.
That was a minor miracle unto itself. The lhaksharut’s announcement of what it was about to do wasn’t followed by any gesturing or chanting or outward invocations of any sort. It was only because of her ability to sense nearby magical fluctuations that Twilight knew that it was casting its spell with its thoughts alone. Compared to that, her needing to use her voice and her hoof to cast her spell should have made it nearly impossible for her to beat it to the punch.
But somehow, she did it anyway. Focusing as much of her alicorn magic through her horn as she could, Twilight sent her spell racing toward the metal-and-stone monstrosity. The effort nearly left her dizzy, her eyes closed as she tried to steady herself, knowing that she’d be able to feel whether or not her spell worked without needing to be able to see it.
In a fraction of an instant, her spell crossed the distance between herself and the lhaksharut. Just as its own spell reached completion, hers struck it. For the briefest instant she felt the two energies clash in an instantaneous struggle for supremacy.
And then hers shattered, unable to overcome the lhaksharut’s.
Twilight’s eyes snapped open immediately. “NOOO!!!”
But it was too late as the lhaksharut spoke a single word, the timbre of its voice making the very air shudder as the massed power of its spell was unleashed. “Dictu-”
And then it was cut off.
Unable to do anything but stare, Twilight tried to comprehend what was happening. Its spell had gone off, but she could feel that the magic wasn’t discharging properly for some reason. Instead it was…smothered. That was the only word for it. She could feel it trying to get out, to sweep outward in a wave of energy that would have engulfed everyone there. But it couldn’t, and a half-second later she felt the spell suddenly collapse in on itself, imploding now that there was nowhere else for it to go. And just like that, it was over…the lhaksharut’s axiomatic numinous field that would have crippled – or more likely killed – several of her friends was defeated.
But how…?
“Good goin’ Twilight!” yelled Applejack as she charged back toward the thing, clearly not realizing that whatever miracle had just happened had come from somepony else. “You keep its magic contained, and we’ll-”
Applejack’s sentence abruptly ended as she ran forward, despite the fact that her lips were still moving. Being so suddenly muted clearly caught her by surprise, very nearly making her stumble, but she shrugged it off as she once again ran up to the lhaksharut, throwing herself into a heavy kick with both of her back legs that deformed another of the swirling rings that made up the thing’s lower body. Just like with what she’d been trying to say, the attack landed silently, lacking the heavy clang that had happened the first time she’d scored a hit on it.
“A silence spell,” murmured Twilight in sudden understanding.
“Darn right!” cheered Pinkie, making Twilight jump. She’d been so focused on what the lhaksharut had been doing that she’d almost forgotten how Pinkie had been hanging back and cheering them on, complete with a pleated skirt and pom-poms that she’d gotten from somewhere. “That big stone meanie has been scaring everyone for the entire fight! Everytime it’s said something, everypony was all ‘oh no!’ and ‘look out!’ and ‘this is so tough, I’m going to need a flashback to come up with a way to deal with it!’ Well it can’t do that now!”
Twilight’s jaw dropped. “Wait, you cast that silence spell on it?!”
“Yep!” grinned the pink party pony. “Well, except it’s not really on it. It’s just sort of around it. If you try to cast this spell on someone then it follows them around which is way more convenient if you want to stop them from saying some really awful stuff, but they might be able to shake it off if you try, in which case the spell doesn’t take and it just sorta fizzles out like a soda that’s sat on the shelf for too long, so it’s usually better to cast this spell right next to whoever you want to make stop talking since it spreads out a short distance from whatever spot you cast it on, although that means that anyone who doesn’t want to be quiet anymore can just walk right out of it, but that’s not really too much of a big deal since the thing lasts for less a minute anyway, but I figured, ‘eh, why not?’”
Still trying to come to grips with how certain disaster had been averted, Twilight could barely take in what Pinkie was saying. “But…but how…?” It made no sense that Pinkie’s silence spell had shut down that thing’s spell. It hadn’t needed to speak out loud to cast it, so why…?
“I once saw a colleague of mine use such a spell, unleashing a powerful burst of axiomatic, or ‘lawful,’ force with a single word against a group of over two dozen gem gnoll marauders that had surrounded us, since he felt certain that none of them were of that particular persuasion whereas we all were.”
“…with a single word…”
Under Score’s anecdote came back to her then, causing Twilight’s eyes to widen in sudden understanding. The lhaksharut hadn’t needed to speak to invoke the spell; rather, the spell was meant to be delivered in the form of a single word, spoken out loud! It had been trying to say that when Pinkie had dropped her silence spell on it – or rather, around it – and saved everyone!
Misunderstanding Twilight’s question, Pinkie just shrugged. “Oh, it’s just a little something I picked up while I was looking for Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. For some reason, ponies kept casting that spell on me when I would show up and ask them if they’d seen two little fillies and that I’d come back and celebrate their birthday if they could help me find them and then showed them a demonstration of how great my parties were by singing and cheering and playing a whole bunch of instruments at once and I just kinda figured out how it worked after a while!”
Despite the fact that they were far from being safe, Twilight couldn’t help but laugh weakly as a sense of relief washed over her. “It’s good to have you back, Pinkie.”
Giving a toothy grin, Pinkie threw her a wink. “Thanks for bringing me back!” Lowering her voice to a stage-whisper, she leaned in closer. “But we should probably save the reunion for later! The middle of a fight is no time to stop and chat!”
Princess Celestia grimaced as another magically-augmented beam of energy winked out of existence right before it hit the lhaksharut. Whatever resistance to magic this thing had was formidable! So far she hadn’t been able to draw its attention!
Instead, it swung its gigantic sword again, aiming for where Fluttershy, Discord, and Cadance were crouched. Once again, Shining Armor raised a force field before the blow could land, though by the way his legs quivered she could tell that it was taking everything he had to prevent the strike from breaking through. Given how swings from the creature’s weapons had so easily reduced the conference room to a rubble-strewn mess, Celestia couldn’t help but be mildly amazed that Shining Armor was able to stop its attacks at all; that thing had to be attacking with far more force than the changeling army had when they’d shattered the shield he’d raised around Canterlot!
Nor was Shining Armor the only one capable of such incredible feats. Dodging a heavy thrust from the lhaksharut’s tree-sized spear, Applejack was in no position to keep moving as the thing brought its mace down toward her in another deadly arc, the spiked metal head at the end of it knocking out more of the ceiling on its swing. But rather than trying to get out of the way, Applejack instead heaved herself up onto her hind legs, raising her forelegs over her head as the same attack that had felled Discord rushed down toward her.
Only for her to catch it.
The force of the blow made nearly made her hind legs buckle, and the ground cratered beneath her hooves, but although Celestia could see Applejack’s face contorting with effort, the farm pony withstood the strike. Mostly. From her vantage point, Celestia could see that one of the spikes radiating out from the head of the mace had grazed Applejack side, sending a long gash down over her ribs. But the earth mare didn’t seem to notice, instead straining to stop the mace from flattening her completely.
In that she succeeded, as the lhaksharut withdrew the weapon a moment later, and Celestia knew that they needed to change tactics. Applejack and Shining Armor were only barely able to keep the enemy’s attacks from getting through, and stopping only a few of them was already taxing them severely. By contrast, the lhaksharut was easily withstanding all of their counterattacks, repairing the few that were getting through. If they kept going like this, they’d be defeated in short order, she knew.
The one good thing about their situation was that everyone who wasn’t fighting had made it out. Even as Celestia glanced at the end of the room, she saw Rarity and Grass Patch hauling a struggling Soft Mane away, bodily dragging her out of the room. The reason for her reluctance to leave was obvious: Spike was still there, the little dragon hurrying over to one of the windows overlooking the courtyard around the castle and…breathing fire on it.
Despite Spike’s tiny size, the gout of green flames that came out was enough to shatter the glass instantly, the flames billowing out past the frame of the window and projecting into the air. Nor did he stop there, continuing to exhale as hard as he could, keeping the flames roaring, until he finally ran out of breath several seconds later. Celestia had just enough time to be confused when he looked over at her – no, at her and everyone around her – his expression tense. “Take cover!” he yelled, immediately diving to the floor at Twilight’s hooves and raising his claws over his head.
Not knowing what was happening, but willing to take Spike’s word on faith, Princess Celestia immediately touched down from where she’d been hovering in the air, moving close to Shining Armor. The stallion grunted with effort as he formed another shield around them, with Cadance moving to support him, murmuring a prayer to ease the strain he was putting himself through using so much magic. Fluttershy whispered something to Discord, who blinked before looking over at the windows expectantly. “Oh, this should be good,” he snickered, producing an umbrella from somewhere and opening it.
Pinkie, meanwhile, bounced up and bit Applejack’s tail, tugging sharply on it. The orange mare seemed to know what that meant, because she broke off her attack on the lhaksharut, barely dodging a sword swipe as she rushed back to Twilight’s side, Pinkie in tow. For her part, Twilight wasted no time, raising a shield of her own around them.
If the lhaksharut was puzzled by their behavior, it didn’t show it. Instead it simply held out its lower arms again, unleashing another series of elemental blasts at each group. A blazing ray of fire impacted Twilight’s shield as another beam of electricity hit Shining Armor’s, both siblings straining to maintain their defenses against the assault. But after several seconds went by with no sign that the lhaksharut was letting up, Celestia leaned toward Fluttershy. Fortunately, they were far enough from the field of magical silence that she was able to speak, raising her voice to be heard over the sound of the beam hitting Shining Armor’s shield. “What’s going on?!”
“Spike called for backup!” yelled Fluttershy in return. “That fire was him signaling her where to go!”
Celestia was about to ask who Fluttershy meant, when a new sound made itself known. It was a high-pitched whistling, barely audible over the din of the lhaksharut’s attacks but growing louder rapidly. In the time it had taken Celestia to become aware of it, it had already overpowered the sound of the their enemy's elemental assault.
But the lhaksharut itself, still inside Pinkie’s silence spell, couldn’t hear a thing.
A second later a rainbow-colored blur flew in through the window at an incredible speed, striking the lhaksharut dead-center with such force that it created a multicolored mushroom cloud.
The force of Rainbow Dash’s attack shook Canterlot Castle to its foundations.
Although the impact itself had been muted, occurring within the zone of Pinkie’s silence spell, the shockwave it sent out was in no way diminished. Both Twilight and Shining Armor strained to keep their shields raised, the latter nearly faltering before Princess Celestia added her magic to the mix. Even then, the ground bucked and jerked beneath their hooves, as though the mountain were trying to shake everyone off of it.
It was only after the quakes had died down that Twilight lowered her shield. “Rainbow D-Dash!” she coughed, flapping her wings to try and clear out the multicolored smoke still filling the area. “Are you alright?!”
“She’s gotta be,” wheezed Applejack, gripping her hat in her teeth as she tried to use it to fan the air clear. “She did that to my old barn before and came out cleaner than a new towel after laundry day.” But despite her assurances, nopony missed the worried tone in her voice.
Almost nopony. “I dunno,” hacked Spike. “That monster looks like it’s a lot tougher than a barn.”
“Aw, I bet she knocked it into next week!” cheered Pinkie, idly blowing up a few balloons before letting the air come sputtering out of them, pushing the colorful smoke away from her. “That way it won’t come back until Saturday morning, and I bet we’ll be able to finish it off in a half-hour when it does!”
“I have to say,” came Discord’s voice from deeper within the smoke, “I’m a really big fan of that idea.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than a heavy breeze swept through the area, pushing the smoke away in its entirety courtesy of an eight-foot tall folding fan hovering in midair, its surface decorated with a stylized image of Discord, which winked at everypony before he changed back to his usual self. Behind him, Shining Armor was leaning against Princess Celestia and Cadance, the latter murmuring another prayer to Lashtada, while Fluttershy nervously scanned the area, biting her lip at what she saw.
“Oh my…”
The conference room had been utterly obliterated. The ceiling was completely gone, as was the exterior wall, leaving the entire area fully exposed to the outdoors. The interior walls had fared no better, having been reduced to rubble in every direction, leaving not just the adjoining rooms totally in view, but the rooms beyond those, and even the rooms beyond those. Nor was that the full extent of the destruction; looking outside revealed that the courtyard was now occupied by a long row of thick debris that, upon a moment’s examination, could only have been one of the castle towers, having crumbled after its supports had been taken out in the blast, leaving Fluttershy gulping at the scope of the devastation.
In one blow, Rainbow Dash had destroyed an entire wing of the castle.
“Oh, I really hope Rarity and Princess Luna got everypony out in time,” she murmured, wincing at the thought of anyone having been caught in the blast radius.
“I’m sure they did.” Celestia’s voice was quiet but certain.
“I just hope that monster’s down for the count,” added Shining Armor with a groan. “I don’t know how many more of its attacks I can fend off.”
“My love will give you strength,” murmured Cadance, leaning down to nuzzle her husband.
The romantic sentiment earned a snort from Discord. “Oh please. Mounting a defense and playing medic are all well and good, but after an impressive entrance like that they’re not going to get either of you voted Most Valuable Pony.” A snap of his fingers made a pair of golden goblets – complete with wings and the letters “MVP” stamped on them – appear, their wings flapping as they flew over Cadance and Shining Armor’s heads before they suddenly disintegrated, causing Discord to smirk.
His comment earned a sharp glare from Celestia. “Perhaps you should consider helping before you criticize other ponies’ contributions, Discord.”
“Well I’m sorry, but that thing’s attacks hurt!” Discord’s expression was somewhere between incredulous and anxious. “I mean really, actually hurt! I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt pain, and I don’t know if you know this, but it’s not a good feeling! Who knows that thing might do if I use more chaos magic?!”
“Maybe it’ll be ready to talk now?” ventured Fluttershy hopefully. “I mean, now that…that…” Her head snapped around suddenly, eyes widening. “Oh no!”
Everyone around her immediately tensed. “What?!” asked Shining Armor, scrambling to his hooves. “What is it?!”
“The portal!” Fluttershy pointed at what had once been the side door into the conference room, where Discord had opened a second gateway to Everglow after the lhaksharut had forcibly closed the first one he’d made. But the doorframe, as well as the wall it had been set in, was completely gone now, as was the dimensional opening that it had previously held. “I think Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon and their friends were still on the other side of it!”
“Those two fillies that Twilight was looking for?” Princess Celestia bit her lip for a moment, then shook off her hesitation. “Discord, can you make another one?”
The question made the draconequus wince. “How about we table that idea until we’re sure its safe?” he asked, turning into a table that was immediately shut inside a thick metal safe.
“Discord, please!” Fluttershy rapped on the strongbox. “Applejack still feels terrible about losing those two, and Pinkie Pie worked so hard to try and bring them back! We can’t lose them again now!”
But no answer came from within the coffer.
“We’ll figure something else out later,” sighed Celestia when it became clear that Discord wasn’t going to come out. “Right now, we need to focus on doing what we can here. Once things have settled down, then we’ll work on getting those two back.” She didn’t say anything else, but the rest of the sentiment hung in the air, obvious to everyone.
For the time being, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon were once again lost on Everglow.
Meanwhile, Twilight, Spike, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie had more immediate concerns.
“Rainbow!”
With the smoke cleared, their pegasus friend was plainly visible, wings flapping slowly as she hovered in the air where the lhaksharut had been moments before, a cocksure smile on her face. She’d apparently flown into the thing with her hind legs, as her forelegs were holding a collection of trinkets, wadded up in a mass that she kept pressed against her chest. Still smirking, she glanced at her friends and started to say something…or at least tried to, her lips moving as no sound came out.
“Ooh, I’ll fix that!” volunteered Pinkie, chirping an arcane word a second later. “There! Silence spell gone!”
“-sssaaavvveee ttthhheee dddaaayyy ooorrr wwwhhhaaattt?” finished Rainbow Dash, causing her friends to collectively blink in surprise, as did Rainbow herself as she heard her voice.
Spike was the first to recover. “Um, is it just me or does Rainbow Dash sound like she’s talking in super slow-mo?”
“The lhaksharut must have used some sort of slow-time spell on her.” Twilight couldn’t suppress a shudder from going down her spine, and not just from the idea that the thing might have survived Rainbow’s attack. The creature seemed to have countermeasures in place for almost everything, shrugging off magical attacks like raindrops, repairing itself whenever they managed to hurt it, closing down dimensional portals as they were opened, and now being able to slow down their fastest fighter. If it had managed to slow Rainbow down before she made contact with it, she would have been a sitting duck.
But Pinkie didn’t seem to be anywhere near as concerned as Twilight, bouncing up and down gleefully. “Do you think I should use that speedy spell I cast on you guys on her too? Or maybe I could whip up a batch of my super-extra-triple-chocolate-marshmallow-fudge cookies? Those always give me a rush when I’m feeling run down!”
“Maybe let’s go with that first one, sugarcube,” chuckled Applejack. “Even if it is kinda nice havin’ her go slow enough that the rest of us can outpace her for a change.”
Rainbow’s wings gave another slow flap as she glared at Applejack. “Ttthhhaaattt’sss nnnooottt fffuuunnnnnnyyy!!!”
Pinkie seemed to disagree, giggling even as she held out a hoof. “Okey-dokey-lokey!”
A few seconds later Rainbow Dash was back to her normal self, wearing a relieved grin. “Whew! Thanks for that Pinkie! Glad to see you’re back and better than ever!”
“You know it!” Pinkie’s answer came with a beaming smile and a hug that left Rainbow Dash struggling to keep her ribs from collapsing. “Everglow was a lot of fun, but I really missed you guys! As soon as we get back to Sugarcube Corner I’m going to throw the biggest welcome home party ever!”
“We might need to wait a little bit before we can start celebrating.” Unlike the rest of her friends, Twilight’s face was still tight with worry. “I don’t think we’ve won just yet.”
“Are you kidding me?” scoffed Rainbow, managing to extricate herself from Pinkie's embrace. “I hit that thing dead-center with a Sonic Rainboom! There’s no way it’s getting back up again!” Grinning, she couldn’t help but preen at her one-hit victory. “I was just too awesome for it!” A moment later it occurred to her to ask, “So, um, what was that thing, anyway?”
“I’ll explain while we get ready,” replied Twilight, before nodding at the collection of stuff that Rainbow was still clutching. “Is that our gear?”
“Yep!” Landing at last, Rainbow dumped the assorted baubles onto the ground. “These are all the magical knickknacks we picked up on Everglow. Belts, cloaks, rings, you name it.”
Applejack gave a low whistle. “I gotta admit, Dash, I’m impressed. You got my stuff from Sweet Apple Acres, Twilight’s from her castle, and yours from your place, and still got here as fast as you did? Even for you, that’s fast.”
“Aw, it was nothing.” Despite her words, Rainbow puffed up like a balloon at the compliment. “Honestly, the hard part was getting all of my things. Unlike you and Twilight, I sort of left them in a heap instead of organizing them all in one place.” Her smile fell away then, giving Twilight a concerned look. “But that reminds me. Twilight, something happened at your castle! I was in the basement getting your stuff together, and you won’t believe what I saw! That portal you made so you can go to that world where Sunset Shimmer lives was smashed to pieces!”
Twilight had already started levitating everything in the pile when she heard that, freezing in place as everything she’d telekinetically grabbed likewise hovered in midair. “What?!”
“I know!” Huffing, Rainbow gave the others a look of righteous indignation. “After we’re done here, we need to track down whoever did that and make them apologize!”
“Hmm…” Pinkie put a hoof to her chin, frowning deeply. “Now who do we know that goes around breaking portals to other worlds?” Pausing for just a moment, she eventually shrugged. “Eh, could be anypony.”
“No offense, sugarcube, but maybe leave the mysteries to Twilight and Rarity,” snickered Applejack.
“We’ll worry about the mirror later,” declared Twilight, having recovered from her shock. “For now, we need to gear up in case that thing’s not dead. Let’s fill Rainbow Dash in while we do.”
The next several seconds were filled with quick chatter as the girls rushed to tell Rainbow what had happened (with Spike doing his best to help) while putting on their magic items. By the time they were finished, Rainbow could only huff. “So in other words, this is all Discord’s fault. Again.”
“It’s not really his fault,” noted Spike. “I mean, it’s not like he knew some crazy statue-monster would show up just because he made a portal to that other world.”
“Even so-” But Rainbow didn’t have a chance to finish, as a low rumble shook the castle again. But unlike her Rainboom, this one was much more localized…as though something were digging its way up through the rubble.
“Get ready, girls,” cautioned Twilight. “I think round two is about to start!”
A small mountain of rubble was suddenly sent skyward as the lhaksharut burst up from where Rainbow Dash had knocked it into the ground.
With the battlefield now exposed to the open air, and the smoke already having been cleared away, it was obvious that the pegasus’ attack had done a number of it. There was an impact crater as wide as a pony on the thing’s torso, creating a depression in its chest that was over a foot deep. Cracks radiated out from the wound, spreading all the way down to its waist and up across its stony face, expression still unchanged. One metal wing was twisted, curling back on itself in a way that kept it from deploying fully. More notable was its sword-wielding arm, which was hanging limply at its side, the fingers looking barely able to hold on to the hilt of the blade.
“Damage sustained,” announced the creature, its voice still lacking any inflection. “Severity: moderate. Self-repair systems-”
“NOW!” yelled Twilight. Even without the lhaksharut’s saying so, it was clear that Rainbow had managed to inflict considerable harm to the thing. If there was any chance for them to overcome it, then they had to keep hammering the thing before it was able to heal itself. And she had already made preparations to do just that, having cast a spell – one augmented with her alicorn magic – to bolster her natural telekinesis.
A second later she put it to good use, bringing a literal ton of bricks down on the lhaksharut’s head.
The makeshift missiles crashed against the creature in a hailstorm of stone, striking with such force that each brick shattered on impact. But the lhaksharut didn’t seem to be fazed in the slightest. Ignoring the barrage of rocks exploding against its body, the thing scanned the battlefield, turning its head in a slow motion. “Primary target not found,” it announced stoically. “Scanning for anarchic numinous readings.”
“SCAN FOR THIS!”
Rainbow Dash’s voice was immediately followed by a crack of thunder as a lightning bolt raced down from above, courtesy of her jumping up and down on one of the scattered clouds dotting the sky. The electricity coursed through the lhaksharut, actually causing the thing to falter for a moment as a torrent of voltage swept over its body. Giving an encouraged whoop, Rainbow kept it up, stomping on the cloud as hard as she could until its lightning was completely expended, the cloud breaking up into nothing a moment later.
The assault was enough to make the lhaksharut to glance upward…just in time to see Applejack hurtling straight down toward it with one foreleg cocked back, having leapt off of another cloud where she’d been waiting courtesy of Twilight’s cloudwalking spell and Rainbow’s hauling her up there. The creature had no time to react before she slammed into it, striking it directly in the face with a punch so heavy that the impact could be heard across Canterlot. Unable to withstand the full force of the blow, the lhaksharut stumbled, the whirling rings that made up its lower body scraping across the ground as it struggled to keep its balance, reeling as it fell back from where Applejack had landed on her hooves…
Only to get a sudden burst of glitter right in its face. “Surprise!” yelled Pinkie, having launched the barrage of scintillating particles at it from a safe distance. “Now this is what I’d call an adventuring party!” she laughed as the lhaksharut pivoted, trying to face the new threat while simultaneously clearing the obstructions from its eyes.
That was when Spike, having clamored on top of a nearby pile of debris, exhaled as hard as he could, bathing the creature in fire.
We’re doing it! The thought made a sudden giddiness rush through Twilight as she watched the lhaksharut raise its arms against the flames, trying to ward them off. We’re winning! They just had to keep the thing off-balance, attacking from every angle and keeping the pressure on before it could regroup and regain the initiative, and they just might be able to pull this off!
But no sooner had that thought gone through her head than the lhaksharut lashed out at Spike. Its gigantic spear thrust out in a sudden, vicious motion, causing the little dragon to yelp with fright, his flames guttering out as a result. It was only by sheer luck that he wasn’t struck by the blow, losing his footing and tumbling down the back of the debris pile that he’d been perched on before the spear could make contact. He landed dizzily on the floor as the collection of stones scattered, taking the hit that had been meant for him.
Nor were the lhaksharut’s other arms idle. The one holding the huge mace swept out, bringing the weapon around in a heavy swing toward Applejack. With no time to react, the earth mare wasn’t able to brace herself, unable to do more than grit her teeth in preparation for what was about to happen.
But the impact never came. In the instant before the strike would have made contact a glowing blue wall sprang into existence between her and it, taking the full force of the hit even as the lhaksharut strained, trying to finish its swing. Her eyes widening as she realized what must have happened, Applejack glanced back to shoot a grateful look at Shining Armor, but the stallion didn’t so much as nod back at her, groaning as he put everything he had into keeping his spell up…only to collapse a second later as his stamina, and his spell, finally gave out.
Without stopping to think, Applejack threw herself forward. Her desperate dive was just barely enough, feeling a rush of air pass right behind her as the mace swung through the spot that she’d vacated less than a second before. She had just enough time to utter a sigh of relief at the near-miss-
“APPLEJACK! LOOK OUT!”
Fluttershy’s scream, shouted from where she was cowering behind a large safe, was her only warning before the lhaksharut’s sword struck home.
Twilight couldn’t even bring herself to scream, too shocked to react as the creature’s sword tore across Applejack’s body, knocking the mare off her hooves and sending a gout of blood arcing through the air.
For a split-second she thought that it had to be an illusion. The creature’s sword-arm had been maimed by Rainbow Dash’s Sonic Rainboom! It shouldn’t have been able to use it!
Except that wasn’t true, she realized instantly. Just because she’d interrupted it before it had been able to finish declaring that its self-repair abilities were active didn’t mean that she’d somehow stopped them from working. Even while they’d been trying to pour the damage on, it had been doing what it could to reverse it, and its first priority had apparently been to fix its mangled arm. All the better to keep attacking them with.
Panicking, Twilight immediately abandoned any notions of wearing the creature down, instead focusing all of her thoughts on how to save her friend before that monster finished her off. Because Applejack was still alive. She had to be. Which meant that the priority now was getting her out of harm’s way. But how? Putting a shield over her would only delay the inevitable, and worse, would prevent help from reaching her. A short-range teleport like she’d used before would still leave her within range of the thing’s elemental blasts. Telekinetically dragging her out was too slow, and Twilight doubted that even Rainbow Dash – who was already streaking down from above, roaring at the top of her lungs – would be able to get in there and retrieve Applejack without getting swatted out of the sky; if the lhaksharut had been able to use that slow-time spell on her when it hadn’t even known she was coming, it would definitely be able to intercept her wild charge now.
Which means that there’s only one chance left, Twilight concluded. I’ve got to make it focus on me.
Knowing that she couldn’t afford to fail, Twilight poured her alicorn magic – which was by now starting to run dangerously low – into her next spell. If this worked, it could end the fight in one shot. Of course, the odds of that happening were low, since the lhaksharut had ignored virtually every spell used against it so far. But even if this didn’t work, it would hopefully draw the creature’s attention enough for the rest of her friends to move in and help Applejack.
Casting the spell as quickly as she could, Twilight suddenly found herself flashing back to the first time she’d ever used something like this. It had been when she’d first gotten her cutie mark, her magic running out of control and affecting everypony nearby. Her parents had been particularly hard-hit by her uncontrolled surge of power, turning into plants.
Much like the field mouse she was attempting to turn the lhaksharut into right now.
An instant later her spell was cast, and Twilight clenched her jaw as she tried to force it to work. She could almost feel the thing’s spell resistance moving to block her, like an impenetrable wall refusing to let her magic reach its target. Squeezing her eyes shut, Twilight pushed harder, commanding her magic to grasp the creature and override its control over its body, to reshape it to suit her will.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered if Lex had felt like this when he’d cursed Luna.
The thought, laced with self-doubt, was enough to make her concentration waver, and for a moment Twilight almost lost control of her spell…and then she was through. The sense of resistance she felt surrounding the lhaksharut fell away, and her spell reached out to engulf it. Twilight felt a surge of triumph as her eyes shot open. She’d done it! She’d done it, and now-
Nothing happened.
There was no sense of resistance this time. No feeling of pushback or impedance. Her spell had just failed. For an instant Twilight couldn’t bring herself to believe it, her brain cycling through possible explanations as she tried to figure out what had happened. Her spell had worked, she’d felt it work, getting through the creature’s spell resistance, so what had happened…?
It’s immune, she realized numbly. It was the only explanation she could think of. While the lhaksharut had some sort of universal resistance to spells cast directly on it, there had to be certain effects which were completely incapable of affecting it, with her transfiguration spell being as useless as if she’d tried to poison its inorganic metal-and-stone body. That’s right, it’s an axiomatic being. Its lawful nature must make it completely impossible to shapechange. After all, Discord was chaos incarnate, and he couldn’t seem to go more than a few minutes without changing himself somehow. The lhaksharut was the complete opposite of that, possessing an immutable body.
And she hadn’t realized it until it was too late.
In desperation Twilight tried to cast another spell, but before she could even decide which one, Rainbow Dash’s shrieking descent met its end. Rushing downward so fast that she was a blur, she got within ten feet of the lhaksharut’s head when its mace came up in a sudden swing, colliding with Rainbow in midair and knocking her off-course, one spike piercing through her wing as it swatted her into the ground not far from where Applejack had fallen. The pegasus hit the floor hard, blood splattering across the stones where she fell, and it was only because a faint moan of pain escaped her lips that Twilight knew she was still alive.
“Scan interrupted,” announced the lhaksharut blithely. Even as it spoke, Twilight could see the cracks in its body starting to disappear, the crater in its chest already beginning to fill in. “Primary target not found. Proceeding with termination of secondary targets.” It raised its lower arms then, the ones clutching the orbs, and pointed them toward Rainbow Dash…and Cadance.
Twilight had just enough time to realize that the lhaksharut was prioritizing the pony in their group who was capable of healing the others, as well as the one who had damaged it the most, before it attacked. Instantly, she cast a spell, trying to teleport both of its chosen targets out of harm’s way…but she didn’t have enough power to move them both. For a split-second she struggled with the gut-wrenching knowledge that she could only save one of the two people she cared about most, knowing that if she didn’t decide she’d lose both of them…and then she focused her magic on Rainbow Dash, silently trusting her brother to overcome his exhaustion and find the strength to protect Cadance.
Except, when her spell went off a moment later, Rainbow Dash didn’t teleport out…and it was only after her spell had failed that Twilight realized that, in her panic, she’d overlooked that the pegasus was lying within the faint green field that the lhaksharut had used to shut down Discord’s first portal to Everglow. It was preventing teleportation the same way it prevented inter-planar travel. No! Not again! Twilight had just enough time to realize that, for the second time in less than a minute, she’d made the wrong call in a life-or-death situation, that she’d made a mistake where magic – her special talent, the Element of Harmony that she represented – was concerned. And now her friends would pay the price for it.
Then twin beams of elemental energy lanced out.
But neither reached their intended target.
Instead, Shining Armor suddenly surged forward, pushing Cadance out of the way a split-second before a torrent of electricity struck him. At the same instant, Applejack suddenly lunged to her hooves, throwing herself in front of Rainbow Dash as the blazing ray of fire slammed into her. For a moment neither pony could be seen, swallowed whole by the blinding light of the twin beams. Then both winked out, leaving a pair of charred husks that fell to the ground, unmoving.
Twilight’s vision swam then, the sight in front of her blurring and rippling as tears filled her eyes, unable to process what was happening. This is a dream, she told herself silently. This has to be a dream. Any second Luna would appear and tell her that this was all a nightmare…except, no, Luna couldn’t do that now, could she? But…but that meant…
“Applejack! Rainbow Dash! Hang on!”
“You monster! How could you?!”
Twilight was only dimly aware of Pinkie Pie and Princess Celestia racing toward the lhaksharut, one intent on rescuing her friends, the other intent on punishing the thing that had struck them down. “No…” she whimpered softly. “Don’t do it…” But neither heard her, and a moment later it was too late. The lhaksharut’s sword tore into Princess Celestia, staining her white coat with blood as she fell. An instant later its mace came down on Pinkie Pie, crushing her body to the ground in a single unstoppable swing.
Nor was it done, and Twilight could only watch with a sickening feeling spreading through her as she saw it heft the spear in its middle pair of arms, turning toward Cadance, who was crouching by the blackened and smoking body of Shining Armor, tears streaming down her face as she chanted a prayer that she would never finish. A second later the lhaksharut lunged forward, and Twilight belatedly closed her eyes, unable to bring herself to watch as someone else she loved was slaughtered.
But the sound that reached her ears a second later wasn’t the slam of a giant weapon hitting a body. There was no tortured scream, no sickening crunch as another pony was smashed by the relentless monster. Instead…
Instead there was a clang of metal on metal…and a second later, Twilight could hear the sound of Cadance’s voice, still chanting a prayer to Lashtada.
Not able to bring herself to hope, Twilight nevertheless opened her eyes.
And gasped at the sight in front of her.
Standing between Cadance and the lhaksharut was a pony that she’d never seen before. As tall as Princess Celestia, he was clad from neck to tail in brilliant armor, the sculpted metal looking as flawless as if it had just been polished. His eyes were a bright, shining blue, his mane and tail shone like gold, and each of his wings – his six wings! – were the color of silver, almost glistening as he unfurled them. The tip of his horn gleamed like a lance in the sunlight, pointed at the lhaksharut as he glowered at the creature with the stern visage of a lord sitting in judgment.
And in front of him, floating of its own accord without so much as a telekinetic aura around it, was a sword as large as the newcomer was. That still made it far smaller than the greatspear that the lhaksharut was wielding, but the sword didn’t seem the least bit strained as it caught the tip of the spear on the flat of its blade, holding the larger weapon back with no apparent effort.
“Stand down, enforcer!” The alicorn’s voice was rich and cultured, with a timbre that would have been warm and inviting had it not sounded so menacing at that moment. “This carnage was not part of our agreement!”
Although she’d never met him before, Twilight had spoken with Princesses Celestia and Luna about the alicorn in front of her now. The Royal Sisters had thought very highly of him, and had hoped that he would attend the meeting they’d set for today.
And now Mihr, the Angel of Friendship, had arrived at last.
If the lhaksharut was intimidated by Mihr’s sudden appearance, it didn’t show it.
“Secondary target recognized,” came its emotionless voice. “Running multi-spectrum analysis. Analysis complete. Entity class: six. Meta-type: para-mortal. Numinous mode confirmed: sacred gradient. Magnitude: category four. Classification: aasimon, mercurian, first rank.” It withdrew its spear then, but only to pull the weapon back into a ready position, its other arms adopting similarly aggressive positions. “Conclusion: containment pending dispossession.”
“Stand down,” repeated Mihr, his sword still floating in front of him. The weapon’s tip had been pointing upward when it caught the lhaksharut’s attack before, but now it turned to point menacingly at the metal-and-stone creature. “Your actions are in violation of the provisional codicil that our representatives agreed to regarding this world.”
“Negative.” The lhaksharut’s unchanging face and uninflected voice gave nothing away, but the fact that it responded to the charge at all was proof enough that the angel’s words had struck home. “Corpus Juris Universalis section one-zero-six part two states that interim annotations to its canon shall not interfere with the enforcement of extant regulations.”
“That,” replied Mihr without hesitation, “is only in the event that a conflict occurs between existing statutes and temporary agreements. But the only conflict I see here is you slaughtering people who are helpless to fight back.”
“Designation: primary target has created multiple non-volatile planar apertures in violation of Corpus Juris Universalis section one-six part four. Destination planes are under no interim annotations regarding non-interference for evaluation purposes. Termination of designation: primary target thus takes priority. Designation: secondary targets are to be terminated to eliminate interference with prior directive.” The metal spheres in the lhaksharut’s lower arms flared to life at that, glowing with flames and crackling with electricity again.
“Someone was creating permanent planar gateways?” Mihr’s brow furrowed at the news, but he shook his head a moment later. “That’s no excuse for this savagery. These people aren’t even aware of the laws you’re enforcing!” He looked around the wreckage again, his expression darkening. “To execute them all goes against the spirit of our agreeing to observe and evaluate this world in the first place! A simple promise from the offending party to cease creating those gateways could have avoided this!”
“Negative. Designation: primary target identified as class five para-mortal entity with magnitude four anarchic numinous mode. As per Corpus Juris Universalis section eight-five-six part seven, agreements with such entities are void without category six or higher thaumaturgical enforcement. Part eight specifies that such enforcement is insufficient if the entity has access to category nine thaumaturgical abilities. Termination directive is therefore given priority status.”
The sigh Mihr gave then was a sad one, but his features didn’t lose their resolve. “I have no wish to destroy you, enforcer, but I cannot allow you to do this. This world is an unsullied garden, one you would mar with the blood of its protectors. Such a thing must not happen.” Mihr’s horn glowed then, and seemingly from nowhere he produced a bow almost as large as he was, though no arrows accompanied it. “This is your final warning: disengage your assault and vacate this world immediately. I will see to it that no further gates are created.”
“Insufficient. Primary and secondary targets must be terminated.”
“Then be prepared to defend yourself, for I will not fail to defend them.” With that final declaration, Mihr slowly flapped his wings, rising into the air until he was level with the lhaksharut’s face. His sword followed of its own accord, and within the grip of his telekinetic aura he pulled back the string of his bow, an arrow appearing from out of nowhere, nocked and aimed at his foe threateningly.
The lhaksharut needed no further prompting, weapons raised as it rushed forward. But it didn’t swing any of them as it moved to close the gap between itself and the angel. Nor did it raise the spheres held in its lower hands. Instead it curled its metal wings around – the damaged one having had time to repair itself during their conversation – in an attempt to make contact with the angel.
But Mihr was faster. In an instant, the angel’s sword had multiplied a hundredfold, scores of blades now hovering in the air where a single one had been only a second ago, forming a barrier of glistening steel as they immediately set to whirling. The swords flew through the air as they moved into position around the charging inevitable, encircling it on all sides.
The lhaksharut seemed not to care. Without hesitation, it plunged through the curtain of swords, the blades slicing it from every direction. But although the attack left deep cuts all over its body, it wasn’t enough to stop the thing, and it closed the gap between itself and Mihr a heartbeat later. Lashing out with the speed of a cobra, one metallic wing struck the angel’s armor. A hideous scraping sound could be heard as razor-sharp feathers tore across Mihr’s protective ensemble, but when the lhaksharut withdrew its wing a second later, all it had to show for its efforts was a shallow cut across the armor, not having cut deep enough to penetrate.
But piercing the angel’s armor had never been the creature’s goal.
Having made contact with its enemy, the lhaksharut’s spell immediately discharged. In an instant, space seemed to fold in around Mihr. A refraction formed around him, as though he was surrounded by glass so clear that it couldn’t be seen, and the angel visibly struggled as the warped area seemed to tighten, compressing him even as it suddenly shot downward, passing through the floor seamlessly.
“Containment complete,” announced the lhaksharut once the angel was gone, before turning to the remaining ponies. “Commencing termination of secondary ta-”
It wasn’t able to finish as Mihr suddenly burst up from the spot where he’d disappeared into the ground, reemerging as suddenly as he’d vanished. Wasting no time with words, the angel immediately unleashed the arrow he’d nocked, the shaft striking the lhaksharut directly in the chest with enough force to make the inevitable jerk backward. A second one slammed home as well, but by the time the third and fourth arrows struck the creature, it had regained its equilibrium, swatting them out of the air with its melee weapons. “Warning,” it blared suddenly. “Necrotic damage sustained. Countermeasures failing. Cause unknown.”
“It’s not my slaying arrows that you should fear, enforcer,” answered Mihr coolly. “It’s my blade.”
The words had no sooner left his lips than his sword – the original one, still hovering by his side while the others remained where they’d originally appeared as a wall of whirling blades – flew upward. The lhaksharut moved its weapons into a defensive position, but the sword danced around them nimbly, rushing in to cleave a deep gash along the lhaksharut’s side, then a second cut along its middle arm, and a third across its chest. It was only the fourth blow, aimed at the creature’s face, that missed, and even then only by a fraction of an inch as the inevitable jerked backward. “Warning,” it announced again. “Anarchic-gradient numinous damage sustained. Structural defenses insufficient to withstand. Self-repair systems failing.”
“Indeed.” Mihr’s wings flapped as he took to the air again, circling the lhaksharut. “Although I serve the will of Heaven, I’ve maintained my friendships with those among the Hosts of Virtue who champion freedom and individuality. Thus, all it took was a simple prayer for them to anoint my sword with the energies of chaos once I realized that I would be facing one of your kind.” The angel’s sword flew back over to him then, hovering in front of him once again. “You, however, have no connections beyond your axiomatic brethren, and so lack the profane magic necessary to truly harm me. Your only hope was to imprison me within that container of sealed time, and you failed.” Slowly, the angel drew the string on his bow again, another arrow appearing as he leveled it at the inevitable. “This battle was decided before it ever began. The only question now is if you’ll continue to pursue this foolishness and force me to destroy you.”
The lhaksharut didn’t stand down, but neither did it rush to resume the battle. “Calculating alternative tactical options,” it announced a moment later. But unlike the last time it said that, it didn’t immediately proclaim that its calculations were complete. Instead, several seconds went by before it finally spoke again. “Alternative options not found. Current projected status of fulfilling primary directive: eighteen-point-five-three percent plus/minus fourteen-point-four-two percent.”
“Poor odds by any measure.” Despite his casual tone of voice, Mihr didn’t lower his weapons, keeping his arrow trained on the lhaksharut as his sword held its ready position. “But if you find them preferable to abandoning your current course of action, allow me to try one last time to convince you otherwise: if you cease attacking, I will personally guarantee that whoever opened those planar gateways will refrain from doing so again until the provisional codicil regarding this world’s disposition under planar law is decided upon.”
Again, silence fell as the lhaksharut seemed to consider its options. In the time that it did, the damage that it had sustained began to fade once again, with the deep gouges that Mihr’s sword had placed on it slowly starting to close. “Self-repair systems rebooted,” it noted.
Mihr drew his arrow further back. “A development that can be rectified in a moment if you feel that my word is insufficient.”
“…negative.” At last the lhaksharut lowered its arms, abandoning its attack posture. “Alternative option deemed sufficient.”
Mihr sighed with relief. “Thank you.” He lowered his bow then, the arrow that he’d nocked disappearing the same way it had reappeared. His sword likewise moved to sheathe itself. A moment later, the wall of whirling blades that he’d conjured was gone as well.
The lhaksharut had no visible reaction to Mihr’s gesture of goodwill. “This concordance will be immediately reported as an amendment to the interim annotation regarding this world’s provisional disposition.”
Mihr nodded. “I understand. Please convey to your superiors my hope that this incident will not prevent us from working together to ensure the prosperity of this place and its people.”
The lhaksharut made no acknowledgment of Mihr’s statement, instead silently invoking its magic. A moment later it was gone, having vanished without any further statements or fanfare.
Just like that, the fight was over.
Knowing that the inevitable was incapable of breaking its word once it had been given, Mihr was at last able to turn his full attention to his surroundings. What he saw made him grimace. The surviving ponies – and one small dragon – had gathered the fallen figures of their companions, now located behind a nearby pile of rubble that offered some makeshift cover. Tears and soft words of comfort were being shared as the larger one was praying for the salvation of her fallen fellows, while the others glanced between her and himself.
Intent on rectifying the situation immediately, Mihr touched down, folding his wings to his sides as he reached within his armor, withdrawing a small silken pouch. Even as he started to open it, one of the ponies crept forward cautiously. “Um, Mihr, is it?” she began, her voice thick with nervousness. “I’m Twilight Sparkle, and I wanted to thank you for saving us-”
“Forgive me, Twilight Sparkle, but I have not yet earned your gratitude,” interrupted Mihr, opening the pouch and pouring its contents – sparkling diamond dust – onto one of his hooves. “Not until I have undone the wrongs that have been allowed to transpire this day.”
Wasting no further time, Mihr knelt down, ignoring Twilight’s awkward look as he lowered his head. Slowly gesturing, he began to chant in a soft, lyrical language, the words flowing and elegant as he allowed the powdered gemstones to spill from his hooves and onto the ground. It was only after his prayer was finished that he switched back to recognizable speech, making no move to rise. “Lords of Compassion,” he intoned softly, “Patrons of Mercy, I beseech you: alleviate the harms that have been inflicted on these innocents today. Assuage their suffering. Tend to their wounds. Renew them and let them suffer not under your gentle ministrations. In your name, this I pray.”
His supplication was answered almost immediately.
All around them, the wreckage began to move of its own accord, rising into the air and floating at a gentle pace, each piece of debris going out of its way to avoid striking anyone. Slowly, each stone and splinter joined together with those around them, reforming the ruined castle. Walls erected themselves as though they’d never fallen. The craters on the floor filled in without leaving so much as a crack to show that they’d been there. The ceiling reconstituted itself, as solid as it had ever been. And outside, seen through the windows where even now the glass was restoring itself, the fallen tower could be seen rising up into the air, pulling itself together as it stood up again.
Nor was the castle the only thing restored by the angel’s prayer. Nearby, groans erupted as wounded bodies suddenly found themselves restored. Rainbow Dash jumped up instantly, looking around until she found where Applejack was slowly blinking her eyes and pulling her into a fierce hug. One that was joined a moment later by Pinkie, looking no worse for wear, and Fluttershy and Spike a second after that. Princess Celestia was similarly sitting up, checking herself for damage before being hugged by Cadance and Shining Armor, the latter already restored by his wife’s magic but still looking refreshed by the angel’s prayer.
Smiling as he saw that the tears of sadness had been replaced by ones of joy, Mihr turned back to the pony in front of him. But she had already rushed over to rejoin her friends and family, throwing herself around them in a warm embrace. The sight was enough to make the angel smile.
“So in other words, this was all Discord’s fault. Again.”
Rainbow Dash turned to glare at the draconequus in question – finally having extricated himself from the safe he’d hidden in after the fighting had stopped – angrily. In the ten minutes since the six-winged alicorn stallion named Mihr had fixed everything, she’d been trying to play catch-up about how what should have been a simple meeting about what to do about that Lex guy had somehow turned into a life-or-death struggle against some huge statue-monster, something that wasn’t helped by how they’d almost all died. The fact that it was all apparently because of a certain Lord of Chaos was enough to make her turn to her friends, Rarity having come back with the rest of the guests – save for Shining Armor, who had gone outside to dispatch the Royal Guard to assure the rest of Canterlot that everything was alright – once the castle had been repaired. “First Tirek and now this! I say, now that Pinkie’s back, we go get the Elements of Harmony and turn this guy into stone again!”
“Really, Rainbow Dash, that’s not very fair of you at all.” At the word “fair,” Discord snapped his fingers, and everypony suddenly found themselves sitting behind carnival booths feature ring tosses and whack-a-mole games, cheerful music coming from nowhere as the doors leading out of the room now sat beneath signs that read “The Haunted Hallway” and “Tunnel of Mushy Stuff.” Through the windows overlooking the courtyard, several rides could be seen, with two ponies who looked suspiciously like Flim and Flam encouraging a crowd of ponies that hadn’t been there a moment ago to come ride the ferris wheel. “You heard what our resident angel here said.” Another snap of his fingers, and Discord appeared right next to Mihr, the draconequus now clad in a white robe with a halo floating over his head. “I couldn’t possibly have known that opening up a portal between dimensions would have made that giant monster appear.”
“A permanent portal,” corrected Mihr gently, apparently unconcerned by Discord’s antics. But his expression was reproachful nonetheless. “And while you cannot be held at fault for provoking the lhaksharut’s ire, the conduct you displayed while your companions faced mortal peril left much to be desired.”
“Darn right!” huffed Spike. Pointing a talon at Mihr, he joined in on the angry looks being directed at Discord. “That guy said that he did something to his weapon to make it have chaos powers, and that’s what wounded that lahk-…lakh-…that big ugly creature! If you’d done that, we might have won that fight!”
Sighing, Discord reached up and tossed his halo away. “Look, I’ll admit this wasn’t my finest moment, but it’s not like I’m the only one who ran away!” He waved a paw toward Cozy, Willow, Zecora, Line Byline, and all the other guests who had been evacuated, causing them to frown at him in turn. But he didn’t seem to notice, finding a loose thread on his robes and yanking on it, the entire thing suddenly unraveling…into cotton candy, which he offered to Spike. “So how about you go take your little girlfriend on a nice date at the fair, and we all let bygones be bygones?”
“I’d rather you just said bye and were gone,” snorted Soft Mane, crossing her arms over her chest.
But Fluttershy had heard enough. “Well I think that everypony needs to stop picking on Discord,” she announced. Flapping her wings, she flew over and hovered in front of him protectively, giving an uncharacteristically firm look at everyone who had glowered at him before. “I know what it’s like to feel too afraid to fight when a big, scary monster shows up, and blaming him for that isn’t very nice. Besides, it’s because of him that we got Pinkie back.”
“That’s right!” Pinkie’s gleeful shout came as she pounced on the cotton candy, snatching it from Discord’s paw and swallowing the whole thing in one fluid motion. She didn’t hesitate as she landed, rushing toward a nearby booth and starting to whack some of the moles there with abandon. “And besides, everything turned out alright in the end, so I say less with the frowns and more with the clowns!” Without missing a beat she abandoned her game to bounce over to a different booth, fishing around in it before withdrawing several tubes of makeup. “Who’s up for some face-painting?! I can do happy clowns and grinning clowns and laughing clowns and chuckling clowns and giggling clowns and silly clowns and scary clowns but only on Nightmare Night and-”
“Um, I hate to burst your bubble, sugarcube,” interrupted Applejack. “But while I’m mighty glad that you’re back and all, I think you forgot Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon.” She gave Twilight a worried look. “You’re sure you didn’t see them come back through the portal with the rest of us?”
Twilight nodded. “I’m sure. But that means that they’re probably alright.”
Applejack sighed, looking only slightly mollified by that. “I’m sure you’re right, and I’m glad for that, I really am. It’s just…I was really hopin’ we could finally bring ‘em back to their families.” She looked over at Mihr then, hesitating for just a moment before speaking. “You said that the reason that monster attacked was because Discord’s portal was permanent, right? So would it be okay if he just opened one up all temporary-like and closed it once those fillies were through?”
Mihr didn’t have a chance to speak before Discord started shaking his head, eyes wide. “Oh no! No way! I’m not going to be responsible for that lucky chariot or whatever it was called coming back!”
“You are right to be wary, chaos serpent,” added Mihr somberly. “Attempting to violate the spirit of an agreement while maintaining true to its letter is a pastime that the inevitables have much experience with. While you might escape their judgment were you to do such a thing, I would not recommend you chance it.”
Twilight put a hoof to her chin. “But what if we didn’t open a portal at all? What if I cast a spell to transport myself back to Everglow, found the fillies, and then cast it again to bring us all home? Would that be acceptable?”
Mihr nodded. “Indeed. The edicts that the lhaksharut enforce are meant to prevent the boundaries of the planes from becoming eroded, not prevent travel between them altogether.”
“Great!” Twilight smiled. “Then I can prepare my spell and head back there tomorrow! We’ll have Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon back in no time at all! Pinkie, where were…Pinkie?” Looking around as she realized she couldn’t find the party pony anywhere, her attention was drawn to the window as she heard a familiar giggling coming from outside. Sure enough, a glance out the window showed her playing bumper cars with several foals. Snickering a little, Twilight nevertheless turned to Discord, giving him a pointed look.
“Oh fine,” he huffed, snapping his fingers again.
In an instant, all of the carnival trappings were gone, and Pinkie was back in her chair at the conference table, giving a loud “aww!” as she realized what had happened.
Twilight gave her an apologetic look before getting down to business. “Pinkie, can you tell me the name of the village where you and the fillies were staying in Everglow? The one that I saw in the distance on the other side of that portal? I need to know so I can look up its location so that I can teleport there after I arrive.”
Blinking, Pinkie tilted her head. “Oh, um, it was Ar…something or other. Arsenal? Artesian? Arugula? Hmm…” Scratching her head, her brow furrowed as she concentrated. “It definitely started with an ‘A,’ and I’m pretty sure about the ‘r.’ Maybe it was Arctic? Or Arbitrary? Arf-arf?”
“Pinkie, this is important!” Twilight tried to fight off the sinking feeling coming over her then. “I can’t teleport somewhere unless I know what the destination looks like and I know exactly where it is! If I don’t know the name of the town, I can’t look it up on a map once I go to Everglow, which means I can’t find Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon!”
Giving an uncomfortable laugh, Pinkie shrugged. “Maybe you could just look up every village that starts with an ‘A’ and try teleporting to them all? How many could there be?”
Her answer came in the form of Twilight groaning and planting her face down on the conference table.
She picked herself up only after Princess Celestia pointedly cleared her throat. “While I’m also very concerned about bringing those wayward fillies home, Twilight, perhaps you and your friends can figure out an alternative solution once we’ve adjourned here, unless,” she directed her attention toward Pinkie then, “you think that they’re in imminent danger?”
“Oh, no way!” Pinkie shook her head back and forth. “That village was kinda like Ponyville in how nice it was! It even had a candy shop! I bet the girls are back there right now eating some of that delicious honey-frosted cake we had before…” Her mouth watering, Pinkie couldn’t help but stare off into the distance, licking her lips as she quite obviously turned her thoughts back to the cake in question for several seconds before collecting herself. “Besides, those girls are actually pretty tough! I mean, not, like, fight off a whole bunch of gem gnolls all by themselves tough, but they’ve definitely picked up a few tricks!”
“Then hopefully they’ll be able to take care of themselves for a little longer,” concluded Princess Celestia. “Spike, perhaps you could send them a letter letting them know that everyone here is alright and that we’ll continue looking for a way to bring them home?”
“Yes ma’am!” answered Spike, giving a salute.
Princess Celestia gave him a grateful nod before turning her attention back to the six-winged angel in their midst. “Mihr, before I go any further, on behalf of everyone here please allow me to express my gratitude for your timely assistance. I fear the worst would have come to pass if you hadn’t arrived when you did.”
Mihr's answer was given with a deep bow. “You honor me with your praise, though I fear I have done little to deserve it. You and yours would never have found yourselves in such dire straits had my attempts to preserve the peace of this world not been so shortsighted in scope.”
“Does that have to do with what you were saying to that lhaksharut before?” asked Twilight. “Something about some sort of provisional agreement that you made regarding Equestria?”
But Mihr didn’t have a chance to answer as Princess Celestia cut in. “Twilight’s question is one that weighs on us all, but before we discuss that there’s something else I’d like to ask you.” She paused then, glancing at Luna in a silent request for permission. It was only after her sister nodded that Celestia continued. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that my sister, Princess Luna, is…afflicted?”
Mihr’s expression turned grave as he nodded, his eyes settling on Luna. “Indeed. The taint of profane magic clings to you now, dampening your splendor like a cloak sodden with foul water.”
Luna winced at that, and Celestia put a wing around her in a silent show of support before she kept speaking. “This is the work of that wizard we told you about before, Lex Legis.” Briefly, she told him what had happened when they’d gone to Vanhoover to confront the pony in question, before outlining how all of their subsequent efforts to remove the curse he’d placed on Luna had met with failure. “We haven’t given up,” she said at last, “and we’re already putting together a new plan. But now that you’re here, I wanted to ask you directly…” She paused then, and everyone held their breath, knowing what her question would be before she asked it.
Mihr’s answer, given with an expression of deep regret, caused any number of disappointed sighs and low groans to fill the room. By contrast, Luna herself bore the news stoically, her expression not changing save for her eyes closing for a long moment. Celestia was much the same, nodding sadly. “I understand. The curse Lex Legis used has proven itself to be unusually strong, which is why it’s resisted the efforts of our best…”
She trailed off as Mihr held up a hoof, shaking his head slowly. “You misunderstand me,” he said a moment later, “and I have no wish to be anything less than completely forthright with you. The wizard’s malediction is mighty, it’s true, but not so mighty that it is beyond my power to remove. Rather, it is because of the concordance reached among the planar powers regarding the oversight of this world that compels me to refrain from offering my aid.”
This time the raised voices were filled with shock and, in some cases, anger. “You’re saying you could help, but won’t?!” Line Byline couldn’t help but sound outraged. “I thought you were supposed to the Angel of Friendship!”
“I can’t believe you’re going to let some agreement keep you from healing someone who’s suffering right in front of you,” murmured Cozy, giving Luna a look of sympathy.
“At least I was willing to give it a try,” noted Discord smugly.
Zecora stood up abruptly, drawing everyone’s attention. “While this is disappointing news, we should consider the angel’s views,” she rhymed. “I’m sure he’ll tell us why it would be worse if he were to remove Princess Luna’s curse.”
“Mihr doesn’t have to explain himself.” Zecora’s eyes widened at Princess Celestia’s sharp retort, nor was she the only one surprised by the rebuke. Twilight cringed, Aisle flinched, and Cadance gave the elder princess a worried look. But it was only when Luna placed a hoof on her sister’s side and quietly uttered her name that Celestia calmed down. “I apologize,” she said a moment later, her voice having returned to its usual steady tone. “What I meant to say was that, after all that he’s done for us already, nopony here has any right to be upset with Mihr if he’s not willing to do even more.”
“I wish that I could.” Mihr’s eyes were filled with sadness as he looked around the room, his gaze sweeping over each person there before coming to rest on Luna. “Everyone here is united by their concern for you, their hearts aching that they cannot do more to help you carry this burden which has so cruelly been thrust upon you. Such compassion rings out more beautifully than all the choirs of my brethren in Heaven, and I am humbled to find myself in the presence of so many who are willing to give so much.”
“Mihr…” Princess Celestia bit her lip at that, a heartbroken expression on her face as she gazed at the six-winged stallion.
But the angel didn’t react to her gentle cry, instead turning to look at Twilight. “You asked me previously about the agreement that I spoke of, which bids me to stand by while your princess suffers even as it compelled me to stand fast against the harm the lhaksharut would have inflicted upon you. With your permission, I will expound upon it now.”
Blinking, Twilight glanced at Celestia and Luna. The latter nodded first, and the former did so a second later. It was only then that Twilight copied the gesture, looking back at Mihr. “If you wouldn’t mind,” she asked hesitantly.
“Of course.” Mihr turned to address the assembled guests as a whole then. “For reasons that remain unclear, your world was until recently isolated from the planes that lay beyond the mortal realm. Neither the Hosts of Virtue, not the Pits of Perdition, not any of the other great powers that dwell among the Outer Realms were aware of it. That was a situation that came to an abrupt end a very short time ago, when this world was suddenly brought into conjunction with the planes beyond it.”
“You’re referring to the Elemental Bleeds?” asked Line, his notepad and pencil out again.
“That is the name that your people have given the conjunction,” answered Mihr gravely. “But while the Elemental Planes touched your realm most closely, they were far from the only connections that were forged then. Although the raw matter of those planes made contact with your world directly, the powers of the Outer Realms have begun to take notice of it as well, and those that haven’t been made aware of it yet will not long remain ignorant.”
“You mean like Everglow’s gods?” Applejack frowned, remembering an encounter she’d had coming back from one of her trips to that other world, when she and her companions had stumbled into the realm of a certain deity. “Kara wanted to get to Equestria so badly you’d have thought she was a diamond dog that’d just heard about Ponyville’s Gem Cave.”
“There are many deities that are eager to expand their flock to this world’s residents,” agreed Mihr. “Although I have yet to see the full tapestry of people that live among you, that none of them seem to have any religions of their own presents an opportunity too great for any god to pass up, for their power is measured by the number of mortals who worship them and the strength of their devotion.” He gestured toward Cadance and the crystal ponies with a wing.
Twilight’s eyes widened then. “Wait, so if Lex has made some sort of deal with the Night Mare here in Equestria…”
Knowing what she was asking, Mihr nodded. “Yes, Princess Twilight. Should his goddess of darkness and tyranny spread her faith here while the others of her pantheon languish, then not only will this serene land of Equestria be at risk, but she might very well gain the power she needs to ascend to the position of leader over the other gods of her divine fellowship. Should she do that, she will surely seek to change the fate of that other world, Everglow, as well.”
“So let me see if I get this straight.” Unable to sit still any longer, Rainbow Dash jumped upward, wings flapping as she hovered in place. “Not only has Lex cursed Princess Luna, but now he’s also working with an evil goddess who’s putting Equestria and Everglow in danger? And you can’t help because why, exactly?”
“I think what Rainbow Dash is trying to say,” interjected Rarity tactfully, “is that we’ve gotten a little off-track from that agreement you were telling us about.”
“Indeed.” Giving an apologetic bow, Mihr continued. “The gods are not the only powers among the Outer Realms who wish to guide this world down a path in accordance with their interests. The inevitables seek to enforce order and natural law here as they do elsewhere. The devils will attempt to corrupt the souls of the populace and bring them to damnation. Demons will see this world as just another place to rampage through and destroy.”
“So we’re going to see more inevitables?” asked Discord uncomfortably.
“And devils?” whimpered Fluttershy.
“And demons?” frowned Applejack.
“Oh my!” grinned Pinkie, her cheery expression a marked contrast to how everyone else looked.
“Do not lose heart.” Mihr’s statement came with a flaring of all six of his wings, and the gesture was more than symbolic. Everyone present felt a pressure radiating off of the angel then, emanating from him like heat from a flame. But rather than pushing them away, it seemed to curl around everyone there, wrapping around them like a warm blanket on a winter’s night, offering security and hope to chase away the specter of despair. “It is in effort to prevent this world from being overrun by the great powers of the Outer Realms that the Hosts of Virtue – the powers that guide the realms of Heaven, Elysium, and Nirvana – have drafted a compact and presented it to those among our fellows who have knowledge of this world. It states that, until we’ve finished investigating the unusual circumstances by which this realm remained outside of our awareness for so long, we shall endeavor to remain apart from it so as to better evaluate it without contaminating our findings.”
“Of course you did,” muttered Willow, speaking for the first time since she’d returned with the other evacuees.
“Don’t be rude,” chastised Grass Patch gently, her smile making it clear that she was still enjoying the warmth of the angel’s protective aura.
But Willow just snorted. “This is what they do, angels and archons and other members of ‘the Hosts of Virtue.’ They hang back, work behind the scenes, and encourage those of us who don’t have anywhere near their power to do the heavy lifting.” She looked at Mihr then, scowling. “Do you actually think that any demons will abide by your little compact? Or that devils won’t find some loophole or workaround?” She shook her head in disgust. “All you’ve done is left us to fend for ourselves.”
“He didn’t exactly hang back when that lhaksha-thingy attacked,” noted Aisle.
For his part, Mihr didn’t seem distressed by Willow’s accusation. “The points you raise are valid ones. There is no possibility that the forces of Perdition or the Abyss will abide by this agreement. But that was not the point of this compact.”
Cadance tilted her head, curious. “Then what was?”
“This world is a testament to the good that mortals are capable of,” answered Mihr. “The souls of your people shine brightly, glowing with virtues such as charity, compassion, devotion, integrity, optimism, and many others. There are few worlds where so many have fulfilled their higher potential, and we among the Hosts consider it to be very important that we preserve and protect this world as much as we can, so that it might serve as a shining beacon to others. But we do not have the power to thwart the other great powers of the Outer Realms should they all use this world as a venue to advance their interests, as they do on others. To that end, this provisional agreement – by convincing them that the possibility of mortal worlds being hidden from our sight is too great an issue to ignore – bids them to suspend their interests in favor of keeping this world pristine, joining us in guarding it and so keeping it secure, at least for a time.”
“That didn’t seem to keep Lex from bringing the Night Mare here,” huffed Soft Mane.
“Or the belier devil that was in Vanhoover,” noted Luna.
“The gods are beyond the scope of our compact,” admitted Mihr. “What allowances they are made in this world is between them and mortals. Likewise, the presence of the belier was what alerted me that we needed to take action to preserve this place. But although we can keep watch over this world to a greater degree the more allies we have, such a defense remains imperfect. Although I wish I could say that not one denizen of darkness will befoul this beautiful world now that our agreement is in place, that is a promise I cannot make. Still, I hope you will take some comfort in knowing that your world will be protected.”
“And that’s why you can’t help us with Luna’s curse,” concluded Twilight. “Because that would break your agreement to leave Equestria alone.”
“Precisely so.” Mihr gestured to the conference room. “To correct the faults of one of our signatories falls within the purview of my oversight. But a conflict between the mortals of this world, even ones that have taken up the faith of foreign deities, is something that I am unable to become involved with.” He stood up then, folding his wings back to his sides as he did so. “But while I must take my leave now, there is one final thing I can do for all of you.”
In an instant, before anyone was able to object, the angel vanished, leaving only the echo of his voice behind.
The conference ended shortly after Mihr’s departure.
With the adrenaline rush from the lhaksharut’s attack wearing off, it had been clear as soon as the angel left that no one was in the mood to continue. To that end, Princess Celestia had suggested a quick review, confirming what they’d decided upon before the lhaksharut’s attack: that they’d try and use the Crystal Heart to break the curse on Luna. That they’d issue a public notice via Equestria’s newspapers recalling the crystal pony missionaries to the Crystal Empire in order to make sure the Crystal Heart was at maximum power when they did. And that Lex Legis was an enemy of Equestria who’d need to be dealt with once Luna was restored…if he didn’t attack them before then.
Once that was done, Celestia had asked if anypony had any other questions or concerns, and when no one said anything – though Twilight, Aisle, and Applejack still looked uncomfortable with that last part – she’d thanked everyone for their help and formally brought the gathering to a close. Luna had excused herself as soon as she had, citing a need for sleep since she wasn’t usually awake in the middle of the day. A moment later Celestia had left as well, going to help Shining Armor reassure the rest of Canterlot that everything was alright. Line Byline had been the next to leave, rushing out so that he could start drafting the notice for the crystal ponies. Cozy, Aisle, and Pillow had spoken with Princess Cadance quietly for a minute before heading back to the guest room that they’d been given, clearly exhausted after everything that had happened.
But there had been one individual who hadn’t left, due to having been waylaid by another one of the guests…
“Willow!”
The purrsian turned at the sound of Twilight’s voice, a streak of annoyance marring her usual mask of indifference. “When I said that I wanted to hurry home to my son, I wasn’t just making an excuse to leave,” she remarked flatly.
“I know,” acknowledged Twilight with an apologetic grimace. “It’s just, after what happened during that fight, I was hoping I could talk with you a little more.”
Letting out a slow breath, Willow nodded toward the hallway. “Walk me to the station.”
Biting her lip for a moment, Twilight glanced back at her friends. Fluttershy was deep in conversation with Discord, and Applejack and Rainbow Dash were similarly engaged. Pinkie was pulling Soft Mane, Grass Patch, and Zecora into a group hug, and Spike looked to be regaling Rarity about the role he’d played in fighting the lhaksharut, his self-satisfied expression suggesting that he didn’t realize that Rarity’s smile was patronizing rather than impressed. The sight made the corners of Twilight’s lips curl upward, and she maintained the expression as she turned back to Willow. “Let’s go.”
But as the two of them started walking, Willow’s next question wiped the happy look off of Twilight’s face. “So what happened with the lhaksharut?”
Looking down, Twilight gave a sigh. “I made some mistakes during the fight, and it almost got my friends killed.”
“That wasn’t how Princess Celestia made it sound,” replied Willow with a sidelong glance. After everyone had returned, the elder alicorn had briefly summarized what had happened before introducing Mihr. “She said that you and your friends fought bravely against the inevitable.”
“Maybe everypony else did.” Twilight’s ears folded down as she spoke, sounding miserable now. “But none of my spells affected that thing. It shrugged off the lightning bolt I threw at it, was completely immune to my polymorphing spell, and Pinkie’s silence spell was the only thing that saved everypony after I couldn’t stop its axiomatic numinous field!” She looked at the ground for a long moment before something occurred to her. “That’s a-”
“I know what it is.”
The purrsian’s tone hadn’t been harsh, but Twilight flinched nonetheless. “Right, sorry. I forgot that your magic specializes in summoning, so you know a lot about planar forces and creatures. You probably knew about how that lhaksharut couldn’t be polymorphed either, right?”
Willow nodded silently, her eyes still fixed on the hallway in front of them, giving Twilight no clue what she was thinking. Finally deciding that there wasn’t going to be an easy opening, she instead plunged forward. “Listen, I know we don’t know each other very well, and I’m sorry that I haven’t been a better friend since you and Sunflower moved to Ponyville, but I need your help. What I didn’t know almost cost my friends their lives in that last battle! If you could teach me what you know about other planes and summoning magic and, well…anything else, I’d really appreciate it!”
Another annoyed expression crossed Willow’s face, and Twilight braced herself for a negative response. But what came out of the purrsian’s mouth next caught her by surprise. “And?”
Twilight blinked, not sure what she was being asked. “And…?”
“And,” repeated Willow, “how much are you going to pay me for my services?”
“Pay you?” echoed Twilight, clearly taken by surprise.
“You ponies.” Willow couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “I know that I’m living in the land of friendship now, and that favors are the norm, but last time I checked tutoring is still a paid position, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but-”
“Good,” replied Willow without breaking her stride. “So, how much are you offering?”
“Um…” It wasn’t reluctance that made Twilight hesitate. Rather, she had no idea what the going rate was for magical tutoring. She’d simply never needed to know it; during her childhood, she’d been so far ahead of her studies that hiring help had always been a non-issue. Likewise, she’d never even thought of charging anypony who came to her for help with something, since teaching was almost as much fun as learning. Even back on Everglow, Under Score had taught her about magic purely out of altruism once she’d joined the Seekers, since he’d made it clear that part of the organization’s mission was to educate would-be adventurers before they set out on dangerous excursions. (Not that knowing what that was worth would have mattered, since she hadn’t worked out the exchange rate between Everglow’s currency and Equestrian bits yet anyway.)
Seeing that Willow was eyeing her again, Twilight gave her a pained smile. “I’ll buy your train ticket back to Ponyville…?”
Willow gave a snort that was either disdainful or a repressed laugh, Twilight couldn’t tell which. “That will be a start. In the meantime, we’ll have your first lesson now.”
“Great!” Twilight’s smile returned in full force as her horn glowed, whipping out a set of blank index cards and a quill. “I don’t have any blank scrolls on me at the moment,” she explained as she saw Willow glance at her with a raised brow. “But since this will just be a quick lesson, I figured a few index cards should do! Plus, this way I’ll have some easy-to-review notes that I can use to prepare for when you give me a test!”
“…right.” Not bothering to argue, Willow instead focused on the matter at paw. “Before we begin, let me ask you something. What did you think about that announcement that angel made? About trying to make an agreement with the other powers of the planes to try and keep this world free of their influence?”
Twilight’s eyebrows went up. Her first test was happening already! “Well…I thought it sounded like a good idea. I mean, Mihr seems nice enough, but Princesses Celestia and Luna told me what they heard about that ‘belier’ devil in Vanhoover, and between that and the lhaksharut I think it’s reassuring that somepony is going to try and keep Equestria safe.”
“So you think they’re going to quarantine the world from any and all planar creatures coming here?”
Willow’s voice was pointed enough that Twilight could immediately tell that the answer was “no.” The question was why, since what Mihr had said made it sound like exactly that. “Well, he did say that they might not be able to intercept everything. Oh, and gods are an exception, since they can’t show up here unless someone living in this world invites them.”
“Good,” acknowledged Willow. “What else?”
Biting her lip, Twilight tried to think of what else Mihr had told them. But no other answers presented themselves, and she bit her lip as she gave Willow an uncertain look, shaking her head.
“What did I do when Discord first showed up?” prompted Willow.
“I didn’t see what you did at first,” admitted Twilight. “But you used an invisibility spell pretty quickly. And after that you tried to distract him with that silver-and-blue cheetah you summoned…” She trailed off as that last word slipped out of her mouth. “Wait a minute, that’s right! You summoned that thing! From the planes! But Mihr said they were going to try and stop planar creatures from appearing here! So…was that one of the ones that slipped by them?”
Willow shook her head. “No. While it wasn’t a very powerful creature, I doubt the celestials guarding this world failed to notice it. The reason it showed up here is because they let it, despite their compact.”
Twilight couldn’t help but tilt her head. “But why?”
“Think about it. Their stated reason for keeping this world quarantined is because they want to research why they didn’t notice it until now, but that angel admitted that the real reason is because they wanted to preserve this world’s autonomy since it’s such a paradise. That means letting the mortals who live here do as we like, hence why he didn’t remove Princess Luna’s curse.”
“Okay…”
“But,” continued Willow. “What if some of the mortals living here want to summon planar creatures on their own?”
The paradox was immediately obvious to Twilight. The celestials bound by Mihr’s compact had agreed not to interfere with what Equestria’s mortals were doing, but had also agreed not to let other planar creatures come into their world. If those two directives were to move into opposition with each other… “So they’ll allow summonings to function even if doing so violates their agreement to keep Equestria under guard?”
“It’s more of a loophole than a violation,” explained Willow. “I’ve studied the cultures and politics of the planes as well as the abilities and powers of their denizens. Angels and agathions and other celestial beings are all quite happy to sit back and do nothing when we’re about to step on our own tails. They might protect us from things that aren’t our fault to begin with, but when it comes to self-inflicted wounds, they take no action and say that they’re just letting us learn from our own mistakes, no matter how catastrophic they are.”
“…you sound like you don’t like them very much.” That was the most diplomatic way Twilight could think to put it. Willow tended to play things close to her chest, but there was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice just then.
“You asked me for lessons, and this is one of them: unless you find a way to summon them under your own power, you shouldn’t count on flights of angels showing up to save you if you find yourself in trouble. This compact or agreement or whatever they call it is just that on a larger scale; they’ll keep hordes of demons away, but don’t expect them to help you if Lex Legis is about to curse you and your friends the way he did to your princess.”
Knowing better than to press what was obviously a sensitive issue, Twilight tried to steer the conversation in another direction. “So, who else do you think signed up for this agreement?” The question earned her another sidelong glance from Willow, wordlessly communicating that she knew full well what her pony companion was doing, but Twilight didn’t let that deter her. “I mean, you got him to admit that creatures like demons or devils wouldn’t agree to it anyway, so I’m just curious who else is out there,” she added with a weak grin.
For a moment it didn’t look like Willow would answer, but after several seconds the purrsian sighed, letting her discontent go as she breathed out. “The evil powers either wouldn’t sign on with such an agreement, or would break their word – either overtly or through some tortured logic – shortly after they did. So the agreement was really for the neutral planar hegemonies.”
“Such as?”
“The inevitables should be obvious. That lhaksharut was here on a technicality, but it was willing to back down when pressed, so I doubt it will push the issue later. Probably the aeons too.”
“The aeons?” echoed Twilight curiously.
“The Keepers of the Balance. They’re obsessed with maintaining some sort of cosmological equilibrium between good and evil, and law and chaos, but no one can figure out exactly how they measure it. They’re kind of like the inevitables in that they just show up and do whatever it is that they’re going to do, except at least inevitables can articulate whatever laws they’re enforcing. Aeons aren’t interested in explaining how they’re trying to maintain whatever cosmic scales they think are tilted; they just do it.” Willow frowned then, but this time it was in thought. “I doubt the proteans agreed to the celestials’ compact.”
“You called Discord one of those things before,” noted Twilight. “What are they?”
“The Serpents of Chaos. They’re not malicious, but they hate all order and structure, right down to basic things like gravity and cause-and-effect relationships. They’d prefer to return all of Creation to a primordial soup. But even how they go about trying to dismantle the multiverse is unpredictable. Some of them might try to tear down the barriers between the planes, but others are more concerned with disrupting societies or even specific localities, rearranging the words in books or sharing secrets people would prefer to keep hidden, all just to stir things up.”
Twilight gave a lopsided grin. “That sounds like Discord alright.” But her smile melted away as she thought through the implications of that. “So this is an entire race of beings like Discord?”
“If they’re serious about this agreement of theirs, the celestials should try to keep them away from Equestria,” answered Willow, hearing the worry in Twilight’s voice. “Besides, if they don’t, the inevitables will. As you can guess, proteans and inevitables hate each other the same way angels hate demons and devils.”
By that time they had exited the castle, and both of them paused as they glanced ahead. In front of the entrance, Princess Celestia was holding forth, Shining Armor at her side as she assured everypony that everyone was alright and that there was nothing to fear. Willow and Twilight watched her for a moment, one with a neutral expression, the other with open admiration.
“Hopefully that angel will make sure no more inevitables come here, performing their normal duties on some minor technicality,” said Willow at last.
“Why’s that?” asked Twilight, not taking her eyes off of her mentor.
“There’s another type of inevitable, called maruts, which are almost as powerful as lhaksharuts,” replied Willow. “They enforce a different natural law, one that Princess Celestia is already in violation of.”
Alarmed, Twilight whipped her head around. “What?! That’s crazy! Princess Celestia helps enforce natural laws here in Equestria! She’s the pony who moves the sun! She moved the moon for a thousand years while Luna was imprisoned! What law could they possibly think she’s breaking?!”
Willow’s expression didn’t change when she turned to look at Twilight. But like before her mask of indifference was flawed, this time by a grave look. The sight sent chills down Twilight’s spine as the purrsian answered.
Routines were a luxury that Lex hadn’t been able to afford for some time.
When he’d been younger, living what in hindsight now seemed like a carefree life at his parents’ house, he’d proceduralized many of his daily activities. Breakfast had always been at a certain time, consisting of the same foodstuffs each morning, eaten in a particular order. The clock in his room, while it could go a week before it would start to lose time, would receive exactly three turns of its key at noon every day. The cloak he’d worn when he needed to go out in inclement weather was always hung on the third peg on the rack by the door, never the first, second, or fourth.
Those and a hundred other constants had helped to buttress his world against the chaos of everything beyond it. Having the things that were under his control operate in recognizable patterns each and every time he interacted with them allowed him to take them completely for granted, not having to spare any time or energy thinking about them and instead directing his attention toward larger issues, issues which actually mattered. The efficiency of it all had been both useful and comforting, and losing that in the wake of the series of upheavals that his life had become – starting with his ill-fated trip to the Crystal Empire that had hurled him a thousand years into the future, followed by being flung into the harsh world of Everglow, and now returning to Equestria only to have to fight a series of battles in order to rescue Vanhoover – had been just one of the many unpleasantries that he’d had no choice but to deal with.
But now, in the five days since he’d defeated Celestia and Luna, sending them fleeing back to Canterlot, he’d found himself able to start enjoying a routine once again.
Each day now began with his studying the gem imbued with the resurrection spell that the Night Mare had given him. Moving into the parlor that adjoined the bedroom of what Trotsworth had assured them was the largest guest suite in River’s mansion, Lex would spend the pre-dawn hours of the morning staring into the facets of the oversized ruby, quietly examining the interlocking lattices of magical energy inside it, mentally dissecting the underlying structure therein. Not that he needed to in order to use it; the activation method was simplicity itself, consisting of a lengthy but uncomplicated liturgy to the Night Mare. Once uttered, it would unleash the spell from the ruby and let him bring back any one individual whom he could name. But then it would be permanently expended, leaving him with no opportunity to revive anyone else; far better to unravel how it worked first so that he could add it to his mental repertoire of thaumaturgical spells. Then, the next time he had the chance to replenish them – which would be in several weeks now that he couldn’t use Severance as a battery – he’d be able to prepare several castings of the resurrection spell on his own. By augmenting it with additional energy channeled through his body, Lex felt sure that instead of bringing just one pony back, he’d be able to resurrect dozens of individuals – perhaps even hundreds! – with each casting. With that done, it wouldn’t be very long before he’d have Vanhoover’s entire population brought back to life.
The scope of such a thing, he knew, would be unprecedented. Even if Princess Cadance could bring slain ponies back to life (something that Celestia and Luna had let slip during their battle with him), resurrecting an entire city would demonstrate to all of Equestria why he was more fit to rule than the alicorns. It would also be a powerful testament to the strength of the Night Mare’s religion. But most importantly, it would help to ameliorate the myriad atrocities that had been visited upon Vanhoover’s ponies; after all of the misery and suffering and death that had been inflicted on them, a restorative measure of comparable amplitude was the very least that a just and capable leader should do.
Lex, however, intended to do more than the very least, which led to the next part of his routine: overseeing the nascent market.
Despite the fact that they’d only been gone a few days, both Ribbon Cutter and Sonata were achieving remarkable results. Only two days after Ribbon had gone back to Tall Tale, boats had started appearing in Vanhoover’s harbor, loaded with timber products ready to be sold. The rapid turnaround had caught Lex by surprise, but only until he’d gotten a look at the watercrafts; each of them was freshly-made, built in a hurry by ponies desperate to sell their backlogged goods. And if they were upset about Ribbon’s order that Vanhoover had right of first refusal on their products, their grumbling wasn’t enough to keep them from doing business, unloading planks and beams and boards and numerous other wooden supplies. Before the first transaction had even concluded, Lex had already put together a group of ponies to go into Vanhoover – overseen by Aria (complaining all the while), in case they ran into any ghouls – and collect hammers, nails, saws, and other tools. By the time the sun was setting, there’d been enough gathered to begin constructing some very basic temporary housing units, much to the joy of the camp ponies.
That joy had been multiplied several times over the next morning. The sun had barely cleared the mountains when farm ponies, pulling wagons loaded with food, had arrived at the camp looking to sell their produce. Lex had immediately set about spending the cash-on-hoof he had from River, procuring enough that he’d not only needed to send another team of ponies into Vanhoover again – this time to raid another one of her banks (with Aria once again unhappily overseeing them) – but also told the camp ponies to get to work building a storehouse to hold what had quickly become a large influx of provisions. Sonata, it seemed, was performing her role with vigor.
The camp ponies, by that point, had been ecstatic. Seeing that their time sleeping in the dirt and living on two thin meals a day was finally coming to an end, the camp had taken on a jubilant atmosphere as yet another party had been thrown. Groups of ponies had started singing and dancing, others had cheered, games had been set up, and there hadn’t been a frown or worried look to be seen.
But it had been what Lex had done next that had truly amazed the camp ponies:
He’d paid them.
Despite the fact that the timber and the food had already cost a significant amount of River’s wealth, Lex had called for everypony who’d ventured into Vanhoover under his direction or was working on the new construction projects to line up. He’d then proceeded to give them bits for their work, explaining that from now on everypony that performed a task at his instruction would be financially compensated for doing so. Taking the blank looks he’d initially received to be confusion, he’d proceeded to explain that they were free to use their money to engage in private sales transactions with the timber merchants and farm ponies – subject to his oversight and potentially voiding those sales if they were for materials that he judged necessary to continue administrating to everypony’s needs – and clarified that distribution of the stored food and temporary housing would remain free for the foreseeable future.
As far as Lex had been concerned, what he was doing was simply good economic policy. Vanhoover needed to engage in commerce if it was ever going to make a comeback, to say nothing of needing to accommodate the huge influx of ponies that he planned to resurrect. To that end, his administration needed to inject massive amounts of money back into the local market in order to stimulate business. That was unsustainable in the long-term, of course, which was why River was going to Las Pegasus, but for the short-term it was the right course of action. Once word got out – first to Tall Tale and the northern farmers, and then to the rest of Equestria – that there was money to be made here, both from his government and from private individuals, more ponies would show up looking to sell their wares, stimulating new growth that was vital to restoring the city. Creating jobs and paying ponies to work was the foundation of that, and was no ultimately different than any other aspect of good governance.
The camp ponies, however, hadn’t seen it that way.
Instead, Lex had barely had a chance to finish speaking when he’d found himself mobbed by the ponies he’d been talking to. He’d very nearly turned into a shadow, thinking that he was being attacked, before realizing that it was just the opposite. He was being thanked.
“I’m so sorry I ever doubted you!”
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for everything you’ve done for us!”
“I knew all along you were a standup stallion!”
“Three cheers for Lex Legis!”
Those comments and many just like them had been accompanied by numerous hoofshakes, hugs, and even a few kisses planted on his cheeks. Tears had poured down the faces of more than a few of the ponies praising him. Others were asking for forgiveness for having thought ill of him before. Several ponies had mentioned how this, in conjunction with the speech he’d given a few days prior, where he’d explained what had happened with Block Party and the alicorns and everything else, had changed their opinion of him for the better. The entire situation had left him completely nonplussed, having no idea how to react to the effusive outpouring of praise and affection.
Some ponies had even asked him if he could teach them more about the Night Mare. That had resulted in him stumbling his way through an impromptu sermon about the goddess, reiterating the basic tenets of her dogma as he understood them. He’d even been asked to teach them some prayers to her.
It had been an awkward scenario, and one he’d only been able to muddle through thanks to the third portion of his new routine: spending his evenings training Fruit Crunch and the rest of the “Night Mare’s Knights.”
Unlike the satisfaction of unraveling the mysteries of resurrection magic, or the awkwardness of suddenly being exalted by everypony in the camp, instructing those children was an activity that Lex had decidedly mixed feelings about. He knew they needed training in the proper use of the magic that they’d been granted; the memory of Fruit Crunch’s wolf clenching a Royal Guard’s neck in its jaws while the colt threatened to kill him if his colleagues didn’t stand down was proof enough of that. But at the same time, he was still deeply uncomfortable with the idea of foals having dangerous powers; children their ages should be worrying about their homework, not how to use potent magical abilities without causing bloodshed.
To that end, once he’d established exactly what powers they had and how they worked, he’d elected to teach them the very basics: how to use their magic in a manner that was ethically and morally correct. That was a lesson that was paramount, given that Severance had given them bits and pieces of the Night Mare’s dogma that were least concerned with the proper ways in which to wield power. Fortunately, the foals seemed eager to learn, and Lex had spent the last few days giving them lessons in basic deontology, with Feather Duster watching in the background as she looked after Tiddlywinks.
But their essays will make it clear how much they’ve really understood, Lex thought to himself as he headed back toward River’s manor. The latest round of supplies and food stores had been purchased, and it was still early afternoon, giving him plenty of time to go over what the children had written in response to the assignment he’d given them last night: to write no less than five hundred words on the different tiers by which the morality of an action was judged. Fortunately River's manor had paper and quills-
The sound of a train whistle cut through his thoughts, and Lex turned in the direction of the sound. Off to the east, he could just make out the sight of an inbound locomotive, its boiler pumping out smoke. Behind him he could already hear the camp buzzing with excitement, and he knew that the Night Mare’s Knights’ essays would need to wait.
Routines were a luxury, Lex knew, and it looked like his were about to be disrupted yet again.
Glancing up at the earth stallion whose name she hadn’t bothered to remember, Aria raised an eyebrow. “So?”
“So?!” echoed the pony, clearly shocked that she wasn’t as excited as he was. “So there’s a train coming! Listen!” He held still for a moment, putting a hoof by his ear. Sure enough, a few seconds later came the sound of a train whistle, faint but undeniably there. “Maybe some of the people who evacuated the city are on it! We should hurry back!”
“Not until we’re done here,” huffed Aria, what little interest she’d had in this new development already fading. Instead she went back to what she’d been doing. Singing the words to a minor telekinesis spell – it wasn’t as good as what most unicorns had, unable to move more than four or five pounds at a slow drift, but it got the job done – she lifted a small rock to just the right height before releasing it as she gave it a sharp kick, watching it sail across the street and hit a few feet to the left of the window she’d been aiming for, one that still had an intact pane of glass. Cursing, she glanced around for another rock, and it was then that she realized that stallion was still there, giving her a discouraged look. “Did you not hear what I just said?” she growled, a note of irritation entering her voice.
“B-but the train…” sputtered the earth pony, his expression making it plain that he didn’t understand why this wasn’t top priority.
“You want to go see that train so badly?” This time her voice was a full-on snarl, advancing on the stallion slowly, causing his eyes to widen as he backed away. “Then get back in the bank and help the others finish emptying the vault! Because we’re not leaving until it's empty! Otherwise you can keep pushing me and SEE WHAT HAPPENS!”
“Y-yes ma’am!” he squeaked, before turning and running back inside at top speed.
“And don’t even think about pocketing any of those bits for yourself!” yelled Aria after him. Not that she really cared if he did, but she knew that Lex would hold it against her if he found out that any of them had, the same way he would if any of them ended up hurt. It was why she’d had to go on this stupid errand in the first place, since he didn’t trust anybody – oh, right, “anypony” – else to handle things if there was still a ghoul lurking around. And so she’d had to trudge through that smelly, filthy bank, checking every nook and cranny and alcove to make sure that there were no undead hiding anywhere. There hadn’t been, and Aria still felt mildly irritated about that; she really could have used something to take her anger out on. Fortunately, the combination to the vault Lex had given her had worked, so the grunts he’d sent with her could take it from there, meaning that she was free to sit outside and wait for them to finish hauling everything out and into the wagon they’d brought. Now if only they’d hurry up; train or no train, she was so bored…
Another rock missed the window, this time going too high, causing Aria to utter another round of profanity. She was half-tempted to steal some of the money herself, purely to stick it to Lex for sending her on these hideously dull assignments. There’d been at least one every day for almost a week now, and the monotony was grating on her. But as much as she wanted to pay him back for making her do this, she knew better than to try. After all, she was still suffering under the results of what had happened the last time she’d pushed him too far…
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Oh come on!” groaned Aria. This was the second night in a row Lex had used that excuse. She’d let it go before; between his having gotten into another fight with Sonata and how the two of them were both obviously upset that Nosey had left (unlike Aria, who totally hadn’t been sad to see her leave or anything), it had been obvious that they wouldn’t be using the huge bed in River’s guest room for anything but sleeping in.
But tonight was different. He’d had a full day to get Nosey out of his system, and Sonata had taken off for her one-mare tour of all the hick farms north of Vanhoover that morning. Now that night had fallen, it was the first time Aria would get to have Lex all to herself, and she’d been looking forward to it. Except now he was being difficult for whatever reason. But that’s fine, she decided. I know how to get a rise out of him in more ways than one. After all, she’d done it before…
“Well, I guess that makes sense,” she drawled in a syrupy voice, separating herself from where she’d been nuzzling him and wandering back toward the bed. “After all, Blondie took your family jewels with her when she left, didn’t she? Or was that Sonata?”
The insult earned her a dark look from Lex, glaring at her from where he was seated at the small writing desk on the other side of the room, reviewing that ledger River had left him. “Don’t test my patience, Aria. Shut up and go to sleep.”
“Or maybe,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him, crawling onto the bed and stretching lithely, “you’ve finally figured out that I’m just too much mare for you to handle.” She gave him a mocking grin as she continued. “After all, the last time we did it, I was the one on top.” She rolled her hips lazily, briefly pantomiming the lap dance she’d given him a few nights previous when he’d been too exhausted to resist. “And before that you ran away with your tail between your legs instead of going all the way with me.”
“Aria…”
There was a dangerous tone in his voice now, his eyes having flared green-and-purple the way they did when he was either very upset or casting a spell. And he definitely wasn’t casting a spell now. But rather than worry her, the sight sent an excited thrill through her. After all, that was exactly how he’d sounded right before he’d almost taken her back at the train station. And this time there wouldn’t be any blonde four-eyes to mess things up. Now all he needed was another little push…
“I guess I’ll just have to go find another stallion who can satisfy me then,” she mock-sighed, rolling off the bed and lazily sauntering toward the door, making sure to put a little extra sway in her step as she did. “I wonder if I should go give that premature pegasus another chance. Or maybe that old butler who runs this place. I bet he’d love to stick it to a mare who looks just like his boss, except younger and hotter.” She’d almost reached the door by then, extending a hoof toward the handle-
Only to be stopped as black crystals grew across the door, sealing it shut.
Fighting down the urge to grin in triumph, she glanced back over her shoulder, her expression one of mild irritation. “Do you mind? I’ve got places to go and ponies to do.”
“I can assure you,” answered Lex coldly, rising from where he’d been seated, “you have neither.”
“Is that a fact?” This time she did smirk, her cocky grin silently daring him to back his words up with action.
“You don’t seem to understand that our relationship has changed.” Slowly, Lex stalked toward her, his eyes still blazing. The sight sent a rush of fear through Aria, and she reveled in it, feeling herself heat up. “When I declared you incompetent to function on your own, you stopped being my girlfriend. From that moment on, you’ve been a ward of the state, and I AM THE STATE!” He struck a hoof on the ground then, and Aria almost jumped. “That means that I am the one who makes all of your decisions! I decide where you go! I decide what you do! And I decide who you spread your legs for!” He was right in front of her now, glaring down at her imperiously as he got right in her face, his voice lowering to a growl that was no less intense than his shouting had been. “And you don’t spread them for anyone except me.”
The heat that had spread through her had become an inferno by then, making her breath quicken and her tail twitch. His anger carried the promise of passion, and she knew that one more little push was all it would take, and he’d stop holding back. “Prove it,” she whispered, voice husky.
The smile that crossed his lips then was pure evil. “Very well.”
She expected him to fling her onto the bed and mount her roughly, rutting her like an animal until she screamed in joy.
She hadn’t expected to see his horn suddenly flare with a purple aura, followed immediately by a sudden sense of discomfort similar to when a leg had fallen asleep, except across her entire body. Belatedly realizing that he was casting a spell – no, a curse! – on her, she tried to resist it, attempting to flex her own magic and shake it off before it could get ahold of her, but it was already too late. A second later she felt his magic sink deeper into her, and the uncomfortable tingling passed.
“What did you do?!” she demanded, her heart slowing down a moment later as she realized she could hear herself. Whatever he’d done, he’d left her voice intact. It was enough to make her hope that this was some sort of magical foreplay on his part; that this was a curse that somehow made things better in the bedroom, like that pleasure-touch spell of his that Sonata had told her about.
But that hope was dashed a moment later as Lex gave a vindictive chuckle, his horn still glowing as he telekinetically retrieved the ledger from where he’d left it at the desk. “Exactly what I said.” He didn’t give her a chance to ask what that meant as he moved passed her, the black crystals covering the door turning to dust in an instant. “I’m going to go over these figures somewhere quieter. Enjoy your evening, Aria…if you can.”
“What does that m-, ah!” Aria’s question was cut off as Lex exited the room. In the instant that he’d moved a few paces away from her, it was like a bucket of cold water had been poured over her, her libido instantly shutting down. “No…!” A horrible suspicion sprouting in her mind then, Aria practically flung herself onto her back, reaching a hoof down between her hind legs and rubbing frantically.
Nothing. She might as well have been scratching her head for how lackluster it felt.
“No no no no no no no!” Leaping to her hooves, Aria charged out of the room, fury and anxiety coursing through her as she went to go confirm the curse that Lex had put on her…
The next several hours had been frustrating in the extreme. She’d rushed through River’s manor until she’d found one of the butlers – a younger one who looked like he was still a teenager – going around and snuffing any candles that had been left lit. Practically pouncing on the surprised fellow, she’d started to nuzzle him passionately only to immediately feel the uncomfortable sensation return, stronger than it had been when Lex had first laid that curse on her. The feeling of the other stallion against her body, both directly and through his clothes, had been like diving into a pit of centipedes, and she’d flung herself off of him in revulsion, rushing out and leaving the poor stallion lying there in confusion.
The same thing had happened when she’d run across Feather Duster a few minutes later, grabbing her as she’d been coming back from giving Tiddlywinks a late-night feeding.
She hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep that night, trying everything she could to get rid of – or at least bypass – Lex’s curse. Since she still had her voice, she’d tried to use her dispelling spell to lift it, to no avail. Equally useless were the makeshift toys she’d tried; everything from using a carrot to sitting on a washing machine while it was running had been no more stimulating than her hoof had. She’d briefly considered rounding up a few stallions and having them pleasure themselves all over her, but abandoned the idea; while that might upset Lex, it wouldn’t do anything for her, save for probably causing his curse to activate in some other horrible way that she didn’t want to think about.
But it hadn’t been until the following morning that she’d realized the full extent of what Lex had done to her. She’d been trudging to the dining room, intent on ordering the manor staff to bring her some breakfast (and hoping to catch them gossiping about how she’d been acting last night, so she could unleash her pent-up frustrations on them in a decidedly violent fashion), only to find Lex there. He didn’t even look up as she entered, eating that horrible porridge of his and reviewing that wretched ledger.
She’d stalked toward him then, intent on having him remove that curse even if it required another magical battle…only to be left gasping as she got within a few feet of him. All of a sudden her libido was working again, the lust that she’d felt last night back like it had never left. With how frustrated she’d been all night, the sensation had been heady, and she’d been ready to climb into his lap and start bouncing right there while the servants watched.
But Lex didn’t give her a chance to act, speaking without lifting his eyes from the pages in front of him. “This is how it’s going to be from now on. You will feel neither amorous desire nor carnal pleasure unless you’re within five feet of me. If you aren’t, then you won’t be able to stimulate yourself, and the touch of others will bring only revulsion.”
“You can’t do this!” she’d snarled at him, still not sure if she wanted to kill him or jump him.
He’d looked at her then, his expression calm and collected. “I believe I’ve made it very plain that I can,” he’d replied matter-of-factly, before producing a piece of paper with some writing on it from one of his saddlebags, sliding it over to her. “Now, you’re going to lead a group of ponies into Vanhoover today to retrieve some more bits from one of River’s banks. You’ll be responsible for their safety, as well as making sure that they don’t help themselves to anything that doesn’t belong to them. The combination is on here. There should be a ledger like this one in the vault as well. Bring it-”
“I won’t do it!” Her voice had been a hiss, furious that he thought he could treat her like this. Or at least, she told herself that she was furious. Her body, now able to feel the aching need that she’d been trying to recapture all night, had other ideas. “I absolutely won’t!”
He’d looked at her then, his features hardening. “Yes,” he said in a voice that made it clear he would not be denied, “you will.” He’d leaned forward then, his voice lowering to a whisper, and the sensation of his breath in her ear had made her bite her lip to keep from moaning. “Because if you’re a good girl, I’ll reward you later tonight.”
She’d wanted to dump that disgusting porridge over his head. To tell him that she was walking out of his life forever, and that she’d find a way to break his curse even if it killed her. To rip his precious ledger into pieces right in front of him before she went and used her magic to knock down part of the manor on her way out. But she hadn’t done any of that. Instead…
Instead she’d been a good girl.
And the reward had been so worth it.
“So worth it,” murmured Aria to herself, as she kicked another rock, this time missing the window only by inches.
“Worth what?” came an unexpected voice, making her jump.
Turning around, she saw the stallion from before had returned, this time with the rest of the crew that she’d led here, tossing bags onto the now-fully-loaded wagon. “Is that everything?” she demanded, vaguely irritated that this nobody – or nopony, whatever – had caught her daydreaming.
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Everything in the vault, ledger included. Can we head back now?”
His obvious eagerness almost made Aria roll her eyes, but she resisted the urge. “Fine. Let’s get out of here.” Despite her irritability, she couldn’t help but feel slightly excited. Another errand completed without incident, which would hopefully mean that Lex would reward her again tonight. After all, she’d been a good girl.
Pausing at that thought, Aria lifted another rock. Taking a long moment to aim carefully, her leg lashed out, and a moment later she heard the sweet sound of glass shattering, chuckling. Sure, if Lex wanted her to be a good girl, she could do that.
“Next stop, Vanhoover!” announced the conductor, squeezing through the press of ponies as he made his way toward the next passenger car. “Next stop, Vanhoover!”
“Finally!” groaned Slip ‘n’ Slide, shifting in place as he let the conductor pass. “I didn’t think I was going to make it!”
“It’s your own fault,” chuckled Funshine, who unlike his brother was still seated, rather than having to remain standing in the middle of the crowded car. “I told you that you’d lose your seat if you got up, but you didn’t listen.”
The comment earned him a sour look from Slip ‘n’ Slide. “Well excuse me for not being able to live on apples for every meal! I’m glad we don’t have to scrounge for food anymore, but that doesn’t mean I can eat the same thing all the time,” he groused. “Besides, you could have saved my seat!”
“It’s hard to save a seat when an elderly pony is the one asking to sit down, Slip,” retorted Granola Bar calmly, nodding toward the wrinkled old stallion sitting in what had been Slip ‘n’ Slide’s seat, his snoring undisturbed by the commotion around him. “And we told you that your idea wasn’t a good one. There was no way the ponies in the dining car were going to trade you anything for those apples.”
“It was worth a try,” huffed Slip, shifting his weight between his legs in a vain attempt to alleviate his discomfort.
“I still can’t believe that so many ponies want to go to Vanhoover,” murmured Hopscotch, glancing around at the packed passenger car. Although the train had been sparsely populated when they’d left Ponyville, more ponies had boarded at each stop, far outnumbering those who’d disembarked, until it had become standing room only now that they’d reached the last leg of the journey. “Don’t they know how bad things are there?”
Garden Gate shook her head. “They don’t. Or at least, they don’t know the full extent of it. Remember, Block Party was keeping the truth from getting out. All they know is that the city was flooded, and the recovery was going so badly that the trains stopped going there.”
“A lot of them probably had friends and family there, and they’re going to check on them,” added Funshine quietly. The noise of the train and the murmur of dozens of conversations happening all around them gave them a semblance of privacy, despite how crowded the car was.
“Or they’re just curious and want to gawk,” snorted Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“Or they’re like us,” offered Granola Bar. “Survivors going home.”
That comment silenced them all. When the five of them had initially realized that the train was filling up with ponies who were heading to Vanhoover, the possibility that some of them were ponies who’d made it out of the city when the flooding had started had occurred to all of them, accompanied by the hope that they’d run into familiar faces. But depressingly, none of them had recognized any of the new passengers making the journey with them, and conversations that they’d hesitatingly started (not sure if Princess Cadance and Shining Armor had declared them wanted criminals after their escape from Canterlot) hadn’t confirmed anypony to be former residents of Vanhoover on their way back.
That didn’t mean that there weren’t any other ponies from Vanhoover on the train, of course. It didn’t even mean that there wasn’t anypony there that they knew. As more and more passengers had filled the cars, it had become harder and harder to move around and talk to anyone. “And besides,” Granola Bar had reminded them yesterday, “if there are any survivors, they’ll probably be in towns closer to Vanhoover, so they won’t board the train until we get closer to the city.” So it was entirely possible that somepony they knew was in a nearby car, separated from them by the crowd.
That was just as well, though. After the initial round of disappointment at not finding someone they’d lost, none of them had been able to bring themselves to go looking again. Getting their hopes up only to have them dashed was pointless, especially when it would be easier to search the crowd after they reached the city and everyone disembarked.
Something which would happen in a few minutes, Garden realized as she felt the train slowing down.
As if hearing the thought, the buzz of overlapping conversations suddenly grew louder, as the ponies surrounding them began to shift and move in sudden agitation.
“Whoa!” yelped Funshine, visibly alarmed by what was happening. “What’s going on?!”
“I don’t know!” yelped Slip ‘n’ Slide, struggling to keep his balance as he was jostled from all sides. Craning his neck, he peered through the crowd. “I think…I think there’s something outside that everypony’s looking at!” Unlike before, he had to raise his voice to make himself heard, the rush of conversations steadily rising toward a deafening roar now.
“Outside?” Hopscotch peered out the window next to their seats, but it was pointless. With the train headed due west, their seats were now facing south, giving her a view of nothing except the river that led to the bay. “What is it?”
“Do I look like I’m near a window?” snapped Slip ‘n’ Slide irritably.
“See if you can push through the crowd and see what’s got them so upset,” suggested Granola Bar. “It’s only a few feet away.”
“I’ll do it,” offered Garden, rising to her hooves as she saw Slip ‘n’ Slide about to tell Granola Bar exactly what he thought of her suggestion. “You can take my seat, Slip.”
But the earth stallion shook his head, swallowing his ire with a resigned frown. “Your horn is still healing. I’ll go see what’s pinching everyone’s flank.” With a long-suffering sigh, Slip ‘n’ Slide started to fight his way through the crowd, disappearing into the press of bodies a second later.
Funshine couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the exchange. “And that was the guy who thought he’d be able to talk the Element of Generosity into helping us.”
“I notice that you never offered him your seat,” pointed out Granola Bar.
That was enough to make Funshine blush, giving a guilty grin as he shrugged. Looking over at Garden, he tried to change the subject. “So what do you think’s going on?”
The question was idle. Her answer, however, was anything but. “I don’t know, but I’m sure it has something to do with Lex and the princesses.”
No one said anything to that, and the four of them sat there in silence until Slip ‘n’ Slide made his way back to them almost a minute later. “I’d like to point out,” he grunted as he emerged from the wall of ponies, “that we could have just waited until we got there to see what all the commotion was about.”
“Did you find out what’s going on?” asked Garden, ignoring his griping.
“Yeah.” Slip glanced back at the crowd for a moment, and when he turned to look at her again, his expression had changed from one of aggravation to one of concern. “The train station has been destroyed.”
“Okay, so, now what?”
Huddled with her friends on the platform – the only part of the train station that was still intact – Garden didn’t answer Funshine’s question, instead staring at the wreckage of what had been, just over a week ago, the camp’s only permanent structure. Now it was a collection of stones, broken beams, and twisted metal, a situation that she felt certain had to be the result of a battle. It wasn’t a good sign, she knew.
That there had been some sort of altercation between Lex and the Royal Sisters had been something she’d figured out before they’d left Ponyville. There had simply been too many clues to ignore. Princesses Celestia and Luna leaving Canterlot in the care of Princess Cadance and her husband. Luna’s negative reaction in her dream to Garden’s telling her about Lex’s use of curses. The way the sun had suddenly fallen out of the sky for a few minutes several days ago. Soft Mane and Spike reading Twilight’s letter out loud, confirming that something terrible had happened to Princess Luna and that Lex was responsible. It all added up to a single conclusion, which was that the elder alicorns had journeyed to Vanhoover to meet with – or confront – Lex, and that a fight had broken out. And now, here was the train station, razed to the ground…quite possibly with Lex under it.
The thought made Garden’s stomach clench with worry. It had taken her some time to figure out, but she’d eventually realized how much she’d come to admire the stallion who had saved not only her life, but given her back her self-respect. As moving as it had been to receive forgiveness from Comfy Cozy and Pillowcase, it had been Lex Legis who had forced her to confront what a monster she’d become, and in doing so go through the painful process of reclaiming the best part of herself.
It was because of him that she was Garden Gate again, instead of still being Fencer.
But while the sun setting in the afternoon and Twilight’s letter made it seem like the princesses had come away from their fight with serious wounds, that still meant that they’d come back from it. There hadn’t been any such indications for Lex, and now, staring at the ruins of the station, Garden found herself contemplating the worst. Not again, she thought numbly. First my dad. Then Turbo. Not Lex too.
“Garden?”
Shaking her head at Hopscotch’s calling her name, Garden pulled herself together. “Now we find out what happened here,” she answered at last. All around them, ponies were still pouring out of the train, talking and mingling with each other and the camp ponies that had come to greet them. “Something like this should have been a huge spectacle. Everypony here should have seen it, which means that it shouldn’t be hard to find out if Lex is still alive.”
“Excuse me,” came a new voice, causing the group to turn in place.
The newcomer was a rather pretty pegasus mare, dressed in a rather provocative maid uniform that showed off the feather duster cutie mark on her flank. Rather than speaking to them, however, she was flying a few feet above the crowd, looking every which way as she tried to flag down ponies at random. “E-excuse me!” she called again, only to be ignored as everypony milled about. “Excuse me!”
“We should talk to her,” announced Slip ‘n’ Slide, his eyes firmly on the maid’s flank.
“We should definitely talk to her,” nodded Funshine, his gaze locked on the same place.
Snorting in amusement at the pair’s reaction, Garden’s horn lit up, a matching aura appearing around one of the frills on the maid’s uniform before it gave a light tug in their direction. Following the sensation, she glanced over at them in time to see Garden raise a hoof and beckon her over. A grateful smile crossed her face as she flapped her wings and touched down next to them. “Thank you, I didn’t think anypony was listening to me,” she panted, her voice filled with relief. “My name’s Feather Duster, and I’m looking for a mare named Granola Bar who might have been on this train. Do you know her?”
The question caught everyone off-guard. Garden had been planning on asking her if she knew what had happened to the station and if Lex Legis was alright, but now all she could do was look over at her friend, who was wide-eyed at her name being mentioned by a total stranger. “Me?” asked Granola Bar after a moment. “You’re looking for me?”
Feather Duster’s eyes widened as well. “You’re Granola Bar?!” The corners of her lips turned up. “This is wonderful! Miss Bank left word with Trotsworth that you and your friends are invited to stay at her manor, and he told the rest of the staff to be on the lookout for you if you showed up!”
“Wait, hold on a second.” Granola Bar’s eyebrows rose as she put the pieces together. “Miss Bank…you mean Piggy’s mom?!”
Feather Duster nodded, as though that were the most obvious thing in the world. “Yes, she-”
“BABE!”
Before she could say anything else, Feather Duster was suddenly scooped up by a passing pegasus stallion and held aloft in a crushing hug. “I knew you’d be okay!” laughed the stallion, having white fur and a chestnut-brown mane and tail. His cutie mark was an exclamation point with a hoofball for the dot. For her part, Feather Duster could only stare in shock at the pony embracing her, eyes wide and mouth open. Finally, she got herself under control enough to utter a single word.
Feather Duster knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she’d said the wrong thing. This was her husband, the father of her child, reappearing after she’d been sure that he hadn’t survived the fall of Vanhoover. With him returning, she should have been overjoyed that their family was whole again, particularly in light of how many other ponies had lost loved ones.
But even so, all she felt (besides shock) at that moment was a growing sense of apprehension. Tryout had many wonderful qualities, but a sense of restraint wasn’t one of them, which made him…indelicate, in situations where a gentler touch would have worked better. Although he never meant any harm, the result was often still troublesome for everypony involved.
Feather Duster could still remember what had happened when Cleansweep, who had only been four years old at the time, had learned about Nightmare Night. She’d been so excited at the idea of the holiday that she’d asked Tryout to tell her a scary story before bed, instead of one of the adventure tales he usually read her. While anypony else would have found an excuse not to do so, or at least told her a story whose frightfulness was diluted down to something appropriate for a foal her age, Tryout had enthusiastically gone along with their daughter’s request, telling her the tale of the Headless Horse. By the time he’d finished, Cleansweep had been too terrified to sleep, bawling her eyes out in fear when he’d tried to leave. It had taken Feather Duster most of the night to calm the poor girl down, and even then Cleansweep had spent the next week sleeping in their bed.
Or there had been the time he’d wanted to ‘liven up’ the Winter Wrap Up celebration by taking the collected snow and making it into Equestria’s largest snowmare. The project had actually been popular with everypony, with several pitching in to help, and at first it had seemed like one of his better ideas. But once things had picked up, Tryout had gotten the brilliant idea of using the snow in the clouds that the aerial team was busting. So he’d grabbed a few clouds, brought them over to where the snowmare was being built, and started jumping up and down on them. The localized snow shower he’d caused hadn’t been a big deal…but the lightning bolts that he’d accidentally discharged had been, since the snow had conducted the electricity to everypony nearby. The resulting injuries had led to that year’s Winter Wrap Up being Vanhoover’s being severely behind schedule.
Then there had been the time that he’d tried to lead an expedition into the Frozen North to chart a path to Yakyakistan (thankfully, the rest of his team had dragged him back before they’d all died of hypothermia). Or when he’d come up with the idea of digging a tunnel under the swamp between Vanhoover and Tall Tale (he hadn’t gotten close, instead managing to dig a ditch that fed water from the river into their basement, flooding it). Or when he’d wanted to try and be the second pony ever to pull off a Sonic Rainboom (succeeding only in pulling the muscles in both of his wings, sending him into a mid-air collision with a flock of very irate geese).
Which wasn’t to say that Tryout hadn’t had his fair share of successes. He’d once managed to fly not only directly from Vanhoover to Tall Tale without stopping – a trip that was long enough that no pegasi would attempt it – but he’d then turned around and flown back to Vanhoover all in the same day (before promptly collapsing, needing a full week of bedrest to recover), winning the coveted Iron Wing award from Vanhoover’s mayor for doing so. Likewise, while his wings were still recovering from that Sonic Rainboom stunt, he’d nevertheless helped to train Vanhoover’s team for the last Equestria Games; the ponies they’d sent had earned two gold, two silver, and three bronze medals between them, and had credited his training for their wins (one of them had even given him their medal in thanks). And he was particularly proud of the time he’d found a lost breezie, trekking across Equestria to help it get home (he had the pictures to prove it, which had made for the best Family Appreciation Day when he’d come in to Cleansweep’s school).
Her husband simply had a lust for life, and no real fear of failure when he set his heart on something. It was just that “no fear of failure” became “no appreciation for consequences” too often for Feather Duster’s liking. Particularly when she – or worse, their daughter – was the one who had to pay the price for it.
And with their current circumstances being what they were, it was all too easy to imagine what that price could end up being. The threats River Bank had used to cow her into obedience were still very much at the forefront of Feather Duster’s mind. And even those were nothing compared to what she knew Lex Legis could do, even if he hadn’t taken it upon himself to take her daughter as one of his students.
Even so, she’d been dealing with it. Each day was a slow-motion heart attack as she did her best to serve Vanhoover’s new overlord without upsetting him, but she’d been learning how to do so. Likewise, the classes that he was giving to those foals were – to Feather Duster’s stark relief – largely benign. Most of what he’d been teaching them had to do with his esoteric philosophy, rather than showing them all dark magic the way she’d feared he would. Even her daughter’s pet snake seemed docile enough. The situation, while still potentially volatile, was stable.
Except, of course, that she still hadn’t obeyed Miss Bank’s instructions about offering Master Legis…companionship. That was something she still didn’t want to think about, especially after Miss Blaze had pounced on her the other night. She’d barely touched her before suddenly letting go, cursing and galloping away with a snarl, but the incident had been enough to remind Feather Duster of what depravity was likely to take place when she finally had no choice but to follow that particular command.
A command that would be infinitely harder to carry out now that her husband was here, she realized with a sinking feeling.
Fortunately, Tryout was used to her fretting, paying little heed to her apparent distress. “Aw, sorry I wasn’t able to come home any sooner, babe, but you wouldn’t believe the adventure I’ve been on trying to make it back here! Listen to this: the boat I was one ended up sailing right past Tall Tale and instead went all the way down to Las Pegasus, okay? And I didn’t have any money to hire a boat to come back, so I figured that since I’m in casino central, I should just gamble to win the bits I needed, but let me tell you: the house really does always win. So next thing I know I’m stuck working off my debt there, and just when I’m thinking that I’m going to be mopping floors for the rest of my life, I meet this buffalo-”
“Tryout,” interrupted Feather Duster, “that sounds fascinating, really, but I need to get back to work.” She couldn’t help but glance around nervously as she spoke. She’d come here to run Trotsworth’s errand as a favor to the old stallion, since he’d always been nothing but kind to her. But while Master Legis had granted her permission to do so – or at least, that was how she’d interpreted his noncommittal grunt when she’d begged his leave to go perform a quick task – she’d told him she’d be right back. Already she was growing nervous about how long she’d been gone. “Why don’t you go tell Cleansweep about your adventures in the meantime?” She couldn’t help but stress their daughter’s name a little; it bothered her a little that he was apparently taking it for granted that she was alright. “She’s staying at Miss Bank’s manor. I’m sure she’ll be overjoyed to see that you’re alright. In fact-”
“She’s staying at the old Banks place, huh?” interrupted Tryout, his grin widening at that revelation in a manner that made it clear that he’d missed her hint completely. Instead, he gave her a conspiratorial wink, elbowing her lightly. “Looks like that new gig you got has some nice benefits after all. Now you just have to make sure our daughter doesn’t put you out of a job, what with how fast she can clean! I swear, that girl can-”
“In fact,” repeated Feather Duster, a little louder this time, “why don’t you take these five ponies there?” She pointed at Granola Bar and her friends, who were watching the two of them with some bemusement, save for the unicorn with the bandage around her horn, who was still glancing around with a mildly concerned look on her face for some reason. “Miss Bank invited them to stay as her guests, and I’m rather busy at the moment, so if you could guide them there that would be very helpful.”
“Actually,” interrupted the unicorn mare, “before we head there, I was hoping that you could tell us what happened here.” She pointed at the ruins of what used to be the train station. “There was a fight, right? Between Lex Legis and the princesses? Do you know who won? Is Lex alright?”
“Wait wait wait,” cut in Tryout before Feather Duster could open her mouth. “Princesses? In a fight? Here?” He glanced back and forth between the unicorn and Feather Duster. “Oh, somepony has got to fill me in on this! Was there some sort of monster or villain or something here in Vanhoover?”
“You don’t know the half of it,” muttered one of the stallions with Granola Bar, the smaller one whose cutie mark was a unrolled length of waterlogged yellow plastic.
But despite how quiet he’d been, and the sound of the ponies around them, Tryout apparently overheard the remark. “And I missed it?!” He turned back to Feather Duster then. “Babe, you were here the whole time, right? We’ve got to trade notes! How about you go on your lunch break or something and we go see Cleansweep together? You can fill me in on what I missed on the way there.”
Feather Duster grit her teeth, fighting down the urge to get angry. She knew that this was just Tryout being himself; she’d known it when she’d married him. But always having to be the responsible one was hard enough when things were going well. Now that they were in a high-tension situation, his attitude was not only not helpful, it was a burden. I should just go, she decided. I’ve already told him that I need to get back to work, where our daughter is, and what he can do to help out in the meantime. Staying here like this is just distracting him. That was also part of who Tryout was; actions got through to him far more reliably than words-
“Whoa,” Tryout suddenly muttered as he looked over her shoulder. “Take a look at that guy! Is the circus in town or something?”
The blood draining from her face, Feather Duster spun around, looking back in the direction of the camp.
She wasn’t alone in doing so. Around her, all eyes were turning toward the pony that had just arrived. The crowd parted like water in front of him. Conversation died as he passed, with those few ponies who dared to speak quieting down to a whisper. His hooffalls were measured and deliberate, moving with the confidence of someone who knew that whatever the situation was, he had it under control. And no one missed how, despite the sun being at a high angle, his shadow stretched out at length behind him.
Feather Duster felt a surge of panic rush through her at Master Legis’s question, knowing that she’d tarried too long. Instantly, she folded her wings and dropped to the ground, dipping her head subserviently. “My apologies,” she croaked. “I didn’t mean to-, erk!”
Her voice caught in her throat as she glanced up and saw what her husband was doing. Without a care in the world, Tryout had strolled right up to Master Legis and started bobbing his head, glancing between Lex and his errant shadow as though trying to figure out why it was falling at the wrong angle. “This is really something!” he gushed, grinning as he crouched down so that Lex was between himself and the sun, looking back at how his own shadow wasn’t obstructed. “I tried some sleight of hoof when I was a colt, but this is seriously impressive! I’d say it has to be a spell, but your horn isn’t glowing!” He finally gave up trying to figure out how it worked, stepping back with an appreciative chuckle. “You must make a killing at birthday parties! What else can you do?”
“TRYOUT!” Terrified that Lex would answer her husband’s question in the worst possible way, she rocketed forward with a speed she didn’t know she was capable of, almost tackling Tryout and forcing him down into a low bow, adopting the same posture as she tried to figure out what would stop Master Legis from turning them both into stone or cursing them to go mad or whatever other horrible punishment he was doubtlessly contemplating at that moment. But when she opened her mouth, only panic poured out. “I’m so sorry! Please, for Cleansweep’s sake, forgive my idiot husband! I swear he didn’t mean to-”
“Geez, babe, what’s gotten into you? I was just trying to be friendly,” complained Tryout as he wriggled out of her grip. He gave her a look that was somewhere between annoyed and worried, before shaking his head and turning back to Lex with his carefree smile back in place, apparently unconcerned by the stony glare the other stallion was giving him. All around them, the crowd had stopped to watch the scene unfold, but that didn’t seem to bother Tryout either. “Don’t mind her, she’s always been jittery,” he explained, before extending a hoof to Lex. “My name’s Tryout, what’s yours?” But the question had barely left his mouth before he kept talking. “No, wait, don’t tell me! Your name is Freaky Deaky, and your special talent is making haunted houses.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed at that, just before they turned green and purple, and Feather Duster could only be grateful that their daughter wasn’t here to see what was about to happen to her fath-
“Don’t talk to him like that.”
All eyes turned to look at the vermillion mare with the bandaged horn who’d spoken just then. “Don’t talk to him like that,” she repeated once she saw that she had Tryout’s attention, striding over and placing herself between him and Lex, getting right in the pegasus stallion’s face. “Ever.”
Stumbling back at the sudden aggression, Tryout made a placating gesture with his hoof. “Whoa, whoa, calm down there, toots. I was-”
“My name,” interrupted the mare coldly, “is Garden Gate, and his name,” she swept a hoof back to indicate Lex, whose eyes had changed back to their normal color, “is Lex Legis, and he’s a hero!”
That sent a murmur through the crowd, with more than a few ponies glancing back and forth between Garden and Lex. For his part, Tryout gave a patronizing nod, still trying to defuse the situation. “Okay, look, Garden, I get it. He’s some kind of bigshot here now, and you’re clearly a fan, so let’s all just-”
“HE’S! A! HERO!” With each word, Garden took a heavy step forward, forcing Tryout to move back, the crowd parting behind him as he did so. “Do you have any idea what happened to this city after the flooding? It wasn’t just a disaster zone! There were monsters everywhere, and he defeated them all! And that was just the beginning!” She continued to move forward, forcing Tryout to cede more and more ground. “When we were starving, he brought us food! When we were sick, he brought us medicine! When we were ready to give up, he brought us hope! And he did it all with ponies like you,” she snarled, reaching to jab Tryout sharply in the chest with her hoof then, “doubting him and suspecting him and distrusting him, even after he’d saved all of our lives!”
“Hang on, I-”
“And he never said one word about any of it! Not one word! If he’d been even half as bad as the rumors that were flying around this place, he would have lashed out at anyone who dared to utter a bad word about him, but he didn’t! The only ponies he punished…” She choked up then, but recovered her poise before Tryout could try and get a word in again. “The only ponies he punished were the ones who did terrible things! Really terrible! The ones who hurt other people! Because that’s what we were doing before he rescued us! We were hurting each other, because we’d given up on ourselves, and he never did…”
She was shaking now. A quick glance around showed Feather Duster that the crowd had grown, with those among the camp ponies who hadn’t come to meet the train drawn over by Garden Gate’s yelling. But despite its size the crowd was utterly silent now, listening raptly to the impassioned speech. Even Tryout wasn’t able to speak, his ears folded back as he finally seemed to realize that he’d crossed a serious line.
This time it took several seconds for Garden to pull herself together, giving her mane a toss and fixing Tryout with a cold stare. “His name is Lex Legis,” she repeated at last. “And if you want to speak to him, then you DO IT WITH RESPECT!” The last part came out with such intensity that it made Tryout step backward again…and go tumbling off the edge of the platform, giving a yelp of fright as he fell to the ground in a heap.
Lex watched as Garden’s final outburst sent that annoying stallion over the edge of the platform. That seemed to act as some sort of signal, as the crowd suddenly burst into applause. The sudden outpouring of support seemed to catch Garden by surprise, making her start slightly as she looked around before giving an awkward smile, her eyes sliding back over toward him as she did.
For his part, Lex had no idea how to react to what had just happened. He’d already been on his way over here when Feather Duster had rushed ahead after asking permission to take care of some errand that he couldn’t have cared less about. What he’d been more concerned with was the sudden reappearance of Fencer – or Garden Gate, since she seemed to be using her original name now – and her friends, something which had caught him by surprise. He hadn’t given them any instructions to return after they’d delivered the most at-risk patients to Canterlot, and he certainly hadn’t expected them to do so of their own initiative. So why were they here now? The only thing he could think of had been that there was some sort of emergency that they felt he needed to know. But he’d barely been able to get a word out before a stallion that was apparently his maid’s husband – and, in all likelihood, Cleansweep’s father – had gotten in his way.
Lex had taken an instant dislike to “Tryout,” as Feather Duster had called him. The other pony had possessed a relaxed disposition that Lex had never known how to handle, unsure if his remarks had been mocking or made in good humor. The ambiguity of it had left him momentarily paralyzed, and that paralysis had been more upsetting than if the other stallion had been openly hostile; Lex was far more comfortable with conflict than uncertainty.
And then Garden Gate had stepped up to defend his honor.
How exactly was he supposed to respond to that?
As the mare in question walked back over to him, her friends offering quiet words of encouragement and congratulations before they fell in alongside her, Lex decided to put the question out of his mind for now. There were more important things to worry about at the moment. “What are you doing here?” he asked, and this time decided to make absolutely sure that the question was as clear as possible so that Feather Duster – who was glancing at the edge of the platform as if uncertain as to whether she should go to her husband’s side or not – didn’t think he was talking to her. “What happened with the ponies you were escorting to Canterlot? Are they alright?”
The question seemed to surprise Garden, but only for a moment. Then she smiled, nodding crisply. “They’re fine. Princess Cadance used her magic to heal them. Last time we checked, they were taken to the hospital for observation.”
“Not only that!” added the larger stallion, Funshine. “That crystal pony who’d been here in camp stowed away on the train with this other guy, and they had Princess Cadance bring her husband back to life!”
That bit of news earned Lex’s undivided attention. Celestia and Luna had mentioned, when they’d rejected his trying to de-escalate their conflict by telling them that he could bring Silhouette back to life, that they’d have Princess Cadance do it instead. He knew that the remaining alicorn princess – the only one he’d never met in person – had taken up the faith of Lashtada, a minor Everglow deity of love, but he’d been skeptical of her being able to accomplish a feat of magic of that magnitude. Even before he’d started studying that gem the Night Mare had given him, what he’d learned during his time on Everglow suggested that resurrection was a difficult feat of magic, and Cadance couldn’t have had more than a month or two to be taken into Lashtada’s religion. And yet now there were eyewitnesses reporting that she’d apparently brought Pillowcase (a pony whom, he noted uncomfortably, he hadn’t been able to save) back to life.
Which meant that Celestia and Luna had been right about Cadance bringing Silhouette back. In fact, she’d probably done it already.
Lex was still thinking through the repercussions of that when another of Garden’s friends, Granola Bar, spoke up. “There’s something else you need to know. We stopped at Ponyville after we left Canterlot, and we overheard Spike, Twilight Sparkle’s dragon, reading a letter from the princesses. They said-”
“Stop.” Lex raised a hoof as he said it, and to his satisfaction she fell silent instantly. They were going too fast, providing information without relevant context or salient details, which raised the possibility that important data would be overlooked or miscommunicated. More than that, everypony was still gathered around them, the crowd having only slowly returned to their mingling after Garden’s confronting Tryout. They needed to be properly debriefed, in a location that would allow them to speak privately. And while he’d intended to continue overseeing the burgeoning market at least until Aria returned, this took priority. “Follow me,” he ordered, turning and walking in the direction of River’s manor.
“M-Master Legis?” called Feather Duster, her voice uncertain.
“See to your husband,” ordered Lex, not bothering to look back. As annoying as he found Tryout to be, he wasn’t about to prevent Feather Duster from reuniting with him now that he’d returned. “I’ll do without your services for the rest of the day.”
“Yes! Thank you!” called Feather Duster, but Lex had already lost interest in her, instead turning his thoughts to what he’d already been told. He’d need to inquire closely about how Cadance’s resurrection magic had functioned; precisely what words and motions she’d made, how close she’d been to the body when she’d utilized it, how long it had taken her to cast the spell, and numerous other factors would need to be properly analyzed, even if it was via secondhoof information-
“So, did you really fight the princesses?” asked the smaller of the two stallions, Slip ‘n’ Slide. “Because we heard something happened to Luna…?”
Lex sighed. There was no point in withholding that particular bit of news, since it had happened in full view of the public. Besides, he’d already told the camp ponies almost everything that had happened anyway, so they’d find out one way or another in short order.
Fiddlesticks rolled her eyes, not looking up from where she was feeding Tiddlywinks. “I’m sure you did fine, Feathercap. Probably better than any of us.”
“You don’t know that,” moaned the colt, still peering through his binoculars out the window of the second-story room they’d been given in River Bank’s manor. Fiddlesticks knew that he was looking for Lex, waiting for the stallion to return in advance of their evening lesson, even though it was still early afternoon. “Those essays were our first assignment. If we get a bad grade on them, it’ll be almost impossible to bring our average up later on.”
“I don’t think it’s going to work like that,” murmured Cleansweep from where she was dusting under one of the five beds lining the room. Although they’d only been there for a couple of days, she had her work cut out for her, since – even though their room was one of the larger guest suites – it was still housing five foals, their animals, and a baby. As such, it didn’t surprise Fiddlesticks in the least that her friend had a lot to do, even with how fast she typically cleaned.
In theory there were enough rooms in River’s manor that they all could have taken one if they’d wanted. But in actuality the manor was filling up fast. Although most of the rainclouds that Cloudsdale had delivered were now being distributed among the northern farms thanks to Sonata (and the team of pegasi that she’d taken with her), Vanhoover’s share of them were still being housed in a first-floor wing of the manor, leaving it off-limits to everypony else.
Similarly, Lex had declared that another portion of the building would serve as the camp’s new field hospital, ordering all of the medical ponies and their patients transferred there. Although the trickle of survivors from the city had slowed down over the last few days, virtually all of the ones who came in were in need of medical care, ensuring that the amount of space set aside for caring for them and housing the doctors and nurses remained considerable. Thankfully, from what Fiddlesticks had overheard, there hadn’t been any need to turn one of the rooms into a morgue. At least not yet.
Nor were those the only rooms that had been repurposed. Although construction had started on a large storehouse to contain the surplus of food that had been purchased, it was being stored at the manor in the meantime. So were the large amounts of bits that were being retrieved from banks in the city. And of course, a few of the guest rooms were still set aside as guest rooms; apparently, River had been expecting some VIPs before she left. Something about her son, though Fiddlesticks hadn’t quite figured out exactly what the story there was.
The end result had been that Cleansweep’s mom had arranged for a few extra beds – taken from a room that was now being used to contain clouds – to be moved into an upstairs room for them. Although she hadn’t said so, Fiddlesticks had the distinct impression that if there had been room, Feather Duster would have slept in there with them as well. Then again, she still seemed nervous around their spirit animals, so maybe that had something to do with it.
“He’ll probably just want to go over what we wrote,” added Straightlace, not looking up from where he was brushing Altaer’s feathers. “Remember, he said those essays were so that he could gauge how well we’ve learned what he’s been teaching us.”
And in the event that the Grand Vizier does find fault with your recitation of his wisdom, that does not mean that he’ll find fault with you, noted Ulespy, perched on Feathercap’s back.
Feathercap seemed somewhat reassured by that, but the words had the opposite effect on Fruit Crunch, who scowled miserably. “Unless we mess up so bad that he decides we’re not worth teaching.”
Fiddlesticks shared a concerned glance with the rest of her friends. Their erstwhile leader had initially been overjoyed when Lex announced that he’d take them on as his students. But his euphoria had quickly diminished once the actual teaching had begun.
Although he hadn’t said anything about it, Fiddlesticks knew that Fruit Crunch was disappointed that their lessons had been so…mundane. He hadn’t slept a wink after Lex had said that he’d begin teaching them, his eyes sparkling at the thought of learning magic at the hooves of his idol. But although they were less than a week into their lessons, the topic of magic had yet to come up. Instead, Lex had focused on issues of right and wrong, lecturing them on how those concepts were “found exclusively within the nature of the actions one takes, independent of both the intent preceding them and the consequences resulting from them.” Fiddlesticks was still trying to wrap her head around exactly what that meant, and she knew she wasn’t alone in that. But for Fruit Crunch, the fact that being Lex’s students involved actual work rather than being an exciting adventure had quite clearly been a huge letdown.
The fact that Lex had so thoroughly repudiated what Severance had taught them hadn’t helped either.
The core of the scythe’s teachings, during those nights when they’d snuck out to learn from it, had been straightforward: whoever had power made the rules, and everypony else either followed them or suffered the consequences. That, according to Severance, was simply the reality of the world. “Right” and “wrong” were irrelevant, being terms that were applied according to however someone felt about what the strong did to the weak. It had been the complete opposite of what Fiddlesticks’ parents and teachers had taught her about friendship and harmony. But after seeing how Block Party – or rather, the monster that had been possessing Block Party, according to what Lex had told them – had run the camp, she hadn’t been able to say that the scythe had been wrong. But Lex had disagreed.
From what Fiddlesticks had been able to understand, their teacher was of the belief that there was a sort of middle path between harmony and might making right. His take on things seemed to be that it was natural for the most capable ponies to rise to leadership positions, but that didn’t mean that they should do whatever they wanted, or that whatever they did was okay just because no one else could stop it. Rather, Lex had made it sound like having power was an incredibly heavy responsibility, and that it was of the utmost importance that powerful ponies behaved properly. It was just that “behaving properly” was apparently really complicated.
That might have been why Lex hadn’t been impressed when Fruit Crunch had showed him the scars that Severance had given him. Although the colt had quite clearly been proud of them, remarking on how they made him “almost match” the barbed wire around Lex’s foreleg, the older stallion had vehemently disapproved, stating that it was inexcusable to injure somepony – particularly a child – just for not having memorized some prayers correctly. That, in turn, had led to Lex telling them how Severance had tried to kill Princess Luna just because she’d set herself up as a competitor to the Night Mare, that it had ended up killing a pony who had worshiped the princess, and how Lex had subsequently banished it from Equestria for that.
It had been a lot to process, and the Knights had stayed up rather late discussing what they’d learned. Fortunately, their spirit animals had been a big help.
There is no contradiction, had been Lyden’s take on it. The Supreme Predator’s weapon taught you that the one who is strongest is the one who is right. The High Alpha defeated it and exiled it from his territory. So by the weapon’s own reasoning, the High Alpha is right.
The truths you have learned are two roots from the same tree, agreed Nemel. From the Supreme Predator’s weapon, you learned the importance of having strength. And now, from the Exalted Primogenitor, you’re learning what to do with it once you have it.
The only difference is the degree of instruction, Altaer had noted. The First Convoker wants you to know what to do with your power before he assists you in gaining more of it. Once he’s satisfied that you all share his values, he will help you to grow in power.
Venin and Ulespy had expressed similar thoughts on the subject, and by the time they’d gone to sleep the five foals had felt a little better about things. But only a little; Lex’s lessons were still very hard to understand…particularly for Fruit Crunch. Never the most scholastic of ponies, he’d looked ashen-faced when he’d turned in his essay. Clearly fighting members of the Royal Guard hadn’t been nearly as upsetting as the prospect that his hero would think he was an idiot.
Gently burping Tiddlywinks, Fiddlesticks tucked him into bed, the infant already yawning now that he’d eaten his fill. Bunching the blankets around him so that he wouldn’t be able to roll around in his sleep, Fiddlesticks scooped up Nemel as she crossed the room, going over to the despondant Fruit Crunch. “Lex won’t decide we’re not worth teaching.”
The quiet certitude in her voice made him frown. “Maybe not you, but I’m the stupid pony who thought that letting Severance cut his hoof was a good thing.”
“Aw, c’mon Crunchy,” smiled Cleansweep. “He blamed Severance for that, not you.”
And he didn’t insist that Cleansweep heal you of the scars you carry now, noted Venin, slithering up Cleansweep’s leg and coiling around her middle now that she had finished tidying up the place. So surely he respects the bravery they represent.
Fruit Crunch bit his lip for a moment before speaking again. “So…you guys don’t think the reason he’s not teaching us magic is because of me?” he asked in a quiet voice.
Another round of worried looks were exchanged, with Straightlace taking the initiative once they were finished. “Of course not. Why would you even think that?”
With a sigh, Fruit Crunch sat up from where he’d been lying in his bed, looking at all of them shamefacedly. “Because I’m the one who thought we should all start learning from Severance in the first place. I ignored you guys when you said that this,” he waved his scarred hoof at them, “might not be a good idea. And I’m the one who took that guard hostage when Lex was fighting the princesses.” He still winced at that, remembering how angry Lex had been then. “So I thought maybe, when Lex said Severance killed somepony, that maybe he didn’t trust me since we were doing what it taught us, and that’s why he’s going over all this morality stuff instead of teaching us how to use magic like him.”
“That’s ridiculous!” protested Fiddlesticks. “Of course Lex trusts you! He just said how proud he was of you – of all of us – at that big speech he gave the other day!”
You should take more pride in your accomplishments, tsked Altaer. You have come to the First Convoker’s aid more than once. Those successes are not diminished by any missteps you might have made elsewhere.
“And even if he does blame you, he’ll need to blame all the rest of us too,” added Straightlace. “We followed your lead of our own will, no matter what anyone says.”
Nemel bobbed her head up and down in a rough approximation of a nod. Never forget that all of you are as one. Your accomplishments and your setbacks are all shared, together.
“That’s right!” piped up Feathercap, finally moving away from the window. “Remember what we all said when we beat those guards? Joining the Night Mare’s Knights has been the most exciting thing ever!”
Have more confidence in yourself, counseled Lyden, padding over to sit by Fruit Crunch’s bedside regally. A good leader is unafraid to question himself, but does not wallow in doubt.
Giving a laugh that was almost a sniffle, Fruit Crunch looked around, smiling. “Thanks guys.”
Smiling, Cleansweep gave Fruit Crunch a sisterly punch on the shoulder. “There you go! Now c’mon, we’ve still got some time before tonight’s lesson! How about we have a quick study session?”
“That’s a good idea,” nodded Straightlace. “We can show Lex that we’re serious about learning what he’s trying to teach us.”
“Um, we might want to hurry up if that’s the case.” Feathercap had turned back to the window, peering through his binoculars again. “He’s on his way back here right now.”
Fruit Crunch’s eyebrows rose, and he joined the rest of his friends in rushing to the window. “Who’re those ponies with him?”
“Isn’t that that mare who helped him fight all those zombies?”
“They were ghouls, not zombies.”
“I thought she left a little while ago.”
“She’s back now, I guess.”
“Hey, Cleansweep. Who’s that with your mom?”
That last question came from Feathercap, and made the filly in question look at him curiously. “Huh? What are you talking about? My mom’s not even with them.”
“Not with them,” answered the colt, passing her his binoculars. “Look further back, near what’s left of the station. They’re coming this way.”
Frowning in confusion, she put the lenses up to her face, peering in the direction indicated. A second later her jaw dropped, and she uttered a single word at the top of her lungs, forgetting that Tiddlywinks was sleeping.
“Wait, wait, hold on,” sputtered Slip ‘n’ Slide. “So you’re saying that you fought Princess Celestia and Luna at the same time, and defeated both of them, all while holding Severance back?” He punctuated the question with a look at the rest of his friends, silently asking if they could believe what Lex hold told them. Garden could understand his surprise; they’d known that there’d been some sort of altercation, but to hear that Lex had overcome both of the princesses – all without taking any serious injuries, no less – even as he’d restrained the same artifact that had slaughtered the ghoul army was staggering. “And you did it all by yourself?”
“As I said,” replied Lex flatly. “The Royal Guard was kept at bay by a group of foals.”
“The Night Mare’s Knights,” mused Granola Bar, chuckling at the adorable name. “They sound like some very special children.”
“They must be, if they’ve got magical powers and spirit animals and Celes-, er, the Night Mare only knows what else.” Funshine gave an apologetic grin as Lex shot him a withering look, hurriedly trying to move on. “I bet they’re a real crack squad of junior achievers.”
“DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!”
The high-pitched squeal drew all eyes upward, just in time to see a yellow pegasus filly streak out of an open window on the second story of River’s mansion, flying so fast that she was nearly a blur as she raced toward the camp.
“My binoculars!” came a shrill cry from that same window, a scrawny-looking unicorn colt appearing a second later. His head veered back and forth wildly before finding what he was looking for, the binoculars in questions still arcing through the air in the wake of the filly’s flight. Leaning outward, the colt’s horn lit up, a matching aura appearing around the binoculars, causing the colt to let out a sigh of relief as he hurriedly pulled them back to his waiting hooves…only to realize that he had leaned too far out the window, giving a yelp of fright as he started to go over the edge.
“Quick! Grab him!” yelled another colt’s voice.
A second later the unicorn youth’s fall was arrested, three other foals appearing in the window with his tail in their teeth. “Use your super-strength, Fiddleface!” huffed the earth colt who was the larger of the two boys.
“If I did that I might yank his tail off, dummy!” snarled the girl.
“Don’t yank my tail off!” wailed the dangling unicorn.
“Well somepony do something! If we don’t get better leverage we’re gonna drop him!” groaned the earth colt.
“Don’t drop me!” howled the unicorn.
“You guys pull! I’ll push!” instructed the other colt, this one a pegasus. A second later he released his friend’s tail – prompting a pair of strained grunts and one terrified shriek – and flew out the window, circling down until he was under his friend, grabbing him and flying upward.
Or at least, he tried to. But his friend’s flailing hooves managed to hit one of his wings, causing the pegasus to give a pained grunt as he started to fall out of the air…only managing to save himself when he reached up and grabbed the binoculars that were hanging from his friend’s neck, hanging from them as the unicorn colt’s eyes bulged, now being pulled in two directions. Above him, the colt and filly biting his tail groaned as the weight they were holding suddenly doubled, slowly being dragged towards the edge of the window…
…until all four were wrapped in the purple aura of Lex’s telekinesis, his eyes similarly glowing as he lifted all four of the children (and the binoculars) and deposited them back inside, closing the window sharply behind them for good measure. It was only after he’d secured it that he glanced at Funshine, who like the rest of his friends was completely nonplussed by the spectacle.
“That’s not how I would describe them.”
“Master Legis? Forgive me, sir, but there’s a pony here who insists on seeing you right away. He says it’s an emergency.”
Lex sighed. It had only been a few minutes since those foals, who had already been granted power beyond most adults and were quite eager to acquire more, had almost gotten themselves killed trying to operate a window. Since then, he’d led Garden and her friends into the manor proper – those four foals (as well as their animals and Tiddlywinks) rushing past them on their way to follow Cleansweep, each of them giving him an embarrassed smile and a murmured thank you – with the intent of debriefing them in the study. But before they’d made it halfway across the parlor, River’s head butler had appeared.
Even so, the interruption bothered Lex only slightly. While progress had been made over the last few days, the restoration of Vanhoover had barely begun; it was inevitable that more situations requiring his attention would arise. And since the old butler was announcing whoever was here, it was unlikely that this emergency presented some sort of imminent threat to anypony’s health or safety. But that didn’t mean that he could simply ignore it.
Turning, he glanced at Garden. “Is any of what you’ve learned time-sensitive or critical to everypony’s well-being?”
The question seemed to surprise her. “Well, no, but-”
“Then I want you to stay here while I handle this,” he replied without letting her finish. “Trotsworth, put these five up somewhere until I’m done with whatever this emergency is.”
“Very good, sir,” answered Trotsworth with a bow, before turning to Garden and her friends. “If you would be so good as to follow me, I think you’ll find that the northern sitting room is quite comfortable. If you’d like, I can send for some refreshments.”
“Anything but apples,” blurted Slip ‘n’ Slide, moving after the old butler.
“Do…do you have any hayburgers?” asked Hopscotch timidly.
“Forget hayburgers, I want some pie!” blurted Funshine.
“Stop it, all of you,” huffed Granola Bar. “This isn’t a restaurant. Tell them, Garden.” She glanced back, only to pause as she realized that their leader wasn’t moving with them. “Garden?”
But the mare in question was still looking at Lex. “I’d like to help.” When he gave her a blank look, she kept going. “With whatever this emergency is. I’d like to help, if it’s alright.”
“Are you kidding?” whined Slip ‘n’ Slide. “We literally just got back! Can we please sit down and have some real food before we run off to our next misadventure?!”
Fighting down a grin at how Slip never changed, Garden shook her head. “You all go ahead. It’s been a long journey and you deserve a meal and some rest. I’ll join you as soon as this is done.”
Funshine frowned. “But what if it’s dangerous?”
“If it is, then I’ll be right next to the pony who defeated Celestia and Luna all by himself,” replied Garden pointedly, before giving Lex a questioning look. “If it’s alright?” she repeated.
Already tiring of the debate, Lex made a dismissive gesture. “Do as you like.”
Nodding gratefully, Garden turned back to her friends. “Guys, I’m serious. Sit back and take a load off. Besides,” she threw a wink at Granola Bar. “I seem to recall you have a certain rotund young fellow eager to meet with you.”
Trotsworth’s eyes followed Garden’s look to Granola Bar, then to the latter’s cutie mark. “Ah, would you happen to be Miss Granola Bar?” When the mare in question nodded, he smiled. “Splendid! Master Piggy has been quite anxious for you to arrive! As per Miss Bank’s instructions, we’ve prepared rooms for all of you. I’ll have the maids ready them and make an impromptu repast while I inform him that you’re here.”
“Rooms?” squeaked Hopscotch. “As in, staying here overnight?”
“With real beds?” added Funshine. “As in, with pillows and clean sheets?”
“That…does sound lovely,” admitted Granola Bar. “And I have been a little worried about Piggy…”
Slip ‘n’ Slide gave her an incredulous look. “Worried? You were worried about the guy living in a manor house with maids and ‘repasts’ while we were dodging princesses and running from guards? Really?”
Frowning, Granola Bar opened her mouth, but Garden – seeing the look of rapidly-fading patience on Lex’s face – jumped in first. “Guys, really, go relax for a little bit. You’ve earned it. I’ll be fine with Lex.”
“If you’re sure,” nodded Hopscotch.
“Just don’t do anything dangerous, okay?” pleaded Funshine.
“Please try and finish up whatever this emergency is fast, okay?” added Slip ‘n’ Slide. “I really want to sleep for a few days in a nice bed, and that’ll be hard to do if we’re all worried because you haven’t come back.”
“And if something happens and you do need backup, get a message to us and we’ll come running,” promised Granola Bar, moving in closer to hug Garden. The others followed suit, and it was only after the group embrace had ended that the other four finally left, following Trotsworth after the old butler informed Lex that he’d send the petitioning stallion in momentarily.
He was as good as his word, as barely ten seconds went by before an earth stallion poked his head in. He was a rustic-looking fellow, having a drab brown coat and a mane and tail that might have been black once, but were now salt-and-pepper with age. His cutie mark was a trio of eggs in a wicker basket, marking him as being a poultry farmer. Or at least that’s what Garden would have guessed. He wasn’t somepony that she recognized, which was a mild relief in and of itself; the last thing she wanted was to run into somepony else that she’d hurt while trapped in Vanhoover.
Stepping into the room, the stallion looked at her only briefly before his eyes were drawn to Lex, gulping loudly as he took in the sight of the unicorn’s red horn, unnatural shadow, and wire-wrapped leg. Reaching up, he took a tattered straw hat off of his head and held it against his chest in what was either a respectful gesture or a half-hearted desire to give himself something to hide behind. “M-Mister Lex?” he asked nervously. “Or, sorry, is it Mister Legis? I’m no good at bein’ all formal-”
“What is the emergency?” rumbled Lex, clearly caring nothing for formalities.
Swallowing, the stallion replaced his hat on his head. “My name’s Egg Basket,” he said, pointing to his cutie mark as though his name required a visual aid. “I’m from Oldenburg, a few days north of here. It’s okay if you haven’t heard of it, a lot of folks haven’t. We’re a farmin’ community, mostly turnips, but we do some other stuff too. My special talent’s getting’ eggs from chickens, for instance.”
Even if she hadn’t known Lex as well as she did, Garden would have been able to tell that he couldn’t possibly have cared less about any of that. His expression had tightened, eyes narrowing as he glared at the old stallion. “What,” he began again, “is the emergency?”
Gulping, Egg Basket nodded. “Well, a little while ago the prettiest mare I’d ever seen showed up in town. She and her posse brought some rainclouds that we desperately needed, and she sang the most beautiful song I ever did hear. After she was done, she told us that you were fixin’ Vanhoover right up so that it was doin’ business again, so me and some of my kin got our crops together and came down here. And for the most part everythin’ here’s been great. I mean, it’s terrible seein’ what’s happened and all, and I’ve heard plenty of awful stories about what some of these poor ponies have gone through, but everythin’ does seem to be turnin’ around now, thanks to you.” He smiled a little at that, but it faded away when Lex didn’t return the expression.
He glanced at Garden, who made a “hurry up” gesture at him. Biting his lip, he turned his attention back to Lex.
“Well, you see, we got most of our buyin’ and sellin’ done just fine, but then somethin’ happened…”
It didn’t take Lex long to find the source of Egg Basket’s discontent.
The camp had been bustling for the last few days, the long-overdue influx of supplies and food creating a flurry of activity as temporary living quarters were constructed and a makeshift market had sprung up. The attendant celebrating hadn’t entirely abated yet either, with several ponies raising a ruckus as they tossed around a hoofball they’d acquired from somewhere. But the largest commotion, one that had already drawn more than a few of the camp’s population, was being caused by a pair of stallions.
They were both unicorns, tall and somewhat slender, and were quite clearly brothers judging from how similar their appearances were. Both had pale, light grayish olive coats, with their manes and tails being solid red except for a thick white stripe down their centers. They were even dressed the same, with blue-and-white striped shirts, bowties, and boater hats. Only the fact that one had a mustache and the other was clean-shaven served to differentiate them, save for their cutie marks; the mustachioed one had an apple with a slice cut out of it, while the other’s flank had what could only have been the missing slice.
The two of them were apparently in the middle of a musical number, judging from the animated way they were moving in time with each other, one of them excitedly rushing through the crowd of ponies gathered around them while the other leaped on top of a makeshift table they’d constructed, having laid a few planks over what looked like two relatively-flat pieces of rubble from the ruins of the train station. Although Lex was too far away to hear exactly what they were singing, the crowd seemed to be wrapped up in it, prancing and swaying to whatever tempo the duo had set. But he was less concerned with that than he was with what was behind the pair of ponies: a large pile of cloth sacks, several dozen of them from the look of it.
Even as Lex watched, the mustachioed stallion put his forelegs around several ponies in the crowd, saying – or, more likely from how he was still moving in a quick beat, singing – something to them. A moment later, the ponies smiled brightly and trotted up to his counterpart, who leaped down from the table just in time for those ponies to begin piling bits onto it. It was only after they’d turned over a considerable mass of coins that the clean-shaven stallion grinned, a cheerful expression on his face as his horn lit up, floating one of the sacks over to the collection of ponies, who seemed overjoyed to receive it. The brothers didn’t miss a beat, moving in tandem as they began to dance around the crowd, repeatedly pointing at the bags behind them, and a moment later more members of the crowd rushed forward, eagerly thrusting money at the pair.
“You see?” called Egg Basket, who had followed Lex outside. “Those two’re bamboozlin’ everypony, just like I said!”
“It’ll be alright,” replied Garden, having come along as well. “Lex won’t let them get away with this, just watch.”
But Lex didn’t bother to acknowledge Garden’s vote of confidence, increasing his pace as the ponies in the crowd began to turn over their money in greater quantities. The unicorn brothers were only too happy to rake them in, and as Lex grew closer he could just start to hear the tail end of their song over the cheers from the ponies around them.
“So if your belly’s rumbling and you’ve got a lot to do,” sang the mustached stallion.
“When hunger makes your every task a bite more than you can chew,” intoned the other.
“Then have no fear, just look right here, you won’t find these on other wagons, trains, or boats!” they chorused, harmonizing perfectly before breaking into a rapid back-and-forth.
The last line was not only sung in unison, but the crowd chimed in as well. The pile of coins on the improvised table was steadily growing larger, but it didn’t escape Lex’s notice how it took several ponies turning over their money before a single sack of oats was dispensed. The sight made him grit his teeth as he stalked forward. “WHAT,” he bellowed, “IS GOING ON HERE?!”
His shout brought the singing to an instant halt, with everypony freezing in place as they turned to look at him, eyes wide. But the unicorn brothers recovered almost instantly. “Why look, Flam,” spoke up the clean-shaven stallion smoothly, “I do believe it’s the pony of the hour himself!”
“I’d say you’re right, Flim,” replied the mustached stallion easily. “The stallion whose name is on everypony’s lips as the savior of Vanhoover and who, if I might add, is rapidly becoming known as quite the ladies’ colt!”
“Lex Legis!” grinned Flim, smiling as though greeting an old friend. He trotted forward, the crowd parting instantly. “I can’t tell you how good it is to finally meet you in person! Ever since we arrived here, we’ve heard nothing but amazing stories about the hero who’s done so much for so many people!”
Flam moved in perfect tandem with his brother, the two of them casually sidling up to Lex. “Indeed! The pony known far and wide for having a fearsome appearance that conceals a heart of gold! Just yesterday, my brother and I heard of your marvelous exploits while we were in Tall Tale, and knew we had to come running to help!”
“And so here we are!” announced Flim dramatically, standing up on his hind legs and gesturing at the large collection of oat-filled sacks. “Together with the freshest and most nutritious oats that we could find, all for the good ponies of Vanhoover!”
“Just like we knew you would have done, had you been in possession of such delectable, and dare I say, sorely-needed source of sustenance!” added Flam. “You’re truly an inspiration to everypony here!”
The crowd seemed to eat up the praise that was being lavished on him, nodding and grinning with each new compliment. But Lex couldn’t have cared less about platitudes from strangers, instead walking right past the pair to where they’d stacked their product. Eyeing the bags for a moment, he lifted one up, testing the weight before he laid it on the table and tore it open, using his circlet to examine them for magical signatures. Finding none, his eyes glowed as he then used his dark magic to enhance his senses, taking in the scent of the oats that spilled out before tasting a few.
The Flim Flam brothers seemed to take this as a victory, grinning as they turned to address the crowd. “You see, folks? Our high-quality oats are so good that even Vanhoover’s hero can’t wait to have some!” crowed Flim.
“Come and get a bag of Lex Legis-approved oats right away, before they’re all gone!” echoed Flam.
“All bags must go!”
“We simply can’t keep them in stock!”
“What do you say, Lex? Aren’t these the finest fare you’ve had this side of the mountains?”
The question, posed by Flim, had everypony waiting with baited breath as Lex finally turned to look at the two. But the expression on his face was one of contempt, regarding the brothers in front of him with undisguised loathing. “These,” he announced, “are ordinary steel-cut oats. The kind you can find in any store across Equestria.”
Both unicorns seemed taken aback by the hostility in his voice, but once again they recovered their poise in less than a heartbeat. “Well not any store, wouldn’t you say?” asked Flam.
“Quite right, brother of mine,” answered Flim. “Why, just look at the state Vanhoover’s in! I’d wager that there aren’t any oats to be found in this town!”
Flam nodded. “And since everypony knows that the farms in this region only grow subterranean flora, and the train service to wider Equestria has been out for weeks, I’d venture that these are the only oats to be found for miles around!”
The crowd was already nodding, but Lex had no intention of letting them continue their travesty continue. “And is that your justification,” he hissed, letting a sliver of his anger leak into his voice, “for charging three hundred bits for a five-pound bag of them, instead of the sixty that they’d cost elsewhere?!”
Although he wouldn’t have called it an emergency the way Egg Basket had, Lex had to admit that the old stallion had been right to bring this to his attention. The farm pony had made it clear how thrilled he’d been to find oats for sale, only for his joy to turn to disbelief when he’d heard how high the singing brothers had raised the price for each bag. Garden Gate had shared his horror, having seen the price of oats back when she and her companions had fled back to Ponyville and concurring that what the Flim Flam brothers were charging was nothing less than highway robbery.
His angry exclamation made both brothers wince, shooting nervous glances around, but they quickly found their smiles again. “Well, we might have been forced to raise the price a little,” admitted Flim.
“But only because of necessary expenses required to bring our product here, where it was sorely needed,” noted Flam. “After all, there were transportation expenses.”
“Finders’ fees.”
“Advertising charges.”
“Bagging costs.”
“So you see, we really had no choice but to raise our rates,” sighed Flim, flinging a foreleg over his head, as though about to swoon. “After all, if we go hungry, we’d end up eating our own product instead of bringing it here where it could do the most good!”
“And besides, everypony here doesn’t seem to mind having to pitch in a little more to help get through the tough times,” smiled Flam, waving a hoof toward the ponies who’d already bought bags, and were now looking back and forth between their purchases and the unfolding altercation. Unlike the unicorn salespony, they were no longer smiling, instead looking like they weren’t sure what to believe.
“A four hundred percent increase in price is not ‘a little more’ by any measure!” snarled Lex, growing angrier by the minute. How could these two be so morally bankrupt?! The ponies that had survived Vanhoover’s collapse had suffered unimaginable hardships, many of which were still ongoing, and yet the stallions in front of him were quite content to treat the widespread suffering that everyone here had endured as an opportunity to make money!
But in spite of his anger, the Flim Flam brothers didn’t seem put off. If anything, they almost looked pleased by his indictment of their business practice. “Well, if you think our prices are too high for the local market to bear, maybe you’d care to purchase these oats yourself?” suggested Flim, grinning slyly.
“We’ve heard that you’ve been, shall we say, banking a lot of money lately,” noted Flam with a matching expression. “We’d be more than happy to sell you our product wholesale, for…how about eighty percent of what we were charging the public?”
“Ah yes, good thinking, brother,” mused Flam, before turning back to Lex. “So, what do you say? Care to live up to your heroic reputation by lifting this burdensome burden off the overburdened public?”
“As we said, we have full faith in you,” added Flam. “After all, you’re well-regarded for your even-hoofed approach to public policy. Why, just imagine what would happen if you weren’t possessed of such penetrating perspicacity! Simply seizing our assets-”
“Or mauling us with magic!”
“-would send a terrible signal to this province’s prospective producers of potential profit!”
“Why, I can almost see the headlines now!” cried Flim. “Local ponies cursed for selling food to the needy, all because one pony thought the price was too high!”
“I daresay nopony would come to sell their wares here then!”
Flam’s melodramatic declaration ended with him and his brother grinning, first at each other and then at Lex, speaking in unison. “So what do you say? Do we have a deal?”
For a moment, Lex was speechless with rage. This wasn’t some instance of two ponies being blinded by greed. They were deliberately and meticulously working to manipulate the situation to their advantage, and were holding Vanhoover’s nascent economic stimulus hostage to do it!
Tall Tale, he realized. They said they heard about me in Tall Tale. Ribbon Cutter had mentioned that the city had recently reopened its rail service; no doubt these two had been among the first ponies back, probably with some other money-making scheme in mind, only to hear about what was happening in Vanhoover. It wouldn’t have been difficult. In fact, it would have been almost impossible to avoid; with Lex demanding right of first refusal on all of the city’s timber exports, all of Tall Tale would have been talking about Vanhoover’s situation. That, and perhaps a few well-placed questions of their own, would have told these two all they needed to know in order to come up with this little scheme.
But just because they’d heard about him from the ponies in Tall Tale didn’t mean they knew everything about what he could do…
“No,” announced Lex.
Flim and Flam blinked in unison. “No?” repeated the former.
“No what?” asked the latter.
“No, I won’t buy your product,” answered Lex, forcing his anger down. As much as he hated to admit it, these two were right. If he lost his temper and cursed them, or even seized the food they were selling, word might get around to other potential vendors. Lex had seen first-hoof how much ponies loved to gossip, and the situation in Vanhoover was still precarious enough that the chilling effect of his taking these two to task could very well imperil the city’s recovery. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
But that didn’t mean he had to play these con artists’ game, either.
“You’d rather let the public pay for these oats out of their own threadbare pockets?” asked Flim, surprised.
“Doesn’t your civic-mindedness require that you take on hardship for the public good?” echoed Flam.
“The public won’t have to pay for what you’re selling,” responded Lex in measured tones. “And I have every intention of seeing to everypony’s needs. Like this.”
And then he started casting a spell.
Flim and Flam scampered back, their faces turning pale, and the rest of the crowd slowly moved away as well. But Lex wasn’t casting a spell on anypony there. Instead, he had something very different in mind.
Although exiling Severance had cost him the ability to recharge his most powerful magic, Lex still had other forms of spellcasting available. In this case, he was using one of the divine spells that the Night Mare had given him. Specifically, the one that created food and water from nothing. Although he’d cast that spell earlier in the morning to provide for his own breakfast, the reservoir of magic in his circlet was sufficient to let him use it again now. But he didn’t stop there; as he performed the necessary gestures and chanted the liturgical incantation, he slowly channeled additional energy through his body, feeding it into the spell, pushing it beyond its normal limits.
Doing so, he knew, would increase not only the quantity of the food created, but also the quality of it. He’d learned that when he’d done this same thing several days ago, creating a massive banquet filled with myriad foodstuffs for everypony here. But that had been when he’d enhanced himself with a spell to increase his physical endurance, using it to try and augment how much energy he could channel through his body and into the spell, inadvertently touching off a feedback loop that had very nearly killed him. This time, however, he wasn’t using that spell; indeed, he couldn’t, since it was a thaumaturgical one that he didn’t have prepared.
But although he wouldn’t be able to create a massive quantity of food that could feed hundreds of ponies, he could still create a considerable amount like this. And while the type of food wouldn’t be nearly as diverse as before, it would still be notable. Even better, it would mostly be oat-based. After all, it normally made porridge.
And porridge was made from oats.
It took several minutes to finish casting, but when he did the result was exactly what he’d expected. From out of nowhere, plain tables had been created, lined with piping-hot oatmeal, oatcakes, oat muffins, oat bread, and numerous other foods of similar make. The sight was enough to make everypony cheer, rushing over and helping themselves to the unexpected feast, save for the Flim Flam brothers, who stared wide-eyed as their sales strategy was suddenly undercut. The sight was one that Lex found deeply satisfying.
“As you can see,” he smirked, “there’s no need for anypony here to buy your product, myself included. Certainly not at such inflated prices.”
“Well…er…that’s fine,” sputtered Flim. “We can always take our wares elsewhere.”
“That’s right! Oats are Equestria’s most beloved food!” gulped Flam.
“Indeed they are,” added Lex. “Which is why you’ll never make a profit. After all, oats are available in every grocery store across Equestria. Whatever you pay to transport these will be costs that you'll never recoup."
For once, neither stallion had anything to say, glancing at each other miserably. Although he had no ability to intuit other people's emotions, Lex found it easy to guess what they were thinking now. Buying all those bags of oats had undoubtedly cost them a fair amount, since they'd quite clearly purchased them on the retail market in Tall Tale. That meant that they stood to lose a fair amount of money, since they no longer had a venue where their goods commanded high prices.
It was exactly what they deserved, Lex knew. But as much as he enjoyed the sight of them so disheartened, he indulged in it for only a moment. "Now, here's what's going to happen. You will sell me all of those bags, right now, for seventy-five bits each, non-negotiable."
Both stallions' eyes lit up at that. "Really?"
"You mean it?"
Lex nodded, not bothering to elaborate. Although he knew better than to admit it, the camp needed what these two were selling. While he could in theory keep casting that spell every day, doing so wasn't optimal. Any food created by that spell that wasn't consumed within twenty-four hours decayed into inedibility, meaning that it couldn't be used to create a stockpile. Similarly, now that Severance was gone, Lex knew he needed to carefully manage how much magic he used; although his circlet and his divine spellcasting would replenish themselves daily, as did his dark magic, he needed to do everything he could to keep them ready in case some other emergency happened...much like what had happened just now. Particularly since food still needed to be stockpiled, since he was still expecting the population to explode once he started resurrecting ponies.
And, of course, this solution would make sure to encourage future commercial activity, given what loudmouths these two seemed to be. They might not be making the fortune they were obviously intent on, but they'd be walking away with a profit. That would have to be enough.
Apparently it was, since both of them rushed forward to shake Lex's hooves. "Well, I have to say, it's been quite the pleasure doing business with you, my good fellow!" beamed Flim.
"Indubitably!" grinned Flam. "It takes a stallion with scads of sufficient sagacity to find such a stupendous solution!"
"It's impressive!"
"It's inspiring!
"It's what's best for everypony," growled Lex, his good mood falling at the sight of those two's elation. "And once this transaction is complete, it would be best for you if you never tried anything like this again." He let the statement hang in the air, giving both stallions a glare that made their smiles wither. Mollified, he turned and walked past the two of them.
He'd tell Trotsworth to pay those two, and then he had every intention of putting them out of his mind. There were more important things to focus on. One of which was right where he'd left her (Egg Basket having gone to help himself to the feast Lex had conjured up), smiling and falling in behind him as he headed back toward the manor. With a glance, Lex indicated that she should walk next to him instead; now that this so-called emergency had been dealt with, he could go back to what he'd been focusing on before.
"Tell me what happened after you reached Canterlot."
“So there I was, the only thing standing between Mama-, I mean, my mother and that ghoul! It tried to scare me off, screeching ‘I’m gonna eat your heart!’ at me, but I just smirked and said, ‘you’re gonna have a hard time with that after I knock your teeth out!’ That made it so mad that it let out a scream and charged at me! But it wasn’t expecting me to bellow a battle-cry and rush to meet it head-on!”
“You were very brave, protecting your mother like that,” smiled Granola Bar warmly. From her spot on the sitting room’s comfortable sofa, she leaned forward, resting her chin on her fore-hooves as she watched Piggy relate his life-or-death struggle against the ghoul he’d encountered. It was quite the performance, as the rotund little stallion leaped and twirled as he relayed the blow-by-blow of the hard-fought struggle. That, she knew, was a testament to just how excited he was to tell her what happened; normally he never moved that fast unless it was to run away from danger or toward food.
The two of them had the sitting room all to themselves now. They’d just been finishing up the delicious meal that Trotsworth had brought them – after several days of apples, the salad, baked sweet potatoes, and biscuits that the old butler had brought them had been beyond delectable – when Piggy had come bounding into the room. “You’re back!” he’d cried, ignoring the groans from Funshine and Slip ‘n’ Slide and the giggle from Hopscotch.
“It’s about time!” had been the next thing out of his mouth, trundling over to her with a cross look. “I had a really hard time keeping this place together while you were off having fun in Canterlot!” He’d paused then to swipe a biscuit from her plate, his little cheeks puffing out as he devoured it. “You better have brought me something nice!”
For her part, Granola Bar hadn’t answered, unable to do anything but smile happily at seeing Piggy again. It had taken her several seconds to collect herself, and when she did her first act had been to pull the fussy little stallion into a hug. “I really missed you,” she’d murmured, the words coming from the bottom of her heart. That had been the point when her friends had decided to let her and Piggy catch up in private…though she suspected that they simply hadn’t wanted to be in the same room as the fat little earth stallion any longer than they had to, letting Trotsworth escort them to their guest rooms. Not that Granola Bar minded either way, simply happy to see Piggy again.
The little stallion’s petty antics were just as soothing to her now as they had been during their time trying to survive in the ruins of Vanhoover. Back then, the scope of the destruction and the totality of how everything had fallen apart had left her stunned, unable to comprehend how her entire world had collapsed so completely. Even though she hadn’t lost any family the way everypony else had – an only child whose parents were farmers in Equestria’s heartland, she’d come to Vanhoover several years ago live out her dream of starting her own children’s summer camp – the horrors that had happened during and after the flooding had left a deep mark on her. Between the utter terror of being hunted by monsters to the despair of wondering why no one in Equestria had come to rescue them, she’d felt her will to live slipping away day by day.
But Piggy had changed all that. Not because the little stallion was charming or brave or handsome. Rather, it was because of how incredibly petty he was.
That pettiness had saved her.
In a place where death lurked around every corner, where survival was a struggle that all too often required preying on others, and where the most you could hope for was to last another day before the monsters dragged you off to a gruesome and painful end, seeing someone else so completely full of themselves – to the point where he was nearly divorced from reality – had been a complete shock to Granola Bar’s system. That Piggy could be so deluded that he thought he was the leader of their little band, and that his rich mother would just show up and be able to fix everything, had reminded her that there was more to life than just grim survival. Listening to him had made her remember back when she’d been concerned with trivial things, and in so doing given her a glimpse of the better life she hadn’t even realized that she’d started to forget.
Pettiness was a luxury that Granola Bar had lost when Vanhoover had fallen, but Piggy never had.
That, and the little guy was simply adorable. Even though he was quite clearly no longer a foal, he still acted like one, trying to boss everypony else around and throwing tantrums when he couldn’t. It was like watching a little colt put on grownup clothes and prance around, play-acting how they thought an adult should be. It was why she was enjoying listening to him go on about the ghoul he’d fought. She had no doubt he’d actually encountered one and been forced to deal with it – he simply didn’t have the imagination necessary to make up a story like that from nothing – but that he didn’t seem to realize how unbelievable his rendition of it sounded just made it all the more endearing to her.
Though to be fair, he was putting some real effort into the retelling. The portly little pony was already flushed and starting to sweat, breathing heavier as he relayed the tale of his heroic battle. “So my dashing toward it caught it by surprise, and that gave me the advantage!” continued Piggy, rearing up on his hind legs as he pantomimed a mighty struggle, his belly jiggling back and forth like someone was shaking a water balloon. “We went tumbling, and it tried to bite me again! But before it could, I reached out and grabbed a nearby chair leg, and shoved it between its jaws, propping its mouth open! It howled, but it couldn’t stop me as I lifted it overhead and slammed it down onto the desk!”
“And you weren’t scared at all?” prodded Granola Bar, unable to help herself.
“Scared? Hah!” Despite how hard he was breathing, Piggy puffed up more. “When it rolled off the other side of the desk, I just beckoned it and said ‘come get some!’ But it started trying to keep the desk between me and it, worried about what would happen if I got my hooves on it again. But that wasn’t about to stop me! I simply knocked the entire desk into the wall, keeping it pinned while it tried to get away! But it managed to wriggle free, and tried to go after my mother again, and that’s when I got angry!”
Giggling a little, Granola Bar nodded, encouraging him to keep going. From the look of him he’d collapse soon, but Granola Bar wasn’t about to get in the way of his fun. Especially not when it made all her stress of the last several days evaporate.
The delicious meal had been wonderful, and sleeping in a real bed sounded like paradise, but right now – watching Piggy’s frolicking – Granola Bar couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
“And so there I am, an angry roc above me, and diamond dogs popping out of the ground below! I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t go down! My wings were already getting tired, and there was no cover anywhere! So you know what I did next?”
“What?! What?!” gasped Feathercap, his eyes wide. Nor was he alone, as Fruit Crunch and Cleansweep were hanging onto every word. Straightlace looked a little more composed, but he was still paying rapt attention to everything her husband said. Only Fiddlesticks seemed to be uninterested in Tryout’s tale, rolling her eyes as she rocked Tiddlywinks in her foreleg.
Although she sympathized with the filly – Tryout was acting as though Cleansweep had been away at summer camp, rather than having been left alone while their home had turned into a wasteland – Feather Duster couldn’t help but smile. Despite the tongue-lashing that mare had given him, Tryout’s joy at seeing Cleansweep had been wholehearted. When he’d seen Cleansweep making a beeline for him, he’d immediately launched himself at her, and the two had embraced in midair. That had been followed by her husband oohing and aahing over their daughter’s pet snake, which had led to Cleansweep hurriedly telling her father about what she had been up to with the rest of her friends (who had also come running, their animals included).
Of course, Tryout wasn’t a pony to be outdone, and he had immediately launched into his own tale of the hardships he’d been through. Coming from anypony else Feather Duster would have thought his stories would have been exaggerations, but from Tryout…well, they were probably still exaggerations, but that was because he saw everything as an adventure, and so his description of events was always more colorful than how most other ponies would have described them. Feather Duster could still remember the time he’d shooed away a gopher that had made a nest in their cellar; he’d later referred to it as “The Basement Battle with the Big Bad Badger,” telling the story whenever anypony had mentioned something related to pest-control.
In the case of his current tale, Feather Duster would have guessed that he’d maybe seen one diamond dog – or, more likely, some other burrowing animal – sticking its head aboveground while a falcon or eagle or similarly-sized bird had been flying overhead. That would have been all Tryout needed to envision himself caught between a roc and a hard place, which was a joke he’d made just a few minutes ago. But while the foals had all groaned at the terrible pun, no one had missed how widely they’d grinned while doing so.
In a lot of ways, it was like Tryout was a big foal himself. He’d never lost his sense of childlike wonder at how much excitement there was to be found in even everyday things, to say nothing of his unquenchable thirst for new adventures. It was by far his best quality as a father, since it let him relate so well to their daughter, even if it left something to be desired in a husband.
And in this case, that ‘something’ was the realization of just how perilous their daughter’s relationship with Lex Legis was.
The fact that Lex’s instructions to Cleansweep and her friends had been benign so far meant little to Feather Duster. After all, Lex was still the same pony who had found fault with Princesses Celestia and Luna – the two most benevolent and noble ponies there were – to the point of engaging in violence against them. He used curses on anypony who displeased him. He was in a lurid relationship with two sisters at the same time (as well as a third mare, though rumor had it she’d left him recently). And he was working closely with River Bank…
…who had ordered her to become part of that lurid relationship as well.
“So when the roc dived down to snatch me, I rolled out of the way at the last possible second, and it went straight into the hole in the ground that led to the diamond dogs’ lair! And believe me, you could hear the fur and the feathers starting to fly when that happened! But I knew better than to stick around and find out who won!”
The conclusion of Tryout’s story earned a round of cheers from the children, and by that point even Fiddlesticks was paying attention, though she was shaking her head ruefully. But Tryout was already launching into the tale of what had happened next, keeping them spellbound.
A moment later Feather Duster winced at her choice of terms, knowing that if something happened to make Cleansweep lose Lex Legis’s favor, she’d find herself spellbound in a very different manner.
I need to do this, Feather Duster realized a moment later. River had all but sold her to Lex, giving her to him like a party favor in a maid outfit, but all the horrible threats that the other mare had cowed her with were nothing compared to the danger of Lex Legis’s ire. River had the power to ruin her family’s reputation, but Lex had already proven himself to have the ability and the willingness to do far worse than that. And if he did, it would likely fall on Cleansweep, since she was his student now. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Tryout wouldn’t be any help, Feather Duster knew. He’d come up with some sort of elaborate scheme to either run or fight, and she felt certain that neither would work. Not against the kind of power that Lex could bring to bear. Or worse, Tryout might encourage Cleansweep to keep studying under Lex anyway, seeing the danger as a source of excitement rather than as something that their daughter needed to be protected from. While that wouldn’t upset Lex, it wouldn’t discourage him from punishing Cleansweep if she upset him somehow. The only thing that had even the slightest chance of that…
Would be if he was sleeping with his student’s mother.
There was no guarantee that would work, of course. But from what Feather Duster had seen, Lex had, if not genuine affection for the girls he took to bed, then at least consideration for them; certainly, he seemed to indulge that ill-tempered mare Aria quite a bit more than other ponies. If worse came to worst, that might make all the difference if she needed to beg him to spare her daughter. At the very least, she couldn’t afford not to try.
Tonight, she decided, realizing that she’d resolved herself. She’d been putting this off for as long as possible, longer than she should have, but Tryout’s return had put an end to that. It has to be tonight. She wasn’t sure how Lex felt about mares who were already mothers, but she doubted her appeal would be enhanced if he thought she’d renewed her physical relationship with her husband.
Feather Duster’s eyes slid back over to Tryout, watching as he and the foals shared a laugh over some anecdote of his, and silently apologized to him. Even though she’d thought she was a widow until earlier that afternoon, she still felt awful about what she was going to do to him now. But it had to be done.
Standing in front of the manor with several young butlers in tow, Trotsworth raised an eyebrow at Aria’s groan of frustration. “Is everything quite alright, miss?”
The mare in question shot him a sour look, her features highlighted by the setting sun. “No, everything is not alright! That took forever!” She glared backward pointedly, directing her ire toward the team of exhausted ponies who were hauling a cart filled with bags of what had to be bits, judging from the way they jingled. And they were jingling quite a bit, since the cart only had wheels on its left side, the others having apparently fallen off at some point, likely due to the weight of their payload.
In an effort to keep moving, some of the ponies under Aria’s direction had apparently compensated for this by simply carrying the right side of the cart on their backs. Even as Trotsworth watched, a half-dozen ponies grabbed the right side of the wagon and lifted it, raising it enough so that a pair of bedraggled-looking earth stallions could stagger out from under it, barely getting clear before they collapsed. Behind them, the others slowly lowered the lopsided wagon down, grunting with effort. Trotsworth could only imagine how heavy that had been; a healthy earth stallion could haul an impressive amount, but pulling that many bits had quite clearly taxed their limits. “How unfortunate,” he replied smoothly, before turning to the other butlers he’d brought. “Deposit these bits with the others as per Master Legis’s instructions. And fetch some refreshments for Miss Blaze’s associates.”
“Associates,” snorted Aria, uttering the words like a curse. “These wimps are the reason this took us all day! We lost two wheels, and suddenly it’s all ‘this is really heavy’ and ‘we need to stop and rest’ over and over!” She rolled her eyes then, giving her team a baleful look. “The only reason we made it back before dark is because I was walking in front of them.” Trotsworth didn’t miss how all of the stallions on her crew – and a few of the mares – turned red at that, making sure not to meet Aria’s eyes. Apparently the sight of her backside had been quite the motivator for them.
“Well, I’m sure that Master Legis will be pleased to see that you’ve returned safely,” he replied diplomatically as the younger butlers began to unload the bags of bits. “Would you like me to take the bank ledger to him while you have something to eat?”
“Let him wait for it,” snapped Aria peevishly, grabbing the book and pointedly not giving it to him. “He makes me go out on these boring errands of his, so he can get his precious notebook when I’m good and ready to give it to him.” The corners of her lips turned upward into a spiteful smirk then. “Besides, I bet he’s worried sick about me, knowing that I should have been back before now.” She glanced at Trotsworth, wearing a petulant expression that quite resembled the one that Master Piggy often wore. “He’s been asking about me, right? Probably wondering what was taking so long?”
Trotsworth cocked his head slightly, his face carefully neutral thanks to long years of practice. “Actually, Master Legis has spent the last several hours entertaining a guest in his study.”
Now Aria was the one raising a brow. “A guest?”
“A young lady. I’m afraid I didn’t catch her name.”
“Really?” To Trotsworth’s mild surprise, the fit of jealousy he expected Aria to display failed to manifest. Instead, she looked almost intrigued. “You know what? I think I’ll go bring him that ledger right now after all. I’m sure he can’t wait to get a look at it.” She was already moving before she’d finished speaking, trotting inside with a renewed spring in her step, making it clear that she was the one who couldn’t wait to get a look at Lex’s guest.
Nor had her lack of anger at hearing that her stallion was with another mare been lost on the rest of the staff. “Looks like it’s going to be a loud one in the Screamery tonight,” muttered one of the butlers as he hoisted a bag, using the name that the staff had given Lex’s quarters (which, unlike Master Piggy’s and those foals’, were in the same wing of the manor as the servants’) after hearing how vocal Aria could be at night.
“I can’t wait to change the bedsheets tomorrow morning,” snorted another, his voice sarcastic. “We’ll need to leave the ‘S’ off the name after that.”
“That’s quite enough of that!” chided Trotsworth. “Remember that you’re professionals,” he admonished the pair, their ears folding back at the scolding, “and professionals maintain decorum at all times.” Or at least, whenever there was someone else around. He knew there was no stopping the staff from gossiping amongst themselves, but these two had apparently forgotten that the rest of Aria’s team was still in their presence, paying close attention to what was being said.
Properly chastised, the pair joined the rest of the staff in getting back to work. This time there was no idle chitchat, and Trotsworth nodded to himself as he turned to head back inside. He’d need to speak to the rest of the staff, he decided, just to make sure they importance of being discrete with their impressions of their new employer.
And to make sure they had sufficient earplugs; Miss Blaze really could be quite vociferous in her appreciation of her lover’s skill.
Garden sighed as she exited Lex’s suite. When he’d said he’d wanted to know everything that had happened after she’d arrived in Canterlot, he hadn’t been kidding! What had followed had been nothing short of an interrogation, one which had lasted the entire afternoon and into the evening.
The first order of business had been the sick ponies he’d sent with her, confirming that Princess Cadance had cured them all and that they’d subsequently been sent to a hospital. After that he’d turned his attention to Princess Cadance herself. That particular line of inquiry had been extremely thorough. He’d had numerous questions of exceeding specificity about every bit of magic she’d used, including and especially when she’d brought Pillowcase back to life.
By contrast, she and her friends’ escape from Canterlot had interested him very little. Although Garden had firmly believed that Lex wouldn’t have a problem with them evading the princess and the guards in order to come back, she’d still been slightly nervous about admitting that they’d gone on the lam. But Lex had seemed almost contemptuous of the idea that they’d done anything wrong. “Any attempt to detain you based on your actions here in Vanhoover would not have been lawful,” he’d said, his voice dismissive. “The princesses abdicated any claim of sovereignty over this area when they ceded it to me, meaning that they had no authority to conduct oversight of your or anypony else’s actions here.”
After that they’d moved on to Princess Luna’s appearance in her dream (the contents of which, prior to the alicorn’s arrival, she’d glossed over). Garden had shamefacedly confessed that she’d unintentionally informed Luna about Lex’s use of curses, but to her relief he hadn’t seem particularly upset about that either, eschewing the idea that his activities were some sort of secret. “Order needs to be enforced,” had been his response. “And maledictions are an excellent tool with which to punish transgressors.”
And then she’d shared the news that Twilight Sparkle and her friends were returning to Equestria.
Garden hadn’t been sure what she’d expected Lex’s reaction to that particular revelation to be, but it hadn’t been for him to simply narrow his eyes and make her repeat exactly what she’d overheard Spike, Soft Mane, and Grass Patch say, making sure she was word-for-word certain about what they’d said. Once she confirmed that she was, he’d gone silent for a few seconds, before asking if she had any other information that needed to be brought to his attention. Shocked at how blithely he seemed to be taking the news that Princess Twilight was coming back – even if it was to help try and remove the curse that Lex had, she’d recently found out, placed on Luna, Garden couldn’t help but think that it still sounded like the alicorns were gathering their strength for a rematch – she had confirmed that it was. But before Garden could ask what Lex thought about what she’d told him, he had dismissed her, telling her to go see Cleansweep about having the lingering damage to her horn repaired.
But despite the prospect of her horn being fully healed, Garden found herself lingering outside the door to Lex’s room, worried that she hadn’t fully conveyed her concerns to him. Everything she’d heard about Princess Twilight indicated that she did whatever Princess Celestia told her to do, and after being defeated in battle and having her little sister cursed, Garden had no doubt that Princess Celestia would tell her protégé to gather up her friends, head to Vanhoover, and use the Elements of Harmony to blast Lex into oblivion. For all she knew, they were already on their way there right now; Spike’s missive had said they’d be back “tomorrow” and that had been several days ago.
And if that happened…if they showed up here intent on killing the pony who had given her back her life…
I need to get some knives, Garden decided, turning and heading down the hallway. There had to be a kitchen somewhere in this huge house. Surely they’d be able to spare some cutlery?
Her thoughts were interrupted as she rounded a corner and nearly walked straight into a mare, stopping just before they collided. “Oh! I’m sorry.” The apology came to her lips automatically, intent on finding what she was looking for, only for her to do a double-take at how ridiculously good-looking the mare was. Up until now, Lex’s girlfriend had been the single most attractive mare Garden had ever seen, but this new girl was easily in the same league. More than that, though, was the odd feeling that she’d seen her somewhere before.
The newcomer seemed to be thinking the same thing, because her eyes widened at the sight of her. “Wait, I remember you!” she blurted. “You’re the chick with the knives, from that big fight with the ghouls!” She paused for a moment, looking her over slowly before cracking a grin. “So you’re part of the harem now too, huh?”
Fighting back a wince at the reminder of what she still thought of as a suicide attempt – since guilt over sending Turbo to what had turned out to be his death had driven her to throw herself at the ghoul army with no thought of her own survival – Garden shook her head in bewilderment. “Excuse me?
Apparently misunderstanding the source of her confusion, the other mare smirked, shifting her weight so that she was posing in a way that showed off her generous figure. “Right. You haven’t seen me since Lex gave me history’s greatest makeover. Before, I had a body several times larger, could only whisper, and was flinging fireballs at those monsters.”
It took Garden a second to process what she was being told. Then her eyebrows rose and her jaw dropped. “Wait, you’re…whatshername?! Sonata’s sister?!”
That earned her an irritated look, followed by a haughty toss of her pigtailed mane. “Aria Blaze, thank you very much.” But her smirk returned a second later, giving Garden another appreciative once over. “You’ll want to know my name so you can scream it along with Lex's.” She stepped closer than was polite then. “So,” she purred, “did he already break you in? Or do I get to help him do it?”
Not knowing what Aria was talking about and not liking what she understood, Garden stepped back. “Listen, I don’t know what you think is going on, but Lex already has a girlfriend. Maybe you’ve heard of her, since she’s your sister.”
Aria snickered at that. “Oh, you are out of the loop, aren’t you?” She grinned then, clearly enjoying Garden’s discomfort. “He’s doing both of us now. Me and Sonata. Together. And he was doing Blondie too, but she couldn’t hack it and ran back to Canterlot.” Her smile faded a little at that, but she shrugged a second later, as though she couldn’t have cared less. “But if you don’t know that, I guess you’re not the new bedwarmer after all, huh?”
Garden couldn’t bring herself to respond, deeply uncomfortable with what she was hearing. It wasn’t that Lex was apparently in a relationship with multiple girls that bothered her. Rather, it was the candid discussion of his love life that made her feel awkward and embarrassed.
After going through multiple emotional upheavals since the fall of Vanhoover – being forced to recognize what a monster she’d become, being acknowledged as reformed, and then forgiven by two of the ponies she’d wronged – Garden had spent the five-day train ride back sorting out her feelings about a lot of things. Including Lex. And what she knew for sure was that, in addition to the gratitude she felt for her savior, she deeply respected and admired him. But she was equally sure that she didn’t have any romantic or amorous feelings for him. While she preferred stallions, thinking about Lex’s sex life was like thinking about her father’s sex life. It was just wrong.
“I need to go,” she muttered, pushing past the other mare. It gave her a small measure of satisfaction when Aria hurriedly pulled away from her when they made contact, all of her earlier flirting gone.
But she apparently recovered quickly, because her mocking voice followed Garden down the hall. “Have it your way, cutie! I’m sure he’ll make me scream enough for both of us!”
Silence was Lex’s only company as he considered what Garden Gate had told him.
Although the mare had barely been gone a minute, the lack of distractions or interruptions made that more than enough time for him to examine every scrap of information that she’d given him, integrate it into what he already knew, and extrapolate future possibilities accordingly. And then repeat the process, multiple times over. But despite his analyses, he was careful not to place too much trust in his predictions; even if he hadn’t spent his entire life trying and failing to apply this very formula to basic interactions with others, he’d still had his expectations confounded too many times to let himself think that he could flawlessly predict what would happen. But that didn’t mean that useful data couldn’t be derived, allowing him to adapt accordingly should his deductions once again be confounded.
The most useful of Garden’s information had been with regards to Princess Cadance’s abilities. As the only alicorn that Lex had never personally encountered, and whose capabilities were the least known to him, the information was quite valuable. He’d known that she, like himself, had forged an agreement with one of Everglow’s alien gods, and the Royal Sisters had alluded to her being able to bring the dead back to life. But now he had eyewitness testimony to the specifics of her powers, and what Garden had told him had been intriguing.
In her initial attempts to alleviate the suffering of the ponies that had arrived in Canterlot, Cadance had used the verbal and somatic triggers that were characteristic of thought-based magic. Indeed, while Garden had been unable to replicate the precise words or gestures – having seen them only once, when she’d already been exhausted – what little she’d been able to describe had sounded almost exactly like the divine spells that Lex himself had used on several of the sick ponies here, specifically the spells to remove disease and ease physical distress. That much hadn’t surprising; while not the simplest of spells, they were far from what Lex would call complicated, even if he still couldn’t use them with anywhere near the proficiency he could his thaumaturgical spellcasting.
But what had caught his attention was how Cadance hadn’t used those triggers when she’d called upon stronger magic to heal those ponies after her initial attempts had proven fruitless. Nor when she’d brought Pillowcase back to life. Instead, all she’d made was a simple prayer, calling out to Lashtada directly instead of reciting any liturgies or performing any rote motions, and receiving power in excess of what she’d otherwise displayed.
To Lex, that sounded extremely similar to how he could call upon the Night Mare’s power to take control of certain magical creatures.
But there were still minor differences, and those had earned his full attention. While the fact that Cadance had still called out a verbal prayer was notable, what Lex found far more interesting was the way Cadance’s eyes had apparently glowed white while she’d used that power. While Garden had mentioned that only in passing, Lex hadn’t failed to recognize the significance of what she’d described.
It was common knowledge among those who studied Equestrian magic that glowing eyes were characteristic of magic saturation. The physical nature of Equestrian spellcasting meant that, should a spellcaster push their limits and flood their body’s natural channels with more magic than they could easily process, the excess power would radiate throughout their physical form, pushing outward until it escaped the body completely. While the excess power could be shed in numerous ways – Lex had heard of everything from powerful but uncontrolled bursts of telekinesis to manes and tails bursting into flame – the most common was simply to release the overflowing power as harmless light, something that the eyes, with their photosensitive construction, were best suited for.
In fact, his own ocular discoloration operated under the same principle, since his dark magic was also a form of physical spellcasting. But while his horn had channels that were optimized for its use, the same couldn’t be said for the rest of his body, despite – or perhaps because of – how often he’d abused it by generating excess magic and then feeding it into his thought-based spells rather than allowing it to escape naturally. The result was that his dark magic tended to manifest via his eyes whenever he called upon it. And quite often when he didn’t, since the excess power would radiate outward at the slightest instance of stress or tension, his body unable to fully contain the power that his horn otherwise could. In those instances, glowing eyes were his dark magic’s least manifestation; more often the energy would be great enough that it would generate black crystals outside of his conscious direction.
But Cadance had apparently been forced to push her body’s limits while calling upon her goddess’s power, which was something Lex didn’t need to do. While he could only call upon the Night Mare’s power to control the motor functions of certain creatures (even if the reasoning behind which creatures were affected and which weren’t was still maddeningly unclear) a certain number of times per day before it was exhausted, that power required no effort on his part whatsoever, unless he used his body to overcharge it the same way he could a spell.
Then again, perhaps that was what Cadance had been doing? After all, his battle with Celestia and Luna had made it plain that the alicorns had some ability similar to his own, in that they could augment their spellcasting. Except, as much as it galled him to admit it, their aptitude for doing so exceeded his own, since they’d used that technique repeatedly with very little debilitation to show for it. Even Garden had described Cadance as calling upon her goddess’s power almost a dozen times, her eyes glowing each time she had, and only being slightly winded by it. Perhaps whatever power Lashtada had given her was minor in nature, and the alicorn princess had figured out that she could increase its potency with her own magic.
Without more data, there was no way to be certain. What was certain was that she’d been able to use that combination of magic and divine providence to bring a deceased pony back to life. But that was something she couldn’t do with impunity; Garden had sadly related how Cadance had confessed to only being able to resurrect ponies that had been dead for a few days, and then only for those whose corpses were intact. That was in stark contrast to the spell-imbued gem that the Night Mare had given him; he’d studied it over the last several days, and had verified what the goddess had alluded to, in that the spell was able to recreate the deceased’s form as part of the resurrection process. Moreover, it could restore somepony who had been dead for decades, perhaps even a century or two (though no farther, something that he’d confirmed with no small amount of bitterness, since it meant that he wouldn’t be able to bring back his parents).
There might be even greater significance to the Night Mare’s resurrection spell being so much stronger than what Cadance could do, Lex knew. But until he’d fully analyzed the magic within the ruby that the goddess had given him, he wasn’t in a position to fully appreciate what that might be. That wouldn’t take much longer now, though; he’d already made significant progress towards unraveling the spell’s construction. Just a little more time, and it would yield all of its secrets. Once that happened, Cadance wouldn’t be the only pony capable of bringing the dead back to life.
But until then, there was nothing more to be gleaned from what Garden had told him about Cadance, which left the remaining development that she’d brought to his attention:
Twilight Sparkle and her friends had returned to Equestria.
Garden Gate had apparently expected this bit of news to catch him off-guard, but nothing could have been further from the truth. From the moment he’d made the decision to curse Luna, Lex had been certain that she and her sister would make every effort to abrogate her punishment, and would doubtlessly recruit the younger princess to help them in doing so. It was exactly the sort of hypocrisy he’d come to expect from them, since Luna’s punishment had been entirely just. It had been to that end that Lex had poured as much power into his curse as he’d physically been able, strengthening it to the point that it had nearly killed him to do so in anticipation of whatever countermeasures that the alicorns would no doubt bring to bear.
The problem was that an extent spell was effectively stuck in a defensive position. If someone tried to negate it and failed, then there was nothing stopping them from coming back and trying again later. Like a suit of armor being repeatedly struck by a weapon, it was only as strong as its ability to withstand the next blow, which meant that failure was inevitable if the opposing forces could attack without limit. If his curse could shrug off nineteen attempts to lift it, that would mean nothing if the alicorns made twenty.
While there were doubtlessly more sophisticated ways to overcome that particular problem, at the time Lex had only one solution available to him: to make his curse so substantial, so thickly concentrated, so overwhelmingly strong that no countermagic would have even the slightest chance of getting through. It wasn’t an artful method of ensuring his curse’s imperviousness, but in theory it would simply be able to overpower anything the alicorns could throw at it and then some. It would be a mountain, rather than a suit of armor, warding off their magic’s metaphorical spears and arrows.
In theory.
In actuality, he had no idea if that would work. Certainly, he’d put enough power into it, but while he felt confident that Celestia and Luna would never be able to lift his curse on their own, he didn't know if Cadance’s goddess-given powers would be able to let her try and remove it. Or what would happen if she brought Luna to the Crystal Empire and bid her subjects to use the Crystal Heart to undo his malediction the way it had undone King Sombra. Although Lex had once gone to the Crystal Empire in hope of studying the Crystal Heart, he’d never had the chance to do so, having arrived shortly before the Empire was placed into stasis for a thousand years. So there was no way of knowing how well his curse would stand up to that relic now.
And then there was Twilight Sparkle. Even overlooking that she and her friends could command the Elements of Harmony – another artifact Lex had wanted to study in his youth, but been denied the opportunity to do so – the alicorn was a force to be reckoned with. She had literally every advantage on her side: like himself, she was a prodigy when it came to spellcasting. But unlike himself, it was also her special talent, her cutie mark elevating her natural ability to utilize magic. And whereas he had abandoned studying native Equestrian spellcasting, Twilight never had, possessing a strong command of it now by all accounts. She was also an alicorn, which meant that she had access to whatever form of magical augmentation that Celestia, Luna, and Cadance did.
And she had also been to Everglow, learning the magical techniques and traditions of that world. Whereas Lex had invented thought-based spellcasting on his own, and was still trying to perfect the technique so that he didn’t need massive amounts of energy in order to prepare his spells, Twilight had readily accepted that world’s variant – and inferior! – methods of doing the same thing, using a spellbook as a focus for compressing the necessary energy within the structure of her thoughts. While Lex considered that to be an unacceptable compromise – simply take away the book, and those spells couldn’t be prepared unless another specialized tome with the proper formula was found – the fact of the matter was that so long as she had it she could prepare her spells at will, whereas he, at the moment, could not. And her skill with thaumaturgical magic, from what he’d seen, was comparable to his own.
All of that, in addition to whatever magic items she’d picked up during her time on that world. Or perhaps she’d learned the secrets of how to create those items herself. As much as it galled him to think that Twilight might have solved a puzzle that he was still working on, he knew it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, since despite how badly Celestia had corrupted her ethical development the younger princess still had an intellect comparable to his own. Or perhaps Twilight had simply convinced one of that world’s spellcasters to teach her. That was another area where they differed, Lex knew; his brilliance was in sharp contrast to his personality, whereas Twilight was somehow ingenious and gregarious at the same time. Maybe she’d even made a pact with a god the way he had…
But there was no way to be sure of any of that. Nor was any of it something Lex considered a priority, at least not at the moment. As much as it upset him to think of Luna evading justice for her crimes, the work he was doing here took priority. If they lifted his curse, there’d be little he could do about it for the foreseeable future. And if they couldn’t…
They’ll likely attempt to open a line of dialogue in hope of negotiation, he decided. There was simply no other acceptable route for them to take if they wanted it removed. As indolent and foolish as they were, Celestia and Luna had to realize that they had no just cause for attacking him, not when they’d been so clearly in the wrong last time. At least then they’d had the excuse of thinking that they were under attack, and that his protestations had been some sort of ruse. That wouldn’t be available to them now, leaving them with no pretext for commencing hostilities, particularly given that he’d had their wounds treated once the fight had been over and subsequently made no move to stop them from leaving.
Of course, there was always the possibility that he was overestimating them. And if he was…if they, or rather, if Twilight Sparkle, with her Equestrian spellcasting, Everglow spellcasting, alicorn powers, magic-boosting cutie mark, enchanted items, and Elements of Harmony came to Vanhoover intent on a fight, while he had no way to recover his strongest magic…Lex knew what would happen.
Aria could already tell her evening probably wasn’t going to have the happy ending she’d been hoping for.
The good mood she’d been in from teasing Knife Girl (or whatever her name was) had only lasted a few seconds after she’d sent the other mare running. That had been how long it had taken Aria to walk into the suite she shared with Lex and saunter over to the entrance to the study, where she knew he would be. Ideally, he’d be ready and eager to go to bed and work off some stress after a long day.
Instead, he’d barely glanced at her, his eyes shifting over to her for a second before turning back to the blank spot on the wall that he’d apparently been contemplating, as though she wasn’t worth his attention. That alone had gotten Aria’s hackles up, but she bitten back the sarcastic comment she wanted to throw at him, knowing that it wouldn’t help. Getting into a fight was the only thing that wasn’t difficult when it came to Lex.
And the last thing she wanted was another curse to have to deal with.
Taking a deep breath, she managed to keep her temper in check. Eyes on the prize, she reminded herself quietly. Fighting was a no-go, and picking at his ego was hazardous to her health, which only left one thing: turning on the charm. And since she couldn’t use magic for that, she’d need to do it the old-fashioned way. It wasn’t her usual go-to, but she still felt sure she could pull it off. He wants a good girl, huh? Well, I’ll give him a girl who’s good at being naughty.
Putting on her sexiest smile, she strolled into the study. “Hey baby,” she cooed. “Rough day?”
When Lex’s only response was a noncommittal grunt, Aria resisted the urge to roll her eyes. At least he was acknowledging her presence now. “I got those bits you wanted,” she continued, deciding that the quickest way to catch his interest would be to talk about those stupid errands he kept sending her on. Pulling out the vault ledger, she held it up. “See?”
“Leave it on the side table,” Lex replied curtly, nodding toward the far corner of the room where the piece of furniture in question resided. “I’ll review it later.”
And now he was using actual words. Progress. Carelessly tossing the book where he’d indicated, Aria ignored the casual dismissal that she knew he’d just given her, instead crossing the study, moving toward him. “So, what did whatshername, that girl from the ghoul-killing party, want to talk about?”
Lex’s expression didn’t change, save to blink once, and Aria had the distinct impression that he was trying to decide whether to answer the question or make it clear that he had told her to go away. Fortunately for her, he chose the former. “Garden Gate witnessed some of Princess Cadance’s powers during her time in Canterlot.” His perpetual frown deepened then, his eyes turning back toward the spot on the wall that he’d been staring at when she’d come in. “She also confirmed Twilight Sparkle’s intent to return to Equestria immediately.”
The name threw Aria for a loop, almost making her stumble. “That miserable little piece of-” She caught herself as Lex turned to look at her, clearly surprised by the outburst. Cursing herself for the slipup, Aria tried to recover her poise. “I mean…I’m sure you’ll make short work of her, just like those other princesses.”
Lex didn’t immediately reply, simply staring at her for a long moment. The unexpected attention left Aria faltering. Her plan had been to keep the small talk going, all while she moved to sit next to him, then start nuzzling him, then kissing, until he was worked up enough that he started to respond. Now, with his eyes fixated on her, she felt herself freezing up for reasons she didn’t fully understand. “L-Lex?”
“Aria.” He stood up then, as though hearing his name had been a signal of some kind. Slowly, he circled the desk and moved toward her, his eyes never leaving hers the entire time. “If Twilight comes here, I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Her breath caught in her throat, and not just because he’d gotten close enough to her that she could suddenly feel desire again. He was…he was worried about her? About how she’d feel about running into that purple pony princess again? “I’m…I’m not scared of her,” scoffed Aria, her plan to try and butter Lex up completely forgotten. “She’s no big deal. I mean, yeah, she ruined my life on Earth, and then again on Everglow, but that…that doesn’t mean anything…” She couldn’t keep going, the words sounding hollow even to her.
“I’ll protect you.” Lex’s words, by contrast, were firm and steady, with no trace of doubt in his voice. He raised a hoof then, placing it on her chest, and Aria couldn’t stop herself from gasping softly as he moved it up to brush over the base of her neck – where her scar had been – a moment later. “I promise, I won’t let her hurt you again.”
“I…” Aria heard herself speaking, but had no idea what to say, suddenly feeling dizzy. She knew that Lex was strong; she’d seen him crush every threat he’d come across. But what he was saying now…that he’d use that strength for her… It sent a warmth through her that was entirely different from lust.
All of a sudden, she didn’t just want to have sex anymore. She wanted him, Lex Legis. She wanted to feel him hold her close. To put her head against his chest and listen to the steady rhythm of his heart beating. To feel his lips pressed against hers. She wanted-, no, she needed him, and she couldn’t wait another second. “Kiss me.”
In the time it took her to realize that she’d said that out loud, Lex had already responded, and Aria stopped thinking entirely.
It was like that night outside the train station all over again. All of a sudden she could feel all of his focus, all of his energy, all of his passion that he usually devoted to his work, now all directed solely toward her. In that moment everything she’d gone through – the millennium of boredom on Earth, the degradation of having her voice taken from her, the months she’d spent in fear living among the sahuagin – were all worth it, because she got to meet someone who made her feel like this.
Someone who adored her.
Someone who loved her.
Someone who she loved too.
I haven’t told him, she realized suddenly, and the thought was like a weight around her ankles, threatening to ruin the sensation of floating that had enveloped her. She’d never actually told him that she had fallen in love with him. He’d said it to her, that night outside the station, but she’d never reciprocated. She’d alluded to it once or twice, without meaning to, but those three little words had never actually crossed her lips.
She’d had very good reasons for doing that, she knew, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember what they were. Something about being too embarrassed or too nervous or simply too busy with a million other things that now seemed completely unimportant. But right now…right now she had to tell him, had to make sure he knew that she felt the same way about him that he did about her.
That thought was the only reason she was able to pull her head back from his. “Mmm, Lex,” she moaned, trying to get her breath back. “Wait…wait a second…” Dimly, she realized that they weren’t standing in the middle of the study anymore. At some point he’d picked her up and laid her on her back over his desk, climbing on top of her. Another few seconds and she knew they’d be making love…and Aria could feel herself blushing at using a sappy term like “making love,” even in the privacy of her thoughts. “I have to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
He had one foreleg on either side of her head, looking down at her with that same intense expression, and Aria smiled in a way that, even without a mirror, she knew was nothing like her usual smirk. Reaching upward, she gently caressed his face. “I want you to know that I l-”
There was a knock at the door.
Aria froze. Above her, Lex’s eyes left hers, zeroing in on the entranceway to the study, and the fact that she was no longer the center of his world made Aria want to scream. Silently, she focused all of her thoughts on whoever was at the door, willing them to go away right that instant. She couldn’t cast a spell on them without seeing them, let alone singing, but maybe, just maybe, if she wished hard enough, the magic would work on its own and they’d leave-
The knocking came again.
“Don’t answer it,” whimpered Aria, pleading in a way she never would have otherwise. “Maybe they’ll think we’re asleep and go away.”
Above her, Lex frowned. “If someone is here this late, it’s likely to be important,” he retorted, climbing off of her.
For a brief moment Aria seriously considered grabbing him and making him stay put. She knew it would have been pointless, since he could easily have turned into a shadow and slipped out of her grasp. Or cast a spell and teleported away. Or simply overpowered her. But she still considered it anyway.
Then that moment passed, and another idea came to her. “I’ll get it, then,” she grunted, turning over and climbing down from the desk. Her legs felt like jelly, the intensity of the last few minutes suddenly catching up with her, but she made herself stay standing. Letting out a slow breath, she started moving before Lex could object, heading toward the door.
In those few steps, Aria felt the last vestiges of what she’d been feeling slip away. The pleasant haze that had settled over her was already fading away like a patch of mist in the morning sunlight, and she could feel her usual cynicism coming back. The fact that her libido was smothered a second later as she moved more than five feet from Lex only added insult to injury. And it was injury; the moment was well and truly dead now, she knew, and whoever was outside of their suite – knocking now for the third time – had murdered it.
And now I’m going to do the same thing to them, swore Aria silently.
In the span of twelve feet and less than half that many seconds, the transformation had finished. She had gone from being Aria Blaze, dewy-eyed schoolgirl in love, to being Aria Blaze, demon hellcat from the depths of Tartarus, ready to unleash the world of pain that only an enraged Siren could bring down on whoever had interrupted the most magical moment of her life. Even odds as to whether or not Lex would be able to stop her before she killed them. And the smart money’s on me!
Her rage rapidly growing to apocalyptic proportions, Aria reached the door to their suite, a spell already on her lips as she flung it open-
To find Feather Duster on the other side.
“G-good evening,” stuttered the maid, still wearing her too-short uniform. Wearing a smile that was obviously forced, she swallowed hard. “I was wondering if Master Legis…and you…would like some c-companionship tonight.”
Long seconds passed as Aria just stared at her, her wrath suddenly struggling not to drown beneath the twin tsunamis of disbelief and irony. Under any other circumstances, she would have jumped at the chance to bring another girl to bed. More people meant more fun, after all. But now…
“Nope! Not interested! Goodnight!”
Without another word, Aria slammed the door shut in Feather Duster’s face.
“Y-yes,” answered Feather Duster, looking down demurely. Or at least, it might have been demureness. Given the way Aria was glaring at the maid from across the room, it could just as easily have been discomfort. Lex couldn’t tell either way. “I know that you’re a stallion of great…appetites,” Feather Duster continued haltingly, “and since Miss Dusk and Miss Newsy are gone, I thought that one mare might not be enough for you. So I wanted to…to offer my services…in their place.” Her face was bright red by the time she finished speaking, glancing up at him furtively before lowering her eyes again.
“Of course you did,” muttered Aria darkly, rolling her eyes. “And you absolutely had to pick tonight, didn’t you? Blondie and Sonata have been gone for days, but you made sure to wait until just now to make your move.” Huffing, she leaned back in the comfortable chair she’d flung herself into after Lex had insisted on seeing what Feather Duster had wanted, giving him a dark look. “Well? Are you gonna bang her or what?”
Lex resisted the urge to sigh, having no idea what was going on.
The entire evening had been one baffling scenario after another, beginning with Aria’s behavior. When he’d mentioned that Twilight Sparkle was returning, she’d reacted in a way that he’d presumed was an instance of fear. After all, according to what Sonata had told him, Twilight’s appearance had twice heralded Aria’s life taking a turn for the worse, even if she hadn’t been the sole factor behind what had happened. So naturally, he had done his best to reassure her that she had nothing to be afraid of; as things stood now, Lex knew that wouldn’t be able to win a fight against Twilight, but figuring out how to change that was his problem to deal with, not Aria’s.
But Aria’s reaction hadn’t been what he’d cautiously anticipated. Instead of reacting with relief or encouragement, her response to his pledging to protect her had been amorous desire. Even stranger, she hadn’t been aggressive or demanding in seeking his affection the way she usually was; instead, she’d acted with a submissiveness that was entirely unlike her. It had been baffling…though not unwelcome. Quite the contrary, in fact.
As bizarre as the situation had been, however, Feather Duster’s interruption had been even more unexpected.
Once he’d brought the maid inside – something done over Aria’s objections; after she’d slammed the door, he’d gone out there personally to see what was going on, ignoring Aria’s protests that she’d “taken care of it” – Feather Duster had reiterated her risqué offer, leaving Lex utterly nonplussed. He’d always known that he was no good at reading people, but Feather Duster’s statement of desire for him ran counter to every impression he’d had of her. And just to make things even more incomprehensible, Aria seemed to be upset with this particular development, in stark contrast to her usual prurience. Nothing was making sense.
The fact that Feather Duster had just mentioned Nosey, whom Lex had gone out of his way not to think about over the last several days, didn’t make things any better.
Not knowing what to do, Lex fell back on the one point that offered any semblance of stability. “This is highly irregular coming from a married mare. What about your husband?”
Aria’s eyes widened at that, sitting up straighter. “Wait, what?” She looked at Feather Duster in surprise. “I knew you had a kid, but a husband? When did this happen?”
Feather Duster flinched, as though the questions were painful to hear. But she recovered quickly, glancing at Lex again. “Tryout…I’m glad he’s alright, but…but he doesn’t excite me anymore. Not like you do.” The last few words came out so quietly they were almost mumbled, and for a moment Feather Duster seemed like she couldn’t keep going. But then she took a deep breath and straightened up, meeting his eyes once again as she took a small step closer to him. “You…you’re a powerful pony, the most powerful pony there is, now, and I want…I want to feel that power. To know what it’s like to…to belong to you.” Reaching a hoof up, she fumbled with the buttons to her uniform, biting her lip as she started undressing. “So please…take me. Take me and-”
“Oh you’ve gotta be kidding me,” groaned Aria. When she saw that her comment had drawn Lex and Feather Duster’s attention, she looked at the former and pointed at the latter. “Tell me you’re not buying this. I’ve heard better hot-talk listening to Sonata make a breakfast order.” Lowering her hoof, she turned her eyes back toward the half-dressed maid, her gaze cold. “You’re obviously not into this, so what’s your game? Did you come here on a dare or something?”
“N-no!” Looking panicked, Feather Duster glanced back and forth between Lex and Aria, as though not sure which of them she should direct her denial toward. “I’m here because…because I’m overcome with desire!”
“Please, you sound like you’re quoting lines from a trashy romance novel,” snorted Aria. Hopping up, she marched toward the other mare. “How about we make a little wager? I’ll bet you all the money I dragged out of that bank vault that you’re drier than a desert right now.” Sneering, she raised a hoof and reached out toward Feather Duster. “Get that tail up and let’s see!”
Yelping, the pegasus mare backed away, almost falling over as she lowered her tail over her rump protectively. “That’s not-, I mean, I don’t-”
“Aw,” cooed Aria mockingly. “Why are you running away? I thought you were offering us ‘companionship.’”
“ENOUGH!” bellowed Lex. “Both of you!”
Both mares stopped where they were, Aria huffing and Feather Duster trembling. For his part, Lex could only grimace, convinced by the exchange he’d just witnessed that this nonsensical turn of events wouldn’t resolve itself the way he’d hoped it would if left to these two. Despite the fact that he didn’t know what to make of any of this, he’d need to solve it on his own.
But I can at least start by isolating the variables, he decided. “Aria, give us the room.”
“Seriously?” she asked sourly. “You’re not even going to let me watch while you do her?”
“Aria.” This time his voice was a growl, making it clear that his patience was wearing thin.
“Fine,” she muttered, making no effort to conceal her displeasure. Without so much as a glance at Feather Duster, she stomped over to the door leading to the bedroom, marching inside and slamming it behind her.
Once she was gone, Lex turned his attention back to the remaining mare. Feather Duster was still looking at the floor, holding her half-unbuttoned uniform like she wasn’t sure whether to put it back on or not. It didn’t escape Lex’s notice that, although Aria had left, she was still trembling a little. But none of that meant anything definitive that he could determine; she could have been shaking in arousal just as easily as fear or humiliation.
Instead, Lex focused on what he wanted. Both Aria and Feather Duster were subservient to him, which meant that his wishes were paramount. Whatever desires those two had were relevant only as much as he wanted them to be. And what he wanted…
For a moment, Lex seriously considered taking Feather Duster to bed. She wasn’t unattractive, and the prospect of enjoying her body was appealing on a visceral level, particularly since he was still feeling worked up from what had happened with Aria. If she was, as she’d said, overcome with desire for him, then why not reciprocate that?
Just like he had with Nosey.
The thought, borne from how Feather Duster had mentioned his former girlfriend – or rather, ex-girlfriend – earlier, immediately quenched any lust that Lex felt for the pegasus mare. This was too similar to the mistake he’d made before, following his desires and letting them lead him to what had ultimately turned out to be nothing but further pain and heartbreak. Nosey’s leaving him was still a frequent scene in his nightmares, and he had no wish to add to them by engaging in a liaison with Feather Duster now.
Besides, there was still the issue of her husband, as well as the fact that her daughter was one of his students. Even leaving aside the immorality of engaging in an affair with a married mare – such a thing wasn’t technically against his code of ethics, but that technicality depended on all parties giving their informed consent to such an arrangement, and there was nothing to suggest that Feather Duster’s husband was even aware of her being here, let alone that he was alright with it – there was no way to anticipate what the disruption to her parents’ marriage would do to Cleansweep. He had a responsibility to that filly and her friends beyond that of most ponies, and he couldn’t teach her about the proper use of power and authority if he was damaging her family just so he could satisfy his libido.
His decision made, Lex turned his attention back to Feather Duster. “Get dressed,” he ordered her curtly, “and then get out.”
For a second she looked like she wanted to protest, but then whatever strength she had seemed to flee, and she nodded, her expression miserable. Slowly, she pulled her uniform back into place, fixing the buttons she’d undone earlier. Once she was done, she turned toward the door…but didn’t move. Instead, she turned back around and threw herself down onto her belly, pressing her nose against the floor. “Please!” she begged, almost sobbing. “If I’ve upset you, please don’t take it out on Cleansweep, I beg you!”
“What?” The confusion that Lex had managed to dispel came back in force then. Her outburst wasn’t a complete non sequitur, since Lex himself had been thinking about the filly’s welfare, but for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why she thought that his being upset with her would have anything to do with how he treated her child. “What are you talking about?”
“She’s saying,” came Aria’s voice as the door to the bedroom opened, revealing her leaning casually against the frame, “that she was trying to whore herself out for her daughter’s sake.” Ignoring Lex’s shocked look, she glanced over at Feather Duster. “I should have put two and two together the moment I saw you. Did River give you this idea too? Tell you that if you put out for Lex, your daughter’s future would be secure?”
“What does River have to do with this?” demanded Lex, feeling more lost than ever now.
That impression wasn’t helped by the bemused look that Aria gave him then. “Oh please, you really think a girl this timid would wear an outfit with a skirt that short unless someone put her up to it?”
Lex was about to order Aria to be quiet and leave, certain that she had to be starting trouble for her own amusement again, when, to his astonishment, Feather Duster nodded. “It’s true,” she whimpered, her voice filled with shame. She made no move to get up, closing her eyes as the tension seemed to flow out of her. “It’s all true. I’m sorry.”
Sauntering into the room, Aria sat down across from the prone maid, a triumphant smirk on her face as she looked at Feather Duster now. She seemed to be taking an almost vindictive pleasure in what was happening, though for the life of him Lex couldn’t figure out why, save to guess that it was related to why she’d been so upset when the other mare had joined them earlier. But that mattered far less than what had just been revealed.
Aria seemed to feel the same way, pausing just long enough to toss him a wink before returning her attention to the pegasus. “Go on. Tell Lex exactly what you’ve been doing and why.”
The future, River decided, was looking brighter than ever.
When she’d been forced to flee Vanhoover, she’d only been able to hope that the Hoofingfords and the McNeighs would fare worse than her. When she’d come back, she’d been horrified at the sheer scope of the damage that had been inflicted on her city. And when Lex Legis had cursed her, she had felt like she’d lost everything she’d spent her life achieving.
But true to form, she had turned things around. With nothing but her wits and her charms, she had stepped back from the brink, and positioned herself to not only recoup what she had lost, but earn more than she’d ever dared to dream. First had been getting Lex to forgive her and remove that horrible curse. Then she’d ingratiated herself into his budding regime, voluntarily turning over her wealth and resources before he could simply seize them, and in doing so buying herself a position at his side. And now he’d placed her in charge of a mission of dire importance to him, sending her to Las Pegasus in order to secure the funding he’d need to bring Vanhoover back to life.
“And that,” she smirked to herself as she twisted and turned in front of the full-length mirror in her cabin’s dressing room, the magnificent music of Ponygliacci playing on her phonograph, “couldn’t be going better.”
Indeed, ever since she’d departed for Cloudsdale, everything that could possibly go right had, starting with procuring proper transportation.
While anypony could simply take a balloon or an airship or some other form of common transportation into Las Pegasus, River was well aware that her method of conveyance would be the first thing that the city’s upper-crust would judge her on, which meant that only the finest aerial yacht would do. But while River had previously ventured to Las Pegasus in just such a ship before – a rare and fantastically-expensive convertible unit that could switch between nautical- and skyborne-travel – she’d been forced to sell it once her cash-on-hoof had started to run low, a humiliating move that in hindsight had marked the beginning of the end of her time in Las Pegasus. As such, she knew she could only return to the city now in a vessel of proper opulence in order to showcase to all and sundry that her fortunes were on an upswing.
Cloudsdale, of course, was the perfect place for that. The city was replete with airships, since it needed to import virtually everything from the ground-based cities it drifted over and the city’s leadership had long since figured out that it was more convenient to have their own vessels available to move heavier things that a team of pegasi couldn’t manage on their own. So all River needed to do was find an airshipwright with a halfway-decent yacht and have them modify it to her needs.
Of course, she’d known that would likely delay her departure by several days, but it couldn’t be helped. While Cloudsdale’s pegasi could be artful enough when it came to the weather or their trite little sports competitions, most of their work was horribly dull when it came to their airships, designing them for serviceability rather than elegance. She’d been sure that she would need to walk them through the various designs she wanted, listening to them complain about how she was sacrificing function for form.
Instead, she’d found a yacht that was almost perfect on the very first shop she’d tried!
It had been a beauty. Over one hundred-fifty feet long and sporting four decks, it had everything necessary for her grand return to Las Pegasus: a theater, workout gym, solarium, dining hall and four-star galley, sauna, dance hall, beauty salon, recreational center, sky lounge, and quite a few other amenities. Not to mention a half-dozen VIP suites that each contained a master bedroom, study, personal stateroom, jacuzzi, and living area, along with twice that many more modest suites in addition to the crew quarters below deck. It was in every way superior to the dinky little watercraft she’d limped back to Vanhoover in. And best of all, it had been priced to move!
In fact, the low price had initially put River off, certain that it had to be indicative of some sort of serious flaw with what was otherwise a gorgeous cruiser. But the proprietor had assured her that wasn’t the case. Rather, this particular ship had been commissioned by the mayor of Fillydelphia, apparently in hopes that making a show of ostentatiousness at the Grand Equestria Pony Summit that was coming up in a few months would convince ponies to bring their business to her city.
That, however, had turned out to be an incredibly poor decision on the Fillydelphia mayor’s part. While that silly little twit had been hoarding her city’s budget to pay for her yacht – throwing festivals and bake sales and donation drives in order to get the citizenry to turn over the bits that were the only ways for a local government to raise money – the on-again/off-again para-sprite problem that her city had been dealing with for the last several years had shifted back toward on-again. The result had been a groundswell of outrage when the Fillydelphia ponies had found out that their mayor had earmarked the city’s finances to pay for a luxury yacht, which she as the mayor would of course maintain possession of once the Summit was over, instead of paying to put the para-sprite problem to rest once and for all.
The result, according to the proprietor, had been that the mayor had been forced to reallocate the city budget to try and deal with the pests and appease the masses. Of course, that meant there wasn’t enough left over to pay for the splendorous luxury vessel she’d commissioned. The airshipwright, left with an extravagant item that had cost his business quite a lot of money to build and now had no buyer, was now simply trying to recoup his losses. It had been the perfect scenario for somepony who had enough bits to swoop in and take advantage of the incredible deal.
And River had done exactly that.
It would have been a bargain at twice the price, all the more so considering that River had initially been looking to rent a ship rather than buy one outright. But while the yacht had been more bits than she’d intended to spend upfront, she was sure it would be worth it in the long run. After all, once she completed Lex’s errand, he’d doubtlessly have more that he’d want to send her on; really, this was an investment in her future by his side. And of more immediate use, she’d been able to cancel those expensive hotel rooms she’d been forced to take out for herself and her staff when they’d headed up to Cloudsdale, moving into the living quarters on her new airship instead (though she’d made it clear that the staff were to only use the crew quarters below deck; even with nopony else on board, the VIP and guest suites were too good for them).
After that, there had only been a few things left to take care of. Primarily that had revolved around outfitting the yacht with the necessary amenities (the most expensive of which had been food, since Cloudsdale apparently had very little to spare) and hiring a crew to operate it, since her servants and staff were too few to run a ship this large. Besides, having more ponies in her employ would look better anyway when she arrived. And of course, the thing needed a new coat of paint, since it had been done up in the utterly garish colors of Fillydelphia. But that had all been taken care of in short order, after which they’d taken off on a course for Las Pegasus.
Arriving mid-morning, River had sent her staff out to acquire the remaining provisions her new yacht needed. She’d also told them to keep their ears open for any juicy gossip, since she needed to know the lay of the land if she was going to have any chance of convincing the richest of the city’s rich ponies to come back to Vanhoover with her. Here, once again, luck had been with her.
The first of the servants she’d dispatched had come running back with a newspaper in hoof, eagerly showing her the headline: “Cheating Scandal Rocks the Bardigiano!” Recognizing the name of one of Las Pegasus’s most famous casinos – one that, she recalled, was owned by that two-faced stallion Gladmane – she’d snatched the paper and eagerly dug in. Apparently one of the dealers (a buffalo, of all things) at the casino had been caught conspiring with an unnamed pony to defraud the place, dealing him winning hooves over several days which they would then later split. While the pony had since escaped with his ill-gotten gains, the buffalo had been caught, spilling the beans about the entire scheme. Although it had apparently happened a few weeks ago, it was only now hitting the papers.
The story had been enough to make River snicker, particularly when she’d gotten to the part about Gladmane’s reassuring everypony that his casino had taken strict measures to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again. By which he means he’ll work extra hard to keep his employees at each other’s throats so none of them will ever try and work together to rip him off, she knew. That was Gladmane’s style: to convince the ponies who worked for him that he was their only friend, and that their colleagues were plotting against them. It struck her as deliciously ironic that now his scheme was working too well, with the bad press making potential customers avoid his casino because they thought his employees were working to undermine them as well. With any luck, this little setback would make it easy to convince him that there was a new opportunity in Vanhoover that he could invest in.
More good news had come in later. Razzle Dazzle, the old nag who ran the Palace of Prance, Las Pegasus’s highlight theater, and Pretty Penny, the hotel magnate, were apparently feuding. Interestingly, she’d heard that particular story from two different members of her staff, with each of them giving a different reason for what had happened. According to Razzle, Penny’s son had been attending the Palace with some friends and had wandered backstage, where he’d proceeded to get a little too fresh with some of the dancers and had to be removed by force. Conversely, Penny had recently had a lucrative real estate deal fall through, and was convinced that Razzle was to blame for it; apparently, several dancers from the Palace had thrown a party at one of Penny’s hotels, which had been rowdy enough that it had upset a business partner of Penny’s who’d been staying there to the point of his breaking off their dealings. Penny was apparently convinced that Razzle had orchestrated the entire thing.
River couldn’t have cared less about which story was true, though in her estimation, likely both of them were. What mattered was that the two of them would be looking to get a leg up on each other. If she played her cards right, River knew she could convince one or even both of them that the way to outmaneuvering the other was waiting back in Vanhoover.
Finally, there’d been a delightfully sordid rumor going around that Jack Pot – one half of the city’s premiere magic act, along with his partner, Big Bucks – was divorcing his wife, Pixie. There was nothing to say it was even true, let alone why, but speculation was running wild. The leading theories at the moment were that Jack had fathered an illegitimate daughter that his wife had just found out about, or that he had walked in on Pixie and Big Bucks in flagrante delicto. Either way, the stallion was one of the most famous performers in all of Las Pegasus, which meant he likely had enough money to be worth considering as a potential investor in whatever plan Lex had dreamed up.
And speaking of Lex, thought River as she glanced out a nearby window. The sun had set a little while ago, which meant that if that little idiot Feather Duster knew what was good for her, she’d be in Lex’s room right now, shaking her hips and moaning in a sweet voice. The thought made River chuckle, examining herself in her mirror again. “First girls, then money, then whatever else he needs. It won’t be long before Lex realizes that I’m his biggest supporter,” she purred to herself, the music from her phonograph masking her words in case anypony was listening at the door. Eventually she’d do enough for him that his sense of honor would push him to offer her a reward, and when he did…
River gave herself one final lookover. Her mane and tail were perfectly coiffed, her makeup was exquisite, and her outfit, accessories, and scent were all in perfect coordination. But the lines around her eyes were still there, the one sign of aging that she couldn’t conceal. Before, that would have made her scowl, feeling her youth slipping through her hooves irretrievably. Not anymore, since what she planned on asking Lex for was to use an age spell (which, as a wizard powerful enough to defeat Celestia and Luna, he’d surely be able to master if he hadn’t already) to give her back her youth. Maybe he could even do it permanently, a thought that sent a pleasant tingle running down River’s spine.
Sneering at the old mare in the mirror, certain that soon she’d never have to look at her again, River turned and trotted out into Las Pegasus.
The decision was mostly one of convenience. While her servants had been able to return with plenty of gossip to supplement the supplies she’d sent them to retrieve upon arriving in Las Pegasus, the schedules of the ponies she’d decided to approach weren’t among the information they’d brought back. And going to their homes or places of business was absolutely out of the question; long years of politicking in her hometown had taught River that approaching someone else directly made it clear that you wanted something from them, which immediately put you at a disadvantage. Far better if she should simply “happen” to run into one of them while out on some unrelated bit of business.
Fortunately, she knew exactly where Pretty Penny was going to be tonight, thanks to today’s newspaper. While the cheating scandal in Gladmane’s casino had been the headline, there had been an article several pages in about the grand opening of a new hotel: the Galloway Bay Resort. Pretty Penny was apparently going to be there to officially open the hotel, which would also kick off a grand celebration; apparently the place had an artificial outdoor beach that its guests could enjoy, hence the “Bay” in the name. Even River had to admit (though only to herself) that making a beach on top of clouds was an impressive accomplishment, one worthy of a large party…just the sort of thing that a passerby could notice and be drawn in toward.
Of course, that still required a great deal of groundwork. First, she’d needed to prepare her ensemble for the meeting, one that was appropriate for where she’d be going while not making it look like she’d dressed specifically for the venue in question. That had been unexpectedly tricky, since a meeting at an elegant hotel required a totally different combination of clothes, accessories, and perfume than a beachside encounter. But River was quite pleased with how well she’d pulled everything together.
The first requirement had been dressing in light colors; being caught at the shore in something dark would make her look like a complete rube. Moreover, her outfit had to be from an airy material, since heavier fabrics were absolutely wrong for the beachside atmosphere. Fortunately it was still summer, which meant that a sundress – a lovely magenta one which complemented her hair – was entirely appropriate for eveningwear while out on the town, particularly since it was quite a bit warmer in Las Pegasus than it was in Vanhoover. Her jewelry would need to be kept to a minimum, since too much would create visual clutter that diminished her look. After some consideration, she went with a sterling silver necklace, since it was tastefully understated while being a perfect match for the white-gold studded earrings she’d picked out. A slight spray of hibiscus perfume completed her outfit, leaving her in an attire that would fit right in at any beach while still looking as though she was simply preparing for a night out in a warm city. It was perfect.
After that, she’d climbed into the carriage that her servants had rented, and prepared to set out. Like her outfit and her yacht, this particular mode of transportation had been given careful thought, though in this case River knew she had a bit more leeway. While her yacht and her clothes would be closely scrutinized for what they conveyed about her presence and social standing, her transportation around Las Pegasus would be given less attention. While walking (or flying, for pegasi) would have been hideously bourgeois, there was no particular stigma attached to simply renting a local vehicle, since doing so conveyed an insouciant nonchalance about how you went from one place to another. Of course, appearances still had to be kept up, but that was easy enough where a carriage was concerned; she’d simply paid a premium so that the tasteful dark blue model with tinted windows – pulled by no less than four strapping young pegasus stallions; fewer than that would have drawn comparisons to the common taxis that ordinary ponies used – would be set aside for her exclusive use for the next week, with an option to extend that period of time should her business keep her here longer.
By the time she’d entered her carriage and instructed the ponies pulling it to set off – deliberately having them take a circuitous course to her destination so that she could arrive fashionably late – it had already been nighttime. That was no coincidence, since Las Pegasus didn’t really come alive until after dark, hence why Pretty Penny’s celebration wouldn’t even start for another half-hour. But River was in no hurry; quite the opposite, she felt more confident than she had in some time, and amused herself by alternating between fantasizing about Lex’s reward of renewed youth and glancing out the carriage’s front window at the tight backsides of the stallions chauffeuring her.
And then she was there.
Fighting down the urge to grin wolfishly, River waited for one of the ponies pulling her carriage to open the door before stepping out, tossing her mane over her shoulder with practiced ease.
It was time to go to work.
“Well well well…I thought opening a beach resort in the clouds meant that there wouldn’t be any washed-up flotsam from Vanhoover here.”
Feigning surprise as the voice she’d been listening for finally made itself known, River turned around. “So the old saying’s true after all,” she drawled, letting her expression shift into a smirk. “Las Pegasus is a town where bad pennies really do keep turning up.”
Pretty Penny – a unicorn with a sepia coat, copper-colored mane and tail, and cutie mark of a pony sleeping in a bed – raised an eyebrow at the remark, giving her a penetrating look. Wordlessly, River matched her expression, staring right back at her, silently counting down. Three…two…one…
As if on cue, Penny broke into laughter, and River did the same. Stepping forward, the two of them planted kisses on each other’s cheeks. “River, sweetheart, it’s wonderful to see you again! And you look absolutely divine!” Penny gushed, making a show of looking over River’s outfit. “I had thought that after that rough patch you hit before, it would be ages before we’d have a chance to catch up!” She adopted a coy look then. “Did you come all the way back here because you heard about my latest undertaking and simply had to see it for yourself?”
River smiled, making a playful swat in Penny’s direction. “Actually, I’m here on business, but I have to say that this is quite the spectacle you’ve made here! I had no idea that a saltwater swimming pool with sand at the edges would be such a huge attraction!” Mentally snickering as she saw Penny’s smile diminish a fraction of an inch at the reductive comment, River turned toward the stallion she’d been talking to when the other mare had approached them. “Would you excuse me for a moment? Penny and I have a lot to catch up on.”
Not giving him a chance to answer – River had been talking to the fellow for almost fifteen minutes, waiting for Penny to notice her, and had been on the verge of falling asleep from boredom; the stallion, whose name she’d already forgotten, had been a film producer who apparently thought that deliberately filming actors at the wrong speed would somehow make his movies more dramatic, as if that “slow motion” nonsense he’d been talking about would be the next big thing; it had been like listening to one of Mounte’s harebrained schemes all over again – River turned and moved so she was alongside Penny. “I’m glad I ran into you, I felt terrible about having to leave so abruptly before. I was just so worried about what had happened to Vanhoover that I couldn’t bear to stay away any longer.”
“Yes, I’d heard your little town had some sort of awful weather trouble,” cooed Penny sympathetically, as though Vanhoover’s flooding hadn’t already become common knowledge. “What was it, something about the weather ponies scheduling too much rain at once?”
“It was a little more serious than that,” replied River, immediately affecting a somber visage. “A lot of ponies lost everything. Some haven’t been found yet.” That was a massive understatement, River knew, but it was a necessary one. Unlike Vanhoover and several other cities, Las Pegasus hadn’t been touched by the Elemental Bleeds, allowing life here to go on as usual. And even if that hadn’t been true, the full scope of what had happened in Vanhoover was something that had to be seen to be believed. River knew because she had seen it and had still struggled to come to grips with it, to say nothing of the pony who had laid claim to the place…
Her eyes widening a little, Penny cocked her head. “I had no idea! But I’m sure Vanhoover’s in good hooves. After all, it has you, as well as those dedicated ponies from, oh what were they called…the McNicker and Hoofington families?”
“McNeighs and Hoofingfords,” corrected River. Outwardly her tone was gentle, but inwardly she was cheering. She’d deliberately dropped the tidbit about being here on business to whet Penny’s appetite, and the other mare hadn’t missed it, which was why she was asking about Vanhoover’s other two families of renown now. “I’m afraid nopony’s heard from them for some time now. I’ve been trying my best to keep everything together but…I’m afraid that Mounte…my sweet, darling Mounte…” She turned away from Penny then, giving a shuddering breath as she murmured an apology, grabbing a nearby napkin to dab at her eyes.
“You poor dear!” Penny gushed, gently guiding her over to a less-crowded section of the beach and helping her into a folding chair. “I had no idea you’d been through such a harrowing ordeal! And to be out and about so soon after such a thing…”
“I have to,” sniffled River, making what she decided was a truly impressive show of trying to retain her composure. “I have to be strong now, not just for the ponies back home, but for my little boy. It’s just…it’s just so hard sometimes…” Spying a waiter carrying a tray of drinks, she gestured at him, taking a sip of the proffered glass a moment later. I should find out who did the catering for this event, she decided as she pretended to hold back a sob. This is chilled to perfection. “I’m sorry,” she sighed as she put the glass down. “You’re throwing a party to celebrate this achievement of yours and here I am going all to pieces on you.”
“Oh no, not at all!” answered Penny, a fraction of a second too quickly for her to conceal her interest. River could almost hear the gears turning in the other mare’s head: if Vanhoover’s power structure was gone, with the McNeighs and Hoofingfords being unaccounted for and she herself on the edge of a breakdown, then there would have to be a lot of real estate whose owners were no longer around. Real estate that could be turned into hotels. “I’m glad you confided in me, truly.”
I bet you are, laughed River inwardly. Now for the finishing touch. “You’re sweet for saying so, but I should go.”
“Are you sure?” asked Penny as River climbed to her hooves. “I’ve already given my speech and cut the ribbon, so if you wanted to stay here and talk it wouldn’t be any problem.”
“Oh, that’s sweet of you,” smiled River. “But honestly, I don’t know if I could say anymore right now. It’s all so overwhelming.” Blinking her eyes as though trying to fight back tears, she made her way back toward the entrance, Penny matching her step for step. “I think a show is just what I need right now, to take my mind off things.”
Penny blinked as well, then. But for entirely different reasons. “A show?”
“At the Palace of Prance,” nodded River. “Plus, it’ll give me a chance to apologize to Razzle Dazzle. I didn’t say goodbye to her when I left either.”
“Of…of course.” Penny wasn’t able to fully hide her dismay at the thought that somepony else – particularly somepony she was feuding with – might possibly find out about the unexpected opportunity that had just presented itself, but she rallied quickly. “Well, we absolutely must get together again before you head back home! I simply can’t bear the thought of you shouldering all of this on your own! You just enjoy your show and don’t spare another thought for what you’ve been through, and I’ll make plans for us to have dinner tomorrow night! In fact, where are you staying while you’re here?”
“Oh, I hadn’t made any arrangements,” confessed River. “I was just going to camp out on my spare yacht-”
“No, you’re not,” interrupted Penny. “You’re staying right here, at the Galloway Bay Resort. I won’t have you roughing it like that on top of everything else you’ve been through.”
“But-”
“Ah ah ah! I insist!” stated Penny firmly. “I’ll make the arrangements right now, and send word to your staff that you’re staying in the luxury penthouse. Gratis, of course. You go enjoy the Palace, and when you’re done come right back here and let my concierge handle the rest.”
“Thank you, Penny.” This time River’s smile was genuine, even as the words that came out of her mouth next were all lies.
Razzle Dazzle was going to be a tougher nut to crack than Pretty Penny had been.
Of course, River had known that before she’d arrived in Las Pegasus. Whereas Penny could easily be led around by the nose so long as she smelled an opportunity to build new hotels somewhere, Razzle wouldn’t be tempted by opportunities to expand her business outside of the city. Mostly because she knew there weren’t any.
Hotels were one thing. Every major city needed those; even Cloudsdale had a few. But not every city had a thriving entertainment industry the way Las Pegasus did. In fact, no other city had an entertainment industry the way Las Pegasus did. While most towns larger than a village would have a theater or two and maybe even a nightclub, they were all small-scale affairs, used mostly for local productions or to host the occasional celebrity visit. They weren’t attractions unto themselves, guaranteed to present an extravaganza every night the way the Las Pegasus did with the Palace of Prance and similar outlets.
Of course, there were exceptions to every rule, such as Manehattan’s Bridleway, but they were just that: exceptions. And River knew that there was no way she’d ever be able to convince Razzle to entertain the possibility to opening up a major entertainment venue in Vanhoover in the wake of the flooding, let alone make that a convincing enough pretext to lure her up there the way Lex wanted. Vanhoover’s reputation, among wider Equestria, was one of remoteness, temperatures that were mild at best, and maritime commercial activity. Nopony thought of it as the place to go for great entertainment.
“Which means I’ll have to change my approach,” River muttered as she took her dress off, carelessly tossing it to the other side of the carriage before doing the same to her jewelry. The perfume was taken care of by carefully dripping witch hazel extract onto a cotton ball and dabbing herself with it, letting it soak up the now-useless scent. While her previous ensemble had been perfect for a beachside hotel meeting, wearing it to the Palace would make her look like a bumpkin. Fortunately, River had already picked out a more suitable ensemble before she’d left her yacht, leaving it in her carriage so that she could change on the way.
For watching a show, dark colors were a must, since a bright outfit would look gaudy after the lights had all turned down. Fortunately, every mare who knew anything about fashion had a little black dress that she could slip into, and River was no exception. The pearl necklace and diamond earrings went perfectly with it, as did the vanilla perfume that she dabbed on afterward. Now the only choice was whether or not to wear a shawl…
She was still making up her mind when they arrived at the Palace twenty minutes later. Sighing, she eventually decided to use one, biting her lip as she picked out the deep blue from the among the three that she’d brought. It was traditional to use more colorful outerwear to contrast a black dress, but River wanted to avoid anything that could be construed as even remotely flashy or attention-grabbing. After all, she needed to keep up the pretext that she wasn’t here to see Razzle Dazzle, despite the opposite being true.
Stepping down from the carriage as one of her chauffeurs held the door, River glanced over at the stallion. “Be a dear and hold my purse for me, would you?” she asked, not bothering to wait for his answer as she headed toward the entrance. “Come along, now.”
There was a long line to get into the Palace, stretching out from the entrance – tickets were bought at the desk inside, rather than having some exterior kiosk like a common theater would have had – and around the block. Looking up at the marquee, it was easy to see why. Tonight’s show was featuring the Ponycat Dolls, one of the Palace’s more successful in-house groups. Which means that Razzle will probably be here, River hoped, knowing that the old mare liked to watch other ponies watching her dancing girls. But if she wasn't, River knew she’d need to keep attending these vapid performances until she got that nag’s attention. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that, since the trick she was about to pull probably wouldn't work if used too often…
“Good evening,” smiled River as she approached the desk inside, ignoring the outraged complaints from the couple she’d just cut in front of. “Would you happen to know if my balcony seat is ready? It should be under the name Bank.”
The stallion behind the desk didn’t blink at River’s casual disdain for the rules, instead flipping through a register. “Bank…Bank…I’m sorry, miss,” he replied a moment later. “I don’t have a Bank here.”
“Oh, of course, silly me,” laughed River easily. “I forgot I had a ticket purchased instead.” Gesturing to the chauffeur she’d dragooned into carrying her purse, she retrieved it from him when he stepped forward, digging around in it for a moment before withdrawing a several gems, placing them in front of the deskbound stallion. “There you go. That should confirm my reservation, don’t you agree?”
The stallion’s eyes moved back and forth between her and the gems. Just like with Pretty Penny, it was easy to tell what he was thinking. Despite working in such a prestigious establishment, he doubtlessly didn’t make very much; the money that she’d just put in front of him was enough that it would supplement his next paycheck nicely if he kept it. Now if there was just a balcony seat available…
“Balcony seat four, miss,” smiled the stallion, sliding her a program as he pulled the gems out of sight. “Enjoy the show.”
“I’m sure I will,” she smiled back. Smirking at the indignant looks from the couple behind her, River handed her purse to her chauffeur. “Put that back in the carriage, would you?” she murmured, though not before glancing inside to quickly count how much money she had left; if she checked it later and some was missing, she’d know who to blame.
With her preparations complete, River made her way upstairs. The Palace’s second story seats weren’t the crowded rows of chairs that made up the first floor. Rather, each balcony was a secluded alcove separate from the others, having four luxurious seats that were a cut above what the ground level offered. The edge of the balcony was a rim that jutted up rather than a railing, meaning that if you pulled your chair back a bit, you were effectively hidden from everypony on the first floor while still being able to see the stage, allowing for clandestine meetings to take place…or other activities.
The Ponycat Dolls had a rather risqué act, after all.
“Hopefully they clean these after each show,” muttered River to herself, peering at her seat before deciding it looked fine. She’d made her presence known with her shenanigans at the desk. Now all that was left to do was see if Razzle was in and willing to rise to the bait.
The lights dimmed a moment later, and music began to play as the curtain rose…
River stood up and stretched as the curtain came down for the first intermission.
The Ponycats had been in rare form tonight. They’d opened with “Belly Rubs,” before moving onto “Nine Lives for You,” “Ready to Pounce,” and “Like Catnip to Me.” But while River couldn’t have cared less for their singing – pop music all sounded alike to her – it was the dancing that had earned her appreciation. Even beyond the provocative costumes they’d worn, each of the mares on stage had flowed sensuously through their routines, trim bodies swaying and writhing to the beat of the music.
River had glanced down at the audience at one point, not surprised to find quite a few mares making up the crowd. While the stallions had all been eyeing the dancing girls with naked desire, most of the mares had been appreciating them for a different reason, one that River understood all too well. They wanted to be them. To have that perfect combination of youth, looks, and confidence that made the mares on stage seem like perfect archetypes of feminine allure. Of course, as attractive as that made them, River knew that it was all a carefully-constructed illusion; the entire thing was the product of exacting applications of makeup, ruthlessly-drilled choreography, harsh dieting, and a hundred other preparations all used in conjunction to make them seem like the ideal mares come to life for the few minutes that they were on stage. Having seen the real thing with those sisters that Lex kept by his side back home, River wasn’t nearly as impressed as she knew she would have been otherwise.
“Enjoying the show?” came a voice from behind her.
Despite having been distracted, River didn’t jump. After all, she’d been half-expecting this ever since she’d sat down. Turning around, she feigned surprise. “Who-, oh! Why Razzle Dazzle, you silly little thing! You startled me!”
“Oh please,” huffed the aging pegasus mare, an unamused expression on her face as she sat down in the seat next to River’s. “After that stunt you pulled to get in here, you might as well have waved a sign saying ‘here I am.’”
“I really don’t know what you mean,” answered River with a smile, sitting back down. “I simply wanted to see the show that badly. It’s quite captivating.”
Razzle let out a disbelieving snort, making it clear that she wasn’t buying any of it, but didn’t press the issue. River took a moment to study the old mare. Razzle Dazzle had always struck her as the epitome of what River didn’t want to become. Wearing so much makeup that it seemed like she applied it with a trowel, it still didn’t hide the wrinkles on her face. And while her sequined red dress covered her from neck to ankle – hiding nearly all of her coat, the only way to see its natural color was with her navy-blue wings, and leaving the cutie mark that River had heard was a pair of spotlights shining on a mare sitting on a swing – it couldn’t conceal how the rest of her skin had begun to sag. Even her periwinkle-colored mane and tail looked awful, the former having been styled into a bob cut that in River’s estimation did nothing for her, but it was still better than the gaudy jewelry threaded through her tail.
The entire thing was a failed attempt to make her appear to be something other than what she was: a withered old nag. But as awful as she looked, River couldn’t imagine that she would have looked any better if she hadn’t made the attempt. That was the thing about old age: it robbed you of your looks no matter what you did. Nor did River have any doubt that Razzle was just as aware of how bad she looked, and the futility of trying to do anything about it. It was probably why the old nag was in such a bad mood all the time.
“I would have made a reservation for this seat earlier,” continued River after a moment, “but I wasn’t sure that there would still be regular shows after that bit of…unpleasantness, with Pretty Penny’s son.”
“The shows at the Palace are never disrupted,” spat Razzle. “I teach all of my girls that that’s rule number one. They go out there and sing and dance for the audience, no matter what.” Her frown deepened then, making her face even more wrinkly. “Even after some lout goes where he’s not supposed to and puts his hooves all over them.”
“I can only imagine how upset you must have been,” offered River sympathetically. “Everypony knows that you take such good care of the mares who work here.”
“Of course I do,” groused Razzle. “Everypony in Equestria knows that being a Palace girl is a mare’s dream, and even though I work them hard, it’s because I want them to be the best that they can be.”
That, of course, was a complete and utter lie. River had learned during her previous stay in Las Pegasus that Razzle Dazzle went far out of her way to make sure that the mares who worked at the Palace never had a chance to advance their careers without her say-so. She regularly switched them around the various in-house dance groups, for instance, in order to make sure that it was the groups themselves that cultivated a following, and never any of the individuals. Otherwise some of them might have gotten famous enough that they’d have clout to demand better pay, lest they go to another venue. And even then, Razzle never kept any of her girls on for more than a few years, making up some excuse to fire them after she’d decided that they’d gotten too old or too ambitious or too tired to keep up with the rigorous schedule of practicing and performing. After all, there were always more wannabe-starlets out there thinking that a stint at the Palace would make them the next big thing.
“That reminds me,” began River smoothly, “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“I was wondering when you’d get down to business.”
Ignoring the barb, River kept speaking. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but Vanhoover actually fared worse than anypony imagined in the flooding.”
“Is that why you’re back here?” asked Razzle, glancing over at River. “Because if you’re still running low on funds and looking for a job, I doubt anyone would pay to see your old flank on stage.” She punctuated the insulting remark with a laugh that sounded like a bullfrog being stepped on.
Now it was River’s turn to snort. “Actually, it wasn’t me I was thinking of. You see, there are a lot of young ladies who, in the aftermath of the disaster, have nowhere to go…”
“And you think that there’s a place for them here?” sneered Razzle. “Do you know how many girls apply to work here every day?”
“I can imagine,” admitted River easily, before lowering her voice and leaning in closer, knowing that what she was about to say would, at the very least, capture the old nag’s attention.
“But there’s a pair of sisters up there whose looks, and voices, are something you won’t want to miss…”
Razzle Dazzle couldn’t have looked less impressed if she’d tried.
“Really?” she scoffed, the expression doing nothing for her withered old face. “Is that what this is about? You came all the way down here just to recommend two little girls to me?”
“These are no ordinary girls,” pressed River.
Razzle snorted. “They all say that. Each and every one of them. Let me guess, these fillies of yours have cutie marks that have something to do with singing or dancing, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer, instead making a dismissive gesture. “Because I get a dozen of them every day. They all show off their flanks, bat their eyes, and go on about how nopony can dance as passionately as they do, or sing as beautifully, or work as crowd as thoroughly.”
She glared down at the stage then, as though scowling at the dancers who would occupy it once the intermission was over. “It’s never true. Maybe they’re a cut above compared to the average mare, but here at the Palace they are average mares. That’s just as true for those sisters of yours as it will be for anypony else.”
“You’re wrong,” smirked River.
The comment earned her a sneer. “Oh really?”
“Yes.” Deciding it was time to stop beating around the bush, River played her trump card. “These girls are the Sirens, Razzle.”
“Please. Do you know how many wannabe Palace girls have described themselves that way? I-”
“No.” Her smile fading, River’s demeanor turned serious. “I’m not saying that they’re like the Sirens, or that they make ponies think of the Sirens, I’m saying that these mares actually are the Sirens.” She knew that Razzle knew who the Sirens were; in her line of work, there was no way she hadn’t heard the tale of three of the most beautiful creatures that Equestria had ever seen.
River had the pleasure of watching a jeering retort die on the wrinkled old mare’s lips as she realized that she was serious. But the conclusion she came to a few seconds later wasn’t the one River wanted. “You’ve lost it.”
“Razzle…”
“You’ve either lost it, or you’re even more of a gullible hick than I thought.” The old nag’s lip curled again, this time in contempt. “Your story doesn’t even match what you’ve been saying. You mentioned that there were two of these mares, but there were three Sirens, and they weren’t even ponies. They were…things. Part pony and part fish.” She stood up then, shaking her head. “I only came up here because I was surprised to see you back in Las Pegasus after how you slunk away before. But if you’re trying to make it by selling outlandish stories, you should have gone to Tall Tale instead of coming here.”
River couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
Having already started to walk away, the mocking words made Razzle freeze in mid-stride, shooting River a dark look. “I beg your pardon?”
“You really don’t get it,” repeated River. “In the last few years, how many old myths and childhood stories have come to life? We’ve had Nightmare Moon make an appearance, not to gobble up candy, but attempt a coup. Then we found out that not only was Discord real, but he almost turned all of Equestria inside-out. Then that renegade creature that escaped from Tartarus and tried to eat everypony’s magic.” She smirked then, as though discussing common gossip rather than how the entire world was in upheaval. “I’m honestly surprised we haven’t seen the Pony of Shadows setting up shop somewhere.”
Razzle made a face like she’d just bitten into a lemon. “What’s your point?”
Standing up, River marched over so she was right in front of the old bat. “My point, Razzle, is that we’re living in a new age now. One of legends. When we were fillies, there was only one alicorn princess, and it had been that way for the last thousand years. Now there are four.” Well, three now, she corrected herself silently. But there was no point in saying that part out loud, since it only would have thrown her off-topic. Razzle and the rest of Equestria would find out about what had happened to Luna soon enough, in all likelihood. “All of a sudden there are crystal ponies, with their own Crystal Empire, all having appeared out of nowhere. Entire cities were flooded or burned or worse just a few weeks ago. And you’re going to tell me that the Sirens being in my city is somehow too crazy to be believed?”
Razzle didn’t say anything, and River knew that she was listening. “You’re right, there are only two of them now, and they’re both ponies,” she continued. “I don’t know what happened to the third one, and as for why they’re ponies now, well…if Nightmare Moon can become Princess Luna, why can’t the Sirens become mares?” Inwardly River cringed, unable to help a moment’s worry that Lex would somehow find out she’d said that and take offense at the comparison.
But she didn’t have time to dwell on that as Razzle spoke up at last. “So I’m just supposed to take your word for it that you’ve got two of the most gorgeous creatures that ever existed up in Vanhoover?” she asked, her voice still skeptical…but no longer derisive. “Why didn’t you bring them here personally if that was the case?”
Now it was River’s turn to snicker derisively. “That’s like asking why you don’t have the Ponycat Dolls perform on the sidewalk so that everypony can see how good they are. You make people come to your place to see your girls; same deal here.”
Razzle seemed to mull that over. “The stories about the Sirens say they made everyone who heard them fight so they could feed off the negativity.”
“They’re ponies now,” replied River, making sure her voice was dismissive. “They don’t do that anymore. Any other questions?”
“Just one,” admitted Razzle, giving River a suspicious look. “Suppose I take a look at these Sirens of yours and decide I want them at the Palace. What’s in it for you?”
It was all River could do to keep her grin from turning triumphant, knowing that no one asked that question unless they’d already been persuaded. What’s in it for me is that I never have to end up looking like you, she laughed inwardly, already looking forward to the reward Lex would give her after she’d proven herself to him. And when he does, I’m going to come back here and flaunt it right in front of you, you dried up old nag. It was the very least she could do after Razzle had insulted her right to her face with that “gullible hick” comment.
But her musings were cut off as the theater lights dimmed, the curtain starting to rise again. Taking that as her cue, River turned to go. “Let’s just say I’m very much looking forward to seeing you in Vanhoover,” she answered cryptically.
Behind her, she could almost hear Razzle frown. “You’re not going to stay for the rest of the show?”
“I’ve heard the Sirens sing,” called River over her shoulder. “After that, it’s hard to be impressed by a couple of Dolls.”
River was feeling like the luckiest mare in Equestria as she strode into Gladmane’s resort.
Her original plan had been to go back to her yacht – or rather, her room at the Galloway Bay, now – after her rendezvous at the Palace. Two business meetings in an evening was quite a lot, after all, especially after all of the traveling she’d done. But things had been going so well that she couldn’t help but push on to her next destination, looking around the casino that made up the first floor of the resort. And besides, it wasn’t like she needed to change her clothes again; other than ditching the shawl, what she was wearing was perfect for the casual atmosphere of the place. Now all she had to do was figure out what to do until she bumped into Gladmane; she knew the double-dealing stallion would wander through sooner or later, pretending to be everyone’s friend while in actuality keeping tabs on everypony. All River had to do was wait for him to show himself, and that couldn’t possibly take too long, not when he’d still be smarting from the cheating scandal making the papers. I wonder if I should put some money down on something in the meantime, she mused idly.
It was a tempting thought, with how spectacular her luck had been recently. Not only had events seemed to conspire to bring her to Las Pegasus in style, but she’d been able to effortlessly beguile two of the city’s richest ponies! In one evening no less!
She hadn’t even needed to try and play Razzle and Penny off against each other the way she’d expected to. With the bad blood between them, River had been ready to drop all sorts of hints about how the opportunities she was giving them could have been used to one-up each other. But it hadn’t come to that; those two had gobbled up the breadcrumbs she’d laid down without her needing to appeal to anything besides their greed. It was thoroughly satisfying…so much so that her good mood wasn’t spoiled by remembering how she herself had been laid low by that very same flaw in the not-too-distant past, brazenly challenging Lex Legis for control of what had been left of Vanhoover, certain that she’d be able to steamroll him and rebuild the city her way. The attempt had very nearly cost her everything, and now Penny and Razzle would likewise end up turning over their money to Lex…however he planned on making them part with it.
Wandering over to a roulette table and placing a bet, River couldn’t help but imagine how Lex would convince those two to give him what he wanted. She couldn’t imagine him bargaining away the real estate that Pretty Penny would want, and she felt sure that he’d never let Razzle Dazzle take his playthings away, even if he’d still have Feather Duster to fool around with. Maybe he’ll curse them if they don’t loan him the money, she thought, pleased by the idea. She could just imagine Penny being cursed to have any building she slept in be infested with bedbugs, or make Razzle unable to distinguish between beauty and ugliness. Let’s see her hire nothing but the cutest girls then, giggled River to herself.
She was still smiling when she won twice what she’d put down a minute later.
“Luck be a pony tonight,” smiled a middle-aged unicorn to her left ruefully, her own money having been forfeit.
“You’re kind to say so,” chuckled River graciously. “I’m sure I’ll have lost it all by the time I leave.”
“Oh, I know,” laughed the unicorn. “My husband is always complaining that I have the absolute worst luck at these tables, but I just can’t seem to stay away!”
“That just means you need to keep him on a tighter leash,” added another middle-aged mare from across the table, this one an earth pony. “Mine wouldn’t dare complain about my spending habits.”
“Mine has other things to complain about now,” sighed another unicorn, taking a seat at the table before giving River a wan smile. “Hello River. It’s nice to see you again.”
“Pixie!” exclaimed River, recognizing Jack Pot’s wife. Stepping over, she exchanged a quick hug with the other mare. Unlike with Pretty Penny, they didn’t bother with cheek-kisses; Pixie was more down-to-earth than that. “My word, how are you these days? I’ve been hearing the most troubling rumors ever since I arrived in town.”
“It’s…been rough lately,” admitted Pixie, idly putting a few bits down on a bet.
“Trouble in paradise?” asked the earth mare, the faintest amount of acid in her voice as she placed her own.
“Oh, don’t be like that,” chastised the first unicorn before placing a bet herself and turning back to River and Pixie. “Don’t mind my friend here, she’s been having absolutely beastly luck all night and it’s left her in an even worse mood than usual. I’m Upper Crust. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintances.”
“Pixie,” offered Pixie with another pained smile.
“River Bank,” replied River in turn.
“Spoiled Rich,” groused the earth mare, “and I’m not having bad luck, it’s just that this entire place is crooked.”
“I seem to recall the papers saying something about that,” nodded River, putting down a bet of her own.
“Really now,” tsked Upper Crust good-naturedly, “that was just because there was a buffalo working here. Can you imagine one of those savages in a place like this? That was just asking to be stolen from. It’s a wonder they didn’t try and take the carpeting while they were at it.”
“You really have to wonder what Gladmane was thinking,” scoffed Spoiled.
“You can ask him if you’d like,” noted Pixie, her voice still subdued, “he’s right over there, next to…oh!”
Even if she hadn’t just found her target, hearing Pixie’s voice suddenly perk up would have caught River’s attention, turning her eyes toward where the other mare was looking, with Spoiled and Upper Crust doing the same. Sure enough, there was Gladmane, strolling through the middle of the casino. But River barely noticed him, instead having eyes only for the pony he was talking to.
A unicorn, he was everything a stallion should be. Tall without being imposing, toned without being bulky, and most of all, devilishly handsome. His coat was almost the same soft white as Princess Celestia’s, and his mane and tail were a golden amber, brilliantly highlighting his baby-blue eyes. Even his outfit was sharp, wearing a collar and bowtie that perfectly accentuated his physique.
River was peripherally aware that every mare in the place had their eyes on the newcomer, but that was no surprise. Even if he hadn’t been a vision of masculine appeal, he would have had all eyes on him. He was simply too famous not to; River herself had never met him before, but she knew exactly who he was.
A moment later the dealer announced the results of the latest spin of the roulette. But River didn’t need to hear him say that she had won again. That much was obvious.
After all, her luck had to be holding out for Prince Blueblood to be here.
“Now that’s what a stallion’s supposed to look like.”
“Is that really him?”
“Who else could it be?”
“Prince Blueblood,” breathed River, only half-cognizant of what Spoiled, Pixie, and Upper Crust were saying. She was too busy trying to comprehend how big of an opportunity this was. It was one thing to bring back a few rich ponies the way Lex had wanted. It would be something else altogether to bring back royalty. This, she felt certain, was exactly the sort of thing that would motivate Lex to give her the reward she so desperately wanted!
While River knew that Canterlot was far outside of her zone of influence – something the high-society ponies there had taken great pains to remind her of when she’d attempted to break through their ranks to secure an age spell to restore her youth – she was familiar with the city’s power structure. And the royals sat at the very top of it. For that matter, they sat at the very top of the social hierarchy for all of Equestria. That was what it meant to be royalty.
Of course, that also made being royalty the ultimate goal for everypony who wanted to advance their station. But reaching that lofty level was virtually impossible. Such a status could, River knew, only be secured in one of three ways.
The first was to become an alicorn, since that status seemed to automatically confer royalty on those few who achieved it. Indeed, “alicorn fever” had briefly swept through Equestria’s collective social climbers shortly after Princess Cadance’s ascension, with everyone wanting to know how it had been done. After all, prior to that the only alicorn anyone had known (since Nightmare Moon had long since been relegated to being a mythical figure associated with Nightmare Night celebrations) was Princess Celestia, and she had been a fixture of Equestria for so long that everypony had come to take her for granted. But the excitement of realizing that alicornhood – and royalty – was theoretically possible had quickly petered out when it became apparent that not only did no one know how to turn that theory into a reality, they weren’t even sure how to start investigating the process.
When Princess Celestia gently but firmly rejected all requests to study Princess Cadance (no one had dared ask the same of Celestia herself), the entire subject had quietly been mothballed. Even Twilight Sparkle’s transformation had been insufficient to renew interest in the subject; by that point, most of Equestria had – rightly or wrongly – decided that ponies who became alicorns were, for all intents and purposes, in the right place at the right time. Like trying to figure out where and when a meteor would strike, it was simply impossible to predict.
The second way of becoming royalty was, on its face, much simpler: to declare yourself as such. But while that sounded easy, in its own way that was almost as hard as becoming an alicorn. While anypony could say that they were royalty, not just anypony could make that mean something, and without force and effect the title was just a title. A royal who had no subjects and no place to rule – or, at least, the patronage of another royal with those things – was just a pony playing pretend.
And since Equestria already had royalty who ruled over it – which included Prince Blueblood; while he might not have been an alicorn, he could directly trace his lineage back to Princess Platinum, one of the founders of Equestria; more importantly, Princess Celestia had publicly declared him to be her nephew, legitimizing his claims of royalty despite not actually sharing blood with him – that meant that anypony who wanted to claim rulership over any part of it either had to receive acknowledgment from the existing royals, or take control of part of the land and be able to stand against them when they responded to such a flagrant challenge to their authority. Insofar as most ponies knew, only King Sombra had ever attempted such a thing, and he’d paid the price for it. At least until Lex Legis had come along…
Which left only one way that an ordinary pony could ever hope to become royalty: marriage.
That particular avenue to social supremacy was one that quite a few ponies were interested in, and had been ever since Princess Cadance’s marriage nearly a year ago. Prior to that, everypony had simply assumed that the new princess would be like Celestia (and Luna, after she’d returned and reestablished herself): living a life that was austere in its celibacy. For all the jokes that ordinary ponies made about the alicorns having proclivities that they kept out of sight for the sake of their public image, no one had taken such things seriously. As such, it had shocked the social establishment when Princess Cadance made it known that she was betrothed, since it had been clear to everypony that her husband would become a prince in his own right.
After that, Equestria’s elites had taken a very keen interest in Princess Twilight and Prince Blueblood. While a few expected that a marriage between the two of them was only a matter of time – who was a better partner for royalty than royalty? – most other ponies eschewed that idea. Mostly because it would mean that they were out of the running. And if most ponies knew that they had no real chance of marrying either of the pair that were now Equestria’s most eligible bachelor and bachelorette, then they at least wanted to comfort themselves with the idea that it was still possible.
But looking at the handsome prince now, River was less concerned with his marriageability than she was with his money.
If the possibility of marrying into royalty was something that was too remote for most class-conscious ponies to seriously pin their hopes on, then access was the next best thing. Everypony who was anypony wanted to have friends in high places, and there wasn’t anyone higher than royalty. To that end, there was a constant level of jockeying that went on with regards to who could lavish the most favors on them, all in hope of buying their way closer to the pinnacle of power in Equestria.
The end result was that money simply wasn’t a concern for royalty, since there was always somepony eagerly waiting to pick up the tab. Fancy Pants was the preeminent example, there. During her all-too-brief time in Canterlot, River had found it to be an open secret that the unicorn stallion paid for everything where the princesses’ castle was concerned. Upkeep and maintenance, foodstuffs and furniture, the salaries of everypony who worked there; Fancy Pants paid for it all. It cost a fantastic amount of money, something he had in abundance thanks to his owning the city’s most lucrative airship dockyards, but it guaranteed that he had access to the princesses virtually whenever he wanted…and so was practically royalty himself.
And if Blueblood were to, say, go to Vanhoover and write a certain pony an I.O.U. for an obscenely large amount of money, Fancy Pants or some other rich pony would rush to pay it…
“You’re drooling,” giggled Pixie, elbowing River lightly and snapping her out of her thoughts.
“Can you blame her?” snorted Spoiled, taking a large sip of something that she’d snagged from a passing server. “Just look at the flank on him. Pure thoroughbred.”
“I’m sure she was just admiring his cutie mark,” snickered Upper Crust, turning her head to look at the blue-and-gold compass rose on the prince’s haunch. “Celestia knows I could stare at it for hours,” she murmured, her voice captivated.
“You’re all incorrigible,” laughed River. “You have husbands, you know.”
Out of her periphery she saw Pixie’s face fall, but didn’t have a chance to think about that as Spoiled snorted. “So does Princess Cadance, but I’ve heard that she likes to have ‘royal summits’ with the prince here whenever she’s in Canterlot.”
“You don’t think Shining Armor would have something to say about that?” asked River, despite being certain that Spoiled hadn’t heard anything of the sort.
Her question earned her a lopsided smirk from the other mare. “What makes you think she doesn’t bring him along?”
“Spoiled!” giggled Upper Crust, holding a hoof over her mouth bashfully. “That’s terrible!” Glancing around, she lowered her voice. “But if she did, you know where one of them would have to stick it!”
Spoiled and Upper Crust both tittered at that, with River joining in to be polite, but Pixie didn’t seem to find the idea funny. “You shouldn’t say things like that,” she murmured, eyes downcast.
“Oh, it’s all in good fun,” protested Upper Crust smoothly, waving a hoof as though to bat Pixie’s objection away.
“Besides, it’s not like Her Royal Flooziness is here to be upset by it,” added Spoiled. “She’s too busy playing with that weird sex cult she started up in the Crystal Empire. Who knows what they’re doing there now?”
But Pixie wouldn’t be put off, frowning as she gave Spoiled an unhappy look. “That doesn’t mean it’s okay to say all those awful things about her,” she insisted. “Rumors can take on a life of their own, and even if you don’t mean to you can really end up hurting somepony’s feelings if they find out about…about…” She choked up then, turning away as she rubbed a foreleg over her eyes, sniffling.
Their good time ruined, Spoiled and Upper Crust shared a look. “Yes, well…I really should be going,” announced the latter pony. “I’m afraid I’m just rubbish at roulette. Maybe trying my hoof at dice would be better. Spoiled, River, would you care to join me?”
“Certainly,” huffed Spoiled, giving Pixie a sour look. “Honestly, if I wanted to listen to some little girl have a tantrum, I’d have my husband bring our daughter back from that summer camp he sent her to.”
“I’m actually going to stay here,” announced River, ignoring the disapproving looks the other two sent her. “I’m doing rather well, and wouldn’t want to walk away before my luck runs out.” That was true, though in fact what she’d said had nothing to do with roulette. Rather, it had to do with location.
Gladmane’s casino was split-level in design, with the front of the place being open from the second-story ceiling down to ground level while the back half had two stories. Gladmane’s office, River knew, was right where the second floor terminated, making way for the openness of the front half of the building. With the entire back wall made out of glass, it was easy for him to look over the entrance to the place at his leisure…and let anyone down there look back up.
Being in the front half of the casino, the roulette tables were therefore perfectly suited for River’s needs, since she just had to glance upward to see when Gladmane and Blueblood would be leaving. That, she knew, would be the perfect time to make her move, bumping into them “on accident” as they were concluding their business; doing so before that would run the risk of irritating them both at the interruption, and she needed to start things off on the right hoof. That wouldn’t be possible if she was sequestered at the dice tables in the back of the building, far away from where she’d be able to see Gladmane’s office.
Of course, that meant blowing off Spoiled Rich and Upper Crust, but given that she’d just met them a few minutes ago, River honestly couldn’t have cared less about that.
“Oh, well…best of luck then,” smiled Upper Crust awkwardly, clearly surprised by the rejection. Spoiled didn’t even pretend to be happy at being rebuffed, simply lifting her nose in the air as she walked away.
For her part, River had already turned her attention back to the roulette table, placing another bet as she surreptitiously kept an eye on the glass wall of Gladmane’s office. The paunchy stallion had just settled into the chair behind his desk, which meant that Blueblood was still in the room with him…
“I’m sorry if I was a spoilsport,” murmured Pixie, turning back around at last. “I just…I couldn’t sit there and listen to those two talk like that about somepony they don’t even know. Not after everything that’s happened.”
“I can only imagine,” replied River half-heartedly, trying to pay attention to the roulette table, Gladmane’s office, and Pixie all at once. “You must have had a hard time of it.”
“Yeah…” Flagging down a server, Pixie grabbed a drink, brushing her mane back over her shoulder absentmindedly. “River, listen…I know we only met a few times when you were here before, but…do you think we could go somewhere and talk? I could really use a friend right now.” She raised her glass to her lips then, draining it in a single gulp. Her hoof was trembling as she put it down. “Jack Pot and I, we’re…we’re getting a divorce.”
“Pixie! Oh, you poor dear!” Reaching out, she pulled the other mare into a hug, taking the opportunity to turn her eyes up toward Gladmane’s office again. There was no telling how long they’d be in there, which meant that she’d need to stay where she was until they were finished. “I have a better idea. Why don’t we stay right here? I think a few drinks and a winning streak at roulette will be exactly what you need to lift your spirits.”
“Here?” Pixie blinked, clearly surprised by the counteroffer. “I don’t know. I’m not feeling very lucky right now.”
“Trust me,” smiled River. “I am, and I’ll be right here with you for as long as you need.”
At least until she had her chance to get what she wanted.
Pixie was perhaps the only pony in Las Pegasus whom River could say that she genuinely liked.
The realization of that had surprised her, back when she’d been on her extended vacation in the city while Vanhoover had been flooding. Virtually all of the ponies who moved in her social circle – both here and back at home – were ones that she’d quickly come to dislike, simply because getting into her social circle meant that they were her competitors, vying with her for influence, resources, and power. She might have respected them, since to do otherwise meant that she might underestimate them, but she didn’t care for them one bit. Nopony liked someone who was trying to displace them.
But Pixie, she’d come to learn, was different. Only a few years her junior, the unicorn mare was still fairly pretty for her age, with a rich coat of aquamarine. The grey that made up her mane and tail was lustrous to the point of looking almost silver in hue, which River knew was her natural color rather than being the result of age. And her cutie mark, showing a smiling peacock with its multicolor tailfeathers spread widely, was quite eye-catching. But most notable was her attitude: in sharp contrast to her husband, Jack Pot – and River herself, for that matter – Pixie was utterly lacking in ambition.
Or at least, she was lacking in sociopolitical ambition. When Pixie was on stage, acting as an assistant to her husband and his partner, Big Bucks, in their magic shows, her personality transformed, going from quiet and unassuming to bombastic and flamboyant. Combined with the extravagant outfits she always wore during those performances, it was hard to believe that her on-stage persona was so different from who she was the rest of the time. But the mare who would volunteer to be sawn in half in front of a gasping crowd, or give her husband a long and lingering kiss goodbye in case he couldn’t escape the tank of water he was about to be plunged into, was nowhere to be found when the audience was gone. Instead, there was a mare who’s only desire, to hear her tell it, was to keep putting on wonderful shows for everypony with her husband.
And amazingly, that seemed to be true. Over the course of the weeks she’d spent in Vanhoover, River had found out that Pixie played an important role in virtually all of the production aspects of Jack Pot and Big Bucks’ shows. She would help come up with the acts, coordinate with advertisers, book venues, and otherwise act as the mare who did most of the legwork that went into making them such enormous hits…and then she’d take virtually no credit for any of it. Everypony had heard of Jack Pot and Big Bucks, even if only in passing. Nopony knew who Pixie was.
“I don’t mind,” had been Pixie’s answer when River had finally asked her about the lack of credit she was receiving, pointing out that Pixie wasn’t getting nearly the benefits for her hard work that she could have. “Jack Pot and I are like a cake. I’m the doughy part, and he’s the frosting. Even if everypony likes the frosting the most, the rest of the cake’s still important. When’s the last time you had a bowl of frosting all by itself?”
So naturally, Pixie had been devastated to find out that Jack Pot wanted to spread his frosting on a different slice of cake.
“I can’t believe how blind I was,” sniffled Pixie. “He lied to me, not just once but over and over again, and I had no idea!”
“You poor thing,” cooed River sympathetically, even as she glanced up at Gladmane’s office again. He and Prince Blueblood had been in there for almost ten minutes now. What were they talking about?
Thankfully, Pixie was oblivious to her divided attention. “At first he said he was just looking into getting someone to help Big Bucks with his part of the routine, even though that was always my job! Then he started talking about maybe having a travel agent book our rooms when we were on tour, even though I’d always done that! And those letters…he said they were just from an adoring fan! And I believed him!”
This time River didn’t answer, seeing Gladmane stand up. Were they finished?! If they were finished, then they’d probably leave his office together, which meant that if she timed things right, she’d be able to bump into both of them. Or should she just focus on Blueblood and leave Gladmane for later…?
“You know how I finally found out? When I finally realized what was going on?” hiccupped Pixie, pausing to drain another drink, adding the empty glass to the growing collection in front of her. “When I walked in on them!” Her voice was filled with anguish now, not caring that she was starting to attract stares.
River didn’t care either. Silently counting how long it would take her targets to exit Gladmane’s office and walk down the stairs. Any second now…any second…
“We were cleaning up after one of our practice runs, and Jack Pot said that he was going to stay late because he wanted to look into maybe doing the Moonshot Manticore Mouth Dive,” continued Pixie miserably. “I thought he was just having a mid-life crisis! Hoofdini was the only one who could ever do that trick. But I didn’t think it was a big deal; he’d look at it and see it was impossible and move on. So I started to go home, except I’d barely gotten down the street when I realized that we hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch. I didn’t want him to go without dinner, so I picked up some General Po’s from his favorite takeout place, and went back to drop it off…and there they were…”
There they were! River’s eyes widened as she saw Gladmane emerge onto the floor of the casino, holding the door open as Prince Blueblood stepped out a second later. Jackpot!
“Jack Pot…he was…he with some mare I didn’t recognize, and he was…he was…” Fighting back a sob, she grabbed another drink, gulping it down. “He was showing her how to do the disappearing box trick!”
River nodded absently, already calculating the best vector of approach. She’d need to time this perfectly so that she could act like she was running into them on accident, which meant this little confessional episode needed to come to its conclusion immediately. Pixie was a sweet mare and all, but business came first. “Pixie, listen-”
“The disappearing box trick!” wailed Pixie, loudly enough that more casino patrons looked over at them…including, to River’s horror, Gladmane and Prince Blueblood. Reflexively, River spun in her seat, barely managing to avert her eyes before they made contact with either stallion’s and turning them back to her sobbing companion instead. For her part, Pixie hadn’t noticed a thing, coming to the climax of her story. “That’s the one where I climb into the box, and he puts the spears through it, and then makes a flash and disappears, only to climb out of the box himself a second later! And he was showing her how it’s done!”
“That, er, sounds terrible,” mumbled River, thrown completely off her game. Giving Pixie an awkward pat on the back, she desperately tried to focus on her peripheral vision, needing to see if Blueblood and Gladmane were still looking at them. But it was impossible to tell, not when the casino itself was still lively with ponies.
Inwardly, River snarled bitterly, certain that her good luck had just come to a spectacular end. It was enough to make her curse the now-thoroughly-inconsolable mare, immediately rescinding Pixie’s status as the only pony in Las Pegasus whom she liked. Now she’d lost her chance to approach both of those two on her own terms!
“Terrible?” echoed Pixie blearily, her eyes red as tears poured freely down her cheeks. “River, a magician never shows somepony how their tricks are done! Not the real ones! The disappearing box trick isn’t like sawing somepony in half! Everypony knows how that works! But he was showing her one of the hardest tricks to pull off! One that can only be done with two ponies! Don’t you know what that means?!”
“I, um…uh…” was all River was able to say, and not simply because she had no idea what Pixie was talking about. She wracked her brain, trying to think of some way to salvage the situation, but it was hopeless. As uncouth as Pixie was acting at the moment, River knew that blowing her off in order to go talk to Prince Blueblood would make her look callous and shallow, which wasn’t how she wanted to introduce herself to royalty! But dragging Pixie out of there wasn’t viable either; River was absolutely certain that even if she simply hauled the sobbing mare to the nearest alley and dumped her there, Blueblood would be gone by the time she got back. One way or the other, her opportunity to introduce herself to the prince was gone.
“It means he wants her to be his new assistant!” With that, the last of Pixie’s self-control shattered, and she began to bawl openly. “Twenty years of doing shows together, and now he wants to work with somepony else! It's the end of our marriage!” She reached for another drink, and it was only River’s grabbing her and pulling her back that stopped her from downing another. But her attempt to stop the situation from getting worse backfired an instant later as Pixie, mistaking River’s actions for an embrace, threw her forelegs around her in turn. “River!” she cried gratefully. “You’re my only friend! Everypony else has been saying all these awful things about us! Like that Jack Pot had been sleeping around on me, or that I tried to cheat on him with Big Bucks! It’s been horrible!”
I should have realized this would happen, moaned River silently. She’d assumed that Pixie’s quiet demeanor would remain intact while she talked, simply because that was how the mare always acted whenever she wasn’t performing. But now the combination of drinks, grief, and quite likely everypony staring at her had caused her to slip into her more audacious self, caterwauling her misery at the top of her lungs and latching onto River as though the other mare were her partner for her impromptu pity-party.
Sighing, River slowly climbed to her hooves, dragging Pixie up with her. If not for the fact that everyone was still watching them – and that likely included the prince, though she knew better than to look around and potentially make eye-contact, since that would only cement the memory of her being part of this shameful encounter if she did – she would have dumped the other mare on the ground right there and walked away in disgust, ready to cut her losses. Instead, she smiled and rocked Pixie gently, knowing she couldn’t afford to be so insensitive in front of so many. “There there,” she said quietly. “Let’s go get you cleaned up, okay?”
Nodding sadly, Pixie struggled to stay upright. “How…how do you do it, River?” she asked, her words halting thanks to residual sobs and how much she’d drunk. “How do you and…and Mounte Bank make your marriage work? You’re always running V-Vanhoover…but you’ve been together for…forever…”
“Oh, I think we can talk about that later,” replied River, despite having no intention of ever speaking to Pixie again after this. She’d cost her a golden opportunity with Blueblood, and likely Gladmane too. I can probably keep Razzle and Penny on board, though, she decided, trying to salvage something of the disaster that her evening had become. But there’s no way that’ll be enough for Lex…
“I say, wait a moment,” called a mellifluous male voice.
It took River a moment to realize that the voice was talking to her, pausing in her efforts to keep Pixie upright. When she did look over at whoever was talking to her, hoping that it was someone offering to take the other mare for her, she froze. It was-
“My name is Prince Blueblood,” smiled the handsome stallion, making no move to help her. Behind him, Gladmane was frowning, but kept silent as the prince spoke. “And I do believe my royal ears overheard your friend say that you’re River Bank of Vanhoover, aren’t you?”
Not knowing what was happening, River could only nod.
“Excellent! Why don’t you drop her off somewhere and then meet me back here in, say, twenty minutes? I’m sure you’d love to join me for dinner.”
“Your Highness,” purred River as she sat down, “Please let me say again what an honor it is to meet you.”
Blueblood nodded, a smile of satisfaction on his lips. “It is an honor, isn’t it?” Glancing over at his reflection in the window next to their table, his expression turned wistful. “An honor that I, alone among ponies, will never get to experience.”
River winced inwardly at the naked narcissism, but knew better than to comment on it. Given that she still wasn’t sure why the prince had asked her to dinner, she knew her best course of action was to tread lightly until she figured out what he wanted. Only then would she be able to start making a plan to get him to come to Vanhoover. But all she’d learned so far was that Prince Blueblood was completely and utterly head-over-hooves in love.
With himself.
Indeed, in the few minutes since she’d come back inside – having gone out just long enough to thrust the semi-insensate Pixie into her carriage and telling the stallions chauffeuring it to take her home; although Prince Blueblood had given her twenty minutes to come back, River had known better than to keep royalty waiting – he’d all but shouted from the rooftops that he was utterly enraptured with his own noble personage. He’d demonstrated as much quite clearly to a pair of perky young mares that had approached him while River had been out, with her returning just in time to overhear their brief conversation.
“Your Highness,” giggled the first coquettishly, “my friend and I were wondering…”
“Would you mind autographing our flanks?” cooed the second, whipping out a magic marker as she and her companion turned around and presented their backsides to him in a motion so smooth that they had to have practiced it.
River had immediately panicked at the sight, worried that the prince would be captivated by their offer – which was quite clearly for more than just an autograph – and toss her aside in favor of the sweet young things throwing themselves at him. But to her surprise Prince Blueblood had turned his nose up at the two…for an altogether unexpected reason. “Ugh, a marker?!” he’d snorted, glaring at the writing implement brandished in a glowing aura before him as though it were a wriggling earthworm. “My royal signature is far too majestic for such a coarse instrument!”
It had taken both mares, as well as River herself, by surprise. Fortunately she’d recovered first, presenting herself to the prince and very pointedly thanking him for inviting her to dinner, making it clear to the interloping mares exactly who had a monopoly on Blueblood’s attention. The pair, clearly still unsure what had just happened, had taken the hint and slunk away.
There had been nearly a half-dozen other exchanges like that in the time it had taken Blueblood to escort her to dinner, held in the luxurious rotating restaurant on the top floor of the resort. A fashionable stallion had wanted to take a picture with the prince, which Blueblood had haughtily turned down on account of his only posing for portraits rather than common photographs. A group of carousing ponies had spotted him and had called out for him to raise a glass with them, only for him to dismiss them on account of their drinking “swill” that was unfit for his refined palate. Few things, it seemed, were good enough for Celestia’s nephew.
Which made River all the more curious what he wanted with her.
Of course, she knew better than to come out and ask him directly. Instead, she pretended to look over her menu as she thought about the best way to try and feel out his intentions, eventually deciding to start with something innocuous. “So, what do you recommend we have, Your Highness?”
“Oh, I always order the most expensive thing on the menu,” he replied easily. “Anything less runs the risk of eating common slop, which would just wreak havoc on my illustrious insides.”
Years of practice allowed River to smile and laugh, as though he’d just said something witty and insightful rather than unbelievably arrogant. “What a magnificent policy! Truly something expected of Equestria’s prince!”
“Isn’t it?” Blueblood preened. “I just hope the food here lives up to its reputation. Gladmane’s resort is supposed to be among the very best this city has to offer, but I swear most of the entertainment in that casino of his were little better than carnival games!”
River couldn’t think of any carnivals that included roulette tables and slot machines, but kept that thought to herself. Instead, she turned to the individual that Blueblood had thankfully introduced into the conversation. “Speaking of which, I do hope that my friend’s shameful display didn’t interrupt whatever business you and Gladmane were in the middle of?”
“Oh, that weeping mare who was hanging off of you?” snorted Blueblood, as though just remembering Pixie’s bawling was an affront to his royal memory. “Hardly. We were mostly finished anyway. Since his special talent is games of chance, I just needed him to cover some wagers I’d made on the last Equestria Games. Honestly, who would have expected those costumed ponies from Cloudsdale to win the aerial relay?”
“You mean the Wonderbolts?” River asked before she could stop herself. As self-absorbed as Blueblood was, she couldn’t imagine anypony in their right mind betting against Equestria’s best flyers when it came to an aerial sporting event.
“That sounds like them,” answered Blueblood with a shrug. “Really, it’s a lot of fuss to go to for a mere hundred thousand bits, and it’s not like Fancy Pants needs the money. But that little girlfriend of his keeps bringing it up every time I run into her at a soirée. Really, I don’t see why he keeps her around. She’s so…clingy.” He pronounced that last word with marked distaste, as though he couldn’t imagine a worse quality in a mare.
A problem I’m sure you'll never have, noted River silently. She’d previously assumed that the prince was single because he was aware that he had his pick of almost every unmarried mare in Equestria. Now she knew better; even if he was royalty, River couldn’t imagine any mare being able to stomach Blueblood’s egotism on a daily basis. And after what I put up with in my marriage to Mounte, that’s saying something. “Well, I’m sure that Gladmane will be more than happy to led his assistance to the crown,” she offered sweetly.
“You’d think he would be,” huffed Blueblood. “But he’d barely agreed to pay the funds when he started asking me if I could promote this little purlieu of his! As though I came out here to do him a favor!” He shook his head in indignation, somehow managing to make even that come across as snooty.
“Some ponies are just so ungrateful,” nodded River, doing her best to keep the irony out of her voice. So that was it. Gladmane had been called upon to indulge royalty, and hadn’t been able to resist trying to parlay that into a tit-for-tat exchange. No doubt he was hoping to make that cheating scandal go away, River knew. A royal endorsement of his establishment would have cancelled out any bad press and then some. But even taking into account Prince Blueblood’s massive sense of entitlement, River had to admit that Gladmane had made a rather serious faux pas. Favors for the royals were done with the hope of cultivating a relationship with them. Trying to turn it into a quid pro quo was just asking to be rebuked. He must have been quite desperate to make those allegations disappear.
Under other circumstances River would have immediately moved to one-up Gladmane by offering to pay the prince’s debt herself. But even leaving aside that she didn’t have a hundred thousand bits to her name at the moment – and knowing that Lex would never approve of her offering to use the money she’d already turned over to him back in Vanhoover – she knew that doing so would have made the resort owner take a very dim view of her. Although Blueblood was by far the bigger prize, River still hoped that she could lure Gladmane to Vanhoover as well.
But that didn’t mean she still couldn’t capitalize off of the stallion’s mistake. “I hope you won’t think me too forward for saying this, Your Highness, but if there was ever anything I could do for you, I’d never be so crude as to ask for something in return.”
It was blatant sucking up, but Blueblood seemed pleased by it. “Ah good. I’d heard that ponies from Vanhoover were all a group of rustic bumpkins, but I’m glad to see there’s at least one with some sense of class.”
River fought down the urge to grimace in irritation at the casual insult, managing to keep her smile in place as a waiter came over and took their menus, with Blueblood living up to his pledge of ordering the most expensive dish and River – knowing that she’d be the one paying for it – doing the same. It was only after the waiter left that Blueblood seemed ready to get down to business. “Since you offered, there is something you can do for me. For all Equestria, really.”
Her ears perking up, River leaned forward slightly. “Of course, Your Highness. I’m at your disposal.”
“My valet tells me that Vanhoover, bucolic little hamlet that it is, doesn’t have a proper airshipyard where I can park my yacht. So I’d like you to take me there.”
River blinked.
Blueblood was right about Vanhoover not being equipped to receive large-scale aircrafts, of course. That was largely because the Hoofingfords had been in favor of building those facilities, eager to expand their maritime dominance to the skies as well, which had naturally seen River ally with the McNeighs to block any such projects whenever they were put forward. Much like how she’d allied with the Hoofingfords to stop the McNeighs from advancing their plans to pave the roads to the farming hamlets scattered throughout the northern region. Or how the McNeighs and Hoofingfords had worked together to squelch her plans of building a larger train station in hope of attracting more foreign capital to prop up her banks. That perpetual stalemate, keeping the city from developing greater transportation services, was – in conjunction with its location on the far side of the Unicorn Mountains – the major reason Vanhoover was considered a backwater, River knew.
Of course, that didn’t mean it was impossible to own and operate an airship if you lived there. It just meant that you’d needed one of the convertible aerial/nautical types, like the one River used to have, since your normal airship wasn’t built with water travel in mind. The alternative was to buy a buoyancy module that would allow an airship to function as a watercraft. River had already purchased one of those for when she made the trip back home, but she suspected that Prince Blueblood hadn’t even considered such a thing for his own airship. Those modules were, she knew, rather unsightly in how they added large outrigger-mounted balloons to a vessel. No doubt Blueblood wouldn’t allow such a thing to be done to his own yacht when a “rustic bumpkin” could do it for him.
But at the moment, River didn’t care about any of that.
“You…you want me to take you…to Vanhoover?” she breathed, scarcely able to believe it. This wasn’t just a stroke of good fortune; it was everything she’d hoped for being given to her on a silver platter. A small part of her wondered if she should feel grateful to Pixie.
“We’ll leave tomorrow morning,” nodded Blueblood. “I’m sure you’ve heard, since you’re from there, but there’s a scoundrel in your town who apparently behaved quite inappropriately with Celestia and Luna. Poor Cadance and the castle guards were in a tizzy when they heard.”
Their food arrived then, and Prince Blueblood took a dainty bite of his entrée, not noticing that the mare across from him had suddenly gone very still. “Thankfully,” he continued, “the news reached me right before I set out on this little excursion.”
“R-really?” croaked River, making no move to touch her food.
Blueblood, of course, didn’t notice. “It was quite fortunate. Now, I can pop over there and vanquish the fiend before returning to Canterlot.”
For River, the next several hours passed in a blur, causing the morning to arrive far too quickly for her liking.
After Prince Blueblood’s casual announcement, dinner had been a tense affair. Or at least, it had been for her. Blueblood, on the other hoof, had been quite relaxed the entire time, apparently seeing his impending battle with Lex as having the same level of danger that most ponies associated with brushing their teeth. Indeed, he’d made it exceedingly clear that as far as he was concerned, there was nothing to worry about.
“Why, I’m certain that the miscreant will throw himself to the ground and beg for forgiveness when he sees my stately self glowering at him!” had been Blueblood’s answer when she’d broached the possibility that his intended course of action could be dangerous. “Most ponies don’t know this about me, since I’m such an easygoing fellow, but when somepony oversteps their boundaries I can become quite cross with them!”
Although River had known that he’d intended for that to be reassuring, she’d found his answer to have exactly the opposite effect. “But, Your Highness, what if the, er, ‘miscreant’ doesn’t back down?”
Blueblood had given her a bemused look then, as though he couldn’t believe that she would seriously countenance the idea that there was an enemy that wouldn’t be intimidated at the prospect of facing him. “I see that it isn’t just fair young maidens whose hearts flutter at the thought of a handsome prince charging into battle,” he’d chuckled, his expression changing to one of patronizing calm. “You needn’t worry. Should that lowlife have the temerity to persist in his malfeasance, then I’ll simply lay him low in honorable combat.”
And that had been that. With the unquestioning certainty that he’d prevail in the fight he was about the pick, the prince had little more to say on the subject, instead changing to topics that he’d found more to his liking. Prominent among them had been Shining Armor having temporarily closed down Canterlot to hunt for some escaped criminals (“He still acts like a mere guardpony instead of a prince!”), the upcoming Grand Equestria Pony Summit (“Can you believe that they’re going to let just anypony attend?”), and Princess Twilight’s new castle (“I’ve heard it’s a gaudy-looking eyesore!”).
By that point, River had recovered enough to start fishing for information about the prince’s strategy for when he faced Lex. Despite being horribly conceited, Blueblood was still royalty, which meant that it wasn’t completely implausible that he’d had some sort of advanced education in martial or magical combat. Not that River thought it would seriously make a difference – Lex had defeated both of the Royal Sisters at once, after all – but she couldn’t help but be morbidly curious.
Fortunately, finding the answers was easily done, since Blueblood’s favorite topic of conversation was himself. But what he'd told her had been anything but reassuring, however. No, he’d never served in the Royal Guard. No, he’d never been to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. No, he hadn’t studied anything as crass as fighting; his education (delivered entirely by expensive private tutors) had focused around important things such as history, poetry, classical music, stately dances, art appreciation, proper speech, elegant sports such as croquet, and everything else that had to do with gentility befitting a royal. Meaning that he didn’t know anything which could possibly help him go up against Lex. His boundless confidence, it seemed, came entirely from his inability to imagine that he could actually lose.
Which means that Lex is going to kick his flank so hard he’ll probably knock his cutie mark right off, had been River’s conclusion as dinner had ended. She’d kept that thought, like so many others she'd had over the course of the evening, off her face as she’d bid the prince goodnight, making her way back to the Galloway Bay Resort and going straight up to the room that Penny had set aside for her. But despite the amenities being glamorous and the bed being large and comfortable, sleep hadn’t come easily to River.
Blueblood had been a boor of the highest order, and each passing hour spent in his presence had been more aggravating than the last. But despite how much of a royal pain the prince had been, the thought of Lex tearing him apart didn’t make River feel good about what was going to happen. Quite the opposite, it filled her with dread.
No matter how unpleasant he was to be around, Blueblood was still royalty, which meant that Equestria’s high society followed the trends he set. Part of the reason River had rushed this errand as much as possible was so that she could round up the richest ponies in town and bring them to Vanhoover to speak with Lex before they found out about what he’d done to Celestia and Luna. Once they’d given Lex a loan – however he planned on making them do that – then he’d have them by the purse strings, giving him considerable influence over them if they ever wanted to get their money back.
But if she were to bring Blueblood to Vanhoover alongside the other ponies she’d recruited, River knew there’d be no hope of ever getting so much as a single bit out of them. Not when Blueblood announced his opposition to Lex, and definitely not when Lex beat the living daylights out of him, or worse, hit him with some horrible curse. The ponies of Vanhoover and Tall Tale might see Lex as a savior who’d swooped in to save the day after the alicorns had all but abandoned them, but Penny, Razzle, and everypony else from Las Pegasus wouldn’t feel the same way. They’d react to a condemnation from royalty with horror and revulsion, to say nothing of seeing a prince be mauled right in front of them.
And River had no doubt that Lex would do exactly that. She vividly remembered the towering fit of rage he’d flown into when she’d tried to stand in his way. She couldn’t imagine that Blueblood would provoke any less of a response.
But at the same time, not taking Blueblood back with her wasn’t an option either. Too many people had seen them dining together, which with how fast information got around meant that the entire city probably knew that she was escorting him to Vanhoover by now. Even if she hadn’t already dangled lures in front of Pretty Penny and Razzle Dazzle, that would be more than sufficient to make the city’s richest and most influential ponies flock to her, finding some excuse to ask if they could accompany her back to her city…which meant, in turn, that if she blew Blueblood off, they’d want nothing to do with her, not wanting to be tainted by associating with the pony who had skipped out on a favor to a prince, meaning that taking a trip with her to Vanhoover would be out of the question. Her mission for Lex would be a complete and utter failure.
Ultimately, River realized she didn’t have a choice but to give Blueblood what he wanted. After all, that was technically what Lex wanted also; he had simply told her to bring back as many rich ponies as she could, and leave the rest to him. So if he found himself facing a stuck-up stallion who wouldn’t leave well enough alone, but couldn’t be rebuked without driving off the ponies whose money he needed, he couldn't possibly consider it to be her fault.
I hope…
The worst thing, reflected River silently, was how well everything had been going up until then. Her luck had been on a massive roll, allowing her to rack up victory after victory. Even the disaster with Pixie had turned out for the best, capping her successes with what had looked like the perfect crowning achievement. So how had she suddenly found herself facing failure no matter which way she turned? It was almost like she had been set up. She knew that thought was ridiculous, of course; nothing could possibly have manipulated events to go in such a way as to put her in this horrible position. It was all simply an unfortunate coincidence of the highest order.
But later, as the sun rose to mark the hour of their departure, she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that there was something deeper going on…
“Let’s go through this one more time.”
In the main chamber of Twilight’s castle, Rainbow Dash groaned as she plunked herself down onto the throne that had a copy of her cutie mark emblazoned on the back of it. “We’ve been over it like a million times, Twilight! An evil wizard is working with a dark goddess to take over Equestria! End of story!”
In her frustration, she didn’t notice the cloud-and-rainbow-lightning-bolt image begin to glow.
Neither did Twilight, her ears folding back at Rainbow Dash’s curt – but not entirely wrong – summary. “I know Princess Celestia and everypony else think that Lex is a threat after what he did to Luna, but there’s still so many things that don’t make sense! Why didn’t he use Severance during their fight? Why did he let Celestia and Luna go after he defeated them?”
“Look sugarcube,” began Applejack gently as she climbed onto the throne with the three apples on it, “I agree with ya that somethin’ ain’t right about all this, but just sittin’ here spinnin’ our wheels ain’t helpin’ anypony. Maybe we should take a break, or at least focus on somethin’ else for a little while.” Above her, the symbol of her cutie mark lit up as well.
“Applejack is right, darling,” added Rarity, likewise taking a seat on the splendid-looking chair, not seeing her cutie mark symbol on it begin to shine. “Why, after everything that’s happened we haven’t even had a chance to start decorating your new castle! In fact, I think this is the first time all six of us have even been here together to appreciate how divine it looks!”
“Ooh! We should have a housewarming party! No, wait! A castle-warming party!” whooped Pinkie, bouncing up and down on her throne in excitement, the balloons on the back of it gleaming with a pink radiance.
“I agree with Pinkie Pie,” announced Fluttershy quietly as she took her seat, likewise not seeing the replica of her cutie mark glistening as she did. “And Rarity, and Applejack, and Rainbow Dash, and Twilight. Oh, and probably Spike too,” she added, pointing at where the baby dragon was asleep in his chair.
“I suppose you’re right,” admitted Twilight, before forcing a smile onto her face as she glanced at the bare walls. “Between trips to Everglow and emergency summits and everything else, decorating this place has been the last thing on my mind. I guess I should try to make it more comfortable, especially since Willow’s going to be coming over to teach me what she knows about creatures from other planes later on.”
“Darling, you can’t have guests over before you’ve settled on the proper décor!” gasped Rarity, appropriately horrified at the thought. “You should go over to her place for your lessons until your castle is at its most fabulous!”
“Actually, she insisted that we not do it at her house,” admitted Twilight sheepishly, climbing onto her own throne. Above her, the image of her cutie mark began to shine. “I think she’s worried about Sunflower eavesdropping, since she’s still not sure if she wants him learning to cast spells or not.”
“Right, ‘cuz he admires Lex,” snorted Rainbow Dash, rolling her eyes. “You’d think all the problems this guy’s causing would get a reaction out of the Tree of Harmony. If it can help us out with Tirek, why can’t it do something-”
Before Rainbow Dash could finish speaking, each of the cutie mark symbols on the thrones suddenly flared brighter. Gasps rang out as six colorful beams of light lanced down onto the floor between the six of them, causing glittering crystals to form. Growing in rapid succession, they piled atop each other, growing larger even as a round, smooth surface began to form on top of them.
A few seconds later, the glow faded, leaving everypony staring in astonishment at the new table sitting in the middle of the room, its surface glowing with a holographic map of Equestria.
Yawning, Spike sat up, rubbing his eyes blearily as he looked at the new addition to the chamber. “Is that new?” he asked innocently. “I like it!” Hauling himself onto the table, he started walking across it, peering closer at the various places on the map. “This is incredible!” he announced a moment later. “It’s got all of Equestria on it!”
“Hi Mom and Dad!” called Pinkie, smiling as she looked at the tiny copy of her family’s rock farm…until Spike stepped on it.
Twilight licked her lips, but before she could say anything felt an odd tingling in her cutie mark. Glancing over at it, her jaw dropped for the second time in less than a minute as she saw that her cutie mark was glowing! No, not just glowing…pulsing! And not just her! Each of their cutie marks was brightening and dimming in a regular pattern, with additional marks around them appearing and disappearing at quick intervals!
A second later things got even weirder as copies of their cutie marks flew off of their flanks, zipping over to hover above the map in tight formation. Breathless, everyone watched as the six symbols settled over Ponyville, only to move a second later. And their destination…
“Is that where I think it is?” asked Applejack a moment later, after the cutie marks had come to a halt.
Twilight slowly nodded, her mind spinning by what had just happened. “Yeah.”
“So, the map wants us to go there?” asked Fluttershy nervously.
“Well, I was planning on organizing my baking sheets,” giggled Pinkie. “But okay!”
“Oh, very well,” sighed Rarity. But despite herself, the corners of her lips turned upwards. “I suppose I have been a little sad about missing out on everyone’s adventures lately.”
“Then it’s settled,” announced Twilight. “We’re going to Vanhoover.”
“We’re almost to Vanhoover,” announced Sonata. “You can totes see it if you squint a little bit.”
“That’s wonderful!” replied her companion gleefully. “I can’t wait to meet this pony you’ve been telling me about! I just know he’ll love learning all about our philosophy!”
“Hehe, yeah,” laughed Sonata, doing her best not to look uncomfortable. “That’s Lex. He just loves learning new things.”
The other pony picked up on her distress, however, giving Sonata a cocky smile in response. “Don’t worry, I know that some ponies can have a hard time accepting that this is for the best, but I’m sure he’ll come around. After all, you did.”
Sonata fought down a wince at that, instead forcing herself to give a toothy grin as she nodded. “Yep!” she chirped, glancing back at her flank. “I sure did…”
It was a struggle to keep herself smiling. Until recently, the symbol there had been a jagged blue musical note in front of a heart. She hadn’t had it very long, only since she’d become a pony, but she’d grown quite fond of it during that time. But now…
Vanhoover’s restoration was proceeding ahead of schedule.
In the ten days since he’d renewed his efforts to reverse the city’s decline – ten days since Cloudsdale had arrived, and Nosey had left him – it had become clear to Lex that the initiatives he’d directed everypony to pursue were paying off greater returns than he’d initially calculated. Not just one or two of them, but all of them were succeeding beyond his original projections. More than that, early evidence suggested that the promising results weren’t temporary aberrations, but substantial dividends that could be sustained, at least for a while.
Most surprising was the number of ponies that were coming to Vanhoover from the northern villages. Given that there were numerous small farming communities spread out across well over a thousand square miles of territory, all of which Lex had directed Sonata to visit in order to distribute rainclouds and inform them of Vanhoover’s market being open, he had been certain that it would take her more than a month to complete the task he’d given her. But judging by how the trickle of ponies coming into the city to sell their produce and buy essential goods had suddenly become a flood, she was somehow accelerating that timetable by a considerable amount. He had no idea how she was doing it, but there were now scores of ponies from dozens of villages coming to the camp to conduct business each day, and that number was growing rapidly.
Nor was the increase in commerce limited to the northern villages. Ponies from Tall Tale were making the journey up the coast in ever-increasing numbers. It wasn’t just freshly-constructed boats that were carrying them there; the Tall Tale ponies had broken out rowboats, canoes, and in some cases even rafts in order to bring goods to Vanhoover. Nor was all of their merchandise timber products like Lex had originally mandated; just like the Flim Flam Brothers, a lot of ponies had realized that the camp’s spartan living conditions meant that there was a high demand for everything.
But unlike the con artists, the ponies of Tall Tale weren’t interested in gouging the survivors of their sister city’s fall. Quite the opposite, they sold their wares – which ran the gamut from blankets and pillows to inkwells to hats and much more – at discount prices, eager to help out the camp ponies. More than a few went one step further, donating what they could and refusing to take any bits for them. Others were simply contributing free labor, helping to build temporary houses for everypony or going into Vanhoover armed with cleaning supplies to help return the buildings there to habitable conditions.
The surge of assistance from the Tall Tale ponies, according to Aria (who overheard a great deal while overseeing the safety of the teams of ponies who went into Vanhoover), was entirely due to Ribbon Cutter. Apparently emboldened by seeing how well Lex’s instructions to give Vanhoover right of first refusal on all of Tall Tale’s lumber exports had worked, she’d taken it upon herself to figure out other ways to play a more active role in Vanhoover’s recovery. Since she didn’t have the budget to engage in any sort of direct action, and wasn’t comfortable throwing her weight around without Lex’s explicit backing, she’d instead started a massive campaign urging the public to do what they could to help out. Even C. Shells’ remaining crewmembers were pitching in, ferrying ponies back and forth between the two cities using River’s boat.
The result of the influx of commerce and support meant that the camp was more vibrant than ever. In fact, it was rapidly going from being a camp to being a small village in its own right. Gone were the filthy tents and rickety lean-tos, replaced now with rows of wooden houses. Far from being grand structures, the houses were all small and extremely simple affairs, being little more than single-room units equipped with bunk beds or hammocks and maybe a table and chairs, but that same simplicity meant that throwing them up had become quick and easy. Since each one could house several ponies, more than half of the camp’s population was now living indoors for the first time since Vanhoover had flooded.
The result was that those ponies who had survived the fall of Vanhoover were now in a state of semi-permanent euphoria. In less than a month, they’d gone from being homeless, sick, starving, and despondent to having plenty of food to eat, homes in which to live, paying jobs to work, and doctors on call to treat their wounds. “It’s not just them seeing the light at the end of the tunnel anymore,” as Garden Gate – whom had taken it upon herself to patrol the camp-turned-village to make sure no one else got up to trouble the way the Flim Flam Brothers had – had told him when reporting in one evening. “As far as they’re concerned, they’re out of the tunnel now. Because you led them there, Lex.”
Of course, she hadn’t needed to add that last part. The ponies he was governing had made their feelings about him exceedingly clear.
Lex couldn’t go outside now without ponies cheering when they saw him, which he had no idea how to respond to. The same was true for the smiles and waves he now received whenever he walked down what was becoming the new village’s main (and so far only) street. And those were the mildest reactions.
At the more extreme end of the scale were things like the young couple who had bashfully asked for him to officiate their wedding. The request had caught him completely off-guard, and he’d managed to extricate himself from the situation only by fumblingly giving them an excuse: that he’d need time to draw up the proper paperwork for their marriage license. Another incident had been a young stallion who had wanted to paint a portrait of him, a request that Lex had flatly refused. He’d come to regret that a few days later, as the artist had apparently decided that he’d turned him down because a mere portrait wasn’t grandiose enough. Now one of the houses in the middle of town had its back wall dominated by a mural of him standing on a rocky outcropping, surrounded by a legion of ghouls as he roared in defiance and lifted Severance high above his head in preparation for a strike, Garden Gate behind him with her knives at ready and gemstones circling her head while Sonata and Aria (the latter depicted as a pony, and both of them dressed in provocatively-torn clothing for some reason) laid on their sides and clung to his hind legs. It had been immensely embarrassing…though not nearly as much as being told by expectant parents that they were going to name their child after him. That dubious honor had happened no less than three times now.
And there was growing interest in the Night Mare now too. Over two dozen ponies had begun to seriously inquire about the goddess, wanting to know how she could help them grow stronger so that they’d never again be helpless the way they had been during the recent spate of disasters. Lex had so far managed to mollify them with what little he knew of the Night Mare’s religious tenets, but he’d now exhausted his repository of doctrinal lore, and the nascent worshipers were eager for more. It was a situation that he knew he’d need to address, and soon.
The Night Mare’s Knights were impatient to learn more too, but despite their name what they wanted wasn’t more information about the goddess (except for Fiddlesticks, to his mild surprise). Rather, they wanted him to teach them more about using their powers. It was a request that Lex was having a hard time refusing, as the children had proven surprisingly dedicated to his lessons about ethical conduct. While he still wasn’t sure how much they truly appreciated what he was teaching them, they’d at least managed to grasp the basic concepts of his moral framework, and could work their way through basic thought experiments about handling moral dilemmas. Very soon, he knew, it would be time to put a focus on practical applications of their powers…especially since the children had started asking him to teach them how to cast spells now too.
Of course, the last ten days hadn’t been entirely problem free. The influx of new ponies from the northern communities, Tall Tale, and the train service had caused several flashpoints to erupt.
In one case, a corps of workers had come back from Vanhoover early due to one of their number being injured. The pony in question had been an earth stallion suffering from some ugly-looking burns and a few bruised ribs, wounds that the doctors had pronounced to be painful but not truly serious. Lex’s relief at that had been matched only at his puzzlement about how the pony in question had managed to acquire those injuries…which had turned to rage when he’d received his answer.
Apparently, the injured pony was from Tall Tale, and so when Aria had escorted them into Vanhoover all he’d known about her was that she was the most beautiful mare he’d ever laid eyes on. He’d spent most of his time on the job inventing excuses to talk to her, refusing to take her irritated rejections to heart. But he’d crossed the line when he’d started touching her, first brushing her fore-hoof with his own, and then pressing his side against hers later on. In both cases, Aria had acted with more restraint than Lex would have thought, chewing him out viciously but not otherwise lashing out, at least until he’d tried to nuzzle her. At that point, she’d used her magic to unleash a cone of fire that had ignited his tail, sending him into a panicked frenzy that had only ended when he’d fallen down a flight of stairs…though that last part might have something to do with the spell Aria had cast to make the floor at the top of them extremely slippery.
Lex had been apoplectic at the news, but not at Aria; while her retribution might have been excessive, it had quite clearly been warranted. Instead, he’d marched into the injured stallion’s room in what had become the medical wing of River’s manor, and had proceeded to make it clear to the injured pony that Aria was his, and anypony who didn’t respect that would pay the price for it. By the time he’d finished making his displeasure known, the offending stallion had been reduced to whimpering and begging for forgiveness.
Of course, Lex had been anything but forgiving.
After having Cleansweep heal the stallion’s injuries, Lex had made him apologize to Aria. She hadn’t been mollified, making it clear what she thought about the pony’s statement of remorse…at which point the curse Lex had placed on the stallion had activated, causing him to suffer a severe bout of nausea whenever a mare expressed anger toward him, though out of consideration for the gratuitous injuries that Aria had given him, Lex had elected to have that curse remain in effect for only one year. Even with that leniency, however, Aria had been delighted by what he’d done, and when Lex had ordered the offender to be sent back to Tall Tale immediately, she had insisted on accompanying him down to the docks, berating the moaning stallion the entire way.
Curiously, she had been quite amorous that evening.
A more serious incident had been a fight that had broken out near the mass grave where the ghouls had been buried.
While not originally marked, many of the survivors had taken to decorating the site as a way of honoring the numerous ponies who were missing and would likely never be found. A few of them had encircled the area with rocks, denoting its boundaries. Others had written small messages on markers – often small pieces of wood that could be set into the ground as makeshift signs – and placed them around the edges of the site. There were quite a few there now, with phrases such as “forever in our hearts” and “gone but never forgotten” on them.
But while the ponies who had been stranded in the camp had come to grips with the fact that many, or even most, of their family and friends had died gruesome deaths – to say nothing of having become monsters themselves – the ponies who were only now returning from having escaped Vanhoover weren’t nearly ready to accept that brutal truth. So perhaps it was understandable, if still unacceptable, that a few of them had become extremely distraught when they learned that some of the ponies who hadn’t made it out had been sliced to pieces by the pony who was now being hailed as a hero. The fact that those ponies had become flesh-eating undead didn’t seem to register to them, the thought apparently too horrible for them to fully comprehend.
To that end, when several of the distraught mourners had begun loudly cursing Lex for what he’d done, several other ponies had tried to set them to right, only to end up upsetting them further. That a fight had broken out, Garden Gate had assured him, wasn’t anypony’s fault; it was just that the ponies who found out what had likely happened to their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, and beloved friends needed to unleash their grief and their anger somewhere. Given that she’d been there to stop the fight from growing into a riot, and had kept anypony from getting seriously hurt, Lex had been inclined to trust her judgment, and had let the matter drop without penalizing the ponies involved.
But as bad as those incidents had been, it was the money situation that troubled Lex the most.
River’s financial institutions had now been emptied in their entirety. Worse, he had already gone through more than half of her liquid wealth, and the remainder was being depleted at an increased speed as more and more ponies came to Vanhoover. But that simply couldn’t be helped; Lex knew that it was vital that his administration continue to purchase food and essential supplies in order to guarantee them to the populace. Likewise, he still needed to pay for ponies to perform various tasks, not only to incentivize them but also make sure that they had the money necessary to restart the local economy. Scaling back on spending was absolutely out of the question…but if would happen anyway if River didn’t come back with rich Las Pegasus ponies soon.
Though when she did, he still intended to have a talk with her about her treatment of Feather Duster…
But that aside, Vanhoover’s finances were rapidly reaching a critical state. Enough so that Lex was seriously contemplating having to put his backup plan into effect. But that was something that he wanted to avoid if he could at all help it.
While the land north of Vanhoover was home to many agricultural communities, Lex was fully aware that farming wasn’t the only industry practiced there. The Unicorn Mountains, which formed a natural barrier separating that region from the rolling fields of central Equestria, were mineral-rich. But only for certain kinds of minerals…specifically, silver and gold.
Since the eastern slopes of the Unicorns ran almost directly into the long chasm that was Ghastly Gorge, setting up mining operations on the easternmost part of the mountains was impossible. That meant that the mining towns responsible for retrieving the buried metals were all on the western side of the mountains, within the territory that Lex was already working to spread his influence over. But it wasn’t just the mining operations that Lex was concerned with…it was the minting of coins.
Bits, the currency used in Equestria, were made out of electrum, the alloy of silver and gold. Supposedly that particular combination of metals had been chosen to honor Celestia and Luna, seeing the two materials as representing how the Royal Sisters ruled over the day and the night. But Lex was less interested in that than he was in the fact that the minting operation – the enterprise that was actually in charge of making Equestria’s money – was merely a few short miles away from Vanhoover.
It was an operation that Lex wanted to avoid if at all possible, at least for the immediate future.
Seizing Equestria’s supply of money would bring some immediate revenue, but the shockwaves that it would send throughout Equestria’s economy would result in any short-term gains being wiped out by long-term losses. Any hint that the production of new units of currency had been interrupted would cause everypony to start hoarding their bits out of fear that it would become difficult to acquire more. That would depress spending, which would in turn cause negative inflation, driving prices down. And while Lex had no doubt that some ponies would think that was a good thing, he knew better. Negative inflation meant that overall revenues would fall, since businesses would take in less money, and so in turn would have less money to pay their employees with, quite possibly leading to more disincentive to spend, hurting economic demand…something which would, he knew, eventually come back to hurt Vanhoover quite badly, since a lack of demand meant that there’d be less incentive to ramp up production on supplies, which was what Vanhoover needed. It had been a minor miracle that such a thing hadn't happened already while the region had been isolated; fortunately, most ponies apparently didn't know where the mint was, and so hadn't realized that there'd been a temporary interruption of Equestria's generating new currency. But Lex doubted that would remain true if the stallion who had defeated Celestia and Luna suddenly seized the means of monetary production.
River, Lex knew, was fully aware of this, since finance was her special talent. She had very briefly mentioned it to him before she’d left, and had been visibly relieved when he’d made it clear he wouldn’t seize the Equestrian mint unless there was no other choice. But he’d also made it clear that doing that would be largely dependent on how well she was able to bring in rich ponies from Vanhoover, and soon.
All of that weighed heavily on Lex’s mind…but not at the moment.
Now, in the predawn hours of the eleventh day after River had left, Lex was thinking of only one thing: the large spell-embedded ruby that the Night Mare had given him, currently floating in his telekinetic aura in front of him.
He had finished studying the magic within the gemstone, having finally unearthed all its secrets about how resurrection magic functioned. But that knowledge brought with it no sense of triumph. Quite the contrary, what he had learned filled him with frustration and bitterness, causing him to grit his teeth as he stared at the gemstone, certain that somewhere, in whatever planar realm she called home, the Night Mare was laughing at him.
There would be no mass resurrections for the ponies of Vanhoover.
Spellcasting, at its most basic definition, was the result of two factors: a particular amount of energy that was put to use, and the manner in which it was utilized.
By that description, casting a spell was no different than any other form of work. Applying the proper amount of kinetic energy to a specific object at the correct angle, for instance, was what allowed a nail to be hammered into a board. Likewise, directing the correct amount of magical energy in a specific arrangement as it was released could do the same thing. Though the particulars were different, the overall process was the same.
Another area where magical and non-magical work were the same was in how little understanding their practitioners needed in order to put them to use. A carpenter didn’t need to consciously calculate the units of force necessary to pound a nail into a surface; they simply intuited how hard they needed to hit it. Similarly, spellcasting – or at least, Equestrian spellcasting – didn’t require conscious understanding of the forces involved. It simply required a unicorn to flex the muscles in their horn, shaping the energy they pushed through it in a way that properly configure it to produce the desired effect.
For most unicorns, figuring out a small array of such effects was enough. They’d learn how to move objects telekinetically, conjure a light, and perhaps a few other tricks related to their special talent – something which would come easier than other spells, thanks to the assistive magic of their cutie mark – and that would be it. Wizards, by contrast, were those unicorns who strove to figure out how to flex the muscles of the horn in complex patterns, utilizing the energy they put into it in intricate arrangements. Like learning the steps to a complicated dance, the process was entirely physical in nature, and mastery of a spell was commonly thought of as being when a unicorn could flex their horn muscles in the proper arrangement without having to consciously think about it any more than an expert dancer would need to stop and think about their steps.
Even before he’d hit upon the realization that the constraints of how much energy the physical body could gather and make use of was a fundamental limitation that needed to be bypassed in its entirety, Lex had disdained the standard approach to Equestrian spellcasting. Unicorns were taught sequences of tensing and relaxing their horn’s muscles, with no effort being made to understand why each sequence resulted in the energy manifesting as a different effect. As far as he was concerned, any school of thought that actively discouraged understanding why something worked the way it did in favor of simply being able to do it was fundamentally flawed.
But then, that was entirely characteristic of the Royal Sisters' style of leadership. It had surprised Lex not at all, once he’d returned from his thousand-year imprisonment in the Crystal Empire, that Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns had remained the only school of magic in Equestria, and that its curriculum had remained virtually unchanged from his brief enrollment there. “Good enough” was their government’s watchword.
Lex’s own approach to magic took the opposite approach, storing energy within discontinuous thought-forms. In fact, “forms” was a misnomer, as it implied physical framework; thoughts, being immaterial in nature, had no structural arrangement per se. Rather, their “shape” was in how they were each maintained as a discrete mental model of the series of processes and reactions, held apart from the rest of his aggregate consciousness. Only by sustaining each one at an exacting level of holistic understanding could they remain coherent enough to hold the energy that was forced into each of them. Essentially, it was the process of keeping an elaborately-detailed thought in your mind at all times, while still being able to direct your attention elsewhere.
And then doing it again for each and every spell you wanted to have prepared.
But although Lex had spent years teaching himself to do just that, the issue of forcing the requisite amount of energy into his thoughts still remained a daunting obstacle. Shoving the necessary amount of energy into them was like folding a sheet of paper over and over, trying to compress it down to where it was small enough that it could fit inside such an ephemeral container. And since stronger spells required mental models of even greater complexity, they required larger amounts of energy to actuate, which essentially necessitated a larger piece of paper that was folded even more times. It was something that, to Lex’s enduring frustration, he still needed outside assistance with.
But even with what limited success he’d had, healing spells had been utterly impossible for Lex to create.
That hadn’t been a surprise, of course. Spells to repair physical damage had long since been written off by Equestria’s magical establishment as being impossible, and when Lex had examined that determination through the lens of his alternative spellcasting, he’d quickly come to realize why that was. Namely, that the specificity such spells would require was staggering in scope.
While storybooks and stage plays were filled with tales of magic that could be used to mend injuries, the reality was far more complex. Spells could only do what their formulaic structure – their data, in other words – was arranged to make the attendant energy do. But the extremely complicated nature of physical bodies, when combined with how injuries were all unique in location, severity, and a host of other factors, meant that it was virtually impossible to make useful healing spells. A spell designed to repair a rupture of the bilateral quadriceps tendon was completely different from a spell that had to repair a lacerated aortic valve. Both of which were radically different from a spell that was needed to repair a fracture of the fifth vertebrae while simultaneously fixing any underlying nerve damage. And none of those spells would handle any related injuries, such as severed blood vessels or damaged skin; those would require separate spells of their own, as specific as the others.
While a rare unicorn doctor might learn one or two spells like that, most never bothered. Why go through the effort to learn to cast a spell that only healed ruptured (instead of lacerated or burned) fenestrated capillaries when there were so many other ways that a patient might be injured? Any moderately-severe injury would have required dozens of highly-specific medical spells, at the very least, from what were likely millions of potential combinations of body parts and injury types. The degree of impracticality was simply too daunting to overcome.
Of course, the obvious alternative to that was to create a healing spell that was able to perform any and all reparative functions to a damaged body. But that was beyond what Equestrian magic was capable of. The overly simplistic “instructions” that could be used on a given amount of energy via flexing the muscles of the horn were simply not capable of imparting such a daunting amount of data. In theory, Lex knew that he could have created such a spell with his thought-based spellcasting, but even without having studied medical science he knew that maintaining a thought-form with that much information in it would have taxed even his limits.
As such, his surprise had been complete when he’d witnessed mere adepts on Everglow using healing spells with exactly that kind of universal functionality.
His investigation of how they were able to do such a thing had quickly run aground, thanks to his unpalatable demeanor, but not before Lex had uncovered one salient detail: the only form of magic (or at least the only one that he’d been able to verify) that was able to use those spells was sacerdotal thaumaturgy, better known as the gods-given “divine magic.” While a few other spellcasting traditions were able to utilize some limited types of panacean remedies, a quick review had found them all to be inefficient and restricted in scope…much like the single, weak healing spell that the Night Mare had given him. That pathetic excuse for reparative magic simply affected a physio-numinous change in the body, briefly causing it to simulate accelerated cellular repair, which was why it left scars. It wasn’t nearly as extensive, nor as thorough, as what he’d seen on Everglow, despite the fact that the acolytes using such a complex spell should never have been able to do so.
But now Lex knew why they had been…
Sacerdotal thaumaturgy was essentially a process of mental self-conditioning – what its practitioners tritely referred to as “faith” – so as to better make their minds receptive to receiving magical energy in the form of spells sent from their deity. Doing so was, at least in theory, dangerous, since allowing a higher power to reach down and stuff you full of energy ran the risk of that energy running out of control and damaging your body if you weren’t capable of containing it within your mind. That was the reason why so many oracles of the gods were maimed in some way, since most of them had been chosen to be receptacles of divine power without asking for it. Likewise, he was able to receive divine spells (albeit only a modest amount) from the Night Mare because his manner of approaching the world was so similar to hers, allowing him to receive power from her without being deleteriously affected.
Lex had known all of that for a while.
What he hadn’t known was that the gods – or whatever divine agents sent spells to their worshipers on their behalf – were, as far as healing spells went, simply bypassing the issue of encoding the thought-form spells they gave their servants with comprehensive data.
Or at least, that was the case with the resurrection spell in the gem that the Night Mare had given him.
There was still a great deal of information embedded within the spell’s conceptual structure, of course. More than Lex himself was capable of containing within even his most complex spells, though he was still working to expand what his mind was capable of. But he’d spent days mentally dissecting each layer of instructions so as to work his way down to a more specific description of the various processes the spell called for…only to find that at a certain level, the information encoded in the gem simply didn’t become more elementary.
This resurrection spell, he’d learned, was essentially healing magic taken to its ultimate conclusion. Far more than what Garden Gate had described Cadance as being able to do, this spell could recreate a body from nothing while simultaneously calling (but not forcing; that had been another thing that he’d learned, that a soul could not be brought back to life involuntarily) the soul of the individual back into it. It was essentially “repairing” death.
The process was unbelievably complex…but not as complex as it should have been. Insofar as Lex had been able to determine, the spell was performing over five hundred different operations. But to recreate a specific body entirely from scratch, perfectly copying everything about it down to the sub-cellular level…even without taking into account the issue of sending a tether out into the afterlife to find the correct soul and guide it back, there should have been far, FAR more. A rough estimate suggested that well over one hundred thousand individual points of data would have been needed, and that was a conservative number.
It had taken time, but eventually Lex had puzzled out why that was. In fact, he’d been startled to realize, he’d seen something like it before.
On the scroll that he’d liberated from Xiriel.
One of the spells on that scroll had been an open-ended magical effect, essentially allowing whoever cast it to – within a limited degree – alter reality in their local area. Lex hadn’t been able to study it in more detail at the time, using it to restore enough of his magical potential to augment the floating gems that he’d given to Garden Gate in order to help her fight the ghoul army. Once he’d cast it, the writing on the scroll had disappeared, preventing further examination.
But from the little bit that he’d been able to examine before he’d used it, it was similar to what was happening here. At a certain level, the instructions in the resurrection spell didn’t grow more specific because they essentially used micro-alterations to reality itself to establish the baseline they needed, and then worked upward from there. Data such as “recreate the heart” had no further instructions for how the energy of the spell should do it; it simply allocated that it rewrite the matter of its immediate locality so that the organ in question would be there, and then let the rest of the spell go to work on it. Healing magic, he’d been able to deduce, was much the same, save for operating on a smaller scale.
It was an incredible piece of spell-work…but Lex found himself unable to appreciate it. Not when it was something only an entity of incredible power, such as a god, could have pulled off. Rewriting the fabric of the universe so as to bypass cause-and-effect wasn’t beyond what his spellcasting could theoretically accomplish – the spell on Xiriel’s scroll had shown that to be true – but being able to utilize so many reality alterations so precisely was a level of efficiency that bordered on incomprehensible. Making just one or two changes of moderate scope would have required immense power, even using external support mechanisms.
Which meant that his only hope for being able to cast resurrection spells on his own, without being able to utilize this divine-level shortcut, was to work out the hundreds of thousands of instructions step-by-step, and provide suitable energy for each and every one of them all at once, something which Lex could already tell would have required far more power than he could have hoped to supply. He could have crammed his thoughts to the metaphorical brim with power, and channeled energy through his body twenty times over, and never even come close to the level of energy necessary to make all of those operations happen.
And that was just to resurrect one person!
Maybe, maybe if he wanted to recreate what Cadance had done, restoring life to an intact body which hadn’t been dead very long, he could find a way to do so…but even that would require outside assistance in terms of gathering and directing the necessary amounts of power. And that was after coming up with the proper spell formula…
Which meant that right now, for all intents and purposes, once he used the spell in this gem, that would be it. Nopony else would be brought back.
There wouldn’t be any great wave of resurrections. The thousands of ponies who’d died in Vanhoover were gone forever.
Murmuring to herself as she approached her manor, River couldn’t help but sigh as she slowed down, taking a moment to compose herself. She hadn’t had a chance to do much of that over the last few days, and years of experience taught her that there would likely be even fewer chances in the days ahead. Especially with how dead-set Blueblood was on pushing a confrontation with Lex.
“With emphasis on the ‘dead’ part,” she muttered, doing what she could to fix her appearance. A glance at the mountains showed that the sun was just starting to peak above them, which meant that Lex was probably already awake. As much as she doubted he’d notice, let alone care, about how she looked, long-ingrained habit made River want to be at her best before going into an important meeting, particularly after how frazzled the last few days had left her.
As she’d predicted, her meeting with Prince Blueblood had spread through Las Pegasus like a wildfire. By the time she’d woken up the next morning, River had received over a dozen messages at the front desk of the Galloway Bay. But she hadn’t had a chance to read them, since Pretty Penny (who had clearly alerted her staff to inform her when River emerged from her room) had been waiting to invite her to breakfast, where she’d eschewed any pretense of subtlety in favor interrogating her – with all the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl wanting to hear how her friend’s big date went – about her meeting with the prince.
Or at least, she’d tried to. Their breakfast had been crashed by several important ponies, ranging from Checkered Cab, who was in charge of the city’s largest taxi service, to Rant ‘n’ Rave, one of the most famous show reviewers in Las Pegasus. Each pony just so happened to have business with Pretty Penny that couldn’t seem to wait, and was absolutely delighted to find that River was there as well since they’d all heard the most interesting rumor about her and Prince Blueblood taking a little jaunt up to Vanhoover.
And that had just been a preview of what was waiting for her when she’d made her way back to her aerial yacht.
There had been close to a dozen ponies of note – including Razzle Dazzle and Gladmane – lingering around where her airship had been parked, trying hard not to look like they were waiting for her to show up. In addition to almost a half-dozen who had followed her there from the Galloway Bay Resort, nearly everypony who was anypony in Las Pegasus had been there. Everypony except Pixie. She had already been inside, sleeping off the effects of her overindulgence the previous night, and had gone unnoticed by River until after they’d taken off.
Apparently, River had learned later, when she’d dumped Pixie in her carriage and told the chauffeurs to take her home, she had – in her excitement to meet Prince Blueblood – forgotten to inform them exactly where Pixie’s home was. Since none of the stallions had recognized Jack Pot’s soon-to-be-ex-wife on sight, nor were privy to River having gotten a room at the Galloway Bay, they’d taken Pixie the only place they could think of: back to the airship where they’d started the evening. Certainly, Pixie had been in no condition to tell them otherwise. And the servants waiting back on the yacht had, for better or for worse, had taken one look at the semi-conscious mare stumbling out of the same carriage their employer had left in and taken it upon themselves to tuck her in for the night, figuring that she was their boss’s guest.
Fortunately, Jack Pot and Big Bucks hadn’t been among the ponies who’d been waiting to try and secure a place on her yacht. Apparently, one of the servants had told her, the duo had a new assistant whom they were working hard to bring up to speed. River, knowing that hearing that would likely set Pixie off again, had subsequently warned her staff not to speak of that again if they valued their jobs.
Of course, the star of the scene had been Prince Blueblood, who had arrived a few minutes after River with a bevy of servants all his own.
Refusing to be upstaged by the crowd, who had quickly turned their attention to the arriving royal, River had made sure to greet the prince in a flamboyant manner. Laying it on as thick as she could, she had lavishly welcomed him aboard her yacht, thanking him profusely for accompanying her back home even as she lamented that her accommodations weren’t of sufficient grandeur for a pony of his noble stature. But as aggravating as it had been when Prince Blueblood had clucked his tongue and agreed that her “dingy little barge” was beneath him, River had grinned and borne it graciously. After all, her presentation hadn’t been for him; it had been to make it clear to all of the other ponies that she was the one running the show, which meant that when she invited all of them to come along on their little excursion after the prince had boarded, it was with one very clear understanding:
You owe me.
Of course, River knew her ability to collect on that would depend very much on what happened when Blueblood met Lex…
But that was largely out of her hooves now. When they had cast off, she knew full well that for all intents and purposes, it had marked the end of her mission. With no stopovers or detours planned, everypony was now committed to the journey back to Vanhoover.
She had succeeded.
But knowing why Blueblood was making the trip dampened her enthusiasm. As much as she was certain that Lex had to have a plan to secure the loan he wanted, she could only hope that he’d find the presence of a prince – even one that was stuck-up and belligerent – to be an opportunity rather than a derailment. Or if not, that he at least wouldn’t blame her for it…
Her persistent anxiety made getting home feel like it took forever, and Blueblood’s rampant narcissism didn’t help. Although River knew she could have avoided the latter if she’d stayed in her suite for the entire trip back, not playing the attentive hostess would have been a major faux pas. That, and she needed to tacitly monitor the prince’s conversations in case he mentioned anything about the “hoodlum” in Vanhoover who had “upset” Celestia and Luna. The odds of that were slim; Blueblood’s favorite topics were himself and his shallow interests, and everypony else was all too eager to feed his ego or try and talk themselves up, but River forced herself to remain vigilant nonetheless. The looming meeting between Lex and Blueblood was one that struck her as destined to end in spectacular failure, but if that happened it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t done everything she could!
That was why, when they’d finally made port at Vanhoover in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, she’d rushed off the instant her staff had deployed the naval-conversion unit. Leaving them with instructions to entertain her guests before disembarking, River had summoned up all of her courage to venture into the dark, empty city, her recent encounter with one of those ghoul monsters still fresh in her mind. Fortunately she hadn’t seen any hint of them during her mad dash through the silent streets, slowing her pace only when she’d emerged from the other side of Vanhoover.
And now…now she was finally home.
But River’s relief was cut short as the front door opened and a pony emerged. Pausing to make sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her in the low light, River scowled as the pony began to sweep the front steps. But it wasn’t the action that upset her; it was the identity of the pony that made her frown. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The pony – a very familiar mare clad in a maid uniform – jumped at the sound of her voice, wings flaring as she nearly dropped her broom. “Wh-, Miss Bank?!”
“What,” growled River, striding right up until she was right in Feather Duster’s face, “do you think you’re doing?!”
“I’m, uh…” Pausing as she collected herself, Feather Duster gathered her broom up with her wings, holding it in front of herself as though it were a shield. “I’m cleaning,” she answered at last.
River’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t get cute with me. Why are you out here now?” Even if Lex was an early riser, River knew that for a maid to already be up and about this early, she must have spent at least an hour waking up, having breakfast, and getting ready before starting work. That meant she would have had to have slunk out of bed quite a while ago, which seemed unlikely if Lex and his collection of coquettes had spent the night putting her through her paces. Nor was that the only thing wrong with this picture. “And why are you dressed like that?!”
Feather Duster was wearing a normal maid uniform, which was exactly the problem: a normal maid uniform, with a skirt that was almost ankle-length, rather than stopping at her waist and showing off her cutie mark. It wasn’t an eye-catching ensemble the way her old outfit had been. That, combined with her being up and about so early, pointed to an upsetting conclusion. “Did you not sleep with him?!”
Feather Duster flinched. “I-”
“I don’t believe you!” hissed River, the other mare’s face telling her everything she needed to know. “Didn’t I tell you what would happen if you didn’t put out for him?! Didn’t I?!”
“Yes, but-”
“I gave you one job to do!” After several days of having to suck up to that conceited prince, to say nothing of worrying about what would happen when he and Lex met, this was the last straw. River had assigned Feather Duster the job of warming Lex’s bed not because she thought the stupid mare would be a good lay – compared to Sonata and Aria, she doubted the little ingenue knew how to do anything except put her head down and her tail up – but because she wanted to extend Lex every possible hospitality in an effort to make herself as indispensable as she could. And having her staff cater to his every whim was an important part of that. And now this pathetic excuse for a maid was jeopardizing that all because she’d gotten cold hooves! “One job! And I made it clear what I’d do to you and your brat if you failed!”
“Miss Bank, please! I-”
“Shut up!” snarled River, suddenly furious. For a moment she wanted to indulge herself in tearing this disobedient little nopony to pieces. Who did she think she was, acting like she was too good to use her body to get ahead?! But River knew she didn’t have the luxury of losing her temper now, not when she needed to hurry and inform Lex about exactly who she’d brought back to Vanhoover with her.
Closing her eyes, River counted to ten, forcing herself to calm down. It was only after she’d regained control of herself that she opened them again, giving Feather Duster an imperious glare. “Go pack your things,” she ordered coldly. “You’re no longer welcome here. And when I’m through with you, you won’t be welcome anywhere.” With that dark promise, River turned to march into her manor.
But Feather Duster’s voice stopped her before she made it to the door. “Miss Bank, wait! Master Legis told me that he wanted to see us when you arrived!”
River immediately homed in on which part of that sounded wrong. “‘Us’? What do you mean he wanted to see ‘us’?”
“You and me,” replied Feather Duster. “He said that as soon as you got back, he wanted to see us both.”
“About what?” demanded River, a fresh round of anxiety suddenly coming over her.
Her tension worsened when she glanced back and saw that Feather Duster’s expression, far from looking terrified the way she would have expected, was oddly composed. “About what you told me to do for him.”
Standing in front of the door to the guest suite he was staying in, River felt her heart sink at Lex’s command. During the trip back, she’d privately rehearsed how she would present the results of her expedition to him. First would be divulging the sheer number of Las Pegasus’s richest ponies that she’d brought back. Then she’d move on to revealing that Prince Blueblood was here as well. It was only after she’d made a big deal about how incredible of an opportunity that was that she’d cautiously mention Blueblood’s…unfortunate disposition. At which point she felt sure she’d be able to turn the conversation into a mutual brainstorming session between herself and Lex about how to deal with that, deftly integrating herself even further into his plans to secure the loan he wanted and in so doing move that much closer to being rewarded by him if and when he succeeded.
But now she could see those plans – which had already taken a major hit at Feather Duster’s casual revelation that Lex wanted to speak to both of them, to say nothing of letting slip what he wanted to talk to them about – crumbling down around her ears. It wasn’t the abrupt dismissal that made the blood drain from her face, however. It was the way Lex was looking at her, his expression far colder than his normal scowl, confirming that he knew what she’d told Feather Duster to do and was very displeased by it.
“B-but Lex, I brought the ponies you wanted!” she stammered, trying not to panic. “Almost twenty of the richest ponies from Las Pe-”
“Will they leave if I don’t meet with them immediately?”
Unable to help but wince a little, River shook her head. “…no.”
“Then the two of you go and wait in the parlor,” ordered Lex, causing River to bite her lip as his gaze moved from her to Feather Duster, who was standing behind her, and back again. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. And River…”
His expression didn’t change, nor did his voice grow any colder, but his eyes erupted into a flash of green then, purple contrails sprouting from the outer corners in what she knew could only be a manifestation of intense anger. “If I so much as think that you’ve attempted to intimidate, coerce, or otherwise manipulate Feather Duster between now and then, I’ll be extremely displeased.”
The threat was enough to make River feel dizzy with dread. As horrific as being confronted by a ghoul had been, the threat the creature had presented had at least been immediate and obvious. The prospect of Lex’s wrath, however, left her mind racing as she considered all the ways that he could use his magic to make her life one of unbearable torment. After all, if he’d been willing to hit her with a curse that destroyed her ability to enjoy the things in life that she valued most over a mere threat to get in his way, the idea that he could be even more upset now was enough to leave her knees shaking. “I won’t!” she whimpered, her voice pleading. “I swear I-”
Lex shut the door in her face.
“…won’t,” she finished lamely.
For several seconds, River could only stare straight ahead, fear eating her alive as surely as that undead pony had wanted to. She tried to think of something, anything, that she could do to avoid the horrible punishment that she was sure Lex was going to inflict on her ten minutes from now. But what could she do? Against his magic, and with so little time, what could she possibly do?
Nothing, she realized, a sickening sense of hopelessness washing over her then. There’s nothing I can do.
Feather Duster seemed to realize that also, because the corners of the mare’s lips were turned up ever so slightly as she gave a polite cough. “Miss Bank? The parlor is this way.”
Her steps faltering as though she were being led to the gates of Tartarus itself, River turned and slowly trudged after the maid.
Lex had already put River and Feather Duster out of his thoughts as he returned to his study.
Instead, he turned his attention back to the spell-embedded ruby that the Night Mare had given him. Telekinetically lifting it so it was level with his eyes, he regarded it – or rather, the resurrection spell inside it – for just a moment.
Then he began to chant the words to invoke its magic.
Now that he’d succeeded in unravelling the mysteries involved with using magic to bring the dead back to life, there was no reason to delay any further. His inability to resurrect all of the ponies who had died here didn’t change the fact that he still had the ability to revive one person. The only question left was whom to choose.
But the ethical quandary of selecting one individual to be given a second chance at life while so many others were denied was one that Lex found easy to navigate. Indeed, that was the sort of conceptual puzzle that had always come effortlessly to him, to the point where he barely had to consciously dwell upon it anymore. He simply applied to problem to his moral framework and immediately found the answer, the process requiring no more effort than it would have taken somepony else to cross an open threshold.
Pony lives were of immeasurable value. That was one of the bedrock truths that made up Lex’s view of the world. And because that value could not be quantified, one could therefore not assert that the lives of certain ponies were more precious than those of others. While the conduct with which ponies conducted themselves could be examined and critiqued for its adherence (or lack thereof) to moral guidelines – to say nothing of the interconnected web of hierarchies and meritocratic determinations that a dynamic society relied upon to urge its members to strive for new achievements – that in no way changed the intrinsic value of a pony’s life unto itself. It was the reason that no pony, not even the most heinous of criminals, could ever be put to death.
By that same token, everypony who had died where the natural extent of their lives would otherwise have continued was therefore entitled to be brought back to life. None could be said to be more deserving than any other in that regard. To allow some ponies to remain dead while others were brought back was therefore a failure on his part – albeit it less of a failure than to not bring anypony back at all – but the scope of that failure would be unchanged no matter who was returned to life.
Which meant that the answer as to who should be resurrected, Lex knew, was twofold in nature:
The first was that who he chose was entirely up to his personal discretion.
And the second was to rage against that aforementioned failure with everything he had.
His eyes flaring brightly, Lex grit his teeth as he began pouring magical power through his body and into the ruby.
The resurrection spell was one that, according to everything he’d learned, he’d never be able to cast on his own. But right now he wasn’t casting it on his own. All of the energy, and its attendant data, was already there, pre-cast and waiting to be unleashed within the gemstone. That meant that the bulk of the work was already done. All he had to do now was force even more power into the thing, overloading it with sufficient energy to carry out the operations it had been tasked to perform with greater alacrity than it would otherwise. Enough so that it would be able to bring back not just one individual but many! As many as he could compel it to revive!
Forcing power through his body into a magic item was, he’d learned, intrinsically more difficult than feeding it into spells contained within his thoughts. While the discrete nature of his thought-form spells were likewise built to only hold so much energy, feeding energy into them at the moment of casting allowed his physically-gathered energy to either merge with that of the spell as it was unleashed, enhancing it, or flow back into the thought-form before it collapsed, retaining it. Magic items, however, offered no such flexibility. Their preset functionality was designed specifically to hold only so much power, and so they inherently resisted having more shoved into them.
But that simply meant that Lex had to push back harder.
Finishing the chant, Lex raised the gem aloft as he invoked the final part of the spell. With no need for a body to work on, it required only that he name the individual he wanted to resurrect. And the first pony he wanted to bring back was…
“Cloudbank.”
A pony who had cursed him bitterly when he’d first met her, Lex had been surprised by how much he’d come to trust the pegasus in the short time that he’d known her. She’d volunteered for the incredibly dangerous task of wielding Severance in the battle against Tlerekithres. She’d been the first pony he’d inducted into the Night Mare’s faith. And she’d agreed to lead the doomed expedition back into Vanhoover. Her metamorphosis into an asset to everypony’s survival had been as notable as Garden Gate’s, save that she’d never lost her moral center to begin with.
Feeling the energy within the gem begin to ebb as it flowed out of its container and went to work, Lex poured more into it.
“Thermal Draft.”
The pegasus pony had been among the very first of Vanhoover’s population to support his efforts. Where so many others had derided or criticized him, she never had. Instead, she’d contributed whatever she could to helping him help everypony, from soothing him after he and Sonata had fought to saving his life during the battle on the docks. Her support had been steadfast, and it had ultimately cost her everything because he had lacked the imagination to see the enemy in their midst.
The spell very nearly went out then, and Lex snarled as he aggressively sent more power into it, his muscles burning, refusing to let it extinguish.
“C. Shells.”
He’d first hired her for passage to Vanhoover in exchange for repairing her damaged ship. Once she’d brought them to the city, she could easily have left. After the sahuagin had crawled onto her boat she would have been well within her rights to turn around and take herself and her crew out of danger. Instead she’d stayed, following him as he’d tried to rid the ruined city of the monsters plaguing it, committing not just herself but also the ponies under her command to the relief effort because she couldn’t in good conscience do any less.
The pain had grown significantly by then, the sheer amount of power needed to force the spell within the gem to triple its effectiveness requiring a massive toll on his body. But Lex ignored it, telling himself that he’d experienced far worse before. Instead, he said the next name that came to mind.
“Sandbar.”
A pony on C. Shell’s crew, the stallion had been one of the first to accompany Lex into Vanhoover. His bravery had seen him rewarded by nearly getting his throat torn out, saved only at the last possible moment. But the experience hadn’t soured him on joining his crew mates in doing all he could, whether it had been cleaning a warehouse or battling the monsters from the sea. And he’d never lost his benign disposition, always bragging about the scar he’d received rather than lamenting it.
His mouth filling with blood, Lex spat it out as he struggled to keep the spell from concluding. Just a little more! Just…a little…more…!
“Turbo.”
The second-in-command among Garden’s gang, he had been dedicated to his friends far more than to Vanhoover’s restoration. But that dedication had driven him to venture back into the city that they’d spent weeks trying to escape from, willing to put Garden’s wish to help ahead of his own safety. If he hadn’t redeemed himself for the things he’d done after the city had flooded, it was because he hadn’t truly had the chance to, unlike how his friends had all escorted sick ponies to Canterlot and then come back because they wanted to do more. It was a chance that Turbo should have had as well.
Lex’s world jumped upward then, and it took him a moment to realize that he had collapsed. But he didn’t feel any pain from the impact. In fact, he realized blearily, he didn’t feel much of anything…except the spell, reaching the end of its-
His eyes widening, Lex reached upward, straining with everything he had to keep it going. One more! There was still one more pony he needed to bring back! One more whom he’d let down, and who had paid for it with his life!
With his last ounce of strength, Lex forced the words past his lips.
The amount of strain that he’d put himself through made that a minor miracle in and of itself. His muscles were spasming painfully, his blood was pounding in his ears, and his legs were refusing to heed his commands as he attempted to back stand up. But at the moment Lex was less concerned with all of that than he was with the sudden pillars of blue fire that erupted around him as the resurrection spell, complete now that he’d ceased feeding energy into it, took effect.
Surrounding him in a radial pattern, the columns of azure flame emitted no heat, nor did they scorch the floor or ceiling. Instead, an intense cold filled the room, as though the fires burned away warmth rather than radiating it. But the chill lasted only a moment, vanishing as the flames suddenly extinguished themselves, leaving a group of ponies in their place.
Five ponies. Not six.
But Lex didn’t even have to look at the dazed figures surrounding him to know who among the ponies he’d named hadn’t returned. Indeed, the knowledge came to him immediately, causing Lex’s eyes to close as a powerful sense of regret fell over him. He knew who hadn’t been brought back, and in doing so had leveled a crushing indictment on him.
Spells that were cast directly on another person always created a residual sense of feedback. More accurately, there was a brief moment where the interaction between the energy you were unleashing on them and the magical channels in their body could be “felt,” for lack of a better term. While that was barely perceptible for spells that were concerned with elementary interactions such as causing physical damage, it was more pronounced when the spell in question attempted to cause some more fundamental change. Sonata and Aria were easily able to tell when someone had managed to resist being enchanted, for instance, even if few ponies had the inner strength to do so.
But this time, Lex had keenly felt as one of the six individuals he’d named rejected the magic that he’d sent out to bring them back. That was one of the secrets that he’d unlocked while deciphering the resurrection spell in the gemstone; souls could only be invited back to life, not compelled. And now, one of them had refused that invitation, electing to remain in whatever ephemeral realm they’d moved on to rather than return to life in the mortal world. And as for which one…
“What happened?!” demanded Turbo, turning to look every which way. “Where are we?! We-”
“Lex!” yelped Thermal Draft, rushing over and kneeling down beside him. “Are you alright?!”
“If he’s not, then we need to move,” replied C. Shells firmly. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he’s the only one who has a chance of taking on that crazy mare.”
“Who?” asked Sandbar, blinking in confusion.
“Who do you think?” snapped C. Shells. “That blonde unicorn with the glasses! The one who made that Severance weapon disappear!”
“I’m guessing that we’re safe for the moment. This place looks too clean to still be in the city.” Cloudbank’s voice was calm as she went and helped Thermal Draft get Lex upright, a rueful smile on her face as looked at him. “You knew we were in trouble and got us out, didn’t you?”
But Lex didn’t return the expression. “No,” he muttered, feeling utterly wretched. “I didn’t.”
Block Party had refused his resurrection, and even for Lex it wasn’t hard to imagine why. Being possessed for barely a day had been enough to severely traumatize Nosey. How much worse had it been for Block Party? How many horrors had he been forced to endure over the course of the weeks that Xiriel had taken over his body, leaving him trapped within his own mind as the devil used him to perpetrate atrocity after atrocity? How gruesome had his death been, finding that he was himself again at last, only to feel a noose tightening around his neck during his last few, panicked moments?
You could have saved him from all of that. The voiceless words from his shadow didn’t take Lex by surprise. The guilt he felt over not having rooted Xiriel out immediately wasn’t new; it was simply thrown into sharper relief now. Even beyond death, Block Party had been so scarred by what had happened to him that the prospect of coming back to life had been more than he could bear, and that knowledge tore at Lex now. Even with the Night Mare’s magic, you couldn’t make restitution to the person who’d been victimized the most, continued his tulpa viciously. And you could have avoided that if you’d just done more.
Aware that something was amiss, but not knowing exactly what, Thermal Draft and Cloudbank shared a concerned look. “Lex?” asked the former gently. “What’s wrong?”
But the words had barely left her mouth when the door suddenly swung open. “What’s all the noise?” complained Aria. “Just because you like to get up at the crack of…” Blinking as she saw how many ponies were in the room, she raised an eyebrow, giving them all a once-over. Maybe it was because she’d just woken up, but something about them seemed familiar. But she dismissed the thought, glancing back at where Lex was sandwiched between two mares. “You having a party or something?”
Thermal Draft frowned, spotting the rumpled bed through the doorway behind the knockout who had just come in…and who was apparently very familiar with Lex. “Who’re you?”
“And are you single?” muttered Sandbar, eyeing the newcomer shamelessly. “And do you have a thing for guys with scars?” One hoof coming up to rub at his neck, he paused, eyes widening as he couldn’t feel the rough patch he’d grown accustomed to. “Hey, my scar! What happened to my beautiful scar?! It was a chick magnet!”
“Yeah, the kind of magnet that pushes things away,” snorted C. Shells. She knew that was catty, but at the moment she didn’t care, feeling suddenly agitated. Something wasn’t adding up about all of this…
She wasn’t the only one who noticed something wrong, as Turbo was also peering into the room that admittedly very attractive mare had come from. But unlike Thermal Draft, his eyes were on the window, the new girl’s referring to it being morning having caused alarms to go off in his head, alarms which grew worse as he saw how dark the sky looked. “It was the middle of the day a second ago,” he noted, his voice growing tense.
Aria, however, had stopped listening after hearing the challenge from that mare who had questioned her. And it was a challenge; she could read it from a dozen different signals the other girl was giving off, ranging from the tone in her voice to the way she’d started leaning against Lex a little more. But rather than grow irritated at the little upstart, Aria grinned, sauntering forward. “I’m one of the girls Lex is sleeping with,” she drawled, chuckling as she saw the stunned expression that got from whoever that was. “Why? You want in on our little arrangement?”
Cloudbank gave her girlfriend a sour look as Drafty began to sputter, but knew there were more important things that she had to focus on right now. “Lex, that mare who attacked us, she-”
“I know,” sighed Lex. Forcing himself to stop focusing on the self-loathing he felt for not being able to do anything for Block Party, Lex straightened up. “All of you listen to me,” he demanded, and although he was still too enervated to put much force in his voice, everyone else quieted down immediately. Stepping away from Thermal Draft and Cloudbank, he crossed the room, turning to that he could face all of them directly.
“I need to tell you all what’s happened…”
Silence reigned in the wake of Lex’s explanation, everypony struggling to come to grips with what he’d just told them.
C. Shells was the first to recover. “We were…” Her voice faltered, and she needed a moment before she was able to bring herself to try again. “We were dead?”
“But…I don’t remember anything,” muttered Thermal Draft, clinging to Cloudbank, who was likewise holding her tightly. “One second we were all in Vanhoover, and then the next…”
Lex frowned. Their behavior had suggested as much, but their lack of memory about whatever afterlives they’d experienced between their deaths and resurrection wasn’t among the knowledge he’d gained from studying the Night Mare’s gem. The spell had only dealt with functionality with regards to reconstructing the body and bringing back the soul; the particulars of what happened to the soul while it was gone was beyond the spell’s parameters.
“Fencer helped fight off an army of ghouls?” Lex had included a brief summary of what had happened while they had been gone, but that hadn’t helped Turbo believe everything he’d been told. “I want to see my friends,” he demanded, suddenly needing confirmation that they were alright.
“I’ll have someone take you to them,” replied Lex dismissively, not bothering to look at Turbo as he started toward the door, fighting down the urge to grunt as his legs protested the exertion. “Right now I’m late for a meeting.”
“A meeting?” echoed Sandbar incredulously. “You just brought all of us back to life, and now you’re going to go to a meeting?” That just seemed wrong somehow, like a magician making a castle disappear before announcing that their next trick would be to pull a plain old rabbit out of a hat. “What, is it a meeting with Equestria’s princesses or something?”
“He defeated the princesses, remember?” murmured Cloudbank, taking deep breaths to keep herself calm. “Or at least Celestia and Luna.”
“And you turned Luna into a unicorn?” asked C. Shells with a wince. “Don’t you think that was maybe going a little too far?”
“Excuse me?” snapped Aria, having stayed during Lex’s recap of what those five had missed. She was a little surprised herself that Lex had apparently brought several dead ponies back to life, but only a bit. After everything else he’d done, this was just the latest in his string of incredible accomplishments. But at the moment she found herself getting upset at the reactions she was hearing. “You all were killed, and this guy just gave you a second chance, and the first thing you do is complain about what he’s been doing in the meantime?!” She glared at C. Shells, who looked properly abashed, before turning her eyes toward the rest of them. “I don’t think I’ve heard one ‘thank you’ out of any of you, either. There are a lot of other ponies he could have brought back besides you, you know!”
“Don’t chastise them, Aria.” Lex’s own rebuke was surprisingly lacking in force, sounding almost resigned as he trudged out of the room. “If I hadn’t failed to adequately provide for their safety in the first place, it wouldn’t have been necessary to resurrect them.”
Thermal Draft cringed a little at that. “Lex, wait…”
“I have a meeting.”
Without another word, Lex was gone. Aria paused just long enough to shoot one last glare at the others before following, leaving the five ponies alone in the study.
After a pregnant pause, Sandbar licked his lips. “Hey, Cloudbank?”
The mare in question glanced over, a little surprised to be called on. “Yeah?”
“If I worshiped the Night Mare, would she give me the power to turn monsters into hot chicks the way Lex did for Aria?”
After a long moment, Cloudbank glanced over at C. Shells. “Slap him for me, would you?”
Out in the hallway, Aria caught up to Lex easily. But before she opened her mouth, Lex was already speaking. “Find one of the servants. Have them see to whatever those five need.”
He was mildly surprised when she didn’t complain, instead nodding. “Fine, but this is going to get around fast,” she warned him. “Right now almost everyone here adores you, so you’re going to need to explain to them why you brought back those ponies and not anyone else instead.”
Lex clenched his jaw at what sounded to him like a suggestion that he’d acted unethically. “It was in no way immoral for me to exercise sole discretion with regards to whom I resurrected! Any implication that it would have been more just to bring back a different group of individuals-”
“Okay, this, right here?” huffed Aria, cutting him off. “This is what you don’t want to do. In fact, you know what? How about you let me figure out what to say to everyone while you go to your meeting?”
Lex gave her a glance, making no attempt to hide how suspicious he felt about how helpful she was being all of a sudden. But as unusual as it was, it wasn’t completely unlike her; Aria had made herself useful when he’d delivered his address to everypony several days ago. If she said that this would be a sensitive social issue for everyone, then there was a very real chance that she was right. And since Sonata wasn’t here…
“Fine,” he answered after a moment’s consideration, hoping Aria was being sincere.
“Great!” she chirped, leaning in to brush her side against his. “So, bringing the dead back to life, power meetings, what’s on the agenda after that?”
Lex didn’t break his stride as he answered her. “Breakfast.”
Like a rat in a cage, she’d spent the last several minutes pacing the length of the parlor, too anxious to be able to sit still. Every few seconds she’d found herself compelled to look over at the grandfather clock on the far side of the room, watching as its pendulum swung back and forth, silently counting the seconds. Although it seemed to be working normally, River could have sworn that the timepiece was mocking her, with the minute hoof seeming to jump forward unnaturally fast whenever she looked away from it.
But when ten minutes had come and gone with no sign of Lex, River had felt sweat start to bead on her brow. She knew that he was making her wait on purpose; making someone’s schedule conform to your convenience was one of the more basic ways of showing that you had power over them. But just knowing that did nothing to ease her tension. If anything, it increased it, since she was already hyper-aware of just how much power Lex had over her. Indeed, she could think of very little else.
Of course, the fact that Feather Duster – standing silently on the opposite side of the room – was the very picture of composure didn’t help either.
Neither mare had said anything since they’d entered the parlor, and for River, it was because she hadn’t dared open her mouth. After Lex’s warning, she hadn’t been willing to risk that anything she said to the maid could be taken as an attempt to influence her. Whatever Lex was going to do to her, River felt certain that he’d make it worse if he thought she was going against his orders. And it wasn’t like she had anything she could offer him in exchange for clemency this time, since she’d already pledged everything she owned to him in order to buy her way back into his good graces. Now that she’d brought back the Las Pegasus ponies Lex had wanted, River was keenly aware that she had outlived her usefulness to him.
Perhaps literally so.
That thought was still in the forefront of her mind when the door to the parlor swung open, its handle briefly outlined in roiling purple before Lex strode into the room.
The abrupt entrance made River jump, swallowing a shriek of fright as her eyes locked onto the pony who now held her fate in his hooves, dimly noting that Feather Duster was standing a little straighter as well.
Lex didn’t look at either of them until he’d crossed the parlor, taking a seat in the large chair near the clock. River couldn’t help but note how his eyes had changed back to normal, the green-and-purple glow that they’d had when he’d dismissed her previously having dispersed. She could only hope that was a good sign, swallowing nervously as she waited for him to speak, not daring to so much as sit down without his say-so.
“River,” said Lex at last, uttering her name like it was a dire pronouncement. “Feather Duster has alleged that you ordered her to enter into a conjugal relationship with me, and that when she refused to do so, you threatened her – and, by extension, her daughter Cleansweep, who is now one of my students – in order to force her to comply.” He let the words hang in the air for several seconds before leaning forward, keeping her pinned in place with the weight of his gaze alone. “Is that true?”
The question made River’s heart leap into her throat, and she very nearly lunged at the out that Lex had just given her. If all he had was the testimony of one fainthearted little maid, then surely it wouldn’t be too hard to discredit her. If she painted Feather Duster as being an employee with a grudge, or a habitual liar, or anything else that made her seem untrustworthy, then maybe there was a way out of this without being cursed!
But River had been in politics far too long to give in to such a basic temptation. She knew this particular ploy, having been on the other side of it many times over the years. It was another of the basic rules of wielding power: asking someone a question that you already knew the answer to in order to see if they’d lie. Lex had already doubtlessly verified Feather Duster’s story. River had no idea how he would have done that, but with the magic he wielded it couldn’t have been hard. She had never been interested in advanced spellcasting, apart from the age spell she’d wanted for so long, but she felt absolutely sure that Lex had used his magic to verify the charges against her and set this trap for her now. Which meant that there was only one course of action she could take.
“Yes,” she breathed softly, lowering her eyes in defeat. “Yes, it’s true.”
Out of the corner of her eyes, River saw Feather Duster give her a look of surprise, clearly not having expected her to confess. But she was less concerned with her maid’s reaction than with Lex’s. If her admission of guilt had bought her any goodwill on his part, however, it didn’t show on his face, his usual frown deepening into a dark expression. “Before I pass judgment on you for this,” he rumbled, “I demand your allocution.”
“Wh-what?”
“Tell me why you did this!” he snapped.
“I…I just…!” River tried to find some way to present herself in the best possible light. Some way of explaining why she’d done what she’d done in a way that didn’t make her look petty and selfish. But very few things came to mind, leaving her flailing. “I wanted to show you how much I could give you!” she managed at last. “To offer you anything you wanted!”
But Lex’s expression only darkened further. “And this is what you think I wanted? For you to terrorize one of my little ponies to the point of degrading herself?”
Cringing, her ears folding back, River shook her head helplessly. “You had all those mares hanging off of you!” she pleaded. “I thought you’d like it if I could give you more!”
“So why didn’t you do it yourself?”
Feather Duster’s question made River blink in confusion, panic having made her nearly forget that the maid was there. “Huh?”
“Why didn’t-” Stopping in mid-sentence, Feather Duster seemed to realize that she’d interrupted, turning back to Lex and bowing. “Forgive me,” she murmured. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
River’s eyes shifted nervously between Lex and the maid, but when the former made a permissive gesture at the latter, Feather Duster turned back to her. “If you wanted to give Master Legis…” she faltered then, looking for the right word. “Female companionship, why didn’t you just do it yourself?”
The accusation in her words was obvious, but River could hear genuine curiosity there as well, and for some reason that made her blood boil. “That’s easy for you to say!” she spat. “You’re still young and beautiful!”
Feather Duster looked taken aback by that. “But…but you’re prettier than I am,” she sputtered.
“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?! Look at me! I’m OLD!” screamed River, incensed. All of a sudden she couldn’t stop herself, the mounting tension she'd been feeling finally boiling over. “You think that any stallion would want me at my age?! My son is old enough to start thinking about having children of his own! How many stallions do you know who want mares that are old enough to be grandmothers?! Who are starting to wrinkle more with each passing day?! Who are already on the wrong side of forty?!”
She hung her head then, tears of frustration gathering in her eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like, putting on more and more makeup each morning and seeing it do less and less for your looks. Having to work out longer each day just to keep your weight the same. Dreading looking in the mirror when you wake up because there’ll be one more gray hair in your mane than there was yesterday.”
Gritting her teeth, River stifled a sob, wanting to save what was left of her dignity even as years of pent-up venom came flooding out. “I’ve spent my entire life making money so that I wouldn’t have to live in squalor the way I did when I was a filly, and now it’s all useless, because I’m turning into an ugly old nag anyway!”
Feather Duster was gaping, clearly not having expected the torrent of emotion that was coming out of her former employer. For her part, River kept directing her words toward the other mare, finding her an easier outlet for her grievances than Lex. “I tried to get an age spell to make me young again, you know. I went to Canterlot and did everything I could to get one of the wizards that can cast it – and believe me, there aren’t many – make me young again. I even offered to put out for them.” She confessed that last part with a hollow smirk, feeling utterly humiliated. She’d never talked about that to anyone since it happened. “They laughed at me when I did. They made it clear that they weren’t interested in some old nag from the sticks, not when they had a city full of the richest and most influential ponies in Equestria giving them everything they could possibly want in order to keep the age-restoring spells all to themselves. And then…” She gestured in Lex’s direction, not able to continue as her anger suddenly ebbed.
But that was enough for Feather Duster to realize what she was trying to say. “And then Master Legis came along, and you thought that if you ingratiated yourself with him the way the ponies in Canterlot did with their wizards, he’d make you young again.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” sighed River. “And I knew better than to use my withered old flank to do it, especially since he already had beautiful girls hanging off of him.” All of a sudden she didn’t feel frightened anymore. She just felt tired. Tired of being afraid of what Lex was going to do to her. Tired of fighting with the most disobedient servant she’d ever had. Tired of struggling so hard for something that was always just out of reach.
Turning back to Lex, River gave him a look of forlorn resignation. “That’s why I did it.”
With nothing else to say, she waited for him to curse her.
Lex looked at River impassively as he considered everything she’d just told him.
Her rant had been one of unabashed self-pity. Compared to the hardships that the ponies of Vanhoover had been forced to endure – those that had survived – her consternation over the advent of senescence-, no, over the altogether minor cosmetic decline and the social consequences thereof brought on by the advent of senescence, was repugnant. That River had tried to force somepony else to debase herself as part of a scheme to soothe her wounded sense of entitlement was loathsome in the extreme. Without even trying, Lex could think of a dozen curses that would have rubbed her nose in exactly what she feared the most, all of which would have served her right.
And yet, in the wake of his inability to bring Block Party back to life, Lex found himself sickened at the prospect of inflicting further misery on somepony who was already so anguished. No matter that her suffering was shallow and self-absorbed; River was still in a state of acute distress. Having just been faced with somepony whose torment had been so great that he had given up on life itself, Lex couldn’t bring himself to inflict further hardship on someone else. Not when his entire purpose for coming to Vanhoover had been to relieve the ponies of the afflicted city.
But that didn’t mean that River could be forgiven for what she’d done to Feather Duster.
“I’m suspending judgment at this time,” Lex announced without preamble.
He watched the faces of both mares carefully, despite not being able to decipher their expressions. Feather Duster opened her mouth, only to immediately close it again. River was slower to react, blinking twice before swallowing. “You’re…you’re not going to punish me?” she asked, her voice shaky.
“I’m not going to punish you for now,” explained Lex. “We will revisit the matter of your sentencing after the delegation from Las Pegasus departs.”
River gasped at that, the corners of her lips turning up. “I understand! I promise, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you get the loan you want! I swear, you won’t regret giving me a second chance!”
“I won’t,” agreed Lex, “because I’m not.”
River’s smile froze. “You’re not…what?”
“I’m not giving you a second chance,” clarified Lex. “When the ponies from Las Pegasus have left, you’ll be made to pay for what you’ve done.”
He pointed at Feather Duster, who had been silently watching the exchange, even as he kept his eyes on River. “And when I deliver my sentence, it will be based on her recommendation. Until then, you can experience what it’s like to have your fate be in the hooves of someone who bears you ill will.”
Both mares’ eyes widened at that, with River turning pale. But as far as Lex was concerned, the matter was closed.
“Now, tell me about the ponies you brought from Las Pegasus.”
“So over there’s River’s place,” pointed Sonata. “That’s where me, Lex, and Aria are all staying, along with the servants and some other ponies. Everyone else lives in the camp, that way.”
“Living in a mansion and being waited on by servants while everypony else is squatting in a camp?” tsked her companion, her expression one of patronizing disapproval.
A unicorn mare, her coat was a pale purple, offsetting the alternating shades of lighter and darker purple that made up her mane and tail. Blue eyes swept across the scenery, casual and yet missing nothing in their perusal. Her cutie mark was an equals sign, the same as the one now gracing Sonata’s flank.
It was a mark that the mare in question – Starlight Glimmer – was quite proud of.
That pride quickly manifested as her smile returned. “I can see that this place needs our help quite badly! Isn’t that right everypony?”
The four ponies behind her – a pegasus mare, earth pony stallion, and a unicorn of each sex, all likewise sporting equals signs for their cutie marks – nodded in unison, identical smiles on their faces. “I can’t wait to help everyone realize how much happier they’ll all be once they’ve given up their cutie marks!” gushed Double Diamond.
“I just hope we have enough jars to hold them all,” added Night Glider, glancing back at the two-wheeled carts she and her friends were pulling, each of them filled with empty glass jars. “It’d be terrible if we could only remove those awful cutie marks from some ponies and not others.”
“Don’t worry, I bet that once they see how wonderful it is not having to argue and disagree all the time, anyone who still has their cutie mark will want to come straight to our village and put it in our vault!” Sugar Belle reassured her.
“So, where should we get started?” asked Party Favor, looking to Starlight for guidance. “That big mansion, or head on over to the camp?”
“Oh, we definitely want to start with Lex Legis.” Starlight’s answer came easily, looking over at Sonata. “According to what our newest friend here has been telling me, he’s a poor pony who thinks that he needs to work harder and do more than anypony else, and it’s making him miserable! If we can show him how much better conformity is, then it should go a long way toward convincing everypony here of how much our philosophy can improve their lives!” She finished her announcement by lifting the forked wooden staff off of her back in her telekinesis, swinging it in a wide arc as though to encompass everything in front of her before putting it down. “So, Sonata, where is Lex most likely to be right now?”
“Well…” Gulping a little, Sonata made a show of thinking. “I guess he’d be in the camp right now? He usually watches over the market, so…”
Starlight nodded. “Wonderful! Then to the camp it is! I can’t wait for us to all become friends!” Without further ado, she started forward, Sonata keeping pace with her as the other four pulled their wagons behind them.
“Yeah,” she nodded, a little too vigorously. “This is totes going to be something…”
“He brought some ponies back to life?!”
The question, or some close variation of it, came from the lips of over a dozen different ponies in the assembled crowd. There were quite a few others as well, but they were lost in the clamor that had broken out in reaction to the news. Resisting the urge to sigh, Aria spoke up again, projecting her voice just enough to carry over the din. “Five ponies,” she clarified, “who lost their lives going into Vanhoover several weeks ago to retrieve supplies. Lex resurrected them early this morning using magic given to him by the Night Mare.”
“My daughter! Was one of them my daughter?!”
“Will he bring back anyone else?! I haven’t been able to find any of my family!”
“How did he decide on which ponies to bring back?! What makes those five so special?!”
The questions were coming rapidly now, but Aria narrowed her eyes at that last one. As much as Lex was currently adored by most of the ponies here, there was a sizeable minority who had only recently gotten back, and so were still in the process of coming to grips with just how bad things had gotten. For them, there was no debt of gratitude for the pony who was running things now, particularly when they heard that he’d sent Celestia and Luna packing, or that he’d slaughtered an army of monsters who used to be their friends and neighbors.
But Aria had no intention of letting this latest announcement be some sort of tipping point for them, nor let it make Lex look bad in the eyes of those ponies who were finally giving him the credit he deserved.
“LISTEN TO ME, ALL OF YOU!” she thundered, immediately causing everypony in the vicinity to settle down, wide-eyed. Satisfied that she had their attention, Aria returned her voice to its normal volume before continuing. “The Night Mare gave Lex the power to bring a small number of ponies back to life as a reward for everything he’s done here!” She had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded good. That was the important thing. “Ever since he came to Vanhoover, Lex has worked tirelessly for everypony’s sake! He’s battled monsters, saved lives, and he’s never once asked for anything in return! He has given each and every one of you food, jobs, and medicine, all without expecting so much as a thank you!”
She made sure to glare at the crowd then, silently shaming them for asking for more after having received so much charity. But she softened her expression a moment later. For something as serious as having had their loved ones be passed over for resurrection, a gentler touch would be needed to seal the deal, she knew. “I know that a lot of you find Lex to be cold and off-putting,” she continued, her voice conciliatory. “He doesn’t smile, he isn’t interested in telling jokes or playing games, and he never, ever, seems to relax.” She gave a rueful smirk then, gauging the mood of the crowd by how many returned the expression. “But the reason he acts that way isn’t because he doesn’t care about all of you. It’s just the opposite: it’s because he cares so much.”
Aria fought down a grin as she saw the ponies in the crowd murmur at one another, their faces uncertain. That’s it little fish. That’s some tasty bait, isn’t it? And there’s more where that came from. “I know what a lot of you think about my relationship with Lex, but since we’ve been together, I’ve seen the parts of him that he keeps hidden from everyone else. The fear that he won’t be able to help everyone who needs it. The guilt that he can’t do even more than he already has. He has to push all of that down, each and every day, just so he can keep working so hard on your behalf.”
The crowd was quieter now, and Aria knew that she was winning them over. “I was with Lex when he heard that those five ponies had gone missing. We went into Vanhoover together to go look for them.” She smiled then, genuinely, as she remembered what had happened then. “Even though he was in a hurry to go looking for them, he still stopped and used a healing spell on me when I hurt myself on the way there. Can you believe that? He was as scared as I’d ever seen him, rushing to go find those ponies that had gone missing, and he still made time for me, because he didn’t want to see me hurt…”
It took her a few seconds to come back to herself, cursing inwardly as she realized the crowd was watching her with rapt silence. This wasn’t supposed to be personal! Clearing her throat, she continued the story. “When we got to the city, and he confirmed that those five ponies had died, Lex was beside himself with grief. It was written all over his face. They’d gone there because he’d sent them there, and he blamed himself for their deaths. And you know what he did then? He came right back here and went back to work, rooting out monsters, creating food, and doing everything he could for all of you. He didn’t stop to mourn, not because he didn’t care, but because he knew that everypony was counting on him.”
She could see them eating it up, hook, line, and sinker. Now she just had to bring it back around, and the resurrection issue wouldn’t be a problem anymore. And this would be a nice little boost for that religion he was starting too. Who doesn’t love a twofer? “The Night Mare gave Lex the power to resurrect those five ponies, and only those five ponies, because she knew he deserved to be rewarded-”
“Which wasn’t very fair to everypony else now, was it?”
Whirling, Aria had a torrent of invectives ready to cut whoever had interrupted her to shreds. But although she caught sight of the heckler – a unicorn mare who was all kinds of purple – the words died on her lips as she saw who was walking next to her. “Sonata?!”
Wincing despite keeping a pained smile in place, her sister raised a hoof awkwardly. “Hey Aria.”
Walking over to her, Aria didn’t try to hide her surprise at Sonata’s appearance. “What’s up with your hair? You hate braids! And, wait-” Her eyes widened as she caught a glimpse of Sonata’s flank. “What happened to your butt tattoos?!”
But before Sonata had a chance to so much as open her mouth, the purple mare stepped in. “You must be Sonata’s sister, right? I’m Starlight Glimmer. I helped Sonata realize that by getting rid of her cutie mark, she could find true happiness!”
The claim made Aria’s brow furrow in confusion, not seeing what one had to do with the other. “What?”
“Oh, it’s very simple,” replied Starlight without missing a beat. “You see, cutie marks cause division, which creates unhappiness among ponies. Case in point…” She stepped around Aria then, addressing the crowd. “Everypony! I heard what Sonata’s sister was telling you before, and it sounds like Lex Legis is a powerful pony with a strong cutie mark, wouldn’t you say?”
There was a general murmur of assent from the assembled ponies, which was all Starlight needed. “He must be,” she nodded. “How else would he be able to pull off such an incredible feat like bringing dead ponies back to life? Why, I don’t think even Star-Swirl the Bearded could have used magic like that! But just look at the result! He gets to have the ponies he cares for be alive again, while you don’t! His cutie mark drives him to excel, while you’re all left out!”
This time the noise from the mass of ponies was far less felicitous, and Aria knew that their ire wasn’t being directed as Starlight. “What are you doing?!” she snarled, circling around and interposing herself between Starlight and the other ponies. “Lex earned the right to bring those five back! He-”
“Didn’t think about how everypony else would feel.” Starlight kept her voice loud, playing to her audience as she replied to Aria. “Oh, I’m sure he had the best of intentions. Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones again if they could? But all of these ponies here don’t have that chance, and because of Lex’s selfish need to be his very best, now they have to feel the pain of losing their friends and families all over again, knowing that Lex could have brought them back but didn’t!”
“If this Lex fellow really cared about everypony here, he’d give up his cutie mark!” remarked a snow-white earth stallion, apparently part of Starlight’s entourage.
“We did!” added a dark-colored pegasus mare, “and it was the best decision we ever made!”
Gritting her teeth, Aria slid her gaze over to Sonata, silently demanding an explanation. This time, her sister’s rictus grin fell away completely, and her ears folded back as she slunk over to Starlight’s side. “Maybe we should go,” she muttered anxiously. “Lex isn’t here, so-”
“Oh, we’ll keep looking for him in a second,” interrupted Starlight casually. “This is an excellent chance to demonstrate how true friendship can only be found in equality.”
Aria, however, had heard enough. “I don’t know what you did to Sonata,” she growled, glaring at Starlight as she moved into an aggressive crouch. “But if you think I’m going to just stand here and let you badmouth Lex after everything he’s done for this place, you’ve got another thing coming!”
Chuckling, Starlight pulled the wooden staff off of her back, her horn glowing as she swung it into a ready position, the ponies behind her blanching as they moved away from the brewing conflict. “You know, Sonata was reluctant to embrace our philosophy at first too. So I suppose it makes sense that her sister would be the same.”
Her smile turned dark as she pointed the forked end of the staff at Aria then. “And you’ll do exactly as well as she did when she put up a fight.”
Everypony held their breath as Aria and Starlight stared each other down, waiting to see who would make the first move.
Everypony except one.
“Wait! Wait, don’t fight!”
Rushing between the two mares, Sonata looked back and forth between them, her expression stricken. “Everypony just take a chill tablet, okay? You don’t need to get all up in each other’s faces this much when you only just met!”
“Are you kidding me?!” It was difficult to say whether anger or disbelief was stronger on Aria’s face right then. “Sonata, this troublemaker just showed up out of nowhere and started badmouthing Lex! How can you act like you’re okay with that?!”
Sonata grimaced at that, but didn’t back down. “Look, I know that wasn’t, like, the best introduction ever, but think about it! A lot of ponies have a problem with Lex at first, but end up becoming friends with him later! Like that one mare he saved a while back, Cloud-something or other! Or what about whatshername, Garden Grate? She fought him the first time they met, but now she thinks he’s the bee’s elbows! And then there’s you! You tried to kill him, remember? And now you guys are totes doin’ it!”
“Sure, after he slapped me down,” shot back Aria, “just like he did those other ponies.” Her lip curled in a sneer then, her eyes moving over to Starlight. “So I think I’ll save him the trouble, this time, and give the new girl her attitude adjustment right now.”
“Starlight’s my friend, Aria.” Sonata let that statement speak for itself, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Plus, she’s all about helping ponies, just like Lex! I know that her way of doing things can seem, like, super hard to deal with at first, and I’m still getting used to not singing anymore-”
“Wait, what?!” Aria’s jaw dropped at that, looking at Sonata in horror. “You don’t sing anymore?!”
Flinching, Sonata hesitated, glancing back at Starlight. It was only when the other mare gave her an encouraging nod that she looked back at her sister. “Not now that my cutie mark’s gone. It was totes making everyone else feel bad that I was, like, so good at it and they weren’t.”
Aria just stared at her, unable to believe what she was hearing. Ever since Lex had given her back her voice, she had found a reason to sing every single day. Whether it was a simple tune to keep herself entertained while leading a crew of ponies into Vanhoover or as part of a little show for Lex to help get him in the mood at night, Aria had reveled in being able to raise her voice in song after having been without it for so long. It was part of her nature as a Siren, as fundamental to who she was as her need to be adored. Even if Sonata hadn’t gone through the same hardships, it was unthinkable that she would feel any differently.
“There. You see, Aria?” Starlight stepped forward, her smirk still in place as she put her staff across her back again, giving Sonata a nod of satisfaction before focusing back on the mare across from her. “Your sister gave up her special talent, and now she has more friends than ever before. You will too, if you say goodbye to your cutie mark.”
But Aria’s gaze was locked on Sonata now, paying Starlight no mind. “I just got my voice back,” she hissed softly, not so much as blinking. “And now you’re telling me to give it up again?”
“Not your whole voice,” pleaded Sonata, “just the singing part of it, like what happened after we lost the Battle of the Bands back on Earth. I know that sounds like the worst, but just give it a chance! For realsies, this will bring us closer together, just like Lex did! You’ll see!”
“Oh I see, alright,” growled Aria, resuming her aggressive posture. “I see exactly what’s going on here.”
Nothing about the way Sonata was acting made sense. Even beyond her usual brainless antics, her behavior now was beyond unusual. But with that last bombshell, Aria had finally realized why that was.
The new hairstyle. Standing up for someone who’d criticized Lex. Losing her ability to sing and acting like that was a good thing. Not to mention subtler clues, like the way she kept wincing, as though reluctant to push her positions even as she kept glancing at that Starlight chick for approval. Aria had seen those signs often enough over the course of her life to know what they meant.
That mare, Starlight Glimmer, hadn’t just removed Sonata’s cutie mark.
She’d put her under an enchantment as well.
The realization made sweat run down the back of Aria’s neck. The enchantment itself didn’t seem like anything special; based on the way Sonata was acting, it was a run of the mill spell to make her think – or rather, feel – that Starlight was a trusted friend, to the point of being able to talk Sonata into doing things that she wouldn’t have otherwise. Even during their time on Earth, where their powers had been drastically curtailed, a spell that minor had still come effortlessly to Aria and her sisters, and they had used it liberally since that world’s humans had been so easy to control.
But Sonata was a Siren, which meant that enchantments of any type – let alone such a weak one – shouldn’t have worked on her at all. That had been why, for all of their endless squabbling, the three of them had never bothered trying to use their powers on each other during their time on Earth. It would have been like if they’d tried to drown each other back when they’d all had their original, water-breathing bodies: completely pointless. But unlike their ability to breathe underwater, Aria knew that their immunity to – as part of their ability to utilize – enchantments was a fundamental part of who she and her sisters were, regardless of what bodies they had now.
And yet Starlight Glimmer had somehow done it anyway.
Which meant that she was no ordinary pony. At the very least, she had to be a spellcaster of considerable power, the way Lex was.
Or, Aria decided, her gaze moving to the staff slung across Starlight’s back, remembering the way the other mare had wielded it like a weapon, she’s using a really powerful magic item.
Oblivious to the thoughts running through Aria’s mind, Sonata was still trying to convince her to stand down. “…and you know that Lex wouldn’t attack someone just because they were, like, saying mean things about him, so he wouldn’t want you to either! And-”
“Put a sock in it, Sonata!” barked Aria, knowing that you couldn’t reason with someone under an enchantment. “I’m done talking to you.”
Ignoring the hurt look on Sonata’s face, Aria turned all of her attention to the purple pony who was still watching the exchange with a smug look on her face. “You said your name was Starlight?” She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “Well you’re going to be seeing stars unless you give Sonata her cutie mark back right now…and undo whatever spell you’ve got her under.”
Starlight tilted her head, blinking in an exaggerated manner as she touched a hoof to her chest. “A spell? I don’t have her under a spell. I’ve simply freed her from the burden of her cutie mark and made her equal to the rest of us. And since she’s our friend now, I couldn’t possibly ruin her happiness by putting it back, especially since she doesn’t want it anyway.” Her smirk returned then, glancing over at Sonata. “Do you?”
Again, a pained look crossed Sonata’s face, but she forced a smile a moment later, shaking her head. “Nope!”
Her expression brimming with satisfaction, Starlight ushered Sonata back toward the rest of her entourage. “And there you have it. She knows that she’s better off this way.” Looking around at the crowd of ponies that was still watching the exchange – albeit from a slightly greater distance now, sensing the tension in the air – Starlight raised her voice as she waved a hoof at the four members of her retinue behind her. “And she’s not the only one! These four are just a few of the ponies who’ve found a better life by giving up their cutie marks! In our village, nopony is better than anypony else! We don’t have ponies who are strong or weak, pretty or ugly, talented or unskilled! Everyone is equal, which means that everyone is happy! If you want to live like that, instead of having to stay here and have Lex Legis lord his specialness over you, all you have to do is step forward right now and let me use this Staff of Sameness to relieve you of your cutie mark!”
Aria tensed, unable to help but glance back at the assembled ponies. She knew that most of them were firmly in Lex’s camp, but she hadn’t finished justifying Lex’s choice about who to resurrect before Starlight butted in. Such a sensitive issue, combined with how some of the newcomers weren’t favorably disposed toward him to begin with, could lead to some ponies – potentially more than a few – taking Starlight up on her offer. And if I try and fight her after they do, Aria realized, I’ll look like the bad guy! That would make things even worse! Even saying that she’d put Sonata under an enchantment would just sound like an excuse then!
Fighting down a surge of frustration, Aria hesitated, trying to decide if she should throw herself at Starlight right now before anyone answered, or use her own magic to try and sway the crowd. Both options had advantages and disadvantages, but-
“He doesn’t lord it over us.”
The voice came from an earth stallion that Aria didn’t recognize, stepping forward along with an earth mare who had a foreleg around him. The two were almost mirror images of each other, as he had a soft yellow coat with a bright orange mane and tail, while hers were exactly the opposite. More distinctive were their cutie marks, with his being a pair of shiny boots while hers was a pair of peaches connected at the stem. Stepping gingerly, as though his hooves were sore, he stallion nevertheless looked right at Starlight as he spoke. “Lex doesn’t lord how special he is over us.”
The stallion’s declaration set the crowd to murmuring, and made Starlight frown. “Of course he does! Sonata told me all about what he’s done here, fighting monsters and changing Sirens into ponies, and now he’s even bringing the dead back to life! How can you stand living here knowing that you’ll never measure up to that?!”
“Because I don’t want to measure up to that!”
Aria took a lot of pleasure in the stupefied expression that came over Starlight’s face then.
The stallion kept speaking. “Having that much power…being that special…it’s not something that just anypony can handle. I couldn’t. I couldn’t deal with having even a little bit of real authority. Instead I let myself be deceived, and was manipulated into doing terrible things, all because I became convinced that what I was doing was important.”
“That’s all the more reason why you should give up your cutie mark and come to my village!” pressed Starlight. “No one’s more important than anyone else there!”
But the stallion shook his head. “I got into trouble because I was fooled into thinking that I was part of something special. But it took someone who was actually special, and knew how to handle it, to make me realize how wrong I was. It was a painful lesson, in more ways than one, but it was one that I needed to learn, and only someone who wasn't like everyone else could have made me realize that. And even though it’s still hard to live with, I’m grateful for it.” He paused then, and the mare next to him whispered something in his ear, causing him to give her a warm smile before looking back at Starlight. “Lex Legis doesn’t lord how special he is over us. Instead, he uses his special qualities for us.”
A round of cheering broke out at that, as the assembled ponies hollered and stomped their hooves. Aria couldn’t help but snicker, watching as Starlight grit her teeth, clearly incensed over being so completely rejected. “And there you have it,” Aria snickered once the shouting had died down. “No one’s buying what you’re selling. So you can either give me back my sister – cutie mark and all – or I can make you. Your choice.”
Looking like she’d just bit into an apple and found a worm, Starlight looked over the crowd one last time before letting her eyes settle on Aria. “I guess I should have gone with my original plan to convince Lex of the superiority of our philosophy first, since he has such a grip over this town…”
“Um, Starlight?” ventured Sonata. “Maybe we should just go to River’s manor, then? Lex is probably-”
“QUIET!” roared Starlight, turning to glare at Sonata, who cowered at the sudden display of anger. Seeing that the other mare was properly intimidated, Starlight kept speaking to her even as she turned back toward Aria. “I’ll deal with Lex later! In the meantime, it seems I'll need to make a more convincing demonstration about why our way of life is superior!”
Aria smirked. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
An instant later, she began to sing a spell at the same moment that Starlight swung her staff around.
Starlight Glimmer was faster by a fraction of a second.
Telekinetically swinging her staff around in an arc, she fired a beam of energy as soon as she sighted Aria between the points of it. But Aria hadn’t been content to simply stand there and let herself be targeted, having started rushing to her left – opposite the direction that Starlight had swung her staff – even as she sang a quick tune. The result was that Starlight’s spell missed her by inches, lancing past her and causing the crowd to shriek as they scattered.
Not taking her eyes off of Starlight as she hurried to finish her own spell, Aria heard two voices rising in louder cries than the others. “PEACHY!”
“What’s happening?!”
A split-second later, the image of two peaches connected at the stem – the cutie mark of that mare who had been with the stallion who’d just told Starlight off – rushed over toward Starlight, coming to rest between the twin points of her weapon. Snarling at having hit the wrong target, Starlight flicked the staff behind her, tossing the captured cutie mark over her shoulder like a piece of junk mail. Unbound, it sailed toward the four ponies who had followed her, with the unicorn mare rushing to fetch a glass jar from the wagon she’d been pulling and bottling the disembodied tattoo up.
The sight was surreal, but Aria didn’t let it distract her. Instead she rushed through the last few syllables of her spell, striving to complete it before Starlight could bring her staff back into a ready position. Here goes nothing…
Aria knew she wasn’t as smart as Lex, but she wasn’t as dumb as Sonata either. That pushy purple pony that called herself Starlight Glimmer had been waving her big stick around ever since she’d showed up. Not only had she announced that it had a name – the incredibly stupid-sounding “Staff of Sameness” – but she’d openly admitted, and now demonstrated, that it was what she used to take cutie marks. All of which pointed to the idea that it was a powerful magic item, and quite likely what she’d used to enchant Sonata.
Which meant that getting it away from her was priority number one, since without it she’d be nothing more than an ordinary unicorn with a big mouth. The question then was what spell would be best for taking it from her?
Aria knew a telekinesis spell, but it was weak, good for little more than lifting rocks for her to kick. Her fireball spell was scorching hot, but the burst of flame it generated was too brief and too intense to actually set anything on fire, while her spell that generated a cone of flame had a short range. And trying to shatter wood with a sonic scream was much more difficult than something crystalline in nature. So instead, Aria had placed her hope in one of the simpler spells that she knew, one which might not work at all, but if it did would immediately separate Starlight from her staff.
An instant later, she finished casting, and Starlight’s staff became covered in a thin layer of extremely slippery grease.
Aria had no idea if that would work on unicorn telekinesis or not, but it was still the best chance she had, and she was already moving forward in preparation to grab the staff if Starlight dropped it…
Only to see the purple pony snicker and give the wooden weapon a quick shake, flicking the slippery substance off of it with contemptuous ease.
Realizing that her plan had failed, Aria immediately skidded to a halt, but Starlight was already pointing the weapon right at her. “Nice try,” she taunted, “but when it comes to magic, it looks like you’re not anything special!” She hadn’t even finished speaking when another beam from her staff lanced out.
And struck Aria dead-center.
The magic enveloped her instantly, causing Aria to groan as she strained against it. But despite her best efforts, the glow from the beam spread out to cover her completely, holding her in place. A second later she felt a strong tugging sensation on each flank, and the thought of losing her ability to sing gave her new strength as she squeezed her eyes shut and fought with everything she had.
For an instant she thought she felt the spell holding her waver, but the tugging sensation renewed itself immediately, and a second later it grew to be too much. It was with a moan of despair that Aria felt her cutie mark peel away from her flanks, floating over to Starlight Glimmer’s staff, the unicorn grinning darkly as she passed it off to one of her followers – the male unicorn this time – for bottling. But Aria barely had time to process what had just happened when there was a new sensation coming from her haunches, causing her to glance back as she saw the equals sign appear where her star-and-note symbol had been up until a moment ago.
Its work done, Starlight’s spell fizzled out a second later, letting Aria drop to the ground in a heap. “There,” cooed Starlight. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”
Her breathing ragged, Aria barely heard the other mare’s jeering. Instead, she took a deep breath and tried to sing. She didn’t even bother with lyrics, simply raising her voice in a wordless tune, silently hoping that somehow the change had been purely cosmetic, leaving her with her voice intact despite all evidence to the contrary.
But that hope was shattered a second later as, instead of a beautiful melody, Aria heard a tone-deaf screeching coming from her throat.
Cutting herself off so fast she nearly choked, Aria somehow forced herself to stay calm. Steadying herself, she tried again, putting all of her focus into holding a single note. But even that was beyond her now, unable to get the tone correct and causing her voice to come out as a cacophonous warble instead of an unwavering pitch, causing her to abandon the effort once again.
Sonata had been right. It was just like when they’d had their gems shattered after the Battle of the Bands back on Earth.
Her reaction to that must have showed on her face, because Starlight spoke up again. “Aw, don’t look so down,” she smirked, making no effort to hide how she was gloating. “It’s not that you’re a bad singer now, it’s just that you’re not any better than anyone else.”
For a moment Aria couldn’t answer her, her legs shaky as she stood up. Slowly, she looked over at Starlight, then past her, beyond Sonata – who was giving her a heartbroken look – over to where Starlight’s follower was screwing the lid onto the jar containing her cutie mark, placing it back in his wagon. “Give it back…” she hissed softly, taking a step forward.
“Ah ah ah,” warned Starlight, the corners of her lips still turned up even as she waved her staff threateningly. “I know the adjustment can be hard, but you just need to give it a little time-”
“Give it back!” snarled Aria, baring her teeth as she kept advancing.
She stopped only when another beam of energy from the staff impacted the ground in front of her hooves. “That’s far enough!” snapped Starlight, her features stern now. “If you want to become our friend now that you’re our equal then you’ll have to-”
“GIVE IT BACK!” Aria’s voice was a roar this time. “Give it back right now, or I’LL KILL YOU!!!”
Then she cast a spell.
Sonata watched in horror as Aria’s fireball exploded against Starlight’s hastily-raised shield spell.
“We’ve got to stop them!” she wailed, rushing forward, intent on putting herself between the two of them again. But she didn’t make it more than two steps forward before Double Diamond and Night Glider grabbed her from each side, holding her back.
“Sonata, slow down! Starlight can handle this!” protested Night Glider.
Double Diamond nodded. “Yeah, remember when Starlight first got rid of your cutie mark? You freaked out exactly the way your sister is now…magic and all.” That last part was accompanied by an uncomfortable look, one which was also reflected on the faces of Sugar Belle, Night Glider, and Party Favor.
“Leave this to Starlight,” pleaded the latter pony, his voice anxious. “If you use that weird magic of yours again now, it’d make you different from the rest of us.”
“I know,” admitted Sonata with a wince. “But Aria’s spells are different than mine. They’re more…” – a thin black beam of energy shot out from Aria’s outstretched hoof, causing Starlight to dodge to the side as she fired a return shot from the Staff of Sameness – “Fighty. If we don’t do something, they might seriously hurt each other.”
Sonata could still remember how she’d kept fighting after Starlight had taken her cutie mark away. Losing it had kept her from using the natural magic that she’d always had, where she could simply sing in order to make people feel how she wanted them to feel, like when she’d helped rev Garden up while fighting those ghouls. But casting actual spells, the way she’d learned how to do after she’d become a pony back on Everglow, was something she’d still been able to do. Even with her singing voice having become the worst, she’d still been able to do things like scream super loud or make people fall asleep. So it was no surprise that Aria, who’d learned a whole bunch of beat-‘em-up spells instead since she’d been stuck living with those awful fish monsters, could still use those.
But as concerned as she was, her new friends didn’t feel the same way. “It’ll be fine, Sonata,” soothed Sugar Belle. “Starlight has the Staff of Sameness, remember? She can handle your sister’s tantrum.”
“I still can’t believe how it can do so much more than just remove cutie marks,” noted Double Diamond, a touch of awe in his voice as he glanced back at the battle.
“Mage Meadowbrook must have wanted a world where everyone was equal too.” The thought made Night Glider smile happily. “We’re lucky that somepony as kindhearted as Starlight found it.”
“You wanna fight?!” shrieked Starlight, charging up a blast of magic. “I’ll give you a fight!”
But before she could unleash her attack, Aria sang – or rather, crooned – another spell, and suddenly her form blurred, causing her to shift and waver like a painting in the rain. Cursing, Starlight unleashed the spell she’d prepared at the persistent nag, trying to freeze her inside a block of ice. But it was harder to target her now that her image was indistinct, and the shot went wide, almost hitting another pony in the rapidly-scattering cloud.
The miss made Starlight’s lip curl, but sound of Aria’s discordant voice being raised in another ear-splitting ditty left her no time to be upset. An instant later, the blurry image of Aria rushed forward, covering the distance between them with incredible speed. Starlight’s eyebrows shot up, barely recognizing the accelero spell – or some closer variation thereof – in time to bring her staff up in front of her face protectively. It was only by sheer luck that she guessed correctly, feeling Aria’s hoof connect with the weapon in a heavy punch a split-second later. Even then, Starlight winced at the sound of the impact.
Fortunately, the staff was able to take the hit, the wood thick enough that it absorbed the blow without suffering any damage, sending a thrill of relief through her. If it had been damaged – or worse, destroyed – then Starlight knew she would have been in real trouble.
After all, she needed it to pretend that all the magic she was using came from it and not her.
Of course, the fact that Sonata – and now Aria – could keep using magic after losing their cutie marks gave her some cover if worse came to worst, since she could say that she was the same as them. But that was only so long as nopony realized that she hadn’t actually given up her own cutie mark to begin with. If they ever found out that she’d simply hidden it with body paint…
Shoving Aria away, Starlight took a step back, forcing herself to stay focused on the here-and-now. Aria’s magic might be different than Sonata’s, but if she couldn’t be beaten into submission, then she’d simply have to be subdued another way! This worked on Sonata! It’ll work on her!
Focusing intently on the hazy image that was her opponent, Starlight hefted her staff toward her as though calling upon its power. “ENOUGH!” she yelled, focusing intently. The cogeria spell wasn’t that hard to use under normal circumstances, since all it did was make the target suggestible, but if Aria was anything like her sister, it would be an uphill battle to make it affect her. “Aria, I am not your enemy! Release your spells and stand down!”
Although she couldn’t see the other mare beneath her blurring enchantment, Starlight could feel her struggling. “Y-you…!”
“RELEASE YOUR SPELLS,” bellowed Starlight, concentrating harder, “AND STAND DOWN!”
“I won’t!” came Aria’s voice, but Starlight could hear the tension in it, knowing she was fighting it with everything she had. “I WON’T!”
Starlight could feel her spell slipping; Aria did indeed share her sister’s resistance to mind-affecting spells. But Starlight refused to let that stop her, knowing what was at stake. I have to win! If I can’t beat Sonata’s sister, I definitely won’t be able to overcome Lex Legis! Sonata had been emphatic about that, telling her how Lex was strong enough to defeat both of the Royal Sisters at the same time, among numerous other powerful monsters. But rather than make Starlight nervous, she’d found it exciting, knowing that if she could get him on her side, she’d be able to spread her doctrine of equality across all of Equestria! Then there’d finally be true harmony! A world where everypony could be happy together!
A world where no one would ever have to lose a friend because of a cutie mark…
“YES, YOU WILL!”
Her eyes glowing white, Starlight held nothing back as she pushed her spell onto Aria with everything she had…and broke through, feeling Aria’s resistance suddenly fall away.
Panting, Starlight nevertheless smiled as she looked at the now-compliant mare. “Now…drop those spells you put on yourself, would you please?”
For a second nothing happened, as though Aria was still trying to fight, but a moment later the blurring effect ended, revealing her standing there with a vacant expression on her face. But a moment later her features twisted, and Starlight realized that she was still fighting it. Maybe I should have used persuadere instead, worried Starlight. But her anxiety passed after just a moment. So long as there were no sudden interruptions, Aria wouldn’t be able to get out from under her spell anytime soon-
A flicker out of the corner of her eyes and a sudden gasp from her friends was the only warning Starlight had, but it was enough to make her whirl around, raising her staff on instinct.
That motion caused the small object flying at her head – and surrounded by a glowing aura – to just barely miss her horn, instead scraping along her forehead painfully before flipping past her. The other one – similarly wrapped in light – impacted her staff, dragging over it harmlessly and slipping behind her. But she didn’t have time to focus on what they were as a pony rushed past her, making a beeline for the mare Starlight had just enchanted. “Aria, get yourself together!”
“What…?” Reaching a hoof up to her forehead, Starlight’s eyes widened as it came away bloody. But her surprise quickly turned to anger as she saw the pony, a tall unicorn mare with a vermilion coat and a cutie mark of a white picket fence, quickly slap Aria across the face, making Sonata’s sister blink as she suddenly came back to herself. No! I had just gotten her under control! “I don’t know who you are, but you’re going to regret that,” Starlight promised through gritted teeth.
The mare, seeing that Aria was regaining control of herself, turned to give Starlight a dark look, clearly unimpressed by the threat. Her horn glowing, the two objects wrapped in her telekinetic aura – knives, Starlight could see now – moved into position in front of her. One of them was still dripping blood.
“My name is Garden Gate,” announced the newcomer. “And I think the only one who's about to have some new regrets…”
She slowly rotated her knives then, making the tips point directly at Starlight in a clear threat.
Garden Gate didn’t respond to Aria’s griping, knowing that it was perfunctory. What concerned her more was the pained note in the other mare’s voice, as though she was still recovering from whatever spell she had been under. “Are you okay?”
The question left her lips without Garden ever taking her eyes off of the purple unicorn across from her. She might not have been Fencer anymore, but Vanhoover had left too much of a mark on her for Garden to look away from an enemy. But whoever the newcomer was, she didn’t rush to attack, instead regarding Garden – and the knives she was still holding aloft – with a wary expression as she rubbed the cut on her forehead.
“I’m fine.” Out of her peripheral vision, Garden saw Aria move up next to her. “No, scratch that. I’m ticked! That nag put me under an enchantment! Me! A Siren!” As much anger as she was trying to inject into her voice then, there was an undercurrent of disbelief – and fear – that was impossible to miss.
But Garden was less concerned with that than she was with the larger implications of what Aria had just said. “Is that what’s wrong with Sonata?” she asked, keeping her voice low. Risking a quick glance to the side, she confirmed again what she’d glimpsed right before her surprise attack: that Lex’s girlfriend (or rather, one of his girlfriends, according to what Aria had told her previously) was biting her lip, looking back and forth between Aria and that purple mare as though worried about both of them. Huddled around her were a group of four other ponies, all of whom had the same cutie mark for some reason…
Aria nodded, a sour expression on her face. “That idiot won’t be any help until the spell’s broken,” she murmured.
“Can you do that with your magic?”
Aria considered the question for a second before giving a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know. If Starlight’s strong enough to enchant us in the first place, it’ll probably be tough.”
Garden raised a brow at the unfamiliar name. “Starlight?”
“Starlight Glimmer.” Aria spat the name hatefully, glaring at the mare in question. “She takes cutie marks, replacing them with these…these…equals signs.” She turned to glare at the mark on her flank now, baring her teeth at it. “Once you have them, you lose your natural abilities. I can still cast the new magic I learned, but I can’t sing anymore!”
Garden let out a slow breath, considering that. “So does that mean you can’t power me up the way Sonata did when I was fighting those ghouls?”
“You catch on quick, don’t you?” Aria’s sarcastic remark was followed by an angry look. “But that might have been different if you’d gotten here sooner! Where were you?!”
“At the memorial site.”
“The what?”
“The mass grave on the other side of the camp,” explained Garden. “Some ponies went there to lay down tokens for their loved ones. I went along because a fight broke out there a few days ago between those who were grateful to Lex and those who blamed him for killing the ghouls instead of saving them.” The curl of her lip made it clear what she thought about the latter group. “I came running once I realized something was happening over here.”
“Next time run faster,” came Aria’s withering reply.
Garden didn’t respond, instead keeping her eyes on Starlight. The mare was still standing there, holding that forked staff in her telekinetic grip and watching them, but otherwise wasn’t doing anything else. Why wasn’t she attacking? Was she waiting for something? It was enough to make Garden nervous, but she wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste. “Listen, when fighting a unicorn, you want to aim for their horn. If it’s disabled, so is their ability to use magic.” She smirked as a memory came back to her then, recalling a certain confrontation in a warehouse in Vanhoover. “Lex notwithstanding.”
But Aria shook her head. “Her powers don’t come from her horn. They come from that staff she’s using.”
Garden risked another glance at Aria, just to make sure she was being serious. “Her staff?” Looking back at it, the thing seemed more like a twisted piece of wood than some sort of magical weapon. But then again, it’s not like I’ve ever seen a magical staff before, she admitted silently.
“We get that thing away from her, and she’ll be completely defenseless. Or we just knock her around until she's too punch-drunk to use it.” Aria’s tone made it clear that she found either option acceptable, a smile growing on her face a second later. “In fact, I have an idea…”
Starlight kept a close eye on Aria and Garden Gate as they murmured to each other, clearly trying to work out a battle plan.
But that was fine. As far as Starlight was concerned, they could take all the time they needed. It gave her a chance to make her own preparations.
She had known, thanks to Sonata’s endless series of stories about her boyfriend, that things would almost certainly come down to a fight once she met Lex Legis. His philosophy, after all, sounded like it was the opposite of her own. But Starlight wasn’t afraid of magically mixing it up with some King Sombra-wannabe; even if Sonata’s stories about Lex weren’t exaggerated, Starlight couldn’t imagine herself losing to anyone, not when she was fighting for something she knew, down to the bottom of her heart, was right.
Running into Aria first hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. If anything, it had been convenient. A quick cutie mark removal here, a suped-up charm spell there, and there’d be one less pony to worry about interfering when she finally took on Lex.
And for the most part, things had gone that way. Although Aria’s magic had been more combative than Starlight had initially expected, she’d been able to bring the troublesome Siren down without too much trouble. That was important, since if Lex didn’t know that she was here already, Starlight felt certain that he would soon; with the audience they had, somepony was sure to tell him, if they hadn’t already. Starlight wasn’t worried about facing him, but that didn’t mean she wanted to go solo against him and Aria together.
Except now this new pony, Garden Gate, had messed things up.
The new girl doesn’t look so tough, Starlight decided at length. Despite how serious it would have been if that surprise attack had injured her horn, Starlight had no fear of Garden's knives getting that close again. All she had to do was start laying some defensive spells on herself ahead of time to minimize the threat of the blades, and both Garden and Aria seemed more than happy to give her as much time as she needed.
Fortunately, since she was still holding her staff in her telekinesis, her horn was already glowing, meaning that Starlight gave no outward indication as she powered herself up. One low-grade shield spell, just to be safe. It wasn’t as strong as the ones she could conjure when she put her mind to it, more of an impact-dampener than a barrier, but on the plus side it wouldn’t require any concentration on her part either. And an accelero spell of my own, in case Aria rushes me again. Plus a little spin on that to boost reaction speed in addition to movement speed… Coming up with that last one had taken her a minute or two of working out the calculations in her head, but it hadn’t been too hard to do. More importantly was that those were all easy spells to cast, not requiring her to push herself. And with any luck, this will be more than enough to put those two down.
If not, then she’d have to start getting serious, and she wanted to save that for when she faced off against Lex.
Across from her, Garden and Aria had stopped talking and were starting to circle her. The former was heading to her right, while the latter was moving toward her left. The sight made Starlight snicker. “Finished your little strategy session?” she taunted.
Neither mare answered her, instead moving until they were about ninety degrees apart.
Then Garden Gate charged her, knives raised, as Aria began casting a spell with her mangled singing voice.
No surprises there, snorted Starlight to herself, moving right to try and put Garden into Aria’s line of fire. Both mares adjusted their course to keep her triangulated, however, clearly having expected her to do that. But that’s fine.
Aria was clearly more comfortable hanging back and tossing out spells at a distance; her earlier attempt to rush in and punch her had clearly been done in a fit of pique rather than any sort of strategy. Garden, likewise, was obviously a close-range fighter. The fact that she’d barreled right past her during her surprise attack made it clear that she wasn’t comfortable telekinetically wielding her knives at long range, at least not with the manual dexterity required for quick, precise movements. That was common among unicorns, since telekinesis didn’t allow for tactile feedback.
The two of them were clearly hoping to overwhelm her by working in tandem, with Garden pressing her attack while Aria sniped at her. But they're dreaming if they think that'll be enough to defeat me.
Then Garden was on her, one knife coming in high, the other low.
Smirking, Starlight ducked under the first strike, adjusting her staff to knock the other blade off-course. Nor did she stop there, bringing the base of the staff around in a sharp blow that caught Garden across the side of the face, clearly not having expected her to retaliate physically. Stumbling, she fell back, bringing her knives back around to try and ward off a follow-up strike, but Starlight thrust the butt of her staff between them, catching Garden hard in the chest and drawing a grunt of pain from her. The sound made Starlight chuckle. “Don’t worry,” she sneered. “Once this is over and I’ve removed your cutie mark, I won’t hold a grudge.”
Rubbing her jaw, Garden Gate spat on the ground. “I’ve killed flesh-eating ghouls with nothing but a pencil. Taking out one nag with delusions of grandeur about equality won’t be anywhere near as hard.”
Starlight was about to reply, but Garden didn’t give her a chance, stepping forward with her knives zig-zagging in. Hopping back to give herself some room, Starlight waved the forked ends of her staff toward the flying weapons. She managed to collide with one, deflecting it, but the other zipped past her defense and delivered a painful cut across her side, managing to get through her minor shield spell. Biting back a grunt of pain, Starlight reversed course, stepping in to try and batter Garden again, but the vermillion mare was ready for her this time, sidestepping the quick jab she made and raising her foreleg to catch a return strike.
Meanwhile, Aria had finished casting whatever spell she’d been crooning, and had started on another. That was enough to worry Starlight, sparing a glance at the other mare even as Garden’s knives flew around her from either side, forcing her to rear up on her hind legs and twist her body to avoid them, her shield spell saving her from a painful slice across her belly. What did that first spell do? And what’s she casting now?
“Ready?” yelled Aria suddenly. Starlight blinked, surprised as Garden suddenly broke off her attack, stepping backward in anticipation of…something.
She found out what a moment later, as all of a sudden she was surrounded by a thick bank of fog.
What the…? Stumbling backward out of instinct, Starlight glanced every which way, but there was only mist in every direction. She could still hear her friends, their voices calling out her name in alarm, but the fog was thick enough that she could barely see the end of her staff out in front of her. But as disorienting as it was to suddenly be surrounded by mist, Starlight found herself more puzzled than afraid. This is their big plan? To blind me with fog? What a joke! They won’t be able to see me any more than I’ll be able to see them!
But she was proven wrong a few seconds later.
There was a loud clapping of hooves, as though somepony was applauding, and then Aria’s voice could be heard. “Ten feet ahead, ten feet left!”
What? What’s she talking- Starlight had her answer as Garden Gate suddenly emerged from the fog, snarling as her knives suddenly zipped in. Starlight wasn’t able to react in time, even with her reaction speed enhanced, and this time couldn’t stop herself from crying out as the sharp blades sliced into her, drawing painful cuts along her foreleg and chest. Circling rather than falling back, she tried to put some distance between herself and Garden Gate…only to find the other mare already in retreat, recalling her knives and vanishing into the mist, the thick fog obscuring even the light from her telekinetic aura.
The entire exchange had taken only a few seconds, leaving Starlight dazed. What just happened?
Another set of hoofclaps were heard. “Five feet back, fifteen feet left!”
She’s tracking me! Realizing that Aria was somehow monitoring her position – no, the positions of her and Garden both – and calling out directions to her partner, Starlight whirled, trying to calculate the direction that Garden would be approaching from. If it’s her left, then it should be…here! Not content to wait for the other unicorn to slash her again, Starlight immediately lashed out with a spell to catch Garden in a block of ice. Not a bad plan, she grinned to herself, but you’re still not able to play at my-
Her thought was cut off as Garden Gate emerged in a completely different direction than she’d anticipated, giving her another cut across her cheek and one across her hind leg, just below her fake cutie mark, a moment later. Again Starlight couldn’t stop herself from crying out, stumbling backward and nearly dropping her staff as she struggled to retreat…only for Garden to immediately fade back into the fog again, leaving Starlight desperately trying to recover from the sudden assault. "Told you it wouldn't be hard," she snickered as she slipped away.
Starlight had no answer, still trying to figure out what was going on. How?! She shouldn't have come from that direction!
Another series of hoofclaps rang out, followed by Aria’s voice once again. “Ten feet directly left!”
Knowing that Garden was about to attack again, Starlight tried to figure out where those instructions would make her emerge from…only to hesitate, recalling how she’d been completely wrong just a moment ago. As such, she was caught off-guard when Garden emerged from exactly where she would have expected her to otherwise, dealing another pair of painful cuts to Starlight before fading back into the fog.
Now bleeding from more than a half-dozen wounds, Starlight finally realized what was going on. The hoofclaps. They’re a code. The instructions Aria was calling out were deliberately jumbled, with the number of hoofclaps she made before she announced them being how to decipher them. One set means that the distances are real. Another must mean to reverse the directions. And there are probably more.
There was no way to break their code in time. As intelligent as she knew she was, Starlight had no illusions about being able to figure out what the hoofclaps meant before Garden Gate carved her to pieces. At this rate…
More hoofclaps, four this time. “Twenty feet ahead, ten feet right!”
Starlight immediately plunged into mist ahead of her, rushing forward without stopping in a random direction in an effort to dodge strikes she knew were coming. Luck was with her, since she didn’t plunge headfirst into Garden, but she’d barely gone more than a few steps before the blood running down her legs made her slip, almost losing her balance. Leaning on her staff now, her breath coming in pants, in occurred to Starlight then that, as confident as she’d felt at the start of the fight, these two had her on the ropes…and weren’t going to stop.
If she didn’t change the situation soon, she was going to lose.
Rushing in a random direction again, Starlight knew she no longer had the luxury of conserving her energy for her match with Lex. If she wanted to beat these two, she was going to have to go all out.
Garden Gate made sure to keep her breathing slow and steady as she crept through the mist.
It was one of many techniques that she’d picked up while trying to survive in Vanhoover. Not only did deep breaths help with the fatigue of continued vigorous motion, they were also quieter than if she’d been panting. Little things like that had often made the difference between life and death when she’d been trying to avoid danger.
Except right now, I am the danger. The thought brought a wry grin to her face, knowing that only a short time ago, comparing herself to the ghouls that had infested Vanhoover would have crippled her with guilt and shame. But no longer; those feelings had been a part of Fencer, and that wasn’t who she was anymore. As Garden Gate, she could take the skills she’d learned during her descent into ruthlessness and use them to help others. That was something else that Lex had given her when he’d put her on the path to redemption.
Even if Aria was the one who came up with putting them to use like this.
As unpleasant as Aria was, Garden had to admit that her plan was brilliant. First a spell to track our positions, then she calls out Starlight’s location so I can get the jump on her…after she claps the proper code. That last part was the most ingenious, since it prevented Starlight from knowing where Garden would attack from. To come up with a scheme like this, Lex must be rubbing off on her, she decided, before wincing at the inadvertent double entendre she’d made, recalling that incredibly uncomfortable conversation she’d had with Aria several days ago outside of Lex’s bedroom. Not what I need to be thinking about right now!
Three claps suddenly rang out, the code for “switch the numbers you hear,” followed by the sound of Aria’s voice. “Fifteen feet back, ten feet left!”
Taking a moment to orient herself so she was facing toward the sound of Aria’s voice – another part of Aria’s plan, since terms like “back” or “left” were meaningless without a point of reference – Garden quickly decoded the instructions. Ten feet back, fifteen feet to my left! Without hesitation, she turned and hurried in that direction, raising her knives as she moved.
But Starlight had already fled by the time she got there, leaving nothing but a rapid swirl of fog as evidence of her quick retreat.
Garden bit back a grunt of frustration, not wanting to take the chance that Starlight was still close enough to hear it. Still, this was the third time now that Starlight had moved – apparently in a random direction – as soon as she’d heard Aria call out instructions. It was a flaw in their strategy that was delaying their efforts to bring the deranged mare down.
Delaying. Not defeating.
At some point, Starlight would mess up. With no way to effectively counterattack, she was moving blindly, which meant that she was just dragging out the inevitable. With all of the wounds she’d already taken, Starlight would eventually tire herself out, at which point the battle would effectively be over. I’ll be able to get her staff away from her then, and maybe one good hit on her horn just to make sure.
Of course, all of this would have been over by now if she’d been able to get a clean hit on Starlight’s horn before, but even with the advantage of attacking from concealment, that had proven to be too difficult to manage. Unicorns learned from a young age to protect their most vulnerable point, and with Aria’s announcement of each impending attack, Starlight was on guard even if she didn’t know where Garden was coming from. That, and there seemed to be some sort of odd resistance whenever Garden had gotten a hit in, as though Starlight was wrapped in some sort of thick, invisible cloth…
“Up!”
The sound of Aria’s voice, this time not preceded by clapping, made Garden stop, wondering if she’d heard correctly. But her doubts were dispelled a moment later as Aria’s voice came again. “She’s flying straight up!”
“And you’re going down!” roared Starlight’s voice a moment later.
Then came the sound of Aria crying out in pain.
Step one, Starlight knew, is to get out of this fog.
She briefly considered using a cloudwalking spell, but discarded that idea almost immediately. That would have let her climb on top of the mist that Aria had summoned, but then she’d have been vulnerable to Garden attacking her from below. And Starlight was through being a practice dummy for that nag to sharpen her knives on.
Teleporting would have been a better idea, but not by much. Since Starlight had no intention of quitting the field, that meant she’d need to keep it short-range. But with no easy way to tell how far the bank of fog extended, moving a short distance ran the risk of ending up in just another patch of mist, which would be pointless. Cutting loose was one thing; wasting her energy was another.
Instead, Starlight wrapped herself in her telekinetic aura, and propelled herself straight up.
She emerged from the fog bank almost immediately. Now outside of it, a glance down made it clear that it hadn’t been very big at all, only a few dozen feet in diameter and not even ten feet in height. They were herding me, she realized. Attacking from whatever direction would drive me back toward the center of the fog!
The thought made her growl, and she swung her head around, spotting Aria immediately. The insufferable mare was gawking up at her, clearly not having expected her enemy to be able to take to the skies. “Up!” she yelped a moment later, obviously calling out to where Garden Gate was still hiding in the fog. “She’s flying straight up!”
“And you’re going down!” yelled Starlight, her frustration with the pigtailed pony boiling over as she poured power into her horn. The aura around it grew correspondingly brighter, and it was only belatedly that Starlight remembered to point her staff at Aria, catching a glimpse of Sonata and the other equalized ponies watching her out of the corner of her eye.
Then she unleashed a heavy blast of magic straight at the troublesome Siren.
Aria tried to dodge it, throwing herself to the side even as she started to atonally sing another spell, but she wasn’t fast enough. Starlight’s magic caught her directly in the side, hitting her with enough force that her body dug a furrow into the dirt as she was knocked back, turning her tone-deaf singing into a scream of pain. Despite Aria not having her cutie mark anymore, Starlight found that the sound was music to her ears, to the point that she couldn’t resist taunting her. “You brought this on yourself! I just wanted to be friends, but you turned it into a fight!”
“How about…” panted Aria, climbing to her hooves, “I give you…a little something…to make up for it!” She quickly song another off-key tune, and before Starlight had a chance to try and disrupt her casting, several small points of light appeared, streaking toward her.
They made it to within a foot of her before Starlight raised a shield, smirking as she watched them shatter against it. “Sorry, those aren’t really my style. I much prefer something like THIS!” Without hesitation, Starlight threw another heavy magical blast slammed down at Aria, bigger than before. Too injured to get out of the way, the Siren didn’t have a chance to so much as cry out as the magical attack engulfed her, the force of it driving her further into the dirt.
Off to the side, Sonata was yelling something, but Starlight ignored her, trusting that the others would keep her in check. Instead, she floated back down to the ground – telekinetic flight wasn’t hard by itself, especially when she had accelero to help boost her speed, but keeping it up while casting other spells was taxing even for her – casually strolling over to where Aria had fallen. A little persuadere now that she’s unconscious should do the trick, she decided. Then she’ll be-
“Nn…nngh…”
Starlight tensed as Aria began to stir, but relaxed just as quickly as the other mare’s eyes fluttered open, the Siren clearly clinging to consciousness only by a thread. “I’m impressed you’re still awake,” Starlight admitted. “But right now, I think it’s time for you to take a little nap.” Bringing her staff around, she pointed the forked end of it right at Aria’s face. “Don’t worry. Once you wake up, you’ll see things my way.”
Aria’s eyes shifted for just a moment, looking at something behind her, and it was only because Starlight had cast a spell to increase her reaction speed that she was able to respond in time. Not bothering to turn around, she spun her staff in a half-circle, reversing its direction as she pointed the forked end directly behind her and fired. A half-second later, she glanced back…
…to see Garden Gate, her face twisted into a snarl and her knives raised, now encased in a large block of ice.
“I almost forgot about you,” snickered Starlight. “Almost. But you know what they say: attack me from behind once, shame on you. Attack me from behind twice, shame on-”
The sound of off-key singing from behind her made Starlight realize that she was more correct than she’d intended.
Aria finished her spell in the same instant that Starlight teleported away, unleashing a sonic scream through the space where the crazy unicorn had been just a fraction of a second earlier. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Starlight reappear less than a dozen feet away, letting out a gasp of relief at the near miss.
But Aria hadn’t been aiming for her to begin with.
An instant later, the block of ice containing Garden Gate shattered into a thousand pieces, and Aria had the spiteful pleasure of watching Starlight’s expression turn into one of horrified realization as the vermillion mare was released from her frozen prison.
“STARLIGHT GLIMMER!” bellowed Garden furiously as she charged, knives whipping forward.
Her eyes wide and her teeth pulled back in a grimace, Starlight’s answer was a mangled shriek of disbelief as she fell back beneath the furious onslaught, bringing her staff up in a desperate defense. But Garden was going all-out now, advancing in a fury as her blades zipped back and forth. With each pass, new wounds opened on Starlight’s body, staining more of her purple coat dark red.
But the assault ended as quickly as it began when Starlight suddenly rose back into the air, visibly straining as she shot upward. Cursing, Garden sent her knives flying after her, but once they were past the end of her hooves it was easy to see that her degree of fine manipulation with them plunged, Starlight easily batting away attacks that had danced past her defenses before. Even so, the bloodied pony rose up higher, until she was several dozen feet off the ground, safely beyond Garden’s ability to easily injure her.
From her position above the battlefield, Starlight took several deep breaths, her features slowly contorting into a look of rage. “YOU TWO DON’T SEEM TO GET IT!” she screamed, incensed. “THIS BATTLE IS OVER!!!”
Her declaration wasn’t idle, as she raised her staff above her head, her eyes glowing bright white. The aura surrounding her flared, making her mane and tail wave in a non-existent breeze as a bright ball of energy gathered between the forks of her staff.
Backing up so she was standing next to where Aria was still lying on the ground, Garden didn’t take her eyes off of Starlight. “Tell me you know a spell that can help with this!”
“Just one.” Somehow managing to sing a quick tune despite the pain she was in, Aria reached out and tapped Garden on the flank. “There.”
Blinking, the other mare glanced between her and where Starlight was preparing to unleash magical devastation on them. “…And?!”
“Flight spell,” rasped Aria. “She won’t expect you to charge her up there.”
“What? But I can’t-”
“You can, now do it! Before she finishes us off!”
For a moment Garden hesitated, then Aria saw her face settle into a determined expression. Looking back up at Starlight – who by now had an uncomfortably large ball of magical power gathered, glowing as brightly as her eyes – Garden crouched down, as though preparing to leap. And then she lunged upward…and kept going.
Barely able to move, Aria could only watch as Garden shot toward Starlight, barely able to see the other unicorn’s face contort in surprise as she realized she wasn’t so unreachable after all. She held her breath as she saw Starlight struggle to bring her staff down, trying to unleash the huge attack before Garden reached her. At the same time, Garden reached back with her forelegs, her knives hovering just beyond the ends of them, preparing to cut Starlight down to size once and for all.
She didn’t quite make it in time.
Starlight was barely able to get her breath back as she slowly lowered herself to the ground.
That was too close. Aria casting some sort of flight spell on Garden Gate had caught her completely off-guard. Other than using telekinesis, which Garden hadn't been since there'd been no aura around her, Starlight only knew of one spell that could make somepony fly, and it was an incredibly fragile bit of magic, creating butterfly wings out of gossamer and morning dew. Aria’s spell hadn’t resulted in anything so obvious or so delicate, and as a result Garden Gate had come very close to knocking her out of the sky.
But close doesn’t count, Starlight reassured herself as she touched down. Her knees felt like jelly, her lungs felt like they were burning, and her horn ached, to say nothing off the cuts all over her body. But despite how beat up she felt, Starlight couldn’t help but smile.
After all, as bad as she felt right now, she knew that Aria and Garden Gate were far worse off.
A glance over at the smoking crater that they were lying in confirmed that much. The two of them were still breathing, but that was the best that could be said for them. Sprawled out on top of each other, it was obvious that neither would be getting up again for quite a while. Which means that I have time to take a little break, Starlight decided, flopping down onto her back.
Staring upward, Starlight took a moment to appreciate how silent everypony was in the aftermath of the battle. As awed – or perhaps frightened – as even Sonata and the others seemed to be, Starlight couldn’t bring herself to care. She was going to need every moment of rest she could get between now and when Lex showed up, since there was no way he could have missed that last exchange. But until he arrives, I’m going to just lie here and enjoy the warm weather, clear blue sky, and…huh, that’s odd.
Despite it being the middle of the day, there was an owl, of all things, circling overhead.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” laughed Turbo. “So half the guards at the entrance just abandoned their post…because one guy offered them free ice cream?”
“To be fair, it was pretty good ice cream,” admitted Slip ‘n’ Slide with a smirk. “Even without any sprinkles on top.”
“Oh Celestia, that’s right!” guffawed Funshine. “I forgot to mention the waitress at that place! She would not take no for an answer when it came to sprinkles!”
“Don’t forget that she was the reason we had enough ice cream to trick those guards in the first place!” added Hopscotch, clearly worried that the waitress wouldn’t get the credit she deserved. “She might have been a little pushy, but she was really nice!”
“I still don’t see why you couldn’t have brought me some ice cream,” muttered Piggy, crossing his forelegs grumpily.
“There there,” soothed Granola Bar, knowing that the fat little stallion was upset about not being the center of attention. “How about I ask the chefs if they can make some ice cream for you for dessert tonight.”
That was enough to make Piggy’s eyes light up. “Really?”
Granola Bar nodded, giving the fat little stallion an indulgent smile. “That way you can have some just like we did.”
Piggy’s squeal of happiness made Turbo roll his eyes, grinning ruefully. “Some things never change.”
“I’m just glad that Cozy, Aisle, and Pillow are okay,” sighed Cloudbank, leaning back on one of the plush sofas that lined the drawing room, or whatever that old butler had called it when he’d escorted them there. “Especially Cozy. She took it so hard after Pillow died.”
“And the same thing happening to us probably didn’t help,” noted Thermal Draft wryly, giving Cloudbank’s ribs a light poke.
But her levity had the opposite effect, as an awkward silence fell.
The initial reunion between Turbo and his friends had been heartfelt in the extreme. After the initial shock and disbelief at seeing their lost comrade once again among the living, there had been an impassioned round of hugs, laughter, and tears. They had just been collecting themselves when Thermal Draft and Cloudbank had dropped by, the pair having found out that their own group of friends had left for Canterlot (without having subsequently come back, the way Turbo’s had). That had kicked off a new round of discussion, as the three resurrected ponies had shared the story of their ill-fated trip into Vanhoover together, after which Turbo’s friends had started catching them up on everything that had gone on during their…absence.
Of course, the full scope of what had happened to the three formerly-deceased ponies was something that no one had been able to bring themselves to broach. Even Thermal Draft looked like she was regretting her choice of words. Death was a hard enough topic to discuss under normal circumstances; how did you bring it up when the person sitting across from you was the one who had actually died?
After a moment, Turbo tried to change topics. “So, um…you guys aren’t sure when Fen-, I mean, when Garden will be back?”
Granola Bar shrugged. “She’s been patrolling the camp lately. Keeping the peace, making sure nopony’s trying to cheat anyone else at the market, that sort of thing.”
“You could go look for her, but it’s needle in a haystack out there,” added Slip ‘n’ Slide. “What with the new houses going up and more ponies coming back and everything.” He paused as his brother elbowed him, giving the larger stallion a glare before sighing. “But I guess we could help you find her if you want to go looking.”
Turbo smiled, but shook his head. “I can wait. I’m just glad her curses are gone.”
The others nodded, but when no one else had anything to add the silence fell again, the air heavy with the subject that no one was sure how to bring up.
Finally, Hopscotch decided to give it a try, clearing her throat. “Do you think this is how it’s going to be from now on? With ponies, you know…coming back?”
Cloudbank tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“I think-” Funshine cut himself off, giving Hopscotch an apologetic look. “Sorry, you go ahead.”
But Hopscotch quickly shook her head. “No, it’s fine. Really.”
“Ah, right.” Licking his lips, Funshine paused before speaking. “I think what Hopscotch meant is that…I mean, Lex is bringing ponies back to life. Princess Cadance is bringing ponies back to life. Is this going to be the sort of thing that, you know, the ponies in charge just do now?”
A round of uncertain looks were exchanged, by everyone except for Cloudbank. “I think so. Severance told me before…before we went into the city, that the most devout worshipers of the Night Mare could eventually learn resurrection magic. I didn’t think Lex was able to wield that much of her power, but he is the pony who introduced everyone to her. And I guess that’s true for worshipers of other gods too, what with Princess Cadance being able to do it.”
“Yeah, well, they need to pick better candidates when they do,” snorted Piggy, scooping up a hooffull of the hors d’oeuvres – baked mushrooms that had been dipped in a sweet fruit chutney – and shoving them into his mouth, his beady little eyes turning nasty as he directed them at Cloudbank and Thermal Draft. “Like, really mean mares who treat hardworking stallions badly probably shouldn’t make the cut from now on!”
“Piggy!” gasped Granola Bar. Nor was she alone in her outrage, as Turbo, Funshine, Hopscotch, and Slip ‘n’ Slide all voices their objections to the corpulent stallion’s words. Cloudbank actually climbed to her hooves, her expression dark, and Thermal Draft was wearing a look that made it clear she couldn’t believe Piggy had actually said that.
But the stallion in question simply stamped his hoof. “Oh come on! That mare” – he pointed a hoof at Cloudbank – “used some sort of weird magic on me back when we were in that warehouse, when all I was trying to do was be friendly! And that one” – he indicated Thermal Draft next – “tricked me into giving her the combination to one of mama’s vaults so that she could steal the money for Lex!”
“Which your mother later told Lex he was welcome to,” growled Funshine.
Piggy faltered for a moment at that, before apparently deciding to ignore that particular detail. Instead, he stamped his hoof again. “And now they’re here in my house-”
“Which, according to that old butler, is also technically Lex’s now,” snorted Slip ‘n’ Slide.
“-and eating my food-”
“Actually, they haven’t had any of those mushrooms yet,” noted Hopscotch.
“-all without saying they’re sorry!”
“That doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to say that you wish they hadn’t been brought back to life!” Granola Bar gave Piggy a deep frown then, shaking her head at him. “I’m honestly very disappointed in you, Piggy.”
The rebuke made the pudgy pony gape, his jaw falling open in shock. “Wha-, this is so unfair! I got you guys through Vanhoover that whole time! You should be on my side!”
Turbo couldn’t help his snort of derision. “Piggy, if you actually think that you-”
“If everypony is against you,” interjected Granola Bar, not letting Turbo finish. “Then maybe you should spend some time thinking about why that is. Until you do, you can forget about that ice cream, mister. And another thing-”
“LEX!”
But it was Granola Bar’s turn to be interrupted then, as the door to the room suddenly burst open and a pegasus filly burst inside. Bright yellow, except for the colorful snake wrapped around her middle, and with a cutie mark of a vacuum cleaner, her little wings were flapping heavily as she zipped around the room. Not finding who she was looking for, she turned her eyes back toward the door. “HE’S NOT HERE!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, before it occurred to her to look at everyone else in the room. “Have any of you guys seen Lex?!”
Stunned, it took everyone else a second to react to what was happening, with Thermal Draft being the first to recover. “Why? What’s going on?”
Barely able to stay still, the filly shook her head. “No time! We have to-” She cut herself off as she glanced at the snake coiled around her.
Cloudbank leaped backward a second later, her wings unfurling in alarm as she stared at the little girl’s serpent. “That thing talks?!”
The filly’s head snapped back around to look at her, eyes wide. “You can hear Venin?!”
“Somepony please tell me what’s going on!” Turbo’s voice was tense, trying to make sense of the chaos that had suddenly descended.
“Right, we weren’t here for this part, but apparently Lex took on some apprentices while we were in Canterlot,” explained Funshine.
“They’ve been living here in the manor too,” added Hopscotch helpfully, offering the filly a hesitant wave. “But this place is so big that we haven’t gotten to see them very much.”
“I still don’t see what’s so great about them,” huffed Piggy, clearly still dejected about not getting ice cream later. “They’re just kids with pets.”
Once again, Piggy was saved from the consequences of his griping as another foal ran into the doorway, this one an earth pony colt with a cutie mark of a hoof stomping on some fruit. But it was the sight of the full-grown wolf right behind him that caused Turbo to yelp, flinging himself behind the sofa as Cloudbank and Thermal Draft both flew upward in fright. But the colt barely noticed, giving the pegasus filly a frantic look. “What’s the holdup?!”
“I’m asking them if they’ve seen Lex!” shot back the filly, before pointing at Cloudbank. “And she can hear Venin!”
The colt blinked at that, glancing up at Cloudbank before shaking his head. “Dust Bunny, we don’t have time for this! We have to find Lex, pronto!”
“He was in his room this morning, when he brought us back to life, but that was hours ago. I don’t think any of us have seen him since.” Turbo looked at the others, who all shook their heads. Hopefully that would be enough to make the kid take his dangerous-looking wolf away.
Unfortunately, the news had the opposite effect, the colt’s eyes going wide. “Wait, he brought you back to life?!” He looked around, before his eyes settled on Cloudbank again, and his jaw suddenly fell open. “Wait a sec, I remember you now! You’re that lady who made that big announcement about the Night Mare a while back! You were the one who told us we could get magic powers if we had enough faith in her! I-” He paused then, glancing back at the wolf despite it not having done anything. A second later he grimaced, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Right, focus. Gotta find Lex.”
Cloudbank’s eyebrows shot even further upward. “The wolf talks too?!”
Slip ‘n’ Slide gave the other mare a frightened look. “Lady, the animals aren’t talking.”
But the pegasus filly – “Dust Bunny,” apparently – spoke before Cloudbank had a chance to, rushing over to her friend. “Crunchy, c’mon! These guys don’t know where Lex is, so we gotta hurry!”
He nodded, and both foals started to gallop out, only for Thermal Draft to call after them. “Wait, what’s happening that you need to find Lex?”
“Some crazy unicorn lady is attacking the camp-, village-, whatever it is now!” yelled back the colt who was apparently named Crunchy, already turning to go. “Miss Aria and some mare with knives were trying to fight her off, but they lost, and now we have to find Lex so he can-, WAIT!” He skidded to a halt, almost causing the filly to collide with him. “I just had an idea!” The pointed at the adults, looking at his friend. “These guys can go find Lex! There’s enough of them that they can search faster! Meanwhile, we’ll go out there and take that evil sorceress down!”
“What do you mean, ‘some mare with knives’?!” Turbo found himself suddenly scared of something far worse than a wolf, landing and rushing over to the fillies without concern for the large animal that was now just a few feet away from him. That’s how Fencer always preferred to fight! “A unicorn?!”
“Feathercap said she was,” answered Dust Bunny. “He saw her through Ulespy’s eyes.”
“Garden!” whispered Granola Bar, her face turning pale.
“We’ve gotta go help her!” Turbo looked at the rest of his friends. “Everypony follow me! I’ll fly up and try and spot-”
“No!” interrupted Crunchy. “We’ll handle this! You guys find Lex as fast as you can!”
Turbo grit his teeth, not having the patience to argue. “Look, kid, I understand that you want to help, but some foals and their pets-”
“My name is Fruit Crunch,” snapped the colt. “And we’re the Night Mare’s Knights! And Lyden and the others aren’t pets! They’re our spirit animals!”
“I’m starting to believe that,” murmured Cloudbank, looking back and forth between the wolf and the snake, her expression having turned from shock to amazement.
Letting out a slow breath, Turbo tried to remain calm. “Look, I’m sure your Night Mare Fan Club or whatever is great, but right now our friend is in trouble, so-”
“I have healing magic,” announced Dust Bunny suddenly. “If we go there now, I can use it on your friend.”
“If you really want to help,” added Fruit Crunch. “Do what I’m telling you and find Lex! The quicker he gets there, the quicker he can put an end to whoever that is that’s attacking! In the meantime, leave the rest to us!”
Turbo opened his mouth, but the conversation was apparently over as the colt turned and ran out of the room, bellowing about a change of plans, his wolf and the filly taking off after him. For a moment Turbo was tempted to follow them, but instead made himself keep a level head, remembering how, back in Vanhoover, panicking was too often a prelude to disaster. Instead, he turned to regard everypony else. “Is it true that those kids have magic powers?”
Funshine shrugged. “Supposedly they took on a squad of Royal Guards. And won.”
“And those animals were definitely talking,” added Cloudbank, looking around. “No one else could hear them?”
Several heads shook, but Turbo’s wasn’t one of them, focusing on more important things. As much as he hated being told off by a pre-teen, he hated the thought of letting Fen-, of letting Garden down even more. “Okay, let’s split up and see if we can find Lex. If that guy can really fight dragons and all sorts of other monsters – and the princesses, for that matter – then he should be able to handle one evil wizard.”
When everypony nodded, Turbo turned and flew through the doorway as fast as he could, knowing that the others were right behind him. Or at least, most of the others. The last thing he heard as he left the drawing room and headed deeper into the manor was a single voice, raised in a rapidly-receding whine.
“We’re approaching the edge of Vanhoover now, Your Highness,” noted River. “Once we’re past the city limits, my manor is only a little further.”
“I can only hope that the accommodations there are more suited to my royal presence than this dilapidated hamlet,” sniffed Prince Blueblood, looking around the filth-strewn city with naked disdain. “Really, I knew that Vanhoover was a backwater, but I never imagined that it had so little community spirit!”
Clustered around the prince, Las Pegasus’ elites nodded their heads and murmured their collective assent. Some more loudly than others. “I reckon that everypony’ll start takin’ more pride in their town once they realize that you’ve come to visit, Your Highness.” Gladmane’s smile was as slick as his mane, which had so much product in it that it practically glistened in the sunlight. “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time you left, this place’ll be spic and span, all thanks to you inspirin’ the folks who live here!”
The compliment made Blueblood nod sagely. “I do have that effect on ponies,” he admitted, a self-satisfied smirk crossing his lips as he gave his mane a toss. But it only lasted a moment as he spotted a moldy rag in his path, grimacing. “Ugh! Valet!”
The bellow brought an effete young unicorn stallion scurrying over. Dressed in a modest suit with a black bowtie that matched the image of his cutie mark, the unicorn stood at attention. “Yes, Your Highness?”
Blueblood pointed to the mess in front of him, turning his head as though unable to bring himself to look at it. “There’s filth in my way! Again!”
“I’m sorry, Your Highness!” Bowing obsequiously, the stallion’s horn lit up as he pushed the offending material to the side, before pulling a cloth and spray bottle out of a pocket and giving the ground a quick scrub. Inspecting it carefully for a few seconds, he put his cleaning implements away as he turned back toward where Prince Blueblood was waiting. “There you are, Your Highness.”
“Finally,” sighed Blueblood. “Honestly, is every city like this when they don’t know that royalty is visiting? Because if so, I’m never making an unscheduled appearance anywhere ever again.” He glanced at the recently-cleaned patch of ground suspiciously, before finally deciding that it was fit for him to step on. “Valet, make a note of that. No more spontaneous appearances. From now on all locales that I grace with my noble presence will be informed of my coming ahead of time so that they can prepare a proper venue.”
“Understood, Your Highness,” nodded the servant, already writing the prince’s instructions down.
“I still don’t understand why there aren’t any carriages available,” complained Checkered Cab. “We really have to walk-, I mean, we really have the make the prince walk the entire way there?”
It took River several seconds to realize that the question had been directed at her, instead of being the idle complaining that the entire group had been voicing (largely at Blueblood’s direction) ever since they’d disembarked and headed into Vanhoover. “They’re all in use at the moment.”
“All of them?” snorted Razzle Dazzle. “Every single one?”
“All the ones that are left,” answered River. That was technically true, since Lex had allocated what vehicles were still serviceable for the recovery effort. Carriages, carts, wagons, wheelbarrows, and virtually everything else that could be used to transport goods were now being put to use by teams heading into the city to help restore the place, transporting goods in from the docks, moving food around the burgeoning camp-turned-village, or performing similar tasks.
But that wasn’t the only reason that everypony was walking to her manor now.
Civic duty, River repeated to herself dully, the words having echoed through her mind since Lex had said them earlier that morning. He wants everypony here to loan him a collective total of one hundred million bits…out of their sense of civic duty. The prospect was so ridiculous that it made her feel almost dizzy with disbelief.
River had tried to explain to Lex, when he’d told her that he wanted to take out a loan from Las Pegasus’ richest ponies, that the individuals in question would be extremely averse to the proposition unless it was heavily slanted in their favor, and that even then it would be difficult to secure. But Lex had made it clear that he didn’t want to hear it, telling her that the only thing she needed to worry about was bringing them back. At the time, River could only guess that Lex was either planning on browbeating them into it – something she knew he was easily capable of after his spectacular defeat of the Royal Sisters – and justifying his actions with his arcane philosophy, or that he had some sort of fiendishly clever plan the likes of which she couldn’t begin to guess at. But a few short hours ago, after he’d postponed her punishment for what had happened with Feather Duster in favor of her telling him about the ponies she’d brought back from Las Pegasus, he’d finally revealed his plan to get the loan he wanted: by appealing to the rich ponies’ sense of moral obligation to address the equinetarian crisis in Vanhoover.
That was the reason she and the others were all walking through the ruined, empty city now. River had asked Lex to lend her some sort of conveyance to bring everypony from her yacht to her manor, but he had refused. He’d wanted them to witness what had become of Vanhoover, to get a firsthoof look at how its people had lost everything, apparently in an attempt to shame the Las Pegasus delegation into being generous with their money once he proposed having them give him the funds he needed to rebuild the place.
In River’s opinion, that was about as likely to happen as Blueblood trouncing Lex in a fight.
She hadn’t said that, of course, but at the same time she hadn’t been able to keep silent either. Although Lex had said that her eventual punishment would be dependent on Feather Duster’s recommendation – which River knew would be for the harshest possible sentence; after all, what servant wouldn’t want to see one of their betters brought low? – River knew her only hope of mitigating the fate that awaited her, or at least securing some measure of leniency, was in making Lex’s wish for a loan into a success, if for no other reason than failure would undoubtedly put him in an extremely foul mood when he decided what he was going to do to her. As such, she’d known that she needed to convince him to change his approach.
But Lex had proven to be just as intransigent as she’d feared, even when she’d revealed that Prince Blueblood was among the ponies she’d brought, that he was intent on picking a fight to avenge the Royal Sisters, and that his opinion carried a great deal of weight with everypony else. None of which had deterred Lex in the slightest. “The ponies of Vanhoover are suffering,” he’d stated flatly. “The ones you’ve brought have the means to help alleviate that. Even Celestia and Luna, as indolent and irresponsible as they are, were moved to offer what pitiful assistance they could bring themselves to pledge once they saw what’s happened here. If this ‘Prince Blueblood’ wishes to present himself as a moral figure, then he’ll have no choice but to do the same.”
“I understand,” River had agreed quickly, mostly because she didn’t want to seem too contrarian by underlining just how full of himself Blueblood was. Instead she’d turned to another area that she knew would be a sticking point. “But the money-”
“Will be repaid to the lenders over time, with interest,” dismissed Lex, refusing to even hear the full scope of her concerns. “This deal will result in a net profit for them, which should alleviate any concerns about cupidity preventing them from providing financial assistance. It’s one of the reasons why I want a loan rather than donations.”
River had bit her lip at that, unwilling to tell Lex that he was dreaming if he thought that would be enough to guarantee everypony’s cooperation. Even overlooking the issue of Blueblood’s endorsement, or lack thereof, rich ponies, River knew from personal experience, were suspicious and cynical by nature. It was how they stayed rich, since hucksters and con artists were constantly trying to separate them from their hard-earned bits, to say nothing of misguided ponies like her late husband, who had repeatedly sunk money into business ventures that had failed to pan out. The result was that the Las Pegasus contingent would look at any proposal that had them shelling out money with extreme skepticism, especially when it was put forward by somepony they’d never met before and with no obvious collateral. Even her having pledged her estate and her fortune to Lex would give him only a little credibility; they’d think she was just providing him with cover, probably in exchange for a cut of the money.
In fact, his entire plan was so audacious in its presumptuousness that she’d only been able to think of one way for it to actually work. “I suppose that if they refuse, you can always penalize them for refusing to help out, right?” she’d asked, certain that had to be his real angle. “Then they’d have to agree to the loan if they didn’t want to be cursed.”
But Lex had frowned sharply at her then. “Absolutely not. While it might be morally incumbent on these ponies to provide financial assistance with Vanhoover’s recovery, that is beyond the realm of what my administration can justifiably mandate.”
River hadn't been able to hide her surprise at that. “But…when we first met…”
“When we first met, you were threatening to interfere with the recovery process, which was credible enough that it merited my taking punitive action against you,” explained Lex. “These ponies are engaging in no such activity. And while there is a legitimate basis for a government periodically levying a compulsory financial charge on its people in order to fund its expenditures toward the common good, this isn’t a situation where I’m able to exercise such prerogatives. Not when I have no claim of sovereignty over Las Pegasus beyond a general declaration of rebellion against the princesses.”
It had taken River a moment to parse that. “So if they don’t want to give you a loan, you’ll just let them go?”
“Yes.” Lex’s answer had come without hesitation. “To do otherwise would be unjust.”
In some other context, River might have found that sentiment noble. Hideously naïve, but still noble. Right now, however, all she could think of was how, in his own way, Lex was just as deluded as Blueblood was.
That had been showcased when she’d made her way back to her yacht. Arriving just as the prince had woken up (and promptly started dropping not-so-subtle hints about how he hoped that her manor was more conducive to his “beauty sleep” than the “threadbare lodgings” on her yacht were), River had waited until after breakfast to lead everypony through the city. She’d dutifully entertained questions about why the place was so deserted and filthy while doing so, reiterating how the city had not only flooded, but that the city had been occupied by monsters, some of whom might still be lurking. The results of her explanations had made it clear just how far off the mark Lex’s estimation of these ponies’ virtue was.
Rather than horror and sympathy at the sorry state of the city, the prevailing sentiments had been disgust and derision. A few ponies, such as Pixie, had seemed more disturbed than disdainful – though whether by the scale of the devastation or the prospect of a monster attack wasn't clear to River – but Prince Blueblood’s obvious contempt for Vanhoover’s situation had quickly quieted them. No one wanted to contradict one of the most important ponies in all of Equestria.
Which meant that Lex’s chances of getting the loan he wanted were nil, River knew.
Just like the chances of her receiving mercy when Lex finally got around to cursing her.
“Is there some sort of festival going on?”
“Hm?” Pretty Penny’s question dragged River out of her silent bout of self-pity. “What?”
“Over there.” Following Penny’s hoof, River peered at the distant camp. Although it was hard to be sure, thanks to the multitude of simple houses that had been erected, it looked like a crowd had gathered. “It looks like there’s an assemblage going on.”
“Maybe we could stop over and visit?” asked Pixie hopefully. “It might be nice to see how the ponies here are doing after everything that’s happened.”
River nodded, eager to delay the inevitable fallout from when Lex and Blueblood met. “I think that’s a good idea. Why don’t we-”
“Oh, you can’t be serious!” huffed Blueblood, exasperated. “First I have to put up with those substandard quarters on your dingy little boat, then walk through that disgusting city like a commoner, and now you want me to mingle with plebeians having some ghastly carnival? Have you no class, River Bank?” Frowning, he gave her a look that was probably supposed to be an intimidating glare, though compared to Lex’s it looked more like the prince was having mild indigestion. “I demand that you take me to your manor this instant!”
River sighed, her ears folding back. Maybe it’s better to just yank the band-aid off, she decided, suddenly recalling how tired she’d felt right before Lex had suspended her sentence. This was going to be a disaster one way or another. She might as well get it over with, and start learning to live with whatever Lex was going to do to her.
Turning in the direction of her mansion, River trudged forward. “Right this way, Your Highness…”
Ocean Spray sighed. “We’ve still got four more crates of oranges to unload, Scrubby. You can take a break after we’ve finished with them.”
But the shorter stallion shook his head. “No, I mean, when this job is over I quit.”
Compass Rose looked up from the clipboard that she was writing on, sharing a glance with Ocean Spray before looking at the third member of their group. “What are you talking about?” she asked, her voice betraying only the slightest hint of frustration.
But Scrubby made no such effort to hide his own dissatisfaction. “I’m talking about this place!” he shouted, earning a few looks from the other ponies ferrying their wares from their boats onto Vanhoover’s docks. Realizing he was making a spectacle out of himself, Scrubby waited until he and Ocean Spray had finished unloading their crate, and then continued in a voice that was softer, but no less intense than before. “I mean I don’t want to work here anymore! In fact, I don’t ever want to come back here again!”
“Scrubby…” Ocean Spray let out a slow breath, not because he was upset by his crewmate’s outburst, but because he understood where he was coming from all too well.
But Scrubby wasn’t finished. “Do you remember how this all started? We were just supposed to ferry that…crazy wizard here, in exchange for his having repaired the crack in our ship’s hull.” He glanced around nervously, as though worried that Lex would hear the insult and come seeking vengeance. “And then as soon as we got here we were attacked by monsters, had our ship destroyed, and were forced to fight just to survive!”
“We know all of that, Scrubby.” Compass Rose almost never lost her composure, but Ocean Spray could see it starting to fray now, her voice flatter than usual as she glared at Scrubby over the rim of her glasses. “We were there too. What’s your point?”
“My point,” hissed Scrubby, “is that some of us didn’t survive! We lost Sandbar, and we lost the Captain, and yet we still keep coming back here! Why?!”
“Because this is where the work is.” Ocean Spray’s answer came with a helpless shrug. “Right now everypony in Tall Tale is looking to send goods to Vanhoover, and we need the money.”
“Who are you trying to kid?” huffed Scrubby. “The money has nothing to do with it and we all know it! We keep taking these jobs because leaving…leaving means admitting they’re gone.” He suddenly faltered, but kept going. “I miss them, and I know you guys miss them more, but I can’t keep doing this. After this job is over, I’m not coming back.”
Compass Rose closed her eyes at Scrubby’s announcement, and Ocean Spray bit his lip, looking toward the warehouses that lined the wharf. They weren’t very far from where he and the Captain-, no, where he and C. Shells had their first time together, in the aftermath of the battle that they’d gone through on these same docks. The memory sent an ache through his chest. They had flirted for months before then, but never seriously, and he’d chalked it up to the natural tension that developed from being at sea together for prolonged periods of time. That it had ended up blossoming into something more, only to be cut short so abruptly… “Maybe you’re right.”
“Ocean Spray!” Compass Rose sounded angry and saddened in equal measure.
“He’s not wrong, Rose.” Once, Ocean Spray would never have dreamed of calling the first mate by her name so casually, but that he found it easy to do now – and the way she didn’t chastise him for it – only seemed to drive Scrubby’s point home. “Nothing’s the same anymore, and I feel like we’re just…” He rolled a hoof, as though trying to pluck the right words out of the air. “Like we’re just staying here, hoping to catch one more glimpse of them.” He looked back toward the wharf, where ponies were going about their business. “But we’re not. And no matter how long we wait here, they’re not going to just suddenly reappear-”
There she was.
Ocean Spray nearly bit his tongue as he froze, his jaw opening and closing dumbly as his brain disagreed with what his eyes were telling him. But although he knew it was impossible, the mare that had just appeared out of the crowd of ponies had to be C. Shells. Her coat was the same soft green, her mane and tail were the same off-white, and even her cutie mark – a ship on top of a cresting wave – was the same! Only her captain’s hat was missing.
And next to her…it couldn’t possibly have been Sandbar, but just like with C. Shells, the stallion’s appearance was a perfect match for his dead friend. Except for the missing scar on his neck, and his lack of his usual bandana. Even the dopey grin was the same, seeing it cross the other pony’s face as he spotted them, waving before turning and tapping the mare who couldn’t have been their old captain, pointing them out to her.
“Ocean Spray? What’s…” Beside him, Compass Rose fell silent as she caught sight of who was approaching them. Out of his peripheral vision, Ocean Spray saw Scrubby do the same, the shorter stallion gasping loudly as his eyes went wide.
“Hey guys!” smiled Sandbar, trotting up to them like he was just coming back from grabbing a bite to eat. “Guess who’s back?!”
Rolling her eyes, C. Shells nudged Sandbar out of the way. “I know this must-”
“CHANGELINGS!” howled Scrubby, rushing backwards as fast as his legs could carry him. Everypony on the docks instantly stopped what they were doing, staring as Scrubby continued to howl, putting more distance between himself and the pair of should-have-been-dead ponies. “CHANGELINGS! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR L-”
The rest of his warning was cut off as he reached the end of the pier and went tumbling into the water, coughing and sputtering as he bobbed back to the surface a moment later.
“Wow,” snickered Sandbar. “And here I thought he was just gonna faint when he saw us!”
Scrubby was unable to reply, still hacking up seawater as Compass Rose lifted him back onto the dock with her telekinesis, not taking her eyes off of the resurrected pair. “What’s happening right now?” she demanded, but the seriousness of her question was undercut by how pale she’d gone. “Are you really changelings?”
“No, we're not.” C. Shells stepped forward, shaking her head. “When I first hired you,” she began, looking at Compass Rose, “you thought you knew everything there was about sailing, even though you’d only ever read books about it. You told me to my face that you’d replace me as captain within a year. Then you got seasick on your maiden voyage. You were so embarrassed that I thought you were going to quit once we made port, but instead you marched right back on board when it was time to cast off again. That was when I knew you had what it took to become an excellent captain someday…even if it would take longer than a year.”
Leaving Rose’s lower lip quivering, she turned to Scrubby next. “You once told me that you felt like a barnacle, just clinging to whatever ship you signed on with because anypony could scrub hulls and swab decks. I told you that wasn’t true, because what you contributed wasn’t just keeping the ship clean. It was how the pride you took in its appearance inspired us all.”
“C-Captain…” hiccupped Scrubby.
She flashed him a quick smile, before turning to Ocean Spray, who found that he was trembling slightly. For a moment she didn’t say anything, then an impish grin crossed her features, the kind she’d never shown when issuing orders. In fact, the only time he’d ever seen her look like that had been the few times they’d been alone together after that night in the warehouse. Whenever she’d looked like that, he’d known that their ranks were dropped, and they were a couple rather than captain and sailor. He could feel his heart fluttering at the sight of it again now, remembering how seeing her like that had inspired him to tell her everything from his dreams for the future to embarrassing stories of him as a child…
“When you were three years old, and first learned what cutie marks were, you told your parents you wanted to be a ballerina.”
Giving a cry at the accurate anecdote, Ocean Spray lunged forward, wings beating hard and hooves outstretched as he grabbed C. Shells, certain it was her now. All around him he heard gasps and startled cries, but he didn’t care. Instead, all of his attention was focused on the mare in his forelegs, unable to hold back as he leaned forward and kissed her for all he was worth.
When she returned the kiss, his heart – which had broken from losing her – sang with joy.
The moment seemed to last forever, and when it was finally over, Ocean Spray belatedly realized that they were in the air, his wings flapping as he kept them both hovering fifteen feet off the ground and rotating slowly, all while he held C. Shells close.
All around them, ponies were applauding the romantic display, whooping and stomping their hooves, clearly no longer worried about Scrubby’s alarm. The shouting was enough to make Ocean Spray blush, and he was surprised to see C. Shells doing the same as he slowly brought them back down to the ground. “I missed you so much, Coral!”
Scrubby’s eyes widened, and he leaned over to Compass Rose. “Wait, the ‘C’ stands for ‘Coral’? I thought it was for ‘Captain’?”
“Don’t be silly,” grunted the redheaded mare, wiping her eyes. “It’s not like she changed her name just because she was in command of a ship. Even if she likes to tease passengers about that sometimes.”
“Hey, um, so long as we’re proving that we’re not really changelings,” interjected Sandbar, trotting over to Scrubby. “You still owe me ten bits.”
“What?” scoffed Scrubby. “No I don’t!”
“Um, yeah,” huffed Sandbar. “Remember back in the warehouse, when everypony was placing bets on whether or not Lex and Sonata were going to get hitched? You said-”
“How is this possible?” Compass Rose stepped toward Ocean Spray and C. Shells. “Was Lex wrong about you two…”
“Dying?” finished C. Shells. Shaking her head, she stepped away from Ocean Spray. Although there was no outward change in her demeanor, the rest of her crew could immediately tell that she was back in her role as their captain. “No, he wasn’t. We were ambushed when we were leaving the city, and we…we didn’t make it.”
“Then how…?”
“How else?” shrugged Sandbar. “Lex brought us back with his magic.”
“He can do that?!” gaped Scrubby.
“Not again,” sighed C. Shells. “He told us that his goddess gave him the power to bring us back, but just once. So no one else is getting a second chance.”
“I’m glad.” Ocean Spray grimaced as soon as the words left his mouth, knowing how that sounded. “I mean, I’m not glad he can’t bring anypony else back to life, but if he could only do it once then I’m glad that he chose you. Both of you.” He sent a smile Sandbar’s way before looking back at C. Shells. “So…what now, Captain?”
Smiling, C. Shells glanced around. “Well, it looks like you’re unloading some cargo, so first let’s take care of that. Then we need to find ourselves a new ship. But until we do…”
“Until we do?” prompted Compass Rose.
“Until we do, then by the captain’s decree, once you’ve finished here, we’re all on vacation!” She grinned then, the same boisterous smile she wore whenever they’d finished a demanding assignment. “After how tough this job’s been, I think we deserve it!”
Ocean Spray burst out laughing, and he wasn’t alone, the others joining him a moment later. The sound made his smile widen, and he could almost feel weeks’ worth of sorrow, anger, and grief evaporating as mirth rolled over him. Staying here had been the right idea after all, because impossibly, in defiance of all common sense, the ponies that he’d refused to say goodbye to were back, part of his life once again.
All was right with the world.
Why can’t anything ever go right?
All Starlight had wanted was a chance to get her breath back before Lex Legis showed up. To just lie in the grass and recover as much of her stamina as she could before the inevitable confrontation. But for some reason, nopony seemed to want to let her rest.
First had been Sonata, practically in tears over what had happened to Aria. She’d wanted to at least have her and that other mare receive medical attention, and had almost gone to fetch some doctors before Starlight had stepped in and made her stop. As certain as she felt that those two weren’t going to get up again anytime soon, the last thing she needed was some idiot in a lab coat proving her wrong. If either of those two got back on their hooves while she was still dealing with Lex, then they might interfere, and with how depleted she already felt Starlight knew she couldn’t allow that to happen.
Then there had been the other four ponies she’d come here with. At first Starlight hadn’t minded them fussing over her, but when Party Favor had tried to wipe up some of the blood staining her coat with his burlap cloak, she’d had to put a stop to that. The idiot had come very close to scrubbing her flank, and if he’d ended up smudging her “cutie mark,” then Starlight knew things would have quickly taken a turn for the worse. Fortunately it hadn’t gotten that far, but it had been another bothersome incident when she’d been trying to recover.
And now there were these new nuisances…
“You can’t be serious,” snorted Starlight, looking over the group that had just declared their intent to challenge her.
“We’re very serious!” proclaimed a colt who was apparently the leader, standing at the head of a motley collection of foals and animals as he pointed at her dramatically.
“We’re the Night Mare’s Knights! And we’re here to take you down!”
Starlight’s reaction to Fruit Crunch’s proclamation was to roll her eyes.
“You forgot to add ‘to the zoo’ at the end of that sentence,” she snickered, glancing over their spirit animals with bemusement.
Only a fool mocks their opponents before taking their measure, pronounced Altaer, the eagle’s mental voice thick with scorn.
Or one who is extremely confident in their own strength, added Lyden, the wolf’s head turning to regard where Aria and that other mare had fallen, then looking over at Sonata. The High Alpha’s mates are not feeble, and yet now one is defeated and the other cowed. No weakling could accomplish such a thing.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t go help them?” whispered Cleansweep, also looking at the unconscious mares. “If I can get them back on their hooves, they could help us beat her!”
Despite looking anxious at the prospect of the imminent battle, Feathercap shook his head. “It’s a bad idea,” he whispered back. “I know how you feel, but you only have so much healing magic, and those two took a serious hit. Even if you got them up, I don’t think it’d be hard for that crazy unicorn to put them down again. Besides, that green lady’s knives are broken anyway.” He canted his head to the side, indicating the lumps of twisted metal lying near where the two grownups had fallen.
Additionally, since our adversary has done us the generous service of underestimating all of us based on our appearance, our most direct route to victory lies in capitalizing on that via attacking her in a concerted effort so as to overcome her quickly with a display of overwhelming force, added Ulespy, his voice as casual as a professor in front of a blackboard as he fluttered down from the sky and landed on Feathercap’s back. Your poison will be invaluable in that regard.
“But they might be really hurt?” murmured Fiddlesticks, dividing her attention between Starlight and the injured adults. “They’re still breathing, but what if they need a doctor right now?”
I agree, added Nemel. Those who attack our home must be driven off, but we must still see to our wounded.
I’ll check on them. Uncoiling herself from around Cleansweep, Venin slithered toward the fallen mares. If their lives look to be in danger, I’ll call for aid.
Meanwhile, Straightlace was working to keep Starlight Glimmer – Feathercap had said that was her name, having heard (via Ulespy) the mare with the knives call it shortly before she was defeated – focused on him and not on what his friends were saying. “You should surrender!” he yelled, his voice as stentorian as he could make it. “Things will be easier for you if you do!” He wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but that was what authority figures usually said when facing a bad guy.
Starlight’s response came with a patronizing smile. “Listen, we’re getting off on the wrong hoof. How about we start over, okay?” She didn’t wait for a response before continuing. “I don’t know if you heard what I was saying before” – she nodded toward the crowd, which had fallen back during her fight, but was still watching from a distance – “but my name’s Starlight Glimmer, and-”
“We know who you are,” answered Straightlace. “And we’re not giving up our cutie marks!”
“You shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it,” insisted Starlight. “In my village, everypony has given up their cutie marks, even the foals, and we’re all much happier now!”
“Did they have a choice?” growled Fruit Crunch. “Or did you beat them up and take them away without asking?!” He held out a hoof toward Aria and that other mare then, but in his mind it was himself he was thinking of, remembering what had happened when he’d tried to stand up to Block Party…or rather, the monster that had been possessing Block Party, according to Lex.
Starlight frowned, unaware of the true source of the colt’s anger. “I didn’t start that fight!”
“No, but now we’re finishing it!” Fruit Crunch had waited long enough. If Starlight wasn’t going to make the first move, then they would! “Night Mare’s Knights, CHARGE!”
With a chorus of howls and shrieks, the assembled foals and their spirit animals rushed at Starlight.
Starlight sighed as the children and their pets ran toward her. “So much for doing this the easy way.”
Bringing her staff around, she fired off a blast of magic at the wolf. Once those kids saw that their most dangerous animal was easily dispensed with, they’d-
Zipping forward, the pegasus colt placed himself directly in the path of her attack, rearing up and kicking out as his hoof connected with the beam of magical energy…and knocked it off course.
The sight was enough to make Starlight’s eyes widen. That’s not possible!
But she had no more time to figure out what had just happened as the rest of that colt’s friends descended upon her.
Before she could raise a shield around herself, the large wolf darted in, surprising her as it went low. A second later, she felt jaws close around her foreleg, causing her to let out a yelp of pain as she threw herself backward, trying to wrench her leg free of the thing. But she’d barely had a chance to shift her weight when the earth colt who’d been right behind the wolf tackled her, knocking her off her hooves and sending her sprawling.
A surge of panic ran through Starlight then, and she swung her staff wildly, trying to dislodge her attackers. But with her balance off-center, and an eagle diving toward her face with its talons extended, the attack went wide, accomplishing nothing except to cause the pegasus filly who’d also been descending on her to veer off-course. Even that small victory was undone almost immediately the earth filly threw herself forward and wrapped her forelegs around the staff, yanking it out of Starlight’s telekinetic grasp with all of her strength.
Which, as it turned out, was a great deal of strength indeed.
Starlight gave a cry as her staff went flying, hearing it echoed in the voices of the ponies she’d brought with her. Far closer was the sound of the remaining foal – the unicorn colt – yelling, his voice raised in excitement. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”
“Great!” yelled the pegasus colt, flying over to join his friends in dogpiling Starlight. “Now hurry up and figure out how to use it!”
But the words had barely left his mouth when Double Diamond’s voice was heard. “Starlight!” he yelled as he charged forward. “Hang on! Hang-, GAH!” His voice rising in a cry of alarm, Double Diamond’s rush to the rescue ended immediately as the large owl from before swooped in front of his face, claws flexing menacingly.
But Starlight was less concerned for him than she was for herself at the moment. The wolf’s teeth were still clenched tightly around her foreleg, defying her efforts to shake it off. That might have been because those efforts were being significantly hammered by the earth colt who had thrown himself across her chest. Despite being smaller than her, he was heavy, and his position gave him leverage enough that even with her telekinesis she was struggling to lift him. Not that she could concentrate on that, since she needed to keep jerking her head back and forth to keep that eagle’s claws away from her eyes and her horn, particularly since her other foreleg was busy trying to knock away the badger that was attempting to gnaw on it. Worse her were hindlegs, both of which were firmly pinned down by that same filly who had ripped her staff away from her so easily. Nor were those the full extent of her problems, as Starlight could just barely make out the pegasus filly from before circling back around, hooves outstretched as though she was planning on doing something besides just throwing herself into the tangle of limbs and fur.
But Starlight had no intention of finding out whether that child had special powers of her own or not.
Gritting her teeth, her lips pulled back in a snarl, Starlight concentrated fiercely, and a split-second later vanished from the press of ponies and animals. Instantly, she reappeared next to the unicorn colt, who let out a yelp of surprise as she telekinetically snatched her staff away from him. The sound made his owl wheel away, hooting in alarm as the two of them fell back.
Panting, Starlight gingerly examined her foreleg. It was by far the worst of the injuries that she’d received just now, but there were a collection of new wounds all over her. But at least her horn hadn’t been damaged, so-
“Starlight?”
Grimacing, Starlight turned her attention back toward where the foals and their animals were untangling themselves, not bothering with the stallion slowly approaching her from behind. “Not now, Double Diamond!”
“But…but you teleported! Without the Staff of Sameness! How-”
“I said not now!” Snarling, she swung the forked end of her staff toward those kids, keeping up the ruse by force of habit even as she furiously tried to think up a new spell before her enemies regrouped. I can’t use a direct attack, or that kid will just deflect it again. So something different. A containment spell. Like my shield but focused on keeping things in rather than out. Okay, this isn’t hard…
Ever since Starlight had discovered that her special talent was magic, she’d found that spellcasting wasn’t the only thing that came easily to her; inventing new spells was also a piece of cake. That was something she was particularly proud of, as most “professional” wizards never created anything new, and those few that did needed months or years to do it! Admittedly, she couldn’t come up with completely original spells out of thin air, but mixing and matching parts from the ones she’d already learned to make something new was simplicity itself, taking minutes or even seconds to pull off…even if she sometimes needed to spend a little extra time ironing out the kinks later on.
But it was one thing, Starlight realized a moment later, to create a new spell over the course of a few minutes while in a relaxed state, the way she had when she’d invented her reaction speed-boosting spell before fighting Aria and Garden Gate at once. Now, when she was still shaken and hurting, trying to come up with a new spell in a matter of seconds, before those foals and their animals collected themselves, was simply too much. She’d barely gotten half of it worked out when they’d reformed their ranks, warily turning to regard her as they tried to figure out what had happened.
Knowing that Double Diamond and the other equalized ponies were wondering the same thing, Starlight sighed, abandoning her half-finished spell in favor of what she could fix. “The, um…residual energies from the Staff of Sameness allowed me to teleport out,” she explained, coming up with the deception off the top of her head. “Its power moves through its wielder's body, meaning that a little bit is left over right after you put it down.”
“Wow!” Double Diamond’s eyes widened. “What an incredible magic item!”
“It certainly is.” Starlight couldn’t help but smirk, but the expression dropped from her face a half-second later, knowing that she couldn’t afford to let her focus wander. Those kids had come closer to defeating her than Aria and Garden Gate had, which meant that she needed to treat them with the same intensity as she had those two mares. “Now get back, Double Diamond.”
Pointing her staff at them, Starlight narrowed her eyes as she regarded the group across from her.
“If those kids want to play rough, then I’ll give them rough!”
The scratch of quill-tip on paper filled the dining hall, the soft sound magnified in the silence.
Lex barely noticed, not bothering to look at the writing implements even as he telekinetically moved the quill over the page, drawing up the loan papers that the Las Pegasus ponies would soon be signing. After all, he’d already worked out the verbiage of the contract in his head quite some time ago, and a mere thirty-eight pages wasn’t something he needed to devote more than a fraction of his attention to in order to write down. Especially not when it was in his native Ponish.
Instead, he eyed the dining hall critically, making sure that the servants hadn’t missed a spot when he’d ordered them to clear it of the rainclouds that had been stored there. While he normally couldn’t have cared less about the aesthetics of his surroundings, the last thing he needed was for the proceedings to be disrupted because somepony had slipped on a patch of half-melted snow that some errant cloud had left before the pegasi on staff had moved it. It wouldn’t have been a problem if they’d simply used one of the unoccupied rooms, of course, but with River informing him that her party consisted of nearly two dozen ponies, this was the only venue large enough to accommodate all of them.
Still, the contract and the room’s cleanliness were simple enough tasks that Lex felt comfortable turning the bulk of his attention to several other projects that he’d devoted portions of his thoughts to. First among them were the various projects that he’d need to allocate the loan money toward in order to speed up Vanhoover’s reclamation. Another was working out possible combat strategies that he could viably use in his current state, subcategorized by salient factors regarding the potential opposition, battlefield conditions, required preparatory measures, and more. Still another was working out a new lesson plan for the Night Mare’s Knights, one with a more practical focus. There was also-
“Lex!”
The quill, wrapped in his roiling purple aura, didn’t stop moving as Lex looked sharply at the door, which had just burst open to admit Thermal Draft. Panting, she hurried over as soon as she spotted him. “There you are! Thank goodness I found you!”
The statement earned a frown from Lex, noting her apparent agitation. “Has something happened?” Had the Las Pegasus delegation arrived? If so, it made little sense that Thermal Draft would be the one coming to inform him, rather than the servants. Then again, she had only been brought back to life a few hours ago, so it was entirely possible that she’d come across some discontinuity between now and before she’d died that was upsetting her. Though if it was the delegation, then he’d need to hurry and finish writing the contract down-
But then Thermal Draft's answer came, and her words brought the scratch of writing to an immediate halt.
I need to take them out fast if I’m going to win this.
For all the bravado that she’d expressed to Double Diamond – currently trotting back to join the others at a safe distance – Starlight knew that she was in trouble. As much as it galled her that she was being pushed to the brink by a group of children and their pets, she knew that if she couldn’t turn the tables on them in one fell swoop, she was going to lose. There simply wasn’t any other path to victory.
That was going to be tough, however, given how bad her current situation was. Nor could she see any easy way of changing it. Flying might have given her some breathing room, since there were only two pegasi in their group, along with an equal number of birds. But with how tired and injured she was, Starlight wasn’t confident that she’d be able to keep herself aloft while simultaneously trying to dodge the flyers and counterattack. A series of rapid-fire teleports would have let her easily outmaneuver everypony, but Starlight knew that would almost certainly eat through her remaining stamina before she put them down. Raising a shield around herself might buy her some time, but it would never last long enough for her to recover her strength, serving only to delay the inevitable. Turning invisible wasn’t much better; even if she made sure to incapacitate the wolf first so it couldn’t track her by scent, she couldn’t stay that way and attack at the same time, and with how weary she felt she wasn’t confident that she’d be able to get the jump on the rest of those kids once they realized that she always reappeared a split-second before she blasted them.
Fighting defensively, in other words, was a losing proposition. But knowing that didn’t help unless she had a plan that involved going on the offensive, and Starlight was having a hard time coming up with one. An extended fight simply wasn’t an option; with how depleted she was, she had no illusions about being able to defeat more than one or two members of the Beast and Brat Brigade – or whatever they called themselves – before the rest dogpiled her again. So what alternatives did that leave…?
Unfortunately, those foals weren’t content to let her just stand there and come up with a plan. “Get her!”
Grimacing as the earth colt and his wolf led another charge at her, clearly looking to replicate their earlier success, Starlight gave ground, frantically trying to think of something – anything – that would allow her to regain the initiative. But as the wolf lunged for her legs again, an attack that Starlight only barely managed to dodge since she’d been expecting it, she realized that she was out of time. Then the earth colt plowed into her, batting aside Starlight’s trying to ward him off with the forked end of her staff, and sent them both sprawling. “Got you!” he yelled triumphantly.
“Fruit Crunch! Grab her horn this time!” yelled the earth filly, trailing behind the others.
“On it!” The earth colt – Fruit Crunch – reached a hoof up hurriedly, and Starlight felt it brush against her horn, her telekinetic hold on her staff flickering as he did.
But he’d overextended himself in doing so, allowing Starlight to gather her hind legs under her, kicking out as soon as she could. “Get OFF!”
The kick sent the colt stumbling, buying Starlight some breathing room…for exactly a half-second. Then the pegasus filly dove down from above, her little wings beating frantically. Desperate to get out of the way, Starlight rolled, certain that the girl was following her friend’s advice and going for her horn. It was with a small measure of grim satisfaction that she felt the girl’s hoof make contact with her right shoulder instead, the touch surprisingly light.
But the filly didn’t seem at all bothered by having missed her mark, pulling up and zipping away with an elated grin. “Hah!”
“Nice job, Cleansweep!” called the pegasus colt, coming in at a low angle even as his friend retreated, his eyes fixed on her staff.
For a split-second Starlight was tempted to let him have it. It wasn’t like she needed the thing anyway, especially after that line she’d fed Double Diamond. But as powerless as it was, the oversized stick was still her only weapon, and losing it would mean being even more helpless than she already was.
Her lips pulling back in a snarl, Starlight gave the kid exactly what he wanted, lashing out with the staff as he zoomed in. Not with magic – he would simply have deflected that, which was clearly why he felt so confident rushing straight in the way he was – but with the butt end of it, thrusting it at him as though it were a spear.
The move clearly caught the kid by surprise, and the blunt end of the staff caught him across his side, nearly clipping one of his wings as he veered off with a yelp. The sight brought Starlight another momentary burst of satisfaction. Weren’t expecting that were you? she snickered to herself as she hurriedly climbed to her hooves.
…or rather, tried to. But for some reason, her right foreleg wasn’t listening to her commands, twitching numbly as though it had fallen asleep. The lack of sensation was enough to make alarm rush through Starlight, trying to figure out what had happened, only to realize an instant later that part of her back was similarly insensate, mostly around her right shoulder-
Her eyes widening as she realized what that pegasus filly – Cleansweep – had done, Starlight was caught completely unawares as the earth filly from before, the one with the incredible strength, clamped her teeth around the end of her tail. “This is what happens when you try and hurt my friends!” she growled, before giving a sharp tug.
Starlight couldn’t hold back a yelp of pain as she was suddenly pulled into the air, the filly whirling her around and around to build up speed. Fighting down a surge of panic and dizziness, knowing that she was about to either be flung into a building or slammed into the ground, Starlight cast a spell. Ignoring the ache that doing so sent through her overworked horn, she fired a blast of energy, using the center of the centrifugal force that was keeping her in the air as a guide on where to aim.
A moment later Starlight felt herself soaring through the air, the world spinning every which way as she tried to orient herself. The sensation was nauseating, and it was almost a relief when she hit the ground a second later, rolling end over end before coming to a stop next to the ruins of what Sonata had told her used to be a train station. For a moment, Starlight felt everything continue to twist and whirl, even though she knew she had already landed, and she distantly remembered how she and her best friend Sunburst had sometimes held spinning contests back when they’d been little, challenging each other to spin around as many times as they could in order to see who could do more before becoming too dizzy to continue. The last time they’d done that, in fact, had been the day before he’d gotten his cutie mark…
The memory of her childhood friend was enough to remind her of what she was fighting for, and Starlight squeezed her eyes shut, forcing herself to focus before opening them again. Somepony please say I took out that pint-sized powerhouse at least, she groaned silently.
The answer came to her a second later, as she saw the filly in question climb to her hooves, unharmed save for spitting a few purple hairs out of her mouth. The sight made Starlight blink, fighting back despair as she glanced at her tail…
Which was now several inches shorter, her blast having hit it rather than the girl.
Fortunately, the other foals were more concerned about their friend than with pressing their advantage, clustering around her in concern, along with most of their animals. But Starlight knew that wouldn’t last once they noticed that she was still conscious-
“She’s not down!” The unicorn colt – who had been staying at the edge of the battle before rushing over to join the others in checking on their friend – was already pointing at Starlight, his expression alarmed. “You guys! She’s not down!”
The warning was enough to turn the other foals’ attention back toward her, and Starlight groaned as she tried to stand up despite her numb foreleg and lingering dizziness, knowing that if they overwhelmed her a third time the fight would be over. Belatedly realizing that she’d lost her staff when she’d been flung through the air, Starlight caught sight of it clutched in the talons of the eagle and owl, the birds flapping hard as they carried it over to the foals. But that was fine, she reminded herself dazedly, she’d convinced Double Diamond and the others that she could do without it for a short period of time…
Which was all she had left, as the foals – with the unicorn colt once again in possession of her staff – were advancing her again, their beasts in tow.
Stumbling, Starlight hobbled over to the crumbling wall of the ruined train station, leaning against it before sliding down into a sitting position. Biting her lip, she telekinetically grabbed a piece of rubble that was almost as big as she was, planting the broken chunk of stone between her and the foals. Then another one of similar size directly to her left. Then a third on her right. Then one more right in front of her. Then-
“Are you trying to make a fort?” came the confused voice of Cleansweep.
Looking up, Starlight saw that the foals had surrounded her, spread out in a half-circle, each of them with their animals next to them. Oddly, Cleansweep didn’t seem to have one…
“You’re dreaming if you think those will save you,” snorted the earth filly, stomping one hoof for good measure.
“For your own sake, stay down until Lex gets here,” added the pegasus colt. “He’ll decide what to do with you.”
“It’s over, Starlight Glimmer.” Fruit Crunch was grinning, making no effort to hide how pleased he was at having won the battle. “Give up. If you try to keep fighting, a few rocks aren’t going to protect you from us.”
“I know,” chuckled Starlight weakly. “They’re not meant to.” With another groan, she moved another large stone into place. By now they were starting to resemble a wall, albeit an extremely crude one.
“What does that mean?” The unicorn colt was the only one who looked nervous, the rest of his friends seeming to be puzzled by her behavior without being alarmed.
“It means,” smirked Starlight, letting the last stone settle into place, “that I finally figured out a plan for beating you.”
Then she raised the largest shield she could, big enough to enclose the foals inside with her. That part couldn’t be helped, since she hadn’t had enough time to figure out how to convert her shield spell – which could only be erected around herself – into a containment spell that could be raised around somepony else. Instead, the rocks would have to serve as cover for what was about to happen…
“This was a ploy!” yelled the unicorn colt, pressing his hooves against the shield in a futile attempt to find a way out. “She wanted us to get this close!”
“Stand back!” Removing her badger from her back, the earth filly reared up on her hind legs and drew a foreleg back, preparing to punch the shimmering dome around them. “I’m gonna try and break it down!”
“Forget the force field!” Fruit Crunch was already in motion, lunging toward Starlight. “Whatever she’s about to do, stop her!”
But Starlight’s horn was already glowing brightly. “TOO LATE!” she yelled, and now it was her turn to have her voice brim with triumph. “I WIN!”
I hope, she added silently.
She put all of her remaining strength into the magical blast she fired then, not bothering to aim, knowing that the interior of the shield would make it ricochet wildly…
“And I’m going to need fresh rose petals every day for my bath. Pink roses. Not white or red ones.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” replied River automatically as she led the assembled ponies back toward her manor. Prince Blueblood had been listing what he needed for the duration of his stay – the bare essentials, according to him – for a little while now. Apparently, after seeing the state Vanhoover was in, along with the “shabby” conditions of her aerial yacht, he had no confidence in her ability to provide adequate lodgings for a guest of his stature without explicit instructions. For her part, River was only barely paying attention to the lengthy list of creature comforts that the prince apparently couldn’t do without, knowing that it would all be for naught once he and Lex met.
“Also, proper serving staff should always wear jasmine scent,” continued Blueblood. “Not too much, you understand. Just enough so that it creates a pleasant background when I’m within, say, three paces of them. Any more than that overwhelms my royal nose. Furthermore-”
“What’s that?!” yelped Pixie suddenly.
Out of the corner of her eye, River saw Blueblood turn to glower at her friend, clearly displeased about being interrupted, but his expression turned to one of confusion when he looked where Pixie was pointing. Nor was he the only one, as the rest of the Las Pegasus ponies were murmuring amongst themselves, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. But River herself didn’t join them, knowing exactly what she was looking at.
Coming from the direction of her manor, a free-floating mass of darkness was headed directly toward them.
A mass of darkness with green-and-purple eyes.
“Lex.”
Realizing that there was nothing else she could do, River bit back a sigh. This was going to be a disaster of epic proportions, but it was out of her hooves now. Along with her hopes of earning even a minor reprieve for when Lex decided how he was going to punish her for what had happened with that uppity maid. The only thing she could do was accept her fate with whatever dignity she could muster.
“Your Highness,” began River slowly, her voice raised enough to get everypony’s attention despite their eyes still being glued to the intimidating sight bearing down on them. By now Lex was a little over a stone’s throw away and closing rapidly. “Please allow me to present Lex Legis, the ruler of Vanhoover and-”
She was still speaking when Lex sped right past them.
It was unexpected enough to leave River completely nonplussed, blinking in confusion as she watched Lex speed off in the direction of where everypony had gathered at the camp-turned-village. He hadn’t so much as glanced at River and her entourage, let alone slowed down. Why…?
“What…what was that?” croaked Gladmane, his face pale.
“River, did you say that was the ruler of Vanhoover?!” Pretty Penny couldn’t have looked more horrified if she’d tried.
“I’ve never seen anything more horrible in my life!” Razzle Dazzle shivered, the sweat beading on her cheeks already starting to make her thick makeup run. “Your Highness, we should get out of here immediately before that…thing comes back!”
For a moment Blueblood didn’t answer, blinking as he stared after Lex. “On the contrary,” he announced a moment later, giving a satisfied smirk. “This is perfect!”
Nopony knew what to say to that.
“River Bank,” demanded the prince suddenly, turning to the mare in question. “Am I correct to presume that was the cad who acted so discourteously toward Celestia and Luna?”
“Well, yes, but-”
“Ha ha!” Giving his mane a toss as though he’d solved a great mystery, Blueblood’s laugh was one of exultation. “Then this is an excellent opportunity to discipline the miscreant! Then I can be on my way instead of lingering in this squalor! Valet!”
“Yes, Your Highness?” answered the svelte stallion.
“I trust you remembered to bring my you-know-what?”
Giving an obsequious bow, the unicorn nodded. “Of course, Your Highness.”
“Excellent!” pronounced Blueblood, turning to regard the rest of the group as he flashed his perfect teeth. “Then let us be off to witness my triumph over the cur!”
“Y-Your Highness,” protested Pixie. “You can’t be serious about confronting that…monster!”
But rather than dissuade the prince, Pixie’s protest only made him puff his chest out. “My dear, you underestimate the resolve of royalty. I can assure you that little stunt was simply a display meant to intimidate the weak-hearted among us.” He gave a condescending snicker then, making it plain as could be that such a category did not include him. “Clearly this ‘Lex Legis’ has no idea just whom he’ll be facing. After having seen Hoity Toity’s attempt at a ‘blue collar chic’ fashion line last fall, there’s little that I find frightening anymore.”
The prince’s announcement made River’s eyebrows rise in disbelief, but not nearly as much as the sudden applause that came from everypony else. Blueblood being even more full of himself than she’d imagined was one thing, but how could everypony else possibly find that to be encouraging?! Were they that eager for a prince’s approval, or were they just desperate to believe that Lex wasn’t as frightening as they thought?
If it’s the latter, then I suppose they’re not wrong, thought River, falling in with everypony else as they followed Blueblood – moving at a trot, since royalty, he’d told her earlier, was never so uncouth as to run – toward the camp. Lex isn’t as terrifying as that glimpse of him would suggest.
He’s much, much worse.
“…up!”
The voice was faint, as though calling out to him from a great distance.
“…-ease…up!”
He could tell the voice wanted him to follow it, but the thought was an unpleasant one. Going back there meant a great deal of effort and pain, he knew. It would be so much easier just to ignore the voice…just for a little while, until he felt more rested…
“Please! Wake up”
That time he heard it more clearly, and he knew that the voice was pleading with him. The knowledge made him feel guilty, knowing that he was letting it down by not answering.
…and not just the voice, he realized a moment later. There were a lot of people who would be disappointed in him if he didn’t go back right away. Cleansweep. Straightlace. Fiddlesticks. Feathercap. His friends. And not just them. Lyden. Venin. Altaer. Nemel. Ulespy. Their mentors.
And Lex.
His hero.
That’s right…would Lex ever let anyone down just because something was hard?
That thought gave him new strength, and he started to focus on the voice, struggling with everything he had to follow it, ignoring the slow haze of pain that began to envelope him as he did, until at last…
The embrace made him ache all over, but Fruit Crunch managed to smile anyway. “Hey, Dust Bunny…”
“I can’t believe you did that!” Her tone suddenly turning angry, Cleansweep released him, sniffling. “What were you thinking?!”
The accusation made Fruit Crunch blink, not sure what she was talking about, but only for a second. Then his memory came flooding back. Starlight Glimmer. The force field she’d trapped them all in. Her firing a huge blast of magical energy that had immediately started to bounce around inside it. Cleansweep yelling and struggling underneath him after he’d thrown himself on top of her, right before he felt something large and furry land on top of him in turn. Then it had felt like he was being struck with steel girders from every direction all at once…
Fighting down a grimace, Fruit Crunch flashed her a cocky grin. “You’re the healer, dummy. I knew that so long as you were safe, we’d all be okay.” But despite his bravado, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t checked on the others. Ignoring how much it hurt, he turned his head, spotting Straightlace, Fiddlesticks, and Feathercap sprawled out nearby, unmoving. But their spirit animals were nowhere to be seen, save for Venin, whom Fruit Crunch belatedly realized was wrapped around Cleansweep’s middle. “Are-”
“They’re okay,” answered Cleansweep before he could finish speaking. “Lyden and Nemel and the rest of the spirit animals followed your lead and jumped on top of them. And on you, too. We all made it through because of that.” She gave him a shaky smile, clearly guilty that she’d had two protectors where the rest of her team had only one. “They’ll be back once you guys all get some rest. And since Venin was with Aria and that other lady, she didn’t get caught in the blast, so I can still use my healing powers.” She reached down and put her forelegs on his chest then. “I’ll fix you up first, and then take care of everypony else.”
Fruit Crunch nodded, only to bite his lip at how even that small movement made his head ache. But it didn’t escape his notice that the shield that had kept the blast contained was gone. “What about Starlight?”
Cleansweep’s expression immediately turned resentful. “She got what she deserved!”
Fruit Crunch’s eyes widened, and not just because he’d never seen her that upset before. “You mean she’s-”
“Not dead.” Cleansweep seemed to realize how her earlier statement about Starlight had sounded, her ears flattening as an embarrassed look came over her face. “But I’m not using any of my healing powers on her!” She canted her head to the side on that last word, and Fruit Crunch followed her gaze.
Starlight was sprawled out by the ruined wall of the train station, which was now even more ruined than it had been. Nor did Starlight look much better. Covered in the dusty remains of the rocks she’d surrounded herself with, the crazy mare was completely still save for the slow rise and fall of her chest. The sight made Fruit Crunch sigh in relief. We did it. We beat her. He could remember, in those last few moments right before he’d lost consciousness – when he’d realized what Starlight’s plan was – thinking that the older mare’s collection of stones was better cover than anything they’d had. But I guess she was already hurt badly enough that it didn’t matter. She was down for the count now.
It was over.
You should both be very proud of yourselves, spoke up Venin. You fought brilliantly, and defeated a foe that even the Lord Sovereign’s mates could not overcome.
“Only because they softened her up for us,” grinned Fruit Crunch, suddenly feeling magnanimous. Though that didn’t mean he couldn’t show off a little, putting his forelegs behind his head and crossing his back legs as though relaxing. “If she’d been at full strength, then we might have had to actually get serious.”
“I’ll get serious if you don’t stop fidgeting and let me heal you,” muttered Cleansweep.
“Right, right,” chuckled Fruit Crunch, the pain he was in already starting to recede as the pegasus filly’s healing magic went to work. “You shouldn’t nag so much, Dust Bunny. You’ll turn into your mom.”
Cleansweep rolled her eyes at that, but Fruit Crunch saw the way she was biting back a smile. “If you don’t-”
Fruit Crunch blinked as Cleansweep suddenly quieted. “…Dust Bunny? You okay?”
Cleansweep! Venin’s voice, rather than confused, sounded downright panicked. What’s happened?!
But the filly answered neither of them. Instead, she was simply staring off into space, her expression vacant. Alarm bells were going off in Fruit Crunch’s head as he turned to see what she was staring at, but her eyes weren’t focused on anything that he could tell, simply looking into the distance without being trained on-
“Heal…me…”
Fruit Crunch gasped, and in his mind he heard Venin do the same: that voice was Starlight Glimmer’s!
“Get rid…of the snake…and…heal me…”
Fruit Crunch had barely had a chance to lift his head, looking at where Starlight – her eyes now open and her horn glowing softly – was looking at them, when Cleansweep abruptly stood up. Venin was already yelling at her to stop, to fight whatever magic Starlight had clearly used on her, but it wasn’t working. In an instant, Cleansweep grabbed Venin, pulling her off of her torso. With a flap of her wings to gain some height, she turned and flung the snake away as hard as she could, before landing and marching over to Starlight, placing her forelegs on the fallen mare’s back.
The filly’s expression remained blank the entire time.
“No!” Biting his lip, Fruit Crunch struggled to get to his hooves, fighting with everything he had to stand. “Dust Bunny! Don’t!”
But she didn’t respond, continuing to stand over Starlight. Healing her, Fruit Crunch knew. The anger at what Starlight had done to his friend, and the dread from knowing that the crazy unicorn was seconds away from recovering, gave him new strength. A second later he surged to his hooves, groaning at the effort it took.
But Starlight Glimmer was already standing as well. “That’s it,” she grunted, smiling devilishly. “More! Give me everything you have!”
Cleansweep nodded, the motion jerky and unnatural. “As you wish, Starlight Glimmer.”
“Leave her alone!” roared Fruit Crunch, trying to charge at Starlight. But all that he accomplished was to stumble, nearly collapsing again.
His frustration overflowing at how helpless he felt, Fruit Crunch could only curse softly. He should have seen this coming! Those rocks Starlight had surrounded herself with had provided her with better cover than the rest of them! Because of that, she’d either regained consciousness on her own, or had only been pretending to have been knocked out the whole time! Either way, she’d clearly overheard him and Cleansweep talking about her being a healer, and had somehow found enough strength to enchant his friend and force her to help her instead of the rest of the Knights!
And I didn’t realize it until it was too late!
Snarling, Fruit Crunch ground his teeth together so hard they ached, staring at the purple mare less than ten yards away from him. “I won’t let you do this!” he seethed. “I’m going to beat you, once and for all!”
But Starlight only smirked at him, now recovering with visible speed. “That’s right,” she cooed, her voice mocking. “You said that if I’d been tougher, you were going to get serious, right?”
A second later her smirk turned malicious as her horn lit up.
Fruit Crunch didn’t wait to see what spell Starlight Glimmer was casting, rushing toward her with his foreleg cocked back for a punch.
Or at least, that was what he tried to do. But his legs wouldn’t cooperate, turning his lunge into a painful somersault that left him crouching in the dirt, desperately trying to get his breath back as he struggled to rise. Up! he screamed at himself silently, his frustration at his own powerlessness hurting worse than his muscles. Get up!
“You’ve got to appreciate the irony.” Starlight’s voice was mocking, earning her a hateful look from Fruit Crunch. But the colt’s angry expression only made her chuckle. “You and your friends tried to fight me because you all thought you were special, didn’t you? You had super powers, or whatever those were, and your animals and your little club name and everything. But now look.” She canted her head at Cleansweep, the filly still staring blankly ahead as she kept her fore-hooves on Starlight’s side, pouring healing magic into her. Even as Fruit Crunch watched, more of Starlight’s wounds vanished, bruises fading and cuts closing, undoing the damage she’d taken up. “Those same powers are the reason you’ve lost.” Starlight’s voice lost its sardonic edge then, her expression turning serious. “This is what happens when you try to be better than everypony else. The thing that makes you special always ends up making you miserable.”
“The only thing making me miserable is YOU!” roared Fruit Crunch, furious at how the crazy lady was belittling not just him, but everything that he and his friends had achieved. “If you hate being special so much, then how come you’re using all that crazy-strong magic?!”
“That’s because I have this.” Starlight’s horn was still glowing, and now Fruit Crunch saw why, as she rolled Feathercap’s unconscious form off of the forked staff they’d worked so hard to separate her from, the colt’s body having kept it intact despite the heavy magical attack they’d all just endured. “The Staff of Sameness give me the power to not only remove cutie marks, but overcome anypony who stands in my way! With it, I can bring about a world of true equality, where everyone-”
Fruit Crunch.
The telepathic voice made the colt look down, spotting the colorful serpent coiling between his hooves. A quick glance back at Starlight confirmed that she was still ranting, and Fruit Crunch kept his voice low as he glanced back down as surreptitiously as he could. “Venin,” he whispered. “Are you alright?”
Yes, confirmed the serpent, her mental voice filled with anxiety, and that’s the problem! You need to kill me, quickly!
“What?!” It was all Fruit Crunch could do to keep his voice down at that. Fortunately, Starlight was acting just like the villains in his comic books, continuing to monologue about her motivation for creating a world where everyone was equal in their mediocrity. “Why?!”
So long as I’m alive, our enemy can make use of Cleansweep’s magic to restore herself, explained Venin. But if I die, then Cleansweep’s powers will be neutralized until I’m restored when next she dreams, preventing our foe from using her as a source of healing. The snake curled around until her head was next to his foreleg, looking up at him. Do it quickly, before she regains more of her strength!
But Fruit Crunch shook his head. “No!” he whispered, aghast. “I can’t! You’re one of us! Part of our team!”
You must! The snake’s expression was unchanging, but her voice was insistent. Every second you delay allows our enemy to continue recovering!
Fruit Crunch could feel himself wavering. With how frustrated he felt at not being able to keep fighting Starlight, the ability to put a crimp in her plans was incredibly tempting. And it wasn’t like this would do any permanent damage to anyone; Venin would come back. But even so, to kill one of his own teammates like that, just for a tactical advantage… “Cleansweep-”
Cleansweep will understand! You’re the one who leads us, so you are the one who must make the difficult decisions, as the Lord Sovereign would!
The mention of Lex brought to mind the lessons that he’d been giving them. Over and over he’d lectured them on his system of ethics and morality, repeatedly discussing the duties that ponies – and other members of the “moral community,” which Fruit Crunch was pretty sure meant everycreature who wasn’t a monster – had to each other and how those responsibilities needed to be carried out. It had been daunting at first, requiring the foals to frequently ask him to slow down, define some unfamiliar term, give them an example, or otherwise make his lessons easier to understand…something they’d only done after he’d pronounced their first round of essays about their understanding of “deontology,” as he called his moral framework, to be “totally unacceptable,” and demanded that if there was something they didn’t understand they speak up immediately.
That had been easier said than done, however. Every time one of them had asked a question, requested clarification, or otherwise made it clear that they didn’t understand something, Lex had frowned, grimaced, or scowled in response. He’d never gotten mad or berated them, but his displeasure had been clear, and it had been very disheartening for Fruit Crunch and the others to think that they were such poor students.
But that had all changed just under a week ago.
It had been mid-morning, and the Night Mare’s Knights had been heading toward the manor’s library in order to use the dictionary there to try and decipher the lecture that Lex had given them the previous night. The route there, however, had taken them past the downstairs dining hall, and it had been a complete coincidence that they’d heard Cleansweep’s mother’s voice coming from there as they’d passed by. Even then, what had caught their attention was that they’d overheard her talking about them.
“Please, Miss,” Feather Duster had been pleading. “The children are trying so hard, but Master Legis is asking too much of them.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?” The voice, partially muffled by the sound of chewing, had belonged to Aria.
“If he could maybe make things a little simpler-”
“I mentioned that back when he gave those kids an earful at the train station that night he dragged them out there,” snorted Aria. “You know what he said? ‘That was the simple version.’ So I doubt he can dumb whatever he’s teaching them down even more.”
“But he gets so mad at them when they ask questions!” Feather Duster’s protest had made them all wince on the other side of the door. “I’m there when he teaches them, and every time one of them raises their hoof and asks for clarification, he looks so upset! I can’t imagine what that’s doing to their self-esteem!”
Aria had been silent for several moments, and when she’d spoken next her voice had been unobstructed by whatever she’d been eating. “You know, for someone who follows Lex around so much, you really don’t understand him at all, do you?”
“I…I’m not sure what you-”
“Look, I don’t care about all that ‘upstanding citizen’ garbage that Lex is teaching those kids,” sighed Aria, clearly having grown tired of the conversation. “If it were up to me, I’d just tell them to keep doing what they’re doing, since they seem to be kicking butt and taking names just fine on their own. But I know Lex, and I know how seriously he takes…well, everything, but especially his whole ‘do the right thing all the time’ shtick. That and he’s terrible at talking to people. So I’ll bet you all the money in this mansion that the reason he’s getting upset whenever they ask a question isn’t because he thinks those kids are stupid. It’s because them needing to ask is making him think that he’s not a very good teacher.”
That had come as a surprise to the Knights, and Fruit Crunch could still remember the shocked looks they’d exchanged then. The conversation between the two mares had turned to other topics shortly after that (mostly Aria complaining about having to go into Vanhoover again, and demanding more pancakes before she left), and the kids had hightailed it to the library to discuss what they’d just heard.
After a brief debate, they’d decided to be more proactive in asking questions from now on. Fruit Crunch had been worried that would only hurt Lex’s feelings more, but Fiddlesticks had pointed out that if they didn’t ask questions, they’d keep failing his lessons, and then he’d feel even worse about his teaching skills. No one had been able to argue with that, and starting that evening they’d all gotten serious about raising their hooves when they didn’t understand something.
The result had been that Lex’s instructions had slowly begun to make more sense, and one of those lessons came back to Fruit Crunch now:
Neither intentions nor consequences are reliable indicators of a deed’s vice or virtue. The moral dimension of a particular action only be found by examining the nature of that action unto itself.
Even if it was to gain a tactical advantage, and even if it would only be temporary, killing one of his own teammates was wrong. Fighting Starlight would be more difficult that way, but it was what Lex would do. Of that Fruit Crunch was certain.
His indecision gone, Fruit Crunch smiled grimly and shook his head. “No. I won’t do that to you, Venin.”
I know this is hard, argued the snake. But-
“It’s not about doing what’s hard,” interrupted Fruit Crunch. “It’s about doing what’s right, even when it’s hard.” The line made him grin a little; he’d have to put that on his next essay! “I’m not going to kill you, so stop trying to convince me to, and instead help me think of a different plan to rescue Dust Bunny and beat that crazy unicorn!”
For a long moment, Venin didn’t reply, simply looking up at him as her tongue slid in and out of her mouth. I question the wisdom of this course of action, she said at last, but if your mind is made up, then I’ll follow your lead.
“Good to hear,” grunted Fruit Crunch. But the sound turned into a strained groan as he tried to stand back up, aborting the attempt as his overstrained body made it clear that it the effort was more than it could handle at the moment. “Next order of business,” he murmured, “help me find some way to get back on my hooves!”
I don’t have healing powers of my own, admitted Venin. And there’s no way our foe will let you avail yourself of Cleansweep’s magic so easily. But there’s one thing I can do that might be able to help. A little.
“Whatever it is, I’ll take it!”
As you wish. Hold very still. With no further warning, Venin darted forward, her mouth opening as she struck out at his foreleg. Fruit Crunch had no time to react as Venin bit him, but surprisingly there was almost no pain as she did, the sensation feeling more like a mild pinch. Nor did she stop there, turning to do the same to his other foreleg before coiling her way up his body and slithering all over him, biting softly as she went.
It didn’t take very long for her to finish, slithering back down a few seconds later. That should do it. Try moving now.
Gingerly, making sure not to move too fast in order to keep from alerting Starlight, Fruit Crunch shifted his posture, eyes widening at little as doing so was met with only a dull ache rather than the sharp pain he’d been expecting. “That’s amazing!” he admitted softly. “What did you do?”
My venom is a numbing agent, explained Venin. In large doses it can deaden limbs and even cause total paralysis, but in small amounts it can dull pain and reduce inflammation. I injected small amounts throughout your muscles so as to ease your discomfort enough to allow you to continue fighting. But be warned: this is only masking the damage you’ve taken. It’s not repairing it.
“Good enough,” grunted Fruit Crunch, shifting his legs under him so that he was ready to spring. “If I can keep Starlight focused on me, can you hit her with a bigger dose of that stuff and paralyze her?”
I can try. But my venom works best when delivered in multiple doses, which means I’ll need to bite her multiple times, and I doubt our enemy will be as reluctant to harm me as you are if I begin sinking my fangs into her.
“Don’t worry.” Fruit Crunch glanced around, his anger returning at the sight of Straightlace, Fiddlesticks, and Feathercap lying motionless, along with Cleansweep still staring at nothing as she kept her hooves on Starlight. “I’ve got a plan to make her focus completely on me.”
Very well. At your command, then.
“Alright…here we go…”
Starlight was still talking, explaining how the world she was going to create would be free from jealousy, insecurity, rivalry, and a host of other ills, replacing them with true harmony. How cutie marks invariably led to hurt feelings and division. How being special separated friends and ruined relationships. That last part caused Starlight to look down, as if in sorrow, and Fruit Crunch knew he wouldn’t get a better chance.
“YOU’RE WRONG!”
Starlight’s head whipped up, her eyes widening as she saw the colt who had barely been able to move before galloping toward her now, bellowing. “BEING SPECIAL-”
Whipping the forked end of her staff around, Starlight tried to bring it to bear on the charging earth pony. But Fruit Crunch was already too close, raising a hoof and knocking the twin points of the staff away from him. The blow was heavy enough to make Starlight lose her telekinetic grasp on it, the wooden weapon falling to the ground as Fruit Crunch moved to within reach of her. “-ISN’T A BAD THING!”
The punch he threw then closed in on Starlight's face...just in time for her to vanish, teleporting away. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her reappear barely twenty feet away, grimacing, but he didn't pursue her. Instead, he stayed right where he was, giving her a vicious smirk as he lifted the Staff of Sameness and braced it against the remaining wall of the train station, watching as her eyes widened in horrified realization...
And then he brought his hoof down sharply, snapping it in two.
“Oops,” drawled Fruit Crunch, his voice thick with sarcasm. “I broke your magic staff.”
Starlight could only stare at him, struggling to process just how big of a setback this was, the gasps and cries of dismay from the ponies she’d brought with her ringing in her ears. Although the staff had never possessed any actual power, it had been a vital part of her plans, serving as a convenient excuse for why she could wield more magic than most ponies despite her supposedly having given up her cutie mark. With her prop gone, she’d need to find some other way of fooling everypony…but she couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would be. As gullible as the ponies in her village were, even they would be skeptical if she conveniently found some other “magic item” that just so happened to function identically to the Staff of Sameness.
Her teeth clenched, Starlight struggled to retain her composure. I can fix this! All I have to do is repair the staff! Simple reparative spells weren’t that hard, so long as all the pieces of whatever was broken were present and intact. I already told everypony that the staff granted residual power even after it was put down, she reminded herself, her horn already lighting up as she grabbed the broken halves of it. I can just say that I used that to put it back togeth-
“Oh no you don’t!” Diving forward, Fruit Crunch grabbed the forked end of the staff in his teeth before she’d been able to move it more than a few inches.
“Give me that!” screeched Starlight, tugging harder.
But Fruit Crunch didn’t let go, grunting as he dug his hooves into the ground. Starlight pulled harder, knowing that the longer it took her to repair the staff, the less believable her “residual power” excuse would beco- “AAH!”
Yelping, Starlight’s telekinetic aura flickered out as a sharp pain shot through her left hind leg. A quick glance back showed why, as the snake that had been clinging to Cleansweep was currently extracting its fangs from just above her ankle, rearing back to strike again. The sight made Starlight hop to the side, avoiding the animal’s second bite, but she could feel her back leg already becoming sluggish…
The same as her right foreleg.
Just like Cleansweep, the snake had poisoned her.
Barely able to keep her balance now, Starlight couldn’t contain a cry of anger as she pointed her horn at the serpent – already slithering toward her again with its fangs bared – and poured her frustration into a blast of magic. The spell sent a sharp headache through her, a sign that while Cleansweep’s healing had closed a lot of her injuries, it had done very little for how badly she’d taxed herself up until now. But at the moment Starlight couldn’t have cared less, instead basking in the spiteful pleasure of watching the serpent vanish within the blast of light, vaporized in an instant. With the nuisance gone, Starlight turned back toward Fruit Crunch…
…just in time to watch him chomp down on one of the wooden prongs on the forked end of the broken staff.
Starlight could only stare, disbelieving, as the colt chewed heavily on the wood, audibly grinding it down to a pulp before swallowing. It wasn’t some sort of sleight-of-hoof; the kid had really eaten it, like how she’d heard some earth pony rock farmers did with the stones they dug up. Even so, the sight was so unexpected that it took her a moment to realize that he’d done the same thing to the other prong already, leaving that end of the staff completely bare.
Catching her eye, Fruit Crunch flashed her a condescending smirk. “In comic books, when the heroes destroy the villains’ magic talismans, the bad guys will sometimes try to recover and repair them. That’s not going to happen this time.”
Starlight felt something snap inside her then. Comic books? That miserable little brat had just shattered her dream, quite possibly beyond repair, and he was talking about comic books?!
All of a sudden Starlight didn’t care about finding a way to continue deceiving everypony. She didn’t care about the numbness in her legs. She didn’t care about conserving power before Lex Legis arrived.
All she cared about at that moment was wiping the smirk off of that punk kid’s face.
Focusing all of her rage into her horn, Starlight threw everything she could into her telekinesis. The agony that flashed through her as she did was so excruciating that for a moment it made her nauseous, but she pushed through it. Her blood pounded in her ears, and her horn felt like it was on fire, but she didn’t let up. The only thing that mattered now was punishing that self-absorbed earth colt who had treated her life’s work as though it was one of his games of make-believe!
Screaming in fury, Starlight tossed her head back, raising her horn up high.
An instant later, the mass of rubble that had once been Vanhoover’s train station rose up into the air.
Every piece of broken wood, shattered stone, and tangled metal had a telekinetic aura around it now, matching the bright glow surrounding Starlight’s horn. And as Fruit Crunch watched, his eyes wide, the accumulated debris slowly began to move, the chunks whirling around each other in a chaotic pattern even as they drifted over, moving away from the building’s foundation. It took them only a second to reach their destination.
Right over his head.
But the thrill of fear that ran through him then wasn’t only for himself.
“STARLIGHT, STOP!” Frantically, Fruit Crunch swept a hoof out to indicate where his friends were still scattered around the battlefield, one staring at nothing and the other three lying unconscious. The fact that Aria and that other lady were far enough away that they were out of danger was only a small comfort. “YOU’LL HIT THEM TOO!”
“Oh, don’t worry!” The words were hissed, her voice twisted with naked viciousness. “The only one I’m going to hit is YOU!!!”
Then the rubble began to fall.
Fruit Crunch threw himself backward, his knees wobbling with effort even as a chunk of rock as big as he was slammed into the ground where he’d been just a second ago. But he couldn’t stop to appreciate the close call, immediately diving left, barely managing to avoid a pair of splintered two by fours that lanced into the ground an instant later. Even then he didn’t stop moving, grabbing the boards and using them as a fulcrum to immediately reverse direction, slipping between them as a tangled metal mass that might have been a bench once missed him by inches.
He had been dodging for his life like this for the last thirty seconds, and Fruit Crunch knew that he didn’t have much time left.
Starlight hadn’t released all of the accumulated debris at once. Instead she was letting go of one or two pieces at a time, positioning them directly over his head before removing her telekinesis and letting gravity do the rest. Meanwhile, she kept the rest of the huge mass churning overhead, the remaining fragments whirling in a confusing swirl that left him with almost no time to react when each new piece fell from the sky.
The good news was that Starlight had, true to her word, only targeted him so far, ignoring the rest of his friends. The bad news was that between the wall of the ruined building on his left side, and the rest of the Knights spread out behind and to the right of him, that left Fruit Crunch with very little room to maneuver. And the even worse news was that he knew he couldn’t keep this up much longer, his muscles burning even through the numbing agent that Venin had used on him.
But at least that means I know what to do now! After all, something like this had happened in the “Fish in a Barrel” story in last year’s Power Ponies Annual, when Marksmare had lured Fili-Second into a dead-end tunnel to try and prevent her from dodging attacks from her magic slingshot. But even without the rest of her team, Fili-Second had beaten the bad guy, quipping one simple rule in her thought balloons as she’d done so. If you can’t dodge and you can’t retreat, then the only way to go is right through your enemy!
A second later Fruit Crunch did just that, skidding past the fractured remains of a desk, twisting around a mangled chair, and dodging a heavy section of a wall as he doggedly made his way toward Starlight. Just a little further! A piece of a pipe came down close enough that it shaved a few hairs from his mane. A little further! A portion of the roof whizzed by him, sending shingles flying as it hit the ground. Panting for breath, his lungs burning, Fruit Crunch leaped forward as he kept closing the distance between himself and Starlight.
Just thirty more feet. No problem at all!
Twenty more feet. A quick glance upward showed that the debris cloud was following him, and wasn’t over any of his friends now.
Ten more feet. It was with a sense of wicked satisfaction that Fruit Crunch saw Starlight try to back away, only for her to nearly stumble as she did. With two legs numbed, it was all she could do to keep her balance now, which meant that with how hard she had to be concentrating to keep so much stuff in the air, she wouldn’t be able to dodge the pounding he was about to give her.
Just five more feet…!
It was pure instinct that made Fruit Crunch stop his charge at the last possible second, hooves digging into the dirt as the upper edge of his vision caught sight of a massive pile of wreckage – composed of several fragments of the ruined building, rather than just one – plummeting from the sky, barely keeping out of their way as they crashed directly between himself and Starlight, cutting him off from her.
But with pure adrenaline flowing through him, Fruit Crunch didn’t hesitate. I can’t see her, but she can’t see me now either! And if she can barely move with her legs like that, then she won’t be able to dodge THIS! The last part of that thought came just as he whirled around, glancing back at the weakest-looking part of the tangled wall – the top half of what looked like a wooden wardrobe – and kicked his back legs out, bucking it as hard as he could.
The broken piece of furniture went flying, and a half-second later Fruit Crunch was rewarded with the sound of a heavy impact followed instantly by a grunt of pain from Starlight.
Not wanting to give her even an instant to recover, Fruit Crunch hurried to follow his makeshift missile, vaulting through the hole he’d made in Starlight’s defense and advancing on her. Sure enough, she was lying on her back next to the busted wardrobe, groaning softly as she reached up to rub her head. She blinked as she did, and the white light began to fade from her eyes, the blue irises starting to reappear.
Unwilling to give her a chance to recover, Fruit Crunch galloped across the last few feet separating them, raising a hoof threateningly as he moved to stand over her. “It’s over, Starlight.”
“No!” Her moan of defiance was accompanied by her biting her lip, visibly concentrating. A second later her eyes started to glow once again, the white light blotting everything else out.
…until Fruit Crunch brought his hoof down sharply on her stomach. It didn’t have quite enough force to be called a punch, but it was heavy enough to make Starlight’s breath immediately escape her lungs, her eyes returning to normal instantly as the aura around her horn guttered out. “I said it’s over!” repeated Fruit Crunch. “You’re beaten! So now-”
“YOU IDIOT!” wailed Starlight, looking up at him. But it was fear, not anger, that crossed her features as she started to wriggle under him frantically. “GET OFF ME!”
For just a moment Fruit Crunch was confused. But then he realized that she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking past him, up at the sky, and Fruit Crunch didn’t have to follow her gaze to realize that he’d just made a critical error: he’d been so focused on reaching Starlight and taking her down that he hadn’t thought about what would happen after he did.
And now it was too late.
Above the two of them, the entire collection of wreckage began to fall.
In the split-second that Fruit Crunch was distracted, looking upward in horror at the mass of debris that was beginning to fall toward them, she wrapped her telekinesis around one of his forelegs, yanking on it as hard as she could. Although the effort made her horn ache, it was enough to unbalance the colt, causing him to yelp with surprise as he went stumbling away from her. As soon as he was clear, she focused on a different spell, biting back a groan of pain as she forced more power through her overtaxed horn. For the briefest instant, she felt the magic struggle to take shape, and the knowledge that she’d be crushed if this failed fueled her concentration.
Her shield sprung into place in the nick of time, a chunk of masonry striking the glowing dome with six inches to spare and bouncing off in a way she knew it wouldn’t have if it had made contact with her head.
A second later the rest of the pulverized remains of the train station came down, and despite knowing that her shield would likely hold, Starlight couldn’t help but squeeze her eyes shut, grimacing as she turned her head away from the cacophony of impacts that rang out then. It was only when the noise stopped that she opened them, scanning the sky through the protective barrier to be sure that nothing else was falling. It wasn’t until she’d confirmed that it was all clear that Starlight let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, releasing the shield and somehow managing to sit upright.
Even that took a great deal of effort, especially since she still couldn’t feel two of her legs. But she needed to make sure that miserable brat wasn’t about to ambush her again. Despite knowing that he couldn’t possibly have avoided the rain of wreckage, the little punk had surprised her too many times for her to take his defeat for granted now. That was why Starlight forced herself to resist the urge to lie back down, barely managing to stand as she looked around, readying herself to bear whatever pain she’d have to in order to blast him with magic as soon as she saw him…
The kid was gone.
For a moment Starlight couldn’t believe it, scanning the junk-strewn area around her a second time and once again not locating him. Had he somehow gotten clear? No, no way, she decided after a second’s hesitation. The colt had been fast on his hooves, but not that fast. But then where…?
Her question was answered a second later as she heard a groan, directing her attention toward the broken remains of what looked like a wardrobe lying a few feet away from her. Belatedly recognizing it as the same piece of furniture that the kid had hit her in the face with right before everything had fallen, Starlight watched as Fruit Crunch – who had apparently taken shelter under it – slowly stood up.
Unlike herself, the earth colt hadn’t escaped the shower of wreckage unscathed. Bruises covered his back where the wood from the wardrobe hadn’t been sufficient to protect him from the falling debris, numerous scratches were oozing blood, and his side had several large splinters jutting from it. But he was still standing up, grunting with exertion as he heaved the remains of his makeshift shelter away, looking around as though prepared to continue fighting.
Starlight didn’t intend to let him.
Before Fruit Crunch even had a chance to look around, Starlight hit him with a blast of magic from her horn. It wasn’t as powerful as she’d intended, but it was enough to send the kid sprawling. Her next shot knocked him off his hooves entirely, leaving him draped across a broken collection of stones, hooves waving feebly as he struggled to rise. But her third strike put an end to that, delivered with a roar of frustration as she finally gave the little brat a taste of his own medicine, leaving him lying limply on the ground.
For a long moment Starlight just stood there, waiting for the worst headache of her life to subside as she sucked in air, barely able to move. Fruit Crunch, however, didn’t seem able to move at all, just twitching and groaning slightly, his eyes somehow fluttering open. The sight of that, of seeing him still trying to resist her, made Starlight want to scream. In that moment, it wasn’t enough to know that she had won; the kid needed to know that he’d lost.
Slowly, aching all over, Starlight dragged herself over to Fruit Crunch, kneeling down next to him. He seemed only semi-conscious, but that was good enough. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, kid,” she whispered, her voice twisted by spite. “That staff of mine that you ruined? It never had any magic. It was just a piece of wood that I found in the desert. The magic always came from me. You accomplished nothing!”
The colt must have been closer to consciousness than she thought, because she saw his eyes open slightly wider at that. But rather than the despair she’d wanted to see, they changed into a look of determination a second later. “Stop…you…” he rasped. “Gonna…stop…you…!”
The words made Starlight see red. “You can’t stop me!” she screamed, her voice rising into a shriek. “You’re a nothing! A no one! Some stupid little brat who’s read too many comic books!” The bile that rose in her throat then had nothing to do with the injuries she’d taken. “All the ponies in this town are crazy! You’ve all had your heads filled with cutie marks and heroes and goddesses, making you think that you can actually become things! No wonder Lex Legis’s goddess is called the Night Mare! Because that’s what everypony will be living in if they keep trying to improve themselves!” Her eyes bloodshot, her breath ragged, Starlight bared her teeth at Fruit Crunch. “Well I’m here to wake everypony up! Starting with YOU!”
Ignoring the pain, she forced more magic through her horn. “I’m going to take it all away! Everything that you think makes you exceptional! And the first to go is this!”
A moment later she discharged her spell, and Fruit Crunch’s cutie mark tore itself from his flank, floating over to Starlight as an equals sign appeared where it had been. Panting, she regarded it for a moment, taking in the sight of a hoof stomping on several pieces of fruit. Although she knew it was likely denoting something to do with food, the impact lines around the hoof didn’t escape her notice. No wonder the kid could hit so hard.
But as much as she wanted to savor her victory then, Starlight knew she needed to put the accursed mark in a container or it would just reattach itself to the fallen colt. Scowling, she glanced around, ignoring the sea of horrified faces watching her from afar until she found the ponies she’d brought her with her. “Get over here, all of you!” she commanded. “Hurry up!”
For a moment they hesitated, and Starlight was enough to repeat herself when they began to shuffle forward, navigating the rough terrain slowly as they pulled their bottle-filled wagons behind them. “S-Starlight? Are you alright?” asked Sugar Belle hesitantly.
“Do I look alright?” snapped Starlight curtly. “Now take this!” Flinging Fruit Crunch’s cutie mark forward, she didn’t bother to watch as the other unicorn mare quickly bottled it, instead turning to another member of her group. “Sonata, you told me before that you have spells that can boost the pony you use them on, right?”
The question made Sonata blink. “Yeah, a few. But you said not to use them anymore, because that would-”
“Never mind that now,” interrupted Starlight. “Cast them on me.”
The order made Sonata’s eyes widen, and she wasn’t the only one. “But Starlight,” protested Night Glider. “If Sonata does that, it’ll show everypony watching that she’s still not equal to the rest of us, even without her cutie mark!”
“And what about the Staff of Sameness?” added Double Diamond. “What are we going to do once that residual power you said it gave you fades away?” He nodded toward where Sugar Belle was putting the jar with Fruit Crunch’s cutie mark back in her wagon. “We won’t be able to make anypony else our friend!”
“Especially that Lex guy!” Party Favor looked around nervously, as though the crowd of the surrounding houses were going to reveal Lex at any second. “Starlight, we should go back to our village now. We can-”
“We are NOT retreating!” The look Starlight gave Party Favor then made him quail. “I’m putting a stop to the insanity infecting this place, and that means confronting the pony responsible for it all!” She swept her eyes over the other five, silently daring them to defy her. “We are not leaving,” she said again, her voice dangerous, “without Lex Legis’s cutie mark.”
Sonata winced at that, looking like she’d just been told that Hearth’s Warming had just been cancelled. “But Starlight, Lex won’t-”
“Shut up and cast those spells!” Starlight stared daggers at Sonata, ignoring the frightened looks that the other four were trading, until at last the mare nodded meekly, starting to mumble an off-key incantation and reaching out to brush a hoof over Starlight’s chest a moment later, causing her to feel tingly all over as renewed liveliness spread through her. Nor did Sonata stop there, starting to cast a second spell.
But rather than feeling grateful, Starlight’s only response was to huff at how obstinate everypony was being, turning to glance over at the other pony she’d enchanted. “Cleansweep!” she called. “Come over here, quickly!” It took the filly only a few seconds to comply, flying over the rubble-strewn field. “Heal me,” demanded Starlight as soon as she’d arrived.
But the filly didn’t move. “I cannot.”
It was all Starlight could do not to scream at that. “Why not?!”
“Without Venin, I am unable to use my magic powers,” replied the filly in a monotone.
“Venin?” Idly, Starlight noted that Sonata had finished her second spell, causing her to feel a rush of vigor.
“The snake. My spirit animal.”
“Then what good are you?” spat Starlight, disgusted. At least Sonata had already started on another spell. But a moment later Starlight put the dots together. “Wait, so you all got your powers from those animals?”
“Yes.”
“Then…then by destroying them, I’ve taken those away from you!” Starlight couldn’t help but laugh then, suddenly feeling vindicated. “First those animals, then your cutie marks, and soon your hero! I can do it!” Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath, suddenly feeling much better for reasons other than Sonata’s magic bucking her up. “I can take away everything that makes you all spec-”
But she couldn’t finish as a chorus of gasps rang out from the ponies around her. “Starlight!” cried Double Diamond. “Look out!”
Swinging her head around to see where he was looking, she turned to follow his gaze…
-only for her world to jar violently to the left as a hoof impacted with her face.
“I’m still the leader of the Night Mare’s Knights!” panted Fruit Crunch, winding his hoof back for another blow.
Reeling, Starlight tried to fall back, to telekinetically fly into the air, to teleport away, but Fruit Crunch didn’t give her a chance, pressing her quicker than she could react. “I’m still Lex’s student!” he roared, hitting her with an uppercut that almost lifted her off her hooves, and probably would have if he’d still had his cutie mark.
In a panic, Starlight looked around for something she could use as a shield. Some rubble or debris that she could put between herself and the colt who just wouldn’t stay down! Something to buy her even a second-
“I’m still Fruit Crunch!” His left hoof coming down on her muzzle was enough to send Starlight into the dirt. “Those are things that you can NEVER TAKE AWAY FROM ME!”
Several thoughts floated through Starlight’s mind then. One was that she probably would have been unconscious already if it hadn’t been for Sonata’s magic. Another was how none of her so-called friends were moving to help her, even after all she’d done for them. But the one realization that she held onto was that there was one way to get the implacable colt off of her, and strike back at him, all at once.
Spitting out a mouthful of blood, Starlight turned her head in a particular direction and fired a blast of magic…
Directly at Cleansweep.
Her gamble paid off a moment later as Fruit Crunch, who had seen where she was aiming, threw himself in the path of the beam, taking the hit full in the face. The strike spun him around in midair, his limbs pinwheeling as he crashed into Cleansweep, the filly blinking as the impact broke the enchantment she’d been under. The two of them fell-
Only to be caught just before they hit the ground, held aloft in a roiling purple aura. The owner of it appeared a moment later, a large shadow whose only features were green-and-purple eyes, the crowd of ponies parted in front of him as he advanced. Although she’d had the sight described to her several times by Sonata, Starlight still found her breath catching as she beheld the real thing.
Cleansweep couldn’t have said when it was that her impression of Lex Legis had changed.
At first she’d been deeply suspicious of him. Despite the fact that he’d come bearing gifts and promises to help improve their lives, Cleansweep had initially kept her distance. After all, Block Party had said similar stuff when he’d gotten everypony organized, only for things to grow steadily worse under his management.
And in the beginning Lex had seemed like just another Block Party. He was cold and unapproachable, his magic was scary-looking, and he carried around a giant weapon everywhere, as though ready to cut down anypony who upset him. That was why, when Block Party had died just a few hours after Lex had arrived, Cleansweep had been sure about who’d been behind it. That Lex had practically tortured that Spit Polish guy in front of everyone had only confirmed in her mind that their new ruler was bad news.
But somewhere along the line, she’d started to have doubts.
Part of that had been because of Sonata. Not only was Lex’s girlfriend the most beautiful pony that Cleansweep had ever seen, but Fiddlesticks had said that she was also kind and easygoing, which had been an indirect endorsement of Lex himself. He had to have some good qualities if such an incredible lady had chosen him.
By itself that wouldn’t have been enough to change Cleansweep’s mind, but things had kept happening to make her question her initial evaluation of Lex. Like the way he’d almost killed himself making that huge banquet for everypony. Or how he’d personally gone into Vanhoover to rescue more survivors. Or how he’d fought so hard to defend them from the ghoul army. All of those were things that Block Party never would have done.
And, of course, there had been Fruit Crunch.
That her best friend thought that Lex was the coolest pony alive hadn’t surprised her very much. He was the living embodiment of the sort of character Crunchy had always enjoyed reading about in those adventure stories he loved: a dark and mysterious pony who looked like a villain but tried to help people. Cleansweep had never seen the appeal herself, but she’d been willing to go along with Crunchy’s enthusiasm, particularly after finding out what Spit Polish had done to him. That had been another point in Lex’s favor; while she’d known that Spit Polish had been Block Party’s lieutenant, and that Lex had punished him for a different reason, finding out that he’d beaten her best friend to a pulp – and that Fruit Crunch had been carrying a lot of bad feelings around ever since then, explaining why he’d started to turn into a bully – had made her reexamine her feelings about Lex cursing bad guys.
Her attitude toward Lex had continued to change after she’d joined the Night Mare’s Knights. Seeing him again put himself at risk for someone else – in this case Sonata’s sister – had simply driven home how selfless he was. And the lessons that she and her friends had received from Severance, seeing it carve deep gashes in Fruit Crunch’s leg when he’d gotten a recitation wrong, had made it easy for her to believe Lex when he’d told them that the weapon had acted on its own when it had killed Princess Luna’s guard.
But it had been the little things that had left the biggest impression on her. Living at Miss River’s mansion, and later on taking lessons from Lex himself, had meant that she’d picked up on all sorts of details about him that she’d never had a chance to find out otherwise. Like finding out from her mom about how he’d always used his magic to make oatmeal for himself every morning because he wanted to leave as much food as possible for everypony else. Or how, when he’d told her to ask Dr. House Call each day if any of his patients needed her to heal them, the medical pony had let it slip that Lex would also check in with him daily, using his own magic to help if it looked like somepony was getting worse. Or finding out how it was really himself that Lex was upset at whenever they asked him a question during their lessons.
Or the way his expression softened, just a little, whenever he looked at Sonata or Aria…and became pained whenever that other lady, Nosey, was mentioned.
By then, without even realizing it, Cleansweep had not only stopped being suspicious of Lex, but she’d started to feel comfortable around him. His dour expression and perpetual humorlessness had gone from being threatening to just being part of who he was. His frustration no longer seemed like a harbinger of imminent violence, but rather the stress of someone who couldn’t give less than one hundred percent to everything they did. He wasn’t Lex Legis, the fearsome scion of King Sombra and herald of the dark goddess, but just Lex, an extraordinary pony doing the best he could in extraordinary circumstances.
In fact, it had gotten to the point where Cleansweep was starting to become frustrated that some other ponies couldn’t see what she did. Sure, the ones who had just come back to Vanhoover hadn’t seen most of the good stuff that Lex had done, but blaming him for not doing an even better job and saving more people was just unfair! The first time she’d overheard some grownups angrily talking about how Lex had “hardly rescued anyone,” Venin had barely been able to talk her down from poisoning them on the spot.
Her own parents weren’t much better either. As thankful as she was to have them both back safe and sound, the way the two of them were reacting to Lex had embarrassed Cleansweep to death on more than one occasion. Her dad seemed to be under the impression that Lex’s accomplishments weren’t such a big deal, spinning yarns about his own adventures whenever Lex’s achievements were mentioned. While Cleansweep normally enjoyed listening to her dad’s stories, hearing him try to one-up the stallion who had done so much for everypony made her cringe almost as hard as seeing how scared of Lex her mom was…though she had gotten a little better recently. Hopefully she was coming to see how noble her new boss really was, and that the only ponies he was a threat to were the ones who did evil things…
Which, Cleansweep thought to herself vengefully, cradling Fruit Crunch’s insensate form as Lex’s telekinetic aura pulled them both toward him, dropping his shadow-form and turning back into a pony as he did so, is what Starlight Glimmer is about to find out.
“I’m not going to tell you again: get out of my way NOW!”
“Miss, I understand-”
“No! You don’t understand! If you understood, you’d step aside and let me have one of those-”
“Drafty, that’s enough!” Squeezing in between her girlfriend and that old butler, Cloudbank gently but firmly moved Thermal Draft back a few paces. “I know you want to do something, but throwing a fit isn’t helping!”
“Neither is sitting here doing nothing!” huffed Thermal Draft, her tail swishing in agitation. “Cloudy, you know this isn’t right! Lex is out there fighting to protect everypony – again! – and this time he’s got a whole bunch of people helping him! The Siren sisters! Those kids with the animals you said can talk! I think even one of Turbo’s friends is out there doing her part, so why aren’t we?!”
“We did our part!” shot back Cloudbank, trying to keep her frustration in check. “We found Lex and let him know what’s happening, and now we’re staying out of the way so that he can fight without having to worry about us!”
But Thermal Draft wouldn’t back down. “You know we can do more than that! We fought those sea monsters on the docks! We made it past those ghouls in the basement of that bank!”
“Yes, yes we did, and I ALMOST LOST YOU BOTH TIMES!” screamed Cloudbank, her patience finally giving out.
Her words were enough to make Thermal Draft’s eyes widen. “Wait, Cloudy, that’s not-”
But she couldn’t finish as Cloudbank turned away from her, sitting up and putting her face in her fore-hooves, letting out a few shuddering breaths before seeming to compose herself and facing her again. “You’re terrible at heroics, Drafty.” She chuckled as she said it, but her smile was weak, and didn’t reach her eyes. “I mean, you’re really, really bad at it. We go out looking for food while we’re hiding out in Vanhoover, and you get bitten by one of those undead ponies, fall ill, and almost die. You stop me from killing Lex after that kraken made me attack him, by taking the hit yourself. You rush ahead to open that vault, only for a ghoul to get the drop on you.” She stepped forward then, her eyes shimmering, and put a hoof on her girlfriend’s chest. “Every time you try to help, you end up nearly getting yourself killed…and that’s not even counting how our last adventure ended. And now, after we’ve been given a second chance, you want to go out there and put yourself at risk again?” Biting her lip, she shook her head, unable to continue.
“Cloudy…” Her ears folding back, Thermal Draft needed a moment to collect herself. But after several seconds, she took a deep breath and smile, stepping closer to nuzzle the other mare. “I know you’re scared. I am too. But I can keep going even when I’m scared because I know you’re always right there with me.”
That earned a self-deprecating laugh from Cloudbank. “How does that help? I’ve never been able to protect you.”
“You’ve always protected me,” countered Thermal Draft. “When we went out looking for food, that ghoul’s bite paralyzed me. But you threw yourself at it and fought it off long enough for it to wear off, and we were able to escape together. When I was hurt on the docks, it was your healing spell that saved my life, the same way it was when we got to the bank vault.” Cloudbank started to protest again, only for Thermal Draft to silence her with a kiss. “You’ve always been the reason I can be brave,” she whispered once it ended. “Because no matter what happens I know that you’ll be there.”
“And what if that’s not enough?” sniffled Cloudbank. “What if we go out there to help Lex only to find that whoever he’s fighting is more than either of us can handle?”
Thermal Draft smiled, bringing her wings up and letting the tips brush the tears from the corners of Cloudbank’s eyes. “When we were trapped in that vault, fighting our way out would have been suicide. So you figured out that the best course of action was to go up. Well, I think we should follow that same strategy now.” She scowled then, looking over Cloudbank’s shoulder to glare at the old butler, still standing in the doorway she’d been trying to get through. “If a certain somepony would get out of the way so we can get what we need to help Lex!”
The stallion, who had tastefully averted his eyes so as to give the two at least some semblance of privacy during their romantic moment, gave an apologetic bow. “I’m terribly sorry, miss,” he began again, “but Master Legis himself said that these rainclouds were not to be used by anypony without his explicit instructions.”
Glowering, Thermal Draft opened her mouth, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before a new voice rang out. “It’s alright, Trotsworth.”
All three ponies glanced over at where a pegasus mare in a maid uniform was approaching them. While Thermal Draft didn’t recognize her, and Cloudbank didn’t seem to either, Trotsworth raised a brow. The mare, in turn, nodded at him. “Please let them get what they need.”
To Thermal Draft’s surprise, Trotsworth seemed to consider that for a moment. “Has Master Legis sent word that he wishes for these clouds to be put to use?”
The maid shook her head. “No, but…I think it’s what he’d want. Either way, I’ll take responsibility.”
Trotsworth’s expression took on a pensive cast. “As you’re Master Legis’s personal assistant, propriety demands that I presume you understand his wishes best. Are you sure that this is what you want to do, Feather Duster?”
For a moment, Feather Duster seemed to waver, but swallowed and nodded. “I am. Master Legis has been…courteous, toward me, even though I haven’t done much to deserve it. If he’s in danger now, then I can at least help the ponies who want to help him.”
The tiniest of smiles found its way onto Trotsworth’s face. “How very proper of you.” Turning abruptly, he gave Cloudbank and Thermal Draft another bow, before marching down the hallway without so much as a backwards glance.
Cloudbank watched him go for a second, before turning back to Feather Duster. “Wait, so you’re Lex’s ‘personal assistant’?”
“Nevermind that!” Thermal Draft was already rushing through the doorway that Trotsworth had just vacated, squeezing through the ballroom that was currently filled with dark-colored clouds. “Help me find the biggest-, there! That one!” Grabbing the largest one of the bunch, Thermal Draft started pushing the cloud toward the door, causing it to rumble dangerously in response. “We are so going to call down the thunder on whoever’s trying to mess with Lex!”
That’s right, sweetheart, came the silky purr of Kara’s voice in her mind, the same way it had when she’d told her what to say to melt Cloudbank’s heart just now. Just keep following my instructions, and you’ll win his heart in no time.
Starlight had to admit, Lex Legis knew how to make an entrance.
Keeping at the ready as the black mass of shadow floated forward from where the crowd parted, she made herself meet those green-and-purple eyes as they locked onto her, refusing to show any fear. But despite her show of bravado, she tensed her legs, prepared to spring if Lex began to cast a spell. Even that caused a pronounced ache to run through her, but it was one that she could bear now thanks to Sonata’s magic.
Most of his magic requires him to gesticulate and recite special words, Starlight reminded herself, recalling what Sonata had told her previously. But his dark magic can be used with a thought, and his eyes will glow whenever he uses either type of magic…or if he’s upset.
A second later Lex changed back to his pony form, striding forward with steps that were slow and confident, setting those two foals down in front of him. But although the aura around his horn faded away as he did so, his eyes lost none of their luminosity. The sight made a rueful smirk cross Starlight’s lips.
Yeah, definitely upset.
It was with cold dispassion that Lex surveyed the scene before him.
He could feel a mixture of dark emotions swirling within him – bitterness at how Vanhoover’s revival was again under threat, guilt that ponies had been hurt while he wasn’t there to protect them, and rage, an inferno of rage, at the purple unicorn mare standing a little more than a dozen yards away, smirking as though proud of what she had done – but he kept them under control. Succumbing to an outpouring of emotion right now would at best be a pointless waste of energy, and at worst cause him to make mistakes that he couldn’t afford. Not when he was already operating on such a meager reserve of strength.
As it was, the physical toll that enhancing the resurrection spell that the Night Mare had given him was acute in the extreme. Although he’d tried to blunt the worst of it by not engaging in any tasks more demanding than walking for the last few hours, he could still feel a profound lethargy coursing through his limbs now. Each step sent soreness rippling through his legs, and he moved slowly in an attempt to conserve whatever small amount of stamina he could, knowing that he’d likely need it all in the next few minutes.
But there were more important things that needed to be attended to before then.
“Lex, Crunchy’s hurt really bad!” Cleansweep’s voice was shaky as she cradled Fruit Crunch’s head in her lap, the colt’s face a mask of blood. “She…that lady, Starlight Glimmer, she put some sort of spell on me, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but Venin’s gone and I can’t heal him! I think…I think he was protecting me! He was-”
But Lex was already casting, chanting a liturgy to the Night Mare as he made the proper gestures, telekinetically withdrawing a vial of water that he’d imbued with the goddess’s power earlier to complete the spell. He saw the purple unicorn – Starlight Glimmer – tense, and prepared himself for her to try and interrupt his spell, but other than readying herself Starlight took no action. A second later Lex finished his spell, brushing his hoof over the colt’s head…and idly noting the equals sign that now graced Fruit Crunch's flank.
“I’ve used my own healing spell on him,” Lex announced a moment later, Cleansweep quieting down as he did. “I want you to stand watch over him until the doctors get here.” After receiving Thermal Draft’s message, that had been the one stop he’d made prior to heading to the battlefield as fast as he could: he’d rushed to the part of the manor that had been converted into a makeshift hospital – making several ponies shriek with fear as he’d emerged through a wall in shadow-form – and ordered Dr. House Call to send whatever doctors he could spare to the camp immediately.
“I didn’t want to hurt the kid that badly,” called Starlight Glimmer suddenly, her voice as casual as if they were discussing the weather. “But he just wouldn’t stay down, something I’m guessing he learned from you since he said he was your student. So really, what happened to him is your fault. Those other ponies too, since I’m sure they were also following your example.”
The anger that Lex was suppressing flared at that, but he managed to force it back down. “Your sophistry is exceeded only by your audacity in suggesting that you have no responsibility for what’s happened here,” he announced around gritted teeth, looking over the battleground.
But even that action wasn’t idle. The snarl of anger in his voice served to hide a groan of effort as he channeled power through himself and into his circlet. Doing so made him feel as though his organs were burning, but by this point he’d done it often enough that he was able to ignore the sensation, knowing it would recede to tolerable levels in a few seconds. Instead, he called upon the item’s ability to let him see into the magical spectrum as he turned his head to examine the local area.
It took a supreme effort of will for Lex to maintain his self-control at the sight of Aria and Garden Gate lying unconscious in the dirt, to say nothing of Feathercap, Fiddlesticks, and Straightlace. Instead, he forced himself to concentrate on the myriad residual spell auras that crisscrossed his field of view, analyzing them in conjunction with the numerous craters and furrows in the ground, as well as wide field of debris, trying to extract useful data from what he could see of the magic that had been used. That was easier said than done, however, as several of the auras had already decayed past the point of yielding useful information, while others were so dense that they overshadowed lesser ones near them. It was like trying to read a book whose pages had been torn out and scattered about haphazardly.
But not entirely.
There were several auras that were still extant, the active magic glowing keenly to his augmented vision. One was on Fruit Crunch, emanating from the foreign symbol where his cutie mark should have been. At a glance, Lex could tell it was acting as some sort of suppressive, likely reversing the qualities that his original cutie mark enhanced. Aria was similarly afflicted.
“You’re the last pony who should talk about responsibility!” Starlight’s angry retort drew Lex’s eyes back to her. “Cutie marks are bad enough, but you’ve actually made things worse! Now, not only is everypony here being led away from harmony by their special talents, they’ve got you encouraging them to develop new ones! What kind of pony does that?!”
“The kind that wants to encourage a prosperous and dynamic society,” answered Lex coldly. “That’s one of the core tenets of good governance.”
That answer was embarrassingly simple, of course, but Lex paid it no mind, using the conversation as a cover to inspect Starlight magically. Like when he’d so with Princess Celestia, he could only get a surface-level reading without being able to examine her up close. But what he could see was enough to make his brow furrow.
Starlight had several spells active on her, apparently to defend herself or enhance her battle prowess. More notable was how her equals sign cutie mark didn’t have the same magical signature as Fruit Crunch’s. While Lex couldn’t make out the specifics at this range, it seemed like it was performing the normal function of improving…whatever her personal aptitude was.
But he was less concerned with that than with what he couldn’t see, which was any method by which Starlight Glimmer was heightening her magical capabilities. Because, according to the residual auras that he’d seen, she had apparently done just that. While some of those spells had clearly been Aria’s, that didn’t account for all of them, which left only Starlight. But that made no sense. The level of power those auras suggested wasn’t something that – even with a cutie mark that improved spellcasting – could be achieved with the physical processes involved with Equestrian spellcasting. The only exceptions that Lex had ever seen had been Celestia and Luna, which he’d presumed had been due to some quirk of their nature as alicorns. So how had Starlight achieved similar results?
For a moment Lex’s mind whirled with possible answers. Was it sort of magic item? Conceivably, but unless she was somehow masking it from both casual observation and magical detection, there was no hint of her possessing any such thing. A spell designed to boost other spells? Unlikely, since entropy would invariably result in more power being expended than could be granted to any spell so heightened. Perhaps she had one or more of her followers assisting her somehow? Also dubious, since they seemed to simply be standing watch over the stolen cutie marks, having nothing notable about their magical channels save for the same suppressive equals sign that Fruit Crunch had…except for one.
Hiding behind the others, one of Starlight’s retinue not only had the same suppression effect on them, but had a second active spell effect on them as well. Some sort of enchantment that, unlike the ones on Starlight, was decidedly manipulative in nature. Even more curious was how the pony also had much more developed magical channels in their body than their companions, and the familiar arrangement of them made Lex tilt his head in confusion, trying and get a better look at the pony in question as they peeked out at him-
“SONATA?!”
Lex’s surprise was total as his beloved stepped out from behind the other ponies, wearing a rictus grin as she awkwardly waved at him. “Hi, Lex,” she called weakly. “I’m back.”
Starlight’s smile, by contrast, was one of triumph. “Well, it looks like your girlfriend doesn’t think much of your ‘good governance,’” she announced smugly. “After I explained to her how a society where everyone is equal leads to true harmony, she eagerly embraced our philosophy and gave up her cutie mark! And you can have that too, if you just-”
“No.”
Starlight blinked, her momentum interrupted. “What?”
“No,” repeated Lex, not noticing the black crystals beginning to sprout from the ground around him as his anger soared, straining against his attempts to keep it in check. “I’m no longer interested in hearing about your warped ideology,” he hissed. “You have perpetrated an attack on the ponies of Vanhoover! In doing so you have unlawfully caused multiple injuries, used invasive magic on its residents without their permission, and threatened the public’s welfare! Your only choice now is to either peacefully submit to being incapacitated prior to being sentenced for your crimes…” Slowly opening his saddlebag, Lex telekinetically lifted his enchanted gemstones from them, setting them in orbit around his head one at a time. “Or be forced to!”
“You really think you’re better than everypony else, don’t you?” snorted Starlight, waving a hoof at her followers, causing them to scurry back, dragging a reluctant Sonata with them. “Well, I think it’s time someone showed you that you’re not!” Her horn lighting up, Starlight sent a wolfish grin his way. “Come on! Sonata told me all about what you can do!”
“Is that so?” Finishing with the gems, Lex began to stalk forward, fury erasing any ache he felt then. “And what makes you think that she knows everything about me?!”
With his primary spellcasting disabled, and his divine spells being unsuitable for combat, Lex had known for some time that he’d be in a bad position if another fight broke out. But that knowledge had discouraged him not at all. Combat was just another form of problem-solving, simply requiring that available resources be utilized in such a manner so as to achieve a particular goal. Despite not having access to his strongest magic, Lex knew he still had numerous options available to him, including his dark magic, his remaining store of magic items, and his ability to augment both of those via his personal magical capacity. And so he’d come up with a strategy based around those.
This was part of my plan in case Twilight Sparkle showed up looking for a fight, recalled Lex as his horn flared, remembering the warning that Garden Gate had given him about the youngest princess’s return, as well as his subsequent promise to protect Aria. But it should only take a few minor adjustments to defeat this upstart nag!
Gritting his teeth, Lex bit back a roar of pain as he channeled magic through his body, pushing it to augment a certain ability, feeling it fall into place a second later.
And then he had the pleasure of seeing a look of fear spread across Starlight Glimmer’s face.
Up until a few seconds ago, Starlight had been quite proud of herself for how she’d stood up to Lex Legis without flinching.
She knew she was in a bad position, with the wounds and the fatigue that she’d accumulated fighting off his servitors and students. Even so, she hadn’t trembled when she’d first laid eyes on the admittedly intimidating sight of his shadow-form. Seeing the free-floating patch of writhing darkness that was his body had been something out of a nightmare, particularly in conjunction with his eyes. The way they’d projected malevolence had only been heightened by their alien colors, and being subject to their gaze had sent a shudder down Starlight’s spine.
Lex’s presence after he’d changed back into his pony-self had been only marginally less threatening. Despite no longer looking like something that would cause most ponies to wake up screaming, he still projected an ominous aura. Everything about him – his body language, the expression on his face, the contemptuous way he’d spoken – radiated a palpable sense of menace, as though he was just waiting to unleash his wrath on anything that provoked him.
But even knowing that she’d done exactly that, Starlight had met Lex’s gaze – as a pony and a shadow – without backing down.
Now, however, she couldn’t help but give ground, falling back as Lex advanced on her. “Sonata!” she yelled, somehow managing to keep her voice steady, rather than turning into a shriek of fright. “What am I looking at?!”
When no answer came, Starlight managed to wrench her eyes away from the monster that was moving toward her, looking back at where her friends had retreated. “Sonata!”
But the mare in question, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging open, could only shake her head dumbly, the sight making Starlight bite back a panicked curse. Lex hadn’t been bluffing; whatever magic he’d just used, it wasn’t something that Sonata knew about. Which meant that she needed to figure out what he’d done and how to deal with it, fast.
At a glance, Lex’s transformation was subtle. Someone who only looked at him for a split-second might have thought that nothing had changed at all, and that he was just in his pony body. But if they’d looked for even a few moments longer, they would immediately have realized that wasn’t the case, although they would have been hard-pressed to describe what they were seeing. Even Starlight, watching as Lex closed the distance between them, was having a difficult time figuring out what she was seeing when she looked at him.
It was like his body was flickering somehow, with a momentary field of darkness interrupting her view of him, and only of him, almost too fast to be seen. It made his motions appear stilted and jerky, with each small movement he made now being visually isolated rather than flowing smoothly into each other. It was as though he were under a strobe light or was being displayed by a filmstrip with too few frames. The sole exceptions were his eyes; still glowing green and purple, their visual continuity was the only part of him that remained uninterrupted. Somehow, that only made the way they were locked onto her all the more terrifying.
Starlight had a vague sense that had she been explaining the sight of Lex to somepony else, it wouldn’t have sounded frightening, but seeing him up close right now was horrific. The way every move he made seemed disconnected gave him an alien quality that was repulsive on a primal level, like looking at a giant spider. Starlight had little doubt that the fact that she was seeing it in broad daylight, surrounded by other ponies, was the only reason she hadn’t run away screaming.
And the slow, almost casual way that Lex was stalking toward her didn’t help.
But Starlight had come too far to back down now. Stamping a hoof, she concentrated on the ache in her leg, using it to make herself focus. “You think your little Nightmare Night parlor trick scares me?!” she yelled, forcing steel into her voice. “I’ll do to you what I did to all those other ponies you’ve deluded!” Without giving him a chance to react, she reared her head back, her horn lighting up as she thrust it forward and unleashed a magical blast at Lex.
Lex moved in a way that might have been an attempt to dodge – it was hard to tell – but any satisfaction Starlight felt at the sight died a half-second later as she watched the beam of energy pass through him with no apparent effect. Or at least, almost no effect; for a moment Lex halted his advance, glancing back at where the beam had struck the side of the house that he’d emerged onto the battlefield from, the building now sporting a sizeable hole in one wall. Then he looked back at her…and smiled darkly, continuing his advance.
Feeling her blood run cold, Starlight realized she had five or six seconds to come up with an alternative plan.
Then Lex would be upon her.
A heady sense of satisfaction flowed through Lex as he strode toward Starlight.
Part of that was purely academic. Although he’d run some brief experiments with what he was doing now during what little free time he’d been able to spare over the last several days, this was the first proper field test. So far it was working exactly as he’d expected. The fact that it was already giving him a not-inconsiderable advantage over Starlight Glimmer was simply a bonus.
As much as Lex was aware of the old adage about the best defense being a good offense, he had always found fault with that axiom. Far better to have a defense that would allow you to mount a good offense. And to a large degree, his shadow-form did just that. Being impervious to non-magical attacks, and highly resistant to most magical ones, it was the ideal state for engaging in a battle of magic.
And yet, it was still imperfect.
For all the advantages that it conferred, turning into a shadow isolated Lex from the non-continuous functions of his magic items. While the passive defenses of his cloak, amulet, and ring were undiminished even when he became incorporeal, he wasn’t able to use the magic in his circlet when it had turned into part of his shadow-body. That was why he’d needed to return to being a pony prior to fighting Starlight, since he wouldn’t have been able to access, much less enhance, its ability to view the magical spectrum otherwise.
Nor was he able to access any of the stored items on his person in that state. Spells that required a material component to activate – such as the weak healing spell he’d used on Fruit Crunch – were stored in his saddlebag, which was inaccessible to him as a shadow. The same had been true for the five gems now circling him, since he’d kept them there when not in use.
And of course, he couldn’t physically interact with the material world when he was in shadow-form. Certainly, he could still use telekinesis while immaterial, but that only allowed for a limited range of motor functions, and even augmenting it could only do so much for so long. He could still create black crystals while incorporeal, but doing so in any notable quantity would quickly have depleted his stores of dark magic, and augmenting the quantity that he could generate was quite often a risky proposition in terms of how effective it was versus how much it depleted him.
Individually, none of those were particularly severe drawbacks. But taken together, and in conjunction with how limited his combat potential had become ever since he’d banished Severance, Lex had been acutely aware that he needed to minimize his weaknesses and maximize his strengths wherever he could. To that end, he’d started working on a way to improve his shadow-form.
The result was what he was doing now.
Changing into his incorporeal state was something that required a sizable amount of dark magic to enact, but not very much to maintain. It was a distinction that Lex had worked to exploit, channeling additional power into the initial transformation while at the same time interrupting the comparatively smaller flow of dark magic that held him in his non-physical state. With the activation energy overcharged, but unable to settle into a low-power state of stability, the transformation process was easy to loop back on itself, moving it into a repeating attempt-fail-reattempt pattern.
In practical terms, it meant that Lex was undergoing a series of extremely rapid micro-transformations, his body changing into a shadow and back dozens of times each second, faster than a pony could blink.
The result was that Lex was now able to utilize the benefits of his shadow-form without the disadvantages. So long as he timed it right – he had a small amount of control over precisely how fast he was shifting back and forth – he could receive attacks with all of the defenses that his shadow-form offered without being cut off from his full range of interaction with the physical world. Starlight’s magical attack just now had hurt, but its damage had been highly ablated, passing through him just as he’d become incorporeal.
Of course, there was a trade-off. While he could normally stay in shadow-form for hours on end, this was a state that could only be maintained for a little over a minute. And since he needed to augment it with additional power through his body, it wasn’t something that he could call upon frequently. That was the price of being able to be effectively incorporeal while still being able to touch things.
But since I can still touch things, thought Lex viciously as he finally reached Starlight, the mare’s attempts to fall back hindered by all the rubble around her, I can do THIS!
Rearing up onto his hind legs, Lex swung his right foreleg back. Immediately he saw Starlight’s eyes go wide, realizing what he was about to do, but she’d barely started to move when Lex pivoted in place, twisting his body to put all of his weight behind the blow, timing the punch to land precisely when he’d be solid even a roar escaped his lips, the rage he’d been suppressing suddenly exploding out of him. Nor did he stop there.
In between when Lex swung his hoof and when it connected, he called upon his dark magic once again, lining his foreleg from the elbow on down in a gauntlet of black crystals.
Physical strength had never been Lex’s forte. For all that he had trained his body to withstand abuse, he’d never deliberately worked to enhance the amount of force his muscles could exert. Combined with how enervated he felt, the punch Lex hit Starlight with then wasn’t one of overwhelming power.
But his black crystals were far stronger than steel. Lining his leg, they gave the impact mass that it never would have possessed otherwise. The result was that when Lex’s blow landed on Starlight’s abdomen, she practically doubled over, eyes wide as blood exploded out of her mouth, leaving her struggling not to collapse.
The sight brought a hateful smile to Lex’s face.
Hoof-to-hoof combat wasn’t something he was proficient in. But since his only attack spell – one designed to seal a target in a prison of supernaturally-cold ice, being a scaled-up version of a similar Equestrian spell that he’d designed in response to seeing how dangerous Everglow’s monsters were – was too deadly to use on another pony, even one as odious as Starlight Glimmer, that left him with no other way to attack her than to resort to brawling. And with his new technique, he could get in close with minimal risk to himself, rather than trying to telekinetically bludgeon her from afar.
And now that he was, it was time to enact the next part of his battle plan.
The force of Lex’s strike left Starlight stunned, hunched over and gasping for air as she tried to figure out what was going on.
He didn’t use magic! The thought reverberated through her mind, the implications of what had just happened struggling to make themselves known through the haze of panic and pain engulfing her. He just reared back and hit me!
Everything Sonata had told her about Lex had convinced Starlight that her inevitable confrontation with the petty tyrant would result in a magical shootout, the two of them bobbing and weaving as they blasted each other with spells. Instead, the only magic Lex had used was that hideous transformation, after which he’d marched right up to her and slugged her in the gut. It ran completely counter to everything she’d expected him to do, being more like…
That colt, she realized sharply. Lex was attacking the same way that Fruit Crunch brat had. Like teacher, like student. That fit with what he’d said about Sonata not knowing everything about him. For whatever reason, Lex had changed his fighting style since Sonata had left his side, mixing physical combat in with spellcasting.
Something about that seemed wrong to Starlight. Why would somepony whose magic was strong enough to slay dragons and destroy devils bother with punching his enemies? But she knew she didn’t have any time to think about it now; from her hunched position, Lex was at the edge of her vision, and Starlight could barely make out that he was moving again, his body still under that unnerving strobe effect as he reached toward her-
With a loud grunt of effort, Starlight threw herself backward. Biting her lip, she ignored the sensations of rubble digging into her hide as she rolled across the uneven ground, stopping only when she was sure she’d put some distance between herself and Lex. Shakily, she righted herself, two of her legs still too numb to support her weight. Worse, her vision swam for a second as the dizziness of her desperate maneuver, combined with the pain and fatigue she felt, momentarily overwhelmed her. But Starlight was less concerned with that than she was with coming up with a new plan, knowing that she had only bought herself a second or two at most.
My attack went right through him like he wasn’t even there, but that punch felt plenty solid, she reviewed, pulling in ragged breaths as she tried to steady herself. So that means…what? It’s an illusion that he can make substantial for short periods? That he can selectively dematerialize? Something else altogether? But no immediate answers came to her, let alone thoughts on what to do about it. I’m going to have to wing it, she decided, turning her attention back toward Lex.
But to her surprise, the sinister stallion was making no move to follow her, nor did he look like he was using a spell.
Instead, he was lying in the dirt, struggling to get up.
For a second Starlight could only watch, nonplussed, as Lex fought to rise, his limbs shaking and his face twisted in a grimace of pain. What was he…no, that didn’t matter! Even if he still had that weird flickering going on, she had to take this chance!
Pointing her horn at Lex, Starlight called on her magic…only to encounter some sort of resistance when she tried. She could feel that the energy, as depleted as it was, was still there within her, but now there was a marked difficulty in accessing it, like turning a faucet all the way and only receiving a trickle of water. It was unexpected enough, and worrisome enough, to make Starlight gasp, her eyes wide.
That was when she noticed the gemstone circling her head.
The backlash was worse than Lex had expected.
He had known that the weakness of his plan – originally designed to defeat Twilight Sparkle, and now repurposed for Starlight Glimmer – was that it relied on performing actions that placed his body under severe strain. But as risky as that was, it was still the most likely path to victory.
Although she wasn’t an alicorn, Starlight Glimmer was clearly a unicorn of unusual magical potential. Even if the numerous residual spell auras dotting the battlefield hadn’t attested to that, the fact that she’d defeated Aria, Garden Gate, and the Night Mare’s Knights – as well as placed Sonata under a charm, something which made Lex grind his teeth to remember – all on her own made her strength beyond question. And while she seemed depleted by those victories, Lex knew that assuming that she was out of power when he didn’t understand the full scope of her abilities could quickly turn disastrous, particularly given how his ability to damage her was limited to something as feeble as trying to beat her into submission. The most effective way to prevent any unpleasant surprises, then, was to suppress her ability to not only use magic, but to fight back altogether.
For that, he needed to use the gems that he’d taken from Xiriel.
The central part of his strategy was simple. Each gem provided a continuous, albeit fairly modest, benefit to its recipient. By forcing more magic into each gem’s magical channels, he could super-charge their output for a limited period of time. It had been that exact method that had allowed Garden Gate to temporarily become a one-mare army while fighting the ghoul horde. In order to defeat Starlight, Lex planned on doing the exact same thing, but with a twist: not only would he augment the amount of power flowing through each gem’s magical channels, he’d also reverse it.
His experiments over the last few days, conducted alongside his augmented use of his shadow-form, had confirmed the viability of that idea. By causing the flow of power in the gems’ magical channels to flow backwards, the functionality of each gem was inverted. The iridescent spindle, which normally would directly oxygenate blood without respiration, would instead make it difficult to breathe, for instance. The pale green prism would impede the user’s central nervous system where it usually enhanced it. The scarlet and blue sphere would inhibit cognitive function rather than improving it. The dusty rose prism would interfere with reactive insight instead of abetting it.
And the orange prism, which was circling Starlight Glimmer’s head at the moment, would interfere with a spellcaster’s ability to utilize magic instead of boosting it.
According to Lex’s calculations, subjecting somepony to all five of the gems, once they’d had their functionality empowered and inverted, would be seriously debilitating. Enough so that, perhaps in conjunction with a curse or two, they would have been hard-pressed to defend themselves from even unskilled applications of brute force. Going into the battle with the defensive properties of his shadow-form upgraded, and benefiting from the standard functions of the gems until he reversed and enhanced them, should have provided him with a battlefield advantage of considerable magnitude.
But that was being undercut by the injuries that he’d voluntarily sustained bringing Cloudbank, Turbo, and those other ponies back to life. Now, what should have been a series of painful-but-bearable exertions were proving crippling in their severity. Augmenting his shadow-form had been difficult enough, but forcing power through himself and into just a single gemstone had sapped enough of his strength that even standing had been too difficult, leaving him struggling to get back onto his hooves now.
The sight of Starlight Glimmer reaching up to swipe at the gem circling her head, however, prompted Lex to struggle harder. Although the gems would still try to avoid obstructions, they wouldn’t be inordinately difficult to dislodge, as Garden’s fight with the ghouls had demonstrated. Nor would their inverted functions last very long, since the power he’d infused in them would be expended after a few minutes, at which point the gems would revert to their benign functions. Which means I need to keep Starlight’s attention on me!
Abandoning his attempts to stand up, Lex instead concentrated on his dark magic, the one reservoir of power he had that was still largely untapped. An instant later, a thin cylinder of dark crystal – he didn’t dare waste power creating anything more substantial – grew out of the ground next to Starlight. Lancing upward at a high angle, the blunt tip of it collided with the side of her head, sending her staggering.
The furious look she gave him a second later made it clear that he’d succeeded in making her focus on him. And Lex reaped the rewards of his efforts immediately thereafter, as Starlight fired a beam of magic at him in response. The ray was thin, and Lex could tell immediately that it lacked the power that her previous attack had possessed, but he still flung himself to the side, avoiding it by inches. Even if she hit him when he was incorporeal, her spell would still injure him, and Lex wanted to avoid taking any further damage if at all possible.
But he wasn’t prepared for her spell to impact a section of what had formerly been the train station’s roof a few feet from him, blowing it apart even with the beam’s reduced power. The shrapnel sprayed in every direction, and it was to Lex’s misfortune that he was solid in the instant that the shower of debris reached him. Although most of the junk bounced off of him harmlessly thanks to the defensive spells that were perpetually on his person, a few pieces got through, causing Lex to recoil as a piece of tile scraped across his face, drawing blood from a long scratch it left just below his eye.
He didn’t bother to wipe it away, knowing that he was running out of time. He was already nearing the halfway point of how long he could maintain his rapid-shifting, and if it ran out before he got the rest of those gems around Starlight, then his chances of winning-
“I’VE GOT YOU NOW!”
Lex barely had time to process Starlight’s triumphant cry before multiple explosions rang out.
To think that a missed attack would be what did it!
Starlight would have laughed if that yell hadn’t left her struggling to get her breath back. That last attack of hers hadn’t hit her target, but in missing Lex it had hit some rubble instead, with one of the pieces it sent flying cutting his cheek. That had been all the proof Starlight needed that the “selectively dematerializing” theory was the right one. More than that, it had shown her what she needed to do to strike back.
That gemstone Lex had put in orbit around her was clearly some sort of magic suppressor, but for the moment Starlight wasn’t concerned about it. If anything, it would serve to keep her from overextending herself. The important thing now was to take Lex down before he could use the rest of those gems on her or find a chance to slug her again or however else he was planning on counterattacking. Luckily, she’d known just what to do.
Using the minimum amount of power possible, Starlight lashed out with her magic, firing beam after beam.
But not at Lex.
Instead, she attacked the area around him. Aiming at every piece of rubble that was within a few feet of him and bigger than a breadbox, her attacks sent splinters and stone shards and bits of twisted metal flying in all directions. Let’s see if you can change back and forth precisely enough to avoid all of these!
She could already see that he couldn’t. Although a considerable amount of the makeshift shrapnel wasn’t connecting, Starlight gleefully noted the way Lex jerked and lurched as several of the attacks struck true, one particularly palpable hit from a broken beam spinning him around. After just a few seconds, he was bleeding from a half-dozen or more new wounds, bruises lining his body as he lay there with his back to her in the aftermath of the barrage.
The sight made Starlight smirk, suddenly finding him a lot less menacing despite his transformation still being active. But part of her couldn’t help but be suspicious; being hit with all of that had to be painful, but Lex had looked like he was injured – perhaps severely injured – before she’d attacked him. Combined with how he wasn’t using the strong magic Sonata had told her about, it was enough to make Starlight wonder if something else was going on, the uncertainty of that thought causing her to hesitate. Is he not able to fight at full power for some reason?
If that was the case, then the fact that he hadn’t moved in the aftermath of her attack just now likely meant that he was down for the count. If not, then there was a good chance that he was playing possum, waiting for her to let her guard down. But I’m not one of those bimbos from a horror story, sneered Starlight to herself. When the bad guy is down, you don’t go over to check on him. You hit him again to make sure he STAYS down! And in order to do that – she paused, tracking the orange gem circling her for a few seconds before using her telekinesis to grab it – this thing needs to go! In fact…
An idea occurring to her, Starlight smirked as she telekinetically moved the gem over toward Lex. If this thing was a magic-suppressor, then maybe it would be able to power down that weird transformation of his so that she could blast him. Of course, he’d had it floating around himself before and hadn’t seemed any worse off for it, but that probably meant there was some trick to deactivating it. If he didn’t bother to do anything when she put it back on him, then she’d know for sure that he was out cold.
Slowly, Starlight moved the crystal closer to Lex’s prone form, tensing as she did. If he was going to counterattack, he’d likely do it right before she released the thing. She had no idea how he’d even know she was about to, but she felt sure he would, silently preparing a shield spell just in case.
Almost there…
With barely two feet between Lex’s head and the gemstone, her caution was proven accurate. Right before she let go of the gem, Lex suddenly rolled over, turning and pointing a hoof at her, his eyes open and blazing. Starlight immediately let go of the gem, casting her spell and raising a pane of force between herself and Lex, being too depleted to make a full-body covering.
But she’d misunderstood what Lex was doing, something Starlight realized too late as she felt agony suddenly radiate up from her one good hind leg, sending her tumbling to the ground even as she glanced back and saw the miniscule black spikes that had sprouted from the ground directly under her hoof. Cursing herself for forgetting that he could do that – he’d just hit her in the face with that same technique barely a minute ago! – Starlight belatedly realized that Lex had effectively immobilized her. With two of her legs still numb, and one injured, it would be all she could do to crawl-
“Now, Cloudbank!” came Lex’s sudden whisper, the words hissed harshly enough that Starlight was able to hear them.
She had just enough time to wonder who he was talking to when there was a sudden rumble of thunder. The sound made Starlight’s eyes widen as she realized that it was coming from right above her, a drop of water impacting her nose even as she looked up at the large black cloud hovering over her. When did that get there?!
Then the rain began to fall in earnest…followed a second later by lightning.
Pixie’s question made Prince Blueblood snicker, his face the picture of condescending amusement despite not bothering to look at her, instead inspecting his hoof with a critical eye. “My dear, everything that royalty does is ‘alright,’ as you so inelegantly put it, so long as it’s done with refinement and regality.” Apparently finding nothing out of place, he turned to give her a patronizing look. “But I confess myself curious as to what exactly you’re referring to.”
“Well, it’s just…” Gesturing toward the crowd of ponies in the distance, Pixie swallowed nervously. “We saw that ‘Lex’ monster rush toward those ponies, and now…” She bit her lip as a clamor of gasps and worried cries rang out from the assembled ponies, clearly witnessing something upsetting. “If he’s hurting somepony, shouldn’t we hurry over there instead of, um…stopping for a makeover?”
Reclining on the silken blanket that one of his servants had produced, and surrounded by a half-dozen attendants who were brushing his coat, combing his hair, shining his hooves, cleaning his tail, and applying a touch of foundation to his face, Blueblood rolled his eyes in a dramatic show of exasperation. “I can assure you, my dear Pansy-”
“Pixie.”
“Of course,” replied Blueblood dismissively as another servant applied a few sprays of cologne. “But I can assure you, only a common pony such as yourself would think that this is a mere makeover. Rather, this is how a prince prepares to go into battle on his people’s behalf.” His voice dripping with self-satisfaction, Blueblood gestured toward the distant collection of ponies. “In a few minutes, I’ll confront the knave who dared to besmirch the honor of my fellow royals. And when I take to the field, it’s vital that both that ‘Lex Legis’ reprobate and the assembled ponies witness me in all my resplendence, so that they can fully understand the scope of the magnificence that he dared to sully.”
“Um, Your Highness?” Trotting over from where several other servants were preparing for the prince’s grand entrance, the reedy valet from before bowed, keeping his head low as he spoke. “We’ve polished your crown, but I’m afraid that your velvet mantle has some wrinkles in it that will take a little while longer to remove. Should we start, or would you prefer to go with the cashmere one instead?”
The question made Blueblood shoot to his hooves, sending the servants clustered around him stumbling as he rounded on his valet in a rage. “You nincompoop!” he sputtered. “You absolute, blithering ninny! That mantle is my finest piece of outerwear! How am I supposed to make Lex Legis regret the weight of his transgressions if I can’t impress on him the full splendor and glory that is Equestrian royalty?!”
Flinching at the verbal assault, the valet lowered his head even further. “I’m very sorry, Your Highess.”
“Oh well isn’t that simply marvelous?” huffed Blueblood sarcastically. “Because of my servants’ incompetence, my regalia – the lustrous finery which serves to both communicate and enhance my stature – has been critically compromised just as I need it the most! But it’s going to be just dandy because you’re sorry.” A gesture brought another attendant scurrying over, placing a pillow on the ground so that Blueblood had something clean to stomp on. “Now there’s a chance that the villain won’t be overawed at the sight of me! Can you imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t come prepared for the possibility of escalation?!”
“I’m very sorry, Your Highness.”
“Oh, do be quiet, won’t you?!” scowled Blueblood. “Just stand back and be ready in case the grand entrance you ruined doesn’t dissuade that Lex fellow.” Sighing, Blueblood laid back down, glancing at the serving ponies clustered around him. “The rest of you, back to work! I can’t very well make a proper presentation if I’m starting to sweat now, can I?”
As the attendants returned to making sure that Blueblood looked immaculate, Pretty Penny crept closer. “Your attention to noble bearing is an inspiration to us all, Your Highness,” she cooed obsequiously. “It’s much the same in the hospitality industry, since we take pride in making sure our accommodations are fit for a prince!”
Not to be outdone, Razzle Dazzle snorted. “Oh please, anypony can vacuum a rug and turn down some sheets. If you want to get a glimpse of grandeur fit for royalty, everypony knows that you need to go to a Palace.”
Pretty Penny chuckled, even as she glared daggers at the older mare. “Oh, I think you’re having a senior moment, Razzle dear. I’m sure somepony as sophisticated as the prince would prefer to relax in a more refined venue, rather than hobnobbing with lowlifes who enjoy watching floozies shake their tails.”
“You mean lowlifes like your son?” sneered Razzle. “Because he certainly didn’t seem very ‘refined’ when he was putting his hooves all over one of my girls.”
“My soon is a good boy!” shot back Penny, her façade of civility dropping away as her temper flared. “Your bimbos took advantage of his innocent nature!”
“Please,” scoffed Razzle. “He’s a brute, as low-class as his mother’s cheap hotels.”
“So,” interrupted Pixie, wearing her dismay openly, “no one else is worried about what Lex might be doing to those ponies?”
Her question hadn’t been directed at anyone in particular, but she swept her gaze across everyone in the group. Blueblood ignored her entirely, as did his servants. Penny and Razzle simply scowled at her, clearly resenting having been interrupted. Gladmane, Checkered Cab, Rant ‘n’ Rave, and the other ponies who had come from Las Pegasus either rolled their eyes or sneered at her.
Finally, she turned to River, who had watched both Blueblood’s temper tantrum and Penny and Razzle’s bickering with unusual passivity. But to Pixie’s disappointment, she didn’t seem concerned about everypony else either, simply giving a resigned shrug. “It’s out of our hooves now,” she sighed. “Lex and the prince are both going to do what they’re going to do.”
Her shoulders slumping, Pixie was about to protest her friend’s apathy when Gladmane piped up. “Now there’s an odd sight.”
Curious despite herself, Pixie followed Gladmane’s gaze, blinking in confusion a second later. That was an odd sight, she had to admit.
Rushing past them, headed toward the crowd of ponies, were a pair of pegasi mares. Wings flapping, the two of them were pushing a cloud ahead of them, the first one that Pixie could recall seeing since she’d arrived in Vanhoover. By itself, that wasn’t really noteworthy; every town had weather ponies.
What made those two unusual was that they, and their cloud, were flying just a few feet off the ground.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” fretted Thermal Draft.
“I’m sure,” nodded Cloudbank. “There aren’t any other clouds in the sky, so if we go in high there’s a good chance that we’ll be spotted by whoever Lex is fighting, and I doubt they’ll just stand still while we position our cloud right over them and start jumping on it. Now that all those houses have been built, we can sneak in, circle around, and hopefully get into position without them knowing.”
“I just wish there was some way we could let Lex know what we’re doing,” moaned Thermal Draft. “Not being able to help would be bad, but if we screw up and make things worse for him, I’ll never forgive myself!”
Fighting down a twinge of jealousy, Cloudbank made herself put on a confident smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”
“But you still only have one spell left, right? One that helps boost the recipient’s courage?”
Cloudbank nodded. Despite having been deceased for several weeks, from her perspective – as well as Drafty’s – only a few hours had passed since they’d fought their way through a bunch of ghouls in order to get to the bank vault. During the battle, Cloudbank had expended almost all of the spells that she’d prayed to the Night Mare for, leaving only the courage-boosting spell remaining. Since being resurrected she hadn’t had a chance to pray to the goddess for more.
But after being told that she was the reason Drafty could be brave, Cloudbank felt obligated to keep her spirits up now, even if she didn’t have all the answers. “We’ll figure something out,” she repeated.
Drafty didn’t look nearly as reassured as Cloudbank would have liked, but there was no time to try bucking her up more as they reached the edge of the crowd. Stowing their cloud behind one of the featureless houses, the two flapped their wings harder, moving up onto the roof of the building in order to get a better vantage point. What they saw made them gasp.
The train station had been completely destroyed, pieces of the building scattered across the landscape. Unconscious ponies dotted the area as well, and it took Cloudbank a moment to realize that she knew one of them, recognizing Fencer sprawled out next to an unknown mare who was extraordinarily beautiful despite her ragged state. A stone’s throw away were several children, two colts and a filly lying unmoving. A third colt was likewise unconscious, his head being cradled by a bright yellow pegasus filly, and it was with a start that Cloudbank realized they were the two she'd met back at the manor house, their animals nowhere to be seen now.
And Lex…
“I’VE GOT YOU NOW!”
Both Cloudbank and Thermal Draft gasped as they watched a unicorn mare they’d never seen before unleash a series of blasts all around Lex. Although they didn’t connect with him, the shards of debris that they flung every which way made him lurch as he was peppered with shrapnel, the impacts jerking him about before he finally laid still, facing toward them.
For a second both mares couldn’t do anything, paralyzed with shock. Then Drafty dove back down to retrieve their cloud, shouting for Cloudbank to follow her. But Cloudbank lingered, suddenly needing some sort of confirmation that Lex was still alive after what had just happened. Thankfully, she got one a second later as he opened his eyes…
And looked right at her.
It was a coincidence, of course. He had been spun around by the hit, and just happened to be looking in her direction. But for a brief second Cloudbank couldn’t look away, a powerful feeling of divine providence washing over her as she saw Lex make a brief gesture, his lips moving as he laid there with his back to the purple unicorn…
“Cloudy! Let’s go!” Thermal Draft’s words snapped her out of her reverie, and she dove back down to join her at their cloud, the two of them pushing it along the outside of the assembled ponies as fast as they could. A few stopped to look at what they were doing, but most couldn’t take their eyes off of what was happening. More than a few were softly intoning for Lex to get up, and several – to Cloudbank’s surprise – were calling out soft pleas to the Night Mare to help him.
“Okay, this should do it!” Drafty’s declaration was enough to pull Cloudbank away from contemplating how popular Lex, and his goddess, had become. Glancing over the top of their cloud, she could see that had finally circled behind the purple unicorn, still standing a short distance from Lex. Oddly, she didn't seem to be doing anything, instead just fiddling with a gem that was circling her head for some odd reason-
“Sonata?!”
Drafty’s yelp of surprise made Cloudbank look away, following her girlfriend’s gaze to where a group of almost a half-dozen ponies were watching the fight, standing apart from the rest of the crowd. It took Cloudbank a second to recognize that Lex’s paramour was among them, since her hair was braided and her cutie mark…what? No, it didn't matter now. "Keep your voice down!" she whispered. "If that unicorn notices us before we get this cloud over her, we won't be able to zap her in time to help Lex! Now come on, we-"
“…Cloudbank…”
Hearing Lex's voice whispering in her ear almost made Cloudbank shriek. "Huh?!"
"I'm using a spell…to transmit whispers…between us…" came his pained murmur. "I heard…what you said. Get into position…and wait…for my signal…"
Even in the daylight, the flashes from the lightning were blinding, forcing Lex to squeeze his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, before the accompanying peals of thunder had even begun to fade, the sight that awaited him was a heartening one. Starlight Glimmer lay unmoving on the ground, the blasted area around her already turning into a mud pit thanks to the deluge that had accompanied the brief storm. But the rainfall was already ending as the cloud that Thermal Draft and Cloudbank were jumping on finally lost its cohesion, breaking up into nothing now that its cache of water and lightning had been expended. And while that meant that Vanhoover’s weather supply was that much smaller, Lex considered it a small price to pay for defeating such a dangerous pony.
As it was, it had been a stroke of good fortune that he’d spotted Cloudbank when he had. He’d cast his whisper spell with the intent of ordering her to start clearing the battlefield of everypony who was unconscious. The chance that some of the injured ponies would be hit by one of Starlight’s sprays of makeshift shrapnel was too great for Lex’s liking, and raising black crystal shields around them all would have depleted his remaining stores of dark magic in no time.
But before he’d been able to communicate his wishes, Cloudbank had whispered her plan to Thermal Draft, not realizing that his spell had also carried her words to his ears; another lucky break, there. Hearing their intent, Lex had changed tactics, and instead coordinated with the pair. The two of them had kept him apprised of Starlight’s movements as they’d gotten their cloud into position, and after which he’d lashed out with an attack to one of Starlight’s legs, eliminating any chance that she’d dart out from underneath the cloud before the lightning struck her.
And it had apparently worked, with Starlight not so much as twitching now. But as relieved as Lex was, he had been in too many fights – and Starlight had proven herself to be too tough an opponent – for him to let his guard down so easily. Instead, he concentrated on his circlet, the magic item still augmented thanks to the power he’d poured into it before, letting his vision slip back into the magical spectrum. Given Starlight’s affinity for magic, this would be the quickest way to verify if she was actually incapacitated or not.
He had just started examining the spell auras around her when Thermal Draft and Cloudbank landed next to him.
“Lex!” blurted the latter, reaching for him only to recoil as she finally got a good look at him and saw how he was flickering, her eyes widening at the unnerving sight. “Are…are you alright?”
Thermal Draft looked similarly disturbed, which was probably why she glanced around instead, her eyes widening as she spotted the orange prism lying nearby, dropped by Starlight before she could put it into orbit around Lex. Fluttering over, she scooped it up, peering at the faceted jewel curiously. “What do you want me to do with this?” she asked at last, glancing back at him. “That mare was trying to put this on you, so should I go put it on her instead?”
Lex, however, ignored the question, instead keeping his attention fixated on Starlight. The were still a few active spell auras around her, but their composition revealed them to be the enhancements that he’d noticed on her when he’d arrived. Similarly, there was a mess of residual auras clinging to her, almost all of which were the imprints left from the magical attacks she’d unleashed.
The glut of magical residue clinging to Starlight was heavy enough that Lex almost missed one other aura, frowning as he caught a faint glimpse of it amidst the others. Scrutinizing it closely, he saw it was for an expired spell, suggesting that it wasn’t a cause for concern, but its design was different from the attack spells Starlight had used. Instead, this one was defensive in nature, and it took Lex only a moment to recognize it as the remnant of the shield spell Starlight had cast just before he’d injured her back leg, causing her to collapse. But that was less notable than how the lingering aura had only just barely started to deteriorate, as though…
His breath catching, it took Lex only a fraction of a second to calculate the aura’s rate of decay, then apply that metric in reverse, confirming that Starlight’s spell had ended precisely seven-point-eight seconds ago.
Which was point-two seconds after the lightning had struck.
Suddenly everything fell into place.
The free-floating nature of her shield, which would have allowed Starlight to point it in any direction, even upward if she so desired. The way the rainfall had preceded the lightning, giving her a brief warning of what was about to happen. The bright electrical flash that had hidden any last-second actions she might have taken.
Withdrawing his vision from the magical spectrum, Lex opened his mouth to give the other two a warning, but even as the words left his lips he could see that it was already too late.
Her undamaged foreleg digging into the damp ground, Starlight Glimmer began to rise. Mud clung to her coat. Water dripped from her mane. Blood trickled from her hind leg. An aura gathered around her horn.
And murder filled her eyes.
Cloudbank felt like everything was happening in slow motion.
Across from her, Starlight Glimmer – Lex having told her the mare’s name while coordinating their attack with the thundercloud – was somehow, impossibly, starting to get up. The mare’s eyes were bloodshot, her lips pulled back in a vicious snarl, and her horn was already lighting up. The sight was as intimidating as whatever it was that Lex had done to himself, but that wasn’t what made Cloudbank’s heart suddenly clench with terror.
It was that Drafty, with her back to Starlight as she held the orange prism out toward Lex, had made herself into a perfect target.
Her girlfriend could obviously tell that something was wrong. Cloudbank could see her eyes widening, a look of fear starting to form on her face even as she started to turn, trying to look behind her in order to figure out how to react. But she wasn’t going to make it; Cloudbank could already see Starlight lowering her head, aiming her horn right at Drafty’s unprotected back.
You’ve always been the reason I can be brave. Because no matter what happens I know that you’ll be there.
All of a sudden, Cloudbank was surging forward. She didn’t even remember doing it; one second she’d been standing there next to Lex, the next she was flying forward so fast that her wings felt like they were going to fall off. But she didn’t care.
This wasn’t going to be like before. This wasn’t going to be like all those times that she hadn’t been able to save Drafty from some horrible monster. I don’t care if it’s ghouls or krakens or crazy unicorns! Cloudbank screamed to herself, accelerating even as she banked sharply, straining to cross the last few yards even a little faster. I’ll protect her!
A beam of light shot from Starlight’s horn toward Drafty. Even moving as fast as she was, Cloudbank could tell that it was going to be close. But rather than worry her, that knowledge infuriated her, driving her to push herself even a little harder, fighting to go even a little faster, not caring about anything except the goal that at that moment was everything.
I’ll protect her from ALL OF THEM!
With split-second timing, Cloudbank threw herself in front of Drafty inches before Starlight’s spell struck home.
The exultation that she felt then was all-encompassing. Cloudbank didn’t know anything about unicorn magic, but if the brightness of the beam and the look of seething rage on Starlight’s face were anything to go by, her attack was meant to be a killing blow. But that was fine, because it was a blow that would never reach Drafty now. Even though she had only been back for a few hours, even though Lex had said that he couldn’t perform another resurrection, Cloudbank felt nothing but triumph.
She’d done it.
She’d protected the one she loved.
That was enough.
With a smile on her face, Cloudbank turned her head, wanting to look at Drafty one last time before the end.
Because of that, she didn’t see the wall of black crystals that rose up between her and Starlight’s spell at the last possible instant.
Starlight screamed in rage as her attack was thwarted.
The fact that the wall of black crystals was thin enough that it shattered under the weight of her assault, the beam punching through it to send those two mares hurtling backward, did little to quell her anger. The feedback she received was enough to let her know that the sudden wall had absorbed most of the force of her blast, leaving only a meager amount to push through and likely doing little to truly hurt those ponies that had been on the other side of it. And Starlight knew exactly who was to blame for that.
“It’s always YOU!” she bellowed, fury driving her to her hooves as she glared at Lex. Two of her legs were still numb, and the punctures on her remaining hind leg ached fiercely in response to her putting her weight on it, but she didn’t care. Right now the only thing that mattered was the miserable, wretched, selfish stallion who kept getting in her way! “They admire you and they praise you and they fight for you and they defend you! All because they think you’re special! WHY?!” She hollered the last word so loudly that it tore at her throat. “WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT YOU?!”
“Starlight…”
“TELL ME!” she screamed, not hearing the soft voice coming from behind her. “Is it your cutie mark?! Your horn?! Your shadow?!”
Her ire only grew when Lex gave her a look of disdain, as though she wasn’t worthy of knowing the answer. “You’re…a fool if…you think…it’s something…so petty…”
He had barely finished speaking when a rod of black crystal suddenly shot out of the ground next to her, the rounded tip aiming for her head. But Starlight had been on the receiving end of that attack before, and even in her weakened state she managed to avoid it, clumsily ducking under the strike. “Then what?!” she raged, firing another beam of energy. With no more pieces of debris close to him, her only choice was to aim at Lex directly, and her rage flared again as she saw it go through his flickering form, the sight of him grimacing soothing her not at all. “Is it your intellect?! Your magic?! Your religion?! TELL ME!”
“Starlight.”
“TELL ME SO I CAN TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU!!!”
“Starlight!”
“WHAT?!”
Turning as the voice from behind her refused to relent, Starlight watched as the pony it belonged to flinched. “What do you want, Double Diamond?!”
Her angry snarl made the stallion – and the rest of her friends, who were gathered around him – flinch, but only for a moment. Biting his lip, he pulled his burlap cloak from around his neck, and Starlight’s anger was marred by confusion as he bunched it up in his hooves like a rag. But that lasted for only a moment.
Then Double Diamond reached out and brushed it along her flank.
“What are you doing?!” yelped Starlight, moving away from him as best she could on her injured legs. But she had her answer a second later as she saw his cloak come away wet with black and purple paint, her blood running cold at the sight. The rainwater! she realized suddenly. I forgot!
Frozen, she could only watch as the ponies she’d brought here from her village looked at her, their faces twisted in expressions of disbelief and betrayal.
“Starlight,” began Double Diamond slowly. “Why do you still have your cutie mark?”
The panic was visible on Starlight’s face as she shook her head in response to Sugar Belle’s anguished cry. “N-no! You don’t understand!” Wrapping her tail around her flank in order to hide the colorful mark there – a purple-and-white star with a pair of blue-hued glimmering streamers – from view, Starlight reached for the first excuse that came to mind. “The Staff!” she blurted. “It was the Staff of Sameness! When it, uh…when it was destroyed, the backlash made my cutie mark reappear!”
“And did the Staff make it reappear underneath a coat of paint?” snapped Night Glider, clearly not buying it.
Neither was Double Diamond. “We believed in you!” he cried mournfully. “We trusted you!”
“I gave up singing because I thought you were my friend!” whimpered Sonata. “I love singing!”
“All this time,” moaned Party Favor, “you kept telling us that cutie marks brought nothing but pain, that special talents led to heartache…and you kept yours!”
“I HAD TO!” yelled Starlight, the hard edge returning to her voice as she lowered her tail. “My special talent is magic! I needed it!”
“But why?” Sugar Belle couldn’t have looked more disappointed if she’d tried. “We already had the Staff of Sameness. Why did you need more magic than that?”
“The Staff?” snorted Starlight, her voice full of contempt. “The Staff never had any magic! It was just a piece of wood I found in the desert! The power to remove cutie marks came from me! It always came from me! If I had removed mine, I wouldn’t have been able to remove anyone else’s!”
Starlight had hoped that her confession would make everypony realize the impossible position she had been in, would make them realize that she was the victim here, protecting a system that she could never truly be a part of. But instead it seemed to have the opposite effect, with Night Glider pointing at her accusingly. “So it was all a lie from top to bottom!”
Nor did Party Favor seem any more understanding. “You said that everypony in our village needed to be equal, or it would destroy our entire way of life!”
“That’s why I pretended I couldn’t use the magic I had left after you took away my cutie mark!” added Sonata.
Double Diamond had tears in his eyes, but his expression was unforgiving. “Was anything you said true?”
“OF COURSE IT WAS!” Although she’d known that this would be the likely result of her secret getting out, Starlight couldn’t accept what was happening. Why was nopony giving her the benefit of the doubt?! Why weren’t they focusing on everything that she’d done for them instead of obsessing over one flaw in what had otherwise been a perfect society?! “So I told one little lie! The rest of it was all true! You were all miserable before you came to my village! The only reason you were able to be happy and become friends is because I made you all the same! You think you would have had it better living someplace like this?!”
She canted her head toward the battlefield, strewn with rubble and unconscious ponies. Maybe pointing out how much worse the alternative was would make everypony feel a bit more grateful. “Look around you! Lex Legis created a society where everyone is different! All so he can sit at the very top of it! Why do you think he’s had so many other ponies do his fighting for him?!” She glared at each of the ingrates surrounding her in turn, daring them to disagree. “You think he’s never lied to any of the ponies living here?! He didn’t even tell Sonata about that creepy magic he’s using to defend himself!”
“That’s, like, totes unfair!” protested Sonata. “Lex only keeps secrets to protect people! He kept what happened to that Block Party guy under wraps because he was worried it’d cause a panic! When the time was right, he told everyone all about it!”
“And that orange pony said that Lex didn’t lord his powers over them!” added Sugar Belle.
“All those ponies who fought you were different,” pointed out Party Favor. “But they still worked together!”
“They were even willing to sacrifice themselves for each other!” added Night Glider. “That earth colt jumped in front of that filly to protect her, and then that one pegasus mare did the same thing for the other!”
“And Lex protected them both!” Double Diamond gave Starlight a look of reproach. “If they can do all of that while still having their cutie marks, why don’t you think that we deserve that same chance?”
Starlight wasn’t able to answer, unable to speak past the bile rising in her throat. After all of the work she’d done on their behalf… Setting up a village dedicated to true harmony. Freeing them from the shackles of their cutie marks. Coming here to try and invite new friends into the society that she’d made. Suffering through so many pains and injuries when Lex’s minions attacked her for threatening their misguided hierarchy. All of that…and now the ponies she’d gone through so much effort to help were turning on her all because of one little white lie?! It was like they’d been looking for a reason to betray her!
Starlight knew there was no victory to be had here anymore. Even if she defeated Lex and these turncoats and everypony else in this place, no one in Vanhoover would follow her now that these traitors had made her look like some kind of hypocrite. The best thing to do now would be to cut her losses and go back to her village. Alone.
“Fine!” she hissed through gritted teeth, her horn lighting up. “You all admire these strangers so much?! Then you won’t mind ending up JUST LIKE THEM!”
Their eyes widening in fear, the others backed away, and Starlight took a moment to enjoy the terrified looks on their faces. It was what they deserved for stomping all over her dream like that-
“Pathetic.”
Lex’s voice was filled with scorn, its mocking edge making Starlight’s spine stiffen as she slowly turned to look at the pony who was responsible for destroying everything she’d built.
His unnatural flickering had ceased, leaving Lex completely solid once again. But despite his magical defense being down, Lex – who had somehow managed to stand up again, an effort that had clearly taken a toll on him – seemed completely unconcerned with how vulnerable he looked. If anything, he seemed completely at ease, his lip curling in a contemptuous sneer as he glowered at her. “You’re so pathetic, Starlight Glimmer.”
“You…”
“You can’t even live by your own philosophy,” he continued, voice oozing with disgust. “And not because of how preposterous it is. You’re just too weak-willed to endure the hardships that you would have other ponies bear.”
Starlight had never hated anyone in her life as much as she hated Lex Legis in that moment. It wasn’t just how deep his words cut her. The fact that he was going out of his way to taunt her like that, to try and hurt her after he’d seen how her closest friends had all betrayed her, filled her with a black, twisted loathing that she hadn’t known she was capable of feeling.
But Lex was either oblivious to that, or he just didn’t care. “It’s clear to me now that your warped ideology has nothing to do with trying to improve the lives of the ponies that you deluded into adhering to it. It’s simply that you want to reduce everyone else to the lowest common denominator because you lack the fortitude to confront your own weakness!” A mocking grin slid across his face then. “And you actually think that you have the power to take anything away from me?” His smirk fell away as he spat on the ground. “As I said: pathetic.”
For a long moment nopony moved, nopony even breathed, as they waited for the inevitable to happen.
And then, very quietly, Starlight spoke. “There’s one thing…” she breathed. “One thing that I know I have the strength to take from you.”
“And what’s that?” scoffed Lex.
Her eyes starting to glow white as she called upon all of her remaining reserves, Starlight pointed her horn directly at him as the last remaining fragments of her self-control shattered.
“YOUR LIFE!!!”
It was fear that drove Lex to action.
He had known that Starlight Glimmer was no ordinary unicorn ever since he’d first set hoof on the battlefield. But it hadn’t been until she’d defeated Cloudbank and Thermal Draft – the two of them now lying sprawled out and insensate a stone’s throw away – that he’d gotten his first direct glimpse of how strong she really was.
The black crystals that he could create were orders of magnitude stronger than steel. Although the wall he’d raised in front of the two pegasi had only been an inch thick, for Starlight’s attack to pierce it had been a sobering demonstration of power on her part. All the more so for the fact that she was already weakened. Her combat acumen was likewise impressive; from her quick discovery of his upgraded shadow-form’s point of vulnerability to her quick use of a shield to protect herself from being struck by lightning, she had proven herself to be an adept tactician.
But what had frightened Lex hadn’t been her power or her intuition.
Rather, it had been her callous disregard for everypony around her.
When Lex had reordered his thoughts to make them suitable for his thaumaturgical spellcasting, he had deliberately and irrevocably formatted them to be incompatible with spell structures that were designed to inflict harm across a given area, as opposed to targeting individuals. The indiscriminate nature of such attacks simply made it too easy to cause collateral damage. And while that restriction made it difficult to fight multiple enemies at once, it was one that he didn’t regret imposing on himself.
Starlight, by contrast, had proven that she had no such restraint. That she had exploded nearby debris without concern that any of the ponies she’d already defeated could be hit by the resulting fragments had driven that point home. But her attack on Thermal Draft had been far worse; the fact that her attack had pierced the black crystals he’d created meant that, if he hadn’t raised that barrier when he had, she and Cloudbank would almost certainly have been killed.
But as worrying as that knowledge had been, it hadn’t turned into full-blown fear until just now, when Starlight’s minions – and Sonata! – had started berating her over her having lied about giving up her cutie mark.
The revelation that Starlight had simply painted over it rather than removed it the way she had for the rest of her group had been of little interest to Lex. While it solved the mystery of why her magical channels hadn’t had the same alterations as Fruit Crunch’s, Aria’s, and those other ponies with Starlight despite looking the same – as well as exposed her for the hypocrite that she was – Lex was far less concerned about that than he was with the danger Sonata and those other ponies were putting themselves in. Hadn’t they seen what she’d tried to do? Didn’t they realize that antagonizing her ran the very real risk of making her attack them?
He’d been halfway through casting his whisper-spell, intending to tell them to cease upsetting her, when Starlight had started to become visibly agitated. At that point Lex had known that it was too late. He needed to focus her attention back on him before she hurt somepony…especially if that somepony was Sonata.
But that would be hard to do when he couldn’t so much as stand.
The fact that his upgraded shadow-form had reached the end of its duration, returning him to full corporeality, just as Starlight began to rant in earnest only drove home how powerless he was at that moment.
The only course of action left was to turn back into his full, unmodified shadow-form and use his remaining dark magic to fight as best he could. That would almost certainly be a losing proposition; Starlight had shown herself to be ready for him to make more black crystals spring up out of the ground around her, and he wouldn’t be able to do that for very long before he ran out of dark magic. But there was no other choice now. Not when Starlight seemed like she was seconds away from losing her temper and killing a group of ponies right in front of him.
Not when she was potentially about to kill Sonata!
That thought made the fear rushing through Lex reach a crescendo, and it drove him to his hooves. Every breath felt like sandpaper against the back of his throat, and his legs felt as weak as a newborn foal’s. But somehow, he stood up anyway. He’d turn into shadow-form in a second; for now he needed to make Starlight focus on him!
Pathetic.
“Pathetic,” he called, and felt a rush of relief when his taunt worked, drawing Starlight’s attention. But to his consternation, Sonata and the others had only moved a few paces back! Silently screaming at them to retreat further, Lex regretted not having used his whisper spell the way he’d originally planned. But now it was too late, and all he could do was keep baiting Starlight and hope that the others would take the hint and fall back. You’re so pathetic, Starlight Glimmer. “You’re so pathetic, Starlight Glimmer.”
The words played across his thoughts at the same time as they came out of his mouth, somehow finding enough breath to speak without needing to gasp between them. It was an odd sensation, but not nearly as odd as the sense of déjà vu that swept over him then. This…this had happened before. But when…?
The sensation of spellcasting that Lex felt a second later answered his question, even as new strength flowed into his body. The ache in his muscles suddenly wasn’t so bad, and although his lungs still felt overtaxed, he could breathe clearer now. While not in great shape, he was suddenly capable of fighting again, recognizing the stamina-enhancing spell that he’d invented in the wake of the battle on the docks, and also – with a muted sense of shock – recognizing what was happening.
It was his shadow.
Just like when he had been on the verge of being defeated by Xiriel, the rebellious fragment of his mind was intervening, casting a spell of its own accord in order to turn things around. But why now? What was the salient factor between that encounter and this one?
Lex had long since mastered the ability to think in parallel, following multiple lines of thought simultaneously. It was that talent that let him continue to berate Starlight Glimmer, indicting her as viciously as he could (and noting with relief that Sonata and the others were finally backing further away from her) even as he tried to run down the similarities between his encounter with the devil, the fight with the ghouls – when his shadow had also been goaded into action – and now. What had made the circumstances of those battles different from the others that he’d fought? What did those three instances have in common? What…?
Starlight had never forgotten how she’d felt the day her friend Sunburst had gotten his cutie mark. Up until that point, her childhood had been an endless procession of fun-filled days, each one spent joyfully playing with the colt who was like a brother to her. But that had all ended when he’d saved her from a falling stack of books, telekinetically grabbing them all in a sudden display of power that would have put any adult unicorn to shame.
For the briefest instant she’d been happy for him, seeing his excitement at having found his special talent. But that happiness had evaporated once he’d run outside to show his parents the new symbol on his flank, leaving her behind. In hindsight, it had been a harbinger for what had been about to happen.
By the time night had fallen, Sunburst had been gone. His parents had always been driven – particularly his mother, Stellar Flare – and when they’d found out that their son’s special talent was magic, they hadn’t hesitated. Other foals would have been thrown a cute-ceañera, a grand party inviting everyone in town to come celebrate the important rite of passage that they’d gone through, typically within a few days of getting their cutie mark. Sunburst had been on a train to Canterlot, Equestria’s capital city and home of the only school of magic in the country, in just a few hours.
Finding out that her best friend was gone had wounded Starlight deeply. Finding out that he wasn’t coming back had been so much worse. She hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.
All because he’d gotten his cutie mark!
But as painful as that incident had been, it had given Starlight something she hadn’t possessed before then: determination.
After all of her tears had been cried out, Starlight had thrown herself into studying magic. If Sunburst wasn’t coming back, then she’d simply develop magical talent of her own and go join him in Canterlot! It was the only way that the two of them could be reunited, since her father had repeatedly told her that Canterlot was too far away for them to visit casually, and Sunburst’s parents always went to visit their son in the distant city over the holidays – all the better for them to make connections with the high-society ponies there, she’d found out later – rather than bringing him home. So, with no other way to see her friend again, Starlight had hunted down every book about magic she could get her hooves on (something easily done, thanks to her father’s love of history in general and old books in particular) and thrown herself into her studies with everything she had.
As it had turned out, “everything she had” was quite a lot.
It wasn’t that learning to cast spells had been particularly easy. Rather, it was that she’d simply refused to fail, knowing that to do so would mean losing her one chance of seeing Sunburst again. The storm of negativity that thought had raised in her had kept her going whenever she’d hit a wall, driving her to untangle every complicated description, master every horn exercise, and pour as much power as she could into each and every spell she studied.
That last part had been the easiest step of the entire process. The archaic explanations in her dad’s old books had required dedicated effort in order to translate, and the horn exercises had required long practice sessions in order to build muscle-memory, all of which she’d done with single-minded focus. But generating the power necessary to make her spells work like they were supposed to – something that, according to all of the books she read, was the most difficult part of the process, since that couldn’t really be improved or increased – hadn’t been a problem for her. All she’d had to do was remind herself of the cost of failure, remembering how heartbroken she’d been when Sunburst had left and imagining what it would be like to lose her only chance to see him again if she failed, and she’d somehow found it within herself to push harder, generating the energy needed to power even the most challenging of spells.
In fact, that had been how she’d gotten her own cutie mark. Mastering teleportation – the toughest out of all the spells she’d studied as a filly – had filled her with such joy, certain that she’d be able to see Sunburst again, that she’d barely been surprised when she’d glanced back and noticed the mark on her flanks. All that had been left to do was apply for Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, where Sunburst was studying, and everything would be like it was again!
Until she'd found out otherwise.
“Oh, sweetheart, Sunburst isn’t studying at the princess’s little school anymore,” had been Stellar Flare’s remark when Starlight had asked her to write to Sunburst ahead of her going to Canterlot to take the entrance exam. “He did so well in his classes that his teachers all agreed that there was nothing more for him to learn there. He’s, er…pursuing an independent study now, traveling around Equestria to work on his thesis.”
For the second time in her life, Starlight had been crushed. But this time her anguish had turned to rage in short order. Sunburst’s special talent – his cutie mark – had come between them again! And worse, her own cutie mark had appeared too late for her to catch up to him! It was like they’d been conspiring to keep them apart!
From that moment on, Starlight had declared war on cutie marks and everything that they represented. If special talents meant pain and loss and disappointment, then no one should have a special talent! If being gifted meant striving for something only for it to be snatched away at the last minute, then that gift was a curse! If the differences between ponies drove them apart, then those differences needed to be eliminated!
Equestria would be a better place if everypony in it was equal.
It had taken Starlight years to begin realizing her goal. So much time spent perfecting spells that could manipulate cutie marks (among less important alterations, such as swapping them), finding the perfect location to build her new village (one that had a rock perfect to serve as a cutie mark vault, identified thanks to a passing rock connoisseur), and working to make each pony who stumbled upon the place realize why it was better for them to give up their cutie mark (which usually required a few days of enforced reflection on the subject until they came around). But it had finally all started to pay off.
Until Lex Legis had ruined everything.
This was the third time in her life that Starlight had seen her dreams crushed, and it was by far the worst. The first time had been happenstance, and the second time had simply been bad luck. But this time…this time there was an architect to her pain. Lex Legis had not only masterminded a philosophy that was diametrically opposed to her own, he had – both directly and through his collection of misguided minions – systematically dismantled all of the progress she’d made. Once word got back to her village about what had happened, and she was sure those traitors she’d brought with her would tell them, Starlight had no doubt that everypony there would turn on her just as quickly as the four she'd brought to Vanhoover with her had.
Her heart broken. Her dreams shattered. Her life reduced to shambles.
And Lex Legis had smiled. He’d stomped all over everything she cared about, and then gone out of his way to show how much he enjoyed her pain.
Now, the only thing that Starlight could think about was making him pay for his cruelty. The consequences no longer mattered.
This was no longer a clash of ideologies.
This was about hurting the pony who had hurt her.
Starlight couldn’t remember how many times she’d pushed her limits over the series of battles she’d fought. She’d already felt depleted after she’d fought Aria and Garden Gate. The fights with the Night Mare’s Knights, those two mares with the thundercloud, and Lex Legis himself had only drained her further. It had gotten to the point where even she’d been surprised that she’d still been able keep going, especially with all of the wounds she’d taken. She should have been too weak to create so much as a light, let alone keep fighting.
But just like when she’d been a filly pouring over her father’s books, the turmoil in her heart brought a rush of power with it.
Starlight knew it wouldn’t last very long. Her horn already felt like someone was trying to tear it off of her head, her muscles felt like they were on fire, and her heart felt like it was about to beat its way right out of her chest. But it was enough to get one more spell off…a single attack so massive that it would overwhelm whatever defenses Lex could muster.
And just to make sure he didn’t try and dodge it…
Despite the rock terrain, and the state of her legs, Starlight was able to reposition herself so that Lex was directly between her and where Aria and Garden Gate had fallen, a fact that she knew he was aware of by the way his eyes suddenly widened. The sight sent a thrill of vicious satisfaction through Starlight, having known that would work on him. After all, it had for that Fruit Crunch brat. Like student, like teacher.
You can either take this head-on, or see what it’s like to lose someone YOU care about!
With a wordless scream of hate, Starlight threw everything she left had at Lex.
It was all a matter of emotion.
Lex had known for quite some time that the tulpa – the semi-autonomous part of his own consciousness, able to manifest materially via warping his shadow – that the Night Mare had afflicted him with was composed of his own fears and doubts. That was the reason that it taunted him by day and tormented him by night. Being composed of his own negative feelings, that was all it was able to do, since it had no other cognitive processes.
Or at least, that had been what he’d thought, until it had started aiding him during moments of extreme crisis. Even more shocking had been how it had provided assistance: by casting spells independently. The Night Mare’s letting it slip that he could conceivably control it had been only slightly less of a surprise.
But upon reflection, much of what he’d learned had made sense. If he’d been able to order his thoughts to the point of being able to maintain thaumaturgical structures, then it made sense that his tulpa would be able to do the same. After all, it was nothing more than a collection of thoughts itself. That didn’t explain where it received the energy to do so, but Lex had a theory about that as well: that it was siphoning off small amounts of excess energy whenever he’d recharged his spells, using them to covertly prepare a scattering of spells on its own, without his being aware of it.
Similarly, the potential to control the tulpa was no real surprise once he’d thought about it. Being able to reintegrate the wayward potion of his mind back into his greater consciousness had long been a goal of his; actively controlling it in the meantime was simply an intermediary step in that process. So the Night Mare’s hint had little practical value to it.
The real conundrum had been figuring out why his recalcitrant shadow had chosen to aid him when it had. The trigger for its startling changes of behavior had remained maddeningly unclear, largely due to a lack of sufficient data. After all, Lex had been in many battles since he’d been stricken with the thing. Why had it only helped in some and not others?
His initial hypothesis had been that it was some sort of vestigial self-preservation instinct; that its collection of fears included the fear of death, and that it was acting to preserve him – and itself – when it therefore perceived death to be imminent. But Lex had been forced to discard that idea. He’d come extremely close to dying during his battle with the green dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale, and his shadow had done nothing then.
His next idea had been that his tulpa’s actions had something to do with his level of cognitive awareness, since he’d been on the verge of losing consciousness – a state somewhat similar to sleep – when it had helped him against Xiriel. But that notion had even less to support it than the “fear of death” idea, since he’d been entirely alert when it had provided assistance against the ghoul army. Nor, for that matter, had he been close to passing out just now when he’d begun taunting Starlight Glimmer.
Other ideas had been various external factors, such as how much he’d slept the prior night, who was around him, the time of day, and other data points. All had shown no reliable points of correlation for when his shadow had provided support instead of antagonism. It had been a mystery with no answer.
Until now.
Now, with what had just happened with Starlight Glimmer, Lex had enough points of comparison that the answer had all but leaped out at him, so obvious that he felt vaguely embarrassed that he hadn’t thought of it before.
His shadow responded to his feeling an acute sense of fear. But it wasn’t the fear of death, like he’d originally hypothesized.
It was the fear of, for lack of a better term, letting the people who depended on him down.
That was, after all, his worst fear. Since he couldn’t – for reasons he still hadn’t figured out – perceive the unspoken cues that went into interpersonal communication the way everypony else could, his ability to engage in meaningful relationships was critically compromised. Until he figured out how to discern and decrypt the intuitive aspects of face-to-face discourse, his only method of justifying his existence was therefore in making a contribution to Equestria of such magnitude that it compensated for how off-putting, unsettling, or otherwise upsetting most ponies found him to be. That was why he’d initially created thaumaturgical magic – an enterprise still critically flawed due to how hard it was to recharge – and subsequently turned his focus toward governance after seeing how Equestria had stood still after a thousand years.
If he couldn’t change his homeland for the better, then there was no point to his being alive.
And the idea that he might fail in such a way that Equestria would be even worse than he’d found it – that his existence was not only pointless, but a detriment to his people – was utterly unbearable.
That was why his shadow had only acted to aid him at certain times. Being composed of his own fears, the gap between it and his greater consciousness was closest to being bridged when he occupied a similar mindset as it. Namely, whenever he perceived a severe, imminent threat to what he valued most, and likewise perceived himself as being unable to stop it.
That had been why his shadow hadn’t reacted when he’d fought that dragon. Although he’d had moments of intense worry about whether or not he’d be able to protect everyone, he’d never lost confidence that he’d be able to protect them. The same had been true when he’d fought Tlerekithres, maintaining his confidence that he could hold the kraken back while everypony else – his friends, Sonata said he’d called them – had handled the rest. Even his fight with Lirtkra’s gang had never caused him to worry that everyone else would pay the price if they killed him.
But Xiriel had been different. The devil had meticulously planned to destroy Equestria, a plan that to all appearances had been succeeding before Lex had blundered into it. Likewise, the ghoul plague would have accomplished much the same, having been a foundational part of the devil’s strategy. In both cases, his shadow had acted…because for a few moments, it had reintegrated at least a little with the rest of his mind, and in so doing had used what power it had hoarded for itself to stave off what he was afraid of the most: the consequences of what failure would mean for his home and his people.
The same way it was doing now against Starlight Glimmer, the pony who wanted to take what made everypony special away from them.
It was with that thought in mind that Lex saw Starlight reposition herself, glancing behind him as she did, and he didn’t need to look back to know what she was looking at, feeling a fear of a different sort – along with an accompanying burst of rage – rush through him as his mental map of the battlefield told him that she had just deliberately put Aria and Garden Gate into her line of fire.
The power that Starlight put into her final attack was staggering to witness.
Her eyes glowing with white light as she screamed in rage, the beam that came from Starlight’s horn was both wider and taller than she was. Its passage alone sent shockwaves rippling out in every direction, causing the ponies in the nearby crowd to let out screams of fright as they struggled to brace themselves. Closer to the source of the blast, Sonata, Sugar Belle, Party Favor, Double Diamond, and Night Glider were all knocked backward, limbs flailing as they went tumbling.
The only pony who didn’t move was Lex himself, his horn shrouded in deep purple as he called upon his dark magic, answering Starlight’s wordless roar with a sharp yell of his own.
The wall of black crystals that rose up in front of him then was dozens of times thicker than the one he’d created to protect Cloudbank and Thermal Draft, its depth measured in feet rather than inches, and wide enough to catch any spillover from Starlight’s energy beam. Physically overcharging his dark magic like that sent a renewed ache through his body, but Lex remained standing, knowing he never would have been able to conjure so much material if his shadow hadn’t bolstered him just now…and even with that, it was unlikely he’d be able to do so again without incapacitating himself a second time, stamina-enhancing spell or no. But this should be enough, he felt certain. With her injuries, and how she'll need to brace herself against that spell’s recoil, Starlight Glimmer won’t be able to move enough to adjust the beam’s angle. That means all I have to do is wait for her to expend the last of her strength trying to breach this barrier, and then-
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of cracking.
Lex wasted a fraction of a second being surprised, his eyes widening in shock as the sound changed into one of shattering, the black crystals at the forefront of the wall he’d conjured breaking down under Starlight’s assault. He’d known he was facing a powerful opponent, but this had been completely beyond his expectations! A barrier of black crystals less than a foot thick had been sufficient to withstand multiple blasts of augmented magic from both of the Royal Sisters! How could Starlight Glimmer, a unicorn who could only use Equestrian magic, generate more power than an alicorn?!
There was no time to ponder the question. The remainder of the wall he’d created was steadily disintegrating under Starlight’s assault, the enraged mare somehow sustaining the massive outpouring of energy despite the incredible drain it had to be putting on her. Even as Lex watched, fissures spread through the ebony material in front of him, the surviving parts of the wall starting to lose their integrity. In another few seconds it would collapse entirely, letting the beam swallow not only him, but Aria and Garden Gate as well.
Gritting his teeth, Lex conjured more black crystals. Knowing better than to strain himself by trying to recreate the large section that had already been destroyed, he instead narrowed his focus, conjuring minute amounts of new crystals to fill in the cracks that were spreading through the remainder of the wall. If I can just repair the damage faster than she can inflict it…!
But a few seconds was all he needed to determine that it wasn’t working.
Although there was still a solid five feet of black crystals between him and Starlight’s attack, the force she was generating was demolishing it faster than he could keep up. New fractures were forming before he’d finished restoring existing ones. The best he could accomplish was to slow the rate at which she was destroying his barrier; he couldn’t reverse it. Worse, although the drain on his reserves of dark magic wasn’t egregious, it was steady, and Lex knew that even if his barrier hadn’t been breaking down faster than he could restore it, he couldn’t maintain this rate of output for long before he ran dry.
Two minutes until I run out of dark magic, he estimated grimly. But only thirty seconds until Starlight breaks through.
One way or the other, he was going to lose unless he could come up with a new strategy. If he couldn’t, not only would the price of failure be death, but Aria and Garden Gate would lose their lives as well. And the rest of Equestria would lose their special talents to Starlight Glimmer, since she quite clearly had both the power and the inclination to take them by force.
Thoughts of what would happen if he failed here made him glance over at his shadow. If you have any other spells, now’s the time to use them! he snarled mentally.
But the tulpa lurking within his umbral outline did nothing.
The lack of response made Lex curse bitterly to himself. Was he not frightened enough for it to come to his aid? Or did it simply have no spells that would be useful in this situation? The latter scenario was a distinct possibility; even if the thing had been siphoning small amounts of power to prepare its own cache of spells – something it wouldn’t have been able to do after he’d banished Severance – it couldn’t have prepared more than a few. It was only a fragment of his larger consciousness, which meant that it likely lacked much in the way of thaumaturgical capacity. But that couldn’t be the limits of its powers…not when it had dragged his nightmares into the real world during the ghoul invasion. If it brought forth those distorted copies of the ponies he’d known now and had them charge at Starlight…
Lex discarded that idea, knowing it would be a recipe for disaster. Even if Starlight couldn’t reliably alter the direction of her oversized energy blast, the sight of several horrors descending on her would likely make her desperate enough to try anyway. Or her balance would be thrown off when the creatures attacked her. Either way would almost certainly cause the direction of her attack to veer off unpredictably, which with all of the people gathered nearby would more than likely result in fatalities – potentially a great many – before Starlight terminated her spell. That was something Lex was determined to avoid at all costs, which likely meant that his shadow wouldn’t bring those nightmares out now.
But with no more spells and no nightmare-creatures forthcoming, that meant that unless it had some other heretofore unknown ability, there’d be no further aid from the tulpa.
Nor was there any other viable way to that Lex could think of to counterattack. He could turn into a shadow and move through the ground, avoiding Starlight’s beam entirely and moving in to attack her physically. But at its current rate of deterioration, what was left of his barrier would be destroyed before he could cross the distance to Starlight, meaning that he’d be abandoning Aria and Garden Gate to die, a course of action that Lex rejected utterly.
Creating more stalagmites to try and attack Starlight wasn’t feasible either. Even if that worked – which was in doubt, since she’d now seen that trick more than once – it ran the same risk of throwing her aim off and hitting the bystanders. That was a factor that couldn’t be countenanced under any circumstances. Winning without protecting everypony wasn’t winning at all.
Which meant that only thing he could do was keep repairing what was left of his black crystal wall and hope that Starlight would run out of power before she broke through…in another fifteen seconds.
Starlight, however, was showing no signs of letting up anytime soon.
His lips pulled back in a silent snarl, Lex tried to think of an alternative plan, one which offered some way out of the bad position he was in without making any unacceptable sacrifices.
But nothing came to him.
And time was running out.
Shielding his face against the wind being whipped up by Starlight’s attack, Party Favor looked at his companions. “We have to do something!”
“Like what?!” Night Glider gave him an incredulous look. “We can’t even get close to Starlight right now!”
“What about the cutie marks in our wagons?” Sugar Belle glanced back at the vehicles in question as she spoke. She and her friends had unharnessed themselves from them when they’d moved in to confront Starlight about her lies, leaving them far enough back that they – and the glass jars that they were carrying – were undisturbed by the force of the blast. “All the other ones she took are back in the vault at our village, but can let these ones out!”
“What good will that do?” Double Diamond gestured toward the battlefield, yelling to be heard over the din. “Starlight only took three ponies’ cutie marks! One was that Aria lady, another was that kid, and the last one was that mare with the peach symbol on her flank! The first two are unconscious and I don’t think the third can help!”
“But we can’t just do nothing!” protested Sugar Belle, before looking at the last member of their group. “Sonata, you still have some magic left, right? Maybe you can…Sonata?”
But the mare in question didn’t answer her, staring at how the black wall that Lex had conjured up was struggling to maintain itself against Starlight’s relentless assault. “Lex…” she murmured softly, the word lost beneath the roar generated by the infuriated mare’s super-huge energy beam.
Starlight Glimmer was her friend. Ever since she’d realized that – shortly after the mare had explained how she’d taken away her cutie mark, and with it her ability to sing, for her own good – Sonata had given Starlight the benefit of the doubt. Not being able to sing anymore had been a major drag, and if she was being totes honest Sonata didn’t really care if everypony else was jealous of how pretty her voice was, but she hadn’t made a big deal out of it since Starlight said it was important. Friends were supposed to support each other, right?
It had been for Starlight’s sake that Sonata had kept quiet when Starlight had torn Aria’s cutie mark off. Sure, Aria had been crazy upset about it, but she’d come around once she realized that Starlight just wanted what was best for her. Friends were supposed to trust each other, right?
Nor had Sonata said anything when Starlight had beaten up those nice kids, the ones who had saved her and Lex and Aria from that Silhouette jerk. That had made her feel totes bad, but Sonata had pushed that feeling down – barely – wanting to believe that Starlight really was doing that for their sake. After all, a lot of ponies had been upset with Lex when he’d first come here. Friends were supposed to believe in each other, right?
Then Lex himself had shown up, and Sonata had suddenly found herself feeling all kinds of awful. When he’d called her name, it had been all she could do not to flinch. And while it had been gut-wrenching watching him and Starlight fight, Sonata had tried to tell herself that it wasn’t really a big deal. Starlight’s zappy-beams were even going right through him thanks to that freaky-flicker mode thingy he was doing, so he probably wasn’t hurt. And those explosions she’d caused weren’t even all that big. Besides, they were both super-smart ponies who had, like…ideas and stuff, so they’d probably calm down and talk it out. Friends were supposed to have faith in each other, right?
That faith had been severely tested when Sonata had seen the paint running down Starlight’s flank, however. But as hurt as she’d felt, she hadn’t been able to become too upset about it, finding herself wanting to believe that Starlight hadn’t really meant to do anything wrong. Sure, she’d basically lied to them about everything, but no one was perfect. Friends were supposed to forgive each other, right?
But now…now Starlight was trying to…she was actually attacking Lex for realsies-
Starlight’s my friend.
She was shooting all that magic at him, and Aria and Fencer too, and it looked dangerous…like, super dangerous-
Starlight’s my friend…
In fact, she’d said what she was trying to do. She’d said really loud that she was going to take his life. She-
St-Starlight’s my f-friend…
She’d aimed at Aria and Fencer on purpose! She’d wanted Lex to get in the way so that she’d be sure to hit him! She was trying to hit him! To kill him!
Star-Starliiight’s my fr-…my f-f-fri-…Starlight’s mmmyyy friii-…
SHE WAS TRYING TO KILL LEX!
At that moment, something in Sonata’s mind gave way.
A sigh escaped Twilight’s lips as she returned her book to its place in her saddlebag, her expression forlorn as she turned to stare out the window of their train.
“Aw, why the long face, sugarcube?” Sitting across from her, Applejack gave Twilight a sympathetic smile. “Last time I saw a book upset you that much was when you flipped through that one about déjà vu and couldn’t remember if you’d read it before.”
“Spoiler alert,” called Spike from the other side of the aisle, his head in Soft Mane’s lap. “She had.”
Blushing a little at the memory, Twilight didn’t have a chance to reply before a new voice cut in. “Ooh! Ooh! I know!” Suddenly hanging upside down from the luggage rack, Pinkie’s eyes gleamed at the chance to get in on a guessing game. “Were you reading a cookbook that said that you could make a triple-decker chocolate-almond peanut butter fudge marshmallow-cream cake with only four pounds of butter and not five? Because that happened to me once, and I was so sad imagining all the poor ponies out there making the cake from that book only to find that it wasn’t as rich and thick and creamy-yummy-licious as it should be!”
The anecdote earned a giggle from Twilight, still enjoying how nice it was to have Pinkie back. “No, that’s not it-”
“Oh good!” interrupted Pinkie, walking along the underside of the overhead rack and down the interior wall of the train in complete defiance of gravity before plunking herself on the seat next to Twilight. “Because then you’d have to go see the publisher and beg and plead for them to tell you everypony that they’d sold that book to and then go and track down every copy so you can cross out where it says ‘four pounds’ and write in ‘five pounds’ instead! Because that can be pretty hard work, let me tell you!” Spotting a dessert car being wheeled down the aisle, Pinkie didn’t hesitate, reaching out with her mane and snagging a slice of triple-decker chocolate-almond peanut butter fudge marshmallow-cream cake and shoving it in her mouth, squealing happily as she devoured it. “Buh ih wah wof ih!”
“Chew with your mouth closed, darling,” admonished Rarity gently from where she was sitting across from Spike and Soft Mane, telekinetically holding a napkin up in front of Pinkie’s mouth as she turned back to Twilight. “You were saying?”
Her dejected expression returning, Twilight gestured at her saddlebag. “Ever since the lhaksharut smashed the mirror portal to Canterlot High, I’ve been corresponding with Sunset Shimmer through our journals about ways to try and repair it, but so far nothing’s worked. Sunset had a few ideas she wanted to try on her end, but since she’s still not sure how magic operates in that world, she’s not making any progress either.”
“Is that all?” scoffed Rainbow Dash. “You’ve already got that dimension-hopping spell down, remember? The one you used to bring us all back here from Everglow when we got Princess Celestia’s letter about what Lex did to Luna? Just use that to zap over there if Sunset needs your help again.”
“Um, I don’t mean to contradict you,” offered Fluttershy timidly, giving Rainbow Dash an apologetic expression. “But I think maybe Twilight’s upset because she can’t just use that spell to, um, ‘zap’ over there.”
“Fluttershy’s right,” admitted Twilight, her ears folding down. “That spell requires a special tuning fork made out of specific materials and set to a specific pitch, but I don’t know what either one is for that world. It might help if I had something from there, but I don’t.”
“Which is why you should always bring back souvenirs,” added Spike.
The smug tone in his voice garnered him a glare from Twilight and a wry grin from Soft Mane, the latter cocking a brow. “You know, you went with Twilight to Everglow both times. Did you bring back anything?”
“Oh, um…I guess I forgot,” admitted the little dragon sheepishly.
After the subsequent round of good-natured laughter died down, Applejack spoke up again. “Well, what about that other portal of yours, Twilight? The one that accidentally sent me and Apple Bloom and her friends to Everglow that one time? Can’t you just make some adjustments to it or somethin’ and have it send you to that world instead?”
The question made Rainbow Dash frown. “Wait, that lhaksha-thingy didn’t break that portal too?”
Twilight shook her head. “No. It was only after ‘non-volatile planar apertures,’ meaning portals that were permanently open. That one only activates if a drop of blood is spilled on it.”
“Well, that sounds rather ghastly,” admitted Rarity with a shudder, before making herself smile, “but now that you don’t need it to go to that Everglow place, I bet you could adjust it to go to Canterlot High easily!”
“Ooh, then we could have…” Turning, Pinkie opened the window and stuck her head outside, craning her neck around and out of sight…only for her face to then reappear from around the edge of the window on the opposite side of the train, grinning. “…a portal party!”
The sight brought yelps of fright from Rarity, Fluttershy, Soft Mane, and Spike, staring at the spectacle in shock before Pinkie pulled back from the window and took her seat again, grinning.
But Twilight shook her head. “I don’t know if I can. That portal was an accident. I’ve left it as-is so that I can study it, but I’m still not sure how I made it in the first place. Trying to alter where it goes could wreck it altogether, or worse!”
“W-worse?” gulped Fluttershy. “Oh. Oh my. Maybe it would be safer to keep researching the proper tuning fork, don’t you think?”
“That’s probably a good idea,” added Rainbow Dash, earning a surprised look from all present.
“Are you bein’ serious?” Applejack didn’t even try to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “I thought you’d be all gung-ho to go off on another adventure.”
“Um, hello?” Waving a hoof to indicate the train car, Rainbow raised her eyebrows at the earth mare. “We’re on one right now! And I didn’t say that Twilight should be the one doing the researching.” Her next statement was directed at Twilight, giving her friend a pointed look. “You mentioned that Sunset Shimmer is in a band over there, right? So let her focus on finding the right xylophone or whatever it is you need while we focus on kicking Lex Legis’s butt!”
But Twilight’s response to Rainbow’s enthusiasm was to grimace. “I know we need to concentrate on the task at hoof,” she admitted, “especially since we’re almost to Vanhoover, but I’m just not sure that the map sent us here to pick a fight.”
“I’m sorry, darling, but I have to agree with Rainbow Dash,” interjected Rarity. “It can’t simply be a coincidence that that map of yours told us all to go to Vanhoover right after that Lex character put such a horrible curse on Princess Luna.”
“Not to mention that he killed one of her guards,” noted Soft Mane with a scowl, the way she did whenever Lex was mentioned. “He probably thought the guy looked too different from ‘normal’ ponies somehow.”
Twilight bit her lip at that, watching as Spike sat up and did his best to calm Soft Mane down. She had initially been against those two coming with them to Vanhoover, not sure if the map wanted only her and her friends to go there. Wouldn’t it have let them know somehow if Spike and Soft Mane were also needed to do…whatever it was that they were supposed to do?
But Soft Mane had been adamant about joining them, pointing out – both to Twilight and to her mother, when the latter had found out what her daughter was planning – that with Cadance and the crystal ponies returning to the Crystal Empire, she was the only one left with healing spells, “and you might need them if Lex attacks,” she’d insisted. Twilight hadn’t been entirely convinced healing magic would be necessary (and she still had that infernal healing spell she’d learned from Under Score, even if it was weak compared to divine healing), but she couldn’t be sure that it wouldn’t be either. And if she made a mistake and there wasn’t any on hoof, it might be her friends who paid the price for her oversight…just like they almost had during the fight with the lhaksharut…
So, reluctantly, Twilight had given Soft Mane permission to come with them. Which of course meant that Spike was going too, refusing to let his girlfriend head into potential danger without his being there to protect her. It was sweet, and the fact that Soft Mane found his chivalry adorable was doubly so. Twilight just hoped she wouldn’t regret it later. If something hap-
“WHOA!”
Twilight heard everyone calling her name in reaction to her sudden yell, but she couldn’t answer, too caught up in what she was feeling. It was only when Pinkie – now wearing a doctor’s head mirror – rapped her on the forehead with a reflex hammer that Twilight snapped out of it. “Ouch!”
“There we go!” beamed Pinkie. “Good as new!”
But Fluttershy didn’t look entirely convinced. “Are you okay, Twilight?”
Nor was she the only one, with Rarity giving her a concerned look. “Darling, what happened? You sounded like you’d just received some sort of horrible shock.”
Swallowing, Twilight nodded. “You could say that,” she admitted, turning her gaze toward the front of the train. “I can feel a huge burst of magic coming from Vanhoover!”
Applejack pushed her hat up as she rubbed her forehead. “What kinda magic?”
“I don’t know!” Closing her eyes, Twilight tried to concentrate, but abandoned the effort after only a few seconds. “We’re too far away. All I can tell is that it’s big – princess-level big, maybe even more – and that it’s coming from exactly where we’re headed.”
“So it’s Lex, right?” Smacking her fore-hooves together, Rainbow Dash glanced in the direction of the city – still a few hours distant according to the last attendant that had wandered through – with a grim look. “He’s probably cursing somepony again!”
“You don’t think he knows we’re coming, do you?” Fluttershy was already turning pale, pulling back as if trying to hide behind her mane. “Oh, what if he’s planning on using some awful curse on all of us before we even reach Vanhoover?!”
“Oh my gosh!” Pinkie’s eyes widened in alarm. “What if he curses us so that our birthdays don’t come around anymore?! None of us would get to have a birthday party ever again!”
“Somehow I doubt that’s the worst thing he could do,” replied Soft Mane dryly.
“Well whatever he’s doing, I’m not gonna let him get away with it!” Before anypony could stop her, Rainbow Dash was at the window, opening it up and vaulting outside.
“Rainbow, wait!” But despite Applejack’s admonition, it was already too late. In the half-second that it took her to stick her head out the window, Rainbow Dash was already speeding into the distance, easily outpacing the train as she headed for Vanhoover. “Consarn it, she’s gone!” Trying to stay calm, she pulled her head back in and looked at the other winged members of the group. “Y’all gotta go after her before she does somethin’ foolish!”
Fluttershy winced, curling up in her seat. “I can’t fly faster than a train!”
“Neither of us can,” admitted Twilight. “But we can tell the conductor that it’s an emergency and we need the train to get to Vanhoover as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll do it,” volunteered Spike, leaping up and heading towards the engine. “I bet if I breathe on the coals, I can kick this thing into overdrive.”
Twilight shot her assistant a grateful smile. “Good thinking, Spike. Everypony else, let’s start working on a plan just in case Rainbow Dash needs our help when we get there.”
“She’s gonna need help when I get my hooves on her, runnin’ off like that,” grumbled Applejack. But no one missed the nervous tremor in her voice.
Twilight could sympathize. Rainbow was brash, headstrong, and – unlike herself and Applejack – thoroughly convinced that Lex was a villain. If she didn’t like what she found when she got there, it was very likely that she’d blame him for it, and act accordingly. And as much as Twilight wanted to believe that Lex wasn’t all bad, she knew that if he felt like he was being attacked, he’d respond harshly…as Princess Luna could attest.
Although Twilight wanted to believe that Lex could understand the magic of friendship, she wasn’t willing to risk her friends’ safety to do it. Not when they’d finally all just been reunited. Not when she’d almost lost some of them during the lhaksharut’s attack. If Lex and Rainbow were fighting when they arrived, and couldn’t be talked down…
Then maybe the map really had sent them there to deal with Lex once and for all.
Sonata’s furious scream drowned out even the roar of Starlight’s energy beam, instantly capturing the attention of everyone present.
She and the other ponies that Starlight had brought with her had been knocked almost directly backward when the crazy unicorn had unleashed her final, massive attack. The result was that when Sonata broke into a gallop now, before the echoes of her angry cry had even begun to fade, she had a clear path toward Starlight’s unprotected back. There was nothing to stop her as she charged across the broken terrain, closing the distance between herself and Starlight Glimmer until they were close enough to touch…
And then Sonata ran right past her without slowing down.
The myriad cries of confusion and disappointment that erupted from everypony watching didn’t reach Sonata’s ears, too close to Starlight’s sustained magical blast to hear anything else. But even if she’d heard, she wouldn’t have cared. Right now, there was something more important than being adored by everyone.
Although Sonata was now certain that Starlight had only been pretending to be her friend, the anger that came with that realization was nothing compared to the guilt she felt. The fact that she’d stood by and done nothing while Starlight had done all those horrible things was tearing her up inside, horrible and unrelenting. I just stood there! she wailed internally, legs pumping as fast as she could. I just stood there and didn’t do anything!
Fruit Crunch and his friends had saved her and the ponies she cared about more than once, and she’d repaid them by sitting back and watching while Starlight had walloped them. She’d barely uttered a word when Aria had lost her cutie mark, and with it her singing voice, despite the two of them finally, finally starting to get along. And Lex…
What if he thinks I don’t love him anymore?!
They’d never really made up after that last fight, when Lex had lashed out at her right before Nosey had left. He’d tried to talk to her later that evening, and again the next morning, before she’d set out to deliver rainclouds to the northern villages. But she hadn’t wanted to hear it, brushing him off and setting out as quickly as she could. With how hurt she’d felt, some time apart had seemed like a good idea.
She regretted that intensely now. For all that he acted like a tough guy, Sonata knew that Lex was really very sensitive. His gruff exterior was just his way of trying to protect himself, not wanting to feel even more hurt and lonely than he already did. He’d reacted so badly to her trying to get him to say goodbye to Nosey, not because he’d wanted to be cruel, but because he hadn’t been able to help himself. It had been just like when she’d tried to get back together with him after they’d broken up; he’d lost control because he’d already been in a world of pain, and so the threat of even a tiny bit more had caused him to snap.
But instead of recognizing that and trying to soothe him, bringing Lex back to his better self the way she had before, Sonata had made the same mistake as him and let her hurt feelings take her over.
It had been the worst thing she possibly could have done, short of breaking up with him again. But for all she knew, Lex thought she had broken up with him again! What else was he supposed to think when she left in a huff, then brought back some crazy lady who attacked him and everyone he cared about while she stood by and didn’t raise a hoof to help? How did that not look like she’d betrayed him?
That was why Sonata ran right past Starlight without so much as glancing at her.
Helping Lex win the fight was important, but making sure he knew that she still loved him with all of her heart and soul was more important.
“Lex!” she yelled as she rounded what was left of the black wall he’d raised. “Lex! I’m sorry!”
“Sonata?!” Behind his barrier, Lex had been the only one who hadn’t seen Sonata’s approach. “What are you doing?! Get out of here!”
“No!” Shaking her head, she stepped forward until she was practically nose-to-nose with him. “I’m not leaving you! Not again!”
Pieces of black crystal were beginning to break off from the edges of the wall, flying past the two of them as Lex bared his teeth at her, his eyes and horn flaring brighter. “You idiot!” he roared. “Listen to me! You-”
“I am an idiot!” Sonata couldn’t stop herself from interrupting, the words inside of her flowing out of their own accord. “Lex, I didn’t hear what you were trying to tell me before, but I totes do now! I know you were hurting, about Nosey, and I wasn’t there for you! But I swear, I never stopped loving you! Not even a little! And I didn’t bring Starlight here because I wanted her to fight you! I should have-”
Then Lex kissed her.
There was no hesitation in it. No sense of grudging restraint. No lingering anger or resentment. Just love, wholehearted and unreserved, his feelings reaching her with more clarity than anything he could have said out loud.
Just like that, all was right with the world again.
When his lips left hers a moment later, Sonata’s eyes were shimmering, unable to help but smile. “Lex, I-”
“Sonata, you have to get out of here.” Lex’s voice was softer now, but no less intense for it, canting his head toward the two ponies lying unconscious a short distance behind him even as more of his wall began to break apart. “Grab Aria and Garden Gate and drag them out of the line of fire. I should be able to keep this barrier up long enough for you to get them clear.”
“Yeah, no,” replied Sonata with a dreamy grin. “I’m not doing that.”
“Sonata! This barrier won’t last another ten seconds!”
“Well then you better come up with some super-genius plan, because I said I’m not leaving you again and I meant it.”
“YOU IMBECILE!” screamed Lex, suddenly incensed. “You’ll die! Your sister and Garden Gate will die! Are you completely insane?!”
“Well, yeah,” answered Sonata with a smirk. “I told you I’d rather die if I couldn’t be with you. Isn’t that why you made me a ward of the state or whatever it was?”
“…”
Seeing that he had no answer for that, Sonata leaned forward, touching her forehead to his even as cracks spread through what was left of the barrier, light shining through the fissures. “You’ve done the whole ‘big heroic sacrifice’ thing a whole bunch of times already, starting with when you first fought that dragon. This time, I wanna help you do some of the heavy lifting, okay?”
“…that’s it!”
Not sure what he meant, Sonata tilted her head. “Lex?”
“I have a plan! Sonata, listen very carefully and do exactly as I say!”
Everyone always betrays me!
The sight of Sonata – who had broken free of the enchantment she’d laid on her somehow – rushing behind Lex’s rapidly-crumbling barricade sent a new wave of rage through Starlight, driving her to pour more power into her attack. She knew she didn’t have much left in her, that this was the magical equivalent of a runner pouring the last of their reserves into the final sprint of a marathon before collapsing, but she didn’t care. Sonata’s demonstration that she’d rather die alongside Lex than live in harmony as everyone’s equal was a savage rebuke, one that made Starlight grit her teeth.
Sonata’s defection – after all Starlight had done to try and show her a better way to live – was just the latest in a lifelong string of betrayals. Sunburst had gotten his cutie mark and immediately left her behind. Her father and Stellar Flare had both ignored how much pain losing her best friend had caused her. Those ingrates from her village had turned on her because of one little white lie that had been a necessary evil. And now Sonata’s last, defiant gesture.
But that was fine, because in just a moment, she and Lex both would become nothing more than a bad memory. By her count, she’d be through in another five seconds.
Four.
Three.
Tw-
Suddenly, something changed.
“Your Highness, I think maybe we should postpone your grand entrance.”
“My dear River, a prince’s grand entrance isn’t something you postpone,” mused Blueblood, his voice indulgent, as though lecturing a child. “It’s not a theater production or some dreary charity event. It’s a display of national pride which other ponies are grateful to suspend their mundane activities for so that they may bask in its brilliance. Teeth?”
That last question had been directed as his valet, pulling his lips back as the reedy stallion inspected them with a careful eye before nodding. “Perfect as always, Your Highness.”
By now the prince’s displays of narcissism had become so routine that River didn’t bat an eye. Of course, she was a bit distracted by the massive beam of light that was visible beyond the crowd, thrumming with so much power that she could practically feel her teeth vibrating. “I don’t really think you can call this mundane.”
Pixie, by contrast, was much more plainspoken. “Whatever that is, it looks really dangerous! Don’t you all think so?!”
It was clear from the looks on the faces of Penny, Razzle, Gladmane, and the others that they did, but that they were extremely reluctant to openly contradict a prince. “Maybe it’ll stop by the time we get there,” ventured Penny, earning a muttering of agreement from her companions.
“Of course it will,” announced Blueblood, not bothering to look at the others as he breathed into his hoof and then sniffed. “That silly little lightshow is simply Lex Legis’s way of trying to frighten me off. I’m sure that by now the varlet has realized that the pony he so brazenly passed before was none other than a prince, here to chastise him. Now, like an alley cat fluffing its tail to try and appear more fearsome, he’s putting on this ostentatious display to try and ward me off.”
Apparently satisfied with his breath, Blueblood put his hoof down, striking a pose as he did so. “Little does he realize, Equestrian royalty is made of sterner stuff! I shall-, ack! Wind! Too much wind!” he suddenly snapped at the pegasus members of his royal entourage, who had been flapping their wings in the background to generate an air current. “This pose requires that my mane and tail be flowing in a gentle breeze, not a howling gale! Now hurry and fix my coiffure you cretins!”
Wincing and murmuring apologies, his staff quickly took action, bringing out silver brushes and golden combs as they worked to make sure that every hair in the prince’s mane and tail was perfectly placed. “Honestly,” moaned Blueblood, his expression woebegone, “how is it that I have the most incompetent staff of any royal in this fair land?”
Once the quick grooming session was finished, the prince finally deigned to look at everypony else. “Now then, you all have the honor of forming part of my royal entourage as I present my noble self to the villain, cowing him with my magnificence! For most of you, this will be the greatest honor of your lives, so do try to act accordingly! That means no idle chitchat, make sure to march in lockstep, and cheer when my staff does! But no whistling or yelping or any of those crass displays of enthusiasm that I’m sure you’re all used to! Remember, the soul of royalty is refinement! Now, fall in!”
“If you don’t mind, Your Highness, I’ll recuse myself,” announced River. “I’m simply not confident that I could live up to your expectations, and I’d hate to embarrass you during your moment of glory.”
“You know what? Me too,” added Pixie. “I’m, um, too used to stage performances to pull off something so…fancy.”
Giving the two a condescending look, Blueblood raised a brow. “Hm, I suppose if you can’t bring yourselves to follow even those simple instructions, you’re better off not assisting with my triumph. That’s to be expected of a common performer,” he noted, glancing at Pixie before turning to River, “but I have to say, I’m very disappointed in you, River Bank. Ever since we arrived in this dingy little hamlet, the modicum of culture that you displayed back in Las Pegasus has shriveled up. I suppose it’s true what they say: you can take a girl out of the country, but not the country out of the girl. Or beldame, in your case.” He burst into laughter then, clearly thinking himself quite amusing, and after a moment everypony else except – except Pixie, looking shocked at both the open rudeness and River’s stoic acceptance of it – joined in.
“But enough of my sterling wit,” Blueblood announced after a moment. “Let us be off to discipline that blackguard!” With that, he began to head toward the crowd, moving at a sedate pace as everypony rushed to fall in behind him.
“Have fun watching from the sidelines, River dear,” smirked Gladmane.
“Looks like Vanhoover’s rustic reputation is secured, just like its hostess,” snickered Penny. “I doubt there’ll be a need for new hotels here now, since nopony’s going to want to come here after this.”
“Pity I couldn’t see those Sirens of yours,” cackled Razzle. “But a show with royalty is a much greater spectacle!”
River made no reply, watching them line up and march behind the prince in silence. It was only after they were gone that Pixie spoke up. “River…are you okay? You’re acting so…so…”
“Calm?” supplied River.
“Passive!” yelled Pixie, throwing her forelegs into the air. “Your city is a disaster zone, it’s ruled by a monster who’s doing…something awful even as we speak, and everypony you brought here hates you now, including a prince, and you’re acting like it’s all no big deal!”
“That’s because it’s not.”
“Why?! Is…is this because Mounte didn’t make it?”
The question made River snort in amusement. “Hardly.”
“Then what?”
For a moment River hesitated, glancing back at the not-so-distant energy beam. “It’s easier if you see it for yourself. C’mon, let’s go watch His Highness find out what he’s really up against.”
“This time, I wanna help you do some of the heavy lifting, okay?”
A rebuke was already on Lex’s lips when inspiration struck. Without realizing it, Sonata had just stumbled onto their one chance to not only survive this encounter, but defeat Starlight Glimmer. It was extremely risky, and even the slightest misstep would mean death for both of them and quite likely a lot of other ponies as well, but if it worked…if everything went perfectly… “That’s it!”
“Lex?”
“I have a plan!” Looking at the mare who was quite literally his saving grace, Lex knew there was no time to waste, not when what was left of his barrier would be gone in seconds. “Sonata, listen very carefully and do exactly as I say!”
By the time she started carrying out the instructions he’d given her, there was less than five seconds left before Starlight blasted his barricade to pieces. But that was enough. Turning back to what was left of the wall of black crystals that he’d raised, Lex ceased his efforts to maintain it.
Or rather, ceased his efforts to maintain most of it.
His original barrier had been over ten feet thick, with Starlight’s massive beam of energy cutting it down to just under half of that size before he’d realized what was happening. After that he’d tried to maintain it despite her onslaught, repairing the damage that she’d been inflicting. But that had been a losing proposition; without channeling more energy through his body to augment his dark magic, Starlight’s assault had broken it down faster than he’d been able to keep up.
So instead, Lex narrowed his focus. He couldn’t create black crystals fast enough to reinforce the entirety of the barrier, but he could create them fast enough to maintain a portion of it. Barely six inches thick, the remainder of the wall was of a small enough area that he could repair all of it at once, effectively allowing him to recreate it again and again even as Starlight’s beam tore it down, at least until he ran out of dark magic.
It would buy them a little more time…but there was a reason why he hadn’t done this earlier, telegraphed by the loud cracking sounds that almost immediately rang out.
Knowing that they were about to be put to the test, Lex reared up on his hind legs and put his fore-hooves against what was left of his wall – letting the gauntlet he’d made dissolve into nothing, since he’d need his grip unimpeded for what was about to happen – bracing it with his body even as he also grabbed it with his telekinesis. “Get ready!” he called back to Sonata.
If she replied, it was lost in the loud splintering sound that rang out a half-second later, the base of the wall breaking apart completely.
That hadn’t been unexpected, of course. With the thickness of the barricade cut down so sharply, its base had been under enormous pressure. Not only was it under the same intense assault as the rest of the structure, the force the beam was placing on the upper part of the wall was magnified there. Like a tree being bent too far by a heavy wind, the foundation of the barrier was simply too thin to stand up to the stress being put on the upper portions, tearing free from where it had been anchored to the ground.
The rest of the wall, still intact, was immediately propelled backwards. Or at least it would have been if not for Lex bracing it, holding it in place with his hooves and his horn against the pressure of the beam even as he kept repairing the makeshift shield that his barricade had become, refusing to let it break down or be blown away under the intense bombardment of magic that Starlight was somehow still keeping up.
For a half-second Lex managed to hold his ground. But physical strength had never been his forte; while he knew his stamina was above average, a contest of muscle power wasn’t something he was confident he could win, especially when he was already so overtaxed. Even so, he tried anyway, straining with everything he had to hold the black crystal shield in place…only to feel his hind legs start to slide backward, losing a half-inch of ground. Then an inch. Then-
“I’ve got you!”
Sonata’s voice rang out just as he felt her fore-hooves press on his shoulders, stabilizing him and stopping his backward slide. A glance back confirmed it, seeing her also standing upright as she reached out to brace him. “Did you cast the spells you needed?” he called back, wanting to be sure.
Despite the seriousness of their situation, her smile was carefree as she nodded. “Yep! I totes used every pump-you-up spell I know on myself, just like you said!”
Her announcement reassured Lex only a little. He was very familiar with Sonata’s magical capabilities, and based on what he’d seen when he’d looked at the equals sign on her flank in the magical spectrum, most of her powers were sealed. That she still had some spells that could artificially induce an adrenaline surge – and which she could only use on herself in their current situation, since attempting to use them on him would just cause his remaining dark magic to automatically counter the attempt to influence his mind, leaving him with less power to repair the shield – was helpful, but there had been no way to know if they would give her enough of a boost to keep them both from being blown away. That they hadn’t already was a encouraging, but the real test would be what came next…
“We need to get closer,” he called back to her. “Each time you take a step forward, I’ll create some small crystals right behind your back legs so that you have something solid to push off against! We’ll keep going until we’re right in front of Starlight! Then it’s up to you!”
“But won’t she just back away?”
“She can’t!” called back Lex. “With the injuries to her legs, and the recoil from this attack, she’d lose her balance if she tried!”
“That’s great!” Sonata gave him a toothy grin then. “We’ve got her right where we want her!”
That wasn’t how Lex would have characterized their situation, but he didn’t argue the point as he turned his attention toward the shield, preparing himself to push forward. Now comes the hard part. “Ready?”
“Let’s do this!” came Sonata’s happy reply. “I’ve totes got your back! Get it? ‘Got your back’? ‘Cuz I’m standing behind you making sure you don’t fall over? Lex? Did you get the joke? Should I explain it agai-”
“Go!” Pressing forward with everything he had, Lex felt Sonata do the same, grunting with effort as he struggled to push the shield back against the force of Starlight’s beam. Immediately his muscles began to quiver, his body making it clear that it wasn’t up for further exertion, but he forced himself to keep forging ahead, feeling Sonata doing her best to propel him forward as well.
And it was working! Slowly, he took a step forward. Then another. And then a third, maintaining the ground they were gaining as Sonata braced herself against the black crystal hoofholds he was creating. Despite the sweat that was already gathering on his brow, the shield shuddering and shaking as the energy blast threatened to tear it from his hooves, Lex couldn’t help but feel a sudden surge of exhilaration. It was actually working! “Keep going!” he yelled back at Sonata. “Keep it up!”
“Whatever – nngh! – you say!” she grunted, already breathing heavy.
Each step that followed was a hard-fought battle, the two of them pushing with everything they had as the distance between them and Starlight slowly shrank. More than once, disaster threatened to put an end to what they were doing, as Sonata’s hoof slipped from its place behind Lex’s shoulder, or one of Lex’s legs almost gave out under the strain. But somehow each of them managed to salvage things before their mistakes turned into catastrophe, recovering and pushing forward, aware that they were, little by little, succeeding.
Starlight Glimmer was aware of it too.
“YOU TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME!” Her angry scream reached the ears of everyone watching, nearly as loud as Sonata’s had been. “I WAS GOING TO MAKE A BETTER EQUESTRIA! TO MAKE TRUE HARMONY! AND YOU TOOK IT ALL AWAY FROM ME!”
“IT’S WHAT YOU DESERVE!” roared Lex. He barely had the breath to holler, still struggling to advance, but he couldn’t stay silent. The rage that he’d been suppressing ever since he’d set hoof on the battlefield and seen what Starlight Glimmer had done to the ponies most important to him was bubbling up now, impossible to restrain any longer. Fear might have been what drove his shadow to aid him, but it was fury that had always pushed Lex to keep fighting in the face of adversity, and he let it wash over him now, driving him to keep moving forward, one hoof in front of the other. “YOU TOOK AWAY PONIES’ TALENTS! THEIR MAGIC! THEIR DREAMS! ALL BECAUSE YOU WANTED THEM TO BE THE SAME!” A vicious sneer crossed his lips then, and though no one else could see it, it was audible in what he said next. “NOW YOU’RE THEIR EQUAL IN WHAT YOU’VE LOST!”
The howl that Starlight gave then was almost painful to hear. “THAT’S NOT HOW EQUALITY IS SUPPOSED TO WORK!”
“IT DOESN’T WORK AT ALL!” Despite his anger, Lex hadn’t let it get the better of him. He could tell from Starlight’s voice that they were closing in on her. Although the thrum of the energy blast made it hard to be certain, she sounded roughly fifteen feet away from them now. With grim determination, Lex kept going, Sonata steadily supporting him as he crossed the remaining distance. “PONIES AREN’T MEANT TO BE THE SAME! WE’RE SUPPOSED TO STRIVE! TO BETTER OURSELVES!”
“NOT EVERYPONY CAN DO THAT!” There was a catch in Starlight’s voice now, one that Lex couldn’t place. “SOME PONIES WORK HARD AND STILL FAIL!”
“THE ONES WHO SUCCEED HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO HELP THE ONES WHO FAIL!” Ten feet now. Just a little closer…
“AND WHO’S GOING TO MAKE THEM LIVE UP TO THAT RESPONSIBILITY?!” The tone in Starlight’s voice was thicker now, sounding almost bitter.
“THE PONY IN CHARGE! THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A LEADER!” Five feet away. Close enough. Bracing himself, Lex reached called on more of his dark magic – now almost completely gone – to make black crystal hoofholds behind his own legs, knowing he was about to need them. “Sonata! Now!”
“Okeydokey!”
Her forelegs left his shoulders then, and Lex struggled with everything he had to keep the shield up on his own, knowing he’d only need to do it for a few seconds if everything went according to plan.
For once, it did.
“Hey Starlight!” yelled Sonata as she darted out from behind the shield, almost within hooves’ reach of the other mare. “I got a little something for ya!”
When Lex had outlined his plan to Sonata, he’d needed her to do two things to prepare. The first had been to use all of her self-enhancement spells on herself in order to help him walk the shield forward against Starlight’s energy beam. And the second had been to collect the orange prism – still augmented to act as a powerful magic dampener – that had fallen from Thermal Draft’s hooves when she and Cloudbank had been downed, landing near Aria and Garden Gate. Having been almost directly behind where Lex had raised the black crystals, Starlight hadn’t been able to see Sonata scamper over and retrieve it, and so she was taken completely by surprise as Sonata tossed it into the air now, the stone taking up orbit around Starlight’s head.
Instantly, her massive energy beam shrank, collapsing to a fraction of its size even as Starlight’s eyes widened in horror. “NO!”
Lex didn’t miss his opportunity. Before Starlight could even think about raising a hoof to knock the gemstone away, he surged forward, crossing the few feet between them in an instant now that the pushback from Starlight’s energy beam was negligible. Swinging the shield upward, Starlight let out a cry as the mass of black crystals hit her horn, disrupting her ability to use magic and causing what was left of the blast to fade away into nothing.
“AND THAT’S THE OTHER WAY YOUR PHILOSOPHY IS FLAWED!” boomed Lex as he tossed the shield away, its purpose served. “IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR ME!”
Starlight tried to back away, cast a spell, and dislodge the floating gemstone all at once. But in her haste, she accomplished none of those things, leaving her flailing as Lex – still standing on his hind legs – advanced on her.
“AND I!”
He cocked his right foreleg back, pivoting at the waist.
“HAVE!”
His horn flared as he grabbed Starlight in his telekinesis, dragging her forward, leading with her chin.
“NO!”
Another gauntlet formed around his hoof, the crystals thick and heavy.
“EQUAL!”
His hoof impacted Starlight’s face with a crack like thunder, echoing across the battlefield as she flew backward, body arcing through the air. Landing bonelessly, she skidded across the broken ground before coming to a halt several feet back, eyes closed and legs akimbo.
A pin dropping would have been audible in the silence that followed, everypony holding their breath as they watched Starlight for any sign that she would get back up. But other than the gentle expansion and contraction of her chest, and the orange prism still circling her head, she remained still. As the seconds passed and nothing happened, the truth slowly dawned on everypony watching: she wasn’t going to rise again. The crazy mare who had terrorized their community had finally been defeated.
For the ponies of Vanhoover, there was no containing the wild jubilation that broke out in the wake of Starlight’s defeat.
Thousands of hooves stomped in joyful prancing, legs rising and falling so fast that the vibrations could be felt through the earth. Pegasi launched themselves into the sky, twirling and diving in joy as unicorns shot colorful sparks and flashes of light from their horns, putting on an impromptu fireworks display. And absolutely everypony cheered or laughed or whistled, raising a din as thunderous as Starlight’s final attack.
None of which Lex acknowledged. Instead, he kept his gaze firmly on Starlight Glimmer, examining her in the magical spectrum via his circlet, which fortunately was still under the effects of the additional magic he’d imbued it with a few minutes prior. Although visualizing the magical pathways in her body hadn’t let him discern whatever method the madmare had used to increase her power so much – nor did it provide any additional insight now – even a casual glance showed that however she’d done it, Starlight had pushed herself too far.
Her body’s magical channels were all strained, with the ones in her horn being in far worse condition, looking almost shredded from how much magic she’d used during their fight. The damage was so bad that it was actually manifesting as physical injuries, with heavy bruising already beginning to cover her horn, though some of that was no doubt from his striking it with his shield in that last exchange. Either way, the combination of internal and external wounds meant that – just like when Princess Luna had tried to attack him with magic after he’d injured her horn – Starlight Glimmer likely wouldn’t be casting spells anytime soon without magical healing.
Even so, Lex knew it would be necessary to put some supplementary curses on her. Since he still wasn’t sure how she’d managed to surpass the limits of standard Equestrian spellcasting so dramatically, there remained a chance that Starlight could present a threat before she’d finished convalescing, requiring that further maledictions be used on her in order to secure everypony’s safety. Those curses, however, would have to wait. While Lex had a miniscule amount of dark magic left, it wasn’t enough for anything other than a single, temporary curse. Nor did he dare try and augment it with what little stamina he had left, since that was purely the result of the spell his shadow had used on him…a spell that would wear off in the next few minutes, at which point Lex had no doubt that he’d be even more debilitated than he was before, likely losing consciousness completely. It would take at least a day before he was in any condition to-
“Lex!” His ruminating was interrupted as Sonata threw her forelegs around his middle and nuzzled him. “We did it! Together! You and me, just like I always dreamed about! Ooh! We should call ourselves Team Lexata from now on! We can have t-shirts made!”
Disentangling himself from the overly affectionate mare, Lex resisted the urge to berate her – and everypony else – for celebrating when there were still injured ponies who needed attending to. “Sonata, Aria and the others need medical attention. I told the doctors to come here before I left River’s manor, but it’s going take them some time to get here. We need to do what we can for them in the meantime.”
Sonata opened her mouth to reply, but before she could a new voice cut in. “Can we help?”
Swinging his head around, Lex tensed as he saw the other four ponies that Starlight had brought with her approaching them. His distrust must have shown on his face, because they all flinched and looked away, save for the unicorn mare, who gulped and took a step forward. “We could load everypony that’s hurt into the wagons we brought,” she offered timidly. “That might make it easier to take them to where the doctors are.”
“Do you actually think I’m going to trust you with the welfare of any of my little ponies?” growled Lex. “You knew what Starlight was planning on doing when she came here, and you participated anyway. That makes you accessories to her crimes.”
The four of them blanched at that, with even the earth stallion – whose coat was already white – turning pale. But Sonata quickly intervened. “Aw, don’t be like that, Lex,” she pleaded gently. “These guys were totes tricked by Starlight too, just like I was. You saw how upset they were when they found out that she’d kept her cutie mark.”
“You were under a spell,” countered Lex, pointing at the other four accusingly. “These four were not.”
Sonata blinked. “Wait, what do you mean?”
“You were under an enchantment until just over a minute ago,” explained Lex, “similar to the sort you and Aria are able to use on others.”
The revelation made Sonata’s jaw drop. “For realsies? Starlight put the whammy on me?” For a moment she just stood there, gobsmacked. Then she smiled. “That’s great! I was feeling super guilty about what happened, but if I was under a spell then it totes wasn’t my fault!” Sitting back on her haunches, she clapped her fore-hooves together. “Oh wow, that’s, like, a serious toad off my mind!”
“…Right.” Resisting the urge to correct Sonata’s butchered idiom, Lex turned back to the other ponies from Starlight’s group. “But since the four of you have no such excuse, you will be held to account for your part in what’s happened here.”
“We didn’t know that Starlight was going to go crazy and hurt so many ponies!” protested the unicorn stallion.
“And we’ll give back the cutie marks that Starlight stole,” added the earth stallion, holding up a glass jar with Aria’s cutie mark in it. Opening the lid, the mark streaked out of its own accord, unerringly streaking back toward where the Siren was still lying in the dirt, planting itself on her flank and displacing the equals sign there. At a nod from the pale-coated stallion, the two unicorns did the same, sending Fruit Crunch and Peachy Keen’s cutie marks rushing back to their owners, the latter giving a cry of delight as she and the symbol of her destiny were reunited.
“Sonata’s is still in the cutie mark vault back in our village,” added the pegasus mare nervously. “And, um, ours too.”
“That’s right!” Her eyes widening, Sonata glanced back at the equals sign on her flank. “Ick! I want this thing off my butt, like, pronto! I can’t sing with it there! It’s like Canterlot High all over again!”
“I’ll send some ponies out to retrieve it, and every other cutie mark that Starlight wrongfully acquired, as soon as it’s feasible,” replied Lex, retrieving the orange prism from where it was orbiting Starlight’s head as he spoke. The alterations he’d made to it, causing it to inhibit spellcasting rather than abetting it, were going to wear off in another few minutes, and the last thing he wanted was for Starlight to have access to it once that happened, placing it and the other four back in his saddlebag. “In the meantime, I’m-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as music suddenly blared, horns trumpeting from behind the crowd, causing everypony to settle down as they turned to look at what was happening.
They weren’t made to wait long. Even as Lex watched, the assembled ponies moved out of the way, making room for several ponies in formalwear who marched in unison as they continued to pipe a lively tune. Behind them, another pony unrolled a red carpet, which quickly saw several more attendants – for it was quickly becoming clear that was what they were – line up on either side of it, flinging flower petals into the air and letting them drift down to the colorful cloth below. Only then did the star of the procession appear.
Striding forward in measured paces, the unicorn stallion was draped in the garb of royalty. His back was covered with a deep purple cape, its white fur trim having black spots, the garment being affixed across his chest with a large, smooth sapphire. Resting atop his head was an ornate crown, and it took Lex a moment to recognize that they greyish-white metal was platinum, glinting in cool contrast with the not only the sapphire on the stallion’s chest, but also the ones set in each of the crown’s five upward protrusions. Even the newcomer’s hoofwear was of the same make.
With his nose in the air and a smirk on his lips, the stallion took his time crossing the carpet. It was only after he’d passed through the crowd – now whispering furiously – that it became apparent that there was more to his retinue, as a group of almost two dozen ponies came marching behind him. Taking care not to step on the carpet themselves, they moved in time with the regally-dressed stallion, mimicking not just his pace but also his refusal to look anypony in the eye, instead keeping their gaze focused upward.
“Oh my gosh,” breathed Sonata, her eyes sparkling as she turned to Lex. “Do you know what this means?”
“I have an idea,” he murmured, recognizing the pony in question from the description River Bank had given him that morning.
“Exactly!” gushed Sonata, her cutie mark forgotten as she fidgeted with excitement. “We beat Starlight on our first try without using any continues, so now we get the best ending! Ooh! I call dibs on entering my initials for the high score!”
Before Lex could ask her what she was talking about, the trumpeters finally reached the end of the carpet, lowering their instruments. Once the echo of the music had died away, the reedy-looking stallion who had been unrolling the length of fabric cleared his throat, taking a deep breath. “Presenting,” he called in stentorian tones, “His Royal Highness, Scion of Princess Platinum, Heir to the Unicorn Homeland, recognized by Her Royal Highness Princess Celestia as her nephew, Lawful Monarch of Equestria and Defender of the Realm, Prince Blueblood!”
The last syllable had barely crossed his lips when he knelt down, with everypony in Blueblood’s party doing the same. Further back, a few members of the crowd prostrated themselves, but most just watched the proceedings, cognizant of the fact that Lex had remained standing.
Blueblood himself didn’t seem to notice, eyes closed as though enraptured with the sound of his list of titles even as he struck a pose, placing one hoof over his heart as the pegasus members of his party flapping their wings gently, causing his mane and cape to flutter behind him.
After several seconds, the pony who had formally announced Blueblood produced a scroll, unrolling it and reading from it out loud. “His Royal Highness, in his capacity as a sovereign ruler of our fair land, has elected to take it upon himself to come to the city of Vanhoover so that he may exercise his royal prerogative to mete out justice upon one who would injure the majesty of the nation of Equestria and its people. To that end, he calls upon the pony known as Lex Legis, who has offered grievous insult to the dignity of Their Royal Highnesses, Princesses Celestia and Luna, to abase himself and offer apologies and recompense for his crass and boorish demeanor-”
“I refuse.”
The interruption almost made the herald drop his scroll, staring at Lex with wide eyes. “You…what?”
“I refuse,” repeated Lex. “Those incompetent nags deserved what they got. They should be thanking me for letting them off so easily, rather than sending the dregs of their so-called administration here to waste my time with this nonsense.”
The herald quite clearly had no idea how to respond to this, but was saved from having to figure out what to say as Blueblood erupted. “You…you…ill-bred swine! How dare you insult my noble pedigree and its institution with such slanderous talk!” Striding to the very edge of his carpet, Blueblood pointed a hoof at Lex, his expression furious. “I demand that you retract that ignominious swill this instant, do you hear me?! I DEMAND IT!”
“I’ve already given you my answer,” snorted Lex, clearly unimpressed by the prince’s tantrum. But other than Sonata (who didn’t seem to understand most of what was being said), he was the only one. Everypony else watched the exchange with wide eyes…save only for River Bank, standing near the back of the crowd.
“You…!” For a moment Blueblood was red-faced, grinding his teeth before he let out an abrupt huff, his face turning stony as he adjusted his cloak. “Very well then. I came here so that you might understand the error of your ways once you’d beheld the illustriousness that you had so brazenly impugned, but I see now I underestimated the depths of your barbarism. As such, you leave me no choice but to use my last resort. Valet!” he yelled, turning to the pony who had been acting as his herald. “Bring me…”
He paused then, and it wasn’t lost on anypony that it was entirely for dramatic effect, eyeing Lex to see if the tension would cause his defiance to crack.
When it didn’t, he continued speaking, his voice filled with the gravity of someone who knows that he’s committed to a course of action from which there was no return. “…my slippers.”
“No, Your Highness!” cried the valet, his voice rising to a horrified falsetto. “Not the royal slippers!”
“Don’t try to stop me, Valet!” cried Blueblood. “My anger is too great! Produce them at once!”
Slowly, with great reverence, the skinny stallion produced a long box, lacquered white and with a replica of Blueblood’s compass rose cutie mark on it. Trembling, he walked it over to the prince and knelt down, opening it to reveal the four slippers within, each as white and unblemished as Blueblood’s coat, all perfectly identical.
But a moment later one was made different from the other three, as Blueblood lifted it in the golden glow of his telekinetic aura.
“Lex Legis,” intoned the prince gravely, “your affrontery against my noble person has escalated to a point that can no longer be forgiven. Now, my honor cannot be satisfied unless I have satisfaction. As such, I do hereby challenge you to a duel!”
And then he floated his slipper over and slapped Lex across the face with it.
Or at least he would have, had Lex not telekinetically grabbed one of the black crystal stalagmites he’d attacked Starlight with and torn it free from the ground, bringing the jagged end of it down sharply on the prince’s hoofwear and pinning it to the dirt before it ever reached his face, drawing a horrified cry of “my slipper!” from Blueblood’s lips.
There was no greater institution in all the world than Equestrian royalty.
That was the truth that had defined Blueblood’s life for as far back as he could remember. After all, it was Equestria’s own Princess Celestia that raised and lowered the sun and the moon each day, dispensing wisdom and keeping the nation safe and prosperous. To be her peer was to stand at the very pinnacle of civilization itself.
But whereas Princess Celestia was an alicorn – powerful and eternal – Blueblood himself was neither of those things, unable to fly or cast mighty spells or set the course of day and night as she did. The disparity between them was so daunting that, shortly after he’d been told that he’d inherit the mantle of prince once he received his cutie mark, he’d confessed his insecurities to his father, Prince Trueblood. He’d done so tearfully, worried that by saying his doubts out loud he’d somehow tarnish the great honor that he was going to be entrusted with. But to his surprise his father had burst out laughing when he’d voiced his fears.
“Oh son,” he’d chortled. “I had the same worries when I was your age.”
Blueblood could still remember being so thunderstruck by the admission that he’d momentarily forgotten his lessons on proper speaking etiquette. “Really?! Er, I mean, is that so, Father?”
“Indeed,” replied Trueblood, his chuckling fading to an amused grin. “And so did my father, and his mother before him, and her father before her. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if everypony in our line had some version of this exact conversation before they donned the crown. So in a way, my boy, you’re carrying on one of our family traditions, exactly as I’d expect of my heir.”
The praise had buoyed Blueblood, easing both his fear at not measuring up to Equestria’s eternal monarch and his surprise that his father had ever actually been afraid of something. But that still hadn’t answered his question. “Then, Father, what’s the answer? How can we stand alongside Princess Celestia as her esteemed equal when she can do so much more than we can?”
His father hadn’t answered right away, still smiling as he leaned back in his favorite chair and turned to look out the window, watching the sun set. “Son,” he’d answered at last, “Princess Celestia is the very heart of Equestria. Not just because she makes day and night happen, and not just because of how strong her magic is, but because she’s a living link to our history. She represents the very best qualities of our most noble race.” He’d paused then, and Blueblood had leaned forward, knowing that there was more. And he’d been right.
“But she while she may represent those qualities, she doesn’t embody them.”
“Huh? I mean, I don’t understand.”
“Refinement, my boy. Cultivation. Sophistication. Nobility. The very essence of what it means to be a pony. While Princess Celestia certainly honors those ideals, she doesn’t truly live them.”
“She doesn’t?” Blueblood had found that almost as shocking as the idea that his father had ever been afraid of something. “But she seems so…elegant.”
“Oh, she affects it well enough,” granted his father. “But once you’ve seen her eat a slice of cake, or make fruit faces on common pancakes, or prance – actually prance! – at the prospect of a theater production, the illusion fades quite quickly. No son, a princess might be what Celestia is, but it’s not who she is. Not like us.”
“Not like us,” murmured Blueblood, doing his best to commit his father’s speech to memory.
Trueblood had nodded then, clearly pleased that his son was taking his lesson to heart. “That’s why she so often holds herself apart from the populace. She knows that if she were among them for too long, her façade would crack, and everyone would see her as she truly is. And while that wouldn’t be the direst of disasters, it would still wound the fabric of our nation. That’s why we, alone among the founding tribes of Equestria, have maintained our exalted status. So that we can remind not only Princess Celestia, but all of Equestria – and indeed, the world – what the conduct of true royalty looks like. We walk among the people so that we may inspire them to strive, in their own small ways, to emulate our example. We demonstrate the poise and the grace that elevates ponies above other creatures, reminding our subjects that their kinship with us gives them a spark of greatness that no other people possess.”
He’d paused then, nodding as though agreeing with himself. “You can see it when it happens. Ponies stand up straighter when they’re in your presence. They try to smooth out their rough edges. They offer their aid, wanting to be a part of something greater than the simple accomplishments that they’ve eked out of their own lives. Because just seeing a glimpse of the very apogee of what it means to be a pony…it inspires them. And that, my son, is something that surpasses even the mightiest of spells.”
Blueblood had reflexively straightened up at that, feeling a deeper appreciation for the responsibilities he was being groomed for settling over him. “I understand, Father. I’ll endeavor to work harder than ever in order to faithfully execute our family’s duty.”
For the first time in their conversation, his father’s smile had disappeared, and he fixed Blueblood with a penetrating gaze, leaving the colt struggling not to squirm under the weight of it. “I know that you will, Blueblood,” he’d said a moment later, voice solemn. “Because if you fail, then something precious will be irretrievably lost to our people. Princess Celestia might be the heart of our nation, but we’re the soul of it.”
The words his father had said next had been ones that Blueblood had remembered every day of his life since.
“Without us, Equestria’s ponies would have nothing to rally their spirits, leaving them all equal in their unfulfillment.”
Silence reigned as Blueblood stared at Lex Legis in shock.
He can’t be serious! Nopony duels with royalty! This has to be some sort of tasteless joke on his part! But as the seconds passed, the brutal-looking stallion – his vulgar appearance made even worse by the filth covering him, as though he’d gone rolling in the dirt while putting on whatever little lightshow he’d been engaging in a few minutes prior – failed to withdraw his acceptance of Blueblood’s challenge, silently letting the enormity of what he’d agreed to hang in the air.
In the years since Blueblood had received his father’s crown, Trueblood’s words had proven true again and again. Everywhere Blueblood went, his presence motivated ponies to place themselves at his disposal, eager to contribute in some small way to the pride of Equestria: himself. Even if most of their efforts didn’t measure up, the fact that they felt so moved as to make the attempt was proof that he was upholding his family’s legacy, carrying out the family duty to live a life that reminded his subjects of what made ponies great. His every word moved them. His every gesture impressed them. His life was a tribute to the illustrious heritage of the country that his fellow Equestrians called home.
By contrast, that meant that nopony dared to publicly disparage him. As a living national treasure, any disgrace thrown at him was a disgrace to the entire nation. The fear of being so tarnished should have kept even the vilest of churls in line, and if it didn’t then their friends and family should have rushed to stop them from doing something foolish, not wanting to be tainted by association with somepony so coarse.
Certainly, being challenged to a duel should have brought Lex Legis up short, and sent ponies scurrying to beg for forgiveness on his behalf. Indeed, he’d predicted that very thing when River Bank had fearfully asked what would happen if Blueblood’s mere presence wasn’t enough to cow the cur, invoking the specter of making Lex face him in combat to hint that this was his trump card. That much was obvious, since there was self-evidently no winning for anypony who dared to duel with royalty; to actually fight a prince was to commit social suicide of the worst sort! It would mean that restaurants wouldn’t take his reservations! Tailors would make him buy off the rack, without doing custom fittings! Luxury importers wouldn’t take special orders on his behalf! It would be a fate worse than death!
And yet, Lex Legis had accepted his challenge.
Not just accepted it, but done so in the most belligerent way possible, leaving no doubts as to his intentions.
Worse, nopony was coming forward to try and stop him. Were they all simply frozen in horror at his temerity? Or did he simply have no one here who was concerned for his reputation?
It must be the latter. Certainly someone as bellicose as Lex was being now must have isolated himself from everypony around him. No wonder everyone was cheering when I took to the field, realized Blueblood. They were all waiting for me to come and put this miscreant in his place!
The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he was right. After all, Lex Legis had already insulted Princesses Celestia and Luna without remorse. Surely by now, everypony knew to disassociate themselves from him, lest they be tarnished with the weight of his transgressions. Which meant that all Blueblood needed to do now was push the issue; once Lex Legis came down from whatever childish thrill he was getting by making a spectacle of himself, he’d realize the enormity of his faux pas and start looking for ways to walk it back. And once he does, decided Blueblood with an inward snicker, confident that he’d properly grasped the situation, I’ll be gracious enough to allow him to save face…with some concessions, of course.
Which meant that all that was left was to bring the metaphorical hammer down.
“Very well then,” announced Blueblood, making sure to keep his expression grave. “The challenge has been issued and accepted. Therefore, as per tradition, we should withdraw from direct negotiation and each nominate an agent to represent our interests, allowing them to work out the details on our respective behalves. Mine will be my valet,” he added, fighting down the urge to smirk at his victory. Once Lex realized that he had nopony willing to take up his cause, it would drive home how badly he’d isolated himself, the embarrassment of which-
“Master Legis, if I may be so forward, please allow me to humbly offer my services.”
“River!” The cry came, not from Blueblood’s lips, but from that low-born mare that had elected to join his loutish host in not being part of his entourage, Pansy or whatever her name was. “What are you doing?!”
But River didn’t respond to her friend’s cry, trotting over and kneeling down before Lex, which Blueblood couldn’t help but note was more respect than she’d ever shown him. “I was wrong before,” she murmured reverently, her voice low enough that Blueblood had to strain to hear it, “I know that now. Please, allow me to make up for it.”
But whatever she was pleading with him about, Lex appeared unmoved. “The last time you begged for absolution, I was inclined to give it to you. This time I’m not. The recommendation of the pony you wronged might sway my judgment when your sentence comes due, but nothing you do now will.”
“I…I understand,” gulped River, a shudder running through her as she kept her face down. “But if you’ll let me, I want to do this anyway.”
“Very well,” sighed Lex, sounding for all the world as though he was growing bored with the topic.
It was that, as much as River Bank’s complete and utter betrayal of his expectations – despite how much he’d already lowered them for her – that made Prince Blueblood step forward, right to the very edge of the red carpet that had been laid out for him. “I demand to know what exactly is happening here!” His voice wasn’t a yell, since royalty were never so uncouth, but neither did he speak softly. “River Bank, does that scoundrel have you under his thrall somehow?”
Standing, River turned to answer, but before a word could pass her lips the mare at Lex’s side – a most comely girl, even considering the company Blueblood typically kept – took a step forward, nudging the villain. “Hey, wait a second, is that guy saying he wants to pick a fight? Because I’ve been listening super hard and it kinda sounds like he wants to pick a fight.”
Blueblood jumped in before Lex could answer. “Fair maiden!” he called, making her raspberry-colored eyes blink as she looked at him. “Would you perchance tell me your name, and what your relationship is to that rogue at your side?”
“You talk funny,” she giggled, the sound like the tinkling of bells. “I’m Sonata Dusk, and I used to be Lex’s girlfriend, until he decided that me and my sister should just be his, you know…” She gave a coy smirk then, and Blueblood’s knees weakened at the sight. “Nighttime snuggle-bunnies instead.”
“S-snuggle bunnies…?” Blueblood felt himself turning red, first in embarrassment at the lewd language, then in outrage at what Lex was doing to that poor girl, sating his vile lusts upon her and her sister both! Doubtless he’d lured her in with promises of being his inamorata, only to instead force her to commit salacious acts together with her own, probably equally attractive, sibling for his wicked enjoyment!
“Um, Your Highness?” murmured his valet, licking his lips nervously. “Should we begin negotiations for the duel, or-”
“You fiend!” shrieked Blueblood, pushing away thoughts of exactly what nefarious activities Lex was making fair Sonata and her sister participate in. “To commit such heinous acts on such innocent girls! Does your depravity know no bounds?!” This was no longer a matter of stately propriety. It was about rescuing a damsel in distress – two damsels, to be completely accurate, who were apparently well-versed in participating in carnal activities together – from a wretch most foul.
Nor was that the full extent of this monster’s transgressions. “I can see the full scope of your misdeeds now, Lex Legis! You have terrorized the innocent ponies of this village, turning your wrath on any who dared to stand against you!” He waved a hoof at the unconscious ponies lying scattered around them, who had doubtlessly fainted in horror at witnessing Lex’s barbarism. “You have preyed upon those defenseless girls for your own foul pleasures!” At his side, Sonata seemed to consider that for a moment, before smiling and nodding. “And now, you have dared to raise your hoof against the crown! You are not merely a boor, but a criminal of the highest order!” Beside himself with righteous anger, Blueblood was about to declare his intent to smite him during their duel – purely as an intimidation tactic so that Lex would fear his anger as well as the social fallout from pursuing their battle, driving him to surrender quietly – but he never got the chance as a new voice suddenly rang out from above.
“I KNEW IT!”
Blueblood barely had time to look up before a vaguely-familiar blue pegasus mare with a multicolored mane and tail dropped out of the sky, landing between himself and Lex as she glared at the latter pony furiously. “I knew you were up to no good! Now you’re gonna get what’s coming to you!”
Then, wings flapping, she launched herself straight at Lex.
Rainbow Dash didn’t give Lex a chance to react before she was on him.
Before he could so much as utter a word, the enraged pegasus slammed bodily into him, knocking him off his hooves and hitting the ground hard, Rainbow Dash on top of him. Her wings flapping heavily, Rainbow didn’t let their combined momentum go to waste, flying forward even as she wrapped one hoof around Lex’s torso, pulling him to her while her other hoof pressed hard against his face, preventing him from lifting his head. The result was that he couldn’t stop her from scraping the right side of his face along the ground, pressing down hard enough that he left a trench in his wake.
Snarling as she curved her flight path to make sure Lex hit every rock and piece of debris in their way, Rainbow ignored the shrieks and horrified screams coming from the ponies around her, glaring down at the villain she was giving a well-earned beating to. “Try changing into a shadow now, jerk!”
“Y-you…!”
Rainbow smirked darkly at Lex’s labored response, feeling him struggling to get out of her grasp. “Yeah, me! Rainbow Dash, here to deliver some way-overdue payback for everything you’ve done!”
Her declaration was marked by her changing directions again, gaining a few feet of altitude and changing the angle of her forward motion so that Lex was directly in front of her rather than beneath her. His struggling intensified as she did that, but Rainbow had no intention of letting him fight back, increasing her speed. Less than a second later the two of them slammed into a nearby house, with Lex taking the brunt of the impact as they hit the exterior wall so hard that the wood splintered, barely managing to keep from collapsing under the force of the collision.
Having walked away from worse crashes ever since she was a filly, Rainbow Dash barely felt a twinge now. But she was intensely gratified to hear a pained groan escape Lex’s lips. "Let's see you cast a spell now!"
Magic wasn’t something that Rainbow Dash had ever been interested in. Sure, the magic of friendship was cool and all, but actually studying magic – like, reading books about it and stuff (boring old books, not awesome ones like Daring Do) – was lame. And Rainbow Dash was too cool for lame stuff. So when Applejack had started studying magic with Twilight back during their first trip to Everglow, Rainbow Dash had passed on joining them. The very idea of being stuck in a library while there was an entire new world of adventure and danger out there was fine for eggheads, but not for her!
But the one thing she had learned about magic, mostly from listening to Applejack talk about it after they’d officially gotten together, was that casting spells was hard. Even though it usually only took a couple seconds, those seconds required focus and concentration, kind of like being in a race. Which meant that if you didn’t have a chance to focus, then you wouldn’t be able to get a spell off, no matter how hard you tried.
And that meant that the way to deal with Lex Legis was to keep hammering him, never giving him a chance to use his magic, until he was down for the count.
Except he clearly wasn’t down now. Although he was barely twitching after the hit he’d just taken, Rainbow could still feel him trying to break out of her hold. Lifting her head confirmed it, since his left eye – the other one shut tightly with how badly the right side of his face had been scraped away – was still open and shining green-and-purple, locked onto her. “You…won’t…”
“Oh yes I will!” growled Dash, bringing her forehead forward to smash against his before he had any time to recover. But that was just a distraction, preventing him from trying anything underhoofed as she yanked him out of the wall and took off again, this time straight up.
Leaving a multicolored contrail behind her, Rainbow Dash soared into the sky, stopping abruptly after barely two seconds of accelerated climbing so that Lex wouldn’t have a chance to orient himself. “Get ready!” she bragged, changing her hold so that she was grabbing him from behind rather than in front. “Because you’re going down!”
And then she abruptly reversed their sudden climb, holding him out in front of her as she rushed straight down.
Lex could already feel his consciousness slipping away as the ground grew rapidly closer.
Rainbow Dash’s sudden appearance had taken him completely by surprise. Although he’d been preparing for a possible confrontation with Twilight Sparkle and her friends – including the unruly blue pegasus – ever since Garden Gate had warned him that they’d been summoned to Canterlot in the aftermath of his battle with the Royal Sisters, he hadn’t expected any of them to quite literally drop out of the sky and attack without warning the way Rainbow Dash had. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for her to do it mere minutes after he’d barely overcome Starlight Glimmer, when he was at the weakest he’d been since his fight with Xiriel.
Under other circumstances, he would have been exceptionally suspicious of her timing. But at the moment he didn’t have the luxury of worrying about the larger implications of her appearance, not when he was about to lose this latest battle and quite possibly his life along with it. Instead, he fought with what little strength he had left to stave off unconsciousness, determined to use the one course of action left to him.
His plan for fighting Twilight Sparkle had been a fairly intricate one, utilizing complex alterations to his magical gemstones in order to progressively incapacitate her. But Lex hadn’t focused his preparations exclusively on Twilight, knowing that she would likely come with the full complement of her friends. So he had likewise come up with strategies for overcoming the other five bearers of the Elements of Harmony in turn, based on what he knew of them. And having originally met Rainbow Dash back on Everglow, he knew a fair amount about her…
“This is what you deserve for what you did to Luna!” yelled Rainbow Dash, her voice filled with righteous anger. “You’re not taking anypony’s wings away ever again!”
Glancing back over his shoulder at her with his one good eye, Lex struggled to make himself heard, refusing to concede the fight. “I’ll…take…one!” he rasped, his horn glowing purple.
“Oh no you don’t!” One of Rainbow’s hooves shot out, impacting his horn. Her position didn’t give her much leverage, resulting in the strike having little power behind it, the punch being a light jab more than a heavy strike. That would have been more than enough to disrupt an ordinary unicorn’s spellcasting, however, and although he didn’t need his horn to use his magic, his current state was such that even that weak blow was enough that it nearly broke his concentration.
Nearly.
But Lex had cast spells through excruciating agony too many times for Rainbow’s feeble strike to overcome him now. Between the incredible pain of casting a minutes-long spell to create a banquet when he’d accidentally overcharged his body’s magical channels, and the overwhelming torment of using his magic while Xiriel had squeezed his broken leg, this was nothing in comparison. It was with malicious satisfaction that Lex unleashed the last of his dark magic at Rainbow a second later, augmented by the miniscule amount of additional magic that he was still able to channel through his body thanks to the stamina-enhancing spell his shadow had used on him before.
Lex had first met Rainbow Dash in Viljatown, the capital of the Pony Empire, back on Everglow. Running into other Equestrian ponies on that world had been surprising, but not nearly as surprising as the injury that Rainbow Dash had sustained mere days later, having lost one of her wings in an underground pit fight that she’d been participating in for fun. Fortunately for her, that world’s advanced magic meant that she’d been able to find a spellcaster capable of regenerating it a few days later, but during that time she’d had no choice but to endure the loss of a limb, and with it her ability to fly.
Lex didn’t begrudge her having her wing restored. Mutilation wasn’t something he approved of, even for ponies that he hated. But it was one thing to cripplingly injure somepony else, and another to make them relive those injuries with magic.
Which was why Lex smiled grimly as Rainbow Dash let out a bloodcurdling scream a second later, his curse causing her to experience the torment of having her wing torn off all over again.
Instantly, her left wing went limp, her body telling her that the appendage had been violently ripped from its socket despite having taken no actual damage. The pain was enough that Rainbow Dash lost her grip on him, turning their controlled dive into a free-fall as they began to drift away from each other. Half-heartedly, Lex reached out toward the wailing pegasus, not in any attempt to comfort her but out of a desire to grab her and use her to break his fall. After how easily she’d shaken off their impact into that house a few second previously, he had no doubt that she’d be little worse for wear after hitting the ground now, whereas he likely wouldn’t survive unless something cushioned his fall, his hoof making contact with Rainbow Dash…
Only to be violently knocked away as she flailed, limbs kicking out at random as she continued to howl in agony.
Lex tried to grab her again, but his second effort was more anemic than the first, with his foreleg barely moving in response to his command. Nor was his horn responding, his telekinesis refusing to activate when he tried calling on it a second later. Or was he just directing it at the wrong point? It was hard to tell with how dark everything was suddenly getting…
Too much, Lex realized dimly, his awareness suddenly fading. I used…too much…
He’d already been at his limit during his battle with Starlight Glimmer, able to fight on only because his shadow had used his stamina-boosting spell on him at the last minute. But he’d expended most of that supplementary endurance with how he’d created so much black crystal to fight her. Now, with additional strain he’d placed on himself in order to curse Rainbow Dash, along with the new injuries she’d inflicted on him, he’d used up all of that extra strength and then some, which meant he was completely incapacitated now, to the point of passing out. And that was with the spell still being active; when it wore off a few minutes from now he’d lose even more vigor, it’d be anypony’s guess if his body would be able to handle the shock…
The thought made him snicker. “A few minutes from now”? He didn’t even have a few seconds until he hit the ground!
Dizzily, he tried to focus downward, wanting to look at Sonata again. She was down there somewhere, but everything was spinning…everything was spinning and there was some big shape nearby, closing in on him really fast…
An instant later Lex felt a jolt. But to his surprise it wasn’t the moment of intense pain followed by nothingness the way he’d expected. Instead it felt like a light jostling. Nor did it spread out across his entire body in a flat impact, but instead felt more centralized, as though something had grabbed him around his middle…
“I can’t believe I’m rescuing you like this.”
The voice that reached Lex’s ears a second later was male, their tone rueful, and it took Lex a moment to place it, and several more to realize what that meant.
Turbo.
Turbo had grabbed him out of the air, preventing him from hitting the ground.
One of the ponies he’d resurrected that morning had saved him now.
Lex’s last thought was to wonder if the Night Mare was laughing at him, not in the spiteful way he’d envisioned when he’d determined that he couldn’t resurrect everyone, but in amusement at how apt her admonition about the futility of trying to do everything on his own had turned out to be. Not just because of Turbo, but because of all the ponies who had played a part in everything that had happened that morning.
Sonata was at Turbo’s side the instant he touched down, terrified more by how unresponsive the stallion he was carrying looked than by the hideous wounds he’d taken. “Lex! Lex, are you okay?!”
“He’s out cold.” Turbo’s reply wasn’t directed at her, but toward the unicorn in the lab coat that was one of the contingent of doctors rushing onto the battlefield, followed closely by Granola Bar, Funshine, and Slip ‘n’ Slide. “I think he was still awake when I caught him, but he went limp a second later.”
The unicorn, whom Sonata belatedly recognized as House Call, the guy who had treated Lex before, was already unfolding a litter. “Put him down here,” he ordered, his voice clipped as he telekinetically dug through his medical bag, a nurse already hurrying over to assist him.
“Lex, c’mon!” pleaded Sonata, her voice trembling. “C’mon, wake up! You’ve been through worse than this no problem! You can totes shake this off!”
“Breathing appears normal,” murmured the nurse, putting her ear near Lex’s muzzle for a moment before moving it down to his chest. “Heart rate is elevated,” she announced after a moment. “Ten beats every five seconds.”
“Get me blood pressure, and get something on that head wound.” There was no change in House Call’s expression as he peeled back one of Lex’s eyelids, his horn shining with a bright but focused light. “I’ve got abnormal pupil responses. Possible concussion.”
“BP is eighty-six over fifty-eight,” reported the nurse, her voice grim.
“Internal bleeding.” There was a tense note in House Call’s voice now, looking at Sonata and Turbo with a serious expression. “The lacerations on his torso are too small to account for this level of injury. Did he suffer any blunt force abdominal trauma?”
“Any what?!” Sonata almost shrieked the question, not understanding what she was being asked.
“Did he take any bad hits to the chest or stomach?” translated River Bank, hanging back as she watched the procedure with a tense expression.
Sonata shook her head so hard her mane whipped around. “No! I mean, Starlight shot some magic beams at him when he was doing his whole freaky-flicker thing, but those went right through him like he wasn’t even there! And that junk she exploded didn’t look like it hit him that hard, and, and…” She trailed off, not knowing what else to say or how to help.
But she was saved from doing either as Turbo spoke up. “It was us.”
Sonata’s eyes instantly locked onto him. “What do you mean?”
“Lex, he…brought us back to life this morning.” Turbo let out a slow breath, still finding it odd to say that out loud. “We didn’t even know that we’d, you know…died. We just appeared next to Lex in that mansion. But when we did, he looked like he could barely stand, as if he’d just been in a fight and lost.”
“No way,” murmured Sonata. Belatedly recognizing Turbo, putting his being there together with what Aria had been saying about Lex right before Starlight had gotten all up in her face, she could feel a lump rising in her throat. “He was already hurt. When he came out here to stop Starlight, he was already hurt…”
“Yeah.” Glancing over at where his friends were clustered around Garden, Turbo licked his lips. “Listen, I hope he’s okay, but I have to go…” Sonata’s vacant nod was all he needed, and he quickly rushed over to where the one pony he hadn’t reunited with yet – and the one he most wanted to – was being seen to.
For her part, Sonata was barely aware that he’d left. “Is he going to be okay?” she whimpered, her expression clearly begging House Call to say that Lex would be alright.
But all she got was a brief shake of his head. “It’s too soon to tell. We need to get him back to the manor as quickly as possible. We’ve got a working ultrasound there, and we can use it to determine if he’ll need surgery or not.”
“Doctor, what about that filly? The one who has healing powers?” asked River suddenly, nodding at where the Cleansweep was flittering over her friends with a worried look on her face as more doctors tended to them.
For a split-second Sonata felt hope rush through her, only for it to come crashing down a second later. “She can’t! She-, Starlight tried to make her use her power, and she couldn’t! Something about how she needs her snake to do it and it’s gone now!”
“Then we’ll treat everyone using conventional medicine,” pronounced House Call, before issuing more instructions to the nurse. “Tell the staff that if their patients can be moved to bring them back to the manor immediately. We’ll triage once we get there.”
As the nurse ran off, Sonata watched her go, her heart giving a lurch as she saw her hurry toward the ponies surrounding Aria. The sight of her sister being wrapped in bandages made her eyes water, and she reflexively started to get up to go toward her, stopping in mid-motion as she realized that it would mean leaving Lex’s side. For a moment she was horribly torn, not knowing what to do, before House Call’s voice broke through her indecision. “Go to her.”
“Wh-what?”
“Your sister. Go see how she’s doing.” Holding one of Lex’s hooves as he took his pulse, House Call didn’t look up at her as he spoke. “I’ll do everything I can for Lex, so go check on her.”
Sniffling, Sonata nodded, getting up and shuffling toward Aria. But she’d barely crossed half the distance to her when a new voice rang out. “My wing!”
Sonata wasn’t the only one who looked up as Rainbow Dash stumbled over from where she’d crashed on the far side of what was left of the train station. She had scuff marks and bruises all over, but nothing that looked serious, save for her left wing, which hung dead at her side. Making no effort to hide her panic at her unresponsive limb, Rainbow’s face was pale as she lurched toward the doctors. “I need help! I can’t feel my wing! I-”
“YOU! THIS IS YOUR FAULT!” Sonata immediately turned and started to gallop toward Rainbow Dash, her anguished expression contorting into one of rage.
“Wai-, Sonata?!” Recognizing the other mare from the brief period that they’d traveled together on Everglow, Rainbow Dash’s one good wing gave a flap as she instinctively tried to put some distance between herself and the furious mare rushing toward her. But with her other wing crippled, she succeeded only in unbalancing herself, almost falling over as she held a hoof out. “Sonata, calm down! I know you have a crush on him, but Lex hurt Princess Luna really badly! And not just her! You can’t seriously think-”
“Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUT UUUUUUP!!!” Her voice ragged, Sonata immediately screeched out a series of off-key notes, and a second later Rainbow Dash stiffened, caught in the grip of Sonata’s paralysis spell. “You don’t get to talk to me about Lex! Not after what you did! Not when you don’t know anything about him!”
Stalking right up to the frozen mare, Sonata continued to rant. “I am so sick and tired of everyone always acting like he’s the worst when all he does is try to help! Well guess what?! He’s not the worst!” She leaned in then, putting her face an inch away from Rainbow Dash’s as her voice dropped down to a growl. “I am!”
Another dissonant series of songs heralded another spell, and Rainbow’s eyes immediately grew wet, hot tears spilling down her cheeks a moment later as Sonata smirked evilly. “Feels totes awful, doesn’t it?” she taunted, circling the paralyzed mare. “Like you’re so sad that you just wanna curl up and die? Well, maybe this’ll help.” Another batch of sour notes, and suddenly rainbow’s breathing became irregular, huffing in short bursts as small twitches wracked her unmoving frame. “How’s that?” cooed Sonata, her voice dripping with false sweetness. “I bet if you could move, you’d be laughing so hard you’d fall over. It must be super unpleasant to feel like laughing your head off and crying your heart out at the same time, huh? Like you’re gonna explode from how crazy-intense those feelings are, especially since you can’t even move.”
Leaning in, she put her mouth an inch away from Rainbow Dash’s ear, her voice dropping to a whisper. “What emotion do you want me to throw in the mix next? Maybe you wanna be so angry that you can’t think straight? Or how about becoming so turned on that it’s unbearable? Or maybe scared out of your mind?” Shrugging, she pretended to think about it as she turned and sauntered away from Rainbow Dash for a few paces, before finally turning back and looking her dead in the eye. “I’ve got it!” she exclaimed in a chipper voice, her lips curling upward in another smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Let’s do all of them!”
Rainbow Dash couldn’t answer, but Sonata could see her reaction in her eyes, and it made her grin turn vicious again, savoring how good it felt to punish the pony who’d hurt the guy she loved, suddenly wanting to rub it in even more before she kept going. “This is just the beginning,” she purred. “I’m gonna keep twisting your brains until they turn into mush and leak out of your ears. I-”
“He’s going into cardiac arrest!”
The sound of House Call’s normally-stoic voice filled with alarm commanded Sonata’s complete attention, her lust for revenge immediately drowning beneath an ocean of fear. “What’s-”
She couldn’t finish the question, her voice failing her at the sight of House Call desperately pressing down on Lex’s chest in quick, firm motions, several other ponies in lab coats rushing over to help him. For a moment she was just as paralyzed as the now-forgotten Rainbow Dash, watching helplessly as the doctors surrounded Lex, cutting off her view of him. That was enough to snap her out of it, and she rushed back toward them at a full gallop, stopping only when River grabbed her before she could hurl herself through the press of ponies. “LEX!”
“Sonata, stop!” yelled River, struggling with all her might to keep the hysterical mare at bay.
But Sonata couldn’t be calmed down, fighting to break out of River’s grasp as she saw someone inject Lex with something, the sight only driving her deeper into hysteria. “Lemme go! LEMME GO! LEX! LEX!”
“I’ve got a pulse!” The sound of House Call’s voice made Sonata gasp, reacting more to his relieved tone than the words themselves. “He’s stabilizing! We need to get him back to the manor now!” He’d picked up one end of the litter in his telekinesis before he’d finished speaking, the nurse from before grabbing the other end as they lifted Lex between them and began to hurry back the way they’d came.
Barely noticing as River released her, Sonata rushed after the doctors, sobbing.
She wasn’t the only one, as Rainbow Dash collapsed a few moment later, laughing and weeping in equal measure as Sonata’s paralysis spell wore off…
“My word, Valet…do you know what this means?”
Gulping nervously, the scrawny stallion nodded. “Yes, Your Highness. I’m sure we can impress upon Miss Bank to return us to Las Pegasus immediately, and then-”
“Are you utterly daft?” scoffed Blueblood, his lip curling with disdain for how foolish his servant was being. “Why would I leave now, when I have the advantage?”
“The…the advantage, Your Highness?”
“Of course!” Smiling with supreme self-satisfaction, Blueblood gestured in the direction that Lex had been carried off. “Did you not see what just happened? For all his boasting, that villain has hooves of clay! One tussle with that loutish mare-”
“That was Rainbow Dash, Your Highness. One of Princess Twilight Sparkle’s closest friends. The former bearer of the Element of Loyalty.”
“Yes, yes, whoever.” Throwing a disdainful glance at where the mare in question was shuddering on the ground like a complete wreck, apparently deeply distraught by whatever Lex’s girl had said to her during their private exchange, Blueblood rolled his eyes. “The point is that one lummox was all it took to put the lie to Lex Legis’s bravado. That means that his bluff has already been called! He’ll never go through with our duel now that his weakness has been exposed! Which means that I need to stay here and insist that he does, leaving him with no choice but to back down and apologize for his rude conduct!” His eyes wandered over to his mangled slipper at that last part, his expression darkening at reminder of Lex’s brazen show of disrespect.
“That’s brilliant, Your Highness!” applauded Pretty Penny.
“An insight worthy of a prince,” added Gladmane.
“You’ve got him right where you want him,” cackled Razzle Dazzle.
The other Las Pegasus ponies were quick to add to the swell of compliments, causing Blueblood’s chest to puff out with pride. “Now, since that cretin is staying in River Bank’s manor, I believe I’ll retire to that dingy little yacht of hers instead for the time being. Its lodgings are subpar, but let it never be said that Prince Blueblood isn’t willing to forego the finer things in pursuit of his duty to Equestria. Now, Valet, I want you and the other servants to form some sort of palanquin out of the cushions that we have and carry me back. All of this unpaved ground is doing terrible things to my delicate hooves.”
Murmuring his assent as he started to gather up the royal pillows, the gangly stallion who served as Prince Blueblood’s primary servant glanced back at Rainbow Dash one more time. She hadn’t moved, save for the tremors that wracked her body, but it was her wing that drew his attention.
Lex Legis had been overwhelmed by Rainbow Dash’s attack, that much was certain. But despite that, he’d still done…something, that had left the mare screaming and falling from the sky, her wing ruined despite not only her reputation as one of the best flyers in all of Equestria, but as part of the team that had defeated the likes of Nightmare Moon, Discord, and Tirek. And Lex Legis had been able to take her out, despite how fatigued he’d already looked when Prince Blueblood had issued his ultimatum. And yet now Blueblood was intent on letting Lex Legis rest and recover his strength before pushing this ill-considered duel, clearly thinking that he couldn’t possibly end up in the same shameful state as Rainbow Dash.
But that, or something worse, is exactly what will happen if this duel goes forward, he sighed inwardly, already despondent over the temper tantrum that Blueblood would throw when he lost. I suppose the only hope now is for something unexpected to happen before it does. Although unlikely, the effete unicorn clung to that thought as they began to march back toward Vanhoover proper.
An hour later, a train carrying five very worried ponies arrived.
Rainbow Dash winced at Applejack’s angry shout, her ears folding back. “I was-”
“Takin’ off all on your own like that! And doin’ it so you can go pickin’ a fight with somepony you know is more ornery than a hungry manticore and twice as dangerous!”
“Look-”
“You didn’t even bring any of your gear with you!” Gesturing at the luggage that Spike was unloading from the train, Applejack continued to rant. “Did you just forget about all that fancy magic stuff we picked up back on Everglow?!”
“Oh darling, please,” interjected Rarity. “Those knickknacks you all brought back might be enchanted, but they’re hardly what I would call fancy. I mean, the stitching on those cloaks alone is just so bourgeois.”
It was a transparent attempt to defuse the situation, but all she accomplished was to make Applejack to transfer her ire to a new target. “That ain’t the point, Rarity! We got all this stuff because it protects you when you wear it, which can make the difference between life and death in a fight! That was why Spike told Rainbow to bring it when that big metal monster attacked Canterlot! And then she goes runnin’ off without takin’ any of it along!”
“I’m not sure how much they would have helped,” sighed Twilight, looking up from where she’d been examining Rainbow Dash’s wing, her expression troubled. “From what I can tell, the curse that Lex used is basically making your body forget that you regrew your wing. There’s no actual damage that I can see, but until the dark magic is removed, I don’t think you’re going to be able to fly.”
Rainbow blanched at that, but it was Fluttershy who spoke up. “But you can remove it, right Twilight?” she asked, her voice quivering as though it was her wing they were talking about.
“I’m not sure,” admitted Twilight. “This is some pretty strong magic. But the good news is that it’s nowhere near as powerful as the curse Lex used on Luna. I think that if I use my alicorn magic in conjunction with my ‘break enchantment’ spell, I might be able to do it. But if I can’t…”
“You’re saying I could be stuck like this forever?!” Rainbow Dash couldn’t help but gape in horror at the prospect.
Pinkie, by contrast, couldn’t have looked less worried. “Aw, it won’t come to that! I got to know Sonata back when she’d just become a pony, and she’s A-okay! So I bet if we ask her reeeally nicely now, she’ll convince Lex to make that awful curse go poof!” On the last word, she stood upright and gestured grandly with her forelegs, a burst of confetti and streamers exploding outward from the ends of her hooves.
The comment made Rainbow Dash bite her lip and look down, but was again saved from replying as Soft Mane snorted. “Yeah, because he’s the forgiving type,” she muttered sarcastically, before withdrawing her hand from Rainbow’s back and standing up. “Okay, I’ve healed all of those cuts and bruises you had. Other than your wing, you’re good as new.”
“I’ve gotta say, cuts and bruises are pretty good when you consider how torn up this place is,” added Spike, glancing around as he brought out the last of everyone’s bags.
It wasn’t hard to see what he was talking about. While the platform itself was intact, the train station that had been right behind it was demolished, reduced to little more than a foundation. Fragments of the building were scattered around haphazardly, as though some gargantuan creature had kicked the place over and stomped on the ruins. Adding to the effect was how there were several craters scarring the ground, as well as a large scorch mark a short distance away, marking what had to have been an epic battle.
Unable to help herself, Rainbow sat up a little straighter. “Yeah, well, what can I say? I might have gotten my wing cursed, but you should see the other guy.”
Applejack raised a brow, her expression skeptical. “You’re sayin’ this is all from you and Lex?”
Her girlfriend’s tone caused Dash’s bravado to wither. “Well, no…”
“Uh-huh,” remarked Applejack flatly, before turning to the alicorn among them. “Twilight, how about you get started on that spell while Dash here tells us exactly what happened after she took off.” She glanced back at the grounded pegasus as she continued. “And she better be honest if she knows what’s good for her.”
“Ugh, fine,” muttered Rainbow petulantly as Twilight began to gesture and chant, her horn lighting up as she fed power into her spell. As she did, Rainbow launched into what had happened after she’d exited the train, telling her friends about how she’d seen a distant light coming from just outside of Vanhoover and had homed in on it, tracking it back even after it had gone out and arriving in time to hear some pompous-looking stallion in a crown listing off all of the evil things that Lex – who had been surrounded by unconscious ponies – had been doing.
Her description of the subsequent battle was more animated, describing the blow-by-blow with gusto, making sure to point out where she’d dug a trench in the ground using Lex’s ugly face. She even stood up to pantomime some of the more exciting parts, complete with the awesome one-liners she’d thrown out. Most importantly, she made sure everyone knew that she’d absolutely been winning until Lex had somehow managed to use the magical version of a sucker punch to hit her with a curse right when she’d been about to finish him off.
When she got to the part that came after that, however, Rainbow’s enthusiasm for retelling what had happened visibly waned. Her voice went from boisterous to mumbling as she reluctantly relayed how Sonata had gotten the drop on her, magically paralyzing her and then messing with her head before Lex’s deteriorating condition had pulled her away. Although the enraged Siren’s spells had worn off barely a minute after she’d left, Rainbow had decided to stay there and wait for everypony to catch up. “But not because I was scared of what Sonata might do if I followed them or anything,” she made sure to add. “I just figured it’d be a shame if I had to beat her up too.”
Her assurance prompted a few knowing chuckles and caused multiple pairs of eyes to roll. But in an unusual turn of events, Pinkie seemed to be the least amused among them. “Sonata really did all that mean stuff to you?”
“Well, can you blame her?” asked Spike, only to wither as several disapproving looks were turned in his direction. “I’m just saying! I mean, if someone showed up out of nowhere and started attacking Soft Mane, I’d go crazy too!”
The admission brought a smile to Soft Mane’s face. “Thanks Spike.” Bending down, she gave the little dragon a hug.
“Yes, well, I can certainly understand a lady unleashing her wrath on someone who would hurt her beloved,” admitted Rarity. “But what I can’t understand is why nopony tried to help you, darling! Couldn’t they see that you were in need of assistance?” She finished by pointing toward the rows of rather ugly-looking houses of short distance away (the closest of which was currently being repaired for the massive crater Rainbow’s attack had made in one wall), where several ponies had gathered, eyeing the eight figures on the station platform. Although it was hard to be certain, their expressions were far from welcoming, and several were carrying shovels or planks of wood despite having no apparent need for them.
But the discussion of the cold reception they were apparently in for was one that would need to wait. “Okay!” called Twilight at last. “Here goes!”
Not sure what to do, Rainbow Dash stood up straight and held still, while everyone else took a few steps back. But Twilight didn’t notice any of that, her face screwed up in concentration as she pointed at Rainbow Dash’s limp left wing, unleashing the magic that she’d gathered.
Normally this wouldn’t have any sort of visible effect, Twilight reminded herself as she felt her magic clash with Lex’s. But if this is like what happened with Luna…
Her suspicion was proven correct a moment later as her spell, normally invisible, took on colored aura as it surrounded Rainbow Dash’s wing. Immediately, the limb began to blacken in response, looking as though it had been dipped in ink so dark that even the daylight couldn’t make it glisten, the ebony substance clinging to every inch of Rainbow’s wing all the way up to her back. I knew it, cheered Twilight internally, her concern for her friend momentarily overshadowed by the thrill of a hypothesis being proven right. Whatever Lex is doing to augment his curses, it’s imbuing them with so much power that they actually become visible when something tries to remove them! That was distinct from how the weaker curses he’d placed on some other ponies – such as the ones Cadance had told her she’d removed, after multiple attempts, from Comfy Cozy and Produce Aisle – hadn’t ever manifested any sort of visible aura when undone. And it lent credence to a theory she’d developed about why all of their attempts to remove Luna’s curse had met with failure so far…
“Um, Twilight?” called Rainbow Dash nervously. “Is this supposed to be happening?!”
No one had to ask she meant. Even as the words left her lips, the pink aura of Twilight’s spell began to quiver, shaking as though under some sort of strain. In response, the black substance coating Rainbow’s wing began to stretch out, as though it were a rubber coating that was being tugged in an invisible grip.
The sight was frightening enough that Applejack took a step forward, concern written all over her face. “Dash! Are you okay?!”
“I’m alright!” nodded Rainbow, watching the spectacle with wide eyes. “In fact,” she added a second later, starting to grin. “I think I can feel my wing a little bit!”
That caused everypony to hold their breath, watching as Twilight’s magic struggled with Lex’s shadowy curse. The pink aura shook harder, its edges growing faint even as it stretched the black substance further, trying to tear it free of Rainbow’s wing. But the dark magic was resisting, struggling to snap back into place. For a moment the two forces seemed to be at an equilibrium, neither able to gain an advantage over the other.
Then…
“Look!” shouted Rarity, pointing. But she needn’t have bothered, as nopony missed the spot of blue appearing near the base of Rainbow’s wing, revealed as the black substance of Lex’s magic was slowly peeled back from it. A second later the tip of an azure feather could be seen, followed by another.
And then the dark mass was ripped away from Rainbow’s wing completely, torn into pieces as Twilight’s magic overpowered it. Reduced to tatters, the inky fragments of Lex’s malevolent magic dissolved almost immediately, collapsing into nothing before they hit the ground even as the pink aura of Twilight’s magic faded away, its power expended now that its task was complete. A half-second later both colors had vanished completely.
Each of Rainbow Dash’s wings snapped out then, a huge grin crossing the pegasus mare’s face as she gave her left one an experimental flap. “Aw yeah!” she whooped, leaping into the air with a powerful beat of her wings. Performing a quick series of aerial loops, somersaults, and dives as her friends cheered her on, Rainbow landed a moment later, striking a pose. “The Dash is back!”
Taking a moment to enjoy the group hug that followed, Rainbow gave Twilight a grateful look. “Gotta hand it to you Twilight, when it comes to magic, that King Sombra-wannabe has nothing on you!”
Rainbow’s comment earned a chorus of agreement from everyone else, causing Twilight to give an embarrassed grin at the outpouring of praise. “I’m just glad I was able to help. But more than that, I think I’ve figured out why I wasn’t able to do the same for Princess Luna!”
“Ooh, is it because his black licorice curse needs an even bigger helping of your pink frosting aura in order to overpower its eeevil flavor?” asked Pinkie.
“Somehow I doubt that’s it, sugarcube,” chuckled Applejack from where she had her side pressed against Rainbow Dash.
“Actually, Pinkie’s not far off,” admitted Twilight with a grin. “You see, normally when trying to undo someone else’s magic, it’s more about precision than about power. But I think the curse Lex put on Rainbow’s wing, and on Luna, are exceptions.”
Fluttershy tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“Think of a spell like a book,” explained Twilight, ignoring the groans her analogy provoked. “The energy is like the paper, and the words written on each page tell you what its designed to do. The stronger the spell, the more pages it has, while having more words on each page means that it’s a more complex spell.”
“Darling, this is fascinating, but I’m not sure I see what this has to do with how you defeated that curse just now,” prodded Rarity, knowing that Twilight would likely go on at length if not made to stay on topic.
“If a spell is like a book, then trying to remove one with another spell is like hitting one book with another, which doesn’t do very much. But if you make sure to use the sturdiest part of your book, and carefully aim for the spine of the book you’re hitting, then you have a good chance of doing some real damage.” Despite it being her metaphor, Twilight couldn’t help but wince a little at the thought of book-on-book violence.
“Okay, but where does the frosting and licorice come in?” asked Pinkie, producing some pink-frosted black licorice as she waited for Twilight to get to the good part.
“I’m still not one hundred percent sure about this, but I think that Lex has found some way to put more energy into his curses in a way that’s more like adding a thicker cover than extra pages, meaning that unless a counter-spell has enough raw power, it’s not able to get through no matter how precisely it’s used. It’s like if you’re using an ordinary paperback to attack a hardback book whose cover is made out of metal a quarter-inch thick. It doesn’t matter how good your aim is, because you won’t be able to hit it hard enough to do anything. In that case, you need a minimum level of power and sufficient precision together in order to break through. Or to put it another way,” Twilight added with a giggle, “it doesn’t matter how sweet the frosting is if there isn’t enough of it to overpower the taste of the licorice.”
“Hmm…” Pondering that for a second, Pinkie whipped out a can of frosting and quickly shoved the end of her cream-covered licorice stick into it, covering it in a huge dollop of icing before biting down on it and chewing thoughtfully. “It works!” she pronounced a moment later, using the remaining licorice to scoop more sugary goodness out of the can.
“So the reason you couldn’t remove Princess Luna’s curse is because Lex put more power into it than you or Cadance could match?” asked Fluttershy, looking intimidated by how strong that meant Lex was. “Does that mean…” Glancing back at where the Vanhoover ponies were still watching them, she lowered her voice nervously. “Does that mean the Crystal Heart won’t be able to remove it either?”
Twilight’s hesitation made her answer clear before the words passed her lips. “I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to study the Crystal Heart very much. But if Cadance is right that its power depends on how many of the crystal ponies are there to pour their love and light into it, then she’s definitely going to need as many of them as possible in order for it to have any chance of working.”
“Or we go with Plan B,” offered Rainbow, still hyped from being able to fly again, “and now that we’re all here we go after Lex together and make him fix Luna!”
Applejack gave Rainbow an incredulous look, but Twilight jumped in before another argument could break out. “Actually, I think there’s a way we can get Lex to remove Luna’s curse without trying to force him.”
“By doing what?” huffed Soft Mane, crossing her arms under her chest. “I don’t know if you were paying attention to Rainbow’s story while you were casting your spell, Twilight, but I really don’t think Lex is going to be in the mood to do us any favors.”
“As a matter of fact, I was paying attention,” replied Twilight, unable to help but smirk. “And that’s why I feel confident that this is going to work. Lex might not be the nicest pony around, but if we ask him to free Luna from her curse then I’m willing to bet that he won’t be able to turn us down…”
She pointed at Soft Mane then, her grin taking on a smug cast as she revealed her plan. “…if you use your magic to heal his injuries first.”
“No! Absolutely not!” Refusing to let Spike try and calm her down, Soft Mane threw her hands in the air, giving Twilight a furious look. “There’s no way I’m using my magic to help that…that…monster!”
The angry shout made Fluttershy wince, and not just because she hated conflict. “Um, maybe it would be a good idea if we went back inside the train,” she ventured quietly, not liking the way the ponies gathered around the nearby houses were looking at them. “Just for a little while, I mean.”
The suggestion made Rainbow Dash frown. “Why should we back off? Soft Mane’s just telling it like it is! Helping the guy who cursed me to feel my wing being torn off all over again is crazy!”
“That wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t gone off half-cocked in the first place,” huffed Applejack. “You already picked a fight once. You really think doin’ it again is such a bright idea?”
“With all due respect, Applejack,” ventured Rarity, “I’d say the fight was picked when Lex Legis cursed Princess Luna for no good reason. And besides, those ponies watching us might not even be in their right minds. For all we know, that ‘Sonata’ character used her magic on them the way she did on poor Rainbow Dash.”
“Hey!” exclaimed Pinkie, a rare frown crossing her face. “She wouldn’t do that! Back when I was teaching her how to be a good pony, I told her that twisting people’s brains to make them really unhappy was a big no-no! And doing it to just make them kinda-sorta unhappy was a little no-no! And doing it to make people want to adore her was just a plain old no!”
“Yeah, well she seemed to forget those lessons real fast when she was saying she was going to melt my brain!” snapped Rainbow Dash.
“That’s because you tried to kill her boyfriend right in front of her!” noted Applejack peevishly.
“Darling, who’s side are you on?” scowled Rarity. “You’re defending the person who put a curse on your special somepony!”
But Twilight had heard enough. “Everypony STOP!” With a flash, everyone was teleported, landing on the cushioned seats of the train car that they’d exited just a few minutes before.
Not willing to give her friends time to resume arguing, Twilight spoke up before the rest of them could get their bearings. “Listen, I know that we don’t all agree on whether Lex is a threat to Equestria or just misunderstood, but we can’t let our disagreements come between us like this! The map sent us here for a reason, and even though I don’t know what that reason is, I do know that we won’t discover it if we’re too busy fighting amongst ourselves!”
Heartened by the round of guilty looks that were exchanged, she kept going. “I know that Lex has done terrible things, but I can’t ignore the fact that he's done some good things as well. That’s why, if there’s any chance that he can come to understand the magic of friendship, then I want to help him do so.”
“And you really think that this is the way to do it?” asked Rainbow Dash, her voice dubious.
But to her surprise, it was Fluttershy who answered. “Sometimes, when I meet an unfriendly animal, a little kindness is all it takes for them to open up to me.”
“This isn’t a wild animal, darling.” Despite her objection, Rarity’s voice was gentle. “This is someone with a history of lashing out at others most severely. Even if Lex has performed some admirable deeds, I simply can’t bear the thought that he might turn his magic on any of you.”
“I bet he wouldn’t if Sonata was there!” gushed Pinkie. “I mean, if she was all super-duper angry that he was hurt, then imagine how happy she’ll be when we show up and make him all better! I bet that she’ll hug him so much that it’ll make him so happy that he won’t be able to get mad!”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” nodded Applejack. “And besides, if worse comes to worst, it ain’t like we can’t defend ourselves.”
Letting out a sigh of relief as things seemed to move toward a productive discussion rather than a fight, Twilight smiled…only for the expression to waver as she looked at the person on whom her plan hinged.
Sitting near the back of the car, Soft Mane had her legs pulled up to her chest, her face miserable as she rested her chin on her knees, her tail curled around her. Beside her, Spike held her hand in his claws, giving her a worried look. She didn’t give any indication that she’d heard what Twilight and the others had said, nor did she turn her eyes – still able to see with some limited ability – toward them as silence engulfed the car, no one sure what to say as one by one everyone else saw how upset she was.
After several seconds went by, Twilight slowly approached the distraught girl. “Soft Mane…”
“He called me a freak, Twilight.”
Twilight’s ears flattened, having been there when Lex had said that. “I know.”
“He called me a freak right to my face.” She sniffled as she spoke, rubbing her free hand across her eyes. “He said that my mom was insane, that she had a ‘disease of the mind,’ for falling in love with my dad, just because she's a pony and he was human.”
Not knowing what to say to that, Twilight simply sat down, sensing that Soft Mane had more to say. A few seconds later she was proven right. “Spike’s been helping me write letters to Princess Cadance, since she’s seriously devoted to Lashtada’s religion while I just sort of fell into it by accident. She told me that one of the things her faith has taught her is that we never really hate someone else. We just hate how they make us feel about ourselves.” She let out a shaky sigh before continuing. “I think that’s the absolute worst part about Lex.”
Twilight cocked her head. “That he makes you feel bad about yourself?”
Soft Mane nodded. “It wasn’t just that he called me a freak. It was the way he said it. Like, he wasn’t screaming it or laughing at me or anything. He just…said it. Like he was discussing the weather. Birds fly, fish swim, and I’m grotesque. It was just a fact to him, and nothing I say or do could ever change that.”
“You know that’s not true,” protested Spike gently, giving Soft Mane’s hand a squeeze. “None of it is. Your mom isn’t crazy, you’re not grotesque, and there’s a lot more to you than just being half-human and half-pony.”
“I know,” murmured Soft Mane, not sounding convinced. “I know, it’s just…everyone’s been so nice ever since I came to Equestria. I mean, yeah, they all gawk at me when they first see me, and that’s still kind of upsetting, but once they get to know me they don’t act the way people did back home. There’s no whispers or rude jokes when I walk down the street and nobody-, ugh, nopony points at me and stares…or if they do they at least don’t do it close enough for me to see them.” A brief smile made it clear that last part was a joke, but it turned sad a moment later. “It’s been really wonderful. And every time I start to think that I’ve left all of that behind for good, there’s some reminder that Lex Legis is here in this world too, trying to make it as ugly and awful as he is, and suddenly it all just seems like a lie.”
“Oh darling, it’s absolutely not a lie!” Her eyes awash with unshed tears, Rarity stood up and trotted over to Soft Mane, wrapping her in a hug. “You have an inner beauty that shines so brightly it’s dazzling! If anypony can’t see it, then that’s their problem! Not yours!”
“Plus, an actual goddess thought you’re so awesome that she gave you a bunch of special powers!” added Rainbow Dash, hovering overhead. “Pretty impressive if you ask me!”
“Which is why you’re always welcome in the bestest and most exclusivest party ever: our adventuring party!” whooped Pinkie, somehow popping up from the seat behind Soft Mane despite having been on the other side of the car a minute ago, tossing confetti in the air as she appeared.
“I think you’re very brave, giving new people a chance to get to know you.” Fluttershy’s smile was tentative but heartfelt. “If it was me, I’d be too scared to even try.”
“Not to mention that you’ve already got yourself a whole bunch of friends who’ll get madder than a hornet’s nest in a rainstorm if anypony gives you a hard time,” nodded Applejack. “So don’t go thinkin’ you have to deal with any of that all by your lonesome.”
“And don’t forget about me!” added Spike, giving Soft Mane a confident grin. “I think you’re the most beautiful girl in all of Equestria! Or Everglow!” The admission brought a flush to his cheeks, before he flashed Rarity a guilty grin. “Sorry Rarity. But I promise you’re still a really close second!”
Giggling, Rarity rolled her eyes as Soft Mane reached over to wrap Spike into a hug. “Thanks, Spike,” she sniffled, looking like she was about to burst into tears at any second. “And thank you all. I’m really glad I met you.”
“We’re the ones who’re lucky to have met you, Soft Mane,” replied Twilight with a gentle smile. “You’re one of our irreplaceable friends, and we’ve all learned a lot from having you be a part of our lives. That’s why, while I don’t want to pressure you, I do think that healing Lex might be an opportunity to change the way he sees you. Because if it does, then no matter what happens, he won’t turn Equestria into a place where you’d be unhappy.”
“And if it doesn’t, you’ll still be able to rub his nose in the fact that the girl he called a freak is the one who saved his life,” added Spike cheekily. “I bet that’d really drive him nuts.”
The suggestion, so completely at odds with the tender words from everyone else, caused Soft Mane to burst out laughing, hugging Spike tighter. A second later her laughter turned into sobs, tears flowing down her cheeks as she finally let out the tension she’d been holding in ever since news of Lex’s exploits had reached Ponyville. The sight earned a chorus of sympathetic cries from the others, who quickly enveloped the pair in a group hug, holding them until Soft Mane finally calmed down.
“Okay,” sighed Soft Mane when the warm embrace finally ended, looking at Twilight. “I’ll do it.”
“Great!” beamed Twilight. “Then let’s head out and show Lex what the magic of friendship is all about! Rainbow Dash, lead the way!”
“Right!” cheered Rainbow, flying to the car’s exit as the others followed her, looking around once they were back on the platform. “Okay, um…hmm…”
Her enthusiasm dampened by how Rainbow Dash was glancing around aimlessly, Twilight paused as a creeping feeling worked its way down her spine. “Wait, Rainbow, you did see where Lex and the others went when they left, right?”
“Well duh!” answered Rainbow just a little too quickly. “I mean, I was kind of dealing with having my brain going haywire and all. But they definitely went, um…that way…” Waving her hoof in a vaguely northerly direction, she bit her lip. “I think…?”
“Maybe he’s in one of those houses?” offered Rarity, nodding toward the makeshift village nearby.
“Or maybe he’s set up some sorta command post in the city proper?” added Applejack.
“We could just ask someone,” noted Soft Mane. “I mean, Lex has been running this place, right? That means everypony here probably knows where to find him.”
Letting out a heavy breath at the realization that things weren’t going to go quite as smoothly as she’d hoped, Twilight tried not to lose heart as she glanced at where the ponies of Vanhoover were watching them. Despite her hoping to the contrary, their glances didn’t look any friendlier now than they had a few minutes ago. But there was no other way if they wanted to have Soft Mane heal Lex’s injuries and hopefully soften his attitude. “Okay everyone, let’s split up into groups of two and see if someone will tell us where Lex is. This is also a good opportunity to talk to the locals and find out some more about what’s been happening here, since we still don’t know what caused that huge magic surge I felt. We’ll meet back here on the platform in one hour.”
Nodding, the eight of them began pairing off as they made their way toward the village.
“You stay away from Lex Legis if you know what’s good for you.”
The angry reply to her question about where Lex was made Fluttershy wince. It had been that way with every other answer she’d received over the last ten minutes of asking, and judging from the dark looks she was getting from passersby, that probably wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Just the thought of being subject to this much negativity, from strangers no less, made her want to run back to the train and curl up under one of the seats until it was time to go home.
But it had been only a short while ago that Soft Mane had broken down, worried that Lex would turn Equestria into a place where someone like her would face this kind of harsh treatment all the time. That was enough to make Fluttershy marshal her courage. Reaching deep, she called on every lesson she’d ever learned in conquering her shyness, determined that this time everypony would see that she would not take no for an answer!
“Pretty please?” she squeaked.
“Nothin’ doin’,” came the flippant response as the pony she’d been talking to walked away.
Fluttershy could feel herself deflating, as much from relief that the confrontation was over as from disappointment over yet another failure. But what else could she have done? Word had already spread through the village about Rainbow Dash’s attack on Lex, and seemingly everypony was upset about it. Worse, they all knew who her friends were thanks to them being famous as the now-former bearers of the Elements of Harmony, and blamed the rest of them by association. Despite Fluttershy’s earnest pleas that they only wanted to help Lex now, no one was willing to trust her on that.
I wonder if I should use the Stare. That would almost certainly have worked, but Fluttershy could feel her stomach tie itself in knots at the thought. Some of the ponies she’d spoken to had proudly recounted how Lex was their community’s protector, and would show no mercy to anyone who attacked them, even other ponies. While they’d usually mentioned that in reference to someone named “Starlight Glimmer,” Fluttershy had been able to read between the lines. As such, she had no desire to potentially earn a curse of her own by trying to bully the ponies here into talking to her.
I hope Pinkie Pie is having better luck than I am, she thought mournfully, turning back to glance at a nearby house. Pinkie had knocked on the door and presented herself as the “Official Housewarming Party Inspector,” there to make sure the residents had a proper celebration when they’d moved into their quite-obviously-new home. That had been a few minutes ago, so hopefully now-
“And stay out!”
The voice was accompanied by the front door of the house Pinkie had disappeared into suddenly opening, the pink party pony flying out of it a moment later, launched upward as somepony’s hoof connected heavily with her backside. Arcing into the air, Pinkie landed on her rump a moment later, bouncing three times – each impact marked by a loud squeak, as though from a child’s toy – before landing abruptly on all fours. Huffing, she turned back and glowered at the now-closed door. “Oh yeah?!” she yelled, reaching back to gingerly rub her posterior. “Well maybe you should move those beds around, because you all clearly woke up on the wrong side of them!”
Biting her lip at the spectacle, Fluttershy crept back toward her friend. “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay, but everypony in there’s got a bad case of the grouchies,” pouted Pinkie. “When I asked them if they knew where we could find the big bad wizard who’s working with the evil dark goddess to try and make the entire world into their slaves, they got really angry and started throwing their lunch at me!” Grabbing her tail, she gave it a firm shake, scowling as several baked potatoes fell out. “I should report them for a salt and buttering!”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Fluttershy put a hoof to her mouth, fighting down a giggle. “I guess we should keep trying,” she conceded, her spirits buoyed by her friend’s antics.
“Absolutely!” cheered Pinkie, her usual exuberance returning in force as she looked at the next house on the street. “And I know just what to do!”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened in alarm a moment later, her peace of mind dissolving as she saw what Pinkie was planning. “Um, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea…”
“What’re you talking about?” chuckled Pinkie as she wheeled her party cannon over to the next residence and aimed it at the front door from a few feet away. “Who doesn’t love a great big surprise party exploding in their face out of nowhere?”
Fluttershy gulped as she watched Pinkie knock on the door and then rush behind her cannon, quivering in anticipation. Maybe it’s not too late to run back to the train and hide under one of the seats after all…
“He killed a dragon?!” croaked Spike, his face twisted in horror at the news.
Behind him, Soft Mane grimaced. When word of how Lex had slain a dragon in Tall Tale had made the papers, she’d worked with her mom, Rarity, Fluttershy, and several other ponies to keep that from Spike, knowing it would upset him deeply. She’d even managed to keep him from overhearing that tidbit of information during Princess Celestia’s conference, thanks to a well-timed bluff about needing him to show her where the bathroom was. But the prospect of dealing with Lex’s prejudice again had been so upsetting that she’d forgotten to come up with a way to keep that bit of news from Spike during their trip here, and now the cat was out of the bag.
“Yep, saw it myself,” nodded the pegasus mare, not looking up from where she was helping to unload a stack of lumber next to a half-finished barn of some sort. “I’d never even heard of a pony fighting a dragon all on their own before then, but he didn’t even blink at the prospect, let me tell you! We were all scared out of our minds, screaming and hollering fit to beat the band, but not Lex! He just stands there, cool as a cucumber, and starts using the most incredible magic! First he zapped one of its wings off, and then he made some kinda humungous see-through moving statue of a pony all around himself, and it boxed that dragon’s ears but good let me tell you! Then-”
Seeing how Spike was trembling, clearly imagining himself as the unfortunate dragon in the scenario that was being described, Soft Mane cleared her throat. “Actually we were just trying to figure out where Lex was right now, so…”
But the pegasus mare refused to take the hint. “Now hold on a second there, this is a great story,” she insisted, pulling the last of the planks down from her wagon. “My name’s Tender Tree by the way, and I’m happy to tell you all about…oh.”
Pausing as she finally turned around and saw who her audience was, the middle-aged mare scratched the back of her neck. “Um, well…the, uh, the dragon got a few good licks in too, I suppose.” Smiling awkwardly, an uncomfortable silence fell for several seconds before she gestured back toward her wagon. “I should probably get back. All that wood’s not gonna unload itself.”
“Yeah, we should go too. Thanks.” Somehow, Soft Mane managed to keep herself from being too sarcastic on that last word as she ushered Spike away.
“I…I can’t believe it,” whimpered Spike, his eyes haunted. “Why would anyone do that to an innocent dragon? We’re such noble creatures.”
Sighing, Soft Mane steered them toward a quiet area away from everypony else. As important as she knew it was that they find Lex, Spike had been there for her when she’d had her breakdown a short while ago. She owed it to him to do the same for him now.
I’m sure the others will figure out where Lex is in the meantime.
“I did not overreact!” snapped Rainbow Dash. “Lex got what he deserved for what he did to Princess Luna! Not to mention all the other awful stuff he’s done! Now tell us where he’s slunk off to so we can-, erk!”
“Dagnabbit Rainbow!” yelled Applejack as she tugged on her lasso, dragging the irate mare back down to the ground and letting the stallion she’d been interrogating – a nervous-looking pegasus fellow by the name of Disc Jockey – beat a hasty retreat. “You’re not helpin’!”
“I’m not helping?!” countered Rainbow hotly as she glared at Applejack. “That guy was gonna spill his guts, and now he’s getting away!”
“He wouldn’t be runnin’ in the first place if you weren’t actin’ crazier than a June bug at a jamboree!” shot back Applejack. “You really think that gettin’ all up in ponies’ faces and yellin’ at them is gonna make them wanna tell you anythin’?!”
“Well nothing else is working!” Rainbow threw a foreleg out to indicate how the ponies nearby were deliberately moving to give the two of them a wide berth. “It’s not like anypony has been cooperative when we’ve asked nicely!”
“That’s because you-” Cutting herself off, Applejack forced herself to take a deep breath as she lowered the brim of her hat over her eyes, needing a moment. She knew that Rainbow could be more stubborn than a dozen mules when she made up her mind to be, and that arguing with her would only make her dig her hooves in. It was something they couldn’t afford since they needed to meet back at the platform in less than an hour.
When she lifted her hat a few seconds later, she was calmer. “Listen sugarcube, I know that you and I don’t see eye-to-eye on this, but Twilight came up with a plan and we all agreed to it. So can you at least try to act like you’re followin’ it?”
“Fine,” groused Rainbow after a prolonged paused, her expression looking like she’d just bitten into a rotten apple. “But I still say this is a bad idea.”
“You mean because Lex beat you in a fight twice now?” Applejack was quite proud of how she managed to keep herself from smirking as she said it.
Rainbow’s fracas with Lex just now had actually been the second time they’d mixed it up. The first one had been in Canterlot a few weeks prior. Lex had been returning from Everglow with them, and he’d taken their reappearing in the castle as an opportunity to demand that Princess Celestia step down. When she’d refused, he’d declared himself in rebellion, using his magic to create a diversion while he turned into a shadow to escape. Rainbow had gone after him, but had accomplished nothing except getting herself caught in black crystals while Lex had gotten away. Applejack knew Rainbow was still steamed about that even now, and having her rematch go so poorly had no doubt gotten under her skin, as Rainbow herself confirmed a second later.
“He did not beat me!” she retorted hotly. “That first time, when we were in Canterlot, all he did was run away! And this time I was still standing while he was down! If it wasn’t for Sonata-”
To Applejack’s mild surprise, Rainbow stopped in the middle of her ranting. But when she turned to glance at her, she saw that it wasn’t because of any effort at self-control on her girlfriend’s part. Rather, Rainbow was staring at something off to her left, her eyes wide and her jaw slack. Blinking, Applejack looked in the same direction…
And beheld the gaudiest mural she’d ever seen.
It was Lex in some sort of action-hero pose, wielding Severance (the sight of which made Applejack frown) as two beautiful girls – one of whom was clearly Sonata – in skimpy rags clung to his back legs, with some unicorn mare wielding knives in the background as a horde of undead ponies surged toward them all.
“Ain’t that a kick in the teeth,” muttered Applejack.
“And ponies think I’m bad for my trophy collection,” snorted Rainbow Dash.
The two of them glanced at each other then, and for some reason everything just clicked. Applejack wasn’t sure which of them started snickering first, but a second later it grew into chuckling, then full-blown laughter, until the two of them were barely able to stand as they howled with mirth, unable to reconcile the seriousness of everything they were doing with the utter ridiculousness of the picture in front of them.
By the time they’d settled down, the two of them were sprawled out on the ground, staring up at the sky, the tension from a few minutes ago gone completely. For a little while neither spoke, just enjoying the companionable silence.
But the moment couldn’t last forever.
“We’ve been on a losing streak lately,” murmured Rainbow at last.
That hadn’t been what Applejack had expected to hear. “How do you figure?”
Rainbow shrugged, but it wasn’t the carefree motion she usually used. “We were doing fine up until Tirek, but then everything went sideways. First we lost Twilight during the Elemental Bleeds, not to mention that monster that tortured Fluttershy. Then Lex attacks Princess Celestia in her own throne room and gets away with it. Then Severance messes with your head, throws Pinkie and those fillies into that other world with no way to find them, and almost kills me. Then that lhak-whatever. Then my rematch with Lex.” She let that hang in the air for a moment. “We’ve been on a losing streak, and I’m worried about what’ll happen if we don’t break it soon.”
“C’mon Dash, you know that ain’t the whole truth,” protested Applejack softly. “We got Twilight back, and Fluttershy’s on the mend. You healed up after that darn scythe stabbed ya, and you helped me get my head back on straight after that. We found Pinkie again, and we know that Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon are alright for the time bein'. Now we’re gonna take care of things with Lex.”
“I hope so. Because I just keep remembering what that Mihr guy said, about how Lex is working with the Night Mare, and if they succeed then she’ll become not just the strongest god here in Equestria, but also on Everglow. So if we mess this up…”
“We won’t.” Standing up, Applejack offered Rainbow her foreleg, pulling her to her hooves. “So long as we all stick together, I’m sure that we can make it through anything.”
Rainbow answered her with a nuzzle, which turned into a kiss, and when they resumed their search for someone who knew Lex’s whereabouts a moment later, they walked through town with their sides gently touching.
Glancing over at Rarity, Twilight couldn’t help but feel slightly nervous on her friend’s behalf. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Rarity. I know the two of you have a history, and I don’t mind talking to him on my own.”
The offer made Rarity smile, but she shook her head nonetheless. “I appreciate that, darling. But as much as I hate to admit it, this might be our best bet for finding out where Lex Legis is, and even though your title is what’s getting us in, I’m the one with the…personal connection, which makes me the better candidate to follow up on this particular avenue. Besides,” she smiled wryly, “exploiting a regrettable romantic encounter to follow up on a lead is exactly what Shadow Spade would do.”
Twilight smirked at the mention of Rarity’s favorite fictional detective. “Daring Do would just sneak in and read his diary while he was out.”
“Well, I suppose that tells us which character has more class now, doesn’t it?” teased Rarity.
Twilight opened her mouth, but didn’t have a chance to reply as the door opened, admitting them into one of the larger rooms on board the yacht they were on, a skinny unicorn standing aside as he announced them.
“Her Highness, Princess Twilight Sparkle and Lady Rarity to see His Highness, Prince Blueblood.”
It was with a sigh that Twilight teleported herself and Rarity back to the station platform, their meeting with Prince Blueblood having concluded a few minutes ago.
“-most arrogant, conceited, self-centered excuse for a stallion I’ve ever met!” Rarity huffed, still ranting as they arrived at their destination, the sensation of magical travel barely making the fashionista pause. “Even if he wears the latest fashions, he’s living proof that the clothes do not make the pony! Honestly, I don’t see how anyone can stand to be around-”
“I’m guessin’ y’all didn’t have much luck either, then?” drawled Applejack, a bemused look on her face at Rarity’s histrionics. But the expression was half-hearted, as though her friend’s spectacle was lifting her spirits only a little.
Rainbow Dash seemed even worse, an uncomfortable look on her face. Fluttershy seemed disturbed too, but rather oddly she didn’t look upset so much as embarrassed for some reason, her cheeks flushed and her gaze kept firmly on the ground. Only Pinkie seemed like her usual self, grinning as she bounced in place. But while that was somewhat reassuring, Twilight was less concerned with how her friends were acting than she was with the pair who wasn’t anywhere to be seen. “Are Spike and Soft Mane not back yet?” she asked after a glance around failed to find the youngest members of their group.
“They’re inside,” answered Rainbow Dash, nodding at the train. “Apparently Spike didn’t know that Lex bumped off a dragon during his stint in Tall Tale, and found out while the two of them were asking around just now.”
“He’s pretty upset about it,” added Fluttershy, raising her eyes for a moment before looking back down again. “Soft Mane thought some food might help him calm down, so she took him to the dining car.”
“I bet it’s nothing a few slices of cake won’t be able to fix!” cheered Pinkie. “Or maybe some ice cream, or some cookies, or some brownies, or some doughnuts, or some eclairs, or some pie, or some…”
Knowing that Pinkie Pie would be listing desserts for a while, Twilight turned back to Applejack. “It didn’t go so well on our end either,” she reported, answering the farm pony’s earlier question. “When Rainbow Dash said she saw a stallion in a crown denouncing Lex, I thought maybe it was somepony worth talking to, but after some asking around it turned out to be-”
“Prince Blueblood.” Rarity spat the name out like it left a foul taste in her mouth.
That was enough to earn a surprised look from Fluttershy. “The pony you went on a date with at the Grand Galloping Gala?”
Stomping her hoof, pointing at Fluttershy in an exaggerated motion. “There, you see?!” she snapped, making the other mare cringe at the agitated response. “You remember that we met each other before! So where does that uncouth lout get off acting like I didn’t leave an impression?! The nerve!” Giving her mane a toss, Rarity closed her eyes and lifted her nose in the air. “That entire rendezvous was a complete waste of our time!”
“We did learn a few things,” amended Twilight, giving Rarity an apologetic look when the other mare shot her an irritated glance. “The most important one being that Lex is probably staying at the home of somepony named River Bank, who’s apparently in charge of one of the most prominent families in Vanhoover. Unfortunately, Blueblood hasn’t actually been to her residence, so other than it not being in the city proper he’s not sure where it is.”
“And he’s apparently not inclined to find out either,” scowled Rarity. “To hear him tell it, he’s going to stay on his yacht for the rest of his time here, sending only his valet to River Bank’s place in order to negotiate the terms of his duel he’s going to fight with Lex Legis.”
That tidbit of information was enough to make Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy’s eyes all widen. “A duel?!” they chorused.
Twilight nodded, a pained expression crossing her face. “Blueblood challenged Lex over what he did to Celestia and Luna, and Lex accepted.”
“And as much as I approve of a gentlecolt stepping in to defend a lady’s honor,” interjected Rarity, “I have to say that Blueblood’s atrocious manners mean that I’m going to be quite torn over who to root for when the two of them have their altercation.”
“Wait, back up!” Shaking her head in disbelief, Rainbow Dash looked between Rarity and Twilight. “This guy is going to fight Lex one-on-one? He knows what happened to Celestia and Luna when they tried that, right?”
“That’s just it, he didn’t know, and telling him only made him more insistent that he go through with it,” answered Twilight, making no effort to hide her trepidation.
“I can’t believe he’s that brave,” murmured Fluttershy, sounding a little awed. “Rarity made it sound like he was afraid of getting a little dirty, let alone fighting.”
“Except he doesn’t think there’s going to be a fight,” clarified Twilight. “After seeing what happened when Rainbow Dash attacked Lex, he’s convinced that Lex is a weakling who only accepted his challenge as a stunt, and that he’ll back down if his valet negotiates aggressively enough. I tried telling him he was underestimating Lex, but he wouldn’t listen. If I have to tell Princess Celestia that her honorary nephew was cursed or cut down by Severance-”
“Actually, you won’t have to worry about that second one,” interrupted Applejack. “Apparently Lex sent Severance packin’ a little while back.”
Twilight’s eyebrows shot upward. “He did? Are you sure?”
“It’s what everypony’s saying,” replied Rainbow Dash, her voice skeptical. “Apparently Lex gave some big speech after the princesses left where he told everyone the same thing he told Celestia and Luna when the fighting started: that Severance acted on its own when it attacked Luna and killed her guard. Except he also told everypony here that he had the Night Mare remove it from Equestria for what it did.”
“Which makes sense.” Unlike Rainbow Dash, Applejack sounded much more certain. “I know from experience how that scythe can be right bloodthirsty when it has a mind to, and that it’ll up and leave if you tell it you don’t want it no more. Given how Lex likes to talk all high and mighty about how he wants to help ponies, I can believe that he sent it away, especially after everythin’ that’s happened here…”
Applejack’s statement ended with her flattening her ears, Rainbow Dash doing the same as she put a wing around the farm pony, pulling her close. The sight was enough to make Twilight glance at Rarity and Fluttershy, mildly concerned. “Did something happen?”
“There’s a memorial on the other side of the village,” answered Rainbow, her voice heavy. “It’s apparently set over where those ghouls that attacked this place were buried. There are all these little signs and messages left for everypony that didn’t make it when the Elemental Bleed that hit this place.”
“Or didn’t survive what happened afterward,” sighed Applejack. “A lot of ponies died here, Twilight. And while everypony we met in town agreed that Lex is pricklier than a hedgehog at a cactus farm, they all said he’s done his darnedest to try and help everypony since he arrived.”
“There were a couple who didn’t think he was all that, but after seeing him get into a fight with Starlight Glimmer this morning even they’re starting to change their minds,” added Rainbow Dash begrudgingly.
“Starlight who now, darling?” asked Rarity.
But the pony who spoke up then was Fluttershy. “She’s a unicorn who showed up earlier today. Apparently she knows a spell that lets her steal cutie marks, and she wanted to use it on everyone here. A bunch of ponies who work for Lex Legis tried to stop her, but she defeated them all until Lex himself came out to deal with her.” She looked at Twilight then. “They said she used some really powerful magic near the end of their fight. I think that might have been what you were sensing, back on the train.” She looked down then, and for some reason her face became redder. “The doctors took her back with Lex and all of the other injured ponies. Now everyone’s wondering when she’ll, um…”
“When she’ll what?” pressed Twilight, excited in spite of herself. Anypony who could use magic at the level she’d felt before was definitely someone worth knowing about. As disturbing as a spell that removed cutie marks was, the potential of what it could be modified to do was fascinating to consider.
“When she’ll…” muttered Fluttershy, hiding her face behind her mane as she murmured something unintelligible.
“You’re gonna have to speak up, sugarcube,” prodded Applejack, clearly eager to talk about something other than the tremendous loss of life that had happened here.
Nor was she the only one. “Yeah, we heard the stuff about her taking cutie marks and all, but nothing else, so if you’ve got some more info spill it already!” insisted Rainbow Dash.
“Do go on, Fluttershy,” urged Rarity. “Every little bit of information helps.”
Biting her lip, Fluttershy glanced at Pinkie Pie from behind her mane, her eyes clearly begging the other mare to step in. But Pinkie didn’t notice, still bouncing in a circle around them rest of them as she recited a list of the sweets that she found comforting…which was apparently all of them. “…or a sundae, or a banana split, or some bubblegum, or some rock candy, or some peanut brittle…”
Realizing that there was no one else that she could push this off on, Fluttershy looked back at the expectant faces of the rest of her friends, screwing up her courage even as she felt more blood rushing to her cheeks. “Wh-when she’ll…” Squeezing her eyes shut, she forced herself to say the rest. “When she’ll join Lex’s harem!”
“HIS WHAT?!” shouted the others in unison.
While Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Applejack were still stunned by Fluttershy’s announcement, Twilight managed to recover her wits. “Fluttershy, that’s crazy! Lex is in a relationship with Sonata! I mean, Princess Celestia mentioned that Aria was flirting with him a little bit after he changed her into a pony, but that’s not the same as him having a…a…” She couldn’t even get the word out, turning red at the idea. “As having one of those!”
“I know,” moaned Fluttershy, clearly wishing she could sink into the ground. “But it’s what everypony here is saying! That even though he acts all mean and growly, he’s still going out with a whole bunch of girls all at once!”
“Darling, that’s just a particularly lurid bit of local gossip,” admonished Rarity, despite looking a bit frazzled herself. “You can’t pay any attention to that sort of rubbish.”
“Seriously!” scoffed Rainbow Dash. “Why would anyone want to go out with a guy like that? I mean, I get that Sonata does, but she has a couple of screws loose!”
“It is kind of hard to believe, sugarcube,” concurred Applejack. “Besides, Twilight went out with Lex once back on Everglow, and he was a perfect gentlecolt the entire time, right Twilight?”
Biting her lip, Twilight nodded. “That’s right. We saw an opera, had dinner, and said goodnight. We didn’t even kiss at the end.”
“There you have it,” pronounced Applejack. “Lex might be many things, but a ladykiller he ain’t.”
But despite looking redder than a tomato, Fluttershy shook her head. “That’s what I thought too at first, but everyone said that when Lex gave that speech after the princesses left, he said that Sonata and Aria were both going to be his p-…his p-…” She needed a moment, taking a deep breath. “His playthings from now on! And they admitted it!”
“‘Playthings’?” echoed Rarity, looking aghast.
“And not just them!” continued Fluttershy, looking determined to report everything she’d heard so she could be done with this topic. “He apparently has a personal maid that he’s t-taking liberties with as well, even though she has a husband and a daughter! He’s even been making her dress in a scandalous outfit for his entertainment!”
“He’s breakin’ up a happy family for his own amusement?!” Applejack couldn’t have looked more horrified if she’d tried.
“And a few weeks ago, Sonata apparently admitted in front of a crowd that Lex m-made…made her and her sister and some reporter from Canterlot all hold still while he t-t-touched them all over.” Fluttershy looked almost dizzy now, like just saying this was more than she could handle. “And then they were all spending every night together alone after that!”
“He made them?! Like, with magic?!” A shudder went through Rainbow Dash at the thought, clearly repulsed by the idea. “That’s horrible!”
“And that’s just the stuff that everypony seems to agree on.” Fluttershy was talking faster now, eager to get to the end. “There’s all sorts of other stories going around about how that River Bank mare is having an affair with him, or that he was dating the mayor of Tall Tale before he came here, or that he had a tragic romance with two mares that he rescued but who later died in Vanhoover.”
For a long moment no one spoke, with only Pinkie’s oblivious listing of various confections breaking the silence.
Finally, Rarity cleared her throat. “Is it too late for me to retract my statement about every little bit of information being helpful?” she asked weakly.
Closing her eyes, Twilight took a moment to compose herself before opening them again. “Listen, I don’t know what sort of…arrangement Lex has with Sonata, or anypony else. But when we walked through town on our way to meet with Blueblood, I checked for magic just to be sure that the ponies here weren’t enchanted, and I didn’t find anything. So maybe it’s best if we just ignore these crazy rumors. It’s not like this is any of our business anyway.”
When everypony nodded, Twilight took a deep breath, eager to change the subject. “Now, since we didn’t find out where River Bank’s home is located, we should-”
“Oh wow, it’s really you guys!”
The new voice belonged to a pegasus stallion with a white coat and brown mane and tail, his cutie mark being an exclamation point with a hoofball for the dot, gawking at them from where he was hovering at the edge of the platform. “I couldn’t believe it when my daughter said that the Rainbow Dash was here, but she didn’t mention that she brought the other Elements of Harmony too!”
“Well, actually we had to retire the Elements a little while ago,” corrected Twilight. “And she didn’t ‘bring’ us here, we-”
“Oh come on, Twilight,” smirked Dash, flapping her wings and heading over to where the stallion in question was looking at her with wide eyes and an even wider smile. “The guy’s obviously a fan, so no need to hit him with a bunch of pointless details. Let him enjoy meeting one of his heroes.” Smirking, she turned to look at the new guy. “Let me guess, you’re hoping for an autograph, right?”
“That’d be great! I am such a huge fan of yours!” gushed the stallion, producing a quill and paper and thrusting them at Rainbow Dash eagerly. “Make it out to ‘Tryout’ if you don’t mind! Hey, is it true you gave that Lex guy a serious whooping just now?”
“Heh, well, I don’t like to brag or anything,” began Rainbow, her tone and expression making it clear that was far from the truth, “but I may have thrown down with him a little while ago and sent him packing.” Her smirk diminished then, as a curious look crossed her face. “So…you’re not upset about that or anything?”
“Nah,” chuckled Tryout as he shook his head. “I mean, I get that everyone here thinks the guy’s a bigshot. Heck, even my daughter is gaga over him, but I just don’t see what the big deal is, you know? I mean, he’s supposed to have done some impressive stuff, but-”
“Do you know where we can find him?” blurted Twilight suddenly. “It’s really important that we see him as soon as possible.”
“Oh, sure,” shrugged Tryout. “He’s back at my wife’s boss’s place. Came back with everyone all upset over his having lost a fight for once. I wasn’t paying too much attention myself; I’ve been getting into shape for a marathon. Think you could give me some pointers as part of that autograph?”
“Tell you what,” offered Rainbow Dash. “If you can take us to where Lex is right now, I’ll give you some personal flight tips that are guaranteed to let you blow past the competition!”
Tryout’s eyes widened. “You got it! C’mon, right this way!”
Everypony cheered at that, with Twilight turning back toward the train. “I’ll go get Spike and Soft Mane!”
A minute later everyone began following Tryout…with one member of the group lingering behind the others.
“…or some frozen yogurt, or some pudding, or some s’mores, or…hey, where’s everypony going?! Wait for me!”
“You have who waiting in the front foyer?” croaked River Bank, not believing what she’d just been told.
“Princess Twilight Sparkle, madam,” answered Trotsworth quietly, his reply delayed as he waited for a few medical ponies to rush down the hallway past them, recognizing the sensitive nature of the news he was relaying. “Along with her companions, a Miss Rarity, Miss Applejack, Miss Fluttershy, Miss Pinkie Pie, and Miss Rainbow Dash. Additionally, their company includes a young dragon by the name of Spike, and a most unusual young lady who calls herself Soft Mane.”
For a second River could only stare, struggling to process just how bad this was. Prince Blueblood was one thing; take away his royal title and his admittedly good looks, and he was about as threatening as her son. Less threatening, in fact, since River doubted Blueblood could have defeated a ghoul the way Piggy had. For all the influence Blueblood wielded in high society, he wasn’t truly dangerous, which was what made his challenging Lex to a duel such a laughable action on his part.
But Twilight Sparkle was another matter entirely. She and her friends were famous for the challenges they’d overcome, having defeated monsters right out of legend such as Nightmare Moon and Discord. While River had no way of knowing if they were more or less powerful than the Royal Sisters, she knew that at the moment it didn’t matter; Lex – the pony whom River had quite firmly tied her own fate to – was in no condition to so much as tell someone off, let alone enter combat again. Which meant if Princess Twilight was here to finish what Celestia and Luna had started…
Turning away from her butler, River took a few seconds to gather her thoughts, counting to ten as she took a moment to remember the soothing tones of Ponygliacci. “Did they say what the purpose of their visit is?” she asked at length.
“Apparently, Miss Soft Mane is in possession of magic that can ameliorate Master Legis’s injuries,” answered Trotsworth. “The princess was quite emphatic in expressing her desire to help at the earliest available opportunity.”
“Oh, I bet she was,” laughed River darkly. That was the oldest trick in the book: create a problem for someone so that you could then turn around and offer them a solution…for a price. And while it was usually done more subtly than having one of your subordinates beat someone unconscious so you could offer to heal them, River could already imagine how Princess Twilight would solve that little dilemma. She’ll use the same excuse that Lex did for that Severance weapon of his, River felt sure. She’ll say she had no idea what Rainbow Dash was going to do, that she didn’t approve of it beforehoof and condemns it now. Maybe she’ll even throw in a nice little forced apology from that multicolored menace as a show of sincerity.
The difference was that, where Lex had been honest in not knowing what his scythe was going to do – something River hadn’t believed at first but did now, having spent enough time in her new ruler’s presence to know that he was scrupulously forthright in everything he did – River couldn’t find it in herself to believe the same of Twilight Sparkle. Years of political maneuvering had taught the Bank family matriarch that coincidence was the pretext that the powerful used to legitimize their schemes. That Rainbow Dash had arrived at just the right moment to deal a critical injury to Lex – a pony who was otherwise very nearly invincible, if even half of the stories she’d heard about his exploits were true – with Princess Twilight appearing just a few hours later with a remedy for his wounds was simply too convenient to be believed.
In fact, it was so convenient that River couldn’t help but wonder just how those circumstances had come about in the first place. While it was easy to think that Blueblood was involved somehow – since he and Twilight Sparkle were both royalty – River couldn’t see how that was possible. Even if his spoiled prince routine was just an act to disguise his true intentions, his being here had no real impact on anything, unless his role had been to distract Lex so that Rainbow Dash could get the drop on him.
And besides, it hadn’t been Blueblood who had brought Princess Twilight to her manor just now. According to Trotsworth, that had been the work of Tryout, Feather Duster’s husband. No matter how much River wracked her brain, she couldn’t see how that could possibly be part of some larger scheme on the maid’s part. While River knew that Lex’s defeat would also see her own fortunes plunge, Feather Duster wouldn’t need to go to such extreme lengths if she wanted revenge on her old boss. A harsh recommendation to Lex would be plenty sufficient there, and wouldn’t run any risk of her daughter being caught in the crossfire the way she apparently had been during the fight with that Starlight Glimmer mare.
In fact, it was Starlight Glimmer – the pony who showed up out of nowhere right before Princess Twilight arrived, and who wield powerful magic of her own – whom River found the most suspicious. Based on the tidbits of information she’d gathered since they’d brought Lex back to her manor, River had managed to put together that Sonata had met her a short while ago in a small village nearby, where Starlight had been using her magic to remove the locals’ cutie marks as part of some bizarre equalist philosophy that she’d dreamed up.
To River, it had all the hallmarks of being a cover story.
Why would somepony so powerful focus on something as banal as equality? Why go to some tiny village in the middle of nowhere if she wanted to spread her philosophy to the masses? Why fight her way through waves of successive enemies, refusing to retreat despite how eyewitnesses had described her as growing progressively more tired, in order to draw Lex out?
The entire thing reeked of a conspiracy, one that involved Starlight Glimmer softening up Lex – and his extended network of allies – as much as she could, with Rainbow Dash swooping in to deliver the finishing blow. All at Princess Twilight’s behest so that she could show up after everything had concluded, offering to fix things with her opportune use of a healing spell in order to…what? Demand political concessions from Lex? Force him to renounce his religion? Make him teach her how his style of magic worked?
Or perhaps Princess Twilight had no intention of healing Lex at all. Maybe Starlight Glimmer and Rainbow Dash hadn’t been trying to wear Lex down, but kill him outright, and now that they’d failed Twilight Sparkle was stepping in with a benign-sounding lie in order to finish the job personally.
“Madam?” Trotsworth’s voice intruded on her thoughts, making River realize that she’d been standing there in silent contemplation for almost a full minute. “Madam? What shall I tell the princess?”
“…I don’t care what you tell her,” River decided after a moment’s consideration. “Just find some way to stall her for as long as you can. Her and her friends. Do whatever you have to in order to keep them right where they are. No tours of the manor. No moving them to more comfortable accommodations. Just delay them until I tell you otherwise.”
“Very good, madam.”
River let out a slow breath as Trotsworth turned and left, knowing she’d bought a little time. The fact that Princess Twilight and her friends had arrived via the front door and formally asked to see Lex instead of simply storming the place meant that they were concerned about appearances. They wanted whatever they were going to do to look legitimate to everypony, probably to avoid a local uprising when they did it (suggesting that if this was an assassination attempt, they’d probably try to make it look like an accident…maybe by saying that Soft Mane’s “healing spell” went awry somehow). But that meant that so long as the possibility of being able to see Lex without raising a ruckus seemed possible, they’d be reluctant to eschew it.
“Now we just need to figure out what to do in the meantime,” murmured River to herself as she turned and walked back down the hallway.
This particular wing of her manor had become the new field hospital for Vanhoover. With various rooms set up specifically to hold supplies, dispose of medical waste, conduct examinations, perform surgeries, provide living quarters for the medical ponies, and act as recovery and observation rooms for patients – something which took up considerable space all on its own, since Doctor House Call had insisted that patients needed to be kept a certain distance apart in order to minimize any risk of infection spreading between sick or injured ponies – the area had been at maximum capacity for some time. That had changed a few days ago, when work on a new cloud storage facility in the village had finally allowed for some of the rainclouds that Lex had procured from Cloudsdale to be moved out of the manor at last, freeing up needed space.
That space was being put to good use now, as medical ponies were rushing about, doing their best to deal with the influx of patients that they’d received as a result of Starlight Glimmer’s rampage. A glance at one of the open doorways on her left let River glimpse a nurse saying something to a pair of bandaged pegasi mares whom she didn’t recognize, one shaking her head in response to a question while the other cradled her companion protectively. Another room had Feather Duster holding a crying infant as she fussed over her daughter, who was apparently refusing to go back to her bed as she instead flittered between where her friends were resting.
But it was the room at the end of the hall that was River’s destination, and she took a deep breath before she knocked, not waiting for an answer before she opened it and stepped in.
“-important thing is that he’s stabilized for now,” said House Call, giving River only the briefest of glances as he kept talking to the pony sitting alongside the room’s only other occupant. “Considering that his heart stopped twice on the way back here, that’s an encouraging sign.”
From the look on Sonata’s face, she didn’t seem very encouraged.
Given the state that Lex was in, it was easy to see why.
Lying unmoving on a hospital bed that had been brought back from Vanhoover, half of his face was completely covered by bandages, the white cloth smelling of antiseptic and blood. Similar dressings dotted his torso and legs, but they couldn’t hide the massive number of cuts, scrapes, and bruises covering his body. Only his left foreleg was completely clear of bandages, instead being where a syringe had been inserted into his arm, connected to several bags of liquid hanging from an intravenous pole.
But as bad as his external wounds looked, River knew that the ones she couldn't see were worse. Between the internal bleeding, dangerously low blood pressure, and multiple bouts of heart failure, it had looked like Lex wouldn’t survive the trip back to the manor. That he had was a testament to House Call’s skill, but while River hadn’t understood the full extent of the medical jargon that had been thrown around once they’d arrived and the doctors had begun treating Lex in earnest, she’d still been able to make out the bottom line: that the equipment and supplies they’d gathered were woefully inadequate for providing the care he needed.
Moving around where House Call was continuing to reassure Sonata that Lex still had a chance, River glanced down at the clipboard that the stallion was holding, noting that he was angling it away from the other mare’s line of sight. While the majority of it was numbers and technical terms, she could still make out what was written near the bottom.
“Condition: critical.”
Princess Twilight might very well have been there to end Lex's life, but River knew that there was a very real chance that would happen even without her doing anything. In which case, the possibility that the alicorn was being genuine with her offer of healing magic had to be seriously considered. Concessions, no matter how heavy they might be, were better than death.
But that was a decision River knew better than to make on her own.
“Doctor,” she interjected when House Call paused. “Can you give us a moment?”
House Call raised a brow at that, glancing between River and Sonata, before giving a crisp nod. “I’ll go check on Aria,” he announced. “She should be awake soon.”
River nodded, waiting until the door had closed before turning her attention to Sonata.
She looked awful. Her eyes were red from crying. Her coat was dirty from falling over several times during their mad rush back to the manor. Her mane was disheveled, the result of her savagely undoing the braids she’d styled her hair in before. But it was the heartbroken look on her face that looked worst of all, staring at Lex in a way that made it clear she was silently begging for him to be alright.
“Sonata,” began River softly. “I need to tell you about something that’s just happened.”
Wincing at Aria’s angry shout, Sonata nevertheless stood her ground. “But they can help! If we tell Twilight we want Soft Mane to heal Lex-”
“This is why you’re the stupid one!” roared Aria, her features twisted with rage. “Why you’ve always been the stupid one! Because you don’t have a brain in your head! Do you really think we can trust Twilight Sparkle – the girl who’s put the screws to us every time she’s had the chance! – to heal the guy who’s trying to overthrow- Ow! Stop that!” That last part was directed at House Call, who was attempting to telekinetically re-wrap the bandages around her torso.
Nor did her angry command make him cease his efforts. “You need to stop moving around so much,” he explained patiently. “If any of the fractures in your ribs turn into breaks then Lex won’t be the only pony with injuries so severe that magic will be needed to treat them.”
The comment earned him a glare from the furious Siren. “Don’t you dare joke about- OW! You’re doing that on purpose!”
Watching the antics, River sighed. She had just finished explaining to Sonata – who had jumped at the idea that there was a way to potentially help Lex – why it might not be the best idea to trust Princess Twilight and her friends when Aria had barged in. Apparently having woken up a little earlier than House Call had been expecting, she had understandably wanted to know what had happened after she’d lost consciousness, and had flipped out when she’d heard how badly Lex was injured. Things had only gotten worse when Sonata had told her exactly who was offering to help him now, and River knew that would likely continue unless she intervened.
Fortunately, she had a pretty good idea for how to change the topic, at least for a moment. “Has there been any change with Starlight Glimmer?” she asked, looking at House Call
Not looking up from where he was bandaging Aria’s ribs, the doctor shook his head. “I stuck my head in her room a few minutes ago and she still hasn’t woken up, which isn’t surprising based on her preliminary exam. Her injuries might not be as severe as Lex’s, but she’s still in bad shape, mostly because of how much she pushed herself.” He gave a rueful shake of his head then, long years of medical training leaving him unable to help but scowl in disapproval at how anyone could abuse their body so recklessly.
“She deserves it, that miserable nag,” growled Aria.
“I wish I knew how to take her cutie mark away,” muttered Sonata, her ears folding back as she glanced at the equals sign still marring her flank. “That’d show her.”
“And you still feel confident that she won’t be casting spells anytime soon?” continued River, mostly to give Sonata and Aria more time to calm down. They’d need to make a decision about Twilight Sparkle’s offer, and soon, but hopefully they’d be able to do it without going completely overboard.
For his part, House Call simply raised a brow as he looked back at River with an expression of mild disbelief. “I sincerely doubt it. Even if she was willing to strain her body more than she already has, she’ll have a hard time using magic with the hairline fracture she sustained to her horn.”
River nodded. “Good, then we-”
“Though I have to ask,” interrupted House Call, turning to give River his full attention as he finished bandaging Aria. “Given the state Miss Glimmer is in, is it really necessary to restrain her?”
“YES!”
The shout came from Aria and Sonata together, the two mares answering before River could so much as open her mouth and clearly catching House Call by surprise. “But she’s hardly a threat to anypony now,” he protested, “and the ropes are only making it harder to treat her.”
“I’m sure that your competent team of medical practitioners will be able to work around them,” replied River flatly. “But right now we should get back to the topic at hoof.” She paused for a moment, her eyes flickering between Sonata and Aria, hoping that they’d both managed to calm down a little. “What do we do about Princess Twilight’s offer?”
“We have to say yes!” blurted Sonata.
“Over my dead body!” shot back Aria.
Sonata stomped a hoof in agitation. “Look, I know that I’m dumb, but I also know Soft Mane! She’s, like, a really nice girl!”
Aria’s lip curled at that. “I seem to recall you telling me that she and Lex didn’t get along. Now all of a sudden she’s his best friend?”
“It’s not like she’s the only one here! Pinkie is too, and she totes wouldn’t go along with some mean sneak attack!”
“You mean like the one her rainbow-haired buddy pulled that did this to Lex in the first place?!”
“WELL I DON’T HEAR YOU COMING UP WITH ANY BETTER IDEAS!” screamed Sonata, losing what little composure she’d managed to recover. But rather than erupting with rage, she seemed to deflate as soon as the words left her mouth, sinking to the ground as sobs began to spill from her lips and a fresh round of tears trickled down her cheeks. “I know this whole thing with Twilight might be a trap,” she hiccupped, “and it might not even work at all, since Soft Mane worships Lash-whatshername, and Lex flipped out when Cozy tried to heal him back when we were all staying in that warehouse, but what else are we supposed to do?! Lex is hurt really bad and he needs help and I’m afraid of what’ll happen if he doesn’t get any!”
“We have people who can help him!” insisted Aria, her sister’s breakdown softening her attitude only a little.
“Like who?!” moaned Sonata. “Cleansweep lost her magic snake fighting Starlight, and she can’t use her powers without it! It’s not going to be back until the next time she goes to sleep and wakes up, and no,” she added, seeing Aria opening her mouth, “I totes already asked her if I could just use my magic to make her take a quick nap in order to get it back. She said it doesn’t work like that. She has to get, like, an actual good night’s sleep. So she won’t be able to help until tomorrow morning.” She looked at House Call then, her expression stricken. “Is Lex gonna make it that long?”
Although he didn’t flinch at suddenly being put on the spot by a distraught mare, House Call didn’t look happy with the question, and no one missed how he paused before answering. “There’s no way to be certain,” he said at last. “With the equipment we have here, all I can say for sure is that right now he’s doing better than he was when we brought him in, but that could change at any time.”
“No, it won’t!” hissed Aria. “Why is everyone acting like Lex doesn’t have a chance?! He can make it until tomorrow morning!”
“You don’t know that!” sniffled Sonata.
Her sister’s rebuke made Aria grit her teeth. “Yes I do! YES I DO!” She looked around at each of the others, daring them to contradict her. “Lex is going to make it through this! If he needs to survive until tomorrow morning then he’ll survive until tomorrow morning! He promised me!” She looked at the corner of the room then, where Lex was still lying insensate in bed. “He promised me that he’d protect me when Twilight showed up again! He won’t-, he always keeps his promises! Just like when he said he’d make me a pony and fix my v-voice…”
The tremor in her words had been obvious, and Sonata climbed to her hooves, taking a step closer to her sister. “Aria…”
“Get away from me!” Spinning around to face Sonata, Aria savagely swiped at the space between them. “I don’t want sympathy you from you! You don’t believe in him at all, even after everything the two of you have been through together! You’re supposed to be in love with him, but you’re acting like he’s going to die! Like it’s okay for you to just say goodbye to him because you already told him how you feel! Well I haven’t!”
By now her eyes were wet and her lower lip was quivering. Turning her back on the others, Aria shakily moved toward Lex’s bedside. “I haven’t told him how I feel about him yet and that’s how I know he’s going to make it through this! Because he can’t…he can’t die before I do! I can’t have missed my chance! I can’t…I just can’t…”
Hearing Aria’s voice dissolve into choked sobs was all Sonata could take. “Aria!” Rushing over, she threw her forelegs around her sister, who struggled for only a moment before leaning into the embrace, weeping bitterly as Sonata did the same.
Their shared outpouring of grief didn’t last very long, with House Call and River Bank both averting their eyes until the pair were able to begin collecting themselves. But their crying had only just dwindled to shaky breathing and the occasional whimper when there was a knock at the door, causing everyone to look up.
“Sorry,” offered Cloudbank quietly as she slipped into the room, Thermal Draft coming in behind her. “I heard the yelling, and thought maybe I could help.” Other than a few bruises and some oversized band-aids, the two had little to show in the way of injuries, having taken the lightest wounds of everyone the doctors had brought back. As if feeling guilty about that, both winced at the sight of Lex, with Cloudbank biting her lip as Thermal Draft’s eyes widened, her fore-hooves coming up to cover her mouth in horror.
“Help how?” demanded River pointedly, not recognizing the duo.
But Sonata did. “That’s right!” she gasped, looking at Cloudbank. “You have healing magic! I remember now! Lex helped you discover it so you could save your girlfriend!”
Aria’s eyes widened. “I remember that too!” Jumping up, she pointed at Lex. “Well?! What are you waiting for?! Use it on him this instant!”
The demand made Cloudbank wince. “I can’t. Not right now.”
The look in Aria’s eyes made it clear that answer wasn’t acceptable. “What do you mean ‘not right now’?!”
“The Night Mare lets me pray to her for spells,” explained Cloudbank hurriedly. “But I’d already used the healing spell I’d prepared before Lex resurrected me.”
River’s eyes widened at that. “Wait, resurrected-”
“Not now, okay?” interrupted Sonata, her voice tense. Although she’d been surprised to see Cloudbank and Thermal Draft alive again when they’d showed up to help stop Starlight, Sonata had eventually recalled that Aria had been saying something about Lex bringing some ponies back to life right before all the fighting had started. But none of that was important now. “When can you get the Night Mare to give you another healing spell?”
“Midnight.” Cloudbank let out a slow breath as she spoke, knowing that probably wasn’t what they’d wanted to hear. “She grants me new spells when I pray to her at midnight.”
“That’s over nine hours from now,” noted House Call.
“Which is better than the sixteen hours it would take if we waited for tomorrow morning,” added River, looking over at Sonata and Aria. Nor was she the only one, as House Call, Thermal Draft, and Cloudbank all did the same, silently affirming that the choice was theirs to make.
Recognizing that, Sonata looked back at Aria, who met her gaze with a look that was equal parts challenging and – to Sonata’s surprise – pleading. “He’ll last that long,” murmured Aria softly. “I know he will.”
For a moment Sonata wavered. More than anything else she wanted to run to where Soft Mane was and beg her to heal Lex immediately, terrified that he’d slip away at any moment. Even if there was a chance it was a trap, that didn’t frighten her nearly as much as losing the one she loved.
But right now, Aria was even more scared than she was. She was facing the possibility of losing the one she loved without ever having confessed what was in her heart to him. Sonata couldn’t imagine how that must have felt, and yet Aria was somehow still brave enough to want to wait. Seeing that now…
It made Sonata want to be brave as well.
“I know he will too.”
A smile – a real smile – crossed Aria’s lips at that, and Sonata returned it before looking back at River.
Tryout grinned at his daughter’s shocked expression, holding up the signed sheet of paper. “That’s right! I got an autograph from the Rainbow Dash! Not to mention a few of her best pieces of advice at being an awesome flyer.” His smile turned cocky then, chest puffing out. “Of course, I gave her a few recommendations of my own. Wing exercises, balance practice, that sort of thing. We were basically trading tips the entire way back here.” From the way Cleansweep was still staring at him, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging open, he knew it was absolutely blowing her mind that her dad was friends with a celebrity. “In fact, she may still be hanging out in a certain nearby parlor room if somepony wants an autograph of her own,” he teased.
“She’s here?!” Cleansweep croaked, still looking like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You brought Rainbow Dash here?!”
“What can I say? We’re buddies now,” chuckled Tryout, playing it cool even though he was inwardly beaming at how excited his little girl was. This was even better than that time he’d gotten an exploding cake for her birthday party! “And not just her either, she’s also here with her friends, including a certain purple alicorn princess,” he added slyly.
Out of his peripheral vision, Tryout could see Feather Duster look at him sharply from across the room, straightening up from where she had just finished tucking the baby she’d been cradling into bed next to a slumbering filly. Like the rest of their daughter’s friends, the sleeping filly had a few bandages around her, the dressings a testament to the intensity of whatever roughhousing they’d been doing, as was how soundly they were all sleeping now. Tryout was almost sorry he’d missed whatever they’d been up to.
Of course, his wife hadn’t shared his attitude about foals being foals, fussing over Cleansweep and the others endlessly, huffing at him whenever he’d tried to get her to calm down. In fact, judging from the way her lips were pursed, she was upset with him about something again now. That wasn’t too unusual though; Feather was a real doll, but she was always getting worked up over nothing, no matter how much he tried to tell her not to sweat the small stuff. Thankfully, Cleansweep takes after me in that regard.
Case in point, their daughter was already leaping into the air, her little wings flapping faster than a hummingbird’s. “W-we have to do something!” she gasped. “We have to keep them away from Lex!”
Tryout rolled his eyes. Okay, maybe she’d inherited a little of her mother’s chronic anxiety.
“Don’t you worry, kiddo,” he soothed, reaching up to tousle Cleansweep’s mane. “After the trouncing that Rainbow Dash told me she gave him, I doubt that sourpuss your mom works for will try to pick a fight with her again. You should ask her to tell you about how she thrashed him. It was epic!”
“Tryout,” murmured Feather, a warning tone in her voice.
Holding out his forehooves in a placating gesture, Tryout laughed. “I know, I know. Violence is never the answer.” He leaned closer to his daughter then, lowering his voice to a stage-whisper. “This time, violence was the question. And Rainbow Dash’s answer was ‘yes please!’”
“Dad!”
Hearing the strained tone in his daughter’s voice, Tryout straightened up, knowing she was getting impatient to go see the superstars that were only a few rooms away. “Alright, alright. You run along and go meet the bigwigs, just don’t pester them too much; they’ve had a long trip here. And don’t worry about your friends missing out while you have all the fun. Once they wake up, your mom and I will send them right after you. Now shoo!”
For a moment Cleansweep hesitated, doubtlessly wondering if it was really alright for her to go meet some of the most famous ponies in Equestria while her friends caught some Z’s. But just when Tryout was about to reassure her that it was fine, she seemed to come to some sort of decision, and zipped out the door so fast she was almost a blur. The sight made Tryout chuckle some more, his heart filled with joy at being able to do something nice for his little girl.
At least until a second later, when Feather Duster uttered the words he’d learned to dread over the course of their marriage. “Tryout, we need to talk.”
Feather Duster bit her lip, screwing up every bit of courage she could muster as she flew through the mazelike hallways of the manor.
Even knowing where she was going, it took her a few minutes to find her destination. Although she’d lived in River Bank’s manor for over two weeks now, the parlor at the southern end of the first floor wasn’t a place she’d frequented in that time. But after making only one wrong turn, she found herself in front of the correct door, muffled voices audible from the other side of it.
For a moment she hesitated, her determination faltering as a wave of nervous tension suddenly washed over her, suddenly very aware of how she was doing this all on her own. “Stop it!” she whispered to herself, hating how cowardly she felt at that moment. Crunchy didn’t hesitate when he protected me from Starlight Glimmer’s attack! Lex didn’t back down when he took her on all by himself! Taking a deep breath, she glared at the door, knowing that her enemies were right behind it, no doubt plotting to finish what Rainbow Dash had started. But that wasn’t going to happen on her watch! I’m a member of the Night Mare’s Knights! One of Lex’s students! This time, I’m going to be the one who protects everypony else!
Then, before she lost her nerve, Cleansweep charged forward, knocking the door open and flying into the parlor at full speed.
The six mares inside – along with a foal-sized lizard and some creature that looked like a pony from the waist down and a…something from the waist up – all froze, staring at her in surprise exactly the way Cleansweep had hoped they would.
Knowing that she had to strike before any of them had a chance to react, Cleansweep accelerated. Despite having charged in blind, she’d gambled that there’d be at least one target sitting somewhere in front of the door, and she’d been right. Slamming into the unicorn mare with the white coat and purple mane and tail – Rarity, she knew – the two of them immediately went tumbling, the wooden chair the older mare had been sitting in falling backwards as the two of them hit the ground in a heap.
Where is it where is it where is it?! Cleansweep screamed silently as she fumbled her hooves at the other mare’s neck, looking for the famous piece of jewelry that should have been there, desperate to snatch it and run away before the ponies around her could react.
But there was no Element of Harmony to be found.
Panicking, Cleansweep twisted her head every which way as she struggled to extricate herself from the flailing mare, the shouts erupting from everyone around her making it clear that she only had a few seconds left to carry out her plan. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t spot anyone wearing one of the famous magical ornaments that she’d seen them sporting in pictures, despite how sure she’d been that they’d have them out and ready to use against Lex. Why?! Why aren’t they wearing them?!
Cleansweep hadn’t been sure if Rainbow Dash had been wearing her Element when she’d ambushed Lex. The speed of the attack, combined with how unexpected it had been and the fact that two doctors had already been tending to her and Fruit Crunch at the time, had made it impossible to be absolutely certain, particularly since she hadn’t been concerned about how the brutal pegasus had been dressed at the time. It had only been a few minutes ago, when her dad had let it slip that Princess Twilight and her friends were also here, that Cleansweep had felt certain that her memory was playing tricks on her. Rainbow Dash must have been wearing her Element, and now that the rest of her team had caught up to her, they were going to friendship-blast Lex into oblivion!
So she’d come up with a spur-of-the-moment plan. She was pretty sure she’d heard somewhere that all six Elements needed to be together to work, which meant that if she could grab one of them and hide it somewhere, Lex would be safe…or at least, safer than he would have been otherwise. Except nopony was wearing them after all so where were they?!
Their bags, realized Cleansweep a second later, her eyes falling on some luggage in the corner of the room. They have to be in their bags!
Righting herself at last, Cleansweep leaped off of Rarity (whose breath exploded from her lungs as she was used as a springboard) and rushed toward the suitcases piled on the other side of the room. With no time to search through them, her only option was to grab one at random and take off with it. The Night Mare willing, it’d be one that had one of the Elements in it, otherwise-
Her thoughts and her forward motion were both abruptly cut off as a lasso suddenly shot out and coiled around her middle, keeping her from reaching the luggage. “Whoa there, little filly!” came a husky voice from directly behind her. “Slow down a mite!”
Somehow managing to swallow the fear that was suddenly threatening to devour her alive, Cleansweep flapped her wings harder, trying to break free. But all she accomplished was to make her wings ache, feeling herself being dragged backward a second later.
“Ooh! Is she giving out surprise hugs?!” cheered a hyper-sounding voice to her left, causing Cleansweep to look over and see a pink earth mare – belatedly recognizing her as Pinkie Pie – grinning and hopping in place as she looked at Cleansweep. “I want one next!” she declared, leaping at the filly with her forelegs outstretched.
Thinking only to avoid getting caught, Cleansweep flew in the other direction with a yelp, curving in a wide arc thanks to the rope still holding her. Belatedly it occurred to her that she could fly around the pony who’d lassoed her – Applejack, she confirmed with a glance – and tie her up in her own rope. But that would still leave her caught in the loop at the end of it, and-
“Hey!” yelled Rainbow Dash, suddenly appearing directly in Cleansweep’s path with an angry look on her face. “What’s the big idea, just barging in and tackling my friend like that?!”
You’re one to talk! But Cleansweep didn’t have a chance to vocalize the thought, dropping down and doubling back in an effort to avoid Rainbow Dash-
Only for the rope to get tangled in the legs of the room’s central table as she went low, immediately causing Cleansweep to veer off-course. Unable to compensate for the sudden change in direction, she found herself bound to one of the table’s thick wooden supports a second later, the ropes refusing to budge no matter how much she struggled. In fact, they seemed to be getting tighter, winding around her belly, chest, and neck in a way that made it hard to breathe…
But the lack of air persisted for only a moment. A second later the ropes were outlined in a deep pink aura, unwinding from around her as though alive. As a rush of air filled her lungs, Cleansweep belatedly registered that same aura picking her up as well, holding her steady – but also firmly – and lifting her into the air, in front of the worried gaze of Equestria’s youngest princess. “Are you alright?”
“L-lemme go!” coughed Cleansweep, trying to wriggle out of Princess Twilight’s telekinesis.
To her mild surprise, the alicorn complied with her demand, sitting her down on a nearby couch and letting her aura fade away. “Is that better?” she asked, smiling gently.
For a moment, Cleansweep was tempted to make another rush for the bags in the corner, but with Princess Twilight between her and them, along with Applejack on her other side – her lasso already retrieved and coiled if she needed to use it again – she knew she’d never make it. I failed, she realized with a sinking feeling, watching as the little lizard and the half-pony thing helped Rarity up, Pinkie Pie bouncing around the room to give a scowling Rainbow Dash a sudden hug from behind. I’ll never be able to make off with one of the Elements now!
The thought made her bite her lip. After everything Lex and Crunchy and everyone else had done to protect everypony, she hadn’t been able to do anything! Worse, she’d gotten herself captured! Feeling her eyes starting to water, she grit her teeth, refusing to cry in front of her enemies.
“It’s okay,” came a soft voice, causing Cleansweep to look over as a pegasus mare – one who had yellow fur like her own, except not as vivid, and a pink mane and tail – whom she realized had to be Fluttershy, climbed out from behind the couch, giving her a gentle smile. “I hope I’m not being rude by saying this, but you look very scared. Is there something we can do to make you feel better?”
“Does it hurt anywhere?” asked Applejack, moving closer. “That was quite a tumble you took.”
“She’s not the only one,” coughed Rarity, shooting Cleansweep an upset look as the two non-ponies righted her chair and helped her sit back down.
“Aw, I bet Soft Mane can fix that right up,” replied the lizard, causing Cleansweep to frown. Hadn’t the stories about Princess Twilight mentioned that she had some sort of talking reptile? “That goes for you too,” he added before she could keep thinking about it, looking right at Cleansweep as he spoke. “If it hurts anywhere, just say the word and she can take care of it.”
He concluded by pointing a thumb at the half-pony, who nodded. “I have some healing magic, so if you-”
“I don’t want your help!” snapped Cleansweep. “You stay away from me!”
“Geez, she’s just trying to be nice,” huffed Rainbow Dash, crossing her forelegs over her chest as she hovered in the air, having managed to extricate herself from Pinkie’s hug. “You could learn a thing or two from her, you know. You practically knocked Rarity into next week and you still haven’t said you’re sorry.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” growled Cleansweep, giving the pegasus a dark look.
Rainbow frowned, more in confusion than irritation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Rainbow Dash, calm down,” admonished Twilight gently. “I think Fluttershy’s right, she’s just really scared.” Turning her attention back to Cleansweep, the alicorn knelt down so that she was at eye-level with the filly. “My name’s Twilight Sparkle. I don’t know what’s wrong, but if there’s something you’re afraid of, I bet my friends and I can help.”
A round of nods followed, though Fluttershy’s was a bit more hesitant. “It’s not, um, something really frightening is it? Like some sort of horrible monster, or…” She glanced at the open door that Cleansweep had flown in through, her eyes widening in realization. “Is it that pony who lives here, Lex Legis? Are you running away from him?”
That was the last straw. “You don’t get to say that about Lex!” shrieked Cleansweep, jumping up as she flared her tiny wings out as wide as she could. “He’s the nicest, most caring pony in all of Equestria! He’s the reason that Vanhoover’s doing as well as it is right now! It’s thanks to him that we’re building new houses and everyone can buy food and feel safe when they sleep at night! He’s paid ponies to work jobs and got Tall Tale to send us supplies and saved us from all sorts of horrible monsters! He saved me and my best friend from that evil pony just this morning! And instead of showing up to thank him for taking such good care of us, she” – her hoof thrust out to point at Rainbow Dash accusingly – “tried to kill him, and now the rest of you are here to help her do it! Well guess what?”
She faltered as she tried to think of the most intimidating thing she could say, only to come up blank, reaching for the first thing that came to mind. “You're…you’re gonna have to go through me first! And a lot of other really tough ponies too! And…and…and we’re not scared because even if you kill us, Lex will bring us all back to life!”
Twilight’s eyebrows shot upward. “Back to life?” she echoed, her voice incredulous.
“That’s right!” Seizing on how shocked her foe looked, Cleansweep pressed the point, having overheard those two mares who had attacked Starlight Glimmer with a cloud talking about that after the doctors had brought them all back. “He brought a bunch of ponies back to life with the Night Mare’s magic just this morning, even though they were lost in the city weeks ago! So there’s nothing you can do to scare us! We’ll stop you, even if-”
“Is everything alright?”
The voice caused everyone to look at the doorway, seeing Trotsworth standing there. When no answer came in response to his question, he gave a polite bow. “I do apologize for interrupting,” he said, as though he’d just intruded on a friendly game of billiards rather than a shrieking tirade. “Miss Cleansweep, your mother has asked that you come see her at your earliest convenience. She’s awaiting you in the medical wing.”
It took Cleansweep a moment to realize what she was being told. Licking her lips, she glanced at the ponies surrounding her, and took a slow step toward the old butler. When no one moved to stop her, she broke into a run, rushing over and giving the elderly stallion a hug once she’d crossed the threshold, knowing that he’d rescued her as surely as Lex had. For his part, Trotsworth smiled as he put a hoof on her back. “There now, it’s quite alright,” he murmured soothingly. “You’d best run along. You don’t want to keep your mother waiting.”
Nodding, she took off down the hallway, wings fluttering as she sped away from the scene of her disastrous failure. But as she departed, she caught Trotsworth’s voice as he spoke again.
“Your Highness, I’m afraid that, in conjunction with Master Legis’s medical staff and several interested parties, Miss Dusk has elected not to avail herself of your offer to assist with his recovery.”
“She doesn’t want our help?” came Twilight’s disbelieving voice a second later.
“I’m afraid not,” was Trotsworth’s answer, his voice as unflappable as ever. “Furthermore, in accordance with her wishes, as well as those of Miss Bank, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you and your party to leave immediately.”
Twilight shook her head in response to Fluttershy’s question. “I don’t know. I was so sure that Sonata would accept our help. I never thought she’d turn us away.”
“I’m surprised too.” Soft Mane glanced back at the manor, the large house already a blur to her even though they were less than a hundred feet away from it. “I didn’t get to know her very well when we were back on Everglow, but based on how upset Rainbow Dash said she was, you’d think she’d want someone to heal Lex right away.” She scowled a little at that last part, unable to help but feel somewhat disparaged at being refused. “Maybe she’s come around to his way of thinking, and doesn’t want to let a freak near her boyfriend.”
“I dunno,” murmured Spike, still looking a bit disturbed by news of Lex’s recent dragonslaying. “She might have been a villain when Twilight first met her, but she really seemed like she was turning good the last few times we saw her. Pinkie, what do you think?”
The question made Pinkie tilt her head in puzzlement. “Why would I know?”
“Well, you’re the first pony she became friends with, sugarcube,” ventured Applejack. “If anypony can hazard a guess about why she’d say no to Soft Mane’s healin’ her stallion, it’d be you.”
“Hmm.” Putting a hoof to her chin, the party pony’s expression morphed into one of intense concentration. “Well, if I had to guess…I’d say she was worried about the same thing as that filly that jumped us a few minutes ago where because Rainbow Dash hurt the love of her life really badly even though he’s apparently been doing good deeds ever since he got here that now Sonata doesn’t trust that we really want to help and probably thinks that we’re lying about healing Lex and that we’ll actually bump him off as soon as we get the chance in order to get revenge for Princess Luna. But who knows for sure?”
An awkward silence fell then, with Rainbow Dash rubbing the back of her neck in mild embarrassment at being the source of their latest setback. “Going after him seemed like a good idea at the time,” she muttered.
Twilight shook her head, not wanting to revisit that topic. “What we need to focus on is what we can do now. If Sonata won’t let us help Lex, then we need to figure out a way to change her mind.”
“Maybe we should just give her a little time?” ventured Fluttershy. “If she’s more worried about losing the pony she loves than she is about us, she might decide to trust us just a little.”
“Pfft, what kind of boring plan is that?” scoffed Rainbow Dash, quickly recovering her poise. “I say we wait until it’s dark and then sneak in and have Soft Mane heal Lex before anyone knows we’re there. Then Sonata and everypony else will know that we’re here to help.” Nodding at her own brilliance, she turned to Twilight. “You’ve got an invisibility spell, right? Just use that on us and this’ll be no sweat!”
But Twilight didn’t look nearly as confident. “That spell only lasts a few minutes, and we’d need to search the entire place. Not to mention what would happen if somepony found us sneaking back inside after we were thrown out.”
“What we need is somepony who’ll vouch for us,” declared Applejack. “Someone Sonata trusts, and who’ll be willin’ to trust us.”
“Spike and I met a mare who said she talked to Sonata a little bit in Tall Tale after Lex, um…got into a fight there,” recalled Soft Mane. Despite her attempt at being circumspect, she frowned as she saw Spike wince. “But it didn’t sound like a close friendship or anything. And for all I know she’s gone back there by now.”
“Maybe we should go to Tall Tale!” Pinkie jumped up and down at the suggestion. “I bet Sonata made a bunch of really good friends while she and Lex were there!”
“Except we don’t have a quick way to get there, since I can’t teleport us to a place I’ve never been to,” sighed Twilight, glancing at the harbor. “I suppose we could ask somepony for a ride, but I’m not sure anyone here is willing to do us a favor right now…except maybe Prince Blueblood.”
Just saying his name made Twilight roll her eyes, but to her mild surprise she was the only one who did. “Rarity?” When she received no answer, she walked over to the group’s only unicorn, who was staring into space with a thoughtful look on her face. “Is everything alright?”
“Hm?” Blinking, Rarity belatedly turned her attention to Twilight. “I’m terribly sorry, darling. What were you saying?”
“She was suggestin’ that maybe we could get that Blueblood fella to give us a lift to Tall Tale,” explained Applejack.
But aside from grimacing at Blueblood’s name, Rarity only looked more confused. “Tall Tale? Whyever would we want to go there?”
“Duh,” interjected Rainbow Dash. “So that we could track down any friends of Sonata’s and get them to come back here and help us convince her to give us a chance. Weren’t you listening?”
An uncomfortable laugh escaped Rarity’s lips. “My apologies. I think I’m still a shade off-balance from being bowled over by that filly before. Plus, it was very upsetting hearing that the poor dear thought we were assassins. To have such worries when she doesn’t look any older than Sweetie Belle, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.”
She took a deep breath then, giving her mane a toss as she visibly collected herself. “I’ll admit I don’t have any better ideas, but I’m not sure asking Blueblood for help is wise. He’s not exactly the sort of stallion who’ll inconvenience himself for the sake of others, even when it’s a lady asking. And in the unlikely instance that he was willing to take us to Tall Tale and back, do we know for certain that Sonata has any close friends there?”
“I guess not,” admitted Twilight, her ears folding back as another plan fell apart. “But I’m not sure what else we can try.”
A reassuring smile on his face, Spike went over and put a claw on Twilight’s side. “You’ll figure something out, Twilight. You always do.”
“Thanks, Spike.” Returning the little dragon’s smile, Twilight couldn’t resist pulling him in for a quick hug. “But I’ll admit, it would be nice if an answer just fell out of the sky all of a sudden.”
Long experience made everyone glance upward then, spending a few seconds scanning the atmosphere for any sort of convenient answer. But when none appeared, Twilight gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “I guess that was too much to ask-”
“Sweet Celestia, it’s really them!”
Caught off-guard, the group turned to see five ponies approaching from the opposite direction of the manor. At the forefront was an earth stallion clad in a bandana, grinning widely as he gestured at the others in his party: a pair of pegasi – a mare with a sea captain’s hat and a stallion walking alongside her – a unicorn mare with glasses, and another earth stallion. “And you said it couldn’t possibly be Princess Twilight and her friends,” laughed the bandana-clad pony, nudging the pegasus stallion. “But here they are! Wow!”
“Calm down, Sandbar,” muttered the unicorn, adjusting her glasses. “You’re making a scene.”
“You’ll have to forgive my friend,” began the pegasus stallion, giving respectful nod as his eyes swept over Twilight and the others, barely pausing as he looked at Spike and Soft Mane. “He’s just excited because we’re all getting ready to go on vacation. My name’s Ocean Spray, and this is Sandbar, Scrubby, Compass Rose, and our captain, C. Shells.”
“It’s nice to meet you all,” smiled Twilight. “I’m Twilight Sparkle, and these are my friends.”
A round of introductions later, Applejack spoke up. “Pardon if this sounds like I’m pryin’ into your all’s business, but this” – she gestured toward the manor house behind them – “seems like a mighty odd place to take a vacation.”
“That’s because it’s not,” snorted Scrubby, looking vaguely horrified at the idea. “We’re just telling Lex that we’re leaving so he doesn’t think…whatever he’d think if we suddenly disappeared without saying anything.”
A round of pointed looks were exchanged before Rainbow Dash cleared her throat. “So you guys know Lex Legis?” she asked, doing her best to sound casual. “And maybe Sonata too?”
Ocean Spray started to speak up, but stopped abruptly as C. Shells extended a foreleg out in front of him. “We’ve worked with them for a little while now, purely in a professional capacity” she replied diplomatically.
“‘Professional capacity’?” laughed Sandbar, incredulous. “Captain, Lex brought us back to life!”
That statement earned exasperated looks from his companions, and shocked ones from Twilight and her friends. But no one’s reaction was stronger than Rarity’s.
“My goodness!” she gasped, trotting forward until she was right in front of Sandbar. “Do you mean to say that you all actually died and Lex Legis resurrected you?”
“Oh, well, not all of us, just me and the captain,” chuckled Sandbar, surprised but clearly thrilled with the attention he was suddenly getting. “We were part of an elite team he put together for a special mission, and these other guys didn’t make the cut,” he bragged.
“Elite team my cutie mark,” muttered Scrubby.
“Really? How fascinating!” gushed Rarity, ignoring everypony else in favor of Sandbar. “As well as romantic! Why, your girlfriend must be absolutely overjoyed to have you suddenly return from beyond death!”
The comment made Sandbar flush, shuffling his fore-hoof awkwardly. “I, uh, I’m actually single.”
“Oh now surely you’re putting me on!” Giving Sandbar a once-over, Rarity shook her head a moment later. “A stallion so brave that he went on a special mission for this town’s ruler, so important that he was chosen to be brought back to life, and also so incredibly handsome, single? Why, I simply can’t believe it!”
“Aw, I’m not that handsome,” guffawed Sandbar, his ego visibly inflating with every word of praise. “You should have seen the scar I got at the Battle of the Bay!”
The boast drew an excited squeal from his new admirer. “Oh, you simply must tell me all about that!”
Watching the spectacle, Applejack took a step closer to her friends. “Y’all reckon that Rarity’s actin’ a mite unusual?”
Fluttershy nodded. “The last time I saw her be this, um, outgoing was when she was showing me how to be more assertive. She got a stallion to give her some asparagus she wanted.”
“She certainly seems to want that guy’s asparagus real bad,” noted Soft Mane wryly.
“Huh, and here I thought it had something to do with that guy saying that he was brought back to life,” noted Pinkie. “I mean, what with her being all quiet when that filly said that Lex could bring people back and now her acting all clingy when this guy said he was brought back.” She shrugged then. “Eh, must’ve just been me, I guess.”
Rainbow Dash frowned, glancing back at where Rarity now had her side pressed against Sandbar’s in an overly-familiar manner, nodding attentively as the stallion launched into a blow-by-blow of the adventures he’d had since coming to Vanhoover. “Hey, Twilight, do you think-”
“Rarity has the right idea,” interrupted Twilight, speaking a little too quickly. “These ponies clearly have some sort of relationship with Lex, and probably Sonata too, which means that they might be our only chance.”
“You’re probably right,” admitted Applejack. “But I think we’d be better off bein’ honest with them about what we’re tryin’ to do instead of butterin’ them up like toast at a breakfast buffet.”
“We can do both!” cheered Pinkie. “If they came back to life, then we should throw them a rebirthday party to celebrate!”
Twilight couldn’t help but smile a little at that, though the expression was slightly strained, one ear twitching toward where Rarity was still feeding Sandbar compliments. “If we want to heal Lex, it’s probably better to change Sonata’s mind as soon as we can, and a party might take too long.”
“Aw,” pouted Pinkie.
“Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of reason to celebrate if we can teach Lex the magic of friendship and complete our map-mission,” Twilight reassured her, before taking a deep breath and turning back toward where the other group of ponies were still watching, amazed, as Sandbar proceeded to hit it off with a mare who was way out of his league.
“Captain Shells? I’d like to talk to you and your crew for a moment…”
“How much longer are they going to keep us waiting?!”
Rainbow Dash’s complaint made Twilight sigh. “It’s only been twenty minutes,” she replied listlessly, glancing at the grandfather clock on the far wall of the now-familiar parlor. As hopeful as she’d felt when Trotsworth had agreed to let them back inside while C. Shells and her crew had gone to plead their case to Sonata, the waiting was starting to make her nerves fray, knowing that they’d be back to square one if this didn’t work. “I’m sure they just need a little more time.”
“I still think they should have taken whatshisname with them,” grumbled Spike, frowning as he glared at the corner of the parlor that was furthest from the door. Or rather, at where Rarity and Sandbar were seated on the small couch there, lost in what appeared to be a deep conversation, one which involved Sandbar doing most of the talking while Rarity listened. “If he really wanted to impress her, he’d fix the problem we’re having now instead of telling her a bunch of stories,” hmphed the little dragon, crossing his arms over his chest in displeasure. “They’re probably all made up anyway.”
Twilight stifled a giggle at that, glad to see that something had finally snapped Spike out of the funk he’d been in ever since he’d found out about Lex slaying a dragon a few weeks back. “I’m sure she’s just trying to make a good impression.”
“That’s right,” added Soft Mane, wearing a smirk that said she found Spike’s fit of jealousy amusing as well. “And besides, if you keep staring at them so much, you’ll make me feel lonely.”
But Spike wasn’t paying attention, waving away Soft Mane’s attempt to pull him closer to her. “Then go help Pinkie plan Lex’s get-well party,” he huffed dismissively. “I’m keeping my eye on that guy to make sure he doesn’t try anything funny with Rarity.”
The brushoff caused Soft Mane’s good mood to die instantly, but before she had a chance to utter a word, Pinkie was on her. “That’s a great idea!” squealed the earth mare, reaching into her mane and withdrawing a folder that was bulging from the amount of papers it held. “I haven’t met Lex before, so I’m having just a teensy bit of trouble filling out a party folder on him! So if you wouldn’t mind telling me if you know any of the following, that’d be really helpful! Question one: what’s Lex’s favorite kind of laugh? You can choose giggling, snorting, chuckling, chortling, snickering, tittering, guffawing…”
Twilight’s amusement at watching Soft Mane try to get a word in edgewise under Pinkie’s barrage of synonyms was cut off as Applejack moved to sit next her. “Twilight, you think maybe that Spike has a point?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “Not about that Sandbar fella, but, well…I know Rarity can be a bit of a flirt sometimes, but I ain’t never seen her act like that before.” Applejack nodded back toward the couple in the corner, causing Twilight to glance that way as well.
It wasn’t hard to see what she meant.
Rarity was curled up on a small loveseat in a way that put all of her curves on display. Partially reclining, she was leaning forward as though enraptured by every word coming out of Sandbar’s mouth, her eyes fluttering as she looked – no, as she gazed – at him. Even as Twilight watched, she threw her head back and laughed at something he said, holding one hoof in front of her mouth bashfully as she gave her mane a toss.
While Twilight didn’t consider herself an expert in courtship rituals – she’d only read a half-dozen books on the subject, which was barely enough to be considered a dabbler – it was obvious even to her that Rarity was sending out every signal she could that she was interested in the stallion across from her.
Shifting uncomfortably, Twilight shrugged. “Maybe he’s her type? I mean, Sandbar’s been here long enough that he’s clearly been on a few adventures, and we know Rarity likes-”
She caught herself before she finished, not wanting to follow that thought to its conclusion. But Applejack wasn’t about to let the matter drop. “Listen sugarcube, I know that a while back, Rarity asked you-”
“This really isn’t the time-”
“Rarity asked you if there was a way you could find some of that resurrection magic for Long Road.”
Twilight wilted in place at the name. Long Road had been a donkey whom she’d met during her first trip to Everglow. A holy warrior of stoic disposition, he’d been one of the first adventuring companions Twilight had made on that world, offering to accompany her into danger with no thought of a reward. While at first she’d chalked his joining her up to the selflessness that paladins – as pious knights of the benevolent gods were apparently called – were renowned for, it had taken Twilight some time to realize that there had been another reason Long Road had offered to watch over her: he had been interested in her.
Never comfortable with the prospect of dating, Twilight had done her best to avoid thinking about Long Road’s being attracted to her, instead focusing on exploring the new world that she’d been thrust into. To his credit, the donkey hadn’t pressed her to return his feelings, instead asking only to remain at her side until she figured out how she felt about him. It had been a relief, letting Twilight push the issue aside without another thought even when Long Road had accompanied her back to Equestria, choosing her over the world he’d spent his entire life helping to protect.
Then Twilight had died.
Losing her life while fighting a particularly vicious manifestation of the Elemental Bleeds in Manehattan had been a shock to everyone, and Long Road had been no exception. Fortunately, resurrection magic was a known quantity on Everglow, and her friends had hurried back to that world in order to restore her to life. But although they accomplished that goal in short order, things between Twilight and Long Road hadn’t been the same after that…because of Rarity.
Brought together by grief, Rarity and Long Road had found comfort with each other in the wake of Twilight’s passing, and their relationship had persisted even after she was resurrected. For Long Road, Twilight’s death had highlighted the futility of pining for someone who wasn’t interested in him, especially when there was someone else who was. For Rarity, Long Road’s selfless spirit was a perfect match for her own generous nature, and she’d found him to be every inch the prince she’d always dreamed of despite his having no titles or riches or connections. Everyone had been able to see how happy the two of them had made each other.
Everyone except Twilight, who had felt confused and betrayed by what had happened.
She’d eventually let those feelings go, of course, but it had taken time. Never having been in a relationship, she’d had no idea how to react to one of her closest friends starting a romance with the guy who’d pledged his love to her as soon as she’d been…out of the picture. Especially since it had driven home how she’d never figured out how she'd felt about Long Road in the first place.
That had been one of the main reasons why, when Lex Legis had insisted that she go on what had ultimately turned out to be a sterile and unexciting date with him, she had agreed, not wanting to make the same mistake that she had with the donkey paladin. Thankfully, Lex had apparently been just as unsatisfied with the experience as she had, since he’d turned his attention firmly to Sonata after that, leaving Twilight resolved to put romance completely out of her life for the foreseeable future.
But even so, it had still hurt when Long Road had passed away.
He’d died, Twilight had learned after the fact, the same way he’d lived: protecting people. When the newspaper had reported strange things happening in Hoofington, he’d recognized the danger, identifying the work of beasts brought over by a lingering Elemental Bleed. He’d left to close it alone, not wanting to risk anyone else dying the way Twilight had, and in that he’d been only partially successful. He’d defeated the monsters and collapsed the elemental gateway, all without any loss of life…save his own.
Rarity had been surprisingly composed about Long Road’s death, telling everyone that they’d already been on the verge of breaking up when it had happened. She’d hosted a tastefully-decorated wake, worn all-black fashions for a month, and cut her social schedule down to the bare minimum. It had been a textbook example of refined, elegant mourning.
It had also been a complete lie. In fact, Rarity had been shattered by losing her first real love, hiding her broken heart out of a misplaced sense that it wouldn’t be generous of her to burden everyone else with her anguish. Thankfully, Sweetie Belle had known her sister better than that, and had helped her open up about her real feelings. That had been when Twilight had finally, really talked to Rarity about her own unresolved feelings about Long Road, allowing the two of them to make up at last.
But that hadn’t precluded Rarity from asking Twilight if they could bring Long Road back the way they had her.
That had been a touchy subject. Unlike when Twilight had been killed, Long Road’s body had never been recovered (although eyewitnesses had sworn that he hadn’t survived), which meant that Princess Cadance’s magic hadn’t been able to help. Even for Everglow, bringing back someone who hadn’t left any physical remains required the strongest type of life-restoring magic: a “true resurrection” spell.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t a spell that just anyone could cast. Being divine magic of the highest order, only a cleric or oracle or other religious spellcaster of unparalleled ability could even hope to use it, and even in Viljatown – the capital of Everglow’s Pony Empire – such individuals were few and far between at best. And for those few who could cast that spell, they still needed the proper material component: a diamond of such size and perfection that finding one was practically a quest unto itself. Since the diamond was always consumed with the casting of the spell, that meant that “true resurrection” spells were exceptionally difficult to come by, and were typically reserved for high-ranking nobility or senior members of the spellcaster’s own clergy should they die without leaving a body behind.
And while Long Road had been a holy warrior of local renown in Viljatown, he hadn’t earned anywhere near that kind of consideration among his brethren, Twilight had been bitter to learn.
That was why it hurt so much to see Rarity flirting with Sandbar – a stallion who clearly played into the stereotype about sailors telling fish stories – now. Although Twilight had told Rarity why she couldn’t bring Long Road back a while ago, she knew that her friend had picked up on what that filly had said in this very room just recently, that Lex had “brought a bunch of ponies back to life with the Night Mare’s magic just this morning, even though they were lost in the city weeks ago!”
Twilight had been sure that the kid had been exaggerating, wanting to talk up a pony who was quite clearly a hero to her. After all, Twilight had seen Lex in action, and while he had some impressive arcane spellcasting, he wasn’t a divine spellcaster, even if he had apparently found religion in the Night Mare. So either Lex had somehow managed to pull off a lesser grade of resurrection somehow – which was dubious – or, more likely, that filly had simply been mistaken and Sandbar was stretching the truth (probably quite a bit). And yet Rarity was apparently still desperate enough to chase after even the possibility that Long Road could be brought back…
“I thought she was over it by now,” sighed Twilight at last. “I thought she was over losing him.”
Applejack shook her head sadly. “The thing about losin’ someone is that you never really get over it. You just kinda learn how to keep goin’ anyway. That don’t mean it ever stops hurtin’, or that you ever stop wishin’ you could see them again…”
Twilight’s ears folded down, knowing that Applejack wasn’t talking about Long Road. “I’m sorry.”
Visibly picking herself up, Applejack gave Twilight a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Don’t be feelin’ sorry for me, sugarcube. I-”
“I’m going to the bathroom.”
Soft Mane’s abrupt announcement was loud enough that everyone turned to look at her as she stood up, her jaw set in a way that made it very clear that she wasn’t happy as she glowered at Spike. “And when I come back, I hope that someone will be ready to act more like a grownup.”
“Hey!” sputtered Spike.
But he didn’t have a chance to finish before Fluttershy spoke up from where she’d been curled up on a chair near the back of the parlor. “Is it okay if I come with you? There isn’t one here and I really don’t want to have to go looking for one by myself…”
Fluttershy’s statement made everyone glance around, belatedly realizing that the parlor’s only door led back out into the hallway. “Really, how rude,” huffed Rarity, her attention off of Sandbar at last. “Putting us in a room with no facilities.”
“It’s fine,” snapped Soft Mane. “A place built for this many people must have bathrooms everywhere. C’mon Fluttershy.”
She didn’t wait for a response as she turned and stalked toward the door, Fluttershy hurrying after her. They were already crossing the threshold when Twilight realized the full implication of what was happening. “Wait, wandering around here alone isn’t a good idea!”
“We’re just going to the bathroom, Twilight,” called back Soft Mane, her voice exasperated in a way that only a teenage girl’s could be. “How dangerous could that be?”
“Did she actually just say that?” snorted Rainbow Dash as soon as the door closed.
Applejack grimaced, clearly not happy about what had just happened. “Think we should go after them?”
Twilight paused, then shook her head. “If we all leave now, it’ll look like we’re sneaking off. We’ll just have to trust that not every little thing will turn into a disaster.”
“Did you actually just say that?” scoffed Rainbow.
“I'm open to suggestions,” admitted Twilight with a groan, looking around the room before noticing that Pinkie was staring at a sheet of paper with an uncharacteristic look of concentration on her face. “Pinkie? Is everything okay?”
“Mm-hmm,” nodded the party pony, reaching up to scratch the side of her head idly. “I'm just trying to figure out what the best kind of party is for someone whose favorite laugh is ‘sardonic.’”
“And presto! The bit was behind your ear all along!”
Piggy snorted, rolling his eyes as Pixie drew her hoof back from his head, the coin she’d made vanish a moment ago now perched on top of her outstretched foreleg. “What a stupid trick,” he huffed. “That was even more boring than that one with the cards.”
Years of professionalism kept Pixie’s smile in place. “Well, maybe you’ll like this next one a little better. Observe: an ordinary hankie,” she began, holding up an unremarkable square of white cloth. “But when I wave my hooves over it and say the magic words, presto change-o, it becomes-”
“Laaame,” groaned Piggy, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling of the solarium. “You’re just gonna make it into a whole bunch of hankies tied together or a couple of pigeons or a bouquet of flowers or something dumb like that.”
“…not necessarily,” retorted Pixie weakly, surreptitiously discarding the flowers that she’d been about to reveal.
“This is so boring!” Kicking his legs in the air in frustration, Piggy grabbed a nearby pillow and threw it at the door in frustration. “When’s Mama gonna be done with whatever her big emergency is?! She’s gotta hurry up and tell Granola Bar to apologize to me already!”
It was all Pixie could do not to sigh. Before she’d started trying to entertain him, Piggy had gone on at length about how somepony named Granola Bar had been really unfair to him, getting angry and denying him some ice cream after he’d called out two mares who had been mean to him before. And while Pixie had quickly come to the conclusion that River’s son was a spoiled brat, she couldn’t help but feel slightly chagrined at how flat her tricks had fallen. Overgrown children should have been easy to keep mesmerized with feats of prestidigitation and legerdemain, but after years of serving as an assistant to her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Pixie was painfully aware of how all of the magic she could do by herself was too modest to even keep one fat little stallion amused.
The thought was depressing enough that it drove her to change tactics. Since she didn’t have any smoke bombs, the old “magician’s exit” was out. But there were plenty of other ways to make herself disappear without Piggy making a fuss about it.
“Well, how about this then?” Pixie ventured after a moment’s pause, her smile never slipping. “Why don’t I go and see if I can conjure you up some ice cream?”
Piggy sat up at that, his eyes suddenly sparkling. “Really?!”
“Sure thing,” grinned Pixie, moving toward the door just a little too hastily. “I’ll go see if I can find some right now.”
“Finally! It’s about time somepony thought about what I want for a change!” Without so much as a hint of gratitude, Piggy pointed her toward the door, eager for her to get going. “Make sure you get at least five scoops, and make each one a different kind of ice cream! And I want chocolate sauce too! And get some of those new sprinkles that they have in Canterlot, where each one has a different flavor! In fact, make the entire thing a banana split, with lots of whipped cream too! Are you writing this down?”
“Don’t worry,” reassured Pixie as she slipped out the door, struggling to keep her friendly demeanor in place just a little longer. “Very soon you’ll have what we in the entertainment business call ‘just desserts.’”
She closed the door to the sound of Piggy’s happy squeal, her double entendre having gone right over his head. Which in your case will be receiving no desserts at all, she thought to herself as she finally let her smile drop, her ears following suit as she turned and began trudging down the hallway of her friend’s humongous manor.
Not for the first time that afternoon, Pixie found herself wondering if she’d made the right decision following River back to her manor. But it wasn’t like she’d had much choice. After refusing to be part of Prince Blueblood’s entourage, she doubted she’d be welcomed back on his yacht, even if it technically belonged to River. Not knowing anypony in that pop-up village they’d briefly come across outside of Vanhoover proper, Pixie had been left with little alternative but to go to River’s manor, trailing her friend and those doctors as they’d rushed Lex Legis and several other injured ponies back to the palatial residence.
Once they’d gotten there and the doctors had been able to get to work in earnest, Pixie had tried to ask River what was going on, having a ton of questions by that point. But River had brushed her off, instead having a servant show her to the solarium, where River’s son Piggy (whom Pixie had never met until then) had also been waiting. It hadn’t taken long for Pixie to realize that she and Piggy had both been pushed to the side, apparently being distractions from River’s focusing on what happened to Lex Legis.
But why is she so worried about that guy? Not only did he apparently insult Princesses Celestia and Luna somehow, he also deliberately antagonized Prince Blueblood! Just the thought of making an enemy out of royalty was unfathomable. It was like asking to be an outcast. Except nopony seemed upset…
That had been particularly disturbing. Long years of working as a show assistant had given Pixie a trained eye where crowds were concerned, and her read on the one she’d just seen had been that they all supported Lex wholeheartedly, even after he’d all but spit in Blueblood’s face. It had been unnerving to witness.
But not nearly as much as seeing Rainbow Dash – an honest-to-goodness hero – come flying in out of nowhere and attack Lex like that.
And Lex downed her. Despite the fact that Rainbow Dash had clearly had the upper hoof for most of the fight, Pixie could still remember the way the colorful pegasus had screamed during that last dive, losing her grip on Lex as somepony else flew in to save him, letting Rainbow Dash hit the ground hard.
The entire thing had left Pixie brimming with questions, particularly after having seen how Vanhoover was trash-strewn and deserted, and the way the area around Lex had been cratered and strewn with rubble. And while Pixie didn’t consider herself to be a snoop or a gossip, she was reaching her limit for not knowing what was happening. You couldn’t be in the middle of so much madness for long before it became impossible to not go looking for answers.
Besides, it’s not like I’m going to go read River’s diary or anything, Pixie reassured herself as she wandered through the hallways. I just need to find somepony who can tell me what’s going- “OH!”
Stopping dead as she turned a corner, Pixie froze, her eyes widening as she stared at the creature standing a few feet in front of her. A pony from the waist down, she looked like some sort of skinny, shaven minotaur from the waist up, except with caramel-colored skin and no horns. And her eyes…the white film over them made them look almost blank. In the dim light of the hallway, the thing was arresting, so much so that Pixie only barely noticed a yellow pegasus with a pink mane and tail cringing behind the creature, so captivated was she by the sight of the anomalous entity.
“Oh great,” sighed the thing, spreading her forelimbs – arms? – out wide, as though presenting herself. “Go ahead. Get a good look so you can tell everypony about the-”
“Most amazing and exotic creature ever!” blurted Pixie, unable to help herself upon hearing the creature speak.
“Right, the most amaz-, wait, what?” Jerking its – no, her; the voice definitely had a female pitch to it – head back, the half-pony was looking at her in shock. “You…you don’t think I look…freakish?” Despite her eyes being covered, she glanced back at the pegasus hiding behind her, as though silently asking her to confirm that this was really happening.
“I think you look like a star!” Unable to help herself, Pixie trotted forward, her eyes shining as she walked right up to the thing. “My name's Pixie! Have you ever considered show business? Because if you haven’t then you definitely should! You’re a natural draw!”
“Um, excuse me…” began the pegasus mare in a soft voice.
But Pixie was too far gone to hear her. Standing up on her hind legs, she reached out to take one of the flummoxed creature’s hands between her fore-hooves, holding it in excitement. “Do you know any magic tricks? I mean, stage magic tricks? Because if you don’t, I can teach you!”
“I’m really sorry to interrupt,” tried the quiet mare again. “But we-”
“With your looks and my experience, we could be the greatest team ever to grace the stage! The most powerful act in the history of Las Pegasus! No, in all of Equestria!”
“Please listen,” pleaded the pegasus quietly. “We’re just trying to-”
“Don’t worry, I’m fine with being your assistant!” continued Pixie. “I’ll handle all of the behind-the-scenes work too! All you’d need to do is learn the tricks and how to present yourself, and you’ll be a legend! Ooh, and we should think of some names you could use!”
“She has a name!”
Blinking as the pink-maned pegasus suddenly interposed herself between her and the creature, Pixie fell back, taken by surprise at the stern look on the other mare’s face. “Huh?”
“She has a name!” repeated the pegasus, her voice quiet but firm. “It’s Soft Mane! And she doesn’t like it when ponies make a fuss over her appearance just because she looks different from you or me! So please try to be a little more considerate of other ponies’ feelings in the future!”
“Fluttershy, it’s okay,” piped up Soft Mane, her voice hesitant. “I was just surprised. That’s not usually the reaction I get when I meet ponies for the first time.”
“Oh.” Settling back down, Fluttershy hid her face behind her mane bashfully, cheeks turning red as she looked at Pixie. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay,” smiled Pixie. “I’m the one who should apologize. I accidentally slipped into my stage persona there for a moment. I don’t usually…” That was when she processed what she’d just heard. “Wait. ‘Fluttershy’?” Pixie’s eyes widened as she looked at the pegasus again, suddenly realizing who she was talking to. “You’re the Element of Kindness!”
Cringing at the excited tone in the other mare’s voice, Fluttershy backed up a step. “W-well, it’s not that I was the Element. It’s just that I could use it…for a little while I mean…until we all gave them up.” Her voice getting progressively more and more quiet, she retreated another step, her timid demeanor in sharp contrast to the assertiveness she’d shown just a moment ago. “I’m sorry if that’s disappointing.”
Dazed, Pixie shook her head. “No, I just didn’t expect…” The light bulb went off over her head then. “Of course, you’re Rainbow Dash’s friend, and she showed up earlier. So does that mean that Princess Twilight and the other Elements-, er, the other ponies who used to have the Elements of Harmony are also here?”
Fluttershy nodded. “Yes, we’re looking for-”
“Lex Legis,” finished Pixie, starting to see how this was all tying together, even if she didn’t understand it all yet.
“Actually, she was going to say ‘the bathroom,’ but you’re right. We’re here because of that…guy.” Soft Mane looked like she’d only barely caught herself from using a different term to describe Lex. “Do you know him?”
Pixie shook her head. “No, I’ve never met him. But I’m pretty sure my friend River knows him, since she brought him back here to her house after he was, um, injured.” She said that last part with an awkward glance at Fluttershy. She’d deliberately omitted the part about River pledging to help Lex duel with Prince Blueblood, not wanting to make her friend look bad, only to realize too late that she had no idea how Fluttershy felt about her Rainbow Dash ambushing Lex like that.
Fortunately, Fluttershy didn’t seem upset. Instead, she looked pleasantly surprised. “You know River Bank?”
“That’s great!” Soft Mane was suddenly all smiles. “We’ve been trying to talk to Sonata for a little while now, and that old butler said he’d take some ponies we brought to vouch for us to River Bank, but we haven’t heard back from anyone yet. Do you think you can help us with that?”
Although she wasn’t sure who “Sonata” was, Pixie’s eyes lit up. Despite having been snapped out of her stage persona, she still couldn’t stop thinking about how much of an attraction Soft Mane could be up on stage. For us to meet like this when I’m in need of a new partner, and her needing to meet somepony I know, this has to be destiny! She felt sure of it, to the point where she was amazed that her cutie mark wasn’t glowing. “Absolutely! In fact, I’ll take you to her right now!”
“Even better!” grinned Soft Mane, and Pixie smiled in response.
Only Fluttershy looked nervous. “But, um, shouldn’t we go back and talk to Twilight and the others first?”
“And interrupt Spike’s vigil over Rarity?” snorted Soft Mane, her voice turning sour. “I’d hate to bother him when he’s doing something so important. It’s not like I’m his girlfriend or anything.”
Despite not knowing the details of what Soft Mane was talking about, Pixie couldn’t help but make a rueful expression, remembering her wayward husband. “Stallions,” she murmured with a shake of her head. “C’mon, I’ll take you to River.”
Biting her lip as the pair began to leave, Fluttershy glanced back the way they’d come before returning her gaze to the retreating pair. “I really think we should…”
Groaning as she realized neither of them were listening to her, she did the only thing she could as she hurried after them. “Can we at least stop and use the bathroom on the way there?”
“Okay, I think we’re in the right place this time.”
“I hope so,” muttered Soft Mane, trying not to sound annoyed.
But some of her irritation must have leaked into her voice, because Pixie glanced back at her with a guilty expression. “Sorry. This is my first time actually visiting River’s home. I knew she lived in a huge house but I didn’t think it’d be this huge!”
“Oh, it’s not your fault,” insisted Fluttershy. “I’m sure we would have gotten even more lost on our own if you weren’t here to guide us.”
“And we did manage to find a bathroom, at least,” sighed Soft Mane. “Now if we could just manage to talk to River Bank or Sonata, we’d be all set.”
“Or,” offered Fluttershy after a moment’s hesitation, “we could still go back and talk to Twilight instead, and-”
“I knew it!” Pixie’s triumphant cry cut Fluttershy off as the unicorn mare pointed at something on the ground, which on closer inspection turned out to be a discarded bandage. Further down the hallway a pair of cylindrical caps – the kind used to cover a syringe – littered the ground, with some used swabs on the floor further beyond them. “I knew this hallway looked familiar! I was following along when the doctors were rushing everypony back here, which means that they should be further ahead, and I bet River is still there too!”
Squinting as she peered as far as she could down the hallway, Soft Mane crouched down. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Now we just have to figure out how to get to River or Sonata without anypony else finding us first.”
Fluttershy’s eyebrows rose at that. “We do?” she asked, her voice full of doubt.
Pixie rubbed her chin, clearly intrigued by the challenge. “Hmm, if I had a couple of full-size mirrors and an hour to arrange everything, I bet I could pull that off. If only I knew what room they were in…”
Not liking the turn things had taken, Fluttershy moved forward and put a hoof on her friend’s shoulder. “Soft Mane, I don’t mean to be disagreeable, but I don’t think that sneaking around like this is a good idea. Maybe, instead of acting like we’re trying to slip into someplace we don’t belong, we could have Pixie walk us in and politely inquire where River Bank is? That way nopony would think we were trying to do something bad like that filly thought we were.”
“That won’t work,” insisted Soft Mane, shaking her head. “Fluttershy, that old butler already told us that River and Sonata don’t want our help when he threw us out the first time.”
“But those other ponies we met-”
“That sea captain owes Lex her life,” interrupted Soft Mane. “I know you guys are celebrities, but if push comes to shove, I don’t see her or her crew insisting that we be allowed in if River tells them that she thinks we’re a threat to their savior.”
Fluttershy’s ears folded back at that, discouraged. “They might,” she objected weakly. “We told them about what Rainbow Dash did, and how we’re trying to fix it now.”
“I know, but our best bet is to plead our case directly,” replied Soft Mane, her voice firm with conviction, “and we can’t do that if we never get to meet with the ponies in charge, which is what will happen if we run into some butler or doctor or someone who insists on escorting us back to that parlor to wait for River or Sonata or whoever to make up their mind. If we want to have any chance of helping Lex understand the magic of friendship, we have to do this.” A smirk crossed her lips then. “Plus, I’ll be able to rub it in Spike’s face that I was getting stuff done while he was moping over his old crush flirting with someone else.”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened at that last part. “That’s really not a good reason to-”
But Soft Mane was already moving on to the next part of her plan. “Pixie, can you figure out what room River’s in and let us know? There’s probably a lot more people that way, and since Fluttershy’s famous and I’m…different, you’re the only one who can poke around without raising concerns if you’re seen.”
Pixie nodded, smirking a little. “That’s no problem. If someone asks what I’m doing, I’ll just say I got tired of being stuck in a room with River’s son. If he treats the staff here the way he did me, they’ll understand.”
Fluttershy was practically trembling now, her heart hammering in her chest as what had started as a simple excursion to go freshen up had somehow turned into a clandestine infiltration mission. “We really shouldn’t be doing this,” she whimpered.
But it was already too late, as Pixie moved out into the center of the hallway and began to trot forward, leaving Soft Mane and Fluttershy to try and hide behind a small console table hugging the wall. Fluttershy held her breath as Pixie casually made her way over to a door and – glancing each way – opened it, sticking her head inside. When she drew back a second later and shook her head, it was all Fluttershy could do not to collapse, the tension almost making her dizzy.
The next door yielded the same results, with Pixie again closing it after only a second’s perusal. At that point the only way for her to go was around a corner, and it was with a quick glance back that she turned and moved out of sight, leaving Fluttershy biting her lip and shaking like a leaf, already imagining the numerous ways this could go horribly wrong. What if somepony gets suspicious and follows her back to us without her knowing? What if somepony finds us hiding here while we’re waiting for her to come back? What if Lex Legis had already recovered and makes Pixie tell him that we’re here and curses us before we can get away?! What if-
Her panic-spiral was cut off as Pixie suddenly ran back around the corner, causing Fluttershy to gasp. A moment later she heard Soft Mane do the same, the human/pony hybrid’s clouded vision hiding Pixie’s approach for a fraction of a second. But unlike Fluttershy, Soft Mane calmed down immediately, likely because of the crucial detail that Fluttershy had, in her fright, initially missed:
Pixie was smiling.
“You guys!” whispered the aquamarine mare as she ran up to them. “You’re not going to believe this!”
“What?!” blurted Fluttershy, not able to handle the suspense. “What is it?!”
Pixie waited just an instant before speaking, unable to help but let the drama build before the big reveal. “I think I’ve found where Lex is recovering!”
Fluttershy felt like she was going to throw up as the door closed behind them, leaving her and Soft Mane alone with the most dangerous pony in all of Equestria.
It had been less than thirty seconds since Pixie had told them about how she’d spotted a pair of doctors exiting a room, the pair taking no notice of her as they’d conversed among themselves. She, however, had distinctly heard them say “still hasn’t regained consciousness” and “severe horn trauma.” Knowing who that sounded like, she’d hurried to check the room the medical ponies had just vacated, hoping that River would be at Lex’s side.
“But there wasn’t anyone else in there,” River had told them in a rush. “Still, with what you guys said about wanting to use your magic to help Lex, I knew I had to tell you where he was!”
Fluttershy had been ready to bolt at that, and had tried to convince Soft Mane to join her in doing so. For a moment Soft Mane had wavered, looking like she wasn’t sure what to do, and Fluttershy had dared to hope that she’d realize just how dangerous this was. But that hope had been dashed a moment later when her friend shook her head. “Twilight was right. Maybe Lex won’t change his ways if I help him now, but we’ll never know unless I try.”
That was how the two of them found themselves standing in Lex’s room, Pixie remaining outside to keep watch and alert them if it looked like anypony was coming.
For her part, Fluttershy couldn’t bear to look across the room, curling up behind Soft Mane as she squeezed her eyes shut. Not that she would have been able to see much anyway; the curtains were drawn and the lights were out, leaving the entire room shrouded in darkness. The only glimpse she’d gotten of the room’s sole occupant had been the bandaged form that she’d glimpsed on the bed that hugged the far wall when Pixie had ushered them in a moment ago. Now, she could almost imagine those awful green-and-purple eyes she’d heard about suddenly lighting up, turning to face them before unleashing-
“Ropes?” Soft Mane muttered, her voice confused.
“Wh-what?” gulped Fluttershy, cracking one eye open.
“They’ve got him tied down,” replied Soft Mane quietly. “There’s ropes securing all four of his legs to the bedposts.”
Fluttershy blinked at that, curiosity momentarily overpowering fear as she glanced toward the back of the room. But without any lights on, it was all she could do to make out the outline of the bed, let alone any details. “You can see that?”
“My distance vision is almost completely gone, but if I’m looking at something nearby I can see fine even in the dark,” explained Soft Mane. “I think it’s Lashtada’s way of trying to make up for what happened to my eyes when she first made me her oracle. Although colors are still completely washed out if there’s no light.”
“Oh.” Fluttershy digested that for a moment. “So, um, can you see why they’ve tied Lex up?”
Soft Mane peered ahead for a long moment before shaking her head. “No. Between the bandages and the blanket covering him, I can barely see him at all. But they’ve definitely immobilized him for some reason. Maybe they’ve realized he’s the bad guy after all?”
“Or maybe he’s still dangerous even when he’s unconscious,” whimpered Fluttershy, remembering everything she’d been told about what Lex could do. She couldn’t imagine what horrible powers he could have that would require him to be tied up even when he was out cold, and she definitely didn’t want to find out!
But Soft Mane was apparently made out of sterner stuff, taking a deep breath. “Here goes.”
It took only a few seconds for her to murmur the quiet liturgy to Lashtada and make the requisite gestures, holding her hand out when she was finished. “This is one of my stronger healing spells,” she explained. “Judging from what Rainbow Dash said, I doubt it’ll heal all of his wounds, but when I touch him it’ll almost certainly be enough to wake him up, so be prepared, okay?”
Licking her lips, which had gone completely dry, Fluttershy nodded. “O-okay,” she squeaked. “I’m r-r-right behind you.”
Slowly, Soft Mane crept forward, Fluttershy following her despite the overpowering urge to run away. All too soon, they were at Lex’s bedside, with Fluttershy’s eyes adjusting to the gloom enough that she could just barely make out her friend reaching out and drawing back the blanket covering Lex with one hand, the other one held at the ready to reach down and deliver her healing magic…
Soft Mane suddenly stiffened. “Oh no!”
“What?!” Fluttershy felt her blood run cold. “What is it?!”
“It’s not him!”
That hadn’t been what Fluttershy had expected to hear. “Huh?!”
“It’s not Lex!” repeated Soft Mane, her voice frantic. “I don’t know who this is, but she’s a mare!”
“W-we’re in the wrong room!” realized Fluttershy, not sure whether to feel relieved or horrified. “We’re-”
Across from them, the door to the hallway suddenly burst open. “Somepony’s coming!” hissed Pixie. “Hide!”
But the sudden entrance had been more than Fluttershy’s poor nerves could take. Before Pixie had gotten her second syllable out, Fluttershy had already leapt forward, instinctively trying to get away from whatever was happening. And since she was behind Soft Mane, that resulted in her barreling into the back of her friend’s legs, letting out a muffled groan as the two of them went down in a heap, Fluttershy collapsing next to the bed as Soft Mane pitched forward onto it.
And causing her to accidentally put her hands on the bound pony beneath her, discharging her healing magic into the comatose mare, who immediately began to stir…
“Quick!” whispered Pixie, galloping across the room to where Fluttershy and Soft Mane were still trying to pick themselves up. “Under the bed! You can finish healing him later!”
“Pixie!” hissed Soft Mane, her voice filled with alarm. “This isn’t-”
“No time!” Not daring to conjure a light, lest it be seen from beneath the door, Pixie reached out with her forehooves and blindly grabbed the other two, hauling them down and shoving them under the bed before crawling in after them, giving them a quick “Shhh!” as she did.
She’d barely finished before the door opened, four hooves being the only part of the newcomer visible from Pixie’s new vantage point. Leaving the door open, they proceeded to cross the room, stopping right next to the bed, mere inches away from where Pixie was holding her breath, able to feel Fluttershy shaking like a leaf next to her. Pixie could sympathize; from what she and Soft Mane had told her on their way here, River and everypony else were very suspicious of them already. She could only imagine how badly they’d react if someone found them in Lex’s room before they’d had a chance to heal him!
Fortunately, the pony who’d entered didn’t seem to have any clue they were there, giving a soft sigh that sounded distinctly annoyed. “Two doctors were just here, and they still had to send a nurse to change their patient’s bandages. Unbelievable.”
But the comment, clearly intended to go unheard by anyone else, received an unexpected response. “…nnngh…wha-…what’s going…?”
Pixie’s eyes went wide at the new voice. That it was coming from on top of the bed they were hiding under was unexpected enough, but that it was decidedly female was something else altogether! Trying to figure out what happening, she glanced at her companions, able to see them thanks to the light spilling in from the open doorway. Fluttershy looked back at her with an expression of barely-controlled panic, but past her Soft Mane was wearing an expression that was both tense and irritated. “Wrong room!” mouthed the half-pony, causing Pixie’s ears to flatten. This wasn’t Lex’s room? Then who…?
Her question was answered a moment later as the nurse gasped. “Oh! Miss Glimmer? Miss Glimmer, can you hear me?”
If Pixie’s eyes had been wide before, she was sure they were almost bugging out now. This was Starlight Glimmer’s room?! She’d managed to hear bits and pieces about the madmare who’d attacked this place, defeating all of Lex’s subordinates before the stallion himself had arrived to put her down. And apparently Fluttershy and Soft Mane had heard those stories as well, because they looked just as shocked. Or at least, Soft Mane looked shocked. Fluttershy looked like she was about to pass out.
“Wh-where am I?” Starlight’s voice was gradually getting stronger. “What hap-, huh?!” Several strained grunts were heard before Starlight spoke again, her voice suddenly panicked. “Why am I tied up?! Let me go this instant!”
“Miss Glimmer, please try to calm down. You’ll only make your injuries-, no! Don’t!”
“AAAAUGH!!!”
Pixie froze at the pained scream that came from Starlight then, the other two doing the same.
“Miss Glimmer, stop!” yelled the nurse. “Your horn is hurt too badly for you to use magic!”
Several tense seconds passed, broken only by the sound of Starlight’s labored breathing, before the mare in question spoke up again. “What did you do to me?!” she demanded, sounding like she was struggling not to descend into hysteria. “Where am I?! How long have I been unconscious?!”
“No one has done anything to you, Miss Glimmer, except treat the injuries you sustained during your fight,” replied the nurse in a soothing voice. They moved over to where the curtains were drawn then, opening them and letting sunlight come pouring in before their hooves strode back to the bedside. “One of the worst of those is a hairline fracture in your horn, which is going to keep you from using any magic for a while. Honestly, I’m amazed you were even able to make the attempt with the state you’re in.” A rustling of cloth was heard then before the nurse continued speaking. “To answer your other questions, you’re in what’s been designated as the medical wing of River Bank’s mansion, just outside of Vanhoover, and have been for the last few hours. Now please hold still so I can change your bandages.”
“Why? So I’ll be in tip-top shape when Lex tortures me later?” snapped Starlight, her voice no less tense despite sounding more in control of herself. “I’ve heard about what he’s done to the ponies who cross him. Was he just waiting for me to wake up before he puts some horrible curse on me?”
This time the nurse didn’t say anything, and Pixie couldn’t help but bite her lip at what that meant, sharing a worried look with Soft Mane and Fluttershy.
Finally, the medical pony spoke up. “I’ll go inform Doctor House Call that you’re awake. He’ll probably be along to examine you in a few minutes. Do you want me to leave the curtains open in the meantime?”
“Oh sure,” sneered Starlight, her voice thick with sarcasm. “The view of the ocean almost makes me forget that I’m tied up and waiting for a supervillain to do Celestia-knows-what to me. By all means, leave the curtains drawn.”
“…I’ll inform Doctor House Call that you’re awake,” repeated the nurse, somehow managing to sound only mildly exasperated. Then the medical pony crossed the room and left, closing the door behind them.
Starlight let out a sigh, and the sound of her head hitting the pillow could be heard. But Pixie was less concerned about that than she was with trying to figure out what to do next, giving a questioning look to the pair in hiding with her.
“You’re the magician!” mouthed Soft Mane frantically. “You figure out how to get us out of here!”
“It doesn’t work like that!” mouthed back Pixie. “Those tricks take a lot of setup! I can’t just- Fluttershy!”
That last word came out as a strangled whisper, Pixie’s eyes widening in horror as Fluttershy – who had looked unusually pensive for the last minute or so – suddenly climbed out from under the bed and stood up.
Her appearance wasn’t missed by Starlight Glimmer, with the bed giving a sudden shake as she no doubt jerked in response to the pegasus mare’s sudden appearance. “Who’re you?!”
“Please don’t be scared,” replied the pink-maned pony, cringing a little. “My name’s Fluttershy, and, well, you’re probably wondering why we were hiding under your bed-”
“‘We’?” interrupted Starlight, her voice suspicious.
Groaning, Soft Mane climbed out a moment later, and after a moment’s hesitation, Pixie did the same, watching as Starlight barely glanced at her in favor of staring at Soft Mane with wide eyes. “Wh-who are all of you?” she gulped. “Are you more of Lex’s minions?”
“Hardly,” snorted Soft Mane, crossing her arms under her chest.
Pixie, for her part, couldn’t help but feel a little surprised. “You seriously don’t recognize the Element of Kindness herself? Have you been living in a cave for the last few years?”
“My village doesn’t have newspaper service, and I was traveling before I lived there,” growled Starlight through gritted teeth. “Now somepony tell me what’s going on!”
Deciding it was better to forgo clarifying how she hadn’t actually been the Element of Kindness itself, Fluttershy tried again. “Maybe I should start over. I’m Fluttershy, this is Soft Mane, and this is Pixie,” she began, pointing to each of her friends in turn. “We were, um, looking for someone else, and came into your room by accident. We overheard what you were saying and, well…I couldn’t just leave. Not when I heard how scared you sounded about what Lex is going to do to you.”
Pixie felt a nervous thrill run through her then, and not just because there was a very real chance that the doctor that nurse had gone to fetch might walk through the door at any moment. “Should we be doing this?” she asked pointedly. “I overheard what everypony was saying on the way here, and this mare hurt a lot of ponies.”
“I didn’t start those fights!” protested Starlight. “Listen to me! My village is a place where everypony lives in happiness through equality! I came here because I wanted to help the ponies here find that same harmony! It was Lex and his flunkies who attacked me when I tried to tell them that there was a better way!”
“That does sound like something Lex would do,” admitted Soft Mane, recalling everything that she’d heard at Princess Celestia’s summit before the lhaksharut had attacked.
Fluttershy nodded. “And if we leave Starlight here and go help Lex recover, and he curses her later, then whatever he does to her will be our fault!” She looked ready to start bawling at the prospect.
But Starlight tilted her head. “What do you mean ‘help him recover’?”
Soft Mane opened her mouth to answer, but Pixie cut her off, not liking where this is going. “So what are you saying?” she asked, giving Fluttershy an uncomfortable look. “That you want to help her escape? Because if you’re trying to teach Lex about the magic of friendship, I don’t think helping the mare who put a lot of the ponies he cares about in the hospital is the best way to do it.”
Fluttershy flinched at that. “Maybe we should listen to her side of the story? I know if I went someplace new and everypony was mean to me just because I was a little different, I’d want someone to give me the benefit of the doubt.”
“…so would I,” murmured Soft Mane.
“Besides,” added Fluttershy with an embarrassed smile, “I’m a little interested in hearing more about how ponies can find happiness through equality.”
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” protested Pixie, pointing at Starlight. “You should hear how everypony is talking about this mare! She’s public enemy number one!”
“Didn’t you tell us before that everypony is making up horrible rumors about you and your husband back in Las Pegasus?” pointed out Soft Mane.
The rebuke caused Pixie’s eyes to widen, not having thought about that. “That’s not-”
“You don’t have to decide right now,” cut in Starlight suddenly, causing everypony to look at her. “Listen, you heard that nurse: some doctor is probably already on his way here. Get back under the bed, and you can think it over while he’s examining me. Then, if you want, you can listen to my side of the story. If you’re still not convinced that I’m worth saving, that’s fine. Either way, I swear I’ll never tell anypony that you were here.”
Fluttershy’s eyes shone at that. “You see? Would someone who was a bad pony say something like that?”
They would if they were trying to gain sympathy points, thought Pixie ruefully. Hadn’t somepony said something about Starlight manipulating Sonata and some other ponies from that village of hers?
But she didn’t give voice to her doubts, still shaken by Soft Mane comparing her situation back home to the one Starlight was in now. Instead, Pixie simply sighed. “Okay, but I still think this is a bad idea. Even if you guys decide to help her escape, it’ll be really hard to get out of this place without being seen.”
“Luckily we have a talented magician who knows a lot about disappearing acts,” teased Soft Mane as she flattened herself down, crawling back under the bed.
Pixie snickered at that, rolling her eyes as she followed the half-pony hybrid. “I suppose we could consider this a trial run for our future partnership.”
“Don’t worry.” Fluttershy gave Starlight a reassuring smile before she moved to join the others back in hiding. “No matter what happens, I’m sure we’ll be able to figure things out.”
Starlight smiled back at her, relaxing back onto the bed despite her legs being bound. “So am I, now.”
Lying next to Fluttershy underneath Starlight Glimmer’s bed, Soft Mane couldn’t help but smile at how things were going.
As much as she didn’t like the idea of helping the stallion who’d so brazenly insulted her parentage, she knew that Twilight was right. Lex Legis might be an awful pony, but that didn’t change the fact that he had – based on everything she’d heard since coming to Vanhoover, and even before then – saved a lot of lives. While Soft Mane couldn’t imagine that she’d ever like him, she couldn’t bring herself to be so cold as to refuse to help someone who had done so much for so many other people.
But the icing on the cake had been what Spike had told her (before he’d let his jealousy over Rarity chatting up that Sandbar guy turn him into a jerk): that she’d be able to rub Lex’s face in the fact that the girl he’d disparaged as being a freak had been the one to save his life. And while Soft Mane knew that was a petty reason to help someone, she had to admit that it put a smile on her face. Even if healing him didn’t change Lex’s attitude the way Twilight hoped it would, Soft Mane was content knowing that the arrogant stallion would hate having needed her help.
And now she’d be able to tweak Lex twice over by rescuing Starlight right out from under his nose!
He’ll be so mad when he finds out she’s gone! she snickered silently. But he won’t be able to do anything about it!
Of that she felt quite certain. While Twilight probably wouldn’t be happy when they came back with Lex’s prisoner in tow, Soft Mane was sure that the youngest alicorn would agree with Fluttershy that abandoning Starlight to whatever harsh fate Lex would no doubt inflict on her was simply too cruel. Which meant that even if Lex demanded that Starlight be turned back over to him, Twilight would refuse, to the point of fighting to protect her if Lex was ungrateful enough to attack the ponies who’d just saved his life (even if Rainbow Dash had been the one to put the hurt on him in the first place).
And if things did come down to a fight, well…Soft Mane didn’t plan on healing Lex that much, whereas Twilight and her friends were all fresh, and had the advantage of numbers if Sonata got involved. It wasn’t like Lex himself would be able to do much anyway; as a spellcaster herself, Soft Mane was sure that he’d need at least a day to recover the magic he’d expended defeating Starlight in the first place. That was more than enough time for Twilight to teleport them all back to Canterlot, Starlight included.
One way or another, Starlight Glimmer was going to end up beyond Lex’s reach.
It’s exactly what he deserves! smirked Soft Mane to herself. Now we just have to wait for that doctor to get here, finish his exam and leave, and we’ll be home free!
As if summoned by her thoughts, there was a knock at the door, which opened a moment later without waiting for a reply.
Holding her breath, Soft Mane watched as four hooves walked in…followed by a second set of hooves.
The sight made her frown, and she shared a confused look with Fluttershy and Pixie. The nurse had only mentioned sending one doctor. Who was the second pony?
“Miss Glimmer,” came a male voice a second later. “My name is Doctor House Call. How are you feeling?”
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to make a joke about how I’d shake your hoof, but I’m a little tied up at the moment?” Starlight’s voice was an equal mixture of sarcasm and bitterness. “And who’re you supposed to be? Aria’s wicked stepmother?”
“My name,” came an icy female voice, “is River Bank.”
You’ve gotta be kidding me! It was all Soft Mane could do to hold back a snort at the irony. The mare they’d been looking for was suddenly right in front of them, and they couldn’t say or do anything to catch her attention!
Having no way of knowing they were there, River kept talking. “And I recommend you not mention Aria again. Both Lex and Sonata are furious about what you did to her.”
Frowning, Soft Mane glanced at Fluttershy and Pixie, the two mares looking as befuddled as she felt. According to what they’d heard, Lex was severely injured, with Sonata keeping vigil over him. So why was River talking like he was just fine? A bluff, decided Soft Mane. She’s trying to intimidate Starlight for some reason. But why…?
“She attacked me!” snapped Starlight indignantly.
“That’s not what the ponies who saw your fight said,” retorted River. “Even those rubes you brought with you say that you fired first.”
“Of course they did.” Starlight’s voice was filled with disgust, but a moment later it changed, becoming accusatory. “Lex threatened them, didn’t he? He told them that he’d curse them unless they sold me out.”
“They didn’t need to be threatened.” The sneer in River’s voice was audible. “After how you lied to them about giving up your own cutie mark, not to mention seeing all of the atrocities you tried to commit here, they disavowed you the first chance they had. And I suspect that everyone else in your little village will do the same once they find out the truth about you.”
“You-”
But Starlight’s voice was cut off as House Call suddenly spoke up. “Miss Glimmer, please look straight up so I can check your pupils.”
“Forget my pupils!” growled Starlight. “Are you saying you sent them back-”
“Miss Glimmer, I need to check you for symptoms of brain trauma,” interrupted House Call. “We’re not working with hospital-grade equipment here, so it’s very important that you let me look you over as best I can so that we can try and catch any potential-”
“Okay! Fine!” Starlight quieted down only for a moment, however. “Are you saying you sent those turncoats back to my village?”
“They left a few hours ago, right after their statements were taken” answered River, her voice smug. “They apparently wanted their cutie marks back quite badly. Almost as badly as they wanted to tell everyone else there about how your little philosophy was based on a lie.”
“IT WASN’T A LIE!”
“Miss Glimmer, settle down! I can’t examine you when you’re thrashing like that!”
A tense silence followed, but it only lasted a few seconds before Starlight broke it. “It wasn’t a lie. Yes, I kept my cutie mark, but only because I needed it in order to free other ponies from theirs. Everything else was real. Cutie marks cause division and disharmony. Giving them up brings ponies closer together.”
“I doubt the ponies here would agree, considering how you brutalized them in order to take their marks against their will,” scoffed River. “Which leads us to why I’m talking to you right now. The fact of the matter is that you don’t have anyone supporting you at the moment. Not the ponies from your village. Not the people who saw your little rampage this morning. No one. Which means that when Lex puts a curse on you that’s so horrible that it makes death look like a better alternative, nopony’s going to speak up on your behalf. Your only chance at making things even a little easier on yourself is to answer my questions.”
“Oh here we go. So now you’re-, OW! Easy on the hoof!”
“Sorry,” murmured House Call in a distracted voice.
Giving a sigh, Starlight started again. “You really expect me to believe that if I tell you whatever you want to know, Lex will take it easy on me?”
“Let me put it this way,” retorted River. “If you don’t cooperate, there’s no chance whatsoever that he’ll show you leniency. If you do, you might be able to make things a little better for yourself.”
Starlight gave a hollow laugh. “Right.”
“It’s your choice, but remember what I said: you’ve got no one else in your corner now, so if you want there to be any hope of digging yourself out of the hole you’re in, you need to make it yourself. So, let’s start with something simple, shall we?” River paused for a moment, and when Starlight didn’t protest, kept going. “In the last two months, have you had any contact with any of Equestria’s princesses, or any proxy acting on their behalf?”
“…what?”
What? Soft Mane’s brow furrowed, not understanding why River would think the princesses had anything to do with Starlight.
“Have you?” pressed River.
“Are you kidding me?” Starlight’s reply came amidst a round of incredulous chuckling. “No, of course not. Why would you even think that?”
“…I see.” River, in contrast to Starlight’s disbelieving laughter, couldn’t have sounded more serious. “Let’s move on then. Why did you attack this place today?”
“I was trying to tell ponies that they can live better lives without their cutie-”
“Yes, yes, I know that part. But why today, specifically? Why didn’t you come here yesterday, or next week? What made you decide that this was the day you were going to attack our town?”
Starlight couldn’t have sounded more perplexed when she answered. “What are you talking about? First of all, I didn’t come here to attack any-, look, I didn’t even know anything had happened here until Sonata showed up in my village to deliver some rainclouds. She-”
“Miss Bank, I need to speak with you,” interrupted House Call.
“In a moment, Doctor.”
“No. Now.”
“…fine.”
Soft Mane was beginning to feel dizzy from how bewildered she felt. The tension in House Call’s voice had been audible, and as he and River walked to the far corner of the room, lowering their voices to whispers, she strained her ears to try and catch what they were saying. What had happened to make the medical pony so upset?
But the whisper she overheard a moment later didn’t come from River Bank or House Call.
“…oh no…”
Pixie’s quiet gasp of dismay made Soft Mane look over at the other pony, blinking as she saw that the mare had produced a piece of paper from somewhere and silently folded it into a cone, aiming the larger end toward the corner of the room where River and House Call were while sticking the shorter end in one of her ears. It was a brilliant idea, but whatever she’d heard was already making her turn pale. Between them, Fluttershy gulped, clearly unnerved by the other mare’s rising nervousness. Soft Mane felt the same way, but at the same time her curiosity soared. What had Pixie heard?
“We’ll continue our discussion at a later time,” announced River suddenly, the door opening before she was halfway done with her sentence.
The abrupt declaration caught Soft Mane off-guard, and it was clear that she wasn’t the only one. “Wait, you’re leaving?” asked Starlight, her voice thick with confusion. “Just like th-, hey! Hey!”
But the only answer she received was the door closing behind them as River Bank and House Call left.
The sound of the latch clicking into place was still hanging in the air when Pixie began to wriggle out from under the bed. “We’ve gotta go!” blurted the blue-furred unicorn.
“Wh-what do you mean?” whimpered Fluttershy. “What happened?”
“You used your magic, didn’t you?” Pixie’s question was directed toward Soft Mane, the half-pony already halfway out from under the bed. “On Starlight, while I was out in the hall. You healed her?”
“Wait,” began Starlight. “Slow down and tell me what’s happening. You-”
“I did,” nodded Soft Mane. “Why? What did they say?”
Pixie let out a groan. “That doctor knew it.” She pointed at Starlight. “He looked at her wounds and realized they were healing too fast. That’s what he was saying to River, that there was no way she could have recovered that quickly on her own.”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened. “And…and we’ve spent most of the afternoon telling River’s servants to tell her that we have healing magic that we want to use on Lex.”
Starlight gaped at that. “You what?!”
“She knew.” Soft Mane felt a shudder run down her spine then. “She knew we were here.”
“I think she was suspicious from the beginning.” Pixie was already circling the bed, her horn lighting up as she started to work at the knots binding Starlight’s legs. “Remember how she asked if Starlight knew the princesses, or why she attacked today, the same day that you guys and Princess Twilight arrived?” She looked at Starlight then, already having gotten one of her forelegs free. “She thought you were already in cahoots before, and now she’s sure of it!”
“But that’s crazy!” Starlight sat up as soon as Pixie had her other foreleg free. “I’ve never even heard of you guys before today! Besides, if she knew you were here, why didn’t she check the room? It’s not like you would have been hard to find.”
“Because River’s a thinker, not a fighter, and you guys have a reputation for defeating even powerful ponies like King Sombra and Nightmare Moon,” answered Pixie, working on the knots binding Starlight’s hind legs. “She probably thought you’d jump her if the jig was up. Instead, she’s probably going to get whatever reinforcements she can, which means we have to make tracks right now!”
Biting her lip, Soft Mane felt her heart sink as she realized the full implications of what had just happened. With River apparently under the impression that Starlight had been working with them from the beginning, and her finding out that they were in the middle of rescuing her now, the odds of her talking Sonata into letting them heal Lex had just shrunk to nothing. Worse, the entire place was likely to be crawling with ponies looking for them in the next few minutes.
So much for being home free once Starlight’s exam was over.
“Turbo,” moaned Garden Gate tearfully, using her unbandaged foreleg to hold the pegasus in question close. “It’s really you!”
“It’s really me,” murmured Turbo, eyes closed as he quietly cuddled the one member of his group whom he hadn’t had a chance to reunite with before now. “I’m here, Garden, and I promise I’m never leaving again.”
Hopscotch sniffled, the heartwarming sight threatening to send her into a fresh round of sobs. Garden had finally woken up ten minutes ago, and Turbo – who had joined Hopscotch, Granola Bar, Funshine, and Slip ‘n’ Slide in waiting at their leader’s bedside for her to recover – had been the first pony she’d seen. At first she’d been confused, then alarmed, thinking that she hadn’t survived her encounter with Starlight Glimmer. It had taken the rest of them a few minutes to convince her that she wasn’t dead, but rather than Lex had brought Turbo and several other ponies back to life. At which point Garden had broken down completely, dissolving into weeping as she’d pulled the resurrected stallion to her.
As if that was a signal, they’d all piled on for a group hug. For Hopscotch, although she and the others had reunited with Turbo earlier in the day, that hug just now had been when she’d really felt like they’d actually, truly gotten him back. Embracing him and all of her friends at once had perfectly paralleled what had happened in the immediate aftermath of the attack by the ghoul army, when they had hugged Garden while she’d cried her eyes out over Turbo having gone on his fatal mission to Vanhoover in her place.
And now, against all odds and overturning all logic, he was back. He was back and Garden was okay and they were all together again.
Hopscotch couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so happy. The intensity of it was almost frightening, and it didn’t surprise her how Garden kept her foreleg curled tightly around Turbo’s chest, refusing to let him go. As it was, Hopscotch was hugging Granola Bar tightly, the other mare gently stroking her mane as she watched the reunion with wet eyes. On the other side of Garden’s bed, Funshine and Slip ‘n’ Slide had a foreleg around each other’s shoulders, blinking back tears as well.
It was only after several more minutes had gone by that Garden slowly calmed down, her breathing growing more regular as she finally let Turbo go, though only far enough that he could take a seat on the edge of her bed. Even then, she kept her eyes on him, as though afraid that he’d disappear if she looked away. “How?” she asked finally. “I mean, I know you said that Lex did it, but…how? Even Princess Cadance said she couldn’t…”
Turbo shook his head. “I don’t know all the details. Just that he used his magic. I think he said the Night Mare had something to do with it…and he can’t do it again.”
Garden tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“He brought back all of us,” explained Turbo. “Me, Cloudbank, Thermal Draft, C. Shells, and that kid, Sandbar. The ponies who went into Vanhoover to retrieve bits from that bank. But he said that he can’t resurrect anyone else now. We were it.”
Hopscotch watched the emotions play out over Garden’s face at that, seeing amazement turn into gratitude and then reverence, the vermillion mare letting out a slow breath as she leaned her head back, finally taking her eyes off of Turbo as she looked up at the ceiling. “I’ll never be able to thank him enough…”
“Lex?” There was a slight catch in Turbo’s voice.
But Garden apparently missed it, nodding as she continued to stare upward. “He’s…” Her hoof waved weakly, as though making a half-hearted effort to pull the words she was looking for out of the air. “He saved us all from the monsters. He saved me from becoming a monster. He's given us so much and now…now he’s brought you back.” She looked at Turbo then, smiling even as her eyes started to fill with tears again. “How do you thank somepony for all that? How do you even try?”
“…y-yeah,” smiled Turbo weakly. “Well, at the moment I’m just glad you’re okay. If I’d come back just to lose you, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Lose me?” For a split-second Garden’s face was uncomprehending, but then her eyes widened. “Starlight Glimmer!” she blurted. “What happened?! Is Aria alright?! Did-”
“It’s okay,” interjected Granola Bar quickly. “It’s all okay now. Starlight was stopped.”
Garden shuddered at that, visibly relaxing. “It was Lex, right? He showed up and took care of everything?”
Granola Bar hesitated just for a moment, then nodded, causing Garden to laugh in relief. “I knew it. I knew it. Nopony can defeat him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” muttered Slip ‘n’ Slide.
Funshine shot his brother a look. “Not now, Slip.”
But Garden seemed to take that moment to start paying closer attention to what her friends were saying, her ears perking up. “Did something happen?”
Never a good actor, Funshine froze. “Er…”
The response made Garden sit up, wearing her concern openly now as she looked at her friends, scrutinizing each of them in turn. “What aren’t you telling me?” she asked at last.
“Nothing,” answered Turbo quickly. “Nothing you need to worry about. You just need to rest for now.”
“If you want me to rest, then I need to know what’s going on,” countered Garden. “Somepony, tell me what happened. Please.”
A round of uncomfortable looks were exchanged, with no one wanting to be the one to tell her about Lex’s condition. Finally, Hopscotch opened her mouth. “It’s like this…”
“I need to see him!”
“Garden, you can’t!” Turbo did his best to restrain the upset mare without being rough about it, putting a hoof on the shoulder of her undamaged foreleg and applying pressure gently. “You have to stay and let the doctors treat you!”
But she didn’t seem to agree, her horn lighting up as she tried to telekinetically remove his hoof. “Let me up right now, Turbo!”
But Granola Bar was quick to reinforce Turbo’s position, both physically and verbally. “Garden, you need to stay in bed,” she insisted as she pressed the upset mare back down. “Your foreleg is broken in two places, one of your ribs are cracked, you have a concussion, and that’s just what the doctors know for sure!”
“And Lex already has Sonata watching over him, along with that River Bank lady,” noted Funshine, moving forward in a way that made it clear that he’d help to hold her down if he needed to.
“And Aria’s with him too,” added Slip ‘n’ Slide, nodding at a nearby bed which was now empty. “We all heard her wake up a little while ago.”
But Garden didn’t look satisfied by that, still trying to climb out of bed, until Hopscotch moved over to her bedside and spoke up. “Lex would want you to stay here and get better,” she pointed out, giving her friend a small smile.
That was enough to make Garden pause, biting her lip. “…what about that kid with the snake? The one who healed my horn?”
Granola Bar shook her head. “I asked about her when we were waiting for you to regain consciousness. She can’t use her powers unless her animal’s with her, and it got vaporized during the fight.” She held up a hoof to forestall Garden’s reaction, seeing the unicorn open her mouth. “She says it’ll come back tomorrow morning, and she’ll be able to heal Lex, and hopefully you, once it does, but she can’t do anything until then.”
“I think Cloudbank will be able to help sooner than that,” offered Turbo. “When we were breaking into that bank vault, she saved Thermal Draft’s life with a healing spell.” He pursed his lips then, but only for a moment before sighing. “And Hopscotch is right. Lex would want you to stay here and focus on recuperating.”
Garden didn’t say anything for a long moment, but finally sank back down, letting out a slow breath as she did. “I want somepony to let me know when he’s healed, okay?”
“We’ll take care of it,” nodded Turbo, before turning to the others. “Guys, can you give us a minute?”
Garden blinked at that, and another round of looks were shared between the others, before they slowly nodded, filing out. With Aria having already vacated the room, and the others exiting it now, that left just the two of them there. Turbo caught Granola Bar giving him a pointed look before she closed the door, but put it out of his thoughts as he turned back to the mare on the bed, who was giving him a curious look.
Smiling self-consciously, he sat down. “You remember when we thought we’d be out of danger once we got out of the city?”
Despite her uncertain expression, Garden nodded. “And we were right. There aren’t any ghouls here, or whatever those fish-monsters were. We have plenty to eat. Shelter that’s warm and dry. This is what we were hoping to get back to.”
“Except for when you’re fighting an army of ghouls all by yourself,” countered Turbo with a wry grin. “Or escaping from Canterlot right out from under the Royal Guard’s nose. Or fighting some unicorn mare who’s actually more dangerous than you are, which I didn’t think was possible.”
That brought a smirk to Garden’s face. “She got lucky.”
“No doubt,” conceded Turbo with a laugh, but his expression softened a moment later. “My point is, even after everything we went through in Vanhoover, and afterwards with Lex cursing you-”
“He was right to-”
“-there’s still a chance that we might lose you,” he finished, not letting her interrupt him. “That I might lose you.”
Garden didn’t miss the way he’d said that last part. “…Turbo?”
Looking down for a moment, the pegasus stallion collected his thoughts, trying to calm the sudden swarm of butterflies filling his stomach. “You know, right after we got out, Granola Bar told me something interesting. She said that she’d had a secret weapon while we were stuck in Vanhoover, one that kept her going no matter how bad things got.” He chuckled a little then, remembering what she’d told him. “I couldn’t believe it when she admitted that it was Piggy.”
Garden giggled. “I’m not surprised. She always seemed like she had a soft spot for him.”
“Yeah,” agreed Turbo. “But the thing was, she pointed out something I hadn’t realized, which was that I had a secret weapon that kept me going too.” He wasn’t laughing now, looking at her directly to let her know just who he meant. “And now…I don’t want to keep it a secret anymore.”
Garden’s eyes widened, and he could see that she was finally starting to realize why he’d asked the others to leave. “Wait, you-”
Reaching out, Turbo took Garden’s undamaged foreleg in his own, hurrying forward before he lost his courage. “I know that this might not be the right time or place for it,” he began, cutting her off. “But I’m starting to think that maybe there isn’t going to be a right time or place, unless we make it ourselves. So, before some new disaster happens, I’m just going to say it.”
His eyes never leaving hers, Turbo put everything on the line. “Garden, I love you.”
“Turbo…”
“I’ve loved you since before we made it out of Vanhoover,” he continued, the words pouring out of him now. “Since before I knew your real name was Garden Gate. Being with you…seeing you every day was what made it possible for me to keep going, even when it seemed like the world had ended. Even after we got out of the city, seeing you so heartbroken about the things you’d done to help us survive broke my heart too. That was when I realized that I needed more than food or shelter or safety in order to feel like I’d found something worth living for…I needed your smile.”
Bringing her hoof up to his lips, he planted a soft kiss on it. “I don’t remember what happened to me after I died, but I do know this: wherever I went, whatever afterlife was waiting for me, it couldn’t have been a good one, because it didn’t have you.”
A fresh round of tears was welling up in Garden’s eyes by that point, and she swallowed audibly, realizing that he wasn’t going to say anymore…and that his silence was a question.
“Turbo, I…I care about you so much…”
A sinking feeling came over him then. “But…?”
“But I just…this is all happening so fast! I was just fighting Starlight, and then I woke up and saw that you’re back, and now, I…I don’t know what to say…”
“Say what you feel,” he implored, silently begging for that to be what he wanted to hear.
Shaking her head softly, Garden tried to keep her lip from quivering. “Turbo…you’re my best friend. I trust you more than anypony else in the world, and I want more than anything for you to be happy…”
“You make me happy, Garden.”
“I know, and I’m glad. I mean, I’m flattered…what you said means so much to me-”
“I should go.” Unable to look her in the eyes, Turbo slowly let go of her hoof, trying to keep his breathing steady.
“No! No, Turbo, don’t go!” Heedless of what her friends had all said a few minutes ago, Garden sat up, throwing back the bedcovers. “Don’t go, okay? We can talk about this!”
“Talk about what?” laughed Turbo humorlessly, already walking toward the door. “How…” Somehow, he managed to catch himself before saying something that he knew he’d regret later. Instead, he swallowed heavily. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done this now. You need to rest.”
He reached the door a second later, putting a hoof on the handle, but couldn’t bring himself to leave. Not when there was one thought that he suddenly couldn’t let go of. One suspicion that he couldn’t stop himself from giving voice to. “Just tell me...is it because of Lex?”
“What? What does Lex-, NO! Turbo, it’s not like that!” Coming up behind him, Garden reached out with her telekinesis, taking his hoof off of the doorhandle. “Lex is the pony I admire more than anyone, but I promise you I don’t feel that way about him!”
“…or about me.”
It was a question as much as a statement, and when she didn’t deny it he knew he had to get out of there. “I really need to g-”
The door suddenly opened, causing Turbo to reflexively step back as River Bank strode in, her eyes looking them both over in rapid succession. “We’re in an emergency situation,” she pronounced a second later, causing both ponies to blink at the non-sequitur. “I need the two of you to get your little street gang ready to defend this area immediately.”
For a moment, everything else Turbo felt was buried under a sudden wave of confusion and alarm brought on by River’s statement. “Why? What’s happening?”
“Princess Twilight and her friends are in league with Starlight Glimmer,” replied the older mare, her voice grim. “They’re healing her injuries as we speak.”
“What?!” Garden’s jaw dropped at the news. “Are you sure?”
“I confirmed it myself just now,” answered River. “Which means we might have only seconds before they try to finish what she started and kill Lex.”
The question brought a smile to Soft Mane’s lips. “I’m sure, Pixie. You were only supposed to take us to River Bank, and strictly speaking you did that, even if we couldn’t talk to her.” Her smile faded as her expression turned more serious. “If you got cursed or locked up or something else because we drew you into our fight with Lex, I’d feel awful. Especially after you figured out how to get us out of there without being seen.”
Pixie smirked at that. “As far as disappearing acts go, it wasn’t exactly a difficult one,” she chuckled, pointing at the window that they’d just exited. “‘Open the window and go outside’ probably won’t get written into the stage magic history books.”
Soft Mane gave a rueful snort. “It was still better than anything we were able to come up with.”
Starlight’s room, as it turned out, had been on the first floor of River’s manor. In hindsight that hadn’t been much of a surprise; when setting up an ad hoc medical facility, it made sense to avoid needing to carry sick or injured ponies up and down stairs. Fortunately, it had also made for a convenient escape route, one so obvious that Soft Mane, Fluttershy, and Starlight Glimmer had completely overlooked it, the three of them having been in various stages of panic at the thought of River coming back at any second with an army of angry ponies behind her. While Pixie had been no less anxious, her years of experience with vanishing acts and misdirection let her easily pick up on what everypony else had missed.
But now Soft Mane was insisting that Pixie had done enough, and that it was time to end their partnership, something which made the unicorn nervous. “Are you sure you don’t want me to at least help you get back to where the rest of your friends are waiting?”
Soft Mane shook her head. “I’m pretty sure we can manage that much on our own. That parlor is the first door on the right after you walk in the front entrance, so all we have to do is circle back around and we should be able to slip inside without anypony seeing us.”
“Just be careful,” cautioned Pixie. “Hug the side of the house, and make sure you stay low enough that no one looking out the windows from inside will see you.”
“We will,” Soft Mane assured her. “But while we’re doing that, you need to get back to wherever you’re supposed to be, before River figures out that you helped us.”
Pixie’s ears folded down at that. “Some help I was,” she muttered, suddenly morose. “If it wasn’t for me leading you to the wrong room, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“You’ve got it wrong.” Reaching out, Soft Mane put a reassuring hand on Pixie’s shoulder. “If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have been able to rescue Lex’s prisoner.”
Rather than cheering Pixie up, however, Soft Mane’s words made her grimace, looking past the half-pony to where Fluttershy and Starlight were conversing quietly a short distance away, the latter pointing at the former’s cutie mark. Biting her lip, Pixie hesitated for just a moment before stepping closer to Soft Mane, lowering her voice. “Don’t heal Starlight Glimmer anymore,” she murmured.
Soft Mane blinked. “What? Why? I can still use a couple more healing spells, and if it comes down to a fight-”
“It already came down to a fight with her,” interrupted Pixie. “That’s why she was tied up. Look, I didn’t see what happened with her, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to her side of the story. But you heard what River said about her brutalizing ponies and stealing cutie marks. If you heal her enough to where she can use her horn again, I’m concerned about what she’ll do.”
“I think you’re worrying over nothing.” Now it was Soft Mane’s turn to glance at the other two ponies, as though she could read Starlight’s intentions with a look. “I think she’s somepony who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that Lex’s minions started picking on her because they didn’t like what she was telling everypony about equality, and now they want Lex to make an example out of her because she defended herself from their bullying.” Her expression turned sour then. “Which he’ll probably do. He might save people, but he’s not what I’d call a nice guy.”
Pixie held her tongue, knowing they didn’t have time to get into a debate. At some point somepony would think to look for them outside the manor as well as inside, and they needed to be gone by the time that happened. “Just…just wait a little while before you fix her horn, okay? Let her explain herself and then make a decision, together with the rest of your friends.”
Despite not looking convinced, Soft Mane nodded. “I suppose that’s not a bad plan.”
Smiling at the concession, Pixie pulled Soft Mane into a quick hug. “Give my best to Fluttershy. And look me up if you’re ever in Las Pegasus, okay? I’m telling you, casting spells is nice and all, but you don’t know what magic really feels like until you’re doing it up on a stage, hearing an audience cheering you on.”
“I will. Take care of yourself, Pixie.”
“You too.”
With nothing more to be said, Pixie turned and galloped away, heading around toward the back of the manor. As worried as she was about what would happen with Starlight, she knew full well that it was out of her hooves now. The only remaining way she could help Soft Mane and Fluttershy was by not getting caught, and that would mean slipping back inside and coming up with an alibi before somepony realized that she was gone.
Luckily, she had an idea of how to do exactly that…
“Surprise!”
The unexpected yell made Piggy squeal in fright, his little legs kicking as he rolled off the couch in a heap. “What’s going-?! Oh, it’s you…”
Keeping her smile firmly in place, Pixie gave a grand bow, as though she were in an auditorium filled with hundreds of ponies instead of a solarium with one ill-mannered stallion. “Thank you for your patience! The second act of Pixie’s stupendous and astonishing magic show is about to begin! Prepare to be amazed, as you’ll witness feats of wonder that-”
“Did you get my ice cream?” interrupted Piggy, crawling back onto the couch with a huff, crossing his stubby forelegs over his chest as he pouted. “Because I’m tired of waiting! I was promised ice cream and I want it NOW!”
Taking a deep breath, Pixie trotted over until she was directly across from him, with only a small cloth-covered coffee table separating them. “Ah, but why worry about filling your belly when you can instead feast your eyes on Pixie’s marvelous magic tricks! Observe!”
Taking the tablecloth in her telekinesis, she yanked it into the air with a flourish. “An ordinary tablecloth,” she proclaimed, twisting it around to show that there was nothing unusual about it, before bundling it up into a ball as she held it just above the coffee table. “And yet, when subjected to the profound and primal power of Pixie’s potent prestidigitation” – she dropped the bundled cloth then, letting it fall open as it settled back onto the table – “it reveals…!”
“A top hat,” sighed Piggy, sounding supremely unimpressed as he looked at the felt-lined headpiece that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“Ah, but top hats are the magician’s trademark,” cooed Pixie, her horn lighting up again. “For within them, we find…!”
Piggy’s eyes widened as Pixie lifted the right-side up hat from the table, revealing that underneath it there was-
“ICE CREAM!”
Licking his lips at the sight of the carton of frozen goodness, Piggy sat up so fast he nearly fell off the couch again. Rushing forward, he grabbed the cylindrical container, confirming that it was still cold as he turned it in his grasp to read the label. “Strawberry?” he pouted, his excitement fading at once. “Strawberry’s only good if you put it with chocolate and vanilla! That’s why I said I wanted at least five flavors!”
“Ah, ah, ah!” tsked Pixie, replacing her top hat on the coffee table. “The trick isn’t done yet! Observe!” Lifting the top hat again, she had the satisfaction of watching Piggy’s eyes widen even more as a second carton was revealed, his fat little forelegs grabbing for it. “Ooh! Fudge swirl!”
“And that’s not all!” Lowering the hat to the table, Pixie let it sit only for a moment before she raised it again, revealing a third carton.
“Vanilla with marshmallows!” squealed Piggy happily. “Wow! What else is in there?!”
Grabbing for the hat, the fat little stallion examined it for a moment, his brow furrowing as he couldn’t see anything else inside of it. Pouting, he turned it over and began banging it on the table, slamming it down over and over as if it was a jar of ketchup. “It’s not working!” he whined when his efforts failed to produce results, looking at Pixie. “Make it make more ice cream!”
“Well, I’m not sure I can,” drawled Pixie, trying not to feel too smug about finally getting the little brat invested in her show. “But maybe the two of us together can. Reach out and gently place your hooves on the brim of the hat,” she instructed, fighting back a smile at how fast Piggy complied, putting her own fore-hooves on the opposite side of the brim. “Now, concentrate as hard as you can on what you want the hat to make, and then, when I count to three, lift it up as quick as you can, Ready?”
“Ready!” replied Piggy, his voice filled with intense focus.
“One…two…three!”
The last word had barely left her lips when she and Piggy raised the hat, the stallion doing so as hard as he could, throwing it into the air so high that it almost touched the ceiling. But he didn’t notice, staring open-mouthed at his prize.
“Th-three cartons!” he breathed, looking at the trio of cylinders stacked one on top of the other, higher than the actual hat itself in a trick that Pixie was actually quite proud of. But the apparent impossibility of what he was seeing was lost on Piggy, caught up in reading the labels. “Cookies ‘n’ cream! Butter pecan! Coffee! Wait, ew, coffee ice cream?”
“Oh, uh, that one’s for me,” murmured River, telekinetically removing that one from the stack. Those six cartons had been the sum total of the ice cream she’d found when she’d raided the kitchen on her way back, and she hadn’t been able to resist snagging that last one, as it was her favorite flavor. After all the stress she’d been through recently, she’d figured she deserved a little something. And what better way to relax than with the same tasty treat that’ll make this kid serve as my alibi?
Of that much Pixie felt reasonably confident. Although she hadn’t known him very long, Piggy had made it clear that he was extremely self-absorbed. But as irritating as that made spending time with him, it also meant that so long as he got what he wanted, he was unlikely to be aware of anything else. And since he got his ice cream, hopefully he won’t think to mention to anypony that I slipped out for a little while.
“Hey, how do I make this thing gimme a bowl and spoon?”
Piggy’s question brought Pixie out of her thoughts, looking at where the pudgy stallion was banging the top hat on the table again, blinking as she realized what she’d forgotten to get in her rush to get the goods and get back here. “Oh, um…”
“And I still need chocolate sauce too,” whined Piggy, lifting the hat to put his hoof inside it, as though he could scoop what he was looking for out of its recesses. “And whipped cream, and some bananas, and sprinkles, and-”
A knock cut him off, causing both ponies to look as the door to the solarium opened, revealing the aged butler that had dropped them off at the solarium before.
“Master Piggy,” began Trotsworth, “Miss Pixie, I do apologize for the interruption, but Miss Bank is requesting that both of you join her in the manor’s medical area at once.”
“Finally!” sighed Piggy, struggling to gather up the myriad cartons of ice cream. “Go get me a bowl and some toppings!” he snapped at Trotsworth as he waddled toward the door. “I’m gonna eat all these right in front of Granola Bar while Mama makes her apologize to me!”
“Very good, Master Piggy,” replied Trotsworth, and Pixie fought down a grin as she followed the little stallion out the door, certain now that River’s son didn’t even remember that she’d left.
Once again, the magician’s secrets are safe, she congratulated herself, before her elation faded under the weight of everything else that was going on.
“Get back here!” yelled River. “Get back here this instant!”
Her command went unacknowledged, causing River to grit her teeth as she broke into a gallop, circling around and placing herself directly in the path of the recalcitrant mare who thought she could ignore her so blithely. “I said STOP!”
Years of political maneuvering had taught River to never lose her temper in public. Doing so was a surefire way to lose respect, which in turn diminished her influence. But despite being aware of how many maids, doctors, and butlers were watching her right now, River couldn’t bring herself to remain calm. Not when the pony she’d pinned all of her hopes for the future on was at death’s door and his enemies were gathering! “You and your cohorts are staying here and helping to fortify this place!” she hissed, her words carrying the weight of someone who had decades of experience issuing orders.
But C. Shells didn’t look the least bit intimidated, glaring at River with a cold command all her own. “Move,” she growled softly, “or be moved.”
River did move, walking forward until she was almost nose-to-nose with C. Shells. “Captain,” she said, her voice filled with quiet menace, “I understand that you’re worried about your crewmate-”
“His name is Sandbar,” interjected Compass Rose coldly.
“-being left in Princess Twilight’s company now that we know why she’s really here,” continued River. “But I need you to focus on the bigger picture. Lex is critically injured, and the majority of our strongest ponies aren’t much better off. So right now, we need to dig in here and do everything we can to keep Lex safe until Cloudbank can begin healing him. That has to be priority one!”
“Sandbar is a member of my crew,” retorted C. Shells. “I don’t leave one of my own behind.”
“I’m not suggesting that you leave him behind.” River’s reply came through gritted teeth. “I’m suggesting that your crewmate is-”
“Less valuable than Lex?” sneered Ocean Spray.
Despite knowing that it was beneath her to reply to the impertinence of someone else’s servant, River couldn’t help but give the pegasus stallion a condescending glare. “Face facts: he is.”
“Oh you did not just say that!” growled Scrubby, stomping forward and glaring at River as he raised a hoof to give her a hard poke in the chest. “Look lady, you might think you’re some kinda big shot, but you-, OW! OW! OW! LEMME GO!”
His face remaining impassive as he twisted the sailor’s foreleg behind his back, Trotsworth looked over at River. “Madam, Master Piggy and Miss Pixie have been made comfortable in one of the recovery rooms as per your instructions. Is there anything else that you require in the meantime?”
“Standby, Trotsworth.” Fighting down a smirk, River kept her gaze locked onto C. Shells. “Well, Captain? Are you going to listen to reason, or is your little thug going to need a recovery room of his own?”
“Let me tell you something.” Far from being cowed, C. Shell’s voice was now thick with fury, her eyes blazing, as were those of Ocean Spray and Compass Rose as they took up fighting positions. “My crew and I fought alongside Lex when the sea monsters invaded. Sandbar and I personally went back into Vanhoover at Lex’s direction. So if you think one stuck-up old nag and her butler can threaten my people and get away with it-”
“Alright, that’s enough!”
The words were accompanied by a kitchen knife – held in a glowing green aura – darting out to slash the empty space between C. Shells’ and River’s muzzles, causing both mares to draw back instinctively. As soon as they did, Garden Gate marched forward, planting herself between the two and glaring at them both in equal measure, her friends moving to either side of her in a silent show of support. “What are you two doing?! We’ve got a princess problem, not to mention Starlight Glimmer being back in the game, and the two of you pick now to start bickering over who’s in charge?!”
C. Shells stomped a hoof. “Sandbar is with Princess Twilight, and this old lady’s trying to stop us from going to get him!”
“I’m trying to organize a defense for Lex!” scowled River. “That selfish nag doesn’t seem to realize that we need everypony here for that!”
“You two…” Garden couldn’t finish, closing her eyes as she swayed, suddenly unsteady.
Instantly, hooves reached out to steady her. “You okay?” whispered Turbo.
A rush of gratitude mixed with guilt came over Garden then, appreciating that the stallion whose heart she’d just broken was still supporting her, giving him a grateful look. “Yeah.”
He managed a smile. “Okay. Anyway, the answer here is pretty clear, so go ahead and tell these crazy ladies how it’s going to be.”
Fighting back the urge to snicker, Garden straightened up, taking a deep breath as she glanced at River first, then at C. Shells, holding the latter’s gaze. “Listen, I understand wanting to run out and rescue your friend. But right now we need to focus on protecting Lex first and foremost-”
“Wait, what?” interrupted Turbo, giving her a shocked look.
“Turbo?” Caught off-guard by the interruption from the pony who had just been backing her up, Garden faltered.
“Garden, we need to let them go,” insisted Turbo, pointing to C. Shells and her crew.
Garden looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “We need to keep Lex safe!” Out of her peripheral vision, she noted that Funshine, Granola Bar, Slip ‘n’ Slide, and Hopscotch were watching the exchange with worried looks on their faces, and the warmth she’d felt for Turbo suddenly fled, replaced with frustration. “After everything he’s done for us, how is that not obvious?!”
“A few ponies leaving won’t make a difference!” As it realizing that he was getting too worked up, Turbo took a slow breath. “Garden, listen to me. I know Sandbar. He was there with me when we went back into Vanhoover, you know…before. If he’s in trouble now, I can’t just sit back and do nothing.”
“And who brought you both back when the worst happened, Turbo?” countered Garden quietly. “Who’s the pony responsible for you being here right now?”
“The same pony who sent us there to begin with!” snapped Turbo. Under any other circumstances, he felt sure he would have been able to keep his cool. But right now, after what had just transpired between the two of them…
Garden seemed to sense that, because she gave him a penetrating look. “Is this about what just happened?” she asked, lowering her voice further. “With us?”
“Of course not!” The words came out with more force than he’d intended. “This is about what’s important, and why you and that rich nag can’t see it!”
“Call me a nag again,” growled River, “and the next time you want a place to hide like a coward while your leader is out facing some deranged magical mare, it won’t be in my manor.”
“Right, because you really got your hooves dirty, chatting up a prince while that Starlight lady was going on a rampage,” jeered Ocean Spray.
Slip ‘n’ Slide raised a brow at the pegasus stallion. “Didn’t you guys just show up, like, ten minutes ago, saying that we should let Princess Twilight and her friends come strolling on in?”
“And none of us were hiding,” added Funshine, frowning at River. “We were searching this gigantic maze you call a manor to find Lex and tell him what was going on.”
But C. Shells had run out of patience. “Every second we waste here puts Sandbar in more danger! I’m not going to tell you again, step aside or be stepped on!”
“You need to calm down.” Granola Bar kept her voice firm without being aggressive, trying to reduce the rising tension. “Right now getting angry is only weakening our position.”
“What do you mean ‘our’?” shot back Compass Rose, her normally-calm voice thick with frustration. “It’s not your friend who’s in danger!”
“We were in Vanhoover after the city fell,” noted Hopscotch. “We know what it’s like to be worried about the ponies you care about, but this-”
“Is why you need somepony who’s used to managing others calling the shots,” interrupted River. “So all of you need to stand back and follow my lead until Lex wakes up, at which point-”
“Stuff it, lady,” snapped Ocean Spray. “I’m going! And if you don’t like it, then try and stop me!”
He flapped his wings then, rising up off the ground in a rush of air, only for his sudden acceleration to pause as a green aura flared to life around him, Garden Gate grimacing with effort. “Down!” she snarled.
“Let him go!” yelled Compass Rose, rushing forward to swat at the unicorn.
But River wasn’t about to let some irritating tradesmare ruin things. “Trotsworth, stop her!”
“Very good, Madam.” Releasing Scrubby – who immediately fell back, whimpering as he rubbed his sore foreleg – the old butler hurried toward Compass Rose.
But Funshine, having heard River’s order but misunderstood whom she’d told Trotsworth to subdue, moved to intercept him. “Back off, old-timer. I don’t want to hurt-, whoa!” The larger stallion couldn’t hold back a yelp as Slip ‘n’ Slide suddenly knocked him off-balance, clearing the way for Trotsworth. “Slip, what are you doing?!”
“Me?! What are you doing?!” his brother shouted back. “I’m trying to-, oof!”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as C. Shells knocked him aside, trying to barrel her way through. She almost made it, only for River to grab her tail in her teeth and drag her back. “Oh no you don’t!”
Everypony watching stepped back as the altercation descended into an all-out brawl, yelps of surprise and roars of anger and cries of pain filling the air, growing louder by the second. A few doctors tried to approach, hoping to break things up, but were forced back by the fury of the conflict. Helpless, all they could do was watch the buffeting of wings, flashes of magic, and heavy swinging of hooves as bedlam reigned.
Peering out from where she’d cracked a door open, Feather Duster’s eyes widened as she beheld the chaos. From behind her, Cleansweep raised her voice. “Is it Princess Twilight?! Is she attacking?! I’m gonna go help!”
“No, sweetheart,” replied Feather Duster quickly, closing the door firmly. “It’s just the grown-ups having an, um, animated discussion. A very animated discussion. You should stay here with your friends. I’m sure they’ll want to see you when they wake up.”
“Geez, babe, let the kid have some fun,” chastised Tryout with a chuckle. “I bet she’d get a kick out of-”
“Tryout, my love,” interrupted Feather Duster as she closed the door firmly behind her. “Shut up.”
“Alright, break it up! Break it up! I said BREAK IT UP!”
The scream, augmented by magic, was loud enough that it sent the majority of the combatants sprawling, falling over each other in a tangle of limbs. Dazed, they slowly climbed to their hooves, shaking their heads and groaning as they looked at the owner of the voice that had so effectively ended their battle royale. Most winced when they saw who it was.
Striding down the hallway toward them, Sonata couldn’t have looked more furious if she’d tried.
Following after her, Thermal Draft looked more bewildered than upset. “What the heck is going on out here?!”
“Sandbar is with the princess, and we-”
“I’m trying to protect-”
“NO!” shouted Sonata, stamping a hoof. “You know what? Just no!”
She glared at C. Shells and River in turn, and when neither dared to say anything lest they upset her more, she kept going. “Lex is fighting for his life right now, and I should be in there with him, but instead I’m out here because you guys totes can’t get your act together! So I’m gonna do like he would and pick someone at random to tell me what’s going on, got it?! Good! Now: eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a pony by his toe-, er, hoof, no, wait…you know what? Forget this. You! What’s this all about?”
“U-um, well,” gulped Hopscotch, having been the one Sonata pointed at. “It was like this…”
By the time she was finished explaining what had happened, Sonata looked calmer, though still very upset. “Okay, look, I don’t know who’s in charge while Lex recovering, but since Aria doesn’t care about what happens to the rest of you guys right now, how about we all pretend that I am, okay? Anypony have a problem with that?”
Everyone shook their head.
“Terrific! Now, you guys,” she looked at C. Shells and her crew then. “Go ahead and go rescue your friend.”
“But…!” Unable to help herself, River took a step forward.
“This is what Lex would want,” interjected Thermal Draft quickly, before Sonata could say anything. “If he could talk to us right now, this is what he’d say to do. Even if it wasn’t one of the ponies he went out of his way to resurrect, he’d never suggest leaving someone else in danger just to protect him.”
River couldn’t protest that, folding her ears back as she looked down.
Letting out a sigh, Thermal Draft turned her attention to Sonata. “Why don’t you head back in there. I’ll keep an eye on things out here for you.”
Sonata bit her lip, glancing back at the door to Lex’s room. “You don’t mind?”
Smiling, Thermal Draft shook her head. “I’ll be fine. And tell Cloudy to stay there with you guys. Since she’s the one who’ll get healing magic first, she needs to keep right next to Lex until she does, just to be safe.”
Clearly relieved to have someone else handling things, Sonata nodded, giving the other mare a grateful smile. “Thanks, Drafty.” She didn’t wait for a reply before hurrying back, the situation with everyone else already forgotten.
Once she’d disappeared back into Lex’s room, Thermal Draft let out a breath, turning to look at C. Shells. “Alright, let’s get ready to do this.”
The nautical pony blinked. “Wait…you’re coming with us?”
“Turbo’s not the only one who was with you and Sandbar when you guys went into Vanhoover, remember?” Drafty was already moving as she spoke, motioning for the others to follow her.
“He’s my friend too, and I’m going to get him back.”
Twilight froze as the angry voice of Sonata, emanating from somewhere deeper in the manor, reverberated throughout the parlor. The furious tone from the normally-easygoing mare, combined with the sheer volume at which she’d needed to have screamed in order to make herself heard through so many walls, was enough to send shivers down Twilight’s spine. Nor was she alone in that, as everyone else went quiet at the angry shout, exchanging a round of wide-eyed looks.
Rainbow Dash was the first to recover, wings flapping as she leaped into the air. “Okay, that does it! Something’s happening and we need to find out what! C’mon!”
“No!” Teleporting in front of the room’s only exit a half-second before Rainbow reached it, Twilight stood upright and spread her forelegs out, blocking the way. “You can’t rush in blindly again! None of us can! That’s how we got in this mess in the first place!”
The rebuke made Rainbow gape. “Are you serious?! Twilight, Fluttershy and Soft Mane have been gone for almost half an hour now! I don’t care how big this place is, it doesn’t take that long to find a bathroom! And now we just heard Sonata yell ‘break it up,’ like a fight was going on, and you’re still saying-”
“Rainbow,” cut in Applejack.
But she didn’t have a chance to finish as the irate pegasus mare rounded on her. “Are you kidding me?! Look, I know I flew off the handle before, but this is different! Our friends might be in trouble! We can’t just sit here and do nothing while-”
“RAINBOW!” thundered Applejack. “Dagnabbit, I’m tryin’ to say that I agree with you!”
Rainbow Dash blinked at that, surprised to the point that she actually closed her wings and landed. “You are?”
“You are?” echoed Twilight, stunned. Applejack had been more upset than any of them at Rainbow’s behavior before. For her to condone it now was completely unexpected.
“Yes,” snapped Applejack peevishly, giving her girlfriend an irritated look, “I am! So how about you let me do the talkin’ for a change?”
“Right,” muttered Rainbow, fighting down an embarrassed blush. “Go ahead.”
Huffing, Applejack paused just long enough to give Rainbow Dash a quick nuzzle, letting her know there were no hard feelings, before she turned to Twilight. “Listen, sugarcube, I get where you’re comin’ from, but the mistake Rainbow made before wasn’t that she rushed in without thinkin’. It was that she went ahead all on her own, without the rest of us. That ain’t gonna be the case this time.”
“Applejack is right, darling.” Standing up, Rarity strode over to Twilight – causing Sandbar to pout as he lost the beautiful mare’s attention – and gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s clear that something unusual is going on, and if there’s even a chance that Fluttershy and Soft Mane are caught up in it, then we need to investigate.”
“I think we should, too!” cheered Pinkie. “I’ll bet everyone here’s throwing Lex a get-well party and Fluttershy and Soft Mane stumbled onto it and now they’re whacking a piñata and Sonata’s cheering for them to ‘break it up’ and get to the delicious candy inside!” She licked her lips, drooling at the prospect. “We need to hurry and get there before it’s all gone!”
Twilight managed a wan smile at that, but her good humor faded away as Spike hurried over to her. “Do you think something happened to Soft Mane?” he blurted, visibly distressed at the thought. “I know she and Lex don’t get along. What if…what if he did something to her, like he did to that poor dragon back in Tall Tale?” His eyes filled with tears at the thought. “What if I never get to tell her I’m sorry about that fight we had?”
“Oh, Spikey-wikey!” cooed Rarity, scooping up the little dragon in a sympathetic hug. “You and Soft Mane had a fight? When? What about?”
“Er, well…” Desperately, Spike’s gaze slid back over to Twilight, silently begging to be saved.
“Don’t worry.” Using her telekinesis to gently pull Spike out of Rarity’s grasp, Twilight gave him a quick hug of her own before putting him down. “If Soft Mane’s in trouble, then we’ll do everything we can to rescue her and Fluttershy.”
“Aw yeah!” whooped Rainbow Dash, unfurling her wings as she punched the air in excitement. “We’re getting our friends back, even if we have to turn this place upside down to find them!”
Pinkie’s eyes lit up. “Ooh, that sounds fun! I call dibs on this room!” she yelled, before immediately flipping the chair she’d been sitting on over, turning it literally upside down before giving a toothy grin as she rushed to the large couch in the center of the parlor.
Fortunately, she was prevented from inverting it as a raspberry-colored aura lifted the sofa before she reached it, sending Pinkie stumbling forward. “Actually, I’d like to say something before we get started,” announced Twilight, putting the couch down once Pinkie had moved away it. “I agree that we should go looking for Fluttershy and Soft Mane, but we still need to be careful. The map sent us here for a reason, and I still think that reason has something to do with showing Lex the magic of friendship. I don’t know what’ll happen if we fail, but I’m sure it won’t be good.”
She looked at each of her friends in turn before she continued. “I know we’re not all in agreement on this, but based on everything we heard at Princess Celestia’s summit, I think that there’s a good chance that what happened between Lex and the princesses was a misunderstanding, at least in part. What happened with Rainbow Dash earlier today definitely was. And while Lex certainly isn’t blameless for how things have turned out, I want to avoid creating another problem if we can help it. So while we’re looking for Fluttershy and Soft Mane, let’s make sure to stay calm and think things through so we don’t accidentally make the situation worse, okay?”
A chorus of agreements came, and this time Twilight’s smile was more genuine. “Okay. In that case, Sandbar, I’d like to ask for your help.”
Sitting up from where he’d glumly watching as everypony forgot about him, Sandbar’s eyebrows went up. “My help?” he echoed, before recovering his poise, climbing to his hooves as he cracked what he was sure was a winning smile. “I mean, of course! I’m always happy to help a mare in need!” That last comment came with a wink thrown Rarity’s way, causing the mare to titter coquettishly.
Fighting the urge to roll her eyes, Twilight nodded. “I’m sure you know this manor better than any of us. Do you think you could guide us to where Sonata is? Even if Fluttershy and Soft Mane aren’t there, we can at least check and see if your friends have changed her mind about letting us help.”
“It’ll also give Dash here a chance to apologize in person,” added Applejack with a smirk.
“Apologize?!” sputtered Rainbow Dash indignantly. But when a quick look at everyone’s faces made it clear that she wouldn’t find any allies in this particular fight, she heaved a sigh. “Okay! Fine! Whatever! I’ll say I’m sorry!” she huffed, crossing her forelegs and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like “Daring Do never had to apologize” under her breath.
Rarity, however, had other concerns. “Twilight, darling, we can’t ask Sandbar to be our guide,” she insisted, trotting over to the stallion and brushing her side against his. “He was just telling me how the first time he’d ever been in here was when he was brought back to life this morning. I doubt he knows the layout of this place any better than we do.”
Twilight’s ears folded back at that, unable to hide her disappointment. “I understand. In that case-”
“Wait, hang on a second!” interrupted Sandbar. Making sure his grin was still in place, he gave a shrug that looked just a little too nonchalant. “I mean, yeah, I’ve only been here once before, but I had a pretty good look around at the time. I can take you all where you need to go no problem!”
“Great!” smiled Twilight, standing aside and gesturing at the door. “In that case, lead the way!”
“R-right!” Nodding, Sandbar swallowed as he walked up to the door and stopped, looking back at the others. “So, um, a word of warning: this place is really big,” he cautioned. “Like, huge. So, don’t be surprised if it takes us a few minutes to get there.”
“Understood,” nodded Spike, clearly eager to get going.
“Also, don’t be surprised if it seems like we’re taking the long way,” continued Sandbar. “The, um, interior layout of this place means that the, er, the shortest distance between where we are and where we’re going isn’t exactly a, um, whatchamacallit. A straight line.”
“We’re taking the scenic route!” sang Pinkie, bouncing excitedly in place.
“Exactly!” Grabbing his bandana, Sandbar mopped the back of his neck with it for a moment before replacing it on his head. “In fact, we may need to double back a few times, because the hallways have, um…angles.”
“Angles?” repeated Twilight, tilting her head with a curious frown. “What kind of angles?”
Sandbar bit his lip, but was saved from having to answer a second later. “Can we skip the egghead stuff and just get going already?” moaned Rainbow Dash.
“Tut tut, Rainbow,” admonished Rarity gently. “I’m sure Sandbar is giving us these warnings for a good reason.”
“It’s like Twilight said,” added Appejack. “We can’t afford to make any more mistakes. We need to take things nice and easy, so that we don’t give Lex or those ponies followin’ him any more reason not to trust us.”
“No mistakes, I get it,” huffed Rainbow. “But if we wait here any longer, we’ll need to-”
But exactly what they’d need to do was left unsaid as the door suddenly opened, causing Sandbar to yelp as it nearly struck him in the face. “Okay, this should be the parlor,” came a familiar voice. “Let’s hurry and get inside before we’re-”
“Soft Mane!”
Yelling his girlfriend’s name upon seeing her in the open doorway, Spike rushed forward, throwing his arms around her. “Are you okay?! Where were you?! You were gone for such a long time! Is Fluttershy with you?! We were really worried! I’m so sorry about before!”
Looking like she was wavering between holding a grudge over their earlier fight and being touched by the outpouring of concern now, Soft Mane eventually chose the latter, bending over to embrace Spike in return. “I’m sorry too,” she murmured, before speaking up as she glanced at everyone else. “And I’m sorry we were gone so long. We got a little sidetracked, but we’re alright. See?”
Stepping aside, she indicated Fluttershy – the pegasus mare having been behind her – who cringed as she became the center of attention. “I’m really sorry,” she whimpered. “I feel terrible for making you all worry about us.”
“You guys probably got lost, right?” Sandbar gave a knowing nod, as though there could be no other explanation. “That’s what happens when you try to navigate this place without a reliable guide.”
“We did at first,” admitted Soft Mane.
“But then we ran into someone else, and we knew we couldn’t leave her behind,” smiled Fluttershy, gesturing toward someone next to the doorframe to come forward as she stepped out of the way. “Everypony, meet Starlight Glimmer.”
A pin could have been heard dropping as a purple unicorn mare with a mane and tail of darker purple moved into view. “It’s so nice to meet you all,” she grinned, looking them over. “Any enemies of Lex Legis are friends of mine.”
For several long moments no one said anything. Then, finally, Rainbow Dash broke the silence, a strained chuckle escaping her lips.
“Okay, well…at least now everypony will stop saying that this is all my fault.”
Always concerned with maintaining her poise, Rarity was the first one to recover. “S-Starlight Glimmer, you said? As in, the pony involved in this morning’s…unpleasantness?”
Starlight’s friendly smile fell away then, but before she had a chance to say anything, Fluttershy stepped forward, her face set in a rare frown of disapproval. “I know that we’ve all heard a lot of awful things about what Starlight did,” she began. “But I think if you all give her a chance and listen to what she has to say, you’ll agree that she deserves our help!”
“Are you kidding me?!” blurted Sandbar, looking at Fluttershy like she’d lost her mind as he pointed at Starlight. “That mare’s insane! She attacked everypony here for no reason!”
Starlight’s eyes narrowed dangerously at that, but once again she was saved from answering. “Excuse me for saying so,” shot back Soft Mane, her voice making it clear that she didn’t really care if she was excused or not as she interposed herself between Sandbar and Starlight, “but didn’t I overhear you telling Rarity earlier that you weren’t here when the fighting happened?”
Sandbar frowned, his eyes darting to the unicorn in question for a split-second before looking back at Soft Mane. “Well, yeah, but-”
“But nothing,” she huffed, crossing her arms under her chest. “Starlight was there. You weren’t. End of story.”
“Yeah,” added Spike, planting himself right next to Soft Mane and copying her stance, glaring at Sandbar. “End of story.”
“Now hold on just a minute, ya’ll,” protested Applejack, looking at Fluttershy as she spoke. “I ain’t one for gossip, but even if Sandbar didn’t see what happened, a lot of those ponies we talked to before sure did, and they didn’t exactly paint the rosiest picture of your new friend here.”
Starlight spoke up at last. “That’s because Lex has brainwashed them!”
“Ooh!” Pinkie’s eyes lit up. “Is that where you put warm water in both your ears and then plug them up and shake your head really hard so that you can get the inside of it all super fresh and clean?!”
Everypony stared as Pinkie acted out the procedure while she described it, somehow producing two bottles of water and emptying them into her ears (a rising waterline being visible in the whites of her eyes) before plugging them and shaking her head so hard it was a blur, only to stop a second later as she tilted her head back, spitting the water straight upward as though she were a living fountain. Finally, when there was no more, she let out a relaxed sigh as she pulled out her earplugs, carelessly tossing them away. “That felt really good!” she declared a moment later, laying back on the couch. “I gotta admit, if somepony brainwashed me like that, I’d probably say whatever they wanted me to!”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Twilight couldn’t help but snicker a tiny bit. “I don’t think that’s exactly what Starlight meant, Pinkie.”
“It’s not,” agreed Starlight, taking a breath as she looked around the room. “Listen, I know that most of the ponies here think that Lex is some sort of great leader, but that’s because he’s taking advantage of them! He’s filling their heads with his warped philosophy, and that’s why they’re practically worshiping him even after what he did to Princess Luna!”
Rainbow Dash raised a brow. “What philosophy? You mean that crazy government stuff he likes to talk about?”
“It’s worse than that,” insisted Starlight. “Harmony, like friendship, is based on what ponies have in common. That’s why cutie marks are a curse, because they make everypony different. I came here to tell everyone that it didn’t have to be that way, that anypony who wanted to experience true friendship was welcome to give up their cutie mark and come live in my village.”
“Give up their cutie mark?” Twilight’s eyes widened, amazement and skepticism appearing on her face in equal measure. “How would they do that?”
“I can show you if you like,” offered Starlight with a grin, before looking back at Soft Mane. “Or at least, I could if you finished healing my injuries…?”
Soft Mane paused for just a moment before answering. “I’m running pretty low on healing spells,” she murmured. “I should save what I’ve got left in case there’s an emergency.”
For a moment Starlight stared at her, as though scrutinizing her words, before giving a shrug. “Well, that’s too bad,” she sighed as she turned back to Twilight. “But to get back on topic, everypony here not only rejected my offer, but several of them became violent, and I was forced to defend myself. After I did, that was when Lex personally attacked me, and in the process admitted what he was trying to do.”
“This should be good,” snorted Sandbar, earning a gentle elbowing from Rarity.
Starlight ignored the heckling, her expression grave as she continued. “Lex isn’t interested in helping ponies overcome their differences. Instead, he thinks that differences are good things! That some ponies are simply better than others, and that makes them more deserving, all so that he can set himself up as being more worthy than anyone else! And he’s got everypony here believing it too! Some of them are already developing magic powers of their own under his tutelage, and they’re using them to defend his regime!” She stomped a hoof then, her expression making it clear that the idea deeply offended her. “He’s already defeated Celestia and Luna! If we don’t join forces and stop him while we still can, Lex will destroy harmony in Equestria!”
“Now, hold on just a minute there.” Walking toward Starlight, Applejack frowned. “I’ll be the first to admit that Lex’s ego is bigger than all of Sweet Apple Acres, and he’s definitely done the princesses wrong, especially Luna, but you can’t deny that he saved a lot of ponies here.”
“Saved them for what?” countered Starlight. “So he can have ponies who’ll tell him how great he is all the time? In case you haven’t noticed, he’s creating a society where the one who benefits the most is him! That’s why he’s living in a mansion while everyone else is living in those ugly houses! It’s why he’s seizing all of the bits in Vanhoover! Why he can fool around with any mare who catches his eye without anyone thinking that he’s being inappropriate! He’s made a hierarchy so that he can sit at the very top of it!”
“Huh.” Pinkie tilted her head, giving Starlight a look of mild surprise. “So does that mean you’re not joining his harem after all?”
Twilight winced heavily, seeing the rest of her friends doing the same, save for Spike and Soft Mane, who exchanged confused looks, not having been there when Fluttershy had told them about that particular rumor. It had been outlandish enough that Twilight had dismissed it out of hoof, and she’d assumed that her friends had all done the same. Pinkie, it seemed, hadn’t.
Nor was that bit of gossip one that Starlight had apparently heard, as she stared at Pinkie with her wide eyes and her mouth hanging open. “WHAT?!”
Oblivious to Starlight’s horrified expression, Pinkie looked upwards in thought. “Well, the way I heard it, Lex has a habit of getting together with mares that he’s beaten in a fight. I mean, he didn’t fight Sonata ‘cuz she’s a big sweetie even if they did have a lover’s spat that destroyed the train station, but I heard that he beat up Aria when she was still a big fish-pony and now she’s his girlfriend too! And then he was in a relationship with some blonde pony after he fought her when she was possessed by a big ugly monster! And that he’s seeing River Bank on the side after she tried to take over here and he cursed her for it! And he did bring Celestia and Luna back here to be treated after he beat them in a fight instead of banishing them or locking them up so everypony thinks that he was gonna try and be all lovey-dovey with them except that they ran away before he could! And now he’s done the same thing with you so-, mmph! MMMPH!”
Keeping her hoof firmly planted over Pinkie’s mouth, Rarity gave Starlight – who looked ready to explode – a shaky grin. “You’ll have to forgive our friend,” she laughed nervously. “She listens to the silliest rumors.”
Unappeased, Starlight reared up and slammed her hooves down so hard that the floorboards nearly cracked. “I’d throw myself in the ocean before I let that monster touch me!” she snarled, whipping her head around to look at everypony, daring them to suggest otherwise. “Lex destroyed everything I’ve spent my life working toward! He needs to be stopped, by any means necessary, and anypony who doesn’t realize that is PART OF THE PROBLEM!”
In the close confines of the parlor, Starlight’s shout was deafening. But that wasn’t the reason everyone winced, as even Fluttershy and Soft Mane backed away from Starlight, who had a wild look in her eyes as she struggled to get her breathing under control. Even then, it took her several seconds to collect herself, gulping as she saw the apprehensive expressions being directed at her. “Wh-why are you all looking at me like that?” she asked, smiling shakily. “Lex is the bad guy, not me!”
“Nopony said you were, Starlight.” Twilight made sure to keep her voice calm and conciliatory, plastering a smile on her face as she nodded. “Listen, why don’t you rest for a little bit while I confer with my friends, okay?”
“I…sure.” Folding her ears back, Starlight let the other mare lead her to a couch on the far side of the room, unable to help but look bitter as she curled up on it.
Silently gesturing for everyone to follow her, Twilight led them to the other end of the room, beckoning them closer before casting a transparent bubble of silence around them. “Okay, so long as we’re inside this we’ll be able to talk without Starlight overhearing us,” she began. But she didn’t have a chance to continue as everyone spoke up all at once.
“I told you she was crazy!” Sandbar shuddered as he glanced back at the mare in question. “My advice: put her back where you found her, before she loses it and tries to kill us all!”
“She’s not dangerous,” muttered Soft Mane, sounding like she didn’t quite believe what she was saying. “She tried to use her magic when we first found her, and all she did was hurt herself.”
“Darling, if you don’t mind my asking, why did you bring her back with you?” Rarity couldn’t help but sound slightly incredulous. “Applejack was right, those ponies we spoke to before were quite insistent that this mare is a very perilous pony!”
But it was Fluttershy who answered. “I know they did, but you should have seen her. They had her tied up in a dark room all by herself, it was awful! And when River Bank came in-”
“Hang on a second,” interrupted Applejack. “You met with River Bank? The pony we’ve been trying to see for most of the afternoon?”
“Did you see Sonata too?” grinned Pinkie. “Is that when she invited you guys to Lex’s get-well party? We heard her yelling something about breaking a piñata!”
Soft Mane shook her head. “We didn’t see Sonata, and we heard that yell just now too, but don’t ask me what it was about.”
“We didn’t really see River Bank either,” explained Fluttershy. “We were hiding under Starlight’s bed when she came in.”
Soft Mane glanced at her then, and Fluttershy knew she was worried that she’d mention Pixie. Before they’d come back, the half-pony had asked her and Starlight not to mention her new friend to anyone, worried that she’d get in trouble if the ponies working for Lex – which included Sandbar, right there in the bubble of silence with them – knew that she’d helped them. As much as Fluttershy hated keeping secrets from her friends, she hated the thought of somepony being cursed because of her even more.
“River told Starlight that Lex was going to curse her, Starlight I mean, for what she’d done,” she continued, her eyes watering at the thought. “I just couldn’t leave her there when I heard that, not after seeing what Lex did to Princess Luna. I’m sorry…”
Rainbow Dash shook her head. “Don’t be! You did the right thing!” She looked at the others. “Look, Starlight might not have sounded like she was all there just now, but don’t forget that Lex just ruined something really important to her!” She held up her left wing then, the one Lex had cursed a few hours prior. “I can kind of relate!”
“So, what do we do?” asked Spike, looking at Twilight. “If we give her back to Lex’s ponies, it’ll be our fault if he curses her. But if we don’t, we’ll make everyone here mad at us, and you won’t be able to teach Lex about friendship!”
Twilight started to say something, but froze right as she opened her mouth, her eyes widening as a look of startled realization crossed her face. “That’s it!”
Applejack blinked. “What’s it, sugarcube?”
“This is why we’re here!” Twilight looked at her friends, suddenly excited. “We were sent here to teach Lex about the magic of friendship, but not on our own! We’re supposed to help him become friends with Starlight Glimmer!”
Numerous eyebrows went up at that, but Spike was the first one to respond.
“Huh. You think they’re here to help with that?” he asked, pointing at the door, where a group of ponies – led by a familiar earth mare in a sea captain’s hat – had just burst in.
Starlight leaped to her hooves as the door to the parlor suddenly burst open, a group of ponies she didn’t recognize rushing in. “Who’re-”
But the pony at the head of the group – a mare wearing a sea captain’s hat – wasn’t listening to her. “Sandbar!” she barked even as her eyes scanned the room. “Where-”
“Captain?” Barely noticing as the soundproof bubble around Twilight and her friends popped, Starlight watched as the lone stallion stepped forward, the confused look he was wearing being a perfect fit for his not-so-bright face. “Is everything alright?”
“That’s our question for you!” snapped the earth stallion from the group that had just burst in, a tense look on his face. “We were worried!”
“What do you mean you guys were worried?” huffed Rainbow Dash, giving the newcomers an irked expression. The sight nearly made Starlight roll her eyes. Although she’d never seen these ponies before, it was obvious from how alarmed they were that they’d not only heard about her escape, but knew that Twilight and her friends had been involved. But Rainbow Dash apparently wasn’t able to put two and two together. “We’ve been sitting here waiting on you for forever!”
“Were you able to talk to River Bank?” asked Spike, the little dragon somehow managing to sound even more naïve than Sandbar. “Did she make Sonata change her mind?”
The pegasus stallion who’d come in right behind the mare in the captain’s hat scowled. “Do you think we’re complete idiots?” he snapped, before turning his attention to Twilight. “You used us! We were your excuse to get back in here so you could rescue your accomplice!”
For a brief moment Twilight looked perplexed, but unlike Rainbow Dash she seemed to immediately intuit what the stallion was implying, her eyes widening. “Wait, you’ve got it all wrong! We didn’t know-”
“That the mare sitting across from you is a killer?”
The new voice came from a pegasus mare who had been at the back of the group of newcomers, pushing her way forward now, glaring at Starlight even though her words had been directed at Twilight. Nor was it a mystery why; with her brown coat, black mane and tail, and a cutie mark of a gust of wind, Starlight recognized her immediately, tensing up. “I didn’t kill anypony.”
“Not for lack of trying,” sneered the pegasus mare.
Starlight didn’t get a chance to respond as Fluttershy gingerly stepped forward. “Forgive me for interrupting, but is it okay if I ask who are you?”
“And how you know Starlight?” added Applejack, frowning.
It didn’t set Starlight’s nerves at ease that the orange mare was giving her a look of distrust just as much as she was that belligerent pegasus.
But if it bothered the pegasus mare, she didn’t show it, continuing to look at Starlight darkly. “My name is Thermal Draft, and less than five hours ago Starlight Glimmer tried to kill me. The only reason she didn’t is that my girlfriend, Cloudbank, saved me, and Lex saved her.”
“You and your girlfriend,” shot back Starlight, unwilling to let someone else control the narrative, “had just hit me with a storm cloud’s worth of lightning!”
“Aw, that’s not so bad,” guffawed Pinkie. “Rainbow Dash goes around zapping ponies every Nightmare Night!”
Starlight had to stop herself from giving the pink pony a dark look, River Bank’s warning about having no one on her side still fresh in her mind. “This wasn’t some little bolt with no power behind it! If I hadn’t raised a shield at the last second, I wouldn’t be here right now! And she’s talking about me nearly killing someone?!”
“Don’t you dare!” Thermal Draft flared her wings in anger. “I’ve been a weather pony for almost ten years! I know how hard to jump to control how much electricity is discharged!”
“That is Weather 101,” added Rainbow Dash.
But her idle comment had the effect of drawing Thermal Draft’s attention, and she narrowed her eyes as she regarded the blue pegasus. “And you…I heard about what you did to Lex. It was cowardly, attacking him out of nowhere like that after he was already exhausted saving us.”
“HEY!” Indignant at her courage being insulted, Rainbow lips drew back in a snarl, clearly intent on giving Thermal Draft a piece of her mind, but she didn’t have a chance to do so as Applejack cleared her throat loudly, giving Rainbow Dash a pointed look. For a moment the colorful pegasus looked just stared at the apple farmer in outraged disbelief, before throwing her head back and utterly a loud groan of frustration. “FINE! Fine, I’m sorry, okay?! I made a mistake and I’m sorry! I’ll tell all of Vanhoover if everypony will just let it go already!”
But Thermal Draft didn’t seem even slightly appeased. If anything, she seemed to get even angrier, flapping her wings as she flew upward and got right in Rainbow Dash’s face. “You’re ‘sorry’?” she hissed. “Lex is fighting for his life because of what you did to him, and you’re ‘sorry’?! Do you have any idea how much he means to m-, to everypony here?! He’s not just some celebrity! He saved us! All of us, again and again! And now, because of you, he might die, and you’re ‘sorry’?!”
“Yes, she is!” Joining the other two in the air, Twilight gently pushed Rainbow Dash back, placing herself directly in front of Thermal Draft. “We all are! That’s why we’ve been waiting here, because we want to make up for what happened!”
“I’m still not clear on how rescuing the crazy lady over fits in with that,” murmured Sandbar, having moved over to rejoin the other nautical ponies.
Slowly returning to the ground, Twilight took a deep breath. “Listen, I know that a lot of mistakes were made, by everypony, and that a lot of bad things have happened. But nothing’s going to get better if we can’t all find a way to move past that!” Her face was pleading as she looked at everyone in turn. “I know that a lot of the ponies here have suffered, and that there are those who’ve lost everything, but that’s why this fighting needs to stop! Today more than one pony almost died; if this keeps happening, then eventually it won’t be ‘almost’! Nopony wants that. Not Lex, not Starlight, and not me. Can’t we start from there and see if there’s a way to work this out?”
“So you’re saying what, exactly?” Returning to the ground, Thermal Draft gave Twilight a flat look, her expression no less upset despite the alicorn’s speech. “That after your buddy Starlight here attacked this place, and then your other friend Rainbow Dash followed it up, and then you broke Starlight out after she’d finally been captured, we need to be willing to trust you now?” She shook her head. “No. Even if I believed you about Starlight not wanting to kill anyone – which I don’t – you have absolutely no credibility with me after what you’ve done, and I’m pretty sure that’s true for everypony here.”
From his place among his friends, the rest of whom were nodding at Thermal Draft’s words, Sandbar mouthed “we’re still cool” at Rarity.
Twilight’s ears folded back. “Please, tell me what I can do to convince you that I’m being sincere!”
“How about you start by turning Starlight Glimmer back over to us?” The earth mare in the captain's hat turned a cold gaze to the unicorn in question. “After what she did, a lot of ponies will feel safer knowing that she won’t have the chance to hurt anyone again.”
To Starlight’s mild horror, Twilight didn’t immediately reject the suggestion, instead turning to look at her. “Are you kidding me?” Starlight blurted, knowing that Twilight was about to ask if that was acceptable. “No way! Twilight, you talk a good game, but there’s no way Lex will go for what you’re saying! If he gets the chance, he’ll curse me for sure!” The time she’d spent talking to Sonata on their way to Vanhoover made her certain of that.
“What about a magic item?” asked Soft Mane.
The question earned her several curious looks, including one from Spike. “What do you mean?”
Taking a breath, the half-pony looked at Thermal Draft. “Look, the reason you, Sonata, and everyone else don’t want us near Lex is because you think we’re lying about healing him, right? What if Twilight made a scroll or a potion or something that I could cast a healing spell into? That way you could examine it and use it on Lex yourselves once you were satisfied that it’s for real.”
“You can do that?” Starlight couldn’t help but ask. Healing magic was unusual enough, but being able to put what sounded like a pre-cast spell in an item didn’t sound like any magic she’d ever heard of.
But Twilight didn’t seem to share her skepticism. “Soft Mane, that’s a great idea!” But her enthusiasm died as quickly as it had come, her head lowering in dejection. “No, wait…I don’t know how to make spell-storing magic items.”
Now it was Soft Mane’s turn to look dejected. “But you studied with the Seekers on Everglow! I thought that was one of the first things they taught wizards!”
Twilight’s face screwed up with a look of someone berating themselves. “Under Score offered to teach me, but I said no. I had already started learning that world’s magic, so I figured that a way to store those spells in objects was pointless if I could just cast them myself! I asked him to teach me how to make permanent magic items instead, stuff like enchanted cloaks and amulets and other wondrous things that we don’t have here in Equestria!”
“Um, Twilight?” Wincing slightly as several ponies looked at her, Fluttershy gulped before managing to find her voice. “Couldn’t you just maybe make some sort of permanent healing magic item somehow? I mean, if you know how to build those, and Soft Mane knows healing magic, wouldn’t that work?”
“I don’t know.” Starlight could almost see the gears turning in Twilight’s head, the alicorn princess going from uncertain to intrigued. “Magic items that could generate healing energy on a permanent basis were pretty unusual on Everglow, but that was largely a matter of them not being cost-efficient. The standardization of magic item creation on that world came about because of a breakthrough that allowed for greater material enchantment to be formulaic rather than componential. Naturally, discrete applications of a given effect required far less in the way of intrinsic imbuement, even when applied in multiplicity, compared to continuous manifestations of particular spell sequences, and since applications of healing were typically only needed at irregular intervals, the-”
“Twilight, darling, this is all very fascinating,” interrupted Rarity, her voice making it clear that she found it to be anything but. “However, I think what’s more pressing is whether or not you could create such an item quickly?”
Biting her lip, Twilight thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure I can do it at all, and probably not in less than a few days.”
“Well what good is that?” snorted the smaller of the seagoing stallions. “So long as Lex lasts until midnight, Cloudbank can-”
“Scrubby!” hissed the captain.
“Shut up!” snarled Thermal Draft.
But the smaller stallion’s slip-up hadn’t gone unnoticed, especially not by Starlight. “What does that mean? What can Cloudbank do at midnight that a healing item from Twilight won’t matter?”
Cloudbank, she knew, was Thermal Draft’s girlfriend – the mare herself had let the name slip a few minutes ago – and so was no doubt the other pegasus who had attacked her with that thundercloud. But what did that have to do with restoring Lex? I already took care of the snake that Cleansweep filly needed to use her healing magic, Starlight recalled. Does he have someone else among his followers with similar powers?
The thought sent a shudder down her spine. Soft Mane and Fluttershy had told her, on the way here, about how Lex was far more injured than River Bank had let slip, thanks to Rainbow Dash. The news had been welcome, taking the edge off of Starlight's worry about him coming to personally retrieve her. But now, with the renewed prospect of her worst enemy recovering his strength quickly, Starlight couldn't help but remember River Bank's prediction: that Lex would put a curse worse than death on her for what she'd done.
“This discussion is over.” The words brought Starlight out of her worrying, hearing the sea captain's voice cut off several questions about Lex, Cloudbank, and midnight from Twilight and her friends as she, Thermal Draft, and the other ponies in her group backed toward the door. “I’ve got my crew member back, so we’re leaving. I suggest you do the same and vacate this manor immediately, because nothing you've said has changed my mind.”
Twilight was already protesting, nearly begging for the retreating ponies to stay, but it was futile. Only a few seconds later, Lex's minions had retreated into the hallway, with Thermal Draft giving them one last mistrustful look before she slammed the door in Twilight's face.
It was all Starlight could do not to smile at the sight. Now hopefully Twilight would realize that there was no peace to be had where Lex Legis and his band of fanatics were concerned. Because once she did, she'd come to the same conclusion that Starlight had a few hours ago.
That for the good of Equestria, Lex had to be eliminated.
“Why?” snorted Starlight, making no effort to hide her displeasure. “If we wait a few more hours, he’ll apparently be all healed up thanks to that Cloudbank mare. Once he is, you won’t need to worry about what happened when he attacked me; you’ll get to experience it firsthoof.”
The angry response made Twilight sigh, and she didn’t try to stop Starlight as the unicorn stomped over to the railing that surrounded the main deck of the yacht, pointedly turning her back on Twilight as she looked out at where the sun was sinking toward the watery horizon. It was an attitude that she’d taken ever since Twilight had decided to leave River’s manor a few hours ago. But as much as the injured unicorn had pressed her to mount another attack before Lex recovered, Twilight hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so, still certain that she and her friends had been sent here to make peace instead of war.
That C. Shells and her crew hadn’t believed them had hurt, and it hurt all the more for how open they’d initially been. But from what her friends had told her after they’d canvassed the town earlier in the day, Twilight knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, no one else in Vanhoover was willing to believe in them either.
The ponies who had suffered through Vanhoover’s destruction, her friends had told her before, felt that Equestria’s princesses had abandoned them. And when Celestia and Luna had eventually put in an appearance – less than a month ago, after Lex had already cleared the city of monsters and established his rule – it had only made them look worse. More specifically, it had made them look like they were more concerned with defeating a political rival than helping their subjects.
Or as one irate pony had put it, according to Applejack, “Our dark wizard brought us food and medicine. The princesses didn’t bring us so much as a get-well card.”
That same antipathy apparently extended not only to Twilight herself, but also to her friends, since everyone knew they were as close to her as she was to Celestia and Luna. Rainbow Dash’s misguided attack on Lex, performed right after he’d defeated a mare who was already being popularly referred to as “The Cutie Thief” – among other, less savory descriptions – had only compounded the public’s dislike toward them. And while Twilight couldn’t fault Fluttershy and Soft Mane for wanting to help Starlight Glimmer, she knew that once word got out that they’d rescued her, their dismal public image would be set in stone. No one else would be willing to help them try to change Sonata’s mind about letting them anywhere near Lex.
And now that she knew that Cloudbank – whoever that was – would apparently be able to use healing magic herself once midnight rolled around, Twilight had been forced to face facts.
Her plan to get into Lex’s good graces by healing his injuries was a failure.
It had been a disheartening realization, but Twilight had done her best not to be discouraged. In a way, this had confirmed what she’d initially suspected. The map had sent the six of them there, but hadn’t said anything about Spike and Soft Mane coming along. By that measure, it made sense that teaching Lex about the magic of friendship wouldn’t rely on Soft Mane’s spellcasting.
And then there was Starlight Glimmer.
The more Twilight thought about it, the more certain she felt that Starlight had an important part to play in their mission here. Somehow, despite her insistence that Lex was an enemy of Equestria, she was the key to helping Lex realize that friendship was more important than rulership. Not to mention the fact that Starlight was apparently in need of friends quite badly, something she didn’t seem to think could happen so long as those friends had cutie marks of their own…
But there had been more immediate issues to contend with. At that moment, with C. Shells having made it clear that there was no more progress to be made at River’s manor, Twilight’s primary concern had been finding a place for her and her friends to fall back and regroup. The train that had brought them there had long since left, so that had been out. Likewise, trying to find lodging in the half-built town was out of the question, especially with Starlight accompanying them. And since teleporting herself and eight other people all the way back to Ponyville, and then back again in the morning, would have put a serious drain on her magic reserves – not a state Twilight wanted to be in if worse came to worst once Lex recovered – that left only one option for where they could sleep tonight.
Blueblood’s yacht.
The snobby prince had been quite surprised when Twilight and her “motley assortment of rapscallions,” as he’d called them – the statement reminding Twilight of how Celestia had once let it slip that Blueblood had taken it upon himself to give Luna lessons in contemporary royal etiquette in the early days after her return, something which had explained a lot about how she’d acted during her first Nightmare Night – but had eventually agreed to let them stay there by virtue of Twilight being royalty herself. Fortunately, Blueblood had made it plain that he intended to stay in his quarters for the next few days and didn’t wish to be disturbed, on account of his preparing an epic poem to commemorate his forthcoming victory when Lex reneged on their duel. And while talk of that particular event had been equal parts amusing and perplexing to consider, Twilight and her friends had simply been grateful that the pompous royal wouldn’t bother them while they settled in and tried to figure out what to do next.
But while her friends had been content to turn in, after Blueblood’s chef had fixed them an early dinner, Twilight had wanted to talk to Starlight some more, starting with the unicorn’s account of what had happened since she’d come to Vanhoover.
Starlight’s account had been illuminating, in more ways than one. For one thing, it had revealed several tidbits which Twilight hadn’t been aware of, such as how the group of foals that Celestia and Luna had mentioned – the “Night Mare’s Knights” – apparently had gained some magic of their own, or that Lex had used a fearsome-sounding new version of his shadow-form. But the greater insights had been with regard to Starlight herself.
The unicorn’s accounting had disagreed with what her friends had learned from the townsponies, not so much with regard to basic facts, but rather with Starlight’s presentation of them. For one thing, she’d not only presented herself as being completely innocent on every count (“all I wanted to do was help everypony develop real friendships!”), but she’d made everyone else involved in the fighting out to be either willfully malicious or a testament to Lex’s malevolence. That included Aria (“I’m telling you, she attacked first!”) and Garden Gate (“She’s insane, fighting with knives like that!”), the Night Mare’s Knights (“Lex is using child soldiers! What kind of monster does that?!”), Thermal Draft and Cloud Bank (“If I hadn’t noticed what they were about to do, I might not have survived!”), and Sonata (“She betrayed me!”).
Of course, her harshest criticism had been reserved for Lex himself, going on at length about how he would ruin Equestria if he wasn’t stopped, which had in turn segued into an impassioned rant about finishing him off before he recovered. And now that Twilight had refused, instead asking her to recount the battle again, Starlight seemed content to sulk, forelegs on the railing as she gazed out at the distant sunset. Twilight watched her for a long moment before going over to join her.
“You know,” she began tentatively, “one of the reasons I asked you to tell me what happened again is because there were some ponies you didn’t mention the first time around.”
That was enough to earn her a glance from Starlight, her expression a mixture of curiosity and irritation. “Like who?”
“Like your friends,” replied Twilight with an easy smile. “The ones you brought with you from your village.”
Starlight’s expression darkened, and for a moment Twilight thought she was going to have another outburst, but after a moment Starlight turned her face back toward the horizon. “I don’t want to talk about those traitors. How do you even know about them?”
“My friends and I asked several ponies in town what happened before we went to River’s manor,” explained Twilight. “A lot of them mentioned that you brought several ponies with you, and that you had a falling out during the fighting. As the Princess of Friendship, I couldn’t help but be a little curious.”
Starlight snorted at that. “There’s nothing to be curious about. They all came to my village because their lives were empty, and I showed them that they were better off without their cutie marks. And my thanks for that was them turning on me when I needed them most.”
“But why did they turn on you?” pressed Twilight. “That’s what I don’t understand. Friends don’t just turn their backs on each other for no reason.”
“Maybe they weren’t really my friends, then!” snapped Starlight, her voice rising as she turned to glare at Twilight. “Maybe they never appreciated what I’d done for them if they abandoned me because of one little-” She stopped abruptly, as if suddenly realizing what she was saying, her expression bitter as she turned back toward the ocean.
The obvious question hung in the air, but Twilight hesitated to ask it. Starlight’s clenched jaw, heavy breathing, and the slight tremor running through her made it clear that this was an extremely volatile subject for her. But that wasn’t a surprise; having learned how important friendship was, Twilight could only imagine how much it must have hurt Starlight to lose the bonds she’d had with those four ponies, and in the middle of a fight no less.
After a long moment of silence, Twilight finally spoke up. “Starlight, if you don’t want to talk about it, I won’t pry. But I just want you to know that if you ever do feel like talking, I promise I’ll be there to listen, and I won’t judge or lecture you.”
“The only thing I want to talk about is what we’re going to do about that monster that’s taken over Vanhoover!” snapped Starlight, lowering her forelegs from the railing. “But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to be something you’re too concerned about, since you’re fine with just sitting back and letting our best chance to stop him once and for all slip away!” She turned her back on Twilight then, the motion abrupt enough to make it clear she was deliberately snubbing her. “I’ll be in my room. If you feel like talking about something that’s actually important, then I’ll be there to listen,” she sneered, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she walked away.
Despite the overt nastiness, Twilight couldn’t help but feel sad as she watched Starlight leave, knowing that she had to be in a great deal of pain over what had happened. I just have to keep trying, and hope that she’ll open up to me over time. And not just for Starlight’s own sake; for all that she seemingly hated Lex, she was like him in a lot of ways, yet another reason to think that she would have the best chance of reaching him.
Particularly since, if and when Lex recovered, another fight didn’t seem likely.
Starlight’s recounting of her battle had let Twilight pick up on several new bits of information, and had revealed quite a bit about Starlight’s state of mind. But the most notable part of her story, at least when it came to the part where she’d fought Lex, had been what she hadn’t said. So much so, in fact, that Twilight had wanted Starlight to repeat the tale just to be certain. Particularly since the missing factor was also one that had been conspicuously absent when Rainbow Dash had relayed her brief encounter with Lex in the minutes after Starlight’s defeat.
That factor being that, in both altercations, Lex hadn’t used his strongest magic.
From the sound of things, in each fight he’d limited himself almost exclusively to the dark magic of his horn; the magic of isolation, as Princess Celestia had called it. Starlight’s extremely brief mention of him doing something to help that colt, Fruit Crunch, had sounded like it might have been a minor thaumaturgical spell, but the surly unicorn hadn’t given enough details for Twilight to be sure. But aside from that one possible exception, there hadn’t been any mention of the arcane power he’d wielded so freely in prior battles.
Celestia and Luna had both described how Lex had used myriad powerful spells during his fight with them. The article in the newspaper about him slaying that dragon in Tall Tale had included a photograph of him inside some sort of huge, translucent construct. And Twilight herself had seen him cast several spells of not-inconsiderable power during their brief time together back on Everglow. So why hadn’t he used those now?
Twilight had briefly considered the possibility that Lex had held back out of concern for his opponents, since for all his faults he’d been consistent in his concern for the welfare of even the ponies he considered his enemies. But that theory hadn’t fit the data; Celestia and Luna were ponies also, and Lex hadn’t held back when fighting them. Surely, with the princess-level power that Starlight had been throwing around – not to mention his life, as well as Sonata’s, being on the line – Lex would have been more liberal with his spellcasting. But even when Rainbow Dash had been relentlessly pummeling him, he had elected to use a curse rather than an attack spell. Why?
No matter how she approached the question, Twilight could only come up with one answer. It was an answer that raised more than a few additional questions, but if she was right, then it would change everything when it came time to deal with Lex directly. Because right now, for whatever reason, it seemed like the answer wasn’t that Lex hadn’t cast his thaumaturgical spells when fighting Starlight Glimmer and Rainbow Dash.
“I still can’t believe you tried to steal one of the Elements of Harmony.”
Feathercap’s statement brought a smile to Cleansweep’s lips, but she couldn’t maintain the expression. “Fat lot of good it did,” she muttered, looking down at her hooves self-consciously. “All I ended up doing was getting myself captured. If Trotsworth hadn’t come and gotten me…”
“Then we would have,” murmured Fiddlesticks, her voice soft so as not to wake Tiddlywinks, her baby brother sleeping next to her.
“She’s right,” nodded Straightlace, his words clipped. “The Night Mare’s Knights don’t abandon one of their own, especially not to one of those, those…cowards. Tell her, Fruit Crunch.”
But the colt in question didn’t say anything, lying flat in bed as he stared up at the ceiling.
“Crunchy?” called Cleansweep, her voice uncertain. Being the only member of their group whom Doctor House Call had said should be moving around, she crept over to her best friend’s bedside, reaching out a hoof to give him a gentle shake. “You okay?”
“Huh?” Blinking, Fruit Crunch looked over at her, his blank expression making it clear he’d been a million miles away. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“We were just saying that if Cleansweep was still captured, we’d have gone to rescue her.” The testy tone in Straightlace’s voice was impossible to miss, giving the leader of the Knights a reproachful look.
“Well yeah!” shot back Fruit Crunch, sitting up so he could frown at the pegasus colt. “Of course we would have!” But his indignation only lasted for a moment before he sank back into bed, staring up at the ceiling again. “Then we all could have been useless together,” he muttered. “Just like with Starlight Glimmer.”
The comment made Cleansweep fold her ears back, hating how despondent he sounded. He hadn’t been like that when he’d woken up a half-hour ago, the very last one of her friends to do so. And while Doctor House Call had said that they were all in “very rough shape” – at least before he’d called her mom and dad over to confer with them privately – Fruit Crunch’s first question, after seeing that his friends were okay, had been about what had happened with Lex and Starlight Glimmer, clearly ready to charge back out onto the battlefield if there was a need for it.
But Cleansweep had been expecting that from him, and knew what to do. Having already relayed the battle’s end to the rest of the Knights, Cleansweep had launched into the incredible story of how Lex, together with Sonata, had defeated the madmare in a struggle that was easily as epic as when they’d fought the army of ghouls. Fruit Crunch’s eyes had sparkled during the story, and only Fiddlesticks giving him a pointed look – not wanting Tiddlywinks woken up – had kept him from raising a ruckus, barely restraining his whooping at the news of his hero’s victory and moaning at having missed seeing it himself. But his disappointment at not having witnessed the showdown with his own eyes had vanished at Cleansweep’s confession that she couldn’t remember what had happened while she’d been under Starlight Glimmer’s control. That had prompted Fruit Crunch to relay that portion of the battle himself, wowing his friends a detailed description of his one-on-one fight against the sinister unicorn. By the time he’d finished, they’d all been grinning and cracking jokes, visibly relieved. The bad guy had been defeated, their spirit animals would be back tomorrow morning, and everything was going to be okay.
Cleansweep hated having to ruin that by telling them what had happened next.
She’d kept that bit of news to herself up until then, not having the heart to tell them how Rainbow Dash had showed up out of nowhere and injured Lex severely. Unfortunately, she’d been made to do so shortly thereafter. By the time Crunchy had finished talking, Doctor House Call had been on his way out, having more patients waiting. Her mom and dad had left a few minutes later, a loud rumble from their daughter’s belly prompting them to go find some dinner for the foals (or rather, prompting her mom, who had then dragooned her husband into helping instead of practicing the new flying tips he’d recently received).
Left alone with her friends, Cleansweep hadn’t been sure how to break the news, only for her to be put on the spot barely a minute later.
“So, Dust Bunny, what’d Lex do to Starlight Glimmer after he kicked her flank?” Fruit Crunch had been grinning as he’d asked the question, causing Cleansweep to fight down the urge to flinch.
“He and Sonata together, you mean,” corrected Fiddlesticks. “And he probably put a curse on her so she lost most of her power, just like Princess Luna.”
“Do you think maybe he turned her into a different kind of pony? I mean, if he can turn an alicorn into a unicorn, I bet he can turn a unicorn into something else. That way she won’t be able to cast spells anymore.” Feathercap had rubbed his horn as he’d said that, clearly intimidated by the idea.
“I don’t know,” mused Straightlace. “Remember, Sonata and Aria can cast spells without a horn. I bet Lex did something more severe, just to be on the safe side.”
“Or we can just ask the pony who saw what happened,” drawled Fruit Crunch, before giving Cleansweep an excited look. “C’mon, out with it! What’d he curse her with?”
When the rest of her friends had looked at her expectantly, Cleansweep had known that there was no more avoiding the topic. “Actually…”
To say that her friends hadn’t taken the news well was an understatement. Feathercap had turned so pale he’d looked ready to faint, shaking all over. Straightlace had been furious, swearing that if he ever met Rainbow Dash in person he’d tear all the feathers off her wings. Fiddlesticks hadn’t said a word, just rocking her little brother while tears had run down her face in silence. But Fruit Crunch’s reaction had been the most pronounced, flatly refusing to believe that anyone, let alone a single pegasus, could have defeated his idol.
Instead, he’d vaulted out of bed and strode toward the door, intent on going to see Lex for himself. He’d made it almost two steps before his injuries caught up with him, sending him crashing to the floor. Cleansweep had flown to his side immediately, but she’d needed the help of the rest of their friends – since they weren’t injured as badly as their leader – to get him back into bed, the earth colt protesting the entire time. Even then, only the fact that he’d exhausted himself in the attempt had kept him from trying again, lapsing into a sullen silence as the rest of the group tried to process what they’d just been told.
His brooding had worried Cleansweep, but what he’d said just now worried her even more. “Hey, c’mon Crunchy. None of us were useless, especially you.” Smiling, she put a hoof on his shoulder. “You saved me from Starlight Glimmer. Twice.”
“She’s right.” Feathercap managed a shaky smile. “You were a real hero, the way you wouldn’t stay down no matter what Starlight did. You even ate her magic staff!”
But Fruit Crunch’s reaction to the compliment came with a disgusted snort. “What are you, an idiot?” He gave the unicorn colt a harsh look, making Feathercap quail before he glared at the rest of them in turn. “Do you guys really not get it? We lost! All we’ve ever done is lose!”
Straightlace looked outraged. “That is not-”
“Yes it is!” snapped Fruit Crunch, raising a foreleg and slamming it against the mattress underneath him in frustration. “Wake up already! Ever since we became the Night Mare’s Knights, we’ve never actually won a fight!”
“Keep your voice down,” muttered Fiddlesticks, the reproach in her voice almost completely drowned by depression as she softly stroked the short fuzz of Tiddlywinks’ mane.
Fruit Crunch’s lip curled, but when he spoke again his voice was softer, though no less bitter. “Think about it. The only thing we could do against that Silhouette guy was keep him busy long enough for the princesses to fix everything. When we fought the Royal Guard, they rounded us up before seeing Celestia and Luna lose made them go to pieces. And Starlight Glimmer…” He couldn’t finish, staring up at the ceiling with a dark look on his face. “We lost. Again.”
Cleansweep shook her head. “That’s not fair. You know we stopped Silhouette from ruining Lex’s ritual, and we stopped those guards from getting in the way of his fight with the princesses. We did a good job then, and we did one now too. You most of all.”
“Don’t start with me, Dust Bunny,” growled Fruit Crunch, still staring upward. “We gave it our best and got our flanks kicked!”
“Okay, fine!” she huffed, starting to feel a little angry herself. “We got our flanks kicked! And ten minutes ago, we were all laughing about it anyway!”
That earned her a glare. “Ten minutes ago we didn’t know-”
“That Lex is hurt?” The way he flinched at the question made Cleansweep feel awful, knowing the pain of hearing what had happened to the pony he admired most was still raw, but she kept going. “Well guess what: he’s been hurt before, and he’s gotten over it! Feathercap told us all about what happened when he fought that three-headed monster! And I know you know what Sonata said about how injured he was when he fought that dragon! Not to mention that he could barely move after he cursed Princess Luna! You weren’t angry about how hurt he was then!”
“Because it wasn’t my fault then!”
The words came out of Fruit Crunch’s throat in a tortured voice, and it made Cleansweep’s heart break to hear it. “Crunchy…you aren't responsible for what happened.”
But Fruit Crunch wasn’t finished. “I almost had her! I almost had her!” He couldn’t look at any of them. “Starlight was on her last legs! She was already tired and injured! If I had just been a little stronger, or a little faster, I could have beaten her! I could have beaten her! But no matter how many times I got back up she just wouldn’t go down! She wouldn’t go down and Lex had to deal with her himself! That's why he didn't have enough strength left to take out Rainbow Dash! If I'd just gotten the job done, she wouldn't have gotten the drop on him, but I didn't and now Lex…Lex is…” He couldn’t finish, and his muffled sobbing was loud in the silence that engulfed the room.
“Lex is proud of you.”
All five foals looked up as the door opened, a single pony stepping inside. Fruit Crunch immediately reached a hoof up to wipe his face, blinking as he looked at the newcomer, only to frown a second later. “You’re that mare from before,” he sniffled. “When we were trying to find Lex.”
The mare – a pegasus with a white coat, pink mane and tail, and a cutie mark of a house made out of clouds – nodded, giving the colt a kind smile. “My name’s Cloudbank. And unless I've been misinformed, you guys are the Night Mare’s Knights.”
“You’re the one who could hear Venin!” added Cleansweep. “You and that other lady attacked Starlight with that storm cloud!”
“From what I’ve been told, you guys did a lot more.” Closing the door behind her, Cloudbank walked over to the side of Fruit Crunch’s bed. “I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but I could hear you from outside.” Putting a hoof out, she gently pushed Fruit Crunch back down so he was lying down again. “I know we don’t know each other very well yet, but trust me when I say that Lex would be proud of you.”
The compliment made Fruit Crunch’s lower lip quiver, and he looked away from her with a huff. “What do you know?”
“I know that you protected your teammate,” replied Cloudbank, nodding toward Cleansweep. “And I know that’s exactly what Lex would have done…because that’s what he did for the mare I love, Thermal Draft, when I almost killed her.”
Several sets of eyes widened. “You almost killed your special somepony?” asked Feathercap fearfully.
A pained look crossed Cloudbank’s face, but she didn’t lose her smile as she nodded. “It was a little while ago, during the battle on the docks-”
“I heard about that!” interrupted Straightlace. “There was an army of sea monsters, and Lex led a group of ponies out there to hold them off while he annihilated their leader!”
“Sort of,” chuckled Cloudbank. “But it was a little more complicated than that. The monster leading the others was a kraken – a squid the side of a skyscraper – and even though Lex was holding it off, it took control of me with a spell.” She paused for a moment, taking a deep breath before continuing. “I couldn’t stop myself, and it made me try to kill Lex. Thermal Draft threw herself in the way when I swung Severance-”
“You used Severance?” This time it was Fiddlesticks who interrupted, a surprised look on her face.
“Lex entrusted me with it,” nodded Cloudbank. “And even though I begged, it didn’t do anything to stop me from almost killing the pony most important to me. I can’t say I was surprised when I asked around just now and found out that it killed somepony else, or that I’m sorry that Lex banished it for that.”
“But how did Lex protect Thermal Draft?” pressed Cleansweep, caught up in the story despite herself. “It sounds like she was the one who protected him.”
Shaking her head as if to clear away bad memories, Cloudbank gave her another smile. “After the battle was over, Drafty was clinging to life by a thread. The doctors couldn’t do anything, and I was beside myself. That was when Lex came to me…and taught me about the Night Mare. When I prayed to her then, she reached out and gave me a healing spell, which saved Drafty's life. All thanks to Lex, because he couldn't bear to let anything bad happen to somepony if he could prevent it.” She gave Fruit Crunch a kind look as she brought her story to a close. “Just like you couldn't.”
Cleansweep’s eyes widened then, recalling what her spirit animal had told her about why her mother couldn’t hear the serpent’s telepathic voice. “Wait, that’s why you could hear Venin! Because you’re a follower of the Night Mare like we are!”
Nodding, Cloudbank stood up. “That was my guess, after I heard your group's name. And since my praying at Lex's bedside hasn't done anything to help him, and there’s still several hours until midnight, I wanted to talk to you a little more about what you all can do…”
The words lured him back to awareness, penetrating the haze of dormancy that had settled over his consciousness. First came the recognition that he was hearing something, followed by the dim recollection that the sounds weren’t random, each possessing a particular meaning. Then the meanings made themselves known, first for each phoneme, then in combination to form words, and finally those words created an entire sentence, comprehensible as his awareness finally returned in full.
His other senses were similarly goaded back to alertness as well, though there was little for them to register. The ground beneath him was pure blackness, and while he was standing on something solid, the bottoms of his hooves registered no tactile input. The air was entirely still, having neither a scent nor even the softest hint of noise, notable only for the faint chill that it carried. The source of that coldness was obvious, as the ring of blue fire that surrounded him – at a distance, though without other markers it was difficult to be certain exactly how far away it was – flickered and writhed, casting a wan light that concealed more than it revealed.
The sight made Lex Legis scowl, recognizing the voice that had spoken to him. “I didn’t summon you.”
Rather than take offense at his impertinence, the Night Mare only laughed, her voice coming from behind him. “Nor did you summon my acolyte to assist you in battle, and yet she and her lover came to your aid anyway. As did several others.” Although he couldn’t hear her moving, Lex had the distinct impression that she was circling him then. “Indeed, even before you took to the field, your plaything and your admirer took it upon themselves to defend your territory from that fool and her misbegotten creed, with my Knights following them. Even that other toy of yours lent you her aid, despite having been ensorcelled to betray you.”
The disparaging remarks about Sonata and Aria made Lex grit his teeth, but he bit back the urge to rebuke the goddess. The Night Mare had demanded that he sacrifice formal romantic relationships in exchange for removing Severance from Equestria. While he had created a pretext for keeping the two Sirens as his lovers, he knew full well how thin it was, and that objecting to the tawdry characterization of his involvement with Sonata and Aria now would only weaken that excuse even further. “Get to the point.”
A dark chuckle came from off to his right, just beyond his peripheral vision. “As brusque as ever. You’re not even going to ask if you’ve died?”
Lex snorted, holding his wire-clad foreleg aloft. “You expended a portion of your own power to give me this. If I was dead, you would have reclaimed it.” He lowered his foreleg then, not bothering to turn his head toward the sound of her voice. “This is a dream.”
“An astute observation,” mused the Night Mare, still outside of his field of view. “And another cause for satisfaction. The victory you’ve won this day is pleasing to me. You put the lie to the idea that conformity is stronger than exceptionalism, and in so doing revealed that sniveling mare to be a hypocrite. It’s a triumph made all the greater for how you succeeded. Not only did you demonstrate your power once again – even with how much your combat potential had been eroded – but the actions of your followers further legitimized my dogma: that having the strong rule over the weak is to the benefit of everyone.”
She strode in front of him then, her stature as gigantic as ever. Her dark armor was lusterless, refusing to so much as glint in the soft light of the azure flames. The same could not be said for her teeth, bared in a predatory smile as she gazed down at him. But it was her eyes that were most notable, shining with a red glow that stood out sharply against the endless expanses of blue and black surrounding them.
“The diligent struggles of those ponies whose loyalty you’ve secured, whose resilience you’ve cultivated, and whose strength you’ve nurtured, all so that you could overcome your enemy, are a greater tribute to me than any prayer. My religion was already growing more popular among those living under your authority. After seeing how you’ve taken foals and felons and turned them into a force for stability and order, strengthening your control, the ponies in your region will turn to me in greater numbers than ever. Especially since you’ve finally brought Cloudbank back to life so she can guide my new adherents.” Her grin widened then, and she stretched her leathery wings out wide. “Perhaps a reward is in order…”
Refusing to take the bait, Lex's lip curled. “Is that all you’re here for? To brag that my defeating Starlight Glimmer will make you look good?”
The goddess leaned her head down toward him in response, her smile undiminished even as her eyes narrowed. “I’m here, my champion, to congratulate you on finally understanding what I’ve been trying to tell you for some time now.”
Lex didn’t need to puzzle out what she meant. “You’re referring to my shadow.” He waved a hoof carelessly, indicating the dark shape he couldn’t see but knew was there. “The activation conditions weren’t difficult to figure out once there was sufficient data to analyze. The operations of that fragment of my mind that you’ve partitioned specifically deal with self-referential negativity, so when my greater consciousness is in a matching state – experiencing acute doubt and anxiety with regard to being able to assist Equestria’s development – then the separation between it and the rest of me is partially bridged.”
His explanation earned another chuckle from the Night Mare. “I should have expected you to put such an arrogant interpretation on the answer.” Straightening up, she folded her wings back in as she regarded him with open amusement. “But since you’ve done such a good job demonstrating the truths that I teach, I’ll be generous and correct your mistake.”
Lex frowned at that, but didn’t have a chance to object before the Night Mare spoke again.
“The tulpa in your shadow acts to help you when you experience intense fear for your sense of self,” pronounced the goddess. “And as much as your need to protect your people and make your mark on your homeland is part of that, it’s not all there is to your identity.”
The words made Lex clench his teeth, and he found himself taking a step toward the Night Mare in sudden fury. How dare she make his noble aspirations sound so petty?! How dare she impugn-
“But in fact, I wasn’t referring to your shadow just now, when I said that you’ve finally understood what I’ve been trying to tell you,” smirked the Night Mare.
The words made Lex pause in mid-step, gnashing his teeth as he stared at the gigantic alicorn. But as much as he wanted to rage at her for daring to be so flippant about something so important to him, the urge to move away from that topic was equally strong, not wanting to continue dwelling on something so personal. That, combined with how he knew he couldn’t actually do anything to her, gave him the strength to force his anger down and focus on the change of topic. Barely.
“Explain,” he hissed.
She paused then, and for a moment Lex wondered if she’d object to his telling her what to do. He found himself almost hoping she would, if for no other reason than it would give him the opportunity to spite her by remaining defiant. But to his mild disappointment, she seemed content to let the insult pass. “You’ve come to appreciate what it means to have subordinates.”
“What are you babbling about?” snapped Lex peevishly. “I’ve always had full cognizance of the necessity of having ponies in my service!”
“Yes, and you’ve always begrudged it. You refused to look at those you control as resources that can be exploited unless you were forced to, berating yourself for not being powerful enough to do everything on your own.” Her eyes narrowed again, but this time without any show of mirth, as though simply recalling that displeased her. “Such unilateral individualism might be considered holy among the faithful of Blaze the war goddess, but in my religion it’s iniquity.”
Her frown eased then, her anger dissipating as quickly as it had come. “But when that pegasus you resurrected plucked you out of the sky, you at last came to see the full scope of what you can accomplish when you make use of those under your command.”
Lex stared up at her silently, his lingering bad mood making him want to throw the Night Mare’s words back in her face. But he couldn’t. As much as he wished he could say that he was capable of doing it all on his own, he knew that would have been a lie. Even for something as simplistic as fighting monsters and defeating the other ponies who had challenged him, he’d always found himself relying on others to some degree.
When he’d fought that dragon outside of Tall Tale, Sonata had been why he’d survived, her friendship with Fireflower driving the aranea to have his brother to heal him.
Sonata had played a more direct role in his first serious fight in Vanhoover, intervening right after he’d killed Lirtkra, and in so doing preventing Monitor and Aria from killing him.
Nor was that all Sonata had done, as she, along with Aria, Cloudbank, Thermal Draft, and so many other ponies had been the reason they’d defeated Tlerekithres and his horde of monsters.
One of those ponies had been Nosey, who even after the torture Xiriel had put her through had still found it within herself to act at a critical moment, throwing him the belier devil’s magical gems when he’d been on the verge of defeat.
Garden Gate’s entrance into the fight against the ghoul army had been even more critical, alongside Sonata and Aria, turning what would have been a catastrophic loss that would have cost everyone their lives into a narrow victory.
Fruit Crunch and his friends had likewise intervened at just the right time, on two separate occasions, preventing Silhouette from ruining his ritual with Aria and later coming to his aid when the princesses had overwhelmed him early in their fight.
And all of the ponies who had stepped up to help him before, during, and after his fight with Starlight Glimmer and Rainbow Dash…
“Those who bend to your will shall be as your limbs, serving as extensions of yourself,” recited the Night Mare, her voice resonant. “Their eyes are your eyes. Their hooves are your hooves. Their magic is your magic. To fail to make use of their strength is to fail to make use of your strength, limiting what you can do. For the strong do as they wish, while the weak suffer what they must.”
Folding his ears back, Lex found himself looking anywhere but at the goddess. “And you think the ponies I oversee appreciate my needing their help in protecting them?” For some reason, the question came out sounding less bitter than he’d intended.
“Ask them yourself,” replied the Night Mare. “Now that the darkest hour has arrived, I’ve granted Cloudbank the healing spells she’s been praying for, which I suspect means that you’ll be rejoining her and the rest of your servants very soon.”
The news made Lex’s ears perk back up. It hadn’t escaped his attention that Rainbow Dash’s arrival likely heralded that of Twilight Sparkle and the rest of her friends, something which potentially boded ill for all of the ponies who’d sided with him. If the Night Mare was right, and Cloudbank was already in the process of healing him, that meant that the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.
“And there it is,” murmured the Night Mare. Her words were still hanging in the air as the blue flames began to die down, shrouding everything in blackness. Even as Lex watched, the darkness grew deeper, obscuring the goddess from sight…save for her red eyes, which continued to stare at him, shining brightly as the cerulean fires sputtered and dimmed.
“Go now, my champion,” called the goddess as the flames finally went out, plunging everything into absolute darkness. “I’m looking forward to what you’ll do next.”
Lex’s eyes snapped open just in time to see Cloudbank removing her hoof from his chest. Immediately, his eyes flickered around the room, seeing numerous ponies gathered around him: Sonata, Aria, Cloudbank, Thermal Draft, Garden Gate, River Bank, C. Shells, House Call, Fruit Crunch, Cleansweep, Feather Duster, Fiddlesticks, Straightlace, Feathercap, and more were all surrounding him, filling the room he was in to capacity. Even as he took in their faces, his memory rushed in as well: Defeating Starlight Glimmer. Accepting Blueblood’s challenge. Rainbow Dash’s surprise attack. Being caught by Turbo. The Night Mare in his dream.
It all came back to him in an instant, and even as the faces of the ponies around him began to light up with smiles and gasps of relief, he struggled to sit up. “What’s the situation-”
He couldn’t finish as cheers erupted from everyone in the room, drowning out his attempt to speak. His attempt to sit up was likewise defeated as he suddenly found himself buried in ponies, with Sonata, Aria, and the Night Mare’s Knights all hugging him tightly enough that it drove the breath from his lungs. Everyone else seemed to be in a similar state, as C. Shells pulled her crew into a group hug, Thermal Draft and Cloudbank shared a passionate kiss, and Garden Gate hoof-bumped her friends…save Turbo, for some reason.
But there was no time to contemplate that as House Call stepped forward, chuckling as his horn lit up and he began prying ponies off of Lex. “Alright, let’s try to let him get some rest,” he chastised gently. “Healing his injuries is all well and good, but Mr. Legis has still been through a lot.”
“I knew some dumb old Wonderbolt-wannabe couldn’t take you down!” The words came, surprisingly, from Straightlace, the colt looking like he was struggling to hold back tears. “I knew it!”
“Of course she couldn’t.” Fiddlesticks pulled the colt into a hug, keeping her eyes on Lex as she spoke. “There’s no way the Night Mare would allow that, right?”
The question was directed toward Cloudbank, who almost missed it, lost in Thermal Draft’s eyes. “Hm? Oh, absolutely. The Night Mare knew that Lex is tough enough to take on everything Vanhoover could throw at him and then some. There’s no way he’d be beaten so easily.” Smiling, she gave a quick nuzzle to Thermal Draft before trotting over to the side of the ornate bed that Lex was resting in. “Are you still in any pain?” she asked softly. “I have another healing spell if you need it.”
“What I – stop that! – need is for – calm down! – somepony to tell me – that’s enough! – what’s going on!” snapped Lex, barely able to get a word out due to the ponies still crowding him.
On each side, Sonata and Aria were making no effort to restrain themselves, kissing his neck, nuzzling his cheeks, and nipping playfully at his ears. In sharp contrast was Fruit Crunch, the colt having resisted every effort to dislodge him from his hero. With his forehooves locked around Lex, he was burying his face in the older stallion’s chest, simply content to hold him close. And working around them was House Call, trying to examine Lex as best he could with the other three in the way. The sight made Cloudbank snicker, mostly because of the look of bewildered alarm on Lex’s face, clearly having no idea how to respond to so much affection.
Fortunately for him, River Bank was a little more pragmatic. “It’s currently midnight,” she murmured as she moved alongside Lex’s bed, raising her voice enough so that he could hear her over the numerous happy voices filling the room. “You’ve been unconscious for a little over fourteen hours.”
He gave a curt nod to that, though it might have been to prevent Aria from stealing a kiss, her lips landing on his nose instead. “Is everypony else alright?”
“You were hurt the worst,” answered Thermal Draft, coming up alongside Cloudbank, brushing her side against her girlfriend’s before continuing. “The rest of us who fought Starlight all had some injuries, but nothing too serious, thanks to you.”
Lex felt some of his tension easing. “What about-”
“Ooh!” squealed Sonata. “I almost forgot! Check this out!” Leaping up, she turned around, thrusting her backside toward his face and swaying her hips back and forth. “Doesn’t it look great?”
Lex’s eyes widened. “Sonata, what are you doing?! There are foals here!”
The rebuke made Sonata blink in confusion, glancing over her shoulder at him. “Huh?”
Sighing, Aria looked up from where she’d been planting kisses on the side of Lex’s face. “Stand in profile, you idiot. He can’t see it if you point your butt directly at him like that.”
“Ohhh! I gotcha!” chuckled Sonata, utterly lacking in embarrassment as she made a quarter-turn.
This time, Lex’s eyes widened for a different reason. “Your cutie mark!”
Grinning, Sonata nodded. “Yep! It just came back a half-hour ago! Those guys must have seriously booked it back to their village!”
Lex’s brow furrowed at that, causing River to step in ahead of the question she could tell was coming. “The ponies who came here with Starlight Glimmer were eager to return to their village and tell everyone else there what happened, as well as get their cutie marks back.” She paused just for a second before continuing. “I thought it would be best to let them go.”
Sweat beaded on her brow as Lex gave her a sharp glance at that, his face darkening. But her tension eased when he seemed to reach some sort of decision a moment later, nodding. “And Starlight Glimmer herself?”
River bit her lip, nervous for a different reason now. “Well-”
“Lex!” interrupted Cleansweep, not having been paying attention to what River and Lex had been conversing about. “You’ve gotta take a look outside!”
“Sweetheart,” murmured Feather Duster disapprovingly. “Master Legis is busy right now. We can show him that later.”
“Um,” piped up Feathercap nervously. “I-I think it would be nice if he saw it now.”
“I’d recommend against getting up anytime soon,” sighed House Call, stepping away and giving Lex a concerned look. “I’m still not sure how much that healing spell actually repairs, but you went into cardiac arrest on your way back here. More than once. Normally, that would mean no exertion this soon afterward.”
“I have a spell that can reduce strain on the body,” murmured Lex, looking at Cleansweep and Feathercap. “What’s outside that I need to see?”
“It’s a surprise.” The answer came from Fruit Crunch, lifting his head from Lex’s chest at last. Blushing at how clingy he’d been acting, he slowly climbed off the bed. “It’s nothing bad, and we didn’t set it up or anything, it just…kinda happened.”
“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” interjected Garden Gate, “then you should take a look from one of the upstairs windows. That’s the best way to see it.”
“We can take you there,” offered C. Shells. “I mean, I know you’re a tough guy and everything, but maybe just this once you’ll let us help you out?”
“Is this the thing?” asked Sonata as she crawled back into bed, taking her place at Lex’s side. “Are you guys talking about the thing?”
“Obviously,” huffed Aria.
Frowning, Lex looked around the room for a moment. “Fine, I’ll take a look-”
“Alright everyone!” boomed C. Shells, not giving him a chance to finish. “You heard Lex! Earth ponies, fall in!” She was already moving as she spoke, going to one corner of the bed. As she did, Funshine, Scrubby, and Granola Bar went to the other three corners. Once they were all arranged, C. Shells spoke up again. “Okay, on three! Ready? One! Two! Three!”
Before Lex had a chance to ask what they were doing, the four of them lifted the bed into the air, each of them carrying a corner as though it were a palanquin.
“Make way, everypony!” yelled C. Shells. “Get those doors open and clear the space in front of us! Somepony go ahead and open the doors to an upstairs room with a southern exposure and a lot of windows!”
“What?! What’s happ-”
Lex couldn’t finish thanks to Aria, this time succeeding in silencing him with a kiss. “Just once, relax and let everyone else do something for you,” she murmured once she removed her lips from his.
“But-”
This time Sonata was the one who kissed him into silence. “For realsies, we can totes do this the whole way there,” she giggled.
“That’s-”
Once again, Sonata’s lips silence him. “Mmm!”
“Hey!” frowned Aria. “It was my turn!”
“You snooze, you lose!” snickered Sonata, sticking her tongue out at her sister.
“Oh yeah?” Giving an angry snort, Aria leaned down and kissed Lex again.
“Hey!” yelped Sonata. “No fair! He didn’t say anything that time!”
“You snooze, you lose,” mocked Aria.
“Oh, I’m totes telling Lex about how you started crying when you thought he wasn’t going to wake up!”
“HEY! That was supposed to be a secret!”
Underneath the bed, Scrubby gave a long-suffering sigh as he listened to the two Sirens argue over their stallion. “He gets all the good mares.”
Granola Bar gave him a wry look. “He also saved two cities, brought some dead ponies back to life, fought off monsters and power-mad ponies, and that’s just the top of the list. Do all that and I bet you’ll have beautiful girls throwing themselves at you too.”
Scrubby had the decency to look embarrassed at that.
“Less talking, more concentrating on where we’re going,” murmured C. Shells as they started up a nearby staircase. “We should be there soon.”
“There” turned out to be a large ballroom on the second floor, which Trotsworth waved them into. “The curtains have been lowered in anticipation of your arrival,” offered the old stallion with a bow as C. Shells and the others put the bed down. “The staff is ready to draw them at your order.”
“Can you stand up?” asked Thermal Draft, having followed Lex there. Nor was she the only one, as everpony who had been there when he’d woken up slowly filed into the ballroom, surrounding him with expectant smiles on their faces. “You’re gonna want the best view possible of this, and that means being right up in front of the glass.”
“I can stand,” muttered Lex defensively, albeit only after he was sure that Sonata and Aria were going to let him speak. But he didn’t immediately make good on his statement, instead chanting a quiet liturgy to the Night Mare, gesturing as he did. It took several seconds to complete, and when he finished he touched his hoof to his chest, just over his heart, and let out a slow breath as he felt a tightness he hadn’t been aware of ease. It was only then that he started to get up, Sonata and Aria staying close by him as he climbed to his hooves.
Even with the curative magic that had been used on him, the effort was more difficult than it would have been if he’d been at full strength. But that was fine; so long as nopony else had a more pressing need for it, he’d be able to recover in a fraction of the time thanks to Cleansweep and Cloudbank’s magic. Which might have been what the Night Mare was talking about, realized Lex as he nodded at the servants.
Then they drew the curtains back, and Lex realized that he’d underestimated what the goddess had told him.
Spreading out in front of the manor was a sea of glowing lights, each of which was carried by a pony. Some held candles, others lifted lanterns, and more than a few unicorns conjured a soft light at the end of their horn. But all of them held something, leaving the yard in front of the manor shining. There were hundreds of them. Thousands. Filling the entire view afforded by the huge picture window.
“They started arriving a little while ago,” explained Cloudbank. “Word got out that we were waiting for midnight, and ponies just started holding vigil.”
“It’s not just the ponies from here, either,” added Garden. “Some ponies ran back to Tall Tale right after everything happened, and they’ve been pouring in ever by the boatful since.”
“Why?” No matter how he turned it over in his mind, Lex couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. There was no practical purpose to this. It accomplished nothing. So what was the point? Why do all this?
“Because everyone wanted to show you how much they care about you,” smiled Sonata. “Duh.”
“How can you be the smartest guy on the planet and not realize how much everyone here loves you?” huffed Aria, before leaning in closer and lowering her voice to a quiet murmur that only he could hear. “I know they do, because…I love you.”
That was enough to earn Lex’s full attention, turning to look at her. “Aria…”
Blushing, she couldn’t meet his eyes, instead giving him a gentle shove. “Now get out there and go wave at everypony, moron.”
“Wave?” blinked Lex, trying to keep up with what was happening.
Trotsworth stepped forward. “If you feel so inclined, sir, the balcony is right this way.”
Lex felt almost lightheaded as he stepped forward, followed by Sonata and Aria. There was a sense of unreality to everything, as though he was dreaming. But that couldn’t be true, because his dreams were all nightmares now, reminding him of his failures and fears and humiliations. They’d long since stopped showing him things that made him feel the way he did right now.
Appreciated.
Vindicated.
Trusted.
Those feelings only few stronger as he stepped out onto the balcony, the warm night air wrapping around him. Down below, a murmur broke out as everypony realized that something was happening and nudged their neighbor. The sound left Lex staring, barely noticing as Garden Gate and Compass Rose moved to each end of the balcony, their horns shining brightly enough to illuminate everything between them.
And everypony below erupted into cheers as they saw who was up there.
“It’s now official,” murmured Aria, smirking as she watched Lex survey the crowd with a look of wonder on his face.
“Lex Legis, you are adored,” purred Sonata, lifting his foreleg up to wave to the crowd.
Lex had faced cheering crowds before. It had happened when he’d accepted the position as mayor of Tall Tale. It had happened when he’d given his tell-all speech to the ponies of Vanhoover a few short weeks ago. It had even happened that morning, when everypony had witnessed him defeat Starlight Glimmer. But now, for some reason – because of what the Night Mare had said, or because of the outpouring of affection from the ponies watching over him, or something else altogether – it felt different this time.
He knew there was more work to be done. Starlight Glimmer would need to be dealt with. Rainbow Dash had undoubtedly come with Princess Twilight and her friends. Funds had to be secured from the Las Pegasus ponies. But right now…
Right now, Lex stood and basked in the adulation of his little ponies.
Nosey sighed as she trudged up the stairs to her apartment. Not quite the welcome home I was expecting.
It had taken forever to get back to Canterlot. Mostly that was because Cloudsdale, after its emergency stopover in Vanhoover, had resumed its original northeasterly course toward the Crystal Empire. And while the floating city had stopped over quite a few other towns on its way there, Lens Flare – the photographer who’d been nice enough to let her crash on her couch and raid her fridge during the trip home – hadn’t had the spare bits to let the still-broke Nosey catch a train back to Canterlot. So she’d been forced to wait until Cloudsdale had reached the Crystal Empire, a city large enough that it actually had its own newspaper operation, unlike the numerous small towns where the entire news apparatus consisted of receiving distribution copies of larger cities’ papers. Fortunately, she’d been able to burnish her press credentials and beg a favor from the editor of Crystal Empire’s local paper, managing to get a train ticket home.
She’d arrived a few hours ago, just as the sun was going down. Although she’d desperately wanted to go home, take a shower, and go to bed – or even just stop by her folks’ place and let them know she was okay – Nosey was a reporter through and through. So it was no surprise that the first place she’d gone had been to see the editor of the Canterlot Chronicle, and her boss, Line Byline, bursting into his office ready to knock his socks off with what Lex was doing in Vanhoover.
But the meeting had quickly gone downhill.
It hadn’t been completely surprising that Line already knew some of what was going on. After what Lex had done to Princess Luna, there was no way he wouldn’t. But what had absolutely shocked Nosey was Line’s complete and utter refusal to accept even the slightest possibility that Lex could be a force for good.
“I’m not just talking about what he did to Princess Luna!” shouted Line, after they’d already gone round and round for what had to have been a few hours. By that time it had already been full dark, with everypony else having gone home. “That ‘Night Mare’ goddess he’s working with could put all of Equestria at risk!”
“Says who?! Some alicorn who appears out of nowhere and calls himself an angel?” retorted Nosey, having been filled in on the disastrous meeting that had taken place at the castle. “What makes him so credible?!”
“He saved everypony’s life that day, Nosey!”
“Lex saved a lot more lives in Vanhoover and Tall Tale! Line, I saw him fight an army of undead ponies practically all by himself! I know that what happened with the princesses looks bad, but I’m telling you, there’s more to the story than that!”
Line had sighed then, but although his expression had softened, Nosey hadn’t liked the look that had come over him then. “About that thing with those undead ponies…”
“What about it?”
“Nosey…have you considered the fact that maybe you didn’t see what you think you saw?”
Her eyebrows had gone up then, insulted. “Excuse me?!”
“Just hear me out.” Line had sat back in his chair then, the large wooden swivel chair that he’d so often joked about having slept in more than his own bed, and given her a piercing look. “You told me that this happened right after you were attacked by some sort of three-headed monster, a…” He flipped through the notes she’d prepared for him then. “…belier devil, named Xiriel.”
Fighting down the urge to swallow at the sound of her tormentor’s name, she nodded, suddenly glad she hadn’t said very much about how she’d been attacked. “That’s right.”
“So you’d already been in a high-stress situation right before those alleged ‘ghouls’ attacked.”
“What do you mean ‘alleged’? I told you, I-”
“You also noted here,” continued Line, as he flipped through her notes. “That Lex cast an illusion over everypony.”
Nosey had nodded again, still not sure why he was bringing all this up. “To stop the ghouls from seeing us.”
“And you know that how? Because Lex told you? Or was it Sonata, a Siren, who’re known for having powers to confound ponies’ minds.”
At that point Nosey had felt a cold chill running down her spine. “Where are you going with all of this, Line?”
It had taken him a moment before he’d tossed her notes back onto his desk. “Nosey, you had already been in an extremely tense situation. You were under an illusion whose effects you can’t personally confirm. And you were in proximity to someone known for manipulating minds. All right before these ‘undead ponies’ came pouring out of Vanhoover…if they were undead at all.”
She’d known where he was going then, and she could only stare at him, shaking her head slowly. “No.”
“Nosey, we have to consider the possibility-”
“No!”
“-that these were living ponies, survivors of Vanhoover, and that Lex slaughtered them.”
“ABSOLUTELY NOT!” She’d slammed her hoof down on his desk then, the pain it caused her only infuriating her more. “Line, Lex would never do that! He doesn’t kill ponies!”
“Right, except for Princess Luna’s guard,” snorted Line, holding up a hoof before she could protest. “I know, that was supposedly the scythe’s fault. Lex draws the line at cursing ponies, which he does with King Sombra’s horn.” He’d pulled out a file from his desk then, glancing through it before pulling out a paper. “Funny, the crystal ponies we interviewed after Sombra was defeated mentioned that he manipulated their memories too.”
By that point she had been shaking with rage, trying to fight back the tears gathering in her eyes, knowing that getting emotional would only make her seem even less credible. “None of that proves anything! You’re engaging in speculation and gossip, not news!”
“I’m pointing out,” replied Line calmly, “that the story you’ve brought me has a lot of holes in it. We’re talking about a pony who apparently loves his people, but seems to hate interacting with them. Who is working with a goddess that makes Nightmare Moon look warm and fuzzy, because he thinks she’ll make Equestria better. Who says this is his home, even though he seems to come from that Everglow place-”
“He’s not from there! He’s from here!” It had been all she could do to keep from screaming at that point, seeing her editor apparently ready to twist every single thing she’d written down, no matter how small the detail. “He was sent there before and came back, is all!”
“How?” Line had raised an eyebrow then, leaning back in his chair. “Did he break into Princess Twilight’s castle and use her portal? Because at this point, you haven’t given any alternative explanation.”
“Because what he’s doing in Vanhoover is more important than that!”
“Nosey, what he’s doing in Vanhoover is a coup.” He’d spoken to her slowly then, like she was a child. “He’s openly admitted to wanting to take over Equestria, and all you can write about is how he apparently deserves to do so. These,” he’d lifted her notes then, “don’t tell us what we need to know, which is what his weaknesses are and how to stop him. In all honesty, I’m concerned about how you seem to be under his thrall.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she’d spat, her voice cold.
Line had nodded then, but not in agreement. “I can see this is upsetting you. How about this? Take a week’s vacation, and when you come back, we can go over your notes some more.” He’d held up a hoof to forestall another protest. “I won’t publish any of what you’ve brought me before I talk to you again.”
“But you’ll take it all to Celestia and Luna.”
“Princess Celestia and Princess Luna,” he’d corrected her crossly, before his expression had softened. “Nosey, I have to. This is too important.” He’d sighed, a paternal look crossing his face then. “I know you think that this is unfair, and that everything you've written down is true. And maybe, maybe it is. But we’ve talked before about how a reporter has a responsibility to more than just the truth. There’s also the damage that a story can cause-”
“Don’t, Line. Just don’t.” She’d turned and marched toward the door then, angrier than she could ever remember being, stopping just long enough to say one thing. “Everything I’ve written down there is the truth, and if the truth is too inconvenient for the princesses, then maybe Lex is right about being more worthy to rule than they are.”
She’d had the satisfaction of seeing his face darken at that before she’d stalked out, trudging home feeling utterly miserable.
She was still feeling that way as she reached her apartment, fumbling with her keys in the dark hallway. I can’t believe I didn’t lose these the entire time I was away, she mused as she let herself in, not bothering to turn the lights on. Thank Celes- She grimaced, remembering everything Line had said. Thank the Night Mare for small favors. It was a pointless bit of pettiness, but it made her feel better as she stumbled toward her bed. She knew the path by heart even after being away for so long, having worked late plenty of times before, and right now the allure of sleep was stronger than her need for a shower, especially after Line had been so-
A sudden rush of hoofsteps was the only warning she got before something – somepony – slammed into her.
Hitting the ground hard, Nosey didn’t have a chance to scream as the wind was knocked out of her. But her attacker wasn’t taking any chances, covering her mouth with a hoof. “I was wondering when Lex’s pet reporter would be back,” snarled a hateful voice.
A voice she recognized.
Leaning forward, his face illuminated by the moonlight shining in from a nearby window, Silhouette sneered at her. “Bet you forgot about me, didn’t you?”
For a moment Nosey could only stare up at the stallion on top of her, too shocked to move.
Silhouette was someone she remembered quite well from her time in Vanhoover. A member of the Royal Guard with an ice-cold heart, he’d attempted to drag Lex in front of the princesses while he’d been performing a ritual to turn Aria into a pony, despite being told that any disruption had the potential to be catastrophic. Only the timely intervention of the Night Mare’s Knights had stopped him.
Later that same evening, he’d prostrated himself at the side of Princess Luna – his goddess, he’d called her – while Nosey and Feathercap had exchanged information with the younger of the Royal Sisters. Which, Nosey realized with a sinking feeling, was most likely how he’d found out where she lived. He was right there when I told Luna that I work for the Canterlot Chronicle. That alone would have made it clear that this was her city of residence.
From there, it wouldn’t have been hard for him to figure out her address. She’d spent a long time trying to cultivate a name for herself as a reporter, and part of that included letting ponies know where to find her in case they had any interesting news to share. She knew a lot of reporters would set up a post office box for written communications and pick a favorite spot – often a restaurant or a particular seat at a theater – for face-to-face meetings. But those all cost bits, and Nosey was a girl on a budget, so she hadn’t seen a problem with using her home. After all, notwithstanding major events like an invasion of changelings or a huge magic-eating centaur, Canterlot was one of the safest cities in all of Equestria. Who would be crazy enough to commit crimes right under the nose of the princesses and their guards?
Silhouette, apparently.
“I know what you’re thinking,” grunted the stallion in question as he held her down, his hoof still pressed over her muzzle. “I should be dead, right? Buried in a shallow grave somewhere after your hero murdered me?” Snarling, he leaned down, until his face was inches away from hers. “Too bad for you that Princess Cadance brought me back. Too bad for you, and too bad for Lex Legis.”
When Silhouette had tackled her, Nosey had been too shocked to respond, unable to reconcile something like this happening in her home. But that shock was gone now, and in its place was a rising panic, which drove her to action. Letting out a muffled scream, she jerked her head to the side, trying to dislodge his hoof. Nor was the rest of her still, as she began thrashing to try and throw Silhouette off of her. Her horn lit up, wrapping him in a glowing aura-
His free hoof, the one that hadn’t been pressed against her face, swung down then, and her head rang from the force of the blow. The pain was enough to make her go limp, and she dimly registered the taste of blood in her mouth. Her head lolled to the side, and for a moment she couldn’t figure out why everything was blurry now, needing a second to figure out that her glasses had been knocked off her face.
Above her, Silhouette wasn’t even breathing hard after the all-too-brief struggle. “Try that again,” he growled, “and I promise you, I won’t stop after just one punch, do you understand?”
When Nosey didn’t reply, still dazed from impact, Silhouette reached out and put his hoof under her chin, making her turn her face toward him. “Do you understand?” His voice was dark with the promise of what would happen if she didn’t say yes.
“Y-yes,” she murmured, already feeling herself starting to shake. This isn’t what was supposed to happen. She’d come back to Canterlot because she wanted her life to go back to normal, but this…first her job, and now her apartment; her time in Vanhoover had followed her home.
“Good. Now get up.” Getting off of her, Silhouette roughly pulled her to her hooves. “If you scream, or run, or use magic, I’ll beat you until you can’t do any of those things. Do you understand?”
Knowing that a response was expected, Nosey nodded, mumbling a vague affirmative. She could already feel herself starting to shake even worse, the tremors running through her entire body. Although she knew it wasn’t nearly as bad, she couldn’t help but think back to when she’d been possessed by Xiriel. Why does this keep happening to me?
Silhouette didn’t reply for a moment, staring at her in the dim moonlight as though deciding whether her lackluster answered warranted another punch or not. The uncertainty was enough to make Nosey’s tension skyrocket, but it only lasted a second before he nodded. “Good. Now, walk slowly toward the bathroom. I’ll be right behind you the entire way.”
Despite herself, Nosey couldn’t stop a question from passing her lips. “Why? Wh-what’s in the bathroom?”
He cuffed her then, his hoof striking her across her ear. It was nowhere near as hard as the previous punch, but it still made her cower, her heart leaping into her throat at the sudden display of violence. “Walk slowly toward the bathroom,” he repeated menacingly. “Now.”
Swallowing, she did as he said, marching the fourteen familiar steps to the room in question. But unlike all the other times she’d done so, the distance seemed to take forever to cross, wondering with each step if she’d be able to take another one without him hurting her again. By the time she reached the tiny bathroom – barely having enough room for the sink, tub, and toilet – she was breathing hard enough that she felt like she’d run a marathon.
“Now,” began Silhouette once they’d reached their destination, “lie down in the bathtub on your back, legs extended upward.”
Once again Nosey found her curiosity briefly overpowering her fear, but this time she knew better than to give voice to her questions, wordlessly obeying her captor. Swallowing in silent terror, she watched – just barely able to see him in the gloom – as he went to the bathroom’s only window, grabbing several towels from the nearby rack and throwing them over the curtain rod. It was only after he’d covered it completely that he turned the bathroom light on. The sudden illumination hurt Nosey’s eyes, but she hoped that somepony would be passing by and notice a light coming on, that maybe they’d think something strange was happening and tell someone…
Then she realized that was exactly why Silhouette had hung the thick bath towels in front of the window: to eliminate any chance of that happening.
Her heart hammered in her chest as she watched him root through the cabinet under the sink, pulling out the spool of twine that her mother had given her when she’d moved into this apartment – “just in case the dryer in the basement goes and you need to hang your clothes out to dry,” she’d said – and cut a length off with the thin pair of scissors her dad had given her in case she’d wanted to save some money by cutting her own hair. For some reason the sight of him touching the things her parents had given her, despite her not having looked at them, much less thought about them, in years made her stomach churn, and she felt her eyes tearing up as he moved over to her.
If Silhouette noticed her discomfort, he didn’t show it. Instead he began to quickly tie her legs together, winding the thin rope around her limbs in smooth, practiced motions. Guard training, Nosey realized with a sinking feeling. He’s done this before.
It took only a few seconds for Silhouette to finish, turning away to look for something else, but Nosey didn’t need to test the ropes to know that there was no way she was getting out of them. He’d made sure to wind them around each of her legs multiple times, tying each one closely to the other three with no slack remaining, knotting and re-knotting them with the cords tight enough that even if she leaned up to work at them with her teeth, she doubted she’d have been able to undo them. He’d even tied her tail to the ropes in several places, winding the hairs in with several of the knots, unwilling to give her even the slightest chance of freeing herself.
That explains the bathtub. Lying on her back like this, with her legs having virtually no range of motion, the small tub was effectively a prison, preventing her from so much as crawling away. All he had to do was gag her now and she’d be completely incapable of doing anything…with one exception.
But when Silhouette turned back to her a moment later, Nosey knew he hadn’t forgotten her horn.
She couldn’t help but squeeze her eyes shut, her mind already racing with nightmarish scenarios about what he was going to do to her in order to stop her from using magic. Everypony knew that disabling a unicorn’s horn was the fastest way to render them helpless, since the numerous delicate muscles around the bone of the horn were what made fine magical control possible. Breaking the bone would make it virtually impossible to cast spells reliably. So would a severe burn. Or several deep cuts. Or-
A second later she felt a rubber band snap around the base of her horn.
The sensation was so unexpected that she gasped, jerking reflexively as her eyes flew open. But Silhouette didn’t seem to care, instead leaning in to twist the rubber band and loop it back over her horn, causing it to tighten. Then he did it a third time. Then a fourth.
It was that point that Nosey couldn’t hold back a groan of discomfort, the loop of rubber cutting off her circulation. Even so, a wave of relief swept over her; as dangerous as she knew it could be to restrict the flow of blood to her horn for a prolonged period of time, it was a far gentler way of stopping her from using magic than she’d been anticipating. No doubt another trick he’d picked up during his time in the Royal Guard, since she couldn’t imagine them deliberately injuring unicorns as a means of securing their magic. Celestia and Luna would never have allowed that.
Luna…the thought made her turn her attention back toward Silhouette, hoping that mentioning the pony he worshiped would let her get through to the violent stallion. “D-did Princess Luna send you? Because she wouldn’t want th-”
“Don’t you ever say her name to me!” hissed Silhouette, a look of absolute fury crossing his face as he leapt to his hooves so fast that he almost stumbled, his withered hind leg barely supporting him. It was his foreleg that concerned Nosey more however, winding up for another punch, causing her to whimper as she tensed and tried to curl up in anticipation of being hit again.
But after several seconds went by without being struck, Nosey dared to crack her eyes open, trembling with the thought that he was waiting for her to relax just so the ensuing blow would hurt more. When that didn’t happen, she opened them further, seeing Silhouette resting his forelegs on the sink, hanging his head as he took deep breaths, struggling with visible effort to calm down. Even then, he needed several seconds to accomplish that task.
When he finally turned to look at her again, Nosey felt her blood run cold. When she’d first met Silhouette back in Vanhoover, his gaze had been dispassionate in the extreme, seeing her and everypony else as nothing more than obstacles toward his goal of bringing Lex in. But now there was a wild look in his eyes, open wider than necessary as he seemed to struggle to focus on her. “Don’t you ever…ever…EVER talk about her to me, do you understand?! After what Lex Legis did…what he did to her…to my goddess…my majestic, beautiful Luna…!”
He couldn’t keep going, sinking to the floor as a sound like a muffled scream came from his throat, barely held in check as he began to rock back and forth quickly. Several pronounced tremors ran through him, as though he was holding back heavy sobs. The spectacle went on for almost a full minute, and it terrified Nosey more than anything that he’d done so far.
Finally, he seemed to regain a modicum of sanity, and he stood up again, panting. When he made eye contact with Nosey, he seemed more like his old self, but she could still see whatever madness had gripped him lurking there, ready to come flying out the next time he was provoked. That was enough for Nosey to be sure; however angry the princesses might have been over what Lex had done to Luna, there was no way they’d allow somepony this…this…irrational to work for them.
Whatever Silhouette was doing here, he was doing it on his own, unsanctioned.
“Now,” he began at last, “I have some questions, and you’re going to answer them. If you do, then once the sun comes up and there’s no chance of your dreams being detected, I’ll allow you to sleep. But if you don’t…” He let the threat hang in the air, unspoken.
Nosey nodded as quickly as she could.
“Good. Now tell me, when did you first meet Lex Legis?”
“Hm?” Blinking, Line Byline struggled to hold back a yawn as he sat up straighter, turning his attention back toward Princess Luna. “I’m sorry, Your Highness?”
“You should go home, Line.” Luna’s smile was bemused, but not unkind, as she nodded toward the papers spread out on the table between them. “You can sleep on these notes that Nosey Newsy brought you without literally falling asleep on top of them. Besides, I’m sure your wife must be worried.”
Line shook his head. “If she got nervous every time I was out late running down a story, we wouldn’t have been married for almost thirty years now.” A rueful smile crossed his lips as his eyes turned vacant. “She told me once, ‘I don’t mind you chasing the news, just so long as you’re not chasing some filly on the side.’”
Luna’s smile softened at the anecdote. “And what did you say?”
“That anypony who’s dumb enough to have an affair when they spend every day surrounded by investigative reporters gets what they deserve,” he chuckled, rubbing his eyes. “That, and I promised that even if she went to sleep without me next to her, I’d always be there when she woke up in the morning.” Sighing, he picked up another paper from the pile. “So the faster we go over what’s here, the sooner I can make sure tonight’s not the night I turn into a liar.”
“I don’t think you need to be worried about that,” murmured Luna as she picked up a page of Nosey’s notes, looking it over. “Most of what’s here doesn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. This one, for instance, is about the group of monsters who accosted Lex Legis when he made his initial foray into Vanhoover to seek survivors. Interesting, but hardly new information.”
The words made Line frown, not because he disagreed but because he knew Luna was right. It had been over two hours since he’d rushed Nosey’s notes to the castle, hopeful that they contained some nugget of information that could prove decisive in helping the princesses defeat this latest threat to Equestria. But so far, that nugget had eluded him and Luna both. “There has to be something in here,” he insisted, more to himself than the princess. “Nosey might be blind to the consequences of her actions, but she’s a good reporter.”
“I know that she is.” Putting down the pages she’d been examining, Luna picked up another set. “I spoke with her during my time in Vanhoover, and she told me much of what’s here…though there are certainly some new tidbits. Apparently, Lex Legis banished that scythe of his, Severance, after we departed the city.”
Line’s eyebrows rose at that. “And he let Nosey get wind of that?”
“He announced it to the public.” Luna passed the papers over to Line.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” muttered Line, skimming what Nosey had written. “Severance is a powerful weapon, Applejack confirmed it during the summit. For Lex to not only discard it but let everypony know that he did…” He stared off into space, trying to make sense of it, before shaking his head again. “It’s got to be a lie. He had to put it aside since he’s made it the scapegoat for trying to kill you, but he’s probably stashed it somewhere, waiting to bring it out the next time he needs it.”
“Perhaps.”
The doubt in Luna’s voice surprised Line even more than the news about Severance. “You don’t think so?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “It might be as you say. But you mentioned Applejack’s testimony regarding the scythe, and I’m sure you remember that she described it as willful to the point of disobedience at times.”
“That doesn’t mean that’s what happened when Lex tried to kill you,” pointed out Line. “If anything, he’s probably just using that as cover, so he doesn’t look like a murderer.”
“And yet he didn’t wield the weapon when he fought my sister and myself, despite holding it within his telekinetic aura,” noted Luna.
“Princess, you can’t-”
“I know.” Holding up a hoof, Luna closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I know. I’m not trying to excuse his actions. Do you really think that I, of all ponies, would think that Lex Legis was devoid of ill intent?”
Letting out a slow breath of his own, Line shook his head. “Of course not.” He took a moment to calm down before continuing. “So you think he’s being honest about banishing the thing?”
“I think Lex Legis is honest about his ambition,” replied Luna evenly. “He seeks to control everyone and everything, and if one of his subordinates were to act without his leave, then I find it eminently believable that he’d cast them out for it. As for announcing it…” She shrugged. “He wants to look legitimate in the eyes of the public. Nosey wrote that his admission was ‘well-received.’ Perhaps it’s worth asking her to expound upon that?”
Line cocked his head. “You want to meet with her?”
“If you think it’s a good idea. She and I shared information once, so I don’t see why she wouldn’t be amenable to doing so again.” Luna waved a hoof over the papers. “These notes of hers are expansive, but I’m sure that she can elaborate on them.”
Leaning back in his chair, Line considered the idea. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. I just…I don’t like that she thinks that Lex is some sort of hero, even knowing what he did to you.”
“I’m sure that she’s not the only pony in Canterlot who feels that way, considering that your last headline about him painted him as the savior who saved Tall Tale,” teased Luna.
But her smile fell away in an instant as Line grimaced, looking pained at the reminder. “Your Highness, that wasn’t…if I had known what sort of pony he really was, I never…I promise you, once you and your sister give me the go-ahead to publish what’s here, I’ll run a piece amending that earlier headline! It won’t-”
“Line, be at ease.” Half-rising, Luna made a calming gesture toward at the distraught stallion. “I was only joking. No one blames you for that headline.”
“They should.” Line’s voice was morose, unable to meet Luna’s eyes. “I ran Nosey’s story without any wider context, not knowing who Lex was or what he’d done before then. If I’d just asked you or Princess Celestia for a comment, you could have told me that he’d already demanded that you abdicate in favor of him, and that he was clearly a tyrant in the making.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” insisted Luna, sitting back down. “The story came from Tall Tale, there was no reason for you to assume that it had anything to do with my sister or me.”
“It was still an unforgivable lapse in editorial standards.” Biting his lip, Line closed his eyes, looking tired in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour. “I knew something was wrong when you and Princess Celestia called me in afterward. You were both acting like you couldn’t tell me the whole truth, and you were right not to. Because of me, ponies in Manehattan and Baltimare and Fillydelphia and everywhere else only know of Lex as some pony who saved a city.”
“Then perhaps it’s time we gave everypony something else to consider.”
It took Luna’s words a moment to get through to Line, surprise causing him to meet her eyes again as he parsed her meaning. “…you want to go public with…” Not being sure how to finish, he nodded in Luna’s direction.
She didn’t answer immediately, instead fidgeting for a moment before eventually nodding. “I think that we should, yes. It can be part of my general announcement about forsaking my claim of being a goddess.”
“So you’ve informed all of your worshipers?”
“All but one,” confirmed Luna. “I’ve searched for him in the dream realm, but to no avail.” A shadow crossed her face then, looking similar to the expression Line had worn moments ago. “I think he’s avoiding me.”
If Line’s reporter’s instincts hadn’t been roused before, they were now. “How does somepony avoid you entering their dreams?”
“By staying awake,” answered Luna dryly, her morose expression reasserting itself a moment later. “Silhouette was part of my guard, along with being one of my most devout worshipers. He knows that my power over dreams is something that I use while awake, rather than when I’m asleep myself. If he simply matched his sleep schedule to mine, slumbering during the day and staying awake at night, I wouldn’t be able to locate him.”
“Wait, Silhouette?” Force of habit had Line pull his notepad out without conscious thought, flipping through it until he found what he was looking for. “The guard who was killed in action in Vanhoover? Who later exited the train you and Princess Celestia returned from Vanhoover on after Princess Cadance resurrected him, and had an, er, altercation with Prince Shining Armor?” When Luna nodded, he took a moment to process that. “I heard that his apartment had been raided.”
“It wasn’t a raid,” frowned Luna. “I sent some of my detachment to check on him and let him know that I wanted to see him, was all.”
“But he wasn’t there?”
Luna hesitated for just a fraction of a second before shaking her head. “No. The current theory is that he’s left Canterlot. Which I suppose is understandable, after what happened.”
“What Lex made happen,” corrected Line, before turning back to the subject at hoof. “So you’re hoping that a public announcement in the paper will get his attention?”
“It’s working for the missionaries that Cadance and Shining Armor sent out, at least according to the letters we’ve received from them.” Luna made an odd motion then, adjusting her shoulders in a way that wasn’t quite a shrug, and it took Line a moment to realize that she’d been attempting to flex wings that were no longer there, apparently without realizing it, since she continued talking a moment later. “I’d prefer not to let him know something so profound in such an impersonal way, but I can’t see any other course of action, especially since…”
“…Your Highness?”
“Celestia thinks it’s a bad idea, going public with what’s happened to me.” Luna looked at the wall then, except Line knew it wasn’t the wall she was gazing at, but rather the direction where her sister’s chambers were. “She says it’s pointless, since the Crystal Heart will be able to restore me very soon, but I know she’s worried about what the exposure will do to me.”
Line shifted in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. “That’s not an unreasonable point.”
The comment earned him a wry look. “I spent a thousand years being feared as Nightmare Moon. Letting everypony know of the ignominy that Lex Legis has inflicted on me now is not a burden too great to bear. And as you noted, it can serve to let all of Equestria know what sort of person he is.”
Reluctantly, Line nodded. “Alright, I’ll start making the arrangements. There are plenty of reporters who-”
“Actually,” interrupted Luna. “I’d like Nosey Newsy to do it.”
“Wh-, Your Highness, that’s not a good idea!” Despite the informal relationship he’d cultivated with the princesses, Line still maintained a certain degree of decorum in their presence, one that he found sorely tested now as he struggled to put his reaction into words. “Nosey…isn’t the right journalist for this particular topic.”
“We’ve already decided to have her come here to tell us more about her time in Vanhoover,” countered Luna. “And she has more experience with Lex Legis than anypony else in Canterlot, You said she’s a good reporter, so I would think that she’d be the obvious choice to write about the consequences of his actions.”
Line leaned forward, silently begging Luna to understand. “Princess, if Nosey writes this story, she won’t make it about you. She’ll make it about exonerating Lex. She’ll…” He licked his lips, which were suddenly dry, and took a deep breath before continuing. “She’ll make it sound like you deserved he did to you.” He knew that was going too far, but if that was what it took to talk the princess out of having the reporter who’d be least sympathetic to Luna’s situation be the one to break the news of her humiliation to Equestria, it was a price Line was willing to pay.
Unfortunately, he could already see that it was having the opposite effect, watching with a sinking feeling as Luna’s expression hardened, clearly insulted. “Of course, I’ll still be the one editing the piece for publication,” he began, trying to backpedal. “And we’ll run other articles in the same paper explaining the wider context of what happened. But I still think that-”
“You’ve made your feelings on the matter clear,” snapped Luna. “Now get her here and set up the interview. No delays.”
His ears folding back, Line nodded. “Yes, Your Highness.” Knowing that he’d worn out his welcome, he started to gather up the piles of notes. “It might take a little while, though. I gave Nosey a week’s vacation-”
“I’m sure she won’t mind coming back early.”
A frozen lake was warmer than Luna’s voice by that point, and it made Line shudder to hear. “I understand. I’ll stop by her place tomorrow and let her know you want to talk to her. We can set it up for a few days from now.”
“For sundown,” corrected Luna, her voice still frosty. “I know my sister will want to be here for this, since we’ll also be discussing the current situation in Vanhoover, but I don’t want to put it off any longer than absolutely necessary. Let Miss Newsy know that I’ll speak with her at sundown today.”
The tight timeframe was enough to make Line grimace, but he knew better than to protest the princess’s decision. “Yes, Your Highness.”
A curt nod was the only response he got as Luna stood up, Line hurrying to copy the gesture; nopony remained seated while royalty stood, especially not while in their castle. “Good. In the meantime, I have royal duties in the dream realm to attend to. You may see yourself out.” She didn’t look at him as she spoke, marching toward the door and yanking it open with her telekinesis.
“Thank you, Your High-” The slamming of the door behind her as Luna left cut off his perfunctory farewell, leaving Line alone in the empty room.
House Call’s nod was perfunctory, his face betraying no hint of either fear or remorse in response to Lex’s snarling. “I understand, sir, but from a medical standpoint it simply wasn’t a priority.”
“It wasn’t a priority from any standpoint,” added Aria, reaching a foreleg across Lex’s chest and gently, but firmly, pressing his sitting posture back to a reclining one.
Nor was she the only one to do so. “What she said,” added Sonata as she made Lex lie back in bed, having been carried back downstairs. “And you’re totes not going back to work now, so it’s no biggie.”
A sour look made it clear that Lex disagreed. “We currently have a dangerous criminal whose whereabouts cannot be confirmed,” he growled. “Her last known sighting places her in the company of one of Equestria’s princesses, suggesting – along with one of her entourage arriving here and attempting to kill me mere minutes after Starlight Glimmer’s defeat – that the two of them are in league. Meanwhile, another member of Equestrian royalty has challenged me to a duel, our finances are on the verge of being completely spent, and almost everypony with the capability to mount a defense if we’re attacked again is injured and exhausted. Given all of that,” he turned to glare at House Call then, his expression souring, “I find it highly imprudent that my chief medical pony neglected to inform me in a timely manner that the treatment I’d received included medication whose potential side effects include alterations to personal temperament!”
“Potential side effects, sir,” replied House Call, telekinetically scribbling something down on a notepad as he put his equipment back in his medical bag. “And the drug regimen you were given was short-term in nature, meant only to try and stabilize you. Even without taking into account the unknown effects of the healing magic Miss Cloudbank gave you, I’d be very surprised if you were still feeling any side effects by sunrise.”
The pronouncement did nothing to ease Lex’s displeasure, but not for the reasons that he’d rattled off a moment ago.
Barely two hours ago he’d been standing on a balcony, reveling in what he’d thought was a sense of acute joy at the outpouring of affection from his people. It had been a heady experience, filling him with a sense of personal vindication so profound it had bordered on transcendent. Finding out that it had been, in all likelihood, an artificial high from the drugs he’d been given had been disappointing in the extreme, obliterating his good mood and then some.
“Aw, don’t worry Lex!” cooed Sonata. “If you’re back to being a sourpuss again, then you’re definitely A-okay!”
Her statement got a few titters from the other ponies in the room, consisting of River Bank, Garden Gate, Thermal Draft, and Cloudbank. Everypony else had either gone to get some sleep shortly after they’d returned to the medical wing of the manor, or had fallen asleep after insisting on staying by his side and been subsequently carried off to bed…even if that latter group had consisted almost entirely of the Night Mare’s Knights.
Before Lex could chide Sonata for her inadvertent rebuke about his attitude, House Call spoke up again. “Normally, somepony who’s been through what you have would need to remain in intensive care for several days to monitor them for potential complications. But seeing as your case is highly atypical,” he continued quickly, seeing the dark look crossing Lex’s face at that, “I’ll confer with Miss Cloudbank about the exact medical effects of her magic and come up with a revised series of suggestions. Until then, I’m going to recommend that you give your body a chance to recover from the stress it’s been under. That means relaxing and avoiding anything stressful, such as spellcasting or vigorous physical activity.”
“Don’t worry, doc,” purred Aria, her hoof sliding down Lex’s chest toward his hip. “I’ll make sure he stays completely relaxed. All he’ll need to do is lie back and let me do all the work.”
“That’s great!” cheered Sonata, leaning in to nuzzle the stallion between her and her sister, as her voice turned amorous. “And while Aria’s doing chores and stuff, we can have some real fun.”
The comment made Aria frown, lifting her head to glare at Sonata. “Did you not hear that I just called dibs on him?”
“Um, no you didn’t,” snickered Sonata. “You said you were gonna work, which means that you make the bed while me and Lex mess it up again. Besides, you had him all to yourself for a while, so now the sugarmoon’s over.”
“The term is ‘honeymoon,’ you ditz, and I-”
“And that’s our cue to leave,” announced Garden Gate, already making for the door.
Cloudbank was right behind her, but paused to glance back at Lex. “When Cleansweep wakes up, I’ll work with her to heal everyone else who’s still injured.”
“You might need to save some for those two if the catfight gets any worse,” snickered Thermal Draft.
River couldn’t help but roll her eyes at the banter, shaking her head before turning to Lex. “I’ve got a few members of my staff on patrol in case Princess Twilight tries something between now and sunrise. I doubt they’ll be able to do much, but they can at least raise an alarm to let us know we have an intruder.”
That was enough to draw Sonata and Aria’s immediate attention, the two of them abandoning their argument and turning to face River in unison. “They wouldn’t dare!” chorused the two.
“If they try and pick another fight, they’ll have more to worry about than an alarm!” seethed Sonata, her usual bubbliness completely absent.
“And they won’t get off as easy as Starlight did,” hissed Aria, her expression murderous before she regained a measure of control over herself, waving a hoof at River. “Now beat it. We’ve got a hero to pamper.”
Nodding, River turned for the door, the last one to leave. But she’d barely taken two steps when Lex’s voice caught her. “River stays. I need-”
“For realsies?!” blurted Sonata, wide-eyed as she looked back and forth between him and the older mare. “Wow, I thought maybe you’d want a third girl now that Nosey’s gone, but I wouldn’t have guessed it’d be her!”
“So what, is this the old lady’s reward for stepping up while you were out?” snickered Aria. “Because if it is, I think we deserve to go first, and she can sit back and watch until it’s her turn.”
But Lex had reached the end of his patience where the Siren sisters’ shenanigans were concerned. “I need to talk to her. Alone.”
“Aww, but-”
“I don’t-”
“Now.” The look on Lex’s face made it clear that this was serious, and Sonata and Aria sighed as they slowly disentangled themselves from him. Murmuring assurances that they’d be right outside, the two slowly trudged out of the room, with River following them as far as the door, closing it behind them before she turned to face Lex, waiting for his instructions.
For his part, Lex was perfectly content to let her wait. Closing his eyes for a moment, he verified that his anti-scrying spell was still in place. Satisfied that it hadn’t been triggered, he instead focused on his dark magic, its reserves having replenished themselves while he’d rested. Glancing around the room, he enhanced his hearing, then his sense of smell, searching for anything unusual or atypical. It was only when he’d found nothing that he glanced at the corner of the room, where his personal effects had been piled. Telekinetically lifting his circlet, he peered into the magical spectrum as soon as it was back on his brow, sitting up and scanning the room.
It was only when he was finally confident that they were alone that he turned his attention back to River. “I want you to prioritize my duel with Blueblood.”
Of all the things River had been expecting Lex to say, that had been very far down the list. “You do? But Princess Twilight and Starlight Glimmer-”
“Are not your concern,” finished Lex. “Your concern is to make sure this duel happens, and that it happens the way I want.”
“I…I understand,” replied River, despite the fact that nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Blueblood hadn’t issued his challenge when she’d previously explained to Lex exactly who the prince was and what his being there meant for his plans for securing an influx of funds – an explanation given just after Lex had deferred her punishment for what had happened with Feather Duster – she couldn’t imagine how a fight, no matter how formal it was, would change anything now. “Lex…win or lose, you know the Las Pegasus ponies won’t support you, right? Not unless you force them to.”
Lex gave her a sharp look at that, and River cringed a little, remembering that he’d already told her that he had no intention of making the rich ponies she’d brought turn over their money if they didn’t want to. But to her surprise, he didn’t rebuke her.
Instead, he smirked.
“No,” he mused, his face displaying nothing but total confidence. “I think they will. Based on what you’ve told me, I think they’ll rush to give me whatever I want from them.”
River hesitated, licking dry lips before speaking again. “May I ask why?”
Her luck held, as Lex didn’t seem to take umbrage at being questioned. If anything, he seemed pleased by it, his look of insidious delight deepening. “Blueblood showed his entire hoof when, after I accepted his challenge, he suggested that we both appoint someone to work out the details of the duel for us.” He shook his head. “That’s a point of order specific to Conduct of Satisfaction: A Guide to the Formal Resolution of Conflict and Calumny, one of the oldest texts on dueling from the Pre-Classical Era.”
That was enough to make River’s brow furrow. “From before the three tribes were united?” Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recalled Blueblood mentioning – during their dinner back in Las Pegasus – that history had been one of the subjects he’d studied…
Lex nodded. “Unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi didn’t share common governance back then, but still needed to work together to produce enough food to survive. As such, individual ponies of different tribes needed a mechanism so that they could deal with conflicts in a way that didn’t lead to escalation or potential loss of life.”
“And dueling was the answer?” asked River, still not sure what this had to do with why Lex was so unconcerned about the ramifications of his upcoming duel with Prince Blueblood.
“It allowed the aggrieved parties to settle petty disputes on their own,” explained Lex. “A fight, with no established stakes or guidelines, typically accomplished nothing except pulling in friends, family, and neighbors, creating long-lasting feuds that often outlived the original conflict. Likewise, bringing complaints to their leaders, all of whom were suspicious of each other, ran the risk of turning a minor argument between individuals into a large-scale conflict between tribes.”
“And you can’t grow food when you’re fighting a war,” reasoned River.
“Precisely. So it was in everypony’s interests to come up with a standardized manner of resolving petty strife when it arose. Hence the development of dueling and its attendant codes of conduct, at least until the three tribes discovered Equestria and united as one people, at which point the practice was largely abandoned, remembered mostly as a historical artifact to highlight how far we’ve come.”
A bitter note entered his voice then, but River didn’t want to push her luck by commenting on it. “So Blueblood’s saying that you and he should have other ponies negotiate the terms of the duel for you because…?”
“As noted in Conduct of Satisfaction, the intent is that your designated agent will be able to represent your interests without being in the throes of whatever indignation led to the challenge being issued and accepted,” replied Lex. “They work out the details, subject to the approval of the ponies they’re working on behalf of, who aren’t supposed to see each other prior to the arrangements being finalized and the duel being either conducted or called off. Once everything is agreed to, the terms are considered ironclad, and breaking them is taken to be unconscionable.”
Now able to see what Lex was getting at, River’s eyes widened. “Which means that if he agrees to whatever terms you set, Blueblood will feel honor-bound to uphold them!” Of that much, River felt certain. Blueblood’s narcissism stemmed from his perception that he existed on a higher plane of personal conduct than everypony else. That arrogant nitwit would sooner break his horn off than break his word! “Can you set the terms of the duel to include receiving something from the loser when you win?”
“In theory, the terms can include anything, since they need to be mutually agreed upon,” answered Lex easily. “In fact, there’s a tradition of making outrageous demands in an attempt to intimidate the other party into backing down. One of the duties of the representatives is to discourage such things as part of facilitating the process.”
“But there’s no need to discourage anything now.” Now that she understood what Lex was doing, River’s imagination was starting to run wild. “Blueblood thinks he’s already won, that you’re all talk and no action. So he’d probably accept any terms we put to him, since he won’t think they matter!” The possibilities were enough to make her head spin. “We could get him to ask those ponies from Las Pegasus to give you the loan you want! Or make an official statement that Celestia and Luna were at fault for that fight! Or-”
But her musings were cut short as Lex gave a dark laugh.
“No,” he chuckled. “Blueblood has something much more substantial that I want.”
Feather Duster groaned as the alarm clock went off, her eyes fluttering open as she was dragged back to wakefulness.
It took her more than one attempt to fish the hateful timepiece out from under her pillow and turn it off, her bleariness making her uncoordinated and clumsy. As it was, she stared at the thing for several seconds afterward, wondering why she’d put it there in the first place. It was only belatedly that she remembered not wanting to disturb anypony else, hoping that the pillow would muffle the accursed thing’s ringing enough that she – with her head directly over it – would be the only one it woke.
A glance around confirmed that her plan had succeeded, as none of her fellow maids were stirring. Of course, having only gone to sleep four hours ago, that wasn’t particularly surprising. After how late they’d all been up, as well as the accumulated stress from everything that had happened yesterday, Feather Duster suspected that a dozen alarm clocks wouldn’t have woken them up. Still, she hadn’t wanted to be rude, especially since the slumbering mares had done her a favor by letting her bunk with them.
Of course, she wouldn’t have needed to do so if not for her insensitive lout of a husband.
“C’mon, babe!”
“Keep your voice down!” Shooting a quick glance at the foals to make sure they hadn’t been disturbed, Feather Duster gave her husband a glare once she was satisfied that he hadn’t woken them. “Tryout, we are not doing it right here while the children are asleep!”
He’d actually had the gall to look mildly exasperated at that. “Obviously!” he’d snorted, before his expression turned into the impish grin he so often wore, nodding toward the closet door on the far side of the room. “I was thinking that, since we’re talking about being naughty, that we could be put in ‘time out’ instead.”
Feather Duster took a deep breath, trying to remain calm. “It’s been a very long day, and I’m exhausted,” she began. “We can do it some other night.”
“You’ve been saying that since I got back!” His cheerful demeanor finally slipped then, revealing an undercurrent of frustration. But it was gone as quickly as it appeared, his boyish smile returning. “C’mon, it’ll do you a world of good. You’ve been so stressed out lately, you’ll feel better after you’ve blown off some steam. And a few other things,” he added with a wink.
When she’d been younger, the lewd come-on would have made Feather Duster blush and giggle, thrilled that somepony so wild was making a pass at a plain, soft-spoken girl like her. But the last few weeks had been stressful enough that renewing the conjugal part of her marriage had been the furthest thing from her mind. And after everything that had just happened – the anxiety of their home being attacked again, the heartache brought on by seeing their daughter’s injuries, and her lingering irritation at how Tryout had encouraged Cleansweep to go hang out with Rainbow Dash – the prospect of changing that now was utterly nonexistent. “If you need your steam blown, you’ll have to do it yourself,” she muttered, too tired to keep arguing. “It’s late, and I have to be up early. I’m going to sleep.”
She’d headed toward one of the unoccupied beds then, but hadn’t made it more than two steps before Tryout was suddenly beside her, giving her a nuzzle as he’d pressed his side to hers. “Don’t be like that,” he’d murmured, his voice still filled with desire. “I know you need this. I need it too.”
It was shock that kept her from reacting immediately, unable to believe how childish he was being about this. Then she extended her wing, pushing him away. “What are you doing?!” she snapped, barely managing to keep her voice down. “Get ahold of yourself!”
But he apparently wasn’t willing to take no for an answer, slipping under her wing to resume rubbing against her. “Just let this happen,” he breathed, leaning in to nip at her neck, ignoring her squirming to get away. “We can make it a quick one.”
She tried to put some distance between them, but with him under her wing flying wasn’t possible. And she’d taken less than two steps away from him when she hit the back wall, leaving her with nowhere to go as he’d continued to smother her with unwanted affection. “That’s enough, Tryout!” His wing slid down her side and across her flank then, flicking her tail up in a way that made the hem of her dress rise. She tried to kick the probing limb away, but her hoof only grazed his feathers, and he didn’t seem to notice, burying his face in her mane and inhaling deeply as he raised a foreleg to caress her chest. “I’m serious! Knock it off!”
“Just relax,” he shushed her, refusing to listen to her protests. His wing was still moving, trying to work her dress up as he pressed himself against her more. “You’ll enjoy it, I promise.”
Gritting her teeth, Feather Duster briefly contemplated just letting him do what he wanted. If she kept fighting him there was a good chance that they’d end up waking the foals, and that was something she wanted to avoid quite badly now. With how worked up he was, it would probably be over quickly anyway.
But as much sense as it made to just stop resisting, she couldn’t bring herself to do so. After everything that she’d been through the last several weeks – not knowing what had happened to her family while she’d escaped to Las Pegasus with River Bank, seeing her home reduced to a ruin once she’d come back, the low-grade terror that she’d lived in after her employer had ordered her to offer herself to Vanhoover’s new ruler, and so many other events that had left her nerves completely frayed – this was more than she could take. Her husband was supposed to be the one pony she could always count on to help her deal with her troubles. Instead, he was so wrapped up in what he wanted that he was making them worse.
This was the last straw.
By that point Tryout had gotten the hem of her dress over her hips, moving behind her. “That’s my girl,” he purred, almost panting by now. “I knew you’d give me what I need.”
Simmering in silent fury, Feather Duster waited until she felt his forelegs settle on her flanks, holding her steady as he brushed her tail to the side. In another second, she knew, she’d feel his weight settle onto her back. But she didn’t intend to give him a chance.
This time, when she kicked out, her hind leg hit exactly what it was aiming for.
A strangled groan of agony escaped Tryout’s lips as he crumpled to the floor, whimpering as he put his front hooves between his hind legs protectively. Fixing her dress, it was with no small amount of satisfaction that Feather Duster watched as tears slid down his cheeks, gagging as his face took on a greenish pallor. After several seconds of dry heaving, he managed to regain enough self-control to look up at her, his eyes filled with shock as much as anguish. “B-babe…” he gasped. “Why?”
“I was just giving you what you needed,” she replied, her voice filled with icy sweetness. “And you were right. I really needed that too.”
And without another word, she’d turned and left him there, marching out to go find someplace else to sleep.
Shaking her head at the memory, Feather Duster sighed. As satisfying as it had been to put a stop to Tryout’s selfishness, she knew it didn’t really solve anything; his lack of understanding about why she’d lashed out made that perfectly clear. But she couldn’t afford to focus on the rocky state of her marriage right now. She had a job to do.
Quietly, she hurried down the hallway toward the dining room. The staff on night patrol had told her that Master Legis had already gotten up, leaving Miss Dusk and Miss Blaze asleep in bed as he’d gone to take his morning meal in the southern dining hall. But as his personal assistant, Feather Duster knew she was supposed to be there in case he required anything, and while she no longer found herself terrified to be in his presence, she still found herself rattled by knowing that she had – no matter the circumstances – failed to fulfill her duty to him.
Turning a corner, she paused to give herself a quick once-over, making sure she was presentable before giving the door to the dining room a soft knock.
“Enter.”
“Master Legis,” she murmured deferentially as she walked inside, keeping her eyes on the floor. “Please pardon my tardiness.”
When he didn’t respond, she dared to glance upward.
If Master Legis had heard her, he didn’t show it. Instead, he sat at the head of the long table, regarding several papers spread out in front of him. His eyes were shining green and purple, but Feather Duster had been around him long enough to know that was probably because of his telekinesis, a churning aura surrounding a spoon as he ate that same porridge as always, eschewing the variety of tasty dishes that the kitchen staff could have prepared for him.
Realizing that he wasn’t going to say anything about her late appearance, she gave an inward sigh of relief, moving to stand behind and slightly to the left of him. It was the traditional place for an attendant, Trotsworth had told her. Unlike other servants, who were expected to remain at a distance when not performing a function, they needed to always be close at hoof so that their master could motion them closer in order to pass them something or whisper instructions that weren’t meant for anyone else’s ears. There were numerous exceptions, of course, and she’d strived to memorize them all, but eating alone wasn’t one of them.
As she stood there, watching him eat the only meal he took in a day, she found herself comparing him to Tryout for some reason. Or more specifically, comparing how Tryout had acted last night to the way Master Legis had acted when she’d thrown herself at him on River Bank’s orders. Her husband, who was an affable pony by any measure, hadn’t respected her wishes, whereas Master Legis, who had no charm or elegance whatsoever, had refused to take advantage of her. True, he’d done so in a cold and off-putting manner, and most likely out of animus more than consideration, but he had still-
“I’m given to understand,” began Lex abruptly. “That you authorized the release of a storm cloud on my behalf yesterday.”
It took Feather Duster a moment to catch up to what he was saying, not realizing he’d known that. Somepony must have told him last night, after I put the foals to bed. “Y-yes, sir.”
He’d turned his head slightly then, glancing back at her. “I’ll have you explain your actions now.”
Nodding, her throat suddenly dry, she launched into the incident in question. It didn’t take her very long to recount what had happened, and why she’d acted the way that she had. When she finished she bit her lip, trying to fight the cold shiver going down her spine. He couldn’t possibly be mad about the loss of one storm cloud, could he? Especially when those two mares had used it to help him?
Lex turned back to his food after she’d finished, but the page of writing that he slid away from himself, along with a quill and inkwell, made it clear that he hadn’t forgotten about her. “I want you to sign this.”
Nervously, Feather Duster took a step forward. “What is it?”
“Your statement of resignation.”
The words stopped Feather Duster in her tracks. “What?”
“I am, strictly speaking, unable to terminate your employment,” replied Lex, speaking as casually as if he’d been talking about the weather. “Despite acting as my aide, you work for River Bank. And while she works for me, my understanding is that she hired you prior to forfeiting her assets in my favor. To fire you myself would therefore constitute an ex post facto alteration of the terms of your contract of service, and since River herself is currently indisposed, I can’t direct her to release you either. Ergo, your resignation.” He glanced back at her again, his eyes still glowing. “Unless, of course, you refuse to sign.”
Unable to speak past the lump in her throat, Feather Duster shook her head, shaking as she approached the table. What did this mean for her family? They wouldn’t starve without her salary, since Master Legis was still passing out free food to everypony, but she was sure that there’d be no place for her or Tryout here in the manor any longer. Cleansweep would probably be allowed to stay, since she was one of Master Legis’s students, but the thought of living apart from her daughter made Feather Duster feel sick to her stomach.
Dimly, she dipped the quill in the inkwell and signed her name on the paper, not bothering to read it. He was really firing her over a single cloud? One that had ultimately been used to help him? She knew he’d worked hard to acquire those, wanting to make sure the region had sufficient rainwater, but was a single one really worth more than her service?
She received her answer a moment later, as Master Legis withdrew the paper without a word, glancing at it and giving a nod of satisfaction before putting it aside.
Feeling utterly wrung out, Feather Duster slumped in place, knowing that she’d just been dismissed. Permanently. “I’ll-”
“Now,” interrupted Lex, “review and sign this.”
A sheaf of papers, consisting of the other pages that he had been looking over, was laid in front of her then, and she stared at them dumbly, not knowing what was happening. “This is…?”
“Your new employment contract.”
“…huh?”
An annoyed look crossed Lex’s face as he looked at her. “The necessity for this should be obvious. A contributing factor in River’s coercing you into making an inappropriate advance toward me was that she was your boss. This rectifies that situation. You will now work for me directly.”
Pausing to finish the last of his porridge, he stood up, his usual sardonic expression reasserting itself. “Your wages reflect the increased salary that River offered to secure your cooperation with her repugnant scheme, along with an increase proportional to the open-ended nature of your work as my aide. Vacation times and benefits are likewise included, along with a buy-back option if you elect not to use them. Adjustments for the cost of living are similarly stipulated, as based on a market-relationship factor compared to the standard of living index which I’ll be rolling out subsequent to Vanhoover’s continued stabilization, prorated of course. And it comes up for renegotiation every three years.”
He didn’t bother to look at her as he strode toward the door. “Read it over and let me know if you have any issues with what’s there. If not, sign it and return it to me as soon as possible. There’s work that needs to be done.”
Feather Duster’s head was spinning as she looked at the stack of papers, and not just because she couldn’t follow half of what Master Legis had said was in there. “I…don’t understand.”
Already halfway to the door, Lex stopped, looking back at her and sighing. “What don’t you understand?”
Weakly, she waved a wing at the new contract he’d given her, only barely starting to register that, far from being fired, this was a raise – and then some – in all but name. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”
She didn’t just mean the contract. He had to know that she’d spent a long time being terrified of him. That she was still uncertain about having him teaching her daughter, to the point of using her position as his personal assistant to monitor what he was teaching her. That her work as his maid was adequate at best, and nowhere near the level of somepony like Trotsworth. So why…?
“Because you exercised good judgment,” replied Lex without pausing.
Feather Duster blinked. “I did?”
Lex nodded. “When Thermal Draft and Cloudbank ran into procedural issues with securing a storm cloud to use against Starlight Glimmer, you used your position as my assistant to resolve the problem. Given that we were in an emergency situation, one which required decisive action without clear direction, your actions can only be taken as evidence of prudence, which is a quality I require from those ponies in my service.”
“O-oh…”
Waiting just a moment to see if she had any follow-up, Lex resumed walking when she didn’t say anything. “I imagine you’ll want to talk with your husband before you make a decision,” he continued as he reached the door. “Do so promptly. I want you to get back to work as quickly as possible.”
Then he was gone.
When his hoofsteps had faded, Feather Duster sat down at the table, flipping through the pages of the contract. Most of it was completely unintelligible to her, despite Lex’s crisp hornwriting. But what she could make out made it clear that he hadn’t been exaggerating: the terms were generous in the extreme.
With everything going on, he’d taken the time to write this out himself, wanting to keep her around – and give her more than he already had – all because she’d told Trotsworth to step aside and let those two mares take a storm cloud.
“I imagine you’ll want to talk with your husband before you make a decision.”
Turning to the last page of the contract, Feather Duster grabbed the quill and hurriedly signed her name before running to catch up to Master Legis.
Fighting down the urge to scream, Starlight nodded. “Yes, Twilight. It’s kind of hard for me to forget the mare who told me to my face that Lex was going to put a curse worse than death on me. Especially since she said it yesterday!”
Starlight was certain that it was embarrassment that made Twilight wince then, rather than in reaction to her raising her voice, and that victory mollified her enough to get to the point. Mostly. “I’m telling you, River Bank is here, which means that whatever she’s saying to Prince Stuck-Up’s viceroy or whatever he is must be on Lex’s orders…since by now he’s probably recovered enough to start issuing them.”
That rebuke had been intended to draw another wince from the princess, reminding her that she’d passed up a golden opportunity to put an end to that monster once and for all. But instead, Twilight gave her a look of concern, taking a step closer. “Starlight, I know that you and Lex don’t like each other very much, and I won’t say that you’re wrong to be angry at him. But I don’t think fighting is the answer here.”
“It’s not now, since you missed your chance to finish him off!” Starlight knew that getting angry was the wrong thing to do. Lashing out at Princess Twilight would make it harder to bring her around to her way of thinking later. But she couldn’t help it; after everything she’d lost yesterday, being lectured by some pampered princess about how violence was wrong was more than she could take. “Whoever healed Lex is probably doing the same for those other ponies he bamboozled into fighting for him! So now we’re back to square one!”
But Twilight was still intent on talking down to her! “Starlight, Lex defeated Princesses Celestia and Luna all on his own. And I think he might have held back when he fought you. Even if we’d gone in horns blazing last night, I’m not convinced it would have gone the way you’re thinking.” Her voice took on a pleading tone then. “Let me see if I can set things up for you and Lex to try talking things out. You won’t even have to speak directly to him if you don’t want to, I can-”
“Are you kidding me?!” What was wrong with this mare that she wouldn’t listen to reason?! Except the answer to that was obvious, being right there on Twilight’s flanks. “Look, I get that your cutie mark is for magic, so you think the ‘magic of friendship’ can solve every problem. But right now you’re putting yourself, me, your friends, and all of Equestria in danger because you’re letting your cutie mark blind you to the fact that there’s no friendship to be had where Lex Legis is concerned!”
Twilight was silent for a long moment. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Lex isn’t somepony who can understand the magic of friendship,” she conceded at last, and for an instant Starlight had a flash of hope that the alicorn was willing to listen to reason, to see that her cutie mark was holding her back from what needed to be done. But that hope was dashed a moment later. “But what about you? Don’t you think that maybe you need a friend right now?”
“What I need is my horn fixed! What I need is a rematch with that despot where he isn’t sending other ponies to do his dirty work! What I need is to show everypony in Vanhoover that there’s a better way to make friendships and build harmony!” But Starlight could see from the pitying look on Twilight’s face that she wasn’t getting through to her. This would be so much easier if I could just rip her cutie mark off by force and shut her in a room all by herself for a few days. That had always gotten better results than talking; most ponies were too brainwashed by how Equestrian society treated cutie marks as wonderful things, requiring drastic measures to be taken for them to see the light, and Twilight was clearly no exception.
Deciding that any further discourse was a waste of her time, Starlight turned and trudged down the hallway of the yacht’s passenger deck. “Go ahead and try and reason with Lex if you want, but I’m not going to be a part of it. Maybe after he’s destroyed something you care about, you’ll be ready to talk sense.”
Twilight watched Starlight go, a good night’s sleep clearly having done nothing for how hurt and angry she was.
While not entirely surprising, it was disappointing, and not just because Twilight still wasn’t sure how Starlight fit in with their mission from the map. Rather, Twilight had been hoping to talk to her more about the friends who had – for whatever reason – abandoned her during the middle of her fight with Lex. But all Starlight had wanted to bring up was the unicorn she’d been fighting against, specifically with regard to how River Bank was here on his behalf, doing who knows what.
But that wasn’t the only reason why Starlight’s words had been upsetting…
“Twilight, there you are!” Smiling, Spike hurried over to her, pointing back in the direction he’d come from. “C’mon, everypony else is having breakfast! Pinkie asked the chef if she could make chocolate toast, which nopony thought was a thing, but she actually did it! And it’s really good!”
The anecdote brought a wan smile to her lips, but only for a moment. “Spike…do you think I’m putting everypony in danger?”
“Huh?” The little dragon couldn’t have looked more confused if he’d tried. “What do you mean?”
Sitting down, Twilight hung her head. “I thought the map sent us here to try and solve a friendship problem, but now I’m wondering if I made a mistake the way I did when the lhaksharut attacked.”
“C’mon, that turned out okay,” protested Spike.
Twilight shook her head. “But not because of me! I made the wrong call, not just once but twice, and my friends almost died because of it! If Mihr hadn’t shown up when he did…” She didn’t want to dwell on that, but at the same time couldn’t think about anything else. “What if I’m wrong, and we should have finished what Starlight Glimmer and Rainbow Dash started? Maybe we’re supposed to deal with Lex the same way we did with King Sombra and Tirek instead of trying to reason with him?”
“But you’re the Princess of Friendship,” insisted Spike. “The map has to know that, right?”
Twilight shrugged. “So does Princess Celestia, and she thinks that Lex isn’t trustworthy. Maybe I was wrong from the start. Maybe we are here to defeat Lex once and for all.”
“Well…” Walking over, Spike put a claw around Twilight. “If you are, I’m just glad the map sent you and everyone else together. After seeing what happened to Starlight Glimmer, I’d hate for you to have to fight him one-on-one.”
This time her smile was more genuine, and Twilight was halfway to wrapping Spike up in a hug when something clicked in her brain. “Wait…one-on-one…”
Spike blinked, pouting a little at not getting his expected hug. “Twilight?”
“Spike, that’s it!” Her eyes widening, Twilight grinned. “You’re a genius!” Scooping the little guy up, she gave him a quick embrace before putting him down and galloping off, her mind whirling as she ran.
Starlight Glimmer thought that Lex needed to be defeated. The map, Twilight hoped, had sent them there to reason with him. Up until now, Twilight hadn’t been sure which option was right.
But Spike had helped her see that maybe the answer was both of them.
“I said I was not to be disturbed,” huffed Prince Blueblood.
“Begging your pardon, Your Highness,” gulped the old unicorn mare who’d knocked on the door for her – it didn’t escape Twilight’s notice that the lanky stallion who served as his valet was nowhere to be found – “But the Princess of Friendship is insisting that she speak with you immediately.”
Putting down the elegant quill he’d been writing with, Prince Blueblood heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, very well. All of these interruptions are utterly ruining my ability to concentrate on this victory poem anyway. Send her in.”
Nodding, the old mare motioned for Twilight to enter, bowing and closing the door once she had. Twilight copied the gesture, lowering her head respectfully. “Your Highness, thank you for seeing me.”
Blueblood gave a disdainful sniff, nose in the air. “As a prince of Equestria, I’m obliged to make time for fellow royal. Even when they insist on going without the least bit of ornamentation like some commoner.”
Twilight frowned at the jab, but let it go. Even if she hadn’t spoken with Blueblood briefly yesterday, Rarity had made no secret of how awful he’d been during their date at the Grand Galloping Gala, so his rudeness was no surprise now, even if it was unpleasant to deal with. But there were more important things to focus on right now, like the tidbit that Starlight Glimmer had let slip earlier. “I wanted to talk to you about the duel you’re planning on fighting with Lex Legis. Is your valet negotiating the terms with River Bank right now?”
The question made Blueblood roll his eyes. “My dear, were you more concerned with royal etiquette, you’d be aware that the terms are the duel. Lex Legis has no desire to face me on the field of battle, especially now that your friend Rainbow Splash so artlessly but effectively demonstrated that the hooligan has a glass jaw.” He paused to chuckle at the memory, giving his golden mane a toss. “My valet has already been back to confer with me thrice now since River Bank, that bumpkin, arrived. Lex Legis is doing exactly what I thought he would: having her press a ridiculously overwrought set of terms in an effort to intimidate me into withdrawing my challenge. Needless to say, it won’t work.”
Twilight bit her lip at that, knowing Blueblood had wildly misread Lex. But rather than try to talk some sense into the hardheaded prince, she instead focused on the one detail she wanted to make certain of. “So that means you’re using the guidelines laid out in Conduct of Satisfaction: A Guide to the Formal Resolution of Conflict and Calumny?”
Blueblood raised a brow. “You know of it?”
“I’ve read it.” Now that she knew the exact structure under which the duel was being negotiated, Twilight’s thoughts were spinning, examining the idea she’d had from all angles. “May I ask what terms are currently under discussion?”
“Ha!” Blueblood’s laugh was one part amusement, two parts surprise. “Normally I’d never disclose details of an ongoing parley…” He waggled his brows then, giving her a cocky smile as he moved to take a seat on a nearby divan. “But if you can restrain yourself from gossiping about it like some lowborn sloven, then I confess that Lex’s feeble attempts at brinksmareship are too amusing to keep to myself!”
“You don’t say.” Fighting back a grimace, Twilight moved to sit across from Blueblood.
“Oh, most definitely. Certainly, it wasn’t unexpected that he wants to settle things via a brawl, but did you know that he’s actually proposing that we battle to the pain? To the pain?!” Chortling, Blueblood held a hoof in front of his mouth. “I’m shocked that he didn’t go for even more melodrama and propose that we fight to the death!”
Twilight laughed weakly, the sound hollow in her ears. “To the pain” was a term from Code of Satisfaction which meant “until surrender or incapacitation,” with unconsciousness being the most common application. “That sounds like Lex.”
“Oh, that’s just the beginning. He’s absolutely overflowing with needless postulations and points of order, all designed to try and repair his fearsome image in my eyes.” Waving a hoof in the air, Blueblood began to count them off. “He wants the battle held as soon as possible, here in this wreck of a city, which is his clumsy way of trying to signal that he’s without hesitation in pursuing this. All posturing, of course, but quite amusing.”
Reclining further, Blueblood took a moment to make sure his tail remained perfectly coiffed as he made himself comfortable. “He wants it held within full view of the public, which is him trying to look like he isn’t concerned about being scorned for insulting a royal. He wants a clear agreement that quitting the field is an instant loss, another not-so-subtle indication of his supposed intent to see this through. He has quite a few stipulations about interference-”
“Has he said what he wants if he wins?” blurted Twilight.
“…I was saving that part for last,” pouted Blueblood, making no effort to hide his irritation at his buildup being interrupted. Sighing, he made a show of letting it go, snickering instead. “But this one is, as the plebians would say, quite a howler!”
Grinning, Blueblood’s eyes twinkled with mirth as he looked at Twilight. “Were he to actually go through with this and somehow pull off a victory, he wants me to ‘permanently and immediately abdicate my royal status and all of its attendant privileges’ in his favor!”
Twilight’s jaw dropped. “If Lex wins, he’ll become a prince in your place?!”
“Yes!” laughed Blueblood. “Isn’t it uproarious? That brute, a prince? Oh! Oh, I can’t remember the last time I heard anything so amusing! He must be truly desperate to avoid this duel if he’s instructed his representative to press such a perverse demand!”
Distractedly, Twilight nodded. Lex as a prince? While she herself had never really wanted to emphasize her royal title, Twilight felt certain that Lex would feel no such restraint. He’d press the legitimacy of his claim as hard as he could. Worse, Princess Celestia wouldn’t be able to deny it, since she was the one who’d underwritten the validity of Blueblood’s family’s royal status. It would be a huge leap forward for Lex’s goal of supplanting the princesses…
Shaking her head, Twilight forced herself not to get carried away. This made it all the more important that she go through with this. “Prince Blueblood, what terms have you put forth?”
“Hm? Oh, not very many,” admitted the stallion. “My strategy is to cow him by threatening to accept his terms, which I can assure you he doesn’t want since then he’d have to actually go through with this.”
After taking a moment to reflect on his brilliance, Blueblood continued. “My terms are mostly that, when I win, the vagrant gives a truly humbling statement of apology to myself and my dear aunts for the insult he gave them. Likely with a hefty monetary penalty, mostly for the joy of seeing him sink into destitution trying to fulfill his financial obligation. I wonder if he realizes that nopony will let him borrow any bits when it becomes known that he insulted the pride of Equestria: me.” He stared into the distance for a moment, openly daydreaming of the scenario that he’d just described, before coming back to himself. “Oh, and that he turn over his mares to my custody.”
“Well, I’d like to…wait, his mares?” Twilight couldn’t ignore that. “You mean Sonata and Aria?”
Blueblood’s face lit up. “You know them?! Oh, you absolutely must tell me about them! I’ve never seen anypony as beautiful as that fair maiden! And to think that scoundrel is defiling her and her sister to slake his vile appetites! Did you know,” he leaned closer to her, his voice lowering, “that he actually ravishes the two of them concurrently? Can you imagine such a thing? Two nubile maidens, siblings each, forced into such a compromising situation, given no choice but to work together to slake their captor’s foul lusts. It’s…” He gave a shudder then, letting out a slow breath. “Absolutely repulsive.”
The look on his face suggested he felt otherwise, which was plenty repulsive for Twilight. “Er, yeah…” Sitting up straighter, she decided to get to the reason she’d come here.
“Your Highness, I’d like to suggest one or two minor changes to your terms for the duel.”
“…and after we did, like, the fourth or fifth village, I started getting sooo bored! I mean, I barely even had to do any singing! Everypony just came for the clouds, I told them Vanhoover was totes open for business again, and then we had to move on! It was the worst!”
On her portion of the bed, cuddled up at Lex’s side across from her sister, Aria snickered. “I bet the ponies traveling with you thought that you were the worst.”
She’d thrown that label at Sonata more times than she could count over the years, but this time it came out differently. Gone was the harsh, mocking edge that she knew got under her sister’s skin, replaced with the teasing lilt of a shared joke. She knew Sonata heard it too, since she giggled in response, sticking her tongue out at her before turning back to Lex.
“So then I got this super-smart idea! I mean, this was a total Lex moment!” she gushed. “Instead of going around to all these little towns and passing out clouds, why not make them come to me at once? So I had those pegasus ponies you sent with me spread out and deliver one cloud each to all the villages nearby, telling them to come to where I’d set up – which was some old dump called Hollow Shades – and they’d get more! And they did! I even made a whole big concert out of it!”
“That was a good idea,” admitted Lex. “I’m impressed that you thought of it.”
Aria rolled her eyes, giving Lex a light jab in the ribs at the backhanded (or was it “backhoofed” now?) compliment, earning a confused look from him. But Sonata didn’t even notice, squealing in delight. “I know, right?! We only missed a couple of really tiny villages, which we mostly hit on the way back.” She let out a sigh then, her smile diminishing as she laid back down. “One of them was Starlight’s.”
Aria tuned Sonata out then, having heard the story last night. The hours that they’d spent by Lex’s side had seemed interminable, and while several other ponies had joined them at various intervals, they’d still had long stretches of time where it was just the two of them, waiting at Lex’s bedside in fear that each breath he took would be his last. More than once the silence had grown too oppressive to bear, driving them to talk, at first by filling each other in on what they’d been doing during their time apart before moving on to other things. From memories of their time on Earth, to wondering how Adagio was doing back on Everglow, to what they’d do to the next person who tried to hurt the guy they’d both fallen so hard for, the two of them had poured their hearts out to each other during the long countdown to midnight.
For the longest time, Aria had convinced herself that she’d merely tolerated Sonata’s presence, not realizing how much she needed her – needed both of her sisters – until they’d been forcibly separated. Even then, she hadn’t been able to admit it, not until Sonata had pressed the issue after Lex had taken her voice away. But once she had, as gut-wrenching as the confession had been, Aria had started to feel better.
She’d been suspicious of that, at first. The sensation of not needing to keep her guard up around someone she needed in her life was as unfamiliar as it was intoxicating, and Aria had been hesitant to trust it. But after last night, when she’d opened up to Sonata – really opened up to her – for the second time, and she’d done the same, the last of her misgivings had faded away.
For the first time in her life, a life that had spanned over a thousand years, Aria Blaze could admit she loved her sister.
And it’s all because of you, she thought, looking up at the stallion who was sitting up in bed, listening attentively as Sonata filled him in on what had happened during her sojourn to Starlight’s village. You rescued me. You healed me. You loved me. And then you brought me and Sonata back together. Leaning her head on his chest, she closed her eyes, listening to his heartbeat. All just because you were being you, the whole time.
The sheer intensity that Lex brought to everything he did had allowed him to force his way into her heart without even trying.
That he’d rescued her from the sahuagin, restored her voice, and given her a place in his newly-reclaimed city had been incredible.
That he’d done it with no expectation of a reward from her had been unbelievable.
That he hadn’t been able to see her growing attraction to him – at least until she’d flung herself at him – had been adorable.
And that he’d finally responded to her, showing her what it felt like when he turned his passion for his work into passion for her, had been irresistible.
And after that…
She still wasn’t sure at what point her feelings had turned into love. Certainly by the time they’d had their first real fight, when she’d pushed him too far and he’d briefly taken away her voice. She’d been unprepared for that to hurt so much, and only his apology – something she’d never thought he’d give her – and his confessing that he had feelings for her had made that go away. And realizing exactly what he meant to her hadn’t been the only effect of their falling out, since that had been what precipitated her and Sonata reconciling.
You gave me all of this. Not because you wanted something for it. Not even because you meant to. Just because that’s what you do. Who you are. And that’s why…
Turning her head just a little, she pressed her lips to Lex’s chest, just over his heart.
I’ll love you forever.
“Aria?”
Hearing Lex call her name made Aria’s eyes flutter open, going rigid in embarrassment. Despite not having said anything out loud, and knowing that he was way too thickheaded to intuit what she was feeling, she could still feel her face turning red. And worse…
“Wow!” tittered Sonata, a knowing grin on her face. “Looks like someone’s getting all lovey-dovey, huh?”
“Sh-shut up!” Huffing, Aria scrambled for a rebuttal, only to realize that she had no idea what to say to make Sonata put a sock in it. Flailing, she turned to Lex, giving him an irate glare. “Why’re you sitting up?! You’re supposed to be resting! Lie back down right now!”
Lex blinked once, the blank expression on his face making it clear that he had no clue what was happening. “The stipulation was that you two would stop harassing me if I returned to bed and worked from here, which, I’ll reiterate,” he added with a trace of irritation, “is entirely unnecessary. As to my specific posture-”
“Master Legis?” Opening the door, Feather Duster stuck her head in. “Miss Bank is here to see you.”
“Send her in.” His command caused Aria to sigh in relief, glad that he wasn’t paying attention to her for once. Though that was only modest comfort; on his other side, Sonata was still grinning at her, and Aria knew she’d be teased about this later.
“We got it all!” River Bank, on the other hoof, was looking more full of herself than usual as she strode in, waving a piece of paper triumphantly. “I got Blueblood to agree to everything you wanted!”
Lex raised a brow, a skeptical look crossing his features as he took the paper from her and looked it over. “His representative didn’t contest any of my conditions?”
River shook her head, still looking inordinately pleased with herself. “He barely had anything to say about them! And it wasn’t just that valet not knowing what he was doing either. He ran back to check in with Blueblood more than once, and he still didn’t object to your terms! The only reason it took so long is that he kept revising his own.” She snorted derisively. “Most of those weren’t even important either. All but one were ridiculous details, like how Blueblood would be formally referred to during the duel. He went from ‘Prince Blueblood’ to ‘His Royal Highness Prince Blueblood’ to ‘His Most Illustrious Highness Blueblood, Royal Prince of Equestria’ to ‘The Royal Personage.’”
“Wow is he dumb!” It was Sonata’s turn to snicker as she laid her head on Lex’s shoulder, cuddling with him as he read. “He made the last one shorter instead of longer! I would’ve wanted to be called ‘Sonata Dusk, also known as Princess Hot Plot the Steamy Siren-’”
“What were the big changes?” cut in Aria, knowing that Sonata would have kept going for some time if not interrupted.
“Well, in the event that he wins the duel,” – all the mares couldn’t help but chuckle at that, with only Lex being silent – “Blueblood originally wanted one hundred thousand bits, a written statement of apology, and, um…” For a moment River paused, her smile faltering as she glanced between Sonata and Aria. “…the two of you.”
“He wanted what?!”
“Are you kidding?!”
River winced a little at both outbursts, but it was Lex’s reaction that made her swallow nervously. Despite being totally silent, his eyes slid over from the paper to meet hers, green and purple light bursting from them. “It’s okay, he dropped that! In fact, he dropped all of those! Now he wants you to restore Luna, rescind your, um, ‘declaration of rebellion,’ against the Royal Sisters, and pledge to open an ongoing line of dialogue with them about how you can work together to improve Equestria.”
She smiled at that, clearly thinking those were better, and Aria was inclined to agree. But the news didn’t seem to calm Lex down. His eyes continued to blaze as he slowly lowered the paper in his hooves, never removing his gaze from River. “Who else was there?”
Aria shot Sonata a confused glance, but she just shrugged in response. For her part, River looked completely at a loss. “What? It…it was just me and that valet. We negotiated everything in the conference room on the topmost deck. I didn’t get his name, but he was the same stallion who Blueblood designated when he-”
“Not in the room with you,” interrupted Lex, his tone clipped. “On the yacht. Who else was there?”
Completely mystified, River shook her head. “No one. I mean, there were a bunch of Blueblood’s servants, but I didn’t see anypony else.”
“Lex?” called Sonata softly. “What’s wrong?”
“These terms are what’s wrong!” he hissed, throwing the paper onto the bed. “This is a trap, and a clumsy one at that! If I were to agree to these, I’d find myself in a duel with Twilight Sparkle!”
A round of alarmed looks were exchanged, with Aria being the first to recover. “You old nag,” she snarled, climbing out of bed and stalking toward River. “You betrayed us!”
River backed up, turning pale, but didn’t get a word out before Lex cut in. “Aria, sit down! River did nothing of the sort!”
Aria stopped advancing at that, but neither did she sit back down. “You said she brought that prince guy here in the first place! And Sonata said that she volunteered to be your negotiator or whatever! How do you know she didn’t plan this?!”
“Because these terms offer no tangible gain for her,” replied Lex easily. “In the event that I fought this duel and lost, nothing in here restores River’s funds, nor prevents me from punishing her if I found out she’d been colluding with the princesses!” The admission seemed to appease the worst of his anger, and he let out a slow breath, his eyes returning to normal. “River’s special talent is finance, which means contracts, and I find it difficult to believe that she’d risk so much in order to secure one that gains her nothing.”
White as a sheet, River nodded quickly. “That’s right! I’d never betray you for so little!” A moment later she heard what she said, and her eyes widened in horror. “I mean at all! I’d never betray you at all! For anything!”
The slip earned her a dark look from Aria. “You better not,” she muttered as she turned and crawled back onto the bed.
A tense silence hung in the room for a moment, until Sonata spoke up. “Well, she’s totes not enchanted,” she added, giving River a kind look. “And besides, I don’t think she’d do that anyway. River’s like you” – she gently poked Lex’s ribs – “all hard and tough on the outside but a big old softy on the inside.” She leaned in to nuzzle him, which Aria knew was an effort to get him to calm down, before her expression turned quizzical as she picked up the paper with the terms of the duel written on it. “What I wanna know is, how do you know this is a trap?”
“Because it utilizes only the barest application of subtlety,” he snorted. “Leaving aside that Blueblood’s current place of residence is one of the more obvious locations for Twilight Sparkle to fall back to-”
“I thought,” began River, before realizing she’d cut him off. “I’m sorry! It’s just…I’ve heard that Princess Twilight can teleport. I thought maybe she’d used that to go back to Canterlot with her friends, at least until they were ready to attack again.”
“She's not from Canterlot, she's from Ponyville, a village that sits near the base of the mountain Canterlot rests on,” corrected Lex. “As for her being able to teleport herself and the rest of her assemblage there, that’s possible, but unlikely. While Twilight might have studied how to use long-range teleportation via thaumaturgical spellcasting during her time on Everglow, even a pony of her intellect would find it to be impossible to maintain the necessary conceptual constructs after only a few months of practice. Barring her procuring some sort of magic item with the same capabilities, which their economic market would price as being hideously expensive, she’d need to use native Equestrian magic to teleport. And transporting that many people that far would be difficult, since the standard usage of the spell doesn’t have the necessary range nor the capacity for so many passengers. Even if she were to augment the spell somehow, the way Celestia and Luna did to their magic, she’d still likely experience a drain significant enough that fighting a duel on top of it would be prohibitive.”
Sonata’s eyes had already glazed over, but Aria had gotten the gist of what he was saying. “Okay, so instead of running home she’s shacking up with Bluebeard or whatever his name is, what’s that got to do with the duel?”
Rather than answer her, Lex turned to River. “When you informed me of your interactions with Blueblood, you noted that he was aware that I’d ‘insulted’ Celestia and Luna. Did he ever go into specifics regarding the nature of my supposed offense?”
River paused for a moment, her expression turning vacant, before she slowly shook her head. “No. But I just thought that was because he was an idiot. Are you saying he didn’t know?”
“All evidence to date suggests that he’s highly invested in Equestrian royalty as an institution,” answered Lex. “For him to be so late in demanding that I reverse Luna’s unbecoming an alicorn would only make sense if he wasn’t aware of it. But Twilight Sparkle would be, since Garden Gate previously informed me that she was called back shortly after I defeated the Royal Sisters.”
Aria raised a brow. “You got all that from him not saying anything about fixing that Luna lady until the last minute?”
Lex shook his head. “There’s also how this specifically calls for me to rescind my original declaration of rebellion. Twilight and Celestia were both there for that. Blueblood wasn’t.”
Sonata shrugged. “Maybe they told him later?”
He raised a brow at her in response. “Then there’s the matter of his titles. As you noted, each one was longer than the last, until the final one. But there’s another point of differentiation: each of the previous titles uses his name specifically, with only the final one omitting it. So if I agree to fight a duel with ‘The Royal Personage,’ then that means-”
“Your opponent can be anypony who’s royalty!” River’s eyes widened in horror at the thought. “I thought his valet just talked him down in order to keep him from sounding ridiculous!” Gulping, she reached for the paper. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize this! I’ll go back and press for a change of terms immediately! I’ll make sure that Blueblood and Blueblood alone is the pony you’ll be fighting! There won’t-”
“No.” Lex’s voice was grim as he shook his head again. “Tell them that I accept the terms.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “Wait, you what now?!”
“You just said it was a trap!” snapped Aria.
Lex didn’t look at either of them as he replied, instead glancing down at the terms of the duel balefully. “It is. And it’s one that I have no choice but to walk into.”
Lex could already feel a headache coming on, letting out a slow breath before answering Sonata. “It’s not a question of what I want. This duel needs to happen as soon as possible.”
“And why’s that?” huffed Aria, crossing her forelegs over her chest. “I’m all in favor of you smacking Her Royal Purpleness around, but you just said she can’t teleport home, so what’s the rush?”
“First, I didn’t say she can’t teleport home,” corrected Lex. “I said that teleporting herself and her friends all the way back to Ponyville using her Equestrian magic would likely exhaust her severely, largely due to her needing to use it several times in succession to cross such a large area. Second, the rush is that the longer this duel is postponed, the more likely it becomes that it won’t happen at all.”
“He’s right,” murmured River, sinking into a nearby chair. “The princesses would never have approved of Blueblood’s issuing a challenge like that if they’d known about it. And while Blueblood made it clear that he doesn’t respect Princess Twilight – her tagging in is probably the best concession she could wring out of him – everypony knows that he defers to Princess Celestia and Princess Luna. If he gets a letter from either of them telling him to withdraw his challenge and stand down, he’ll be embarrassed, but he’ll have no choice but to do it.”
“At which point the duel will be cancelled, and this opportunity will be lost,” finished Lex. “As such, there can be no tarriance in this matter. This engagement must happen, and it must happen today.”
“Wait, wait, I’m confused.” Scrunching her face up in concentration, Sonata struggled to put her thoughts in order. “When those plus-sized princesses were here before, you were trying super hard not to get into a fight with them.” Seeing Aria wince a little at that, Sonata hurried onward. “So why do you want to get into one now? What’s this big opportunity you’re talking about?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, sweeping the room for magic or other possible leaks of information the same way he had before telling River what he was after. It was fairly pointless to do so now, he knew; Twilight Sparkle was already aware of what he wanted should he win the duel. But the more he kept things under wraps, the less likely the chance that there would be any more unpleasant surprises. “In the event that I win the duel,” he began once he was satisfied no one was eavesdropping, magically or otherwise, “I’ve demanded that Blueblood immediately and irrevocably forfeit his royal status, and all of its attendant privileges and responsibilities, to me.”
“Oh, I get it!” Sonata smiled widely, only to frown again a moment later. “No, wait, I don’t. What’s that mean?”
“It means,” replied River evenly, “that if Lex defeats Princess Twilight, he’ll become a prince.”
Sonata’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates. “For realsies?!”
Unlike her sister, however, Aria's expression was one of skepticism. “That’s what this is about?”
“Aria!” Sonata gave her sister an incredulous look. “Lex is gonna be a prince! Like, with a crown and everything, right?” She glanced at River then, and when the older mare nodded – a bemused expression on her face – Sonata turned back to Aria, clapping her hooves in excitement. “See?! That’ll be, like, the most incredibly stupendous thing ever!”
Aria nodded, but her expression didn’t change as she looked at the would-be prince. “I get that. What I don’t get is why you have to win a fight to do it. If you want to be a prince or a king or whatever, just say that you are. You’re already the strongest pony in Equestria, and everyone here adores you. So give yourself a fancy title and that’ll be that. You don’t need to get into another fight when you’re already hurt.”
Utterly deaf to the worry in her voice, Lex made a dismissive gesture. “Simply anointing myself with monarchical status won’t carry the institutional authority that I require to alleviate the damage to Vanhoover’s infrastructure and economy.”
Sonata glanced at the other two mares helplessly. “He said what now?”
“He means the rich ponies I brought here from Las Pegasus,” explained River. “They’re all desperate to be important, and they know that doing favors for royalty is one of the best ways to do that, which means that if a prince were to ask them to, say, fund Vanhoover’s recovery, it wouldn’t be too hard to get them to agree.” She waited a moment, and when Sonata nodded, continued. “But it’s not enough for Lex to just call himself a prince. They have to acknowledge that he is, and the quickest way to do that is for him to take the crown from someone they’ve already recognized as a legitimate monarch.”
“So this whole thing is just about money?” scoffed Aria. “In that case, I’ll just go get some ponies to raid a few more banks.”
She started to climb out of bed then, intent on making good on her word, but Lex spoke up before her hooves touched the floor. “Don’t bother. You’ve already emptied them all.”
Aria froze, unable to hide her surprise. “I have?”
“Wow,” murmured Sonata, looking impressed. “And that’s not enough?”
“It’s nowhere close.” River’s voice was pained, her eyes closed as though in mourning. “Even with the reduced population, this level of expenditure can’t be sustained for very long without new revenue coming in to offset it.”
“At our current rate, my administration will be completely broke by the end of the month,” confirmed Lex. “If that happens, the only way to prevent this city from falling back into decline will be to raid the minting facilities northeast of here, which have nothing to do with candy,” he added quickly, causing Sonata’s excited smile to immediately collapse into a pout. “Doing so will buy Vanhoover a little more time, but at the cost of adversely impacting Equestria’s economy as a whole. That’s another reason to conduct this duel with all possible haste.”
“That, and I’m worried about what else Princess Twilight might do,” added River. “Lex, if she’s on that yacht with all those rich ponies, what if she asks them to fund Vanhoover’s recovery before you can?”
Her concern received only a snort of amusement from Lex. “I’ll admit that I haven’t known Twilight Sparkle for very long,” he sneered, “but she’s Celestia’s pupil through and through. She treats responsibility as something to be avoided, particularly with regard to executive prerogative. I doubt it’s even occurred to her to wield her authority in that regard.”
“Why not just tell her that, then?” Shrugging like it was no big deal, Aria tapped the paper with the terms of the duel written on it. “She leans on those rich guys and you get paid, without having to put yourself in harm’s way again.”
But even before she’d finished speaking, Lex was shaking his head. “Blueblood has already made it clear to the Las Pegasus delegation that he has considerable antipathy toward me. Even if our duel is cancelled, I don’t trust Twilight to be able to convince them to finance anything of mine while that fop is there to undermine her.”
“Whereas defeating and having him surrender his princely title, in accordance with the terms that he voluntarily agreed to, takes him out of consideration,” added River. “Even if Blueblood wasn’t a bore, those ponies are all cynical enough that they’ll drop him in favor of Lex the instant the crown touches his head.”
“I still don’t like this,” frowned Aria. “It was just yesterday that you had two ponies try to kill you, very nearly pulling it off, and now you’re getting into another fight. One with Twilight Sparkle, the girl who defeated us, the Sirens, twice.”
“Aw, lighten up, Aria,” chuckled Sonata. “This is Lex we’re talking about! I bet he’ll do some sort of big magical stuff and be all like, kapow! Zap! Boom! And it’ll be over in ten seconds flat!” Grinning, she nuzzled Lex. “So what’re you gonna hit her with? That huge see-through pony armor thingy? Or those big balls of lightning? Or your green destructo-beam? Or, um…huh…”
Blinking, Sonata sat up, her face once again screwing up in thought. “Hey Lex? How come you didn’t use any of those spells against Starlight Glimmer?”
A shadow passed across Lex’s face then. “River, go and deliver my acceptance of these terms to Blueblood. Now.”
Nodding, the mare in question stood up. “Of course. Do you want me to tell him that we know that Twilight Sp-”
“No,” snapped Lex curtly. “As for the two of you,” he glanced at the Sirens on either side of him, “I can’t concentrate on my battle plan with you distracting me. Vacate the room immediately.”
“You’re throwing us out?” asked Aria in disbelief, Sonata looking equally shocked.
“Yes,” insisted Lex. “On your way out, tell Feather Duster that I’m not to be disturbed unless it’s an emergency.”
Sharing an incredulous look, Aria and Sonata both hesitated to obey. But when it became clear that Lex wasn’t going to change his mind, they slowly climbed out of bed, trudging toward the door. Each of them glanced back more than once, silently pleading for Lex to change his mind, but in every instance he refused to meet their eyes. Finally, with one last worried look, the two of them followed River out, leaving Lex alone with his thoughts.
Mostly alone.
Your secret isn’t so secret anymore. Stretching toward the open window in defiance of the light pouring in, the mocking words of his shadow stoked Lex’s rising anxiety. If even Sonata noticed your dearth of magical ability, then there’s no hope that Twilight Sparkle will overlook it.
Lex said nothing, not only in an effort to quiet the tulpa – the renegade portion of his mind still largely uncontrollable even with what he’d learned about it – but because he had no answer to that. While Celestia had cultivated many faults in Twilight, imperceptivity wasn’t one of them. Twilight had no doubt interviewed her senior princesses extensively about their fight with him, and Lex couldn’t imagine her failing to do the same with Starlight Glimmer now. It wouldn’t take her long to notice and begin wondering about the discrepancies regarding how much magic he’d used in the former battle versus the latter.
Nor was that the full extent of how dire his prospects for the upcoming duel were. Lex had known that his chances of defeating Twilight in a direct battle were dim even before she’d arrived in Vanhoover. That was why he’d come up with the plan involving his floating gemstones, flooding them with additional magic in order to reverse their functionality and use them to debilitate Twilight rather than augment himself.
But the unexpected arrival of Starlight Glimmer had forced his hoof, leaving him with no choice but to use his plan for Twilight on her instead. Although he’d only been able to make use of a single gem in that manner, it had still been highly conspicuous in its effect. Which meant that Starlight would no doubt tell Twilight about it, greatly diminishing the chances that she’d fall prey to that tactic now.
Coming up with highly complex strategies had always come easily to Lex. While enacting them might require large amounts of time or titanic effort, formulating a plan in the first place rarely required much of him. But he could only make plans based around what he had to work with. And right now, his available resources were almost nil.
His thaumaturgical spells were near-totally depleted. His divine spells were largely noncombative in nature, save for a few defensive enchantments. His dark magic was a known quantity to Twilight. His magic items only offered passive defenses or mild augmentations. His supply of spell-storing gems was completely gone. His shadow could be made to aid him only when he was in an extreme state of mind, something that was highly difficult to deliberately conjure. His ability to physically augment his spells and magic items was likely still at least somewhat compromised thanks to his lingering injuries from yesterday’s fight. And he wouldn’t be able to call upon the ponies who served him while fighting a one-on-one duel.
Which left him with nothing.
Your ambition has exceeded your abilities at last, taunted his shadow. And in a few short hours, everyone will bear witness as your pretensions of greatness come to an end.
The sound of her editor’s voice, accompanied by a series of heavy knocks, made Nosey’s eyes flutter open. For a split-second she didn’t know where she was or what was happening, registering only that she wasn’t in her bed and that there was a sick sense of dread building in her gut. Had she been having a nightmare?
Then Silhouette limped into the bathroom, the sight of him bringing a rush of memory, and she recalled that she hadn’t had a nightmare; she was living one.
“Don’t try anything stupid,” hissed the black-and-white stallion, glaring down at her as though Line’s being there was her fault before he turned and crouched in the hallway, ready to pounce if Line somehow made his way inside.
Had Nosey not been sore, exhausted, and terrified, the warning would have made her laugh. What exactly was he worried about her doing? She was bound, gagged – Silhouette having shoved a washcloth in her muzzle, which was tied closed now that he was finished interrogating her – and had a rubber band around her horn, which had already gone numb from lack of circulation. He hadn’t even given her back her glasses after knocking them off her face in the initial struggle.
Another round of knocking dragged her attention back to the stallion at her front door. “Nosey!” called Line, loud enough that she could hear him clearly. “Look, I know we didn’t leave things in a good place last night, but something’s happened!” He paused then, and Nosey could almost hear him glancing around suspiciously. Line was like her, a reporter through and through, and he wouldn’t want to let a juicy piece of news slip before it was ready to be published. "Princess Luna wants to speak with you!”
That was enough to make Nosey’s ears perk up. Silhouette had spent the remainder of the night peppering her with questions about Lex, refusing to let her sleep until dawn broke. But in between telling him what he’d wanted to know, Nosey had managed to get a few tidbits of information out of him as well, one of which was that his insistence on keeping dusk-to-dawn hours was an attempt to avoid having Princess Luna stumble across his dreams; apparently she only patrolled the “dream realm” at night, when she was awake, something which Silhouette had learned during his time as part of her guard.
But she’d also confirmed that whatever madness Silhouette was struggling with was firmly centered on Luna. Just mentioning her made his composure waver, and even vaguely alluding to what Lex had done to her was enough to send him into a fit, moaning and shaking as though the memory caused him pain. While Nosey still wasn’t certain why Luna’s defeat had pushed Silhouette over the edge, she’d learned to tread very carefully around that particular subject…and now Line had inadvertently blundered right into it.
Sure enough, she saw Silhouette suddenly go rigid, his focus shattered by the sound of his fallen goddess’s name. The readied crouch he’d fallen into was abandoned a second later as he lurched forward, as though planning on throwing the door open, only to stop so abruptly that he almost fell over, his body language screaming confusion. For a moment he stayed like that, frozen, before turning and hurrying back toward her.
“Nosey?” This time Line’s voice was less certain, and she knew that it was a precursor to him giving up and leaving.
Silhouette, apparently, knew that too, rushing forward and tearing the gag out of her mouth. “Keep him talking!” he hissed. “Find out what’s going on! But don’t try anything funny, or else!”
Nodding, Nosey licked her lips, her mouth horribly dry. “Line?” she called, silently hoping that he hadn’t already walked away. “Line, is that you?”
For a few seconds there was no answer, and she watched as the anxiety grew on Silhouette’s face. If he didn’t get the answers he wanted-
“Nosey?”
The sound of Line’s voice made Nosey close her eyes in silent relief. Standing over her, Silhouette let out a breath so heavy he almost collapsed. “I’m here!” she called again, trying to think up a plausible excuse. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you! I was, um…I had the water running! I’m taking a bath!”
The intense look that Silhouette gave her then was one of suspicion mixed with frustration, baring his teeth at her in a silent threat. Whether to sound more natural or to hurry and move the conversation back around to Luna she wasn’t sure. Probably both.
But he needn’t have bothered; Nosey had every intention of indulging him.
To do otherwise risked losing her chance to escape.
At some point during her pre-dawn interrogation, the shock and terror brought on by being attacked in her own home had faded, replaced by…something else. It wasn’t outrage or indignation or anger, though all of those were there. Rather, it was like an acute sense of concentration, as though she were studying a particularly vexing problem, one that was happening to somepony else. And while Silhouette’s madness and potential for violence were still frightening, that fear no longer made her lose her ability to be rational, and because of that she’d been able to seize on the significance of what was happening now.
Most of the time, Silhouette was methodical in everything that he did. He’d effortlessly subdued her, made sure to bind her in a way that made escape impossible, and even eliminated the minor chance that she’d be able to potentially receive help in her dreams. In that respect, it was easy to see why he’d been a commander in the Royal Guard, able to overcome even a Siren back in Vanhoover.
But all of that went out the window when Luna came up. When she was introduced into the conversation, his self-control completely fell apart. More than that, he became sloppy. Nosey didn’t consider herself an expert on capers or heists or any sort of criminal activity, but even she knew that it would have been smarter for Silhouette to simply keep her quiet until the pony who’d come looking for her left. But now that Line mentioned the name of Silhouette’s goddess, her captor was suddenly willing to let her answer him, which was a huge risk regardless of how much he threatened her.
It was an opportunity Nosey had no intention of missing.
Especially since she hadn’t seen him use any spells the way he had back in Vanhoover…spells which he’d received from Luna, according to what the princess had said.
“Well get out and open the door!” came Line’s voice, laced with impatience. “I need to tell you what’s happened so you can get ready!”
“Just a second!” she called, before looking back at the two-toned stallion beside her. “I need to go to the door! I won’t let him in, but he’ll be suspicious if I keep yelling at him from another room like this!”
“You’re staying right where you are,” growled Silhouette. “Just figure out what he knows and send him away!”
Nosey took a half-second to weigh the risk of what she was about to try. Silhouette’s order was rational, and that was a problem. While it would have been difficult to get Line to tell her what was going on while she refused to even approach the door, let alone let him in, Nosey felt reasonably sure she could have done it. But that wouldn’t have gotten her any closer to freeing herself, which meant that she needed to throw Silhouette off his game…and she knew just how to do that.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t result in a black eye.
“He won’t tell me what he knows about Princess Luna if he has to yell it like that,” whispered Nosey. “He’s a reporter, he’ll be too worried about whatever scoop he has being overheard.”
Just like she’d hoped, the princess’s name visibly threw Silhouette for a loop. Instantly, his eyes darted back toward the front door, their harsh glare now filled with uncertainty. His breath quickened, shifting his weight between his legs as though preparing to spring. He raised a hoof a moment later, and Nosey tensed, but he didn’t cock it back, instead pressing it to his head, biting his lip.
When he looked back at her a second later, she could see the desperation written across his face. “If you try anything,” he murmured at her, struggling to fill his voice with the malice he’d had only a few seconds ago, “I swear I’ll bury you.”
Nosey nodded quickly, making appropriately-meek sounds of obedience, but internally she was cheering as Silhouette grabbed the scissors and cut her legs free. Biting back a groan at how stiff her limbs felt, she slowly turned over and climbed out of the tub, trudging toward the front door as Silhouette followed close behind her. “Coming!” she called before Line could ask what was taking so long. “I just had to dry off!”
“Just let me in already!”
Now came the risky part. As she walked toward the door, Nosey listed slightly to the side, putting her close enough to her fallen spectacles for one hoof to reach out and scoop them up. Behind her, she heard Silhouette give a soft snarl, causing her to tense up. But he didn’t otherwise object, likely considering her transgression too small to warrant a more aggressive response, and Nosey held back a smile as she put her glasses back on.
Now she just needed to keep Line talking about whatever was going on with the princess, while simultaneously refusing to let him in. Otherwise, this wasn’t going to work. Although the door was barely five feet away, Silhouette was closer than that, and despite the wild look still being in his eyes, Nosey knew that if she tried to make a break for it, he’d be on her before her hoof ever reached the knob. “I’m still mad at you, Line,” she called, speaking at a more reasonable volume now that the distance between them had shrunk. “You can tell me whatever’s going on from out there.”
“From out he-, Nosey c’mon! You…” Even with a door between them, Nosey could hear him sigh. “Look, I’m sorry that you feel upset, but I’m the editor of the Chronicle. That means that it’s my call, and right now the story you brought me isn’t ready for publication. But it is ready for the princess, and she wants to hear it from you, so let’s act like grownups and start preparing.”
Nosey had to force herself not to look over at Silhouette. “Princess Luna wants to hear from me?”
Another sigh came from Line, this one of resignation. “She’d like to go over your notes with you, to see if you can fill in some gaps. She wants you there as of sunset tonight.” Perhaps thinking that wouldn’t be enough to get her to stop acting so petulant, he kept going. “She also wants you to be the one to write the story on an announcement she’s going to make.”
“What announcement?” Even speaking in a whisper, Silhouette’s voice was strangled. “Ask him what announcement!”
“What announcement?” echoed Nosey.
“…it’s not my place to say,” replied Line, and Nosey could hear the puzzlement in his voice. He knew her well enough to know that dangling a tidbit like that should have been irresistible to her. Now if he’d just start putting the pieces together…!
“Make him say!” hissed Silhouette. Out of her peripheral vision, Nosey could see that he was trembling.
“I’m not opening this door if you don’t tell me, Line!” Paying careful attention to see if Silhouette noticed what she was doing, Nosey reached a hoof up to – ostensibly – adjust her glasses as she saw that the stallion was staring intently at the door, more concerned with the pony behind it than with her.
Hopefully he’ll stay that way! Carefully, she pushed the rim of her glasses against the rubber band coiled around the base of her horn.
“You know how Luna came back from Vanhoover…injured?” began Line, and this time Nosey was sure that he knew something was up. She could hear it in his voice.
But all Silhouette heard was the reference to what had happened to the mare he worshiped, and just like before it hit him like a physical blow. He doubled over, and Nosey could see him convulsing as though fighting not to retch. “Yeah?” she called, working her glasses faster. The rubber band was steadily rolling upward, causing her to wince as the blood began rushing back to her horn, making it tingle painfully.
“She’s going to tell all of Equestria what Lex Legis did to her.” The news made Silhouette’s eyes – suddenly bloodshot – widen in abject horror, his body going completely still.
“…no…”
Nosey worked her glasses faster, no longer trying to disguise what she was doing as the rubber band reached the tip of her horn and fell off.
“And,” finished Line, “she’s going to publicly declare that she’s no longer a goddess.”
“Don’t you think we’re cutting it a little close?!”
Spike’s question had been directed at Twilight, but Rarity couldn’t help but add her own opinion as well. “I have to agree. While I’m normally all for being fashionably late, giving ourselves only fifteen minutes to spare seems a trifle shortsighted considering how important this duel is.”
“It couldn’t be helped!” explained Twilight, leading the rest of her friends as they galloped toward the array of hastily-built houses that marked the edge of the camp-turned-village where Vanhoover’s survivors were living. “If Lex doesn’t know that I’m going to be fighting him on Blueblood’s behalf, then somepony telling him that we’ve shown up at the site of the duel early might clue him in! At least this way there’s a chance he won’t be completely prepared!”
“He wouldn’t have been prepared if you’d finished him off last night!” growled Starlight, giving Twilight a dark look. “But no, you just had to let him rest and recover first, didn’t you?”
“It’s called a fair fight,” shot back Applejack, her voice pointed as she frowned at Starlight. “And for that matter, it ain’t to the death, which means it’s a lot safer than what you were talkin’ about.” But her frown was directed toward Twilight a moment later. “Even if tryin’ to settle things by getting into a scrap all by your lonesome wasn’t exactly the brightest idea, sugarcube.”
“Seriously!” huffed Rainbow Dash, barely having to flap her wings to keep pace with everyone else. “After everypony and their mother gave me a hard time about running off and fighting Lex all by myself, this was your big idea?!”
“Give her a break,” snapped Soft Mane, trailing everyone else at the back of the group. “She told you guys before we left: there wasn’t any time to talk things out. That Blueblood guy was already almost done with settling the terms when Twilight thought of this, and River Bank was demanding that it happen as soon as possible.”
“And then Lex would have called Blueblood’s bluff, beating him up and becoming a prince before anypony could stop him,” winced Fluttershy, unnerved as much by the prospect of violence as somepony so awful becoming royalty.
“So now it’s a showdown at high noon!” Bouncing gleefully alongside her friends, Pinkie jumped up high enough to momentarily leave everyone’s line of sight, somehow wearing Appleloosan fashions when she landed again. Fighting down a toothy grin, she hurried in front of Twilight – before turning around to face her, effortlessly running backwards – as she adopted a pretend-glare. “This’ll be so exciting! You’ll stalk down the empty street, staring at your enemy in tense silence as everypony watches from hiding! A tumbleweed will blow out of nowhere, and the music will get really intense! That’s when you throw back your poncho and yell ‘draw pardner!’”
Reacting to her own cue, Pinkie whipped out a sketchpad and pencil from out of nowhere, scribbling furiously for a second before tossing the writing implement away and turning the pad over, revealing a shockingly-detailed (and, somehow, full-color) picture of a smiling Twilight. “And whoever draws the best picture of their dueling partner wins!”
Although her tension had been skyrocketing as the appointed time approached, Twilight couldn’t help but giggle at Pinkie’s incredibly inaccurate description of what was about to take place. “That’s not actually how it’s going to go, Pinkie. But it would be nice if it was.”
Ahead of them, a crowd could already be seen forming, attracted by Prince Blueblood and his entourage. Slowing down, Rarity couldn’t help but grimace as one of the ponies from Las Pegasus said something to the prince, causing him to give his mane a shake and raise his nose in the air, the haughtiness oozing off of him even if they were too far away to hear what he was saying. “Honestly, as awful as everyone’s said this Lex character is, I can’t say I’d be entirely sorry to see Blueblood lose his title; he’s such an affront to the idea of royal elegance. Not that I’m rooting for you to lose, Twilight darling,” she added quickly.
Twilight shook her head. “It’s alright. After spending this much time with Blueblood, I completely understand. The only reason he even agreed to let me take his place in the fight is because he thought there wouldn’t be a fight. He kept insisting that Lex would back off before it started.” Rolling her eyes, her voice turned wry. “He actually congratulated himself for ‘indulging’ me.”
“Now there’s somepony who’s full of himself,” snorted Applejack, “Not that those ponies from Las Pegasus are much better. I bumped into this one mare this mornin’ who seemed nice enough, but as soon as I mentioned Sweet Apple Acres to her, she started tryin’ to talk me into sellin’ it to her so she could tear down my family farm and put up hotels!”
“At least you were offered money,” grumbled Rainbow Dash. “I ran into some creep who kept begging me to endorse his casino in exchange for free chips! Like I’d want to go on vacation just to play boring old cards or dice games!”
Fluttershy moved to the back of the group, putting her friends between herself and the ponies gathered around Blueblood. “I got cornered in a hallway by an old lady who kept insisting that I come work for her as a dancer,” she murmured. “She kept saying I could be a ‘palace girl,’ and wouldn’t take no for an answer! I was about to agree just to make her leave me alone when Pinkie rescued me.”
“I still don’t know why she ran away like that,” added the pink pony in question. “I tried to tell her that I made up a new dance, the Pinkamena, and that it’ll be the biggest hit ever! I even made up a song to go with it!” Standing upright, Pinkie started moving her forelegs rhythmically. “¡Dale a tu fiesta alegría, Pinkamena! ¡Que tu fiesta es pa’ darle alegría y cosa buena! ¡Dale a tu fiesta alegría, Pinkamena! ¡Eh Pinkamena!”
“Huh, that is kinda catchy,” admitted Spike, starting to sway to the singing.
Pinkie’s eyes lit up at the compliment, but she didn’t have a chance to go any further as Rainbow Dash suddenly touched down, having circled overhead for a moment. “I spotted Lex,” she reported, her voice grim. “He’s got his own crowd of admirers, and it looks like they’ll be here any minute.”
Twilight let out a slow breath. “Okay. Once he and Blueblood formally declare that their disagreement is irreconcilable, and that they’re both resolved to go through with this, that’ll be my cue.”
Soft Mane knelt down next to Twilight, giving her a reassuring smile. “I’ve got plenty of healing spells ready, so don’t worry about cutting loose, okay? I can patch you up as soon as you win.”
“And we’ll make sure that everypony here’ll stay a safe distance back,” added Applejack. “You won’t need to worry about hittin’ any innocent bystanders.”
“You should also keep a close eye on those ponies Lex brought with him.” Despite not having cracked a smile since they’d brought her onto the yacht, Starlight’s expression managed to sour even further. “I wouldn’t put it past them to try and cheat somehow if he starts losing. Probably by casting some spells of their own to help him out.”
“Aw, Sonata wouldn’t do that!” insisted Pinkie. “I bet she’ll be too busy cheering her head off, just like we will!”
“Just be careful, Twilight,” murmured Fluttershy, already starting to tremble. “I’d rather see Lex become a prince than see you get some horrible curse like what happened to Luna!”
“It won’t come to that.” Spike’s voice was one of absolute conviction…for all of three seconds, before he looked at Twilight fearfully. “Will it?”
“I don’t think so.” Pulling on the Everglow-made magical gear that she’d brought with her, Twilight glanced in the direction Rainbow Dash had said Lex was coming from. “In fact, if I’m right, I don’t think it’ll come anywhere close to that.”
That caused several of her friends to exchange inquisitive looks, but Rainbow wasn’t one of them. “This is gonna be great!” she cackled. “I can’t wait to see the look on Lex’s ugly face when he realizes that he’s facing off against the pony who represented the Element of Magic itself!”
“Say it a little louder, why don’t you?” shushed Soft Mane, glancing around despite her limited vision.
Applejack, however, wasn’t about to let that tidbit go. “Twilight, you know somethin’ we don’t?”
Twilight didn’t answer immediately, sending another glance toward where Blueblood was waiting. He’d obviously gotten word that Lex was coming, because he’d turned his back toward the direction the other stallion was approaching from, making an obvious – and rather childish – show of disdain for his opponent. However, Twilight was less concerned with the prince’s petulance than she was with how the valet that Blueblood had designated as his representative hadn’t started speaking yet. Once that happened, she’d need to be ready to announce herself. But until it did, she had time, and she’d already gone ahead and set this up without consulting her friends. Letting them in on her theory now was the least she could do.
“I’ve been going over what Starlight told me about her fight with Lex, comparing it to what we heard from the Royal Sisters, and it just doesn’t add up,” she admitted, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “I don’t know it for sure, but the best explanation I can come up with is that Lex is suffering from some sort of magical backlash as a result of what he did to Luna.”
Jaws dropped and eyes widened, with Starlight being the first to recover. “That’s what you meant when you said you thought Lex was holding back against me!”
“It’s just a theory,” cautioned Twilight. “But Lex used a lot of powerful magic when he battled Celestia and Luna. So why did he stay on defense for almost all of his fight with you? Why did most of his attacks consist of punching instead of miniaturized tornados or electrical orbs?”
“So he really did defeat the princesses,” murmured Starlight, more to herself than in reply. “I thought Sonata was exaggerating about that, since she was so obviously hung up on him.”
Fluttershy bit her lip, looking like she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that things would be that easy. “But why would he agree to get in a fight if he’s lost most of his magic?”
The answer came readily to Rarity. “Because he thought he’d be facing that pushover of a prince, obviously. Blueblood would run away in terror if somepony so much as sneezed too close to him.”
But Rainbow Dash seemed skeptical as well. “I dunno, Twilight. Even if Lex is powered-down, he still had enough juice to mess up my wing.” Landing, she gave Twilight a pointed look. “If he does the same thing to your horn…”
“She doesn’t need her horn to use her magic,” interjected Applejack, giving Rainbow a nudge. “Or at least not all of it, the same way I can cast a few spells even though I’m an earth pony, remember?” She didn’t wait for an answer, turning to Twilight instead. “Sugarcube, I hope you’re right about this, but don’t put all your apples in one basket. No matter what he’s got goin’ on, Lex ain’t an opponent you should take lightly.”
“I know,” nodded Twilight. “But if I’m right-”
The rest of what she was going to say was lost as an effete voice suddenly cut through the conversation. “Fillies and gentlecolts! I must ask you to fall silent as we prepare to resolve the ongoing feud between His Royal Highness, Prince Blueblood, and the knave who calls himself Lex Legis!”
“It’s time,” sighed Twilight, turning toward where Lex and his entourage had arrived, standing across from Blueblood. “Wish me luck.”
With her friends’ heartfelt replies sending her off, Twilight began making her way toward the crowd.
“Feathercap’s going to keep Ulespy circling overhead during the fight,” explained Fruit Crunch, moving at a trot as he kept pace with Lex. “Once the duel starts, he’ll look through his eyes and keep watch on the crowd, just in case Princess Twilight or her goons try anything funny. If they do-”
“Then I’ll swoop in and handle it,” promised Straightlace darkly, flying alongside the earth colt.
Decorum, chastised Altaer. Composure is the watchword of confidence.
The gentle rebuke made Straightlace huff. But he wasn’t the only one who seemed to relish the prospect of violence. “You wanna dish out some payback for what Rainbow Dash did, you’ll have to get in line,” murmured Aria.
“Don’t encourage him,” chided Fiddlesticks. Living in the same house as Sonata’s sister had put them in a weird place where they weren’t strangers, but weren’t exactly close either. But knowing that this wasn’t the time to work out how to relate to the older mare, she quickly turned towards Straightlace, giving him a scowl. “You’ll handle it if they do something with magic,” she corrected. “If they try anything physical, then Fruit Crunch and I will deal with it.”
And Cleansweep and I will assist either way with our poison. Coiled around the aforementioned filly’s belly, the snake’s head turned toward her companion, tongue flicking out to taste the air. You still have some healing magic after restoring the others this morning, yes?
Cleansweep nodded, but didn’t have a chance to speak before Garden Gate chimed in, not having heard the telepathic part of the conversation. “Not by yourselves you won’t,” she declared, her horn lighting up as she adjusted the knives tucked into her belt. “Look, I’ve heard about what you kids can do, but my friends and I have experience. If things go sideways, I want you to back us up instead of taking point.”
“You do realize that ‘things going sideways’ will probably mean that Twilight and her friends bust out the Elements of Harmony, right?” noted Thermal Draft wryly. “I don’t think-”
“They don’t have them,” interrupted Cleansweep, mildly irked at being talked over. “I…checked, when they showed up at the manor yesterday. They didn’t bring the Elements, I’m pretty sure.”
“For realsies?” blinked Sonata, almost stumbling as she glanced over from where she was walking alongside Lex. “How did you check on that?”
“I’d like to know that also,” frowned Feather Duster, though the effect was somewhat ruined by how Tiddlywinks – cradled in her foreleg – was cooing as he chewed on a strand of her mane.
The Knights shared an uncomfortable look, but were saved as Cloudbank gave a conspicuous nod, her eyes trained upward where a pegasus was headed toward them. “Heads up.”
Coming in fast, Turbo swooped downward, banking in a wide arc so that he joined the procession from behind. Slowing down to match everyone’s speed, he effortlessly made the transition from flight to trot, legs touching the ground in the same instant that he folded his wings to his side, avoiding Garden’s gaze as he moved alongside Cloudbank. “They’re here,” he confirmed immediately. “All six of them, plus a tiny dragon and something that looks like it’s half pony and half…I don’t know what. Minotaur, maybe? No sign of any jewelry, but that other mare you told me about – unicorn, purple coat, mane, and tail? – she’s there too.”
“Starlight Glimmer.” Cloudbank pronounced her name like a curse, but her gaze was anxious as she glanced at Thermal Draft.
Nor was she alone in reacting to the name, Lyden baring his teeth with a loud growl. If we’re needed, I strongly recommend targeting that one first.
“Um, did her horn still look like it was hurt?” squeaked Feathercap, his face pale. “Th-they were saying something about having healing magic of their own before, right? So if they used it on her…”
Turbo shook his head. “I don’t know, kid. It was just a quick flyby.”
“If things do get ugly, there are a lot of ponies who’ll be caught in the crossfire,” warned C. Shells, looking over the crowd that had already gathered to watch the duel.
“There weren’t last time,” noted River. Although outwardly calm, the terse note in her voice betrayed her anxiety.
“I’ve sent medical ponies ahead, just to be safe,” added House Call. “But if this turns into a debacle…”
“That will not be allowed to happen.”
All eyes turned to Lex as he finally broke the silence he’d maintained since he’d left the manor. Coming to a halt, he turned to face the ponies gathered around him, looking each of them over as they all stopped what they were doing, giving him their full attention. Waiting for him to tell them how he would prevent what they were worrying about from coming to pass.
Even a few days ago, he would have taken that for granted. More than that, he would have made it clear that all he expected from them was not to interfere if things went the way they were supposed to, and to retreat and leave everything to him if they didn’t. But now…
“Those who bend to your will shall be as your limbs, serving as extensions of yourself. Their eyes are your eyes. Their hooves are your hooves. Their magic is your magic. To fail to make use of their strength is to fail to make use of your strength, limiting what you can do.”
The Night Mare’s words, still fresh in his mind, took on new meaning now. If worse came to worst, and this duel turned out to be a trap or otherwise devolved into a general melee, then Lex knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it alone. And while that was still a bitter realization, it no longer caused him untenable frustration the way it had before. The thought of having to put other ponies into harm’s way in order to secure things was still repugnant, of course, but attempting to go it alone had no greater chances of assuring everyone’s safety. In fact, in his current state, it had less. Which meant that the responsible thing to do wasn’t to simply dismiss them all, but to delegate tasks to them ahead of time…and hope that they’d be able to carry them out.
“Your worries will, in all likelihood, turn out to be groundless,” he pronounced at last. “While I hold the royal institutions of Equestria in extremely low esteem, its members regard themselves as being wholly legitimate in the authority they claim to exercise. As such, a public abrogation of a challenge proposed by one of their own would severely discountenance their pretensions of prestige. Ergo, the odds of duplicity on their part, while not nil, are improbable.”
“…well, that makes me feel better,” snorted Aria, rolling her eyes.
Lex, of course, missed her sarcasm completely. “As well it should. However, in the event that treachery occurs, I expect you all to follow these directives.” He paused again, and when no one objected, turned to C. Shells, House Call, and River Bank. “You three and yours will work on getting everypony who isn’t part of this group to safety. Do what you can to usher everyone toward the manor. That will cut down on any delays in deploying medical resources.” Catching Feather Duster’s gaze, Lex paused just long enough to glance at the baby she was carrying. “You’ll go with them also.”
“Understood,” replied C. Shells with a brisk nod, House Call and Feather Duster doing the same. While she looked vaguely annoyed at having someone else speak for her, River copied the gesture as well.
“Sonata, Aria, I want you to assist them if it looks like everypony is starting to panic. Use your magic to make the crowd evacuate northward in a calm and orderly manner. Otherwise, I want you to keep your attention focused on Princess Twilight’s friends. Several of them have spent time on Everglow, and have made at least some study of that world’s magical traditions. As spellcasters, you’re best qualified to notice if they attempt to interfere.”
“Ooh!” Reaching a foreleg into the sky, Sonata waved it frantically. “Ooh! Ooh! I have a question!”
Belatedly realizing she required prompting for some reason, Lex bit back a sigh. “Yes, Sonata?”
“What if they use those Element thingies?”
The question made Lex frown. Sonata was the only one, along with Aria and River, that he’d shared his suspicions about Twilight stepping in for Blueblood with. But apparently she hadn’t put together that Twilight’s acting on her own went against the Elements’ activation requirements. “Based on what I learned from Twilight Sparkle during our brief association on Everglow-”
“Wait,” interrupted Fruit Crunch, his eyes widening at finding out something new about his hero, “you met her before?! On that other world?!”
“Briefly,” repeated Lex. “And she was careless enough to reveal that the Elements needed to be returned to the Tree of Harmony-”
This time it was Garden Gate who interrupted, her brow furrowed. “The Tree of what now?”
“My point,” continued Lex, his voice tight, “is that it’s highly unlikely that the Elements of Harmony will be put to use here. But if they are, then they become priority one for everyone for myself, Sonata and Aria, the Night Mare’s Knights, and Garden Gate and her subalterns.”
Slip ‘n’ Slide raised a brow, leaning closer to Funshine. “What’d he call us?”
“Be quiet, Slip,” hissed Granola Bar.
Lex kept going. “The Elements of Harmony only work if Princess Twilight and her friends are each wielding their respective gemstone. Separating even one of them from their talisman, or incapacitating them outright, will render the whole of them inert.”
Cloudbank looked relieved, but Thermal Draft had the opposite reaction, miffed at having been left out. “What about us?”
“Drafty…”
“We can help too!” insisted the darker of the two pegasus mares. “We did when Starlight attacked, so now-”
“I have a different job in mind for the two of you.” Lex didn’t take his eyes off the pair as he nodded at Turbo. “If a larger battle does break out, I want you to keep Spike and Soft Mane – the dragon and the pony-hybrid Turbo mentioned – from interfering.”
Cloudbank started to say something, then paused, turning to the pegasus who’d delivered the report. “You did say he was a small dragon, right?”
“He is,” replied Lex before Turbo could open his mouth. “But while not physically powerful, be aware that he can still breathe fire. And Soft Mane has a modest selection of divine spells, most of which she’ll likely use for healing. Don’t let her use them to revive anypony that the rest of us defeat.”
“What about Starlight Glimmer? If she steps out of line, who gets to put her in her place?” Aria’s tone made it obvious that she wanted in on that particular venture quite badly.
But she was destined to be disappointed. “Presuming that I’m correct about the Elements of Harmony not being put into use, I want the Night Mare’s Knights and Garden Gate and her subordinates to keep a close eye on her. While I question how much she’ll want to upset her allies, I’m aware that she personally has little vested interest in the sanctity of this duel, so I want you all to be ready to strike the moment she looks like she’s attempting anything untoward.”
The Exalted Primogenitor is wise, murmured Nemel reverently.
It shall be done, Grand Vizier, echoed Ulespy.
“Well, she can’t be tougher than a city full of ghouls, right?” chuckled Funshine, only for his grin to falter as he glanced first at Garden, then at the Knights, seeing that they weren’t smiling back. “Right?”
Gulping at the silent testament to Starlight’s power, Hopscotch nevertheless nodded. “W-we’ll do our best!” she promised.
“I expect nothing less.”
With that said, Lex looked over the assembled ponies again, taking a moment to review the tasks he’d given each of them. But despite having come up with those assignments on the spot, no necessary alterations suggested themselves, and he decided to bring the impromptu meeting to an end. “I’ll reiterate that these roles are strictly reactive in nature. If all goes well, you won’t need to carry out these instructions. Having said that, I want you all to disincentivize perfidy on their part by being conspicuous in your preparedness.”
“Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!”
This time Lex did sigh. “That means that you should make it obvious that you’re ready to take action if necessary, Sonata. I want those ponies to know that if they try anything, you’ll stop them.”
“Ohhh! Like being eye candy, except with a totes nasty flavor!” she grinned. “I gotcha!”
Her exclamation sent a wave of chuckling through the group, though that might have been from the pained look on Lex’s face. But he didn’t have a chance to say anything else as a feeble voice rang out. “Fillies and gentlecolts! I must ask you to fall silent as we prepare to resolve the ongoing feud between His Royal Highness, Prince Blueblood, and the knave who calls himself Lex Legis!”
The announcement made Lex’s lip curl. “It’s time. You all have your directions.”
He was already turning as he spoke, scanning the ponies waiting ahead of him. Blueblood was easily spotted, the fool having turned his back on him in a pathetic display of contempt. But Lex was far more interested in the glimpses of deep purple that he could see further back in the crowd, the sight reminding him of how, for all that he’d accepted the necessity of giving instructions to everypony, the crux of what was about to happen was entirely his own.
The sight of the unicorn who had done such horrible things to Princess Luna and Starlight Glimmer and probably a lot of other ponies sent chills down Fluttershy’s spine. Despite all the ponies who’d expressed praise and admiration for him when she and Pinkie had gone through the half-constructed village yesterday, and all the stories she’d heard about him vanquishing deadly monsters, just looking at Lex Legis now made her want to turn and run for the hills. How can anypony think that someone who looks like that is a good guy?!
Everything about him screamed danger. From the hideous way his shadow stretched out in front of him despite the sun being high overhead to the gruesome way a strand of barbed wire was wrapped around one of his forelegs, Lex’s appearance seemed like a deliberate attempt to intimidate everyone around him. Nor did his fearsome nature end with his more supernatural aspects. Even his stride seemed aggressive, stalking forward slightly faster than a normal walk, as if he was planning on bursting into a gallop at a moment’s notice. His expression was no less fierce, his jaw set and his eyes narrowed, scowling deeply as though he was just barely holding back a torrent of anger.
But it was Lex’s horn that frightened Fluttershy the most.
She’d recognized it immediately. How could she not? It’s blood-red color and lack of a spiral pattern pulled her memory back to the thankfully-brief glimpses she’d gotten of its former owner, King Sombra, during the power-mad pony’s attempt to conquer the Crystal Empire. Except where King Sombra’s horn had been crimson in its entirety, the same couldn’t be said for Lex, the base of it being the same slate-gray as the rest of his coat; grisly proof that he’d grafted the tyrant’s horn onto himself. And he’d done that on purpose…?
Fluttershy could feel her stomach churning, her breakfast threatening to come back up as the full horror of what she was seeing washed over her. King Sombra had been a monster in the form of a pony. The idea that someone had willfully mutilated themselves, attaching a piece of his body onto their own, because they actually wanted to be more like him…
Whimpering, Fluttershy started backing away. The fact that Lex wasn’t looking in her direction, and that there were several ponies between him and her did nothing to calm her down. For a brief instant she considered flying, but immediately rejected that notion, since putting herself in the air would mean that there’d be nothing obstructing his view of her, and-
Fluttershy bumped into something at the same time as she heard an irritated voice. “Ow! Watch it!”
Choking down a scream, Fluttershy whipped her head around…to see Starlight Glimmer frowning at her.
Several feelings ran through Fluttershy then, one of the strongest of which was shame. Here she was panicking at the sight of Lex Legis, when her new friend had to be going through so much worse! After all, poor Starlight had been seriously hurt after the fiend had attacked her, and he would have tortured her with curses afterward if she, Soft Mane, and Pixie hadn’t rescued her! And yet she’d come out here anyway to cheer Twilight on!
“I…I’m sorry, Starlight,” she murmured, looking down. “I saw Lex for the first time now, and I was just so scared…” Biting her lip, she glanced back in Lex’s direction, shuddering. “I wish I could be as brave as you.”
The comment caused Starlight to pause, glancing in Fluttershy’s direction as she raised the hood on the cloak that Rarity had loaned her before they’d left the yacht. “What do you mean? I’m not any braver than anypony else.”
“Really?” Fluttershy couldn’t help but be surprised by that. “I know that if Lex had almost killed me, and then had his minions drag me away so that he could put all sorts of horrible curses on me later, I’d be too afraid to go anywhere near him ever again! But just one day after he did that to you, you’ve come out here to cheer on Twilight while she fights that monster.” Peeking out from behind a strand of her mane, Fluttershy looked at Starlight with open admiration. “That seems really brave to me.”
Starlight blinked, looking like she was trying to figure out whether to accept the compliment or brush it off. But she didn’t have a chance to do either as a new voice suddenly made itself known.
“There’s a difference between bravery and foolishness,” pronounced a pegasus colt with an off-white coat and green mane and tail, dropping out of the sky and landing several feet away from them. Holding one foreleg out parallel to the ground, a large eagle came down and settled on it a moment later. Although the bird tucked its wings in, the colt kept his flared, giving Fluttershy a quick scowl before looking at Starlight, his gaze deepening into one of open hostility. “And coming back here was definitely the latter.”
Narrowing her eyes, Starlight pulled her cloak around herself tighter, even as she maintained a thin smile. “Well well well, looks like I’m not the only one up and about,” she mocked, glancing at the eagle. “Find a new bird already, kid?”
The words made the colt bristle. “You don’t have what it takes to put Altaer, or me, or any of the Knight Mare’s Knights down for the count! And if you try to inter-”
“Oh my, how adorable!”
“-fere with…” Blinking, the colt turned to look at Fluttershy. “Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized reflexively. “I just couldn’t help but admire your bald eagle! Did you say his name was Altaer? That’s so majestic!”
Clearly thrown by the flurry of praise, the colt glanced between her and Starlight warily. “Yes, well, um…”
“My name’s Fluttershy.” Moving forward, she held a hoof out in greeting. “What’s yours?”
But rather than the friendly greeting she’d been anticipating, the colt scowled at her again, refusing to shake her hoof. “I’m Straightlace,” he answered, the unfriendly tone returning to his voice. “And I’m one of the Night Mare’s Knights, the personal students of Lex Legis, who’s about to kick that coddled prince of yours all the way back to Canterlot!”
Fluttershy froze, but not because of the colt’s speech. Rather, what stopped her cold was how, as soon as Straightlace had finished speaking, his eagle – Altaer – had ruffled its wings again, giving a soft screech.
A screech that had been completely unintelligible to her.
In the background, Fluttershy could hear raised voices. Blueblood’s valet was one of them, and she distantly recognized the other as River Bank’s, the mare’s voice being the same one she’d heard while hiding under Starlight’s bed yesterday. But at the moment Fluttershy couldn’t process any of that, all of her attention captivated by – for the first time since she’d gotten her cutie mark – being unable to understand what an animal was saying.
She was so out of it that she barely noticed when another pegasus foal joined them, a filly with a yellowy coat a little brighter than her own whom she dimly remembered was the one who’d bowled Rarity over while they’d been waiting in that parlor yesterday. “Straightlace, what’re you doing?!” she snapped, giving the colt a look of incredulity mixed with anger. “Lex said we’re supposed to keep Starlight from interfering, not start another fight with her!”
“I’m not starting anything, Cleansweep,” huffed the colt, glaring at Starlight again…who, Fluttershy belated noted, actually looked concerned, her eyes flickering back and forth between the foals. “I’m just letting her know that if she so much as looks at Lex wrong, we’ll be on her before she can even think about casting a spell.” He tore his gaze away from the hooded unicorn to direct it at Fluttershy again. “And that goes for you and your friends as well.”
Cleansweep looked like she wanted to protest for a moment, but her expression darkened as she looked between Starlight and Fluttershy. “I guess that works,” she admitted.
And that was when Fluttershy had another shock to her system, as a snake – one that she hadn’t noticed was coiled around Cleansweep’s middle – stuck its head forward, its tongue flicking in and out. A second later, the filly nodded. “I know, but she’s here too, so we might as well.”
I can’t understand those animals! The thought made Fluttershy dizzy, too shocked to even feel frightened by what was happening. I can’t understand them, but those foals can!
Her eyes immediately traveled down to the children’s cutie marks, noting how neither the vacuum cleaner on the filly nor the striped necktie on the colt seemed to be animal-related. After a moment, she glanced back at her own, finding the familiar three butterflies on each of her flanks. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, so why…?
Ignoring everything else going on around her, Fluttershy looked at the ground, needing more reassurance. A few seconds was all it took for her to find what she was looking for, kneeling down. “Excuse me, Mister Grasshopper,” she whispered as she put herself at eye level with the insect she’d spotted. “I hope this isn’t too forward of me, but can you understand what I’m saying right now?”
Looking up from the blade of grass that it was munching on, the grasshopper chittered its mandibles in an affirmative, and Fluttershy let out a deep breath of relief at finding its response to be comprehensible. “Thank you! And I’m sorry I interrupted your lunch. If it’ll make up for it, there’s a nice patch of dandelions south of here.”
“Fluttershy,” murmured Starlight, her voice tense. “Maybe it’s not the best time to have a tea party with some bugs.”
“Sorry.” Standing back up, Fluttershy took a half-step toward the two foals, only to stop in mid-motion as they both frowned at her. “Um, I don’t mean to be rude, but if it’s alright I’d like to ask you something.”
“Forget it,” answered Straightlace immediately. “We’re not here to answer your questions.”
“We’re here to make sure that you don’t try to ruin Lex’s duel,” finished Cleansweep.
“What she said,” came a new voice, as an earth colt approached, a wolf at his side.
“Hey, Crunchy,” called Cleansweep, her voice deceptively casual. “Glad you could make it.”
“We can’t all fly, Dust Bunny,” called back the colt in the same tone.
By now several nearby ponies were looking at them, and Fluttershy grimaced as snatches of nearby conversations reached her ears.
“…those’re Lex’s students…”
“…Rainbow Dash’s friend…”
“…bet she’s up to something…”
“…can’t trust those princesses…”
“…in the cloak looks familiar…”
“Darling, are you alright?”
That last one came through clearer than the rest, and it took Fluttershy a moment to realize it was Rarity, the unicorn trotting toward her only to slow down as she spotted the foals confronting her. “What’s going on here?”
But no one had a chance to answer as a new voice, loud and harsh, cut through the air.
“There will be no reconciliation,” announced Lex, his voice immediately silencing the crowd. “Since you’ve made clear your intent to press your challenge, then allow me to make mine equally unambiguous: I intend to meet it. In combat.”
For a second silence reigned, only to be broken a moment later by the sputtering voice of Prince Blueblood. “B-but that’s…that’s preposterous! I’m a prince, you dunderhead! A prince! Royalty! Do you not understand what that means?! Already you’ve tarnished your name with your repeated transgressions against my noble self! Did nopony bother to explain to you what you're doing, or are you simply mad?! Going through with this will irreparably-”
“ENOUGH!” thundered Lex, causing everypony – including Blueblood – to jump. “This final attempt at mediation has failed! Now, either take your position…” Everypony held their breath as Lex’s eyes suddenly lit up, shining green and purple. “…or send in Twilight Sparkle to do your fighting for you.”
Fluttershy’s stomach had twisted itself into knots at the sight of the familiar glow in Lex’s eyes, but when she heard her friend’s name come out of his mouth, her insides felt like they’d collapsed in on themselves altogether. In that moment, her worries about meeting animals that she couldn’t communicate with were completely forgotten, replaced with an all-consuming fear for what was about to happen to one of her dearest friends. He knew! He knew she was going to take Blueblood’s place! How?!
But no answer presented itself as Twilight slowly stepped forward…
Twilight had just finished donning the magical equipment she’d picked up back on Everglow when Lex called her out.
The majority were various defensive items, several of which were identical to the ones she knew Lex was wearing. Around her neck was an amulet that was designed to toughen the dermal layer of her skin, giving her body a modest degree of natural armor. Her left foreleg had a ring around it – though it was more like an anklet now since, like all of the magic rings from that world, it magically resized itself to fit the wearer – that created a minor deflection field around herself, one which would passively try to redirect anything that attempted to make contact with her.
The cloak she’d slung around herself had a more general enchantment, one that would better allow the magical channels in her body to better shrug off hostile magic, something she knew she’d need when facing someone who used curses as much as Lex. It, like the rest of her gear, had been contained in a bag that was ensorcelled to store more on the inside than its external appearance would otherwise indicate. Although currently loaded down with a few hundred pounds’ worth of books – including the spellbook she used to prepare the arcane spells she’d learned on that world, something she’d put aside for a time since coming home, only to diligently resume doing ever since the lhaksharut had attacked Canterlot – it barely weighed a fraction of that, tied around her middle.
But it had been her headband that Twilight had donned last, biting her lip and examining it critically before doing so.
Delicately woven with threads of what looked like pure gold, it was adorned with gemstones of blue and purple, the latter a perfect match for her mane. But as impressive as it looked – Rarity would have fawned over it, had she ever laid eyes on it before now – Twilight knew that the real value of the thin strip of cloth wasn’t in its construction, but in its magic. Specifically, in its ability to increase the wearer’s intelligence by a vast extent.
The exact amount was difficult to measure, but the first time Twilight had put it on had been dizzying. Without it, she was able to memorize pi to just over a thousand places; wearing the headband had let her sail past twelve hundred easily. On her own, she could come up with the root of any number up to a degree of five without having to think about it; with the headband on, that increased to a degree of six. Most astoundingly, the headband had allowed her to solve the Camtois Conjecture, proving that there were certain functions of N where a real number could not be reduced to 1. Had Twilight been wearing socks when she’d realized that, they would have been knocked right off.
As amazing as that discovery had been, however, it had also been the event that had put her off of using the headband. The joy of achieving such a notable breakthrough had been tainted by the fact that she hadn’t gotten there on her own. The accomplishment had only been possible because she’d used a magic item to increase her brainpower, giving her an unfair advantage. It had made her feel like a fraud, and she’d torn the headband off in a fit of disgust, letting it languish at the bottom of her extra-dimensional bag…until now.
Now, she needed it to solve a different problem: that of Lex Legis.
Or rather, the problem of winning this duel and teaching him about the magic of friendship.
Twilight knew that the headband would give her a tactical edge in their fight. From memory recall to predictive capacity to critical reasoning, the headband stimulated all manner of cognitive functionality. But there was another benefit to its ability to enhance its wearer’s thoughts.
That benefit being how the thaumaturgical spellcasting she’d learned on Everglow, which relied on storing energy in mental structures, was entirely based on thoughts.
So long as she wore it, therefore, the spells she cast at Lex would be more difficult for him to resist. If he really was suffering from some sort of magical backlash, then using this would give her a huge advantage right out of the gate once their duel started. Maybe even enough to overwhelm him right from the outset, ending the fight as soon as it began.
Twilight knew this wasn’t like the situation with the Camtois Conjecture. There was no reason for her to feel guilty about using a magic item to give herself an edge. After all, Lex had a collection of magic items of his own; even peeking through the crowd, she could see that he’d already deployed the floating gemstones that Starlight had told her about last night. And while Under Score – her magic teacher back on Everglow – had briefly referenced that type of magic item (“ioun stones,” he’d called them), he’d covered them only briefly, as part of a general overview of that world’s expansive array of enchanted items. Which meant that apart from what Starlight had told her about one of them – the orange prism – suppressing her magic (which made it suspicious that Lex had it around himself now), there was no way to know what the others did. So if Lex had those, wasn’t it fine for her to have a surprise of her own?
It’s not like I’m cheating on a test! Twilight reassured herself silently. Besides, this is for a good cause! If I win, Lex will have to change Luna back!
She focused on that thought, closing her eyes as she made herself remember her failed attempt to break Lex’s curse on the younger of the Royal Sisters. How stricken Luna had looked. The heartbroken look on Celestia’s face. The sense of crushing disappointment she’d felt at her inability to help. I owe it to both of them to win now! And not just them! I know Lex wants to do good, but he thinks that he needs to make everypony submit to his demands in order to do it! That’s why the map sent us here, to teach him that there’s another way: the magic of friendship! And I can’t do that if I lose!
Letting out a slow breath as she pushed her doubts away, Twilight slowly reached up and put the headband on.
A second later, she heard a familiar voice call her name.
“…or send in Twilight Sparkle to do your fighting for you.”
She should have been surprised. But with her enhanced intelligence already kicking in, it was easy for Twilight to see how Lex could have predicted her role in what was about to happen. In fact, she suddenly found it hard to believe that she hadn’t anticipated his knowing that she’d step in.
Which means he’s committed to this. She’d had some hope that Lex would back down when he saw who he’d be fighting, not wanting to press a conflict in his current state. But she could see how unrealistic that hope had been now. Lex was intent on winning the duel and becoming a prince.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to reach out to him, just in case, decided Twilight, stepping out of the crowd…and deciding what spell she’d cast first when the fighting began.
Lex resisted the urge to swear under his breath as Twilight approached him.
He’d already engaged his circlet before he’d called her out, letting his vision slip into the magical spectrum even as Equestria’s youngest princess entered his field of view. Although he’d briefly considered enhancing his circlet by forcing additional magic into it, he’d reluctantly abandoned that course of action, judging it not worth the strain it would put on him. Besides, the level of information that he was receiving, basic though it was, matched his expectations.
But that didn’t mean the news was good.
Although he’d briefly hoped that Twilight wouldn’t have thought to bring whatever magical equipment she’d acquired on Everglow with her now – after all, Rainbow Dash had also visited that world, and she hadn’t warn any when she’d ambushed him yesterday – Lex had known the chances of that were remote. Although her morals had been corrupted by Celestia’s teachings, Twilight wasn’t naïve. After hearing about how he’d dealt with Celestia and Luna, there was little chance that she’d head into a potentially hostile situation without protection.
And just like he’d predicted, she hadn’t. Twilight was wearing almost a half-dozen magic items now, all of which radiated auras consistent with enchanted gear of Everglow make. In fact, most of them looked like near-exact copies of the defensive items he was wearing, as well as the extra-dimensional pack he’d lost fighting Xiriel. That wasn’t surprising, considering how much more advanced Everglow’s magical practices were than Equestria’s. The only outlier was that headband of hers…
“It doesn’t have to be like this, Lex.”
Snorting at Twilight’s statement, he ceased concentrating on his circlet, letting his vision return to normal. “A hypocritical sentiment, coming from somepony who deliberately inserted herself into a duel that doesn’t concern her.”
The crowd, which had been watching with rapt attention, began to whisper furiously amongst themselves at that. But both of them ignored it, staring each other down. “It does concern me!” insisted Twilight. “Not just as a princess, but as the Princess of Friendship! Lex, you can’t just install yourself as ruler of Equestria and overthrow anyone who objects! That won’t-”
“That,” he cut in sharply, “is a gross mischaracterization of what I’m doing, and I suspect a deliberate one. Anypony is free to voice their objections to my actions, but they are not free to interfere with them! Not when doing so adversely impacts the ponies whose welfare I’m attempting to safeguard!”
“And who’s safeguarding Luna’s welfare?” pressed Twilight. “Or Starlight Glimmer’s? Or anypony else that you’ve cursed?” His reaction to that clearly showed on his face, because she rushed to continue, not letting him interrupt. “Even if what they did was wrong, how does making them suffer help them realize that?” She took a step closer to him then, holding out a hoof with a pleading look on her face. “You’ve done so much good here. Everypony we’ve talked to says so. If you were just willing to compromise a little bit, to let ponies work with you instead of demanding that they work for you, and let friendship-”
“Shut up!”
The angry yell came from the last pony Lex had expected it to. Out of his peripheral vision, he’d seen various members of his entourage watching the exchange with wide eyes, obviously surprised to find Twilight Sparkle facing him instead of Blueblood. But the one who’d spoken up so suddenly hadn’t been Fruit Crunch or Garden Gate or Thermal Draft.
It had been Feather Duster.
“Just…shut up!” she yelled again. Although she was shaking, cradling Tiddlywinks tightly to her chest, the angry look on her face was one that Lex had never seen before. “You might be a princess, but you have no right to talk down to Master Legis about friendship! You all came to Vanhoover because you were worried about the other princesses, but Master Legis came here because he was worried about all of us! You talk about the good he’s done here, but you’re about to fight him because you don’t like that he wants to punish the mare who hurt my daughter?! The mare you’re protecting?!” She pointed at where Starlight was standing, causing the unicorn to cringe as she pulled her hood lower.
Feather Duster kept going. “Master Legis didn’t demand that I work for him, either! He gave me a choice! And I’d rather choose to serve him than be friends with you!”
Her final shout set off a chain reaction of raised voices, the crowd growing agitated as they followed her example and turned their anger toward Twilight and her friends.
“Go back to solving friendship problems so Lex can solve real ones!”
“Being a criminal is all it takes to become a princess’s best friend now, huh?!”
“It's because of Lex that I can feed my children now! How’s that for friendship?!”
“Why’d you even come here if you don’t want to help?!”
“Lex is the Night Mare’s champion! She won’t let him lose to the likes of you!”
The outpouring of vitriol caused Twilight to gape, wearing her surprise openly. Nor was she the only one, Blueblood staring openmouthed as everypony blatantly showed their disrespect for Equestria’s Princess of Friendship, the Las Pegasus ponies matching him in their stupefaction. And not just her, as more than a few ponies turned toward where Twilight’s companions were gathered, marching toward them with angry looks on their faces as their yelling swelled into a crescendo of outrage-
“YOU WILL ALL FALL SILENT!” roared Lex. Despite a lack of surfaces to echo off of, his voice seemed to hang in the air, the weight of it quieting the crowd in an instant. Rearing up on his hind legs, he stared out over the assembled ponies, black crystals sprouting from around him as his eyes flared brighter, his voice icy. “Any of you who wish to air your grievances with how Equestria’s royalty have mismanaged this country will do so in a calm and orderly manner! And you will do so after this duel has concluded!”
He didn’t wait for the crowd to acknowledge his demand before turning back to Twilight, falling back down onto all fours. “And as for you, the duel negotiations have already concluded. Your role here is simply to serve as Blueblood’s substitute. Now either forfeit…”
His horn began to glow then, sheathed in a churning aura of deep purple. “Or take your position.”
From thirty feet apart, Lex and Twilight stared at each other.
Off to the side, River Bank glanced nervously between them, having won the coin toss for who would call the official beginning to the duel. Normally that wouldn’t have been the case, as the rules laid down in Conduct of Satisfaction called for a neutral third-party to provide the official commencement of hostilities, a proviso meant to prevent any suggestion, no matter how spurious, that the opening circumstances had unfairly favored one duelist over the other. It was only when no such third-party candidate could be found – as none had been now – that the coin-flip was called for.
The distance between them was likewise per the book’s official recommendation. Since most historical duels had been between ponies of different tribes, and the rules had needed to be written with any possible combination of duelists in mind, thirty feet had eventually been settled upon as the range that favored no one group of ponies over any other. From that distance, a pegasus might be able to take to the air and start maneuvering before a unicorn fired a bolt of magic before an earth pony was able to rush in with a tackle. And if that arrangement lent itself more toward “first to draw blood wins” dueling than the more severe types, then the authors of Conduct of Satisfaction hadn’t seemed to have a problem with it.
“Are you both ready?” called River, glancing between the two of them. Although she’d only raised her voice slightly, the silence carried it to everypony in range, the weight of what was about to happen robbing everyone watching of their powers of speech.
When Lex and Twilight both nodded, River – already stepping away – spoke again. “Then on my signal, you may attack at will! Three…!”
Twilight spread her wings, holding them aloft in readiness.
“Two…!”
Lex pointed his horn directly at Twilight, the aura around it churning more violently than before.
“One…!”
Standing off the to side, surrounded by his retainers and sycophants, Prince Blueblood was rapidly turning green, realizing too late that this confrontation that he’d pushed for – with its potential to cost him everything – was actually going to happen after all.
“BEGIN!”
Lex watched as Twilight launched herself into the air before River had finished speaking, her wings flapping heavily as she shot upward. Whether it was because she’d fallen for his bluff – pointing your horn directly at someone was an aggressive gesture among unicorns, and he’d wanted her to think that he was going to attack immediately – or because she’d always intended on taking to the air was irrelevant. What was important was that she’d put defense first, rather than pressing an attack before he could put his own strategy into place.
The snort of contempt he gave then was directed entirely at himself, his disgusted grimace going unseen by anypony else as he called upon his dark magic and changed into a shadow. As though this deserves to be called a strategy.
But as tactically unsound as it was to rely on a plan that was both impractical and untested, he hadn’t been able to think of anything better. Not when he had so few options, and his opponent had so many. And while there were numerous ways that this could fail, it represented his best – and quite possibly only – chance of defeating Twilight.
Focusing on that thought, Lex put his dark magic to use again, flooding magic into it through his body’s magical channels, still extant even in his incorporeal state. But he’d barely gotten started when he heard Twilight’s voice ringing out from above, a glance upward showing her gesticulating as she chanted. Despite needing to concentrate on utilizing his dark magic, Lex had no trouble splitting his attention, watching every motion Twilight made, listening to every word she enunciated, collating that with what his magical senses were telling him as he worked to decipher what spell she was-
Oh no.
Had he not turned into a shadow, Lex would have gritted his teeth. As it was, he rushed to finish what he was doing, knowing that once Twilight finished her spell, he’d have more immediate concerns than his rapidly-dwindling chances of victory…
Having ascended out of easy reach, Twilight watched as Lex turned into a shadow. For a moment she expected him to fly up after her, thinking that he’d changed so that he could follow her into the air. She’d been prepared to use her “dispel magic” spell on him if he had, remembering how Princess Celestia had told her she’d used that same tactic during their fight to send him plummeting to the ground, with a little bit of extra help from Luna. But Lex didn’t seem keen on giving her the opportunity, instead staying right where he was.
Abetted by her headband, her thoughts were already in overdrive, trying to anticipate what Lex was up to. Was he waiting for her to attack first, in order to better develop a counterattack? Or was he trying to capitalize on the unsettling way that everypony had turned against her and her friends just now, wanting her to strike first so she’d look like the aggressor? Or was-
The sensation of magic being used immediately sent her thoughts spiraling in a different direction, knowing that it was coming from Lex. He wasn’t using any thaumaturgical spellcasting; otherwise she’d have heard him chanting, and even in his bodiless state he would have needed to gesture somehow. Nor were the ioun stones circling his shadowy body acting any differently, making it unlikely that they were the source of whatever he was doing. Which meant that it was almost certainly his dark magic, and since there weren’t any black crystals rising out of the ground, that suggested a curse.
The thought made Twilight tense up, but there was no sensation of invasive magic crawling over her. Even with her cloak augmenting her body’s natural ability to fight off unwanted magic, she knew she should have felt something. But whatever Lex was doing wasn’t targeting her…
A brief moment of panic made her glance at her friends. Attacking someone other than the pony you were fighting was strictly against the rules of the duel, and Twilight couldn’t imagine Lex flagrantly violating the terms that they’d agreed to like that. But she still had to be sure, her eyes sweeping over them…and seeing nothing except them looking between her and Lex, expressions ranging from confidence to nervousness written all over them as they took the opportunity to start calling out encouragement, ignoring the dark looks being sent their way by the ponies of Vanhoover.
But if they were fine, then what was Lex putting a curse on?
Even with her headband on, there was no way of knowing; curses weren’t an area of magic where she’d had much study, and Lex was highly experienced with them. Short of casting some of the few information-gathering spells she’d prepared – which would have been strategically unsound, since it would have left her wide open to attack, and had no guarantee of finding an answer anyway – she’d just have to do the best she could without knowing what exactly she was up against. But if he was preparing some sort of trap, that didn’t mean she couldn’t make her own preparations for overcoming it.
And the key to overcoming adversity is friendship.
Although Twilight was sure that Lex would have sneered at the concept, she’d seen the power that friendship had. Not just in the raw might of the Elements of Harmony, but in the little things that had, over time, turned out to make the biggest differences. Fluttershy’s kindness had brought about a change of heart in Discord, giving them the literal key to defeating Tirek. Her human friends’ willingness to extend their hands in forgiveness had been the reason Sunset Shimmer had been there to help them defeat the Sirens. And Twilight’s reaching out to Willow after the lhaksharut’s attack on Canterlot had been the reason the purrsian had begun teaching her the spells that she knew, one of which was perfect for what was happening right now…
Chanting the requisite words as she performed the necessary gestures and added her alicorn magic to the mix in order to strengthen the effect, Twilight kept a wary eye on Lex, knowing that if he finished whatever he was doing before she could complete her spell, he’d have a perfect opportunity to attack her, likely ruining what she was trying to pull off. But maybe her luck would hold, and he’d need more time to put into motion whatever scheme he was hatching. Just a few more seconds…
As if Lex had heard her thoughts, Twilight felt him finish whatever he was doing, her own casting still only halfway done. It was no surprise when she immediately felt him using his dark magic again a second later, and this time it was followed by the unsettling sensation of it settling over her, and although there was no tactile element to it, she still felt her skin crawl, imagining that she could almost see the black aura that had manifested when he’d cursed Luna and Rainbow Dash.
And the resemblance to the latter didn’t end there. For a brief, heart-stopping moment Twilight felt her wings stiffen up, muscles locking into place as joints refused to move, causing her to begin losing altitude. But then the moment passed, and she shrugged off Lex’s curse, the enchantment in her cloak aiding her in flinging the repulsive magic away, her wings beating hard as she arrested her fall before it could begin. And all the while, she’d kept her spell going, giving an internal whoop of victory as it went off an instant later, looking expectantly down at where she’d taken off from even as she dimly registered a collective gasp sweeping through the crowd.
The place where she’d been standing before was now occupied.
Her summoning spell had worked.
The creature that she’d brought forth could have been described as diamond dog, but only if the person making that comparison had been feeling exceptionally uncharitable. Whereas the beasts that had once kidnapped Rarity were hunched, dumpy creatures with beady eyes and unkempt fur, the being Twilight had summoned was anything but. Standing at his full six-foot height, every inch of the bipedal canine presented a regal bearing, from the way his short coat of black fur seemed almost to glisten in the light to the immaculate press of his ochre breeches, the only article of clothing that he wore…save for the sword strapped to his back, which was almost as large as he was.
His muzzle scanning to and fro, it was only belatedly that he looked upward, his lips curling into a smile that was no less genuine for how small it was as he caught sight of Twilight. “Lady Sparkle,” he pronounced, his voice deep and possessing a rich timbre. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”
“I’m sorry, Behemiel, but this isn’t a social call,” apologized Twilight. “I need your help. Long story short, I’m fighting a duel against that pony” – she pointed at Lex, the edges of his shadowy form twisting in agitation as he glared at her and her ally – “and I need to win.”
The explanation earned her a raised brow from Behemiel. “And you think it appropriate to summon aid to what I presume is a challenge of single combat?”
Twilight grimaced, but didn’t back down. “I know this is bending the rules, but we’re allowed to use the full scope of our magic, and it’s my spell that’s keeping you here, so it should be okay, right?” Moving lower until she was hovering just overhead, Twilight gave him a pleading look. “Please, Behemiel. I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t important.”
She couldn’t hold back a sigh of relief when, after a moment, he nodded. “Very well. Though our friendship is still in its infancy, I’m willing to place my trust in you.” Reaching back, he drew his sword then, the five feet of polished steel glinting as it caught the sunlight from overhead. “Particularly when your opponent makes no protest of your use of summoning magic. Though I question how useful my sword will be against one who appears to lack a physical form.”
“I thought of that.” Fishing a scroll out of one of her saddlebags, Twilight unrolled it, a quick reading being all it took for her to activate the spell stored within. Touching a hoof to the sword, the blade took on a soft radiance, barely visible in the sunshine. “This should let you do some damage even when he’s incorporeal. But this duel is only to unconsciousness or surrender!” she added quickly. “No killing!”
“As I would expect from one whom the Angel of Friendship speaks so highly of,” noted Behemiel approvingly. But his expression hardened a moment later as he turned back to Lex. “I regret that our first meeting must be under these circumstances,” he called, meeting his foe’s green and purple eyes without flinching as he took a ready stance, blade held in both hands.
“But if the Lady Sparkle requires it, then Behemiel, hound archon of Proelera, the Second Heaven, will aid her in defeating you!”
Behemiel’s announcement was no idle boast, the hound archon rushing forward to attack as soon as he’d finished speaking.
He was faster than Lex had expected, closing the distance between the two of them in under two seconds, leading an upswing of his now-glowing sword. Unable to react in time, Lex couldn’t hold back a pained grunt as the weapon passed through his immaterial body, Twilight’s spell enabling it to harm him even in shadow-form. Fortunately, it was still less damaging than it would have been if he’d been solid, but that was cold comfort as the hound archon pressed his assault, stepping in closed after his initial strike and bringing the sword back down for another.
In the face of that, there was nothing Lex could do but give ground, jerking backward and veering right. He didn’t dare move skyward. Although Behemiel had no apparent means of flying, Lex had little doubt that if he took to the sky as a shadow, Twilight would replicate what Princess Celestia had done and dispel his dark magic, leaving him to plummet painfully to the ground where her summoned monster would be waiting to tear into him. While Lex doubted she’d be able to dispel his dark magic and return him to corporeality easily, the possibility was too great and the results too severe for him to take the chance.
Nor was sinking into the ground a viable option. While it would have provided him with absolute cover from both of his opponents, staying hidden ran the very real possibility of Twilight or Blueblood charging him with quitting the field, which would be an automatic forfeiture on his part. Even if he vanished only to return a few seconds later, Twilight would be able to say – even after their fight had concluded – that she’d thought he’d given up and fled, dropping her guard as a result and thus potentially delegitimizing his victory if he overcame her. That was something that Lex needed to avoid at all costs, even if it meant putting himself at risk now.
And Behemiel seemed intent on capitalizing on that risk, a third swing of the creature’s sword following after him as he fell back, the tip of it nicking the edge of his umbral form and sending another jolt of pain through him. “You’re a sorcerer of unusual caliber,” growled the hound archon, already moving to pursue him. “The magic you’ve used to take this form reeks of evil, and yet I sense no groundswell of corruption from you. Are you resisting the spiritual contamination such powers bring, or are you simply hiding the true nature of your heart?”
Lex didn’t bother answering; even if he'd cared what the creature was saying, talking during a fight was pointless at best and a distraction at worst. Instead, he called upon his dark magic again, black crystals shooting up from the ground. But unlike the massive stalagmites he so often raised, these were smaller, barely an inch long. The lack of mass, however, was made up for by the sheer quantity of them, raising several thousand in a fan-shaped area between himself and Behemiel. It wouldn’t be enough to keep the creature at bay permanently, but since it was barefooted it would be forced to break off its attack while it circumvented the spike-filled ground…or at least Lex hoped that would be the case. Planar creatures often had esoteric defenses, and if this “hound archon” was the same then there was a chance it wouldn’t even notice his attempt to keep it at a distance.
But he had more immediate concerns to deal with. Hanging back from the fighting, Twilight was casting another spell, and Lex immediately lurched to the side, placing Behemiel between himself and her. Twilight wouldn’t dare attack him if she ran the risk of hitting-
He was proven wrong a second later, as Twilight completed her spell and sent a lightning bolt blasting through him and Behemiel both.
The strike hit Lex dead-center, and it was only because he had no physical form that he wasn’t flung backward from the force of it. Even then he dimly recognized that he’d just taken considerable damage, that knowledge coming to him through a haze of intense pain. But he was less concerned with that than he was with how badly he’d misread Twilight’s intentions. She shot right through that creature she summoned! Is she-
“Brilliantly done, Lady Sparkle!”
Behemiel’s voice was completely without pain, and that sent a surge of dread through Lex as he turned his attention away from how badly he’d been injured and back to the battlefield. Sure enough, the hound archon was completely unharmed, lacking any visible burns or scorch marks, and in that moment Lex knew exactly why Twilight had hit them both with her lightning bolt. Planar creatures often had esoteric defenses, and it seemed that one of Behemiel’s – which Twilight had clearly known about – was immunity to electricity.
Indeed, the hound archon seemed more concerned by the field of needle-sized spikes separating itself from its quarry, its eyes darting between Lex and the ground as it tiptoed forward cautiously, sword held at the ready as it carefully planted its feet between the individual protrusions. “Now that our enemy is wounded, I will lay him low!”
“Behemiel, wait! I want to give him a chance to stand down!” Moving so that she had an unobstructed view of Lex, Twilight held out a hoof toward him. “Lex, please, don’t force yourself to keep going! I know you want to help make Equestria better, but this isn’t the way!”
“This is exactly the way!” Goaded into responding despite knowing better, Lex sent a hate-filled glare at Twilight. “You and your fainéant mentors have allowed my homeland to fall into complacency, and your indolence is crying out for redress! I will NOT stop until I’ve undone the damage your neglect has allowed to happen!”
But rather than being intimidated by his defiance, Twilight seemed saddened by it. Stepping closer, she lowered her voice. “I know that something’s wrong with your magic,” she confessed, and had Lex not been bodiless he would have winced, hoping that no one could overhear her. “And I saw the vigil that everypony held for you last night while you were recovering. Look around.” She swept a hoof out to encompass the crowd watching them. “You already have everything you need to help everypony; you don’t need a crown to do more.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me about doing more!” hissed Lex, his eyes glowing brighter. Bad enough that she had figured out that he was without his magic. Bad enough that she was actually thought she had him so beaten that she could casually converse like this during their fight. But to have Twilight Sparkle – a pony who thought that idly giving lessons on reciprocal altruism made her fit to govern a nation of millions – talk down to him about responsibility was more than he could take! “YOU AND YOUR ILK HAVE ALL SQUANDERED THE POWER YOUR ROYAL STATUS AFFORDS YOU, AND SO NONE OF YOU DESERVE TO KEEP IT!” he roared, and this time the black crystals that sprouted around him were larger. “I AM THE ONLY ONE WITH THE VISION, THE STRENGTH, AND THE WILL TO GUIDE EQUESTRIA INTO THE FUTURE!”
“Spoken like a true despot!” snarled Behemiel. Throwing himself forward, the hound archon dove past the final portion of the spikes Lex had raised, coming up on his feet in one smooth motion as he brought his sword around. “I see now why Lady Sparkle is intent on defeating you! To do so is the responsibility that her office demands of her!”
Righteous indignation poured off of the archon in waves now, radiating from it so heavily that Lex – even as furious as he felt at that moment – couldn’t help but take note. More than just a display of emotion, the creature’s wrath all but rippled in the air, surrounding it with an aura that bordered on being palpable. It seemed to thicken the very space around him, and although Lex knew that couldn’t actually be the case, he could almost feel his incorporeal body growing heavy, dulling his reactions as Behemiel brought his sword down with a roar. The blade passed right between the green and purple eyes that were Lex’s only visible feature in that form, sending a brief shot of agony through him.
But rather than breaking his resolve, the renewed push only made Lex angrier.
Abandoning any semblance of caution, he pointed a shadowy tendril at Behemiel’s face, gesturing rapidly as he hissed a series of arcane words, his voice tight with controlled fury. This was the only attack spell he had left among thaumaturgical repertoire, one that he’d kept in reserve all this time because he’d considered it too deadly to use against another pony. And while he had no idea if the hound archon would simply shrug it off the way it had Twilight’s lightning bolt, it was a risk that he was now willing to take, even knowing that he’d likely be defeated if this didn’t work.
Except that didn’t seem likely, as Twilight – doubtlessly deciphering what spell he was casting, the same way he had for her summoning spell – suddenly screamed a warning, telling Behemiel to look out. Lex had the pleasure of seeing the hound archon’s face suddenly twist in alarm, watching as the creature started to shift its weight in an attempt to dodge. But it was too little, too late.
A half-second later, Lex’s spell was complete. For an instant he felt a measure of impedance, and he recognized it as the same spell resistance that Xiriel and the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale had possessed, the externalization of the archon’s inner magical channels attempting to fight off the incoming magic. But it was nowhere near as strong as the belier devil’s had been, and even the dragon’s had been more substantial, making it no surprise when Lex’s spell punched through the feeble opposition and surrounded Behemiel a second later.
Instantly, the hound archon was frozen solid, his entire body encased in ice over a foot thick.
There was an Equestrian spell like this, Lex knew. He’d never seen it in action, but he’d heard about how it used the water in the air to create a block of ice around a target, immobilizing them. The spell he'd just used, however, was of Everglow origin, and was far more deadly. The ice it covered the target with was supernaturally cold, far more so than frozen water naturally was. The result was that it leeched heat out of the target’s body at an accelerated speed, and while – thanks to the orange prism circling him – the icy prison would remain for almost fifteen minutes, it would kill most creatures in a fraction of that time.
“BEHEMIEL!”
Twilight, it seemed, knew that too.
Rushing forward with a look of fear on her face, she stopped a short distance back from where her ally was frozen. Holding out a hoof that shook only a little, she quickly began to gesture, chanting as she did, and Lex recognized the dispelling spell she was casting, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to stop her before she finished it. If she succeeded in undoing his spell and freeing that creature…
Both ponies felt the clash of power as Twilight’s spell collided with his own. Although there was no visible manifestation to the contest, each of them could feel the interplay of magic, Twilight’s being strong enough that Lex felt certain she had to have enhanced her spell somehow, the same way Celestia and Luna had done when he’d fought them. But he’d cast his with the benefit of his floating gemstone, heightening the degree of refinement with which he’d unleashed his magic. This is going to be close, he knew.
And then, just like that, the struggle between their two spells was over.
“No!”
Yes!
The rush of exhilaration that Lex felt then wasn’t only due to his magic winning out over Twilight’s. It was also because, in her horror over being unable to save her ally, she’d taken another step forward.
Right into the area that he’d cursed at the start of their duel.
Twilight immediately began casting another dispelling spell, knowing that she needed to get Behemiel out of that ice as soon as possible.
But she’d barely gotten the first few syllables out of her mouth, waving a hoof through the requisite gestures, when an array of black crystals shot up from the ground. It was only because Starlight Glimmer had warned her about this trick that Twilight was able to react in time to avoid several deep lacerations, and even then she wasn’t entirely successful, one of the ebon spikes slicing along the inside of her outstretched foreleg. Stumbling back with a yelp of pain, Twilight felt her spell fizzle, its casting interrupted, and although Lex had no visible expression in his shadow-form, she could almost feel his malicious smile.
Cradling her injured foreleg, Twilight tried to collect herself. She’d been in worse situations than this before and gotten through them. But knowing that didn’t slow the rapid pounding of her heart, nor calm the tension in her muscles, as a single thought forced its way to the forefront of her mind despite her efforts to push it away:
Not again!
Twilight had been confident in her prediction that Lex had lost the use of his thaumaturgical spellcasting. It had been the only plausible explanation she’d been able to think of for why he hadn’t used it during his confrontation with Starlight Glimmer, where not only his life but the lives of other ponies were in jeopardy. Even if she could only speculate as to why that was the case, the conclusion had seemed sound, particularly in light of how it had held true during Rainbow Dash’s attack as well.
Except now, Lex had used thaumaturgical spellcasting to imprison Behemiel in a cocoon of ice, one that Twilight knew wasn’t just arresting the hound archon’s movements, but was sapping the heat from his body with unnatural speed. Worse, her attempt to undo Lex’s magic with her own had failed! She’d been able to feel her spell struggle against his, and although she knew hers had only lost by a thin margin, the result was that Behemiel was still frozen solid.
It’s just like when the lhaksharut attacked! I made a mistake, and now another one of my friends is paying for it!
Intellectually, Twilight knew that this wasn’t like what had happened during the lhaksharut’s attack on Canterlot. Behemiel wasn’t in any real danger; the type of summoning magic that Willow had been teaching her was based around conjuring the spirits of planar denizens, rather than bringing forth their entire selves. Creatures that were summoned that way had a physical presence, not because their actual bodies had made the trip along with the rest of them, but because a large portion of the spell’s energy was spent on incarnating their spirits in a facsimile of their bodies (in a process that Willow had deemed to be “similar to astral projecting,” without expounding on exactly what that was). That meant that whatever damage they sustained wasn’t truly harming them; the worst-case scenario was that, if their ersatz forms took what would normally be fatal damage, they would simply break down and allow their spirits to return where they’d come from without them being any worse for wear.
But being aware of that fact did little to change how Twilight felt at that moment. No matter that she’d be able to summon Behemiel again later; right now he was trapped, in pain, and facing the functional equivalent of death! All because she’d underestimated what Lex was capable of!
The guilt that washed over Twilight then was overwhelming, and it pushed her thoughts in a direction she normally never would have entertained. If I forfeit the match, will Lex let Behemiel out of there? That would mean giving up on making him restore Luna, but Luna wouldn’t want to be changed back at the cost of someone else’s suffering, would she? Besides, the remaining crystal ponies were already on their way back to the Crystal Empire; surely once they arrived, the Crystal Heart would be able to break her curse. So maybe…maybe it was better just to stand down now, before-
“TWILIGHT! DON’T GIVE UP!”
Spike’s voice, yelled at the top of his lungs, broke through her rising depression, making her turn to look at where the tiny dragon had clamored on top of Soft Mane, raising a tiny first in the air as he stood on her shoulders. “Don’t give up!” he yelled again. “You can do this! I believe in you!”
“No she can’t!” retorted an angry-looking colt with an eagle on one outstretched foreleg, flapping his wings as he rose up to where he could look over everypony’s heads, glaring at Twilight directly. “No you can’t!”
“Yes you can, darling!” came Rarity’s voice immediately. “You’ve never let your friends down before, and you won’t now!”
“That’s right!” whooped Rainbow Dash. “Bust that whatever-it-is loose and then bust up Lex!”
“You won’t be able to!” booed a pegasus mare with a cutie mark of a stylized gust of wind. “You’re gonna fail!”
“Nuh-uh!” cheered Pinkie Pie. “Just pretend like you’re meeting new people at a party and break the ice!”
“You got this, sugarcube!” Applejack’s reassurance came with a confident nod. “Don’cha go thinkin’ otherwise!”
“Lex won’t lose!” shot back a unicorn mare with a white picket fence cutie mark, glowering at Applejack and then at Twilight. “Not to you! Not to anypony!”
“T-Twilight won’t lose either!” gulped Fluttershy, swallowing her nervousness with visible effort. “She definitely won’t!”
“You can do it, Twilight!” Thrusting a first in the air to match Spike’s, Soft Mane added her voice to the chorus. “Give it everything you’ve got!”
By that point, the rest of the crowd was yelling as well, trying to drown out her friends with shouts of discouragement and negativity. But Twilight wasn’t able to hear any of that, momentarily overwhelmed by the sudden warmth spreading through her. They still trust me, she realized. Even after what happened before…even after they got hurt because of me…they still believe in me!
In that moment Twilight knew that the only one who’d blamed her for what had happened with the lhaksharut was herself.
Blinking back tears of gratitude, she turned her attention back to the problem at hoof. Her friends had faith that she’d do her best to overcome Lex and rescue Behemiel. And while she still wasn’t sure if she could do it, to give up without even trying would mean that she didn’t have that same faith in them.
That wasn’t worthy of the Princess of Friendship.
With her resolve restored, Twilight started working on a plan.
Despite Lex’s initial jubilation over Twilight’s wandering back into the area he’d cursed, he knew he wasn’t ready to spring his trap yet.
While there was no physical demarcation of the malediction he’d laid down, the area he’d cursed was only about forty feet in diameter. That wasn’t small, but it was restricted enough that Twilight could easily move out of it without even trying, as evidenced by how she was right on the edge of it now. Therefore, the first thing he needed to do was seal her ability to move easily. That meant disabling her wings, since they gave her the greatest degree of mobility.
Unfortunately, his first attempt to do so had failed. While he’d been prepared to disrupt her second attempt at casting a spell – since she’d so foolishly landed after her first one had failed – by attacking her with black crystal stalagmites, he’d aimed at both of her wings along with her outstretched hoof. Only the latter had connected, however, with Twilight somehow managing to avoid his attempt to ground her.
Worse, the injury she’d taken had caused her to stumble back, moving just outside of where he needed her to be!
Resisting the urge to scream in frustration, Lex instead took the few moments where Twilight’s idiot friends were shouting their hackneyed attempts at encouragement to come up with an alternate strategy. She’s desperate to free that monster she summoned before my spell finishes it off, he knew. And her attempt to negate my magic directly has failed twice now, which makes it highly likely that she’ll take a different approach. Which meant…
She’s going to attempt to shatter it.
That was a viable option. The ice he’d conjured up was supernaturally cold as well as quite thick, but it was still just ice. A dedicated assault would be able to break it down without undue difficulty. The question now was how she’d go about it; he’d need to come up with a counterattack that would not only foil whatever she tried, but let him disable her wings in the process. If I just knew what spells she had at her disposal…
But there was no time to bemoan his lack of information as Twilight flapped her wings and took to the air again, not stopping until she was nearly thirty feet above the battlefield. The sight made Lex tense, despite having no muscles, as he hurriedly worked through the probabilities of various scenarios. Would she summon another monster and let it try to batter the icy prison open while she engaged him directly? Unlikely; if she could have summoned more aid she would have done it by now. Another lightning bolt? Also unlikely; the initial impact of the lightning would damage the ice somewhat, but frozen water was a poor conductor compared to its liquid form, which would impede the overall effectiveness of the attack. Some sort of fire spell? That would be the ideal choice, especially if she had one with a wide area, similar to Aria’s fireball, but assuming that the hound archon didn’t have the same resistance to fire that it did to electricity, that ran the risk of damaging it in the process of-
His thoughts were cut off as Twilight began to move.
But not toward him, and not toward Behemiel.
Instead, she began circling, maintaining her altitude as she flew in a ring, staying parallel to the ground the entire time. Wings beating hard, Lex watched as she increased her speed, whirling in a horizontal loop again and again, faster each time. Soon enough a light wind had settled over the entire area, causing manes and tails to wave in the breeze formed by Twilight’s passage.
Lex wasn’t able to feel the wind, but he was acutely aware of the sudden rush of apprehension he felt, not because he knew what Twilight was up to, but because he didn’t. Was she trying to create a hurricane on her own? Was she trying to make it difficult for him to identify a spell she was about to cast? Was she just trying to make him dizzy from watching her?
None of those possibilities seemed the least bit plausible. The only thing that did make sense was that she was building up momentum for some reason. But her trajectory was entirely wrong for that; any course-correction she made now would bleed off a large amount the speed she’d built up. If she was intending some sort of brute physical attack, her target would need to place itself directly in front of her. The only way that would happen would be if she tried to telekinetically levitate Behemiel’s frozen form up toward her – and Lex was certain that she knew he’d counter her with his own telekinesis before she could bring that thing anywhere close to her – or if she…
Lex’s eyes widened as he suddenly knew exactly what Twilight was up to.
But he didn’t get a chance to act on that knowledge, a bright flash of light engulfing Twilight as she suddenly vanished. Immediately, a loud crash came from behind him, and out of his peripheral vision Lex could see chips of ice go flying. And although he immediately turned around, Lex knew that the sight that would greet him would only confirm what he already knew.
He’d thought that Twilight would use her magic to try and free her summoned monster, and she had. But not the thaumaturgical spellcasting she’d learned on Everglow. Instead, she’d simply drawn on the magic she had naturally as an alicorn, combining the talents of all three tribes of ponies. Pegasus magic to raise her velocity and brace herself for a high-speed impact. Earth pony magic to strike with maximum force. Unicorn magic to use short-range teleportation, the kind that relied only on her horn and not gesturing or chanting.
But while Twilight’s gamble had paid off – leaving Behemiel sprawled out on the ground, groaning and shivering but alive, free of his cold confinement – it had also left her vulnerable, lying in the dirt several feet away from her summoned creature.
It hadn’t been Twilight’s use of teleportation that had surprised Lex.
Quite the opposite; he’d been extremely cognizant of her ability to do that long before he’d set hoof on the battlefield. She’d mentioned it to him during their brief association on Everglow – showcasing a reckless disregard for protecting information about her tactical abilities that was entirely consistent with somepony Princess Celestia had trained – and he’d subsequently known that if he ever found himself facing Twilight Sparkle in a fight, she’d leverage that ability to its fullest. And while the Equestrian version of that spell was highly limited compared to the counterparts developed on Everglow, Lex was likewise aware that Twilight would likely be able to push those limits thanks to her magic-focused cutie mark and her nature as an alicorn.
The only thing that had surprised him now was that she’d used it as a means to bodily hurl herself at the monster he’d frozen solid. It was an ill-considered tactic on her part, since while she’d succeeded in liberating that creature, she’d still – even with the inherent toughness of an earth pony and the crash-resistance of a pegasus – injured herself in the process, a pained moan escaping her lips as she lifted her head.
For Lex, whose entire plan hinged on stripping away Twilight’s mobility, it was a chance that he knew he had to capitalize on.
“Be-Behemiel,” she coughed, spitting out a mouthful of grass as she looked at where, several feet away, the hound archon was likewise lying on the ground. “Are you okay?”
“Thanks t-t-to you, Lady S-S-Sparkle,” shivered Behemiel. But the archon’s trembling was already fading, the remnants of the magical ice rapidly melting away now that they no longer encased their target. “But that was foolish,” he added as he climbed to his feet, grabbing his sword. “You know that I’m in no true danger while you’ve summoned me like this.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to abandon you when you’re in troub-, WAAAAH!”
Although Twilight’s scream was one of surprise rather than pain, Lex couldn’t help but take a measure of enjoyment in it, watching as the ring of black crystals he’d conjured spread out to encircle Twilight’s abdomen. Since she’d tucked her wings in to her sides right before colliding with her summoned monster, the narrow band of ebon material – three inches wide and an inch thick – kept them pinned there now, too tight for her to yank them free, though she was already trying. “Can’t…get…loose!” she grunted, her face going red with effort.
Realizing that wasn’t going to work, she scrambled to her hooves – giving Lex a wary look, as if only now remembering that he was there, before returning her attention to the coal-colored loop of crystal keeping her feathery appendages constrained – and blasted it with a beam of energy from her horn, again falling back on the type of magic that she knew best as she tried to forcibly free her wings.
The attempt failed to so much as scratch the band keeping them pinned, which surprised Lex not in the least. His black crystals were far stronger than steel, after all, and that Equestrian spell she was using had a high degree of control but did comparatively little in the way of actual damage; a decent choice for attacking it without accidentally hurting herself in the process, though one with little hope of actually removing it. But there was another detail that Lex found far more interesting…
She uses native Equestrian magic during periods of acute stress. Twice now she’d been under intense pressure – once over freeing her summoned creature, and again now at losing the use of her wings – and in both cases she’d relied on the magic she’d grown up learning, rather than the stronger kind she’d learned on Everglow. That was-
Lex’s train of thought was interrupted as he caught sight of a softly-glowing sword rushing in at him from the edge of his peripheral vision. But unlike Twilight, his satisfaction at having scored a strategic victory hadn’t caused him to lower his guard, and he ducked beneath the heavy thrust, the blade missing him by inches.
“Lady Sparkle!” howled Behemiel, bringing his sword down in a sharp swing that Lex only barely dodged, placing himself between Lex and Twilight. “Fall back! Leave the sorcerer to me and regroup!”
That miserable cur! Giving Twilight time to regroup was the last thing Lex wanted, and he snarled silently as he sent more thin spikes of black crystal shooting up from the ground, jagged edges shooting toward the hound archon while he floated away from the creature. But Behemiel twisted by the first, bringing his sword up to block the second as he danced forward, refusing to let Lex put any space between them.
This was bad.
A glance past the creature showed that Twilight was following the archon’s advice, but only partially, distancing herself from the fighting as she glanced between Behemiel and the ring around her middle, biting her lip. If she calmed down enough to realize that she’d be better served trying to use her dispelling spell on the black crystals instead of attempting to break them off, then she’d likely have them removed in short order. As proficient as Lex was in his dark magic, he wasn’t quite as skilled with it as he was with his thaumaturgical spells. And getting those on Twilight a second time would likely prove to be extraordinarily difficult. While it might have looked effortless to an outsider, forming crystals around something required him to pinpoint the space around the target, which couldn’t easily be done if said target was moving.
But in order to keep Twilight’s attention, Lex knew he had to continue harrying her, and he couldn’t do that while her pet monster kept attacking him! Worse, he didn’t have any more spells to fight the creature with! Only more black crystal spikes, and those weren’t getting the job done!
A curse won’t be enough to incapacitate that thing unless I augment it, he felt certain. But that was out of the question. The strain he’d felt while amplifying the curse he’d laid down at the beginning of the duel had been severe enough that Lex knew he’d only be able to do that once more, and he needed to save that for when he sprung his trap on Twilight. Which left him with no viable method of stopping the hound archon’s relentless assault.
And what made that especially galling was how gravely injured the creature was. Twilight might have freed it before his frozen prison had been able to vanquish it, but it had still inflicted severe damage on the thing. Large patches of its body were suffering from frostbite, giving its black fur a bluish edge. It favored its left leg, stepping down hard on it each time it moved as though trying to wake the limb up. More than a few blisters were already forming on its face, where its fur was thinnest. But most telling was how much effort the creature needed to keep up its wild offense.
Before, it had wielded its five-foot sword as if it were an extension of itself. Now, every swing came with a pained grunt, and the period between its attacks was filled with heavy breathing. Its ears were folded back in a clear sign of exertion, and it was slower to recover its stance after each attack, notably so compared to before.
Even so, the archon didn’t let up for an instant, forcing Lex to continue giving ground as it advanced on him.
One more spell! Although he knew it was pointless, Lex couldn’t help but rage at being unable to defeat the monster when it was barely holding on. If I just had one more attack spell, I could finish it off! But he didn’t, and since no one was allowed to help him, that meant-
Wait…
There was a way!
Rushing forward, Lex abandoned all pretense of defense, passing right through the hound archon as he sped toward Twilight.
He heard the archon’s angry yell, felt the creature’s sword cut through him as he made a beeline for the alicorn, but he ignored it all. Instead, he drew himself up as he flew forward, spreading his shadowy form out as if preparing to engulf her whole. “I HAVE YOU NOW, TWILIGHT!” he roared, his eyes flaring as he prepared to use his dark magic again. “HERE’S A LITTLE TASTE OF WHAT I’M GOING TO DO TO CELESTIA AFTER I’M DONE WITH YOU!”
He saw her eyes widen, grimacing as she took a step back. But the mention of his ill intent toward her mentor did what he was hoping, and her features changed into a snarl of anger a moment later. “I thought you were different!” she screamed. “I thought you weren’t as bad as everypony said!” She lowered her horn then, pointing it directly at him with less than five feet between them. “But if you’re going to hurt the people I care about…!”
Lex tensed, knowing his timing would need to be absolutely perfect for this to work…
“Then I won’t forgive you!” Twilight’s final angry shout was punctuated by a massive energy beam from her horn.
It was the same spell she’d used a moment ago in her failed attempt to free her wings, but augmented far beyond what any normal unicorn could have done. Had he not fought already Celestia and Luna, Lex knew the massive output of power would have caught him by surprise. As it was, the beam filled his vision in an instant, lancing forward faster than he could dodge.
But not faster than he could think.
And a thought was all it took to activate the dark magic he’d gathered, returning him to corporeal form and falling to the ground as he flattened himself out as much as he could, Twilight’s spell surging past him with unimaginable force.
A half-second later that force engulfed Behemiel – the hound archon visible now that Lex’s shadow form was no longer hiding him from Twilight’s sight – whole, the creature giving a pained howl that lasted barely a moment before it was cut off.
“NO!” Twilight’s horrified scream came in the wake of the archon’s as she cut off the rush of magical energy, her eyes wide and mouth hanging open as she stared at the space where her friend had been. But there was nothing left of him now, save only for the sword that dully clattered to the ground, having been raised aloft in preparation for another strike against Lex. Even that turned transparent and vanished an instant later, following its owner back to the celestial realm he’d been summoned from.
“Behemiel…” breathed Twilight, taking a half-step forward-
Only for Lex to surge to his hooves, roaring as he threw himself directly at Twilight, slamming into her with all the strength he could muster. It wasn’t much, far less than Twilight herself had managed to build up when she’d hurled herself at Behemiel less than a minute ago. But it was sufficient to drive her back now, her hooves struggling to find purchase as Lex pushed her.
Back into the area that he’d cursed before.
And this time, swore Lex silently, too focused on what was about to happen to feel any sense of accomplishment at the archon’s defeat, she won’t leave it so easily!
Still dazed by what had just happened, it cost Twilight precious seconds before she was able to separate herself from Lex, recovering enough of her wits to form a shield around herself, the dome spreading out just enough to push Lex away. Even then, she didn’t follow it up, letting the shield fade as she gave Lex a shocked look. “You…you tricked me,” she panted, only partially from exertion. “The way you made yourself a target like that…the stuff you said about going after Princess Celestia…you planned on me-”
“I did,” he spat, planting his hooves as he channeled everything he could muster into his dark magic, his horn lighting up. “The same way I planned on doing THIS!”
Around Twilight, a field of tiny black crystal spikes grew, the same as the ones he’d raised between himself and Behemiel not too long ago. But now they surrounded Twilight completely, giving her nowhere she could step without piercing her hooves. Nor was that the full extent of what he created, gritting his teeth and pouring all of his concentration into what came next…
Lex hadn’t been surprised when Twilight had teleported before. Rather, he’d simply considered himself fortunate that she’d teleported outside of the area that he’d cursed. Otherwise his entire plan might have fallen apart before it had even begun.
From the beginning, his strategy had relied on stripping Twilight of her mobility. Her wings were swift, giving her an aerial advantage that needed to be negated, and so he’d looked for an opportunity to keep her from using them. Her hooves were sure, and so he’d waited for a chance to surround her with jagged obstructions that would keep her in place. And her magic…
Realizing that he was up to something, Twilight’s horn flared as she disappeared in a flash of light…only to reappear in the exact same spot an instant later in a flash of churning purple that matched the aura around Lex’s horn, a look of bewilderment on her face.
A look that changed to recognition a second later.
He’d only heard about this after the fact, of course. The way his predecessor, King Sombra, had hidden the Crystal Heart behind layers of deceptions and traps. But the one that had interested Lex most was the trap that had kept Twilight from teleporting away once she’d retrieved the Heart. While he hadn’t been entirely certain he’d be able to pull off replicating that feat – King Sombra having been far more proficient with dark magic than Lex currently was – he’d put everything he had into trying once the duel had started, cursing the widest area he could with what he’d termed “dimensional impermeability.”
That Twilight hadn’t summoned her archon into that area had been a minor stroke of luck, since it might have tipped her off as to what he’d done. And while the hound archon had passed through the cursed area after she’d conjured it, doing so hadn’t triggered the malediction, due to it already being on this plane rather than trying to move between them. After that, only Twilight’s single use of teleporting had run the risk of finding out what he’d before Lex was ready to spring his trap, and that had also occurred outside of the twenty-foot radius he’d used his magic on.
And now, with nowhere to run, no way to fly, and no ability to teleport, Lex had Twilight right where he wanted her.
Which meant it was time to hit her with everything he had left.
Rising up on his hind legs, Lex called forth the largest mass of dark crystals that he could, raising his forelegs in a gesture that had no practical impact save to help him focus. Behind him, a mountain of the stuff burst upward, rising from the ground with explosive force. Curling forward, the black mass churned and bent, crystals forming within crystals to give it the appearance of movement as it kept spreading out, looking for all the world like a tidal wave of ebony crystal.
One that crested directly toward the trapped alicorn.
And then Lex pointed at toward her and brought his hoof down. “I WIN!”
A second later several tons of crystal fell toward Twilight.
The sound of the princess’s friends screaming barely registered in Starlight’s consciousness as she watched the mass of black crystals slam down, the alicorn disappearing under what had to be several tons of the stuff. The impact was so heavy that Starlight needed to brace herself, nearly falling over as the ground shook and heaved beneath her hooves. But even when she’d regained her balance, she still felt dizzy from what she’d just witnessed.
He killed her. There was simply no way Twilight could have survived that. For all Lex’s talk about wanting to protect ponies, and the rules of the duel forbidding killing, there was no way anypony could have lived through having several tons of extremely dense black crystals dropped on them. And while that meant Lex had broken the rules and so technically lost the duel, that was cold comfort to Starlight right at that moment. He killed her…and I’m next!
Lex had already defeated Celestia and Luna. Starlight herself and given him her best fight, and although Lex had needed his minions to soften her up, she’d still lost in the end. And now Princess Twilight had fallen. Since Princess Cadance was, by all accounts, a creampuff when it came to fighting, that meant that there was nopony left who could stop Lex, regardless of whether his magic was somehow compromised or not. And with no more enemies of note to keep him busy, Starlight had no doubts that Lex would turn his attention back to her in short order.
Which means I need to get out of here right now! Normally that would have been easy; some teleporting would have let her leave Vanhoover and its insane overlord behind in mere moments. But with the state her horn was in, that was out of the question, which meant that she needed it fixed now.
“Soft Mane, my horn!” she barked, turning to the half-human/pony. “Heal my horn! Now!”
“Not gonna happen!” In an instant, Fruit Crunch and his wolf were between her and Soft Mane, the colt rearing up and waving his forelegs at her in a naked display of aggression before falling back onto all fours. “Your horn is staying just the way it is! Lex has won fair and square, and you’re not going to mess with that!”
“Are you insane?!” snarled Starlight, even as she took a step back, knowing from experience just how hard that brat could punch. “Your hero just murdered a princess in front of everypony, right after agreeing that this duel wouldn’t be to the death, and you call that ‘fair and square’?!”
“Don’t confuse Lex for you,” sneered a filly’s voice as Starlight suddenly felt a hoof on her back. Turning her head, she caught sight of Cleansweep hovering just above her, the snake around her middle hissing as the filly kept her hoof pressed just above the base of Starlight’s tail. “You’re the one who tries to kill ponies when they don’t do what you want, not him. And if you so much as point your horn in his direction, I’ll pump you so full of poison you won’t be able to move for a week!”
Starlight bristled at the threat, but somehow managed to keep herself under control. “Nice try,” she shot back coolly, “but you already told me you can’t use your magic without your animals. You might have gotten a new snake from somewhere, but that doesn’t mean I forgot that I vaporized your old one.”
“I told you,” came Straightlace’s angry voice as he set himself down in front of Starlight, positioning himself directly between her and the battlefield. “You don’t have what it takes to take out our spirit animals permanently. They came back, and so did our powers.”
“Just sit down and keep watching.” The latest voice belonged to the other filly in Lex’s little child-soldier brigade, the earth one with the badger, currently moving to cover Starlight’s other side…and it was then that she realized that she was trapped, the four of them surrounding her and cutting her off from everyone else. “It’ll be over soon.”
Although she wasn’t sure if the filly meant to do so, Starlight couldn’t help but hear a double entendre in that. Trying to fight down a rising sense of panic, she glanced around, hoping that the rest of Twilight’s friends would come to her aid…only to see that they had problems of their own. Spike and Soft Mane were being stared down by two pegasus mares whom Starlight belatedly realized were the ones who had almost electrocuted her yesterday. The other five – Fluttershy and the rest of the former Elements of Harmony – weren’t much better off.
Aria and Rainbow Dash were glaring at each other as they exchanged cutting remarks at a rapid-fire pace. Pinkie Pie and Sonata were arguing with less visible acrimony, but quite a bit more agitation, waving their hooves so wildly that they were almost playing a highspeed game of patty-cake. Garden Gate and Applejack were right in each other’s faces, the latter holding her hoof out in a way that made Starlight think of how Twilight had cast some of her spells by gesturing as she’d chanted, while Garden Gate’s horn was glowing, matching auras surrounding the handles of a pair of kitchen knives tucked into a makeshift bandolier. Rarity looked like she was trying to reason with a pair of earth stallions that Starlight didn’t recognize, while Fluttershy was pleading two earth mares, a heartbroken expression on her face.
“You guys have this under control?”
A new voice brought Starlight’s attention upward, watching as a pegasus stallion came in for a landing, looking the foals over with a nod. “Nice job.”
The praise garnered a sour look from Straightlace. “Lex told you and your friends to back us up,” he noted, his voice thick with accusation.
But the pegasus only shrugged. “Garden thought that Sonata and Aria needed their help more.”
“And you didn’t?” asked the filly with the badger.
A shadow passed across the newcomer’s face. “I wanted see the mare who hurt her,” he muttered, giving Starlight a hard look.
“You’re all completely out of your minds,” announced Starlight, the words uttered through gritted teeth. The admission that Lex had deployed them in order to prevent any interference – and likely drag her back once the duel was officially over – had left her with a sinking feeling. There had to be some way-
“You guys!” called another foal, a unicorn colt who was the fifth member of the group and had been standing apart from the others, his eyes closed for some reason. “Something’s happening!”
“What do you-”
Fruit Crunch’s question was cut off as a loud cracking sound rang out, like a thousand sticks being snapped all at once. It commanded everypony’s attention, causing all conversation to cease as everypony turned toward the source of it: the mass of black crystals that had buried Twilight Sparkle.
For a few seconds it seemed like there was nothing to see, the enormous mound of jagged jet-black material looking unchanged from when it had crashed down on the princess. Then another sharp crack filled the air. Then another. And another after that. And slowly, their cause became clear.
The black crystals were, slowly but steadily, rising up from their impact point. Inch by inch, they haltingly reversed the path of their recent stab downward, until a dome of purplish light could be made out beneath them, pressing them upward as it slowly expanded. And inside of it…
“TWILIGHT!”
Inside of her shield spell, Twilight smiled as she heard the relieved voices of her friends. But the expression lasted only for a moment before it changed into a grimace of effort, struggling to maintain the ground she’d painstakingly gained against Lex’s last, massive attack.
The shield spell she’d used right before the black crystals would have flattened her had been instinctive on her part. It had managed to stand up to the incredible force Lex had brought to bear only because she’d used her alicorn magic when she’d manifested the shield, strengthening it far beyond what she could have when she’d been a unicorn. As it was, the impact had pressed her – shield and all – into a crater over a foot deep, flattening her shield so low that she’d been forced to lie on her belly inside of it. It had only been by the barest of margins that she’d been able to start pushing it back, reinforcing and expanding the shield and pressing the black crystals up and away from her.
That she was trying to displace several tons of rigid and unyielding matter, against gravity no less, was bad enough. But what made it worse was that Lex was still actively fighting her. Even now, she could feel the pressure on her shield increasing, knowing that he was creating even more black crystals within the gigantic mound of them he’d already conjured up, increasing their weight and displacing the bulk of it downward, making her groan as she hastily put more of her alicorn magic into her shield to compensate, pushing her limit for how strong she could make it.
But she could already tell she wouldn’t be able to push it much further.
He knew I was going to do this!
Twilight was certain of that. Now that Lex had played his trump card, it was easy for her to see that he’d spent the entire fight building up to this. He’d laid down that anti-teleportation field early on, waited for an opportunity to bind her wings, and then raised a field of spikes around her, all so she’d have no avenue of escape when he did this. With such meticulous planning, there was no way he hadn’t known that she’d raise a shield around herself.
And that was why Lex had created such a large quantity of black crystals. While this would have been an overwhelmingly fatal attack against anypony else, he’d anticipated that she’d throw everything into defense, and had adjusted the strength of his attack accordingly. Which means that I’m still following his plan! realized Twilight with a sinking feeling. I’m doing exactly what he expected me to!
As if to prove precisely that, Lex’s voice rang out a second later.
“Give up, Twilight!” There was a harsh edge to his words, and she knew it was putting a strain on him to create such a huge volume of matter. But he didn’t sound as strained as she felt at the moment. “You have no escape, and I can keep increasing the pressure on your shield! You’ve lost!”
“…no…!” Just getting that one word out almost broke her concentration, but she somehow managed to do it anyway. “Not…yet…!”
Lex’s retort came in the form of yet more black crystals pressing down on her from above.
Desperate, Twilight tried to think of some way out of her predicament. But Lex was right: there was no escape. Trying to throw herself out from under the downward-pressing accumulation of black crystals simply wasn’t possible; she’d need to cease concentrating on her shield to do so, and even if she ignored what the field of needle-sized spikes would do to her when she landed on them, the sheer quantity of the mass bearing down on her gave it a wide radius, more so than she’d be able to clear before it came down on her. She might have been able to fly fast enough to get clear, but that wasn’t an option with her wings bound…and while she’d belatedly realized that she could possibly free them if she used her dispelling spell on the band around her middle, that simply wasn’t possible now. Thaumaturgical spells required focus and concentration, and right now she was putting all of that into keeping her shield up.
And Lex had already made it impossible for her to teleport away.
…or had he?
The teleportation spells Twilight had looked at during her time on Everglow had been beyond her ability to learn, but not her ability to understand. While they’d called for storing more power in thought-forms than she’d been able to do, she’d still been able to study their underlying principles, unpacking the formulae and diagrams and comparing them to how Equestrian teleportation worked. And while there had been more than a few differences, there had also been several points of similarity.
One of which was that the teleportation spells of both worlds had safeguards built into them that prevented the user from ending up inside a solid object.
If that would happen, then the spells’ safeguards would kick in, and reroute the caster to the nearest empty space that was large enough to allow for them. If there was no such space within a certain distance, then the spells wouldn’t activate at all, leaving the caster in their original location rather than transporting them somewhere that couldn’t physically accommodate them.
But what if the caster’s original location became unable to accommodate them? Say, because a huge mass of black crystals had slammed down to occupy it during the brief instant between teleporting and being magically dragged back? What would the spell’s safeguards do if something tried to return her to her starting point then?
Twilight knew what she was contemplating was incredibly risky. Although she still had alicorn magic left, even if she used it to bolster her teleportation spell there was no guarantee what she was planning would work. After all, bolstering a spell with her alicorn magic hadn’t let her overcome the curse Lex had put on Luna, and he’d used a curse to prevent teleportation now. It was entirely possible that his malediction would overcome her teleportation’s safeguards and she’d end up inside the mountain of black crystals that he’d conjured…which would be instantly fatal.
The thought should have been terrifying, which was why Twilight couldn’t help but feel surprised by the rush of morbid humor that came over her then. If I commit suicide by teleportation, that won’t be a forfeit on Lex’s part!
For a moment she almost laughed, but the urge was abruptly scattered as she felt another push against her shield, strong enough that it almost collapsed right then and there.
Biting her lip, Twilight seriously considered surrendering. For all that she trusted in the map, knowing that it was an extension of the Tree of Harmony, she wasn’t sure it wanted her to risk her life like this. If the Crystal Heart could fix Luna anyway, then did Lex taking a crown really matter?
Except she knew it wasn’t about a crown.
It was about living up to the faith her friends had in her. It was about demonstrating to Starlight Glimmer that friendship wasn’t something you gave up on, no matter how bad things got. It was about repaying Blueblood, as egotistical and narcissistic as he was, for letting her duel with what was most important to him.
And it was about showing Lex why the magic of friendship was the most important magic of all.
Her decision made, Twilight spared a glance upward. Using her teleportation spell, to say nothing of pouring her alicorn magic into it, would mean dropping her shield. If she wasn’t fast enough, she’d be hit with the full force of what Lex was throwing at her before she could even put her last-ditch effort into play.
Then the pressure from above increased again, and Twilight knew that if she didn’t try in the next few seconds, that would happen anyway.
Closing her eyes, Twilight took a deep breath and counted to three.
With a heavy crash, the mass of black crystals slammed down on Twilight’s position for the second time in less than a minute.
The impact wasn’t nearly as thunderous as the previous one had been, owing to the amassed tonnage only falling a few feet as Twilight’s shield spell collapsed, but to Lex it struck with much greater force than before.
He’d done it.
He’d made his haphazard, half-formed plan work.
He’d defeated Twilight Sparkle.
Despite his still feeling the residual damage from yesterday’s battles and resurrections, despite Twilight’s intuiting that he had almost no thaumaturgical magic left, despite her unexpected use of summoning magic forcing him to improvise, he’d managed to direct the flow of the battle to the end he wanted. Moreover, there had been no interruptions or interferences, meaning that there were no grounds for anypony to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory. He’d won the duel, and with it a crown of his own, one that the princesses would have no choice but to recognize.
Smirking at the thought, Lex ceased adding more black crystals to the enormous mass he’d already conjured, and the wave of weariness that ran through him then almost caused his knees to buckle. He could already tell that he wouldn’t be physically augmenting his magic for a while after this, not that it mattered too much since he’d used almost all of his dark magic in that last attack. Not to mention the wounds he’d taken from Behemiel’s attacks – translated back into physical injuries now that he’d returned to physical form – were starting to ache as well, though at least that he could ameliorate those, fumbling through the weak healing spell that the Night Mare had given him.
Once it was cast, Lex glanced back at where Twilight had been smashed beneath the conglomeration of black crystals, pausing just long enough to confirm how many seconds had passed. As severe as dropping what was effectively a small mountain on her appeared, he’d been very meticulous in gauging how much damage she’d take, wanting to conclusively incapacitate her without putting her life in jeopardy. To that end, he’d projected how much force he’d need to bring to bear against her defenses – broadly calculating how much her magic items and alicorn-granted earth pony toughness would insulate her from fatal injury – and for how long. And now they were approaching the limit of that duration.
Striding forward, a thought was all it took for Lex to dissolve the field of spikes that he’d raised, doing the same thing to the portion of the black crystals that had driven Twilight into the ground. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t necessary for him to drag her unconscious body forward and deposit it at Blueblood’s hooves; he could just as easily call him and everyone else over to see that she was beaten. But Lex had every intention of-
She wasn’t there.
Freezing in place, Lex stared at the hole in the ground where Twilight should have been, trying to make sense of what he was – or rather, wasn’t – seeing.
Hurriedly activating his circlet to examine the area for residual magic, Lex tried to figure out what had happened. Had she transmogrified herself into some alternate form in order to slip the band he’d put around her wings and escape? She had mentioned turning herself into a breezie once. Possibly a speed-enhancing spell to let her rush away in the instant between when her shield had collapsed and the mass of black crystals had come down? Or maybe she’d cast some sort of illusion, creating the appearance of falling into his trap when she’d actually avoided it altogether?
No, he decided uneasily. None of those make sense. Twilight was skilled, but he’d been putting too much pressure on her shield for her to keep it up while also casting a polymorphic spell; she’d have had to have dropped the former in order to use the latter, meaning she would have been crushed before being able to escape. If she’d created an illusion to avoid his trap then she never would have bothered wasting energy putting up a shield, or at least not for as long as she had; she’d have simply made it look like she’d either been defeated immediately, or only have put up a token struggle to prevent him from becoming suspicious. And even if she’d enhanced her speed to the level necessary to take advantage of the fraction of an instant between when her shield had fallen and the black crystals had come down, she’d still have torn her hooves to shreds running over the field of spikes he’d created.
Not to mention that his circlet wasn’t detecting any traces of those types of magic anyway. All that it was picking up were the remnants of her shield spell and those of a recent attempt at teleportation, the latter of which was clearly from when she’d initially fallen victim to the curse of dimensional impermeability that he’d laid down. But then where was she?! Where-
“NNNRRRRRAAAAAAUGH!”
A flash of light and a howl of pain made Lex spin around, just in time to see Twilight fall to the ground a short distance away from him, landing right outside of the anti-teleportation field he’d laid down.
Twilight groaned as she climbed to her hooves, panting for breath as she looked around. I made it! she realized shakily. I’m back!
That her plan had worked was, she knew, nothing short of miraculous. She’d essentially teleported under circumstances that left her with no ability to reach her destination…or any destination. With Lex’s curse trying to snap her back to her starting location, and her spell’s safeguards trying to move her somewhere else when they detected that location was occupied, she’d had nowhere to go in the most literal way imaginable.
The result was that, for a few seconds, she’d been stuck outside of physical space with no way back in.
It had been a torturous experience, and one that Twilight already knew she never wanted to go through again. There’d been nothing to see since there was no light, or even a medium for light to travel through, nor anything to hear since the same was true for sound as well. There’d been nothing to kick off of or push against, no sense of up or down, and it had only been when she’d felt an intense sense of discomfort radiating from her chest – and rapidly growing stronger – that she’d realized that she couldn’t breathe either. Worst had been how she hadn’t been able to move, since there was no space for her to move in, and yet she’d had a dim sense of intense pressure all the same, only she hadn’t been able to tell whether it was focused inward or outward, leaving her feeling like she was being stretched out but also compressed at the same time.
Needless to say, it had not been a pleasant experience; even now there were painful spasms shooting through her muscles with every move she made, her joints ached like she’d tried to bend them all the wrong way, and her head felt like she charged a brick wall full-tilt. But it worked, she reassured herself as she took a deep breath, savoring the sensation of being able to do so. It turned out okay, and now-
“Are you insane?!” Lex’s voice drew her back to herself, frowning as she turned to regard the incredulous look he was giving her. “You deliberately teleported under conditions where you had no viable point of return?! Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?!”
A small part of Twilight was impressed at how quickly he’d figured out what she’d done. The rest of her was focused on finishing what she’d started. “I do. But right now, I’m fighting for what I believe in, as well as everyone who believes in me, which means doing everything I can even if it’s risky. I thought that you, of all ponies, would understand that.”
An ugly look crossed his face then. “Dedication alone isn’t worthy of being lauded,” he spat. “It only has merit if what you’re trying to achieve is virtuous, and there’s nothing virtuous about your conflating friendship with leadership!”
His eyes flared as he spoke, and not just because of his rising anger; Twilight saw black crystals form around the end of his right foreleg, stretching from his hoof halfway to his elbow. A gauntlet, she realized. Just like the one Starlight said he used when he finished their fight yesterday.
With her headband on, that was enough to kick the analytical part of Twilight’s brain into overdrive. Her eyes flickered over to the massive pile of black crystals that Lex had dropped on her mere moments ago before returning to him. She’d heard the strain in his voice before, when he’d been trying to crush her, but even though he’d stopped he was still breathing heavily now, sweat gathering on his brow. Although he’d surprised her by using a thaumaturgical spell to trap Behemiel in ice, he hadn’t used one since, relying entirely on his dark magic. And if he was going to start physically attacking her next…
“You’re wrong, Lex.” Canting her head toward where everypony was watching them, Twilight kept her eyes locked on his own. “It’s because of my friends that I was able to become a princess, and it’s thanks to what they’ve taught me that I’ve been able to help protect Equestria and everypony in it, not just from monsters and disasters, but from anything that makes ponies unhappy.” Slowly, she extended a hoof out toward him. “I know you don’t have much magic left. Please, stand down. Let me show you how to be a great leader and a great friend to everypony here.”
If her words had any effect other than to make him angrier, she couldn’t see it. “I will not yield,” he rumbled darkly. “Administrating to a society means doing more than protecting it. The welfare of the people is more important than their happiness. And you” – he extended his gauntlet-clad hoof toward Twilight then, mirroring her posture, but the message his gesture sent couldn’t have been more different from hers – “are unfit to be a princess!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” replied Twilight steadily. “But when this duel is over, and you’re making peace with Celestia and Luna, I promise I won’t give up on teaching you friendship lessons.”
Then she started casting.
Lex immediately rushed toward her, his foreleg cocked back for a punch, but in his fatigued state he wasn’t able to reach her before she got her spell off. Immediately, she felt the magic of her dispelling spell impact the band he’d conjured around her middle. Like before, his magic warred with hers in a silent struggle. Unlike before, hers was victorious, the ring of black crystal disappearing a second later, freeing her wings.
She’d just finished extending them when Lex closed the remaining distance to her, leading with a heavy swing of his gauntleted hoof. But Lex had never been a brawler, and his exhaustion did him no favors, allowing Twilight to duck under the wild punch easily. Rather than fight back, she instead focused on getting into the air, flapping her wings heavily as she kicked off the ground, this time pulling her legs up before Lex’s desperate backswing could catch them.
And then she was flying upward, leaving him behind as she ascended out of reach. Rearing back, she sent a beam of magic directly at him, watching as he tried and failed to dodge out of the way, the hit almost knocking him off his hooves. He backed off then, and even if Twilight hadn’t noticed his lack of a counterattack – or even turning back into a shadow – the desperate anger and bitter frustration on his face told her everything she needed to know.
Knowing that he wouldn’t stop until he was, as per the terms of their duel, incapacitated, Twilight was already planning out her next phase of attack. Another lightning bolt would be too much in the state he’s in, but if he doesn’t have any way of attacking me up here, then that’s no problem. I can just wear him down gradually with my Equestrian spellcasting, and I still have some alicorn magic left-
Out in the crowd, Spike suddenly let out a belch of green flame, a scroll falling into his claws.
Unrolling it, his eyes widened a second later. “T-TWILIGHT!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “THERE’S AN EMERGENCY IN CANTERLOT!”
Twilight knew that she should have taken care of Lex before responding, that whatever was happening could likely wait a few minutes for her to finish the duel. But Canterlot was where she’d grown up. It was where her parents lived. Where Celestia and Luna lived. If it was being attacked…if some new monster had shown up…
Willow’s words in the aftermath of the lhaksharut’s attack came back to her then.
“There’s another type of inevitable, called maruts, which are almost as powerful as lhaksharuts. They enforce a different natural law, one that Princess Celestia is already in violation of: that all mortals must eventually die.”
Spinning in the air, Twilight turned her full attention toward Spike. “What is it?!”
Scanning the message, Spike shook his head. “I’m not sure…something about some member of the Royal Guard going crazy and attacking some ponies.” Although he wasn’t yelling quite so loud now, his voice carried easily, everyone falling silent as they listened. “One pony…” he gulped before continuing. “One pony is critically injured. Princess Celestia is sending a pegasus chariot to your castle. She wants you to get Soft Mane out front to meet it.” He looked up then, his face stricken. “Immediately.”
Twilight felt her blood turn into ice-water then. The map! she wailed silently. I KNEW there was a reason it didn’t tell us to bring Spike and Soft Mane with us to Vanhoover! If she had just left them back in Ponyville, there’d be no problem! Spike would have received the message and gotten Soft Mane ready on his own! But now…!
Trying not to panic, Twilight put her hooves to her headband, as if she could increase its output by touch. What do I do?! I think I have enough alicorn magic left to teleport myself and Soft Mane back home, but that’ll mean forfeiting the duel! But if I don’t, somepony might die because Soft Mane won’t be there to save them! How can I…
Then inspiration struck.
“Lex!” Twilight yelled suddenly. “I want to postpone the duel! You’ll agree to that if it’s to save somepony’s life, right?!”
“No.”
Twilight almost fell out of the sky. “What?! But you were just talking about the welfare of the people being the most important thing! How can you-”
“The welfare of the people is the most important thing,” shot back Lex, glaring up at her with no visible sign of delight at her dilemma. “And if you don't assist with helping whoever's injured, I'll be the first to condemn you. But I am NOT under any obligation to make it easier for you to discharge your moral duties, especially not at my own expense!”
For a moment, Twilight couldn't say anything, knowing that Lex was right. He wasn't actually preventing her from leaving – that anti-teleportation field of his couldn't have been that large, since it hadn't stopped her from teleporting when she'd rescued Behemiel – and he didn't have any reason for agreeing to postpone the duel instead of having her forfeit if she left, which she knew she had to do. One minute, she felt certain. I can't teleport all the way back to Ponyville in one go, but if I use all of my remaining alicorn magic, I can increase the range of my teleporting and get Soft Mane and me back home in a short series of them, and then I can do the same to come back. I'd only be gone for one minute! If only there was some way to pause the duel, or have someone else fill in for her while she was…was…
“The Royal Personage!” she blurted.
Below her, Lex raised a brow. “What?”
“The duel states that you're fighting the Royal Personage!” hurried Twilight. “That's how I stepped in! Even if I leave, there's still one pony here who can fulfill that term!”
Before Lex could respond, Twilight reached out and grabbed Soft Mane in her telekinesis, the half-human/pony yelping as she was lifted into the air and pulled toward the distraught alicorn. “Blueblood, I'm sorry, but I just need you to last for sixty seconds, then I'll be back!” Knowing that she'd waited too long already, Twilight cast her teleportation spell, focusing her alicorn magic into it and whisking herself and Soft Mane away.
Surrounded by his retainers and admirers, all of whom were suddenly looking at him, Prince Blueblood could only blink. “...huh?”
It was exceptionally rare for Prince Blueblood to find himself in a situation egregious enough to leave his noble self speechless.
It had happened when he’d come back from his ski trip to Mount Everhoof to attend Princess Cadance’s wedding – making sure to time it so that he’d arrive fashionably late – only to find that the “change-things” or whatever they were called had made an absolute mess of his city! The sight of that disgusting green goop everywhere, quite literally staining the splendor that was Canterlot, had almost made him faint in horror! The shock had been so great that he’d been forced to immediately take a long vacation to Trottingham to recover!
Then there had been that time when Celestia and Luna had vanished, forcing him to cancel his photo-safari to Somnambula – which, in all fairness, had been rather boring anyway, the mythical “sphinx” proving as elusive as it had ever been – and rush back home to find out what was going on. Fortunately, his senior royals had returned by then, but Blueblood could still remember being positively aghast to learn that upjumped rube Twilight Sparkle had been placed in charge! The thought of how his city must have suffered under her mismanagement had left Blueblood so despondent that only an extended stay at Rainbow Falls’ most luxurious spa resort had been able to cure him of his malaise.
What arrested Blueblood’s thought processes now, however, wasn’t an assault on his refined senses. Not because there wasn’t anything uncouth before him; the battlefield in front of him was filthy with dust and dirt and whatever those ugly black crystals were, and the conduct of both participants had been gauche in the extreme. But for the first time in a very long time, Blueblood had something more important to worry about.
Namely, that Lex Legis was staring directly at him, thirty feet away and closing fast.
“Sire?” came a reedy voice. “Sire? Shouldn’t you advance and break your opponent’s momentum?”
There was an odd tension in his valet’s voice that pulled Blueblood out of his paralysis, swallowing heavily. “Of course. I was just about to do that, you-”
The insult that he’d meant to level at his incompetent retainer died on Blueblood’s lips as he glanced over and saw that, rather than standing a tail-length back and to the left of him as a proper servant should, his valet had backed over a dozen feet away from him and was still retreating. Nor was he alone in doing so. All the rest of his attendants, as well as those tiresome hangers-on from Las Pegasus, were distancing themselves from him, glancing wide-eyed between himself and the pony stalking toward him.
Sputtering, Blueblood turned back toward the pony in question, trying to think up the perfect set of blistering invectives that would let the misbegotten ruffian know precisely what would happen to him if he dared to pursue his ill-fated course of action.
But when Blueblood locked eyes with Lex again, now only twenty feet away, all that came out of his mouth was a whimper.
Blueblood had been shocked to the point of mild nausea when the duel had, unthinkably, actually commenced in an open exchange of hostilities. While he knew that Princess Twilight invoked no real awe compared to his illustrious self, the fact that Lex Legis hadn’t balked in the slightest at fighting her had rocked Blueblood to the core. At that moment, he’d finally realized just how badly he’d misjudged Lex’s character.
This wasn’t some crazy pony on a course of unchecked social suicide.
This wasn’t some doltish boor who didn’t understand what he was getting himself into.
Rather, this was somepony who knew full well that he was challenging the core institutions of Equestrian society. Who truly believed that he could stand up to the weight of over a thousand years of tradition and emerge triumphant. Who was willing to get his hooves dirty in barbaric acts of violence in order to achieve what he wanted.
Which meant that Lex Legis hadn’t been posturing when he’d accepted Blueblood’s challenge. He’d accepted it fully intending to fight the duel, rather than engaging in brinksmareship while planning to avoid it. And as Blueblood had watched Princess Twilight struggle against the would-be usurper, he’d come into the full, visceral horror of exactly what he stood to lose if Lex Legis emerged triumphant.
That knowledge was all that kept Blueblood’s hooves rooted in place as Lex closed to within ten feet of him, his instincts screaming at him to run. The brute had a wild look in his eyes – which were glowing in those ghastly colors again – and his lips were drawn back in a vicious snarl, striding forward in a heavy lurch that was almost a jog. And his right foreleg, the one covered in jagged black crystals, was rising up and winding back…
“B-BACK!” yelped Blueblood, his voice coming out a few octaves higher than he’d intended. “BACK I SAY!”
And without waiting for Lex to respond, he lowered his horn at the reprobate and called upon his magic.
Although his jaw was clenched so hard that it made his teeth ache, Lex kept careful count of each passing second as he advanced on Blueblood.
Sixty seconds. He had sixty seconds to either make the useless fop surrender or knock him unconscious. And that was if Twilight had been telling the truth about how long it would take her to return. Her habitual disinclination to control tactical information suggested that she was, but Lex didn’t want to take a chance if he could help it. Which left him with precious little time to bludgeon the quivering stallion in front of him into submission.
Because, as much as it galled him to admit it, Lex knew that he needed to accept Twilight’s interpretation of the rules.
Her assertion – that she and Blueblood could swap in for each other during the course of the duel, since they both could be identified as “The Royal Personage” – was utterly fraudulent, of course. The illogicalities in what she’d suggested were both numerous and glaring, to the point of being an insult to his intelligence. By all rights, he should have insisted that her vacating the field be taken as an immediate forfeit.
But Lex knew he couldn’t do that. Not when the entire point of this exercise was to gain legitimacy as a prince. That was the only way he’d be able to secure the loan that he wanted now that Blueblood had poisoned the minds of the Las Pegasus delegation against him. That meant that his victory here had to be beyond all possible reproach, regardless of how thin it was. There couldn’t be even the slightest shadow of a doubt about the validity of what he achieved here today. Otherwise this would be all for naught; even if Twilight didn’t press a claim that the duel wasn’t conclusive, Celestia and Luna would. Lex felt sure of that, especially given what River had told him about the amount of influence royalty wielded among high-society ponies. That would ruin what he was trying to achieve in a way that no mere personal animus could. It was fine if they rebuked him, so long as they acknowledged to the rest of Equestria that he had earned his place among their ranks.
Which meant that one way or the other, Blueblood needed to be overcome before Twilight returned.
Fortunately, the dandy seemed to have no idea how to react to being put on the spot, simply staring at Lex with a dumbstruck expression as the distance between them shrank. It was only when his valet muttered something to him that Blueblood seemed to realize what was happening, choking out a reply before gulping and lowering his horn. “B-BACK!” he shrieked. “BACK I SAY!”
The beam of magic he unleashed then was thin to the point of being dainty, the sort of energy blast that would have been useful for zapping an irritating horsefly, but not much else.
Lex was injured and exhausted. He was also clad in numerous magical defenses, ranging from the protective spells he’d long since woven around himself permanently – and which the Night Mare had augmented when she’d bestowed her power on him – to the cloak and amulet draped over him to the dusty rose prism orbiting his head alongside the other gemstones. And while he knew full well that a skilled combatant could pierce his defenses, Twilight being one of the most recent to do so, River’s description of Blueblood had made him sound like anything but.
As such, Lex wasn’t surprised in the least when Blueblood’s anemic magical beam hit him in the chest with all the force of a lightly-thrown pebble, bouncing off without inflicting so much as cosmetic damage.
Blueblood had just enough time for his eyes to widen, lips curling back in a grimace. “Wha-”
Then Lex’s punch connected with the side of his face.
The blow knocked Blueblood into the dirt, his cry of pain muffled as his he hit the ground muzzle-first. But he immediately scrambled back onto his hooves, panic driving him as he stumbled away from Lex. “S-stay away!”
“Yield!” growled Lex, keeping pace with the terrified prince. “Now!”
The hysterical scream was prompted by Lex telekinetically grabbing Blueblood’s foreleg, bringing the panicked stallion’s retreat to a sudden halt. Terrified, it took Blueblood a moment to remember that he could counter with his own telekinesis, and his horn lit up a moment later, the golden aura clashing with the Lex’s purple one. The latter disappeared immediately, and in his fear Blueblood didn’t realize that it had been released on purpose, his eyes immediately darting back upward-
This time Lex’s punch collided directly with his nose, which arced blood as his head snapped back.
“YIELD!” boomed Lex, the voice following Blueblood as he turned and ran blindly, thinking only of escape, his eyes squeezed shut as he tried to block out the pain that was rapidly becoming his whole world.
That pain grew worse a moment later as he charged headfirst into the mound of black crystals that Lex had conjured before. Bouncing off, he dumbly regarded the black barrier with watery eyes for a moment before picking himself up, knowing that if he stopped moving for even a moment the monster chasing him would-
Lex’s gauntleted hoof impacted Blueblood’s face for a third time, smashing the other side of his head against the unmoving mountain of black crystal.
“YIELD!!!”
For a moment Blueblood couldn’t answer, couldn’t even understand what was being said, his vision swimming in a way that made him feel sick to his stomach. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself, only for a renewed sense of panic to rush through him as he felt a foreign object in his mouth. Doubling over, he spit it out along with a mouthful of blood, only belatedly realizing that it was one of his teeth.
His head was abruptly yanked back, Lex having curled one hoof his horn and pulled it like a lever, standing upright as he reared back his crystal-clad foreleg for another blow…
And that was all Blueblood could take.
“Th-thtop!” he wailed, barely able to make the words come out right, his nose throbbing in agony. “I gib!”
Lex didn’t throw his punch, but he didn’t lower his hoof either. “Louder!”
“I GIB!” cried Blueblood, all dignity gone as he began to sob. “I YIELB!”
Still not lowering his hoof, Lex’s head snapped around, eyes searching Blueblood’s retinue until he found his valet. “Confirm this!” he demanded.
To his mild surprise, the effete stallion replied immediately. “Prince Blueblood yields!” he yelled shrilly, before looking at the rest of the royal retinue, his eyes wide. “He yields the duel! We’re free of him!”
Jubilant cheering immediately erupted from Blueblood’s entourage, more than one maid shrieking joyfully as the stewards cried out in exultation. Several began dancing spontaneously, either alone or grabbing one of their fellow servants as they celebrated without restraint. Caps were thrown into the air as horns launched fireworks.
The jubilation was no less wild among the Vanhoover ponies, roaring at the top of their lungs in triumph. Pegasi shot into the sky, whistling and clapping as they flew in loops, Straightlace and Thermal Draft leading them. Earth ponies reared up, slamming their hooves in applause as they whooped and hollered, Fruit Crunch pounding the ground before grabbing Hopscotch in a hug and whirled her around, the two of them laughing as her back legs left the ground. Unicorns lit their horns as brightly as they could, Garden Gate’s aura shining as she tossed Fiddlesticks into the air and catching her again, the filly shrieking happily at the impromptu flight, while Feathercap waved his binoculars wildly. Lyden howled, the sound long and triumphant. C. Shells and Ocean Spray kissed passionately. Sandbar and Funshine stood on their hind legs and chest-bumped each other. And River, knowing that it was her job to formally as Lex’s representative to formally declare his victory, yelled “He wins! Lex wins!” over and over.
But not everypony celebrated. Clustered in a small group, Twilight’s friends backed away from the joyous crowds, moving in the direction of the only other ponies who seemed perturbed by what was happening: the ones from Las Pegasus, who blinked and watched the proceedings with blank expressions.
For his part, Lex had just relaxed his aggressive posture when he spotted Sonata and Aria breaking through the crowd and making a beeline for him. “Find Cleansweep,” he instructed the two, raising his voice as they galloped toward him. “Before anything else, I want her to heal Blue-, oof!”
His instructions were completely disregarded as the two mares tackled him, sending the three of them rolling across the ground before they came to a stop, the two mares on top of him.
“You totes did it!” cheered Sonata.
“You’re a prince now!” purred Aria.
“Master Legis!” called Feather Duster, still cradling Tiddlywinks in her hooves – the baby shrieking with delight at the sound of so much laughter – as she flew over the three of them. “Congratulations!”
“Find your daughter and have her fix that idiot’s injuries!” scowled Lex, pointing at Blueblood as best he could from beneath the two Sirens, who were already nuzzling him amorously. “And the two of you, control yourse-”
But once again he was interrupted as a flash erupted at the edge of his vision, instantly fading away to reveal a panting purple alicorn, her face falling as she looked around. “No!”
Sonata and Aria hopped up at once, interposing themselves between Twilight and Lex. But they didn’t have a chance to say anything before another voice spoke up. “EVERYPONY!” came the shrill tones of Blueblood’s valet, rushing out onto the dueling ground with a bundle carried awkwardly in one foreleg. “EVERYPONY! MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE? EVERYPONY!”
It took a moment for everyone to quiet down, but when the silence fell it was sudden, and the valet adjusted his volume accordingly as he strode toward Lex. “As per the terms of the duel, agreed upon by all parties, Prince Blueblood shall immediately turn his royal titles, and all of their attendant privileges and responsibilities, over to Lex Legis!”
Grinning so widely it must have hurt his cheeks, he quieted as he turned toward the pony in question, holding the bundle toward him. “Your Highness, if I may?”
Climbing to his hooves, Lex eyed what the stallion was offering him, and gave a single nod.
The valet shuffled forward, Lex holding still as the smaller stallion telekinetically removed his cloak first, then his circlet, carefully passing them to Aria – the pony closest to him – before revealing what he’d been carrying:
Prince Blueblood’s mantle and crown.
Slowly, reverently, the smaller stallion laid the violet cloak over Lex’s back, affixing the clasp before moving the crown over his head.
But before he could lay it down, his aura – a thin, pasty beige – was overwritten by one of thick, roiling purple.
Blinking, the valet looked at Lex questioningly. When he received a smooth stare in reply, he bowed, releasing the crown, leaving it in his new lord’s magical grasp.
For several moments, Lex held the sapphire-and-platinum regalia in front of himself, looking it over as though examining it at length.
And then he placed the crown upon his head.
“I GIVE YOU,” called the valet, his voice once again stentorian, “PRINCE LEX LEGIS!”
The cheers seemed ready to resume, but before anypony could take so much as a breath, Lex raised a hoof, calling for silence. When he received it, he lowered his hoof slowly, letting his eyes sweep over everypony assembled, looking them all over one at a time. It was only after he'd met the gaze of everyone watching that he spoke a single word.
“Kneel.”
Some ponies obeyed immediately, as Garden Gate, River Bank, the Night Mare's Knights, and many others fell to their knees without hesitation.
Others obeyed more slowly, the Las Pegasus ponies all glancing at each other in confusion and anxiety before they slowly knelt down.
A few didn't kneel at all, Twilight flying over to join her friends, watching the coronation with gazes that alternated between worry and sorrow.
But nopony dared to say anything, silenced by the magnitude of what was happening.
Nopony except one, as Sonata leaned over to her sister and spoke in a whisper as soft as it was profound.
“No,” answered Nosey numbly as she stared at the hospital floor, using her hooves to pull the blanket she’d been given around herself tighter, her horn not having recovered enough for her to do it telekinetically.
“He didn’t say anything at all about what he was planning on doing after he’d finished questioning you?” continued the guard, one eyebrow raised as he glanced at her over the top of his notepad, quill held at the ready.
The skeptical tone in his voice made Nosey flinch. She wasn’t so out of it that she couldn’t recognize the irony of the situation – she’d interviewed plenty of ponies over the course of her career, and knew that gathering information often meant pushing a reluctant witness – but she’d never fully appreciated how it felt to be on the other side of this exchange before now. “No.”
The guard opened his mouth to continue, but another voice beat him to the punch before he could. “Interrogated,” snapped a female voice that was only slightly warmer than a frozen lake.
The guard blinked, turning his attention to the middle-aged unicorn mare with the deep blue mane and tail, dark gray coat, and crossword puzzle cutie mark. “Ma’am?”
“You said that criminal ‘questioned’ my daughter,” continued Wordsy Windbag, telekinetically shoving the cupful of hot cocoa into Nosey’s hooves as she got right in the guard’s face. “The proper term is that he ‘interrogated’ her. Or perhaps ‘terrorized’ her. Or even ‘tortured’ her. Are you writing those down?”
Frowning, the guard pulled his notepad away before Wordsy could look at what he’d scribbled on it. “Ma’am, please. Our focus is on tracking down Commander Silhouette so that we can ascertain exactly what happened-”
“You know what happened!” growled Wordsy, stepping forward until she was nose-to-nose with the guard. “That maniac abused, attacked, and assaulted my daughter!” Raising a hoof, she jabbed the guard’s armor. “And where do you get off calling that fiend ‘commander’ anyway?! Nosey told you an hour ago that Princess Luna stripped him of his rank when they were in Vanhoover!”
The guard bristled. “First of all, ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back. Second of all, there’ve been no orders from the princesses with regard to Commander Silhouette’s rank changing. And third of all, it’s because the prior contact that your daughter had with the commander back in Vanhoover was – by her own admission – hostile that we need more information before we can draw any firm conclusions about what happened this morning, especially since the only other eyewitness is currently unable to give testimony.”
Nosey couldn’t hold back a choked sob at that, causing Wordsy’s face to darken as she began to lay into the guard. “You atrocious, contemptible, detestable, reprehensible, vile-”
But her tirade of insults was interrupted as a new voice cut in. “Honey, maybe I should talk to the guard for a moment?”
Furious, Wordsy rounded on the newcomer, a unicorn stallion with a pale green coat, a blond mane and tail that were both cut short, and his cutie mark depicting several colorful pills. “Pill, if you’d heard what this…this…disgrace was saying about our daughter…!”
Adjusting his glasses, Pill Bug gently but firmly interposed himself between Wordsy and the guard, smiling as he put a hoof around the latter. “I’m terribly sorry about my wife. She hasn’t been getting enough vitamin D lately,” he explained as he gently began guiding the guard back down the hospital hallway. “Also, I think our daughter’s iron levels are low again. She had that problem all the time as a child; never would finish her peas. I’ve got some iron supplements here with me and they’ll perk her right up, but they take a little time to kick in. Do you think we could have Nosey give you that statement later?”
The guard frowned, looking ready to protest. “Actually, I really need-”
But Pill Bug kept right on going. “You know, you look a little tense. Do you get enough B vitamins in your diet? Those are really important for reducing anxiety. Maybe some chamomile if you’d prefer that? Obviously tablets are better, but I think they have it in tea form around here somewhere…” His voice faded out as he guided the guard around the corner.
Huffing, Wordsy sat down next to her daughter, fussing with her blanket. “Honestly, the nerve of that guard! Acting like that ‘commander’ of his is the real victim here, I swear!”
“They don’t want the embarrassment,” murmured Nosey as she stared into her cocoa, her voice a dull monotone. “Everypony knows that the Royal Guard was no help when Nightmare Moon came back, or when the changelings invaded, or when the princesses vanished last year. Having one of their own go bad would make them look even worse, so they’re desperate to avoid having that be the case.”
“That doesn’t mean they get to make it sound like what happened is your fault!” growled Wordsy. “Of all the backward, cowardly, feckless-”
“Maybe it was…”
“-underhoofed, unprincipled, unscrupulous-, wait, what?” Blinking as she finally registered what her daughter had just said, Wordsy’s anger was replaced with concern in an instant. “No! Nosey, sweetheart, look at me!” Gently putting a hoof under the younger mare’s chin, Wordsy gently raised her head until she was looking her in the eyes. “Absolutely none of this is your fault! Zero, zilch, zip!”
Nosey’s lip quivered, a fresh round of tears filling her eyes. “…I pushed him…”
Wordsy blinked, tilting her head. “What?”
“Silhouette,” explained Nosey. “I knew that mentioning Princess Luna would set him off. Everytime she came up, he went completely to pieces. So when Line started talking about her, I thought…I thought that maybe if I kept the conversation going, it would drive Silhouette over the edge, and I’d be able to escape.” A small plop could be heard as a tear ran down her cheek, falling into her cocoa. “And because of that, Line is…is…”
She couldn’t finish as her mother wrapped her into a hug, letting Nosey weep as she rocked her.
They were still like that when Pill Bug returned a few minutes later, sitting on Nosey’s other side and silently joining in the embrace. It was only when Nosey, temporarily out of tears, broke the hug that he spoke up. “I got the guard to agree that now wasn’t a good time to take your statement. He’ll come back later in the evening.”
“I can’t do it this evening,” sniffled Nosey. “I need to sit down with Princess Luna then.”
“Sweety, you can’t still be thinking of going to that interview,” protested Wordsy. “Not after what just happened.”
“It’s what Line wanted,” insisted Nosey, her voice taking on the stubborn tone she’d always used whenever her parents had tried to talk her out of something. “Even after we had that fight, and I said all those horrible things to him, he still wanted me to be the one to talk to her, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
Over her head, Pill and Wordsy shared a worried look, but knew better than to push the issue with the state Nosey was in. “Alright, sweetheart,” murmured Wordsy.
“I’m sure you’ll make him proud,” smiled Pill.
Nosey managed a wan smile of her own at that, before taking a breath, sitting up a little straighter as she looked at her dad. “Has there been any change in how he’s doing?”
Pill’s smile faltered. “Sweety, it’s only been a few hours. They’re still trying all sorts of things.”
“Dad, c’mon…” Putting her cocoa down, Nosey waved a hoof at her cutie mark. “What are the doctors saying?”
Pill Bug licked his lips. “You really shouldn’t be worrying about that right now,” he pleaded. But Nosey kept staring at him, and after several seconds he sighed, looking away. “He’s not responding as well as they’d hoped. Right now, they can keep his heart beating and his lungs working, but other than that…”
“Oh…”
Wincing at the heartbroken tone in her daughter’s voice, Wordsy plastered a smile on her face as she put a foreleg around Nosey. “Hey, it’s not all bad news. When I was getting you that cocoa, I overheard a nurse say that Princess Celestia herself is doing everything she can to help. Supposedly she’s called in some sort of specialist!”
“Has she talked to his wife?” The question had barely left Nosey’s lips when she realized that she hadn’t heard anything about the rest of Line’s family. “Has anypony even told her what happened? We…we came right here from my building, I didn’t even think to ask-”
“She knows,” interjected Wordsy quickly. “She knows, sweetheart. I saw her a little while ago, while you were being bandaged up.”
“What…” Nosey needed a second before she was able to ask her next question. “What about his kids?”
“They’re still in school right now,” murmured her mother. “Two of the Royal Guard are going to pick them up as soon as classes end and bring them here.”
“And maybe by that time the princess’s specialist will have arrived,” added Pill. “Line could be well on the way to recovery by the time his children even hear about this.”
But Nosey didn’t seem to be listening at that point, putting her cocoa down as she staggered to her hooves. “I should go talk to her…tell her how sorry I am for this…”
Both of her parents were at her side in an instant. “Nosey, that’s not a good idea right now,” cautioned her father. “You’ve just been through a terrible shock, you don’t need to put yourself through anything else at the moment.”
Wordsy nodded. “And you’ll need to save your strength for when you talk to Princess Luna tonight, right?”
“I should have told him to run.” As if deaf to what her parents were saying, Nosey looked down the empty hallway, her eyes haunted. “I should have told him to run and get help as soon as I had the chance. Maybe then-”
“Nosey, you can’t do this to yourself.” On the surface Wordsy’s voice was made of steel, with only a slight tremor to betray that she was begging rather than ordering. “There’s no way to know what would have happened if you’d done that. It might have made things worse.”
“Not to mention that Line would never have run away, even if you’d told him to.” Gently guiding Nosey back down onto the bench with the help of his wife, Pill gave his daughter a small smile. “One way or another, once he knew that you were in trouble, he was going to come charging in.”
“…”
Silence fell then, but it only lasted a few seconds before Wordsy couldn’t bear it anymore. “Nosey…what happened in Vanhoover?”
Pill gave his wife a sharp look. “Wordsy…”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” continued Wordsy, not taking her eyes off of her daughter. “I don’t want to pry, especially right now. It’s just…we didn’t even know you were back until the Royal Guard came to fetch us this morning, and then you say that you met the pony who attacked you while you were there, that Princess Luna demoted him, and that he has some sort of grudge against someone you were interviewing out there.” She shrugged helplessly. “It’s befuddling, confusing, disconcerting…”
“Maybe we should all find some lunch first,” cut in Pill. “I bet they have some grapefruit around here somewhere. The high vitamin C count helps with healing injuries, fighting off infection-”
“-and absorbing iron,” finished Nosey with a small laugh, shaking her head. “It’s okay, Dad. Mom’s right. I know this must have been awful for you both, especially with how it all just came out of nowhere like this. I owe you an explanation.”
“Only if you feel up to it.” Wordsy wrapped a hoof around her daughter’s.
Her father repeated the gesture with her other hoof. “We do want to know what’s going on,” he admitted. “But not if it makes it harder for you to recover.”
“No.” Taking a deep breath, Nosey sat up straighter. “No. I want to talk about it. I think…I think I need to.”
Neither of her parents said anything, letting her go at her own pace.
For several minutes Nosey was silent, trying to sort it all out in her own head. Tall Tale. Sonata. The dragon. Vanhoover. Aria. The sea monsters. The camp ponies. Xiriel. The ghouls. The princesses. Silhouette.
And Lex.
“I went to Tall Tale to write a pony interest story about how it was recovering after the Elemental Bleeds,” she began at last. “While I was there, I met a stallion…”
“The guests from Las Pegasus have all been shown to their accommodations, and are ready to meet with you at your convenience, Your Highness,” reported River, grinning widely as she moved to take a seat at the far end of Lex’s study.
From behind the desk that dominated the back corner of the room, Lex didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. “I would find it convenient to do this now. The sooner I can take out a loan from those ponies, the sooner I’ll be able to start repairing Vanhoover in earnest.”
“If I may be so bold, Your Highness,” chirped Stuffed Shirt, the stallion who had been Blueblood’s – and was now Lex’s – valet. Throwing a suspicious glance at Feather Duster, who was standing behind his new employer in the traditional position of a personal attendant, he stepped forward from his position beside the study’s entrance, smiling deferentially. “I believe it may be helpful to keep the Las Pegasus ponies waiting. Doing so sends the message that they’re the ones here to serve your interests, rather than the other way around. That will help to quash any ideas they may have about taking advantage of your being new to your royal status.”
“Anyone who thinks they can take advantage of Lex is in for a rude awakening,” snickered Aria. Seated on the edge of Lex’s desk, she shot the scrawny stallion a dark smile. “I tried it once, and I got spanked. Hard.” Shifting her weight in a way that was almost a wriggle, she grinned as she watched the scandalized servant’s face turn red.
He wasn’t the only one, Cloudbank needing a moment to collect herself before she glanced at River. “Won’t they be upset if Lex makes them sit around and wait, though?”
“Are you kidding?” Barely able to keep herself from laughing, River shook her head. “They get to be the first ponies to meet the new prince. If we told them to wait a month, they’d do it!”
“Our finances won’t last a month,” rumbled Lex. “Which is why Vanhoover needs an infusion of bits as soon as possible. The time it will take those ponies to travel back to Las Pegasus, round up the first payment, and send it here will already eat into most of our remaining resources. And even if those ponies are as servile toward royalty as you’ve claimed, and agree to all of my terms without protest, securing the loan I want from them will still require hours – more likely days – of meetings.”
“How come?” piped up Sonata. Seated on the other side of his desk, across from Aria, she tilted her head. “I mean, River made it sound like these guys are gonna do whatever you want, right?”
The last word was directed at the mare in question, who nodded. “These ponies were all willing to kiss Blueblood’s flank in hopes of getting in good with him. I really don’t think our new prince will have any trouble keeping them in line.” River’s words came out amid an undercurrent of chuckles, making no attempt to hide how satisfying she found that prospect.
“Right,” nodded Sonata, before turning back to Lex. “So how come this is gonna take so long? Can’t you just say ‘gimme the money’ and have them say ‘okay’ and that’s that?”
“While simplistic, your, ah, paramour is correct, Your Highness,” noted Stuffed Shirt, giving Sonata an uncomfortable look before turning his full attention to Lex. “The traditional relationship between royalty and ponies of means is that the latter give gifts to the former, typically via oral agreement. When documentation is necessary, such as in the bequeathment of property, their respective staffs handle the details that their betters have already agreed upon. To personally haggle with your guests about the specifics, and over a loan, no less…” He let his voice trail away, clearly uncomfortable with the prospect of his new liege going into debt.
“Actually, I’m a little curious about that as well,” added Cloudbank. “Lex, why ask for a loan instead-”
“Your Highness,” cut in Stuffed Shirt, frowning in disapproval. “The proper term of address for a prince is ‘Your Highness.’ Or ‘Your Royal Highness’ if you want to emphasize your obeisance to the crown. ‘Sire’ or ‘Prince Lex’ are also acceptable. The only exceptions are family or those who have an intimate relationship with the sovereign pony in question. Seeing as you do not-”
“That’s enough.”
Lex’s rebuke was quiet, but it was enough to make Stuffed Shirt flinch. “But Sire, protocol-”
“Matters only as much as I want it to, which right now is very little.” Although Lex’s eyes changed color only for a second, that was more than enough to quell Stuffed Shirt’s protests, the valet slinking backward until he was again standing next to the entrance to the study, murmuring apologies the entire way.
As he did, Lex took a moment to calm himself. Stuffed Shirt hadn’t done anything wrong, he knew; as a royal valet, part of his job was to make sure that various conventions and formalities were observed. But seeing him dress down Cloudbank on his behalf like that had made Lex wince internally, still viscerally aware of how badly he’d failed the pegasus mare by not protecting her from being slaughtered by Xiriel. That one of her first acts after being brought back to life had been to assist him in his fight against Starlight Glimmer had only exacerbated his discomfort now. For someone who strove to live their life in an upstanding manner, it was an intolerable feeling.
“To answer your question,” he continued as he turned his attention to Cloudbank, his lingering guilt driving him to indulge her, “there are several reasons I want a loan rather than a gift. First, because I suspect that these ponies will be more inclined to agree to a larger sum if I make it clear that I intend to pay it back, with interest. Second, because successfully paying back the debt will establish that my government’s credit is reliable. And third…”
He glanced at Stuffed Shirt again. Everypony else in the room with him now was someone he trusted, with the stallion being the only one who hadn’t proven himself. But while Lex was tempted the send the gangly unicorn out of the study, he checked that urge. The Night Mare’s lesson about his needing to delegate responsibility among the ponies under his authority was even more fresh in his mind than his guilty conscience toward Cloudbank.
Stuffed Shirt’s position as Blueblood’s valet meant that he doubtlessly had connections to the various retainers surrounding the princesses. It would be a simple matter for him to pass them sensitive information, be it disguised in otherwise-innocuous letters to friends and colleagues, meeting clandestinely with ponies who would run back to Canterlot with what he told them, or simply reporting to Luna in his dreams, something Lex felt certain she’d still be able to do since his curse hadn’t suppressed the magic of her cutie mark. Those risks – which extended, to a lesser degree, to all of the servants that he’d inherited from Blueblood – were all very real.
It was all too easy for Lex to imagine his new retainers celebrating his downfall the way that they had celebrated their previous employer’s.
But at the same time, this particular secret wasn’t really anything that Stuffed Shirt could act on. While what Lex wanted from the Las Pegasus ponies was exceptionally important to his future plans, the deal would be struck before they left Vanhoover, which would give Celestia no real time to react even if Stuffed Shirt told Luna everything in a dream tonight. So if the valet tried to use this information against him, he – or someone else among his group, if he told them what he heard here – would need to do it here, on their own, before the loan agreement was completed. Such subterfuge would be much easier to detect and defeat, thanks to the support of the ponies Lex already trusted, and would serve as a decent barometer of how reliable the newest addition to his inner circle was.
“Third, the loan won’t be made by those ponies directly. Instead, I’m going to have them form a corporate entity, which they’ll finance, whose sole purpose will be to loan money to my administration. Doing so guarantees that Las Pegasus will come under my authority.” He leaned back in his seat then, pushing his suspicions and recriminations away in favor of a moment of self-satisfaction at how elegant his plan was.
At least until Garden Gate, who had been silent up until now, spoke up from where she was sitting at the small writing desk opposite Stuffed Shirt. “…I don’t understand.”
Frowning, his enthusiasm dampened, Lex tried again. “Once they agree to form a corporation for the purpose of loaning my government money, they’ll all be bound to the terms agreed therein, not just individually but as a group. Not only will they have a vested interest in the success of my rule – since that’s the only way they’ll get their money back – but the corporate structure will serve as an entity that polices its aggregate members against financial malfeasance or fiscal irresponsibility, assuring compliance.”
Silence fell for a long moment, before Aria looked at River. “You’re a banker. Translate.”
“This isn’t exactly my area,” mumbled River. “My institutions usually dealt with private accounts, safety deposit boxes, letters of credit, that sort of thing. This is…”
“Let me try this again,” growled Lex after River trailed off. “Rather than having two dozen individual agreements between myself and everypony from Las Pegasus, I'll have one agreement with the group those ponies have formed. So now, instead of it being my problem if one pony can’t live up to their promises, it’s the rest of the group’s problem.”
“Ohhh,” nodded Sonata, a distant look in her eyes. “It’s like how a big music contest judges your entire band, so if the drummer gets sick, you’ll all be disqualified even though everyone else showed up on time, since you still can’t play.”
“So you better make sure the entire band shows up, no matter what,” nodded Aria. “That makes sense.”
“…close enough,” sighed Lex disgustedly.
“And that gives you control of Las Pegasus?” asked Cloudbank, trying not to sound overly skeptical.
By now thoroughly irked that no one could see what was right in front of them, Lex’s response was more sardonic than usual. “This corporation will be composed of the richest and most influential members of the city, all of whom are now operating under a collective obligation that invests heavily in my success. When I declare that Las Pegasus is now part of an independent polity from Equestria – along with Vanhoover, Tall Tale, and the surrounding territories – under my absolute control, do you really think they’ll refuse to recognize my authority?”
Cloudbank’s eyes widened. “Wait…”
But she was beaten to the punch as Stuffed Shirt took a step forward, his jaw hanging open. “Y-Your Highness,” he began, needing a moment to find his voice. “Your Highness, are you saying…?”
“You already saw that I have the support of everypony here in Vanhoover,” replied Lex flatly. “And the situation is similar in Tall Tale. Once this agreement is struck and I have Las Pegasus, every major city on the western coast will answer to me. Since the satellite villages and nearby townships depend on those cities, they’ll follow suit. I’ve repeatedly demonstrated that my administration will work to uplift those ponies it oversees, more so than the princesses have, so there can be no credible claim that I don’t have the requisite moral authority to rule on my own. And I’ve showcased that I can resist any challenges the princesses can throw at me anyway.”
“So…so becoming a prince…?” gulped Stuffed Shirt.
“Wasn’t part of my original plan,” admitted Lex. “I didn’t foresee Blueblood being as monumentally stupid as he was. But now that I’ve seized his title, I suspect that everypony will accept what’s going to happen even easier than they would have otherwise. After all, once it becomes common knowledge that I'm a prince, controlling territory will simply seem like a natural extension of that. Right now it's just a matter of waiting for word to spread that I've become royalty, along with letting the new corporation establish itself in Las Pegasus.” That brought a thin smile to Lex's lips, knowing that for once time was on his side.
“But by this time next year, I won't be a prince anymore. I'll be a king.”
“Next is the Trottingham residence,” announced Stuffed Shirt, turning the page of the thick tome that he’d produced.
“It’s a relatively recent addition to the royal holdings, having been gifted to Prince Blueblood’s great-great-grandmother, Princess Pureblood. With a ninety-eight hundred square-foot dwelling sitting on a little less than fifteen hundred acres of land, it’s really more of a bungalow than a proper estate,” he continued, shooting Lex an apologetic look. “There’s only a single servant stationed there full-time; an earth mare named Throw Rug. She’s as old as the hills, but she keeps the place tidy and the clocks wound, along with overseeing some local hires who come in once a week to manage the grounds.”
“Wait, so that Blueblood guy has some sweet old lady cleaning one of his big houses all by herself?” Looking up from where she’d been batting at the iridescent spindle floating over her head – Lex having given it to her to play with – Sonata frowned. “That’s awful! Lex, you’ll send her some help, right?”
“And break up her little love nest?” snickered Aria, glancing at Stuffed Shirt with a leer. “It’s your job to know what all the other servants are up to, right? Be honest: those groundskeepers she brings over are all doing her in the master bedroom every week, aren’t they?”
Bristling, Stuffed Shirt gave both mares an indignant look. “I’ll have you know that I asked Throw Rug if she wanted to retire two years ago, when Prince Blueblood last elected to stay in Trottingham. She indicated that she was quite satisfied with her current arrangement, and didn’t want anything to change.”
“Oh, I bet she was ‘satisfied,’ alright,” leered Aria, clearly enjoying having someone new to tease. “She probably-”
“Aria.”
One word from Lex was all it took to bring the Siren up short. Although she knew he wouldn’t do anything as awful as taking away her voice again, the last thing she wanted was to get another curse because she’d pushed him too far, not when she still couldn’t enjoy being touched unless she was within a few feet of him. “I was just having a little fun,” she groused as she laid back down, returning her attention to the magazine she’d gotten from one of the maids.
“Hmph!” Taking a moment to recover his poise, Stuffed Shirt turned to the next page in his book, his face brightening as he did so. “Next we have the Manehattan assets. These include not only real estate, but a magnificent collection of antiques, portraits, and other objets d’art, most of which are on loan to various museums and galleries. Further, you also have permanent memberships in a number very exclusive institutions, as well as reserved seating at several of the city’s most highly-rated theaters and eateries.” Taking a moment to look the listings over with a fond smile, Stuffed Shirt indulged himself for only a moment before turning back to the business at hoof. “Shall we go over them one by one?”
Lex sighed. They’d been reviewing the full scope of what he’d inherited from Blueblood for over an hour now, ever since the meeting regarding his future plans had finished, and judging by how many pages remained unturned in Stuffed Shirt’s catalog of his new royal possessions, they were barely a quarter of the way through. And while Lex was cautiously optimistic by how his new valet had recovered from his shock at hearing how his new employer was already planning to cleave off part of Equestria and make it a country of his own with no apparent dismay or disapproval – or rather, by how Sonata and Aria hadn’t seemed overly concerned by Stuffed Shirt’s reaction, since they were far better judges of someone’s disposition than he was – the overview held little interest for him in the face of more pressing concerns.
As it was, the only practical benefit to going over his new possessions now was knowing what he’d be able to sell if it became necessary to generate some additional income for Vanhoover before finalizing the loan agreement. Or so he’d thought. But when he’d mentioned the idea to Stuffed Shirt, the valet had hesitantly informed him that any such sale would require getting an appraisal – ideally more than one – before hosting an auction (since that was apparently the most reliable way to maximize the proceeds), a process that could take weeks to arrange, since only a select clientele would be able to field the amount of money necessary to make such sales worthwhile in the first place. Which meant that his negotiations with the Las Pegasus ponies would be over, and the first payouts from the loan arriving, before he could divest himself of any of what he’d acquired. Meaning that doing this now was little more than a vanity exercise.
But at the moment, there was nothing else for him to do. At the insistence of River and Stuffed Shirt, he’d postponed his plans to meet with the Las Pegasus delegation until tomorrow. The market was being patrolled by Garden Gate, the unicorn mare having taken it upon herself to act as a troubleshooter for any minor disputes that arose. The Night Mare’s Knights were currently caught up on the lessons he’d been giving them, and he already had a new set devised. Even the religious doctrines he needed to work on for the new devotees among the local populace was being handled by Cloudbank, the pegasus mare promising to have some material for his review soon.
The only extant matter left was Starlight Glimmer, and as much as Lex hated to admit it, there was nothing he could do about her in his current condition.
He was exhausted, injured, and out of magic – again – and while Princess Twilight had clearly been fatigued by teleporting all the way to Ponyville and back, via overcharged Equestrian magic no less, she still had more strength left than he did at the moment. Even if she didn’t have enough power to teleport herself and her friends away at the first sign of trouble, Lex knew that Twilight would still be able to put up a fight if he tried to force her to turn Starlight over. Worse, her friends would no doubt aid her, and while Lex had followers of his own that he could deploy, he wasn’t willing to risk doing so. Not when several other members of Twilight’s group had Everglow-based magic and equipment on top of their history of defeating various threats.
And besides, they’d be gone soon anyway. In the aftermath of the duel, before he’d been practically carried back to River’s manor by a throng of jubilant ponies, Lex had made sure to take note of what his adversaries were doing. Twilight and her friends had hunkered down on the platform of the demolished train station, apparently eager to leave Vanhoover at the first opportunity. The weeping wreck that was Blueblood had been among their number, still bawling like a baby even after Cleansweep had healed him. That Starlight Glimmer was with them also hadn’t escaped his notice either, and-
A knock at the door of the study broke him out of his thoughts, and he looked up in time to see Trotsworth enter. “Please forgive my interruption, Prince Legis,” he murmured, bowing. “But there’s a guest to see you.”
Stuffed Shirt clucked his tongue in disapproval. “Do they have an appointment? His Highness’s time is very valuable.”
“They don’t,” admitted Trotsworth. “But I thought that this particular guest might warrant the prince’s prompt notification regardless.”
“Why?” Her interest momentarily piqued, Sonata dragged her eyes away from the gemstone orbiting her head, continuing to avoid her attempts to capture it. “Who’s here?”
“A young lady by the name of Rarity.”
Alright Rarity. Deep breaths. You can do this.
Checking her makeup one final time in the mirror of her compact, Rarity nodded in satisfaction, telekinetically returning it to her travel bag. Said bag was, technically, the reason she was here at all, having “accidentally” left it behind on their previous visit to River Bank’s manor. That was the oldest trick in the book, of course – leaving a personal item at someone’s home so that you’d have an excuse to see them again when you went to pick it up – but it had worked when she’d needed to justify coming back here without her friends.
Even with a reason at the ready, however, she’d had a difficult time convincing the others that she’d be perfectly fine returning to the manor on her own. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy had both been certain that Lex would take her hostage and try to trade her safe return in exchange for Starlight Glimmer, a prospect which had clearly frightened the mare in question. Twilight and Applejack had been less convinced of that, but had still felt it was a bad idea. Pinkie and Spike had offered to go with her – the former wanting to see Sonata again, and the latter wanting to be her bodyguard – but she’d talked them down, saying that she was just going to talk to the manor’s staff, which was technically true…she simply hadn’t mentioned what she was going to talk to them about, which was meeting with Lex Legis.
Specifically, meeting with him so that she could beg him to bring her beloved Long Road back to life.
The odds of that happening were miniscule, she knew. Sandbar, the naïve but sweet colt whom she’d shamelessly pumped for information when she’d learned that Lex had resurrected him – and whom she’d run into on her way back here, forcing her to put on an impromptu rhapsody about how they came from two different worlds and it could never work out between them but that she’d always remember him fondly, capping it off with a kiss on the cheek before she’d bid him adieu – had informed her in no uncertain terms that Lex’s ability to revive him and his friends had been due to a magic item gifted to him by his goddess, the Night Mare. A magic item that was expended now, and couldn’t be used again.
But it’s not like he can’t simply ask his goddess for another one now, can’t he? In fact, Rarity had no idea if that was plausible or not – she didn’t know very much about these “gods,” and what little she’d heard about the Night Mare suggested that she wasn’t the generous sort – but even if the chance was infinitesimal, it was one she had to take. Especially since, unlike with Princess Cadance’s method of bringing somepony back, Lex’s single instance of resurrection had been neither time-limited nor required an intact body.
If there was even the slightest hope that Equestria’s newest prince would be given the power to resurrect somepony again, Rarity knew she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t do everything in her power to convince him to bring the love of her life back to her.
No matter how daunting that task seemed.
And daunting was the word for it. Although she’d never laid eyes on Lex Legis before his duel with Twilight, Rarity had heard enough about him – thanks to the conference with the princesses, before Discord and that metal-and-stone monster had disrupted things – that she felt like she had a good grasp on what sort of pony he was. And what she knew wasn’t encouraging.
For one thing, if Soft Mane’s breaking down into tears yesterday was any indication, he was horribly prejudiced against non-ponies. That meant that if he did obtain another instance of resurrection, he’d be disinclined to use it on a donkey, even one as noble as Long Road. Moreover, Lex seemed like the sort of pony who held grudges, and while the two of them had never actually met, Rarity felt certain that his poor relationship with her friends would color his perception of her. And now that he was a prince, any hope of bribing him was completely gone; Rarity knew full well that wealthy ponies would flock to him now, hoping to ply him with expensive gifts in return for royal consideration. While business at the Carousel Boutique was booming – her plans for opening a second shop, this one in Canterlot, were on the verge of coming together if the location she wanted would just open up! – that sort of money was far beyond what she could afford.
But Rarity felt certain that she still had one thing that could tempt him.
Rainbow Dash might be gifted at fighting with her hooves, and Twilight at fighting with her magic, but there’s no mare in Equestria more skilled at wielding their feminine wiles than me!
That was her best, and only, chance. Lex’s hyperactive libido was, according to what her friends had learned while canvassing the half-built village made up of Vanhoover’s refugees, an open secret among those who knew him. He was apparently having torrid affairs with a number of different mares, including a pair of sisters who were the legendary Sirens! And while Rarity had to admit that Sonata and Aria were in a league of their own where beauty was concerned – having gotten a glimpse of them while they’d argued with her friends during the duel – she knew full well that stallions like Lex were always looking for new territory to conquer.
Touching up her perfume, Rarity couldn’t help but wince at using that particular metaphor.
As confident as she felt about her charms, she had no illusions that Lex would be led on as easily as Sandbar had been. Most likely, he’d want everything she had to offer, and if that was what it took in order to secure a promise from him to bring Long Road back to life if he had the chance – a promise that she felt certain he’d keep; for all of his many vices, Lex came across as somepony who was honorable in his own way – then Rarity was prepared to surrender herself to him. Long Road wouldn’t want her to, she knew, but if that was what it took to get him back…
Really, this is just like those silly novels, she reassured herself as she popped a breath mint in her mouth, thinking back to the books she kept – along with a few other items of a delicate nature – locked in the hope chest in her bedroom (all the better to keep them hidden from Sweetie Belle, especially now that she was old enough to have her first boyfriend; that nice young purrsian named Sunflower). The heartbroken maiden, desperate to rescue her beloved, offers herself to the wicked sorcerer in exchange for his help. He accepts, ravishing her cruelly while she tries not to lose herself to his bestial passions, knowing that she can never tell her lover what she sacrificed in order to save him.
She’d read variations of that scene plenty of times, usually in the evening with a glass of wine and a nibble of chocolate. This was no different, except now she was acting it out instead of reading about it. And if life imitates art, Lex will fulfill his promise to bring Long Road back, at which point we’ll be married and expecting in short order, only for me to realize that the baby isn’t my husband’s, starting a new series of entanglements. The absurd thought made her chuckle, helping to quell the butterflies in her stomach as she ran her brush through her mane one last time.
She’d just put it back in her bag when Trotsworth returned. “Miss Rarity? Prince Legis has agreed to see you.”
Having finished readying herself inwardly as well as outwardly, Rarity nodded, walking out of the room with her head – and her tail – held high.
“Your Highness, thank you for seeing me,” smiled Rarity as she bowed deeply to the stallion sitting across from her in his private study. “Please allow me to congratula-”
“What do you want?”
Although she had anticipated a cold reception, Rarity couldn’t help but wince inwardly at the hostile tone in Lex’s voice as he cut her off. Flattery was the vanguard of allure, after all. If Equestria’s newest prince wasn’t interested in letting her stroke his ego, let alone anything more personal, then her chances of convincing him to bring Long Road back to life should he ever have the opportunity were virtually nil.
Nor was that the only way in which the proverbial deck was stacked against her.
When Rarity had asked to meet with Prince Legis, she’d presumed that it was understood that she wanted to do so alone. But whether the subtext of her request hadn’t been received or it had been understood but denied, there were several other ponies present besides the two of them. And none of them seemed particularly friendly.
Flanking Lex on his immediate right and left were Sonata and Aria, both of them shooting her looks tinged with deep suspicion. Slightly behind Aria was a pegasus mare in a maid’s outfit; the same maid who had denounced Twilight’s attempt to appeal to Lex’s better nature before the duel had begun, Rarity belatedly realized. And while she kept her eyes carefully on the floor, the tension in her jaw and the bead of sweat running down the side of her face made her feelings about her master’s visitor quite clear. Opposite her, standing back and to the right of Sonata was the frumpy little stallion who’d been Blueblood’s valet, and was now apparently Lex’s. Like the maid, he was careful not to look at her, but unlike his female counterpart his face was a perfect mask of indifference, showing no emotion whatsoever, and in so doing making it evident that he was entirely at his prince’s disposal, and would likely adopt his liege’s attitude toward her if pressed.
And, from where he was glowering at her from behind his desk as he waited for her answer, Lex’s attitude toward her seemed to be dark indeed.
But Rarity wasn’t Fluttershy, so lacking in self-confidence that she fell apart at the first hint of reproach. She had years of experience buttering ponies up, all of which had prepared her for what to do when her opening salvo of charm didn’t work: fire another one. And another. And then another. Until you eventually wore them down from graciousness.
“First, I wanted to express my personal admiration toward you for how thoroughly you overwhelmed that boor, Blueblood,” she gushed, giving him a rapturous look for a long moment before looking down, evincing mild embarrassment. “I don’t know if you know this, but he and I have some history between us. Suffice it to say, it was quite cathartic watching you give him his comeuppance.”
“Yeah right,” snorted Aria. “Is that why, when everyone else was cheering after Lex defeated that blowhard, you stood there gawking with the rest of your friends?”
“Oh darling,” laughed Rarity, airily waving a hoof as if Aria’s objection was barely worth rebutting. “It’d be absolutely gauche for a lady to so brazenly rejoice at the fall of someone they dislike, don’t you agree?”
“No.” The corners of her lips turned upward, but the look Aria gave Rarity then couldn’t have been called a smile by any means. “I’ve got no problem celebrating when I see someone get what they deserve.”
That bordered on open hostility, and Rarity bit her lip as she tried to think of the best way to respond. Fortunately, the brief lull in the conversation gave Sonata a chance to speak up. “So that’s why you’re here?” she asked, tilting her head and blinking in an adorable show of confusion. “You just wanted to tell Lex thanks for him beating up your ex-boyfriend?”
“He wasn’t my boyfriend, darling,” corrected Rarity gently. “Blueblood was just, well…it all seems so silly now. But you’re right; there is another reason for my visit.”
Despite the Sirens jumping in, Rarity’s attention hadn’t left Lex for a moment. While he hadn’t continued to inquire about her motives, he hadn’t chided Aria for her not-so-subtle display of aggression either. Which means I’ll need to address the elephant in the room before we can go any further.
Dipping her head, Rarity kept it bowed as she spoke. “I want to formally apologize on Rainbow Dash’s behalf for how she ambushed you yesterday. It was an awful thing to do, and absolutely inexcusable. Had the rest of us realized what she was planning before she took off, I promise you we would have stopped her.”
The valet whose name she hadn’t gotten glanced at her then, raising an eyebrow. “Is this apology coming from Princess Twilight?”
For a moment, Rarity hesitated, considering whether an affirmative answer would serve her purposes better than the truth. But after a moment she shook her head; getting caught in a lie would only make it harder for Lex to trust her. “No. She doesn’t know that we’re meeting like this.”
Taking a deep breath, she stepped forward, knowing that she needed to push the envelope if she was going to have any hope of getting anywhere. “Your Highness, since coming to Vanhoover, I’ve seen the good you’ve done for all of the ponies here. Your subjects sing your praises, telling everyone who’ll listen about how you’ve protected them and provided for them. There’s not a doubt in anypony’s mind – including mine – that you’re every inch a kindhearted prince. That’s why…” She took another step toward him, and she didn’t need to fake the pleading tone that entered her voice then. “…I want to appeal to your kindness now.”
If Lex was moved by her compliments, he did an excellent job of hiding it. “Get to the point.”
“It’s…it’s a deeply personal matter,” she confessed, biting her lip. “I was hoping that we could talk about it privately.”
But Lex didn’t have a chance to answer her as Sonata snorted loudly. “Forget it, Uptighty-Whitey,” she scowled, moving in front of Lex protectively. “Whatever you’ve got to say to Lex, you can say in front of us.”
“Your friends seriously hurt our stallion twice in the last twenty-four hours!” growled Aria, matching her sister’s defensive posture. “And you helped that nag Starlight Glimmer escape! You’re dreaming if you think you’re getting any alone time with him!”
“Be quiet, both of you.”
Lex’s command was given quietly, but both Sirens reacted as though he’d made the pronouncement from on high, immediately moving back to their original positions in perfect unison, shooting indignant glares at Rarity as they did so. For his part, Lex hadn’t moved a muscle, looking at Rarity with the same acerbic expression he’d had since she entered the room. But unlike before his eyes were glowing, the sight eerie in the dim light of the study. “Twice now I’ve told you to state your business. I won’t say it a third time.”
Trying to fight a rising sense of trepidation at how her charm offensive hadn’t put the faintest crack in his icy mien, or how she’d failed to take their conversation to a more private setting – it was far harder to proposition someone when there was an audience watching intently – Rarity bowed again. “Forgive me,” she murmured. “I’ll speak plainly, then.”
Lifting her head, she took a deep breath, trying to ignore the sensation of her heart attempting to beat its way out of her chest. “Shortly after the Elemental Bleeds ended, I lost my beloved, a warrior named Long Road. I’m here to ask you to resurrect him.”
The green and purple light faded from Lex’s eyes then, and Rarity dared to hope that was a good sign.
But the one who spoke up a moment later wasn’t Lex.
“Long Road?” muttered the valet, frowning. Turning, his horn lit up as he telekinetically pulled a worn notepad out of a pocket, flipping through it. “I’ve heard that name before. I-, aha! Here it is!” Smiling triumphantly, he scanned the page. “Prince Blueblood was invited to Trottingham several weeks ago for a memorial being held in honor of this Long Road fellow. He refused, saying that it was undignified for a prince to attend a celebration held for some lowly donkey.”
“Long Road was not some lowly donkey!” Although she knew that her slim chances of success hinged entirely on how she presented herself, Rarity couldn’t let that go, rounding on the valet in a rage. “He was a knight! A paladin who dedicated himself to the highest principles of selflessness and sacrifice! He gave his life defending Trottingham when he realized that the Elemental Bleed there hadn’t been closed! There wasn’t…they couldn’t even find his body afterward…”
Her anger departed as swiftly as it had come, leaving her fighting to hold back tears as she cursed herself bitterly. Oh well done, Rarity. There’s nothing stallions find more enticing than watching a mare break down in tears as she pines for someone else. But her recrimination lasted only a moment; she’d known that this would be a hard sell before she’d walked in the room, and the meeting wasn’t over until Prince Legis dismissed her, which meant that she needed to keep trying until he did.
“Your Highness,” she began, her voice stiff. “I know that you only resurrected the ponies you did because you’d been given a gift by your goddess in commemoration of your valor, and that you’re presently unable to bring anypony else back to life. And if you were…” She took a moment to figure out the best way to phrase the next part delicately. “…and if you were, a donkey likely wouldn’t be your first choice after the unspeakable losses that befell the ponies of Vanhoover. I know that, and yet…”
This time Rarity didn’t just bow; she prostrated herself completely, sinking down until her belly touched the carpet and lowering her head until she was staring at the floor. “Long Road was the love of my life,” she murmured, forcing her voice to remain level. “That we had so little time together before he was taken away…I can’t bear it. I can’t bear knowing that I’ll never see him again. My heart-”
Instinct made her stop, reflexively clamping down on the agony that threatened to come bubbling up if she kept talking about what losing her beloved had done to her. Although it had been over four months since Long Road had died, she still felt like she’d lost him only yesterday, and while it had gotten easier to ignore that pain thanks to the help of her friends and family, it was still a thin scab over a raw wound, ready to erupt into fresh anguish if she poked it too much. And with how hardhearted Lex Legis seemed, she knew she couldn’t afford to fall apart in front of him.
After several deep breaths, she forced herself to shift her focus. “I’ve known that resurrection was possible for some time now, and I’ve tried everything I can think of in order to bring him back. I’ve asked Princess Cadance for help, but it’s beyond her power. I’ve prayed to the Sun Queen, Long Road’s goddess, more times than I can count, begging her to return him to life, and all I’ve received is silence. I’ve asked Twilight about going back to Everglow and finding resurrection magic for him there, and she’s assured me that it’s not feasible. You’re my last hope.”
Although she’d imagined the circumstances as being salacious rather than despondent, her offer was ultimately still the same, and having once again brushed up against the visceral heartache of the prospect of spending the rest of her life without the one person who made it complete, Rarity found it surprisingly easy to put her dignity aside as she looked up and met Lex’s eyes. “If you swear to bring Long Road back should you ever regain the power to resurrect someone, there’s nothing I won’t do to repay you. Everything I have, everything I own, everything I am…all of me, yours in exchange for your promise.”
Around the prince, Rarity could see the variety of reactions that she’d elicited in his companions. There was discomfort written across his valet’s face. Sympathy on Sonata’s. Aria seemed unmoved, giving her a sneer. The maid was biting her lip as she quietly wiped her eyes.
But Lex wasn’t looking at her at all. Instead…
Rarity followed his gaze down toward his left foreleg, and her breath caught in her throat.
Was the barbed wire wrapped around his leg moving?!
She blinked once, trying to clear her vision of whatever unshed tears were making her see things, and she must have succeeded because when she reopened them the wire was once again stationary. And now Lex was looking right at her, his expression pensive as he held her gaze for a few seconds before speaking at last.
“All of you leave the room. I want to speak to her in private.”
“What are they doing in there?” groused Sonata. “This is totes taking forever!”
“It’s only been forty-five minutes,” murmured Feather Duster, hearing the worry underneath Sonata’s complaining. To her mild surprise, it was a worry she found herself sharing, knowing that not too long ago she would have been hoping that something awful had happened to Lex, rather than dreading the prospect the way she was now. “I’m sure Mast-, I mean, Prince Legis knows what he’s doing.”
“What he’s doing is probably her, after how she practically threw herself at him like that,” muttered Aria, her voice thick with anger rather than her usual prurience.
“For realsies?” Sonata’s eyebrows rose at Aria’s accusation, glancing between her sister and the closed door in disbelief. “I didn’t think she sounded hot for him at all.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re an idiot,” snapped Aria, before adopting a woebegone expression and putting one hoof to her brow. “‘Everything I am,’” she moaned, doing a passable imitation of Rarity, “’all of me, yours in exchange for your promise.’” Snorting, she dropped the act, looking disgusted. “She might as well have wagged her tail in his face and said ‘give it to me, baby.’”
Stuffed Shirt bit his lip, looking like he desperately wanted this conversation to be over. “Yes, well, that’s all the more reason for us to wait patiently then. No one likes being interrupted when they’re…in flagrante delicto.”
Sonata shot the stallion a baffled look. “Huh? Lex isn’t in a fragrant delectable anything. He’s getting it on with whatshername.” Ignoring Stuffed Shirt’s cringing, she turned back toward her sister. “And why’s that such a bad thing? I thought you got a kick out of him finding a new girl that we could all play with.”
Aria waved a hoof at the closed door. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not all playing with her! We’re not even close enough to hear what’s going on!”
Sonata wilted a little at that, her ears folding back. “Oh yeah.”
When Lex had sent them away, he’d ordered them to wait outside of the guest suite altogether, rather than simply exiting the study. While that only added one extra room between them – the entrance to the suite emerging into the living area, which the study branched off from – that was enough to completely muffle whatever they were doing, regardless of how intently someone might try to eavesdrop. Sonata could personally testify to that.
“And now that dewy-eyed little nag is getting her claws in him,” growled Aria. “All the cute girls here, and he just has to go for one of the least trustworthy!”
Feather Duster opened her mouth, closed it, and then licked her lips before finally deciding to give voice to her thoughts. “I thought she seemed sincere,” she admitted.
Aria rounded on the maid immediately. “I don’t care if she was sincere!” she snarled. “So she lost her boy toy! Boo freakin’ hoo! I care that her friends tried to kill Lex twice in the last two days! Three times, in fact, since that Starlight chick is part of her little clique now!”
“The terms of the duel specifically prohibited killing,” noted Stuffed Shirt. “I’m sure Princess Twilight would have abided by them had things not gone His Highness’s way.”
“What’re you, dense?” sneered Aria. “She would have bumped him off and then just said it was an accident or something. Ruining lives is what Twilight Sparkle does.” She glared at the door to the suite, as though trying to melt it with her gaze. “And now Lex is in there topping one of her best friends, so I’m sure we won’t be seeing her anymore after this.”
Her disgusted pronouncement was punctuated by her plunking her bottom down in exasperation, sulking. An awkward silence fell, and lasted for almost a full minute before Aria let out a slow breath, her anger fading as she looked at Sonata again. “We need to ask him.”
The younger Siren’s reaction was one of total confusion, giving Aria a blank look. “Huh? Ask who what?”
Had their relationship been the same as it was, Sonata’s inability to follow a simple change in subject would have provoked a storm of insults from Aria. As it was, she came very close to slipping back into old habits anyway, her patience eroded by how Lex was getting involved with one of those dangerous mares when he was already so hurt. But she managed to hold her tongue, recalling the warmth she’d felt toward Sonata earlier that morning, when she’d still been basking in the realization that she loved her sister.
Taking a deep breath, she tried again. “Lex,” she said slowly. “Remember what we talked about last night, before Cloudbank healed him? After we talked about Blondie leaving?”
She could almost see Sonata winding back the conversation in her head, her eyes turning vacant – more than usual, at any rate – and her lips moving slightly as she replayed the relevant portions of last night in her mind. Finally, her eyes lit up. “Ohhh! You want to ask him about that!” A moment later, she seemed to realize what she was saying, an uncertain look crossing her face. “I dunno, isn’t that kind of a big deal? I mean, a lot of stuff’s going on already, with the duel and becoming a prince and now that lady with the diamonds on her butt.”
“That’s exactly why we should ask him now,” pressed Aria, ignoring the quizzical looks she was getting from Feather Duster and Stuffed Shirt. “There’s always something going on. If he’s not fighting dragons or monsters or crazy princesses then he’s taking meetings about loans or teaching those kids or something else. The sooner we put this on his plate, the sooner he’ll get to it.”
“Hmm.” Glancing upward, Sonata turned that thought over for a few seconds before grinning and clopping her fore-hooves together. “Sounds good to me!”
“So glad you approve,” muttered Aria, but there was no heat in her voice. At least until she looked at the entrance to the suite again, scowling. “Now if he would just hurry up and finish with-”
A light blue aura appearing around the doorknob cut her off, the door swinging open a moment later to reveal a pair of unicorns.
“Oh my!” Blinking as she took in the sight of everyone clustered around the entrance, Rarity managed a flustered smile. “I, ah, hope we didn’t keep you all waiting for too long?”
“Not at all, madam,” offered Stuffed Shirt, standing at attention as he gave her a polite nod. “We were simply remaining at the ready in case His Highness needed-”
“So were you guys doin’ it or what?” blurted Sonata.
Grimacing, Lex shot her a look. “That’s enough, Sonata.”
“What?” whined the Siren. “Aria said you were!”
Her cheeks coloring, Rarity gave her mane a toss. “Really now, darling. There’s nothing more lowbrow than interrogating a lady about her-, can I help you?”
Her question, laced with indignation, was directed toward Aria, who’d moved forward until her face was within an inch of Rarity’s, causing the unicorn to recoil. “Plenty of perfume,” murmured the Siren suspiciously, “and minty-fresh breath.” Squeezing past the other mare, she turned around, examining Rarity from the back. “…I can’t tell,” she huffed a moment later. “It’d be white on white.”
Sputtering in embarrassment, Rarity flattened her tail over her rump protectively, but Lex spoke up before she could voice her outrage. “Both of you, back off!” he growled, glaring at each sister in turn, and while they both frowned, they knew better than to push the issue.
Satisfied that they’d let the matter drop, Lex turned his attention back to Rarity. “I want to emphasize again that this won’t be a quick process. Even preliminary findings will take some time to compile, and there’s no guarantee of anything.”
“I understand,” nodded Rarity. “And I’m grateful all the same.” Hesitating, she glanced at Sonata and Aria again before leaning in closer to Lex, planting a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you,” she murmured, her voice so soft it was almost a whisper.
Lex’s only response to her show of gratitude was a grunt, before looking at Feather Duster. “Escort our guest out, and arrange for transportation to take her back to the train platform. After that, find Thermal Draft and tell her I want to speak to her.”
Feather Duster bowed immediately. “As you wish, Sire. Miss Rarity? This way please.” Smiling politely, she gestured toward the unicorn mare’s travel bag. “I can take your luggage if you’d like.”
“Oh, thank you darling,” nodded Rarity, before her own smile took on a sharper edge as she glanced back at Aria. “I am feeling rather sore.”
“Y-” A look from Lex silenced her before she could voice a retort, leaving her fuming as Rarity was led down the hallway and around a corner, vanishing from sight.
Sonata, having missed the meaning of Rarity’s parting words entirely, frowned in confusion. “What do you want Drafty for?”
“I’m opening an investigation into the disappearance of Long Road,” answered Lex as he turned and headed back toward the study, the other three following him. “To that end, I want somepony to go to Trottingham and start gathering data on what happened there.”
“Thermal Draft’s one of those ponies you sent to their deaths a few weeks back, right?” Aria’s voice was silky sweet as she flung herself into a nearby chair, shooting Lex a phony smile in response to the glare he gave her then; he could make her stop asking about what he’d done with Rarity, but he couldn’t make her like it. “What makes her such a good choice for researching your new sweetheart’s dead donkey? Other than the fact that she has experience with not being alive, I mean.”
Halfway to his desk, Lex stopped in mid-motion at that, his eyes shining vividly as he slowly turned to look at her. “You’re treading into very dangerous territory, Aria.”
“Says the guy who just banged one of Twilight Sparkle’s-”
She couldn’t finish as Sonata’s hoof covered her mouth. “You really want him super-mad before we ask him what you said we should ask him?” she whispered, giving Aria an incredulous look.
Batting her sister’s hoof away, Aria’s expression was beyond sour, but by some miracle she didn’t argue the point. Instead, she looked between the pleading expression on Sonata’s face and the icy expression on Lex’s before turning toward the latter pony and sighing. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she muttered, dropping her gaze to the ground as she idly shuffled her hoof. “Sorry.”
Her eyebrows rising, Sonata sidled up to Lex, still keeping her voice at a whisper. “That’s, like, one for the record books! Aria never says she’s sorry!”
Lex seemed to consider that for a moment before turning his back on both of them, completing the journey to his desk in silence. It was only after he sat down – his eyes changing back to normal, the sight precipitating two soft sighs of relief – that he spoke. “To answer your question, I want Thermal Draft to do this because everypony else I trust already has tasks. Cloudbank will be working with me to develop the Night Mare’s formal doctrine. C. Shells and her crew are needed to keep facilitating commerce with Tall Tale. Garden Gate is serving as a troubleshooter. River will be assisting me with the Las Pegasus delegation. The Night Mare’s Knights are too young to be sent on a trip without supervision. Feather Duster’s contract doesn’t include this kind of investigative work. And I want you two here where I can keep you out of trouble.” A dirty look from him made Aria wince and Sonata grin sheepishly. “That leaves her.”
Moving into the place at Lex’s left that Feather Duster had held before, Stuffed Shirt leaned forward. “Shall I send a letter to Throw Rug instructing her to prepare your Trottingham residence for a guest, Sire?”
“Yes,” replied Lex after a moment’s consideration. “But she won’t be arriving immediately. I’ll dispatch her after the loan has been secured and the payments begin arriving.”
Stuffed Shirt nodded, scribbling a note down. “Very good, Your Highness.”
“Great!” cheered Sonata. “So, um, now that’s all taken care of, can we talk about something?” She glanced at Stuffed Shirt then before looking back at Lex. “Just the three of us?”
One brow raising, Lex nodded at the stallion, who bowed and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Taking a breath, Sonata gave Aria a nudge, the other Siren still looking shamefaced as she stood up. Slowly, the two of them approached Lex, moving with the shared precision of a millennium of dancing together as they circled his desk from opposite directions. It was only when they were within hooves' reach of him that they stopped, slowly sinking down until they were both kneeling on each side of his chair.
“Lex,” began Sonata, smiling up at him. “Meeting you has been the best thing that’s ever happened to us.”
“You rescued us,” continued Aria, “you’ve protected us, and you’ve taken care of us.”
“But more than that, after a thousand years, you’ve given us what we wanted most of all.”
“We thought it was to be adored, but we know better now.”
Leaning forward in perfect synchronicity, both mares took one of his hooves in theirs. “We wanted to be loved,” they chorused.
“We didn’t realize it before we met you,” confessed Sonata. “But now we know that’s what we were looking for all along.”
“We kept getting in our own way before,” admitted Aria. “We were always able to use our magic to take control of anyone we wanted, which meant we never really felt anything for them.”
“But we couldn’t do that to you.”
“Your magic is stronger than ours.”
“Strong enough that you could have defeated us and never looked back.”
“Or used us and then abandoned us.”
“But instead,” they continued, once again speaking in unison, “you chose to love us.”
“When you did that,” breathed Sonata, “there was nothing we could do but love you back.”
“And that,” purred Aria, “brought us closer together as sisters.”
“We’re both happier than we’ve ever been…”
“…or ever known we could be…”
“…because of you.”
“Which is why we want to ask you for something now.”
“Something that will make us, all of us, happier still.”
“Our one and only wish that’s still unfulfilled.”
Both of them stopped then, and it took Lex a moment to realize that they needed to be prompted. “Tell me.” Although he knew they hadn't used their magic, in that moment he found himself enthralled by the two of them, seized by a fierce urge to grant their desire, whatever it was. “Tell me so that I can make it happen.”
The two Sirens shared a smile before turning their adoring gazes back to him.
“We want you to find our sister, Adagio, and bring her home.”
“And we want you to make her fall in love with you the same way you did us.”
“And here are the quarters we’ve prepared for you and your colleagues.”
Stuffed Shirt pursed his lips as he glanced back down the hallway that the old butler – Trotsworth, he’d introduced himself as; the head servant of the household – had led him down. “It’s rather distant from His Highness’s chambers, don’t you think? I’d hate for him to find me unavailable should he have need of me.”
“I do apologize for that,” replied Trotsworth smoothly, giving an abbreviated bow. “The, shall we say, unusual circumstances of the past few weeks have caused any number of unforeseen difficulties. As it stands, we’re still removing the storm clouds from where they’d been temporarily stockpiled.”
Stuffed Shirt blinked, aghast. “Storm clouds? Here, in a manor house?”
Trotsworth’s genteel smile took on the faintest hint of amusement. “Oh yes. As I said, the circumstances have been most unusual.” And then his mask of professionalism was back in place, his expression once again pure politeness. “We took the liberty of bringing your colleagues an evening repast twenty minutes ago. Normally we’d have invited you to use the servants’ dining area, but as we didn’t know your schedule, there was a concern regarding insufficient seating should your party and ours show up at the same time.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you.” Now it was Stuffed Shirt’s turn to bow. As he did so, he let his eyes flicker to the nearest window for just a second. It didn’t face westward, but from what he could see of the shadows being cast on the ground outside, it was somewhere between late afternoon and early evening.
That wasn’t an unusual time for an evening meal, if one preferred to dine early. Still, it seemed unlikely that a majority of the manor’s permanent staff would be having dinner now, which meant that there probably wouldn’t have been an issue if Stuffed Shirt and the rest of the royal retinue had elected to help themselves to the servants’ dining area. In fact, as the head butler, Trotsworth in all likelihood knew precisely when his staff ate their meals.
Which meant that bringing the newest ponies in service to Prince Legis dinner in their rooms, rather than inviting them to use the facilities, was in fact a message. One that Stuffed Shirt, who had been a servant all of his life, could decipher as easily as if it had been garishly scribbled upon the walls:
This is our turf.
There was no way to call the old earth stallion out on that, though. He’d already disguised his message as one of respectful attentiveness. Moreover, any sort of overt objection would have been extremely tactless; one of the cardinal rules of being a servant was that you never let your problems trouble the ponies you served, and strife among staff members was a surefire way to do exactly that. It was the same reason why Stuffed Shirt hadn’t objected to that Feather Duster mare having the place of honor as His Majesty’s left side, despite protocol dictating that the Royal Valet outranked a mere personal assistant.
But that didn’t mean Stuffed Shirt had to take this lying down.
“I truly hope I’ll have the opportunity to show similar consideration for you one day,” continued Stuffed Shirt, making sure his smile was no less polite than Trotsworth’s. “Perhaps when His Highness goes to inspect some of his many holdings around Equestria, I’ll be able to arrange for you to tag along.”
Translation: My turf is each and every one of the myriad royal properties, you provincial rube.
“A most generous offer,” acknowledged Trotsworth. “However, I suspect that I’ll not be able to take you up on it for some time. Prince Legis seems so very invested in his work here in Vanhoover that it’s hard to imagine him gallivanting around Equestria simple because he’s picked up some extraneous paraphernalia.”
Translation: Maybe so, but the prince is here, you little upstart.
“Well,” chuckled Stuffed Shirt. “I can see this is going to be a most vibrant partnership. I’m certain that between the two of us, we’ll be able to see to all of His Highness’s needs.”
Translation: Kiss my flank.
“I look forward to working with you.” With that, Trotsworth gave a polite nod before turning and heading back down the hallway.
Stuffed Shirt watched him go, knowing that the old stallion’s parting shot had been the sugarcoated equivalent of “right back at you.” It was only after Trotsworth disappeared around a corner that Stuffed Shirt relaxed, unable to hold back a small groan as the tension of the exchange slowly faded. Even then, he needed several seconds to collect himself before he straightened up and entered the new, and hopefully temporary, quarters that he’d be sharing with his compatriots.
“You’re back!”
Smiling as she saw him enter, Puff Pastry, the royal confectioner – a pudgy unicorn mare with a dull yellow coat, snowy white mane and tail, and a cutie mark of gumdrops arranged to form a candy crown – paused just long enough to call “he’s back!” over her shoulder before grabbing a tray of cupcakes in her telekinesis, all of them frosted with a swirl of green and purple, save for a dollop of bright red in the center, and waving them in front of him. “Do you think the prince will like these? I patterned them off of his, er, unique color pattern. The frosting is lime and grape mix, and the red part is strawberry. I wanted to use cherry, but Coat Tail said he couldn’t find any at the market. I think he just didn’t look hard enough-”
“If I didn’t look hard enough,” frowned Coat Tail, the royal clothier – a balding unicorn stallion with a rather flat blue coat, black mane and tail (even if his mane was now limited to a horseshoe hairline), and a cutie mark of a needle stitching a fur-trimmed cape – brushing crumbs from his muzzle as he walked in, “it was because I was also bringing our personal effects here with very little help, so an extra errand to run wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities.” Ignoring Puff Pastry’s frown, he turned to Stuffed Shirt. “You’ve been with the prince, right? Is it true that all he wears are that tattered old cloak and a few accessories? Surely he must have a more expansive wardrobe than that?”
But Stuffed Shirt had no opportunity to answer before another pony joined the conversation. “Bah, you dress new prince in whole closet if you have way,” snorted Tranquila Rest, the royal leisuremeister – like Puff Pastry, she was a large mare, save for her stubby horn; unlike the confectioner, however, Tranquila was all muscle, her powerful frame covered by a drab green coat, her auburn mane and tail both cut short; only her cutie mark, showing a gem-encrusted croquet mallet hitting a diamond, really stood out on her – as she clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Fewer clothes make easier for moving, yes? Sound good to me.” Pretending not to see Coat’s scowl, she glanced at Stuffed Shirt next. “I hearing talk. New prince is, how you say, tightup? Work hard but no play hard, even with beauty that call herself ‘nighttime snuggling bunny’?”
“Her and her sister,” corrected Color Palette, the royal painter – his blush making his freckles stand out even more against his cream-colored coat, contrasting even more sharply with his dark blue mane and tail, as well as with his cutie mark, which consisted of a portrait of a regal throne in an ornate frame – with a self-conscious wince. The youngest member of the group, the unicorn colt was still in his mid-teens, and was painfully shy around even moderately-attractive mares, something that the older ladies in the royal entourage loved to tease him about. “I sketched a few outlines of the prince’s, um, lady-friend,” he mumbled, turning over a sketchpad to reveal a rather flattering image of a smiling Sonata. “I know I should have started making some of His Highness himself, but I thought maybe he’d like this more?”
“Does he have any sort of family crest or personal emblem?” called Flag Staff, the royal vexillologist. “I want to start working up some basic designs if he wants to amend the seal of his office.”
“Forget that,” interrupted Constance Halation, the royal magician. “Did you happen to find out his birthday? I’m certain that he must have been born under a truly auspicious stellar conjunction!”
“Is he partial to animals of any kind?”
“Does he have a favorite type of music?”
The barrage of questions only grew heavier as more and more of Stuffed Shirt’s associates came rushing in, eager to find out what the valet – the highest-ranking among them – had learned about the new prince that they all worked for. But just like with Trotsworth, Stuffed Shirt knew that they weren’t really asking what they wanted to know. Except where the old butler had been exercising nuance, everypony yelling questions right now was deliberately dancing around the most fundamental question, afraid to give voice to it directly:
Would Lex Legis see fit to retain their services, or would he let them go?
So it’s finally sunk in, sighed Stuffed Shirt to himself as he tried to get everypony to quiet down.
While everyone on the royal retinue, himself included, had been deliriously happy to see Blueblood lose his royal title – while they were all consummate professionals, years of service to someone who had gone out of his way to denigrate each and every one of them on a daily basis, regardless of how hard they’d tried to please him, had led to them all privately despising their now-former employer – Stuffed Shirt was keenly aware that the sense of euphoria which had caused them all to only belatedly realize that they knew next to nothing about the pony who held their fate in his hooves was starting to fade. And while the joy of seeing Blueblood get what he so richly deserved was a pleasure that wouldn’t fade away quickly, it was no cure for the creeping uncertainty about the future that was now dawning on them all. Answers were needed, even if they were scared of what those answers would be.
It was a nervousness that he could relate to. As odious as Blueblood had been, nopony on his staff had seriously considered quitting their job. Not when royal service was part of their destiny, as depicted on their cutie marks. While Puff Pastry could have gotten a job in any bakery on Equestria – or even started her own – it wasn’t simply making sweets that gave her a sense of fulfillment. Rather, it was knowing that she’d made things just a little better for somepony who did so much for so many; whose service to Equestria was just a tiny bit easier because she, and all the rest of them, were there to help.
Naturally, that had made working for Blueblood all the more galling. But even with his overwhelming ego, constant narcissism, and complete self-absorption, he’d still served a function. Or at least, he’d seemed to, since rich and influential ponies had kept flocking to him, and most of them had seemed, if not uplifted for having dealt with Blueblood, then at least satisfied. And so his entourage had all quietly resigned themselves to enduring the prince’s constant put-downs as best they could, taking solace in the fact that – while they couldn’t take pleasure in their jobs the way the servants of the princesses (all of whom, like Trotsworth, weren’t eager to let someone else move in and try to displace them; servants who transferred between royals were almost unheard of) could – the sacrifice of their happiness was not without meaning. Even if they didn’t like who they worked for, they all knew they were still needed.
Except now they were all worried that they might be working for somepony who didn’t need them at all.
It was a concern that Stuffed Shirt shared. Although he’d only worked for Lex Legis for a few hours, he could already tell that the new prince was not only nothing like Blueblood – a huge point in his favor, there – but also nothing like any royal he’d ever heard of. Austere, ambitious, and utterly unconcerned with overturning protocol and precedent when it served his interests to do so, it was hard for Stuffed Shirt to imagine that Prince Legis would need a clothier or a leisuremeister. Especially since he was planning to sever part of Equestria and make it his own country…
But nopony in the retinue needs to know about that, Stuffed Shirt decided uneasily. Political machinations, especially at that level, were the sort of thing servants shouldn’t get involved with. Not if they wanted to continue being servants. Instead, what he needed to do right now was reassure everyone. And the best way to do that would be to help them figure out how they could all be of service to the new prince. After all, he’d be less likely to want to dismiss servants who’d tailored their special talents to his proclivities. As much as we all can, at least.
“Everypony,” he called, trying to make himself heard over the din of overlapping voices. “Everypony, please, quiet down! Everypony!”
“EVERYPONY MAKE SHUSHING!” boomed Tranquila, quieting everyone else immediately. Nodding in satisfaction, she smiled at Stuffed Shirt. “You talk now.”
Rubbing his now-aching ears, Stuffed Shirt gave her a pained smile back. “Thank you.” Even then, he waited another few seconds to let everyone’s hearing recover before he began speaking.
“Let me tell you all what I’ve learned about Prince Legis so far…”
“And those are the basics,” finished Cloudbank. “Does anypony have any questions?”
Looking at the ponies gathered around her, most of them having migrated over from the nearby market after they’d recognized her, she sincerely hoped that no one did. It wasn’t just that she still felt nervous speaking in front of an audience – and with almost fifty ponies having shown up to hear her talk about the Night Mare and what it meant to be one of her faithful, her stomach had been clenched in knots for the last hour – but also because she felt exhausted. Maybe I’ll just skip praying for spells come midnight and sleep straight through to tomorrow. No, scratch that. To next week.
She wouldn’t seriously do that, of course. It was too important for her to renew what few spells she possessed at every available opportunity. But the thought remained tempting nonetheless, the accumulated stress and fatigue leaving her feeling wrung out.
Although it had been less than thirty-six hours since she’d come back to life, she’d already gotten caught up in another serious battle, one that ended with her throwing herself in front of Drafty – reckless, helpless, beautiful Drafty – in what she’d been sure would be the end of her new lease on life. That she’d woken up a short time later with only mild injuries, and found out that Drafty’s wounds were little more than superficial, had left her relieved but deeply shaken. All the more so when she’d found out that not only was Lex at death’s door, but realized that his best hope for survival (since no one trusted Princess Twilight’s convenient offer of healing, especially after she’d sprung from captivity the mare who’d hurt so many ponies) was her praying for a curative spell, something that the Night Mare would only grant her come midnight.
Despite how relieved she’d been to find that Drafty’s wounds weren't much worse than a few bruises, Cloudbank had spent every hour leading up to midnight in a state of controlled anxiety. As much as she hadn’t been able to imagine Lex dying before she was able to heal him – after how many monsters he’d killed, there was no way some punk mare on an ego trip could possibly punch his ticket – she hadn’t been able to get rid of the persistent dread that she was in denial. After all, she had been equally certain that Vanhoover would be fine, which was why she’d scoffed at the prospect of leaving the city until it was too late.
The one thing she hadn’t felt in those long hours leading up until midnight, however, had been the one thing she’d thought she’d have been consumed by: guilt.
That had initially left her confused, uncertain why she wasn’t wracked with remorse over what Starlight Glimmer had done to Lex. After all, she’d seen how badly resurrecting them had depleted him; he’d barely been able to stay on his hooves after finishing the spell. That he would have easily defeated that nutcase if he hadn’t bothered with bringing them back – or even if he hadn’t needed to waste some of the power he had left saving her and Drafty; something she’d found out about only a few hours after waking up in the makeshift infirmary – should have been like a dagger in her heart.
Except she hadn’t felt that way. Not even slightly. Instead, beneath the pervasive worry that something would happen before midnight arrived – the sight of him lying in bed, insensate like that had been distinctly unnerving – there had been a jumble of inexplicably positive feelings about what Lex had done for her.
It hadn’t been until she’d knelt at his bedside and prayed to the Night Mare, even though midnight had still been hours away at the time, that she’d finally realized why that was.
Lex Legis was somepony who couldn’t not do everything that he could for others. Underneath his intimidating demeanor, blatant rudeness, and total lack of interpersonal skills, there was a deep well of compassion, one that drove everything he did, to the point where he couldn’t bring himself to do anything less than his utmost in service to that urge. That was why he’d voluntarily injured himself bringing them back to life; because he couldn’t bear the thought that he hadn’t been able to protect them. He’d practically said so himself right after resurrecting them, mournfully telling Aria that their deaths had been his fault.
In hindsight, that had been a glimpse of Lex at his most honest. He had just done an incredible thing, something that nopony else would have imagined possible, and rather than expecting gratitude or praise – or even expressing joy or satisfaction at accomplishing something so monumental – he’d castigated himself for having needed to do it at all. In his eyes, all he’d done was correct a mistake that he never should have allowed to happen in the first place; that he’d used magic that would have made Star-Swirl the Bearded’s head spin to do it was an unimportant detail.
And as if the Night Mare had personally reached down to peel the metaphorical blinders from her eyes, Cloudbank – deep in prayer at the time – had realized that that was why she couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty about the sacrifices Lex had made for her. Why the thought of what he’d done filled her with pride, gratitude, admiration, and so many other warm feelings that seemed inappropriate when her benefactor was hurt so badly. Because Lex was, at his core, somepony who cared about her – and everyone else that he saw himself as being responsible for – with an intensity that wasn’t diminished in the slightest by how impersonal it was.
Being the recipient of that much devotion, how could she not think of what Lex had done with anything less than heartfelt appreciation?
Having come to understand the sort of pony Lex was now that she could see past his off-putting exterior, it was easy for Cloudbank to understand why Sonata and Aria were so smitten with him. If his dedication to strangers was that powerful, what must it be like to be loved by him? What kind of fervor did his affection bring with it, when his regard for ponies he barely knew was already so overwhelming? Cloudbank could only imagine, but it was enough to make her see why Drafty, who’d always had a significant romantic streak in her, was so stuck on him…even if that still made her somewhat jealous.
“Actually, I have a question.”
Drawn out of her thoughts as she saw a hoof go up, Cloudbank plastered a smile on her face. “Yes?”
The questioner, a middle-aged earth stallion with a rather unkempt-looking beard, put his hoof down. “When do we get to the good stuff?”
“I’m…” Blinking, Cloudbank took a moment to turn his question over in her mind, wondering if her nervousness about public speaking was making her miss something. But after several seconds of consideration, she still didn’t know what he was talking about. “I’m sorry? The ‘good stuff’?”
“Yeah,” nodded the stallion. “I mean, all that stuff you were telling us about how the Night Mare respects strength and demands loyalty and all of that is fine, but what do we have to do in order for her to give us super-charged magic spells and flying weapons and all that other cool stuff that’ll, you know…” He gave her a grin that was half-apologetic and half-leering then. “Let us do like Prince Lex and attract some hot mares of our own.”
For a moment Cloudbank couldn’t do anything except stare at the pony who’d quite clearly understood nothing of what she’d spent the last hour talking about. “…what?”
But the stallion didn’t have a chance to respond before another pony, this one a bubblegum-chewing teenage pegasus mare dressed in a rather chic vest and beret, let out a snort. “Oh, my gosh. You’re, like, so gross,” she sneered at the stallion, before turning to look at Cloudbank. “Listen, I don’t want to agree with Creepy McNasty over here, but I do want to know when we get our own spirit animals like those kids have? Because I was in Canterlot a few days ago and that stuck-up old nag Fleur de Lis just had, like, a cheetah dedicated to her at the zoo by Fancy Pants – he could do so much better than her, bee-tee-dubs – and while I’m sure a bunch of foals are happy getting snakes and moles and stuff, I’m totally going to need something better if I want to show her up.”
Normally, when Cloudbank froze up in front of a crowd, it was because of anxiety. But right now she was struck dumb for a different reason, utterly nonplussed as the pegasus paused, blowing a large bubble before popping it loudly and pulling it back into her mouth before continuing. “I was thinking, like, maybe a gazelle with a tiger-print coat, y’know? Or maybe a cross between a puma and a fox? The Night Mare can do that, what with her being such a big deal and all, right?”
“Can da Night May-ah do dat?” marveled an earth colt who looked like he couldn’t have been more than five years old, his eyes round as he looked between Cloudbank and a pair of embarrassed-looking older ponies who had to have been his parents. “I-I wanna hamthta dat’s awtho a wombat! And ith bwue!”
“Everypony stop.”
Holding up a hoof, Cloudbank closed her eyes as she took several deep breaths, opening them only once she heard everyone quiet down. “I thought I made this clear before, but apparently I didn’t. So, I’ll say this one more time: the Night Mare is a goddess of strength. Not brawn or stamina or anything like that, but strength that comes from within. To develop a set of principles and convictions so firm that, when they’re challenged, you reshape the world to fit them rather than reshaping them to fit the world. Worshiping her means seeking that strength out, whether by cultivating it within yourself or devoting yourself to someone else who has.”
She paused for a moment to let that sink in, not even noticing that her nervousness about speaking in front of ponies had vanished. “That’s the only reason to be part of the Night Mare’s faith,” she continued.
Giving the colt a firm, but not unkind, look, she shook her head. “Not because you want a pet.”
Giving the teenage pegasus a scowl of disapproval, she repeated the gesture. “Not because you want status.”
Giving the scraggly earth stallion a sneer of disgust, she shook her head a third time. “And not because you want to get girls.”
Looking around, she waited to see if there were any objections to what she was saying. When none came, she gave a perfunctory nod. “Being a part of the Night Mare’s faith means pushing yourself to improve, mastering yourself and your environment as best you can. Sometimes it’s scary, and a lot of the time it’s painful, but whether you’re trying to grow for your own sake or because you want to be useful to someone else, it’s something that you have to do. Then and only then will the Night Mare even consider rewarding you for your effort.”
“But that sounds hard,” whined someone in the crowd.
“Exactly,” replied Cloudbank without hesitation. “Now you’re getting it. The Night Mare’s religion isn’t an easy path to power. It’s one of the hardest paths there is, and that’s no accident. It’s only by accomplishing something difficult that you can achieve something worthwhile. That’s why Lex Legis is the Night Mare’s champion. Not because he’s defeated monsters and princesses, but because he did so to defend what he believes in, which is making a better future for all of you.”
Standing upright, she put a hoof to her chest. “I gained the Night Mare’s favor when I threw everything I had into helping him do that, shaking off a spell in order to keep fighting the monster who was trying to kill him and the mare that I love. The Night Mare’s Knights earned her recognition when they stood up to the Royal Guard when Lex was at the critical stage of a delicate spell, putting themselves in harm’s way even though they were just a bunch of kids standing against a group of adults in armor.”
Falling back onto all fours, she spread her wings out in an encompassing gesture. “I want everypony here to think about how you can demonstrate that kind of devotion to the Night Mare now that things are more peaceful here. Take some time, and we’ll meet back here tomorrow evening so you can tell me what you come up with, okay?”
The response that came from the crowd was mixed. Several ponies grumbled, others shook their heads, and more than a few simply turned and started walking without saying anything. But others seemed more enthusiastic, smiling and nodding while others fell in with friends as they began to excitedly discuss ideas. Overall, there probably wouldn’t be quite as many ponies showing up tomorrow. But that’s not so bad if I don’t have to listen to anypony else ask how my religion can improve their love life, she snickered to herself, wings flapping as she turned toward River’s manor.
She still needed to work on the finer points of the Night Mare’s religion with Lex, of course. Without Severance, there were a lot of blanks that needed to be filled in. But at least now she’d gotten the ball rolling, teaching those ponies the parts she already knew. With any luck, the ones who hadn’t been scared off by that would start to understand what it really meant to have faith. In themselves. In the Night Mare.
Once the train departed Vanhoover, it didn’t take long for Twilight and her friends to have a passenger car all to themselves.
That could have been a coincidence. While the ride toward the city had carried plenty of passengers alongside them, only a few ponies had been intent on departing the city when they’d entered the outbound train a few hours ago. Since it was already late, it really was no surprise that the ones who’d been in the same car as them had gotten up and left after a short while. No doubt they were on their way to one of the sleeping cars, or perhaps the dining car for something to eat before turning in.
But as much as she tried to tell herself that everypony leaving had nothing to do with them, Twilight knew better. They were the ones driving everyone away. And not just the other passengers either; even the pony pushing the dessert cart – normally eager to peddle tasty treats that would tempt ponies into going to the dining car for a full meal – had rushed through the center aisle with his eyes down and a half-hearted mumble instead of the boisterous hawking of his wares that he should have issued.
It might have been because everypony knew about their misadventures in Vanhoover – rescuing Starlight Glimmer (whose reputation as a villain had already been cemented by the time they’d freed her) and challenging Lex (who somehow, despite his abrasive mannerisms and boundless ambition, had become a local hero) – and wanted nothing to do with them. Or maybe it was because of the gloomy atmosphere. While Pinkie had made a few attempts to lighten the mood, they’d been half-hearted at best, and had received only tepid responses as everypony struggled to cope with just how badly their trip had gone, leaving them all morose as they stared out the windows or at the floor.
Both were distinct possibilities. But if Twilight had to guess why everyone was avoiding them, it would be…
“WAAAAAAAAHAAAAHAAAAHAAAAAAAA! I’M A COMMONER NOW!”
…that.
Blueblood had, in the wake of the duel, proven to be completely inconsolable. Even after being healed of his injuries, he’d continued to sob and wail at the top of his lungs hysterically, putting on a display of heartbreak that was leagues beyond anything Rarity had ever managed. It had been so bad that Twilight had needed to use her telekinesis to carry him to the train platform, the ex-prince being too distraught to so much as walk. Even then, he’d carried on for nearly half-an-hour before finally passing out, his tantrum ironically exhausting him far more than his brief experience with fighting had.
Since then Blueblood’s disposition had improved. Marginally. While still prone to bursting into loud fits of tears, the ex-prince’s caterwauling would now die down after a few minutes, leaving him whimpering and hiccupping…until something came along that reminded him that he was no longer royalty, at which point he’d start over with a fresh round of bawling.
Of course, with how luxurious his life had been up until now, everything seemed to remind Blueblood of what he’d lost. From the dessert cart’s treats being wrapped in plastic rather than wax paper, to the seats being upholstered in wool rather than velvet, to the fact that he was taking a “mere locomotive” at all; all had driven the stallion to weep. As responsible as Twilight felt for what had happened to Blueblood, her patience was starting to wear-
“I can’t take it anymore!” snapped Starlight, teeth gritted as she rounded on the sniveling unicorn. “Will you please just shut up already?!”
To Twilight’s amazement – and that of everyone else, given how their eyes widened – Blueblood actually complied, staring at Starlight in shock. “Wh-, th-, y-you ill-mannered hussy! How dare you speak to me like that! I’m…I’m…” His lip quivered as he trailed off, once again realizing that he no longer had a basis for looking down on everypony else.
Nor did Starlight intend to let him forget it. “You’re what?” she growled. “Just like everypony else now? Yeah, you are! WHY IS THAT SUCH A BAD THING?!”
The yell that she unleashed at the end made everyone else wince. “Um, Starlight?” ventured Fluttershy. “Maybe we should give Blueblood a little more time to work through what happened before-”
“NO!” Although Fluttershy had been the one to rescue Starlight, that didn’t stop her from giving the pegasus an angry look now. “I’m done listening to this!”
She didn’t wait for an answer – not that Fluttershy seemed intent on giving her one, drawing back with a compliant squeak – before turning her attention back to Blueblood. “You should be happy that you’re not royalty anymore! What did that crown ever do except isolate you?! Everypony around you was either trying to suck up to you, afraid of offending you, or resentful that you had what they didn’t! Now that you’re the same as them, you can maybe make some real friendships! You’re free now! You should be celebrating!”
But Blueblood looked far from convinced, staring at Starlight as if she’d grown a second head. “You’re insane!” he sputtered at last. “Being a prince was wonderful! I may have had few peers, even among those who could claim to be my equal” – that last part came with a disapproving glance at Twilight – “but that was a price that I was more than happy to pay in service to Equestria!”
Starlight’s lip curled. “What service? It’s not like you ever moved the sun or saved a kingdom from disaster.”
Blueblood sneered right back at her. “I don’t expect your uncultured mind to understand. As the people’s prince, my role is to be a point of inspiration for them!”
“I think you mean ‘was,’” noted Rarity dryly.
Conveniently, Blueblood didn’t hear her, and kept going. “It’s just like my father always said. In seeing me, I remind everypony of what Equestria represented, letting them know that in their own small and insignificant way, they each play a part in the creation and maintenance of something truly grand! Something larger than themselves, which I have the privilege and the responsibility of maintaining and exalting, for their continued inspiration!”
“Then your father was an idiot!” spat Starlight, her voice dripping with venom. “Because every time I’ve had somepony turn out to be different from me, it’s ruined my life!”
Twilight winced at that, hearing the ragged edge in the mare’s voice. “Starlight…”
But just like Blueblood, Starlight was beyond listening. “My best friend, Sunburst, got his cutie mark before I did! We’d spent our entire lives together before then, but he changed and I didn’t, so his parents whisked him off to Canterlot while I stayed behind! Do you have any idea how much that hurt me?! And then again yesterday! All those ponies I helped give up their cutie marks turned on me when they found out I hadn’t given up mine! Even though I tried to tell them that I only kept it so I could remove cutie marks from other ponies who needed help! That I would have given it up and been like them otherwise! That everything I told them about being their friend was real! They still didn’t believe me! All because of my cutie mark! All because I was DIFFERENT!”
Although her expression was no less furious than before, there were tears running down Starlight’s face as she raised a hoof and jabbed Blueblood in the chest. “And now you finally get to stop being unlike everyone else, and all you can do is cry?! You don’t know how good you have it, you ungrateful” – another jab, stronger now – “self-centered” – this time her strike was more akin to a punch – “unappreciative” – now it was definitely a punch – “selfish-”
But before her hoof could lash out again, a pink aura caught it.
“Starlight, stop!” Wings fluttering as she flew over to interpose herself between the quarreling pair, Twilight gave Starlight a pleading look. “I know how you feel, but-”
“No you don’t!” Wrenching her hoof free from Twilight’s telekinesis, Starlight gave her a look of pure loathing. “You’re a princess and an alicorn AND you still have all your friends! You do NOT KNOW HOW I FEEL!”
With that, her horn lit up, and Twilight had just enough time to recognize a teleportation spell before Starlight suddenly lost control of the spell, a cry of pain escaping her lips as her damaged horn proved unable to properly shape the magic she was channeling. Fortunately, all that happened was a bright flash as the energy she’d gathered dissipated, but Starlight stumbled back all the same, nearly falling over as a groan escaped her lips.
Twilight was at her side in an instant. “Are you alri-”
“Leave me alone!” Shoving Twilight away, Starlight took off running, not looking back as she reached the back of the car and threw the door open, exiting in a rush.
For a moment, Twilight considered letting her go. But she just couldn’t. For all that she’d talked to Starlight over the last day, the unicorn mare had made only the barest mention of the friends who had abandoned her during her battle with Lex, refusing to say more than two words about what had actually driven them apart. For her to open up like that now…it had to be absolutely tearing her apart inside. As someone who had learned just how precious friendship was, it broke Twilight’s heart to hear how hurt and alone Starlight felt.
Especially since she was apparently reliving what had happened with her childhood friend.
“I’m going after-”
“Did you hear how she spoke to me?!” whined Blueblood, his eyes already filling up with tears again. “It’s already starting! Ponies are treating me like I’m…I’m…no one special!” The last syllable was already a whine, and it was clear that another round of bewailing was imminent.
“Lemme come help,” insisted Rainbow Dash, winging over and pushing Twilight toward the door that Starlight had just passed through. “I’ll provide, uh, moral support.”
“I’ll join you as well, darling,” added Rarity, following close behind. “I’m sure I can whip up a proper fainting couch if poor Starlight feels overwhelmed again.”
“Me too! Me too!” whooped Pinkie, hopping quickly after them. “If we stop by the dining car, I can get some ice cream and throw her a proper pity party!”
“I should go too,” murmured Fluttershy, falling in with others. “I’m the one who rescued Starlight in the first place. I can’t bear to not be there for her now.”
“Count me in as well,” announced Applejack, rushing to keep up. “Ain’t nothin’ worse than feelin’ like you got nopony in the world to care for you.” Without pausing, she glanced back at the final member of their group. “So Spike, you stay here and look after Blueblood!”
“What?” Aghast, Spike – who had already been making his way toward the door – stopped cold, glancing back at where Blueblood was already starting to sob uncontrollably. Again. “Why me?! I don’t know what to do!”
“You’re both fellas,” shrugged Applejack as she reached the door, the last one to depart. “Maybe invite him to one of your games of Ogres & Oubliettes? Big Mac sure seems to look forward to ‘em.”
Then she was gone, not bothering to glance back in time to see the mortified look on Spike’s face. “How do you know about that?!”
It didn’t take very long to find Starlight Glimmer.
Even with so few ponies onboard, a crying mare rushing through the middle of the cars was hard to miss, not to mention how limited her options were for where to go. As such, Twilight hadn’t been overly surprised to find Starlight at the very back of the train’s caboose, her forelegs perched on the railing at the final car's back entrance, staring forlornly back at the sunset and the gradually-receding sight of Vanhoover. At that moment she looked like the very picture of misery, far more so than Blueblood’s howling.
Waving at her friends to give them a little space, Twilight slowly walked toward the despondent-looking unicorn, stopping a few feet behind her. “Starlight? I know you said to leave you alone, but…is there anything I can do to help?”
Several seconds went by, with Starlight not so much as flicking an ear to indicate that she’d heard the question. Twilight was about to ask again when Starlight finally spoke up. “We really were friends, you know.”
“You mean the other ponies from your village?”
Starlight nodded, the gesture half-hearted. “I…I had to push some of them…a lot of them…to give up their cutie marks. But I really did want to show them that they could be happier that way, and they really did seem to be. Even if I wasn’t honest about everything, what we had wasn’t a lie.”
Hearing how quiet – how fragile – Starlight’s voice was, and knowing that the unicorn herself was most likely in the same state, Twilight took a breath before crossing the last few feet, standing next to Starlight at the very back of the train, taking in the view. “I believe you. Friendship is the strongest force there is, and that means that most of the time, a single fight isn’t enough to ruin it.”
“Then why did they leave me?” The grief in the other mare’s voice was raw and open. “Why did they care more about my cutie mark making me different from them than about our friendship?”
“I don’t think they did.” Turning away from the scenery, Twilight looked at Starlight directly, giving her a soft smile. “Starlight, the same way a fight can’t take your friends away, neither can a cutie mark. Ponies can be friends even if they’re different. Sometimes those differences can be the very things that make their friendships strong.”
She held out a wing then, pointing toward where her friends were watching them from a short distance away. Slowly, as though every motion were an enormous effort, Starlight turned to look at the five other ponies, all smiling at her. Twilight didn’t miss how the other mare hesitated then, looking each of them – and their cutie marks – over, before she slowly shook her head, her ears flattening and eyes looking down. “Being different pushes everypony away from me.”
“Only if you let it,” countered Twilight gently. For a moment she considered bringing up the childhood friend Starlight had mentioned, but decided against it. Better to stick to the topic Starlight felt more comfortable discussing. “You said that what you had with those other ponies was real. I bet that they feel that way too. If you’re willing to reach out to them, I'm sure they’ll still want to be your friends, even if you all have your cutie marks.”
Starlight gave a hollow laugh at that. “Reach out to them? After what I…after everything that’s happened?” The shrug she gave then radiated hopelessness, but for the first time since Twilight had followed her, Starlight looked her in the eyes. “I can’t. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
But Twilight had been expecting her to say that, and she knew what answer to give. “Then let me teach you. Just like my teacher taught me.”
Then she held her hoof out and waited.
Starlight’s indecision was written all over her face, so powerful that Twilight could almost see the interplay of hope and fear, knowing that she desperately wanted to believe what she was being told but was scared, so scared, of being hurt again. And although she knew she couldn’t do anything but respect whatever decision Starlight made, Twilight nevertheless found herself wishing with all her heart for her to accept her offer. I wasn’t able to help Lex, she lamented silently, the caustic stallion having shut down every attempt she’d made to try and connect with him. So please, Starlight, let me help you!
Starlight raised her hoof, and Twilight’s heart leapt…straight into her throat as Starlight hesitated. “I…”
For just a moment she wavered.
And then, slowly…she reached her hoof forward and touched it to Twilight’s. “Okay.”
Twilight couldn’t help but let out a gasp of relief, belatedly realizing that she’d been holding her breath, and she saw Starlight give a shaky smile in reply…before her gaze turned into one of confusion, shifting downward. “What’s wrong with your cutie mark?”
“What do you-, huh?!” Glancing back to look at her flank, Twilight’s eyebrows shot upward as she saw that her cutie mark was glowing, copies of it appearing on her flank and moving toward the original before disappearing, the process repeating every second or so. It was a phenomenon that she’d never seen before…except she’d seen one like it recently, back in her castle with- “The map,” she breathed softly, dazedly looking over and seeing that the same thing was happening to the rest of her friends, causing them to yelp and cavort in surprise.
Starlight blinked, tilting her head. “Map?”
Twilight, however, couldn’t hear her, dazed as the meaning of what she was seeing crashed over her. She’d thought the mission that the map had given them was about Lex, that it wanted her and her friends to go there and teach him the magic of friendship, a task at which she’d failed miserably. But now… “It was you,” she murmured, looking between her cutie mark and Starlight with wide eyes.
“It was never about Lex at all. It was always you.”
Striding into the private study that she and her sister had always used when Line Byline had come to speak with them, Luna grimaced as Nosey Newsy – having bowed as soon as the doors had opened – lifted her head in response to her apology. The mare looked even worse than she’d been told. Rope marks could still be seen around her legs. Bandages covered her neck and middle. One eye was blackened, almost swollen shut.
But it was the look on Nosey’s face that worried Luna the most. She’d met the reporter before, during their ill-fated trip to Vanhoover, and while Nosey had clearly been awed to meet with a princess in person, she’d nevertheless evinced a playfulness that had hinted at a deep passion for what she did, agreeing to answer questions only if she could ask some of her own. Given how she’d been tortured by that “belier devil” that Mihr had warned them about prior to then, Nosey’s attitude had been a sign of remarkable resilience.
That resilience was nowhere to be seen now. Beyond the bruises and the bandages, the look on Nosey’s face was a mask of detachment, her emotions held so fiercely in check that she was inadvertently telegraphing that fact to everyone who so much as glanced at her. The sight almost made Luna wince; it wasn’t something somepony did unless they were either in a great deal of inner turmoil or were in the presence of a person they had strong negative feelings toward. Neither boded well for this meeting.
“It was no inconvenience, Your Highness,” answered Nosey robotically, telekinetically bringing her quill and notepad to the ready. “Shall we begin?”
Despite how Nosey was radiating professionalism, the abrupt question still caught Luna off-guard, having assumed that the reporter would want to talk about Line and Silhouette before starting. But maybe she’s saving that for after we’re done, she decided uneasily. “Of course.” Glancing at the pair of guards that had entered with her and moved to flank the door, Luna nodded toward them. “Go wait at the other end of the hall, if you please.”
The armored stallions glanced at each other, but to Luna’s surprise didn’t move, instead shifting uncomfortably in place. “Princess,” began the one of her left, “forgive us, but if it’s alright with you, we’d prefer to remain here.”
Luna’s eyebrows rose, looking at the two in mild disbelief. The Royal Guard wasn’t exactly a bastion of military might, but its ponies were obedient to a fault where she and her sister were concerned. For two of its members to openly defy her like this, and in front of a reporter no less…
Pushing down the fear that she was no longer seen as a legitimate princess because of what Lex Legis’s curse had done to her, Luna drew herself up to her full height, trying not to think about how that was several inches shorter than it should have been. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded. “I gave you an order!”
It was with some satisfaction that she saw both guards flinch. “Princess, we mean no disrespect,” pleaded the one on her right. “It’s just…” Glancing at Nosey, a scowl crossed his features as his eyes returned to Luna. “That mare is a known associate of Lex Legis, the pony who murdered Commander Silhouette and, well…” He gestured toward her, clearly not sure how to refer to her condition.
“She’s a security risk, Your Highness,” concluded the other guard. “For your own safety, please allow us to stay in the room with you.”
That she’d been so wrong about their motivations was a source of comfort to Luna, and she hated that it was, feeling guilty over the relief that ran through her even as she saw Nosey’s jaw clench out of her peripheral vision. Fortunately, she had two convenient targets to take her negativity out on right in front of her. “Are you implying,” she murmured, her voice thick with displeasure, “that you think me so weak that one injured mare could be a threat to me?”
Both guards turned pale. “N-no, Your Highness!” gulped the one on her right. “That wasn’t what we meant at all!”
“Then what did you mean?” snapped Luna, her voice rising as she glowered at the pair, watching them squirm. “That you think your judgment regarding my safety is superior to my own?”
“Of course not, but-”
“Then go!” snapped Luna. “And do not return until I call for you!”
To her considerable irritation, both hesitated for a second before complying, mumbling apologies as they turned and left the room, shutting the door behind them.
Taking a moment to calm herself, Luna turned back toward Nosey. “I’m very sorry for that-”
“Why did they refer to Silhouette as being a commander?” demanded Nosey.
Once again, Luna found herself off-balance. Not just because she didn’t understand the question, but because now Nosey apparently did want to talk about what had happened, at least obliquely. As much as the younger mare was clearly trying to keep everything together, Luna knew it was another sign as to how much she had to be reeling after what she’d been through. “I’m sorry? I don’t understand…”
“Those guards referred to Silhouette as being a commander,” explained Nosey, frowning. “So did the one who tried to interview me this afternoon. But you stripped him of his rank after he tried to attack Lex. I know because I was there when you did; you even took away his armor. So why don’t they seem to know that?”
“Ah, of course.” Fighting down the urge to grimace, Luna took a moment to seat herself, gesturing to a chair across from her. “Please, make yourself comfortable. Before I answer, would you care for something to eat? My sister would always bring cake whenever we met Line here-”
“I’m fine, thank you,” interrupted Nosey, her voice still flat and cold.
It’s not just shock from what happened, Luna decided. She’s upset at me personally. That wasn’t unexpected; Silhouette had been one of her guards, as well as her most devoted worshiper, both of which made him her responsibility. And while Luna knew that he’d been…upset, after having been resurrected – the report she’d gotten about his assaulting Shining Armor, to say nothing of how he’d apparently destroyed his meager possessions in a fit of rage, had been worrying in the extreme – the hasty briefing she’d gotten after waking up barely an hour ago was something she was still struggling to process.
Sighing, Luna decided that there was no point putting her answer off any longer. “Silhouette is still referred to as a commander because my directive that he be stripped of his rank was never processed,” she admitted. “Although I’d intended for him to head up a religious order dedicated to me, one separate from the Royal Guard, discharging him from his position was still an indignity. Since he died defending me a short time later, it seemed…petty, I suppose is the word, to make it official.”
“And that was true even after he was resurrected?” pressed Nosey, flipping through her notepad. “Despite his assaulting Prince Shining Armor in public?”
“Yes.” Unable to help the look of regret that crossed her face then, Luna looked down. “He had just been brought back to life after a violent death, not to mention that as soon as he was resurrected he witnessed me having a…a breakdown, after confirming that the curse Lex Legis placed on me would not be easily removed. I had hoped that he was simply suffering from some sort of temporary hysteria, and that he would come to his senses after a little while.”
Nosey’s face at that moment could have been carved from stone. “He hasn’t.”
This time Luna did wince. “I know. I was late just now because I was being informed as to what he’d done, and I want to apologize to you for what you went through.” Lowering her head, Luna made no effort to hide the remorse she felt at that moment. “You and Line were hurt because I abandoned my responsibility to Silhouette. I was so completely concerned with my own situation that I couldn’t bring myself to deal with anything else. I know that isn’t an excuse for my failure, but I hope it at least explains it.”
For a moment Nosey didn’t respond, and Luna knew she was trying to find a way to process something that personal without letting her mask crack. “Line and his family are the ones you should apologize to,” she said at last. “What they went through…what they’re still going through, is worse than what happened to me.”
I’m not so sure about that, countered Luna silently. But she knew better than to say that out loud. “I’m going to see Line at the hospital after we’re done here,” she admitted, lifting her head. “I’m just glad Soft Mane was able to heal him. Tell me, is he faring well under her ministrations?”
Nosey shifted in her seat, suddenly unable to meet Luna’s eyes. “I haven’t seen him yet. I just heard that she was able to bring him back from the brink of…that she was able to fix his injuries, and that the doctors want her to stay close by just to be safe while they keep him overnight for observation.”
“I see.” Looking over Nosey’s injuries in silence, Luna paused as an idea came to her. “Would you like to come see him with me, after we’re done here?”
Despite Nosey’s best efforts, a glimpse of her real feelings slipped through her mask then, and although it was brief, Luna recognized the mixture of guilt and fear that flashed across the other mare’s face. “I shouldn’t,” answered Nosey after a brief moment. “If I go there, Line will insist that Soft Mane use her magic to heal me, and I don’t want her to waste any just in case he has any sort of relapse later.”
It was a plausible excuse, but in conjunction with what she’d just seen Luna knew that it was just that: an excuse. “Nosey…” How would Celestia do this? “What happened to Line wasn’t your f-”
“We should get started.” Nosey’s voice was slightly louder than necessary as she flipped through her notes, swallowing deeply as she turned her notepad over. “When he came to my apartment, Line said you wanted to announce to the public that you were no longer going to present yourself as a goddess?”
For a moment Luna considered pushing the issue. But this wasn’t a dream, where even in her weakened state she could manipulate her surroundings in order to better help ponies confront their fears and doubts. Here in the real world, all she had were her words and her own presence, and the latter had been sullied thanks to Lex Legis, leaving Luna with little confidence that she could talk someone through their problems the way her sister could.
“That’s correct,” she answered at last. “I’ve already spoken with my worshipers – my other worshipers, I mean – and informed them of my decision, as well as my…condition. Now it’s time to let the rest of Equestria know.”
“You should have your picture taken as well,” noted Nosey, not looking up as she began scribbling notes. “For the article, I mean.”
“I’ve already scheduled a photographer for later this evening,” replied Luna. “Nosey…did Line get a chance to tell you why I wanted you to come here?”
Her brow creasing slightly, Nosey looked up. “I just said: for your announcement about not being a goddess.”
Luna shook her head. “No, I mean, why I wanted you, Nosey Newsy, to be the one conducting this interview?”
For a moment Nosey didn’t say anything, even though Luna could see on her face that she knew where this was going. “…no.”
“It was my hope,” explained Luna slowly, “that you’d be willing to expound on what you told Line last night about your time in Vanhoover-”
“Because you’re hoping I’ll give you something you can use against Lex.” Behind her glasses, Nosey’s eyes narrowed.
Fortunately, Luna had seen this particular development coming far in advance. “Because I’m hoping that you can set the record straight about him. Line is a fine journalist, but he can be a bit…overzealous, where my sister and I are concerned.” A faint smile crossed her face about that. “We actually got into a fight about that last night, when he came to tell me what you’d told him. I’ll need to apologize for that when I see him later, as well as what happened with Silhouette.”
The admission seemed to take the edge off of Nosey’s tension. “I already gave Line everything I jotted down while I in Tall Tale and Vanhoover. I’m not sure what else you want me to say.”
“Whatever you feel like saying.” Managing a smile, Luna sat up. “When we last spoke, you suggested that we answer each other’s questions in equal measure, trading answers on a one-for-one basis. How about we do that again now? I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, if you’ll do the same for me.”
Nosey blinked once, and then looked down, her eyes taking in the carpet as Luna watched her consider her offer. That the reporter would accept was a near-certainty; an interview with a princess, especially one where nothing was off-topic, was simply too juicy an offer to pass up, especially with how ambitious Line had described Nosey as being. And even if she didn’t have turn over any useful information about Lex, then this would hopefully help Nosey feel better. In Luna’s experience, ponies who performed activities relating to their cutie mark tended to-
“No.”
Luna blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“No,” repeated Nosey. “I’m not going to tell you anything about Lex, or Vanhoover, or any of it.”
For a moment Luna just sat there, stunned. “But the interview-”
Nosey tore a few pages off of her notepad, levitating them over to Luna. “You said that you’re going to see Line after this, right? These are the notes I’ve taken during our conversation just now. I’m sure that he can finish the interview with these. Please excuse me.”
Distractedly taking the pages, Luna tried to figure out what she’d done wrong as Nosey stood up and began walking toward the door. “Wait. Nosey, wait.” Jumping to her hooves, Luna moved to cut her off. “I’m not asking you to betray whatever confidence Lex may have entrusted you with. I just-”
“Your Highness, I’m tired,” blurted Nosey, her veneer of indifference faltering for the second time, this time showing a deep exhaustion that matched her words. “It took me several days to get back home, and in the twenty-four hours since I’ve arrived I’ve fought with my editor, had my home broken into, been assaulted and interrogated, worried myself sick over Line, had the Royal Guard all but accuse me of being a criminal, and now you’re asking me to…”
Biting her lip, she cut herself off, shaking her head. “With all due respect, Princess Luna, I’m done. I’m going to go to my parents’ house and get some sleep, and then I’ll make a statement to the guards so that they’ll leave me alone, but after that…” She let out a slow breath. “After that, I don’t want to think about Lex, or Vanhoover, or goddesses, or any of it, for a very long time. I just…I want to rest.”
That was enough to bring Luna up short. She’d just finished talking about how she’d been too wrapped up in herself to see what was going on with Silhouette, and now she was making the same mistake with Nosey, even if she was being gentler about it. “You’re right. I should have been more sensitive to what you’ve been through. Forgive me.”
Stepping aside, she watched as Nosey opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. “Is there anything you’d like me to tell Line when I see him later?”
That got Nosey to pause, spending a few seconds in thought before glancing over her shoulder. “Tell him that I’m sorry about what happened. And also…”
Turning around, she started walking again.
“Tell him that I’m on vacation until further notice.”
The ground was rough and uneven, and more than once a slight dip or bump in the terrain had sent him sprawling, unable to see even such minor obstacles in the pitch blackness. Other times he had walked face-first into a wall, and although he’d been moving at a pace slower than a walk, the impact had still been painful. More than once, he’d tasted blood as a result, though that might have been because he’d re-opened some of the injuries he’d acquired in that last fight.
Even so, he knew it could have been worse. As much as each impact hurt, colliding with a wall or loosing his hoofing were mild consequences compared to what could happen if he wasn’t careful. It was why he now took each step with utmost caution, reaching forward from a stationary position and tapping the ground ahead of him before moving forward. It had reduced his progress to a snail’s crawl, but it would prevent him from accidentally plunging off a ledge and falling to his death.
And Silhouette refused to die before he’d had his revenge on Lex Legis.
That was why he was down here now, crawling like a worm through the caves beneath Canterlot.
This had been the way out of the city that Silhouette had least wanted to take, knowing how dangerous the route would be. While sneaking onto a train would have been far more preferable, it simply wasn’t possible. Even if his appearance hadn’t been so distinctive, with his stark coloration and withered hind leg, most of the guards knew him personally. While he considered none of them to be his peers, let alone his friends, he had still worked with them enough to develop at least casual familiarity with the majority of them, something that would work both ways should they catch even a glimpse of him now.
The next alternative had been to sneak onto an airship. Canterlot had plenty of those, ranging from mail delivery liners to private pleasure barges owned by the city’s richest residents. But those had risks all their own, the major one being that – unlike how a train would continue toward its destination in all but the most dire of circumstances – an airship could easily turn around and return to Canterlot if a stowaway were discovered. And the risk of discovery was not something to be dismissed lightly; while most airships were bigger than a train car, they weren’t bigger than the dozen or so cars that most of the trains to and from Canterlot pulled. That meant fewer places to hide, especially since airships tended to make optimal use of every square inch of space they had; finding someplace that didn’t see at least moderate use during anything longer than a brief voyage to sequester himself in would likely have proven to be difficult at best.
And just to make things more difficult, the Royal Guard had apparently let a group of scofflaws slip out of the city right under their noses recently. While Silhouette wasn’t certain what the details of that incident were, he’d overheard snatches of conversation during his time hiding out in that gossipmonger’s apartment – the voices of passersby floating in through the windows or in the hallway outside her front door – talking about how the guards had briefly grounded all air traffic and searched the train yard. The implication had been that they’d been looking for someone, and from what he’d been able to piece together, they’d apparently failed to catch them.
Silhouette held his fellow guards in contempt on general principle; they more or less revered the princesses, but their feelings fell well short of true faith. Beyond that, there was a pervasive view among their ranks that becoming part of the Royal Guard was an accomplishment that didn’t need to be further built upon. While there were some stallions who worked hard in hope of advancement – mostly ones with cutie marks related to guard duty, and so planned on staying enrolled for life – the majority of the Royal Guard treated their time there as a temporary digression from their true calling, setting aside a few years of service out of a sense of patriotism or because it looked good on a résumé, and then moving on…which they could do as they pleased, since the princesses didn’t believe in compulsory service.
That attitude, combined with how tedious many found their duties to be (guarding empty hallways for hours at a stretch was a common source of exasperated jokes among the ranks) meant that most members of the Royal Guard were little more than showpieces in uniforms, at least in Silhouette’s view. But for all of their laxity, they had their pride. Having just let some other ponies slip by them, they wouldn’t be eager to let it happen again, which meant that if they were watching the train station and airshipyards for him – which seemed likely now, given how violent his altercation with those hack journalists had been – they would almost certainly make an actual effort to catch him.
And if they spotted him in his current state, they’d likely succeed.
Silhouette had always taken his guard duties with the utmost seriousness, knowing that his actions reflected upon the one whom he worshiped with all of his heart. For her sake, he had filled his off-duty hours with training and prayer, eager to mold himself into the perfect symbol of devotion. And if his rigor – along with his pronounced lack of tolerance for even the slightest hint of disrespect toward the alicorn who was the object of his devotion – had won him little camaraderie among his fellow guards, it hadn’t kept him from being promoted to the rank of commander, in part due to his fighting prowess. Even with his bad leg, and without his armor, two reporters without any combat training shouldn’t have given him a hard time.
But they had. For all his training, a pair of civilian unicorns – a stallion who was clearly past his prime and a mare whose will should have been broken – had very nearly overpowered him. Even those brats who’d gotten in his way back in Vanhoover hadn’t managed such a thing, since their strategy had been merely to stall him while one of their number ran for help, otherwise he’d have defeated those foals in short order. But this time he’d won only because he’d managed to knock Nosey Newsy’s editor out a window, sending the mare herself rushing after him in a panic and giving him a chance to escape…though not before several bystanders had gotten a good look at him, he was sure.
As it was, he was still feeling the injuries he’d taken in that fight. His split lip – courtesy of that old stallion – still ached every time he ran his tongue over it, and one of his back teeth was suspiciously loose. Of more concern was the shot he’d taken to his ribs; the ache was refusing to fade, and even lightly brushing his hoof against it made him bite back a groan of pain. To think that four-eyed nag had done that to him!
Taken together, his wounds painted a grim picture. Not so much of his physical state (though that was certainly poor as well), but of his competence in the wake of being brought back to life. And that worried him. Hadn’t Princess Twilight mentioned something about that, in the moments after he’d come back to life? He couldn’t remember it clearly, since that moment was obscured by the soul-searing pain of seeing what Lex Legis had done to his Goddess, but there was a vague sense that the youngest alicorn had said something to that effect.
If she had, then she hadn’t been wrong. Ever since then, Silhouette had felt a persistent lethargy dogging him, as though he was walking around with invisible weights affixed to his body. While not truly debilitating, it nevertheless dulled his reflexes, depleted his stamina, and took the edge off of his strength. Worse, it seemed to cut into his situational awareness, making him slightly slower to recognize and react to his surroundings than he knew he was otherwise capable of. Even basic things such as memory and simple computations now required a moment or two of additional thought. And while none of those were major problems in isolation, together they served to reduce him to the point where, well…where two untrained unicorns had nearly bested him. Actual guards, no matter how incompetent they were, would likely subdue him easily if he encountered them.
And if coming back to life had debilitated him to the point where he couldn’t even handle two ordinary ponies, then his chances of defeating Lex Legis – a sorcerer of such power that he had triumphed over multiple alicorns on his own – in battle were nil.
But that didn’t mean he was incapable of avenging his Goddess.
Ah, Luna…
Just thinking her name – her holy, sacred name – sent a ripple of ecstasy down his spine, and Silhouette came to a halt as he enjoyed the sensation. But the feeling was a pale shadow of what it had once been, tainted now by the memory of seeing her wretched and wingless, wailing as he beheld the blasphemy that Lex Legis had worked upon her once-flawless self. A whine rose in his throat as the unwanted memory ruined what should have been a moment of rapture, denying him the peace he missed so desperately.
It was enough to make him consider lying down and letting himself drift off to sleep. The promise of the sacred communion with the one who ruled his heart was tantalizing, letting him recall when she came to him in his dreams and comforted his troubled mind. The memories of how the demons had ravaged his poor brother while Manehattan had burned, once the bane of his unconscious hours, had miraculously faded away under her gentle ministrations.
It had been a life-changing experience.
Helpless within her sacred magic, a force as gentle as it was overwhelming, the serenity he’d felt as she’d manipulated his dream – touching his very soul – had been an experience far more intimate than anything mere lovers could have shared. Under Luna’s power, he was naked and exposed, all of his flaws and imperfections made manifest to her eyes, and she in her grace and mercy had not turned away from the ugliness within him, but instead seen fit to wipe it away, cleansing him and leaving him renewed. That he might experience such a thing again had been part of his nightly prayers, ashamed of his own selfishness and yet unable to keep from hoping that his Goddess would deign to visit him again, bringing him to bliss once more.
It was something that would never happen again, now. Even if she was still capable of reigning over dreams, the mark of Lex Legis’s power over her was indelibly stamped on his mind now, as was the way she’d bleated – broken and whimpering – as the other princesses had proven powerless to restore her. It had broken him to witness, making it impossible for him to pray to her with faith in his heart anymore, and where he’d once hoped for nothing more than to have the Goddess enter his dreams again, he now feared the prospect, not wanting to experience the lack of rapture that he knew would result.
Normally, avoiding any chance of her finding his dreams was easily done, since all he needed to do was match his sleep schedule to hers. But that was impossible to do in a cave. Now all he could do was stay awake as best he could as he stumbled forward, inch by wary inch, and curse himself for never having thought to inquire if there was a map of these tunnels.
As it was, he’d already expended what knowledge he had of them, gained when he’d been freshly enlisted and given a grunt job cleaning out some of the upper mines so that they could be converted in archives for old records. That was the only reason he’d known about these caves at all, since they’d long since been abandoned (despite the gems they contained being far from depleted) due to fears that digging too far down would lead to somepony accidentally breaching Tartarus, the underworld beneath Mount Canterlot where the most dangerous monsters in all of Equestria were imprisoned. Fortunately, nopony had expected him to head back to those archives now, slipping inside during a shift change, and from there to deeper caverns.
It was far from a perfect escape plan, though. He hadn’t had a chance to bring any food, his only sources of water were where condensation had dripped down from the ceiling and collected into puddles, and it was unpleasantly cold. And while a unicorn would have been able to light up the darkness with even a minor spell, since their horn glowed whenever they used magic, he was trapped in darkness that had not even the faintest light to break it.
But he kept going anyway.
Somewhere there was a way out. Twilight Sparkle had gotten Princess Cadance out of these same caverns once, and while Silhouette had no idea where he’d emerge, the fact that most ponies still didn’t know that there were tunnels beneath Canterlot suggested that wherever the exit was, it was far from prying eyes. Far enough that he’d almost certainly be past the guards, letting him make his way down the mountain without them realizing he’d already slipped by them.
That was a gamble, of course. But it was the sort of gamble that he knew he’d need to take if he ever wanted to be able to make Lex Legis pay for what he’d done. The first of many.
The information that he’d gotten out of Nosey Newsy hadn’t been very helpful. A great deal of it had been things that he’d already known, or had been able to guess. But there had been nuggets of useful knowledge here and there, enough for Silhouette to realize what he needed to do to make his revenge more than a flight of fancy. And while he might fall into Tartarus in the attempt – literally, with how deep these caves seemed – it was worth making.
Besides, the hard parts would come later. Right now, all he needed to focus on was getting to the next step of what would likely be a long and dangerous journey:
“Super-thorough double-extra down to the bottoms of your hooves sure?”
“Yes.”
“…well, I guess if you’re sure,” sighed Sonata, sitting back with a pout as she reached for another waffle.
Sitting across the dining table from her, Lex resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he picked at his porridge, still feeling slightly chagrinned about what had happened last night.
It wasn’t that he now needed to track down Sonata and Aria’s missing sister, Adagio Dazzle – still somewhere on Everglow, at least as far as they knew – in addition to his myriad other responsibilities that made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t even that he’d agreed to make her fall in love with him, a task that he had no idea how to accomplish, particularly since he wasn’t entirely clear how he’d managed to woo Sonata and Aria in the first place. Rather, it was that he’d assented to the pair’s request before they’d even properly told him what they wanted.
That the two of them had seduced him was, in hindsight, obvious. Committing to something before getting even the vaguest of details about what was being asked of him was such a lapse of prudence that there could be no other explanation. Especially since it wasn’t the first time they’d done something like that; whether it was Sonata’s amorous demand that he “convince” her that she was prettier than her sister back when they’d been bivouacking in the warehouse, or Aria’s lustfully taunting him into almost rutting her when they’d been sleeping in the train station, both sisters had proven that they knew how to use their sexuality to make his desire for them overpower his reason. For them to do so together, despite his having enjoyed their bodies many times now – both singly and in tandem – had been overwhelming.
Taken in conjunction with the poor judgment he’d exhibited at trying to start a relationship with Nosey – a subject that remained at the forefront of his nightmares – as well as how he’d felt no need to protest when Sonata and Aria had moved things to the bedroom last night to show their appreciation for his ill-considered agreement, the entire episode had left Lex feeling awkward and embarrassed when he’d woken up that morning, to the point where he found himself wanting to spend some time apart from the Sirens. But that had nothing to do with why he wasn’t bringing them with him to meet with the Las Pegasus delegation. Nothing at all.
Pathetic, came the voiceless words from his shadow. You can’t handle your own mares, and you still think you can run a kingdom?
Fighting down a rush of anger at the barb, Lex focused on keeping his voice steady. “Your skill set won’t be required,” he explained, keeping his eyes on the paperwork that he’d drawn up. The review was entirely pointless, of course; the fiscal outlines and corporate structures that he’d made were simple enough that he could have recited them backwards without the slightest bit of effort, but at least this way he didn’t have to look at Sonata while speaking to her. “I’m not going to be socializing with the ponies from Las Pegasus. This meeting is going to be entirely about the technical details of the loan I want them to give me.”
“You do know that you’re going to have to schmooze with them at least a little, right?” scoffed Aria, nibbling on her bagel. “You can’t just walk in and start making demands before those ponies so much as introduce themselves.”
“I’m aware,” murmured Lex, keeping his eyes resolutely downcast. “That’s why I’m bringing River Bank with me.”
The mare in question smiled as she looked up from where she was enjoying her tea and toast. “I already made the preliminary preparations last night,” she confirmed. “After a quick round of putting names to faces, we should be able to get started almost immediately.”
“Whatever,” snorted Aria. “It’s not like I wanted to sit there and help you figure out how to talk to a bunch of stuck-up rich jerks anyway.”
“For realsies?” blinked Sonata, giving her sister a surprised look. “I thought you wanted to help out more?”
He question brought a derisive sneer to Aria’s lips. “Are you kidding me? Why would I want to do that now that I don’t have to keep taking ponies into the city to empty bank vaults?”
“But last night, after Lex fell asleep, you said all that stuff about how you wanted to do everything you could to make-, OW!” Rubbing her head where Aria’s bagel had impacted it, Sonata glared at her sister. “Whadja do that for?!”
“What kind of a moron are you?!” snarled Aria, her cheeks bright red. “Don’t repeat the stuff I said when we’re alone in front of other people!”
“Lex!” whined Sonata. “Aria threw food at me!”
“You deserved it!” Aria looked toward Lex before her sister could reply. “Tell her she deserved it!”
“You two…” growled Lex, squeezing his eyes shut as he put a hoof to his brow.
“Your Highness, If I might interject,” offered Stuffed Shirt, stepping forward from where he’d been hugging the wall behind Lex. “I believe that there’s a way that all parties might be satisfied.”
“Speak,” ordered Lex.
“Since I’m given to understand that you’ll be taking your, er, personal assistant” – he shot a sidelong glance at Feather Duster, who had once again taken up the traditional position of a favored servant as Lex’s left – “with you to your meeting this morning, I’d like to propose that I take this opportunity to introduce Lady Dusk and Lady Blaze to the rest of your royal attaché. That way, they can brief you on my colleagues at your convenience, if that’s acceptable to you.”
“It is.” Lex’s reply came without hesitation, glad to have some task that would keep troublesome pair busy for a while. Finishing his porridge, he gathered his papers as he stood up and made for the door, River and Feather Duster scrambling to keep up. “The two of you meet with the other royal servants and give me your impressions of them at the end of the day. Until then, don’t disturb me unless it’s an emergency.”
“That does sound kinda fun,” admitted Sonata, a smiling growing on her lips at the thought.
“Just so long as they all know to call me Lady Blaze,” smirked Aria, giving her pigtails a toss.
Lex grunted in acknowledgment as he left the room, forcing himself to stop thinking about the mares in his life as he marched toward the conference room where the meeting would be held. What was about to happen was too important to allow personal problems to distract him. Just because this wasn’t a battle didn’t mean that the stakes were any less high, or that he could afford to approach it with anything less than his full concentration.
The loan that Vanhoover needed was finally within reach, which meant that nothing – and nopony – could be allowed to interfere with his acquiring it.
It was all Tryout could do to hold back a groan as he slowly flew down the hallway.
Even after twenty-four hours of barely moving, the pain in his groin hadn’t fully receded. His boys still ached so much that just walking shook them enough – even if he kept his back legs in a wide stance so that his thighs didn’t brush up against them – to leave him feeling ill. Fortunately, he had wings; so long as he kept a slow and even pace, he could still get around without too much trouble.
Let’s just hope there’s something cold in the kitchen that nopony will miss. Ideally there’d be ice, but if not then anything chilled would do. As much as Tryout didn’t relish the thought of freezing the family jewels, there wasn’t much alternative for numbing the pain. It wasn’t like he could tell one of the doctors around here what had happened; if anypony knew that he’d been kicked in the stones so hard that they still hurt a day later – and by his wife, no less – he’d be laughed at! Luckily, his daughter had spent all of yesterday playing with her friends, so she hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong.
Now if I just knew what got into Feather, since I sure didn’t. Despite the soreness raiding outward from between his back legs, Tryout couldn’t help but snicker a little at his own joke. Still, he knew it was no laughing matter. His wife had always been the giving type, and certainly never violent; for her to be so incredibly selfish about tending to his needs, to the point of lashing out, was unlike her in the extreme. So what was the deal?
It was a mystery that needed to be unraveled with all possible speed, since the fate of his marriage might very well depend-
“Oh, hey ladies.” Flashing a winning grin at a pair of maids that turned a corner ahead of him, Tryout did his best to look natural as they walked by, smiling and nodding at him in return. Despite needing to take it easy, he couldn’t help but turn to watch them head down the hallway, eyes on the hemlines of their dresses as they entered a nearby room, cleaning implements at the ready. Sixes, both of them, he decided as he started to resume his journey toward the kitchen. Maybe sevens if those outfits were more flattering. After all, maid uniforms weren’t exactly the sexiest outfits around, not unless they were dolled up like Feather’s had been when he’d finally gotten back to Vanhoover. Now that had been a hot little number!
Maybe when I figure out what’s wrong with her and how to fix it, she’ll wear that for me again, he chuckled to himself, before shaking his head. But first thing’s first, gotta uncover why-
“Was that him?” came a voice from behind him, emanating from the room the maids had vanished into.
“Shh! He might still be nearby.”
Recognizing that the pair were talking about him, Tryout ducked around the corner that the maids had emerged from. The motion set his boys to shaking, and he had to stifle a pained whimper as he landed. Still, it’d be worth it; listening to the admiration of his female fans was a treat he got to enjoy all too rarely. Bet it’ll be about my Iron Wing award, he grinned, remembering the medal he’d gotten for flying from Vanhoover to Tall Tale and back in a twenty-four hour period. Thing’s a chick magnet. Not that he’d ever cheat on his wife – even if she was acting like the world’s biggest nag at the moment – but if some ladies wanted to fantasize about getting together with a star athlete, that wasn’t something he could help now was it?
“It’s clear,” came the voice of one of the maids. “Poor guy. I feel so bad for him.”
…huh?
“I know,” sighed the other. “Just imagine: being separated from your wife and daughter while fleeing the city, spending weeks worried sick and not knowing what happened to them, only to come back and finding out that they both survived, but found someone to replace you.”
WHAT?!
Oblivious to Tryout’s panic, the pair kept conversing. “So you think it’s true? That Feather’s having an affair with Master Legis?”
“Prince, remember? He’s Prince Legis now.”
“I forgot! Oh, I really wish I’d gotten to see the duel yesterday! I still can’t believe he actually fought Twilight Sparkle and won!”
Tryout could feel himself starting to hyperventilate. That ridiculous-looking sourpuss his wife worked for was a prince now?! He’d fought a duel with Twilight Sparkle, the pony who’d led the team that overcame numerous monsters and threats to Equestria, and actually beaten her?! And he was…he and Feather were…
“I know, right? And I’ll tell you what, if Feather’s not angling to get a piece of that action, then she must be crazy! I mean, he’s already so good with her daughter, he’s got all of Miss Bank’s money, he’s royalty, and…” A stifled giggle broke the flow of the conversation, but only for a moment. “…the way he makes Sonata and Aria carry on, he must be a tiger in bed!”
“You’re terrible!” squealed the other maid. “But I know what you mean! Did you hear the way they were going at it last night?!” Another round of giggling ensued. “If I was braver, I’d ask them exactly what he’s doing so my boyfriend can do it to me!”
“Well, you might be able to ask Feather pretty soon.” Her voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper then, and Tryout had to strain to hear what she said next. “I heard that for the last two nights, she and her husband have slept apart. And now she’s the prince’s ‘personal assistant’ too!”
“I bet the offer he made her came with a really ‘big package’ of benefits!”
The voices dissolved into laughter again, and that was all Tryout could take, turning and rushing away as fast as his wings could carry him. This time, it wasn’t his aching stones that sent a sick sense of nausea flowing through him. Rather, it was a horrible mixture of outrage, betrayal, and humiliation.
Now he knew what had gotten into Feather: Lex Legis.
All of a sudden that joke didn’t seem nearly as funny.
He thinks he can fool around with my wife?! seethed Tryout as he flew through the halls. He thinks he can be a dad to my little girl?! He thinks he can take my family away from me and get away with it?!
It didn’t matter that Lex Legis was some kind of hotshot wizard.
It didn’t matter that he was the richest guy in town.
It didn’t even matter that he was royalty.
Anypony who came between Tryout and his family was going down!
Lex had no idea if the silence that filled the room was a good thing or not.
Scattered in front of him, the ponies from Las Pegasus quietly traded glances in the aftermath of his proposal. Seeing those quick looks made Lex tense up, hating that he couldn’t decipher whatever wordless communication was passing between them in those momentary exchanges. It wasn’t even that his inability to read their dispositions weakened his ability to conduct this meeting – though that was a large part of it – rather, it was a reminder that after a lifetime of trying, he was still no closer to compensating for whatever defect he had that made interpersonal communication so difficult.
Knowing he needed to calm himself before he grew agitated enough that his tulpa began to taunt him – or worse, before his eyes changed color, telegraphing his aggrieved state to the Las Pegasus ponies – he forced the emotion back down. Instead, he made himself review the details that River had briefed him on prior to her bringing everypony in. None of them had been meaningful that he’d been able to see, but she’d seemed to think they were important.
The seating arrangements had been one of them. As inane as it seemed, apparently who sat closest to him during the meeting had been a major concern for River, to the point where she’d had the long conference table he’d thought they’d be using removed ahead of time. In its place, she’d arranged a large chair for him to sit at – with a smaller one for herself at his side (with Feather Duster standing attentively behind him) – one that was high-backed and ostentatiously decorated. Everypony else, by contrast, was sitting in parlor chairs that had been spread out in a one-hundred-fifty degree arc in front of him, equidistant.
The order of introductions had been another matter that Lex couldn’t have cared less about, but which River had apparently put a great deal of thought into. While Lex would have simply done away with the entire thing, since River had already told him about each and every one of the ponies she’d brought back, that was apparently some sort of major faux paus. Worse, unlike with the chairs, there was no way for her to arrange any sort of parallel presentation there, since apparently it was imperative that everyone be presented to him individually rather than as a group. As such, River had defaulted to the least-tendentious manner of introduction she’d been able to think of: alphabetical order.
As it was, those introductions lasted nearly a half-hour on their own. Far from River simply reading off everypony’s name as they walked into the room, each and every member of the Las Pegasus delegation had insisted on making a display of obsequiousness, showering him with pointless flattery while simultaneously attempting to talk up whatever merits they thought their business successes credentialed them with. It had been a complete waste of time, one that Lex had indulged only because River had previously cautioned him was very important for putting those ponies in a receptive mood.
It was only after those mundane pleasantries had been dispensed with that Lex had finally been able to get down to business.
Over the course of almost forty minutes, he’d outlined precisely what he wanted from the ponies River had brought to him, and how he expected them to go about fulfilling his wishes. In this area, too, River had taken it upon herself to be proactive, frequently breaking in when she apparently felt he’d made a point that required further elucidation. That was entirely by design, of course; without Sonata, he needed someone else to act as his spokespony. The only difference was that he hadn’t bothered to use his whisper-spell for River; with everypony focused on them, and no background noise to act as cover, even a whisper would be highly conspicuous.
Now, with his design having been laid out, there was nothing left to do but wait and hope that everyone would see that what he was proposing was in everyone’s best-
“Your Highness.”
Lex’s reminiscing abruptly fell away as a unicorn mare with a sepia-colored coat – Pretty Penny, the hotel magnate – stood up. “First, please allow me to congratulate you on crafting such a comprehensive plan for Vanhoover’s recovery! I think I speak for everypony here when I say that it’s wonderful that our newest prince is so concerned with the welfare of Equestria’s downtrodden!”
That brought a murmur of agreement from everypony else, and Pretty Penny smiled, as though anticipating a favorable reaction from Lex. When it became clear that none would be forthcoming, her grin sagged for only the briefest instant before she forged ahead. “I’d also like to be the first pony here to personally pledge my wholehearted support for your grand vision! And in that spirit, I’d like to propose one minor alteration to this incredible enterprise you’ve shown us.”
Pretty Penny’s announcement brought an immediate frown to Lex’s face. The program he’d come up with wasn’t anything particularly complicated, but he’d still put considerable time into reviewing it, making sure that it would serve the best interests of Vanhoover’s ponies while simultaneously positioning him to be able to seize political authority over Las Pegasus in the near future. Even a slight deviation could put one or both of those goals at risk, and that wasn’t acceptable.
But on the other hoof, while both prior experience in general and what he’d been told about these ponies in particular suggested otherwise, there was still the chance – however small – that Penny’s suggestion might improve upon his design. For that reason alone, she deserved to be heard. As much as Lex was aware that his intelligence outstripped virtually everyone else in Equestria, he was equally cognizant of the folly of presuming that no one else had anything useful to add.
The memory of Sonata screaming a warning at him that the dragon attacking Tall Tale breathed acid mist, rather than fire, was proof enough of that.
“What alteration?” he prompted.
Flashing him another smile, Penny gave a deep nod that was almost a bow. “I’d like to propose that, rather than donating my share of the funding toward the aggregate investment, I’ll instead invest directly in renovating and building new living accommodations for everypony in Vanhoover.”
Lex’s frown deepened. So much for her having anything useful to add.
But before he could tell Pretty Penny exactly what he thought of her idea, River spoke up. “Penny, His Highness made himself very clear during his presentation. The sum total of the loan will be made via the corporation you’ll be joining, with the funds being presented to Prince Legis in installments to be used at his sole discretion.”
“Oh, of course, of course,” chuckled Penny. “It’s just that this way, I can donate the money rather than loaning it, reducing High Highness’s debt. Even better, I can send labor and materials directly, cutting out the middlemare so that construction can be built without draining local resources-”
“You mean you can have your people come in and build more of your cheap hotels,” snickered Razzle Dazzle, the elderly pegasus whom River had said ran some sort of dance hall in Las Pegasus. “Because that’s really what everypony here needs now, a set of overpriced fleabag resorts.”
Penny’s smile remained, but its mirth drained away in an instant. “Razzle, dear, are you sure it’s not time for you to take your medication? You’re being quite rude in front of the prince.”
“The prince,” snapped Razzle, “is clearly a pony who values frankness, something you know nothing about.”
By that time Penny wasn’t smiling anymore, but Razzle didn’t give her a chance to retort, instead focusing on Lex. “Your Highness,” she purred – though her aged voice came out as more of a guttural rasp – “you don’t need money from selfish ponies like this. That’s why I’ll be happy to pay for Pretty Penny’s share of the loan if you feel like expelling her from this meeting for her audacity. In fact…”
She waved a hoof at several of the other ponies gathered around her. “I daresay don’t need to borrow much money at all. You have a pair of exceptional beauties living here, don’t you?” For some reason she glanced at River as she said that, before returning her gaze to him. “I bet that if a new branch of the Palace of Prance were to open here, and your girls headlined, you’d rake in money from tourists faster than you would from some complicated loan.”
“Whoa, now let’s all slow down just a minute,” chortled a stocky earth stallion whom Lex recognized as Gladmane, owner of one of Las Pegasus’s larger casinos. “Prince Legis just put his crown on barely a day ago, and after a fight so spectacular, I bet it’ll be the talk of the town here for years to come. Maybe what we need to do right now is give the prince some space to consider all these big ideas in a more relaxed and welcoming environment.”
Displaying a set of teeth so pearly-white that they were almost fluorescent, he slicked his mane back as he nodded at Lex. “Your Highness, I bet that if you spent some time enjoying yourself at my casino, you’d come up with the perfect solution that’ll keep everypony happy and get you that big score you’re looking for. Why, who knows? Maybe you’ll even win so big that you won’t even need to take out a loan at all.” He punctuated that last part with a wink and a throaty chuckle.
But his good humor died as he saw how the prince’s eyes were shining green and purple.
For his part, Lex’s patience was at an end. Every single suggestion made so far had sought to compromise some essential element of what he was trying to accomplish. Worse, they were nakedly self-serving in their attempts to do so, to the point of openly trying to undermine each other in their attempts to turn what he was trying to do to their own ends. It was a display of such wanton cupidity that it was impossible to for him to affect even the flimsiest pretense of indulgence. “You should all-”
“You should all be ashamed of yourselves!”
The new voice caught everypony unaware, including Lex. Only River seemed to recognize it, though she seemed no less confused for that. “Pixie? Is that you?”
Outside one of the nearby windows, a sudden burst of smoke appeared. The sight prompted Lex to rise, already activating his circlet in mild alarm as he scanned the sudden plume of sooty vapors for magical emanations, calming only slightly when he detected none. Even so, he continued to eye the fumes warily, ready to lacerate them with black crystals if anything even vaguely threatening happened. After the events of the last two days, he was thoroughly sick of surprises.
But what emerged from the smoke after a few moments was an aquamarine hoof, waving blindly as the sound of coughing could be heard. Finally, the hoof found the windowsill and grabbed on, its owner – a middle-aged unicorn mare with a grey mane and tail, her cutie mark showing a smiling peacock with multicolored tail feathers – awkwardly climbing in a moment later. “Forgot,” she wheezed as she stumbled inside. “Those work better for exits than entrances.”
“Pixie!” Her expression vacillating between anger and worry, River marched over to the newcomer, helping her inside. “What are you doing?!” She glanced back at Lex, reading the tension in his body language before gulping and turning back to the unicorn. “You could have been seriously hurt!”
“I’m sorry,” coughed Pixie again, taking a moment to get her breath back before she continued. “But I couldn’t help myself! I was just so mad!” Glowering at the Las Pegasus ponies, she pointed at them accusingly. “I was outside trying to practice some new tricks, and I couldn’t help but overhear what you guys said! How can you be so two-faced?!”
“Now miss,” soothed Gladmane. “I don’t know what you think you heard, but-”
“No!” interrupted Pixie, giving him a dirty look. “Just yesterday, you all were laughing and saying the most horrible things about this pony because he was planning on fighting Blueblood, the same way I know you all gossiped about Jack Pot and I breaking up! And now that he's taken Blueblood's crown, you think you can just pretend like you're all his biggest supporters, saying you want to help out if he'll just help you out, acting like you never said all those mean-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish, however, as Lex raised a hoof and brought it down hard against the floor in a loud crack that made everypony turn back toward him immediately. “Shut,” he pronounced darkly, “up.”
Now wearing his displeasure openly, he glared at Pixie. “You were not invited,” he snarled. “And you are not helping!” The unicorn started to babble an apology, her indignation melting away in the face of Lex’s anger, but he had already turned toward the Las Pegasus ponies. “And as for the rest of you, these terms are non-negotiable. The only recompense you’ll receive for participating is the interest on the loan, to be paid out on the timetable I previously outlined.”
He let that hang in the air for a moment, daring anypony to object. When no one said anything, he slowly sat back down, though his irritation was only slightly appeased. Vanhoover was on the edge of ruin, and the ponies whose money he needed were all idiots who couldn’t see past their own pathetic desires! But this is going to happen, he swore silently. And it's going to happen today! There won’t be another interruption-
It was at that moment that another voice floated through the room.
One sultry, and female, and laden with erotic pleasure.
A voice that Lex knew quite well, having heard it as recently as last night from Sonata.
The sound of Sonata’s moan sent an immediate jolt through Lex.
It wasn’t arousal, despite the amatory tenor of her voice. Nor was it confusion, even though he had no idea what was going on to make her cry out like that. It wasn’t even concern.
Instead, the emotion he felt at that moment was pure jealous rage.
SHE’S MINE!!!
Sonata was his! Her and her sister both! He had claimed them for his own in every conceivable manner! He’d protected them in battle, dominated them in bed, received their vows of love, and presented them to the Night Mare and the public as belonging to him! The right to enjoy them was his alone, and yet now someone else was DARING TO TOUCH ONE OF THEM!!!
His eyes blazed solid green, blotting out any other discernable details as the purple contrails from their outer corners flared brightly. Black crystals erupted from the floor around him, causing the assembled ponies to yelp in fright as they fell out of their chairs, flailing and scooting backward in alarm. The jagged edges rose high enough to blot out several of the windows, causing the lighting in the room to darken even as his shadow remained conspicuously visible, looming abnormally on the wall behind him like some menacing specter.
With terrible slowness, Lex stood.
“River,” he pronounced quietly, the controlled timbre of his voice not matching his ferocious appearance. “Take care of things here. I’ll return once I’ve dealt with this…interruption.”
From off to the side he heard her gibber an assent, but he was only barely listening, his gaze locked onto the far wall where Sonata’s ecstasy-laden voice had come from. Striding forward, he didn’t bother clearing the overturned chairs from his path, instead turning into a shadow moments before he would have collided with them, idly registering the sound of gasps as he changed forms. Without slowing his pace, he reached the far wall and went right through it without stopping.
Just in time to hear Sonata’s voice raised in another sensuous moan.
“MORE MORE MORE!!!”
The edges of his umbral form flickered and writhed as his agitation increased, his speed picking up as he noted that her voice seemed louder now. Passing through a drawing room and then an empty guest room, curses ran through his mind by the dozens, each more horrible than the last. Nor were they all intended for whomever had made the mistake of daring to lay hooves on one of his mares. He hadn’t cursed Sonata the way he had Aria because he hadn’t thought he’d needed to, but with how she sounded now it was difficult to imagine her being anything but a willing participant in whatever treachery was occurring. But that was a mistake he’d rectify and then some!
“GIVE IT TO ME! MMMMMM!!!”
From the decibel level, he could tell that she was right on the other side of the next wall. His fury reaching its peak, Lex rushed through it. Sure enough, there was Sonata, lying face down on a small table with her legs splayed out as she-
“SO GOOD!!!”
“Oh my!” blushed a rather fat unicorn mare as she levitated a plate over to catch the crumbs falling from Sonata’s mouth. “I had no idea you liked cupcakes so much, Lady Dusk!”
“Hah!” laughed another unicorn mare, this one tall and muscular and rearing up on her hind legs as she pressed her hooves down on the base of Sonata’s spine, drawing a ragged groan of pleasure from the limp Siren. “Is good! Strong appetite put more meat on skinny bones! Make you nice and plump for prince!”
“She’s already got all the cushioning she needs,” snorted Aria from the other side of the room, reclining in a cluster of pillows with her back legs crossed, a plethora of clothes strewn around her. “Most of it in the rear. Now, how’s that picture coming? Are you getting my…” She uncrossed her legs on a languid motion, closing her eyes and giving a breathy grunt as she stretched, putting one leg back over the other, opposite to how they’d been before. “…good side?”
“Y-yes!” squeaked the teenage unicorn stallion across from her, holding a shaking paintbrush in his telekinesis, gulping as he glanced between her, Sonata, and an easel set up in front of him, his tail curled underneath himself in an effort to preserve his modesty. “I mean,” he repeated after swallowing, his voice no longer cracking. “Yes, Lady Blaze! But I can’t go any further without knowing which outfit you’ll be wearing!”
“Perhaps something more casual?” In contrast to the sweating teenager, the balding unicorn stallion off to the side seemed entirely composed as he levitated a pair of bathrobes toward her. “Would you prefer velvet or silk, my lady?”
“I think…both,” grinned Aria.
The balding stallion blinked at that, his stoic expression marred by confusion as he glanced between her and the robes. “I don’t understand…how-”
“Your Highness?!” From his position near the door, Stuffed Shirt did a double-take as he looked up and saw the glowing-eyed shadow at the far end of the room. Breaking away from the pair of unicorns he was talking to – a stallion carrying a book of what looked like miniature flag designs and a mare holding a pair of scrolls – he trotted toward Lex, all activity ceasing as everypony else took notice of where his attention was directed. “Is everything alright? I was under the impression that your meeting with the Las Pegasus delegation would take several hours.”
Realizing that he’d badly misunderstood the nature of what was happening, Lex’s rage vanished immediately, leaving only embarrassment to fill the void as he turned back to corporeal form. “There was a…break,” he muttered, fumbling for an excuse that didn’t involve him making a fool of himself. “I mean, we’re taking a break while everypony…makes suggestions.”
Stuffed Shirt cocked his head. “I see. Well, is there anything that I can-”
“Lex!” Hauling herself off the table, Sonata rushed over to give him a quick hug. “You have got to try these cupcakes! They’re, like, the best! Bester than best! And that lady” – she waved a hoof toward the muscled mare, who grinned proudly – “gives the totes most incredible massages! For realsies, it was sooo good, you have no idea!”
“Oh, I think he has some idea,” snickered Aria as she sauntered toward him, grinning as she leaned in for a nuzzle. “Lemme guess,” she whispered as she rubbed her cheek to his. “You heard little miss cupcakes-for-brains here moaning and got all hot and bothered?”
Her guess was too close to the truth for comfort, making Lex recoil. “No,” he blurted immediately, only to realize a moment later that an alternative explanation would be required now that he’d rejected hers. “I was…just…seeing how the evaluations were going.” He had no idea if that sounded plausible or not, resisting the urge to fold his ears back as his discomfort continued to skyrocket. This was far worse than merely being seduced into making a troublesome promise; at least that had happened in private! Now he’d not only been driven to disrupt the extremely-important loan negotiations, but he was also on the verge of humiliating himself in front of his new subordinates! “I need to get back.”
Stepping away from both mares, he turned back the way he’d come, only to realize in mid-motion that he couldn’t go through the wall he’d emerged from now that he was in solid form. That led to another half-second of indecision before he instead aborted the move and pushed past the two of them, heading for the door on the other side of the room, refusing to make eye contact with anyone as he felt his cheeks burning. In his mind, his tulpa was already launching a vicious swarm of cutting remarks, and he knew it would be some time before he’d be able to master his emotions enough to make it settle down, hoping against hope that his chagrin had managed to slip by everyone else unnoticed.
It seemed there were some for which it had, because the unicorns that Stuffed Shirt had been talking to – still standing by the door – smiled as he approached, somehow managing to hold their expression as the two of them engaged in a quick round of trying to nudge each other out of the way in order to be the first to approach him. The struggle only lasted a second before the winner was determined, the mare’s smile brightening as she outmaneuvered her companion. Her proximity earned her the briefest of glances from Lex, noting the cream-colored coat and a mane and tail that were the same deep brown as his own, though in her case the former was done up in a tight bun at the back of her head. She also wore thick glasses that gave her an owlish look, along with a cutie mark depicting three two-tailed shooting stars, overlapping in a way that created a crown design.
“Your Highness,” she began. “I’m Constance Halation, your Royal Magician. That’s ‘Constance’ with an ‘s’ sound; some ponies think my name’s ‘Constant’ Halation, or even ‘Constellation,’ although my family does call me that – ‘Constellation,’ I mean, not ‘Constant Halation’ – along with one boyfriend I had when I was a teenager. Would it be alright if I walked back to your meeting with you?”
“No,” snapped Lex immediately.
“Of course,” she replied, even as she moved to keep pace with him, hefting a scroll. “It’s just that my specialty is non-traditional magic, which technically isn’t a specialty since it covers every sort of magic that isn’t how unicorns normally cast spells, and I’ve been told that you’re using the same dark magic that King Sombra used? I only ask because I wrote a paper on that and submitted it for consideration to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns two years ago, and although my fourth and fifth letters inquiring about their thoughts on it went unanswered, the third one received a response that said they’d found it ‘interesting’ and were ‘looking into’ it, and I was absolutely fascinated by the display you put on during your duel yesterday and was wondering if you wouldn’t mind demonstrating turning into a shadow again sometime since I only got a brief glimpse of that two days ago when you were rushing to go confront that Starlight Glimmer lady, and of course just now, and that would really-, oh! Yes! Just like that!”
The last thing Lex heard before he rushed through a nearby wall – once again incorporeal – was the sound of Constance Halation furiously putting quill to parchment.
“Babe! There you are!”
Tryout couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice as he landed, walking toward his wife. While thirty minutes with his boys in an icepack had done wonders for the ache between his hind legs, trying to track down Feather Duster had been another matter entirely. This place was a maze! As it was, the only reason he’d turned down this particular hallway – spotting his wife dancing attendance on a bunch of stuck-up-looking ponies milling about – had been because he’d taken a brief detour while trying to hunt down who’d been making those sexy moans. “We need to talk!”
Glancing back at him, Feather cringed. “Not now!” Without waiting for a reply, she turned back toward some of the snooty-types, plastering a smile onto her face. “Everypony, please, head back inside. I’m sure His Highness will be back momentarily.”
“I’m not sure I want to be here when he does,” muttered one pony.
“If we don’t give him what he wants, will he attack us?” gulped another.
“Prince Legis wouldn’t do that!” frowned Feather, before taking a breath. “He’s really a very kind and generous pony-”
“Yeah, especially when it comes to someone else’s wife!” Stalking toward Feather, Tryout made sure to stay out of hooves’ reach, just in case she was still in a kicking mood. “Feather, how could you?!”
“This isn’t a good time, Tryout,” she shot back, giving him a glare. “Whatever’s bothering you, we can discuss it later.”
“What’s bothering me,” he snapped, refusing to let her brush him off, “is that my wife is some wannabe-prince’s personal assistant, and he’s not very interested in the ‘-istant’ part. Did you even think about Cleansweep? About what this is doing to our…our…oh no!”
In front of him, his wife was giving him a look of anger and confusion, but Tryout wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. Instead, his gaze was fixed past her, on a heavyset earth stallion with a greyish mane and blue coat and a cutie mark of several twinkling bits. A stallion that was staring back at him with a look of shock that was rapidly turning into outrage. A stallion Tryout had hoped he’d never see again.
Frozen in shock, Tryout could only watch as Gladmane pointed a hoof at him and let out a bellow.
River’s rebuke made Pixie cringe, her ears folding back as she lowered her eyes. “I was just trying to help…”
“I don’t need your help,” snapped River, “and neither does the prince!” For a moment it seemed like she was going to continue ranting. Instead she stopped abruptly, taking a deep breath before glancing back at where the Las Pegasus ponies had spilled out into the hallway, Feather Duster doing her best to reassure them that everything was alright. Sighing, she turned back to her friend. “Pixie, I know you’ve had my back since we got here, and I appreciate that, but barging in the way you did…it wasn’t the right move.”
Pixie nodded, keeping her eyes on the carpet, the very picture of misery. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…those ponies are so awful, only caring about what they can get for themselves when Lex is trying to do what’s best for everypony.”
“Prince Legis,” corrected River. “I know he’s only had the title for a day, and I don’t think he’s too hung up about people using it, but you should still refer to him by it.”
“R-right.” Flushing, Pixie winced a little, mentally kicking herself for her mistake. “Prince Legis, of course. The last thing I want is to make him even angrier with me.”
River glanced around again, this time at the black crystal spikes puncturing the floor. “No, you really don’t.” Her lips formed a thin line as she turned her attention to the wall Lex had passed through, as though expecting him to return at any moment. “The good news is that right now, he has other things on his mind. Which means it’d probably be better for you if you weren’t here when he gets back.”
She’s right. It’s time to go.
Straightening up, Pixie regarded the ponies gathered around the doors for a moment, then canted her head toward the window she’d entered from with a weak smile. “Guess a magician should vanish without anypony noticing, huh?”
“Yeah.” River’s features softened after a second’s consideration. “Listen, how about we discuss this over drinks later tonight? I’m sure I’ll need the alcohol by then, and the company would be nice.”
No!
“I can’t,” blurted Pixie immediately. It was only when River raised an eyebrow, looking mildly offended, that she tried again. “I mean…after how badly I embarrassed myself, I’d rather just forget all of this. Would it be too much to ask if we could just pretend I was never here?”
Looking vaguely surprised by how her initial offer had been rejected so quickly, River nodded. “Alright, but we really should get together somet-”
“THIEF!”
From out in the hallway, a stallion’s voice cried out in anger, and a commotion immediately sprung up in reaction.
“What now?!” groaned River.
“Go figure out what’s happening,” urged Pixie. “It’s what L-, Prince Legis needs you to do. I’ll see myself out. We’ll definitely sit down sometime before I head back home.”
Sparing a half-second to shoot her friend a look of acknowledgment, River turned around and galloped toward the hallway as Pixie slunk toward the window.
“That was terrible,” moaned Pixie quietly as she trudged around the side of the manor. Her voice was soft, despite there being no one to hear her. Her solitude wasn’t much of a surprise; although it was nearing noon and the day was sunny and warm (no rain having been scheduled yet, despite the rainclouds in storage), everypony who wanted to be outside was at the camp – though it was now more of a fledgling village – or at the adjacent market rather than slinking around the outside of River’s home.
Her recrimination continued as she made her way down the back of the manor, passing window after window until finally she came to the one that led to her guest bedroom. “I can’t believe I did something so stupid!” she huffed as she pushed it open, clamoring inside. “What was I thinking?!”
But as she shut the window and pulled the shade down, a voice answered her.
You were thinking that you wanted to help the pony you love. There’s no shame in that.
“But I didn’t help him!” she wailed, before biting her lip. Carefully, she glanced around the room, sticking her head in the adjoining washroom before opening up the closet and the door to the living area, making sure that no prying servant had heard her outburst. It was only when she was sure she was alone that she spoke again, keeping her voice down. “I didn’t help him at all! I made him mad at me!”
Mad at Pixie, sweetheart, not at you, came the silken voice in her mind, causing her to turn to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room, staring at the unicorn whose reflection gazed back at her. And you should be proud of yourself. You played your part flawlessly. No one suspected a thing, not even Lex himself.
“I guess…” Sighing, Pixie squeezed her eyes shut. “Can you change me back now? I don’t want to look like this anymore.”
If that’s what you want, cooed the voice. Just remember, once this trial run is over, I won’t have the power to change your appearance a second time. It’ll be up to you to make the commitment if you want to do this again.
“I know.”
Then go ahead and open your eyes.
Slowly, hesitantly, Pixie obeyed, parting her eyelids just a crack…
…to find that she was Thermal Draft again.
Letting out a groan of relief, she flopped down onto the bed, panting as the stress of the last several minutes caught up with her. “You’re sure, you’re absolutely sure, that Lex didn’t know it was me?”
Oh, sweetheart, laughed Kara’s voice in her mind, I’d be a poor goddess of shapechangers if I let my worshipers be so easily found out. Besides, if he’d known you weren’t who you were pretending to be, wouldn’t he have said something?
“I guess,” murmured Thermal Draft, turning over to look at herself in the mirror again, glad to be back in her own body. “He might have anyway, if he hadn’t heard Sonata carrying on like that.” Despite herself, she could feel her cheeks turning red. Even if Sonata wasn’t the mare she loved, Thermal Draft couldn’t deny that the Siren was beyond gorgeous, and hearing her voice raised in passion like that had been seriously hot.
Even if he didn’t have a chance to use it, I suppose it’s possible that Lex has the power to see through my glamour somehow, admitted Kara. A simple scan for active spells wouldn’t be enough to detect the disguise I placed on you, but he might have other ways of knowing. Since he’s never called out to me in supplication even once, all I know about his abilities are what you and Sonata have told me. That’s why I arranged for that distraction.
That was enough to make Thermal Draft blink, sitting up in bed. “Wait…that was you, making Sonata moan like that?”
Tweaking her pleasure centers to make her feel physical satisfaction a little more strongly than normal was the very least I could do. Although she couldn’t see the goddess, Thermal Draft could almost hear the shrug in her voice. Literally, the very least. Sonata never truly worshiped me the way you do, and since she hasn’t been calling out to me lately, that was the last little bit of influence I had over her. But since it’s her nature to be vocal, I knew she wouldn’t hold back if she enjoyed herself. And that was enough to send Lex running.
Thermal Draft digested that for a few minutes, thinking back over everything that had happened as she waited for her heart to slow down. “I don’t like that I was dishonest with him,” she muttered at last, curling up into a ball. “I agreed to try this out because I wanted to see if I could find a way to be useful to him, not deceive to him.”
I know, sweetheart. Kara’s voice was filled with sympathy, and Thermal Draft could almost imagine the goddess reaching out to enfold her in a gentle embrace. But don’t forget that if you decide to go down this path, you will be useful to him, and not just by dropping a storm cloud on his enemies. He might have several ponies who can fight, but he’ll need more than that if he wants to rule. Being able to fool ponies plotting against him, confounding their plans and learning their secrets, will be far more useful to him than being able to beat someone senseless. Right now, that’s something that only you have the potential to do.
“But I lied to him…”
Out of love, Kara reminded her. A little white lie to protect his feelings, no worse than showing up for a date early and telling the other person that you only just arrived when they finally show up. Because his feelings are the most important thing. You don’t want to hurt him the way that awful Nosey girl did, do you?
The name got an immediate reaction from Thermal Draft, clenching her teeth as she recalled what she’d heard about that four-eyed nag since being resurrected. “I hate her,” she murmured, hugging her hind legs to her chest tighter. “I know it wasn’t her fault that she killed us, but to have Lex’s love and throw it in his face like that…” Just thinking about the heartbreak that horrible mare had inflicted on her savior – a pony who was already carrying so much on his shoulders – made her heart ache, tears of sympathy coming to her eyes. “I hate her so much!”
Shhh, I know that you do, sweetheart. The soothing tone of the goddess’s voice was relaxing, and Thermal Draft closed her eyes as she let it wash over her. But right now you need to focus on the ponies you love, rather than the ones you hate. Keep working hard to make yourself useful to Lex. Soon he’ll come to realize how much he cares for the you, and then you’ll be able to be with him the same way you are with Cloudbank.
“And he’ll love us?” sniffled Thermal Draft, running a hoof over her nose. “He’ll love us both the way same way he does Sonata and Aria?” She wanted that so badly it almost hurt. The same way Lex was the perfect stallion, Cloudy was the mare of her dreams, the girl she loved and wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She wanted her to share in these feelings she had for Lex more than anything, the three of them together…
But Kara’s answered wasn’t what she’d been hoping for. I can only guarantee that he’ll love you, sweetheart, cautioned the goddess. Cloudbank isn’t my worshiper; I can’t make promises where her heart is concerned.
Thermal Draft felt her chest ache at that, but the goddess’s voice turned conciliatory a moment later. But it’s not impossible, especially if you act as the bridge that leads them to each other. And even if Lex doesn’t develop feelings for her, the two of them will still love you. In the meantime, you just need to keep following my instructions. You did a wonderful job chatting up that Pixie pony yesterday, finding out all those details about her life so you could put on such a convincing performance. You’re a natural at this, and I know you’ll be a big help to Lex. That is…if you decide you want the power to change your appearance.
“I…” Slowly, Thermal Draft sat up. “Can I think about it a little more?” She couldn’t help but feel nervous asking that, not to mention guilty. Kara was doing so much to help her get what – or rather, who – she wanted most, and all she could do was pussyhoof around when shown how to do it!
Fortunately, the goddess’s goodwill seemed inexhaustible. Of course, sweetheart. You take as much time as you need until you’re sure.
Letting out a deep breath, Thermal Draft closed her eyes again, this time in reverence as she murmured a prayer of gratitude. “Thank you, Kara. I’d be lost without you.”
There there now, came the warm reply. Just keep believing in me with your whole heart, and I’ll make sure you get exactly what you deserve.
Five minutes, seethed Lex to himself as he stared at the empty conference room. It took less than five minutes for everything to fall completely apart!
From behind him, he heard River – the only other pony present – clear her throat. “After I got everypony to stop shouting, we weren’t sure when you’d be returning, so I thought it’d be best if we adjourned for a little while,” she murmured, resuming the report he’d demanded from her after coming back and finding the place deserted. “The Las Pegasus ponies probably all went back to their rooms. The village and the market are almost certainly too rustic for their tastes, and my yacht is the only route back home for them if they don’t want to spend weeks on a train, so even if they’re not in their quarters they’re probably still somewhere in the manor. The servants should have no trouble locating them if you want to call them back.”
Lex didn’t even consider doing so, knowing that he’d need to deal with this latest round of strife before he could even start to fix things. “And that pony whom Gladmane accused of stealing from him?”
“Tryout,” supplied River. “Feather Duster’s husband and Cleansweep’s father. From what I was able to gather, he came here because he needed to talk to his wife about something, and Gladmane spotted him during the, ah…commotion.” She paused then, and it was only when Lex didn’t say anything that she continued. “The two of them, Feather Duster and Tryout, are waiting for you in my study.”
The name of his personal assistant’s husband brought a scowl to Lex’s lips, remembering the jovial loudmouth that he’d met at the ruins of the train station several days previous. Tryout’s convivial greeting had left him off-balance, not knowing what to make of the newcomer’s banter. Fortunately, Garden Gate had stepped in, berating the pegasus stallion for not showing sufficient respect. After that he’d ceased to occupy Lex’s thoughts, not having run into Tryout since, though he’d been peripherally aware that Feather Duster’s husband had taken up residence in the manor, mostly because Cleansweep had subsequently expressed delight about her family being reunited.
But now, regardless of whether Gladmane’s accusation was true or not, Tryout’s presence had become a distinct liability.
And yours hasn’t? jeered his tulpa. That buffoon might have caused the negotiations to break down, but it was your temper tantrum that made that possible in the first place. You knew how important this was, and yet you still threw a fit and stormed out like a child, angry because you thought someone else was playing with your toys.
A rush of fury ran through him in response to his shadow’s taunting, and he instinctively embraced it, trying to drown out the humiliation he felt over how he’d acted and the consequences it had wrought. But as much as he wanted to bury himself in rage – something that was especially tempting since Tryout made for a convenient scapegoat – Lex knew he couldn’t afford to. After all, it was that very behavior that the rebellious portion of his mind was chastising him for.
Instead, he forced himself to stand in silent witness to the evidence of what his outburst had wrought. Black crystal spikes jutting up through the floor. Overturned chairs from where everypony had rushed to get away from him. The crumpled and scattered pages of the loan agreement that he’d passed around for everyone to review. All because he hadn’t been able to control himself when it came to Sonata and Aria, the same way he hadn’t when they’d plied their charms on him last night.
Nor was that the full extent of the mistakes he’d made.
I shouldn’t have sent them away.
Even if he hadn’t been able to rein in his emotions, this would never have happened if he’d simply kept the mares he loved at his side when he’d met with the Las Pegasus ponies. Certainly, he would have needed to manage their disruptive tendencies, but whatever minor disorder would have resulted from their presence would have been heavily outweighed by the social acumen they possessed. They’d already proven that multiple times over, most recently when they’d helped make his disclosure to the public about the truth behind Block Party’s death, Severance’s treachery, and his fight with the princesses go over so well. And of course, if they’d been there with him then there would have been no unexpected moaning drawing him away.
But instead, he’d let his embarrassment over how they’d manipulated him last night get the better of him, sending the Sirens away despite Sonata all but begging to accompany him to his meeting. Was it any wonder it had turned out to be a disaster? River was experienced at politicking, and Feather Duster was a competent assistant, but neither were able to manage his lack of charisma.
You were so certain you’d finally come to appreciate the Night Mare’s advice about utilizing the ponies at your disposal, sneered the voiceless presence in his mind. But as soon as you felt even slightly unsure of yourself, you reverted back to your old habits. Now look at what it’s cost you.
Letting out a slow breath, Lex turned away from the debris. There’d be time for recrimination later; quite likely in his nightmares. Right now he needed to fix this. “River.”
The pony in question straightened up as he turned his attention toward her. “Yes, Your Highness?”
“How badly has all of this,” he waved a hoof toward the empty room, “hurt my chances of securing a loan from the ponies you brought here?”
Biting her lip, River didn’t answer right away, instead taking a moment to examine the mess, as though the answer to his question could be found amongst the disarray. “I don’t know exactly what the story is between Tryout and Gladmane,” she admitted. “But just the accusation that somepony who’s part of your household, let alone related to two ponies close to you, stole from one of them will probably make the others wary about cutting a deal with you. Plus…”
She didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. “My behavior did little to instill them with confidence in my administration.”
For some reason that made River wince. “It’s just…even divided among all of them, and spread out over ten years, one hundred million bits is a lot of money. Telling them you plan on paying it back with interest doesn’t do them much good if that won’t start for at least a decade. Plus, the terms you put down are heavily slanted in your favor. I know Vanhoover needs this to happen, but even for royalty you’re asking an awful lot from some of the most selfish ponies in Equestria.”
Lex spent a moment digesting that before sending another question River’s way. “Is it your opinion that this is a lost cause?”
If it was, he’d need to use his backup plan of taking control of the Equestrian mint, which would provide short-term relief at the cost of long-term consequences. Even being a prince wouldn’t offset the economic fallout that would result if he did that. While it was better than letting Vanhoover perish, it wouldn’t be the recovery he wanted, and it would set his plans for assuming greater political power back considerably.
Fortunately, River shook her head after pondering his question for a long moment. “I think this can still work, but you’re going to need to give them something.”
A flash of irritation ran through him at the thought of needing to incentivize virtuous behavior, but he shoved it down. “You’re suggesting that I make the terms of the loan more favorable for them?”
“That might be enough,” murmured River, seemingly deep in thought now. “But they’d probably be more agreeable if you offered them favors.”
“Favors,” repeated Lex flatly.
River shrugged. “Ponies who do things for royals don’t usually ask for things in return. In fact, Gladmane himself upset Blueblood quite badly when he did exactly that. But this isn’t a typical situation and you’re not a typical prince, which is probably why they were being so blatant about suggesting changes that were favorable for them.” Pausing as though to consider what she just said, she nodded after a second. “It doesn’t have to be as part of the loan, but telling them that you’re open to helping them get what they want could go a long way toward winning them back.”
“You’re suggesting a quid pro quo arrangement.” It wasn’t a question on Lex’s part, his expression neutral as he continued to suppress his feelings. “That in exchange for them agreeing to fund Vanhoover’s recovery on my terms, I strike favorable deals with them regarding unrelated matters.”
It was unpalatable, but if that was the cost of bringing this city back from the brink, then it was one that he could live with. For all that he’d envisioned himself assuming absolute authority once he took power on the world stage, Lex had known from the beginning that he’d still need to cut deals and make agreements; he’d simply envisioned doing so with foreign heads of state and similar potentates, rather than domestic captains of private enterprise.
River was apparently of the same mind. “It’s not like several of them didn’t already tell you what they want. And this way, they’ll be even more likely to back you when you declare independence and take Las Pegasus as part of your new country.”
The idea that this hasty attempt to repair negotiations actually had a bright side was enough to make Lex snort. “And I assume I’ll need to do this with each and every one of the ponies whose money I want?” Despite this option looking more and more like a viable way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into, he couldn’t bring himself to feel pleased at the prospect of having to make additional agreements with two dozen-odd ponies.
The question caused a pained look to cross River’s face. “You could try it with just a few of them, but they’ll probably flaunt it to the others in private, and then they’ll start wondering why they didn’t get special treatment, and, well…”
“Of course,” muttered Lex, some disgust leaking into his voice as his attempt to remain impassive faltered. Rallying his self-control, he focused on what he needed to do next. “Time is still of the essence, so I want to reconvene everypony tonight. Can you meet with each of them before then and try and get a sense of what it will cost to win them over?”
A hollow laugh escaped River’s lips at that. “That won’t be a problem. For most of these ponies, talking about what’s in it for them is their favorite subject.”
“Just make it clear that you’re not agreeing to anything on my behalf. Not before I know what it is they want.” That was what he had done wrong with Sonata and Aria last night, promising them whatever they wanted before he’d had any idea what they intended to ask for, his embarrassment over which had led to his current predicament. That wouldn’t happen this time. “And make certain they know that I won’t give them anything unless they agree to the loan first.”
“Understood,” replied River. “I’ll need to get started now if we’re going to do this tonight. Should I tell everypony that we’ll be meeting over dinner?”
“Make whatever arrangements you feel necessary,” replied Lex dismissively, already turning toward the door. Now that the current problem was being dealt with, it was time to move on to the next one. “Just take into account that I’ll be bringing Sonata and Aria with me this time.”
“Razzle will be happy to hear that,” muttered River as she fell in behind him. But that lasted only until they exited the conference room, with River turning in a different direction, pausing as she glanced over her shoulder at Lex. “If I can ask, what will you be doing in the meantime?”
Lex didn’t bother looking back at her as he headed toward her study. “Dealing with my personal assistant’s troublesome husband.”
“-WHILE I’M AT WORK! WHAT MADE YOU THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?!”
“WELL EXCUSE ME FOR THINKING THAT SOMEPONY ELSE COULD DANCE ATTENDANCE ON HIS ROYAL PRETENTIOUSNESS FOR A FEW MINUTES! I GUESS HE JUST REALLY NEEDS TO KEEP YOU CLOSE BY ALL THE TIME, HUH?!”
“DON’T YOU DARE START WITH THAT AGAIN!”
The lack of adequate soundproofing in River’s manor made itself known to Lex for the second time that day as he approached the study, the raised voices of Feather Duster and Tryout reaching his ears well in advance of his arrival and causing him to grit his teeth. But it wasn’t the latter’s insult toward him that blackened Lex’s already-foul mood. Nor was it that the two of them were apparently more concerned with their personal problems than with the serious accusation that had been leveled against Tryout and the attendant difficulties it had caused with the loan negotiations.
Rather, what bothered Lex most was the possibility that Cleansweep might be close enough to hear her parents fighting.
The odds of that were low, but not so low that he felt comfortable dismissing the possibility. She and her friends made a habit of playing outside most mornings, but they typically came back to the manor for lunch, and it was getting close to that time now. Even if River’s study wasn’t anywhere near the children’s quarters, he hadn’t assigned them any new homework recently; it was entirely possible that Cleansweep would indulge her special talent by looking for an empty room to clean, potentially coming close enough to overhear her mother and father yelling at each other.
That was something Lex wanted to avoid. Despite how well she and her friends had taken to the lessons he’d given them in using their powers responsibly – to say nothing of the valor that they had consistently demonstrated even before he taken them under his tutelage – the possibility of an emotionally-distraught little girl with goddess-given powers wasn’t a situation that he wanted to deal with. Particularly not now, with so much else happening that required his attention.
As such, when Lex barged into the study a few seconds later, he hadn’t even fully crossed the threshold before he hissed at the pair of ponies within, “The two of you lower your voices at once!”
Feather Duster immediately complied, bowing down. “Your Highness, I’m so sorry about what happened! My husband-”
“Well well well,” sneered Tryout, apparently in no mood to let his wife speak for him. “If it isn’t Freaky Deaky himself, come to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong.” Jeering, he glanced at his wife before looking back at Lex with a scowl. “At least this time it’s just his nose, isn’t that right, honey?”
“Tryout,” groaned Feather Duster, her voice strangled. “Show the prince respect!”
“Some prince,” scoffed Tryout, not taking his eyes off of the stallion glowering at him. “I might have missed the show, but I asked around while I was looking for you.” He pointed a hoof at Lex accusingly. “This guy didn’t become royalty because he did anything all that great! He just beat up two other ponies, one of whom is an Equestrian hero! And you really think a guy like this should be giving lessons to our daughter?!”
Still prostrating herself, Feather Duster tensed, but Lex didn’t give her a chance to reply. “Somepony responsible had to,” he shot back. “And regardless of what you think about how I obtained my crown, the fact is that I was here to give Cleansweep the guidance she needed, while you were apparently off robbing rich ponies in Las Pegasus.”
Tryout’s eyes widened. “Oh, you self-righteous piece of-”
“Tryout!” Flinging herself up, Feather Duster interposed herself between her husband and Lex. “Stop! Just stop!” Risking a glance over her shoulder at Lex, she paused just long enough to confirm that a curse wasn’t incoming before she turned back to the irate pegasus. “Listen, I know that I haven’t been the most attentive wife since you got back, and I’m sorry about that, okay? I’m sorry! But please, don’t pick a fight with Prince Legis!”
“Why?” scoffed Tryout. “Because your boyfriend here will put some awful curse on me?” He looked Lex dead in the eye then, stepping out from behind Feather Duster as he flared his wings. “Well go ahead, pal! Do your worst! Because if you wanna keep giving it to Feather right under my nose, that’s what it’s going to take!”
That was unexpected enough to bring Lex to a halt, furrowing his brows in confusion. “…what?”
“You heard me!” Giving an angry beat of his wings, Tryout pointed first at his wife – who had her face in her hooves, groaning – and then at Lex. “I know that you’re doing her! And I’m not going to stand for it!” Rearing upright, Tryout held his forelegs in front of him. “C’mon! You’re supposed to a tough guy, right?! Mister dragonslayer and devil-killer and whatever else you’re calling yourself?! Let’s you and me settle this like stallions; winner gets the girl!”
“I’m sorry,” moaned Feather Duster, giving Lex a miserable look. “I told him it’s not true, but he wouldn’t listen.”
For his part, Lex wasted several seconds trying to figure out how it had come to this, especially since he had deliberately eschewed doing the very thing that Tryout was accusing him of. Finally deciding that comprehending the source of the misunderstanding was less important than putting it to rest so that more pressing things could be dealt with, he looked back at Tryout with a scowl. “You are laboring under a severe misapprehension,” he growled. “Your wife and I are not-”
“I’ll misapprehend your face!” Tryout’s angry shout was the only warning he gave before he sprang forward, one hoof cocked back.
But that was warning enough.
Rainbow Dash had been sufficiently fast that, even after announcing her presence, Lex hadn’t been able to react before she’d collided with him. Tryout, by contrast, had nowhere near her speed. Despite being only a few feet away, his sudden rush forward – telegraphed well in advance – gave Lex ample time to call upon the dark magic of his horn, turning into a shadow before Tryout could reach him.
“Huh?!” His eyes widening in shock, Tryout was unable to arrest his momentum in time, passing right through Lex and colliding face-first with the door behind him. The impact was enough to make the door rattle in its frame, and Tryout groaned as he hit the ground on his back, staring up at the ceiling in a daze.
“Idiot,” spat Lex contemptuously as he made black crystals grow out of the floor. Unlike the jagged spikes he’d inadvertently raised back in the conference room, these had deliberate shape, forming thick bands that reached out to curl around Tryout’s legs, wings, waist, and neck, pinning him to the ground.
It took the stunned pegasus several seconds to realize what had happened, blinking in surprise as he found himself unable to get up. “What?!” he grunted, straining with all his might to break free. But all he accomplished was exhausting himself, panting as his strength ran out. “Should’ve known you’d fight as creepy as you look…”
“Tryout…” Feather’s face was mournful as she took a step toward her imprisoned husband. But she advanced no further, closing her eyes as she took a deep breath, holding it for just a moment before turning to face the mass of darkness that was her employer. “Are you alright, Your Highness?”
“As though a simpleton like him could actually pose a threat to me,” snorted Lex as he resumed physical form.
“Feather…” Glaring up at where his wife was moving to stand by Lex, Tryout fixed her with a look of supreme bitterness. “I can’t believe you chose some weirdo playboy over me, your daughter’s father!”
“It’s not like that, Tryout.” Sagging in place, Feather Duster looked down. “He said no to me.”
Lex gave her a sideways glance as Tryout’s eyes widened, the immobilized stallion unable to hide his shock. “Wait, what?!”
“I offered myself to him, and he turned me down,” confirmed Feather Duster. It took her a moment, but she made herself look Tryout in the eye as she continued. “I didn’t do it by choice. Miss Bank ordered me to. She thought that giving Mas-, Prince Legis a pretty girl to play with would endear her to him, and she threatened us – me and Cleansweep – if I didn’t comply. I delayed as long as I could, but eventually I went to his bedroom…and he refused my advances.”
Visibly stunned, Tryout looked back and forth between the two other ponies in the room before swallowing, his indignation withering. “Why didn’t you tell me that before now?”
The question made Feather grimace. “Because it’s not a story I’m proud of! Being treated like that…like I was some sort of knickknack to be traded around rather than a pony, and being too weak to stop it…” Her ears folded back as she looked down again. “I didn’t want you to find out about that.”
“But…but what about the rumors?!” sputtered Tryout. “I heard some maids saying earlier today that you two were getting it on!”
“I know,” sighed Feather. “And you believed rumors and gossip over the word of your own wife.”
“To say nothing of over my word,” interjected Lex, having grown tired of watching the pair’s marital drama play out. “And while I have every intention of making River Bank face justice for what she did – based on your wife’s recommendation – that justice has been suspended until after my conference with the Las Pegasus ponies is concluded. A conference,” he growled, giving Tryout a baleful look, “that has been disrupted by your allegedly having stolen from one of the ponies I’ve brought here. As such, that allegation” – his eyes began to glow as he spoke, revealing that his patience had reached its limit – “is one that I’ll have you answer for now.”
Gulping, Tryout managed to give a rictus grin. “Okay, you know what? I think you’re gonna laugh at this, since that’s one big misunderstanding too, just like this was. In fact, do you suppose I could get a mulligan on the whole ‘fight me for the girl’ thing? Because if I’d known the truth from the get-go, it never would have come to that.”
“No,” responded Lex coldly. “Had you limited your misbehavior to mere asperity, I could have overlooked that. My administration is one that respects the rights of ponies to express themselves even in an odious manner.” He lowered his head then, bringing his face to within a few inches of Tryout’s as he bared his teeth. “But you dared to strike at me,” he hissed. “Whatever the truth about what happened between you and Gladmane, that is not something I’ll forgive!”
“B-babe!” whimpered Tryout, squirming ineffectually in his bonds. “Babe, c’mon! Tell him this is partially your fault too! You owe me!”
Despite her melancholy over her husband’s actions, Feather Duster frowned a little. “Excuse me? I ‘owe you’?”
“For the other night, remember?” gulped Tryout. “When I just wanted to spend some time with you, and you went off the deep end and kicked me for no reason?”
“For no reason…?” echoed Feather Duster incredulously as she stared at Tryout. “You actually…after everything that’s just happened you still think…” She couldn’t seem to finish, her jaw working silently as she stared at Tryout for a long moment before finally shaking her head. “Just tell Prince Legis what he wants to know,” she said at last, a disgusted tone entering her voice, “and maybe he’ll let you off with only a mild curse.”
“Babe!” wailed Tryout, gaping at her with a betrayed look.
“You would do well to listen to your wife’s advice,” admonished Lex darkly as he made his way to the large chair at the end of the study. “The best you can hope for at this point is to not irritate me further.”
“Now,” announced Lex as he seated himself, Feather Duster moving to stand at attention at his left as he gazed imperiously down at Tryout’s prone form. “Tell me what happened between you and Gladmane.”
“So you see, it was really all that buffalo’s fault,” finished Tryout. “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Despite being kept flat on his back by black crystal bindings, Tryout flashed an easygoing grin as he concluded his story. Lex didn’t return the expression, not that Feather Duster had expected him to; she was quite aware that the prince wasn’t given to even mild displays of levity. But she’d have been willing to wager that even the most forgiving of ponies would have had a hard time finding Tryout to be as blameless as he’d made himself sound like…
“Let me see if I understand you correctly,” rumbled Lex, his voice filled with more displeasure than usual. “After the flooding in Vanhoover sent you fleeing to Las Pegasus-”
“It was pure luck that I was on the first boat out,” noted Tryout quickly.
“-you managed to find gainful employment,” continued Lex, ignoring Tryout’s interruption, “as well as room and board, since you were one of the first refugees to arrive in the city-”
“Pulling a cab was hardly gainful,” chuckled Tryout. “I mean, when you’re new to the city you don’t exactly have the streets memorized, you know? You make a couple of wrong turns a few times and suddenly everypony’s complaining that you’re too slow or trying inflate the fare or whatever. It’s like they don’t realize that you’re supposed to relax when you’re in L.P., you know?”
“-and yet you still,” continued Lex, the angry tone in his voice making it clear that he was losing patience for Tryout’s running commentary, “colluded with a dealer in Gladmane’s casino to defraud the place!”
“No, no, that wasn’t it at all. Weren’t you listening?” Clucking his tongue, Tryout shook his head with an exasperated sigh. “Babe, a little help? Tell him he’s got it all wrong.”
But all Feather could do was shake her head, not so much in refusal as in disbelief that her husband couldn’t see that he was digging the hole he’d made for himself even deeper.
As it was, she still couldn’t help but feel a lingering sense of regret that she hadn’t found him during his time in Las Pegasus. After all, she’d been there as well, having been part of Miss Bank’s entourage when she’d sailed there on her yacht. In hindsight, that hadn’t been surprising; with Tall Tale’s port having been inexplicably closed – the truth of which she’d only found out later, after overhearing Sonata recount what she and Lex had gone through there – Las Pegasus had been the only city large enough to accommodate the bulk of the ponies fleeing Vanhoover.
We were so close to each other all that time and didn’t know it. It had been awful, all those nights wondering what had become of her husband and daughter. Knowing that Tryout, at least, had been safe would have eased her troubled mind somewhat. And she would have been able to keep him from getting into trouble…or at least, tried to.
But it was a moot point now. No effort had been made to reunite the ponies who’d been displaced from Vanhoover, nor had any other coordinated response been made to help them. Feather still wasn’t sure if the ponies who ran the city hadn’t known what was happening or simply hadn’t cared, but either way the result had been the same: they’d all been on their own.
If Tryout had possessed an ounce of sense, he would have played that up for Prince Legis now, emphasizing the desperation and helplessness that came from being stranded in a distant city with no support network and no way of knowing what had happened to his family. But he hadn’t done that. Instead, Tryout had done what he’d always done when spinning a yarn: made it sound like a wild adventure.
“Ugh, fine,” moaned her idiot husband, rolling his eyes. “Let me tell it again. See, I’d been going to the Bardigiano Casino for a little while-”
“Where, like an idiot, you gambled away what little disposable income you’d managed to accumulate,” growled Lex, clearly of no mind to listen to the story a second time.
“I was trying to increase my cash on hoof,” corrected Tryout. “Seriously, do you not know that fortunes are won and lost every day in that city? I figured if I just kept playing, eventually I’d have to hit it big, and then I’d have enough bits to settle in somewhere nice until Vanhoover was given the all-clear instead of working my hooves to the bone. That’s something you learn when you live in the world of professional sports,” he added with a smirk, “luck is about perseverance more than chance.”
“Except it wasn’t, since you never actually won anything no matter what game you tried,” sighed Feather.
“Right, see, that’s just it though!” exclaimed Tryout, as though his wife had inadvertently pointed out something important. “I knew there had to be some reason why I kept losing all the time, because that’s not how things normally go for me; eventually I should have broken the streak and raked in the bits. So I’m sitting at the bar, taking advantage of the free peanuts while I’m trying to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong, and I end up striking up a conversation with this buffalo who’s doing the same thing. Except it turns out he works there as a dealer-”
“And the two of you hatched a plot to steal from the casino,” finished Lex, clearly looking to bring the retelling to an abrupt end.
But Tryout was apparently incapable of taking the hint. “I keep telling you, it wasn’t like that,” he insisted. “We got to talking, and he tells me that Gladmane told him that the other dealers are trying to muscle him out, since they’re all ponies and he’s a buffalo. That they’re deliberately dealing bad cards to the ponies at their tables – not many, but a little bit here and there – so they’d have a higher take at the end of the night, making him look like he’s not pulling in enough to keep up with them. And that’s when I realized why I’d been losing all the time: it was because those other dealers were cheating!”
“A conclusion that’s highly questionable, considering how dubious that story is,” sneered Lex. “River Bank already informed me that news of one employee cheating – this buffalo with whom you’re an accessory – has imperiled the reputation of Gladmane’s establishment. If he knew that there was a conspiracy to engage in similar behavior among several of his employees, why did he take no action besides gossiping about it?”
But Tryout just shrugged the issue off. Or at least he tried to, his bonds making the motion little more than a wriggle. “I’m an athlete, not a detective. Maybe he didn’t care so long as they kept bringing in more bits every night? But either way, I figured that there was a way we could balance the scales, where I got the winnings I was supposed to and my new friend could bring home a bigger take.”
River shook her head again, this time in sadness. “By having him deal you winning cards off the bottom of the deck when you played.”
The disappointment in her voice was lost on him, grinning. “Exactly! Not too often, and not for too much, but enough so that it added up, with the two of us splitting the money afterward. That way, I got the bits I should have been winning all along, and he got to put his half back toward the amount he brought in.”
“Which was by far the stupidest part of your so-called ‘plan.’” At this point, Prince Legis’s eyes were glowing, and Feather Duster couldn’t help but shiver at the sight. Although she’d come to see the noble side of her employer, his anger was still terrifying to witness, and she wasn’t eager to see a repeat of what he’d done to the conference room when he’d heard Sonata moaning without him. “If your accomplice was returning half the amount of money that he arranged for you to win, his revenues would only experience that much more of a shortfall.”
“Well, yeah, but I figured he’d massage the books or something,” replied Tryout casually. “I mean, it’s not like what he did with his half was my problem anyway. I just wanted the winnings I’d been cheated out of.”
“Except it became your problem when your partner in crime identified you to the authorities after his consistent payouts were discovered.” At last Lex stood up, stalking toward where Tryout was bound to the floor. “At which point your escaping arrest with your ill-gotten gains became Gladmane’s problem! And now your presence here when I’m trying to cut a deal with him and his colleagues has made it my problem!”
Once again, Tryout’s confidence deserted him, an anxious look crossing his features as he belatedly realized that his attempt to downplay what had happened hadn’t worked. “Hey, look, I’d give the money back if I could, but it’s all gone now. I had to keep dipping into it for food and lodgings after I left Las Pegasus, which wouldn’t have happened if Gladmane hadn’t made such a big deal out the whole thing that I had to skip town. So really, this is his fault.”
“You’re making it worse, Tryout,” muttered Feather.
“Gimme a break!” groaned the oblivious stallion, before sighing and looking back up at Lex. “Okay, look, how about this? I’ll earn the money to repay Gladmane, okay? There’s a big marathon coming up in a little while over in Rainbow Falls, with a cash prize for the winner. I’m already in training, and with the tips I got from Rainbow Dash the other day-”
“I can assure you,” hissed Lex through gritted teeth, a purple aura surging to life around his horn, “you won’t be competing.”
“Y-Your Highness!” blurted Feather, the words flying past her lips before she realized that she was even speaking. “Please wait!”
To her relief, the prince hesitated…but only barely. The aura remained around his horn, his eyes still shining green and purple as he looked at her sharply. After a moment of silence, Feather realized that he wasn’t going to say anything, instead waiting for her to explain herself. Gulping, she lowered her head, bowing. “I know what Tryout did was wrong,” she murmured, “and I won’t ask you not to punish him for it-”
“Oh come on!” groaned Tryout.
“…but he’s still Cleansweep’s father,” finished Feather. “I don’t want to see her heartbroken because something terrible happened to him.”
“A salient factor which I’ve already taken into account,” replied Lex coldly. “Now be quiet. I have a criminal to punish.”
“Hey, you know what? Just a thought here,” blurted Tryout quickly, a nervous tone filling his voice. “You’ve got all these special servants now that you’re a prince, right? Like, Royal Door Opener or His Highness’ Pencil Sharpener and stuff? I could be one of those! The Royal Sports Master or something like that! I could represent you in all sorts of athletic competitions! I’ve won a whole bunch of medals and awards and certif-”
His ranting was abruptly cut off as the aura around Lex’s horn flared, a matching one springing into being around Tryout. Even as Feather watched, the purple field around her husband began to darken, the coloration deepening until it was a solid black, obscuring him from sight. But he was only hidden from view for a moment, as the opaque aura began to collapse in on itself, passing through Tryout’s bindings as though they didn’t exist until it was covering the struggling stallion like a second skin, the black substance coating him completely.
And then it contracted further, slipping beneath Tryout’s skin and disappearing into him as he gave a sudden, terrified gasp, head twisting as he tried to see what had become of the blackness that had engulfed him only moments before. “Wh-what the…?!”
“That should do,” announced Lex, his voice thick with satisfaction as he returned to his chair, Feather nervously following him. It was only after he sat down that he waved a hoof at Tryout, the black crystal bands around the stallion’s body dissolving into nothing. “You may leave.”
The way he smirked as he said that last part sent shivers down Feather’s spine, making no secret of her nervousness as she looked at her husband. As far as she could see, nothing had changed, and yet His Highness had clearly done something. But what…?
She received her answer a second later as Tryout failed to rise.
It wasn’t for lack of trying on his part. All four of his legs moved, but in an ungainly manner, flopping around as though each limb had fallen asleep. The sight was frightening to witness, and judging from the look on Tryout’s face, even more frightening to experience. “Wh-what’s going on?!” he yelped, staring at his legs with wide eyes. “Why can’t I get up?!”
Lex’s only response was a non-committal grunt, watching as Tryout managed to roll over, flopping onto his belly as he tried to get his legs under him, looking for all the world like a newborn foal trying to figure out how to walk. And amazingly, he seemed to be making progress. Staring at his right foreleg, he slowly lifted it up and placed it on the ground, grimacing as he brought it down a little too hard. Then he repeated the motion with his left foreleg.
He needed more time to work his back legs, but eventually managed to get them into place, his limbs wobbly as he finally stood up…and promptly lost his balance, letting out a pained grunt as he fell backwards into a sitting position. “What’s happening?” His voice came out breathy, as though he were asking himself as much as Lex. “I’m not numb, I’m not dizzy, but everything feels like…like…”
He apparently couldn’t whatever he was experiencing into words, shaking his head as he glanced back at his wings. Slowly, experimentally, he moved one, then the other…but to Feather’s confusion, he didn’t line up their movements. Instead, he began flapping them slightly out of sync with each other, the motion lacking symmetry between them. As a result, he achieved nothing except destabilizing himself, falling onto his side with a grunt.
“What did you do to me?!” he wailed, and this time the question was clearly directed at Lex.
Still wearing his malevolent smirk, the prince deigned to answer. “I muted your sense of proprioception.”
No comprehension shown on Tryout’s face, and Feather Duster couldn’t blame him, having no idea what that was. “My sense of…what?”
“Proprioception,” answered Lex. “Your inherent awareness of the position of your body and its movements. It governs your ability to subconsciously compensate for kinesthetic activity. You’ll still be able to perform coordinated motions, of course, but only with active concentration and deliberate placement for each and every one of your limbs while you do.”
“Wait,” grunted Tryout, looking like he was still trying to understand what he’d been told. “Wait…”
But Lex was already striding toward the door. “Since you’ll need practice to adjust to your condition, I’ll leave you to acquire it.” He paused at the threshold, glancing back at where Feather Duster was still standing by his chair. “Stay here if you wish,” he called back, “but I'll expect you to be in attendance when I reconvene the loan negotiations over dinner tonight.”
“Babe, c'mon,” pleaded Tryout, trying and failing to stand up again. “You can't leave me like this! Tell him to change me back to normal!”
Feather paused, glancing at where Lex was standing in the doorway, awaiting her decision. Then she looked back at where Tryout was looking up at her, silently begging.
The events of the last few days flashed through her mind then. Tryout sending their daughter to go see Rainbow Dash even after she'd just beaten Lex within an inch of his life. Tryout showing up while she was trying to work and accusing her of having an affair. Tryout taking a swing at Lex himself just now.
Tryout demanding use of her body two nights ago, even after she'd told him no.
“I'm sorry,” she murmured, turning and heading toward the door. “As Prince Legis's personal assistant, I need to go help him get ready for the conference. I'll have someone else come check on you.”
“Wait wait wait,” gushed Sonata, her eyes widening with excitement at what she’d just heard. “We’re going on vacation?! All of us, together?!”
“It is not a vacation,” scowled Lex, spitting the last word out as though it were an epithet. But his ire wasn’t directed toward Sonata, instead glaring at River as he spoke. “It’s a trip to conduct a series of utterly pointless exercises which, if I agree to them, will cut deeply into my managing things here in Vanhoover.”
From her place on the other side of the living area in Lex’s suite, a harried-looking River bowed her head, having only recently returned from conferring with the ponies from Las Pegasus. “I’m sorry, Your Highness, but that’s the best I could do. For those ponies, a royal endorsement of their business interests is an extraordinary prize, one that requires that you go to Las Pegasus and conspicuously partake of – and enjoy – the activities, services, and facilities they run.” She paused then, giving him a pained smile. “At least I was able to talk down the ones who wanted real estate rights here in Vanhoover.”
“Hmph.” Although Lex knew River was right, he couldn’t bring himself to be happy about that.
Aria, however, was quite willing to do it for him. “Well I think it’s a great idea,” she grinned, giving her pigtails a toss from where she was reclining on a nearby couch. “After everything we’ve done here, a few weeks of staying in the best resorts, eating the best food, and having a whole lotta fun is what we deserve.”
Lex glanced over at her, horrified. “This will not take weeks!”
“Sire, please,” murmured Coat Tail, the Royal Clothier, his voice simultaneously annoyed and pleading as he readjusted his tape measure around Lex’s shoulders. “I still need a few more measurements before I can start altering Prince Blue-, Blueblood’s wardrobe to fit you.” Biting his lip for a moment, he decided to take a risk. “Are you certain you don’t have any color preferences for what you wear to dinner tonight?”
“For the last time, no!” hissed Lex, begrudging even the few seconds wasted on the frivolity that was fashion.
But before he could return to more important topics, Feather Duster spoke up. “Earth tones,” she murmured, coloring slightly as Lex sent an inquisitive glance her way. “They go with your eyes.”
Coat Tail nodded sagely. “The lady makes a good point, Your Highness.”
“Fine,” snapped Lex. “Whatever. I don’t care.” After what had happened earlier, he knew he needed to keep his irritation in check, but that was growing progressively more difficult as inane things seemed to conspire to waste his time. But as pointless as the topic of his wardrobe was, it paled in comparison to what Aria was suggesting, causing Lex to turn back toward River. “Traveling to Las Pegasus and back will take up too much time as it is. If I do this, then it can’t take longer than a day, two at most.”
“Aww!” pouted Sonata. “But I heard they have a zoo in Las Pegasus! I love zoos! They have leopards! And giraffes! And dalmatians!”
“Dalmatians?” echoed River, shooting Aria a questioning look.
“It’s the spots,” sighed the other Siren, rolling her eyes. “She thinks anything with spots is exotic.” Frowning, she sat up as she fixed Lex with a frown of her own. “And we are not going on vacation just for a day or two! We should be there for at least a month!”
“Actually, Sire, if I may be so bold: Lady Blaze makes a good point,” chimed in Stuffed Shirt, looking up from a scroll that he’d been scribbling on for the last half-hour. “The more time you spend in the city, the more it will help get the word out that there’s a new prince in Equestria. And since it’s going to take a few weeks to get your coronation set up anyway, a longer stay will let you stop in Tall Tale on the way back, where we can hold the ceremony-”
“What,” interrupted Lex, giving his Royal Valet a mystified look, “are you talking about?”
Stuffed Shirt blinked, matching Lex’s confused expression with one of his own. “Your coronation, Sire, as I said.”
“I’ve already been coronated,” shot back Lex. “You were there. I placed the crown on my head right in front of you, and a large number of other ponies as well.”
Stuffed Shirt’s eyebrows shot upward in realization. “My prince,” he began after a long pause, licking his lips. “It’s true that you claimed the crown you won – which, if I may say again, was a truly masterful victory on your part – but there needs to be a proper ceremony so that you can formally present yourself to Equestria as its newest royal. That is the coronation I’m referring to.”
Lex was already shaking his head, ignoring the put-upon look that caused to appear on Coat Tail’s face as he prepared to shoot down this latest addition of meaningless pageantry to his schedule, but River didn’t give him a chance. “He’s right,” she nodded. “The first rule of being important is that people have to know you’re important. You need to make everypony aware that you’re a prince now, and a big celebration of that fact is the best way to do it.”
“And,” continued Stuffed Shirt without missing a beat, “with all due respect to the incredible work you’ve done here, Your Highness, Vanhoover simply doesn’t have the necessary resources for something on the scale you’ll need, while Las Pegasus is too gaudy; it would seem like just another show if you held your coronation there. Tall Tale is by far the best venue for the occasion.”
“That’s a great idea!” cheered Sonata. “We totes had our first big adventure in Tall Tale! Ooh! And we’ll be able to visit all our friends there too! This is, like, the most super-wonderfultastic idea ever!”
“And we’ll have to make sure not to invite Twilight Sparkle and the other princesses,” snickered Aria, giving Lex a lopsided smirk. “I can just imagine them sitting at home, twiddling their hooves while all of the other rich and important ponies come running to shower you with gifts and praise.”
“It does sound lovely,” admitted Feather Duster, getting caught up in the excitement as she smiled at Lex. “If there’s a parade, would it be alright if Cleansweep and her friends marched in it? I know they’d love that.”
Lex didn’t answer, simply turning his head to look around the room, not liking how everypony seemed to disagree with his take on the situation. But as much as he wanted to dismiss their opinions, recent events made him stifle that urge. He couldn’t afford another mistake, at least not where the ponies from Las Pegasus were concerned (hence why he was allowing his Royal Clothier to dress him for dinner in the first place), and as much as the idea of some grand spectacle to celebrate his becoming a prince smacked of pointless vanity, committing an error of protocol at this level ran the risk of consequences that were potentially worse than simply alienating a group of rich ponies whose money he needed; after all, the entire point of what he was doing was to show the rest of Equestria that there was a better alternative to how the princesses were mismanaging things. While his adherence to pomp and traditions shouldn’t affect everypony’s judgment of such things, his experiences to date suggested otherwise.
But that didn’t mean he was completely out of objections, either.
Turning toward Stuffed Shirt, a sour expression crossed Lex’s face as he played his last card. “The cost of such an event-”
“Won’t be an issue, Sire!” replied the valet cheerfully, at least until he realized he’d just interrupted his prince. Flattening his ears, he lowered his gaze. “Forgive me,” he murmured. “It’s just, for an event of this magnitude, I’d be shocked if ponies didn’t come out of the woodwork to donate materials, bits, and their time to make your coronation a scene of utmost majestic resplendence.”
“Yeah!” whooped Sonata, clopping her hooves together in excitement. “And I bet they’ll make it a really big honkin’ deal, too! There’ll probably be confetti! And fireworks! And balloons! Oh my gosh, this’ll be a party bigger than anything Pinkie ever put on!” For a moment her smile dimmed, thinking about the fight she’d gotten into with her friend right before Lex’s duel. But she shook it off a moment later. “And it’s all gonna happen as the grand finale to our vacation! Woo hoo!”
“The situation’s stable enough here that I can probably head to Tall Tale and begin coordinating with Ribbon Cutter as soon as we’re done with the loan negotiations,” murmured River, one hoof going to her chin as she started to focus on the specifics. “She’ll need to start making preparations right away. We’ll need to bring in that Cloudbank mare too, since this will be a good chance to introduce the prince’s religion to more ponies.”
“I’d prefer to be a part of any planning that takes place,” interjected Stuffed Shirt, floating the scroll he’d been writing in toward River Bank. “I’ve started compiling a list of preliminaries that will need to be seen to, as well as notable ponies whom we should invite.”
Taking the scroll, River nodded absently as she began perusing it. “In that case, we should send out the invitations sooner rather than later. If the prince spends a month in Las Pegasus, plus, say, a week to travel there and another to come back, that only gives us six weeks in total to put this together. Factor in how long it will take the invitations to reach everyone, for notices to be run in newspapers, and for ponies who want to be here to make travel arrangements…”
“Guess that means you guys won’t be making the trip to Las Pegasus with us, huh?” smirked Aria. Getting up, she slunk over to Lex, nuzzling him amorously. “Imagine what kinds of trouble we can get into without the chaperones there…”
“Ooh! I’ve got an idea!” Running over to press against his other side, Sonata almost quivered with excitement. “We can paint the town red! I’ve always wanted to do that! No, wait, brainshower!” Smiling widely, she glanced back at Feather Duster. “We can paint the town earth tones! They go with his eyes, right?”
Blushing more, Feather Duster fidgeted, unable to meet Sonata’s gaze. “Y-yes, but I don’t think that’s-”
“My ladies, if you please,” murmured Coat Tail, a whining note entering his voice. “I still need a few more measurements.”
“Aw, fine,” pouted Sonata. But her frown couldn’t hold as she moved to nudge Aria away from Lex, giddy at the prospect of all the fun they were going to have. “I can’t wait! When do we leave?!”
“If you can seal the deal tonight, then probably tomorrow morning,” admitted River, looking up from Stuffed Shirt’s scroll. “The ponies from Las Pegasus are eager to head back, and my yacht’s ready to go at any time.”
Stepping away from Sonata before she could nudge her far enough from Lex to activate the curse he’d placed on her, Aria smirked. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go charm those rich ponies and head out!”
“It’s still a little early for dinner,” noted Stuffed Shirt. “Plus, the prince’s attire still needs to be finished.”
“I’ll also need to do another fitting once I’ve made the initial adjustments,” warned Coat Tail as he got back to work. “Custom alterations aren’t something you can do with measurements alone.”
“If you need some mirrors, I can have a few brought over from nearby rooms,” offered Feather Duster helpfully.
At the center of the storm of activity, and yet paradoxically forgotten by everypony, Lex let out a sigh.
The next several weeks were going to be very long indeed.
Sonata’s happy squeal was punctuated by her flinging herself onto the bed, twisting as she bounced so that she was looking at Lex when she came to a stop, grinning. “You gotta wonder if that was paper or plastic, because we totes had that in the bag!”
“Was there ever any doubt?” smirked Aria, glancing back at Lex as she sauntered into the bedroom portion of their suite ahead of him. “After all, when there’s something we want, we always get it.”
Lex ignored her baited comment, save for rolling his eyes, as he strode into the room and began to telekinetically unfasten the outfit Coat Tail had prepared for him.
Although he knew nothing about fashion, everypony had assured him that the ensemble looked good on him. The deep brown overcoat had been a only few shades darker than his mane, with dark red embroidery along the edges that – to hear Feather Duster say it – had “splendidly” accentuated his horn. The second article had been the black vest he’d worn underneath it, which Sonata had dubbed “snazzy.” Third and last had been the rubies that Coat Tail had used to accessorize the outfit, both for the coat’s cufflinks and the vest’s fasteners, which according to Aria had made for a “pretty intense” look. The overall effect had met with River’s approval as well, looking him over before they’d entered the dining hall and pronouncing him to look “every inch a prince,” whatever that meant.
But if his outfit had been a spectacle, it had been nothing compared to the dinner itself.
The long table in the dining hall had been absolutely covered with food, the layout of which had been as colorful as it was expansive. A selection of grapes that had been peeled, chilled, and rolled in sugar had sat next to a series of cheeses sliced and arranged to look like a bouquet of flowers, both of which had sat around a set of green, red, and yellow peppers stuffed with lightly-roasted oats seasoned with cumin and oregano. And that had just been one entrée among dozens. The table, despite being a massive construction of solid wood, had nearly sagged beneath the enormity of the feast spread across it.
The sight had reminded Lex of the description he’d heard of the empowered food-creation spells he’d cast several weeks back, the last of which he’d fed too much power into and had almost died casting as a result. As it was, River had mentioned – whispering to him as he’d moved to his seat at the head of the table – that it was apparently the result of his Royal Confectioner, Puff Pastry, finding out that the rescheduled meeting would be taking place over a meal. Upon hearing that, she had immediately rushed down to the kitchen and dragooned the manor staff there into helping her, somehow turning out the prodigious amount of food in just a few hours.
And that had just been the beginning of the evening…
“Master Legis?” called Feather Duster, standing in the doorway. “Oh! I’m sorry, I mean, Prince Legis? Forgive me for interrupting while you’re preparing to retire for the night, but I wanted to ask…when you leave for Las Pegasus tomorrow morning, will I be going with you?”
“Of course you will!” answered Sonata before Lex could even open his mouth. “You were great tonight! We totes don’t want to break up the band!”
“Eh, we’re gonna need someone to carry our bags and do the laundry and all that boring stuff,” admitted Aria. “Besides, you make a decent backup singer.”
“R-right,” Feather blushed, biting her lip as she looked down at the carpet. “I, um…I really didn’t think I was very good, compared to you two.”
“Compared to us, no one is,” purred Aria, stretching a little as she undid her pigtails in preparation for bed. “And I don’t just mean when it comes to singing.”
“Hey, be nice,” huffed Sonata, lazily tossing a pillow at her sister. “I thought she did really well.”
Lex sighed, not in the mood for more of the pair’s antics, despite the pleasant nature of the surprise they’d given him – and everypony else – after the meal had concluded.
The servants had been clearing the remaining food away (with River quietly assuring him the leftovers would go to everypony in the village), and Lex had been preparing to resume the negotiations, when Sonata and Aria had spoken up. Except it hadn’t been “spoken” so much as “sung.”
What followed had been a musical performance that, in hindsight, had been no less of a seduction than the one they’d used on him the night before. Except instead of words of love and adoration spoken in tandem to win him over, it had been a song of admiration for what he’d done combined with anticipation for what he would do next, praising his accomplishments while teasing the listeners to be part of his plans for the future. With an upbeat tempo, their voices perfectly harmonizing as they freely switched between singing together and supporting one another, the two of them had effortlessly kept the dinner guests spellbound.
Not literally, of course; Lex had used his circlet to check for spellcasting as soon as he’d realized what they were doing, and to his relief neither Siren had laced their voice with a spell. But with how enthralled everypony had been, they might as well have. By the time they’d gotten a full minute into their song, the guests had all been singing along.
To Lex’s surprise, it had been Feather Duster who’d gotten into it most. While River and a few other ponies had gotten in a word here and there, the maid had somehow ended up with her own solo part where she had – to Lex’s mild embarrassment – sung about how she’d once feared him but now revered him, for some reason segueing into how he’d put her husband in his place before returning to the song’s refrain, at which point Sonata and Aria had picked it back up.
By the time the performance had finished, the Las Pegasus ponies had been dancing and laughing, completely at ease with what he was asking of them. Gladmane hadn’t even mentioned what had happened with Tryout. Razzle Dazzle had been in tears, her withered old face wearing a smile so wide it had to have made her muzzle ache. And while they’d all quite clearly still expected him to accompany them back to their city and endorse their endeavors – more than one had mentioned how they were looking forward to showing him the best of what Las Pegasus had to offer – there hadn’t been a single objection raised about lending him the money he wanted.
One by one, many of them still humming Sonata and Aria’s song, they’d all signed the loan papers.
Just like that, Lex had gotten the money he’d so desperately needed.
He hadn’t needed to say so much as two words the entire time, and it had all come together thanks to the ponies he’d brought with him. While Lex had always known he’d need to delegate responsibility to others to make his vision for the future work, it had been something else to see it in action. The fact that he'd felt the barbed wire around his foreleg shift without cutting him – a sign of the Night Mare's pleasure – when everypony had finished signing the papers hadn't surprised Lex in the least. And speaking of the ponies who worked for him…
“Your contract specifies that you’re expected to accompany me on matters of business-related travel unless I say otherwise,” he answered Feather Duster at last. Pausing then, he turned to make eye contact with her. “If, however, you feel that your husband’s punishment requires you to stay here for the sake of your family-”
“No!” Her ears folding back as she realized she’d interrupted him, Feather Duster gave an apologetic bow. “I’m sorry, I just meant that that won’t be necessary. I’ll need to talk to Cleansweep before we go, but I’m sure she and her friends will be able to manage without me for a little while.” The corners of her lips turned up as she raised her head. “She’s so busy with her friends these days, I barely see her when she isn’t asleep anyway.” Giving a quick nod to Sonata and Aria, she backed away, pulling the door shut behind her. “Good night, Your Highness.”
“Feather Duster.”
Turning back, the mare in question blinked as she moved back to the threshold. “Yes, Sire?”
Picking up a piece of paper and a quill, Lex scribbled on it for a moment before levitating it over to her. “Before you turn in for the night, collect everything on here and bring them to my study.”
Looking over the list she’d been given, Feather cocked her head. “Of course. I think we have most of these.” Pausing, she waited for just a moment. When it was clear that neither an explanation nor any further instructions would be forthcoming, she bowed her head again and left.
“What was that about?” Arching a brow, Aria gave him curious look, only for it to melt into a lopsided smirk as she moved over to the bed. “Actually, let me guess. That was a list of toys you’ll be using tonight to ‘thank’ us for all of our help.”
Sonata’s eyes lit up instantly. “Ooh! Is one of them a frisbee?!” Jumping to her hooves, she pranced in place at the thought. “I want you to throw it as far as you can, and I bet I’ll be able to catch it in my mouth before it hits the ground!”
Ignoring the pained look that crossed Aria’s face, Lex turned his attention away from the duo, focusing instead on divesting himself of his clothes. “It’s materials for a spellbook.”
Aria frowned. “A what?”
Sonata tilted her head. “Wait a minute…I remember those things from back on Everglow. Don’t wizards there need them to cast their spells or something?”
Lex nodded absently. “They’re assistive devices used for preparing thaumaturgical spells. The formulas found therein function like molds, imprinting the structural layout of a given spell into the user’s thoughts while simultaneously compressing the necessary energy to activate the spell when it’s cast.”
“Hm.” Already losing interest, Aria rolled over. “I’ve never seen you use one of those before.”
“I don’t need such things,” replied Lex truthfully. He didn’t need spellbooks to prepare his spells. His thaumaturgical spellcasting required assistance in other ways. “But constructing one for someone else is easy enough to do.”
“Wait.” Sitting up a little as she dismissed thoughts of chasing frisbees, Sonata struggled to put two and two together. “If you’re making a spellbook…you’re going to teach somepony magic? Who? Those kids with the animals?”
“My Royal Magician,” answered Lex idly. “Constance Halation.”
Aria raised a brow. “The geek girl from your new flunky squad? Why her?”
Again, Lex had an answer at the ready. “Her area of expertise is non-traditional magic. Since I don’t need her to come with us to Las Pegasus, I’m going to write down a few simple non-combative spells and see if she can decipher how to prepare them by the time we get back. It’s one of several projects I’ll be assigning the ponies who will be staying here while we’re gone.”
“Aw, that’s great!” Flopping down next to Aria, Sonata shot him a toothy grin. “So you’re keeping them, huh? They’ll be totes happy to hear that. They were all, like, super worried you were going to fire them.”
“I considered it,” admitted Lex as he removed the last of the clothes he’d been given, laying them on a nearby divan. “But I’ve recently been given cause to put more effort into finding ways to make use of the ponies who work for me.”
“In that case…” Scooting a little closer to her sister than was appropriate, Aria gave him a sultry look. “Why not come make use of the two you’ve got right here?”
But rather than tempt him, the lewd entreaty made him grimace. “About that. There’s something I need to tell you two.”
Exchanging a worried look, both Sirens sat up. “What is it?” murmured Sonata, an undercurrent of nervousness in her voice.
Sighing, Lex sat down across from them, trying to figure out the most delicate way to break what he’d learned to them, despite knowing that he had no skill at being tactful. “I’ve been made aware that the walls in this manor are of only limited usefulness where noise-cancellation is concerned. Hence why, Sonata, I was able to overhear your…appreciation, of those cupcakes earlier today. It’s since occurred to me that this means that the two of you are likewise audible, at least to the ponies resting nearby, when we’re engaged in carnal activities.”
Silence reigned for a long moment as both mares blinked.
“Wait…” said Sonata slowly. “You heard me going on about those cupcakes, and now you’re saying that means everyone can hear us when we’re doing it at night?”
Lex nodded, certain she had to be mortified. Certainly he was, and he wasn’t even vocal the way they were. “That’s correct.”
The two of them shared a look that lasted for a long moment before turning back to him.
“Well duh,” shrugged Sonata.
“You didn’t know that before now?” snickered Aria.
Lex could only stare at them, eyes widening. “You knew?!”
“Yeah,” scoffed Sonata, putting a hoof to her chest. “I mean, hello, Sirens here. We’re supposed to be loud. It’s kinda hard to enchant people if they can just go inside and shut their doors and windows.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t know!” laughed Aria. “So you weren’t aware that the servants are calling our bedroom ‘The Screamery’?”
“I don’t like that name,” huffed Sonata as she pointed at her sister. “I scream, she screams, we both scream, but nopony brings us ice cream.”
Still chuckling, Aria leered. “Oh, we should definitely have some of that.”
But Sonata shook her head, pouting. “It’s no good. I asked for some yesterday, and they said somepony took it all. It really bummed me out.”
Putting his face in his hooves, Lex could only groan.
Despite having finally secured the loan that Vanhoover needed, his nightmares had been as bad as ever, ending with the abrupt shift to wakefulness that ensured he started his day without the slightest shred of imperturbation. But as unpleasant as it was, Lex had already put it out of his thoughts less than two seconds after returning to consciousness, knowing that he had a great deal of work to do and not much time to do it before they left for Las Pegasus. Besides, if he had to spend the next several weeks engaged in leisure – something that made him profoundly uncomfortable to consider – then it was all the more reason to push himself now.
Though the sleeping mares pressed against him on either side seemed to have other ideas about that.
Not wanting to wake them – a sentiment borne as much from his desire to work undisturbed as it was from tender feelings toward the pair – Lex wasted several seconds trying to gently disentangle himself from Sonata and Aria before realizing that it was futile. Although he’d made it clear last night that there would be no lovemaking until the issue of their room being soundproofed was resolved, the girls hadn’t taken his declaration lying down, becoming quite upset that they were being punished (despite his repeated assurances that they weren’t) after how useful they’d made themselves. It was only after a compromise had been reached, wherein they’d eschew conjugal activities in favor of what Sonata had termed “hardcore cuddling,” that they’d all gone to sleep. As favorable as the arrangement had seemed at the time, result was that he was pinned between the two of them now.
A pang running through him as he recalled when something similar had happened back when they’d all been sleeping on a bench in Vanhoover’s train station – back when Nosey had still been with them – Lex silently called on his dark magic, turning into a shadow and passing soundlessly through the bed and toward the door.
Soft groans of displeasure from both mares made him stop, glancing back at the two of them as they unconsciously adjusted to his leaving. Considering them for a moment, Lex telekinetically lifted two of the larger pillows and placed them between Sonata and Aria. That would stop the latter from accidentally touching the former, triggering the curse he’d placed on her and likely waking her up.
Further thought saw him telekinetically tucking in the blankets around Sonata, since she had a tendency to swish her tail in her sleep and displace them. And Aria’s hair was slightly in her face, requiring it to be moved back before it disturbed her. Both girls also needed to have their sleeping positions adjusted – very carefully so as not to rouse them – so that they weren’t lying the wrong way, potentially cutting off the circulation to a carelessly-placed leg, along with several other minor adjustments that needed to be made in order for them to rest properly.
Finally certain that they were as comfortable as he could make them, Lex turned away, floating through the wall of the bedroom and into the study portion of his suite.
The materials that he’d told Feather Duster to gather were neatly arranged on his desk, but Lex was less concerned with them than he was with the ornate, full-length silver mirror standing in the corner of the room. It was one of several that had been brought into the living area of their suite last night, while Coat Tail had been dressing him, so that he could examine his outfit from every conceivable angle. But while the other mirrors had been removed after the tailoring on his ensemble had been completed, Lex had ordered this one to be placed in his study. Nopony had seemed to give it much thought at the time, being too focused on the imminent dinner meeting, but it was the sole object of Lex’s attention now.
Not bothering with a source of illumination, since he could see in the dark while in shadow-form, Lex approached the reflective surface and began to cast a spell.
The evocation that he’d used to imprison Behemiel – the creature Twilight Sparkle had summoned during their duel – in ice had been the only thaumaturgical spell he’d had left that was combat-oriented. The remaining few contained in his mind, of which there were less than ten now, were entirely utilitarian in nature, focusing on esoteric tasks such as creating a floating disk to carry things, warding an area so that an alarm would go off if someone entered it, or the one he was casting now: a scrying spell, designed to let him clandestinely see and hear someone regardless of the distance between them.
It had been several weeks since he’d last used this particular bit of magic. At the time, he’d tried to contact Twilight (since the channel the spell created between himself and the target could potentially be enhanced, allowing him to use his whisper-spell through it), goaded by Cloudbank into admitting that Vanhoover’s situation was dire enough that it warranted reaching out to the princesses for assistance despite his animosity toward them. The attempt had failed, however, and Lex still wasn’t certain if that was because the spell simply hadn’t been able to properly fixate on Twilight, or if Xiriel had done something to interfere with magical communications into and out of the city.
There was no evidence of the latter, of course, but given the diverse selection of spells on the scroll Lex had taken from the thing, it wasn’t implausible to imagine that one designed to isolate particular areas from what he was doing now had been among them. There was no way to be certain of that, however; utilizing a spell stored in a scroll caused the writing to vanish as part of the activation, much like how the spells he imbued into gemstones caused those gems to crumble to dust when they were released. Still, Lex couldn’t imagine the meticulous creature not having a way to make sure that magical calls for help could be defeated once it had started capitalizing on the city’s downfall.
But it was just as possible that his spell had failed of its own accord. After all, Twilight had been on Everglow at the time, and while this spell was capable of piercing planar boundaries, it lost a certain amount of efficacy in doing so, like an arrow needing to punch through a layer of armor in order to reach its target. Nor was that the only potential problem it faced; this spell’s core function was to create a channel between himself and the target, a task whose difficulty was inversely proportionate to how much data about the target he was able to input during the casting process.
Having something of theirs was the easiest way to do that, since he could simply have the spell itself analyze and look for shared characteristics. A strand of hair, or some similar piece of the target’s body, would have been ideal. A favored garment or possession was almost as good, and even a picture or likeness would have presented something to work with.
Casting the spell without those – as he was now – meant that his only option was to manually direct the spell toward what he knew of the person in question. That would have worked far better if they were someone he knew well, or had at least met them before. But neither of those were the case now, leaving him with nothing but second-hoof information to work from…
Minutes ticked by as Lex chanted, the edges of his umbral form swirling in an approximation of the necessary gesticulations. This particular spell took a full hour to cast, a result of how much data needed to be input as the requisite energies were being shaped and directed toward the person he wanted to locate. Most spells didn’t require anywhere near as long due to most of the salient information already having been entered into them; what few adjustments needed to be made during the casting process, such as targeting coordinates, were minor enough that their impact on the time needed to activate the spell was negligible. Not so with this one.
Still, for all its tediousness – and the ever-present possibility of failure – the advantages of his shadow-form made the spell’s casting slightly easier. While Lex could say without conceit that he had more than enough discipline to perform sixty minutes’ worth of precise chanting while simultaneously making the exacting gesticulations the scrying required (he had done so for far longer when conducting the ritual to change Aria into a pony, after all), being immaterial meant that much of the unpleasantness associated with doing so was mitigated simply because he had no physical form for the activity to tax. There would be no aches from standing still for too long, nor strain on his voice from the constant utterances required of him, nor any similar discomforts.
But that wasn’t why he’d elected to remain in this state before he’d begun casting the spell.
Rather, he had chosen to stay in shadow-form out of an abundance of caution.
Scrying on someone meant creating a channel between himself and the target. But while that channel could be augmented to the point of allowing supplementary magic to flow across it, that was just one way in which it could be potentially manipulated. Theoretically, there were numerous other possibilities, some of which could be used as vectors of attack, and not just by the spell’s caster.
Indeed, the counter-scrying spell Lex had cast on himself back on Everglow – one that he’d labored long and hard to create, unable to abide the mere possibility of being remotely spied upon without his knowledge – was built on that very idea. In the event that it detected a scrying sensor in his vicinity, it would immediately activate, flooding the channel with more energy than it could handle, collapsing it and causing the scrying’s caster to be bombarded with an explosion of electrical feedback on their end. Or at least, that’s what it was supposed to do; to date, the spell had never come across its activating condition, so he wasn’t completely sure it would function the way it was designed to.
Hopefully, this wouldn’t turn out to be its first field test.
It was with that grim thought in mind that Lex finally finished casting the spell, peering intently at the mirror as he waited for the results, or lack thereof, to manifest.
For all the ways this spell could fail, and the potential dangers if it succeeded, the major issue with scrying on someone was ultimately a tactical one. If it worked, it would still only last for a few minutes at most, which meant that it was only as useful as what you could learn about the target during that time. Scrying on Celestia or Luna while they were making plans to undermine him, for instance, would have been eminently valuable…but only if he knew exactly when they were making those plans. Otherwise, he ran the risk of wasting his spell to watch one of them eat a meal, or read a book, or otherwise engage in some pointless activity. The only information that a successful casting was guaranteed to return, countermeasures notwithstanding, was the target’s disposition and immediate surroundings.
But when it came to Long Road, the donkey that Rarity had begged him to bring back, and Adagio Dazzle, whom Sonata and Aria had asked him to find, that was more data than he had at the moment, making the use of this spell warranted.
While he could only use this spell to try and scry on one individual, it had been easy for Lex to decide which of those two he should be the focus of his efforts. Long Road was a donkey for whom there was credible (though not conclusive) reason to believe was dead. Adagio, by contrast, was a pony who – as far as her sisters knew – was alive back on Everglow. To confirm Adagio’s current circumstances now, and potentially make contact with her through the scrying, was by far the more rational decision. If Long Road was still alive months after his disappearance, a few more weeks – which is how long Lex would need to prepare this spell again (the equinox being just over a month away now) and review what Thermal Draft learned in Trottingham – would likely make little difference.
Not that this seems to have made much of a difference either, sighed Lex silently, staring at the unresponsive mirror. Although this was only the second time he’d used this spell – the silver mirror it called for was one that required a high degree of craftsmareship, something that was much rarer on Everglow than Equestria, leading to him only acquiring one shortly before returning home (which had been subsequently lost when he’d been forced to jettison the extradimensional pouch containing it, and most of his other belongings, during his fight with Xiriel) – several seconds had already passed with no effect. If the spell had worked, then surely by now something-
The mirror’s surface rippled.
Like a pond that had a pebble thrown into it, the flat surface pulsated, the reflection of his green-and-purple eyes slowly fading away. The glass’s surface lightened, no longer showing the gloom of the unlit room but instead turning a misty gray color, murky at first but gradually clearing up, revealing a figure…
In the time that Lex had known them, Sonata and Aria had mentioned their sister Adagio more than once.
While the references they’d made to the missing Siren had quite often been unflattering in their depiction of her – terms such as “bossy” and “pushy” had been thrown around quite frequently – they hadn’t been universally negative in how they’d described her. Both had acknowledged that Adagio had looked out for them during their thousand-year exile on Earth. Apparently, she had been the only one among the trio to put actual consideration into where, when, and how they should use their powers of enchantment, aiming to minimize the attendant risks of magically manipulating that world’s human population while maximizing the payoffs, rather than doing so as the mood struck her. To Lex, that had sounded like little more than strategic thinking at its most basic level, but it had apparently been enough to leave a lasting impression on Sonata and Aria.
Nor had that been the only good thing the pair had to say about their absent sister. Despite being vain creatures themselves, both Sirens had – begrudgingly – admitted that Adagio was notably pulchritudinous even by their standards. “It’s not that she’s hotter than us,” as Sonata had put it, “it’s just that she, like, totes plays it up.” Aria’s description had been similar, saying that Adagio “knows how to work it.” At the time, Lex hadn’t understood what they’d meant.
But finally seeing Adagio Dazzle for himself, he did now.
The resemblance between her and her sisters was impossible to miss. Even with only a moment’s glance, Lex could see that her eyes were the same raspberry hue as Sonata’s, the pout gracing her full lips a perfect match for the one Aria so often wore. And just like the other two, her body was a work of art come to life, composed of curves that were as plentiful as they were generous. Paradoxically, those similarities were highlighted all the more by how different her hair was from theirs, eschewing the darker hues of her siblings for a veritable waterfall of vivid orange and brilliant yellow.
It wasn’t just her physical attributes that captivated his attention, however. Half-reclining on an opulent-looking divan, her posture accentuated her body in a way that made it impossible for him to examine her dispassionately. One leg was stretched out, while the other was bent at the knee, leaving her hips slightly askew. Her chest was pushed out slightly more than necessary. Her head tilted back just a little, as though she was caught in the middle of a sensuous stretch. The combined effect made her look inviting, as though she were silently calling him to climb on top of her, and yet wasn’t so wanton that she couldn’t have played the entire thing off as his imagination if she’d wanted to.
She looked, quite simply, like sex incarnate, and despite his bodiless state Lex found himself wanting her…which left him confused and unnerved, because he knew he shouldn’t, for one very simple reason.
Adagio Dazzle's body wasn’t that of a pony, nor was it the Siren form he'd seen Aria in.
Instead, the beautiful creature lounging in front of him was a human.
The absence of the disgust he knew he should have felt was enough to leave Lex reeling, trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance assailing him, all other considerations temporarily pushed to the side. Recalling that he’d experienced a similar attraction to Aria when he’d first seen her, despite her still being in her original body, he desperately looked Adagio over, trying to locate some hint of equine features.
But there were none to be found. No tail. No triangular ears. No pony attributes of any kind, at least that he could see…and her outfit left little to the imagination. Save for a few baubles – a silver pendant resting in the valley of her cleavage, and rings on the middle fingers of each of her hands – she was clad in nothing but a bright red pair of panties with roses patterned into it and a bustier of matching color and design, her only other article of clothing being a diaphanous robe, open slightly over her chest and giving the rest of her skin a slightly silken look, as though tempting him to reach out and caress-
“-rupted my beauty sleep?” huffed Adagio, her voice dragging Lex away from his unwanted fantasies as she raised one hand to brush a stray lock of hair away from her face. “If that’s all you came here to tell me, then leave.”
Forcing his hyperactive libido, and the discomfort that caused him, out of his mind, Lex turned his consideration toward Adagio’s surroundings, needing to focus on something else.
Although the scrying was centered on her, Adagio’s immediate vicinity was visible as well. Matching the plush divan she was laying on, the room she was in seemed like an exercise in extravagance. The wall was cream-colored and decorated in an abstract pattern, lit by a candelabra in a nearby sconce. In front of her was a small tea table, across from which – at the edge of Lex’s range of vision – was another small sofa to match the one she was using, which for some reason was the focus of her attention, despite being unoccupied.
“Hm, and what’s in it for me?” she asked abruptly, eyes still trained squarely on the empty divan as she laid her hand on her hip, legs rubbing against each other idly.
Despite her being able to make even a display of apparent boredom look suggestive, Lex felt a rush of concern that had nothing to do with his irrational attraction to Adagio’s human form.
The one-sided conversation he was overhearing shouldn’t have been one-sided. Even if his scrying spell’s range of vision was narrow – perhaps she was looking at someone behind the empty divan, beyond the area he could see – he still should have been able to hear what she was hearing. Any sound that reached her ears would have similarly reached the spell’s sensor and been relayed to him.
“That’s not enough,” Adagio smirked, shifting in a way that was almost a wriggle. “If I’m going to be the one taking all the risks, then I want a much bigger reward.”
There were numerous possibilities for why he wasn’t picking up whatever communication she was responding to, of course. It could have been something as mundane as someone standing out of visual range and using some form of communication that didn’t rely on speech, such as some sort of gestural language or writing their responses down and showing them to her. Or the person she was talking to could be using magic to turn invisible and communicate telepathically; his scrying spell had no countermeasures for such things, and although Adagio’s gaze seemed steady, it was possible she had some sort of anti-invisibility spell of her own active. Aria had learned to utilize new magic during the few months she’d been apart from her sisters, so it was entirely possible that Adagio had as well. Or perhaps one of the trinkets she was wearing had an enchantment for that purpose.
But the more likely scenario was that she was talking to someone who had some sort of anti-scrying magic active on them, screening their presence from what his spell could detect.
“That’s more like it,” purred Adagio, sitting up slowly as she crossed her legs. “Now, tell me the details.”
Lex’s first instinct was to check Adagio and the area around her for magical signatures – the ability to view the area through the magical spectrum was, like his whisper-spell, something that could conceivably be performed across the channel created by his scrying sensor – but his ability to do that was dependent on his circlet (he did know the thaumaturgical spell that replicated that effect, but he hadn’t bothered preparing it; why waste the thought-space, minor though it was, on such a spell when he had a magic item that perform the same function?), and it was non-functional while he was incorporeal. Swearing softly, Lex mentally directed the shifted the scrying spell’s point of view, angling it to it was behind Adagio, giving him a better look at the seemingly-unoccupied sofa across from her. That would give him the best angle-
“What?!” Adagio’s voice was suddenly thick with tension, her hair whipping about as she looked around quickly, one hand rushing to her chest to clutch the pendant around her neck. “How?! I’m wearing the amulet!”
Lex paused, still in shadow-form. What was happening?
“You should have told me that sooner!” seethed the Siren-turned-human, falling silent as she stood up. But she stayed quiet only for a moment. “Where is it?” Following unheard instructions, she turned in a slow circle, coming to a stop as she turned her head…
…and looked directly at him. “There you are.”
Lex didn’t hesitate, immediately moving to terminate the spell.
That wasn’t something that could be done with a thought, the way some spells could be. With all of the effort that scrying put into locating the target and creating a channel between them and the caster, the spell’s effect was too robust to have any sort of built-in shutdown effect. It either had to be allowed to expire naturally, or be actively negated. But there was one other way to bring it to an immediate end, one that Lex had been keenly aware of before he’d started casting the spell, just in case a situation like this occurred.
A half-second later the sound of shattering filled the study as the stalagmite of black crystal he’d conjured struck the mirror, shattering it into a thousand pieces.
Feeling the spell dissipate as its medium was destroyed, Lex watched as the shards fell, the fractured image of Adagio vanishing before the first of the mirror fragments had hit the ground. Nor did he move after the last of them had come to lay on the carpet and the echoes of the crash had faded away. Instead, he continued to regard them silently, mentally reviewing the events of the last few minutes.
Technically, he had accomplished what he’d set out to do, which was gather basic information about Adagio’s circumstances. He’d confirmed that she was alive, that she wasn’t in immediate danger, and some supplementary data besides, such as her unexpected transformation into a human form. Although Sonata and Aria had told him that they’d spent their time on Earth in bodies matching those of the native population – apparently as some sort of side-effect of being shunted into that dimension – they’d confirmed that they’d changed back to normal once they’d arrived on Everglow. For Adagio to have somehow reverted to that alien form was a conundrum, and although Lex was sure he could undo whatever had done that to her – if he could change Aria into a proper pony, he could do the same thing for Adagio – it was still unnerving to consider.
Nor was that the only reason he couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that had fallen over him.
Whoever had been there with Adagio had been adept at hiding themselves from magical detection. While that might have been the extent of their talents, it hadn’t been lost on Lex how that unknown individual, rather than Adagio, had been the one to initially detect his scrying spell. If they were versed in defeating and detecting such things, then it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they also knew more aggressive – or insidious – countermeasures. Hopefully his ending the spell as abruptly as he had meant that they hadn’t gotten a chance to try and put any such things into effect. The last thing he needed was another problem from Everglow making its way to Equestria, especially now when everything was finally starting to proceed how he wanted it to.
But there would be time to try and analyze what he’d witnessed for clues about potential threats later. Indeed, with six weeks of recreation in his immediate future, he’d have a surfeit of opportunities to do so. Right now, he had other tasks that needed to be taken care of before they left-
For Princess Celestia, breakfast was the best part of her day.
After raising the sun, the chance to enjoy a quiet meal and prepare for the coming day was a calming ritual that she’d come to cherish. Not simply because the food was delicious (although the fact that pancakes could be topped with any number of sugary treats certainly helped), but because it gave her a chance to properly remind herself that each day was a day that would never come again. That knowledge – that every day was special, offering unique chances to help bring joy into the lives of her little ponies – was what made her duties as a princess a privilege rather than a burden, and Celestia made sure to always keep it close to her heart.
The last few years had been especially fortunate in that regard, as Celestia had the opportunity to share her morning meal with her beloved little sister Luna. After a millennium of separation, Celestia took delight in preparing Luna’s breakfast (even if it was technically her sister’s dinner) personally, using berries, fruit slices, or whatever other delicious toppings the kitchen staff had prepared to make a smiley face on top of her sister’s pancakes. It might have been a little silly, but Celestia couldn’t resist sending her sister off to bed each day with a reminder of how much she cared about her.
Unfortunately, it had become harder for Celestia to appreciate breakfast ever since she and Luna had taken their disastrous trip to Vanhoover. Part of that was because of the renewed strain of having to raise and lower the sun and the moon, a burden Celestia had carried for the thousand years that Luna had been banished, and one that she now had to take on again thanks to the curse Lex Legis had placed on her sister. But that wasn’t the real reason that mornings no longer brought Celestia the joy they once had.
Although Luna had temporarily ceased attending breakfast upon their return to Canterlot, she’d recently started showing up again. But her behavior had changed markedly from how she used to act. While still tired from staying up from dusk till dawn – insisting that she continue monitoring the dream realm as best she could – Luna now attentive at breakfast in a way she hadn’t been before, making token efforts at small talk, remarking on stories in the morning paper, politely thanking Celestia for the food, and generally going out of her way to be amiable and nonchalant. To anypony else, it must have looked like her sister was handling what had happened to her with poise and grace, bearing the indignity of being stripped of her alicornhood with the composure of a true princess.
But Celestia knew better. The fact that Luna was trying so hard to act like she was alright was the surest sign that she wasn’t alright. Had she been back to normal, Luna would have shown up each morning exhausted and surly, taking two bites of her pancakes (without remarking on the fruit face) before muttering “going to bed” under her breath as she trudged off without a word of thanks. And if that had left Celestia feeling disappointed that her gesture of caring had gone unnoticed, it would have been a thousand times better than seeing Luna act like she wasn’t still feeling ashamed of the fact that Lex Legis had humiliated her the way he had, using his magic to make her very body into a symbol of his dominance. Seeing her sister suffering in silence like that never failed to ruin Celestia’s morning now, knowing that the pony whom she wished joy for the most was the one she was powerless to help.
Which brought her to this morning.
“I just wish you had consulted with me first, Luna.”
Sitting across the table from her, the pony in question shook her head. “You would have tried to talk me out of it if I had, sister.”
“I would have suggested postponing this,” admitted Celestia, tapping the morning paper with her hoof, fighting back the urge to grimace as she looked at the front-page picture of her sister – the same stoic expression on her face there that she’d worn to breakfast for a while now – spread out beneath the banner headline: PRINCESS LUNA CURSED BY VILLAIN. “Luna, I know you wanted to publicly renounce your claims of being a goddess, but this…”
Luna shrugged, a faint smirk of self-deprecation crossing her face. “I thought this got the point across quite well. How many goddesses do you know who are defeated and cursed by an evil sorcerer?”
“Luna!” Although she knew that chastising her sister was the wrong thing to do, Celestia couldn’t help it, equal parts angry and horrified that Luna was trying to act like her condition wasn’t something of utmost seriousness.
But seeing Luna wince, her ears folded back, was enough to make her immediately backpedal. “I’m sorry.” Taking a moment to collect herself, Celestia tried again. “Luna, I’m not upset, I’m just worried. Most of the crystal pony missionaries that Cadance and Shining armor sent out across Equestria have already made their way back to the Crystal Empire. Once the last of them have returned, we’ll be able to undo what Lex did to you, and I don’t want you regretting telling everypony-”
“And what if that doesn’t work?” cut in Luna sharply, all traces of her earlier insouciance gone. “Celestia, I know how much you want to believe in this plan, but we need to face facts. If Discord couldn’t remove my curse then there’s a very real chance that the Crystal Heart won’t be able to either.”
Celestia wanted so badly to argue the point. To point out that the dark magic Lex had used – the magic of isolation – was the same magic that King Sombra had wielded, and which had been overwhelmingly defeated by the love that the crystal ponies had poured into the Crystal Heart. That it therefore stood to reason that Lex’s curse would fare no better when put to the test.
But instead, she forced herself to remain silent. She knew what was happening; Luna was afraid to believe in their plan because, if by some chance it did fail, her disappointment would be cushioned by never having gotten her hopes up to begin with. It made sense, but in a horrible way, and Celestia hated seeing her sister do that to herself. But as much as she wanted to make her sister realize that lowering her expectations like that was just another way of giving up, she knew she couldn’t say that. She and Luna had already lost a thousand years because she hadn’t been sensitive to her sister’s pain before; it wasn’t a mistake she would make again, no matter how much it hurt.
Seeing that Celestia wasn’t going to push back on what she’d said, Luna let out a breath, the tension draining from her body. “I know you want to protect me,” she admitted at last. “And I appreciate that. I do. But this is…”
She let out a slow breath, and Celestia didn’t interrupt, giving Luna the time she needed to put her thoughts in order. “I can’t control what Lex Legis did to me, but at least this way I can control how everypony finds out about it. Doing it on my terms, rather than having news of it slowly leak out as the ponies who work here gossip with the ponies in town, and having those ponies spread it to other cities, until all of Equestria knows what happened to me but pretends otherwise in order to be polite…” Biting her lip at the thought, she shook her head. “It’s my decision, sister, and even if this were undone tomorrow, I won’t regret it.”
“Oh, Luna…” Fighting down a sudden lump in her throat, Celestia found herself blinking back tears. “You’re right. It is your decision. I should have respected that.”
This time, the small smile that made its way onto Luna’s face was genuine. “Thank you.” She glanced down at the paper under Celestia’s hoof, and her smile turned rueful. “It’s funny. Even though I’d already made up my mind to tell everypony what Lex did to me, I don’t think I fully appreciated the significance of doing so until I talked to Nosey Newsy the other night.”
Celestia arched a brow at that. The newspaper article revealing what had happened to Luna had been written by Line, who – after interviewing Luna from his hospital bed when she’d gone to visit him – had rushed back to the Canterlot Chronicle as soon as he’d been discharged in order to write the story. “I wasn’t aware that you’d spoken to her.”
Luna didn’t answer immediately, her horn lighting up as she gently tugged at the newspaper under Celestia’s hoof. When her sister released it, she levitated it in front of herself, looking at her picture dispassionately. “She came over the night after she and Line were attacked by Silhouette. I’d told Line I wanted her to be the one to interview me for this, and she showed up to do that despite what had happened to her.”
“But Line’s the one who wrote the piece here,” prompted Celestia.
For a moment Luna didn’t answer, still examining the picture of herself, until finally she spoke up. “She blames me.”
This time both of Celestia’s eyebrows rose. “You mean Nosey? She blames you…for Silhouette?”
“Yes.” Sighing, Luna put the paper down. “She didn’t say so, but I could tell. And she was right.” Holding up a hoof to stop the protest she knew was coming, she kept going. “When I first told Line that I wanted to go public with what happened to me, it was for spite. I’d hoped that if everypony saw what Lex Legis had done to one of their princesses, it would hurt his reputation. It was my way of trying to strike back at him in retaliation for this curse.”
“That’s understandable,” admitted Celestia, giving Luna a smile. “And it’s probably true. You’ve always been more popular than you think.”
Luna flashed her a wan smile in return, but it didn’t last as she looked back down at the paper. “It wasn’t until I spoke to Nosey, hearing how angry she was – angry with me – that I realized how selfish I was being. That ever since this happened to me, I’d abandoned all of my royal duties in favor of feeling sorry for myself.”
“That’s not true,” rebuked Celestia, gently this time. “Luna, you’ve still watched over the dream realm since you came back, and that’s not all. You participated in the summit we held about what to do regarding Lex, and you contacted your other worshipers in their dreams to tell them that you were giving up your aspirations of godhood.”
“You’re kind to say so, sister.” Finally putting the paper down, Luna met Celestia’s gaze directly. “But the summit was your idea, and one I participated in only because I was desperate that someone would be able to find a way to make restore me immediately. I shut down my religion because – while I recognize now that I should have been content to be a princess – it was…it is too difficult to tell ponies that they should worship me when I feel like this…”
“Luna…”
“And as for the dream realm,” she continued quickly, “I can present myself however I wish in ponies’ dreams, and while I felt that I owed my former worshipers the truth, everypony else…” Breaking eye contact at last, she looked out a window, gazing at the vista that was Canterlot’s skyline. “It’s been too easy for me to pretend that I’m still an alicorn when I’m there. It’s an indulgence, one that I’ve been engaging in when I should have been concerning myself with more pressing matters, such as locating Silhouette after he fled from us. And Line and Nosey paid the price for my inattention.”
Heaving another sigh, she looked back at Celestia. “That was when I realized that there was more to this interview than hurting Lex Legis’s public image. It’s my declaration that I’m not going to run from what’s happened to me anymore.”
Celestia couldn’t speak for a moment, unable to find the words to articulate how proud she felt of her sister right then. It was only after a few seconds had passed that she managed to find her voice again. “So does this mean you’re going to go back to ignoring the fruit faces I put on your pancakes every morning?”
Luna blinked once…and then began laughing. That set Celestia to chuckling, which in turn made Luna laugh harder, until the two of them were howling, half-collapsed over the table as weeks of pent-up tension came flowing out of them both in great gouts of mirth.
Just like that, Celestia knew that whatever happened with the Crystal Heart, her breakfasts with her sister were going to be-
A sudden flash in the middle of the room made both of them stop laughing, sitting upright in shock as three ponies appeared. One of them was Twilight, one was a unicorn mare that Celestia didn’t recognize, and the third…
“Auntie Celestia!” wailed Blueblood, flinging himself at her. “Please make me a prince again!”
For Starlight Glimmer, the last thirty-six hours had been a whirlwind of activity.
After accepting Twilight’s offer, becoming the Princess of Friendship’s official student (the first one, Spike had told her later), she’d spent the rest of that evening getting to know how six ponies whose backgrounds, personalities, and cutie marks were all so wildly different could be best friends. Though “getting to know” them might have been a bit of a stretch; she’d actually spent most of that time listening to them talking about how some magic map had sent them to Vanhoover in the first place – to find her, according to Twilight – which had then spun off into tales of their adventures together. From rediscovering the Elements of Harmony together to saving the Crystal Empire to going on danger-filled journeys to other dimensions, the things those ponies had been through together had bordered on unbelievable, and by the time Starlight had settled down for the night in one of the sleeping cars her head had been spinning. Even so, she’d been out like a light as soon as she’d closed her eyes.
As it turned out, realizing that the philosophy you’d spent most of your life following was flawed (to put it nicely) could be pretty exhausting.
Admitting that she’d been so wrong had been a bitter pill to swallow, but with the proof of it right in front of her eyes, it had been impossible to deny. Just a few hours in the company of Twilight and her companions made it clear that the six of them were the closest of friends – and, in the case of Rainbow Dash and Applejack, more than that – the same way Starlight remembered being with Sunburst. But what had affected her most was the way that seeing such genuine friendship up close, rather than recalling it through the blurred lens of distant memories, had driven home just how poor of a friend she’d been to the ponies in her village, despite her earnest desire to do right by them.
It had been a thoroughly depressing experience, and when she’d woken up the next morning, Starlight had felt too ashamed of herself to get out of bed. She’d only gotten up because Twilight had eventually come to check on her, coaxing her into coming to breakfast.
Where her teacher’s friends had been waiting to throw her a surprise party.
That had been Pinkie’s work, it had turned out. The hyperactive mare had somehow sensed that Starlight would be feeling down, and had gotten up extra early to coordinate with the train staff and the other passengers to get the dining car all to themselves in order to throw a party in honor of her new friend. That she’d somehow found balloons, streamers, a piñata, and other party supplies sufficient to decorate the entire car was a mystery Starlight still hadn’t figured out.
Nor had Pinkie been the only one eager to celebrate her. Applejack had raided the train’s food supplies in order to whip up some apple-flavored treats for the occasion. Fluttershy had cajoled several birds who’d been flying near the train to come inside, conducting them as they sang in harmony. Rarity had insisted that turning over a new leaf deserved a new outfit, and had made her promise to stop by the boutique she ran once they got to Ponyville. Rainbow Dash had had likewise promised to take her to see the Wonderbolts the next time Cloudsdale drifted by, and the horrified face she’d made when Starlight had confessed to not knowing who the Wonderbolts were had put everypony to laughing. The only one missing had been Spike, who as it turned out had been stuck with “Blueblood duty” (something which, Starlight had been amused to learn, he’d agreed to only because Rarity had batted her eyes at him; apparently the little guy had a thing for her despite being Soft Mane’s boyfriend).
By the time the party had finished – concluding with a group hug – Starlight’s depression had been completely gone, replaced by gratitude toward the ponies who had rescued her in more ways than one. The rest of the day had been spent on talking with her new friends, and this time Starlight had done more than just listen, opening up about her life and the decisions she’d made. It had been surprisingly easy to admit her many mistakes, knowing that the ponies she was talking to wouldn’t judge her for what she’d done wrong.
It was, Starlight had come to realize, the exact opposite of what had happened with Lex Legis. Whereas Twilight had seen how heartbroken she was and been moved to help, selflessly reaching out to her again and again, Lex had mocked her in her grief. Starlight could still remember the way the coldhearted unicorn had smiled when the ponies from her village had rejected her, jeering as he’d condemned her for her failings. That he’d intended to curse her afterward only drove home how cruel Equestria’s newest prince was.
Twilight must have felt the same, because as the day had neared its end, she’d brought up the need to report what had happened to the Royal Sisters (though Spike’s begging her not to make him babysit Blueblood anymore might have had something to do with it). After a brief discussion with the rest of them, she’d decided that a letter wouldn’t be sufficient, and given the gravity of what Lex’s royal status could mean for Equestria, it behooved her to teleport to Canterlot to speak to Celestia and Luna in person. Starlight had volunteered to go with her, as had Blueblood…though in his case it hadn’t been so much “volunteered” as “cried and begged.”
With their plan decided upon, Twilight had gathered everypony around her the next morning and teleported them all back. It hadn’t been instantaneous, needing to make several “hops” before arriving at Ponyville – pausing just long enough to wave goodbye to Spike and her friends as they’d headed home – taking a deep breath to gather her courage before teleporting them straight to Canterlot Castle…
“Twilight, I can’t believe you did something so foolish.”
Despite how gently Princess Celestia delivered her rebuke, Twilight still cringed. “I know! I’m so sorry! I should never have agreed with Lex’s demand that if he won the duel he’d become a prince!”
Still wearing the same stern expression she’d had during Twilight’s hurried explanation of what had happened in Vanhoover, Celestia shook her head. “I don’t mean the terms of your duel, Twilight. I mean that you put yourself at grave risk by fighting Lex Legis, and on your own no less.”
“But the rules…” protested Twilight weakly.
“Twilight.” Extending one wing, Celestia features softened as she gently placed it under the younger alicorn’s chin, making her look up at her directly. “I know you think that he’s an honorable pony, but Lex isn’t trustworthy. He could very well have killed you during that duel and claimed it was an accident, much like how he evaded responsibility for what happened to Luna’s guard.”
Twilight winced, but didn’t have a chance to argue before Starlight spoke up. “Your Highness?” When the elder princess looked her way, Starlight gulped, plunging ahead before she could lose her nerve. “With all due respect, Twilight would have won that duel if you hadn’t sent her a letter at the worst possible time.”
“Starlight!” squeaked Twilight, horrified.
“Th-that’s right!” blurted Blueblood, leaping to his hooves. It was the latest of a series of interruptions that he’d made while Twilight had told the princesses what had happened. Each time, Princess Celestia had shushed him, leaving him whining and fretting like a foal being told that he had to wait a little longer before opening his Hearth’s Warming presents. “That fiend taking away my title is partially your fault, Auntie Celestia!” Despite his words, Blueblood’s tone wasn’t accusatory in the least, too filled with desperation to let anything else leak in. “So please, make me a prince again!”
“You shouldn’t be so upset, nephew,” ventured Luna, who had been largely silent up until that point. “As distressing as it may be to lose your crown, Lex Legis could have done far worse to you had he wished.”
Starlight saw pained looks cross Celestia and Twilight’s faces then, and she was sure she must have looked the same. Hearing about what Lex had done to Luna had been one thing, but actually seeing it was something else. It was enough to send a shudder down her spine, knowing that if it hadn’t been for Fluttershy, Soft Mane, and Pixie, she’d be laboring under a curse of her own right now.
Blueblood, however, seemed incapable of that level of empathy. “I don’t care that it could have been worse!” he yelled. “I want somepony to make it better! Right now!” His eyes filling with tears, he looked at Celestia again. “Auntie, please!”
For a moment Celestia scowled, but the expression lasted for only a moment before she sighed, a mournful expression crossing her face as she shook her head. “I’m sorry, Blueblood. I can’t restore what Lex Legis has taken from you.”
Her pronouncement rocked Blueblood back on his hooves. For a moment all he could do was gape at her, his eyes wide and jaw hanging open before he glanced around the room, as if waiting for someone to tell him that the princess was joking. When no one did, he turned back to Celestia, managing to find his voice again. “B-but, but, you’re…you’re you! The most senior member of Equestrian royalty! You can do anything you want!”
Looking for all the world like a mother trying to deal with a crying foal, Celestia let out a slow breath as she closed her eyes. “Blueblood…”
“You can do whatever you want!” insisted Blueblood. “You’re the princess with the most exalted pedigree in Equestria! No one can protest your decisions, let alone challenge them! You made that rube,” he nodded his head at Twilight, “a princess, so if you say that I’m a prince again, then I’ll be a prince again because no one can tell you you’re wrong, so why won’t you just-”
“Blueblood!” The sharp tone in Celestia’s voice, combined with the upset look she gave him, silenced the sniveling stallion immediately, his lower lip trembling.
Seeing him cowed, Celestia let her anger evaporate, sorrow filling her features as she looked at him. “I know how important carrying on your ancestral legacy is to you, and that this loss has wounded you deeply. And I want you to continue staying here in the castle while we work out what this means for you. But you of all ponies should know that I can’t simply make someone royalty; it’s long been a point of pride among your family that you can trace your line back to before my sister and I began our reign, and that we acknowledged your title rather than investing you with it.”
Blueblood wilted. “But Twilight…”
“…was similarly acknowledged as having elevated herself as a princess by virtue of her deeds, the same as Cadance. Both of them are princesses regardless of whether Luna or I recognize them as being so.” Walking over to the distraught ex-prince, she gently wrapped a hoof around him. “Blueblood, if I were to simply declare you to be a prince again, other ponies might not protest the announcement, but it wouldn’t be long before they realized that I could make them royalty the same way, and they wouldn’t stop until I did. Would you really want to see Fancy Pants or Upper Crust become princes, the same as you?”
Unable to hide his horror at the idea, Blueblood shook his head. “No! But if you can’t make me a prince again, then how can I get my title back? The only other way would be if…if I…”
For a second he didn’t move, staring blankly ahead as his eyebrows rose, clearly stumbling onto some new idea.
A second later he shot out of Celestia’s embrace, throwing himself in front of Twilight as he sank to his knees. “Marry me!”
Twilight instantly recoiled. “WHAT?!”
“Marry me!” repeated Blueblood. “If you do, I’ll become a prince again!” Shuffling forward, he stared at Twilight with all the intensity of a drowning pony spotting a life preserver. “You owe me! You said you’d win the duel for me! It’s your fault this happened!”
Sputtering, Twilight retreated, clearly having trouble processing what was going on. “H-hold on! That’s not-, I can’t-”
“She’s not marrying you!” snapped Starlight, grabbing Blueblood in her telekinesis and yanking the crazed stallion away from her teacher. “Get ahold of yourself!”
“Then have Cadance marry me instead!” yelped Blueblood, still looking at Twilight as he struggled in Starlight’s aura, so frenzied that he didn’t even think to use his own to try and escape. “I’ve heard the rumors! She’s leading some debauched religion, right?! One that allows mares to have more than one husband?! I don’t mind sharing her with that upstart soldier of hers if it means I can be a prince again!”
“If you want Twilight’s help convincing her sister-in-law to take your hoof in marriage,” noted Luna dryly, “perhaps it would be better not to refer to her brother as an ‘upstart soldier.’”
Blueblood was already opening his mouth, but thankfully Celestia jumped in before he could say anything else. “Blueblood, while I’m glad that you’ve found a reason to continue hoping for the best, perhaps a more…dignified, approach would better convince the mares you plan on wooing that you’re a suitable match for them.”
His horn lighting up as he freed himself from Starlight’s aura, Blueblood nodded, breathing heavily with desperate excitement. “Yes! Yes, that’s a good idea, Auntie!” Looking back at Twilight, he flashed a manic grin at her. “I should still have some finances in my personal accounts! I’ll go retain a minstrel to compose some sonnets to convince you and Cadance both of my suitability as a husband!”
Shielding herself with her wings, Twilight took a step back, giving him a pained smile that was barely more than a grimace. “That’s not-”
“No, you’re right!” scoffed Blueblood. “I should compose them myself! Different ones for each of you, of course! Perhaps with a harpist to create the proper ambiance when I recite them! Or would a lutenist be better? No!” he declared suddenly, holding a hoof out toward Twilight. “Don’t tell me! I shall discover the way into your hearts myself!” Turning, he strode toward the door, his movements firm and purposeful.
Pausing at the threshold, he looked back at Twilight, his arrogance reasserting itself for the first time since he’d lost his crown. “Tell your sister-in-law that you and she should prepare to be wooed as you’ve never been wooed before!”
Then he left, leaving Twilight staring after him with a growing look of horror on her face while Luna and Celestia did their best to keep their expressions neutral.
Raising a brow, Starlight glanced at the elder of the Royal Sisters. “Really?”
“It’s given him something to take his mind off what he’s lost,” replied Celestia innocently. “And while he can be a bit…trying, at times, he’s really quite harmless. Twilight and Cadance should have no trouble-, oh!”
Celestia’s exclamation of surprise made everypony else follow her gaze, looking at the nearby window where a piece of paper – folded in the shape of a snowflake – floated in on a breeze. Taking it in her telekinesis, Celestia unfolded it, scanning the contents. “It’s from Cadance,” she announced, a smile gracing her lips a moment later. “The last of the crystal pony missionaries returned last night, faster than she was expecting. They’re all back in the Crystal Empire now.”
Twilight’s eyes widened at the news. “You mean…?”
Celestia nodded, but when she answered a moment later, Luna was the one she spoke to. “It’s finally time to lift your curse.”
“I can’t believe Princess Luna wants to wait to remove her curse!”
Pausing in the tour of Ponyville she’d been giving Starlight – having teleported the two of them there just a few minutes ago – on the way back to her castle, Twilight shook her head. “She’s not waiting, Starlight. She and Princess Celestia are taking the next train to the Crystal Empire.”
“But she said no when Princess Celestia asked you to teleport us all straight there!” Glancing around idly as they passed through the plaza at the center of town, Starlight gave a huff. “I don’t know what sort of horrible curse Lex had in mind for me, but I do know that whatever it was, I’d want it removed as soon as possible. But Princess Luna wants to take the train because ‘it’s about the process’?” Scowling as if she found the princess’s reasoning offensive, Starlight shook her head. “What does that even mean?”
In contrast to her pupil, Twilight’s expression was one of concern rather than scorn. “I’m guessing it means that even if we did teleport there right away, Cadance would still need time to get everything ready. Remember, all of the crystal ponies need to come out and pour their love into the Crystal Heart at once. That level of coordination isn’t something you can set up with just a few moments, which I suppose is why they made the Crystal Fair a national holiday, since it’s traditional for everypony to empower the Heart at the end of the festivities.” Finishing her lecture, Twilight let out a sigh. “But I don’t think that was Luna’s real reason for not wanting to rush.”
That was enough to pique Starlight’s interest, glancing over at Twilight. “What do you mean?”
The question made Twilight look down, her ears folding back. “I don’t have the same relationship with Princess Luna that I do with Princess Celestia, but I like to think I’ve gotten to know her pretty well since she came back from the moon. And the way she’s acting now…it’s like she’s afraid of getting her hopes up if the Crystal Heart doesn’t work.”
“Oh.” Digesting that for a moment, Starlight joined her new mentor in looking dejected. “I didn’t even think of that. So much for learning about friendship, huh?”
The recrimination in Starlight’s voice immediately snapped Twilight out of her funk. “Starlight, it’s barely been two days since I took you on as a student, and you haven’t even had your first friendship lesson yet. You can’t expect to just pick up everything right away.”
Despite nodding, Starlight’s expression didn’t change. “I know, but it’s just…I was right there with Luna, and I couldn’t tell how she really felt. Maybe that means I’m just not cut out for friendship…”
Smiling, Twilight put a wing around the other mare, giving her a quick hug. “I don’t think that’s true. Somepony who couldn’t make friends wouldn’t be so worried about how they left things with the ponies in their village. Not to mention that you had a really close childhood friend, too. You said his name was Sunburst, right?”
Smiling in spite of herself, Starlight looked up. “Yeah, although I haven’t seen him in years.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not a friendship worth cherishing,” counseled Twilight as the two of them approached her castle at last. “In fact, since I’m not joining Celestia and Luna until their train’s stopover in Ponyville tomorrow morning, I’ll have time to write some letters and see if I can find out where Sunburst is now.”
Starlight’s eyes widened. “You’d do that for me?”
“Of course!” Pleased at the thought of being able to help rekindle a long-lost friendship, Twilight smiled. “Once we know where he’s living now, meeting him will be your first friendship lesson. Until then, you can get settled in and explore Ponyville until I get back from the Crystal Empire.”
Stopping just in front of the doors to the castle, Starlight turned to face Twilight directly. “About that…I was actually wondering if I could go to the Crystal Empire with you.”
Her brow furrowing, Twilight tilted her head. “Why? I mean, I’d love to have you, but I thought that after everything you’ve been through in the last few days, you’d want a little peace and quiet.”
“Are you kidding?” asked Starlight, giving an exaggerated snort. “I can’t wait to see Lex’s evil magic come undone!” Her smile took on a sharper edge as she imagined the event. “I hope there’s some sort of feedback on his end, something to let him know that he’s been thwarted.” Her features softened then, and she gave Twilight a wry look. “Besides, somepony’s going to need to run defense for you and Princess Cadance if your new suitor happens to show up.”
Twilight grimaced. Her student’s antipathy toward Lex was understandable, but to Twilight it was a worrying reminder of how few ponies shared her opinion that he wasn’t all bad. And with her attempt to force Lex to the negotiating table via their duel – which in hindsight seemed like a terrible idea, now that she knew Starlight was the one the map had sent her there to find – having failed, resulting in Lex’s ascension to royalty, those opinions would only harden.
But Twilight knew that it was still too soon to even broach the subject of Lex with Starlight, so instead she focused on the other issue that her student had raised. “That reminds me,” she murmured, “I need to let Cadance and Shining Armor know what happened in case Blueblood turns up on their doorstep, asking if he can get in on their marriage.”
“Your parents live in Canterlot, right?” added Starlight. “You might want to give them a heads-up too, just in case. Blueblood seems like the sort of guy who’d make a big deal about getting your dad’s permission to seek your hoof in matrimony, or something like that.”
Twilight bit her lip as she telekinetically opened the doors, knowing Starlight was right. “I’ll send them a quick word of warning right now,” she groaned as she walked inside. “Spike! SPIKE! I need to send some letters!”
But after several seconds passed in silence, it became clear there wasn’t going to be any response from the little dragon.
“Maybe he’s out with Soft Mane,” offered Starlight. “Princess Celestia said she left Canterlot yesterday, after that pony she healed was released from the hospital, right? We didn’t eat anything before you teleported us off the train, so I bet they went somewhere for breakfast.”
“I don’t know.” Walking over to the kitchen, Twilight frowned as she looked at the sink and spied a distinct lack of dirty dishes. “Spike usually likes to show off his cooking skills.”
“Well, then maybe they’re in his room celebrating having some alone time together,” smirked Starlight. “They are boyfriend and girlfriend, after all.”
The comment earned her a dirty look from Twilight. “Grass Patch, Soft Mane’s mother, is staying here too, and she makes it her job to chaperone them.” Looking for a reason to change the subject, she turned around and started toward the stairs. “I’m sure they’ll be back later. In the meantime, we can start getting your room set up.”
“You really don’t have to go that far,” insisted Starlight, taking in the sight of her new residence as she trotted after Twilight. “You’re already letting me live here, I should at least take care of settling in myself…or at least that’s what I would say, if my horn wasn’t still damaged.”
“It’s still not fully healed?” asked Twilight, glancing back in mild concern.
Reaching one hoof up to rub it gingerly, Starlight grimaced. “I think I might be able to use a little magic now, but I’ll admit I was hoping to have Soft Mane do her thing and-…did you hear something?”
Twilight stopped, perking her ears up. “I don’t think so. Did you?”
“I thought I did. It almost sounded like a voice…” Glancing around, her eyes settled on the door to her immediate left. Looking at it for a moment, she smirked, then stepped closer to Twilight. “What’s that room?” she whispered.
Confused at the sudden reduction in volume on Starlight’s part, Twilight reluctantly did the same. “The linen closet. Why?”
“Well,” drawled Starlight quietly. “If I wanted to avoid my parents while spending some quality time with my boyfriend, I know where I’d hide.”
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Twilight at her normal volume. Her face twisting as the subject of Spike – who was like a little brother to her – having an intimate encounter was once again thrust into her consciousness, Twilight shook her head as she walked over to the closet door. “The only thing in here are sheets, which now that I think about it, you’ll be needing for your roo-”
Then pandemonium descended.
A heavy thump, followed by a muffled groan of pain, came from inside the closet. But there was no time for either mare to react before the door suddenly flew open, Spike hurtling out to collide bodily with Twilight, knocking them both to the floor. Nor was he alone, as Soft Mane stumbled out of the open entranceway a moment later, tripping over the other two and fall onto all fours.
Watching the three of them collapse, Starlight blinked once, then giggled at the sight. “Wow, you guys…”
But the joke she was about to make died on her lips as a third individual exited the linen closet.
An earth stallion, his body was a study in contrasts. His coat was pitch black, while his mane and tail were pure white. His cutie mark was a similar snowy, showing the featureless outline of a pony standing in profile. The only color to be found on his body was in his eyes, and even then, it was only in how bloodshot his sclera were, his irises black enough that they were indistinguishable from his pupils.
His lips curled back in a silent snarl, revealing unblemished teeth that seemed to shine against the darkness of his coat, the unknown pony was already moving as he rushed into the hallway. Leaping over the fallen trio, he spared Starlight only the briefest of glances as he whirled around and galloped down the hallway. In a second he’d turned a corner and vanished from sight.
“Silhouette!” coughed Twilight, struggling to extricate herself from underneath the other two. “That was Silhouette! What-”
“Stop him!” yelled Spike, sitting up abruptly. “Quick! He’s heading for the portal!”
Starlight frowned in confusion. “The mirror to that human world? Twilight said it was smashed!”
“Not that one,” coughed Soft Mane, having caught a hoof to the stomach during their fall. “The other portal! The one that needs blood to be activated!” Stretching an arm out, she pointed down the hall where Silhouette had gone. “He’s trying to get to Everglow!”
That was all Starlight needed to hear. “I’ll stop him!”
“Starlight, wait!” But Twilight’s warning went unheeded as her student took off down the hallway, disappearing around the same corner that Silhouette had a few seconds prior.
Worry for her new friend warred with concern for her old ones as Twilight got to her hooves, the latter barely edging out the former as she looked Spike and Soft Mane over. “Are you two okay?! Where’s Grass Patch?!”
“She’s alright,” wheezed Soft Mane, one hand on her aching middle. “He knocked her out, but she’ll be okay.”
“Don’t worry about us,” added Spike, moving to help Soft Mane stand. “Go help Starlight!”
Taking a half-second to confirm that they’d be alright without her, Twilight nodded, then turned and flew down the hallway, wings flapping hard as she chased after Starlight and Silhouette. She didn’t dare teleport to the room in question; even if the portal was normally quiescent without a drop of blood to activate it, using trans-spatial magic in its vicinity was just asking for trouble. But so was someone activating it blindly! I should have dismantled that thing as soon as I came back to Equestria! Twilight berated herself as she flew faster, trying to erase Silhouette’s head start. I know the spell to move between planes now, so there’s no reason to let that-
“Don’t move!”
The sound of Starlight’s voice raised in anger made Twilight fly faster. Hurrying around the same corner as the other two, she barreled down the connecting hallway. Just one more turn, and the portal room would be the third door on the right. Almost there!
“I said don’t move!”
Reaching the destination corridor at last, Twilight saw that the door to the portal room was thrown open, Starlight’s voice emanating from within. Flying as fast as she could, Twilight rushed for the door, not able to see what was happening inside…
There was no answer to Twilight’s frantic call, and as she reached the threshold of the room where the flash had come from, the reason for the lack of response became immediately clear:
It was empty.
For a moment Twilight just stared, her eyes sweeping back and forth across the room, as though she’d just overlooked Starlight somehow and a few seconds’ worth of closer examination would locate her. But Twilight’s frantic looking around failed to produce the other mare, nor locate any reason for her to calm down. If anything, it made her anxiety grow worse.
This room, on the second floor of her castle, had originally been her backup laboratory. Her primary laboratory had been in her basement, just like the one she’d had at the Golden Oak library, but it had grown too crowded to work in once she’d started storing the mirror portal to Canterlot High there. Fortunately, her new castle had rooms to spare, giving her plenty of space in which to set up a new magical work-area.
That was why, when she’d acquired a new book on magical theories and practices from antiquity, she’d designated this room as her backup laboratory. The concentric circles of runes described in the tome had required a wide area to inscribe, and she’d been meticulous in laying them down with utmost precision. Or at least she’d thought she had. But when she’d shed the drop of blood necessary to activate the spell – which should have created a portal to the Crystal Empire, allowing her to visit Cadance and Shining Armor without needing to use the train or exhausting herself with consecutive uses of alicorn-enhanced teleportation – it hadn’t taken her to the destination she’d intended.
Instead, it had deposited her on another world entirely.
Everglow.
The question of what she’d done wrong hadn’t been one she’d had the luxury of indulging in at the time, however. Issues of getting herself and Spike (who’d been drawn through with her) to safety had taken priority, as had finding a way home. But in the course of returning to Equestria, she’d picked up so much new knowledge – thought-based spellcasting, alien gods who bestowed their followers with special powers, new techniques for constructing magic-imbued devices, and that was just scratching the surface! – that pouring over her imperfect portal had simply been less interesting. To that end, she’d moved her research into a new room on the ground floor, one she’d deemed her “auxiliary backup lab,” after sealing her backup lab off so she’d be able to come back and examine the portal at a later date.
Though in hindsight, just putting a velvet rope in front of the doors hadn’t really been enough.
That much had been proven when Applejack and the Cutie Mark Crusaders had accidentally reactivated the portal and gotten lost in Everglow while Twilight had been out. It was a situation that she hadn’t even been aware of until some time after it had happened, lost in analyzing all of the magic she’d acquired on that world.
Ironically, it had been Lex – having fled back to Everglow when Princess Celestia had rejected his demand that she and Luna abdicate in his favor, leading to an outbreak of violence that he and Celestia each blamed the other for instigating – who had brought Applejack and the CMCs back. That he’d done so, despite knowing how poorly he would likely be received by everypony else, had motivated Twilight to try and broker a peace between him and the princesses, setting up a second meeting with herself as a mediator. That it had resulted in him assuming authority over Vanhoover with Celestia and Luna’s blessing had been a positive outcome…or at least, it had seemed like it at the time.
Pleased with how well things had gone, and still somewhat mortified by not having realized that several ponies she cared about had disappeared, Twilight had scaled back on her magical research, instead putting a renewed focus on maintaining her friendships. Dismantling the accidental portal – still sitting in her backup lab, waiting for another drop of blood to trigger it – had thus been, quite literally, on her to-do list when she’d found out there’d been another incident of ponies getting lost in Everglow: Pinkie Pie, Diamond Tiara, and Silver Spoon.
That, at least, hadn’t been her fault; rather, it had been Applejack’s use of Severance – under the baleful weapon’s influence – that had sent them there. And while Rainbow Dash had helped AJ banish the weapon shortly thereafter, those three were still lost, prompting Twilight to put together another expedition to that world to try and find them. One that had been cut short when she’d gotten a letter from Princess Celestia informing her that something terrible had happened to Luna…
And now it’s come to this, thought Twilight miserably as she stood in the threshold. I let myself get distracted again and again, and Starlight’s paid the price for it.
But she and Silhouette would be the last ponies to pay for her carelessness, since now the portal would never open again.
“Twilight!” called a familiar voice, growing louder as Spike rounded the corner at the other end of the hall, running toward her as fast as his little legs could carry him. “Twilight! What happened?! Are you okay?! Where’s-, WHOA! What happened here?!”
The reason for Spike’s surprise was obvious. The tables that had hugged the far walls were in disarray, knocked over and strewn about haphazardly. The walls were blackened, as though scorched. Debris was scattered everywhere.
But most notable was the long gouge in the floor, cutting right across the runic circles, irreparably marring the delicate inscriptions.
Gulping, Spike looked up at Twilight. “Starlight?” he asked hesitantly. “Silhouette?”
Unable to take her eyes off of the disaster zone in front of her, Twilight shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know. I heard Starlight’s voice from in here, telling Silhouette not to move, and then there was a flash, and now…”
“They’re probably on Everglow, right?” From the tone in his voice, it was clear what answer Spike wanted to hear. “I mean, I know this looks bad, but if they’re not here then that has to mean that they made it through, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” repeated Twilight, but this time there was an underlying note of panic in her voice, her breathing coming heavier as she started thinking of all the ways things could have gone wrong. “Trans-spatial magic is delicate; any sort of disruption can lead to all kinds of unintended consequences! They might have made it to Everglow, or they might have ended up somewhere else entirely! Or worse, what if they didn’t make it anywhere?! I was stuck outside of physical space for a few seconds when I fought my duel with Lex, and it was horrible! If they’re trapped there, then-”
“Twilight!” Fumbling with a paper bag that he kept for occasions such as this, Spike held it over her muzzle. “Twilight, calm down! Breathe into the bag!”
He needed to say that a few more times before Twilight got the message, taking hold of the bag in her telekinesis and keeping it in front of her face as she frantically held one foreleg up, placing it over her chest and then straightening it out in the calming gesture Cadance had taught her. Even so, it still took almost a full minute for Twilight to begin coming down from her panic attack. “Thanks Spike,” she murmured as she finally got her breathing under control, belatedly realizing that the little dragon had come alone. “Where’s Soft Mane?”
Spike nodded back the way he’d come, an uncomfortable look crossing his face. “Using a healing spell on her mom. That Silhouette guy clocked her pretty good.”
Biting her lip at the thought of such a sweet mare being beaten unconscious, Twilight’s face was despairing as she looked at the wrecked room. “Spike, what happened? What was Silhouette doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Spike slumped over, dejected. “I was coming back to the castle to see Soft Mane, but when I got here, I heard some crashing coming from inside and found Grass Patch unconscious and Soft Mane fighting that guy. I tried to help, but he got ahold of me and told her to back off or else…”
Twilight’s eyebrows rose, alarmed. “He took you hostage?!”
Spike nodded, a miserable look on his face. “He kept asking about the portal. ‘The one to that world where Lex Legis gained his power,’ was the way he put it. We kept trying to stall him, since I was pretty sure you’d be back soon, telling him we didn’t know what he was talking about, but he kept getting angrier, and Soft Mane was worried about what he’d do if we kept it up. She was taking him here when we heard you come back, which was when he made us hide in that linen closet.”
“Oh Spike, I’m so sorry!” Picking the little dragon up, Twilight hugged him. “You must have been so scared!”
“Of that guy? No way,” huffed Spike, though he didn’t fight the hug. “I was just angry he got the drop on me. It’s a boyfriend’s job to rescue their girlfriend, not the other way around!”
Fighting down the urge to snicker, Twilight put him down. “I’m sure Soft Mane will forgive you.”
“I hope so, I really want to be a good boyfriend to her,” sighed Spike, before glancing past Twilight at what was left of her backup lab. “So, can you tell if Starlight’s okay?”
Taking a deep breath, Twilight took another look at the wreckage in front of her. “Stand back.”
Only paying partial attention as Spike acknowledged her request and moved away from her, Twilight took another deep breath, and then began casting a spell.
Peering into the magical spectrum a second later, she tried to put together what had happened with the portal.
That the room was flooded with conjuration magic wasn’t surprising; although the name made it sound like it was concerned exclusively with bringing something to the caster’s location, it was actually a catch-all term for any sort of magical translocation effect. At least, it was the catch-all term on Everglow, since that world had a more sophisticated magical classification system than Equestria.
What was more concerning was the residual instance of evocation magic, which was the type of magic concerned with offensive spells. That had to be from Starlight Glimmer; she’d said her horn was recovering enough for her to start casting some modest spells again. If she’d fired a magical blast at Silhouette, maybe while he was activating the portal…
Her eyes moving toward the large furrow dug across the runic circles, Twilight realized that was probably Starlight’s doing. Had she fired a beam at Silhouette and missed? Or had she been trying to disable the portal before the crazed earth stallion could activate it?
“Twilight?” called Spike timidly from behind her. “Have you figured anything out yet?”
“Just a second, Spike.”
Another look around the room turned up no new auras, causing Twilight to frown. She hadn’t expected to find any additional magic, but she hadn’t found out anything definitive either. More information was needed, but her spell had turned up as much information as it could…which meant that her best option was to feed it some of her own alicorn magic, enhancing it and hopefully giving it enough of a boost to give her some clue about where the two had gone.
Fortunately, she still had a little alicorn magic left. Equestrian teleportation wasn’t made for long trips, so teleporting everypony here from the train, then taking herself and Starlight to Canterlot, and then coming back to Ponyville had depleted a lot of her reserves, but she had enough left for this.
Closing her eyes as she slowly fed extra power into the spell – thought-based magic wasn’t meant to be enhanced on the fly like this, requiring careful augmentation so that the spell-form didn’t crack under the strain of taking on additional energy – Twilight gave it as much as she felt it could handle, then opened her eyes again.
Thankfully, it had worked. Able to see the residual auras in more detail now, Twilight’s brow furrowed as she studied the imprint of the conjuration magic that had taken effect. Although she’d never examined the lingering magic left by previous uses of the portal, she was able to compare what she saw now to the plane-shifting spell she’d learned during her time on Everglow. Comparing the diagrams and conceptual models of that spell to the residual magic now… “They made it through.”
“To Everglow?” came Spike’s hope-filled voice.
“Yes.” Smiling in relief, Twilight dismissed her spell with a thought as she turned to face her number one assistant. “The quantized gradient of the spell shows that it was regularized until-”
“Um, Twilight?” interrupted Spike. “Maybe explain it in a way that someone who isn’t a magical genius can understand?”
Not sure whether to huff or giggle, Twilight did neither, instead taking another breath before trying again. “I think the portal activated in the split-second between when Starlight fired her spell and when it struck the circles, so they would have been transported before the magic was completely disrupted. That means they probably made it through okay.”
“That’s great!” cheered Spike, only to pause as he saw Twilight’s lack of enthusiasm. “Isn’t it?”
“We still don’t know where on Everglow she is,” murmured Twilight, more to herself than him. “Moving between different planes of existence is difficult enough that there’s usually some imprecision involved in reaching an exact destination, and with the tail-end of the spell interrupted, they could have ended up anywhere on that world.”
“Well, what about sending her a letter?” offered Spike.
Twilight blinked, momentarily thrown back to the letters she’d been telling Starlight she needed to write just a few minutes ago. “A letter?”
Spike nodded. “Yeah. You write it down, and I’ll send it to her, just like we did when Pinkie Pie was lost over there.”
But Twilight was already shaking her head. “She won’t be able to write anything back. If I tell her to go to Viljatown and wait for me to come find her there, that won’t do any good if she’s too far away to get there. That’s why we never found Pinkie until Discord brought her back.”
“Okay, well, how about sending her instructions on how to cast the spell to send letters back?” shrugged Spike. “I mean, she’s a really powerful unicorn, right? If she can beat all of Lex’s friends and then almost defeat him all by herself, I bet she can learn that spell no problem.”
Her eyes lighting up as she realized he was right, Twilight couldn’t stop herself from grinning. “That could work! Spike, you’re a genius!” Picking him up in her telekinesis, she gave him a happy nuzzle. “This is why you’re my number one assistant. Come on!” Placing him on her back, she turned and galloped down the hallway.
“If everything goes well, we’ll have Starlight back before the princesses’ train arrives tomorrow morning!”
River Bank had, in her own estimation, been at the top of her game recently.
Luring the richest ponies in Las Pegasus, to say nothing of a prince, to come back to Vanhoover with her – using nothing more than guile and innuendo – had been an impressive task in and of itself. To then negotiate the terms of, as well as officiate the opening to, the duel that resulted in said prince losing his crown was far greater. And of course, having a central role to play in the new prince’s coronation was a great honor. Each of those was a feather in her proverbial cap beyond anything she’d achieved in over two decades since she’d taken over the Bank family.
So great were those accomplishments, River knew, that they would elevate her social standing by orders of magnitude, at least among the ponies who really mattered. While common ponies might not ever bother to learn who called the formal beginning of the duel where the new prince had defeated the old one, or wouldn’t care who planned the festivities at the upcoming coronation, high society ponies – the ones who presided over the upper echelons of Equestria’s largest cities – would all be keenly aware of the mare who had done so much for the new royal. It would take some time for word to get out, of course; most of Equestria likely hadn’t even heard about the transfer of power yet. But once they did, River knew that anypony who aspired to be somepony wouldn’t be able to get away with treating her like a nopony, the way Canterlot’s movers and shakers had when she’d gone there begging for an age spell.
That wouldn’t mean they’d fall to their knees and welcome her back with open forelegs should she find herself there again, of course. With how bad her patron’s relationship with the princesses was, the battle lines were no doubt already being drawn (though hopefully only in a figurative sense). But they wouldn’t dare dismiss her the way they had before; not when they heard just how powerful the pony she served was. The potential repercussions were simply too great, and it brought River no small amount of glee to think that those same ponies who had all but laughed in her face would soon be sweating the ramifications of their thoughtless actions.
It was, in other words, her second success story. The same way she had risen to become one of the most powerful ponies in Vanhoover, she was now completing her ascension to a far loftier perch. Just like before, it was a victory that she’d attained with nothing more than her own intelligence and willpower, a testament to what she could accomplish if she brought her full potential to bear.
All of which meant nothing right now.
Because Lex Legis, the stallion whose ambitions and accomplishments made her own seem feeble by comparison, was once again sitting in judgment over her.
Sitting in the same chair he’d been in when he’d suspended her sentencing her a few days previous, Lex looked slowly around the parlor. River couldn’t imagine what he was looking for, his eyes slowly sweeping the room as seconds ticked by, the silence only broken by the ticking of the grandfather clock behind her. Finally, he seemed satisfied with whatever search he’d been conducting, and spoke at last.
“The time has come,” he pronounced menacingly. “Are you prepared to make your recommendation regarding the sentence of the pony who wronged you?”
Although the words hadn’t been directed at her, River couldn’t help but flinch, looking at the only other pony occupying the room. But Feather Duster didn’t return the look, keeping her eyes trained purely on the prince. “Yes, Your Highness, I am.”
Lex’s expression didn’t change, revealing nothing of his thoughts on the matter. “And what say you?”
Feather Duster hesitated, glancing at River out of the corner of her eyes for just a moment before looking back at the unicorn who was their lord and master. “Sire, may I address Miss Bank directly?”
Lex raised a brow, but gave her permission with a nod.
Giving him a brief bow in thanks, Feather Duster turned to look at River, who reluctantly turned her full attention to the mare in response. “Miss Bank,” began Feather, her expression carefully composed. “When Prince Legis said he’d punish you based on my recommendation, I was very uncomfortable. He said…” She took a deep breath then, as though needing to steady herself before continuing. “He said he wanted you to know what it was like to have your fate be in the hooves of someone who bared you ill will. That upset me, and I didn’t know why.”
Not sure how to react to what she was being told, River stayed silent, and after a moment Feather Duster continued. “It took me a little while to realize that it was because he was right: I do bear you ill will. I’ve never been somepony who’s comfortable with being angry, and you took advantage of that. You threatened me. You threatened my little girl. You made me so scared that I…I would have…”
Swallowing, Feather Duster glanced at Lex then. Seeing that his impassive expression hadn’t changed, she licked her lips before speaking again. “I’m not somepony who’s comfortable with being angry,” she repeated, cringing a little. “I don’t think that it helps anything. Being angry at somepony usually makes them angry back, or it makes them scared of you, and both of those things only make a bad situation worse. Anger takes us away from harmony, instead of leading us back toward it. And if I’m being honest, it frightens me, the things that anger can make somepony do…”
Straightening up, she looked River in the eye then. “But recently, I’ve learned that sometimes getting angry is the right thing to do. There are some ponies who’ll take advantage of you unless you make them stop, and that you – that I – can’t do that unless I get mad.” Feather took another deep breath. “Miss Bank, I’m angry at you. I’m angry at how heartless you were, about how scared you made me feel, both for myself and for my daughter. For how humiliated I felt when I went to His Highness’s room that night.”
River felt her blood run cold as she realized what was about to happen.
“That’s why I want Prince Legis to punish you harshly,” concluded Feather Duster. “To give you a curse so horrible that you won’t ever dare to threaten me or anypony else ever again.”
Stumbling back, as though Feather Duster were waving a weapon under her nose, River almost fell over as collapsed into a sitting position. Dimly, she turned toward Lex, prepared to beg him to be merciful, to remind him how useful she’d been to him these last few days and how much more helpful she could be in the days to come, but the sight of his dispassionate expression made her throat close up, knowing it was pointless. He’d told her as much, after all; when she’d volunteered to be his representative in negotiating with Blueblood, he’d made sure to tell her that he wouldn’t take that into consideration when delivering her sentence. Besides, he had a whole slew of royal servants now, like that bootlicker Stuffed Shirt, who’d be able to-
“However…”
That single word was a lifeline of hope, and commanded all of River’s attention as she looked back at Feather Duster.
“However,” said the pegasus mare again, “I can’t forget what you said right before Prince Legis suspended your sentence. I don’t think that you look like an old mare, but I know that you think you do, and that it’s causing you a lot of unhappiness, and that was what made you desperate enough to do what you did. Plus, you’ve been a lot of help to His Highness over the last few days, and I’d feel terrible if he lost somepony so valuable just because I was feeling vindictive. And even though I’m still angry at you, I don’t want to be the sort of pony who makes someone else suffer just so she can feel better. So that’s why…”
Her heart pounding in her chest, River watched as Feather Duster turned back to Lex and bowed again. “My prince, please be lenient with Miss Bank.”
Lex didn’t answer right away, scrutinizing Feather Duster for several seconds as though weighing what she’d said.
When his horn and eyes began to glow a second later, River almost shrieked, thinking that he’d rejected her reasoning, or that his definition of “lenient” was still incredibly harsh. But all that happened was a matching aura surrounded a quill on a nearby writing desk, which – after a single glance from Lex to confirm the position of some nearby paper – began to scribble something at a rapid pace. River’s eyes watched every motion the quill made, knowing that whatever it was writing assuredly had something to do with what Lex was going to do to her-
“River,” spoke Lex at last.
“Y-yes!” Standing up again, River kept her eyes firmly on Lex, even as she followed the quill’s motions as best she could with her peripheral vision. It was moving incredibly quickly in Lex’s aura, despite his not looking at it; she could already see the top sheet of paper – now covered with writing – being moved to the side as the quill began to rapidly fill out the next page.
“The first time you committed malfeasance while under my purview, you were able to acquire clemency by placing all of your resources at my disposal,” began Lex, his voice calm and measured despite how fearsome he looked. “It’s now time for us to formalize that agreement.”
River had no idea what that meant, but she knew better than to do anything except agree. “Of course, Your Highness.”
He gave another crisp nod. “The contract I’m writing will stipulate that everything you own, as well as all business arrangements to which you’re a party, will now be passed to me. This will include not only everything you wrote in your ledger – your liquid wealth, material possessions, real property, and other tangible assets – but will also see all the ponies in your employ transfer their terms of service to me as well, though if any of them object to the transfer I’ll allow them to resign without penalty. Either way, when you walk out of this room, it will be as a pauper.”
“I understand, Sire,” murmured River, fighting down a wince. The loss of everything she spent her life acquiring hurt, but it was nothing compared to when he’d cursed her to be unable to bear the touch of any of life’s finer things. Besides, she’d come up from nothing before; she could do it again, especially if… “Please forgive me for asking, but will I still be allowed to continue serving you?”
“You will,” answered Lex immediately, causing a shudder of relief to run through River’s body. “Though you’ll find the salary and attendant benefits to be of modest proportions, though perhaps enough to rent a room here, if this manor’s new owner is feeling generous.”
River blinked. “The…new owner, my prince? You mean you?”
“Only for a moment,” corrected Lex, “since once you sign the papers turning it over to me, I intend to transfer it – along with the employment contracts of everypony who works here – to Feather Duster as compensation for the anguish you’ve put her through.”
Both mares’ jaws dropped at that, with Feather Duster finding her voice first. “M-my prince, that’s…that’s too much!” she sputtered. “You already gave me such a generous employment contract, and now this…!”
“The terms of your contract are proportionate to the value I place on your service,” replied Lex evenly. “This is a separate consideration entirely, being remunerative for what River did to you.”
“But this whole manor…” murmured Feather Duster, looking around the parlor with wide eyes. It was only a moment later that something occurred to her. “Your Highness, even with how much you’re paying me, I can’t afford to pay all the staff members who work here!”
Her protest earned her a flat look from Lex. “That’s what article five, section four of your employment contract with me is for.”
Feather Duster gave him a blank look, not having read the full terms and conditions of the packet of documents that she’d signed a few days prior. “Article five…?”
“The provision that says you’re empowered to hire additional help, subject to my approval, and can request commensurate funds,” explained Lex. “Since I’m currently working out of this location, and will be for the foreseeable future, the necessity of exercising that option should be self-evident.”
“O-oh,” gulped Feather Duster, her cheeks reddening. “Of course.”
River, for her part, watched the exchange quietly, amazed that Lex had somehow seen all of this coming. Although she knew she should stay quiet, a sudden bout of curiosity seized her, and she found herself speaking up against all common sense. “Your Highness,” she blurted, “if Feather Duster hadn’t asked you to be lenient, what would you have done to me?”
“This,” answered Lex, narrowing his still-glowing eyes at her, “but I also would have cursed you so that your outward appearance was elderly in the extreme, since it was vanity that motivated you to act with such depravity in the first place.”
Feeling herself start to shake as she realized how close she’d come to having her worst nightmare made real, River lowered her eyes. “I’m grateful for your mercy.”
“This is not mercy!” snapped Lex suddenly, making River stiffen. “This is the punishment being proportional to the crime, with the victim being the one to determine the rate of proportionality. Is that clear?”
River nodded so fast it nearly rattled her brain.
“Good,” continued Lex. “Now, once the papers have all been signed, the three of us will make a joint announcement to the staff here. That should eliminate any confusion brought on by these changes. Feather Duster, since you’re coming to Las Pegasus with me, you’ll need to designate somepony to carry out whatever instructions you might wish to make regarding the manor’s operations while we’re gone. I suggest Trotsworth.”
Feather Duster made a statement of acknowledgment then, but River wasn’t listening, instead taking a moment to tabulate what this meant for her.
Lex’s punishment had been light, she knew, compared to what he could have done to her. Moreover, he’d left the door open for her to potentially earn future rewards if she kept doing his bidding. After all, if he was willing to give Feather Duster so much – that remark about her employment contract had been a detail River hadn’t missed – just for being a decent maid, then surely he’d see fit to do even more for somepony who helped advance his dream of founding his own kingdom.
Fruit Crunch’s blunt assessment caused Cloudbank to frown, a piece of toast halfway to her mouth. Fighting down the urge to sigh, she lowered her food, giving the colt a patient look. “It hasn’t even been a week yet. We don’t know that it’s not working.”
“But none of us have gained a single spell yet!” complained the colt, huffing as he took a bite of his muffin. “We’f been waken-”
“Chew with your mouth closed, please,” interrupted Fiddlesticks, cringing at the sight of Fruit Crunch’s half-eaten food.
Glowering at the filly – who didn’t notice as she focused on mashing up another pile of blueberries for Tiddlywinks, the giggling baby’s blue-stained fur a testament to the limited success she was having feeding him – Fruit Crunch huffed, swallowing before starting again. “I was saying, we’ve been waking up every night at midnight to pray for spells for days now, and it’s not working. Also, you’re squishing those berries wrong.”
Fiddlesticks glanced up sharply at the unwanted criticism, but didn’t have a chance to speak up before Feathercap cut in. “Maybe we should give it a few more days?” he asked as he levitated a pitcher of orange juice over to refill his glass. “I mean, we didn’t gain our spirit animals all at once either.”
“We kinda did,” noted Cleansweep, stirring her bowl of cereal idly. “I mean, we all went to sleep and then the Night Mare gave them to us, just like that.” Pausing, she glanced at Venin, coiled around her middle like usual. “Are you sure you don’t want any breakfast?”
Thank you, but like my companions, I remain healthy and nourished so long as you are, came the serpent’s reply.
“You know, we didn’t actually gain Altaer and the others right away,” observed Straightlace, finishing his yogurt and wiping his muzzle with a napkin. “We spent a few nights learning prayers from Severance first, remember? Maybe this is the same.”
To abandon an enterprise so soon after undertaking it is beneath your dignity as servitors of the First Convoker and the Supreme Predator both, agreed Altaer, perched on the back of Straightlace’s chair. It smacks of diffidence.
It smacks of a waste of time, huffed Lyden, glancing at the eagle sidelong. The path to greater power will not be found by mewling for the Supreme Predator’s favor.
And yet that favor is bestowed upon the elder in our midst, as a reward for her show of devotion, argued Ulespy from where he’d settled on the chandelier that hung over the dining room where they’d gathered for breakfast, spreading one wing out to indicate Cloudbank. Ergo, it’s too soon to conclude that this line of inquiry is fruitless.
What’s fruitless is this bickering, chided Nemel, trundling across the table as she delivered more blueberries to Fiddlesticks. We should listen to what our clan’s mentor thinks of the situation, rather than second-guessing her.
Knowing that meant her, Cloudbank didn’t answer right away, buttering another piece of toast – normally there would have been some servant pony trying to do it for her, but they’d all been called away to some assembly for some reason; it was just as well, since they usually put on too much – and taking a bite before replying. “Listen, I know it’s frustrating to have nothing to show for your effort,” she began slowly. “Believe me, I do. And it’s not just you guys; you know those other ponies who’ve been joining us each night to pray? None of them have received any spells yet either. So at the very least, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong.”
“Or you’re just not a very good teacher,” muttered Fruit Crunch.
But although he’d lowered his voice, it was still audible to everyone in the dining room, causing Cleansweep to scowl at her friend. “Crunchy!”
“I’m just saying, if it’s not us then maybe it’s her!” protested Fruit Crunch, swiping another muffin before he stood up, giving Cloudbank a sour look. “I agreed to this because I wanted to start winning fights for a change, but so far we haven’t learned anything that’ll make us stronger, which means we’re not going to be any more of a help to Lex-”
“Prince Legis,” corrected Straightlace frostily.
“-than we have been the next time some nutjob pony attacks,” finished Fruit Crunch, refusing to acknowledge the interruption as he kept his eyes on Cloudbank. “I’ll keep showing up for midnight prayers, but if something doesn’t happen soon, then I think we should try something else.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and strode out the door, Lyden padding after him.
Wincing at her friend’s outburst, Cleansweep gave Cloudbank an apologetic look. “He doesn’t mean that. He still thinks that if he’d done more to stop Starlight Glimmer, Lex-, sorry, Prince Legis wouldn’t have been hurt so badly.”
“Fruit Crunch is dumb like that,” muttered Fiddlesticks, but there was no heat in her voice as she fed Tiddlywinks another spoonful of mashed berries (most of which got in his mouth this time). “I’m still amazed he kept it together as well as he did when he got up in Starlight’s face during Lex’s duel. I know we all had orders not to, but I really thought he was going to take a swing at her anyway.”
“You really should call His Highness by his title,” frowned Straightlace. “Our teacher is a prince now. Ignoring that is disrespectful.”
“So is calling Miss Cloudbank a bad teacher,” murmured Feathercap, shielding his face behind his binoculars as if he expected his friends to get angry with him for saying so.
But Cloudbank herself was the one who replied, shaking her head. “He might be right,” she sighed. “The truth is, I barely know what I’m doing. I only learned a little bit of the Night Mare’s doctrine from Severance before I…passed on, so it’s entirely possible that I’m not teaching everypony how to pray to her correctly. Except she still grants me spells when I do, so I don’t know why it’s not working for anyone else.”
Silence fell then, the remaining Knights sharing worried looks among themselves and their spirit animals, not sure what to say to that.
“Was…” Feathercap faltered as everyone looked at him, gulping as he marshalled his courage. “Was anything different when you first started receiving spells from the Night Mare?”
Cloudbank tilted her head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, maybe praying for her to renew your spells isn’t the same as whatever you had to do in order to start getting them in the first place,” explained the colt. “It’s like, when I registered at the library, I had to fill out a form and everything in order to get my card, but after that checking out books was a lot easier.”
An excellent hypothesis! proclaimed Ulespy, fluttering down to perch on the back of Feathercap’s chair. If the conditions to begin receiving the Supreme Predator’s favor are more stringent than merely renewing said favor, then that might be the key to explaining why your efforts to date have been futile!
“But nothing was different,” protested Cloudbank. “The first time I received spells from the Night Mare was the first time I prayed to her for them, right after the battle at the dockyards.”
“Maybe there was something unusual then, and you just didn’t realize it?” offered Cleansweep.
Straightlace frowned, a skeptical look crossing his face. “But wouldn’t the Night Mare let us know if that was the case? I mean, she wants more ponies to worship her, right? So why not just say ‘do X, Y, and Z in order to receive my power’?”
“That’s not how it worked for us,” pointed out Fiddlesticks. “We knew we wanted her to give us magic powers when we started sneaking out to see Severance, but it didn’t tell us that we’d be given spirit animals when it began teaching us. We just followed its instructions, and then we met her in a dream after we fought that Silhouette guy.”
“And the Night Mare’s a goddess of self-reliance anyway,” added Cloudbank. “I may not know as much about her as I should, but I know that she helps those who help themselves. That was one of the first things Lex told me about her when he introduced me to her faith.”
Straightlace winced. “You should really call him Prince-”
“Maybe that’s it,” murmured Feathercap, frowning lightly as he turned his binoculars over in his hooves. As with Fruit Crunch, his voice wasn’t so low that everyone around him was unable to hear him.
“Maybe what’s it?” pressed Cleansweep.
Looking up, Feathercap licked his lips. “Well, Miss Cloudbank started getting spells from the Night Mare right after she helped win the battle against those sea monsters. And we got our spirit animals after we helped defeat that Silhouette guy. So…maybe the Night Mare only offers her power to people who’ve won a fight?”
Nemel’s head bobbed up and down approvingly, the motion looking odd on a badger. The idea has merit. The Supreme Predator would surely want any who emulate her to prove their worthiness.
But Cloudbank only shook her head. “I’ve spoken with the ponies who’ve been praying with us each night, and some of them have won fights.”
Were their victories sincere displays of combat prowess? asked Altaer haughtily. I doubt the Supreme Predator would find value if their altercation was a mere tussle.
“Some of those ponies were trapped in Vanhoover, just like I was,” replied Cloudbank, giving the eagle a flat look. “That meant they had to deal with the ghouls, and some of them said they actually fought and killed some of them. I don’t have any way of proving that, but I doubt that each and every one of them are lying. Besides, you guys have won fights – regardless of what Fruit Crunch thinks – so you should be getting spells anyway.”
Feathercap looked down, crestfallen. “So much for that idea, I guess.”
Venin’s tongue flicked out and back. Don’t be discouraged. Your idea was a good one.
And it might yet be correct, added Ulespy, leaning down to give the unicorn a gentle nip on the ear. Perhaps there are simply criteria in addition to the one you identified.
“If that’s the case, then we should look for commonalities between when Cloudbank gained spells for the first time, and when we gained our spirit animals,” noted Fiddlesticks as she again tried to get Tiddlywinks to eat without making too large of a mess. “Other than having just gotten into a fight, I mean.”
“I can think of one,” came a familiar voice from the doorway. “And that’s Severance.”
Cleansweep’s eyes lit up. “Crunchy! You came back!” Flying out of her seat, she rushed over to give the returning colt a hug.
“Miss me already, Dust Bunny?” Fruit Crunch grinned. But his smile faded as he looked at the others, before his eyes finally settled on Cloudbank. “I’m sorry for what I said before,” he murmured, his voice thick with contrition. “I know you’re doing your best to help us out. I just got frustrated that nothing’s seemed to go right lately.” One hoof rose up to pat Lyden – the wolf still at his side – between the ears. “Fortunately, I had someone to remind me that being a good leader means not lashing out at your allies.”
The other Knights smiled at that, turning toward Cloudbank in hope that she’d accept his apology. They weren’t disappointed as the older mare flashed Fruit Crunch a smile. “It’s alright. Believe me, I know how upsetting it is when you feel like you’re not strong enough to protect the people you care about.” Then it was her turn for her smile to fall away. “But unfortunately, Severance isn’t the key to this particular puzzle. After the battle at the docks was over, I gave it back to Lex.” Missing the way Straightlace pursed his lips, she shuddered at the memory. “I didn’t want it anywhere around me, since it refused to do anything when that kraken made me use it to hurt Drafty.”
Fruit Crunch’s shoulders slumped at that, shuffling back to his seat dejectedly. “Darn it. I was sure that had to be it, since that thing was so full of the Night Mare’s power.”
“Wait, what?” Feathercap looked over at Fruit Crunch then, his eyes widening. “What did you say?”
“Huh?” Fruit Crunch looked back at the smaller colt. “What do you mean?”
Suddenly brimming with excitement, Feathercap pointed at Fruit Crunch. “Say that again. What you just said, say it again. Word for word.”
Sharing a confused look with everypony else, Fruit Crunch slowly repeated himself. “I was sure that had to be it, since that thing was so full of the Night Mare’s power.”
“The Night Mare’s power…” murmured Feathercap, his eyes widening. “The Night Mare’s power!”
“Whatever brainstorm you’re having, tell the rest of us already!” snapped Cleansweep. “I can’t take the suspense!”
“Well, this is just a guess,” began Feathercap. “But when Miss Nosey, that reporter from Canterlot, was talking to Princess Luna before Le-, er, before Prince Legis took away her wings,” he corrected himself quickly, glancing at Straightlace, “she told him about some of His Highness’s adventures, and one of the things she mentioned was that, during the battle on the docks, he held back that kraken-”
“-with the Night Mare’s power!” finished Cloudbank, starting to see where he was going with this. “That’s what he called it afterward, when we were all filling each other in about what happened!”
“Okay,” drawled Straightlace, glancing between Cloudbank and Feathercap. “So that means…?”
“That means Severance and Prince Legis both have the Night Mare’s power in them,” realized Fiddlesticks. “So if you pray to the Night Mare while in their presence…”
“…and if you’ve managed to win a serious fight,” continued Cleansweep, catching on also.
“Then that’s what it takes for the Night Mare to give you magic powers!” concluded Fruit Crunch in a rush.
So that means the High Alpha is the only way into the Supreme Predator’s good graces now, concluded Lyden. It’s only appropriate that honoring him is the path to her approval.
Presuming that this new theory is correct, cautioned Ulespy. But if so, it would explain a great deal.
“But aren’t you guys a source of the Night Mare’s power?” asked Straightlace, looking at each of the spirit animals in turn. “Or what about Miss Cloudbank’s spells? They come from the Night Mare too.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” muttered Cloudbank, thinking out loud. “Severance told me something about how it’s hard for gods to manifest on a world where no one, or almost no one, worships them. But if it and Lex-”
“-Prince Legis both have an actual piece of the Night Mare’s divine power in them, then it’s like part of her is actually here on Equestria. You need to reach out to that part of her that’s in this world in order to make that connection in the first place. That’s different than her simply sending spells to me, or how your spirit animals were created by her but are tied directly to all of you.”
“And the connection we made to her through Severance was enough to give us Lyden and the others, but not get spells?” Fruit Crunch put a hoof to his chin as he pondered that.
“Maybe the amount of power she put in each of them is different, and that has something to do with it,” offered Feathercap. “Or maybe the battle we fought with Silhouette wasn’t impressive enough, since it wasn’t to the death the way Miss Cloudbank’s was against that kraken. Or maybe it was because we wanted powers – which our spirit animals give us – and not spells.” He looked at Cloudbank then. “You wanted her to give you healing magic, right?”
“A healing spell,” realized Cloudbank, thinking back. “Lex told me that divine magic could heal, and that a healing spell could save Drafty, so that’s what I prayed for!”
“That has to be it!” cheered Cleansweep. “So if we pray to the Night Mare again with Prince Legis there, we’ll be able to ask her to give us real spells this time!”
“Then what are we waiting for?!” Fruit Crunch shot to his hooves, a wide grin on his face as he turned and ran for the door, Lyden right behind him. “C’mon! Let’s go find Lex! Midnight’s only fifteen hours away!”
“Prince Legis!” corrected Straightlace as he and the others – Cloudbank included – rushed after him.
The mare in question blinked as Stuffed Shirt called her over, rolling up the scroll she’d been penning as she stood up from the table that dominated the center of the royal servants’ living area, leaving the biscuit that Puff had made that morning on her plate half-eaten. “Stuffed,” she called cordially. “Does His Highness need something from me?”
She couldn’t imagine any other reason why the Royal Valet would call her aside, particularly since she wouldn’t be joining Prince Legis on his trip to Las Pegasus. That made sense, of course; with all of the carousing he’d be doing, there was no need for the Royal Magician to be there. Tranquila and Coat Tail made much more sense; being the Royal Leisuremeister, the former pony would know how to eke every ounce of recreation out of the trip (especially in the city that was Equestria’s most luxurious vacation spot), while the latter would make sure that His Highness looked appropriately fashionable during his time there. Normally Stuffed Shirt would have gone as well, but he’d already announced that he’d be staying behind to work on the prince’s upcoming coronation, along with the rest of the royal retainers.
But just because she understood the prince’s reasoning hadn’t meant that Constance had been happy about it. Prince Legis was, from what she knew of him, a veritable font of new magic. Not just the dark magic that King Sombra had been famous for, but also some sort of heretofore unknown variety of spellcasting that relied upon gestures and incantations! And rumor had it that his “Night Mare” goddess was also a source of mystical power! But while Constance suspected that last one was just a rumor – she’d shown up at midnight the previous night to listen to that Cloudbank mare lecture about the goddess, and had come away with nothing to show for it except an hour of lost sleep – the first two were most definitely true, which was more than enough for her!
After all, it had been only yesterday that Constance had been able to see an actual instance of dark magic up close! Witnessing His Highness’s umbral transmogrification had sent her into a tizzy, and she’d spent the rest of the day furiously writing down everything she’d witnessed. The postulations and hypotheses she’d subsequently formulated had ranged from where the displaced mass of his corporeal form had gone to the significance of his ocular organs being the only distinguishable feature post-transformation. She’d ended up filling an entire scroll – on both sides – and going through two inkwells before she’d finally run out, losing the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening in doing so.
For Constance, it had been like a sip of cold water after years spent trudging through the desert.
Blueblood had made it clear from the outset that he had no real use for her; his only reason for wanting a Royal Magician in the first place was because the position was a traditional part of the royal household, and not filling it would have made him look bad. As a result, all he’d ever used her for were mild magical conveniences – chilling his drink, repelling insects, hiding the occasional rash or pimple with an illusion, or any of a hundred other tasks that any third-rate wizard could have done – and a source of magical trivia that he could trot out at parties in order to sound smart. If not for the fact that her position gave her ample free time and considerable access with which to work on her own theories regarding various non-traditional magical disciplines, she would have been sorely tempted to quit, even knowing that her mother would start setting her up on blind dates again if she did.
But now there was a new prince in town, and while Constance still felt excited by the possibilities he represented, her enthusiasm had been dampened by how he seemed just as intent on pushing her to the side as Blueblood had been. Unless, of course, Stuffed Shirt was about to tell her that Prince Legis had changed his mind…
But the Royal Valet’s answer wasn’t what she had expected. “Actually, His Highness wanted me to give this to you,” he replied, levitating a book over to her a moment later.
“He did?” Puzzled, she took hold of the tome in her own telekinetic aura, turning it over as she examined it. “What is it?”
The book was a comparatively thin folio; judging from the thickness it couldn’t have had more than a hundred pages at most. Even so, it was slightly heavier than it looked, suggesting that the pages were made from high-density paper, the expensive sort that was resistant to tearing or bleed-through by the ink. For that matter, the scent of the ink – though the lack of the distinctive chemical tang told Constance right away that whatever had been used to pen this particular monograph hadn’t been the cheap printer’s ink that most books used – still clung to it, as though whatever was written on the pages had just finished drying. Most curious was the cover, which lacked any title or listing of authorship.
The examination took only a second, after which Constance flipped the book open, just as Stuffed Shirt spoke up again. “I believe His Highness called it a ‘spellbook.’ He said he wants you to study it while he’s gone and present your findings to him upon his return…”
His voice faded out then, not because he’d stopped speaking but because Constance was no longer listening. Indeed, her awareness of everything that wasn’t written on the pages before her had completely fallen away.
Instead, her whole world now consisted of the diagrams, equations, and formulae that filled her vision. Each entry was a puzzle, but one written in a language she recognized, her brain shaking off the years of rust that had accumulated under her previous employer as she began deciphering what was written, translating the alphanumeric symbols and abstract measurements into recognizable concepts. A moment later she began to link those concepts together, forming a chain of understanding as she pieced the conjectural representations together and comprehended the full meaning of what she was looking at:
A completely new type of magic, one that used thoughts – rather than physicality – to cast spells.
In the instant before she fainted from sheer joy, Constance Halation’s last thought was that it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
“He’s sending me away?” croaked Thermal Draft, horrified.
“For a couple of weeks, to someplace called Trottingham,” replied Aria, the bored expression on her face making it clear that she either didn’t know or didn’t care that the news she’d so casually delivered had left Drafty reeling. “Lex wants you to go there and investigate the disappearance of some donkey named Long Road. There’s a place for you to crash-”
“I want to speak to Lex!” This had to be some sort of misunderstanding; Drafty felt certain of it.
All her outburst got her, however, was a snicker from Aria, the mare giving her a condescending smirk. “Not gonna happen. He’s already busy getting ready for our vacation to Las Pegasus, which is why he sent me here to deliver the news.” Stalking forward, she got to within a foot of Drafty, her expression oozing smugness. “So while we’re drinking, dancing, and getting it on, you’re going to be slumming it looking for some dead donkey dude.”
“But…but we’re supposed to go on a double date.” Drafty could feel a hollow pit forming in her stomach, stung by how the stallion she admired hadn’t even bothered to dismiss her in person. “Me and Cloudy together with him and Sonata; he agreed to it back when we were all camping out in that warehouse on the docks. I thought we could all go with him to Las Pegasus and do it there…”
Aria scoffed, making a show of rolling her eyes as she turned away from the heartbroken pegasus. “First of all, there’s no way he’d go out on a date with Sonata and leave me behind. Second, that Cloudy chick of yours is staying here anyway; Lex wants her to make sure the Night Mare gets a big sendup when he has his ‘I’m a prince now’ bash in Tall Tale. Third” – she glanced over her shoulder at Drafty then, and her smile was cutting – “you’re dreaming if you think that Lex even remembers that agreement.”
The pegasus all but recoiled at that, her eyes watering. “He wouldn’t forget!”
“Maybe not,” shrugged Aria as she sauntered toward the door, “but if he hasn’t then he certainly doesn’t care.”
A furious rebuttal was on Drafty’s lips before Aria had even finished speaking, ready to point out that not only had Lex saved her life – as well as Cloudbank’s – more than once, but that he’d even gone out of his way to resurrect them, to say nothing of all of the hardships and adversity that they’d been through together. But she didn’t have a chance as the other mare stopped at the exit, one hoof on the doorknob as she turned to glance at Drafty again. This time, however, the Siren's expression was neither sardonic nor vindictive, instead fixing her with a piercing gaze. “I don’t mind that you’ve got a crush on him, but you need to keep it to yourself from now on.”
“Excuse me?!”
“You heard me.” Although her expression didn’t change, the look on Aria’s face became unmistakably colder. “I was there in that warehouse too, so I know you’ve been into Lex for a while, and I’m telling you that it’s not going to happen. If you just want him to bang you, that’s no big deal; then you’re just a sex toy with a pulse. But if you even think about trying to start a relationship with him, you and I are going to have a problem.” The corners of her lips turned upward then, but her smile was terrifying to see. “And that’s not something you want.”
This time Drafty couldn’t stop the tears gathering in her eyes, but it was frustration rather than heartbreak that filled her voice. “That’s not fair!”
“Life isn’t fair!” snapped Aria. “It’s not fair that I had to get my throat cut in order to meet the guy I love! It’s not fair that he’s had to suffer so much just because he wants to help people! And it’s not fair that that selfish, four-eyed blonde nag betrayed him after he fell for her! That’s not happening again while I’m around!”
“That’s what this is about?!” seethed Drafty, suddenly furious that she was being punished for someone else’s mistakes. “I’m not like that other mare! I love him!”
“You say that now,” shot back Aria. “But what’ll happen when your girlfriend tells you that she’s not down for whatever threesome you’re hoping for? Because she’s pretty clearly not into guys, not into sharing, and not someone Lex can easily replace if you screw things up so bad that she can’t bear to stay here anymore. That’ll mean that either you leave Lex to go back to her, or he dumps you in order to keep her around, and either way he’s the one who ends up hurt. Again.”
Shaking her head, Aria clenched her jaw. “Bad enough I had to watch him act like he was fine after Blondie left. I'm not going to let him go through that a second time. He’s got me, he’s got Sonata, and he’ll have Adagio, and we’ll make him happy.”
Letting out a slow breath, the Siren turned back toward the door. “Go to Trottingham, and do whatever you need to do to get Lex out of your system. Come back and play kissy-face with Cloudbank, and maybe one day I’ll let him take you for a ride if he feels like it. But give up on trying to work your way into his heart, or I’ll tear yours out.”
And then she turned and left.
For a moment Drafty just stood there, shaking as she stared at where Aria had so casually crushed her hope for the future. “Kara!”
I’m here, cooed the voice of the goddess in her mind. Tell me how I can help.
“You can guarantee that Lex will love me if I follow your advice? That even if I can’t get Lex and Cloudy to love each other, they’ll both still love me, without it ruining their working relationship?”
Of course I can, sweetheart. I’m the goddess of love. Have faith in me.
“I do,” nodded Drafty, determination welling up in her chest.
“And I’m ready to do whatever you say in order to make my dream come true.”
“Thanks guys!” smiled Sonata, giving a wave as she trotted toward the door. “Lex will be totes happy to know he can count on you to take care of Vanhoover while he’s gone!”
“After everything he’s done for us, we’re happy to help,” replied Garden Gate, giving the departing mare a warm smile in return. “Just make sure he has a good time in Las Pegasus.”
“You know it! We’re gonna make him relax to the max!” cheered the Siren as she crossed the threshold that led out of the solarium, her eyes taking on a distant look as she sauntered into the hallway. “First, we’re gonna go out someplace really nice for breakfast in bed, then we’re gonna…”
She kept talking as she wandered away, and it was only after her voice could no longer be heard that several confused looks were exchanged.
“So…Las Pegasus has restaurants where you can have breakfast in bed?” asked Hopscotch, scratching her head.
“I think maybe she was talking about some sorta prince thing,” offered Funshine, though he didn’t sound entirely certain. “I mean, if a prince showed up somewhere and said that’s what he wanted, they’d probably make it happen…somehow.”
“They’ll probably just have what they want delivered to wherever they’re staying,” shrugged Granola Bar. “Even if whatever place they pick doesn’t normally offer takeout, I’m sure there’ll be somepony who can go get their order for them.”
“If a beauty like her is the one doing the asking, somepony definitely will,” murmured Slip ‘N’ Slide, still staring at where Sonata had left.
“I think Granola Bar was referring to one the prince’s servants, Slip,” snorted Turbo, rolling his eyes as he stood up. “Look, if there’s nothing else, I’m heading out. Some of the pegasi in the village are trying to put together a pre-industrial cloudmaker, and I said I’d help.”
Funshine tilted his head. “You mean one of those old pedal-powered things they have in museums? I thought they needed, like, a week’s worth of work just to make one little cloud?”
“All the more reason to get started now,” replied Turbo glibly as he strode toward the door.
But he hadn’t made it halfway there when Garden spoke up. “Actually,” she began, her voice carefully neutral as she looked at pegasus stallion, “I think we should all sit down and come up with a game plan. Lex-, Prince Legis is trusting us to take care of everypony here while he’s away, so we should try and think of some ideas about how we can keep this place running smoothly, as well as what we’ll do if there’s another emergency.”
Turbo looked ready to protest, but Hopscotch raised a hoof before he could get a word out. “Maybe we should wear badges?” she asked, looking around to see what everyone else thought of the idea. “That way, everypony will know that the prince asked us to watch over them, and they won’t feel worried.”
Funshine clopped his hooves together excitedly. “That’s a great idea! Everypony already knows that Garden helped fight off all those ghouls, and that she almost defeated Starlight Glimmer all by herself! If they see that she’s been left in charge, they’ll know everything will be fine!”
Garden looked down, smiling self-consciously at the praise. “I didn’t fight those undead ponies alone, or Starlight Glimmer for that matter. But I do think some sort of symbol would help everyone know that we’re here for them while His Highness is away.” Nodding, she looked around the room again. “Any other ideas?”
“We should ask those kids, the Night Mare’s Knights, if they want to help,” volunteered Granola Bar. “They might be young, but they’re no ordinary foals.”
The words were barely out of her mouth when Turbo resumed his beeline toward the exit. “I’ll do it.”
Frustration and sadness flashed across Garden’s face in equal measure. “Turbo, wait-”
“Those kids are working with Cloudbank now,” he shot back quickly, cutting Garden off, “and I got to know her pretty well when we were raiding that bank, so I’m the best person to talk to her about coordinating with those children.” He didn’t look back as he reached the door and turned the corner. “I’ll let you know what she says.”
Then he was gone, leaving an awkward silence hanging in the air in the wake of his departure.
“It’s not just me, right?” asked Slip ‘N’ Slide after a few seconds, looking around at the others. “Everyone else thinks that was weird too?”
“It’s not just you,” confirmed Funshine. “I haven’t seen Turbo make tracks that fast since the last time we ran across a ghoul pack back in the city.”
“I hope he’s okay.” Hopscotch’s ears folded down, dispirited at the thought of something bothering her friend. “I can only imagine what it must have been like to not only have died, but then come back to find that a whole bunch of stuff happened in the meantime, and then for a big fight to break out immediately afterward.”
Granola Bar reached a hoof out to gently tousle the smaller mare’s mane. “I don’t think that has much to do with it,” she reassured her. “Turbo’s probably just upset he wasn’t there to help against Starlight Glimmer.”
“Aren’t we all,” huffed Funshine. “If we’d just gotten there sooner-”
Slip ‘N’ Slide gave his brother an incredulous look. “That crazy nag almost fought Lex – or Prince Legis, or whatever we’re supposed to call him now – to a standstill, and that was after she took on all of the other heavy-hitters here! If we’d gotten there sooner, we’d be the ones needing to be resurrected!” He gave a shudder at the thought. “I’m just hoping that this will be an easy job and nothing goes wrong for a change.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” began Granola Bar.
But she didn’t have a chance to continue as Slip ‘N’ Slide groaned. “Did you actually just say that?! Do you not remember that the last time we did a job for Lex, we wound up fleeing from the Royal Guard in the middle of the night? All we were supposed to do was drop a few sick ponies off, and it ended up turning into ‘Escape from Canterlot!’”
“I got us into trouble then too, didn’t I?” murmured Garden quietly, looking down.
Seeing the depressed look on their leader’s face, and the glares being directed at him from the others, Slip ‘N’ Slide quickly began to backpedal. “Wait, no, that’s not what I was trying to say!”
“I know it wasn’t.” Forcing herself to smile, Garden raised her head. “And it’s okay. That whole escapade might have been my fault, but what I haven’t forgotten how you guys stood by me the entire time. That, and it helped me come to terms with everything I did while we were trapped in Vanhoover.” Taking a deep breath, she turned back to the matter at hoof. “We’ve got two good ideas now. Turbo’s going to talk to Cloudbank about the Night Mare’s Knights pitching in. What’ll we do about some sort of badge or emblem to let everypony know that we’re keeping the peace in the prince’s stead?”
“About that,” volunteered Hopscotch. “I think one of his new servants is supposed to be in charge of crests and insignias and things like that. Maybe we could ask them for some ideas?”
“In that case we should do it now, in case they need to run anything by Prince Legis,” decided Granola Bar.
Garden was already nodding. “Since this place is so huge, let’s all split up and see if we can track whoever we’re looking for down. Meet back here around noon. Badges or not, I want us to start going out and letting ponies know what’s going on then. Also…tell Turbo what we’re doing if you see him, okay?”
A series of nods and affirmative grunts came in response as everypony filed out of the room, save for Granola Bar, who stayed seated. “I’m actually meeting Piggy here in a few minutes,” she explained. “His idea. I think he’s finally ready to apologize for how awful he was to Cloudbank and Thermal Draft the other day.”
“I suppose them not being here for the apology would help,” scoffed Slip ‘N’ Slide.
But Granola Bar had an answer at the ready. “Oh, I’m planning on having him write it down, so he can show it to them later.”
A look of deep skepticism crossed Funshine’s face. “You really think he’ll do that?”
“He’s a good boy, deep down. He just needs to learn that while that stubborn streak of his can be helpful when things are falling apart, it’s not always the best option when it comes to getting along with others. Besides” – the barest hint of a smirk crossed Granola Bar’s lips then – “I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”
Slip ‘N’ Slide raised a brow at that, grimacing. “I don’t want to know what that means,” he muttered, exiting the room with a shudder.
Funshine looked only a little less put off than his brother. “Have fun, I guess,” he called over his shoulder as he left.
“Good luck with Piggy,” added Hopscotch, and unlike the stallions her smile was genuine.
Garden was the last to leave, giving Granola Bar a perfunctory nod. “See you back here at noon.”
“Garden.”
“Hm?”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
The question made the taller mare freeze. “I…don’t know what you mean,” she lied.
Granola Bar was silent for a long moment before replying. “Do you remember what I said after you helped defeat the ghoul army? When we were all mourning Turbo together?”
“…”
“I encouraged him to do something to help with how guilty you felt about the things you’d done back when we were all trying to survive,” recited Granola Bar, quoting what she’d said that night word for word. “What I didn’t say was that the reason I encouraged him was because he was more upset about what Lex did to you than any of us, and I knew why.” She let that sink in for a moment, making sure her expression was as nonjudgmental as she could make it. “And I know why he’s acting the way he is now.”
Another pregnant pause ensued, with only the sound of Garden swallowing breaking the silence. “Do the others know?”
“I think Hopscotch suspects, but Funshine and Slip have no idea.” She rolled her eyes, a good-natured smirk sliding across her face. “Stallions.”
“Yeah,” replied Garden softly, a ghost of a smile crossing her lips. But it lasted only for a moment before her expression turned miserable. “I broke his heart. After everything he went through…after he died because of me…he comes back and the very first thing I do is hurt him.”
“We don’t choose who we fall for,” pointed out Granola Bar gently. “You don’t need to feel guilty if you don’t love him.”
“I do love him,” answered Garden immediately. “I love him deeply, the same way I love you and Hopscotch and Funshine and Slip ‘N’ Slide. But that’s not what he wants from me…”
“I’m going to say something that might sound cold, or maybe dismissive, but it isn’t meant to be,” warned Granola Bar, waiting for Garden to nod before she plunged forward. “You’re not responsible for what Turbo wants, or anypony else for that matter. You’re only responsible for what you want. Do you know what that is?”
“I want things to slow down.” Again, Garden’s answer came without hesitation. “I want to stop feeling like I’m living on a roller coaster that’s about to jump the tracks. I feel like I’ve only just managed to figure out who I am again, and things are still happening faster than I can keep up! Everything was just starting to settle down, and then that crazy mare attacks and almost kills me, then I wake up and find that my dead friend has come back to life and is in love with me, but I can’t deal with that because Princess Twilight and her friends are here and plotting to kill Lex, who’s already at death’s door, except he’s better now and he’s fighting a duel, and he wins but now he has to go to Las Pegasus and we’re being asked to run Vanhoover for him and Turbo’s mad at me and I just want everything to slow down!”
Granola Bar didn’t say anything, staying quiet in case Garden needed to vent more. Her instinct was proven correct a second later. “I know I need to talk to Turbo,” sighed the unicorn. “I know this isn’t anypony’s fault, and that we need to work this out before it ruins our relationship, but I’m afraid that if I try, I’ll end up making things worse, and I can’t deal with that right now. I just can’t. Maybe if the next six weeks are as calm and quiet as I need them to be, but not right now…”
“Okay,” smiled Granola Bar sadly, moving over to give Garden a hug. “You know that you can always talk to me about anything, right?”
“I know,” smiled Garden, the expression turning playful as she ended the embrace. “But right now you’ve got your own love life to deal with, so I’ll stop burdening you with mine.” Walking toward the door before Granola Bar could insist she wasn’t a burden, Garden gave her friend a cordial wave as she disappeared through it. “See you at noon.”
“See you,” called back Granola Bar, but Garden was already gone, leaving her alone in the solarium. Sighing, she leaned back, craning her neck up to look out the large windows that dominated the room, thinking about everything her friends were going through. She was still lost in thought when she heard the door open a few minutes later, followed by the sound of hoofsteps approaching her. Shaking off her reverie, she couldn’t help a moment of guilty gratitude that she wasn’t going through anything as complicated as Turbo and Garden. “Piggy, I’m glad you-”
“Piggy won’t be in attendance,” snapped an unfamiliar voice, causing Granola Bar to nearly fall over as she turned her head to look at the newcomer.
“You’re-”
“River Bank,” replied the middle-aged mare as she strode into the room. “Piggy’s mother. And you’re Granola Bar.”
Surprise kept Granola Bar rooted in place as River advanced, stopping just outside of leg’s reach as she looked the other mare over from top to bottom.
“I think it’s time you and I had a conversation about your intentions toward my son.”
Piggy Bank couldn’t put his hoof on exactly what was happening, but things had been weird all morning. Of course, things had been unusual for a little while now – like the way his mom was intent on humoring that misfit named Lex even after he’d started helping himself to all of their money – but this was different. Worse, it was different in a bad way, and that was enough to make Piggy nervous.
It had started right after he’d woken up, finding that the pre-breakfast snacks he’d instructed the servants to leave outside his door had been mysteriously absent. Given that his mother had thrown a dinner party last night – one he hadn’t been invited to, much to his consternation (since it meant missing out on not only a wide variety of tasty treats, but also a chance to remind whichever ponies she’d invited that they were small potatoes compared to him and his mom) – there should have been more than a few leftovers remaining. While it was possible that the guests had eaten everything that the cooks had prepared, that almost never happened; it was far more likely, Piggy knew, that the lazy ne’er-do-wells had simply forgotten to bring him the choice bits left over. They’d probably eaten them instead!
As such, it was with an empty belly and a ferocious pout that he’d dragged himself over to one of the master baths. While his bedroom had a small washroom and bathing area attached to it, the master baths were more spacious, being essentially indoor pools with showerheads, jacuzzis, and several other luxury features. And of course, they were staffed, which meant he could have the servants bathe him instead of having to do it himself.
Once, that had been Piggy’s favorite part of the day, back when the master bath closest to his room had been staffed entirely by mares. With all the water present, lots of slippery soap, and how close they needed to get in order to properly wash him, all sorts of titillating “accidents” had been waiting to happen each morning, ranging from an unfortunate splash leaving a maid uniform all wet and clingy to a slick spot on the floor causing him to fall in a way that left his face planted underneath a skirt. It had been the highlight of Piggy’s morning, even if some of the more fainthearted mares had rushed out of the bathroom in tears.
Unfortunately, the good times hadn’t lasted. After one particularly uppity nag had slapped him – just because he’d happened to lose his balance in a way that caused him to brush up against her, letting her feel how excited he was after she’d scrubbed him in a particularly sensitive area – resulting in him complaining about the offending maid to his mother, he’d found the master bathroom he liked staffed entirely by stallions from then on. It had been a singularly unpleasant surprise, one that had made sense only later, when his mother had explained that she’d done it in order to make sure that some mare with loose morals wouldn’t try to worm her way into their family by tempting him into knocking her up. She’d been quite adamant about that; even his worst tantrum hadn’t convinced her to change her mind, leaving him with no alternative but to get used to being scrubbed clean each morning by a bunch of gross old stallions.
On this particular morning, however, there had been no cadre of butlers waiting for him in the master bathroom. Nor had there been any maids. Or anypony at all, the entire bathroom being deserted.
It had been downright spooky – reminding him much too much of the wasteland that Vanhoover had become – and Piggy had hurried through a basic washup before trundling out of the empty bathroom as fast as his little legs had been able to carry him.
He’d become even more disconcerted when he’d noticed that the halls were empty also, driving him to speed up, and by the time he’d reached the dining hall he’d worked up a sweat, making the brief bath he’d taken pointless. Fortunately, several servants had been there, chatting animatedly amongst themselves as though they hadn’t had a care in the world.
That had been when things had started to get really weird.
“Where have you been?!” he’d griped at them, panting for breath. “Nopony brought me any snacks this morning, the bathroom was empty, and…” That had been when he’d noticed that the table hadn’t been set. “Why isn’t anyone making my breakfast! I want pancakes and I want them NOW!”
The servants – two maids and a butler whose names he’d never bothered to learn – had glanced at each other then, and Piggy hadn’t liked the way their expressions had slowly changed from confusion to realization to what had looked like repressed jubilation. “We’re so terribly sorry, Master Piggy,” tittered one of the maids, for some reason emphasizing his title.
“We’ll go ahead and bring you your breakfast right away,” chuckled the butler, turning and trotting out of the room.
“Is there anything else we can do for you in the meantime?” the other maid had asked, smiling widely.
Thoroughly unnerved by that point – the idea that everyone was laughing at him had been stronger than ever, and despite putting his formidable intellect to use he hadn’t been able to figure out why – Piggy had shaken his head. “N-, yes! Where’s my mom?!” If anypony knew what was going on, it would be her. And as an added bonus, the reminder of who they worked for would hopefully make everyone stop acting so creepy!
But if anything, the mention of his mother had the opposite effect, as the two maids shared another quick glance, their smiles undiminished as the younger one spoke up. “Who?”
“Wh-what do you mean ‘who’?!” he’d sputtered, alarmed. “My mom! River Bank! Your boss!”
“Our boss,” echoed the maid, looking at her older counterpart, her face painted with faux-seriousness. “Did you hear that? First he wanted to know where his mother is, and now he’s asking about our boss.”
The other maid nodded, her expression quickly changing into one of fake concern. “We should probably find River Bank quick. I’d hate for him to tell our boss that we were lax in our duties.”
The exchange had left Piggy pale and shaking by that point, knowing that it was all kinds of wrong. The servants should never have been so flippant in front of him, for one thing; they knew he had the power to make their lives difficult in all sorts of ways if he just complained to his mom. Then there was the fact that the older maid had referred to his mother as “River Bank” rather than “Miss Bank,” as if they were peers! And the way they’d kept referring to their “boss” and his mother in turn – despite them being one and the same – had been especially disconcerting…
But he hadn’t had any time to put more thought into that as the butler that had gone to fetch his breakfast had returned, a platter balanced on one hoof with a large cover hiding its contents from view. “I’m afraid the kitchen wasn’t able to put together any pancakes, Master Piggy,” he had snickered, again stressing his title for some unknown reason. “But the chefs were able to whip something up that’s entirely appropriate to your station,” he’d finished, putting the tray down and snatching the cover away.
Although his hopes of having a nice breakfast had been steadily diminishing, Piggy had still felt profoundly disappointed – and angered – by what had been revealed.
A couple of sliced carrots. Burnt toast with no butter. A small bowl of curds that smelled suspiciously unsweetened. A glass of what looked like plain water.
It was the sort of tasteless breakfast that he’d always imagined poor ponies ate, reminiscent of the drek he’d been forced to survive on while trapped in Vanhoover, and the sight of it had left him utterly repulsed, pushing away from the table with enough force that he’d almost toppled over. “Wh-what is this?!” he’d snapped then, frightened and angered in equal measure. If something had happened to the manor’s food supply… “I demand that you all tell me what’s going on this instant!”
“Whatever do you mean, Master Piggy?” laughed the elder maid.
“We’re simply serving you in the manner to which you’re entitled,” chortled the butler.
“If you have some complaints, you can take it up with our boss,” sniggled the remaining maid.
Frightened, upset, and hungry, Piggy had fallen back on the only remaining course of action he knew. “WHY IS EVERYPONY BEING SO MEAN TO ME?!” he’d wailed at the top of his lungs, stamping his hooves as he put everything into throwing what he’d already decided would be a tantrum of epic proportions. “I WANT MY MAMA AND I WANT SOME REAL BREAKFAST AND I WANNA KNOW WHY EVERYPONY’S LAUGHING AT ME!”
“Is everything alright?”
The voice – cutting in during the split-second when Piggy had paused for breath – had brought everyone to a standstill, the three servants straightening up instantly as their mirth had died away. So had Piggy’s tantrum, relief having coursed through him at the sight of the new arrival. “Trotsworth!”
“Master Piggy,” acknowledged the head butler, thankfully without any odd stressing of his title. “Are you feeling unwell?”
“Those ponies are making fun of me!” Piggy hadn’t hesitated, pointing at the three servants who were suddenly grimacing, looking away as their ears folded back.
For his part, Trotsworth had glanced at the guilty-looking trio for only a moment, then at the tasteless breakfast still sitting on the table, and then back to Piggy. After a moment, he took a single step forward, looking at the three servants impassively. “This,” he began, his voice slightly softer than normal, “is unprofessional.”
All three had winced then, despite the head butler’s rebuke having been far softer than Piggy’s tantrum. “We were just having a bit of fun,” explained the younger maid.
“And it’s not like he doesn’t deserve it,” huffed the butler who’d brought the awful food.
“You know what he’s like!” pleaded the elder of the two maids. “You’ve worked here longer than anyone. Can you blame us?”
“It’s not my blame you should be worried about,” had been Trotsworth’s reply, his voice still level. “It’s that of your employer’s, as I do believe she warned against exactly this sort of behavior. Though if she were to ask my opinion on what’s happened here, I doubt you would find it to your liking.”
All three had winced again at that, and Trotsworth had let them wallow in their guilt for a moment before continuing. “As servants, our actions represent the ponies we serve. We execute their wishes, nurture their decorum, and safeguard their reputation. To contravene that is conduct unbecoming of our profession, and besmirches the good work done by those whom you work alongside.”
“Darn right!” Piggy had huffed, glad that someone was finally on his side.
Trotsworth had thrown the briefest of glanced his way then, before turning his attention back to the miserable-looking servants. “We’ll discuss this more later. In the meantime, Prince Legis’ departure has been briefly delayed while he discusses holding an impromptu prayer service with Miss Cloudbank and his young charges. I’d like you to use this time to double-check that his guests have had the entirety of their luggage packed and brought to His Highness’ yacht.”
Murmuring statements of compliance, the three had quickly filed out of the room, leaving Piggy feeling vindicated but still curious as he’d turned to look at the head butler. “Trotsworth, what’s going on with everypony this morning? And where’s that Lex guy going?” He was vaguely aware that the freeloader living in his mom’s house was calling himself a prince now – apparently he’d won the title in a bet or something – and it made Piggy laugh to consider how someone who was so utterly lacking in charm could think that he was worthy of special treatment. “Is my mom going with him? Does this have something to do with last night’s dinner party?”
Trotsworth had paused for just a moment before replying. “Perhaps it would be best if I took you to Miss Bank so that she could explain,” he’d said after a moment, turning to lead Piggy out of the dining hall.
That had been several minutes ago, and after a long march through the manor – too long on an empty stomach – Piggy realized that they were approaching the southernmost solarium. “What’s my mom doing in here?”
“Taking an important meeting, I believe,” replied Trotsworth, knocking on the door – waiting until sound of River’s voice could be heard, telling him to enter – and sticking his head in. “Miss Bank, Master Piggy to see you.”
“Perfect timing, send him in.”
Needing no more encouragement, Piggy rushed into the room. “Mama! Everypony except Trotsworth is acting strange! When I got up…” He trailed off as he realized they weren’t alone, his eyebrows shooting up as he saw that Granola Bar was seated across from his mom, standing up as she saw him. “Granola Bar?” he sputtered, confused. Looking at his mother, he tilted his head. “What’s going on? I thought you said you wanted me to introduce you to her, remember? After I saved you from that ghoul?”
Smiling, River trotted over to him, pausing to give him a kiss on the head before kneeling down in front of him. “I know I did, Piggy, but circumstances have changed. I’m going to be heading to Tall Tale in a little while, and once I arrive I’m going to be very busy, so I wanted to get this taken care of now.”
“Get what taken care of? Does it have something to do with what’s going on?” Piggy’s question came as he looked between his mom and Granola Bar…only to do a double-take as Granola Bar blushed and looked away, an embarrassed smile on her lips.
The sight was enough to rock Piggy back on his hooves. Granola Bar was never embarrassed, about anything. In the weeks that he’d known her, she was always calm and self-assured, whether she was helping to plan a raid of stomping the life out of a ghoul, she never lost her cool; only Fencer had been more composed – besides himself, of course – and she’d lost that ever since that Lex guy had spanked her and made her change her name to that stupid-sounding “Garden Gate.” So for Granola Bar to be acting so…so girly on top of everything else that had happened…
His apprehension must have shown on his face, because his mother gave him a quick hug. “Don’t look so worried, my little pumpkin. Mama’s been looking out for your future, and has made sure that you’re going to be taken care of.”
Not sure if he liked the sound of that or not, Piggy gulped. “Wh-what do you mean?”
River started to say something, but stopped as Granola Bar trotted over to them, the two sharing a knowing look – and Piggy was starting to get really tired of ponies doing that right in front of him! – before River stood to the side, Granola Bar moving to stand directly in front of him. “Piggy…” she began, and there was a quiver in her voice that he’d never heard before. “I, um…”
A jolt of nervousness rushing through him, Piggy stepped closer to her, suddenly concerned. “Are you okay?” His old gang from when he’d had to rough it in Vanhoover were a bunch of losers who never would have survived without him, but while most of them had never been grateful for all he’d done for them, Granola Bar had been the one pony who’d always appreciated him. Even if she’d been a bit of a nag about his telling off those two mares, Cloudbank and Thermal-whatever, that Lex had brought back, Piggy still didn’t like seeing her so upset now. “Is there something you need?”
“Yes,” Granola Bar croaked, taking a moment to clear her throat before continuing. “There is.”
As River watched, smiling in satisfaction, Granola Bar knelt down, taking Piggy’s hoof in her trembling one.
“I can’t wait to get back to Las Pegasus!” purred Pretty Penny, sitting up just long enough to take a sip of her mint julep before leaning back in her deckchair, gazing out at the ocean from the aft portion of River Bank’s yacht. “I’m going to prepare the finest suites in six different resorts for His Highness’ exclusive use while he’s there! That way, he’ll never be more than a few blocks away from luxury no matter which part of the city he’s in!”
From the next chair over, Razzle Dazzle gave a loud snort. “You think he’ll care whether he’s sleeping on a featherbed or a waterbed?” sneered the old mare, adjusting her sunglasses despite the large umbrella keeping the sun off of her. “With those two beauties at his side, it’s obvious that he has an eye for the ladies. That’s why, when he comes to take in a show at the Palace, I’m going to make sure the Ponycat Dolls put on a performance he’ll never forget!”
“You really think the prince will go for that, Razzle?” chortled Gladmane condescendingly from where he was using a tanning reflector to take in the sun. “If some pretty little filly catches his eye, I’m sure he’d rather chase her than have her shake her flank at him.” He chuckled at the thought, one hoof reaching up to brush his mane back, the motion smooth and practiced. “He’s like me, a pony of action. That’s why I’m giving him ten thousand chips in advance for my casino, so he can take fortune in his hooves there the same way he did when he won his crown.”
“Why would anypony want to waste time tossing dice and playing cards when they could be indulging themselves in the finest of finery?” sneered Pretty Penny over the rim of her drink. “The prince will want to spend his time in luxury.”
“Creature comforts are inconsequential compared to the comfort that a gorgeous creature can give you,” snorted Razzle Dazzle, arching a brow over her sunglasses. “The prince will want to surround himself with pretty girls.”
“Loose ladies are temporary pleasures, not like a big pile of money that you won with nothing but your own skills and good luck,” jeered Gladmane, glancing over the top of his tanning reflector. “The prince will want to have fun gambling.”
The three of them glared at each other for a long moment before Pretty Penny broke the stalemate. “What do you think, Pixie? Which type of recreation is more to Prince Legis’s liking?”
“Huh?” Glancing up from where she was stretched out on her own deckchair, idly juggling a quartet of oranges that she’d nabbed from a nearby bowl of fruit, Pixie glanced over at the trio of ponies. “Oh, um, I’m just catching a ride back home,” she murmured, hoping to avoid being drawn into the three-way argument, knowing that whichever pony she agreed with would result in the other two lashing out at her.
“Come on now, don’t be shy,” urged Gladmane, flashing her an easy smile. “You’re in close with the prince, aren’t you? What’s his favorite pastime?”
Catching the oranges, Pixie gave a shrug. “I wouldn’t know. I mean, I’m sure River does, but I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to her, so I couldn’t say. It’s not like I know the prince himself very well.”
“You were singing a different tune yesterday,” noted Razzle, a taunting lilt in her voice. “Did Prince Legis read you the riot act a second time after your attempt to defend him failed so spectacularly?”
Pixie’s brow furrowed at that, but the look on her face was one of confusion rather than anger. “I’m sorry?”
“Ouch, that bad, huh?” chuckled Pretty Penny, swirling her drink lazily. “I was wondering why we didn’t see you at dinner last night. I guess now we know.”
“Now ladies, there’s no need to be rude to our poor little Pixie here,” snickered Gladmane. “After what happened with Jack Pot and now our new prince, it’s clear that she’s working on her newest magic trick: getting a stallion to make her disappear!”
All three burst into laughter at that, leaving Pixie confused and angry, her cheeks turning red as she glared at the guffawing ponies. “What are you all talking about?!”
“Oh, don’t act like you don’t know,” cackled Razzle. “Yesterday morning, when we had our first meeting with River Bank and His Highness. You barged in-”
But her explanation was interrupted as a new voice cut in. “Everypony, if I could have your attention please! Everypony!”
Looking over, the four saw a pegasus mare in a maid’s uniform – Feather Duster – cough self-consciously into her hoof as everyone turned to look at her. “I wanted to let you all know that our departure for Las Pegasus has been slightly delayed while Prince Legis makes some last-minute arrangements regarding Vanhoover’s safety in his absence. He thanks you all for your patience, and assures you that we’ll be underway soon.” Her announcement finished, she turned toward the fore of the boat.
“Now there’s a girl who knows how to trade up,” mused Pretty Penny, watching Feather Duster go. “Throwing aside her thieving husband for being a prince’s right-hoof mare, what a lucky break.”
Gladmane’s features twisted into one of vindictive satisfaction, remembering the bit of news that had slipped out during the musical number that had happened during last night’s dinner party. “I’m just glad Prince Legis punished that no-good pilferer so harshly. He’s the reason my casino got such a bad reputation.”
“Like it ever had a good one,” scoffed Razzle. “But that girl was smart to offer herself to the prince as a maid. She’s too homely to cut it as a plaything. You should keep that in mind, Pixie. Pixie?”
But the mare in question wasn’t listening to the others any longer, having broken into a gallop as she hurried to catch up to Feather Duster. “Excuse me, miss? Miss?”
Belatedly realizing that she was the one being called out to, Feather Duster turned around. “Yes? Can I help you with something?”
“You’re Prince Legis’s maid, right?” asked Pixie, slowing to a trot as she approached Feather. “I heard you got mad at Princess Twilight on his behalf when she tried to get him to call off the duel.”
The memory made the pegasus mare blush, embarrassed that she’d actually spoken like that to royalty, and in front of so many other ponies no less! “Ah, yes. I’m His Highness’ personal assistant, Feather Duster. And you’re Miss Bank’s friend Pixie, right?”
“The one and only.” Giving the maid a polite smile, Pixie’s expression turned serious a moment later. “Listen, do you know if River’s going to be joining us? I just assumed she’d be coming along, but I haven’t seen her all morning.”
Feather adopted an apologetic look. “I’m terribly sorry, Miss Bank won’t be joining us for the prince’s excursion to Las Pegasus. She’ll be going to Tall Tale to help prepare for his upcoming coronation ceremony instead.”
“Oh.” Her ears folding back in disappointment, Pixie sighed. “I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and talk to her since we made the trip up here, so I was hoping we’d at least be able to on the way way back. I mean, I know she’s really busy and all, and I’m sure the prince really relies on her if he’s trusting her to help with his coronation. I just…I really wanted to speak with her.” Biting her lip for a moment, she gave Feather a hopeful look. “I don’t suppose there’s enough time for me to head back to the manor and have a quick word with her before we take off?”
Feather Duster grimaced. “I’m not sure how long Prince Legis is going to need to finish preparing to leave, but I know that Miss Bank is seeing to some arrangements of her own.” Seeing the disheartened look on the other mare’s face, she tried to offer what consolation she could. “If you like, I could take her a message and bring you back whatever response she sends.”
Pixie, however, was already shaking her head, a polite – though obviously fake – smile on her face. “No, no, it’s fine. I just wanted to ask her about something that happened yesterday morning anyway.”
“Ah.” It took Feather Duster a moment to put two and two together, needing a second to connect the time period in question with who she was talking to. “Wait, is this about what you did for Prince Legis at the meeting he had then?”
Having already started to turn away, Pixie very nearly tripped over her hooves as she spun around. “Were you there?!”
Nodding, happy that she could be of help, Feather Duster smiled. “I was, and I thought it was wonderful the way you came to His Highness’ defense like that. I know he seemed ungrateful, and that the way he stormed out a few minutes later was frightening, but I can assure you that he’s really a very kind pony, and…is everything alright?” Feather’s smile faltered as she saw the confused expression on Pixie’s face then.
“I came to the prince’s defense…?” repeated Pixie slowly.
Tilting her head, Feather tried to make sense of the pegasus’ reaction. “I was a little concerned when you weren’t in attendance at dinner last night. That means you didn’t sign the papers to join the corporation that’s funding Vanhoover’s restoration, right?”
“Ah, no,” murmured Pixie, looking like she was only paying partial attention to what she was being told, staring into space with a mystified expression. “No, I didn’t sign any papers.”
“I see.” Nodding, Feather waited for some further reaction on Pixie’s part, only to be left hanging as the unicorn continued to stare into space, looking as though she was working on some sort of intractable problem. “Well…” prompted Feather, “once we’re on our way, I could inquire with His Highness about setting up a meeting if you’d like? I don’t know if he’d be willing to let you sign on after everypony else, but you’d at least be able to ask him, if you wanted.”
Again, it took Pixie several seconds to reply, eventually shaking her head as she turned her expression back to Feather Duster. “No, thank you, that won’t be necessary. I just…thank you,” she finished, giving another fake smile before turning and slinking away, leaving Feather to watch her go with a confused look before turning away to resume preparing for departure.
For her part, Pixie’s smile dropped as she made her way back to her room on the yacht’s lower deck, closing and locking the door behind her before moving to sit on her bed, feeling a cold shiver run down her spine her as she pondered what she’d just learned.
She had spent all of yesterday morning at the edge of the market, performing magic tricks and legerdemain for passing ponies. It had been something she’d done on a lark, an idea she’d gotten after spending time talking to a nice mare she’d met – a weather pony named Thermal Draft – who’d listened to how upset she was about what had happened with her husband and how unpleasant Piggy Bank had been and how River didn’t seem to have time for her. Drafty (as she preferred to be called) had suggested that she spend some time following her cutie mark, and she’d been right; seeing all the smiles that her magic show had put on had made Pixie feel much better.
But any lingering joy from that was gone now, replaced by the unnerving knowledge that somepony – or something – had been impersonating her.
The obvious explanation was that there was a changeling about, but for the life of her Pixie couldn’t imagine why it would not only choose to impersonate her, but would do so in order to try and help Lex seal his business deal with Las Pegasus’ most influential ponies. It didn’t sound nefarious in any way that she could imagine, nor like part of some scheme to steal love. It was a mystery of the highest order.
And I can’t tell anyone here about it!
Doing so was completely out of the question. If word got back to Lex Legis that somepony had stolen her identity in an attempt to interfere with his business, Pixie had no doubt that he’d want to talk to her at the very least. More likely, he’d want to use magic – either the terrifying dark magic that he wielded, or the mesmerizing powers of the Sirens, or the strange “religious” magic that he supposedly wielded, or something else she didn’t know about – in order to confirm that she was telling the truth, or that she wasn’t a changeling, or otherwise extract as many details as he could from her, and that wasn’t something Pixie could let happen.
Because if it did, there was a chance that he’d end up uncovering how she’d helped Starlight Glimmer escape.
It wasn’t an implausible scenario. If the Sirens enchanted her the way people said they could, she might end up confessing out of a magically-induced sense of guilt. Or maybe Lex would put a curse on her that would make her unable to lie, and then ask if she was hiding anything from him. And those were just what she knew about; in all likelihood, he had numerous other ways of making her talk.
And ways of punishing her once he found out what she’d done.
Shaking as the cold shiver running down her back grew worse, Pixie decided that the mystery of her imposter was one that she could live with not solving. As awful as it was to have her marriage fall apart, and for that make her into a topic of malicious gossip, her time in Vanhoover had made her painfully aware that things could be much worse. Pixie had no intention of tempting such a fate simply to satisfy her curiosity.
In the meantime, she’d need to stay in her room for the remainder of the trip back home, just to be safe. Hopefully her conversation with Feather Duster hadn’t tripped any alarm bells. Once they arrived in Las Pegasus she’d be able to put more distance between herself and Equestria’s fearsome new royal, hopefully enough that he’d forget about her entirely.
Despite the anxiety coursing through her, Pixie couldn’t help but smile a little as an idea crossed her mind.
Her daughter had followed in her and Jack Pot’s hoofsteps, traveling across Equestria and putting on magic shows everywhere she went.
Maybe it was time to ask her if she wanted an assistant.
“Thank you so much for this, Your Highness!” gushed the stallion as he backed toward the exit, bowing with every step. “I promise you won’t regret it!”
“Thanks!” chirped Sonata, smiling as she waved at the departing stallion. “We’re, like, totes looking forward to it!”
“Just remember,” added Aria with a haughty toss of her pigtails, “you won’t get a statement of endorsement unless everything’s absolutely perfect.”
“It will be!” nodded the stallion, his head pumping up and down repeatedly as he backed through the doorway. “I’ll see to every arrangement personally! You’ll be eminently pleased; you have my word!”
With one final bow, he turned and trotted away, Feather Duster closing the door behind him.
From his place in the high-backed chair that dominated the sky lounge – though with the hasty redecorations that the servants had done, it now looked more like a reception area – of his (formerly River’s) aerial yacht, Lex resisted the urge to sigh, glad the obsequious stallion’s prattling was finished. That had been the eighth meeting he’d had with a member of Las Pegasus’ elite since they’d left Vanhoover a little over two days ago, and it had proven to be just as tiresome as the rest. Now that the loan papers had been signed, each of the ponies who’d pledged to fund his nascent government was eager to talk about what they wanted from him. Or more accurately, what they wanted to do for him, since having a prince publicly find favor with their business was a highly coveted prize in their social circle.
As a result, each such conference was virtually identical. One of the signatories would sit down with him apart from his or her peers, outline the various extravagances that they’d lavish on him once they reached Las Pegasus, and then drop transparent hints that they wanted him to make some sort of overt statement of approval to the media during his time there. It was banal in the extreme, and only the fact that he’d already had River signal his agreement to these arrangements kept him from canceling them altogether, knowing that this was part of the price he’d agreed to pay in exchange for the one hundred million bits these ponies would loan him over the next ten years.
The only thing that had made these platitudinous exercises at all bearable had been, to his mild surprise, Sonata and Aria. Whereas he had no interest in conspicuous consumption, the Siren sisters took to it naturally, and so were keen to hear the details of the luxuries being thrown at him now. Between Sonata’s gushing approval and shameless delight at each new exorbitance, and Aria’s brazen entitlement and thinly-veiled disapproval if a given opulence wasn’t up to her standards, the pair had gotten everything they’d wanted from everyone they’d met with so far. The result was that there’d been little for Lex to do except sit back and supervise as the two mares worked out the particulars of the various affluences that were waiting for them in Las Pegasus.
Though that made sitting through these meetings no less tedious for him.
“These discussions are not to take place over meals from now on,” snapped Lex as his horn lit up, telekinetically retrieving the book that he’d spent the day reading between appointments. “The introduction of refection into these talks makes them take longer than necessary.”
“Aw, and miss the chance to play with our food?” grinned Aria, keeping her eyes on him as she peeled a banana, drawing her tongue slowly up its length before working it in and out of her mouth.
Lex grimaced at the display, while Feather Duster blushed and averted her eyes. But Sonata frowned, shaking her head. “What is it with you and bananas? That’s, like, the third one you’ve had, and you keep eating them wrong. Even that guy just now thought it was weird; didn’t you notice the way he kept staring at you while you were doing it?”
Rolling her eyes, Aria took a bite of the fruit at last. “That’s because he found it captivating, unlike that ‘trick’ you did.”
“Nuh-uh! Mine’s way more fun! Look!” Picking up a cookie, Sonata rose up onto her hind legs. Tilting her head back, she carefully placed the sugary treat on the end of her nose, grinning as she kept it perfectly balanced for several seconds before – with a bob of her head – she sent it skyward, catching it in her mouth as she fell back down onto all fours, munching happily. “See?”
Her question was directed toward Lex, but the stallion in question wasn’t watching, causing her to frown as she saw that he’d gone back to his book. “Lex,” she whined. “You weren’t looking.”
“Guess my trick was more entertaining after all,” snickered Aria.
Sonata scowled at that, but Feather Duster jumped in before she had a chance to retaliate. “That was the last meeting you had for today, Your Highness. Would you prefer to go over tomorrow’s schedule now, or in the morning?”
“Definitely in the morning,” interjected Aria.
“I was gonna say that,” huffed Sonata. “He’ll totes do it in the morning, because he’s gonna spend the rest of the day playing with us. Now come on!” Her usual cheer reasserting itself, she pointed toward the door. “The rec center has foosball! Last one there has to wait for next game!”
Lex waved a hoof at her without lifting his eyes from the pages. “You two go ahead. I want to finish this.”
“Oh come on.” Aria sauntered up to him, draping herself across his lap. “Wouldn’t you rather see me score all over Sonata than sit here alone with…” She paused as she glanced at the book’s cover, her brow furrowing. “‘Dapple Gray’s Anatomy’? You’re turning down spending time with us so you can read a medical textbook?”
“It’s one of several suchs texts that I instructed House Call to loan me before we left,” explained Lex. “Given that our schedule once we reach Las Pegasus is likely to be filled with inane activities, I’d prefer to get through the majority of these treatises on the way there.”
Sonata’s eyes widened. “For realsies? Lex, you’re already a super-strong wizard who introduces new religions, rescues and rebuilds cities, makes deals for, like, tons of money, and now you wanna be a doctor too?”
“I’m not interested in that title, or the certifications involved in earning it,” replied Lex as he turned a page, scanning it quickly. “I just want the knowledge. Everypony with healing magic stayed behind, and if another unforeseen disaster happens during this trip I want more curative options at my disposal than just the weak healing spell that the Night Mare gives me.”
Both sisters glanced at each other then, having a moment of shared understanding.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” sighed Aria, reaching up and snatching Lex’s book away, ignoring his snarl of outrage as she rolled off of his lap.
“You mind giving us the room for a little bit?” Sonata’s smile was polite enough, but Feather Duster knew immediately that she wasn’t really asking, murmuring a statement of compliance as she showed herself out.
“What do you two think you’re doing?” growled Lex as the door closed, his eyes glowing dangerously as he rose from his seat.
“Getting you to relax,” huffed Aria, dropping the book to the floor and putting her hoof on it just as it was surrounded in the grip of Lex’s telekinetic aura, preventing him from picking it up. “Seriously, we’re two days into this trip, and you’re still acting like everything’s going to fall apart if you don’t keep up the tough guy act twenty-four-seven!”
“C’mon, Lex.” Unlike Aria’s belligerent tone, Sonata’s was pleading, walking over to nuzzle him. “I know things have been crazy for a while now, but you did it. You beat the bad guys, saved everyone who needed it, and now things are looking up. So let’s all blow off some steam now that we can.”
But Lex was already shaking his head. “I didn’t save everyone who needed it,” he corrected, his voice turning dour as he thought back to how Block Party had refused to be resurrected.
“Close enough!” snapped Aria. “Look, do you not get that if there is another disaster, you’re in no shape to handle it right now?”
The indictment of his abilities cut through Lex’s melancholy, causing his to narrow his eyes in anger. “What?”
“She’s kind of got a point, Lex,” admitted Sonata. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, you did an awesome job with Starlight Glimmer and all – plus, I totes loved fighting next to you – and it was super-impressive seeing you drop a huge mountain of black crystals on Twilight like that. But you could have been a little harder on them, you know?”
“A little?” scoffed Aria before turning back to Lex. “I get that you don’t kill ponies, but you were holding back so much that you put your own life at risk! Where were all those spells you used when you fought me? No force fields or pits filled with acid or red-hot energy beams? That wasn’t smart, and being smart is supposed to be your thing.”
Lex opened his mouth, only to immediately close it again, knowing that he couldn’t afford to disabuse them of the idea that he’d refrained from using his strongest magic deliberately. Twilight Sparkle had already figured out that something was wrong with his thaumaturgical spellcasting, and had doubtlessly shared that bit of knowledge with the other princesses by now (though hopefully his using his last attack spell to freeze the hound archon she’d summoned would make them hesitate to put much stock in her theory). Any further leaks of information regarding that particular weakness had to be avoided if at all possible.
“See?” pressed Sonata, misreading the reason for his silence. “Plus, you’ve been totes jumpy the last few days, always looking around like you’re expecting to be attacked any second.”
“You won’t even let us relax you the way we know you like, even though the walls are thicker here,” added Aria, flicking her tail in irritation. “Which is pretty unfair considering how helpful we’ve been lately.”
This time Lex did flinch. In the immediate aftermath of his scrying on Adagio Dazzle, his own counter-scrying spell had activated, which meant that either she or whoever had been there with her had attempted to magically spy on him the way he had on them. That shouldn’t have been possible, since scrying on someone required the caster to have some sense of the target’s identity. A scrying spell could be directed at someone if all you knew was their name, or their face, or had some other sense, no matter how modest, of who they were. “The person who just attempted to spy on me” – which should have been all that Adagio and her unknown companion knew about him – wasn’t sufficient. And yet, they’d done it anyway, suggesting that in the brief period of time between when his spell had been noticed and when he’d terminated it, one or both of them had somehow used their own magic to pervert the link between himself and his scrying sensor in order to get some information – likely audiovisual, since that’s what the spell normally conveyed – about him. Although he’d been in shadow-form at the time, even a glimpse would have been enough to let them focus a scrying spell on him in turn.
And while his countermeasure had defeated that first attempt – sending a torrent of magic that not only overloaded the scrying sensor, but sent a dangerous explosion of electricity back through the link to strike the spellcaster – his counter-scrying spell was now expended, leaving him with no way of defeating subsequent attempts to magically view him from afar.
That knowledge had left Lex profoundly uncomfortable, and while he’d refused to let that keep him from performing necessary work on everypony’s behalf, he’d taken to sweeping the area around him for magical signatures at random times, using his circlet and peering into the magical spectrum in an attempt to ferret out the active (or lingering) divinatory aura that a scrying sensor would have generated; thankfully, he hadn’t found any yet, but he’d kept checking all the same. He’d thought he’d been subtle about it, calling upon his circlet in silence and spending several seconds looking around. But apparently Sonata and Aria had apparently noticed, even if they hadn’t realized exactly what he was doing.
Of course, the fact that he’d refused to engage with them sexually since then had been something he knew they’d object to, but that couldn’t be helped. As stressful as it was to know that someone was potentially spying on him at any given moment, the idea that some stranger was watching him during what he considered to be a profoundly intimate experience between him and the mares he loved was utterly intolerable. That meant that, until he could prepare and cast his anti-scrying spell again – something that would likely have to wait until the equinox, now just over a month away – there was nothing to do but remain chaste.
The fact that he hadn’t explained to Sonata and Aria why he’d suddenly stopped touching them – with no confirmation of any subsequent scrying attempts, and no way to stop them if there were, it would have been premature in the extreme to share that information – was something he’d known wouldn’t go over well. But with no alternative explanations having come to mind, there had been no other choice but to say he wasn’t in the mood during the trip and hope that the activities awaiting them in Las Pegasus would be sufficiently exhausting so as to deaden the girls’ libidos. It was an unlikely hope, but it was the only one he had.
And judging from Aria’s complaint just now – as well as the way Sonata was nodding fervently in response to it – he was going to need to come up with a better plan.
Pouting at his lack of response, Aria strode forward, standing opposite Sonata to nuzzle him herself. “C'mon, I know you're capable of relaxing," she murmured. “Sonata said you were actually playful after you beat that dragon in Tall Tale. And I know you got into a pillow fight once while you were huddled in that warehouse. I wanna see that side of you.”
“And we're not saying you have to party hearty all the time,” chimed in Sonata, picking up the discarded anatomy book from where Aria had dropped it and bringing it over to him. “You can totes get some reading done too. Just not all the time, 'kay?”
“You work hard,” added Aria. “So now let’s play hard. First in the rec room...” She leaned in closer then, putting her lips by his ears as her voice turned husky. “And then in the bedroom.”
“Or,” grinned Sonata, “we could pillow fight in the bedroom and then totes get naughty and wreck the rec room. Just sayin’.”
Lex grimaced, knowing he couldn't give them what they were asking for; not completely, at least. “The two of you go ahead,” he sighed. "I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
“Woo hoo!” cheered Sonata, grinning as she turned and galloped toward the door. “Now that’s what I like to hear! C’mon Aria, I’ll race you! First come, first served!”
“Like I care about who comes first.” A sultry grin on her face, Aria turned and set off after her sister at a more sedate pace, flashing a smirk back over her shoulder at Lex as she made sure to wag her tail a little more than necessary. “Just so long as I get what I want in the end.”
Lex let out a slow breath as he watched the two of them go, sitting back down as he idly swept the room for magical emanations again, only barely paying attention to the results as he thought about how unsustainable the situation with Sonata and Aria was likely to become. Especially since he wasn’t even sure that someone was spying on him to begin with.
“Are you sure you don’t feel anything? No indigestion? No stuffiness? No tickle in the back of your throat?”
Twilight’s question earned a sigh from Spike, rolling his eyes in irritation. “Ei heew hain.”
Blinking at the nonsensical answer, Twilight belatedly removed the tongue depressor from her assistant’s mouth, quenching the light from her horn as she ceased examining the back of his throat. “Sorry, what was that?”
“I said I feel fine,” huffed Spike, rubbing his chin gingerly. For all that he regularly munched on gemstones, five uninterrupted minutes of holding his mouth open had left his jawbone aching something awful. “Twilight, I’m telling you, there’s nothing wrong with me. If Starlight had sent a reply, I would have received it.”
“Then why hasn’t she written back yet?!” Twilight’s yell was accompanied by a reflexive flap of her wings, but it was anxiety, rather than anger, that colored her features. “It’s been seventy-two hours since we sent her the instructions for the spell that’ll let her write back, and there’s been no word!”
Spike grimaced as Twilight began to pace up and down the length of the train car. Fortunately it was one that they had all to themselves, Princess Celestia having reserved the entire train for their trip to the Crystal Empire. With her and Princess Luna, along with a small cadre of guards and retainers, having taken the frontmost car, there were plenty others where Twilight could fret uninterrupted.
“Come on, Twilight,” Spike pleaded, hating how distraught she looked. “I know Starlight’s special talent is magic, but you said that spell wasn’t exactly an easy one. Not to mention her horn was still injured, right? So it’s probably no big deal that she’s taking a little longer than you thought to write back.”
Twilight rounded on him, incredulity and panic written all over her face. “No big deal?!” she echoed. “No big deal?! Less than two days after I take on my very first student, she winds up being thrown into another dimension filled with all sorts of dangers, right alongside the dangerous maniac who attacked us in our own home, and now she’s not writing back even though we’ve sent her eleven letters in the past three days begging her to let us know how she’s doing, and you’re saying it’s NO BIG DEAL?!”
Flinching, Spike managed a rictus grin. “Um…yes?”
“AUGH!” Flopping down onto an empty seat, Twilight buried her face in her hooves, her nervous energy temporarily expended. “This is all my fault, Spike,” she moaned. “I never should have let Starlight chase after Silhouette like that.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” offered Spike, a worried look on his face as he crept closer to her, not wanting to trigger another outburst. “You told Starlight not to go after him, but she took off on her own anyway.”
But Twilight shook her head. “I should have done something. If I’d put up a force field or telekinetically grabbed her or even just flown a little faster, she’d still be here right now. And I never should have left that portal just sitting there like that, waiting to be activated.”
Wincing at the guilt in her voice, Spike found himself wishing he had some backup, knowing that a funk this bad would be difficult for him to break Twilight out of all on his own. But there was no one else available. Although all of their friends had offered statements of support – both for what had happened to Starlight, as well as for Luna’s restoration – before the two of them had boarded the train, none of them had been able to come with them, citing personal obligations that needed to be fulfilled.
That was something that neither Twilight nor Spike could begrudge them. While their friends had made it clear that they didn’t regret having dropped everything to run off to Vanhoover with them, Rarity had orders that had begun to pile up at the Carousel Boutique in her absence. Applejack couldn’t bring herself to miss another harvest at Sweet Apple Acres. Fluttershy had let it slip that Angel would have a temper tantrum of epic proportions if she left again anytime soon. Rainbow Dash had bemoaned the chewing out she was sure to receive from the other weather ponies for leaving them in a lurch. Pinkie Pie had said something about needing to bake three hundred cupcakes ASAP…though nopony was certain if that was because Sugarcube Corner had a backlog of baked goods that needed to be made or if she was simply feeling particularly hungry.
With Soft Mane wanting to stay behind to look after her mother, and Princess Celestia putting all of her focus on Princess Luna – who was in a decidedly mixed frame of mind, being almost too nervous to be hopeful – that left nopony else to try and keep Twilight calm as she fretted over Starlight’s increasingly-worrisome lack of response. Now, with no one else to help him talk Twilight through the latest of what was becoming a series of self-inflicted guilt trips, Spike fell back on one of the more tried-but-true tactics he’d learned for managing Twilight: distract her. “So,” he began, trying to sound nonchalant, “do you think the crystal ponies will be able to remove Lex’s curse from Luna?”
The look Twilight gave him in response made it clear that she knew exactly what he was doing. But she held it only for a moment before sighing. “I hope so,” she murmured, turning her eyes toward the window at where the Crystal Empire was rapidly approaching. Normally it took three days by train to get there from Ponyville, but Princess Celestia had requested that the engineer make the best time possible. Between that, and the train not making any of the stops that it normally would have on the way there, they’d managed to cut that time down considerably. “After everything that’s happened, we could all use some good news.”
Spike wasn’t sure what to say to that. Fortunately, he was saved from coming up with a reply as a knock sounded from the door at the front of the car, a guard sticking his head in a moment later. “Princess Twilight? The engineer says that we’ll arrive at the Crystal Empire in thirty minutes.”
Twilight managed a smile, nodding in acknowledgment. “Thank you.”
She held the expression until the armored stallion had left, her worried look reasserting itself as soon as the door closed. “If this doesn’t work, Luna’s going to be crushed.”
“It’ll work,” replied Spike confidently as he climbed onto the seat next to Twilight’s. “And Starlight will write back before you know it, too.”
Twilight couldn’t help but raise a brow at that. “What makes you so sure?”
Pointing a clawed thumb at the glittering buildings visible out the window, Spike smirked. “Because when Spike the Brave and Glorious comes to the Crystal Empire,” he answered smoothly, “the day’s as good as saved.”
Twilight just stared at him for a moment, before a strangled snort escaped her lips, finally turning into a full-blown bout of giggling. “Let me guess,” she tittered, “you were saving that line to use on Soft Mane?”
Blushing as she saw right through him, Spike gave an embarrassed smile. “I was really hoping to show her the statue of me while we were there.”
Still chuckling, Twilight reached over and wrapped the little dragon up in a hug. “We’ll take a picture of it for her,” she promised. “One with all of us in front of it. You, me, Princess Celestia, Luna, and Starlight, together.”
Glad that he’d managed to cheer her up, Spike hugged her back…and hoped that things would turn out the way he’d predicted.
“Everything’s prepared,” reported Cadance, flying up to the third-story balcony that jutted out over the front of her palace, where Celestia, Luna, Twilight, Spike, and Shining Armor were gathered. “The Crystal Heart is in place, and the crystal ponies are all here.” Landing, she walked over to her husband, giving him an affectionate nuzzle before directing a warm smile at Luna. “Are you ready?”
Swallowing, Luna managed a nod. “Yes, I am.”
“Alright.” Parting from Shining Armor, Cadance headed back toward the edge of the balcony, spreading her wings. “I’m going to lead the crystal ponies from down there, so that I can add my love to the Crystal Heart as well.”
Twilight’s eyes widened, surprised. “You can do that?” she blurted. “I thought only crystal ponies could empower the Crystal Heart.”
“Normally that’s the case,” explained Shining Armor, smirking as he nodded toward the crystal heart cutie mark on his wife’s shapely flank. “But Cadance is an exception, being the Princess of Love and all.”
“And being a disciple of Lashtada, the goddess of love, doesn’t hurt either,” added Cadance with a smirk of her own, before her expression turned serious as she glanced at Luna again. “I’ve been praying for our success since I got word that you were coming. I’m sure Lashtada won’t let us down.”
Luna managed a smile at that, though her expression remained strained. “Thank you, Cadance.”
Giving one last nod, the alicorn priestess flew back down, leaving the others to await the Crystal Heart’s activation.
Knowing that it wouldn’t take very long, Celestia turned to her sister. “Luna, I know that you’re nervous about whether or not this will work. That’s why, even though I’m certain it will, I want you to know how proud I am of the courage you’re showing right now.”
This time Luna’s smile was much shakier, but it was also far more genuine. “Celestia,” she began, her voice trembling as she moved to rest her head against her sister’s chest. “I’m glad you’re here with me.”
“I’ll always be with you, sister,” murmured Celestia, wrapping one foreleg around Luna and pulling her into an embrace. “Always.”
Off to the side, Twilight smiled at the display of sororal affection, and Spike surreptitiously wiped his eye with a claw. The only one not watching the two was Shining Armor, looking down at where the pellucid streets of the Crystal Empire were lined with ponies. “Here we go,” he murmured, watching as they all knelt, directed by the voice of his wife – unseen, since she was standing in the open plaza where the elevated palace’s first floor would have been were it a normal building, and where the Crystal Heart was displayed now – which was raised, not in command, but in a gentle request for them all to share the light and love that dwelt within them.
Immediately, a gentle glow began to gather beneath the crystal ponies’ hooves. It spread out slowly along the translucent roadways, the radiance from each of the crystal supplicants mixing and merging, growing brighter and stronger until it filled every one of the pathways that connected the Crystal Empire, a visible representation of the bonds that its citizens shared. Everyone on the balcony knew from experience that in a few seconds, the Crystal Heart would absorb that power, and then radiate it outward in a field of powerful magic that would cover the entire Crystal Empire…and hopefully blow Lex Legis’ evil magic completely apart.
Luna closed her eyes.
Celestia held her breath.
Shining Armor bit his lip.
Twilight shuffled in place.
Spike let out a belch.
That last one was incongruous enough that everyone turned to look at the little dragon…and so everyone saw the green bout of flame that left his mouth, resolving into a folded scrap of paper that arced through the air toward Twilight a second later.
“It’s here!” gasped Twilight, the tension of the moment suddenly forgotten as she grabbed the letter with her telekinesis, pulling it to her as she tore it open, her eyes devouring its contents. “It’s from Starlight! She…” Words failed her as her brain caught up to what she’d just read.
Beneath them, the light filling the streets of the Crystal Empire suddenly raced inward, drawn by the pull of the Crystal Heart.
But Twilight didn’t register that at all, nor did she hear the voices of the people around her asking what was wrong. Instead, she could only stare at the single line of script written on Starlight’s letter.
Captured by griffons. Taken someplace called Cuachan. HELP!
Then the love gathered by the Crystal Heart burst outward, washing over everyone.
“Hoity Toity is an eminent fashion critic, one whose opinions are well-regarded by anypony who pays attention to the trends of high society. He should be on the guest list.”
“He’s also from Canterlot, which means he’s one of the princesses’ sycophants. I guarantee you that if he shows up for Prince Legis’ coronation, it will be so he can trash it in the press after it concludes in order to score points with Celestia and Luna.”
Stuffed Shirt scowled, sending a disapproving glare at River Bank from the far side of her study. “I’ve known Hoity Toity for years, and I’m telling you, you’re wrong about him. He might be pompous enough to give Blueblood a run for his money, but his appraisals are always apolitical in nature.”
River arched a brow in Stuffed Shirt’s direction, meeting his look with one of her own. “And if you’re wrong, then His Highness is the one who looks like an upstart playing pretend to the rest of Equestria, which isn’t a risk I think is worth taking. Prim Hemline is a much safer choice.”
“Prim Hemline?” sputtered Stuffed Shirt, aghast. “That persnickety perfectionist from Manehattan? She’ll see a tablecloth slightly askew somewhere during the ceremony and write about how the entire thing was a disaster!”
“Then make sure the tablecloths are all on straight,” shot back River dryly.
Years of having dealt with Blueblood’s tantrums had given Stuffed Shirt a very large reservoir of patience when it came to dealing with obstinate ponies, and it served him well now as he took a deep breath. “Miss Bank-”
“I had lunch with Prim two years ago,” interrupted River, “when my idiot husband lured her out here with the promise of an all-expenses-paid trip in order to have her review his idea for a line of inflatable clothing.” The disgust in her voice made it clear what she thought of that idea. “Before she told him exactly how hideous the mock-ups he’d had designed were, she expressed frustration with how Canterlot is the culture capital of Equestria, while Manehattan remains a distant second when it comes to sophistication. That’s why her standards are so high: she knows that only by being the first one to endorse something uniquely fashionable and utterly without flaw will let her beat those Canterlot ponies at their own game.”
Stuffed Shirt paused to take that in for a moment. “And you think she’ll find what she’s looking for at His Highness’ coronation?”
“Your Royal Clothier did a good job making the prince look handsome for the dinner party we threw for those Las Pegasus nitwits, and that was a last-minute arrangement with almost nothing to work with,” shrugged River. “Do you think he’ll be able to top himself by the time the coronation arrives?”
“I…of course,” replied Stuffed Shirt hesitantly, the compliment toward his colleague having caught him by surprise. She’d said much the same thing the night of the dinner party when she’d seen His Highness in his new outfit, of course, but that was to be expected; only a fool created strife with a co-worker in full view of their employer. For her to express that same sentiment in private meant that she was being genuine.
That was unexpected, to say the least. Stuffed Shirt had simply assumed that, much like her staff – or rather, her former staff, since by now their recent change of employment was common knowledge – River Bank viewed him and everypony else in the royal retinue as outsiders with whom she was competing. For her to so casually praise the efforts of one of their number now made Stuffed Shirt wonder if he’d been uncharitable toward her. “Coat Tail has been a Royal Clothier for almost fifteen years now. I’m sure he’ll outdo his previous work by orders of magnitude when designing Prince Legis’ coronation outfit.”
“Then there’s nothing to worry about,” concluded River. “Besides, if we make it clear to Prim that nopony from the Canterlot fashion scene has been invited, she’ll realize that this is her shot and seize it for all its worth.” She leered then, her eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the time she’s done, she’s made him into a bigger heartthrob than Blueblood ever was.”
“That might be a tad difficult, considering that he’s already in an amorous relationship with Miss Dusk and Miss Blaze,” lamented Stuffed Shirt. “To say nothing of the vow he made to his goddess to remain a bachelor. While it was always more fantasy than reality, the possibility of marrying into royalty was a large part of Blueblood’s allure, and Prince Legis won’t have that.”
But rather than being discouraged by the flaws he’d found with her reasoning, River burst out laughing, surprising Stuffed Shirt for the second time in as many minutes. “Are you kidding?” she chuckled, giving him a bemused look. “If anything, that’ll make him more attractive.”
Stuffed Shirt could only blink, flummoxed. “And you’ve come to that conclusion how, exactly?”
The question made River’s grin widen. “You really don’t know how mares think at all, do you?”
Huffing at the blatant teasing, Stuffed Shirt sat back, crossing his forelegs over his chest. “Why would Prince Legis’ being in a relationship with two of the most beautiful ladies in Equestria, and having sworn never to marry, make him an object of desire?”
“Because the more a mare thinks that she can’t have a particular stallion, the more she wants him,” answered River.
Stuffed Shirt waited for her to elaborate. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to, he gave her a skeptical look. “So the female half of Equestria is stricken with chronic contrarianism when it comes to romance?”
Sighing, River leaned back in her chair. “Let me put it this way: Blueblood had a lot of mares throwing themselves at him, didn’t he? Why do you think that was?”
Stuffed Shirt snorted. “Because he was a prince, though I suppose that his being handsome helped, along with them not knowing how awful his personality really was.”
River shook her head. “Looks don’t matter nearly as much to mares as they do to stallions. Personality counts for more, but even that’s not disqualifying. You’d be amazed how many mares think that loving a stallion long enough, hard enough will change his character.”
“Which leaves only his being a prince,” concluded Stuffed Shirt, feeling vaguely uncomfortable with where this conversation was going.
“Exactly,” nodded River. “So why did that bring the mares out in force?”
This time Stuffed Shirt put some thought into his answer, mulling the question over for a few moments before replying. “Because…being with a prince makes them feel special?”
“I’m impressed. I thought you’d say something stupid like ‘because princes are rich.’”
“I almost did,” admitted Stuffed Shirt. “Even if they were in the minority, some of the ladies who approached Blueblood made it clear that they were fine with a relationship that was…transactional in nature.”
“I’m sure they did,” sneered River. “The same way I’m sure that some of them were hoping to get pregnant so they could rope him into marrying them.” Her expression turned rueful then. “That one’s a winner if you can pull it off. But for most mares, it’s because princes can choose to be with almost anyone, so if he wants to be with one mare in particular it must mean that there’s something about her, and her alone, that no other mare has.”
“And that’s even more true for Prince Legis?”
River nodded. “Think about how he looks to those dewy-eyed dreamers, compared to Blueblood. He’s not playing the field the way his predecessor was, even though he could now that he’s royalty. Instead, he’s vowed to remain single, which to most mares will mean that he’s given up hope of having a fulfilling relationship. He keeps Sonata and Aria around to sate his desires, but that’s all, convinced that he’ll never meet the love of his life.”
“I’m given to understand that His Highness does indeed love Miss Dusk and Miss Blaze very much,” pointed out Stuffed Shirt. “Nor is he shy about proclaiming his feelings publicly, when asked.”
River waved a hoof as though shooing an annoying fly away. “That won’t matter. He doesn’t act affectionate toward them, so the mares who’re dreaming about winning his heart will simply assume that he only thinks he loves those two, but won’t know what love really is until he meets them. When he does, then it won’t be about looks or sex or status or anything else. It’ll be that he’s suddenly found somepony who makes him smile and laugh and sing and dance and enjoy being alive in a way he obviously doesn’t now. Somepony so special that he’ll send Sonata and Aria packing, and break his vow to the Night Mare, because he just has to be with this one-of-a-kind mare that he found, no matter what it costs him, since he can’t bear to go back to the cold, grey life he was living before he met her.”
Silence fell as River finished, giving Stuffed Shirt a pointed look as though daring him to disbelieve her. “That’s what mares want,” she pronounced at last, “and that’s why – if his public debut is managed correctly – he’ll be an even bigger hit among them than Blueblood ever was.”
Stuffed Shirt didn’t answer immediately, his melancholy growing as he processed everything River had just told him…and compared it to the relationships he’d been in.
Of course, calling them “relationships” was being far too generous. When it came to romantic connections with the opposite sex, Stuffed Shirt’s experiences had been decidedly lacking in romance. Such was the nature of his job.
Being the chief servant to the most eligible bachelor in Equestria meant that there were some mares who’d cast their eyes his way, thinking that being with him would give them greater access to Blueblood. Having been warned of exactly this by his predecessor before he’d formally assumed the position of Royal Valet, Stuffed Shirt had managed to avoid having his heart broken; indeed, he’d reveled in the situation at first. A never-ending stream of mares looking to entice him with their bodies, without wanting any sort of real commitment – and who quickly ended things when Blueblood inevitably refused to give them the time of day – had seemed like a dream come true for a healthy young stallion, especially one as effete and willowy as him.
The situation had lost its allure fast, however.
At first it had been little things, like moaning the wrong mare’s name during a tryst, only to find that his partner didn’t care. Or being asked not to introduce his current paramour as his girlfriend when he brought her to royal functions. Or how so few of them would ever want to kiss, even during sex.
Gradually, his awareness of what he was missing had grown, creeping into his consciousness in spite of his attempts not to think about it. Realizing that he’d never walked a mare home. That he had no pictures of any of the ladies he’d been with. That he didn’t know their birthdays, favorite colors, hobbies, or anything about them besides how good of a lay they were.
But worst had been seeing the difference in the way those mares had looked at Blueblood compared to him. Whereas they’d seemed to gaze right through him more often than not, their eyes had always lit up when they’d fallen on the handsome prince, the sight of him animating them in a way that Stuffed Shirt – no matter how vigorously he’d tried to please them – never had.
That had been when he’d realized he couldn’t do it anymore. That what had seemed like an endless source of pleasure without responsibility was in fact meaningless, because none of the mares he’d hooked up with had actually cared about him. That to them, he was a means to an end, rather than being someone special.
Was that really any different than what River was saying mares wanted?
Feeling chastised, Stuffed Shirt shook his head, pulling himself out of the reverie he’d fallen into. “Okay, Prim Hemline it is then.”
River smirked. “So glad you agree.”
Jotting down the name, Stuffed Shirt turned to the next order of business.
“Now that we’ve decided who’ll cover the fashion angle, who should we get to do the catering?”
The status quo had reached a point that Lex could no longer tolerate.
The possibility that someone was spying on him had been difficult to bear, but it had still been just that: a possibility. Although someone had attempted to scry on him in the immediate aftermath of his scrying on Adagio Dazzle – an attempt that his specially-prepared countermeasure had defeated – the chance that further scrying attempts would follow had been high, but not absolute. As thin as that distinction had been, it had been one which Lex had remained keenly aware of, prioritizing the things that had to be done rather than dropping everything to focus on a problem that might not manifest.
Although Lex had presumed the unknown entity conversing with Adagio – the most likely suspect for who was scrying on him now – had used some sort of specialized spell to gather information on him via his attempt to magically spy on the missing Siren sister, enough to then scry on him in turn, that had been the worst-case scenario. Despite that unknown personage’s apparent specialization in magical surveillance, as evidenced by their ability to seamlessly screen their visual and audible presence from his own scrying sensor, Lex hadn’t been able to rule out less-disastrous hypotheses, giving him a sliver of hope that there would be no further attempts to observe him. If that hidden person had, for instance, some sort of spell that was theoretically designed to respond to a scrying with a targeted counter-scrying, following a detected sensor back to its source as an automatic process rather than somehow diving information about him – a countermeasure theoretically similar to his own, but more insidious than explosive – then there was nothing to worry about; his anti-scrying spell had overloaded his opponent’s magic as soon as it had manifested, destroying it before it could relay even the briefest glimpse of him, leaving them with no knowledge of his identity in order to make a subsequent attempt.
But that theory, which had been thin to begin with, was now conclusively disproven. The detection of a scrying sensor during the second day of their trip to Las Pegasus confirmed that the threat – and an unknown entity monitoring his activities remotely was a threat, regardless of any other salient factors – was real, which meant that it needed to be dealt with. Not after the equinox, when he’d regained his thaumaturgical spells, but now, before they reached Las Pegasus.
But that was easier said than done, however.
While Lex knew he wasn’t without options for how to ward off future scrying attempts, the problem was that none of them were good options.
The first possibility that he’d come up with was using his dark magic to curse a particular area to be occluded to scrying. Whether or not that was even possible was purely conjectural, but in theory it was similar to what he’d done during his duel with Twilight, essentially miring a given region of space in dark magic that was tailored to impede a particular type of movement, in this case the movement of sensory information via magical sensor. It was an ideal solution…and one that he had very little expectation would actually work, even if it could be done.
After all, Twilight herself had demonstrated the weakness of that particular application of dark magic, since she’d broken through the anti-teleportation curse he’d laid down, and using Equestrian magic – which was comparatively weaker than thought-based spellcasting – no less. True, she’d almost certainly augmented it with that same unknown power that Celestia and Luna had used to empower their own magic, and she’d put herself at grave risk in the process, but in the end her magic had overcome his. Someone with expertise in thaumaturgical scrying would likely have far less trouble overcoming a similar barrier.
And even if he went ahead and tried to put up curses to prevent remote observation via magic, there were still practical limitations to consider. His anti-teleportation curse had required him to physically overcharge his dark magic, a process that put his body under great strain, and it was likely that any similar measure against scrying would require just as much effort. Even then, he’d only been able to cover an area roughly forty feet in diameter. Covering the entire yacht would have taken days and left him exhausted…and would have been utterly pointless anyway, since whatever area he cursed would have been fixed in space, rather than following the movements of the airship. Cursing whatever hotel room they were staying in once they reached Las Pegasus would potentially be a more fruitful exercise, but only slightly, since they were supposed to be on a whirlwind tour of the city’s various entertainments that would leave little downtime anyway.
Taken individually, those limitations were comparatively moderate. Taken together, they made it clear that this was a problem that was beyond his dark magic to solve.
With that determination made, Lex had weighed another, much more extreme, option: replenishing his full complement of thaumaturgical spells immediately, rather than waiting for the equinox. His anti-scrying spell could be cast again then, as could the warding spell – which also prevented scrying – that he’d used to guard the warehouse during his initial foray into Vanhoover. While both were powerful enough that retaining them after casting would be exceedingly difficult, it wouldn’t be impossible. He just needed to prepare them again now.
That, however, would require him to be in proximity to the Tree of Harmony.
With Severance gone, that was the only object in Equestria that Lex knew of that emanated sufficient magical power for him to renew his strongest magic. While that didn’t require interacting with the Tree itself – something Lex had no desire to do, since the last time he had (attempting to force open the mysterious locked box it had manifested), it had retaliated with such force that it had blasted him off the face of Equestria completely, sending him on what had been his first trip to Everglow – since he could simply make use of the massive energies that radiated out from the Tree the same way heat radiated from a fire, there were still numerous problems with putting such a plan into effect.
The largest one being the matter of distance. The Tree of Harmony was located on the other side of the Everfree Forest from Ponyville, which was over a thousand miles distant from his current position. Nor was he in any position to undertake such a voyage.
He could have, of course. The yacht was his, and the ponies crewing it worked for him; if he told them to change course and make for the outskirts of Ponyville – though he knew it was unlikely that they were provisioned for such a voyage – they’d have no choice but to obey him. While their airship was nowhere near as fast as a train, they’d still be there in a matter of days.
But the costs of such a detour were simply too high for Lex to countenance. Even if he ignored the massive upset it would cause to everyone on board, there would be questions about what he was doing, questions that he wasn’t prepared to answer. Until he found a way to overcome his inability to easily renew his thaumaturgical spells, that limitation had to remain secret; dragging a ship full of ponies along with him as he made a desperate attempt to do exactly that wouldn’t help.
Slipping away and taking a train to Ponyville once they reached Las Pegasus would be only marginally less disastrous. Lex had no illusions about how conspicuous he was; even if most ponies hadn’t heard of his new royal status, his appearance was too outlandish to allow for any clandestine travel. A bright red horn that didn’t match his coat, eyes that glowed brightly whenever he used so much as simple telekinesis or lost control of his temper, and a shadow that never failed to make itself notable for how it fell the wrong way would make it easy to trace his movements if he suddenly disappeared for several days…which would, in turn, lead to questions that he didn't want to be asked.
And of course, taking the train to Ponyville ran the risk of alerting the princesses. Twilight Sparkle lived in that same village, which was located near the base of the mountain that Canterlot – Celestia and Luna’s home – resided on top of. As lax in their duties as Lex found them to be, he couldn’t imagine that they’d ignore news of someone who looked like him appearing right on their doorstep. Given that Twilight was already on the verge of discovering his greatest weakness, leaving her so many clues about what he was doing would be courting disaster, more so than he could justify.
Having concluded that neither train nor airship would serve, Lex had briefly considered a third mode of travel: teleportation.
Although he had little more than a half-dozen thaumaturgical spells left in his mental reservoir, one of them was his short-range teleportation spell. It could only transport him (and a few passengers, if he chose) around one thousand feet, but if he overcharged it via his body’s magical channels, in theory the spell could take him much further. Potentially to within a stone’s throw of the Tree of Harmony, where he could replenish his magic – including another short-range teleportation spell – and then return via the same method.
But that was an optimistic take on what could happen. Since he’d never fed additional power into that spell before, it could just as easily prove to be insufficient for transporting him the required distance, leaving him at some point between Las Pegasus and Ponyville. Or he could potentially overshoot his destination. Either way, the potential for winding up off-target was too large to overlook, leaving him with no easy way back and nothing to show for his efforts. It was simply too risky.
Having ruled that final method of transportation out, Lex had been forced to acknowledge that a surreptitious detour to the Tree of Harmony was beyond his capabilities.
Which narrowed his options for dealing with his unwanted watcher to exactly one.
A ritual.
By directly shaping ambient magical energy without internalizing it first, the results were potentially far more efficacious than a curse. Nor would he have to travel anywhere, putting his weakness at risk of discovery. On those virtues alone, it was the best choice available to him.
Of course, the risks with such an undertaking were familiar to him. Ritual castings took hours of exacting vocalizations and somatic gestures, and even the slightest of interruptions would cause the gathered energy to collapse, producing magical disasters of an unpredictable nature as it dissipated back into the surrounding environment. If that happened, Lex knew he’d suffer the brunt of the backlash, but everyone around him would also be at risk.
Not to mention that the actual method by which the ritual was enacted needed to be designed. While not as exact as his thaumaturgical spellcasting, rituals were still highly specific in attempting to produce an effect. That meant that he needed to define exactly how he wanted to deal with the scrying spells being directed at him and then come up with parameters to enact that exact sequence, along with other salient factors such as the duration of the effect, the range at which it would operate, etc. Such a thing was no small task; Lex had invented the ritual to summon Harrow Ordeal in a matter of hours and entirely in his head, but that was because it was simply a modification of the ritual he’d made to summon the Night Mare into his presence, something that had taken him weeks of painstaking testing and development back on Everglow.
Of course, that had been when he’d been heavily distracted by numerous other concerns, both practical (such as securing his safety in that harsh, alien world) and cerebral (studying the plethora of magic to be found there, as well as looking for a way back to Equestria). Given that he had far fewer distractions now, as well as a rough baseline to work from via the thaumaturgical spells he knew that dealt with scrying, comfortable surroundings with servants who would obey his every word, and a plethora of ponies who were eager to give him whatever he asked for – including materials for practical experimentation – things would proceed far more quickly.
More quickly than they had gone over the last few days, at any rate. Between the servile ponies that he needed to deal with, and Sonata and Aria growing progressively more dissatisfied with how tepid his indulgence for their recreational pastimes was – to say nothing of his continuing refusal to engage in licentiousness with them – opportunities for research had been far more limited than he’d liked. Interruptions seemed to lurk around every-
“My prince?” called Feather Duster from the doorway to his quarters. “Forgive me for disturbing you, but I was just told that Las Pegasus is coming into view.”
“And?” he snapped, resenting the disturbance.
Wincing a little, Feather continued. “I’ve heard that the city is very beautiful when seen from a distance at night.” She paused then, as though waiting for him to intuit whatever she was implying. When he simply stared at her, waiting for her to get to the point, she seemed to wilt a little. “I think that Lady Dusk and Lady Blaze would enjoy seeing it.”
“Then you should be informing them of its proximity rather than me,” rebuked Lex.
“…I think they’d enjoy seeing it together with you.”
“They'll need to live with their disappointment.” Lex pointedly turned away from her then, making it clear that the conversation was over.
Out of his periphery, he saw Feather fold her ears back. “Yes, Your Highness.”
She slunk away then, but Lex had already put her out of his thoughts before the door clicked shut. Dealing with whoever was spying on him was too important, especially with all of the other distractions that he couldn't afford to ignore. He'd explain to Sonata and Aria what was happening after he had dealt with it; he couldn't take the chance that a scrying sensor would manifest while he was telling them prior to then. The possibility that the person viewing him didn't know that he'd discovered what they were doing was a potential advantage that Lex wasn't willing to give up. If they realized that he was taking action to stymie them, there was a risk that they'd be goaded into taking action to prevent that from happening, and that wasn't something he wanted to encourage. Until then…
Just a little more time, he reassured himself as he went back to work, mentally outlining the ritual that would put an end to this latest complication in his life.
“Sorry we’re late,” apologized Soft Mane as she sat down at the patio table, Spike taking a seat next to her. “We surprised my mom with a trip to the Ponyville Day Spa, and had to talk her into accepting the super-deluxe mane blow-out and massage we got for her.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all,” replied Fluttershy, giving the pair a timid smile as she passed menus their way. “We were still trying to figure out what to have for breakfast.”
“And we’d have waited either way,” added Applejack. “Takin’ care of family’s important.”
“I still can’t believe one of Princess Luna’s own guards attacked you guys,” huffed Rainbow Dash. “Did it not occur to him that he could have just asked to use Twilight’s portal thingy?”
“He didn’t exactly seem like the asking type,” noted Spike wryly, scanning his menu.
“Well, I still think that Princess Luna should have warned us that somepony so dangerous was on the loose,” added Rarity, her voice thick with disapproval. “That newspony from the Canterlot Chronicle that we met at the assembly Princess Celestia conveved even mentioned that cad had assaulted Twilight’s brother before he went missing, so clearly he was someone we should have been watching out for.”
“Hmm, it is kind of hard to believe she forgot to mention that,” agreed Pinkie, looking up from where she’d been using crayons to draw a surprisingly-detailed picture of herself as the Pona Lisa (save for the wide grin on her face) on the children’s placemat she’d requested. “I mean, besides telling everyone there that she’d been cursed, dealing with Discord, me and Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon finally making back from Everglow, that giant monster attacking, all of us almost dying, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon getting lost on Everglow again, and then all of us being saved by an angel, you think that would have been what that big meeting was all about!”
Coming from anyone else, that remark would have been sarcastic in the extreme, but coming from Pinkie the statement was completely genuine, something which made Rarity flinch in embarrassment. “Yes, well…I suppose she may have had other things on her mind.”
“If she didn’t before, she certainly does now,” murmured Fluttershy sadly, looking back down at the newspaper in front of her, the front page of which showed Luna – wingless and with her mane hanging limp – stoically looking at the camera.
Her comment caused several sets of ears to fold back. Luna’s public announcement of what Lex Legis had done to her had made the local papers that morning, and while it was still early, it had already taken the town by storm. A glance back inside the restaurant whose veranda they were on showed that their water – rather than coming back to take their orders – was huddled in a corner with several other members of the staff, their eyes glued to a copy of the same newspaper.
But that wasn’t the reason Fluttershy’s observation had caused everyone to cringe.
“So…anypony know if Princess Luna’s plannin’ to try again with the Crystal Heart?” asked Applejack after a moment.
That earned her an incredulous look from Soft Mane. “After what Spike said she went through the first time?”
“I know, it’s just…” Taking a moment to order her thoughts, Applejack tried again. “I ain’t no wizard, but I’ve picked up a few things about magic since I started studyin’ it, and one of those things is that just because somethin’ doesn’t work the first time don’t mean it ain’t never gonna work. Which is kinda like a lot of things, really.”
“You mean like how, at that conference, Princess Cadance said she needed a few tries before she was able to remove the curses that Lex Legis put on those other two ponies, Produce Aisle and Comfy Cozy?” murmured Fluttershy nervously, as though merely talking about the villain who had spread so much misery was frightening her.
“Yeah, but don’t forget what Twilight said when she took the curse off my wing back in Vanhoover,” pointed out Rainbow Dash. “Lex is doing something new with his curses that makes them harder than normal to remove.”
“So it’s like how my Nana Pinkie’s special caramel taffy bubblegum is so sticky it can even stick to non-stick pans?” pondered Pinkie, casually taking out a piece of the caramel taffy bubblegum she’d made that morning and popping it in her mouth, the thick substance quickly leaving her fighting to part her lips. “‘cuth thath weawwy thihy!”
“Something like that,” murmured Spike, shuddering as he remembered how spectacularly the Crystal Heart had failed to remove Lex’s curse from Princess Luna.
It hadn’t been for lack of trying. The moment the artifact had unleashed the love it had gathered from the crystal ponies, the dark magic Lex had covered Luna in had manifested, appearing as an inky black material that covered her completely, just like what had happened with Rainbow Dash’s wing. The hope had been that, just like Twilight had done then, the Crystal Heart would be able to peel the filmy substance off of her, at which point it would lose cohesion and dissipate, leaving Luna restored.
For a split-second, that had been what happened, the murky stuff stretching as the Crystal Heart’s aura pulled it away from Luna, tears appearing in its viscid-looking mass that revealed the alicorn underneath. In that instant, he and everypony else on the balcony had been able to see the real Luna – her stature restored, her mane waving, and her wings spreading outward – struggling to get out. And as more of the opaque film enveloping her was torn open, it had seemed like she would.
That was when the curse had started fighting back.
Writhing under the onslaught of the Crystal Heart’s magic, the dark magic had lashed out with a viciousness wholly unlike the previous attempt to remove it. Rippling and thrashing as though an electrical current was coursing through it, the black substance had thrown itself back onto Luna in large splotches, hauling its amorphous mass around her in defiance of the power tearing it away. Even as one section had been peeled away under the relentless aura of the Crystal Heart, another would lunge forward, covering part of her that had been freed only seconds before. It had been like watching a tar pit come to life, fighting to engulf a victim that fallen into it.
At that point everyone had rushed forward to help her, but it had been futile. For all that the substance of Lex’s curse had looked like a viscous mass, it hadn’t had a physical substance for them to grab. Twilight had explained later that the ebony goop was just what the magic looked like when manifesting to the point of being visible with the naked eye, and wasn’t something that could actually be touched, but at the time all they’d known was that they couldn’t seem to grab hold of the stuff. Twilight and Cadance – who had flown back up to the balcony when she’d heard the commotion – had been the only ones to use their magic instead, the two of them casting their curse-removal spells in an effort to turn the tide.
It hadn’t worked.
None of them had been able to do anything as Luna – screaming wildly as she fought with every fiber of her being to get away – had been pulled back into the lightless sludge, not just once but again and again and again, the Crystal Heart pushing it back enough to give her a glimpse of freedom but never enough for her to extricate herself completely. Even when she’d fallen to the ground, too exhausted to do anything but moan and shudder, the two magical forces had remained locked in stalemate, the substance of the curse being pulled apart only to reconstitute itself around her again seconds later.
That had been when Celestia had told Cadance to stop the Crystal Heart, the younger alicorn obeying immediately, recognizing that letting the struggle continue would only make things worse for Luna. Wordlessly, Cadance had flown down and removed the artifact from the center of the plaza, its aura dying away immediately. The instant it was gone, the black magic of the curse had overrun Luna again, the thickness of it surrounding her and hiding her from sight before it began to draw inward, sinking back into her until it was clinging to her like a second skin. When that had finally receded, Luna was once again her diminished self, being a unicorn to all appearances, surrounded by the shimmering and translucent forms of everyone else who had been touched by the Crystal Heart.
“…Spike?”
“Huh?” Shaking his head as he drawn away from the fearsome memory, Spike looked up. “Sorry Rarity, what did you say?”
“I said, do you think that Princess Celestia might try to negotiate with Lex Legis to remove her sister’s curse now that he’s a prince?” repeated Rarity.
But Spike didn’t have a chance to answer as Rainbow Dash jumped in. “Seriously? First Twilight, then Applejack, and now you’re talking about reasoning with him too? Rarity, I know all that highbrow royalty stuff is kind of your thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that Lex is a bad guy, and you don’t negotiate with bad guys, you kick their butts!”
An uncomfortable look crossed Rarity’s face at the rebuke, but it was there for only a moment before she gave her mane a toss, putting her nose in the air with an indignant huff. “As unpalatable as you might find the prospect, Rainbow Dash, I hardly think it would be beyond the pale for somepony to make compromises for the sake of someone they love.”
Pushing back the brim of her hat, Applejack nodded. “I know what you mean, Rarity.”
For some reason, that made the unicorn in question blink. “Y-you do?”
“Absolutely. Luna might be a princess and all, but to Princess Celestia she’s just her little sister, which means she wants to look out for her the way you do for Sweetie Belle and I do for Apple Bloom.”
“Oh yes, yes of course,” agreed Rarity quickly. “Watching out for one’s little sister is precisely what I meant.”
Peeking out from behind her mane, Fluttershy bit her lip. “You don’t think it would be different if the person you had to bargain with was the same person who hurt her in the first place, though?”
“Maybe it’ll be easier if Princess Celestia sends somepony to do it for her!” gushed Pinkie. “Like how I’ll sometimes ask Gummy to buy party supplies for me when I’m working on a big new surprise birthday bash for somepony and can’t get away! Even though he sometimes buys the wrong ones because he thinks polka dot balloons are the best even though solid colors are a party favorite for almost everypony in Ponyville and I have to make extra trips in order to return them and pick up the right ones, most of the time he’s really helpful!”
Soft Mane frowned, having met Pinkie’s pet alligator recently, but before she could ask about how such a sedentary creature could run errands, Rainbow Dash gave a snort. “Probably Twilight then. I guess if she can get Lex to agree to a duel, she might be able to get him to agree to change Luna back,” she groused. “I still think she should just lay the smackdown on him until he undoes her curse, though.”
Ignoring her girlfriend’s complaining, Applejack turned her attention to Spike. “Speakin’ of Twilight, any word from her, sugarcube?”
His features tightening with worry, Spike shook his head. “Not for a couple of days now. Last I heard, she’d made it to Viljatown, and was planning to use the magic map there to teleport to where Starlight said she was, but nothing since then.”
Fluttershy perked her ears up. “That place has a magic map? Like the one in Twilight’s castle that sent us to Vanhoover?”
Spike shook his head. “Not exactly. In the center of this hedge maze right by the castle in the middle of the city, there’s this big map of Everglow set in the ground. It’s called the Mythril Map, and it can teleport you to any place that it shows, even if you haven’t been there before. You have to pay a fee to use it, but I’m pretty sure it depicts the griffon kingdom too, so Twilight was planning on using that to get to Cuachan.”
“Aw, she’s going to Cuachan?” pouted Pinkie. “I wish I’d known! I’d have told her to pack warm clothes, bring extra toothpaste, and watch out for assassins!”
A heavy silence fell then, as a round of alarmed glances were exchanged. “Pinkie,” gulped Rarity at last, “what exactly do you mean, darling?”
“Well,” began Pinkie casually, “griffons use their beaks for eating, so they don’t really worry about brushing their teeth-”
“Not that part!” yelled Rainbow Dash, slamming her hooves on the table in agitation. “The part about the assassins!”
“Oh, that,” chuckled Pinkie. “Well, Cuachan is where I finally found Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon. They were getting ready to flee the city because they’d tried to break into the textile market in order to earn some money to try and get home, and some of the local griffons were so mad that they hired some assassins to deal with them. I heard they had some really close calls too!”
Heedless of the horrified looks being directed her way, Pinkie glanced back toward the restaurant. “Do you think anypony’s ever going to come take our orders? I’m really hungry!”
“It needs to be understood that the sound I’m looking for is one of elegance and refinement, rather than some crass mishmash of insouciant dissonance.”
Nod nod nod.
“But it’s not enough that it should be euphonious, you realize. It must also be stirring. Not because it overwhelms the senses with some sort of acoustic onslaught, but because its sweet melody tantalizes those who hear it with glimpses of rarefaction.”
Nod nod nod.
“Of course, the most integral component for this piece is its cognizance of its role as an accompaniment. It should seek to complement the dulcet tones of my voice, providing a backdrop against which the illustriousness of my words can reach their fullest flowering. The way a competent servant performs their duties so well that they fade into the background, the mellifluousness that I’m seeking should be felt rather than truly heard, elevating my grandeur to a truly captivating level. Is that understood?”
Nod nod nod.
Blueblood frowned, suspicious of how easily the lofty requirements he had were being agreed to. “I want to make it very clear that you weren’t my first choice for this,” he harumphed, wanting to make sure the pony he was talking to had a firm sense of their own unimportance. “My first instinct was to retain the services of the Canterlot Philharmonic, but alas, they were unable to accommodate a last-minute engagement.”
That was technically true, though the fact that the cost of hiring them, on top of paying for their travel expenses, meals, and lodgings would have done serious damage to his remaining finances had been a factor as well. Not that he was worried about money, of course; that would cease to be a problem once he was a prince again. It was just that every day he went without having regained his title saw his available funds shrink a little more…
Brushing aside that unwholesome thought, Blueblood turned his attention back to dressing down the irreverent pony accompanying him. “My next selection was a local cellist of some renown, something which I found hard to believe given that she lives in this bucolic little thorp” – he waved a hoof to indicate Ponyville as they crossed the town’s one and only bridge – “but whose work came highly recommended nevertheless.” And who was, no doubt, much cheaper. “But in this, too, I was undone, as she’s currently taken a three-week posting with the Whinnyapolis Symphony Orchestra. Which brings me to you, my third choice.”
He gave his companion a practiced side-eye then, making sure his gaze was critical and unwelcoming. But to his muted distress, all he received was a series of nods from the pony beside him, who seemed distinctly unintimidated by his scowling visage. It was enough to leave Blueblood unnerved. Word of his dethronement had already spread across Canterlot; had news of his shame reached as far as this hamlet?
His anxiety swelling, Blueblood rushed forward, planning himself in front of the mare he’d been walking next to ever since he spotted her trotting through the town square, recognizing her from the description he’d been given after asking several local plebians where he could find a quality minstrel. “Miss, er, DJ Pon-3,” he began, fighting down the urge to wince at the grandiloquent name, “you’ve presented yourself as being extremely confident that you can create music that will abet my efforts to woo a princess, but I’m afraid I must demand some further display of proof with regard to the quality of your music.”
The mare in front of him – a walking testament to bourgeois taste, with her spiky blue mane, tacky sunglasses, and some sort of plastic earmuffs; had it not been for her cutie mark of a musical note, he’d never have guessed that she was melodically inclined – came to a stop, her ceaseless nodding finally ending in favor of her cocking her head to the side. Putting a hoof to her chin, she looked away in thought, before a smile of inspiration crossed her face. Her horn lighting up, she lifted her earmuffs from her head, and to Blueblood’s confusion, placed them on him as she telekinetically cranked a dial-
And the most horrific din imaginable assaulted his ears.
The electrified screeching was worse than ten thousand hooves being drawn across chalkboards. The heavy percussions sounded like the denizens of Tartarus clamoring to be free of their prison. The atonal sound effects were like the warbling of a thousand parakeets as they were throttled in their nests by a horde of sadistic cats. Taken together, it was more than just an assault on his carefully-cultivated aural sensibilities; it was the sound of utter madness made manifest, and in the face of it, there was only one possible reaction.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! MY ROYAL EARS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED!!!”
Flinging the earmuffs – which were clearly imbued with some sort of dark magic – away from him, Blueblood turned and ran as fast as his hooves could carry him.
Watching him go, DJ Pon-3 gave a relieved sigh as she picked up her headphones and put them back on, adjusting the volume back to the level that she liked. Bobbing her head, she went back about her day, once again pleasant now that the weirdo who liked to hear himself talk was no longer ruining her enjoyment of her techno track with his endless blabbering.
“-and so you see, that’s why I need an arrangement of floral decorations beyond any mere bouquet, but rather a collection of efflorescent beauty that conveys both sophistication and hauteur in equal measure, demonstrating why a match between myself and the princess would be not only a boon to her, but to all of Equestria,” finished Blueblood. “Does that answer your query, or do I need to provide additional details?”
“No!” blurted one of the flower merchants immediately; Daisy, she’d said her (distressingly common) name was. “We get it!”
“I believe what our friend is trying to say,” interjected her companion, an (exceedingly plain-looking) earth mare named Lily Valley, “is that we understand perfectly what you mean, Your Highness.”
“After almost ten minutes of explaining, how could we not?” groused the third member of the (ill-mannered and quite possibly inbred) trio, named Roseluck, also an earth mare. “And he’s not a prince anymore, remember?”
Blueblood glowered at the tactless wench. “That,” he pronounced, using every inch of poise he’d spent his life commanding, “is a situation that will be soon rectified, if you’ll hurry and bring me your most cultured of blooms. On the double, if you want me to remember the role you played in my regaining my status.”
“Of course, Sire,” smiled Lily Valley, clearly the least dull-witted of the three of them. “In fact, I know just the flower.” Ducking her head below the counter, she came up with a set of crimson blossoms in her mouth, depositing them in front of him. “Since you’re looking to start a romance between yourself and Princess Twilight – or, um, Princess Cadance – red roses are exactly what you’re looking for! They symbolize passion, allure, and-”
“Utter banality,” scoffed Blueblood, recoiling from the repulsive plants. “Just look at these! They’re not even heirloom roses! Ugh!” Putting a hoof over his nose, lest his royal senses be subject to the quotidian stench being thrust at him, he stepped back. “I don’t know what filthy alleyway you pulled these out of, but take them away at once!”
Grumbling, Lily removed the flowers, even as Daisy brought a glass jar filled with deep pink flowers over. “How about carnations? This shade represents admiration with just a touch of desire, and is perfect-”
“For a hoedown, perhaps.” Giving a sneer that he’d used countless times before, Blueblood lifted his nose into the air, away from the offending vegetation. “I’m asking one of those parvenue princesses to merge their heritage with my own illustrious bloodline, not for some floozy to accompany me to a school dance!”
One eye twitching, Daisy took the jar away, even as Roseluck brought a flowerpot with some yellow flora forward. “Peonies,” she said flatly as she put them down. “Traditional for wedding bouquets, the yellow color signifies new beginnings. Since their name means ‘most beautiful-’”
“More like ‘most juvenile,” groaned Blueblood, sighing, making sure to do so well away from the atrocious herbage so he wouldn’t breathe in any of its lackluster odor. “My good lady, I know that high society is alien to you, but among those of us who possess actual class, there’s a saying: ‘peonies are for peons.’ And I, my dear, am no peon.”
Muttering under her breath, Roseluck removed the flowerpot, and Lily managed another smile as she gently ushered her friends backward. “Can you excuse us for a moment, Your Highness? I’m sure if we put our heads together, we’ll be able to come up with something to your liking.”
“I truly hope so,” lamented Blueblood. “But I confess, I’m losing confidence after how disappointing your recommendations have been so far.”
Roseluck made a sound suspiciously similar to a growl, and Daisy struck the ground rather sharply with one foreleg, with Lily having to struggle in order to usher them away. “We’re terribly sorry about that. Please wait just a second.”
Making a dismissive gesture, Blueblood didn’t bother answering, silently bemoaning how hard it was to find good help, especially in this dreary little burg. That Princess Twilight lived here voluntarily was a sign of just how badly the poor thing needed actual royalty in her life. The first thing we’ll do once we’re wed is move back to Canterlot, Blueblood decided. Though that’s only IF I choose her. Cadance having a husband already is certainly inconvenient, but at least she has the good sense to live in a proper city.
“Your Highness?” came Lily’s voice. “I think we have a winner.”
Arching a brow skeptically, Blueblood nevertheless paused as he looked at the collection of purple flowers contained in a surprisingly stylish vase. “Orchids,” he murmured.
“Exactly!” smiled Lily, clopping her hooves together in delight. “As I’m sure you know, orchids are the mark of a one-of-a-kind love, while also exemplifying beauty and strength. This purple variety is also the hue of royalty, which makes it perfect for you and whichever princess you choose.”
“Hmm.” Ignoring how pleased the earth mare trio looked, Blueblood leaned in closer, taking a tentative whiff of the flowers. To his mild surprise, the aroma was exquisite as he’d hoped, and he couldn’t help but lean in closer, taking a deeper breath, feeling the interior of the petals kiss the end of his nose-
“Oh, er, Sire, you…you have a little something on your muzzle there,” murmured Lily bashfully.
Blinking, realizing that he could still feel something between his nostrils even after he pulled his nose free of the plant, Blueblood’s eyes crossed as he looked down…
And beheld the monstrous caterpillar crawling up his face.
“Sorry about that,” laughed Lily weakly as she reached forward to brush if off of him, gently depositing it on a nearby patch of dandelions. “The scent draws in all sorts of creatures sometimes, but it’s really…Your Highness? Are you alright?”
But Blueblood couldn’t hear her, instead still staring at the tip of his nose. “An insect,” he murmured, his eyes widening in dread. “A common insect was besmirching my luxurious face! A lowly, base vermin despoiled my features!”
The trio exchanged a look, concerned. “Um, it was just a caterpillar,” ventured Daisy hesitantly. “It’s not like it did anything. You can’t even tell it was there.”
Blueblood, however, was beyond reassurance, his eyes rolling back in his head as he collapsed to the ground, insensate.
“The horror!” he whispered as the last remnant of his consciousness fled. “The horror!”
For several seconds the three mares just stared, with Daisy eventually rubbing the back of her neck self-consciously. “Huh. Anypony else feel kind of upstaged?”
Blinking, Roseluck removed the orchids from the countertop, ignoring her friend’s remark. “Well, at least now we know what flowers to get him when he wakes up.”
Lily tilted her head. “We do?”
“Mm-hmm.” Lifting a pot of orange-and-black blooms, she put the bouquet down with a smirk of satisfaction. “Pansies for the pansy.”
Blueblood panted, exhaustion and nerves having sapped him of his strength. Sweat ran down his brow, something which he knew was hideously inelegant, but made no move to wipe away. Even a second’s distraction could cost him everything now.
Across from him, the demon that had kidnapped the princess crouched, baring its fangs as it roared in fury at his having trespassed in its domain. But beneath the creature’s bluster, Blueblood was sure that he could detect a hint of fear. After all, the monster had surely thought that it was safe here in its underworld abode, protected by its innumerable minions as well as fiendish traps that should have laid any would-be rescuer low, leaving it free to visit vile torments on the princess free from interruption. And yet here now stood a pony in front of it, undaunted and defiant.
“Come then, beast,” murmured Blueblood as he took a slow breath, knowing that he couldn’t afford to tense up lest it hinder his reflexes. “Let us bring this dance to a close.”
As if it understood him, the monster suddenly rushed forward, one claw slicing out so fast it could barely be seen.
But Blueblood was no longer in its path, having burst into motion as soon as the demon had started moving. He’d been caught by that monster’s claws before, and though he’d suffered grievous damage from them, he’d picked up on the beast’s fighting style. No longer would he be rendered helpless, cursing his own weakness as he struggled to continue the battle. No more would he be caught unaware by the monster’s lightning-fast reflexes. The demon’s timing was known to him now, and this time the creature would fall.
With the barest grunt of effort, he sailed over the outstretched talons, leaping forward to put his hoof directly between the demon’s eyes. A pained grunt escaped the thing, its features contorting in a grimace as the blow struck home. It scuttled backward, trying to buy some room in order to compose a counterattack, but Blueblood had no intention of surrendering the advantage.
Darting forward, he launched attacks in rapid succession, his hooves blurring as he pummeled the monster. Blow after blow struck home, punching through the demon’s defenses as he whittled down its stamina, each hit causing it to stagger just long enough for the next one to land. It was working!
“Keep going!” came a shout from behind him, that of the youth he’d met at the start of his adventure, his guide who’d helped him reached the abode of the monster that had stolen the princess. “You can do it!”
Blueblood couldn’t answer, all of his focus trained upon beating the monstrosity into submission. If he could just keep the demon off-balance, giving it no time to recover!
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the creature snapped its head forward, its skull colliding with his own and sending him reeling backward. Sucking in a sudden breath, Blueblood tried to recover in time, but wasn’t able to regain his hoofing before the monster charged forward, its bulk slamming into him and sending him skidding across the ground.
“No no no no! Get up get up get up get up!” yelled the earth colt.
Biting back a snarl, Blueblood struggled to do just that, knowing that he had a second – two at most – before the thing would follow up on its attack. All too slowly, he managed to rise, barely able to shift into a defensive stance as the onslaught arrived. Shifting his weight as he dodged some strikes and blocked others, he was somehow able to keep his guard up as the monster pressed him, knowing that he just needed to wait for the right moment…
And suddenly he saw it.
The monster’s last strike with its claws had just missed him, leaving a gap in the thing’s defenses. Without stopping to think, knowing that the point of vulnerability would vanish if he didn’t act immediately, Blueblood abandoned his defense, throwing everything he could into one last, desperate rush. “Take this, fiend!” he bellowed as he shot forward, planting a two-hooved punch directly to the thing’s chest, right over whatever sludge that it called a heart.
And the demon fell, a croaking rasp of defeat passing its hideous lips as it collapsed to the ground. For a moment Blueblood remained at the ready, certain that it was going to rise again. But as the seconds passed and it failed to stir, he realized that he’d done it. It was finished.
He’d won.
“You did it!” whooped the urchin, giving a holler as he reared up on his hind legs. “You beat him!”
“Indeed,” sighed Blueblood, finally feeling his fatigue catching up with him. It had been a long battle, on top of an even longer quest, having taken effort and money to complete. But now, at last, it was done. And the object of his crusade was finally within reach.
Slowly, the princess stepped forward from out of the bowels of the demon’s lair. Her dress was immaculate, confirming that he’d been in time to stop the thing from subjecting her to its foul depredations. Her hair swayed behind her as she elegantly stepped forward, the picture of grace and beauty. And her smile was radiance itself, and directed only at him as she stepped forward, her lips parting to give him the benediction that he’d sought for so long.
“Congratulations, hero! A winner is you!”
Blueblood blinked. That hadn’t been what he’d been expecting.
“Now let’s go get a hayburger,” continued the princess. “Ha ha ha!”
His brow furrowing at the uncouth sentiment, Blueblood shook his head as he turned his attention from the surprisingly unrefined princess, instead turning to look at the youth who’d helped guide him on his journey. “It’s done,” he proclaimed. “The demon is defeated and the princess is rescued. Now, how do I make this feat known to the masses?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” grinned the dirt-brown earth colt, giving the propellor on his beanie cap a spin. “You just go ahead and enter your initials now. See?”
Frowning, Blueblood turned back to the screen set in the arcade cabinet where he’d spent the last few hours. Sure enough, the screen was now asking him to enter his initials. Dutifully, he did so…and his scowl grew deeper as the screen changed to say GAME OVER. “Now what?”
“Now,” answered the colt (whose name, Blueblood belatedly realized, he couldn’t recall), “everypony who plays this will know that you’ve got the highest score!”
“And that display of my prowess and dedication will stir the hearts of Princesses Twilight and Cadance?” pressed Blueblood, suddenly wishing that he’d confirmed this before he’d spent several hours and a large number of bits on this endeavor, instead of being lured in when he’d heard the frustrated youth exclaim that overcoming the “boss monster” was a task beyond even the capabilities of Princess Celestia.
“Huh?” Scratching one ear, the colt shrugged. “Well, I don’t think they really like video games. It’s mostly just me and some of the guys from school.”
Blueblood felt his heart sink. “Some of the guys from school?” he echoed numbly.
The colt nodded. “Yeah. Like, Rumble and Featherweight and Pipsqueak. Sometimes Twist will come too, but she doesn’t show up as much since she got her cutie mark. That new guy, Sunflower is kind of cool, but he spends most of his time with Sweetie Belle.”
The colt’s face soured at that last part, but Blueblood was no longer paying attention, instead shuffling off as he realized how much time and money he’d wasted. His great accomplishment was something that the princesses wouldn’t even know of, fit only for impressing the simpleminded children of this town! All of that effort, wasted on something that Twilight and Cadance wouldn’t even know about!
Sighing, Blueblood marched back toward Ponyville, leaving the colt in the unfashionable beanie to slip a few coins in the machine he’d just vacated. For a moment Blueblood thought about doubling back and unplugging the machine, just to pay the child back for causing him so much pointless grief, but decided that was beneath him.
He’d spent enough time trying to save a royal mare who wasn’t even real.
His princess was in another castle.
“…and when I went to go talk to her directly, her pet dragon told me that Princess Twilight wasn’t even home!” moaned Blueblood forlornly. “And when I asked him when she’d be back, he said he didn’t know!”
“Oh, you poor dear,” murmured the bright green earth mare lying on the next table over. “You’ve had such a hard time of it. He’s had such a hard time of it, hasn’t he, Bulk?”
“YEAH!” howled the muscular pegasus giving her a massage.
“I know,” sighed Blueblood, feeling quite sorry for himself as the earth mares tending to him – a pair of twins named Lotus and Aloe – worked the stress from his body. As much as Blueblood knew he needed to conserve his bits, the aggravation that he’d gone through today could only be assuaged by some pampering. At least here he’d managed to find a sympathetic ear. “I was aware that being a commoner would be hard, but I had no idea it would be this hard! And the worst part is knowing that all of my effort has come to naught! I’m no closer to wooing Twilight or Cadance now than I was when I started!”
“Well, I don’t know if this will help,” grunted the green pony as her masseur pressed down hard on her back, “but I’m not sure how much flowers or music would have helped anyway. From what I know of them, those girls don’t put much more stock in those than they do in video games.”
The only thing that kept Blueblood from rolling his eyes was the fact that the twins had just places pickle slices over them. “You’re a close confidant of two princesses, then?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” chuckled the middle-aged mare. “But I like to think I’ve gotten to know Twilight pretty well after living with her these last few weeks. And my daughter is a pen pal with Cadance.”
Blueblood snorted. “Of course, that-…wait, you’re cohabitating with Twilight Sparkle?” Sitting up, he peeled the vegetable slices off of his face, turning to give his conversation partner more scrutiny. “And your daughter is corresponding with her sister-in-law?”
She flashed him an embarrassed smile, one which changed into a grimace as Bulk bent her hind legs back. “I don’t like to advertise it too much, since it makes it sound like I’m somepony important. I’d really rather just find a nice little cottage somewhere where me and my daughter can live. But my little girl loves it, since this way she’s never more than a few rooms away from her boyfriend.”
Blueblood’s eyebrows rose, alarmed. “Her boyfriend? There’s a stallion residing under the same roof as the princess?” If so, then sooner or later they’d realize that dating a princess would be far superior to the doubtlessly-plain girl this mare had birthed, even if her daughter was apparently trading letters with Princess Cadance for some reason. And unlike Cadance, there was no indication that Twilight adhered to a religion that allowed for multiple spouses, which meant that there might very well be a disaster in the making!
But his worries were dispelled a moment later. “Oh, heavens no!” chuckled the earth mare. “She’s dating Spike, the dragon you mentioned before.”
Blueblood did a double take at that. “She’s being courted by him?!”
Her chuckling turned into full-blown laughter. “Yeah, that’s how everyone reacts at first. But what can I say? The heart wants what the heart wants. It’s just like how it was with me and my husband, back in the day. Everyone was scandalized, but we didn’t care; we were in love and that was all that mattered.”
“Yes, well, you had the luxury of not worry about other ponies’ expectations,” muttered Blueblood, not wanting to know what sort of creature the pony across from him had married that had caused the scandal. Probably a donkey, since she had a daughter now; as far as Blueblood knew, they were the only race that could actually breed with ponies, though why anypony would consent to such a thing was beyond him. “As royalty, I can’t afford to be so blasé.”
“I suppose I can understand that,” admitted the mare as Bulk moved up to her shoulders. “But from what I know of them, Twilight and Cadance don’t think like that. They’re not concerned with their status, so trying to appeal to that won’t sway them very much, no matter how nice the things you get them are.”
Blueblood doubted that very much. In his experience, mares were all simple creatures, fainting over his title and his money and his fame. But then, he realized with a frown, as princesses, Twilight and Cadance had all of those things already. Of course, not having been born into royalty, their ability to appreciate them was certainly lacking, but that wasn’t to his advantage either, since it meant that his ability to discern what was worthy of royalty and what wasn’t would be wasted on them.
Trying to romance those two was going to prove more difficult than he’d thought.
Taking a moment to mull that over, Blueblood licked his lips. “I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, Miss…?”
“Grass Patch,” answered the mare. “And I think I might have a few…”
That was a question that Princess Celestia had been asked more than a few times over the last several days. Ever since her younger sister had gone public about the curse that Lex Legis had placed on her, well-wishes and statements of support had come pouring in, often in conjunction with queries about her state of mind. With the news still spreading across Equestria as the story was reprinted in the papers of cities further from Canterlot, to say nothing of the gradual dissemination of how the Crystal Heart had failed to restore her – that particular story wasn’t something they’d put into print, but it didn’t matter; with nearly the entire population of the Crystal Empire having witnessed what happened, there was no way to keep that disturbing piece of news contained – it wasn’t a situation Celestia expected to abate for some time.
Hearing the question again now, she almost launched into her usual answer out of sheer reflex, an assurance that Luna was holding up well immediately coming to her lips, along with praise for her sister’s courage and resiliency in the face of hardship. The pony asking the question this time, however, wasn’t a rich socialite or visiting mayor, but Shining Armor, the Prince of the Crystal Empire. More than that, he was the brother of her most cherished pupil, the husband of her adopted niece, and the former Captain of her Royal Guard, making him one of the very few ponies whom Celestia thought of as family, and someone she knew she could trust with the truth.
“I’m worried about her,” she sighed, crossing the drawing room to sit on a cushion across from her guest. Settling down, she took a sip of her tea, grimacing a bit at how cold it had gotten. Normally one of the servants would have changed it out for a warmer pot, but she’d asked them to give her and Shining Armor some privacy. “She’s trying to put on a brave face, but I can tell she’s losing hope about ever returning to normal.”
Shining Armor nodded, his lack of surprise making it clear that he’d been expecting something along those lines. “And how are you holding up?”
The question made Celestia smile. Back when he’d been the Captain of the Royal Guard, he’d often asked her that, not taking it for granted that Equestria’s eldest princess could weather any hardship without the slightest bit of upset the way so many of her little ponies thought she did. Although she didn’t begrudge anyone for thinking that she was unflappable – it was an appearance that she’d cultivated, knowing that it helped to reassure her subjects – she’d still appreciated the consideration. It had been one of several reasons why she’d encouraged his relationship with Cadance back when they’d started dating, despite how shocked the press had been that a princess would allow herself to be courted.
But that didn't mean she wanted to talk about herself at the moment. “I’m alright.”
The look on his face made it clear that he didn’t believe her. Thankfully, he knew her well enough to know that she didn’t want him to push the issue, and he took a sip of his own tea instead. For a long moment silence filled the room, and it was only when it was broken by the soft clink of his teacup being returned to its saucer that he spoke again.
“What are we going to do?”
Celestia closed her eyes at the question, giving the appearance of thinking it over. In fact, she’d been expecting him to ask her that – or some variation of it – for some time now. Ever since he’d insisted on accompanying her and Luna back to Canterlot, in fact.
For all that he was a compassionate pony, Shining Armor was also a military stallion. When faced with a threat, his instinct was to come up with a plan of engagement. So when he’d asked her to brief him on everything that Twilight had told him about her recent trip to Vanhoover – since Twilight herself had rushed off to Everglow less than an hour after receiving her student’s frantic call for help – during the train ride back, Celestia had known that he was trying to come up with an idea for what their next move should be.
Of course, she also knew that he wouldn’t have raised the issue unless he’d arrived at an answer. It was just that he wouldn’t volunteer whatever solution he’d come up without giving her a chance to speak on whatever subject they were discussing first, a holdover from before his rank had become equal to hers.
“What do you think we should do?” she prompted.
Shining Armor’s response was immediate. “We should march on Vanhoover and hit Lex Legis with everything we’ve got.”
Celestia was already shaking her head. “No.”
But Shining Armor wasn’t finished; while he might have been solicitous of her take on a situation before voicing his own opinion, he wasn’t afraid to disagree with her, nor explain his reasoning, traits which she’d encouraged back when he’d been the leader of the Royal Guard. “A joint operation,” he pressed. “Vanhoover’s rail line is part of a loop between Canterlot and the Crystal Empire. We each take all of the guards we can spare, and have them advance on the city by train from both directions. We commandeer Cloudsdale and have the Wonderbolts cordon the city off from the air; the mountains will make it easy to hide its approach. If done right, we can have Vanhoover surrounded before anypony knows what’s happening. All we’ll need to do then is send a squad to lock down the dockyards.”
“Numbers won’t be enough to defeat somepony as powerful as Lex,” pointed out Celestia.
But Shining Armor had an answer for that too. “I know, that’s why I’ll face him myself. I’m aware of how ridiculous that sounds, since he was able to hold his own against you and Luna together, but I’ve been training nonstop since the Elemental Bleeds, physically and magically. If Lex really is weakened the way Twilight thinks he is, then I think I have a real shot at overcoming him.”
Celestia paused just long enough to make sure he was finished. “And where’s Cadance when you’re putting yourself at risk like this? Or Twilight, for that matter? Or me?”
His ears flickered, as though he’d started to fold them back only to catch himself before completing the motion. “It’s better if I’m the one to assume the risk for this.”
“Shining Armor…”
“I understand your hesitation,” he insisted, “but there’s no one else. If you or Cadance or Twilight show up, there’s a chance that we’ll lose another alicorn to a curse like Luna’s; if I'm the only one leading the operation, that won’t happen. Discord’s not reliable, Mihr won’t get involved, and even if Twilight was here, removing the Elements from the Tree of Harmony puts it at risk. I’m the only one who can do this.”
His horn lit up as he reached into his saddlebags, pulling out papers covered with his hornwriting. “This isn’t bravado talking. I’ve interviewed every member of the Royal Guard you and Luna brought to Vanhoover – Silhouette notwithstanding – and I know it’s not just Lex that we’ll need to deal with. Before he was killed, Silhouette defeated one of the Sirens with a spell that muffled sound; if I put them in a force field that’s also a bubble of silence, they won’t be a problem. Those child soldiers that he’s indoctrinated into his vile religion were tough, but they’re still just kids with zoo animals; a squadron of guards was able to subdue them last time, so they’ll be able to again. Everyone else in his camp is basically just an ordinary pony. And you said that Twilight told you that that magic scythe of his, Severance, was nowhere to be seen, right? If it’s really gone, then that’s all the more reason to act now.”
Putting the guards’ statements away, Shining Armor gave her an earnest look. “I’ve faced King Sombra’s magic before, so I know what it can do, and having a wife who’s the Chosen of Lashtada has made me familiar with how divine magic works. If Twilight’s right about something being wrong with Lex’s ‘thaumaturgical’ spellcasting, then this is our opportunity. Even if we can’t defeat him, we might be able to put enough pressure on him to at least change Luna back, but only if we act now.”
For almost a full minute, Celestia didn’t answer, considering what he’d told her. Luna’s tell-all in the newspaper had put a lot of ponies on edge, she knew; the idea that an alicorn could be turned into an ordinary pony – and that the villain who’d done so was ruling a city openly in brazen defiance of royal authority – had caused more than a few of the ponies sending condolences for Luna to voice concerns about “the stability of the ongoing situation,” as Fancy Pants had put it.
Those concerns, Celesta knew, would only grow worse when everypony found out that Lex had donned the mantle of royalty himself.
But even so, what Shining Armor was suggesting…
“When I banished Luna to the moon, it sent shockwaves throughout Equestria,” she said at last.
Shining Armor cocked his head, clearly not having expected the conversation to turn to events from a millennium ago. “I’m…sure that it did.”
“Everypony was afraid,” she continued. “The two of us, ruling together, were a bedrock institution in the lives of our subjects. As much as we’d encouraged our little ponies to govern themselves, we were still their protectors, living symbols of the stability of Equestria. To lose one of those symbols – not because of some enemy or accident, but because she’d embraced the very darkness that we were supposed to fight – frightened everypony badly. Enough so that I needed to form an entirely new military order in order to restore public confidence.”
“The Protective Pony Platoons,” nodded Shining Armor. “Which led to the E.U.P. Guard, the pegasus branch of which eventually became the Wonderbolts. I’m familiar with the history.”
“It’s history now,” noted Celestia. “But at the time, I wasn’t at all certain that it would turn out the way that it did. Because it wasn’t just the public that was frightened. I was too.”
“I was afraid – terrified, to be honest – that the rift that had formed between Luna and myself would deepen, to the point of dividing all of Equestria.” Standing up, she moved to a nearby window, staring out at the vista that was Canterlot. “Despite how unappreciated she felt, there were more than a few of our subjects who deeply admired my sister. They did so from afar, since her role as Princess of the Night kept her distant from them, but the notion that she’d turned to evil and been banished was hard for them to accept. They eventually did, but it took a long time.”
Behind her, she heard Shining Armor stand up, though he made no move to join her at the window. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at.”
“I was able to bring Equestria back from the brink because, when I told everypony the truth about what had happened, there was no other version of the story for them to cling to. Luna hadn’t cultivated any sort of following before she became Nightmare Moon, nor did she have a chance to find adherents after her transformation. Because of that, those ponies who felt personally invested in Luna didn’t have any support structure to reinforce whatever misguided loyalty they would have transferred to Nightmare Moon.” She turned to look at Shining Armor then, her expression grave. “None of that is true for Lex Legis.”
This time his ears did fold back, recognizing at last what she was talking about. “Hold on, you actually think that if we make a move on Vanhoover…”
“Then it could lead to a civil war,” finished Celestia softly.
Shining Armor shook his head. “No. No way. He’s got maybe a thousand refugees squatting in tents and cheap houses. If we bring down him and his inner circle, then so long as we keep the food and blankets coming-”
“You’re grossly underestimating the hold Lex has developed on the hearts of the ponies under his command,” interrupted Celestia. “It’s true that when Luna and I went to Vanhoover, opinions toward him were only lukewarm, enough so that if we’d defeated him then I doubt there would have been any major problems. But based on what Twilight told me, since that time he’s made great strides in winning everypony over. Nor is his influence limited to Vanhoover; the ponies of Tall Tale also speak of him as their savior.”
“That thing with the dragon?” Shining Armor scoffed. “So they made him honorary mayor. Do you really think they’d go to war for him?”
“According to Twilight, he stabilized the damage that their period of isolation did to their economy when he reopened Vanhoover’s markets,” explained Celestia. “Add in how many of Tall Tale’s merchants have been visiting Vanhoover to sell their wares, and the critically ill and injured ponies that he’s shipped to Tall Tale’s hospital, and the two communities are mingling a great deal, spreading Vanhoover’s enthusiasm for Lex to Tall Tale, which was already predisposed toward him. And that’s not even taking into account his religion.”
“Even if he’s started training acolytes, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.” Shining Armor put a hoof to his chest. “I told you that I know what divine spellcasters can do, and whatever magic they’ve received, it won’t be enough to stand up to trained guard ponies.”
But Celestia couldn’t have looked less reassured as she returned to her place at the table and sat down. “It’s not their spellcasting that worries me, it’s their conviction. You saw what happened to Silhouette when he had a crisis of faith. Imagine a city – or multiple cities – filled with ponies who would react like that if they saw us remove Lex, the exemplar of their goddess, from power.”
There was nothing Shining Armor could say to that. Celestia could almost see him replaying the one and only encounter he’d had with Luna’s former guard in his mind, when the distraught earth stallion had slugged him across the face in broad daylight, in front of a crowd. Just the thought of a mob of ponies like that was enough to give her the chills, and it must have been the same for him because he shuddered before sinking back onto his cushion. “So that’s it then?” he asked, his voice bitter. “We can’t risk an invasion, so instead…what? You’ll try to cut a deal with him to change Luna back?”
“No,” answered Celestia without hesitation. “Lex isn’t trustworthy. If I bargained with him to remove Luna’s curse, he’d do something underhoofed like removing it and then putting it right back again, saying that he’d only agreed to lift it, not to refrain from ever cursing her again.”
“Then…what’s left?” asked Shining Armor after a long moment of consideration. “If you don’t think fighting’s worthwhile, and you won’t negotiate with him, what’s your plan? Letting Twilight keep trying to make friends with him?”
“I have no hope that somepony as twisted as Lex Legis can be befriended, even by Twilight.”
“Then what?”
“Something I swore I would never resort to.” Unable to keep the sorrow out of her voice, Celestia turned toward the drawing room’s exit, her horn lighting up as she telekinetically pulled the door open, raising her voice slightly as she called out to where her steward was waiting in the hallway.
“Give it up, you little brats!” cackled the madmare from where she was levitating above the battlefield, firing a barrage of energy blasts from her horn. “You don’t have what it takes to defeat me!”
As much as he wanted to toss out a witty one-liner in response, Fruit Crunch didn’t have the energy to waste on trying to sound cool. Instead, he put all of his effort into a desperate shoulder roll as one of Starlight’s magical beams lanced down toward him, avoiding the attack by inches as he came up on his hooves, panting. Ignoring the deep gash carved in the ground next to him – and what it would have done if it had struck home – he risked a glance to either side of him, worried about his friends.
Fortunately, they’d managed to weather the onslaught of energy beams as well. Off to his left, he could see Cleansweep and Fiddlesticks leaning out from behind some freshly-scorched rubble that the latter filly had used as a makeshift shield. To his right, Straightlace was in front of Feathercap, his hind leg still extended from having deflected Starlight’s magical attack. As he made eye contact with each of them, they all gave a quick nod, recognizing that it was time to use the strategy that they’d worked out for exactly this situation. Here goes nothing!
Cleansweep and Feathercap started chanting at the same time, the filly raising her voice in a liturgy to the Night Mare’s power while the colt was murmuring a complex series of intonations Fruit Crunch couldn’t follow, both of them waving a foreleg in a series of sharp gestures. Cleansweep finished first, immediately reaching out and placing a hoof on Fiddlesticks’ side, activating her spell. “Go!”
Fiddlesticks didn’t need to be told twice, racing directly toward Fruit Crunch as fast as her hooves could carry her. For his part, Fruit Crunch heaved himself up onto his hind legs, putting his fore-hooves side by side out in front of him, both turned upward as he bent his knees slightly. Gritting his teeth as Fiddlesticks gave a hop, putting her back hooves on his front ones, Fruit Crunch couldn’t hold back a grunt of effort as raised his forelegs as hard as he could, fighting with everything he had as Fiddlesticks pushed off of him, straining to send his friend skyward.
An instant later Fiddlesticks was launched into the air, rocketing upward as though shot out of a cannon.
It was far more of a vertical climb than an assisted jump should have been able to give her, even taking into account the boosted strength and speed from the wolf spirits Fruit Crunch had imbued them all with at the start of the fight. But thanks to the spell Cleansweep had cast on her, Fiddlesticks’ jumping power was greatly enhanced, and with the added boost from Fruit Crunch, she ascended as quickly as any pegasus, cocking her hoof back as she soared toward Starlight Glimmer. From his position on the ground, Fruit Crunch could see the evil mare’s eyes widening, clearly having been taken by surprise.
The sight made him snicker.
You haven’t seen anything yet.
Fiddlesticks had crossed more than half of the distance to Starlight, and was still climbing rapidly, when Feathercap finished his spell.
Immediately, Fiddlesticks began to grow.
Normally one of the smallest members of their group, the earth filly’s size was suddenly robust enough that she could have made even the stoutest of stallions feel insecure. Her torso was as broad as a barrel. Her legs were as thick as tree trunks. Her hooves were the size of anvils. And her eyes were trained directly on Starlight.
The sudden transformation earned a shriek of fright from the levitating mare, and the sound was music to Fruit Crunch’s ears. He knew that Starlight was fully aware of how strong Fiddlesticks was normally, and could no doubt guess how much more power her punch would pack now that her mass had increased several times over. The force of the oncoming strike would mean lights out for her, and even if she somehow stayed conscious, she’d be in no condition to keep fighting.
Holding his breath, Fruit Crunch could almost see Starlight calculating her options, but the belligerent unicorn was out of time, with Fiddlesticks reaching the apex of her leap. With a roar, the filly pivoted at the waist as her hoof came forward, putting her entire body behind the blow. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as she lashed out…
…and struck nothing but air as Starlight suddenly shifted to the side, just barely managing to get clear of Fiddlesticks’ punch.
“Ha!” The laugh burst from Starlight’s lips in a voice that was as relieved as it was triumphant. “Missed me!”
But the smile Fiddlesticks sent Starlight’s way as she sailed past her was one of victory. “You’re going down.”
From his position on the ground, Fruit Crunch saw Starlight’s brows furrow in confusion and alarm, but she didn’t have a chance to react before another voice rang out.
“FALL!!!”
The bellow sounded too loud to have come from Straightlace, the Night Mare’s magic imbuing the command with supernatural potency. The sheer weight behind the word made Fruit Crunch cringe reflexively, despite the force of the spell not having been directed at him. Whereas Starlight Glimmer, he knew, was getting the full effect of it.
He could almost see the order take effect, the compulsion imbued in the word following the sound as it reached her ears and slammed into her brain. Under normal circumstances, he knew, the odds of this kind of spell working on Starlight were low. Mind-affecting magic coud be fought off through sheer willpower, and whatever else could be said about her, Starlight Glimmer was a pony of unyielding determination.
That was why they’d gone to such great lengths to try and distract her, softening her up for Straightlace’s spell. While it would have been great if Fiddlesticks had been able to land a decisive blow, they’d all agreed beforehoof that it was unlikely. With Starlight’s telekinetic flight giving complete mastery of her aerial positioning, an uncontrolled leap – even if it took her by surprise – was unlikely to get within striking range of her.
What it could do, however, was leave her off-balance and unprepared for a sudden battle of wills. Even as Fruit Crunch watched, a sudden jolt ran through Starlight’s body, her jaw clenching as she tried to resist the sudden impulse demanding that she return to the ground. The sight made him swallow, knowing that they didn’t have a backup plan if this didn’t work.
But a second later, the aura surrounding Starlight’s horn winked out, the larger one surrounding her body following suit. A shudder ran through Starlight as she began to fall, still trying to beat back the order compelling her not to fly, but there was nothing she could do to stop herself as she hit the ground hard, a cry of pain escaping her lips as she bounced and rolled…
Directly toward where their spirit animals had been waiting.
Her cry of pain becoming one of panic as Lyden led the charge, Starlight couldn’t do anything as the five of them leapt from where they’d been concealing themselves, descending on the fallen pony with a vengeance. In an instant, she was at the center of a storm of teeth and talons, thrashing wildly as she was scratched and bitten from all sides.
“Her horn!” yelled Fruit Crunch as he raced toward where Starlight had fallen, knowing that they needed to put her down before she could regroup and counterattack. “Get her horn!” Straightlace’s spell would only last for a few seconds before wearing off naturally, and it didn’t prevent Starlight from using other kinds of-
A bright flash from the center of the animals made his heart sink, and when he saw a matching shine out of the corner of his eye, he already knew what it would be before he turned his head. Sure enough, there was Starlight, over fifty feet distant and glaring at them. Despite her having managed to protect her horn, she still looked worse for wear. The shoulder she’d landed on was already discoloring badly, scratch marks covered her sides and back, while bite marks covered her hooves. But she was still on her hooves.
Cursing, Fruit Crunch changed course, rushing toward her despite knowing that he’d never be able to get there before she got her next spell off. He could already hear his friends behind him, and out of his periphery could see that the spirit animals were already starting to move. Maybe we can still get her, he found himself hoping. Some of those bites on her hooves had to be from Venin, so maybe if the poison-
“This isn’t over,” growled Starlight, her voice thick with malice as she swept her eyes over each of them. “I promise you, the next time we fight, you won’t be so lucky.”
The words made Fruit Crunch’s eyes widen, unable to believe what he was hearing. Was she…?
A moment later, Starlight disappeared, and this time the flash of her teleporting wasn’t matched by another one elsewhere in his field of vision.
She had fled.
“Did…did she just retreat?” came Feathercap’s disbelieving voice.
“I think she did!” whooped Cleansweep. “I think we beat her!”
“It worked!” cheered Fiddlesticks, still gigantic. “It really worked!”
“We really did it,” laughed Straightlace, grinning as he walked up next to Fruit Crunch. “Can you believe it?”
Fruit Crunch couldn’t help but smirk at that. “Of course I can,” he answered, unable to help the cocky tone in his voice as he turned to look at his friends. “We’re the Night Mare’s-”
That was when Fruit Crunch woke up.
All around him, his friends were coming to as well, yawning and stretching as they slowly shook off the vestiges of slumber. Sitting up, Fruit Crunch rubbed his eyes. “You guys are not going to believe the dream I just had,” he murmured.
On the other side of the room, Fiddlesticks groaned as she brushed her mane out of her face. “Do you really have to make that joke every time?”
He didn’t have a chance to answer as Cleansweep, already completely awake, flew a quick circuit of the room. “Forget the bad jokes! We just beat-”
“Shhh!” hissed Fiddlesticks suddenly. “You’ll wake Tiddlywinks!”
“Sorry!” Lowering her voice to a whisper, Cleansweep gave the other filly an apologetic look as Fiddlesticks went to adjust her baby brother’s blanket, the infant having managed to sleep through the commotion. “But seriously though, we just beat Starlight Glimmer! I mean, I know it’s not the real Starlight Glimmer, being that she’s a composite from our memories and everything, but still! How long have we been trying to do that now?!”
“I think that was our sixth time fighting her,” mused Straightlace.
“Seventh,” corrected Feathercap, slipping his binoculars around his neck.
Grinning, Fruit Crunch clopped his hooves together, the noise earning him a dirty look from Fiddlesticks. “We took care of that Silhouette guy and his goon squad in two tries, and that Royal Guard regiment in three. Now that we’ve beaten Starlight Glimmer, I wonder who we’re gonna fight next?”
You’re too quick to call what happened this time a victory, huffed Lyden, lifting his muzzle from where he was lying in the corner of the room. Your enemy was able to leave on her terms and under her own power.
I agree, added Altaer from where he was perched in the rafters. Further, you were too quick to abandon your defensive posture. Reconnaissance should have been performed to confirm her retreat.
“What reconnaissance?” frowned Fruit Crunch. “We saw her teleport away.”
Is that what you saw, or what you thought you saw? lectured Ulespy, twisting his head around to look at Fruit Crunch from where he was clinging onto a hanging lamp. Had she used her magic to turn invisible, cloaking her intent with words of defeat, would you have known the difference?
“He’s right,” groaned Feathercap. “One of us should have cast that spell to detect magical radiation. The emanations from an illusion spell are different from a trans-spatial one.”
“We probably should have put some eyes in the sky too,” sighed Fiddlesticks, glancing at Ulespy before looking over at Lyden. “And a nose to the ground, in case her scent turned up somewhere it shouldn’t have been.”
Not to mention that you should have taken the momentary lapse in hostilities as an opportunity to begin healing the others. Venin’s chastisement made Cleansweep pout as she touched down, the snake slithering up her leg and curling in her usual spot around the filly’s middle. Even if they were only moderately wounded, you always want your nest to be free of injuries in case the battle suddenly resumes. Particularly since there were no bystanders nearby in need of your aid.
We’re not saying you didn’t do a good job, added Nemel as she trundled over to Fiddlesticks. Both your tactics and your teamwork were excellent. We just don’t want you to drop your guard too soon.
“So does that mean we’re gonna have to fight Starlight in our dreams again tonight?” moaned Cleansweep.
“If it does, then we’ll deal with it,” sighed Fruit Crunch. “The Night Mare is letting us share these dreams so that we can work on getting stronger. That means figuring out how to best use the spells she’s giving us, along with better developing the powers we get from you guys.” That last part was directed at Lyden, who raised and lowered his muzzle in the lupine approximation of a nod.
Very well said, replied the wolf, pride filling his mental voice. You’re all growing more proficient at using the abilities we’re able to grant you. Combined with the spells at your command, and your nocturnal training, you’ll soon become a true force to be reckoned with. I have no doubt that the High Alpha will be most pleased when he returns.
Fruit Crush couldn’t help but grin at that, looking at his friends and finding matching looks on their faces. Lex was gonna be so impressed when they told him how much stronger they’d gotten!
Fighting down the urge to daydream about what that would be like, Fruit Crunch glanced at the window. Although the shade was drawn, he could still see light seeping in from around the edges, telling him that morning had arrived. “We should probably get a move on. What’s on everypony’s schedule for today?”
“I’m going to be working with Miss Halation some more,” replied Feathercap immediately, earning some good-natured groans from the others.
“Feathercap, you’re already getting spells from the Night Mare,” chided Cleansweep with a teasing grin. “Why do you want to study magic in books too?”
Hugging his binoculars to his chest, Feathercap frowned. “Some of the spells I’m learning with Miss Halation aren’t like the ones we get from the Night Mare,” he replied defensively. “That’s how I was able to cast that enlargement spell on Fiddlesticks.”
“He’s got a point there,” noted the filly in question.
“And I can still keep an eye on things outside by looking through Ulespy’s eyes,” huffed the only unicorn member of the Knights.
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” chuckled Straightlace, waving a hoof in a conciliatory gesture before smirking. “After all, if you study enough magic, you may become as good as me one day.”
The statement – spoken in a lilting tone that made it clear he wasn’t being serious – caused the other foals to roll their eyes. For whatever reason, the Night Mare hadn’t granted them spellcasting abilities in equal measure. Straightlace had received the most, followed by Fiddlesticks, and then Feathercap, with Cleansweep and Fruit Crunch being tied for having received the least. While their spirit animals had told them that the variances were likely in response to their personal aptitudes for receiving her power, rather than being a reflection of how much she favored each of them – an explanation abetted by how the range of specific spells they could pray for were different for most of them – it was still a subject that provoked some ribbing among the group.
“I’ll be with Cloudbank most of the day,” added Fiddlesticks, in a transparent attempt to move the conversation along. “She’s still teaching those new guys who’re receiving spells about how to use them, and I offered to help out. Which reminds me: Cleansweep, can your dad take care of Tiddlywinks? Most of the manor staff here are busy doing what they can to help out with the coronation or with Granola Bar’s wedding, so I thought maybe he could babysit?”
“Oh, um, I guess I can ask him,” shrugged Cleansweep. “He’s been acting kinda weird lately, taking it easy instead of being all gung-ho about some sporting event the way he usually is. I think he misses Mom, so maybe that’ll cheer him up. I’ll ask him before I meet up with Hopscotch.”
Fruit Crunch nodded. “Lyden and I are going to be making the rounds with Garden Gate.” He sat up a little straighter. “I’m gonna ask her about maybe having a daytime training session with our group and hers, one leader to another.”
“And I’ll be on air patrol with Turbo,” confirmed Straightlace. “I think maybe he’ll wear the badge the Royal Vexal-…Vexol-…”
“Vexillologist,” chimed in Feathercap.
“Right, the badge the Royal Vexillologist made.” He shook his head in mild consternation. “I don’t know why he’s so against wearing an emblem showing Prince Legis’s cutie mark.”
“Yeah,” frowned Cleansweep. “You think he’d be a little more grateful, what with being brought back to life and all.”
Fiddlesticks shrugged, gently picking up Tiddlywinks and sliding him onto her back. “It’s probably because the prince sent his friends on that adventure in Canterlot while he was gone, and he’s upset he was left out.”
“Which is why the Night Mare’s Knights always stick together,” pronounced Fruit Crunch sagely. “We work as a team, in dreams and in the daylight.”
Cleansweep smirked. “Except for splitting up while we’re patrolling with the grownups, right?”
“You know what I mean!” groaned Fruit Crunch, prompting a round of laughter from everypony – himself included – as they filed out of their room, spirit animals in tow, looking forward to what the new day had in store.
“Are you sure? I thought that placing the moon between Canis Major and Canis Minor might make for a nice nocturnal scene, two dogs chasing a ball, but now that I look at it I wonder if they’re too far apart for it to really work.”
Luna bit back the urge to snap at her sister, knowing that Celestia was trying to draw her into a conversation. It was the latest in a series of attempts that the elder alicorn had made to engage with her over the last few days, taking time out of her schedule – despite being busier than ever – to talk to Luna about everything from the gemstone statue that was being constructed for the upcoming Grand Equestria Pony Summit to what gift they should send to Cranky and Matilda’s upcoming wedding. Each new day saw something new, and invariably trivial, on Celestia’s mind that she just had to share with her sister.
It wasn’t dissimilar from what had happened at breakfast just before they’d headed to the Crystal Empire. Or at least, Luna knew that’s what her sister was hoping: that there’d be some inconsequential nonsense – such as fruit faces on pancakes or Blueblood’s overwrought efforts to marry back into royalty – that would serve to distract the alicorn-turned-unicorn from the reality of her situation. Perhaps even lead to her shaking off her doldrums and facing the future with optimism rather than malaise.
But if that was what Celestia was hoping for, then she was going to be disappointed.
The laughter that Luna had found bubbling up inside of her that morning hadn’t been because she’d been able to momentarily step outside of herself. It had been because, in the wake of publishing her tell-all about what Lex Legis had done to her, she’d still been able to do something of importance, even if only a little. It had been because the prospect of using the Crystal Heart had still brimmed with possibility rather than failure.
It had been because there was still hope.
But now…
“It’s fine, sister,” replied Luna at last, dragging her morose gaze away from the night sky that she no longer controlled. “You raised and lowered the moon for a thousand years while I was banished. You’ve long since grown more proficient at it than I am.”
“That’s not true!” Celestia stepped closer, concern written all over her face. “Luna, this is your destiny,” she insisted, pointing at her sister’s cutie mark, “not mine. Once you’re back to normal-”
“Why did you meet with Willow Longtail?”
Celestia blinked, thrown by the sudden change in topic. “What?”
“Why did you meet with Willow Longtail?” repeated Luna, desperate to avoid listening to her sister’s empty reassurances about how things were going to be alright. Those were even worse than the blatant attempts at buoying her mood. “I’m aware that you invited her to a private conference yesterday with Shining Armor, but none of the castle staff seems to know what it was regarding.”
“…I was seeking her advice.”
Luna arched a brow, both at the half-second’s hesitation that preceded her sister’s answer, and at how non-specific the answer was. “May I inquire as to what you needed her to advise you on?”
Celestia sighed, an uncomfortable look crossing her face. “Luna…”
Her tone of voice was almost pleading, clearly wanting her to let it go, but Luna had no intention of doing so. Quite the opposite, she felt an almost vindictive glee at pressing the topic, suddenly wanting to pay Celestia back for how smothering her attempts to cheer her up had been. “I am still a princess, am I not?” she demanded. “Is this castle still not as much mine as it is yours?”
“Of course you are,” replied Celestia, her tone subdued, “and of course it is.”
“And may I presume that the advice which you sought was not in regards to your personal affairs?”
Seemingly resigned to where this was going, Celestia shook her head. “It was not.”
“Then I don’t believe that I’m out of line for wanting to know what you met with Willow Longtail about,” finished Luna pointedly.
A tired look crossed Celestia’s face then, and she crossed the balcony to head back into Luna’s boudoir, picking at the sugar cookies that the steward had left out for them. “We spoke about several topics,” she murmured between bites. “Chief among them being the possibility of appealing to one of the pony deities of Everglow for help removing your curse.”
Luna’s eyebrows rose at that, and for an instant she felt a renewed surge of hope. But it came crashing down in an instant, knowing that if there were any sort of good news to be had, Celestia would have been far more animated. “And I take it the conclusion was poor?”
Her sister nodded, not looking up at her. “It’s apparently very difficult for gods to project their power into a world where they’re not worshiped. Willow thinks there might be ways around that, but they all involve either summoning that god directly – which is either difficult, or dangerous, or both – or bringing in some sort of aspect of their power that they can use as a conduit. But even then, she’s not entirely certain.”
Finally stepping in from the balcony, Luna frowned. “What about-”
“We discussed the possibility of you going to Everglow and asking for help there, too,” interrupted Celestia, her tone flat. “Either from the pony gods or one of that world’s spellcasters, since the magic developed there is stronger than our own, but Willow was dubious of those possibilities as well.”
That brought a frown to Luna’s face, both from the interruption and the further bad news. “Why?”
Celestia didn’t answer right away, instead pouring herself a steaming mug of tea and taking a sip. The strong odor coming from it caused Luna to wrinkle her nose, recognizing that it was a caffeinated blend. Though that wasn’t surprising, considering that Celestia needed to preside over both the day and night now. It was only when she put her mug down that she at last looked at Luna, and her expression was haunted. “Because she thinks the Night Mare is personally maintaining the curse Lex put on you.”
Luna’s eyes widened at that, and if she’d still had wings she would have flared them in surprise. “What?! His goddess is…?!” A shudder ran down her spine then, her throat going dry. “Is Willow certain?”
Celestia shook her head. “No. She’s neither an adherent of the divine, nor an expert on curses. But she’s of the opinion that while a static effect can be self-sustaining – like a curse to inhibit arousal or experience sympathetic pain, like Lex put on Produce Aisle or Comfy Cozy – a curse that exhibits more malleability in its application, or which resists being easily lifted, must have an intelligence behind it. One whose strength is proportional to the effect in question, and since Lex is apparently a living channel for the Night Mare to project her influence into this world…”
Suddenly numb, Luna sat down, thinking of how her curse had fought back so ardently against being removed. “It…it makes sense,” she muttered, as much to herself as to Celestia. “That would explain why Discord wasn’t able to fix this. Why it was able to persevere where King Sombra’s magic failed against the Crystal Heart.”
Pouring a second mug – this time from a pot of non-caffeinated tea – Celestia levitated it over to her sister. “That’s why Willow is uncertain how much a mortal spellcaster could accomplish. While she doesn’t think it’s impossible to find one who remove it, since the curse is only being sustained by a god rather than having been given by one directly – which she thinks is an important distinction – she’s not certain who, if anyone, would have the strength to do such a thing.”
Taking a sip of the hot liquid, Luna let it warm her for a moment, still wrestling with the idea that a goddess – a real one, not the would-be deity she’d set herself up as – was personally taking a hoof in her suffering. “What about the queen who rules that world’s ponies? Ilena, wasn’t it?”
“Iliana,” corrected Celestia. “And no, she won’t help.”
The certainty in her sister’s voice drew Luna’s gaze to her, studying her for a long moment. “You already contacted her.”
Celestia nodded, her expression dejected. “Spike met her briefly while he and Twilight were on that world. I sent him a missive to send to her, telling her what had happened and begging for her help.”
“And she said no.” Just like before, Luna phrased it as a statement rather than a question, Celestia’s expression making the answer evident.
In response, the elder alicorn drew forth a scroll, unrolling it and skipping past the greeting before reading out loud. “‘While you have my deepest condolences for what has befallen your beloved sister, I must regretfully inform you that I cannot lend you my aid at this time. Though I do not carry the tenets of her religion in my heart, the Night Mare is still a member – indeed, a senior member – of the pony pantheon, making her a patron deity of the Pony Empire which I have sworn to protect. To act counter to her interests beyond the borders of Everglow in such a partisan manner runs the risk of angering her at a time when unity, among both the gods and ponies of the Empire, is critical.
“‘I likewise have no wish to become entangled in the internal affairs of another nation. While I cannot speak to the character of the pony whom you named as being responsible for your sister’s malediction, I am not prepared to undertake what could be construed as an act of hostile interference toward someone who has, by your account, assumed a position of importance in Equestrian politics. While I have every hope that you will find a solution that both restores your sister and protects the stability of your realm, I’m afraid that solution is one that I cannot be a part of.’”
Sighing, Celestia rolled up the scroll. “She offers more sympathy after that, but nothing of substance.”
“I suppose that would have been too easy,” grunted Luna, leaning back in her chair. It was funny how the queen’s refusal to help didn’t sting nearly as badly as the Crystal Heart’s failure did. But then again, she hadn’t spent weeks wondering if she’d receive Iliana’s aid, nor had that world's pony queen let her down as spectacularly as the Crystal Heart had. “What about the other idea? That I go there and appeal to one of the benevolent gods directly? Willow didn’t think that would work either, I believe you said?”
“She thinks that it would be like with Iliana, that they’d refuse to get personally involved,” replied Celestia as she put the queen’s answer away. “Gods apparently prefer to act via mortal proxies, since taking direct action invites retaliation. That’s why she thinks it’s significant that Lex was the one who actually cursed you in the first place.”
“Oh.”
The renewed sense of helplessness that she felt right then must have been audible in her voice, because Celestia looked at her then, anxiety reasserting itself. “Luna, except for Iliana’s refusal to help, this is all supposition on Willow’s part, something she openly admitted. It’s entirely possible that she’s wrong about any or all of what she said.”
Luna could feel a mirthless laugh bubbling up inside of her. “Do you think she is?”
“I think we need more information,” replied Celestia diplomatically. “With any luck, Twilight will be back soon, and we can see if she has any insights.” For the first time in a little while, a smile reasserted itself on her face. “Knowing her, she’s already retrieved Starlight Glimmer and Silhouette and is researching alternative ways to restore you right now.”
The platitude made Luna grimace, hating that they were back to those. “No doubt,” she muttered, standing at last.
Despite having been the one to bring this up, Luna suddenly found herself not wanting to talk about it anymore. Whatever other possibilities Celestia and Willow had discussed for removing her curse had no doubt come to the same conclusion, since Celestia would have been quick to inform her if something more viable been found, and as much as Luna disliked being treated as if she were fragile, she didn’t want to hear a list of reasons why there was no hope of her ever being an alicorn again. “Forgive me, sister, but it’s past time for me to look in on the dream realm. Even diminished, I can still protect the peaceful slumber of our subjects.”
If she was surprised by the abrupt dismissal, Celestia didn’t show it. “I understand. But please don’t push yourself too hard. You’ve already informed everypony of what’s happened to you. They’ll understand if you-”
“Thank you,” smiled Luna, though it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”
Celestia bit her lip then, before letting out a slow breath. “Goodnight, Luna.”
Thankful that the issue hadn’t been pushed, Luna nodded as she turned and headed back toward the balcony. “Goodnight, Celestia.”
Sighing as she closed the door to her sister’s room behind her, Celestia headed back to her own chambers, stifling a yawn. As much as she wished she could go straight to bed, she knew she didn’t have that luxury. Not when there was still so much to do; answers had to be written to the condolence letters that were still pouring in regarding Luna, plans needed to be reviewed for the upcoming summit, groundwork needed to be laid for potentially reopening diplomatic relations with Yakyakistan, and so much more.
And, of course, the moon would need to have its position periodically readjusted throughout the night. That required her to sleep in increments, waking up every few hours so as to move it across the sky, but while it wasn’t an ideal schedule, it was one she could live with. She had for a thousand years, after all.
What she couldn’t live with was seeing Luna continue on the way she was, bereft of hope. After everything that had happened – becoming Nightmare Moon, her failed attempt at starting her own religion, Silhouette’s death and subsequent madness – Celestia couldn’t bear to see her little sister continue to suffer like this. She deserved to be happy.
That was why Celestia was glad Luna hadn’t pressed her for what else she’d talked to Willow about.
The purrsian had been doubtful that Lex’s curse would come undone if he died, reasoning that his goddess – if she was indeed the one maintaining the affliction – would continue to uphold it whether or not her servant was still alive. But as with so much else that they’d talked about, she’d admitted to not being sure. That was enough for Celestia; while his death would close off the possibility of Lex ever removing the curse voluntarily, that was a possibility that she couldn’t bring herself to put any stock in. Lex was, after all, not trustworthy. Better to make it so that he wouldn’t be able to curse anyone else ever again, so that once they found a way to make Luna an alicorn once more there’d be no chance of her ever having to go through this a second time.
Of course, that ran afoul of what she’d told Shining Armor about potentially starting a civil war…but that was only if Lex’s death was attributed to them.
If he simply disappeared, or was killed by someone with no obvious connection to Equestrian royalty – such as a purrsian from another world – the chances of his followers blaming the country’s reigning monarchs would drop precipitously. That wouldn’t solve everything, of course; the Night Mare’s worshipers, the Siren sisters, and likely several other troublesome ponies would need to be carefully managed. But without Lex Legis there to act as a symbol of rebellion, Celestia had hope that they’d be able to defuse the situation.
And at the very least, it would give Luna some comfort to know that the pony who had hurt her so terribly was gone.
But even that thought couldn’t make Celestia feel entirely at ease with what she’d asked Willow to do. Assassination was an option she’d sworn never to avail herself of, and she’d kept that promise for over a millennium. But in the face of what Luna was going through now, her only remaining relative who had already endured so much hardship, it had been surprisingly easy to break that vow, even if she hadn’t fully made peace with it yet. Shining Armor had been similarly shocked when she’d raised the possibility, but after what he and Cadance had lost during the Elemental Bleeds, he’d eventually come around as well.
This is no different than confronting any of the other villains who’ve threatened Equestria over the years, she told herself as she trudged back to her room. Discord. Tirek. King Sombra. We never had to resort to lethal measures, but we were prepared to if they couldn’t be contained. This is the same, except Lex is too powerful to face directly. I’m simply adjusting my strategy accordingly.
She continued telling herself that the entire way back, and by the time she’d reached the door to her suite she’d managed to quiet most of her doubts. Besides, it was out of her hooves now anyway. She’d already told Willow to do whatever she had to, so long as nopony else got hurt, in order to make Lex go away for good.
But as she sat down to begin working her way through the pile of correspondence she needed to answer, Celestia couldn’t completely banish the sensation that somehow, she was making a terrible mistake.
“He was such a nice young fellow. So polite and considerate. A real credit to his people.”
“Mother!” Sitting across from their guest, Pocket Square gave the elderly mare at his side a horrified look. “You can’t say things like that!”
On the other end of the sofa, Paisley Sachet tilted her head and blinked. “Why not, dear? He really was an upstanding lad, not like most of his kind. Courteous to a fault, that one; almost like a pony. If only he’d been one, instead of a donkey, I would have tried to fix you up with him. He would have been a much better choice than that no-good griffon you’re running around with these days.”
Pocket Square’s face instantly turned bright red. “You leave Gregory out of this!”
Recognizing that an argument was about to unfold, Thermal Draft gave a loud cough. “I’m sorry, if we could just bring things back around to Long Road…?”
“Oh yes,” smiled Paisley. “He was such a nice young fellow. So polite and considerate.”
It had been like this ever since she’d arrived in Trottingham four days ago. When the topic of conversation turned to Long Road – the donkey warrior who had showed up out of nowhere just in time to defeat a threat the city’s inhabitants hadn’t even realized was there – things became inordinately difficult. Not because no one wanted to talk about him, but because everyone did, even if they had nothing useful to share.
It had been exactly the opposite of what Thermal Draft had been expecting. While Trottingham wasn’t exactly a small town – being a city of respectable size – it was still a comparatively isolated locale, being the only major population center on the Griffish Isles. As such, much like Vanhoover, it had a reputation for being something of a provincial community.
Of course, also like Vanhoover, that reputation was more about its location than its people. Situated in the northern Celestial Ocean, the Griffish Isles had the distinction of being the only islands in the body of water that separated the Equestrian continent from its eastern neighbor. Equidistant between the two landmasses, the Isles should have been a natural point for the transcontinental railroad that was the main point of travel between Equestria and Griffonstone, the kingdom which hugged the opposite coast.
However, geography had seen fit to scuttle those plans long before the railroad had been invented. As a result of tectonic activity, the landmass that Griffonstone sat on was far more elevated than Equestria, being over a mile above sea level and turning what otherwise would have been a picturesque coastline into a series of jagged cliffs that ran nearly the entire length of the continent’s western edge.
The vertical distance between the two continents had proven to be a far more challenging obstacle to trade than the oceanic gap. With Griffonstone and its southern neighbors unable to build ports, maritime activity was a perpetual nonstarter. Airships were viable, but inefficient due to their slow speed, limited cargo capacities, and constant need for refueling, to say nothing of recurrent problems with pirates, dragons, and other aerial hazards.
That had left only the trains, and even those had faced significant problems at first, since building mile-high pylons to elevate the track to the necessary height had repeatedly proven to be a disastrous undertaking. While the undersea portions of the pylons were designed to take advantage of hydraulic pressure to keep them stabilized, the above-water portions had no such support. While a few hundred feet wouldn’t have been an issue, the lack of ballast meant that at that height some swaying was inevitable, posing a severe risk of sending any train using the tracks plunging into the ocean.
The only reprieve had been at the northwestern edge of the continent, where the elevation tapered off just enough to allow a rail line to be safely laid down. Fortuitously, Equestria’s northeastern coastline jutted sharply into the ocean, reducing the distance between the two landmasses down to less than a hundred miles. It was an ideal place to build the transcontinental railway (though not, as it turned out, to build maritime facilities; the sheer amount of ice that far north made such pursuits more trouble than they were worth).
It also meant that the Griffish Isles – which sat on the same latitude as Manehattan – saw the railroad completely pass them by.
The end result was that, barring the occasional ship making the trip up from Baltimare, Manehattan’s port was the only way to reach Trottingham.
Thermal Draft had been quite cognizant of that when she’d arrived, and had prepared herself to be treated like an outsider, especially when she began asking questions. Thankfully, her fears had been groundless; despite its comparative isolation, ponies here were just as friendly and outgoing as they were in Vanhoover. And while she’d heard that griffons – a minority here, despite the islands’ name (which, she’d learned since arriving here, was in reference to griffons having discovered them first, even if difficulty accessing them had led to their becoming Equestrian territory) – were greedy and surly, the expatriates she’d met so far had all been cordial.
Now if she could just get some first-hoof information about what had happened to Long Road!
“Mrs. Sachet!” Smiling as her yell managed to cut through the bickering that her hosts were having about Pocket Square’s dating habits, Thermal Draft gestured toward the empty plate in front of her. “Forgive me for interrupting, but is there any way I could get some more of those delightful scones? They don’t have them back in Vanhoover and I simply can’t get enough of them.”
“Oh, of course, dear!” Delighted, the old lady stood up, collecting the dishes as she trotted back toward the kitchen, talking all the while. “It’s an old family recipe, you know. Most ponies these days prefer the store-bought brands, but those are never as good. The secret is in how much butter you use…”
Catching Pocket Square’s eyes as his mother’s monologue floated in from the adjoining kitchen, Thermal Draft canted her head in the other direction, toward the den that they’d passed when she’d been invited inside. Nodding, the chagrinned stallion got up and led the way, Thermal Draft following quietly behind him as they stepped into the next room.
It was only when they were both inside, and Pocket Square had closed the door, that he let out a sigh. “I’m so sorry about my mother. She doesn’t really have anything against griffons or donkeys. It’s just that she’s never approved of any of my boyfriends. Not one! Even when-”
“I understand,” cut in Thermal Draft quickly. “Believe me, I know all about romantic difficulties. But right now, I really want to talk about Long Road.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” Gesturing to a nearby easy chair, Pocket Square seated himself in a matching one opposite it.
“Thank you,” sitting down, Thermal Draft took a deep breath, trying to put all of her frustration from the last few days aside. “Now, Pocket-, is it alright if I call you Pocket?” When the stallion nodded, she continued. “Before anything else, I’d like to get one thing out of the way: did you personally witness Long Road’s last moments?”
An uncomfortable look crossed Pocket’s face. “Well, no…”
Closing her eyes, Drafty couldn’t help but slump. After days of talking to ponies, she’d been so sure that she’d been on the right track. She’d started with the statue of Long Road that had been erected in the town square, looking up the pony who’d built it. From him she’d gotten the name of the pony who’d ordered the piece. And from him she’d been referred to the Long Road Memorial Commission.
That had led to a series of talks with the Commission members, until she’d gotten to the pony in charge of collecting testimonials, convincing him to let her peruse the collected stories about the paladin’s heroics. She’d then spent every waking moment tracking down the ponies who’d volunteered stories of having met Long Road, most of which were comparatively inconsequential. While Drafty knew firsthoof how being saved by someone could change your life, none of that helped her figure out how the donkey had met his end.
And now she’d struck out again. “Thank you, Pocket,” she sighed wearily as she stood up. “I’ll see myself out-”
“No, you don’t understand,” sputtered the stallion as he stood up. “Nopony saw Long Road’s last moments.”
That got Thermal Draft’s attention. “I’m sorry?”
“Nopony was there with him…at the end,” murmured Pocket, looking more uncomfortable than before.
The certitude in his voice made Drafty sit back down. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“Of course, I…” He paused then, looking her over. “You’re really not with the papers? Or the Commission?”
“I’m not, I swear.” Placing her hoof over her heart, Thermal Draft made sure to look him right in the eyes as she told him the truth. Mostly. “I’m here because the Long Road had a lady love, and the pony I work for wants to help her get closure.”
Pocket studied her face then, and it took several seconds before he finally nodded, swallowing. “Alright. I…I wouldn’t want someone who cared for him to not know the truth about what happened. I know that I’d never be able to bear it if something like that happened with Gregory.”
Drafty didn’t say anything, waiting patiently as Pocket leaned back and looked at the ceiling, though the distant expression that came over him then made it clear that he was seeing something else. “You have to understand,” he began, “none of us knew what was happening at first. We didn’t hear about the Elemental Bleeds until after they were over. I mean, over everywhere else. All we knew was that there’d been some sort of terrible fire in Manehattan. The reports of it being the work of some sort of monsters were presumed to be rumors or shoddy reporting, though a few of us thought maybe it was some sort of dragon attack. They don’t usually come this far north, but every so often there’ll be a sighting…”
Shaking his head, he brought himself back to the topic at hoof. “What I’m trying to say is, when we first started hearing stories about how there were things in the sewers, nopony made the connection between them and what had happened to the rest of Equestria. Instead, we just laughed them off. We all figured that it was children with runaway imaginations or some workers who were hitting the sauce a little too hard. They only made the papers because news was still coming in slowly from the mainland.”
He swallowed, taking a breath before continuing. “Even when it started getting bad, we didn’t realize the full extent of the problem. Culverts started overflowing, basement drains began backing up, gutters filling with water even though it hadn’t rained in days. We all thought there was some sort of…of underground clog or something. That there was some sort of blockage in the city’s septic system. We were all upset, rather than being afraid.”
Taking out a hankie, he mopped his brow. “That was when the attacks started…”
This time Thermal Draft was the one who needed to take a slow breath to steady herself. She’d done enough research since arriving here to know that the Elemental Bleed that had hit Trottingham had been water-based, just like Vanhoover. That alone was enough to send chills down her spine, remembering how the disaster that had all but destroyed her home had progressed along similar lines, from an inconvenience to a crisis to a catastrophe.
Except where Vanhoover had been beset by sea monsters and the undead, Trottingham had been forced to deal with different creatures.
“It almost sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud,” murmured Pocket, staring into space once more. “Attacked by ooze creatures? It’s like something out of a schlock film.” He shuddered then, licking his lips. “It stops being so ridiculous when you see somepony you know engulfed by one of those things, thrashing and screaming while they try to get out, only to go still a moment later. Or for what you thought was a patch of wet stone to suddenly extend some sort of…of pseudopod at somepony next to you, and watch their leg start melting when it grabs them. Or to follow someone into a room they swore was safe only to see them plunge face-first into some sort of giant amoeba, hanging suspended inside it while it starts breaking them down…”
He fell silent then, and after several seconds Thermal Draft gave a small cough. “Long Road?”
“Hm? Ah, yes, forgive me.” Mopping his brow again, Pocket met her eyes this time. “The entire city was just falling into panic when Long Road arrived. I found out later he’d seen the news reports poking fun at the so-called sewer monsters and knew that something was wrong. But at the time all we knew was that a stranger stepped into the city and brought us back from the brink.”
For the first time since he’d started talking, a smile graced Pocket’s face. “He was like something out a fairy tale. A handsome knight, clad in armor, coming to our rescue. He even wielded a sword, too. An actual sword! You wouldn’t think that would avail much against monsters that were gelatinous in nature, but he sliced them to ribbons all the same. And not just that; he healed the wounded as well! Just a simple touch made wounds close and scars fade. It was…miraculous.”
“Yeah…” murmured Thermal Draft, momentarily drifting back to the moment she’d first met Lex, opening her eyes and seeing the powerful pony who had cured her illness and brought her back from the bring of death, capturing her heart in the process.
“You might wonder how one donkey was able to bring the entire city back,” continued Pocket, bringing her attention back to the present. “But it wasn’t just what he did for us. It was like he had this air about him. Like just being near him calmed us down. The entire time he was here, he never once became agitated. We were all losing our minds, every pony and griffon in Trottingham, and he never once raised his voice. He called us all ‘sir’ and ‘madam.’ He said ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ He didn’t make light of the situation, but he never panicked either, and somehow that made us all calmer.”
His sweating under control now, Pocket put his hankie away. “He got us organized, spreading the word that everypony should move to upper floors and rooftops. To throw small marbles or pebbles or anything small ahead of us so we wouldn’t walk into them. To dig trenches and pits that they’d have a hard time getting out of.” Nodding slowly, he gave Thermal Draft a look that she knew she’d worn countless times when talking about Lex. “He’s the reason we survived.”
She licked her lips, not sure how to prod him forward when she knew exactly how he felt. But he continued of his own accord. “Once he’d rallied us, he started asking about how this had started, and it didn’t take him long to figure out it was coming from the sewers. We eventually found some old maps in city hall, and he started to investigate where the slime monsters were coming from. He said that there was some sort of leader, some creature that was responsible for all of the other creatures being here, and that if he could destroy it, they’d all go away.”
He fell silent again then, looking down. “When he went down to find it, I went with him.”
Thermal Draft’s eyebrows rose. “You followed him into the sewers?”
Pocket nodded, but it was embarrassment that shown on his face then, rather than pride. “If that sounds heroic, it wasn’t. He knew he couldn’t wield his sword and carry the map and flashlight at the same time, so he asked for a volunteer to accompany him. I was the one who drew the short straw, was all.”
“But you still went, right?” pressed Thermal Draft, remembering when Lex had taken them through Vanhoover in order to get back to the warehouse he’d set up as a base of operations. “Even if you were scared, you still stepped up.”
“For all the good it did,” muttered Pocket. “He dispatched what must have been a dozen slime monsters as we kept going down, having to wade through filthy water and worse, until we got to a flooded chamber in the lower levels of the sewer. The walkways along the edges were the only navigable parts, and it was impossible to see what was in the water, but somehow he knew the enemy he was looking for was there.”
Despite herself, Thermal Draft leaned forward, caught up in the tale.
“Long Road started calling for it – he called it a demon – to come out. For a moment nothing happened, and then a shape suddenly surged up out of the water. At first I thought it was just another slime monster, but this one was different. It kept…shifting. Changing. Like it was continually melting and reforming, trying to turn itself into a pony shape even as it kept breaking down. And it…s-spoke…”
“It spoke?”
Turning pale, Pocket nodded. “Not out loud but…in my head. Its voice was horrible. I can’t even…” He gulped, needing a moment to recover his composure. “It said it would drag us down. Drag us all down into the abyss…”
Just hearing that sent a shudder down Thermal Draft’s spine. “What happened then?”
“Long Road swore that wouldn’t happen, that the Sun Queen – I think that’s what he called Princess Celestia – that her light would boil the creature’s evil away. He actually started glowing when he said it. Or maybe it was his sword that was glowing, I’m not sure. Then he attacked. He wasn’t afraid. Even then he wasn’t afraid…”
Realizing that Pocket was lost in memories again, Thermal Draft quietly spoke up. “You said you didn’t see how the fight ended?”
Shuddering, Pocket shook his head. “No, one of the creature’s…it shot some sort of ball of slime at me, it just flung a leg – a tendril – at me, and the blob of the stuff hit me right in the face. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt, and I was sure I was dying, that my head was going to dissolve right there, and I heard Long Road chanting something, some…I know this sounds silly, but they sounded like magic words, and suddenly I wasn’t in pain anymore. The acid or whatever it was that hit my head was gone, and I heard Long Road groan and realize that somehow, it was on him instead, that he’d used some sort of…I don’t know, spell or something, the way he could heal others, and he’d taken the hit for me somehow.”
Pocket bit his lip, his eyes starting to water. “That’s when he told me to run. To run and not look back.”
“And did you?”
“I shouldn’t have,” sniffled the stallion. “I should have stayed, I should have said I wouldn’t leave him. But I did…I turned and ran. Behind me, I heard Long Road calling out to the Sun Queen again, and there was the sound of fighting, and I was going to keep going, but then everything stopped.”
Thermal Draft tilted her head. “Stopped?”
Slowly, Pocket nodded. “The light Long Road was radiating went out. The sounds of fighting stopped. It was suddenly all dark and quiet again. I was so scared…I wanted to keep running, but…I just couldn’t. So I turned around and went back to that flooded chamber, but it wasn’t flooded anymore. The water was back down to the normal level, and I later found out that all of the ooze monsters had disappeared then too. Long Road had won.”
Drafty leaned back in her chair, processing that. “But he was gone?”
“Mostly,” whispered Pocket.
Drafty frowned. “What does that mean?”
Pocket didn’t answer right away. Instead, he slowly stood up and moved over to a nearby bureau. Opening the top drawer, he pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle, slowly peeling the edges back until its contents were revealed.
Inside were the half-melted remains of the hilt of a sword.
Staring down at the sink as she leaned on the bathroom counter, Drafty’s voice was barely audible to her ears. Had there been anyone else in there with her, she was sure they wouldn’t have been able to hear her at all. Not with how loud the music was playing right outside, the heavy bass and synthesized tones that dance clubs were famous for only slightly muffled by the walls.
But inside her head, Kara heard her loud and clear. Of course you can, sweetheart. Don’t you want Lex to love you?
“I do,” she replied immediately. “Of course I do. But this is…” She couldn’t finish, lifting her head to gaze at herself in the dirty mirror. The filth on the glass marred her reflection in a way that seemed horribly appropriate for what the goddess was asking of her. “If he ever finds out I did this…him or Cloudy or anypony…I’ll never be able to look them in the eye again.”
They won’t find out, purred the goddess, her voice confident and reassuring. Everyone who knows you is a continent away, and you haven’t told any of the ponies waiting for you outside your real name. Everything you do tonight will be our little secret.
“I know, I just…” For a moment Drafty floundered, biting her lip as she closed her eyes, trying to quell the rush of trepidation washing over her. “I just wish you could tell me how this will make Lex love me,” she pleaded.
Sweetheart, we’ve talked about this, sighed Kara, somehow managing to keep her voice gentle and compassionate despite the exasperation Drafty was sure had to be there. The bond that allows gods to channel our power to mortals is one of faith. Doubts like this are why I’m not able to grant you any spells.
Drafty flinched at that, knowing that despite her kindly tone, the goddess had just rebuked her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You keep trying to help me and all I do is complain.”
Oh, my poor Drafty, cooed Kara. I just want you to have all the love you’re entitled to, rather than ending up like that miserable stallion you spoke with before, pining over a romance that never had a chance to blossom.
The mention of Pocket Square made Thermal Draft’s ears fold back, keenly cognizant of the parallels between herself and the earth stallion whom she’d spoken to only a few hours ago. Just like her, Pocket Square had – despite having a special somepony, or special somegriff in his case – fallen for a selfless stranger who, when disaster had struck and things were at their bleakest, had showed up out of nowhere to save everyone. No matter that the mournful stallion hadn’t said anything about having developed feelings for Long Road; as someone who was pining after a love that was increasingly looking unattainable, Drafty had been able to recognize a kindred spirit. The difference was that she, thanks to Kara, still had a chance to be with both of her beloveds, something Pocket Square would never be able to do.
Reaching into her purse, Drafty pulled out the melted hilt that Pocket Square had given her. The earth stallion had insisted that she take it with her, saying that Long Road’s lady love would surely want it back. But Drafty couldn’t shake the notion that he’d wanted it gone, as though the keepsake had become unbearable for how it reminded him of what might have been.
“I don’t want to live like that,” she murmured, staring at the twisted lump of metal. “I don’t want to regret not following my heart.”
That’s my girl, cheered Kara. Now, get back out there. Those stallions are waiting for you.
Nodding, Drafty took a deep breath, straightening up as she brushed her mane back and gave the mirror a quick smile. Satisfied that the mare looking back at her was a party girl who only cared about having fun, she trotted – no, she strutted, making sure to put extra sway in her hips – out of the bathroom.
Immediately, the music blared louder, the decibels reaching a level that could be felt as much as heard. The visuals were no less frenetic, as colored lights flickered on and off with in no distinguishable pattern, mingling with the haze created by the smoke machines as ponies jumped, shook, swayed, and twisted on the dance floor. But Drafty paid no attention to the ponies around her, heading back toward the group she’d been chatting up before she’d excused herself to go freshen up.
Clustered around a table were a group of stallions, laughing and tossing back drinks. A mixture of pegasi, earth ponies, and unicorns, they were all around her own age, ranging from late teens to early twenties. More notable than that was how each of them was an exceptional specimen of vigor, having physiques that ranged from “strapping” all the way through “ripped.” But then, that was to be expected of the Trottingham Tacklers, the city’s premiere hoofball stars.
Catching the eye of the admittedly handsome young pegasus stallion who was the team’s wide receiver, Drafty gave him her most seductive smile, and the goddess murmured praise as he immediately turned to nudge his buddies and nod in her direction. “Hey boys,” she purred as she climbed over the lap of the cornerback – making sure that her dress, a too-tight little black number that she’d deliberately changed into before coming here, rode up scandalously high as a result – and sat herself down between the receiver and the linebacker, wriggling a little as she did. “Did you miss me?”
“We were starting to get a little lonely without you here, Kara,” snickered an earth colt who she knew was the team’s center, calling her by the name she’d given them earlier. That had been the goddess’s idea, and if any of the Tacklers had thought it sounded odd, they’d kept that opinion to themselves. Of course, with how she’d been acting all night, she suspected that her name was the last thing on their minds now. “We were almost ready to start looking for someone else to keep us company.”
“Aw, you didn’t think that all this was worth waiting for?” she pouted, reclining more as she traced a hoof up over her body, making sure to let it linger between her thighs for just a moment, her mock-sadness fading into a sultry smile. “I guess I’ll just need to do a better job convincing you I’m worth it, then.”
“How’re you gonna do that?” guffawed the cornerback she’d flashed before, clearly not the brightest of the bunch.
But under the silent tutelage of the goddess, Drafty refrained from rolling her eyes, instead picking up a flute glass of something and kicking it back. Holding the liquor in her mouth, she shimmied up from where she’d parked herself, working her way back over to the cornerback, every motion lithe and exaggerated, until she’d crawled into his lap and was straddling him. Leaning forward, she pressed her lips to his, her tongue snaking out and pressing against his mouth demandingly. He didn’t resist, and instead closed his eyes and let out a pleased grunt as she slowly let the contents of her mouth flow into his. It was only when he’d swallowed it all, leaving him flushed and panting, that she leaned back, giving him her sexiest grin. “Like that.”
All around her the Tacklers whooped and hoof-bumped at the wanton display, eyes locked onto her, with the team’s center giving an overwrought huff. “I thought that was supposed to be for me.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” giggled Drafty. “I’ve got something special in mind for you…” Standing up again, she reached out with her wings, caressing both cheeks as she leaned in closer to him, stopping when her face was barely half-an-inch away from his. “But you’ll have to follow me out on the dance floor to get it.”
That’s right, encouraged the goddess as Drafty led the eager stallion into the throng of bodies. Arouse them. Entice them. Make them want you until they can’t think about anything else.
Drafty knew how to play the flirt, briefly recalling when she and Cloudy had done so in order to tease the combination to the bank vault out of that repulsive little butterball, Piggy. But she pushed the memory of her girlfriend away as she made herself discard her inhibitions, letting the lights and sounds and sensations drown out everything else. When she felt the stallion she’d led on grab her tail and tug her backward, she didn’t fight it, pressing her backside against his waist as she looked over her shoulder at him with hooded eyes and a not-so-silent moan.
Become the object of their every fantasy, their every desire. Abandon the parts of you that don’t feed their passions, and they’ll want you more. Change yourself into what they yearn for, until their need for you overwhelms everything else.
She was back at the table now, lying down across the laps of three stallions sitting side by side. Twisting languidly, she made small motions with her muzzle, wing, and back leg, causing each of them to grunt and squirm, biting their lip and groaning. She felt like a living sex toy – recalling how Aria had once said that was the only way she’d ever be with Lex – but she shoved that thought away, looking over to wink at her audience. Around her the rest of the Tacklers watched, wide-eyed, and even several of the ponies around them were staring, unable to tear themselves away from the debauchery as she openly fondled three guys right in front of them.
The more you promise them, the more they’ll surrender. Reason. Morals. Promises. Consequences. All sacrifices that they offer you, desperate for the pleasure you’re giving them.
The night air was cool as she led them back to her place, the chateau on the outskirts of town. None of the stallions could seem to go more than a few feet without touching her, hooves tracing her mane, her wings, her legs, and more intimate areas of her body. Each time she leaned into the touch, a whimper escaping her lips as she pressed herself against the probing hooves and eager lips and swishing tails…but only for a moment before she pulled away, her attention flitting between each of them without stopping, driving them to be bolder and bolder as they all sought to keep her focused on them.
When their restraint is gone, and they have nothing left to offer, then they’ll give you the only thing that they have left: themselves. Their bodies. Their vigor. Their love. Accept it as your due and take it all.
They practically burst through the entrance of the estate, Drafty falling over as the stallions gathered around her, peeling her dress off and flinging her purse away. Immediately, one stallion climbed on top of her, shoving his companions away with a snarl as he positioned himself between her hind legs. Another one, unable to wait, grabbed her head in his hooves and crouched over her. The others were just as impatient, surrounding her as they made use of her hooves, her wings, and even her tail. Those that were left out saw to their own pleasure, never taking their eyes off of her as their excitement mounted.
Their lust is submission. Their sex is worship. Make them say your name – my name – and beg for my favor!
Drafty gave herself over to the stallions completely. Time ceased to have meaning as they moved around her and against her and inside her, their movements growing more and more frenzied. All around her she could hear them groaning the name of the goddess, dimly recalling that she’d told them to say it, and the press of bodies became absolutely frantic as muscles spasmed and breaths caught in throats.
For a single moment everything seemed to go still, as if everyone had stopped moving, stopped grunting, even stopped breathing in unison. Then Drafty felt a sudden rush of ecstasy – so intense that it was almost painful – shoot through her, causing her back to arch and her body to convulse and her voice to rise in a wail as her senses deserted her. All around her she could hear the stallions crying out in response, as though her release had been their signal, and she could feel wet warmth flowing over her inside and out. The sensation was impossible to process, and all she could think about as her consciousness fled was that it hurt so wonderfully…
The voice of the goddess followed her down into darkness.
Well done, sweetheart. Now you’re truly one of my children.
When Drafty came to, she was lying on the floor of another bathroom.
The return to consciousness was slow, her memories of last night coming back in bits and pieces, having to fight to make themselves known through the throbbing ache that was assaulting her. Not simply between her legs or under her tail, everything was sore, from her back to her hooves and even her eyes, causing her to wince as sunlight filtered in through a nearby window. It was only after several seconds of squeezing them shut that she cracked them open again, recognizing the stately washroom in the chateau where she was staying.
That’s right, she recalled blearily as she sat up. Kara told me to go out, and I met those guys at the club. I flirted with them all night, and brought them back here, and then we… The memory of what had happened next made her wince. At least the goddess had been true to her word about no one finding out, since the old lady who kept this place up was deaf as a post and slept like the dead. Now she just needed to find something to ease how uncomfortable she felt, turning toward the medicine cabinet-
Yelping, Drafty lurched backward, reflexively trying to avoid the monster she’d just caught sight of. For a moment she laid there on the floor of the bathroom, her heart hammering in her chest from the glimpse she’d gotten of the black thing, her wings buzzing as they twitched, making her-
Wait…buzzing?
Twisting her head around, Drafty’s eyes widened as she beheld the featherless, transparent wings sprouting from her back. Her back, which was covered in a black carapace rather than brown fur. Her tail was some sort of translucent membrane. And on her flank…her cutie mark was still there, the stylized lines that formed and upward-directed gust of wind standing out clearly against the rest of her. But the rest of her…
Shaking, Drafty slowly climbed back to her hooves. She knew what she’d see this time, but she still had to confirm it. Had to prove that this was actually happening.
Standing up, Drafty looked into the bathroom mirror, and screamed at what she saw.
And in the mirror, the changeling that she’d become screamed back at her.
Don’t worry, sweetheart. Everything’s going to be-
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!”
Try and relax, Drafty. There’s nothing to-
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!”
I said CALM DOWN!
Thermal Draft quieted immediately. Up until that point, Kara had never been anything but pleasant to her. The goddess had often been soothing and warm, sometimes playful and a bit naughty, and even at times consoling her when she’d felt down. Not once had she ever heard Kara sound upset the way she did then, and Drafty couldn’t help but react like a child who had just been scolded by an angry parent.
But while that was enough to cut through her hysteria, it did nothing for the horror she felt as she stared at the black bug in the bathroom mirror. “You made me into a changeling,” she moaned, recalling the photos from the newspaper about the monsters that had attacked Princess Cadance’s wedding.
Those love-eating parasites you told me about before? Hardly, snorted the goddess. I’ve made you into a doppelganger, one of my spiritual children. There are many of them on Everglow, and now you’re the first one in Equestria!
The triumphant tone in Kara’s voice made Drafty wince. “But I don’t want to be a doppel…whatever they’re called. I want to be me!” Unable to bear the sight of her reflection anymore, she squeezed her eyes shut. “Change me back!”
It’s not that simple, sweetheart.
“No!” Shaking her head, Drafty couldn’t accept that answer. “Change me back!”
In her head, the goddess sighed. I can’t change you back to how you were, but you can have the next-best thing. Concentrate on how you looked before. Recall the color of your eyes. The feel of your coat. The scent of your mane. Think of them all, and about how much you want them to be a part of you again.
That much Drafty had no problem doing, still hoping to wake up from the horrible nightmare her life had become. Biting her lip, she wished with all of her heart that when she opened her eyes, she’d be back to her normal self, that this would all turn out to be some sort of bad dream brought on by too much partying. That she’d be back plain old Thermal Draft again, not some-
A sudden sensation washed over her then, causing her to gasp. It was like popping a joint, except it was in her muscles instead of between her bones, spreading across her entire body in an instant from her muzzle to her tail. The feeling was so unexpected, and so alien, that her eyes popped open instantly, terrified that something even worse had just happened to her. “What-”
She couldn’t finish, her breath catching in her throat as she caught sight of her reflection again, seeing herself.
Her old self.
“I’m…I’m back to normal,” she croaked, scarcely able to believe it.
Oh sweetheart, “normal” is such an ugly word, murmured Kara disapprovingly. You really shouldn’t use it to describe yourself.
Feeling her heart starting to slow and her breathing returning to normal, Drafty seriously considered pushing everything that had just happened out of her mind completely, overcome by a desperate sense that if she just acted like the last sixty seconds had never happened, then they wouldn’t have.
But she couldn’t do that. It had been exactly that sort of behavior – sticking her head in the sand and hoping for the best to the point of denying what was going on around her – that had gotten her stranded in Vanhoover when the city had flooded. Living through that had crippled her ability to willfully blind herself to unpleasant truths. That was why, after taking several deep breaths, Drafty forced herself to speak up again. “Kara…what happened?”
I told you, explained the goddess, her voice once again soothing and gentle. You’re a doppelganger now.
Hearing the goddess’s use of the present tense, despite her apparently having turned back to normal, made Drafty swallow nervously. There were a hundred questions going through her head at that moment as she continued staring at herself in the mirror, scared that at any moment she’d change back into the insectoid creature she’d been only a few seconds prior. But the one that came out of her mouth was, “Why?”
You remember what I told you before, about how I can’t manifest in your world unless I’m worshiped there? asked the goddess rhetorically. Well, last night you carried out a rite that was sacred to me, and in doing so allowed me to extend a tiny bit of my power into Equestria. It wasn’t much, but it was just enough to give you my kiss, granting your body the mutability it now possesses.
Drafty couldn’t help but fold her ears back at that. “No, I mean…why did you do this to me?”
Oh sweetheart, I did it for you, replied Kara in a sad tone. Now you can finally have what you always wanted: Lex’s love.
“Are you kidding?” Drafty couldn’t help the half-hysterical laugh that escaped her lips then. “Love me? He wouldn’t even recognize me if he saw me when I was that…that…”
She couldn’t even come up with the words to describe the chitinous form she’d so recently taken. But she didn’t have to. Even as the image of how she’d looked popped into her brain, she felt the same peculiar sensation wash over her, her eyes widening as she belatedly realized what was happening.
In the mirror, her entire form suddenly turned blurry, as though she were looking at an oil painting that had been splashed with water. But it only lasted a fraction of a second before her features came back into focus. Except they weren’t her features anymore, but those of a changeling, or doppelganger, or whatever the proper name was for what she’d become.
“He won’t love me like this!” Drafty’s voice came out as a choked sob. “No one could!”
Sweetheart, don’t you remember what we talked about before? When I helped you impersonate that Pixie pony?
“What?” Still trying to process the enormity of what had happened to her, Drafty couldn’t understand why Kara was bringing up something that was almost two weeks old. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Kara sighed. I want you to try something for me. Think about Sonata.
“Sonata? Why?” asked Drafty, completely lost now.
Trust me. Just picture her in your mind’s eye.
Not knowing what else to do, Drafty did as she was told, making herself visualize the supernaturally beautiful mare who was always at Lex’s side. Even in her agitated state, it wasn’t that hard to do; as much as she loved Cloudbank, Drafty had to admit that Sonata was the sort of girl you couldn’t help but fantasize about. It didn’t hurt that her voice was almost hypnotic, perfectly matching her incredible body-
“Huh?!”
The sudden exclamation flew from Drafty’s lips as her hideousness was suddenly blurred, her muscles popping…
And then Sonata was staring at her from inside the mirror, a dumbstruck expression on her face.
There, you see? purred Kara smugly. You might not have her magic, but imagine if Lex saw you now. He’d nuzzle you, kiss you, and softly tell you all the secrets he reserves only for his most cherished lover. That’s you now.
Drafty couldn’t respond, still awestruck by how she’d become a perfect copy of the most beautiful girl she’d ever seen. Gulping, she turned, examining herself in profile. Sure enough, Sonata’s cutie mark – a bright red heart with a jagged musical note in front of it – was on her flank. “This is…” She couldn’t finish, her eyes widening as she heard Sonata’s voice coming out of her mouth.
Normally, it takes quite a bit of training for a doppelganger to learn to take on other forms, explained Kara, her voice filled with pride. And impersonating specific individuals is an even more advanced lesson. But you’re special, the first one of my children born in Equestria, so I’ve advanced you beyond what most newborn doppelgangers can do. This isn’t even all, either. Have you ever wondered if Sonata would look better as a blonde?
“A…blonde?” echoed Drafty, still not used to hearing herself speak in someone else’s voice.
Go ahead, urged the goddess. See how it looks on her.
For a moment Drafty hesitated, feeling oddly nonplussed at what Kara was suggesting, but after a second she managed a nod, looking at her – Sonata’s – mane and imagining how it would look if it was colored golden instead of alternating shades of blue.
In the mirror her mane suddenly blurred, and then her imagination became reality, as a blonde Sonata was staring back at her.
See? Kara asked happily. Since she acts like such a blonde anyway, this is perfect for her.
The idle snarking brought a giggle to Drafty’s lips, not so much because it was funny but because of how utterly incongruous it was for what was happening. She’d had an orgy last night, woken up as a hideous monster, and now she’d turned into Lex’s girlfriend, and yet here she was listening to jabs about how dumb Sonata was from the alien goddess in her head. It was completely insane.
A second later she caught sight of her tail – or rather, Sonata’s tail – and realized that it was still in Sonata’s original colors. Fighting down the urge to laugh harder, she concentrated, and sure enough it changed to match her mane a second later. Seized by a sudden urge, she made a quick decision, and a second later Sonata’s coat was no longer bluish white, instead decorated with the exotic black and white stripes of a zebra exactly like the one she’d once seen on the cover of a trashy bridle-ripper novel. “Oh wow!”
There you go, purred Kara. Have fun with it. You can be anyone you want, though there are limits to how far you can transform.
But Drafty was barely listening, a sudden sense of excitement sweeping away all of the despair she’d felt only minutes earlier. Now she remembered what Kara had talked about, back when she’d pretended to be Pixie; she’d mentioned giving her the power to change form, to look like whomever she wanted. She hadn’t realized it would mean changing her natural appearance into something that looked almost exactly like a changeling – though thankfully retaining her cutie mark – but now that she could look like anypony she wanted, that suddenly didn’t seem like such a big deal.
In fact, the range of possibilities was suddenly tantalizing…
With just a moment’s concentration, she was suddenly C. Shells, the nautical captain who’d been part of their group when they’d broken into that bank vault. Then she was Garden Gate, tall and svelte. Then she was River Bank, scowling at herself in the mirror before bursting into giggles again.
Her imagination ran wild with each new transformation. With a thought she was Sapphire Shores, pop star sensation. Then she Princess Cadance, so recently the subject of every newspaper in the country leading up to her marriage, gaping at herself and adjusting her stance as she was suddenly several inches taller than she was used to. Then she was Shining Armor, the handsome captain whom Cadance had picked to be her husband…and her brain froze as she realized the full implications of what she’d just done.
This is the part that everyone has fun with, chuckled Kara as Drafty sat back and glanced between her hind legs, her brain fusing out at how…complete, the change was. Shining Armor was a heartthrob by any measure, and now his likeness was completely at her disposal. Her mouth suddenly running dry, she turned and examined herself from every angle in the mirror, jaw hanging open as she examined the prince – whose picture she’d seen in the newspaper alongside his bride-to-be in the days before his wedding – in an up close and very personal manner.
Just so you know, you can’t copy the specific aspects of an individual that you haven’t personally witnessed, warned Kara suddenly. Right now your brain is simply filling in the details of what you think that stallion’s equipment is like. It’s not guaranteed to match the reality. The same is true for birthmarks, scars, or any other distinctive markings that you haven’t seen. That’s something you’ll need to be aware of when impersonating someone.
“R-right,” Drafty muttered, bringing a hoof up to her muzzle in surprise a second later at how deep her voice was now. Taking a slow breath, she changed back into a she. But even as she returned to normal – a pegasus mare whose coat, mane, and tail were all shades of brown – another idea occurred to her. Looking back down at her lap, she focused, and almost fainted as she changed one particular part of herself to be male.
You’ve got plenty of time, noted Kara, her mental voice thick with amusement. Go ahead and play with it if you want.
For a moment Drafty was inclined to do exactly that, reaching down to touch what was there…only to suddenly recall that she’d done much the same last night, when she’d handled the goods of more than a few stallions.
The thought was enough to kill her sudden ardor. She’d alternated between boyfriends and girlfriends growing up, and almost all of her relationships had been physical, but she’d never let herself be so blatantly used like that, practically begging those stallions to treat her like a cheap thrill. While it might have been physically satisfying, the memory of how she’d been nothing to them but a collection of parts to be played with was enough to smother her desire to do anything similar now. “Maybe later,” she muttered, changing her loins back to normal as she stood up.
As you like, replied Kara easily. But there’s one more thing you should be aware of. Try changing into that reporter who broke Lex’s heart, Nosey.
The name brought a frown to Drafty’s face, and not just because of how badly that awful nag had hurt the stallion she loved. Although Lex had told her how the unicorn mare hadn’t been in control of herself at the time, Drafty still couldn’t forget how Nosey had been the one who’d killed her. “I don’t want to change into her.”
Have a little faith in me, insisted the goddess. Just turn into her. I promise you’ll be surprised.
Huffing, Drafty didn’t argue, instead staring at herself as she imagined the pony in question. Blonde hair. A coal-colored coat. A horn. A newspaper-and-magnifying-glass cutie mark.
One moment of blurriness later, she was looking at Nosey’s reflection, reaching up to adjust her glasses…
“Wait, glasses?” Blinking, she pulled the spectacles off of her muzzle with her hoof, distantly noting that her eyesight was the same with or without them on, as though the lenses were lacking any refractive properties.
Just one of many different types of accoutrements you can create on your person when you transform, clarified Kara. Bodywear, hoofwear, accessories, all of it will appear on you as you imagine it. They’ll all vanish if they’re no longer in contact with you, of course, and you can’t create anything of intricate construction or much mass, but whenever you alter what you’re wearing any real items on yourself will be changed to match your new appearance.
Drafty’s eyebrows had been progressively rising during the goddess’s summary of this latest aspect of her power. Slowly, she put the glasses down, watching as they evaporated like a leftover bit of a busted cloud the second her hoof ceased touching them. And the limits Kara was describing weren’t really that strict, which meant…
“Oh, I’m gonna have so much fun with this.”
It was the knocking on the bathroom door that finally brought Drafty back to herself.
“Miss Draft?” came the voice of Throw Rug, the old lady who was caretaker of this place. “Are you in there?”
Giving one last glance at herself in the mirror – taking in the sight of her wild mass of bright red hair against the form-fitting green gown and golden earrings for a long moment – she sighed and changed back to normal. Knowing that the near-totally deaf mare wouldn’t hear her if she yelled through the door, she gave herself a once-over, making sure she looked like she should, before she trotted over to the door and opened it. “Yes?”
A relieved look crossed Throw Rug’s face. “Miss Draft, you missed breakfast this morning. Are you quite alright?”
Fighting down the urge to flinch, Thermal Draft nodded. “I’m fine, thank you for asking,” she answered loudly, knowing that anything less than a near-shout would go unheard by the old mare. “I was out late last night, so I overslept.”
Throw Rug tilted her head. “In the master bathroom?”
“Er, yes.”
One of the elderly maid’s eyebrows rose, her features hardening into a look of matronly disapproval. “Would this have anything to do with that awful mess that was in the front foyer this morning?”
“…no. No, it wouldn’t,” answered Drafty flatly.
“Miss Draft-”
“I’ll be down for breakfast after I freshen up,” finished Drafty, already retreating back into the bathroom. “Thank you!”
Waiting until she heard the old maid’s hoofsteps slowly retreat into the distance – accompanied by muttering that was probably intended to be under her breath, but was instead spoken at a normal volume – Drafty sighed. She’d never been much of a clothes horse, but the prospect of being able to create any outfit she wanted, in any style, pattern, or design, had simply been too much to ignore. Even if she couldn’t create any precious jewelry to go with it, instead having to settle for cheap knockoffs, the possibilities had been endless, and with how she could alter her appearance as well, all with a thought, she wasn’t sure how long she’d spent just trying out look after look after look.
“And I haven’t even tried turning into a non-pony yet,” she murmured, remembering the idea that had occurred to her halfway through her one-mare fashion show.
Which is just as well, answered Kara. I gave you a leg up over the training most doppelgangers need to go through, but only a modest one. Right now you can make use of minor physical changes, and a wide range of cosmetic ones, but your range beyond that is extremely limited. Creatures of similar size and shape to a pony are possible, but nothing further. And never forget that you won’t have the magic of any creature whose appearance you take, including unicorns.
Drafty nodded. “I know. That’s how Lex figured out that Nosey was possessed.”
The mention of her crush – and the mare who’d earned his love only to throw it away – caused her recent excitement over her new powers to ebb, the misgivings she’d had before coming back. Sighing, she turned into Sonata again, staring at herself. “I know it might sound hypocritical, after how much I was playing around, but…this isn’t what I wanted.”
You wanted to be in a relationship with him and Cloudbank both. For Lex to love you with the same passion and intensity that he has for Sonata and Aria, without it ruining your relationship with your girlfriend. Now that’s possible.
“I wanted him to love me,” protested Drafty, a sorrowful look on Sonata’s face. “Me! Thermal Draft! Pretending to be someone else that he loves isn’t real!”
In her head, Kara laughed softly. I’ve been a goddess for a very long time, sweetheart, and I’ve heard all sorts of platitudes about “true love” and “higher love” and “love that’s real” and many other poetic yearnings for some sort of romance that’s greater or deeper or stronger than your typical love. And you know what I’ve discovered? That there’s no such thing as a typical love. Each and every one is unique, and none of them deserve to be called false or lesser, which is what the adherents of “true love” – or whatever term they use – are all implying.
Drafty gestured at Sonata’s reflection. “But if I were to go to Lex looking like this, and he said he loved me-”
Then he’d be baring part of his soul to you, sweetheart, murmured Kara. Regardless of what name he puts to your face, or what history he thinks you share, he’ll still be giving you something profound and intimate. Don’t diminish that by saying that it’s not real.
“But it’s meant for Sonata,” Drafty protested softly. “Not me.”
When you look the way you do now, you are Sonata, countered the goddess. You’re a shapechanger now, sweetheart. You can’t think of identity in concrete terms anymore.
“That’s not-”
Go to him.
“What?”
Go to Lex, repeated Kara. You’ve done everything you came to this city to do. Now go find him in Las Pegasus. You did all of this so you could feel what it’s like to be someone he loves. Don’t you think you should at least experience that just once, so you can decide for yourself if it’s real or not?
Drafty hesitated. She’d already done as much research as she could about Long Road, so there wasn’t any reason to stick around here. And she’d already become a doppel-whatever, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t already gone past the point of no return. Maybe…maybe just once…one time with the stallion she wanted so badly…
For almost a minute, Drafty stood there, debating with herself.
Then she strode out of the bathroom, raising her voice. “Missus Rug! I need to pack!”
Willow could almost hear her son rolling his eyes as he trudged into the living room, not looking up from her newspaper as he moved to stand across from her, pouting, the ensemble in question bunched up in his paws. “Can you please just let me use the magic stuff I brought here from back home?” he begged. “It’s so much cooler than this dorky outfit you made me!”
Raising an eyebrow, Willow slowly folded her paper, giving him a cool look as she put it down. “I think you look very handsome in that costume.”
“Mom!” Sunflower whined, managing to make the word several syllables long. “The armor is made out of tinfoil, the cloak is an old quilt, and the mace is a soup can glued to the end of a broken fishing pole! I look like a kid playing pretend!”
“That is the point of a school play, last I checked,” pointed out Willow, trying not to sound too bemused.
“It’s not a play,” huffed the younger purrsian, his wings flaring in childish indignation. “It’s our entry for the school talent show! Me and the Crusaders are putting on a reproduction of the adventures we had together back home! I need the real stuff to make it look authentic!”
“First of all, it’s ‘the Crusaders and I,’” corrected Willow. “Second, Equestria is home now. And third, I’ve told you before, using real weapons and armor is not only unnecessary in a place as peaceful as this, but also runs the risk of upsetting the neighbors. So unless there’s some sort of emergency, they’re staying under lock and key where they belong.”
“Great,” huffed Sunflower miserably, his wings drooping as a sour expression crossed his face. “So not only do I get to be the only one who can’t cast spells, I don’t get to have magic equipment either.”
Willow resisted the urge to sigh. Sunflower’s desire to become a spellcaster was looking less and less like a phase that he’d grow out of, and more and more like a serious interest. The fact that the fillies he spent most of his time with were all dabbling in various spellcasting traditions that they’d picked up while on Everglow was likely exacerbating matters, inadvertently reminding her son of his own deficiency in the arcane arts.
Of course, Willow knew why he really wanted to study magic.
The framed newspaper article about Lex Legis, showing him inside an astral construct as he stared down a dragon, still hung on the wall of Sunflower’s bedroom.
Her mood falling at the thought of the stallion who was trying to ruin the idyllic society where her son could grow up safe and happy, Willow let her cool gaze turn into a steely one, long years of practice allowing her to keep her thoughts from showing on her face. “Do you want to have this discussion again now?” she asked pointedly. “Or do you want to go practice your act for the talent show with your friends?”
Grimacing, the younger purrsian looked down, his expression defeated. “I gotta get going,” he mumbled, turning and heading toward the front door.
For a moment Willow watched Sunflower go, her features returning to their usual neutral expression, hiding how much she hated making her son look so upset. Fortunately, she’d been his mother long enough to know what to do about it.
“And make sure you actually do your share of the work,” she called after him as she turned back toward her newspaper, acting as though she didn’t have a care in the world. “Don’t spend all of your time making out with Sweetie Belle.”
The gentle admonishment had the desired effect as Sunflower whirled in place, his cheeks red beneath his fur and his eyes wide with childish embarrassment. “MOM!”
It took all of Willow’s self-control to fight down the sudden laugh that bubbled up inside her then. “I’m not saying the two of you can’t sneak off for a little while, just not the entire time. And make sure to wash your face when you’re done, just in case she’s wearing her sister’s lipstick again. Unless you want the other girls to tease you some more, that is.”
Sunflower’s response came in the form of a mortified shriek as he rushed out the door, slamming it behind him.
Once he was gone, Willow stopped holding back, chuckling at how adorable her boy was. But the moment ended all too soon, her good humor fading away as she turned back to the problem that she’d been wrestling with for the last several days.
How to kill her son’s idol, Lex Legis.
It was a task that she was no closer to accomplishing now than she was when she’d been asked to do it by Princess Celestia three days ago. And while neither the princess nor Prince Shining Armor – the only other person who had been privy to the clandestine request for Lex to be dispatched – had specified any sort of timeframe, Willow knew that waiting was doing her no favors. Not when Lex was continuing to shore up his powerbase.
That much was evident from what Princess Celestia had told her during the meeting. Not only had Lex taken a royal title for himself, along with all of the perks and privileges that it commanded, but he was apparently also working hard to empower others to fight on his behalf. Although the fight between his lackeys and Twilight Sparkle’s new student, Starlight Glimmer, had apparently ended in the latter’s victory, the tale of the battle – relayed to her by Princess Celestia – had sent cold shudders down Willow’s spine.
Though that had less to do with the various abilities and aptitudes his followers had displayed than it did with how several of Lex’s most devoted minions were apparently children no older than her son.
As it was, Willow had accepted the commission from the princess – which mandated only that the deed had to be done as secretly as possible and that no one else was to be hurt in the process – because she firmly believed that Lex needed to be taken out of the picture before he could irreparably damage the fabric of Equestrian society. But that didn’t mean she had a plan for how to go about it. Even with Princess Celestia relaying Twilight Sparkle’s belief that something was wrong with Lex’s arcane spellcasting, Willow had no illusions about who would win if she were to fight the newly-crowned prince head-on.
Certainly, her own skills as a summoner weren’t up to the task. Although she was able to conjure a wide variety of planar denizens, all of them were of modest power and limited intellect; indeed, most of them were lacking in sapience altogether, being little more than beasts. Even those that were capable of intelligent thought were still among the weakest creatures of their realms.
But then, that was only to be expected. As a summoner, her magic focused heavily on controlling the creatures that she called forth, to the point where they were infallibly bound to total obedience. It was the greatest strength of her spellcasting style, but also the greatest weakness, since focusing so heavily on control meant that not only was there little power left to actually ensnare the creatures she pressed into service, but they couldn’t remain under her control for very long. Five or six minutes was the most she could currently manage, which made her summoned monsters good for little more than backup during a fight.
The sole exception was Kalik, the fire elemental whom she’d formed a soul-bond with back when she’d desperately needed a protector she could trust utterly. The connection between them was much stronger, to the point of allowing her to call Kalik forth with nothing more than a minor ritual, after which she could remain by her side indefinitely. The downside was that Kalik retained her independence, and although she was well-disposed toward Willow, she couldn’t be ordered to do anything she didn’t want to do.
Even then, as far as elementals went, Kalik was notable more for her intelligence (which was high for one of her kind, even if it was less than impressive by mortal standards) than her destructive potential. While Willow knew it was possible to augment the elemental’s power – enhancing her summoning magic had been the focus of her studies right before she’d found herself caught up in the events that had brought her and her son to Equestria, and the soul-bond between her and Kalik allowed her to increase any such augmentation several times over – she also knew that would the slow cultivation of her own meager magical skills. Like everything else she’d achieved in her life, her magical prowess was the result of long, hard work rather than inborn talent.
It was a stark contrast from Twilight Sparkle, who after only a few tutoring sessions in summoning magic was already outperforming Willow. Of course, Twilight had elected to disable the forced obedience controls built into the summoning spells Willow had taught her (and the fact that she had been able to isolate, alter, and rework the underlying structure of those spells so easily had been incredible all on its own), redirecting the freed-up energy toward summoning stronger creatures – like that hound archon, Behemiel – and trusting in friendship, rather than any sort of compulsion or ritual bonding, to see things through. Fortunately, Twilight knew to restrict herself to creatures of a benevolent disposition, such as angels, archons, and similar denizens of the empyreal realms; Willow didn’t want to think about what would happen if Twilight was stupid enough to summon a demon or something similarly malicious without being able to control it.
Of course, that didn’t help Twilight in her duel, noted Willow silently as she stood up, tossing her newspaper – a reprint of Princess Luna’s tell-all from several days ago, along with some supplementary information about Lex – onto the table as she headed toward the front door.
Summoning wasn’t the only magic that Willow had available, but it was the majority of it. She’d picked up a few other spells over the years, mostly a smattering of defense and utility spells, none of them very powerful. The same was true for the bits of enchanted gear that she’d collected; other than Sunflower’s mace being ensorcelled to be able to strike incorporeal creatures as if they were solid – found while he and those fillies had risked their lives exploring an old ruin on Everglow – they were little more than armor that had received minor magical strengthening, mildly apotropaic cloaks, and a few other trinkets, none of which would be more than marginally helpful against Lex. Not when he could create a small mountain of black crystals and drop it on someone.
And that was with his strongest magic supposedly being crippled somehow.
Stepping outside, Willow adopted a smile that was in direct contrast to her mood as she made her way through Ponyville, knowing that her typical reserved expression would stand out in the cheery town. She’d made that mistake once before, and it had resulted in Pinkie Pie following her around all day trying to “cheer her up,” which had entailed everything from serenading her with some sort of one-mare band contraption to an impromptu food fight. It had taken hours for Willow to wash all the icing out of her fur, and it wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.
Instead, she strolled leisurely through town, smiling and waving at various ponies who were her and Sunflower’s neighbors, none of whom were useful to her at the moment. Equestria didn’t have any sort of assassins’ guild or mercenary force that she could subcontract to kill Lex for her. And while there were magic items for sale, all of them were horribly weak, which made it just as well that they weren’t meant for combat anyway.
The only place that had any chance of having something stronger – whether of local make or brought back from Everglow – was Twilight’s residence. While Willow didn't know if there was anything there she’d need to appropriate in order to kill Lex, she doubted it would be too hard to convince one of the purple pony princess’s houseguests to let her inventory what was available. Princess Celestia let it slip that Twilight was feeling guilty over her student being caught up in a portal that she’d foolishly left open, reviewed Willow as she made her way toward the crystal castle. It shouldn’t take much to convince whoever’s there that I just want to look at whatever other magical knickknacks she’s lying around in order to make sure nothing like that happens again. After all, I’m her summoning tutor.
She was still going over her story as she knocked on the front door of the castle. It wouldn’t do to take anything now, of course, but she’d at least be able to catalog if there was anything useful-
“Willow?” Spike looked pleasantly surprised as he opened the door. “Wow, heard the news already, huh?”
Willow blinked, her cover story momentarily forgotten. “The news…?”
Nodding, Spike held his arms out in joy, a toothy grin on his face. “Twilight’s back! And she found Starlight too! They both suddenly reappeared less than a half-hour ago, so I’m letting everypony know!” Clearly overjoyed, he ushered her in. “Come on, you’re the first one to arrive!”
“I…I see,” murmured Willow, trying to figure out what to do now.
“Do me a favor,” continued Spike as he led her into the kitchen and shoved a bowl into her paws. “Would you bring them these cauliflower chips I made? Soft Mane’s out with her mom, and I’m still sending everypony letters to let them know that Twilight’s back while I whip up a few more dishes.” Without stopping to look at her, he took a cake pan out of the oven, setting the steaming confection aside before replacing it with what looked like some sort of cheese dish, moving to grab a piece of paper from a stack that had been set on a nearby countertop along with a quill and inkwell. “They’re talking to their new friend in the map room.”
Willow’s brow furrowed as she tried to process the sudden rush of information that was being thrown at her. Especially that last part. “…new friend?”
“Yep! In the map room,” answered Spike distractedly as he rolled the letter up and breathed on it, the paper turning into a collection of sparkling motes that whipped through the air and toward the door.
Watching them go for a moment, Willow glanced back at the baby dragon, seeing him adjust the temperature on the oven before starting another letter as he happily hummed a cheerful tune. Raising an eyebrow, Willow wandered away, having been here often enough for Twilight’s summoning lessons that she knew where the map room was, knowing that her plans were likely scuttled but that it would raise questions if she ducked out now.
Heading down the hallway that led to her destination, Willow slowed down as voices floated out from behind the closed doors. There were three of them, all female, and they sounded…not happy. Curious despite herself, Willow crept closer, making sure to step lightly.
“…-not ungrateful for your help,” came Twilight’s voice, sounding more subdued than Willow could ever remember her being. “I just don’t think you needed to go that far. Those guards had already surrendered!”
“Come on, Twilight,” came a second voice, this one conciliatory in tenor. “She did what she had to do. It’s not like we were in a position to take prisoners or anything. If we’d let them go, we never would have gotten out of there! Besides, we helped a lot of ponies escape.” A sigh then, and the voice turned sour. “Even if Silhouette was one of them.”
“I know, Starlight,” came Twilight’s voice again, not sound reassured at all. “I’m just wondering if there was a better way.”
“There wasn’t,” replied a third voice coldly. “Not unless you wanted someone to raise an alarm, in which case none of us would have gotten out of there.”
But Twilight didn’t sound ready to accept that reasoning. “You could have knocked them out-”
“And if they’d recovered before we were done, that would have been it,” interrupted the third voice. “And I’m through talking about this. It’s over, and I kept my end of the bargain, so now you keep yours.”
“Alright,” sighed Twilight. “Give me a day or so to get the money together. I don’t usually have to ask for royal funds.”
“One day,” answered the third person flatly. “Now, you can keep wringing your hooves if you want to. I’m going to find something to eat.”
Engrossed in the conversation, it took Willow a moment to realize the implication of those words, and before she could react the door was thrown open and someone collided with her bodily, sending the two of them spilling to the floor along with the bowl of cauliflower chips.
The newcomer sprang away immediately, rolling back and coming up in a fighting stance, reaching for a sheathed hilt around her middle. Willow reacted slower, surprised to find that the newcomer wasn’t a pony like she’d assumed.
Instead, she was a griffon.
Her front half was completely black, having the appearance of a crow. Her back half shared her inky coloration, being feline in nature but otherwise harder to place; it could have been anything from a jaguar to a housecat. Her clothes were in the same style, with her cloak, tunic, belt, and large collection of pouches, bandoliers, and short blades all dyed ebony. Including the buttoned purse at her side that had spilled open in the commotion, causing a set of thin, eyeless needles to spill to the ground.
Willow’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of them. She knew what those were, having spent enough time dealing with the underworld elements of her hometown, Murrage, to recognize that they were no ordinary sewing implements.
They were quieting needles, made to be inserted into the vital areas of a dead body and remain there unseen so that, if the corpse was resurrected, the unlucky person would immediately suffer fatal injury and die again in seconds.
The tools of an assassin.
Willow blinked, unable to believe her luck, as Twilight and a purple pony who matched Princess Celestia’s description of Starlight Glimmer moved up to look at them both.
“Willow?” asked Twilight, clearly befuddled, before shaking her head. “I suppose everypony’s starting to arrive, so we should probably take a break anyway. Let me introduce you to our new…friend.” Willow didn’t miss the way Twilight’s voice fell on the last word before continuing.
“Her name’s Dark Streak, and she’s the reason Starlight and I made it out of Cuachan alive.”
“Your Highness,” repeated the pegasus stallion, part of the gaggle of ponies – a mixed group of rubberneckers, royalty-obsessed superfans, and ponies with more curiosity than sense – who’d followed them around ever since they’d arrived in Las Pegasus. “I don’t mean to question your judgment-”
“Then don’t,” snapped Lex irritably, not looking back at the ponies following him as he instead allowed Feather Duster to lead him down a particularly filthy avenue between a pair of large brick buildings.
“Of course,” replied the obsequious pony quickly. “It’s just, if you could tell us why you’re here…”
From her place between Lex and the hangers-on, Aria rolled her eyes, hearing Sonata sigh next to her.
“Here” was the terrestrial portion of Las Pegasus, and in the last few hours Aria had become quite familiar with the place, courtesy of Lex’s sudden departure from what should have been a visit to the Wild Blue Yonder, a ride touted as being the most extreme rollercoaster not only in the city, but in all of Equestria. But when Feather Duster had come rushing back – apparently having been sent out on an errand earlier that morning – saying that she’d “found them,” Lex had abruptly gone off-script. While Sonata had been dismayed at not getting to go on the rollercoaster, Aria couldn’t bring herself to be too upset about it, knowing that her sister tended to shriek at an ear-splitting volume on thrill rides.
Instead, they’d come down to the part of Las Pegasus that wasn’t so glamorous.
Living quite literally in the shadow of the ritzy, cloud-dwelling resort town was Equestria’s premiere tourist destination was what Lex had called “the vital infrastructure required to maintain the habitability and operational integrity” of the aerial part of the city. Aria hadn’t known what that meant at first, but as they’d approached their destination – riding the same luxurious airship that they’d left Vanhoover in down to a dockyard that was considerably less prestigious than its counterpart in the clouds – it had quickly become clear. It had been enough to make her wonder if the rollercoaster wouldn’t have been better.
The grounded portion of Las Pegasus was the polar opposite of the floating portion of the city in every way. The majority of the place seemed to be factories and processing plants. The concrete lining the streets was old and cracked. The paint that covered building exteriors was faded and peeling. The lights – ubiquitous since the upper portion of the city made the place perpetually overcast – were far from the neon opulence that was to be found above, instead being fluorescent and dim. Many had gone out entirely, leaving large portions of the city shrouded in gloom.
Of course, none of the ponies there had seemed to notice the oppressive conditions, likely due to how busy they all were. Ever since they’d stepped off their airship, Aria had observed how everypony they’d seen had been rushing to get something done. Making deliveries, repairing pipes, filing out paperwork; there seemed to be no shortage of tasks that needed to be accomplished, with everypony going about their work so diligently that even the newcomers among them had barely warranted a glance, with neither Lex’s intimidating features nor the Siren sisters’ beauty getting anything besides a few quick looks as everypony went around their business, apparently too busy to stop for more than a moment.
Sonata had remarked on how weird the lack of attention was, prompting Lex to launch into an explanation of how they likely couldn’t afford to since the lower area functioned as a lifeline that fed necessary supplies to the otherwise-isolated cloud-dwelling part of Las Pegasus, but Aria hadn’t been listening by that point, already having discerned the truth of the matter:
Everyone down here worked their tails off so that everyone up there could have fun.
It was, in other words, a miserable environment, one that Aria – along with her sisters – had sought to avoid while living on Earth. While the humans living in such places had been no more difficult to beguile than the rest of their kind, the fringe benefits from doing so had never failed to be minimal. People who lived in this sort of borderline-squalor virtually never had anything to give, meaning that their adulation had no tangible form for the Sirens to take advantage of, making them good for a quick recharge and little else.
Of course, that was something that didn’t concern Lex, Aria knew. So why was he down here in the middle of the afternoon instead of living it up-
“We’re almost there,” announced Feather Duster quietly, turning into what looked like the loading zone of a factory. Or at least, a former factory, since the place was so decrepit it had to have been abandoned. At a glance, Aria could see patches of ivy growing up the side of the place, with several windows being broken or boarded up. The sight made her grimace, too reminiscent of how Vanhoover had looked.
The interruption of what was supposed to have been a fun-filled vacation brought a caustic remark to the tip of Aria’s tongue, but she let it die there, unspoken. What’s the point?
The fact of the matter was that their vacation had turned sour before it had even begun. Lex, for whatever reason, had been acting unusually distant ever since they’d left Vanhoover. In conversation he was even more curt than normal, his every statement terse and clipped. He seemed to begrudge every moment spent with either of them, frequently demanding to be left alone even when there was nothing else on his schedule. Even after reaching Las Pegasus, he fulfilled only the bare minimum of the activities he’d agreed to, and it was only because the city’s elite were already singing his praises in their naked attempts to keep currying favor with the new prince – along with Sonata and Aria’s continual attempts to soften his mood and present him to the public in the best possible light – that his burgeoning reputation hadn’t suffered.
That was no small feat considering that the local newspaper had broken the story about what Lex had done to Princess Luna the same day they’d arrived in the city.
Even now, that particular scandal hadn’t been smoothed over so much as it had been smothered. The established ponies of Las Pegasus – fully aware of the implications of having entered into a binding agreement to support the new prince – had done their best to bury any follow-ups to the story. Only certain reporters were allowed to cover Prince Legis’s appearances, only preapproved questions were allowed to be asked, and anypony who couldn’t abide by the rules was politely but firmly escorted out.
It had contributed in no small part to the collection of ponies following them now, having gone so far as to charter a hot air balloon in order to tail them down to the lower city. From how often she’d heard Luna’s name mentioned as they’d muttered to each other, Aria knew they were all intensely curious about why someone who’d done something so awful to one of Equestria’s princesses was being treated with such reverence by everypony who was anypony in Las Pegasus. She also knew that the question would need to be answered, since that accursed article had shoved the issue in everypony’s face.
But Lex, as with so many other things lately, seemed utterly uninterested in doing so.
Across from her, Aria belatedly noticed Sonata’s ears perk up as they crossed the loading zone toward the far end of the abandoned factory. “You hear that?”
“Hear what?” muttered Aria distractedly.
Sonata cocked her head. “I’m not sure. Just listen.”
Frowning, Aria concentrated. At first she couldn’t quite pick anything out, belatedly noting that all background noise in the area was being drowned out by a dull, distant roar coming from inside the factory, that was likely caused by whatever production was going on in there…only to realize a second later that if the factory was as abandoned as it looked, there wouldn’t be any production happening inside. Which meant…
Her wings fluttering, Feather Duster stopped by one of the loading dock doors, behind which the dull roar was even louder, and gave Lex a bow. “In here, my prince.” Looking up, she smiled at him, and Aria couldn’t help but note how the expression was different from her usual reserved manner. “Shall I?”
Aria exchanged a puzzled glance with Sonata, hearing the whispers from the ponies behind them growing loud enough to be heard over whatever din was happening inside. But Lex simply nodded, his expression unchanged.
Making a noise that sounded suspiciously like a squeal of delight, Feather Duster flapped her wings, grabbing the cord that dangled from the bottom of the overheard door and yanking it upward to reveal the source of the noise…
Ponies.
What had to be hundreds of ponies filled the building. The factory floor was completely bare, whatever machinery had once filled it gone, and in its place milled ponies of every variety. Some were set up behind tables, dipping ladles into large vats and spooning out what looked like soup into bowls, passing them to anypony who approached them. More were lying on cots, mats, or even folded pieces of cardboard in the back of the building, talking to their companions or reading dusty-looking books or newspapers or simply sleeping. Others had set up a wicker basket with the bottom cut out halfway up a nearby wall and were tossing a ball around, trying to get it through the makeshift hoop.
There were just a few of what she could make out, along with brief glimpses of children playing with a tattered old jump rope, wizened ponies knitting in a circle, clusters of earth stallions talking while pegasi tried to clean some of the filthy windows and unicorns lit up their horns to try to brighten the interior of the place, and others. It was, Aria decided, like a smaller version of the camp back in Vanhoover. A second later her eyes widened as she suddenly knew why they were here.
“EVERYPONY!” called Feather Duster, having to repeat herself several times before everyone inside the factory quieted down, looking at her. Landing, she turned so that she was standing in profile to the truck-sized door, extending a wing toward it. “I know some of you didn’t believe me before, but just like I promised, Prince Legis has come to take you all back to Vanhoover!”
Dead silence reigned as Lex stepped inside the building, looking around at the ponies gathered within.
For a moment nopony moved, until an earth stallion with a dirty coat and shaggy beard shuffled forward, his face tight with uncertainty. “Um, Your Majesty, sir. Beggin’ your pardon, but…is that true? You’re really here to take us home?”
His expression looking like it had been carved out of stone, Lex nodded once. “Yes.”
Biting back a snarl as she realized that the crowd would be the opposite of reassured by Lex’s demeanor, Aria adopted a coy smirk as she trotted forward. “That’s right,” she drawled, giving her pigtails a toss as she felt all eyes turn toward her. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but Equestria’s newest prince has been working hard to reverse the damage done to the city. He’s already cut a deal with the richest ponies here for them to fund the recovery effort.”
“And he’s totes given out free food, and medicine, and even jobs to everypony who comes back!” gushed Sonata, grinning as she followed up on Aria’s announcement. “We’re even building houses that everypony can live in while we clean up the place!”
“I know I said it before, but I can personally vouch for everything these ladies are saying,” added Feather Duster, looking out over the crowd. “Some of you know me. Most of you don’t. But I can promise you, Prince Legis is a force for good in Equestria.”
“But…” Another pony shuffled forward, this one a wrinkled old unicorn mare. “But what about what he did to Princess Luna?” she asked, voice trembling as she held up a newspaper article, showing the former alicorn staring at the camera.
“We kinda wanna know that too,” muttered someone in the group that had followed them there.
Aria grimaced, and Sonata frowned, but before either of them could say anything, Lex spoke up. “I stripped Luna of her alicorn status because she doesn’t deserve to be one,” he announced flatly.
Sonata folded her ears back, trying to turn the alarmed look on her face into a smile as she swallowed nervously. “I think what Lex means to say-”
“The princesses have failed you,” continued Lex, refusing to let himself be interrupted. “They failed to protect you from the disaster that drove you from your homes, they failed to see to the city’s recovery, and they failed to come look for all of you now.”
He swept a hoof out, indicating Feather Duster. “When my assistant’s husband told me that he was unable to return to Vanhoover due to a lack of personal funds necessary to make the trip, I knew that there would be other ponies here who were in the same position. That is not acceptable.”
Each of the last four words came out with the force of a hammer blow, resonating in the air with an intensity that was almost palpable. “I have a responsibility to see to the safety and wellbeing of everypony under my care,” Lex continued, “and if anypony tries to interfere with that – even a princess – then they will be made to pay.”
He let that hang in the air for a moment, as though daring anyone to ask any follow-up questions. When no one did, he looked back at the scruffy stallion that had first approached him. “Now, is this all of you?” he demanded.
Slowly, the bearded pony nodded. “Yessir. We brought everypony back when that one there” – he pointed at Feather Duster, much the way Lex had a moment before – “said that there was a prince here to bring us all back.”
“Good,” replied Lex. “Now, let’s discuss the logistics involved with getting all of you back to Vanhoover.”
Slowly, everypony else in the building began talking, the collective breath they'd been holding coming out. Aria could almost see the emotions play across their faces, allowing themselves to believe that the pony in front of them really was here to help them, that their time living like vagrants was at an end, and that they were finally going to be able to go home. It rippled across them like a wave, starting with excited murmurs, then turning into relieved laughter, and finally into joyous shouting, until the entire place was thrumming with noise far louder than before. Similar reactions were coming from the group that had been tailing them, with murmurs of "knew there was more to the story" and "give him a chance" being thrown around.
Sharing a relieved glance with Sonata, Aria tried to relax, glad that for once Lex's inability to sugarcoat things had worked in his favor. But she couldn't bring herself to completely be at ease. After all, the ponies in Vanhoover had been in a worse state than this for a longer time, and Lex had still been able to open himself up to them despite that.
Whatever had been bothering him up until now, it wasn't this. Of that Aria felt sure. And while it was all well and good that Lex was still helping complete strangers, she wasn't sure how much more she could take of him pushing away the ponies who loved him...
“I heard he reserved an entire luxury train over twenty cars long to bring them all home!”
“My roommate’s sister is a nurse, and she says that he personally met with each and every one of them to make sure they were okay!”
“You think that’s something? The newsstand where I work got tomorrow’s copy of Rolling Pone in right before we closed up for the night, and in an interview, one of the ponies who’d followed him down there says that he used his magic to create a huge banquet completely out of thin air!”
The snatches of chatter floated through the air as last of the casual customers were ushered out, causing Sonata to smile as she twisted and turned in front of the mirrors set all around her, the manager quietly telling them to take their time before excusing himself. Although it had only been yesterday since Lex had rescued all of those Vanhoover ponies who had been living in the lower part of Las Pegasus, the news had spread like wildfire. The press had gone absolutely wild for the news, but the city’s gossip network had been several steps ahead of them, to the point where the new prince’s abandoning his plans in order to save a group of downtrodden ponies was all anyone seemed to be talking about.
The sole exception, of course, being Lex himself.
Thoughts of her temperamental stallion made Sonata’s smile diminish, unable to help but sigh. Lex had been even more uptight than usual for a while now, and no amount of begging, pleading, or cajoling had been able to get him to tell them what was wrong, let alone lighten up. Even after he’d saved all those ponies, he’d still been weirdly tense, acting like he thought the sky was going to fall at any moment.
That was ridiculous, of course. Sonata had checked with several of the local pegasi, and they’d all assured her that the sky was going to stay exactly where it was. But Lex had barely blinked when she’d told him that, leaving her latest guess about what was bothering him no more helpful than all of the others she’d made since they’d landed in Las Pegasus.
“Lady Dusk?” came the voice of Coat Tail, the Royal Clothing Guy (or whatever his title was). “Is that dress to your liking?”
“Hmm.” Standing up in her hind legs, Sonata spun in place, watching the way the hem of the sundress she was trying on rose and fell with the motion. It was a cute little thing, light blue with a raspberry-colored print, and it went really nicely with the wide-brimmed hat she’d picked out. “Yep!” she decided as she stepped out of the changing room. “I think it’s totes great!”
“I suppose it will be,” murmured Coat Tail as he looked her over, “once I make a few improvements.”
Sonata couldn’t help but smirk at that. The finicky stallion had initially protested her dragging Aria out shopping, insisting that any clothes they bought should be made from scratch just for them. But while Sonata had appreciated that, sitting around and waiting for someone else to make outfits for them was a lot less fun than going out and trying them on! Especially since, now that word had gotten around that they were the new prince’s girls, ponies kept offering them stuff for free.
So in the end, Coat Tail had relented, though only after Sonata had agreed that he’d be allowed to make alterations to whatever they bought so as to “accentuate their inherent pulchritude,” whatever that meant. Even then, he’d insisted on coming along, saying that seeing their choice in purchases would help him keep their tastes in mind when he designed their outfits for Lex’s coronation. That had been fine with Sonata, since having someone to talk to about the different outfits they tried on was part of the fun.
Or at least it was supposed to be.
“Hey Aria,” called Sonata as she looked at the other dressing room, the door still closed. “You done in there? I wanna see that new swimsuit!”
From behind the door came a sigh, and Aria slunk out, dressed in a black one-piece that clung to her body like a second skin. “This is dumb,” she groused half-heartedly. “Everyone in this world goes around naked anyway, so what’s the point of wearing a bathing suit?”
“Style, of course,” replied Coat Tail primly.
“Yeah!” added Sonata, smiling brightly as she looked her sister over. “And I’ve got to say, you’re totes rockin’ that look! For realsies!”
That wasn’t an exaggeration on her part. The swimsuit, though despite being a uniform black in color, had clearly been designed with an eye for the female form. The bottom cut high, leaving Aria's cutie mark entirely on display, which – along with the opening for the tail in the back – meant that when viewed from behind it emphasized far more than it concealed. It reminded Sonata of how, the very first time she’d met Lex, she’d been wearing a swimsuit of her own, although one far less stylish; even so, he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of her, unlike how he didn’t seem to want to look at her now…
“You really think Lex will care?” snorted Aria, apparently having been thinking the same thing.
The comment made Sonata cringe, not because of how bitter her sister’s tone was, but because it was nowhere near as cutting as usual. Normally Aria was super sarcastic, making biting remarks every time she opened her mouth. Even with how much better their relationship had gotten since they’d both fallen for the same guy, Aria was still in the habit of copping an attitude; it was just that she’d done it in a way where Sonata had been able to hear, for the first time in over a thousand years, genuine warmth underneath the prickly comments, rather than meanness.
But now, the only thing she heard in Aria’s voice was sadness, and it was enough to break Sonata’s heart. For as long as she could remember, Aria had always been tough, staying flippant and aloof no matter what happened. That had been why it had been so awful to see how badly she’d been hurt after the three of them had gone their own way. Seeing her depressed now was just as bad.
No, Sonata decided a moment later, it’s worse. Like, a bajillion times worse.
At least before, when Aria had raged at her about being abandoned, Sonata had known why her sister had been so upset. More than that, she’d been able to do something about it, apologizing and offering to help her fix things with Lex, since the two of them had been fighting at the time. But that wasn’t the case now.
Now, Lex was pushing both of them away, which meant that Sonata not only felt hurt and confused about what was happening, but she had to watch Aria mope on top of it. And it had been going on for, like, a really long time! This was supposed to be their super-fun happy-time getaway, but instead it had been days and days of barely being glanced at, only seeing him for meals and outings, and nothing except quick pecks on the lips at bedtime! It was awful!
All of a sudden, Sonata couldn’t take it anymore. It was one thing for Lex to lose his cool and fly into a rage, or even sulk and pout when something went wrong, and even then he usually couldn’t stop talking about what was bothering him. For him to clam up and ignore them like this was more than she could take, not just because it hurt really bad – more than she’d been willing to admit up until now – but because seeing how it was hurting Aria was a misery all its own.
“I quite agree, Miss Dusk!” chimed in Coat Tail, his voice indignant. “The fabric on that swimsuit is far too coarse, the monotonous coloration is in desperate need of highlighting, and the contrast between the daring cut in the back and the conservative cropping in the front is utterly garbled!”
“Huh?” Momentarily thrown, Sonata shook her head. “No. Well, I mean, I guess, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Huffing as she tried to get her head of steam back, she turned toward her sister. “I’m mad! Like, super duper mad! And you should be too!”
Aria frowned, but in confusion rather than anger. “Look, this shopping trip was your idea.”
“No, I mean mad at Lex!” clarified Sonata. “He’s been, like, the absolute worst ever since we went on this trip, and I’m totes sick and tired of it! Aren’t you?!”
Aria’s ears folded back as she looked at the ground. “Whatever’s going on with him, he’s made it clear that it’s none of our business,” she muttered.
But Sonata refused to let that slide. “Oh come on! You’re Aria Blaze! Are you really gonna just sit back and let him push you around like this?!” Closing the distance between them in two long strides, Sonata wrapped a hoof around her sister – ignoring the way Aria yelped as the touch made the curse Lex had put on her kick in – and dragged her back into the changing booth, making her face one of the mirrors before releasing her. “You’re baddest bad girl there is! When you growl, big dogs roll over and show you their belly! When you sneeze, everyone’s too afraid to say ‘bless you!’ People walking down the street look both ways before they cross you!”
Stepping up right behind Aria, Sonata looked her reflection in the eye. “You once chewed out a supermarket cashier so bad that he let you open up a second package of hot dogs – for free, right there in the store – so you could take enough to match how many buns you’d bought,” she intoned, her voice dire. “And now you’re just gonna sit here and mope because a guy is giving you the cold elbow?”
A bewildered look had been growing on Aria’s face during Sonata’s speech, and by the end of it she was staring at herself in the mirror as if she didn’t recognize who she saw there. “Y-you’re right,” she whispered, her voice shocked. “What am I doing? This isn’t me! This isn’t me at all!”
Stepping back, Sonata smiled in relief as Aria continued to rant at herself. “I can’t believe I’ve been letting that self-righteous sack of crap treat me this way!” growled the pigtailed Siren, no longer keeping her voice down. “I can’t believe I’ve let it go on this long! And I absolutely can’t believe I needed you to snap me out of it!” That last part came out as Aria turned to face Sonata, a familiar fire in her eyes. “And it’s cold shoulder, doofus! Now are you going to stand there grinning like a moron or are you going to help me give Lex exactly what he deserves?!”
Knowing that was Aria’s way of saying “thank you,” Sonata squealed in delight, rearing up and clapping her hooves together. “Now that’s the Aria I know!”
“You got that right!” Peeling her swimsuit off, Aria glared at Coat Tail. “Is Lex still at the hotel?” she demanded.
Looking distinctly uncomfortable at suddenly being dragged into a personal matter, Coat Tail fidgeted. “Er, I believe so. Tranquila went ahead to confirm that everything was set for his appointment at the water park this evening, but that won’t be for several hours yet.”
“Good!” hissed Aria. “Then I know exactly where to go in order to give him a piece of my mind!” Without waiting for a response, she stalked toward the front of the store. “And I want that swimsuit too!” she added without looking back.
Grinning so hard it made her cheeks hurt, Sonata hurriedly doffed her sundress and hat. “Wait for me! I’m totes gonna read Lex the rampage act too!”
In no time at all they’d made the trip back to their hotel, taken their private elevator straight to the penthouse, and were approaching the outer door, with Aria leading the way. But the path wasn’t clear, with Feather Duster standing in front of the entrance as if to greet them. “My ladies,” she began, a nervous lilt in her voice, “I’m terribly sorry, but Prince Legis said that he’s not to be disturbed.”
“He’s already disturbed,” sneered Aria. “And by the time I get through with him, he’s going to be troubled, distraught, and pained! And so will you if you don’t get out of my way!”
“What she said!” chimed in Sonata.
Feather Duster paled, glancing between the two of them before turning her eyes toward Coat Tail, training behind them. But the balding stallion only answered her helpless look with a shrug, causing her to gulp. “I, um…I understand this might be important, but His Highness was very clear about not being interrupted for any reason. If you could just come back in a little while,” she pleaded.
Growling, Aria stepped forward, putting her nose a half-inch from Feather Duster’s. “You’re not hearing me,” she snarled softly. “Either you move, or I make you move. Your choice.”
For a half-second, Feather Duster wavered. Then she folded her ears back and lowered her gaze, stepping aside.
“Smart girl,” quipped Aria as she stepped by her, snagging the keys from the maid’s belt loop and unlocking the entrance, marching with Sonata right behind her. “Lex!” she bellowed. “Get out here!”
No answer came, and Aria was about to yell for him again when she paused. Sonata didn’t need to ask why, however, having heard the same thing as her sister: the sound of Lex’s voice raised in a series of vocalizations, the exact words muffled as if he were a few rooms away.
Stopping just long enough to determine which direction he was in, Aria stalked toward the sound of his voice, her anger at being ignored visibly growing with each step. Behind her, Sonata frowned, noting something odd about the rhythm of Lex’s voice. There were no pauses between whatever words he was saying, rattling off an unbroken series of utterances with no room for anyone else to chime in. It was less like he was having a conversation than it was like he was making some sort of lengthy speech, reading something out loud, or otherwise reciting something. But she couldn’t imagine what he’d be doing that for, especially since – now that they were getting closer to where he was as they crossed the suite – she could hear that the words weren’t in a language she recognized.
Weird, Sonata thought to herself as she followed her sister. The last time I heard him do that was when he changed Aria into a pony. But that…wait…
Thinking back to what had almost happened then, Sonata’s eyebrows rose. “Um, Aria? Maybe we should hold on a sec.”
“Forget that!” snarled Aria as she walked up the door on the far side of the sitting room, on other side of which was the den…and judging by how much more clearly Lex’s voice could be heard, where he currently was. “I’m going to give him a piece of my mind, and I’m doing it right now! If you want to sit back and just enjoy the fireworks, be my guest, but I’m not waiting!”
Aria threw the door open before Sonata had a chance to respond, revealing Lex standing on the far side of the room, his back to them as he gestured and chanted elaborately, not so much as glancing at the two of them.
Being further ignored only seemed to enrage Aria further, and she stalked toward him, eyes blazing in a way that matched her namesake. “LEX!” she bellowed. “I don’t know what your problem is, and I don’t care! We’re having this out right now!”
Behind her, Sonata furrowed her brow in confusion at how careless Aria was being. Didn’t she know that the last time Lex was casting a ritual – and that’s what this looked like – he’d been majorly stressed about not being interrupted? No, wait, she realized suddenly. She DOESN’T know that! She was asleep the whole time Lex was changing her into a pony! She doesn’t know what’ll happen if she messes things up!
Panicking as she realized that a disaster was about to happen, Sonata ran forward. “Aria, wait!”
But it was too late. Reaching Lex, Aria snarled as she reached out and grabbed his shoulder, spinning him around. “You listen to-”
“YOU IDIOT!” Lex roared, his expression contorting into a mixture of rage and panic.
Then the magic that he’d been gathering collapsed.
“Wait wait wait, so you saw Adagio?” asked Sonata, her eyes wide. “And she was okay?”
“Forget okay,” scoffed Aria. “I wanna know how she turned herself back into a human.”
The pair’s reactions made Lex clench his jaw, still furious about what had happened. “That’s not the point!”
It had been a little over an hour since the ritual he’d been performing had been interrupted by the Siren sisters. While technically that had been Aria’s fault, he blamed Sonata almost as much, since she’d apparently been responsible for egging Aria on. In the aftermath of the backlash – or at least, in the aftermath of Lex’s initial estimates of how bad the repercussions of the miscast ritual had been – it had only been because he was still keenly aware of the blunders he’d made the last time his emotions had clouded his judgment, first sending Sonata and Aria away when he’d met with the Las Pegasus ponies back in Vanhoover and then flying into a rage a short while later when he’d heard Sonata moaning, that he’d been able to master his rage long enough to demand an explanation from the two of them.
Even then, he’d come very close to cursing the both of them on the spot for just how badly their reckless actions had cost him. That urge had only grown more powerful when, in the course of explaining themselves, the two of them had rediscovered their indignation over how he’d been treating them ever since they’d left Vanhoover. As though he was to blame for their stupidity!
The only thing that had kept him from acting on that impulse was the knowledge that he couldn’t afford to impair either of them now.
Not after what the miscast ritual had done to him.
As it was, the only thing that had let him stay in control of himself then was by making it clear to the two of them that he’d had very good reasons for treating them the way he had. That had led to his outlining everything that had happened since before they’d left, ranging from his scrying on Adagio to the subsequent scrying that he’d been periodically subjected to since to the ritual he’d designed in response. While it had given him some measure of satisfaction – bitter though it was – to put the two of them in their place, Lex hadn’t been able to ignore the reality of what his explaining himself signified, which was just how bad things had become now that his ritual had failed. After all, he’d kept them in the dark because he hadn’t wanted whoever was spying on him to know that he knew what they were doing while he designed a countermeasure. Now that it had failed so spectacularly, there was no reason not to alert Sonata and Aria to what was going on.
Except, of course, they were still more concerned over the news of their missing sister than with the more salient ramifications of what had just happened.
“I dunno,” mused Sonata, examining her forelegs. “I kinda regretted not having fingers at first, but these hooves can actually do a lot more than I thought.”
“Forget fingers,” snorted Aria, putting her hooves to her chest and making a hefting motion. “I miss the twins. They were all kinds of fun-”
“Will you two shut up and focus?!” seethed Lex, barely keeping his temper in check as he noticed black crystals beginning form around him. It was all he could do to block out the mocking words of his tulpa, again taunting him about how this entire situation could have been avoidable if he’d simply handled it better. “We’re under periodic surveillance by an unknown entity, with unknown goals, and now, thanks to the two of you, my one effort to put an end to that has not only come to naught, but actually made things worse!”
Sonata cringed, her ears folding back. “So…it’s really that bad?”
“Of course it’s ‘really that bad!’” snarled Lex. “I’m blind!”
Aria rolled her eyes. “Oh, you are not.” Picking up a pillow from the couch she was reclining on, she lazily tossed it at him, smirking as she saw him track the incoming object with his eyes and swat it out of the air. “Case closed. You can see just fine.”
“You know full well that I meant magically blind!” hissed Lex. “That’s just as bad! No, even worse!”
That wasn’t hyperbole on his part. Had his eyes merely been damaged as a result of the failed ritual, he would have been able to repair them in short order. After all, one of the divine spells that the Night Mare gave him was designed to do exactly that. But there was no curative magic that he was aware of that could restore his ability to detect magical energies.
Had the ritual worked as intended, nothing so dramatic would have happened. Instead, he would have created a stabilized disruption in the flow of ambient magical energy in his immediate vicinity. One calibrated with such a high degree of precision, and introduced an interruption of such mild proportions, that the only gradation of magic it would have affected was the highly specialized construction that went into scrying sensors.
The effect was similar to digging a small distributary into the bank of a river, one designed to such exacting specifications that it would only admit leaves floating on the surface of the water, separating them from the main flow and carrying them away to be deposited elsewhere. In the same manner, the disruption that Lex had wanted to create around himself would have gently pulled any scrying sensor that came into his immediate vicinity away from him, preventing such spells from being able to focus on him. Designed to be robust and long-lasting, it would have kept him safe from being remotely monitored with magic for some time, potentially weeks.
But thanks to Aria’s interruption, things had gone badly awry. Instead of creating a stabilized eddy that would only have altered a small degree of ambient magic around him in a precise manner, the entire thing had come crashing down onto him. Without any of the delicate assemblage that he’d been intending to build, it had affected all forms of magically-augmented sensory input, rather than the specialized construction of a scrying sensor. Rather than deftly redirecting the flow of magic around himself, the entirety of the power he’d been manipulating had hit him all at once.
The result was that, the same way an extremely bright flash at close range could burn out one’s eyes, or being very close to an incredibly loud noise could blow out one’s ears, the sudden cascade of magical energy had completely extinguished his ability to detect said energy.
It was a condition that Lex found distressing in the extreme. Although his ability to sense magical operations via tactile sensation was far from acute, he still relied on it a great deal when attempting to interface with any sort of external magical effects. At the most basic level, if someone used magic in his immediate proximity, he’d usually be able to know that something was happening, even if he wasn’t otherwise aware of the details.
Worse, his ability to perform rituals was dependent on his magical sense. While designing them relied on a combination of calculations and experimentation, the actual utilization relied on his ability to feel how he was altering the flow of magical energy around him. No matter that the words and gestured had been worked out ahead of time; attempting to manipulate something without direct sensory feedback was like trying to clearly recite a lengthy speech while deaf, or legibly write an entire book while blind. Given that rituals were already delicate in their utilization, performing one now would all but guarantee failure, calling down even greater disasters.
Nor was that the sum total of what Lex had lost.
Beyond his intuitive sense for magical activity, some brief checking had revealed an even more devastating conclusion: he couldn’t use magic to augment his normal senses either.
It was an affliction of such severity that it bordered on unbearable. Ever since Lex had learned how to use the dark magic of his horn to become a shadow, he’d been keenly aware of the secondary effects of the transformation; namely, that it was artificially recreating his senses, since in that state he had no body, and as such no sensory organs to perceive the world around him. It had taken only mild experimenting to figure out how to take advantage of that while remaining corporeal, increasing his visual, audial, and other senses with little effort, to the point of being able to see in the dark or feel even faint vibrations in the ground if he’d wished. No longer. He could still turn into a shadow now, but doing so deprived him of all sensation, leaving him with no way to so much as measure his own movement, let alone know what was happening around him.
Nor could he use his circlet’s ability to peer into the magical spectrum. Or, for that matter, use his whisper spell to communicate with nearby ponies. He could still send messages to others with that spell, but he wouldn’t hear any replies that were sent his way. It was frustrating beyond measure.
The worst part of it all was that he had no way of judging whether his condition was temporary or permanent. Not without throwing himself back into the medical textbooks he’d borrowed from House Call in order to see if anything like this had been catalogued by Equestria’s medical profession. Even then, he had little hope of finding any answers there; most of what he’d read so far was thoroughly biological in coverage, with only basic levels of physiomagical interaction, and nothing remotely like what he was experiencing now.
All told, it was one of the single greatest setbacks he’d experienced since returning to Equestria, second only to being unable to replenish his strongest magic after he’d directed the Night Mare to take Severance back. And even that had been a voluntary tradeoff on his part, accepting the loss of power as a necessary sacrifice in order to protect the ponies of Equestria. This had no upside.
Sonata, however, didn’t seem to agree. “Aw, you’ll be fine,” she grinned, getting up and coming over to nuzzle him, an act which comforted Lex not at all. “You’ve been, like, totes hurt in all sorts of ways before and you always got better. Like that time you were almost melted by that dragon’s acid breath. Or when you got stabbed by that freaky fish guy Aria was hanging out with. Or when you almost fried yourself trying to make all that food for everyone. Or that time-”
“To put it another way,” broke in Aria, rolling her eyes as she sat up, “you’ve come back from worse than this, so quit with the melodrama.”
But rather than calm Lex down, the dismissive advice only enraged him further. “Need I remind you whose fault this is?!” he growled.
Completely unintimidated, Aria scowled at him as she crossed her forelegs over her chest. “Yeah. Yours.”
“Aria-”
“She’s kind of got a point, Lex,” noted Sonata with a shrug. “I mean, we totes wouldn’t have interrupted what you were doing if you’d just told us what was going on.”
His hackles rising, Lex stood up, moving so he had both of them in his field of view. “Do I need to explain the chain of causality to the two of you again?! You were the ones who deliberately came in here even after being told that I wasn’t to be disturbed! Your motivations in doing so are in no way relevant! If you-”
“That’s not the point!” Standing up, Aria marched right up to him. “The point is that you didn’t confide in us! All we knew was that all of a sudden you didn’t want to talk to us, didn’t want to touch us, and didn’t want to be around us! Do you have any idea how that felt?!” The look on her face was one of anger, but there were tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, the sight throwing Lex off-balance.
His hesitation gave Sonata enough time to jump in. “It felt like Nosey all over again,” she murmured, a pained note filling her voice as she looked down. “You were still here, but you might as well have gone away for how closed off you were.”
The accusation made Lex recoil, the mention of Nosey bringing a wave of anguish that had diminished not at all in the weeks since she’d left. “That wasn’t…my withholding information was entirely appropriate for the situation. You were the ones who misconstrued the nature of my actions.”
“Didn’t you just get through saying that you didn’t tell us what was going on because you wanted to make sure whoever was watching didn’t know what you were doing?” asked Aria bitterly. “Well guess what? You did such a great job of it that we didn’t know what you were doing either, and now you’re going to blame us for ‘misconstruing your actions’?”
Sonata got to her hooves also, but unlike Aria she didn’t approach him, instead fixing him with a pleading look. “Look, we get that we screwed up. For realsies. But do you get that we missed you? That we still miss you? Even if you don’t want to get it on because someone stranger’s peeping on us – and I agree, that’s totes a turn-off – you can at least talk to us. Even if you can’t tell us what’s happening, you can at least tell us something!”
That last part ended with a catch in her voice that sounded suspiciously like a sob, and Aria wasn’t in much better shape when she spoke up a second later. “Maybe we screwed things up when we interrupted that ritual of yours, but if that’s what it took for you to talk to us again, then I don’t regret it!”
Lex didn’t have an answer to that, silently looking back and forth between the two of them, watching as their composure broke down and wondering how it had come to this. As far as he could tell, he hadn’t done anything wrong; he had been reacting in the best way that he could to the circumstances that he had been presented with. So why had things turned out this way?
He could feel frustration bubbling up inside him, the same frustration that he’d felt his entire life at how inscrutable everyone around him was, knowing that it was his fault that he couldn’t understand them. It was such a horrible feeling that he wanted to push it away with everything he had, to scream at them and insist that they were the ones who were wrong, that his reasoning was impeccably cogent and that it was their lack of understanding that was to blame, rather than his own.
But he couldn’t find it within himself to do so. Not when Sonata and Aria were struggling to hold back tears right in front of him. Not when they’d just told him that he’d hurt them as badly as Nosey had hurt him. Not when they’d just said that even his anger was better than his indifference.
Instead, he took a deep breath and tried with everything he had to make himself understood.
“It was never my intention,” he began slowly, “to hurt the two of you. I regret-”
That was all he got out before he was tackled by two crying mares, holding him tightly as they sobbed into his chest.
The battle was an intense one, and Willow didn’t allow herself to so much as blink as she eyed her opponent. They’d been going at it for some time already, which she took to be a positive sign; with how much of a disadvantage she was at, the fact that things had yet to be decided was a good thing. Now if she could just find an opening…
But there was no more time to think as the next exchange began.
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…no.”
Holding down the urge to smirk at not having been the first to speak, Willow instead tilting her head just slightly. “No?”
“No,” repeated Dark Streak, her face impassive as she shook her head. “I’m not taking the job.”
Despite how definitive the statement was, Willow knew that the conversation was far from over. After all, if ebon-colored griffon really wasn’t interested, she would already have been making her way toward the door. Instead, she remained leaning against the far wall of Willow’s kitchen, apparently at ease as she awaited the purrsian’s reaction to being turned down.
Of course, Willow knew better than to place too much faith in that. Dark Streak held a powerful advantage – and worse, knew it – by being the only game in town when it came to contract killing. Although the griffon had only been in Equestria for a little over twenty-four hours, she’d apparently heard quite a bit about the place before she’d left Everglow, and was fully aware that murder for hire was inconceivable to the ponies who lived here. That meant that she’d had the upper paw (or talon, rather) the instant that Willow had let her know that she wanted to hire her.
But Willow had known that would be the case from the beginning, and was prepared to work around it now. After all, a potential customer having to make their interest known was part and parcel of haggling, which was a form of combat with which Willow was intimately familiar with. You couldn’t grow up in Murrage, where everything had a price and everyone was looking to cash in, without learning the ins and outs of negotiation.
Instead, she let a look of sudden comprehension cross her face, nodding sagely. “I understand. A lot of people would be afraid to face someone so powerful.”
It was a clumsy jab, but intentionally so, inviting Dark Streak to swat it away, and in doing so reveal what the real reason for her refusal was. The griffon didn’t disappoint, an amused snort escaping her beak. “And how powerful is that exactly? You said yourself that you don’t know the full extent of what this Lex guy is capable of.”
The statement was a telling one, causing Willow to frown inwardly. “I’ve spent almost three hours telling you what I do know about him. His magic, his goals, his associates. I’ve answered every question you’ve asked to the best of my knowledge, recounted everything I’ve personally witnessed about him as well as what others have told me. At this point you know him as well as I do.”
“What I know,” shot back Dark Streak, pushing off from the wall, “is that the target you want dead is an arcane spellcaster of considerable skill. One who’s used to battle,” she added, nodding toward the framed newspaper article from Sunflower’s room, now lying on the kitchen table, “and has a diverse array of spells. And yet you’ve never seen him use a spellbook to prep them, which means that there’s no chance to determine what specific spells he knows ahead of time, let alone steal or destroy it in order to cripple his renewing them.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” countered Willow. “Twilight thinks that there’s a reason why he’s been so reluctant to use his arcane spellcasting recently. It might very well be that he kept his spellbook hidden, and something’s happened to it recently, preventing him from readying magic that way.”
“Emphasis on ‘might,’” retorted Dark Streak without missing a beat. “He’s also apparently a divine spellcaster of at least modest talent, since he’s able to create food and water from nothing. Which he apparently uses to take his meals, meaning that – in conjunction with the fact that most divine spellcasters have healing magic – clandestinely poisoning him will be difficult at best.”
Knowing that she was on her way to losing this particular round of verbal sparring, Willow again leapt toward a hole in her opponent’s logic. “Lex has never used any counter-poison spells that I’m aware of.”
But Dark Streak was apparently ready for that. “Which isn’t a useful observation, since none of what you told me about him involved poison to begin with.”
There was nothing Willow could say to that, and when she saw that the purrsian wasn’t going to interrupt again, Dark Streak continued. “And then there’s that ‘dark magic’ you mentioned, which you apparently don’t even know the proper name of,” she sneered. “Whatever it is, it lets him turn into a shadow – making him virtually impossible to pin down or trap – create massive quantities of black crystals which are highly durable, and hit people with debilitating curses. Did I get all that right?”
Dark Streak let Willow’s continued silence speak for itself before she kept going. “You don’t have a conclusive list of what magic items he has in his possession. He doesn’t go drinking, gambling, or whoring, even if the rumormongers apparently like to talk up his love life, which means he has no vices that are easy to exploit. He’s a high-profile political figure, being that he’s a prince now, which makes him extremely visible wherever he goes. He’s usually accompanied by a small retinue, several of whom are notable fighters or spellcasters in their own right, all of whom are apparently thoroughly loyal to him. And you don’t want there to be any collateral damage in terms of lives lost.”
Willow shrugged nonchalantly. “It certainly sounds challenging to me,” she admitted, hoping that a change of tactics would work. “But I’m not a professional. Starlight Glimmer made you sound like an unstoppable force when you came to her rescue.”
But rather than looking flattered, Dark Streak’s disdain was palpable. “Starlight Glimmer is a child, one who thinks that power is a substitute for skill, and that the ability to improvise means that you don’t need to have a plan in place ahead of time. Which makes it no surprise that she was defeated when she tried to put Lex Legis in the ground.”
There was a tone of finality in Dark Streak’s voice that Willow didn’t like, and she knew it was time to bring things around to the topic of money. “That sort of expertise is why I’m willing to pay you ten thousand bits.”
Dark Streak clucked her tongue. “Play money,” she grumbled, glancing at one of the bags tied to her belt, one that Willow knew was enchanted with an extradimensional space that let it hold far more than its appearance would have suggested. “If I’d known that this country used electrum for its currency, I would have demanded a lot more when Twilight hired me.”
That was a sentiment that Willow could sympathize with. Equestrian bits were made from electrum, the alloy of gold and silver. While both metals were used as units of currency on Everglow – the gold coin being the standard monetary unit, with ten silver coins being equal to one gold coin – electrum had a poor reputation due to a history of counterfeit coins, where the gold portion surrounded a silver interior, letting them be passed off as pure gold. In terms of the amount of each metal used, Willow had estimated that two Equestrian bits were likely worth one gold coin back home, but that was a purely academic calculation; the alloy had long since fallen out of favor with most of Everglow’s governments, trading companies, and merchants, to the point that the majority of people on that world refused to accept electrum coins at all.
But Dark Streak didn’t say she wouldn’t have accepted the job if she’d known that Twilight would pay her in electrum, noted Willow silently. She said she’d have asked for more. And Twilight told me she paid her two thousand bits, which is a lot more than the few moneychangers who’re willing to deal in electrum back on Everglow could easily convert into gold or silver coins. Which means that she’s planning to stay in Equestria for a while. That was potentially important; a central strategy in bargaining was finding out what the other person wanted and then manipulating them accordingly.
Not letting any of that show in her body language, Willow shrugged again. “It’s the only money they accept here, and since Equestria doesn’t have much in the way of demand for professional killers, you might want to build up a nest egg now while you can.”
Dark Streak threw a sharp glance her way then, and again Willow suppressed a smirk. That’s right. You might be the only one offering this particular service, but I’m the only customer you’re likely to see for a long time. Now it was just a question of who wanted it more…
The answer was revealed when Dark Streak shook her head once again. “Not worth it,” was all she said as she turned and headed toward the back door.
Willow kept her composure, but couldn’t hide the tension in her voice, certain that the griffon wasn’t bluffing this time. Which meant that the battle was about to end in a way that it absolutely couldn’t be allowed to. “Would it be worth it for twenty thousand bits?”
Dark Streak didn’t react, reaching the door and grasping the handle.
“Fifty thousand.”
The griffon opened the door and started walking out into the night, her inky body almost invisible against the night sky, and Willow played the only card she had left.
“You can name your price.”
Halfway across the threshold, Dark Streak stopped…then slowly came back inside, closing the door behind her.
For several seconds no one spoke, Willow knowing that she’d likely won – the griffon wouldn’t have turned around if she wasn’t tempted by that – but that in terms of this being a negotiation, it wasn’t much of a victory. Still, the fact that she was spending Celestia’s money rather than her own, the alicorn having promised to cover any expenses incurred she’d commissioned Willow to kill Lex, took some of the sting out of how poorly she’d managed to keep the overhead of this particular assignment down. Hopefully the princess would be prepared to live up to that statement.
For her part, Dark Streak made a slow, exaggerated look around Willow’s kitchen. “You live in a place like this, and you have that kind of money to throw around?”
Despite herself, Willow couldn’t help but swish her tail at that remark. Bringing an assassin into your home was foolish by any measure, but there had been no other choice. Hiring a killer required absolute discretion, and having this conversation in the hotel where Dark Streak was currently staying was just asking to be overheard, whether by someone through the thin walls, a meddlesome housekeeper lurking outside the door, or some other way.
Instead, Willow had conjured a small animal to deliver a note to Dark Streak’s room, on which was written nothing but a time and a place, specifically midnight at the bridge near the middle of town. Fortunately, the griffon had showed up, and – after confirming that she’d destroyed the note – the two of them had journeyed back to Willow’s house in silence, the one place where they could speak freely since Sunflower was taking part in a sleepover at a friend’s house. It had afforded them the privacy necessary, but Willow still wasn’t entirely happy with the idea that a killer was a few feet from where her son ate breakfast every morning.
“I can assure you,” she said, her voice a touch frostier than necessary, “money won’t be an object.”
“Hm.” Dark Streak processed that for a moment, giving Willow a look. “You’re offering money beyond your apparent lifestyle, and you want this badly enough that you’re willing to pay anything to make it happen. Either you’re doing this at someone else's direction, or it’s personal and you have some sort of savings that you’re willing to burn.”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“Then why bring it up?”
“Because I prefer to know what I’m dealing with.” Padding over to the refrigerator, Dark Streak removed a picture held to the front of it by magnets, one that Sunflower had drawn, showing him and Willow surrounded by several smiling ponies. Dark Streak held it up as though it were some sort of notable discovery. “Lex Legis looks like he won’t die easy, but it’s the unknowns that concern me more than the knowns, and I don’t just mean about him. So I want to know if this is because he pissed off someone important, or if he diddled your kid while you weren’t looking.” She raised a brow then. “Or while you were looking, and didn’t pay you afterward.”
Willow didn’t rise to the barb, knowing the reputation that her people had among the other races of Everglow. While purrsians weren’t the only ones to practice slavery, they were by far the most open about it, with almost no restrictions on who could be exploited, or how.
Snatching the picture out of Dark Streak’s grasp, Willow put it back on the fridge. “Lex needing to die is my idea,” she snapped. “If he takes over this country, he’ll ruin it, and I like it the way it is now. That’s all.”
The last two words came out more harshly than she’d intended, but they had the desired effect, with Dark Streak letting the topic go. “I’ll want one hundred thousand bits,” she said at last. “Plus you’ll need to cover my expenses, since this is going to require more than a few custom materials to pull off. I assume these ponies have a magic market?”
“There’s one in Canterlot, the city on the mountaintop near here,” nodded Willow. “But don’t expect anything like what they have back on Everglow. This world’s magic isn’t nearly as advanced as it is there.”
Now it was Dark Streak’s turn to shrug. “As long as they have basic reagents and alchemical compounds, I’ll be able to do the rest. Also, you’re going to need to give me half of the money up front, or the deal’s off.”
Willow had been expecting a proviso like that, even if the amount was still staggering. “It’ll take me a few days to get it, but fine. Start buying what you need to in the meantime.”
Dark Streak gave an amused grunt at that, turning back toward the door for the second time. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
“Dark Streak.”
The assassin paused, glancing over her shoulder at the sound of her name.
From the other side of the room, Willow couldn’t resist getting a parting shot in, still unhappy about what the griffon had said about her renting out her son for strangers to use. “I trust that if you fail and Lex captures you, you have ways of making sure my name never comes up.”
Dark Streak’s eyes narrowed, but in mirth rather than anger. “If that’s what you’re worried about, then relax.”
Turning away, the griffon walked out into the night, her final words hanging in the air behind her.
“When I take a job, I see it through to the bitter end.”
“THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND LEX LEGIS’ ASSAULT ON PRINCESS LUNA REVEALED!”
It was the sort of headline that was meant to grab attention, as much from the gaudy yellow font as from the inside knowledge it promised to have. Nor was that the sum total of what it promised, with the bottom of the front page promising more. “It was only phase one of his master plan!”
The sight made Nosey bite back a groan. It wasn’t the first time she’d felt embarrassed by how gossip rags – in this case, the National Equiner – were considered to be part of her profession. But this time, the disdain she felt was far more personal. If anypony at that tabloid has ever so much as laid eyes on Lex, then I’m an alicorn, she thought ruefully.
“You want me to ring you up a copy of that, too?” came the voice of the cashier, a gum-chewing unicorn mare who looked like she was barely out of school, having finished bagging the rest of Nosey’s groceries.
Managing not to wince, Nosey shook her head. “No, thank you.”
“You sure? I read that one, and it’s pretty good,” urged the teenage-looking mare, leaning in as she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “It says that Lex guy is planning to build, like, this huge base on the moon, and that’s why he needed princess Luna out of the way, ‘cuz she can control it. Now there’s nothing stopping him. Once it’s done, he’ll be able to summon the rest of his people from their home planet.”
Leaning back, the cashier nodded as though she’d just imparted a revelation of vast importance. “That’s right,” she answered in response to Nosey’s nonplussed look. “Lex Legis is actually a space alien, here to lead the way for the coming invasion.”
Nosey knew she should have just picked up her groceries and left, that it wasn’t worth telling some teenybopper how gullible she was being, but she couldn’t help herself. “So, what’s he doing about Princess Celestia, then?”
A confused look crossed the cashier’s face. “Huh?”
“Princess Celestia,” repeated Nosey. “You know, Princess Luna’s older sister? Been ruling Equestria from right here in Canterlot for over a thousand years now? Currently moving the moon on Luna’s behalf, making it hard for someone else to seize control of it? Where does that little detail fit into his ‘master plan’?”
“Whoa…” The checkout mare’s chewing slowed as an amazed look crossed her face, her eyes widening. “That’s a really good point! Wow, I wonder if they’ll talk about that in the next issue?!”
Fighting down the urge to groan, Nosey left without another word, picking up her groceries in her telekinesis as she exited the store.
How can anypony be that dumb? she groused to herself as made her way through Canterlot’s downtown, her body moving on its own as she traversed the familiar route back to her apartment. The ponies who write that nonsense aren’t even real reporters! They just make stuff up! Anypony who believes that would have to be more naïve than…than…than Sonata!
The thought brought a brief smile to her lips, remembering the bubbly mare who had been her best friend. That’s right, that kid was like Sonata, and I snarked on her just like Aria would have. The only pony that was missing was Lex…
Her smile crumpled at that, disappearing under the confused jumble of feelings that swept over her then. A sudden longing to see him – to see all of them – again, which was instantly followed by a surge of discomfort at the prospect, remembering how adrift she’d felt being caught up in the course of his adventures. Then came guilt at how pained they’d all been when she’d left, trailed immediately by a sense of resentment at how overbearing the three of them had been, each of them such a forceful presence that they’d inadvertently left her feeling like she was becoming an extension of them rather than being able to be herself.
That was just the beginning. There was a brief surge of desire as she remembered the brief point during which they’d been lovers. Then a sudden sense of embarrassment at how wanton she’d let herself become. Then shame that she was thinking about sex at all after everything that had happened. Then a sudden surge of indignation that she had anything to be ashamed of after all the hardships she’d been through.
Her thoughts and emotions kept going round and round, to the point where by the time she reached her building, Nosey felt thoroughly exhausted.
Setting her groceries down as she opened her mailbox, Nosey paused as she examined the contents. The fliers were all junk, and there were a couple bills that needed to be paid, but it was the newspapers that made her hesitate. Like all of the Canterlot Chronicle’s employees, she got a free subscription to the paper, and since she’d been staying at her parents’ house, she hadn’t had a chance to come pick up her copies.
Absently picking up her groceries as she started wandering up the stairs toward her apartment, she shuffled through the newspapers, still not having found the one she was looking for as she reached the landing and fumbled for her keys. It was only after she’d made it inside, kicking the door closed behind her the same way she’d done a hundred times before, that she located the issue from several days ago, showing Princess Luna – a stoic expression on her face as she looked right at the camera, baring her diminished state to the world – beneath a headline denouncing Lex as the villain who’d done that to her.
Mechanically, Nosey made her way toward the kitchen, putting everything she’d bought away, never able to take her eyes off of the paper for more than a second or two at a time. She’d seen it before, of course; once it had been published, that particular story had been everywhere, to the point where she’d heard that the Chronicle had needed to reprint it nearly a half-dozen times. But she’d never sat down and actually read it herself; just the thought of doing so had been more than she’d felt ready to handle.
Even now, just remembering everything that had happened after she’d come home to Canterlot was enough to make her chest tighten, a sensation that didn’t abate as she put the newspaper down and looked around her apartment.
All signs of the struggle that had taken place here, along with the investigation that had followed, were gone now. Her mother had come over a few days later and tidied the place up, even replacing the pane of glass that Silhouette had hurled Line through. To look at it now, it was the same homey little bungalow it had always been.
Except it wasn’t. It was the lair of the crazed guard who’d held her captive in her own bathroom. It was the battleground where her boss – whom she was still angry at for how biased he was against Lex, even as she felt grateful to him for rescuing her and guilty for how it had almost killed him – had nearly lost his life. It was the place that the Royal Guard had tossed while they’d tried to find evidence to discredit her story.
Suddenly it was too much. After the unexpected firestorm of emotions she’d experienced on her way to her apartment, and finally reading Princess Luna’s interview, being back here was more than she was able to process. Her stomach clenching, Nosey shoved the newspaper away, letting the pages flutter to the ground in a heap as she lurched toward the door.
She had reassured her parents that morning that she felt good about heading back to her place, and despite their protests she’d been confident that she was ready. She’d take back her home, enjoy her vacation, and start working on the book that she’d decided to write back in Tall Tale. It would be a tell-all about her time with Lex, one that would set the record straight about him while simultaneously letting her put him – and everything that she’d been through – behind her for good.
Just a few hours ago Nosey had felt ready to move on with her life.
Now, the idea she’d seriously entertained that possibility made her feel even stupider than that girl at the checkout counter.
I can’t live here anymore, she thought, the realization making her want to cry for some reason. I’ll need to ask Mom and Dad if I can stay with them a little longer, just until I can find a new- “ACK!”
Stumbling as she suddenly collided with someone, the two of them went down in a heap, Nosey squawking in pain as something pointy jabbed her in the breastbone. A moment later her brain caught up to what her body was doing, and she scrambled to her hooves, mortified. “I’m so sorry! I-” She couldn’t finish as she suddenly sucked in a breath, every muscle in her body tensing as she recognized who she’d just run into.
Silhouette.
No, she realized a second later, her heart hammering in her chest. No, it’s not him.
In fact, the pony she’d run into wasn’t a “him” at all. Rather, it was a pegasus mare. But one with a midnight-black coat just like Silhouette’s, her mane and tail being silvery in a way that was reminiscent of her attacker’s snow-white hair. Her cutie mark was different too, being a small pile of bits that was barely visible underneath her dark cloak. Being the most colorful part of the pony she’d just run into, Nosey focused on that for a moment, letting it remind her this wasn’t Silhouette.
For her part, the mare she’d hit didn’t seem to enjoy the attention, scowling as she stood up. “Are you done checking out my ass?” she huffed, adjusting her cloak so that it fell over her haunch.
Taken aback by the coarse language, Nosey flinched, the motion exacerbating the ache in her chest where something had jabbed her. “Oh, no, I was just…” Shaking her head, she made an effort to pull herself together. “I’m sorry, you look like someone I know is all.”
“Maybe you should invest in a better pair of spectacles, then,” sneered the stranger.
Nosey nodded meekly, ignoring the lingering ache from where she’d been jabbed. It hadn’t broken the skin, so it was probably fine. Except…something seemed odd. The mare in front of her wasn’t wearing anything pointed, so what had poked her? Unable to help herself as her reporter’s instincts went to work of their own accord, Nosey replayed what had just happened in her mind. She’d come rushing out the front door of her apartment, almost leaping from the two of the two steps between the entrance and the street, and that had been when she’d run into the mare in front of her. So the pegasus’ muzzle would have impacted her chest, but that didn’t make any sense; her muzzle was as rounded and blunt as any other mare’s. So why…?
In front of her, the pegasus sighed, her features softening. “Listen, I’m sorry for being so blunt, but I’ve been looking for a magic shop ever since I arrived here this morning. Do you know where the nearest one is?”
As she spoke, she turned her head to gesture at the city, and Nosey caught sight of a hairpiece that she hadn’t seen before, a clip with a rather ornate design of two theater masks – one laughing and one crying – attached to it. That must have been it, Nosey decided. It wasn’t exactly as pointy as she’d have thought, but it was still metal. She must have had her head turned, and that’s what I bumped into. It was odd that she’d done so without knocking it askew, but what other explanation was there?
Putting the thought out of her mind, Nosey made herself smile, pointing down the street. “There’s one a few blocks from here. It’s down a side alley, so it’s easy to miss. Just look for the place with the constellation stickers on the windows.”
“Constellation stickers. Got it.” The conversation was apparently over then, as the ebony pegasus moved past her. It was apparently an afterthought that made her glance back over her shoulder. “Try not to trample anybody else,” she called as she walked away.
Nosey waved at her, the motion awkward. It wasn’t just because she still felt embarrassed, but also because of the odd phrasing. “Anybody”? What kind of word was that? It sounded like something Sonata used to say back when she’d first met her, the mare butchering idioms and simple expressions left and right.
Thoughts of Sonata reminded Nosey of what had just happened, and she put the odd pegasus out of her mind as she winced, turning around and resuming – at a more sedate pace – her trek toward her parents’ house.
A little while later, she was knocking on their front door. “Mom? Dad? You guys home?”
“Nosey?” came her mother’s voice from inside, Wordsy Windbag appearing a moment later, concern etched all over her face. “What’s wrong? You said you were going back to your apartment?”
Shamefaced, Nosey nodded. “I did. But then I got there and I just…I don’t know what happened. I couldn’t…” She wasn’t even sure where to start, suddenly feeling at a loss to explain everything she’d been feeling.
But her expression seemed to do the job just fine, as her mother suddenly stepped forward and pulled her into a hug. “Oh, my poor baby! Come on inside, we’re just getting ready to have a late lunch.” Letting her go, she gave Nosey a sympathetic smile. “You’ll have to put up with your father’s cooking, of course. I swear, that stallion can make the healthiest food in Equestria, but it’s not exactly what I’d call flavorful.”
Fighting down a laugh of relief at how simple and uncomplicated things were with her parents, Nosey followed her mom inside. “So what would you call it?”
Wordsy rolled her eyes. “Oh, I’d say something along the lines of insipid, savorless, unappealing…”
But to Nosey’s surprise, her mother’s list of synonyms ended there, the mare turning to look at her as she led her into the dining room. “Actually dear, I’m glad you’re here. Your father and I were wondering…”
She stopped talking as Pill Bug walked into the room, levitating a salad bowl. “Here we are!” he announced. “Spinach, lettuce, and kale all in one! This has all the antioxidants we’ll need-, Nosey?” Putting the bowl down, Pill blinked in surprised as he adjusted his glasses. “Sweety, what are you doing here?”
“She was just telling me that she thinks she was a bit too hasty, impulsive, and rash, going back to her place so soon,” answered Wordsy before Nosey could, ushering her daughter toward a seat.
Looking at his daughter’s downcast expression, Pill crossed the room to give her a quick hug. “Well, I’m just glad you didn’t try to force yourself. You know you’re welcome to stay here for as long as you need.”
“Thanks Dad,” smiled Nosey, suddenly exceptionally grateful that she had such wonderful parents.
“Now let me go add some okra to this salad,” announced Pill Bug. “The calcium will help boost your mood and combat depression.”
“Actually, darling, I think we should tell Nosey what we were talking about before,” prompted Wordsy.
The news sent a trickle of anxiety through Nosey’s gut, not liking how that sounded. “What?”
Pill hesitated, glancing between his daughter and his wife before his eyes settled on the latter. “Do you think now’s the best time?”
“Absolutely, indubitably, unquestionably,” nodded Wordsy. “She needs something else to think about, and this will help her.”
“Think about what?” asked Nosey. “Is it something bad? Because I really can’t handle another surprise right now.”
“No, sweety, nothing like that,” chuckled Pill. “It’s just that your mother and I were planning on taking a trip for our anniversary, and we thought maybe you’d like to come.”
Nosey felt a weight lift off of her chest, glad it wasn’t more bad news. “Oh. Well, that’s really nice, but I’d hate for you to babysit me on your anniversary.”
“We knew you’d say that,” answered her mother with a light chuckle. “But think about this: if you don’t come with us, we’ll spend the entire time worried about how you’re doing. So you’d actually be doing us a favor if you came along.”
That logic was so backward that it made perfect sense, and Nosey couldn’t help but laugh. She knew she should protest more, but the thought of being alone in Canterlot was unpleasant enough that she couldn’t bring herself to. “Okay, you talked me into it. So where are we going?”
Pill smiled, sharing a glance with his wife. “Well, we usually try to go to more out-of-the-way vacation spots, but this year we were thinking something a little more traditional.”
“Las Pegasus,” announced Wordsy as her husband began to serve everyone their meal.
The war cry had barely left Scootaloo’s lips before she charged forward, her rapier held at the ready. Darting beneath her enemy’s spear, she quickly murmured the words of a spell, her free hoof making the requisite gestures. A second later she smirked, noticing the wet sheen that was suddenly coating the length of her blade.
Not giving her foe time to react, she thrust upward, sinking her rapier to the hilt in the bad guy’s torso. Even before she’d pushed it all the way in, a sizzling sound reached her ears, the acid that she’d lined the blade with taking effect. “Not so tough now, are you?” she whooped triumphantly.
But the reply she received came from behind her. “Scoots! Get clear!”
Yanking her sword free, Scootaloo threw herself backward, watching as a thin glass vial went sailing past her. Tumbling end over end, it crashed against their adversary’s chest, striking almost exactly where Scootaloo had skewered them a moment before. The glass shattered on impact, but had barely begun to fall when their contents – volatile in the extreme – blew up.
As far as explosions went, it wasn’t much of one, sounding more like a firecracker had gone off than anything else. Even so, Scootaloo felt a sudden ripple as the pressure wave washed over her, bringing with it a rush of heat, making her throw a hoof up over her face reflexively. When she lowered it a second later, she couldn’t help but grin as she saw that their enemy was now on fire, teetering unsteadily before falling over and laying still.
The sight was enough to set Scootaloo to cheering. “Oh yeah! Who’s the mare now?!”
“I’d say that’d be me,” grinned Apple Bloom, the vials in her saddlebags clinking as she all but strutted forward. “I mean, ‘cause my bomb was what finished him off and all.”
“As if!” snorted Scootaloo. “If I hadn’t gotten up in his face, he would’ve turned you into a pincushion before you could’ve thrown that.”
Apple Bloom raised an eyebrow at her friend. “I think I can outmaneuver a scarecrow,” she replied dryly.
The comment made Scootaloo glance back at the burning collection of sticks and straw-filled rags, her cheeks coloring as she realized she’d been getting too into it. “I just meant if this was a real fight,” she muttered.
“If this was a real fight, we would’ve needed a grownup to finish that thing off,” replied Apple Bloom, taking a flask out of her saddlebag and emptying its contents over the burning scarecrow. The concoction of flame-retardant chemicals immediately went to work, hissing as they smothered the fire. A second later the flames were quenched, and Apple Bloom gingerly pulled the spear – actually a butter knife tied to the end of a curtain rod – away from the now-soaked mass. “I mean, that’s how it actually happened, remember? That thing barely felt our attacks, and if it wasn’t for Applejack we wouldn’t have made it out of there.”
“Aw, c’mon,” protested Scootaloo as she went to help Apple Bloom affix the makeshift weapon to another of the scarecrows that they’d made. “This is whatchamacallit…artistic license. The important thing is that we beat the monster and saved the day. Besides, it’s not like any of the other adventures we had over there had nearly as much action.”
Huffing, the pegasus filly started affixing a tangle of thorn-covered vines to scarecrow’s chin in a crude approximation of the bristly beard the actual creature had possessed, complaining as she worked. “Most of the bad guys we met weren’t even really bad guys at all. Like when we went after those giant rats, and they turned out to be rat-people who were just down on their luck and needed a break. Or when we were attacked by that sea monster, who was actually some sort of mermare or something who was just lonely.”
Scowling as she helped her friend drag the doomed dummy to the middle of the clearing, located at the edge of Sweet Apple Acres where they’d spent the last few days practicing, Scootaloo didn’t let up on her grumbling. “I mean, I’m glad we were able to help people who needed it, but I just wish things had been a little more exciting, you know? Maybe if they had, we would’ve gotten cutie marks in adventuring or monster-fighting or something cool like that!”
“Well, I doubt Sweetie Belle would have,” frowned Apple Bloom as she drove the base of the scarecrow into the ground, “seein’ how she got her cutie mark already, and it wasn’t anythin’ like that.”
Scootaloo’s ears folded back at that, a dejected look crossing her face. “Yeah…”
That had happened shortly after they’d come back from their trip to Everglow. Sweetie Belle had immediately run home to check on her sister, knowing that Rarity had to have been worried sick about her. She’d been correct in that assumption, far more so than she’d realized.
At the time, no one had realized just how heartbroken Rarity had been over losing her boyfriend, Long Road. He’d apparently gone off on some trip to Trottingham and had some sort of terrible accident, with Rarity never getting a straight answer about exactly what had happened to him. So when her little sister had vanished a short while later, it had apparently hit the fashionista pretty hard. Scootaloo had found out later – having been hanging out with Rainbow Dash at the time – that when Sweetie Belle had gone to see Rarity, the relief at her little sister being alright had caused the older unicorn to break down completely, the accumulated stress and worry hitting her all at once.
Heartbroken at what she’d put her beloved big sister through, Sweetie Belle had tried to soothe Rarity with a song, having picked up the basics of musical magic during her time on Everglow. She’d apparently succeeded at the task, with Apple Bloom (who’d been there to witness the whole thing) telling Scootaloo after the fact that the song Sweetie had sung had been the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard. It had managed to calm Rarity down, but in the process had achieved something far grander.
It had earned Sweetie Belle her cutie mark.
A pink heart whose rounded tops were approximations of the curls in her mane, and with a purple musical note over it, it had reminded Scootaloo of the cutie mark that Lex’s girlfriend, Sonata, had. Which wasn’t that surprising, since she was apparently a really good singer too. What had concerned Scootaloo a lot more was what that meant for the Cutie Mark Crusaders; after all, now that she’d found her special talent, Sweetie Belle’s crusade was over.
Fortunately, Sunflower – who had also been there – had come up with an answer for that. Sweetie Belle could stay on as part of the CMCs if she was crusading for Apple Bloom and Scootaloo to get their cutie marks.
It was a great idea, one that had been eagerly embraced by all three of them. No one wanted the Crusaders to break up, after all. So they’d unanimously accepted that Sweetie Belle was still part of the group and moved on, content that nothing had really changed.
Except that it had.
As much as Scootaloo hated to admit it, things weren’t like they used to be. Or rather, Sweetie Belle wasn’t how she used to be. She still went on expeditions with them while they’d tried new things – just last week, she’d come along to help them see if they could get cutie marks in mattress testing, singing a gentle lullaby while the two of them had tried out various beds at the furniture store (at least until the manager had thrown them out) – but in Scootaloo’s estimation, her heart wasn’t really in it. Or at least, she didn’t seem as excited to try new things as they were.
Another thing that was beginning to bug her was how Sweetie Belle’s support always seemed to come in the form of a song. It had been fun at first, but lately she’d been using it for everything. Scootaloo liked a catchy tune as much as the next pony, but a small part of her felt like Sweetie Belle was showing off how she’d discovered her special talent and they hadn’t. She knew that wasn’t the case, that their friend would never rub her good fortune in their faces like that, but the thought was one that refused to go away.
That wasn’t the only thing that had changed about the Sweetie Belle though…
“Say,” noted Apple Bloom, “don’t you think it’s takin’ Sweetie Belle and Sunflower an awful long time to go pick up lunch?”
Scootaloo felt a groan welling up from deep inside her. “They’re probably off sucking each other’s faces again.”
For the life of her, Scootaloo couldn’t understand what the big deal was about having a boyfriend. Sunflower was a nice guy, sure, but Sweetie Belle’s brains turned completely to mush whenever he was around! If he was in her field of view, she had trouble paying attention to everything else around her. Every word out of his mouth seemed to make her blush, giggle, or squeak. And if Scootaloo had to hear one more time about how cute Sunflower was when he got embarrassed – which apparently happened whenever Sweetie Belle caught him purring, or saw him with his tail fluffed up, or heard him complain about getting wet – she was going to scream!
And then there was the kissing. Sweet Celestia, the kissing. Their lips were pressed against each other’s so often that it was like their teeth were made out of magnets. Miss Cheerilee had actually needed to make a rule forbidding kissing in class, that was how bad it had gotten!
She’d mentioned all of that to Apple Bloom, and while her fellow blank flank agreed with her, she’d also pointed out that there wasn’t really anything they could do about it. It was Sweetie Belle’s destiny to sing, and apparently it was normal for boyfriends and girlfriends to be crazy about each other, even if the emphasis was on the “crazy” part. Apparently, you didn’t need somepony to slip you a love potion – or a love poison – for a crush to drive you completely nuts.
“Come on,” sighed Scootaloo, hefting her rapier. “We might as well practice our routine again. There’s no way those two are going to be back anytime soon.”
“I guess you’re right,” frowned Apple Bloom, kicking a nearby tree and grabbing the apples that fell off of it, tossing one to Scootaloo. “I’m sure by now, the two of them have completely forgotten about us.”
“Sw-Sweetie Belle,” gulped Sunflower nervously. “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, really sure?”
“I am,” insisted the unicorn filly, looking at him with an earnest expression that made Sunflower feel like he was going to float away, despite his wings being tucked at his sides. “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I won’t say I’m not scared, but I know in my heart that this is right. Don’t you think so too?”
He nodded immediately. The way she was looking at him now, he would have agreed with her if she’d said it was a good idea for him to shave off all of his fur and pluck the feathers from his wings. But a small part of him couldn’t help but wonder if things were moving too fast, and somehow that idea bypassed his brain completely, heading straight toward his mouth. “You don’t think you should talk to a grownup first? Like your sister or one of her friends?”
The suggestion made Sweetie Belle frown, and even that made his heart skip a beat. “I know what they’d say!” she huffed, her voice cracking into an adorable squeak. “That it’s a bad idea! That I’m too young to make such a big decision! That I should wait, because I can always go through with it later!” She stomped a hoof, the gesture poetry in motion. “I don’t want to do this later! I want to do it now!”
Seeing how strongly she felt, Sunflower moved forward and pulled her into a hug. “Okay,” he murmured, loving the way her mane smelled. “If this is what you want, then I think it’s a good idea.”
“Sunflower,” she murmured, her eyes fluttering closed as she tilted her head back.
“Sweetie Belle,” he purred softly as he leaned in.
“Um, guys?” cut in a third voice. “As cute as the preteen romance is, can we hurry things along? I really want to get this over and done with.”
Blushing, Sunflower reluctantly let Sweetie Belle go, the filly’s cheeks bright red as she stepped away from him. “Sorry, Starlight,” she mumbled.
Standing on the other side of the alley between Mr. Breezy’s Fan Shop and Quills and Sofas, Starlight Glimmer waved a hoof. “It’s no big deal, I’m just supposed to be making a new friend right now so I can tell Twilight that I completed my friendship lesson, and since Dark Streak’s checked out of her hotel I need to hurry up and find somepony else.” She glanced around then, a self-conscious look crossing her face. “Not to mention that if someone sees me doing…this, they’ll think that I’m backsliding.”
Sunflower wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but he could guess. Sweetie Belle had dragged him here while they were supposed to be getting lunch for the rest of their friends. At first, he’d thought she’d wanted to make out in private, but to his confusion this older mare had been waiting for them.
That had been when Sweetie Belle had told him what was going on. About how she’d heard about this lady, Starlight Glimmer, from her sister. About the idea she’d come up with. About the part she wanted him to play. He’d had some doubts at first, but if this was what his girlfriend wanted, then it was his duty as her boyfriend to support her.
Besides, Sweetie Belle seemed to have her mind made up anyway, giving Starlight a firm nod. “Okay,” she announced, standing up straighter. “I’m ready.”
That was apparently more than could be said about Starlight, the mare hesitating. “Look, I know I’m still new at friendship, but I don’t know about this…”
“Friends are supposed to help each other, right?” offered Sunflower. “Sweetie Belle told you why she wants to do this, and you agreed that it was a pretty good reason. Plus, it’s not like it’ll be hard to undo if she changes her mind. So what’s the problem?”
Despite the uneasy look on her face, Starlight nodded. “I guess there isn’t one, when you put it like that.” Shrugging off the last of her doubts, she turned toward Sweetie Belle. “Okay,” she announced, her horn lighting up. “Here we go…”
Sunflower watched in silence as she fired a beam of energy at the smaller unicorn, Sweetie Belle giving a yelp as it made contact with her. The sound made a rush of anxiety shoot through Sunflower as he watched Sweetie Belle go rigid, and for a moment nothing else happened…
Then her cutie mark sprang free of her flank.
Wide-eyed despite having been told what to expect, Sunflower watched as Starlight levitated it over to her, ushering it into the glass jar she’d brought and screwing the lid on tight. Only then did the aura around her horn expire, Sweetie Belle letting out a breath as she was suddenly able to move again, stumbling. Sunflower was by her side in an instant, propping her up. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” murmured Sweetie Belle, sounding like she’d just spun around a few dozen times. Despite that she craned her head around, her eyes widening as she looked at her flank and saw the empty space where her cutie mark had been. “It worked! I’m a blank flank again!”
“In the old days I would have replaced the mark with an equals sign that would have suppressed your special talent,” admitted Starlight as she placed the jar containing the glowing symbol in front of the pair. “But this way you won’t have any sort of interference doing what you’re good at. You just won’t get a boost from it the way you normally would have.”
“Thank you so much, Starlight!” gushed Sweetie Belle, grinning toothily. “Now I can finally be a Cutie Mark Crusader again!”
“You know you were still a Crusader before, right?” teased Sunflower gently. “Your friends said so and everything.”
“I know,” admitted Sweetie Belle. “But I could tell they felt differently. Now I’m really back on the team, instead of just cheering them on while they try to get their cutie marks!”
Sunflower gestured to the glass jar with the glowing heart-and-note symbol inside of it. “And you really want me to be the one to keep this?”
“Absolutely!” squeaked the filly. “Anypony else would just let it out again and say it was for my own good. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t be tempted at some point either. But I know I can trust you to keep it under wraps until Apple Bloom and Scootaloo get their marks too. Besides,” she blushed, giving him softer smile. “I like the idea of my destiny being with my boyfriend.”
His cheeks heating up, Sunflower gave an awkward laugh. “Aw, well, now I feel like I should give you something special too.”
Although she couldn’t purr, Sweetie Belle’s voice was a close approximation as she leaned forward to nuzzle him. “Well, I have a few ideas about that…”
Rolling her eyes as the two started kissing again, Starlight gestured toward the mouth of the alley. “Well, I’ll just be going then. Friendship lessons wait for no mare.”
When the pair didn’t respond, Starlight chuckled to herself, turning and trotting away, leaving the two of them to bask in the success of Sweetie Belle’s cutie unmarking.
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Willow quietly, making sure to keep her eyes on her menu, staunchly ignoring the inquisitive gazes turning their way.
Across from her, Shining Armor sat back in his chair, his eyes still wide from the sum that Willow had just quoted him. “One hundred thousand bits?” he muttered weakly, needing several seconds to process that before he belatedly picked up his own menu, staring at it blankly. “I can’t believe you actually agreed to that,” he huffed after a few moments, glancing up long enough to send an accusatory look at the purrsian sitting across from him. “I thought you were supposed to be some sort of businessperson back on your world, Willow!”
Willow bit back a sigh.
She hadn’t been surprised when Celestia had made it clear, back when the elder alicorn had contracted her to kill Lex, that her direct involvement in the scheme ended at giving the order. The potential fallout that would result from being associated with an assassination was enough to make that a simple act of prudence. Likewise, Celestia had been smart enough to assign someone else to act as her liaison in case Willow needed something to complete her mission.
But Willow questioned Celestia’s judgment in having Shining Armor be the one to act as her point of contact. While that was probably because he was the only other person who’d agreed with her about the necessity of taking such extreme measures, the Prince of the Crystal Empire was only marginally less famous than Celestia herself, making it difficult for Willow to make contact with him in a way that wouldn’t draw attention to herself. It was inconvenient in the extreme.
“I told you, Shining Armor,” explained Willow patiently, keeping her voice soft and measured, “there was nothing I could do about the price. The contractor knew that she was the only here who worked in that particular field, which meant that there was no competition to potentially underbid her.”
“You could at least have tried to get her to lower her price,” groused Shining Armor. “Maybe if you reminded Dark Streak that Equestria doesn’t have much of a use for her particular talents-”
“I did remind her of that,” growled Willow quietly. “The same way I’ll remind you not to say her name or what she really does. Or are you trying to get us caught?”
Shining Armor flinched at that, his eyes darting around in a way that was so blatantly suspicious it made Willow clench her jaw.
That was another reason why Princess Cadance’s husband was a bad choice for the role that Celestia had assigned him. His military career left him lacking where subterfuge was concerned, enough so that Willow was beginning to regret her decision for them to meet in public like this.
But what other choice did she have? For all that the residents of Ponyville had gotten used to having royalty walk among them, thanks to Princess Twilight living here, a handsome – and married, for that matter – prince couldn’t simply drop by a single mother’s house without it setting tongues wagging. The local newspaper might not send reporters out to follow famous ponies around like Willow had heard happened in some other cities, but there was no way a piece of gossip that juicy would be left alone.
While Willow couldn’t have cared less if her neighbors thought that Shining Armor wanted to try some “catnip,” to use one of the nicer colloquialisms from back home, she knew that she couldn’t afford to be so blasé. If she got a reputation as a homewrecker, Sunflower would suffer for it. As much as Equestria was a beacon of tolerance, Willow couldn’t bring herself to believe that, when it came to family, shame by association wasn’t a thing here.
For his part, Shining Armor was even more concerned about the appearance of impropriety than she was. Even the rumor that he was stepping out on his wife had the potential to embarrass both him and Princess Cadance on the national stage. Fortunately, he had a built-in excuse to come to Ponyville, since his sister lived here; the only issue had been finding an excuse for the two of them to meet in a public area where they could still converse privately.
That hadn’t been particularly hard for Willow to come up with, selecting a local restaurant where they could meet for lunch. It was the easiest way for the two of them to speak without someone else getting too close, so long as they kept an eye out for other guests and passing waiters. It was also the least suggestive meal for them to share, since dinner could be seen as the prelude to a romantic encounter and breakfast could be interpreted as the aftermath of one.
And as for coming up with a cover story about why they were meeting in the first place…
“Are you ready to order?” asked their waiter, trotting up to the two of them with a polite smile.
Willow turned over her menu immediately. “I’ll have the pasta salad.”
“Just a hayburger and fries for me,” added Shining Armor, his voice coming out a little too quickly for Willow’s liking.
Apparently the waiter thought so too, albeit for a different reason. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather take a trot on the wild side with a more exotic dish?”
The suggestion was, as far as Willow could tell, completely benign. Neither the waiter’s tone nor his expression were even slightly suggestive, nor did he give any sort of pointed glance in her direction, or do anything else that might have indicated some sort of lewd euphemism. In fact, she could already seem him turning the menu back toward her dining partner, preparing to point out several of the other items on it, further driving home that his statement was completely innocent.
But Shining Armor seemed to think otherwise.
“She’s just a friend,” he blurted.
The waiter blinked. “Huh?”
“She needs advice about her love life,” explained the stallion, oblivious to the piercing glare that Willow was giving him. “That’s why we’re here. She doesn’t know how to attract stallions, so I’m helping her. I mean, I’m advising her. It’s not like we’re on a date now, with each other. Because we’re not. On a date, that is.”
The waiter’s eyebrows had been progressively rising during Shining Armor’s hurried explanation of why the two of them were having lunch, finally coming to rest just short of touching his mane. “…so you don’t want me to go over today’s specials again?”
Now it was Shining Armor’s turn to blink. “Specials?
“One pasta salad and one hayburger with fries,” interjected Willow, her voice polite but firm as she caught the waiter’s gaze and nodded.
Taking the unspoken cue, he returned the gesture and left, Shining Armor letting out a breath as they two of them were given some semblance of privacy again. Their table was along the back wall of the restaurant, away from the windows, and there was no one sitting at any of the adjacent tables. Even so, both of them waited until their server had disappeared back into the kitchen before speaking again.
“Sorry about that,” muttered Willow’s not-date. “I can’t stop thinking about how bad us meeting this could look if somepony gets the wrong idea.”
Willow bit back the cutting retorts that came to mind. “Then perhaps you should turn your thoughts toward how we’re going to pay the contractor I retained, since she’s going to want half of the money up front, plus expenses.”
Shining Armor cocked his head at that last word, but was apparently wise enough not to ask exactly what expenses an assassin might incur. Instead, he hunched forward slightly, his expression tense. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t have fifty thousand bits. Neither does Cadance. We keep some cash on hoof, mostly given to us by local ponies who want to contribute to the Empire’s well-being, but that kind of money is just…”
“You’re royalty,” replied Willow evenly. “I’ve seen how it works here. Just come up with a reason and ponies will throw bits at you until you tell them to stop.”
Shining Armor frowned. “That much money will take time, and there’s no way I’d be able to do that without Cadance noticing and asking questions. Besides, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Crystal Empire isn’t exactly as rich as Equestria. We only have one city, and none of its residents are as wealthy as the high-rollers in someplace like Canterlot or Manehattan.”
Willow let out a slow breath, closing her eyes for several seconds as she silently reminded herself that budget constraints were a part of any enterprise, and that this was nothing to stress over. There was always a revenue stream somewhere. It was just a matter of looking hard enough. Asking Celestia to fundraise is out of the question, since she’s keeping her distance from this whole operation. The other princesses don’t know about any of this, so they’re no help either. So what options are left? Maybe getting in touch with Equestria’s richest ponies directly? Or maybe I should try and start my own business enterprise?
It took her only a few seconds to discard both ideas. Even if there weren’t significant hurdles that she’d need to overcome, there was no way she’d be able to do either of them in the few days she had until Dark Streak turned up and demanded the down payment. Given how the black griffon had been prepared to walk during their initial meeting, Willow had no doubt that she’d do so again if told that the money wasn’t ready. I might be able to get her to wait a few extra days, but not any longer than that, Willow decided grimly. If I can’t get her the money by then, she’s gone.
“We need to bring in someone else,” she admitted after several more seconds of consideration. “Someone who knows how to squeeze money out of Equestria’s most well-to-do ponies. Someone who’s familiar with each of them personally and knows what would make them part with their bits without asking too many questions. Someone who can do it without seeming suspicious or out-of-place. Someone like…like…”
“Like my own illustrious self.”
The new voice, masculine in tenor, made both of them jump, turning in their seats to face…
A picture of a bowl of fruit hanging on the wall next to them.
For a moment they both just stared at it, until Shining Armor’s horn lit up, removing the picture and revealing a square opening in the wall that was only slightly smaller than the frame he’d just taken down. The inner chamber was tiny, with barely enough room to fit a child, and lacked a bottom, instead plunging downward beyond where she could easily see. Whoever’s voice that was had come from down there, but at the moment Willow was less concerned with that than she was with why that aperture was there in the first place.
Shining Armor had the answer. “A dumbwaiter,” he moaned.
Willow blinked, unfamiliar with the term. “A what?”
“A dumbwaiter,” repeated her companion. “A miniature elevator designed to allow food to be moved from the kitchen to a different floor.”
“But the kitchen’s over there,” protested Willow, pointing at where their waiter had disappeared.
“It is now, plebians,” came the voice from before, now clearly echoing up from wherever the dumbwaiter led down toward. “But in years past, this establishment’s cooking facilities were located on its lowest level. When they decided to expand their operations, it was easier to move their kitchens to the ground floor rather than widen the basement, and so this lower level became used for storage instead, with the dumbwaiter shaft being used for ventilatory purposes. But it carries nearby voices just as well,” chortled the voice, clearly pleased.
Shining Armor just stared at the dumbwaiter opening, clearly having no idea how to react to this development, but Willow was already getting her paws back under her. “So you heard our dilemma, then,” she murmured, leaning closer to the hole in the wall. “And you said we needed someone like you. Do you think you can get what we need?”
That was enough to snap Shining Armor out of his stupor. “Willow! You can’t just ask some eavesdropper for help! We don’t even know who this is!”
A haughty laugh floated up from below. “Hah! Then wait but a moment, my dimwitted counterpart, and your savior shall reveal himself forthwith!”
The pompous insult made Shining Armor frown. “Who’s he calling dimwitted?”
Privately, Willow agreed with the third-party’s assessment of Shining Armor’s intelligence, but she knew better than to say so out loud. “Let’s be less worried about that than about whether or not this person can live up to their claims.”
Huffing, Shining Armor fixed her with an irritated look. “You really want to trust some stranger with something this important?”
“If they weren’t intent on helping, they could have just stayed silent,” countered Willow. “Instead, they revealed themselves and are now coming up to meet us. Since we don’t have any better ideas, then yes, I think we should hear what they have to say.”
“Yeah, well, I think their claims sound pretty pie-in-the-sky,” snorted the stallion. “How exactly does whoever we talked to think they’re going to be able to earn that much money that quickly?”
“Because I already have it.”
Recognizing the voice from the dumbwaiter, both of them turned to look at the pony striding toward them.
He was a unicorn stallion, one Willow hadn’t seen before. Like Shining Armor, he had a white coat, but that was where the resemblance ended. Only slightly taller than her companion, the newcomer was nowhere near as solidly built, being trim without the toned figure that admittedly made Shining Armor so easy on the eyes. His mane and tail were blonde, his cutie mark was a compass rose, and his face was twisted into an arrogant smirk as he strode over to them.
Shining Armor’s eyes widened. “Blueblood?! That was you?!”
“Indeed, my dear ninny, ‘twas I! Prince Blueblood!” He punctuated his statement by stopping in place and raising a hoof to his chest, pointing his nose skyward as if expecting to be showered with praise merely for giving them his name.
Willow settled for raising an eyebrow, glancing back at Shining Armor. “Prince?”
“He’s not a prince anymore,” scowled Shining Armor. “Celestia told me he lost his title in a duel, to Lex Legis of all ponies.”
Blueblood’s noble expression immediately soured. “Blame your sister for that, you dullard. It was her inability to overcome that degenerate brute that cost me my family’s title.”
He looked ready to expound on that grievance at length, but Willow – now recalling the nitwit whom Celestia had mentioned was responsible for Lex's ascension to royalty – wasn’t interested in whatever scene he felt like making. “Why were you down there?” she demanded, wanting to get that out of the way before anything else.
“Hmph.” Giving his mane a toss, Blueblood sank down into a seat opposite them. “Since my fall from grace, necessity has forced me to make strategic compromises as I strategize my return to the lofty heights which I had so unjustly stolen from me. To that end, I lending my considerable aid to the proprietors of this eatery in exchange-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as their waiter suddenly reappeared, bringing their food out, only to pause in mid-step as he spotted Blueblood. Sighing, he put their meals in front of them before turning to the blond stallion. “BB, you better get back down there and finish up that inventory. You’re already on thin ice with the boss; he looked up that word you called him, a ‘fribble,’ and he’s pretty upset.”
Blueblood glowered at the waiter. “You tell that shabbaroon that I’m on my break! Now begone! We have matters of import to discuss!”
Rolling his eyes, the waiter shrugged and left, with Shining Armor chuckling as soon as the other pony was out of earshot. “So you’re working here, huh?”
“My current predicament is one that requires extraordinary measures to be taken,” answered Blueblood airily, his self-satisfied smile returning a moment later. “And indeed, it’s most fortuitous that I’ve down so. For now I’m positioned so solve your problems, and in doing so return to that most lofty of states in Equestrian society.”
“How so?” prompted Willow.
Blueblood flashed her a grin. “My current savings are just enough to provide for the half of the money that you require, and my knowledge of Equestria’s most affluent ponies is second to none. I should be able to easily acquire sufficient funds to cover the remaining portion of what you need.” His eyes shifted over to Shining Armor then. “Though obviously, I’ll need help regaining what I’ve lost in order to for that to be effective.”
The other stallion’s brows furrowed at that, shooting Willow a confused look before turning back to the former prince. “What exactly are you saying?”
Blueblood couldn’t have looked more smug if he’d tried.
“I understand that your wife recently officiated a marriage where a mare took two husbands…”
Equestria, Dark Streak had decided, was a predator’s paradise.
Its towns – whether sleepy little villages like Ponyville or bustling cities like Canterlot – completely lacked any sort of access controls. There were no walls, ditches, or fences to stop anyone from coming or going as they pleased. Nor were there wires strung between buildings in an attempt to discourage flyers from entering or leaving without going through a checkpoint. Not that there were any checkpoints; even Canterlot, whose mountaintop location provided a modicum of defense, had no city watch or other constabulary recording who came and went from its trainyard, let alone collecting entry tolls, searching incoming merchandise, or even patting down suspicious-looking individuals for weapons or contraband.
Magical means of preventing unauthorized entrance or egress were similarly lacking. While it wasn’t, as far as Dark Streak knew, possible to use spellwork to monitor an entire town – her understanding was that attempting to set up any sort of magical effect that covered a large enough area, lasted long enough to be worthwhile, and could provide useful information, very quickly ran into problems of expense, complexity, and numerous other issues – even the most basic levels of scrutiny had been entirely absent. For all of her surreptitious checking when she’d taken the train to Equestria’s capital, Dark Streak had found no one so much as looking for the presence of magic items on newcomers. It was insane.
The lack of safeguards had been so glaring that Dark Streak had taken extra precautions, unable to shake the feeling that she was being lulled into a false sense of security. She’d used her hat of disguise – one of the lesser magic items in her arsenal – to cloak herself in the illusion of a nondescript pegasus. She’d made sure to cast a nondetection spell on herself as well, suppressing all magical emanations on her person, rendering her spells invisible to detection and making her magic items look mundane. She’d even gone out of her way to conceal several quick-escape tools on herself, rather than storing them in her bags of holding – sacks which were enchanted to be larger on the inside than their outward appearance would indicate – where they’d take longer to retrieve. Everything from a potion of gaseous form, which when drunk would turn her and everything she was wearing into mist for up to ten minutes, making her almost impossible to capture, to a vial of foul-smelling mixture that, when splashed on her trail, would make it difficult for bloodhounds to track her.
All for naught. Canterlot, like Ponyville, had been as unguarded as it appeared. The worst thing Dark Streak had needed to deal with had been a clumsy unicorn not looking where she was going.
Now, having finished her business there – the magic shop having been able to supply her with almost everything she’d required – and done some supplementary research besides, she’d come back to Ponyville to pick up the down payment on her commission. Once she’d collected the money, she’d be able to head out and start making preparations for-
“LOOOOOOK OUUUT!!!”
Dark Streak flung herself straight upward before she’d even consciously registered the warning, wings flapping as she belatedly registered something rushing at her from her left. Pulling her legs up, she barely managed to get them clear before a blue blur passed under her, trailing fire as it rocketed by, before it collided with a nearby building with a tremendous crash.
Landing, she gave a grunt of satisfaction at having avoided whatever that was. Between Willow and that four-eyed unicorn, she’d been getting tired of being nearly run over by the people here. It wasn’t going to happen again.
“Oh no, my scooter!”
The voice – the same one that had called out a warning a second later – belonged to an orange-coated pegasus filly, currently covered in dust as she picked herself up and rushed toward the site of the crash. Ignoring the dent in the wall, she slumped as she looked at the broken pile of wood and wheels, lifting two pieces and vainly trying to fit them together. “Awww…”
“Scootaloo!”
“Are you alright?!”
Still on edge after nearly being mowed down, Dark Streak watched as two more fillies – one a yellow earth pony with a bow in her hair and the other being a light grey unicorn – ran toward their friend, checking her over for cuts and bruises. For her part, the pegasus filly, Scootaloo, nodded sadly. “I’m alright, but my scooter’s totaled.”
“And you didn’t get your cutie mark neither,” sighed the earth filly. “None of us did.”
“So much for getting cutie marks in rocket science,” sighed the unicorn filly.
“Yeah,” huffed Scootaloo, before suddenly grinning, her disappointment over what had happened to her scooter vanishing in an instant. “But you know what? I don’t mind that we didn’t get our cutie marks! I’m just glad all three of us got to do this together!” She punctuated that last statement by moving between her friends and throwing a hoof over each of them.
“I agree!” echoed the earth filly, giving her unicorn friend a toothy smile. “It’s really great havin’ you back on the team, Sweetie Belle! I mean, you were still a Crusader before and all, but I feel like this is how it’s supposed to be, y’know?”
“Aw, thanks Apple Bloom!” gushed the unicorn, Sweetie Belle. “And you did a great job making those chemical boosters too! If I’d known they were going to be that strong, I’d have tied our wagon to the back of the scooter a lot tighter! Then we would have gotten to go along for the whole ride instead of just part of it!”
“Well, maybe it’s better that you didn’t,” admitted Scootaloo, looking at the sizable impact mark her runaway ride had left on the side of the building. Curiously, only a few other passersby were stopping to look at the damage, with most simply glancing at the trip and then moving on, as though this were a common occurrence. For their part, the fillies seemed to be fairly unfazed by what had happened, instead moving to start gathering up the remains of the ruined ride. “I’m just glad this place is still closed for repairs,” sighed the filly.
“Did anypony ever figure out exactly what happened here?” asked Sweetie Belle. “This was Rarity’s favorite restaurant.”
“The way I heard it,” offered Apple Bloom, “some poor fella ended up getting’ stuck in some kinda crawlspace between the first floor and the basement. Got wedged in there real tight too, since nopony could pull him out. They eventually had to tear up the wall and part of the floor to get him loose.”
Deciding that she’d heard enough, Dark Streak was already walking away when Scootaloo suddenly trotted up to her. “Hey, um, miss?” she started. “I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry about almost crashing into you with my scooter.”
“We all are,” added Sweetie Belle. “I guess we kinda got carried away.”
“We were just so excited to have the old team back together,” chimed in Apple Bloom. “I suppose we weren’t exactly thinkin’ straight.”
Scootaloo nodded, a self-conscious grin on her face as she rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m just glad I saw you before my scooter crashed into you. I was so wrapped up in how it almost felt like flying to be going that fast that I almost didn’t.”
For her part, Dark Streak just wanted the conversation to be over, since it was keeping her from collecting her fee. But she knew she couldn’t draw any undue attention to herself; she’d changed the illusion that she’d worn in Canterlot out of an abundance of caution – now looking like a pegasus with a tan coat and black mane and tail, her brand of destiny (or “cutie mark,” as it was apparently called here) now looking like that thing she’d seen in the magic shop, a “cash register” – but she still wanted to draw as few parallels between her fake identities as possible. Which meant effecting a nicer attitude than she’d showed that clumsy unicorn in the capital.
Forcing herself to smile, Dark Streak nodded. “Well, child, perhaps the next time you want to feel what it’s like to fly, you can just flap your wings.”
Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle cringed at that, and Scootaloo winced, her expression becoming pained. “Oh, um, I can’t.” Flapping her wings, the filly grunted as she rose barely an inch off the ground, hovering there for a few seconds before dropping back down, ceasing her efforts. “My wings don’t really work. They never have.” Taking a deep breath, she shook her head. “It’s no big deal. I’m still…um, are you okay?”
But Dark Streak only dimly registered the question, instead staring at the orange filly with wide eyes and her mouth open, feeling like she’d just been punched in the gut.
An alce.
The girl was an alce.
Dark Streak hadn’t been an assassin for very long, but she’d taken to the profession with a natural ease that had shocked and intimidated her peers. Even so, she’d taken several serious wounds in the course of completing her contracts, some of them quite painful. But those were nothing compared to how she felt at that moment, the sudden ache in her chest blotting out everything else, including her better judgment; that was the only way to explain what came out of her mouth next.
“Your wings don’t work…and your parents let you live?”
Scootaloo’s eyes widened, looking like she’d just been slapped across the face. “Wh-what?”
“Of course they did!” Apple Bloom moved to stand in front of her friend, scowling. “What kinda horrible question is that?!”
“Apologize!” demanded Sweetie Belle. “You apologize to her right now!”
Rattled to her core, Dark Streak shook her head, the fillies’ fury making her step back in a way that armored warriors and powerful wizards hadn’t been able to do. Dimly, she realized that other people were starting to take notice of the altercation, the girls’ anger capturing their attention in a way that the rocket-propelled scooter hadn’t been able to do. It was exactly the situation she’d been trying to avoid, and one she knew she needed to fix immediately, for which apologizing would be the quickest route.
But that was something – the one thing – which she couldn’t bring herself to do.
“I need to go,” she muttered, turning away from the fillies and setting off at a brisk pace.
“Hey! You come back here!” yelled Apple Bloom, the sound of hooves hitting the ground making it clear that she was following her.
“You tell Scootaloo you’re sorry for what you said!” added Sweetie Belle, sounding like she was also giving pursuit.
Dark Streak didn’t listen, picking up the pace before belatedly remembering that she’d disguised herself in an illusion that had wings, so it wouldn’t seem unusual if she flew. Availing herself of that option, she took off into the sky, leaving the incensed shrieks of the fillies behind as she pushed herself, flying faster and faster, away from the angry foals. Away from their judgmental eyes and outraged voices. Away from their flightless friend.
But not away from her memories.
On Everglow, griffons had a meritocratic culture, celebrating individual strengths and accomplishments. Who you were didn’t matter, only what you were able to do, whether warrior or scholar or simple tradesgriff. It was an egalitarian society where even the criminal elements, while no less illegal or disreputable, were still respected for their prowess.
That was the theory, at least.
In fact, griffon society was deeply prejudiced, divided into various strata based on the characteristics of its citizens. At the top of the hierarchy were the griffons with predatory aspects to them, those whose avian halves were hawks and falcons and ospreys and similar raptors, while their back halves were akin to those of the biggest cats: lions, tigers, leopards, and others of their ilk.
Below them were those griffons with less impressive traits. If your avian half was something like a robin, finch, parrot, or some other prey-type rather than predator, then griffons tended to assume you were less likely to possess noble traits like courage, determination, or assertiveness. Similar judgments were made about griffons whose feline aspects were lacking compared to their larger cousins, such as ocelots, lynxes, and bobcats. It was still possible to earn the respect of the predatory griffons above you, but that it had to be earned at all – rather than being freely granted under the assumption that you had surely already done something to earn it – was the differentiating factor.
Things were worse for those whose bird half was a scavenger. Vultures, terns, and crows like herself were deemed to be shifty, always looking for a way to get ahead without actually trying in an honorable way. Likewise, griffons with the feline traits of the smallest kinds of felines, such as sand cats, savannah cats, or worst of all, housecats, were reviled for their perceived inherent laziness. They occupied the bottom rung of griffon culture, always having their accomplishments scrutinized and doubted, having to work twice as hard for half as much recognition.
But the worst were the alces, the cripples who were born without wings.
While sages and chirurgeons had long since determined that there were medical reasons for why the occasional griffon hatched without wings, their pronouncements had made little dent in common prejudices. For most, the idea that a griffon could be born so mangled meant that something must have been wrong with the parents, not just in terms of physiology but also morally. One of the more common rumors was that alces were the result of eggs being brooded by their father, rather than their mother. That was ridiculous, of course, but the impression that there was some sort of perversion there – that the mother was too butch or the father too effeminate – was one that lingered.
Naturally, without their wings, an alce griffon was doomed to a life of pity at best, outright scorn at worst, no matter what their front or back halves were like. That, and the shame heaped on their parents, made them every expectant parent’s nightmare. If their community found out what they'd hatched, their reputation would never recover.
That was why, if some poor griffon did find an alce among their brood, difficult decisions had to be made.
Fluttering down in an alleyway, Dark Streak waited just long enough to confirm that no one was watching before she used the magic in her hat of disguise to change her appearance back to the disguise she’d worn in Canterlot. It wasn’t ideal, using the same illusion that she’d already worn, but at least it was different from the one she’d cloaked herself in when she’d inadvertently insulted those fillies.
Stalking out from between the two buildings, Dark Streak hurried toward Willow’s house, intent on collecting her money. The sooner she finished this job, the sooner she’d be able to set about establishing herself among this world’s griffons. If they were anything like their pony counterparts, it wouldn’t be difficult for her to carve out a place among them, one far loftier than anything she could have achieved back on her world.
And then she’d never have to set talon in Equestria, with its unbearable acceptance of the deformed members of its population, ever again.
Willow didn’t answer Dark Streak immediately, instead taking a slow, deep breath to calm herself. It didn’t escape her notice that she’d been doing that a lot lately. “This was exactly the deal. You wanted half the money up front, plus coverage for your expenses. There it is.”
Willow pointed at the slips of paper sitting on her kitchen table, untouched since she’d put them down barely a minute ago. For her part, Dark Streak’s eyes narrowed dangerously, the griffon making no move to pick up the pieces of parchment. “I wanted actual money, not a bunch of IOUs.”
“They’re promissory notes.”
“They’re worthless is what they are!” hissed Dark Streak, glancing at the papers in disdain. “They’re all pledged to someone named Blueblood, which means only they can redeem them!”
Now it was Willow’s turn to narrow her eyes, not in anger but in concern. The last time Dark Streak had stood in her kitchen, she’d been calm to the point of being unflappable. Now, she was visibly agitated, tense and demanding where before she’d been cool and unconcerned. What had happened?
No, decided Willow a second later. That’s the wrong question. What I should be trying to figure out is how to make sure I don’t upset her even more. The fact that Dark Streak had broken into her house in the middle of the day – a troubling revelation which the assassin's assurances that she'd done so unseen had failed to assuage, since Willow didn’t want to imagine what would have happened if Sunflower had been here and she hadn’t been; thankfully, he was out, helping his friends try and get cutie marks in scooter construction (which seemed oddly specific) before they got ready for the talent show tonight – was bad enough. If she flew off the handle, Willow knew things could get much worse in a hurry.
Keeping her voice level and her movements slow and visible, she nodded toward the papers on the table. “You need to look closer. Blueblood already signed each of those, and added instructions to them all saying that the full balance listed therein should be paid to the bearer of each note. Altogether, they add up to fifty-four thousand two hundred nineteen bits, which covers the first half of the money and, I trust, whatever expenses you’ve accumulated.”
The explanation didn’t make Dark Streak’s expression any less sour, but after a moment she snorted and picked up the stack of promissory notes, looking through them one by one. “These are all from ponies in different cities,” she groused as she glanced between them. “Whinnyapolis. Baltimare. Fillydelphia. I’ll need to track them all down one by one.” She scowled as she glanced at Willow again. “You couldn’t have cashed these in ahead of time?”
Willow shrugged, keeping her tone light and airy. “You’d rather I had half a ton of coins piled up here for you to haul away? Because I’m guessing those bags of yours can’t carry that much.” That much she felt sure of. While magic items weren’t exactly cheap back on Everglow, they were hardly the exclusive purview of the rich either, with extradimensional storage containers being one of the more popular items sold. But there were limits on how much those could hold, she knew, and pushing those limits would cause the price to rise steeply.
But Dark Streak only scoffed as she shoved the promissory notes into one of her bags. “I’d rather you exchanged these for this country’s play money and then converted that into something with actual worth, like high-value gems.”
Willow shook her head. “They don’t have those here.”
Dark Streak raised a brow, her demeanor seeming calmer now. “I saw gemstones all over the place in Canterlot.”
“None of which are worth very much,” explained Willow, “Equestria might be rich with gems, but despite their cut and polish, they’re extremely brittle, and don’t stand up to damage well. Just dropping them on the ground can cause them to shatter. No one uses them to represent large sums here.”
“Of course not,” huffed Dark Streak, and Willow felt a slight pang of sympathy for the assassin. On Everglow, gems were the medium of choice for moving huge quantities of money around, since they were tough, compact, and could be worth hundreds or even thousands of gold coins. Finding out that Equestria’s gemstones were fragile commodities of only minor value had been difficult to accept, since at a glance they looked like they should be worth a small fortune. “So they normally use these statements of debt instead?” continued the assassin. “Forgery must run rampant here.”
Willow had thought that at first too, but for all that Equestria was the land of harmony, those promissory notes had several anti-counterfeit techniques on them, ranging from embossed seals to personalized stamps with intricate logos on them. None of which Willow was interested in discussing at the moment. “If you’re satisfied, then we’re done here. I’ll have the rest of the money prepared by the time you finish the job and get back from Vanhoover.”
“I’m not going to Vanhoover.”
Willow paused at that. “What?”
Dark Streak smirked, her mood apparently buoying more at Willow’s consternation. “Lex Legis is currently vacationing in a city called Las Pegasus.”
That was enough to make Willow raise an eyebrow, skeptical at the thought of that dour stallion taking time off to relax. “And you know this how?”
The griffon’s answer came in the form of a newspaper, pulling it from one of her pouches and tossing it to Willow. Catching it, the purrsian’s brows rose. “PRINCE LEGIS RESCUES WAYWARD PONIES” read the headline, beneath which was a picture of Lex – Sonata and Aria on each side of him, along with a cheering crowd in the background – overseeing a group of ponies boarding a train, the hotels and attractions of Las Pegasus shining brightly behind him. It was only belatedly that she glanced up at the date, seeing that this had happened less than a week ago. Nor was that the only detail she noticed. “This is the Las Pegasus newspaper,” she murmured. “Where did you get this?”
“Does it matter?”
“Humor me,” pushed Willow, continuing to scan the article.
For a moment it looked like Dark Streak would refuse, but after a moment she shrugged. “I saw one of those ‘news papers’ in a shop I was visiting. After the proprietor answered some questions about what it was and where it came from, I asked about papers from other cities, since you said Lex Legis is someplace called Vanhoover. They said they didn’t have any, that every city prints their own, but I just figured that meant I needed to dig deeper.”
Willow glanced at her over the top of the paper. “And you found someone importing another city’s newspaper?” Most newspaper were willing to mail issues to ponies in other cities if paid to do so, but few people bothered since major news was shared between papers anyway.
“I didn’t need to,” answered the assassin. “I just went down to the train yards and asked around. Capital cities tend to receive traffic from the entire country, so wasn’t hard to figure out that someone taking a train from the western region might have brought one of those papers from Lex Legis’ city, discarding it later since they're apparently disposable. After that, it was just a matter of sneaking onto a train and looking around until I found what I was looking for.”
She shrugged again. “Of course, I didn’t find one for Vanhoover, but it was just as well. Now I know that he’s in a different city, and apparently without most of his guards, that’s where I’ll do the job.” She held out a talon expectantly. “I’ll leave immediately, since that article about him makes it sound like he’s only going to be there a little while longer.”
Willow couldn’t help but feel impressed at the griffon's ingenuity, nodding as she returned the paper to Dark Streak. “That should-”
The sound of her front door opening cut her off in mid-sentence. “Mom? You home?”
Willow froze at the sound of her son’s voice, the prospect of him catching sight of Dark Streak making her blood run cold. Griffons, like all non-ponies, were highly conspicuous in Equestria. If Dark Streak was spotted while eliminating Lex, something that was far from inconceivable since Willow had made sure to impress upon her how no one else was to be killed, then word would quickly spread that a black griffon was the one responsible for assassinating the upstart prince. If that happened, Sunflower – or whoever else he told, since she had no doubt he’d remark about such an unusual guest in their home – would no doubt recall the visitor in their kitchen and put two and two together.
That couldn’t be allowed to happen, Willow knew. If it did, their entire conspiracy could potentially come to light. Worse, if Sunflower realized that she was involved in the death of his idol, he might hate her for it!
“My costume for the talent show ripped,” called Sunflower again, his voice closer this time. “Can you fix it?”
Trying not to panic, Willow turned back toward Dark Streak. “Hide-”
The word died on her lips, her eyes widening as she stared at a lanky earth mare she’d never seen before, standing right where Dark Streak had been.
She was still staring at the unknown pony when Sunflower walked into the kitchen, his costume held under one paw. “Mom! Why didn’t you-,” He stopped as he caught sight of the pony there, blinking in confusion as he looked back and forth between them. “…what’s going on?”
Dark Streak – that had to be her, Willow realized; she’d used magic to disguise herself somehow – said nothing, simply glancing her way, and the purrsian floundered for an excuse, even as she tried to keep her outward demeanor relaxed. “It’s nothing. This is just…an assessor from the restaurant, here to talk about the damage.”
Sunflower cocked his head at that. “Really? How come?”
“I was there when it happened,” muttered Willow, already regretting her choice of lies. The last thing she wanted was her son paying attention to that particular debacle.
To say that Shining Armor had hit the roof when Blueblood had offered to give them the money they needed in exchange for receiving permission to wed Princess Cadance – and, the ex-prince had insisted, Shining Armor’s assistance in convincing her to go through with it – was an understatement. It had been all Willow could do to stop him from beating the blond stallion to a pulp right then and there. Even then, she hadn’t been able to prevent him from shoving Blueblood headfirst down the dumbwaiter, resulting in him being firmly wedged in there since it was far too small for a full-grown pony to easily squeeze into.
It had taken several hours of convincing on Willow’s part – during which time a construction crew had been called in to disassemble the wall and pry the stuck stallion loose – to get Shining Armor to agree to Blueblood’s proposal, pointing out to him repeatedly that the threat Lex Legis posed to Equestria was far greater than the threat Blueblood posed to his marriage. Thankfully, he’d eventually come around, albeit extremely begrudgingly. Once Blueblood had been freed, they’d informed him of the good news, and the former prince had been quick to turn over the promissory notes that were apparently the source of his remaining funds. Last Willow had heard, the two of them were on their way back to the Crystal Empire to tell Princess Cadance the “good” news.
Of course, the consequences of Shining Armor’s tantrum weren’t limited to Blueblood. While no one had gotten in his face about it (and Shining Armor had made sure to leave before word had gotten back to Twilight), everyone had been intensely curious about what had made him fly off the handle so badly, all the more so when it became known that the other party was the recently-dethroned Blueblood. With no ability to try and control the rumors while she was trying to convince Shining Armor to accept Blueblood’s offer, the waiter who’d brought them their orders had apparently let it slip that Shining Armor had been a little too insistent that Willow was “just a friend” whom he was teaching how to entice stallions. Add in a few nearby patrons picking up just enough of Shining Armor’s angry yelling to understand that the situation involved a lady, and Willow knew that the rumor mill was on the cusp of making the conclusion she’d wanted to avoid.
That Sunflower hadn’t heard anything yet was a good sign, but Willow also knew that she’d need to deal with the situation, especially since she might need to meet with Shining Armor again if any new developments happened with Dark Streak. But that was a problem for later. The problem for right now was getting her son out of the same room as the assassin she’d hired. Dark Streak might have been able to change her appearance, but Willow didn’t want to take any chances.
Luckily, she knew just what to do.
Seeing Sunflower’s mouth opening to ask more questions, Willow beat him to the punch. “You know what? That costume does seem a little shabby now that I think about it. Do you still want to use the genuine articles instead?”
For a moment he didn’t seem to understand what she was talking about. Then his face lit up. “Really?! You mean-”
“Just this once,” she cautioned, taking out a key and tossing it to him. “They’re in the trunk at the foot of my bed. Go ahead and take what you need.”
His eyes sparkling, Sunflower raced forward, dropping the costume she’d made him in favor of wrapping her in a hug. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!” he gushed before letting her go and racing away, wings flapping excitedly.
“And I’ll see you at the talent show later tonight!” called Willow after him.
Dark Streak sneered at the spectacle, earning a dire look from Willow. But the pony she’d turned herself into – either with an illusion, shapeshifting magic, or something else entirely – didn’t seem intimidated in the least. “As you were saying, I believe we’re done here,” she concluded, turning to leave. “I’ll let you know when the job is done. Try to have something more substantial than a bunch of papers ready for me when I do.”
Willow didn’t say anything, watching as the disguised griffon left. Normally she’d have made it clear that proof of completion was expected before turning over the other half of the money, but that seemed like overkill. From what she knew about Lex, he’d either overcome the assassin or die trying. Running away or faking his own death wasn’t in his nature, any more than a vacation was; the article had confirmed that he was there as part of some business deal, with his publicity-stunt rescue mission being some sort of sideshow. When Dark Streak made her move, Lex would either fall victim to it, or he’d break through and turn the tables on her.
The only question now was which one of them would kill the other.
“C’mon, Lex, please?” whined Sonata. “Please ask her? Pretty please with a cherry, hot fudge, and sprinkles on top?”
“For the last time, no,” huffed Lex.
“Aw, why not give it a shot?” snickered Aria, making no effort to hide how much she was enjoying the exchange. “Maybe she’ll surprise you.”
“Yeah!” added Sonata. “The Night Mare has totes helped you out a bunch of times before! Like when she gave you that power that you used to stop that big squid monster when we first went to Vanhoover! Or when she gave you that big jewel that let you bring Cloudbank and everyone else back! So I bet if you asked her for some more magic now, she’d be super okay with it!”
Lex grit his teeth. “First of all,” he growled, keeping his voice low enough that only the two mares, walking at his sides, could hear him, “the ritual I use to summon the Night Mare into my presence isn’t one I can perform in my current state. Secondly, any boon I wanted from her would have a cost associated with it. And third, I am not asking her to give me the power to pull a rabbit out of a hat! That’s not even magic!”
“Yuh-huh!” insisted Sonata, pointing back at the theater they’d just exited. “Those guys on stage said it was!”
“Besides, how would you know?” grinned Aria, her expression sly. “It’s not like you can sense when spells are being cast now.”
Lex gave a wordless snarl at that, his eyes flashing green and purple as he glared at the beauty on his left. Aria, however, simply chuckled, pressing her side against his affectionately. “I’m just teasing,” she purred. “Honestly, that entire show was dumb anyway. Who puts on a magic show without any magic, in a world where every unicorn on the street knows at least a few spells?”
Cocking her head, Sonata wrinkled her nose in confusion. “Wait, so it wasn’t real? Not even the part where the guy put that assistant lady in the box, ran it through with all those spears, and then disappeared in a flash only to come out of the box a second later? I was, like, totes sure he had to have done that teleportal thingy, like Twilight did during the duel.”
His eyes changing back to normal, Lex was saved from needing to answer as a new voice cut into their conversation.
“Your Highness!” called Tranquila Rest, the Royal Leisuremeister, as she came trotting up to them. “Was good show, yes? Making your flesh all bumpy like goose?”
Lex snorted. “The most extraordinary part of that pageantry was how completely it relied on the willful suspension of its audience’s ability to think critically about what they were seeing.”
“Yeah!” cheered Sonata. “It was great!”
Aria had to put a hoof over her mouth to stifle her laughter.
For her part, Tranquila looked uncertain how to parse Lex’s answer, casting quick looks at his mares before seeming to decide that their reactions meant that her prince was satisfied. “Much good!” she pronounced. “Now, you take meal at special restaurant! Top floor spin round like whirlybird! Then go see show where ponies use trapeze! Fly without wings like WHOOSH!”
She added that last part as a helpful sound effect, rearing up and waving her forelegs around in a vague imitation of catching a swinging bar high above the ground, the burly mare grinning as she fell back onto all fours. “Is so exciting, make stress vanish, just like assistant in magic box! You want make much relaxing after!” She paused then, as though remembering something. “Ah, my prince, you will excusing me please? Must check hot tub in carriage again. Water still not perfect.”
A single nod was all it took to send the leisuremeister trotting toward their carriage, a luxurious conveyance that was, for all intents and purposes, an extravagant bungalow on wheels. Lex, however, was no longer paying attention to Tranquila in the slightest. “Aria, check again.”
The order made the Siren roll her eyes, but the corners of her lips turned up. “Right, right.”
Singing a few notes, Aria cast the spell to let her see magical emanations, glancing around surreptitiously as they walked toward. “Not seeing anything so-, wait.” She came to a halt suddenly, her eyes narrowing as she looked off to their right. “Over there,” she murmured quietly. “Near the ticket booth.”
Turning his gaze toward the now-empty kiosk, Lex clenched his jaw as he caught sight of the scrying sensor Aria had found.
That Aria knew the spell to look into the magical spectrum – a product of her learning to diversify her magic during her time in captivity among the sahuagin – was small comfort for Lex, since even though it had been several days since his failed ritual, his magical senses showed no sign of recovering. But it was better than nothing, since it meant that he could still check for instances of being magically spied upon, albeit by proxy.
Of course, that meant that he’d needed to endure both sisters frequently reminding him that he could have had her do that for him earlier if he’d simply asked them for help instead of shutting him out. It was utterly fallacious reasoning, of course; he wouldn’t have needed to have Aria search for magical signatures on his behalf if they hadn’t interrupted his ritual in the first place. But for whatever reason, the two of them were utterly resistant to reason on that point.
It had only been when he’d pointed out that he hadn’t known Aria knew that spell to begin with – neither Siren ever having told him the full complement of spells that they knew; Sonata had tried once, but her explanations had provided almost no useful information and frequently tended to run together (“I’ve got one to make someone like me, and one to make them think I’m, like, super hot, and one to make them really like me, and one to make them think I’m super duper hot, and one to make them like me and think I’m hot, and one to make them like me-, wait, did I say that already?”), whereas Aria had flatly refused to do so (“A girl’s gotta have a few secrets. It’s part of our charm.”) – that they’d stopped mentioning that. Even so, Lex had caught them smirking more than once when he’d given the order.
What had been more surprising, however, was finding out that scrying sensors were visible to the naked eye.
Despite having utilized scrying magic of his own, the slight visual displacement created by the presence of the sensor hadn’t been something that Lex had been aware of, though in hindsight it seemed obvious. Although it had no mass, the sensor’s presence still required it to displace information, routing light and sound that came into contact with it back to wherever its caster was. The loss of stimuli was infinitesimal, but while it wasn’t enough to affect ambient sound, it was just enough to create a visually-perceptible distortion around it, similar in appearance to a localized heat shimmer.
In other words, the same golf ball-sized ripple in the air that Lex was looking at right now.
“Ooh! I see it I see it I see it!” gasped Sonata, before standing up on her hind legs and waving. “HEY ADAGIO! IF YOU’RE THERE, WE MISS YOU!”
Lex grimaced. Although he’d acknowledged the pointlessness of pretending to be unaware that he was being surveilled – that had only been so he could work on a countermeasure in secret, and with that plan having gone so spectacularly awry, there was no reason to continue the deception – Sonata’s direct interaction with it still made him nervous; there was no guarantee that whoever was on the other end of the sensor was her sister, nor that they couldn’t be baited into taking action if she inadvertently upset them somehow. “I told you to stop doing that!”
His warning had little effect, however, as Aria sauntered closer to the magical relay. “I doubt that’s Adagio,” she mused, eyeing it with a lopsided smirk. “She preferred to take charge rather than hang back and watch. And besides,” turning so that her rear was pointed toward the sensor, she glanced over her shoulder, reaching back to give her flank a slap, “she’d want to try out the guy who was able to tame all this.”
“That’s enough, both of you!” growled Lex, his eyes and horn lighting up as he telekinetically tugged Aria back toward him, ushering her and Sonata into the carriage before climbing in after them, the chauffeur rushing around to shut the door and confirm their destination before returning to his post at the front of their transportation, giving the order to move out.
Inside, Lex scowled at the girls as they moved toward some couches. “Is it still present?” he demanded, looking around. While it was possible to see the sensor without magic, it was still hard to spot, compared to how looking through the magical spectrum made it stand out.
Singing her spell again, Aria looked around, then shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it. But that thing can move around, and I can only look in so many directions at once, so…” She shrugged, apparently unbothered by the idea that someone could still be watching them.
Her lack of concern for what was happening made Lex scowl. “I’ve told you before, don’t overtly acknowledge the sensor. The last thing we need is for you to provoke whoever’s on the other end of it.”
“I still hope it’s Adagio doing that,” sighed Sonata. “If it is, she might see how much fun we’re all having and decide to come home!”
“Doubt it,” snorted Aria. “She’s always got some scheme going. Remember when we got to Everglow? It was her idea to try and take over that castle in the middle of that Viljatown place, saying that once we’d enthralled whoever lived there, the rest of the city would fall in line.” She frowned at the memory, one hoof going to her throat. “Just look how well that turned out.”
“I guess,” pouted Sonata. “I still miss her though.”
Aria shrugged. “Yeah, well…we’ve got a dependable guy on the job,” she murmured, glancing at Lex.
Sonata smiled at that, also directing her eyes toward him. “We do, don’t we?”
Huffing, Lex sat down between them, still having no idea how to even begin fulfilling the promise that they’d beguiled him into making.
The rest of the ride passed in silence, and in short order they’d arrived at the restaurant. With Tranquila remaining behind to continue working on the carriage’s hot tub, the three of them made their way to the top floor – escorted by a maître d’ who’d been waiting for them, along with several members of the waitstaff who were eager to see to their every need – only to find the entranceway blocked by a group of ponies crowding the doorway.
Flustered, the maître d’ was already apologizing for the delay, but he hadn’t gotten more than two words out before a mare’s voice, filled with outrage, could be heard. “What do you mean you cancelled our reservation?! We made it five months ago!”
“Madam,” began the water in a soothing tone, “I’m truly sorry for the inconvenience, but as I explained to you before, we’re expecting guests of royal persuasion, and so somepony had to be bumped. Now, we’ll gladly compensate-”
“We don’t want compensation!” replied the unseen mare, her voice filled with righteous indignation. “We want dinner! This is amateurish, improper, unprofessional-”
“Madam, please, I understand you’re-” The waiter stopped in mid-sentence as he caught sight of the maître d’ frantically gesturing at him from the back of the crowd, his eyes widening as he spotted the trio of guests he was escorting, and he cleared his throat. “Everypony!” he called. “Everypony! Make way for His Highness! Make way for the prince!”
Turning around, whispers and soft mutterings erupted through the crowd as they turned around and saw who was there. The click of shutters could be heard as pictures were taken. Several ponies pulled out newspapers, glancing at the front page before looking up to confirm that yes, that was the actual prince in front of them now.
But Lex was completely unaware of all of that, instead staring straight ahead in shock.
Not all of the crowd had parted at the waiter’s announcement. Standing in front of him were three ponies, who presumably were the group that had been turned away in order to make room for himself and the Sirens.
The first was a middle-aged unicorn mare with the deep blue mane and tail, dark gray coat, and crossword puzzle cutie mark, still scowling at having been told that her reservation had been cancelled. Next to her was a unicorn stallion with a pale green coat, a blond mane and tail that were both cut short, and his cutie mark depicting several colorful pills, his expression far more placid than his companion.
But it was the third member of the group who held Lex’s undivided attention.
A unicorn mare, her coat was the color of coal, and her mane and tail were blonde. Her cutie mark was a magnifying glass over a newspaper. On her muzzle sat a pair of glasses, behind which her eyes were currently widening even as her jaw fell open.
On one side of him, he heard Sonata gasp. On his other side, he glimpsed Aria going rigid. Between the two of them, Lex simply stared at the mare who had, in the brief time that he’d known her, become an important part of his life, right before she’d cut herself out of it, her name coming to his lips unbidden now.
It was rare for Wordsy Windbag to find herself in a situation where she didn’t know what to say.
Expressing herself through verbiage had always been her passion. She could declaim, delineate, describe, and detail at the drop of a hat. She loved to dramatize, extemporize, and soliloquize, doing so at the slightest provocation. She’d been called a blabbermouth, a chatterbox, and a jabberer at various points, and had worn all of those labels with pride.
Nor was her infatuation with language limited to speaking; at various points, she’d been a columnist, dramatist, and essayist, freelancing for various periodicals as the spirit had moved her. Every few days, she’d find herself writing a letter to an editor, a response to an article, or a review of something she’d heard, read, or watched. Even to relax, she enjoyed a nice crossword puzzle, jumble, or word search.
In her entire life, she could only remember two times when she’d been at a complete loss for words. The first time had been when Pill Bug had proposed to her; she’d been so overwhelmed that it had taken her several seconds to remember that the word she was looking for was “Yes!” The second time was when her daughter, Nosey, had been born; holding the beautiful baby she’d brought into the world, her throat had closed up and she hadn’t been able to do anything except cry in happiness.
And now, for only the third time that she could remember, Wordsy found herself tongue-tied.
After all, sitting across from her was a pony who collected titles the way other ponies collected stamps. Prince of Equestria. Despoiler of alicorns. Lover of Sirens. Heir of King Sombra. Dragonslayer. Dark wizard. Savior of Vanhoover. Champion of the Night Mare. Rescuer. Usurper. Defender. Tyrant. Hero. Villain.
Lex Legis.
The stallion who had saved her daughter from a fate worse than death, only to take advantage of what she’d been through and push her into a relationship that her innocent little girl clearly hadn’t been ready for, capturing Nosey’s heart so powerfully that she’d been forced to flee halfway across the continent in order to escape the hold he had over her. Yet now he was sitting just a few feet from them, his shadow stretching across the table despite the absence of backlighting, as though reaching out to enshroud everything it touched within its dark-
“Madame?” came a voice. “Your order?”
Blinking, it took Wordsy a minute to realize that their waiter was addressing her, waiting for her to make her selection. Nor was he the only one, with everyone else at the table staring at her.
Her cheeks coloring in embarrassment, Wordsy glanced back down at her menu, reading aloud the first item her eyes settled on. “The vegetable hay-skewers,” she murmured, passing her menu over.
Apparently, she was the last one to make her selection, since the waiter didn’t ask anyone else what they were having. Instead, he turned back toward the red-horned unicorn and gave an obsequious bow. “We’ll have everything ready shortly, Your Highness,” he promised, turning and departing only after receiving a grunt of acknowledgment from the stallion in question.
An awkward silence fell then…or at least it would have, had it not been for the breathtakingly gorgeous mare – Sonata Dusk – sitting to the right of Lex giggling as she looked out the window. “This is, like, so cool!” she gushed, watching as the scenery rotated below them, the rooftop restaurant spinning sedately. “Hey, do you think they can crank this thing up like one of those carnival rides? They we could all eat dinner while being stuck to the walls ‘cuz of how fast this place is spinning! That’d be so much fun!”
“I’m not sure how well they’d be able to serve everypony if the restaurant was spinning that fast,” offered Pill Bug with a quiet chuckle.
“Besides,” sneered Aria, “right now the only thing spinning that fast is Blondie’s head.”
The comment made Nosey wince, and Wordsy frowned, maternal instincts kicking in at the perceived jab toward her little girl. “My daughter has a name, thank you very much.”
“Mom, it’s okay,” murmured Nosey. “That’s what Aria’s always called me.”
But the Siren had locked her eyes onto Wordsy now. “After the way your daughter abandoned us, you should be glad I’m not calling her a whole lot worse.”
Wordsy flared her nostrils, but Sonata jumped in before she could say anything. “Aw, c’mon Aria, don’t be like that,” she pleaded, before turning and giving Nosey a grin. “I think it’s great that our bestie’s back! We should totes be celebrating, not fighting!”
“We’re just here on vacation,” interjected Pill. “It’s only for a few days, then we’re all heading returning to Canterlot.”
Sonata’s ears folded back at that, giving Nosey a saddened look. “For realsies? But I thought…” Shaking her head, she made herself smile again. “Well, we should have fun together anyway! After dinner, we’re going to another show! You guys wanna come along?”
“Really?” snapped Aria, glaring at her sister. “This chick acts like she’s our closest friend, only to cut and run when things start getting hot and heavy, and when she just happens to wander back into our lives, your first response is to invite her and her folks to not just have dinner with us, but follow us around all night too? What’s next, you bring her back to our hotel so we can get it on before she walks out of our lives agai-”
“Shut up, Aria.”
Lex’s order – one of the first things he’d said since their unexpected encounter at the entrance to the restaurant – made the Siren grimace. “But Lex! She-”
But the prince was apparently in no mood to listen to more of her complaining. “I said be quiet.”
Huffing, looking like she’d just bitten into a lemon, Aria closed her mouth and looked down, with another uncomfortable lull settling over the table. Out of the corner of her eye, Wordsy saw Pill glance around, as though confirming that the privacy of their dinner arrangements – they were sequestered in a posh corner of the restaurant, cordoned off from the common dining area with curtains, a small stringed quartet playing nearby to help cancel out any ambient noise, creating a private atmosphere that under other circumstances would have been cozy – were still doing their job.
Wordsy, however, was less concerned with anyone overhearing them than she was with their daughter’s state of mind. Nosey was staring down at the table with a miserable expression on her face, biting her lip as though Aria’s tirade had physically pained her. This was an error, Wordsy decided, a mistake, a lapse of judgment. We never should have agreed to have dinner with them. No, she amended silently, we shouldn’t have come to Las Pegasus in the first place.
The idea had seemed like a good one at the time. Take Nosey someplace new, with no bad memories attached to it, and let her relax and hopefully move on from all of the awful things that had happened to her recently. To that end, she and Pill had made – during their first full day in Las Pegasus – to keep their daughter away from anything even remotely related to all of her troubles. No newspapers, since they’d almost certainly be re-running the story about Princess Luna. No gossip rags, since Nosey hated low-quality journalism. And if there’d been some background chatter about “the prince” being here, they’d been unconcerned about whether it was Blueblood or Shining Armor; whichever one was here, it had nothing to do with them.
Until they’d gone to dinner, at which point they’d paid the price for having ignored the talk of the town.
It had been Sonata’s bright idea for them all to dine together, and Lex’s lack of objection had been taken by the waitstaff to mean that he approved of the idea, despite the displeasure in Aria’s body language. While Wordsy had reminded her daughter that they could simply leave, Nosey hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so, clearly feeling obligated to accept. Knowing her daughter as well as she did, however, Wordsy felt certain that it wasn’t Sonata’s forwardness nor Aria’s hostility that was the cause of her daughter’s hostility.
Rather, it was Lex’s pronounced indifference to the situation.
It had only been a few minutes since they’d all sat down, but his complete lack of engagement with her daughter – or anypony, really, save for his admonishing Aria just now – was throwing Wordsy for a loop. He hadn’t engaged in small talk, but he wasn’t going out of his way to snub or ignore them either. Rather, he was simply sitting there, observing his unexpected dinner guests as though they were bugs in a jar. It was highly disconcerting, and Wordsy could only imagine how awkward it must have been for her daughter.
It was getting to the point where Wordsy was gearing up to prompt him. So far no one on her side of the table had worked up the nerve to speak to Lex directly – between his public exploits and the relationship he’d had with their daughter, trying to make conversation with him seemed like a daunting task, even without taking into account that he was apparently royalty now – but the silence was quickly becoming unbearable. At least it was for Wordsy; she could almost feel her cutie mark aching with the need to say something.
But just as she’d taken a breath, Lex spoke. “Nosey.”
Almost jumping at suddenly being addressed, Nosey sat up straighter, blinking behind her glasses. “Yes?” she breathed, and Wordsy almost cringed at the tone in her daughter’s voice, sounding so hopeful and so afraid at the same time.
“I read the interview that the editor of your newspaper recently conducted with Princess Luna,” announced Lex casually, “and while it made mention of my horn having previously belonged to King Sombra, it conspicuously failed to make any mention of using the Crystal Heart to try and remove the curse I placed on her. Since even they’re not stupid enough to ignore such obvious parallels, are you aware of any such attempt having been made?”
Nosey slumped in place, disappointment radiating off of her in waves. “Oh. Um, I’m not-”
“That’s the first thing you ask her?!” Clenching her jaw, Wordsy leaned forward, no longer intimidated by the stallion in front of her. “After everything she went through – everything you put her through – your first reaction to seeing my daughter again is to treat her like she’s just some reporter?!” She brought a hoof down onto the table, making the silverware rattle. Outside, she heard the string quartet start to play louder, trying to drown out the sound of her voice for anyone who might be listening. “Did it even occur to you to ask her how she’s doing?!”
Sonata and Aria stared at her, startled by the outburst. But Lex didn’t even raise a brow. “If you’re referring to the trauma Nosey was experiencing in the wake of Xiriel’s possession, I was under the impression that her coming here to engage in recreation was indicative of her having recovered to the point of resuming her normal lifestyle.”
“Is that so?” growled Wordsy. “Well maybe if you had asked, she would have told you that she isn’t alright-”
“Mom, please,” interjected Nosey, her voice pleading. “Let’s not do this, okay?”
“Maybe we should order some appetizers,” suggested Pill, clearly looking to change the subject. “I think some pickle slices-”
But Wordsy was in full mother lion mode now, refusing to be dissuaded as she glared at Lex. “Do you not understand that everything my daughter’s been through is your fault?! Everypony here talks about you like you’re some sort of protector, but you were the one who let her be possessed by that, that…monster in the first place!”
“Mom!” yelled Nosey, horrified.
But Wordsy was less concerned with that than she was with the way Lex’s features hardened at that. It was the first genuine reaction she’d from him since he’d spotted Nosey, and she immediately pressed forward, unleashing the verbal tirade that was her go-to for when she was upset. “And then you acted like rescuing her gave you the right to take liberties with her! She just wanted you to keep her safe, and instead you forced your affection on her, knowing that she was too scared to refuse!”
Lex actually flinched at that, and the sight sent a rush through Wordsy. He might have killed dragons and laid princesses low, but no one messed with her little girl!
“Hey!” protested Sonata. “That’s, like, totes unfair!”
Aria was less diplomatic, rising to her hooves as her lips curled into a snarl. “You don’t know when to shut your mouth, do you?”
For her part, Nosey was squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head, though whether it was to refute her mother’s characterization of her relationship or to try and shut out what was happening now was impossible to tell, leaning into her father as Pill Bug slipped a foreleg around her, giving his wife an exasperated glare.
Wordsy was oblivious to all of it, continuing to lay into Lex. “And it was your fault that Silhouette pony assaulted her in her home! You-”
“WHAT?!”
Lex’s roar of fury was more than just an angry shout. It was accompanied by a horrific light that filled his eyes, the twin orbs suddenly shining with a sickly green color that looked like something from the depths of Tartarus, purple contrails erupting from their outer corners. More frightening were the black crystals that suddenly erupted upward from the floor at an angle, knocking the table aside as though it weighed nothing at all, sending it crashing to the ground at the edge of the curtains.
Slowly, his motions taut with controlled rage, Lex rose to all fours, the black crystals that had knocked the dinner table aside disintegrating as he closed the few feet between himself and Wordsy, who tried to back away only to trip and fall over her chair. Sprawled out on the ground, she could do nothing as Lex stalked over to her, not even noticing Nosey and Pill watching the scene in frozen shock. Instead, her world was made up of Lex leaning over her, his shadow covering her entirely and making his features seem even darker, obscured save for the glow of his eyes. In that moment, the full weight of who this was – the things he’d done and the power he commanded – fell over Wordsy, and she realized just how badly she’d erred; a mother lion would scare off an ordinary pony, but to someone who’d killed devils and massacred ghouls, it was a puny thing.
“Tell me what happened,” Lex demanded, his voice dripping with wrath.
Cadance stared at her husband, bewildered. “Shining Armor, I already know Blueblood, probably better than you do. After I became an alicorn, I lived in Canterlot Castle until the Crystal Empire reappeared, remember? Blueblood wasn’t a frequent resident, with how he was constantly touring the countryside, but he still spent plenty of time there. We’re not what I’d call close, but we’re not strangers either.”
Shining Armor nodded, the look of discomfort he’d been wearing since the conversation had started growing more acute. “I know.”
“I know you know,” noted Cadance. “That’s why I’m confused about what you’re asking me to do.”
Shining Armor took a deep breath, and Cadance could almost see him tensing up. “I just think you should try and…” He pursed his lips then, and his next several words came out strained, as though he were having a particularly difficult bowel movement. “…deepen your relationship with him.”
“‘Deepen my relationship with him’?” echoed Cadance, trying to make sense of what he was asking her. “I don’t have a relationship with him. I tried befriending him before, more than once, and he was never interested. He always called me ‘the accidental princess.’ He barely even stopped by for our wedding. He only put in an appearance several hours after we were supposed to be married; if we hadn’t postponed things because of the changeling invasion, he would have missed it completely. Even then, he didn’t so much as congratulate either of us; he just took one look at the havoc that had been wreaked on the city and ran away to Trottingham.”
She paused then, not because she’d run out of examples of Blueblood behaving badly – she had more of those than she could count – but rather to give her husband a chance to explain himself. But he didn’t meet her eyes, and after several seconds it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything, leaving Cadance more and more perplexed. Shaking her head, she tried to approach the increasingly-bizarre situation from another angle. “How exactly do you want me to get closer to him?”
“As a mare,” croaked Shining Armor weakly.
Her eyes widening at that, Cadance couldn’t help but look around, wondering if Pinkie Pie – or possibly Discord – was going to pop out at any moment and burst out laughing at the prank they’d somehow roped her husband into playing on her. But when neither made an appearance, she could only conclude that this was really happening, as baffling as that was to consider. “I’m sorry…?”
“As a mare and a stallion.” Shining Armor was clearly forcing the words out at this point. “That’s how the two of you should…get closer.”
“As in, you want me to date him?” That was the nicest way Cadance could bring herself to put it.
The question seemed to make Shining Armor’s voice fail him completely, his mouth opening only to close again a second later, pursing his lips. Squeezing his eyes shut, he nodded instead.
Cadance’s gaze traced the perimeter of the room again, this time trying to find where Luna was hiding. This had to be a dream. Clearly her adopted aunt was having some fun with her; maybe a bit of revenge for how badly the Crystal Heart had failed to remove her curse?
But once again, the object of her search failed to manifest, leaving her with no choice but to accept that this wasn’t some dreamtime delusion; her husband was, in fact, telling her to go out with somepony else. Not just anypony, either, but Blueblood, who ever since she’d known him had looked down his nose at her, treating her as a pretender despite her being an alicorn.
That thought made her turn her head in another direction, toward the balcony on the other side of the room where the stallion under discussion was seated, fussing with a middle-aged earth mare with a green coat.
Cadance let her eyes settle on the latter pony. She hadn’t recognized Grass Patch at first, only having seen her once before, at the summit that Princess Celestia had called. Soft Mane’s mother hadn’t contributed very much to the discussion, mostly being there to support her daughter, and with how chaotic things had become after Discord made his appearance – far more so than usual, with the lhaksharut’s attack – Grass Patch had slipped Cadance’s mind entirely.
But Cadance was less interested in the mare herself than she was with the glowing cord connecting her to Blueblood.
One of the gifts that Cadance had received from Lashtada after accepting the love goddess into her heart was the ability to see the relationships between people. Both of them had to be within her field of view, and in fairly close proximity, for it to work. But so long as those conditions were fulfilled, their connection manifested as a glowing rope that stretched between them, with the color indicating how they felt about each other and the luminosity representing the strength of those feelings. If the colors, or how brightly they glowed, were different at either end of the cord, then it was an expression of a difference in how each one felt about the other.
That was the case for Blueblood and Grass Patch. The end of the mystical rope connecting to the latter was a gentle blue, shining with a gentle light, indicative of enjoyment – or perhaps fun – without being too overwhelming. That wasn’t too surprising; Cadance could see the smile on Grass Patch’s face as she licked a folded napkin and dabbed at his face, causing Blueblood to squirm.
What was more surprising was that Blueblood’s end of the connection was a similar color to Grass Patch’s. For all that he looked exasperated by how the older mare was – from the look of it – mothering him, he wasn’t actually upset about the treatment at all. The intensity of the glow was still less than on her end, but the fact that it was present at all was something Cadance couldn’t help but be surprised by. Blueblood had always, as far as she knew, held “common ponies” in disdain. For him to be appreciative of being treated like a foal getting ready for his first day of school was enough to make Cadance question what she thought she knew of him.
Of course, then there were the ropes connecting Blueblood to herself and her husband.
While Grass Patch had no connections to either of them – which, Cadance knew, represented her having no real feelings about them, or at least none strong enough to register to the gift that Lashtada had given her – Blueblood’s were quite strong. The rope connecting him to Shining Armor was a mixture of green (representing envy), yellow (representing fear), and light grey (representing enmity, a color she knew would turn more and more toward black as it grew closer to true hatred). None shown very brightly, and except for the unanticipated presence of jealousy toward her husband, nothing there was unexpected.
More surprising were Blueblood’s feelings toward her. She’d expected it would be grey, and possibly the pink tinge of lust, but it was neither of those things. Instead, it was a brilliant mixture of yellow and white, the latter being the color of hopefulness. But for what, she couldn’t tell, since he apparently had almost nothing in the way of carnal desire for her.
“Cadance?”
Shining Armor’s voice brought her eyes back toward him.
Still looking like he was going to be sick to his stomach, Shining Armor vaguely gestured in Blueblood’s direction. “I know this is an unusual request, but whether we like it or not, Blueblood is an icon of Equestria. After how Lex Legis stole his birthright, I think…” He faltered then, only to visibly rally a second later. “What I’m saying is, unity is important, even if it’s only symbolic. For the sake of the ponies who count on us…”
Cadance nodded as he kept going, saying something about patriotic solidarity, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she examined Shining Armor’s end of his connection to Blueblood. It was a darker grey than the other stallion’s, tinged with yellow. So a great deal of resentment, along with a touch of anxiety; it was enough to concern Cadance quite a bit.
But not nearly as much as Shining Armor’s end of his connection to her, which blazed a brilliant yellow, the color so bright it blotted out the red light of love that should have been there.
That was the one flaw in the gift Lashtada had given her. The emotional connections she saw represented each person’s current feelings toward the individuals in their lives. So if a loving couple was having a terrible fight, the dark grey would obscure the red. Two people that hated each other but were intensely attracted to each other would, if their passions soared high enough, see pink overwrite black, at least for a little while. And now, Shining Armor’s request was terrifying him to the point that it was submerging everything else he felt for her.
What Cadance couldn’t figure out was why. What was he so afraid of? That she’d be angry with him for asking her to date Blueblood? Or that she’d agree to do so? Why was he even asking her in the first place? It clearly had nothing to do with political unity – he wouldn’t have suggested that he wanted her to become intimately acquainted with Blueblood if it was – so what was going on?
Stepping closer to her husband, Cadance lowered her voice just above a whisper. “Is Blueblood blackmailing you?”
Shining Armor flinched at that, the color of his cords unchanging. “N-no, of course not. Why would you ask that?”
She was silent for a moment as she considered his answer. Based on how Shining Armor was acting, that seemed like the most obvious explanation, except she couldn’t imagine what her husband could have done that he was this desperate to hide from her. Their marriage was a partnership, and she was sure he knew that he could tell her anything without her judging him for it, so there was no need for him to keep secrets.
Unless…
Cocking her head, Cadance raised a brow, still keeping her voice lowered. “Is this…something you’re into?”
“Wh-what?! No!”
The vehement denial made Cadance frown, trying to parse if he was protesting too much.
As much as she loved what a wholesome stallion her husband was, she’d always been a little suspicious of how that extended to the bedroom. It wasn’t that Shining Armor lacked a libido – far from it; they still had sex almost every night of the week – but that he was always so, for lack of a better word, considerate when they did it.
For him, her pleasure was always the top priority, with his own being an afterthought. As much as Cadance appreciated that, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was the extent of Shining Armor’s passion. Wasn’t there something that would drive him completely wild, to the point where he’d lose all self-control? It was a mystery that she’d had fun exploring, particularly during their honeymoon, but if her husband had a particular kink, he either didn’t know it himself, or was keeping it very well hidden.
Except now here he was, all but telling her that he wanted her to start a relationship with another stallion. True, doing so was terrifying him, but wasn’t that the normal response to confessing something so incredibly personal? Or rather, trying to make headway on a deeply-held fantasy without actually admitting it was a fantasy?
If that’s what this is about, decided Cadance, then it’s one of two things. Either he wants to see me with another stallion, or he wants to be with a stallion himself and this is an excuse for making that happen. Either were plausible; living in Canterlot Castle, she’d heard titillating fantasies from several of the maids (and a few of the butlers) regarding the all-male nature of the Royal Guard in ways that didn’t involve either of her aunts.
Likewise, Cadance had spoken to Comfy Cozy just a few days ago, since she liked to keep in regular contact with the rest of Lashtada’s clergy. While most of their discussion had been her reassuring the crystal mare of the power of love in the wake of the Crystal Heart’s failure to restore Luna, toward the end she’d inquired into how she was settling in with Pillowcase and Produce Aisle. Cozy’s response had been to admit, red-faced and giggling, that her two husbands were – slowly and awkwardly – learning what it meant to share a wife.
If either of those were what Shining Armor needed in order to feel romantically fulfilled, then she had a moral obligation, both as his wife and as Lashtada’s representative on Equestria, to find a way to make that work within the bond of their marriage.
And besides, if that wasn’t that case, and Blueblood did have some sort of hold over Shining Armor, letting him court her would be the quickest way to find out what it was.
Saying a quick prayer of thanks to Lashtada for giving her the wisdom to decide what to do next, Cadance smiled, giving Shining Armor a nod. “Alright then.”
He gave her a disbelieving look, clearly not able to believe what he was hearing. “Alright…what?”
“I’ll give Blueblood a chance.”
Shining Armor blinked. Several times. Finally, he swallowed, his eyes darting between her and the stallion on the balcony. “R-really? Just because I asked you to?”
Stepping forward, Cadance gave her husband a gentle nuzzle. “Precisely because you asked me to.”
The yellow color in the cord connecting him to her began to fade then, darkening back toward red. “Cadance…”
“Save it for later,” she teased. “I’ve got a stallion to take out to dinner.”
Pressing her side to his for just a moment, she turned and headed toward the balcony, seeing Grass Patch and Blueblood rise as they saw her approaching them, the latter grinning in a self-satisfied manner that made Cadance sigh inwardly.
Lex watched as Nosey glanced at him, only to avert her eyes a moment later, looking back out the window of their carriage. “Y-yeah. It was nice.”
That was a far kinder characterization than Lex would have made about the show they’d just seen – an utterly banal stage adaptation of the adventures of some mare he’d never heard of named Daring Do – but he didn’t bother saying so. Sonata had been quite clear that he should frequently inquire as to Nosey’s state of mind, regardless of whether or not there was any evidence to suggest a change in her disposition. Aria, begrudgingly, had agreed.
When Lex had pressed them on their reasoning, the Sirens had explained that simply inquiring was apparently a demonstration of concern, something which had only confused Lex more. For one thing, his experiences with repeatedly querying someone for the same information over and over had been decidedly negative. Likewise, demonstrating concern seemed highly inappropriate; with Nosey having ended their romantic relationship, he no longer had the requisite standing to be invested in her emotional well-being, or at least no investment beyond that which he’d have for anyone else.
That last point was a bitter admission on his part, since the sight of her still sent a pang through him, but he knew his own feelings on the matter had no bearing on the situation. Nosey had made her choice, and since there was no compelling governmental interest in her personal life – and unlike with Sonata and Aria, there was no pretext upon which to declare her incompetent to manage her own affairs – that left Lex with no choice but to accept her decision. Particularly since his vow to the Night Mare to abstain from formal relationships of an amorous nature was still in effect.
“Lex?”
“Hm?”
Glancing at him again, Nosey seemed to need a moment to find her voice. “I, um…I just wanted to thank you for these last few days. For what you did for my folks, I mean.” She smiled at him then, and the sight made his heart ache. “It really means a lot to me.”
Now it was his turn to look somewhere else. “The decision was a strategic one,” he replied gruffly. “Based on what your mother told me, Silhouette’s tactics were covert. By placing Tranquila and the ponies assisting her at your parents’ disposal, any chance that he might target them here is minimized.”
Her ears folded back at that, but only for a moment. “I know. But I still appreciate it. I was feeling bad that I was horning in on their anniversary. Now they’re having a vacation fit for royalty. I’m just glad I was able to talk them out of cancelling everything and heading back early.”
Lex wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he elected to remain silent. For her part, Nosey fidgeted in place, glancing around the interior of their ride. But there was little to hold her gaze – his more spacious transportation having been loaned to Nosey’s parents, forcing them to use a smaller method of conveyance – and so after a moment she went back to looking out the window.
But only a few seconds had passed before she spoke up again, seemingly unable to bear the silence. “So, um…what are Sonata and Aria up to?”
“Shopping,” answered Lex, not bothering to hide his distaste.
For some reason, that got a giggle out of Nosey. “They’re already out spending your money, huh?”
“They’re not spending anything,” answered Lex with a frown. “They simply walk into a store and ponies offer them whatever they want.”
The entire thing was unseemly, but there was little he could do to put a stop to it. If ponies wanted to offer their wares to Sonata and Aria free of charge, that was entirely their prerogative. And while he’d made it clear that he didn’t think that the two of them should accept such overt obsequiousness, his admonishment was toothless and they knew it; simply accepting gifts wasn’t any sort of misdeed, let alone one worthy of a curse. As such, the Siren sisters’ shopping trip continued unabated; if anything, Sonata had seemed oddly intent on their outing, despite Aria protesting that it would mean leaving him alone with Nosey. Lex could only hope that Coat Tail would find a way to curb the worst of their excesses.
But apparently Nosey saw little wrong with the situation, still snickering as she shrugged. “I guess that’s one of the perks of being the prince’s girlfriends.”
“They’re not my girlfriends.”
Nosey’s good humor faded at that. “Right…your vow.”
This time neither of them broke the silence, and it was only when the carriage stopped in front of her hotel that Nosey spoke again, knowing what was coming. “You don’t have to escort me upstairs. I’m certain everything is fine.”
“I’m not certain,” growled Lex, opening the door before the chauffer could, stepping out and looking back at her. “Which is why I’m going to continue checking until I am.”
Lex couldn’t read the emotion that passed across Nosey’s face then, but after a long moment she nodded, stepping down to join him. “Alright.”
Glad that was settled, Lex led her inside.
Although it had been several days since he’d found out what had happened to Nosey, the thought of Silhouette brutalizing her still sent a rush of rage through Lex, and it was only with deliberate effort that he was able to maintain his temper. He’d given little thought to Silhouette after Celestia and Luna had fled Vanhoover in the wake of their defeat, but now he found himself almost hoping that crazed stallion – his initial attempt to pump Nosey for information having been foiled by her editor’s timely intervention – had followed her to Las Pegasus. The need to punish the stallion for what he’d done, for having beaten and terrorized Nosey, was so powerful that it bordered on overwhelming.
Nor was Silhouette the only one Lex blamed. The Royal Guard’s treating Nosey like a suspect rather than a victim had only inflamed his outrage further, heightening the contempt he felt for the princesses whom they answered to. For that matter, while he’d stopped short of holding Celestia and Luna responsible for Silhouette’s actions – what he’d done was so far outside the purview of the Royal Guard that the doctrine of respondeat superior couldn’t be applied – Lex still found his contempt for the pair deepening, since they’d apparently been aware that Silhouette’s actions in the wake of his resurrection had been highly suspect (he’d apparently gotten into a physical altercation with Shining Armor) yet had taken insufficient measures to mitigate whatever had driven him to such reprehensible actions. It was yet another example of why they were unfit to lead.
That was why, after they made their way upstairs, Lex proceeded to check the suite that he’d secured for Nosey and her parents, inch by painstaking inch. Every closet, cabinet, cupboard, and crawlspace was examined. Every ceiling tile moved jostled and moved aside. Every window had its lock checked. It wasn’t until he’d looked through everything he could possibly think of that Lex finally ceased his efforts, and even then he wasn’t satisfied, knowing that if he’d only been able to enhance his senses, he would have been able to search far more thoroughly in far less time.
“It seems secure,” pronounced Lex at last, emphasizing the second word. “I’ll confer with the manager on my way out to make sure they’re still taking precautions. No hotel staff coming to this floor who haven’t worked here for at least a year. No guests on this floor who haven’t booked their rooms at least three months in advance and can prove their identity. No unauthorized stairwell access, and the elevators will continue to be monitored.” He wasn’t sure if she needed him to reiterate that each and every time he checked her room, but presumably doing so fell under the purview of Sonata’s advice about repetition being a good thing.
But that seemed to be in doubt as Nosey gave him an odd look. “Lex…you know I never blamed you, right? You don’t have to feel guilty for what happened.”
“Of course I don’t,” snorted Lex, scowling at the implication. “My actions are in no way responsible for what Silhouette did.”
That much was obvious. Regardless of the fact that Silhouette’s apparent motivation had been to gather information about him, presumably for some ill-considered attempt at revenge for either his death or Luna’s curse, Lex knew full well that it was facile to suggest that there was a causal chain between either of those events and Silhouette’s subsequent crimes. The two-toned stallion had neither been under orders nor could he claim any sort of circumstantial impetus to attack anyone else, and so he bore sole culpability for his actions.
Despite the mild rebuke, Nosey was smiling as she shook her head. “I meant for what my mom said the other day, back in the restaurant.” She paused then, taking a breath and licking her lips before continuing. “You didn’t take advantage of me, after what happened with Xiriel. I wasn’t…I may not have been at my best, then, but I’d already decided that I, you know…liked you.”
Lex felt a knot of tension inside him unclench at that. “Nosey…”
“Besides,” she continued, her face reddening as she looked away, “if I was going to blame someone, it would be Sonata. I swear, she’s my best friend, but I still wanna smack her for using magic to seduce me like that.”
Lex blinked. “She did what?”
Nosey cocked her head. “Yeah, right before you fought Celestia and Luna. I thought she told you?”
Stunned, Lex could only shake his head.
Nosey looked similarly perplexed. “She didn’t say anything about it at all? I thought with how upset she was that she couldn’t get in touch with Kara-”
“Kara?!” echoed Lex, horrified. “The goddess?! What does she have to do with this?!”
Cringing a little, Nosey gulped. “She told me that she’d been talking to her for a little while, asking for advice on her relationship with you. But for some reason Kara stopped responding, so Sonata thought that if the two of us…did it, that might-”
“Are you telling me,” interrupted Lex, his voice a hiss of fury and alarm, “that not only did Sonata use her magic to beguile you into an unwilling sexual encounter, but that she’s also been clandestinely feeding information about me to a deity other than my own?!”
“W-well, like I said, Kara had stopped responding to her,” repeated Nosey. “She was pretty upset about that, since she wasn’t sure what to do about you and Aria. And I, um, wasn’t exactly unwilling…” she admitted, red-faced. “I mean, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go through with it, but when her spell wore off I…didn’t want to stop. So, I guess I sort of agreed to it after the fact?”
“…I’m going to put a curse on her such as this world has NEVER SEEN!” snarled Lex, his eyes blazing and his jaw clenched as he turned and started for the door.
“Wh-, Lex, no! No! Stop!” Rushing past him, Nosey threw herself in front of the exit, blocking his path.
Furious, he glared at her, black crystals sprouting around the two of them. “Get out of my way, Nosey!”
“No! This isn’t why I told you that!” Desperate, she stood up on her hind legs, leaning back against the door. “Look, I’m telling you, I’m fine with her having used her magic on me, okay? I know I said I was mad at her for it, but I didn’t mean it! So please please please, don’t punish her because of me!”
“That doesn’t mean what she did was okay!” roared Lex. “And it certainly doesn’t excuse her passing sensitive information about me to a foreign divinity!” Only the knowledge that he would have lost all sensory awareness kept him from changing into shadow-form in order to bypass her, not wanting to take the chance that he’d rematerialize inside a solid object. Instead, his horn lit up as he tried to move her telekinetically.
“She did it for you!” An aura sprung into being around Nosey’s horn, her telekinesis fighting with his as she tried to keep herself in place. “Lex, she did it because she was in love with you and didn’t want to lose you!”
Lex ignored her pleading, focusing on moving the coal-coated mare. For a moment he considered augmenting his magic, but decided against it; he could already feel Nosey’s grasp slipping.
Apparently, Nosey felt it too. “Kara was the one who talked her into taking you back after you broke up!”
Freezing at that, Lex let his aura dissipate, shocked for the third time in as many minutes. “What?”
Panting from the brief struggle, Nosey nodded. “She told me. She was feeling terrible about what happened, so she asked Kara what to do, and she helped Sonata realize that she still loved you.”
“…” There was nothing Lex could say to that. Sonata’s leaving him remained one of his most painful memories, and while renewing their relationship had been an arduous process, it was one he remained intensely appreciative of. And Kara was responsible for that…?
“Lex?” Tentatively taking a step forward, Nosey took a breath, steadying herself. “Listen, I know I don’t get a say in things now, since we’re not together anymore, but…please just listen to her side of things before you go all curse-happy, okay? Talk to her instead of berating her. Please?”
“…fine,” muttered Lex, still reeling from the revelations of the past few minutes.
A ghost of a smile crossed her lips. “You promise?”
He gave her a dark look at that, but couldn’t hold onto his anger. “Yes.”
Giving a relieved sigh, Nosey crossed the distance between them, wrapping him in a hug. “Thank you,” she murmured as she planted a kiss on his cheek.
Not sure how to respond, Lex half-heartedly returned the embrace, then moved toward the door. This time Nosey didn’t block him. “And Lex?” she called as he crossed the threshold, making him pause to look back at her.
“Don’t forget how much you love her. Not for a second.”
Then she closed the door behind him.
Lex still hadn’t figured out how he felt by the time he made his way back to his own hotel. That his tulpa hadn’t begun berating was the best that he could come up with, but that wasn’t much of a point with which to anchor his feelings. The anger and betrayal were still there, but they were marred by confusion and ambivalence, along with a growing concern for how much Sonata had kept from him.
But despite the maelstrom of emotions whirling within him, Lex wasn’t so out of it that he failed to notice something was wrong as soon as he opened the door to his suite.
The entrance was dark, despite it only being late afternoon. The lights had all been turned off, and across the room Lex could see that the curtains had been drawn, the heavy drapes shutting out all of the light from the windows. But the dim lighting bothered him far less than how no one was there to greet him. “Feather Duster?”
“That you, Lex?” came Sonata’s voice from the direction of their bedroom. “I sent the maid on an errand. She’ll be gone for a little while.”
The reply made Lex frown, not having expected Sonata back from her shopping trip so soon. Still, it was just as well, and he stalked toward the open doorway. “Sonata, we need to t-”
His voice died on his lips as he beheld the sight that was waiting for him.
The entire room was lit with candles, clusters of them spread around on various tables and ledges. A sweet scent hung in the air, as though the entire room had been bathed with perfume. Rose petals were scattered across the floor, as well as the foot of the bed. But those were nothing compared to the mare who was at the center of the room.
Sonata had let her hair down, her mane flowing over her reclining form like a gauzy curtain as she laid back on the bedspread. The pink négligée she wore clung to her in all the right places, outlining her proportions in a way that accentuated her curves. Her back legs were clad in stockings of a matching color, climbing all the way up her legs only to end at mid-thigh, leaving the upper portions of her limbs tantalizing unclad, and Lex found himself staring as she teasingly rubbed her legs together, the motion making her hips wriggle.
“Welcome back, baby,” she purred, her voice thick with desire. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Lex spent a long moment drinking in the sight of Sonata before he managed to recover. “What are you doing?”
The question made her giggle. “What? The candles, rose petals, perfume, and super-sexy underwear don’t make it obvious?” Sticking her tongue out, she winked at him. “And here I thought I was supposed to be the dumb one.”
Lex shook his head. “Sonata, you know we can’t do this.”
“Aw, sure we can,” she replied smoothly. “Look, I’ll even get things started.” Bringing one hoof up to her lips, she slowly ran her tongue over it, her eyes never leaving his. It was only after she’d thoroughly wetted the bottom of it, that she slowly traced it down her body. First her chest, then her belly, until finally it came to rest between her back legs, a pleasured grunt escaping her lips as she began to rub herself-
“Stop that!” hissed Lex, his horn lighting up as he telekinetically grabbed her hoof and pinned it against the headboard, his eyes scanning the room. “Someone might be watching!” He could feel his heart pounding, but not from any sort of anxiety over their unknown voyeur. Sonata’s little show had driven home, in the most visceral manner imaginable, that it had been weeks since the last time they’d been intimate…and that it was a state of affairs which would continue until the equinox. But while that was less than a month away, it suddenly seemed unbearably long.
For her part, Sonata’s brows furrowed. “Watching…?” She seemed to chew on that for a moment, glancing around, before shaking her head. “I don’t care.”
“Sonata…”
“I don’t care!” she repeated, a little more forcefully, before her coy smile reasserted itself. “If it means you loving me up, I wouldn’t mind doing it on stage in front of a full audience.” Despite the bold words, her cheeks still colored at what she was saying. “That would actually be pretty hot, don’t you think? I bet I’d be embarrassed at first, feeling all those eyes on me, listening as you made me make all sorts of naughty sounds.”
A shudder ran through her then, causing her to arch her back. “At first it’d just be a gasp, or maybe a whimper, as you got me warmed up. Then you’d touch me where you know I like, and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from moaning.” She put free hoof in front of her mouth, her expression bashful as she flushed more, her tone breathy. “And then, knowing how ashamed I felt” – she gulped then, her hoof dropping just a little as her voice faded to a whisper – “you’d make me do it again.” Biting her lip, she rubbed her legs together again. “And that’s when I’d start to beg.”
Despite the fact that he had no desire to show her off to anyone else, Lex could feel himself heating up. Did she really want him that badly? It wasn’t like her to be this aggressive; she was usually more than content to passively wait for him to make a move. Except for that time in the warehouse, he recalled suddenly. She was like this then, too. Refusing to take no for an answer. Of course, she’d still been concerned about privacy then…but that had been when she’d still been insecure about Aria butting in on their recently-renewed relationship; once she’d made peace with sharing him with her sister, Sonata had possessed no such reservations about the manor staff having been able to hear them before they’d left Vanhoover, so maybe now-
Shaking his head, Lex terminated that line of thinking. It was more difficult than he’d anticipated, and he clung fast to the frustration that made him feel. Sonata in the warehouse, Aria in the train station, the two of them in his office…even Adagio, her human body sprawled out in lingerie; each and every one of the Sirens had been using their charms to beguile him lately, and it was something that had to stop. “Where’s Aria?” he demanded, letting go of Sonata’s foreleg. “I need to talk to you about something, and I don’t want her interrupting.”
Sonata pouted again. “Aw, don’t worry about her. I promise, I’ll be everything-”
“Sonata!” growled Lex, cutting her off. “Where’s your sister?”
“Ugh, fine, I ditched her, okay?” she huffed. “Is it such a big deal that I wanted you all to myself once in a while?” Turning over, she settled onto her belly. “What’s so important that we have to normal-talk about it instead of pillow-talk?”
Taking a moment to calm himself down now that she was no longer trying to seduce him, Lex made himself concentrate on the information he’d recently been made aware of. “I spoke with Nosey. She-”
“What?!” Sonata’s eyes widened as a shudder – one that was nothing like the sexy shiver she’d had a minute ago – ran through her. “Why?”
Lex frowned. “It’s what you said I should do.”
“I…right, yeah, I did.” Scrunching her face up, she let out a breath. “Sorry, I got so caught up in the moment that I forgot. What’d she say?”
Disregarding her odd behavior as they came to the heart of the matter, Lex gave her a cold look. “She told me about Kara.”
Sonata blinked once. Then a second time. Then a third. Her mouth opened, then closed. She swallowed, her lips pursing. Finally, she gave a shrug, her eyes lowering from his to look at a group of candles on a nearby bureau. “What about her?”
“‘What about her’?” echoed Lex, indignant. “How about the fact that you’ve been in contact with her for months?! Or that you’ve been feeding her private details about our relationship?!” He slammed a hoof on the floor, feeling his temper beginning to stir again. “Do you not understand how egregious that is, to say nothing of how dangerous?!”
But Sonata’s response took him completely by surprise.
“I had to…”
“What?”
“I had to!” The words came out in a wail, her tone anguished. “I didn’t know what else to do! I was losing you – no, I’d already lost you – and I couldn’t figure out how to fix things!”
That wasn’t the reaction Lex had been expecting. Although she was even more unpredictable than anypony else he knew, he’d anticipated that she’d either be completely blasé about what she’d done, or she’d be upset at the suggestion that she’d done something wrong. Never had he imagined that she’d break down like this.
But I should have, he realized. This is what Nosey was talking about: Sonata felt bad after she ended things between us, and she needed Kara’s help to fix them. It was enough to make him wish that the bespectacled mare was here now; she’d clearly foreseen this situation, or one like it, occurring; that was why she’d all but begged him not to be angry with Sonata, to listen to her side of the story. Now if only she’d told him what to do next.
Except, he recalled, she had: “Don’t forget how much you love her. Not for a second.”
Letting out a slow breath as he tried to figure out how to put that advice to practical use, Lex searched for the right thing to say. “You could have talked to me,” he muttered at last, his ears folding back. “We could have…figured something out.”
The words sounded hollow even to him. He could still remember how badly he’d reacted when Sonata had told him she’d wanted to get back together, throwing the idea in her face in a fit of rage. It had been nothing short of a miracle – maybe literally so, if Kara had been the architect of it – that she’d been able to get him to look past that and forgive her.
Apparently, Sonata felt the same way. “I was too scared,” she sniffled. “All I could think about was what would happen if I messed things up. The thought of you saying that you didn’t love me…just imagining it hurt so much.”
She gave him a miserable look, her eyes shimmering wetly. “I knew it was wrong. With Kara, I mean. I knew it, but I just…I didn’t care. If there was even the slightest chance that it meant we could be together, then it was worth it. I love you, Lex. I’ve always loved you.” She held out a hoof toward him then, the first tears slowly making their way down her cheeks. “Please…please, don’t hate me for this.”
His heart broke at that. How could it not? It was one thing to turn away from her when he was in the depths of rage, but now? Seeing her weeping and begging him not to throw her away? It was enough to completely banish any shred of his anger, and he found himself approaching her, climbing onto the bed to place his hoof against hers. “I could never hate you,” he murmured softly. “Never. I love you.”
She made a sound that was somewhere between a relieved laugh and a sob then, burying her face in his chest. “Say it again,” she begged.
“I love you.”
“Again. Please.”
“I love you.” Curling his forelegs around her, Lex pulled her closer. “I’ll always love you.”
He felt her shudder as she returned the embrace, and when she looked up, he didn’t have to be prompted, leaning forward and pressing his lips to hers. Her eyes fluttered closed, and his own did the same a moment later, forgetting about everything except reassuring her of what she meant to him. It was only when she shifted, laying back on the bed, that he hesitated, breaking the kiss as he glanced around uncomfortably. “Sona-”
Her hoof touched his lips, silencing him. “I need this,” she pleaded. “I need you. I don’t care about the circumstances or the consequences anymore. All I care about is you.”
Taking his hoof in hers, she placed it on her chest, letting him feel her heart beating. “They’re still there, you know. All of those bad feelings. The fear, the longing, the loneliness. I can still feel them in between each beat.”
Reaching up, she caressed his face. “You’re the only one who can make them go away, Lex. Even if it’s just for a little while, I want your love to be the only thing I feel. For it to fill me up inside until there’s no room for anything else. Make me feel how much I mean to you, so that I’ll never worry or wonder ever again, because the memory of it will keep me warm for the rest of my life.”
She might have said more, but her mouth was blocked as Lex kissed her again, moving so that he was on top of her.
He hadn’t seen any sign of the scrying sensor when he’d glanced around just now, but that meant little; it was very difficult to spot with the naked eye, even without being distracted. But that didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that the mare he loved was hurting, and was begging him to make it better. How could he say no to that?
His horn glowing as he started to disrobe, Lex began caressing his beloved…
I don’t care what Miss Dusk says, sighed Feather Duster to herself as she exited the ice cream shop. There was no reason for me to go pick this up myself.
On paper, running out to get ice cream shouldn’t have been a chore worth mentioning. After all, Las Pegasus was only slightly north of the San Palomino desert, and while it was late in the season, it was still summer. Ice cream shops were a bit a dozen.
But as it turned out, Miss Dusk – having come back early from her shopping trip (and without her sister for some reason) – wanted a very particular flavor, and for some reason only trusted Feather to go out and pick it up. Which, again, shouldn’t have been a big deal…except that, as it turned out, bubblegum-flavored ice cream with almonds was rather unusual combination, one that you couldn’t find in any old parlor.
It had taken forever for her to track down the specialty ice cream store at the edge of town, which specialized in unusual flavor combinations, for her to find what she was looking for. Even then, it had taken the pony behind the counter quite a bit of time to go digging through the back and produce the carton she’d needed. But I finally got it. Now to head-, huh?
Feather Duster’s thoughts came to a screeching halt as she glanced down an alleyway, catching sight of a small crowd of ponies on the street at the other end of it. By itself that was no big deal; most ponies traveled in groups in Las Pegasus, since few people came to a tourist town on their own. But in this case, the crowd had been following a pair of ponies that Feather Duster recognized very well:
Sonata and Aria.
Even as Feather watched, the beauties walked on by, followed by a balding unicorn stallion who could only be Coat Tail, the Royal Clothier, struggling to keep a small mountain of packages and shopping bags aloft as he hurried after them, the crowd of admirers, reporters, and gawkers not far behind. None of them noticed the maid, staring at them from the other end of the alley, and it was only after they’d gone by that Feather Duster shook her head, blinking.
What was Miss Dusk doing out here? When she’d come back to the hotel room, she’d made procuring this ice cream sound like some sort of emergency, one that could only be handled by Feather herself. Of course, there was no way this was actually an important task, but for Miss Dusk to have resumed her shopping trip with her sister was odd, even for the mercurial mare. Did I take too long, and she decided to go back to what she was doing?
Deciding not to worry about it, Feather Duster ducked into the alley, intent on catching up with her prince’s beloved-
When a dark shape swooped down at her from above, muttering something indistinctly as it performed a series of quick gestures. Feather jumped back, alarmed…or at least, that was what she meant to do, but she suddenly found herself overcome with lethargy, her limbs going slack as a powerful sense of fatigue fell over her. Unable to help herself, she felt her frightened yelp turn into a yawn as it left her mouth, and she collapsed to the ground as her eyes began to shut, unable to summon the strength to keep them open.
The last thing she saw was black wings folding closed as someone landed in front on her, tail swishing in a very un-pony-like manner as they stalked closer.
Well? purred Kara as Thermal Draft stumbled down the hallway, her legs still shaky after the marathon she’d just been through. Was it everything you’d hoped it would be?
“Better,” moaned Thermal Draft in Sonata’s voice, leaning against the wall as she struggled to pull herself together. Although Lex had dismissed that pleasure-touch spell he’d used on her during their third and final round of lovemaking, she was still experiencing aftershocks, each step making the ache in her hips flare up in the most wonderful way. “I can’t believe he used that spell on me while we were in the shower.”
That was quite devious of him, wasn’t it? giggled the goddess approvingly. Casting that spell when he knew the hot water pouring over you would make it feel like the most sensuous massage you’ve ever had. And then moving the showerhead over your body like that, brushing it near your most sensitive spots without touching them directly. He’s must have really enjoyed the way that made you writhe.
Biting her lip, Thermal Draft sank to her knees, her tail – along with other parts of her – twitching madly. “Kara!” she groaned. “S-stop! I’m still…!”
The goddess, however, had no more mercy for her than Lex had. I thought he’d wait until you’d begged enough, and then finish you off. But the way he suddenly went on the attack like that, mounting you while directing the waterflow between your legs… It’s a good thing I made sure your transformations don’t come undone when you lose consciousness, don’t you think?
But Drafty couldn’t answer, biting her foreleg in order to stifle her cries as she collapsed to the ground, spasming. It was only after several long, blissful seconds that she finally went limp, lowering her hoof from her mouth as she panted. “Y-you did that on p-purpose,” she gasped.
I’m a love goddess, sweetheart, chided Kara, her voice rich with mirth. It goes with the territory. Still, I’m glad he’s using those spells I gave him. I was worried he’d refuse out of some sense of misplaced pride.
“That spell was…something else,” agreed Drafty, dragging herself further down the hallway until she came to the cushioned bench in front of the elevator, throwing herself onto it as she struggled to get her breath back. “But he did just fine on his own, too. More than fine.”
That was, she decided after a moment’s reflection, putting it mildly.
Even without the magic he’d used at the end, Lex had proven himself to be a highly skilled lover. For all his fearsomeness, he’d been surprisingly gentle with her during their first coupling, vindicating her certainty that there was a sensitive soul beneath his intimidating exterior. Their union had been a thing of beauty, a physical expression of love in the truest sense, and although Drafty was no virgin, she’d never felt as fulfilled as she had when Lex had brought her to her peak.
Had things ended there, that would have been enough to satisfy her, but to her surprise Lex hadn’t been finished. Quite the contrary, he’d actually grown playful. From nipping at her neck to tugging at her tail – smiling, really smiling, all the while – he’d shown a teasing side that she hadn’t ever suspected was there, and the experiencing had been sensuous in the extreme. Unlike the first time, when he’d laid her on her back so that they could share kisses and loving looks while he showed her his passion, this time he’d put her on all fours, her head down and back legs spread wide as he’d climbed on top of her, softly growling exactly what he was going to do to her. It had been wild and exciting and intensely erotic.
And of course, after that they’d gone to the shower to clean themselves up, at which point he’d really cut loose…
“He was incredible.”
Oh, I know, murmured Kara, still sounding smug. You’re welcome.
Drafty had been only half-paying attention to what the goddess had been saying before, her thoughts still muddled from the lingering sensations of pleasure. But now, with that last release having finally begun to recede, she found her awareness returning, and with it her curiosity. “Wait…wait a second,” she muttered, lifting her head up. “You’re saying that was all because of you? And what do you mean you gave him that spell he used at the end? You told me before that he’d never prayed to you even once.”
He hasn’t, agreed Kara. It was a matter of divine politics. I owed the Night Mare a favor, basically, and giving her champion a smattering of spells that my faithful have invented over the years helped me pay it off. That pleasure spell he used to push you over the edge was one of them. So was that contraceptive cantrip he used at the beginning.
Drafty blinked at that, barely recalling the quick word and arcane gesture he’d made right before he’d entered her for the first time. But she had no time to process how she felt about the fact that Lex had apparently used protection before the goddess kept going. But what I was talking about before was the other spell he used, the one that made him so proficient to begin with.
“I don’t understand,” admitted Drafty, managing to raise herself into a sitting position. “He didn’t use any other spells. That one at the beginning, to make sure there’d be no…consequences, and the one at the end to make me all…” Another shudder ran down her spine. “Sensitive. Those were it.”
Yes, replied the goddess coyly. And no.
Drafty couldn’t help but roll her eyes. Kara might be a goddess – one of the oldest in her pantheon, to hear her tell it – but sometimes she acted like a teenager. “What does that mean?”
Come on, urged the goddess. I told you that Sonata told me that Lex told her that she was his first time, and they’ve only been together a little more than three months. I don’t care how much of a quick study he is; do you really think that anyone learns to be that good at sex that fast?
The question made Drafty frown, never having considered that. “I dunno. I mean, he’s got Sonata and Aria. I figured they’d, you know…taught him stuff.”
Oh please, snorted Kara. Teaching is a skill, especially when it comes to screwing. You know those two. Do either of them seem capable of instructing anyone about anything? For that matter, does Lex strike you as someone who’d ever let others tutor him? No, he used one of the stronger spells from among the collection I gave him, one that grants inherent proficiency in the erotic arts.
Drafty raised a brow. “‘Inherent proficiency in the erotic arts’?”
To put it another way, the recipient becomes talented at pleasuring others sexually. It’s similar to how your brand of destiny, or ‘cutie mark,’ as you call it here, works, but subtler, since it heightens the carnal instincts that you already have rather than granting a new talent altogether. Even better, since all it does is augment an inclination that’s already present, the spell doesn’t need to maintain any sort of sustained magical effect; it’s one-and-done. So it can’t be detected, dispelled, or suppressed. It doesn’t replace your existing mark or the talent it provides. And it has no ugly side effects the way herbal or alchemical ‘enhancements’ do. The goddess sighed, her mental voice thick with pride. It really is a wonderful little enchantment, if I do say so myself.
For her part, Drafty shifted in place, biting her lip at the thought of the stallion she admired casting a spell to make himself better in bed. It was one thing to use a bit of magic to spice things up on the last go-round. But enchanting himself to be supernaturally skilled at sex in general…it just seemed like cheating, somehow. “I don’t think that Lex would do something like that,” she murmured, brushing a lock of Sonata’s hair out of her eyes. “I mean, he doesn’t seem like the type of use a shortcut like that.”
Oh sweetheart, chuckled Kara, her voice patronizing. All ponies are insecure when it comes to their conjugal prowess, especially stallions. You have no idea how important that is to them.
Drafty snorted. “I’m pretty sure I do.”
No, you really don’t, insisted the goddess. I’ve seen stallions – males of every race, really – laugh in the face of death, shrug off incredible pain without crying out, but cringe at being told that they’re bad in bed. Finding out that they can’t satisfy the ladies wounds them in a way that few other things can. It damages their ego to the point of hurting their entire sense of self. And the prouder they are, the worse it is for them.
This time, Kara’s chuckle had a dark undercurrent to it. Now compare a dateless virgin like Lex to a beautiful, experienced mare like Sonata, and you can only imagine how terrified he must have been at the prospect of pleasing her. The thought of her laughing at him must have shaken him right down to his core. Compared to that, casting one little spell to make sure she was happy with his performance would have seemed like a small compromise indeed.
Drafty didn’t say anything to that, not wanting to think that the stallion she loved could be that insecure. After how intimate he’d just been with her, not just sexually but in how he’d shown her the parts of his personality that he kept hidden from the rest of the world, it felt like a betrayal to even imagine him like that.
Of course, that’s not even the most impressive bit of magic I gave him, continued Kara. That distinction belongs to a powerful spell that can-
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” huffed Drafty, getting back to her hooves as she stalked over and pushed the elevator button.
Oh, I’m sorry sweetheart, did I ruin your afterglow? The pout in Kara’s telepathic voice was audible. I just wanted to make sure you knew how much I’ve done to make sure your first time with Lex was everything you deserved. After everything you went through, it would have broken my heart if you felt like it wasn’t worthwhile.
“I guess,” sighed Drafty, glancing at the elevator doors impatiently.
By the way, you might want to change into a different disguise, warned the goddess. You and Lex were going at it for quite a while, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for Sonata to come face to face with herself if she were to come back now.
The words had no sooner entered Drafty’s mind when the elevator doors dinged, the sound sending a sudden surge of alarm through her despite her having been the one to call it. Panicking, she changed into the first form she thought of just as the elevator doors opened-
“OOF!”
-and somepony rushed out, bowling her over and sending them both sprawling.
“Ouch!” yelped Sonata – the real Sonata – as she rubbed her head, picking herself up off the floor. “Geez, what-” She stopped as she saw the pony she’d collided with, blinking in surprise. “Hey, I know you!” Grinning, she stood up, extending a hoof helpfully. “What’re you doing here?”
Chuckling weakly, Thermal Draft – having changed back into herself, or rather, what her old self looked like before she became a doppelganger – gulped, trying to keep herself calm as she reached up to take Sonata’s hoof. “Oh, I um…I was just coming to tell L-, Prince Legis about, er…what I found out in Trottingham! Yeah, I finished early and didn’t want to wait until after the coronation!”
“No one cares!” snapped Aria, stepping off the elevator behind Sonata and scowling at her sister as she slipped by her, headed toward their suite. “Right now we’ve got an emergency, remember?”
“I didn’t forget!” protested Sonata as she followed after Aria.
The ransom note should be arriving right about now, decided Dark Streak, watching as the last sliver of sunlight disappeared below the horizon.
Of course, that was only if the courier she’d paid to deliver her note was reliable. If they weren’t able to deliver it at sunset the way she’d specified – or worse, opened the envelope despite her instructions – then she’d have to change her plans. But that wasn’t a big deal; even if worse came to worst, Lex Legis would have a hard time tracking her down via her messenger, since as far as the courier knew they’d been hired by an earth pony with a blue mane and tail. The only other issue would be if he tried to locate his missing maid with magic.
And Dark Streak intended to take care of that problem right now.
Wings spreading as she vaulted over the catwalk, she glided down to the ground floor of the abandoned factory she’d used for her lair. Touching down silently, she padded over to the bound, blindfolded, and gagged pegasus mare hanging from the rope binding her forelegs. Pausing, Dark Streak looked her prisoner over, needing only a moment to confirm that she’d apparently woken up at some point. The fact that she’d done so without screaming into her gag made the assassin raise a brow, surprised; she’d have expected a homely little maid in such a pampered country to go completely to pieces upon realizing that she’d been abducted.
This one’s been through some hardship, she mused. Hopefully that would make this next part easier. Hysterical people were always difficult to reason with.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” announced Dark Streak without preamble, her voice making the pony jerk and writhe in her bonds. “I’m going to cast a spell on you. It won’t cause you any pain, but if you resist and make me have to cast it again, then you will experience pain.” Unsheathing a dagger – one of the unenchanted ones she kept as a backup weapon – she traced the tip of it over the bound pony’s belly, not hard enough to cut her clothes, let alone her skin, but hard enough to make her intentions clear. “Is that understood?”
The threat had the desired effect, as the mare – breathing heavily and trembling like a leaf, now – managed a nod.
“Good,” replied Dark Streak, sheathing her weapon. “Now hold still.”
Reaching into one of her pouches, she grabbed a talonful of diamond dust and sprinkled it over the bound mare’s head, rearing upright so that she could gesture with her other talon at the same time that she mumbled the requisite words necessary to activate her non-detection spell. It was a handy little ward, making it difficult for magic to detect someone, which meant that if Lex Legis used a crystal ball or magic mirror or some snooping spell that he knew, he’d have a hard time getting a fix on her. It wasn’t foolproof, but if Willow was right about something being wrong with his magic, it would hopefully be enough.
Finishing the casting, Dark Streak brushed her talon over the captured mare’s chest, feeling the spell go off. Just like every other time, the rush of magic sent an unpleasant tingle through her scalp, as though ants were crawling around inside her skull.
Of course, that wasn’t too far from the truth, as she knew the sensation was actually the sigils she’d had inscribed onto her brain activating.
That hadn’t been the most pleasant way to learn magic, but then, assassination tended to be an unpleasant vocation. After all, targets who were easily disposed of didn’t require the services of a professional killer; any group of thugs or mercenaries could get the job done. A skilled eliminator was hired only when the target in question was hard to kill, and more often than not, that was because they had magical resources. Thus, any assassin worthy of the name had to have magic of their own to counter that.
Learning to cast spells, however, took years of training and study, unless some god or similar entity took a fancy to you. But for Dark Streak, who had fallen into her current line of work almost by accident after her husband had died, that hadn’t been an option. Although joining Cuachan’s assassins’ guild had allowed her to avoid any sort of official reprisal after she'd killed one of their members, she’d been keenly aware that doing so had earned her no friends and more than a few enemies among her new peers. That was an untenable situation; while the guild technically forbade infighting among its members, that was – so long as it was kept sufficiently discreet – a rule that was honored more in the breach than in the observance. And since her colleagues all had various magical affinities of their own, Dark Streak had needed to catch up fast.
Fortunately, there’d been a local emeritus from the Copperclaw – the alchemical academy that was the closest thing Cuachan had to a magic school – who’d earned a reputation for being more interested in transmuting flesh than metals. While the old widower had initially scoffed at her desire for him to find a way to implant magical proficiency into her, she’d managed to change his mind in short order. It was amazing how cooperative people became when you held their loved ones hostage, she’d discovered.
Fortunately for the old alchemist’s son, the procedure his father had come up with – physically scarring the pathways necessary to shape and direct magical energies into spells onto her brain – had worked. Unfortunately for the boy, he’d needed to enroll in the local orphanage shortly after Dark Streak had undergone the procedure, since she’d thanked his father by slipping a dagger between the ribs. After all, she couldn’t have him telling anyone what spells he’d made her capable of casting, especially since she couldn’t learn any others; the only spells she could use were the ones he’d carved into her head.
“Mff! Mrgh mrr!”
Frowning as her hostage started moaning behind her gag, Dark Streak cocked her head. The spell had already gone off without issue; was she trying to ask what she’d done? No, concluded the assassin after a moment’s thought. Her tone didn’t sound inquisitive.
Mildly curious, since she doubted that someone who was capable of remaining in control of themselves after waking up bound and gagged would suddenly go to pieces, Dark Streak reached toward the bound pony’s gag. “I’m going to take this out of your mouth,” she announced. “If you scream, or try to call for help, it goes right back in. Not that anyone would hear you anyway.” She’d made sure of that, having spent an entire day confirming that no one in Las Pegasus’s ground-based undercity was using this particular locale.
Slipping the pony’s gag off, Dark Streak couldn’t help but tense slightly, reaching down to grasp the hilt of another one of her daggers. Spellcasting in this world seemed to be limited to unicorns, but she couldn’t help but wonder if Lex Legis had taught his maid any incantation-based magic. If she started muttering the worlds to a spell…
But her caution was proven unnecessary a moment later. “D-don’t…don’t do this…” stuttered the pegasus, her voice quavering. “Whatever y-you’re trying to do…M-Master Legis…the prince…will be l-lenient if you let m-me go right now…”
Dark Streak couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “Oh he will, will he?”
The pegasus swallowed, but managed a nod. “I’ve s-seen him do it,” she stammered. “H-he’ll ask me for m-my rec-recommendation. I’ll s-say that you w-weren’t cruel, that th-this was all just s-some sort of m-m-misunderstanding…h-he might n-not even put a c-c-curse on you…”
“Really?” Narrowing her eyes, Dark Streak immediately seized on pegasus’s inadvertent admission. “And what curses have you seen your master use?”
The maid hesitated for a fraction of a second too long. “I…I s-saw him curse Princess L-Luna…that’s all.”
Despite herself, Dark Streak couldn’t help but feel slightly impressed. It was one thing to choke down panic; it was quite another to actually find the courage to tell a lie when someone had you at their mercy. But that doesn’t mean I can let that go.
After all, while she'd forfeit the second half of her fee if anyone besides Lex was killed, there were no stipulations about no one else being hurt.
In a single motion, her dagger cleared its sheath, whipping out in a quick motion that cut the feathers from the tip of her left wing, missing the underlying flesh by a hair’s breadth. From the terrified whimper the maid let out, she was aware of it too, and Dark Streak didn’t put the blade away as she spoke. “For every lie you tell, I’ll cut a piece of you off. That time was just a few feathers. Do you want to find out what you’ll lose next time?”
The pegasus was shaking worse now, clearly losing the battle to retain what was left of her composure, but she managed to shake her head.
“Good,” replied the griffon assassin evenly. “Now, what curses have you personally seen Lex Legis use?”
There were, Dark Streak had learned, particular preparations that needed to be made when your target was a wizard.
Obviously, the first one was to learn what magic they had at their disposal in terms of spells and magic items. Oftentimes that was difficult, since accomplished wizards would have a repertoire of scores – perhaps even hundreds – of different spells, as well as a large collection of enchanted paraphernalia. Even so, every little bit of information helped.
But that was far from the only precaution that needed to be taken. Another one was to never fight a spellcaster on their own turf. Any magic-user worth their salt would always make sure they had a home-field advantage, whether it involved covering entrances with magical alarms that only they could hear, having hidden refuges behind illusory walls, doorways that had glyphs inscribed on them that would stun any unauthorized person who passed through them, or myriad other possible defenses. To say nothing of whatever automatons or summoned monsters or other creatures they’d have right there to defend them.
That was why Dark Streak hadn’t simply used her hat of disguise to take the appearance of Lex Legis’s pegasus maid and slip into his penthouse suite. Even if he didn’t break through her deception – something which was all too easy to do, since the hat only covered her in a visual illusion; not only could it not alter her voice, but if he so much as patted her on the ass it would immediately be obvious that how she felt didn’t match her appearance – she’d only get one shot to kill him, and in the not-inconceivable scenario that one strike proved insufficient to get the job done, she’d likely have to fight her way out of there before being able to finish him off.
Far better, instead, to make Lex Legis come to a place where the advantage was hers. Hence why Dark Streak had chosen this particular location. The hollowed-out shell of the old factory was as spacious as it was isolated, and in gloom of the encroaching night, it offered numerous hiding places, all of which she was familiar with after spending several days thoroughly canvassing the place’s interior. That, and setting up several traps for when Lex Legis arrived, along with a few other surprises…
Of course, luring him out here meant tipping him off ahead of time that something was wrong, but that couldn’t be helped. As it was, the note she’d sent him had demanded ten thousand Equestrian bits for the safe return of his maid; while she doubted his guard would be lowered if he thought this was “just” a ransom rather than an attempt on his life, at least this way he’d bring a few extra bits that she’d be able to confiscate after she killed him.
What was more important was that she’d demanded he make the payment at midnight tonight. That was another rule when fighting spellcasters: give them as little as possible in the way of preparation time. Most wizards could only change the spells they’d prepared after a full night’s sleep. By denying Lex Legis that opportunity, he’d be limited to whatever spells he’d readied that morning, before he’d known anything was wrong. If he was as cautious as Willow said, that might not make much of a difference, but it was still an advantage worth pursuing.
Likewise, Dark Streak had made sure to tell him to bring the money alone and in person. Not that she’d given him her current location; that would have been inexcusably stupid, since there were still several hours before midnight and he’d have had time to begin clandestinely observing the area and making plans of his own. Instead, she’d sent him the address of a dilapidated apartment building down the street, one where she’d have a good view of him from one of the upper windows with her spyglass. That way, she’d be able to see when the other courier she’d hired met him there at midnight and told him to go to the abandoned factory instead.
And once he got here, that was when the real work would begin.
I have your maid, the pegasus mare with the downy brush on her flank. Bring ten thousand bits to the address below at midnight tonight, alone, or you’ll never find her body.
Lex stared at the note in cold fury, his eyes shining and thoughts whirling as he contemplated the two sentences of text and the location scrawled below them, a single word going through his mind as he looked them over again.
Silhouette.
The name had been at the forefront of his thoughts since he’d read the demand, despite its lack of a signature. Ever since Nosey’s mother had told him how the crippled stallion had not only assaulted her daughter in an effort to find out more about him – and worse, had gotten away with it – Lex had wondered what the deranged earth pony would do next. Now, it seemed, he had his answer.
After all, this was exactly Silhouette’s mode of operating: find someone weaker than himself to use as leverage. He’d done exactly that when they’d first met, taking advantage of the fact that Lex had been unable to cease performing his ritual over Aria to subdue Nosey and Sonata right in front of him, a memory that still made Lex grit his teeth in anger and shame. Silhouette had done the same thing when he’d gone after Nosey a second time, surprising her at her home in Canterlot and interrogating her for what Wordsy Windbag had made sound like tactical information. Now he was holding Feather Duster hostage in order to force a confrontation.
There’s no guarantee that he hasn’t killed her already, hissed Lex's tulpa malevolently. Her only value to him is in calling you out. He doesn’t need her alive for that.
“S-Sire!”
Coat Tail’s panicked voice pulled Lex’s attention away from the voiceless whispers in his head, belatedly taking notice of the field of black crystal spikes that had pierced the floor around him, causing the other ponies in the room to back away from him nervously. Forcing himself to rein in the worst of his rage, Lex made the stalagmites dissipate with a thought, giving the note one last glance before he turned toward the others. “When did this arrive?”
Gulping, Coat Tail took a step forward. “It was sent by courier,” he replied. “The delivery pony was waiting in the lobby when we arrived, since he was instructed to deliver it to you personally but wasn’t allowed upstairs.” The bald stallion’s horn lit up as he telekinetically tugged at his collar. “I managed to convince him to let me sign for it, since I was in your direct service. Naturally, I took the liberty of opening it first, in case it was a waste of Your Highness’s valuable time, and, well…here we are…”
“I want to know who commissioned that courier to deliver this,” hissed Lex.
But the words had barely left his mouth when Tranquila spoke up. “It was occurring to me to be making that question!” The words rushed out of her mouth all at once, as though she’d been struggling to hold them back. “Skinny delivery colt say only it was earth stallion, mane and tail blue like sky, not seeing any cutie mark and no giving of name!”
“We got the guy at the front desk of the hotel to look up that address for us. Turns out it’s an apartment building in that shabby part of town, down on the ground,” volunteered Aria. Lex’s features immediately tightened, but he didn’t have a chance to say anything before she kept speaking. “And no, before you throw a fit over word of this getting out, we didn’t tell him what was going on. I just told him the address, asked if he knew where it was, and that was all.”
“I still think you should have totes let me put the whammy on that guy,” huffed Sonata, before giving Lex an upset look. “The guy at the front desk is, like, a butler right? Everyone knows the butler’s always involved! How else could some weirdo have gotten in here and kidnapped poor Feather Duster without him seeing?”
The question made Lex frown, but not because of any insight on Sonata’s part. Rather, it struck him as incongruous that her first assumption was that Feather Duster had been kidnapped from their penthouse. After all, she’d been the one who’d sent the maid away so that the two of them could have some time to themselves. Or does she think Feather Duster was abducted before she exited the lobby? he wondered.
“However it happened, what’s important is that someone’s kidnapped that poor pony,” broke in Thermal Draft before Lex could give the matter any further thought. “Right now the most important thing is figuring out how to get her back.”
The question – or rather, the mare which uttered it – made him narrow his eyes, still suspicious of her sudden arrival. But with his magical senses crippled and his thaumaturgical spells all but depleted, there was little he could do to investigate her sudden reappearance. She’d given her report about what she’d learned in Trottingham, showing him the melted remains of what she’d said was the hilt of Long Road’s sword, and the story (complete with her coming to Las Pegasus in order to tell him what she’d learned at the earliest possible opportunity) had seemed plausible.
Even so, he’d subsequently made her recount their first meeting, when he’d healed her illness in the filthy apartment in Vanhoover where she and her friends had barricaded themselves, in order to verify her identity. After that, he’d pulled Sonata and Aria aside, asking the former if she seemed enchanted while having the latter cast her spell to detect magical emissions. Both had declared Thermal Draft clean.
With no further way to examine his misgivings, Lex was left with little alternative but to conclude that he was being overly cautious, and that Thermal Draft showing up at the same time Feather Duster had been kidnapped was exactly what it appeared to be: a coincidence.
“Perhaps we should alert the authorities?” ventured Coat Tail, blind to Lex’s foreboding.
“I am the authority here,” rumbled Lex. “And Aria’s instincts are correct; the fewer people who know about this, the better.”
“How come?” asked Sonata, ignoring her sister’s triumphant smirk. “Like, even if we don’t know where she is, telling everyone what’s happened will make it easier to find-, no, wait, oh my gosh!” Her eyes widened as she grinned, pointing at the ransom note. “We do know where she is! The kidnapper totes wrote down their address! Haha, what a dummy!”
“Says the person who not only didn’t realize that until just now,” snorted Aria, “but whose first suggestion was that we should look around for an actual trail of breadcrumbs that would lead us to the kidnapper’s hideout.”
“Oh, excuse me,” snorted Sonata. “I forgot that your big idea was to blow-dry the paper to see if anything was written on it in invisible ink.”
“At least my idea was from actual detective stories instead of fairy tales!” retorted Aria, coloring slightly. “It was worth a shot!”
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Lex, quashing the urge to castigate them further for reverting to petty bickering during a crisis, since doing so would make him guilty of the same thing. Instead, he looked at Sonata. “This address is obviously not where Feather Duster is being kept. More likely it’s some sort of drop-off point for the money they’re demanding for her return. As for why I want this kept quiet, the lower portion of Las Pegasus is the one place in this city where my presence doesn’t draw a crowd. If there’s any chance that news of this could make ponies follow me around while I’m down there, potentially putting them in danger if something goes wrong, then I want to avoid that if at all possible.”
Tranquila cocked her head. “So plan is paying ten thousand of the bits?”
Lex frowned again, glancing at the ransom letter. Despite his certitude that Silhouette was the culprit behind Feather Duster’s abduction, he couldn’t bring himself to feel completely confident in that conclusion, largely because of the demand for money in exchange for his maid’s safety.
While the tactics involved suggested the stallion’s involvement, the stated motivation made no sense. Pecuniary desires had never been Silhouette’s impetus before, being instead concerned with enacting Luna’s will, and subsequently with what sounded like a desire to avenge her being cursed…and possibly his own death, as well. Yet rather than calling him out for some sort of showdown, Lex was keenly aware of how the note instead demanded money. It was a dissonant element, alongside the curious phrasing with regards to Feather Duster’s cutie mark; calling it a “downy brush” was odd phrasing, sounding almost archaic in its vernacular.
But if it wasn’t Silhouette, who else could it be? Despite the animosity he felt toward the princesses, Lex couldn’t imagine them being involved in this; the demand for money made even less sense when it came to them, and for all their incompetence, they at least wanted to do the right thing. Despite the callowness of their morals, even the alicorns knew that kidnapping, extortion, and threatening to murder an innocent pony were wrong.
Of course, the third possibility was that this had something to do with his unknown entity that was periodically monitoring him via scrying magic. But there was no way to confirm or deny that, which made it pointless to speculate.
Ultimately, there was no way to ascertain who was behind Feather Duster’s kidnapping without directly engaging them, and that bothered Lex deeply. Bad enough that this was happening at the worst possible time; not knowing who he was dealing with made it difficult to formulate an effective response.
Difficult, but not impossible.
“No,” Lex replied at last, looking at Tranquila. “The plan is to rescue Feather Duster, and if possible capture whoever took her.”
“Not without us, you’re not!” declared Sonata sharply, shrugging at the inquisitive look Lex gave her a moment later. “What? This is usually the part where you say that you’re going to do it all by yourself and you want everyone else to just hang back and let you do your thing, so I figured we’d skip to where me and Aria tell you that you can totes forget that.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I agree with the ditz,” snorted Aria. “I don’t care if that letter says that you’re supposed to come alone. We’re going with you, so work that into your plan.”
“The two of you accompanying me is part of my plan,” replied Lex flatly.
Two sets of eyebrows rose. “For realsies?!” gaped Sonata, before the corners of her lips turned upward. “That’s great! The three of us haven’t fought bad guys together in, like, forever!”
She wasn’t the only one grinning, with Aria flashing him a smirk. “Well well well, look who’s finally figuring out how this works.”
Lex rolled his eyes at their posturing. With his power being at its lowest ebb in quite some time – and the equinox still being a little over two weeks away – bringing the Sirens along wasn’t so much a concession as it was a necessity. Even if that hadn’t been true, his last few attempts to distance them from his plans had ended in disaster, ranging from his first meeting with the Las Pegasus delegates to his trying to develop an anti-scrying ritual. As much as he didn’t want to bring the two of them closer to danger, Feather Duster’s life was on the line; when viewed dispassionately, it was far more likely that Sonata and Aria would prove to be a help rather than a hindrance.
Hopefully.
“I’ll help too!”
Thermal Draft’s declaration turned all eyes toward her, with Aria being the first to react. “You wanna help?” she scoffed. “Stay here and plan the victory party for after we’ve taken care of things.”
Thermal Draft scowled, but kept her eyes on Lex. “I may not be able to cast spells or hypnotize ponies with my voice, but I can make a difference! I was right there in the thick of it when we all battled those sea monsters on the docks! I was part of the team that broke into that bank vault despite all the ghouls, even if we got ambushed on the way out! And when Starlight Glimmer attacked, I was the one who came up with the idea to attack her with lightning! I know I can be useful, so please…” She took a step forward, giving him a pleading look. “Let me help.”
Lex hesitated for just a moment, making the decision to put aside the last of his reservations about her, before nodding. “In that case, there’s something I want you to do.”
“Yes!” Her wings giving a single flap as she leapt upward happily, Thermal Draft grinned at him. “Name it!”
“I want you to go to the hotel where Nosey Newsy and her parents are staying and protect them.”
“In fact, I want the rest of you to go there as well,” continued Lex, looking at Coat Tail and Tranquila. “Everypony should stay together until this situation is resolved in order to maximize security.”
“Wait,” interrupted Thermal Draft as the two others nodded. “I don’t…you want me to stay behind? And to protect her, of all ponies?”
Lex raised a brow. “I want you to protect her, her parents, and everyone else there with you.”
“But-”
Lex, however, gave her no chance to protest. “If you’re of the opinion that this is some sort of pointless exercise, allow me to dispel any such misconceptions. While it strikes me as unlikely that Feather Duster’s kidnapping is some sort of feint in order to force me to be at a specific place at a specific time so that some subsequent transgression can be carried out without my being there to stop it, I’m not willing to rule out that possibility entirely. Should that turn out to be the case, then it’s important to make sure that everypony known to associate with me is safe in case any of you are being targeted; since you have the most experience in crisis situations, that will be your job.”
“You think someone might be after one of us?” Coat Tail looked positively ill at the thought.
“Unlikely,” admitted Lex. “But this is too important to leave to chance. I want all of you to head to Nosey’s hotel immediately. Make sure you stay together, and don’t draw attention to yourselves.”
“Aw,” cooed Sonata. “That’s, like, super-sweet!”
“Is good plan!” agreed Tranquila. “Help keep everypony relaxed while prince give bad guy whack on noodle!” Smiling, she gave Thermal Draft a hearty pat on the back, almost knocking the smaller mare over. “Counting on you very much!”
For her part, Thermal Draft pursed her lips, pausing for a long moment before nodding, her smile still absent. “A-alright. I’ll do my best.”
“Good,” answered Lex perfunctorily. “Now, start getting ready to depart. The sooner you’re with Nosey, the better.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the other end of the suite, glancing at Sonata and Aria. “The two of you come with me. There’s still a few hours before midnight, so we’ll use this time to go over what I want you to do.”
“Will you hurry up already?! We should have been there by now!”
“I’m going as fast as I can! In case you haven’t noticed it’s totes slippery down here and I do not want to fall!”
“I swear I’m going to trip you if you don’t get your rear in gear! This place stinks and I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to, so get a move on!”
“If you don’t like it, then maybe you should have let me be the one to read the map while you figure out where we can step without gunking up our hooves!”
“Are you kidding me?! You can’t read a map to save your life! Isn’t that why you and Lex ended up going to Tall Tale when you were supposed to go to Vanhoover?”
“Which turned out to be a super-awesome adventure, thank you very much! Besides, I seem to recall you saying we were lost a little while ago!”
“That was your fault! We got turned around because you started screaming and freaked me out!”
“Oh come on! I told you that was because I stepped on a rat! Do you, like, not get how gross that was?!”
“You want to see gross? Try living with a bunch of fish people for weeks on end. They don’t even have sewers, they just go wherever…wait. Wait a second. I think this is it!”
“Really?! Oh my gosh, let me see the map!”
“Hey! Hooves off, you idiot!”
“Aww!”
“Look! Look over there! See?! It says ‘J7’! That’s juncture number seven! So if we turn this corner, the ladder should-”
“I SEE IT! Oh wow, we’re finally there! C’mon, let’s blow this popsicle cart!”
“Wait! Don’t run! You moron, you’re going to-”
“WAAAAAA!”
“…fall.”
The marehole cover exploded upward, arcing through the air high enough that it almost hit the basement ceiling before it finally came crashing down, a terrific clatter filling the air as it hit the ground, tumbling end over end until it came to an abrupt stop as it hit the far wall, leaving only the echoes of the din its sudden flight – as well as the sonic scream Sonata had used to blast it upward – had caused.
A moment later the mare in question – her coat, mane, and tail stained and filthy – hauled herself out of the sewer entrance and into the basement, her sister following after her a moment later.
“Real subtle, Sonata,” groused Aria as she climbed out of the hole, fumbling for a nearby light switch before managing to flip it, illuminating their surroundings. “You better hope that no one heard that, otherwise Lex’s entire plan could be ruined!”
“Shut up!” moaned Sonata miserably, her head swiveling left and right as she frantically looked around. “It was bolted down and I wasn’t going to wait for-, aha!”
Spotting the shelf full of cleaning supplies on the back wall, Sonata immediately abandoned the conversation to rush over to them, opening a bottle of detergent and upending it over herself before grabbing a roll of paper towels and tearing some off, scrubbing her body furiously.
Sighing, Aria glanced at the clock on the nearby wall, noting that there was still a little bit of time until midnight before marching over to where her sister was frantically trying to wash the foul-smelling fluids off. “Gimme those,” she ordered, snatching the paper towels away.
“But-”
“Be quiet,” huffed Aria, reaching for where a hose had been hooked up to a nearby sink. “This’ll go faster if you hold still and let me do it. Now, go stand next to the sewer entrance.”
Sonata almost protested, sure that this was the beginning of some mean prank where she was pushed back down into the smelly gunk waiting at the bottom of the hole. But the look on Aria’s face was sincere, and it took Sonata a second to remember that they didn’t have the same relationship now that they did back on Earth. Feeling guilty at having momentarily forgotten that – even if it had been because of how revolting all that filth was! – Sonata folded her ears back as she followed Aria’s instructions. “Sorry.”
“Just hold still,” replied Aria evenly before turning the water on.
Minutes passed in silence before she put the hose aside, going to work with the paper towels. “There,” she pronounced at last. “All clean.”
Twisting her head as she looked herself over, Sonata let out a relieved breath as she saw that she was no longer covered in filth, pulling her sister into a hug. “Thanks Aria.”
Giving Sonata a quick squeeze in reply, Aria's haughty look was already back in place as they separated, giving her pigtails a toss. “I just didn’t want to have to go through the rest of this with you while you smelled like that,” she snorted. “And when Lex finally gets over his whole ‘we can’t do it because someone’s watching us’ thing, I’m going first.”
Sonata rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, yeah.” Taking just a moment to savor the sisterly bond she felt then, Sonata glanced at the clock on the wall, knowing that they were running short on time. “You should probably get started.”
Nodding, Aria sang a quick note, activating her spell. Feeling the magic fall into place, she turned her gaze upward, brow furrowing as she concentrated.
“Anything?” asked Sonata after several tense seconds.
“Not yet.”
“….how about now?”
“No.”
“…now?”
“No.”
“…”
“…”
“…how about n-”
“She’s not here,” pronounced Aria, with only a slight growl in her voice.
Sonata frowned, despite Lex having predicted exactly that. “You’re sure?”
Aria frowned right back at her. “Look, I used this tracking spell on Lex himself back before he rescued me from the sahuagin, and it never let me down. The range on this thing is enough that it should cover every floor of this apartment building, and the next couple buildings in every direction, and I’m telling you I’m getting nothing. She’s not here, and I’m pretty sure she’s not anywhere in half a block of here.”
“Huh.” Sonata processed that for a moment before shrugging. “So, I guess we move on to phrase two then?”
“It’s phase-, never mind. Let’s just go.”
Shrugging, Sonata followed her sister as the two of them headed upstairs. Despite the noise they’d made, no one seemed to have heard them, with the stairwell being empty as they climbed up to the top floor and glanced down the hallway, confirming that they were alone before walking to the end of it. “Ready?”
“Ready,” nodded Aria.
“Then let’s pinch butt and take names!”
“…I still think you mess those sayings up on purpose.”
Sonata giggled. “Oh, quit complaining and sing already, will ya?”
“Fine, fine.”
Taking a deep breath, Aria closed her eyes as she held it, before opening her eyes as she started to sway in place, raising her voice as she began belting out a quick, catchy tune. “Everypony everypony, why do you sleep the night away?”
A half-second later, Sonata joined in, effortlessly harmonizing with her sister. “Everypony everypony, you all work so hard ev’ry day.”
The next line came from the two of them in unison, projecting their voices louder as they harmonized. “So why don’t you get up, get down, and come on out and play!”
The singing had the desired effect, as light began to spill from under nearby doors, which cracked open a moment later to reveal sleepy and confused ponies, dragged out of bed to see what all the commotion was about. But any complaints they might have had about being woken up were instantly forgotten as the two beauties in the hallway smiled and winked at them, hooves tapping and bodies swaying as they danced in place, clearly inviting their audience to join them.
Not that they could refuse, thanks to the magic infusing the song.
Slowly, the Sirens started down the hallway, heading back toward the stairs.
“Everypony everypony, you wish that you could get your chance?”
Behind them, their bewitched audience slowly wandered after them, unconsciously pacing their steps to match the melody.
“Everypony everypony, find something that could make you prance.”
Making their way down to the next floor, it was easy enough to repeat the process, with ponies coming to investigate the noise only to fall prey to the Sirens’ spell, their eyes glazing over as their bodies began to sway with their song.
“So why not show us what, you’ve got, and come on out and dance!”
Floor by floor, Sonata and Aria worked their magic. Falling in behind them, ponies of all ages swayed, spun, twirled, and leaped to the beat they set. Stallions fell in behind the Sirens, dancing in coordination, as mares provided vocal accompaniment. Foals danced on the backs of adults while babies, rocked by their parents in time with the melody, cheerfully waved their hooves. Elderly ponies swung canes and walkers in sweeping gestures as high notes were hit. Even pets were taken in by the singing, making their way underhoof as they padded along in time with the tempo.
By the time they’d reached the ground floor, everyone in the building was following Sonata and Aria, enchanted in the most literal sense of the word. None of them thought twice about what they were doing as the Sirens led them outside and down the street, capable only of obeying the lyrics telling them to sing, dance, and party like there was no tomorrow. The message filled their minds as they reached the end of the block, heading toward the more populous parts of Las Pegasus’ lower city as they sought to obey the directive they’d been given.
But outside, not everyone who heard the Sirens’ singing joined in the revelry.
From across the street, standing in the mouth of an alley, Lex watched as Sonata and Aria emptied the building.
The sight made him frown, not happy with seeing them use their magic to take over the minds of so many other people, but the exigent circumstances warranted it. That apartment building was the location given in the ransom note, and while it had been exceedingly unlikely that Silhouette – or whoever had kidnapped Feather Duster – had holed up in that place with his hostage, Lex hadn’t been prepared to gamble on that fact; not when a wrong guess could potentially put the residents’ safety at risk. That justified the use of the Sirens’ magic, since it allowed for everyone to be evacuated in a quick and (relatively) orderly fashion.
Fortunately, this was the only residence on the block. Located at the edge of the city, the ramshackle apartment building was surrounded by shuttered shops, a park that looked like it had been abandoned for years, a decrepit-looking building that might have been a schoolhouse once, and a dilapidated old factory. Given that Lex hadn’t been able to spot anyone who looked like Silhouette or Feather Duster in the crowd of ponies that Sonata and Aria had led away, that meant she was likely being held in one of the nearby buildings. Along with whoever took her, Lex knew. Almost certainly watching from some hidden vantage…hm?
Even as Lex watched, a pegasus stallion, dressed in black pants and a bright red button-up jacket and matching cap, winged over to the apartment that the Sirens had just cleared, sparing a puzzled glance for the makeshift parade marching down the street as he touched down in front of the building…and made no move to enter.
His eyes narrowing, Lex watched as the stallion instead stood in front of the door and looked toward the street, fidgeting slightly…just as a distant bell rang, announcing that it was midnight.
Certain that this was no coincidence, Lex spent several seconds weighing the risks, then abandoned his hiding place, stalking toward the unknown pony.
As soon as he caught sight of Lex approaching, the stallion straightened up, a polite smile gracing his features. “Prince Legis! I’m truly honored to-”
“Identify yourself!” demanded Lex as he stalked toward the pegasus. “Now!”
The unknown pony’s smile wavered, but only for a moment. “Of course, Your Highness! My name is Speedy Delivery, and I’m with the Courteous Courier Service, where we guarantee that your shipment is always made with a smile! I’ve been instructed to deliver this message to you personally,” he explained as he reached into a pocket with one wing, withdrawing an envelope.
Lex eyed the paper container for a long moment, making no move to collect it. Instead, he turned his eyes back toward the pegasus. “Who commissioned you to do this?”
“Ah, well, Your Highness, client requests for anonymity are always honored at your business-”
“Who,” rumbled Lex again, his eyes glowing, “commissioned you to do this?”
His smile perilously close to failing, Speedy Delivery gulped. “I, uh, I didn’t get his name, but it was an earth stallion. Blue mane and tail. His cutie mark was covered by his outfit, honest!”
Lex narrowed his eyes at that. The same description as the pony who had arranged for the ransom note to be delivered. A disguise? A collaborator? Or some dupe hired to instruct the couriers out of an abundance of caution on the culprit’s part?
Taking the envelope in his telekinesis, Lex eyed it warily, wishing he could examine it for magic with his circlet. As it was, the only clue was his name written on the outside in plain, blocky letters.
Glancing back at where Speedy Delivery was waiting, Lex made a dismissive gesture. “You may leave.”
“Of course, Sire,” replied the stallion, recovering his poise. “And if you found our service satisfactory, please consider telling your friends and colleagues about the Courteous Courier-”
“Leave. Now.”
Still somehow managing to keep his smile intact, Speedy Delivery bobbed his head once before taking off. Lex watched the stallion go, making sure that he was gone before glancing back down the block. Sonata and Aria were still leading everypony away, following his instructions to make sure that the ponies they’d ensorcelled were nowhere near here when they ceased concentrating on their enchantment. It would hold for a little while without them being there to maintain it, but he wanted to make absolutely sure that none of the ponies they’d enchanted would consider coming back to celebrate at their residence to celebrate, instead seeking to party elsewhere.
Knowing that they’d be back in a few minutes, and not wanting them around in the unlikely event that the envelope was trapped – while there was no reason to think it was, the memory of how Xiriel’s scroll had exploded in his face wasn’t something Lex had forgotten – he telekinetically held the envelope at a distance and opened it.
After several seconds went by with nothing happening, he removed the contents, unfolding them as he made out the single line of script.
The factory. Now. Or she dies.
Swearing, Lex threw the letter to the ground, looking at the building in question, knowing that whoever had sent this had to be in there, watching him right now. But there were few streetlights this close to the edge of the city, and none close enough to illuminate the factory.
For an instant, Lex considered waiting for Sonata and Aria to return. He’d cast his whisper spell on the two of them before they’d set out into the sewers; even if he couldn’t hear anything they said to him, he could still at least send messages to them. But while its duration had yet to expire, its range was limited to a little over two hundred feet, and they were further away than that now, and would likely remain so for at least a few minutes more.
And if whoever had sent this letter – and who had doubtlessly seen him open it and read the contents – saw him standing around and waiting for the Sirens to return, Feather Duster’s life could very well be forfeit. Just like with the people in the apartment building, that wasn’t a risk that could be countenanced in good conscience.
Snarling, Lex took out the floating gemstones that he’d taken from Xiriel, setting them in orbit around himself as he turned and stalked toward the factory.
Speedy Delivery’s eyes widened as Lex made his way toward the worn-down old building. That letter must have told him to go there!
Finding that out had been extraordinarily difficult. While it would have been simplicity itself to simply tear open the envelope and examine its contents, that would have made for some rather awkward questions upon delivering it. Steaming it open hadn’t been an option either, since there weren’t any convenient pots of water or stoves just sitting around waiting to be put to use. Ultimately, the only option had been to turn the letter over to its intended recipient and watch how Lex reacted when opening it.
Of course, the stallion in question had done his best to stymie that, refusing to open the letter until he thought he was alone. That had left Speedy Delivery with no choice but to pretend to leave, flying at a level below the rooftops for a few blocks – a plausible enough action given that the massive clouds that Vanhoover’s glamorous upper city sat on were dense enough that pegasi couldn’t simply fly through them – before winging around a building and out of sight. Fortunately, Lex had taken the exit at face value, not realizing that the courier had frantically winged back around to peer at him from atop a nearby roof.
The entire thing had been a major gamble, but one that had ultimately paid off. And this isn’t even the hard part yet.
Heaving a sigh at how something so simple had proven to be so much effort, Speedy Delivery heaved a sigh, flopping back down onto the roof.
…and changed back into Thermal Draft.
I still think this is a bad idea, sweetheart, came the voice of Kara a moment later, renewing her reservations about the current course of action. This is likely to be dangerous, and you’re not a fighter. Remember how poorly your last sojourn into danger turned out?
“I can’t just do nothing,” muttered Drafty, staring up at the heavy clouds that kept the lower part of Las Pegasus in perpetual shadow. “I know I can help.”
How?
Drafty didn’t answer right away, instead lifting her head up to peek back over the edge of the roof.
Lex had stopped in front of the large double doors at the front of the factory, looking them over carefully. As she watched, his horn lit up, a matching aura springing to life around the doors as he pulled them open. He regarded the open entrance for just a moment, and then strode inside, out of sight. It would probably be at least a few minutes until he met with whoever had kidnapped Feather Duster; the place looked pretty big.
“I don’t know yet,” she answered at last, standing upright as she vaulted over the side of the building – a crumbling schoolhouse down the block from the factory that Lex had just entered – opening her wings to slow her fall a few seconds before she touched down, making her way to the building’s back entrance. “That’s why I brought backup.”
She’d barely set hoof inside the building before said backup rounded on her.
“Lex met with some courier while you were out,” blurted Nosey Newsy, standing up from where she’d been peering out between the slats of a boarded-up window. “They were too far away for me to eavesdrop, and the entrance to that apartment building isn’t in my line of sight, but I saw Lex approach him – the courier I mean – and then head down the street a minute later. There aren’t too many buildings in that direction, so if we hurry-”
“He’s heading for that old factory,” interrupted Thermal Draft flatly. Although she knew that the four-eyed pegasus wasn't responsible for having killed her, the memory of the attack that had ended her life wasn't something easily forgotten. Nor was the fact that this mare had thrown away Lex's love, hurting him terribly in the process. “The one at the end of the block.”
Nosey’s eyes widened just a little as she tilted her head. “Where were you hiding that you were able to see that?”
Drafty couldn’t help the smug expression that crossed her face then. I was hiding in plain sight, rather than in some ramshackle hole, you dolt. But she kept that thought to herself, shrugging. “Splitting up so that we’d have better vantage points to see what was going on was your idea, remember? I just picked a better one,” she finished, giving her wings a flap.
Nosey frowned. “It must be nice being a pegasus,” she muttered, before shaking her head. “Okay, so we know where he’s headed. That means that’s where Feather Duster and the kidnapper are, so then…”
When she didn’t complete her sentence immediately, Thermal Draft stomped a hoof. “Look, maybe those dramatic pauses make for sensational reading in the newspaper, but Lex is already inside the building! If all those years of investigate journalism that you were bragging about have given you some sort of insight whoever’s holding Feather Duster for ransom, now’s the time to share it!”
“…It’s not a ransom.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not a ransom,” repeated Nosey after a moment, her expression grave. “Think about it. Whoever did this was smart enough to cover their tracks. They only sent messages through couriers, and made sure to direct Lex to a location that wasn’t their hideout, not giving him the real address until the last minute so he couldn’t investigate the place ahead of time.” She pushed her glasses up her face then. “So why don’t they have a way out prepared?”
Thermal Draft blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Look at it from the kidnapper’s point of view,” explained Nosey. “They’re in an empty building at the edge of the city, surrounded by desert in every direction. There’s no train station nearby, no hot air balloons, and I’m pretty sure we would have seen it if there was an airship parked somewhere around here. So once they get the money, where are they going to go? They can’t possibly think that once they turn Feather Duster over, they’ll just be allowed to walk out of there.”
“Well…maybe she’s not in the factory with them,” ventured Drafty, feeling a chill run down her spine. “Maybe they stashed her someplace else, and plan on giving Lex the address in exchange for the money.”
But Nosey was already shaking her head. “Look, we both know Lex. Do you really think he’s just going to let whoever did this get away with it?” She let that hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “No, as soon as he sees them face to face, he’ll capture them and make them tell him where Feather Duster is. And I’m betting that whoever did this knows that, so the lack of a quick getaway method is odd. Not to mention how suspicious their demands are.”
Not liking where this was going, Thermal Draft raised a brow. “Suspicious how?”
“Ten thousand bits isn’t that much,” muttered Nosey, seemingly speaking to herself as much as the other mare. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, and it just doesn’t make sense. This is Las Pegasus; you can win more than that if you hit it big at one of the casinos in the upper city. Plus, everypony knows that royalty can get all the money they want, and the newspapers here are all talking about how Lex has the city’s richest ponies funding his recovery initiative for Vanhoover to the tune of millions and millions of bits. So why go to all this trouble just to ask for pocket change?”
Thermal Draft shifted her hooves, biting her lip as she digested all of that. “So, if this isn’t a ransom, then what is it?”
“A trap.”
The interior of the factory was pitch black, with the distant streetlights barely able to send more than a tendril of illumination in through the open doors.
Lex briefly considered opening them wider, allowing more light to spill inward, but discarded the idea as futile. The entrance to the factory was set back from the street, leaving a sprawling yard that had likely once been a flurry of activity as whatever was manufactured here was loaded onto carts and shipped out. Now, the extra space between the building and the streetlights made the latter’s radiance more diffuse, as though struggling to bridge the distance.
But despite how dim the light was, it was enough for Lex to see the tendril of smoke curling through the air in front of him.
The sight made him narrow his eyes, wary. The vapor was thin and wispy, more hazy than anything substantial. There was no unusual odor accompanying whatever was in the air either, or at least none that he could detect, which along with the lack of any sort of temperature fluctuations ruled out a fire having been set. Some sort of toxic substance, then?
The thought made Lex uneasy. While the Night Mare had given him only a single, weak healing spell, she’d been far more forthcoming when it came to other types of curative magic. He could reduce strain on the body, cure blindness or deafness, and banish disease, among other palliative spells. Poison, however, was an area where his goddess had been less generous. The one spell she’d given him in that regard would merely delay the onset of any poison the recipients came in contact with, rather than neutralizing it…and even then, not for very long; a few hours at most.
Of course, such a threat would have meant nothing to him if he’d been able to turn incorporeal with impunity the way he was accustomed to. But just like the prospect of enhancing his senses to see through the darkness, that option was useless now, thanks to the botched ritual he’d performed. Which meant whatever vapor was in the air was something he’d have to endure; if it was toxic, then Feather Duster was likely already exposed to it, and so he’d need to save his poison-retarding spell for when he’d be able to use it on her as well as himself.
And whoever had set up this trap – which it absolutely was; the paltry sum demanded, lack of viable escape vectors, and what was looking more and more like a deliberate attempt to separate him from Sonata and Aria, all pointed to that inescapable conclusion – was plainly signaling that Feather Duster was here.
The single yellow feather lying inside the factory entrance made that very clear.
The sight was enough to make Lex abandon his hesitation, lest the kidnapper – whether it was Silhouette or somepony else entirely – use it as an excuse to make good on their threat against her life. Even so, Lex chose his steps with caution as he walked into the haze-filled factory, looking in every direction as he moved. A thought was all it took to pick up the single piece of plumage, and Lex kept it in his telekinetic grip, the aura surrounding it, along with the matching one around his horn and the soft glow from his eyes, managing to push back the darkness just a little.
Further in, just at the edge of the dim light he was making, another feather could be seen, and Lex knew that he was being led. But there was nothing he could do about it, save to see where the path went.
The seconds crept by as he ventured deeper into the abandoned building. The trail of feathers led him on a zigzagging route, winding around stacks of steel barrels, the metal frames of disassembled conveyor belts and freestanding machines, and support columns that stretched upward. Several times he caught glimpses of chains hanging down from somewhere above, often with hooks on the ends, and the glimpse of metal stairs heading upward suggested that there were catwalks crisscrossing the place.
And then he found her.
Bound in chains and hanging from her forelegs – the metal links binding them together having been laid over a hook hanging from above – the pegasus mare was blindfolded and gagged, and a spike of apprehension shot through Lex as he saw that she wasn’t moving. But he stifled the urge to rush over and check on her condition, fully aware that she was the bait for this trap, which meant that this was where it would be sprung. Instead, he looked around, doing his best to pay attention to what little he could make out of his surroundings.
But in no matter where he looked, there was only blackness and silence.
Slowly, his every nerve on edge, Lex crept closer to Feather Duster, ready to make spikes of black crystal erupt from the ground at the slightest hint of an ambush. But when he got to within hooves’ reach of her, he couldn’t help but feel a trickle of relief: she was alive. He could just barely make out her chest expanding and contracting, the motion almost impossible to make out in the dim light, especially with the way the omnipresent haze was swirling around her-
Lex’s eyes widened in alarm.
Moving. The smoke was moving, despite the air being completely still! Which meant something-, no, someone was-
He didn’t have time to finish the thought before a dagger plunged into his back.
Dark Streak knew immediately that she’d failed to strike a fatal blow.
There were some assassins who relied on sheer strength to get the job done, coming at their targets with overwhelming force until they’d hacked or bludgeoned them to death. That wasn’t her; even if she’d wanted to, she didn’t have the build for engaging in that level of brutality. Instead, she preferred to use finesse, attacking a target’s most vulnerable points in order to finish them off as quickly as possible.
In the case of Lex Legis, she’d been aiming for the back of his neck. If everything had gone according to plan, the blade of her dagger would have slipped directly between his fourth and fifth vertebrae, severing his spinal column and causing instant death.
But something had alerted him to the danger, causing him to shift in place at the last possible second. She didn’t know if it was because of those ioun stones he had circling him (supposedly their functions could be identified by their cut and materials, but Dark Streak had never studied those), or some spell he’d cast before coming inside, or if he was just stupidly lucky. All that mattered was that he’d moved a fraction of an inch right before her blade had struck home, throwing off the precision behind her attack and causing her blade to sink into the meat of his shoulder rather than his spine.
Worse, her invisibility spell had just worn off.
She didn’t know why that spell was designed to abruptly terminate when an attack was launched, only that it did, and that was a problem because while Lex Legis had clearly felt that attack – his mouth opening in a strangled hiss of pain – his eyes were already turning toward her even as the aura surrounding his horn flared violently.
Dark Streak didn’t hesitate. Her right talon twisted the blade in his shoulder in an attempt to deepen the wound, and hopefully throw off whatever magic he was using, even as she brought her left around, her second dagger aiming directly for his heart-
The attack never reached him. Instead, she was forced to break it off as black crystals erupted from the floor. They came up at a low angle, and would have slashed her legs to ribbons if she hadn’t managed to leap into the air – tearing her dagger from Lex’s shoulder – dodging the spikes by a hair’s breadth. Launching herself backward with a single flap of her wings, she landed several feet away from him, knowing that if she hadn’t studied up on him that likely would have gotten her.
Looks like Willow was right, she smirked to herself. And not just about his powers. It hadn’t escaped her notice that Lex’s counterattack hadn’t gone for any vital points. But then again, that wasn’t a surprise, since according to Willow he couldn’t bring himself to kill his own kind.
And thanks to the magic in her hat, she looked just like his pegasus maid at the moment.
She could almost see the confusion in his eyes, hesitating as he looked her over before his eyes slid to the bound figure hanging a few feet away from him, trying to figure out what was going on. It was an opportunity that Dark Streak didn’t let pass her by, wings beating fast as she rushed forward, darting around the spikes he’d raised with a hard curve, rolling in mid-air as she lashed out with her daggers.
She saw him grit his teeth, his horn lighting up again just before she struck home…only for an expression of shock to cross his face as nothing happened, causing her to grin as she sank her blade into his side halfway to the hilt. Surprise, she snickered inwardly as she pulled the blade along his chest in a savage cut. No turning into a shadow for you.
That was thanks to the incense she’d whipped up with the materials she’d bought in Canterlot. It was just one of the recipes she’d taken after killing the alchemist who’d scribed the spells into her brain, creating a “phasic disruption” that made insubstantial creatures solid while within its vapors. While it had taken quite a few sticks of the stuff to fill the entire warehouse, the price had been eminently worth it.
After all, Dark Streak noted as she brought her other dagger around in an arc that would open Lex’s throat, you have to spend money to make money.
But to her surprise, Lex didn’t try to avoid the blow. Instead, he bent his knees and lunged toward it, tucking his head as he did. The result was that, rather than slicing his neck open, the blade of her dagger cut a deep groove across the top of his head, skittering across the roof of his skull in a laceration that was likely very painful but did very little damage…save for slicing his horn off near the base, the red prong hitting the ground with a trickle of blood.
The sight made her sneer. Idiot. What good is saving yourself if you let me cripple you in the process? While she wasn’t sure how much a spellcaster like Lex needed his horn to use his magic, she felt sure that losing it would do something to impede his-
That line of thinking came to an abrupt halt as Lex’s horn suddenly grew back, causing her eyes to widen in alarm. Willow never said anything about that!
Unable to help herself, her eyes shot downward to where the severed appendage had fallen, checking to make sure what she’d seen hadn’t been some sort of illusion. It was only as she caught sight of Lex’s sudden grin out of her periphery that she realized she’d just fallen for the same trap she’d sprung on him, looking away from an enemy while in close quarters. Swearing, she turned her eyes back toward him just in time to see his horn light up…
And the horn that she’d cut off of him suddenly changed into black crystals, lancing upward.
Again, Dark Streak lurched into the air, but Lex was apparently ready for her to try that this time, and the spike of black crystal – long and thin like an oversized needle – shot higher, carving a bloody groove across her belly as she twisted in mid-air.
Choking down a cry of pain, Dark Streak prioritized falling back, thankful he hadn’t hit the enchanted goggles she was wearing that allowed her to see in the dark. Wings beating harshly as she put more distance between herself and Lex, she saw him turn back toward the bound pony, eyeing the chained maid cautiously. Oh no you don’t!
Even if she’d somehow missed that Lex could apparently regrow lost body parts, Willow’s description of his personality had been spot-on so far. Which meant that, once he got over his confusion about whether or not the Feather Duster hanging in front of him was the real one, he’d almost certainly try to get her out of here. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, since otherwise there was nothing keeping him here in the kill zone she’d readied.
Fortunately, she’d prepared for an extended encounter.
Winging upward, a single swift motion was all it took for her to sheathe the dagger in her right talon. It was one of her primary weapons, enchanted to be unnaturally sharp, and so was too useful for her to easily discard. The same couldn’t be said for the unenchanted one she drew a second later, aiming and throwing it at the lever on an overhead catwalk.
Her throw was perfectly aimed, knocking the lever into its upper position. The effect was immediate, as down below Feather Duster suddenly shut upward, the chain she was hanging from suddenly retracting. Dark Streak watched as Lex, visibly startled, tried to grab the pegasus with his telekinesis…only to apparently realize that for her to ascend that fast must have meant that there was a corresponding counterweight coming down. It was with a twinge of irritation that Dark Streak watched him throw himself to the side just before the metal table she’d spent so much effort dragging up there crashed down onto where he’d been a half-second prior.
Cursing inwardly, she flew upward to land on the catwalk in question, taking just a moment to throw the coupling link she’d put there earlier around chain right above Feather Duster’s hooves, connecting it to the catwalk railing…just as the rest of the chain suddenly went slack, causing her prisoner to dangle in place rather than fall. Glancing over the railing, Dark Streak smirked; sure enough, just like she’d expected, Lex was standing there with a short length of black crystal in his telekinesis, having just cut the chain she’d tied around the table. He knew that without the counterweight, his maid should have come falling right back toward him. Too bad I knew that too.
She watched, waiting for his next move…only to cock her head as his eyes scanned back and forth blankly, not locking onto Feather Duster or her. No way. It can’t be.
But when he didn’t try and so much as tug on the hanging pegasus with his horn’s aura, she knew it for certain: he couldn’t see them.
I thought he was supposed to be some sort of incredible wizard, but he can’t even see in the dark? laughed the griffon silently, watching as Lex turned and moved deeper into the factory, apparently looking for a way upward. The place was crowded, and some of the clutter left behind was stacked high enough that he quickly moved out of her sight. Not that it mattered too much; the dim glow from his horn – which he was apparently using to see – meant that he’d never be able to sneak up on her, even if she hadn’t had her goggles on.
Silently snickering, Dark Streak spared one last glance for Feather Duster – still unconscious thanks to the oil of taggit she’d made her drink – and moved to follow Lex. But her movements were relaxed now, knowing that she held a powerful advantage. After all, Lex wouldn’t leave before recovering his maid, and with what Dark Streak now knew, he’d never find his mare before she got the drop on him. Now I just need to figure out how to deal with that regeneration of his.
Or maybe I won't have to, she mused to herself as she flew through the hazy air. With any luck, the deathblade poison that I coated my daggers with will finish him off for me.
“…until the break! Of! Dawn!”
Sonata and Aria stood on their hind legs as they sang the last note of their song, hooves held wide. Ahead of them, the ponies they’d enchanted whooped and hollered as they continued forward, heedless of the fact that they were leaving the Sirens behind as they continued toward the more populous parts of Las Pegasus’s lower city, still looking to party. In less than a minute, they’d disappeared around a corner, though the sound of their continued laughing and cheering continued to hang in the air after them.
Falling back onto all fours, Sonata gave a cheer of her own. “Alright! Mission totes accomplished!”
“It won’t last until morning, but they should stay enchanted long enough for Lex to make short work of whoever snatched whatshername,” agreed Aria.
Sonata clapped her hooves in excitement. “Ooh! Speaking of which, I wanna be the one to tell him we took care of our part with no slip-ups!” Covering one ear with her hoof, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Princess Hot Plot to Chief Red Horn. Come in Chief Red Horn. The beagle has landed! I repeat: the beagle has landed!”
Aria stared at her sister, brows rising. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Um, reporting in. Duh.”
For a moment, Aria could only work her jaw soundlessly, needing a few seconds to process just how much of an idiot Sonata was. “You do realize that we’re out of range for Lex’s whisper spell to work, right? And even if we weren’t, he couldn’t hear you because of what happened with that ritual you made me screw up?”
“Oh yeah!” giggled Sonata, sticking her tongue out as she playfully bopped herself on the head. “I was so excited about him asking us to help that I totes forg-…wait a second! What do you mean I made you screw it up?!”
“And for that matter,” continued Aria without missing a beat as she turned around and started heading back the way they came, “it makes no sense to say ‘the beagle has landed’ since beagles can’t fly, you dimwit.”
“Oh yeah…would it have worked better if I had said weasel instead?”
“Ugh!”
The playful bickering continued as the duo made their way back to the apartment building they’d just cleared, but both of them fell silent as they saw that there was no one there to greet them. “Oh, he did NOT!” snarled Aria in sudden rage.
“Huh?” Blinking, Sonata looked at her sister, confused. “Who didn’t what?”
“Lex!” bellowed Aria in a rage. “He was supposed to wait for us here, and instead he ran off to go save that stupid maid on his own while we were taking care of that crowd!”
“No way!” whimpered Sonata, her ears folding back. “He said he wanted us to help out this time…”
“He was probably just telling us what he thought we wanted to hear,” spat Aria bitterly. “After all, we’re so messed up that we need someone like him, who’s so much smarter than we are, to make all of our decisions for us, remember?” She kicked a rock angrily, sending it skipping across the sidewalk. “It’s just like what happened with that scry-spy thing or whatever it was; he pushes us away and we’re just supposed to accept that it’s for our own good! How we feel about it doesn’t matter!”
“I really thought he got it that time,” sniffled Sonata, before shaking her head. “You know what? Maybe we’re, like, jumping to complications! There could totes be another reason he’s not here!”
Snorting in disgust, Aria didn’t even bother to correct her sister’s mangled idiom. “Like what?”
“Well, um…” Biting her lip as she tried to think of something, Sonata suddenly perked up. “Ooh! I know! Maybe he’s still here now, but he’s just hiding!”
Aria gave her sister a disgusted look. “Are you kidding me?”
“Come on, it’s not that crazy!” insisted Sonata. “I mean, think about it! He said he’d be hiding while he watched us get everyone out of the building, so maybe he’s still hiding now!” Looking around hopefully, Sonata waved a hoof in a random direction. “Lex! We totes did it! You can come out now!”
Shaking her head, Aria gave a mirthless laugh. “Give it up, Sonata.”
But the other Siren would not be deterred, trotting over to look behind the scraggly shrubs planted along the front of the apartment building they’d just emptied. “Lex! We, like, admit that you’re the best there is at hide and seek! Come out come out wherever you are! Olly olly-, hey, what’s this?”
Picking up the discarded piece of paper, Sonata turned it over, examining the single line of writing for just a moment before her eyes widened. “Um, Aria?”
The mare in question barely stirred, staring at the ground with a miserable expression. “What?”
“I think I know where Lex went.”
The worried tone in her sister’s voice got Aria’s attention as much as the words themselves, rousing her from her funk as she glanced over at where Sonata was trotting toward her, holding the crumpled piece of paper out toward her with a tense expression.
Snatching the paper, Aria looked it over…and her eyebrows shot upward, a flurry of emotions rushing through her. Relief that there’d been a good reason why Lex had run out on them. Embarrassment at how she hadn’t had enough faith in him. Irritation that Sonata of all ponies had been the one to figure out what had happened.
But the one that came through the strongest was worry. Something like this hadn’t been part of the plan, and while Lex was the strongest pony – the strongest anything, really – that she knew, Aria was keenly aware that he was far from invincible. She’d seen him be seriously injured too many times to think that. And with how much he’d been fretting over that failed ritual – something she knew was her fault, as much as she wanted to deny it – the chances of that were higher than normal if things came down to a fight, the way they so often seemed to with him.
Dropping the letter, Aria looked at Sonata and scowled, pointing at the location written on it. “What are you just standing there for?! We need to go help Lex right now!”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned and started galloping toward the factory, Sonata right behind her.
With a soft snapping sound, the bobby pin broke cleanly in two.
Nosey stared at the broken length of metal for a long moment, the lower half of which was now stuck in the padlock securing the chains wrapped around the handles of the factory’s rooftop entrance. The aura around her horn guttered out as she dropped the remaining half of the hairpin, licking her lips as she turned around to look at where Thermal Draft was tapping her hoof impatiently. “Okay, so as it turns out, picking locks is actually pretty hard to do.”
Putting a hoof to her face as she saw the condition the lock was in, the pegasus gave a strangled groan. “Great. Just great. I carried your fat flank all the way up here because I thought that maybe, maybe you were right about us needing to be covert. Instead, we’re wasting time playing around while Lex walked right into a trap!”
Flapping her wings, Drafty hovered an inch off of the roof, giving the unicorn a disdainful look. “You can keep playing Shadow Spade if you want to. I’m going through the front door!”
She didn’t wait for a response before taking off…only for her departure to be abruptly curtailed as she felt a sharp yank on her tail, the unexpected sensation making her squawk in pain and surprise, flopping back down onto the rooftop. Grunting as she picked herself up, she glanced back, frowning as she caught sight of Nosey’s telekinetic aura around her tail. “What’re you doing?!”
“Stopping you from making a mistake!” shot back Nosey. “The last time I ran into a dangerous situation without a plan, I ended up possessed, which resulted in you dying!”
Her rebuke had effect she’d been hoping for, Thermal Draft’s eyes widening and her mouth falling open. Seeing that there was no argument forthcoming from the pegasus, Nosey released her tail, taking a deep breath. “Look, I know you don’t like me, and I’m guessing it’s not just because of what happened when I…wasn’t myself.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment, and when Thermal Draft averted her eyes with a scowl, Nosey continued. “But you need to remember that, regardless of how you feel about the way things ended between Lex and me, you’re the one who asked me to come help out now, because you knew that my special talent might be useful.”
“And aren’t you doing a bang-up job of it so far,” muttered the chastised pegasus, glancing at the padlock again.
“I’ll admit I screwed up the lock thing,” replied Nosey evenly. “But what I said before about us coming up here still stands. Right now, we have no idea what’s going on in there, which means that our best chance of sneaking in and grabbing Feather Duster – which is how we can be most useful to Lex, since then he’ll be able to fight without needing to worry about rescuing or protecting her – is if we enter in a way the kidnapper isn’t expecting.”
“Even if that means we’re up here, taking our sweet time figuring out a way in, while for all we know Lex is fighting for his life?” huffed Thermal Draft petulantly.
The corner of Nosey’s mouth turned up. “Do I really need to tell you how many enemies Lex has triumphed over? If anything, I’d say it’s more likely that by the time we figure out a way in, he’ll have everything wrapped up.”
Thermal Draft snorted at that, but Nosey was relieved to see that there was a hint of a smile on her lips. “Alright. So how do we get inside?”
Nosey grimaced at that, turning back to the problem at hoof. “Yeah…I was kind of hoping that my speech would have inspired you to come up with something.”
Thermal Draft rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything, and several seconds passed as the two mares regarded the locked door in front of them, until the pegasus broke the silence. “What about making a key?” she muttered.
Nosey raised an eyebrow at the odd idea, giving her companion a sidelong glance. “What, you mean with magic?”
For a moment, Thermal Draft didn’t react to the question, only belatedly nodding as she kept her eyes on the padlock. “Yeah.”
Nosey frowned at how distant the other mare was being, almost as though her attention was somewhere else entirely, before shaking her head. “I’ve never heard of a spell that’ll just make a key to whatever lock you need appear out of thin air. I mean, maybe Lex knows one with that crazy magic of his, but I only know basic Equestrian spellcasting. I can probably get the broken half of the bobby pin out of there, but that’s it.”
Her ears flattening for a moment, Thermal Draft shook her head. “You’re right. It was a dumb idea.”
“It was worth asking,” reassured Nosey, though privately she thought otherwise. A spell to just make a lock out of nothing? Exactly what kind of magic did this mare think unicorns had?
“There’s got to be something else,” continued Thermal Draft. “Bolt cutters, maybe?”
“I don’t have any, and it’s not like there’s any just conveniently lying around,” sighed Nosey. “I hate to say it, but I think we’re going to need to find another way in. Maybe through one of the windows on the side of the building?”
This time Thermal Draft was the one shaking her head, finally looking at her again. “I saw them while I was flying us up here. They’re all triple-hung windows with lower-tilt latches, where the panes don’t slide up or down but instead have the bottoms push outward a couple of inches. The sort you install if you want to be able to unfasten them for cleaning or ventilation, without them opening wide enough that a tardy pegasus could slip inside when she’s late for work.”
Arching a brow at the unmistakably autobiographical note in the explanation, Nosey pursed her lips as she looked around. “Well, there has to be some other…wait…ventilation.”
“Huh? What about it?” Thermal Draft frowned, giving Nosey a confused look. “I already said, those kinds of windows won’t open widely enough-”
“Not that kind of ventilation,” interrupted Nosey, a grin forming on her face as she pointed the boxy metal protrusion jutting up from the far corner of the roof, one that – in her estimation – looked large enough to fit a pony. “That kind! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before! This close to the desert, every building has air conditioning, and even if this place isn’t being used anymore the ducts are still there! Come on!”
She didn’t wait for an answer, galloping toward the ventilator shaft, Thermal Draft following behind her.
Even before his wounds began burning, Lex knew that he was in serious trouble.
His initial estimation that this was a trap had been proven correct in the worst possible way. Despite not saying a word during the initial attack, his attacker had made that very clear. Worse, it was now obvious that whoever – or whatever – had attacked him had not only taken care to leverage the battlefield in their favor, but had studied up on him beforehoof.
The fact that he couldn’t change into shadow-form was proof enough of that. Although doing so would have robbed him of his senses, seeing how adroitly his opponent had wielded their daggers – easily surpassing what he’d seen Garden Gate do – had convinced Lex that the rapid-shifting technique he’d used against Starlight Glimmer would be worthwhile. From his perspective, it would make everything look like it was under a strobe light, since he’d be unable to see anything during each micro-transformation, but the same would be true for how his enemy saw him, putting them on a more even hoofing.
His surprise had been complete when he’d found himself unable to do so. Despite his ability to sense spells being cast in his immediate presence being muffled, Lex felt reasonably confident he’d have felt something if a spell had been used to lock him into place. Nor had there been any tell-tale signs of magic being used, whether in the form of a glowing horn or the sound of chanting. It was possible that her weapons had some sort of enchantment to form-lock anyone they wounded, but even if he couldn’t feel emanations of magic being activated, it was difficult to imagine that the highly-developed magical channels in his body – aided by the magic items he wore – wouldn’t be able to fight off such an invasive effect.
That left only the odd vapors permeating the building.
That was a hypothesis with nothing to support it, but without any further data, it was the least-unlikely theory that Lex could come up with. If the smoke was somehow interfering with his ability to displace his corporeal mass, or perhaps with the mode required to maintain an incorporeal form altogether, then there’d be nothing for his internal magical processes to resist; whatever magic the vapors had would be distributed throughout the local vicinity, affecting it rather than him directly.
Either way, he’d still strained himself notably on his failed attempt to shift back and forth between solidity and incorporeality, the result of which was that he’d fatigued himself for nothing.
Worse, he'd allowed his assailant to score a substantial hit on him, opening up a deep gash in his abdomen…one which, like the cut on his shoulder, was starting to sting badly.
Fighting down a grunt as he spotted a metal staircase hugging the wall of the building, Lex made his way over to it. But rather than ascending the steps, he instead moved under them, letting the stairs act as cover in case his adversary came flying at him again. They obviously had some way of seeing in the dark, which meant that they were likely observing him right now, and there was a very real chance that they’d want to prevent him from casting a spell…
But I’m going to have to chance it, Lex knew. The burning sensation in his shoulder and side were getting worse, but that alarmed him less than how the feeling was spreading to his chest. Already, he could feel his breathing becoming labored, having to struggle to force air into his lungs.
As much as he’d wanted to save his poison-retarding for when he’d found Feather Duster so that he could cast it on both of them just to be safe, it was clear to Lex that he no longer had that option. His enemy’s blades had obviously been coated with some sort of toxic substance, and even if it wasn’t lethal, he was already at a severe disadvantage several times over. He couldn’t afford to be impaired any further.
A few gestures and a short liturgy to the Night Mare were all it took to invoke the spell, and fortunately whoever had attacked him didn’t take the opportunity to do so again now. The result was that, when Lex pressed his hoof to his chest, discharging the spell, the burning sensation in his wounds immediately vanished, his lungs clearing a second later. Four hours, decided Lex as he took a moment to reorient himself. Maybe five, then it’ll come back.
The good news was that the spell would remain active until then, so any subsequent poison he was exposed to would be a non-issue until then. The bad news was that his enemy had numerous other weapons at their disposal. An invisibility spell. Some way of navigating in the dark. Obvious proficiency at flying.
None of those were beyond the reach of what Equestrian magic could do. But the anti-incorporeal vapors suggested a familiarity with advanced magical concoctions, and the combat prowess was indicative of a history of violence. There were few ponies who could claim all of those mantles, and most of them were the princesses whom he’d already defeated.
More disturbing was his foe’s disguise magic. Lex had never seen a changeling before, but that sounded like their signature ability. Then again, such illusions were child’s play for what the spellwork on Everglow was capable of. But if his foe was from that world, then the implications were far more disturbing…
Shaking his head, Lex put his speculations aside. Figuring out who was attacking him and why would have to come later. Right now, he needed to focus on rescuing Feather Duster and getting her out of here safely. That meant dismantling his enemy’s tactics one by one.
First was their ability to alter their appearance. That was an excellent way to get someone to lower their guard, but instead they’d broadcast it loud and clear by taking the form of the pony he’d come to rescue while she was in plain sight. Which meant it had been done with another intent in mind…
“Sonata, Aria,” Lex whispered, alternately hoping and dreading that they were in range of his whisper-spell. “Be aware that the enemy is using magic to alter their appearance. If you see me, say my name backward so that I’ll be able to identify you. I’ll do the same.” As far as codes went, it wasn’t very creative. But it would get the job done, at least until he ran across whoever was attacking him again.
“They fight with knives, use poison, fly, and aren’t hindered by a lack of light,” he continued. “Exercise extreme caution. If you find Feather Duster, get her out of here immediately.”
With nothing left to do, Lex cast the weak healing spell the Night Mare had given him on himself, keeping his eyes turned upward as he finished the liturgy and moved out from under the stairs, circling around to begin climbing them.
They let me cast two spells without interruption, as well as gave me enough time to try sending a message. That refuge wasn’t so secure that they couldn’t have attacked me if they’d wanted. Are they hoping that the poison would finish me off? He’d never had cause to use his spell to slow the spread of poison before now, so there was no way they could have anticipated that. But now that it’s failed, they’ll make another attempt soon.
When that happened, he’d be hard-pressed to defend himself. They’d all but danced around the black spikes he’d created; the only hit he’d scored had been because they hadn’t realized that his horn grew back. But there was no way that trick would work a second time…
His every sense on alert, Lex finished ascending the stairs…and stopped.
The catwalk he’d climbed onto spread out in three different directions, the stairs having come up at a T-intersection. Forward and back hugged the wall of the factory, while the perpendicular path went deeper into it. But that wasn’t what interested Lex.
Rather, his attention was held by the steel barrel placed where the path split.
More specifically, by how it had been perforated in several places, with vapor pouring out of the holes.
The sight made Lex’s eyes narrow. So this is where that smoke is coming from. Of course, it couldn’t be the only source of the stuff; this place was large enough that there had to be others to fill it so completely. But if he could snuff this one, and possibly others, then he’d be able to minimize another of his enemy’s strengths.
Which they had to be aware of.
Which meant that this was a trap.
Another quick look around still showed nothing nearby, nor could he hear anything, but Lex felt more certain than ever that he was being watched. But while the temptation to avoid the trap and keep looking for Feather Duster was strong, the chance to recover even a little of his options was one Lex knew he couldn’t pass up lightly. Being able to flicker back and forth between solidity and immateriality would be useful in the likely scenario that he wound up in another fight with his dagger-wielding foe.
Which means I need to risk it. But there’s no reason not to reduce the risk as much as possible, decided Lex as he backed away from the barrel, until it was just barely within the light of his horn.
Reaching out, he telekinetically grasped it, and when nothing happened, slowly lifted it upward, raising it high enough that he could see a wooden stand of some sort inside it. Cautiously, he raised the barrel further, until he could see that on top of the stand, there was an incense holder containing a single lit stick.
But what caught his attention more was the glass bottle – the inside of which glowed with stored lightning – next to it, sitting on a small mat attached to a string, the other end of which was taut, stretching upward as though it had been attached to the underside of the barrel’s top. And it was already raising the mat enough that the bottle was tipping over…
His eyes widening as he realized what was about to happen, Lex tried to lower the barrel, but it was already too late. Before he could stop it, the glass bottle fell, shattering as it struck the metal catwalk, immediately discharging its contents into the conductive substance and making Lex grit his teeth as the current washed over him painfully.
And in the momentary flash created by the sudden electrical burst, he managed to spot a dark shape swooping toward him, daggers at the ready.
His muscles still spasming from the electrical shock he’d suffered, Lex threw himself backwards, desperately trying to put some distance between himself and his opponent.
He wasn’t fast enough. A burst of pain flashed through his chest as his enemy’s dagger dug into him, missing his heart but still biting deep into his flesh. It was accompanied by a long cut across his collarbone, the wound as clean as a papercut but far deeper, the tip of the dagger slicing across bone and barely missing his throat.
Nor did his adversary – still wearing Feather Duster’s form – slow her assault. Her hind legs alighting on the catwalk moments after the last spark of electricity faded away, she pressed her attack, advancing on him as she lashed out with her blades again and again. Each attack aimed for a vital area, the daggers gleaming in the light of his horn as they darted toward his eyes, ears, neck, and other vulnerable points.
Against such an onslaught, there was nothing Lex could do except fall back, raising thin poles of black crystal to block the hits he couldn’t avoid as he backed onto the middle portion of the T-intersection. But he could already tell that his defense was failing rapidly. Without physical augmentation – something which he knew would quickly exhaust him if he kept relying on it – he could only produce so much black crystal, and using it continuously like this was already taking a toll on his supply of dark magic.
But creating a mountain of the stuff, the way he had against Twilight, wasn’t an option either. His enemy’s agility, combined with his own inability to see beyond the glow of his horn, made it likely that she’d retreat beyond his visual range before he’d be able to hit her with anything that big. That was why he’d spent so much effort working to limit Twilight’s movement, but now…
His horn glowing brighter, Lex tried to form a band around his enemy’s wings, trapping them the same way he had Twilight. But the crystal had barely started forming before the false Feather Duster twisted out of the way, sidestepping the half-formed loop of black crystal in a fluid motion before it could encircle her. The motion was so swift and so immediate that it made Lex momentarily flash back to Monitor, the pudgy fish-creature he’d fought in Vanhoover whose movements had been similarly deft. Like that monster, whoever he was fighting now wouldn’t be caught so easily.
A curse, then, Lex decided as he continued his fighting retreat. It would have to be augmented, but there was no helping that; without pouring extra energy into them, he was only capable of minor curses, and it was obvious that nothing short of a major malediction would be sufficient to deal with someone so dangerous. The only question now was what to hit them with.
It took Lex only a few seconds to decide, but in that time he took several more wounds, as a fast strike opened up a painful cut along his cheek, followed up by a deep gouge in his foreleg as he hastily raised it up to block an angled thrust aimed at his temple. Knowing he couldn’t take much more of this, Lex grit his teeth as he again forced a surge of power through his body’s magical channels, pouring it into the dark magic gathered in his horn as he directed it toward the unknown creature in front of him. Let’s see how well you can fight after this!
There were any number of curses that could have impaired her fighting prowess. He could have weakened her synaptic coordination the way he had to Spit Polish. Or shut down her sense of proprioception like he’d done to Tryout. Or caused her to become debilitated when near someone else just like what he’d put Garden Gate through.
But none of those were sufficient, now. Someone this dangerous couldn’t simply be disabled. Not when they’d proven themselves to be such a deadly threat.
The curse he used now, Lex knew, had to completely incapacitate them.
Which was why he was attempting to shut down the autonomic functionality of her lungs.
There was no visible discharge to the magic, and while Lex couldn’t feel her struggle as the curse fell over her thanks to the effects of the botched ritual, he heard her give a quiet gasp nonetheless. The sound made a malicious smirk cross his lips.
The malediction was designed to make her lungs only operate when consciously utilized, turning breathing an activity that had to be actively undertaken. As a consequence of that, she’d have a hard time regulating how much air vigorous activity required, making it impossible to sustain a high level of exertion such as fighting or flying. She could try, of course, but she’d likely reach the point of passing out before she’d be able to accomplish much, at which point he’d have no problem cancelling the curse and taking her prisoner-
“Heh.”
The quiet laugh brought Lex’s thoughts to a complete standstill. In front of him, Feather Duster’s features twisted in a sneer every bit as scornful as his own had been. Holding up a dagger, she clucked her tongue as she waggled the blade back and forth in a “tut-tut” motion.
Then she lunged forward, and although Lex jerked back instinctively, he was only able to save one of his eyes.
The sound of Lex’s voice raised in a roar of pain brought Sonata and Aria up short.
“That was Lex!” gasped Sonata, the blood draining from her face as she realized that he was in trouble. “Oh my gosh! We’ve gotta do something!” Lowering her voice to a whisper, she didn’t wait for Aria to respond. “Lex! We’re here! Where are y-, oh no!” Returning to her normal volume, she gave her sister a stricken look. “I forgot this doesn’t work! Quick! Do something!”
But Aria was already casting a spell, closing her eyes as she concentrated, her voice shaking only slightly as she sang the necessary words. A second later she snapped them open again. “He’s in that direction!” she declared, pointing to their right and slightly upward…directly at a stack of steel barrels.
Sonata looked back and forth between Aria and the metal containers, twitching with repressed motion. “He’s in one of those barrels?! Which one?!”
“No, you idiot!” hissed Aria. “He’s in that direction! My spell doesn’t take obstacles into account!”
“But…” Sonata looked around helplessly, taking note of how the only open routes were either to the left – in the opposite direction from where Aria had pointed – or back in the direction of the factory entrance, where they’d passed several other junctures. “Then which way do we go?!”
“I’m working on it!” growled Aria, a hysterical note in her voice. “Stop distracting me!”
“Well work faster!” Trying to peer down the leftward path to see if it turned in the opposite direction, Sonata growled at the inadequate visibility provided by the book of glow-in-the-dark stickers she’d snagged after one of the kids from the apartment building they’d cleared had dropped it during all the dancing. “I can’t see if this is the right way or if we should go back! You learned a whole bunch of non-singing, non-mess-with-your-head magic, right?! Can’t you make a light or something?!”
“I can set things on fire!” shot back Aria. “If you want me to make something to see by, that’s the best I can do!”
“Then set something on fire!” urged Sonata. “We’ve gotta get to where Lex is!”
“Fine! FINE!” shrieked Aria, her tone now one of barely-controlled panic. As horrible as it was to hear the guy she loved crying out in pain, the subsequent silence was far worse, filling her mind with terrifying images of what might have happened to him.
Whipping her head around as she looked for something she could ignite, Aria bit back a scream of frustration when nothing obvious could be seen in the faint light. “Screw this!” she declared, turning back toward the stack of metal barrels. “If those things aren’t flammable, then this’ll at least knock them down!”
She didn’t wait for Sonata to reply before quickly singing the words to a spell, holding out her hoof as a pea-sized orange bead rocketed from the end of it. In a fraction of a second it hit the stack of barrels, detonating outward into a fireball that lit their surroundings up in a bright flash.
The results were immediate. The barrels went tumbling, a series of deafening crashes making both sisters cover their ears as the heavy containers came down hard, the impacts setting off further collisions as nearby objects were destabilized. Clouds of dust went up, making Sonata and Aria stumble backwards, coughing as they tried to get away from the fouled air.
It was fortunate that they did, as the first barrel exploded a few seconds later.
The detonation swept both of them off their hooves, their yells of terror swallowed up by the boom that accompanied the blast. Sliding across the filthy ground, they came to rest side by side beneath the remains of some sort of industrial machine, blinking as they stared at where the flames spread by the wreckage were beginning to expand.
“You know,” coughed Sonata weakly as she looked at the devastation. “Between this and what happened with Lex’s ritual, I’m thinking that maybe, from now on, you should be the one to give me advice.”
Aria’s reply was lost as another barrel exploded.
“So, what’d they make here anyway?” muttered Thermal Draft as they crawled through the air duct, grimacing at the filth she felt covering her coat. “Besides dust, I mean.”
“How should I know?” whispered Nosey, pausing as they came to another intersection. “I’m not from here.”
“You’re the investigative reporter,” replied the pegasus. “I figured that while we’re looking for a grate we can pry loose, you had to have made notes about all the boring details.”
Rolling her eyes at the jab, Nosey chose the rightward path at random, hearing Thermal Draft following her. “Right now I’m more focused on figuring out how we’ll get Feather Duster out after we find her, but if I had to guess I’d say this place probably made various disposables for the upper city.”
“Disposables?” echoed Drafty.
“Las Pegasus’ lower portion is one big support system for all the resorts, casinos, hotels, and other tourist attractions up in the clouds. Some of that includes making things that the ponies there use once and then throw away.”
“Like what?”
Had she not been crawling along on her belly with nothing but her horn to light the way, Nosey would have shrugged. “The same things we do. Stuff made out of paper, cheap metal, and plastic. Probably more plastic than anything else.”
“Why’s that?” murmured Drafty, only paying partial attention as she tried to flex her wings in the cramped space.
“Because cheap metals are only good for tiny things like paperclips and staples, and using paper for stuff like plates and napkins looks too low-class for places that want to pass themselves off as being fancy,” explained Nosey. “I saw it all the time in Canterlot. Eateries and shops and places like that all want to look good for their customers, but the ones that aren’t the cream of the crop are all operating on a budget, so they have to cut corners on things like utensils and cups, and that means plastic.”
Drafty grunted at that. “So somepony did the math and figured out it’d be cheaper to have all that stuff made here than just ordering it, huh?”
“Probably, though my guess would be that they just made the raw materials here and shipped it elsewhere in the lower city for processing,” explained Nosey. “So this is where they’d mix the plant fuels or whatever they use, and there’s other places that turn them into wrappers or casino chips or-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a loud voice, raised in a wordless bellow of pain, echoed up from below them, causing both mares to freeze.
“L-Lex!” rasped Thermal Draft after a moment, starting to panic. “Something’s happened to Lex!”
“We’ve gotta hurry!” Nosey was already crawling faster. “There’s got to be some sort of access panel or removable flooring or something!”
“I knew this was a bad idea!” moaned Drafty.
“It’ll be fine! Lex will be fine!” insisted Nosey, trying to convince herself as much as the other mare. “He usually gets hurt when he fights someone, but he’s always the last pony stand-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a series of heavy crashes rang out, both mares going rigid with tension. The clanging echoes continued for several seconds, with the subsequent silence lasting for only a few moments before it was broken by the sound of explosions, the cacophony causing both of them to scream in fright.
“What’s happening?!” shrieked Thermal Draft, covering her head with her hooves. “WHAT’S HAPPENING?!”
“KEEP GOING!” yelled Nosey, dragging herself forward. “WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF-”
She wasn’t able to finish as a hatch suddenly opened beneath her, a yelp of fright escaping her lips as she fell through.
Dark Streak snickered to herself as she watched Lex Legis stumble backward, howling as he held one hoof over his ruined eye.
She wasn’t sure what sort of curse he’d tried to put on her, but that he’d made the attempt was obvious. Despite his magical attack lacking anything that could be seen or heard, there’d been the briefest sensation of being enveloped by something foul, causing her breath to catch in her chest. It had been enough to send a rush of genuine concern through her, worried that her precautions had been insufficient.
Curses, as it turned out, were hard to defend against. You could wear armor to protect yourself against swords and knives, and safeguards against direct magical attacks like fireballs or frost rays were easy to acquire if you had the money or the know-how. But curses? What were you supposed to do against those?
Her cloak had a general ward woven into it, the sort that was supposed to provide modest protection against a range of malign effects, but Dark Streak hadn’t been willing to put all of her trust in that. After all, her target was supposed to be a savant where curses were concerned; Dark Streak had no intention of finishing Lex Legis off only to find that, in his last moments, he’d laid some sort of lifelong affliction on her. Special measures needed to be utilized.
Her options in that area had been slim, however. The recipe book she’d taken after slaying the alchemist who’d made her into a spellcaster had mentioned only a single tincture – a synthetic version of a substance called “mumia” – designed to protect against “imprecations, execrations, and maledictions most foul.” It was an ironic description, since the brew itself was a disgusting concoction of embalming fluids and liquefied animal organs. Despite the book’s assertions that a dollop of honey was a vital ingredient, Dark Streak had been of the opinion that it was more likely an attempt to mask the flavor of the foul brew. If so, it hadn’t worked.
As it was, she’d needed to wash it down with a stimulant in order to counteract the fatigue that was the drug’s primary side effect. Fortunately, that had worked, even if it left her feeling vaguely jittery and a touch unfocused. It wasn’t pleasant, and she knew it would be even less pleasant as the various substances worked their way out of her system over the next few days.
But as much as Dark Streak had disliked the idea of being under the influence of a cocktail of alchemical substances, especially during a life-or-death battle, it had been that or go up against Lex Legis’s curse magic au natural. Based on what Willow had told her, along with what she’d learned from interrogating that pegasus maid, it had been an easy choice to make.
Not to mention the right choice, since it had allowed her to shrug off his vile magic almost as soon as it had touched her, surprising him enough that she’d been able to take his eye.
And now, she swore as she rushed forward, daggers raised in preparation for the deathblow, I’ll take your head.
Lex Legis hadn’t been too tough of an opponent. The magic he’d used during their fight had come nowhere close to the various tales she’d been told about him. No huge astral constructs, no disintegration rays, no orbs of lightning. Either his spellcasting ability was more compromised than she’d been led to believe, or the stories told about him had been highly exaggerated.
But what hadn’t been overblown was what she’d been told about his extraordinary discipline. At no point during their battle had he peppered her with meaningless questions or hissed empty threats, let alone tried to bargain with her or buy her off. Equally absent had been any sense of fear or bravado, making no move to quit the field and leave his maid behind, nor charge forward with reckless abandon. It had actually been a little impressive; while Dark Streak hadn’t been an assassin for very long, she couldn’t remember seeing anyone face their own imminent death so calmly.
Too bad you couldn’t keep your composure to the very end, she laughed as she brought her blades across his throat, his screams stopping instantly as they cut through his neck. But then, losing an eye would make anyone-, huh?!
During her career as a professional killer, Dark Streak had lost count of how many throats she’d cut. That was in part because each time she opened someone’s gullet, they always reacted the same. First was the look of shocked incomprehension on their face as they found themselves unable to breathe. Then they collapsed to the floor, gasping and floundering as they began choking on their own blood. Then they twitched a few more times before going still. That was how it had always worked, and that’s what should have happened to Lex Legis now.
Instead, he’d remained standing, his remaining eye now fixed squarely on her as he shot her a vicious grin.
A grin that looked all the more demonic with how his entire body was flickering.
All at once, Dark Streak realized what had happened, leaping upward and beating her wings as she tried to put some distance between herself and Lex Legis.
But it was already too late.
Black crystals burst upward from all around her, their edges sharper than razors, and Dark Streak couldn’t help but writhe in agony as she felt them carve bloody paths across her body. But the pain worried her less than the knowledge of how she’d been tricked. He lured me in! The screaming, the way he was cradling his eye…it was all an act!
Lex’s attempt to curse her had been real; it had to have been. She could still see where she’d left a gouge across his left eyeball, the ruined organ seeping blood; there was no way he’d let her strike such a serious blow just to get her to lower her guard. But it was only now that the trap had been sprung that Dark Streak could see how cursing her hadn’t been his only plan, turning her head to look behind her at the steel barrel – now lying on its side after Lex had dropped it less than a minute ago – that had previously covered the electrical trap that she’d rigged up, as well as the stick of phasic disruption incense.
A stick that had gone out, its length crushed and broken.
He must have stepped on it while he was retreating! She hadn’t bothered to track the placement of his hooves then, all of her concentration having gone toward slipping through his defenses in order to strike a fatal blow. With how heavily she’d pressed him, the idea that he’d chosen his steps so carefully seemed inconceivable, and yet he’d somehow done it anyway!
And once the smoke had thinned out, that had been when he’d tried to put a curse on her. He was using this as a backup plan! She felt sure of it now. He’d tried to incapacitate her with a curse, and when she’d overcome it and retaliated, he’d simply moved on to his secondary strategy: playing up the agony of losing his eye in order to trick her into rushing in for the kill. Then, just as she’d put her daggers across his neck, he’d activated that flickering technique he’d used against Starlight Glimmer.
That was why he hadn’t fallen after she’d delivered the fatal blow: because it hadn’t been a fatal blow.
The only thing she’d cut had been a wisp of insubstantial shadow.
All because she'd underestimated just how disciplined Lex Legis truly was.
Got to fall back! Twisting in mid-air, Dark Streak struggled not to fall, knowing that if she stopped moving for even a moment Lex would press his attack. Got to get away and regroup!
But she could already tell that Lex had no intention of letting her go. Every way she turned, the black spikes were expanding, sprouting more needles-thin branches at oblique angles, a lattice forming around her. In a few more seconds she’d be trapped.
Fighting down the urge to panic, Dark Streak folded her wings in close as she ducked down, pulling her legs in tight against her body as she threw herself into the widest opening between the bars of the ebony cage that was already forming around her, fighting down a surge of panic. She still had her potion of gaseous form, saved in case she found herself on the verge of being captured, but it was in one of her pouches, and with how tightly the bladed enclosure was forming around her it was unlikely she’d be able to retrieve and quaff it if she couldn’t get free. And even if she could, she was completely defenseless in that state, and she had no idea if turning into a patch of mist would make it harder to resist another curse from Lex.
If I can’t get out of this… she swore as she vaulted into the gap.
The exit was already narrowing even as she started wriggling through it. More spikes sprouted against her sides, making her clench her beak as she fought back further screams as the razor-sharp edges cut into her. But she kept going, knowing what would happen if she was caught; her disguise was purely visual, which meant that it wouldn’t stand up to any sort of close scrutiny. And once Lex discovered she wasn’t a pony…
The knowledge that this was life-or-death gave Dark Streak the edge she needed, and although it felt like she’d torn the skin off of her lower body, she managed to burst free a moment later.
Gasping, she didn’t hesitate, wings stretching out to grab the air as she hurried away from Lex-
And a massive crash rang out from somewhere in front of her, causing Dark Streak to pull up short in midair.
For a long second she hovered there, bloodied and cut all over, her mind racing as she tried to figure out what she’d heard. The source of the crash was too far away to make out – her goggles only let her see in the dark for a few dozen feet – but it had sounded tremendously loud. Was that some other plan on Lex’s part? Had he anticipated her going in this direction somehow? A glance behind her showed the unicorn in question up still on the catwalk, a furious look on his face as he peered in the direction she’d started flying. But maybe that was another bluff. Maybe he-
The explosion took her completely by surprise.
Fortunately, it was too far away to do anything worse than that, but she still needed to shield her eyes from the rush of flames that went up, the accompanying boom momentarily deafening her. It was only when she lowered her foreleg that she saw the flames starting to spread out, illuminating that end of the factory in a dim glow that just barely reached to where she was, causing her to glance back at Lex in alarm-
Just in time to see a steel barrel outlined in his telekinetic aura – the same perforated one she’d used to set up her electrical trap, she dimly realized – fill her vision.
There was no chance to dodge it, or even brace herself against the impact, and this time Dark Streak couldn’t keep herself aloft as the heavy container struck her in the side of the head. Instead, she raised her forelegs in front of herself protectively as she fell toward the ground, barely managing to avoid cracking her skull open as she hit the paved floor. The barrel crashed next to her a second later, Lex’s aura no longer surrounding it, and Dark Streak blearily glanced upward, belatedly noticing the collection of shipping crates she’d fallen behind, keeping her out of view of the catwalk that Lex was on.
For a moment she couldn’t bring herself to move, struggling to process the pain and chaos of the previous thirty seconds.
She’d had Lex Legis dead to rights, cornered and injured and unable to fight back, only for him to completely turn the tables on her at the last possible instant.
Not to mention how, for some reason, her carefully-chosen battleground was suddenly blowing up.
So much for doing this the easy way, she decided as she reached up, pulling a fourteen-inch length of ash wood with a quartz crystal on the end from one of the bandoliers strapped across her chest. Placing the tip of the wand against her temple, she quietly croaked the command word, sighing in relief as she felt a wave of healing energy spread through her.
She used the wand twice more before replacing it, even though she was still far from fully healed. Unlike her alchemical mixtures, the wand was a purely magical item that could only be used so many times, and recharging it wasn’t something she knew how to do. Since Equestria apparently didn’t have magical healing, that meant it needed to be used only in dire circumstances, and even then only for the minimal amount necessary.
And this should be more than enough for me to finish the job, Dark Streak decided as she picked herself up, scooping up her daggers (which had thankfully fallen next to her) as she moved down the length of the crates, making ready in case Lex had closed in on her position while she’d been healing herself.
But when several seconds went by and the unicorn didn’t appear, Dark Streak relaxed her guard. He’s probably going after his maid first, she decided. Good thing I moved her before I went after him.
A glance behind her showed that the fire was starting to spread. The sight made Dark Streak frown, and not just because of how it was illuminating the place. Lex Legis had proven himself to be dangerously creative, and the fact that she didn’t know what had caused that explosion worried her. Better safe than sorry, she decided, reaching for the rearmost pouch on her left hip. For all that he’d gotten the jump on her, Lex was still hurt quite badly, which meant he wouldn’t be moving very quickly. And that gives me time to apply some fire ward gel to myself, just in case-
Her thoughts came to a screeching halt as her talon closed over empty air where her pouch should have been, the tie connecting it to her belt sliced cleanly through.
He’d won the exchange of hostilities, only to lose the battle.
There was no other way to accurately characterize what had just happened, Lex knew, groaning as he ceased rapid-shifting between his shadow-form and solidity. For all that he’d managed to fight off his mysterious opponent, for the second time no less, doing so had cost him dearly. In the likely event that his enemy regrouped and came after him a third time, she’d find him without any means of defending himself.
As it was, even the simple act of turning back to normal nearly brought Lex to his knees, his breathing coming in ragged gasps as he struggled to remain standing. He succeeded in doing so only because he was able to lean against the railing of the catwalk, muttering a liturgy to the Night Mare and fumbling his way through the requisite gestures as he cast the weak healing spell she’d given him on himself.
It was the last time he’d be able to avail himself of that particular remedy, however. He still couldn’t manage more than three divine spells in a day, and having used his poison-retarding spell after his first exchange with his mysterious assailant, followed by an application of this same healing spell, he had now expended his complement of goddess-given magic. Nor could he call upon the reservoir of spell energy in his circlet to manage one more bit of curative magic if things became dire; he’d expended it earlier that morning, when he’d cast his food-creation spells (also one of the Night Mare’s) so that he wouldn’t have to suffer through the terrible meals – most of which consisted of high amounts of grease, or sugar, or both – prepared by the various eateries in Las Pegasus.
Nor was that the only resource he’d depleted. Between the curse he’d failed to put on his enemy, his last-second utilization his shadow-form in order to avoid what would otherwise have been a fatal blow, and the sheer amount of black crystals he’d created in his failed effort to ensnare her, he’d managed to expend all of his dark magic. And with how he’d overstrained himself during those last-ditch efforts, channeling magic through his body in order to push his dark magic beyond its normal limits, he’d succeeded in fatiguing himself badly, his muscles burning from the simple effort of putting one hoof in front of another.
Worst of all, he had made no progress in locating Feather Duster. All of that pain and effort would have been worthwhile if he’d found his missing maid. But as it stood now, he couldn’t even hope to protect himself, let alone Cleansweep’s mother.
What had started out as a rescue mission had become a struggle for survival.
It was a struggle that Lex knew he was on the verge of losing.
Which is why I didn’t come alone.
That thought, however, brought more anxiety than reassurance, causing him to look toward the flames spreading across the front of the factory. Had Sonata or Aria stumbled across one of the kidnapper’s traps? She’d seemed surprised by the explosion, dropping her guard long enough for him to telekinetically hurl a barrel at her with the last of his strength, but Lex didn’t trust that he’d read her reaction correctly.
“Sonata, Aria,” he rasped in a whisper, the effort of speaking while moving being almost more than he could handle. “If you can hear me, I’m on a catwalk near the center of the factory. I haven’t located Feather Duster.” That last part was a bitter confession, all the more so for the fact that he could barely make out the chain where she’d been bound ahead of him, still clipped to the railing, a bit of black cloth along with a few yellow feathers laying on the ground in silent testament to her having been there previously. “If you’ve found her, signal me by-”
“There he is!”
The sound of Sonata’s voice made Lex blink, turning to look at the shadow-shrouded far end of the catwalk, where he could hear hooves galloping toward him. Sure enough, the mare in question bounded into view a half-second later, barreling into him and knocking him painfully to the ground as she wrapped her hooves around him. “LEX! Oh my gosh! I’m so glad you’re alri-”
She wasn’t given a chance to finish as Aria came up behind her and bit her tail, yanking on it sharply, causing Sonata to give a squeal as she was pulled off of him. “He’s NOT alright, you idiot! Look at him!” Despite her acerbic tone, her face was pale as she helped him to his hooves, a sudden intake of breath coming from her as she got a good look at him. “Who did this to you? Are they still-”
“Ooh! Wait!” blurted Sonata suddenly. “Remember that whisper-message we heard right after we walked in? We’re supposed to say our names backward so he knows it’s us! Okay, let’s see…K first for me, then, um…then S, so K-S…um, U, so K-S-U…D, so that makes ‘Ksud.’ Bleh, that sounds ugly. Ksud, um…A-”
“I think you’ve proven that you’re the real deal,” interjected Aria with a snort, before turning her attention back to Lex. “I used my tracking spell to figure out where you were. Tell me who attacked you, and I’ll use it to find them too.”
“They’re disguising themselves as Feather Duster,” answered Lex with a weary shake of his head, somehow managing to find the strength to wave at the shipping crates that were at the edge of his vision thanks to the flames. “The last I saw they fell behind those, but by now they could be anywhere.”
The sisters shared a look at that, having a moment of perfect understanding.
“I got this,” announced Sonata a second later, singing a quick spell.
Lex frowned. “What are you-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as Sonata took a deep breath, before unleashing a magically-enhanced scream.
“YOU SUUUUUUUUCK!!!”
The sonic attack slammed into the crates with the force of a battering ram, the uppermost ones splintering as they went tumbling over, falling with a crash that was utterly drowned out beneath Sonata’s amplified voice. By the time she released the note she’d been holding, the containers were scattered across the ground, with several of them broken and the rest of them cracked. But in the dim light of the fire – slightly closer now – there was no sign of anyone among them.
“Nuts,” huffed Sonata. “I was totes hoping to deliver some payback.”
Lex, however, couldn’t hold back his anger. “You idiot! Indiscriminate attacks like that run the risk of hitting Feather Duster!”
Sonata flinched at the rebuke, but Aria shook her head. “She’s not here, Lex. I used my tracking spell to search for her a while ago. It’s still up now, and I haven’t gotten a bead on her even once.”
Lex paused as he digested that. Had the image of Feather Duster that he’d seen, unconscious and bound in chains, been some sort of trick? It wasn’t like he’d actually touched her before whoever was trying to kill him had pulled her out of reach.
Lex glanced down, looking at the scrap of cloth and feathers by his hooves. His enemy had clearly studied him; were they just making him think that Feather Duster was here in order to prevent him from retreating? The note saying they’d return her in exchange for bits had obviously been a lie. Had they already killed her and dumped her body somewhere, rigging up some sort of illusion in order to deceive him into staying here, where they had the advantage?
“C’mon.” Sonata pressed herself against his other side, opposite Aria, and started nudging him forward. “We’re, like, totes getting out of here.”
But Lex dug his hooves in. With how little strength he had left, the motion almost made him topple over again, only staying upright because both mares were practically carrying him. But it was enough to arrest his forward motion. “No.”
Another look passed between Sonata and Aria. “Lex,” began the latter, “there’s no reason to stay here. Feather Duster-”
“She’s here somewhere,” insisted Lex. “I’m not leaving without her.”
Sonata tilted her head. “You’re sure?”
“It’s the most likely possibility.” Of that, Lex felt confident, having turned the idea over for almost ten full seconds now. “Whoever set this up studied me in advance. They know my powers, and they know how to block them. Which means that there’s a good chance they know about yours too.”
Two sets of eyebrows went up. “Wait,” began Aria. “So you’re saying my tracking spell is being scrambled somehow?”
Lex nodded. “You used that spell every time I sent you into Vanhoover to guard ponies that were emptying a bank. No secret was made about that being the method you used to make sure there were no ghouls nearby. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to hear about that and prepare a countermeasure.”
Sonata tilted her head. “Is that, like, even possible?”
“If whoever’s behind this can prevent me from changing into a shadow, they can do that much.” There was no doubt about that in Lex’s mind. Whoever was behind this whole affair was simply too resourceful for him to think otherwise.
“Hang on a sec,” interjected Aria, “you’re saying you can’t-”
“There’s also the fact that my would-be assassin is also trying very hard to keep me here,” continued Lex, refusing to be sidetracked. “The best way of doing that isn’t to make Feather Duster look like she’s alive; it’s to keep her alive. Because if they’ve killed her and are just making it look like she’s still waiting to be saved, then if I do something unexpected and see through their deception, they lose their leverage.”
“I guess that makes sense,” admitted Sonata. “But Lex, this is place is, like, huge. Plus, it’s on fire now because, er…reasons. Where are we even supposed to look for her?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately. The fire was near the front of the building, but it was slowly spreading, punctuated by the occasional explosion as some flammable substance quickly went up. The high ceiling meant that the air was still relatively breathable, but as the flames spread that would quickly start to change.
But whoever was trying to kill him had to know all that as well.
If his assumptions were right…if they were intent on finishing him off, and wanted to make sure Feather Duster stayed alive so as to minimize any chance that he’d leave before they managed to kill him, then they’d want her as far away from the fire and smoke as possible. Which meant…
“Head down, and toward the back of the building,” instructed Lex. “She’s most likely being kept somewhere in that area.”
The Sirens nodded in unison, helping him forward, and Lex could only hope that he was right. As confident as he felt, his predictions were still just educated guesses, and his foe had proven to be insightful in finding ways to counter his strengths. It was far from unimaginable that any of what he’d postulated might turn out to be wrong.
Held between the two ponies who meant more to him than anyone else in the world, Lex was keenly aware that if that turned out to be the case, it wouldn’t just be his own life that was in danger.
“I was kind of hoping that after we got inside,” admitted Thermal Draft as they passed between what looked like a pair of huge vats, “you’d have a better plan than ‘wander around and hope we find Feather Duster by accident.’”
“With how dusty this place is, I figured we’d find some tracks or something if we looked long enough,” muttered Nosey, creeping along in front of the pegasus as she kept her horn lit. “Even if whoever took her can fly, they wouldn’t hang her up where anyone can see her, so they had to have landed sometime.”
“Carrying someone around does get tiring after a while,” nodded Thermal Draft. “I’d know, since I had to haul you all the way on top of this place, and then catch you after you fell through the ductwork just now.”
Nosey frowned, not sure if that had been a friendly jab or not, before deciding it didn’t matter. What was important now was finding Feather Duster and getting out of here, especially since the far end of the building was apparently on fire! “Just help me look-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as she was suddenly tackled from behind. Falling onto her belly, she didn’t have a chance to cry out as she felt a hoof go over her mouth, another one cuffing her horn painfully, disrupting her magic and causing her aura to immediately wink out, plunging them into darkness. “Shhh!” hissed Thermal Draft before Nosey could even begin to thrash. “Someone’s coming!”
The warning was enough to make Nosey hold still, straining her ears to try and hear whatever had alerted the other mare. Because she must have heard something, reasoned the reporter. There’s no way she could have seen something before I did in this-
Then, a second later, she had her answer: the soft flapping of wings.
The sound was impossibly quiet, as though whoever was moving was using their wings as little as possible. But the ruffle of feathers pushing against the air was distinct, and judging from the direction it was coming from, was happening almost at ground level. And it was getting closer…
“Underneath!” whispered Drafty, climbing off of her and flattening herself down. Without waiting for an answer, she slid underneath the bottom of the vat on their left, the bottom of the massive tank being barely two feet off the ground. Drafty followed her immediately, twisting her head to avoid scraping her horn along the underside of the gigantic container.
Holding her breath so that the kidnapper didn’t hear them – and it had to be the kidnapper, since Lex, Sonata, and Aria weren’t pegasi – Nosey waited, the sound of intermittent flapping growing closer. If we can pinpoint where they’re going, we can follow them! Then we’ll know exactly…
Her train of thought came to an end as the flapping sound stopped right in front of the vat where they were hiding.
At this distance, the glow from the fire was almost nonexistent, thanks to so many intervening objects, but Nosey could have sworn that she saw two hooves touching down, along with hair pooling in two places in front of them. Feather Duster’s mane and tail, decided Nosey. Whoever that is, they’re carrying her in their forelegs.
While Nosey didn’t consider herself an expert on flying by any means, she couldn’t imagine that being a comfortable way to transport someone. To be able to do so while being so quiet had to mean that whoever this was, they were almost impossible to detect when not encumbered. So what are they doing here?
She had her answer a moment later as she heard the soft sound of a hatch opening, Feather Duster’s pooled hair vanishing just before the soft thump of something being laid down above them could be heard. They’re putting her inside!
Her heart pounding, Nosey tried to keep calm as she considered what that meant. Industrial stories weren’t her forte, but she knew enough to know that huge vats like this one had access ports around their sides, so that pipes could be hooked up from different directions depending on where whatever was inside needed to be pumped. And unused ports can either be sealed up with an airtight cap to prevent leaks, or with a mesh to allow for venting. If she’s unconscious, then it’s probably the latter, since she’d suffocate otherwise. At least, Nosey found herself hoping that the maid was merely unconscious…
The hatch clicked a moment later, and the hooves in her field of vision lingered for just long enough to make Nosey nervous, thinking that they’d been discovered…before she heard a softly-muttered word, unintelligible. Then the hooves leaped into the air, vanishing from sight.
It didn’t escape Nosey’s notice that this time, there was no sound of wings flapping.
Looking over at Thermal Draft, the pegasus mare kept her eyes closed, her ears perked as she listened intently. After several seconds, she opened her eyes, giving a shrug as best she could and shaking her head.
Biting her lip, Nosey waited just a few seconds longer, not wanting to take the chance that they’d run into the kidnapper before they got far enough away.
Then she crawled forward.
Thermal Draft was right behind her, and as soon as they’d cleared the bottom of the vat, both turned around to regard the hatch that they’d heard. Nosey couldn’t suppress a soft sigh of relief as she noticed that it was indeed a mesh covering, turning the latch with her hooves rather than her horn, not wanting to make a light. And inside…
Blindfolded and gagged, the sight of a chained-up Feather Duster greeted them.
Gesturing to Thermal Draft to stand back, Nosey crept into the vat, gently picking up the maid before carrying her out, Drafty closing the hatch once she was clear.
Smiling, the two took a moment to grin at each other before quietly undoing the maid’s restraints, noting with relief that she was still breathing. Putting Feather Duster on her back – knowing that there was no way Thermal Draft could carry both of them out of there – Nosey motioned for the pegasus to follow her. With a fire at the front of the building, they’d need to find another exit, but first on the agenda was letting Lex know-
Beside her, Thermal Draft suddenly stiffened, her eyes widening in fear.
Nosey almost asked her what was wrong, but didn’t need to, figuring it out herself a moment later.
The sudden flapping of wings was audible again, louder this time, as though their owner was agitated, more concerned with speed than stealth.
Dark Streak clenched her beak as she flew back toward where she’d stashed her hostage.
Moving the maid to the back of the factory had been a strategic decision. While she’d initially been content to shove the pegasus in a barrel (with the lid ajar, since if she suffocated it would mean losing fifty thousand bits) elsewhere on the ground floor of the factory – leaving her hanging from the catwalk would have given Lex a chance to find her; even though he couldn’t see in the dark, he’d still been making his way toward where she’d vanished upward – the fire had changed things. Although she hadn’t been the one to cause the place to start going up in flames, Dark Streak wasn’t about to risk her money on an accident.
The vat near the back of the place had seemed like as good a place as any to stash the unconscious pegasus. But while she’d felt confident that Lex wouldn’t locate the mare anytime soon, Dark Streak hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance. That had been why she’d used a charge from another of her wands.
In that case, the wand had created an invisible perimeter encircling the vat. If anything bigger than a mouse passed across it – in either direction – it would create an alarm that only she could hear. It wasn’t really necessary; Feather Duster was still drugged, and Dark Streak had left her chained up for good measure. But for all that Lex Legis had proven to be nowhere near the wizard she’d been warned about, he’d still been more resilient than expected, as the unhealed wounds covering her body could attest. Until she could go back and finish him off, Dark Streak had no intention of leaving anything to chance.
Which was why her alarm going off had taken her completely by surprise.
Someone had found Feather Duster. There was no other explanation. But at the same time, it couldn’t have been Lex; the sheer number of injuries he’d taken, combined with his lack of darkvision, meant that he couldn’t possibly have found her so fast.
Nor, Dark Streak felt sure, could his singing doxies.
She was ready to face the so-called Sirens, of course. She’d prepared several countermeasures for their special powers, ranging from simple earplugs to a special tea that would make it harder for them to sway her mind with their magic to a vial of dead air, which when uncorked would remove the breathable elements from the immediate area for a short while. They’d have a hard time singing their spells when they were asphyxiating.
But it was unlikely in the extreme that either of the two were responsible for tripping her alarm. Even if she hadn’t just heard one of them give an extremely loud scream from where she’d last fought Lex, his pets were – according to everything Dark Streak knew about them – a pair of idiots. Even if they’d split up instead of rushing to Lex’s side together (which also sounded unlike them), she couldn’t imagine them pinpointing the maid’s position so quickly. They were playthings that also functioned as magical auxiliaries for their owner; thinking was outside of their skillset.
Which means someone else is here, decided Dark Streak as she rushed back toward the vat. That, or Lex Legis was holding back far more than he seemed to be.
That was an unsettling thought, and one that made the assassin hesitate as she reached her destination. Wanting to keep her elevation low so as to avoid being sniped by either of the Sirens, she touched down, pausing as she surveyed the pile of discarded chains in front of the open mesh grate on the side of the large container.
It was entirely possible that this was a trap, and she had ways of checking for both mundane and magical ambushes, but checking for all of them would take time. If whoever had grabbed Feather Duster was trying to help Lex, then they’d be looking to vacate the place immediately, letting the unicorn know that there was no reason to remain here any longer. That was something that Dark Streak knew couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Which meant that she had no time to lose if she wanted to keep her quarry contained.
Sheathing her daggers, Dark Streak strode forward, focusing her attention on the castoff chains. If there was a clue to be found, it would-
“Don’t move,” came a cold voice from behind her.
Every muscle in her body tensed as Dark Streak immediately went still, her mind racing.
“Turn around. Slowly.”
Hesitating for just a second as she weighed her options, Dark Streak quickly came to the conclusion that she couldn’t take action before she saw who’d gotten the drop on her, turning slowly in place…
It took all of her self-control to keep her wings from flaring outward as she saw who’d spoken.
Standing just a few yards away from her – his hoof held toward her threateningly, and his wounds completely healed – was Lex Legis, smirking at her surprise.
“Don’t move.”
Perfect! That was exactly the way Lex would have said it! cheered Kara. Remember, it’s all in the presentation. You are Lex Legis, slayer of dragons, conqueror of princesses, ruler of the realm. You fear no one and nothing. You have the situation under your complete and total control.
Thermal Draft nodded, only to realize that was the wrong thing to do; fortunately, the indistinct figure still had their back to her, apparently not inclined to challenge her – or rather, Lex’s – order not to move.
The slip-up would have made her swallow, her tension already sky-high, except that her mouth was completely dry. It was all she could do to keep her breathing steady, having to concentrate on taking slow, deep breaths. “Turn around,” she demanded, making the words come out stern and imperious. “Slowly.”
Now she just needed to figure out what to do once they did.
Taking Lex’s form in order to give Nosey a chance to get Feather Duster out of there had sounded like a great idea at the time – she’d make a heroic stand, keeping the bad guy delayed until she found a chance to give them the slip, and have Lex praise her for her bravery after everything was over – but now Drafty found herself regretting it. Not because she was afraid of staring down whoever had snatched the maid (after everything she’d gone through in Vanhoover, a mere kidnapper seemed almost quaint) but because she wasn’t sure that Nosey had actually left.
The urge to glance behind her, where the four-eyed reporter had taken refuge behind the second vat – opposite the one that Feather Duster had been stashed in – was overwhelming, and Drafty could barely fight the impulse off. She’d only had a few seconds to tell Nosey to take Feather Duster and go, that she had a plan to stall the kidnapper, and Nosey’s initial response had been to argue. There’d been no time to convince her to shut up and do what she was told before Drafty had been forced to step out behind the shadowy figure examining the chains, taking on Lex’s form as she did so.
If she finds out, she’ll never keep my secret! Of that Drafty felt sure. Nosey’s destiny was to be a reporter; making secrets public was her stock-in-trade. She’d tell Lex, and with how smart he was, it would only be a matter of time before he figured out that she’d pretended to be Sonata in order to slip into his bed.
If he finds out what I did, he’ll hate me for sure! And I bet Cloudy will too, especially when she sees how ugly I am now!
Focus, urged Kara, the goddess’s voice soothing. Deal with one problem at a time. Right now, you need to keep your eyes on…oh you have got to be kidding me!
Drafty didn’t need to ask what Kara meant, blinking as the figure turned to face her.
It was Feather Duster, Lex’s maid whom they’d just rescued.
What?
It’s a disguise, snorted Kara, a disgusted tone in her voice that Drafty had never heard before. And a lousy one at that. Look at how her hooves aren’t leaving hoof-shaped patterns in the dust! So sloppy!
Drafty wasn’t sure how to react; her first thought had been that this was another of the goddess’s doppelgangers, but listening to her now – ranting with all the venom of a trendy teenager criticizing an ugly outfit – that obviously wasn’t the case. Which made sense, now that she thought about it; after Drafty’s transformation, Kara had let it slip that she was the first one in Equestria. A changeling then? Except they fed on love, and this sort of elaborate kidnapping seemed like the worst possible way to go about doing that.
They’re probably wearing one of those cheap hats, the kind that are ensorcelled to let you change your appearance, sneered Kara. They’re commonplace on Everglow, mostly because of how useless they are. They don’t alter your voice, or how you feel to the touch, or anything else except looks. Absolute bottom of the barrel trash, right there.
The derision in the goddess’s voice aside, that gave Drafty an idea for what to do next.
“Drop your disguise,” she ordered, making sure to keep her voice – Lex’s voice – at a low growl. “Now.”
Across from her, the fake Feather Duster’s eyes narrowed. In the poor light it was hard to be certain, but Drafty was sure she saw the other pony’s back legs shift slightly, as though she were redistributing her weight…
Taking a single step forward, Drafty held her foreleg out straighter, keeping the bottom of it pointed directly at the imposter’s face, as though about to unleash a torrent of magical death directly at her. “Don’t.”
A low, frustrated breath came from whoever was impersonating Feather Duster, and Drafty snorted in a way she was sure Lex would have. “I’ll give you one more chance. Remove that headpiece you’re wearing, or I’ll remove it for you.”
You know it doesn’t have to be that hat I mentioned, right? noted Kara, her voice wry. It might just be that they know the spell that magic item is based on.
Next time tell me that sooner! shrieked Drafty silently. Lex was supposed to be an expert on magic; if “he” made some obvious mistake now…
But to her relief, no such accusation came. Instead, the disguised individual stared at her for a long moment, then slowly reached upward, until her hoof touched the lace headband behind her ears. As she slowly lifted it up, her entire form seemed to shift, as though the scant amount of light falling on her had suddenly been run through a kaleidoscope, and Drafty couldn’t help but compare it to how she looked when using the shapeshifting power that Kara had given her. But that thought was short-lived as the other person’s form came back into focus, revealing…
“A griffon?” murmured Drafty in Lex’s voice.
Standing in front of her was a griffon – female, from the look of her – dressed all in black, her cloak and leather armor blending seamlessly with the natural coloration of her fur and feathers. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of goggles. Two bandoliers crisscrossed her chest, adorned with vials, daggers, and wands. Around her waist was a belt from which hung multiple saddlebags, though on closer examination one of them seemed to have been cut, which struck Drafty as odd. More than that, she could see what looked like several cuts and scratches across her body, evidence she hadn’t come out unscathed from whatever fight she’d had with Lex.
Or rather, the real Lex, Drafty reminded herself, narrowing her eyes in a way that she hoped was intimidating. “Who are you, and why did you kidnap Feather Duster?”
For a moment the griffon didn’t say anything, and Drafty was about to repeat herself when the kidnapper suddenly answered. “My name isn’t important,” she replied coolly. “As for why I abducted your maid…”
She gave a lazy shrug, as though the topic couldn’t have mattered less to her. “She was just the easiest way to get to you.”
The calm, almost emotionless way the black griffon spoke sent a chill down Drafty’s spine, and she had to repress the urge to step back, reminding herself that Lex never showed weakness. “For what purpose?”
The griffon's cheeks tightened in a way that might have been a smile. “So I could do this.”
Then she suddenly lurched upright, using the momentum of the motion to kick one of her hind legs forward, flinging the loose pile of chains – which, Drafty realized too late, she’d worked her paw beneath while they’d been talking – directly at the disguised pegasus’s face.
Dodging to the side, Drafty barely managed to avoid jangling tangle of metal. Knowing it had been a distraction, she immediately turned her attention back to the one who’d thrown it-
Just in time to see the griffon rushing straight at her, wings flapping and daggers clutched in her talons.
When Thermal Draft had told her to take Feather Duster – who refused to wake up, no matter how vigorously she’d been shaken – and run, Nosey had naturally objected. Despite the pegasus assuring her that she had a plan, Nosey had been dubious. After all, whoever had kidnapped Feather Duster had done so in order to lure Lex into a trap.
That alone had been enough to make Nosey nervous about this entire endeavor. While she didn’t regret coming along to help, the fact was that there were only two reasons why someone would challenge Lex, a pony who was – thanks to Princess Luna’s recent tell-all – famous across Equestria for his deeds. The first was that they’d wildly misjudged themselves, thinking that they had the power to overcome someone who’d defeated dragons, devils, and princesses.
The second was that they actually had the strength to do just that.
And with how methodical their preparations had been so far, Nosey didn’t like how distinct that second possibility seemed.
That was why she’d strongly objected to Thermal Draft acting as a distraction. Avoiding coming into contact with someone who could potentially take on Lex and win had been a top priority for the newsmare, still cognizant of what had happened the last time she’d blundered into a situation that she wasn’t prepared for. And while Nosey still wasn’t sure how the kidnapper had detected them, she’d been more than ready to try her luck at slipping away with Thermal Draft, carrying Feather Duster between the two of them.
But Drafty had felt differently, stepping out to confront the mastermind of her own accord.
For a single instant, Nosey had considered leaving her there. It had been what Drafty had told her to do, after all, and getting Feather Duster to safety was still a priority. But even knowing that, Nosey hadn’t been able to take even a single step away, one thought keeping her hooves rooted to the ground.
Lex would never abandon anyone.
So she’d stayed in place, peeking out from around the edge of the humungous vat that sat across from the similarly-sized container that they’d pulled Feather Duster out of, and watched as Thermal Draft had stepped out to confront the kidnapper.
…and changed into Lex as she did so.
The sight had been enough to leave Nosey completely gobsmacked, all thoughts of danger completely forgotten as she stared at pegasus-turned-unicorn, trying to figure out what she’d just witnessed, dimly listening as “Lex” ordered the shadowy figure to turn around.
The fact that the figure turned out to be Feather Duster only made things more confusing.
It’s a changeling invasion. It’s got to be. That was the only thing Nosey could think of, having lived through one such attack already. She’d been lurking outside of Canterlot Castle when the shapeshifting bugs had invaded, fuming over her inability to interview anypony more important than Princess Celestia’s steward’s barber about upcoming nuptials between Princess Cadance and Shining Armor, when all of a sudden there’d been a swarm of the things outside of the shield around the city, battering it relentlessly.
Curiosity had warred with panic at the sight, leaving her standing completely still when the bugs broke through a moment later. As such, she’d been an easy target for them to hit with their sticky green goop, leaving her pinned to a wall and – as she’d realized a few seconds later – completely unable to so much as track what was going on! It was almost funny to recall now, but at the time that had been her biggest worry: that she wouldn’t be able to properly witness and document everything that was happening for the article she’d write later on.
She had, in retrospect, been too naïve to be afraid.
Xiriel had cured her of that.
“I’ll give you one more chance. Remove that headpiece you’re wearing, or I’ll remove it for you.”
The strange command from Drafty – or the changeling that was impersonating Drafty, presuming that she’d ever been a real pony to begin with – dragged Nosey out of the whirlpool of guesswork and speculation that her thoughts had become, slowly putting Feather Duster down as she continued watching the standoff. Drafty wanted Feather Duster’s copycat to remove her headpiece? Why? What did that have to do with-
Then the accessory in question came off, and all of a sudden there was a black griffon dressed in what looked like some sort of commando outfit standing where Feather Duster’s double had been.
Nosey could only stare, completely lost by that point. What the actual f-
“A griffon?” murmured Thermal Draft, still disguised as Lex, apparently as surprised by the revelation as anyone. But she shook it off a moment later. “Who are you, and why did you kidnap Feather Duster?”
“My name isn’t important,” answered the griffon in a voice far too casual for Nosey’s liking. “As for why I abducted your maid…” She shrugged then, and Nosey noticed that she let her headpiece – now looking more like a nondescript chapeau than the lacy headband it had been a moment ago – slip from her talons as she did so. “She was just the easiest way to get to you.”
She thinks that’s the real Lex, realized Nosey, swallowing silently as her eyes darted between the two figures. She doesn’t know she’s talking to an imposter!
“For what purpose?” demanded Drafty, and Nosey had to admit that she was doing a good impression of Lex, perfectly mimicking the forceful tenor he so often used.
But if the griffon was even slightly intimidated, she didn’t show it. “So I could do this.”
Then she kicked out, rearing upright as she launched the chains – formerly used to bind the real Feather Duster – collected in a heap in front of her back paws directly at Thermal Draft’s face.
Nosey held her breath in fright as she watched the disguised pegasus, still looking so much like Lex, fling herself to the side, barely avoiding the heavy mass of metal. But the half-second she spent dodging was all the time the griffon needed, wings flapping as she rushed forward, her talons smoothly drawing a pair of daggers from her bandoliers. There was no hesitation in her movements, no hint of doubt or indecision as she brought her blades up.
The same couldn’t be said for Thermal Draft. Although her impersonation of Lex had been flawless up until that point, Nosey could see her eyes – Lex’s eyes – widen in alarm as the griffon barreled toward her. While the reporter knew that the real Lex would have raised a barrier of black crystals between them, or turned into a shadow, or cast some spell she’d never heard of, Thermal Draft’s ability to copy the unicorn prince was apparently limited to his appearance alone. No aura burst to life around that red horn. Those brown eyes stayed brown, rather than being awash in green and purple. No precise gestures were made nor arcane words spoken.
Instead, what saved Thermal Draft was that she tripped, her back legs becoming entangled in the chains she’d just avoided as she reflexively stepped backwards.
It was a brief respite. Although the sudden collapse onto her back caused the swipes of the griffon’s daggers to miss, Drafty’s attacker didn’t hesitate to press her assault, pouncing on the downed pony like a hawk descending on a field mouse. Nosey could only watch as the griffon dropped heavily onto Thermal Draft, coming down hard on her torso and causing her breath to exit her lungs in a rush, stunned.
That was all the opportunity the griffon needed, settling over the fallen pegasus-turned-unicorn so that her back legs were pinning Thermal Draft’s forelegs to the ground, resting her weight on them as she straddled the pony’s torso. By that time Drafty, realizing how bad her position was, began to thrash, but she had no leverage, back legs kicking uselessly as she tried and failed to free herself. In desperation, she brought her head up sharply, trying to headbutt the griffon…but was forced to abort the motion midway through as the griffon held one of her daggers in front of her; had Drafty gone through with it, she’d have impaled her neck on the blade.
As it was, the griffon slowly brought the dagger forward, until its tip was resting against the captured pony’s throat. Even then she kept pushing, forcing Drafty to lower her head back to the ground, until finally she was lying flat, with the griffon still pressing the point of the blade against her neck. In her other talon, she raised the matching dagger up high, reversing her grip so that it was pointed downward, right above Drafty’s face.
The entire thing had taken barely fifteen seconds.
Momentarily overwhelmed by the sight of such brutal efficiency, Nosey felt her blood run cold as she realized what was about to happen. If the griffon brought either dagger down, it would mean the end of Thermal Draft, and whether she was a changeling or not, Nosey wasn’t prepared to watch the other pony die…especially not while she was wearing Lex’s form! Maybe I can blind her with that fireworks spell I learned as a kid! It wasn’t very impressive, and not dangerous in the least, being a modest explosion of colored light and sound with no actual pyrotechnics behind it – it was more of a party popper than an actual firework, really – but maybe in the relative gloom it would be enough to startle her. She could grab Drafty and get away with Feather Duster, just like she’d originally planned, and hopefully lose that griffon before she…she…
Belatedly, Nosey realized that the griffon hadn’t moved, declining to finish Thermal Draft off instead of bringing her daggers down.
A moment later she found out why.
“Too easy,” murmured the griffon, staring down at the disguised Drafty from behind her goggles. Her head twisted as she looked around, and Nosey held her breath as she slunk back further behind the vat. Apparently she hadn’t been detected, because a moment later she heard the griffon speak again. “Are you really Lex Legis?”
“What? Of course I-, ngh!”
Drafty’s answer was cut off as the griffon once again reversed her grip on the dagger she was holding aloft, bringing the butt of it down hard across Drafty’s face. As her victim reeled from the blow, she reached up and yanked off the circlet the captured pony was wearing…only to watch as it immediately faded into nothing in her grasp. “An illusion?” she muttered. “But it felt real to the touch…” She considered that for a moment as she looked the pony beneath her over. “Explain yourself. Now.”
“My…my magic is beyond your feeble understand-, hrgh!”
Another sharp blow to the face cut Drafty off, the griffon snorting in irritation. “Let me make this easy for you. I’m here to kill Lex Legis. So if you want to save yourself, you’ll stop with the games.”
Drafty swallowed, looking away from the dagger and the person holding it. “I’m not scared of you. I know that death doesn’t have to be permanent.”
“I have ways of defeating resurrection magic,” replied the griffon coldly. “So if you’re thinking someone will bring you back, think again.” She let that sink in for a moment before continuing. “Now, are you Lex Legis?”
Beneath her, Nosey could see Thermal Draft swallow, breathing faster, but her expression remained defiant. “Why would you assume otherw-”
This time, it wasn’t a blow to the face that interrupted her. It was the upraised dagger coming down sharply, stopping a fraction of an inch from her eye. “When I fought Lex Legis, I cut him. I stabbed him. I poisoned him, electrocuted him, and sliced through one of his eyes. And the only time he so much as flinched was when he was trying to lure me into a trap. You’ve been all talk and no action. So either you’re an imposter using some sort of advanced shapechanging magic, or you've healed up and this is all part of some elaborate ploy.” She spun the dagger idly, as though it were a drill about to be lowered into her captive’s eye. “So, which one is it?”
Drafty swallowed, but clenched her jaw, saying nothing.
“Last chance,” hissed the griffon. “Then I decide to be safe rather than sorry.” The dagger spun faster. “Tell me your name.”
“…you first.”
“Have it your way. I’m not supposed to kill anyone except my quarry, but if you turn out to be a fake after all, what my employer doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”
She moved her dagger away from Drafty’s eye then, but only to return it to a raised position. “I’m Dark Streak, and you, whether you’re the real Lex Legis or not, have been an incredible disappoint-”
That was when Nosey cut loose with her fireworks spell.
A screeching sound from up ahead, followed by a loud pop accompanied by a burst of light, made Aria frown. “What was that?”
Lex’s reaction was far less restrained, going stiff with alarm. “That was a fireworks spell, the kind unicorns use at parties! We have to hurry!”
On his other side, Sonata blinked. “For realsies? ‘Cuz this is, like, the worst place to throw a party.” Her comment came with a glance behind them, where the fire was creeping closer despite their having moved further toward the back of the building. Already, the heat was becoming pervasive, with smoke now visible above them as it collected at the factory’s high ceiling.
“It means,” hissed Lex, his voice thick with tension, “that there’s some sort of altercation going on up ahead!”
Sonata tilted her head in confusion. “Alter-what now?”
“He means a fight,” grunted Aria, picking up the pace. But she wasn’t able to move anywhere near as fast as she could have, still half-carrying Lex between herself and Sonata. “How do you know that spell means a fight’s happening? In fact, how do you know that was even a spell at all?”
“If that had been a physical firework, it likely would have flown upward, above all this debris, where we could have seen it,” replied Lex. Aria didn’t miss the strained tone in his voice, despite the fact that he was resting most of his weight on them. Even beyond the horrific wounds he’d taken, he looked exhausted, his face pale even though sweat was running down his brow. “If it hadn’t, it likely would have ignited more of whatever flammable materials this place is filled with. But the magical equivalent has no combustible properties, ergo that’s likely what that was.”
“So the kidnapper’s a unicorn?” asked Sonata, her eyes widening as a thought occurred to her. “Hey, is this one of those things bad guys use for luring people into a trap? Whatchamacallit…a lure?”
Lex shook his head, not bothering to react to her inanity. “That’s unlikely. If this was some sort of ruse, the perpetrator would almost certainly have used something less subtle in order to make us abandon a cautious approach. And although they have magic, they’ve never used telekinesis when fighting, despite the tactical advantage it could have given them. Which means someone else used that spell.”
Aria’s brow furrowed at that. “Who? It’s not like Feather Duster’s a uni-”
“No! NO!”
The scream, full of fright, that rang out from nearby answered her question, as they all recognized the owner of the voice.
Nosey.
Lex immediately withdrew his forelegs from around Sonata and Aria, shoving the two of them away. “Go!” he hissed at them. “I’m slowing you down! Go help her!”
Aria looked torn, glancing between Lex and the winding path ahead of her. “But what if that’s the less subtle lure you were just-”
“There’s no suggestion that the person behind this even knows who Nosey is!” snarled Lex, the words spilling from his lips faster as his tension rose. “If this were a ploy, they would have used Feather Duster’s voice! Go!”
Sonata bit her lip. “But will you be oka-”
“I said GO!”
Both sisters hesitated for just a moment, then nodded in unison, turning and running toward where Nosey’s voice had come from.
For his part, Lex managed to wait until he was sure they were gone before he collapsed, biting back the pained groan that threatened to escape from his lips. Even a few seconds of standing on all fours without the girls’ help had pushed him to his limits. If it hadn’t been for the iridescent spindle circling him – the floating gemstone that was enchanted to let its user ignore the need to breathe – he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, his muscles clenching in agony from the combination of injuries and overtaxing, to the point where standing and breathing at the same time would have been too much.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. That stone was, Lex knew, his only hope if he couldn’t find an antidote to whatever he’d been poisoned with. The difficulty he’d had breathing before he’d delayed the toxin suggested that it attacked the lungs. The problem would be if the poison continued to spread, affecting organs like his heart…
Terminating that line of thought, Lex forced himself to his hooves, an endeavor that required three tries before he was successfully able to stand. His magic would keep the poison from being a problem for several more hours; whatever was happening with Nosey – and, in a few moments, Sonata and Aria – and quite possibly Feather Duster, since she had to be nearby, was far more immediate. He’d worry about himself afterward.
Forcing himself to move through sheer willpower, Lex put one hoof in front of the other, somehow managing to hobble forward. It was at a snail’s pace, but he refused to relent, reminding himself of all the times other ponies had paid the price for his being unable to help them. He’d failed to keep Nosey from being tormented by Xiriel. He’d failed to notice that Feather Duster was being blackmailed by River Bank.
He wouldn’t fail either of them again.
Dark Streak reacted to the sudden explosion of light and sound before she’d even fully registered what was happening.
One instant she was crouched over the pony who may or may not have been Lex Legis, ready to bring her dagger down and put an end to them. Then she was throwing herself into a roll, dropping her weapon in favor of reaching for her bandoliers even as she started to process that someone had just fired something at her. The specifics of what exactly she’d just dodged were less important than where it came from though, and even as her brain traced the trajectory back around to the equinoid shape hiding in the shadow of the vat across from her, Dark Streak was already throwing the small pouch she’d grabbed, one talon tearing a small rupture across its surface as she lobbed it at the indistinct figure.
Coming up from her roll onto three legs, she had just enough time to watch as the unknown pony reared back, their body language registering surprise as the small packet – known as a tanglefoot bag – hit them dead-center. Then it exploded, a wet splattering sound filling the air as the pressurized sludge inside the sealed bag burst outward. The gunk covered the pony almost completely, stopping just below her neck as she stumbled backward into the side of the vat, finding herself pinned there by the slime as she began to struggle, unable to extricate herself.
“No!” she shrieked, realizing that she was trapped. “NO!”
Her horn lit up then, trying to yank the sticky substance off of herself telekinetically. That wouldn’t work, Dark Streak knew. The mixture of tar, mucilage, and resin that the tanglefoot bag contained could be scraped off with any sort of edged tool, but the simple pushing and pulling of telekinesis wouldn’t be able to do anything to it. At least, not until the mixture began to congeal, something that would take roughly thirty seconds to happen now that it had been exposed to air.
But Dark Streak couldn’t bring herself to care about that at the moment. Nor did the sight of Feather Duster, slumped behind the squirming unicorn, earn more than a moment’s notice from the assassin. Instead, she found all of her attention focused on the trapped unicorn herself, her face illuminated by the light from her horn.
I remember her.
The sight of the bespectacled mare who’d quite literally bumped into her back in Canterlot, when she’d been looking for a magic shop where she could purchase the alchemical ingredients she needed for this job, was so unexpected that for a moment Dark Streak couldn’t do anything except stare. She’d checked herself over thoroughly after they’d parted company back then, making sure that the seemingly accidental encounter hadn’t been the unicorn trying to either steal something from her or plant something on her. When she’d found nothing out of the ordinary, Dark Streak had been content to write the entire meeting off as pointless, not giving it another thought.
And yet now that same pony was here, somehow having followed her across the continent in order to interfere with her assignment to kill Lex Legis. This can’t be a coincidence, Dark Streak decided as she looked the thrashing pony over in silent amazement. I’ll need to interrogate her-
From behind her came the soft scrape of metal against stone, almost inaudible over the four-eyed mare’s struggles.
-after I take care of things here.
Pivoting one hundred eighty degrees, Dark Streak stepped back to give herself some room, her free talon unwrapping and flinging the bolas that she’d secured to her belt in a single smooth motion, the wire taut and twirling between the wooden weights on each end as she released them.
For the second time in less than ten seconds, her aim proved true. The bolas hit Leg Legis just below the knees, sending the red-horned unicorn crashing to the floor as his legs were suddenly pinned together. He let out a pained groan as he hit the ground chin-first, her dagger falling free from where he’d been holding it in his mouth, hitting the floor with a clatter far louder than when he’d picked it up a moment ago.
This time Dark Streak took a moment to regard the pony who was supposedly her quarry, watching as he tried to futilely tried to kick his legs free of the wire wrapped around them.
She hadn’t bothered using restraints against Lex when she’d fought him before. Even with the incense she’d spread throughout the factory suppressing his ability to turn into shadow, he was still able to create black crystals that were sharp enough to cut him out of almost anything. But now…
Unable to resist a snort of derision as “Lex” grabbed her dagger in his mouth and started trying to saw through the wire, Dark Streak sauntered over to him. A sharp kick to the face was all it took to make him drop the weapon, and she couldn’t help but shake her head as she picked up her dagger, more confident now that this was an imposter. But it’s still better to be safe than sorry, she decided, raising her blade again. This time there wouldn’t be any interrup-
“I think it’s this way! Come on!”
“Shut up, you idiot! They’ll hear us coming!”
The voices, which could only have belonged to those two mares who were Lex’s playthings, were close enough that Dark Streak had no time to be irritated. Instead, she wasted a half-second glancing at where it sounded like they were coming from, silently judging that she had maybe five or six seconds before they were here. But that was more than enough time to finish whoever was intent on pretending to be their boyfriend off-
Except the pony with their legs bound underneath her wasn’t Lex Legis anymore.
Instead, it was a dull brown pegasus mare, her eyes filled with fear. But those eyes weren’t looking up at her, but were instead directed toward where the Sirens’ voices had come from. Even as Dark Streak watched, the unknown pegasus’ gaze slid over to where the four-eyed unicorn was still stuck to the vat, wincing as the two of them made eye contact. Finally, she looked up at Dark Streak, her expression turning into one of wry resignation. “You got me,” she sighed. “I’m not the real Lex after all.”
For a moment, Dark Streak was tempted to stab the mare under her to death anyway, just for having made herself so annoying. But that would have been pointless; by now the Sirens were close enough that she could hear their hoofsteps. Even though those two were idiots, they had enough magic that Dark Streak knew she couldn’t afford to take them lightly. Nor could she simply fall back; if they grabbed the ponies here and led them outside somehow, there’d be nothing keeping Lex – who was almost certainly still somewhere inside the factory – from leaving. Not to mention that the fire looked like it was spreading faster; she’d have to finish things here quickly, and then find out where her target had gone.
Clenching her beak so tightly that it was almost painful, Dark Streak began preparing to face Sonata and Aria in battle.
“Hey, do you think we should we try to come up with a plan?” murmured Sonata, keeping her voice low as she and her sister hurried through the maze of old machinery and storage supplies toward where they’d heard Nosey’s panicked scream. “I mean, if there’s a fight up ahead, Lex would probably have a plan, you know?”
“What are you talking about? We have a plan,” snorted Aria as they rushed past the metal skeleton of some old piece of industrial equipment. “We’re gonna stomp all over the bad guy, rescue Blondie and Little Miss Maid, head back and get Lex, then go home.”
“Oh…”
The disheartened tone in Sonata’s voice made Aria glance at her, frowning. “What? You think you could come up with something better?”
Sonata shook her head, her expression apologetic. “No, that’s, like, totes awesome! I was just kinda hoping it’d include stopping for ice cream on the way back, you know? That’d be really great after how hot it’s gotten-”
She cut herself off as the two of them turned one final corner, coming to an immediate halt as they saw several figures in front of them, outlined in the dim glow of the fire that was slowly working its way toward their end of the building. One was a familiar unicorn mare in glasses, stuck to the side of a huge vat by what looked like a big glob of gunk. A second was a pegasus in a maid outfit, unmoving as she lay slumped nearby. Unexpectedly, there was another pegasus there as well, her updraft cutie mark prominently displayed due to how she was lying on the floor with her legs tied together.
But the fourth figure, although not one that either Siren recognized, was the one who nevertheless commanded their attention.
Directly in the center of the open area in front of them was a griffon dressed all in black. Standing upright on her back legs, she was lowering a vial from her upturned beak. Although her eyes were impossible to see behind her tinted goggles, there was no mistaking where she was looking as her other talon came up, pointing the dagger she was holding directly at Sonata and Aria in a silent, deadly promise.
Without taking her eyes off of the fearsome figure, Sonata leaned closer to Aria. “I think maybe she’s the bad guy,” she stage-whispered.
“Sonata!” shrieked Nosey, struggling in her gooey prison. “Aria! Watch out! Her name’s Dark Streak, and she’s really fast! She-”
Then the griffon rushed forward, wings beating heavily as she closed the distance between herself and the Sirens in an instant.
Sonata and Aria immediately leaped apart, heading in opposite directions as they circled the outer edge of the clearing. Despite not having discussed tactics beforehand, both instinctively understood that splitting up would force their enemy to pick one of them to follow. Whoever they didn’t pursue would be able to sing a spell uninterrupted. After a thousand years of working their magic together, it was an obvious course of action for the two of them.
It was obvious to Dark Streak also.
Moving to pursue Aria, the assassin lashed out with a horizontal slash that left a deep cut along the Siren’s chest, just below her neck. It was painful enough that Aria couldn’t help but cry out, the spell she’d started singing disrupted as her voice rose in a shriek of pain.
But Dark Streak wasn’t paying attention to that, instead turning her head just enough to catch sight of where Sonata was backing away, her voice already raised in song. Clutching the pouch that she’d withdrawn from one of the bags tied to her belt – an action that she’d deliberately drawn attention away from by pointing her dagger at the pair in an overly-dramatic fashion – she loosened the drawstring as she flung it in Sonata’s direction.
The tiny projectile hit the Siren on the side of the face, a spray of gray-green powder billowing out in a cloud. Despite scrambling away, Sonata couldn’t help but breathe some of it in, having to draw in air as she tried to finish her musical chant. An instant later she doubled over, her lyrical intonations replaced by coughing and hacking, her lungs rebelling as the suffocation powder that Dark Streak had thrown at her lived up to its name.
“Sonata!” The worried cry left Aria’s lips involuntarily, despite knowing that she had no time to worry about her sister. Dark Streak had diverted her attention to the other Siren only for a moment, looking back toward Aria as soon as Sonata had begun to choke, drawing one of the many daggers sheathed in her bandolier as she did.
But this time, Aria was ready for her. Backpedaling as quickly as she could, the pigtailed mare sang a shorter spell, finishing the melody before Dark Streak could press her attack. Immediately, Aria’s form became blurry and indistinct, like an oil painting in the rain. Got you now! she crowed inwardly as she started singing another spell, Dark Streak’s dagger striking out and missing her by inches as she hurried to finish casting.
Nor was she the only one rallying. Sonata was already clearing her throat, pulling in a deep breath of air as she managed to begin singing again. The sound caused Dark Streak to turn in place, one dagger leaving her talon as she threw the weapon directly at Sonata’s face…
Only for it to embed itself in Thermal Draft’s shoulder as the mare suddenly hopped up and planted herself in the dagger’s flight path, the bolas that had previously bound her legs glowing as Nosey’s telekinesis dragged them away. Drafty’s face twisted in agony, but she managed to choke down a cry of pain, giving Sonata a desperate look. “Get her!”
Although Sonata couldn’t verbally reply, she managed to give the injured mare a grateful nod, completing her spell as she turned her full attention back toward Dark Streak. You’re totes gonna regret messing with us! she swore as she felt her enchantment reach out toward the assassin. For realsies!
The spell was one designed to manipulate the target’s emotions. Specifically, to fill them with overwhelming grief, to the point where they wouldn’t be able to do anything except weep in sadness. It was fitting for someone who’d hurt Feather Duster, Lex, and now Aria. Even better, while she was busy feeling sorry for herself, the griffon would be in no condition to-
Dark Streak shook the spell off, the backlash letting Sonata feel that the assassin had brushed off her enchantment with no more effort than it would have taken her to kick a pebble away.
It was enough to leave her open-mouthed. She knew it was possible for someone with a strong enough will to resist being enchanted, but she couldn’t believe how casually the griffon had done it. Either she’s got some sort of magic helping her out, or she’s got willpower equal to Lex! Or both!
Shaking away her amazement as she saw the griffon take another swing at the purple-and-fuchsia smudge that was her sister, Sonata opened her mouth to warn Aria not to try enchanting her enemy.
Fortunately, Aria hadn’t been planning on it.
Rearing up as she finished the last note of her spell, Aria held her hooves outward, and the indistinct splotch of white that appeared across her blurry visage was the only indication of the savage grin she wore. A second later, a gout of flames erupted outward, the fire erupting less than a foot from Dark Streak’s face. Spraying outward, the heat made Sonata yelp and throw herself backward, Drafty recoiling as tendrils of flame came within inches of her.
But none of them reached Dark Streak, the assassin having thrown herself into a crouch and rolled forward, avoiding the flames and coming up alongside Aria, her dagger lashing out.
The blurring spell the Siren had placed on herself prevented the blade from finding a vital area, but it didn’t keep it from scoring a wicked hit on Aria’s middle, making her cry out as the flames guttered and went out. Falling back onto all fours, she stumbled back, ready to cast that spell again…
Only to realize that the assassin had placed herself directly in front of Nosey.
If I attack her from here and miss, I’ll hit Blondie! realized Aria, her eyes widening as she realized that the griffon had to have done that on purpose. One hoof coming up to cover where Dark Streak had stabbed her just under her ribs, Aria tried to reposition herself to get Nosey out of the line of fire even as she tried to think of a less-expansive spell she could use. But as she saw the griffon moving in, drawing another dagger to replace the one she’d thrown, Aria knew she wouldn’t get the chance-
Sonata’s voice, raised in song, made Dark Streak hesitate, and Aria – recognizing the spell her sister was casting – threw herself backward.
The griffon took her cue from Aria, and leaped upward, but she hadn’t gotten more than a foot of clearance from the ground before Sonata’s spell went off.
“TAKE THIIIIIIIIISSS!!!”
Sonata’s magically-empowered scream hit Dark Streak dead-center, knocking her through the air as though she’d been shot out of a cannon. Her impromptu flight was cut short, however, as she hit the side of one of the huge vats at the edge of the clearing, a deep metallic thrum ringing out as she collided with the huge container hard enough to dent its side.
But when the assassin fell to the ground a moment later, she managed to land on all fours.
“You gotta be kidding me,” muttered Sonata, making her way over to where Aria was crouched.
“Who is this chick?” groaned Aria, watching as the assassin slowly stood back up. That she’d been hurt by that last attack was obvious, her movements faltering as she righted her posture. But it was equally obvious that she still had plenty of fight left in her, one talon coming up to wipe away a trickle of blood that was running down from the corner of her beak.
“She’s an assassin.”
Nosey’s voice made both mares glance over at her, just in time to see Thermal Draft – the dagger that had struck her shoulder now clenched firmly in her teeth – finish scraping the last of the adhesive goo away from the unicorn. Although there were still patches of it stuck to her in places, Nosey was able to pull herself away from the vat, and together she and Thermal Draft managed to carry the still-unconscious Feather Duster between them, awkwardly making their way over to where Sonata and Aria were standing. “Someone paid her to come here and kill Lex,” finished the newsmare.
Sonata looked shocked. “For realsies?”
Nosey nodded. “She said it herself, when…” She trailed off then, glancing at Thermal Draft, who was looking back at her and biting her lip. Both Sirens could tell that something passed between the two mares in that moment, but neither could have said what it was. Finally, Nosey let out a slow breath. “When she caught me with that gunk. She mentioned having an employer, and that she was only here to kill Lex, her quarry.”
“Yeah, well, she doesn’t seem to be too worried about anyone who gets in her way,” groused Aria. Despite still being hidden beneath her blurring spell, the pained undertone in her voice was impossible to miss. “What are you two even doing here anyway? Lex told you not to come!”
“Where is Lex?” murmured Thermal Draft, glancing back at where Dark Streak was glaring at them, seemingly assessing the situation. Further back, the glow from the fire was getting closer, the air becoming fouler as smoke continued to fill the building. But the pegasus was seemingly less concerned with that than she was with the missing member of their group, peering left and right. “Is he alright? That griffon said she…that she hurt him.”
“It’s nothing he can’t handle,” replied Aria gruffly.
“Yeah!” nodded Sonata, though her voice wavered. “He’s, like, totes on top of things! I bet-”
“Maybe we should compare notes later,” warned Nosey. “She’s coming!”
Sure enough, Dark Streak was advancing on the group, daggers held tightly in her talons as she strode forward. While Lex might have been her target, her intent to commit violence radiated off of her in waves, from the tension in her beak to the way her tail thrashed behind her. Despite that, she remained firmly in control of herself, her movements smooth and coordinated as she stalked toward them.
“We’ll handle her!” growled Aria. “You guys get out of here!’
“What she said!” added Sonata. “We’ve totes got this!”
Nosey hesitated. “But-”
“They’re right,” interrupted Thermal Draft. “You said the best way we can help is to get Feather Duster and get out of here, remember? If we stay, we’ll only make it harder for them to fight.”
Nosey winced at that, but managed to find her resolve a moment later, nodding. Together, she and Thermal Draft turned around, still carrying Feather Duster between them. But they’d only gotten a short distance away when she looked back at where Sonata and Aria were preparing themselves to receive Dark Streak’s next attack. “You two had better win!” she called back to them. “I broke Lex’s heart when I left him! I don’t want to do it again by telling him that you died!”
Glancing back over her shoulder, Sonata threw her a smile and a wink, and while there was no way to be certain what Aria’s reaction was under her blurring spell, Nosey was sure she saw the pigtailed mare nod.
Then Dark Streak rushed toward both of them, and Nosey forced herself to look away, knowing that if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to make herself leave.
Lex wasn’t the only one who’d be heartbroken if they didn’t make it.
No, scratch that. She’d passed the point of being irritated when that shapeshifting pony had toyed with her.
Now, barely having managed to land on all fours after her painful collision with the giant vat behind her, Dark Streak was pissed.
Although she’d tried to plan for as many contingencies as she could, this job was nevertheless turning out to be far more trouble than expected. Bad enough how, even with his powers impaired, Lex Legis had proven to be damnably difficult to kill. But the intervention of an unknown shapechanging pony had been a complete and total surprise, as was the unexpected presence of a seemingly random mare Dark Streak had met back in Canterlot. The barrage of unpleasant surprises made a mockery of the work she’d put into preparing.
Now, her quarry was nowhere in sight, while the maid whom she’d kidnapped had been retaken by the unknown duo. Worse, the pair had the Sirens covering them. While Dark Streak wasn’t particularly concerned about facing the enchantresses in battle – the meditation tea she’d downed right as Aria and Sonata had put in their appearance had, in conjunction with the abjuration magic woven into her cloak and her own steely sense of resolve, made it relatively easy to resist whatever mind-control magic the latter Siren had tried to use on her – she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of anxiety. With five ponies standing in plain sight in front of her, it highlighted the absence of the one she’d come here to kill.
Where was Lex Legis?
I’m losing control of the situation. The thought made Dark Streak swallow both her anger and her concern, shoving them down as she tried to clear her head. I need to figure out what’s going on.
Neither Sonata nor Aria seemed eager to continue the battle, instead conversing with the other two mares in low tones, giving Dark Streak a chance to surreptitiously survey the area. Lex wouldn’t have fled; of that she felt certain. While there was a chance that he’d succumbed to his injuries and was unable to fight, Dark Streak couldn’t bring herself to put much stock in that possibility; the last time she’d underestimated Lex’s tenacity, he’d almost caught her in a cage of black crystals. Far better to assume that he was planning something, letting these other ponies act as a distraction while he readied whatever trap he was likely preparing.
Which means, decided Dark Streak as she began to stride forward, that if I can take his mares down before he’s ready, I should be able to force him into the open.
The glasses-wearing unicorn barked a warning, prompting the Sirens to tell her and her pegasus companion to take the maid and go, that they’d stay behind and cover them. Dark Streak couldn’t have cared less; while she still wanted to interrogate that unicorn about how she’d followed her all the way from Canterlot, that was a minor concern at the moment. So long as she had someone to hold hostage, Lex Legis would have to show his face at some point. All the more so if it was one of his playthings.
As the two ponies carrying Feather Duster broke away from the Sirens, sharing one final plea for Sonata and Aria to make it back, Dark Streak charged.
Both Sirens gave ground, singing as they did. Like before, they moved away from each other, trying to divide her focus. The predictability of it made Dark Streak snicker. This again?
With Aria hiding underneath that annoying blur effect, the assassin moved after Sonata, daggers at the ready. A quick beat of her wings was all it took for Dark Streak to circle behind the songstress, putting Sonata between herself and her sister. That should give me enough cover to avoid whatever she tries to hit me with, decided the griffon as she lashed out with her blades, aiming for the Siren’s face in an attempt to disrupt her spellcasting.
To her mild surprise, Sonata stood her ground, managing to raise her forelegs in time to protect her face. Although she took a pair of deep cuts for her trouble, the Siren somehow managed to keep her voice steady, finishing her chant. No sooner had she completed her spell when she threw her head back and let out an ear-piercing scream.
Wincing at the high decibel level, Dark Streak found herself regretting not having put in the ear plugs she’d brought with her, feinting to the side in case the magical attack used sonic force the way Sonata’s last spell had. But unlike before, there was no sense of pressure or impact; just a loud shriek that made her feel like her ears were bleeding. She’s not trying to hit me with anything so concentrated this time, realized Dark Streak as the head-splitting shriek came to an end. It’s pure volume, which means there’s nothing to dodge!
The good news was that the attack hadn’t deafened her, since she could still hear Aria singing her own spell.
The bad news was that even as she realized that, the other Siren finished casting.
Immediately, five points of light flew from her blurry image toward the assassin. Swirling around each other, they split apart as they swerved around Sonata, twisting as they converged toward Dark Streak. The assassin ducked to her left, only for the glowing projectiles to follow her unerringly, and she had just enough time to realize that they couldn’t be dodged before they struck home, slamming into her chest one after another.
Individually, none of the hits were very painful. The sensation was akin to being struck with a small rock fired from a slingshot. But together they made her hiss in pain, stumbling backward from the series of impacts.
“Woo hoo!” cheered Sonata. “Got her!”
“Celebrate after we’ve won!” snarled Aria. “Keep casting!”
Both Sirens’ voices immediately began singing again, but this time Dark Streak was done playing around. Sucking in a deep breath of air, she dropped the dagger in her right talon, reaching for another of the metal vials lining her bandoliers. Flicking the cap open, she tossed it into the center of the clearing where they’d been fighting.
She didn’t have to wait very long. Both Sirens moved away from the metal container, as though worried it would explode as it hit the ground. But the vial simply clattered to the ground, empty, and Dark Streak saw Sonata glance at Aria uncertainly as the two of them kept singing, clearly not sure what to expect.
The answer came when both sisters’ voices suddenly faltered, their singing trailing off into ragged gasps.
Dark Streak grinned inwardly as she watched both of them waver, Sonata’s hoof going to her throat as her eyes widened in alarm. Although it was tough to tell what Aria was doing behind her blurring effect, it wasn’t hard to imagine that she was reacting much the same. The sight was immensely gratifying
Sixty seconds, Dark Streak laughed to herself as she picked up her discarded dagger, making sure to hold her breath as Sonata and Aria began to flail, panicking. For the next sixty seconds, you’re not going to be able to get any air in your lungs. After that, the dead air that had been compacted into that vial would dissipate, and they’d be able to breathe normally – and cast their spells – again.
But Dark Streak had every intention of making sure that they’d be in no condition to do so.
Seeing her approach, Sonata stumbled backward, but Dark Streak easily outpaced her. Darting forward, she reversed her grip on her dagger, bringing the pommel down sharply against the side of Sonata’s head. The mare’s mouth opened in a silent cry of pain, and she raised a hoof reflexively. That was all the opening Dark Streak needed, lashing out with a kick that caught the mare right in the stomach, almost doubling her over as she sank to her knees, eyes bulging as she tried to suck in air that wouldn’t come.
Off to the side, Aria’s blurry form sprang forward suddenly, causing Dark Streak to tense. But instead of coming at her, Aria instead descended on the metal vial that she’d thrown, the heavy sound of stomping ringing out as she brought her hoof down on it.
The sight almost made Dark Streak laugh. Like that’ll do you any good now.
Since Aria’s spell made it difficult to target her with any precision, Dark Streak went for the next best thing. As Aria continued stomping on the empty vial in useless desperation, Dark Streak casually swept a leg out, disabling Aria’s balance enough that she toppled over. Aiming at the center of her indistinct form, Dark Streak stamped her back leg down, mimicking the motion that Aria had been doing a moment earlier, and was gratified to feel her paw coming down on something soft and yielding, a strangled gurgle coming from Aria as shuddered and curled in on herself.
Too bad your pegasus friend abandoned you, smirked Dark Streak triumphantly. If she’d used her wings, she might have been able to make enough of a breeze to dissipate this stuff. As it is, even if you knew any wind spells, you can’t cast them when you’re in this state.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sonata starting to start to drag herself along the ground, and she immediately turned. The dead air would spread out about twenty feet in every direction from where she’d opened the vial, so if either of them got further away than that…
But Sonata wasn’t crawling away from her. Instead, she was moving toward her. The sight was unexpected enough that Dark Streak raised a brow, watching as the breathless Siren – one bloody hoof clenched around her middle – pulled herself forward…and placed herself in front of Aria protectively, turning a defiant gaze toward the griffon.
Dark Streak had to fight to keep from laughing out loud at the useless gesture. Punching outward, the knuckles of her talon connected solidly with Sonata’s nose, sending the Siren sprawling. Are you seeing this, Lex Legis? mused Dark Streak as she turned to scan the area again, idly throwing another kick at the pair, feeling it strike one or the other of them; it didn’t really matter which. Your harlots are in trouble. Are you just going to let them suffer while you keep hiding?
Keeping her eyes on her surroundings, Dark Streak threw another kick at the downed pair. Then another. Then a third. They were barely fighting back now, and were probably only half-conscious by this point. Fortunately for her, she felt fine, the deep breath she’d taken being more than enough to keep her going as she kicked her leg out again-
Only for it to be caught by Aria.
Having been reared up on her hind legs, with her attention directed outward in anticipation of an incoming attack, Dark Streak couldn’t reorient her balance as Aria yanked hard on her trapped leg, causing the assassin to fall.
Immediately, Sonata threw herself on top of her, her fat flank coming down hard on Dark Streak’s middle. The sudden weight dropping onto her stomach was enough to make the griffon jackknife in place, the air she’d made sure to keep in her lungs suddenly rushing outward as her upper body jerked forward-
Which was when Sonata kissed her.
For a moment Dark Streak couldn’t figure out what was happening. But as the Siren pressed her lips against the end of her beak – her hooves coming up to cover the sides of it in the same motion – she heard Sonata inhale heavily, and suddenly realized what was going on.
Despite being trapped in an area where no respiration was possible, the two mares had managed to find a single source of breathable air.
Her lungs.
Yanking her head away from Sonata, Dark Streak brought her daggers around in quick swipes. But her positioning was awkward, unable to put any power behind the strikes, and she did little more than leave shallow cuts across Sonata’s chest as the pony rolled off of her, flopping onto her side awkwardly. Dark Streak immediately moved to pursue, only to find that Aria – who should have been on the verge of passing out by now – was still hanging on to her back leg, preventing her from moving.
Snarling, her empty lungs already starting to burn, Dark Streak prepared to stab down at the blurry Siren.
But the sound of singing made her stop.
Her eyes widening as she turned back toward Sonata, Dark Streak realized too late that the pony hadn’t stolen her last breath of air merely to relieve her suffocation. She was using it to cast a spell! Even as the words left her lips in a rasping wheeze, Dark Streak could see the Siren hurrying to finish it before she ran out of breath.
Shifting her grip on her dagger in order to throw it, the griffon wasn’t able to complete the motion before Sonata croaked out the last syllable.
An instant later, Dark Streak found herself frozen in place, unable to move.
Feeling her spell work, Sonata’s first instinct was to sigh in relief.
When that didn’t work, she somehow managed to get her hooves under her, stumbling toward where Aria was. It was hard to get a grip on her while she was still all blur-ified, but somehow she managed to wrap her hooves around her, dragging her away from the frozen griffon. She had no idea how long her spell would hold, or if they’d be able to breathe if they got far enough away from her, but she had to try-
Suddenly, as they moved between the two vats that marked the edge of the clearing, Sonata felt fresh air flow into her lungs again, collapsing as she drew in a deep breath. Next to her, she heard Aria do the same, her sister gasping raggedly as she could finally breathe again. “A-Aria,” she coughed. “You okay?”
It took her sister two tries to answer her. “Y-yeah,” she groaned, before grunting a lyrical note. Instantly, the blurring around her faded, letting Sonata see the bruises that were already forming from where Dark Streak had kicked her. “You?”
“Totes,” muttered Sonata, lying back and staring upward blankly. Everything hurt, from where the assassin’s dagger had cut her foreleg to where she’d been kicked to the burning ache in her chest, though thankfully the latter feeling was already beginning to fade. “I’m just glad you figured out what I was trying to tell you.”
“It wasn’t that hard, since you were looking right at me and mouthing ‘grab her’ while she was kicking us,” grunted Aria. “But I didn’t think you were going to kiss her.”
Sonata managed a shrug. “I thought I could do like in the movies, where someone will be drowning, and the hero kisses them and breathes into their mouth. Just, you know, in reverse.” Turning her head to look at Aria, she managed a grin. “What do you think? Was that a plan Lex would be proud of or what?”
Aria made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a snort. “You’re an idiot.”
But the words came as she reached a hoof out and curled it around Sonata’s, gripping it tightly for a moment before letting go, grimacing as Lex’s curse kicked in.
Sonata giggled, taking the affectionate gesture for what it was before her expression turned serious and she sat up with a groan, looking at the paralyzed griffon. “We’ve still gotta, like, put her down for the count.”
“What’re you talking about?” huffed Aria as she picked herself up. “She’s paralyzed, right? You got her. Now let her choke to death the way we almost did.”
But Sonata shook her head. “I don’t know if my spell will hold. I mean, I figured I could use my stand-still enchantment because she was all, like, surprised and distracted and stuff, but she could shake it off at any moment. Like with how that freaky fish guy you were with almost did, remember?”
Aria frowned, recalling how Sonata had paralyzed Monitor back when they’d fought back in Vanhoover. The creature had started to overcome the paralysis quickly, almost breaking free before Sonata had finished the creature off. If that happened now…
A hateful grin worked its way across Aria’s face then. “I’ve got this.”
Taking another deep breath of sweet, delicious air, she began to sing a spell, hoping that the assassin was still conscious. She wanted her to feel every second of what was about to happen…
Then she finished her spell, and a blazing ring of fire sprang up around the frozen griffon, rising twenty feet into the air and obscuring her from view.
Sonata yelped, stumbling backwards and almost falling over, but Aria didn’t move. “Relax,” she drawled. “The fire made by this spell only radiates heat in one direction, and in this case it’s all concentrated inside the circle.” Smirking at the thought of the assassin not being able to move as she was burned, Aria gave her pigtails a toss. “Normally I have to concentrate to keep that going, but it’ll last for a minute or so without me doing anything. And I’m betting that’ll be more than enough time to fry her to the bone.”
“Normally, I’d say that was super harsh, but she totes deserved it,” sighed Sonata. “She was, like, the worst, so I’m fine if that griffon’s goose gets cooked.”
Aria rolled her eyes at the terrible joke. “I think you’re the worst, Sonata.”
Smiling at the insult-turned-in-joke, Sonata stuck her tongue out at her sister. “Well I think you’re worser than wo-” She didn’t have a chance to finish as her eyes suddenly widened, her head snapping around to look at the pillar of fire. “It’s worn off!” she blurted.
Aria’s brow furrowed. “Wh-”
Then Dark Streak came leaping through the flames.
Blazing, with smoke rising from her body, the griffon didn’t stop moving even as she reached the edge of the dead air zone, ramming into Sonata full-tilt.
Dark Streak didn’t break her momentum as she took a breath of much-needed air, barreling forward into Sonata, carrying her back and slamming her into the side of the vat.
The Siren’s head hit the metal container with a heavy crack, and she slumped down with a groan, stunned. Off to her side, Aria stepped back, her eyes wide with horror at her reappearance. For a moment she couldn’t seem to speak, her mouth hanging open, before she managed to start belting out a quick tune. Holding out a hoof, a burst of kaleidoscopic light shot out from the end of it, flashing with a cascade of colors so brilliant it was almost blinding.
Dark Streak barely noticed it, gripping her daggers so tightly it was almost painful as she threw herself at the pigtailed mare.
Aria tried to sing another spell, but found herself unable to do so as Dark Streak’s dagger was suddenly pressed between her teeth, the edge of the blade pressed painfully against her tongue. “We’ll see how well you can sing after I’ve cut your voice out!” she hissed, fully aware of just who was responsible for trying to burn her to death.
Apparently, her threat was even more intimidating than she realized, because the blood immediately drained from Aria’s face. Shaking all over, she backed away, pulling her head free of the blade and shaking it wildly. “No!” she shrieked, a look of fear spreading across her features. “NO! NOT AGAIN!”
Not knowing what the Siren was talking about, Dark Streak couldn’t bring herself to care, raising her dagger high, intent on making good on her threat.
Only to stop as she caught sight of something glittering out of the corner of her vision, back at the edge of the clearing.
Standing there, his floating gemstones glittering in the light of the ring of fire Aria had raised, Lex Legis stared straight at her.
Dark Streak froze, her entire body going tense as she waited for him to make his move.
And then he did.
Slowly, with visible effort, he reared up on his back legs, spreading his forelegs out wide in a clear, unmistakable gesture:
Come and get me.
For a second Dark Streak hesitated. This had to be a trap of some sort. An illusion or another imposter or something else. But unlike the last Lex she'd seen, this one was covered in wounds, including one eye being rent. Nor were his eyes or horn glowing. He was just standing there, daring her to attack him.
Despite knowing that he was provoking her, Dark Streak suddenly couldn't bring herself to care. She'd been through too much aggravation, expended too much effort, and experienced too much pain. It was time to bring this job to a close. Whatever he had planned for her didn't matter. She'd go right through it, and then through him.
Bringing her daggers up, she ignored the frightened cries of the Sirens as she flapped her wings, flying towards Lex, intent on burying the blades in his skull. It was only when she got to within five feet of him that his horn lit up, and she saw him lift something in his telekinetic aura, tossing it at her.
Snarling, she batted it away...only to belatedly realize that it was the storage bag he'd cut off of her belt the last time they'd fought.
Then, before she had a chance to react, he opened his mouth and blew the poison powder she'd been keeping in there right in her face.
There was no way for Dark Streak to avoid breathing some of the poison in.
The exertion involved in her maddened rush toward Lex Legis, along with how she was still getting her breath back after she’d been caught in the zone of dead air she’d made, made sure of that. Even as she twisted her head around and snapped her beak shut, she could feel a tingling sensation developing in the back of her throat, a bittersweet taste settling onto her tongue a moment later. Along with her sudden shift from offense to defense, the symptoms were alarming enough that her dagger strikes went wide, doing little more than leaving scratches along Lex Legis’s shoulders as she crashed into him.
They went down hard, and Dark Streak tucked her wings close to her body as she rolled, riding her momentum and directing it so that she could come up on the edge of the dead air, far from the ring of fire Aria had created. Keeping her daggers clenched tightly in her talons, she raised her head immediately, already thinking about what she needed to do after she dodged whatever follow-up attack was surely about to follow. Namely, retrieve the bag Lex had tossed at her; she made sure to carry the antidote to every poison she used, just in case something like this ever happened. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which toxin he used, she reassured herself as she got her legs back under her, springing up into a fighting crouch. I always keep the remedy in the same-
“You should have talked to me first.”
The voice was soft, masculine, and utterly heartbroken. But that wasn’t what made the daggers drop from Dark Streak’s suddenly-nerveless talons.
It was that she recognized who it belonged to.
“Bright Feather?” she croaked, only to realize as the name was leaving her beak that it couldn’t possibly have been him.
After all, Bright Feather – her husband – was dead.
He’d died back on Everglow, almost a year ago now. He’d been torn apart after investigating Old Greybeak’s cabin, despite knowing that the hateful bitch’s ghost still haunted the place, after he’d heard that two wayward children had gotten lost there. He’d always had a soft spot for children, especially after…
“It wasn’t only your decision to make.”
“I had to!” she shrieked, spinning in place; the voice had come from behind her that time, from the back of the factory. “You wouldn’t have been able to go through with it! You would have…have tried to talk me…” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she was saying.
This was the conversation that had spelled the end of their marriage. They’d continued living together afterward, never having formally ended their union, but there hadn’t been any intimacy between them. They’d become two strangers who happened to reside in the same house. Why was this happening now…?
This isn’t right, she decided, and it took her a moment to realize that she should have come to that conclusion immediately. The fact that she hadn’t made her choke down a wave of panic. What was she doing?! She was in the middle of a fight! She needed to kill Lex Legis and his…wait, no, the Sirens! This was their doing! They’d used their magic to mess with her mind! Except…she hadn’t heard them singing…so if they hadn’t caused this, what else could have-
Suddenly she knew exactly which poison Lex Legis had gotten her with.
Yanking her goggles down so that they dangled around her neck, she squeezed her eyes shut as she tightly pinched the space between them, focusing as intently as she could. It’s not real! she told herself insistently. It’s all just phantoms! Ignore them and finish what you came here to do!
But when she opened her eyes a moment later, Bright Feather was standing right in front of her.
His eyes were bloodshot, with tear tracks matting his cheeks. His voice was hoarse, filled with repressed sobs. He rocked in place as he held a small bundle to his chest, one that was completely still as he fixed her with a look of absolute sorrow.
“She was my baby too.”
Intellectually, Dark Streak knew that this wasn’t actually happening, that the correct thing to do would have been to ignore the hallucination she was having and go kill Lex Legis. But that impulse was utterly drowned beneath the wave of emotions that swept over her then. They’d never spoken of what had happened after that day, and some part of her had always wondered if she should have brought it up again. Had there been some particular combination of words that would have made him understand? Would he have come to see things from her point of view if she’d just kept trying to reach him?
Although she’d tried to put those speculations out of her mind, she’d never been able to truly escape them. Now, faced with the vision of what had happened on that day, she couldn’t summon up the strength to disregard what was right in front of her. Real or not, she just couldn’t.
“I did it for her!” It was all she could do not to howl the words in anguish. “Why can’t you see that?! No one would have accepted her!”
“We would have.”
The new voice was one that Dark Streak didn’t remember, coming from behind her. Spinning around, she needed a moment to recognize the orange-furred pegasus filly with the dark pink mane and tail. The one whose wings didn’t work.
“Just because she couldn’t fly doesn’t mean that everyone would have been mean to her,” stated the filly, giving Dark Streak a look of pity. “I can’t fly, and I have lots of friends.” As if to back up what she was saying, the two other fillies that had been with her that day – the earth pony with the bow in her hair and the unicorn with the curls – stepped out of the shadows and put their forelegs around their crippled friend. But their eyes were sad, gazing at the griffon in silent condemnation.
Dark Streak could feel herself starting to shake, her breath coming heavier as she shook her head. Behind her – on the other side of the pillar of fire – she could hear a low murmur of voices, followed by the sound of hoosteps, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Not in the face of what she’d just been accused of. “That’s different! You’re ponies! She wouldn’t have been able to live among your kind!”
“Why not?” This time, the voice was Willow’s, the purrsian slinking out of the darkness with her usual stoic expression replaced by one of detached scorn. “I came here in order to give my son a better life, and the ponies of this land accepted us both without hesitation.”
As if to prove her words true, her kitten ran across Dark Streak’s field of view then, rushing past Willow before turning and giving his mother a wave. “I’m going to the talent show, Mom!” he called, grinning toothily before joining the three fillies, who turned and followed him as they galloped off into the dancing shadows cast by the light of the flames.
“None of that matters!” Dark Streak barely recognized the sound of her own voice now, the words coming out guttural and harsh as she repressed the urge to scream them from the top of her lungs. “We had to live there! I would have had to watch her grow up there! Do you know what that would have done to her?! What that would have done to our family?!”
“I don’t,” lamented Bright Feather, “but we would still have been a family. We could have gotten through it together, until we’d found our way here, to this world.”
“You’re twisting things!” hissed Dark Streak. “No one knew that there was a world like this out there! There wasn’t any hint that a place like this existed! I’m only here now because of what happened! Because of the decision that I made! We would never have found this place otherwise!”
“You don’t know that for sure,” came the cold voice of Willow. “And you never will.”
“YES I DO! YES I DO!” screamed Dark Streak, the last vestiges of her self-control collapsing. “I did what a mother is supposed to do! I put my baby first! I did what was best for her, even though it broke my heart! It wasn’t wrong! IT WASN’T WRONG! IT WASN’T WRONG!!!”
Bright Feather stepped forward then, holding out the bundle he’d been cradling; it twitched and moved now, unlike before. “Look at her, and say that again.”
She didn’t want to. She wanted to turn and run away, as far away as her wings could carry her. But even as the impulse crossed her mind, her limbs refused to move, frozen by her desire to see her daughter again, even knowing what was about to happen.
A choked whimper escaped her lips as she stepped forward. Even though she knew this wasn’t real, that it was all a delusion brought on by the poison she’d been subjected to, she couldn’t tell the difference as she took hold of the swaddled infant, feeling the weight and warmth of her through the blankets. Tears rolled down her face as she gently pulled the cloth back, dreading the sight that awaited her even as she couldn’t help but ache to see her again.
She was so beautiful. Inquisitive little eyes looked around in innocent wonder. The feathers on her head and upper forelegs were black, just like her mother, but changed to a brilliant turquoise on her belly, matching Bright Feather’s coloration. Her lower half also shared his colors, save for the black tip at the end of her tail, which waved cutely.
And at her sides, there were no wings to be found.
Her daughter was the most despised kind of cripple in all of griffon society. The ones who were scorned and mocked, to the point where even their parents were shunned for having produced such a twisted mockery of what griffons were supposed to be. The ones who were relegated to the absolute bottom of their culture, an embarrassment that no one respected or accepted, regardless of what they accomplished.
An alce.
“Are you still certain you weren’t wrong?” Willow’s voice was mocking.
Dark Streak’s mouth was dry, her body shaking with sobs. “I…”
“Was it really what was best for her?” The orange filly’s voice was imperious, demanding an answer.
“She…” Dark Streak couldn’t finish, holding her daughter tighter.
“Did you do the right thing?” Unlike the others Bright Feather’s voice was free of any undertone, and it took Dark Streak a moment to realize that he was really asking.
It was a question that he’d never put to her when he was alive. During that last conversation, he’d been too consumed by grief to try and look at things from her point of view, to let her explain that although it had broken her heart, she’d only wanted what was best for their baby. Nor had they ever returned to the topic afterward, even though she’d wanted to so many times.
And now he had…except, to her horror, she was no longer so sure of herself. The things she’d seen here in Equestria – weak, vulnerable, careless Equestria – had planted a seed of doubt in her mind. Ever since she’d met that crippled filly, playing carelessly with her friends, that seed had begun to sprout, creating a crack in the wall of absolute certainty that she’d erected around her heart in the wake of her decision.
That certainty had been what had made it possible for her to go on, afterward. The knowledge that there hadn’t been any better alternative had sustained her even as her marriage had withered away into a hollow husk. It had enabled her to walk away when she’d been widowed without shedding so much as a tear.
And it had been what had made her into such an excellent assassin.
After all, once you’d killed your newborn baby, killing a stranger was easy.
Except it wasn’t a stranger Dark Streak was holding now. It was her daughter, brought back by the visions she’d been poisoned with. And now that she’d seen that there was a place where her little girl could have grown up safe and happy and accepted, Dark Streak knew that she needed to answer the question she could no longer ignore:
Had she done the right thing?
In her left talon, her baby cooed softly, reaching up to brush a tiny foreleg against her mother’s beak.
Had she done the right thing?
In her right talon, although she didn’t remember picking it up, her dagger gleamed.
Had she done the right thing?
When it came to her a moment later, the answer made Dark Streak scream long and loud.
Sonata and Aria’s voices rang out in unison, but Lex couldn’t bring himself to look over at the two of them. Literally so, as he didn’t have the strength to turn his head. Indeed, at that moment, simply hanging onto consciousness felt like a struggle that he was only barely winning.
The newest lacerations that he’d acquired when that griffon – who was, he could tell by the daggers she’d wielded, the assassin who’d previously worn Feather Duster’s appearance – had barreled into him were like searing lines of fire across his shoulders, adding themselves to the overwhelming maelstrom of pain coursing through him. Managing to stand upright in order to provoke the assassin into attacking him had almost made him black out from the effort it had required, and after she’d collided with him, he could only manage the smallest of motions. Even that, he suspected, was because the floating gemstones were still orbiting him, their magic making things just a little easier.
“Bright Feather?”
Easier enough that he was able to manage a faint smirk as his one undamaged eye managed to glimpse the assassin – who by chance was still in his field of view – drop her daggers and call the name of someone he didn’t recognize, staring into empty space.
He was still wearing the expression when Sonata and Aria dashed over to him, frantic.
“Lex!” Aria was the first to reach him, picking him up and looking him over just long enough to confirm that he was alive and conscious before pulling him into a bone-crushing hug. “I knew you’d rescue us,” she whimpered, sounding more fragile than he’d ever heard her. “She said she was going to cut my voice out, but I knew you’d stop her!”
“Of course he did!” smiled Sonata, rubbing the back of her head gingerly before leaning in to nuzzle him. “Lex Legis might be the smartest pony, like, ever, but he totes doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘give up.’” She cocked her head then, her smiling fading as something occurred to her. “No, wait, that’s two words. Lemme try that again-”
“I had to!” The assassin’s hysterical cry cut her off, making both mares stiffen in fright as they looked at where the griffon was shrieking at nothing. “You wouldn’t have been able to go through with it! You would have…have tried to talk me…”
Her voice faded, leaving both mares rigid with tension as she yanked her goggles down and pinched the space between her eyes. But Lex knew they were letting precious seconds slip away. “We need to get out of here,” he murmured. If it hadn’t been for the iridescent spindle removing his need to breathe, he doubted he’d have been able to summon up the strength to speak. “I don’t know how long that poison will last.”
“Poison?” Sonata tilted her head, looking between him and the distressed griffon. “Is that why she’s acting like a honey-crusted nutbar all of a sudden?”
“If she’s lost her mind, then we should finish her off right now,” murmured Aria. But she made no move to act on her words, and Lex could feel her tremble faintly as she stared at the assassin.
“No,” he rasped. “There’s no telling how long this will last, or how much her current state will impair her ability to react to danger. We need to withdraw now, before she comes to her senses.” He paused then, as much from the strain of speaking as to survey the battle-scarred clearing. “Where are Feather Duster and Nosey?”
“We told them to run,” answered Sonata, grunting as she started helping him up, the floating gemstones adjusting their orbit so as to not collide with her. “Feather Duster was totes out of it, but Nosey and Drafty were able to carry her, and we told them to get out of here.”
“Thermal Draft?” The rush of surprise and worry that ran through Lex then almost made him dizzy. “She’s here too?”
“Yeah,” murmured Aria, finally managing to tear her eyes away from the unseeing griffon. “She and Blondie found Little Miss Maid, and then Dark Streak – the assassin – found them.” She paused for a second, then continued. “Blondie said someone paid her to come and kill you.”
“Dark Streak, not Nosey,” added Sonata helpfully.
For a moment Lex wanted to ask how they’d figured out the assassin’s name, as well as how they’d managed to get her to return to what he presumed was her natural state, before deciding that he’d worry about those things later. “We need to find them. There’s no telling if they made it out or not.”
“I’ve got that covered.” Aria didn’t wait for a response before she sang a quick spell, waiting just a moment after the last note ended before pointing toward the back of the warehouse. “There. Blondie’s in that direction.”
“Let’s go,” urged Lex. “Quickly.”
It wasn’t just the possibility of Dark Streak coming to her senses that lent urgency to his voice. The fire had crept much closer during his third encounter with the assassin. The heat was rapidly becoming uncomfortable, with only a few obstacles now between them and the open flames. Worse, the air was rapidly fouling, and he knew it wouldn’t be too much longer before it became unbreathable altogether.
Fortunately, he had a way out prepared, since his short-range teleportation spell was one of the few bits of thaumaturgical magic he had left. It wouldn’t get them very far, its maximum range being only a little under a thousand feet, but it would be able to get them outside of the burning building.
Except, he realized, he couldn’t use it now. Even though that spell only required spoken components – in his current state, the proper gestures that most of his other spells needed would have been almost impossible for him to complete – he could only transport himself and four other individuals. And the presence of Sonata, Aria, Feather Duster, Nosey, and now Thermal Draft meant that there was one more person than he could bring along with him. Nor could he simply elect to stay behind himself and transport the five of them instead; the spell required that the caster be transported in order to work, bringing any passengers along as adjuncts. Nor could he try and empower it beyond its normal limits; such a thing was far beyond his current capabilities.
And since leaving anyone behind was completely unacceptable, that meant that they’d need to find some other way out before the assassin recovered, or the fire reached them, or they succumbed to smoke inhalation, or something else happened.
“I did it for her!” came Dark Streak’s wail from behind them. “Why can’t you see that?! No one would have accepted her!”
The anguished cry made Sonata glance back. “What’d you poison her with, anyway?”
“I don’t know what the substance actually is,” admitted Lex, “but the label said that it was called ‘waking nightmare.’” Although he had little use for humor, he couldn’t help but see the irony in that. “Given that it was pulverulent, I took a chance that it was meant to be inhaled rather than ingested.”
“Wait, so you just whipped up some sort of poison powder between when we left you and now?” Aria raised a brow at that, continuing to guide them through the maze of discarded factory equipment.
Lex tried to shake his head, but even that much was more than he could muster, so instead he replied verbally. “No. It was in one of that griffon’s bags.”
Sonata’s eyes widened in sudden insight. “Oh, you mean this one?” she asked, casually producing the pouch in question. Seeing the nonplussed looks directed her way then, she tilted her head. “What? I saw you fling it at that griffon when she rushed you and figured it might be important, so I scooped it up while Aria was acting like a damsel whose prince had come.”
The mare in question flushed. “I was not acting like a damsel!”
“Yuh-huh!” grinned Sonata. “You were all like ‘I knew you’d rescue us!’ and ‘She was going to cut my voice out, but I knew you’d stop her!’ and ‘I totes want to put on a pretty dress and sing you a love song!’”
“You made that last one up!” screeched Aria as she turned even redder.
Lex ignored the pair’s antics, instead eyeing the pouch Sonata was casually carrying. He’d retrieved it after having managed to accidentally cut if off of the griffon during their previous encounter, when he’d tried to enclose her in a cage of black crystals. It was similar to the haversack he’d lost during his fight with Xiriel, being enchanted so that it was bigger on the inside than on the outside. It was another indicator that this ‘Dark Streak’ was from Everglow – which was troubling in its implications, if Sonata was right that someone had paid the griffon to come and kill him – since containers with such a utilitarian enchantment were a regular feature of that world’s magic item shops.
Even so, he’d had no time to conduct even a partial inventory of what the bag contained. With how much of a struggle it had been just to walk, attempting to examine the contents of the sack while simultaneously tracking the sounds of battle – using that to home in on where Sonata and Aria had been fighting, since he’d suspected they’d be no match for the assassin – had simply been too much. It had been good fortune alone that the powder-filled vial labeled “waking nightmare” had been the first thing he’d seen when he’d opened it.
That, and a bit of divine assistance. Despite the fact that he didn’t need to breathe thanks to the iridescent spindle orbiting his head, Lex had little doubt that he’d introduced some of the waking nightmare poison into his own system. Holding it in his mouth made that all but guaranteed. Fortunately, it wouldn’t kick in for several hours, thanks to the goddess-given spell he’d used to slow the spread of poison through his system.
“There they are!” exclaimed Aria, coming to a sudden halt. “Blondie! Over here!”
It wasn’t hard to see the pony she was calling out to. Up ahead, Nosey’s eyes were widening behind her glasses, awkwardly turning toward them as she half-carried Feather Duster on her back, the unconscious maid draped over her and Thermal Draft, who was close by the reporter’s side.
That situation lasted only for a moment, however, before Thermal Draft yelled his name and made a mad dash toward him, leaving Nosey staggering as she found herself suddenly carrying Feather Duster all on her own.
Thermal Draft didn’t seem to care in the slightest, however, skidding to a halt right in front of him as she looked him over, her expression horrified. “Lex! Oh my gosh, you’re hurt really badly!” she exclaimed, wincing as she looked at his ruined eye. “That griffon, she…she said she did all sorts of horrible things to you, but I figured she had to be lying. You never lose a fight-”
“And he didn’t this time,” snapped Aria, giving the fretting pegasus a glare. “Why do you think we’re here and she’s not? Lex got the better of her.”
“Totes!” added Sonata. “He, like, breathed some of her own poison on her, and she went super-crazy! She started talking to herself, and looking at the walls, and-, um…hey Lex? How come you weren’t affected by that stuff you hit her with? I mean, you were holding it in your mouth, right? How come you haven’t gone round the bend the way Dark Streak did?”
Lex opened his mouth, but didn’t have a chance to answer as Nosey made their way over to them, grunting as she shouldered Feather Duster’s weight. “I’m glad you guys are here, we have a prob-, oh!” Her train of thought disrupted as she got a good look at Lex, Nosey’s hoof flew up to her mouth, her eyes starting to water as she looked him up and down. “Oh geez, Lex! You look awful!”
He didn’t bother to respond to that, instead turning his attention to the pegasus on her back. “Is Feather Duster alright?”
“We can’t get her to wake up,” answered Thermal Draft, still eyeing him as though she expected him to succumb to his injuries at any second. “We’ve tried shaking her, pinching her, yelling in her ears; none of it worked.”
“She’s still breathing, and her pulse is steady,” added Nosey. “We just can’t get her to come around. I think she’s drugged.” Shaking her head, she looked between him and the Sirens. “Listen, we’ve got a problem.”
“Aw come on! Another one?!” moaned Sonata. “What is it now? Is the whole place sinking? Or is it being invaded by giant rats? Or maybe it’s sinking because it’s being invaded by giant rat, since they’re gnawing on the foundation or something?”
“Worse,” replied Nosey grimly. “We’ve been checking, and there’s no way out of here.”
Aria slumped in place. “Are you kidding me?”
Nosey’s expression was bleak as she shook her head.
Aria’s voice was a mixture of outrage, disbelief, and fear. But those weren’t the only things that made her yell. Now that the fire had spread to cover the majority of the abandoned factory, the sound of the flames was growing louder. The sizzling and popping as the place burned had gone from being mere background noise into a roar; one which was growing less distant with each passing second.
“We found a back door, but it was sealed shut!” answered Thermal Draft. She was speaking as much to Lex as Aria, seeming to find it difficult to take her eyes off of the injured form of her hero for more than a few seconds. “We couldn’t get it open no matter what we tried!”
“I bet I can blast it off its hinges if I use magic to scream really loud,” offered Sonata.
Nervous skepticism was written all over Nosey’s face. “I don’t know…this didn’t feel normal. It was like it was reinforced somehow.”
Aria grimaced, not liking what she was hearing. “You think that griffon did something to it?”
But Lex was the one who replied. “I’m sure of it,” he murmured, barely able to make himself heard above the sound of the flames. “She went to a great deal of trouble to configure this place so that she had the advantage. Securing any exits would have been a high priority for her.”
Nosey winced as, not too far away, the sound of something exploding temporarily caused the conversation to momentarily halt. “I wish she’d made fireproofing this place a priority too!”
That earned a wince from Aria, but Sonata spoke up first. “But how come she didn’t do that for the front door? It was wide open!”
“Because she was targeting me,” answered Lex, “and she knew I wouldn’t leave until I’d retrieved Feather Duster. She needed to leave the entrance open to draw me in; the other exits were sealed so that, if I managed to get her hostage back, she’d know which way I’d need to go in order to get out.”
“Get out…” murmured Thermal Draft quietly, before her head jerked up suddenly, her eyes widening. “I’ve got an idea! When we raided that bank back in Vanhoover, we had to go down into the basement to get where we needed to go, so maybe we can do the same thing here!”
Nosey raised a brow. “Do warehouses have basements?”
“I don’t know,” answered the pegasus with an impish smile. “But I bet it has something almost as good: a sewer!”
“That’s right!” An excited grin broke out across Sonata’s face. “We got into the apartment building down the street that way, so it’ll totes be our ticket out now!”
“Not if we don’t know where the entrance is,” rasped Lex. “The sewer map I examined before sending you two out confirmed that the sewer connected to this location, but it wasn’t to scale with regard to where in here it is.” One of his hooves twitched, the closest he could make to gesturing toward the fire that was closing in on them. “Even if that assassin hasn’t already found the entrance and sealed it, there’s a good chance that it’s already in the fire by now.”
“Oh well that’s just great! Absolutely superb! Aren’t you supposed to be the guy who comes up with answers instead of telling us why things won’t work?” growled Aria, though by now the anxiety in her voice was clearly outstripping the frustration, her pigtails bobbing as she looked around frantically before settling her gaze on Drafty. “If we can’t go down, then how about up? Can you find some sort of hatch in the roof or something and fly us all out of here?”
Her question wasn’t idle, moving away from the heat that was creeping closer to them, carrying Lex with her. Nor was she alone in doing so, the entire group moving toward the back of the warehouse, away from the encroaching flames. But all too soon the wall of the building was in view, making it clear that they had run out of room, and in a few minutes would be out of time as well.
Even before they’d reached the end of the path, however, Thermal Draft was shaking her head. “We tried getting in here through the roof, but the door was locked up tight. We managed to crawl in through the airducts, but there’s no way we can use those now!” She pointed a wing upward, and a single glance was all it took to confirm that she was right.
Although the flames had raised the level of illumination in the building, the entire ceiling – ducts and all – was completely hidden from view now, shrouded in thick smoke. Even if the pegasus had been able to fly them all up there one by one, it was obvious that they’d choke to death long before they’d be able to crawl out of there. “They’d probably break if all six of us climbed in them at once anyway,” muttered Nosey, before giving Thermal Draft a look. “Isn’t there…something else, that you can do?”
The pegasus glanced at her sharply before shaking her head. “I could maybe fly Sonata or Aria up high enough that they could break one of the windows with their magic,” she answered, her voice oddly tense. “But that would just be the glass; that stuff that runs between the individual panes-”
“The mullions,” interjected Lex.
“I don’t know that they’re called,” admitted Drafty, “but yeah, the mullions or whatever, would still be there, and they’re way too small to squeeze through.”
“Then let’s just knock a wall down!” shrieked Aria. “Even if they’re empty, those barrels are still exploding when they catch fire! Just stack a bunch of them next to the wall and we’ll hit them with everything we’ve got!”
“These walls are too thick for that.” Lex was eyeing the structure as he spoke, and despite how strained his voice was, it was completely free of any trace of doubt. “Anything destructive enough to blow a hole in them would require us to be far enough away that we’d have to be in the flames. Otherwise we’d be too close to the blast radius.”
“So…so there’s no way out?” gulped Nosey, her veneer of calm beginning to crack at last. “We’re going to die here?”
“I have a teleportation spell,” admitted Lex. “But it can only transport five of us at most, and-”
“Absolutely not!” added Nosey. “Don’t even think about it!”
Lex blinked, confusion written plainly across his face. “What are you-”
“They’re saying they know what you’re thinking of doing,” cut in Drafty, her expression darkening. “And so do I: you’re going to pull some heroic self-sacrificing bit where say you want us to get out of here while you stay behind, aren’t you?” Despite the heat growing worse with each passing moment, she stamped a hoof. “Well forget it! Either we’re all getting out of here or none of us are! Tell him Sonata! …Sonata?”
The bubbly mare’s lack of an answer drew all eyes toward her, only belatedly noticing that she’d fallen toward the back of the group. But when they all glanced at her, Sonata didn’t look back at them. In fact, she wasn’t looking at them at all, having quite literally lost her head.
…or at least, that was how it appeared at first glance. It was only when Thermal Draft rubbed her eyes for a moment that she realized that, in fact, Sonata had stuffed her head – along with one of her forelegs – into a small sack…which was quite a disturbing sight, since the bag was nowhere near big enough for her to do that. And yet, she was doing it anyway.
“S-Sonata?” muttered Nosey, going over and gently prodding her.
That was enough to get her attention, as she pulled her head out of the bag with a gasp, coughing a little. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention. Did we come up with a way out?”
Thermal Draft ignored the question, giving the Siren a curious look. “What were you doing?”
Sonata tilted her head. “Huh? What Lex told me to do: checking the bag he took from that Dark Streak lady for anything useful.”
“When did he do that?” demanded Aria, before looking at Lex. “When did you do that?”
“When you were shrieking at me to come up with answers instead of just pointing out the flaws in everypony else’s hypotheses,” replied the injured unicorn. “Since you were ranting too loudly for me to make myself heard, I used my whisper-spell to give Sonata my instructions.”
“Oh…” muttered Aria, chastised.
But Nosey had no such issues, giving Sonata a desperate look. “Please tell me there was something useful in there!”
“I’m not sure,” admitted the mare. “It mostly looks like a lot of junk. There’s some rope, a tiny shovel that’s all folded up, one of those binocular things for just one eye, some papers with stuff written on them, a case with a bunch of weird-looking needles inside, a bag full of some tiny balls with spikes on them, a whole bunch of those tiny things you drink stuff out of – for realsies, there’s a lot of those, and they all have different names – some wire, some little clay pellets, a few-”
“The vials,” interrupted Lex. “The things you drink from, what are they?”
“Um…” Taking a moment to stick her foreleg into the bag down to the elbow, Sonata dug through it. “Soothe syrup, wow that sounds tasty. Meditation tea, doesn’t say if it has any honey in it or not. Bladeguard, which just sounds funny; aren’t blades supposed to guard you? Fire ward gel, which I’m guessing is some kinda hot sauce. Smelling salts, which is weird since salt doesn’t smell-”
“Wait!” yelled Aria.
“That last one!” yelled Nosey.
“Get it out right now!” demanded Thermal Draft.
Sonata tilted her head. “What, the smelling salts? Because it’s already kinda dry in here, and-”
“THE FIRE WARD GEL!” screamed the other three in chorus.
Her ears folding back at the yelling, Sonata huffed, digging through the bag again. “Alright, alright, geez…”
A few seconds later there were five metal vials laid out on the ground, each bearing the same three words on the labels affixed to their sides. But despite the bounty, Nosey groaned. “There’s not one more in there?”
Sonata shook her head. “I’m pretty sure. I looked a while bunch.”
“It’s fine,” declared Aria. “Lex just said he had a spell that could get almost everyone out. This stuff – I’m guessing you’re supposed to rub it on, since it’s a gel? – should be more than enough for whoever stays to run through the fire back toward the front door. And you,” she added, pointing at Lex, “are going to be one of the ones who teleports out! And just to make absolutely sure you have to, no gel for you, got it?”
The other mares all nodded in agreement with that, their faces set in stone despite the sweat that was running down them at this point.
Knowing that there was no time left to explain that he needed to be one of the ones who teleported out anyway, due to how his spell worked, Lex simply rolled his eyes and nodded. “Fine. Now all of you start applying that substance to yourselves. Then we’ll figure out who’ll have to exit this place on their own.”
That last part came out bitterly, but the girls didn’t seem to care. Sharing smiles of relief – both that Lex wasn’t fighting them on this, and that they’d found a way out – the mares quickly popped the vials and began pouring the contents out.
The gel was thin, having a clear contrast to it that made it seem like water that had somehow become partially congealed. But as the four ponies began rubbing it onto themselves – with Nosey attending to Feather Duster – its protective properties quickly became clear. “I think it’s working!” gasped Drafty as she coated her face and neck with the stuff. “All of a sudden the heat doesn’t feel so bad!”
“This is great!” laughed Sonata. “We’ll be able to stroll right out with this stuff on!”
“No,” murmured Lex, having managed to get to his hooves enough so that he could lean against the back wall. “There’s no telling how long that material will last, or how much protection it offers. Not to mention that it won’t protect you from smoke inhalation or falling debris. Whoever stays behind will need to run for the front of the factory as fast as possible.”
“So, um…who’s that going to be?” murmured Nosey nervously.
“I’ll do it,” offered Aria, earning surprised looks from the others, which in turn made her look at them in irritation as she rubbed the gel onto her belly. “What? It makes the most sense. I’ve got a tracking spell telling me where Blondie here is” – she nodded toward Nosey before turning back to Lex – “so that means if you teleport her and everyone else back out front, I can use that to navigate my way out.”
“But that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to make it out easily,” protested Thermal Draft as she coated her wings in the gel, gulping before she continued. “I can fly, so with how much light the fire is making, I should be able to make it out easily so long as I stay low enough that I don’t head into the smoke.”
“Maybe we should play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to stay,” offered Sonata as she brushed the wet substance over her back legs, earning several curious looks and one of annoyance.
“And how exactly are we supposed to do that with hooves, you ditz?” scoffed Aria. “I swear, sometimes you-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as an anguished wail suddenly rang out.
It was loud enough that it drowned out the roar of the fire, and for a moment no one could move, frozen by the intensity of the wordless howl. The sound was almost like that of an animal, except no animal could have filled their voice with such raw, open grief. The worst part was the end, as it trailed off into a ragged gasp that clearly conveyed that the one making it would have continued screaming if they’d but had breath in their lungs.
A round of horrified glances were exchanged, and no one dared to do anything until Lex – the only one who was apparently unintimidated by what had just happened – snapped at them. “Keep covering yourselves in that gel! The fire’s almost here!”
Numbly, the girls went back to work, finishing in silence. When they were done, Nosey cleared her throat. “I know we still have to decide who’s staying behind, but-”
“LOOK!” screamed Thermal Draft, pointing upward.
It was easy to see what had gotten her attention.
Backlit by the flames was the outline of a griffon, wings beating lightly as she hovered in the superheated air.
Lex’s mind went into overdrive as Dark Streak swooped directly toward them, analyzing every aspect of what was happening.
How the assassin had found them was obvious. With the light from the fire, there was no way to keep a group as large as theirs hidden from view. Not when Dark Streak was viewing their position from above, her initial ascent having taken her to just below where the smoke was collecting near the ceiling. For that matter, the back of the factory was the only part of the place that wasn’t covered in flames yet, meaning that she wouldn’t have needed to look very far to find them anyway.
And now that she had, there was no way to fight her off. For all the injuries that Sonata and Aria had dealt her – on top of the ones he’d managed to inflict on the griffon during their previous altercations – Lex couldn’t see anything to suggest that Dark Streak was significantly injured. Her wings beat steadily, her talons clutched her daggers tightly, and both of her eyes were locked onto his remaining one. With her bandoliers still strapped across her chest and her bags still held securely around her middle – minus the one he’d managed to take from her – she was very clearly still in fighting condition.
That was more than could be said for his group.
Feather Duster had yet to regain consciousness, making her worse than useless in a fight since she’d need to be protected. Nosey and Thermal Draft were little better; both had some minor combat experience after what they’d been through in Vanhoover, but neither were anywhere near Dark Streak’s level. Sonata and Aria had the ability to meaningfully fight back, but based on what Lex had seen of their previous fight, neither of them were a match for the assassin.
Nor was he, for that matter. In all of his previous encounters with the griffon, it had taken everything he had just to drive her back, and each time had come at a high cost in terms of how many injuries he’d taken. Now he desperately clinging to consciousness, barely able to move, and the only magic he had left was a spell that would let them run away…so long as he left someone else behind to face the assassin’s wrath in his place.
But that idea – of abandoning someone else while he fled to safety – was utterly beyond Lex’s ability to accept.
The plan that he came up with in response to that wasn’t really a plan at all. It was a gamble, one that had almost no hope of working, and would put everyone’s lives at risk. But it was also the only course of action that offered any hope of getting them all out alive.
It was also a course of action which took him a half-second too long to come up with, realizing too late that Dark Streak wasn’t pulling out of her dive, either confident in her ability to arrest her forward motion in an instant or intending to slam into him full-force.
Which one was a question that would never be answered, however, as Sonata and Aria chose that moment to begin singing.
Voices raised in tandem, both Sirens sped through their chants in a single breath, unleashing a wave of magic at the plunging griffon.
“Twenty feet ahead!” shrieked Aria, a small orange ball of light shooting from the end of her hoof.
Sonata’s cry was far louder. “STAY BAAAAAAAAACK!!!”
Although the wave of sonic force wasn’t visible, Dark Streak somehow swerved around it anyway, wings angling sharply in the air as she banked hard to her right. The power concentrated in Sonata’s voice pummeled a nearby stack of shipping pallets, the wooden slats sent flying as they were reduced to a storm of splinters, but Dark Streak didn’t seem to notice as the shards of wood went flying past her harmlessly.
Instead, the assassin tucked her wings in close to her body, letting her mid-air turn become a fall. That lowered her elevation just enough that when Aria’s fireball exploded an instant later, she was already out of its radius. Somersaulting as she hit the ground, Dark Streak didn’t let her momentum go to waste, coming up into a crouch and springing forward with only slightly less speed than when she’d been flying.
The acrobatic display left Sonata and Aria gaping, and neither mare was able to do anything more than gasp in alarm as the assassin was suddenly right in front of them, her daggers flickering in the firelight as she struck out at both of their necks.
Her eyes never left Lex the entire time.
That was likely the only reason that Nosey and Thermal Draft were able to reach Sonata and Aria in time, the former yanking on Sonata’s tail with her telekinesis while the latter tackled Aria. Neither was able to save the Sirens from being injured, but the cries of pain each mare gave made it clear that the assassin’s strikes hadn’t been lethal, leaving deep cuts across their cheeks instead.
If Dark Streak was upset that she hadn’t killed either mare, she didn’t show it. Instead, she continued advancing, making her way directly toward where Lex was slumped against the back wall of the factory. She clutched her weapons tighter as she approached him, her knuckles turning white as she stalked forward, her tail whipping back and forth behind her. “Do you have any,” she snarled, her voice trembling with repressed fury, “any idea what you did to me?!”
“…” Lex made no response, instead eyeing her coldly as he attempted to struggle to his hooves. But even with his gemstones still orbiting his body, the effort was more than he was capable of, and he collapsed to the ground, unable to so much as raise his head.
Despite his condition, the lack of an answer only made Dark Streak angrier. “It wasn’t personal!” she screamed. “It was just a job! But you made me live through my worst memories all over again! And after all the restraint I showed!”
“What are you saying?” croaked Aria from behind her.
The question made Dark Streak glance back at her sharply. But the injured mare was struggling just to disentangle herself from the pegasus that had bowled her over, looking back at her and Lex with a desperate expression on her face.
The sight made Dark Streak snort in disgust, turning back to Lex. “When I took this contract, part of it stipulated that I didn’t kill anyone except you. If I do, then the other half of the money is forfeit. And while I don’t mind breaking the rules if sticking to them is too much trouble, all I really cared about was getting paid. But now it isn’t about money anymore. Now, I’m going to kill you because I WANT YOU DEAD!”
“No,” muttered Sonata from where she’d collapsed against Nosey and Feather Duster, opposite of Aria and Thermal Draft. “No…”
“Yeah,” sneered Dark Streak, giving the mare a look of contempt before returning her gaze to Lex, who was still lying face down on the floor. “But before you die, I’m going to make you live through your worst memory, just like you made me. And since you breathed in that poison and it didn’t affect you, I’ll just have to make sure that your worst memories…” Her voice lowered, but the wrathful tone it possessed wasn’t any lesser for it. “…are right now.”
In the back of her mind, Dark Streak knew she was making a mistake, knew that she should just kill him and be done with it. This pony had already proven that he was incredibly resourceful and extremely dangerous. Taunting him like this was an invitation to disaster.
But this was no longer about what was tactically sound. Regardless of whether he’d known what he was doing or not, Lex Legis had found the part of her that hurt the most and stomped on it. Simply killing him wasn’t enough, now. She needed to hurt him, to break his spirit, in a way that mere physical injury never could.
She hefted her daggers then, a cruel glint flashing in her eyes. “That’s why I’m going to slaughter your little harem right in front of you.” Her back legs came forward then, giving him a kick in the ribs. “Do you hear me, Lex Legis? You’re going to watch them die, crying and screaming and begging for you to save them, while you lay there powerless to do anything!”
Nearly trembling, she waited for his reaction. For him to look at her in impotent rage and fear. For him to tremble pathetically and try to pick himself up. For his horn to start glowing or for him to begin chanting, either of which would immediately find her dagger carving another gash across his body so as to disrupt whatever spell he’d try to cast.
But instead, Lex Legis did nothing.
It was the last thing Dark Streak had expected, and the worst thing he could have done, leaving her clenching her beak so hard it nearly cracked as her frustration boiled over. “SAY SOMETHING!” she screamed, kicking him again, this time hard enough to make him turn over. “Say something, you bastard!”
And he did, in a whisper which – now that his voice was no longer muffled by facing the ground – just barely reached her ears.
“Do it now, both of you!”
And then Dark Streak heard the sound of Sonata and Aria singing. It made her whirl in place, turning to face the two of them, certain that they were trying to attack her mind. After all, she was standing right in front of Lex, which meant they couldn’t attack her with fireballs or sonic screams again; they’d hit him too.
Except this time, the Sirens weren’t aiming at her.
The plan that Lex had come up with wasn’t really a plan at all. It was a gamble, one that had almost no hope of working, and would put everyone’s lives at risk. But it was also the only course of action that offered any hope of getting them all out alive.
It was also a course of action that relied on others to pull off, specifically Sonata and Aria. But with Dark Streak right in front of him, Lex knew he couldn’t simply say his idea out loud. Not when so much relied on trying to catch the assassin – who was fast enough to dodge magical attacks in mid-air from little more than a dozen feet away – off-guard.
That was why, when she’d approached him and started talking instead of finishing him off, Lex had seized on the opportunity she’d so stupidly given him, making sure to collapse in a way that hid his face from her eyes.
While deception was something that Lex objected to in principle, he knew it had its uses. Primarily when it came to employing misdirection against an enemy. He’d made good use of such tactics during his duel with Twilight, manipulating her into disadvantageous circumstances repeatedly so that he could maneuver her into a trap. And while Dark Streak was far shrewder than the youngest alicorn when it came to battlefield stratagems, her sudden loquacity was an error he intended to take full advantage of.
“Sonata, Aria,” he whispered, keeping his voice as low as he possibly could, knowing that his whisper-spell was still in effect. “On my signal, I want the two of you to fire your most destructive spells directly above us. If I’m right, that should be enough to bring the airducts on the ceiling crashing down.”
That was an idea that he’d gotten from Nosey and Thermal Draft. The latter had mentioned that they’d crawled in through the building’s ductwork, while Nosey had speculated that they’d break under the weight of six ponies. Presuming that she was speaking from experience, that something had happened while she and Thermal Draft were entering the factory, that meant that – combined with how the metal had to already be starting to warp under the heat from the expanding blaze collecting up near the ceiling – a powerful shock would bring them down.
“What are you saying?” croaked Aria, and her voice was loud enough that Lex felt certain that she’d remembered that he couldn’t hear whispers sent to him in return.
“As soon as you cast your spells, grab the ponies next to you and run for the exit,” he continued. “If you move fast enough, you should be able to get clear of any falling debris and make it into the fire. You’re already wearing the gel, so you’ll be alright, and if those vials were Dark Streak’s only way of resisting heat damage, she won’t be able to follow you.”
“No,” moaned Sonata. “No.”
Lex wasn’t sure which part of his plan she was objecting to, but he could guess. “While you’re doing that, I’ll cast my spell and teleport to the front of the building. We’ll meet up there. Now, as quietly as you can, tell Nosey and Thermal Draft what’s about to happen, and get ready…”
Neither mare said anything else, and Lex could only hope that they were following his instructions and telling the other two about the plan. Such as it is, he scoffed to himself. The sequence of events he’d outlined was predicated on guesswork and chance, with very little room for error. He could easily think of a dozen things that could go wrong, ranging from the girls’ magical attacks – despite the range they covered – not hitting anything due to all of the smoke obscuring the ceiling to the debris hitting some or all of them if they didn’t run away fast enough to Dark Streak having some contingency that he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
But it was the only way, now. His teleportation spell required that he be touching anyone he wanted to take with him, and Dark Streak was standing between himself and everyone else. Nor could he simply teleport himself and the murderous assassin elsewhere to let the girls escape unhindered; the same limited energy expenditure that kept the spell from being able to cross more than a small distance prevented it from bringing an unwilling passenger along. Any resistance from whoever was touching him when he cast it meant that the teleportation would automatically exclude them.
The only chance of everyone making it was for something to draw away Dark Streak’s attention – something like the unignorable danger of a huge pile of metal falling toward her – just long enough for everyone else to flee the scene. If that worked, and if she had no way of reacting or escaping, and if nothing else went wrong…then they’d all make it out, leaving the assassin behind.
Although the fact that – even with how agitated she’d become – Dark Streak was apparently so unperturbed about being inside a burning building without her fire ward gel was a source of concern all its own…
But there was no more time to consider that as Lex felt Dark Streak’s paw hit his ribs, first with only moderate force, but then again hard enough to turn him over. “SAY SOMETHING!” she screamed as knocked him onto his back. “Say something, you bastard!”
Wanting to keep Dark Streak away from the others in order to give them as much of a headstart as possible, Lex knew that he couldn’t delay any longer. Even another second or two of hesitation might goad her into acting on her sadistic promise to begin killing everyone right in front of him. There was no more time to deliberate; only to act.
The explosion of noise unleashed by the Sirens’ spells was so violent that it seemed to shake the entire building.
Sonata’s scream was wordless and ringing, combining with the explosion of Aria’s fireball into a cacophony that could be felt as much as heard. But mixed in with both was a third sound, one that Lex had been hoping for: the twisted screech of warping metal. Warbling in a dissonant tone, it quickly reached a tortured crescendo…and then stopped.
That was when the smoke that had hidden the factory roof from view suddenly parted, revealing large chunks flaming wreckage falling toward them.
Lex knew he should have started casting his spell then. If anything, he should have started casting it as soon as Sonata and Aria had begun to sing. There was no telling where the debris would fall, nor how Dark Streak would react, which meant that any window of opportunity had to be seized and acted upon immediately.
And yet he hesitated.
Once he began casting the spell, there would be no chance to stop. If the casting was interrupted, the spell’s structure would collapse in on itself, causing the energy it was imbued with to dissipate without taking effect. If that happened, then there’d be nothing he could do about it; while he had methods for retaining a spell after it was cast, all of them revolved around reservoirs of energy – ranging from the modest repository of power in his circlet to overtaxing his body’s magical channels – that were expended now. He had only one shot at getting this right.
But it was that very knowledge that kept Lex from acting, instead turning his eyes toward the mares around him, needing to confirm that they were escaping. If any of them were unable to make it – if some rubble barred their way, or if their injuries kept them from moving fast enough, or if Dark Streak acted to prevent them from leaving – then their only remaining hope would be for him to make his way over to them (even if the prospect of crawling across the ground seemed like a titanic effort in his current state) and cast his teleportation spell on them both. It bordered on suicidal to wait like that, even if it only required a fraction of a second to sweep his one undamaged eye across the battlefield, but it was the only course of action that Lex could live with.
Fortunately, his caution wasn’t necessary. A quick glance showed that Aria and Thermal Draft were already on their hooves and rushing into the flames. Across from them, Sonata and Nosey were carrying Feather Duster between them, the pegasus’s forelegs across their backs as they hurried away, Sonata managing a single glance back at him as they vanished into the conflagration.
And Dark Streak was diving to his right, wings tucked at her sides as she threw herself forward.
Given that she’d been standing right next to him up until now, that was a bad sign. Calling his teleportation spell to mind, the first syllable was right on the tip of Lex’s tongue as he looked upward…
And saw that it was already too late.
It was sheer instinct that caused him to lurch rightward, somehow finding enough energy to fling himself out of the way of the scorched metal that crashed down onto where he’d been a moment ago.
Although he’d managed to avoid being crushed, the reverberations from the impact were heavy enough that for a moment, Lex couldn’t tell which way was up. It was a condition exacerbated by how his vision was suddenly swimming, the cost of his sudden exertion catching up to him as the tension in his muscles flared, causing his wounds to throb. The bombardment of it all flooded his pain-soaked mind, blotting out all other input as he struggled to fight down the sensory overload that threatened to overwhelm his tenuous grip on consciousness.
As such, he was completely unaware that the contorted knot of metal that he’d barely avoided hadn’t come to a complete stop until it rolled on top of him.
The debris might have been part of the airducts once. But under the twin assaults of Sonata and Aria’s magic – along with the fall it had just endured – it was now little more than a crumpled mass of twisted wreckage. Its surface was blackened and soot-stained. Its edges were crooked and gnarled. And its temperature, after soaking up the heat from the fire, was far beyond anything that was safe to touch.
So when it came to rest on the left side of Lex’s body a moment later, he couldn’t hold back a scream of agony as the superheated metal proved impossible for him to dislodge.
It was enough to shock him back to full alertness, everything else pushed from his thoughts by the new and unexpected pain. Even as he registered that the anguished howl he was hearing was coming from him, he managed to hold onto the thought that he was out of time; that if he didn’t cast his teleportation spell now, he never would. Somehow, he managed to regain control of his voice, again calling to mind the necessary words to chant-
“Aw, don’t stop screaming on my account.”
Only barely able to keep himself focused through the literal searing pain emanating from his left half, Lex couldn’t even manage to so much as move his head in the direction of the voice. But he didn’t need to, as a moment later Dark Streak’s chuckling visage entered his remaining eye’s field of view. “I have to say,” murmured the assassin in a pleased tone, “I wanted to see the look of helplessness on your face as you watched your collection of sluts die right in front of you. But this is almost as good.”
The assassin wasn’t idle as she spoke, squatting down next to him, holding only a single dagger now. But it was her empty talon that reached out idly, one claw flicking out in a quick motion. A clinking sound rang out immediately, and in his beleaguered state, it took Lex a moment to figure out that she’d just knocked one of the floating gemstones free of its orbit around his head, the scarlet and blue sphere coming to land a few feet away from him.
“You know,” continued Dark Streak conversationally, “you’re probably wondering why it is that I’m not really bothered by the heat, even though you snatched the bag where I was storing my fire ward gel.” Out flicked her claw again, and another clinking sound heralded the orange prism being knocked away.
“It’s my armor,” she continued, tapping her chest. Now that she wasn’t disguising herself as Feather Duster, Lex could make out some sort of protective covering there, almost invisible due to it being the same black coloration as her fur and feathers. It extended down her chest, over her middle, and around her back, leaving room for her wings before reaching down to her flanks. “Looks like leather, doesn’t it?” she mused, flicking a claw out again. The dusty rose prism circling his head went sailing away then, before clattering to the ground.
“In fact, it’s actually made out of a special substance, ‘amiant’ or ‘amiantos’ or something like that,” she continued. “Alchemically treated to be resistant to heat without sacrificing defense against conventional attacks. It’s not as good as magical protection from fire, but it’s a lot cheaper, and it gets the job done. Especially if you supplement it with the gel.” Another clink, and the pale green prism was lost to him.
Pausing to enjoy another throaty chuckle, the assassin waited to see if he had any response to make. When none came, she shrugged. “Pity you don’t have either. If you did, you wouldn’t be cooking to death right now.” Shrugging, she flicked a claw out again, knocking the last of his floating gems – the iridescent spindle – away. “I bet it’s really pain-, hm?”
Her one-sided conversation came to a halt as Lex drew in a ragged gasp, his lungs now burning almost as badly as his left half was. Without the iridescent spindle’s magic, his need to respirate was no longer suspended, forcing him to draw air into his lungs. But with all of the stress accumulated on his body, that action required more energy than he had to spare. Already, he was becoming lightheaded, and he dimly realized that he’d reached his limit: in a few seconds he’d lose consciousness, never to wake up again.
Although he knew there was no chance Dark Streak would let him finish, he began gasping out the words to his teleportation spell.
The griffon’s eyes narrowed immediately, her grip on her dagger tightening. “Oh no you d-”
“GET AWAY FROM HIM!”
With his vision already starting to dim, Lex couldn’t place whose voice had interrupted the griffon, nor properly identify the shape that slammed into Dark Streak an instant later. It required his full concentration just to pull in each breath of air while somehow murmuring the necessary words. The spell wasn’t a long one, requiring only a modest chant to activate, but right now each syllable was a monumental task, one that he was rapidly losing his ability to complete.
Each moment the effort grew worse, and after a second he couldn’t parse the yells and pained grunts coming from off to his side. Nor could he clearly recall where he’d been trying to direct his spell toward. It had been…somewhere nearby. Somewhere safe. But the image refused to form in his mind. He knew that was bad; teleporting required visualizing a clear destination. Otherwise it…went wrong. He couldn’t remember exactly how, but he knew that it did.
How many syllables were left? It didn’t seem like many, but he suddenly wasn’t sure anymore. He was still pronouncing them…wasn’t he? He felt like he was, but he couldn’t hear himself speaking anymore. Had he stopped, or was something wrong with his ears? He considered looking up at them to make sure they were working right, but that seemed like so much effort, and he was so tired…so incredibly tired…everything seemed so far away now…
Except the ceiling. For some reason it was getting closer…
That seemed like it was important for some reason.
Then he couldn’t see it anymore. He couldn’t see anything except the crying face of a mare he knew, her lips moving soundlessly. Were his lips moving too? Was he saying something? Doing something? He couldn’t tell anymore. There was no sense of anything now, except…
Danger…something bad was going to happen…he had to…something…help someone…was it the mare he’d seen?
That thought stuck out, for some reason. Help someone…he wanted to help someone…it suddenly seemed really important. Even though he wanted to lie down and rest more than anything in the world, he couldn’t…he knew he wouldn’t be able to unless he tried just a little harder…did just a little more…
Somehow, he managed one last burst of effort. He couldn’t even tell what he was doing…only that the sudden sense of weary exertion meant that he was doing something…
And then there was nothing.
Sonata felt like she was going to cough her lungs up as she stumbled out of the front of the factory, Nosey heaving alongside her as they managed to drag themselves – and Feather Duster, still held between them – away from the front of the blazing entranceway before finally collapsing.
“That stuff…” She had to stop, coughing so hard she almost threw up. It was only when she managed to pull in several deep breaths of clean, sweet air that she tried again. “That stuff, the gel or whatever, was totes overrated.”
Looking up from where she was checking Feather Duster over, Nosey nodded. “It kept the worst of the heat away, but it didn’t exactly make us fireproof.”
Groaning, Sonata looked at the unconscious maid. “Is she okay?”
Flopping down onto the ground, Nosey spent a few seconds clearing her throat before she nodded. “I’m pretty sure. Her head was lower than ours since we were carrying her between us, so I think she breathed in less smoke. Her pulse is strong, and she doesn’t have any obvious wounds.”
Still panting, Sonata managed a smile. “Great. Lex would be totes mad at us if we didn’t take care of her.” It took a moment for her to realize that something was wrong, until the obvious question came to her, making her sit up and look around. “Hey, where is-”
She wasn’t able to finish as Aria came galloping out from the front of the building, hacking and choking. She sank to her knees before she managed to get her breathing under control, but when she looked up, her expression was wild. “Where’s Lex?!”
The panicked expression on her sister’s face made a chill run down Sonata’s spine. “He…I dunno, he said he’d teleport out here, but I don’t see him.”
“Oh no!” Frantic, Aria staggered to her hooves, her pigtails whipping around as she looked every which way. “Oh no no no no no!”
“She went back!” Aria didn’t look at the other mare as she answered, still trying to find Lex.
The reply made the other two gape. “What?!” they chorused, before Nosey kept speaking. “Why?!”
“Because she heard Lex scream, that’s why!” snapped Aria, almost hysterical.
If Sonata had felt a chill before, her blood was practically ice water now. “…what?”
The question made Aria turn to face her sister, her expression incredulous. “You didn’t hear him?!”
“She and I were shouting directions at each other, trying to find the way out,” answered Nosey, her face pale.
But Sonata was less interested in explaining herself than in what had happened. “You heard Lex scream, and you didn’t go back to help him?!”
Aria whirled on her immediately, her face contorting into rage. “I couldn’t! Everything kept collapsing! Whatshername had wings, so she could fly back, but all I could do was…all I could do was run…”
Her scream of anger puttered out then, turning into a choked sob, making Sonata’s anger immediately dissolve into guilt. “Aria…”
The other Siren shook her head, rubbing a foreleg across her eyes. “She went back to get him. If something happened, I’m sure she’ll be able to carry him back here.”
Nosey bit her lip at that, looking back at the burning building. “The gel we were wearing kept evaporating as it absorbed heat. There’s no way it’ll last long enough for her to-”
“No!” Sonata stomped a hoof. “Aria’s right! Drafty’s absolutely going to bring Lex back! Or, you know what? I bet he’ll teleport the both of them out. In fact, I bet you that they’ll appear right…now!”
She flung a foreleg out dramatically, indicating a spot in front of her.
But as the seconds passed, nothing happened.
Swallowing, she repeated the gesture. “Okay…now!”
Still nothing.
“Okay, for realsies…now!”
“Sonata…”
The mare in question spun around, glaring at Nosey. “NO! Just no, okay? This is what Lex does! He pulls off these big super-dramatic last-second wins! And everyone always gets all weepy and worried thinking he’s not going to make it, only for him to pull through just when it seems like it’s over, so that’s what’s going to happen…now!”
This time, when she flung her foreleg out, something did happen.
But not what she’d expected.
Instead, there was a tremendous crash as the roof of the factory, finally heated past the point that it could withstand, collapsed inward. Instantly, the flames inside the building leaped higher, fed by the sudden rush of fresh air. Windows shattered, smoke billowed up, and a plume of fire erupted from the front entrance, causing all three mares to cry out and back away.
And when Sonata lifted her head up a moment later, there was still no sign of Lex and Thermal Draft.
Nor had they reappeared by the time the fire brigade showed up.
Dark Streak hadn’t been certain of that at first, but with several hours having gone by since their final encounter and no sign of the red-horned unicorn, she felt confident in that conclusion now.
Mostly.
Using her spyglass as she peered between the boards covering the belfry window of the abandoned schoolhouse where she’d taken refuge, Dark Streak eyed the burnt-out remains of the factory, only barely within line of sight from her position.
The fire had been quenched now; once the roof had collapsed, allowing the flames and smoke to billow upward in a way that made it obvious to everyone in Las Pegasus’ lower ward what was happening, the ponies had been quick to react. While she’d expected them to fly clouds over and try to drown the flames with heavy rainfall, they’d instead elected to dump large carts full of sand – presumably gathered from the nearby desert – onto the building, eventually smothering the fire that way. According to a few snatches of conversation that Dark Streak had overheard, that was the preferred way to fight a chemical fire for some reason.
But right now, she was less interested in the blackened shell of the building than she was in the ponies gathered around it. There were quite a few of them, largely composed of a crowd gathered around the outside of the building, many with pencils and pads of paper, while others had those “camera” things that let them make instant portraits of whatever they pointed them at. A few were wearing uniforms of some sort, keeping the rest back from the wreckage.
And several that she recognized were clustered at the edge of the smoldering ruins, consoling each other the same way they’d been for the last several hours.
Feather Duster – awake now that the oil of taggit Dark Streak had made her drink had worn off – was wrapped in a blanket, given to her by one of the medical ponies which had looked the survivors over. She pulled it close despite the morning already being a hot one, a miserable look on her face as she leaned against Sonata, her shoulders still jumping with the occasional sob.
The Siren herself seemed bereft, one hoof around the crying maid as she stared at what was left of the factory with a dazed expression on her face. She’d been that way ever since getting out, and while she’d answered questions and let the doctors treat her wounds, she had refused to be moved from the scene. Nor did anyone attempt to usher her away, either out of respect for what she was going through or because they were afraid of what she’d do if they tried.
Aria, by contrast, needed no excuse to lash out at everyone around her. Even as Dark Streak watched, a pair of pegasi in overlarge coats – presumably made out of heat-resistant material the way her armor was – and covered in soot trudged out of the charred skeleton of the building, making their way over to the pigtailed Siren, their lips moving. After a moment the duo shook their heads, causing Aria’s temper to flare up.
Although she was too far away for Dark Streak to hear her, she could see the Siren berating them, her brow furrowed and her eyes wide as she gestured sharply at the pair before pointing back toward the burned-out factory. The two appeared to protest what she was telling them for a moment before a renewed bout of anger from Aria made them give up, shoulders slumping as they turned around and marched back toward the ash-choked ruins. It was a scene that had repeated itself several times now, and in Dark Streak’s estimation wasn’t going to cease anytime soon.
Off to the side, the blonde unicorn mare with the glasses was engaged in a conversation of her own. She’d been coordinating with most of the ponies who’d arrived on the scene, apparently taking charge of the situation. She continued that now, as a pair of well-dressed ponies whom Dark Streak recognized as being part of Lex’s retinue – a unicorn stallion with a balding pate and a muscley unicorn mare with a close-cropped mane and tail – worked their way through the crowd, approaching the bespectacled mare.
The three spoke for almost a minute before the unicorn apparently asked them both something, and just like with the firefighters who’d spoken to Aria, the two servants looked downcast as they shook their heads, causing the blonde mare to slump in place.
As with Aria, it wasn't hard for Dark Streak to guess what was going on. The two were reporting in to let the four-eyed mare know that Lex Legis and his shapeshifting pegasus hadn’t turned up elsewhere. Combined with how the ponies searching the rubble had yet to pull any survivors out of the ashes, the obvious conclusion was that Lex and his would-be rescuer had been consumed by the fire, and now there was nothing left of them to find.
Sighing, Dark Streak put her spyglass away before leaning back in the cramped belfry, considering her next move.
Lex’s death was entirely presumptive; it wasn’t lost on her that he’d been casting a spell in his final moments. Although he’d been grievously injured and had likely already been dying from the sheer number of wounds he’d taken, Dark Streak couldn’t bring herself to dismiss the significance of what he’d been doing. Not after how tenacious he’d shown himself to be.
But at the same time, if he’d been attempting to save himself, then it didn’t seem to have worked. From what she could tell, Lex had yet to reappear, either here or anywhere else in Las Pegasus. Given that he’d come running when a mere servant’s life had been at stake, she couldn’t see him neglecting to come and check that the rest of his harlots were alright.
The likely explanation was that he’d simply been unable to finish his spell before the roof had collapsed. Although that shapechanging pegasus had bought him some time – her wild attack hadn’t been particularly dangerous, but she’d been shifting forms so rapidly that it had been difficult to try and target any of her vital areas – Dark Streak was fairly confident that he’d still been chanting when a loud tearing sound from above heralded the ceiling giving way. The odds that he’d finished his spell in the remaining two or three seconds he’d had, given how much pain he’d been in and the trouble he’d apparently had breathing, were slim to none, even with that pegasus rushing to his side.
Unfortunately, Dark Streak hadn’t been able to remain there long enough to personally witness his death. Unlike when the Sirens had brought a portion of the roof down, it had been immediately obvious that there’d be nowhere left to run this time. So Dark Streak had availed herself of her sole remaining escape option: drinking her potion of gaseous form.
In hindsight, she’d overestimated the efficacy of that potion. While turning into mist had saved her from being crushed to death, it hadn’t prevented her from being scorched by the heat when the influx of air had caused the flames around her to surge. If anything, she’d been more vulnerable to being burned than before, since the fire-resistant properties of her armor had been useless in that state.
The result had been, after she’d slipped out of the inferno unnoticed – drifting through the air toward this empty building which she’d decided ahead of time would be her fallback position – and returned to normal, she’d been covered with burns and in a great deal of pain.
Fortunately, that had been a problem that her wand of healing had been able to fix, and the griffon hadn’t hesitated to apply its magic to herself liberally. Too liberally, as it turned out; while she’d been able to close nearly all of her wounds, she’d expended the last of the wand’s power in doing so. It was nothing more than an elaborately-decorated stick now. While Dark Streak wasn’t sure if it was possible to recharge a spent wand, the point was moot; while she could cast a few spells thanks to the inscriptions on her brain, she didn’t have the magical know-how to attempt anything more complicated.
It was, in other words, another magic item that this job had cost her, up there with her hat of disguise, her gaseous form potion, and one of her bags of holding. With how this world seemed to have little knowledge in the way of imbuing material objects with magic, that added up to a devastating loss. Especially in the case of her hat, which was most likely a pile of ashes buried under a ton of debris by now; with it gone, there was no way to hide that she was a black griffon in a land of colorful ponies. She’d stand out like a sore talon now, especially if Lex’s doxies started telling everyone who had attacked them.
The thought sent a wave of spite through her. I should make good on what I told that miserable stallion I’d do and butcher them all, scowled Dark Streak silently.
But she couldn’t bring herself to take that idea seriously. As wretched as she still felt after coming face to face with her own worst memories, and as much as she wanted to punish Lex Legis for that, spiting someone who was already dead was an exercise in futility. Striking out at Lex’s mares now would accomplish nothing.
Nothing except letting everyone else know that I survived the fire, she amended silently. That was the one good thing about her current situation: as far as anyone else knew, she hadn’t made it out of the factory either. Although she’d still need to take pains to lay low – such as making sure to cast her non-detection spell on herself periodically, the way she had a few hours ago after using her wand to heal herself – no one would put out a search for someone who’s last known location was inside of a burning building. Not unless she gave them reason to, at which point she’d likely become Equestria’s most wanted criminal; even if most of the population outside of his area of control had thought poorly of Lex Legis, no one in this land would condone a murderer, especially of royalty. For her own sake, Dark Streak knew it was better that the Sirens and their friends continued to think that she was dead.
Of course, the fact that she was only pretending to be dead raised the possibility, however slight, that Lex Legis could be doing the same thing…
Shaking her head, Dark Streak reminded herself of the evidence against that idea, glancing out the window at where Sonata was staring forlornly at the smoking ruin. He wouldn’t hide, not for this long, she decided. He’d reassure everyone that he was undefeated if he could, or seek medical attention if he had to. Either one would have come to the public’s attention by now.
Which meant that it was time to focus on the future.
If I wait until nightfall, it should be easy to sneak on one of the trains at the edge of town. While the upper portion of Las Pegasus could only be reached through the air, the lower part of the city had a railway that connected it to the rest of Equestria, mostly so things that couldn’t be locally produced – such as food – could be imported. With how lax Equestria’s security was, covertly boarding an outbound train would be child’s play. And after that…
Pulling out the map of Equestria that she’d had the foresight to pick up back in Canterlot, Dark Streak looked over the country’s layout. She was in the southwestern most portion of the country, and the only way to get to the eastern continent – where this world’s griffons lived, and where she’d be able to blend in without much effort – was in the northeast. And directly between them was Ponyville.
For a moment Dark Streak considered that, then shook her head. She’d never get the other half of the money from Willow; with no way to prove that she’d killed Lex, the purrsian would wait for independent confirmation before paying her anything. And once she learned that someone else had died in the process, she’d likely argue that the contract had been broken. While Dark Streak had little doubt that she’d be able to force the issue, that would likely be more trouble than it was worth. Better to just make a clean break and be done with it.
Besides, she snorted to herself, one talon dropping to her belt, the last thing I want is another bundle of IOUs that I’ll need to crisscross the continent to collect-
Her thoughts came to a screeching halt, however, as she reached for the bag those declarations of debt had been stored in, and clutched only empty air.
For a moment confusion clouded her brain, the mass of alchemical concoctions that she’d taken combining with her tiredness and emotional exhaustion to leave her struggling to process what was going on. But then her momentary bewilderment cleared up as she remembered which bag she’d stored those papers in. And where that bag was now…
Crushing her map of Equestria in her talons, Dark Streak clenched her beak together and tried to swallow her scream of frustration.
Even dead, Lex Legis had managed to vex her one last time.
“BLONDIE!”
Looking up from where she’d been trying to draft a statement that would tide the press over until they knew more, Nosey blinked at the pigtailed mare who was stalking toward her. “Aria? What’s-”
“Where is it?!” demanded the Siren, her angry growl carrying an undertone of desperation that bordered on hysteria.
Not sure how to react, or what her friend was talking about, Nosey could only blink. “Where’s what?”
“The bag!” shrieked Aria. “The one Lex took from that griffon! Sonata said she dropped it when you two were carrying Little Miss Maid out, and you picked it up with your horn, so where is it?!”
Knowing that there was no reasoning with her in the state she was in, Nosey’s horn lit up as she pulled out the item in question. “It’s right here, but-”
“Give me that!” Aria didn’t hesitate, swiping the sack out of Nosey’s telekinetic grasp. “There’s got to be something in here that can help us find Lex!”
She didn’t wait for a reply, instead turning the bag inside out. Immediately, the its contents came spilling out, forming a pile on the ground far in excess of what its size would have suggested, causing several nearby ponies to turn their heads and stare in amazement. But Aria couldn’t have cared less, tossing the bag to the side carelessly as she began digging through the clutter. “He’s not showing up on my tracking spell, but that maid wasn’t either, so that griffon must have had some way of hiding them! If whatever it was is in here, I can shut it off, and then I’ll know where Lex is!”
“Aria…” The other mare’s voice was all desperation now, and Nosey could feel her throat closing up. She’d been burying herself in various tasks after they’d gotten out – liaising with the fire brigade, making sure the doctors saw to her friends, checking in with Lex’s other servants, finding a courier to send a note back to her hotel to let her parents know that she was okay, and numerous other chores – and that had been enough to keep the full weight of everything that had happened at bay. But now, seeing Aria like this drove home that it was hours later and there was still no sign of Lex or Thermal Draft, and Nosey could feel her eyes starting to water as the weight of what that meant began to settle over her…
“Don’t just stand there!” snapped Aria. “Help me look through all this!”
“R-right,” sniffled Nosey, kneeling down to begin sorting through the pile. Maybe Aria was right. Maybe instead of waiting for a miracle that was looking less and less likely, the thing to do was take a more active-
Nosey’s train of thought abruptly jumped the tracks as she turned over a collection of papers, her eyes widening as she saw what was on them. “These…!”
Aria’s attention was instantly on her. “What is it?! Do you have something?!”
It took Nosey a moment to answer, flipping through each page and scanning them. “These are promissory notes!”
Frowning, Aria moved around to look at the pages over Nosey’s shoulder. “What are those?”
“They’re formal declarations that you owe someone else money,” explained Nosey, still looking over each note in turn. “It’s like a written promise that you’ll pay them back, stating how much you owe and to whom.”
“So that means what, exactly?” huffed Aria. “That assassin was in debt to someone?”
Nosey shook her head. “Just the opposite, I think that these were being used to pay her. See here?” She tapped the corner of the topmost page. “This little hoofwritten part in the corner? It says that the debtor should pay the bearer of this note in full, whomever they might be, instead of the declared recipient. They’ve all got that written on them…and they’re all signed and initialed by the same person that all of these notes are made out to.”
Aria went very still then, her eyes moving down to the signature at the bottom of the page. “Are you telling me,” she breathed, her voice no longer filled with barely-repressed grief and rage, instead having become colder than ice, “that this is the person who sent that assassin?”
Under any other circumstances, Nosey would have shuddered at hearing so much malice in someone’s voice. But at that moment, after everything that had happened, and with the possibility of Lex’s being alright becoming slimmer with each passing moment, she couldn’t find it within herself to be afraid. Quite the contrary, after what she’d been through – first in Vanhoover, then in her apartment back in Canterlot, and now here in Las Pegasus – she was sick to death of being afraid. “If he’s not, then I bet he knows who did.”
It was someone else’s turn to be afraid now, and his name was written on the note she was holding.
The voice, when it came, was the only thing he was aware of.
“And those who keep their faith unto Me – with offerings of resolve where others tender only platitudes, sacrifices borne of their own forbearance rather than oblations of gold and gems, and the will to strengthen their spirit in My own image – shall find that I keep faith unto them as well. My voice will be heard in their words. My gaze will be seen in their eyes. My form will be glimpsed in their shadow. For those who forge a covenant with I, the Dweller in the Deepest Darkness, shall find that I grant My favor not to those who wish it of Me, but to those who are worthy of it.”
The words spoke to his mind and his ears as one, impossible to ignore. It was the only reason he was able to grasp what was being said, and even then only fleetingly. His thoughts were like drawings made in the sand of a beach: for a few moments everything was clear, but then waves of pain and fatigue would blur them, wiping out most of what was there and leaving only a fading impression in their wake. Already he could feel himself struggling to make sense of what had been said, the meaning and the identity of the speaker growing more distant as his awareness grew sluggish again…
“In other words, be grateful to me, my champion.”
The voice sounded closer now, but when he opened his eyes he found they wouldn’t focus on anything, showing a world that consisted of nothing but wan blurs and formless shapes. Even that glimpse was impossible to maintain, his eyelids fluttering closed of their own accord only a moment later. Although it had been only the tiniest of movements, the effort he’d expended sent a deep sense of lethargy through him, dispelling any thoughts of making a second attempt.
It continued speaking regardless.
“You managed to cast your teleportation spell, but your fading consciousness was unable to keep a clear destination in mind. Had I not intervened, you would have sent yourself – and that weakling who clings to you, desperate for your favor – down into the ground in a mangled attempt to avoid the final thing you saw: the collapse of the structure you fought within. And while your spell’s protective measures would have shunted you into the nearest open area, the shock of being so abruptly redirected would have killed you both.”
He was being told something important now. But the details were already growing hazy and indistinct, pain and exhaustion blurring their meaning before he could give them his full consideration. It would have been a frustrating experience, but even that emotion was too much for him to sustain in his current state.
“Fortunately for you, teleportation moves through the Astral Plane, and unlike your little corner of the mortal world, that is a realm where I can manifest my power in full, making it easy to snatch you and your passenger before your fatal journey was completed. But that doesn’t mean I can send you home…”
There was a pause, and when the voice spoke again, he had the impression that it was even closer now, as if the speaker was right alongside him, both the audible words and the psychic impression somehow more resonant than before.
“Be grateful to me,” came the repeated insistence. “Had your followers not realized that your presence was required in order for them to form a connection to me, you would have failed to honor your pledge to grow my religion in your world, and I would have allowed you to meet your demise. Now I have enough ponies worshiping me that a proper congregation can be formed in that realm, and if their faith remains strong, then in time I’ll be able to manifest there of my own accord.”
There was a sense of movement from the speaker again, as if they were circling him.
“There are many gods who would have no further need of you now that our pact has been fulfilled, but I am a goddess of loyalty. You have stayed true to my ideals, honored me with your deeds, and shown fidelity to our agreement. For such devotion, I will give you a reward: the chance to grow stronger.”
It was getting harder to hold onto any semblance of what was being said to him now. The proverbial waves were coming in faster, and taking longer to roll back out. Like a tide coming in, his ability to maintain even the vaguest aspect of awareness was rapidly drowning beneath the accumulation of damage and weariness. Even the voice was fading out now, but not before it spoke once more…
“Avail yourself of this opportunity with everything you have, my champion. Demonstrate the veracity of my dogma once again, and in so doing purge yourself of weakness. Grow your followers. Strengthen your powers. Regain what you’ve lost, and then take what you desire.”
Further away now…and yet there was a growing sense of urgency…a growing sensation that something was happening, or perhaps needed to happen…something involving him…something he had to…to…
“Rise up!” The voice was so distant now that he could barely hear it, and yet it continued calling to him. “Ascend to new heights of mastery! Surpass the limits that held you back! Pull the weak under your sway and bring order to their lives! Now, open your eyes!”
The sense of urgency was growing worse. It was almost painful now, pressing down on him…crushing his chest…
“Open your eyes!”
The pressure was becoming more unbearable with each passing moment. It drove the breath from his lungs, and his heart felt like it was going to shatter his ribcage with every beat. He tried to move, tried to thrash and fight off whatever was happening to him, but his limbs wouldn’t respond to his commands.
“Open your eyes!”
Everything hurt now, as though he was on fire from the inside. Something about that triggered a memory, and it made the sense of urgency he’d felt before come roaring back. He had to get back! He couldn’t remember where he’d been or what he’d been doing, but he had to get back! There was no time to be lying here like this but he just…couldn’t…breathe…!
“Lex, please, open your eyes!”
Lex’s eyes flew open, taking in a deep gulp of air as warm lips pressed over his own, breathing into his mouth.
The sensation brought sweet relief to his tortured lungs, and he although he knew he wasn’t moving, everything seemed to lurch wildly, as though he were being spun about. His thoughts were much the same, dimly registering that the pony – a mare – who’d been forcing air into his mouth also had her forelegs on his chest, pressing rhythmically. It was only when he groaned that she stopped, a cry a delight escaping her lips as she sat back. “Lex!”
He struggled to identify her, but the lighting was poor and everything was still spinning, albeit slower now as he managed to pull in a breath on his own. For an instant he was sure it was Sonata, but then he managed to focus his vision and saw that the mare had wings, and brown hair, and a cutie mark of an upward-blowing breeze. It took him a few moments to recall her name: Thermal Draft.
“You’re alright!” She seemed to be out of breath as well, trembling and very nearly collapsing for some reason.
Slowly, his memories began to filter in. This was…he’d just defeated Starlight Glimmer, only for Rainbow Dash to ambush him, and everypony was gathered around, waiting for him to…no…no, that wasn’t right. That had already happened; he’d come back from that and fought Twilight Sparkle, becoming a prince after narrowly winning their duel. Then he’d gone to Las Pegasus, and then…
In a flash, the rest of it came back to him, and everything finally ceased spinning as Lex Legis fully returned to consciousness.
Immediately, a flood of sensations made themselves known to him, all of them unpleasant. His right eye was throbbing horribly. His left side felt like it was only a few degrees short of being on fire. His lungs throbbed with every ragged breath that he managed, and his heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice. There were painful cuts all over his body. His stomach felt hollow, and the back of his throat was parched. It was cold. The plethora of discomfort was enough that he couldn’t do anything except lie there, his strength completely gone, barely able to do more than keep drawing in air as he stared up at Thermal Draft, who was making a sound somewhere between laughter and sobbing as she got back up and shuffled to his side.
“I’m so glad you’re alright!” she sniffled. “I don’t know what happened! I went outside to take a look around, and when I came back you’d suddenly stopped breathing! I thought you…that you were…” She shook her head then, wiping her eyes. “But I knew you couldn’t be! You’re not the sort of pony who’ll let anyone punch your ticket!” Managing a shaky smile, she rubbed a hoof over her nose. “I’m just glad I asked Doctor House Call for those lessons about what to do if somepony was ever seriously hurt before we went to raid that bank. I was worried I’d need to use what he taught me on Cloudy; I never thought-”
“What…happened…?” rasped Lex.
“I…um…” Thermal Draft’s smile fell away, and she swallowed nervously, glancing toward the entrance of the cave they were in…and it was only then that Lex became cognizant of the fact that they were in a cave at all. To his right he could just barely make out the opening, beyond which shined so much light that it was impossible to see anything, though he could feel a cold wind blowing from it. To his left, there was only darkness, the back of the cave beyond where the light reached.
“I don’t know,” answered Thermal Draft miserably, dragging Lex’s attention back to her. “We were in that factory, and I heard you scream so I flew back. I saw that griffon, and you were trapped under that rubble, and she was…she looked like she was about to kill you, so I tried to fight her off, and then the ceiling collapsed, so I threw myself on top of you, and then…then we were out there.” She gestured toward the cave entrance.
Lex was silent for a long moment, digesting that and comparing it to what the Night Mare had said, because now he knew that had been her voice in his dream. That was why he’d been confused upon waking, thinking that it had been just after his battle with Starlight Glimmer; just like then, the goddess had elected to speak to him as he’d lain insensate from his wounds. And based on what she’d told him…
“Lex?” Apparently taking his silence as an invitation to continue, Thermal Draft swallowed nervously. “Lex, something’s wrong. I mean, I’m glad you got us out of there, but something’s really wrong. There are mountains all around us, and I don’t think they’re the ones from back home. I can’t see any towns or anything nearby. It’s snowing really hard even though it’s barely the middle of September, and, um…” She bit her lip then, clearly unnerved. “Nopony’s doing it.”
Lex already had an idea what was going on, but he wanted confirmation from her first. “Doing…what…?”
“Nopony’s making it snow,” she whimpered. “I looked everywhere, I mean everywhere, and there’s no one making the weather! The clouds are dropping snowflakes on their own, the wind is blowing even though no one’s flapping their wings, and it just keeps happening! It’s been hours, and it’s still going on like this!”
Her wings flared out to her sides in alarm before she shivered, wrapping them around herself. She settled down next to him, and Lex belatedly realized that she’d wrapped him in his cloak in an attempt to keep him warm. “Lex, what’s going on? Where are we?”
The answer came easily to him. After all, the Night Mare had all but stated outright that – while she’d been able to grab them in the moment that his spell had transported himself and Thermal Draft to the Astral Plane – she hadn’t been able to return them to Equestria. Which made sense, after all; she still couldn’t project her power into that world yet, which meant that she couldn’t return them there after she’d interrupted his spell.
But she could transport them somewhere else. Someplace where she had an established religion with a firm powerbase. Someplace that was more hostile than Equestria, requiring strength in order to survive and prosper. Someplace where the weather happened on its own, instead of needing ponies to manufacture it. Someplace he knew all too well, the name of it coming to his lips now, the corners of which turned up in a mirthless grin at having found himself here once again.
Curled up next to Lex underneath his cloak, spreading one wing across his sleeping body – making sure to avoid the burns on his left side – Thermal Draft smiled at little at the thought of her girlfriend. While being thrown into another world, was a frightening experience, she couldn’t help but look at the bright side. At long last, she got to have an adventure together with the stallion she loved; now if only the mare who made her heart sing was here too, things would have been perfect.
A particularly loud howl from the wind outside made her shiver – even through the linen-and-wool clothes she’d used her shapechanging powers to create around herself after Lex had passed out – cuddling closer to the sleeping unicorn. Maybe “perfect” is a bit much, Drafty conceded. Even so, it would have given all three of them a chance to grow closer. Pressing her muzzle to Lex’s neck, Drafty closed her eyes and imagined how it would have gone. Cloudy realizing that it was possible for her to love a stallion. Lex slowly opening his heart to both of them. And then…then they’d all be together. Really together, with no shapeshifting necessary in order to steal moments of affection that were meant for someone else.
That thought made Drafty sigh. No matter how much she wished it, Cloudy wasn’t here. Not to mention her little fantasy conveniently avoided how she’d need to keep secrets – namely, that her true form was something hideous now, as well as the fact that she’d already lied about her identity in order to sleep with Lex – from both of the ponies she loved. That’s the thing about adventures, she decided as she listened to Lex breathing. They don’t always work out the way you want them to.
She’d learned that when Vanhoover had fallen apart. And again when she and her friends had raided that bank. And a third time when she’d followed Kara’s advice in Trottingham.
That last memory made her turn her thoughts back to the goddess. “Kara?” she murmured softly, not wanting to wake Lex. “Are you there?”
Of course, sweetheart, came the soothing reply. How are you holding up?
Drafty shifted in place, biting her lip to keep from groaning as she did so. That assassin had gotten her good during their last scuffle, right before the roof of the factory had fallen in. While the stab wound in her side wasn’t aching quite so badly anymore, it still hurt. On top of being cold and hungry, it was enough to make her downright miserable. On the other hoof, she was still alive after that terrifying ordeal in the factory, she was cuddled up with the stallion she’d yearned for, and the memories of their first time together – less than a day old – were enough to help keep the chill away. “I’m doing alright. Compared to Vanhoover, this isn’t so bad.”
You say that now, but this world isn’t like yours. It’s far more dangerous, and you’re a lover, not a fighter. You need to get back to Equestria as soon as possible.
“I’m sure Lex will be able to get us home,” replied Drafty quietly, her wing over the slumbering unicorn’s body moving back and forth to gently caress his chest. “He got us here, so it shouldn’t be too hard for him to cast whatever spell he used to get us back. I bet by this time tomorrow we’ll be laughing about this with everypony else.”
I hope you’re right about that…
The skepticism in the goddess’s voice was plain, but Drafty chose to ignore it, instead focusing on more practical concerns. Lex had fallen asleep shortly after confirming that they were on another world, and that had been some time ago. Since then, it had grown dark, and while it hadn’t gotten too much colder – being in a cave helped to stabilize the temperature – she was still worried about keeping him comfortable. “Are there any forms I can change into that are warmer? I mean, if I became a big burly earth pony, or maybe something with a big shaggy coat like a yak, would that help to keep the cold away?”
It doesn’t work like that, sweetheart, answered the goddess. I told you, the changes you’re capable of undergoing are limited. You can’t create anywhere near enough mass to appreciably ward away the chill you’re feeling. Right now, those clothes are the best you can do.
Drafty shook her head gently. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” She didn’t say anything else for a few moments, trying to think of what else she could do for Lex. “Dragons are pony-sized when they’re young, right? If I turned into one, would I be able to breathe f-”
That kind of transformation is more than what any save the most capable of my children can do, answered Kara, cutting her off. You might be able to do it someday, but right now it’s beyond the power I’ve given you.
“Then can’t you give me more?” The orgy she’d taken part in back in Trottingham wasn’t something she was proud of, but it wasn’t anything she couldn’t live with either. “I know Lex and I are all alone here, but this is the world you come from, right? Isn’t there something you can do? Some ritual you can walk me through or…I don’t know…something?”
For a long moment there was no reply, and when Kara finally answered her, the goddess’s voice was unusually subdued. Even for gods, there are rules that have to be followed, sweetheart. A lot of them relate to how we interact with the mortal world. Some of them are…I suppose you’d call them natural laws. Others are political decrees by various powers that we have to abide by. But the end result is that I can’t just reach down and fix things for you, nor do you have what you’d need to try and perform any of my holy rites.
The answer wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it was disappointing nevertheless, causing Drafty to frown in resignation. “So what should I do?”
What you do best, answered Kara without hesitation. Follow the stallion who’s captured your heart. Trust him to get you home, and support him in his efforts. Remember how much his love means to you, and that anything done for the sake of that love is never wrong.
“Anything done for love is never wrong…” repeated Drafty softly as she closed her eyes, stifling a yawn. She’d been trying to stay up in case Lex’s breathing suddenly stopped again, but she could feel herself drifting off now. As much as she tried to keep her eyes open, she could already tell it was a losing battle.
And make sure to get rid of those clothes you’re wearing before your beloved wakes up, urged Kara as Drafty finally fell asleep. Otherwise you’ll have some very awkward questions to answer in the morning.
“What you’re doing is foolish,” huffed Lex irritably.
“We need to stay warm,” replied Thermal Draft calmly as she finished the last of her portion of the oats and water Lex had conjured. “Your cloak isn’t enough for both of us, and that blizzard doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon, so we need to get some firewood before we both freeze to death.”
“The cave is mitigating the worst of the cold,” countered Lex, already having finished eating. “Going out there in these conditions means you’ll be subject to the full force of it. If you become lost while searching for fallen branches, you could easily succumb to hypothermia and die before you find your way back here. That’s not even taking into account the possibility of running into hostile lifeforms. It’s smarter to wait for the weather to change, since it does that frequently here. You’ll have an easier time navigating then.”
But rather than listen to the good advice he was giving her, Drafty only shot a smile his way, standing up. “I was a weather pony for almost ten years back in Vanhoover. I know my name might be Thermal Draft, but I worked plenty of snowstorms during that time, so you don’t have to worry about me getting lost. And I’ll be sure to fly away if I see anything even a little dangerous.” She paused then, her smile faltering. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go looking for a town or anything? If I fly high enough, I might be able to get above the clouds and at least see some smoke from somepony’s fireplaces. At least then we’d know which direction to head when the weather changes, and then we’d be able to start looking into getting you what you need to get us back to Equestria.”
Lex fought down the urge to wince. The spell to travel between planes of existence was one he knew, but it was a spell that required a material focus in order to use. Specifically, it required a tuning fork that not only had to be set to a particular pitch, but it also needed to be made out of a specific substance. He’d had one for Equestria, but it had been lost when he’d sacrificed his extradimensional haversack – and all of its gear – while fighting Xiriel. He’d explained as much to Thermal Draft, unable to look the pegasus in the eyes when he’d told her that, for now at least, they were stuck here.
The reminder did little to lighten his mood. “You’re already taking a huge risk going out in this weather. Just find firewood and return as quickly as you can.”
Her smile returned, though it wasn’t as broad as before, and she threw him a quick salute with one wing. “As my prince commands.” But rather than turning to leave, she gave him a quick once-over, the lilt that had been in her voice just now falling away. “And you sure you’ll be alright while I’m gone?”
“For the last time, yes,” snapped Lex. She’d been inquiring about his health ever since he’d woken up, and the constant reminders of just how poorly he’d conducted himself in that last fight had left him feeling quite defensive. “The pulmonary paralysis you said I experienced earlier was a result of the poison that assassin coated her blades with when she fought me. Now that I’m past the effects of the initial exposure, its efficacy should continue to diminish.”
“Alright,” conceded Thermal Draft, turning toward the mouth of the cave. “I’ll be back in a little while. Try to stay warm while I’m gone, okay?”
“Hmph.”
She lingered for a moment, then flapped her wings and flew outside, vanishing from sight almost instantly. Lex watched her go, then laid down, exhausted from the brief exchange.
In a few moments the echoes of her hoofsteps faded away, and the cave fell silent…but in Lex’s mind, a different conversation was already taking place.
How the mighty have fallen, taunted his tulpa. Bad enough that you have no idea if the others made it out of the burning building alive, but now another pony is putting herself in danger for your sake. Again. All because you continue to grow weaker and weaker.
Lying on the uneven ground, Lex curled up, the words cutting him as deeply as Dark Streak’s daggers.
Just thinking of the griffon was enough to make him clench his teeth. Although there were any number of ways he could have dressed it up, the simple fact of the matter was that Dark Streak had bested him. No matter that she’d been commissioned to kill him and he was still alive; he’d been wholly unable to overcome her. The result was that Sonata, Aria, Nosey, and Feather Duster could very well be dead right now. Not knowing whether if they were alright was torture, one that he’d been suffering under since he’d woken up.
And given the distinct possibility that Dark Streak – being highly resourceful – might have survived their battle, he couldn’t discount the possibility that even if everypony had made it out of the building, the assassin might have simply bided her time and killed them later on. She’d vowed to do exactly that, after all. Admittedly, she’d said she’d wanted to do it in front of him, which was impossible now, but that was cold comfort indeed.
There was little he could do to check on them now, however. While he’d be able to prepare his spells in a few days – the equinox was rapidly approaching, since the seasons on Everglow were thankfully in sync with those in Equestria – it wasn’t like he could use his plane-shifting spell without the proper tuning fork. Nor was his scrying spell usable without a mirror. He could prepare his spell to exchange short messages with one other individual, but there was no guarantee that would necessarily work; it hadn’t gotten through to Twilight Sparkle when he’d tried to contact her about how bad Vanhoover’s condition was, after all.
As it was, even if he got back, he was in no condition to face Dark Streak again. Full complement of spells or no, he could barely stand. He’d made use of his strain-relief spell this morning to ease some of the stress on his body, but while it had helped to alleviate some of the damage the poison had done to him, he was still in bad shape. Thanks to his circlet, he’d had some of the Night Mare’s divine magic left over after conjuring food and water for himself and Thermal Draft, and he’d put it to use casting his remove blindness spell on himself, hoping it would repair his damaged right eye.
In that regard he’d been fortunate, since the spell had restored the injured organ. But that was the one bright spot in an otherwise-dismal inventory of his abilities. His magical senses were still impaired. He’d lost his floating gemstones, thanks to Dark Streak knocking them away before he’d cast his spell. He didn’t feel anywhere near capable of physically augmenting what little magic he had left, which was once again just the dark magic of his horn.
Well…that and the Night Mare’s power, but that was all but useless. With it he could control the motor functions of certain creatures, but other than confirming that those animals the goddess had given to the Night Mare’s Knights were subject to it, he hadn’t had cause to use it since the battle on the wharf, when he’d held Tlerekithres – the kraken commanding the undersea monsters that had attacked Vanhoover – in place. Besides that, it was good for nothing except attuning small amounts of water into a suitable material component for the weak healing spell the Night Mare had given him. He’d used it this morning on Thermal Draft, seeing the cut she’d gotten while defending him; she’d tried to say no, insisting that he use it on himself instead, but he’d pressed the issue until she’d relented.
It wasn’t much, but besides keeping the two of them fed, it was all he could do now…and that was the problem. His tulpa was right; his power had been on a slow but steady decline for some time now. He’d been able to mitigate it, somewhat, by relying on the ponies who’d placed themselves at his disposal, but that didn’t change the fact that his strength was at an all-time low. The last time he’d been this vulnerable had been several months after he’d been released from the field of frozen time that King Sombra had placed over the Crystal Empire, when he’d rushed out to confront the monster calling itself Tirek, accomplishing nothing except getting his magic drained.
You swore you’d never be that helpless again, and yet look at you now, snickered the hateful presence in his thoughts. A mere griffon was able to cut you down where dragons and alicorns couldn’t. And you think you’ll be able to protect not only yourself, but someone else as well? Here, in a world far deadlier than your own?
Closing his eyes, Lex tried to shut out the voiceless words, knowing that his tulpa would fall silent eventually. In the meantime, he just had to wait for Thermal Draft to come back. The cold in the cave was uncomfortable, but not life-threatening. They’d wait for the weather to change, and then start looking for a nearby town or village. He’d be able to prepare his plane-shifting spell, and once he was able to commission the construction of a proper tuning fork, he’d be able to get them both home. It wouldn’t take long…he might even get back in time for his coronation.
It was Lex’s last thought before he unintentionally drifted off to sleep…
And shuddered as a new round of horrible dreams descended upon him.
“LEX!!!”
Thermal Draft’s shout made his eyes snap open instantly, sitting upright so quickly that the world seemed to lurch for one nauseating moment before it righted itself.
Turning toward the entrance to the cave, Lex immediately noticed three things. The first was that the blizzard seemed to have stopped. The second was that Thermal Draft was galloping toward him, a terrified expression on her face.
The third was the large shape pursuing her, golden eyes gleaming as a loud growl filled the cave.
For a brief instant, the large shape pursuing Thermal Draft was impossible to make out, all details of it – save for the pair of brilliant gold eyes – hidden by the blinding glare of the light pouring in from the entrance to the cave.
Then it rushed further inside, hot on the pegasus’ hooves, and Lex got a look at the largest wolf he’d ever seen.
Its size was comparable to that of Princess Celestia. Four feet tall at the shoulder, its fur was the same color as the snow. Its teeth were bared, showing ivory-white fangs that were almost six inches long. And for some reason, although he could hear it panting as it kept up the chase, its breath wasn’t visible in the chilly air.
The same couldn’t be said for Thermal Draft. Her breath came out in thick white clouds with each ragged gasp she took, running as fast as her legs could carry her. As she barreled past the bright light at the mouth of the cave, the reason she was running instead of flying quickly became obvious: her left wing was stained red with blood, pressed to her side.
Lex noted all of that in an instant, pulling himself up into a sitting position as his eyes and horn lit up. “Jump!”
The pegasus obeyed his order without question, leaping forward as far as she could, carrying her over the field of inch-tall black spikes that suddenly protruded from the ground right in front of her.
This was the same trick that he’d used against Twilight during their duel. Raising a field of small but extremely sharp spikes would either force the white wolf to break off its pursuit, or it would rush forward and injure its paws. It was less effective than if he’d raised a grate or a lattice across the entire cave, which had been his first impulse, but that was out of the question; the cave was far too wide and too tall for him to do that without enhancing his dark magic physically, which was more than he could handle in his current condition. Still, that should be enough to drive the thing-
Without slowing down, the wolf leaped into the air, following Thermal Draft’s trajectory as it easily cleared the field of black spikes.
The pegasus gave a scream of fright at seeing the monster’s continued pursuit, reaching where Lex was and rushing behind him in terror, but the injured unicorn’s shock was great enough that he barely noticed. Had that creature understood what he’d said to Thermal Draft?
But with the oversized wolf now being barely a dozen feet away from him, Lex knew there was no time to ponder the question. Instead he concentrated on bringing his dark magic to bear-
Only to be caught completely by surprise once again as the creature, rather than rushing him, came to a sudden halt, facing him as it opened its mouth…
And unleashed a snowstorm.
There was no other explanation for it as a torrent of snowflakes, hail pellets, and freezing wind hit Lex directly in the face. To say that it was frigid was an understatement; it was like suddenly plunging into an arctic river, the chill so heavy that it was painful, and despite his fatigue Lex somehow found the strength to fling himself backward, swallowing a scream as the cold burned him as badly as the fires in the factory had less than a day ago. For its breath to be that cold solved the mystery of why the thing’s panting hadn’t fogged the air, but that was the last thing on Lex’s mind as he retreated from the gelid onslaught.
His eyes squeezed shut in order to prevent them from freezing solid, Lex felt himself collide with something he dimly registered as being Thermal Draft. The pegasus yelled his name, and beneath that was the sound of padded feet rushing toward them, and Lex knew the monster was upon them.
It was desperation that made him fling his left foreleg – the one with the barbed wire – out toward the creature then. He could have changed into a shadow, but that would have left Thermal Draft to fend for herself, and against that hulking creature she stood no chance. Nor did he try to raise more black crystals; with how close the thing was, the odds of stopping it in its tracks were dicey at best. But if this worked, then the fight would be over…and if it didn’t, then it would be over in a far more decisive manner.
Pushing that thought from his mind, Lex called upon the power that the Night Mare had given him, directing it out and toward the monstrous canine bearing down on them. “STOP!”
It was a complete gamble. This power had been useless against the sahuagin and their undersea monsters, but had worked against Tlerekithres. It had been able to overpower Aria in her natural body, but had proven useless against Xiriel. It didn’t affect ponies, but had bound the araneas in Tall Tale easily. Whatever criteria determined what it could affect was a completely mystery, so there was no telling if it would work on whatever this creature was.
As such, when Lex felt the invisible bands of power snap firmly around the thing, arresting its movement, his relief was profound. All the more so when he opened his eyes and saw that it was only a few inches away from him, body stretched out in a lunge and teeth bared as though about to open its maw and tear his throat out. But that would never happen now.
For the next sixty seconds, the oversized wolf was under his absolute control, and he had no intention of giving it the opportunity to attack them again.
“L-Lex?” whimpered Thermal Draft, shaking as she picked herself up and surveyed the scene. “Did you get it?”
“I did,” murmured Lex, not bothering to rise. Everything hurt now; the creature’s icy breath weapon had hit him primarily along his right side, opposite where he’d been burned, and the prospect of standing was an endeavor he didn’t want to consider. “Just give me a few seconds, and then I’ll dispatch this thing.”
“No! Let me go!”
The voice – which was female in timbre – was filled with desperation almost to the point of anguish. But that wasn’t what made both ponies freeze, their eyes wide.
It was that the words had been spoken by the wolf.
“Did…did that thing just talk?” muttered Thermal Draft, staring at the snow-furred canine as she made her way over to Lex, gingerly helping him up.
Her question was answered a moment later, the wolf’s lips and jaw managing to move as it visibly, albeit futilely, strained against the power holding it. “Let me go!” it repeated. “Let me go so I can eat you! I’m so hungry!” The words were punctuated by a loud growl, one that came not from its muzzle, but from its belly.
Lex’s eyes narrowed at the confirmation of the thing’s intelligence. “The only one who’s going to die is you.” Better to do it quickly in case it had some sort of countermeasure. Tlerekithres had been able to resist his control to a profound degree, very nearly breaking free with its own magic. Although there was no indication that the white wolf had anything like that, he wasn’t about to take a chance.
But he’d only just started to call upon his dark magic when Thermal Draft nudged him. “Wait! Maybe she can help us!” She didn’t let him object before looking at the paralyzed wolf. “You just want something to eat, right? If we give you some food, would you mind answering our questions?”
“You’ll…give me food?” The canine’s voice was tinged with suspicion, but there was a hopeful tone in there as well as it looked over the ponies, settling on the pegasus. “Then, can I have the seidrmadr? He looks almost dead anyway. I promise I’ll make it quick and painless.”
Thermal Draft cocked her head. “The what? Wait, you mean Lex?! No! No, listen, we have some food over here.” She swept a hoof toward the bowls of gruel and water that Lex had conjured earlier. The spell had made more than the two of them could eat, and more than half of the conjured containers were still full. “You can have all of that.”
“All of that?” The thing’s eyes slid over to the bowls, its nose twitching. “Is there any meat?”
But Lex wasn’t interested in bargaining. “This creature attempted to kill us both,” he pointed out. “It needs to be slain before it has the opportunity to do so again.” His eyes flared as he spoke, conjuring a spike of black crystal from the floor, its pointed tip pushing upward toward the underside of the thing’s head-
Only for his pegasus companion to quickly extend her foreleg under its muzzle, making him quickly arrest the crystal’s growth before he pierced her hoof. “Thermal Draft!”
“Lex, please!” pleaded Drafty. “She might know where a town is! Listen, you’ve got her under control, right? So she can’t do anything you don’t want her to. Why not at least make her talk to us first, and if that doesn’t work then you can…” She grimaced, glancing at the bound wolf again before continuing. “…then you can put her down, okay?”
Lex let out a slow breath, which was very nearly a hiss of displeasure. After everything that had happened, the wounds he’d taken and the fight he’d lost and the relentless burden of not knowing if the ponies who’d been relying on him were alive or dead now, taking a chance like she was suggesting was the last thing he wanted to do. But at the same time, Thermal Draft brought up a good point. They needed information, and so far this creature was the only sapient being they’d met. While his control over it wouldn’t last very long – though he could extend it by a few minutes if he kept calling on the Night Mare’s power until it was expended – then it was, barring the wolf having some sort of powerful magic that it was holding in reserve, powerless to disobey him.
It was still a risk, but one which was – for once – weighted in his favor.
None of that was what made Lex hesitate, however. Instead, it was the sudden memory that came to him then, reminding him that he’d been in a situation similar to this one before.
This is just like what happened with Sonata and Fireflower.
He could recall it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The two of them had been on their way to Tall Tale, and had happened across the aranea, a giant spider able to take the form of a pony. Lex had been intent on killing the unnatural creature, but Sonata had managed to take it alive, and the two of them had argued about what to do with it.
Things had only grown worse the following morning. Fireflower, in gratitude to Sonata for her leniency, had offered to show her the fire magic he knew. Lex, awakening during the demonstration, had mistaken the sight for Fireflower attacking the mare he loved, causing him to lash out with everything he had. Only Sonata’s intervention had saved the aranea, and even then it had been a near thing.
The fight they’d had after that had resulted in Sonata breaking up with him.
The memory was enough to make him wince even now, especially with how worried he felt over not knowing if she was alive or dead. That spike of emotion, in turn, was enough to make his tulpa stir, the spiteful thing making itself known a moment later. That was another example of your poor judgment. If you’d ignored her and slain that spider-creature, its siblings wouldn’t have come to save you after you slew that dragon, it jeered, causing Lex to clench his jaw.
It went against his every instinct to do so, but Lex let the aura fade from around his horn, his eyes returning to normal as he let the black crystal stalagmite he’d conjured beneath the wolf’s head crumble to dust. Ignoring the way Thermal Draft beamed at him, he glowered at the creature. “Go to the bowls,” he spat. “Eat your fill of what’s in them.”
Those golden eyes widened then, but the wolf didn’t say anything as it padded over to the remaining food and water that he’d created. Sniffing them for a moment, it dug in, pink tongue darting out to lick up the gruel in large mouthfuls. In just a few moments, it gobbled down an entire bowlful of the stuff, immediately moving on to another.
Smiling, Thermal Draft watched the spectacle. “Is it good?”
One of the wolf’s ears twitched. “…its awful,” it answered after a moment, and Lex frowned as he heard a catch in the thing’s voice. “It’s slimy, it’s mushy, and it’s tasteless. But…”
Its voice hitched again, and this time the sound was recognizable as a sob, the wolf finishing the second bowl and moving on to a third. “…it’s good! It’s really…really good!”
She sank to her belly then, squeezing her eyes shut as tears ran down the fur of her cheeks, the water crystallizing before it hit the ground. The soft pattering of the ice crystals hitting the floor of the cave was punctuated only by the sound of the wolf’s weeping as she continued to eat her fill.
When she’d finally finished, Thermal Draft – her own eyes looking suspiciously wet – took a tentative step forward. Lex made a low grunt of disapproval at that, but the pegasus gave him a quick wave before turning back to the reclining creature. “Do you feel better now?”
Her ears flicking back, the canine glanced at her for just a moment before looking down. “Yes…”
“My name’s Thermal Draft,” continued the pegasus. “And this is Lex. What’s your name?”
For a moment no answer came. Then the snow-colored wolf looked over at the two of them.
Lex could feel his tension growing in inverse proportion to how much time was left before the creature that called itself Solvei slipped free of his control.
He’d performed several tests with the power the Night Mare had given him – albeit only rudimentary ones, since his focus had been on getting to Vanhoover as quickly as possible – shortly after acquiring it. Besides confirming a large array of creatures that he couldn’t control, and that the ones he could remained under his power for no longer than sixty seconds, he’d also determined that he could only use that power no more than thirteen times in a single day. And while he’d learned during the battle at Vanhoover’s dockyards that he could enhance that power by physically channeling energy into it through his own body, he couldn’t retain uses that way; thirteen times per day was the absolute limit, until that power refreshed itself each night at midnight.
Given that he’d only used it twice today – once to prepare a component in order to use his minor healing spell on Drafty from where Dark Streak had injured her, and again to subdue Solvei – Lex knew there was little immediate danger with regard to the oversized wolf. It would be easy to take control of her again if she so much as looked at either of them wrong. But that would only suffice for a grand total of eleven minutes, at which point there would be little he could do to stop Solvei from making a meal out of the two of them.
As much as Lex could appreciate the parallels between what had happened with Sonata and Fireflower compared to Thermal Draft and Solvei now, that didn’t mean that the situations were identical. Fireflower had been lost and afraid, meaning no harm to anyone. Solvei had attempted to kill them and eat them. No matter that she’d apparently filled her belly now; given her large size, it wouldn’t be long before she was hungry again, most likely for the meat she apparently craved.
To that end, the smart thing to do would be to pursue the line of inquiry Thermal Draft had raised – finding out if Solvei knew where the nearest pony municipality was – and be done with the creature before the next eleven minutes were up.
But that was going to be difficult if Thermal Draft kept peppering it with inane questions!
“Wait, so you’re called a ‘winter wolf’?” asked the pegasus with a good-natured snicker, keeping up the conversation she’d started with the monstrous canine after the creature had divulged its name. “That’s a little too on the nose, isn’t it? I mean, we’re a pegasus and a unicorn, not a ‘winged pony’ and a ‘horned pony.’ Although I guess earth ponies are kind of the exception.”
“Just so you know, ‘winter wolves’ are what others call us,” answered Solvei defensively. “We call ourselves utvalgte. It means ‘the chosen ones,’ because we’re the tribe that remained loyal to our ancestor, Hrothvitnir, after Vutok the Destroyer emerged from the Great Gap beyond the edge of the world.” Rising to a sitting position, she gestured with a paw. “We-”
“Lie back down!” demanded Lex, backing the command up with another application of the Night Mare’s power. The previous use had worn off just as the wolf had sat up, and he couldn’t take the chance that she’d felt her freedom return and had been preparing to pounce.
Having no choice but to obey, Solvei sank back onto her belly. “I didn’t mean any harm,” she whimpered. “I was just going to tell the sacred story of our ancestors. You didn’t have to use your seidr on m-, oh! That’s right!” Despite being unable to get up, she looked over at him with renewed interest. “You’re a seidrmadr, aren’t you? What other powers do you have?”
Thermal Draft tilted her head. “That’s the second time you’ve called him a seid-whatever. What does that mean?”
Solvei opened her mouth to reply, but Lex – not wanting another long digression from the winter wolf – cut her off. “‘Seidr’ is their word for ‘magic.’ The suffix ‘-madr’ means ‘user’ or ‘wielder.’”
Solvei’s eyes widened. “You know the language of our ancestors?!”
“I know many languages,” snorted Lex dismissively. “Now-”
“Yeah, but one spoken by the ancestors of a tribe of talking wolves on another world?” interrupted Thermal Draft, a look of amazement on her face. “What’s the story there?”
Lex let out a slow breath, strangling the urge to berate the pegasus for wasting time they didn’t have. He’d cut in to avoid a long story, not to tell one! “The temple of Luminace – the pony goddess of magic – in Viljatown, the capital of the Pony Empire, doubles as a library,” he explained through gritted teeth, wanting to finish this and get back to more important topics. “When I first came here, I used its resources to try and research a way home. Since several of their treatises on magic made use of various foreign terms and phrases, it was most efficient to simply teach myself those languages using the dictionaries they’d compiled. One of those was Koloss,” he added, with a nod at Solvei to indicate that as the tongue she’d been using.
Thermal Draft blinked. “Teach yourself those languages?” she repeated. “By reading dictionaries? As in, reading each one cover-to-cover?” Her eyebrows went up when he nodded. “Exactly how long did that take you?”
Lex scowled, not understanding the point of the question. “A few hours for each one. Why?”
“A few hours each,” echoed Drafty, nonplussed. “You learned to speak entirely new languages in a few hours each.” Shaking her head, she regarded him with wide eyes. “Lex, just how smart are you?”
The question made him frown, not sure if she was actually asking or if she was being rhetorical, but Solvei cut in before he could give it any further thought. “If you have seidr, and you can speak the language of my ancestors, then can you heal my pack?”
It was such an abrupt subject shift that Lex could only frown at the winter wolf. “What?”
“My pack, my family, are all sick,” she explained, her ears folding back. “I’ve been looking for a way to fix them, but nothing’s worked. Can you help them? Please?”
The request made his lip curl. “Absolutely not.”
Despite already lying on the ground, Solvei seemed to slump in place. “Please! You’re looking for others of your kind, right? That’s why you’re out here all alone? I can show you where they live! And…and we can reward you for your help! We have the gold that your people love! And, um, and…and we have some seidr of our own that I’m sure my mother would be willing to share once you cured her! So please…!”
For her part, Thermal Draft bit her lip. “Lex…maybe you should…”
“No,” he replied coldly. “This creature injured your wing, almost froze me to death, and now it wants me to use my magic to cure whatever’s afflicting the rest of its misbegotten kind? It’s one thing to feed a creature like this. It’s another to help its kin so that they can continue savaging ponies!”
He gave the white wolf a look of loathing then. “That’s what your kind does, isn’t it? That gold you mentioned, you’ve gotten it from other ponies that you’ve killed. Isn’t that why you know where they live?”
Solvei winced. “It’s not like that! All of those things were taken as keepsakes from before I was born! Yes, we used to hunt your kind, but my mother’s mother declared that their home was off-limits after her mate got most of their pack killed when he led an attack on their land! She said they had dangerous weapons – metal sticks with sharp edges, long spikes that they shot through the air, and other strange tools – that they weren’t prepared to for. Now we stay away from their homes. I only bit your mate’s wing because I was starving…”
The correction came to Lex’s lips automatically. “She’s not-”
“Lex,” interrupted Thermal Draft, blushing for some reason as she walked over to him. Tentatively, she reached out and brushed a wing against his side, making sure not to let the feathers trace over any of his wounds. “You saved me when I was sick,” she murmured softly. “And that’s when I knew that…” She trailed off, swallowing before she continued speaking. “That you were my hero. Why not do the same for her now?”
The utter fatuousness of her reasoning made him scoff. “You are a pony,” he replied without hesitation. “I have a moral obligation to do everything in my power to aid ponies whose lives are in danger. This,” – he waved a hoof at Solvei, the motion nearly drawing a grunt of effort from him – “is a carnivorous monster, no different than the sahuagin and the other sea creatures whom we slaughtered by the dozens when they attacked Vanhoover. Even if she’s telling the truth about not attacking pony settlements, that’s a position that could be abandoned at any time.”
He paused for a moment, letting that sink in. “I will not aid creatures that prey on ponies. Better that her pack be wiped out by whatever disease they’ve contracted.”
“You don’t understand!” protested Solvei. “Being sick has made them more likely to attack your kind, not less! They all think that they’re invincible now, and that the old rules don’t apply anymore! If I can’t find a way to fix them, they’ll attack your people’s land again, which means that they’ll all be killed!”
Thermal Draft’s gaze immediately moved back to the winter wolf. “Wait, what?”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “You’re saying your pack has contracted an illness that’s made them more aggressive?” That sounded too similar to the outbreak of ghouls that had overrun Vanhoover for his liking. While most of the undead ponies’ victims had been paralyzed and subsequently devoured alive, anypony who’d been bitten by a ghoul but had managed to escape had contracted an illness. Those who’d succumbed to it had died – which had been most of the ponies who’d gotten sick, since Vanhoover’s collapse had meant that not only had medical treatment been impossible to find, but even basic hygiene had quickly become unsustainable – only to rise again as new ghouls, slowly but surely expanding the population of the hungry undead.
If Solvei was telling the truth, and there was something similar plaguing her kin now…
It wouldn’t even need to be something that serious to be dangerous, he decided after a moment’s consideration. Any disease whose symptoms include aggression and bouts of violence could be devastating for anypony living nearby. While Solvei had made it sound like the ponies in the region had fought off the winter wolves before, they’d likely lost lives in the process. That would almost certainly happen again if the winter wolves mounted another attack now…in which case, he’d be at fault for not curing Solvei’s pack when he had the chance, preventing the attack before it ever happened.
“Fine,” he spat, giving Solvei a sour look. “I’ll see what I can do for your pack.”
Immediately, her tail set to wagging, a relieved sigh escaping her lips as her ears perked back up. “Thank you! Please let me up, and I’ll take you to them right away!”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” came a new voice from the mouth of the cave.
Like Solvei’s, it was female, but with a slightly deeper pitch, as though the speaker were older. Nor was it alone, being accompanied by chuckling from at least two others. Or at least, that was all Lex could determine as he whipped his head back toward the cave entrance, spotting three large shapes walking inside, their features obscured by the glare from the light outside.
But Solvei apparently didn’t need to see who’d spoken to know who it was. “Mother!”
“It’s time for you to come home now, Solvei,” continued the newcomer as she padded further into the cave, her features slowly coming into view. “No more running away.”
The words made Solvei cringe. Or perhaps it wasn’t what her mother had said, but rather was the sight of her that made the winter wolf flinch. If so, that was something Lex could understand.
Now that he could see them clearly, it was obvious that whatever had happened to Solvei’s kin was far worse than a mere illness…
The trio of winter wolves entering the cave were nothing like Solvei.
Each of them was larger than her, six inches taller at the shoulder than she was as well as being a foot longer. The additional mass was enough to easily give them a fifty-pound advantage over the smaller wolf, possibly more. Each of the newcomers’ teeth put Solvei’s to shame as well, showcasing incisors that bordered on being true fangs, long and thick before coming to a sharp point.
But those were only modest details compared to the more noticeable differences. Large patches of the fur covering their bodies had fallen out. But the skin underneath wasn’t the healthy pale pink that should have been there. Instead, their flesh was ferruginous in color and thickly calloused, as though it had turned into dark red leather while still on their bodies, forming ugly blotches that were distributed across their bodies at random. If Solvei’s white coat looked like a field of fresh snow, these wolves were a wintry pasture that had been stained with blood.
Nor was that the full extent of what had happened to them. Each of the larger wolves’ front paws were distorted, the toes stretched out grotesquely to accommodate the long claws that now protruded from them. Leathery wings stretched out from their shoulders, their flesh devoid of fur or feathers, instead showing only folds of bright red skin with darker veins visible through the toughened membranes. Even their eyes were red, in contrast to Solvei’s gold.
And, as the three of them came to a stop in front of the patch of black crystal spikes Lex had raised earlier, those red eyes were trained squarely on Lex, Drafty, and Solvei now.
“Look at that,” snickered the wolf on the right, its voice filled with mockery. “Little Solvei actually caught a pair of ponies on her own.”
“It’s the first time the runt managed to catch some game before we did,” laughed the one on the left.
“Sten, Ebbe,” moaned Solvei miserably, looking at each of the pair in turn. “Brothers, don’t do this! You’re not well!”
“That’s enough of that nonsense!” snapped the wolf in the center, the same one who’d spoken a moment ago when the three of them had entered the cave. “It’s bad enough that you’ve refused to honor your father’s wishes-”
“Bolverk isn’t my father!” snapped Solvei. “He killed my father! How can you stand to be near him after what he did?!”
“That’s what’s supposed to happen!” retorted the center wolf. “The strong replace the weak! Bolverk’s power was greater, so he became our alpha!”
“Only because he had the Red Man’s sickness! And now he’s made all of you sick as well!” Solvei’s ears turned down so far that they pressed against her skull as she looked at Lex. “Please, seidrmadr, fix them! I’ll do anything you ask if you can cure my pack!”
“Seidrmadr?” echoed the Solvei’s mother, narrowing her eyes as she looked at Lex, who’d been silently watching the exchange as Thermal Draft crouched behind him. “Solvei, have you betrayed us to the ponies?!”
“It doesn’t matter even if she did,” sneered Sten. “As we are now, their weapons can’t hurt us, and I doubt their seidr could either.”
“After the Red Man takes his share, we’ll feast on all of the ponies in that land!” laughed Ebbe. “We’ll eat so much meat that our bellies will be swollen!”
That was when Lex’s eyes flared, shining green and purple.
“I’ve heard enough.”
In the dim light of the cave, the sudden glow was captivating, and his pronouncement seemed to fill the rocky shelter. The wolves immediately tensed, wings flaring at the ready as all three bared their teeth and growled, crouching as though preparing to leap. But Lex couldn’t have looked less concerned, instead regarding the creatures with an expression of contempt. “None of you will be allowed to bring harm to a pony. Now, lie down on the ground and hold still so that I can examine you.”
The words were backed with the authority given to him by the Night Mare. At his silent command, invisible tendrils of power sped toward the monstrous wolves, wrapping around them in an instant…
And failed to take hold of them.
It was unexpected enough that Lex couldn’t keep his surprise in check, his eyes widening in shock and alarm. What was going on?! Whatever had affected Solvei’s pack, they were still the winter wolves, the same as her. If the Night Mare’s power was able to take control of her, then it stood to reason that it should have been able to do the same to them, regardless of whatever deformities or mutations they’d undergone!
If they’d been able to struggle against it, the way Tlerekithres was able to, that would have made more sense, cursed Lex silently, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what was happening. But this isn’t affecting them at all!
“Lex?” whispered Drafty from behind him. “What’s happening?! They’re not lying down!”
Despite her attempt to be quiet, her whisper was loud enough to be heard by everyone, and Solvei’s mother chuckled darkly, her sons laughing with her. “So much for your seidrmadr, daughter,” she taunted, coming out of her crouch as she folded her wings back at her sides. “Now, step away from the ponies, and we’ll-”
Lex swung his foreleg around to point it at Solvei. “Defend us!” he ordered, invoking the Night Mare’s power again. If he couldn’t command those outlandish wolves, then he’d make use of the one he could!
Unable to disobey, Solvei sprang up, placing herself in front of Lex and Drafty. “Wh-what’re you doing?!” she protested. “I don’t want to hurt my pack! I want to save them!”
“Right now, you’re the ones who needs saving, Solvei!” howled Ebbe as he launched himself forward, wings flapping as he picked up speed, leaping over the black crystal spikes. Lex and Thermal Draft barely had time to fling themselves out of the way before he collided with Solvei head-on, both wolves going tumbling as they snarled and snapped at each other, one involuntarily and the other with obvious relish.
It immediately became clear that Solvei was outmatched, landing on her back as her brother moved his jaws toward her throat. Twisting her head away from his fangs, she only barely managed to get her back legs drawn up, kicking out a moment later and dislodging Ebbe from on top of her. But effort cost her, as his elongated front claws raked over her belly before she managed to shake him off, opening up rows of cuts that immediately began to ooze blood as she picked herself up.
Lex barely noticed, his attention on the other two wolves that were rushing toward himself and Thermal Draft, the flap of their wings loud inside the cave. Barely able to stay on his hooves after moving out of the way of Solvei and Ebbe, he called on his dark magic, and immediately a thin protrusion of black crystal shot out from the wall of the cave. It was all he could manage, but it was enough to catch Sten off-guard, the pointed edge piercing his side and sending him crashing to the ground with a pained yelp.
…or rather, that was what Lex had expected would happen.
Instead, the black crystal caught Sten in the side, but did little more than open up a small scratch on the mutated wolf’s flank, causing him to snarl in irritation more than pain. But before Lex had a chance to do more than widen his eyes at how ineffective his attack had been, Solvei’s mother was on him, easily knocking him to the ground and bringing her jaw forward.
Bringing his foreleg up instinctively, Lex somehow managed to wrap black crystals around it just as her teeth made contact. Growling, she bit down, but the thick material held up, saving him from having his limb torn off. But that was small comfort as she suddenly jerked her head to the side, almost yanking his foreleg from its socket as she tossed him into the wall of the cave.
His head with the stone with a sharp crack, and he felt the world spin nauseatingly as he collapsed to the ground. In the distance, he heard Thermal Draft scream his name, but he couldn’t focus enough to see what had become of her, even when her cry of alarm became one of pain a moment later.
“Don’t kill her, you fool!” snarled Solvei’s mother. “Remember what Bolverk told us? The Red Man wants us to bring any ponies that we find to him first!”
“Can’t I at least eat one of her wings?” huffed Sten, and Lex focused on the wolf’s voice, somehow managing to glimpse Thermal Draft lying on her back, one of the white-and-red wolf’s claws pressing down on the bloodied wing that Solvei had injured earlier, making the mare whimper with repressed agony. “She won’t die from that.”
“She will if she bleeds out,” snapped Solvei’s mother irritably as she padded over to Lex. Casually reaching out with one claw, she grabbed his head and slammed it against the side of the cave. He nearly blacked out right there, going limp as she continued holding him against the rough stone. The sight made Solvei’s mother sneer. “Some seidrmadr you turned out to be.”
Huffing, she turned back to Sten. “I know the hunting has been bad lately, but you need to control your hunger for a little longer. If we anger the Red Man, Bolverk will cast us out, and if we lose these powers we won’t be able to attack the pony lands-”
She couldn’t finish as a pained scream from Solvei announced the white wolf’s defeat. Only barely clinging to consciousness, Lex managed to catch sight of the white wolf hitting the ground, her white coat stained red as Ebbe stood over her, triumphant. “Stupid,” taunted the mutated wolf. “You never once beat me in a fight before. What made you think you could do it now that I’m stronger than ever?”
Solvei’s mother rolled her eyes. “Since you’re so strong, Ebbe, you can carry her back home. Now let’s go. If we’re lucky, Kaja’s managed to find some dinner by-, hm?”
Lex didn’t bother to look at the wolf pressing his head against the cave wall as he shakily raised his left hoof toward Solvei. “Get…up…” he muttered. “Get…up…!”
The sight made Sten snicker. “This is what we were afraid to attack? The things that supposedly killed grandfather and most of his kin?”
He wasn’t the only one laughing, Ebbe giving Solvei a sharp jab with his claw. “You heard him Solvei. Get up so I can knock you down again.”
Lex ignored both of them, instead keeping his hoof pointed at Solvei. The wolf was looking back at him now, and could see more tears turning into shards of ice as they fell from her eyes. “I can’t,” she sobbed. “I can’t do it. I can’t fight my family.”
“Get…up…!” repeated Lex, calling on the Night Mare’s power again, pushing as much of it as he could toward the whimpering wolf. “I command you…! Defend us…!” He tried to think of some sort of strategy that he could order her to follow, some sort of tactic that would let her drive her warped packmates away. But in his current state that level of coherent thought was impossible, and all he could do was demand that she produce the results he wanted somehow. “Move faster…! Strike them harder…! Shrug off your wounds and keep fighting…! DEFEND US…!”
The goddess-given power flowed down the barbed wire embedded in his left foreleg then, and Lex felt it reach out and take hold of the winter wolf…
And then it flowed into her.
Lex could only stare. That…wasn’t supposed to happen. The Night Mare’s power either had no affect on a creature, or it wrapped around them and let him control their motor functions. But this…
Solvei gasped suddenly, her head arching back as her eyes widened, lurching up onto all fours. The reaction was unexpected enough that Ebbe stepped back, blinking in surprise. “What’re you doing?” he snapped, raising a claw angrily. “Lie back down before I make you, you little…”
But he couldn’t bring himself to finish that sentence.
Because Solvei was no longer a “little” anything.
In the span of an instant, she’d more than doubled her height. Whereas before she’d been four feet tall at the shoulder, she was now nearly ten, only a few feet shorter than the cave ceiling. Eight feet of length now bordered on twenty, with her tail being longer than her entire body had been a moment ago. Nor were those the only changes she’d undergone, as her fur was now free of bloodstains, suddenly whole and unblemished, showing off the rippling bands of muscle that now lay beneath her coat, as though her body could barely contain its own strength.
The change left everyone speechless, staring at the behemoth that Solvei had become with wide eyes and open mouths, frozen and unable to react.
Which made it easy for Solvei to go on the attack.
With a growl so deep it seemed to rumble up from underground, she brought her head down lightning fast, jaws the size of a wagon closing around Ebbe’s middle. The wolf yelped in shock as he felt Solvei’s teeth – now as large as fence posts – close around him. But there was nothing he could do as she shook him like a ragdoll before flinging him toward the entrance to the cave, still wailing in fright as he sailed through it and hit the snow outside.
The mother wolf could only stare at the spectacle before she released Lex, stumbling back toward the cave entrance where Ebbe had been tossed. “R-retreat!” she gulped, managing to tear her eyes away from the titan that her weakling daughter had suddenly become. “Grab that pony and retrea-”
She wasn’t able to finish as Solvei darted forward – moving far faster than she should have been able to at her current size – and whacked her with one paw.
It wasn’t an artful strike by any means, being little more than a slap. But with the sheer amount of mass that she’d gained, the blow landed with the force of an avalanche, and the elder wolf went skipping along the ground like a stone thrown over water. She bounced once, twice, and finally a third time before rolling several feet, eventually coming to a stop near the cave entrance, her head lolling as she struggled to remain conscious.
In the face of the overwhelming force that his sister had become, Sten had no intention of sticking around. But the few seconds he’d had to process what was happening while Solvei dealt with the rest of his packmates were enough for him to recover his wits, and he lowered his head to take the scruff of Thermal Draft’s neck in his jaws before he turned and bolted, wings beating as fast as she could as he raced toward the cave’s only means of egress.
The realization of what was happening made Drafty yelp, struggling futilely as she was carried off. “L-LEX! SOLVEI! HELP ME!”
“Get her back…!” rasped Lex, recovering enough presence of mind to eliminate the black spikes he’d raised earlier.
Solvei didn’t answer verbally, instead rushing after her departing brother and his captive. But even with her speed having been enhanced, Sten had a head start. Nor were his wings just for show, propelling him forward with surprising quickness even with a struggling pony in his jaws.
And yet, Solvei was quickly gaining on him…
The two reached the entrance of the cave at almost the same moment, and Lex lost sight of them as they disappeared into the glare coming from outside.
Distant yelling reached his ears a few moments later, but they seemed to fade away almost as soon as he heard them. Seconds passed, and the silence seemed to stretch on interminably. Just as he was contemplating trying to drag himself to the cave entrance, it darkened as a massive wolf padded forward…alone.
“I’m sorry,” murmured Solvei, keeping her eyes on the ground. “I couldn’t get her back. Sten banked upward as soon as he cleared the cave, and the others flew off after him. I wasn’t able to-, HNGH!”
Solvei’s groan was one of surprise more than pain, and Lex watched as she suddenly returned to her former self, shrinking back down to her original size and build. But her wounds didn’t reopen, her coat remaining the same pure white it had originally been. Looking almost dizzy from the sudden transition, Solvei took a moment to examine herself, as though not entirely certain that she’d turned back to normal.
Apparently satisfied that she was, Solvei turned her golden eyes back toward Lex. “What…just happened?”
“Kara,” whispered Thermal Draft. “I know you said there are rules preventing you from offering any direct assistance, but I could really use some help now!”
The winter wolf holding her by the scruff of the neck – Sten, according to what Solvei had called him – growled softly, the sound reverberating through her bones thanks to his grip on her. It was enough to make her wince, having hoped that the rush of the wind whipping by them, along with the heavy flapping of his leathery wings, would keep her voice from reaching his ears. Apparently, it hadn’t.
Nor was Kara’s reply any more reassuring. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but there’s still nothing I can do. These creatures don’t worship me, so I don’t have any leverage over them, and since I’m not a senior member of the pantheon I can’t manifest on Everglow as I please.
While the answer wasn’t unexpected, Drafty couldn’t help but bite her lip, resisting the urge to try and wriggle out of the winged winter wolf’s jaws. A glance down showed that they were at least two hundred feet in the air, and while Drafty wasn’t afraid of heights – what sort of pegasus would be? – her mangled left wing meant that even if she were to free herself from Sten’s jaws, the best she’d be able to hope for would be a controlled fall.
Even then, she had no doubt that Solvei’s family would be on her in an instant. Even if she was able to confuse them with her shapeshifting powers, she wouldn’t be able to escape. In the few minutes since she’d been abducted, Drafty had observed the flight dynamics of her captors, and while their large bodies meant that they weren’t as maneuverable as a pegasus, their broad wings caught a great deal of air with each flap, making Solvei’s kin superior in terms of pure speed.
Slumping, Drafty took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. These creatures – she wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to think of them as winter wolves, with how different they were from Solvei – weren’t going to kill her. At least, not right away. Solvei’s mother had said as much when she’d told Sten not to eat her; apparently the “Red Man” who’d made them into how they were now wanted to meet with ponies for some reason.
And I really don’t want to know what that reason is, fretted Drafty to herself, shivering as much from the horrible things her imagination was conjuring up as from the cold. Given that he’d apparently turned the winter wolves into monsters – making them sick, as Solvei had put it – maybe he wanted to do the same to ponies? It was a terrifying thought, reminding her of how close she’d come to transforming into a ghoul before Lex had rescued her.
The memory of her savior – and, more recently, her lover, even if he didn’t know it – sent a wave of hope through the captured pegasus. That’s right. Lex saved me then, and he’ll save me again now. It’s what he does. Whether it was protecting everyone from a raging dragon in Tall Tale, saving ponies from sea monsters and the undead in Vanhoover, or rescuing his kidnapped maid in Las Pegasus, Lex Legis always came through.
That was enough to buoy her spirits. But as the silent flight continued, giving her nothing to focus on except the cold, the pain in her wing, the other two winter wolves flying alongside Sten, and the snow-covered forests, valleys, and mountains that filled her vision, she found her calm slowly eroding, anxiety about what would happen when they reached their destination gradually filling her mind again. Lex would come and rescue her, but until he did, she was on her own…
That shouldn’t have been so upsetting. In the last few months, Thermal Draft had been through more than her fair share of hardships. The complete collapse of Vanhoover. Fighting a pitched battle against an army of sea monsters. Dying and coming back to life. Almost being killed a second time by that witch called Starlight Glimmer. Thanks to the ponies in her life – including and especially Lex and Cloudy – she’d gotten through them all. Being kidnapped by mutant wolves so she could be taken to their leader should have been a walk in the park compared to what she’d experienced, especially since she knew that help was on the way.
And yet the fear was still there.
“Talk to me,” murmured Drafty, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to control the apprehension growing in her gut. “Please, Kara. I just need to hear a friendly voice.”
I understand, sweetheart. What do you want me to talk about?
Had there not been jaws gripping the back of her neck, Drafty would have shaken her head. “I don’t care. Something. Anything. Just give me something else to think about.” Opening her eyes, she looked around helplessly, an idea for a topic belatedly coming to her a moment later. “How come the weather happens all by itself here?”
For several long seconds, no answer came, and Drafty was about to start pleading with the goddess to respond when Kara finally answered. It didn’t always.
A rush of curiosity ran through Drafty then, crowding out the worst of her anxiety. It wasn’t just the ambiguous nature of Kara’s response that got her attention, however. It was the undertone of bitterness that had filled her mental voice. “I don’t understand.”
Kara sighed. In Equestria, the weather only happens when pegasi like you create it. Here on Everglow, any scholar or historian worthy of the name could tell you that it used to be like that. But for a long time now, that’s been less and less true. Breezes will roll in with no apparent cause. Clouds will sometimes form on their own, and even precipitate without being touched. And such events are getting stronger and more frequent with each passing year. Pegasi can still affect the atmosphere as much as they ever could, but now they react to weather they don’t want as much as they create weather that they do.
Drafty’s brow furrowed as she absorbed that bit of news. “But why is that happening? How come is the weather becoming more and more uncontrolled?”
A question many ponies are asking, replied the goddess evasively, her tone still subdued. But I can tell you this much: unseasonable blizzards like the one where you are aren’t normal. Everglow’s weather will frequently act on its own, but it won’t suddenly dump feet of snow on someplace at the beginning of autumn, even if you’re in a cooler climate.
“It won’t?” murmured Drafty, trying to process what she’d just been told. “But then why…?” She couldn’t finish as a particularly cold breeze made her shiver, as though the snowstorm itself had overheard her conversation and was punishing her for questioning it.
Pegasus magic isn’t the only magic that can control the weather, answered Kara, her voice regaining its usual flippant quality. Even back before Iliana brought the tribes together and founded the Empire, ponies – and anyone else – with powerful nature magic could command the skies to do as they bid. Only for a local area, and only for so long, but weather-control spells aren’t unknown here. Or maybe it’s some sort of creature with powers related to cold. This world is situated close to the Elemental Planes, and it’s not unknown for rifts to form between them and Everglow, with denizens from those realms coming through.
“Just like what happened in Equestria,” murmured Drafty, her eyes widening in realization. “Then, could that have something to do with the ‘Red Man’ who Solvei said warped her family?”
I don’t know, sweetheart. But if whoever that is has the ability to cover such a large area in a blizzard this intense, they’re likely someone – or something – of great power. Magic this strong isn’t wielded easily.
That was a thought as chilling as the temperature, and Drafty found herself again worrying about what was waiting for her when the wolves finally reached wherever they were headed.
It felt like a long time later when Sten began to descend, staying in close formation with his mother and brother. Although there was no way for Drafty to judge the passage of time due to the sun being hidden by the dark gray clouds overhead, the ambient light was fading fast, and the back of her neck had become stiff from bearing carried in Sten’s jaws for so long. We were flying for at least an hour, Drafty decided as the wolf touched down, releasing her to stumble to her hooves, her legs numb from the cold. Maybe two.
The wolves’ home wasn’t much to look at. Nestled in a pass between two of the mountains, there was little to distinguish it from any other part of the terrain. Snow drifts piled between the rocks, fallen logs, and those trees that were still standing. It was only on a second look that Drafty realized that several of the rocks and logs had been placed in ways that would make traversing the terrain particularly difficult, except for in a few locations, as though funneling any would-be intruders toward a particular area.
Said area was the only notable feature in the pass, being a large entrance that had been dug into the rock face at the far end. Broad wooden beams braced the sides and the roof of the opening, suggesting that it hadn’t been the wolves who’d originally settled here. “A mine?” Drafty murmured, recognizing the basic architecture; an old girlfriend of hers had come from one of the mining towns north of Vanhoover, nestled at the base of the Unicorn Mountains, and she’d visited her at home a few times. But there was none of the external support apparatus that a mine would have had; no cart tracks, no storage sheds, no lighting equipment. It was just an entrance into darkness with some wooden supports. “What’s a mine doing here?”
It might not have been the sort of mine you’re thinking of, sweetheart, murmured Kara. The goddess had made good on her promise to keep talking to Drafty during the journey here, and she continued providing dialogue now. There are plenty of tool-using races here who prefer to dwell underground. Kobolds, goblins, and similar vermin. They don’t-
But Kara wasn’t given a chance to finish as Sten brought a claw down right next to Drafty, making her yelp in fright. “Be quiet, pony!” growled the mutated wolf.
The swipe made Solvei’s mother growl. “I told you, she needs to be intact for the Red Man!”
Sten returned her snarl with one of his own. “That’s easy for you to say! She kept babbling the entire way here, calling out to some spirit or something! It was annoying!” Turning back to Drafty, he licked his lips menacingly. “Not to mention that the taste of her skin in my mouth made me very hungry…”
Gulping, Drafty backed away, but Solvei’s mother intervened before she could take a few steps. “I’ll take her to see the Red Man. The two of you go and see if Kaja caught anything to eat.”
“Or if Bolverk left anything for us, if she did,” snorted Ebbe, tucking his wings at his sides as he glanced at the mine entrance.
Solvei’s mother narrowed her eyes at him. “Watch your mouth. He’s going to be in a bad mood since we didn’t bring your sister back. Even with these powers, our pack is still only six in number, and we’re going to need everyone when we attack the pony village. The longer we have to wait, the hungrier we’ll all get.”
“I still don’t know why the hunting is so bad,” muttered Sten irritably. “With how fast the snow came in, there should be a lot of game!”
“It’s not because the snow came in fast, it’s because it came in early,” replied a new voice, and Drafty looked over to see another winter wolf exiting the mine. Like the others, she was splotched with angry-looked patches of furless red skin, contrasting sharply with her white fur, and leathery wings tucked at her sides. “Normally most of the game would have spent the season fattening themselves up and storing food for the winter. But because winter came so soon, they didn’t have a chance. So they’ve ranged further to try and collect food, making them harder to find.”
“Kaja.” Solvei’s mother trotted over to the newcomer, and to Drafty’s surprise the two exchanged a quick nuzzle, not unlike how ponies would have done. “Did you find anything to eat, daughter?” asked the elder wolf as she stepped back.
“A bear,” answered Kaja. “A black one. But Bolverk claimed it for himself.” Her ears folded down then. “He says that if we eat well now, we won’t be motivated to attack the ponies later on.”
The news made Ebbe bare his teeth. “That’s crazy! We can’t fight on empty bellies!”
“He’s just being greedy,” agreed Sten. “I bet he won’t even have finished it all by the time we’re ready to raid the pony lands.”
“Stop it, all of you!” Solvei’s mother reared up in anger, bringing her claws down heavily as she glowered at her sons. “Bolverk is your father now, and our alpha! He brought the Red Man who made us all stronger, so none of you have a right to complain! Once we bring Solvei back, we’ll have more pony meat than we’ll be able to eat, and it will be because of him! Until then, you will honor his wishes!”
“Where is Solvei?” asked Kaja, glancing around, her eyes settling on Drafty. “And where did you find that pony? We’re not supposed to attack them until the entire pack is ready, so they can’t prepare their weapons or seidr.”
Solvei’s mother sighed. “Ask your brothers. I need to take this one to the Red Man now. Then I’ll go hunting and see if I can find something else for us to eat in the meantime.”
Sten’s gave a low whine at that, the sound almost puppyish. “Mother, you should rest. We spent more than two days tracking Solvei. Ebbe and I can go hunting.”
“He’s right,” added Ebbe. “I thought I saw some rabbit tracks on the way back. I bet I could find them again.”
Solvei’s mother gave a low laugh, padding over to nip each of them on the ear affectionately. “Fine. Go see if you can scare up some rabbits. Just don’t stay out for too long. If that seidrmadr your sister found comes looking for his mate, I don’t want you two trying to fight him alone.”
“I’ll go with them,” offered Kaja. “I want to hear what happened with Solvei.”
Solvei’s mother looked between her children, hesitating for a moment before giving a single nod. “Very well. Good hunting, and may the spirits of our ancestors watch over you.”
“And you, Mother,” replied Sten.
His siblings each repeated the phrase in turn before they all leaped into the air, wings flapping as they took off. Solvei’s mother watched them go until they were out of sight. Only then did she turn toward Drafty. “Come with me,” she ordered gruffly. “If you try to run, I’ll catch you and hobble you. Do you understand?”
“Y-yes,” gulped Drafty, knowing that without being able to fly, she had no chance of escaping.
The wolf eyed her for a moment, then turned and began walking. To Drafty’s mild surprise, she moved away from the mine entrance, instead heading toward the wooded part of the pass. “We’re not going into the mine?”
“My kin and I live in the den,” answered the wolf without looking back. “The Red Man keeps to himself.”
“Oh…”
The two of them walked in silence for a moment, with Drafty clamoring over the obstacles that the wolf had a far easier time with, and it was then that Kara spoke up again. Talk to her, sweetheart.
“What?”
Her sudden exclamation made the wolf look back at her, frowning in suspicion, and all Drafty could do was give her a rictus grin, swallowing. It was only when Solvei’s mother turned and started walking again that she repeated herself, quieter. “What?”
Talk to her, urged Kara. You saw how she related to her children just now. She’s not incapable of caring about others. See if you can make her care about you. Winning over your captors is a path to freedom.
Drafty wasn’t so sure about that; these wolves were planning on attacking what sounded like an entire village of ponies so that they could eat everyone there. But on the other hoof, it’s not like I’ve got a lot to lose, she admitted silently. Clearing her throat, she uttered the first thing that came to mind. “So, um…should we let the Red Man know we’re coming? I mean, just showing up when you’re not expecting company can be pretty rude, right?”
“The Red Man will know when we’re near,” answered the wolf, not so much as breaking her stride. “He always knows.”
“Okay…that’s not creepy at all,” muttered Drafty before trying again. “Listen, I heard what you and your children were saying, since I was standing right there and all, and if you guys have a problem with food, Lex – he’s that seid-whatever that enchanted Solvei back there – he can help you guys out.”
The disbelieving snort she received in reply drove her to continue. “I’m serious! Solvei was starving when we met her, but Lex had created a large amount of food, and we shared it with her! It might not have been exactly what you all are used to, but she ate a lot of it! If you just let me go, I can talk to him, and-”
“Enough,” huffed Solvei’s mother, glancing over to give Drafty a low growl. “We’ll eat our fill when we feast upon your kin. The Red Man has given us powers so that we can hunt you as game, not to shame our ancestors by having you feed us as pets. So we honor him now by bringing you to him first, as he wishes.” With that, she turned and kept walking, leaving Drafty stumbling to keep up. “Personally,” added the red and white wolf, “I hope that the Red Man decides he has no need for you. If not, then I doubt he’d mind if I let my children devour you.”
“…so much for winning her over,” muttered Drafty under her breath.
They continued in silence for several minutes, until at last Solvei’s mother came to a stop. “The Red Man approaches.”
The pronouncement made Drafty glance around. As far as she could see, they were in a small clearing in the woods, unremarkable except for the break in the trees. “What do I-, hey!” she called, seeing the wolf turn to leave. “Hey!”
But Solvei’s mother didn’t even acknowledge her, and in a few moments Drafty was alone in the snowy woods, with the light already fading. Her fear returning in full force, she slowly started turning in a circle, trying to look in every direction at once. She still had no idea what the “Red Man” was supposed to be, but at least he wouldn’t get the drop on-
“My, you really are a little pony indeed!”
The voice came from directly behind her, despite the fact that she’d been looking in that direction only a half-second ago, causing Drafty to yelp in alarm. Leaping away from the voice and spinning in place, she turned and beheld…
A creature like nothing she’d ever seen before.
The Red Man was a bipedal thing, standing several inches over six feet tall. The “red” part of his name was obvious; naked from the waist up, his skin was a uniform crimson in color, clinging tightly to a chiseled musculature. His forelegs didn’t have proper hooves, instead having odd digits at the end, and his hind legs – visible below the loose breeches he wore over his lower body – were much the same. If anything, they were like the “hands” and “feet” she’d heard that diamond dogs had. If he had a tail, she couldn’t see it.
His face had no muzzle, but still had a masculine cast to it. Black lips were turned upward in an amused smirk, and like the wolves, his eyes were bright red. His ears, she noted, were on the sides of his head rather than on top the way a pony’s were, and yet were still pointed.
But those were the least unusual of the Red Man’s features. Far more notable were the horns protruding from his head. There were a half-dozen of them, all pure black in color, twisting around each other and pointing upward, as though forming a wicked-looking crown. Nor were those the only spikes growing from his body. Sprouting from his back were a number of horns, far thicker than the ones on his head. The exact number was hard to tell, because they curved around his sides and over his shoulders, as though he were surrounded by a tangle of thick black branches.
What was most notable about those horns, however, wasn’t their color. Nor was it their thickness. Nor was it how they curled around the Red Man’s body.
It was how there were scrolls draped over all of them.
The long papers fell over each of his body-horns, dangling down to the ground in large numbers, making him appear to be surrounded by a waterfall of paper. Each had writing on them, but in the poor light it was impossible to make out what they said. Lowering her gaze further, Drafty confirmed there were no tracks in the snow except her own and those of the wolf who’d brought her. With no wings that she could see, the Red Man had apparently appeared completely out of thin-
A contract devil! hissed Kara suddenly.
The creature’s sudden appearance, alien looks, and the tension in the goddess’s voice was enough to leave Drafty completely off-balance. “Wh-what…what’s…?”
Sweetheart, listen to me, urged the goddess. Whatever you do, don’t-
“Ah ah ah,” chastised the Red Man, making a slashing gesture with one hand. “No coaching from the peanut gallery.”
Instantly, Kara’s voice vanished from Drafty’s mind.
“Now then, my adorable little pony,” grinned the Red Man. “Let’s you and I have ourselves a conversation, shall we?”
From his position on her back, Lex felt Solvei flinch at the question, her ears flicking down for a moment before returning to their usual position. “Because I need to rest,” she panted, glancing back at him as she maintained the loping stride that her hurried bounding had devolve into. “I’m very tired.”
“I don’t care!” snarled Lex, his eyes glowing so brightly that he could see the green and purple reflection on the snow around them. “Thermal Draft’s chances of survival are highly dependent on how long it takes me to rescue her! Go faster” – he held his wire-wrapped foreleg out toward her head then – “or I’ll make you!”
“But shouldn’t you save your seidr for when we find my pack?” whined the winter wolf, her answer coming between puffs of breath that made no steam clouds in the cold weather. “How will you rescue them, or your mate, if you use it all up now?”
The question made Lex’s spine stiffen, not because it was stupid, but because it was penetrating.
Despite what had happened back at the cave, he knew that there was little chance that he’d be able to rescue Thermal Draft in his current condition. The fight he’d had with Solvei’s kin, although brief, had caused several of his injuries to reopen. More than once during the frantic pursuit he’d demanded that Solvei make after her family had abducted Thermal Draft, Lex had come close to falling off of the winter wolf.
It didn’t help that he was freezing; not only was his cloak useless against the low temperature and cutting wind, but Solvei had been leaping through snow drifts almost as deep as she was tall. More than once, Lex had ended up showered with snow that she’d kicked up as a result, chilling him more. Even worse, Solvei’s body was cold to the touch as well. That wasn’t entirely unexpected, due to her breath, but it meant that being in contact with her was like touching an ice sculpture wrapped in fur. Between her, the snow, and the wind, Lex had lost the feeling in his limbs some time ago, a condition he’d ignored in his rush to save Thermal Draft.
Throw in that he’d expended a not-inconsiderable amount of his dark magic, and all he had left to rely on was the Night Mare’s power. But that would be for naught if he used it up before it had a chance to replenish. Or if the only creature he could use it on was too exhausted to fight because he’d pushed her too hard…
“…find someplace defensible where we can rest,” he ordered, making no attempt to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Somewhere warm.”
She screamed for your help as she was being taken, and yet now you’re thinking of your own comfort? sneered his tulpa as Solvei nodded and began to look around. What if she dies while you’re napping? Will you tell Cloudbank that you were too tired to rescue the mare she loved?
Tactically, Lex knew he was making the right decision. It had barely been a day – one day! – since his fight with Dark Streak, a fight which he’d only survived because of an act of divine intervention. To engage in another fight now was tantamount to suicide, particularly when there were multiple enemies about which he knew relatively little, and his own powers were so attrited, to say nothing of how grievously he’d been wounded.
Even so, his instincts were screaming at him to ignore all of that and rush to Thermal Draft’s side as quickly as possible, and to Tartarus with the consequences. He’d made decisions like that before – such as prioritizing defending Nosey over himself while fighting Xiriel, or protecting Aria and Garden Gate against Starlight Glimmer’s final attack – and they’d turned out to be correct.
Except, of course, that they hadn’t. In both of those cases, he’d won only because his tulpa, given to him by the Night Mare, had cast spells of its own accord – a wound-transference spell against Xiriel, and his stamina-enhancing spell when he’d faced Starlight Glimmer – which had made all the difference.
That hadn’t been the only assistance he’d received in either fight, of course; Nosey had stepped up during his battle with Xiriel, and Sonata had rushed in to help him defeat Starlight Glimmer. But that didn’t change the fact that in both fights, the difference between victory and defeat had been because of what he’d received from the goddess.
Just like what had happened back at the cave barely an hour ago.
“I think this looks okay,” murmured Solvei, dragging Lex out of his brooding. Looking up, there was just enough ambient light for him to make out a cul-de-sac formed from where a large boulder sat near a rocky outcropping. A fallen conifer served as a makeshift roof, its boughs having kept most of the snow out, with several limbs having fallen down to create a moderately thick green blanket of overlapping foliage. While it had little heat to offer, it would at least be free from the worst of the wind and the weather, and Lex knew that was the best that could be expected. It would be a long and miserably cold night, but a survivable one.
The winter wolf padded over to the natural shelter, sinking down onto her belly so that he could climb off of her. Even so, Lex very nearly collapsed when he got down, his chilled hooves only reluctantly supporting his weight as he dragged himself onto the small patch of dry ground, pulling his cloak around him. It was only after he finally settled down that he noticed that Solvei was staring at him. “What?” he snapped irritably.
“Your name is Lex, right?” Rising to a sitting position, Solvei tilted her head. “Will you be warm enough here?” she asked, glancing around with a dubious expression. “I know your kind require heat, and this place doesn’t have very much of it.”
“I am Lex Legis,” he corrected sharply, lip curling in derision at being worried over by a thing that had wanted to eat him a little over an hour ago, “and I don’t need your concern, creature. Now stay there and keep watch.”
Solvei frowned, and Lex briefly wondered if she’d try to disobey him. “My name isn’t ‘creature,’” she muttered at last, moving to lie down in front of the entrance to the cul-de-sac. “It’s Solvei.”
Lex watched her for several moments before he was satisfied that she was following his orders. Not that she has a choice, since I can force her compliance for at least a little longer if she becomes defiant. He still had over a half-dozen uses of the Night Mare’s power left, and he’d already confirmed that he could control her with it, though after what had happened at the cave that seemed like a waste.
After all, there was apparently a great deal more to that ability than he’d imagined.
Being able to follow parallel lines of thought simultaneously meant that, even while he’d been trying to come up with plans for rescuing Thermal Draft, he’d also been analyzing what had happened a short while ago, when he’d unintentionally used the power that the Night Mare had given him to enhance Solvei. But so far, he’d come up with little except theories and speculation. The one thing he felt sure about was that the ability he’d manifested – to enhance and empower the creatures that were vulnerable to what the goddess had bestowed upon him, in addition to simply controlling their movements – had been there from the beginning, ever since the goddess had designated him as her champion back on Equestria.
That was the conclusion that best fit with the available data, at least. Most obviously by way of the fact that he now knew that he – or, more accurately, the presence of anything that contained some fragment of the Night Mare’s divine essence – had the ability to forge a connection between the goddess and ponies who wished to dedicate themselves to her, even if they were in a world that was beyond her reach the way Equestria was. In order to independently operate in a realm where the goddess herself had no power strongly suggested that what she'd given him was self-sufficient, neither losing strength when metaphysically distant from its creator nor gaining it when closer to her. Certainly, that fit with the goddess’s dogma of self-sufficiency; while she was willing to give him tools to work with, it was up to him to figure out how to utilize them. His continuing struggle to master his tulpa was proof enough of that.
That it had taken Fruit Crunch and his friends to open his eyes to the truth about his needing to personally induct ponies into the Night Mare’s religion was something that Lex was still embarrassed about. The fact that Cloudbank had had gained divine spells only after he’d taught her the basics of the Night Mare’s faith, and had been the only one to receive them despite multiple ponies taking up the goddess’s worship after Vanhoover had been saved, should have been enough for him to figure it out. That he hadn’t realized the significance of those children gaining special powers under the tutelage of Severance – a divine artifact which, like himself, had a sliver of the Night Mare’s divinity – was an unforgivable lapse of perspicacity on his part, one which he’d spent quite a bit of his time in Las Pegasus gritting his teeth over.
But that was nothing compared to how he felt now.
If I’d known that there was more to this power, I would have taken the araneas with me when I left Tall Tale!
The thought of how things could have gone differently if only he’d been smarter was a constant refrain in his mind now. Thermal Draft could still be rescued, and Sonata and the others might still be alive, but the knowledge that he could have done more if he’d simply realized the full scope of what he’d been given was a wound for which there was no balm. Especially since Fireflower and his siblings had been right there for him to make use of.
In hindsight, it was obvious that the Night Mare had expected him to do so. Why else would she have been so sanguine about his request to bring Waterlily – Fireflower’s deceased sister – back to life? No matter that the six of them hadn’t wanted to leave Tall Tale; with no one else he could have used that power on, and the crisis in Vanhoover requiring extraordinary measures to resolve, there had been more than enough justification to force them to come.
How many more lives could he have saved if he’d brought the araneas along? They were already spellcasters of modest talent in their own right, and while their spider forms were disgusting, they offered natural advantages of their own. Being able to potentially empower them with abilities beyond that could have alleviated any number of challenges. Survivors could have been found faster. Block Party could have been rescued. Silhouette could have been protected from Severance’s treachery. There were any number of possible disasters that could have been averted if he had only realized what was right in front of him all along!
But you didn’t, did you? laughed the voiceless presence lurking in his shadow. Instead, you let yourself develop tunnel vision, becoming so focused on the ponies you wanted to save that you failed to take proper stock of everything you had at your disposal to save them with. And now you’re intent on making the same mistake all over again.
Too exhausted to suppress his reaction, Lex winced. As much as he hated to admit it, his tulpa was correct. Now that he was aware that there was more to the power the Night Mare had given him than he’d first assumed, he needed to test it. Without knowing what its limits were, what range of powers he could potentially grant a subject and how they operated, he was effectively divesting himself of a resource. That was inexcusable under normal circumstances, and far more so now, when he had so little left to make use of.
Fortunately, he still had over a half-dozen uses of the Night Mare’s power left before midnight arrived, and there was a creature right here whom he could use them on.
Turning his head slightly, Lex regarded the winter wolf lying across from him. As loathe as he was to admit it, he needed her assistance if he was going to rescue Thermal Draft; the battle in the cave had made that very clear. But Solvei needed him just as much, since without the power he commanded, she was far weaker than the rest of her mutated kin. Not to mention that she almost certainly possessed information about what happened to her family – and the “Red Man” who had apparently made them that way – that he’d likely need when it came time to face them again. That data would tell him what he’d need to do when he used the Night Mare’s power on her, enabling her to fight the battle he needed to win.
By making her into an extension of his own strength, they’d be able to do what he couldn’t accomplish alone.
It was all so perfectly representative of the Night Mare’s religious tenets that Lex couldn’t help but snort, looking at the barbed wire wrapped around his left foreleg, the physical representation of the fragment of her power that the goddess had given him. Was this the chance to grow stronger that she’d alluded to when she’d put him down here? Had she placed him in Solvei’s path so that he’d discover the true nature of what she’d given him?
It might have been because the numbness in his legs was beginning to wear off, but Lex could have sworn he felt the wire move just a little bit.
Having no further use for recriminations, he turned his eyes back toward the winter wolf lying a few feet away from him. The mistakes he’d made would weigh on his conscience for the rest of his life, which was what was supposed to happen, but right now he had a responsibility to avoid making them again. “Solvei.”
Her ears twitching, the winter wolf lifted her head, a look of surprise flashing across her face. “Yes?”
“Before either of us rests, I want to test what kind of powers I’m capable of giving you,” stated Lex, paying no mind to the way her ears perked up at that.
“And then,” he continued, “I want you to tell me everything you can about the Red Man and what he did to your pack.”
Thermal Draft continued muttering under her breath as she slowly backed away from the Red Man – or rather, the “contract devil,” as the goddess had called it – without taking her eyes off of the creature.
She’d been nervous before, and Kara’s soothing voice had helped to take the edge off of her anxiety, but being so abruptly cut off had immediately reversed that. While Drafty still had mixed feelings about having been turned into a doppelganger, she couldn’t deny that she’d grown used to having the goddess’s voice in her head. For the creature in front of her to not only detect that Kara had been speaking with her, something not even Lex had been able to do, but actually sever the line of communication was enough to leave Drafty on the edge of panic-
“Now now,” cooed the contract devil, still looking at her with a wide smile. “There’s no need to panic. I just wanted us to be able to talk one-on-one without anyone else interrupting. Surely there’s no harm in that?”
Swallowing, Thermal Draft came to a stop, but couldn’t bring herself to relax any more than that. “What did you do to Kara?”
The contract devil burst out laughing at that, one hand going to his stomach as he shook with mirth. “Oh, aren’t you precious?” he snickered, his free hand coming up to wipe his eyes. “Are you really under the impression that I just reached out and muzzled a deity with a wave of my hand?”
Despite her tension, Drafty could feel herself starting to calm down just a little. The laid-back nature of the contract devil was completely at odds with the creature’s fearsome appearance, and it was beginning to erode her fear. “…yes?”
The red-skinned being looked at her for a long moment, then burst into a fresh round of laughter, his entire body quivering such that the scrolls draped from his horns shook, filling the clearing with the sound of rustling paper. “Do you mind if I mention this to my colleagues over in the Ministry of Immortal Relations?” he chuckled when his laughter finally began to trail off. “They’ll absolutely bust a gut when they hear it.”
“Um, o-okay.” This conversation was growing weirder by the minute – this thing was talking like it was some sort of office worker rather than a hideous monster – but that was still preferable to having it try to eat her or infect her with whatever had happened to Solvei’s kin. Licking her lips, Drafty decided to take a chance. “Listen. All, um, joking aside…why can’t I hear Kara anymore?”
“Ah, yes.” Clearing his throat, the contract devil stood up straighter, hands idly smoothing the scrolls draped over his horns. “The simplest explanation is that I’ve rendered you telepathically deaf. Completely harmless, I assure you. I have no doubt that your deity is still speaking to you, it’s just that you can’t hear what she’s saying.”
Drafty frowned at that, but before she had a chance to open her mouth the contract devil held a hand toward her, palm out. “Now, I know what you’re going to say, but I only did it because I didn’t want her filling your head with all sorts of prejudiced opinions about me. I mean, calling me a ‘contract devil’?” For the first time, a pout crossed the creature’s lips, his arms crossing over his chest indignantly. “That’s a slur, you know.”
A lifetime of having been taught to be considerate of others made Drafty cringe slightly at that, unable to help but feel embarrassed at having used that term in her thoughts just now. “Oh, well, I’m sure Kara was just…um…” Realizing how ridiculous it sounded to be apologizing on behalf of a goddess, she switched topics. “So, if you don’t mind my asking, what are you?”
“I,” replied the creature, placing a hand to his chest and closing his eyes as he raised his nose into the air, “am a phistophilus.” He held that pose for just a moment before his grin reappeared, shooting Drafty a wink. “Sounds haughty and pretentious, doesn’t it?”
Drafty couldn’t help but giggle. “Maybe a tiny bit.”
Dropping the pose, the contract devil – or rather, phistophilus – shrugged congenially. “Of course, I prefer to go by my given name.”
“Which is?” asked Drafty, recognizing the prompt.
Sweeping one arm out to the side and placing the other across its torso, the red-skinned creature inclined its head. This time, the gesture seemed genuine rather than jocular. “Prevarius, at your service.” He held the position for a few moments before raising his head, his impish grin returning. “I’d bow lower, but if I did these things would all slide off” – he gestured to the papers draped over his horns – “and I’d much rather not go through organizing all of these again if I can help it.”
That got a chuckle out of Thermal Draft. “It’s nice to meet you, Prevarius. My name’s Thermal Draft, but you can call me Drafty.” She was starting to feel a bit silly now for how scared she’d been, and she couldn’t help but give voice to that thought. “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I’m really relieved you’re such a nice guy. I seriously thought you were going to be…I don’t know, some sort of monster or something.”
A sad look crossed Prevarius’ face then, giving a rueful shake of his head. “It’s alright, I’m used to it by now. When you have red skin and black horns, a lot of people tend to react badly to the sight of you. Not like being an adorable little pony, I would imagine.”
Drafty shrugged, the motion making her mangled wing ache a little…which reminded her about what Solvei’s family had mentioned regarding the phistophilus in front of her. The fact that they’d been so callous in their plans to attack ponies while being so deferential toward Prevarius struck her as odd now. “Yeah, well, not everyone’s friendly toward ponies. Those winter wolves who brought me here, for instance.”
His expression turning uncomfortable, Prevarius suddenly seemed to find the trees around the clearing very interesting, avoiding eye contact with the pegasus. “Ah yes. Them.”
Silence fell, and Drafty – feeling more confident now – slowly moved closer to what she was hoping was a new friend, if there was a good explanation for what had happened. “Earlier today I met a winter wolf named Solvei, who was running away from the rest of her family. She said you did something to them, that you made them sick somehow.”
Sighing deeply, Prevarius brought a hand up to his face, pinching the bridge of his nose for a moment before finally looking back at Drafty. “You look rather cold,” he announced without preamble. “Before I explain what happened, would you care to warm up?”
The offer made Drafty blink, not having expected that much consideration. “I, um…yes, thank you. That would be lovely.”
This time Prevarius’ smile was pained. “Of course. Really, I should have offered such hospitality when I first saw you. It’s just that this level of cold doesn’t really bother me, and well…let’s get a fire going, shall we?”
Pointing toward the far edge of the clearing, a trio a bright red beams spring from Prevarius’ outstretched finger. Drafty jumped, but the thin shafts of light weren’t aimed at her, firing instead at the snow-covered ground. Except a moment later, as the beams struck home and the snow began to rapidly melt, she saw that the phistophilus hadn’t been aiming at the ground. Rather, he’d been aiming at a fallen log which had split into three pieces, the broken timber hidden underneath the snow. Now they were free of their white coverings, and as another cold breeze blew through the clearing, the scorch marks covering the logs’ exteriors looked warm and inviting.
“There we are,” announced Prevarius. “One bench for you, one for me, and one to make into a nice campfire.” With that said, he strode across the clearing, making his way toward the middle log. Kneeling down, he reached a hand toward it, and Drafty trotted over just in time to see flames appear in the palm of his hand, conjured up out of nowhere. Holding it closer to the wood – now completely dried thanks to the scorching ray he’d shot at it previously – he waited a few seconds for the log to catch fire. Once it did, he nodded in satisfaction before stepping back, the log already beginning to blaze brightly.
Drafty didn’t wait for an invitation, clamoring onto one of the free logs with a groan of relief as her hooves were finally free of the snow-covered ground. After being cold for so long, the heat from the fire was heavenly. Across from her, Prevarius sat down, making sure to push the papers hanging from his horns back from the fire. “Feel better?” he asked, his easy grin back in place.
“Yeah,” murmured Drafty, momentarily lost in the thrill of being warm again. Glancing from the fire toward Prevarius, she held out her left wing hopefully. “I don’t suppose whatever magic you have can fix my wing?”
Prevarius shook his head, his expression turning apologetic. “I don’t have the power to heal.”
“Oh. Well, it’s not that bad anyway. I bet in a couple of days, it’ll be good as new.” She really hoped that was the case; it didn’t feel like any bones were broken, so with any luck, once the soreness went away she’d be back in flying condition in no time. “So…the winter wolves?”
Again, Prevarius’ expression turned troubled. “I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” added Drafty quickly, worried that she was asking for too much. After how nice he’d been, pushing him for answers about why his companions were so bloodthirsty seemed inconsiderate.
But Prevarius shook his head. “No, no, it’s fine. They brought you were, so you deserve some answers. It’s just…do you have a trade, Drafty?”
“What, you mean like a job?” When Prevarius nodded, she did the same. “Yeah, I’m a weather pony. It’s my special talent, see?” Turning, she showed him her flank. “See my cutie mark? I’ve known ever since I got it that my destiny is to bust clouds, make it rain, build rainbows, stuff like that. Why?”
Prevarius raised a brow as he examined her cutie mark, but only for a moment. “Well, my destiny is…I suppose you could say that I’m a facilitator.”
“A facilitator?”
“As in, I assist those who want to make something happen,” answered Prevarius. “Not for free, of course. I have to make a living just like everyone else. But if there’s something you’re trying to accomplish, and it looks like it’s beyond your reach, I can help you get it done. These” – he lifted a hand to indicate the scrolls draped over his horns – “are all contracts that I’ve made. We tend to carry them around for safekeeping. Hence the whole ‘contract devils’ thing.”
Drafty bit her lip. “About Kara saying that…”
But she didn’t have a chance to say anything else as Prevarius chuckled, though this time there was a resigned undertone to it. “You shouldn’t feel bad. Most gods don’t like us. They tend to teach that faith is the answer to most problems. Or that their church can find a solution. Or that the real answer is the eternal reward they promise their followers in the afterlife. So when someone like me comes in and offers to fix things for a fair price, it tends to make the gods look bad.”
Thinking back to how Kara had tricked her into becoming a doppelganger, Drafty wasn’t sure what to say to that, finally deciding to return to the original point. “So that’s what you did for Solvei’s family? You helped them fix a problem they were having?”
“Precisely.” Prevarius gave her an earnest look now. “Specifically, the fact that they were going hungry due to the sudden change in the weather. It was a little unorthodox, and I’ll admit they’re not as sightly as they used to be. But now they can range further thanks to their wings, their bodies are tougher, so they can take down stronger prey, and they’re even resistant to heat, so that they’ll be able to hunt widely even after this cold snap ends and temperatures return to normal, instead of retreating to their icy mountaintops the way they normally would during the warmer months.”
“But they’re talking about attacking ponies!” protested Drafty. “They were saying there’s some pony village or something nearby and they’re going to eat everyone there! Except the ones they’re going to bring to you…”
“I know,” answered the phistophilus with a forlorn shake of his head. “And this is probably going to sound cruel, but there’s very little I can do about that.”
“What are you saying?!” Rising to all fours, Drafty pointed at the contracts draped over Prevarius’ horns. “They only got those wings and tougher bodies and everything because you gave them to them, right? So just take them back! Cancel their contracts or whatever!”
“The entire point of a contract is that you can’t back out of it just because you come to regret it,” corrected Prevarius gently. “That’s as true for me as it is for the other party. And as awful as it is to say, hunting is what wolves do. If they were to lose everything they’d gained, they’d go immediately back to starving. Is that fair to them?”
“But…” Drafty couldn’t finish, remembering how Solvei had burst into tears when she and Lex had fed her. “But there has to be some other way,” she finished, slumping in place.
“I’m trying to find one,” agreed Prevarius. “But so far, all I can come up with is getting them to agree to bring at least some of the ponies they hunt down to me first. If I can cut a deal with them, they might be able to get away without being eaten.”
“You’d make them sign a contract in order to save their lives?!” Drafty couldn’t help but feel aghast at that, thinking of how Lex would never have demanded a deal be cut in order to help somepony who was in trouble.
“I know how it sounds,” admitted Prevarius. “But my ability to allocate resources is highly limited without a signed contract. I can do little things like this” – he waved a hand at the fire he’d created, still burning steadily – “but I work at the Ministry of Mortal Relations, which means that I have bosses just like everyone else, and if I started giving our services away for free, you can bet that they’d have something to say about it.”
Drafty slumped back down. “No way…”
“I’m afraid so,” replied the phistophilus gently. “Which leads me to ask: may I borrow one of your feathers?”
The request was an odd one, but after everything he’d done for her, Drafty didn’t feel like she was in a position to refuse. “Sure,” she mumbled, still a bit distraught as she leaned over and clamped her teeth around one of the feathers on her damaged wing. It came out easily, and she passed it to the phistophilus.
“My thanks,” he smiled, examining the base of it.
Despite still being upset by what was going to happen to a village full of innocent ponies, Drafty couldn’t help but feel curious. “What did you want it for?”
“I think a better question, my dear Drafty…”
Spinning the feather around in his grasp, Prevarius held it by the base, as though it were a quill. His other hand plucked a long scroll – a contract – off of one of his horns. Holding it up, he placed the tip of the quill to the paper, giving her a pointed look.
Dropping to the ground from atop Solvei’s back, Lex didn’t bother replying to such an obvious statement. Solvei had already told him everything she knew about her family’s lair last night; the entranceway in the wall of the mountain pass in front of him now matched that description perfectly. But Lex was less interested in that than he was in the surrounding area.
While the ambient light made it clear that morning had come, the overcast weather and the high mountains surrounding them were enough to leave the narrow valley under a gloomy shroud. Even so, it was bright enough for Lex to see that there were no visible tracks around the opening. By itself that wasn’t necessarily a cause for concern – it had continued to periodically snow throughout the night, so it wasn’t surprising that any tracks would have been covered by the inclement weather – but the fact remained that if Thermal Draft had been taken inside there, she hadn’t come out recently enough to leave a trail in the snow.
But that wasn’t the only way to look for clues about what had happened to her. “Can you smell anything?”
In response, Solvei put her nose to the ground, walking in a broad circle before shaking her head. “Just my family’s scents, but those’re supposed to be there. It’s how we warn other creatures that this is our territory. But there’s no scent of blood or ponies.” She paused, then lowered her ears a bit. “Although, after this much time and all the snow, it might be that the scent trail has faded. I’m not really the best tracker. That was always Kaja…”
The words came with a soft whimper, but Lex ignored it, more focused on practical matters. “What about the Red Man?”
This time Solvei’s answer was immediate. “No. Or at least, I don’t think so. It’s like I told you last night, he never came to our den before. Bolverk – or someone else, after the others got sick – would always take us out to meet him.”
Lex frowned at that. “And you’re certain that there was no common element to these meetings? No prearranged time or location, or some signal used to let him know that his presence was wanted?” He’d already questioned Solvei about this extensively last night, but given that her intelligence was lackluster at best, it seemed prudent to reconfirm it now.
But the winter wolf’s answer hadn’t changed in the last few hours. “No. They’d just go outside and keep going. Somehow the Red Man always knew that we were looking for him, and he’d just appear out of nowhere.”
Which likely means that he’s using some sort of scrying magic, targeting whomever he’s mutated. The thought was enough to make Lex grimace, reminding him of how that type of magic had indirectly contributed to his being brought back to Everglow.
He’d never confirmed who had been scrying on him during his time in Las Pegasus. The obvious answer was Dark Streak – which would mean that she’d been the one conversing with Adagio Dazzle, and that the Siren had paid her to kill him – but Lex couldn’t give that theory any credence. Not after having fought the griffon himself.
Dark Streak had been a powerful foe, but most of the magic she’d used had been decidedly basic in nature, utilized primarily to supplement her close-quarters style of combat. Having used scrying magic himself, Lex knew that it wasn’t something you could learn by being a dabbler. Such spells were highly complex, and whomever Adagio had been conversing with had been a master of them. If Dark Streak had possessed that much magical aptitude, Lex was certain that she would have put it to use during their fight, in which case he would have died back in Las Pegasus, given how ruthless the assassin had proven herself to be.
Of course, that meant that whoever had been spying on him was still out there…
Which matters not at all right now, Lex reminded himself with a scowl. Right now, the priority is retrieving Thermal Draft, which means subduing Solvei’s kin and making them reveal where they took her to meet with the Red Man. With any luck, she’d still be there now, hopefully unharmed and unaffected by whatever that creature had done to Solvei’s family. If not…then measures would need to be taken.
Fortunately, he had the means to do that now; the experiments he’d performed last night – investigating how he could apply the Night Mare’s power to Solvei – had been more fruitful than he’d anticipated.
The fact that his body was no longer covered with wounds was proof enough of that.
“Let’s go,” ordered Lex. “I want this resolved as quickly as possible.”
“R-right.” Despite herself, Solvei hesitated for just a moment before loping forward, padding through the snow until she was at the entrance to the den, stepping inside.
Lex was right behind her, his eyes lighting up as soon as he crossed the threshold. A single glance backward was all it took as he called upon his dark magic, causing thick bars of black crystal to spread across the opening, the space between them so small that even a foal would have had found it impossible to squeeze through. He heard Solvei gulp in response to that, but he ignored it; this was a measure to make sure that – if everything went according to plan – the rest of her kin wouldn’t be able to flee outside and take to the air the way they had yesterday.
Of course, if worse came to worst and they had to retreat, he could dissolve the bars with a thought. Even then, if they got clear of the place before the rest of the wolves followed them outside, he’d be able to recreate the blockage, sealing the rest of Solvei’s family inside for an hour, at which point the black crystals would disintegrate of their own accord. That would be plenty of time to shake off any possible pursuit and prepare to try again.
But Lex had no intention of letting things come to that.
“It’s early enough that I don’t think anyone will be awake yet, but they might have left someone on watch,” murmured Solvei as she turned and padded further down into the den. “Normally we don’t worry about that too much, but after what happened last night-”
“We wanted to be on guard, in case you were foolish enough to come here with your seidrmadr,” murmured a voice from up ahead.
“Kaja!” yelped Solvei quietly as she came to a stop.
Behind her, Lex frowned, seeing a winged wolf step out from an alcove further inside the main passageway. A fight here wouldn’t be ideal; given that there was a very real chance they’d need to fight the Red Man later, Lex wanted to conserve as much of the Night Mare’s power as he could. The best way to do that was to gather the five remaining members of Solvei’s pack – Sten, Ebbe, Kaja, her mother (whose name, Solvei had told him, was Turid), and Bolverk – all in one place, and then empower her enough to overwhelm them the way she had yesterday. Even with the two of them being outnumbered, Lex felt confident that he could not only imbue Solvei with sufficient strength to win, but that he wouldn’t need to expend much of his goddess-given power in order to do so.
But while the tunnel they were in now wasn’t cramped, neither was it spacious, barely ten feet wide and with a ceiling that was roughly the same in height. That meant that bypassing Solvei’s sister in order to reach the main area further down – which Solvei had assured him was more cavernous than these tunnels – would be almost impossible. Given how brief the Night Mare’s power lasted, if he had to apply it to Solvei now in order for her to defeat Kaja, he’d almost certainly need to do so again when they found the rest of her pack. And if this turns into a series of one-on-one battles, it’s not out of the question that I could run out completely before we ever find the Red Man, Lex knew.
Fortunately, Kaja didn’t seem to be intent on fighting, instead glancing at Lex before giving Solvei a cold look. “So it’s true. You’ve thrown in with the ponies over your own family.”
Solvei flinched at that, but held her ground. “I’m doing this for my family,” she insisted. “Kaja, you can’t believe that our ancestors would want this! They told us not to attack the pony lands for a reason! Our grandfather almost lost his entire pack-”
“Because they were weak,” cut in Kaja. “Just like you are, Solvei. But the rest of us are stronger than the ponies now. Thanks to the Red Man that Bolverk brought us, we have nothing to fear from them anymore.”
“The Red Man has made you all sick! How can you not see that?!” Raising a paw, Solvei pointed at her sister. “Look at what’s happened to all of you! The way your fur is falling out and your skin is turning red! Those ugly wings! Your front paws becoming all gnarled and horrible! The Red Man has made you twisted, just like in the stories our father told us about how Vutok twisted the tribes who heeded his call to fight against Hrothvitnir! Remember what happened to them?!”
“Those old stories don’t fill my belly,” spat Kaja. But her expression softened a moment later. “Solvei, you can still come back to us. Kill that pony and bring him as an offering for Bolverk. With how much he eats, he’s sure to forgive you if you bring him fresh meat and accept the Red Man’s power.”
Solvei’s lips pulled back in a snarl. “Never!”
But rather than return Solvei’s aggression, Kaja’s ears folded back, a whimper escaping her throat. “Solvei, please. Bolverk wants the full pack with him when we attack the ponies, but if you keep defying him, he’ll have no choice but to kill you.” Taking a half-step forward, she lowered her head. “We’ve already lost our father. I don’t want to lose you too.”
Solvei’s growling ceased then, but she didn’t close the distance between herself and Kaja. “I don’t want to lose you either, Kaja. You or Mother or our brothers. That’s why I came here: I want my family back, even if that means I have to fight all of you.”
Kaja’s expression hardened as her eyes slid over to Lex, watching the unfolding drama from behind Solvei. “This is your fault!” she hissed, wings flaring in anger. “Sten and Ebbe told me what you did! You used your seidr on Solvei and now, just because she surprised them, she thinks she’s strong! But you’re just using her to retrieve your mate!”
Lex sneered, but didn’t bother wasting his breath on the creature, instead raising his wire-wrapped foreleg to point at Solvei. He’d held his tongue while her little family drama had played itself out in the hope that she’d be able to talk her sister down. But now it looked like that wasn’t going to happen…
Kaja, however, didn’t try to rush them or breathe frost the way he’d expected her to. Instead, she threw an angry look at Solvei, hackles raised. “I’m going to go wake the others. If you’re smart, you’ll use this chance to run away and find another pack to take you in. Because if you’re still here when I come back with everyone else, you’ll end up joining our ancestors instead.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, turning and running down into the darkness of the tunnel. A moment later a loud howl could be heard, echoing through the mine.
Sighing in relief, Lex lowered his foreleg. “This is our chance. Follow her!”
This time, Solvei didn’t waver. “Right!”
Then the two of them ran after Kaja, descending deeper into the den.
It took only a few seconds for Lex and Solvei to find the rest of the winter wolves.
Exiting the narrow tunnel, the two of them emerged into a wider area. A few dozen feet across, there were several similar tunnels branching out in a radial pattern. Had he not been briefed on the layout of this place by Solvei the night before, Lex would have been concerned that the rest of her kin would use those tunnels to disappear further into the mine, turning their engagement into a series of hit-and-run attacks in order to wear them down.
But Solvei had assured him that such a thing was impossible. Each of those tunnels was – like the one Kaja had emerged from a few moments ago – its own little room, not going any further back. While the mine might have gone further at one time, the rubble that Solvei had described as being in the rearmost alcove suggested that whatever tunnels had been dug deeper into the mountainside had collapsed. Which was, in Lex’s estimation, likely the reason this place had been abandoned to begin with, leaving it wide open for Solvei’s family to move in.
Nor, from the look of them now, were they happy to find out that they had uninvited guests.
“I can’t believe you actually came back here,” snickered Ebbe as he stalked forward. “You might have surprised me before, but you should have known better than to let it go to your head like this.”
“Your brother is right, Solvei,” murmured Turid – the mother wolf – as she moved alongside her son. “Whatever seidr that pony used on you yesterday won’t be useful in here.”
She canted her muzzle upward as she spoke, and it was easy to see why. Although the chamber they were in now was wide, the ceiling was still barely ten feet high. Any attempt to increase Solvei’s size, the way Lex had the day before, would leave her cramped enough that she’d be at a considerable disadvantage in a fight.
Lex couldn’t have cared less about that, however. Compared to yesterday, he had a far more profound understanding of what he could do with the power the Night Mare had given him. Something as tame as merely increasing Solvei’s mass was the very least of it.
In the face of that, whatever power Solvei’s family had gained was puny in comparison. Which was why Lex didn’t hesitate as he strode forward, drawing the attention of the mutated wolves. “Where is the Red Man?” he demanded. “What has he done with Thermal Draft?”
Coming up next to her mother, Kaja’s lip curled. “You want to see the Red Man? I’ll drag you to him myself…right after you’ve been made to realize how badly you erred in coming here.”
“Forget that,” sneered Sten. “We already brought the Red Man a pony. We’ll bring him plenty more after we invade their lands. I say we eat this one, since Bolverk kept last night’s meal for himself.”
“And what if I did?”
The voice came from the opposite end of the cavern, and Solvei’s family spun around, turning to face its source. Solvei herself growled softly, baring her teeth as she flattened her ears. “Bolverk,” she spat.
The wolf in question sauntered forward, giving Lex his first good look at the final member of Solvei’s pack.
He was an ugly creature, even without taking into account what the Red Man’s power had done to him. His muzzle was short, giving him a pug-faced look, and several of his teeth protruded past his lips, to the point of almost being saber-toothed. His ears were too small for his head, thin membranes twisting as though to try and make up for their lack of size. His fur was thin, almost to the point of being mangy.
That was only where he still had fur, however. The majority of his body had lost its natural covering; whereas the rest of Solvei’s pack still had their white fur, almost all of Bolverk’s body had been reduced to gnarled, leathery skin. Haphazard patches decorated his sides, legs, and belly in asymmetrical locations. His tail was completely hairless, and was far shorter than it should have been, barely constituting a nub at the base of his spine. Even his wings were unpleasant to look at, pronounced veins pressing up through the batlike folds, giving them the appearance of being mottled with age.
But as hideous as he was, the one thing Bolverk didn’t look like was weak. For all his disgusting features, the mutated winter wolf was thickly built, with his front paws having become claws so long that they scraped at the ground as he moved. Twice as wide as Solvei without being any longer, he could have been mistaken for corpulent at a distance, but up close it was plain that beneath his skin he was all muscle.
Giving a gulp so loud it was almost audible, Sten curled his tail between his legs. “A-alpha,” he stuttered. “We were just discussing what to do with this-, NGH!”
Lazily pulling his claw back from where he’d swiped Sten across the face, knocking him to the ground, Bolverk glowered at him. “I heard what you were discussing,” he spat, snarling as he moved to stand over Sten, the fallen wolf shaking as he curled up in a ball. “And I heard the disrespect in your voice when you mentioned me.”
Lex frowned at the display. As galling as the unwarranted violence was, he couldn’t help but note how deep the bloody furrows on the side of Sten’s head were. He’d hit the wolf with a spike of black crystal yesterday, during their brief altercation, and it hadn’t inflicted anywhere near as much damage. For him to strike with that much force that he so easily split the other wolf’s unnaturally tough hide was a testament to just how much power lay in that bulky frame.
A whimper as his side made Lex glance at Solvei, seeing her shaking as she watched Bolverk tower over her brother. The sight brought a frown to his lips; that wouldn’t do. If she lost her nerve now, he’d have no effective means of forcing the other wolves to tell him where the Red Man was. For all that he’d learned about the Night Mare’s power, he still couldn’t use it on himself; it had to be channeled into an intermediary, and right now Solvei was the only one of those he had.
Never having had a pet growing up, Lex had no idea how to soothe a frightened beast. The most he knew was what he’d seen other ponies do as a child. And with no better ideas now, he availed himself of what little knowledge he had.
Standing up on his hind legs, Lex reached over and stroked Solvei’s fur.
She almost jumped at the contact, inhaling sharply as she looked at him with wide eyes. Knowing better than to look away from an enemy – even if he still felt confident that, so long as Solvei didn’t lose her nerve, the other wolves were no true threat – Lex didn’t return the look, instead keeping his eyes on Bolverk. But his hoof didn’t stop, stroking her fur from the back of her head down to the middle of her back, then removing it and repeating the process, over and over.
He was on the eighth pat when he felt her shaking stop. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see her tail wagging behind her. That was supposed to signify relaxation in canines, wasn’t it? Deciding to take her reactions as a positive sign, he ceased petting her, falling back onto all fours.
Across from them, Solvei’s kin were still unsettled. Her ears flattening against her skull, Kaja slunk over to Bolverk’s side, keeping her head low. “Bol-, I mean, father, please. My brother spoke out of hunger, not disrespect. He-”
Bolverk turned his head to look at her, the motion slow and menacing. “Are you correcting me, Kaja?”
Stepping back, Kaja shook her head quickly. “No! I just meant-”
“And now you’re lying to me!” howled Bolverk, suddenly furious. “Right to my face!”
Growling, he marched toward Kaja, causing her to step back again in turn, which only seemed to make him angrier. “After all that I’ve given you, you ungrateful pups still refuse to give me the respect I deserve! Of course I ate first! That’s my right as alpha!”
Again he lashed out, and Kaja’s yelp was high-pitched and pained as she went sprawling. But Bolverk still didn’t seem satisfied, stalking toward her. “After I tore the throat out of that pathetic mutt who sired you, I could have done the same to you and the rest of your siblings! But instead I took you in! I allowed you to remain together as a pack, and even shared the Red Man’s power with you all, and THIS IS THE THANKS I GET?!”
His enraged howl echoed of the cavern walls, and it was enough to drown out the sound of Turid’s paws on the ground as she placed herself between Kaja and Bolverk. But her eyes were on her daughter, rather than her mate, as she raised a claw and brought it down across the top of Kaja’s head.
It didn’t escape Lex’s notice that, unlike the larger wolf’s strike, this one caused no visible damage, save to ruffle the younger wolf’s fur.
“How dare you treat your father so rudely!” snapped Turid. “And on the day when our family is finally reunited!”
Spinning in place, she faced Bolverk, dipping her head. “My alpha, please forgive my stupid children. As their mother, the fault is mine for not raising them to honor their alpha properly. But I hope it pleases you to know that my other daughter has finally come to her senses, and seeks to rejoin the pack. She’s even brought you a meal as an apology for her behavior before.” She turned her head toward Solvei then, and Lex could just make out her mouthing the word “please” at the white wolf.
But Bolverk cut in before Solvei could react. “The reason your pups are feeble and insolent is because they were sired by a weak and foolish cur.” He turned to look at Solvei then, growling. “Why else would your youngest allow a pony to stroke her fur as though she were a mere dog?”
Answering his growl with one of her own, Solvei took a step forward, defiant. “You take that back!”
Bolverk laughed. “A dog is a dog, and so I’ll call you a dog as much as I like!”
“Not that!” Raising a paw, Solvei swiped at the air. “Take back what you said about my father!”
Bolverk’s mirth fled as quickly as it had come. “I’m your father now, you miserable runt!”
Solvei, however, refused to be intimidated. “No, you’re not! My father was Frode! He spoke to our ancestors and taught us their stories! He reminded us why we’re a proud people, the utvalgte! He-”
“Died,” snapped Bolverk, “when he was stupid enough to face me, his superior, in battle!”
“YOU CHEATED!” The words coming out of Solvei now seemed to well up from deep inside her, as though she’d been pushing them down for a long time and could finally keep them back no longer. “YOU ONLY WON BECAUSE YOU HAD THE RED MAN’S SICKNESS!”
“It’s not a sickness, you stupid pup! It’s power!” Rearing up on his hind legs, Bolverk gave a loud howl. “When I first fought your father, he said he had the spirits of his ancestors on his side, and that was why he won! Why he got Turid and I got nothing! So if he can borrow power in order to win, then WHY CAN’T I?!”
“Because you’re a fool,” interjected Lex, having grown impatient. “One too stupid to recognize the difference between borrowing power and earning it.”
Bolverk’s eyes slid over to Lex then, regarding him with rage so intense it was almost palpable. “Pony,” he hissed, “my son might be a disrespectful weakling, but he was right about one thing: you’re not going to see the Red Man. Because I’m going to devour you alive right here.”
“Solvei told me about what her father was capable of,” continued Lex, as though Bolverk hadn’t spoken at all. “How when he ‘spoke to the spirits’ he could do inexplicable things, such as commanding fog to rise up and hide him from sight, or look at a carcass and know if it was diseased. In other words, he was probably a spellcaster, whereas you’ve simply allowed some unknown monster to mutilate you.”
Solvei’s eyes widened. “Wait… Are you saying that my father was a seidrmadr?!”
“There’s no way of being certain,” shrugged Lex. “But it’s the most likely explanation. In which case, it was likely a talent that he worked hard to cultivate, unlike that failure over there who couldn’t become stronger on his own.”
Bolverk gnashed his teeth. “And what does that make Solvei then, pony?! Turid told me that the only reason her daughter defeated her and those useless sons of hers was because of your seidr!”
Lex laughed, the sound as cold as the snow blanketing the outside of the den. “It makes her smart enough to realize that if she can’t become strong enough to defeat you on her own, she simply needs to pledge herself to someone who can give her that strength.”
“And that’s you?” sneered the alpha wolf. “One puny little pony?”
“It is,” affirmed Solvei. “And the Red Man’s going to find that out soon! But right now it’s your turn! Let’s put what you got from the Red Man up against what I’ll receive from this seidrmadr, Bolverk!” Throwing her head back, Solvei let out a howl. “I challenge you for the right to be alpha!”
For a moment Bolverk just stared at her. But when he finally reacted a moment later, it was to burst out laughing rather than roar with anger. “You’re really as stupid as Frode was, you know that? He was foolish enough to fight me all by himself just because I challenged him to. I know better.” He looked at the rest of the pack then, who had huddled together against the side of the cavern, watching the exchange fearfully. “Go. Kill them both.”
For a moment, none of them moved, until finally Ebbe spoke up. “B-but…she challenged you for the position of alpha. By the decree of our ancestors, you’re supposed to fight her alone-”
“Burn your ancestors!” yelled Bolverk. “All of you, go kill those two right now, or after I’m done with them I’ll make you all wish you were dead!”
“Don’t do it!” urged Solvei. “I can win! Mother, you’ve seen what this pony’s seidr can do! You know I can win!”
Slowly, Turid stood up, a miserable look on her face and her eyes wet with unshed tears. “I’m sorry, Solvei,” she murmured as she began to advance on her daughter. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But I have to protect your siblings.”
The other three slowly moved alongside their mother.
“I told you to leave when you had the chance,” muttered Kaja bitterly.
“You should have just done what you were told,” whimpered Sten.
“This is on your head, Solvei. Not ours,” murmured Ebbe, his voice gruff.
For a moment, Solvei’s expression turned haunted. “You…” But she recovered a moment later, shaking her head. “No, it’s okay. This is why I came back.” Lifting a paw, she brought it down sharply. “I said I was going to save you even if I had to fight you, and I meant it!” Her eyes moved over to Bolverk as she continued. “And then, I’m going to make you pay for everything you’ve done to my family! In my father’s name, I swear it!”
Alongside her, Lex remained impassive, having already diagrammed how the fight was likely to proceed.
Knowing what he knew now, it was clear to Lex that there had been plenty of clues as to the true nature of the power that the Night Mare had given him. He simply hadn’t noticed them. Or rather, he hadn’t properly appreciated the significance of what he had known.
That the Night Mare had imbued him with a portion of her own nature as a deity had been self-evident. “You shall contain a fragment of my essence within you,” she’d said at the time. It was something that he should have paid more attention to.
The next clue had been the gemstone-embedded resurrection spell she’d given him. It had been a gift that he’d studied long and hard before putting it to use, hoping to reverse-engineer the life-restoring magic held within. He’d failed at that, but had gained new knowledge in doing so: that divine magic – while relying on thought-forms which shaped and directed energy through a series of complex instructions in a way that seemed identical to the magic that he’d painstaking created when he was younger – was fundamentally different from his own thaumaturgical spellcasting. Not just for healing magic, he realized now, but for all divine spells, if you examined their underlying structure closely enough.
His own style of spellcasting worked because it relied on specialized instructions embedded in the conceptual structure of his thoughts, instructions which made use of complex manipulations of natural laws so as to actualize metaphysical principles in order to achieve specific, concrete effects in the real world.
The instructions bound up in divine spells – if examined closely enough – operated on a different basis.
They worked because the gods wanted them to work, restructuring a small portion of existence itself so that it functioned how they desired.
Of course, if the nature of a god was to alter reality– at least to some limited degree – as an act of pure willpower, and a god had placed a fragment of their own essence within him, then Lex had realized that the power the Night Mare had given him was capable of far more than he’d ever imagined. The question then was what else he could do with it.
And now he knew the answer:
Anything I want.
The four winter wolves rushed forward as one, teeth bared and claws flexing. Their strides were heavy enough that the vibrations could be felt through the solid rock of the cavern floor. Snarling and howls filled the air, the calls of hunters who’d found their prey and were committed to the kill.
In response, Lex raised his wire-bound foreleg toward Solvei and spoke.
“Overwhelm them.”
It was more than just a command. It was an order that carried the weight of a godly pronouncement behind it. It was a declaration of what would happen, for no other reason than because he wished it to.
Even as the words left his lips, he felt the invisible tendrils of power lashing out, finding Solvei and sinking into her. It wasn’t anything so crude as puppeteering her limbs now; instead, the power went to work on a far more refined level, changing her so that she could fulfill the proclamation he’d made, a vessel to carry out his will. It was like what had happened in the cave yesterday, when he’d called upon her to defend them, but in a more sophisticated manner now that he was consciously directing the process.
At his side, Solvei shuddered, not in pain but in a rush of exhilaration as new strength coursed through her body. Reflexes sharpened. Bones toughened. Muscles thickened. Adrenaline flowed. The magical channels in her body surged. Every part of her physical self became greater, stronger, more than she had been only seconds ago, all to fulfill the mandate she’d been given.
With a wordless roar of exaltation, she shot forward, bridging the gap between herself and her family in an instant. From his position on the other side of the den, Lex saw their eyes widen in shock, either at her suddenly going on the attack or at how fast she’d moved.
Then she was on them.
Having been in the lead of their wild charge, Ebbe was the first to go down. Darting out of the way of his wild rush, Solvei lowered her head and sank her teeth into his foreleg as his own momentum carried him past her. Her fangs pierced his thick hide even easier than Bolverk’s claws had, and Ebbe howled with pain as her teeth scraped across bone.
But his cry had barely left his throat when Solvei yanked her head around, pulling his leg in the direction opposite he’d been moving. Combined with his forward motion, the sudden yank backward caused him to lose his balance completely, sending him tumbling to the ground as Solvei released his leg. Worse, his sudden fall put him directly in Kaja’s path, causing her to yelp in alarm as she stumbled into him, tripping over his prone form and staggering off-course as she tried to tried to keep her legs under her.
Solvei, however, had no time to capitalize on her sister’s sudden vulnerability, instead turning her attention to where Turid was rushing past her on her other side. Lex could see that the elder wolf’s eyes were locked onto him, clearly having decided that the best way to win was to take out the seidrmadr who had bolstered her daughter’s combat prowess.
She never got a chance to get close to him though, as Solvei spun around with far greater quickness than a creature her size had any right to, clamping her jaws around one of her mother’s wings. Turid gasped in pain, but just like Ebbe didn’t get a chance to do anything else as Solvei surged forward, plowing into her mother’s side as she savagely shook her head back and forth. It was enough to make Turid abandon all thoughts of offense, desperately flapping her wings in an effort to free herself from Solvei’s grip…only to be caught off-guard as Solvei suddenly released her, rushing upward before she could stop herself and colliding with the low-hanging roof of the den. The crack of her skull hitting the stone was audible to everyone in the den, and she crashed to the floor a moment later, unable to get her legs under her in time to prevent her from landing hard on her belly.
Satisfied that her mother was dealt with, Solvei looked toward Sten, who’d been at the back of the charge-
Only for him to slam into her full-force just as she turned to face him.
The hit should have knocked her into the air. Sten had six inches and several dozen pounds on her, and had been running full-tilt. But while the impact lifted Solvei’s front paws off the ground, she managed to keep her back legs firmly planted, grunting heavily as she fought to recover her stance.
Sten, however, wasn’t about to let the opportunity in front of him go to waste. Keeping his forward motion going, he reared up, latching his jaws around Solvei’s throat even as one claw came around to swipe at her vulnerable underbelly. Both were killing shots, and he had Solvei dead to rights on each.
But when he squeezed his jaw a moment later, the only sound that could be heard was his teeth suddenly cracking as they failed to penetrate her skin. His claw swipe fared little better, opening up a line of shallow scratches along her belly that oozed only a trickle of blood, what should have been a disemboweling strike reduced to a set of light scrapes.
Unable to contain his surprise at what had happened, Sten stood no chance in the face of Solvei’s counterattack. Wrenching her neck free of his jaws, she returned the favor a moment later, sinking her teeth into the meat of his shoulder, easily piercing the skin which had so effortlessly shrugged off being stabbed by Lex’s black crystals only yesterday. Using her upright position to her advantage, Solvei reared her head back, lifting Sten a few inches clear of the ground before she turned and flung herself back onto all fours, slamming him onto the floor of the cavern hard enough that the breath exploded from his lungs in a whoosh, leaving him wide-eyed and gasping in pain.
The entire exchange had taken less than ten seconds.
Scattered around where Solvei was still standing tall, the other four winter wolves groaned and started picking themselves up. Ebbe looked as though he wanted to rise, but a single growl from Solvei was all it took for him to abandon that idea, curling his injured leg under him as he crawled backward. Turid grunted as she shook her head, her injured wing tucked protectively at her side. Sten coughed, sucking in a lungful of air as he finally managed to get his breathing under control. Kaja was the least bad off, having managed to regain her balance as she stared at her sister, wide-eyed at how effortlessly the white wolf had fended the four of them off.
And at the back of the cavern, Bolverk was raging. “What are you fools doing?! She’s just one little pup! The runt of the litter! You all have the Red Man’s power, so kill her already!”
Even though it wasn’t directed at her, Solvei sneered at the rebuke. “If you’re unhappy with your followers, come over here and fight me yourself, alpha.” The last word was thick with derision, turning the term from one of respect into a form of mockery.
His eyes flashed at that, but Bolverk remained where he was. “I’d rather watch your kin rip you into bloody pieces.”
From his position near the entrance to the den, Lex laughed. “It should be obvious, even to a creature of limited intelligence such as yourself, that they can’t.”
Snarling, Bolverk slammed a paw down onto the ground hard enough to make a dust cloud rise around him. “What was that?!”
“You heard me,” sneered Lex, looking at the pack leader contemptuously as he gestured at the fallen wolves. “These curs that you browbeat into subservience, like yourself, are empowered by mutations from that Red Man of yours. But right now, Solvei is empowered by the Chosen of a god. Even you should be able to tell which one is superior.”
That was ultimately what it came down to, Lex knew. While there were still limits to what he could do with this power – he could only use it so many times, couldn’t break the sixty-second limit, and could still only affect certain creatures – the sheer breadth of what it was capable of was something he was still exploring. While he could only imbue Solvei with so much power at a time, the limits in how he could make it manifest in her were few indeed. Throw in how he could potentially force larger quantities of power on her if he concentrated harder, and even force it to greater heights if he overchanneled energy into it through his body, and the potential for what he could do was staggering to consider.
Having learned so much about what the goddess had given him, Lex had come to one other realization as well. Ever since he’d received this ability, he’d simply referred to it as “the Night Mare’s power.” But now he found that to be a wholly inadequate term, and as much as Lex knew that the nomenclature of what he’d been given was unimportant, he disliked descriptions that were misleading on principle. Calling this “the Night Mare’s power” identified where it came from, but not what it was.
Fortunately, he knew exactly what to call this now, even within the privacy of his own thoughts. Indeed, there was only one label that was appropriate when referring to a god-given power to overwrite an aspect of reality that was found to be lacking:
“Kill them, you fools!” screamed Bolverk. “Kill them all, or I’ll strip you of the Red Man’s power and LEAVE YOU ALL TO STARVE!”
The threat had little effect on his pack. Oh, they got up again, renewing their attacks against Solvei – having placed herself between the seidrmadr and the others, it was obvious that any attempt to kill the pony would require going through her first – but their efforts were having little result.
Even as Bolverk watched, Turid and Kaja came at Solvei from opposite sides, trying to flank her as Sten and Ebbe fell back to regroup. Between the two of them, mother and daughter should have been able to tear Solvei apart; there was no way that the white wolf could defend herself in two opposite directions at once, especially when she could only fight with her teeth, lacking claws that were suitable as weapons like Turid and Kaja had now. She was outnumbered and overmatched.
But just like she had a few seconds ago, when the rest of her kin had rushed her, Solvei didn’t seem to realize that.
Instead, she waited until both moved in for the kill – claws darting out as they lunged forward to snap at her – and then threw herself directly at Kaja in retaliation. The sight made Bolverk grin, certain that Turid would tear that ungrateful little upstart to pieces now that Solvei had turned her back on her. But the smile dropped from his face a second later.
Solvei hadn’t leaped at Kaja. She’s jumped over her, her head nearly brushing the ceiling as she planted her paws across her sister’s back – almost knocking Kaja to the ground for the second time since the fighting had started – and bounded across her, twisting in mid-air as she came down so that she was facing Kaja’s unprotected rear.
That move had cost her, of course. Turid, despite her age, hadn’t missed a chance to swipe her claws across Solvei’s back legs, and even Kaja had managed to awkwardly raise her head and bite at her sister’s belly. Those should have been enough to cripple the rebellious wolf, slicing through her back tendons and leaving her innards on the verge of spilling out. But for some reason, just like when Sten had gone for killing blows against her, Solvei shrugged the hits off as if they were nothing. From his position across the cavern, Bolverk could only see a few drops of blood falling from where Turid’s claws had raked across Solvei’s legs, with Kaja’s teeth barely having left a bruise on her sister’s stomach.
Nor had Solvei simply been retreating. Even as her paws touched down, she was already leaning forward, jaws coming out to bite down hard on Kaja’s tail. Her sister let out a shriek of pain, one which abruptly rose in volume as Solvei suddenly spun around.
Bolverk watched, stunned, as Solvei whipped Kaja around as though her sister weighed nothing at all. Nor was he the only one surprised, Turid’s jaw dropping in astonishment as the runt of her litter performed an impossible feat of strength. That surprise worked against her, however, as she realized too late just where the arc of Solvei’s swing would take Kaja, and a second later mother and daughter collided, Solvei releasing Kaja’s tail as her sister and Turid went tumbling into a heap.
All Bolverk could do was stare. What was happening?! Were the others allowing Solvei to trounce them because they couldn’t bear to shed the blood of one of their own? That couldn’t explain how she’d just tossed her sister around so casually, but what other explanation was there?
It couldn’t have been because of that pony’s so-called seidr. He had just pointed his hoof at Solvei and told her to attack; there had been no appeals to any spirits like Frode had made, no presentation of runes the way the Red Man had made when they’d made their deal, nor any change in the white wolf’s appearance to show that she’d gained any sort of power. The entire thing had to be nothing more than a bluff, one that had obviously worked on Turid, Ebbe, and Sten yesterday if they’d thought that Solvei had actually grown larger. So why-
Bolverk didn’t have time to think of anything else as Sten suddenly threw himself at Solvei. Growling loudly, he curled his front claws around her front and rear right legs, clutching them in a way he never would have been able to if the Red Man hadn’t changed them from being simple paws. His grip was sure enough that Bolverk saw Solvei stumble as she tried to pull herself free. “What are you doing?! Let me go!” she yelped, apparently confused by how Sten was holding her rather than biting her; she wasn’t the only one, as Bolverk frowned, wondering what the younger wolf was thinking.
He had his answer a moment later as Sten opened his mouth. “Ebbe, go!” he yelled. “Get the seidrmadr! Hurry!”
“NO!” Solvei’s eyes widened in horror, whipping around to where her brother was already charging at the pony. “Lex!”
Finally, laughed Bolverk to himself, watching as Ebbe closed the distance between himself and the pony. “Lex” apparently had no reaction to the sight of death bearing down on him, regarding Ebbe evenly as the wolf shot toward him, but Bolverk had seen plenty of prey freeze up when they realized that they were about to die. This was no different.
And once he’d dead, that will be the end of Solvei’s defiance, sneered Bolverk, eager to watch the pony’s death. Maybe it will break her enough that I can take her to the Red Man and make her-, HUH?!
Bolverk’s thoughts came to a complete stop then, along with everything else.
All around the den, not a sound could be heard. No claws scraped the ground. No wings flapped. No one even dared to breathe.
All they could do was stare at the pony.
Or rather, stare at the living patch of darkness – as black as the night sky, with edges that billowed and roiled like clouds – that the pony had become.
Darkness that stared back at them with eyes that glowed.
“Pathetic,” announced the monster that the pony had become, turning its horrific gaze away from the terrified Ebbe to look instead at the pack leader. “None of you have the power necessary to harm me.”
At that moment, Bolverk knew what he was looking at, and it was neither a pony nor a seidrmadr.
It was a creature like the Red Man, a spirit that had somehow made the journey to the living world.
Fear slid down Bolverk’s spine then, for the first time since he’d become alpha and made Turid and her pups his. He’d never had any use for stories or legends growing up; why bother wasting time listening to tales of long-dead ancestors or warnings about wicked creatures that no one had seen in generations when there was delicious prey to hunt? But he’d overheard enough to know that there were many spirits out there, and that some of them would lend their power to those who forged a pact with them.
Frode had been the proof that those tales were true. He’d always called upon the spirits each time he’d accepted one of Bolverk’s challenges, and had subsequently won each and every one of their fights, despite being smaller and weaker. It had been a humiliation of unbearable proportions, made all the worse for the fact that Frode had never dealt the killing blow after besting him, instead asking him to join as the pack’s beta.
As if I’d ever submit to the younger brother who could barely hunt on his own when we were pups!
It was a cruel joke, all of it. Even if he was unpleasant to look at, Bolverk had still been the strongest of their litter, while Frode had been the runt. Before he’d seen ten winters, Bolverk had already been able to hunt enough food for all of them by himself, while Frode had been so weak he’d needed to stay behind and listen to their aging mother spin pointless tales of their ancestors, or the mythical Hrothvitnir and Vutok, or how their father had gotten himself and most of their pack killed with his ill-fated attack on the pony lands.
When she’d finally died, and it was time for them to go and seek mates to form their own packs, Bolverk had dallied, wanting to find the biggest prey he could so as to show off his skills to the winter wolves in the next valley over. While packs tended to stay separate so as not to compete for food, they weren’t completely isolated, which was why it was no secret that Turid – who lived up to her name, which meant “beautiful” in the Old Tongue – was finally coming of age. But by the time Bolverk had located and killed a woolly rhino, a rare beast, and one that was dangerous to hunt alone, but which had enough meat to feed even a large number of winter wolves for days, and brought it to the neighboring pack, he’d found that Forde had already gotten there ahead of him!
Worse, he’d already claimed Turid for himself, having wooed her with the useless stories that their mother had taught him!
It had been an insult, one that Bolverk – who’d long resented letting his weakling brother eat any of the food he’d brought home – had been unable to bear. Turid was his by right! So what if he was ugly? He was strong, and a provider! That was more than Frode could say!
Thus, when Frode had refused to stand aside, it had only made Bolverk even angrier. How dare that ungrateful wretch deny him anything?! Didn’t he know who his better was?! Issuing a challenge had been a way to mock his brother more than anything, knowing that Frode still believed in those pointless old rituals; defeating him on his own terms would make victory all the sweeter.
But instead, the impossible had happened: Frode had won.
It had been beyond Bolverk’s ability to understand, even after his brother had tried to tell him that mother had taught him how to speak to their ancestors, letting them guide him. What did it matter if he could speak to a bunch of dead wolves? Bolverk was bigger and stronger; that was everything!
And yet, Frode proved victorious the next time he’d challenged him as well.
And the next.
And the next.
Each time Bolverk would slink away, snarling at his brother’s offer to join as the pack beta. The thought of having to stay there as a subordinate while an unworthy wolf bred such a beauty was unbearable. Bad enough that all too soon – on one of his doomed attempts to become alpha of his brother’s pack – he’d discovered that Turid’s belly had begun to swell, and not long after there were four pups whom their weakling father was somehow managing to feed.
The injustice of it all was enough to keep Bolverk coming back, year after year, failed challenge after failed challenge. He could have journeyed out past the valley and found another pack to take over. But he’d long since put such thoughts behind him, unable to bear the knowledge of how he’d been cheated. Turid was supposed to be his mate! Her children were supposed to be his pups! But no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many dangerous beasts he killed or how many battle-scars he collected, he couldn’t defeat Frode, all because his weakling brother could talk to spirits!
IT WASN’T FAIR!
The score had only been settled when he’d met the Red Man, not even a half-cycle of the moon ago. With the hunting having gotten bad because of the increased snowfall, he'd been on the trail of what he’d thought was some bizarre new prey. When he'd caught up to it, however, the creature had demonstrated strange powers far beyond anything Frode had ever shown. It had been enough to leave Bolverk awed and more than a little unnerved, unable to help but ask if the creature was a spirit like the ones his brother spoke to.
That had been when the Red Man had smiled and said that he was indeed.
After that, they’d begun to talk, and a deal had been reached. Bolverk still didn’t know why the Red Man wanted to meet ponies so badly, or what all the runes he’d consulted on those strips of dead wood he carried around were for, but none of that mattered. All that mattered was taking back what was rightfully his, and if that meant putting his paw-print on some “contract” with the Red Man and bringing him ponies, that was a small price to pay.
Of course, Bolverk was no fool. He’d made sure to ask for more than simply having a better body. Being stronger and tougher, having wings, and resistance to the painful heat that melted the snows and made the valleys all but uninhabitable after winter ended were all valuable prizes. But Bolverk had wanted one more thing, a sure-kill weapon in case his brother – or any other winter wolf – ever managed to surprise him again.
The way Solvei had now.
The wretched little ingrate had clearly found her own spirit to form a pact with. That was why she was so much stronger and faster now; that creature that had disguised itself as a pony was lending her some sort of invisible power, and as much as Bolverk hated to admit it, it was stronger than what the Red Man had given them.
But that was fine. He still had the weapon that the Red Man had given him. He might not have needed to use it against Frode, but always kept it close anyway just in case something like this happened.
It would put an end to Solvei’s little rebellion, as well as her life…and that of the spirit named Lex.
The greatest limitation of the divine authority that the Night Mare had given him, Lex knew, was its sixty-second duration.
While he could only grant so much power to Solvei – or any creature whom this power could affect – the variable nature of precisely how he could bolster her offered a vast array of possibilities. But those possibilities were sharply curtailed by the brevity of how long that power could be maintained. Even if he invoked the divine authority as often as he could, it wouldn’t have lasted for even fifteen minutes. That was enough time to deal with problems whose solutions could be implemented immediately, but was wholly inadequate for anything that required a more substantial commitment.
Lex, however, was used to dealing with constraints on the powers that he commanded. From the difficulty he still faced in recharging his thaumaturgical spellcasting, to the strain he put on his body whenever he physically overcharged his magic, to the limited quantities of black crystals he could create, his boundaries were something he had always been keenly aware of, but had never accepted. And while he’d come to appreciate the Night Mare’s advice about allowing others – not just ponies, he realized now, but creatures that he could dominate with her power as well – to act as extensions of his own strength, finding ways to push, circumvent, and overcome his own limits remained deeply ingrained in his personality.
As such, it had been deeply satisfying when Lex had discovered that, while the sixty-second restriction on what he could do with divine authority couldn’t be broken, it could be bypassed, albeit only indirectly.
What that meant was that, while the powers he granted Solvei via divine authority would only last for one minute, the effects of what she used those powers for would remain even after that duration expired.
That was no surprise, of course. Give her the strength to crush a boulder, and when that strength went away, the boulder would remain pulverized. Endow her with the power to rip a tree from the ground, and it would still be uprooted when that power dissipated. That much was obvious.
But the divine authority that Lex had been given was a piece of the Night Mare’s own godly essence. And as Lex knew from personal experience, as well as seeing it in others, that gods could do more than simply imbue mortals with powers. They could imbue them with magic – with spells – that could be used on others in turn.
Which meant that he could imbue Solvei with spells. Spells which, once cast, would have their effects remain even when the application of divine authority that granted them to her in the first place wore off.
That had been his theory, at least. The reality had been slightly different. Imbuing her with true spellcasting in the same manner that he utilized – thought-based constructs containing and shaping the requisite energy to make a particular effect happen when triggered via particular verbal and somatic components – was beyond what he could grant her. Not because his divine authority lacked the power to do so, but because such an arrangement would only have given her the ability to receive divine spells; actually granting them to her would have required at least an hour of mental preparation on her part, acclimating her thoughts to the power that would be placed inside them. Otherwise – without her being able to hold the mental frameworks in place – that power would have dispersed throughout her body, injuring her in the process, similar to how that disgusting hybrid that called itself Soft Mane had lost her eyesight when she’d received Lashtada’s favor without conditioning herself to it first.
But if Lex couldn’t grant Solvei the ability to cast true spells, he could do the next best thing.
The Night Mare had, after all, granted Fruit Crunch and his friends the ability to use magical abilities directly, without needing to utilize actual spellcasting in order to achieve them. Cleansweep could heal, for instance, while Straightlace could physically repel active spells, and Fiddlesticks had gained great strength. It hadn’t taken much examination on Lex’s part to realize that the goddess had done this by not only altering the magical pathways in their bodies, but imbuing those new pathways with the necessary energy to make use of them as well.
And if she had been able to do that for the Night Mare’s Knights, then it stood to reason that he could do the same for Solvei.
The first test had been granting her the ability to heal with a touch, the same as Cleansweep. To his delight, it had worked better than he’d expected; whereas the filly could only heal modest wounds, Solvei had been able to repair all of the damage his body had taken, leaving him completely revitalized. Naturally, that healing had remained after the sixty-second time limit had passed. But that hadn’t been the main reason that Lex had been so amazed.
The real source of his excitement had been that he hadn’t needed to chart out the full nature and scope of that power before granting it to Solvei. Whereas his thaumaturgical spellcasting, or a ritual, required that a mental blueprint be made in order to precisely measure how the necessary energy was being applied, divine authority required no such rigor. He simply selected what effect he wanted Solvei to be able to manifest, and the requisite channels spread throughout her body – without any sort of disruptions or injuries to her physique in the process – along with the necessary energy to make it happen.
It was the functional equivalent of how a god granted their worshipers divine spells, in other words: overwriting reality by sheer force of will.
Of course, the technique required a fairly significant amount of divine authority to enact. It was a two-step process, after all; he needed to imbue Solvei with the physical channels necessary to make use of the particular magical effect he wanted her to be able to manifest, and then grant her the necessary energy to make it happen. Those requirements meant that he couldn’t grant her magical effects of particular power or complexity – such as traversing the planes in order to get them back to Equestria – and that it was exceedingly difficult to grant her more than one spell-like ability at a time, but the versatility of the technique was still notable; all the more so since he only needed to concentrate on what he wanted her to be able to do rather than how she’d be able to do it.
It had been with that thought in mind that Lex had immediately moved on to the next experiment: imbuing Solvei with the ability to remove the blindness his magical senses had been afflicted with ever since the botched ritual back in Las Pegasus. The cure for that had been purely theoretical, since having an impaired sense of magic made it impossible to examine himself magically, but he’d at least been able to get a rough idea of what was needed.
Fortunately, that had been enough, and Lex was once again able to use magic to perceive the world around him.
That had been what had let him use his circlet to examine the outside of the winter wolves’ den for residual magic, trying without success to see if there had been a clue as to where Thermal Draft had been taken.
That had been what had allowed him to stride into the unlit cavern that Solvei’s kin called home, calling upon his dark magic to let him see in the pitch-blackness unhindered, something which the winter wolves could do naturally.
And that was why, as Ebbe charged him, Lex simply sneered at the creature’s inbound rush, ignoring Solvei’s frightened cry in favor of turning into a shadow the moment before her brother’s claws and teeth made contact with him.
To Lex’s mild surprise, he felt a slight impact as Ebbe’s wild slashes and sharp bites made contact with his immaterial self. That was unexpected. For these creatures to be able to potentially damage him even when he was in shadow-form – much like the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale – meant that whatever mutations the Red Man had inflicted on them wasn’t purely physical; the magical channels in their bodies had grown as well.
But it didn’t matter. Between his defensive enchantments and the protective magic items he wore – which still functioned even in his incorporeal state – Ebbe’s strikes weren’t enough to actually injure him, and Lex glared down at the warped wolf. “Pathetic,” he announced coldly. “None of you have the power necessary to harm me.”
Whether from his pronouncement, or simply because they’d never seen anything like the form he’d taken, the winter wolves all stopped and stared at him, eyes wide and jaws hanging open. For a moment, silence reigned throughout the cavern, until at last Turid found her voice, bounding forward. “Sten, keep hold of Solvei! Ebbe, Kaja, follow my lead!”
Coming to a halt barely a dozen feet away from Lex, she took a deep breath as the latter two wolves fell in beside her, mimicking her actions. Off to the side, Solvei had resumed struggling, but Sten was stubbornly refusing to release her, the prehensile nature of his fore-claws giving him an advantage in grappling. For his part, Bolverk simply smirked, reaching up to scratch his neck with one claw idly.
Lex took in the scene impassively, deciding that there was no need for him to take action. Conserving power for when he confronted the Red Man was still a priority, which meant that there was no need for him to react to what Turid, Ebbe, and Kaja were about to do…
A moment later all three winter wolves exhaled harshly, and their breath was a blizzard.
The rush of air was heavy enough that it filled the cavern with a howling shriek. Frost immediately covered the ground, spreading across the front of the den while hailstones the size of marbles clattered as they hit the cavern floor. Despite having no physical body at the moment, Lex could still feel the temperature in the cavern plunge as a result of the trio’s combined attack, a testament to the magical nature of their breath weapon.
But the intense cold bothered him not at all.
Utterly predictable.
Solvei had used this same attack against him when he’d first met her. It had injured him seriously then, when he’d been completely unprepared for it. But things were different now. In his shadow-form, magical cold – like most other supernatural powers – had only limited ability to harm him.
The protection provided by his incorporeal nature was further bolstered by the fact that he’d used one of the few divine spells that the Night Mare gave him on himself before entering the den. Specifically, one that allowed for the recipient to shrug off a certain degree of damage from various applications of energy, chosen when the spell was cast. It was the same spell he’d used to protect Thermal Draft – along with Cloudbank, Comfy Cozy, and Pillowcase – from Aria’s fireball back when he’d rescued them in Vanhoover, save that at the time he’d used it to ward against heat, and this time he’d set it to resist algidity.
Ignoring the frigid attack, Lex turned his attention toward where Solvei was still struggling to free herself from Sten. Even as he watched, the smaller wolf leaned her head down, sinking her teeth into his foreleg and twisting her head sharply, wrenching his claw away from her. But as soon as she opened her jaws – moving her head to where his other claw was still clutching her – he put his claw back where it had been a moment before, not letting her free herself from his grasp.
With a sigh, Lex called upon the innate telekinesis that all unicorns possessed, taking hold of Sten’s claws. Although he didn’t have anywhere near the strength necessary to break the creature’s grip, that wasn’t the point. Rather, the point was the roiling aura that surrounded the wolf’s lower appendages then, causing Sten to gasp in shock at the sight, body going rigid with alarm as he stared at the alien sight surrounding his front legs.
Solvei – who had seen his telekinesis more than once during their time together – didn’t miss her chance, rearing up and pulling herself free of Sten. From her current position, she had a clear shot at Bolverk, but instead of taking it she faltered, looking at where her remaining family was just finishing unleashing their freezing breath at Lex. “Are you alright?!”
Although it didn’t show outwardly, Lex frowned. “I’m fine!” he snapped, irritated. He’d told her that his magic would protect him if they tried this, so why was she hesitating?! “Get Bol-”
That was when Bolverk yanked his claw away from his neck sharply, pulling his foreleg back before bringing it forward in a throwing motion.
The flames filled the cavern, bringing with them chaos and pain.
Or at least, that was how it seemed to Lex as the fire erupted around him, searing his immaterial self in a manner that made its magical nature clear. The bright flash accompanying the ignition was almost blinding, lighting up the darkened den in an instant, even as the stones beneath him sizzled and smoked, the sound barely audible beneath the dull roar caused by the explosion, the frost from the breath weapons of Solvei’s kin boiling away in an instant. Nor was that all that assaulted his senses at that moment.
All around him, the wolves were screaming in fear and agony.
Solvei’s voice was the loudest among them.
But even as he processed that, the flames sputtered and died, vanishing as though their appearance had been nothing more than an illusion. The lingering pain in his shadowy body told Lex otherwise, however, as did the scorch marks on the ground, the cracks lining the stones due to their suddenly being superheated, and the sight of the winter wolves around him, lying scattered on the ground as wisps of smoke rose from their bodies.
Solvei!
Although he knew he would have been hard-pressed to continue fighting without the white wolf by his side, tactical considerations were the furthest thing from Lex’s mind as he rushed toward where Solvei had fallen.
When he’d first met her, Solvei had been on the run from her family, knowing that she wasn’t strong enough to fight them. She’d only come back to face them now because he’d convinced her that his magic would see her through. No matter that he’d used divine authority to force her to obey him at first, if she’d truly had no faith in his abilities, she could easily have abandoned him last night while he’d been asleep. Her having stayed was all the proof necessary that she’d accepted his proposal wholeheartedly.
That she’d done so meant that he had a duty of care with regard to her now, Lex knew. She might not have been a pony, but that wasn’t a relevant factor here; he’d entered into an agreement with her, one that required him to see to her safety. To let her come to harm now was a failure on his part.
And after losing Thermal Draft, not knowing if Sonata, Aria, Nosey, and Feather Duster were alive or dead, being unable to save Block Party, and so many other times when he hadn’t been strong enough or fast enough or smart enough to help someone who needed it, Lex Legis was sick to death of letting other people down.
But as he rushed to Solvei’s side, Lex saw that he was on the verge of doing so again.
The white wolf was in bad shape. Lex could tell at a glance that, rather than inoculating her from the heat, the frigid nature of her body had rendered her that much more vulnerable to the flames. A large portion of her fur, as well as the skin beneath it, had been seared black. Other parts of her were completely hairless, her flesh blistering and already starting to ooze a disgusting clear fluid. It was only because of the wheezing, shuddering breaths that escaped from her throat that he could even tell that she was alive at all.
Do you think this is what happened to Sonata and the others? murmured his tulpa cruelly. All because you still haven’t realized that you can’t protect anyone.
SHUT UP!!! roared Lex internally, the edges of his umbral body roiling in rage. But he knew he didn’t have the luxury of letting the rogue portion of his mind distract him now. Saving the injured wolf in front of him was what mattered.
“Solvei, if you can hear me, remain still,” he murmured. “I’m going to heal you now.”
The sound of his voice made her twitch. “…h-hurts…” she whimpered, her voice weak.
Directing his divine authority toward her, Lex concentrated on giving her the ability to recover from her injuries, along with resistance to damaging heat. Otherwise, if Bolverk did whatever he’d just done again, healing Solvei now would be pointless; she’d simply be reduced to this state – or worse – all over again.
That wasn’t a risk Lex was willing to take.
But that didn’t mean that this didn’t involve risks of a different sort.
A single application of divine authority was enough to imbue Solvei with a considerable amount of power, the specifics of which were up to him to delineate. While imbuing her with the ability to create magical effects that were external to herself was difficult, enhancing her body directly was much easier. But while the sixty-second limit was the most pronounced restriction on what he could do, it wasn’t the only one.
Another was that he could only use a single application of divine authority on her at a time. If he used a second before the first had worn off, then the new use of divine authority completely overwrote the old one. While the application he was giving her now had enough energy left over to re-apply at least some of the physical enhancements he’d given her before, the self-healing and heat resistance he was granting her left little room for much else, which meant she wouldn’t be able to maintain the same level of combat prowess she’d had up until now.
The result was that, if her family renewed their attacks now, her odds of continuing to overcome them were now precipitously lower. And that wasn’t even taking into account Bolverk, who looked stronger than any of them, and who was unwearied as well. Which means that unless I can figure out how he made that fire, and how to neutralize it, we’re stuck in a defensive position.
If Lex had been corporeal at the moment, he would have gritted his teeth in frustration. As it was, he’d just finished applying his divine authority to Solvei when a voice drew his immediate attention. “Solvei?”
Cursing inwardly, Lex glanced up in time to see Sten – who’d been on the edge of the blast – creeping closer. Unlike his sister, he looked little worse for wear. Only some mild burns were visible on him, showing up as slightly darker patches on his leathery skin. There was no question that he was still in fighting condition.
Snarling, Lex prepared to unleash a barrage of black crystals, intent on buying time for Solvei to recover. The healing power he’d given her would only need a few seconds to kick in, but she’d be vulnerable during that time. Even then, she’d be in no condition to fight her brother off.
But the loud whimper that came from Sten’s throat then made Lex hesitate, giving the wolf time to look at him, ears folded back. “Is…is she going to be alright?”
A round of harsh laughter cut through his mourning. “Of course she’s not!” howled Bolverk from the back of the cave, where the flames hadn’t reached. “She dared to challenge me, so now she’s going to burn!”
“Bolverk…what have you done?!” Turid stood up shakily, her expression incredulous as she looked at her leader. Her wounds were worse than Sten’s, but only slightly, leaving her nowhere near as bad off as Solvei. On either side of her, her remaining children seemed to be no worse off. Physically, at least. Ebbe was cowering, his eyes wide as he settled into a terrified crouch, while Kaja was curled up and sobbing.
If Bolverk cared in the slightest, he didn’t show it. “I’ve shown my foolish daughter what happens when she bears her fangs at me!” he sneered.
“But you used fire!” protested Turid. “That’s the evil power that Vutok used when he turned against Hrothvitnir! Our ancestors-”
“Shut up with that drivel!” howled Bolverk, suddenly enraged. “I don’t care about our ancestors! I never did! I spent my entire life listening to Frode talk about them again and again and again, as though a bunch of dead wolves could help feed us! If they were really so important, they never would have died in the first place!”
Lifting a claw, he pointed to his neck, and Lex could see the necklace that had previously been hidden in the folds of the thick hide and loose patches of fur there, one that had a little more than a half-dozen beads hanging from the front of it. “You see this?” sneered Bolverk. “I got it from the Red Man, just in case the power he gave me wasn’t enough to deal with Frode! As long as I have it, I can make fire, which means there’s no one among our people who can defeat me, no matter what spirits they whine to!”
Flaring his wings, he threw back his head and howled. “Once I show the other packs how strong I’ve become, and how much food we can all have once we slaughter the ponies, they’ll all make me their alpha! I’ll become the leader of the largest pack ever! From now on, the stories our people tell won’t be about our ancestors, they’ll be about ME!”
“And if they don’t, will you make us fight their alphas for you?” Turid took a step forward then, lips pulling back as she growled at Bolverk. “Will you burn them while we distract them? Will you burn us – me and my children – alongside them the way you did now, even after all we’ve done for you?!”
But her anger earned only a contemptuous snort from Bolverk. “You sound almost as stupid as your runt of a daughter,” he jeered. “So what if you all were burned? Have you forgotten that you have the Red Man’s power now? He gave you the ability to withstand heat, which is why we’ll be able to hunt in the valleys and the plains even after the snows melt! That’s why you’re still standing while Solvei is barely alive!”
“I’m more alive than you’re about to be!”
Bolverk’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head as Solvei’s voice rang throughout the den, loud and strong. Lex had deliberately positioned his shadowy form between the alpha wolf and Solvei, allowing her to heal without being seen, and so Bolverk’s surprise was complete as she stepped out from behind her benefactor a moment later, glaring up at the wolf she’d challenged. Around her, the rest of her family seemed similarly shocked, with Kaja and Ebbe slack-jawed as they stared at her, Turid in a similar state of disbelief. Only Sten was composed, and even then only somewhat, still dumbfounded from having witnessed her unnatural recovery.
For her part, Solvei ignored them, staring up at Bolverk with open contempt. “You’ve disgraced everything my father stood for! You’ve spit on our ancestors, violated our traditions, and broken our worst taboo! The rest of our people will never follow a monster like you, the same way our forebearers wouldn’t follow those who threw their lot in with Vutok! Now, I’m going to send you to our ancestors to be judged for what you’ve done!”
For a moment Bolverk’s jaw worked soundlessly, until he finally found his voice again. “You…how?! I burned you! With fire! How did-, no, I don’t care!” Snarling, he reached a claw up to his neck, and Lex’s eyes narrowed as he watched him yank another bead off of it – the beads on either side of it joining together smoothly as he tore the intervening one free – before rearing his foreleg back threateningly. “If burning you once wasn’t enough, then I’ll do it again! And this time I’ll rip you to pieces afterward for good measure!”
Lowering his voice to a whisper, Lex didn’t look away from Bolverk as he spoke to Solvei. “Distract him long enough for me to get close to him. I have a plan.”
Solvei nodded. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he can’t afford to take his eyes off of me.”
“Just remember, I’ve made you resistant to fire, but your combat skills have suffered for it,” warned Lex. “Fight defensively until I can restore your battle augmentations.”
“I will.” The corners of Solvei’s mouth turned upward as she shot him a quick smile. “I’m not afraid of him anymore, thanks to you.”
Then she charged, howling a wordless battle cry as she raced straight at Bolverk.
Bolverk didn’t wait for Solvei to reach him, throwing the bead he’d been clutching as soon as she rushed forward.
Instantly, fire filled the cavern again. The flames caused the rest of his pack to cower, yelping in fright as they threw themselves backwards, barely avoiding the inferno that threatened to engulf them. Bolverk himself was similarly out of range of the flames, a round of hateful laughter erupting from his maw as he saw that Solvei – and that shadow-spirit with the glowing eyes – was caught in the center of the conflagration. “You see?! You can’t-, HUH?!”
For the second time in less than a minute, Bolverk’s triumph turned to shock. While the shadow-spirit seemed to be deterred by the blaze, veering off and circling around at a distance, Solvei hadn’t so much as broken her stride, the fire doing little besides singing her coat as she charged through them.
But that was impossible. Solvei didn’t have the Red Man’s power, which meant that the flames should have devoured her, the way they nearly had just a few seconds ago! So why weren’t they working now?!
There was no time to ponder the question, however, as Solvei cleared the last of the flames, crossing the last of the distance between them before she leapt, her jaws wide as she went straight for his throat.
His surprise had been enough to prevent Bolverk from taking a stance, and as such he was unprepared to receive the white wolf’s assault. Before he could react, he felt Solvei’s jaws clamp down on his neck, teeth digging into the leathery flesh there. It was only because the Red Man’s power had toughened his skin that she didn’t crush his windpipe immediately, and that realization was enough to snap Bolverk out of his stupor.
Roaring in pain and outrage, he immediately reared up, wings flapping as he tried to shake Solvei off. But Frode’s youngest daughter wasn’t so easily deterred, digging her legs in and growling louder as she twisted her head, and Bolverk knew that she was trying to throw him onto his back. If that happened, she’d not only have greater leverage, but his prone position would leave him hard-pressed to dislodge her. And with the power that spirit of hers had granted her, that almost certainly meant that if he went down, he wouldn’t be getting up again…
As if I’ll let some upstart little runt get the better of me!
Snarling, Bolverk brought his forelegs up. Before he’d gotten the Red Man’s power, his front paws had only been good for walking. But since he’d made the pact that had transformed his body, the pair of claws he’d gained at the ends of his front legs were able to grasp things, and he put that to good use now, wrapping one claw around Solvei’s lower jaw as the other grasped the top of her muzzle. Then he began to pull.
The two of them teetered dangerously as they both strained, and Bolverk felt Solvei fighting him with everything she had…but it wasn’t enough to stop him from pulling her jaws apart, yanking her teeth free from his neck.
He howled in victory as he pried the smaller wolf off of him. “What happened to all of the power that spirit granted you, Solvei?!” sneered Bolverk, his claws still pulling her jaws in opposite directions, fully intent on ripping her apart. “Did you think I was as weak as the rest of my pack?!” Putting his face right in front of hers, he kept pulling, feeling her jaw hit its limits. “Now you’re going to die, because you didn’t realize just how strong I-, ACK!”
His gloating was cut short as Solvei breathed frost right in his face.
Her doing so caused him no pain, of course. Although he had the Red Man’s power, Bolverk was still a winter wolf through and through; the cold had no power to harm him. He was sure Solvei knew that too, and for that very reason he’d never expected her to try using her breath weapon on him. As such, the move surprised him enough that he reflexively loosened his grasp on Solvei’s jaw, allowing her to tear her head free of his claws and fall back a few feet as he cleared the ice and snow from his face.
“Stronger? Maybe,” she conceded, panting as she worked her jaw. “But smarter? Not even a little.”
“You miserable little runt!” snarled Bolverk. “You are not smarter than me!”
A smirk crossed Solvei’s lips then. “I wasn’t talking about me.”
Bolverk frowned at that, but didn’t have a chance to ask what she meant before something suddenly landed on his back.
Bolverk’s second fireball was more intense than the first one had been.
Or at least, that was how it felt to Lex. Even with his incorporeal state reducing the damage from the attack, he had to force himself to hold in a grunt of pain, not wanting to do anything that could draw Bolverk’s attention. If this was going to work, the larger wolf had to focus completely on Solvei, leaving himself wide open for when Lex made his move.
It was with that thought in mind that Lex circled the edge of the cavern, surveying the battlefield. Solvei’s family was hanging back, apparently too scared of the flames to try and intervene. Solvei herself had managed to get the jump on Bolverk, and he could see the larger wolf struggling to retain his balance as Solvei locked her jaws around his throat, apparently taken off-guard by the white wolf’s shrugging off his fireball.
But even as Lex moved further around, trying to escape from Bolverk’s field of vision, he could see the alpha was already recovering, wrapping his claws around Solvei’s muzzle. That idiot, hissed Lex silently, knowing that Solvei had no recourse for that, lacking prehensile claws like Bolverk had. She went in too aggressively!
For a moment, Lex considered abandoning his plan in favor of helping her. The healing ability he’d given Solvei was strong, but there were limits to how much damage it could repair…
Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, as a blast of Solvei’s breath weapon made Bolverk sputter, giving the white wolf the chance she needed to tear herself free of his grasp. The sight sent a thrill of relief through Lex, glad that she’d managed to extricate herself from the bad position she’d been in. Even better, Bolverk was blinking and rubbing at his face, completely focused on Solvei now.
Knowing that he wouldn’t get a better chance, Lex moved upward, approaching Bolverk from behind.
For his part, the alpha wolf was still spewing epithets at Solvei. “You miserable little runt! You are not smarter than me!”
“I wasn’t talking about me,” smirked Solvei.
That was when Lex – who’d positioned himself directly over Bolverk – changed back into his corporeal form, dropping onto the alpha wolf’s back.
And immediately reached his hooves for the necklace Bolverk was wearing.
With the power he’d granted her previously, Lex had felt confident that Solvei could take Bolverk in a fight. While the alpha was larger and almost certainly stronger than the rest of Solvei’s kin, there was nothing to suggest that he was more powerful than all of them put together. With how the enhancements he’d given Solvei had let her toss her family around without any serious effort on her part, it was highly likely that she’d be able to do the same to the usurper who’d taken over her pack.
But that calculation hadn’t taken Bolverk’s ability to throw fireballs into account. That power – granted to him by the necklace he was wearing – changed things for the worse. With Solvei’s inherent cold making her vulnerable to fire, giving her the power to resist the heat, and recover from any damage that got through said resistance, were absolute requirements; otherwise, she’d be burned to death long before she’d be able to finish Bolverk off. Even if the alpha could only use as many fireballs as there were beads on his necklace, that was still true.
Which meant that the only solution was to take Bolverk’s necklace out of the equation.
Snatching it off of him telekinetically would have been the easiest solution, but Lex had discarded that idea as soon as it had crossed his mind. The necklace was pulled taut around Bolverk’s neck, with no slack to it. Working it around his jaw and past his stunted ears wouldn’t have been possible before Bolverk felt what was happening and grabbed it. Nor did Lex have any faith that simply ripping it off of his neck would have been any more successful; the fact that Bolverk had been able to tear one of the beads off – which should have ripped the necklace apart – only for the surrounding beads to seamlessly pull themselves together, suggested that it wouldn’t be so easily broken.
Which meant that the only alternative course of action was to somehow sabotage Bolverk’s fireball necklace while he was still wearing it.
Fortunately, Lex had some experience with manipulating magic items.
The downside to that course of action, however, was that – in order to maximize his chances of success – he’d need to make contact with the necklace in order to tamper with it. Physically make contact with it, using his corporeal body.
That wasn’t an absolute requirement. He might have been able to do so in shadow-form, but that was iffy; the same principle that minimized how most forms of magic could affect him while incorporeal would work against him if he tried to override the magical instructions in Bolverk’s necklace while in that state. Pouring magic through his body and into the necklace was a difficult proposition when he had no body. It could theoretically work, but there was a very real chance that not all of the magic he’d be forcing into the magic item would successfully transfer. If some of it didn’t make it through, then at best nothing would happen, save that Bolverk would likely be alerted to what he was trying to do; at worst, the alternate instructions he planned on feeding the magic item would be incomplete, causing it to behave in some manner other than how he’d intended.
Given the necklace’s explosive nature, that wasn’t something Lex wanted to chance.
Which was why he was currently clinging to the alpha’s back, teeth gritted as he reached his hooves around Bolverk’s thick neck to touch them to the necklace-
“What the-?! Get off me!”
-or at least, he tried to. But Bolverk was already thrashing, shaking heavily as he tried to throw Lex off. He very nearly succeeded, and it was only because Lex managed to dig his back legs between Bolverk’s wings and his flanks – the alpha having folded the former tightly against the latter as he flailed wildly – that he was able to maintain his grip on the wolf. Even then, he could already feel his grip slipping…
“Lex! Hang on!” There was no time to ponder if Solvei had meant that literally or figuratively as the white wolf rushed back in, snapping at Bolverk’s face and forcing him to stop his attempts to dislodge his unwanted passenger in order to avoid Solvei’s teeth catching his eyes. Instead – as Bolverk cursed and swiped a claw at Solvei – Lex focused on finishing what he’d started. Gritting his teeth, he reached out and pressed his hooves to the necklace, concentrating as he forced power through the magical channels in his body and into the item…
So intent was his focus that he didn’t react to Bolverk’s sudden lunge– one claw raking across Solvei’s side as she tried to feint to the left, only for Bolverk to see through it and leave a deep gash on her side as she went right instead – in time, and Lex went tumbling to the ground a moment later.
Bolverk didn’t hesitate, jaws widening as his head darted downward fast enough that Lex knew he wouldn’t be able to call on his dark magic before the mutated wolf mauled him.
Solvei, however, wasn’t about to let that happen.
With Bolverk between herself and Lex, she threw herself into the winged wolf full-force, slamming her body against his own with as much power as she could. It wasn’t enough to so much as bruise Bolverk, but it did unbalance him enough that his bite struck the ground next to Lex rather than the prone pony himself, buying him just enough time to turn into a shadow again, drifting away from Bolverk and back around to Solvei.
“Are you alright?” she panted as she fell back.
“You should be more concerned with yourself,” snapped Lex. “I told you to fight defensively!”
Solvei cocked her head. “I thought I was doing okay so far,” she murmured glancing back at her side, where the wound Bolverk had given her was already starting to close. “What about that plan you said you had? Did it work?”
Lex didn’t answer that, instead looking at where Bolverk had turned to face them.
“You two…” panted the alpha wolf, hackles raised as he bared his teeth at them. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’VE HAD ENOUGH!” Putting a claw to his neck, he gave Solvei a look of pure venom. “Whatever powers that spirit gave you” – his eyes slid over to Lex then – “and whatever seidr you have, I’m betting that if I throw all the fire I have at you at once, it’ll be enough to kill you both!”
Solvei’s eyes widened at that, unable to help but shoot a frightened look at Lex. But his eyes only narrowed, focusing on the necklace…
Thinking he had them dead to rights, Bolverk sneered, panting harder as he gripped the beads. “It’s a shame – nngh! – to use them all at once. But I bet – hrck! – that the Red Man will give me another, once I – rrnh! – bring him the ponies he – ack! – wants-, what’s happening?!”
By now, Bolverk’s breathing had become visibly labored, with the mutated wolf openly struggling for breath.
Why he was having trouble breathing was no mystery, however. In fact, it was obvious to everyone watching.
The necklace he was wearing – and was now scratching wildly at, the beads suddenly refusing to come off – was rapidly tightening around his neck, threatening to cut off his air supply.
Although it didn’t show in his incorporeal state, Lex smirked at the sight.
“Yes,” he replied at last, making no effort to hide the satisfaction in his voice. “It did.”
Watching Bolverk slowly choke to death was more satisfying than Solvei had thought it would be.
In front of her, the brawny wolf was struggling to remain upright, his breath coming in wheezing gasps as his claws dug uselessly at his necklace. Even as Solvei watched, he scratched bloody grooves into the thick skin of his neck, trying to get purchase around the ever-contracting wire before it cut his air off completely. The reward for his effort was another strangled inhalation, barely managing to breathe in for a half-second before his labored intake of air ended abruptly.
A glance to the side showed Solvei that the rest of her family was staring at the spectacle as well, watching Bolverk’s drawn-out strangulation with expressions ranging from amazement to grim vindication. Those were emotions that she could relate to; Bolverk had always been an intimidating wolf, not just because he was big and ugly, but because he lived out in the wilds all alone. For Solvei, the smallest of her parents’ children, being alone and without a pack was something to be feared, akin to death. It hadn’t been for nothing that most of the stories that her father had told them – the stories handed down by their ancestors – had been about working together and staying loyal to their pack.
But when Bolverk had come back for the final time, he’d used that togetherness against the rest of her family. He’d spread the sickness he’d gotten from the Red Man to the others, using his position as alpha to stamp out all dissent. Worse, he’d announced his plan to attack the ponies, disregarding the wisdom that their grandfather had died to learn.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it, she growled as she watched Bolverk’s eyes grow more bloodshot, his tongue hanging out as the necklace tightened further. He refused to face me himself when I challenged him, as our ancestors dictated. He threatened to let my family starve if they didn’t help him. And he actually used FIRE!
After all the terrible things Bolverk had done, it was only fitting that his end would be slow and painful like this.
“That will kill him, right?” Tilting her head, she glanced at the black shadow with the glowing eyes that was Lex. “It won’t stop until he’s dead?”
Lex gave her only a brief glance before looking back at Bolverk. “It should continue to shrink for roughly ten minutes,” he answered, his voice calm and emotionless. “After that, the instructions built into the necklace’s magical channels should reassert themselves, and it will resume its original functionality. But by that point, he should be deceased.”
Solvei heaved a sigh at that, relieved to hear that this was indeed the end of Bolverk. “How did you know you could make that thing he’s wearing do that? It was something to do with your seidr, right?” The question was a wistful one, as she found herself wishing that her father – who, if Lex was correct, had been a seidrmadr himself – had figured out how to turn Bolverk’s secret weapon against him.
If Lex noticed the forlorn tone in her voice, he didn’t react to it. “His necklace didn’t tear whenever he pulled a bead off,” he explained. “Instead, it rejoined itself, adjusting its size so that it remained taut around his neck. Figuring out that I could simply override its operating parameters, causing it to behave as though it were continually having beads removed and contracting accordingly, was eas-”
“NNNNNNNNRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!”
Bolverk’s sudden roar cut Lex off, making Solvei – along with the rest of her family – jump as he suddenly redoubled his efforts to save himself. Pressing his wings against the floor in order to keep his balance, he lifted both forelegs to his neck, putting both claws to the necklace as he dug at it with all of his strength. His muscles rippled with effort, veins throbbing as he again clawed at his own neck in an effort to procure a hold on the shrinking collar…and this time Solvei could see the bloodied tips of his claws curl around the edge of it, pulling it ever-so-slightly upward.
Lex apparently noticed it too, because in an instant the necklace was surrounded with an aura of churning violet as he struggled to pull it back down.
Bolverk didn’t even seem to notice his efforts, straining for all he was worth as he dragged the necklace further up, this time to where his neck met his jawbone.
“Solvei, go!” Unlike before, there was audible strain in Lex’s voice now. But Solvei barely noticed, instead feeling a sudden surge of strength and vitality spread through her, recognizing it as the seidr he’d used on her before so that she’d have the power to fight her family. “I’ve restored your combat enhancements! Kill him now!”
“R-right!” Fighting off her surprise at how Bolverk’s seemingly-assured death was suddenly in doubt, Solvei rushed forward, hoping to lock her jaws around her enemy’s neck a second time. Even if I can’t tear his throat out, I can at least prevent him from taking that thing off before it kills him!
But Bolverk didn’t give her a chance to make good on that. Despite the fact that he was low on air and devoting all of his strength to pulling the necklace off before it killed him, he still managed to react to the sound of her paws rushing toward him across the stones, instincts forged from hundreds of solitary hunts kicking in and causing him to roll away from her, sweeping his wings out wide. It didn’t accomplish much – for all that Bolverk was a large wolf, the bones in his wings were still slender, and the membrane itself was thin – but it was enough to keep her teeth away from his throat, forcing her to brush aside the leathery curtains and buying him a few more seconds to try and free himself from the deathtrap squeezing his neck. Just a little further now…
“Oh no you don’t!” snarled Solvei. With his wings out of the way, she had a clear shot at his neck, and nothing was going to keep her from it, jaws wide as she leaped forward.
That was when Bolverk did the last thing she was expecting.
Bolverk knew that he was about to die.
His vision had already grown hazy, his lungs felt like they were on fire, his limbs were gradually losing feeling, and Solvei was right in his face, ready to either rip him to pieces with the power that her spirit had given her or simply prevent him from taking off the accursed necklace that was choking him. Either one would be the death of him; he could either pry her jaws apart the way he had before, or he could keep tugging at the necklace. He couldn’t do both, which meant that no matter what happened, this was the end.
If he’d been able to breathe at that moment, he would have laughed.
How many times had he been here? How many times had he stared death in the face, fighting for his life against the creatures of the wild? How many times had he been in situations where he should have died, only to pull through, not because he had some spirits giving him special powers, but because he was too tough, too strong, and too stubborn to give up?
He’d long since lost count. With his father having gotten himself and most of the rest of his pack killed by the ponies, Bolverk had been hunting almost as soon as he’d been able to walk. Food needed to be procured, for himself and his runt of a brother and their mother, who’d been lamed by the ponies and grew progressively more crippled with each passing year. So he’d hunted alone, with no help from anyone, putting his life on the line while Frode had stayed behind and listened to their mother’s useless old stories.
Every fight had been a lesson. Whether it had been something simple like learning to stay upwind of prey, or something more complex like luring them into a stream and then using his breath weapon to freeze the water around their legs, he’d become a better and deadlier hunter, able to see paths to victory against any enemy.
Like the one he saw right now.
Solvei was lunging forward, jaws wide open, going for the kill. It was an amateur move, one that committed all of her momentum to the attack, clearly thinking that she didn’t need to worry about protecting herself. After all, she had power from her spirit ally, and he was too busy trying not to choke to death. It must have looked like an easy win to her.
But as she got to within a few inches of him, Bolverk lowered his head – putting his face right in front of hers – and put all of his remaining strength into pulling on the necklace. He could already feel it giving way, and as it reached the back of his head, he knew he’d be able to slip it off of himself…and then follow through on the motion and slide it around Solvei’s neck.
Judging from the look of surprise and horror blooming across her face, she’d realized it too.
Stupid runt, he sneered inwardly. You’re just like Frode, thinking that you can borrow strength from a spirit to make up for your own weakness. But when both of us have spirits, the victor is the one with more experience, and that’s me!
“I…win…” he rasped, lips twisting into a cruel smirk. He could already see Solvei trying to twist in place, muscles curling to abort her ill-considered charge, but there was no way for her to change her direction in time. With one last surge of effort, Bolverk heaved the necklace up, putting the last of his strength into it as he pulled it to the top of his neck-
And hit an obstruction.
“No,” announced the spirit Solvei had called Lex, his glowing eyes locked onto Bolverk as his formless body floated forward. “I win!”
What’s happening?! Barely noticing as Solvei fell back, Bolverk felt a sudden surge of panic fall over him as he couldn’t pull the necklace over his head, the motion blocked no matter how frantically he tried. A second later his final burst of effort was expended, and he felt the wire dig harshly into his throat again, cutting off the small amount of air he’d been able to draw in. What’s happening?!
Collapsing to the ground, he didn’t bother getting up, instead glancing back as he put his claws to his neck, blood running cold as he realized that he could feel something else there now, encircling his throat like a collar. It was hard and unyielding, more so than stone, but its surface was as smooth as ice, without being cold. From the edge of his vision, he could see that it was pure black, with smooth edges and facets, almost like crystal.
Recognition fell over Bolverk then, recalling what Turid had told him yesterday, about how the pony seidrmadr had created black crystals from nothing before giving Solvei the power to drive them off. He’d thought little of it at the time – they’d only mentioned creating small spikes from the ground and walls, which were of little concern even to weaker wolves like them – and had promptly forgotten about it.
But the pony, or spirit, or whatever he was, called Lex hadn’t forgotten.
That this was his own fault wasn’t something Bolverk could accept, however. No! I didn’t make a mistake! This is wrong! he howled silently as he saw white paws pad in front of his field of vision. I’m the strongest now! The alpha! I have a spirit that’s more powerful than any of Frode’s! I’m supposed to win! It was the same perversion of the natural order all over again. His brother, the little runt who couldn’t even hunt for himself, had always been the one enemy he’d never been able to defeat, and now his runt daughter had inherited that legacy…
“It’s over, Bolverk.” In front of his eyes, Solvei leaned down, her expression as cold as the snow her fur resembled. “Now you’ll answer to our ancestors for what you’ve done.”
Bolverk tried to stand up then, but there was no strength in his legs anymore. He tried to call out to the Red Man, hoping he’d appear out of nowhere the way he usually did, but when he opened his mouth not even a whisper escaped. He tried to flap his wings, hoping to at least fly back and put some distance between himself and his enemies, but all he managed to do was make them twitch feebly.
And when Solvei’s teeth filled his vision a moment later, there was nothing he could do but close his eyes and hope that dying wouldn’t hurt too much.
Solvei panted as she stepped back from Bolverk’s body, blood and saliva dripping from her maw in equal measure.
The wolf who’d killed her father, made the rest of her family sick and ugly like him, and had wanted to do the same thing to her – to say nothing of dragging their traditions through the dirt – was dead, his throat torn out. She could almost feel the cold escaping him, his body starting to warm now that his life had ended. It was finally over.
“Solvei…”
No, she corrected herself as the sound of her mother’s voice made her turn her attention to the rest of her kin, watching as Turid and the rest of her siblings crept closer, eyes darting between her and the shadowy form of the pony who’d aided her. It’s not over yet. We still need to find the Red Man and make him return Lex’s mate and change my family back to normal.
She couldn’t help the slight pang of disappointment that went through her at that. Although she’d known that Bolverk’s death probably wouldn’t result in the rest of her pack suddenly turning back to how they’d been, a small part of her had hoped that would be the case. But at least now they’ll want to go back to stop being sick.
Or at least, she hoped they would.
Solvei’s disappointment changed into a sudden rush of trepidation as her mother and her siblings moved to surround her. They were happy that Bolverk was dead, right? While he might have earned his position as alpha legitimately – and even then, with how the Red Man’s sickness had warped him, his challenge had only been legitimate because her father had accepted it even after seeing what had happened to his brother’s body – Bolverk had still been a terrible alpha. Surely they wouldn’t be upset at her for killing him…would they?
No, that idea was ridiculous. They’d all been horrified at how he’d used fire, as well as how he’d made them fight her after she’d issued her challenge. Even before she’d run away, they’d all complained at how he’d eaten most of what they’d caught on their hunts, despite the shortfall of food. They wouldn’t forget that just because he’d given them great strength, and wings to fly with, and the ability to resist terrible heat, and promised them all the food they could ever want…
All of a sudden Solvei felt a whimper building in her throat. If she had to fight her family again-
Stepping forward, Turid smiled as she gently nipped the tip of her daughter’s ear. “Your father would be so proud of you, Solvei.”
The breath that Solvei had been holding came out so quickly that it was almost another icy exhalation of ice and snow. “Mother!”
And just like that, her pack – her brothers and sister and mother – all rushed in to nuzzle her, the same way they had when she’d been younger.
“I can’t believe you actually made a pact with spirit of your own!” gushed Kaja, tail wagging happily.
“And one stronger than the Red Man, don’t forget,” grinned Ebbe, his voice filled with brotherly pride.
“Stronger than the Red Man, and stronger than any that our father ever spoke to,” noted Sten, giving her other ear a nip of his own. “I bet he’s already telling the story of your victory over Bolverk to the rest of our ancestors!”
Blushing at receiving so much praise, Solvei shook her head, raising a paw to wave them off. “Wait, wait…Lex isn’t a spirit,” she murmured, before turning to look at the shadow with the glowing eyes that the pony in question had become. “…are you?”
“I am a pony,” affirmed Lex, changing back into the form in question. The sound of his hooves striking the ground was loud in the closed confines of the den. “And so is Thermal Draft, the pegasus you dragged in front of whatever creature you call the Red Man.”
He gave them all a dark look then, and Solvei wasn’t the only one who flinched; unlike the rest of them, Lex apparently saw little accomplishment in Bolverk’s death. “Now tell me where they are!”
A round of uncomfortable looks were exchanged then, and Solvei could guess what they were thinking. Despite how weak he’d seemed yesterday, Lex had proven himself to be a being of great power, one who was still clearly very upset about what had happened to his mate. But then, given how lost and alone she’d felt when Bolverk had turned her family against her, Solvei could understand how he felt; if something similar happened to Thermal Draft, then he’d be just as alone as she had been.
“I was the one who took her to him.”
Turid’s voice brought Solvei out of her thoughts. “Mother?”
Ignoring her daughter, Turid took a step toward Lex, curling her tail between her legs as a sign of submission. “I can take you to where I brought her yesterday, but I don’t know if they’re still there now.”
“We’ll all go,” volunteered Ebbe, a little too quickly.
Sten immediately joined him. “If they’ve moved, we’ll find them faster if we all search together.”
Solvei frowned, knowing that they were offering to accompany them because they were worried that, if the Red Man and Thermal Draft were gone, Lex would take his anger out on their mother. But before she had a chance to assure them that he wouldn’t do that, Turid spoke up again. “No. I want you two to dispose of Bolverk’s body.”
An unhappy whine came from Sten’s throat then. “But Mother-”
“Unless the alpha objects,” interrupted Turid, giving her daughter a look.
Solvei paused at that, glancing back at Lex – who, judging from his gritted teeth, was rapidly losing his patience with the discussion – before nodding. “I agree. The two of you get rid of that” – she canted her head at Bolverk’s corpse disdainfully – “and Mother will lead Lex and me to where the Red Man was.”
Turid frowned. “I was hoping you would remain here and let the spirits-, forgive me,” she corrected herself, giving Lex an apologetic look, “and let the pony and the Red Man settle their own affairs.”
“Solvei’s presence is not optional,” hissed Lex, his eyes suddenly glowing despite having turned back to normal. “Your current status makes you unsuitable for enhancement, which means that if it becomes necessary to leverage force against this so-called Red Man, then I’ll need to make use of her.”
Turid’s eyes narrowed at that, but Solvei intervened before her mother could object, lowering her voice as she leaned in to nuzzle her again. “Lex helped bring you all back to me. I want to help bring his mate back to him now. Besides, I want to help Thermal Draft. She was very kind to me when we first met.”
Her mother looked ready to argue, but she was saved from doing so as Sten spoke up, prodding Bolverk’s body with one paw. “Is it safe to move this?” he asked, looking at Lex. “He’s still wearing the beads that make fire…”
Frowning, Lex strode over to where the necklace was still tightening around Bolverk’s throat. A single touch of his hoof was all it took to cause the beaded wire’s contracting to stop, and a moment later it was surrounded in a purple aura as he pulled it off the wolf’s corpse. Solvei didn’t miss how the others exchanged nervous glances as he held it up, looking it over for a long moment.
The tension then spiked when he placed it around his own neck a moment later.
“What’re you doing?!” yelped Ebbe, looking ready to bolt.
“This magic item still has several fireballs left,” answered Lex, showing no indication that he’d recognized the effect his wearing that necklace was having on everyone else. “They might prove useful if hostilities become necessary to secure Thermal Draft’s safety.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” announced Solvei, giving her brothers a glare. “The Red Man gave Bolverk that evil power, so it’s only fair to turn it back against him.”
More unsettled looks were exchanged, but to Solvei’s relief, no one contradicted her.
But that didn’t mean the rest of her kin were happy about her decision.
“Yeah, well, I’m going to get rid of this,” muttered Ebbe, grabbing one of Bolverk’s back legs in his mouth and dragging it toward the den’s exit as quickly as he could.
“I’ll coming too,” added Sten, grabbing the other leg of the corpse and pulling.
Lex snorted, but other than waving a hoof in the direction of the cave entrance – dissolving the bars he’d put into place earlier, Solvei belatedly realized – had no reaction to the pair, instead turning his attention back to Turid. “Now, take me to the Red Man,” he ordered.
Turid sighed, but nodded, turning to follow Ebbe and Sten out, when Kaja – who had been silent for some time now – spoke up at last. “Wait.”
Lex’s teeth were clenched as he glanced back at her. “What?”
Gulping, Kaja held her wings out for a moment before tucking them back at her sides. “If you have to fight the Red Man, will we go back to normal if you defeat him?”
“Answering that would require more data about how he induced your transmogrifications than I’m currently in possession of,” snarled Lex dismissively.
Solvei wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but Kaja seemed to, since she had an answer at the ready. “Then, would it help if you saw the softwood runes that the Red Man gave us?”
To Solvei’s surprise, Lex’s impatience seemed to lessen then, one brow raising in a show of interest. “The what?”
“The softwood runes,” answered Turid. “We all have one. Bolverk did too. The Red Man gave them to us when he made us like this. Softwood is a long, thin slice of wood – so thin that it shakes and waves like a squirrel’s tail – and the ones we have are covered in runes, which are markings that have mysterious powers.”
“You mean something that’s written on paper,” retorted Lex, his voice flat. But it was better than the seething impatience he’d been displaying a moment ago as he looked back at Kaja. “Bring them to me.”
Kaja hesitated, glancing at Solvei just long enough to receive a nod from her sister, and then turned and hurried toward one of the alcoves near the back of the den.
It was enough to remind Solvei of something else they kept there. “Oh! I almost forgot! Mother, I want to give Lex the gold and the seidr that grandmother brought back with her when grandfather tried to attack the ponies.”
Turid blinked at that, and looked ready to argue for a moment, but restrained herself. “Alright,” she sighed, heading toward a different alcove. “It’s just as well. That gold is so much litter anyway, and I suppose a seidrmadr as strong as him wouldn’t find that seidr dangerous.”
Lex waited until she was out of earshot, then glanced over at Solvei. “You brought potentially dangerous magic back to your living area?”
“It was either that, or leave it out there,” replied Solvei. “It’s very scary stuff, but bringing it back here meant that there was no chance that someone else would find it and learn how to use it against us. Or at least that’s what my father said his mother told him.” She trailed off then, getting lost in a pleasant memory for a moment before coming back to reality. “That’s where the gold came from too, actually. It got caught in the seidr that grandmother brought back.”
That last part caused Lex to furrow his brows. “How does gold get ‘caught’ in magic?”
Solvei smiled as she caught sight of her mother padding back toward them, gingerly holding the seidr in her jaws. “Take a look for yourself.”
When no reply came, she glanced over at him, cocking her head when she saw his expression.
Given the strange powers Lex commanded, Solvei hadn’t been entirely sure how he’d react to the sight of the seidr that her grandmother had brought back. Disinterest had been a distinct possibility, given how strong he already was. Or perhaps worry, if the seidr was as dangerous as she’d always been told. Or maybe even delight, if it was something that he could put to good use.
But his reaction now was none of those things.
Instead, the look on his face was one of surprise.
The clink of coins hitting the ground accompanied Turid as she returned, causing the mother wolf’s ears to fold back as she deposited her bounty at Lex’s hooves.
“This stuff gets everywhere,” she muttered darkly once her jaws were free, glowering at the gold that had fallen along her path.
“Better that than trying to close it up,” murmured Solvei, a shiver running through her as she glanced back at Lex, unnerved by how he was just staring at the thing. “Each time someone opens that, there’s something different inside,” she explained. “It’s unnatural.”
“We usually just push whatever that comes out of there back into it,” added Turid, “but after the last time, when Sten and Ebbe were daring each other to open it, I decided to leave it unsealed. It only changes things when its closed, and better it spit out litter like this” – she flicked a gold coin with her tail, sending it skipping across the rocky terrain – “than something more dangerous.”
“It’s because the folded spaces inside of it all have variable orientation,” replied Lex, his voice distracted. “If they’re not opened with any particular configuration in mind, then it will place a random item in the topmost position.”
Turid and Solvei shared a blank look before turning their eyes back toward Lex. “Huh?” they grunted in unison.
But he wasn’t paying attention to either of them, silently invoking his circlet’s ability to let him see into the magical spectrum as he regarded the object that Turid had brought back. A few seconds later, it confirmed what he’d already concluded.
The backpack lying in front of him was an extradimensional storage device, just like the one he’d lost when fighting Xiriel.
By itself, that wasn’t much of a surprise. Those were among the more common magic items to be found on this world, owing to their utilitarian nature. While not ubiquitous by any means – largely owing to how all but the cheapest of magic items was priced outside the reach of what most ponies could afford – finding one like this was only mildly improbable.
But even so, Lex couldn’t help but be perturbed by the symmetry of what was happening.
Having been brought to Everglow against his will was nothing new; it had been how he’d originally come to this world, roughly a year ago now. But while his return was wholly unwelcome – albeit better than dying – the last forty-eight hours had brought up parallels to a previous trip that were becoming progressively harder to ignore. Except that prior expedition he was seeing allusions to now wasn’t with regard to the time he’d spent on Everglow before.
Rather, the events of the last two days bore striking resemblance to his recent life back on Equestria.
That his time here was an unexpected detour, just like his trip to Tall Tale had been, was easy enough to dismiss as coincidence. But then he’d become separated from Thermal Draft, much like he had been from Sonata during that excursion. The details were different, of course, but then – just like now – their parting had been preceded by meeting an intelligent creature who was in need of aid, their family having been forcibly pressed into service by a monster that wanted to use them to abet its plans to devour ponies.
And now, the same way the dragon he’d killed had been in possession of a portable hole filled with gold, Turid had produced a similar item that was also brimming with coinage.
Is this the Night Mare’s doing? Is that why she brought me here? Lex wondered uneasily. Conceptual frameworks had always come easily to him, but the significance of religious symbolism wasn’t something he found easy to grasp. She said she was giving me the opportunity to grow stronger, but how does facing down facsimiles of trials I’ve already overcome accomplish that?
An icy paw gently touching his shoulder broke his train of thought. “Lex?” murmured Solvei. “Is everything okay?”
The interruption was enough to dispel his misgivings. What was he doing? A vague resemblance between his current circumstances and a snapshot of his earlier life was indicative of nothing. Worse, it was a distraction from the more immediate issue: rescuing Thermal Draft. To that end, the proper course of action was to evaluate what Turid had brought him to see if any of it could help with retrieving the abducted pegasus.
“Stand back,” Lex ordered without preamble, lifting the haversack in his telekinetic grasp and holding it away from him. “I’m going to empty this.”
Turid backed up with a yelp, wings flaring in alarm. Solvei’s reaction was more subdued, moving to put Lex between herself and the raised backpack, but remaining by his side.
With no further hesitation, Lex turned the backpack inside out, letting its contents spill onto the ground.
Five minutes later, Lex once again found himself staring.
This time at the incredible hoard of treasure strewn before him.
The gold coins numbered in the thousands. While Lex had dealt with larger sums before, this was still a windfall of considerable magnitude. Enough to obviate any monetary concerns that might arise after he rescued Thermal Draft and found a nearby settlement.
Having studied Everglow’s economy during his prior time here, it was easy for Lex to estimate the overall worth of the gold in front of him. In this world, a pony that was skilled at their trade could earn a gold coin a day, perhaps more if they were particularly gifted in their field; presuming that they lived a modest lifestyle and tempered their spending habits, their living expenses would be roughly one-third of their income. Which meant that the average pony could earn roughly two hundred-fifty gold coins – or gold “pieces” as they were called here – in net profit over the course of a year.
By that margin, there was easily ten years’ worth of gold lying in front of him. More than that, in all likelihood.
Of course, that sum would doubtlessly be larger if the gemstones that sat among the piles of gold were properly appraised. Although there were less than a dozen of them, and none were of exceptional size or luster, Lex knew at a glance that each of them were more valuable than the baubles that littered Equestria. Enough so that, if he’d had any thaumaturgical spells prepared, he’d have been tempted to use the gems as repositories to store some of them in.
And those were the very least of what the backpack had contained.
Nearly an entire wardrobe’s worth of clothes was present, comprising several different outfits. Some were entirely practical, such as the wool suit with fur trim that seemed designed specifically for the cold, while others were of a far more ostentatious presentation, such as the brocaded outfit with silver buttons and gold embroidery. Save for a few wrinkles, any of them could have been freshly sewn, their threads lacking the slightest hint of wear or fade.
There were also several small cases, each one latched. The largest had been full of various chemicals and extracts in thin metal vials, and Lex had quickly recognized it as an alchemical kit, the kind used to concoct mixtures that utilized the base magical properties of various substances in order to provoke reactions beyond what mere chemical catalyzation could create. It had been an unwelcome reminder of his recent defeat at Dark Streak’s talons, and Lex had given it only a cursory examination before setting it aside.
The next case had also contained a variety of chemicals, but these were presented alongside various bandages and powdered herbs, along with a small scalpel, tweezers, and other implements that made its medical usage obvious. While that was less useful than it would have been even a day ago, now that he could simply use divine authority to imbue Solvei with healing ability, it would still be convenient to have after he and the wolf parted ways.
The third and final case was even more varied than the other two had been, containing a variety of esoteric substances which on their own made little sense. A few copper coins, a pinch of wool, a piece of coal, some unidentifiable animal hairs, and other knickknacks were all laid out in small containers. It was only when Lex saw the folded belt, complete with hooks for hanging the cases off of it, that he understood what he was looking at: it was a case full of spell components, minor material items that certain magical traditions on Everglow required – alongside the more typical verbal and somatic triggers – to cast their spells.
But even if that hadn’t been there, it would have been obvious that the backpack’s owner had been a spellcaster.
The magic items it held were proof enough of that.
Contrary to Lex’s expectations, the haversack itself wasn’t exactly like the one he’d lost. It was, in fact, an improved design, with its capacity more than triple what his own version had possessed. Of course, its total weight – while still unchanged regardless of how much it contained – was slightly heavier than his own had been, but only by a few pounds, making it a more than worthwhile tradeoff.
That was just the first of more than a dozen enchanted objects.
Roughly a third of them were little more than trinkets, petty magical curios whose magic was so miniscule that even the feeble magical imbuement processes of his native Equestria could have produced them. A small wand that, when waved over an area, cleaned it of dust, dirt, and grime. A pin that did much the same for whoever wore it. A bedroll designed to keep whoever slept in it warm and comfortable. A small metal box which was cool to the touch, but when opened revealed a smokeless fire that perpetually burned within. A ball of string that seemingly never grew smaller no matter how much it was unwound.
Several potions of minor note were also present. Two briefly increased the drinker’s speed. Two allowed for unknown languages to be comprehended, whether spoken or written. The final two made whoever imbibed them able to experience a singular moment of kinetic intuition, the sort of thing which Lex knew was useless for most everyday activities but was extremely valuable during a fight.
But it was the last five which were the most powerful.
One was a cloak which had a general ward against misfortune woven into it. Like the extradimensional backpack, those were fairly common items, but this one was unusually powerful, more so than the one he currently possessed.
The next two were so obviously complementary that Lex couldn’t help but think of them as a matched pair. One was a robe of plain brown thread that belied the potent enchantment it held. The other was an amulet of similar strength.
Like the cloak, the amulet was similar to a protective device he already had. But while his was designed to harden the skin, creating a layer of natural armor, this one went a step further. It not only toughened the epidermis, but also swelled and increased the flow of the magical channels that flowed through the wearer’s extremities, allowing them to not only imbue a degree of magical force in their punches and kicks, but also to deliver spells as a part of their strikes.
It was enough to make Lex’s earlier apprehensions about the parallels between his recent past and now momentarily resurface, recognizing the amulet’s enchantment as variation of the spell scroll that he’d taken from the dragon’s hoard, and which had saved his life when he’d fought Lirtkra back in Vanhoover. This one was far weaker, but it was also continuous in nature rather than only lasting for a minute or so. Similarly, the more modest flow of power was set to abet, rather than hinder, his spellcasting abilities, trading power for versatility in that regard.
The robe was also an item that heightened its wearer’s attack and defense at the same time, but in a different manner. Specifically in how it stored up a miniscule amount of kinetic energy – though never more than a minute amount, with any excess being lost – from its wearer’s movements, redirecting it to both push away incoming attacks while simultaneously lending greater force to the user’s own strikes. Neither were outrageously strong, but were still enough to turn even an untrained combatant into a competent fighter.
The penultimate item was a plain steel rod, two feet long and a half-inch in diameter. But when viewed under the magical spectrum, it radiated an aura of divinatory construction that was almost kaleidoscopic in its intricacy. It had taken Lex almost a full minute to puzzle out what it did, and when he finally unraveled its secrets, he’d snatched it up so quickly it had startled Solvei and Turid.
The rod continuously emitted a complex but subtle form of emotion-detection within several dozen feet in all directions. Specifically, it sensed hostility – not simply enmity or dislike, but fierce animosity – directed toward whoever held it. It then reacted in a magnetic fashion, pointing in the general direction of those individuals, regardless of their attempts to hide or conceal themselves. Indeed, a moment’s concentration could make the rod magnify its detection capabilities, pinpointing the precise location and number of enemies within its range, though it could only be made to operate at that heightened function three times in a twenty-four-hour period.
But it was the last item that was the most notable, and most powerful, of them all.
Carved out of a single piece of wood whose coloration was unnaturally pale was a mask fashioned in the shape of a pony skull.
That one had multiple magical effects laid upon it. One was a petty transmutation effect so that it would fit whoever wore it. Another was a modest enchantment to make the one who wore the mask seem more intimidating. A third was a minor necromantic effect which allowed the wearer to briefly but repeatedly conjure up a trickle of negative energy – the antithesis of healing magic, which directly assaulted the life force of any living creature – around one limb, using it to attack a creature struck. And the fourth and final enchantment…
Behind him, Solvei shifted her weight nervously between her paws. “I saw that wooden skull once when I was little,” she remarked, trying to keep her voice light as she glanced at her mother. “Remember that? Ebbe, Sten, and Kaja were teasing me, so I wanted to prove that I could be as brave as them, and I opened up that seidr bag and the skull fell out.”
Turid gave a strained chuckle. “You screamed so loudly your father heard you from the other end of the valley. It took a month before you’d go anywhere near the back of the den after that.”
“At least I showed up my siblings,” laughed Solvei, though like her mother it came out as forced. “They ran away so fast you would have thought that Vutok himself had lit their tails on fire, but I stayed put.”
“Only because you passed out from fright,” retorted Turid. “I’d never seen your father so scared as when he ran in and saw that you weren’t mov-”
She wasn’t able to finish, giving a sudden gasp of alarm, one that was echoed by Solvei, as Lex turned the mask over in his hooves and placed it upon his face.
“L-Lex?” gulped Solvei. “Are you…are you sure that’s safe?”
“For me, yes,” replied Lex darkly, causing the wolves’ fur to bristle in fright, the baleful tone in his voice amplified by the mask’s power. “But not for the Red Man, if he’s harmed Thermal Draft.”
He didn’t look at them as he spoke, instead putting the treasures he’d received to good use. The new cloak and amulet replaced his old ones. The enemy-detecting rod was slid through the belt of the cold-weather gear he put on after that. The robe was donned a moment later. Everything else was placed back into the backpack, which was the final thing he put on.
The final result made wolves back away in fear.
The unenchanted clothes he wore were universally black, designed to catch as much heat as they could. The contrast only heightened the pale coloration of his skull mask, even more frightening for the way his red horn now protruded from the middle of it, looking as though it was bathed in blood. The backpack he wore was hidden beneath his robes, giving him a hunched appearance that suggested that he was preparing to spring, and the cloak he wore seemed to billow around him like a shroud.
With the way his eyes glowed beneath the hollow sockets of the mask, and the purple aura from his horn casting just enough light to make his shadow visible, looming large on the cave wall behind him, the effect was even more frightening than his umbral transformation had been.
For both Solvei and Turid, the sight evoked the same impression:
That they were looking at the grim specter of death itself.
Neither dared to breathe, just staring at the fearsome sight in front of them, until Kaja’s voice broke the silence. “Sorry that took so long!” she called as she came bounding back, reams of paper folded beneath her wings. “I wanted to gather all of them up at once so-, AAAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Her shriek of terror as she caught sight of Lex reverberated throughout the den, ending only when her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped to the ground, unconscious.
As Turid rushed over to check on her other daughter, Solvei snickered weakly as her heartbeat began to slow down. “Well, I guess now I’m not the only one who’ll be teased about how scary that mask is.”
Lex didn’t bother replying, instead telekinetically grabbing one of the long pieces of paper that Kaja had been bringing him. Bringing it closer, he scowled as he saw that it wasn’t written in a script that he was familiar with. After a moment’s consideration, he withdrew one of the language-comprehension potions and downed it, waiting impatiently for the draught to kick in.
When it did, he quickly began to skim the document, idly noting Bolverk’s name near the top of the paper as he took in the salient terms written there.
…phistophilus…
…Prevarius…
…contract…
…Hell…
Despite the warmth of the clothes he’d put on, Lex felt a chill as he continued reading, and not just because the apparent presence of a devil threw his earlier misgivings about how his personal history was repeating itself into stark relief. The mutation that Bolverk – and, most likely, the other wolves – had undergone wasn’t a mutation at all. It was a physical reflection of a much deeper alteration, one that had serious consequences beyond any mere warping of the body. If Thermal Draft had signed a contract like this…
Intellectually, Lex knew that he’d been right not to rush after the missing pegasus as fast as he could. Taking time to evaluate the situation and explore his options had been what had enabled him to unlock the greater potential of the divine authority he’d been given, as well as make use of the magic items that the superstitious wolves had overlooked. But now his sedate pace seemed like the worst mistake possibly could have made, and Lex knew he could tarry no longer.
“Turid!” he snapped, causing the wolf in question to jump from where she’d been helping Kaja to stand upright. “Take me to the Red Man now!”
Solvei cocked her head. “Shouldn’t we wait for Sten and Ebbe to come back, in case-”
“I SAID TAKE ME TO THE RED MAN!” bellowed Lex. “RIGHT NOW!!!”
“I have to say, I thought it would take longer than a single night’s practice for you to get the hang of this.”
Prevarius’ compliment made Thermal Draft smile, fighting down a yawn as she gave the phistophilus a grateful look. “Says the guy who not only gave me the ability to do this in the first place, but then was nice enough to stay up and train me.”
“What can I say?” The devil gave a theatrical bow, chuckling deeply. “I pride myself on providing excellent customer service.”
“Well, let me know if there’s anywhere I can leave you a good review,” giggled Drafty. But her smile lost its teasing tone a moment later, becoming a look of gratitude. “All kidding aside though, I really do appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I know you said you can’t help anyone out for free, but you still gave me an awful lot in exchange for nothing but-”
“THERMAL DRAFT! GET AWAY FROM THAT CREATURE IMMEDIATELY!”
The voice that roared at her from across the clearing made her jump, pain flaring across her mangled wing as she tried to take to the sky on reflex. But even before her hooves returned to the ground, her tired brain reminded her that the voice was one that she knew. The realization was enough to make her heart speed up, excitement rushing through her as she turned to look at the stallion whom she’d never doubted would come looking for her.
“Lex! I’ve been w-”
Her greeting died on her lips as she caught sight of the black-clad, skull-faced pony who stepped out from the trees a moment later.
The image was scary enough that she took an involuntary step back, fright causing nearly causing her to stumble, and it was only belatedly that she recognized the bright red horn and green eyes with purple flames sprouting from their outer edges. Even then, she felt a shiver run down her spine as she looked him over, bringing with it a rush of anxiety rather than the usual warmth that she felt whenever she laid eyes on him. It was enough that she barely noticed Solvei pad out from alongside him a moment later, followed by the winged wolf who’d brought her here to begin with. The latter winced as she glanced at Prevarius, leaning over to mutter something to Solvei before turning and running back into the woods.
“Interesting,” murmured Prevarius, one hand coming up to rub his chin. “You said he wasn’t like other ponies, and you weren’t kidding.”
The phistophilus’ unconcerned reaction – along with the sight of Solvei, who Drafty knew was kindhearted, standing next to Lex – were enough to make the pegasus shake off the last of her fright. What was she doing? She’d been waiting for him to come find her so she could surprise him, and now she was embarrassing herself! Huffing in consternation, she tried to recover her poise, glancing up at Prevarius. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Take your time,” grinned the devil, looking bemused. “I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.”
That’s putting it mildly. But Drafty kept that thought to herself as she trotted over to where Lex and Solvei were. “Hey you guy-uys!” she called, deliberately putting a lyrical lilt into her voice as she stretched out the syllable. “You don’t need to worry, everything’s okay! Although I gotta admit, you really gave me a fright just now!”
She directed that last part at Lex, close enough now to see that the skull was actually a wooden mask, one that contrasted sharply with the black outfit he’d put on and the dull robe and cloak swirling around him. “Seriously, what’s with the Nightmare Night getup? Are you-, wait! Is that stuff ma-gi-cal?” She sang the last three syllables, then made a show of concentrating for a moment, hoping that he’d pick up on the hints she was dropping. She knew Lex wasn’t exactly the smoothest pony when it came to picking up nuance, but between the way she looked now, the way she kept injecting tonal elements into her words, and what she was actually saying, surely she was making it clear enough even for him? “Oh my gosh! It is! Wow, I guess we’ve both gotten an upgrade!”
“Thermal Draft,” rumbled Lex, his voice practically thrumming with tension. “Did you sign a contract with that monstrosity?”
Drafty fought the urge to slump, discouraged by both his open hostility toward Prevarius as well as his needing to ask. “C’mon Lex, don’t be like that. Prevarius is really nice. I mean, I know he looks ferocious, but so do you and you’re a great guy.”
“Drafty, the Red Man isn’t your friend,” interjected Solvei, glancing between the pegasus and where the devil was still grinning at them from a stone’s throw away. “I told you how he lent his power to the wolf who killed my father, and then made my entire family sick, remember? He’s a spirit of evil.”
This time Drafty did slump, ears folding back. “You too, Solvei? Look, Lex and I both thought you were a monster when we first met, remember? Because you tore up my wing and all?” She held the maimed appendage in question out, seeing the wolf wince at that. “But we sat down and talked to you and realized that you’re not-”
“Did you make a deal with him?!” hissed Lex, his eyes flaring brighter.
“Geez, you really can’t tell?” huffed Drafty. “I thought it would be obvious: of course I did.”
Lex let out a sharp breath, looking like he’d just been slugged in the gut. “No…”
Solvei tilted her head, looking Thermal Draft over. “Are you sure? My family looked horrible when they got the Red Man’s sickness, but you don’t seem to have changed.”
Biting back a groan, Drafty made one more attempt to show off. “Are you sure?” She stood up on her hind legs then, keeping her eyes on Lex as she put one hoof on her hips and the other behind her head, tilting her neck back as she let a melody flow into her words. “Don’t I seem, just a bit, different from how, I, used to be?”
She didn’t let it stop there, silently calling on the new powers she’d gained from her contract with Prevarius. With a thought, a quartet of colored lights surrounded her, shining in different colors as they bobbed and weaved, painting her in a bright swirl of lights that lit up the dreary clearing. She held the pose as they did, letting her last syllable trail off into the air as Lex looked at her, his expression hidden behind his mask.
That’s right, she grinned. Drink it all in. Kara might have given me the power to look however I wanted, but now I know what it takes to look spec-freaking-tacular.
That was something the goddess hadn’t gotten around to teaching her. It was one thing to look like someone else, but it was another thing to understand what actually made somepony look attractive. Tastes might vary between individuals, of course, but there was a surprising amount of things that were both universal, and so subtle that your average pony couldn’t have articulated them. But Drafty understood them all now, grinning as Lex gazed at her.
Can you tell the difference? she wondered. Can you see that my lips are just a tiny bit plumper? That my eyes are a little rounder than they were? That my waist is trimmer, my plot is bubblier, and my back legs are thinner? Because it’s all for you…you and Cloudy, once we get home.
“Thermal Draft,” breathed Lex a moment later, his voice no less tense despite having lowered it. “What did that thing do to you?”
Drafty sighed, mentally ordering the colored lights to fade out of existence as she dropped back down onto all fours. “Really? You’re the smartest pony I know, Lex. Aren’t the looks, the voice, and the magic enough to clue you in?”
Solvei glanced back and forth between the two ponies, finally letting her eyes settle on Drafty. “You had the Red Man make you into a pretty singing seidrmadr?”
“Close,” murmured Drafty, taking a step closer to Lex, leaning in to nuzzle him.
“I had him make me into a Siren.”
It had taken only a few minutes for Turid to lead them to where she’d delivered Drafty to the Red Man, whom Lex now knew was a phistophilus devil named Prevarius.
That she’d been so close made Lex want to scream in frustration. Now that he had her location, it was even easier to second-guess the actions he’d taken since her abduction. But those thoughts had temporarily abated when he’d caught sight of her, apparently none the worse for wear, even though she was standing alongside that red-skinned creature who’d engineered the corruption of Solvei’s family.
But the faint hope that she’d somehow not fallen into the same trap as the winter wolves had been dispelled almost immediately.
“I thought that would be obvious,” huffed Thermal Draft. “Of course I did.”
She delivered the news casually, as though commenting on something that hardly mattered in the least, but at that moment Lex felt as though the ground had fallen out from under him.
You failed her.
His tulpa’s condemnation was simple and direct, lacking the barbs and invectives it usually delivered. But that was no surprise; there were no words that could have made the truth of the situation harder for him to bear. No words except for one.
You failed her again.
Thermal Draft had been one of the ponies who’d died during the disastrous mission into Vanhoover that he’d ordered. Then, just like now, a devil had outmaneuvered him, hiding its presence until it was too late, and Thermal Draft – along with several other ponies – had paid the ultimate price for his lack of ability to discern the lurking threat and shield them from it. And now history was repeating itself again, the same way it had ever since he’d gotten here, with another one of those misbegotten abominations showing once again that he was powerless to protect her, just like he had been back in Vanhoover. Just like with Block Party. Just like with the others in Las Pegasus.
Except this time, Thermal Draft was facing a fate far worse than merely dying.
But he was snapped out of his recrimination as something completely unexpected happened a moment later: Thermal Draft used magic.
There was no gesturing or chanting on her part, but he could feel the magic taking effect as a quartet of colored lights appeared around her. It was enough to make him call upon his circlet, looking her over via the magical spectrum…and finding nothing out of the ordinary. But that wasn’t too surprising for a scan that only detected active and recently-faded spells.
For a brief moment he was tempted to forcibly augment the device, allowing him to peer deeper into the magical channels throughout her body. It might give him some insight into the specifics of what the phistophilus devil had done to her…
But Lex abandoned that idea almost immediately. Augmenting a magic item that way put strain on his body, and he couldn’t afford that now. He’d already had Solvei heal him of the wounds he’d taken during his fight with Bolverk on the way here, using another application of divine authority to do so, and while he still had plenty of uses of that power remaining, he didn’t want to spend them when there was another, much easier way of finding out what had happened to the pegasus.
“Thermal Draft, what did that thing do to you?”
For some reason, the question seemed to upset her. “Really? You’re the smartest pony I know, Lex. Aren’t the looks, the voice, and the magic enough to clue you in?”
Solvei chimed in then. “You had the Red Man make you into a pretty singing seidrmadr?”
“Close.” Drafty stepped in closer, nuzzling him for no reason that Lex could tell. “I had him make me into a Siren.”
That answer made no sense whatsoever. The Sirens weren’t simply pretty mares who could sing and cast spells; their agelessness was proof enough of that. But there were more important things than correcting Thermal Draft’s mistaken impression of what made Sonata and Aria different from other ponies. He needed concrete answers, and he knew where to find them.
“Show me the contract,” he demanded icily.
Thermal Draft blinked, giving him a blank look. “Huh?”
“The document you signed,” pressed Lex. “Show me your copy of it.”
The pegasus herself seemed a bit put off, but after a moment her smile returned. “If that’s what you want. Check this out!” She closed her eyes for a moment, and Lex felt another mild surge of magic, as she reached her wing into thin air and produced a rolled-up piece of paper. “Pretty neat, don’t you think? I can’t store more than one thing at a time with that spell, but it’s-, hey!”
Lex ignored her babbling, instead snatching the scroll with his telekinesis and scanning it furiously. It was written in the same unfamiliar language as the wolves’ contracts had been – he’d gathered the rest of them, alongside Bolverk’s, from Kaja as they’d left the den – but the potion he’d taken was still in effect. As such, it only took Lex a few seconds of looking the document over before he found what he was looking for, gritting his teeth as his shame and regret over allowing this to happen suddenly vanished, swallowed up by the feeling that washed over him then. The same emotion that had always saved him whenever anguish or despair or sadness had threatened to drown him.
Rage. Overwhelming rage.
“You know, I kind of thought you’d be happier about all this,” grumbled Thermal Draft. “I mean, I’m glad you were worried about me, but everything turned out fine! You’re okay, Solvei’s okay, and I’m better than okay! So what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal…” hissed Lex, black crystals beginning to sprout all around him as he looked up from the contract, glaring at the smirking creature standing across from them.
The creature whom he was about to utterly destroy.
For a long moment Drafty simply stared at him in what Lex could only presume was disbelief. But then, in complete defiance of the range of reactions he’d anticipated, she simply shook her head and snickered. “No way,” she chuckled. “Lex, there’s no way that’s right.”
Her total lack of concern for the gravity of the situation made Lex grit his teeth, fighting down the urge to scream at her. Instead, he folded the contract she’d given him so that only a particular section was visible, shoving it in her face. “‘The undersigned,’” he quoted, having memorized the words there despite glancing at it only briefly, “‘affirms and agrees that, upon the cessation – including but not limited to: death, discorporation, or any other instance of non-temporary discontinuance – of their mode(s) of existence contemporaneous to the enactment of this agreement, their metaphysical self (identified as the anima, astral body, soul, spirit, or other moniker; see section 1D.5(g), “Definitions”) shall immediately take up indefinite residence in Perdition and be subject to all applicable rules and laws therein under the oversight of this document’s purveyor, forsaking all other covenants, accords, contracts, pacts, concordances, or other forms of understanding – including those reached (implicitly or otherwise) with any gods, divinities, powers, or other entities that present themselves as such – in contravention thereof.’”
After he finished, Thermal Draft didn’t immediately react. Her brow furrowed, and Lex watched as she mouthed several of the words he’d just read her, apparently needing time to sort through them. It was only after several seconds had passed that her expression slowly changed to one of alarm. “Wait a minute,” she muttered as her eyes widened. “Wait a minute…I sold him my soul?”
She didn’t wait for him to reply before turning to look at Prevarius. “I sold you my soul?!” she yelled. “You said all you wanted in return for everything you gave me was some help understanding ponies better!”
“And I didn’t lie,” replied Prevarius glibly, his smile still in place. “I’m very interested in learning more about you little ponies. Specifically, how much I can trade you for on the soul market.”
“The soul market?!” shrieked Thermal Draft, beginning to hyperventilate. “As in, a market for buying and selling people’s souls?!”
“No, no, of course not,” chuckled the devil, waving a hand as though to brush Drafty’s suggestion away. The pegasus managed to calm herself a little at that, until Prevarius continued. “It’s also for buying and selling the souls of creatures that no one would consider to be ‘people’ in the first place. You can purchase the spirits of insects and protoplasms for almost nothing, whereas something like the anima of an ancient dragon or a royal naga can command sums that are absolutely princely!”
“What about my family?!” Solvei bounded forward then, and Lex cursed as he raised his foreleg, thinking that the winter wolf was going to charge the devil on her own. But she managed to rein herself in before he needed to invoke his divine authority, skidding to a halt on the snowy ground as she growled at Prevarius. “You’re saying that they’ll go to this ‘market’ of yours instead of joining my ancestors in the afterlife?! That that’s where Bolverk is right now?!”
“Oh, is Bolverk dead?” Prevarius shrugged. “A pity. I was counting on him to put pressure on the nearby pony communities. With a group of monstrous wolves threatening to overrun their defenses, they would have been tripping over themselves to cut a deal in order to gain the power to fight them off.”
Giving a deep sigh, the phistophilus shook his head. “I suppose I’ll have to find someone else to attack them now. I’d do it myself, but consumer confidence always takes a hit when people realize that you’ve created the problem that you’re offering them a solution to.”
“‘A solution’?” echoed Solvei, looking confused. “But Bolverk said you wanted my pack to bring you whatever ponies were left alive after they overcame them, so why…” Her jaw dropped as the truth dawned on her then. “You weren’t going to wait until after they raided the ponies at all! You were going to make deals to give the ponies seidr the way you did for Thermal Draft right after my pack started attacking, weren’t you?!” She snarled then, baring her teeth at the devil. “And with those powers, they would have slaughtered my family!”
“Mea culpa,” murmured Prevarius, giving the wolf a modest bow. “It’s considered gauche to arrange for the deaths of your clients after they’ve signed their souls away, but cutting a deal with parties who are adverse to your client is another matter entirely.”
Straightening up, the devil spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “If it’s any consolation, I was only interested in the ponies; the souls of your kind simply aren’t worth very much.”
That was enough to earn a howl of rage from the winter wolf. “Change my family back!” she demanded. “Change them back right now or I’ll kill-”
“Solvei!” snapped Lex. “That’s enough!”
The rebuke was enough to make Solvei gape, looking back at the unicorn in shock. “But Lex-”
Behind the wooden mask, Lex narrowed his eyes at her. “I said that’s enough.” He raised his wire-wrapped hoof again, pointing it at her in a silent reminder that he could easily force her to obey him. “Now, step back.”
For a moment Solvei hesitated, staring at Lex as though she couldn’t believe what he was telling her to do. But when he didn’t back down, the tension drained from her body, and she slunk back to his side with her ears pressed flat against her head. “You’re going to make him undo what he did to my family, right?” she whimpered softly. “You’re not just going to rescue Thermal Draft and abandon the rest of them?”
“He won’t do that,” murmured Drafty, her voice shaky with barely-repressed anxiety as she moved around and – invoking a spell to protect herself from the winter wolf’s natural cold – gave Solvei a hug. It was as much for herself as it was for the wolf; as frightened as she felt right now, having something big and furry to hold onto was the only way she could make herself stop shaking. “He has a plan. Lex always has a plan. He’ll fix this, you’ll see.”
For his part, Lex gave no indication that he’d heard either of them, instead glaring at Prevarius.
The devil, for its part, stared right back at him, looking completely unconcerned by the naked antipathy being directed toward him. “Lex Legis, I presume? Thermal Draft told me a great deal about you. Allow me to formally introduce myself.” The creature bowed at the waist, the papers hanging from its body-horns rustling with the motion. “My name is Prevarius, a phistophilus devil of Dis, the Second Hell.”
Lex didn't bother returning the cordial bow. Every instinct was screaming at him to rush in and destroy the smirking monster in front of him. The rage and shame that he felt at not having been able to prevent Thermal Draft from being tricked into signing her soul away bordered on unbearable – the latest failure in what was rapidly becoming a succession of failures, from the disastrous results of his scrying on Adagio Dazzle to his inability to overcome Dark Streak – and in that moment he wanted nothing more than to unleash his pent-up frustrations in a storm of violence that would see Prevarius torn limb from limb. With the magic items he now possessed, and the power he could imbue Solvei with, there was nothing to prevent him from indulging in that urge. He could practically feel a scream of fury, one that would announce his assault, climbing up his throat as he opened his mouth…
“How much?”
Raising an eyebrow, Prevarius tilted his head. “Hm?”
“How much?” repeated Lex, the words coming out thick with bile. “What’s your price to buy out the contracts for Thermal Draft and the rest of Solvei’s pack?”
Prevarius blinked once. Then a second time. Then he leaned his head back and let out a roar of laughter. “Oh! Oh my! Are you actually suggesting that you can simply purchase someone’s infernal contract?”
“Yes,” replied Lex flatly.
As easy as it was for him to compare the creature in front of him to the other devil he’d encountered – the belier that had called itself Xiriel – it was a different otherworldly entity that was at the forefront of Lex’s mind at that moment: Harrowing Ordeal.
A denizen of the Night Mare’s realm that he’d briefly summoned in order to answer some questions about the goddess, the creature had been intent on bargaining for its services. But while Lex had been insistent on paying for information with gemstones, the scabrous creature had given voice to its preference for a mare that it could take back to its infernal realm and impregnate, promising to return whoever it was given after its brood had been born. That had been a complete nonstarter, of course, but while Lex had chalked Harrowing Ordeal’s request up to simple degeneracy at the time, now he was less certain.
According to what Prevarius had said, souls were monetary units in its infernal realm. While there was nothing to suggest that Harrowing Ordeal participated in any such debased marketplace, that would explain why the creature had specifically mentioned siring offspring as a method of payment for its services; whatever children its unfortunate partner birthed would have been mere money to it, their souls sold to enrich their depraved father.
But that hadn’t happened. Harrowing Ordeal had ultimately acquiesced to Lex’s demand that it accept gems as payment. Which meant…
“I’ve dealt with things like you before,” asserted Lex, his eyes still glowing with repressed anger as he stared down the phistophilus. “Souls might be currency where you’re from, but they’re not the only currency. Given that you yourself just admitted that some souls are worth more than others – noting the comparative value of insects, dragons, and winter wolves – that means that there’s quantifiable value to them. As such, you should be able to quote a price for buying back the souls of Thermal Draft and Solvei’s pack.”
The words were like acid on his tongue. That pony life held value beyond measure was a core part of Lex’s worldview. To entertain any alternative was complete and utter anathema to everything he believed in.
But if maintaining the sanctity of his beliefs came at the cost of sacrificing another pony – or even the loved ones of someone he’d entered into an agreement to save – then that was hypocrisy of the highest order. Right now, there was no way for Lex to be sure that an attack on Prevarius would be successful. And even if it was, there was a very real possibility that killing the creature wouldn’t undo the contracts it had made.
And although this line of negotiation bent his moral code to its limits, it didn’t break it. Recognizing that other creatures didn’t share his view on the priceless nature of pony life, and interacting with them accordingly, was neither a renunciation of his own outlook nor repudiation of the truths that formed the basis for his ethical framework. It was the implementation of that principle that was impinged upon by the pragmatics of the situation, rather than the principle itself.
In other words, this was a question of politics.
And that was also one of his responsibilities as a prince.
“You’re quite correct!” laughed Prevarius, apparently delighted to be negotiating. “There are indeed other forms of fiscal compensation used as part of the soul trade. After all, how else would souls be exchanged if not for other goods or services? But alas,” the devil put a hand to his chest then, feigning sorrow, “while I might be persuaded to let the winter wolves go, I simply cannot bring myself to part with the soul of the lovely Thermal Draft. Not for any price.”
Gritting his teeth, Lex resisted the urge to lash out, knowing it was possible that the phistophilus was saying that purely as a bargaining tactic. “And why is that?”
But when it came a moment later, the devil’s answer caught him completely off-guard.
“Because among the myriad connoisseurs of souls, you ponies have the potential to be the next big thing!”
Prevarius’ answer was passionately delivered, tilting his head back and yelling the last three words to the sky as he spoke, raising his arms upward in excitement. “It’s every salesman’s dream! To get in on the ground floor of the next big craze, so that you’re sitting on a limited supply of the hot new item just as the demand skyrockets!”
Grinning so widely that it almost took in his ears, Prevarius tapped his fingers together excitedly as he looked at Lex. “It’s so exciting! Just recently, there’s been a trickle of pony souls onto the market, and buyers have been going absolutely crazy for them! We’ve had demons and liches and dark fey and witches and so many others break out into bidding wars to buy pony souls! Right now it’s just a flash in the pan, but it has the potential to become even bigger than that drow elf craze we had a few decades ago!”
Lex could only stare as Prevarius ranted. He had no idea what a “drow elf” was, but the juxtaposition of something as horrific as souls being traded for money with the banality of what sounded like some sort of buying frenzy – like how certain toys would experience sudden surges of popularity around Hearth’s Warming, leading to rushes to buy them all from stores – was jarring enough that he couldn’t help but feel nonplussed. But the devil had let something else slip as well, something that Lex knew he couldn’t afford to miss.
“You said that the souls of ponies started being traded only recently?” he murmured, narrowing his eyes.
“Precisely!” cheered Prevarius. “And when I saw how they were becoming all the rage, I knew I had to act fast! It required calling in every favor I was owed, and even agreeing to owe a few down the line, but I managed to track the supply down to here, in this region of this world!”
Spreading his arms out wide, the phistophilus spun in place, laughing in delight. “And now that I’ve found this place, I can finally do what I’ve always dreamed of: start cornering the market! At this rate, I’ll be able to buy my way up the infernal hierarchy in no time at all!”
Dropping his arms back down, Prevarius sighed happily before turning to give Lex a lazy grin. “So you see, I really can’t give Thermal Draft’s soul back. It’s simply too valuable. Unless…” – his smirk took on a sharper edge then – “you can offer me the soul of a pony even more valuable than she is.”
The hint was obvious enough that even Lex was able to pick up on it, meeting the devil’s gaze evenly. “You’re referring to me.”
Prevarius gave another shrug. “What can I say? She’s an unusual specimen, to be sure, but compared to what she told me about you? The pony who’s mastered multiple types of magic, has a transplanted horn, glowing eyes, and a shadow that falls against the light? Not to mention possesses a fragment of a god’s essence?” His eyes slid to the barbed wire wrapped around Lex’s foreleg then, chuckling. “You’re unique. And unique items always sell for the highest prices.”
Lex’s lip curled at that. “You’re suggesting-” But he didn’t have a chance to finish before he felt the wire begin to move, its edges pressing painfully against his skin. It wasn’t enough to draw blood, but it was more than enough to make the Night Mare’s opinion clear.
“I’m suggesting,” answered Prevarius with a throaty chuckle, “that I’ll happily give up Thermal Draft’s soul, and those of the winter wolves, in exchange for yours. Only after you die, of course.” Lightly plucking a ream of paper from one of the massive horns curled around its body, the phistophilus nodded toward Lex. “We can start ironing out the rest of the details now, if you’d like?”
Lex didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he eyed Prevarius for a long moment, considering.
Then he glanced at his foreleg, where the barbed wire was pressing itself even tighter as it dragged over his skin.
Then he looked at where Thermal Draft and Solvei were looking at him, their fear and desperation written plainly on their faces.
His mind made up, Lex turned back toward Prevarius. “First, I want the contract written in the language we’re speaking now…”
“No, I will not agree to a cure period in the event of asset forfeiture due to force majeure,” stated Lex flatly. “That’s grounds for an exclusionary clause, at the very least.”
“I can agree to that, if you’ll stipulate that such a circumstance warrants an indemnity,” offered Prevarius, scribbling on the parchment as he spoke. “With the requisite compensation being held in escrow, pro tempore.”
“In that case,” retorted Lex without missing a beat, “I want the remittance to be itemized in full, rather than inter alia…”
Watching from halfway across the clearing, Solvei lowered her head toward Thermal Draft. “Do you know what tongue they’re speaking?” she murmured, keeping her voice low so as not to interrupt the bickering duo.
Thermal Draft shrugged. “Legalese, I guess.”
“Lee-gull-eez,” repeated Solvei quietly, looking back at where Lex was continuing to hold his own against the Red Man using nothing more than strange words. “Is that the language of the spirits? The rest of my family only spoke to the Red Man for a moment or two before they pressed their paw against his softwood runes, and the pact was made. But Lex has been contending with the Red Man for…how long has it been?”
Sighing, Thermal Draft glanced upward, but the heavy cloud cover was still blocking the majority of the light, meaning that there were few clues as to how much time had passed since Lex and Prevarius had begun haggling over their contract. “An hour, I guess?”
“Oh.” Solvei paused to consider that, still not taking her eyes off of the unicorn and the devil as she spoke again. “How long is an ‘hour’?”
The question made Thermal Draft’s brow furrow in confusion, before realizing that Solvei hadn’t grown up with clocks or watches the way she had. “It’s, um…it’s how long it takes for the shadows on the ground to move a little bit.”
Solvei tilted her head at that, glancing around. With how diffuse the daylight was, there were no visible shadows to speak of…save for Lex’s, which had been trailing out behind him ever since he’d entered the clearing. Still, that he’d been confronting the Red Man for that long was impressive. “Lex must love you very much,” murmured the white wolf quietly.
But not so quietly that Thermal Draft didn’t hear her, her cheeks turning red at the unexpected comment. “Wh-what?!”
Solvei gestured toward the stallion in question. “He’s selling his soul to the Red Man so that you can have yours back, right? And that’s why it’s taking so long, so that he won’t be tricked the way you and Bolverk and my pack all were?” She couldn’t help the wistful sigh that escaped her then. “He’s really devoted to you, to want to protect you so badly.”
Drafty managed a wan smile at that, but shook her head. “No. Lex would do that for anypony. Not just ponies, either. He’s also trying to get the rest of your family out of their contracts too, remember?” Her expression turned melancholy as she gazed across the clearing. “And now it’s on him to save the rest of us. Again.” Her ears turned down as she slumped in place. “I wanted to be a Siren because I thought I’d be able to help him out, but instead I only made things worse.”
Solvei cocked her head again. “You mentioned that word before. What’s a Siren?”
“It’s a bit hard to explain,” grunted Drafty, “but basically, it’s a mare – a female pony – who’s incredibly beautiful, has a captivating singing voice, and can use powerful magic. Those are the qualities that Lex finds attractive, and I admit I wanted to be more appealing to him, but I also wanted to stop being such a burden to him all the time.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” protested Solvei. “When I first met you two, he had all those wounds, and you were the one taking care of him.” She paused then, realizing something. “Come to think of it, why was he hurt so badly then? And why were the two of you in that cave, so far away from any other ponies?”
Drafty gave a wry laugh at that, recalling the crisis they’d been in before the current one. “That’s kind of a long story. Basically, we-”
But she was cut off as a loud yell tore across the clearing, making her and Solvei jump in surprise.
Except it wasn’t just the sudden shout – which had come from Lex – that caused both of their eyes to widen. It was what had precipitated it.
Across from them, Lex had lunged forward, his hoof colliding heavily with Prevarius’ face.
Imbued by the magic of the robes he was wearing, as well as his new amulet, Lex’s strike carried a great deal more weight that it would have otherwise. The impact against the devil’s face was forceful enough that the sound of it seemed to fill the clearing, following in the wake of his battle cry as he finally released all of the pent-up frustration he’d been holding back. It was with a great deal of spiteful satisfaction that he watched the devil recoil…
By exactly one step, his infuriating smirk still in place. “Dear me,” laughed Prevarius, “does this mean that negotiations have broken down?”
“I was never negotiating with you,” spat Lex as he withdrew his foreleg, falling into a crouch. Physical combat had never been his forte, but with the magic items now in his possession it was a credible option for him. Although the lack of so much as a bruise on the devil’s cheek indicated that it might not be as credible as he’d hoped. “I just wanted you to think that.”
A contract, at its simplest, was simply an agreement between two or more parties. But agreements unto themselves meant little, since they were voluntarily entered into; and anything voluntarily agreed to could be voluntarily broken. That meant that the most important aspect of any contract was how it was enforced.
Lex had picked up on that immediately upon realizing what he was looking at, back when Kaja had turned the winter wolves’ contracts over to him back at their cave. But at the time, he hadn’t had enough information; with the contracts being written in the language of the devils, he’d only been able to review them due to the translation magic in the potion he’d drank. Even if he had done more than briefly skim it – locating Thermal Draft having been the priority at the time – Lex hadn’t been about to trust his understanding of what he’d read to such a spell. Without having examined the potion’s effects in greater detail, there was no way for him to be certain if its translation accounted for nuance, variable interpretation, or other shades of meaning.
And after confirming that Thermal Draft had fallen prey to the schemes of the devil she’d been brought before, Lex had known for certain that studying a version of the contract in his native language was absolutely necessary. That was the only way to figure out precisely how its soul-taking provision was enacted.
Fortunately for him, the creature that wrote those contracts was right there.
To that end, Lex had known that subterfuge – never his strong suit, but something which was imperative now – was called for. After all, it was highly unlikely that Prevarius would produce a contract purely so that he could figure out how to undermine it. But with the devil admitting that Thermal Draft had told it about him, a blunt offer to sell his soul would likely have put the creature on guard.
The answer, then, had been to signal that he was open to making a deal by offering to buy out the contracts it had made with Thermal Draft and Solvei’s kin. And just as he’d hoped, the devil had refused, but parleyed that refusal into an offer to buy his own soul in exchange for the others. It had been as eager to buy his soul as the Night Mare had been upset at the prospect that he’d sell it.
And now, having reviewed the contract – but not having signed it – Lex finally knew how it operated. And how to void it. Which meant the only thing left to do now-
“So we’re finally done playing games, are we?” chuckled Prevarius, straightening up without so much as a hint that he’d felt Lex’s punch.
Lex narrowed his eyes at that. “What?”
“Oh please,” snickered the devil. “I’ve been doing this for over six hundred years. You really think I don’t know when someone’s dealing in bad faith?” He pointed at the ring around Lex’s right foreleg then, a magic item which prevented low-level mental intrusions. “I might not be able to read your thoughts, thanks to that trinket you’re wearing, but I hardly need to. You have the worst poker face I’ve seen in a very long time.”
The devil raised a brow, his expression bemused. “It was clear from the moment you tried to buy back the souls of your little girlfriend and your pet’s family that you were looking for a way to investigate how infernal contracts functioned.” He casually waved the scroll they’d spent the last hour going over, before adding it to the collection of paper draped over his body-horns. “I trust the lesson was instructive?”
Lex grit his teeth, refusing to rise to the taunt. “The writing on those documents isn’t just a collection of clauses and provisions. They also diagram a ritual, one which alters the trajectory of the soul upon death.”
Prevarius’ smile widened. “It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it? The recipient signs their name in blood, and as soon as they do, it forms two effects; the first is to grant them whatever wishes they were looking for, but the second is a contingent effect. The body and the soul retain a connection even after death, you see; that’s why it’s resurrection magic which depends on having an intact corpse is easier to use than resurrecting someone who’s body has been completely destroyed. Of course, once a soul goes to Hell, we don’t let it go so easily.”
He reached a hand out then, caressing the hanging papers. “These contracts exploit that connection, so that when the soul tries to journey to its afterlife, the blood tie activates the secondary outcome, causing the soul’s aura – its numinous gradient, as an arcanist like you would say – to be altered while in transit, so that it naturally gravitates toward Perdition instead of its intended destination. And since the ritual effect is outlined ahead of time on the paper, there’s no chance of error or chaotic side effects.”
“But only so long as the contract itself is intact,” retorted Lex coldly. “If it’s destroyed before the recipient dies, all of its effects are null and void. And based on what you outlined during our discussion, I know that there are two copies of each contract you’ve made: one given to the individuals whom you’ve cut deals with-”
“-And the other is kept by me personally,” agreed Prevarius. “And it was quite obvious that once you figured that out, you’d forego signing and instead try to destroy the contracts in my possession. Since I obviously have no intention of letting you do so, that necessitates you to kill me before you can get to them.”
“A requirement that I intend to fulfill immediately,” hissed Lex, his eyes glowing brighter.
“Solvei! To my side!” he roared, sparing only the briefest glance back at where the winter wolf and the pegasus had been watching the exchange, alarmed. “Thermal Draft, fall back!”
But despite the announcement of imminent violence, Prevarius seemed wholly unconcerned, his smug expression not faltering in the slightest. “Do you know why I went along with your little scheme, despite it being so transparently obvious?”
“The motivations of someone who’s about to die are irrelevant,” dismissed Lex as the winter wolf bounded toward him.
“On the contrary,” tsked Prevarius. “I’ve been in more than a few fights since I was promoted to the rank of phistophilus – an occupational hazard, you see; there are more than a few people out there who object to what I do on principle – and my still being here is a testament to how hard I am to kill.”
The devil tilted his head to the side then, cracking his neck as he rolled his shoulders, loosening up. “No, the reason I humored you is because, despite what you think, you’re going to sign that contract we drew up.”
That earned a dark chuckle from Lex. “And how do you intend on making me do that?”
Prevarius put a hand to his cheek, as though scandalized by the question. “Perish the thought! I never make anyone sign a contract. They do it of their own free will, just like you’re about to.”
For the first time in their discussion, the devil’s smile took on a sharper edge. “You see, once you realize that you can’t kill me, that’s the only way you’ll be able to save your dear Thermal Draft and poor little Solvei’s family. Oh, you’ll struggle and you’ll rage and you’ll curse your own powerlessness, but it will all come to nothing. And when it does, the only way you’ll be able to hold on to that precious pride of yours will be to sign your soul away, saving them at the cost of yourself.”
In an instant, the phistophilus’ wolfish smirk was gone, his convivial expression back in place. “And so, everyone gets what they want. Your companions get out of their contracts, you get to feel like a big strong protector, and I get a highly profitable pony soul.”
Taking a deep breath, Prevarius let out a happy sigh. “I must admit, deals like these are the reason I enjoy my work so much.”
“Solvei, follow my lead,” instructed Lex as he circled the devil, moving to Prevarius’ left. “Coordinate your attacks with mine.”
“Right!” Solvei was already mirroring his movements, positioning herself to Prevarius’ right. Even if she had been the runt of the litter, she’d still gone out hunting with the rest of her family as soon as she’d been old enough, eagerly soaking up all the knowledge she could about how to bring down prey. Attacking a foe from opposite sides had been one of the earliest lessons she’d learned.
For his part, Lex waited until she was on the devil’s other side – Prevarius still grinning as he bemusedly looked between them, apparently completely unconcerned by their intent to come after his life – then raised his left foreleg to point at the phistophilus. “You should know,” he announced darkly, “that I don’t believe in granting an opponent mercy. Even if you offer to undo the contracts and leave this world forever, I won’t spare your life.”
The threat was dire enough that it made Thermal Draft – standing well away from the trio – gulp, and even Solvei felt a shudder run down her spine. But Prevarius simply threw his head back and laughed. “You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not too worried about that,” he chuckled.
Behind his mask, the corners of Lex’s lips turned upward as well, but unlike the devil there was no mirth in his smile. His threat had been nothing more than a distraction, a way to keep Prevarius focused on him while he held his hoof toward Solvei – while making it look like he was pointing at Prevarius, since the winter wolf was directly opposite the devil – and channeled his divine authority toward her, giving her the same suite of powers that he had when she’d faced Bolverk, slightly modified to account for his guesses regarding the phistophilus’ strengths and weaknesses.
But even so, Lex couldn’t help the rebuttal that rose to his lips then, baring his teeth as his eyes glowed brighter, meeting Prevarius’ own. “You will be.”
It was the last warning he gave before he rushed at the monster. On Prevarius’ other side, Solvei gave a loud howl as she charged, the sound ringing across the clearing.
Prevarius simply snorted at the display, crossing his arms over his chest as the two of them rushed in.
Lex got there first, his legs leaving the ground as he jumped upward, a blue glow surrounding his foreleg as he cocked it back, preparing to punch the devil right in the face for the second time.
His hoof had just gotten within a few inches of striking home when Prevarius vanished, teleporting away and reappearing across the clearing, standing right next to Thermal Draft.
The mare gasped, her eyes widening. But she had no chance to react as the devil tsked, a smug grin on his face-
-only for a purple aura to suddenly appear around him.
This time it was Prevarius’ turn for his eyes to widen, unable to do anything before the magic yanked him back to the spot that he’d just vacated.
Lex’s hoof was waiting for him when he arrived.
Just like before, the hit struck with enough force to put cracks in stone, the blue glow around his foreleg flaring as it made contact with the devil. But the phistophilus only tilted his head slightly from the impact, ignoring the pale light surrounding the hoof that had just struck him entirely; it was enough to let Lex see that the only damage he’d inflicted had been to knock the smile off of Prevarius’ face, which was now frowning in mild consternation.
But that changed a half-second later, as Solvei sank her teeth into the flesh of Prevarius’ right leg.
“Hnrgh!”
The devil’s groan of pain sent a rush of hateful satisfaction through Lex as he stepped back, his horn already glowing tried to use the phistophilus’ moment of distraction to form black crystal fetters around the creature’s legs. With its teleporting locked down, all they needed to do was seal the rest of its movement, and then finishing it off would be-
But before he could even begin making the attempt, Prevarius pivoted sharply, causing the branch-like black horns curling from around his back to whip around directly toward Solvei. Fortunately, the motion was obvious enough that the winter wolf saw it coming, recognizing that she had to abandon her position or risk being impaled. Even then, she came very close to suffering that fate anyway, only barely managing to leap back – ending up alongside Lex – before the devil’s horns swept through where she’d been.
Panting in residual pain, Prevarius stumbled for just a moment before regaining his footing, and Lex held off on using his dark magic, recognizing that the creature’s guard was back up.
But the phistophilus seemed to be in no hurry to counterattack, instead shifting his legs as he made sure that his wounded leg was still capable of bearing his weight. “I see now,” muttered Prevarius, his smile reappearing – though now rueful rather than mocking – as he took several deep breaths, straightening up before looking back at Lex. “I thought that first punch you threw, the one that ended our discussion over the details of your contract, was just you having a fit of pique. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?”
The devil pointed at the amulet hanging from Lex’s neck, then. “That’s not just a simple protective device. It also allows you to imbue it with a spell and release it as part of an attack, and so you made sure to load it with an anti-teleportation effect ahead of time.”
“I told you I’ve dealt with things like you before,” sneered Lex.
That he’d be facing a foe capable of teleportation had been near the forefront of Lex’s mind ever since he’d realized that his foe was a devil. After all, Xiriel had possessed that ability, and there had been no reason to think that Prevarius wouldn’t as well; it was the most obvious explanation for how a creature from another plane of existence had made its way here to the mortal world. Given how strong that ability was – Xiriel had nearly killed him after it had unexpectedly teleported right back after Lex had managed to shove the thing through a rip in space, and Twilight Sparkle’s ability to teleport had very nearly cost him their duel – finding a way to shut that power down had been one of Lex’s top priorities during the brief trip from the winter wolves’ den to the forest clearing. Otherwise, even if he was able to overpower his enemy, killing it before it could escape would be exceptionally difficult.
The obvious answer was to simply use his dark magic to curse the entire area with dimensional impermeability, the same way he had when he’d fought Twilight. But Lex hadn’t been satisfied with that answer; after all, Twilight had ultimately broken through that particular restriction. No matter that she’d leveraged an unlikely – and highly risky – series of circumstances in order to do it; if his curse hadn’t been strong enough to keep her restrained, Lex had little doubt it could stand up to a malevolent creature who was, in all likelihood, more powerful than her.
The best solution he’d been able to come up with had been to try and reduce the area affected. Instead of locking down a set area, he’d scale the curse back so that it could only affect a single creature. That was easier to do – though it still required him to physically boost his dark magic – but ran into another problem: doing so would almost certainly tip his hoof. After all, laying curses on someone required that he be within a few dozen feet of them, and Lex hadn’t doubted that the creature he’d be facing would have magical senses at least as sharp as his own. The last thing he wanted was for his plan to be detected and defeated before he could enact it.
Fortunately, he had a brand-new amulet capable of – among other things – storing a magical effect and releasing it when he struck someone.
That had been why, when he’d determined that the time for talking was at an end, the first thing Lex had done had been to slug Prevarius across the jaw. It had been quite cathartic, not simply because the monster had more than earned that level of retribution, but because he’d managed to release the curse without the phistophilus noticing.
“And I’m guessing that glow around your hoof just now was negative energy, probably from that mask you’re wearing, likewise routed to your attacks via your amulet,” continued Prevarius, still eyeing Lex as though reevaluating him after that last exchange. “Pity for you that didn’t have as much luck getting past my defenses.”
Lex bit back a grimace of irritation at that. Even with all of his preparations, it had still been a stroke of good fortune that his anti-teleportation curse had worked; he’d felt the effect struggle to get past the devil’s passive resistances, and he had little doubt that its ability to withstand magical attacks was on a level similar to that of Xiriel, who had harmlessly shrugged off most of the spells he’d thrown at it. And judging from how he’d punched Prevarius twice now with nothing to show for it, the devil apparently also had supernatural toughness akin to – or, more likely, better than – Bolverk. Which meant that attempting to damage the creature physically, even augmenting his attacks with the magic of his amulet and his mask, was a losing proposition.
But not for Solvei.
Prevarius must have been thinking the same thing, because his eyes slid over to the winter wolf then, narrowing in consideration. “But what I can’t figure out is her.” He glanced down at the bloody wound on his leg for a moment before eyeing Solvei again. “I don’t see any active spell auras on her. Yet to wound me so easily should have required spiritual energies laced with sanctity, which is a numinous aspect her kind aren’t known for.”
He looked back at Lex then, his expression thoughtful. “Not to mention that if she had that power before now, she likely would have challenged me already. Which means that it’s something you granted her. But you don’t seem like that type either, and based on what Thermal Draft told me, neither does that divinity you worship. So how did you do it?”
“Figure it out for yourself,” replied Lex coldly.
“I’m happy to give you another demonstration if you want,” added Solvei, baring her teeth in a snarl.
Prevarius only sighed. “A pity. You’d be surprised how many people happily turn over information about their powers just because they’re asked about them, even in the middle of combat. But I suppose that was too much to hope for with you.”
The devil shifted his stance then. It wasn’t much different from how he’d been before, save that he lowered his center of gravity a little, keeping his arms up and in a ready position, muscles tense where before they’d been relaxed. “I’ll admit, I was taking you both rather lightly before,” he admitted, his tone conversational. “I thought I had the two of you all figured out. A lesson in overconfidence, I suppose.”
“Lex! Solvei! Be careful!” yelled Thermal Draft, backing up despite already being halfway across the clearing. “He looks a lot more dangerous all of a sudden!”
The warning came as Solvei suddenly began growling louder, hackles raised. It was enough to make Lex frown, realizing that he’d once again missed another non-verbal cue; to his eyes, Prevarius’ body language was inscrutable, but the other two had clearly read something in his posture that had caused them to become alarmed.
What Prevarius said next proved the two of them right.
“Now then,” continued the phistophilus, “would either of you like to try attacking again? Because I can assure you that this time, I’ll take you seriously indeed.”
“Solvei,” murmured Lex, keeping his voice just above a whisper. “I want you to move in and press him as hard as you can, but be ready to fall back on my signal. I’m going to try and end this in one shot.”
The winter wolf gave a sharp nod in reply, not taking her eyes off of Prevarius. “Okay, but don’t be surprised if I rip his throat out before you do whatever you’re gonna do,” she growled hatefully. “He wasn’t just planning on betraying my family, he’s also using his seidr to try and enslave them when it’s time for them to join our ancestors in the afterlife! I’ll kill him for that!”
The invective made Lex frown, giving her a sidelong glare. “Just do as I tell you,” he rumbled warningly. “We’re already in a bad tactical position. Don’t make it worse by doing something stupid.”
Solvei grimaced at that, but didn’t have a chance to respond as Prevarius spoke up. “By the by, Solvei,” he called, his voice filled with faux-sweetness. “Did I mention that, although your father never signed a contract with me before Bolverk killed him, I’m considering capturing his spirit anyway? It’s usually more trouble than it’s worth to take possession of souls postmortem, but even if your kind aren’t worth very much, I do so hate breaking up a set.”
“Don’t you DARE!” screamed Solvei, all self-control vanishing as she rushed forward, jaws wide. “DON’T YOU DARE DO ANYTHING TO MY FATHER!!!”
“Solvei, stop!” yelled Lex, only to curse as his warning was completely ignored. This was just like when he’d told her to attack Bolverk cautiously, only for her to charge in the same way she was now! Against a brute like Bolverk that had been reckless, but against a cunning opponent like the phistophilus it was dangerous in the extreme. I’ll need to drag her back with divine authority!
But before he could so much as raise his foreleg, Prevarius made his move.
With a cruel chuckle, the crossed his arms in front of himself, each hand reaching for one of the thick horns curling around the opposite side of his body. Taking hold of two of the unwound scrolls that were draped over the black protrusions, he gripped them tightly, one leg sliding backward to adjust his balance as Solvei raced toward him.
Then he whipped his arms forward, the scrolls lancing out toward Solvei almost faster than the eye could see.
Intellectually, Lex knew that should have accomplished nothing. Paper was just paper; no matter how quickly Prevarius whipped it through the air, it should have just fluttered limply before falling to the ground.
But that wasn’t what happened. Instead, the scrolls snaked out with all the speed and flexibility of a pair of whips, curling around even as their edges remained firm and rigid. It was in complete defiance of how such flimsy material should have acted, but that was no comfort as the razor-thin sides of each scroll struck Solvei, causing her to scream in pain as they opened up deep papercuts across her body.
Even so, the winter wolf didn’t abandon her wild charge, too enraged to be stopped. But all she earned for her perseverance was another pair of painful cuts as she fought to close the distance between herself and the devil. It was only by sheer luck that she managed to dodge a fifth strike, leaping into the air as she finally got to within a few feet of Prevarius, blood spilling onto the ground beneath her as she leaped…
And the devil flicked his wrist, causing the scroll in his left hand to wrap around Solvei’s back leg in mid-air. With her jaws only inches from his face, Prevarius smirked as he yanked his arm back, causing Solvei to be pulled violently off-course, thrown around in a wide arc before being slammed onto the ground hard enough that the blood from her injuries splattered around her, turning the snow from white to red.
“SOLVEI!” screamed Thermal Draft, starting to race forward.
“STAY BACK!” roared Lex, his horn lighting up as he hurriedly prepared to retaliate. “DON’T COME ANY CLOSER!”
Seeing Thermal Draft skid to a halt, even as Prevarius took a step closer to the downed winter wolf, Lex didn’t hesitate. He’d planned on doing this once Solvei got clear, but now he had no other alternative except to hope that he’d calculated the distances involved correctly. Gritting his teeth, the aura around his horn flared brighter as he concentrated on his telekinesis…
And flung one of the explosive beads from Bolverk’s necklace right behind Prevarius.
It detonated immediately, causing a rush of heat to flood across the clearing. It was enough to make Thermal Draft put a hoof in front of her face, crying out in surprise despite being over two dozen feet away from the flames. Solvei yelped as well, much closer to the sudden conflagration, but to Lex’s relief he saw that she’d escaped the radius of the blast, the rush of fire stopping a few feet from her back legs, driving her to pick herself up and start limping away; that was fortunate, since he hadn’t been able to give her any special resistance to fire with his last application of divine authority. And as for Prevarius, who had been nearly at the center of the blast-
“Ah, what a refreshing temperature!”
As the last of the flames went out, the phistophilus remained exactly where he’d been before Lex had thrown the bead, looking no worse for having been caught in the fireball. Although the ground – now clear of snow – was charred and blackened, and residual heat could still be felt in the air, the devil didn’t have so much as a soot stain marring his features. Worse, the contracts draped over his body were similarly unharmed, completely intact despite the flames.
Lex felt himself tense up at the sight. It hadn’t been outside of his expectations that the devil might escape unharmed, due to its ability to resist magical attacks, but he’d hoped to at least take out the contracts. That would not only have freed Thermal Draft and Solvei’s family, but also – based on how it used the papers to thrash the winter wolf just now – crippled Prevarius' ability to fight! Or does that thing have some other method of protecting them? Given that he was willing to use them as weapons, they can’t-
“That’s that trinket I gave Bolverk, isn’t it?” chuckled Prevarius, turning to face Lex. “I’d almost forgotten about that. Not that it really matters. Fire doesn’t bother us devils, you know. But the same can’t be said for winter wolves.” With a single motion, the phistophilus returned the scroll in his left hand to his horns, and pointed a finger at Solvei, who froze in alarm at the threatening gesture.
Fortunately for her, Lex hadn’t. Instead, is left foreleg raised, pointing the barbed wire toward Solvei as he sent a new application of divine authority toward her, one that put almost everything toward defense, healing, and resistance to flames. It wasn’t a moment too soon, as three bright red rays shot out from the devil’s outstretched finger…but not toward Solvei.
With his concentration devoted toward protecting the winter wolf, there was almost nothing Lex could do. It was thanks to his defensive enchantments and magic items that he somehow managed to dodge the first beam. But the second and third slammed into him, striking him on the shoulder and chest. Agony tore through him immediately, and he couldn’t hold back a roar of pain as he felt his flesh sizzle and burn.
“LEX!!!”
The cry came from Thermal Draft and Solvei at the same time, both running toward him. But the unicorn barely heard them, pain and sudden insight pushing all else from his mind as he fought to remain standing. He wasn’t just calling out the wrong target to get me to drop my guard, cursed Lex inwardly. He saw Solvei’s reaction to that explosion, and knew that she didn’t have any protection against fire. Since he knew I’d enhanced her, he deliberately announced his attack so that I’d do it again, giving him a chance to try and figure out how divine authority functions!
He was proven right a moment later. “Hm, what was that?” mused Prevarius, arching a brow as he watched Solvei rush to Lex’s side. “You held out your hoof toward her, but there were no spell effects that I could see, and I didn’t feel any magical emanations either. So what were you doing?”
Thinking on that for a moment, the devil gave a belated shrug. “Ah well, I suppose all I need to do is take away that ring you’re wearing. Then it should be easy to read your mind and find out the answer.” With that, he strode forward, intent on making good on his plan.
Solvei had other ideas. “You stay away from him!” she snarled, planting herself directly between Lex and Prevarius.
The threat caused the devil to chuckle, shaking his head in a patronizing manner. “Ah, sweet little Solvei. You know, I’m almost tempted to offer you a deal: sign your soul away, and I’ll let the rest of your family go. That way I can sell you and Lex as a pair after you die, like a toy that comes with an accessory. That would really drive up his value, don’t you think? After all, he hasn’t tried to use that mysterious power on himself or Thermal Draft, which means that there’s some reason it has to be you.”
“I’d never forge a pact with you!” hissed Solvei. “Never!”
Behind her, Lex was thinking furiously, trying to come up with an alternate strategy. Despite having been certain that this would be a hard fight, Prevarius’ combat abilities were still higher than he’d expected. Worse, the devil was a brilliant tactician in his own right, one who was willing to sacrifice immediate advantages for longer-term gains. Which is why he’s stopping to taunt Solvei again, Lex knew. He’s trying to goad her into letting something slip, while also giving me time to use it again so he can get another chance to decipher it.
For a moment, Lex was tempted to do so anyway. He’d given Solvei greater defenses now, but he had no idea if they’d be able to protect her if the devil went on the attack again. No, they definitely won’t, Lex silently amended a moment later, glancing at Solvei, who was now close enough for him to see what he’d missed before.
Although he’d given her an accelerated ability to heal, her fur was still missing from where she’d been cut by the devil’s scrolls. A shudder went down Lex’s spine then as he recalled the medical textbooks he’d borrowed from House Call for the trip to Las Pegasus. The sides of her neck. The heels of her front paws. The thighs of her back legs. If winter wolf anatomy is anything like pony anatomy, those are all areas where major blood vessels are close to the surface of the body. He was trying to bleed her out!
That Prevarius had been able to control the placement of his strikes against a moving target to such a degree was worrisome in its own right. But even worse was how he’d been going for disabling Solvei rather than trying to kill her outright. Because he knew it was more important to gather information, Lex realized grimly. This is what he meant by taking us seriously. Everything he’s doing now is so he can evaluate what we’re capable of!
As if to further prove Lex right, the devil continued to taunt Solvei. “You’ll never sign a contract with me? Such a shame.” Giving an exaggerated sigh, he hung his head, before shaking off his faux-sadness with an easygoing shrug. “Well, I suppose I could just use the blood you got all over this unsigned contract I cut you with” – he waved the unrolled paper still clutched in his right hand – “and forge your name. That will just be our little secret.”
Solvei’s eyes had just enough time to widen in alarm before the devil burst out laughing. “Oh! The look on your face just now! You should have seen yourself!” he cackled, enjoying a long laugh before calming down. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. You see, these papers are specially made by our Ministry of Mortal Relations. They don’t rip or tear, they don’t smudge or burn, and the blood signature has to be signed immediately, otherwise it doesn’t take. It’s a pity, don’t you think? Otherwise I would have been able to sign your contracts on your family’s behalf instead of having Bolverk-, whoa!”
The phistophilus’ jeering came to an abrupt halt as he turned to the side suddenly, barely avoiding a spray of a dark, foul-smelling liquid that arced through the space where he’d once stood, landing on the ground and sizzling loudly.
Clucking his tongue, Prevarius turned to look at the person who’d launched the surprise attack. “Tsk tsk, Drafty. And here I thought we were friends.”
“Friends?!” shouted the pegasus, her expression outraged. “Friends?! You pretended to be nice to me so that you could trick me into signing away my soul! You helped some crazy wolf force Solvei’s family into giving up theirs! And now you’re trying to take Lex’s by using ME as leverage!” Seething, she flared her wings out, too enraged to even flinch at how that stretched out the injured one. “WE ARE NOT FRIENDS!”
Placing a hand on his chest, Prevarius put on an exaggerated pout. “I’m hurt you think so, especially since I haven’t said a word about all those secrets you’re keeping from your boyfriend here.”
Drafty blanched at that, but Lex had other things on his mind at that moment, instead staring at where the caustic liquid Drafty had fired – doubtless a product of the spellcasting that Prevarius had given her – was dissolving the patch of ground it had landed on. He dodged it.
Whatever powers the phistophilus had given Thermal Draft, Lex found it hard to believe that they were potent enough that they posed any serious threat to his ability to resist harmful magic. But the devil had made sure to avoid the attack, so if it wasn’t to protect himself…
Behind his mask, Lex’s eyes turned toward the contracts draped over Prevarius’ horns. Those scrolls might not be able to be ripped or torn or burned, he decided silently. But he didn’t say anything about melting them.
“Solvei,” murmured Lex, his voice thick with urgency. “Listen very carefully. We’re changing the plan-”
“THERE THEY ARE!”
The shout came from above, causing everyone’s eyes to turn upward. But only for a moment, as Turid, Kaja, Ebbe, and Sten all dropped out of the sky, surrounding Prevarius on each side.
“What are you all doing here?!” yelped Solvei, wearing her surprise openly. “It’s dangerous!”
“Which is why we’re here!” answered Sten immediately, baring his teeth at Prevarius.
“We heard you crying out, and we couldn’t take it anymore!” added Kaja.
“We shamed ourselves when you were fighting Bolverk, so we’re making it right now!” agreed Sten.
“I couldn’t do anything to save your father,” declared Turid, giving Solvei a sorrowful look. “I won’t be able to face him in the afterlife if I don’t do everything I can to save his children.”
Her features hardened then, turning to glare at Prevarius. “You’ve exploited my family long enough, Red Man! This is the end!”
Prevarius didn’t reply immediately, instead taking a moment to regard each of the winged wolves in turn, then glancing at Thermal Draft, then Solvei, and finally at Lex. At last, he shrugged.
Lex had no intention of waiting to find out what Prevarius’ “Plan B” was.
“All of you!” he roared, causing the winter wolves’ ears to swivel toward him. “Blast him with your breath weapons! Now!”
It was a desperate strategy, and one that had evidence against its efficacy. After all, if Prevarius felt no apparent discomfort at being outside in the cold, then it was likely he had some sort of resistance to freezing temperatures. But that didn’t necessarily mean that he was completely immune to such things the way he apparently was to fire, which meant that if this worked, they’d at least have a viable vector of wearing the creature down. After all, whatever else the phistophilus was, he wasn’t regenerative; it hadn’t escaped Lex’s notice that the bite on his leg that Solvei had dealt him was still unhealed.
To her credit, Solvei obeyed him immediately, opening her jaws wide and unleashing a stream of snowy, super-chilled air at the devil. The rest of her family followed her lead, and in a moment Prevarius’ body could hardly be seen, reduced to little more than a vague outline as he was pelleted with freezing blasts from five directions at once. But despite being obscured, Lex could see the devil well enough to discern that he was hunching his shoulders and raising his arms in a crossed position, as if to protect his face. It was working!
Then he felt a magical fluctuation.
Thermal Draft, now in possession of magical abilities of her own, appeared to sense the same thing. “It’s not working!” she yelled, rushing over to Lex’s side. “He’s up to something!”
“I’m aware!” snapped Lex, tension making his voice come out as a hiss. That Prevarius was doing something was obvious; it was figuring out what he’d done – and how to craft an appropriate response – that was the problem.
The obvious answer was to use his circlet to peer into the magical spectrum in order to get a better sense of what the devil was doing. But that would take too long; with the amount of magic that had been put into play since the start of the battle, the number of active and residual spell auras would make it virtually impossible to get an adequate reading with any timeliness. And he doubted that the devil would sit back and let him decipher whatever he’d done at his own pace.
Which meant that the best course of action was to go forward with the plan he’d come up with right before Solvei’s family had intervened. Besides, he decided with a grim smile, it should work even better now that those other four are here.
Moving up alongside Solvei, fighting down a pained grunt as the burns he’d taken ached at the movement, he pulled Thermal Draft closer. The roar of the wind from the winter wolves’ breath weapons made it hard to hear, but right now that was a boon; a lot depended on keeping this strategy from Prevarius until it was too late…and hoping that whatever the devil was doing wouldn’t disrupt it.
“Solvei, Thermal Draft, I have an idea, but I’m going to need you both in order to make it work…”
It took only a few seconds to explain what he wanted them to do, which was just as well. The last word had barely left his mouth when Solvei finally ceased her frigid exhalation, panting as she finally started breathing in again. Nor was she the only one, the rest of her family following suit barely a second after her.
Almost as the same moment, Lex felt whatever spell Prevarius was using suddenly snap into effect.
But nothing happened to mark the sudden activation of the devil’s magic. There was no flash of light or burst of sound or anything to indicate just what the devil had done. Instead, the only thing that happened was the devil straightened up, letting out a sharp breath as he brushed the snow off of his arms. “I’ll admit, I felt a chill there,” he chuckled, infuriating grin still in place despite the painful-looking patches of frostbite dotting his body. They weren’t nearly what an ordinary person would have suffered after being hit with a multitude of miniature blizzards, however, and the devil himself didn’t seem overly bothered by them. “Now where was I? Ah yes! Plan B!”
In front of Lex, Solvei suddenly lifted her head, body going tense. “I smell something,” she growled. “There’s a new scent all of a sudden!”
“I smell it too,” growled Turid, nose twitching as she looked around, her other children doing the same. “It’s like…old bones that have somehow gone sour.”
Thermal Draft looked befuddled by the description. “What does that mean?”
“It means that something else is here!” cursed Lex, even as he held his foreleg out toward Solvei, giving her the necessary configuration of divine authority that she’d need in order to do her part of the plan. “That’s what his ‘Plan B’ is: calling for backup!”
Drafty’s eyes widened. “You’re saying there’s an invisible monster here?!”
“So, here’s the situation,” announced the devil, his voice loud enough to carry across the clearing. “I’m in the middle of closing a contract with the red-horned pony over there” – he nodded at Lex, his eyes looking carefully at nothing – “and some of my old customers” – this time lazily waved a hand to indicate Solvei’s family – “are getting in the way. If you wouldn’t mind running interference, I’ll give you five percent of the get profits when I sell that pony’s soul.”
Everyone tensed, waiting for the invisible creature’s reaction to the devil’s words. The wolves held themselves at the ready, still trying to figure out where the unseen creature was lurking. Drafty began casting a spell, and despite the lack of words or gestures on her part, the construction was familiar enough for Lex to recognize that she was looking into the magical spectrum. Knowing that she’d run into the same problems that he’d predicted, Lex had no expectation that she’d be able to find whatever Prevarius had brought forth; as it was, he was already figuring out an alternative, even as he finished giving Solvei the powers she’d need. If I use my dark magic, I should be able to enhance my senses enough to figure out-
“Ugh, fine,” moaned Prevarius suddenly. “Ten percent of the gross profits, and I’ll recommend you for a promotion interview. But only if you act now.”
Apparently the phistophilus offer was acceptable, because Sten suddenly let out a pained howl, blood spurting from his side.
And the invisibility of the creature that Prevarius summoned wore off.
To Lex’s eyes, the thing looked like some sort of humanoid that had spent its entire life underground, been starved for a year, and then stretched out on a rack. Nearly ten feet tall, it couldn’t have weighed more than a few dozen pounds, its gray skin clinging to its bones like its skeleton had been shrink-wrapped. Hairless and lacking anything resembling sex organs, the only thing it wore was a wispy gray cloak…which Lex realized a moment later were wings tucked against its back, the membranes far thinner and flimsier than those of Solvei’s kin. Its eyes were nearly too large for its cranium, giving it a bug-eyed look.
Despite the monstrosity’s frail appearance, it exuded a palpable aura of menace. Lacking lips entirely, its teeth weren’t separate bones, instead being jagged spikes that projected directly from its skull and jawbone. Its fingers and toes ended in pointed claws, one of which was already covered in blood as it pulled back from where it had raked bloody furrows into Sten’s side.
But the single most notable aspect of the creature was its tail. Thick, heavy, and segmented with a stinger on the end, it looked like it had been plucked from the body of some sort of giant scorpion and attached to the monster, a drop of poison leaking from the end as the intimidating limb curled up over the thing’s head…
And then came rushing down to bury itself in Sten’s flank.
The wolf screamed in pain, and his agonized cries took on a more anguished note a moment later as the creature pressed its attack, digging its other claw into Sten’s neck as it scuttled forward, burying its face in his side as its jaw worked at wound it had already torn open.
“STEN!!!” The name erupted from the throats of the rest of the mutated winter wolves, abandoning their positions around Prevarius to race to the aid of their comrade.
They weren’t alone, as Solvei moved to join them, only to stop as Lex’s telekinesis wrapped around her tail, causing her to stumble in place. “Stop, you idiot!” he snarled. “Remember the plan!”
Solvei looked back at him, her expression stricken. “But Sten-”
“Lex is right,” insisted Thermal Draft. “Your family can handle that thing. We-”
“Need to put your little plan into action?” called Prevarius bemusedly. “You know, I seem to recall mentioning before that I can read minds. Do you actually think I don’t know what you’re up to now that you’ve told those two what your strategy is?”
“You’re lying,” murmured Thermal Draft, squinting at the phistophilus. “It’s hard to be sure, because of all the spell auras around here, but I’m not detecting that type of magic from you.”
“Tsk, how quickly they bite the hand that feeds them.” Glancing back at where Solvei’s family were throwing themselves at the creature he’d summoned, the devil looked back at the white wolf with a smirk. “Speaking of which, I should mention that Degron, my association over there, is quite the experienced killer, even among osyluth devils. You already abandoned your family once when they all signed contracts with me; are you really going to do it again now?”
Solvei’s legs shook, not in fright but in suppressed rage. “I didn’t abandon them! I went to find help so I could save them! And that’s what’ll happen when we tear you apart!”
Clucking his tongue in paternalistic disappointment, Prevarius finally turned his attention back to Lex. “And then there’s you. So desperate to protect everyone around you, and yet look at you now: sending your pet to fight on the front lines, letting your girlfriend do reconnaissance, and even letting those poor wolves fend for themselves against a foe they can’t possibly defeat. What kind of leadership do you call that?”
In other circumstances, the words would have struck Lex deeply. But now he found it easy to ignore them, certain that Prevarius was trying to pull off some twisted scheme. “The kind that will result in your death,” he replied bluntly. “And won’t require any sacrifices in order to achieve it.”
“Hm, you know, I’m starting to think that you just might be able to pull that off,” admitted Prevarius after a moment, giving a thoughtful nod. “You’ve given me quite a bit of trouble during this fight; the fact that I had to call Degron is proof enough of that…which gives me an idea. How about we make a wager?”
Thermal Draft’s face screwed up in confusion at that. “A wager?”
“A contest,” replied Prevarius, keeping his eyes on Lex, “between your wolf and my associate. You can enhance her however you want, and they’ll fight to the death. If Solvei wins, I’ll turn over the souls of her family and Thermal Draft. If she dies, you sign your soul over to me, and I keep Thermal Draft’s as well. It’s a favorable offer, don’t you think?”
Reaching around to one of his body-horns, Prevarius plucked free a scroll; oddly, this one was rolled up, unlike the others, requiring him to slide it off of the horn. “Of course, I’ll need you to sign an agreement stipulating to the terms. If you could just look this over…” Holding the scroll toward Lex, he started to unroll it-
Thermal Draft gasped, her eyes going wide. “No!”
But before she’d even begun to speak, Lex was already taking action, his horn glowing as a thin spike of black crystal shot up from the ground, impaling the scroll and ripping it from Prevarius’ hands. Lex didn’t stop there, driving it further and further upward, carrying the thing dozens of feet into the air before he directed additional protrusions to erupt outward from the head of the spike, ripping through the paper and tearing it to shreds.
Shaking, Thermal Draft sat down, gulping. “That scroll wasn’t like the others,” she explained, catching a glimpse of Solvei’s confused and alarmed expression. “It had a spell on it, one which was radiating evil magic.”
“Yes, and it really was a fine piece of work,” sighed Prevarius. “Such a pity. I was quite looking forward to watching you all writhe in agony when you viewed the symbol of pain I’d inscribed on there.” Shrugging, he flicked away a scrap of paper falling around him. “For it to be destroyed so easily, I suppose that’s what I get for using chemically-treated paper rather than the truly infernal kind. It can stand up to fire, but not much else.” He shook his head then, his expression like that of an office worker forced to use substandard materials. “You know how it is with inscribed magic.”
“I do,” answered Lex coldly.
It hadn’t been any sort of chemical analysis of the scroll that had let him detect Prevarius’ trap. Nor had he analyzed its magical signature the way Thermal Draft had. Rather, it was simply that he’d recognized a situation similar to one he’d been in before.
Xiriel, the last devil he’d killed, had carried a scroll also. Unlike Prevarus’, Xiriel’s scroll had contained pre-cast spells, but it had also contained a rune that – as soon as Lex had looked at it – had exploded, injuring him badly and destroying the scroll in question. It hadn’t been a stretch for Lex to imagine that Prevarius had a similar trick, particularly since the scroll he’d withdrawn just now had been rolled, unlike all of the others; all the better to keep whatever “symbol of pain” it had from being accidentally activated.
“Lies,” muttered Solvei, her face twisted in an expression of utter loathing as she watched the last scraps of paper flutter to the ground, the sounds of her family still fighting Degron loud in her ears. “It’s all you do: tell lies. You lied to my family about what those pacts meant. You lied to Bolverk about making more pacts with other ponies. You lied to Drafty about being her friend. You lied about wanting to end things now with an honorable challenge.”
Snarling, she slammed a paw down, trembling with rage. “I’m sick of it! Your lies have done nothing but hurt everyone I know, and I’M SICK OF IT!”
Growling, she looked at Lex, seeking permission. “Is everything ready?”
Lex paused just long enough to glance at Thermal Draft – who nodded grimly – before answering. “It is,” he replied, before telling Solvei what she’d been waiting to hear.
The thought crept across Turid’s mind with an undercurrent of anger, frustration, and disbelief. Despite having that creature – Degron, the Red Man had called it – outnumbered four to one, the thing was somehow holding its own against all of them, even with the powers they’d been given. Or rather, we’re somehow managing to hold our own against it, she corrected herself grimly.
Although they’d managed to sink their teeth into Degron several times now, leaving bite marks that oozed black blood across its hideous body, it was obvious even at a glance that they’d only inflicted superficial damage to the creature. Despite its frail appearance, the monster’s bones refused to break, no matter how hard any of them bit down on them. Nor did it seem discomforted by the blasts of frigid air they made sure to breathe out when biting it, the ice crystals formed by their exhalations refusing to become lodged in its filthy skin.
But the creature had no such impediments when it came to lashing out at them. Skittering about on all fours like some oversized insect, its spindly teeth and slender claws had cut through each of them with only modest resistance, their toughened muscles doing little to turn away the monster’s natural weaponry. But it was the creature’s tail that was its most dangerous feature, being the primary reason why fighting to a stalemate was the best they’d been able to achieve so far.
Their usual tactic for bringing prey down was to surround it, with each member of the pack darting in to bite at their target’s unprotected side, trading off attacks as it spun around to face each new threat. But Degron had found a way to turn that strategy against them.
Despite appearances, they’d learned the hard way that the creature’s tail was not only incredibly flexible, but its strikes were dangerously fast as well. Each of them had tried rushing in from opposite directions, looking to wear the creature down, only for its poison-tipped appendage to whip around and bury itself in their bodies. But rather than being painful, the poison it had pumped into them had a far more insidious effect, numbing their muscles and making it difficult for them to put their full power into their jaws.
Even now, Turid could feel a slackness building in her muzzle, preventing her from biting down to full effect as she moved in, barely managing to slip under another lightning-fast thrust from Degron’s tail and close her jaws around the creature’s back leg, twisting her head to try and throw it off-balance.
It was a desperate strategy; there was nothing in the creature’s appearance to suggest that it had any sort of soft underbelly for them to sink their teeth into. But it was better than nothing…or at least, it would have been, if she’d managed to pull its leg out from under it. Instead, all she managed to accomplish was provoking an angry hiss from Degron as it kicked her jaw away, one claw coming out to swipe heavily against her muzzle. Despite the lack of feeling in her mouth, the strike made her head ring, and the taste of blood – her own, she realized belatedly – spilled over her tongue.
Dizzy after the hit she’d taken, Turid stumbled, only distantly noting that Degron had turned to face her, jaws opening as the hideous thing rushed forward-
“Mother! Look out!” Kaja’s voice cut through Turid’s awareness just in time for her to recognize that it was her daughter who’d interposed herself between her and the oncoming monster. A moment later, Kaja’s pained shriek filled the clearing as Degron sank his misshapen teeth into her wing, biting down hard. Nor did the Red Man’s monster stop there, tail rushing in to sink its stinger into her neck, making her groan as she thrashed, trying to get away.
She succeeded at that only because Ebbe and Sten ran in toward Degron’s back legs then, drawing the creature’s attention toward them long enough for Kaja to tear herself free of the disgusting thing’s jaws…though doing so took a good chunk out of her wing as well. Even then, the cost of her freedom was high, as one of Degron’s back legs raked its claws across Ebbe’s face – barely missing his eyes – and its tail hit Sten again, pumping more poison into him.
It was with frustrated grunts and pained whimpers that the four of them fell back, eyeing the creature warily. All of this, and it’s not even trying to kill us, shivered Turid, feeling a rush of fear move down her spine. The Red Man just wanted it to keep us from helping Solvei. If he’d told this thing to finish us off…
She wasn’t the only one thinking that. “This creature is toying with us!” spat Ebbe, giving Degron a hateful look. “It’s trying to keep us away from Solvei!”
“And it’s doing a good job of it,” muttered Sten, his words partially slurred due to how much poison he’d been hit with.
“Mother, you should go help her.” Kaja’s words came out around grit teeth, fighting to force them out over the pain her torn wing was causing her. “The rest of us can keep this thing busy.”
“No,” answered Turid immediately, forcing her voice to come out strong and confident. “We’re all going to have to work together to kill this thing. Then we’ll go and fight by Solvei’s side together, as a pack.”
The words earned smiles from her children, and Turid returned the expression. But she couldn’t help but steal a glance at her other daughter, looking a short distance away at where Solvei – alongside those two ponies – was in a standoff against the Red Man. The sight made her heart ache, wanting more than anything to run to Solvei’s side, even as she felt pride well up in her.
Frode, can you see how strong our daughter has become? Just a few days ago, all she could do was cry and run away. But now, she’s standing unafraid against the worst enemy our pack has ever faced. The runt of our litter has grown up to become the bravest and most reliable of all her siblings, just like you did.
She just hoped that would be enough to let Solvei overcome the enemy she was facing now.
Then there was no more time for worrying about anyone else, joining the rest of her children as they rushed back into battle.
“Take him.”
The words had barely left Lex’s mouth when Solvei shot forward, moving so fast that her paws tore up the ground beneath her. In a flash, she was right in front of Prevarius, snarling as she leaped forward, her teeth going straight for his face-
Only for him to casually bend at the knees, ducking under her and letting her go flying. In a lazy motion, he whipped one arm out – having grabbed one of his many contracts in a single smooth movement – and flicked it behind him, catching Solvei in the air and causing her to cry out in pain as it cut her skin, sending her blood spurting through the air. “Really? Trying to catch me off-guard with a sudden burst of speed?” Rolling his eyes, he gave Lex a look of bemused condescension. “You can do better than-, hm?”
He cocked a brow then, feeling a sudden release of magic even as he realized that it was getting harder to see the red-horned unicorn, or anything else for that matter; all around him, mist was rising, growing thicker by the second.
“You know, I think I recognize this,” mused Prevarius out loud as he was enveloped in a thick fog, blotting everything else from sight. “Drafty mentioned one of your little girlfriends – Aria, wasn’t it? – trying using this strategy to blind some witch who attacked your village while another pony of yours wore her down. So now you’re having Drafty conjure up some mist with the magic I gave her so that Solvei can do the same.”
No answer came, save for a sudden rush from off to his left as Solvei leaped at him again. Despite her jaws coming within a hair’s breadth of his arm, Prevarius again dodged the attack, giving Solvei another sharp paper cut for her effort. “It’s not a bad strategy,” he continued, voice patronizing. “Especially since I’m guessing you enhanced your pet’s senses, in addition to her speed, so that the fog isn’t an impediment for her. Unfortunately for you…”
Solvei’s next attack came from behind, but it fared no better than the first, with Prevarius briskly sidestepping her charge, delivering a third slash across her body before she could fade back into the mist.
“…all the speed in the world won’t help if I can use magic to track her movements.” To drive the point home, he glanced to his right and flicked the contract he was holding in that direction, causing another pained cry to emanate from within the mist. “You see? I know that same location-tracking magic your Aria pony used. It’s one of several magical reconnaissance tools at my disposal, actually. Which means that this is nothing more than a waste of time.”
“It’s not a waste,” came Lex’s voice from outside the mist. “It’s given me the chance-”
The mist suddenly vanished, as if it had never been there at all. The sudden return showed Solvei, cut and bloodied but still standing, off to his left. Thermal Draft was opposite her, the concentration on her face making it clear that she’d just cancelled her spell. And Lex was directly in front of him, wearing a dark smile behind his mask…
“-to do this.”
There was no other warning before the mask suddenly separated itself from Lex, flying directly toward Prevarius.
Of all the magical treasures that he’d received from the winter wolves, Lex had quickly determined that the skull mask was the most powerful of them all, layered with multiple magical effects.
The least notable of them was a minor transmutation effect, designed to let it change shape so as to fit whoever wore it. The second was a modest aura designed to make itself, and whoever donned it, appear more intimidating. The third was to release a modest amount of negative energy – the opposite of the healing power that restorative magic used – so as to try and injure someone by touch, a power which Lex had used his amulet to channel through his punches in a vain attempt to damage the phistophilus devil.
But the fourth and final power of the mask was by far the strongest.
Once per day, the mask could release the negative energy it gathered in a single, overwhelming burst. Doing so would unleash a wave of necromantic power that had the power to snuff out even a life force of exceptional potency. It could only affect a single individual, and resistances to harmful magic would still apply, but this was a power that was far, far more difficult to resist than a mere trickle of negative energy the mask normally released.
However, there was a catch to that power: in addition to only be able to be invoked once per day, it could only be utilized after the mask had been worn for one full hour.
Lex had no doubt that restriction had been put on there as a protective measure. That would prevent someone from stealing the mask in the middle of a fight and using its strongest power against the wearer. And while he’d felt confident that he could override that particular stipulation with a careful application of his own magic – much like he’d done to his floating gems on multiple occasions – he hadn’t dared to try doing so now; the risk of accidentally setting off the mask’s power and killing himself or someone else was too high to take. Likewise, there hadn't been sufficient time to investigate whether or not assuming shadow-form while wearing the mask would count against the timer, or worse, cause it to reset.
Instead, he’d simply put it on, knowing that he’d need to find a way to stall for an hour until the limit on the mask’s death-touch had been surpassed.
Fortunately, Prevarius had been all too happy to let the time go by while they’d argued over a contract that Lex had no intention of ever signing.
As such, when Lex had felt the mask’s restriction finally fade a few seconds ago – right before Solvei’s family had swooped down to join the fight – he’d immediately come up with a strategy for utilizing it.
Now, the mask – designed to deliver the death-touch itself, flying under its own power toward the doomed devil – was speeding toward Prevarius, Lex watching with a malicious smirk as the phistophilus’ eyes widened in alarm-
-and brought one hand up, fingers splayed and palm held out toward the mask, and Lex could almost feel the concentration of the phistophilus’ magic resistance.
As though it had struck a wall, the wooden skull came to a halt in mid-air, hovering scant inches from the devil’s outstretched hand.
For a moment no one moved, the struggle invisible and inaudible as Prevarius’ power struggled against that of the mask. The wooden skull almost seemed to vibrate as it hovered in place, as though it were screaming in frustration at not being able to deliver its fatal magic to its intended victim. For his part, Prevarius face had once again lost its easy grin, instead going tense with a look of intense effort as he focused everything he had on keeping the magic item from reaching him.
A second later, the contest came to an end.
Prevarius let out a relieved sigh as the mask turned away and returned to Lex, its magic defeated. “That was rather dangerous,” he admitted, shaking his hand as though it ached. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to block that.”
Lex didn’t react to the banter, silently catching the mask in his telekinesis. A simple glance was enough to let him know that its power had been expended, and he didn’t bother putting it back on, instead tossing it to the ground, hanging his head. “…”
The gesture was enough to bring back Prevarius’ smirk. “Don’t be so down on yourself,” he called mockingly. “It was actually a halfway decent plan. Use Solvei and Drafty as a distraction, then use that mask to try and score a deathblow. Sadly, that sort of surprise doesn’t really work when your enemy can see magic.”
Chuckling, Prevarius pointed gestured at the fallen mask. “A bit of free advice, just in case you ever try your hoof at magical artificing: safeguarding their functionality is an important aspect of magic item creation. Anti-tampering protocols, unauthorized usage restrictions, and obscurement enchantments so that casual detection abilities won’t reveal all of their powers. If that little mask of yours had possessed that last one, it might have actually taken me by surprise just now.”
Radiating smugness, Prevarius crossed his arms over his chest then. “As it is, I’ve been waiting for you to play your trump card for some time now, all so that I could show you how pointless all this struggling is.”
When no response came, the devil shrugged. “So, do you need me to cut you and your pet to ribbons some more? Or perhaps you need a few more burns? Maybe I should have Degron kill a few of those other wolves?” Whipping a scroll off of its body-horns, Prevarius held it at the ready. “Or are you finally ready to go with a strategy that works, and do what you need to do in order to save everyone?”
“…you’re right,” admitted Lex, lifting his head…and gave the devil a vicious smile. “It’s indeed time to go with a winning strategy, one that saves everyone.”
The triumphant look gave the devil pause, and that was all the time Lex needed. “Solvei! Thermal Draft! Do it now!”
Acting on his orders, the pegasus and the winter wolf – both of whom had returned to Lex’s side while Prevarius had been bragging – took action. And Lex had the joy of watching the devil’s eyes widen as Solvei pulled several long scrolls, seemingly from nowhere, and laid them in front of Thermal Draft, the pegasus’ brow furrowing as she concentrated on a spell.
“You see,” smirked Lex, finally able to give the devil a taste of his own medicine, “I knew you knew what my mask could do. You made that obvious when you mentioned your ability to see magic before. That was why I wanted you to think that Thermal Draft and Solvei were making a distraction for me to use it, when in fact my using it was the real distraction.”
“What?!” Prevarius wasn’t grinning now, instead looking at the myriad contracts draped over his horns. Despite how haphazard their placement seemed, they were actually arranged with a great deal of meticulousness, and it took him only a moment to confirm that there were several missing.
Nor, he realized, were the purloined scrolls random. They were four very specific contracts. “When did-”
“You were half-right before, by the way,” continued Lex, now wearing a derisive smirk of his own. “I enhanced Solvei’s senses, but not so she could attack you through the mist that Thermal Draft conjured. Rather, I boosted her sense of smell to the point where she could not only detect even the faintest of lingering scents, but also distinguish between them. That way, since your contracts require the signatory’s blood to be effective, she’d be able to find the ones which smelled like her family. The mist just made it easier for her to grab them and shove them in an extradimensional pocket without you noticing. That was another power I granted her, inspired by how you taught Thermal Draft to keep her copy of her contract in a similar spatial container.”
Even as he spoke, Lex withdrew the wolves’ copies of their own contracts – having collected them back at the den – and added them to the pile of papers on the ground. “And since you dodged the acid attack that Thermal Draft threw at you earlier, despite how weak its magic was, I can imagine what this oh-so-resilient paper of yours is vulnerable to.”
The last syllable had just barely left his mouth when Drafty finished her spell, a gout of brackish liquid arcing from her hooves onto the jumbled mass of paper, which sizzled and bubbled as the contracts began to melt.
“No, stop!” yelled Prevarius, alarm and outrage etched all over his face as he ran forward. “STOP!”
But it was too late. Before the devil had crossed even half the distance to them, howls erupted from behind him, causing him to turn and look at what he already knew was happening.
A short distance away, the rest of Solvei’s pack were all crying out in unison, voices raised as they shook uncontrollably, with Degron – not knowing what was happening – backing off in confusion.
With each convulsion, a bright red substance arced off of them, as though they were shaking off a heavy coating of crimson dust. But the substance didn’t fall to the ground as they writhed, instead hanging in the air like smoke, curling around them in tendrils that grew thicker and darker as more was added to it.
For a moment the red vapors seemed almost to solidify, forming ill-defined shapes around each of them, the outlines of twisted wings and distorted legs and malevolent countenances visible in the roiling auras. But then, just as they reached their thickest, they began to break down. Losing cohesion, the red substance collapsed in on itself, churning violently as it decreased in form and volume, until finally there was nothing left of it, the last of the otherworldly substance breaking apart on the wind.
Leaving behind four wingless wolves with pure-white coats.
“It worked!” gasped Solvei, watching with tear-filled eyes as the rest of her family picked themselves up, looking at each other in wonder. “It worked!”
“Congratulations,” snapped Prevarius, his features tight with repressed rage. The devil’s pleasant demeanor was completely gone now, hands clenched into fists. “I hope you find this little victory satisfying, because now that those curs are no longer carrying the infernal essence I bestowed upon them, they’re even weaker than they were before. And since they’re not contracted to me anymore, there’s nothing stopping me from having Degron kill them all right now.”
“There’s one thing,” answered Lex with a smirk, raising his wire-wrapped hoof.
Again, he had the joy of watching as the devil’s eyes widened in sudden realization. It was a sight that Lex was rapidly growing quite fond of, stretching his hoof out not only toward Solvei, but toward the rest of her pack as well, invoking the power that the Night Mare had given him – power that the devil’s contracts had prevented from working on the rest of Solvei’s family before, but which was gone now – with a silent roar of triumph.
Lex held nothing back as he poured power into Solvei’s family.
While divine authority wasn’t magic unto itself, it was still capable of interacting with outside forces. That had been how Tlerekithres – the kraken who’d led the invasion of aquatic monsters against Vanhoover – had initially resisted his trying to force it back, activating some sort of magical tattoo that had increased its resistance to divine authority. But Lex, perceiving the interaction between magic and deific energy, had responded in kind, channeling magical power through his body and augmenting the strength that the Night Mare had given him.
It was that same combination that Lex called upon now, pushing magic through his body and into the barbed wire wrapped around his left foreleg as he pointed it at the winter wolves. This was his last strategy for overcoming Prevarius; as strong as the devil was, Lex felt confident that an entire pack of winter wolves enhanced by divine authority would be more than the devil could handle. Even so, he had no intention of leaving anything to chance, intent on giving them as much power as he possibly could.
And in doing so, became aware of what he’d overlooked before.
Now I understand, realized Lex. I knew that divine authority was the ability to overwrite an eligible creature’s reality through willpower alone, with the scope and scale of the changes being directly proportional to how much divine energy was required to enact them. But that divine energy doesn’t operate in a static state; the intensity of my own focus affects the efficacy of each application. Adding my own magic to it is simply the natural extension of that.
Fighting down the urge to chastise himself for not having come to that conclusion sooner, Lex pushed that thought away, knowing that it would only dilute his concentration. Instead, he bent all of his awareness toward the winter wolves, pushing everything else out of his mind.
The results were dramatic.
“What…what is this?” panted Kaja, almost dizzy from how the pain in her torn wing was not only gone – along with her wings entirely – but had been replaced by a sudden rush of exhilaration so forceful that it was almost heady. “What’s going on?”
“Solvei did it!” yipped Ebbe in unabashed delight. “We’re back to normal!”
“This isn’t just normal,” murmured Sten, his voice brimming with awe as he looked himself over. “Our wounds are all gone, and I don’t feel numb anymore.”
“It’s that pony,” answered Turid breathlessly, looking at the unicorn Solvei had befriended. He was standing rigidly at attention, as still as a statue as he pointed his hoof at them all, eyes shining a solid green as the purple flames from the outer corners flickered brightly. “I think he’s giving us all the same power he gave-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Degron darted toward them.
Turid wasn’t sure if the creature had simply recovered from its surprise, or if the Red Man had given it some unseen signal to continue fighting, or if it had simply been unable to resist rushing in while they’d all been distracted. But either way, she belatedly turned her head as the skeletal monster made a beeline toward Ebbe – the wolf closest to it at the moment – with its tail raised, mouth open as it hissed aggressively. It was on him in an instant, claws and teeth and tail all lashing out toward her son.
But none of them came close to striking him.
It wasn’t speed that let him avoid the creature’s strikes. Nor did he shrug them off with simple toughness, the way the Red Man’s power had allowed them to do. Rather, Ebbe simply bobbed and weaved around the strikes in a manner that was almost casual, lazily lifting a paw above a swipe of Degron’s claw before ducking his head beneath its bite and leaning to the left to avoid the creature’s scorpion tail. It was as though the entire sequence of attacks had been rehearsed beforehand, with the winter wolf having known exactly where not to be in order to avoid being struck.
No one looked more surprised by this than Ebbe himself. “Oh, this is too good to be true,” he murmured, laughing in disbelief.
Degron apparently thought so as well, snarling in anger as he swung his claw toward Ebbe’s face.
This time, rather than avoiding the attack, Ebbe countered, catching the creature’s spindly forearm in his jaws. Clenching down, he was rewarded with a loud cracking sound that was immediately followed by a pained shriek from Degron, its spindly bones fracturing as Ebbe bit down harder.
“No way,” muttered Sten, jaw dropping. “We could barely put a scratch on that monster before, but now Ebbe’s-”
“This is no time to be amazed!” yelled Turid, shaking off her own sense of surprise. “Let’s finish that thing off so we can go help Solvei fight the Red Man!”
She didn’t wait for Kaja and Sten to reply before rushing at Degron’s unprotected side, sinking her teeth into the thing’s ribs and biting down hard. Just like with Ebbe had done to the monster’s arm, she felt the bones – which had felt more unyielding than stone before – strain and begin to splinter in her jaws. The monster’s tail lashed out at her immediately, but avoiding it was trivially easy now, rearing back and letting the strike sail harmlessly over her head.
Nor was it able to try and hit her again, as Kaja snagged the monster’s tail in her teeth, the thick plating along its sides no longer a match for her as she bit deeply into the heavy limb and dragged it down, clearing the way for Sten to move to the creature’s other side and bite down hard on Degron’s back leg.
Thrashing wildly as the prey that it had been toying with suddenly overpowered it, there was little that Degron could do. It snapped its jaws at each of them in turn, its unhindered claws lashing out wildly at anyone within reach, but it was in vain. The wolves’ situational awareness registered each attack long before it reached them, giving them ample time to avoid or turn aside each blow. In turn, their own were becoming increasingly difficult for the monster to avoid, the damage that it had shrugged off before now inflicting grievous wounds across its spindly body, reducing its ability to fight back as its injuries grew.
It wasn’t long before Turid moved in for the kill, her maw closing around the monster’s neck and biting down as hard as she could.
A rush of ichor filled her mouth, and the screech Degron emitted then was nothing like any sound she’d ever heard before, making her ears ache from the jagged cacophony. But she didn’t pull back, instead thrashing back and forth as she worked her jaw to the side, seeing to inflict as much harm as she could. After a second she felt a heavy shudder go through the creature, and its resistance suddenly ended, but she didn’t cease her efforts, not wanting to take the chance that it was playing dead to get her to lower her guard.
Then her jaws shut completely, and Degron’s head hit the ground a second later, rolling away from its now-motionless body.
“Heh, that thing wasn’t so tough after all,” snickered Ebbe.
“Tasted terrible though,” complained Kaja, rubbing a paw over her bloodstained muzzle.
Sten nodded. “It did, but I bet the Red Man-, huh?!”
But Sten’s exclamation of surprise didn’t prompt any questions from the rest of his pack. They were too busy struggling with their own shock over what had just happened:
Degron’s body had disappeared.
There was no other word to describe it. One moment his mangled corpse had been laying there, and the next it was completely gone. His severed head, thrashed body, and even the blood that had been spilled across the ground – as well as the wolves’ maws – were all nowhere to be found. Even the creature’s scent had vanished, as though the entire fight had been nothing more than a dream which they’d all just woken up from.
Turid was the first to recover. “Forget that thing. We need to go help Solvei.”
“And if that monster’s not really dead?” muttered Ebbe nervously.
“It won’t matter,” replied Sten. “With how strong that pony seidrmadr has made us, even if it’s still alive it’s not like it’s a threat.”
“Besides,” added Kaja, “we’d smell it coming anyway.”
The four of them shared a nod, before turning and bounding across the clearing.
It was time to pay the Red Man in full for what he’d done to their family.
“Shouldn’t we be helping?”
Lex shook his head in answer to Thermal Draft’s question. “No. The battle is almost over now.”
Thermal Draft bit her lip at that, not wanting to contradict someone who was, she knew, both smarter and more experienced than her. Even so, she couldn’t help but feel nervous; from her point of view, the fight between Solvei and Prevarius didn’t seem to be anywhere near a conclusion.
The phistophilus was lashing out at Solvei with everything he had, his jovial countenance replaced with a look of grim determination as he swung razor-edged contracts in both hands. The papers had been whipping around so fast it was almost a blur, slicing through the air with such precision that they seemed like extensions of the devil’s own arms. Nor had Prevarius limited himself to physical attacks, interspersing bright red beams of magical heat and thrown handfuls of flame as well, trying to take advantage of the winter wolf’s inherent weakness to fire.
But unlike before, Prevarius had little to show for his efforts now. Although he’d managed to land several hits on Solvei with the contracts he was using as weapons, in every instance the wounds had closed almost as soon as they’d been dealt. Each time she failed to dance around a strike – something that was much rarer now than it had been only a few seconds ago – the winter wolf’s injury seemed to vanish in an instant, leaving her white coat unblemished.
Nor were the devil’s flame attacks faring any better; just like with his attempts to cut her, Solvei simply refused to stand still long enough to be burned. And even when he did manage to connect, the intense heat seemed simply to wash over Solvei’s body without injuring her, inflicting little more than a few welts that quickly sealed themselves over.
But while Prevarius’ wild offense wasn’t wearing Solvei down, it was preventing her from inflicting much damage to the devil. So far she’d managed to land only two bites to the phistophilus, one on his arm and another on his side, just above the waist. Every other attack had been deflected by the whirlwind of cutting paper and fire magic. Worse, Drafty knew the devil wouldn’t get tired, having stayed up all night talking to her without so much as a yawn to show for it, whereas Solvei would eventually become winded. Assuming that whatever Lex did to her doesn’t wear off first-
Her thought was interrupted as a hideous shriek rang out across the clearing, dragging her eyes over to where the other wolves were fighting the monster that Prevarius had summoned.
Or rather, where they had been fighting it. Thermal Draft’s eyes widened as she watched Degron’s head hit the ground, the sight leaving her queasy.
Lex had a markedly different reaction, smirking at the creature’s death. Why became apparent a moment later as the wolves paused only for a moment, apparently conferring among themselves, and then raced toward where Solvei and Prevarius were still fighting, both of them having ignored Degron’s death cry in favor of continuing their battle.
But there was no ignoring the rest of Solvei’s pack once they joined the fight.
Prevarius was clearly aware of their approach, half-turning in place to whip the papers in his grasp at the other wolves, but it was clear from the moment they joined the battle what the results would be.
As Drafty watched, the wolves moved in concert, Solvei mixing in with them seamlessly to surround the devil and move in. While they earned several slashes across their bodies for the effort, it was easy to see them creating openings for each other, and it didn’t take long for their efforts to bear fruit.
First Prevarius’ left arm was grabbed, one of the wolves biting down hard just above the wrist, preventing him from swinging the contract in his grasp. Then his right leg was grappled in a similar manner, keeping him in place. A third wolf got his right arm when he brought it around to try and bring fire down on the one biting his leg, jaws sinking in above the elbow so hard that it caused his hand to spasm, dropping the paper he’d been holding as he clenched a fist. A fourth grabbed one of the thick horns protruding from his back, and the devil grimaced as the protrusion was wrestled down, bringing him to one knee, overburdened by the relentless attackers.
And then only Solvei was left, coming to a stop in front of Prevarius, who was now unable to fight back.
“We beat you,” she panted, her voice thick with emotion. “After everything you did to my family…getting Bolverk to kill my father, infecting the rest of my pack with your sickness, trying to set us against the ponies so you could help them kill us…it’s all over now. Your lies, your seidr, your monster…we beat all of it.” She looked at each of her packmates then, before looking back at Lex and Draft. “Together.”
The sight made Drafty smile, and she nodded at the winter wolf. Solvei returned the gesture before returning her gaze to Prevarius. “And now, you’re going to get what you deserve for everything you’ve done,” she began, bearing her teeth as she slowly advanced on the helpless devil, clearly intent on tearing his throat out. “This is for my f-”
“Wait,” interrupted Lex, stepping forward. “Don’t kill him yet.”
The order caught Solvei by surprise. “But-”
“I said no.” Lex’s tone brooked no argument as he stepped forward, moving until he was standing alongside Solvei in front of Prevarius. “He said before that ponies were turning up on those ‘soul markets’ of his, and that they were coming from this area. I want to know more about that.”
Prevarius snorted, the first sound he’d made since the fight had turned against him. “And if I tell you, you’ll let me go?” he asked, his tone making it clear that he already knew the answer.
“What you should be asking,” replied Lex easily, “is what I’ll do to you if you don’t answer my question.”
Prevarius lowered his head at that, but rather than looking intimidated, a lopsided smile wormed its way back onto his face. “You know, there’s no way you could know this – us just having met and all – but before I made it to the rank of phistophilus, I was an osyluth, just like Degron.”
The non sequitur made Lex frown. “I have no patience for stall tactics,” he rumbled. “Tell me about the pony souls! Now!”
“I really enjoyed my job,” continued Prevarius, as though oblivious to what Lex had said. “Don’t get me wrong, soul collection is fun, but most of the time it’s almost too easy, the way it was with Drafty.” He smirked at the pegasus then, before looking back at Lex. “But the enemies I fought before? Matching tactics and strategy in a lightning-fast battle of wits? It was sublime. Or at least, it was when they were strong enough and smart enough to make it worthwhile.” His grin grew wider then. “And in that regard, you’ve been one of the best. I’ll remember this battle for millennia.”
“Happily,” answered the winter wolf, already making for Prevarius’ neck.
She’d just put her jaws around it when the devil opened his right hand, revealing a glowing ball of light in his clenched fist.
Drafty blinked, not sure what she was seeing, but before she had a chance to ask she was airborne, yelping as she was flung backward by Lex’s telekinetic aura. “GET BACK!” he roared, diving away from Prevarius. “GET BACK N-”
“But in the end, I always win,” laughed the devil.
Prevarius’ fireball was far more powerful than any of the incendiary beads from Bolverk’s necklace had been.
That realization – coming to Lex as his sensitivity to magic suddenly screamed at him in the seconds before the devil unleashed the destructive magic clenched in his palm – sent a spike of panic through him, realizing that he’d badly misjudged the situation.
As he telekinetically shoved Thermal Draft backward as hard as he could, trying to get her clear even as he flung himself away from the phistophilus while simultaneously screaming a warning at the winter wolves, Lex was already analyzing where he’d gone wrong. It wasn’t that he had been blind to the possibility that the devil might have been keeping some last-ditch ability in reserve. With no way of knowing the full scope of the creature’s powers, Lex had been keenly aware that the creature would likely try something rather than sitting back and waiting for death.
Rather, where he’d gone wrong had been in assuming that Prevarius wouldn’t use deadly force over a wide area. He can’t use Thermal Draft as a hostage in order to force me to sign my soul away if either of us are dead. That had been Lex’s thought at the time.
But in the last instant before the fireball went off, Lex realized that he’d pressed his adversary too hard. Certainly, the creature had a goal it wanted to achieve, but that goal was ultimately profit-based – wanting to make a fortune on those soul markets it had referenced, and then using the money and attendant influence to buy a promotion in whatever infernal hierarchy devils operated within – and so was self-evidently not worth dying to accomplish. With how long devils apparently lived, since Prevarius had let it slip that he’d been a phistophilus for over six hundred years and had been an osyluth devil before that, it was far smarter to abandon an opportunity if it became too dangerous to pursue and simply wait for another chance to present itself.
And in giving the winter wolves the strength necessary to overpower Prevarius, Lex had made things exactly that dangerous for the devil.
Then there was no more time for Lex to ruminate over his mistakes as the blast struck him.
Thermal Draft couldn’t even cry out as the explosion struck, the heat from the blast forcing her to shield her eyes on reflex. As it was, the force of it bowled her over, causing her to gasp with pain as she lost her balance and landed on her injured wing. But she scrambled upright immediately, looking around to see what had happened to Lex and Solvei and the other wolves.
They’re alright, she told herself frantically as she blinked the spots away from her vision. That had to have been some sort of suicide blast on Prevarius’ part, just like in adventure stories. He blew himself up, trying to take Lex and everyone else with him, but there’s no way it worked. They’re all fine-
Then her vision cleared, and she saw that she couldn’t have been more wrong.
The winter wolves were lying in a radial pattern, their blackened and burnt bodies twisted, as though they were gigantic pieces of charcoal that just happened to be shaped like wolves. From the faint twitches and soft whimpers coming from them, they were still alive, but given how much pain they had to be in Drafty found that fact horrifying rather than comforting.
Somehow, by some miracle, Lex wasn’t as badly injured, lying insensate in the snow with his cloak spread out over him. But as she stumbled over to him, Drafty could see that he’d still taken a great deal of damage, his body smoking as he drew in a shuddering breath.
It’s like what happened in that abandoned factory all over again, she thought miserably as she fell to her knees at his side. He’s gotten all these horrible burns fighting to save the rest of us, and I can’t do anything to help him!
Except, she realized a moment later, that wasn’t true. That’s right! I have magic now! She’d spent all night practicing with it under Prevarius’ guidance, and while she still wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, she’d gotten pretty good at putting together some basic spells. Okay, I just need to make a healing spell. That can’t be that hard; Drafty figured out how to cast one right after Lex inducted her into the Night Mare’s faith, and she hadn’t had any magical training before that. All I have to do is start putting the pieces together…
But she had barely begun when a familiar voice rang out from across the clearing.
“Now now,” tsked Prevarius, climbing to his feet as he stepped out of the ash-lined crater that his fireball had made. “I think the whole ‘weeping damsel revives the dashing hero’ trope is very much played out, don’t you?”
Her eyes wide with horror, Drafty could only stare as the devil – looking none the worse for wear despite having been at the center of the blast – glanced around, taking stock of the situation. “It’s really a shame,” he mused, smirking ruefully at the sight of the charred wolves before turning back toward Thermal Draft. “I really wanted to see how much I could get for that stallion’s soul once I put it up for auction. But there are some people you just can’t do business with. And as much as I hate losing contracts, especially with nothing to show for it, sometimes you end up taking a loss on a venture.”
The words washed over Drafty without her really hearing them, too stunned to process what was happening. But her shock lasted only a moment before she managed to regain control of herself, turning back toward the fallen unicorn. Forget healing magic! I just need something to wake Lex up! Then he can fix the wolves and they can finish that monster off!
“You really need to learn how to control your thoughts better,” snorted Prevarius, pulling a contract off of his horns; like himself, the paper was completely undamaged by the blast. “As much as I’d like to keep trying to pressure that unicorn of yours into selling me his soul, whatever power he’s been using on those wolves is simply too dangerous.”
Biting her lip, Drafty forced herself to keep concentrating, even as she knew that she’d never finish building her spell before the devil acted.
Prevarius seemed to know that too. “Under other circumstances, I’d just slaughter the wolves, so that when you woke Lex up he’d see that there was no way for him to keep pushing the conflict,” he explained as he reared his arm back, preparing to attack. “But something tells me that you’d have him up and about before I’d be able to finish off all of them, and with how much power he was able to give them, I can’t have-, hm?”
“S-Stay away…from them…”
Drafty’s heart leapt into her throat as she heard Solvei’s voice.
Somehow, impossibly, the winter wolf had managed to pick herself up and drag herself forward, putting hersel between Prevarius and the ponies.
The sight made Drafty want to cry. Solvei looked like she was going to expire at any moment; black bits of ash – the scorched remains of her fur and skin – fell off of her with every movement she made. Her breathing was ragged, as though each tortured inhalation was a struggle. The heat pouring off of her was enough that the snow under her paws melted beneath her.
But her golden eyes were both open and fixed squarely on Prevarius.
Choking back tears, Drafty forced herself to concentrate on a reviving spell, knowing that was the best thing she could do for Solvei now.
For his part, Prevarius seemed far less amused. “Let me guess? This is the part where you posture at me in order to buy your friends a few more seconds so that they can pull off their daring recovery, right?”
Taking a halting step forward, Solvei pulled her burnt lips over her teeth, causing them to crack and ooze blood. “You-”
“Wrong,” continued the devil. “You’ve been a thorn in my side for a while now, Solvei. So this time-”
Bringing his arm forward, the contract in Prevarius’ hand lashed out, the paper flicking through the air to wrap around Solvei’s neck. Before she could so much as take a breath, the devil yanked hard on the scroll, lifting the winter wolf off her paws as he pulled her through the air to him…
And impaled her on one of his body-horns, the thick spike piercing through her abdomen and exiting out her back. “-I’ll put one of mine through yours.”
Helpless to do anything as she gathered the necessary magic, Drafty could only watch as Solvei wriggled for a moment, then went still.
A moment later, she finished her spell.
The sensation of waking up through a haze of agony was rapidly becoming familiar for Lex. But unlike the last time he’d woken up like this, the sickening sensation of pain refused to make way for his returning consciousness, shrouding his thoughts in a fog that made it difficult for him to tell what was happening.
Blearily, he somehow managed to open his eyes. Even that was a struggle, and the effort involved made the pain enveloping him spike, very nearly causing him to pass out again. It was only when he managed to focus on what was happening that he realized that he was cradled in somepony’s – Thermal Draft’s – forelegs, the mare weeping as she looked at something out of his field of vision. “L-Lex,” she sobbed. “It…it’s Solvei…she…she’s…!”
Solvei. For some reason, that name sent a twinge through him. He knew who that was, but the details refused to come, leaving only the emotional impressions.
Solvei was someone he hadn’t known very long, but still felt a responsibility to protect.
Solvei was someone he could rely on, making it possible for him to keep fighting when he otherwise would have been helpless.
Solvei was someone he trusted, who could have turned on him or left him, but never had.
Solvei was someone he cared about, who’s presence had ever so slightly eased the suffocating sense of isolation that had hung over him for as long as he could remember.
Solvei was someone he didn’t want to lose, not after he’d just lost so many other people who were important to him.
Slowly, fighting to retain what little awareness he’d managed to hold onto, Lex turned his eyes toward where Thermal Draft was looking…
…and saw a red-skinned creature – his enemy, he dimly recalled, though no other details came to him then – pushing a charred body off of one of its black horns.
A moment later, he recognized that the burned body was Solvei.
“…no…” he muttered, forcing the word out without meaning to. “…don’t…go…”
“Lex…” Sniffling, Thermal Draft reached over and lifted his foreleg, the one with the wire wrapped around it, pointing it toward where Solvei had fallen. Forcing herself to smile, she gave him a nod. “I’m not afraid. I know you can save her. That’s what you do.”
“As if I’d just stand here and let you,” snorted the red creature, making a motion as if to attack.
Lex was oblivious to all of it, only cognizant of the fact that he was about to lose someone else that he cared about. As much pain as he was in, that knowledge hurt worse, pushing through the unbearable ache in his body to smother him whole. No…not again…
“…stay…” he rasped, unable to think of anything except not wanting to go through that again, “…with…me…” Although he couldn’t so much as twitch, he clung to that one thought, wanting down to the bottom of his heart to not have to experience that pain once more, even as he felt his consciousness start to fade again, his wounded body simply not able to sustain the level of stress he was putting on it. “Stay…with…me…”
From above him, he heard Thermal Draft gasp, and nearby he heard his enemy do the same, but he registered none of it.
The only thing he could think of then was not wanting to be separated from Solvei.
“Stay…with…me…” he murmured as his eyes drifted closed, “…for…e…ver…”
Then even that thought was too much to sustain, and his consciousness fell away.
But this time, what awaited his insensate mind wasn’t the void of unawareness.
Her father had always told her that dying meant joining their ancestors in the afterlife. There, all of the utvalgte – except for those who’d turned their backs on their traditions in life, and so were cast out after death, left for Vutok to destroy or corrupt with his terrible fire – were part of a single enormous pack, with Hrothvitnir himself as the alpha. In his domain, it was always comfortably cold, there were no monsters to be wary of, and the game was constantly plentiful, no matter how many of their people eventually joined them.
In that place, her father had explained to her when she’d still been a wide-eyed pup, all of their people were united. There were no fights for dominance, no struggles over territory, no bickering about the distribution of food. Just one extended family, living together, hunting together, celebrating their joys and mourning their sorrows together. It had sounded wonderful, and despite the overwhelming grief she’d felt when Bolverk had killed her father right in front of her, Solvei had taken comfort in knowing that not only was Frode in a better place now, but that she’d see him again when death inevitably came for her.
But now that her time had come, her father was nowhere to be seen. Nor were any of the rest of her people, or Hrothvitnir himself for that matter. Even the snowy landscape that she’d expected was nowhere to be found.
Instead, the only thing she saw when she opened her eyes was fire.
Blue fire.
The sight made Solvei yelp with alarm; despite the odd coloration, she still recognized the flames which symbolized the perverse might of Vutok. Panicking, she whirled around, wanting to put some distance between herself and the wicked substance, but it was all around her, trapping her inside a ring of the stuff.
Whimpering, she tried to figure out what was happening. Had Hrothvitnir seen fit to cast her out? Even after everything she’d done to fight Bolverk – a wolf who had forsaken their most important customs and beliefs – as well as the Red Man who’d led him down the path of wickedness? That couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t. Her father had always described their forebearer as the wisest and most noble of all of their kind; surely he wouldn’t banish her for doing her best to live up to his ideals.
This must be some kind of test, she decided uneasily as she looked around at the featureless ring of flames. Maybe I’m supposed to prove my courage by leaping through the fire?
It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but she couldn’t come up with anything better. The blue fire was the only substance here; the ground was a solid blackness, feeling neither cold nor warm under her paws, and the sky was similarly blank, having no clouds or stars or any other discernable features. It was just her, alone inside the azure ring.
Gulping, Solvei marshaled her courage as she slowly slunk toward the flames, preparing to endure the horrible heat as she approached them.
Except, for some reason, the flames didn’t feel hot. Even when she crept to within a tail’s length of them, she didn’t feel even the slightest bit of warmth coming from the flickering blue blaze. Frowning in confusion, Solvei hesitated for just a moment before tentatively reaching a paw forward, holding her breath as she brushed it against the fire…
Cold. The fire burned cold.
Laughing in relief, Solvei slumped in place, her worries falling away. I don’t know what this is, but it’s definitely not the flames of Vutok, she mused. Her father’s stories had all agreed that the evil wolf had embraced the destructive power of fire for the damage that its heat could do, needing it to fight Hrothvitnir. For these fires to burn cold meant that they weren’t his. And since they’re not hot, decided Solvei, standing up and striding toward the flames, then I should be able to pass right through them and leave-
No. Don’t go.
The voice made her freeze in place, but not by choice. Instead, her limbs locked up of their own accord, preventing her from taking another step. But that was less surprising than the fact that she recognized the voice, knowing its owner well by now.
“Lex?” she called, looking around in surprise. Although she still wasn’t sure what part of the afterlife this was, she hadn’t expected the pony to be here as well. “Is that you?”
Although she’d been alone only a moment ago, a turn of her head revealed that the pony in question was standing behind her now. Except he wasn’t a pony; he’d become that frightening shadow that he’d taken the form of back in their den, the sight of him seeming even more ghostly now that he was backlit by the soft azure light of the cold inferno surrounding them both. But his green eyes, with purple flames of their own sprouting from the outer corners, were fixed directly on her.
“Is…is this your seidr?” she asked, the idea coming to her suddenly. In any other context it would have been a ridiculous notion, but after how much she’d seen Lex do, the idea that he could somehow prevent her soul from reaching its afterlife didn’t seem so outlandish. After all, the Red Man had been doing something similar, and Lex was almost as powerful. The only question now was why-
Stay with me, came his voice again, and she realized that she was hearing him in her head instead of with her ears.
But as unsettling as that was, it was his command that made her bite her lip, uncomfortable. “I can’t. Lex, I can’t. I have to go. My father is waiting for me, and so are the rest of my ancestors, and Hrothvitnir. I need to join them.”
Solvei wasn’t sure if his command had made her move closer to him, or if he’d floated toward her, but by the time she was finished speaking he seemed close enough to touch. But despite what he was telling her to do, Solvei knew she couldn’t obey. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, raising a paw to gesture at him. “I know you did a lot for me, and I’m grateful that you helped me free my family from the Red Man’s sickness, but-”
Then her outstretched paw brushed against the shadowy substance that was Lex’s body, and Solvei let out a gasp, feeling emotions that weren’t her own rush into her. Or rather, one single emotion.
Loneliness.
The intensity of the emotion brought her to her knees, snatching her paw back as she stumbled and fell, barely able to process the overwhelming sensations. She’d experienced those feelings before – the longing and the heartache and the desperation – when she’d been on the run, her family having been infected with the Red Man’s sickness. But what she’d gone through for those few days was nothing compared to what she’d felt just now. And although it had been only for a moment, the sense of isolation had been so crushing that she could already feel tears gathering in her eyes, swallowing a sob as she looked up to meet Lex’s eyes. “I…I didn’t know…”
Stay with me.
The sense of shame that washed over Solvei then had nothing to do with anyone else’s emotions, suddenly filled with remorse for how selfish she’d been.
“You lost your pack too, didn’t you?” she sniffled, feeling utterly wretched as she stood up. “Something terrible happened and you lost your family, just like I lost mine. That’s why you were hurt so badly when I found you in that cave, alone except for Drafty. And then you lost her too, because I was being followed and led them right to you.”
Her ears folded back against her head as she continued. “It didn’t even occur to me to ask about what had happened to you. Not until we’d already defeated Bolverk and you were arguing with the Red Man about those pacts he’d tricked my family into making. This whole time, you’ve been hurting worse than I was, and you still helped me rescue everyone I care about before we even started trying to save just one person who’s important to you.”
That last part stung worst of all, reminding her that she hadn’t fully trusted the red-horned unicorn at first.
As much as Solvei had known that she needed the pony seidrmadr in order to rescue her family – that had been obvious ever since the first time he’d used his power on her, turning her into a giant capable of batting the other wolves around as if they were pebbles – a small part of her had been aware that the reverse wasn’t true. That while Lex had seemed to accept the necessity of overcoming Bolverk and the Red Man in order to rescue Drafty, he’d had another option.
Solvei had been keenly aware of that when she’d led him to her family’s den. At that point, he could easily have used his seidr to take control of her, marching her inside and turning her over to Bolverk in exchange for setting up an audience with the Red Man. Given how the evil spirit wanted to meet with ponies, Bolverk might very well have agreed, at which point Lex could have abandoned her completely and put all of his effort into rescuing his mate.
She could still remember when she’d put that fear behind her, back in the den.
Bolverk had been yelling, violently asserting his dominance over the rest of her family, and Solvei hadn’t been able to stop shaking. Not just because it had been a terrifying display, putting the lie to the bravado she’d shown Kaja only a few moments prior, but because if Lex had been intent on betraying her, that would have been the moment to do it.
Instead, he’d stroked her fur to calm her down.
That had been when she’d known that he was committed to helping her. For all that Lex had seemed callous and withdrawn – something which, she realized now, was probably because of whatever tragedy he’d gone through – that single act of kindness, given when she’d expected cruelty, had shown her what sort of person he really was.
And here I am, saying that I want to abandon him, realized Solvei miserably. Drafty’s the one person he has left, and the Red Man still has her soul, but I’m fine with going to my eternal reward now that my family’s been freed. If that’s the sort of wolf I am, do I even deserve to join my ancestors at Hrothvitnir’s side at all?
Overcome with remorse, Solvei made herself look up at the glowing eyes of the person who’d given everything for her. “Lex, I’m so sorry! I never meant-”
Stay with me forever.
For a moment, Solvei’s eyes widened. After how ungrateful she’d been, he still wanted her to remain by his side? Not just until they’d beaten the Red Man, but even after that?
There were no words to describe how she felt at that moment.
“I…alright.” Somehow managing to push down the storm of emotions flowing through her, Solvei found herself smiling. “I swear that I’ll never leave you alone again. Not ever.”
With that said, she plunged forward into the shadowy substance that was Lex Legis.
Thermal Draft gasped, hearing a similar exclamation coming from Prevarius, as she saw blue flames erupt over Solvei’s body, covering her completely.
But unlike herself, the devil was quicker to react. “Oh no you don’t!” he snarled, leaping backward even as he flung his arm out, whipping a scroll around toward where Solvei had fallen.
Solvei, however, was no longer there.
And then Prevarius let out a scream of pain as one of the thick horns sprouting from his back suddenly went flying, contracts spilling onto the ground along with shattered pieces of black bone.
For a moment, Thermal Draft couldn’t make sense of what had happened. Then her brain caught up to what her eyes were telling her, and she managed to breathe a single word.
“Solvei?”
Standing across from where she'd been lying only a moment earlier, the winter wolf’s wounds were gone. But that wasn’t the only thing about her that had changed. She was taller now, nearly six feet at the shoulder. Her fur was no longer a pure white, instead having ice-blue highlights running through it. Neither of those differences, however, were what made Thermal Draft’s jaw drop, struggling to understand what she was seeing. That was due to the other new feature upon Solvei’s body:
On each of her flanks, standing out in sharp contrast to her fur, was Lex’s cutie mark.
The sight of Lex’s cutie mark on Solvei was enough to make Drafty’s thoughts come to a screeching halt, not understanding what she was seeing.
After a long moment, her eyes drifted down to Lex of their own accord. His clothes had become disheveled in the wake of Prevarius’ fireball, allowing her to catch a glimpse of his flank, confirming that his own cutie mark was still there. So then what-
“Drafty,” came Solvei’s voice, snapping the pegasus out of her surprise. “If you can use your seidr to revive Master without hurting him, do so as quickly as you can.” The winter wolf didn’t take her eyes off of Prevarius as she spoke, slowly advancing on the injured devil. “I’ll make sure nothing interrupts you in the meantime.”
“R-right,” sputtered Drafty, berating herself for getting caught up in what was happening. Taking care of Lex was the most important thing right now. Even so, she couldn’t help but sneak another glance at Solvei as she started constructing her spell, amazed at the changes in the winter wolf. It wasn’t just the way she looked; there was an edge to her voice now that hadn’t been there before, one that spoke not only of cool confidence and controlled anger, but which was delivered with a mellifluous timbre, enunciating her words with greater clarity and an articulation that bespoke-
Hang on a second, realized Drafty, finally noticing what she’d almost overlooked in her shock. Did she just call Lex “Master”?
“And as for you, Red Man. Or rather, Prevarius the phistophilus devil,” continued Solvei as she came to a stop a short distance away from the creature in question, the rage in her eyes visible as she glared at him. “You’ve brought misery and suffering into the lives of everyone I care about. My father is dead because of you. You tricked my family into signing away their souls, and when they got them back, you severely injured them all. You still have a claim on my friend Drafty’s soul. And if all that wasn’t enough, you’ve caused hardship for my strong and proud master, Lex Legis; someone who’s already endured more than his fair share of heartache!”
She threw back her head then and let out a howl, one so loud that it not only filled the clearing, but seemed to echo across the valley. “FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO THEM, PREPARE TO DIE!!!”
Her declaration caused Prevarius to sneer, readying a scroll in each hand. “It’s too bad. I could have made a fortune selling the souls of you and your ‘master’ together. Now your deaths will be nothing more than a wasted opportunity.”
Despite the devil’s words, Thermal Draft could tell that Prevarius wasn’t doing so well. He was favoring his left side, where Solvei had shattered his body-horn, and his face was drawn tight with pain, his breath heavier now. Between the phistophilus’ injured appearance, and whatever power-up Solvei had just gotten, it was enough to give Drafty real hope that they’d finally be able to overpower the devil.
Solvei seemed to think so also, because she didn’t bother wasting anymore of her breath on threats or warnings. Instead, she charged.
Prevarius had clearly been waiting for her to do so, his hands whipping out in an instant. Instantly, the scrolls darted out, coiling through the air as they spun toward Solvei.
They never came close to touching her, however. Instead, the winter wolf seemed to dance between the scything slices of each ream of paper. Despite her increased size, her agility seemed to have heightened even beyond what Lex had enhanced her with a moment ago, allowing her to move around, under, and between the twisting scrolls without so much as a single hair from her coat being cut.
Drafty’s eyes widened at the graceful display, and she saw Prevarius’ do the same right before Solvei was in his face, jaws snapping outward. It was enough to make the devil jerk to the side on reflex, and that made Solvei’s jaws clamp down on his right shoulder instead of his head. Immediately, a muffled crunching sound reached Drafty’s ears, followed by Prevarius’ scream of pain.
Solvei didn’t stop there, opening her jaws only to immediately close them again, clearly intent on tearing Prevarius arm off. But even as she did, Drafty saw Prevarius grin through the pain, somehow managing to flick his mangled right arm enough to loop the contract it held up and around Solvei’s neck, pinning her in place. At the same time, his undamaged left arm swung its scroll around in a heavy arm toward the back of Solvei’s neck, clearly intent on beheading the wolf in one fell swoop. And with the way Solvei was tangled in his other hand’s contract, Drafty couldn’t see any way to avoid it.
That was when a purple aura surrounded the contract wrapped around Solvei’s neck, yanking it off and giving Solvei the half-second she needed to release Prevarius shoulder and leap back, his decapitating strike hitting nothing but air.
Letting out the breath she’d been holding, Thermal Draft found herself panting in relief, knowing whose telekinetic aura that had been. But her respite turned to confusion an instant later, realizing she hadn’t used her revivifying spell on Lex yet.
A glance at the unicorn she was holding confirmed it: he was still unconscious. So whose telekinesis was-, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!
Across from her, Solvei’s eyes were glowing green, with purple contrails sprouting from their corners, making it clear whose aura that had been.
For a moment Drafty’s jaw worked soundlessly, before a hysterical laugh bubbled to her lips as she realized she had no idea what was happening anymore. Realizing that the one person who could make sense of everything was the one she kept getting distracted from, she put all of her concentration into finishing her spell. “C’mon, Lex! Wake up! You’ve gotta see this!”
As if in response to her urging, the unicorn cradled in her forelegs shifted, a groan escaping his lips as his eyes fluttered open. “…nngh…mnff…”
“Lex!” Unable to help the rush of relief that went through her, Drafty smiled, lifting him up a little more-
Just as Prevarius went on the attack.
“There doesn’t seem to be any end to how many tricks that pony can grant you,” he spat as he swung his scrolls around again, somehow able to still wield two despite the damage done to his right arm. “But can you do it to both of these contracts at once?” He swung them outward then, the edges of the paper cutting through the air so fast that they almost whistled…
But not toward Solvei.
“Because if you can’t,” jeered Prevarius cruelly, aiming one scroll each at the downed forms of Ebbe and Sten, the two of them lying near each other, still blackened and unable to move – let alone defend themselves – after the devil’s fireball had tossed them away, “you’ll need to decide which brother you want to save!”
Solvei was already moving before Prevarius finished speaking, rushing toward her brothers. Although her eyes continued to shine, no telekinetic aura wrapped around Prevarius’ scrolls, and Drafty knew with a sudden certainty that there wouldn’t be; she’d known enough unicorns in her life to understand that trying to grab moving objects with telekinesis was a difficult task, especially when it came to things moving as fast and as unpredictably as the phistophilus was swinging his scrolls.
Is she planning on taking the hits herself? wondered Drafty with a sudden rush of anxiety. Even if Solvei did that, she’d only be able to save one of her brothers! They’d landed near each other, but still too far apart for her to cover both of them!
“…no…”
The quiet murmur from the pony in her arms made Drafty whip her head around. “Lex!”
But the stallion’s eyes, half-focused and only partway open, were fixed on Solvei. “…s’a trick…”
“What?!” Her heart rising in her throat, Drafty turned her gaze back toward Solvei-
Just in time to see the wolf grow to immense proportions.
It was just like what had happened back when they’d first met, when her family had come after them in the cave. Just like then, Solvei suddenly increased in size, going from being only slightly larger than Princess Celestia to being the size of a small house…except this time, Drafty noted with a quick glance, Lex wasn’t holding his wire-wrapped hoof out toward her.
Just like with her use of telekinesis, Solvei was invoking that power completely on her own now.
A moment later she crashed onto her belly in front of Ebbe and Sten, her increased size giving her sufficient mass to cover both of them before Prevarius’ scrolls could make contact with either, a realization which made Drafty silently cheer. Yes! She saved them both!
Then she realized that the devil was smiling.
And suddenly she knew why Lex had said it was a trick.
“Gotcha,” snickered Prevarius, twisting his arms just slightly, altering the trajectory of the contracts’ attacks, both now directed right toward Solvei’s throat.
Drafty’s eyes widened as she realized that Prevarius had been counting on the fact that Solvei would use her body as a shield to protect her family, and that in doing so she’d leave herself open. Even if he couldn’t possibly have known that she’d increase her size like that, all it meant now was that she was a bigger target for him to hit. And with how Solvei had thrown herself to the ground to keep Ebbe and Sten safe from harm, there was no way she’d be able to recover her stance in time before the edges of Prevarius’ scrolls slit her throat.
It was over, realized Drafty with a surge of despair. The devil had won.
The two metallic clinks that rang out across the clearing a moment later, however, suggested otherwise.
Now it was Prevarius’ turn to stare with wide eyes, mouth hanging open at the sight that greeted him as his scrolls fell away from Solvei harmlessly. “What the…?”
Across from him, Solvei slowly stood up, the motion causing more soft sounds of scraping and jangling to fill the air. Their source was no mystery, however; everyone could tell that they were from the dark plates that Solvei now wore. Black and lusterless, they covered her body completely, as though sculpted to fit her enlarged proportions perfectly. The matte black substance enveloped her head, neck, middle, legs, and tail, leaving no part of her visible save for her eyes, which were once again glowing green and purple.
Black crystals, realized Drafty dazedly. She covered herself in armor made out of black crystals.
A moment later the muzzle covering opened, and Solvei roared in anger. “NEVER AGAIN!” she bellowed. “YOU’LL NEVER HURT ANYONE I LOVE EVER AGAIN!!!”
This time her roar was no mere declaration, followed immediately by a sharp inhalation. It was enough to make Prevarius fall back, expecting another blast of her breath weapon.
But he was still underestimating just what Solvei was capable of now.
In between her open jaws, a blue light began to gather, coalescing into a glowing orb. In a matter of seconds it grew brighter and larger, its azure radiance steadily increasing. As it did, Drafty felt a chill fall over everything, as though the energy coalescing in Solvei’s mouth was devouring what little heat could be found in the clearing, causing her teeth to chatter as the temperature plummeted.
Prevarius clearly felt it too, because his lips pulled back in a sudden snarl of alarm, eyebrows rising as he turned to try and dive out of the way.
But it was too late, as he’d barely started to move when Solvei brought her head forward and unleashed the gathered energy with a roar of anger.
Instantly, the ball of blue light exploded forward, turning into a rushing torrent of pure cold several feet in diameter. The cerulean beam shot across the clearing to engulf Prevarius entirely, the devil’s outline immediately disappearing beneath the onslaught as the shockwave sent snow flying in every direction, adding to the chill of the attack. It was enough to make Drafty cover her eyes, leaning over Lex and wrapping her one good wing around him protectively.
After a moment, the worst of the chill abated, and the pegasus dared to lift her head up and glance back at the results of…whatever it was Solvei had done, belatedly wondering if Prevarius’ resistances to magic and cold temperatures had protected him from the winter wolf’s attack.
A second later she saw that it hadn’t.
Prevarius was still standing, but that was about all that could be said for him. His injured right arm was frozen solid, encased with a coating of ice crystals, as was the lower half of his torso, and both of his legs. The only reason the rest of him had been spared was because he’d twisted his body to stand in profile to the blast, managing to keep his left side and his head mostly undamaged, though even there Drafty could see welts forming from the extreme cold. Even as she watched, the devil issued a pained grunt, forming a small flame in his left palm.
Then Solve bit him in half.
It happened in an instant. One moment the devil was rearing back with his small flame – whether to try and melt the ice covering him or use it to attack was unclear – and then the house-sized armor-clad wolf was there, rushing forward and scooping him up in her jaws, which closed over the middle of his frozen body and clenched down hard, causing it to shatter like glass.
Drafty watched as Prevarius’ upper body, now missing everything below his ribs, hit the ground and lay still, a surprised look on his face.
She did it, realized the pegasus, the thought seeming almost dreamlike for how unreal it was. After how strong Prevarius had been, it was almost hard to believe that they’d finally defeated him. Even now, Drafty could feel her nerves refusing to relax, ready for whatever new trick the phistophilus had up his sleeve. Hyper-fast regeneration. Or his death was an illusion. Or he’ll possess someone like that other devil did to Nosey. Or his body will suddenly explode.
But all that happened was that Solvei spat the remaining pieces of the frozen devil out of her mouth, shaking her head as she ran her tongue over her lips. “Disgusting,” she snorted.
In Drafty’s forelegs, Lex shifted slightly, as though trying to raise his hoof. “…Sol…vei…”
The words were barely audible, but the wolf in question reacted instantly. “Master!” Wasting no time, she bounded over to Lex, the black crystal armor dissolving into nothing as she shrank back down to her normal size, a whimper escaping her throat as she crouched down in front of Lex. “Master, please grant me the power to heal your wounds!”
With a low groan of effort, Lex managed to make his hoof twitch, and Drafty quickly reached over to help him raise it toward Solvei again. While there was no visible effect, only a second passed before the winter wolf drew in a sharp breath. Without hesitating, she raised a paw and pressed it to Lex’s torso. An instant later, the worst of his burns began to fade, and the disorientation disappeared from his face, his gaze sharpening as his consciousness fully returned, sitting up.
But his wounds weren’t completely healed when Solvei withdrew her paw. “Master,” she began, her tone apologetic, “forgive me. I know you’re still injured, but this power you gave me is limited, and my family…”
Lex nodded once. “Go help them,” he ordered gruffly.
Solvei’s expression brightened immediately. “Thank you, Master!” Then, before he could react, she leaned forward and licked his face, causing him to blink and sputter before Solvei turned and ran toward the rest of her pack, tail wagging.
The spectacle was enough to make Drafty giggle, suddenly feeling euphoric as the realization that they’d somehow managed to win despite everything that had happened began to sink in. “So, you’re her ‘master’ now, huh?”
The teasing made Lex scowl. “I don’t know why she’s calling me that,” he snapped, cheeks burning. “Nevermind that now. Tell me what happened.”
The command made Drafty tilt her head. “What do you mean? We won, that’s what happened. You gave Solvei all sorts of super magical powers and she tore Prevarius apart.” Sitting back, Drafty gave him a wry look. “Just a suggestion for the next time we get in trouble: give your allies the big power-up first thing, instead of waiting until the last possible second, okay?”
But Lex wasn’t listening, instead looking between his wire-wrapped hoof and Solvei, his brow furrowed. “I made her that strong…?” he muttered.
The question, more directed toward himself than her, made Drafty blink. “Wait, you don’t remember doing it?” Sitting up, she nodded toward where Solvei was going around to each of her packmates, running a hoof over them and causing their burns to recede in favor of white fur, causing them to slowly stir, already moving toward the last of her injured family members. “You and her and the other wolves were almost killed by Prevarius’ fireball, and Solvei got back up anyway, giving me enough time to try and revive you. You pointed your hoof at her and said-”
“Drafty!” called Solvei, making the pegasus look up, seeing that the winter wolf was bounding toward her now that the rest of her pack had been healed. Like Lex, they were by no means completely restored, but their burns no longer looked life-threatening. “I still have some healing left,” announced Solvei as she rejoined the ponies, her eyes on Drafty. “Hold still so I can fix your wing.”
The offer made Drafty blink, suddenly self-conscious. “Oh, no, that’s okay. Everyone else is hurt worse than me. You should-”
“Fix her wing,” interrupted Lex. “Now.”
The command made Solvei wag her tail again. “I knew you’d want me to help her before healing you any further, Master!” she bragged, reaching a paw over to brush Drafty’s injured wing. The pegasus immediately gasped as she felt the sudden absence of pain in her torn limb, the wound suddenly gone as though it had never been there in the first place.
“You’ll probably want to go find that pact that Prevarius made you sign so you can destroy it and get your soul back,” added Solvei. “I’ll stay here and watch over Master while you look for it.”
Her announcement – which struck Drafty as being unusually pushy – was accompanied by her moving alongside Lex…and shrinking in size. Completely nonplussed, Drafty watched as Solvei’s height decreased until she was pony-sized, no larger than Lex himself as she moved to sit next to him. “Master, please lean on me if you feel unsteady!”
An awkward silence fell then, the other winter wolves glancing at each other uncertainly. “Does anyone know why Solvei is suddenly all runty?” asked Ebbe pointedly. “And why she’s calling that pony ‘master’?”
But before anyone had a chance to answer the question, a hacking cough cut through the air…one that came from Prevarius’ body.
Immediately, the wolves turned and growled, Solvei the loudest of all as she resumed her normal size. Drafty flared her wings in alarm, her eyes going wide. Lex struggled to his hooves, gritting his teeth as he prepared to continue the fight.
A short distance away, Prevarius – now reduced to little more than a head atop a mangled torso – coughed again, before his voice dissolved into pained laughter. “Done in by a mutt…” he choked, blood staining his lips. “To think that’s how I’d go out…”
Drawing in a ragged breath, he glanced over at where the others were huddled, one corner of his lips turning up as he made eye contact with Lex. “Though really, I suppose it’s your victory,” he granted. “After all, you gave her…whatever that power was.”
“Why isn’t he dead?!” muttered Drafty, backing away from what should have been the devil’s corpse.
Lex, however, seemed far less afraid. “These creatures aren’t completely dependent on biology to stay alive,” he explained, slowly walking toward Prevarius’ broken body. “Because of that, even catastrophic physical damage can take some time to kill them.”
“Then we’ll just have to make him completely dead,” growled Turid, warily padding toward the mutilated devil.
The threat only made Prevarius chuckle again, not taking his eyes off of Lex. “You should call off your dogs,” he muttered. “At least if you want me to give you your reward for defeating me.”
“Master, this is some sort of trap,” warned Solvei. “Let us finish him off now before he tries something!”
Lex hesitated only for a moment before waving a hoof at the others. “All of you stay back. I want to know about those pony souls he said were being traded.”
Prevarius snickered at that. Or at least, he tried to, the laugh turning into more guttural coughing that ended with him spitting up another mouthful of blood, pulling in another few tortured breaths of air once he’d cleared his throat. “Oh, you don’t need to be concerned with them. You have bigger problems to worry about now.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed at that. “What do you mean?”
“That’s your reward,” smirked Prevarius. “Despair. You see, I know you’re going to tear up all of my contracts” – his eyes slid over to the papers that lay scattered across the clearing, all of them out of reach now – “and I just wanted you to be aware that Hell doesn’t take kindly to those who interfere in our business operations. You can expect to be made to pay for all the souls you’re going to cost us,” he laughed, the sound watery. “With interest.”
The threat made Lex scoff. “Hell will never know who was responsible for what happened here today. With your death, there’s no one who’ll ever tell them.”
But Prevarius’ grin only widened. “That’s where you’re wrong. By now, Degron has already made a report about you.”
That prompted a round of concerned looks among the winter wolves. “You’re bluffing,” huffed Sten. “We killed Degron. His head was torn clean off.”
“He’s alive,” insisted Prevarius. “The summoning I used didn’t call him fully here. It was what you’d call an astral body. It takes solid form here, since this is the physical realm, but his real self never left Hell. Destroying his local incarnation just sent his consciousness back.” His grin grew wider then, giving Lex a mocking look. “And since he communicates telepathically, it was easy for me to tell him your name before that happened.”
The news caused a dark look to pass over Lex’s face, staring daggers at the spiteful creature. “You…”
“Enjoy looking over your shoulder for the next few decades,” laughed Prevarius. “Compared to what’s going to happen to you, oblivion isn’t such a bad fate.” His eyes slid over to Thermal Draft then, and his eyes narrowed. “Don’t you think, Drafty?”
The question sent a chill down the pegasus’ spine. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Prevarius didn’t answer right away, seized by another coughing fit. This time it was worse, and when it finally ended his breathing was noticeably shallower, each breath coming slower. But his smirk remained. “I put a special clause in your contract,” he admitted. “A little something I’ve been working on for a few decades now, to strengthen the sanctity of infernal deals.”
The revelation drew a hiss from Lex, his eyes sweeping over the wolves. “Bring me Thermal Draft’s contract!” he demanded.
But the wolves didn’t move, instead looking between Lex and the scattered papers. “We can’t read runes,” admitted Kaja after a moment, flinching in clear expectation of Lex’s anger. “So we can’t tell which one is hers.”
“Then gather them all up,” suggested Solvei. “I’ll stay by Master’s side in case this is some sort of elaborate deception.”
Her siblings glanced at their mother, who in turn looked between Solvei and Lex for a moment before nodding, their movements guarded as they moved to gather up the scattered contracts.
But Lex wasn’t content to wait for them. “What clause did you add to Thermal Draft’s contract?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
“Certainly…” rasped Prevarius. “Wouldn’t want to miss…the look on your face…” Pausing the draw in a deep breath of air, he forced the words out with visible difficulty. “It’s a special provision…one which says that…in the event that Hell…can’t collect her soul…then it forfeits any other destination…and with no ability to go anywhere…and no life force to anchor it to her body…simply ceases to exist…”
Thermal Draft turned as white as a sheet then. “Wh-what? You’re…you’re saying that…that when I…when I die…”
“It’s the end…for you…permanently…” wheezed the devil. “Even…resurrection magic…won’t be able to…bring you back…”
“You’re wrong!” hissed Lex, marching up to the dying devil, heedless of whatever danger Prevarius potentially still posed. “When her contract is destroyed, that provision will cease to have any effect, along with the rest of it!”
Prevarius shook his head, the motion feeble. “What makes the…provision special…is that it…survives…the contract being…terminated…” His breath rattled as he exhaled. “…her signature already…put that directive…onto her soul…”
His teeth grinding together as his eyes widened in fury, Lex snatched the devil up in his telekinesis, putting his nose an inch from the phistophilus’. “YOU’RE LYING!”
“I’m not…” The weak breaths that came from Prevarius’ mouth then were only barely laughter. “You might…have killed me…but I wonder…if you’ll be able…to call this…a victory…?”
Lex threw what was left of Prevarius back down with a roar of anger then, but it was too late. Even before the devil’s body hit the ground, his eyes closed, and he breathed no more.
The sky was featureless in its blackness, shrouding everything in a canopy that had neither a sun nor stars to brighten its eternal gloom.
But while the realm itself had no natural light, there was still illumination to be found throughout. Across, above, and even beneath the land, an observer would have beheld pinpoints of radiance, as though the absent stars had fled the sky to take up residence below it instead. Even these, however, were transient more often than not, with the majority blinking into existence for only a short while before vanishing from sight.
Investigating what had become of those temporary lights would have ended poorly for most, as they were utilized for a variety of purposes that were to the bane of any whose curiosity outweighed their caution.
Among the briefest were those lights furnished by the desperate or the foolish. Wayward travelers who had arrived in the region by accident, new arrivals who weren’t sufficiently prepared, or those who had overestimated their own ability to cope with the everlasting night, they were beacons to those who dwelt in the blackness. In such cases, predators were never far behind, eager to take advantage of such easy prey.
In other cases, the lights were prepared precisely to draw in those same predators. When they went to investigate what was expected to be an easy meal, those hunters would instead find themselves becoming the hunted, realizing too late that they had been lured in by predators that were stronger, craftier, or otherwise deadlier than themselves.
Sometimes the brightness was a weapon in and of itself, bursts of illumination designed to blind the unwary, giving their enemies a momentary advantage. Other times, the flashes were simply a byproduct of another form of attack, as bursts of flame or blasts of lightning lit up the area, damaging sensitive eyes along with the flesh of their victims.
Least common were the lights that put out a sustained glow, shining steadily against the omnipresent gloom. In almost all cases, these were the hallmarks of those who’d carved out their own territories, their power – whether wielded by them personally, or administered via subordinates who carried out the will of their masters – sufficient to withstand the negative attention such prolonged illumination invariably invited. Such places boasted the largest populations, as there were many who found bowing down before the lords of such fiefdoms to be preferable to forging their own path through the perpetual gloom that covered the remainder of the realm…though nearly all of those who kneeled did so with a silent vow that one day, they would be the one who made others bow before them.
But for all those who dwelt in that realm, whether they avoided the scattered lights or sought them out, there was one area that they all regarded with fear. In that location, the darkness was more than just an absence of light; it was the very antithesis of it, giving off a murky cast so opaque that – even at a distance – it was visible against the surrounding gloom.
And indeed, “at a distance” was how most of denizens regarded that blackest of places: the moon which hovered overhead.
But the darkness of that umbral orb wasn’t the real reason that the dwellers of that realm regarded it with a mixture of awe and terror. Rather, it was because that moon was the lair of the one who ruled over all of those lightless lands. And none dared look up at it for long, unable to bear the thought that its ruler might be looking back at them from that benighted place.
For this was the realm that those scholars and sages who mapped the planes of existence knew as Darkest Night, the home of the Night Mare.
But had there been any with the courage to approach goddess’s abode – as well as the power and skill necessary to do so uninvited, for the black moon which constituted the heart of the domain was far from undefended – and reach the innermost portion of her court, they would have found themselves privy to a most fascinating discussion indeed…
“That upstart must be repudiated!”
The voice, delivered in an electronic crackle that would have pained a mortal’s ears, was accompanied by the sound of metal striking stone as the speaker brought their hoof down. “Lex Legis has gone too far this time! His actions have imperiled us all, and so he must be disavowed before we’re all made to suffer the consequences of his foolishness!”
The outburst brought a derisive chuckle from another resident of the great hall, who slunk forward a moment later. “I must say, I find Steel Soul’s confidence inspiring,” announced a resplendently-dressed stallion, raising one batlike wing to brush his mane back as he flashed a fang-filled grin; like all members of the Night Mare’s inner circle, the supernatural darkness impaired him not in the least. “After failing so badly to convert the clockwork ponies to Our Dark Lady’s worship, anyone else would be inclined to second-guess their judgment. Truly, our mechanical comrade is made of…sterner stuff.”
Although Steel Soul’s metallic face was incapable of displaying anger, the soft hum of attack systems powering up made his anger clear as he took a threatening step toward the bat-winged pony. “The interference of that paladin was only a temporary setback, you bloodsucking corpse! My plans for forcibly upgrading the clockwork ponies to new psibernetic bodies like my own-”
Are irrelevant right now.
The heavy steel shield that swooped down from above made the other two flinch, as much from the tone in its mental voice as from the harsh clang that resounded as it reached the ground. While Sanguine Disposition’s rebuke is not misplaced, Steel Soul isn’t wrong. Lex Legis’ status as the Night Mistress’s champion means that Perdition might seek to indict Her for his forcibly voiding their infernal contracts. If that happens, it could be the first step toward open hostility between our pantheon and the devils.
“You see? Bulwark understands,” laughed Steel Soul, his artificial voice filled with spiteful glee before glancing upward. “I hope the rest of the Umbral Regalia do as well.”
Above them, the collection of sentient weapons, armor, and other tools that were the Night Mare’s closest advisors hovered in place, broadcasting their thoughts aloud.
No gods have ever recognized the validity of Hell’s infernal contracts, came the sneering voice of Headhunter, a double-headed greataxe. If they issue some sort of indemnity, we’re under no impetus to honor it.
Which is why they’d do so, you unsubtle oaf, hissed Incision, a small dagger. If Hell claims we’ve wronged them, and we refuse their overtures to resolve the matter, they’ll have justification for escalating things. If we’re made to appear in the wrong, then it will be that much harder to muster our allies!
We can’t win a war with the devils, murmured Bastion, a suit of full-plate armor. Its comment was enough to make the others quiet down for a moment, recognizing one of the greatest of their number, who was in charge of security for the entire realm. Even if we brought the might of the rest of the pantheon to bear, our only viable strategy would be to make it clear that a victory for Hell would be costly enough that it would be more trouble than it was worth for them to prosecute such an undertaking.
Bulwark levitated back up to join its brethren then. After what happened with the elves, we would be hard-pressed to make such a demonstration.
That was enough to earn a grunt of annoyance from the one in the center of the hall, bringing all other activity to a halt.
“I’ve heard enough,” announced the Night Mare, rising from the high-backed throne in the center of the hall. “The devils are parasites, and my champion put an end to one of their efforts to steal the souls of the mortal ponies whose worship I desire. I will not break faith with him over that.”
There is a basis for saying that he broke faith with you first, if you should desire it.
The rumbling chuckle that came from the Night Mare’s lip then was enough to make everyone cower. “Severance,” she sneered. “Still upset over how my champion threw you away?”
Lex Legis has exceeded the authority of the divine mandate you graced him with, continued the scythe. You granted him the power to bind eldritch beasts, but not beyond death. By merging his magic with the fragment of divinity you lent him, he has tied the soul of that winter wolf to his own. Even if she dies, he is her only afterlife now. That’s as much a violation of the divine prerogative as Hell’s infernal contracts.
“Irrelevant,” snorted the Night Mare, her tone bemused. “The so-called utvalgte have no gods of their own, just a few greater spirits for whom their reverence barely crosses over into genuine worship. Besides, should my champion die while still bound to her, that winter wolf’s soul will follow him to me, so I lose nothing either way.”
Crossing the chamber, she didn’t raise her head as she addressed the rest of the Umbral Regalia floating above her. “As for the devils, if they bother to send any sort of formal complaint over losing a paltry few souls, remind them that we have a peace accord with the elven gods now,” she spat, her words taking on a harsher edge. “If our pantheon has to live with that humiliation, we might as well make it work for us, since the elves hate the devils on principle. The idea of Perdition carving out a place in this world is one they won’t tolerate, and the devils know it.”
That might be enough to ward them off, but they won’t be happy about it, warned Bastion, floating downward to stand at the side of the now-vacant throne. The accord reached by the virtuous powers might be enough to keep them from openly making a move on Equestria, but if they send some of their subtler operatives to disrupt your fledgling church there, it could make growing that sect difficult.
“I’m aware,” snorted the goddess. “So after they finish their blustering, make a deal for a few of the lesser Regalia to aid them in their next sortie against the demons. That should be enough for them to save face.”
The Night Mare continued toward the exit, apparently satisfied that the matter was dealt with, only belated adding one more instruction. “And make sure that they formally agree to drop any animosity toward my champion as part of the arrangement,” she called back. “Now that he’s finally beginning to avail himself of his latent potential, I don’t need them distracting him over some petty vendetta.”
Bastion gave a bow at that. As you wish.
But there was one among the Umbral Regalia who was dissatisfied with that. You’re extending him leniency, noted Severance. He’s already served his purpose, setting up your church in that other world. Why are you showing him so much favor now?
The question was enough to stop the Night Mare in her tracks, and when she looked back at the scythe, her expression was dangerous. “If I’m showing leniency,” she answered coldly, “it’s to you, for daring to question my judgment.” Turning around, she stalked toward the weapon, which froze in mid-air, as though realizing that it had gone too far. “Perhaps I should rectify that mistake right now,” mused the goddess darkly.
Severance immediately prostrated itself, falling to the floor with a loud clatter as it impacted the stonework. The mistake was mine, it admitted hurriedly. I have no excuse.
“Indeed,” replied the Night Mare flatly, before raising a hoof and bringing it down sharply. The tortured scream that filled the hall then was as much from the twisting of metal as it was from Severance’s psychic cry of agony. “In fact, I’ve noticed that you've had little excuse for several of your failures lately. Your inability to turn that Equestrian mare I initially gifted you to, Applejack, toward my worship was one. Then you strained your relationship with my champion to the point where he saw fit to request your banishment was another. And now you think to imply that even my reasoning is flawed.” With each notation, she brought her hoof down again, deforming Severance’s shape further.
“I should leave you like this, for how poorly you’ve served me lately,” she continued, looking down at the twisted wreck of metal that Severance had become. “But that would be a waste. Instead, after you’ve completed the long and painful process of repairing yourself, I want you to be the one who goes to help the devils slay their demonic foes after Bastion closes a deal with them. At least then you’ll be doing something useful, and more importantly, you’ll be out of my sight.”
Finally removing her hoof from Severance and turning back toward her original destination, the Night Mare kept speaking as she left. “And while you're serving alongside Perdition’s forces,” added the Night Mare, “I want you to pay attention to anything you might overhear them say with regard to my champion. I doubt they’d let anything slip in front of one of my own weapons, but if they do, you’ll report it to me immediately.”
…I…understand…
“Good. Because unlike you, my champion has my favor right now, something which I fully expect him to continue to do…”
Disappearing into the darkness, the goddess’s last words lingered in the air behind her.
“It’s about time.” Lex made no attempt to hide the impatience in his voice, giving the pegasus an irritated glare.
But if Thermal Draft was upset by his petulance, she didn’t show it, instead sticking her tongue out at him playfully. “You’re the one who said you wanted me to do this. Next time let me prepare first.”
“You didn’t need to make any preparations to use the magic Prevarius gave you when we were fighting him yesterday,” noted Lex testily. “Why would you need to now?”
“Because you said you’re going to examine the magical channels in my body while I do it, that’s why.” Fighting down a blush, Drafty let her eyes drift to the ground, shyly looking back up at him. “You can’t just tell a girl you want to look inside her like that. It’s embarrassing, especially since…” – she gulped then, her cheeks reddening more – “since I heard about what that was like when you looked Sonata, Aria, and Nosey over that way.”
Despite her outward embarrassment, Drafty cheered inside as she saw Lex’s eyes widen slightly, his face flushing. But the thrill of getting him to consider her in an erotic manner, even if only for a moment, was short-lived. His expressed darkened immediately, bitterness replacing chagrin, and she knew he was remembering the last time he’d seen the trio in question, not knowing if they’d made it out of the burning factory or not.
The emotions played out on his face clearly, until at last she saw him shake them off and collect himself. “There won’t be any touching involved,” he muttered, huffing. “Just use your magic and I’ll observe you from here.”
Trying not to feel disappointed that her ploy to tease him hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped, or guilty that she’d reminded him that they still didn’t know what had happened to the others who’d confronted Dark Streak with them, Drafty turned and faced in the direction of the forest, taking a deep breath of the cold air outside the winter wolves’ den – the wolves themselves out hunting together as a family – as she started concentrating on the magic the treacherous devil had given her. Even so, the thought of what Prevarius had done sent a flicker of unease through her. C’mon Kara. This is the sort of flirting that somepony who worships you would do, isn’t it? And you wouldn’t let one of your faithful become nothing when they die…right?
The thought sent a chill through her that had nothing to do with the cold as she started constructing a spell.
Although it had only been a day since they’d defeated the devil, the anxiety that had fallen over Drafty since then made her feel like she’d aged a year. Finding out that Prevarius had consigned her soul to Hell – which was apparently the home realm of devils like him and Xiriel – had been bad enough. Finding out that her soul would cease to exist if Hell didn’t receive it had been even worse. And then, after they’d finished the fight and trudged back to the winter wolves’ den, too tired to even think about setting off for civilization, she’d had both of those fears validated when Lex had looked over her contract, eventually confirming Prevarius’ dying words.
Needless to say, she hadn’t slept very well that night.
Nor was that all that had kept her tossing and turning. Now that she had a better understanding of how magic worked, thanks to the benefits granted to her by her infernal contract, she was fully aware that whatever spell Prevarius had used to cut off her ability to hear Kara’s telepathic voice was likely putting out a magic aura, one that Lex could conceivably detect. If that happened, he’d likely have questions about what it was, questions that Drafty wasn’t prepared to answer.
The good news was that – although she still hadn’t figured out how to break whatever the devil had done to make her telepathically deaf – she’d been able to cobble together a concealment spell, one designed to suppress magic auras; for all that Prevarius had been a lying sack of dirt, his magical instructions had been on-point enough for her to fumble her way through the process while Lex and the rest of the winter wolves had slept. Even then, the only reason she had faith in it was because Lex apparently used that circlet that he wore to look into the so-called “magical spectrum.” Fortunately for her, that magic item – at least when she’d covertly inspected it herself during the night – seemed to be built for efficiency rather than power, meaning that so long as he relied on it to look her over, Prevarius’ telepathy-blocking spell would hopefully pass beneath the circlet’s notice.
But at least I’m sure he won’t notice how I’m a doppelganger now, instead of a pegasus, she reassured herself silently as she cast her acid-spray spell. That’s because I have faith in you, Kara. You gods are all about faith, aren’t you?
No answer came – not that she’d really expected it to – as she completed her spell, the foul-smelling liquid arcing out from her hoof and hitting the ground, sizzling as it made contact with the dirt. It wasn’t very impressive, the thin stream of liquid shooting out with as much force as if she’d fired it from a squirt gun, but it had been one of the first spells she’d come up with on her own after Prevarius had taught her how to use the magic he’d given her. Her intention at the time had been to come up with ways she could show Lex she was useful in a fight, in case he needed her help the way he had with Dark Streak. That turning out to be the case much sooner than she’d thought was an irony Drafty remained keenly aware of now.
With her spell cast, she turned an inquisitive glance toward Lex, trying not to let her nervousness show on her face. “How’s that?”
“Keep going,” grunted Lex, peering at her intently.
Okay, he’s not saying anything about a suspicious spell aura around me, and he’s not yelling that I’m a hideous monster wearing a Thermal Draft disguise. So far so good, she decided as she started pulling together the pieces of another spell, this time the large patch of fog she’d used in yesterday’s fight. It took a little more time to create, but after a few seconds had gone by, there was a thick bank of mist floating in the air in front of her. Looking it over for a few seconds, Drafty turned her eyes toward Lex again. “Should I keep going?”
A few feet back, Lex nodded, his usual frown deepening as he continued to stare at her intently.
Despite – or perhaps because of – all of the nervous tension running through her, Drafty couldn’t help but feel a bit of a thrill at how closely Lex’s eyes were on her. All of a sudden she badly wanted to think about something uplifting, something besides all the lies she was juggling, the imperiled state of her soul, or the fact that they were stranded on an alien world. Him blushing when I teased him means that he’s aware that I’m prettier now, she mused to herself. And this isn’t exactly the best time to sing him something, so instead, let’s see if I can knock his socks off with some really impressive magic!
Keeping that thought in mind, she started pulling together a spell that was far and away bigger than anything she’d tried to date. Let’s see if I can make one of those fireball explosions like he and Prevarius were throwing around before!
Pursing her lips, Drafty concentrated on pulling the necessary components of the spell together, taking a deep breath as she ran them through her head. Okay, gotta keep the effect in mind first, otherwise it won’t do anything. So that’s fire. Now I’ve gotta calibrate it so that it explodes all at once rather than a slow burn, adjusted for the fact that there’s no fuel source beyond the initial expenditure of power.
“What are you doing?” demanded Lex suddenly.
But Drafty couldn’t bring herself to answer him, biting her lip as she tried to put the pieces together. Oops, gotta make sure it covers a wide enough area, otherwise it’ll just be a tiny little flare. And it has to happen far enough away, otherwise it’ll hit both of us! And, um, the heat gradient has to be set high enough, or it’ll just feel like a rush of warm air instead of actual flames. No, wait, that should have been part of the initial effect I set…I think? Oh geez, it’s slipping away!
“That’s enough!” There was tension in Lex’s voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Thermal Draft, abort your spell!”
“I can’t!” she squealed, sweat dripping down her brow. “If I don’t finish it now, it’ll go off on its own!” Trying to keep her breathing steady, she closed her eyes, focusing on keeping the rapidly-unraveling components of her spell together. Almost got it! Just need to fold in a restriction on how high the flames jump so they don’t catch the trees-, no, that’s part of the area I outlined already!
It was like trying to juggle eight flaming torches after having only mastered keeping three balls in the air at once. There was simply too much to keep track of, and the components she’d already pulled in formed a series that was dangerously incomplete, leaving her flailing as she tried to keep it from tumbling down around her. But although it required no actual movement on her part, she could feel the sequence coming undone…
Which meant that her fireball spell was about to go off right on top of her and Lex both. “Run!” she yelped, wings flaring even as she realized that she’d never be able to fly away in time. “Lex, ru-”
She wasn’t able to finish speaking as something heavy collided with her, everything going dark immediately afterward. It was enough to make a sudden burst of absolute terror rush through her, certain that she’d just accidentally killed herself, and now the contract she’d signed – and which they hadn’t destroyed, since Lex had still been studying it last night – was sending her soul toward whatever torments awaited her in Hell. I’m sorry! she wailed silently. Cloudy, I’m so sorry! I didn’t-
“Are you alright?!”
The voice – Lex’s voice – jolted her out of her panicked state, only realizing that she’d squeezed her eyes shut as she opened them. Looking up, she saw the stallion in question moving off of her, a dome of black crystals falling away to reveal the overcast sky. All around them, the ground was scorched, with only the small area covered by the protective barrier that Lex had raised being spared, along with the two of them. The sight was enough to leave Drafty dazed. “I…I think so…”
“You weren’t thinking at all!” raged Lex, apparently satisfied that she was well enough for him to berate. “Do you not understand how that magic you were using works?! Because if you did, you’d realize just how danger-, MMPH!!!”
For a moment Drafty couldn’t figure out why Lex hadn’t finished speaking.
Then she realized it was because she’d wrapped her forelegs around his neck and pulled him downward, kissing him deeply.
That was enough of a surprise that her grip slackened as her brain caught up to what her body was doing, giving Lex enough leverage to pull away from her. “Wh-what are you doing?!” he demanded, shock and confusion written all over his face as he stared at her.
“I don’t know!” The words flowed out of her mouth without any conscious control on her part. “I was just so touched by how you keep saving me! First when I was sick and dying in Vanhoover and then bringing me back after I was killed and again when Prevarius tricked me and then just now and I was so overwhelmed I…um…I mean…” Trailing off as she managed to regain some semblance of control over herself, Drafty didn’t have to feign embarrassment this time as she shakily climbed to her hooves. “I guess I just…couldn’t help myself…”
“…” Lex could only stare at her, his expression making it clear that he had no idea how to respond to any of what had just happened.
The awkward silence that fell then was so thick it was almost palpable, and Drafty fidgeted in place, desperate for something else to talk about. “So, um…did you figure anything out?”
“…what?”
“About my spellcasting,” murmured Drafty, shuffling her hoof idly, not able to look him in the eye all of a sudden. “Did you learn anything?”
“Oh! Um, yes.” Taking a moment to clear his throat, Lex quickly availed himself of the change in topic. “For one thing, you’re technically not casting spells at all.”
That was unexpected enough that Drafty felt her discomposure start to recede. “Wait, I’m not?”
“Spellcasting, strictly speaking, is the externalized release of energy gathered internally,” explained Lex. “While there are different methods of doing that, what you’re doing doesn’t involve any internalization of energy to begin with. Instead, you’re arranging ambient magical energy into specific effects without ever taking them into yourself, a process referred to as ritualization, or simply a ritual for short.”
The news was enough to make Drafty blink. “Wait…I’ve heard of this before. Didn’t you do something like this when you gave Aria her pony body?”
Lex scowled at that, and Drafty had just enough time to kick herself for again mentioning one of the ponies whose fate was still unknown to them before he answered. “That’s the same overall process, but you’re going about it slightly differently than I do.”
“How so?”
Lex took a breath, and Drafty had the distinct impression he was trying to figure out how to dumb things down enough to where she could understand it. “While ritualization doesn’t require you to absorb anything, it’s still dependent on the magical channels that all living creatures possess. Specifically, the way you manipulate the ambient energy in your local environment is via that energy in your body, utilizing it in specific arrangements that produce corresponding changes in the area around you.”
“So…it’s like using a magnet to move stuff that’s attracted or repelled by magnets?” ventured Drafty.
“In terms of the specific principles of application, it’s nothing like that,” huffed Lex, before sighing. “But insofar as a basic explanation goes, that analogy is…adequate.”
For some reason, that made Drafty giggle a little. “In other words, I’m some sort of ritualist now?”
“Essentially,” frowned Lex, not sharing in her mirth. “From what I can tell, Prevarius performed some sort of alteration to the way the magical channels in your body function. Their arrangement and overall operations appear to be unaltered, but they’ve become much more finely-tuned to interacting with the ambient energy around you.”
“That’s great!” Suddenly excited as she realized what that meant, Drafty flared her wings. “You’re a genius at magic, and I’m super good at constructing rituals now! I mean, I know I messed up that fireball just now, but together you should be able to teach me how to make a ritual that’ll take us back to Equestria, and we can…um…why are you shaking your head?”
“Because that won’t work,” replied Lex flatly. “The magical channels in your body have become highly specialized with regard to ritualization, but while the magnitude of interaction has been amplified, the overall wavelengths affected has decreased, with the phase velocity becoming much more sensitive with regard to the dispersive medium-”
“Whoa, whoa, you lost me,” interrupted Drafty, shaking her head. “Can you try that again, using smaller words?”
Grimacing, Lex snorted before speaking again. “If the magical channels in your body are like magnets,” he started, rolling his eyes, “then they’re magnets that are stronger than normal, but much smaller. You have a great deal of fine control, but the effects you can construct via ritualization are highly limited. As what just happened should illustrate.”
“Hey, come on, that was an accident,” protested Drafty, wincing a little. “I might have messed that up, but I bet I’ll get better with practice.”
“Potentially,” admitted Lex. “But while you’re able to construct effects very quickly, at least compared to how typical ritualization goes, and can do so without elaborate gestures or vocalizations, my estimation is that – in terms of raw power – you’ll only be able to equal a unicorn wizard, with a magic-focused cutie mark, who’s been trained in Equestrian spellcasting. And you won’t be able to ritualize effects as fast as they can cast spells, unless the effects are extremely simple,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“That’s still really good!” gushed Drafty, only for her enthusiasm to ebb a moment later. “But I suppose it’s not enough to get us home, huh?”
“No,” confirmed Lex. “And I don’t want to make the attempt myself unless there’s no other option. Moving between planes of existence is fraught with peril even using structured spellcasting; with a ritual, it’s courting disaster.” He glanced around then, his expression returning to its usual sour look. “Even more disaster,” he muttered darkly.
But Drafty couldn’t help but snicker in helpless amusement. “You can say that again,” she agreed as she pulled out both copies of the contract she’d signed with Prevarius, having gotten them back from Lex that morning. “It’s too bad though. Being able to use magic isn’t worth losing my soul over, but it’s still really nice.”
“In that regard, you have more latitude than you realize,” spat Lex, glaring at the papers hatefully. “The same provision that says your soul’s being lost to oblivion if Hell can’t collect it will survive the contract’s termination also applies to the so-called beneficial provisions of your contract. It’s a consequence of the agglutination of addenda regarding-, what are you doing?!”
Looking up from where she’d just dumped a gout of acid on both copies of the contract, Drafty gave Lex a look of resolve, one that was only partially ruined by how she could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks again. “Trusting that you’ll do what you always do, and save me.”
“Thermal Draft-”
“I don’t want to go to Hell after I die, Lex. Not if it’s the sort of place that produces monsters like Prevarius or Xiriel. If it’s a place filled with creatures like them, then I’d rather not exist.”
Letting out a shaky breath, Drafty sent a silent apology to Kara. I guess I’m really not cut out for the whole ‘religious faith’ thing, she admitted, as much to herself as the goddess. There’s really only one person I believe in that much.
“And besides,” she continued, giving Lex a warm smile. “I know that you’ll figure out a way to save me from this.”
Drafty didn't let her gaze waver then, looking Lex straight in the eye as she – just for a moment – put all of her lies and deceptions aside and spoke from her heart.
“There’s a cul-de-sac up ahead,” reported Thermal Draft as she touched down beside Lex. “It’s basically just a small rock ridge with a slight curve to it, but it’s the best cover I’ve seen so far.”
Lex glanced upward, but it was futile. With the heavy cloud cover having returned in force earlier in the day – presaging the thick snow that had once again begun to fall – there was no real way to tell how late it was. The only reason he knew it was daytime at all was because full dark hadn’t fallen yet, and with the high mountains all around them serving to elevate the horizon, when nighttime did come it would arrive quickly.
“We’ll stop there for the night,” he decided.
“You know we could probably keep going for a little longer, right?” Thermal Draft flexed her wings, as if preparing to take off again. “I’m not tired, and I bet that I could whip up a spell to see in the dark pretty easily now, with all the practice you’ve had me doing. So we could probably get a few more hours in before we needed to take a break.”
“There’s no guarantee that we’ll find any sort of defensible position when we do,” retorted Lex flatly. “If we have to stop in the middle of the night with no cover because we’re all exhausted, we’ll be vulnerable to whatever predators might be out here.”
“Solvei said that there aren’t that many dangerous creatures in this area. Besides…” Smiling, Thermal Draft reached out to flick the amulet – formerly his own, now hers since he had a better one – that hung from around her neck, ruffling the cloak he’d also given her. “Thanks to these protective items, and with my wing being all healed up, I’m not afraid of whatever’s out here. Worse comes to worst, I can fall back and support you and Solvei from a distance while-”
“It’s an unnecessary risk,” snapped Lex, struggling to keep his voice level in the face of the sudden surge of anger that rushed over him then. “First of all, Solvei’s information doesn’t take into account the ecological impact of this prolonged period of inclement weather; a lack of food means that hungry creatures will range outside of their usual territory, so her attesting that this area is comparatively safe is not the reassurance you seem to think it is!”
Drafty took a step back at that, blinking at the sudden vehemence in his voice. “I didn’t mean-”
“Secondly,” continued Lex, “your assumptions about the nature of any threats we may face are entirely unwarranted! If we’re beset by something that can fly, then your wings won’t allow you to maintain a safe distance from whatever’s attacking us! Nor would such an attack necessarily be any sort of obvious confrontation, since an ambush predator could conceivably attack and inflict serious injury or death to any of us – including and especially yourself, despite the faith you’ve put in those altogether minor magic items I’ve given you – before we could even detect them in the first place!”
Her wings drooping, Drafty cringed. “I wasn’t suggesting-”
“And finally,” snarled Lex, his eyes changing color as his attempt to keep his emotions in check failed, “given the severity of what will happen to your soul if you die, I would think that you of all ponies would realize that this is a dangerous situation which needs to be handled with the utmost caution INSTEAD OF ACTING LIKE THIS IS SOME SORT OF ADVENTURE!!!”
Her ears flattening against her skull, Thermal Draft swallowed before answering, looking anywhere except at him. “…you’re right. I’m sorry.”
Turning away from him, she sniffled once before flapping her wings, rising into the air. “The cul-de-sac is about a hundred yards ahead. I’ll go get it cleaned up for us.”
The words had barely left her mouth when she took off, leaving Lex scowling in the wake of her departure. I just told her to take our circumstances more seriously, and the first thing she does is run off by herself?! No matter that a hundred yards wasn’t a great distance – though the foul weather, rocky terrain, and thin distribution of evergreens made it harder to cross than it normally would have been – the fact that she’d ventured off on her own so easily meant that he hadn’t gotten through to her, despite how cogent his reasoning had been.
Nor was Thermal Draft the only member of their group whom he was having trouble relating to…
Master, I felt your anger. Is everything alright?
Solvei’s voice slid through his mind, causing Lex to cringe at the unwanted mental contact. It’s nothing for you to be concerned about, Solvei.
Would you feel better if I brought you something to eat? queried the winter wolf. I saw a quail just now! It looked big and fat and very delicious! I could catch it for you!
Ponies don’t eat dead animals the way your kind does, thought back Lex disgustedly. Thermal Draft and I are settling down for the evening. Finish whatever you’re doing with the rest of your family and make your way to my position.
Yes, Master.
Solvei’s final statement carried considerably less enthusiasm than before. But it wasn’t the tone of her mental voice that let him know that she’d apparently taken the rebuke more harshly than he’d intended. Rather, it was that he registered her dejection directly.
That was another function of whatever bond – for lack of a better term – he’d somehow forged with the winter wolf. While he didn’t experience Solvei’s emotions, Lex was still aware of her state of mind at any given moment, along with her overall health and relative location. It was like there was a news relay about her in his brain. One which, at the moment, read: “Solvei. Distance: one quarter-mile northeast. Status: healthy. Disposition: sad.”
But as disconcerting as Lex found that, he was more uncomfortable with the fact that the link between himself and Solvei wasn’t a one-way transmission. The same way he was aware of her position and overall health, she was likewise aware of his own. But where Lex only received a notification of the winter wolf’s feelings, she actually felt the emotions that he experienced. It was a state of affairs that Lex was profoundly uncomfortable with, and yet could do almost nothing about.
The one bit of good news was that Solvei didn’t feel his feelings all of the time. It was only when they hit a certain threshold of intensity that they were transmitted to her; much like how only peak moments of anger or frustration would cause his eyes to glow, his emotions would only reach the winter wolf when they overflowed past the point where he could keep a lid on them.
To that end, he’d tried to retain his equanimity as much as he could, but that was a battle he’d spent his entire life fighting with little to show for it. Like a door with no latch and no lock, the barrier between his feelings and Solvei seemed ready to swing open of its own accord at the slightest provocation. For someone who was intent on safeguarding the sanctity of his mind at all costs, the situation bordered on unbearable.
Of course, he could shut Solvei out completely, if he used his dark magic to do it. The same power that allowed him to shrug off any attempts to interfere with his mind allowed him to shut down the connection between himself and the winter wolf completely…but never for very long. Worse, doing so not only put a drain on his dark magic – something which Lex knew he could ill afford, given how he’d been on Everglow for only a few days and had already fought multiple life-or-death battles – but it also suppressed the ancillary effects of their link. The last thing Lex needed was to psychically muzzle Solvei only for her to need to contact him because of something she’d found.
Nor was a more permanent dissolution an option. While Lex still couldn’t remember whatever it was that he’d done in that moment of semi-consciousness when he’d somehow bound Solvei to himself – though the winter wolf’s later testimony that they’d been together in some place surrounded by blue fire had been enough to confirm to Lex that the Night Mare’s divine authority had been involved – he’d made only a single attempt to try and undo whatever it was he’d wrought.
The result had been agonizing, for himself and Solvei both. The pain he’d experienced then had been as if he’d tried to rip one of his own legs off, and the winter wolf’s anguish had been – according to what he’d sensed over their link – far worse than his own, to the point where he’d been momentarily afraid for her life. The guilt he’d experienced over that incident had been unexpectedly profound, and enough to convince him that any further investigation into how to separate them would need to be postponed until he could figure out a way to do so without harming her.
Which meant that, for the foreseeable future, he had to live with Solvei’s presence in his mind.
And those are just the passive effects of whatever this is that’s connecting the two of us, Lex sighed to himself as he made his way after Thermal Draft. If I tried to augment it…
That he could do so seemed obvious. After all, that was the case with every form of magic he was capable of utilizing, as well as with divine authority. There was little reason to expect whatever was connecting him to Solvei would be any different. But as much as Lex knew he couldn’t afford to ignore the limits of what he was capable of – it was only because he’d explored what he could do with divine authority that they’d defeated Prevarius – this wasn’t an area he was eager to explore. Already, Solvei was concerned about the distress she’d felt from him each night as he slept; that she might become aware of the personal nature of the nightmares he suffered, or worse, the tulpa that continued to taunt him whenever his worries about Sonata, Aria, Nosey, and everypony else back home weighed on him too heavily, wasn’t something Lex wanted to deal with.
Instead, in the three days since they’d left the winter wolf’s den, he’d taken to exploring the other powers that Solvei had gained as a beneficiary of their newfound connection.
That had been a more fruitful area of research, if for no other reason than because the winter wolf was quite eager to show off her newfound abilities. Each morning, while her family – who had insisted on accompanying Solvei as she led them toward the nearest pony settlement – slept after a night of hunting, Solvei would eagerly demonstrate what she was capable of now. And after a few sessions of testing her limits, even Lex had to admit that he was impressed.
The magical channels in Solvei’s body were completely different now, having become highly optimized in the use of cold-based magic. While the overall power that she could bring to bear at any given moment was comparatively limited, the range of what she could do was determined only by her imagination, so long as it was exothermic in nature.
More extraordinary was that, as far as Lex could tell, Solvei had no limit on how often she could call upon her cryomantic power. Whereas a pony would eventually get tired from using their body’s inherent magic over and over, and even Thermal Draft’s ability to affect external energies via ritualization would eventually produce a strain on her body, Solvei’s ability to put her body’s magical channels to use seemed to cause her no physical stress whatsoever. The same way Solvei’s heart and lungs would work of their own accord without requiring any deliberate effort on her part, she could use the magic she’d gained – magic which required no chanting or gesturing on her part – as much as she wanted.
What would strain her was pushing herself beyond the limited power she was capable of using. Like himself, Solvei could flood her body with more energy than it was normally capable of handling, resulting in brief instances of excessive magical power. Even there, though, her body’s design was far more efficient than anything Lex had ever encountered; Solvei could only push herself so far before exhausting her ability to press her limits, but whereas he’d inflicted severe injuries on himself on more than one occasion as a result of pushing past what his body could safely handle, Solvei’s body didn’t go into shock when overtaxed in that fashion. Instead, it simply wouldn’t call upon more power, her autonomic systems overriding her ability to consciously overwork them.
And that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
She’d also gained a reserve of dark magic of her own, though from what Lex could tell, she could only use it to resist mental intrusions and form black crystals. And to use minor telekinesis, Lex reminded himself. It was something the winter wolf took no small delight in calling upon, fascinated with the fine motor control that granted her.
Solvei had also retained, for some reason, the ability he’d granted her before to alter her size at will. From being as small as a pony to as large as a house, she could grow or shrink as she desired. Likewise, she’d kept a great deal of the supernatural toughness he’d imbued her with on previous occasions as well, and even improved on it. Now she could resist not only physical attacks, but fire, acid, electricity, and other esoteric forms of damage.
And that was on top of the greater physical prowess she now had. She was stronger, faster, and tougher than she had been before, nor was that all. Kinetic vision, reflexes, stamina; they’d all shown marked improvements compared to her past self. It was almost as though her body remembered all of the power he’d granted it before, and had simply rebuilt itself along those lines.
There were even hints that her mind had improved as well; she was picking up on various terms and definitions that Lex had mentioned when examining her with surprising acuity. She’d already corrected her speech pattern with regard to “seidr,” now properly referring to it as “magic” instead.
The one downside was that it was more difficult – slightly, but perceptibly – for him to imbue her with additional abilities via divine authority. That wasn’t surprising; there was so much power coursing through Solvei now that Lex would have been shocked if it hadn’t been harder to add more. As it was, the fact that it was only a little harder to grant her additional capabilities was staggering; it was, Lex knew, a testament to how efficient her new abilities had integrated with her. That was how he’d granted her the ability to use a minor but long-lasting spell to protect against modest extremes of temperature on himself and Thermal Draft, letting the two of them traverse what would otherwise have been miserable conditions in relative comfort.
Overall, the winter wolf now commanded a dramatic array of powers…which meant that Lex did as well, since Solvei was now effusive in her declarations of loyalty and obedience toward him. Calling him “master” was simply the most obvious display; not only did she obey his every command without question now, but she’d made it clear that she had no intention of ever leaving his side. It was enough to be off-putting, although Lex was in no position to reject her subservience; between her inherent powers, and what he could grant her via divine authority, Solvei was simply too useful for him to throw away…even if he’d been able to, given their psychic connection.
Though the thought of parting ways with Solvei, if he were being completely honest with himself, was-
Master, came the mental voice of the wolf in question, interrupting Lex’s musings, I just thought you might want to know, Kaja says that at the rate we’re going, we’ll arrive at the pony lands in another two days.
The report made Lex frown. That’s too soon.
Too soon, Master? In Lex’s mind, Solvei’s disposition changed to “puzzled.” I thought you wanted to return to your fellow ponies as quickly as possible?
I do, replied Lex, giving Thermal Draft a glance – one she didn’t return – as he reached the cul-de-sac. But two days from now is an event which is going to require my full attention.
What event, Master?
Between the magic items he’d gained, the powers that Solvei now had, and even Thermal Draft’s modest magical abilities, Lex knew that their group was far stronger now than they’d been even a few days ago. But after everything that had happened, he had every intention of marshaling as much power as he could. Which meant taking a slight delay on the journey home in favor of regaining the apex of his own strength, now that the chance to do so was finally upon him.
“I don’t suppose Master told you what he’s doing?”
Drafty blinked, not having expected that question from Solvei. “No. All he told me was that it’s important that he not be interrupted.” Shrugging, she glanced at where Lex was gesturing and chanting a few dozen yards away, standing exactly where he’d been since before sunrise. “Honestly, I thought he would have told you what he was up to, since he’s your ‘master’ and all.”
The winter wolf sighed as she laid down, putting her head on her paws. “That he wasn’t to be disturbed was all he said to me, too. I just thought you might know more since you can use magic the way he can.”
That brought a small smile to Drafty’s face, as much from the fact that Solvei was using the correct term as from the compliment. “Don’t forget that you can use magic too, now.”
“I guess, but it doesn’t really feel the same,” murmured Solvei. “I mean, I can use a few of the same powers as Master, but other than that, all I can do is manipulate the cold.” As a demonstration, she waved a paw at a branch that had fallen nearby. A moment later there was a rush of cold, and the branch was encased in a thin coating of ice. “See? It’s just different ways of doing the same thing, not like all the different stuff you and Master can do.”
Drafty’s smirk turned rueful then. “I seem to recall you doing a number on Prevarius with the magic you have now.”
Solvei managed a wan smile at that, but it didn’t last. “I’m just not sure how much I’ll be able to help Master once we get to the pony lands,” she admitted a moment later. “Or worse, I might cause trouble for him. I mean, the utvalgte and the ponies aren’t exactly on good terms. If they see me walking beside him, things could get ugly…”
Drafty frowned. “So…you’re really going to stay with Lex?”
The question earned her a puzzled look from the winter wolf. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I?”
“I meant…” Drafty paused, trying to figure out the most delicate way to phrase what she was attempting to say. “After how hard you fought to get your family back, I’m just surprised that you’re willing to leave them like this.”
Solvei’s ears folded back, her gaze falling toward the ground. “I love my family,” she said at last, “and I’m glad they’re safe. But it’s because of Master that they are safe. After everything that’s happened to him – all that stuff you’ve told me over the last few days about how he lost his family and his home and all the pain he went through – I can’t just turn my back on him now. He helped me rescue everyone I care about; now I’m going to do the same for him.”
“You know that means going back to Equestria though, right?” pressed Drafty. “If you do that, you might not be able to see the rest of your pack again. At least, not for a long time.”
“I know, and I’ll miss them, but at least I’ll know they’re okay here. Master…” Solvei trailed off as she glanced at Lex, still engaged in whatever magical exploit he hadn’t seen fit to explain to them. “…he’s not okay. He’s angry and sad and lonely, and I’m starting to think he’s been that way for a very long time. I feel all sorts of terrible things from him every time he goes to sleep. If I can help him feel even a little bit better, then I want to try…even if it means leaving my family.”
That was enough to make Drafty shift in place, suddenly uncomfortable. She’d been keeping her distance from Lex ever since he’d snapped at her, hurt by the outburst. Being reminded that he didn’t know if the other mares who’d gone to rescue him were dead or not made it difficult for her to hold on to that feeling now, though, instead making her wonder if she was being petulant. I wish I could talk to Kara about this.
But that wasn’t going to happen for at least a little while longer…mostly because the spell she’d come up with to try and undo Prevarius making her unable to hear the goddess’s voice hadn’t worked.
Yet.
“Have you thought about asking them to come with us?”
The question made Solvei cock her head. “Huh?”
“Your family,” explained Drafty, wanting to think about something else besides the idea that she hadn’t been cutting Lex enough slack. “I’m sure Lex would be willing to do…whatever it is he did to make you so strong, on them. I mean, he powered them up when we fought Prevarius, so-”
“They’re afraid of him,” muttered Solvei.
The answer was so unexpected that it took Drafty a moment to process. “They’re afraid of him? After everything he did to help you save them? Why?”
“They look at me now, and think that it’s like what Prevarius did to them,” huffed Solvei, frustration filling her voice. “The devil gave them new powers, and changed their appearance, because he took ownership of their souls. So now they see how I look different, and have magic of my own, and they think it’s the same thing.”
Privately, Drafty wondered if that wasn’t the case. She still wasn’t entirely sure what Lex’s “divine authority” – as Solvei had said he’d called it, when he’d experimented on her with the power the Night Mare had given him the night before they’d confronted Bolverk and Prevarius – could do, but the fact that Solvei was suddenly devoted to Lex, to the point of calling him “Master” and being willing to follow him to another world entirely, struck her as being suspicious. Lex was impressive, but that was a short time to develop that sort of hero-worship.
Of course, given that she’d fallen for Lex from the moment she’d first laid eyes on him, Drafty knew she wasn’t exactly in a position to throw stones.
“That’s why they haven’t come around,” continued Solvei, glancing back at a nearby grove of trees – where Drafty knew the other winter wolves were lurking – with a look of reproach. “It doesn’t matter how many times I explain to them that I chose this. They’re afraid that if they get too close to him, he’ll gobble up their souls the way he apparently did mine.”
“Just don’t let it turn into a fight,” replied Drafty after a moment, her thoughts turning to Cloudbank all of a sudden. “If you know you’re not going to see them again for a long time, you want to at least make sure you say goodbye properly.”
Solvei glanced at her then, before giving another sigh. “I know. I guess I’m not quite as okay with leaving as I made it sound.” Sitting up, she took a deep breath, as though gathering up her resolve. “The truth is, we said our goodbyes last night, since Master made it clear that once he finishes…what he’s doing, then we’re immediately going to the pony lands.”
“You mean if he ever finishes what he’s doing,” snorted Thermal Draft. “He’s been going at whatever it is since it was still dark, and I’m pretty sure that it’s past sundown now. If he hadn’t told us both that we needed to stay here and make sure nothing bothered…”
She didn’t bother finishing, since Solvei was quite clearly no longer listening to her, her head having whipped around toward Lex as a whimper escaped her throat. It was enough to make Drafty jump to her hooves, following the winter wolf’s gaze to look at the stallion. But as far as she could see, he was just fine. Except…
He’s standing still now, realized Drafty, seeing that Lex had fallen silent, his motions and incantations having ceased. Does that mean he’s done? But the winter wolf’s reaction suggested that something was wrong. “Solvei, is everything okay?”
“Master’s angry.” Solvei’s answer came with a cringe, as though she’d been swatted across the nose. “Furious! He’s-”
But she didn’t need to give any further description as Lex suddenly let out a wordless bellow of rage, black crystals erupting all around him.
Things were going well for once.
Had he not been busy directing the flow of magical energy surrounding him, the ambient currents of power swollen thanks to the equinox, Lex would have sneered at the thought. There had been so many disasters happening at such a rapid pace that the lack of the worst-case scenario breaking out now seemed like “going well” in comparison. Given that they were still stuck on Everglow, with no idea what was happening back on Equestria, and only a vague plan for getting back, the current situation remained far from ideal.
Even so, Lex had to admit that being able to replenish his thaumaturgical spellcasting without interruption was a huge step in the right direction.
He’d made sure to get an early start, wanting to give himself enough time to make up for any potential interruptions. It didn’t require the entire day for him to restore his full complement of spells, which meant that if a violent storm suddenly sprung up, or some monster suddenly attacked, or something else happened, he’d have enough time to deal with it and return to gathering power. As it was, having Thermal Draft and Solvei see him restoring his magic (even if they, hopefully, didn’t know what he was doing) was less than ideal – this was a weakness which needed to be concealed as much as possible – but it was more important for them to act as guards.
Amazingly, however, nothing had disturbed him, and now, lowering his hooves and letting his voice lapse after hours of work, Lex took a moment to revel in the feeling of renewed vigor rushing through him.
At last, he was finally back at full strength!
Or rather, almost at full strength; while most of his spells didn’t require material foci to function, a few did, such as the silver mirror required for his scrying spell, or the tuning fork necessary to cast the plane-spanning spell that would take them back to Equestria. He’d prepared both of them, of course, but without the proper materials – which would require access to an urban market of sufficient size to procure – there was no use in casting them.
But there was another spell he could cast right now that could at least tell him something about what was going on back home.
This spell, designed to let him send a twenty-five-word message to one individual, and receive a response of equal length – regardless of where they were – was one he’d cast before. For all the spell’s careful construction, its abilities weren’t foolproof. Traveling the planes, as well as disruptive local conditions, meant that there was a small chance it wouldn’t go through. And of course, if he sent it to someone who wasn’t in a position to answer, then the only response he’d receive would be silence.
And considering that he didn’t know what had become of Sonata, Aria, Nosey, or Feather Duster, Lex knew that no matter how badly he wanted to direct the spell toward one of them, doing so would have been imprudent.
Better, instead, to reach out to someone who was, to the best of his knowledge, almost certainly still alive. Someone who had been with him in Las Pegasus, and so would know what had happened to the girls. Someone who already worked for him, and wouldn’t balk at answering his questions.
Due to the complexity of its design, the spell was one that took ten minutes to cast, but Lex didn’t need nearly that long to decide to whom to send his message.
“Coat Tail,” he intoned once the spell had been successfully cast, naming his Royal Clothier, one of the two members of his entourage whom he’d brought with him to Las Pegasus. “This is Lex Legis. I’m currently on Everglow with Thermal Draft. In twenty-five words, tell me what happened to Sonata and the others.”
The moments that passed as he waited for a response seemed to last for years.
“Your Highness!” came the stallion’s voice at last, causing Lex to release a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I’m so relieved that-, yes, I know it’s the prince, Tranquila! Now hush! I only have twenty-five words to respond! Sire, Miss Dusk-”
And then his voice cut out, the length of the spell’s messaging capabilities exceeded.
For a moment Lex could only stand there, staring at nothing as he tried to process what had just happened.
He’d found out nothing. That blithering imbecile Coat Tail – as well as Tranquila Rest, the so-called Royal Leisuremeister, who’d apparently also been there and distracted him – had managed to somehow mangle what should have been the simplest of orders! And now, because of that, the fate of Sonata and the others was STILL UNKNOWN!!!
Worse, he couldn’t cast that spell again; he’d only prepared it once, needing to allocate the limited space in his mental architecture to other spells. Nor had he been able to retain it after being cast; the degree of power that spell required meant that it exceeded anything his circlet could fuel, and trying to feed it compensatory energy through his body’s magical channels would have severely crippled him, a state that couldn’t easily be cured since divine authority could only imbue Solvei with so much power – including healing – now.
That meant more not knowing what had happened to the mares he loved – Sonata, the first person to brighten his existence since he’d lost his parents; Aria, whose passionate intensity excited him like no one else; Nosey, whom he still cared for deeply despite their relationship not working out – as well as Feather Duster, who had been counting on him to rescue her.
Had they made it out of the warehouse alive? If so, were they hurt? Had Dark Streak gone after them? Had Celestia moved to arrest them once word of his presumed death had gotten out? Or had the worst come to pass, and none of them had escaped from the burning factory?
For someone who approached life as a series of problems that needed to be solved, who hoarded every scrap of knowledge and pored over every piece of data that he came across, studying and analyzing everything he could, not knowing what had happened to those four was worse than any answer Lex could possibly have received. Even if they were all dead, he would have been able to start making plans and crafting strategies to bring them back. It would have been beyond agonizing, knowing that he’d failed them so badly, but at least he would have been able to do something.
But instead, he was stuck with the same uncertainty as before. Trapped between hope and fear, with grief and relief each waiting in the wings, there was no way to prepare for one without it coming at the expense of the other, leaving him paralyzed as to what the correct course of action was. All while trying to deal with the persistent dangers of Everglow, the precarious state of Thermal Draft’s soul, and whatever had happened between himself and Solvei…and, of course, trying to find what he needed to get home.
So much for everything going well for once, snickered his tulpa.
In his current state, the mockery more than Lex could take, and he threw his head back and screamed as loud as he could.
When he finally ran out of air, he dimly registered that Thermal Draft and Solvei were on either side of him. The two of them were asking him what was wrong, if he was alright, if there was anything they could do…but at that moment, Lex couldn’t bring himself to care. Instead, he took a step away from both of them, heading northeast. “We’re done here,” he muttered, his voice sounding lifeless even to his own ears. “Let’s go.”
The nearest pony village, according to Solvei, was on the other side of the mountain whose base they were at now. Circling around it would only take a few hours. Once they were there, they’d at least be able to pinpoint where on Everglow they were, and figure out where to go from there.
The sticks hit the table with a clatter that seemed unnaturally loud, as though magnified by the silence filling the common room of the inn.
There was a pregnant pause as the group – five earth pony mares – eyed the carved pieces of wood, before four pairs of eyes turned to each other inquisitively. A round of shrugs and shaken heads passed between them, before turning to the fifth and final member of their band, waiting for an explanation. For a moment none came, as the one who’d cast the sticks regarded them in silence, her brow furrowed, until finally she heaved a sigh and spoke.
“It’s going to be warm and sunny for the next two days, with clear skies and mild wind…just like today.”
As always, Spinner was the first member of their group to react to the news. Leaning back in her chair as she let out a heavy breath, wiping her forehead in an exaggerated manner. “Thank the gods! And here I was worried that this lovely weather wouldn’t hold!” She punctuated her statement by placing a hoof by her ear, leaning toward the nearby window where, outside, the snow continued to fall in drifts, the wind howling.
“I’m just glad our mage is finally developing a sense of humor,” noted Shadow Star dryly, before gesturing at the fallen sticks. “Even if it still needs a lot of work.”
“Or she miscast her spell,” added Valor, her voice sour.
Huffing as she gathered the sticks back up, Mystaria frowned at her friends. “Look, I know how ridiculous that sounded, but the ‘read weather’ spell is never wrong. It’s supposed to be warm and mild out, which means that what’s happening now is definitely unnatural.”
Pausing as she put the last of the carved rods away, she frowned at Shadow Star. “And I have a great sense of humor, thank you very much! It’s just more cerebral than short-sheeting bedrolls and slipping chili extract into someone’s drink. Why do you think those two caravan guards we made the trip here with kept asking me to tell them more riddles?”
Valor snorted. “Because they wanted to take off your pants,” she answered flatly.
“The expression is ‘get in your pants,’ Valor,” corrected Spinner, before looking back at Mystaria. “And she’s right. They were only pretending to be interested in those conundrums of yours because they were trying to chat you up.”
“That is so not true!” Her face bright red, Mystaria waved a hoof at the medallion hanging around her neck, one which depicted an open book held aloft in a hoof; the holy symbol of Luminace, the goddess of magic. “I told them that I’d taken vows of chastity and celibacy!”
Although the lower half of her face was hidden behind her half-mask, Shadow Star’s pitying expression was impossible to miss. “Mysty, telling guys you’re unavailable makes you more desirable, not less. Trust me on this; I’m from Blevik. The ‘naughty nun’ routine is one of the more popular roles among Kara’s temple whores there.”
Fortunately, she was spared further embarrassment when a new voice spoke up. “Meep? meep meep meep?
The voice, adorably high-pitched, came from what looked like a rabbit the size of a small dog – though, with the single horn emerging from the center of its forehead, no one would have thought it was a mere oversized bunny – currently resting in the lap of the last member of the group, who reached down to stroke the creature in response.
“Littleknight wants to know if a pegasus could be causing this,” translated Woodheart, fishing a berry out of the pocket of her leaf-and-feather robe and feeding it to Littleknight, who squeaked happily as he devoured the snack. “Since they can move clouds and stuff like that.”
“Could a pegasus be doing this, since they can move clouds and stuff like that,” echoed Spinner, clucking her tongue as she gave Mystaria a look of mock-disappointment. “This is how far you’ve fallen, Mysty. The heathen who dances naked in the moonlight has a more insightful take on the situation than the acolyte of the goddess of knowledge.”
The description made Woodheart frown. “I wasn’t dancing,” she admonished Spinner gently. “I was enticing the spirits of the animals in the area, asking if one of them wanted to enter my body and fill me with their vigor.”
“While naked,” added Spinner, doing her best to keep a straight face.
“Being naked is better,” huffed Woodheart, shifting slightly in place, causing her robe to sway in a way that made it clear she was wearing nothing under it. “I still don’t understand why I have to wear clothes all the time. No one did back in the forest.”
“And we’re halfway to another of the temple whores’ favorite routines,” muttered Shadow Star.
“There’s no pegasi that could have done this.” Mystaria’s voice was a little louder than necessary, clearly desperate to change the topic. “Even if there were a team of experienced weather-workers, all with brands of destiny depicting meteorological phenomena, there’s no way they could keep up something this drastic for this long over such a wide area.”
“So what could do something like this?” asked Valor. “Is there a spell for it? One that you can counter?”
Mystaria rubbed her eyes as she gathered her thoughts. “There are weather-control spells,” she admitted. “But there aren’t many spellcasters powerful enough to pull something like that off. Or at least, not that I know of. And even then, the autumnal equinox was just today; to be able to change things to a blizzard of this magnitude…” She shook her head. “With that much power behind it, this isn’t something I can stop. And if it’s an elemental rift, then that wouldn’t matter anyway.”
Woodheart cocked her head, feeding another berry to Littleknight. “What’s an elemental rift?”
“It’s where some monster comes here from one of the elemental planes, and brings a piece of home with them,” answered Spinner, fiddling with her lute as she spoke. “It makes everyone in the area miserable until someone goes and kills whatever’s the cause of it, at which point things go back to normal.”
“And to affect this large of an area to this degree, it would have to be something incredibly powerful,” concluded Mystaria.
The group mulled over that in silence for a few moments, before Shadow Star spoke up. “I say we call it quits and head back first thing tomorrow.”
An unhappy look crossed Valor’s face at that. “And leave everyone in this village to deal with what’s happening on their own?” She glanced around the common room, lit only by the fire in the large stone hearth across from them, indicating how empty it was. “I grew up with the sun cat nomads south of here, so I don’t know much about agriculture, but even I can tell that this village didn’t have a chance to harvest very many crops before this happened. If whatever’s making it snow doesn’t stop soon, they’ll all starve.”
“C’mon, Valor. I feel bad for everyone here, but this is above our pay grade and you know it.” Shadow Star waved a hoof at the window, outside of which snow and sleet continued to pile up. “This was supposed to be an easy trip. We come up here, find that old temple Mysty mentioned, strip whatever was left, and head back to Viljatown so we can enjoy the festival with some gold in our pockets. Now we’re talking about dealing with either some sort of super-powerful elemental monster or a spellcaster who’s packing gods only know what kind of magic? That’s courting suicide.”
“Or achievement!” insisted Valor, leaning forward. “The reason we named our adventuring party Fail Forward is because we’ve always found a way to turn bad luck into good.” She looked around the table then, making eye contact with each of her friends in turn. “We met each other because we all made a clutter-”
“Mess,” corrected Mystaria.
“-a mess of our lives somehow,” continued Valor without missing a beat. “And every time we’ve gone on an expedition, something always goes wrong, but we’ve somehow managed to turn tragedy into triumph every single time. So let’s do it again now!”
“You say that,” grumbled Shadow Star, “but I’m from Blevik, where a string of near-misses means it’s probably time to rethink how you’re doing things.”
Spinner sighed, her earlier jocularity vanishing. “I’d like to remind our resident idealist and cynic both that there’s a third option,” she murmured. “Mysty, isn’t there supposed to be some sort of famous magic school nearby? Maybe they’d be able to handle it if we told them what’s happening.”
Mystaria hesitated, her expression pained. “Bright Night is only a few days away. But it’s…” She pursed her lips for a moment before continuing. “The reason Bright Night is so famous as a magic school is because of how self-directed its curriculum is. It’s not like the Academie d’Grace back in Viljatown, where the Temple of Luminace and military work together to make sure that all of the students are instructed in the ethics of spellcasting and only practice magic under safe and supervised conditions. At Bright Night, so long as you agree to a two-year teaching contract, you can work on whatever you want, without any sort of oversight or management.”
Woodheart frowned, confusion plain on her face. “You’re saying they wouldn’t want to help?”
Mystaria shook her head. “I’m saying they’d want to study whatever’s going on instead of stopping it. Unknown magical phenomena like this is what the ponies there live for.” She snorted then, glancing at the window darkly, as though she could see the school in the distance. “There’s probably already a dozen researchers fighting their way through the weather to get here right n-”
The door to the inn suddenly burst open, causing all five to jump. Littleknight meeped in agitation as he was thrown from Woodheart’s lap, but none of the members of Fail Forward paid any attention to him. Instead, their eyes were drawn to the pair that walked into the common room then.
The first was a pegasus mare. While her coat was a dark chestnut and her mane and tail were black, no one would have described her as plain-looking, having features that would have made any stallion stop and stare. Her attire was no less flattering, clad in a form-fitting white tunic and deep black pants that showed off a luscious figure, her cloak tossed carelessly over her back, she was the very picture of a noble lady out on an excursion.
But it was her companion that caused the five mares in the far corner of the inn to collectively catch their breath.
A unicorn stallion, he was dressed almost entirely in black. Only the dusty color of his cloak broke up the monotony of his appearance, save for how his horn was red almost to the base, where it turned into a dull gray that matched his coat. But it was his shadow that was the most arresting thing about him, stretching toward the fire behind the five earth mares rather than away from it. It was unnatural enough that Woodheart and Valor both took a step back, causing their chairs to scrape against the floor.
The noise drew a sharp glance from the unicorn, his features tense and his expression foreboding. For a second he didn’t move, his eyes traveling over each of them in turn, as though silently evaluating them against criteria known only to him. Apparently he found them all lacking, since his eyes narrowed a moment later.
But his companion didn’t seem to share his scorn, instead heaving a sigh as she shook her hair out, doing the same thing for her tail a moment, the motion causing her bottom to wag in a display that would have lived on in a teenage colt’s dreams for years to come.
Either unaware or unconcerned with the tantalizing display she’d just put on, the beauty turned to her companion as he telekinetically closed the door – an act which caused his eyes to light up in a frightening array of green and purple, causing several of the earth mares to stifle gasps – and shook her wings free of snow. “Are you sure it was a good idea to leave Solvei behind?” she murmured, keeping her voice low. “She seemed pretty upset at not coming with us.”
“She’ll be fine,” came the curt response from her companion, who hadn’t spared her a glance despite his being the only one she could have been putting on the show for. Instead, he finally turned his gaze away from the five earth mares, striding across the common room to the bar that made up the opposite wall. Spotting the small bell that hung above the end of the counter, he didn’t hesitate to reach up a hoof and strike it sharply, despite the late hour.
“Hell of a pair,” muttered Shadow Star, moving backward a few steps, toward where the shadows from the fire were thickest.
“The stallion’s definitely from Bright Night,” whispered Mystaria. “Most of the students there are unicorns, and a lot of them like to dress up in gaudy clothes and ridiculous illusions to try and make themselves look fearsome.”
“It’s working,” shivered Woodheart, sitting back down as she picked up Littleknight, stroking the horned rabbit quietly. “That’s another reason why going naked is better.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure most stallions would agree with you once they got a look at her,” murmured Spinner, looking the pegasus up and down with envy as the winged mare trotted after her companion. “What do you think? Visiting aristocrat, paying some poor student to guide her while she goes slumming it?”
“Probably,” growled Valor, causing the others to exchange pointed looks. Having grown up in a nomadic culture where everyone worked to pull their weight, the entire concept of some people being superior to others because of the circumstances of their birth – or having more privileges due to an excess of wealth – was anathema to her. While the other four knew that Valor was typically a caring and compassionate mare, she had nothing but contempt for those who lived easily off of others’ hard work.
For their part, the duo seemed to be oblivious to the quiet conversation, the stallion continuing to ring the bell, growing visibly frustrated at the lack of response as his companion continued to try and chat him up, until at last a sleepy-looking earth stallion clad in nightwear stumbled out from the back room, yawning and blinking his eyes blearily. “Trav’lers? This late?” he muttered, before rubbing his eyes and managing a smile. “Welcome to-”
“It’s about time!” snapped the unicorn, slamming a hoof onto the bar.
The sound made the earth stallion jump, eyes widening as he got a good look at the pony berating him, only for his fright to be arrested as his eyes slid over to the gorgeous pegasus beside him. The sight of the two, each striking in wildly different ways, was enough to leave him completely flummoxed. “Wh-, uh…welcome to…uh…to the-”
“We’re taking a room for the night,” announced the stallion imperiously. “Given that rural localities here aren’t known for their salubrious conditions, security, or weatherproofing, I trust you’ll have no objection if I inspect the available accommodations and inform you which one is least unsatisfactory.”
The proprietor blinked, his jaw hanging slack. “Uh…”
“Good,” replied the stallion, turning and walking toward the stairs at the opposite end of the common room. “Thermal Draft, come with me.”
“Actually, I’d like to stay here,” answered the mare. “I’m kind of hungry, and I want to see what the local food’s like.”
“That’s a bad-”
“It’ll be fine, Lex,” she smiled, giving him an easy wave of her hoof. “Look, you go inspect the rooms, and I’ll stay right here and grab a bite to eat. I’ll finish up by the time you’re done, and then we can turn in. No problem, right?”
The unicorn – Lex – glowered at her. Then his eyes flickered back to the five mares in the corner, before returning to Thermal Draft. “This won’t take very long,” he answered her at last, somehow managing to make that sound like a threat. “Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, and don’t talk to anyone.” With that said, he turned back to the proprietor. “You, come along.”
The earth stallion glanced between Lex and Thermal Draft, easily making up his mind which one he’d rather be around. “Actually, um, I should stay here as well,” he chuckled weakly. “The lady’s stew won’t serve itself now, will it?”
His answer came in the form of a cold stare from Lex, making the older stallion sweat. “But, um, please feel free to inspect the rooms. They’re all open, save for the two at the end of the hallway. Those are being rented by the ladies.” He nodded his head toward the members of Fail Forward.
An unhappy rumble came from Lex’s throat at that, but he didn’t seem inclined to argue, giving one last unhappy look toward the proprietor and Thermal Draft before stalking up the stairs and disappearing from sight.
“Well…at least now we know that someone from Bright Night is on the scene, so there’s no reason for us to stay here,” murmured Shadow Star after Lex, and his oppressive presence, had left, the proprietor scurrying away as well to fetch Drafty’s meal while the pegasus seated herself at a nearby table.
“I’m not convinced that these are the right ponies for the job,” frowned Mystaria.
Woodheart nodded. “He didn’t seem very nice, did he?”
“He probably just can’t wait to get his girl there alone in a room,” smirked Spinner. “Did you see the way she was flaunting herself? She might be a high-society lady, but she’s clearly looking for more than just a tour of the village.”
Valor opened her mouth, but whatever she was going to say was lost as the proprietor came scurrying back, carrying a bowl on a tray. “Here you are, miss!” he enthused. “I’m sorry it’s all we have, but this late at night…”
“Oh, it’s alright,” smiled Thermal Draft, her pleasant demeanor the polar opposite of Lex’s as the earth stallion set the bowl in front of her. “You said this was stew?”
“Indeed. It’s better hot, but even cold, I promise you that the combination of lentils, carrots, and bacon is pleasant to the tongue.”
Nodding, Thermal Draft picked up the spoon next to the bowl in one wing, curling it around the utensil in a remarkable display of dexterity. Dipping it into the chunky broth, she brought it to her nose, inhaling deeply. “Pardon me for asking, but what exactly is bacon?”
The question made the proprietor tilt his head, nor was he the only one; the mares of Fail Forward all glanced at each other in confusion. Who was this lady that she didn’t recognize one of the most common foods around? “Why, it’s pigs, miss,” answered the earth stallion. “Fried pig meat.”
The spoon halfway to her open mouth, Thermal Draft froze, her eyes going wide, before she let out a shriek, flinging the spoon away with such force that her hoof collided with the bowl, sending it spilling to the floor.
The proprietor recoiled, clearly taken by surprise. He wasn’t the only one, as Drafty sat up, giving him a horrified look. “Meat?! As in, dead animal parts?! You wanted me to eat pieces of-”
“What do you think you’re doing?!”
Valor’s voice seemed to fill the common room as she strode forward, ignoring the disapproving voices of her friends as she marched right up to Thermal Draft. “Well?!”
Clearly taken by surprise, and still visibly sickened by what she’d almost put in her mouth, the pegasus recoiled. “What-”
“These people have nothing!” hissed Valor, getting right in Thermal Draft’s face, the proprietor falling back at the sudden explosion of anger. “This is a small village, the kind where everyone has to work hard just to get by! And they’re not able to get by now, with how bad the weather’s been, but they still served you some of the small amount of food they managed to gather, and your response is to throw it on the ground?!” Narrowing her eyes, she pointed at the mess scattered over the floor. “Pick it up and eat it, princess.”
Shaking her head, Thermal Draft stepped back. “Listen to me, I didn’t-”
But Valor wasn’t in the mood to talk, righteous indignation filling her features. “I said…” Without warning, she reached out and grabbed Thermal Draft. The pegasus let out a frightened yelp, but there was nothing she could do as the larger earth mare forced her down, pressing her face to the stew-stained floor. “…eat-”
“GET AWAY FROM HER!!!”
The enraged bellow made Valor look up just in time to see Lex – his eyes glowing and his face twisted in an expression of apocalyptic fury – leap at her from the top of the stairs.
Two minutes. They had been in this village for a grand total of two minutes, and already things were going wrong. Lex had no idea why the earth mare with the blue mane and tail was accosting Thermal Draft, but at that moment he didn’t care.
First it had been Dark Streak’s attempt on his life. Then it had been finding himself stranded on Everglow. Again. Then he’d lost Thermal Draft, requiring him to fight an insane winter wolf who’d sold his soul for power just to find out where she was. At which point he’d been forced to slay the soul-taking devil who’d beguiled her into signing her afterlife away, something he’d only accomplished because he’d somehow made a horribly intimate and frighteningly powerful bond with a winter wolf he barely knew.
And then he’d found out that Thermal Draft’s soul was forfeit anyway, something that she’d made worse when she’d voided her contract because she was sure he’d be able to do something about it, despite his having no idea what to do! After which his one chance to find out if Sonata and Aria and the others were alive or dead had been foiled because his staff was unconscionably stupid! All on top of the fact that he had yet to make any progress in finding a way home!
Now, immediately after they’d managed to find some semblance of actual civilization – having been drawn to this hamlet’s tiny inn by the bright red light shining like a beacon from the stunted steeple that protruded from the building’s second story – the local ponies were threatening them. Or rather, threatening Thermal Draft, for whom irrevocable nonexistence awaited if something killed her. It was as if these ponies – no, as if this entire misbegotten world – was actively trying to find ways to vex him even further, menacing the one person whom he absolutely had to protect!
Lex had long prided himself on his ability to endure hardship, to withstand an onslaught of setbacks and resolve even the most difficult of problems. But in the face of such persistent adversity, of disaster after disaster that seemed intent on mocking his ideals, undoing his accomplishments, endangering his companions, and ending his life, there was only so much he could take. And now, having heard Thermal Draft yell, causing him to hurry back in time to see the unknown mare pressing the pegasus’ face to the floor, Lex felt the last shred of his restraint give way.
“GET AWAY FROM HER!!!”
Leaping from the top of the stairs, Lex gave the blue-haired earth mare no time to obey his command as he brought his hoof down, slamming it against her face – the force behind his punch augmented by the magic in his amulet and his robe – with every ounce of strength that he had.
The blow sent Thermal Draft’s attacker reeling, stumbling back as she spat out a mouthful of blood, along with a couple of teeth.
But she didn’t fall.
“VALOR!” The name – Lex vaguely registering it as such as he hit the ground, rolled, and came up on his hooves between Thermal Draft and the others – came from the lips of Valor’s companions as she got her legs back under her.
But the mare herself didn’t pay any attention to them. Instead, she kept her eyes on him as she worked her jaw experimentally. Then, finding it wasn’t broken, she smirked. “Alright, you spooky bastard. If you want me to mop the floor with your face instead of your girlfriend’s” – reaching into the pack tied to her flank, she withdrew a small shield and slipped it over her foreleg – “that’s fine by me.”
Then pandemonium descended as the fight began in earnest.
“Both of you, stop! STOP!”
But no one listened to Mystaria’s command, leaving her to watch, horrified, as Lex and Valor charged at each other. The latter roared a battle cry as she rushed forward, but although Lex didn’t answer it with one of his own, the look of wild hatred etched on his features – his eyes glowing so brightly they were almost hard to look at – made it clear that he had no intention of backing down while Valor was still standing.
“You guys, we have to stop-, WHOA!” Mystaria barely avoided a blow to the head as the table they’d been gathered around suddenly flipped through the air, knocked askew by a huge spike of black crystal – just one of several – that had erupted from the ground.
“We’re going to have to put that guy down!” yelled Spinner, bringing her lute around, something that Mystaria knew she needed to use to invoke her magic. “We can apologize afterward, but right now we need to stop him by force!”
“But-”
“She’s right,” murmured Woodheart, releasing Littleknight before rising up onto all fours and – with one quick flick of her hoof – undoing her robe, leaving her completely naked save for her boots and the few accessories she wore as it slid to the ground. “Besides, I’m worried about what Valor will do to that guy if she gets serious. It’s better if we end this fast.”
Shadow Star didn’t voice her agreement, having vanished from view, but Mystaria had been friends with the masked mare long enough to know that she apparently thought the same way as the other two. After all, attacking from concealment was Shadow’s usual modus operandi, which meant she was already moving into position to strike.
But even though she knew her friends were almost certainly right, Mystaria couldn’t bring herself to abandon a peaceful resolution so easily. Instead, she brought a hoof up to her amulet, taking a deep breath as she murmured a soft prayer to Luminace that this would work. Her pacification spell had a low chance of success once hostilities had already broken out, but if there was any hope that it would end this senseless fighting, she had to try it.
Raising a hoof, she made the necessary gestures as she called out the requisite liturgy to Luminace, asking for Her to quell unruly passions and let cooler heads prevail. Instantly, she felt the magic radiate out from the holy symbol she wore, spreading out in calming waves that banished her unease as she felt her emotions recede in the light of Luminace’s blessed calm.
But when the magic reached Lex and Valor a moment later, her hopes were dashed. Neither seemed to even notice the pulse of magic, not slowing in the slightest as they continued to clash. Even as Mystaria watched, Valor caught a heavy right hook from Lex on her shield. Although the wooden disk – engraved with an image of a snarling bear’s head on the front – was only a foot wide, Valor had no trouble placing it in the path of the incoming punch, absorbing the force of the blow before she smacked his hoof away, bringing her own hoof back around to smash the flat of her shield against Lex’s jaw.
She didn’t stop there, changing the angle of her shield-bearing foreleg in the split-second that Lex faltered from the blow, trying to smash the edge of her shield against his horn. But Lex saw the attack coming, bending at the knees to duck under the blow, using that to spring forward as he brought his left hoof around, the motion so fast that it caused the sleeve of his robe to bunch halfway up his foreleg as he hit Valor hard in the sternum, earning a pained grunt from her.
It was just enough to let Mystaria see the barbed wire coiled around his foreleg, recognizing it as the holy symbol of the Night Mare.
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t have a chance to say anything before Spinner strummed a fast tune on her lute. “Against a foe with evil eyes, our Valor stood so true! Experienced and battle-wise, she knew what he would do! Each punch she blocked, each kick she dodged, she saw how it would go! And in the end, she won the day, and laid the villain low!”
She wasn’t the only one casting. Although her chant was far less musical than Spinner’s, Woodheart’s incantation had a notable pitch all its own, spoken in the sylvan language of the fey as she performed a series of wide, sweeping gestures. Having seen that particular spell before, Mystaria knew that it was designed to siphon an enemy’s strength, sapping the vigor from their muscles and transferring it to someone else – in this case, to Valor – letting them use their enemy’s own strength against them.
Having grown up studying magic at Luminace’s temple in Viljatown, Mystaria could almost see her friends’ spells speeding through the air toward the battling duo. This particular combination was one that they’d used many times before – typically in conjunction with her invoking Luminace’s protection on Valor, placing a ward around her friend so that her natural ability to absorb damage was augmented even further, to the point where she was nigh-impossible to bring down – and from her vantage point, Mystaria caught a glimpse of the warrior mare smirking, knowing what was about to happen.
Or maybe it was because she’d caught sight of Shadow Star, somehow having gotten onto the rafters hanging overhead without having drawn any attention to herself, preparing to leap down at Lex from above.
Everything seemed to happen all at once. Crouching down to avoid a jab from Lex, Valor sprang upward, the rim of her shield poised to catch him under his chin in an uppercut, one that wouldn’t miss thanks to Spinner’s magic, and would strike with devastating force thanks to Woodheart’s. That was the same moment that Shadow Star leapt down from the rafters, a baton with a leather-clad knob at the end clutched in her teeth, ready to bring it down on top of Lex’s head right as Valor hit him from below.
Then the magic, Valor, and Shadow Star all struck their targets, and Mystaria squeezed her eyes shut as she heard that pegasus mare – Thermal Draft – cry out Lex’s name, hating how they’d gotten into such a pointless conflict with another worshiper of the pony pantheon. I’ll heal him myself after everyone’s calmed down, she decided. Once Valor apologizes, I’m sure we can-
“What?!”
“Are you kidding me?!”
Her eyes snapping open at the sound of Woodheart and Spinner’s raised voices, Mystaria’s jaw dropped at the sight that was waiting for her.
Lex was still standing.
Judging from the way they were moving – Shadow Star tumbling across the floor to put some distance between herself and the unicorn, while Valor had reared up onto her hind legs, her shield-bearing foreleg still upraised – they’d somehow both missed their target. But that was unthinkable; the spells Spinner and Woodheart had cast should have made it almost impossible for Valor to miss, and Lex had given no indication that he was aware of Shadow Star’s position. So how…?
“My spell didn’t reach him,” muttered Woodheart, sounding stunned by the admission.
She wasn’t the only one, Mystaria’s eyebrows rising. “He has spell resistance?” If that was the case, it would be all kinds of bad.
But Woodheart shook her head. “He didn’t resist it. It just…couldn’t find him. Like he wasn’t there at all.”
“What does that…”
Spinner’s question died on her lips as Lex moved.
Slowly, he reached one foreleg back to his saddlebag, and everything about the motion was somehow wrong. What should have been a simple, smooth gesture was inexplicably stilted, as though his hoof was moving between different points in space – each one closer to his pack – without actually crossing the distance between them.
It reminded Mystaria of a kineograph one of the clerics at the temple of Luminace had showed her when she was a filly. Flipping the pages, she’d been delighted by how the drawings had seemed to come to life, moving in a simple optical illusion that had nevertheless delighted her. Flipping the pages as fast as she could had become a game, trying to make the figures move in a way that real ponies would have.
Eventually, she’d figured out that the game was unwinnable. Since the flip book only had so many pages, some motion would invariably be lost between one drawing and the next, meaning that the figures would always seem to move in a way that was robotic and unnatural; the intervening motions simply weren’t there.
And that’s what’s happening with Lex right now, realized Mystaria, a chill running down her spine. Woodheart’s spell couldn’t target him for the same reason that Valor and Shadow Star weren’t able to hit him. He’s somehow shifting back and forth between being physically present and not.
Which meant that the enraged unicorn had just become a whole new level of dangerous.
But Mystaria realized that she’d come to that conclusion too soon as Lex retrieved what he’d been reaching for.
“That was an impressive display of tactics,” he remarked coldly as he withdrew a skull-shaped mask from his saddlebag. When he placed it on his face a moment later, Mystaria wasn’t the only one who took an involuntary step back; between his unnatural movement and the way his eyes glowed beneath the death’s head visage he now wore, Lex suddenly seemed far more fearsome than he had been only a moment ago.
“Now, it’s my turn.”
Shivering uncontrollably, the proprietor of the inn stumbled away from the building, wanting to put as much distance as he could between himself and the crazed ponies inside.
But it wasn’t the cold that made the old stallion shiver, heading for his neighbor’s house to get out of the storm. Nor was it the thought of what damage those feuding adventurers – for what else could they be, to cause so much trouble? – would do to his inn.
Rather, what sent shudders of terror through him was the red light shining from the building’s steeple, despite his having been the one to put it there only a few hours earlier.
He hadn’t wanted to, of course. No pony of sound mind and good conscience would. But he had no choice in the matter, knowing what would happen if he didn’t obey the instructions he’d been given. He felt bad for those adventurers, of course; they might be a violent and rowdy bunch, but they didn’t seem like bad people. But if it was them or the ponies of his town – his kin, friends, and neighbors, whom he’d known all his life – then, gods forgive him, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.
Originally, he’d planned to simply cower in the back of the inn with his head under his pillow, letting those poor ponies be taken in their sleep. But now that they were awake, they wouldn’t be caught by surprise, which meant that they’d probably try to fight back. That meant turning a horrible fate into something even more horrible, and the old stallion had no intention of getting caught up in that. Even if his neighbors, who knew what the red light meant, refused to let him inside, it was better to die out in the cold than to be caught up in what was about to happen.
They would be here soon, the creatures that had shown up shortly after the unnatural winter had arrived. And once they came, they wouldn’t leave until they had what they wanted.
Fighting back a sob of fear and shame, the old stallion could only pray that this would be the last time.
“So, um…is it too late to apologize for what our idiot did to your lady friend?”
Spinner’s weak chuckle hung in the air, the only thing breaking up the tense atmosphere as she and her friends regarded Lex warily. Before, the enraged stallion had seemed like he’d be a tough customer to put down; not unreasonably difficult, but enough to be a pain. But now – with the way his every movement had become jarring and abnormal, along with the skull mask he’d donned – what had started as just another barroom brawl looked like it was about to become something much worse.
But Spinner’s question, only half in jest, went unanswered as Valor – never one to let the enemy take the initiative if she could help it – threw herself at Lex with a roar. Her shield lashed out, the edge of it catching Lex right between the eyes…and going through him, as though he were nothing more than a phantom. Nor did her follow-up do any better, the flat of her shield passing through his body with no resistance. “I can’t hit him!” she snarled, rearing back to try again anyway. “It’s like he’s some sort of gh-”
Her warning was cut off as Lex’s hoof shot out, catching her directly across the muzzle, a pained cry escaping her lips as his punch brought Valor to her knees.
That was enough to spur Shadow Star to action. She’d seen ponies break chairs over Valor’s head without the earth mare so much as grunting, and while Lex’s first strike might have caught her friend off-guard, she’d taken several follow-up hits from him without flinching. For her to be in so much pain now, after what seemed like just another punch, meant that something was seriously wrong.
“Mystaria!” she yelled as she vaulted over a fallen stool and moved to Lex’s back, hoping to distract the flickering unicorn as she discarded the baton she’d tried to brain the stallion with in favor of the dagger strapped to her hoof, a flick of her foreleg making it snap out to a ready position as she swiped at his unguarded side. Fortunately, that seemed to get his attention, but Shadow knew better than to celebrate, twirling her dagger in a defensive pattern as she waited for his retaliatory strike. “Figure this out and come up with a plan! Fast!”
It took only a single touch of her holy symbol and a silent prayer to Luminace for Mystaria to activate the goddess’ munificence, calling upon the power that allowed her to speak to her friends mind-to-mind. Everyone, listen carefully. I’m not sure what sort of magic he’s using, but that stallion is somehow shifting back-and-forth between solidity and incorporeality at an accelerated rate. That’s how he can let your attacks go through him and still hit you with his own.
That’s not the only thing that’s different about him, reported Valor, rubbing her jaw as she stood back up. That last punch hurt worse than the ones he was throwing earlier. He didn’t hit any harder, it’s just…more painful, somehow.
Knowing that Luminace’s grace allowed each of her friends to communicate with her, but not with each other, Mystaria quickly repeated what Valor had told her, letting the rest of her teammates know. That’s probably because of that mask he’s wearing, she added once she’d finished relaying what Valor had said. It’s design suggests necromancy, which means that his attacks are probably damaging your life force directly as well as inflicting physical injury.
Wonderful, so now we can add “necromancers” to the list of people Valor’s started a fight with, came Spinner’s sarcastic reply. And here I was thinking that she’d never graduate from the likes of bounty hunters, crooked guards, or corrupt magistrates!
Despite the danger they were in, her friend’s good-natured complaining made Mystaria smile, knowing it was Spinner’s way of whistling in the dark. I know this looks bad, but I have a plan. Shadow, if you time your strikes right, you should be able to hit him in the instants when he’s solid again. Valor, you too. That will put pressure on him to stay immaterial as much as possible. Spinner, help them out with your ghostbane dirge; since that spell makes incorporeal creatures partially solidify, I’m guessing he’ll respond by pushing back and going fully incorporeal. Woodheart, that’s when you’ll cast your purge spirit spell. He might not technically be a ghost or a specter or anything like that, but if he goes fully incorporeal, it should affect him.
Understood, replied Woodheart, Littleknight still circling her protectively in case their enemy targeted the naked mare. And what’ll you do?
Preparing my paralysis spell in case it goes the other way, and he returns to full corporeality, answered Mystaria. Everyone ready?
A chorus of affirmative responses sounded in her mind, and Mystaria nodded briskly, feeling a thrill run down her spine. As much as she knew this entire confrontation was a mistake, one that was their fault, she always felt a rush of excitement when she and her friends were able to work together as one. Believing in each other, working together to overcome obstacles that none of them would have been able to handle alone, was an experience akin to how she felt when praying to Luminace. It was knowing that she was part of something greater than herself, something personal and profound, built on trust, respect, and faith.
As long as she had her friends at her side, and her goddess watching over her, Mystaria knew that things would be alright.
Okay, then let’s-
That was when everything went black.
Master, please! begged Solvei over their psychic link. If you’re in trouble, let me help!
Lex snarled, as much as from the flurry of shield bashes and dagger swipes as from the winter wolf’s continued pleading. For the last time, stay where you are, Solvei! I have the situation under control!
It was no idle boast on his part, as he sent a surreptitious glance at Thermal Draft, who had retreated behind the common room’s bar counter as soon as the fight had started.
“I’m ready,” came her whispered response, her spell carrying the hushed words to his ears over the din of the fight.
That she was capable of using his whisper spell at all hadn’t come as any real surprise to Lex, even though he hadn’t known that she’d figured out how to use it until he’d heard her voice in his ear after the fight had started, asking how she could help. It was one of the simplest spells he knew, after all, and Thermal Draft’s aptitude with ritualizations – so long as their structure was relatively uncomplicated – meant that it was well within her ability to master. All the more so since she’d been quite keen on expanding her capabilities during their trip toward civilization.
What had surprised him was the level of perspicacity she’d shown. As soon as the fight had started, she’d not only taken cover behind the most defensible position in the room, but she hadn’t subsequently put herself at risk. He’d half-expected her to do something stupid, like throwing minor magical effects at those other mares and making herself a target or attempting to tackle one of the spellcasters; instead, she’d used the whisper spell to let him know that she was putting her powers at his disposal, waiting for his instructions.
Of course, in his furious state, Lex had very nearly told her to shut up and stay hidden. But when anger drove him to fight, it didn’t rob him of his wits; quite the opposite, rage bent all of his thoughts toward how to overwhelm his enemies, putting all of his intellect into processing the available data and how it could be most effectively utilized. In that regard, Thermal Draft’s abilities were no different, and it had been easy to incorporate what she could do into the plan he’d come up with after it had become clear that these mares weren’t so weak that he’d be able to simply bludgeon them into submission, whispering it to her as quietly as he could over the last few seconds.
And now that Thermal Draft’s preparations were ready, as well as his own, Lex put his plan into action.
Instantly, black crystals spread over the front of the fireplace – the only source of illumination in the room – covering the flame-filled recess at its center and plunging everything into darkness.
The five mares immediately panicked, exactly as he’d been hoping.
“What’s happening?!” yelled the blue-haired one – Valor – from in front of him.
“It’s the fire!” shouted back the one with the lute. “He doused it!”
“Stay on him!” yelled the one in the half-mask. “His eyes are still glowing! Aim at them!”
“He’s moving!” This time the cry came from the one who’d doffed her robe. “Mystaria! I think he’s heading toward you!”
The exclamation made Lex smirk as he heard hooves rushing away from his position. In fact, he hadn’t moved at all. The only thing he’d done had been to shut his eyes – keeping their green glow hidden from view – and laying a foreleg across the bridge of his muzzle, hiding the purple contrails from their outer edges.
Of course, the image of his eyes was still clearly visible in the dark room, thanks to the minor illusion that Thermal Draft had cast. And right now she was leading it toward where the last pony – the one whom the masked mare had called out to for tactical advice just now, and so who was the one he most needed to incapacitate – was standing. And those two idiots who’d been harrying him were following after it, cursing and stumbling as they rushed through the pitch-black room, heedless of the fact that what they were chasing was far more phantasmal than he was at the moment.
Dark Streak might have possessed magic that allowed her to see in the dark, but these mares apparently had no such resources.
An instant later there was the sound of a heavy impact, which was immediately followed by a pained grunt and the sound of something hitting the floor. But the feminine nature of the voice gave away who had been on the receiving end of whatever blow had just been delivered, and Lex had to bite back a dark chuckle as he heard Valor’s voice cry out a second later. “Mystaria! I’m sorry!”
“Ow…” moaned Mystaria. “This is what I get for not preparing a light spell today…”
“He’s trying to trick us into hitting each other!” cursed the masked mare. “No one attack!”
“If we don’t attack, we’re sitting ducks!” replied the lute-wielder.
“Meep! Meep meep meep! Meep meep!”
“You guys! Littleknight says he hasn’t moved at all! He’s still where he was before!”
That last line, delivered by the unclad mare, made Lex frown. He hadn’t identified what that horned rabbit was, but it apparently possessed not only the ability to see in the dark, but the situational awareness to realize what was happening and communicate salient knowledge to the others. Or at least, to the mare who’d translated for him.
But if it could do all of that…
Raising his left foreleg toward the creature – having made sure to use his dark magic to heighten his senses to the point where he was able to pinpoint everyone’s location via their hooffalls before he’d covered the fireplace – Lex called upon divine authority. “Attack the naked mare,” he murmured, not worrying about his voice giving his position away now that his ruse had been spoiled.
He smirked, triumphant as he felt the bands of power wrap around the creature, binding it to obedience despite its struggles. Except…nothing happened. For a moment Lex paused, confused as he tried to figure out why it wasn’t obeying his order, despite not being able to resist his commands. Then the obvious answer came to him, and he repeated the order in the same language that the creature’s owner had used – Ciltach, he knew – when she’d tried casting a spell on him earlier. “Ionnsaigh an each rùisgte.”
The creature shrieked at the command, but was powerless to stop itself as it turned and dove at its mistress, driving its horn into the meat of her back leg, causing her to cry out as she stumbled backward. “Littleknight! What are you doing?!”
“Woodheart!” yelled Valor, fumbling her way toward her friend. “What’s happening?! Are you alright?!”
“I think he’s taken control of Littleknight somehow!” the mare with the lute yelled back. “He told it to attack her!”
“Damn it, we need light!” snarled the masked mare, and Lex could hear her digging through what sounded like her saddlebags.
That was enough to convince him that it was time to bring this to a close. Given the combat savvy that they’d demonstrated so far, these mares were likely “adventurers” – the popular term on Everglow for tomb-robbers and monster-slayers – which meant that they were likely used to dealing with various difficult situations. Snuffing out the only source of light had caught them by surprise, but they were already starting to recover; better to end it now before they were able to coordinate a counterattack.
Murmuring the words to a spell, Lex made the requisite gestures and telekinetically dug the requisite focus out of his saddlebag as he conjured an extradimensional space into being in the form of a pit set in the ground, placing it beneath the hooves of Valor, the mare named Mystaria, and their masked friend.
He’d used a spell like this back when he’d fought Lirtkra, the sahuagin warrior, back in Vanhoover, except that one had been filled with acid at the bottom. In this case, the hole was dry the entire way down, but that was likely little comfort for the trio judging from the way they yelled as the floor suddenly disappeared beneath them, plunging thirty feet down before hitting the bottom hard.
“Valor! Mystaria! Shadow Star! Are you guys okay?” yelled the lute-toting mare, venturing timidly toward where her friends voices had emanated from. When they didn’t answer, she turned toward where the other one was still struggling with her pet. “Woodheart, hang on! I’m coming to help!”
No, answered Lex silently. You’re not.
Another brief spell was all it took to conjure up the miniature tornado he’d used several times before. Invisible in the gloom, it was easy enough to direct it around toward where the musician was staggering about, the sudden wind easily buffeting her into the hole. Like her friends, she screamed as she fell, only to stop abruptly as she landed on the others. A moment later, “Woodheart” and her pet joined them.
A thought was all it took to complete their capture, causing black crystal bars to form over the mouth of the pit. Only after that was done did Lex remove the crystals from in front of the fireplace, allowing the light to come back.
For a moment, the only sound filling the interior of the inn were the collective groans of the mares – and whatever “Littleknight” was – as they struggled to untangle themselves at the bottom of the hole Lex had conjured. Then Thermal Draft slowly made her way over to him, letting out a low whistle as she looked at the grate-covered hole in the ground. “Can you teach me how to cast that spell next?”
Lex didn’t have a chance to answer as Solvei’s mental voice made itself known again. Master-
I told you, I have the situation under control, snapped Lex irritably.
It's not that, Master! answered the winter wolf, even as Lex registered that her disposition had become "agitated." There are a large number of creatures headed toward the pony settlement right now!
Solvei’s warning sent a rush of tension through Lex.
What do you mean ‘creatures’? he demanded. How many of them are there? What’s their approximate distance from the village? How fast are they moving? Are they carrying any armaments?
I’m not sure how many of them there are, answered Solvei after a moment, her mental voice sounding harried as she tried to keep up with the barrage of questions. I can only see so far in the dark, and the blizzard is making it harder, but there’s a few packs’ worth at least. And they’re moving almost as fast as me. I mean, as fast as I was before you made me even quicker. And, um, and they’re big, er, tall, but also heavyset, and, um…
Almost none of that is useful information! raged Lex. Be more specific!
Across their link, Lex registered Solvei’s agitation growing worse. I’m sorry, Master! Maybe it would be better if you looked at them through my eyes instead of me describing them?
Her suggestion was so outside of what he’d expected that it brought Lex up short. …what?
“Lex?” At his side, Thermal Draft nudged him lightly. “You’re spacing out. Is everything okay?” She spared a glance at the pit he’d made, the black crystal grate over the top of it still intact. From inside, the voices of the five mares could be heard, talking over each other. “Those bullies didn’t get you with anything serious, right?”
“I’m communicating with Solvei,” he muttered dismissively.
A concerned look passed over the pegasus’ face. “Is she alright?”
Lex didn’t bother answering, instead motioning for her to keep quiet, needing to put all of his attention on what was happening with the winter wolf. What do you mean, look at them through your eyes?
Solvei’s disposition became confused at the question. It’s one of the ways in which we’re connected, Master. You’re capable of borrowing my senses whenever you wish.
Her statement was delivered in a casual, matter-of-fact tone, but to Lex the implications were myriad. Although he knew there were several more pressing questions that needed to be answered, but with his emotions only just having receded from the boiling point, the one that passed through his mind – and his link to Solvei – first was entirely personal. Does that work in reverse? Are you capable of borrowing mine?!
The thought was terrifying, to the point where Lex could feel his heartbeat quickening. Having a mind-to-mind connection like this was already uncomfortable for how invasive it was, something that he’d uneasily reconciled himself to – for now, at least – only because of how trustworthy Solvei had proven herself to be. But if the winter wolf was capable of tapping into his personal perceptions whenever she wanted…
Fortunately, his fears were assuaged a moment later. No, Master, answered Solvei, perhaps sensing his sudden distress. Not unless you wish me to.
Taking several slow breaths to calm himself, Lex dimly registered Thermal Draft’s anxious look. Nor was that the only thing he knew he needed to remain aware of; that pit that he’d shoved those unruly earth mares into wasn’t capable of maintaining itself for very long. By his calculation, there was barely sixty seconds left before it popped out of existence, depositing them all back into the common room. Which meant that there was no more time for his worrying about what Solvei’s casual admission meant for him personally; he needed more information about the creatures that were headed toward the village.
Alright, he eventually replied, still feeling uneasy. Try and get a good look at…whatever’s approaching, without putting yourself in danger. I’ll make use of your vision to see them for myself.
Right away, Solvei’s anxiety disappeared, her disposition becoming pleased. Yes, Master!
Not sure exactly what to do, Lex closed his eyes. He’d questioned Feathercap about this very thing – the colt having the power to see through the eyes of his spirit animal, Ulespy – but the activation condition hadn’t been a priority. The colt had simply made it sound like he see what his owl saw whenever he wanted to, with no more effort than a modicum of concentration. With nothing more to go on, Lex tried the same thing now…
…and couldn’t help but gasp as all of a sudden, he was outside in the snow, trees and rocks rushing past as he – no, he corrected himself firmly, as Solvei – ran through the wilderness.
The cognitive dissonance was enough to make Lex sway for a moment before planting his hooves more firmly, momentarily struggling to reconcile the image of quick motion without actually feeling any sense of movement. A moment later he felt a warm body press against his own, steadying him, and knew that it was Thermal Draft. To his mild surprise, that helped, and the sense of disorientation passed quickly, leaving him to concentrate fully on what the winter wolf was seeing.
For a moment, there was just more wintry terrain darting past. Then Solvei glanced to the side, and Lex saw the red light shining from the steeple of the inn they were staying at, recognizing that the winter wolf had obeyed his orders to stay away from the edge of the village. At the time, he’d been concerned that one of the ponies living here would catch a glimpse of her and panic; that she’d picked up on what was quite likely a threat that he hadn’t anticipated was a stroke of good fortune.
Of course, there was the very real possibility that whatever was headed toward the village wasn’t intent on harming anyone. Despite the fact that the village seemed like nothing more than a minor hamlet tucked away at the edge of the mountains, Lex knew from his prior experiences on Everglow that this world had far greater biodiversity than his native one. Given that, unlike Equestria, the Pony Empire wasn’t isolated by oceans – while there was one to the west, the eastern born was entirely landlocked – that meant that the place was, on the whole, more cosmopolitan than his home was, even if the level of development in everything except magic lagged behind that of Equestria.
And Thermal Draft and I came out of the mountains in the middle of the night, Lex reminded himself. So there’s no reason to assume that whatever’s headed this way now has malicious intent.
Then Solvei – having settled into a small gully, flattening herself out so that her eyes were just barely peeking above the edge of the ditch – caught sight of what was headed toward the village, and Lex abandoned any such thoughts.
Walking through the trees were several large shapes, and even with Solvei’s ability to see in the dark, the driving snow obscured the finer details of their forms. But what Lex could make out wasn’t reassuring. Standing almost ten feet tall and nearly half that in thickness, the things walked on two legs despite their hunched posture. Naked save for thick coats of shaggy fur, they’d braided their bodies with dangling bits of bone, while several wore necklaces composed of various body parts; as one passed close to the winter wolf’s hiding place, Lex could see shriveled ears, broken teeth, and what might have been the desiccated remains of an eyeball strung together in a grisly display.
The creatures carried no tools or equipment that he could see, though with the long claws that extended from the end of each finger on their meaty hands, that wasn’t too surprising. More disturbing was the filth that covered the ends of those claws. While Solvei’s darkvision wasn’t able to distinguish color, Lex couldn’t imagine that the dark stains that decorated their talons were anything good.
Worst of all were the things’ faces. Flat-nosed with sloping foreheads, the mouths were filled with misshapen teeth. If they had ears, they were hidden beneath the thick fur that covered everything but the front of their lumpy skulls. But while their eyes were bulging – the lids pulled back enough to leave their irises completely bared, giving them a frenzied look – their gazes swept the terrain in a careful manner.
In fact, they were doing more than just looking the area over, Lex realized grimly. The creatures – he could see at least a dozen, though between the driving snow and the limited range of Solvei’s darkvision, there could easily have been twice that many or more lurking about – were moving in an organized fashion, with several ranging ahead before looking back at the rest and motioning them forward. As he watched, the one closest to the winter wolf turned and swung an arm as thick as the trunk of the tree it stood next to, lips curling back as its jaw worked.
Recognizing that the thing was speaking, Lex needed a moment to remember that he could borrow more of Solvei’s senses than just her sight. A moment later the sounds of the inn fell away, with the crackling fire, the arguing mares, and Thermal Draft’s soft breathing replaced by the driving wind, the crunching of snow as the creatures strode forward, and the tortured grunts of the closest one’s voice, not speaking a language that Lex recognized.
But what he wasn’t expecting was to hear someone answer it.
“No guards, it says!” hooted a voice that was only slightly more pleasant than a fork scraped across a chalkboard, the pitch only vaguely recognizable as female. “Of course, no guards! Place lacks walls or trenches or fences! What use for guards? Besides, not like they could stop us!”
The furred humanoid replied with another series of ape-like grunts, this time gesturing toward the red light shining from the village.
It had barely finished when its unseen speaking partner replied. “No!”
The owner of the voice strode into view then, but there wasn’t much to see. Half the size of the furred creature, they were completely covered in a heavy cloak, obscuring their features entirely. The only part of them that was visible was a single arm – the skin mottled and riddled with warts – emerging from a baggy sleeve, clutching a staff as tall as it was. But rather than being wood, the staff’s surface was faceted, its edges catching the reflection of the distant red light, and it took Lex a moment to realize that it was composed of ice…though judging from how dark it appeared in Solvei’s vision, that ice seemed as though it was unnaturally black.
That staff swung around a moment later to belt the furred creature in the face, causing its head to snap around. “Not taking them all! Nothing to eat later then! Red light, second floor, like always!”
The larger creature brayed at that, but the cloaked figure seemed unimpressed. “Little hungry now better than much hungry later. Think. You rather eat small ponies?” The hooded figure stepped closer to the shaggy beast then, planting its staff firmly on the ground. “Or rather we eat you?”
Despite the fact that its sheer size made it seem as though it could have effortlessly torn the smaller figure to pieces, the shaggy creature crooned what Lex imagined was an apology, squatting down and hiding its face with one large claw. The display seemed to pacify the cloaked individual, who raised its other arm to pat the creature on the head. “There there, brother,” it cooed, which made its voice only slightly less painful to hear. “Feel better after eating, yes? Good boys get meals right after we’re home.”
The figure strode past the oversized creature then, the rest of the group following after her…and Lex noticed that it unlike the rest of its entourage, the hooded individual left no tracks in the snow. “But if there’s one, a strapping young stallion for me first!” it cackled, sounding delighted by the prospect. “With mother away, my turn to play with the food!”
It was still laughing as it continued toward the village, the hulking creatures shuffling after it.
Having heard more than enough, Lex withdrew his senses from Solvei, opening his eyes to see Thermal Draft looking at him anxiously. “Lex?” Her voice was tentative. “I’m trying not to freak out, but you’re starting to scare me. What’s going on?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, instead taking a moment to collate everything he’d just learned. Most importantly, how much time they had before those creatures arrived. Based on how distant the light from the inn had appeared from Solvei’s vantage point, how fast those creatures had been moving, and how fierce the weather was, they’d arrive in roughly…
“Lex?”
Knowing that there was no time to waste, Lex turned his attention back to Thermal Draft. “We’re about to come under attack,” he reported bluntly, before moving on to the next piece of salient data.
“I’m trying, Mysty! But it’s hard to move when Valor’s right on top of me!”
“If I move now, I’ll lose my grip on Woodheart’s horned rabbit thingy!”
“His name is Littleknight, he’s an almiraj, and he can’t help himself! That awful unicorn did something to him! He’d never attack me like this otherwise!”
“Meep meep!”
From her place on top of the heap of mares, Spinner cradled her lute – thankfully undamaged by the fall – as she extricated herself from her friends. “At least there’s nowhere to go from here but up,” she chuckled weakly.
“Not the time for bad jokes, Spinner!” groused Shadow, managing to squeeze out from between Mystaria and Valor.
That freed up enough room for Valor roll free of the others, only barely managing to keep hold of the squirming form of Littleknight, still trying to obey the order he’d been given to attack Woodheart. “Mysty, anytime you want to do your thing and fix whatever spell that stallion put on this little guy, that’d be great!”
Groaning as she crawled toward a corner of the pit, Mystaria took a moment to rub her aching head before casting her ‘detect magic’ spell, frowning as she peered at Littleknight. “That’s odd,” she muttered after several seconds.
“What?! What is it?!” fretted Woodheart, looking torn between wanting to hug Littleknight and not being able to look at him in his current state.
“I can’t see any magic on him at all,” answered Mystaria with a frown.
Valor cocked her head, her innate toughness letting her ignore the way Littleknight sank his teeth into her foreleg as she was momentarily distracted. “What does that mean?”
“It means that this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” huffed Shadow, eyeing the grate across the mouth of the pit appraisingly.
That earned the masked mare a scowl from Valor. “You always make it sound like I’m the one getting us in trouble, but I seem to recall that you’re the one who got us kicked out of that caravan we’d gotten ourselves hired to guard. Without being paid, for that matter.”
Shadow shot the other mare a sharp glance at that. “That’s not fair and you know it! Yes, I spiked the campfire with flash powder, but it was just supposed to give those two braggarts who kept chatting up Mysty a scare!”
“It did a little more than that,” muttered Mystaria as she continued examining Littleknight.
Shadow Star threw her forelegs into the air in exasperation. “Look, those guys were clearing making up all those stories! I’m sorry, but no one faces down a dragon all by themselves and makes it out alive, much less slays it! I figured that when the flames shot up unexpectedly, they’d scream like little girls, fall on their asses, and maybe wet their pants! I didn’t expect it to attract a swarm of giant bug monsters!”
“They were ankhegs,” noted Woodheart distractedly, hovering over Mystaria’s shoulder fretfully. “And that was a nest, not a swarm.”
“It was enough to make sure we had to trudge here on our own, with barely enough money for our rooms and a hot meal, was what it was,” snorted Valor.
Shadow bristled, the tension in her jaw making it clear that she was gritting her teeth behind her mask. “At least I didn’t pick a fight with a necromancer’s girlfriend and get us all captured!”
“I don’t think he’s a necromancer,” spoke up Mystaria, sighing as she stood up. “Did anyone else notice his left foreleg?”
“I think we were all a bit more concerned with the glowing eyes, twisted shadow, and skull mask,” pointed out Spinner ruefully.
“That stallion – Lex – has barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg,” continued Mystaria. “That’s the holy symbol of the Night Mare.”
Shadow Star raised a brow. “I thought you said he was probably a wizard studying at that Bright Night place. Now you think he’s a cleric?”
Mystaria shook her head. “I’m not sure. He might study arcane and divine magic both, like me. But at this point, there’s not enough evidence to be certain.”
She gestured upward, at the black crystal lattice sealing the entrance to the pit they were stuck in. “I don’t recognize whatever magic he used to create those black crystals, and the spell to create a pit like this isn’t divine in nature. But the fact that he’s actually wrapped his foreleg like that, instead of just tattooing the image of wire around it – or carrying some other symbol of her faith that isn’t nearly as painful – says that he’s extremely devout. The fact that he’s apparently able to make Littleknight turn against Woodheart, without using any sort of magical compulsions that I can determine, is also concerning…”
“So you can’t undo whatever that stallion did to him?” Almost in tears now, Woodheart looked between Mystaria and where the almiraj was struggling to free itself from Valor’s grip, still meeping. “He knows what he’s doing, and he doesn’t want to, but he can’t help himself, and it’s breaking my heart to see him like this!”
“Don’t worry,” soothed Spinner. “It’ll be alright.”
“Our present circumstances suggest otherwise,” noted Shadow Star sourly.
“On the contrary,” retorted Spinner with a smirk. “As much as you might have thought I was just exercising my peerless wit when I said there’s nowhere to go but up, I really do think things are about to get better.”
The other four exchanged skeptical looks. “And you think that because…?” prompted Valor.
“Experience,” replied Spinner glibly. “Look, this is exactly what Valor was talking about before she ticked off tall, dark, and angry. We’re Fail Forward, right? Well this” – she waved her hoof to indicate the hole that they were sitting in – “looks like failure to me. So what comes next is the ‘forward’ part. All the more so since we’re following our usual pattern.”
“We have a usual pattern?” Shadow Star didn’t bother trying to hide the doubt in her voice.
But Spinner only scoffed at her friend’s apprehension. “Are you kidding me? This is how things always go for us! We try to earn some easy money with a simple job. Things go pear-shaped when you try to prove you’re smarter than some obvious blowhard, or when Valor decides that she’s going to bully a bully.”
“Hold on!” frowned Valor.
“That’s overstating things!” huffed Shadow Star.
But Spinner continued as though she couldn’t hear her friends’ complaints. “Then we get in a few fights, Woodheart strips down for everyone’s viewing pleasure, Mysty comes up with a plan, and we manage to get away none the worse for wear with a few more coins in our pockets than we had when we left. After that we kick back until we need some more money, and the whole thing starts all over again.” She gave her lute a quick strum to underline the point. “See? So there’s nothing to worry about.”
Silence fell for a moment as everyone considered that.
“That’s kind of simplistic, and a little reductive, don’t you think?” replied Mystaria at last, her expression pained.
“I notice that you forgot to add how another reason we tend to get in trouble a lot is that you make predictions which turn out to be wrong almost as often as they’re right,” complained Shadow Star.
“Or that you like to talk about how you’ve been everywhere and done everything,” added Valor, “even though half the time you’re either repeating things you’ve heard somewhere else or you’re making it up as you go.”
“And you didn’t mention Littleknight!” pouted Woodheart, reaching a tentative hoof toward the almiraj, only to snatch it back when he snapped at her. “He’s been a big help too, you know!”
But Spinner just waved a hoof, as though the others’ criticisms were nothing more than a few errant flies. “Look, the important thing is that this is almost certainly as bad as it’s going to get. All we need to do is make nice with the Night Mare’s nutjob up there, and then we can go back to worrying about how we’re going to find that old temple in this awful weather. In fact…” Her eyes twinkled as she shot Mystaria a grin. “Didn’t you say the place we’re looking for used to be consecrated to the Night Mare?”
Mystaria frowned, but nodded thoughtfully. “That’s what I’d heard. Supposedly something happened and it was abandoned years ago, but I couldn’t find any details, including its exact location. If Lex has an idea about where it might be-”
“Then maybe we can help each other out,” nodded Shadow Star, picking up on the idea. “He might be a tough bastard, but trudging through the wilderness during a blizzard isn’t exactly something you want to do with only one or two people. If we offer to help him ‘recover’ any relics that are still there, we might just earn a fat reward for our trouble when we take them back to the Great Temple in Viljatown.”
“More importantly, maybe there’s a clue as to what’s causing this unnatural weather there?” asked Valor, shooting Mystaria a questioning look.
“It’s possible,” admitted the mare. “The cold isn’t an official part of the Night Mare’s divine portfolio, but she’s often associated with it. At the very least, it’s worth checking out.”
But Woodheart shook her head. “I want to help everyone too, but I’m not doing anything with that unicorn until he fixes Littleknight!”
Mystaria raised a hoof like she wanted to put it on her friend’s shoulder, then seemed to remember that Woodheart was still naked, lowering her foreleg with a grimace. “I’m sure that if we can work things out, he’ll undo…whatever it was that he did. Maybe he’ll even give us an explanation about what magic he was using. Bright Night might not be the most responsible institution in the Empire, but it’s had its share of breakthroughs in magical research over the years. In fact, it was an alumnus of theirs who initially proposed the theory that psychic magic and psionics were different disciplines-”
“Okay!” interrupted Spinner quickly, knowing better than to let Mystaria hold forth when it came to magic. “Now this is what I was talking about: putting the ‘forward’ in Fail Forward!”
“Yeah, well, don’t forget that this all hinges on getting that Lex guy to listen to us in the first place.” Shadow Star canted her head upward, at where the black crystals were still covering the entrance to the pit. “Because he doesn’t seem like the chatty type, what with not having glanced down here once so far.”
“He might not need to,” murmured Mystaria, glancing at the walls of the pit. “If I remember my magic lessons correctly, the hole created by this spell doesn’t last very long.”
“Wait, what?!” Valor’s eyes widened, and she only belatedly caught Littleknight as the almiraj came close to wriggling free. “You mean we’ll be buried alive?!”
She calmed down only a little when Mystaria shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. This hole is actually an extradimensional space, like my bags” – she nodded her head at her saddlebags – “which means that when the spell expires, the hole will cease to exist and we’ll all be instantly moved up out of it harmlessly.”
“Even with that grate there?” noted Spinner, suddenly looking nervous.
“Er…” Realizing she didn’t have an answer to that, Mystaria felt her pulse quicken. That Lex fellow had been furious, but surely he wouldn’t try to kill them over what had happened, would he? For that matter, would sealing up the hole necessarily hurt them? A collapsing extradimensional space would shunt things back to the nearest point of stability, so it wasn’t like they’d be shoved through the grate…probably.
“I think-”
But Mystaria didn’t have a chance to finish her thought as the pit they were in suddenly vanished.
Fortunately, the black crystal lattice over the top of it did as well, and before any of the ladies of Fail Forward could so much as gasp, they found themselves standing in the middle of the inn’s common room again.
And standing across from them, apparently in expectation of their being released, was Lex.
Okay, the good news is that he apparently wasn’t trying to kill us by sealing the hole up, noted Mystaria as she let out a shuddering breath. Plus, he’s not flickering anymore, even if he is still wearing the skull mask. So…he’s signaling that he doesn’t want to keep fighting, but is ready to if we keep going at him? Glancing behind him, she took note of his pegasus companion, regarding her and her friends with an unfriendly – but not hostile – expression.
Glancing at her friends, they each gave her a quick nod – her telepathic magic having expired a little while ago – and Mystaria inhaled deeply, steadying herself. Alright, I can do this. Luminace teaches us that it’s not enough to know how to use magic; we also need to understand the virtues of tolerance, respect, compassion, and humility. That’s how we make sure to conduct ourselves responsibly, not just as spellcasters, but as ponies.
Clearing her throat, she took a single step forward. “I-”
“Are the five of you still battle-ready?” demanded Lex.
Fighting down the urge to wince, Mystaria raised her forelegs in a gesture of peace. “We don’t want to fight! I know you’re still angry over-”
“That’s not what I asked you,” interrupted Lex, his voice colder than the blizzard raging outside. “Are able to continue fighting?”
Mystaria couldn’t help the way her ears folded back then. “That’s…”
“You’re damn right we are!” huffed Valor, taking a step forward. “And if you-”
“Good,” answered Lex, not bothering to listen to the rest of her answer. “There’s a throng of monsters heading this way. They’ll be here in less than five minutes. Now, tell me what magic, weapons, and resources you have at your disposal so that I can develop a plan to best utilize your abilities.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…okay,” murmured Spinner. “Maybe I called that whole ‘this is where things get better’ part a little too soon.”
“What do you mean ‘a throng of monsters is heading this way’?!”
“How exactly do you know that?”
“Did you summon them? Everyone knows the Night Mare is the goddess of monsters!”
“Five minutes?! We can’t prepare for a huge fight in only five minutes!”
“UNDO WHATEVER IT WAS YOU DID TO LITTLEKNIGHT!!!”
Mystaria winced as Woodheart’s angry yell drowned out the rest of them, silently berating herself for letting Lex’s announcement distract her from how much distress her friend was in. Even now, Littleknight was thrashing and struggling in Valor’s grasp, the almiraj still trying to carry out the orders he’d been given to attack Woodheart. Whether or not Lex was right about a horde of monsters descending on them, they couldn’t fight at full effectiveness this way.
But judging from how Lex was tensing up – gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes as Woodheart glared at him, the druid looking angrier than Mystaria could ever remember seeing her – ordering him to remove whatever magic he’d used to force Littleknight to attack his mistress was only upsetting him further. That wasn’t surprising; her religious studies had taught Mystaria that the Night Mare’s adherents were often proud to the point of arrogance. More importantly, from Lex’s point of view they were the mares who’d stood by while one of their number attacked his lady friend, and then ganged up on him when he’d moved to defend her. Acting indignant wouldn’t get them anywhere now.
Taking a slow breath, Mystaria put a hoof out in front of Woodheart, gently motioning the druid back as she took a step forward, one of Valor’s butchered aphorisms coming to mind. You attract more strays with milk than with vinegar.
“Your name is Lex, right?” Making sure to keep her voice even, Mystaria gestured at where Valor was still holding the struggling almiraj. “That creature you’ve ensorcelled is Littleknight, and we consider him to be a member of our party. We can’t fight whatever monsters you’re warning us about if we-”
Lex cut her off with an impatient wave of his hoof…his left hoof, the one with the barbed wire wrapped around it, Mystaria noticed. “There,” he announced irritably, and sure enough Littleknight had gone limp in Valor’s grasp, panting. That was enough to convince Woodheart that the little guy was alright, because she scooped him up in an instant, a happy cry escaping her lips as she immediately started nuzzling the horned rabbit, who meeped in reply.
The sight earned a relieved sigh from the rest of the group, and Mystaria felt a rush of hope that maybe they could put aside their differences and work together, when Lex opened his mouth again. “If you’re finished wasting time, give me all of your combat-relevant information,” he demanded. “NOW!”
And just like that, the tension that had vanished was back, with Shadow Star bristling at the order. “Listen, you self-righteous sack of-”
“Shadow!” hissed Mystaria.
“No!” shot back the masked mare, giving her an angry look before glaring at Lex. “If time is of the essence, then maybe it’d be faster if the two of you told us what you can do, instead of having the five of us-”
“Six,” interjected Woodheart, still cuddling Littleknight.
“The six of us explain everything we’re capable of,” finished Shadow Star without missing a beat. “Did that ever occur to you, smart guy?”
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” offered Spinner, who thankfully sounded contemplative rather than hostile. “Those of us who can cast spells can start using them to get ready while you tell us what magic you two have. It’d be more efficient that way.”
Behind Lex, Mystaria noticed that his pegasus companion – Thermal Draft, he’d called her – seemed to be wavering, her unfriendly expression turning pensive. “Lex, maybe we should…”
But the masked unicorn silenced her with an angry look. “Efficiency is not effectiveness,” he retorted, his voice brimming with hostility as he turned back to scowl at the five earth mares. “Given that I was able to subdue your entire group with only a token effort and minimal assistance, it should be obvious that my capabilities far outstrip yours. Since I’m also the one with the most information regarding what we’re about to face, it should be obvious that the best course of action is for you idiots to place yourselves fully at my disposal so that I can use you in the most tactically sound manner! Now do as you’re told and TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW!”
This time Valor was the one to take offense, stomping a hoof as she took a step forward. “Just who the hell do you-”
“Don’t argue!” snarled Lex, his eyes turning green-and-purple again. “Obey!”
Valor looked incensed at that, but was saved from responding as Spinner hurriedly pulled her back, signaling with a nod for Mystaria and Woodheart to do the same to Shadow, who was already reaching for a weapon. “Would you mind excusing us?” she called back to Lex, her voice filled with insincere sweetness. “We just need a moment to regroup.”
But Lex seemed determined to deny them even that much respite. “I just said-”
“Lex, can I talk to you for a moment?” Putting a hoof on his shoulder, Thermal Draft bit her lip at the angry glare that the unicorn gave her then, but didn’t falter. “Please?”
If this is going to work at all, decided Mystaria as she glanced back, seeing Lex reluctantly allow himself to be led away by Thermal Draft, it’ll be through her.
Of course, there were more pressing problems at the moment, since behind her mask Shadow Star was seething as the two of them ushered her back toward the far side of the room – Woodheart pausing just long enough to grab the cloak she’d discarded earlier and throwing it back over herself – with Valor in a similar state as Spinner managed to pull them into a huddle. “Okay,” began the bard, slinging her lute over her back, “let’s take stock and try to figure-”
“Screw that!” growled Shadow. “I say we go all-out and hit that pompous jackass with everything we’ve got!”
“Works for me,” nodded Valor.
“And when the monsters he warned us about – something he didn’t need to do, I’ll add – come pouring into town?” asked Spinner pointedly. “If he’s right, we’re about to be in very big trouble.”
“Are we really going to take that at face value?” snorted Shadow. “I’m from Blevik; throwing an enemy off-balance with a lie is one of the first tricks you learn when you live there. This whole ‘we’re about to be attacked’ thing is a ploy.”
Mystaria shook her head. “Why would he bother with that, though? We were sitting ducks in that pit; he could have started throwing fireballs or lightning bolts or even just huge chunks of those black crystals he made down on top of us. Instead, he let the spell run out, freed Littleknight, and warned us that there’s an attack coming.”
“And you don’t think that’s suspicious?” huffed Valor. “This village is tiny. If these so-called monsters are five minutes away, that means they’re still out in the wilderness. So how is it that he just now happened to realize that they’re coming here?” She shook her head. “I think he’s trying to pull one around on us.”
“Over on us,” corrected Mystaria with a sigh, before looking at the only member of their group who hadn’t spoken yet. “Woodheart, two of us think this is a trick, and two of us think it’s serious. You’re the tie-breaker. What do you say?”
Woodheart didn’t reply for a moment, reaching back to gently rub Littleknight – the almiraj riding on her back – between the ears. “I don’t like that stallion,” she answered at last. “He’s the meanest, most awful person I’ve met since leaving the forest. What he did to Littleknight was cruel, and just thinking about it now…” She shuddered, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head before speaking again. “It makes me want to yell and scream and hit him over and over until he says he’s sorry.”
Mystaria grimaced, exchanging a worried glance with Spinner even as Valor and Shadow looked vindicated. “Then…”
“But if he’s right about monsters attacking,” continued Woodheart, “wouldn’t that mean that the people in this village are in danger of being hurt, or even killed?”
Valor winced at that, and Mystaria could almost see the anger flow out of her. Shadow was in a similar state, suddenly not able to look anyone in the eye. For her part, Mystaria let out a breath of relief, and Spinner gave the druid a look of admiration. “That forest you came from is worse off for not having you in it, Woodsy.”
Woodheart blushed at the praise. “Thanks. But don’t call me Woodsy.”
But the banter came to an end as Valor sighed. “If this village really is about to be attacked by monsters, then we have to help protect this place. But working together with him” – she canted her head over where Lex was conversing with Thermal Draft; although they were keeping their voices low, his body language was tense and angry, while hers was conciliatory, clearly trying to soothe him – “is going to be impossible.”
“Then we shouldn’t,” concluded Shadow Star.
Mystaria’s ears folded back in exasperation, but before she could protest her friend’s decision, Shadow held up a hoof. “Hear me out. If we accept that bastard’s telling the truth, then it was, what…two minutes ago, maybe three, when he said we had less than five minutes to get ready?” She shook her head. “That means there’s no time to try and coordinate our efforts with him and his girlfriend. We’re better off preparing on our own.”
Frowning, Mystaria shook her head. “That’s not-”
“She’s right, Mysty.” Spinner gave her an apologetic look, but the expression on her face was one of resolve. “Remember how long it took all of us to really come together as a team? There’s no way we could do that with two strangers in only a couple of minutes, especially not with someone as prickly as that guy. If we’re about to fight for our lives, I’d rather put my trust in you girls than him.”
Pursing her lips, Mystaria took a deep breath. She knew her friends were right; coordination in battle wasn’t something that could be rushed, and a clash of personalities would only make things worse. But it still felt like a missed opportunity; as unpleasant as he’d been, Lex had still been proposing that they work together. That, after they’d been the ones to start that fight. “We should at least try to trade some basic information.”
“Fair enough,” admitted Valor, before lifting her head and turning toward where Lex and Thermal Draft were talking. “Hey jackass!” she called, smirking when both ponies looked at her. “How many monsters, where are they coming from, and what do they look like?”
From what little of Lex’s face could be seen beneath his mask, he was ready to unleash a blistering retort. That must have been clear to Thermal Draft as well, because she jumped in before he could get a word out. “They’re something called ‘humanoids,’” she answered. “Big ones! There’s nearly twenty of them, and they’re coming here from the northwest!”
“That’s all I needed to know. C’mon girls.” Not giving Lex a chance to respond, Valor strode for the door, clearly intent on taking the fight to the incoming humanoids before they arrived in the town proper. Mystaria could only heave a sigh as she joined the rest of her friends in trotting after her, knowing that the headstrong mare wouldn’t be dissuaded now that she’d made up her mind.
But to her mild surprise, Valor stopped when she reached the door. Pausing for just a moment, she took a deep breath before glancing back over her shoulder, catching Thermal Draft’s eye. “I’m sorry about before.”
Then she kicked the door open and strode out into the night, Mystaria and the others trailing after her.
Stepping out into the snowy night alongside the rest of their band, Spinner rolled her eyes at Valor’s swearing, trying not to shiver too much. “So which one was it?”
Scowling, Valor turned glanced back to frown at the bard, her breath coming out in steamy white puffs. “Huh? Which one was what?”
Spinner clucked her tongue. “The dark or the cold, which one did you forget about? Because don’t get me wrong, that was a great exit. You snubbed that dictatorial boor and even managed to score a few extra points by apologizing to whatshername on the way out. But from the way you were cursing just now, you either forgot that it’s freezing cold out here, or that it’s pitch black. I’m just curious which one slipped your mind.”
“At least the wind’s dying down,” muttered Shadow Star, digging through her saddlebags in the dim light coming from the inn’s front windows, along with the bright red gleam from the building’s steeple.
The latter might have been why Valor’s cheeks seemed to be flushed as she glanced away. “I kind of forgot about both,” she admitted sheepishly.
“I can take care of the cold,” volunteered Mystaria, teeth chattering. “I might not have prepared any illumination spells, but I doubled up on my ‘communal endure elements’ spell after we left that caravan, and I’ve still got the second one ready now.” She didn’t wait for any further commentary before she started casting her spell, clearly wanting to be protected from the chill as soon as possible.
“And these” – Shadow Star pulled several thin metal cylinders, each a foot long and with one end colored gold – “should take care of the lack of light.”
Spinner’s eyebrows went up. “Sunrods?”
The masked mare nodded, clearly pleased with herself. “That’s right. One for each of us. Just smack the golden tip against something, and these things will shine as bright as a torch for a full hour.”
“You couldn’t have used these a few minutes ago when that Lex guy hid the fire?” complained Woodheart, although the bite was taken out of her voice by Mystaria finishing her spell and reaching out to touch the druid, making the latter pony sigh in relief as the biting cold suddenly became bearable. “Make sure to do Littleknight too,” she reminded Mystaria, holding up the almiraj helpfully.
For her part, Shadow Star snorted at the complaint. “I would have if there’d been time to root through my stuff and pull one of these out. But since we were in the middle of a fight, and I thought we could still see that jackass’s glowing eyes, it seemed like a better idea to keep going at him.”
“It’s fine, Shadow.” Spinner couldn’t hold back her own groan of satisfaction as Mystaria placed a hoof on her after touching Littleknight, the bitter temperature suddenly feeling no more unpleasant than a mild spring afternoon. “If you’d used them before, we wouldn’t have them now, so it’s better this way.”
“I’m not so sure,” countered Valor with a frown. “If we’re all carrying lights, won’t these so-called monsters – presuming they’re even real – see us coming?”
“You’re probably right,” admitted Woodheart, examining the sunrods curiously – although they’d been adventuring together as Fail Forward for a while now, this was the first time that Mystaria hadn’t had a light spell prepared for when they’d had to fight in the dark; something which made Spinner grateful that Shadow Star’s cynicism tended to manifest as overpreparedness – before taking one in her teeth and whacking it against the side of the inn, causing the end of the metal bar to flare into brightness. “But it’s either that or we fight blind, and after what just happened, I know which one I’d prefer.”
“She’s right,” added Mystaria, placing a hoof on Shadow Star next. “It’s going to be disadvantageous either way, but it’s highly likely that whatever we’re going to be facing has some way of seeing in the dark. At least this way, they won’t get the drop on us.”
“I’m going to have a hard time playing my lute and singing if I have to carry one of those things,” noted Spinner, bringing her instrument – the focus for her magic, without which she’d have a hard time bringing most of her powers to bear – around and giving it a quick glance to make sure the strings were still tuned.
“I can take care of that,” offered Valor, pausing just long enough to let Mystaria put her ‘endure elements’ spell on her before lighting one of the sunrods and trotting over to the bard. “Just hold still for a second.”
Moving around behind Spinner, Valor held the sunrod up to her friend’s back leg and – before any of her teammates could ask what she was doing – twisted the length of metal into a loop, coiling it around the bard’s ankle. “There you go,” she announced, pleased with herself. “Hooves- and mouth-free transport, and you’re guaranteed not to lose it when the fighting starts.”
“That’s actually a really good idea,” marveled Shadow. “I mean, I’m not doing that, since even if we’re fighting an enemy that can see in the dark, there are still plenty of ways to take them by surprise, but still, that’s good thinking.” The effusive praise, uncharacteristic of Fail Forward’s sneakiest member, hung in the air for a moment, before Shadow gave Valor a suspicious look. “Which leads me to ask, who are you and what have you done with the real Valor Stronghoof?”
“Ha ha,” snorted the shield-toting mare as she wrapped a sunrod around her own leg. “Let’s just get this done in case those humanoids really do show up. And Woodheart, I am not putting one of these on you unless you’re covered up!”
“Ugh, fine!” groaned the druid as she pulled her cloak back on. “But I’m getting rid of this as soon as I need to start casting spells! The animal spirits have a harder time recognizing me as an ally if I’m not unclad like they are!”
“Meep meep!” added Littleknight, his head bobbing in what looked like a nod.
“Speaking of which, we should start with the usual buffs.” Mystaria glanced at Spinner first. “You want to use a ‘cat’s grace’ spell on Valor while I put a ‘shield of faith’ on her?”
Spinner nodded, quickly singing a ditty about a kitty as she cast the spell to make Valor more nimble, turning to Shadow Star as Mystaria cast her own spell. “Shadow, you want one of these too?”
“Make it a double,” joked the mask-wearing mare, trotting over to receive the spell from the bard.
“I just wish we had more time to prepare,” complained Woodheart as she pulled a few of the leaves and feathers off of her cloak, bundling them together and popping them in her mouth. She gave them a few harsh chews before spitting the material onto her hoof, walking over and pressing the gooey mass against a nasty bruise on the side of Valor’s head, the result of one of Lex’s punches after he’d put that hideous mask on. “If I’d had an hour, I could have asked one of the more ferocious spirits in the area to possess me so that I could fight on the front lines too.”
“It’s fine.” Having been on the receiving end of one of Woodheart’s healing poultices before, Valor didn’t flinch at having the soggy coagulation so close to her face. Privately, Spinner wondered if Valor’s having been raised by sun cats had anything to do with that; while those poultices worked, their unhygienic nature still made Mystaria and Shadow – as well as Spinner herself – flinch whenever Woodheart used them. “It’s not like Spinner’s had time to do one of those future-reading things of hers either.”
“It’s called a divination,” corrected Shadow Star, “and I can’t believe you still trust those things. You know they’re wrong almost as often as they’re right.”
Spinner stuck her tongue out at the masked mare. “It's not that my sneak peaks into the future are wrong, it’s that they require proper context to interpret correctly, thank you very much. Besides, I don’t hear you complaining when I’m using the shorter version to help everyone here react to the things an instant before they happen during a fight.”
“I still say that’s some sort of hypnotic battle-trance induced by the rhythm of your music rather than subconscious knowledge of the immediate future,” grumbled Mystaria.
Grinning at the old, and by now very familiar, debating topic between the two of them, Spinner opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t have a chance to get a word out before Littleknight meeped loudly, sitting up on his hind legs as he sniffed the air. “The wind’s picking up again,” noted Woodheart, listening intently to what the almiraj was saying. “Littleknight says he can smell something awful on it. Like old blood.”
“And the wind’s coming from the west,” noted Valor grimly.
Behind her mask, Shadow swore. “I really wanted that jackass to be lying, and not just because I was going to give him an earful later.”
“We should head to the edge of town,” announced Mystaria. “I don’t want this fight to happen in the middle of the village. Even if everyone’s inside for the night, there’s still a chance that an innocent bystander might become involved. Woodheart, Spinner, let’s keep casting while we move. We probably don’t have much time left to prepare.”
“Be careful.” Shadow brought her dagger out as they moved, taking point as she peered ahead. “Even if they’re upwind of us, the fact that they’re close enough for Littleknight to smell them means they’re already close enough to see our lights.”
Spinner didn’t respond, in the middle of casting another spell. Woodheart and Mystaria were the same, leaving Valor to nod. “Got it.”
But the words had barely left Valor’s mouth when Shadow came to a stop, their group barely having advanced a hundred feet from the front of the inn. Her eyes narrowing, the masked mare took the final sunrod – Valor having wrapped the other four around her friends’ hooves – and banged it on the ground, lighting it up before tossing it forward…
…and revealing a small army of hulking brutes directly in front of them.
The sight of the creatures made Spinner’s mouth go dry, and she almost fumbled her spell, barely managing to finish placing her speed-enhancing spell on herself and her friends. Although she’d fought bipedal enemies before, there was a stark difference between orcs and gem gnolls and the creatures in front of them now. The former had worn clothes and wielded tools, spoken languages she knew, and generally had plenty of other indications that they could be understood.
That understanding had been a potent advantage for Spinner. It allowed her to intimidate, confuse, beguile, or parley with the humanoids as necessary, since they possessed motivations and values that she could comprehend. In that regard, they were no different from ponies.
The humanoids in front of her now had no such indications about them. Almost ten feet tall, they were naked save for a few grisly tokens adorning them, their bodies covered by nothing else except thick, white fur. Their clawed hands carried no weapons or shields, flexing in a manner more akin to animals than people. Their eyes were wide, possessing a savage gleam that made her knees knock together, and while she felt sure that the gibbering and hooting they emitted was some sort of language, it wasn’t one she’d ever heard.
They were, in other words, exactly what she’d been told they were: monsters.
She simply hadn’t understood just what that meant until now.
Shadow Star apparently felt the same way. “…this is bad.”
“We’ve dealt with bad before,” snorted Valor, living up to her name as she stalked toward the throng. “And even if we fail, we’re gonna fail FORWARD!”
She broke into a charge then, the last word erupting from her lips as a guttural battle-cry, and the pitch was unusually low, as though her voice had suddenly dropped several octaves. The sound would have surprised anyone who hadn’t heard it before, but Spinner knew exactly what it was. She’s using her totem already, realized the bard, even as she began to play a rousing song on her lute. I hope that’s enough to overpower these things!
If it wasn’t, then this was likely to become very bad indeed.
Valor could still remember the day she’d found her totem.
That she’d been chosen to be the one to take her baby brother, Sudden Surge, out on his first hunt had been almost as thrilling as when she’d gone on her own. It was a sign that her parents had recognized that she was ready for more responsibility, and trusted that she could make a contribution to the pride, something she’d been insecure about ever since she’d come to appreciate that she was an earth pony adopted by sun cats. As such, she’d been almost as nervous as Sudden was when they set off alone across the savannah.
In Sudden’s case, his anxiety was understandable. Succeeding on your first hunt was a rite of passage for sun cats; it was the major difference between children and adults, and in Sudden’s case, a chance to prove that his name referred to his skill in chasing down prey, rather than how quickly he came running when their mother announced that dinner was ready. As such, it was understandable that his only concern had been bringing back the most impressive catch he could.
But Valor should have known better. She’d been on plenty of hunts by then, and had been told many times that the most important lesson to keep in mind when looking for prey was not to let yourself become prey for something else in the process. But with how nervous she’d been about what would happen if Sudden came back without having caught anything, she’d foolishly neglected that lesson.
That was why, when Sudden had set upon a diatryma – a large, flightless bird with a beak like an axe – that he’d spotted, Valor hadn’t thought to wonder why the creature was running away from the half-grown sun cat so quickly, despite being known for its territorial and belligerent nature.
But when a huge shadow had settled over her little brother and his prey a moment later, she’d realized her error.
Though, in her defense, the wyvern that had touched down then had ventured far outside of its usual hunting grounds.
She’d found out later that another pride had ventured into the nearby hills where the wyverns nested. Driven by greed, they’d slaughtered the vicious creatures in order to sell their bodies for parts; alchemists and apothecaries valued the creatures’ poison, wizards and artificers had myriad uses for their bones and organs, and wyvern scales – almost indistinguishable from those of dragons – were used to fashion decorative armor among fashion-conscious adventurers and nobles. But while they’d managed to kill off nearly all of the wyverns, one had escaped, fleeing toward the savannah.
All Valor had known at the time, however, was that a saurian monster twice her size had just touched down, crushing the diatryma in its hind claws and roaring hungrily at Sudden.
A roar which had become one of pain an instant later as Valor launched herself at the beast.
A lot of the fight was a blur to her, even now. All she’d been able to think about was that she couldn’t let Sudden get hurt. Not because it would mean she’d failed at the important task she’d been given, but simply because he was her beloved baby brother.
The parts she could recall were mostly disjointed fragments. Talons tearing across her ribs, before she sank her fangs into their base, tearing them asunder. The tip of a barbed tail gouging her stomach, only for her claws to shred it asunder in a spray of blood and ichor. Ripping scales apart to get at the soft flesh underneath as the beast thrashed and writhed.
And then, finally, picking Sudden up and slinging him across her back as she stumbled home, collapsing just as their camp had come into sight.
She’d woken up three days later, her mother and aunt hovering over her worriedly. Apparently the severity of her wounds, combined with how much poison the wyvern’s tail had pumped into her, had left her on the verge of death. And that was after the pride’s healers had exhausted themselves trying to save her.
But none of that had mattered to Valor; at that moment, all she’d cared about was the fact that Sudden was curled up next to her, alive and unharmed.
At least, until her mother had informed her that she’d killed the wyvern who’d attacked them…and that, according to Sudden, she’d transformed into a bear in order to do so.
At first she’d thought her mother was joking, until her aunt – the pride’s shaman – had started quizzing her, asking her about the details of what had happened. Knowing better than to defy the force of nature that was her mother’s sister, Valor had dutifully answered everything to the extent that she was able. After recounting the tale several times, and answering a bewildering array of seemingly unrelated questions from everything about what she’d eaten recently to what sort of dreams she’d been having, her aunt had announced her conclusion.
Valor had gained a totem, the mark of favor of one of the sacred beasts who served the Sun King, the great god who was the patron of not only the sun cats, but all of the feline races of Everglow. In her case, her aunt had explained, it was the totem of Makwa, the wise and powerful Mother Bear who acted as guardian and protector of those who couldn’t protect themselves.
The news had stunned Valor, nor had she been the only one. While most prides had a shaman, adept, medium, or other intermediary between them and the gods, to receive a totem – and from a servant of the chief deity in their pantheon, no less – was a rare honor. All the more so when held by a smaller pride such as theirs.
Her father had been ecstatic when he’d been informed. That his daughter, only a few years past her own first hunt, had slain a wyvern all on her own was a triumph worth bragging over. That she’d received such an exalted blessing only made it that much greater. Now that he knew Valor was going to survive, he’d immediately begun spreading the word, inviting every pride he knew of to come and celebrate the accomplishment.
Famous for his generous disposition, it had never occurred to Valor’s father that some of those other sun cats would be offended that a totem would be granted to a pony instead of one of their own…
“And even if we fail, we’re gonna fail FORWARD!”
The last word erupted from her throat in a guttural roar as Valor ran forward, feeling the change wash over her as she called upon the totem Makwa had granted her. Her muzzle elongated, her teeth becoming larger and sharper as she bellowed again. Her body grew heavier as her muscles thickened, heavy claws growing where her hooves had been. Her clothes vanished, melding into her new form seamlessly; even her shield, with its snarling bear’s head emblem – a gift that her father had given to her during the feast he’d thrown in her honor – vanished into the coarse fur of her forearm.
And then several hundred pounds of ursine fury crashed into the assembled humanoids.
The creatures’ gibbering immediately erupted into panicked screams, trying to put some distance between themselves and the raging predator that the little pony charging them had suddenly become. But Valor had no intention of letting them back off, rearing up on her hind legs as she swiped her paws at the face of the nearest creature, intent on caving in the thing’s skull.
Except that wasn’t what happened.
Although her claws sank deep into the thing’s face, its flesh was unusually tough, causing her vicious swipe to gouge the skin on its face in a painful – but ultimately non-fatal – wound rather than turning its head into pulp. That was enough to catch her by surprise; like the rest of her teammates, Valor had experience fighting creatures whose bodies were supernaturally toughened, and knew that the answer to that was to attack with magically-enhanced weapons.
In her case, her weapons were her claws and fangs, and she knew Woodheart had enchanted those a few moments ago, when they’d ventured away from the inn. She’d heard the druid chant that particular spells a score of times before, and had recognized it now. It should have been enough to let her punch through whatever magic was annealing its body.
That it hadn’t worked out that way was surprising. But as unexpected as that was, what caught Valor off-guard was the freezing temperature of the shaggy creature’s body. Despite the spell that Mystaria had put on her a moment ago, Valor found herself gasping as the cold immediately reached painful levels, the blood pouring over her claws feeling like it should have frozen immediately due to how frigid it was.
It was the unexpected nature of the pain, rather than the searing cold itself, that made Valor yank her claws away from the creature. But although the ends of her forelegs were already going numb, Valor could see that she’d still done a number on her enemy. The brute was doubled over, howling in agony as it clutched the bloody mess that she’d made of its face.
It was an opportunity that Valor had no intention of missing, rearing up now that the creature’s throat was in biting range. But as she clamped down on its neck, Valor again felt resistance where there shouldn’t have been any. With no bones protecting its throat, she should have been able to tear it open. Instead, the muscle was strangely tough, making her feel as though she were biting a tree as she squeezed her jaws as tightly as she could, trying to inflict a mortal wound. Worse, the coldness of the creature’s body was just as intense as it had been a moment ago, making Valor feel as though she’d just shoved her face beneath the ice of a frozen lake.
But the freezing sensation ceased abruptly as the injured creature’s wild backhand knocked her away. The strike was clumsy and uncoordinated, more of a dismissive swipe than anything else, but it was enough to make her lose her grasp on its throat, stumbling backward.
Even that was enough room for the creature she’d injured to recover, letting out an enraged bellow that seemed to shake the ground itself. Despite the mauling she’d given it, the white-furred monster seemed upset rather than intimidated, its bulging eyes now filled with rage as it advanced on her.
Along with a half-dozen of its companions.
In an instant, Valor found herself in the center of a whirlwind of claws. Supernaturally cold claws, which ripped and tore at her from every direction. The one whose face she’d torn open was clearly intent on repaying her in kind, slashing at her muzzle. Two others went for her flanks, while more circled around behind her, cutting her off from her friends as they sought to bring her down.
Had she still been the half-grown girl she was when she’d gone out on her first hunt, Valor wouldn’t have been able to defend herself against the onslaught. But she wasn’t a hapless child anymore; she had her friends’ magic backing up the training she’d undertaken in how to use her totem, and she put them all to good use now.
Still on her hind legs, Valor pivoted with a grace that no ordinary bear could have achieved, courtesy of Spinner’s spell. It was enough to let her avoid the wild slash from the torn-faced creature, its claws missing her by a fraction of an inch as she spun around, extending her paws to slap away the attacks coming from either side of her. Even that light touch was freezing cold, as though these creatures were composed of ice rather than flesh and blood, but this time the contact was too brief to be painful.
Of course, that left nothing to protect her from the ones that had moved around to attack her from behind. Save only for the other spells that her friends had used on her. They weren’t impenetrable shields, Valor knew; rather, they were more like layers of armor, making it harder for enemies to find purchase when they tried to hit her.
It was that magic which made the first set of claws slide across her back without sinking in, feeling like little more than a cold tickle. But Valor barely had a chance to smirk to herself as another claw latched onto her side, and this time even her friends’ spells weren’t enough to protect her. Snarling as she felt a searing pain flare just above her hip, it was immediately followed by another rush of cold. So was the painful swipe that tore across her shoulders a moment later. And the one that followed it a moment later, running parallel to her spine.
Always a firm believer that the best defense was a good offense, Valor moved to repay her attackers in kind. Throwing herself at the enemy she’d already injured, she discarded any worries about its innate toughness or its supernatural cold. Instead, flung herself bodily at her foe, intent on doing as much damage as she possibly could.
This time her enemy wasn’t taken by surprise, its massive arms catching her before she could knock it to the ground. But the triumph that spread across its torn face lasted only for a moment as it felt her paws wrap around its body and begin to squeeze. Twin groans erupted, as Valor felt the chill of the creature’s body penetrate her bones, even as the hirsute biped’s began to strain of her grasp.
Panicking, the monster shrieked as it tried to extricate itself from the literal bearhug, only to find that – although it towered over her – it couldn’t free itself. A moment later its cry became one of agony, the sound covering up the soft cracking as its bones began to splinter. But its voice was drowned out by Valor’s as she unleashed a scream of her own, the burning in her muscles temporarily masking the spreading cold permeating her body as she heaved and lifted, bringing the monster up off the ground.
With nothing to brace itself against, the creature could do nothing to save itself as Valor put everything she had into one last squeeze, shattering its spine and crushing the life from the thing in a single instant.
Feeling her enemy go limp, Valor dropped the corpse, falling onto all fours as she shivered and panted. One…it had taken almost everything she had to bring down one of those things, at the cost of several deep gashes and a persistent chill that was leaving her feeling dangerously numb. Worse, the six others surrounding her didn’t seem to be intimidated by their companion’s death. If anything, they looked pissed.
But what frightened Valor at that moment wasn’t how badly the odds were stacked against her.
It was the sudden scream she heard from her friends.
Shadow Star’s worried cry caused Woodheart to tense up, her pulse pounding as the black bear that their friend had become disappeared behind a wall of white fur, the shaggy humanoids moving to surround her. But as much as she wanted to run to Valor’s rescue the way Shadow was doing – the masked mare rushing to the transformed mare’s aid, disappearing from sight as she ducked under a wild swing from one of the monsters that had decided that the rest of their party was easier prey than a roaring bear – the druid knew better. Even if she hurried to Valor’s side, close combat wasn’t her specialty; at least, not without inviting an animal spirit to possess her first.
But just because she didn’t have enough time to summon a spirit into herself didn’t mean she couldn’t help.
Forcing herself to remain calm as she continued to chant her spell, Woodheart took slow steps back, trying to put as much distance between herself and the oncoming humanoids as she could. Fortunately, they were sauntering toward them, ugly grins on their hideous faces, clearly thinking that she – along with Mystaria and Spinner, both of whom were alongside her, similarly calling upon their magic – wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight.
In front of her, Littleknight growled, lowering his horn and pointing it toward the brutes in a clear threatening gesture. The sight was enough to set them to hooting, apparently finding the small creature’s bravado hilarious. But the few seconds they wasted laughing at the almiraj cost them, as Mystaria finished her spell.
In an instant, the creature’s gibbering turned to screams of pain and fear as a sphere of flame five feet in diameter appeared out of nowhere.
The flaming globe manifested around the lower body of the leading humanoid, causing him to shriek as he flung himself out of the flames, his fur catching fire easily. Screaming, the creature lurched off to the side, flinging its body to the ground as it hurriedly shoveled snow onto itself in an effort to douse the flames. The other monsters made no move to help their burning companion, instead giving the burning sphere a wide berth as they paused, reevaluating how dangerous their chosen targets were.
“I think these things are yetis!” yelled Mystaria, brow furrowed in concentration as she raised one foreleg and swung it around, causing the fiery sphere to move accordingly, a hiss going up as its flames evaporated the snow instantly. But that was all it was able to burn, the monsters paying careful attention to its movements and dodging out of the way well in advance of its approach. “Use fire magic if you have it! And don’t look them in the eyes! Their gaze is supposed to be so fierce that that it makes you lose your nerve!”
The warning caused Spinner to strum her lute faster, a new verse to the battle hymn she’d been singing immediately spilling from her lips. “Against the yeti horde we stood, their ranks our fire broke! Their evil eyes were useless too, all blinded by the smoke!”
Her words, laced with magic, caused the flaming sphere that Mystaria had created to suddenly emit a series of crackling pops, as though it had rolled over a bundle of firewood. Immediately, thick black fumes began to waft out from it, despite the burning orb having produced no emissions when it had initially appeared. Oily and noxious, the smoke spread around in a wide area, spreading further as Mystaria directed the sphere to roll about in a wide pattern, causing the yetis to begin hacking and choking as they inadvertently inhaled the foul vapors, which rapidly thickened to the point of obscuring everything within range of them.
“I think that bought us some time,” murmured Mystaria. “We need to go help Shadow and Valor, and then fall back and regroup. If we can barricade ourselves-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as two of the creatures hurtled out of the smoggy cloud in a rush. Coughing and gasping, they nevertheless kept their momentum, gazes locked onto Mystaria and Spinner, the two closest targets. Worse, both mares inadvertently made eye contact with the beasts, too surprised to avoid looking at them.
In an instant, Mystaria’s warning was proven true as both mares went rigid with fright, Mystaria’s mouth hanging open in mid-sentence while Spinner’s hooves locked up, her lute falling silent as she stared at the furious juggernaut closing in on her. Barely twenty feet away from them, both yetis gained momentum as they moved, reinvigorated by the sight of the two ponies’ guards having dropped. Clawed hands reared back, ready to slaughter the two…
“Kill the white furs!”
…only to find themselves suddenly being mauled by a flurry of claws and fangs.
Woodheart let out a sigh of relief as the arctic tiger she’d finally managed to finish summoning tore into the yetis, alarmed cries erupting from the pair as they fell back in confusion. Bringing a spirit into the living world was always difficult, and it never lasted very long, but it was a welcome reprieve in the heat of battle. “Are you two alright?”
Shaking off the sudden spike of terror that had gripped them, Mystaria and Spinner both nodded. “I hate to say it, but Mysty was right,” croaked the latter. “None of our spells are going to last much longer. If we don’t retreat now, we’ll be overrun.”
An agonized expression crossed Woodheart’s face at that. “But Valor and Shadow-”
“I’m in contact with Shadow right now,” murmured Mystaria, and Woodheart could tell by the distracted tone in her friend’s voice that she was using the telepathic blessing that her goddess, Luminace, had given her. Although she couldn’t use it very often, this was exactly the sort of situation where it was – sometimes literally – a lifesaver. “I’m telling her to get Valor and get back to the inn.”
Spinner grimaced. “Will they be able to make it on their own? They were surrounded by a bunch of those things!”
“If anyone can fight their way out, it’s those two,” answered Mystaria, glancing back at where the other yetis were still stumbling around in the thick black smoke, trying to find their way out without stumbling into the flaming sphere that was still inside the haze with them. “Come on, we have to go while there’s still time!”
Woodheart hesitated for a moment, but then fell in alongside Spinner as they followed Mystaria, scooping up Littleknight and hugging him close as they ran. As awful as it felt to run away without the rest of their friends with them, she knew that Mystaria was correct. Shadow Star was the single sneakiest pony she knew, and seemed to have a natural affinity for disappearing from sight, despite not being a spellcaster. And Valor was by far the toughest pony she’d ever met, even without turning into a bear.
That last part was enough to make a wry smile cross the druid’s lips, despite the seriousness of their situation. Valor’s ability to assume an animal form so easily was something she’d always been jealous of. Even after learning that it had been granted to her by some sort of minor divinity, she still felt envious of what Valor could do. After all, it was in search of that same power which had driven Woodheart to leave the forest where she’d grown up.
Changing into an animal – not with a spell, but by attuning one’s self to nature so closely as to become an extension of it – was one of the most sacred techniques of the Order of the Old Ways. To be able to “wild shape,” as they called it, was a necessary precondition for advancing beyond the rank of novitiate, since without the deeper connection to nature provided by living as an animal, there was no way to learn the advanced teachings of druidism.
But Woodheart had never, not once in years of trying, been able to change into an animal form.
She still didn’t know why that was. Having grown up in the Order, she’d studied its sacred rites all of her life, and they’d always come easily to her, except for that one. She spoke the sacred language, taught only to those who followed the Old Ways, fluently. She could identify the nutritional and medicinal properties of virtually any plant or mushroom. She was familiar with the behaviors and life cycles of myriad different animals. She could make use of the spellcasting traditions of the Order without any undue difficulty.
And those were just the standard teachings. Even beyond such basic instructions, she was keenly aware of the nature spirits that were always around her, to the point of being able to invite them into her body when she needed their help. That was something that no one else in the Order could do, and it had made her a rising star among her peers.
That had all come to an end when it had been time for them to demonstrate their ability to change into an animal form. One by one, each of her fellow students had showcased their mastery of the technique, becoming gazelles and falcons and boa constrictors and so many other animals. But not her.
After countless failed attempts, Woodheart had been too ashamed of her failures to stay in the Order any longer. With no better ideas than to try and find answers by experiencing a greater diversity of nature, she’d petitioned the hierophant who presided over their circle – the local branch of the Order – to allow her to leave the forest. Although reluctant to let her go, the hierophant had eventually agreed, not sure what else she could try to overcome whatever deficiency was holding her back. After bidding farewell to the only family she’d ever known, she’d set out, hoping that learning more about the world would teach her about herself.
It was fortunate that she’d found such good friends to help her with that.
Of course, when she’d left the forest, she hadn’t expected that she’d end up going on quite so many dangerous adventures. But so far, she and her friends had always managed to figure out a way to turn unexpected disasters into good fortune. Or at least, into less-serious disasters. And with any luck, this would end up being another-
Littleknight’s nose suddenly twitched, and he meeped in alarm. But before Woodheart could ask him what was wrong, a raspy voice cut through the air.
“Thinking I’ve seen enough.”
The words seemed to come from nowhere, sounding as though the speaker was barely a stone’s throw away despite no one being close to them. The tone was grating, sounding like a springtime warbler was trying to sing while someone wrung its neck, and the pitch was only barely recognizable as female. The lilt that the voice held suggested amusement, and through her surprise, Woodheart felt a chill fall over her that had nothing to do with the cold.
And then the street they’d been running down was blocked off by a wall of ice appearing right in front of them.
The trio skidded to a halt, a chorus of gasps and yells and curses spilling from their lips. Mystaria was the first one to get herself under control, whipping her head back and forth. “We’re trapped!”
Looking around, Woodheart could see that she was right. The wall blocked off the entire street ahead of them, folding around in a semicircle so that they couldn’t run around it either; the only way back was the way they’d come, with the cloud of smoke barely thirty feet behind them. And while the ice wall was only ten feet tall, that was more than any of them could have hoped to scale; the sheer surface of the barrier made it clear that any attempt to climb it was doomed from the outset.
“Woodheart!” blurted Spinner suddenly. “Your tiger! Call it back and tell it to bust through the wall!”
“It’s a tiger, not a rhino!” shot back the druid, trying not to panic. “It doesn’t have the strength to ram through something like this!”
“Maybe we can melt a hole through it,” ventured Mystaria, breathing faster as she tried to think up a plan. “If we hold our breath long enough, I can bring the globe of fire over here and have it make a path through. But the real problem is who put this here!”
“I heard a voice,” ventured Woodheart, looking around warily. “A female one, close by, just before this appeared. And Littleknight smelled something too.”
“You think there’s someone invisible following us?” Spinner’s head whipped around, looking at the untouched snow all around them. “If there is, they didn’t leave any tracks.”
“I’m not risking it,” answered Mystaria immediately. Rearing upright, she pointed one hoof toward the still-smoking flaming sphere, beckoning it closer, even as her other began to fish through her saddlebag. “I’ll use a scroll of ‘see invisibility’ and-”
“Don’t be bothering,” came the hideous voice again, this time with a malicious cackle. “Plenty happy to show myself.”
Then they were hit by a wave of cold so frigid that the three of them could do nothing but scream in pain.
The sweeping wave of cold drove the air from Spinner’s lungs.
Or maybe it was her scream of pain that left her breathless, the frigid blast so agonizing that it might as well have been fire. She tried to stumble backward, desperately throwing a foreleg up to cover her face, only to stumble when her legs refused to listen to her. Somehow managing to crack her eyes open despite the gelid gale, she looked down…and it took her a moment to realize that, except for the foreleg she’d put in front of her face, the rest of her limbs were all quickly becoming encased in ice, anchoring her to the ground.
The sight was enough to send a surge of panic through her, worse than when she’d caught sight of the yetis’ eyes a few moments ago. Trying not to panic as she realized that being pinned in place now – when the remainder of the yeti horde was likely only a few seconds away from plunging through the smokescreen she and Mystaria had made – was a death sentence, she quickly turned her head, looking for Mystaria and Woodheart.
If if they were both trapped like she was, freeing herself and them before they were overrun would be almost impossible.
“You guys!” she yelled, trying to tug her legs free. “Are you alri-”
The words died in her throat, her eyes going wide as she saw what had happened to Woodheart.
Rather than curling up or backing away from the sudden burst of cold, the druid had reared up on her back legs, maximizing her exposure to the frigid attack. Although she’d pivoted in place, turning her back to the onslaught, she’d still suffered greatly for her actions, with ice having spread from her rearmost hooves all the way up to the back of her neck. The sight was enough to make Spinner’s mouth go dry. Why did she do that?!
But the question had barely passed through the bard’s mind when she saw the answer.
“Meep meep!” cried Littleknight mournfully, still nestled protectively in Woodheart’s forelegs, having been shielded from the worst of the cold by the mare’s body. “MEEP!”
“G-go,” moaned the druid, looking like she was barely able to stay conscious as she tried to let Littleknight down, her lips already blue as the almiraj fought to stay with her. “Run…away…”
“Woodheart!” Mystaria’s voice drew Spinner’s attention next, and thankfully the other mare seemed to be mostly alright, free of the clinging ice despite the frost coating most of her body. Biting her lip, Mystaria looked between her two friends, temporarily caught in a moment of indecision before one hoof went up to clutch at her holy symbol. “Just hang on! I’m going to heal both of you right now!”
“Gonna spoil my preserves?” came a familiar cackle, drawing Mystaria and Spinner’s gazes toward it. “Shouldn’t unfreeze meat ‘til you’re ready to cook it.”
Then the voice’s owner stepped forward.
The sunrods that Valor had tied around their hooves barely made enough light to reach the thing’s position, despite it being less than a stone’s throw away, and the falling snow obscured its features even more. But there was still enough illumination for Spinner to get a look at who had just blasted them with such intense cold, their invisibility broken after having launched an attack.
During her many travels throughout Everglow, Spinner had seen her fair share of humanoid races. Humans, elves, goblins, dwarves, kobolds, gnomes, orcs, halflings; there were as many different bipeds as there were tribes of ponies. And while they didn’t have quite as broad an array of shapes and colors as their equine counterparts, the humanoids made up for it with their individual characteristics.
And this particular humanoid had quite the distinguishing characteristic indeed.
She was hideous!
Dressed only in a shapeless grey hooded robe with a threadbare shift underneath, her skin was wrinkled and covered with pockmarks, which stood out against the warts and boils that dotted her saggy flesh. The blemishes looked all the more awful for the frostbite that covered every visible part of her body, shading it with a sickly-looking blue tint. Her fingernails were black with filth, and looked as though they hadn’t been cut in months, making her bare hands appear reminiscent of claws.
Worst of all was her face. A tangled mass of wispy white hair was swept back from her head, revealing a leering countenance with a hooked nose, stained and misshapen teeth, cleft chin, and rheumy eyes. Eyes that slid over each mare in turn as a thin tongue swept over cracked lips, causing Spinner to shiver in revulsion.
“Oh no,” breathed Mystaria, staring at the old woman in horror. “A winter hag.”
The comment caused the crone’s hideous smile to turn into a sneer. “Not nice to be calling me names,” she spat, pointing the staff she held – a thin pillar of black ice as tall as she was – at Mystaria. “Thinking I’ll eat you first once we’re back.”
“Wait! Wait a second!” Rearing up on her back legs as she held a hoof out a gesture of supplication, Mystaria gave the old woman an earnest look. “We can come to an arrangement! If food is all you want, there are easier ways to get it!”
Her friend’s pleading made Spinner’s eyes widen in disbelief. What was Mystaria doing?! It was one thing to try and broker peace with some pony with a bad attitude; it was another thing entirely to do so with some sort of monster! Is she crazy?! Hags aren’t just old and ugly humanoids! They’re warped by their own magic from birth! You can’t reason with them!
The hag in question seemed to agree, cackling again. “Thinking the current arrangement’s good enough. Brothers and I are hungry, and you’re here. Works out nice.”
The reference to “brothers” made Spinner frown. That…wasn’t right. Hags were uniformly female by nature; they didn’t have brothers. And that’s the least important thing right now! We’ve got to do something before Woodsy’s tiger and my smokescreen run…huh? Pausing as she noticed something out of the corner of her eye, Spinner felt her anxiety suddenly slow. Was that smoke cloud so close before?
“I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to be like this!” continued Mystaria, drawing Spinner’s attention back to herself. “There’s already been at least one death on your side. Surely you don’t want to risk your, er, brothers’ lives just to eat, right?”
The words were passionate and heartfelt, but this time Spinner noticed that Mystaria’s other hoof – the one not held out in a pleading gesture – was making small beckoning motions. Out of her peripheral vision, she could see the edge of the smoke cloud, still emanating the noxious fumes from the sphere of flames Mystaria had conjured, grow slightly closer. It was enough to make the bard fight down a smile. Mysty, if we get out of this alive, I swear I won’t make fun of your peacenik habits ever again. Or until the next time it’s funny. Now if I can just figure out a way to break the ice on my legs without drawing attention to myself!
Thankfully, the hag didn’t seem to notice, instead holding her icy staff of her as though it were a quarterstaff as she advanced toward her and Woodheart threateningly, leaving no tracks behind her as she moved. “Don’t like to play with my food,” she sneered. “Rather finish preparing my meal.”
Apparently realizing that the time for subtlety was over, Mystaria abandoned all pretense of diplomacy. “Then eat THIS!” she yelled, waving her other hoof in a sweeping motion.
The smoke cloud rushed forward immediately, enveloping them all as the ball of fire bounded toward the hag. Holding her breath and squeezing her eyes shut, Spinner didn’t hesitate, grabbing the neck of her lute in her teeth and swung it down heavily. Sorry I have to do this again, Mom, but this is the reason you gave me my inheritance early, right?
With a resounding crack, the body of her lute struck the ice covering her body, and it was with immense satisfaction – and some wincing at the bruising she’d just dealt to herself – that Spinner felt the frozen shackles shatter. That wasn’t surprising of course, considering that her mother’s lute was battle-hardened, its wooden finish actually a thin veneer applied over its steel construction, making it an effective bludgeon when necessary. Even so, she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of concern, reminding herself to look the instrument over later; she hated the thought of damaging her mother’s most prized possession, even though she knew that sometimes using it like this was necessary.
And this is definitely one of those times, she reassured herself as she hurried toward where Mystaria and Woodheart were. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get out of here before Granny Evil or whatever her name is follows-
Her thought was cut off as the smoke cleared abruptly. Momentarily stupefied, Spinner glanced back at where the hag was…and saw her fanning herself with one hand, as though the choking vapors had bothered her no more than an errant whiff of flatulence. More concerning was the trail of melted snow that abruptly terminating right next to her, as though the flaming sphere had suddenly winked out of existence…which is exactly what had happened, Spinner realized grimly.
“Spell resistance,” cursed Mystaria softly.
“Please tell me you have another way to melt a hole in that ice wall,” muttered Spinner, moving to stand alongside Mystaria.
“I do, but I’m not sure how effective it’ll be,” muttered Mystaria, glancing back down the street. “Or how much time we have to use it.”
Sparing a brief glance in the same direction, Spinner saw what she meant. Woodheart’s tiger was now on the defensive, the great cat being pushed back by a trio of yetis, with more moving to join the fight now that the smoke cloud wasn’t obscuring their vision any longer. Worse, there was still no sign of Valor and Shadow, though Spinner thought she could see a few more yetis lying in the snow further back-
“No time for looking away!” snapped the hag, rushing forward suddenly.
Her speed was surprising for someone so old, but it wasn’t more than Spinner could handle, bringing her lute up to block as the crone swung her staff of black ice around. Even so, she wasn’t prepared for how much power was behind the blow, her knees almost buckling as she caught the end of the hag’s staff with her instrument. “Hurry up with that exit, Mysty!”
For a moment, Mystaria looked torn, but then nodded, running toward the middle of the wall as she chanted, gesturing quickly before pointing a hoof at the barrier. Immediately, a cone of flames shot outward from her hoof, sending a cloud of steam up as they impacted the frozen obstruction.
“No you don’t!” screeched the hag, withdrawing her staff and moving toward Mystaria.
But she hadn’t taken more than a single step before a loud meep cut her off.
Jumping down from Woodheart’s half-frozen form, Littleknight shrieked in anger as he charged toward the hag, head lowered as he pointed his horn at her. Before the old woman had a chance to react, he slipped past her guard and leaped up, intent on skewering the one who’d hurt his mistress.
The bony protrusion – its pearlescent appearance marking it as the most magical part of the magical creature, Spinner knew – struck home, impacting the crone’s midsection…and bounced off, sending the almiraj tumbling as it fell back toward the snow.
It was enough to leave Spinner slack-jawed. Despite his cuddly appearance, every member of their group knew that being gored by Littleknight was no joke. She’d seen his horn pierce through the rocky skin of a gargoyle without slowing down, a creature whom even Valor had struggled to injure. That the winter hag was strong and quick had been surprising, but for her to be so tough as to shrug off Littleknight’s attempt to gore her… This is a whole new level of bad.
She was proven right as the hag snickered, amused by the almiraj’s attack. “Skipping the appetizer course,” she chuckled, bringing her staff around in a quick motion. The end of it struck the side of Littleknight’s head, sending him airborne to crash down several feet away, laying very still as the snow around him began to turn red.
The hag was moving before Littleknight had hit the ground, with Spinner circling around to try and cut her off, but before either had a chance to move, a voice interrupted them.
“How could you…?”
“Hm?” The hag glanced up, looking at the half-frozen pony who had spoken.
“How could you?!”
“Woodheart!” blurted Spinner, hearing several sharp cracks fill the air.
The druid didn’t seem to hear her, tearing herself free from the ice that had kept her immobile. Her legs were bright red with frostbite, her back was missing patches of fur, her tail was frayed and tattered, and her eyes were blazing with rage.
“HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO LITTLEKNIGHT?!”
Woodheart’s scream was immediately followed by her chanting a spell, throwing herself at the crone – whose grotesque face was twisted in a look of surprise – even as rattled off her incantation, one that Spinner knew would conjure deadly poison inside the bloodstream of the next person the druid touched. Yes! Go Woodsy!
Matching the druid’s pace, Spinner rushed around to strike at the hag’s unprotected back, forcing the crone to spare her a quick glance as she easily sidestepped the wide swing of Spinner’s lute. But that half-second distraction cost her, as Woodheart rushed forward, jerking her head to the side to avoid being struck between the eyes by the butt of the hag’s staff, and punched her hoof against the old woman’s face.
Please work! chanted Spinner silently. Please get through her spell resistance! Woodheart would know if the attack worked or not, but unless she gave them a sign, there’d be no external sign of its effects until the hag either began convulsing or shrugged it off.
But apparently it wasn’t going to be the latter, as Woodheart gave the hag a look of hateful satisfaction. “That’s what you get for hurting my familiar,” she spat. “Now, that poison will kill you from the insi-, NNGH!”
Her hateful recrimination was cut off as the crone brought her staff back around, this time smacking the other end of it against the druid’s jaw, nearly breaking it. “Poison’s no trouble,” noted the hag calmly, her grating voice filled with bemusement. “But if you’re bothered, you and bunny there can be cooked together.”
“Woodheart!” Spinner felt only marginally reassured when the druid groaned in response to her yell, rolling over with great difficulty. Stepping back, Spinner glanced over her shoulder, hoping against hope that Mystaria had melted a hole through the wall.
But it wasn’t to be. Although there was a wide depression in the middle of the frozen barrier now, it hadn’t gone deep enough to form a full breach. Mystaria herself was hurriedly pulling a scroll out of her saddlebag, and Spinner found herself hoping that it would get the job done as she turned back toward the hag. Just gotta buy us a little more time, she tried to reassure herself, despite having no idea how they’d be able to get away if they needed to carry Woodheart and Littleknight on their backs, particularly given that they had yet to inflict so much as a scratch on the winter hag.
So let’s try a different strategy, she decided as she brought her lute around, strumming it as she sang a short but bawdy little ditty about the many important uses of lubrication. I may not be able to slow her down, but if this works it’ll at least make it harder for her to go on the attack.
A moment later her spell was complete, and the hag’s staff of black ice was immediately covered in a layer of extremely slippery grease.
…which froze an instant later, the beldame cackling at the futility of Spinner’s efforts. It was enough to make the bard’s stomach clench into knots as she took a step back, lute at the ready. Okay, magic doesn’t work. Physical damage doesn’t work. Poison doesn’t work. So what does that leave?
She was still wondering that when the hag took a step forward, ready to go through her to get to Mystaria…only to be flattened as a bear fell out of the sky and landed on top of her.
For a moment, Spinner couldn’t react, just staring at the incongruous sight. I suppose that would do it.
“Don’t just stand there like an idiot,” came a familiar voice in her ear. “Grab Woodheart and let’s go!”
“Shadow!” blurted Spinner, belatedly going over to the downed druid even as the bear – Valor – swiped her claws at the witch underneath her. “How did-, what-, you two…”
“I never thought I’d see the day when you ran out of words,” snickered the masked mare, rushing over to scoop up Littleknight. But the humor in her voice fell away an instant later. “We need to get moving. Those shaggy things we left behind will catch up any second now, and I don’t think Woodheart’s tiger will last much longer.”
Spinner didn’t even bother looking back, more interested in getting out of there while they still could. Even so, she couldn’t help the questions spilling from her tongue, her storyteller’s instinct needing to know what had led to the dramatic save. “But how did the two of you-”
“I used a scroll with a ‘jump’ spell on Valor,” explained Shadow. “That’s how she bypassed the rest of those monsters: she just jumped from roof to roof.”
Despite herself, Spinner glanced around. Sure enough, several roofs on nearby houses had large impressions left on the snow covering their roofs. “I’m amazed she didn’t fall through-, wait a second, since when did you start carrying spell scrolls?”
“I don’t,” answered Shadow Star easily. “I just borrowed some of Mystaria’s. Like that scroll of that lets you throw your voice. That’s how I was able to hide under one of those corpses while they were all watching the bouncing bear and make it sound like I was running in the opposite direction when they looked to see where I’d gone, confusing those stupid things long enough for me to get away.”
Although they were still in incredible danger, Spinner couldn’t help but snicker as she hefted Woodheart onto her back. “You know Mysty’s going to lecture you for taking her stuff later, right?”
“If she can get us out of here alive, then she can anoint me as a nun of Luminace alongside her,” shot back Shadow without missing a beat.
As if she heard them, that was when Mystaria finished reading the scroll she’d withdrawn, launching a spray of acid at the depression she’d made in the wall of ice. A loud hiss rang out, and a moment later the depression grew deeper, the ice dissolving until finally the other side was visible. The sight was enough to make Spinner cheer. “YES!”
“Valor!” called back Shadow. “Let’s go!”
The black bear roared in reply, but didn’t get a chance to move before it was sent stumbling, knocked away by the hag, who stood up with a snarl. “OFF!”
“C’mon!” yelled Mystaria, waiting in front of the opening she’d created, unwilling to leave without the rest of her friends. “Hurry!”
For a moment Spinner was worried that the hag would chase them down before they got away – even after they made it past the wall of ice, it wasn’t like there was anything preventing her from chasing them, and while Woodheart’s tiger was still putting up a fight, it would go back to whatever spirit world she’d summoned it from in less than a minute – but another glance back showed that the ugly creature wasn’t moving. Instead, she was staring at a long laceration in her arm, courtesy of Valor’s claws…a shallow one, and which (rather oddly) wasn’t bleeding, but which seemed to command the whole of the hag’s attention.
“Cut!” she shrieked, sounding incensed. “Wounded! Injured!”
Clenching her fists around her staff so tightly that she looked like she was about to snap it, her voice rose in anger. “Ruining all the work I did! UNFORGIVEABLE!!!”
The last word accompanied another blast of supernatural cold, and this time it was enough to knock Spinner completely off her hooves. But this time she didn’t manage to scream. She couldn’t. The air was too cold for her lungs to work properly. Her legs were too numb to catch her as she touched down a second later, falling into the snow. It was with shaky hooves that she somehow managed to sit up, scarcely believing that she was still alive as she reached up to wipe away the snow that was obscuring her vision.
Only to realize that there was no snow on her face…and yet she still couldn’t see anything.
“Sh-Shadow?” Spinner called, hearing the hysterical note in her voice as she felt the sunrod still curled around her foreleg, despite her vision still being completely black. “Shadow, where are you?! I can’t see anything!”
“I can’t either,” came Shadow’s voice from somewhere to her right. “Mystaria?”
“My eyes!” came her friend’s pained moan from behind her. “My eyes!”
Okay, I’m now officially panicking! decided Spinner as she tried to get to her hooves. We can’t escape like this! We can’t-
“Planning on going back to cook you proper,” came the hag’s voice, sounding horribly close. “But appetite’s all worked up now. Thinking I’ll eat a leg or two before going-, hm? Another one? Who’re you?”
Spinner’s breath caught in her throat at the sudden change in the hag’s tone. Who was she talking to?
A moment later her question was answered.
“I’m the pony who’s going to kill you,” answered the voice of Lex.
“I think it’s that guy from the inn, with the skull mask!”
“Woodheart! Valor! Say something if you’re okay!”
Lex watched with forced dispassion as the downed mares called out to each other, unable to take in their surroundings visually. That they were blind wasn’t surprising; from what he’d observed, the blast of supernatural cold that disgusting humanoid had unleashed had been so frigid that it had frozen the water in their eyes.
What concerned him more were the two who hadn’t answered. Woodheart – he’d heard the five of them call each other by name often enough over the last several minutes that he could match their names to their faces now – was unresponsive, though the glowing rod curled around her hoof provided sufficient light to show that she was still breathing. But given how pale she looked, that was the best that could be said for her.
Valor, however, was in far worse condition. Her ursine transformation had ended only a few seconds prior, and her insensate form was once again that of an earth pony, albeit one that was completely drenched in blood from head to hoof. But while Lex was sure that some of that was the blood of those yetis she’d been fighting – he’d seen her down three of them before she’d been forced to retreat – he was certain that the majority of it was her own. That much was evident from how the deep laceration she’d taken, right where her left shoulder met her neck, was pulsing blood in rhythmic spurts.
Even if hadn’t read each and every one of the medical textbooks that House Call had loaned him during his ill-fated trip to Las Pegasus, Lex knew that a ruptured artery was fatal if not treated immediately.
Which meant that the time for watching the battle from concealment was over.
Striding purposefully toward Valor’s fallen form, Lex kept one eye on the old crone that was standing amidst the defeated ponies, ready to react if she tried to prevent him from reaching the earth mare before she bled out.
But rather than attacking, the disgusting biped seemed content to leer at him. “Kill me, it says!” she hooted. “Funny! Looking forward to seeing you try.” She paused for a moment to look him over, a wicked giggle escaping her chapped lips. “And looking forward to peeling your clothes off. Gonna have lots of fun with you before dinnertime.”
The lewd comment earned a sneer of revulsion from Lex. “In a few moments, you’re not going to think I’m much fun at all,” he spat, reaching Valor’s side, barely a dozen feet away from the hag. “And then you’ll never think anything ever again.”
He didn’t wait for a reply before he began casting the weak healing spell that was one of the few divine spells the Night Mare had given him, chanting the requisite liturgy even as he prepared for the crone to try and interrupt him.
But to his mild surprise, she made no move to do so. Instead, she barked a laugh as she circled around him, moving opposite to the wall of ice that she’d conjured. It was only when she called out in the language of the yetis that Lex realized why she wasn’t going on the attack: because she didn’t have to. She still had fifteen of her so-called brothers to do it for her, the shaggy beasts lumbering forward now that their last distraction – the white tiger that Woodheart had summoned – had been dealt with, the animal having winked out of existence a few moments prior.
Placing a hoof on Valor’s side as he discharged his healing spell into her, Lex regarded the earth mare long enough to confirm that the healing spell had worked, watching as the worst of her wounds closed. She was still in dire need of medical attention, but for the moment her life was no longer in danger.
Which meant that he could turn the bulk of his attention to the slaughter that was about to happen.
“L-Lex,” came a frantic voice from behind him, which he belatedly recognized as belonging to Spinner. “Can you see Valor and Woodheart?! Are they still alive?!”
“If they are, please get them out of here!” begged Mystaria. “And the rest of my friends too! I swear I’ll do whatever you ask if you save them!”
“Damn it, Mysty, that’s probably what this guy wants!” snarled Shadow Star, rubbing at her eyes and squinting at the glowing band around her hoof. “He was the one who told us these things were coming, remember?! That means he deliberately hung back while we were getting our asses kicked!”
“Something which wouldn’t have happened if you had agreed to follow my orders instead of stupidly charging out here without a plan,” shot back Lex, not taking his eyes off of the horde in front of him. They were still moving into position, and it didn’t escape his notice that the old woman was directing them to spread out rather than cluster together. It was, he knew, as much to cover any available paths of retreat as it was to make sure they weren’t close enough to all be hit in case he used any area-affecting attack magic.
“Your recalcitrance, along with your inadequate preparations and lack of information prior to engaging in battle, is to blame for the sorry state you’re in now,” he continued, the rebuke coming easily as he continued to analyze the situation. “Using your recklessness to determine what these creatures are capable of was the best tactic available to me under the circumstances.”
Shadow Star started to say something else, but was cut off by Mystaria. “Woodheart and Valor-”
“Are still alive,” interrupted Lex. “I staunched the latter’s bleeding, and the former is unconscious but still breathing.” A soft meeping drew his glance to the side, where the horned rabbit had limped over to Woodheart, nudging her in a futile effort to wake her up.
That seemed to calm the others, three sighs airing almost simultaneously. “Thank you,” breathed Mystaria.
Lex didn’t bother answering, more concerned with the unfolding situation than with their gratitude. Specifically on how there was still one possible fallback point: the hole in the ice wall behind him. But the crone was apparently unconcerned about that. Which means, he decided, that she thinks I won’t use it, or that I won’t have a chance to. Either option was plausible; he’d made no effort to hide that he was coming out here to save the other ponies, and with two of them down and the other three unable to see, there was no way they’d be able to fall back with any appreciable speed. Something which won’t matter if she can conjure another wall anyway.
Of course, two could play that game. He had more than sufficient stamina to create a wall of black crystals between himself and those monsters. But the relatively open layout of the village meant that they’d have little trouble circumventing it if they were willing to circle around the block. And that was presuming that their leader didn’t have sufficient magic to simply dispel it or force her way through the way Starlight Glimmer had.
Not that Lex had any intention of adopting such a defensive strategy to begin with.
“Giving you one more chance,” called the hag, cackling. “Come along without fighting, and you won’t go into the stew pot as long as you keep me happy. Otherwise” – she threw her arms wide then, indicating the yetis behind her – “their strength. My magic. All at once. More than you can beat by yourself.”
Lex answered her taunting with a dark laugh of his own. “What makes you think I’m by myself?”
He had just enough time to appreciate the confused look on the hag’s face before he waved his left foreleg in her direction. Go, Solvei.
And then the winter wolf – already having grown to gigantic proportions and surrounded herself in black crystal armor – appeared directly in front of the assembled yetis in mid-leap, plunging into them in a whirlwind of devastation.
Monitoring the flow of the fighting hadn’t been hard. One of the magic items he’d gained from the winter wolves had been a steel rod which detected animosity held for the wielder. While Lex had been concerned that it wouldn’t work if the creatures in question didn’t know who the rod’s user was specifically, that hadn’t been the case. Either because these creatures had come here with murder on their minds, or because they held hostility toward ponies in general or this village in particular, they’d registered to the item’s detection capabilities.
That had turned out to be a potent boon indeed. Thermal Draft had been able to perch above the battlefield on a cloud – easily plucked from the mass of them which were blotting out the sky – and use the rod virtually undetected, taking note of the numbers and position of the monsters invading the village. After that, it was a simple matter for her to use the whisper-spell she’d cast earlier to report her findings back to Lex, along with whatever she’d glimpsed on the few instances when she’d disobeyed his orders and had peeked over the cloud’s edge. Thanks to her, he’d been able to realize that the creature leading the invasion was present at all, hiding under an invisibility spell and whatever it was that allowed the hag to avoid leading tracks in the snow.
That had allowed him to use his circlet to examine the magic auras surrounding her without being detected himself. Unfortunately, that had been largely a wasted effort; there had been some sort of powerful illusion aura on her that had overshadowed almost everything else. Presumably that had been the invisibility spell, along with whatever was keeping her from leaving footprints, but there had been no way to be certain without feeding additional energy into the circlet, and Lex hadn’t wanted to potentially injure himself before going into a fight.
More importantly, Thermal Draft’s monitoring the situation meant that he was free to interrogate Solvei as to what else she knew about their bond that he didn’t.
The fact that she’d known that the two of them could borrow each other’s senses had come as a shock to Lex. Not only was it another uncomfortable expression of how closely the two of them were joined now, it was also an ability that had completely escaped his detection, despite several days of testing – albeit reluctantly – what the practical effects their connection had.
In hindsight, that reluctance had an oversight on his part, since he’d cataloged only the most obvious effects before moving on to what he’d considered to be more pressing issues. As such, he’d simply had Solvei confirm what he’d already known, rather than asking her if she was aware of anything that he wasn’t. It was a mistake that Lex had rectified a few minutes prior, ordering her to tell him everything she was aware of regarding ways that their bond could be exercised, leaving nothing out.
To his relief, other than being able to share their senses, everything she’d told him had been what he’d already known…with a single exception.
Apparently, he had the power to summon Solvei to him whenever he wanted.
It didn’t work in reverse; he couldn’t travel to her position. Nor could she will herself to appear by his side as she pleased; he had to be the one to bring her to him. A similar restriction applied to bringing passengers with her; only Solvei, and a modest amount of nonliving matter directly on her person, could be summoned that way.
But distance was no factor. Solvei could have been anywhere, anywhere at all, and with a thought he could teleport her to him. Nor did it require him to use divine authority; he could call her as often as he wanted, with no drain on the power the Night Mare had given him. And he could place Solvei exactly where he wanted her, so long as it was within roughly thirty feet or so of his own position.
He didn’t even require her consent. If he wanted her to be there with him, she would be, regardless of her wishes. Of course, the thought of resisting his summons hadn’t even occurred to her anyway. He’d registered her surprise when he’d asked about that, saying “Why would I not want to come when you called me, Master? I’m your Solvei, and your Solvei will always be with you.”
Despite how uncomfortable he was with his connection to the winter wolf, he’d found that oddly reassuring.
Then again, watching as the yetis howled as Solvei began to tear the life out of them, her jaws easily shredding their flesh even as their claws skittered uselessly against her armor, that sense of reassurance somehow didn’t seem quite as odd as it had before.
With a shriek, the winter hag rushed at Lex, bringing her black ice staff toward his head in a heavy downward swing.
Rather than retreat from the sudden offensive, Lex moved to receive it, rearing upright as he crossed his forelegs over his head, catching the end of her staff between them. Until recently, he never would have tried to stand up to physical assault so directly if he had any other options available; now, however, he was in possession of magic items that increased his combat prowess, meaning that it was no longer necessary to dip into his finite reserves of magic in response to any potential threat.
Even so, blocking the hag’s attack was more difficult than he’d expected, his knees almost buckling under the force of the blow. Although he’d known that she was stronger and faster than she looked, having witnessed her fight with those five mares, both the speed and the power that she possessed were far in excess of what her wrinkled appearance suggested. Worse, the cold radiating from her staff was intense; almost as soon as it touched his forelegs, he could feel them starting to go numb.
But that’s easy enough to solve, Lex knew, before taking a half-step to his right and pivoting, letting his left foreleg fall away. The result was that the force the hag had been exerting on her staff was now thrown off-center, causing her to lurch to his left, leaving her open. Lex didn’t hesitate to capitalize on the opportunity, turning at the waist and burying his hoof under her ribs.
The hag didn’t so much as grunt, let alone double over, but he hadn’t expected her to. If she could get away with being leaped on and subsequently mauled by a bear with nothing more than a scratch along one arm, then even with his enhanced fighting skills, it was unlikely that he’d be able to wound her. At least, not in terms of simply bludgeoning her; but thanks to his mask, he had more options than that.
Just like when he’d fought Valor a few minutes ago, simple toughness wouldn’t protect the hag from direct damage to her vitality.
Except, when she straightened up a moment later, the hag didn’t seem to be injured in the slightest, snickering as she firmed up her stance. “That supposed to hurt?”
Ignoring the taunt, Lex moved in, certain that she was simply feigning not being hurt. While the power in his mask let him bleed off an enemy’s life force directly, it only did so a little at a time. Releasing it all at once required him to wear it for an hour, and since he’d only donned it a few minutes ago, that wasn’t an option available to him right now.
But it doesn’t matter, he decided as his next punch was intercepted by the hag’s staff. Time is on my side.
The loud howl that Solvei gave a moment later proved him right, causing him and the hag both to glance at where the winter wolf was battling the yetis.
Or rather, where she was slaughtering them.
Despite being heavily outnumbered, Solvei was tearing through her opponents with ease, her every attack followed by screams of pain and spurts of blood from the assembled throng. Even as Lex watched, her jaws closed around one yeti’s arm, and a jerk of her head tore the creature’s limb off completely, a wailing screech coming from the creature as its white fur – along with that of the yetis closest to it – was immediately dyed red. She didn’t stop there, spitting the severed limb out as she turned to catch the leg of another creature in her teeth, whipping her head back and forth as she shook the unfortunate yeti like a rag doll, slamming it into its brethren with wild abandon.
But to Lex’s consternation, the yetis didn’t seem to be frightened by the monstrosity in their midst. If anything, now that they’d recovered from their initial shock, they seemed almost incensed, swarming around the winter wolf from all sides, claws raking over her crystal-clad form as they tried to overbear the wolf.
Like a swarm of ants try to bring down a black-shelled beetle, the yetis didn’t stop at simply clawing at her, grabbing onto whatever parts of her they could as they yanked, pulled, and twisted. A half-dozen threw themselves as her back legs, anchoring them in place as they scratched and chewed at her armor. One hung from her tail, arms quivering in exertion as though trying to rip the limb off of her. Two more had managed to climb onto her back, raining blows onto her from above as they sought to find a gap in her armor. And all around her more swarmed, fighting to get closer to the behemoth that had slain their fellows.
None of which seemed to bother Solvei in the slightest.
Through their mental link, Lex registered the winter wolf’s disposition as vacillating between irritation and disgust. The latter took precedence a moment later as she craned her head back to catch one of the yetis on her back in her jaws, the crunch of snapping ribs audible over the din as she tossed the thing away a moment later. Disgusting! came her voice in Lex’s mind a moment later. These things’ fur completely ruins their flavor!
Satisfied that she had things under control, Lex turned his attention back to his own fight, just in time to duck under another heavy swing of the hag’s ice staff. How they taste doesn’t matter. Just make sure to kill every last one of those creatures.
Solvei’s mental squeal came over their connection then, as Lex registered embarrassment coming from her. I’m sorry, Master! I didn’t mean to say, er…to think that out loud. Her mental tone quickly changed, trying to sound more professional even though her abashed state remained the same. Would you like me to dispose of them in any particular fashion, or is it more important that I eliminate them as quickly as possible?
Lex didn’t answer immediately, taking a heavy hit across his flank as the winter hag pressed her attack, presumably having realized that she needed to win before her yetis were all killed, otherwise she’d be overwhelmed in short order. Falling back as the impact was accompanied by a painful chill, Lex retreated just long enough to firm up his defense, moving back in. This time he was ready for the heavy sweep of the hag’s staff, catching it on one foreleg before lunging in to land a punch directly on her chin. Just kill them, Solvei!
Yes, Master!
Ignoring the winter wolf’s affirmative, Lex fell back onto all fours, observing the winter witch as she stumbled back. Despite his having scored another successful hit on her, there was no evidence that he’d actually damaged the foul humanoid. Her lip wasn’t split, her teeth were all still intact, nor was there even a bruise forming. It was enough to make Lex frown; even if he wasn’t physically injuring her, the negative energy in his mask should have had some sort of outward manifestation. So why wasn’t she hurt?
The hag didn’t seem inclined to give him any clues, straightening up as her eyes slid from him over to Solvei again. “Losing more than expected,” she murmured. “Mother won’t be happy.” Her eyes slid back to Lex, and another ugly grin crossed her lips. “But might not care if I bring that creature back with me.”
Lex registered a twinge of magic coming from the old crone then, realizing that whatever spell she was using was one that didn’t require her to gesture or chant. Realizing that she was aiming whatever she was doing at Solvei, he immediately launched a counterattack of his own. Rather than bothering with another ineffectual punch, he opted instead to use his magic, making the requisite gesticulations as he rattled off the incantation as fast as he could.
But there was no way that a spell which had so many activation requirements could outpace one which could be utilized with a thought, and the winter hag’s spell hit Solvei before his own was even halfway complete.
Across their connection, Lex registered Solvei’s momentary surprise as the dark magic he’d somehow given her as part of their bond – the same dark magic he’d gained ever since he’d grafted King Sombra’s horn onto his head – activated of its own accord, reaching out to crush the winter hag’s spell before it could take root in Solvei’s thoughts. A mental attack, realized Lex a moment later, not letting the sudden comprehension disrupt his own casting. She was trying to take over Solvei’s mind.
The thought would have been laughable if it hadn’t suddenly sent a surge of possessiveness through him. While Solvei wasn’t able to utilize the dark magic she possessed nearly as adroitly as he could – she couldn’t change into a shadow with it, nor enhance her senses – her proficiency with the power she’d gained wasn’t limited to simply forming black crystals. So long as her admittedly modest reserve of dark magic held out, it also served to protect her mind from any external influences.
Now that she belonged to him, only Lex could issue commands to Solvei.
And the thought that this gruesome monster had even dared to try was an affront that he would not forgive.
Snarling the final syllables of his spell, Lex threw a hoof out, pointing it at the hag. Immediately, flames sprung up around her, the magical fire punching through the crone’s spell resistance as it consumed her body, giving Lex the satisfaction of watching the beldame turn into a living bonfire as she stumbled backward. But when she opened her mouth an instant later, what came out wasn’t the agonized scream he’d expected. Instead, it was a roar of anger.
“How dare you!” shrieked the hag, fixing her stance even as she continued to burn. Underneath the flames, Lex could see her face beginning to melt, but it didn’t seem to bother the old woman in the least. “Ruining all my hard work!”
Before Lex could even begin to process what she meant, there was another sense of magic coming from the hag as she suddenly rushed forward – apparently uncaring that she was still on fire – and slammed one wrinkled hand directly against his chest.
His magic items cushioned the blow, preventing it from so doing little more than causing him to stumble, but the despite the hag’s continuing immolation it was cold – rather than heat – which shot through Lex then. Far worse than what he’d felt when she’d struck him with her staff, this time the numbing chill swept over his entire body, sapping the strength from his limbs as his nerves began to deaden. In an instant, remaining standing was a struggle, his legs threatening to give out from under him as the chill continued to worsen.
His first instinct was to turn incorporeal, but Lex pushed that urge away in favor of going on the attack. It wasn’t as though that hideous crone wasn’t taking damage from the flames; her flesh was visibly liquefying as the fire continued to eat away at her body. The sooner he eroded the last of whatever insane tenacity was keeping her going, the sooner she’d finally lie down and die!
Pouring as much power through his frigid body as he could, Lex’s eyes blazed as he brought an eruption of black crystals outward, hoping they’d skewer the hag now that her toughened flesh was sizzling. But to his shock, she deftly avoided the volley of stalagmites he sent at her, ducking and rolling beneath them, abandoning her ice staff as she came up on all fours, inhaling deeply.
The sound of her drawing in a large breath made Lex flash back to when he’d fought the dragon outside of Tall Tale, and – wasting a half-second to glance back, confirming that those earth mares were directly behind him – he immediately shifted to defense, again pushing his body past its limits as he raised a wall of black crystals between himself and the burning humanoid.
On the other side of the wall came the sound of rushing wind, along with the clinking of impacts against the barrier he’d raised, and from the frost creeping over the top of the wall, it was easy for Lex to imagine what sort of ice storm the witch was unleashing. But she won’t be able to keep that up for long, he felt certain. Even if she doesn’t feel pain, there’s no way her lungs will be able to sustain this effort with the flames searing them!
He was proven right a moment later, the sounds of the wintry attack falling away as quickly as they’d come. Lex immediately dissolved the wall, letting it turn into dust as he readied another spell…and found no available target, the witch having vanished.
For an instant he found himself wondering if she’d been completely devoured by the flames, but he discarded that idea immediately. She’d been burning quickly, but there was no way her body would have been melted without a trace, particularly not in the scant few seconds when he’d lost sight of her.
Lost sight of her…
Cursing as he realized that she’d turned invisible again – and that whatever was preventing her from leaving footprints in the snow was still active – Lex immediately called on his dark magic again, enhancing his senses-
Only for a hand to reach out and grab him by the throat before he could, squeezing his neck tightly as he was lifted into the air, a triumphant cackle cutting through the air as the hag came back into view.
Or rather, as what was left of her came back into view.
The flames had finally gone out, but strangely her body hadn’t blackened at all, instead leaving her looking like a melted candle. Her hair had dissolved completely, leaving her scalp plastered with white. Her robes had fared little better, clinging to her like a grayish layer of skin now.
Her face was far worse. Her mouth was little more than a gaping hole in the middle of her face, her nose having sloughed off completely. The right side of her head had collapsed inward, as though that portion of her skull had liquefied, and her left eye was little more than a dripping ball of milky liquid.
But despite her horrific wounds, her cackling continued as she lifted Lex into the air. Immediately, his horn lit up, but before he could telekinetically grab what he’d been reaching for, her other hand clenched around his horn, shutting his telekinesis down. “Don’t care much for boys who break my toys,” she sneered, bringing her ruined face close to his own. “Thinking that after I’ve enjoyed you, I’ll burn you just like you burned my puppet.”
“‘Puppet’?” rasped Lex, barely able to take in enough air to form the word. His hooves pressed against the half-melted fingers wrapped around his neck, trying futilely to pry them away.
…or at least, that’s what he hoped she thought he was doing.
“Really proud of it,” sneered the hag. “Made it just as beautiful as the real me, even if still a bit weaker. Almost perfect to see and hear through. Took a lot of work. Then you ruined it. Naughty boy.” The hands holding him aloft grew colder, and Lex could feel his body’s numbness growing worse.
Master! yelled Solvei over their link. Hold on! I’m coming!
No! Stay back!
But-
I SAID STAY BACK!
“But now I got you,” continued the hag. “Big bad wolfy of yours can’t attack me now. Or might just pop your head off. Don’t wanna though, rather play with you first. Ride you, then roast you, then eat you.”
Behind his mask, Lex grinned savagely as he finally managed to get his hooves around what he’d been after. It had been tricky to do so without telekinesis, all the more so since her hand was almost covering it, but now he had what he needed, ripping the bead off of the necklace that he’d taken from Bolverk. “Eat this!”
Then he slammed it directly against the mangled wreck of her face, causing the fireball to detonate.
Somehow, Lex managed to remain conscious through the explosion.
The force of the blast was enough to tear him out of the winter hag’s grip, though it left him momentarily disoriented as he hit the ground, his numbed limbs not responding as he rolled across the snowy terrain. But although his ears were ringing and his vision swam nauseatingly, Lex knew he was fortunate; despite being at the epicenter of the explosion, his protective items had allowed him to weather the blast without taking too much damage. Or at least, without taking as much as that crone, he hoped, trying to get a hoof under-
“LEX!”
Thermal Draft’s cry announced her presence only a moment before she touched down alongside him, immediately moving to help him up. “Are you okay?! I can’t believe you actually-”
“I told you,” rasped Lex, managing to find the strength to give her an angry look, “to stay hidden-”
“No matter what happened, or else you’d put a curse on me to make me stay away from danger, I know,” shot back Thermal Draft, clearly not worried that he’d make good on his threat. “Well I’m sorry, but that’s what it’s going to take if you keep making these self-sacrifice plays!”
Master! came Solvei’s panicked voice through his mind before Lex had a chance to reply, the winter wolf still dealing with the remnants of the yetis, now down to barely a half-dozen in number. Please tell me you’re alright!
“Both of you, shut up,” muttered Lex, thinking the command as well as speaking it. “We need to confirm-”
“Trying to blow me off?” cackled a grating voice from behind him, causing Thermal Draft to go rigid with fright as Lex craned his head around, his eyes widening in alarm.
Rising up from the scorched patch of earth where the fireball had gone off, the winter hag – or rather, the puppet she was acting through – drew herself up to her full height. Although she still looked like a twisted lump of colored clay that had been molded into a vaguely humanoid form, her half-melted features were no different than they’d been a moment ago, before he’d triggered the explosion right in her face. Her spell resistance! cursed Lex inwardly. The explosion didn’t get past it!
The hag took a step forward, her movements looking far more stable than her mutilated appearance would have indicated, harsh laughter continuing to spill from the broken ruin that was her mouth. “Not taking no for an answer. You’re coming back with me, then I’m gonna-”
“SCREW YOU!”
The roar stopped the hag in her tracks, twisting the collapsed wreckage of her head around so that her one good eye could peer in the direction it came from…just in time for Valor to slam into her, the two of them going down in a heap.
“C’mon, we gotta move!” Thermal Draft leaped in fright, causing Lex to stumble as Shadow Star’s voice came from behind them, the masked mare somehow managing to have crept up on them sight unseen. “Valor’s giving us a chance to get out of here while she keeps that scorched shrew pinned down, so let’s go!”
Lex registered the words even as he glanced past Shadow, seeing Spinner carefully guide Mystaria – who, unlike the rest of her friends, apparently hadn’t regained her sight yet, judging from how gingerly she was moving – over to the downed form of Woodheart, Mystaria falling to her knees alongside her friend as she began chanting what was almost certainly a healing spell. But although the druid began to stir as soon as her friend’s spell was complete, Lex could already tell that the retreat the earth mare wanted them to embark on wouldn’t be a speedy affair. Between the foul weather, their collective injuries, and having to direct a blind pony as well, the fight between Valor and that crone would be over long before they’d managed to put much distance between themselves and the remainder of the battle.
Of course, all of that was irrelevant anyway; Lex had no intention of leaving somepony behind while he quit the field.
Thermal Draft seemed to be of the same opinion, shaking her head. “You can’t be serious! Your friend doesn’t stand a chance against that monster!”
Shadow Star grimaced, but refused to relent. “Don’t count Valor out yet. She got a double dose of healing from those two” – she canted her head back at Spinner and Mystaria, who were propping the semi-conscious Woodheart up between them, Littleknight meeping as he circled the trio – “and she’s the toughest mare you’ll ever meet. Besides, she just has to hold her own until that summoned beast of yours finishes off those arctic gorillas, right? There’s no way Valor will go down before then.”
As if to prove that she was capable of living up to her friend’s boasting, Valor gave a wordless cry of fury. Straddling the prone form of the mutilated hag, she brought her shield-bearing foreleg up, bracing it with her other hoof for extra power before slamming the edge of it down onto the crone’s neck. Nor did she stop then, bringing her shield back up for a second strike before bringing it down so hard that the resulting crack sounded like thunder.
Despite the show of ferocity, Lex had no confidence that Shadow’s faith in her friend was warranted. Although Solvei was viciously ripping the life out of the remaining yetis, there were still enough left to keep her occupied for at least another few seconds, and he doubted the hag would need longer than that to recover and resume her assault, likely slaying Valor in the process.
Rather than arguing with Shadow Star, Lex instead took action. Although preserving his remaining spells was a priority, saving pony lives was a far greater priority, which was why he didn’t hesitate to begin chanting, leaning against Thermal Draft to brace himself as he prepared to unleash a disintegration spell-
“HEY! Damn it, stop!” Snarling, Shadow Star darted in front of him, forcing Lex to abort the casting. “What if you hit Valor?!”
“YOU IDIOT!” seethed Lex. “Move before-”
Before he could finish castigating Shadow Star, Valor gave another guttural roar as she brought her shield down for a third time…only for the misshapen fingers of the hag to catch it in mid-motion, arresting the weapon’s descent easily. “Not much for playing with other girls,” she sneered, before kicking one of her gnarled legs up, hooking it under Valor’s chin before jackknifing it back down, effortlessly throwing the earth mare off of her. “Just don’t have the right equipment.”
Righting herself, the hag strode forward, looking none the worse for wear after Valor’s assault. “Thinking it’s time to go,” she announced, glancing back at where Solvei had cut the yetis’ numbers in half again, with only three of them still throwing themselves at the armor-clad winter wolf, the brutes only barely managing to keep her from barreling through them. “But not before I finish what I started. Betting one more cold snap will get the job done.”
The words had barely left her mouth when she inhaled sharply, preparing to unleash her supernaturally cold breath again.
The imminent attack drew varied reactions from the assembled ponies. Valor threw herself to her hooves and charged at the hag again, even though it was obvious she’d never make it before the crone exhaled. Shadow Star cursed as she dug in one of her saddlebags for something. Mystaria and Spinner tried to move back, barely able to make any progress as they carried Woodheart. And Thermal Draft positioned herself directly in front of Lex, all use of her magic forgotten as she moved into the position that Shadow Star had just vacated, rearing up and spread her wings and forelegs out protectively.
Lex himself, however, took an entirely different course of action.
Then the hag unleashed her wintry breath, sleet and hail pellets carried on the freezing winds that rushed out to envelope the assembled ponies. Just like before, the temperature plunged in an instant, falling beyond the point of discomfort and into the realm of deadly cold. There was no avoiding it, the hag turning her head in order to catch them all in the blast, cackling when the gelid gale came to an end a moment later.
But her laughter immediately died when she saw that the ponies hadn’t. Instead, they were looking at each other in shock, realizing that not only had they survived the attack, but hadn’t felt so much as a chill. “What?! How?! Should have been flash-frozen!”
The only answer she received, however, was another spell from Lex.
Taken by surprise, the hag had no chance to react as he rattled off the necessary words, one hoof making the few necessary gestures, ending with his foreleg pointed outward at his foe.
An instant later, an array of five marble-sized spheres of force shot forward from the end of his outstretched hoof, streaking toward the crone. The glowing projectile struck home a moment later, piercing the winter hag’s spell resistance and body alike, her form jerking in place as they slammed into her.
The effect was dramatic. Already weakened from the accumulated damage she’d taken, the hag’s puppet body collapsed under the onslaught. The first missile hit her just below her sternum, punching a hole two inches wide through the middle of her belly. The next struck her left shoulder, blowing it apart completely. The third did the same thing to her right leg, her hip shattering into nothing under the attack. The fourth tore her other leg off at the knee, while the fifth and final shot struck her collarbone, breaking it apart and causing her head to come flying free of her body.
Still nonplussed by the sudden reversal of fortune, the silence was only broken by Mystaria, gulping as her sightless eyes swept the area in front of her. “What happened?” she asked at last. “Is everyone alright?! I heard that hag breathing out, and then Lex casting a ‘magic missile’ spell! Is that hag dead?”
“She’s dead,” answered Shadow Star, sighing in relief as she withdrew her hoof from her saddlebag. “His spell blew her to pieces.”
“But…what about that freezing air she breathed on us?” asked Spinner, the curious look she directed toward Lex making it clear where she thought the answer lay. “It felt colder than ice water when she used it before, but I barely felt anything that last time.”
Thermal Draft, however, was more certain about who had saved them. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she murmured, settling back down onto all fours as she gave Lex a worshipful look. “You saved everypony, just like you always do.”
“I came up with a plan,” admitted Lex. “But Solvei was the one who executed it.”
Thermal Draft’s eyebrows went up. “Solvei did?”
Looking up as she retrieved Woodheart’s cloak, Valor sent a questioning glance at the two of them. “I don’t suppose either of you would care to tell the rest of us exactly who ‘Solvei’ is?” she asked as she wrapped the bundle of leaves and feathers around the naked mare.
Lex had a biting retort prepared, but didn’t get a chance to use it as Thermal Draft spoke up. “Oh, that’s easy. She’s right over there.” Turning, she waved a hoof at where the house-sized winter wolf was ripping the innards out of the last yeti. “Solvei!”
Spitting out a mouthful of viscera, Solvei paused just long enough to glance around, confirming that there were no enemies left before she bounded over to the ponies, shrinking down to their size even as she let her armor crumble to dust, ignoring the shocked looks that the earth mares were sending her way.
“Master!” she yelled happily, taking Thermal Draft’s verbally addressing as a signal to hold their conversation out loud as she rushed over to Lex, her tail wagging. “I’m so glad my spell worked! When you told me to use my cryomancy to protect everyone from the cold just now, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it! I mean, not that I doubted you! It just never occurred to me to try something like that! And I wasn't sure I'd be able to cast it correctly since those awful-tasting things kept scratching at me! But they couldn’t get through my armor, so I concentrated as hard as I could-”
“It was fine, Solvei,” answered Lex, fighting down a grunt of effort as he walked away from her and Drafty, more interested in examining the scattered pieces of the hag’s so-called puppet. But for some reason, he found himself driven to elaborate on his evaluation of her. “You did a good job.”
Although delivered casually, the praise made Solvei gasp with delight, as Thermal Draft gave her a friendly nudge. “And here you thought your ice magic wasn’t good for anything.”
“You’re telling me ‘Solvei’ is a talking wolf?” muttered Valor, completely nonplussed.
“A talking wolf that can use magic?” noted Shadow, sounding dazed.
“And has a brand of destiny?” added Spinner, staring at the cutie mark on Solvei’s flank.
Mystaria didn’t say anything, only half-listening to what her friends were saying as she cast another healing spell on Woodheart. As fascinating as that sounded, it hadn’t escaped her notice that they had all regained their vision, while hers was still refusing to clear up. Although the immediate danger was apparently over now, the fact that she still couldn’t see was causing her tension to worsen rather than dissipate. I still haven’t learned the spell for curing blindness!
Ignoring the quiet conversations taking place nearby, Lex instead looked over the hag’s remains. Her characterization of her body as that of a puppet hadn’t been figurative; he could already see the bloodless body parts losing what little cohesion they still had. But what confused him was what they were turning into: snow. Even as he watched, her dismembered leg lost its coloration, turning white and falling apart into clumps of frozen water, quickly becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the snow on the ground. The same thing happened to her other severed limbs and shattered torso. Only her cranium remained intact-
-which was explained as the hag’s remaining eye fluttered open, a quiet cackle escaping her broken mouth. “Erred…on the side…of caution,” she sputtered, her jaw barely intact enough to form words. “Been different…if I’d really…been there….”
“Tell me your location,” snarled Lex, “and we’ll find out if you’re right.”
Another strangled laugh came from the severed head. “No need to…be impatient…gonna take some…time to regroup…be back in…a while…”
With deliberate slowness, Lex raised one foreleg. “Not if I find you and kill you before you get the chance.”
“Welcome to…try…” snickered the hag. “By the way…name’s Grisela…you’ll be…screaming it soo-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish before Lex brought his hoof down, crushing what was left of her head.
Grisela’s groan was loud in the small room, causing Nenet to wake up with a start, wings flaring outward in sudden terror. Although she hadn’t meant to fall asleep, the late hour combined with the tedium of watching over her elder sister’s physical form while she projected her senses through her puppet meant that she’d been unable to help nodding off. But that wasn’t an excuse that Grisela would have accepted; her sister had never been the forgiving sort.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be an issue now. Contrary to what Nenet had initially feared, Grisela wasn’t looking at her. In fact, she wasn’t looking at anything at all, eyes squeezed shut as she pinched the bridge of her nose with one hand, another groan – of pain, Nenet belatedly realized – escaping her lips.
That she’d escaped what likely would have been another beating brought Nenet no relief, however. All it meant was that her fear settled back into the same low-grade terror she’d been dealing with ever since Mother had headed out on her expedition. Grisela had always hated her, Nenet knew, and now that there was no one around who cared enough to hold the winter hag back, more abuse at her hands was a question of when, not if.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t at least try to avoid it as long as she could.
“Grisela?” called Nenet softly, trying to keep her voice from shaking as she crept toward the hag. “Are you alright?”
“I look alright?!” snarled Grisela, her free hand grabbing the black ice staff laid across her lap and lashing out with it blindly.
Nenet had been expecting something like that, however, and it was the only reason she managed to choke down a scream as she threw herself back. Although avoiding the blow wasn’t difficult – when you were the size of a housecat, you tended to be harder to hit, especially when your attacker had their eyes closed – Nenet still felt her heart pounding in her chest, hoping that defending herself hadn’t upset Grisela further. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean-”
“Shut up!” hissed the hag. “Trying to think!”
Nenet quieted immediately, setting down on the far side of the room and holding as still as she could, even going so far to hold her breath as the winter hag lowered her hand from her face and opened her eyes.
The silence that fell then was oppressive, and Nenet wondered if her heartbeat was as loud as it seemed right then, the burning in her chest as she tried to keep her breath from spilling out growing steadily worse as the seconds slid by. Finally, when she felt like she couldn’t bear it anymore, Grisela let out a sigh. “Go fetch Sissel.”
Nenet let out a rush of air, almost collapsing in relief; mostly because it gave her an excuse to be out of Grisela’s presence for at least a few minutes. “Y-yes!” She turned and made a beeline for the blanket covering the entryway, only to stop as she realized something, wavering just for a moment before managing to speak. “She’s probably sleeping right now…”
“So wake her up,” snapped Grisela.
Not needing any further prompting, Nenet fled the room as fast as her wings could carry her.
It wasn’t until she was sure that Grisela wouldn’t pursue her that she slowed down, taking a moment to calm herself as she touched down. Although the stone floor was cold, it was an acceptable bit of discomfort if it bought her a few extra seconds of relative safety. Still, it was another reason to hope that Mother would be back soon; her illusions had made the semi-worked cave they lived in now seem like an opulent mansion. It might not have been real, but it had been enough to fool Nenet’s senses even despite knowing that.
But it’ll be that way again soon, she reassured herself as she crept toward the area that Sissel had claimed for herself. Mother will come back, and I’ll continue my memorization exercises, just like before. And when I’ve done a good enough job, she’ll tell me who my father is…
The fantasy was one she’d indulged in many times, making it easy for Nenet to lose herself in it now as she paced through the cold halls of the cavern. Once she knew the identity of her father, she’d be able to set out in search of him, leaving Mother and Grisela and Sissel and everyone else behind. And while it would probably be a difficult journey – Mother rarely settled down anywhere for long – it would be worthwhile once she finally found her paternal parent.
He’ll be surprised at first, but he won’t turn me away, Nenet silently assured herself. Once he uses his magic to confirm that I’m really his, he’ll take me under his wing. We’ll study everything together, and he’ll teach me all that he’s learned about astronomy and history and mathematics and religion and magic and medicine and philosophy and everything else that he’s studied! And once he’s taught me everything he knows…
She sighed as she came to Sissel’s chambers, pausing just long enough to finish her fantasy before she pushed the hanging furs aside and entered.
…then I’ll finally become a proper sphinx!
The thought contrasted sharply with the sight that greeted her as she glanced at herself in the full-length mirror standing on the far side of Sissel’s room. Looking back at her was a meek, tiny little creature. One whose feline body was small enough to be stepped on, rather than the large and impressive figure she’d seen in her mother’s books. Her wings were equally unimpressive, her feathers a dull brown rather than the majestic burgundy in the illustrations she’d stolen glimpses of whenever she’d had the chance.
More disappointing was her face. Surrounded by matted fur rather than actual hair, her features were flat and unrefined, with thin lips and a mashed nose; taken together with her beady eyes and how large the rounded ears on the sides of her head were, what should have been a noble visage instead looked more like that of a monkey. Though even that was better than her tail, which was thick and ungainly, with ugly nubs protruding from the end of it.
All in all, it was a body Nenet hated looking at. But that wouldn’t change until she finally accumulated enough knowledge – and there was no way to know how much was required – to grow into her proper self. Which meant that there was nothing she could do but continue following the limited curriculum that Mother had her studying, until she could uncover her father’s identity and let him take over her education.
Until then, she just had to do her best to stay alive…something that was suddenly in doubt as Nenet looked away from the mirror only to find the blade of an axe held to her throat.
“What are you doing in my room?” came a low voice from the side of the room, its owner making no move to rise from the pile of furs she was lying in.
Trying not to shake lest she accidentally open her gullet on the blade, Nenet needed a moment to find her voice. “G-Grisela sent me. She w-wants to s-see you, Sissel.”
The axe made no move away from her neck. “Why?”
“She d-didn’t say,” replied Nenet, giving a squeak when the blade at her neck pressed ever-so-slightly harder against her skin. “I th-th-think something went wr-wrong when she went to c-c-collect food from those p-ponies!”
Sissel considered that for a long moment, then finally lowered the axe, causing Nenet to almost collapse with relief. Sissel was also her sister, but while she wasn’t cruel like Grisela, she also had no love for the smallest of her siblings. Rather, she was simply disinterested in her, the same way she was in everything that couldn’t be used to help her grow stronger.
“Has she sent for anyone else?” asked Sissel, sitting up at last. “Vidrig? Paska?”
“No. Just you,” murmured Nenet, watching as Sissel stood up and began to dress.
Like Grisela, Sissel was humanoid in figure. But the differences between the two of them were profound. Whereas Grisela’s body was hunched and gnarled, Sissel stood straight, looking every inch of her twelve feet in height. Grisela’s skin was mottled and frostbitten; Sissel’s was smooth, the milk-white flesh stretched tightly over firm muscles. Grisela’s hair was long, stringy, and pale; Sissel’s was platinum blonde, cut to a quarter-inch in length.
Even their taste in clothes was a study in contrasts. Grisela wore little other than loose robes, whereas Sissel was already pulling on a leather cuirass, lined with metal studs, over her nightclothes. Not sure if she’d been dismissed or not, Nenet could only wait as Sissel continued to dress, pulling on matching greaves, boots, bracers, a skirt, and finally a helmet before slinging her axe over her back.
It was only when she’d finished dressing that Sissel turned to the mirror that Nenet had glimpsed herself in before. Laying a finger on its polished surface, the snow giant – for that was Sissel’s race, Nenet knew – traced an arcane pattern against the silver glass, murmuring an incantation as she did. Immediately, the mirror shrank, going from being nearly tall enough for Sissel to examine herself in to being barely bigger than Nenet. But the miniature sphinx had no time to admire the magical display as Sissel picked up the shrunken reflector and tucked it beneath her armor before turning to the entrance, never once giving Nenet so much as a glance. “Come.”
Wincing at the prospect of going back into Grisela’s presence, Nenet flew behind Sissel wordlessly, knowing that it was pointless to protest. Sissel would simply have grabbed her and carried her along, and while that was far less painful than a beating, she wouldn’t have made any effort to be gentle. Given the snow giant’s tremendous strength, it wouldn’t have been a pleasant experience, Nenet knew.
All too soon, they were back at Grisela’s quarters, to which Sissel entered without knocking, Nenet touching down and slinking in behind her, hoping not to be noticed.
“About time!” snapped Grisela irritably, glaring up at the taller humanoid.
“Sister,” replied Sissel, her calm voice a sharp contrast to the winter hag’s. “Am I to understand that what should have been a routine expedition to restore our provisions ran into unexpected trouble?”
Grisela shot Nenet a dark look then, and the sphinx shuddered, knowing that another beating was guaranteed now. “Resistance,” spat the crone as she looked back at Sissel. “Ready and waiting when we arrived.”
Sissel’s face remained impassive, but the scorn in her voice deepened just a touch. “We’ve been using that village to resupply our food stocks for some time now. It was inevitable that they’d put out a call for aid, even with the blizzard we created isolating them. You should have expected a fight.”
“Not like this!” howled Grisela, furious at being talked down to. “More than just fools and weaklings! One, a masked unicorn, had real power!”
One corner of Sissel’s lip turned up. “Power enough to destroy that simulacrum you were projecting yourself through?”
Grisela gnashed her teeth, but her lack of denial was an answer in and of itself. Sissel waited another few seconds, her smirk speaking to how much she enjoyed her sister’s humiliation, before she returned to the business at hand. “The yetis will probably flee the scene now that you’ve been defeated,” she mused. “We should get Paska to round them up before they lead whoever bested you back here.”
“Won’t happen,” muttered Grisela, her voice turning bitter. “All of them, dead.”
Sissel stopped at that, and Nenet saw her eyes widen just a bit. “All of them? You’re certain?”
“Told you that pony had real power,” spat Grisela. “Summoned a beast. Giant wolf in black armor. Tore our brothers apart all by itself.”
“By itself?” The disbelief was audible in Sissel’s voice. “They were slaughtered – each and every one of them – by one single creature that this masked unicorn of yours summoned?”
“Ripped them up good,” snorted the winter hag. “Least they’ll have difficulty questioning their corpses that way.”
“This is a disaster!” Although she wasn’t yelling, the intensity in Sissel’s voice made Nenet wince. “We needed those yetis! They were supposed to be the vanguard for our attack on Hvitdod’s lair! They might not have been individually strong, but they would have served to keep him busy while we wore him down!”
“Still have enough,” muttered Grisela, but her voice lacked conviction.
“Maybe,” admitted Sissel. “But the lack of fodder means that we’ll lose most of our forces in the attempt. That means that when Mother gets back, and we move on to the next stage of the plan, there’ll be almost no one to guard us while we perform the necessary spell-work, which is going to be a problem since apparently there’s a masked pony out there who’s a serious threat!” Taking a moment to calm herself, Sissel shook her head. “We need to tell Mother what’s happened.”
Grisela’s reaction was immediate. “NO! Can still fix this!”
“There’s a chance that Mother hasn’t launched her attack yet,” explained Sissel, reaching for the small mirror she’d tucked beneath her armor. “If we tell her that we’ve hit a setback, she can abort her operation and come back here with the rest of our siblings. They’ll be able to wipe out whoever this unicorn is while Mother replenishes our ranks, at which point we can all try again. But that’s only possible if we contact her before she strikes! After that, she’s committed, and so are we!”
“I’ll be blamed!” shrieked Grisela. “Not just our brothers that Mother replaces! Not just me, either! You too!”
Sissel’s eyes narrowed. “I had nothing to do-”
“Bet Mother will agree?” interrupted Grisela. “Left you in charge, remember!”
For a moment, neither moved, the two of them staring at each other. Finally, Sissel sighed, replacing the shrunken mirror beneath her cuirass. “You better have a plan for how to fix this.”
“Beginning of one,” admitted Grisela. “Pony killed our brothers, so pony can take their place.”
Sissel cocked a brow. “You want to force him to fight for us? How?”
“Working on it!” snarled Grisela. “Why I called you!”
By now Nenet was creeping toward the exit, knowing that she’d already heard too much. But she’d barely made it when Grisela darted forward, snagging her by the tail and lifting her into the air. “Almost forgot about you!” she hissed. “Can’t have you ruining things!”
“N-no! NO! Grisela, please! I won’t say anything!” whimpered Nenet, terrified now. “I swear, I won’t!”
“Got that right,” laughed the winter hag, her voice thick with malicious glee.
“You can’t kill her.” Sissel’s voice made it clear that wasn’t negotiable. “She’s Mother’s backup spellbook. Her dying will only make things worse for us.”
“Don’t have to kill her,” snorted Grisela, before baring her crooked teeth in an evil leer. “Just shut her up good.”
Sissel rolled her eyes. “Then be quick about it. Time isn’t on our side.”
“Don’t worry,” cooed Grisela, tightening her grip on Nenet’s tail, the tiny sphinx sobbing as the hag raised her staff. “Won’t take long at all.”
Thermal Draft’s announcement earned a scowl from Lex. “‘Pretty sure’ isn’t good enough.”
Biting her lip, the pegasus let out a slow breath before replying. “Lex, I just flew over the entire village, pointing this thing” – raising her hooves, she held up the metal rod that detected hostile intent – “in every direction the whole time, and I didn’t get so much as a blip out of it. You trusted me to use this to monitor where all of those creatures were before and tell you their positions, right? Well, I’m telling you that I’m not picking up anything now.”
Lex didn’t answer, struggling to contain his urge to snap at the pegasus. From the rod’s limited range to potential magical countermeasures against its detection abilities, he could think of dozens of reasons why they weren’t safe despite her finding no enemies. It was only because berating her would have been a complete waste of time that he instead turned his thoughts toward Solvei. Have you found anything?
Their trail was easy to locate, Master, came the winter wolf’s response in his thoughts. But it won’t stay that way for long with how heavily the snow is coming down. If it doesn’t let up, their tracks will be completely gone by morning.
Follow their trail as far as you can, decided Lex after a moment’s consideration. Even if you can’t find where they came from, there might still be some worthwhile information to be found.
Understood! came Solvei’s response, clearly meant to be a signoff.
But Lex wasn’t finished, a twinge of concern managing to break through his worsening mood. Exercise caution. Just because those yetis were no match for you doesn’t mean you’re not potentially heading towards danger. If you find yourself imperiled, inform me at once so I can summon you back. Is that clear?
Across their link, he registered a sudden spike of joy coming from the winter wolf. I will! I absolutely will, Master!
Frowning in confusion over why Solvei was so delighted by his warning, Lex didn’t have any time to ponder the mystery as Thermal Draft spoke up, nodding at something behind him. “We’ve got company.”
“Pardon me.”
Grimacing, Lex glanced over his shoulder, seeing the smiling form of the lute-wielding mare who called herself Spinner. She’d separated from the rest of her friends – who were huddled together a short distance away, speaking in low tones – and had stopped about ten feet away from himself and Thermal Draft.
“Hi,” she called as soon as he made eye contact with her. “Listen, we got off on the wrong hoof before. Understatement of the century, I know, but…we’re all good now, right?” Her eyes flickered between his own and Thermal Draft’s. “Bonds of friendship forged in battle, you know?”
“Is that what you think?” hissed Lex, turning to face the blonde mare, his eyes lighting up as surge of frustration shot through him. “That immoral actions are somehow imbued with virtue when they occur proximate to even greater atrocities? That the conduct of your associate – conduct which you and the rest of your group made only the most token of protests against – toward Thermal Draft is no longer deserving of indictment simply because we all experienced a shared threat?”
At his side, Thermal Draft winced, stepping closer to him as she lowered her voice. “Lex, I’m angry about what happened too, but that other mare already said she was sorry.” She nodded toward Valor, who caught her gaze and held it for a moment before nodding back. “Maybe, after what just happened, this isn’t the time to make more enemies.”
“I am not the one making enemies!” seethed Lex, incensed. “These ponies made themselves our enemies when they assaulted you! I am simply pointing out the extant nature of that state of affairs!”
“Lex…”
Thermal Draft gently placed a hoof on his side, only for Lex to knock it away, glaring at her. “This is how the ponies here are! They cloak their unethical natures behind veils of pragmatism, or claim that a lack of greater iniquity is comparable to righteousness, or simply reject moral accountability altogether!” He turned back to Spinner then, his voice rising as his temper continued to flare. “Ponies like you are the reason Everglow is in the state that it is!”
“You’re a gods-damned hypocrite, you know that?” Stomping forward, Shadow Star met his glare without flinching. “Okay, sure, Valor was out of line before. And you know what? I’ll cop to the fact that the rest of us should have stopped her. But you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re any better than we are!”
Wincing, Spinner closed the distance between herself and the masked mare, trying to nudge her backward. “Not helping, Shadow.”
But Shadow wouldn’t be moved. “No! This guy thinks he can look down his nose at us, when he’s no different!” Pointing at Lex accusingly, she kept going. “You talk about how ‘immoral’ it was that our friend got physical over a spilled bowl of stew, but you were the one who turned things into an all-out fight! You could have tried talking things down or cast a spell to defuse the situation, but instead you came out swinging! So where do you get off acting like we’re the only ones who’re to blame for what happened?!”
“That’s because he was defending me,” pointed out Thermal Draft coolly. “Your bear-buddy wasn’t defending anyone. So no, that’s not the same.”
“And we shouldn’t forget that this is also the guy who called a truce when he realized that things were about to get a whole lot worse,” added Spinner, giving Shadow Star a warning look. “So maybe we should all take a few deep breaths and remember-”
“Yeah, no. He’s blameless, and we’re all worthless. Got it,” muttered Shadow, turning and stomping back toward the others, cursing under her breath.
Sighing, Spinner turned back toward Lex and Thermal Draft. “I’m sorry about her. She’s not a bad pony, but she really hates being looked down on.”
“She is a bad pony, and she should be looked down upon,” shot back Lex immediately. “The same can be said for you and the rest of your group.”
Seemingly taking her own advice, Spinner drew in a deep breath before replying. “…listen, I understand that you’re still angry about what happened, and I won’t say that you’re wrong for feeling that way-”
“Real generous of you,” snorted Thermal Draft.
“-but right now, we need your help,” finished Spinner. “Specifically, Mystaria needs it.”
She gestured back at where her friends were clustered. Woodheart was in the process of tearing a few leaves off of her cloak, popping them in her mouth and chewing on them for a moment before spitting the soggy concoction into an empty glass vial that Shadow Star passed to her. Stooping to scoop some snow into the clear tube, she shook the container, encouraging the frozen water to melt and mix with the rest of the vial’s contents before turning her attention to Mystaria.
The mare in question was looking straight up, Valor holding her steady. The reason why became clear a second later, as Woodheart said something before moving closer, holding the vial over Mystaria’s upturned face. Carefully, the druid turned the vial over, pouring a few drops of the mixture it held into each of her friend’s eyes.
Squeezing her eyelids shut, Mystaria grimaced, one hoof coming up to curl around the symbol of Luminace hanging around her neck, lips moving in what was almost certainly a prayer. It wasn’t until she’d finished whatever plea she’d been making that she opened her eyes…only to shake her head a moment later, biting her lip as her ears folded back, causing her friends to slump in place.
Turning back to Lex, Spinner made no effort to hide her disappointment. “She took one of those blasts of cold right to the face,” explained the bard. “It injured her eyes, and nothing we’ve tried has been able to fix them. Mystaria says that there’s a special spell for repairing sensory damage, but she hasn’t learned it yet. And since it’s a clerical spell, they probably won’t have anyone who knows it at Bright Night, yes?”
“Bright Night?” echoed Lex, recognizing that it was a place name, albeit not one he recognized.
Spinner cocked her head. “The wizard school? Couple days’ travel from here?” When Lex gave no reaction, she glanced at Thermal Draft, looking more puzzled when the pegasus only shrugged. “I thought…nevermind.”
Shaking her head, Spinner returned to the topic at hoof. “I don’t know if you know the spell she needs, but you’ve obviously got a great deal of magical power, and Mystaria said before that she saw you wearing the Night Mare’s holy symbol. If there’s any chance you can fix-”
Lex didn’t let her finish, having heard enough. With no warning, he strode right past her, making his way directly toward the other four mares, leaving Thermal Draft and Spinner rushing after him.
Shadow, Woodheart, and Valor all stiffened as he approached, with Littleknight meeping loudly in alarm. That was enough to alert Mystaria that something was occurring, her head turning as her sightless eyes swept the area in front of her. “What’s happening?”
“That Lex guy is headed this way,” answered Woodheart curtly, fiddling with the hem of her cloak as though preparing to cast it off.
“He is?” Mystaria’s ears picked back up then, and her breath quickened. “Point me toward him.”
“Mysty…” Valor seemed like she wanted to say more, but instead shot Lex a worried look before gently turning her friend so she was facing him. “Okay. Count to five, and by the time you’re done he’ll be right in front of you.”
Mystaria nodded, lips moving as she silently mouthed each number. When she got to five, she cleared her throat. “I, um…I know we haven’t been properly introduced, but my name is Mystaria, and I wanted to apologize for what happened-”
“Shut up,” ordered Lex, his voice filled with contempt. “Your pathetic little band has been offering empty apology after empty apology, and I’m sick of hearing them.”
Mystaria winced, and the other three mares all glowered. “You bastard,” growled Valor, raising her shield-bearing foreleg. “If you-”
“I’ll repair your vision,” continued Lex, not bothering to so much as glance at angry mares flanking Mystaria. “And then, I want nothing more to do with any of you.”
That was apparently enough to mollify the rest of her friends, something which only made Lex angrier. Valor, at the very least, deserved a curse for what she’d done to Thermal Draft, and there was a strong case to be made for giving the rest of them maledictions of their own as well. But as much as it galled him, Lex knew he couldn’t afford to pass judgment over the earth mares; not under the current circumstances, at least.
Despite the thrashing they’d received, these mares had recovered to the point of being at least somewhat combat-capable again, which meant that if he had to fight them a second time – something which would certainly happen if he tried to curse them – he’d need to either dip into his reservoir of thaumaturgical spells in order to subdue them, or call back Solvei to do it for him. Neither option was acceptable, not when Grisela remained the more dangerous threat by far.
That left Lex with no choice but to choke down the bile that rose in his throat as he started to chant the liturgy to the Night Mare, making the necessary gestures even as he inwardly raged over how he was morally bound to help the blinded pony in front of him even while being unable to punish her for her transgressions. It was yet another cruel joke from a cruel world filled with cruel ponies.
When he finished the spell a few seconds later, he immediately pressed his hoof to Mystaria’s face, discharging the magic. “It’s done,” he spat, turning and walking away before he’d even finished speaking; now that he’d fixed her sight, he wanted Mystaria and her friends out of his as soon as possible.
Behind him, Mystaria gasped. “It worked! I can see!”
She’d barely gotten the words out before her friends began whooping in joy, laughter and relieved sighs filling the air. For a moment their voices overlapped with one another, before Mystaria’s rose above the others. “Thank you!”
Lex didn’t reply, instead stalking toward a house across the street. He’d caught a glimpse of a face peeking out from a window there a minute ago, and he’d recognized it as being that of the innkeeper he’d spoken with earlier in the evening. Given how Grisela – when he’d observed her through Solvei’s senses before the hag had reached the village – had referenced the red light shining from the inn’s steeple, noting that they’d be abducting ponies from the second floor of the building “like always,” it was easy to infer that the colored light had been some sort of signal, with the innkeeper’s conspicuous absence from his place of business further indicating that he’d known what was coming.
That thought was enough to make black crystals sprout up around Lex as he strode toward the unassuming house, ready to tear it apart if need be in order to get to the stallion hiding inside.
Mystaria and her misbegotten friends had managed, at least for now, to escape his judgment. So had Grisela, for that matter.
Drafty couldn’t think of any better way to phrase it as she watched Lex stalk toward a house across the street. She didn’t know why he’d targeted that particular building, but he made his way toward it with single-minded determination, black crystals sprouting around him as he approached it.
That the dark stalagmites were forming around him was just the latest in a series of bad signs. Drafty had known Lex long enough to recognize that they were expressions of rage, and even if she hadn’t known that, it wasn’t as though he was making any effort to hide his anger. Ever since earlier in the evening, when he’d ordered her and Solvei to stand watch while he gestured and chanted – she still wasn’t sure what he’d been doing – Lex had been in an extremely foul mood.
No, she corrected herself silently, wincing as she remembered how he’d screamed at her a few days prior when he’d thought she was taking their current situation too lightly. He was angry even before that. And it’s partially my fault…
The recognition brought a rush of guilt with it. She’d destroyed the contract she’d signed with Prevarius, consigning her soul to oblivion if she died, because she’d wanted Lex to know how much confidence she had that he’d find a way to fix things. But over the last few hours, she’d begun wondering if she’d only put more pressure on him instead. He was already dealing with how to get them home in the face of a relentlessly hostile world, all while having no idea what had happened to Sonata and Aria and everyone else; being responsible for the precarious state of her soul – something that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t let Prevarius talk her into signing that contract – surely wasn’t helping.
“What’s he doing…?”
The comment came from the group of mares who’d rushed out to take on the yetis, now huddled a short distance away, looking like they weren’t sure what to do with themselves now that the fighting was over. Although they hadn’t been talking to her, Drafty found herself frowning anyway; they might not be bad ponies – they’d tried to apologize for what had happened back at the inn, not to mentioning helped out against those monsters – but she still couldn’t help but feel sore at them. Though I can understand why they’re confused now, she silently admitted. What exactly is Lex-
She got her answer as he reached the front of the house, turning to shadow without breaking his stride and passing right through the wall.
“…what just happened?” murmured the mare in the leaf-and-feather robe.
“I think that was like that flickering magic he was using before,” answered Mystaria. “Except that time he was completely incorporeal without changing back.”
“Forget what he did, there are people in there!” The voice of the shield-toting mare with the blue mane and tail – Valor, Drafty remembered – was thick with tension. “Is he going there to shake them down? Is that why he was defending this place?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, jogging toward the house Lex had vanished into. But she hadn’t gotten more than two steps before the door to the building swung open, a middle-aged earth stallion – it took Drafty a moment to identify him as the guy who’d been managing the inn they’d just vacated – came rushing out, slipping and falling as his hooves hit the snow. “NO! Get away!”
His terrified scream gave everyone pause, but the stallion didn’t wait for a reaction, frantically picking himself up and stumbling further away from the door.
Behind him, the mass of darkness with the glowing eyes that was Lex’s shadow-form emerged from the doorway. “You lured those creatures here!” he thundered, floating after the fleeing pony with menacing slowness. “The red light you set signaled them! That makes you an accomplice to their actions!”
“It’s not true!” wailed the stallion, clearly terrified. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t-”
He couldn’t finish as, stumbling down the street, he came upon what was left of the yetis that Solvei had slaughtered. The sight stopped him dead in his tracks, staring at the massive patch of scattered body parts in a field of crimson snow. Although the storm was already covering the worst of the carnage with fresh flakes, the sight was still a grisly one, and the old stallion could only stare with wide eyes, his jaw working silently.
“Tell me what you know of those creatures!” roared Lex, continuing to advance on his quarry. “Tell me, or I swear I’ll put a curse on you that’s so horrible you’ll NEVER KNOW PEACE AGAIN!!!”
“STOP IT!”
Rushing forward, Valor put herself between the dark cloud that was Lex and the trembling stallion, who’d sunk to his knees, squeezing his eyes shut as he quivered in terror. “Are you crazy?! This old guy didn’t do anything! He’s just an innkeeper! Why would he want to call a bunch of monsters into his home?!”
“Maybe we should all calm down,” offered Mystaria, keeping her voice as soothing as possible as she walked forward, giving Lex a pleading look before giving Valor a pointed one. “I’m sure the last thing any of us want right now is to get into another pointless fight.”
“I’m a bit curious as to why you’re so sure this pony sold us out,” added Spinner, and although her words were directed at Lex, her eyes sent an inquisitive glance Drafty’s way.
But she didn’t have a chance to answer – not that she would have been able to anyway – as Lex spoke again. “None of you have the right to challenge my decisions!” he snarled, his eyes glowing brighter with fury. “This stallion’s guilt has already been established! The only question now is what punishment he deserves!”
That was enough to break what little remained of the innkeeper’s courage, snapping him out of his stupor as he turned to run again. But he’d barely moved when the purple aura of Lex’s telekinesis surrounded him, yanking his legs out from under him and dragging him closer to the bloody remains of the yetis. “Your confederates are all dead or in hiding,” he hissed, the black mass of his insubstantial form drawing closer to the whimpering stallion. “No one is coming to rescue you. Your only recourse is to confess to your crimes, and hope that my pity for you overcomes my disgust! NOW TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW!!!”
“He’s lost it!” growled Shadow Star. “Woodheart, hit him with-”
“I had to!” wailed the innkeeper suddenly, tears falling from his eyes as he dug his hooves into the ground, trying to stop Lex from dragging him further toward the pile of corpses. “I didn’t want to do it, but I had to! They made me! I swear!”
That was enough to make everyone else pause, exchanging uncertain looks as Lex released the stallion from his telekinetic grasp. “Continue,” he ordered, and the quiet menace in his voice was just as intimidating as when he’d been screaming.
“It…it happened a little while back, after the blizzard started,” blubbered the innkeeper. “They came in the middle of the night. We didn’t know what was happening at first. We’d just wake up and see homes that had been broken into, entire families gone. They got the Plowwrights, the Cartwheels, the Knittingfurs…” He started to shake harder than before, a sob escaping from his throat. “They got my nephew! He-, he was barely out of his teens! He’d offered to stay over at the Knittingfurs; he was sweet on their girl, and he was…he was just gone, and…”
He couldn’t continue, putting his face into his hooves and bawling. The sight was heartbreaking, or at least Drafty thought so. Apparently she wasn’t the only one, as Mystaria and Woodheart started to step toward the distraught pony.
But Lex heard their hoofprints, his glowing eyes turning to face them. “Stay back!” he ordered.
The command made both mares wince, with Mystaria looking particularly conflicted. “But-”
“DO AS I TELL YOU!” bellowed Lex, making both mares jump before he turned back toward the innkeeper. “How did you come to reach an accord with those creatures?”
Hiccupping, the stallion lifted his head, his expression miserable. “We…we drew lots,” he sobbed. “Loser had to stay out, try to bargain for our lives. We’d figured whatever was doing this had to be intelligent, since they didn’t seem to tear through stuff like an animal would’ve. I drew the short straw.”
“Why didn’t you send for help?” blurted Shadow Star. “You could have sent a messenger to Bright Night, or to Viljatown, or someone!”
“We tried,” moaned the stallion. “We asked Bright Night for help, but they said they were a school, not an adventurer’s guild, and told us to seek help elsewhere.”
For some reason, Mystaria winced at that. “Of course they did,” she muttered, her voice uncharacteristically dark.
“After that, we sent word to Viljatown, but we never heard back,” continued the innkeeper. “That’s when we decided our only chance was to beg whatever was attacking us for our lives!”
“And in exchange for them, you offered to sacrifice those of other ponies who stayed at your inn.” The rage was still present in Lex’s voice, but this time it was mixed with a thick layer of disgust.
The weeping stallion cringed at the tone, but when he spoke next his voice was defeated. “I didn’t know what else to do. When they came back, there was a couple of ponies staying at the inn. No one we knew, just some prospectors from outta town, saying they wanted to poke around in the mountains for ore. Someone was going to be taken, why should it have been my friends and neighbors?” He gave Valor and the others a pleading look. “What would you have done, if you had to choose between some strangers and the people you care about?”
None of them had an answer for that, and when they couldn’t meet his gaze, the innkeeper turned back toward Lex, shaking again as he looked into those glowing green eyes. “That’s all I know, I swear! I swear to all the gods!”
Drafty held her breath as she waited for Lex’s reaction. But she was the only one who stood still; out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Mystaria was gripping her holy symbol again, while Woodheart pushed the hem of her robe up. The others were similarly readying themselves, and Drafty bit her lip, getting ready for another fight when Lex cursed the old stallion for what he’d done.
But that wasn’t what happened.
Instead, Lex turned away from the quivering pony without another word.
“L-Lex?” called Drafty, confused. But he didn’t answer her, instead moving back toward the inn where they’d been staying. Even more confusingly, he turned back into a pony halfway through, his steps slower now, lacking the furious focus that he’d had when’d gone to fetch the innkeeper.
Sharing a baffled look with the others as it became clear that the unicorn wasn’t coming back, Thermal Draft flapped her wings, moving to follow him. By the time she reached the inn, he’d already made it inside, and she pushed the door closed behind her just in time to see him make his way up the stairs to the second floor. “Lex? Are you alr-”
The sound of a door slamming shut was her answer.
Sighing, Drafty couldn’t keep her wings from drooping as she dragged herself over to a table that was still upright, most of the rest of the common room still a mess after the fight that had happened there only a few minutes ago. Picking up a fallen chair, she plunked herself onto it, putting her elbows on the table and resting her chin on her hooves. I wish Cloudy was here.
It was a thought she’d been having more and more often over the last few days, ever since they’d left the den that was the home of Solvei’s family. As much as Drafty wanted to focus on the good parts of what was happening – getting to go on an adventure with Lex, earning magic and beauty and a lovely singing voice, becoming friends with Solvei – it was getting harder and harder to ignore the drawbacks of everything that had happened. The constant danger. Becoming nothing if she died. Not knowing what was going on back home. And now the fact that Lex was quite clearly hurting, and she didn’t know how to help him.
Cloudy would know what to do. Of that, Drafty felt certain. Her girlfriend had managed to stay focused even while Vanhoover had been falling down around them, keeping them alive and even relatively safe even after the city had become a deathtrap. It was no coincidence that – although they’d gotten off to a rocky start – Lex had chosen Cloudbank to wield Severance when they’d fought against the sea monsters, and then to subsequently lead the trip into the bank. Cloudbank was a skilled flier, an accomplished cloud-architect, and now a disciple of the same goddess that Lex followed, the Night Mare.
And I can’t even get in touch with Kara anymore, groaned Drafty inwardly, before half-heartedly gathering some magic, trying once again to break the spell that Prevarius had used to keep her from being able to hear the love goddess’s voice. She had no idea if what she was trying would even work, particularly since it had already failed quite a few times now, but she didn’t know what else to do. “C’mon Kara,” she huffed as she discharged the spell. “Tell me I’m getting through.”
You were always getting through, sweetheart. It was just that you couldn’t hear my replies.
The voice made Drafty sit up so fast that she fell over, landing in a heap before leaping to her hooves. “Kara!”
Shh, not so loud. Lex isn’t that far away, and I doubt the walls in this rickety old inn are very thick, answered the goddess.
“K-Kara, can you help us?” The question spilled from Drafty’s lips immediately, hope rushing through her. “I mean, I know you said before you couldn’t, but a lot of stuff’s happened-”
I know, sweetheart, replied Kara evenly. I’ve still been able to observe you, and I know everything that’s happened. But things haven’t changed on my end. You’re not one of my worshipers, which means that I can’t fix what you’ve done to your soul.
Drafty slumped in place, her hopes dashed. “So there’s nothing you can do?”
I said that my situation hasn’t changed, answered the goddess, a teasing tone entering her voice. But that doesn’t mean I can’t offer you some advice. With Lex, for instance.
That was enough to make Drafty bite her lip. “I don’t know…I mean, I helped out a little during that last fight, but I mostly just seem to make things worse. I got kidnapped, signed that contract like an idiot, and put the burden of breaking it all on him.”
Then help relieve that burden, purred Kara. Or at least, make it easier for him to bear.
“How?”
I’m glad you asked…
Drafty knocked softly on the door, and when no reply came, let herself in.
It was the fourth room she’d tried, and this time she found who she was looking for, with Lex sitting across from the door. He barely glanced at her as she closed the door behind her, looking at her only in passing before returning his gaze to the opposite wall, staring at it as if trying to bore a hole through it with his glare.
Despite the fact that his eyes weren’t glowing, it was immediately obvious to Drafty that he hadn’t calmed down much, if at all. His body was stiff with tension, from his clenched jaw to his rigid posture to the harsh way he was breathing. It was enough to make her hesitate, sensing that he would go off if provoked.
Of course, that was her intention.
Following Kara’s advice, Drafty didn’t say a word as she put down the lit candle she’d been carrying, placing the brass holder on a small table near the door. She’d scrounged both from the back of the inn, and the candle itself had marks on the side of it, indicating how much time had passed by how far down the flame had burned, with the very bottom of it indicating an hour’s passage.
But that was a while away, since she’d only lit it a few minutes ago, and in the small confines of the room the tiny flame seemed to burn brightly, casting plenty of light over two chairs, a simple dresser, and a single bed. On the other side of the room, near Lex, the curtains had been drawn over the single window. Nor was there a closet or any other exit to be found.
Quietly locking the door behind her, Drafty put the key next to the candle, stepping toward the middle of the room so that she wouldn’t knock it over when she moved.
Then she began taking her clothes off.
Although she’d used magic to prevent the cold from reaching her, that didn’t change the fact that her outfit was soaked due to being out in the snow. As such, taking it off now brought a low groan of relief from her, shuddering in the soft light as she slowly disrobed.
Each motion was languid, not trying to call attention to herself, but making no effort to be discreet either. First her cloak came off, and she flared her wings for a long moment once they were free of it, the silence making the catch of her breath seem loud. Her shirt was next, causing her to stretch her back, a quiet grunt escaping her lips as she slid the protective amulet Lex had given her over her head, laying it next to the key and candle.
Her pants were last, and she wriggled as she worked the them over her hips, the material having become clinging in its dampness. Giving her tail a wriggle, she deposited them on the floor in the corner of the room.
Then she turned to Lex.
He hadn’t moved, or even given any indication that he was aware of her presence, still staring at the far wall in stern silence. But neither did he react when Drafty stepped closer to him, her movements slow and without hesitation, her breathing steady as she gently reached up and removed his mask.
With almost reverential slowness, she gently laid it on the dresser, then moved behind him to undo his cloak, wings reaching around to undo the clasp, her lips brushing the side of his neck as she took the hem of it in her teeth and put it aside. Then her foreleg came around to relieve him of his own amulet, her hoof brushing over his chest before she lifted the talisman up and over his head. Then she circled back around to his front, kneeling in front of him as she took off his robe…
She continued until he was as devoid of clothing as she was, and while his eyes remained fixed on the wall, Drafty didn’t miss how his breathing had changed, becoming slower and deeper than when she’d walked in. As had her own.
He was still tense, though. Drafty felt it as she moved to sit alongside him, letting her hip lightly press against his own. She felt it again when she leaned her head over and nuzzled him. And when she planted a kiss against the underside of his jaw, she felt a shudder pass through him. It was followed by another when she kissed his neck, and yet another when she moved to press her lips to his shoulder.
His tension was still there, but as she moved further down his body, she knew that it wasn’t from anger anymore.
She was on her knees again when Lex finally snapped.
He gave Drafty no warning as he suddenly grabbed her, not bothering to use his horn as he lifted her up and threw her onto the bed. Nor was there any tenderness in how he handled her next, roughly pinning her in place once he’d turned her onto her front, yanking her tail upward even as he pushed her head down. The harsh treatment drew gasps from her, but she didn’t fight him, instead spreading her hind legs to brace herself, arching her back in a silent show of willful submission.
She heard a murmur from him then, recognizing his spell to make sure there’d be no consequences from what was about to happen. Then she felt his hooves slip down to her waist, gripping her hips as he held her steady. And then it was her voice that rang out, no longer able to remain silent as Lex began taking what he wanted from her.
The candle on the nearby table burned out long before he was finally satisfied.
“Good news, ladies,” announced Shadow Star as she emerged from the inn’s backroom, balancing a tray on her back that was loaded with bottles, cups, and even a pitcher. “This place has booze to spare.”
Mystaria frowned as the masked mare walked over to their table – which they’d just finished picking up and cleaning off, leaving the rest of the common room a wreck as they took their place near the fire – and started dispensing the alcohol she’d found. “Should we be helping ourselves to these ponies’ liquor?” she asked, giving Valor a look. “I seem to recall someone saying that the people here don’t have much to go around.”
Valor snorted as she grabbed a bottle and yanked the cork out with her teeth. Not bothering to pour herself a cup, she instead paused just long enough to spit the cork out before taking a heavy swig directly from the bottle. “That was before we found out that the ponies here were planning on giving us over to those monsters in order to save themselves.”
“I’ll drink to that,” muttered Spinner, taking another bottle and emptying half of its contents into a tall mug, which she promptly drained.
“Listen…do we know for sure what that innkeeper said was true?” asked Woodheart, giving her friends a hesitant look as she poured liquor into a shot glass and set it on the ground, Littleknight sniffing at it hesitantly before lapping at it.
Valor arched a brow. “You think he made all that up?”
“I think he was terrified by that monstrous unicorn,” shot back the druid, scowling. “If some big black cloud with glowing eyes appeared out of nowhere and started screaming at me to admit to something, or it would curse me to ‘never know peace again,’ I’d be scared enough to do anything it wanted just to make it go away.”
Valor grimaced at that, and Mystaria – who’d made no move to touch any of the bottles – looked troubled as well. But Shadow only shook her head. “He was telling the truth,” she announced matter-of-factly, popping the cork out of another bottle and taking a sniff of its contents before pouring herself a cup. “As much as I hate defending that self-righteous blowhard, that innkeeper wasn’t lying.”
“And you know that because…?” pressed Woodheart.
“I’m from Blevik,” shot back Shadow. “When you grow up in a city run by doppelgangers, you learn to pick up on the difference between truth and lies real fast.”
“Plus, being terrified makes it harder to make up a lie,” added Spinner, already on her second bottle. “I know everyone thinks that when someone’s getting the screws put to them, they’ll say whatever they’re told to in order to make it stop. And, I mean, that’s true if they’re using actual screws or something like that. But when someone just gets in your face and starts yelling?” She paused to take another big gulp of her mug before continuing. “Makes it really hard to think up a complicated story like that innkeeper’s.”
Mystaria grimaced, but not because of what had happened with the innkeeper. “Spinner, do you maybe want to slow down a little?”
“I would if you’d join us, Miss I’ve-Taken-Vows-Against-Having-Fun,” snickered the bard, saluting Mystaria with her mug before taking another heavy swallow. “Otherwise, I’ve got to drink your share for you.”
Mystaria looked ready to argue the point, but Shadow put a hoof on her shoulder, shaking her head. “Let her cut loose if she wants. She’s the one who’ll have to deal with the consequences when we’re hoofing it out of here tomorrow morning.”
That was enough to make Valor scoff, giving Shadow a disbelieving look. “Are you kidding? We can’t leave! Not now that we know what’s happening to these villagers!”
It was Spinner’s turn to snort then, though it came out sounding more like a hiccup. “I thought your sympathy for these people ended after you found out they were going to feed us to that hag and her pet yetis.”
Valor put her bottle down with enough force that it nearly broke. “That’s not the same! You heard that stallion just now! Those things took – and probably killed and ate – his neighbors, and his nephew! Can you really just walk away after hearing that?!”
“I’m not talking about walking away,” interjected Shadow. “I’m talking about being realistic in how we help everyone here.”
Looking up from where she was nursing a half-full cup of her own, Woodheart tilted her head. “Realistic how, exactly?”
Shadow gestured to the front door of the inn, in the general direction of the house that the proprietor had stumbled back toward once Lex had left the scene. “That stallion said they sent word to Viljatown, but never heard anything back. I say, we head back there and raise as many alarms as we can about what’s happening here.”
Looks of consideration were traded by the others at that, except for one member of the group who kept her head down, not meeting anyone’s gaze. That quickly became apparent, causing Shadow Star to sigh at the holdout. “Mysty…”
“I just…I don’t think heading back is the right idea,” muttered Mystaria, shifting uncomfortably in place.
Spinner groaned, rolling her eyes as she reached for a third bottle and refilled her mug. “Look, maybe you didn’t notice because you got blinded halfway through the fight, but we got our asses kicked. And just between you and me, I’m pretty sure that would have been the case even if we’d known exactly what was going to happen and had prepared accordingly.”
Pausing just long enough to guzzle more of her drink, Spinner gave a loud belch as she put her mug down, coughing and whumping her chest with one hoof before continuing. “If you’re worried about leaving everyone here in the meantime, I’m sure that tall, dark, and crazy can take care of things after we’re gone.”
But Mystaria was already shaking her head. “It’s not just that. I think there’s a divine hoof at work here.”
Woodheart tilted her head, her cheeks flushed despite her cup still being more than half full. “You think Luminace brought us here for some reason?”
“Not Luminace,” corrected Mystaria, one hoof coming up to touch her holy symbol reflexively. “The Night Mare.”
“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me,” muttered Shadow.
“Look, we originally came here because we’d decided to see if we could find an old temple to the Night Mare,” pressed Mystaria. “And what do we find when we get here? A powerful spellcaster wearing the Night Mare’s holy symbol. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
“Mysty, I get that magic and the gods and all that stuff is kind of your thing,” began Valor, her tone one of concern. “But that guy’s a nutshell-”
“Nutcase,” corrected Spinner.
“Whatever. My point is that he’s dangerous,” continued Valor. “Look, you know I’m the last person who would ever back down from a fight, but even if we stayed here, what would we do? The monsters are already gone, and even if that ugly old witch was just some sort of puppet-”
“A simulacrum,” interrupted Mystaria. “That’s what she was using. It’s a powerful spell designed to make a copy of someone, at approximately half the strength of the original. Although it doesn’t usually let you project your consciousness through it the way that hag was…”
“I think what Valor’s trying to say,” noted Shadow, “is that even if that winter hag survived, she’s not exactly going to be eager to come back. I mean, all of her yetis were killed; she’d have to be suicidal to go for a rematch. Which means that this place is probably going to be safe long enough for us to go to Viljatown and get it some real help. And like Valor said, what would we even do if we stayed here?”
But Mystaria had an answer ready. “We could take Lex to that temple we were going to look for.”
Her response brought groans from the rest of her friends. “I’m not drunk enough for this,” moaned Spinner.
“Did…didja ever think mebbe that guy knowsh ‘zactly where his goddesh’ temple ish at?” hiccuped Woodheart, pouring some more alcohol into Littleknight’s shot glass, and very nearly dousing the almiraj with liquor in the process, causing him to meep unhappily. “Fer all we know he comesh from there.”
“Slurring aside, Woodheart makes a good point,” noted Shadow. “He might know exactly where that place is already.”
“Then we should ask him,” declared Mystaria. “Tomorrow morning, after he’s had a chance to cool off.” Sensing the resistance to her idea, she quickly added a follow-up. “If he does, then I won’t have any objections about leaving. But if not, we might be able to help out; for all we know, not only does he not come from that temple, but it might be where that hag is holed up. If that’s the case, we’d be helping him put an end to the monsters preying on the ponies here!”
“Even if you’re right, what makes you so sure he’s going to go after that old crone anyway?” huffed Valor. “I mean, he doesn’t exactly seem like the warm and fuzzy type.”
“More like the hates everyone and everything type,” agreed Shadow. “I really don’t see him saving everyone here out of the goodness of his heart.”
“He didn’t have to fix my eyes,” countered Mystaria. “Or warn us about those monsters, for that matter. I know” – she held up a hoof to stop the protest she could see forming on her friends’ lips – “his attitude is…off-putting, to say the least. But when push came to shove, the only times he fought tonight were to protect others.”
Shadow gave an unhappy sigh at that, while Valor frowned, and Woodheart looked pensive. But Spinner didn’t seem to share her comrades’ troubled state, instead bursting out laughing. “Oh wow! Our little Mysty is having her very first crush!”
Had she been drinking anything, Mystaria likely would have choked. As it was, she needed a moment to collect herself, giving the bard a flabbergasted look. “Excuse me?!”
“Come on,” teased Spinner, now on her fourth bottle. “He’s a spellcaster, just like you. He’s a religious type, just like you. He fought to save everyone here. He fixed your eyes.” Grinning, she waggled her eyebrows at Mystaria. “You know how many romantic ballads begin like that?”
“That’s ridiculous!” sputtered Mystaria. “Look, I’ll admit I’d like to compare notes with him and maybe learn more about his magic-”
“Is that what they call it in Luminace’s religion?” snickered Valor. “‘Comparing notes’?”
Her face reddening, Mystaria huffed. “I’m pretty sure that Thermal Draft lady is his girlfriend, thank you very much.”
“Sheemed that way,” added Woodheart blearily. “Or meb-mebbe hish big ol’ wolf iz, shince she waz callin’ him ‘mashter.’”
“I’m not sure that ‘Solvei’ is really a wolf at all,” murmured Shadow, her eyes narrowing. “She had a brand of destiny. Only ponies have those.”
“Maybe that Lex guy gave it to her.” Spinner quirked a smile, clearly enjoying the idle speculation. “I mean, she was wearing the same black crystals that he makes for her armor, and her eyes were glowing green and purple too.”
“And she was the one who used that protective spell to make sure we weren’t all frozen by that hag,” added Mystaria. Unlike the bard, she was frowning, bringing one hoof up to her chin in thought. “It’s almost like he was giving her his own magic somehow…”
“Shounds kinda like me ‘n’ Littleknight,” mumbled Woodheart, now having to brace herself against the table to remain upright. “You know? ‘Cuz I can…I can have him casht my shpellsh for me! Look!”
She waved one foreleg then, starting to badly mutter a spell, but was interrupted as Valor and Shadow both rushed to her side, grabbing her before she could complete her casting. “Whoa there, Woodsy,” chuckled Valor nervously. “Let’s not have a repeat of what happened in St. Moon’s Reach, okay?”
Woodheart’s brow furrowed in confusion for a moment before she scowled. “Thash not…not fair. Guy’sh fashe turned back to normal real fasht…”
“Of course it did,” agreed Shadow, her voice soothing. “And if he hadn’t been the son of the town’s commanding officer, it probably would have been fine. But he was, so it wasn’t.”
“He shoulda…shoulda kept hish…hoofsh to himshelf…” hiccupped Woodheart, her intent to cast a spell apparently forgotten.
“I’m sure he would have if you hadn’t been naked and dancing on the bar at the time,” muttered Valor, her voice wry as she slunk back to her seat.
“Doeshn’t matter…no meansh…no meansh…shomething…” She pawed at her mug again, but fortunately didn’t seem able to pick it up. “Sho yeah…Sholvei’sh like Lilknight…a familiar…”
“A familiar…” Mystaria frowned then, before digging into her saddlebag and riffling through it, pulling out a book which she immediately began to flip through, stopping when she got a particular page. “That can’t be right. But it would explain…”
“Mysty?” Spinner had to call her friend’s name a few more times before she got her attention. “Something on your mind?”
“I think Woodheart is right,” began Mystaria. “I mean, I didn’t get a chance to actually see Solvei, but judging from what you’ve all said, she sounds like she might be one of the utvalgte, better known as a winter wolf. If that’s the case, and she’s Lex’s familiar, that would be…unbelievable.”
“I know I’m going to regret asking this,” sighed Valor. “But how come?”
In answer to that, Mystaria stood up. Grabbing the glass pitcher – empty all this time – from the tray that Shadow had brought out, she took it and marched outside, coming back in a moment later having filled the container with snow. “Okay, bear with me for a moment.”
“You know, I was going to use that to try mixing some of these,” huffed Shadow.
“Just hear me out,” insisted Mystaria, gesturing to the pitcher, inside of which the snow was quickly melting. “Say that this pitcher of water represents a wizard.”
“Because it’s tasteless and bland?” snickered Spinner.
“Ha ha,” replied Mystaria flatly. “I’m serious. This is your average wizard. Race doesn’t matter, just that it’s a sapient individual who’s learned to use magic.”
“At least she used water for this, and not the good stuff,” sighed Valor, gulping down the rest of her drink and going for another.
“The pitcher,” continued Mystaria, “represents the body, while the water inside of it represents the soul. You with me so far?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” sighed Spinner, reaching out to take Woodheart’s mug and downing its contents.
“Now this” – taking a shot glass, Mystaria filled it with the contents of one of the collection of bottles, the liquid dark red – “is an animal. It can be anything, a cat, a falcon, a field mouse. Even an almiraj,” she finished, gesturing at Littleknight, who was lazily scratching one ear. “It’s a lot smaller, and since it’s not sapient, it’s spirit isn’t as developed.”
“Liquor is supposed to be less developed than water?” scoffed Shadow.
Ignoring the comment, Mystaria instead looked around at her friends. “Now, what happens when the wizard wants to make this animal his familiar?”
Glancing at each other, shrugs and grunts of uncertainty were made, with only Woodheart managing more of an answer. “He…drinksh it?”
The corners of Mystaria’s lips turned upward. “That’s actually the right answer.”
Valor arched a brow. “Seriously?”
“Essentially,” confirmed Mystaria with a nod. “Watch.”
Lifting the shot glass, she gave each of her friends a pointed look, and then emptied its contents into the pitcher. The water immediately darkened, with the new liquid dispersing as Mystaria lifted the pitcher and gently swished it around. After several seconds, the alcohol had fully mixed with the water, which now had a light pinkish hue, in contrast to the dark red of the fermented liquid that had been poured into it. Satisfied, Mystaria then poured a small amount of the mixture back into the shot glass, before setting it down and giving her friends a triumphant look. “You see?”
“…no,” answered Valor, eyeing the liquids in confusion.
Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Mystaria pointed at pitcher. “The wizard takes the spirit of the animal he chooses into himself, integrating it with his own soul, and then takes a piece of their combined essence and puts it back into the animal. In that way, the two of them are like one being in two bodies.”
“Looks to me like the wizard gets the better end of the deal,” noted Spinner, her eyes traveling between the pitcher and shot glass to Woodheart and Littleknight and back again. “He’s mostly the same, whereas the glass’s contents are a lot different.”
Mystaria nodded, clearly pleased by the observation. “That’s exactly it. A wizard with a familiar isn’t changed much at all by having one – someone with a cat familiar might be a little more stealty, or having a hare might make you a bit quicker to react, but that’s it – whereas the animal becomes like an extension of the wizard’s personality.”
“Aw, but I’d neber…neber drink Lilknight’sh shoul…he’sh shuch a good boy…yesh he ish,” hiccuped Woodheart, reached down to try and pet the almiraj, only to fail when her forehead hit the table. “…ow…”
Ignoring their friend’s drunken antics, Shadow cocked her head. “So you think Lex did that with Solvei?”
“That’s the thing: he can’t possibly have done that,” insisted Mystaria.
Valor sighed. “Alright, I’ll take the bait: why not?”
“Because winter wolves aren’t ordinary animals. They’re almost as smart as ponies, and sapient creatures have more developed souls.” She pointed at the larger piece of glassware. “It would be like trying to pour a pitcher of something into another pitcher. It wouldn’t work.”
“So, she’s not Lex’s familiar,” concluded Spinner. “I’m glad we wasted several minutes and some perfectly good liquor on that example.”
Mystaria’s smile deepened then. “On the contrary. I think Solvei is his familiar.”
Valor frowned. “You just said-”
“I know,” admitted Mystaria, clearly eager to present how she’d resolve that contradiction. “But according to this” – she tapped her book – “one of the greater blessings that the Night Mare will rarely grant to a mortal champion is ‘mastery over magical beasts’. It allows whoever receives it to not only take mystical creatures for familiars, even if they’re sapient beings, but lets them have more than one!”
Despite herself, Shadow looked somewhat interested now. “So you normally can’t have more than one familiar?”
Mystaria shook her head. “Not normally, no. Once you’ve mixed another spirit into yours, the soul rejects further mixing. No one’s sure why, but the popular theory is that more than one mixture would begin to dilute your sense of self, which is believed to be the essence of the spirit-”
“Okay, okay.” Shadow held up a hoof. “So you think Lex has this greater blessing or whatever it is?”
“It’s just a theory,” admitted Mystaria. “And, if I’m being honest, one with a pretty big hole in it.”
Now it was Spinner’s turn to raise a brow. “Which is?”
“All of the gods give out blessings, including the Night Mare,” explained Mystaria. “They’re usually small things, and they can manifest as whatever the gods want them to be. But sometimes they give out more powerful ones, which is what the greater blessings of the Night Mare are.”
Valor shrugged. “So what’s the problem with your theory?”
“Because, as far as anyone knows, the Night Mare only ever bestows a particular greater blessing to one pony at a time,” answered Mystaria. “And we already know who has the power of mastery over magical beasts: he's the head of her temple in Viljatown.”
“If you just want him to bang you, that’s no big deal; then you’re just a sex toy with a pulse.”
In the darkness and silence of their room, the memory of Aria’s words was so clear that Drafty could almost hear them out loud.
It wasn’t as though there was nothing else for her to focus on. Lex, fast asleep now that his seemingly inexhaustible stamina was finally depleted, was still pressed tightly against her back. His breath was warm against her mane. His forelegs were curled around her belly. His hind legs were intertwined with her own.
But despite his closeness, as well as the wonderfully intense ache between her legs, Drafty couldn’t shake the feeling that what had just happened was exactly what Aria had described back in Vanhoover.
That shouldn’t have been a surprise, Drafty knew. It had been beyond obvious that Lex was deeply upset, and Kara’s advice had been purely practical with regard to that. Offering him her body had been nothing more than a way for him to alleviate his stress; it had never been intended to be any kind of romantic encounter.
Even so, Drafty couldn’t help but compare what had just transpired between them to the last time they’d been together, back in Las Pegasus when she’d disguised herself as Sonata. Lex’s passion had been no less intense then than now, but there’s been so much more. He’d shown sides to himself that she’d always known had to be there, but had never seen before then. Tenderness, playfulness, vulnerability…and love, such a deep well of love that it had moved her to tears even as it had made her heart soar to be the recipient of such intense feelings.
There’d been none of that now. While Lex – whether because he’d used a spell to increase his prowess, or because he’d had plenty of practice with other girls, or was simply naturally skilled at bedding mares – was proficient enough that she’d been unable to hold back her screaming and moaning, the complete lack of emotions involved in the act was striking. It had reminded Drafty more of Trottingham, when she’d let a group of stallions whose names she hadn’t bothered to learn treat her like a cheap fling, than of the last time she and Lex had been together.
It was exactly like Aria had said: to Lex, Drafty was nothing more than a sex toy with a pulse.
Sniffling, Drafty reached up to wipe her eyes with a wing. “It’s not fair…” she whispered, anguished enough that she couldn’t keep the thought to herself.
What isn’t fair, sweetheart? Kara’s voice was one of surprise mingled with sadness. I thought you’d be happy. You got to be with Lex again, and this time in an approximation of your old body.
Normally, the reminder of how hideous her real body was would have made Drafty flinch. But now… “He doesn’t love me.”
Oh, my poor Thermal Draft. You’re being too hasty.
“He doesn’t love me,” repeated the pegasus, choking back a sob. “I know that this wasn’t supposed to be about that. That I was just supposed to let him work out his frustrations on me. But I thought…I thought that once we started…”
…that once you began making love, he’d open himself up to you, the way he did when you disguised yourself as Sonata, sighed the goddess, her voice thick with sympathy.
“Yes!” The word came out louder than Drafty had intended, sending a rush of concern through her. But behind her, Lex’s breathing didn’t change, remaining slow and steady, and after several seconds she calmed down, making sure to keep her voice as soft as she could when she spoke next. “I thought he’d realize he felt something for me, that he’d want a connection that was more than physical. But he didn’t; it was just him rutting me.”
…but it was really good rutting though, right?
The question, asked with a wry insouciance completely inappropriate to what they were talking about, actually made Drafty giggle a little, despite how wet her eyes were. “Yeah.”
Sweetheart, listen to me. Just because Lex doesn’t love you right now doesn’t mean he never will. He took comfort in you tonight, which means that he’s likely to do so again, and there’s only so long that two people can come together – no pun intended – before they start to develop feelings for each other.
Drafty bit her lip. “But what if he doesn’t?”
Just give it time, answered Kara. For all we know, the mares he loved all died back on Equestria. Maybe you’ll make it home and find that all of the competition is gone. In that case, he’d have no one else to love but you.
Drafty couldn’t say anything to that, shocked by how casually the goddess had suggested that the deaths of Sonata, Aria, and Nosey would be a good thing for her. She was more shocked a moment later when she realized that part of her hoped that would be the case, immediately sending a rush of shame through her. “I…I don’t want that…”
It’s alright to admit it, urged Kara. You’re far from the first one to wish that the people standing in the way of your happiness would just disappear.
“I was in there with them,” protested Drafty softly, squeezing her eyes shut as she wished fervently that Sonata and the others were okay. “We all fought side by side, covering each other and working together. Even if they’re my rivals for Lex, I don’t want them to die. I’d…I’d rather lose him than be the sort of pony who’d wish for something like that. And besides, he’s had enough heartbreak for ten lifetimes. I don’t want him to go through any more. He deserves to be happy.”
And what about what you deserve? After everything you’ve been through, losing your home, then your life, and now potentially losing your soul, don’t you deserve a happy ending that’s more than a lewd joke?
The question made Drafty’s ears flatten against her head, feeling rebuked despite the lack of accusation in the goddess’s tone. “I still want him to love me back,” she protested. “He and Cloudy are the two most important people in my life. Even if all three of us can’t be together, if I can still be with the two of them, that’s enough for me. I just…I’m worried that when he wakes up, he’ll say this was a mistake, and push me away because of it.”
Now I understand, sighed Kara. You think he’ll be afraid to open up to you because of what happened with Nosey.
Drafty didn’t answer, her expression turning pained. She didn’t know if Lex was over the blonde reporter or not, but given how quickly he’d assigned her to watch over Nosey when Feather Duster had been kidnapped, the latter seemed like a distinct possibility. Although Drafty couldn’t bring herself to hate Nosey anymore for how she’d had Lex’s heart and stomped all over it, the two of them having reached a truce when they’d worked together in order to help him fight Dark Streak, she still felt bitter about how the four-eyed mare had hurt the stallion she loved so much.
For what it’s worth, sweetheart, I’m an expert when it comes to love, and I don’t think that Lex will abandon you over this, continued Kara when Drafty remained silent. But if you’re really worried, there’s something you can do right now in order to create a permanent bond between the two of you.
That made Drafty blink, her ears perking up. “A permanent bond?” she echoed. “Like with Solvei?”
In her mind, Kara laughed. Much more powerful than that.
Her eyes widening, Drafty felt a shudder run through her. Although she didn’t know all of the specifics regarding the bond between Lex and Solvei, she knew that the two of them were deeply connected now. While she couldn’t bring herself to be jealous over that – Drafty refused to be the sort of mare who begrudged her stallion having a pet, even if that pet was a giant talking wolf – the thought of sharing something that profound with the guy she loved was tantalizing. “You never mentioned anything like that before!”
You were never able to use magic before.
Gulping, Drafty took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. Taking a moment to remind herself that the last time she’d borrowed Kara’s power, she’d not only had to participate in an orgy that she felt ashamed of now, she’d turned herself into a horrible bug monster. “Can you…I know you said I can do this right now, but I want you to tell me everything about this before I go through with it. Please.” She added that last part as an afterthought, worried that Kara would withdraw the offer if she sounded ungrateful.
But if anything, the voice in her head sounded amused rather than irate. Relax, sweetheart. This is as simple as can be. You’ll understand once I teach you the spell.
“I…” Hesitating, Drafty turned that over in her mind. She wasn’t sure how a single spell could help; although she’d figured out how to use quite a few minor magical effects – it was actually pretty easy once you got the hang of it, since all she needed to do was break each intended effect down to its component parts, and then build them one by one – anything truly powerful was beyond her, and as she’d learned when she’d almost exploded a fireball right in her face a few days ago, attempting to push her limits was quite often dangerous. “I don’t know if that’s safe. I can’t handle any really powerful magic.”
Trust me, purred Kara. There’s more to magic than just power.
“…alright. Please teach it to me.” There was no harm in at least knowing whatever spell this was. After all, Kara would only be instructing her in how to build the effect. There was no need to actually cast it if it seemed dangerous.
Of course, sweetheart. Now, here’s how you’d cast this using your style of magic…
It didn’t take very long for Kara to explain the spell to her; as the goddess had promised, it was actually a simple bit of magic. But by the time she’d finished, Drafty’s eyes were wide and her heart was pounding.
“Kara…this is a fertility spell!”
My, aren’t you a quick study, came the snickering response.
“But…but…” Her head spinning, Drafty couldn’t seem to order her thoughts. “You said this would create a bond between us…”
That’s precisely what children are, sweetheart: a living bond between their parents. No matter what happens, or what sort of relationship they have otherwise, the new life they’ve created forever represents a union between the two of them. It ensures that they’ll always be a part of each other; there’s no connection more powerful than that.
Kara’s words were enough to make Drafty shiver, her gooseflesh rising. “You mean if…if I…if we…”
If you have Lex’s baby, you’ll always be more to him than just some mare he rutted one time.
Finally managing to recover some semblance of rational thought, Drafty swallowed. “But he’s been casting a spell to make sure…that, won’t happen.”
And this is the counterspell, replied Kara immediately. Right now, his magic is deadening the seed he pumped into you. Cast this spell on yourself, and that will be negated, allowing nature to take its course.
Despite the marathon sex she’d just had, Drafty could feel her face heating up. “That-”
Cast it on yourself a second time, continued the goddess, and without any opposing magic to cancel it out, you’re guaranteed to conceive.
Swallowing again despite how dry her mouth suddenly felt, Drafty couldn’t help but slide one hoof over her lower belly, imagining what would happen if she used the spell she’d just learned. A baby…mine and Lex’s baby…
The last time she’d thought about children had been a year or so ago, when she and Cloudy had been talking about where their relationship was going. Both of them had agreed that it might be fun to be moms, with the idea being that they’d adopt, but that was as far as the conversation had gone; since the two of them weren’t even married yet, it had been one of those things that they’d felt comfortable leaving until sometime in the future. But now…
You don’t have to decide right this minute, added Kara, as if hearing her thoughts. And maybe she had. So long as it’s kept inside you, his seed should remain viable for about five days. Use that spell at any point between now and then if you want to do this, but after that you’ll need to have him rut you again. And if you do decide to go through with it, don’t worry about showing; now that you’re a doppelganger, you can use your powers to hide when your belly starts to swell.
“Kara!” moaned Drafty quietly, her embarrassment reaching its peak.
Behind her, Lex grunted in his sleep, pulling her closer. It was enough to make Drafty gasp, suddenly hyper-aware of how close they were, feeling him press against her tighter for a moment before he relaxed. This might be the last time he ever holds me like that.
And not just because he might reject her, she suddenly realized. Everglow was an incredibly dangerous place, and both of their lives were at risk just by being here. In light of that – particularly since she couldn’t be resurrected again if she died – the thought of leaving something behind…proof that she and Lex had been together, even if only for one night, was suddenly far less scary than it had been a minute ago.
Of course, the thought of how Lex would react if she went through with it was still frightening, but with an undercurrent of excitement. Would he hate her for sticking him with a responsibility he didn’t want? Or would he insist on marrying her? He might have made a vow to the Night Mare never to enter into a formal relationship, but surely he’d insist on renegotiating that for the sake of his child.
…the sake of their child. His and hers. Together.
“Kara…”
Yes, sweetheart?
“Walk me through how to build that spell again, please. I want to make sure I don’t make a mistake…”
“It’s now official,” announced Shadow as she emerged from the back room of the inn for the second time in twelve hours. “There’s no coffee to be found.”
“Of course not,” groaned Spinner miserably, hunching over her bowl of watery pottage as she tried to avoid the morning light shining in from the common room’s windows. “I don’t know why I even bothered asking. The damned cats-”
“Excuse me?” murmured Valor pointedly, arching an eyebrow.
The bard grimaced. “Ugh, fine. The damned purrsians – there, you happy? – have a monopoly on the stuff, and I doubt the ponies in this backwater have ever even seen a foreign merchant, much less bought stuff from them.”
“You should be thankful there’s anything for us to eat at all,” admonished Woodheart gently. “With how much snow is on the ground, there’s no berries that I can enchant to provide extra nourishment, and Mystaria still hasn’t learned the spell to create food out of thin air.”
Although the druid’s words had lacked any critical tone, Mystaria’s smile was still pained. “I doubt any of us would like the fare that spell creates anyway,” she muttered, stirring her own bowl of broth and withered vegetables. “It’s supposed to be gruel that’s even more tasteless than this.”
“It would at least save these villagers some food,” frowned Valor, though she apparently didn’t feel bad enough to keep from sipping at her portion of their meager breakfast, glancing at Shadow. “I know we’re almost out of money, but we should leave something for the guy who runs this place, don’t you think?”
“After he sold us out to those monsters?” snorted Shadow. “Forget it. If he doesn’t like that we’re eating his food after what he did, he can say it to our faces.”
“Fat chance of that,” grunted Spinner, cutting off an unhappy-looking Valor. “As long as Mister Skull Mask is here, I doubt anyone in this village is going to want to come anywhere near this place.” She took a sip of her pottage then, wincing at the taste.
“At least they’ll get some decent rest,” muttered Valor.
Her comment had a more dramatic reaction than an onlooker might have expected, causing Shadow to grimace, Spinner to snicker, and Mystaria to turn bright red. “Can we please not talk about that?” begged the latter mare, looking like she wanted to sink into the floor.
Valor frowned again, but this time in exasperation as she looked at her friends. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Back on the plains, we heard that all the time. Well, not all the time, but you know what I mean. Tents don’t exactly make for a lot of privacy.”
“Did I miss something?” asked Woodheart, taking a withered carrot out of her bowl and passing it to Littleknight, the almiraj digging in with gusto. “What are you guys talking about?”
Shadow rolled her eyes at the druid’s cluelessness. “After we went to bed last night-”
“At least you got to sleep in a bed,” huffed Spinner. “Some of us had to make do with the floor.”
“It might have been cramped, but all of us sleeping in the same room was the right call,” retorted Shadow. “There’s a reason why ‘never split the party’ is rule number one of adventuring, especially when your innkeeper just tried to sacrifice you to a bunch of monsters in the middle of the night.”
Woodheart looked more confused than ever now. “We all slept in the same room?”
“You wouldn’t remember,” sighed Mystaria, apparently resigned to the conversation going where she didn’t want it to. “By the time we were done for the evening, you’d already passed out.”
“To be fair, she’d had almost four whole ounces of liquor,” teased Shadow. “But to answer your question, Woodsy, we’d all just closed our eyes when we heard them doing it.”
“Don’t call me Woodsy,” huffed Woodheart, before tilting her head. “And heard who doing what?”
“And here I thought Mysty was the innocent maiden of the group,” chuckled Spinner. “Lex and Thermal Draft. The lovely lady was rewarding her hero for a job well done.”
Valor smirked. “From the sound of it, she was the one being rewarded.” Her smile faded as she stifled a sudden yawn, one hoof coming up to rub her eyes. “It did make it kind of hard to sleep, though. I mean, he was quiet enough, but she has quite the set of tubes on her.”
“Pipes,” corrected Spinner automatically.
“Why didn’t you guys just move to another room?” asked Woodheart. “Or ask them to quiet down?”
“Are you kidding?” Valor waved a hoof around, indicating the building they were in. “The walls here aren’t much thicker than the tents we used back home.”
“And I’m willing to bet that if someone had knocked on their door and told them to please fornicate quietly, Lex’s answer wouldn’t have been ‘sorry, I’ll keep it down,’” added Shadow dryly.
Mystaria, however, had reached her limit. Slamming her hooves down on the table, she fixed her friends with a glare. “Will you all please FOCUS?! Last night we were almost killed by a horde of yetis, then by a witch, and then found out that this entire town is being coerced into turning strangers over to those monsters under pain of death! Now we’re getting ready to make our way through blatantly unnatural weather, potentially to find a lost temple alongside a guy who has a major religious ordination that by all logic he shouldn’t possess! So can we maybe, just maybe turn our attention to any of those and not…not…”
“And not the fact that Lex and Thermal Draft were getting it on for what sounded like close to two hours?” asked Valor bluntly. “Sure. Works for me.”
“I’m fine either way,” agreed Woodheart.
“Anything that involves less yelling,” whimpered Spinner, holding her head.
“Thank you…” sighed Mystaria in relief, sitting back down.
But Spinner couldn’t resist getting one last dig in. “Besides, it really wasn’t all that impressive anyway.” Leaning closer to the nun-in-training, Spinner lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Thermal Draft was faking it.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
Shadow wished she could have taken the words back as soon as they left her mouth. In truth, she was plenty tired of talking about Lex and Thermal Draft’s sexual escapades. But Spinner, she knew, liked to present herself as the worldliest member of their group, having been nearly everywhere and done nearly everything. Flatly contradicting her like that wasn’t something the bard would let go.
She was proven right a second later as Spinner raised a brow, a slightly indignant look crossing her features. “Oh really?”
“Didn’t we all just agree to drop it and move on?” groaned Mystaria.
“No no no no, I’m curious now,” huffed Spinner. “What makes our resident rogue so sure that what we heard last night was the real deal? Especially since she put earplugs in after the first couple minutes.”
Valor gave the masked mare a sharp glance at that. “You had earplugs and you didn’t share them?”
“I only had the one pair,” snapped Shadow, starting to grow a little irritated as she glared at Spinner. “And for someone who’s sure that pegasus was faking it, I can’t help but recall that the first thing you did when you woke up this morning was wash your hooves.”
“That was because I still had some yeti blood on them,” fired back Spinner, though her cheeks turned suspiciously red. “Quit changing the subject: what makes you so sure she was being genuine?”
“I kind of want to know too,” admitted Woodheart quietly. “Except for how everyone thinks my getting undressed is a mating display, I haven’t had much of a chance to study the breeding habits of sapient creatures.”
That was enough to make Mystaria lay her forehead on the table. “Luminace help me…”
She wasn’t the only one who looked pained, with Valor rubbing her forehead. “Comments like that are why one of us stays with you at all times whenever we enter a town, Woodheart.”
“And that’s saying something,” interjected Shadow, “coming from the barbarian for whom, growing up, peeing on last night’s campfire was a regular morning activity.”
“I told you, only the guys do that!” Scowling at the masked mare, Valor crossed her forelegs over her chest defensively. “I still don’t see what the problem with that is, anyway. They have to go, the embers need to be put out, and the scent marking helps to keep dangerous creatures away from our territory.”
By that point, Mystaria had begun to lightly bang her head on the table, but everyone else was familiar enough with her prudishness that they ignored her now.
Gulping down the last of her pottage, Spinner piped up next. “That leads me back to my original question-”
“How does sun cats peeing on their campfire each morning lead you back to your original question?” interrupted Woodheart.
“By way of the same part of their anatomy being put to use in both instances,” replied Spinner smoothly, keeping her eyes on Shadow. “How are you so sure that Thermal Draft wasn’t faking her reactions to Lex’s doing her?”
Knowing that it was going to come back to this, Shadow had her answer at the ready. “Three reasons. First, pretending to be pleasured is a chore. You have to try and match your reactions, vocally and otherwise, to what your partner’s doing, all while dealing with sensations that – if you have to fake it in the first place – are probably distracting, if not downright uncomfortable. It’s not something you do for two hours straight; it’s easier to pretend to pass out or something before then.”
“Is that the voice of experience?” snickered Valor.
Knowing that her friend was just paying her back for the earlier jab about the sun cats’ morning custom, Shadow kept going. “Secondly, you might remember that Thermal Draft wasn’t the only thing we could hear.”
Spinner raised a brow. “It wasn’t?”
“If you’re referring to Lex, I’m calling your bluff,” objected Valor. “If he was making any noise at all, his girlfriend was drowning him out.”
“…the headboard,” sighed Mystaria, sulking as she lifted her head from the table. “The other thing we all heard was the headboard of their bed hitting the wall over and over again.”
Shadow nodded. “Gold star to Mysty.”
“So they were putting the bed through its paces.” Spinner’s brow furrowed as she shrugged. “What does that prove?”
“I might not have listened to them screwing for very long, but I heard enough to notice that the headboard kept hitting the wall at irregular intervals,” explained Shadow. “Since it was obviously moving in time with Lex’s thrusting-”
“What makes you think he was the one on top?” interrupted Woodheart, leaning forward as if engrossed in the conversation. “Maybe she was the one setting the pace.”
Shadow scoffed. “You really think a guy who screams stuff like ‘Do as you’re told!’ and ‘Don’t argue! Obey!’ is going to lie back and let his chick ride him? No, the headboard hit the wall in time with his thrusting, and the arhythmic impacts meant that he was varying up his technique, rather than just going in and out of her at the same pace over and over. That’s not only harder to fake reacting to, but is virtually always pleasurable for the mare.”
Mystaria squeezed her eyes shut as she took Luminace’s holy symbol between her hooves. “O Divine Lady of Amity, please grant me your patience…”
“And what’s the third reason?” asked Spinner sullenly, apparently resigned to the fact that Shadow had indeed shown her up. “That you caught a whiff of some rare aphrodisiac that none of us noticed? Or that you heard wings beating in a way that pegasus mares only do when they’re getting off?”
“The third reason is that I’m from Blevik,” retorted Shadow flatly. “When you grow up in the spiritual center of Kara’s faith, you overhear more than a few mares having orgasms. Eventually you start learning how to tell the real ones from the fake ones. And Thermal Draft’s were definitely real.”
Resting her case, Shadow leaned back as silence enveloped the table again. Spinner was pouting, but didn’t seem inclined to argue the point any further. Valor went back to finishing her breakfast. Mystaria was still praying, her eyes shut and ears folded back. Woodheart was passing another vegetable to Littleknight. Finally.
“They’re coming,” announced Valor suddenly.
Spinner sighed. “I think we’ve pretty well exhausted the topic, Valor.”
“What? No, I mean those two are on their way here. Listen.” Pointing upward, Valor perked her ears up, with all of the others – save only for Mystaria, who didn’t react as she continued to chant under her breath – doing the same. Sure enough, the sound of hoofsteps could be heard, moving across the second floor toward the staircase at the far end of the room.
Shifting in place as she made sure her weapons were at the ready, Shadow adjusted her chair so she was facing the staircase. Lex might have saved their lives last night, but the way he’d conducted himself hadn’t filled her with confidence. While Mystaria was under the impression that he was an ally sent by the gods – or at least, by the Night Mare – Shadow couldn’t bring herself to believe that. Quite the opposite, she could easily see him attacking them again if he felt slighted.
And self-righteous bastards like him tend to feel slighted whenever anyone refuses to kiss up to them, she knew.
“Alright,” murmured Valor as the hoofsteps reached the top of the stairs and started to descend. “We failed last night, so let’s hope this is the part where it takes us forward.”
A certain mare was on Lex’s mind from the moment he opened his eyes.
It wasn’t Thermal Draft, despite the fact that he woke up embracing the pegasus in the most intimate way possible. Nor was it any of mares he loved – Sonata, in her adorable idiocy; Aria, in her irascible passion; Nosey, whom he couldn’t stop caring about despite her having broken his heart – whose unknown dispositions continued to be a source of anguish for him. It wasn’t even Feather Duster, who had been depending on him to rescue her, and who might very well have died in agony for it.
Instead, as he breathed in the scent of Thermal Draft’s mane, feeling the soft feathers of her wings brush over where his forelegs were curled around her chest, Lex found himself unable to stop thinking about Cloudbank.
Despite the antagonism that had marked the beginning of their relationship, the pink-and-white pegasus was one of the few ponies who had earned Lex’s respect, consistently demonstrating a rare combination of courage and competence during their time in Vanhoover. More notably, Cloudbank hadn’t felt it necessary to discard her morals in order to maintain those virtues the way ponies such as Garden Gate had, willingly placing herself at risk in order to protect the lives of everypony around her. It had been no surprise to Lex that, upon introducing Cloudbank to the Night Mare’s faith, the goddess had seen fit to share power with her.
That his own shortsightedness had gotten her – along with several other ponies – killed was something that Lex still felt guilty about. No matter that he’d brought her back later; she should never have had to go through that in the first place. That Cloudbank had then turned around and rushed to his aid against Starlight Glimmer, nearly losing her life a second time in the process, only compounded his regret over not having been able to live up to his obligations toward her.
And now he’d had an affair with her girlfriend.
Is this how you reward one of your most trusted followers? sneered his tulpa. Bad enough you couldn’t prevent her beloved’s soul from being put in such a precarious state, but now you’ve violated the sanctity of their relationship! And all for your own selfish pleasure!
The accusation cut deeply, and it was all Lex to do to stop himself from shoving the sleeping mare away, as though that would have made anything better. She was the one who initiated this! Not me!
Even to himself, that excuse sounded petulant and hollow, making him grimace.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on his newest regret, the vehemence behind the rebuke provoking an unexpected reaction as Solvei’s thoughts intruded on his consciousness. Hm? Ah, Master, is that you? There was a pause in the winter wolf’s thoughts, and Lex registered her emotional state as one of mild embarrassment. I’m sorry, I was asleep. Did you need me for something?
N-, yes, answered Lex, pushing away his recrimination over what had happened last night in favor of what still needed to be done now. Were you able to follow those tracks back to their source?
The discomfort he picked up from Solvei then answered his question before her actual reply came. I’m sorry, Master. I traced them back as far as I could, but with how heavily the snow was falling…
Although the answer wasn’t unexpected – she had warned him about that last night – Lex couldn’t help but feel disappointed. The emotion must have been strong enough that Solvei picked up on it, because he noted a sudden spike of remorse from her a moment later. Master, I know I let you down, but I swear I’ll do better next time! From now on, I promise I won’t sleep until I’ve carried out your orders, no matter how tired I feel! Or how hungry, or-
That’s enough. Rather than reassuring him, Lex felt a rush of guilt at Solvei’s words. They’d spent most of yesterday reaching this village, only to immediately get into a fight after arriving; that was exhausting by any measure, but while he and Thermal Draft had retired afterward, he’d immediately told Solvei to go on a trek that he’d known would be long and potentially dangerous, without regard for the fact that she’d likely been tired and in need of food. I’m not upset with you.
Really?
Yes. With how he’d just abused Cloudbank’s trust, the indifference he’d shown toward Solvei struck Lex as being particularly egregious now. Eat something, then find a secure location and rest. I’ll summon you later.
His awareness of Solvei’s emotional state registered relief then. Thank you, Master. Please don’t hesitate to wake me up if you need me.
I’m hoping it won’t come to that. But considering that they were in a village that had thrown in with monsters in order to save their own lives, as well as a motley crew of so-called “adventurers” who were dangerously mercurial in their temperament, Lex knew there was a strong chance that it would.
The thought brought a sigh to his lips as he slowly separated himself from Thermal Draft, trying not to wake her as he slipped out of bed and began getting dressed. As despicable as he found the villagers’ actions, he knew he couldn’t hold it against them; they had acted under duress, the same way Fireflower’s siblings had back in Tall Tale when threatened by that dragon. To punish them for things that were beyond their control would not only be unjust, but cruel.
And so would abandoning them to their fate, Lex knew.
This was the situation he’d most wanted to avoid. As much as his personal failings ate away at him, they didn’t interfere with his finding a way to get himself and Thermal Draft home safely. All of the other issues that he needed to address, from researching how to free the pegasus from the lingering effects of her infernal contract to figuring out a way to dissolve the bond between himself and Solvei, had no imminence to them, and so could be suspended until after they’d made their way back to Equestria.
That wasn’t the case with what was happening in this village. Grisela, who had quite clearly been the leader of the yeti horde, had survived their initial encounter. If he left now, there was nothing to stop her from continuing her depredations on the ponies here.
Which meant that he was duty-bound to stay here until he’d rectified the situation.
It was the last thing he wanted to do; more than anything, he wanted to leave this misbegotten world behind and go home to Equestria. To find out if Sonata and the others were alright. To continue building the political apparatus he’d worked so hard to create before the princesses dismantled it all. To continue guiding his people and his homeland toward the future that they needed and deserved, which the alicorns would never be able to give them.
But his moral framework – the guiding principles that he had painstakingly constructed to ensure that his actions and achievements were put toward virtuous ends – was very clear about the situation in which he now found himself. His obligation to address wrongs was proximate to his ability to do so; the mere existence of injustice unto itself created no imperative that he address it. Rather, it was when he had the means to do so that he became duty-bound to try and fix things.
It was, in other words, an issue of power, both having the requisite amount of it – be it magical, fiscal, political, or any other sort – and being able to adequately project it toward a particular problem. That had been one of the primary reasons why he’d set out to install himself as Equestria’s ruler. Not only would he be able to remove the incompetent princesses who’d long since ceased to properly utilize their authority, but he’d be able to much more effectively address the problems that they’d allowed to fester once he had the resources of an entire nation to call upon.
By that same token, he’d been able to suspend concerns about problems occurring beyond Equestria’s borders. Without adequate means of addressing problems in his own country, there was no point in attempting to fix things abroad. His influence couldn’t reach across the ocean without the power that a regime afforded him, much less another world entirely such as Everglow.
But he wasn’t in Equestria now; he was here, on this other world. Which meant that the problem he’d encountered in this village wasn’t one beyond the reach of his ability to address. While his influence was diminished without the support of the governmental infrastructure he’d started to build for himself, his magical aptitude meant that he was far from helpless; if anything, that particular aspect of his might had grown, thanks to the magic items he’d found and his bond with Solvei. Even Thermal Draft made him slightly stronger in that regard, due to her newfound ability to construct micro-rituals.
And since this village had already tried to reach out for help elsewhere and found none, he had no choice but to use his strength for their benefit.
“Mmm…Lex…?” From behind him, Thermal Draft’s yawn drew his attention out of his frustrated ruminations, the pegasus sitting up in bed, blushing as she made eye contact with him. “G-good morning…”
The simple greeting made Lex freeze, realizing he had no idea how to address Thermal Draft now. For all that he felt culpable about what had happened between them, he hadn’t been wrong about her being the one to initiate things…except, he realized now, he had no idea what had motivated her to do so. To the extent that he’d been able to determine, she and Cloudbank were very happy together, so why…?
His blank look made her fidget, drawing the blanket up until it covered everything below her chin. “Can you please not stare at me so much?” she muttered, looking down. “It’s embarrassing…”
That was in stark contrast to how she’d acted last night, and only served to make Lex more confused now. I don’t have time for this, he decided, turning back to his scattered clothes with a scowl. “Get dressed. We have a lot of ground to cover today.”
Blinking, Thermal Draft slid out of bed, her bashfulness apparently forgotten as she began to pick up her clothes. “We do?”
Lex nodded. “Solvei wasn’t able to follow those monsters’ tracks back to their lair. We’ll travel to where she lost the trail, and then search from the air. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll try enhancing the rod you were using last night.”
Midway through putting her pants on, Thermal Draft almost fell over. “Was…was that a dirty joke?”
“What?” For a moment Lex couldn’t understand what she was talking about, before he realized the inadvertent double entendre he’d made. “No!”
“R-right. Sorry.” Biting her lip, she went back to getting dressed. For almost a minute, the only sound was the rustling of fabric as the two of them put their clothes back on. It was only when they were almost done that Thermal Draft cleared her throat. “Listen, Lex. About last night…”
But he had no intention of broaching that topic, telekinetically yanking the door open as he put his mask back on. “We should get going. Flying will let us catch up to Solvei quickly, but we still have a lot of ground to cover.” He didn’t wait for an answer as he exited the room, making for the stairs.
“Wait, we’re leaving right-, ngh?!”
Lex spun in place as Thermal Draft gave a pained groan, hurrying to her side as she sagged against the doorframe. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m just a little sore,” she grunted, wincing as she lifted one of her back legs experimentally, before giving him a wry grin. “And also a little dehydrated. Can we at least stop for breakfast before we leave?”
“…let’s put this place behind us first, then I’ll create some food,” offered Lex, embarrassment softening his voice. First Solvei, now Thermal Draft; why couldn’t he seem to do right by anyone lately?
Thankfully, Thermal Draft seemed to find his course of action acceptable. “Works for me. This hasn’t exactly been the friendliest town I’ve ever visited.” Pushing off from the doorjamb, she extended one elbow toward him. “Walk me downstairs?”
For an instant he was tempted to tell her to simply use her wings, but kept that statement to himself. Instead, he hooked his foreleg around hers, letting her lean on him as he helped her through the hallway and down the staircase.
They had just made it past the halfway point when a voice called out to them. “Hey lovebirds! Sleep well? Or at all?”
“Damn it, Spinner! We’re trying not to pick a fight this time!”
“Oh come on, Mysty! After two hours of panting and screaming and grunting and moaning, we’re not supposed to say anything?!”
“Knock it off, both of you.” Rising from their table near the fireplace, Valor waved a hoof at another table opposite theirs, upon which rested two bowls of some steaming liquid. “Peace offering,” she declared. “It’s not much, but I promise it’s got no meat in it.”
Thermal Draft, her ears having flattened at Spinner’s crass comment, flicked them back up at that, looking at the bowls with interest. But Lex held her foreleg fast within his own, glaring at the five earth mares. “We want nothing from the likes of you,” he spat, guiding Thermal Draft toward the exit.
From her place at the table, Shadow Star snorted. “What a surprise. The jerkass is still a jerk even after getting some ass.”
Lex’s eyes flashed, and although he knew he couldn’t start a fight over mere insults – it was a frivolous waste of power, and risked putting his companion in danger for nothing – he still found himself sorely tempted to lash out at the masked mare. That what had happened between himself and Thermal Draft last night had been overheard by those five was humiliating in its own right. That he hadn’t realized that their conjugal activities would be audible to others, despite this same scenario having happened back in Vanhoover with the servants overhearing him being with Sonata and Aria, only made that realization worse. “You-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as Mystaria suddenly upended her bowl over Shadow Star’s head, causing the masked mare to sputter. “Hey! What did you do that for?!”
“If you don’t want to make a new friend, that’s fine!” retorted Mystaria. “I can’t make you get along with someone. But can we please stop trying to make new enemies?! Last time I checked, we have more than enough of those!”
But Shadow didn’t seem ready to back down. “That guy-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Woodheart put a hoof on her shoulder, shaking her head. “Shadow, I know how you feel. I’m still mad at him for what he did to Littleknight” – she sent a glare of her own at Lex then, before turning her gaze back toward the masked mare with a sigh – “but Mysty’s right. If we end up working together, I don’t want to keep fighting all the time.”
The announcement made Lex narrow his eyes. “We won’t be working together,” he spat. “I believe I was quite clear last night about wanting nothing more to do with any of you, and that remains true now.”
At his side, Thermal Draft’s expression was pained. “Lex, maybe we could use their help…”
The plea made his lip curl, and he stalked toward the door, bringing the pegasus along with him. He had almost reached it when Mystaria’s next words stopped him in his tracks.
“Wait! We think we might know where that hag from last night is hiding!”
“Wait! We think we might know where that hag from last night is hiding!”
The words stopped Lex dead in his tracks. As much as he detested the five earth mares he’d briefly fought – and fought together with – last night, the prospect of locating Grisela’s lair, rather than combing the wilderness searching for her, was one that he couldn’t afford to pass up. Though that still left the question of what exactly that pony who’d spoken – Mystaria, he knew – would want in exchange for telling him what she knew.
But to his mild surprise, the earth mare didn’t stop there. “We came here because we were planning to look for an old temple to the Night Mare that’s supposed to be in the mountains somewhere in this area. We don’t know for sure, but it’s possible that winter hag is using it as her base of operations.”
Outwardly, Lex showed no reaction to what he’d just been told. But in his mind, he was already looking to verify Mystaria’s information. Solvei.
Yes, Master? The winter wolf’s mental voice was thick with surprise, clearly not having expected to hear from him so soon.
Since you started following those creatures’ trail, did you see anything that resembled an artificial structure?
Puzzlement was the emotion he registered from her then. You mean like those odd ‘house’ dens the ponies in that village made for themselves? No, Master, nothing like that. Just burrows and warrens and the occasional cave.
Lex didn’t bother to reply, turning back to Mystaria, who looked like she was waiting for a reaction from him. But Thermal Draft beat him to the punch before he could say anything. “There’s a temple to the Night Mare out in the middle of nowhere?” she asked, her voice thick with skepticism.
Spinner answered before Mystaria could. “It’s probably antenoctem. Most of her houses of worship from that era were made far away from anything that we’d call civilization.”
“Excuse me?” snorted Valor. “Anti-what now?”
“Since when did you become a religious scholar?” added Shadow. “I thought that was Mysty’s turf.”
“Well, what can I say?” smirked Spinner, giving the masked mare a triumphant grin. “I might not have grown up in Blevik, but I’ve picked up a few things here and there.”
“So, what’s ‘antenoctem’ mean?” chimed in Woodheart, finishing the contents of her bowl and placing it on the ground for Littleknight to lick.
“It’s actually two words,” explained Mystaria. “‘Ante noctem’ is Lacertian for ‘before nightfall.’ In the Night Mare’s religion, it refers to the period before she was recognized as a goddess who claims dominion over the night itself as well as mastery of its terrors, which marked the beginning of her worship becoming widespread among ponies, since before that she was seen only as a goddess of monsters, and so needed to be placated rather than venerated. Of course, this is regarded as an act of usurpation rather than religious reformation by the Moon Princess and her allies, since before that the latter goddess claimed sole dominion over the night-, ouch!”
Rubbing her shin where Shadow had just kicked her, Mystaria frowned at the other mare. “What did you do that for?”
“Besides payback for you dumping your breakfast over my head?” drawled Shadow. “I thought that maybe it was a bad idea for you to start talking about someone else’s goddess as being a ‘usurper.’ Since we’re trying not to make any new enemies, I mean.”
Mystaria turned bright red at that, spinning around so she was facing Lex before bowing her head. “I’m so sorry!” she sputtered. “I swear, I meant no disrespect to the Night Mare!”
Lifting her holy symbol, she held it out toward Lex even as she kept her eyes on the ground. “While Luminace might be the goddess of my heart, I swear that I have nothing but reverence for every deity in the pony pantheon!”
For his part, Lex couldn’t have cared less about what she’d said about the Night Mare. As far as he was concerned, the goddess’s standing on Everglow wasn’t any of his affair; he was far more interested in potentially expediting the process of securing this village’s safety. “Where is this temple?”
For some reason, Shadow slumped at that. “Damn it.”
Mystaria, however, perked up at his question. “I have a map that shows where it is.” She opened her saddlebag then, rooting around in it. "I found it when I was going through an old trunk full of my parents’ things. There were actually several really interesting-”
“I don’t care,” interrupted Lex, his patience wearing thin. Whether it was attacking Thermal Draft, needling him about having heard his affair with the pegasus, or simply wasting his time with their endless banter, he was growing thoroughly sick of these mares. “Give me the map. I want you out of my sight as soon as possible.”
Far from having the desired effect, his statement seemed only to upset the group further. Valor was the first to respond, her lips curling in a sneer as she shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
“You’re not exactly fun to be around either, you know,” shot back Woodheart.
“Is he always like this?” Spinner’s question was directed toward Thermal Draft. “Because even if he has a crap-ton of magic and is great in the sack, I don’t know how you can put up with his attitude.”
Lex was about to tell the lute-carrying mare not to speak to Thermal Draft, but didn’t have a chance before Shadow chimed in. “How much are you willing to pay for the map?”
That was enough to make Mystaria – who’d stopped digging through her saddlebag when he’d ordered her to turn the map over, giving him a crestfallen look – send a glare her friend’s way. “Shadow!”
“What? Isn’t this the best answer?” insisted the masked mare. “This way, he gets to go check the place out, and we get to make some money. Plus, we can still tell the authorities what happened here once we get back.”
“That wasn’t the deal and you know it,” sighed Valor. “Mysty said she’d drop her objections to us heading back to Viljatown if he already knew about that temple. Unfortunately for us, he doesn’t.”
“And I’m not selling my parents’ map!” Giving Lex a look as if to make sure he knew the statement was directed at him as much as Shadow, Mystaria frowned at the latter pony. “I never got a chance to know them, and the stuff in that trunk is all I have of theirs now!”
Taking a slow breath after her outburst, Mystaria collected her composure, turning back to Lex and Thermal Draft. “I know we got off on the wrong hoof before, and if it helps, I’ll apologize again for what happened last night. But the ponies in this village are starving, terrified, and have no one coming to save them. I want to do my part to fix things here, and I know that you do too. So I’m proposing that we work together-”
“Absolutely not.” Lex didn’t hesitate to make it clear that he had no intention of budging on this point. “Even if you weren’t ponies of weak moral character, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that you’d be assets when I face that disgusting humanoid that calls itself Grisela again. You’re not fit-”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Thermal Draft, stepping in front of Lex to give Mystaria and her friends a pained grin. “Can you excuse us for a moment?” Without waiting for an answer, she put a hoof on Lex’s chest, trying to direct him backward. “Just need to have a quick powwow.”
Lex, however, refused to go along with whatever the pegasus was up to. “I am not-”
Once again, however, the pegasus didn’t let him finish. “Lex, please,” she begged, still trying to direct him toward the far end of the common room. “Just hear me out-, ngh!”
Just like before, her hind legs gave out on her, and the reminder of how rough he’d been with her last night softened Lex’s attitude as he moved to steady her. Sending a warning glare at the others – one that was largely ignored, as they’d moved into a huddle – he bit back a growl of irritation as he helped Thermal Draft limp away from the earth mares.
“I am not working with those five,” he reiterated as soon as they’d reached their destination, wanting that to be as clear as possible. “They’re useless at best, and dangerous at worst.”
“Look, I’m not what you’d call their biggest fan either,” agreed Thermal Draft. “But they might be useful the next time you fight that winter witch, or whatever she was.”
Lex snorted. “Their performance last night suggests otherwise.”
“Does it?” She canted her head back at the five earth mares then. “That one with the shield, Valor, actually transformed into a bear and took down a couple of those yetis all on her own. The one with the mask, Shadow, was able to get her and Valor out of there when they realized they were outnumbered, despite being surrounded and with very few places to hide. Mystaria conjured up a big ball of fire. Spinner made a smokescreen. Woodheart summoned a huge tiger from out of nowhere. And they did all that with only a few minutes to prepare, and no real idea what they were up against.”
But Lex was unmoved. “I’m aware of their exploits, as well as the fact that they ultimately proved insufficient.”
“They might be sufficient next time around, if they had you commanding them,” insisted Thermal Draft. “Lex, you’re a leader; having followers makes you stronger! You were able to turn a group of foals into a fighting force capable of standing up to Starlight Glimmer. Solvei was the runt of her litter before you turned her into an unstoppable powerhouse. Imagine what you could do with a group of seasoned adventurers!”
“I’m more concerned with what they could do to you, if something sets them off again.”
His retort seemed to surprise Thermal Draft, her eyes widening even as her cheeks reddened. “Lex…”
“And besides,” he continued, “Solvei and I are sufficiently powerful to deal with Grisela. Even if she has additional forces in reserve, I’d rather face them with a small group that I trust than with a larger unit that’s unreliable.”
Thermal Draft moved closer to him then, uncomfortably so. Bringing her face within a few inches of his own masked visage, she placed her hoof on his chest again, this time simply letting it remain there rather than trying to push him someplace. “And I’d rather not see you get hurt again.”
Frowning, he took a step back, letting her hoof fall away. “I told you, Solvei and I-”
“You still got beaten up pretty bad last night, Lex.” Thermal Draft’s eyes never left his own as she shook her head sadly. “You had Solvei with you, and you still received a lot of injuries. The same thing happened with Prevarius, remember? You and her were fighting together – and I was helping too – and you still almost died. I’ve had to watch you get hurt over and over…”
She couldn’t seem to continue, which was just as well, because Lex didn’t care for the implication she was making about his power being insufficient for the task ahead. “It was a fight. Injuries are inevitable.”
“And what if you’d died?” Again, she stepped closer to him than was appropriate. “If you won’t let those adventurers help for your sake, then let them help for mine! If something happens to you, I have no way to make it back to Equestria! I’d be stranded here, with no way home and no one to work on breaking that last part of the infernal contract I signed, and I don’t know what I’d do then…”
Beneath his mask, Lex clenched his jaw, hating that she had a valid point. “Those mares assaulted you less than a day ago. I don’t trust-”
“I trust them,” she interrupted. “Or at least, I trust them more than I trust those monsters that attacked us, which is what we’ll be facing when we find where that witch is hiding. These ponies are at least trying to apologize.”
“…”
Lex didn’t reply to that, instead brooding in silence. As much it galled him, the vested interest that Thermal Draft had in those five mares accompanying them was well-founded. While he still doubted their overall combat effectiveness, they weren’t helpless in battle. That wasn’t something he could bring himself to overlook, not for his own sake, but for Thermal Draft’s.
Leaving her here in the village while he and Solvei went looking for Grisela was not an option. While the ponies here had been forced to turn on their own kind, the fact remained that they had. He couldn’t take the risk that they’d do something to her in his absence.
But taking her along meant that her safety had to be prioritized. While Lex remained confident that he and Solvei would be able to handle whatever Grisela threw at them – regardless of whatever wounds he’d sustain in the conflict – Thermal Draft would be safer if she had experienced adventurers surrounding her. At the very least, that would require him to pay less attention to defending her when he inevitably faced the hag in battle.
And while he still found those mares’ statements of remorse for how they’d treated Thermal Draft last night insufficient, he had to admit that they’d never displayed any sort of murderous intent the way those monsters had.
Besides, it wasn’t like he was the best at judging apologies anyway. He’d badly misread Garden Gate’s display of contrition in the wake of Pillowcase’s death back in Vanhoover. If he was making the same mistake now…
“Fine,” he murmured, his voice coming out thick with displeasure. “We’ll bring them along. But I’ll dissolve this collaboration at the first instance of misconduct on their part, and I won’t hear any arguments to the contrary. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely!” Far from seeming chastised by his warning, Thermal Draft gave a happy gasp, throwing her forelegs around him a moment later. The unexpected hug lasted only for a moment before she turned toward the others, still huddled in front of the fireplace. “You guys! Lex says we’re go for teaming up!”
Mystaria’s head shot up, a grin plastered all over her face. “Really?! That’s great!”
Breaking ranks with her friends – who looked considerably less enthused – she trotted over to Lex and held out a hoof. “Mystaria of Fail Forward, at your service.”
Looking at her outstretched foreleg for a long moment, Lex heaved a long-suffering sigh before raising his own, begrudgingly pressing his hoof against hers. “Lex Legis.”
“I think this is – mmm – the beginning of a beautiful partnership,” moaned Spinner.
“No argument there,” agreed Valor. “Those two – oh wow, this is good! – are alright by me!”
“Hoo thee?” Despite her mouth being full, there was no missing the triumphant note in Mystaria’s voice, the mare pausing long enough to swallow before continuing. “This is why cooperation is better than conflict! Because when you do something nice for someone, more often than not they’ll do something nice for you!”
No one needed to ask what nice thing Mystaria was referring to, as the example she was citing was impossible to miss.
In stark contrast to the miserable fare that the five of them had been dining on a few minutes prior, the common room of the inn was now packed with food.
The sheer amount of provisions to be found nearly filled the expansive hall to bursting. More than that, the quality of the cuisine was something that looked as though it had come straight from a lord’s banquet. Tables were stacked with delicacies ranging from fruit platters that looked as though they’d been freshly-picked, to steaming stacks of thinly-baked cake slices that had some sort of sugary syrup drizzled over them, to a selection of fried potato slices that had been spiced and salted, to pitchers filled with fizzy drinks that were sweeter than honey. It was a staggering display of culinary grandeur, all created with Lex’s magic, and the smacking of lips and groans of delight coming from the mares of Fail Forward attested to it all tasting as good as it looked.
Or rather, coming from all but one member of Fail Forward.
“Shadow, you’ve got to try this!” groaned Woodheart, gesturing toward a large round flatbread covered with melted cheese, now missing a triangular section. “It’s incredible!”
“Meep!” echoed Littleknight, messily gobbling down his own slice of the victuals.
“I’ll pass,” huffed the masked mare, sitting apart from where her friends were gorging themselves. “One of us should refrain just in case the food is poisoned.”
That earned a frown from Mystaria. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t know Lex Legis very well yet, but I’m fairly certain that something as duplicitous as agreeing to work with someone and then immediately poisoning them goes against the Night Mare’s tenets.”
Shadow shrugged. “I somehow doubt he’d be the first person to commit a sin in order to get what they wanted. Besides, if all this food is safe to eat, how come he and Thermal Draft aren’t here having any?”
Looking up from where she was eating what looked like a hay-and-vegetable medley between two circular cuts of toasted bread, Valor rolled her eyes. “Knock it off, Shadow. You were sitting right there when he said that he was going to go make sure this village had a local spellcaster who’d be able to magically preserve all this after we left. That way the ponies here won’t starve while we’re off hunting down that hag.”
“That was awfully nice of him,” noted Woodheart, helping herself to a bowl of tricolored iced cream. “I never would have thought he’d do something like this after what those villagers did.”
But Shadow refused to relent, crossing her forelegs over her chest. “And he needed his girlfriend to help him knock on a few doors? Besides, this whole thing is suspicious. Mysty was just telling us that magically-created fare is supposed to be bland and awful.”
“Ih ihf!” Again, Mystaria’s voice was muffled, this time by a mouthful of fried dough glazed with cherry jelly, forcing her to hurriedly chew and swallow before continuing. “I’m telling you, at Luminace’s temple, one of the jobs of the junior priests was to magically create a meal each morning for the foals in their care. No matter which of the acolytes did it, the result was always the same: plain gruel and tepid water. Nothing like all this.” She waved a hoof at the feast laid out before them.
“Which is all the more reason to be suspicious,” argued Shadow stubbornly.
“Oh who cares?” groaned Spinner, the words coming out between bites of baked artichoke leaves dipped in garlic butter. “If this is poisoned, then I can’t think of a better way to go. No wonder that pegasus is so stuck on him, if she gets to eat like this all the time!”
“I dunno,” mused Valor, leaning back in her chair and rubbing a hoof over her middle. “Too much of this and I’d be worried about getting fat.”
“Oh, there’s no way that’s a problem for our dear Drafty,” smirked Spinner. “Our new friend Lex Legis – generous founder of this sumptuous repast that he is – no doubt has her exercise all of this off every night when he puts the pretty pegasus through her paces.”
Woodheart tilted her head, recognizing that the bard’s flowery language was a sign that she was well and truly gratified to be able to eat so much exquisite food. “You were complaining about that not too long ago,” she noted. “Now you sound almost jealous.”
“Ah, but that was when I thought our horny horned hero was simply subjecting his companion to his advances without concern for her pleasure,” noted Spinner, sounding almost pleased to admit her earlier mistake. “Now that I’ve been so graciously corrected by our resident expert in the carnal arts” – she sent an appreciative nod Shadow’s way, causing the masked mare to snort at the flamboyance – “I can appreciate that he was instead giving her cause to celebrate having been born a member of the fairer sex.”
Leaning back in her chair, the bard took a deep full from her mug, the vessel filled with milk that had somehow been imbued with sweetened cacao extract, before letting out a contented sigh. “I have to say, between his erotic expertise and his epicurean evocations, I’m starting to think we misjudged our newfound associate rather badly.” She let out a belch then, chuckling as she put a hoof over her mouth. “If he turns out to be rich in addition to his other talents, then I may need to ask if he’s looking to keep a mistress on the side…”
Behind her mask, Shadow sneered. “You can’t possibly-”
She was cut off as the door to the inn suddenly opened, admitting a blast of cold air and a swirl of snow as Lex and Thermal Draft entered, the pegasus in the middle of speaking to her masked companion. “I’m just saying, I could have asked them on my own. I don’t think anypony would have tried anything if you hadn’t been there.”
“That theory is naïve in its conception, and would have been dangerous to test,” rumbled Lex, his eyes shining as his horn lit up, telekinetically slamming the door shut behind him. “The ponies here might not be morally culpable for their actions, but they nevertheless acted as accessories to that hag’s depredations. Placing yourself as risk-”
“And there’s the stallion of the hour!” cheered Spinner. “Come join us! It feels weird to be eating your food while you’re abstaining!”
Valor nodded. “Breaking bread together is a tradition for comrades who fight together, and it’s a good chance for us to get to know each other better.”
“Speaking of which, are you going to invite your wolf, too?” asked Woodheart. “I kind of want to talk to her, if that’s alright.”
“And I want to ask you about the spell you used to make all this.” Rising from her seat, Mystaria rifled through her saddlebag. “I thought this might have been an improvement or variation on the ‘create food and water’ spell, but according to the liturgical aspects that I picked up from your casting, it was the basic version. Did you enhance it with some sort of metamagic, or was-”
“No.”
Mystaria blinked at the unicorn’s terse response. “No, it wasn’t metamagic?”
“No,” repeated Lex, “to all of it. I’m not telling you how I did this, I’m not summoning Solvei, and neither Thermal Draft nor I will be partaking in any of this, since I conjured it to feed the villagers here while we’re gone rather than ourselves.” His eyes narrowed as he looked over the earth mares then, scowling at how they were helping themselves to everything. “Or you, for that matter.”
“Here’s an idea: maybe next time try conjuring some manners for yourself,” jeered Shadow. “Or are you under some sort of curse where you can’t open your mouth without putting your hoof in it? Because you can only insult everyone around you so much before you eventually push them too far.”
“Your question demonstrates your ignorance as to how curses work.” Lex’s eyes lit up again, and this time it had nothing to do with his telekinesis. “And the next time you threaten me, and I’ll remedy that gap in your knowledge.”
“So, how did it go out there?” chimed in Spinner loudly, clearly trying to salvage the situation. “Is there someone here who knows a preservation spell?”
“Actually, yes,” answered Thermal Draft, giving the bard a grateful look as she tried to nudge Lex toward a chair. “Turns out there’s a magic school a few towns over, and an old graduate lives-”
“The situation has been resolved satisfactorily,” snapped Lex, refusing to budge. “Now, all of you get your things together. We’re leaving immediately.”
A chorus of protests erupted at that.
“But we’re nowhere near ready to get underway!” objected Mystaria. “I haven’t conducted my daily prayers to Luminace yet! Or studied my spellbook!”
“I was really hoping that we could set an hour aside so that I could ask one of the local animal spirits to possess me,” complained Woodheart. “After how we got caught off-guard last night, I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
“I was planning on working out before we got underway,” huffed Valor. “Trudging through the snow is decent exercise, but it’s not enough to build muscle.”
“My gear needs maintenance,” added Shadow flatly, “and that takes time. Not everyone uses magic for everything; I have blades that need to be cleaned and sharpened, my armor needs to be checked and oiled, and after last night’s round of sweating and bloodletting, a bath would be nice, which means finding a basin and heating the water.”
Mystaria gave the masked mare a pained look. “You know I have a cantrip that can take care of that last one, right? A few seconds, and you’ll be as clean as if you spent an hour in a tub.”
“It’s not the same,” muttered Woodheart. “Cleaning yourself off isn’t just about dirt and grime, it’s about releasing tension as part of a process of self-purification.”
“And because they didn’t have hot water back in your forest, right Woodsy?” teased Valor.
Woodheart stuck her tongue out at her friend in response, but didn’t deny the charge. “Don’t call me Woodsy.”
“While we’re on the subject of preparations, I’d like to look into the future to see what’s going to happen after we set out,” added Spinner nonchalantly.
That was enough to make even Lex quirk a brow, but Thermal Draft was the one who spoke up, her eyes widening. “Hang on…you can see into the future?”
“Oh, here we go,” muttered Shadow.
But there was no stopping Spinner now. Rising up onto her hind legs, she stood on her chair as she spun her lute around, giving its strings a quick strum. “Indeed I can. You see, while anyone who can hum a few bars and knows a spell or two can call themselves a bard, yours truly is a cut above.”
Twirling in place, she struck a pose, putting one hoof on her hip while the other went to her forehead. “For you see, the pony before you is no mere singer of songs, teller of tales, and performer of poetry.” She flipped her mane back then, lifting her chin. “Instead, the lovely mare you now behold is a certified, verified, bona fide…”
She hopped down from her seat then, somersaulting as she hit the ground, and came up kneeling, spreading her forelegs wide as though expecting a round of applause. “…filidh!”
Lex and Thermal Draft exchanged blank looks as the other four mares all waited, bemused.
“I don’t understand,” ventured Thermal Draft after a few seconds of awkward silence. “You’re a filly? As in, not grown up?”
Spinner seemed to wilt in place. “What? No, I’m a filidh. F-I-L-I-D-H. It’s Sylvan. It means ‘one who sees.’”
“That’s the etymological derivation,” chimed in Mystaria. “But today it’s understood to mean a bard who’s undergone religious training, specifically-”
“Specifically,” announced Spinner, “in the faith of She Who Made the World. The creator of Everglow and all of its people. Who sets the destiny of every pony upon their flank at birth.”
Placing her hooves together in a dramatic pantomime of prayer, she raised her eyes to the ceiling. “The Author, who chronicles the stories of our lives.”
Rising back up onto all fours, Spinner stowed her lute across her back again as she gave Lex and Thermal Draft a cocky grin.
“And if I ask her nicely, she gives me a peek at what’s going to happen in the next chapter.”
“And then he called a giant wolf in armor black as night! She howled and she roared and then she leapt into the fight! Lex ordered her to slay the beasts and she fulfilled his will, fighting all the yetis whom she then began to kill! And kill and kill and kill and kill, and kill and kill and kill and kill, and kill and kill and kill and kill-”
“In the spirit of our alliance,” rumbled Lex, doing his best to ignore Spinner’s crooning as the bard – or filidh, rather – strummed her lute in accompaniment to her song, “I should inform you that I have little patience for whatever drivel passes for jocularity among your group.”
“You’re kidding.” Not bothering to look up at him, Shadow continued drawing her whetstone across her dagger, eyeing the blade critically. “I never would have guessed that someone as personable as you had no sense of humor. What a shock.”
“Quit being – one hundred fifty-seven – bitchy, Shadow,” grunted Valor, sweating her way through her pushup regimen. “You were – one hundred fifty-eight – just as confused by Spinner’s – one hundred fifty-nine – fortune-telling the first time – one hundred sixty – you heard it.”
“-and kill and kill and kill and kill!” continued Spinner, giving no indication that she was aware of the conversation happening only a few feet from her, the bard’s eyes closed as she continued to sing. “The sight was so gory it made us feel ill!”
“So, um, she’s really communicating with ‘The Author’ right now?” Thermal Draft couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice, listening the Spinner recount last night’s battle with a grimace. “I mean, I would have thought that talking to a goddess would be more…you know…”
“Austere? Solemn? Dignified?” ventured Shadow. “Believe me, we know.”
Shaking her head, Thermal Draft opened her mouth again…only to close it abruptly, her expression turning distant for a moment as she settled back down next to Lex. “Never mind.”
“One hundred seventy-eight!” groaned Valor before flopping down, apparently unable to continue. Giving herself a moment to recover, she slowly got up, wiping the sweat from her brow. “I agree it’s pretty weird, but this is Spinner’s process. She sings about the recent past leading up to the present, and after a while she puts herself into a trance or something, at which point she starts singing about stuff that hasn’t happened yet. It just takes a little while for her to get into it.”
“Lex finally beat the evil hag, and left her puppet broke! But then his wrath, unsatisfied, turned to the village-folk!”
Gritting his teeth, Lex resisted the urge to berate the bard, silently reminding himself that – presuming Valor was telling the truth – if he interrupted Spinner now, she’d have to start all over again. “Exactly how long does she need to ‘get into it’?”
Valor shrugged. “Dunno.” Balancing two chairs on top of each other, the muscled mare carefully climbed on top of them. Rearing up on her hind legs, she gave a quick jump, grabbing one of the rafters overhead. Grunting as she turned over, Valor hooked her back legs over the wooden beam, hanging upside down. Crossing her forelegs over her chest, she exhaled sharply as she curled upward, touching her muzzle to her knees before straightening out. “One,” she announced, before curling upward again. “She usually – two – needs at least ten minutes before – three – she can make it happen. But sometimes – four – she takes longer. I think once she – five – needed a half-hour.”
“They turned in for the evening then, fair Drafty and her Lex! And heady from their victory, the two had lots of sex! Yes lots and lots and lots and lots, and lots and lots and lots and lots, and lots and lots and lots and lots-”
“You can see why Mystaria went back to our room to conduct her prayers,” groaned Shadow, putting her dagger away as she instead began to work on oiling her armor.
Hearing how loudly Lex was grinding his teeth next to her, Drafty winced as she nodded. “Maybe we should go see how Woodheart’s doing,” she offered weakly. “I mean, you two will listen to whatever prediction Spinner makes, right? You don’t need us here?”
“We’ve got – twelve – this covered,” grunted Valor. “But Woodheart needs – thirteen – even longer to – fourteen – do her thing.”
“That’s fine,” replied Drafty quickly, throwing the inn’s front door open. “I’m sure it’ll be educa-”
“AWOOOOOOOOO!!!”
The animalistic cry made Drafty jump, wings flaring in fright as Lex’s head snapped around to look out the front door, where the sound had come from. Its owner was easily found, however, as Woodheart – having once again doffed her robe, the discarded bundle of leaves and feathers now being guarded by Littleknight – still had her head thrown back, muzzle pointed toward the sky as her beastly howl trailed off.
The odd display became even odder a second later, as the druid began to repeatedly sniff the air before glancing sharply to the side, her spine arching upward as gave a loud hiss. One hoof came up to swat at the empty space alongside her as she started to pace in a tight circle, moving in profile as though about to leap on an invisible opponent. Her tail twitching, Woodheart yowled as she dove forward-
And Shadow Star slammed the door shut, cutting off the Equestrian ponies’ view of the druid.
“How about giving my friend some privacy, perv?!” snapped the masked mare, glaring at Lex. “Just because she’s naked doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to stare!”
The response was so incongruous with what they’d just witnessed that neither Lex nor Thermal Draft were able to formulate a response.
Instead, Valor was the one who broke the silence. “Not fair and – twenty-six – you know it, Shadow.”
“Is…is she okay?” ventured Drafty at last, glancing back at the closed door. “I mean, I know she said she was going to conduct some sort of spirit summoning, but…”
“Possession, not summoning,” corrected Shadow, turning her attention back to her armor, albeit not without one last dark look at Lex. “Woodheart reaches out to animal spirits in the local area, and invites one of them to take up temporary residence in her body, borrowing its power. She mentioned before that it usually takes her an hour, remember? So she’ll be like that for a while.”
“I’m more concerned with what she gives up in exchange for the power she gains,” replied Lex, his voice tinged with suspicion. “Because even if whatever entities she’s allowing herself to be invaded by lack sapience, her ‘inviting’ them suggests that she’s offering them something in return for their compliance.”
“No idea,” answered the masked mare casually, rubbing an oilcloth over her leather cuirass in slow, deliberate motions. “You’ll have to ask her, though she usually doesn’t speak except in grunts and growls while she’s possessed, so that might be hard.”
“Mystaria might – thirty-eight – know,” grunted Valor. “She’s an expert – thirty-nine – about religions. Even – forty – heathen ones.”
Drafty’s eyebrows rose. “Heathen ones?”
Sighing, Shadow put her armor-cleaning kit away. “Woodheart’s religion isn’t devoted to a god. Instead, she belongs to a sect that worships nature itself.”
“He conjured up a ton of food, to show indeed his heart was good! With cakes and cheese and fruits and pies, no one could believe their eyes! It looked so good and tasted great, we ate and ate and ate and ate! And ate and ate and ate and ate, and ate and ate and ate and ate-”
Compared to the Sirens, Spinner’s crooning was all the more painful to Lex’s ears. Fortunately, ignoring her was easier now that he had something else to focus on, though that didn’t mean he was happy to learn what he’d just been told. “‘Nature’ is nothing more than a category denoting natural phenomena that takes place without the intervention of a self-aware intelligence,” he noted unhappily. “Obeisance directed toward such activity should not result in obtaining magical abilities.”
“That’s what Mysty – forty-six – says, but Woodsy still – forty-seven – casts spells,” answered Valor.
“Resolving ‘the paradox of non-theistic religious mysticism’ is a pet project for Mystaria,” added Shadow, shrugging her leather armor back on. “She’s not the first pony to try and figure that one out, of course; that particular conundrum has apparently been giving church bigwigs a headache for a very long time.”
Thermal Draft cocked her head. “How come? I mean, so she can do magic without worshiping a god, isn’t that just whatchamacallit…arcane magic?”
“According to Mysty – fifty-three – Woodsy wouldn’t be able to – fifty-four – heal if that was the – fifty-five – case.”
“Since there are druids who worship gods, the leading theory is that the ones who don’t are having their prayers answered by some deity,” continued Shadow, buckling the last of the straps on her armor before arranging the collection of pouches hanging off of her belt. “But no one knows for sure.”
The masked mare paused at that, brow furrowing before looking up at Lex. “Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be getting ready?”
Frowning, Lex didn’t try to hide his irritation at the uselessly vague question. “What are you talking about?”
Shadow met his annoyance with an exaggerated sigh of her own. “Your magic, moron. Mystaria needs to spend an hour in prayer before Luminace will replenish her divine spells, and then another hour studying her spellbook to prep her arcane spells. You’re obviously a caster of some sort” – she gestured toward his wire-wrapped hoof – “so don’t you need to go pray, or meditate, or study a spellbook, or whatever it is you do to get your spells ready?”
The question made Lex tense up, not wanting to go anywhere near the issue of how he couldn’t easily replenish his thaumaturgical magic. Bad enough that Twilight Sparkle had come uncomfortably close to figuring out that particular limitation during their duel; letting these unreliable mares learn his secret would have been a disaster.
Fortunately, he didn’t need to formulate a response as Thermal Draft piped up. “Not every kind of magic works like that, you know,” she huffed, giving Shadow a pointed look. “I can use spells also, and I don’t have to prepare them ahead of time; neither does Lex, for that matter. So maybe in the future stop and think about that before you criticize other people about something you don’t understand.”
Shadow quirked a brow at Thermal Draft, but it was bemusement rather than acrimony that shone in her eyes then. “Well look who’s standing by their stallion. Hoping he’ll give you a quickie before we set out?”
Lex took a step toward Shadow then. “If you speak to her like that again-”
“If we’re – sixty-six – taking cookies before we – sixty-seven – go,” interrupted Valor from above, panting as she continued her stomach crunches, “then grab some – sixty-eight – for me!”
Thermal Draft couldn’t hold back a snicker at that, only to stop a moment later. “Listen!”
Scowling, Shadow glared at the other mare. “You listen-”
“No, I mean listen to Spinner!” Pointing at the bard, Drafty’s eyes widened. “I think she’s giving her prediction and we’re missing it!”
That was enough to quiet everyone down, with even Valor finishing her exercises as she straightened her back legs, releasing the beam and flipping around as she vaulted down from the ceiling to land on her hooves with surprising grace, ears perked as she looked at her friend.
“The Night Mare’s test Lex Legis faced, seeking Her dark salvation!” sang the filidh, her eyes still closed as she nimbly worked her hoof over the strings of her lute. “But interference from outside left his body misshapen!”
Three sets of eyes turned toward Lex at that. Valor was grimacing, giving him a look of sympathy, while Shadow seemed unusually pensive at the news. Drafty, however, looked stricken at the prediction, the blood draining from her face as she looked at Lex. “That…that can’t be right…it just can’t be…”
For his part, Lex showed no reaction, save to set his jaw grimly as he continued listening to the bard.
“Accepting that there was no cure, Lex found his progress jammed! So then he chose to venture down, the pathway of the damned! The damned the damned the damned the damned, the damned the damned the damned the damned, the damned the damned the damned the damned-”
Her song came to an abrupt end as Thermal Draft rushed forward, slapping the lute out of the bard’s hooves.
The instrument twanged as it hit the ground, coming to a stop next to a food-lined table. Silence fell over the common room then, the only sound being Drafty’s harsh breathing as she backed away from Spinner, shaking.
For her part, Spinner slowly opened her eyes, shaking her head as though coming out of a fugue. Blinking, she looked at Thermal Draft, then at her friends, then at her fallen lute, before finally making eye contact with Lex. Gulping, she managed a rictus grin.
“I don’t think Spinner’s prediction is nearly as bad as it sounded.”
Mystaria’s announcement earned a frown from Lex, not because he found the subject at all uncomfortable, but because the earth mare had made her proclamation immediately after putting a book she’d been consulting back in her saddlebag. It had been the sixth tome she’d examined during their outing so far – having left the inn several hours ago, after the members of Fail Forward had completed their interminable preparations – and he’d been under the impression that she’d been looking for further information about their destination. Now, though, he suspected otherwise. “Is that what you’ve been researching this whole time?”
Apparently thinking his question was some sort of approval of her actions, Mystaria smiled as she nodded. “That’s right! And the good news is that there are a lot of reasons not to worry!”
“Why would we be worried?” snapped Thermal Draft, flying alongside Lex. She’d made the entire journey by wing so far, saying her hips still sore after last night, and had spent most of that time hovering close to him and shooting dark looks at the earth mares. “After all, it was just a prediction saying that Lex would be mutilated and damned. Nothing to worry about there at all!”
She finished with a glare at Spinner, who cringed at the pegasus’ words, causing Valor to frown at Thermal Draft in turn. “Knock it off, will you? She’s just the messenger; she doesn’t decide what her goddess tells her.”
“And like I was saying,” interjected Mystaria quickly, “I don’t think her prediction means what you think it means. For instance, being ‘damned’ is something that’s changed meaning over time.”
Crossing her forelegs over her chest, Thermal Draft scoffed. “This sounds an awful lot like you’re trying to put a good spin on bad news.”
“Just hear me out,” pleaded Mystaria. “The original derivation of the word comes from Lacertian ‘damnare,’ which means ‘to condemn,’ and referred to one who had been deemed heretical to a particular faith. But the definition shifted, likely as a result of people realizing that there were many different faiths out there, and so came to be understood in a different context. Specifically, that being ‘damned’ meant that your soul wasn’t going to a paradisaical afterlife, either because your soul’s numinous inclination aligned to one of the less-harmonious planes, or because it’s pledged to the service of a deity which dwelt elsewhere.”
“Like the Night Mare,” concluded Thermal Draft, her voice flat. “So you’re saying that Lex is already damned, is that it?”
“Exactly!” exclaimed Mystaria, grinning. It was only when she realized that she was the only one – Lex ignoring her, Thermal Draft scowling at her, and the rest of her friends were either grimacing or shaking their heads – that her smile withered.
“Er, there’s also the fact that Spinner’s predictions are non-recursive in nature,” she continued. “That means they don’t take into account anything you do differently after hearing them. Plus, I’m pretty sure they can’t see more than a couple of days into the future anyway, which means they’re blind to any developments that might happen after-”
“Where is this temple?” interrupted Lex, fed up with Mystaria’s prattling. So far she hadn’t raised a single point he hadn’t already considered regarding Spinner’s prediction – if her vague descriptions and imprecise prognostications could even be called that – and he had lost interest in the subject before they’d left the inn. There were more important things to focus on at the moment. “You said before that you’re in possession of a map depicting its location. Show it to me.”
“Wait, so that’s it?” Looking back at him, Shadow cocked a brow. “You’re not even going to ask about the whole ‘your body becomes misshapen’ thing, and there being no cure for it?”
“No.”
After having chopped off his own horn in order to affix King Sombra’s onto his head, mutilation held little fear for Lex now. Even ignoring that he could tap into Solvei’s powers of perception now, his dark magic allowed him to augment his natural senses, albeit only temporarily. Likewise, his shadow-form would allow him to ignore virtually any physical impairment, potentially for hours. While the prospect of being stricken with some sort of permanent disability wasn’t appealing, Lex had sufficient options that he regarded such a thing as a matter of inconvenience, rather than any sort of serious setback.
When Shadow didn’t push the issue – for whatever reason, her cantankerousness had been sharply curtailed ever since Spinner had made her prediction – Lex turned back toward Mystaria. “The map,” he repeated. “Now.”
Mystaria hesitated for a moment, but quickly relented, rooting through her saddlebag before digging out a rolled-up parchment. “Be careful with it,” she murmured as he telekinetically grabbed it. “I don’t have any reparative spells prepared.”
Lex ignored her. While he’d been able to glean certain aspects of exactly where on Everglow they were from listening to the member of Fail Forward, as they called themselves, the map he was looking at now was the first concrete information about where he and Thermal Draft were.
While only a regional map, mostly concerned with charting the various thorps and hamlets that surrounded Bright Night – the magical school those mares had mentioned, and which was apparently only a few days’ journey from here – Lex was pleasantly surprised to find that Viljatown was not only depicted, but was relatively close, being almost directly south of their present location.
Twelve days, he decided, eyeing several of the other cities shown – places with names like Wind’s Rest, Colvenhame, and Arcysus – and triangulating the distances involved based on what he knew of them from research into Everglow’s geography during his previous visits to this world. With good weather and no detours, we could make it there on hoof in twelve days.
But as heartening as it was to know that their best chance of getting home – being the capital, Viljatown’s markets would almost certainly have what he needed to make the tuning fork that his plane-shifting spell required to get them back to Equestria – was closer than he’d expected, that was a secondary factor to what the map said about the temple they were looking for. “The Shrine of the Starless Sky,” he read aloud.
“I know the map says it’s due north of here,” interjected Mystaria, “but since it’s on the far side of the mountains, it’s actually quicker-”
“-to cut through the pass northwest of here and go around,” finished Lex, having picked that up at a glance. Unlike the situation with Viljatown, that was decidedly less than good news. While the tracks he’d bidden Solvei to follow had gone northwest, the fact that there was a natural pass there meant that the yetis and the misbegotten hag leading them could have come from any direction before heading through it.
His ruminating was interrupted as Woodheart let out a chirp, followed by a series of short snarls, ending with her pointing upward. Perched on her back, Littleknight sniffed the air, then let out a meep of his own.
The sight made Thermal Draft quirk a brow. “So…she can still understand us, right? It’s just that she can’t talk while she’s possessed by…whatever animal has taken over her body?”
“It’s not that it takes over her,” corrected Valor. “More like she’s merged with it.”
“From what she’s told us before, using speech feels unnatural for the animal spirit she’s sharing her body with, so she doesn’t do it unless it’s an emergency,” added Shadow. “She can still understand what we’re saying just fine.”
“Right now, I think she’s trying to tell us that it’s going to snow again soon,” interpreted Mystaria, giving the clouds hanging above them a discouraged look. Although the snowfall had petered out just before they’d left, the overcast sky had lightened up only a little, and was already turning darker than it had been just a few hours ago. “I’ve prepped a few more castings of my ‘communal endure elements’ spell, so it won’t be a big deal if the temperature drops, but I’m worried about the visibility if another blizzard hits. Without being able to see the sun, our only way to navigate is to use the mountains, and if we lose sight of those…”
Thermal Draft shot Lex a glance then. “I could probably come up with a spell for that.”
He fought down a wince at the suggestion. He’d already instructed Thermal Draft in how to construct a weather-proofing micro-ritual to protect the two of them from the cold – not trusting Mystaria to use her own magic on them, despite the earth mare offering to include them in her so-called ‘endure elements’ spell – and while the pegasus had been happy to help, she’d still felt compelled to ask why he wasn’t simply casting that spell himself. While she’d seemed to accept the fumbling excuse he’d made about wanting her to practice using her magic more, he still took the exchange as a bad sign.
First Shadow Star had pointedly asked about his not preparing any spells, something that Lex knew virtually all of Everglow’s magical traditions allowed for on a daily basis. Then Thermal Draft had questioned why he was delegating modest spellcasting to her. At the rate things were going, his efforts to conserve his thaumaturgical spells was going to become more and more conspicuous.
But there was little that could be done about that, save for continuing to find ways to deflect whatever suspicions arose. Fortunately, he had one prepared for the current situation, shaking his head in response to Thermal Draft’s offer. “I have a better idea.”
The pegasus cocked her head to the side, but Lex’s thoughts were elsewhere. Solvei.
The winter wolf’s answer came immediately. Yes, Master?
Were you able to rest and recover? From the state of mild contentment that he was registering from her, he could guess the answer already, but he still wanted to confirm it before he put her to work again.
I was, Master! I found two glacier toads, and not only were they delicious, but their lair made for a great place to rest! she reported. The sense of pride that he registered from her then made it clear that she was quite pleased with herself, presumably because ‘glacier toads’ were considered fearsome foes by her kind.
But Lex was less interested in that than in her current location. Thanks to his innate knowledge of where she was in relation to him, he could tell that she was almost at the mountain pass that they were headed toward. Check the local area to make sure it’s clear of any potential threats or dangers. Once you’re finished, let me know and I’ll summon you.
Understood, Master! Do you want me to bring these shiny rocks I found in the toads’ lair with me?
That gave him pause. Gemstones?
Yes, like the ones in the bag Mother gave you, except more.
Bring them, he answered immediately. Now that he’d managed to replenish his thaumaturgical spells, he could start stocking up on a reserve of spell-embedded gems again. There had been less than a dozen jewels in the extradimensional pack that Turid had relinquished to him, and Lex was eager to acquire more.
In fact, he realized, this could help to quell the suspicions of his traveling companions. So long as he relied on the reserve of energy in his circlet, along with channeling modest amounts through his body, in order to cast minor spells into the gems without depleting them from his mind, he’d be able to build up enough of a supply of minor magical effects that he wouldn’t need to be so hesitant about using them. With any luck, that would be enough to alleviate – or at least confound – their suppositions about his reticence to use magic. And so long as he mixed that with his dark magic and the divine spells the Night Mare gave him-
“Lex?” Thermal Draft’s voice drew him out of his thoughts, and he belatedly realized that the pegasus was looking at him expectantly. “So…what’s your idea?”
Taking a moment to chastise himself for getting so caught up in his excitement over Solvei finding a few gemstones, he waved a hoof at their destination. “Solvei is at the mountain pass we’re headed toward right now. I’ll summon her here, and have her lead the way there. Since she made the trip there recently, she’ll have an easier time guiding us if the weather turns-”
Master! Solvei’s mental voice reached him just as he detected a spike of concern coming from her.
What is it?
Something strange is happening. There’s some…I think its some wispy clouds? Or maybe its patches of smoke? I’m not sure, but there’s a bunch of them, and they’re heading toward the mountain pass right now… moving against the wind.
Lex stopped in place, which made everypony else do the same, shooting him confused looks. “Lex?” called Thermal Draft worriedly. “Is everything okay?”
He ignored her, focusing instead on Solvei. Maintain your position. I’m going to look through-
Master, they’re changing direction! Her concern was becoming alarm now. I think-, they’re headed toward me! Fast!
Fall back immediately, ordered Lex. Outdistance whatever they are.
After a moment, he registered frustration from her. I can’t! They’re catching-, huh?! Something’s happening! Master, they’re changing! They look more solid now! Like they’re-, whoa! They’re in front of me now too! Master, I’m surrounded!
Lex had heard enough, and without another moment’s hesitation, summoned her back.
The mares in the group all yelped as Solvei suddenly appeared in their midst.
None of them seemed more surprised than Mystaria, however, her eyes widening as her gaze settled onto the cutie mark on Solvei’s flank. “It’s true!”
Thermal Draft, by contrast, recovered quicker, glancing between the wolf and the unicorn before settling on the latter. “What happened?”
But Lex had more important concerns than his companion’s curiosity, instead using his circlet to let his vision slip into the magical spectrum as he looked Solvei over. He knew she wasn’t physically injured; their connection let him detect her status, as well as her emotional disposition and relative proximity to himself, and he felt certain that he would have known if she was hurt.
But that didn’t mean that whatever it was that she’d encountered hadn’t tried to use some sort of spell on her. Even if she had her own reservoir of dark magic to protect her mind – having defeated Grisela’s attempt to ensorcell her – Lex couldn’t bring himself to calm down until he’d ascertained that nothing had happened to her. “Are you alright?”
Solvei didn’t answer immediately, instead turning her head to the side and spitting out a mouthful of gemstones before replying. “Yes, Master!”
Off to the side, Shadow Star’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “The talking wolf barfs up gems?!”
“That’s even better than a duck that lays golden eggs!” hooted Valor.
“It’s a goose,” corrected Spinner, trotting over to examine the gemstones that Solvei had spat into the snow. “Although now I’m curious what comes out of her other-, WHOA! Down girl!”
No one needed to ask why the bard was suddenly shouting, Solvei having snapped at Spinner when the earth mare had reached out to collect the gems. “Those aren’t for you!” she growled. “I brought them back for my master!”
“We’ll hold onto them for him,” muttered Shadow, creeping closer.
But her words were drowned out as Woodheart came bounding over, yowling loudly as she threw her cloak off – Littleknight meeping in alarm as he was tossed off her back as well – and started circling the winter wolf, hackles raised.
Solvei, of course, didn’t take that very well, turning in place to keep Woodheart in front of her. “What’s your problem?!”
“That opal’s got to be worth at least a couple hundred gold pieces,” whimpered Spinner, not taking her eyes off of the gems. “Same for the aquamarine. The others are smaller, but those two bloodstones look like they’re enough for a pony to stay at a decent in for two months, maybe three, with meals included. Ditto the quartz and the garnet…”
Another loud growl issued from Solvei’s throat as she glanced over her shoulder at the two at the two, making them back up. “I told you,” she snarled. “Those are for my mas-, HEY!” She whirled then, glaring at Mystaria, who had been poking at her flank. “What do you think you’re doing?!”
“That’s an actual brand of destiny.” Mystaria’s voice was hushed with awe, one hoof coming up to touch her holy symbol. “It’s not just some birthmark or a tattoo; it’s real, just like a pony’s…”
Off to the side, Thermal Draft landed next to Lex. “It’s kind of like watching a group of fillies play with a puppy,” she chuckled. “Except I guess this is the Everglow version, huh?”
When all she got from the stallion was a noncommittal grunt, her humor died away, and she fixed him with a worried look. “You didn’t bring Solvei back just because you wanted her here with us, did you? Something happened.”
Having finished examining Solvei for foreign magic – and thankfully having found none – Lex nodded at last. “She was at the mountain pass, scouting the area when she spotted a group of unknown creatures. They’d moved to surround her just before I summoned her.”
Thermal Draft winced at that, looking back at where Littleknight had bitten the tip of Solvei’s tail, inflicting no damage but apparently irritating the winter wolf to no end as she spun in place, trying to catch the almiraj in her jaws before eventually remembering that she had telekinesis now. Her eyes lit up in the same green-and-purple as Lex’s then – causing Mystaria to shriek with excitement at the new discovery – and a moment later the horned rabbit went flying toward Shadow, forcing the masked mare to abandon the gem she’d been reaching for in favor of catching Woodheart’s familiar.
Woodheart herself howled at that, rearing up and waving her front legs at Solvei in a display that looked as threatening as a kitten baring its claws at a mastiff. It was only because Valor clamped her teeth around the druid’s tail that Woodheart didn’t launch herself forward a moment later, undaunted despite being clearly outmatched. The whole thing was only made more cacophonous by Spinner having started to strum her lute, singing a jaunty tune to go along with the chaos as she sidled closer to where the gemstones still lay in the snow.
“I hope we don’t get into another fight,” Thermal Draft murmured, not taking her eyes off of the spectacle. As much as she didn’t care for the mares of Fail Forward – from attacking her last night to embarrassing her this morning to predicting Lex’s doom before they’d set out, the five of them were definitely not on her Hearth’s Warming card list – watching them fool around so easily made it clear that they weren’t bad ponies. “These mares might be a mixed bag of nuts, but I don’t want them to get hurt.”
“We need more information.” Lex’s tone was pensive, not liking that they were already encountering obstacles so early in their trek, but not surprised by it. “If we’re fortunate, one of those idiots will have some idea what Solvei encountered.”
Thermal Draft cocked a brow at that. “And if they don’t?”
Telekinetically lifting the gemstones before Spinner could grab them, Lex called Solvei back to his side with a thought, causing Fail Forward to cease their foolishness. “Then we’ll have no choice but to go in blind. And if that happens, there’s a high probability that we’ll end up fighting for our lives again…”
“Wait, so you were attacked by a bunch of clouds?”
Having made their way to one of the more heavily-wooded areas of the wilderness at Lex’s insistence – the trees providing cover from being spotted from the air if the vaporous beings that Solvei had seen came looking for them – Solvei huffed at Valor’s question. “They weren’t clouds, exactly,” she explained, her eyes drifting from the blue-haired mare toward Lex as she spoke. “Clouds don’t twist and swirl as much as those did, and when they surrounded me, it looked like they were twisting into a more solid shape.”
Spinner rubbed her chin with one hoof. “What sort of shape?”
Solvei’s ears turned down for a moment as she sighed. “I’m not sure. I only saw it for a moment. I think it was like all of us: a head, a tail, and four limbs, but I could be wrong.”
Woodheart barked, tapping her hoof on the ground three times in a slow, deliberate succession.
“I think she’s asking how many of them there were,” interpreted Shadow, earning a nod from the druid, who was once again wearing her robe, with Littleknight planted firmly on her back (and still glaring at Solvei after what had happened before).
“Six, maybe seven. It was hard to tell.” Again, Solvei’s answer was directed at Lex. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find out any more, Master.”
“Information retrieval wasn’t your objective,” replied Lex evenly. “It’s more important that you returned unharmed.”
“Unharmed and with a whole bunch of jewels,” noted Shadow, eyeing the saddlebag where Lex had secreted the gemstones away.
Despite the covetous tone in the masked mare’s voice, Solvei seemed to take that as a compliment. “I knew that Master would want them even before I asked, so I made sure to hold them in my mouth,” she announced proudly.
“‘Asked’?” echoed Mystaria, leaning forward. “You asked him about those before he brought you here? Even though you were miles apart?”
“My Master is never truly apart from his Solvei,” replied the winter wolf smugly. “We’re connected-” A mental rebuke from Lex cut her off, and she cringed, realizing that she’d said too much. “I’m sorry, Master.”
“Telepathy,” breathed Mystaria excitedly as she looked from Solvei to Lex. “That’s like what Luminace allows me to do with my friends, but at a much greater range. And I’m guessing that’s your brand of destiny on her flank, isn’t it? Does that mean she possesses your special talent too? Is that why her eyes were glowing when she used telekin-”
“The important thing right now,” interrupted Lex, gritting his teeth at the incessant questioning, “is figuring out what exactly Solvei encountered.” He swept his eyes across the five earth mares then, daring any of them to try and change the subject. When none of them did, he continued. “Do any of you have knowledge of creatures matching the description she gave?”
A round of inquisitive glances were exchanged between the members of Fail Forward. “Well…” began Shadow. “I suppose I’ll start off with the obvious: ghosts.”
Thermal Draft’s eyebrows went up. “Hang on. Ghosts are real? I mean, I knew there were things like ghouls, but actual evil spirits…?”
Woodheart nodded, giving a low growl that made it clear what she thought of such things.
“They probably weren’t ghosts,” offered Mystaria. “Ghosts, specters, banshees, and similar incorporeal undead tend to have forms that are at least partially-defined. And wraiths and shadows don’t look like clouds. Instead, they look like inky black spots of darkness…”
She gave a gulp as she trailed off, giving Lex an apologetic look, to which he glared at her in response. An awkward silence fell until Valor piped up. “Maybe we’re thinking about it too hard. It was probably just some air elementals or something. Wouldn’t this crazy weather attract them?”
“It might, if this turned out to be an elemental bleed,” nodded Spinner. “Classically, cold is a mixture of air and water, so this could attract either. Or…” Her voice dropped an octave then, and a sly grin slid across her face. “It could be something else.”
“Such as?” snorted Lex, unimpressed by her theatrics.
But Spinner didn’t seem to mind, using her tail to dust off a nearby log before sitting down. “Back when I first set out traveling, I met an old mare on the road. She told me how she used to be an adventurer back in her day, until her entire party was wiped out by…” She looked toward each side of her, as though checking to make sure that no one was eavesdropping, before leaning forward. “The crimson death mists,” she whispered.
Thermal Draft felt a shiver run down her spine. “The crimson d-death mists…?”
Spinner nodded solemnly. “Supposedly they look like patches of fog at first, exactly like Solvei saw in the pass. But when they move to attack, you can just barely make out limbs and a head, with glowing eyes that stare right through you. That’s the last thing their victims see, before they engulf them whole and draw all the blood out from their body, leaving them a husk while the mist – now as red as its name – floats off to digest its meal.”
“Oh come off it, Spinner,” huffed Mystaria, though she pulled her cloak around her tighter as she said it. “The temple of Luminace in Viljatown has extensive records on all sorts of unusual and bizarre creatures, and I’ve never heard of anything in their archives that matches that description.”
“And there’s no creature like that in any of the tales my father told me when I was a pup,” added Solvei.
“I’m guessing you never even met an old mare who told you about that, did you?” added Valor, fighting down a shiver. “You probably just made it up with some of your bard buddies when you were a filly a something; some contest to see who could come up with the scariest story or something.”
Spinner simply shrugged nonchalantly. “If you say so.”
“Come on, there’s no way something like that can be true,” insisted Thermal Draft, shifting imperceptibly closer to the stallion on her right. “Right, Lex? Tell them that’s preposterous.”
“What’s preposterous is that I thought these imbeciles had anything useful to impart.” From behind his mask, Lex glowered at the five earth mares. “I wanted information, and all you’ve offered is speculation and hearsay, to say nothing of a complete lack of any practical advice for dealing with the theories you put forward.” He stood abruptly, his tone turning contemptuous. “Next time, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, just say so.”
Reactions to his denunciation ranged from rolled eyes to upset frowns, but unsurprisingly, Shadow took it the worst, scowling at the unicorn. “Well since you’re such a big genius, why don’t you tell us what you think those things were, then?”
“The sparsity of data precludes my developing a working theory,” shot back Lex. “No thanks to any of you.”
The answer made Shadow sneer. “Now who can’t say they don’t know?”
“Look, maybe we should turn in for today,” interjected Mystaria. “We got a late start this morning, the snow’s starting to come down harder, and thanks to the cloud cover it’s already getting dark. If we get an early start tomorrow and push ourselves, we might be able to hit the pass before the end of the day.”
“Works for me.” Shrugging off the heavy backpack she’d been carrying as though it weighed nothing at all, Valor glanced at Lex and Thermal Draft. “We’ve only got enough bedrolls for the five of us…”
“Thermal Draft and I have our own,” answered Lex, not noticing the blush that crept over the pegasus’ face at that.
She wasn’t the only one, with Spinner coughing awkwardly as her cheeks heated up. “Maybe try to be a little quieter this time?”
“I’m more concerned with the temperature,” cut in Mystaria quickly, her face red. “My ‘communal endure elements’ spell lasts for twenty-four hours, but I have to subdivide it between everyone here. I wasn’t prepared for us to turn in quite this early.” She glanced at Solvei then. “I don’t suppose you could cast a spell to keep us all safe from the cold, like how you did when we were fighting that hag?”
But the winter wolf wasn’t given a chance to answer as Lex cut in. “I’ll take care of maintaining a comfortable climate.”
Disappointment clouded Mystaria’s features, but only for a second. “Okay then. Thank you for that.”
Ignoring her gratitude, Lex began casting, using the reservoir of energy in his circlet in order to retain the spell as he made the necessary gestures and vocalizations.
Mystaria watched him intently, as did Woodheart and Thermal Draft, but it was Spinner who spoke up a moment later. “I know that one! It’s the ‘tiny hut’ spell!”
“He’s making a house?” frowned Valor skeptically.
Spinner shook her head. “Not exactly.”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a transparent dome appeared around Lex and the others. It wasn’t very large, extending forty feet from side to side, but the interior temperature immediately began to rise, the snow quickly starting to melt as a result. The persistent breeze also fell away, unable to penetrate past the magical shell that Lex had conjured. There was even a soft glow from the inside, diffuse and lacking in any readily-apparent source.
“The hell…?” muttered Shadow, poking the edge of the dome with her hoof. To her surprise, it went right through, and she stepped outside curiously, only to immediately turn around and come back in. “Huh. This thing’s transparent from the inside, but from the outside it’s all white, like an igloo with no entrance.”
“The borders of this spell keep out wind, rain, cold; pretty much anything that would ruin a picnic,” confirmed Spinner. “But other than the exterior being colorized, it’s not a defense against being attacked, since anything else can pass through it either way. But The Author knows I’d rather sleep in here than out there; Mysty’s spell might keep us from freezing, but waking up buried in snow is no fun.”
The dig was lost on Mystaria as she glanced around their lodging for the night. “This is impressive. How long will it last before expiring?”
“Long enough,” answered Lex curtly, retrieving from his saddlebag the bedroll that had been part of the treasures he’d received from Turid.
“How come you didn’t ever cast this when we were making our way toward that village?” asked Thermal Draft, using her wings to shovel some of the snow away, not wanting it to melt right there and turn the ground to mud. “It would have been a lot more pleasant.”
Cursing inwardly at her asking such a pointed question, Lex didn’t answer, instead glancing at Solvei. “I want you to maintain a vigil around this area. Let me know when you need to rest, and I’ll take over.”
“Understood, Master.” The words had barely left the winter wolf’s mouth before she turned and ran off, going to check their surroundings.
“The five of us already have a schedule for keeping watch,” noted Shadow, unrolling her bedding. “We’ve done this before, you know.”
“As if I’d entrust our safety to the likes of you,” scoffed Lex.
Mystaria opened her mouth, but this time it was Spinner who came to the rescue. “You know, since it’s still pretty early, this might be a good time for us to exchange personal histories. Even if we don’t all like each other, knowing more about each other will make it easier for us to fight together.”
Thermal Draft nodded. “I think that’s a good idea-”
“The only thing any of you need to do in a fight is follow my orders,” cut in Lex. “Otherwise your modicum of competence will quickly reach its limit, and you’ll just need me to save your lives again.”
“Makwa help me,” growled Valor between gritted teeth. “Fine. You can sit over there and brood like the miserable bastard you are.” Letting out a slow breath, she looked at Thermal Draft. “What about you? I know we got off to a bad start, and that’s on me, but I think we’d all like to get to know you better now.”
But once again, Lex spoke up before the pegasus could get a word in. “No. Thermal Draft is going to be busy assisting me with an experiment.”
Momentarily torn, Thermal Draft hesitated before shooting an apologetic look toward Valor, even as she moved closer to Lex. “What experiment?”
His horn glowing, Lex held up the gemstones Solvei had given him. “I want to see if it’s possible for you to store applications of your magic in these.”
The awkward greeting made Spinner glance behind her, a cordial smile crossing her lips as she watched Thermal Draft finish extricating herself from the bedroll that she’d been sharing with Lex, moving gingerly so as to not wake the sleeping unicorn. “Hey yourself. Can’t sleep?”
Gently flapping her wings, Thermal Draft flew toward the other side of the dome Lex had conjured around everyone, setting down a short distance from Spinner. “Not really,” she admitted, keeping her voice low to avoid disturbing the sleeping forms of the bard’s teammates, Lex, or draw Solvei’s attention, the winter wolf patrolling a short distance outside of the protective bubble. “I keep drifting off and waking up again. It’s like I can’t settle down.”
Spinner quirked a brow, her grin turning sly. “Let me guess: you’re used to your boyfriend ‘relaxing’ you when you turn in every night?”
Thermal Draft blushed at the unsubtle innuendo. “It’s not like that! He’s not even really my boyfriend.” Seeing Spinner’s eyes, as well as her grin, widen at that, she waved a hoof. “I mean, we’re not officially together or anything. We’re just…we’ve known each other for a little while, and we kind of wound up here all by ourselves and things just, you know…sort of happened.”
“Hmm…” Spinner made a show of eyeing Thermal Draft for a moment. “Something tells me you were hoping things between you and him would ‘just sort of happen,’ am I right?”
Thermal Draft tried very hard to keep the guilty smile off of her face, but felt her muzzle betray her a moment later, not able to bring herself to make eye contact with the bard. “What time is it anyway?” she asked, looking at the snowy darkness outside of the dome.
Spinner chuckled at the blatant attempt to change the subject, but didn’t push the issue as she joined the other mare in looking at the featureless night. “A little after midnight, I think. I’ve got the third watch, so there’s a while to go before dawn. Valor will be next, then Mysty, and that’s when we’ll start breaking camp.”
“And make our way to the mountain pass, where whatever Solvei saw is likely waiting,” sighed Thermal Draft, idly pulling out the magic rod Lex had given her. On a whim, she pointed it outward and concentrated, only putting it down several seconds later when it failed to register anything.
This time, Spinner’s smile was genuine instead of teasing. “If that’s what you’re worried about, don’t be. I know that last fight wasn’t exactly our finest hour, but we were caught unprepared. Mysty and Woodheart hadn’t prepped their best spells, and we were going in blind, after which we were surprised by that hag. This time we’ll be ready.”
She canted her head toward where Lex was sleeping as she continued. “Not to mention you’ve got a guy who’s practically an archwizard over there, plus his big bad wolf. And besides, from what I overheard before I turned in before, his little gem-experiment was a success, right?”
The corners of Thermal Draft’s lips turned up at that. “Yeah.” On impulse, she reached into the pocket of her trousers with one wing, extracting a small carnelian and looking at it. “I knew he stored spells in these sometimes, but I just assumed they had to be his. It never occurred to me that he could put spells from other people into them.”
Fighting down the urge to lick her lips, Spinner stared at the gemstone. “So, what happens after the magic’s released? Do you just throw them away, or…?”
“Sorry,” chuckled Thermal Draft. “Releasing the magic corrodes the gem. It crumbles like a piece of coal that’s been thrown in a fire.”
“Damn it!” Spinner slumped in place, groaning at the thought of those precious stones going to waste. It was only after spending several seconds mourning their future destruction that she looked at the stone Thermal Draft was still holding. “So what’s in there that’s worth ruining all that cash for?”
“Two castings of a spell that creates a low-grade force field around a single person. It’s not impenetrable – according to Lex, it has a ‘modest repulsion effect, which is far from true inviolability’ – but it’s supposed to be as good as a light suit of armor. And this one” – Thermal Draft picked up another gem, this one a bloodstone – “has two castings of a cone of fire.” She paused then, looking them over with a heartfelt sigh. “Offense and defense, in case things go bad tomorrow and can’t be there to protect me.”
Spinner rolled her eyes at the smitten tone in the pegasus’ voice. “You know, far be it from me to ruin the romantic symbolism of him wanting to make sure you’re safe before we venture into the unknown, but if you were the one who put those spells in those jewels in the first place, isn’t giving them to you kind of a moot point? Why not give you some gems with super-powerful spells of his own?”
The questions earned her a wry look from Thermal Draft, putting the gems away. “He said I’m not ready for anything stronger,” she groused. “Apparently, even though the spells inside these things have already been cast, it’s possible to improperly release them, and if that happens it can be dangerous for the user as well as those around them.”
“Ouch,” laughed the bard. “Yeah, I imagine that stings a bit.”
“It’s still a thoughtful gesture that he gave me those,” huffed Thermal Draft. “At least this way, I just have to release the spells from the gems, which is a lot faster than building each spell piece-by-piece in the middle of a fight.”
The admission was enough to make Spinner cock her head. “I’ve never heard of a style of spellcasting like that. Which I suppose explains why Mysty kept watching you guys so closely the whole time you were making those.”
Thermal Draft’s eyebrows went up. “Is that what her deal was? I thought it was because Lex was using gems instead of scrolls. That’s how she made it sound, at least.”
Spinner shrugged. “The gem thing is unusual, but only because it’s not the repository of choice for most spellcasters. Spell scrolls are pretty easy to make so long as you have the right kind of ink and specially-treated paper, neither of which are very hard to process, or so I’ve been told. But plenty of spellcasters in other cultures use different mediums for that sort of thing. Like, I once met a sea horse wizard who stored spells in kelp strands that had been tied in these really complicated knots-”
“Wait, hold on, back up a second.” Blinking as she gave her head a quick shake, Thermal Draft held up a hoof. “A what wizard?”
“A sea horse,” repeated Spinner. “You know, the aquatic tribe of ponies?”
“The aquatic tribe of ponies,” echoed Thermal Draft, saying each word slowly and deliberately, as though she couldn’t wrap her head around what she was hearing. “Unbelievable…”
For her part, Spinner found Thermal Draft’s surprise as unusual as the pegasus seemed to find the existence of sea horses. “I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a little while, but you’re not from around here, are you?”
Just like she’d expected, the question set the pegasus to squirming. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” mused the bard, her voice filled with false nonchalance. “I was just thinking of how, back when we first met, you didn’t seem to know that Bright Night was a famous magic school, despite having an unusual style of spellcasting.”
“Hold on,” protested Thermal Draft. “That was-”
“And then,” interrupted Spinner. “I could have sworn that, when I was explaining to you that I’m a filidh, your face was completely blank when I said who The Author was. Almost as though you’d never heard of the whole world’s creator goddess.”
“Okay, look-”
“And now you seem shocked to find out about sea horses. Next you’ll tell me you have no idea what zebras are.”
But rather than the cornered look she’d expected, Thermal Draft’s expression turned smug. “For your information, I happen to know that zebras are the black-and-white striped tribe of ponies, thank you very much.”
Spinner turned that over for a long moment, not taking her eyes off of the pegasus as she processed that unexpected turn of events. “Curiouser and curiouser…”
Thermal Draft frowned then, but it was an expression of discomfort more than anything else. “Look-”
“Oh relax, already.” Turning away from the other mare, Spinner grabbed her lute, looking it over critically before giving each string a gentle pluck, listening to the resulting sound to make sure it was still in tune. “As much as I love a good story, I know that not everyone’s comfortable talking about their past. Hell, Shadow still hasn’t told us why she left Blevik, and she’s been part of the group for over a year now.”
Thermal Draft glanced at where the mare in question was sleeping near the center of the dome. “She’s been with you guys for that long, and she’s still keeping secrets?”
“‘Secrets’?” snickered Spinner. “She doesn’t even take her mask off if she can help it. Even when we’re eating, she just undoes the lowest tie and passes the food up to her mouth beneath it. She uses a piece of straw to suck up whatever she’s drinking the same way.”
Thermal Draft’s eyes widened at that. “Seriously?”
“We’ve actually got a pool going about what her deal is. Mysty thinks it’s some sort of curse. Valor says it’s a taboo. Woodheart says it’s religious.”
“What do you say?”
“How can I put this? I don’t think all of her strings are tuned correctly, if you know what I mean,” chuckled Spinner. “But in case you haven’t noticed, that’s sort of the norm in our group. I mean, Mysty’s more sheltered than I thought anyone could ever be. Woodheart’s always getting naked in front of everyone. Valor thinks more like a sun cat than a pony. Shadow’s got her mask. And I’m, well…”
Her good humor faded away as she plucked the last string on her lute, satisfied that the instrument was in perfect working order. “I love the idea of being able to predict the future, but a lot of the times I end up regretting it when I actually do.”
Thermal Draft glanced back at Lex then, and it wasn’t too hard for Spinner to guess what she was thinking. “Lex says he’s not worried about what you said happens to him.”
“But you are.” It wasn’t a question.
“…Lex is the strongest pony I’ve ever met,” murmured Thermal Draft, still watching the stallion sleep. “He’s stronger than I knew anypony could be. But he just…he always does what he thinks is right, and sometimes its like he doesn’t care what happens to himself in the process.”
She turned her face back toward Spinner then, and her expression was haunted. “You remember how he set off that fireball right in his face when he was fighting Grisela? He’s done stuff like that over and over, and that scares me, because I can see him letting that stuff you predicted happen if he thinks it’s the only way to help someone else.”
Spinner digested that for several seconds before opening her mouth again. “Listen, you heard what Mystaria said before, right? This isn’t like those stories where someone tries to avoid something bad happening and ends up causing it in the process. If he goes out of his way to avoid what I predicted, then it won’t happen. Period.”
Thermal Draft let out a slow breath as she nodded, her wings coming up to wipe her eyes, and the glistening moisture at the corners of them spoke volumes. In that moment, Spinner knew for sure that the pegasus didn’t just have a crush on the dour unicorn, nor was she following him because he was good in bed, could create sumptuous feasts, and was apparently rich enough that he could burn off gemstones in order to store spells.
The poor girl was completely and utterly in love with him.
“Sorry,” sniffled Thermal Draft after a moment. “I don’t know why I’m getting so worked up over this. Actually, no, I take that back; I know exactly why. It’s because we’re heading toward an elemental bleed.”
Spinner could hear the story there, knowing that the pegasus just needed a little prompting. She hadn’t been lying about not wanting to pry, but if the perplexing pegasus felt like sharing a few choice anecdotes, that was something else entirely. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Turning her gaze back toward the clouded sky, Thermal Draft let out a slow breath, and Spinner knew she was seeing memories rather than the night stretching out above them. “One of those things destroyed my hometown.”
Spinner winced at the tone in the other mare’s voice then. “…I didn’t know.”
“None of us knew. All we knew was that the city was suddenly flooded. Some ponies got out while they could; they were the lucky ones. Those of us who couldn’t evacuate, or who chose to stay behind…” Thermal Draft shuddered. “It got bad…really bad. There were creatures there, things we’d never seen before and didn’t know how to fight. Some friends and I holed up, waiting for help to arrive, but…”
“No one came?” ventured Spinner.
Thermal Draft shook her head, her expression distant. “We waited and waited, and things got worse and worse. After a while, I got sick. My friends did everything they could for me…Cloudbank did everything she could…but I kept getting worse. I was starving and thirsty, I was in a lot of pain, and I was so scared, because I knew I was going to die…”
She trailed off then, and Spinner tried to respect the fact that the pegasus was undoubtedly reliving one of the worst moments of her life. But eventually the silence went on too long, and she couldn’t keep her curiosity in check. “So, what happened?”
It took a few seconds for Thermal Draft to answer, her voice coming out quietly enough that Spinner had to strain to hear it. “A hero arrived.”
Spinner put two and two together instantly. “Lex?”
“He saved me,” answered Thermal Draft with a nod. “He saved us all…”
And then she launched into the most incredible tale Spinner had ever heard.
“You know that she’s completely full of it, right?”
Shadow’s question made Mystaria grimace, shooting a worried look at where Lex, Thermal Draft, and Solvei were walking ahead of them, leading the way toward the mountain pass. “Will you please keep your voice down?! The last thing we need right now is to start another argument!”
“Fine,” huffed Shadow, rolling her eyes. “But someone please tell me that I’m not the only one who’s aware that everything Spinner said Thermal Draft told her last night is bunk.”
“I don’t know,” shrugged Spinner, her voice pensive as she looked at where Drafty and Lex were conferring in low tones. “I mean, she had to be stretching the truth some – and she admitted that she wasn’t there for a lot of what she told me – but she really looked like she believed everything she was saying. Which is really something, considering that a lot of the details she dropped made it sound like she’s not from anywhere in the Empire…”
Valor raised a brow at that. “You think she and Lex are from some distant corner of the world?”
“That or another world entirely,” mused the bard.
“Oh come off it,” huffed Shadow. “Planar travelers are like the Legion of Imperial Sentinels. Everyone knows about them, and almost everyone’s got a story about how their cousin’s best friend’s spouse met one of them one time, but good luck finding someone who’s actually seen one of their number in action. And he’s supposed to be a prince too? Please.”
The masked mare canted her head toward Drafty then. “She said they’re here because of a teleportation accident, right? They’re probably from some remote kingdom where he’s distantly related to whoever’s in charge, and they want to get to Viljatown to use the Mythril Map in order to go home. The rest of it’s just her being lovesick and gullible.”
“I’m with Shadow on this one,” agreed Valor, nodding her head. “There’s too much of her story doesn’t check out. If that guy could use his magic to create some kind of gigantic suit of ‘astral’ armor or whatever she said it was, why didn’t he do it when he was fighting that winter hag night before last?”
“I’m sure he’s saving it for the next time he has to fight a dragon all on his own.” Shadow laid the sarcasm on thick, her tone changing to disgust a moment later as she glared at Lex from behind. “First those idiot guards on the caravan we took to get here, now this guy. Why does every stallion think a ridiculous story like that is the way into a mare’s pants?”
“If the way he was banging Drafty the other night is any indication, because it works,” noted Spinner wryly. “But all kidding aside, my guess is that Lex fought some sort of saurian or reptilian creature – something like the wyvern that Valor killed before she met the rest of us – and protected himself with some sort of force-armor spell during the fight. He taught her a spell like that last night in order to have it stored in one of those gemstones, so he almost certainly knows a stronger version. After that, the story doubtlessly grew in the retelling.”
Shadow nodded. “Probably the same for the so-called ‘army’ of ghouls he destroyed almost entirely on his own.”
Woodheart chimed in then, chittering and trilling as she raised a hoof to point to her eyes, then at the pegasus.
Valor took a guess at what her friend was trying to say. “You’re asking about the stuff she says she saw with her own eyes, right? Like the sea monster invasion?” She paused long enough for Woodheart to nod before continuing. “I’m guessing that was-”
“Severance,” cut in Mystaria quietly.
“Right, his magic scythe,” scoffed Shadow.
But Mystaria shook her head. “Severance isn’t just a magic weapon. It’s one of the Night Mare’s Umbral Regalia.”
Spinner’s brows furrowed at that, trying to place the term. “Those are…sacred relics of her faith, right?”
To the bard’s mild surprise, Mystaria shook her head again. “They’re more than mere relics. The Umbral Regalia are living weapons and armor that the Night Mare personally created. There’s an entire collection of them, and they’re considered to be some of her most powerful servants.”
“I have some experience with receiving favors from divine servitors,” noted Valor, her voiced laced with skepticism. “If Lex really had such a powerful weapon – or creature, I guess – helping him, then where is it now?”
“Yeah, that part of her story was really weak,” noted Shadow. “Lex brings Drafty and her friends all back to life, using another magic item that he conveniently doesn’t have anymore, and says that he just up and returned that incredibly powerful weapon to the Night Mare because it backtalked him or whatever?”
“It’s not that unusual,” insisted Mystaria. “Even leaving aside the resurrection issue – and, by the way, magic items with that function are rare, but not unknown; the archpriestess of the Sun Queen’s temple back in Viljatown is famous in religious circles for possessing New Day, an exceptionally powerful staff of life – the Night Mare has a history of lending out parts of the Umbral Regalia, but only for short times. In fact…”
She almost stumbled then, her eyes widening as a sudden realization struck her. “In fact, the Umbral Regalia are infamous for warping the mentality of those who wield them! Prolonged usage supposedly alters the fundamental nature of whoever holds them, making them domineering and ruthless in accordance with the Night Mare’s ethos! That’s it!”
Valor frowned, not putting things together quite as fast as her friend had. “What’s what?”
“That’s why Lex is so unfriendly!” squealed Mystaria, her eyes shining as she put the pieces together. “His antagonism isn’t who he really is; it’s a result of his wielding Severance!” Almost prancing in excitement, she turned to Spinner. “Maybe that’s what your prediction meant! Remember what I said about damnation originally meaning ‘condemned by a god’? Maybe whatever’s going to happen results in Severance’s influence being broken, restoring Lex’s original disposition and resulting in his leaving the Night Mare’s faith!”
“Is that really something you should be happy about, Miss ‘I respect all the gods in the pony pantheon’?” noted Shadow wryly.
For her part, Spinner put a hoof to her chin in consideration. “I don’t know…what about that part where his body becomes ‘misshapen’? That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with what you’re suggesting.”
But Mystaria was on a roll now. “I bet that’s a reference to all of his other weird features,” she gushed. “Like how his shadow always falls the wrong way, or how his horn is miscolored, or how his eyes glow sometimes!”
“You’re saying that if those things go away, he’ll be misshapen compared to how he is now?” The doubt in Valor’s voice made it clear what she thought of that idea, Woodheart adding a chirp of her own as she nodded.
“It’s probably just poetic. A lot of prophecies are like that, mixing literal and thematic elements with no clear distinction,” murmured Mystaria, one hoof coming up to touch Luminace’s holy symbol hanging around her neck. “This is why we’re here, I’m sure of it. Luminace wants us to help turn Lex back to normal while we save that village from those monsters!”
“Great,” snorted Shadow. “Maybe you could tell Luminace that if she’s putting us on double duty, maybe she should look into actually rewarding us for doing her job for her. And I mean a real reward,” she added as she saw Mystaria open her mouth again. “Something we can spend, not virtue or satisfaction or whatever it is we’re supposed to take away from this.”
“Let’s not count our gems before they’re cashed,” cautioned Spinner. “Mysty, even if you’re right about this theory – and I’ll be honest, that sounds like a pretty big if to me – you do realize what that means, right?”
Mystaria cocked her head, confused by the trepidation in her friend’s voice. “That we’re going to save a pony from a curse they probably don’t even realize they’re under?”
Spinner shook her head. “Think for a second,” she pressed, lowering her voice even further. “I’ve heard about magic items that change someone’s personality, and one thing they all have in common is that the victim doesn’t want to change back; they have to be forced to.”
She let that sink in for a moment, and judging from the pensive expressions that her friends all adopted then, knew that they were remembering how things had turned out the last time they’d fought the dour unicorn.
“I don’t know what’s waiting for us at this temple, the Shrine of the Starless Sky,” Spinner continued after a few moments, giving each of her friends a serious look. “But if Mysty’s right, and this place has a way to remove Severance’s influence from Lex, then our biggest challenge isn’t going to be our rematch with that winter hag…”
She paused, looking at where the pegasus and the unicorn that they’d teamed up with were conferring with each other, her eyes settling on the latter.
“It’s going to be us versus him again. And I’m betting that when he figures out what we’re trying to do, he’ll start playing for keeps.”
“Do you have any idea,” rumbled Lex, his voice thick with repressed anger, “how egregiously poor your judgment was?”
Thermal Draft winced. “I was just trying to help…”
“How could telling those five miscreants everything you know about me possibly-” Lex forced himself to stop, choking down the torrent of invectives that he wanted to unleash on the pegasus. Only twenty-four hours earlier he’d been chastising himself for pushing both Thermal Draft and Solvei too hard. That, along with his still having no idea how to interpret the liaison she’d initiated between them, was still very much at the front of his thoughts now, and it helped him to clamp down on his temper. “Explain your reasoning to me.”
Knowing that it wasn’t a request, Thermal Draft bit her lip for a moment before complying. “I thought that if they knew everything you’ve been through…all the good that you’ve done, and how hard you’ve worked to try and help so many ponies…that they’d realize what a wonderful person you are, and that you deserve their respect.”
Lex forced himself to contain his initial reaction to that, which was to berate her for caring so much about something so inane. Instead, he kept his voice low and level when he spoke next. “I want to make this clear as possible: I don’t care what the ponies of Fail Forward think of me. I don’t hold them in anything remotely resembling high regard, and their opinions don’t concern me in the slightest.”
Off to the side, he saw Thermal Draft wilt a little, though he had no idea why she’d be discouraged by that. “What I am concerned about,” he continued, “is them now knowing about our home world.”
This time Thermal Draft’s reaction was to blink and cock her head. “Wait, Equestria? You’re upset that I talked to them about Equestria?”
“Keep your voice down!” hissed Lex, glancing back at the five mares following them. Fortunately, they seemed caught up in a discussion of their own, not noticing his anxious glance in their direction. “I don’t want them to know its name!”
“Why?” Thermal Draft couldn’t have looked more clueless if she’d tried. “What does that matter?”
Lex let out a slow breath. “It matters because knowing that a place exists is the first step toward locating it. Those idiots might not have the ability to travel between different planes of existence, but if they propagate the existence of another world that has ponies, eventually it will reach the ears of someone with sufficient magic to go there.”
He fell silent then, remembering the unknown entity that had started spying on him in the aftermath of his disastrous scrying on Adagio Dazzle. He hadn’t detected any instance of their continued presence since shortly before he’d gone to confront Dark Streak – let alone since he’d come to Everglow – but that that brought him little comfort. Without knowing what had prompted them to stop monitoring him, their change in activity could have meant any number of things, most of them bad. “…even the most innocuous leak of information can lead to disastrous consequences.”
“I mostly just talked to them about you,” murmured Thermal Draft. “I didn’t mention Equestria by name. I think.”
Lex bit back a sigh, wondering if it was worthwhile to explain to her the tactical folly of making those five aware of the greater range of his magic – since he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d need to fight them again – but didn’t have a chance as Solvei, who had ventured several yards ahead, reached out to him telepathically. Master.
Abandoning the conversation he’d been having with Thermal Draft, Lex instead looked toward the winter wolf. What is it?
We’re here. Right up ahead is where I saw those things yesterday.
The news brought Lex to a halt, with Thermal Draft doing the same. Behind him, he heard the other five slowly close the gap between them. “Everything alright?” came Spinner’s voice.
“We’re almost to the area where Solvei was accosted yesterday,” answered Lex, scanning the surroundings slowly, switching between normal vision and the magical spectrum. “Use the rod I gave you and start scanning the area,” he ordered Thermal Draft gruffly.
The mountain pass wasn’t particularly narrow, offering several dozen feet of snow-covered landscape to their left and right before rising upwards toward the peaks that they were passing between. Even then, the mountainsides bracketing the pass were angled acutely upward, but lacked sufficient verticality to be unscalable, presenting challenging slopes more than sheer rock walls. If they needed to retreat from whatever it was Solvei had seen, they’d have options besides turning back the way they’d come.
But that was grim comfort to Lex, who found the terrain to be altogether disadvantageous.
Despite being far lower than the mountains surrounding it, the pass was still at a greater elevation than the village they’d left. As a consequence of that, the trees that they had spent most of the day picking their way between had thinned out, allowing the snow to pile up in thick drifts that were becoming progressively more difficult to wade through. Despite that, the immediate area still offered several places to hide even though it was relatively open; large rocks and several wiry evergreen shrubs that didn’t seem to mind the desolate terrain provided multiple areas of concealment.
Worse, while the slopes on either side of them might not have been impassible barriers, they were still good places to set up an ambush. The elevated terrain would allow for ranged weaponry, boulders, and even spells to be rained down on anyone in the pass from relative safety, even with how the wind was starting to pick up. Nor was the fading light helping any, the heavy clouds and late hour conspiring to offer plenty of dimly lit areas all around them.
The complete lack of magical signatures – both active and residual – did little to allay Lex’s suspicions. The range of his circlet’s detection was only a little over fifty feet, meaning that any spells or enchanted items outside of his range wouldn’t show up when he looked into the magical spectrum. The hostility-detecting rod that he’d given Drafty was similarly limited in how far out it could pick up enemies. Given how open the area was, that sharply limited their usefulness.
As if guessing his thoughts, Drafty looked at him and shook her head. “I’m not getting anything.”
The cave where I killed those glacier toads was further up the mountainside, reported Solvei, glancing to her left. I can lead the way back there now if you think it’s a good idea, Master.
Lex didn’t need to consider it for more than a moment. “We’ll take cover in the cave Solvei cleared out yesterday,” he announced.
Mystaria grimaced. “Do you think it’s wise to camp so close to whatever it was that she saw?”
“Wiser than pushing onward after dark,” answered Lex. “At least in a cave, we’ll be harder to surround.”
No further challenges to his decision came a result of that, and he quietly gave the order for Solvei to move. She nodded once, then turned and bounded toward the mountain.
But she’d barely taken a single leap when a figure suddenly rose up out of the snow ahead of her, their form obscured by the white spray that they flung into the air as they pointed a spear directly at the winter wolf’s throat. “Don’t move, unatattik, if you value your life!”
“Solvei!” yelled Thermal Draft, wings spreading in alarm.
But she didn’t have a chance to do anything as another spear came flying from behind a rock, landing within a foot of her. “Stay where you are!”
More spears landed around them, coming from every direction. “Drop your weapons, omigiji, and remain still! If you try to run or cast a spell, you’ll be killed without hesitation!”
The owners of the voices – all of them having expertly hidden behind the terrain’s natural cover – appeared a moment later. The sight of them drew a round of shocked gasps and surprised grunts from the mares surrounding Lex, who narrowed his eyes when he saw what they were dealing with.
All around them were white wolves with icy blue eyes. But unlike Solvei, these creatures wore clothes and walked on two legs, their forelimbs ending in hands rather than paws. As they slowly moved closer, each of them clutching another spear, it didn’t escape Lex’s notice that their steps left no tracks when they passed over the snow…and a moment’s concentration revealed that, unlike the ones they’d thrown at them, the spears they were holding now were magical.
Standing a few inches taller than the others’ six feet, the largest of the bipedal wolves strode up to them. His muscles were tense, but he wore a smirk as he came to within five feet of Lex, the tip of his spear only a few inches away from the unicorn’s chest.
“Now,” he sneered as his eyes swept over the group, “if you cooperate like good little ponies, you might just live another day. Resist, and we’ll be gnawing on your bones before nightfall.”
He paused then, his smirk faltering as he realized that the red-horned pony was meeting his gaze evenly, showing no signs of fear whatsoever. The sight made his lip curl. “Look at this one!” he shouted to his fellows. “Acting so brave from behind his mask!”
That brought a round of derisive laughter from the other two-legged wolves, who moved in closer as their leader joining them in their snickering, though he never took his eyes off of Lex. “Let’s see how much courage you have when you’re not hiding your face like a coward.” Tightening his grip on his spear, he pressed the point of it directly over Lex’s heart. “Take your mask off. Right now.”
A dark smile crossed Lex’s lips at that. “Certainly.”
A dark smile crossed Lex’s lips at that. “Certainly.”
Without hesitation, he moved a hoof toward his face, by all appearances complying with their attacker’s demand. But the instant that his hoof made contact with the wooden material, Lex made his move, activating the mask’s deadliest function with nothing more than a thought.
With no warning, the mask flew off of his face, rushing toward the bipedal wolf that was standing mere feet from him.
“Wha-?!”
The lupine creature’s surprise was readily evident, his eyes widening as his jaw fell open. Even so, he still tried to twist out of the way, pivoting at the waist as he leaned backward. But it was too little, too late as the upper teeth of the mask scraped across his chest.
In the instant that it made contact, the creature stiffened as a powerful pulse of magic was released into its body, invisible to the naked eye but registering heavily to Lex’s magical senses. Nor was he the only one who felt it, as he heard Mystaria suck in a sharp breath behind him, the sound almost drowning out the soft curse that came from Spinner, with Woodheart growling in alarm.
It didn’t escape his notice that the creatures surrounding them, however, simply looked confused. “Panuk?” called one of the others. “Are you-”
The lupine thing didn’t get a chance to finish its question, however, as its compatriot toppled over backward, the spear falling from its grasp. With eyes open but unseeing, it made no attempt to cushion its fall, nor did it try to rise again after hitting the ground, lying in the snow with unnatural stillness. It was only as the mask flew back toward him – with Lex catching it in his telekinesis and putting it back on – that the sound of gasps could be heard, coming from ponies and wolves alike.
All of them recognized death when they saw it.
Now, Solvei.
Having been telepathically warned about what her master was going to do, the winter wolf immediately leaped to obey, ducking under the spear pointed at her throat – its owner too busy gawking at how their leader had been slain so easily – and lunging forward. A moment later a scream split the air as she sank her jaws into the meat of the creature’s upper arm, causing the bipedal wolf to howl in pain.
As though the cry was a signal, that was when pandemonium erupted.
“They killed Panuk!” screamed one of the wolf-headed humanoids, his voice rising in rage. “SLAUGHTER THEM!”
His cry was punctuated by him hefting his spear and charging, crossing the snowdrifts without leaving so much as a single paw-print behind. But Mystaria was faster, rattling off a quick incantation as she gestured with one hoof while the other awkwardly dug some powder out of her saddlebag and flung it in the charging creature’s direction. Although the gold-colored dust should have been caught in the wind and dispersed, it flew directly toward the onrushing lupine before bursting out in every direction, like a puffball that had been trodden on.
The oncoming wolf let out another howl, but this was of alarm rather than anger. “My eyes!” Despite his sudden blindness, he didn’t stop his mad rush forward, thrusting his spear randomly as he careened toward the group. Fortunately, his inability to see slowed him down enough that Valor was able to push Mystaria out of the way, leaning to the side as the creature passed between them, striking nothing but air.
He went down a moment later, as Woodheart got one his hind legs in her teeth, snarling as she started chewing on his ankle as he thrashed, causing the rest of the group to spread out in order to avoid being hit by the downed creature’s wild swings.
By that time, Spinner had already brought her lute around and began strumming it, and a quick ditty springing from her lips as she saw that another of the two-legged wolves was rushing toward her, spear in hand. “Magic endeavors are brute force’s betters, a mirror of errors dispels battle terrors!”
As the last word left her lips, the air around her shimmered, and suddenly there were six of her, all standing within a few feet of each other. “Okay, that-, WHOA!” The yell seemed to come from all six images of Spinner, the identical voices overlapping as the snarling wolf skewered one of the lute-toting mares…only for it to vanish into nothing as he made contact with it, disappearing like a popped soap bubble. “Ha!” laughed the remaining five Spinners. “That’s what you get!”
“Coward!” snarled the wolf, pulling his spear back for another strike. “Have you no shame?! Using dirty tricks to-, AUGH!”
He couldn’t finish his rant as Shadow, having dived behind the enraged creature, withdrew her dagger from between his ribs. “‘Dirty tricks’ are what losers call fighting smart!”
The wolf staggered back, but the furious glare on his face made it clear that the injury he’d been dealt was far from mortal. Before he could turn to face his newest enemy, however, a spear shot by him, thrown by one of his comrades. The weapon cut through the air, coming within a hair’s breadth of Shadow, but passed by her…only to sink into Valor’s middle, shield-bearing mare letting out a grunt as the head of the weapon buried itself in her stomach, causing her to stumble back from where she’d been pounding on the blinded enemy that Woodheart had downed.
“VALOR!” Mystaria’s scream cut through the battlefield as she rushed toward her friend, a healing spell already on her lips as Valor somehow righted herself, looking more angry than anguished despite the seriousness of the wound.
Lex, however, had no time to worry about that, as he found three more of the bipedal beasts rushing his way. The sight brought a sneer of derision to his lips, and he reared up on his hind legs as he pointed his left foreleg at the creatures, silently calling upon the divine authority that the Night Mare had invested him with. “Stop.”
He felt the wellspring of power that the goddess had granted him shift then, reaching out to enfold the trio in its grasp…and passing through them without effect.
It was enough to leave Lex momentarily stunned, having been certain that the creatures would be vulnerable to his power. While their morphology was markedly different, they had enough similarities to Solvei that he had felt confident that they were related to winter wolves, and so were subject to divine authority. But for whatever reason, that wasn’t the case, and Lex had just enough time to realize that his mistake had left him vulnerable as the three enemies closed in.
Cursing under his breath, he instead turned to his dark magic, intent on raising a wall of black crystals before they bipedal creatures ran him through. But before he had a chance to actualize that thought, the creature leading the charge – presumably wary of being struck down by his mask – barked a command in an unknown language. The word had barely left his lips when he came to a sudden halt, hurling his spear forward as his comrades did the same.
With no time to prepare, there was nothing Lex could do except tense up as the spears struck home.
The first one dealt him only a glancing blow, its tip striking his outstretched foreleg and leaving just a scratch as it hit the barbed wire there and was turned aside, the goddess-given metal not shifting in the slightest from the contact. The second, however, tore through the meat of his right hind leg, sending agony coursing through him as it lodged just above his knee.
It was enough to make him fall back onto all fours, his back leg no longer able to support his weight. That turned out to be fortunate, however, as his sudden repositioning caused the third spear to strike off-center, the head of the weapon burying itself in his shoulder instead of his chest. But Lex couldn’t bring himself to celebrate that fact, instead struggling not to collapse as he telekinetically tore the weapons from his body, knowing that he had two, maybe three seconds to take action before his attackers-
“MASTER!!!”
Solvei’s enraged howl caused the three humanoid wolves to stiffen in alarm, their heads swiveling around to the source of the scream as they reached for the backup spears strapped to their backs. Across from them, Solvei flung the enemy whose arm she’d been gnawing on away, nearly tearing the bloodied appendage off as she tossed the creature through the air. But at that moment her eyes were fixed on the spear-throwers who had injured her master, giving another howl – this one wordless – as she rushed toward them, her size increasing as she charged.
That was enough to scatter the trio of bipedal wolves, more worried about the furious behemoth that was suddenly running them down. Barely two dozen feet away, Spinner let out a breath of relief. “Lex, hang on! I’ll use a healing-, NNGH!”
Stumbling backward, Spinner pressed a hoof toward the bloody wound that had been cut across her scalp, grimacing as she caught sight of the vicious grin across the face of the creature that had rushed her before, having managed to figure out her position despite the illusory doubles clustered around her.
“So much for your gimmick,” he spat, bringing the haft of his spear back in time to sweep aside Shadow’s dagger, the masked mare almost stumbling as the strength behind the parry knocked her off-center. “Next time you get in a fight,” he sneered as he closed his eyes and inhaled sharply, “have your illusions copy your scent as well!”
Realizing exactly how she’d been found out, Spinner stumbled backward, raising her lute like a club to try and ward off the incoming blow. Not gonna be able to get a spell off before this guy-
“Next time you’re in a fight,” shouted a familiar voice from off to the side. “Don’t shut your eyes like an idiot!”
The bipedal lupine’s eyes snapped open at that, his head turning…just in time to see the sudden burst of flames that engulfed him from head to toe, an agonized wail erupting from his lips as his fur and clothing immediately caught fire, causing him to drop his spear to the ground as he flung himself down, thrashing in the snow as he tried to put the flames out.
Stumbling backward as the heat from the fire washed over her, Spinner looked over at where Thermal Draft was lowering the bloodstone gem she’d been holding between her hooves. “Thank-”
But Drafty wasn’t listening, already putting the gem away as she rushed toward where Lex was somehow managing to prop himself up. “Lex! I’m so sorry, I thought you’d be fine on your own! Hang on and-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Lex shoved her away. “Use the gem with the force armor spell,” he rasped. “Then fly up where it’s safe!”
Drafty stared at him for a moment, uncomprehending. “But what about you?! You’re hurt-”
“Do as I tell you!” he snarled, glaring at her from behind his mask.
Flinching, Drafty swallowed her objections, instead nodding wordlessly. Fishing the carnelian gem from her saddlebag and murmuring the incantation to release a casting of the protective spell it had been imbued with. A moment later she gave Lex a worried look, but when he stared back at her without wavering, she flapped her wings and shot upward.
She’d only gotten about thirty feet of altitude, however, when the blinded wolf-creature that Woodheart was biting – Littleknight’s horn spearing one of the monster’s hands when it reached for the druid, who was tearing into the flesh of its leg viciously, a glimpse of bone visible beneath her teeth – suddenly opened its mouth and let out a wild cry. “Natakkunak! Natakkunak!”
“Toklo, no!” shouted back one of the trio that was trying to fend off Solvei, the three of them barely managing to keep from being snatched up in the enraged winter wolf’s jaws. “You’ll get hit too!”
The unseeing wolf didn’t seem to care, a look of concentration passing over his face despite the injuries he’d taken, raising one hand up toward the sky.
And a localized ice storm engulfed him, radiating outward just far enough to catch all of the ponies in its icy grip.
As the supernatural cold washed over him, Lex felt a moment of grim vindication. After what had happened with Grisela, he’d instructed Solvei to use her magic to ward them all against extremely low temperatures. But his satisfaction was immediately undone as something struck him across the face, his mask doing little to soften the blow.
He had no time to register what it was before further impacts fell across his body, striking rapidly and with no pattern that he could detect. It was only when he hit the ground a moment later and felt several round objects beneath him that he realized that he was being pelted with hailstones the size of oranges. Nor was he alone in that, as he heard pained grunts and cries from his comrades ringing out amidst the sudden storm.
But it was Thermal Draft’s pained cry that made his heart leap into his throat, looking upward through the sudden snowstorm – the huge hailstones tapering off in favor of sleet and snow – just in time to see a pony-sized shape hitting the earth.
Biting back a worried cry, he somehow managed to crawl over to where the pegasus had fallen, dazed and groaning but still very much alive. That was enough to send a rush of relief through him, but the sensation fell away almost as quickly as it came.
What replaced it then was simmering anger.
It was time to stop holding back. As much as he wanted to conserve his strongest magic, that was a secondary priority compared to protecting Thermal Draft, as well as the other ponies in his care. Despite having put their enemies on the defensive, these creatures were still presenting a stiff resistance, and the risk that entailed no longer justified his restraint.
Gritting his teeth as he peered through the magically-conjured foul weather, Lex looked toward where the three creatures that had speared him were still facing off against Solvei. Despite her having summoned her black armor over her body, the trio had kept things to a stalemate; each time she tried to bite one of them, the other two would stab at her eyes and open mouth, forcing her back before she could inflict a telling blow.
It was a situation that Lex was no longer content to allow to continue.
Raising his undamaged foreleg, Lex hissed the words to a spell as he made the necessary gestures, telepathically giving Solvei new instructions as he did so.
A second later, a pit opened up directly beneath one of the three bipedal wolves, who yelped in fright as he reached for one of his comrades. He managed to catch hold of the other creature’s arm, but succeeded only in pulling his companion down into the pit with him. Their sudden fall was enough to earn the surprised attention of the third, which gave Solvei the opening she needed. Following Lex’s orders, she darted forward, one paw coming around to smack the final member of the trio into the hole.
All three cried out as they hit the bottom of the sixty-foot shaft that Lex had conjured. But rather than being silenced by the impact, their screams took on a louder quality.
That didn’t surprise Lex in the slightest, however, since unlike the hole he’d created to subdue the mares of Fail Forward, this one was filled with acid at the bottom.
His mind already turning toward the quickest way to kill the largest number of these creatures, Lex swung his gaze around the battlefield, picking his next targets-
“We need to retreat!”
The order came from the bipedal wolf whose arm Solvei had savaged, the creature grimacing as he looked at his remaining comrades, holding his bloody arm. “All of you, take to the wind! Now!”
“NO!” The defiant cry came from the creature that Thermal Draft had burned, snarling despite the burns covering his torso. “We can’t leave Panuk’s body behind!”
“We don’t have a choice!” The voice of the injured lupine was agonized, but resolved. “If we don’t, we’ll end up joining him in death, and then who will bring our bodies back?!” He didn’t wait for an answer, sweeping his gaze across the pass as he looked at his comrades. “Take to the wind! Now!”
But Lex had no intention of letting these creatures go. Don’t let them escape! he ordered Solvei, even as he prepared another spell, this time targeting the creature who was giving orders.
Except the figure, already hard to see through the driving wind and rain, was steadily becoming harder to make out. Even as Lex watched, the two-legged wolf’s image grew hazy and indistinct, as though being viewed through a thick fog. Except, he realized a moment later, he wasn’t seeing the creature through a fog; it was becoming fog, its body changing into mist.
That was proven a moment later when Solvei clamped her jaws around the creature, doing nothing except to stir its image up more as the now-vaporous being rose into the air. A look around showed that he wasn’t the only one, as the other creatures that had attacked them – and, judging from the screams in the pit slowly fading away, the ones he’d trapped down there as well – were similarly transforming, quickly drifting skyward.
A few seconds later, they were gone, letting silence envelope the mountain pass once more.
“At least now we know what Solvei saw yesterday,” muttered Spinner.
“And that they're definitely hostile,” added Mystaria, going to check on Thermal Draft.
Grunting in acknowledgment, Shadow put her dagger away, before going to retrieve Woodheart's robe, wrapping it around the druid. “Anyone have any idea what those things were?”
“No,” huffed Valor, patting her stomach where Mystaria’s healing spell had patched her up. “But for once there’s some good news to go with the bad.”
She punctuated that statement by kicking a leg out, her hoof striking the ribs of the now-unconscious creature that Mystaria had blinded, having been knocked out by the hailstones from the miniature storm it had created.
Tossing her wet mane over her shoulder, Valor looked at the others. “So who wants first dibs on questioning our new friend here after he wakes up?”
“I’m telling you, the smell isn’t completely gone,” complained Spinner, waving a hoof in front of her nose. “Gods, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“It’s just your imagination, Spinner.” Despite the confidence in Mystaria’s voice, she had a greenish pallor to her as well. “Lex and Drafty cleaned the entire place.”
“They didn’t do anything about their pet’s breath.”
Shadow’s earned a soft growl from Solvei, causing Spinner, Mystaria, and Woodheart to wince as they – along with the rest of their team – glanced toward the back of the cave where they’d taken shelter.
Lying on her belly near the deepest part of the alcove, Solvei didn’t glance at the ponies, keeping her eyes trained on the unconscious and tied-up figure of the humanoid lupine that they’d dragged with them upon taking shelter for the night. But in the dim light – brought about by the illumination spell Mystaria had cast on a loose pebble, which they’d then laid her cloak on top of as a makeshift lampshade, so that the light from her spell wouldn’t spill out of the cave entrance and broadcast their location to everything nearby – they could see that one of the winter wolf’s ears was pointed in their direction.
“Sorry about her,” offered Spinner with a weak grin, not liking the prospect of ticking off a wolf that weighed several hundred pounds and could use magic. Especially when said wolf’s master already harbored ill-will toward them. “She’s just, um…”
“Hungry,” cut in Valor. “The rest of us haven’t had dinner yet.”
That brought a pained groan from Mystaria, her stomach rumbling queasily.
After the battle against the two-legged wolves had concluded, Lex had declared – after ordering to Solvei to heal him and Thermal Draft, which was something Mystaria hadn’t known the winter wolf was able to do – that they’d keep to their original plan and spend the night in the cave that Solvei had previously cleared. No one had been in the mood to argue, since between the rapidly dwindling daylight and the post-battle exhaustion starting to set in, the prospect of continuing their march had been a non-starter among the assembled ponies.
To Mystaria’s mild surprise, Lex had then taken it upon himself to use a healing spell on the unconscious creature that they’d captured. It hadn’t been a particularly powerful one – Mystaria had recognized the “infernal healing” spell, which called upon malevolent forces to allow for only modest recovery – but it had been enough to stop the creature’s bleeding and at least scab over its savaged leg, without revitalizing the humanoid enough to usher it back to consciousness. Still, that he’d been concerned for their prisoner’s well-being had been an encouraging sign.
Less encouraging had been the state of the cave that Solvei had led them to. While the winter wolf had explained that she’d found it yesterday, killing the glacier toads that had been the place’s previous inhabitants, the aftermath of the slaughter had still been readily apparent.
Whereas how the bipedal lupines they’d just fought had – except for their captive – all fled, leaving behind nothing more than patches of bloody snow, a few spears, and the undamaged body of one of their own behind, the cave had been in far less hygienic of a state. Bloody chunks of the two toads had been everywhere, and while it was too soon and too cold for any real decay to have set in, the scattered piles of gore along with the stench of blood had made Mystaria gag as soon as she’d set hoof in the cave.
The fact that Solvei, apparently having worked up an appetite, had happily started eating some of the grisly leftovers that were strewn about hadn’t helped.
Fortunately, Lex had a solution. After telling Solvei to take her meal outside, he’d produced a cleansing wand – the sort of trinket that nobles invested in to keep their estates tidy when they didn’t want to bother with an overly large cleaning staff – and had begun sanitizing the place. Although a cleansing wand wasn’t able to clean a large area nor work very quickly, needing to be held over a single square-foot for several seconds before erasing the filth in its area of effect, Lex had telekinetically moved it across the floor of the entire cave, not stopping until the whole place was cleared. Thermal Draft had then pitched in by conjuring a modest wind to blow any lingering smells out.
By that time Solvei had come back from her meal, and had offered to guard their prisoner while Lex took Thermal Draft outside, apparently to instruct her on how to lay some simple protective spells around the entrance.
With nothing else to do, Mystaria and her friends had started to settle in for the evening, and although none of them had eaten anything besides a few trail rations – bags of shelled nuts, dried fruit, and salted jerky – the prospect of dining now was one that Mystaria couldn’t bring herself to entertain. Nor was she the only one who felt that way, with Spinner placing a hoof over her belly. “Please don’t mention food,” groaned the bard. “I really don’t think I could keep anything down right now.”
“What’s with you two?” huffed Valor. “It’s not like you’ve never seen dead bodies before.”
“Dead bodies are one thing,” muttered Spinner, laying out her bedroll and settling down. “Globs of carrion are another, especially when one of your allies starts eating them.”
“Can we please talk about something else?” asked Mystaria, the question coming out forcefully enough that she hoped it was clear that she wasn’t really asking. Woodheart gave a low nicker that Mystaria hoped was agreement, shucking her robe and settling down on top of it, Littleknight giving a meep that turned into a yawn as he settled down against the druid’s stomach.
“That’s a good idea, but I think we should keep it down,” murmured Shadow, giving Mystaria a pointed look while tilting her head toward Solvei. “Mysty, do you have anything to make sure we don’t distract our guard over there from watching over our guest?”
The question was enough to make Mystaria blink, knowing that Shadow was really asking if she had any spells that would let them speak without being overheard by the winter wolf. “…yeah. Give me a second.”
Rooting around in her saddlebag, she withdrew a scroll a moment later. Unrolling it, she read the words off the paper, the text vanishing as she released the enchantment stored within. It was only when she’d finished that she put the now-useless scroll away. “It’s done.”
Shadow let out a slow breath, glancing at Solvei again. “You’re sure she can’t hear us?”
The question earned her a frown from Mystaria. “The ‘silent table’ spell makes it almost completely impossible to overhear anyone outside of its area of effect,” she huffed as she laid out her own bedroll. “If you screamed at the top of your lungs, Solvei might register a faint noise, but I doubt it. Now what’s this about, Shadow? You know that these scrolls aren’t exactly cheap to make.”
“I figured it would be better if we could put our heads together without Lex’s guard dog listening in on us,” answered the masked mare. “You’re the one who said that the two of them are in telepathic contact, right? That means anything she knows, he knows.”
“So?” Settling onto her own bedroll, Valor shrugged. “Why’s that a big deal?”
“She means what we were talking about before we got into that fight,” sighed Spinner. Like the rest of them, she was preparing to turn in for the evening, taking her own saddlebag off and putting it down before pressing its contents together the way she would have fluffed a pillow. “If we’re going to keep going with the ‘Lex is a nice guy who went bad because of Severance’ idea, which – assuming it’s correct, and that we figure out a way to change him back – means we’ll probably have to fight him in order to fix him, we should probably reevaluate that based on what just happened.”
“Like, say, that his mask can kill someone outright,” noted Shadow. Although she kept her voice level, the tension in it was impossible to miss. “No big flash of light, no loud command word, he just tossed it at that guy and then boom! Dead!”
“For what it’s worth, I felt its magic discharge,” added Mystaria, not trying to hide how disturbed she felt remembering that. It was one thing to kill someone in the heat of a fight, but the casual way Lex had dispatched that creature had been chilling. “I’m pretty sure it was a powerful necromantic effect. And the fact that he didn’t keep using it suggests that he can only do so once per day. Probably with some other restrictions, since he didn’t try using it against Grisela.”
“Wonderful,” snorted Valor, laying down and digging out some more trail rations. “So maybe he can dump us in another pit instead, one that does something horrible to whoever’s at the bottom of it. Did you hear the way those things started screaming when they fell in?”
Again, Mystaria had the answer. “I think that was the ‘acid pit’ spell. It’s like the one he used against us the other day, but the bottom is-”
“Filled with acid, we get it,” interrupted Shadow. “It’s kind of in the name.”
Woodheart made a series of vocalizations then, ranging from squawking to churring as she pointed at where Solvei was guarding the unconscious humanoid.
Shadow, Mystaria, and Spinner all looked at Valor, but the latter mare simply shrugged. “What? It’s not like I can actually understand her when she’s like this. I just read her body language and try to guess.”
“So guess what Woodsy’s trying to say now,” shot back Shadow easily, ignoring the sour look Woodheart gave her in response to that nickname.
Valor glanced at the druid for a few seconds before shrugging again. “Either something to do with Solvei, or something to do with that wolf-thing we dragged back here.”
“Real penetrating insight there, Valor,” sighed Spinner, laying back and putting a foreleg over her eyes. “How do you do it?”
“Look, maybe this isn’t the conversation we should be having right now,” offered Mystaria. “I don’t think it’s going to be too long before that…whatever it-, no, whatever he is wakes up, and I’m a little nervous. I’ve never interrogated someone before.”
“Nah, that’s easy.” Valor waved a hoof. “We just ask him some questions, and if he doesn’t answer, or seems like he’s lying, then we make him regret it.”
Woodheart gave an unhappy mewl at that, and this time no one had to ask what she meant, with Spinner uncovering her eyes and looking at her friend. “And how exactly do you propose we do that, Valor?”
“The same way my parents did when my siblings and I got in trouble,” answered the muscled mare without hesitation. “We threaten to shave him.”
Her answer was so glib that Mystaria found herself snickering, her laughter being echoed by her friends, causing Valor to frown. “What? It’s a serious punishment. Having your fur shorn off is a mark of deep shame.”
“Oh, no doubt,” chuckled Spinner. “And if that doesn’t work, should we threaten to make him eat blackberries until his teeth are permanently stained ebony?”
“Well, what’s your idea if he doesn’t cooperate, then?” groused Valor. “Making him listen to you sing for a few hours straight?”
“Ouch, the daughter of the sun cats has claws,” laughed Shadow.
“I might be able to get him to cooperate if I can use a charm spell on him,” offered Mystaria, the last of her giggles dying away. “But that can be tough to pull off if we’re threatening him.”
“If that’s the case, we may want to have Lex go somewhere else and let us talk to the guy,” noted Spinner, her expression turning serious. “Actually, we might want him to do that anyway. I’m sure he’s got his own ideas for how to make that wolf-person talk, and I’m in no hurry to find out what they are.”
Valor’s expression was troubled then. “If he tries to torture him…”
“That’s not going to happen,” answered Shadow, her voice filled with steel. “I don’t care what kind of magic he’s got. If he does that, I’m stepping in.”
Woodheart barked in agreement, and Valor and Spinner nodded, the latter looking over at Mystaria when she didn’t offer her own support of Shadow’s statement. “Mysty?”
“I agree that torture is off the table,” replied Mystaria after a long moment. “But…I don’t think we should assume that it’ll come down to a fight between us and him. And I don’t just mean over what to do about the captive we’ve taken.” She looked at each of her friends then, her hoof coming up to touch her holy symbol. “The battle we were in just now was the second time we risked our lives together with Lex and his people, but we’re still talking like it’s only a matter of time before he becomes our enemy again. Doesn’t that feel wrong to you?”
“Just because we’re working with him, doesn’t mean we’re on the same side,” replied Shadow. “Look, I’ll admit that we didn’t exactly make a good first impression, but Valor’s apologized over and over again for what happened. And so have you, for that matter, and he’s still acting like we’re his worst enemies. So yeah, we should expect him to treat us that way and plan accordingly.”
“Plus, you’re the one who’s convinced that he’s not in his right mind because of the Night Mare’s umbral whatever-it’s-called,” added Valor. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly comfortable around someone that powerful who’s brains are twisted, even if it’s by a goddess.”
“And changing him back means a fight, Mysty,” concluded Spinner. “I’m sorry, but can you really see him just smiling and saying ‘sure, please fix my head,’ after being told that we think he’s not in his right mind, and that we want to undo what’s happened to him? Because I can’t.”
“I know, I just…” Biting her lip as she rubbed the symbol of Luminace hanging around her neck, Mystaria shook her head. “I just think we should try talking to him. Not necessarily about Severance, but about anything, the way friends do. Maybe if we can convince him that we’re not his enemies, we can all stop acting like it’s only a matter of time until we fight him again. And…”
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and holding it for a few seconds before releasing it. “And you're right that my theory about Lex being the way he is because of Severance is just a theory. It might not be correct.”
“You said you were sure-”
“I know.” Holding up a hoof to forestall any more comments from her friends, Mystaria opened her eyes, trying not to look as chastised as she felt. “I know I said I was certain that must be what happened, and that’s why Luminace sent us here. But that was my excitement over the religious significance of such a thing getting the better of me, just like it did before…”
Woodheart cocked her head, giving an inquisitive murr as the rest of her friends exchanged worried glances.
“Is this about that thing your temple said you’re doing?” asked Valor. “A sap-sickle or whatever it was?”
“A sabbatical,” corrected Mystaria miserably. “And yes, it is. I was told to take one after letting my enthusiasm run away with me, just like I did about Lex. The result is that we're all here risking our lives now, and I don’t want to make that mistake again.”
Spinner raised a brow. “Wait, so when we were looking to raise some cash for the festival, and you suggested checking out the temple that’s up here, it wasn’t just because of what you’d found in your parents’ old trunk?”
“No. Well yes, but there’s more to it than that.” Finally releasing her holy symbol, Mystaria rolled over, staring up at the roof of the cave so she wouldn’t have to look any of her friends in the eye. “A little while ago, I wrote a treatise on the nature of Luminace’s divinity. It’s the sort of thing we do all the time, in order to demonstrate our knowledge of her faith and show that we’re ready to advance in the church hierarchy. In my case, I wrote that, as goddess of magic, Luminace theoretically had the power to deny the other gods the ability to grant divine magic to their faithful.”
This time both of Spinner’s eyebrows rose. “Wait, really? Wow, so you basically said she was the most powerful goddess in the pantheon, huh?”
“NO! I didn’t!” Mystaria sat bolt upright then, her jaw clenched. “That was never what I meant! It was purely an investigation into a theurgical aspect of her divine portfolio! It wasn’t meant to be any sort of suggestion that she had power over the other gods or their worshipers!”
“But someone else didn’t see it that way, I’m guessing?” Shadow’s voice made it clear she already knew the answer.
Mystaria nodded, her expression sour. “It’s not everyday you get personally berated by the head of your diocese,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize at the time that if the other churches had gotten wind of what I’d written, it would have stirred up trouble, and I probably would have been punished a lot more harshly in order to appease them. As it was, I was told to go on sabbatical ‘until such a time as I gained a greater understanding as to why friendship, rather than magic, is the source of Luminace’s grace.’ Since I’d just come across my parents’ trunk right before that, taking a trip seemed like a good idea. That and…”
Turning back over, she fished around in her saddlebag for a moment, eventually withdrawing a tattered old notebook. “I wanted to stop at Bright Night, since the headmistress emeritus there might be able to fill in some of the gaps in my father’s journal.”
This time, the round of looks that were exchanged were of confusion rather than concern. “Why would some old lady at that magic school be able to tell you anything about your dad?” asked Valor.
“Wait, hold on a second.” Spinner held out a hoof, shaking her head in disbelief. “You’re saying that your grandmother runs Bright Night?”
“She used to,” sighed Mystaria. “She’s retired now. That’s what ‘emeritus’ means. But my dad’s journal makes it sound like she’s still a bigshot there. Or at least, she was when he and my mom left…”
She finished that by tapping the tattered notebook in question, looking at it with a troubled expression, which was enough to make Valor frown in confusion. “You don’t sound very happy to have found one of your relatives. Or are you worried that your grandmother might have died already?”
Shadow gave the muscled mare a flat look. “Real tactful there, Valor.”
Mystaria shook her head. “It’s not that. Well, I guess part of it is. But that’s not what I’m worried about; you don’t get to be headmistress of a place like Bright Night unless you’re a spellcaster of considerable ability, and when you’re capable of calling on that much power, there are supposed to be options for delaying the inevitable.”
“Hm, that’s a good point.” Closing her eyes, Spinner nodded sagely. “There are lots, and I mean lots, of stories about old wizards, witches, and sorcerers who’ve used their magic to live far beyond their years. Of course, most of those involve them delving into some sort of forbidden practice, like demonology, alienism, necromancy, blood magic-, ow!”
“Not helping, Spinner,” huffed Shadow, retracting her hoof from the back of her friend’s head.
For her part, Spinner had the grace to look embarrassed. “But they’re not all bad!” she hastily corrected. “Queen Iliana has lived for centuries, and everyone knows she’s as saintly as they come!”
Mystaria couldn’t help but giggle a little. “Thanks, you guys. But really, that’s not what was making me anxious.”
Woodheart churred, and while none of them could understand her in the slightest, the inquisitive tone in her voice made it clear that she was asking what had been on Mystaria’s mind.
Her smile fading a little, Mystaria turned the pages of her father’s journal. “According to what my dad wrote in here, he and my mom left Bright Night while she – my mom, I mean – was pregnant with me, after the two of them got into some sort of huge fight with my grandmother.”
Valor cocked her head at that. “But that has nothing to do with you.”
Mystaria shook her head. “This wasn’t just some argument. Listen to what my dad wrote.”
Coming to the page she’d been looking for, she read it out loud. “‘I hope that when that miserable old bitch finally gets what’s coming to her, her punishment doesn’t stop at simply dying in agony. When the black sludge that she calls her heart stops beating, I want demons to come for her twisted soul and drag it to the very bottom of the Abyss, where she can spend eternity screaming for mercy that will never come. And I swear to any gods who’re listening that if Perennial Stock – I’ll never again call her Mother – ever comes near my family again, I’ll be the one to deliver her to that fate.’”
Grimacing as though the words left a foul taste in her mouth, Mystaria’s ears folded back as she looked at the shocked faces of her friends. “That was my first reaction when I read that, too. He never says exactly what happened, but for him to be that upset…”
It was Shadow who broke the awkward silence then, moving over to sit closer to Mystaria. “Why didn’t you tell us about all this when you suggested we come up here?”
Unable to meet the other mare’s gaze, Mystaria kept her eyes on the ground. “In his journal, my dad says that I was born only a few weeks after they left Bright Night, so my grandmother had to know I was on the way. But when my mom and dad died just a few months later, she never came looking for me…”
Seeing what Mystaria was leading toward, Spinner gave her a sympathetic look. “Mysty, that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe she didn’t know how to find you.”
“She ran one of the most prominent magic schools in the Empire, even if it is infamous,” laughed Mystaria hollowly. “I think that if she really wanted to, she could have figured it out.” Shaking her head, she couldn’t hold back a sniffle. “I know you might be right, that there are a lot of reasons why she’s never showed up. But I keep thinking that, if she was as mad at my dad as he was at her, maybe…maybe she doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
Her lip quivering, Mystaria managed to drag her eyes upward, brimming with unshed tears as she gave her friends an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, you guys. I didn’t mean to keep all this a secret. It’s just that you were all so excited about getting some money to enjoy the festival…I didn’t want to burden you all with my problems.”
That was all Woodheart could take, a heartbroken cry escaping the druid’s lips as she leaped at Mystaria, wrapping her up in a hug…one that was interrupted for only a moment as Shadow forced the possessed pony’s robe back around her. “How many times do we have to tell you, no naked hugs!” huffed the masked mare. “It sends the wrong message!”
“I think we all understand what she means loud and clear this time,” murmured Spinner, moving in to wrap her hooves around Mystaria from the other side. “I know I do.”
“Me too,” added Valor, joining the group embrace.
“I swear, you’re all too softhearted for your own good,” muttered Shadow, though the words lacked any real impact since she joined in the group hug as she said them.
It was only after they eventually released each other that Spinner, wiping her eyes, let out a sharp exhalation. “Okay, that settles it! Mysty, on behalf of the group, I nominate you to be the one to go talk to Lex!”
Blinking at the sudden pronouncement, Mystaria found herself momentarily at a loss. “Huh?”
“She’s right,” interjected Valor. “It should definitely be you.”
“Wait, what-”
“I agree also,” added Shadow.
“I don’t under-”
Woodheart, going back over to where Littleknight had curled up near the wall of the cave, gave a single bark and nodded.
“And that makes it unanimous.” Standing up, Spinner pulled Mystaria up as well, spinning her around to point her toward the mouth of the cave. “Okay, go get him, girl!”
“Hang on a second!” Looking completely baffled now, Mystaria looked her friends over, trying to figure out what was happening. “This isn’t unanimous, I don’t-, will someone please tell me what’s going on?!”
Sighing, Valor stood up as well, putting a foreleg around Mystaria’s shoulders. “Look, we get that this thing with your grandmother is bothering you. But right now, you can’t do anything about that. So maybe you’ll feel better if you focus on what you can do, which in this case is making sure that the dark wizard – or whatever he is – we’ve thrown in with knows that we’re not going to let him torture anyone.”
“Besides,” added Spinner, “out of all of us you’re best suited for the task anyway. I mean, you have the most in common with the guy, since you’re both arcane spellcasters who’re deeply religious. Not to mention that if you can figure out a way to become chummy with someone as prickly as Lex, it’ll dovetail nicely with that whole ‘gain a greater understanding as to why friendship, rather than magic, is the source of Luminace’s grace’ mission that you’re on sabbatical for. Once the festival is over, you can go back to Luminace’s temple with your head held high!”
“And even if you can’t make friends with a bastard like him,” chimed in Shadow, “it’ll still be good practice just in case your grandmother turns out to be as awful as your dad said.”
“You guys…” Touched by how considerate her friends were being, Mystaria felt herself starting to tear up again.
“Also, try to butter Lex up enough that he’ll conjure some of that incredible food again, would you?” smirked Spinner. “My stomach’s finally settling down, and I’m starting to feel kind of hungry.”
“Even better, get him to teach you how to cast that!” Valor couldn’t help but sound excited about the idea. “Then we can eat that good every day!”
That was enough to make Mystaria snort in amusement. “You do remember that I haven’t even mastered the basic version of that spell yet, right? There’s no way I could do whatever he’s doing to enhance it so much.”
“Then at least get him to stick a few castings of it in those gems of his,” offered Shadow. “That way you’ll be able to examine them at your leisure. Besides, even if the food isn’t poisoned, I’d still trust it more if you looked that spell over first.”
Woodheart chirped what sounded like some sort of birdcall, before opening her mouth and gesturing to it, then toward the entrance of the cave.
Still chuckling, Mystaria held up a hoof in surrender. “I’ll see what I can do. Just be careful, okay? The ‘silent table’ spell I used to keep our conversation private is going to wear off in less than a minute, so please don’t trash-talk the pony I’m going to be trying to befriend, okay? It’s like Shadow said: if Solvei hears anything she doesn’t like, she’ll probably report it to Lex.” Her smile faded a little as a new thought came to her then. “In fact, she’s almost certainly told him that we’ve deliberately taken precautions to keep her from overhearing what we’re saying now. That’s probably making him suspicious.”
“All the more reason for you to get out there and chat him up,” encouraged Spinner. “So get going! Show him just how amicable an up-and-coming nun of Luminace can be!”
“But don’t forget to tell Thermal Draft to come back inside before you try and strike up a conversation with Lex,” advised Valor. “That way you won’t have to worry about her running interference while the two of you are talking.”
Shadow shook her head. “That’s a bad idea. It’ll make Mysty look like she’s talking to him about something she doesn’t want the pegasus to hear. A jealous girlfriend is a problem we don’t need.”
Valor scoffed. “She was the one who pushed him to work with us. That’s not something an insecure mare would do.”
“That’s because Lex has made it plain that he hates our guts,” countered Shadow. “If Mysty starts mending fences, his squeeze might start to get worried.”
“You know what? I can use a quick augury.” Pulling out her lute, Spinner gave it a strum. “It won’t be a full look into the future, and so won’t be quite as accurate, but a quick glance at what will happen if Mysty asks if she can talk to Lex in private shouldn’t be too-, hey! Quit it!”
Her yelling had no effect on Littleknight as the almiraj – tired of his attempts to fall sleep being interrupted – snatched the neck of her lute in his jaws and yanked on it, leaving Spinner cursing as she fumbled to maintain her hold on the instrument.
The sight was ridiculous enough that Mystaria burst into laughter, her earlier amusement at her friends’ antics returning tenfold now. It was only when she’d managed to get her guffawing under control that she shook her head, a warm feeling spreading through her chest. “I feel like an idiot now,” she confessed.
Looking up from where she was watching Woodheart and Valor help Spinner recover her lute from Littleknight, Shadow raised a brow. “What’re you talking about?”
Giving the masked mare a smile, Mystaria gestured at her and the others. “I was so worried about meeting my grandmother I forgot that, no matter what happens with her, I still have a family.”
Mystaria spotted Lex and Thermal Draft as soon as she exited the mouth of the cave.
The two of them were standing a few dozen feet away from the entrance, barely visible as the snow caught the feeble remnants of what little remaining daylight had made it through the cloud cover. Even that was fading fast now, with full dark nearly upon them. Despite that, Lex’s shadow was still visible in the gloom, stretching over the snow and reaching toward the cave as though eager to attack the dwellers within.
Or as if it wants company, decided Mystaria, wanting to banish any negativity toward the unicorn from her thoughts as she made her way toward the pair. How I approach them sets the tone for the entire conversation. A warm and friendly greeting, maybe a compliment or two, and then we can segue into a productive exchange of ideas about what to do with our prison- “Erk!”
Her internal monologue was interrupted as a loud ringing – as though someone were waving a bell – erupted from right in front of her, causing her to skid to a halt in surprise since the noise had no apparent source.
But it had a very clear effect as Lex and Thermal Draft both turned their attention her way. Lex scowled at the sight of her, but Thermal Draft let out a whoop. “It worked!”
“Its primary function worked,” corrected Lex curtly. “The password feature to bypass its activation remains untested.”
“Oh, I know this one!” blurted Mystaria as she realized what was going on. “This is the ‘alarm’ spell, right? They use this a lot at Luminace’s temple back in Viljatown.” She grinned as a memory came to her then. “I could never figure out why, whenever I tried to sneak into the restricted book section, I always got caught. It turned out that one of the junior acolytes was tasked with maintaining a casting of this spell around the entrance, except they used the mental signal when it was tripped rather than the audible-”
“What do you want?” interrupted Lex, positioning himself so he was standing directly across from her, as though he expected her to challenge him to a duel or something.
While not unexpected, his aggressive demeanor was still off-putting; fortunately, Thermal Draft came to Mystaria’s rescue. “Aw, c’mon Lex, don’t be like that. I bet she’s just come to tell us that wolf-thing we captured is starting to come around or something.”
“If there was any news regarding that creature, Solvei would have informed me,” snapped Lex, before returning his gaze to Mystaria. “You’re interrupting our efforts to secure this location. State whatever business brought you out here, then go back inside.”
Struggling to maintain her positive demeanor in the face of Lex’s unabashed negativity, Mystaria fumbled for a response. “I, er…I just wanted to, um, say that…” Inspiration struck then, as his utilitarian focus on defense reminded her of something else. “That your tactical advice was brilliant. We probably would have taken a lot more of a beating if you hadn’t given us those pointers.”
While she and her friends had spent most of the day talking about what Thermal Draft had told Spinner the night before, that hadn’t been the only subject to have been discussed. Shortly after they’d broken camp that morning, Lex had taken it upon himself to start giving them combat advice based on what he’d seen of their abilities. While most of the rest of her friends had been indignant at his presuming to lecture them despite their having a number of successful – or at least, not fatal – adventures under their collective belts already, Mystaria had to admit that most of his advice had been well-reasoned.
And telling him that now would hopefully be the way to ease Lex out of his hostile stance. After all, everyone liked receiving compliments, right? “Having the spellcasters focus on defense and impeding our enemies’ ability to fight effectively, while our physical combatants harried any attackers who seemed like they’d overcome those tactics, all so you and Solvei could focus on dishing out major damage without worrying about the rest of us was absolutely the right strategy. I just wanted to let you know that it was recognized and appreciated.”
Thermal Draft beamed, as though she’d been the one complimented, but Lex’s expression didn’t change. “Considering its source, I find that statement to be of questionable veracity.”
Mystaria blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I also told you that, unless someone was dealt a wound of life-threatening severity, or we found ourselves in a drawn-out conflict and had sufficient cover, healing should be deprioritized in favor of defense,” noted Lex coldly. “And yet when Valor was injured, you immediately used curative magic on her.”
“Hold on!” Mystaria wanted this to be a pleasant conversation, and she had come out here prepared to give ground on any number of topics in order to establish an amiable atmosphere. But this was something she couldn’t agree to. “She’d just taken a spear to the stomach! I couldn’t ignore that!”
“You weren’t supposed to ignore it,” retorted Lex. “You were supposed to understand that since she was in no immediate danger of dying, the greater priority was to prevent her from taking further wounds rather than undoing that one. Your inability to recognize that put her, as well as the rest of us, in greater danger.”
“You mean like when you stood up and just told three of those things to stop? The result of which was that you almost got skewered?” shot back Mystaria. “Because whatever that was you were doing, it wasn’t very effective at keeping us out of greater danger, and come to think of it, what were you doing, anyway? I didn’t sense any magic, which means that wasn’t some sort of command spell, so what-”
“I employed a tactic, and it didn’t work,” growled Lex through clenched teeth. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Okay, maybe we should all take a breather,” cut in Thermal Draft. “Lex, maybe it would be a good idea to cast that spell that makes food and water? I’m actually getting pretty hungry. If you go back inside and get started on it, I’ll stay here with Mystaria, and we-”
“Absolutely not!” Mystaria had to resist the urge to take a step back as Lex’s eyes changed color then, his sclera becoming a brilliant green as dark purple flames erupted from their outer corners. In the fading light, and with him still wearing his skull mask, the sight was only slightly less intimidating than when she’d first seen it a few days ago. “After what happened the last time I left you alone with those unscrupulous ponies, I’m not doing it again!”
Mystaria gaped. He was still mad about that? How many times-
“Hey.”
Moving so that she stood directly in front of Lex, Thermal Draft’s voice was soft. “I’m okay,” she murmured, taking a hesitant step forward. When he didn’t step back, she moved in closer, nuzzling him. “I know that you’re worried about me, and I know that I haven’t exactly helped make things better. But I’m not upset about what happened with them anymore, okay?”
“You don’t have to be.” Despite the quiet pleading on the pegasus’ part, Lex’s voice had softened only a little. Even so, his eyes changed back to normal. “I am.”
The breath that Drafty let out then was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Honestly…they predict that you’ll be disfigured and damned, and you’re less angry about that than them having bullied me a little…” She looked like she was going to say more, but suddenly seemed to remember that Mystaria was there, glancing back at the earth mare self-consciously.
For her part, Mystaria felt her anger draining away as she watched the two of them confer. What am I doing? She’d come out here intent on repairing their group’s relationship with Lex, and instead she’d been on the verge of making it worse. She’d let herself be goaded by his acrimoniousness, overlooking what should have been blatantly obvious: that he was apparently worried sick about his girlfriend. And if even half of what Drafty had told Spinner was true, then his aggressiveness toward anything he perceived as a possible threat wasn’t surprising, given how much strife he’d been through.
“That wasn’t just bullying, it was an assault,” insisted Lex, as if to confirm Mystaria’s realization. “Ponies like them aren’t guided by principled conduct. That’s why I instructed Solvei to watch over that creature we captured; she’s powerful enough to ensure that it can’t threaten anyone, and to make sure these mares don’t have a chance to physically abuse it like they tried to do to you.”
“Wait,” sputtered Mystaria, jolted out of her ruminating by that particular revelation. “You thought that we were going to tor-”
“Lex, they apologized for what happened back at the inn,” pressed Drafty, keeping her voice gentle. “Valor said she was sorry. So did Spinner. And Mystaria, too.”
But Lex seemed unwilling to back down. “And I made it clear that I found their statements of contrition to be disingenuous. And even if they were sincere, they’re still wholly inadequate when compared to their actions-”
“You’re right.”
Mystaria’s announcement was enough to make both ponies look at her. “You’re right,” she repeated. “Us just saying we’re sorry isn’t enough to make up for what happened.”
She let out a slow breath, remembering one of the lessons she’d learned at Luminace’s temple growing up, long before she’d started studying how to cast spells. “In my religion, atoning for when you do something wrong requires more than just saying you’re sorry. It requires that the harm caused actually be redressed, and we haven’t done that.”
She couldn’t help but pause then, realizing it had been years since she’d thought about that lesson. But she knew she couldn’t afford to mull that over now, since both Lex and Drafty were still looking at her, waiting to see how she’d follow through on her acknowledgment that restitution was required for what had happened back at the inn.
Opening her saddlebag, Mystaria slowly drew a slim folio out of it. “This is my spellbook,” she explained, before realizing that if they were from a country with different magical traditions – which wasn’t that hard to believe, given how unusual their magic seemed – they might not realize the significance of what she was showing them. “Do you know what wizards use these for?”
“I’m guessing they write spells in them?” joked Thermal Draft lightly.
“They’re more than that,” replied Lex, his eyes sliding between Mystaria and the tome she was holding. “A spellbook is a compression device for ambient magical energy, used by certain magical practitioners to prepare their thaumaturgical spells. Each spell written into it is not only a model of how its thought-form is constructed, but also serves as a tool to shape and internalize the power necessary for its casting.”
Mystaria nodded. “That’s right. And without it, I can’t prepare any of my arcane spells. Well, except for the ‘read magic’ spell, which deciphers magical inscriptions.” Giving a self-deprecating smile, she tapped the side of her head. “I’ve used that one enough that it’s up here permanently. And I can still pray to Luminace for divine spells. But since I never got around to making a backup one of these” – she nodded toward her spellbook, still cradled in her foreleg – “I’d be magically crippled if something happened to it.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment…and then held her spellbook out toward Lex and Drafty.
The pegasus’ eyes widened as she realized what was going on, and reflexively stepped forward to take it, but Lex held a hoof out in front of her, regarding Mystaria suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“I’m offering the two of you my spellbook,” answered Mystaria honestly. “Not permanently, but from now until sunrise, it’s yours to do with as you wish. Of course, if tomorrow morning you don’t want to give it back, I doubt anyone here would be able to make you, so…”
Lex didn’t move to take the book, nor did he allow Drafty to do so, but neither did he turn away from her. “And you think this is adequate recompense for what your friends did?”
Instead of saying yes or no, Mystaria replied with a question of her own. “You’re out here teaching Thermal Draft spells because you want her to be able to protect herself, right? Well, I’ve got dozens of spells in here that she can learn. They’re not very powerful, but they’re versatile. She can study them and add them to her repertoire. So can you, for that matter, if there are any which you don’t already know.”
Taking a step forward, she gestured to him to take the book. “Also, this way, you’ll know all the arcane spells I can prepare, so you’ll be able to offer better advice in battle. And if you really want to punish us – because I’m doing this on behalf of my friends – for what happened with Drafty, then…I won’t be able to stop you from destroying it.”
She was quite proud of herself for having kept her voice steady as she said that last part. It had taken her most of her adult life to fill out her spellbook to the extent that she had. Luminace’s temple was a masterful institution of magical learning – there was a reason why it worked so closely with the Pony Empire’s premiere magical school, the Academie d’Grace – but even for their clergy, access to its resources wasn’t free.
Spellbooks had to be constructed using specially-treated paper and particular inks in order to serve their function as preparation tools. Components and foci for spells that required them had to be purchased. Lessons in arcane magical practices – unlike their religious education, which was free for orphans who lived at the temple – needed to be paid for. And all of that was before the actual costs associated with either inventing a new spell from scratch or paying someone else to copy their spells. Given that she and her friends were always hurting for money, the loss of her spellbook, meager though its contents were, would easily set her back years if Lex chose to destroy it.
But they were all headed into danger now, having already risked their lives in what were likely only the first few of several battles, and continued infighting would only hurt their chances of making it back safe and sound. Besides, for all his acerbity, Lex had yet to do anything truly awful; in fact, judging from the way he continually harped on others’ failings, and his concern for Drafty, his self-righteousness seemed like it came from a desire to actually be righteous, apparently in everything he did.
Which meant that if she trusted him to do the right thing now, then maybe, just maybe, he’d start trusting them in return.
Friendship, rather than magic, is the source of Luminace’s grace.
“Please forgive us for what we did to Thermal Draft.”
The pegasus in question was holding her breath, fully cognizant of the weight of what was happening as she looked between Lex and Mystaria. But Mystaria kept her eyes on Lex, the stallion making no move as he stared at her in return.
The silence dragged on as both mares waited for Lex’s response.
Until finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he nodded, telekinetically taking hold of her spellbook and passing it over to Drafty. “Very well.”
Mystaria slumped with relief, her knees almost buckling as a sudden feeling of exhaustion swept over her. Although she’d been fighting for her life just recently, this felt like it had been a far more grueling battle. Drafty looked much the same, and the two shared a grin for a moment before the pegasus began to speak. “This is great! C’mon, let’s go tell everypony else the good news! Oh, and before I forget, the password so we don’t set off the alarm spell on the way back is ‘Cloudbank.’ It’s the name of-”
“Tell her later,” interrupted Lex, moving past her as he quickly made his way back toward the cave. “We’re heading back.”
The sudden tension in his voice was enough to make Drafty and Mystaria share another glance, this time of concern. “Is everything alright?” asked the latter.
When it came a moment later, Lex’s reply caused both of them to rush after him.
“Solvei just contacted me. That thing we captured is waking up.”
The earth mares were standing at the ready as Lex strode back into the cave, Thermal Draft and Mystaria trailing after him.
But it wasn’t him they were waiting for, all four of them directing their attention toward the back of the cavern. There, Solvei had also stood up again, growling as the two-legged creature wriggled and groaned softly, nearing consciousness once more.
A glance from Lex made Thermal Draft stop pursuing him, nodding back at the unicorn as she retreated a few steps to stand near the mouth of the cave, turning and looking back out into the night so that nothing would be able to sneak in while their attention was diverted. Even so, she couldn’t help but glance back over her shoulder every few seconds, her curiosity impossible to contain.
Mystaria, for her part, moved over next to Spinner, who was the furthest back among her friends. Long experience had taught her that the distance the bard was keeping wasn’t due to fear, but rather was hanging back so that she wouldn’t be in anyone’s way when she brought her musical powers to bear. Just like she had against Grisela, Mystaria knew that Spinner wouldn’t hesitate to rush into the fray and use her lute as a blunt instrument if that turned out to be necessary.
She just really, really hoped that it wouldn’t come to that now.
“Everything go okay with the world’s friendliest unicorn?” murmured Spinner as Mystaria stood next to her, not taking her eyes off of their captive.
“Believe it or not, we had a breakthrough,” reported Mystaria, also keeping her attention on the awakening biped. “He agreed to let go of the grudge he’s been carrying for what happened with Valor and Thermal Draft, and he’s not going to torture that two-legged wolf.” She decided to omit the part about Lex thinking that they were the ones who needed to be stopped from tormenting the prisoner; hopefully, now that they’d started to reach an understanding, such remnants of their mutual mistrust could be put behind them.
The news garnered her an impressed look from Spinner. “No kidding? How did you pull that off?”
Resisting the urge to smirk, Mystaria shrugged. “Empathy, compassion, humility…and I’m letting him borrow my spellbook.”
Spinner’s head snapped around to look at her. “You’re what?!”
Mystaria didn’t have a chance to answer as the creature’s eyes finally fluttered open. For a half-second it didn’t seem to register what was happening, staring at Solvei and the assembled ponies with a blank expression on its face. Then its eyes widened as it began to thrash, falling over as it tried to leap to its feet only to find them bound together, its wrists similarly restrained behind its back. But it didn’t stop moving, uttering a string of harsh syllables in an unfamiliar tongue as it struggled to right itself.
Lex made a motion with one hoof – something which Mystaria was certain was for show, since he could talk to her telepathically – and Solvei moved forward, lowering her head as she closed her jaws around the creature’s throat. The humanoid gave a ragged cry, this time clearly of terror, and Shadow and Valor both cursed as they rushed forward. But they’d barely taken a step when Solvei, rather than biting down, raised her head and tilted it slightly, maneuvering the creature back into a sitting position before releasing its neck and moving back to Lex’s side.
“I believe your situation is self-evident,” began Lex, and the calm tone in his voice in no way mitigated the malice it held. “But in case you’re having trouble understanding the position that you’re in, I’ll make it clear to you: you have committed multiple crimes against ponykind. Now that you’re captured, it’s in your best interest-”
“Where are my people?!” The creature’s eyes swept over the cave, as though only now realizing that it was the only one of its kind there. “The others who were with me, what happened to them?! Did you-” It didn’t have a chance to finish as black crystals erupted from the cave wall behind it – their tips blunt rather than pointed – shoving it forward and causing it to fall on its face at Lex’s hooves.
Managing to turn on its side, the wolf-creature couldn’t stop itself from shaking as it looked up at Lex, the unicorn’s eyes glowing. Its trembling grew worse a moment later when Lex, his every motion careful and deliberate, removed his mask and crouched down, putting his face to within an inch of the creature’s. “It’s in your best interest to answer my questions,” he continued, as if no interruption had occurred, “because if you make no effort to mitigate the severity of your misdeeds, then I have no further use for you. Do you understand?”
Its eyes darting back and forth between Lex and the wooden mask – the deadly weapon which had instantly struck its leader dead, and was now less than a foot away from its body, balanced on the unicorn’s hoof – the creature couldn’t seem to remember how to speak, its breathing turning rapid.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!”
Lex’s scream made the creature – as well as the other ponies in the cave – jump, cracking the back of its head against the black crystals behind it. But it managed to nod a moment later, squeezing its eyes shut. “Yes!”
“Good.” His voice calm and restrained once more, Lex stood up, putting his mask back on as his eyes resumed their normal colors. The black crystals sprouting from the cave wall turned to dust then, and another gesture from Lex had Solvei again return the creature to its sitting position. Soft whimpers were coming from its muzzle now, and to Mystaria it almost sounded like it was sobbing.
“Now,” began Lex, “where is Grisela?”
The creature opened its eyes, and despite how terrified it still looked, the corners of its lips turned down. “Wh-what?”
“Grisela,” spat Lex, impatience leaking into his voice. “The winter hag. Where is she?”
The creature shook its head. “I don’t…” Its voice failed then, and it swallowed hard before trying again. “I don’t know who that is.”
Lex narrowed his eyes, which burst into green and purple light again. Behind him, Mystaria exchanged concerned looks with her friends. If the biped had become defiant at the sound of Grisela’s name, that would have been one thing, but the confusion it had shown just now had sounded genuine.
But apparently Lex didn’t think so. “I’m going to give you one more chance. Where. Is. Grisela?”
“I don’t know who that is,” repeated the lupinoid. Closing its eyes, it swallowed again, taking several deep breaths before opening them. This time, when it did, its expression held the confrontative look that Mystaria had previously expected. “And if that’s someone else you intend to murder, then I won’t help you find them!”
Its body began to grow translucent then, taking on a hazy appearance, and it was easy to recognize that it was turning into mist the same way its fellows had. The recognition brought a low growl from Woodheart, and Shadow cursed softly before looking at Lex. “If you’ve got some sort of brilliant idea for how to keep that thing from escaping, now’s the time to use it!”
“I already have,” replied Lex calmly, making no move to stop the transforming humanoid.
The answer was vague enough that Valor threw a hoof in the air, visibly frustrated. “What the hell does that mean?!”
She had her answer a moment later as the wolf fully became mist. Its bonds slipped from its wrists and ankles as the featureless patch of fog floated through the air, racing toward the cave entrance…and then banked sharply upward, pressing itself against the ceiling.
The sudden turn made Mystaria’s brow furrow, but she had no time to wonder what the creature was doing before its misty body suddenly shot back down, whirling dizzyingly as it moved back toward the rear of the cave, only to loop around and then rush at the right wall. It slid along the surface before swooping along the floor, coming back up, and then immediately reversing course and hugging the ground again.
“What in Luminace’s name…?” muttered Mystaria, watching as the gaseous body continued to careen around the cave, lurching to and fro as if drunk.
Watching the action from the cave entrance, Thermal Draft nodded. “I’ve flown in tornadoes with more coordination than that thing is showing right now.”
“I believe it,” answered Spinner, before glancing at Lex. “Hey, you mind filling us in? Mystaria says that the hatchet is officially buried now, and while that wolf might be the only one who turned into fog, I think we’re all mystified about why it’s…” She gestured at where the gaseous mist was currently corkscrewing through the air, brushing up against the left wall of the cave at a steep angle before swirling around and hitting the ceiling again. “…you know, doing that instead of fleeing.”
Mystaria half-expected Lex to tell Spinner off, but was pleasantly surprised a second later. “I put a curse on that creature shortly after we captured it,” he explained. “This is the result.”
Shadow cocked a brow. “A curse?”
“You can curse people?” added Valor.
“What sort of curse?” Mystaria had studied magic for as long as she could remember, but the archives at the temple where she’d grown up were both voluminous and had an expansive section of restricted texts. The result was that curses weren’t an area where she knew much, leaving her with little to go on with regard to Lex’s casual admission of having yet another mysterious power.
Perhaps because he’d agreed to cease holding what had happened with Thermal Draft back at the inn against them, Lex didn’t object to her asking for more information. “One that disrupts the magical facsimile of equilibrioception that thing it utilizes while in its vaporous state.”
Her friends looked confused by his reply, as did Thermal Draft and Solvei, but Mystaria understood what he was telling her. “You threw off his sense of balance?”
Lex nodded. “A patch of mist has no sensory organs, which means that in order for that creature to detect its surroundings, whatever magic it’s using to transform itself into fog needs to approximate its ability to perceive the world around it. That includes being able to tell which way is up. I simply cursed it to be unable to do that.”
“He might still find his way outside like that,” noted Spinner.
“I anticipated that it might,” answered Lex immediately. “Which is why part of what I was teaching Thermal Draft just now was how to cast a spell to create a momentary burst of powerful wind. In the event that thing manages to get near the cave entrance, she’ll simply push it back inside.”
“That’s probably for the best,” noted Valor, looking a little dizzy herself as she watched the fog cloud continue to turn and twist vertiginously. “Can you imagine if that thing got outside now? He wouldn’t know how high up he was before he changed back, which means he’d probably turn back to normal up in the sky and then fall to his death.”
As if hearing that – which, Mystaria realized a moment later, it probably had, since its other senses weren’t affected by Lex’s curse – the mist resumed a humanoid shape. Slowly coalescing, the humanoid wolf changed back into solid form several feet above the cavern floor, falling and hitting the ground with a weak groan. “No…”
Stepping forward, most likely at a telepathic command, Solvei chuckled darkly. “That’s what you get for thinking you can outsmart my master,” she sneered, before grabbing the creature by the back of the neck and dragging it toward the rear of the cave again.
She’d barely finished depositing it back there when Lex looked at Shadow. “Tie that thing up again.”
The masked mare made no move to comply, giving Lex a cold look. “You didn’t say please.”
“I’ll do it,” sighed Spinner, stowing her lute on her back as she trotted toward the back of the cave, giving Solvei a nod. “Cover me in case he tries anything, okay?”
“If he does, he’ll wish he hadn’t,” growled the winter wolf.
But the creature barely twitched as Spinner bound his arms and legs again, its expression stiff with fear, as though it was too afraid to move. Mystaria felt a sliver of guilt run through her then, and she could see the same on Spinner’s face as the filidh finished tying the creature up, giving it a concerned once-over. “Are the ropes too tight? I can loosen-”
“That’s enough,” interrupted Lex harshly, telekinetically yanking Spinner away from the creature. Yelping as she was pulled off-balance, Spinner stumbled back, leaving Lex free to take her place next to the humanoid. “Your escape attempt was easily anticipated; what you should have anticipated was that, once you were recaptured, my patience would be at its end. Now, unless you want to find out how many other ways I can curse you, tell me where Grisela is.”
“…don’t know…” whimpered the creature, squeezing its eyes shut again, looking like a child convinced that there was a monster under its bed. “I don’t know who that is!”
Lex’s horn lit up then, and Mystaria found herself rushing forward, putting herself between Lex and the terrified creature. “Lex, he doesn’t know!”
But despite the breakthrough they’d just had, Lex didn’t seem inclined to listen. “Move, Mystaria, or I’ll have Solvei move you!”
Knowing that arguing would solve nothing, Mystaria instead tried to change the subject, turning around and kneeling down by their captive before the winter wolf could drag her away. “If you don’t know who Grisela is, then why were your people lying in wait to attack us?”
Perhaps realizing what would happen if he didn’t answer, the lupinoid let out a shuddering breath. “We were there to investigate the pass. One of our hunters said that they saw yetis marching through our territory. We knew that couldn’t be right, so we sent a scouting party to check.”
Mystaria heard Solvei pad up behind her, but she kept going. “Why couldn’t that be right? What do the yetis mean to you?”
“They’re heretics. They worship a false idol,” answered the creature. “That’s why we killed them all.”
Mystaria wasn’t sure what to say to that, but took it as a good sign that Solvei had apparently stopped, no doubt at Lex’s direction, so she asked the first thing that came to mind. “Wait…you killed them all? When?”
“Several seasons ago.” Perhaps realizing that he wasn’t about to be killed or cursed, the creature opened its eyes, giving Mystaria a miserable look. “I begged my father to let me join in the battle, but he refused. He said I was too young. That’s why, when the report came in that the yetis had somehow replenished their numbers, I demanded to be part of the scouting party. But all we saw was a single unatattik, which disappeared when we moved closer to it.”
He nodded at Solvei then, and Mystaria could feel her confusion growing. But of all the questions bouncing around in her head then, what came out was perhaps the least important one. “What does that mean? ‘Unatattik’?”
“In your language, ‘soldier,’” answered the creature, and despite its terror, its expression took on a derisive cast as he looked over Mystaria’s shoulder. “They’re the ones who let Nuti-Amaguk, the Great Wolf, use them as disposable fighters in his war against Ikumak-Amaguk, the Fire Wolf.”
Behind Mystaria, Solvei suddenly snarled. “You’re taking about Hrothvitnir and Vutok! Which means…”
The scorn in the winter wolf’s voice was thick as she turned back toward Lex.
Spinner was the first one to speak up in the wake of Solvei’s announcement. “Okay, I’ll bite: what’s an adlet?”
“A traitor,” spat the winter wolf, giving the tied-up lupinoid a look of contempt. “A coward. Hrothvitnir created them, just like he did us. But when Vutok the Destroyer came forth in fire and wrath, these ungrateful wretches fled rather than fight for their world or their maker.”
That description prompted a snarl from the adlet, his cowed expression giving way to a look of anger. “You’re twisting what happened! The only reason Nuti-Amaguk created us was so he could sacrifice us in his war! When we realized that he didn’t value our lives except as weapons, we decided for ourselves not to die fighting his battle with Ikumak-Amaguk! Now we live as a free people, beholden to no one, unlike you!”
Solvei’s teeth pulled back from her lips, growling dangerously. “You mistake savagery for freedom!”
“You’re one to talk of savagery,” sneered the adlet, the argument seeming to rile him up rather than intimidate him more. “We’ve grown strong and wise in our independence, while your kind still run naked through the snow, with no weapons other than the sharpness of your teeth and no magic beyond the chill of your breath!”
“Your clothes and your tools don’t make up for the fact that your spirits are empty,” retorted Solvei, her eyes flashing as black crystals grew around her, covering her from snout to tail in armor even as she grew in size, looming over the bound adlet. “And the magic my master has given me is both weapon and garment, far greater than anything your kind have ever-”
“That’s enough, Solvei.”
Lex’s order was given in an even tone, but the winter wolf nevertheless whimpered, her tail drooping. “But Master, this lowly creature-”
“Is wasting my time with fables when there are more urgent matters to address,” interrupted Lex. “Now stand aside.”
Solvei didn’t argue, shrinking back to her usual size as she let her armor crumble to nothing, backing off as Lex stepped toward the adlet. “Tell me more about the yetis,” he demanded.
The recalcitrance that the adlet had recovered while bickering with Solvei fled then, the two-legged wolf shuddering as he looked away from the masked pony. “Like I said, they’re heretics. They don’t work in harmony with the spirits of the land and sky as we do” – Woodheart perked up at that, giving an inquisitive churr that Lex ignored – “nor do they honor any gods. Instead they bow and scrape for some icy monstrosity that calls itself Kryonex, which isn’t-”
“I don’t care about their religion,” hissed Lex. “You said that your people killed them all, and that it couldn’t have been correct that a large group of them moved through the pass only a few days ago, even though that’s what happened. Is it possible that there was a troop of yetis that escaped your notice when you attempted to wipe them out?”
The question made Valor cock her head. “You think the yetis attacking that village is related to what happened between them and the adlets?”
“It’s possible,” murmured Shadow thoughtfully. “If a couple of them survived, maybe Grisela found them and promised to help them get revenge. Maybe leading them to the village in order to kidnap ponies for food was her way of providing for her new followers.”
“But this wasn’t just ‘a couple,’” protested Mystaria. “There were almost twenty of them. Not to mention it doesn’t make sense that they’d need to go all the way through their enemy’s territory just to get that much food. That village is the most distant from Bright Night, and that innkeeper made it sound like this only started happening recently.”
“Maybe it’s because of how heavily it’s been snowing recently,” offered Thermal Draft. “That’s what happened with Solvei’s family. Even though the snowy weather was more comfortable for them, it made game harder to come by.”
“Shut up, all of you.” Lex didn’t so much as raise his voice, but his cold glare made it clear that he expected to be obeyed. “I want to hear the prisoner’s answer.”
The adlet grimaced at being at the center of everyone’s attention again. “Maybe one or two could have gotten away, but no more than that. There’s no way they could have replenished their numbers enough to make any sort of war party this soon.”
“Are there other yeti tribes around here they could have called upon for reinforcements?” pressed Lex.
A sliver of the adlet’s earlier indignation reasserted itself then. “We weren’t just trading skirmishes with a few groups of those idolators; we warred with all of the yetis in this region, and we won! After the fighting had finished, our shaman communed with the land and announced that there weren’t enough of those filthy creatures left to oppose us!”
His ire fled as quickly as it had come, and he slumped back down then. “It was the last revelation she gave us before she passed away, and we held our victory games in her honor. Akna wept when she ate her bones, saying her grandmother-”
“‘Ate her bones’?” cut in Thermal Draft, looking horrified. “You…devoured your shaman?!”
The adlet looked at her, confusion written all over his face. “Of course we did! That’s how…” Whatever he was going to say was lost as his eyes widened, recalling something. “Panuk’s body! What happened to it?!”
“Why?” asked Valor, a disgusted look on her face. “Hoping for a snack?”
“We eat our fallen so that their spirits aren’t lost to us!” There was a desperate tone in the adlet’s voice, as though imploring them to understand. “Consuming their flesh is what allows them to be reborn within the tribe! If they’re devoured by scavengers, it might be generations before we eat enough of the scroungers who carry the fragments of their being for them to be restored to us!”
“Maybe if you actually had an afterlife to look forward to, you wouldn’t need to worry about what happens to your kind after they die,” snickered Solvei, openly enjoying the adlet’s distress. “Your friend should have thought of that before he challenged my master.”
The adlet’s eyes widened, looking between Solvei and Lex. “What are you say-”
His question was cut off in favor of a terrified yelp. The reason for it was obvious to everyone as Lex’s horn had already begun to glow, his eyes doing the same as a black aura appeared around the captive adlet, shrinking to cover him like a second skin. The others all jumped at the sight save for Solvei, who smirked.
“Lex!” yelled Mystaria, looking like she wasn’t sure whether to rush toward him or the thrashing humanoid. “What are you doing?!”
“I told that thing before that I was growing tired of listening to its pointless digressions,” answered Lex, his voice stern. “Now it’s going to pay for refusing to heed my warning.”
“So you’re going to suffocate it instead?!” Spinner couldn’t have sounded more horrified as she watched the adlet writhe helplessly, unable to free itself from the black coating covering it.
“‘No torture’ my ass!” spat Shadow, bringing her dagger to bear as she rushed toward the adlet, clearly intent on cutting him out of whatever clingy material Lex was covering him with.
But she didn’t even make it halfway to the adlet before Solvei intercepted her, the winter wolf growling as she moved between the earth mare and their prisoner. “Master is punishing that loathsome creature for disobeying him. Interfere with that, and I’ll be the one who punishes you.”
“We’re used to taking punishment,” shot back Valor, moving up alongside Shadow, shield held at the ready.
“Not your best comeback, Valor,” sighed Spinner, starting to strum her lute as Woodheart barked in agreement.
“All of you, back off!” yelled Thermal Draft. “Lex knows what he’s doing!”
Seeing how fast everything had gone downhill, Mystaria bit her lip, giving the unicorn in question a pleading look. “Lex, stop this!” she pleaded. “I thought you didn’t believe in mistreating prisoners!”
“I don’t,” answered Lex calmly. “And if you idiots had paid closer attention instead of jumping to conclusions, you’ll see that I’m not. Look.”
He held a hoof out toward the adlet, directing everyone’s attention to it…just in time for them to see the black covering sink into the creature’s body, seeping into every inch of it, until it had completely withdrawn into the creature, who was left gasping and shuddering. “Wh-what happened?!” he croaked. “What did you do to me?!”
“I placed a curse on you,” intoned Lex darkly. “One that will keep your spirit from ever returning to your tribe after you die.”
That sent a shudder through the members of Fail Forward, glancing at each other in trepidation. “You used some sort of necromancy on him?” murmured Spinner with a gulp.
The question drew an amused snort from Lex, glancing at Solvei as he telepathically gave her an order.
Blinking in confusion at the instructions, she turned and approached the adlet, ignoring the way he cringed as she padded over and picked him up in her jaws again, just like she had when she’d sat him upright before. This time, however, her eyes bulged the instant she closed her mouth around him, and she flung herself backward a moment later, heaving and retching and she furiously wiped her paws over her muzzle.
The spectacle drew blank stares for a moment, until Mystaria’s eyes widened. “Wait, don’t tell me…”
“You made him taste bad?” Thermal Draft’s voice was an equal mixture of incredulous and impressed.
But the adlet himself took the news much worse, his eyes widening. “No!” Twisting in place, he managed to bend over far enough to put his snout to clawed paws at the bottom of his digitigrade legs. Having worn no footwear, it was an easy matter for him to nip at one ankle…at which point he, like Solvei, immediately gagged, spitting it out with a moan of misery as his stomach roiled and his eyes watered.
“Now you see how it is,” explained Lex as the adlet continued to convulse. “Your flesh has become completely inedible. No matter what sort of palate it has or how it prepares you, the taste of your body is one that no creature can stomach.”
“You…you can’t do this!” wailed the adlet, its voice rapidly turning hysterical. “Please, have mercy!”
Lex laughed darkly, holding up his wire-wrapped foreleg. “I don’t show mercy. When you die, your body will be left to rot, with neither your kin nor the carrion-feeders consuming it. What happens to your spirit then, unable to be reborn among your people?” His horn lit up again, this time dragging the adlet back into a sitting position as Lex stepped closer to him. “Go on. You enjoy prattling on about that primitive religion of yours, don’t you? Tell me what happens to the spirits of your dead that can’t be returned to your tribe.”
The adlet was openly weeping now, going completely limp in Lex’s aura. “Don’t do this to me!” he sobbed. “I beg you!”
“This is a first,” muttered Shadow. “A guy breaking down in tears because he just found out he’s not going to be eaten by cannibals.”
“That’s all a bunch of hooey though, isn’t it?” murmured Drafty, abandoning her position at the mouth of the cave to join the mares of Fail Forward as they looked at Lex. “I mean, all that stuff about their spirits…their souls, being reborn if they eat each other…it doesn’t actually work like that, right?”
“The short answer is ‘no, but,’” sighed Mystaria. “The longer answer is that it’s complicated. While the passage of souls to the Outer Planes – either to the realm of whatever god they worshiped in life, or to the plane whose numinous gradient is the closest match for that of their soul – has been repeatedly documented by sages, there’s evidence to suggest that a soul can alter its own trajectory after its mortal life comes to an end. The most notable example is souls that refuse to move on after death and become various incorporeal undead, like ghosts and specters. So while it’s never been proven that I’m aware of, in theory someone who believed in reincarnation strongly enough could potentially-”
“Your whimpering moves me not at all,” continued Lex to the adlet, the mares all quieting instantly as they waited to see what he was going to do next. “If you want to be absolved, then you’ll offer me your obedience, not your tears.”
The adlet looked up then, a glimmer of hope in its eyes. “And…and then you’ll remove this curse?”
“That depends on how well you follow my orders.”
Gulping, the adlet nodded. “I…I understand…”
“Good.” Releasing the furred humanoid from his telekinesis, Lex glared down at it imperiously. “Now, after your people killed the yetis, what happened to their bodies?”
“They were disposed of.” The adlet’s voice was one of utter defeat, as though he couldn’t imagine voicing any opposition now. “Their hides became our tents, their bones were used for tools, their fur was made into our clothes. We made use of them for everything except food. We might threaten to eat other thinking creatures, but that’s a scare tactic; doing so would pollute our spirits.”
Lex considered that for a moment, then switched topics. “There’s a temple to the pony goddess known as the Night Mare somewhere in this area, the Shrine of the Starless Sky. What do you know of it?”
The adlet paused for a moment, then shook his head, cringing slightly. “I’ve never heard of such a place.” As if anticipating Lex’s anger at the lack of information, he quickly continued, the words spilling quickly from his lips. “But Akna, who became our foremost shaman after her grandmother passed, might know of it! She has much mystical knowledge, and the spirits tell her many things! In fact” – seemingly desperate to please now, he nodded eagerly – “I bet she could tell you everything you want to know about that place! Or even take you to it!”
“Why bother?” snorted Shadow. “We’ve already got a map.”
Mystaria frowned. “We have a map, but it’s decades old, and doesn’t account for things like terrain hazards, dangerous creatures in the area, or how the heavy snowfall might have made certain paths more difficult.”
Spinner glanced between Mystaria and their captive, raising a brow. “So you’re saying…what, exactly? That we should go ask for directions from a tribe of cannibals, one of whom we just killed, another of whom our unicorn friend here cursed, and in the company of a winter wolf, which we know they hate?”
“Or,” countered Mystaria, “we go ask for help from a tribe of people whom we know are the enemies of the yetis we just fought, who don’t eat ponies the way said yetis do, and who might be able to save us a lot of time and trouble finding the place we’re looking for. Besides, we need to talk to them after what happened.”
Valor raised a brow. “How do you figure?”
“She’s suggesting that, having killed one of their number and captured another, the remaining adlets might be preparing to retaliate against the pony communities nearby,” answered Lex, ignoring the relieved sigh that came from their captive upon hearing that no one else from his scouting party had lost their lives. “In which case, the situation is one that needs to be dealt with preemptively, since I have no intention of allowing that to happen.”
“Exactly,” nodded Mystaria. “So it might be worthwhile to try and deescalate any potential hostilities before they occur. There’s no point in saving everyone here from Grisela if we start a war with the adlets in the process.”
“Oh wonderful,” sighed Shadow. “This trek we’re on just keeps getting better and better. So now we’re going to pay a visit to a tribe of wolf-people? The same wolf-people who killed the yetis that almost killed us?”
“We did alright for ourselves fighting them just now,” shrugged Valor, to which Woodheart offered an enthusiastic chirp. “Besides, I think Woodsy is eager to talk to people who communicate with spirits the way she does.”
“And if they try anything,” added Solvei, glancing at their morose-looking captive, “we can just kill the rest of them.”
“Or not, please,” winced Thermal Draft. “I’d like to avoid more fights if we can.”
Her eyes slid to Lex as she said that, but the unicorn was already looking back at their prisoner. “You’re certain that your tribe’s shaman knows about the Night Mare’s temple?”
“I’m sure she must know something,” he insisted, nodding.
“Then you know what to do if you want to have any hope of having your fellows eat you once you die,” answered Lex, his lip curling in disdain. “Take us to this shaman of yours.”
“You can’t possibly think that this is a good idea.”
Shadow’s statement made Valor grimace as the two of them trudged through the snow, heading back toward where they’d fought the adlet scouting party a short time ago. “I think eating their dead is a disgusting practice, but it’s their religion. They take it seriously, which means we have to take it seriously if we want there to be any chance of softening things over.”
“Smoothing things over,” corrected Shadow with a roll of her eyes. Although the sun cats had taught their adopted pony daughter how to speak properly, the fact that they didn’t seem to have idioms was either amusing or exasperating, depending on the circumstances. And lately, it had been the latter much more often than the former. “And I’m not talking about this corpse-retrieval errand Mysty somehow talked us into running; I’m talking about this hare-brained idea of trying to reach an accord with these ‘adlets’ in the first place.”
That got a surprised look from Valor. “You think we should be trying to wipe them out?”
“I think that any chance for peace went kaput when that power-mad unicorn killed one of their number in cold blood,” snorted Shadow.
Valor groaned. “C’mon, Shadow. That’s not fair and you know it. Those guys popped up out of nowhere and pointed spears at us, growling all sorts of threats. We all thought our lives were in danger; Lex just did something about it.”
Now that the sun had set, there was barely enough lingering light for Valor to see the disgusted look that her friend gave her then. “And when exactly did you join the Lex Legis Appreciation Society? I thought that you and I were on the same page here; that guy is bad news.”
“Mysty doesn’t think so. She said she had some sort of breakthrough after we sent her to talk to the guy, and I trust her judgment.” Valor stopped in place then, glancing around. The snow had been falling steadily for a little while, but there were still signs of their recent battle in the area. “Okay, I think this is the place. Help me look around for the body.”
“You look for the body,” retorted Shadow. “I’m going to start gathering up those spears they were throwing around.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m apparently the only one who hasn’t forgotten that the reason we came here in the first place was to score some quick cash.” Kicking at a snow drift in frustration, Shadow started searching for the adlets’ weapons. “There’s got to be some collector or antiquarian or some other sage back in Viljatown who’ll pay some decent coin for authentic barbarian weapons. And if we’re really lucky, some of them might be magical. If they are, and we can sell them, that might actually make this trip worthwhile.”
“You don’t think-”
“Saving a village full of innocent ponies is worthwhile, even if they did try to sell us out to Grisela and her merry band,” sighed Shadow, anticipating Valor’s objection as she traipsed over to a pair of spears that were still sticking up from the ground, yanking them free. “I mean, I know they had no choice, but they could have said ‘we’re being terrorized by monsters, and you look like a group of experienced adventurers, can you please help us?’ or something.”
“Actually, I was going to say that the adlets will probably want their weapons back too,” replied Valor glibly. “Insisting on keeping them probably won’t go over well, since we’re trying to make them realize that ponies aren’t their enemies and all.”
Shadow uttered several choice profanities at that. “They’re spoils of war. Even savages have to understand that.”
Valor shook her head. “You might think that killing one of their number means that there’s no chance for peace, so there’s no downside to taking their weapons, but different people have different traditions. Returning weapons, captives, and the bodies of the fallen could be taken as a gesture of respect between warriors.”
She paused then, and a glance from Shadow showed that Valor had found the body of the adlet Lex had killed. Panuk, recalled the masked mare. That poor bastard Lex cursed said his dead friend’s name was Panuk. The thought was an uncomfortable one, making her shiver for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold. “I don’t think that there’s any tradition that will change the fact that this guy probably had family and friends who’ll be heartbroken when they find out he’s dead, let alone get them to forgive his killer.”
Valor seemed to be having similar thoughts, silently regarding the corpse – still staring sightlessly upward with a twisted expression of shock on its face – for a long moment before reaching up to gently close its eyes. Then she began to brush the snow from Panuk’s body, her motions slow and reverent. “Long ago, before Iliana unified the pony tribes and founded the Empire, the various prides of sun cats would periodically raid each other. That led to blood feuds, as the kin of a slain cat would take revenge on his killer, only for the killer’s family to take revenge on them in turn, starting a vicious cycle.”
“Which is exactly my point,” groused Shadow, moving to pick up the Panuk’s spear, which had fallen next to his body. “This whole idea is going to get us killed.”
But before she could take the fallen adlet’s weapon, Valor put her hoof over it, giving Shadow a pointed look. “The sun cats don’t have blood feuds anymore. Now, when one cat kills another, they pay the blood price to the deceased’s family, and the issue is settled. All the prides enforce this, with every cat under their authority agreeing not to take revenge once the payment is made, under pain of being declared an outcast if they don’t. Maybe the adlets have something similar.”
Shadow grit her teeth. “I don’t believe this! You – who flies into a self-righteous rage every time you see a merchant bribe their way past a gate guard – are telling me that it’s okay to kill someone as long as you can pay for it?!”
“I’m not saying it’s okay,” replied Valor, refusing to get angry in the face of Shadow’s outrage. “I’m saying that it’s a way to keep one tragedy from turning into the first in a series of tragedies.”
“By putting a price on people’s lives!” snarled Shadow, turning away from Valor as she stomped over to another spear, wrenching it out of the ground. “That’s no better than those orc slavers we fought in the hinterlands! If anything, it’s worse! At least their victims were still alive after the money was paid! This-”
“Three large wagons.”
Shadow blinked at the non sequitur, pausing as she sent a dark look Valor’s way. “Huh?”
“Three large wagons,” repeated Valor, picking up Panuk’s spear and laying it alongside him, slowly folding the adlet’s arms over it. “Covered and solidly-built. It took eight hearty cats to pull each one. They were all beautifully decorated, painted with scenes honoring the Sun King, his brother the Hunter, and the totem spirits who served them.”
Shadow looked around, wondering if there was some obvious reason for Valor’s sudden digression that she was missing, but if there was any change to the dark and snowy landscape around them, she couldn’t see it. “What are you talking about?”
“They weren’t empty either,” continued Valor, as though she hadn’t heard her friend’s question. “The first was filled with rare foods and spices. Two casks full of honey. A chest with twenty-five pounds of cinnamon. Five baskets of saffron. A crate of potatoes. The second one held textiles and furs. Ten ermine pelts. A hundred square yards of canvas. Five square yards of silk. The third was laden with weapons. Thirty javelins. Twelve steel daggers. A half-dozen shortbows. Five hundred arrows…”
She sighed as she finished, staring at nothing for a long moment before turning back to Panuk’s body, continuing to arrange it so that he looked like he was resting peacefully. “That was the blood price my pride received after my father was killed.”
The admission nearly caused Shadow to drop the spears she’d gathered. “Wait, what?!”
Ignoring the other mare’s shocked outburst, Valor made her way over to the evergreen shrubs nearby, examining several of them in silence before casually uprooting them. Breaking off several of the largest stalks, she unshouldered the rope that she’d brought with her and started lashing them together, making a crude sled. “When you gather up the last of those spears, help me with this, will you? It’s not very well made, but it should be enough to carry his body back to the cave.”
“…alright.” Not knowing what else to say, Shadow quietly finished picking up the fallen weapons. Once she was sure she’d gotten them all, she made her way over to Valor, and the two mares worked in silence until they had a passable transport arranged. “This should do it.”
Valor nodded once before placing Panuk’s body on the makeshift transport, making sure to disturb it as little as possible in the process.
It was only when she’d finished, moving in front of it to tie the ends of the rope around her middle, that Shadow spoke again. “Listen, I didn’t mean-”
“I know.”
The words were neither curt nor angry, but Shadow flinched all the same. “I wasn’t trying to-”
“I know you weren’t,” replied Valor evenly.
Not sure what else to say, Shadow held her tongue, and the two walked in silence for a while. Minutes passed as the two made their way back to the cave, the shoddy sled slowing their progress considerably. Eventually, Valor spoke up again. “When I received my totem from Makwa, my father called all of the nearby prides together for a banquet in my honor.”
Determined not to put her hoof in her mouth again, Shadow kept quiet as Valor continued. “He was always looking for a reason to celebrate something,” she chuckled softly, a wistful smile crossing her lips. “If there was good news of any sort, for us or someone else that he knew, he always insisted that it had to be commemorated. ‘Good fortune is the Sun King’s blessing,’ he’d say. ‘To overlook it is to take his generosity for granted.’ My mother and my aunt both said that he only ever wanted an excuse to sing and dance and drink, but they always ended up laughing right along with him whenever he got going. And the more people who showed up, the happier he was.”
She paused as the sled caught on something, with Shadow moving to untangle it. “So naturally, it didn’t go over very well when, at the feast he’d thrown in my honor, several of his guests objected to his pony daughter having received a totem from one of the Sun King’s servants.”
“He was upset?” asked Shadow cautiously as she uncoupled the sled from the root it had gotten stuck on.
“My father? No, he was confused at their anger. My aunt, however, was livid. She was the one who’d pronounced me blessed by Makwa, and she never suffered fools gladly. She started haranguing the cats who’d protested my totem, lecturing them in…let’s just say, the strongest possible terms, about their ignorance regarding the will of the gods.”
“And they didn’t appreciate that?”
Valor shook her head. “They struck her. Even if they were drunk and angry, raising a paw to your host is a severe violation of their hospitality, and that upset my father a great deal. That and he loved my aunt dearly. So when the offending party refused to apologize, saying that the entire reason for the banquet – me, in other words – was an offense to the Sun King, well…at that point, a fight was inevitable.”
“To the death?” murmured Shadow, a little surprised. Valor had spoken about sun cat customs on many occasions, and she’d taken pride in presenting them as the superior civilization compared to ponies, despite their rustic living conditions.
“It wasn’t supposed to be,” sighed the muscled mare, shaking her head. “But as I said, the offending party – a sun cat named Echoing Roar, who leads one of the largest prides – was drunk and angry. He grew even angrier when my father started winning the fight, at which point Echo reached for his hammer and…and…”
She couldn’t finish, letting out a shaky breath, and Shadow said nothing, giving Valor as much time as she needed.
“The funny thing is, I know how much that makes Echoing Roar sound like a monster, but he really wasn’t,” continued Valor at last. “When we held my father’s funeral a few days later, he wept openly when he presented us with my father’s blood price, and publicly begged my mother to forgive him for what he’d done.”
“And did she?”
Valor shrugged. “She told him she did, which was more than I could bring myself to do. I had already made plans to kill him, blood price or no.”
Shadow cocked her head. “But you were just saying-”
“I know, but at the time I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that I’d lost my father. Nothing else mattered except revenge, although in hindsight I doubt I would have succeeded anyway. I might have killed a wyvern and gained a bear totem, but Echoing Roar already had a long list of mighty deeds to his name. It’s probably an even longer list now.”
Hearing the shift in tense, Shadow frowned. “So you didn’t make the attempt?”
Valor shook her head. “My aunt stopped me before I could. She talked me down, not because she told me that I wouldn’t win if I challenged Echo – I think she knew that would have only spurred me on – but because she said that if I won, our pride would never be able to pay the blood price for him.”
Shadow cocked a brow. “And that’s what got you to give up on taking revenge?”
Valor hesitated for a moment before answering. “Here’s the thing about paying a blood price: responsibility for doing so falls not just on the one responsible, but on their entire pride. I was ready to be declared an outcast for taking vengeance on Echoing Roar despite his having made amends for killing my father. But my mother, my aunt, my siblings…they all would have become outcasts if I’d killed Echo and we weren’t able to pay for it, and after my aunt pointed that out to me, I knew I couldn’t do that to them…so I left.”
“Wait, I thought you left your pride because you wanted to try and find out about your pony parents?” frowned Shadow.
“That’s part of the reason. Or at least, it’s part of the reason I came here instead of going somewhere else,” admitted Valor. “But the reason I left was because…”
She stopped walking then, putting a hoof to her face. “Because I wanted to earn enough money to afford being able to kill Echoing Roar.”
“I’m guessing that’s not the case anymore,” ventured Shadow cautiously, “since I don’t remember you ever being concerned about money.”
Valor managed a wan smile. “It’s not, and I don’t. You see, after a little while I realized how hard it is to earn a lot of money here, and I started…” She bit her lip for a moment, then plunged ahead. “I started wondering if I could earn a lesser amount and just kill someone Echo cared about. One of his wives. A brother or sister. One of his children…”
“Valor!”
The mare in question cringed. “I know. When I caught myself thinking that, I was beyond horrified. Makwa gave me this totem because I protected someone younger and weaker than me, not because I hurt them. That was when I made the single most difficult decision of my life…”
She started walking again, and Shadow fell in beside her. “And that was?”
“To let what had happened to my father go.”
Despite herself, Shadow couldn’t help but scoff. “Just like that?”
“No, not ‘just like that,’” snapped Valor, before catching herself. “Like I said, it was the hardest decision I ever made, but I also know it was the right decision. And the only reason I had enough time and gained enough distance to realize that was because the blood price system kept me from doing something I would have regretted.”
“And you really think that will be the same for the adlets?” asked Shadow, glancing back at Panuk’s body.
“We don’t even know if they have something like that,” admitted Valor. “Not to mention that I doubt Lex will fall down weeping and apologizing the way Echoing Roar did. But there might be some way we can earn their respect enough for them to not punish the pony villages in the area for Panuk’s death. I doubt they’ll want to help us the way Mysty thinks, but we can at least keep from making things worse.”
“That’ll be easier if Lex removes that curse from that other adlet we captured,” muttered Shadow, her tone of voice making it clear what she thought about that particular possibility.
“Toklo,” answered Valor. “His name is Toklo; one of his friends said it during the fight. And I agree, we should tell Lex that we’ll have a better chance of earning their respect if we show it to them in turn.”
“Or, you know, if he hadn’t decided to kill first and ask questions later.”
Giving a rueful shake of her head at Shadow bringing that up again, Valor decided against pointing out what she’d mentioned before about the circumstances making his actions understandable. Instead, as the cave entrance came into view, she tried a different tact. “Well, that makes him a perfect fit for our group, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?” sneered Shadow. “How exactly do you figure that?”
“Because now we’re going to talk to the adlets, who from the sound of it are the yetis’ natural enemies. We wouldn’t be doing that if we’d just chased them off.”
“And your point is?”
“That in terms of diplomacy, he might have failed,” answered Valor with a smile. “But as a result of that, we’re failing forward.”
“You know, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I was under the impression that everything was copacetic between our two groups now.”
Although Spinner’s tone was nonchalant to the point of being jovial, Mystaria sighed, hearing the underlying dissatisfaction in her friend’s voice. “Lex said that he forgave us for what happened back at the inn with Thermal Draft, and I think he’s a stallion of his word, so I believe him.”
She made sure to say that last part a little louder than necessary, since Lex and Thermal Draft were seated less than twenty feet away, and there was no way they hadn’t overheard the two of them. But while Lex continued to study her spellbook without bothering to acknowledge the conversation that was going on, Thermal Draft raised her eyes from where she was reading it over his shoulder, giving the three of them – herself, Spinner, and Woodheart, the druid dozing lightly near the wall of the cave, having curled up around Littleknight – a gentle smile, clearly pleased to hear Mystaria’s opinion of her stallion.
Spinner, however, didn’t seem to take the hint, keeping her eyes fixed squarely on Lex even as she answered Mystaria. “Right, no, I got that. I just wanted to make absolutely sure that there wasn’t any lingering resentment, you know?” She let that hang in the air for a moment, as though waiting for a response.
When none came, she continued. “I mean, I don’t think that there is, but I’m just concerned that someone else might, since the food our illustrious ally conjured up back in that village was a feast fit for the Queen herself, and this” – she swung a hoof, indicating the bowl of gruel and unadorned mug of water sitting in front of her – “isn’t.”
Mystaria sighed. When Lex had volunteered to use his magic to create food for them all, she’d thought it was a real breakthrough moment. Not only was the prospect of getting to eat such incredible fare appealing in the extreme, but she’d held her breath at the prospect that he might share whatever secret he was using to make the spell – which usually created a meager amount of bland rations – produce such a bountiful output of epicurean delights.
But ten minutes later, when he’d finished casting the spell, her hopes had died a spectacular death when the result of his magic had been several servings of the tasteless gruel and tepid water she’s subsisted on so often during her childhood.
It had been disappointing, and from the look on Thermal Draft’s face the pegasus had been hoping for more also, but she hadn’t commented on it, instead moving to sit next to Lex as the unicorn had wordlessly partaken of the meal he’d made. Woodheart hadn’t seemed to have a problem at all, helping herself without so much as a peep of protest. And after taking a moment to chastise herself for getting her hopes up – knowing that the path to building a lasting friendship was a marathon rather than a sprint – Mystaria had done the same.
Unfortunately, it seemed like Spinner wasn’t content to simply let the issue lie.
“I’m just saying,” pressed the filidh, “that some ponies – not me, you understand, but some ponies – might think that being able to create a sumptuous feast out of nothing, and instead choosing to make a couple of bowls of soggy oat-paste, was deliberately discourteous.”
“I wonder if those same ponies would think that it was rude to complain about the food that someone else made for them,” noted Thermal Draft dryly, her friendly smile having vanished in favor of an unamused look.
“Ignore her,” ordered Lex, the first thing he’d said since he’d conjuring up their meal. “It’s more important that you study the structure of these spells, even if they are inefficiently designed.”
“Excuse me?!” All thoughts about trying to cultivate their group’s relationship with Lex went right out of Mystaria’s head then. “‘Inefficiently designed’?! All of the spells in my spellbook were copied directly from the archives at the Athenaeum Arcane, Luminace’s temple in Viljatown! They’re the absolute pinnacle of effective thaumaturgical construction!”
His horn lighting up as he lifted her spellbook in his telekinesis, Lex flipped it open to a particular page before turning the tome toward Mystaria. “Then explain this.”
Frowning, she stood up and stalked over to him, examining the page in question with a scowl. “That’s the ‘resist energy’ spell. It allows you to imbue yourself and everything on your person with a static level of warding against a particular form of attack – those being extremely high temperatures, extremely low temperatures, electrical damage, corrosive agents, or sonic assaults – chosen when you cast it, which makes it highly efficient.”
“Only when you don’t know ahead of time what type of damage you need it to protect against,” retorted Lex. “Since a significant portion of this spell’s structure is concerned with making it viable against any one of the attack forms you outlined, even though it can only actualize one, that potentiality is wasted if you already know what you’re going to need it for. Case in point, my having Solvei ward everyone here against cold damage before we reached the mountain pass.”
“That was a lucky guess,” huffed Mystaria, glancing at the back of the cave where the winter wolf in question was still keeping watch over the adlet they'd captured.
“It was an educated guess,” corrected Lex, “based on the fact that we were in an arctic environment, as well as having already fought monsters who utilized supernatural cold as part of their arsenal. To that end, a variation of this spell that did away with its multiplicity of potential protection in favor of only being able to defend against a single damage type – such as severe algidity – would be more economical in terms of the thought-form it required in your mental architecture. To say nothing of those scrolls you make use of.”
“Hold on,” protested Mystaria. “I’ll admit that you’re right about how, in certain scenarios, saving on the headspace involved by preparing a variant of ‘resist energy’ that only defends against a single form of attack is the better choice. But the entire point of preparing scrolls is that they’re not subject to limits on mental storage capacity! If you’re saying that it’s better to prepare…what, five different scrolls, each of which protects against one damage type, instead of a single scroll that can potentially protect against any of those-”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” cut in Lex flatly.
“Uh-uh, no way,” Mystaria shook her head. “Maybe it’s different because you use gemstones as containment vessels, but there’s absolutely no way that’s right. And I’ll prove it.”
Digging into her saddlebag, she quickly pulled out an abacus, along with a notebook, quill, and a stoppered bottle of ink. Muttering something unintelligible as she took the feather in her mouth, she quickly began scratching out a series of notations, stopping every few seconds to adjust several of the beads on her counting tool.
Lex, for his part, simply turned the earth mare’s spellbook back toward Thermal Draft. “Keep studying this spell’s underlying components, but only to where you can evoke a single type of protection-”
“Rather than trying to recreate its ability to potentially make use of any of them prior to the casting,” she finished with a smirk, sticking her tongue out at him. “I was actually able to follow most of that conversation, you know. Besides, casting a spell that has the capacity to ward against several different kinds of injuries but can only actually guard against one doesn’t fit well with my style of magic anyway. Since I have to build every spell I cast from the ground-up, it’s easier-”
“Wait, hold on a second.” Her brow furrowing, Spinner made her way over to the pair. “I just want to make sure I understand this correctly…”
Letting out a slow breath, her expression turned serious as she gave Lex a resigned look. “You’re not going to conjure up all of that delicious food for us again, are you?”
Thermal Draft snickered, but Lex couldn’t have looked less amused. “Shut up and go away.”
Groaning, the bard did exactly that, slinking off to plunk herself down beside Woodheart with a disheartened huff.
“You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand,” admitted Thermal Draft as she turned her attention back toward Mystaria’s spellbook. “See right here?” She pointed to a spot on the page of the resist energy spell, taking the opportunity to move closer to Lex as she did so, not stopping until their sides were touching. “This part about how, during the casting, the dispersion of energy should be layered rather than disjointed…what does that mean?”
Lex barely had to glance at the passage before answering. “It’s a method of making the spell offer a greater buffer against damage than it normally would, without having to pour more energy into it. Essentially, it has you build the ward in overlapping layers rather than a single barrier, giving it enhanced durability.”
“Oh!” Drafty’s eyes lit up in understanding. “So it’s like how the clouds that form the foundations of Cloudsdale are made with extremely dense nebulosity, right?” She gave a wistful smile then. “I remember how Cloudy would talk about that all the time, since her special talent was being a cumulo-architecture. I’d tease her whenever she brought it up, saying that there was already a really dense Cloudbank right in front of me. She’d pretend to get mad, but I could always see her fighting not to smile…”
She looked down then, her smile diminishing, but it never occurred to Lex to console her. Instead, he found himself suddenly uncomfortable, the anecdote reminding him of the liaison they’d had two days prior. The fact that Thermal Draft had seated herself so that her flank was pressed against his own even as she pined for her beloved did nothing to help the confusion and guilt he felt with regard to what had passed between them, leaving him unsure how to react to her.
“Just…study the spellbook,” he muttered at last; just like when they’d set out from the inn, there were more important things to focus on right now. “Figure out how the spell’s basic mechanics work, and focus on the advanced casting techniques later, when you’ve-”
“I don’t believe it!”
Mystaria’s shocked exclamation was punctuated by her putting her abacus down, the beads on the wooden racks clattering loudly in the silence. But the earth mare in question didn’t seem to notice, instead staring at her notebook with a wide-eyed expression before turning to look at Lex.
“You were right,” she breathed. “I triple-checked it just to be sure, and it’s true; if you use the minimum power necessary during the storage process, then creating five scrolls – each one with a variation of the resist energy spell that’s keyed to a single damage type only – is more efficient, and less costly in terms of construction materials, by a factor of sixteen-point-six-seven percent, with no reduction in overall protection, duration, or any other variable that I can come up with!”
“Obviously,” snorted Lex, though inwardly he was relieved at the change in topic. “And since you didn’t seem to realize it before, that’s true regardless of the medium used to store those spells in.”
But Mystaria didn’t even notice the condescending language, her mind still whirling with the possibilities of what she’d just learned. “This is revolutionary! Do you have any idea how much this will save our temple on construction costs for those scrolls?! And it’s not just for the basic spell forms! Modifications that allow for them to be used on multiple people, both with subdividable and full durations, will also follow the same principle! The savings will be astronomical; thousands of gold pieces per year! We-”
“I think what you’re trying to say,” interrupted Thermal Draft, her melancholy attitude having vanished in favor of mild smugness. “Is ‘thank you.’”
Blushing, Mystaria nodded, her expression still giddy as she grinned at the two of them. “Yes, thank you! Thank you very much! And please tell me if you think anything else in my spellbook is inefficiently designed!”
Slightly nonplussed, Lex raised a brow, glancing inquisitively at Thermal Draft, who giggled and nodded.
Mentally shrugging, he turned to another page and showed it to Mystaria. “Since you asked, the composition of this one is also less than ideal…”
“Oh, for the Sun King’s sake…” sighed Valor, trudging over to where Mystaria had fallen muzzle-first into the snow. “Mysty, you can’t keep doing this.”
“It’s fine,” muttered Mystaria as she picked herself up. From her place at the back of the group, she could see that everyone had stopped walking and was looking back at her. Shadow and Spinner, who along with Valor were closest to her, were both shaking their heads in exasperation as they hefted the collection of spears that Shadow had gathered last night.
Ahead of them, Lex was scowling while Thermal Draft was giving her a sympathetic look. Even their prisoner – who was being forced to march at the head of their procession, pulling the rickety sled with his dead companion’s body on it – had glanced back in curiosity, Woodheart still striding alongside him just like she’d been ever since they left the cave, Littleknight riding on her back.
Her cheeks burning in embarrassment, Mystaria was sure that Solvei would have been looking at her too if Lex hadn’t sent her to scout ahead.
Brushing the snow from her face, she moved to gather up her spellbook and the assorted notes that she’d been glancing between, not worried about the snow having soaked either of them thanks to the cantrip she’d used when they’d set out. “I just got distracted. It won’t happen again.”
“This is already the third time since we set out,” huffed Valor, reaching out to snatch the spellbook and papers before Mystaria could retrieve them. “I’m sorry, but you can’t keep trying to read while we’re walking.”
“Hey!” Lunging forward, Mystaria tried to grab her possessions back, only for Valor to rear up on her hind legs and hold the assorted writings aloft, her greater height letting her easily hoist them up out of Mystaria’s reach. “Gimme those back!”
Valor shook her head. “You can have them back when we make camp again, and not before.”
Mystaria knew that the disappointed moan that escaped her lips then made her sound like a child, and that she should have been mortified by how she was acting, but she couldn’t help it.
After all, she was still trying to get a proper handle on all of the magical insights that Lex had imparted to her last night.
While he’d only deconstructed a half-dozen of the spells in her spellbook, which was a comparatively large number since she’d only inscribed a grand total of just under three dozen arcane spells so far, in each case Lex had identified some aspect that could be modified, adjusted, revised, or otherwise altered. While only one of his changes had been an outright improvement on the basic spell design – that being her spell to temporarily enlarge someone; apparently, when compared to the magical growth that Solvei possessed, her spell “overcorrected for the ratio between size and mass” – in each case Lex had been able to point out potential scenarios for where a variation on the underlying composition would serve better.
The result was that she now had the notes for a nearly a dozen new spells to inscribe into her spellbook.
True, all of them were adaptations of existing spells rather than anything genuinely new, but he’d still increased her magical versatility – at least insofar as her arcane spellcasting went – by an incredible amount.
Her “jump” spell, for instance. Shadow had nicked a scroll Mystaria had made of that in order to help Valor escape from the yetis they’d been fighting. It had worked, but there had been any number of potential scenarios where the spell’s function – which imbued the recipient’s leg muscles with the ability to generate brief bursts of vigor – wouldn’t have helped. Lex had easily come up with variations where the spell instead allowed for less staggered releases of that energy. While that was no good for jumping, strenuous activities that required constant exertion, such as climbing or swimming, would instead benefit.
It had been like that for each and every one of the spells that Lex had examined. None of the alterations he’d made had been powerful, but they’d all been inspired. As it was, he’d stopped only because Shadow and Valor had returned from their expedition to retrieve the dead adlet’s body. Mystaria felt sure that, if he’d had the time to do so, Lex would have been able to come up with some new twist on almost all of the spells she’d recorded.
Which, she decided as they all got moving again, makes his behavior that much stranger.
That Lex was a wizard-priest, like herself, seemed fairly certain at this point. While he was still a huge pile of mysteries – such as his having greater blessing that was supposed to be unique to the head of the Night Mare’s church back in Viljatown, or the altogether unfamiliar magic that let him turn into a shadow, summon black crystals, and apparently lay curses on people, all without any somatic or verbal components – she’d seen him cast traditional spells enough to know that he was versed in both disciplines.
And yet, while his clerical magic seemed fairly rote, the massive amount of high-quality food he’d created back in the village notwithstanding, she couldn’t get a handle on his arcane spellcasting. He didn’t study any sort of spellbook that she’d seen, nor did Solvei seem to act as a living repository of spells for him the way some witches used their familiars. His weird, glowing eyes and strange shadow might have been indicative of being a sorcerer – that was the term used for people who came into arcane magic naturally, usually by way of some sort of unnatural lineage that often manifested in physical twisting as their bodies struggled to properly contain their burgeoning eldritch powers – but she had a hard time believing that she’d never come across any mention of a bloodline with such conspicuous identifiers.
Most mysterious of all, however, was that Lex seemed to be going out of his way to conserve his arcane spellcasting.
That was just a theory, of course. After how she’d almost jumped to conclusions about his having had his mentality altered by wielding Severance – a hypothesis that she’d set aside, but not discarded, for the moment – she was wary of getting ahead of herself. But it was still notable how Lex seemed to be highly reluctant to use his non-divine spells.
Last night had been what had clued her in. For all that Lex had been able to theorize new spells so easily, he had shown no real excitement over having done so. Nor had he made any effort to prepare them, let alone put them through any sort of practical testing. In fact, he had barely even finished properly making them, simply outlining their thaumaturgical structure and design before moving on to the next one. It had been the magical equivalent of excavating a gold mine, finding the richest veins it contained, and then abandoning the entire enterprise. It made no sense.
Moreover, it had gotten Mystaria thinking about when he had put his arcane spellcasting to use, which upon review had only left her more confused.
He’d only used it as a last resort when defending Thermal Draft during his disastrous introduction to Fail Forward, for instance, electing to use – of all things – physical attacks first, then relying on his magic items and whatever that shadow-form was. He’d only resorted to arcane spells when the fight had begun to drag out.
The same could be said for his fight with Grisela. While he’d quickly shifted to using what seemed like his strongest magic once it became clear just how tough the winter hag was, he’d still opened with a series of ineffectual punches. Or at least, that’s what her friends had told her after the fact, since she’d been blind at the time.
Even against the adlets, Lex had made casting proper spells his last resort, opening the fight with the deadly power of his mask. Then he’d – in a truly bizarre turn of events – simply tried to tell three of them to stop, not using any sort of magic that she’d been able to feel, and had been sliced up for his efforts. That’s what it had taken for him to cast a deadlier version of the pit-creating spell he’d used on them back in town.
It had been the same last night, after Valor and Shadow had come back with the adlet’s body. Lex had used a “gentle repose” spell to preserve it, but only after trying to instruct Thermal Draft in how that worked, and her shamefacedly admitting that it was too hard a spell for her to construct.
Of course, the pegasus’ magic was unusual as well, but at least it was something Mystaria could understand…even if she couldn’t fathom why someone would want to learn such an ineffective method of spellcasting. Saying that out loud would be incredibly rude, of course, and as a priestess of Luminace it went without saying that she respected all methods of harnessing magic.
But even so, for all the flexibility that Thermal Draft’s build-it-as-you-go style afforded her – at least before all of that effort overtaxed her ability to keep shaping local energy – it not only took much longer than thaumaturgical spellcasting, it required her to keep all of the pieces in place until she’d finished constructing the entire thing, which meant that she’d never be able to put together anything truly powerful. Stronger spells required more components than she’d be able to maintain before unleashing the finished product.
And yet it almost seemed like Lex was training her up so that he could have her do the spellwork that he seemed oddly reluctant to do. Well, her and Solvei; Mystaria hadn’t had much of a chance to speak with the winter wolf, but she was apparently some sort of ice elementalist. Although she’d also displayed a number of other powers that weren’t cold-themed – like that black crystal armor she’d used while fighting the yetis – presumably as a result of Lex having taken her as a familiar thanks to his apparently having the Night Mare’s favor.
All of which means…what? That he has some sort of taboo against secular spellcasting? Mystaria turned that over for a minute before discarding the idea. No. Whatever that magic is that’s letting him lay down curses and raise black crystals, it doesn’t seem divine in nature, and he’s fine with using that. Maybe he needs a spellbook the way I do, but lost his?
A moment’s thought showed that theory was flawed as well. If that were the case, he would have copied everything in mine as soon as he got his hooves on it. I don’t have many in there, but it’s still better than nothing. Does he just not know very many spells to begin with?
No, in light of how easily he’d created new versions of what was in her spellbook, that idea was impossible to take seriously. Besides, Spinner said that Thermal Draft told her that Lex had used all sorts of spells during the adventures they’d been on before now. Even if she was exaggerating, that’s still more than we’ve seen him use so far. So why is he holding back so much now?
To call that behavior unusual was an understatement. Other than spells which required expensive material components, one of the single largest advantages of thaumaturgical spellcasting was that it was an easily-renewable resource. Regardless of how many spells you used over the course of a day, an hour’s worth of preparation the next morning would replenish them all. As such, while wise wizards made sure not to expend all of their magic before they reached the end of the day – and had a safe place to rest and relax so they could renew their magic later on – there was no reason to hold back as much as Lex was.
…unless, for some reason, he had to.
It’s almost like he needs something other than a spellbook to renew his arcane spells, and he doesn’t have access to it now, decided Mystaria. At least, that fits best with how he’s acting. But if it’s not a spellbook, what does he need?
After several minutes of pondering that question in silence, Mystaria gave up. Her understanding of Lex – and, for that matter, Solvei and Drafty – was disjointed and incomplete. They, or rather, the two ponies, apparently came from a foreign kingdom, and their unusual styles of magic suggested that the spellcasting traditions were different there. Without more information, there was no way to guess what it was that Lex needed, but didn’t currently have, in order to replenish his spells.
Which means I’ll just have to ask him, Mystaria decided with a nod.
After all, what better way to help build trust and strengthen bonds of friendship than by helping him fix what had to be a terrible problem? Given that he was clearly desperate to protect Thermal Draft, and they were headed toward a village of adlets who were likely to be hostile, seeking help to find a lost temple that likely housed a winter hag whom they knew was hostile, having his arcane spellcasting crippled like that had to be stressing him out in a bad way. And who knows? Whether or not he’s had his personality altered by Severance, this might actually help him relax a little!
Satisfied that she was well on her way to making the dour unicorn into a friend, Mystaria reached for her holy symbol. While she couldn’t be sure, Lex seemed like he was probably keeping his limitation a secret from Thermal Draft, likely to keep her from worrying. In that case, I can just ask him what I can do to help telepathically so that his secret won’t get out.
Taking a deep breath, she called upon the gift that Luminace had graced her with. She could only communicate telepathically with someone for a short while, and only if they were relatively close, but it was a power that had proven itself useful again and again over the course of her adventures with her friends. And it would prove its worth again now, she knew, as she reached out to touch Lex’s mind-
Only for the link to be terminated before it could connect, ending with a sudden, nauseating spike of…of…
Rejection. That was the best way she could think to describe the sensation. It had been the psychic equivalent of trying to say something, only for someone to slam their hoof over her mouth before she could get a single word out, shutting down any attempt to open a line of dialogue.
Except it wasn’t “someone,” Mystaria corrected herself shakily, mildly stunned by just how immediately, and how viscerally, she’d been rebuffed. It was Lex. But how…?
She didn’t have any more time to wonder about that, however, as the stallion in question had come to an immediate halt as soon as she’d tried – and failed – to reach his mind. Now, he was looking back and forth wildly, his eyes glowing flaring green and purple.
“Lex?” Up ahead, Drafty reached out to put a hoof on his shoulder. “Is everything alr-”
“Something just tried to attack my mind!” he snapped, still scanning the area around them. “All of you, prepare for battle! There’s a hostile presence-”
“No!” blurted Mystaria, realizing that she’d just made a blunder, hoping that she hadn’t just wiped out the goodwill she’d only earned with Lex yesterday. “It wasn’t an attack! I was just trying to talk to you privately!”
Lex’s eyes settled on her then, and the intensity of his gaze was so heavy it was almost physically painful. “Explain.”
Although his demand was only a single word, the tenor of his voice was thick with the threat of violence if she didn’t comply. On the edges of her vision, Mystaria could see the rest of her friends shifting in place, knowing that they were getting ready if a fight broke out, and she cringed internally. How did I mess up this badly?!
Knowing that there’d be time to berate herself later, she sat down in the snow – Solvei had already enchanted them against the cold before they’d left – and raised one hoof to her holy symbol, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. “I told you before that Luminace has given me the power to speak to my friends telepathically, remember? Like you can with Solvei. That’s all I was trying to do now; talk to you mind-to-mind. It wasn’t an attack, I swear it on the goddess’s name.”
Slowly, never taking his eyes off of her, Lex stalked toward her. “How is it,” he hissed, his voice thick with a rising tide of anger, “that a servant of a goddess who champions the responsible use of magic doesn’t realize that casting a spell on someone without their express permission IS, IN FACT, AN ATTACK?!”
He bellowed that last part, continuing to close the distance between them, only for Valor and Shadow to move in front of him. “You need to calm down,” demanded the former.
“And get over yourself,” spat Shadow. “Do you really think that Mystaria, of all ponies-”
“Stand aside, both of you,” interrupted Mystaria, knowing that if they got in Lex’s face things would likely get worse in a hurry. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but please move.”
“Mysty, you can’t be serious!” Although it was hard to make out her expression behind her mask, the disbelief in Shadow’s voice was impossible to miss. “This nutcase-”
“Let’s go.” Valor didn’t give Shadow a chance to finish her objection, instead pushing the masked mare out of the way as she moved aside.
Which didn’t mean that Shadow went quietly. “Valor! What are you doing?!”
“The same thing I said I was doing last night,” answered the larger mare without hesitation. “Trusting Mysty’s judgment.”
Pausing just long enough to flash her friend a grateful smile, Mystaria turned her full attention back to Lex a moment later, the unicorn still staring at her balefully. “You’re right,” she admitted, falling back on the same tactic that had led to her managing to reach an accord with Lex the previous evening. “I should have asked for permission before trying to contact you magically the way I did. I’m deeply sorry for having upset you; I only did it because I didn’t want everyone else to overhear the topic I wanted to discuss with you.”
“And now,” rumbled Lex, “they’ll all overhear it, because you’re going to tell me precisely what you thought was so important that you’d dare impinge on my mental autonomy.”
Mystaria blinked, unprepared for him to make that particular demand. “What? That’s…no. I mean, you don’t want me to do that!”
“I can assure you,” growled Lex, “I do. And it wasn’t a request.”
“Lex, please!” pleaded Mystaria. “It’s about you, about how I could try and pay you back for all those spells you developed and shared with me last night! That’s all!”
The glow in his eyes grew brighter then, and a purple aura sprang to life around his horn. “This is your last chance!” he snarled. “State specifically what you tried to contact me about, or the curse I put on you will make you spend the rest of your life wishing that you had!”
“Not gonna happen!” snapped Shadow, drawing her dagger, and this time Valor didn’t hold her back, readying her shield instead. Nor were they the only ones getting ready, as Mystaria could see Spinner bringing her lute around, with Woodheart throwing her robe off as Littleknight jumped off her back and bounded toward them.
Knowing that she had no choice now, Mystaria squeezed her eyes shut even as she raised her voice.
“I was going to say that I wanted to help you fix whatever it is that’s keeping you from replenishing your arcane magic!”
Solvei sighed as she took another bite of her lunch, surveying the area ahead of her.
At a casual glance, it looked little different from any stretch of arctic wilderness, with a snowy forest of evergreens spreading out to the north. But having been probing at the edges of the place for the better part of the afternoon, Solvei knew that the taiga – a term that her master had taught her during their trip to the pony village – wasn’t nearly as peaceful as it looked. Her current meal was proof enough of that.
The large spider she’d killed wasn’t nearly as tasty as yesterday’s glacier toads had been. Whereas the large blue frogs had been full of deliciously chewy meat, the spider was nowhere near as big – only about the size of a pony – and its hard exterior, covered in bristly white fur, concealed very little meat within. That she still felt hungry despite this being the fifth one she’d eaten, a nest of the things having rushed out to try and overwhelm her as she’d paced the forest’s perimeter, was a testament to how little nourishment they provided.
But at least they were better than those trees that had attacked her.
That nearly a dozen of the smallest pines – the largest of them only a little taller than her natural size – clustered around the edge of the taiga had come to life and attacked her when she’d tried to enter the frozen forest had taken Solvei completely by surprise. Fortunately, despite having superior numbers and having gotten the drop on her, the timber creatures had been quite weak. Or at least, they’d seemed weak in the face of the incredible gifts her master had given her; had she still been the utvalgte she was before she’d met Lex, Solvei knew things might have turned out differently.
That was because, unlike the straightforward aggression of the spiders, the tree-creatures had fought intelligently. During the course of their fight, they’d used the terrain to their advantage, luring her into traps they’d set up ahead of time. Patches of snow that had concealed thick splinters wedged upright in the ground, a deadfall that had been set up just inside the forest proper, and a pit that had been covered with loose brush and branches; the entire place had been booby-trapped.
Fortunately, the ploys had availed the mobile trees little. Her armored paws had easily crushed the splinters, her enhanced speed had let her dodge the deadfall, and thanks to her master giving her the power to increase her size, the pit trap had been too shallow to contain her. Still, the entire exercise had been irritating.
All the more so since the tree-things had been completely inedible. While the bulk of them had escaped into the forest once they’d realized they couldn’t stop her, Solvei had still managed to down several of them. Any doubts she’d had about them being actual trees had been dispelled once she’d bitten into them, getting nothing but a mouthful of wood and sticky resin for her trouble.
At least I didn’t get any splinters in my tongue, Solvei consoled herself silently as she finished her spider, taking care to not embarrass herself by accidentally sharing that thought with her master. Since she was already going to have to share bad news with him, the least she could do was try not to make a fool out of herself as she did it.
Still, this definitely won’t make him happy, she knew, her ears folding back as she surveyed the terrain again.
After they’d left the mountain cave earlier that morning, their adlet prisoner had told them that, after exiting the mountain pass, they’d need to go north in order to find the rest of his people. Given that they’d already been headed that way to begin with, that had seemed like good news. But the adlet – being meek as well as a faithless wretch – had warned them that they’d be heading through dangerous terrain; apparently, it was no coincidence that their kind usually turned into mist and flew over it.
But while Solvei had sneered at the creature’s cowardice before, she had to admit that it’s lack of bravery wasn’t entirely unfounded. While there had been plenty of wooded areas in the valley where she and her family had made their lair, the forest that spread out to the north of the pass was vast and wild. That much had been made clear after spending almost half the day trying to circumnavigate it, with little to show for her effort.
Since going around the wintry woodland seemed like it would take too long, that only left going through. But while Solvei was certain that she and her master could fight their way through without too much trouble, she was less certain about keeping Drafty – and those other ponies, even if her master didn’t like them very much – safe in the process. Finding a cave to sleep near the pass to sleep in had been a stroke of good luck, but Solvei doubted there’d be any more such alcoves in the forest.
Not to mention how, if there are big spiders and moving trees at the edge of this place, there are probably even worse creatures that live inside of-
Solvei’s thought was interrupted as her master’s emotions suddenly flooded her mind.
Or rather, one single emotion:
Panic.
Normally, Solvei couldn’t feel what Lex was feeling. While she knew he was aware of her own emotions – although he apparently didn’t experience them himself – the reverse wasn’t true…most of the time. Moments when her master experienced some extremely intense emotion, she’d learned, were the exception. In such instances, whatever barrier kept his feelings hidden from her came down, and his emotions flowed into her through their link.
To date, that had only happened a few times. Right before they’d arrived in the pony village, when he’d stopped to spend the day chanting at nothing, he’d suddenly become intensely angry for some reason, though he’d refused to talk about why. She’d also felt a brief spike of rage from him shortly after they’d arrived in the pony village, when (she’d learned later) those other females had attacked Drafty. And sometimes, if she was awake while he was sleeping, she’d receive brief flashes of loneliness, regret, or grief.
But she’d never once felt fear from him.
Until now.
Master! What’s wrong?! she yelped across their link, her concerns about how to cross the woods completely forgotten in the face of Lex’s distress.
But no answer came.
As unnerving as it was to think that something could actually frighten her master – whom she’d seen stand undaunted in the face of numerous life-or-death situations – his lack of an answer made Solvei’s anxiety skyrocket. Master, please summon me back! Let me help-
She didn’t get a chance to finish as she felt him slam their telepathic connection closed. That was something else he could do, she’d learned. Although she’d received a power similar to his, protecting her mind from any attempt to intrude upon it, Lex himself was the exception. She couldn’t shut out his mental voice, or refuse his summons, or otherwise use the powers he’d given her to defy him.
But as with the emotion-sharing nature of their link, the reverse wasn’t true; if Lex wanted to suppress their telepathy, he could. He’d never done so for very long – she wasn’t sure if he could do it for very long, having the impression that it was something that required his deliberate maintenance, like flexing a muscle – but when he did, there was nothing she could do but wait for him to open it again.
Until he did, however, she had no idea what was happening to him.
For a brief moment, Solvei hesitated. Her master had sent her to scout ahead, knowing better than to trust everyone’s safety to a tattered old map and the word of a vile adlet. While his refusal to listen to her now was upsetting, it stood to reason that he wanted her to continue doing what she was doing. After all, if he wanted her there, he would have summoned her. By that logic, she should keep skirting the edge of the forest until her master called for her.
But the panic she’d felt from him just now…
Just remembering it now made her want to whimper. It hadn’t been simple terror or a sudden sense of alarm. Rather, it had been something deeper, fear laced with a sense of…of…dread.
That was it. Whatever had frightened Lex, it had been something he’d been worried about for a long time, some fear that he’d long anticipated and had just now come to pass. Solvei couldn’t imagine what that was, though; if something had hurt Thermal Draft, his response to his mate being injured would have been rage, rather than panic. Nor would he have been afraid of those other ponies betraying him, not with how easily – according to what Drafty had told her after the fact – he’d subdued them before. And that was doubly the case for that pathetic adlet he’d captured.
Which means this is something else, she decided. Something he thinks I can’t help with, and my talking to him was only making it harder for him to concentrate.
That thought made her tail droop, and she glanced toward the forest again. Although it was still the middle of the day, the woods were an impenetrable haze of gloom, the heavy cloud cover above and snow-filled canopy serving to keep its interior in state of perpetual murkiness. Although Solvei could see in the dark, the range of her nightvision wasn’t very far, and even that was curtailed by the mess of trees and undergrowth. There could easily have been more snow spiders or tree-creatures or numerous other dangerous monsters silently watching her from concealment, especially since the wind had died down, making it hard to smell anything that wasn’t already close by.
The right thing to do would be to continue measuring the boundary of the forest, so that when her master called her back, she’d be able to tell him if trying to go around it was worthwhile or not. And the more hostile creatures she encountered, the more she’d be able to warn Lex about what they’d be up against if he decided that they needed to plunge through the woods instead. Besides, the more monsters she killed now, the fewer he’d have to deal with when he eventually made it here.
That was the smarter course of action, determined using the logical and rational analysis that her master championed. Solvei felt certain that it was what he expected of her now, which made it what she needed to do. And yet…
He’s afraid. He’s afraid, and I’m not there to help him.
That knowledge wasn’t just painful, it was enough to completely break her heart.
Even when her father had been killed, Solvei had known that he was in a better place. Losing her family to Prevarius’ corruption – even if she hadn’t fully understood what it was at the time – had been awful, but even that had been tempered by her desperate hope that if she found help and defeated the creature, her family would recover from the “sickness” he’d infected them with. In both cases, those beliefs had given her something to cling to, blunting how badly she’d been hurting by what had happened to her loved ones.
But there was no such belief to sustain her now, and that made knowing that Lex was in trouble absolutely unbearable. While the smarter choice was to respect her master’s decision that she couldn’t help and continue doing his bidding in the meantime, that wasn’t a choice that Solvei could live with. Not when the person who’d put everything on the line for her and asked for nothing in return except that she stay with him – and who’d already gone through so much anguish and suffering – was facing some long-held fear come true.
Even if she couldn’t do anything to help, she wanted to at least be there for him.
Whirling in place, Solvei took off running back the way she’d come.
Her master might have cut off their telepathic communication, but he hadn’t – and, Solvei was pretty sure, he couldn’t – shut down her ability to sense his direction and distance from her. And although she wouldn’t be able to get to him for a little while, at least now she was doing something to help him. Not his plans, not his strategies, but him personally.
That desire – to ease his pain, even if only a little – was the reason she’d accepted him binding her soul to his.
Master, I’m coming! She knew he couldn’t hear her thoughts right now, but that didn’t stop her from sending them his way. Right now he was afraid, and she wanted him to know that whatever was happening, he didn’t have to go through it alone. Not anymore.
Woodheart tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice, but judging by the look on Toklo’s face, wasn’t completely successful. “In the Earliest Times, after we fled from Nuti-Amaguk and his war, we reached out to the spirits who inhabited the world alongside us,” he explained, and the tenor of his voice made it clear he was reciting something he’d been told.
“Like ourselves, the spirits lived as they wished to. They celebrated the lush new world that they found themselves in, and showed us how to reap its bounties. They cherished the beauty that each new day brought, and taught us to honor its glories. They expressed the wild natures in their hearts without shame, and inspired us to take pride in our freedom. And for this we honored them.”
“And for this we honored them,” murmured Woodheart, intuiting that the audience was supposed to repeat that line.
Apparently she’d guessed right, because Toklo gave her a surprised look. “You know the story of our people?”
Giving a self-conscious chuckle, Woodheart shook her head. She had made sure not to invite an animal spirit to possess her this morning so that she’d be able to talk to Toklo about his people’s spiritual practices, and now she was interrupting him when he tried to share them with her! “Sorry, no. I just got caught up in your story. Please, go on.”
Looking as though he wasn’t sure what to make of her answer, Toklo hesitated for a moment before continuing. “But the spirits had revealed only fragments of their knowledge when Nuti-Amaguk learned that we had defied him. His anger was terrible then. He howled so loudly that the moon hid its face. He drove his paws into the ground so heavily that the land shook. He swung his tail so wildly that the wind from its passage uprooted trees. And he threw back his head and shouted ‘As my most favored children have shown no devotion to me, so shall no others be devoted to them! For any who give them succor shall, once Ikumak-Amaguk’s fires have been quenched, become my enemy in his place!’”
Woodheart made a mental note to ask Solvei about that later. She hadn’t had a chance to speak with Lex’s winter wolf – the closest she’d come had been to bark at her a few nights previous, when Littleknight had bitten Solvei’s tail in a rather adorable display of bravado – and she wanted to rectify that as soon as possible. Learning more about how other creatures saw the natural world was the entire reason she’d left her forest, after all.
“And so many of the spirits, afraid of the Great Wolf, fled from us or refused to speak to us or even turned against us,” continued Toklo, huffing a bit now from having spoken for so long while also pulling his friend’s body behind him. Although she and Valor had both worked on whittling the collection of branches down to something reasonably approximating a sled, it was still a poor substitute for the real thing, and while Toklo didn’t look like he had an ounce of fat on him, it was clear that the constant exertion was beginning to wear him down.
“That’s why we only learned how to mimic a few of the spirits’ powers,” he concluded after taking a deep breath. “Until the day Nuti-Amaguk and Ikumak-Amaguk finally kill each other, and the spirits are free to live with us without fear, we won’t be able to learn any others.”
Woodheart cocked her head at that. “What about your people’s shamans? You made it sound like they still had a relationship with the spirits.”
The question managed to earn a smile from him. “Not all of the spirits were scared of Nuti-Amaguk’s threat. A few of them still communicate with the most gifted among us, but even then, they only-”
“Something just tried to attack my mind!” Lex’s voice, filled with tension, made both of them jump. “All of you, prepare for battle! There’s a hostile presence-”
“No!” came Mystaria’s panicked response. “It wasn’t an attack! I was just trying to talk to you privately!”
“What’s going on?” muttered Toklo quietly, looking behind them in trepidation.
Woodheart’s only reply was to shake her head again. Although she’d managed to get the adlet to open up to her, Toklo was still terrified of Lex, and seeing the unicorn’s anger now was enough to make him cringe.
Not that I can blame him, admitted Woodheart silently. Bad enough that Lex had killed his close friend right in front of him – she’d finally gotten Toklo to open up to her when she’d asked him about Panuk, coaxing several stories from him about how the slain adlet had been a beloved member of their community – but the curses the unicorn had placed on him had left Toklo stricken with anxiety, fearful of the possibility that Lex would never remove them.
Woodheart had promised him that she’d talk to Lex about that, and that had seemed to calm the adlet down a little bit, but in truth Woodheart had no idea how to broach the subject with the dour unicorn. Although she’d only known him for a few days, Lex had displayed only two attitudes during that time: sneering condescension and overwhelming rage. And while she could appreciate that he was apparently going through a hard time – at least according to what Spinner had said that Thermal Draft had told her – the sheer unpleasantness that Lex radiated at all times, along with the lingering memory of how he’d hurt Littleknight during their first encounter, made it easy for Woodheart to keep her distance from him.
Which is what Mysty should have done, she fretted inwardly as Lex stalked toward her friend, his ranting making it clear that she’d tried to contact him telepathically.
Why Lex was furious over that Woodheart had no idea – hadn’t Mystaria reached some sort of understanding with him just yesterday? – but the sight of him getting in her friend’s face was enough to make the druid tense up, causing Littleknight to shift uneasily on her back. “Meep?”
“I don’t think so,” she murmured, watching as Shadow and Valor put themselves between Lex and Mysty, only for the latter to wave them off. “But if he starts casting a spell, I want you to jab him. Not hard, just enough to disrupt his magic, okay?”
“Meep meep!”
“Is that wise?” whimpered Toklo. “If you defy him now, won’t it only anger him more?”
“It’s just a precaution,” she replied, keeping her voice soft and soothing. “Lex gets angry a lot, but Mystaria is good at talking him down-”
“This is your last chance!” hissed Lex, his horn glowing brightly. “State specifically what you tried to contact me about, or the curse I put on you will make you spend the rest of your life wishing that you had!”
“-usually,” she finished with a grimace, flicking Littleknight off of her back to race toward Lex as she threw off her robe.
But Mystaria’s next words caught everyone by surprise.
“I was going to say that I wanted to help you fix whatever it is that’s keeping you from replenishing your arcane magic!”
Lex froze at that, the aura around his horn fizzling out. Woodheart breathed a sigh of relief at the sight, only for puzzlement to overtake her a moment later. Something was wrong with Lex’s arcane magic? She shared a confused look with Spinner, and saw that Valor and Shadow were doing the same.
It was Thermal Draft who broke the silence first. Up until now, the pegasus had been watching the confrontation with an uncertain expression on her face, as though not sure whether to join Lex in chastising Mystaria or try and calm him down. Now, however, she flapped her wings and flew to her lover’s side, giving him a quizzical look. “Lex? What’s she talking about?”
But Lex’s only response was silence, still staring at Mystaria from behind his mask.
That seemed to unnerve the pegasus more than his ranting had, however, and she took a hesitant step closer to him. “L-Lex?”
Swallowing nervously, Mystaria licked her lips. “I hypothesized that was why you were so reluctant to utilize that method of spellcasting in the fights you’ve been in up until now, despite how effectively you use it,” she explained. “I wanted to talk to you about it because I thought maybe I could help with whatevAAAAAAHHHH!!!”
“LEX!!! STOP!!!”
Mystaria and Drafty’s voices rang out – one pained and the other horrified – as a forest of black crystals erupted from the ground around Lex.
It was the sheer amount of them, along with the suddenness of the attack, that left Woodheart momentarily stupefied. She’d seen him do something like this back at the inn, when they’d first fought. But then he’d only created smaller crystals, barely the size of a pony, jutting up at random around the common room.
Now, however, there were spikes of all sizes shooting up from beneath the snow around Lex. From splinters that were half the size of Littleknight to massive tors rising over fifteen feet in the air, the black crystals spread out in every direction. Emerging without warning, at angles ranging from completely upright to almost parallel with the ground, their points were sharp and their edges were jagged, and they made Mystaria scream in agony as her legs were pierced, collapsing to the ground. It was only because she frantically dragged herself away from him that her torso wasn’t perforated a moment later.
“LEX, PLEASE!!!” screamed Thermal Draft, barely having managed to avoid the same fate as Mystaria by leaping into the air, circling closer to the stallion. “YOU HAVE TO ST-, HNNNGH!!!”
She couldn’t finish as a sudden spike shot out, cutting a deep gash across her face. The pain made her cry out, but her expression was one of disbelief rather than agony as she managed to shakily flap away.
But Lex didn’t seem to notice what he’d done to his girlfriend. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice anything at all, still staring forward silently at where Mystaria had been, as though nothing had happened. Except that his eyes were glowing brighter than before. So brightly that the green light blotted out everything else, the purple flames at the outer corners whipping madly as though caught in a thunderstorm.
“He’s lost it!” screamed Shadow, whipping out a throwing dagger and hurling it at Lex. The projectile didn’t even make it halfway to its target before another black spike shot up from the ground, knocking it astray. “Valor, get Mysty out of there! Spinner, get a healing spell ready! Woodheart, help me give them some cover!”
No one replied to the masked mare’s instructions, having immediately taken up their assigned roles without bothering to waste any time on acknowledgment. Seeing that Valor was already halfway to where Mystaria was dragging herself away from the ever-expanding field of black crystal spikes, Woodheart turned her attention to Lex. Let’s see how you like it!
It took her barely two seconds to rattle off a quick series of syllables as well as the proper gestures necessary to activate her spell. A moment later, the snow at Lex’s hooves crystalized upward, forming a spear of glistening white to match the black crystals all around him. Lancing upward, Woodheart resisted the urge to cheer as its point struck Lex across the side of the head, just past the edge of his mask. She’d deliberately aimed it to wound, hoping that it would snap him out of whatever had happened to him.
A moment later her efforts bore fruit as Lex slowly turned to look at her, and Woodheart’s hopefulness died immediately.
His eyes were still solid green.
A moment later his head moved slightly, and although she couldn’t see his pupils, Woodheart realized that – for whatever reason – he was looking at Toklo now.
The sight was enough to break the adlet’s courage, and he dropped the rope tied to the sled carrying Panuk’s body as he turned and ran. His flight was one of pure panic, not heading for any cover or protection, only concerned with putting as much distance between himself and the horrifying figure whose otherworldly gaze was now solidly directed at him.
That was when Lex lifted a hoof up to touch his mask.
Having seen him do exactly the same thing yesterday, Woodheart suddenly knew what Lex was about to do. “NO! DON’T!”
Her words fell on deaf ears, as a moment later Lex let his mask fly toward the retreating adlet.
Woodheart’s hooves were in motion before she even consciously registered what she was doing. Turning and running toward Toklo, it was only because she had four legs compared to his two that she was able to close the distance between them. But the mask was already arcing toward its target, its trajectory magically propelled, and Woodheart pushed herself harder, trying to get there before it reached the poor creature she’d spent the morning befriending.
Behind her, she could hear voices raised in alarm, but she didn’t have a chance to pay attention to them as she strove to run faster, seeing that the mask was now within a few feet of Toklo. Throwing everything she had into one last burst of speed, she leaped forward, colliding with the adlet as she bowled him over, a sudden rush of exhilaration coursing through her as she landed on top of him.
“I was going to say that I wanted to help you fix whatever it is that’s keeping you from replenishing your arcane magic!”
Lex felt the world fall away from beneath his hooves at Mystaria’s declaration, leaving him to plunge into an icy sea of panic.
The enormity of what had just happened threatened to overwhelm him completely. While not his worst fear by any means, knowledge of his single greatest weakness getting out was still a scenario that he’d dreaded deeply since before he’d first come to Everglow, and had subsequently gone to great lengths to avoid. To that end, he’d never so much as alluded to that particular limitation to anyone, not even Sonata; while Lex had heard all sorts of trite expressions about how ponies who loved each other didn’t keep secrets from each other, he’d never once considered telling her about the flaw in his mightiest magic.
After all, keeping that secret was a matter of survival, and not simply his own.
The enemies that Lex had needed to fight ever since he’d sought to assume power in Equestria had proven to be staggering in their numbers, powers, and ruthlessness. On multiple occasions, they’d been defeated only by the slimmest of margins, and often as severe costs. If any of those foes had known to form a strategy around his inability to easily restock his thaumaturgical magic – and Lex himself could easily think of myriad ways in which to do so, from guerilla tactics deliberately designed to make him deplete his reserves to staging attacks on the few days when he could restore his spells – then the worst could easily have come to pass.
Lirtkra. Xiriel. Even that dragon he’d killed outside of Tall Tale. If any of them had adjusted their tactics according to his magical deficiency, they could have beaten him. And if they had, allowing them to carry out their depredations unopposed, Equestria would have suffered.
Which in turn meant that there was no margin for error when it came to others finding out. Regardless of how trustworthy someone else was, Lex had seen too many techniques that could be utilized to extract sensitive information from most ponies. Things that were remembered in dreams could potentially be seen by Luna. Prevarius had been able to read minds. Dark Streak had magic that allowed her to disguise herself as anyone. While Lex knew that governance required that information be shared as a matter of simple practicality, there simply wasn’t anyone besides himself who was capable of keeping his most important secret.
The only time when things hadn’t been quite so dire had been the brief period when he’d been given Severance. The scythe had ameliorated the worst of his limitations, but the weapon had proven itself to be more of a liability than an asset, leaving him with no choice but to discard it. And with no options for replacing the artifact, Lex had no alternative but to continue doing what he’d done ever since he’d designed his imperfect magical paradigm: conserve his spells as much as possible, expend them when necessary, and prevent anyone from finding out about the restriction that he was working under.
And now his secret had been revealed, and Lex found himself paralyzed as he struggled to take in the full scope of what that meant.
Dimly, he registered what might have been voices nearby, but he shut them out without even consciously deciding to ignore them. Too much of his brainpower was needed elsewhere, as he desperately tried to figure out how this had happened, what the ramifications – both immediate and long-term – were, and what could be done to mitigate them. Every factor, every variable, every possibility had to be holistically and immediately analyzed so that he could-
Be even more certain than you already are that there’s nothing you can do? laughed his tulpa. You already outlined how, once others learn about your weakness, it’s only a matter of time before it’s used against you. What makes you think you can overturn that conclusion now?
Because no other outcome was acceptable. Not when the consequences for failure were so severe. A solution needed to be found, and so would be found.
And what exactly is that solution? How will you protect your secret now that it’s already been overheard by so many?
Not that many. Barely more than a half-dozen. A few targeted curses to cause short-term memory loss would-
You were just berating that mare about the immorality of using magic on others without their permission, jeered the mental construct. Now you plan on doing the exact same thing?
The two situations could not be directly compared. Having institutionalized authority over the fates of others created a compelling interest that necessitated the ability to enforce measures that kept that authority intact. To that end, their participation in the dissemination of restricted information-
Their “participation”? Although voiceless, the words carried a heavy weight of scorn this time. What participation? That priestess might have figured out your weakness – completely on her own, with no unethical behavior behind her deduction, you’ll note – but the others simply happened to be there when she announced it. And she only announced it because you pushed her. She made it very clear that she didn’t want to say what she’d learned out loud; she did so only because you threatened to curse her.
The fear that was coursing through Lex, already threatening to smother his ability to think critically about what was happening, surged at that. Bad enough that his vulnerability had been found out, but the knowledge that he was responsible for disseminating it was a horrific realization that that bordered on unbearable.
The voices from the ponies around him had become screams now, but Lex continued to pay them no mind. This had to be resolved.
It won’t be.
There was a solution.
There isn’t.
He simply needed to find it.
You can’t.
The ideal answer would have been to simply correct the underlying flaw in his spellcasting altogether. That would not only obviate the premise of Mystaria’s statement, but it would solve numerous other problems for him as well. But that was little better than wishful thinking; he’d gone over that particular problem many times since he’d first developed thought-based magic, with no solution to the issue his inability to compress the necessary energy on his own presenting itself.
A verbal statement of denial, that’s what was necessary now. A blanket refutation of the conclusion that Mystaria had reached. As much as he abhorred falsehoods – communicating with others was difficult enough even when they were presumed to be honest – that would convince everyone listening to disregard what she had just said. Except…what if his denial wasn’t convincing? The imperceptible subtext that underscored most communication was likely to be a salient factor when it came to convincing others to put stock in something that wasn’t true, which placed him at a severe disadvantage. Worse, in failing to be convincing, he could inadvertently confirm what she’d said, making things even worse. Again.
Perhaps disregarding her statement altogether would serve to undercut its credibility? But there was no way to judge that, and any attempt to gauge the others’ reactions ran the same risk as an unconvincing rejection of what Mystaria had said. Not knowing if he’d successfully convinced them that there was nothing wrong with his spellcasting wasn’t sufficient, nor would it speak to whatever had led to Mystaria unearthing his secret in the first place.
Which was another point that needed to be addressed. How exactly had Mystaria managed to identify his thaumaturgical spellcasting’s central defect after only a few days in his presence? Was it some insight given to her as a worshiper of this world’s goddess of magic? Or was it because she herself was so familiar with different forms of thought-based spellcasting? Twilight Sparkle had grown suspicious over the course of their duel back in Vanhoover; perhaps – as distressing as it was to contemplate – his weakness was obvious to anyone who knew that particular form of magic?
That possibility was enough to send Lex down an entirely new avenue of self-doubt. Was it no coincidence that Dark Streak had attacked mere days before the equinox? Had the unknown entity who’d been repeatedly scrying on him during the trip to Las Pegasus learned why he’d never been able to foil their magical monitoring? If he made it back to Equestria, would it be only a matter of time before Twilight figured out the weakness in his magic?
You should never have asked the Night Mare for a compensatory artifact when you bargained with her, taunted his tulpa. You should have told her that you wanted her to correct the flaw in your magic. But you just couldn’t bear to admit that the imperfection was beyond your capabilities to correct, could you?
Lex had no response to give, too busy trying to come up with an answer…any answer.
But there were none to be had.
Although he was devoting every fiber of his being toward figuring out what to do in response to the crisis he’d suddenly had thrust upon him, Lex still didn’t know what to do about it. There were no hypotheses that were workable, no theories that were viable, no proposed courses of action that were feasible. With each passing moment, his fear and desperation grew worse, and he held them at bay only by assuring himself that he just needed a little more time…that a solution would surely make itself known to him…that there had to be something he could do…
Pain intruded across his consciousness then, and it was all Lex could do to keep from screaming, not from agony but because simply registering the stimulus impinged on his concentration, making an impossible task even harder.
Slowly turning in place as begrudgingly gave the unexpected sensation the smallest portion of his attention, Lex found himself looking at Woodheart and that adlet they’d captured…and suddenly he realized that there was a solution. Or at least, a partial one.
Right now, there were seven individuals who knew about his weakness. Eight if Woodheart’s familiar was counted.
Their knowledge of the defect in his magic gave Lex no grounds for prosecuting the ponies, nor their pet. But the adlet was another story.
That humanoid had attacked them with intent to kill. Given that it wasn’t a pony itself, its actions therefore warranted a death sentence. While he’d suspended that so that the hideous thing could be put to practical use in the meantime, doing so in no way meant that the adlet had escaped its execution. After all, it had only cooperated as a result of coercive measures being applied in the form of a curse rather than because a deal had been made, and so its service now warranted no clemency.
And since it was a foregone conclusion that, once it led them to the rest of its kind, the adlet would immediately tell its kin what it had just heard, the drawbacks of leaving it alive now outweighed the benefits.
Which meant that there was about to be one less individual who knew his secret.
His decision made, Lex reached up to grab his mask, letting it fly with an almost contemptible swing of his hoof. He’d barely thrown it into the air before he lost interest in it, turning the whole of his thoughts back toward the array of problems besieging his mind. There had to be some way out of this, some method of fixing the unacceptable situation in which he now found himself.
But he’d barely started to sink back down into his thoughts when another interruption made itself known. It wasn’t a tactile sensation, instead being another raised voice. But this time, it wasn’t one that he was able to ignore, demanding his attention in spite of his efforts to put it out of his mind…and when he processed the words a moment later, it became clear why.
Taking a moment to swallow his irritation toward his idiot sister, Paska made sure his whisper was as soft as he could make it. “Not yet, Vidrig. Now shut up, or else.”
He hoped that would be enough to keep her quiet. Although the spell she’d used allowed them all to whisper to each other over a short distance, the magic didn’t prevent those whispers from being overheard by anyone nearby. While that didn’t seem likely, since they were still a good distance away from the ponies – as well as the adlet who looked as though he was their prisoner – Paska preferred not to take unnecessary chances.
Fortunately, Vidrig seemed disinclined to grumble about his decision, likely since the memory of what had happened the last time she’d complained at him – her incessant whining last night about their meager provisions had eventually pushed him to chop her legs off with her own axe, after which he’d forced her to consume her severed limbs – was still fresh in her mind. That, or the sting from her spending half the night regrowing her lower appendages hadn’t faded yet.
Unfortunately, Vidrig wasn’t the stupidest member of their group. “Why?” came a guttural snarl that was barely a whisper. “Want eat now!”
“I said no, Blat,” shot back Paska, not bothering to follow up his order with any threats. If Vidrig, dumb as she was, was smart for an ice troll, then Blat was stupid even for a manticore; simple concepts such as consequences were difficult for his brother to handle. Short and simple commands worked best. “Keep waiting.”
A wordless grunt of frustration came from Blat then, but he didn’t seem inclined to disobey…which was good, because after several days of tracking down the ponies, Paska was in no mood for things to go wrong at the last moment.
It wasn’t as though the journey had been particularly onerous. Periodic castings of his “find quarry” spell had been enough to direct them unerringly toward the unicorn who had defeated Grisela. Rather, it had been once they’d gotten to within a half-mile of their target that the hard work had begun. Laying an ambush was an activity fraught with the potential for mishaps, particularly when your target was powerful, was traveling with a group, and needed to be taken alive.
Not to mention the fact that we’re only going to get one shot at this, Paska silently reminded himself. Their strategy hinged on several factors, the most important of which was their exfiltration once they’d grabbed the stallion. Sissel had been very clear that the magic they’d use to whisk themselves and their captive – who needed to be unconscious, since the spell wouldn’t transport anyone who put up even the slightest resistance – back home could only be used once. If something happened and they couldn’t get away, the entire plan fell apart.
But as important as that was, escape was the last thing on Paska’s mind at the moment. Rather, he was more focused on making sure the conditions for unleashing their attack were as favorable as could be expected.
The good news was that the giant wolf in black armor that Grisela had mentioned wasn’t there. Had it been, the entire plan would have needed to be postponed until it was gone; Paska had no desire to face off against a creature that could kill over a dozen yetis without taking a single serious wound in return. But with it having left to scout ahead – that’s what the tracks Paska had found earlier suggested, since the paw-prints were headed away from the ponies’ current position and had yet to be snowed in – they had an opportunity to strike.
Or at least, that was how it looked. The problem was that Grisela, being an idiot who only thought she was smart, had already used several of the most effective ambush tactics when she’d assaulted that village a few days ago. Invisibility to move in close. Making sure not to leave a trail where she walked. Sending minions ahead to distract enemies. All were excellent ploys, which meant that if the ponies were sensitive to them now, things could easily go bad in a hurry.
That was why, once they’d gotten within a half-mile of the ponies, Paska had started running reconnaissance.
First had been having Vidrig cast an invisibility spell on Blat, after which he’d had the manticore do a quick flyby over the ponies. If they’d had any counter-invisibility magic active, it would have been obvious from how they’d react to the sight of a monster like that circling them. But – watching from concealment beneath a nearby outcropping – Paska had detected no reaction on the part of his targets.
Nor had the ponies stumbled across evidence of his passage, despite moving over terrain that he’d crossed less than a half-hour earlier. That wasn’t surprising, of course; Paska had already used his “pass without trace” on himself, Vidrig, and Blat, letting them all move without leaving a trail in the snow the way Grisela naturally did. Still, the lack of reaction from the ponies suggested that they had no magical method of detecting recent movement in an area.
That wasn’t too surprising, of course; Paska was no arcanist, but he knew that most spells had relatively short durations – no more than a few hours at the maximum, and many were far shorter than that – and so his quarry couldn’t stay on alert all the time. Still, it was far better to make sure that the ponies’ guard was lowered than to simply assume it was. Which was why, despite Vidrig put invisibility spells over all three of them now, spells which would only last for a few minutes, Paska was still holding his siblings back.
If an error was going to be made, it should be made on the side of caution. As stupid as Grisela was, she at least knew not to put herself personally in danger. Paska didn’t have that luxury, which meant that he needed to prepare as much as he could. Blat was expendable, and while losing Vidrig would upset Grisela and Sissel greatly – not because they actually cared about her, but because the three of them were able to pool their magic somehow, performing spells that none of them could do alone; those tasteless puppets of Grisela’s being just one such example – Paska was, unlike pathetic little Nenet, more than capable of weathering their anger, especially if it meant his own survival. Nothing could be left to chance.
But that doesn’t mean letting a golden opportunity slip away, either, he decided after a few more seconds of watching the ponies trudge through the snow, seemingly oblivious to what was about to happen.
“Vidrig, start casting augmentation magic,” he whispered. “I’ll do the same. Blat, get ready.”
“Finally,” chortled Vidrig, and Paska was glad that they were already invisible. Ice trolls were hideous creatures, and Vidrig was even uglier than most. The sight of her grinning was enough to turn even his stomach.
He pushed that image out of his mind as he started casting. First a spell to enhance his own muscularity. Then another to toughen his skin. And then – reaching out to his right – he brushed a hand against where he knew Blat was, augmenting the power the manticore could put into his claws, fangs, and tail. Vidrig, he knew, was doing much the same; although she was a poor spellcaster, she knew just enough magic to increase her physical abilities before she charged in with her axe. But that wasn’t what he needed her to do right now; their plan had a very specific opening move.
He just hoped that Grisela was right about exactly how that unicorn had summoned that monstrous wolf, and that the spell Nenet had told them about would counter it.
“Vidrig, on my signal, use the scroll Sissel gave you on that unicorn,” he instructed, glad that the snow giant had made sure that the scroll’s writing would be visible when it was unfurled. “Blat, if the scroll doesn’t work and a huge wolf appears, kill it” – though more likely all he’d do was buy them a few seconds at the cost of his life – “and if not, then attack the other ponies. But not the one you see me attacking, understand? No kill horn pony.”
“No kill horn po-pony,” growled Blat, stuttering slightly. Two-syllable words had always been hard for him to grasp.
“Good. Now, get ready…” Hefting his hammer, Paska started creeping toward the ponies. “In three…two…o-”
“Something just tried to attack my mind!” yelled the unicorn suddenly. “All of you, prepare for battle!”
Paska froze, silently cursing his sister. “Vidrig!” he hissed, “what did you do?!”
“Not me!” Her frantic reply came instantly. “I didn’t do anything yet!”
He was about to demand that she answer for what was happening when one of the mares started pleading with the unicorn to calm down, saying that she’d tried – and had apparently failed – to contact him telepathically. For a moment Paska hung back, watching them bicker, and had just decided to go forward when the mare, in response to the unicorn’s growing aggression, let out a yell of her own.
“I was going to say that I wanted to help you fix whatever it is that’s keeping you from replenishing your arcane magic!”
If he hadn’t been standing completely still, Paska would have cocked his head at that. So the unicorn, who’s magic had been enough to overpower Grisela, wasn’t able to recharge his spells? Interesting…
But he had no time to consider what that meant as the stallion suddenly went berserk.
That the pony could somehow create sharpened spikes of black crystal wasn’t a surprise; Grisela had mentioned him doing that during their fight. But the sheer quantity of them that erupted then was staggering to behold. Some were taller than Sissel, while others were half the size of Nenet, erupting from the ground at all angles, causing the unicorn’s companions to cry out as they fell back, several of them injured by the sudden tangle of razor-sharp edges surging up from the ground.
Fortunately, Paska hadn’t gotten close enough to the unicorn to be in range of them, but he leaped back all the same. “Both of you, hold your positions!” he hissed, despite knowing that Vidrig’s invisibility spell was close to wearing off. “Don’t do anything yet!”
“Want kill!” complained Blat. “Just watch no fun!”
“Don’t be stupid, it’s plenty fun!” laughed Vidrig. “They’re doing our job for us!”
“If this turns into a real fight, that pony will summon his wolf back,” growled Paska, irritated that they couldn’t figure out that this development wasn’t a good thing. “We’ll have to abandon the plan and try again later, assuming he even sends it away again. We have to act n-”
He didn’t get a chance to finish as a spear of snow shot up from the ground near the unicorn, hitting it on the side of the head and making it stagger for a moment. For a split-second Paska worried that their target had been killed before they could capture it.
Then the unicorn turned around, his eyes blazing solid green behind his skull mask as he stared at the now-naked mare standing barely a dozen yards away, presumably the caster of the spell that had just struck him, and the adlet she’d been speaking to.
The latter immediately turned and ran, to which the unicorn…took his mask off and flung it at him. Paska had just enough time to feel confused by that before realizing that the mask wasn’t falling the way it should have, instead maintaining its course as it flew toward the adlet. But in the instant before it made contact, the unclad mare threw herself in its way, knocking over the adlet and letting the mask brush against her instead, causing her to stiffen for an instant before going limp.
The entire thing took less than five seconds.
Grisela didn’t say anything about that, realized Paska uneasily, watching as the mask flew back toward the unicorn, who was still staring ahead as though-
“BASTARD!!! screamed the mare with the half-mask covering the lower portion of her face, drawing out a dagger as she ran toward the unicorn, heedless of the field of jagged ebon between herself and him. “YOU KILLED HER!!!”
The words seemed to snap the stallion back to his senses, his eyes losing their glow. In perfect synchronicity with that, the black crystals began to disintegrate, losing cohesion and turning to dust even as the unicorn blinked and furrowed his brow, looking around as though just now realizing what he’d done. “That…no,” he muttered, one hoof coming up to catch his mask, the motion half-hearted. “That wasn’t-”
“SHUT UP!!!” roared the blade-wielding mare, taking advantage of the terrain suddenly becoming clear to throw herself at the stallion, who only barely managed to jerk his head back before her dagger opened his gullet. “DIE!!! JUST DIE!!!”
Cursing silently as he realized that he’d waited too long, Paska darted forward, hoping to catch the ponies off-guard before the unicorn was either slain or recalled his wolf. “Do it now!” he hissed as he brought his hammer up. “Vidrig, the scroll! Do it now! Blat, kill!”
He didn’t wait for a reply from either of them, moving into position as he brought his weapon around in a wide arc, pivoting at the hips to put as much power into the swing as he possibly could, even as he felt Vidrig’s invisibility spell come undone.
There was just enough time for the unicorn to register Paska’s sudden appearance right next to him, his eyes going wide with shock.
Then Paska’s hammer caught him full in the chest and sent him flying.
That was all that Thermal Draft could think as she hovered in the air, one hoof pressed to the bloody gash marring her face, as everything descended into chaos around her.
Lex’s sudden announcement that something had tried to attack his mind had caught her completely off-guard, and she’d barely been able to follow up on what was going on as Mystaria had tried to explain that she’d been trying to contact him psychically, but that it wasn’t an attack. That Lex hadn’t accepted that explanation had been far less surprising; Drafty knew him well enough to know that even when he was at his best, Lex wouldn’t approve of other people using magic on him without his say-so, no matter how benign it was.
And Lex had been nowhere near his best for some time now.
Drafty had thought she’d known why that was, with his not knowing what had happened to Sonata and the others, her stupidly selling her soul and then selfishly putting the responsibility for saving it onto him, and his being thrown into several life-or-death battles in rapid succession.
But when Mystaria had unexpectedly announced that something was wrong with Lex’s ability to recharge his arcane spellcasting, it had become clear that it wasn’t simply recent events that were stressing him out.
In fact, that explained a lot about what had been going on with Lex lately. While Drafty hadn’t been present to witness several of his most impressive feats of magic – it had only been after the fact that she’d collected accounts of his conjuring a huge suit of transparent armor to fight a dragon, or instance, or using multiple orbs of lightning to attack Celestia and Luna – she’d seen more than enough to know that he was a wizard of extraordinary power. For him to struggle so much against a single griffon, even one as devious as Dark Streak, had gone completely against her expectations.
That he hadn’t been fighting at full power had only grown more conspicuous once they’d arrived on Everglow. There had been no giant suit of see-through armor used against Prevarius. No electrical orbs when battling Grisela. It was like he’d been holding back, which made no sense since Lex never held back, especially when he was fighting to protect someone else.
But if he couldn’t cast those spells…
As disturbing as the implications of that were, however, Lex’s reaction to Mystaria’s declaration had been far worse.
Drafty had thought she’d witnessed the full scope of Lex’s emotional range. She’d seen the remorse on his face after he’d brought her back to life. She’d seen his loving tenderness when she’d stolen an intimate moment with him while disguised as Sonata. She’d seen him rage against countless enemies.
But she’d never seen him completely lose it the way he had just now.
With black crystals exploding out of the ground around him, neither Mystaria’s pained screams as she was caught in the jagged eruptions nor her own cries for Lex to stop had seemed to reach him. In fact, nothing seemed to be getting through to him; he had simply stared straight ahead, completely non-responsive as his eyes had glowed more brightly than she’d ever seen. To that end, Drafty had tried to rush in, intent on physically snapping him out of whatever fugue state he’d fallen into.
The result had been her getting face sliced open.
As painful as that was, it had shocked her more than it had hurt. While she’d known for a long time that Lex was a dangerous pony to be around, that was because he had no compunctions about fighting for what he knew was right. She’d never once considered the possibility that he himself would actually hurt her.
Her surprise was even greater when, a moment later, Lex turned and flung his mask – which was a lethal weapon – at the adlet they’d captured yesterday.
Only for Woodheart to jump in front of it.
The sight of the druid hitting the ground had stolen the breath from Drafty’s lungs, horrified by what she’d just witnessed. She hadn’t spoken to Woodheart very much, the druid spending most of the time she’d known her either barking and chittering like an animal or talking to that adlet, Toklo. But she hadn’t deserved to die like that.
And the fact that Lex had killed her was as tragic as it was terrifying. Tragic because she knew it was the sort of accident that he’d never forgive himself for. Terrifying because, with how badly the cut across her face still hurt, Drafty could suddenly see herself in Woodheart’s place if Lex ever lost control of himself like this again.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be an immediate concern. Whether it was the sight of what he’d done to Woodheart, Shadow Star’s scream of rage and grief, or for some other reason entirely, Lex had come back to reality then. The black crystals fell away, but he barely had a chance to blink before Shadow Star was on him. A short distance away, Mystaria was fumbling through a healing spell, repairing the damage to her hooves, while Spinner and Valor were racing toward Woodheart.
For a moment Drafty hung in the air, not sure what to do. Half of her wanted to rush to Lex’s side and push him out of the way of Shadow Star’s wild strikes the same way she had back in Vanhoover when Cloudbank had been mind-controlled into trying to strike him down with Severance. But the other half of her wanted to fly over to Woodheart, hoping against hope that maybe, somehow, the druid had surviv-
WHUMP!
The sound of a heavy impact, followed by the sight of Lex arcing through the air before hitting the ground hard and rolling to a stop, brought Drafty’s thoughts to a complete standstill.
In the spot where Lex had been standing a moment before, barely two feet from where Shadow Star was gaping in complete stupefaction, was a two-legged creature clutching a hammer.
Clad in an outfit that was all muted browns and deep greens, its body shape resembled that of Grisela, or even Toklo and the other adlets. But there were numerous differences as well. The newcomer had no tail. Its pale pinkish skin had neither fur nor a coat covering it, completely bare to the elements. Its ears were round, and even weirder, were on the sides of its bald head rather than on the top where they should have been.
Strangest of all was its face. Its muzzle was completely compacted back into its face, sitting flush with the rest of its skull. Only its nose jutted out slightly, sitting above the pale white mustache and goatee that circled its mouth.
Despite the bizarre appearance, there was a vague sense of familiarity to the thing, and in her dazed state it took Thermal Draft a moment to recall Sonata telling her about how, when she’d been banished to another world entirely before coming to Everglow, the bodies of her and her sisters had been altered to resemble the native creatures of that “Earth” place. The description she’d given of those things was almost a perfect match for what was in front of her now. She’d called them “humans.”
Lex had just been attacked by a human.
But Drafty had barely processed that thought when a sudden roar exploded in her ears. Almost falling out of the air in fright, she reflexively turned her head toward its source, just in time to see a monster nearly three times her size appear out of nowhere as it leaped at Valor and Spinner. Leonine in form, it had large batlike wings and a thick tail with a rounded tip from which multiple spikes jutted.
Unlike the controlled expression that the human wore, the manticore – Drafty couldn’t help but think of it as a manticore, as it vaguely resembled the creatures she’d read about as a filly – was snarling as it tackled the two ponies. Bloodshot eyes blazed with feral hunger as its bearded jaw fell open, revealing a mouthful of filthy, crooked teeth for a moment before it bit down deeply on Spinner’s neck, one paw coming up to rake across Valor’s flank at the same time.
NO! Panicking as her shock began to wear off, Drafty fumbled with her saddlebags, trying to retrieve the spell-infused gems Lex had given her the other night. I’ll use the fire spell to scare that thing off-, no, I’ll use it on the human to give Lex some breathing room. Then he can summon Solvei-
But before she could even complete that thought, she felt a spell go off.
Having only come into her own magical abilities a few days ago as a result of her contract with Prevarius, the sensation was still a new one to the pegasus. It was like feeling a soft breeze, except with her mind instead of with her coat or feathers. While she knew that experienced spellcasters could develop it to the point of being able to determine what was being cast, that was beyond what Drafty was capable of at the moment, and the feeling passed without giving her any clue what had just happened.
But the fact that Lex, groaning as he tried to pick himself up, suddenly gasped, putting a hoof to his head as his eyes widened, wasn’t lost on her.
“Worked! It worked!” shrieked a grating voice from behind her, and Drafty glanced back over her shoulder…
In time to see the ugliest creature she’d ever beheld in her life.
Grisela – or rather, the puppet she’d crafted in her own image – had been a hideous sight to behold, growing progressively uglier as she’d accumulated enough battle damage to mar her twisted features. But compared to the thing striding toward them now, she’d been a beauty.
Wearing nothing except a ragged fur cloth around her waist and another across her chest, the teal-skinned humanoid loping across the snow was a gnarled, misshapen thing. Its back was hunched, and while it would have towered over the human if it had stood up straight, its crooked spine kept it bent so far over that it was actually slightly shorter than its hammer-wielding counterpart. Its gangly legs were uneven in length, making it move in an irregular lurch rather than a smooth stride. Its spindly arms didn’t seem to bend correctly, its shoulders being misaligned and its elbows folding out rather than inward, causing it to clutch its double-headed battleaxe – each end of which was stained a deep, rusty red – in an awkward carry.
But it was the monster’s face that was the worst. Greasy strands of stringy black hair failed to cover up the asymmetrical shape of its bumpy skull. Its eyes weren’t level with each other, and were sunken so deep in their sockets that they could barely be seen at all, leaving the impression that it had two gaping cavities with nothing inside of them. Its ears were mere holes on the sides of its head, and a crusty opening in the center of its face was all it had for a nose. Its lower jaw protruded well past its upper teeth, giving the thing a pronounced underbite that showcased pointed teeth which were uniformly black and rotted.
“No magic wolf now!” hooted the abomination as it loped toward where a horrified Mystaria was just getting her legs under her, and Drafty felt her blood run cold as she realized that the freak was referring to Solvei.
That’s what it was doing, she realized. That thing was some sort of spellcaster, and Lex had jerked in place because she’d done something to keep him from summoning the winter wolf to his side.
The revelation was enough to tie her stomach in sickening knots. This wasn’t some unfortunate coincidence, like when they’d stumbled into a village that just so happened to be the location Grisela and her yetis had chosen to terrorize. Nor was it a group that was investigating an incursion into their territory like the adlets had been.
This was a kill squad, one that knew exactly who they were up against and had prepared accordingly.
And with Lex having neither his arcane spells nor Solvei to call upon, and half of the rest of them either already down or fighting for their lives, it didn’t look like there was any way of stopping them.
Around him, the world spun nauseatingly, everything having descended into a mad tableau of chaos. A cacophony of pained screams and terrified shouts assaulted his ears. Each breath he took sent a sharp, agonizing throb through his chest. And there were a half-dozen different crises pushing their way to the forefront of his consciousness, each one demanding his full attention.
He needed to figure out what to do now that the flaw in his thaumaturgical spellcasting had been revealed. He had to determine how his attempt to execute that adlet had gone so disastrously wrong. Thermal Draft’s safety had to be confirmed. The sudden appearance of several new individuals had to be analyzed and reacted to accordingly. The severity of his injuries needed to be evaluated in case they were incapacitating. Solvei’s abrupt disappearance from his consciousness had to be investigated.
While Lex had taught himself how to follow parallel lines of thought years ago, that was a technique for calmly and rationally examining multiple hypotheses at the same time. Now, his thoughts were a disorganized jumble that left him struggling to come up with a coherent response to what was happening. It was pure instinct alone that made him start picking himself up, dazedly looking around to try to-
The head of a hammer came down hard on his right foreleg, the elbow snapping under the blow.
Lex couldn’t even scream as he collapsed back into the snow, the sudden influx of additional pain becoming bogged down in the quagmire of his mind.
“Grisela said you’d be tougher,” came an unfamiliar voice. It was enough to make Lex look up, staring at a humanoid – or rather, a human of all things – that he didn’t recognize, lifting their hammer for another blow. “I should’ve known she was just making excuses.”
But before he could swing the weapon, another voice interrupted them. “HEY BALDY! CATCH!”
Dimly, Lex managed to look over just in time to see Shadow Star fling his mask – the magic item having fallen from his hooves when the first hit from the human’s weapon had taken him unaware – at his attacker. The sight was enough to make Lex’s brow furrow in confusion, dimly recalling that the mask was only able to unleash a killing pulse of negative energy once per day, and even then it had to be worn for a full hour before it could be used in that manner.
But while Shadow didn’t seem to know that, the human apparently didn’t either, abandoning his attack in favor of diving to the side, allowing the mask to sail harmlessly by. Coming up in a crouch, the human rose to his feet-
Just in time for Thermal Draft, hovering a dozen feet above his head, to release the fire spell embedded in the gemstone Lex had given her.
The human looked upward just in time for the torrent of flames to catch him full in the face, pouring down to engulf him completely.
“PASKA!” came a grating shriek, once again causing Lex to reflexively look toward its source. Standing a short distance away, holding a double-headed axe, the ugliest creature he’d ever seen was gaping at the sudden firestorm. “Don’t let the scroll with our way back get burned!”
“You should worry more about yourself!” snapped Mystaria, having just finished an incantation. Darting toward the thing, she slapped her hoof against the head of the creature’s axe. Immediately, a loud crackle filled the air as tendrils of electricity arced down the haft of the weapon, causing the hideous creature carrying it to stiffen in pain as the voltage coursed through her.
From within the cone of flames, a dry chuckle could be heard. “That pony is right, Vidrig,” smirked the human as Drafty’s spell finally ran out, leaving the pegasus open-mouthed as she looked down at where her enemy was standing, completely unharmed. “You and Blat do your jobs, and let me worry about doing mine.”
Lex had no idea who “Blat” was, but a distant roar clued him in a moment later. Further past Mystaria and Vidrig, some sort of winged lion with a spiked tail and a twisted countenance struggled and snarled as Valor forced its jaws open. The earth mare stood upright, pressing her shield to the roof of the creature’s mouth while one hind leg stepped down on its jaw, ignoring the scratches along her abdomen as she instead used her other foreleg to pry Spinner free from where the monster had bitten down on the filidh’s neck.
“Someone,” she hissed through clenched teeth as the other earth mare gave a bloody gurgle and stumbled back, only to collapse before she’d taken two steps, “get a healing spell in her! NOW!”
Her eyes widening as she saw the state Spinner was in, Mystaria immediately stepped toward the fallen bard. “Spinner, hang on! I’ll-, AAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Mystaria’s howl of pain grew louder a moment later, when Vidrig yanked her axe free from where she’d just planted it in the priestess’s flank. “Bet’cha wish you could heal like me,” she leered, nodding at where the scorch marks on her arms from Mystaria’s electrical spell were already closing. “‘Cuz I’m not gonna let you cast no more spe-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a spear drove itself through the side of her head.
Her face pale with agony, Mystaria nevertheless turned her head, tracing the weapon’s trajectory back…
To where Toklo was panting from the effort he’d put into his throw, one arm still extended.
“If that helped at all,” he murmured as he caught Mystaria’s eye, “then please tell your friend to uncurse me when this is over!”
Gulping, Mystaria nodded, but the adlet wasn’t looking at her anymore, instead moving to grab another of the spears that had been scattered across the snow when Valor and Spinner had been attacked…and as he did so, she was able to catch a glimpse of Littleknight further back, meeping sadly as he poked at Woodheart’s unresponsive form, still laying where she’d fallen.
The sight made Mystaria’s heart lurch, but she forced the feeling down. She could still be alive! Lex’s mask might have been a deadly weapon, but that didn’t mean that its every use was absolutely lethal. There was every reason to hope that the druid was still clinging to life…but the same wouldn’t be true for Spinner much longer, the bard’s eyes already turning glassy as her efforts to draw breath through the bloody mess that was her neck grew feebler.
Knowing that she had to prioritize the latter pony over the former, Mystaria lurched toward Spinner, trusting that Valor would be able to keep that manticore – Blat – busy in the meantime. But she barely got two steps before she had to stop, the gash in her flank making it impossible for her to put any weight on her back leg. And although Spinner was barely a stone’s throw away, that was still far enough that by the time she limped over to her and cast a spell, it would likely be too late.
Fortunately, Mystaria had more healing than just spells.
Please let me be in range! Mystaria fervently prayed, reaching a hoof up to touch her holy symbol; a silver amulet showing an upturned hoof holding an open book. “O Luminace, Lady of Friendship, please help me to safeguard those dearest to me!”
The words had barely left her lips when her amulet began to glow. Shining brightly, the illumination stayed concentrated on the icon for only an instant before it burst forth, the light radiating outward in all directions.
The glow didn’t travel very far, dissipating a little past two dozen feet. That was enough to let it wash over Spinner and Valor, however, as well as Vidrig and Blat. But whereas the manticore and the hideous humanoid saw no benefit from the energy that moved over them, the ponies were an entirely different matter.
Immediately, the wounds along Spinner’s neck closed, and the filidh gasped as she drew in a sudden breath, her eyes snapping open as she sat up, hacking and spitting out the blood that she’d swallowed. Valor was likewise healed, the cuts on her side closing even as she jumped back from the manticore’s mouth, narrowly avoiding taking several new cuts as the manticore swiped at her furiously. “Nice job, Mysty!” yelled the shield-toting mare.
But Mystaria had no time to thank her for the compliment. “You two work with Toklo and stop that manticore! I’ll go help Shadow and-”
“You’re not goin’ nowhere.”
The sound of Vidrig’s voice made Mystaria jump in fright – thankfully, Luminace's grace had also healed her own injury – and in doing so just barely managed to avoid taking an axe hit directly to her spine. Even then, the near-miss sent her scrambling, falling back in a panic. How can she still be alive?! Luminace’s curative blessing only works on those I designate as friends, and that monster is NOT my friend!
Vidrig seemed to sense her confusion, snickering as she hoisted her axe in anticipation of another strike. “Told you I can heal,” she snickered. “This little scratch up here don’t hurt barely at all.”
In another context that statement would almost have been funny. The spear had struck her with such force that half of its length burst completely through the other side of Vidrig’s skull before it came to a stop, leaving her head completely skewered. It was like how foals would sometimes take a broken arrow or crossbow bolt and use a tiny bit of wire to hold them on each side of their head, pretending to have been shot.
Except Vidrig wasn’t pretending, something she demonstrated a moment later as she reached up and casually yanked the spear out of her head. Grunting as the last few inches exited her cranium, she paused long enough to give it a quick glance before tossing it away with a snort. “Now,” she drawled, reaching up and digging a finger in the hole in her head as though she were cleaning wax out of her ears, “where were we?”
She’s some kind of troll, realized Mystaria, backing away with a gulp. She’ll regenerate from anything unless she’s burned or melted. And judging by her skin pigmentation, she’s probably some sort of arctic sub-species, which means fire is the way to go.
She couldn’t help but bite her lip at that, wishing that Thermal Draft had unleashed the cone of flames on this creature instead. While Mystaria had a few such spells prepared, she wasn’t sure if they’d be enough for her to bring the troll down on their own. I just hope that she and Shadow are doing okay. If they can hold off that human long enough for Lex to recover from whatever happened to him, he can summon Solvei back…
But a glance in the direction of the fallen unicorn was enough to dash those hopes.
The human – Paska – was barely paying attention to Drafty and Shadow, instead advancing doggedly toward where Lex was once again trying to get up. But Paska apparently had no intention of letting the stallion rejoin the fight, one hand going to the back of his belt and withdrawing a small throwing hammer, which he brought up and flung at Lex even as he kept closing the distance between them.
His singlemindedness left him open, however, as Shadow dived past him, her dagger flicking out as she did. But although her blade slipped across the back of his knees, all she had to show for her effort was a deep cut in his boots, the skin and muscles beneath them completely undamaged by her attack.
Nor did Drafty’s attempt to defend Lex fare any better. Hurriedly finishing a spell, a lump of snow in front of Lex suddenly surged upward, interposing itself between the semi-lucid unicorn and the thrown hammer. But before enough snow could rise up to catch the blow, the hammer struck home, punching through the icy cushion as though it wasn’t even there and striking Lex on the side of the head – just above where Woodheart’s ice spear had cut him less than a minute ago – and sending him sprawling again.
“Nothing personal, kid,” remarked Paska conversationally as he moved to stand over Lex, ignoring that Shadow and Drafty were both frantically moving in on him again. “But you set things back for us pretty badly before. So now, when you wake up, we’re gonna talk about how you’ll make it up to us.”
The thought sent a wave of panic surging through Thermal Draft, almost causing her to lose the spell she was constructing. Not that it mattered; Paska’s hammer had already begun its downward arc toward Lex’s head, and neither Shadow Star’s mad dash toward the human’s unprotected back nor her own frantic spellcasting were fast enough to interrupt it.
The fact that Paska had mentioned taking Lex alive – that this wasn’t a kill squad after all, even though it seemed like Lex was the only one they wanted – did nothing to curb Drafty’s agitation. The human had let it slip that he was in league with Grisela, which meant that if Lex was taken now, he’d almost certainly be tortured or worse. As frightening as it had been to see Lex lose control of himself, injuring the ponies around him and almost certainly killing a member of their group, her heart still quailed at the thought of him going through more pain.
But that didn’t mean she could do anything to save him from it.
Even as she watched – struggling to finish a spell that she knew would be too late, screaming silent prayers to Kara that the goddess was powerless to answer, wishing that Solvei would suddenly arrive despite knowing she likely wouldn’t – Paska’s hammer continued on its downward path…
Only to veer off to the side, harmlessly impacting the ground next to Lex.
The weapon’s sudden miss was no accident, however. Rather, it had been knocked off course, pushed out of the way at the last possible instant.
But the hoof that had diverted it wasn’t Lex’s.
No… Drafty didn’t even notice as her half-completed spell fell apart, too stunned to do anything except stare at the pony standing by Lex now, having appeared out of nowhere. It can’t be!
“This is, like, totes all your fault, Lex.”
Sonata Dusk had arrived.
But the sight of the Siren brought Drafty no relief, instead sending a sudden jolt of horror and revulsion through her. Nor was she alone in her reaction, as a strangled moan escaped Lex then, the stallion squeezing his eyes shut and putting his hooves over his face. Even Paska let out a surprised grunt, lifting his hammer into a ready position as he leapt back, staring at the newcomer with narrowed eyes.
Nor was Shadow able to hide her fright either, skidding to a halt as she pointed her dagger at the new arrival. “What the hell?!” she yelped, her voice rising in alarm. “What’s going on?!”
Drafty had no answer to that question, however, too busy struggling through her own fear and confusion. Sonata’s being there was as inexplicable as it was bizarre. But it wasn’t the Siren’s unexpected entrance that had left her reeling.
It was that Sonata was dead.
There was simply no other way to describe the mare standing in front of her now. The beauty that had bordered on supernatural was gone, replaced with a panoply of horrific burns. Half of her face was missing, melted away to leave nothing but charred bone showing from beneath patches of blackened skin. Her luxurious coat had been seared away, her torso was crisscrossed with singe marks, which in several places had been burned through entirely, showcasing innards that had been cooked. Even her mane and tail, long and lustrous when she was alive, were little more than singed wisps of hair now, their rough and uneven lengths choked with ashes.
A ghoul. Memories of the horrors she’d seen in Vanhoover assaulted Drafty then, and she found herself shaking all over. The way that Sonata had died might have been different, burning rather than wasting away from a disease, but the end result looked close enough that Drafty couldn’t think of it as anything else. She’s become a ghoul!
Belatedly, she realized that she had to get Lex – that she had to get everyone – away from her, before Sonata-, no, before the thing that Sonata had become started paralyzing and devouring them. But before Drafty could turn that thought into action, the burnt corpse that had been the Siren turned and lunged…not at Lex, who was right next to her, but at Paska.
“You ruin the lives of everyone you get involved with!” she shrieked, still speaking to Lex even as she threw a punch at the human, who grimly caught it on the shaft of his hammer. The words made Drafty wince, and not simply because of how harsh they were. Sonata’s voice – that part of her that Drafty knew Lex had appreciated most – was twisted and raspy, making it clear her throat hadn’t been spared the fiery affliction that had ravaged the rest of her body. “And now you’re doing it again!”
“Wasn’t it enough that we died screaming in agony because of you?!”
Drafty gaped as another familiar voice came from behind Paska, the human having no chance to react as a charred hoof struck him in the side of the head, sending him stumbling. Barely managing to keep his feet under him, he turned to face another pony who hadn’t been present a second before…letting Drafty confirm that the burnt corpse of Aria Blaze was there now too, her blackened appearance giving her last name an appalling new appropriateness. “Did you really have to drag more innocent ponies down with you like this?!”
Just like with Sonata, Aria’s hateful accusation was directed at Lex, even as she continued attacking Paska. As she reared up to throw another punch at the human, Paska ducked under it, slamming the butt of his hammer into her midsection. It landed with a sound like paper being crumpled as part of her torso caved inward, but if Aria was hurt by the blow at all, she didn’t show it. Instead, she simply lashed out again, forcing Paska to give ground in order to prevent her from bringing her hooves down on the back of his neck.
“You can’t even claim that this wasn’t your fault, or that you didn’t mean to.”
This time it was Nosey’s ruined body that spat the words, again appearing right where Paska had been moving. Bucking both of her hind legs directly into the human’s back, she drew a grunt of pain from him, knocking him back toward the other two even as she kept taunting Lex. “You’re responsible for the death of that mare just now. You threw the mask that killed her.”
Moving cautiously to Drafty’s side, Shadow didn’t drop her guard for a second, her eyes wide as she watched the undead mares close in on their attacker. “Who are-, were, these ponies?!” she hissed, her voice thick with tension. “Did Lex kill them too?! How do they know about what happened to Woodheart?!”
“I don’t know!” Drafty couldn’t even begin to make a guess as to what was happening. It made no sense for Sonata and the other two to be here. For that matter, Shadow’s last question only made things more confusing; even if Lex had somehow brought them here – and Drafty had a hard time believing he’d ever do that to the mares he loved, even if he’d shown a startling lack of self-control a few minutes ago – how had they known about what had happened before they appeared?
But she didn’t have any time to ponder that as Shadow sucked in a sharp breath. “There’s another one!”
“What happened to all of your morals?!” sneered Feather Duster, her tattered uniform still clinging to her burnt body as she appeared at Paska’s side. He managed to block most of the blows that came his way, apparently having expected a fourth attacker, but one still got through to land just above his hip, causing a grimace of pain to cross his features. “Weren’t you supposed to show my daughter and everypony else how to live an exemplary life?! Instead, you’re a murderer!”
Biting her lip, Drafty managed to tear her eyes away from the mangled corpses of ponies she’d once known, looking around the rest of the battlefield. Everypony else was aware of what was going on, shooting horrified glances in their direction, but they couldn’t break away from their own fights.
Even as she watched, Drafty saw Toklo rush in to jab his spear at Blat’s side, darting backward before the manticore could claw him in response. But the manticore swung his tail in the adlet’s direction a moment later, and to Drafty’s shock several of the spikes at the end of the appendage came loose, flying at Toklo and embedding themselves in his chest and stomach. He went down with a howl of pain, and it was only Valor – now in the form of a bear – charging at Blat that kept the manticore from pouncing on the fallen adlet, Spinner casting a spell that made her ursine friend’s speed increase as she rushed in.
Closer to them, Mystaria’s fight with Vidrig was at a stalemate. The priestess was managing to keep the ugly humanoid at bay, using a rolling sphere of fire to prevent Vidrig from getting too close, following it up with select other spells whenever it looked like the hideous biped – who was nimbler than her twisted form would have suggested – managed to get past the flaming obstacle. But if the earth mare had managed to score any telling hits on Vidrig, Drafty couldn’t see them.
“Now there’s five of them!” muttered Shadow, sounding only marginally less anxious. “Lex is the one doing this, right?”
Again, Drafty had no answer, swaying on her hooves as she caught sight of the newest pony attacking Paska, who was now starting to look concerned by the sheer number of enemies appearing around him.
“I trusted you to protect the pony I loved!” shrieked Cloudbank…or rather, a twisted effigy that looked and sounded like Cloudbank. Unlike the others, she wasn’t burned, but it was impossible to mistake her for the mare Drafty had fallen in love with. Her proportions were off, looking as though she’s stepped out of a funhouse mirror, and her features were asymmetrical and distorted. Nor did she look at anyone except Paska, sparing not even a glance at Thermal Draft as she dove at the human, still spitting invectives at Lex. “But all you’ve done is put her in danger!”
I hope your girlfriend isn’t really that judgmental, murmured Kara inside Drafty’s mind, sounding vaguely bored. Otherwise you’ll never get that threesome you’re hoping for.
“What is this?” Despite the utter insanity of everything going on, Drafty somehow found the presence of mind to keep her response vague enough so that it would sound to Shadow Star as if her question was rhetorical, rather than being directed at the deity speaking to her telepathically.
Isn’t it obvious, sweetheart? These are Lex’s fears, or rather, his nightmares, brought to life. That uptight goddess of his gave them some limited independence. He must be really upset for them to come out now; the last time they appeared like this was when he was fighting that undead army back on your home world and it looked like they were about to be overrun. Sonata saw it happen, though the little airhead didn’t understand what it was.
Drafty felt a chill run down her spine then. These were Lex’s nightmares? She’d known that he suffered from bad dreams; Sonata had let that slip once or twice back on Equestria, and Solvei had confirmed as much in the last few days. But that they had “limited independence,” as Kara called it, was horrifying to consider…especially since that apparently meant that the Night Mare had made it possible for them to come into the real world like this as a result of Lex’s breakdown.
“I risked everything for you!” screamed a twisted copy of River Bank, flinging herself over the other ponies to strike at Paska from above, managing to catch him across the side of his head. “Now who’ll protect me when the princesses come to punish those of us who supported you?!”
Shadow took a step backward, the growing number of monstrous ponies surrounding the human clearly intimidating her. “How many of these things are there going to be?!”
But Drafty wasn’t listening. Instead, she flapped her wings, taking to the air as she looked past where the nightmare ponies were surrounding Paska.
Sure enough, Lex hadn’t moved. Heedless of his wounds, he was still lying in the snow as he kept his face in his hooves, curled up as if trying to block out everything happening around him.
Grimacing at the sight of the strong stallion she’d fallen in love with looking so cowed, it took Drafty only a moment to fly over to him. “Lex…”
He didn’t respond, except to try and curl up even tighter, shudders going through him.
“Lex, please,” begged Drafty, landing next to him. “You have to stop this!” Despite the fact that his nightmares were fighting off the human who’d injured him, she couldn’t help but be worried about his state of mind. After what had just happened with Mystaria and Woodheart, the last thing he needed was to be berated like this.
And the storm of negativity being directed at him was growing worse. More and more warped copies of ponies he knew were appearing, all of them taunting and berating and denouncing him even as they threw themselves as Paska. The human himself was still fighting, his hammer swinging wildly as he knocked the nightmares away, but despite the damage he was doing to them he was faltering beneath the weight of their numbers, the numerous cuts and bruises he’d taken starting to add up.
But at the same time, Lex’s trembling was growing worse as well.
Not knowing what else to do, Drafty reached out, putting a hoof on his shoulder as another platitude came to mind…only for Lex’s body to vanish as soon as she touched him, replaced by a turbid mass of churning shadows. “Lex!”
“DAMN IT!” Thermal Draft didn’t have a chance to finish her plea, Paska’s sudden swearing causing her to jump. Glancing behind her, she saw the human dive out from under a mass of twisted ponies – now more than a dozen in number – and come up in a roll, darting straight toward her. But when she reflexively beat her wings, jumping upward in fright, Paska’s eyes didn’t follow her, and it took her a moment to realize that he hadn’t been looking at her, but at the mass of shadows that Lex had become.
She was proven right a moment later as he swung his hammer at the billowing gloom, which seethed and convulsed faster in response, but otherwise did nothing as the head of his weapon exited the shadows without encountering any resistance. That was enough to make Paska clench his jaw, but he didn’t have a chance to do anything else as the nightmare ponies flung themselves after him, still shouting accusations and wailing invectives at Lex all the while.
This time, Paska didn’t try to fight them off, instead opting for a full retreat. “Vidrig! Blat! We need to go! The plan has failed!”
Grunting as she dodged out of the way of Mystaria’s flaming sphere, Vidrig gave the human a shocked look. “We’re not allowed to fail! You know what Sissel said!”
“Then grab someone else!” yelled Paska, barely keeping ahead of the grotesque pack that was chasing him. “Anyone else, just so long as they’re unconscious!”
“No one-, wait!” In her sockets, the troll’s recessed eyes widened, and she turned toward where the manticore was fighting the others. “Blat! That pony that fell down before, the one who was hit with the mask! Grab her!”
“Does she mean Woodheart?!” Spinner’s eyes widened at that, barely managing to duck under a swipe from the manticore’s claw.
“NOT EAT YET!” roared Blat, advancing on the bard.
“DO IT NOW!” screamed Vidrig, falling in alongside Paska as the human ran past her. “DO IT NOW OR ELSE!”
She apparently didn’t need to say what she’d do, as the threat was enough to make Blat roar in anger as he broke off from the battle, wings flapping as he flew over to where Woodheart had fallen. The sight of him descending on the druid was enough to provoke outraged cries from the rest of Fail Forward, with even Shadow losing interest in the horde of nightmare ponies in favor of running toward the winged monstrosity.
But Valor was closer, having received Spinner’s speed enhancing spell earlier in the fight. Giving a guttural roar as her ursine form sped toward the manticore, she was still hampered by the deep snow, tearing up the white powder in vain as Blat touched down next to Woodheart…only for Littleknight to shoot up from alongside his mistress’s prone form, his horn gleaming as he struck the manticore across its neck.
But just like when he’d tried that against Grisela, the tip of his horn failed to break the beast’s skin.
He didn’t get another chance to try again as Blat swung a claw, the back of it striking the almiraj and flinging him away.
“No no no no no!” swore Mystaria before chanting another spell, unleashing two thin streaks of light that shot forward, piercing the manticore’s hide. But Blat’s growl was irritated more than pained as he picked up Woodheart’s unresponsive form, carelessly clutching her in his claw.
“Lex, listen to me, you need to do something!” begged Thermal Draft, watching helplessly as the three attackers converged on each other. Paska was already withdrawing a scroll from one of his belt pouches, unrolling it even as the deformed ponies Lex had summoned closed in on him. “I know you’re suffering right now, and I know it feels like there’s no point in even trying, but if you let them get away like this, you’ll feel even worse! So please, stop them!”
But the featureless murk that was Lex didn’t respond.
An instant later she heard Paska chanting something, the human putting one hand on Blat even as Vidrig leapt onto the manticore’s back. All around him, Fail Forward and Lex’s nightmares were closing in, but Paska didn’t even look at them, continuing to read.
And then, with no flash of light or parting threats or fanfare of any sort, he, Blat, Vidrig, and Woodheart were all gone.
Mystaria’s heartbroken cry seemed to drain the energy from her, causing Luminace’s priestess to sink to her knees in dejection. But she wasn’t given a chance to wallow in her grief, as Shadow Star bounded over to her, cuffing Mystaria across the shoulder. “Get up! They might still be here!”
Valor seemed to agree, the mare-turned-bear giving a guttural roar as she leaped through the space where Paska, Blat, and Vidrig had been only a moment ago. When she encountered nothing, she turned around as soon as her paws touched down, slashing through the empty space where the trio had been as though not having realized that they’d vanished.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Jogging over to her friends, Spinner kept her lute at the ready, looking equal parts furious and anxious. “Mysty, do something! Figure out where they went so we can track them down and get Woodheart back!”
“We don’t even know if they’re really gone!” insisted Shadow, glancing around suspiciously. “None of them were leaving tracks during our fight just now, the same way Grisela didn’t, so if that scroll the bald guy used made them invisible, they might still be here!”
“Their scent is fading,” called Toklo, the adlet standing apart from the ponies. Despite his announcement, he hadn’t lowered his spear, and was also looking around warily. “If they’re still here, they’re concealing that as well.”
“They’re gone,” moaned Mystaria, making no move to stand up. “The scroll that Paska guy read was a teleportation spell. I recognized some of the words in the incantation he used to activate it.”
“Great!” yelled Spinner, though the word came out more impatient than excited. “So now that we know they’re gone, let’s figure out how to follow them! C’mon, you’re a priestess of the goddess of magic, right?! What’s our next move?!”
“There is no ‘next move’!” screamed Mystaria, suddenly furious. Standing up at last, she gestured at where Valor was tearing up the ground where their attackers had vanished, apparently unable to contain her anger. “The verbal components for a teleport spell don’t include its destination, and I don’t know any magic for tracking them! Which means they could be anywhere! They could be halfway across the world for all I know! We can’t-”
As one, the trio of ponies turned…just in time to see the twisted monsters that Lex had summoned bearing down on them. Their voices overlapping in a dissonant clangor of enmity and recrimination, the procession of horrors hadn’t stopped just because their target had disappeared, still advancing with ruthless determination…right toward the three of them. The sight was enough to make all three earth mares freeze in place.
“Oh gods!” whimpered Mystaria.
“Oh no!” muttered Spinner.
“Oh sh-”
Shadow didn’t have a chance to finish her curse as she was suddenly hit by a quarter-ton black bear, Valor – still under the effects of the Spinner’s speed-enhancing spell – snatching her up and throwing her onto her back before tucking Mystaria under her foreleg and grabbing Spinner’s tail in her jaws, dragging them all out of the way of the throng of twisted ponies.
With nothing to stop them, the misshapen ponies descended onto the same patch of ground that Valor had been clawing at only a few moments earlier, swarming over the trampled snow in search of their prey. Undeterred at finding nothing, they continued to tread the area over and over, still shrieking and snarling hateful words toward the pony who had summoned them.
Letting out a breath as she realized that – unlike a few minutes ago – Lex’s out-of-control magic wasn’t being directed at them, Spinner pulled her tail free of Valor’s muzzle, taking a few deep breaths to try and slow the pounding of her heart as she stood up. “Right…I suppose there’s one person here who has magic enough to figure out where they went.”
“Are you serious?” snorted Shadow, climbing down from Valor’s back. She glanced back at Lex as she spoke, the stallion having yet to retake corporeal form, the mass of inky blackness that was his body still churning heavily even as Thermal Draft continued to hover around him, pleading in vain for him to calm down. “We can’t rely on him for help. Mysty said he can’t recharge his magic, which means that even if he has whatever spell we need, he can’t prepare it. Not to mention the fact that he’s clearly gone completely around the bend. And, I almost forgot, HE KILLED WOODHEART!!!”
She let that hang in the air for a moment, glaring at Spinner as though daring the filidh to argue the point with her. But it was Valor – a shudder going through the black bear as her body shrank and the fur covering her thinned out, returning her to her pony form a moment later – who spoke up. “Do we-, thpff, pah!” Coughing as she spit out a few hairs from Spinner’s tail, Valor rubbed her muzzle before trying again. “Do we know for sure that she died?”
“Are you kidding me?!” Narrowing her eyes, Shadow pointed at Toklo was going over to check on Panuk’s body. “Did you not see what that maniac’s mask did yesterday?! It’s why we’re hauling a corpse along with us now!”
“Just because someone’s been stabbed doesn’t mean that the wound’s fatal!” argued Valor. “I’m not ready to give Woodheart up if there’s any chance that she might still be alive!”
“Toklo!” The adlet in question’s head jerked up as Spinner called out to him, as though surprised to be addressed by name. “You were right there when Woodheart…when Lex’s mask hit her. Is there any chance that she survived?”
The question made Toklo grimace, looking down. “…I don’t know.”
“Oh come on!” Stamping a hoof in exasperation, Spinner gave him a frustrated look. “She saved your life, and you can’t even tell us whether or not she died in the attempt?!”
The rebuke made Toklo’s grip on his spear tighten. “I don’t know! Everything happened fast! One moment that pony went mad and tried to kill me, then suddenly I’m tackled from behind, and then we were attacked by those monsters!”
“How do you not-”
But Spinner’s angry retort was cut off as Valor put a hoof on her shoulder, giving a silent shake of her head when the bard gave her an angry look. For a moment Spinner seemed ready to lash out at Valor too, only to let out a shaky breath a second later, giving the adlet one last dark look before turning away from him. “Mysty, you’re our resident magic expert. Please…please tell me you think there’s a chance Woodheart’s not dead.”
Mystaria didn’t reply, instead staring at where the monster ponies Lex had brought forth were milling about. They hadn’t moved from the place where Paska and the others had disappeared, simply going back and forth over the same stretch of ground again and again, still rattling off a litany of abuse toward Lex. It was only when Valor’s hoof touched her side, making her gasp, that Mystaria turned away from the grim spectacle. “Huh?”
Valor glanced at the horde of nightmares that had captured Mystaria’s attention before turning back to the priestess, her expression pensive. “Are you okay?”
“…if I hadn’t tried to use my telepathy to speak to Lex-”
“Oh no,” interrupted Spinner. “No no no no no! There’s no way any of this is your fault! The only thing you did wrong was wanting to believe that nutcase wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen! Tell her, Shadow! You didn’t trust that guy…Shadow?”
It was only then that the three of them realized that Shadow Star had abandoned the conversation, instead having picked up one of the spears that Toklo had thrown as she walked a short distance away, poking at the ground with the weapon as if searching for something. Mystaria opened her mouth to ask what her friend was doing, but the question died on her lips as Shadow unearthed what she’d been looking for.
Lex’s mask.
“Knew I threw it around here somewhere,” muttered Shadow, glancing at where Thermal Draft was still trying in vain to get Lex to respond. Apparently satisfied that neither of them were paying attention to her, she stood over the skull-shaped piece of wood and raised Toklo’s spear, keeping the business end pointed at the mask.
“Shadow!” called Valor, her voice tense. “What are you doing?”
“Demanding that Woodheart’s blood price be paid,” snapped Shadow.
“That’s not-”
Shadow didn’t let her finish, bringing the spear down as hard as she could right between the mask’s eyeholes.
The blade sank into the wood with a resounding thunk, one which made everyone watching flinch. But other than the deep scratch marring the surface of the mask, nothing else happened, which was enough to draw a muffled curse from Shadow as she pulled the blade free and raised it up for another strike.
“Can it, Mysty! We tried it your way and it only made things worse!” snarled Shadow as she brought the spear down again, this time opening a deep gouge in the center of the mask. “Bad enough when we thought that unicorn was just some weirdo with a lot of magic and a bad attitude! Turns out he’s completely insane, and that just cost one of our friends her life!”
She wrenched the spear free again, shoving Mystaria away when the other mare tried to stop her. “So this time, instead of just hoping that he’s a decent pony deep down, I’m doing something about it! He’s dangerous enough with being able to turn into shadows and create giant razor crystals and summon a horde of monsters from nowhere, so he doesn’t-”
THUNK!
This time the spear cut a deeper rent in the mask.
“NEED!”
THUNK!
The blade punched completely through its target this time, sending a large crack through the length of the wooden skull.
“THIS!”
THUNK!
The last blow was more than the mask could take, the wood splintering as it split perfectly down the middle. With its container ruptured, the magic it held immediately flooded out, and all four mares shuddered as a wave of cold that had nothing to do with the temperature washed over them. But the feeling receded almost instantly, and after several moments of nothing happening, it became obvious that there was nothing else to fear from the item’s having been broken.
Even so, Spinner let out a sigh of relief as she put a hoof over her heart. “Tip for the future, Shadow. Next time, give your friends a word of warning, okay?”
“This had to be done before the crackpot came to his senses,” shot back Shadow, throwing the spear aside. “And I didn’t want to take the chance that he’d start reacting to things when he heard me say ‘hey guys, I’m going to break the nutcase’s killer mask before he flips out again and murders someone else with it.’”
“You do realize that if Woodheart’s alive, we’re going to need his help rescuing her, right?” Valor canted her head in Lex’s direction. “He’s the only reason we survived fighting Grisela and her yetis. It was his tactics that let us hold our own against the adlets. And those…things, that he summoned were what chased off those monsters just now. If Mystaria’s correct about something being wrong with his magic, then destroying that mask has made him weaker at a time when we’ll be relying on his strength to get our friend back.”
“Valor’s right,” announced Mystaria. “Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea, but we’re committed now, and we’re going to need Lex’s help if we want to get Woodheart back alive.”
Spinner’s eyes lit up with hope. “So you do think she survived!”
“I don’t know for certain, but I think there’s a chance.”
“Based on what?” Shadow’s voice was bitter as she kicked one of the broken halves of Lex’s mask. “That adlet didn’t survive, remember?”
“That mask was filled with necromantic energy, which in a lot of ways is like a poison,” explained Mystaria. “When you take in a toxic substance, your body starts trying to expel it. You might throw up or start sweating or even hack up blood; those are all methods of trying to get rid of a harmful substance. Necromantic energy is similar; the reactions aren’t necessarily physical, but your body still tries to reject it.”
“And you think Woodheart might have done that?” questioned Valor, her expression stoic.
Mystaria gave a helpless shrug. “It’s possible. If she was only grazed-”
“She was!” yelled Spinner, making no effort to hide her excitement. “I saw it! When she jumped on Toklo, the mask only brushed against her flank for a second!”
“So maybe she might have just gotten a small dose of what the mask was capable of,” reasoned Mystaria. “In that case, even if she lost consciousness, it’s possible that she didn’t die outright.”
Despite her pessimism, Shadow seemed to be coming around to what her friend was proposing. “If you’re right…and those freaks just now wanted to snatch Lex without killing him, but had to grab someone else instead…”
“Then if Woodheart is alive, they might keep her that way, at least for a little while,” finished Valor.
“Yes! I knew it!” Jumping up, Spinner punched a hoof in the air. “I knew Woodsy wouldn’t let her ticket be punched so easily!”
“I just wish there was some way to be sure.” Closing her eyes, Mystaria reached up and touched her holy symbol. “Luminace, please, send us a sign. Let us know if our friend is still with us, and what we can do to rescue her if she is. I have faith in her, and in your benevolence, but right now we need-”
“Meep?”
Her eyes snapping open, Mystaria went rigid, barely noticing how the rest of her friends were likewise stunned at the obvious answer that they’d all forgotten. As one, they slowly turned their heads to look behind them.
And Littleknight, Woodheart’s familiar, cocked his head curiously as he looked back at them.
“That looks pretty bad. Maybe talk to Spinner about getting some help?”
The question had come from Valor, which was mildly surprising; Thermal Draft had been certain that Mystaria would be the one to approach her. Not that it mattered; for all that she’d begged and pleaded and cajoled, the mass of shadows that Lex had become had yet to respond in any way, simply hovering in place no matter what she did. Eventually she’d stopped trying, simply staring at his umbral form dejectedly. “I don’t think Lex is going to want to hear his fortune told right now.”
“I meant you,” replied the shield-toting mare, moving to stand across from Drafty as she nodded toward the pegasus’ face. “Go tell Spinner to cast a healing spell on you. That cut looks nasty.”
Grimacing, Thermal Draft reached up, gingerly tracing the laceration that Lex’s black crystals had left her with. Even the light contact was enough to draw a pained grunt from her, the wound beginning to throb now that the adrenaline rush had worn off. In spite of that, the pegasus shook her head. “It’s fine. Lex can give Solvei the power to heal me when she gets back.”
“…that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.” Sitting down next to Thermal Draft, Valor paused for a moment, glanced between the pegasus and the umbral form that Lex had taken. “Mysty says, um…sorry, can he hear us? When he’s like this, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” sighed Drafty. “I think so. I mean, he was always able to before, but after what just happened…” She bit her lip, not able to finish that sentence. Not that she needed to; the way Lex had seemed to lose touch with reality right before they’d been attacked was impossible not to think about now.
Seeing that Drafty wasn’t going to continue, Valor tried again. “Mysty says Vidrig, that freak with the axe she fought – who was apparently some kind of troll – did something to cut Lex off from Solvei.”
Drafty nodded. “I heard her say ‘no magic wolf now’ when she appeared, right after I felt a spell go off.”
“Is the spell still affecting him?” Valor canted her head toward Lex then. “Do you have any way of analyzing it?”
“I…what?” The question was unexpected enough that it momentarily threw Thermal Draft for a loop. She’d expected the remaining members of Fail Forward to explode in anger over what Lex had done to Woodheart, or to demand answers about the nightmares that he’d brought forth, or even to simply abandon them altogether. Not technical inquiries about the nature of the spell that had prevented Lex from summoning Solvei. “I mean, I can give it a shot. Lex taught me the basic spell for looking into the magical spectrum, but he said it’s not very helpful.”
“Could you try anyway?” pressed Valor. “Mystaria says your style of magic is different from hers and Spinner’s. Maybe you’ll see something they can’t.”
Her brow furrowing, Drafty couldn’t help but glance over at the others then. Mystaria was standing a short distance away, pulling a book out of her saddlebag and flipping through it. Next to her, Spinner was talking to Littleknight, her expression becoming one of confused frustration when the almiraj meeped and waved his tiny paws in reply.
Shadow Star wasn’t with them, instead marching toward where Toklo had gingerly picked up Woodheart’s robe. The masked mare gave the nightmare ponies – still wailing and howling horrible things at Lex as they continued to tear up the patch of ground where Paska and the others had disappeared – a wide berth on her way to the adlet. Even then, she didn’t take her eyes off of them, keeping her dagger ready as she circled the monstrosities.
“Drafty?”
“I…yeah. Hold on.” Taking a moment to steady herself, Drafty put the unexpected behavior of her traveling companions – along with the worsening pain in her face, the fear and chaos of the last several minutes, and the growing worry she felt for Lex – aside for a moment as she concentrated on the simple spell that would let her visualize magical effects. Even then, it took her several seconds to remember what she needed to do, pulling the spell’s constituent parts together as she looked at Lex.
After several seconds she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m pretty sure I can see the spell they used, but…Lex taught me how to look at magic like this, but I still don’t understand most of what I can see when I do. It’s all just different glowing auras.”
Valor slumped in place, letting out a sigh. “Damn it…”
“I’m sorry,” repeated Drafty, letting her spell fade.
Waving her apology away, Valor straightened up. “It’s fine. Mysty said it was probably a longshot, but she wanted to be sure.”
Drafty cocked her head again, glancing back at the mare in question. Mystaria still had her nose buried in her book, but Spinner seemed to be playing charades with Littleknight, putting a hoof up to her forehead as she peered into the distance. “Why?” she murmured as she watched the almiraj shake its head at the bard. “What was she hoping to find out?”
“From what she told me, she wanted to know if the spell’s structure would reveal whether or not it had a detectable effect on the familiar even though it was cast on the master,” explained Valor. “Or at least, I think that’s what she said. She was babbling pretty excitedly when she said it.”
“Wait…the ‘familiar’?”
Her confusion was mirrored on Valor’s face then. “Lex didn’t tell you? A familiar is a creature that shares a mystic bond with a spellcaster. According to Mysty, Lex’s connection to Solvei seems stronger than the one Woodheart has with Littleknight, but is still basically the same-”
“Wait, stop, hold on a second.” Holding a hoof out, Drafty closed her eyes as she tried to process what she’d just been told. “So you’re telling me that Woodheart has the same sort of soul-link to Woodheart that Solvei does to Lex?”
“That’s the theory,” nodded Valor. “Mysty said she wasn’t entirely sure, but felt confident-”
But Thermal Draft wasn’t listening, lowering her eyes in thought as she processed this new information. “Lex tried to break his bond with Solvei after it first happened, but that doing so caused both of them terrible pain. The best he could do was shut some of it out for short periods. But Littleknight looks like he’s fine now, which means-”
“That his connection to Woodheart might still be intact,” finished Valor, the corners of her lips turning up slightly. “Which means that she’s alive. Or at least, that’s our working theor-”
“That’s wonderful!” yelped Drafty, not letting Valor finish as she flapped her wings in delight, grinning broadly as she turned to look at the formless darkness that her lover had become. “Lex! Did you hear that?! Woodheart’s alive! You didn’t kill her!”
But if Lex heard what the pegasus was telling him, he had no reaction whatsoever to the news.
Her smile fading as she settled back down, Drafty tried not to let her disappointment show. “I don’t understand…I was sure that would get through to him…”
Valor looked only marginally less discouraged. “Maybe it’s a result of losing contact with Solvei? You said it hurt him when he tried to break it before.”
“Maybe…” But Thermal Draft’s tone made it clear what she thought of that idea. Lex had already been nonresponsive before they’d been attacked, coming out of it only momentarily before Paska and the others had gotten the jump on them, when he’d seen what he’d done to Woodheart.
“You do know it was an accident before, right?” she blurted suddenly, hating the thought that the mares she was traveling with might think otherwise. “Lex would never try to kill another pony.”
“I know,” answered Valor, her voice turning chilly. “He was just trying to kill Toklo instead.”
Drafty cringed at that, but didn’t have a chance to say anything before Valor sighed. “That came out wrong. What I meant was…” She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “You and I don’t know each other very well, but…I once lost someone I cared about because of someone else’s accident. It took me a long time to stop holding a grudge over it. It’s why I can’t stand it whenever I see someone doing horrible things on purpose; there’s already so much that’s wrong with the world even when people simply make mistakes, and yet some people are out there actively trying to make it worse.”
She pursed her lips for a long moment before taking a deep breath, giving Drafty a pointed look. “I know Lex didn’t mean to hurt Woodheart. But this happened, or at least the parts before Paska and Vidrig and Blat showed up, because he tried to kill Toklo. He needs to take responsibility for that.”
Something inside of Thermal Draft snapped then. Valor’s criticism of Lex had been dispassionate, delivered in an even tone and lacking any of the hateful rhetoric that the unicorn’s nightmares had spewed. But somehow that made what she’d said worse rather than better, and Drafty found herself suddenly furious with the muscled earth mare.
“‘Take responsibility’?” she seethed. “’Take responsibility’?! He’s only here because he’s taken on the responsibility of protecting everypony in that village that he saved! Something he did even after he found out that they were working with the monsters who tried to kill you, me, him, and all of your friends, all while you guys were wondering if you could run away back to that Viljatown place and make what happened here someone else’s problem!”
“That’s not-”
“Or what about his responsibility to everypony back home?!” continued Drafty, heedless of the fact that everyone else had stopped what they were doing to look at her. Instead, she pointed to the nightmares Lex had conjured. “You see those?! Those are his fears about what’s happened to the ponies he cares about because he can’t be there now to help them! But instead of finding the quickest way back to them, he’s here protecting a bunch of strangers who’re content to sit back and talk about how he needs to ‘take responsibility’ even when they’re all too weak to do anything on their own!”
“I didn’t mean-”
“And then there’s all the responsibility I’ve dumped on him!” Drafty shrieked, her voice rising as her anger crested. “I’m the one who couldn’t keep herself from getting captured, making him put himself into danger rescuing me! I’m the one who sold her soul because I was too stupid to realize I was being tricked out of it! I’m the one who tore up the contract afterward, making it so that if I die I’ll cease to exist, because I was sure he’d figure out a way to fix everything!”
Valor’s eyes widened at that. “Wait, you-”
But Drafty was past listening now, tears running down her cheeks as everything she’d been suppressing for the last few days came pouring out of her, unstoppable. “All I’ve done since we came here is be a burden to him! Even though I’ve finally got him all to myself the way I’ve been hoping and praying for! Of course he doesn’t love me! Why would he?! Not only am I not helping him, I’m making things worse! That’s why he won’t talk to me now! Because he’s being crushed under the weight of his responsibilities and I’m just another one even though I want to help him but I don’t know how and when I try it always goes wrong…”
She couldn’t get anymore out, her words drowning under a torrent of sobs as she sank to her knees. At the edge of her vision, she could see Valor’s hooves moving toward her-
“MASTER!”
Solvei’s howl made everyone jump, Drafty included, as the winter wolf suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Ignoring the frightened cursing and gasps of shock that her arrival caused, the Solvei looked every which way. Her gaze swept over Lex’s insubstantial form, then Drafty’s lacerated and tear-streaked face, then the nightmares still keening their endless stream of grievances, and finally the war-torn landscape. It was only after she’d taken everything in, her eyes growing progressively wider, that she finally spoke.
“I think we need to review everything that’s happened today.”
Mystaria tried not to be disheartened by the reactions she received, but even so she cringed a little inside. Her friends were regarding her with reactions ranging from pained to incredulous. Littleknight’s only reaction was a soft, despondent meep. Toklo looked sullen, as though wishing he was anywhere else. Drafty’s expression was a clear plea for her to sit down and be quiet. By contrast, Solvei shot her a look of barely-concealed hostility.
And Lex, of course, showed no reaction at all to what she’d said.
Knowing she couldn’t allow herself to be discouraged, Mystaria plunged ahead. “I know that things look bad right now, but we can’t afford to give up. Woodheart is counting on us to save her, and so are all of those ponies back in that village, which means we need to find a way to work together-”
“Speak for yourself,” muttered Toklo. Sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, the adlet stared at the ground dejectedly. “All I want is to have these curses lifted and to bring Panuk’s body home. The rest of you can keep killing each other for all I care.”
“And we all understand why you feel that way,” answered Mystaria. “But right-”
“I don’t,” snapped Spinner peevishly, giving Toklo an irritated look. “You do remember that Woodheart saved your life, right? You really don’t feel any sort of debt to her for that?”
This time Mystaria did cringe. “Spinner, please-”
“Of course he doesn’t,” sneered Solvei. “He’s an adlet. They don’t know anything about loyalty. Just ask Hrothvitnir.”
“That’s not what we-”
But again, Mystaria didn’t have a chance to keep things on track, as Shadow snorted derisively. “You’re really going to talk about loyalty after what your ‘master’ did? He’s the reason we lost Woodheart to those monsters!”
“Shadow!” hissed Mystaria through clenched teeth.
“It’s not his fault Grisela’s allies showed up out of nowhere like that!” protested Drafty, cutting the priestess off. “If they hadn’t ambushed us, Lex would have summoned Solvei back and healed Woodheart right away!”
“Listen, blame won’t help-”
“That we were attacked doesn’t change the fact that Lex lost control,” interjected Valor. “The result of which was that Woodheart almost lost her life, and was left unable to defend herself when those monsters kidnapped her. Like it or not, that’s on him.”
“Which wouldn’t have happened at all if someone hadn’t stuck her nose where it didn’t belong!” growled Solvei, giving Mystaria a hateful glare. “Maybe next time, mind your own business!”
“If we’re going to talk about next time, then how about you don’t venture so far ahead?” huffed Spinner, pointing a hoof at Solvei. “Spell or no spell, if you’d only been scouting a few hundred yards in front of us instead of – what was it? A couple miles? – you could’ve showed up and chased those guys off before they nabbed our friend!”
“Or maybe you guys could actually figure out how to handle yourselves in a fight instead of needing to be saved all the time!” Drafty picked up an empty bowl and hurled it as Spinner, the bard ducking under the makeshift missile. “Aren’t you supposed to be professional adventurers?! How can you be so incompetent?!”
“Says the damsel who was stupid enough to sell her soul to a devil,” jeered Shadow. “Not to mention has a magic item that detects hostile intent but was somehow still taken by surprise before.”
“I can’t wave that thing around every minute of every day just in case there’s an ambush waiting to happen! If anyone’s to blame for being caught off-guard, it was your ‘filidh’ for not predicting it ahead of time!”
“I told you before,” yelled Spinner, stamping her hoof in agitation, “it doesn’t work like that!”
By that point, the accusations, insults, and recriminations were coming so fast that they were starting to drown each other out, and Mystaria had ceased trying to make herself heard. Instead, she reached into her saddlebag, drawing out a hooffull of multicolored sand. Throwing it in the air in front of her, she traced a quick pattern with her free hoof as she recited a brief incantation.
An instant later, the sand exploded into a kaleidoscope of overlapping colors, flashing brightly as they mixed with each other in a vivid, strobing rainbow.
Immediately, the shouting voices turned into shrieks of surprise and discomfort, their argument forgotten as her companions all squeezed their eyes shut. Knowing that she likely only had a few moments before they were at each other’s throats again, Mystaria spoke up as soon as the spray of colors faded out.
“I swear to Luminace, the next one of you who says something nasty is going to get a flaming sphere five feet in diameter shoved straight down their throat! Because if this is how things are going to be, then we might as well save Grisela and Paska and whoever else they’re working with the trouble and just kill each other right now! Otherwise it’s only a matter of time!”
She looked around then, daring anyone to protest what she was saying, but although she received more than a few sour looks, no one objected.
Taking that as a signal to continue, Mystaria let her voice soften only a little. “Luminace teaches us that while friendship is something to strive for, we can’t expect to make friends with everyone we meet. Maybe that’s the case here, but even if we can’t learn to like each other, we have to learn how to work together! Because if we can’t, we won’t even be able to save ourselves, let alone Woodheart and those village ponies!”
No one could meet her eyes then, her companions all looking perturbed. Deciding it was a start, Mystaria sat down before speaking again. “What happened today was everyone’s fault, mine included. Now, we can point our hooves at each other and assign blame over who did what, or chide one another for not doing what they should have, or second-guess the decisions we all made that led us to where we are now…”
Pausing, she spread her hooves out toward everyone in a pleading gesture. “Or we can learn from our failures, and try to move forward.”
For a moment no one said anything, and Mystaria dared to hope that the malaise of the last few hours was finally about to be broken.
It shouldn’t have been that way, at least in her estimation. Solvei’s sudden return had been a positive sign; the only way she could have abruptly appeared like that was if Lex had summoned her. That, in turn, meant that not only was he coming out of his nonresponsive state, but that the spell Vidrig had cast on him had a limited duration. Both were cause to be hopeful.
Equally heartening had been what she’d found in her reference books on the topic of familiars. While they hadn’t explicitly confirmed that a familiar would experience some sort of debilitation if their master died – something which Littleknight had shown no symptoms of so far – they had been very clear that the opposite was true: a master who lost their familiar would go through profound psychic shock. While not hard confirmation, it was enough to make Mystaria fairly confident that the reverse had to be true, which was all the more reason to believe that Woodheart was still alive.
Even better, her books had verified that the mystical link between a master and their familiar made both aware of the other’s general location. But only if they were within a mile of each other. Past that, the link was stretched so thin that they lost their awareness of each other’s presence.
According to Solvei, that wasn’t a problem for her and Lex; as far as the winter wolf knew, no amount of distance could weaken her bond with her master. But that wasn’t the case for Littleknight. The almiraj had been bereft in the aftermath of Woodheart’s abduction, pawing at her discarded robe and meeping sadly, giving no indication that he knew where the druid was.
While Mystaria would have liked to converse with the horned rabbit to confirm that he’d be able to find his mistress if he came within a mile of her, she hadn’t bothered to try. For whatever reason, Woodheart had always been the only one who’d ever been able to communicate with Littleknight. To her, his meeping had been intelligible speech, likely because of their soul-bond; to the rest of them, the sounds he made were just that: sounds, not words.
Still, the fact that they had a “Woodheart-detector” (as Spinner had called him), even one that only had a one-mile range, had been some much-needed good news.
The other reason Mystaria had wanted to be optimistic had been because of Lex: shortly after Solvei’s reappearance, he’d become active again.
Barely.
The first sign had been when those twisted ponies he’d summoned – his incarnate fears, according to Thermal Draft – had slowly faded out. He hadn’t seemed to do anything to dismiss them; rather, they’d simply faded away, losing substance like mist in the morning sun. It had been shortly after that that a pair of glowing green-and-purple eyes had appeared in the mass of shadows that he’d become.
But he hadn’t turned back into a pony. Nor had he said a word to anyone. Instead, he’d simply floated off in the direction they’d been traveling when they’d been ambushed, not so much as bothering to inquire what had happened or if they were alright. It had been like he’d completely lost interest in everyone else.
Thankfully, he’d shown at least marginal concern for the rest of them as time had passed. He had – in some manner that Mystaria still didn’t understand – granted Solvei the ability to heal with a touch, allowing the wolf to repair Thermal Draft’s lacerated face. And shortly before nightfall, when they’d arrived at the outskirts of a snow-covered forest that Toklo had warned them about, Lex had abruptly stopped, casting the ‘tiny hut’ spell that created a climate-controlled dome for them all to rest under. He’d even used his ‘create food and water’ spell to make a meal for all of them, albeit the same gruel and tepid water he’d conjured the day before, rather than the glorious feast from before they’d left the village.
Even so, Mystaria had the distinct impression that he’d done those things only because Solvei had telepathically begged him to. Nor had he so much as made eye contact with anyone during the hours that he’d continued venturing into the wild. Neither Drafty’s timid inquiries about his health nor Shadow’s sneering insults had produced the slightest reaction from him, and his complete refusal to engage with them had cast a pall over everyone, making in unsurprising that things had finally come to a head now.
The fact was that Lex was the tactical lynchpin of their current undertaking. It wasn’t just that he was conspicuous in how much magic he commanded, even with his inability to replenish his arcane spellcasting, or because he controlled the powerhouse that was Solvei; his ability to make food and shelter alone showcased how much more difficult things would be if the dour unicorn wasn’t there. Valor had been right before, when she’d bluntly stated that Lex was absolutely necessary for this expedition to succeed.
But the way he was acting now made it seem like he’d all but given up.
I just hope I was able to get through to him, Mystaria prayed silently as she waited for someone to say something in reaction to her speech.
A moment later the silence was broken as Thermal Draft let out a soft giggle. “I’m sorry,” she tittered, putting a hoof over her mouth. “It’s just…that joke you made just now, about your group’s name? That was awful.”
“A nun with a terrible sense of humor,” snickered Spinner. “Way to play into the stereotype, Mysty.”
Toklo’s ears twitched, glancing between the pegasus and earth mare in confusion. “That was a joke? I don’t get it.”
“Trust me, you’re better off,” chuckled Valor.
“Why?” asked Solvei, looking unsure as well.
“Because getting everyone to talk about how bad that joke was is the biggest ‘fail forward’ we’ve had in a while,” muttered Shadow, her voice wry.
Another round of chuckling passed through the ponies then, even as Solvei and Toklo shared a glance, momentarily united in their not seeing the humor. It was enough to make Mystaria sigh in relief, glad that the tension from before was finally dissipating.
But after several seconds of quiet laughter, all eyes turned toward Lex.
Hovering near the edge of the protective dome he’d conjured, the pony-turned-shadow had yet to react to anything that had happened over the last several minutes, continuing to steadfastly shut out everyone around him as he stared out into the darkness. And he seemed intent on continuing to do so now, showing no indication that he was aware that everyone had turned their eyes toward him.
“Lex…” murmured Drafty quietly, and the plaintive tone in her voice made Mystaria’s heart ache for the poor girl. Given how deeply in love with him the pegasus was, being ignored like that had to hurt worse than having a gash torn across her face. It was one thing for him to shut out people he didn’t trust, but Drafty couldn’t have been more obvious in her devotion, and now-
Solvei suddenly sat up straighter, her eyes widening. “Yes, Master!”
Everyone watched, suddenly rapt with attention, as the winter wolf strode over to Lex’s side…just as he turned back into a pony for the first time in several hours.
A grunt escaped his lips as he steadied himself, the awful wounds that he’d taken before still present. But he had to bear them for only a moment, as his winter wolf was immediately at his side, apparently already having been imbued with restorative powers. A single touch from her was all it took to fix Lex’s broken leg, the cut on his head closing a second later, followed by his bruises fading. By the time Solvei put her paw down, Lex looked as though he’d never been hurt to begin with…though the bitterness of his expression, far more pronounced than his usual sardonic look, made it clear that he hadn’t gotten over what had happened.
But at least now he’s stopped ignoring us, which means now we can start focusing on doing better next time, decided Mystaria, smiling as she took a step toward Lex. “Welcome back. Do you want to eat something first, or should we…Lex?”
But the stallion in question didn’t answer her, didn’t even look in her direction, before turning his back on her and lying down near the edge of the dome, pulling his cloak tighter around himself.
A round of looks – confused, dismayed, and disgusted – were exchanged among the Fail Forward mares, even as Drafty crept toward the reclining stallion. “Lex, please, don’t be-, hey!”
Her objection came as Solvei padded up behind Thermal Draft and took the scruff of the pegasus’ neck in her jaws, lifting her up and carrying her away from Lex. “Solvei, what are you doing?!”
“Master wishes to be left alone right now,” replied the winter wolf, her voice sad as she gently put Drafty down several paces away from Lex.
“But…but he changed back to normal,” protested Drafty, a stricken look on her face. “I thought that meant-”
“He changed back because he needs rest,” answered Solvei, her voice taking on a resigned tone. “He doesn’t want to be disturbed, by you or anyone else.”
The winter wolf didn’t wait for a reply, padding back toward Lex and curling up next to him protectively, keeping her body between his and the others, leaving Drafty standing there looking crushed and everyone else scowling, Mystaria included.
“Spear!” yelled Toklo, throwing away the half-melted remains of his weapon.
“Here! Catch!” yelled Drafty, tossing another spear to the adlet, who deftly plucked it out of the air and swung it into a ready position in a single motion. “We don’t have many left!”
“I’m running low on throwing daggers!” added Shadow, bringing her hoof down as she sent another of the weapons in question sailing through the air. “Correction! I’m out of throwing daggers!”
“Damn it, we need to get in close!” cursed Spinner, before turning her head to shout behind her. “Mysty! If Lex taught you a heat-specific version of that ‘resist energy’ spell of yours, now’s the time to use it!”
Further back, Mystaria didn’t answer as she finished casting the strongest healing spell she had on Valor, her face a mask of worry and tension as she put a hoof on her friend’s back, avoiding the parts of her that had been seared. A second later the magic discharged, and Valor couldn’t hold back a sigh of relief as the burns covering her legs healed, the blackened flesh flaking off to reveal healthy pink skin underneath. While the spell wasn’t powerful enough to undo all of the damage, leaving her legs looking as though they’d gotten a bad sunburn, it was enough to let Valor stand back up without choking down a scream. “Thanks.”
But Mystaria shook her head. “Solvei’s the one you should thank. If she hadn’t snatched you out of that thing’s jaws when she did-”
“I know.” Straightening her shield as she moved back toward the fray, Valor glanced at the winter wolf in question. “I owe her one.”
Solvei, for her part, didn’t notice the earth pony’s grateful look, too busy facing off against the latest beast to have challenged them since they’d entered the forest.
Hissing as it circled her hungrily, the monster across from her could have been described as a centipede, if centipedes were over twenty feet long and nearly a third that in height. Then again, most centipedes didn’t have slavering jaws where their mandibles should have been, nor an exoskeleton that was red in color. But the nature of its unnatural coloration was no mystery to anyone; far from being its natural hue, the bright red cast of its outer shell was due to the waves of incredible heat that even now rolled off of the creature, making it glow.
It was that same heat that made Solvei regard the monster warily now. Although she’d managed to retrieve Valor before the thing had been able to swallow the earth mare – something which had only happened because Valor had managed to hold the thing’s jaws open when it had burst up from the ground beneath her hooves, having already been on alert thanks to Thermal Draft’s hostility-detecting rod alerting everyone to an incoming enemy – the blazing insect hadn’t taken at the loss of its meal lightly, managing to sink its fangs deep into Solvei’s flank in retaliation.
Although the power Lex had imbued her with had given the winter wolf a marked resistance to the heat which was normally the bane of her kind, the intense temperatures rolling off of the creature had been too strong for Solvei to completely shrug off. Even now, having formed her black crystal armor around herself, she was favoring her left side, moving to stay out of easy reach of the giant insect’s burning maw. While her armor might have been almost impossible to penetrate with mere physical force, it would only shield her so much from the blistering heat of the creature’s furnace-like body.
But the monster, sensing that the largest of the prey it had found was intimidated, wasn’t content to let Solvei hang back, instead rushing in for the kill.
Only to falter as the ground beneath it suddenly turned into a field of jagged black crystals.
The sudden transformation of the terrain didn’t harm the creature, its exoskeleton being tough enough that the razored spikes cut only shallow grooves into its legs. But neither was it able to maneuver as easily as it had a moment before, the black material being not only rough and uneven, but tough enough that it refused to begin melting the instant it came into contact with the monster’s body. The overall effect was that it slowed the thing’s charge to a crawl.
Giving Solvei all the time she needed.
Inhaling sharply as she called upon the magic her master had granted her, the winter wolf sent a telepathic message of thanks to Lex, her eyes traveling to the hovering mass of shadows watching the battle from near the tree line. It was because of him that she was able to enhance her breath weapon to far greater heights than a normal utvalgte would ever have been able to manage, the inside of her maw starting to glow blue as she super-cooled the air she’d taken in, pushing it to temperatures far below mere freezing.
This is the power that defeated Prevarius! she crowed to herself triumphantly, pointing her jaws toward the bright red bug. And now, it’s going to take you down too!
“What are you doing?!” yelled Toklo suddenly. “That won’t work!”
But Solvei barely heard him as she opened her mouth and let loose with her breath weapon, gelid energy shooting out in a massive beam of blue light that swept over the creature, engulfing it completely as the red of its body vanished beneath the force of Solvei’s attack.
The wind kicked up immediately, making the trees above shake back and forth as the interplay of heat and cold sent the air whipping back and forth wildly. The snow that hadn’t already melted as the giant centipede had passed over it was immediately snatched up by the breeze, turning into a snow squall. It was chaotic enough that Toklo and the mares all cried out as they stumbled, struggling to stay upright in the face of the sudden gale.
It was only when Solvei’s breath finally ran out, and the blue light of her magically-charged breath weapon died faded out that the wind died down. But as the azure luminescence dimmed, the color darkened toward purple, and in mere moments a red haze could be seen where the creature had been. Moments later, the air shimmering as the last of the super-cooled air was pushed away by the heat, the glowing exoskeleton could again be seen.
Toklo had been right: Solvei’s attack had done nothing to the creature.
“I told you!” shouted the adlet, his voice a growl as he gripped his spear tighter, shooting a dark look at Solvei. “Didn’t you hear me say when this thing attacked that it was an ice worm?!”
“Of course I did!” shot back Solvei, trying not to appear as daunted as she felt at having thrown so much magic at the creature to no effect. “But it’s as fiery as one of Vutok’s spawn! I thought the cold would hurt it!”
“You primitive savage! An ice worm is what your people call a remorhaz!” Toklo gave Solvei an angry glance then, and consequentially missed how the insect’s head swung around to regard him as soon as that word left his lips. “Its body heat can’t be quenched while it’s ali-”
“LOOK OUT!” shrieked Drafty, Spinner, and Mystaria in unison.
Their screams made Toklo turn back toward the monster, only to find the remorhaz bearing down on him, having acclimated to the uneven ground Lex had created. His eyes widening as the creature opened its jaws, sending a wave of blistering heat over him, Toklo could only grip his spear as he suddenly found himself wondering if the curse that made his body taste bad would be enough to keep the creature from devouring him whole…and if so, whether or not it would spit him out before its inner fires – which had been hot enough to melt the throwing daggers Shadow had hit it with – scoured the flesh from his bones.
“Stoppe.”
The tone in Lex’s voice was even colder than Solvei’s breath weapon had been, and it brought the creature to an immediately halt, its body trembling as it suddenly found itself caught in the grip of a power far greater than its own.
“…a paralysis spell?” muttered Mystaria, staring in confusion as the shadowy mass that was Lex floated down from above, green eyes with purple contrails regarding the immobilized creature callously.
“Look who finally decided that other people’s lives are more important than his magic,” sneered Shadow.
But Spinner shook her head. “I don’t think that was a spell. He didn’t chant an incantation, and I didn’t feel any magic just now.”
“I think it’s that other thing,” remarked Valor, cautiously moving back to check on Littleknight, the almiraj having been told to stay well away from danger since he was their only hope of finding Woodheart. “That ‘greater blessing’ or whatever.”
But Drafty had another name for it, folding her wings at her sides as she touched down from where she’d been hovering. “Divine authority.”
Lex ignored them all, moving downward until he was right in front of the remorhaz. “Drep deg selv,” he intoned dispassionately, still looking at the creature. “Na.”
The order made Solvei blanch a little, but it was nothing compared to how the insect shook then, redoubling its efforts to throw off the force binding it. But it had no more success than before, and a shriek escaped its maw as it coiled itself, turning so that its head was positioned over its midsection…and then leaned down and clamped its jaws around its exoskeleton, biting down hard.
“The hell…?” muttered Shadow.
Toklo was no less shocked, taking a step back in surprise. “What’s going on?!”
Spinner added her voice to the chorus of confusion a moment later. “Does someone want to explain what’s happening, please?!”
“That was Koloss,” explained Solvei, her voice subdued. “The language of my ancestors, as well as of other creatures who came out of the Great Gap alongside Hrothvitnir and Vutok. Master saw that remorhaz react when that adlet said its name. Since it understands that tongue, Master can give it orders that way.”
“Give it orders?” echoed Mystaria, her eyebrows rising. “Without making it into a familiar?”
No one had a chance to answer her before the remorhaz let out a shrill cry then, its chitin finally crumpling as its jaws sank through the hard shell, now puncturing the soft organs beneath. The sound was sharp enough that several of the ponies covered their ears. “And he ordered it to do what?” yelled Valor over the din. “Kill itself?!”
“That’s exactly what he told it to do,” sighed Solvei. “And Master’s orders are always absolute.”
The remorhaz’s scream grew louder then, kicking up to an octave no pony would have been able to reach. But just as it hit an ear-splitting intensity, it cut off abruptly, as did the creature’s back half, its jaw snapping shut as it bit completely through itself.
The giant insect collapsed then, its bisected body hitting the ground with dull thuds. Blood with the consistency of magma sprayed from its bisected body, the ground sizzling where the ichor landed. Even then it continued to cling to life, both of its halves thrashing, legs kicking wildly as it convulsed, until finally its wild flailing slowed, and then halted altogether.
Lex observed the creature’s death with no visible reaction, not that his shadow-form gave much away to begin with. It was only when the creature remained still for several seconds that he turned away from it, moving back toward Solvei. The winter wolf cocked her head for a moment, then turned to look at the others. “Master says we’re leaving. Hurry and get your things together.”
“You can’t be serious!” moaned Spinner. “We need to take a break!”
“The longer we wait here, the more likely something will come to investigate the disturbance,” replied Solvei, though the way she kept glancing at Lex made it clear that she was still serving as his mouthpiece. “Scavengers, hunters hoping the winner will be weakened, creatures looking to warm themselves from this monster’s residual heat. All will descend on this location in short order.”
“And you really think we’ll be safer if we leave?” snorted Shadow, looking through the melted remains of her throwing daggers for any that were still serviceable. “We’ve been pushing through this forest for four days, and we’ve been attacked, what, sixteen times now? Seventeen?”
“Nineteen, including just now,” corrected Valor, picking up Littleknight and placing him on her back.
“Nineteen!” growled Shadow. “First there were those birds with the stabbing beaks that laughed like hyenas! Then the octopi that swung across branches with their tentacles! Then the polar owlbears! Then a swarm of carnivorous butterflies! I didn’t even know there were carnivorous butterflies! And that was just the first day!”
“At least we’re making quick progress,” consoled Mystaria, before looking at Toklo. “How much further do you think it is before we reach the other side?”
“I’m not sure,” admitted the adlet, swallowing nervously as he glanced between Lex and the dead remorhaz. “I told you, we usually don’t venture into the forest when it’s so much easier to just take to the air and fly over it. I think we’re getting close, but-”
“We’ve got incoming!” warned Drafty suddenly, holding the enemy-detecting rod in her hooves. Closing her eyes, she swung it around several times before grimacing. “At least a dozen hostiles, closing in fast!”
“Use the dead bug as cover!” yelled Valor, darting toward the remorhaz’s corpse. “It’s big enough and hot enough that we should have an advantage there!”
“Ew!” squealed Spinner, looking aghast at the suggestion. “No way!”
“Then by all means, face whatever’s coming this way on your own,” warned Toklo, heading toward the insect’s carcass.
But he’d barely gotten halfway to it when a voice rang out from deeper in the forest, one that made him stop dead in his tracks.
“PONIES! RETURN MY SON AT ONCE!”
Toklo’s mouth fell open, his eyes going wide. “Father?!”
The adlets that came streaming out of the forest weren’t like the ones they’d encountered a few days ago.
Even Drafty could tell that much at a glance, backing away as the two-legged wolves rushed to surround them. Whereas Toklo’s group had been armed with nothing more than a few spears, the adlets moving to encircle them now possessed a greater variety of weapons. Several clutched a sickle in each hand, waving the curved blades in an intricate – and intimidating – pattern that made it clear that they knew how to use them. Others held long staves whose ends had been carved into wicked-looking barbed claws, clearly designed to rip and tear the flesh of whatever they sank into. A few hefted massive clubs as thick as tree trunks, swinging them with worrisome ease as they moved into position.
Nor was that all that distinguished them from the scouting party. Whereas Toklo and his friends had worn only simple clothing, his kinfolk emerging from the forest had clad themselves in preparation for a fight. While none of them wore any sort of full-body armor, they’d instead elected to garb themselves in thick quilting, wrapping the material around their arms, legs, and torsos, supplementing them with small coverings of stone or bone tied over their knees, elbows, and other vulnerable areas. It was an ensemble designed to cushion blows rather than deflect them, sacrificing greater protection for mobility.
That mobility was on full display as the adlets converged on them, easily moving across the battle-scarred terrain as they formed a loose perimeter around the ponies. Nor did they make any effort at stealth as they did so, instead howling and shouting in their native tongue, their voices overlapping into a harsh medley of angry cries. The effect was heightened by how, in the dim glow of the remorhaz’s still-glowing corpse, the light seemed to have a hard time reaching the adlets, leaving parts of their bodies obscured by the gloom.
No, not gloom, Drafty realized as the adlets completed their encirclement, letting her get a better look at them as they stopped moving. Paint. They’re wearing warpaint.
Taking a second to look more carefully, she could see that each of the lupines had painted parts of their bodies, their white fur slathered with dark blues, deep greens, and solid blacks. None of the designs made any sort of recognizable image, instead seeming to be used solely for camouflage or to demoralize an enemy.
And they definitely regarded the ponies in front of them as enemies, Drafty knew; the rod on her hooves was pulsating heavily, recognizing the hostility being directed at them.
Mystaria muttered an arcane syllable, waving a hoof as she moved back, grimacing a moment later. “They’re carrying a lot of magical gear,” she whispered, and Drafty felt certain that her saying that out loud – rather than using her goddess-given telepathy – meant that she wanted Lex to hear her.
“Weapons?” grunted Shadow, moving into a tight formation with the rest of her friends, and Drafty found herself backing up to stand alongside them.
“Weapons, armor, and I think even that body-paint they’re wearing,” grunted Mysty, her head moving from side to side as she took in the sight of the humanoids surrounding them. “I can’t tell for sure; there are too many auras.”
“Cast another spell, and it will be your last, pony!” snarled one of the closer adlets, finishing his epithet by barking a word in his native language. Immediately, the sickles in his hands began to vibrate, the blades emitting an audible hum as they shook.
“Or go ahead and run if you want,” laughed another, twirling a claw-topped spear, the end of it whistling unnaturally as it sliced through the air. “You won’t get far before you’re brought down.”
“Which one of you killed Panuk?” growled a third, slamming his club on the ground, the strike heavy enough that everyone could feel the impact. “Tell me, so I can end you myself!”
“SILENCE!”
The command, roared from deeper in the forest, quieted all of the adlets instantly. A moment later, the one who’d shouted the command emerged from the forest. Drafty’s eyes widened at the sight, and around her she heard a series of muffled curses come from the others.
The adlet who appeared then sat astride a polar bear, the creature – which was itself clad in armor made of cured hides – gnashing its teeth and roaring as it loped forward. Astride its back was an adlet who looked older than his fellows, the fur around his muzzle having darkened from white to grey. But his eyes were clear as he surveyed the group, one hand holding a set of reins to guide his mount while the other held a spear decorated with runes which seemed to shift and shimmer in the soft light.
The point of the weapon remained lowered as his bear strode toward them, stopping as the rider gave a sharp tug on the reins. It took only a moment for the elder adlet to survey the situation – his eyes immediately looking over Toklo before moving to survey the huddled mares, the armor-clad form of Solvei, the dead remorhaz, and finally the insubstantial shadow with the glowing eyes that was Lex – before he dismounted, stepping forward without hesitation.
The sight of his sire snapped Toklo out of his surprise. “Father!” he yelled again, dropping his spear as he ran forward. But he didn’t get more than two steps before Solvei – having grown in size, and now moving with an ease which told Drafty that Lex had healed the injury she’d taken fighting the remorhaz – pounced on him.
A single swipe of her armor-clad leg was all it took to knock Toklo to the ground, and before the dazed adlet could even think about getting up, she brought her paw down onto his back, pinning him in place. “BACK!” she roared, her voice loud enough that it made several of the adlets wince from the volume, though the leader didn’t flinch. “BACK, ALL OF YOU, OR THIS ONE-”
She stopped speaking so abruptly that it could only have been because Lex ordered her to, a theory that was proven correct a moment later when she swung her head around to look at the mass of darkness that was her master. A moment later a whimper escaped her throat, her ears folding backward as she released Toklo and stepped back.
But despite whatever rebuke Lex had given her, he didn’t seem content to let Toklo go either. Solvei had barely moved when a ring of black crystals erupted from the ground, and for a moment Drafty couldn’t breathe, flashing back to what had happened a few days ago when Lex had lost control. Judging by the sudden gasps and soft snarling that came from the earth mares, they were just as concerned.
Their fears were allayed a moment later, however. Unlike the random eruptions that had marked Lex’s previous rampage, the black crystals formed with deliberate shape and purpose now, jutting up from the ground in a ring that separated them from the adlets. Nor did the lusterless shapes create a mere barrier; instead, their jagged edges were angled at a uniform forty-five degrees, all pointing outward at the adlets, who shifted uneasily at the sight of the deadly spikes now aimed at them.
Their leader seemed to be made of sterner stuff, however, not flinching despite one of the black crystals terminating less than a foot from his neck. Instead, he brought his spear up and laid it across his shoulder in a relaxed position, glancing first as Solvei and then at the mass of shadow with the glowing eyes. “Are you the one who speaks for these others?” he asked, waving his free hand at Solvei and the huddled mares.
But it was the winter wolf who answered a moment later. “My master wishes you to know that he is.”
The adlet frowned at that, glancing between Solvei and Lex before turning back to the former. “And your master has no voice of his own?” he asked, a note of derision entering his tone.
“None that you’re worthy of hearing,” came Solvei’s answer.
An unhappy murmur went through the other adlets at that. Several of them were eyeing the black crystals as though wondering if they could leap over them, while others were shifting their stance as it preparing to throw their weapons. “Lex,” murmured Mystaria, “we came here to stop a war, not start one, remember?”
The elder adlet glanced at her for a half-second, then turned his gaze back to where Lex was still hovering in the air above the dead remorhaz. “If you can’t speak, then let’s see how well you can listen. You’re going to return my son to me immediately,” he demanded, nodding toward Toklo, who was shakily climbing to his feet. “Then, you’re going to turn one of your ponies over to us for having murdered Panuk; they will serve our people until such a time as we decide they have repaid us for your crime. The rest of you will make a show of remorse for having violated our territory, turning over all that you carry and surrendering your front teeth, after which you will be escorted back to your own lands.”
“He wants our teeth?!” squeaked Spinner, putting a hoof to her mouth in horror at the idea.
“I’d be a little more worried about what’ll happen to whoever has to stay here,” muttered Valor, keeping her shield raised.
“No one’s going to be left behind,” replied Drafty, keeping her voice soft. “Lex won’t allow it.”
“Yeah, he’d rather we all go down fighting instead,” snorted Shadow.
Drafty didn’t say anything to that. While she still felt sure that Lex would do his best to protect everyone, his withdrawn nature over the last few days had left her deeply concerned. He’d spoken to them only when absolutely necessary, and even then only through Solvei, using his own voice only when he needed to cast a spell. Worse, he’d continued spending long stretches of each day in shadow-form. Being so completely rejected was painful unto itself, even with Kara whispering in her mind to give him time, but more than that it left her wondering how much more he could take before he broke down even worse than before.
As if to prove that she was right to worry, Solvei sneered. “If you attempt to harm any of my master’s companions, you and yours will all suffer a fate far worse than that of Panuk. Just ask your son if you don’t believe me.”
Although the adlet leader didn’t bring his spear down from his shoulder, he gripped the weapon tighter then. “What does that mean?” he demanded, not waiting for an answer before he looked at his son. “Toklo! What is she talking about?!”
Cringing as though he were being berated, Toklo couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. “He…that shadow the winter wolf calls her master…he put a curse on me. Two curses.”
His jaw clenched tightly, Toklo’s father looked back at Lex, his face tight with anger. “What curses?”
Swallowing, it took his son a moment to answer. “When I change into mist, I become too dizzy to fly correctly. And…and he’s made it so that…” Squeezing his eyes shut, he flattened his ears to his skull. “So that my flesh can’t be eaten.”
The adlets erupted into horrified shouting then, outraged screams mingling with oaths to the spirits and reflexive denials that such a thing was possible. But they all quieted down when their leader nudged his mount, the polar bear rearing up on its hind legs and giving a roar. That was enough to quiet the others, though several continued to mutter to each other as the beast fell back onto all fours, all of them now sending hateful glares Lex’s way.
None were more heated than Toklo’s father. “Is this true?” he demanded, his voice quiet.
“It is,” smirked Solvei. “And my master wishes you to know that he is prepared to curse each and every one of you should you try to harm any of us.” She let that hang in the air for a moment, glancing around with undisguised delight at the worried looks the other adlets were trading now. “However, my master also wishes you to know that he is prepared to lift your son’s curse, and even share information about the yetis that recently moved through your territory, if you cooperate with him.”
No one spoke as the offer hung in the air, waiting to see what the adlet leader’s reaction would be. For a long moment he simply stared at Lex, as though trying to incinerate him with his gaze alone. Finally, after nearly a full minute of silence, he spoke. “There’s no honor in what you’re proposing,” he spat. “To die in battle shows respect for your enemy, and earns theirs in turn. To hold their spirits hostage is not only cowardly, it’s cruel. Such a thing” – he lifted his spear then, the runes on it shimmering brighter as he pointed it at Lex – “is nothing less than an affront to the natural order.”
“Your boyfriend’s a lousy negotiator,” muttered Spinner to Drafty, readying her lute.
The comment earned a sneer of derision from Shadow. “Who would have thought that ransoming someone’s child would make things worse?”
Wincing at the comments, Drafty was already starting to pull a spell together when the adlet leader lowered his spear. “Which is why I hope the spirits can forgive me,” he continued, the anger in his voice fading, “because I cannot condemn my son and my fellows to suffer such indignity.”
His troops were all visibly shocked by that, with more than a few starting to protest his decision, but he quieted them all with a shake of his head, a look of resignation crossing his features as he scowled up at Lex.
That Ujurak was the first to voice his opposition to dealing with the ponies was no surprise, being that he was well-known for his impatience and short temper. Both were qualities that had gotten him into trouble many times over the years, and it was only because he was tall and thickly muscled – swinging his greatclub around with the force of a giant – that he hadn’t gotten himself killed a long time ago.
But rather than take that lesson to heart, the towering adlet seemed to believe that his strength would carry him through any hardship he faced. While that had made him into a fine warrior, Yotimo found him tiresome to deal with. Being skilled in battle was a noble trait to have, but it didn’t mean that his every complaint was worth airing.
“We should simply kill the ponies!” continued Ujurak, slamming his club on the ground, apparently undeterred by the fact that Yotimo was ignoring him in favor of removing the armor and riding gear from Nangiannatuk, who gave a huff of relief at having it removed; while the polar bear was willing to allow himself to be used as a battle-mount, he was never happy to wear such uncomfortable accoutrements for long. “I’ll bet that after they’re all dead, Toklo will be fine!”
Yotimo paused then, not because he put much stock in Ujurak’s words, but because he’d spotted Silla approaching. But an unhappy growl from Nangiannatuk got him moving again; it wasn’t fear that prompted him to continue his task, however, but rather that his old friend had worked tirelessly navigating the forest with them for the last several days, and had earned some consideration now.
“Silla, tell him that we should just end the ponies now,” snapped Ujurak, giving the smaller adlet a glare. “Panuk must be avenged!”
Silla made no reply, instead standing silently as Yotimo finished removing the last of Nangiannatuk’s gear. It was only after he’d finished, the bear giving a full-body shake and wandering off to sniff at the dead remorhaz’s corpse hungrily, that he turned to look at Silla expectantly.
Hooking his thumbs in his belt next to his sickles, the shorter adlet didn’t keep him waiting. “I checked Toklo myself, and had Kumaglak and Nootaitok do the same just to be sure,” he reported, nodding back toward where Yotimo’s son was alternating between speaking with rest of the war party and shooting worried looks his father’s way. “That winter wolf was telling the truth. His flesh has become completely inedible. The good news is that Panuk’s body can still be consumed safely.”
“That’s good news?!” howled Ujurak, slamming his club on the ground again. “My best friend is dead, and not only have we not taken vengeance on his killers, we’re helping them get what they want! How is that good?!”
Silla’s eyes narrowed as he gave Ujurak a disapproving frown. “Lower your voice. Everyone can hear you, including the ponies you’re talking about killing.”
Not being the brightest member of their war party, Ujurak swung his head around to confirm what Silla was saying. Sure enough, the ponies – or rather, the five ponies and the winter wolf in the strange black armor – were looking right at him; only the black cloud whom Toklo had said was actually a powerful unicorn continued to ignore him. Both seemed to irritate Ujurak, and he snarled at them all before turning back to sneer at Silla. “So what? We’re speaking our native tongue. It’s not like they can understand what we’re saying.”
“One of their number commands powerful magic,” answered Yotimo at last, finished with putting away the last of Nangiannatuk’s riding gear. Standing up, he turned to give Ujurak a disapproving look. “He slew Panuk in a single blow. He takes the form of a dark cloud. He’s made a mere winter wolf into a creature that, from the look of her, is more fearsome than Nangiannatuk. And he can bring forth that sharp black stone in great amounts. It’s not difficult to imagine that he might have magic that allows him to understand what we’re saying.”
He took a step toward Ujurak then, and despite the fact that he needed to look up to make eye contact with him, it was the taller adlet who flinched. “And even if he doesn’t, it’s foolish to announce your intent to kill someone when they’re within earshot. And it’s an insult to do it right in front of me after I’ve promised that no harm will come to them from my warband.”
Ujurak’s ears flickered, lowering for a moment before snapping back upright as the moment of wisdom that had made him falter in the face of Yotimo’s rebuke drowned beneath his pride and outrage. “You shouldn’t have promised them that to begin with! If we’d rushed them all at once-”
“Then more than a few of us would likely have ended up like that remorhaz,” cut in Silla, deftly interposing himself between the two, keeping his eyes on Ujurak. “We’re quite far from the southern edge of the forest, which is where these ponies had to have entered from. For them to last this long is impressive, don’t you think?”
“We’ve lasted just as long!” scoffed the taller adlet.
“With nearly twice their number,” pointed out Silla. “And besides, while I’m sure you’d have won a glorious victory, would it really be worth it if the rest of us had our flesh cursed like Toklo? Who would eat us then?”
“I would!” Snorting contemptuously, Ujurak pounded a fist against his chest. “No matter how foul you tasted, I would consume every last bite of you!”
“Well then, go nibble on Toklo and prove it,” concluded Silla, the corners of his lips turning upward ever so slightly.
“Ha! Watch me!”
Without so much as another glance at their leader, Ujurak strode away, already calling for Toklo. The other two watched him go before Yotimo sighed. “I assume he’s not the only one who’s questioning my judgment?”
Silla shrugged. “The only one doing so that loudly. But Panuk was very popular, and there’s a lot of anger that justice isn’t being served.”
He fell silent then, but the words he’d left unspoken hung in the air. “And a lot of anger that I’m not serving it in order to save my son?” grunted Yotimo as he sat down next to Nangiannatuk’s equipment, glancing at where Toklo was now trying to keep away from Ujurak, running around a tree in fright as the larger adlet snapped at him. The sight was a comical one, but only a portion of their party was laughing; the rest were scowling.
Silla winced a little then, an uncomfortable look crossing his face. “No one faulted you for putting a war party together to rescue Toklo, and no one can blame you for being worried about his spirit now. The curse that pony put on your son is sickening; any father would have done what you did.”
A loud yelp from Toklo announced that Ujurak had finally caught him, the brawny adlet biting down on the smaller one’s ear for just a moment before doubling over, retching and hacking. But his nausea passed quickly, and when he straightened up a moment later his features were fixed in a look of determination, striding toward Toklo again, who immediately took off, one hand still over his aching ear.
It was enough to make Yotimo shake his head. “Toklo was never meant to be a warrior.”
“I doubt it was any of the ponies who melted those spears against that remorhaz. Besides, Ujurak’s breath would make anyone run.”
“He’s no coward,” admitted Yotimo, ignoring the joke. “But bravery without skill to match courts an early death. I’ve already eaten my son’s mother; I will not eat him too.”
His previous attempt at humor having failed, Silla refrained from making a comment about how no one would eat Toklo until that curse that pony-turned-shadow had put on him was removed. Instead, he fished some jerky out of a pouch, biting into the dried meat as the two sat in silence. It was only when he’d finished his meager meal that Silla spoke up again. “Do you think that winter wolf was telling the truth about the yetis?”
“I’m not sure it matters,” answered Yotimo after a moment’s consideration. “We already knew they were back, even though they shouldn’t have been able to replenish their numbers so quickly. That they’re apparently working for a hag is new, as is them attacking ponies for food, but it’s not much to go on.”
“We should at least send someone back to report the news,” insisted Silla. “A messenger could be home before morning if they took to the air now. Perhaps one of the elders knows something about a hag in this area. Spirits know they love to talk about every dangerous creature that ever lived in the region. I’ve heard the stories about that dragon, Hvitdod, so often I can recite them in my sleep.”
Yotimo grunted, but didn’t otherwise respond, still watching his son’s frantic attempts to avoid Ujurak.
When it became clear that the elder adlet wasn’t going to say anything else, Silla let out a slow breath. “Yotimo, we need to talk about that deal you made.”
“...”
Leaning in closer, Silla lowered his voice. “You know that none of us have ever heard of that ‘starless sky’ place those ponies are looking for, right? So if that unicorn won’t remove Toklo’s curse until after he’s gone there-”
“Akna will be able to find it,” interrupted Yotimo. “The spirits told her where we should search in order to find Toklo, so they’ll be able to tell her where this shrine is.”
“And if they can’t?” pressed Silla.
“She’s a powerful shaman, more gifted than her grandmother ever was,” retorted Yotimo. “She’ll figure it out.”
“She hasn’t been able to figure out why the weather’s been so good lately, except that it’s not natural.” Sitting up, Silla glanced at the ponies again. They were huddled together across from the adlets, talking in low tones. But the winter wolf – still in her armor – was regarding them warily, while her master was still staring into the forest, apparently oblivious to everything.
Hoping that the latter two individuals weren’t using magic to eavesdrop on them the way Yotimo had said they might be, Silla lowered his voice further as he turned his gaze back to his leader. “I think that we should send a messenger back tonight. They can tell the others about the yetis, and ask Akna about the ponies’ shrine. And if she can’t find it...”
Yotimo tore his eyes away from his son then, giving Silla a piercing look. “No.”
He pressed ahead anyway. “If she can’t find it, we should ask her to go on another vision quest.”
“You mean the same vision quest,” corrected Yotimo. “The one she took before we fought the yetis.”
“And look how that turned out!” insisted Silla. “The spirits led her to a weapon of immense power! She was the reason we won with so few losses-”
“Few for whom?”
Silla fell silent then, chastened. Looking down, he took a deep breath before he spoke up again. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to diminish what you went through. Losing your beloved and your parents was a tragedy that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”
He waited, but Yotimo offered neither forgiveness nor further rebuke. Instead, he glanced at where Panuk’s body had been placed, two of their number standing guard over it to ensure that it wouldn’t be snatched or defiled by any of the forest creatures – or the ponies – before it could be brought home and prepared to be ritually consumed. Then he glanced from the body to his son again, who had finally resigned himself to being repeatedly nipped by a gagging Ujurak.
“I know that Akna said she was only borrowing the weapon, and that she returned it after the battle was over,” continued Silla when the silence stretched out too long. “But she never said she wouldn’t be able to use it again. And if she can’t fulfill the promise you made to that pony...”
He couldn’t finish, hoping that Yotimo wouldn’t make him say it.
If it turned out that they couldn’t find a way to take the ponies to their “Shrine of the Starless Sky,” there was a strong possibility that the ponies would lash out at them in anger. If that happened, there would be more dead adlets, likely under curses that would keep them from being eaten, preventing their eventual rebirth. The only way to prevent that would be if Akna retrieved the most powerful weapon any of them had ever seen and used it to end the ponies before they became a threat.
But that would mean Yotimo would lose – permanently – his last living relative.
“Silla.”
His ears twitching in surprise, the younger adlet sat up straighter. “Yes?”
“Go.”
“...understood.” His shoulders slumping at the abrupt dismissal, Silla stood up and walked back toward the others, feeling wretched that he hadn’t been able to offer any real solace, nor useful advice, to the one he admired so much.
But he had barely taken two steps when Yotimo’s voice stopped him. “No.”
Half-turning, Silla cocked his head. “Hm?”
“Go home,” clarified Yotimo, still not looking at his subordinate. “Go deliver the message about the yetis. Tell Akna what the ponies want. And if...if she can’t find that shrine...” There was a catch in his voice then, and he needed a moment to finish. “...tell her to get ready.”
“Of course. I’ll leave right now.”
The words were barely out of Silla’s mouth when he began to transform, letting his body dissolve into mist. Nor did he tally once the change had finished, flying up above the forest and toward their village as fast as he could. But although he knew how important it was to bring back word of what had transpired, it wasn’t the urgency of what he was relaying that made him move so quickly.
It was that he couldn’t bear to see the tears in his leader’s eyes.
Valor’s declaration was met with a series of skeptical looks and incredulous snorts, Shadow’s being the most pointed among them. “Are you kidding? The moment we close our eyes, Toklo’s dad will tell his troops to run us through, cut our throats, and bash our brains in!”
“I suppose having his son’s afterlife taken hostage would make him mad enough to order all three,” chuckled Spinner weakly, only for her grin to falter when no one else cracked a smile. “Ugh, fine. All gallows humor aside, I don’t think some shuteye is a good idea right now.”
She finished her statement with a nod toward the adlets, not that she needed to. With night having fallen a little while ago, the two-legged wolves had set up camp. While the majority of them had strung up hammocks between the trees, nearly a third of them had elected to remain on watch. Rather than lighting a fire, those adlets had all murmured a soft word in their language, resulting in their weapons glowing with soft illumination like that of a torch, bright enough to let them see their surroundings without being so intense that they acted like beacons in the dark.
But it hadn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the adlets were using the glow of their weapons to watch the ponies as much as the surrounding forest.
Even so, Mystaria shook her head. “I think Valor’s right. Their leader said we wouldn’t be harmed, remember?”
“And you believed that?” snorted Shadow. “Newsflash, Mysty: when someone’s son is a prisoner, parents will say anything to protect them.”
The jab made the priestess of Luminace frown. “I might be an orphan, but I know that much,” she snapped, her voice coming out harsher than she meant.
Putting a hoof on Mystaria’s shoulder, Valor cut in. “I think what Mysty means is that the deal was for Lex to remove Toklo’s curses after we find the Night Mare’s shrine. If he’s going to attack us, he’ll do it then and not before.”
“Or, you know, he could just take one of us hostage in the meantime,” noted Spinner, idly strumming her lute. “I mean, he said he wouldn’t ‘harm’ any of us, not that he wouldn’t threaten to harm any of us.”
“I think it’s safe to go to sleep,” interjected Thermal Draft, her voice soft as she glanced back at the adlets. “Toklo’s father seems like he really loves his son; I don’t think he’ll do anything that could put him in danger. And even if he did, Lex would rescue-”
“Are you kidding me with that crap?” cut in Shadow, giving the pegasus a flat look. “Assuming your boyfriend even noticed” – she canted her head toward where Lex, still in his shadow-form, remained staring out into the woods; Solvei, lying down alongside him, had an ear pointed their way, but just like when she’d been guarding Toklo after they’d first taken him prisoner, didn’t otherwise react to what they were saying – “then for all we know, he’d just kill us where we stood instead of letting us be used as a bargaining chip. Presuming he didn’t just go crazy all over again.”
Mystaria put a hoof to her brow, a pained expression crossing her face. “Shadow...”
“What?” retorted the masked mare. “Tell me I’m wrong!”
“Of course you’re wrong!” snapped Drafty. “How can you say-”
She closed her mouth abruptly, taking a deep breath and holding it for several seconds before slowly exhaling. Finally, with her composure back in place, she looked at Shadow again. “Why do you hate him so much?”
Scoffing, Shadow arched a brow at her. “Gee, I don’t know. Let me ask Woodheart what she thinks. Oh wait, I can’t!” She punctuated her final statement by waving a hoof at where Littleknight was curled up in the druid’s robe. “I swear to all the gods, the real question here is why you keep sticking up for him. At the rate you’re going, you’ll end up like his previous girlfriends.”
Valor, Spinner, and Mystaria all winced at that, noticing that Solvei was glancing in their direction now. Nor was she the only one, as the adlets watching them were nudging each other and nodding in their direction. “Shadow,” ventured Spinner tentatively, “maybe we should put a pin in this for the time being.”
“Oh no. No no no,” cut in Drafty before Shadow could say anything, her voice as cold as the weather. “I want to know what she meant by that.”
“Gladly,” sneered Shadow, waving a hoof in Lex’s direction. “We all heard what those nightmare monsters of his said, you know. The last few girls he was shacking up with all ended up burning alive, and even he thinks it’s his fault. But even after that, after he all but admits he’s dangerous to be around – after seeing what happens to the mares in his life, not to mention what he did to Woodheart – you’re still acting like a schoolgirl with a crush, despite the fact that he’s never shown you the slightest ounce of concern that I can recall.”
“You,” hissed Drafty around clenched teeth, “don’t know anything!”
Shadow couldn’t have been less impressed at the other mare’s display of anger. “Oh come off it. Yes, he jumped in to defend your honor when Valor lost her cool, and he took you on a grand tour of pound-town. So what? He’s never once kissed you, or smiled at you, or had anything nice to say to you. Not once! Not to mention that time when he – and I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that this is a bad thing where you come from – sliced your face open! Did he ever even say he was sorry for injuring you?!”
She didn’t wait for Drafty to answer her, instead rising to her hooves. Immediately, her friends were at her side, each of them murmuring for her to calm down, but Shadow pushed past them, her eyes blazing with anger as she advanced on Drafty, who stood up and flared her wings as the earth pony stomped closer, putting her nose within an inch of the pegasus’ own.
“I’ve seen mares like you before, you know,” hissed Shadow, her voice dripping with venom. “I’m from Blevik, and everyday there’d be some lady in the market with too much makeup on, or who’d styled her mane so that it covered part of her face, or would wear a floppy hat that obscured her features, hoping that it would keep everyone from noticing that she had a black eye or a split lip or a bruised jawline.”
Despite her anger, a sliver of confusion ran across Drafty’s face then. “What are you talking about? The only time Lex ever hurt me was on accident!”
“It’s always an accident,” spat Shadow, the words sounding like acid on her tongue. “I heard every one of those excuses growing up, from tripping and falling down the stairs to him not knowing what he was doing because he was drunk. But it all came down to the same sick song over and over: that he didn’t mean to hurt you. That he’s really a sweet guy deep down. That no one else knows him like you do. And it was always a GODS DAMNED LIE!”
Drafty was backing up now, her angry expression having faded into one of worry. Nor was she the only one; Mystaria, Valor, and Spinner were all sharing looks of concern. Even the adlets were making no pretense about their staring now, watching the drama unfold from a comfortable distance.
But Shadow was blind to all of it, focused only on keeping pace with Drafty as she retreated, one hoof coming up to jab the pegasus in the chest sharply. “The truth is that you’re the one who doesn’t know what sort of person your boyfriend is! You’re the one who can’t see that he doesn’t care about you! And you’re the one who’s too stupid to realize that you’re going to end up just like every other mare he’s used and abused if you don’t wake up and get away from him while you still can!”
“I’ve heard enough of this!” Solvei’s growl was filled with fury, her teeth bared as she stood up. But she’d barely taken two steps when she came to a sudden halt, flinching as she looked back at Lex with a pleading expression. “But Master...!”
Her whine got caught in her throat, however, as she saw that the green and purple eyes shining out from the shifting mass of shadows was no longer staring at nothing.
Instead, Lex was looking at Shadow and Thermal Draft.
And then, a moment later, he began to move toward them.
Neither mare noticed, however, with Thermal Draft still looking flummoxed by what was going on as Shadow continued to stay right up in her face. “But no!” screamed the latter mare, her hoof impacting Drafty’s ribs with more force this time. “You’re not going to do that, are you?! Even though it’s obvious to everyone except you!”
“Shadow, stop!” Finally shaking off her surprise, Mystaria was by her friend’s side in an instant, trying to drag her backward. “You’re scaring her!”
“You need to calm down!” insisted Valor, putting a hoof on Shadow’s chest.
“GET OFF ME!” screamed Shadow, shoving Mystaria away before bringing her elbow back sharply into Valor’s nose. The blow sent her stumbling, her expression one of surprise rather than pain. “Stop acting like it’s my fault! I’m the only one who’s trying to help! I’M TRYING TO HELP! If she can’t make herself leave the stallion who’s killing her, then she needs to be taken away from him for her own good!”
She turned back to Drafty then, panting through her mask as she looked at the cringing mare. “HE DOESN’T LOVE YOU!” she shrieked, her eyes wild, seeming to look through Drafty rather than at her. “HE’S NEVER LOVED YOU! ALL HE WANTS IS A LIVE-IN MAID WHO WORKS FOR FREE AND PUTS OUT ON COMMAND! THAT’S IT!”
Her foreleg lashed out again, and this time Shadow put as much force as she could behind it, making Drafty cry out in pain as the earth mare struck her ribs. “THAT’S!” – jab – “ALL!” – jab – “YOU!” – jab – “ARE!” – jab – “TO!” – j-
Rematerializing right in front of her, Lex caught Shadow’s hoof. “Leave her alone.”
For a moment Shadow didn’t react, as though having trouble processing what was going on. Then her eyes settled on Lex, and she drew her hoof back. “You...” she hissed, reaching for her dagger. “You think you can smack me around and I’ll fall in line, is that it?! You think-”
“That’s it!” Valor barreled into Shadow a moment later, sending them both tumbling. “Spinner! Mysty! Now!”
At her cry, Spinner threw a coil of rope at the struggling duo, while Mystaria took a scroll out of her saddlebag and unrolled it, rattling off the spell it had been inscribed with. Instantly, the rope began to move of its own accord, snaking toward where Shadow was struggling to get free of Valor. The brawny mare waited until the thick cord reached them both, then rolled away from Shadow, just in time for the rope to begin coiling around her.
Cursing and shrieking like a wildcat, Shadow kicked and thrashed, trying to knock the rope away, but her wild movements did little except to tire her out. Within seconds, the heavy twine had wound around each of her legs, pulling them tightly together before tying itself around her middle, the ends twisting together into a thick knot. Even then, Shadow didn’t stop fighting, cursing and yelling incoherently as she tried in vain to free herself.
Managing a rictus grin, Spinner gave an awkward wave to the adlets, many of whom were now sitting up in their hammocks to get a look at all the commotion. “And that’s our show for tonight, everyone!” she called out, waving as she, Mystaria, and Valor went to retrieve their hysterical friend, dragging her further away to where they’d have a modicum of privacy. “Thanks, and have a great evening!”
Lex watched them go before turning around to look at Thermal Draft. “Are you alright?”
Shaking as she rubbed the sore spot on her chest, Drafty managed a nod. “I... I think so, yeah.” A moment later it occurred to her that Lex was actually talking to her, something he hadn’t done in days. “Lex, are you-”
A sharp cry from one of the adlets cut her off.
Around them, the two-legged wolves were raising their guard, gripping their weapons tighter and nudging their fellows who were still asleep. Among them, Toklo’s father was already barking orders, spear in hand as he looked...upward?
A few seconds later, a patch of mist moved down from the trees to the center of their camp.
Immediately, it began to assume a humanoid shape, and a few moments later it had solidified into another adlet.
“Where is he?” came a feminine growl as the newcomer stood up. “Where’s the pony who killed Panuk?”
The other adlets began jabbering in their native tongue then, glancing at each other in visible surprise. But while it was impossible to make out what they were saying, a single word could be heard on every tongue, repeated by each of them.
Of course, Lex knew that there had been prolonged periods of silence over the last few days. Hours had gone by as everyone had trekked through the wilderness, first through the remainder of the mountain pass and then into the forest, without saying anything. Long stretches of night had gone by where no one had been able to bring themselves to make a noise. Even the periods when someone had been forced to speak – casting a spell or shouting warnings during the intermittent periods of violence – had been comparatively brief.
But not once, during all that time, had his tulpa ceased to broadcast his own failures and regrets and self-loathing back at him.
It had been utterly relentless. Hour after hour, day after day, its voiceless words had slid across the forefront of his consciousness, dragging his thoughts back time and again to the events of the last several days.
His inability to adequately protect Thermal Draft.
His disturbing new bond with Solvei.
His failure to find out if the mares he loved were still alive or not.
His being forced to go on a profoundly dangerous detour instead of putting all his effort into getting home.
And then the newest, most recent low that he’d sunk to, where not only had the secret that he’d worked so hard to keep buried been casually unearthed to all within earshot, but had subsequently broken the most inviolable prohibition that he’d set for himself; the single constraint that he’d sworn to never, ever break.
He’d killed somepony.
This wasn’t his having failed to anticipate some situation or circumstance that had led to pony deaths that could have otherwise been prevented. This wasn’t him having lacked the power or the resources to stop a tragedy, whether natural or engineered. No, this was his having launched a deliberate attack that had slain another of his own kind. That he’d been aiming at someone else made no difference; the intent of his attack had been to kill, and because of that a pony was dead.
Maybe.
That Woodheart’s death hadn’t been confirmed – and that there was circumstantial evidence to the contrary, according to what he’d Mystaria say – brought Lex no solace. If anything, it made him feel worse rather than being a source of hope. Just like how he hadn’t been able to find out if Sonata, Aria, Nosey, and Feather Duster had survived, the uncertainty surrounding Woodheart’s fate was paralyzing. Each time he dared to hope that she might still be alive, the presence lurking in his shadow mocked him viciously about being too weak to face the harsh reality of what he’d done. And when he found himself sinking into despair over her Woodheart’s likely death, his tulpa had spitefully pointed out how she might have survived, preventing him from even beginning to work through the moral ramifications of his actions.
It had been all he could do to keep functioning in the face of such vitriolic condemnation. His thoughts had been filled by it – and his dreams had been so much worse – leaving him struggling to maintain his resolve in the face of such overwhelming bitterness. Everything else had received the minimum attention necessary, from the hostile environment to the periodic attacks by monsters. Even the adlets had required only a fraction of his consideration, since the threat of giving them the same inedibility curse that he’d put on Toklo made them easy to control.
But Shadow Star’s antagonism toward Thermal Draft had been different.
Unlike the monster attacks, he hadn’t been able to pass that one off to Solvei. For whatever reason, the masked mare’s attacks on his character had upset the winter wolf severely, to the point where she would have escalated the situation if he’d sent her to intervene. Nor had he been able to stomach the thought of using his black crystals to separate the two mares...not after the shameful way he’d lost control of himself earlier. And with Shadow’s own friends unable to call the mare off, taking action personally had been the only recourse.
“Leave her alone.”
Stopping the enraged earth mare’s attacks had been easy enough, but just for an instant he’d needed to think about what to do if she’d continued to press her attack. For a split-second, he’d had something to focus on other than his own misery, a task that couldn’t be outsourced to Solvei or avoided by turning into shadow. None of those earth mares were what he considered to be strong, but they had just enough power that he couldn’t afford to dismiss them completely, especially given what would happen if Thermal Draft were to lose her life.
It hadn’t come to that, however. Although she’d been prepared to press her attack, Shadow’s friends had regrouped, taking advantage of the distraction he’d inadvertently provided to drag their friend away. It had only been when Lex had turned to confirm Thermal Draft’s well-being that he’d realized that he wasn’t being bombarded with negativity anymore.
Inside his head, it was finally – finally! – quiet once again.
The respite was a small one, like a single swallow of water after weeks in the desert. But it was enough to send a rush of relief through Lex. While the anguish he felt over everything that had happened hadn’t gone away, putting it out of his thoughts had allowed its intensity to lessen just enough that the rogue portion of his consciousness had at last fallen silent.
But that would only last so long as he had something else to concentrate on; some immediate circumstance that required his personal attention. Otherwise he felt certain that, with nothing else to occupy his thoughts, he’d find himself focusing on his recent failures again.
Which meant that it was time to talk to Thermal Draft about what had passed between them that night at the inn.
There was no guarantee that he’d like the outcome of that conversation, but at least it would give him something new to think abou-
“Where is he? Where is the pony who killed Panuk?”
The female voice – not one he recognized – caused one of Lex’s ears to twitch in mild surprise, even as Solvei, ever protective, interposed herself between him and the speaker.
It seemed he’d have plenty of things to busy himself with for now.
“What are you doing here, Akna?”
Having learned years ago that nothing demoralized a group faster than seeing their leader lose his composure, Yotimo kept his voice neutral, despite his surprise. Nor did he outwardly react when the shaman – their tribe’s only shaman ever since Akna’s grandmother had passed away in the war against the yetis – turned to glare at him. “Give me Bloodletter,” she demanded, pointing at his spear as she drew herself up to her full height. “I’m going to deal with Panuk’s killer myself.”
Pausing to make sure he’d heard her correctly, Yotimo took a deep breath. But instead of answering her, he instead glanced around. Sure enough, everyone – or at least, all of the warriors he’d brought; the bulk of the ponies seemed preoccupied with their hysterical friend, while the other two were being covered by the winter wolf – was watching them. Even the members of their band who had been sleeping were wide awake now.
That wouldn’t do. Morale was already low because he’d made a bargain with the pony leader to save Toklo. Getting into a fight with their shaman, let alone allowing her to put herself in danger, would only make things worse. Which meant that the first order of business was giving himself some cover to figure out what Akna was thinking.
Fortunately, long years in command had taught him how to do exactly that.
“I’m sure everyone here would appreciate the entertainment.” He nodded at the rest of their people, letting the barest hint of a wry tone enter his voice.
Akna didn’t miss it, her eyes narrowing. “You don’t think I can do it?”
“Oh, I think it would be a spectacle,” he replied evenly, making sure not to dodge the question, “one that’s dearly needed since our perimeter guards are so bored that they’re not bothering to keep watch for forest creatures.”
Several adlets grimaced as a round of self-conscious looks were traded. Shuffling their feet in embarrassment, the guards turned their attention back toward the forest, knowing that they were responsible for the safety of their fellows. The rest of the troops settled back into their hammocks as well, though Yotimo had no illusions about them going back to sleep. Instead, he glanced at Akna – and over her shoulder at the ponies again – before nodding his head in the opposite direction. “Walk with me.”
“I’m not one of your warriors,” she shot back, still glaring at him. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“Suit yourself,” he replied, again keeping his tone light and unconcerned. “I’m going this way, you can come along if you want.”
He didn’t wait for her to reply before he turned and started walking, knowing that she’d follow if she really wanted the spear.
Sure enough, he heard her mutter an oath under her breath before moving to catch up to him. When she spoke next, her voice was thick with anger, but at least she kept it down. “How dare you treat me with such disrespect! And in front of the others!”
“I apologize if I made you look foolish,” replied Yotimo easily. “I’m afraid I’ve never been skilled at making the bad decisions of others appear wise.”
She could almost hear her teeth grinding. “You old-”
“What are you doing here, Akna?” he cut in, not interested in her temper tantrum. She might have been the tribe’s only shaman, but she was still young, which meant that her outbursts needed to be managed rather than indulged. “I told Silla that you should ask the spirits about the ponies’ shrine, or prepare to repeat your vision quest. Not come out here on your own.”
“And I told you that I don’t take orders from you,” growled Akna. “For that matter, I also told you why I’m here: Panuk must be avenged!”
Yotimo came to a stop then, turning to give her a flat look. “And yet you never once responded favorably when he tried to court you.”
Frustration clouded Akna’s features then, as it often did when this topic came up.
That their shaman was an object of desire for most of the tribe’s younger males was no surprise to anyone. It wasn’t simply that being the mate of the shaman was prestigious; it was that Akna herself was a beauty. Her legs were long and lean, as though all the fat in them had been moved upward to her bottom, which was pleasantly full, making it a perfect match with the wide flair of her hips. Despite that, her waist was compact, as was her trim middle, something that only made the swell of her breasts – already more generous than those of most females even when nursing – stand out all the more.
Throw in her soft features and white hair that looked like it was spun from snow even when it was pulled back in a braid, and she was pretty enough that even Yotimo couldn’t completely ignore her looks, despite his carnal desires having died along with his beloved. Even her name was suggestive; “Akna” was their language’s word for “fertile.”
Akna herself hadn’t seemed to mind the attention that her looks and her name had brought her – what young girl wouldn’t? – but her grandmother had been adamant about teaching her to speak with the spirits before she’d allow her granddaughter to be courted. Even so, Akna had been a terrible flirt, and on several occasions fights had broken out among boys over who she liked more.
That had all changed after war had broken out with the yetis, however.
That Akna had undertaken a vision quest had caught everyone by surprise, and her grandmother had argued against it, saying it was too dangerous. But, in a rare show of defiance to her mentor’s opinion, Akna had gone anyway. And the results had been beyond anyone’s expectation, coming back with a weapon of such power – far beyond Bloodletter, the spear her grandmother had spent years crafting – that she’d turned the tide of the conflict all on her own.
But she hadn’t come back in time to save her grandmother, and the bright young girl who’d enjoyed teasing the boys hadn’t come back either. In her place was a grim, humorless young adlet who – despite having to return the weapon she’d saved them all with – seemed to regard the entire world as a hostile place, rather than a source of majesty and beauty. While Yotimo could relate, his own joy having died with Toklo’s mother and grandparents, he still mourned how such a joyful young girl had become so jaded.
Worse, at least for the tribe, was that she’d lost all interest in mothering any children of her own. Despite having seen twenty winters, she still slept alone, and there was talk of asking the elders to push the issue. The tribe’s numbers needed to be replenished, and another shaman needed to be trained, and yet the adlet named for her fertility and in her prime breeding years showed no interest in any such thing.
Which made it all the more mysterious that she was so upset to learn about Panuk’s death now.
“It’s not just that the ponies killed one of our people,” she retorted at last. “They’ve trespassed on our lands, and put a curse on one of us – on your own son! – that offends the spirits! And yet you’re negotiating with them instead of making them answer for their crimes, even though you brought an entire war party with you!”
But Yotimo refused to let her turn the conversation back around on him. “And you felt that the best way to rectify this was to come out here personally, rather than either finding that shrine the ponies are looking for or retrieving the means to wipe them out?”
Akna, however, seemed to be tired of explaining herself. “Give me Bloodletter, and let’s see.”
She held her hand out then, but Yotimo made no move to give her the weapon. “Bloodletter isn’t the sort of weapon-”
“Do not lecture me about the spear!” growled Akna. “I watched my grandmother work on it many times when I was young! I know all about what it can do: that it turns even a slight scratch into a serious cut and a cut into a deep gash, but at the cost of inflicting matching injuries to the wielder! Now give it to me!”
“It’s not matching injuries,” corrected Yotimo, still refusing to do as she said. “The wounds you take correspond to the location of the hits you land, but they’re not as severe, which means you need to fight carefully, rather than angrily. And nothing about it can remove curses, like the one that Toklo received, which that pony will put on you if you go through with this.”
“He’ll lift them to save his own life,” insisted Akna. “And if he won’t, then he will to save the lives of his companions!”
“That’s only if you can best him in the first place,” countered Yotimo, trying not to sigh. It was like talking to Ujurak all over again. “These ponies survived four days in this forest on their own. None of them should be taken lightly.”
Akna lowered her hand then, apparently realizing that further discussion was pointless. “I’m doing this,” she declared. “You can either aid me or hinder me, but I’m confronting that pony. And I’m doing it now.”
This time Yotimo didn’t say anything, trying to figure out what was going on. Even with how grim her personality had become, Akna had never been this aggressive that he could remember. So why was she acting this way now?
Taking his silence as defiance, the young shaman snarled at him. “Have it your way, then. We’ll see how much longer you can take that attitude when everyone here sees me save your son.”
She marched passed him then, stalking back toward the ponies. This time Yotimo did sigh, taking a few moments to gather his patience before moving to follow her. Hopefully, after she failed, he’d be able to confer with that winter wolf’s master and confirm that their deal was still in place. With any luck, her being humbled would bring Akna to her senses as well; they still needed her to find that shrine.
But when he caught up to Akna a few moments later, she was frozen in place, her eyes wide and her jaw hanging open, a look of shock on her face.
Following where her eyes were looking, Yotimo got his first good look at the pony leader now that he was a pony again, rather than a black cloud with glowing eyes. Like Toklo had described, he was a unicorn, but whose horn didn’t match his coat, being blood-red where the rest of his body was grey. Even more strangely, his shadow fell against the light, stretching out further than it should have in the dim glow of the guards’ weapons. He was clad in robes and a cloak, though thankfully he wore no mask; Toklo had told him how one of his companions had destroyed it after he had temporarily gone mad and tried to kill him, hitting one of his retinue instead.
Still, he looks only slightly less formidable now than he did before, Yotimo decided, glancing at Akna’s thunderstruck expression again. If Toklo hadn’t described him to me, I suppose might have been caught off-guard by his appearance also.
Except, he realized a moment later, Akna wasn’t just staring at the unicorn, who was glowering back at them in a silent challenge. She was staring at his foreleg, where the sleeve of his robe ended just above his hoof. Frowning, Yotimo glanced at the pony's leg again, trying to see what Akna was gawking at.
A moment later he caught a glimpse of barbed wire, of all things.
Despite asking as gently as she could, Mystaria’s question still resulted in a look of supreme bitterness from Shadow Star. “Get these damned ropes off of me!” she spat, wriggling in her bonds.
“If we do, are you going to go after Lex and Drafty again?” asked Valor, her expression neutral.
From behind her mask, Shadow snarled. “Stop making it sound like I’m the problem! That miserable bastard is the reason our group is down a member! His old girlfriends all died in a fire because of him! He sliced open Drafty’s face, Mysty’s hooves, and is the reason all the adlets here want to kill us! So why am I the only one who’s tied up?!”
The string of invectives made Valor sigh. “That’s a yes, then.”
“No offense, Shadow, but you have terrible timing,” cut in Spinner, glancing back at where the newly-arrived female adlet – her body language suggesting that, like Shadow, she was very upset about something – was speaking with Toklo’s father. “If you recognize that the adlets aren’t exactly happy with us, then maybe showing disunity in front of them wasn’t the best idea? At least Lex thought we were alone when he flipped out and went nuts.”
“I am not flipping out!” seethed Shadow.
The pointed looks that she received from her friends then left her fuming, but she managed to keep herself from ranting further. Instead, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back, taking several deep breaths. After nearly thirty seconds had passed, she spoke again, this time keeping her voice at a normal volume. “I’m not wrong about him. At the rate he’s going, it’s only a matter of time before Lex gets us all killed.”
“I agree that he’s a deeply flawed individual,” admitted Mystaria diplomatically. “But I think that he wants to do the right thing, in spite of that. And whether we like it or not, we need him.”
“Says you,” snorted Shadow. “I say we turn him over to the adlets, and use that to get in good with them so that they’ll help us rescue Woodheart. Then Lex gets what he deserves, the adlets get justice, Drafty gets away from him, and we get our friend back.”
“Oh now there’s a plan,” scoffed Spinner. “You really think Lex will just sit back and let us turn on him like that? Even if he can’t recharge his spells, I don’t think he’ll hesitate to burn through them if the adlets try to overpower him. Plus he’s still got Solvei, remember? The winter wolf who took out over a dozen yetis without breaking a sweat? I doubt she’ll approve of us hanging her master out to dry.”
“Then what’s your idea?” spat Shadow, lying back with a contemptuous snort. “To keep doing like we have been? Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but that hasn’t exactly been working out for us.”
“We could say that about most of our adventures, you realize,” chimed in Valor. “Almost every single time we take on a job, things go peach-shaped-”
“‘Pear-shaped,’ Valor,” groaned Spinner, though the corners of her mouth were turned upward.
The muscled mare scowled at that, but recovered her poise after only a moment. “Whatever. My point is, if anyone knows about screwing things up, it’s us. But we always manage to find a way to come out ahead. This is just...a little more extreme, is all.”
But Shadow refused to give an inch. “It’s completely different, and you know it. Believe me, Lex isn’t someone we can rely on. I’ve seen what happens to mares who depend on stallions like him.”
“Where?”
Spinner’s question made Shadow blink, giving the filidh a confused look. “What?”
“Where have you seen what happens to mares who depend on stallions like him?” repeated Spinner. “I mean, what is it that makes you so sure that we’re wrong and you’re right?”
“I’m from Blevik.”
“Which is why you’ve seen mares at the market trying to cover up a black eye, or stallions who’re only interested in a girlfriend who’ll act like a maid they don’t have to pay,” acknowledged Valor. “But those don’t sound like Lex and Drafty. So like Spinner said: what makes you so sure?”
“Why does everyone keep defending him?!” Sitting up, Shadow struggled with the ropes again, but only kept up the effort for a moment before slumping back down, looking down. “You need to trust me on this. Ponies like him hurt the people around them. It’s what he does. Who he is. And he can’t change that, even if he wanted to.”
The defeated tone in her voice was enough to make the other three exchange looks of concern.
“...look, Shadow, it’s obvious to all of us that you feel very strongly about this,” began Mystaria. “But I think what we’re having a hard time understanding is why you feel that way. You keep saying you’re certain you know what sort of pony Lex is, but you can’t tell us why. And no,” she added before Shadow could reply, “saying that you’re from Blevik isn’t good enough.”
Grimacing, Shadow shook her head. “...he’s a monster. You just can’t see it.”
“Then help us see it,” urged Mystaria. “Tell us what it is that makes you so sure about him.”
Again, their bound companion fell silent. A short distance away, Lex and Thermal Draft were speaking softly, their voices too low to make out. Past them, the voices of that female adlet and Toklo’s father could just barely be heard, despite the two of them having moved out of sight.
“They were just like them.”
Shadow’s quit murmur made Mystaria cant her head slightly, sharing an uncertain glance with Valor and Spinner before turning back to Shadow. “Who?”
“My mom and stepdad,” answered Shadow, her voice barely audible as she kept her eyes downcast. “They were just like Lex and Drafty.”
Three sets of eyebrows rose then. In all that they’d known her, Shadow had never once talked about her family. Now it was starting to become clear why.
“Did you know that the Pony Empire never actually legalized prostitution?” she continued, her voice taking on a derisive tone, though without the fire she’d had before. “A lot of people don’t know that, since you can find whores working openly in any city worth the name, but it’s true. Iliana outlawed the practice as soon as she consolidated her rule. But with one exception.”
To Mystaria, it was obvious what Shadow was referring to. “Kara’s faith.”
The masked mare nodded. “In her religion, selling your body is a holy act, and Iliana needed the entire pantheon behind her in order to bring all the pony tribes together. So anyone who’s a member of Kara’s church can rent out their body without being arrested. It’s why every strumpet on a streetcorner has to turn over a portion of their take to the local chapterhouse; so long as they do that, Kara’s faithful claim that they’re acolytes. They even offer them some support, telling them how to turn tricks better, selling alchemical remedies to protect against disease, and even selling spells that will temporarily keep the recipient from getting pregnant...”
She let out a slow breath before she kept going. “My mother was either too poor or too cheap to spring for that last one, and so one of her clients knocked her up with me.”
Spinner opened her mouth, and the look on her face made it clear she was about to offer up a joke in hope of lightening the mood, but a sharp look from Valor made whatever she was about to say die on her lips.
Heedless of what her friends were doing, Shadow continued speaking. “When she found out she was expecting, my mom freaked out, since pregnant whores aren’t exactly a hot commodity among stallions. So she turned to the city’s largest temple, which like all of Kara’s holy houses was also its largest brothel, and begged for help so that she wouldn’t starve in the street.”
“She didn’t have anywhere else to go?” asked Valor quietly, ignoring Spinner’s irked look. “No family who could take her in?”
Shadow didn’t look up as she shook her head. “I never got the full story out of her, but I think her parents fell in with the Resistance, and came to a bad end. I just know that she’d been a working girl since her early teens.”
The answer made Valor’s brow furrow in confusion, and she glanced at the other two while mouthing “the Resistance?” at them.
“Blevik is run by the doppelgangers, the shapeshifting ponies who, like their mother goddess, are a little bit nutty and a whole lotta slutty,” answered Spinner quietly, ignoring the disapproving look Mystaria shot her then. “The Resistance tries to clear them out, since everyone knows dops are bad news, but most people think it’s a lost cause.”
“It is a lost cause,” huffed Shadow. “Kara’s church is the only game in Blevik, and my mother knew it. She went to them because serious practitioners of Kara’s faith, instead of just affiliated streetwalkers, get to live at the temple free of charge. They still have to sell themselves while learning how to become proper practitioners, since they have to pay back what they incur for food and board, but a lot of what they study involves how to be a high-class call girl instead of a common tramp. How to squeeze a guy while he’s inside you, taking it under the tail without lube, that sort of thing.”
Having grown up in a very different temple environment, Mystaria cringed, but didn’t say anything.
“That’s where I was born, a sacred whorehouse,” sighed Shadow. “I’m just grateful that I don’t remember the place, since we left before I was two years old. Mother had hit the jackpot, you see: she’d gotten married.”
“Married?” blurted Spinner. “Someone married a-”
She snapped her jaw shut, reddening at what she’d almost said, but Shadow didn’t seem offended. Instead, she gave a mirthless snicker. “It’s every harlot’s dream: to seduce a guy to the point of proposing, leaving them set for when they get older and lose their looks. And stallions love it, too; they get to be the hero who rides in and saves the girl from her shameful life, rescuing a slightly-used damsel in distress.”
The scorn in her voice was almost painful to listen to, but after Spinner’s outburst no one interrupted her. “So I guess those lessons my mother had taken about how to blow a guy’s mind, and other parts, had paid off: she’d gotten herself hitched a former adventurer who’d had enough luck that he not only bought out her debt to Kara’s temple, but had a house right there in the city. They might even have been happy together for a little while...”
Her voice softened slightly then, and her gaze turned distant. But it lasted only for a moment. “By the time I was five, it was already falling apart. My stepdad had married my mom because he wanted a live-in doxy who wouldn’t charge for her services and would cook and clean. Instead, he got an actual wife who didn’t enjoy being treated like a servant or a sex object; the fact that she came with a daughter who needed to be clothed and fed and looked after didn’t help either. So it’s no surprise that most of my earliest memories are of them fighting. And then...”
A catch in her voice made her stop, though she tried to pass it off by clearing her throat. “And then he started hitting her.”
“Shadow...”
Valor’s sympathetic murmur was somehow more heartbreaking than the masked mare’s tale, but no one else said anything as Shadow shrugged. “Since he had experience fighting monsters, he was apparently pretty good at beating one defenseless mare into submission. So good that he started hitting her whenever she pissed him off, which happened more and more as I got older. At first he’d only raised a hoof to her when she’d objected to him pressuring her to put out in the middle of the day or hadn’t gotten his laundry done. But later on he did it more and more; when she’d overslept and forgot to make his breakfast, or when she’d misplaced his favorite shirt, or when she tugged on a knot while combing his mane. Anything that made him angry, and he seemed to get angrier every year.”
Again, her eyes turned distant, gazing back into the past. “There were always ladies in the market trying to hide their bruises...and my mom was one of them.”
Out of her peripheral vision, Mystaria could see the female adlet – along with Toklo’s father – returning, but she couldn’t bring herself to pay attention to them, too caught up in what her friend was saying.
“I begged her to leave him, of course,” muttered Shadow, a note of bitterness creeping back into her voice. “But he was the reason we had food on the table and a roof over our heads. Mom was too old to go whoring again, not that my stepdad would have let her, and I was too young. And when I pressed her too hard about it, she’d collapse into tears, and I...I hated doing that to her. So eventually I just stopped trying...and the beatings got worse, to the point where sometimes she’d need a healer to examine her.”
Shrugging as though she’d already finished the important parts of the story, Shadow leaned back as though making herself comfortable. “Things didn’t get better until I was fourteen.”
Spinner cocked her head. “What happened when you were fourteen?”
This time, Shadow looked her friend right in the eye when she replied. “I killed him.”
Mystaria’s jaw fell open then, and Valor looked equally shocked. “You killed your f-, your stepfather?”
“It wasn’t even that hard,” snorted Shadow. “He’d been out of the adventuring business for quite a few years by that point, and I was getting old enough for the son of a bitch to start noticing my body. He’d already started making lewd comments when my mom wasn’t around, brushing up against me, smelling my mane, that sort of thing. I don’t know why he thought I’d be attracted to him, after everything he’d done to my mom, but when I started wearing a short skirt and flirting with him, he ate it up. After that, it was easy to get him drunk one evening and lure him to my bedroom. He’d still kept some of his old weapons from his adventuring days, and with how dark it was...”
Mystaria swayed on her hooves, suddenly feeling nauseous. She’d been so excited to find her parents’ old stuff, particularly her father’s journal. That one of her closest friends had not only suffered so much because of her parents, but had actually killed one of them, was more upsetting that she’d thought.
Her voice nonchalant, Shadow brought her story to a close. “I got rid of his body after that, hoping that everyone would think that he’d skipped town, but I screwed that part up. Blevik might not have the strictest law enforcement in the Empire, but they patrol their sewers just like everywhere else in order to make sure monsters don’t lair in them, and his corpse was eventually found. Lucky me, his old adventuring buddies were upset that their friend’s throat had been slit, and paid for the temple to use some magic that can make a dead body answer questions.”
“The ‘speak with dead’ spell,” muttered Spinner. “It allows for a brief conversation with an intact cadaver.”
“If I’d known that at the time, I would have cut off the bastard’s head and crushed it with a rock,” snorted Shadow. “As it was, he made sure to tell them who’d done him in, and the next thing I know I’m wanted for murder. As you can imagine, I skipped town after that. Luckily my stepdad’s old adventuring gear sold for enough to get me far away.”
“And that’s why you wear your mask all the time,” realized Valor.
“Got it in one,” admitted Shadow. “Blevik might be at the far end of the Empire, but it’s a popular destination for ponies that want to enjoy the very best of Kara’s holy hookers. Since my face is still on a wanted poster there, it’s not hard to imagine that someone who visited the city might recognize me.”
“But what about your mother?” blurted Mystaria. “What happened to her?”
Shadow shrugged. “Dunno.”
“You don’t know?!” repeated Spinner, incredulous.
Sighing, Shadow shook her head. “I told her what I’d done before that son of a bitch’s body was found, but she wasn’t happy the way I thought she’d be. Instead she was horrified. I tried to get her to come with me, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She just kept weeping and saying ‘How could you?! How could you?!’ at me, like she was heartbroken that the guy who’d fractured her leg and bruised two of her ribs the day before was dead. So yeah, when the guards came to our house, I took off without her. After that I spent a couple of years teaching myself how to be a cutpurse, then I met you guys, and the rest is history.”
Spinner shook her head. “Hang on, back up a second. You’re still a wanted criminal in Blevik?”
“The reason I’m telling you all this,” answered Shadow, a thread of irritation returning to her voice, “is so that you’ll know I’m not just blowing smoke when I say that I know what sort of stallion Lex is. He’s the same arrogant, domineering, violent bastard that I grew up with. The fact that he has a trail of dead girlfriends, and his current one is already worse for wear because of him, is no coincidence. Not to mention what he did to Woodheart. So yeah, as an expert on bad stallions, he is one, and we need to treat him accordingly, for Drafty’s sake as well as our own.”
Mystaria opened her mouth, only to falter for a moment. What could she say, in the face of what Shadow had just told her? But at the same time, she knew she had to say something. “Shadow...I can’t even begin to imagine what you’ve gone through. But Lex-”
Glancing back at the stallion in question, Mystaria’s voice caught in her throat as she saw him talking to the female adlet and Toklo’s father. But it wasn’t that they were conversing that caught her by surprise. It was that, after a moment’s conversation, he stepped back and began casting a spell, the words and gestures cluing her in that it was the tiny hut enchantment – which created a thin dome of weather-repellent force – that they’d been sleeping under for the last few days.
Sure enough, the silvery hemisphere appeared out of nowhere a moment later.
And then Lex strode into it, the female adlet following after him, leaving everyone else behind as they disappeared from view.
Yotimo’s question snapped Akna out of her shocked stupor. Shaking her surprise off, she silently cursed her own lack of self-control as she saw the old warrior glancing between her and the barbed wire wrapped around the unicorn’s foreleg. Bad enough that she’d been caught so completely off-guard by something she should have expected, but she’d let Yotimo see what it was that had rattled her.
That wouldn’t do. Yotimo was hardheaded and small-minded, but he was also a grizzled old warrior who’d seen dozens of battles before she’d been born, which made him no one’s fool. That she’d shown up here of her own initiative – worried that he’d slay or drive off the ponies before she could talk to them – without a plausible excuse had already made him suspicious. She couldn’t afford for him to question her motives even more.
“I just...I didn’t expect that pony to look so formidable,” she muttered, trying hard to make it sound like she was intimidated and attempting not to show it. “His shadow isn’t cast right, his horn looks like it’s been dipped in blood, and his foreleg...is that how ponies show off their strength? By wearing something so painful?”
Yotimo didn’t answer for a moment, a clear indication that he wasn’t sure if he believed her, but eventually his eyes turned back toward the pony leader. “I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “But like I said; these ponies have survived being in this forest for days, so if that is an emblem of strength, he came by it honestly.”
Akna nodded, adopting a pensive expression. “What about his mask? The one he used to slay Panuk?”
“It’s gone,” replied Yotimo. “Apparently, one of his companions” – he nodded at where four female ponies, one of them tied up for some reason, were conversing in the distance – “destroyed it after he tried to kill Toklo and hit them instead.”
This time Akna didn’t need to fake her concern. “He tried to kill Toklo? Even though he already cursed him?”
Yotimo nodded, and although the expression on his weathered old face didn’t change, Akna could tell that news weighed heavily on him...enough so that he was no longer wondering about her. Which means I need to keep him thinking about son, rather than me.
With that thought in mind, she glanced back in the direction they’d come from. “It occurs to me that I haven’t asked how he’s doing.”
The faintest trace of surprise could be seen in Yotimo’s eyes then, a far cry from how openly she’d worn her own a few moments ago. “He’s...he’ll be fine. We’ll give the pony what he wants, get his curses removed, and then I’ll bring him home.”
“When you do, try not to hold what happened here against him,” cautioned Akna. “The way I heard it, he fought bravely before he was captured, and it was his last stand that allowed the others to escape. Not to mention he survived being in captivity. That’s its own form of strength.”
Yotimo’s eyes flickered back toward where they’d left his son and his warriors, but after a moment he shook his head. “Right now we need to focus on the ponies. I’ll deal with Toklo after that.”
Hoping that she’d done enough to take his mind off his suspicions toward her, Akna nodded. “I agree. Which is why I’m going to try and convince that pony to remove your son’s curses now.”
She strode forward then, but had only taken a single step when Yotimo grabbed her arm. “What are you talking about? I already made a deal with that pony. He’ll remove Toklo’s curses-”
“After he finds this ‘shrine’ he’s looking for, I know,” she shot back, giving him an irritated glare as she wrenched her arm free of his grasp. “Silla told me. But that’s assuming we can count on that pony to keep his word. And even if he is honorable, we still have to find that place, and he still needs to survive until we do, and that’s if there’s nothing dangerous there. It’s better if we can convince him to remove Toklo’s curses now.”
Yotimo’s brows furrowed. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that?”
“By offering him a more valuable hostage.”
Yotimo immediately knew who she meant, and this time he didn’t bother grabbing her arm, instead moving to stand in front of her. “No! You are not taking those curses in Toklo’s place!”
Smiling inwardly now that the old warrior was dancing to her tune, Akna fixed him with a stern look. “That pony’s curse – one of them, at least – is keeping your son from being eaten if he dies. That’s an offense both to the spirits and to our way of life. As our tribe’s shaman, it’s my duty to place myself between my people and the threat that pony represents!”
Yotimo glowered at her. “Not if that means potentially losing our only shaman!”
“My life won’t be in danger,” countered Akna. “Only my ability to be reborn after I die. Even if I bear the pony’s curse for life, I’ll still be able to have a daughter of my own and pass on the role of shaman to her.”
Her reasoning was solid enough that Akna could see the frustration on Yotimo’s face now, despite how well he hid it, and she had to fight down the urge to laugh. It must have sounded so noble to him, the shaman putting her spirit in jeopardy for the good of the tribe. If only he knew.
Silla’s having told her that the ponies wanted to find the Shrine of the Starless Sky had been what had caused her to rush out there, rather than any desire to avenge Panuk or safeguard Toklo’s ability to be devoured when he died. Instead, she’d been intent on capturing the ponies and torturing them for information; how did they know about the Shrine, and what were their intentions if they found it?
That one of the ponies was apparently a priest of the Night Mare, to whom the Shrine was dedicated, hadn’t crossed her mind.
But now that she’d spotted the Night Mare’s holy symbol, wrapped around the hoof of the pony who was apparently the leader of the group, everything was clear.
This was the opportunity she’d been, quite literally, praying for.
“I don’t like this,” growled Yotimo softly, “and neither will any of my warriors.”
But Akna had expected him to say that. “They didn’t like it when you made a deal with the ponies to rescue Toklo,” she countered easily. “Did that stop you?”
There was nothing Yotimo could say to that, and a moment later he stepped back, moving out of her way.
It was all Akna could do not to smirk as she stepped past him, heading back toward where the ponies were.
“If things go wrong and this comes down to a fight-”
“It won’t,” dismissed Akna, frowning a little. Was he really going to fret so much now that their course of action had been decided upon?
“If it does,” he repeated, his voice insistent, “then I’ve given orders for everyone here to take a defensive posture and try to drag out the battle for as long as possible. According to Toklo, something’s wrong with that unicorn’s magic, and he can’t recharge it. The more he uses now, the weaker he’ll be later.”
Akna frowned at that, but other than giving him a nod didn’t reply. If something was preventing that unicorn from restoring his magic, was that why he was looking for the Shrine? Because he had offended the Night Mare somehow and was on a quest to regain her favor? If so, that might limit his usefulness to her...but he was still better than nothing.
It took only a few seconds of walking to bring them back to where the ponies were, the unicorn conferring quietly with the pegasus as the winter wolf stuck close to them, her posture one of readiness. All three looked up at her as she approached them, but Akna only had eyes for the stallion, fighting down the urge to grin as she glanced at the barbed wire around his hoof again.
Finally...it was finally happening...
“Okay...I think I understand.”
“Don’t attempt to use it before you’ve had a chance to test it properly,” cautioned Lex. “Even if it’s a simple spell, your control is still less than perfect.”
“Geez, you don’t have to put it like that,” huffed Thermal Draft. “It’s just an increase in speed, it’s not like I’ll be fooling around with another fireball.”
“Be that as it may, I want you to exercise caution,” repeated Lex. “The process by which you construct micro-rituals is prone to errors if you don’t-”
“Construct each spell with the utmost precision, I know,” sighed the pegasus. “I’ll be sure to practice the spell, okay? Just once we’re somewhere safer.”
Frowning, Lex nevertheless nodded, watching as Thermal Draft looked uneasily at the adlets, before glancing over at where Mystaria and the others had dragged Shadow Star. She looked at them for only a moment before glancing back at where the elder adlet’s polar bear was dozing by the remorhaz’s corpse, studying the sleeping bear for just a moment before turning her eyes to Solvei, as if making sure the winter wolf was still there. When Solvei tilted her head inquisitively at the pegasus, Thermal Draft murmured an apology before looking down instead.
Looking everywhere except back at him, in other words.
She’d been fidgeting like that ever since he’d broached the topic of why she’d initiated their sexual encounter several days ago, back in the village.
As bad as Lex was at reading people, it had been clear even to him that the question had left her extremely flustered. She’d hemmed and hawed for several moments, a range of expressions crossing her face, none of which he’d been able to identify, before she’d abruptly regained control of herself, saying that she’d prefer to talk about that when they had some privacy.
The excuse had brought a scowl to Lex’s face, but before he’d been able to point out that there was little chance of that happening in the immediate future, she’d quickly suggested that he teach her more spells instead, since they might need them if the newly-arrived female adlet insisted on picking a fight. And although Lex had wanted to stick with his original topic of choice – if only so that he’d have something else to occupy his thoughts – her reasoning had been too cogent to dismiss. Even if they didn’t fight the newcomer, there were likely to be more battles in the near future, and he’d already missed several days’ worth of instructing her in new spells.
So, reluctantly, Lex had let the mystery of why Thermal Draft had slept with him lie, instead teaching her a spell that would enhance her flight speed for a short duration. Now that she had that down, the next one he had in mind was-
Master, came Solvei’s telepathic voice, those adlets are coming back.
Glancing at the winter wolf, Lex followed Solvei’s gaze toward the forest, with Thermal Draft doing the same when she saw where his attention was directed.
A few moments later, the elder adlet – Yotimo, Toklo’s father with whom he’d cut a deal – and his female companion emerged from the gloom, walking directly toward them.
When they got closer, Solvei moved to stand in front of them, growling softly as she glared at the two. “What do you want?”
The female adlet glanced at her only for a moment before looking Lex over, her gaze finally settling on his. “My name is Akna,” she announced at last. “I’m the shaman for our tribe. I wish to negotiate with you for Toklo’s freedom.”
Solvei snorted as Lex telepathically fed her his response. “My master has already made a deal with your leader. His son’s curses will be lifted when my master and his entourage reach the Shrine of the Starless Sky, and not before.”
“Yotimo is not my leader,” corrected Akna with a frown, keeping her eyes on Lex’s. “As the senior shaman for our people, I answer only to our council of elders. And as one who speaks with the spirits and learns from their wisdom, I believe that a more favorable bargain can be reached, for all of us.”
“Great, another Prevarius,” muttered Thermal Draft.
The comparison made Lex grimace, reminding him of the medley of negativity that he was trying not to concentrate on. Instead, he made himself focus on what he wanted Solvei to say, and a moment later the winter wolf parroted his response. “Speak your piece and be done with it.”
For the briefest instant, Akna’s eyes darted toward where Yotimo was standing slightly behind her. “I’d prefer to do that in private, if you don’t mind.”
The request made Yotimo narrow his eyes as he looked at the shaman. “Akna, what are you doing?”
“What I said I would,” she replied easily. “Relax. I know what I’m doing.”
“You didn’t say anything about speaking with him alone,” shot back the elder adlet. “If he attacks you-”
“My master wouldn’t do that!” snarled Solvei, hackles rising. “Not unless she attacked first!”
“Which won’t happen,” answered Akna, crossing her arms under her chest. “I’m only interested in talking.”
“You were ranting about wanting revenge for Panuk just a minute ago.” Thermal Draft made no effort to be polite, giving the adlet a frown. “How do we know this isn’t an attempt to separate Lex from the rest of us so you can attack him when he’s alone?”
Akna shrugged. “Do you want me to swear an oath about my peaceful intentions?”
“Would you feel bound by it if you did?” sneered Solvei, this time without any prompting from Lex.
For a moment Akna’s lip curled, but she didn’t reply to the winter wolf’s taunt, instead keeping her eyes on Lex. “One way or another, this all comes down to trust. Your deal with Yotimo required you to trust him to lead you to the shrine you’re looking for, rather than a trap. He’s trusting you to release his son once you get what you want. Can you really not trust me enough to speak with me alone for a few minutes?”
“What do you want to say to him in private that you can’t-”
Thermal Draft’s question died on her lips as Lex held out a hoof, silencing her. A moment later he sent instructions to Solvei, and despite the sudden sense of trepidation he registered from her, she relayed his message faithfully. “My master will agree to your request.”
“Lex,” whined Thermal Draft. But he wasn’t listening, instead, calling upon the reserve of magic in his circlet, just as he had the last few days whenever he’d cast his spell to create a livable shelter. The dome of force it created wasn’t much as far as privacy went – it only shielded those inside of it from sight, not muffling any sounded that emanated from within – but it would have to be enough.
Akna and Yotimo both stiffened as the silvery dome appeared, but Lex ignored them both as he strode inside, letting Solvei deliver his instructions for him. “My master will speak with you inside here. Drafty, you should go tell the others what’s happening, just to be safe. As for you,” she spat, looking at Yotimo, “go tell the rest of your kind to keep their distance, and keep yours too for that matter.”
But Yotimo held his ground, even as Thermal Draft reluctantly flew back. “I am not leaving,” the old adlet protested. “If Akna is going in there, then I’m staying right here.”
“I will stay here,” shot back Solvei, baring her teeth, “to make sure that no one disturbs Master and that so-called shaman of yours until they’re done. You will do as you’re told, or else.”
Yotimo firmed up his stance then, his features tightening as he glared right back at Solvei. But before he could otherwise react, Akna put a hand on his shoulder. “I have a suggestion. I’ll put my own guardian out here, alongside the winter wolf, while Yotimo falls back.” She glanced between the featureless surface of the dome, before looking back at Solvei. “I trust your master has no problem with that?”
Solvei frowned, but this time it was suspicion that Lex registered from her. “What guardian?”
In answer, Akna held a hand out beside her, eyes closing as she took a deep breath. Immediately, the sensation of magic registered across Lex’s senses, and he saw the snow around Akna suddenly whip around, caught in a cold wind. The change in the weather couldn’t reach him inside the dome, but he still noticed that the nearby trees weren’t moving; whatever the adlet shaman was doing was localized to directly around her.
But that was only the case for a moment, as the windswept snow curled around itself, pulling in more of the white powder from the ground nearby. Held aloft, the snow clumped together rather than being scattered by the breeze, twisting in mid-air as though an invisible pony was attempting to sculpt a snowball. Nor did it stop there, as more and more of the sleet around the adlet shaman – who continued to hold her position, eyes closed and hand out – was picked up by the wind.
A moment later the snow began to shape itself into a creature.
It was like watching an ice sculpture melt in reverse. Rather than starting at its feet and forming upward, the swirling snow formed a thin frame of the entire body, clinging to itself as it took the loose form of a humanoid, with a spindly torso from which two arms and two legs sprouted, joined by a head a moment later. Then more snow rushed in, filling the nascent creature out.
Even as Lex watched, the snow piled together, rushing in to give what had moments ago been a wire-thin frame form and definition. Already, the nearby snowdrifts were depleting, pulled into the nascent creature and seemingly becoming part of its mass, adhering to the greater collective of frozen water even as the snow solidified more, turning into solid ice. In moments, the creature had become as thick around as a pony, and stood twice as tall as Akna.
And it continued to grow.
The entire process lasted only a few more seconds, but when it was over, there was a massive creature of pure ice towering over the adlet shaman. Fully three times her height, it was easily thicker than three ponies standing together. It had no discernable features, lacking anything that resembled a face on its round lump of a head nor any sort of discernable anatomy beyond its humanoid shape. But what it lacked in fine details it more than made up for in mass, and as the ice monster turned toward Akna, Lex could feel its steps reverberating through the ground.
I knew it! yelped Solvei, growing to her full height in alarm. This is a trap! Master, let me-
Stand down, Solvei, ordered Lex. Wait and see what she does next.
She didn’t argue, but the anxiety coming from her was quite clear as Akna beckoned for the ice creature to lean down. It obeyed wordlessly, kneeling down and lowering its head toward her. Looking up at it, Akna’s lips moved for just a moment before she stepped back, nodding. “I’ve ordered this ice spirit to stand watch outside of our meeting place,” she explained, looking at Yotimo. “If something happens, it will move to protect me. Is that enough to quell your fears?”
Letting out a slow breath, Yotimo glanced at the ice creature, then at Akna, then at Solvei, before finally looking at the dome. Although Lex knew he couldn’t see through it, the elder adlet’s eyes seemed almost to find his before he nodded at last, and then turned and went back to his warriors, once again gawking at the spectacle.
“My master says for you to enter the area of his spell,” relayed Solvei under his mental prompting, still staring at the ice creature the shaman had conjured up. “But speak with care. It keeps out prying eyes, but your words can still be heard outside of it if you’re loud.”
“Understood,” nodded Akna, before striding into the dome.
And then, at last, they were alone.
“The ice elemental I summoned won’t last very long, and I suspect that Yotimo will come running if he sees it crumble before I come back, so I’ll get right to the point,” began Akna abruptly. “We need Yotimo and his warriors to leave, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you remove those curses from his son.”
“I couldn’t care less whether the rest of your kind stay or go,” shot back Lex. “Any benefit that’s gained from their departing is negated by not having them to deter and fight this forest’s monsters for us, so what does it matter if they leave or not?”
“It matters,” insisted Akna, “because I can’t lead you to the Night Mare’s shrine if they’re here!”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. That she’d mentioned the Night Mare by name was unexpected, but not completely surprising; that the Shrine of the Starless Sky was dedicated to the Night Mare had been mentioned in front of Toklo several times, so it wasn’t impossible that she had heard about it when talking to Yotimo just now. But that she knew its location ran counter to everything Lex had expected. “You know where it is?”
A smile slid across Akna’s lips then. “I’ve been there before.”
Intrigued despite himself, Lex raised a brow. “For what purpose?”
Her answer took him completely by surprise.
“It’s where I pledged myself to the goddess, in return for which she allowed me to use Headhunter, one of her Umbral Regalia.”
Lex couldn’t keep the skepticism out of his voice. Shortly after they’d taken Toklo prisoner, the adlet had expressed marked disdain toward the concept of serving a higher power, fiercely asserting that his people were free, living in harmony with some vague consortium of spirits. For his tribe’s shaman – who was the doctrinal authority among the adlets with regard to said spirits – to be faithful to an actual deity was difficult to believe.
If Akna noticed his doubts, however, she didn’t seem phased by them. Instead, she nodded gravely. “Now do you understand why we need to have Yotimo and his warriors leave? To them, I’m an apostate; they’d kill me and devour me on the spot if they knew that I had promised my life to a god, hoping that my soul would be reborn within the tribe rather than going to the Night Mare’s realm.”
The implication that she’d be taken in by the goddess after her death made Lex’s lip curl. “And you really think she’ll accept you?”
Akna’s brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t she? My faith in her is true!”
“The Night Mare is a pony goddess,” spat Lex. “And you’re no pony.”
Tilting her head in confusion, Akna needed a moment to come up with a response. “She’s a goddess whose followers are mostly ponies,” she admitted. “But she herself accepts the pledge of any who commit themselves to her wholeheartedly.”
“Ridiculous,” spat Lex.
Scoffing, Akna gestured behind herself, at where – beyond the edge of the dome Lex had conjured – Solvei was cautiously creeping closer to the ice elemental the shaman had conjured, her nose twitching as she took in its scent. “Your slave isn’t a pony,” she noted. “And yet she serves you devoutly. Does that not mean that she also worships the goddess of your heart? And if she does, do you truly believe the Night Mare will refuse to let you keep your slave after the two of you die?”
“Solvei is not-” Lex forced himself to stop speaking, fighting down the sudden flare of indignation that came over him then. The sheer number of assumptions Akna had made just now was bad enough; notwithstanding the number of close calls he’d had recently, Lex fully intended to live forever, making any assumptions about the circumstances of his afterlife moot. Likewise, he’d never bothered to inquire as to what Solvei thought of the Night Mare; it simply hadn’t been something he’d ever considered.
But it was her assertion that Solvei was his slave – a piece of property whose life had quantifiable value – that bothered him the most. Even then, it hadn’t been Akna’s blithe assumption that he’d do something so hideously immoral that had caused his temper to flare.
It had been that she’d insulted Solvei’s dignity, implying that her service to him was borne out of coercion rather than loyalty.
The idea made Lex want to gnash his teeth in anger, and it was the very fact that he felt that way about Solvei which disturbed him so much. Particularly since it wasn’t the first time he’d felt such affection toward the winter wolf.
It made no sense. Solvei wasn’t a pony; she was a creature with which he’d found himself sharing a profound – and profoundly unwanted – bond, which was the only reason he could think of why he was so partial to her now. That explanation didn’t comfort him, however. The idea that their connection might be affecting his view of her, corrupting his thoughts and feelings in a way that his dark magic couldn’t resist, was a prospect that frightened Lex more than the grave.
And on top of all the recent negativity that he’d only just managed to push out of the forefront of his mind, it was more than he was prepared to deal with right now, leaving him looking for a different topic to focus on.
“Where?”
Again, Akna cocked her head. “Where...? You mean, where is the Shrine?”
Still trying to regain his equilibrium, Lex simply nodded, not trusting himself to speak at the moment.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” she replied. “I’ll take you there myself once we’ve sent Yotimo and-”
Her reticence had the opposite effect, serving only to frustrate Lex further. “Where,” he hissed, his eyes glowing as black crystals began to sprout from around his hooves, “is the shrine?!”
The threatening display caused Akna to back up, tensing as she moved toward the edge of the dome. A glance back showed her that her ice elemental hadn’t moved, and she licked her lips as she looked between it and Lex. But she didn’t call for it, instead gauging how much to say as she narrowed her eyes. “North of here,” she admitted grudgingly. “Near the edge of the woods. But you’ll never find it without my help.”
For a long moment, Lex didn’t reply. Then he let out a slow breath, his eyes returning to normal as the black crystals crumbled to dust. “That won’t be necessary. I’m no longer concerned with locating the place.”
He ignored Akna’s shocked look as he strode toward the edge of the dome.
It was a matter of simple geography. The entire reason he and the others had been searching for the Shrine of the Starless Sky to begin with was because they’d hypothesized that it was the staging ground from where Grisela and her coterie of monsters were launching their attacks on that village. But while Mystaria’s map had indicated that the Shrine was beyond the mountain pass and to the north, it hadn’t indicated that such a thick and deadly forest was in their way, nor that the adlets – who were hostile to the yetis that Grisela had relied upon – claimed that area as their territory.
What that meant was that the Shrine was unlikely to be where Grisela was operating from. Between the adlets and the monsters in the forest, the trek to the pony village would have been more trouble than it was worth. And Lex had no doubt that the winter witch and her so-called brothers had traveled on foot; if they could have teleported, they wouldn’t have appeared in the mountain pass where the adlets had originally spotted them, over a day’s march away from where they were trying to procure food.
That was all supposition, of course, but without hard evidence one way or another – and with the lives of those villagers, and quite possibly Woodheart as well, depending on them finding and dispatching Grisela and the rest of her ilk as quickly as possible – it was a question of where to prioritize searching. Now that the Shrine was looking less and less likely to be the place they were seeking, it was time to direct their efforts elsewhere.
“What are you doing?!” snarled Akna as Lex marched toward the edge of the dome. “Stop!”
Her last order came as she interposed herself between him and the boundary of the spell, and her voice was loud enough to make Solvei glance back at them sharply, the ice elemental belatedly doing the same. But the adlet shaman didn’t seem to care, glaring at him. “You came here looking for the Shrine, and now you’re just going to abandon it?!”
“I came here looking for the force commanding those yetis we slaughtered,” corrected Lex. “Now that you’ve given me enough information for me to determine that the Shrine isn’t likely to be their base of operations, I’ve lost interest in it.”
“Base of...?” echoed Akna, looking at him incredulously for a moment before shaking her head. “Listen to me, that Shrine is more than just a place sacred to the Night Mare! It serves as a bridge between this world and hers! That’s how I was able to acquire Headhunter! If we work together now, then we might be able to bring back even more holy relics like it!”
The prospect made Lex’s lip curl. As badly as his thaumaturgical spellcasting had been crippled when he’d discarded Severance, and as often as he’d wished he had a way to overcome the limitation on his strongest magic – particularly in light of Mystaria figuring out his secret – he’d never once regretted his decision to throw the scythe away. Not after it had murdered Silhouette, attempted to do the same to Luna, and covertly turned Fruit Crunch and his friends to the Night Mare’s service without telling him.
The prospect of something like that happening again wasn’t something he could bring himself to entertain. Not when Drafty’s soul would expire if she were to die again. Not if one of the others had their mind warped – the way Akna clearly had – because they’d held one of those weapons without realizing the consequence. Too many ponies had already paid the price for his mistakes; to have that happen again when he knew full well what the consequences would be was absolutely inexcusable.
“Those living weapons are more trouble than they’re worth,” he snarled. “You’re better off without them. Now get out of my way.”
Her hands clenching into fists, Akna stood her ground. “What is wrong with you?! You’re intent on fighting whatever brought those yetis back, aren’t you?! It was because of Headhunter that I was able to wipe them out in the first place! Think of how easy it would be for us to finish the job with two weapons like that!”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” warned Lex. “Move, or I’ll go through you.” It was no idle threat on his part, as a thought turned him back into a mass of shadows.
But Akna refused to budge, her words spilling out faster as she realized that their meeting was coming to an end. “It’s not just about ending this new threat! If we show my people that the Night Mare is their salvation, I might be able to convert them to her worship! Think of the prestige we’ll gain with her if we can bring new souls into her faith!”
Having already done exactly that, the prospect earned a derisive snort from Lex, already floating forward. “If you thought that was possible, you would have done so after you used Headhunter for the first time.”
“That was because I had to give it back, and I wasn’t sure-, no, wait!” In her desperation as Lex made good on his threat to leave, Akna attempted to grab him, but it was futile. Her fingers passed through the billowy blackness of his form without closing on anything substantial, and she could only watch helplessly as he moved to the edge of the hemisphere he’d conjured.
“You can undergo the Rite of Sublimation there!”
Her last outburst meant nothing to Lex. He’d never formally studied the Night Mare’s faith, which meant that the specifics of her religious practices were outside his realm of knowledge. Nevertheless, he came to a halt anyway. But it wasn’t because of what Akna had said that he stopped. Not directly, at least.
It was because he’d felt the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg move.
That shouldn’t have been possible. He was in shadow-form at the moment, which meant that he had no foreleg to feel anything with. And yet the sensation had been unmistakable.
Even more unexpectedly, what he’d felt hadn’t been pain. Usually, when the manifestation of the Night Mare’s power reacted to something, it was because she’d taken umbrage at something he was doing, the barbs cutting him with an intensity proportional to her displeasure. It was only rarely that they moved without cutting him, something he knew was indicative of her approval.
Which had been what he’d felt just now.
Returning to material form, he examined his foreleg with a critical eye. The barbed wire had gone still now, but even so...
“The Rite of Sublimation,” he murmured.
Sure enough, the barbed wire moved again. Only slightly, but this time he could see the motion in addition to feeling it.
Whatever that was, the Night Mare seemed to be pleased by the idea of him undergoing it.
That was enough to give Lex pause. He wanted nothing to do with any of the goddess’s so-called Umbral Regalia, but as much as he disliked the living weapons, he had no antipathy toward the Night Mare herself. For all that he found her troublesome at times, he still respected her. Likewise, he was keenly aware that she’d saved both himself and Thermal Draft when his attempt to teleport them out of the burning factory back on Equestria would have killed them both.
She had looked out for him then. Was she looking out for him now?
Behind him, Akna sighed in relief, thinking that it was her admission alone that had stopped him. “It’s true,” she added. “And I can prove it.”
That was enough to make Lex glance back at her, one brow raised in a silent query.
For a moment she didn’t move, except to purse her lips. Then she raised her hands, only to pause as if thinking better of what she was doing, lowering them a second later. Instead, she bent at the waist, only to abort that motion midway through as well, standing back up straight. Her ears flickered as she looked around, and Lex saw her glance at where the rest of her people were stationed, several of whom had their eyes on the dome they were in.
“This...whatever it is,” she muttered, waving a hand at the transparent shell around them. “It’s not going to vanish anytime soon, right?”
The question, along with her odd behavior, made Lex frown. “It will last for an entire day unless I dismiss it.”
“...alright.”
Taking a deep breath, Akna nodded, straightening up as though having resolved herself. Even so, Lex saw her swallow lightly, and she turned so that she was standing in profile to him, staring outward at the patch of the forest away from where her people were keeping watch.
Then she began to strip.
Repulsed, Lex took a step back. “What are you doing?!”
“When I went back to the Shrine, after the yetis were all slain, I prayed to the Night Mare for the power to bring my people to her,” answered Akna, refusing to meet his eyes as she untied the straps of her fur-lined halter top, pulling the garment – the only thing she was wearing above her waist – over her head a moment later and tossing it aside. “And in order to prove myself, I offered to undergo the Rite.”
She kept moving as she spoke, fiddling with the belt around her waist before pulling it off, pulling her russet leather pants down past her hips a moment later. “I managed to complete it without losing myself, and was rewarded for doing so. And that reward showed me that the Night Mare didn’t want me to simply bring the adlets into her fold, but all the creatures who dwell in the frozen reaches.”
All that she was left in now was a thong, the thin material doing almost nothing to preserve what was left of her modesty. Even then she hesitated only a moment before grasping the sides of it, tail raising just enough for it not to catch on her fur as she bent down and stepped out of her last article of clothing. “That’s why she gave me this power.”
Lex was about to ask what she meant when Akna began to change.
A wet snapping sound came from within her body, drawing a pained grunt from her lips as she sank into a crouch. It was immediately followed by another, and then another, until the soft pops and crunches flowed into a quiet cacophony. The entire time, Akna’s body continued to shift, her shoulders moving so that her arms extended in front of her rather than to the side, fingers shortening as her nail turned into claws. Her chest flattened, breasts disappearing as her ribs grew wider. Her back legs shortened as she fell onto all fours, becoming proportional to her new body shape. Even the hair on her head seemed to retract, her braid vanishing in favor of leaving her covered with fur that was uniformly white, leaving her blue eyes the only spot of color on her now four-legged body.
In the span of a few seconds, Akna had become a winter wolf.
Groaning in relief now that the transformation had finished, Akna looked back at Lex. “Long ago, my people and your Solvei’s were one and the same. And the Night Mare has bid me to bring them together again, reunited under her dominion.”
Akna’s transformation left Lex completely nonplussed, staring at her in shock as the she-wolf smirked back at him triumphantly.
“Now do you see?” she cooed as she sat down amidst her scattered clothing. “By visiting the Shrine and undergoing the Rite, I was able to transcend my limitations. Now I’ve become a living symbol of the link between my people and the winter wolves. As we were once one, we shall be again, unified under the Night Mare’s faith.”
She pointedly glanced past the edge of the dome then, looking at where Thermal Draft was talking to the members of Fail Forward before turning her eyes back to him. “Imagine if you became something like that for your ponies. You could have wings as well as a horn.”
This time, Lex managed to control his outward reaction, even as his heart began to beat faster.
An alicorn. She was suggesting that this so-called “Rite of Sublimation” would turn him into an alicorn.
It was enough to make Lex glance down at his foreleg again, eyeing the barbed wire there. Was that why the Night Mare had reacted positively to the Rite’s mere mention? Was this the opportunity to become stronger that the goddess had mentioned when she’d brought him back to this wretched world?
If so...the idea was far from unappealing. As much as Lex had grown to despise Equestria’s princesses for being derelict in their duties, the power that they commanded – as well as their limitless lifespans – had still given them strength enough to govern an entire nation for over a millennium. If he were to acquire abilities comparable to that, in addition to those he already had...
Would that allow me to replenish my thaumaturgical spellcasting? The thought was enough to send a shiver down his spine. He’d briefly glimpsed the magical channels in Celestia’s body, back when that oversized nag had visited Vanhoover, and had been shocked at how unimpressive they were. But there had been more to the story, since when they’d fought a short time later, she’d surprised him by being able to overcharge her spells beyond what her physique should have been able to generate. Not only that, she’d done so without injuring herself the way he did whenever he’d forced his body beyond its natural limits.
Which meant that the energy Celestia had been using hadn’t been from overstraining her body’s magical channels. It had come from somewhere else, and since Luna had done the same thing during their fight, the best hypothesis Lex could come up with was that being an alicorn gave them some other well of power to draw upon; a reservoir of magical energy that they could tap into as necessary, like his circlet except far greater.
And if such lazy, self-indulgent creatures as the Royal Sisters had gained that much power simply by becoming alicorns, did it not stand to reason that he – who was already strong enough to defeat them in battle – would gain that much more power if he were to ascend to that state? Perhaps enough so that he wouldn’t need an outside source in order to renew his strongest magic?
To Lex’s mind, it was a distinct possibility.
Except...
“The Night Mare’s test Lex Legis faced, seeking Her dark salvation!” sang Spinner, her eyes still closed as she nimbly worked her hoof over the strings of her lute. “But interference from outside left his body misshapen!”
Was this what the bard had been referring to? That she saw him undergoing the Rite only for something to cause him to fail? Except if that was the case, why would the Night Mare want him to attempt it? Surely, if Spinner’s goddess knew the future, his own could be no less aware of what would happen. Or would that happen at all? Mystaria had said that Spinner’s predictions could be avoided if they were compensated for; if he could become an alicorn, and something attempted to interfere, could he avoid whatever it was that left him “misshapen” now that he was cognizant of it?
But he didn’t have a chance to keep contemplating those questions as Akna spoke up again. “That reminds me, does your slave know a winter wolf named Bolverk?”
That was enough to earn Lex’s full attention, all thoughts of alicornhood and prophecies promptly replaced by suspicion. Bolverk had been Prevarius’ puppet, and while the phistophilus was dead, the chance that Akna was involved in some lingering scheme of his wasn’t something that could be ignored. “Why?”
Akna tilted her head, as though confused at his question. “I don’t have many chances to take this form, but on occasion I’ve managed to slip away from my tribe long enough to meet a few other winter wolves. They’ve all said that Bolverk was one of their mightiest hunters, and that he’s without a mate. A union between us-”
“Bolverk is dead,” snapped Lex, his concern giving way to disgust at what she was suggesting. “Solvei and I killed him a few days ago.”
If Akna was upset by the news, she didn’t show it. “That’s a shame. I was hoping to bring him to the Shrine and have him pledge his faith to the Night Mare so that he could undergo the Rite. Then, we could each have worked to bring our kindred together, each of us wielding a piece of the Umbral Regalia, uniting all of our kind under our own...” She paused for a moment, before looking at him. “I believe the word is, ‘dynasty.’ Is that right?”
“There’s nothing right about what you just said,” sneered Lex.
This time Akna didn’t ignore his disdain, frowning at him in turn. “I’m already under pressure from the rest of my tribe to hurry up and breed,” she snapped. “I need to find a winter wolf – a leader among their kind who will pledge himself to the goddess – to impregnate me so that I can give birth to a new bloodline that will rule our combined people!” Huffing, she glanced at Solvei, her expression turning sour. “If only your slave was male, she’d be perfect.”
“Stop calling her that!” hissed Lex, his eyes flaring. “Solvei follows me of her own free will, not because I force her to! For that matter, this obsession of yours with using the Night Mare’s religion to remake your culture is a product of your having used one of her living weapons! Those things alter the mentality of whoever wields them, molding their thought processes so that their beliefs and ideals match hers!”
Akna’s eyes widened at that, but she squeezed them shut an instant later, brow furrowing as she shook her head. “So what?”
“‘So what’?!” echoed Lex, aghast. The idea that someone wouldn’t care that their mind had been tampered with was beyond his comprehension. “Your thoughts and feelings, the things that make you who you are, have been twisted according to someone else’s design!”
“And I say so what?!” repeated Akna, opening her eyes to glare at Lex, her calm falling away. “How is that any different from the life I was living up until now?! Everything I believed growing up, I believed because other people convinced me!”
She rose to all fours then, her lips curling back in a snarl. “As far back as I can remember, my grandmother and the elders and everyone else in my tribe said that the best way for me to make a contribution was to speak to the spirits and make weapons for our warriors and give birth to pups, all so things could stay the same! And I believed it because I didn’t know any better! But now I do!”
She stalked forward then, until her muzzle was within a foot of Lex’s face. “Headhunter told me that I could do more, that I could help my people live better, more fulfilling lives if I dared to be more ambitious! And he was right! Who cares if I needed someone else to help me understand that; now that I know those old traditions are holding us back, I’m going to shatter them all! Once they’re gone, and everyone has accepted the Night Mare, she’ll remake our culture anew!”
“The Night Mare doesn’t build a society,” retorted Lex, his voice full of scorn. “It’s leaders do.”
On the surface, what Akna was spouting was remarkably similar to what he wanted for Equestria. But Lex had spent years coming up with a comprehensive system of ethics, one which guided everything he did in his efforts to reform his homeland. Akna, by contrast, seemed to be under the impression that once she’d assumed power, and forcibly introduced the Night Mare’s religion, everything would fall into place. “You need to evaluate what you’re doing through an axiological schema, one that properly qualifies both goals and implementation methods as imperatives-”
“What are you talking about?” huffed Akna. “I’m just going to make everyone else use Headhunter, the way I did! Then they’ll all realize that things need to change!”
Horrified, Lex needed a moment to find his voice. “...you can’t be serious.”
“It’s the perfect plan,” retorted Akna. “This way, instead of having to fight with my tribe when I introduce the Night Mare’s religion, they’ll all accept it with open arms! And the winter wolf I take as my mate will do the same for his people with whatever weapon he retrieves! We’ll both-”
“What you’re proposing is an absolute betrayal of your people’s trust in you,” rumbled Lex, a dangerous tone in his voice. “They have the right – everyone, pony or adlet or winter wolf or any other sapient creature has the right – to personal autonomy with regard to their thoughts! Any attempt to abrogate that, outside of extremely limited and highly specific circumstances, is monstrous!”
“If it’s so monstrous,” taunted Akna, “then how come the Night Mare made it so that her greatest weapons all have that power?”
Lex didn’t have an answer for that, nor was he interested in trying to find one. Instead, he held out his left foreleg, putting his hoof right in Akna’s face. “Prostrate yourself before me.”
Akna had no chance to respond before the Night Mare’s divine authority seized her, forcing her to obey his command as she immediately dropped down, pressing her belly and chin to the ground.
Her eyes widening in alarm, she tried to struggle, but couldn’t manage to do anything more than wriggle slightly as she maintained her subservient posture . “Wha-”
“Remain silent. Do not use any magic you possess.”
Lex stared down at the prone adlet-turned-wolf then, his glowing eyes staring into her terrified ones. He hadn’t known for sure that divine authority would work on her – it hadn’t on the other adlets when he’d attempted to use it on Toklo’s companions a few days earlier – but he’d suspected that it would. After all, not only were winter wolves subject to it, but according to Akna she’d gained that ability via a religious ceremony performed under the Night Mare’s auspices, which made it all the more likely that it would leave her vulnerable to the power that same goddess had given him. But there was still one other hypothesis that needed testing.
“Return to your humanoid form.”
Shuddering in pain as she involuntarily complied, the quiet chorus of wrenching ligaments and shifting bones filled the hemisphere, leaving Akna gasping for air as she changed back into an adlet. A moment later she’d completed the transformation, now folding herself compactly with her shins lying flat, hunched down and bending at the waist with her jaw on the ground, arms forward and palms down in forced supplication.
A thin smile crossed Lex’s face then. As he’d expected, divine authority still worked on her even like this. He could still feel her trying to squirm as the Night Mare’s power kept her still, with no more success than she’d had a moment ago. Which meant that he no longer needed to listen to her half-baked plans and petulant arguments. Instead, he could simply force her to obey him.
“Now, you’re going to answer my questions, simply and directly. You will not scream or call for help, or otherwise do anything except tell me what I want to know.” He didn’t bother asking if she understood, nor warning her what would happen if she disobeyed, since it was literally beyond her ability to do so right now. “First, tell me where the Shrine of the Starless Sky is located.”
“A half-day’s travel from here,” whimpered Akna quietly, “north by northeast, beneath the river.”
That last part made Lex frown. “What do you mean ‘beneath the river’?”
“The Shrine is underground, in a cave system” answered the compelled adlet. “The only way to reach it from the surface is through a nearby river. It flows underground, and if you dive in and follow the current, it will take you there.”
Lex digested that for a moment. That certainly explained the “starless sky” part of the Shrine’s name. Likewise, he hadn’t considered the possibility that it was a subterranean in nature; if not for what Akna had just told him, they likely never would have found the place, despite how closely they’d followed Mystaria’s map.
But Lex dwelled on that for only a moment before thinking back to the possibility that Akna had raised regarding the Rite of Sublimation.
The Shrine was almost certainly not where Grisela and her twisted family were operating from. Whatever promise of power it held, his immediate priorities were to recover Woodheart and slay the monsters that were terrorizing the nearby village. But with no further leads as to where they were, and with wandering in the wilderness in hopes of stumbling onto them not being a viable option – doing that would, at best, accomplish nothing; at worst it would leave them vulnerable to another ambush – there was no compelling reason not to go to the Shrine.
In fact, if he successfully completed the Rite and gained sufficient power, that might enable him to achieve the goals that were, as of now, proving elusive. Not just rescuing Woodheart and slaying the monsters, but maybe even separating himself from Solvei and returning to Equestria with Thermal Draft. All of it, potentially solved with a detour of less than a day.
His mind made up, Lex leaned closer to where Akna was trembling on the ground.
“Tell me everything you know about the Rite of Sublimation.”
Solvei kept her eyes on Toklo’s father as her master removed the curses that he’d placed on the aged adlet’s son, ready to leap into action if the grey-furred warrior made any attempt at treachery. Although his hands remained at his sides, his spear stowed safely across his back, Solvei didn’t relax. If anything, she found herself almost hoping that he’d try something, giving her an excuse to tear into his wizened old flesh.
Instead, the old wolf took a step closer to Toklo once her master had lowered his hoof, reaching out to take hold of one of his son’s arms and lifting it up. He hesitated for a moment, nose twitching, before opening his jaw and nipping at Toklo’s wrist. A shudder ran through him a moment later, and Solvei saw his shoulders slump as he let out a sigh, lowering Toklo’s arm. “It’s edible,” he pronounced, a smile gracing his lips for the first time since he’d emerged from the forest earlier that evening. “Your flesh can be eaten now, son.”
The younger adlet’s reaction at the news was nowhere near as reserved as his father’s had been, as Toklo fell to his knees with a moan of relief, cradling his arm to his chest for a moment before sinking his teeth into it. Confirming what he’d been told, a whimper rose in Toklo’s throat, squeezing his now-watery eyes shut as his ears folded back to press against his head. “I thought...I thought I was going to die like that,” he hiccupped. “That my spirit would be trapped in a body that would never be consumed, decaying into nothing and I’d never be reborn-”
“That’s not something I’d ever let happen,” murmured Akna, crouching down next to Toklo and putting a hand on his shoulder. “Your afterlife, and the afterlife of all my people, is my highest concern. That’s why I came as soon as I was told you’d been found.”
Solvei couldn’t hold back a snort at that. Her master had told her, through the link that they shared, exactly what had happened with the so-called shaman once they’d entered the silvery hemisphere that he’d made with his magic. That this “Akna” was lying to her own tribe wasn’t surprising; adlets were deceitful and untrustworthy by nature. But the idea that she worshiped the same goddess as her strong and proud master was almost insulting. What did her kind know about having faith in someone else?
But that didn’t unsettle Solvei nearly as much as the idea that Akna could also become one of the utvalgte.
In front of her, Toklo’s father dropped to one knee, putting his eyes level with his son. “It isn’t just your flesh that has been restored. You should now be able to take to the air without issue.” He raised his gaze to Lex then, Toklo also looking at the red-horned unicorn. “Isn’t that right?”
Lex’s answer came in the form of a single nod, but it was enough to earn a renewed shudder from Toklo. But his father wasn’t done, grasping his son’s arm as he stood back up, making Toklo clamor to his feet also, Akna taking a step back to give the two some space. “Now that you’re free, I want you to go back ahead of us. Tell the elders that we’re fine, and that we’ll return in a few days.”
Akna frowned slightly at that, but Toklo’s gaze was one of confusion as he glanced between her and his father. “But Panuk’s body...?”
“I’ll bring it back,” answered his father. “You’ve done well to get it this far. Let me take care of the rest.”
His face flushing and his tail wagging at the compliment, Toklo glanced back at Akna. “What about you?”
But his father jumped in before the shaman could answer. “She’s going to make the trip back with us.”
Toklo’s smile faded then. “With you? But wouldn’t it be safer if she went back with me now? These woods are dangerous, and she’s not a warrior-”
“Not a warrior?” snapped Akna, huffing as she put her hands on her hips. “Do I need to remind you exactly who it was that fought back the yetis?”
Flushing for a different reason now, Toklo shook his head. “No, but that was-”
“If you say that was only because of the weapon I found, then I promise you, everyone here will make good on your flesh being edible,” she growled, fixing him with a flat look. “I just got finished telling you that what happens to my tribe after they die is my responsibility, which means that until Panuk’s body can be brought back and ritually devoured by his remaining kin, I’m staying with it.”
“I...o-of course,” fumbled Toklo, giving her an apologetic grin. But when no one said anything else, he fidgeted in place for a moment, glancing back at his father – who was looking at him expectantly, clearly waiting for him to turn into mist and fly away – and Lex, who was watching the adlets impassively. “Um, is it alright if I say goodbye to the other ponies before I leave?” murmured Toklo, directing the question to both of them. “They weren’t unkind, and I-”
“They’re not your friends,” interrupted his father sternly. “You don’t need to bid them farewell.”
“But we fought alongside each other,” protested Toklo. “And they had one of their number stolen from them!”
The grey-furred adlet’s eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t concern you.”
“She saved my life!” snapped Toklo. “She-, uh...” His momentary burst of anger fading as he glanced back at Lex, suddenly cognizant of who exactly it was that Woodheart had saved his life from.
Solvei felt a sudden rush of shame from Lex then, and it made her want to scream. How dare that little ingrate rub what had happened in her master’s face now, when he’d generously allowed him to go free?! It was so hideously galling that she found herself taking a step forward, intent on taking the insult out of his hide. But before she could make good on her intentions, Lex held a hoof out in front of her, a telepathic command stopping her advance. “Make your goodbyes and then leave,” hissed Lex, giving Toklo a venomous look, “before you try my patience any further!”
Swallowing nervously, Toklo glanced at his father once, then at Akna – who simply shrugged at him before canting her head toward the other ponies – before breaking into a jog toward where they were huddled.
Everyone waited until he was out of earshot, and then turned back to regard each other warily. For a long moment Lex and Toklo’s father eyed each other coolly, and Solvei wondered if the adlet was going to make a move. I hope he does, she growled inwardly. I’ll tear him to pieces before he can come close to Master!
It was a thought that she’d had quite often over the last few days, going out of her way to viciously slaughter everything that had challenged them since they’d entered the forest. But it still didn’t make up for the gnawing guilt she felt over not having been there several days before, when a combination of those other ponies’ prying into her master’s secrets and a sudden ambush by monsters had left him badly hurt. But while he’d given her the power to heal his body, the pain in his heart wasn’t so easily repaired.
That much had become obvious over the last few days. Watching him withdraw from everyone and everything around him – including her – had been more than once left Solvei on the verge of tears. The entire reason she’d become his was because she wanted to ease his pain, to soothe the incredible loneliness that was making him suffer so much, but when he’d needed her most she hadn’t been there for him!
Since then, she’d cursed her own stupidity many times. She’d simply assumed that, with her master’s ability to summon her from any distance, she’d always be at his side when he needed her. That magic might be used to prevent him from doing so – or that he’d be so distraught as to shut her out completely – had never occurred to her.
The result of which was that the pony whose pain she wanted to soothe was now hurting worse than ever before.
Solvei had tried everything she could think of to make up for her failure since then. Each day, she’d stuck close to him, allowing nothing to come near his umbral form unless he explicitly told her otherwise. Each evening, when her master had finally changed back to his pony form and settled down for the night, she’d waited until he’d fallen asleep to curl herself around him protectively – able to press her frigid body against his warm one without causing him any discomfort thanks to the cold-resistance spells she’d placed on all of the ponies to protect them from the constant chill – gently nuzzling him whenever he’d shuddered or cried out in his sleep. Each morning she’d parted from him shortly before he woke, warning the others not to embarrass him by mentioning the sounds he’d made during the night.
And all of it had been for nothing.
In the end, it had been Drafty who had gotten him to start opening up again, her angry outburst toward the other ponies prompting him to come to her defense when that mare in the mask had struck back. And while it was only right that his mate would be the one to soothe him most, Solvei couldn’t help but feel frustrated at how inadequate her own efforts had been.
But in the last few minutes, frustration had turned to fear...
“So you’re going to stay with us while we bring Panuk’s body back?” Toklo’s father’s voice brought Solvei out of her ruminating, the old adlet giving Akna a disapproving look.
The question made Akna sigh. “You know full well I told him that in order to prevent a panic, Yotimo. If he went back home and told everyone I was going into the forest with a group of ponies-”
“They’d think it was a terrible idea,” he finished. “Because it is.”
“It was also the only way to free your son,” she countered, “which is what you wanted most.”
“And the only way to find the Shrine of the Starless Sky,” interjected Solvei, “which is what my master wants most. And his wishes are more important than yours.”
The old adlet – Yotimo – frowned at her. “If we return without our tribe’s only shaman-”
“I won’t be in any danger,” huffed Akna, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “You were just saying how these ponies must be powerful if they’re able to survive in these woods, right?”
“Something which will become less true if their leader isn’t able to restore his magic,” countered Yotimo, giving Lex a suspicious look.
Again, Solvei felt a flare of emotion from her master, this time of frustration, causing her to bare her teeth at the wretched old fool. “It doesn’t matter if my master runs out of magic! He has ME!”
She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. It was that kind of thoughtless announcement about his weakness that had driven him into a panic only a few days before! But before she could telepathically convey her remorse, her master’s voice resounded in her head. I’m the one who determines what matters, Solvei. Not you.
Forgive me, Master, she whimpered, cringing as she shot him an apologetic glance. I didn’t mean to-
Be silent, he snapped, his mental voice thick with displeasure as he gave her a cold look in response. In fact, go and make sure that Toklo’s departure is prompt. I’ll deal with these two on my own.
Another rush of anxiety ran through her then. But-
Go!
...yes, Master.
Her ears folding back, Solvei turned and padded toward the others, but she couldn’t help but glance back as she left, her nervous tension continuing to rise. But it wasn’t Yotimo that she looked at, her eyes instead coming to rest on Akna. Nor was it fear for her master’s safety that ran through Solvei’s mind then, but rather fear for her own place at his side.
After all, Akna had far more to offer him than she did.
Before she’d met Lex, Solvei had been an ordinary winter wolf, her only notable features being her unusual golden eyes and how she’d been the runt of her litter. Everything that she could do now, she could do because of the power her master had given her as a result of their connection. All of her strength now – her heightened speed and physical prowess, her command of ice magic, changing her size and wrapping herself in black crystals – all of it came from him.
But Akna was different. She was already a shaman among her own people, one who could speak to the spirits – just like her father had done – all on her own. She’d demonstrated that much when she’d casually brought a huge pile of snow and ice to life, something that Solvei, for all of the magic that her master had given her, hadn’t known was possible. She’d even tried to quietly copy what the adlet had done while her master had conversed with the humanoid, conjuring up a tiny wolf out of ice and trying to make it move, only for it to break into pieces after each attempt.
By itself, that wasn’t a big deal; at most, it was something she could ask Master or Drafty about later on. But then she’d found out that Akna could transform into an utvalgte, and that she could be brought under Master’s power...
Solvei knew she wasn’t a genius like her master was, but even she could see the obvious point of comparison.
If her master could turn an ordinary winter wolf into a powerhouse, what could he do to an adlet who was already exceptionally gifted? An adlet who, by her own admission, worshiped the same goddess as him, and who could lead him to the shrine he’d been seeking?
Intellectually, Solvei knew that she was being foolish. Her master had made it clear that dissolving the bond between them was – at least for now – beyond his power. Moreover, he didn’t seem particularly eager to tie his soul to anyone else, as he was still being very cautious in exploring the full nature of the bond the two of them now shared. So there was, when looked at dispassionately, nothing for her to worry about.
And yet, that did nothing to quell the apprehension she felt.
It had been an act of desperation – a battlefield necessity, performed to save their lives – that had prompted her master to bind the two of them together. What if, in one of the battles to come, he found himself needing to do the same thing with Akna? He’d surely recognized the possibility that something like that might happen, and how strong the adlet shaman would become as a result. How long would it be, after that, before she became the one he relied on? What if, when he found out how to break these bonds, he decided that he didn’t need a winter wolf who was clearly inferior to his newer minion?
The thought shouldn’t have terrified her as much as it did – if that happened, then at worst she’d simply go home to her family – and yet Solvei found herself dreading such a scenario coming to pass. What she felt for her master...for Lex...it wasn’t just that she wanted to ease the loneliness that hurt him so much, nor was it simply gratitude for him saving her family. It wasn’t camaraderie from the battles that they’d been through together. It wasn’t even the connection that they had, as profound as it was. Rather, it was something far simpler.
Lex watched silently, Akna at his side, as Yotimo strode back toward where his troops were camped.
It was only when he was sure that the old adlet had strode out of earshot that he glanced at the shaman beside him. “Will he keep his word?”
He didn’t bother forcing her to answer honestly via an application of divine authority, since Akna knew full well that her life was in his hooves now. With her having told him everything she knew about the Shrine of the Starless Sky and the Rite of Sublimation, her usefulness to him was limited. All he had to do was make her change into her winter wolf form in front of her people, and the assembled adlets would see her for what she was, at which point her life would be forfeit.
As if to telegraph that she was acutely aware of that fact, Akna’s eyes slid over to his left foreleg before answering. “He will. Yotimo knows that if anything happens to me, he’ll be blamed. Even though it was my decision to come out here, he was still the one who made a deal with you to save his son, which I then took on myself.” She shook her head as she glanced back at where the grey-furred warrior was waking the adlets that had gone to sleep. “He won’t want to make an orphan out of Toklo.”
“And no one else from your tribe will come looking, for you or him or anyone else, in the meantime?” pressed Lex, wanting to make sure there wouldn’t be any unexpected interferences. If he was going to avoid the fate Spinner had prophesied, he had to eliminate or control as many variables as he could think of.
Again, Akna shook her head. “They won’t. With Silla having already gone back to confirm that Toklo and Panuk’s body were found, and Toklo himself having reappeared to tell everyone that the situation is resolved and that his father and I will return in a few days, no one will suspect anything. Besides, most of the tribe’s warriors are here now, and there’s no one among our people who doesn’t know how dangerous this forest is. No one will be searching for us.”
She paused then, licking her lips before glancing at Lex. “Unless we’re gone too long,” she added hesitantly. “It will take Yotimo and his warriors a few days to return, and if they aren’t back by then – or they are and I’m not with them – my people won’t simply do nothing. Not when there’s a report of the yetis having returned.”
“A few days is more than enough time for me to complete the Rite,” answered Lex easily. “After that, you’ll be escorted to the rendezvous point, and can return home with Yotimo and the others.”
She fell silent at that, but only stayed quiet for a moment before giving a quiet huff. “If we could just retrieve even one of the Umbral Regalia-”
Lex silenced her with a look. “I told you not to mention that to me again,” he warned her, a dire tone entering his voice. “Whether or not the Night Mare lends you one of her weapons is up to her, but I have no interest in them. As it is, you should be thankful that I haven’t cursed you for planning to violate the sanctity of your own people’s minds.”
Akna shuddered then, but didn’t say anything else, knowing his threat wasn’t an idle one. In order to lend legitimacy to the story she’d fed Yotimo about taking Toklo’s place, Lex had put the same curses on Akna that he had on the younger adlet. Like with him, her flesh was now inedible, and her ability to fly in mist-form was severely impaired. For Akna, the latter curse was far worse than the former; she was convinced that she’d enter the Night Mare’s realm after her death, but her inability to navigate while in her gaseous state meant that she had no real ability to flee if she decided to abandon him before they reached the Shrine, since Solvei would be able to track her down easily if the Akna fled on foot.
And, as Lex had made clear to her before they’d ended their private conference, he had many other curses that he could place on her if she gave him reason to do so.
A short distance away, Yotimo had finished waking those among his warriors who had been dozing. The ones on guard stayed at their posts, only glancing back occasionally as their leader issued instructions, and a few minutes later they’d brought Panuk’s body forward, with Yotimo kneeling down to unwrap it reverently.
“Panuk...” murmured Akna, her ears folding back at the sight. Squeezing her eyes shut, she swallowed once before taking a deep breath, steadying herself as she looked back at Lex. “I need to go. There are ceremonies that need to be completed before we can partake of Panuk’s flesh, and it’s my job to make sure that they’re performed correctly.”
Lex’s lip curled in disgust as the adlet warriors gathered in a semicircle around the corpse of their fallen comrade, listening to whatever eulogy Yotimo was giving as he looked down at Panuk’s still form. “How long will this savagery take?”
The comment earned him an angry glare from the shaman. “Reciting the deeds he accomplished in this life will be quick, since he was too young to have many,” she snapped. But her indignation had no force behind it, knowing how much power the red-horned unicorn had over her, and resignation softened her voice as she continued. “After that, we’ll need to clean his body, then remove his fur, and then determine who here will eat which parts of him. Only then can we begin consuming his body, and by the time we’re done...” She glanced upward, only to frown at the lack of stars or a moon to help her judge the time. “It will probably be morning, perhaps a little later.”
Lex grunted at that, continuing to watch one of Yotimo’s warriors brought forward a spear – one of the ones that Toklo had been using during their trip through the forest, the young adlet having returned them to his people after his father had struck a deal with Lex – and laid it in Panuk’s arms. The sight made Akna wince slightly. “His parents and sisters will be heartbroken that they weren’t here for this.”
“It was your idea to undertake this....custom, now, rather than bringing his body back to your village,” pointed out Lex.
“I told Toklo that I wouldn’t leave Panuk’s body until it was eaten, and I meant it,” replied Akna. “I’ve known Panuk my entire life, and I wanted him – wanted everyone – to embrace the Night Mare so that we could all be together in her realm after we died. But if that can’t happen, I can at least make sure he’s reborn among us so he can take up the Night Mare’s worship in his next life. Besides, even if this isn’t ideal, it’s still for the best; while I doubt this forest has much that could seriously threaten a war party, if something truly dangerous does accost them between now and when I meet up with them again, they won’t run the risk of being forced to abandon Panuk’s body.”
“Just be ready to leave after you’ve finished your meal,” sneered Lex. “I want to arrive at the Shrine as quickly as possible.”
Akna was going to reply to that, but didn’t have a chance as a new voice interrupted their conversation. “Lex?”
Turning, she saw that the rest of the pony’s party had come to join them. Solvei was already moving to stand alongside him, shooting her an angry glare as she did so, no doubt due to the ancestral hostility between their people. Aside from her, the others were clustered behind the winged pony, each of them looking tense save only for the rabbit with a pearlescent horn, which yawned as the muscled pony carrying it stroked its fur soothingly.
“Solvei says you know where the Shrine is?” asked the winged mare, glancing at Akna for a moment before turning her eyes back toward him. “And it’s really close?”
Lex gave a single nod. “A half-day’s journey north-northeast of here. The Shrine itself is hidden underground; in order to access it, we’ll need to enter a river which flows beneath the surface...”
“...and let the current carry us to our destination.”
Woodheart paused for a long moment, then shook her head. “The spell’s ended. I can’t hear anything else.”
“Cast it again!” shrieked Grisela. “Finally getting decent information! Need to know more!”
“That was the last instance of it I’d prepared,” explained the earth mare flatly, before her lips curled up as she gave the winter hag a mocking smile. “But if you’d like to go ahead and cast it, be my guest.”
Watching as Grisela, whose magical abilities weren’t developed enough to pull off such complicated spellwork, gnashed her teeth in anger, Woodheart smirked for a moment before glancing over her shoulder. “Can you find their exact position?”
“Give me a moment,” replied Paska, before casting the same spell he’d used to track the ponies previously. A moment later he nodded. “I’ve got them.”
“How far?”
“Just short of fifteen miles away, further if we want to reach their destination before they do.”
“Too far,” huffed Grisela, crossing her arms over her chest in anger of the rebuke she’d just received. She found an outlet for it a moment later as she turned and, with one long stride, snatched up the cowering form hunched across from her. “Nenet! Get us there faster!”
Breathing rapidly, her eyes wide with terror, the tiny sphinx trembled as she shook her head. “G-Grisela, I can’t! I don’t know any speed spells that last more than a few seconds! If I did, I’d-, NO! PLEASE NO!” Her shrieking rose in pitch as Grisela’s free hand came up to grip Nenet’s wings, the feathered appendages having had no chance to heal since her sister had broken them in an earlier fit of rage. “Please, Grisela, don’t! Not my wings again! I swear, I don’t know any spells that can help!”
“You’re Mother’s backup spellbook,” cooed the winter hag, clenching her grip around Nenet’s wings just hard enough to make the sphinx writhe, choking down a scream that was as much terror as it was pain. “Got all sorts of spell stored in that tiny brain. Holding out on us, maybe? Wanting us to fail so Mother gets rid of us?”
“I’m not!” sobbed Nenet, going limp as tears rolled down her cheeks. “I’m trying to help, I swear! That’s why we know where the ponies are going now!”
The mention of their prey drove the largest member of their group to make their opinion known then, as Blat let out a roar. “WANT KILL! KILL AND EAT!”
“Soon Blat,” soothed Woodheart. “Soon you’ll be able to sink your teeth into several ponies.”
“Is that really something you should say while wearing that one’s skin?” noted Paska dryly.
Woodheart’s response was to roll her eyes, before pronouncing a single word to end the spell she was using. Immediately, her eyes fluttered closed, her muscles going limp as she fell to the ground, insensate. At the same time, Sissel – the snow giant lying a short distance away – groaned as her eyes opened, working a crick out of her neck as she stood up. “That’s better,” she sighed, before looking at where Grisela was squeezing Nenet’s wings tighter, making the tiny sphinx wail in pain. “Stop that. I’ll need to renew my spells soon, and Nenet can’t recite what she knows if she’s passed out. We’ll need to prepare carefully in case the ponies decide to fight instead of bargaining for their friend’s life.”
She casually kicked Woodheart’s unmoving body then, and while the blow wasn’t heavy, it was enough to send the earth mare rolling, coming to a stop near where Vidrig was sulking. “I still don’t get why we’re doing this. That unicorn didn’t look so tough to me.”
“He outfought Grisela on his own, and managed to repel our ambush despite being mad at the time,” replied Paska. “Do you want to take on Hvitdod by yourself, or do you want someone like that to soften him up first?”
“Him and that wolf of his,” corrected Sissel. “The others don’t count for much, but those two should have enough power to threaten even a dragon. More so than the yetis, even. Maybe we’ll even get lucky and they’ll kill each other.”
“Waste if they did,” leered Grisela, flinging Nenet to the ground with enough force to make the sphinx scream as she landed on her damaged wings. “Still want to ride him. Tired of Mother hogging all the stallions we took.”
“But didn’t the other ponies say something was wrong with his magic?” groused Vidrig, frowning enough that her hideous face was even more repulsive to look upon. “He can’t fight for us if he’s turned into a weakling.”
“WEAK GET EAT!” guffawed Blat, the simplistic rhyme striking him as a clever play on words.
Sissel, by contrast, simply rolled her eyes. “If we can arrive with enough time to spare, I’ll use my possession spell on that one again,” she stated, nodding at Woodheart. “Since she’s still connected to her familiar, and they’re carrying that creature with them, maybe we’ll get lucky and the next time I use Nenet’s sense-link spell to eavesdrop on them, that stallion will talk more about what’s going on with his spellcasting.”
The plan earned a nod from Paska. “For being in a coma, she’s turning out to be quite useful, isn’t she?”
“More like boring,” sneered Vidrig. “You don’t need me to be here if you’re just gonna make that stallion do what we say.”
“You?” sneered Grisela. “Ha! Should have had me stay behind. Could have sent my puppets along instead of being here myself.”
“So you could have them turn on us if things went sideways?” snorted Sissel. “No, this is a risk we’re all taking together. Like it or not, that pony is our best chance to accomplish the task Mother gave us before she gets back.”
Everyone quieted down at that, with the only sound being Nenet’s quiet sobbing as she crawled into a corner and curled up.
“All of you get some rest,” ordered Sissel at last. “We’ll leave in a few hours. After that...”
Her features hardened, knowing that they were committed now.
“I’m sorry, you guys? Would you mind giving me and Lex a few minutes alone?”
Drafty gave an apologetic smile to the other mares as they shot her looks ranging from surprised to exasperated, clearly not having anticipated being asked to leave the dome Lex had conjured right before finally going to sleep. But as bad as she felt at asking them to exit the warmth and comfort of the shelter, she didn’t withdraw her request.
It had been barely an hour ago that Lex had finally, after coming out of his days-long refusal to engage with anyone, indicated that he wanted to talk about what their having slept together meant. At the time Drafty had panicked, not having been prepared for him to suddenly bring that up, and it had only been Kara’s timely intervention – the goddess feeding her an excuse to postpone the discussion – that had allowed her to change topics. But while she’d been relieved then, it hadn’t taken long for her to start wondering if she’d missed an opportunity.
Their current circumstances couldn’t have been less conducive to the kind of heart-to-heart Drafty wanted to have with Lex. They were currently camped out in the middle of a forest that made the Everfree look like a picnic ground, with their shelter set up a stone’s throw away from the corpse of a giant bug that they’d killed earlier in the evening, and the nearby adlets were currently in the process of quite literally cannibalizing one of their dead. There was nothing remotely peaceful – let alone romantic – about their situation.
But that was unlikely to change in the near future. If anything, it was the current moment of relative calm that would be coming to an end soon. Which meant that if Lex was interested in clarifying what sort of relationship they had, she couldn’t afford to brush him off; there was no telling when, or if, he’d show this much interest in her again.
Of course, that presumed that he wasn’t just going to tell her that the night they’d spent together had been a mistake, or that he’d lost respect for her for throwing herself at him the way she had, or that he never wanted to see her again after they got back to Equestria. She knew that last one wasn’t likely, of course; Lex had made it very clear that he felt responsible for what had happened to her soul, and that he’d find a way to fix it no matter what, but it was amazing how nervous she felt all of a sudden!
Don’t worry, Sweetheart, cooed Kara in her mind. Just follow my instructions, and I promise that when you and Lex are done talking, you’ll be a very happy mare.
The goddess’ guarantee was enough to make Drafty shiver – this time as much in anticipation as nervousness – but she didn’t have a chance to dwell on that as the others, realizing that she was serious, voiced their complaints.
“Seriously?” groaned Spinner, looking up from where she’d just unfurled her bedroll. “It’s got to be after midnight!”
Shadow didn’t even bother to raise her gaze, fiddling with her saddlebags. “If you two want privacy, you can leave,” she snorted, retying a drawstring knot. “I’m not standing around in the cold and the dark while you have a quickie.”
Lex, who had been laying out a few gemstones before Drafty had made her request, glared at the masked mare then. He didn’t say anything, but a moment later Solvei – who had laid down across from him – stood up. “You can wait outside,” she growled, “or I can throw you out. Your choice.”
This time Shadow did look up, ignoring Solvei in favor of sending a hateful glare at Lex. “You know, at least Toklo’s father had the guts to make his threats himself, instead of having one of his subordinates do it.”
Growling, Solvei took a step forward, but Valor reached the earth pony before the winter wolf could. “C’mon, Shadow,” she sighed, taking the masked mare’s tail in her teeth and pulling her toward the edge of the dome. “Let’s go.”
“Ow! Valor!” yelped Shadow, struggling to keep to her hooves as her friend dragged her outside. “You’re really going to let him order us around like this?!”
“It was a request, not an order,” yawned Mystaria, scooping up Littleknight – the almiraj not even waking up as she deposited it on her back – as she moved to follow the pair. “And it was Drafty’s request, not Lex’s.”
As the trio left, Spinner heaved a sigh that seemed to come from her hooves, eyeing her bedroll wistfully before standing up and trudging after her friends. “Try and make it quick, will you? We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
“Y-yeah...” called Drafty, trying not to feel too self-conscious, but the filidh was already outside of the dome and walking away.
Solvei glanced at Lex once before nodding in response to some telepathic command, and then went after then, having just enough time to shoot Drafty a wan smile before following the other mares, leaving the pegasus alone with Lex, who was now regarding her with a neutral expression. “If you want more spell-embedded gemstones-”
“I don’t,” blurted Drafty, the words coming out in a nervous rush, and she winced a little as she saw him frown at her. “I’m sorry, I just...”
Deep breaths, murmured Kara, her voice steady and soothing. Nice and easy. Just like I told you before, okay? Now, ask him directly.
Knowing that she’d lose her nerve if she hesitated, Drafty plunged ahead. “Lex...is what Mystaria said about you not being able to replenish your magic true?”
He went rigid with tension then, and Drafty had to resist the urge to shield her face with her wings, hoping that she hadn’t just sent him into another breakdown. Why Kara had insisted that Drafty begin their talk by bringing that up was beyond the pegasus, but the love goddess had been adamant that this was the way to start things off. And while Drafty had been dubious – her transformation into a doppelganger was still something she was coming to terms with – the fact remained that Kara had gotten her closer to Lex more than once up until now. If she could do it again...
After a pregnant pause, Lex let out a slow breath. “That,” he growled from between clenched teeth, “is none of your concern.”
Relief that he hadn’t gone into a rampage flooded through Drafty then, and she found herself following Kara’s further instructions without hesitation. “Lex, it is my concern. You’re the only one who can undo what Prevarius’ contract has done to my soul. If something’s keeping you from fighting at full power, that puts more than just yourself at risk.”
He flinched at that, and Drafty felt a sudden rush of guilt. Trusting Prevarius had been her own foolish decision, as had been destroying her contract, triggering the clause that her soul would be consigned to oblivion after she died rather than going to Hell. Lex didn’t deserve to have that put on him.
Patience, sweetheart, urged Kara. This is all building toward a purpose.
For his part, Lex had recovered from his brief display of mortification, his expression turning bitter. “I don’t need to be reminded of what’s at stake if I can’t protect you,” he spat. “What you need to be reminded of is that this conversation makes it harder for me to do that!”
This time Drafty didn’t need Kara to tell her what to say. “How?!”
“Because any discussion of the limitations of my capabilities runs the risk of being found out by hostile parties!” he snapped, his eyes flaring into luminescence. “Regardless of your intent, there are any number of ways that information could be leaked! Mind-reading spells, somniloquy, mistaken identity-”
“What are you talking about?!” Flaring her wings in agitation, Drafty tried to make sense of what he was telling her, even as she kept parroting the lines Kara was feeding her. “Lex, everyone already heard Mystaria say that something was wrong with your magic, remember?! You made her say it out loud! We all heard it, so did Toklo, who I’m sure told his dad and all the other adlets here, and I’m betting those monsters who attacked us right afterward heard it too! You’re protecting a secret that’s already out in the open!”
Black crystals were starting to form around him now; not the massive spikes that had marked his complete loss of control a few days ago, but the smaller ones that she knew were indicative of his emotions flaring up. Even so, she followed Kara’s instructions and stepped closer to him.
His face was twisted in a snarl of rage and frustration, but although his eyes were glowing bright green – the purple flames from their outer corners flickering of their own accord – what she saw when she gazed into them wasn’t hate or anger or resentment.
It was fear.
Suddenly Drafty knew exactly what Kara was doing.
“I’m not bringing this up because I don’t trust you,” she murmured, closing the distance between them even more. “I’m doing it because I want to help. I want to be more than some burden you have to protect; I want to be someone you can rely on, the way you do with Solvei.”
Lex was the one who looked away from her then, his eyes suddenly turning back to normal as the black crystals around him abruptly crumbled to dust. “What happened with Solvei wasn’t by design,” he muttered, sound almost petulant.
“But you still make use of her now,” pointed out Thermal Draft. “That’s something the Night Mare is big on, right? Using the resources you have available? Well, my ability to use micro-rituals is a resource. I want to put it at your disposal, but since I don’t have a psychic connection to you the way Solvei does, I need to understand what you’re capable of so that I can make snap decisions in a fight.”
Lex’s ears folded back then, his face scrunching up as though he’d bitten into a lemon, and for some reason Drafty found it so adorable that she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Instead, she gave him a gentle smile. “Lex, there’s no downside to this. I know you wanted to keep what’s wrong with your magic a secret, but now that it’s out there, shouldn’t we make the best of it?”
For a moment he didn’t answer, scowling as he stared at the ground next to her, before he suddenly raised his eyes back to hers. “Back in the village, why did you proposition me?”
And there it was.
Just like Kara had predicted, Lex had sought to change the subject to something else when he couldn’t argue the point any further, bringing up the topic that she’d dodged earlier that night.
But this wasn’t like when he’d asked her that before. Last time, there’d been a sense of detachment when he’d asked her about what they’d done, as though he wasn’t particularly interested in her answer but was simply looking for something to talk about and hadn’t been able to think of anything else.
Now, however, that aura of indifference that he’d had was completely gone. Talking about whatever was wrong with his magic had touched a nerve with him, but unlike a few days ago – when raising the issue had driven him completely over the edge – it wasn’t so bad that he lost all control over himself. Instead, whatever fears he was dealing with were eroding the emotional walls he normally kept up, causing him to inadvertently showcase the vulnerability – and the intimacy – she knew that he was capable of, having shown it to her before, when she’d disguised herself as Sonata in order to steal an intimate encounter with him.
And now he was showing it to her again, without thinking that she was someone else.
In her mind, Kara laughed in delight, and Drafty could feel her heart beating faster even as she gave Lex a coy look. “For the same reason that you accepted me when I did,” she murmured, moving closer to him. “Because I knew.”
Lex’s brow furrowed, but only a little, and he didn’t back away as she moved closer than was polite. “Knew what?”
“That you’d made a vow to the Night Mare,” she responded softly, leaning in to nuzzle him. “To take no wife” – she planted her lips on the side of his neck then – “to keep no mistress” – her next kiss pressed against his jawline – “to have no girlfriend” – and then she brushed her lips softly against his own.
“Because I knew,” she whispered, wrapping her wings around him then, “that the only way you’d accept me was if we didn’t talk about it, didn’t put a label on it, didn’t try to formalize it. And we shouldn’t. We shouldn’t talk about what it meant, or what to call it, or what happens next. We should just accept it. Maybe not forever, or even until we get home, but just...just for right now...we let this be whatever it is.”
Another long silence fell over them then, and even in Drafty’s mind, Kara was quiet. What happened now, whether Lex was willing to go along with what she’d proposed – a state of affairs so nebulous and imprecise even she wasn’t sure what it meant – was entirely up to him.
Finally, after almost a full minute of stillness, Lex spoke.
“The reason I can’t replenish my thaumaturgical spellcasting is because there’s a flaw in how I created it...”
Spinner rolled her eyes at her friend’s grousing. “You don’t say, Shadow? I had no idea you felt like that.”
“Even a bad plan is better than no plan at all,” recited Mystaria, the lilting tone in her voice making it clear that she was quoting something. “So sayeth ‘The Opuscule of Precocity,’ which while not technically part of Luminace’s canon serves to introduce young readers to the basic principles and tenets that the goddess teaches in order to live a happy and fulfilling life. That particular lesson comes from a story where two fillies were tasked with cleaning their rooms, and while neither knew how to get started, one of them came up with a rather simple routine for straightening things up, while the other-”
“Had no plan at all?” finished Valor, giving Mystaria a wry look.
“That’s right!” grinned the nun in training, missing the indulgent tenor in her friend’s voice. “You see, the one with the bad plan was able to start realizing where she’d gone wrong and fix things, while the filly with no plan at all never got started-”
“Will you shut up already?!” snapped Solvei, teeth bared as she glared at Mystaria first, then at Shadow. “You keep speaking ill of Master’s plan, but it’s not like you have any better ideas! Do I need to remind you that everything that’s gone wrong has happened because you refused to follow his orders?!”
Shadow snorted. “I can’t tell if you really believe that, or if you’re just trying to get your belly rubbed later.”
The sneering jibe was enough to make Solvei bristle, turning toward Shadow with malice in her eyes, but Drafty spoke up before the winter wolf could say anything. “You’re doing it again.”
Despite the mild nature of the pegasus’ comment, Shadow groaned in exasperation. “Oh come off it!”
Shrugging, Drafty made a show out of looking around before holding up the rod she’d been carrying curled up in one wing, the faint quivering of the metal indicating that it had detected hostile intent. “I don’t see anyone else around, so yeah, I’m pretty sure this thing is reacting to you. Again.”
“Really?” scoffed Shadow. “Because I think you’re blowing smoke. Your boyfriend’s pet looks angrier than me. Maybe she’s the one who set your gizmo off.”
“That’s not how it operates,” intoned Lex darkly, coming to a halt as he turned to glare at Shadow. “The rod detects hostility directed toward the one who bears it. Solvei has none for Thermal Draft, but your outburst last night made it very clear that you do.”
“You know what?” huffed Shadow, staring right back at Lex. “You’re right, I do have plenty of hostility for your winged floozy.” She threw back her cloak then, raising a hoof to flash her dagger at Lex. “But that’s nothing compared to how much I despise you. Because despite what your lapdog thinks, every disaster that’s happened since we came here has been your fault.”
“You’re a fool for thinking so,” shot back Lex. “And my patience for suffering fools has been exhausted. If you find our alliance so untenable, then perhaps it’s time we dissolved it.”
“Are we really doing this now?” sighed Valor, glancing at the rest of her friends. But she received only a concerned look from Mystaria, one hoof coming up to touch Luminace’s holy symbol. Spinner looked equally unnerved, biting her lip as she brought her lute around, giving its strings a nervous strum. “Aren’t we almost to that shrine?”
Standing off to the side as she watched the confrontation unfold, Akna nodded. “We are. The river we’ll need to enter is just up ahead. A few more minutes of walking should bring it into sight.”
“I don’t care, we’re doing this now,” replied Lex coldly, keeping his eyes on Shadow as he changed into his umbral form. Next to him, Solvei grew to a larger size as she wrapped herself in black crystal armor, while Drafty started piecing together a spell. “The situation when we joined forces was already abysmal, and since then has grown steadily worse. I see no reason to allow it to continue festering. Better to bring it to a swift conclusion.”
Smirking behind her mask, Shadow drew her dagger. “Get ready girls!” she called over her shoulder as she flipped the blade around, bringing it into a ready position. “It’s time to finish what we started.”
The warning wasn’t needed, as Mystaria was already drawing a scroll from her saddlebag, tossing it to Spinner, who deftly caught it in her mouth and unrolled it, deftly strumming her lute as she worked the paper open with her lips and tongue, laying it on the snow in front of her. Valor was similarly making preparations, setting Littleknight down off her back as she brought her shield up. “Alright,” she sighed. “If that’s how it’s going to be, then let’s do this.”
Sighing, Akna moved closer to Lex, waving a hand as the nearby snow began to gather, forming into the same humanoid shape that she’d formed last night. “I suppose it’s better to have this out of the way now rather than after we reach the shrine.”
“Meep?” chirped Littleknight, blinking in confusion as he glanced at the standoff that was forming. “Meep meep?”
No one bothered to answer the almiraj, as the two sides – Fail Forward and Lex’s followers – stared each other down, unmoving.
A moment later, the spell Drafty had been constructing was finally complete.
Immediately, Mystaria and Spinner both began casting, their voices rising in tandem as they both chanted the words to the same spell; Mystaria casting it from memory as she drew a hooffull of powder out of a saddlebag and flung it into the air as she gestured, while Spinner focused on reading the scroll in front of her out loud.
A moment later, two large clouds of golden dust sprang into being. One appeared between two large trees a stone’s throw behind them, while another materialized in front a rocky outcropping a short distance ahead of them.
And in the middle of each dust storm were humanoid figures – their invisible bodies now outlined with golden speckles – who were hacking and coughing as they cursed, rubbing their eyes as they fumbled for their weapons. From behind them, Lex could make out the sight of a bald-headed figure wielding a hammer, next to whom was a lanky creature with a double axe. Up ahead was the crouching form of what could only be a manticore, and next to it-
“TRAP!” choked the grating voice of a humanoid holding a staff. “KNEW WE WERE HERE!”
Although he couldn’t smile in his shadow-form, Lex still felt a rush of spiteful anticipating run through him at that.
For once, everything had gone perfectly.
“They were spying on us through Littleknight?!”
Mystaria couldn’t have sounded more horrified as she glanced at the yawning almiraj for a long moment – the creature lazily reaching up with a hind leg to scratch one ear before settling back down to sleep – before looking back at Lex. “Are you sure?”
The unicorn nodded grimly. “I have some experience with scrying sensors, and with how those creatures that attacked us before were able to shut down my connection to Solvei, it wasn’t difficult to surmise that they might be able to do the opposite as well.”
Turning pale at the news, Spinner’s ears folded back as she lowered her voice. “Woodheart would never spy on us for those creatures. Not if she had a choice. Does...does that mean they’re-”
“Hey.” Going over to the bard, Drafty pulled her into a quick hug. “Don’t think about that, okay? I’m sure she’s fine.”
“But-”
“Listen,” interrupted Drafty before Spinner could protest. “I know what it’s like to be scared for someone you care about, and imagining what they’re going through doesn’t help.” Letting the filidh go, she clapped her on the shoulder. “The best thing we can do for Woodheart right now is figure out how to turn the tables on the people that kidnapped her; once we do, we can make them give her back.”
Swallowing her protests, Spinner managed to force herself to smile. “You’re right.” Taking a deep breath, she looked at Lex. “So, you’ve got a plan, right? Because I’m willing to bet my lute that you wouldn’t tell us this unless you had some idea what to do about it.”
But Lex didn’t have a chance to answer before Valor cut in. “Should we be talking about this here?” she muttered, looking back at where the almiraj was still sleeping near the edge of the dome.
The stallion shook his head. “After I noticed the scrying sensor, I made sure to confirm its presence by looking into the magical spectrum. The spell’s aura was active on the creature then; it’s not now.”
“Was that before or after you oh-so-casually revealed the exact location that we’re headed for?” huffed Shadow. “Because as I recall, Littleknight was right here when you said where the Shrine of the Starless Sky can be found.”
Solvei snickered at that. “You really don’t get it, do you?”
A round of confused looks were exchanged between the remaining members of Fail Forward then. “Get what?” asked Spinner, voicing the others’ lack of understanding.
“I revealed the Shrine’s location knowing full well that I was under observation while I did so,” answered Lex flatly. “Now, for the first time, we have the advantage of Grisela and her twisted family.”
“The advantage?” echoed Mystaria, looking aghast. “How does them knowing where we’re going give us-” She cut herself off as her eyes widened in sudden understanding. “You want to set a trap for them,” she breathed. “To draw them out so that we can get the jump on them when they come after us.”
“Precisely.” The corners of Lex’s lips turned up then, but the expression he wore was dark enough that it couldn’t have been called a smile. “These monsters have shown a proclivity for attacking without warning; raiding the village at night, ambushing us while invisible and leaving no tracks. This time, we’ll be ready.”
“Now this is a plan I can get behind!” Rearing up on her hind legs, Valor kicked her hooves in the air before bringing them back down in a heavy stomp. “Those ugly freaks aren’t going to know what hit them! By the time we’re done with them, they’ll be begging to give Woodheart back!”
Shadow, however, looked considerably less enthused. “Yeah, well we’re going to have a hard time with that if they’re waiting for us inside the Shrine,” she noted, her voice sour. “If the only way inside really is a river, then all they have to do is head in before us, and they won’t have much trouble picking us off while we’re climbing out of the water.”
“That won’t happen.” Lex canted his head at where the adlets were gathering their gear. Now that the sun had risen – the ambient light telegraphing that morning had come, despite the thick canopy of tree limbs and the perpetually overcast skies – the humanoids were preparing to depart, Akna leading several of them in what looked like some sort of service. “Akna informed me that the Shrine is protected by more than just its location. The odds of Grisela and the others lying in wait for us there are slim.”
“And you trust her?” murmured Spinner, giving the adlets a queasy look. “I mean, no offense and all, but you’re the reason they were chowing down on one of their own kind last night.”
This time Lex’s smirk was less wolfish, though the dark chuckle he gave then made it no less intimidating. “I have her under control.”
“...right, well, I do agree that they probably won’t attack from inside the Shrine,” ventured Mystaria. “Even if this is an antenoctem place of worship, the Night Mare’s temples aren’t exactly known for being undefended. And if they’ve figured out that you’re part of her clergy, they won’t want to face you on ground consecrated to your goddess.”
“So you’re thinking...what?” asked Thermal Draft, looking between Lex and Mystaria. “Right outside the place?”
“That’s probably their best bet,” muttered Valor, one hoof at her chin as she thought out loud. “The further away from it they get, the more likely that they’d miss us on our way there.”
“So we have a rough idea of where they’ll be, and since we have a guide we can judge when we get there.” Sitting back, Shadow crossed her forelegs over her chest. “That’s still no good if we don’t see them coming. Last time we were taken completely by surprise despite being out in the open.”
“What about using Solvei’s nose?” Spinner nodded at the winter wolf. “Even if they’re invisible, she should be able to sniff them out, and maybe Akna too since she’s-”
“First of all,” huffed Solvei, “I doubt some sheltered little shaman is used to detecting prey by scent. And second, that won’t work anyway; I sniffed all around the area where those creatures attacked Master before, and the same way they left no tracks, they didn’t leave any scent trails either. So that’s not going to work.”
“There’s a spell to see invisible creatures,” sighed Mystaria dejectedly, “but it’s not one that I know. Sorry you guys.”
“Don’t apologize Mysty, I don’t know it either,” confessed Spinner, before giving Lex a hesitant look. “I, um, don’t suppose you...”
Lex shook his head again. “That particular spell is not one which I’ve had a chance to study.”
“Of course not,” snorted Shadow. “That would actually be convenient. Actually, no, wait, I forgot. You wouldn’t be able to prep it even if you did know it, would you?”
Thermal Draft scowled. Solvei growled and bared her teeth. Valor and Mystaria winced. Spinner took a wary step back.
But surprisingly, Lex simply gave her a cool look. “...no,” he admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “I wouldn’t. But it doesn’t matter, because Thermal Draft can use it just fine.”
The pegasus in question blinked, looking mystified. “I can?”
“A modest enhancement of your visual acuity should be easy for you to create,” explained Lex. “There’ll be plenty of time to teach you how to use it while we head for the Shrine. Coupled with the divinatory item you’re carrying, you should be able to easily ascertain when we come within range of our enemies.”
The pegasus blushed at the vote of confidence, a nervous expression crossing her face a moment later. “Lex, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve gotten pretty good at using this thing” – she held up the enemy-detecting rod for a moment before lowering it – “but it’s been our number one way of staying alert ever since we entered the forest. If Grisela’s group has been watching us through Littleknight, they’ll know all about it, which means that if I start waving it around when we get close to them, the jig will be up.”
Lex, however, couldn’t have looked less concerned. “I know. And I have a plan for that as well. One that relies” – he looked at a different member of their group then – “on you.”
Everyone’s eyebrows rose at then, especially the pony in question.
No one had expected that Shadow Star would be the one he was relying upon.
Despite her initial skepticism, even Shadow had to admit – grudgingly – that Lex’s plan had worked to perfection.
Since Drafty’s magic item detected hostility, all she had to do was play up the antagonism she already felt towards the red-horned unicorn and his cadre of followers. “They know that it registers animosity,” Lex had explained. “But they likely don’t know anything more specific than that. All you need to do is make periodic displays of enmity, and Thermal Draft makes sure to state out loud that you’re what she’s detecting, they’ll likely assume that their antipathy toward us is being masked by your own.”
That would allow Drafty to use the rod without letting Grisela and her misbegotten collection of horrors know that they were onto them. At which point, the plan was to pretend to escalate the level of infighting. “The last time they attacked, it was during a period of intra-party conflict,” Lex had noted. “This time, we’ll use that to our advantage.”
To that end, he’d come up with a surprisingly insightful series of tactics. Specifically, that Drafty would use the “detect invisibility” spell Lex had taught her on the trip there to figure out exactly where their enemies were stationed. Meanwhile, Mystaria would use the blessing of telepathy to connect herself to Drafty – who would inform her of where she saw Grisela and the others – and relay that via telepathic connections to Shadow, Spinner, and Valor, along with Solvei, the wolf being explicitly told not to block the contact. That way, she’d be able to inform Lex, who would, after having turned into shadow-form, use whatever his “greater blessing” was to start pouring power into Solvei...and apparently Akna too; Lex had hinted that he could do that to her, though Shadow still didn’t understand exactly how. Either way, the other spellcasters would start getting ready as well.
Once they were done, Mystaria and Spinner would drop glitterdust spells on the baddies, breaking their invisibility and hopefully blinding them, just like they’d done to Toklo back when his group had ambushed them.
After that...
After that, decided Spinner as she raced toward where her enemy of choice – the bald human called Paska, who’d been responsible for Woodheart’s abduction – was stumbling out of the dust cloud, blinking and rubbing his eyes, we beat you within an inch of your worthless lives and GET OUR FRIEND BACK!
Having Akna remain with them had been the correct decision.
After extracting as much useful information as he could from her, Lex had briefly considered sending her back with the rest of her kind. Not only would doing so have helped to defuse tensions with the adlets – potentially enough to keep them from retaliating against the ponies living in the region for Panuk’s death – but also would have squelched any chance that she’d attempt to regain Headhunter, or any other of the Umbral Regalia, once they located the Shrine. Akna’s plan to brainwash her tribe was abhorrent in the extreme, and Lex had no desire to provide her with even the most indirect of assistance in carrying it out.
Despite that, he’d elected to have the adlet shaman accompany him during their trek to the Shrine of the Starless Sky. That particular decision had been motivated by several factors; although he’d forced her to speak honestly and in detail about both the Shrine and the Rite of Sublimation, it was entirely possible that there was something she’d overlooked or forgotten. Keeping her close would allow her to be consulted again if that turned out to be the case.
Another reason he’d wanted to keep Akna close was so he could interrogate her about the powers she commanded as a shaman. From what Yotimo had said, she had been the one who’d originally directed him – before he and his warriors had left their tribe’s village – toward their location, despite being miles distant. Although his plan for dealing with Grisela and her family of freaks and monsters would hopefully result in their destruction, Akna’s abilities would be useful in tracking them down if any of them escaped...or if they still needed to find Woodheart afterward.
But the main reason Lex had wanted Akna to stay with them had been so that he could exploit her as a combat resource.
And now, his foresight was paying off.
“Pepehi i na kanaka!” she shouted to the ice elemental she’d summoned – Lex recognized the phrase as meaning “kill the humanoids” in Olelowai, the name Everglow’s scholars had given to the language spoken by creatures from the Elemental Plane of Water – pointing at where Paska and Vidrig were defending themselves against a fierce assault from Shadow and Valor, with Spinner and Mystaria supporting them at a distance via songs and spells.
The crystalline creature immediately moved to obey, loping toward the fight in heavy strides that carried its twenty-foot frame over to where the ponies were engaging the duo in battle.
Vidrig was the closer of the two, snarling a series of vile epithets as Valor – already having transformed into a bear – tore a heavy pair of gashes across her torso, retaliating with a swing of her axe that sank deep into Valor’s side. The pony-turned-bear roared at the hit, giving Vidrig enough time to wrench her axe free and rear back, preparing to bring her weapon down in an overhead chop that would cleave Valor’s skull in two. But the elemental struck first, bringing one icy fist down on top of Vidrig’s head with the force of an avalanche.
The power of the blow made Vidrig’s cranium collapse inward, causing a thick mass of black blood to explode out of her mouth and ears, her eyes quite literally popping out of her skull, tangles of pink nerves leaving them dangling in front of what was left of her face.
Spasms ran through hideous creature’s body then, her arms and legs jerking wildly, each limb moving separately from the others in uncoordinated motions like those of a wriggling bug. But somehow, impossibly, she remained on her feet, her body continuing to act despite her brain having been pulverized. Valor fell back as the huge axe tore through the space she’d occupied only a moment ago, the blade sawing through the air in a frantic motion as Vidrig’s seizure continued.
A short distance away, Paska grimaced at the sight, which distracted him just long enough for Shadow to slip past his guard and plunge her dagger between his ribs. But the weapon’s tip sank in less than a quarter-inch before coming to a halt, and when she yanked it free a moment later – rolling to avoid a strike from his hammer – it was obvious that she’d inflicted little more damage than a papercut.
Ignoring the minor wound he’d taken, Paska instead darted forward, shoulder-checking Vidrig’s convulsing body and sending it stumbling away. The result was that he took Mystaria’s spell full on, the flaming sphere that she’d sent after Vidrig instead engulfing him from the waist down. He likewise received Spinner’s follow-up attack a moment later – the bard having just finished reading from another of Mystaria’s scrolls even as she kept strumming her lute – as a gout of acid struck him directly in the face.
The bald human’s only reaction was to grunt in irritation.
“Nothing hurts him,” murmured Drafty from her place alongside Lex, her voice thick with nervous tension as Paska wiped the acid off of his face with one hand, stepping out of the fiery sphere as though it were nothing more than a snow drift.
“My elemental will,” answered Akna confidently, the shaman also having hung back. “No matter how tough he is, a living glacier is tougher.”
“Meep!” growled Littleknight, the almiraj squirming unhappily in Drafty’s hooves. From the way the creature was glaring at Paska, it desperately wanted to attack the person who had kidnapped its mistress. Woodheart’s friends, however, had already instructed the pegasus to keep the druid’s familiar close by, not wanting any harm to befall it.
“Summon another one just in case,” ordered Lex, glowing eyes narrowing as Vidrig’s head began to reform, her eyes slowly retracting back into their sockets. “I want them to be completely overwhelmed.”
Akna grimaced then, glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. “I can’t,” she confessed a moment later. “I don’t have a strong enough rapport with the spirits of the cold to conjure up more than one ice elemental of that stature each day.”
“You do now.”
That was the only warning Lex gave Akna before turning the Night Mare’s divine authority on her. But unlike before, when he’d seized control of her body, this time he used it in the manner he’d only discovered recently: to empower rather than to dominate.
Although he wasn’t sure how the adlet’s ability to incarnate ice spirits functioned, he felt reasonably confident that didn’t matter. Divine authority operated under the auspices of the goddess who had granted him that ability, altering reality itself to make his commands come true. It had its limits, of course, but Lex was betting that this wouldn’t push them very far at all.
For her part, Akna sucked in a breath as she felt a surge of power rush through her, eyes going wide as she tensed up. “What...what did you just do to me?!”
“Summon another elemental,” repeated Lex.
“I...” Slowly, Akna’s look of shock slowly turned into a wild grin. “I can do a lot better than that!”
Turning back toward where Fail Forward was continuing to fight the two humanoids, Akna held out her hands as she closed her eyes, though her broad grin remained. Several seconds passed, but Lex said nothing, feeling the magic flowing off of her. A moment later, snow began gathering around Akna again.
But this time, the torrent of freezing wind and whirling flakes was more than a modest squall. Instead, it immediately grew into a cyclone of arctic wind and freezing rain, engulfing the shaman completely. The sudden storm was violent enough that Drafty had to shield herself with her wings, hugging Littleknight close as the almiraj let out a frightened meep.
Lex, however, could hear Akna laughing within the gale.
Then, as suddenly as the snowstorm had arrived, it was gone, and the reason for Akna’s triumphant cackling became apparent.
She hadn’t simply summoned another ice elemental.
She had summoned an entire squad of them.
“TEN!” howled the shaman, raising her arms in triumph as she looked at the icy beasts surrounding her, all waiting for her orders. “Look at this! There’s ten of them! My grandmother’s grandmother could only summon three, and she was considered one of the greatest shamans who ever lived!”
Privately, even Lex was surprised at just how potent Akna’s summons had become. But before he could tell her to put her new abilities to use – that many elementals would be able to overwhelm their enemies entirely on their own – he suddenly registered a burst of negativity from Solvei.
Before he could inquire as to what was wrong, turning his attention toward where she’d volunteered to take on Grisela and Blat all by herself, he heard the winter wolf’s thoughts in his mind. Master! I’m almost done with these two! Just give me another minute, and I’ll be able to eliminate all of your enemies by myself!
A glance in her direction showed that Solvei wasn’t exaggerating.
With her enlarged size and her black crystal armor, the winter wolf was quickly making short work of her foes. Even as Lex watched, Blat – who was already bleeding from several wounds across his face, chest, and legs – dove at Solvei, wings flapping to propel him forward as he swiped at her. But his claws couldn’t get past her defenses, scratching uselessly across the side of her helmeted face before he bit down on her neck, accomplishing nothing except to make two of his front teeth crack.
Solvei’s counterattack was almost disdainful in its ease, a single swipe of her paw being all it took to knock the manticore to the ground in front of her. Lowering her head, she clamped her teeth around Blat’s middle – being large enough to just barely fit his torso between her jaws – and squeezed. It was only because the manticore was possessed of the same supernatural toughness as his other siblings that his body wasn’t bisected instantly. Even then, he immediately began to thrash, frantically trying to free himself from Solvei’s jaws, mouth working soundlessly as she squeezed the air from his lungs.
A moment later, Solvei’s eyes lit up, shining green and purple. Knowing what that meant, Lex glanced at where Grisela was glaring at Solvei, gnashing her teeth in frustration. “Wear you down!” she screeched, pointing at the winter wolf and furrowing her brow in concentration. “Whatever’s safeguarding your mind, gonna wear it down and make you mine!”
Snorting contemptuously, Solvei bit down harder, and a second later Blat’s thrashing grew more frantic as the sound of snapping ribs filled the air. Spitting the manticore out a moment later – causing Blat to groan as he immediately started to drag himself away from Solvei – the winter wolf turned to glare at Grisela. “The only person I belong to is my master, Lex Legis,” she spat, her voice turning haughty. “And all that you’ll get from me is my teeth crushing the life out of you.”
She took a step toward Grisela then, intent on making good on her threat-
“ALL OF YOU, STOP FIGHTING OR THIS ONE DIES!”
The announcement made Lex whirl around, the voice having come from behind them. He wasn’t the only one to be surprised, as Thermal Draft nearly jumped out of her skin, Littleknight meeping unhappily as she squeezed him tighter. Even Akna paused at the interruption, midway through giving orders to her elemental army.
Emerging from a particularly dense grove of trees was another humanoid, this one being wholly unfamiliar to Lex. Standing just over a dozen feet tall, her skin was the same color as the snow, with platinum-blonde hair that was cut extremely short. She was clad in armor, with a cuirass of studded leather protecting her torso, matching the greaves, skirt, and boots that she wore. Across her back was a massive axe, similar in design to Vidrig’s but proportional to the newcomer’s height.
But the giant’s identity – as well as her having somehow avoided detection – concerned Lex less than what she was carrying in her arms, one hand clasped tightly around the neck of an unmoving form whom he immediately recognized. And judging from the strangled cry that came from all four members of Fail Forward a moment later, they did as well.
“L-Littleknight! Calm down!” sputtered Thermal Draft, wings flapping in agitation as she struggled to hold the frantic almiraj, the horned rabbit’s eyes locked onto its mistress as it continued trying to escape from the pegasus’ grasp, intent on making a beeline for Woodheart.
The creature’s frantic reaction was enough to momentarily capture Lex’s attention, his eyes flickering to where it was thrashing before returning to the unresponsive earth mare held firmly in the grip of the pale giant. Woodheart’s friends had been certain that the druid’s familiar was key to finding her, purporting that it would be able to sense when she was nearby. But with how her kidnappers had been using the almiraj to spy on them, it was no surprise that they’d taken pains to prevent the creature from homing in on their captive.
If their enemies could shut down his link to Solvei, even temporarily, Lex had no doubt that they could do the same to Woodheart’s connection to Littleknight.
But that bothered him less than how such a large creature had managed to avoid being detected until now. No tracks, noted Lex silently as he glanced behind the giant, seeing that the snow was unmarred. Which means she’s likely using the same scent-blocking spell as the other freaks. A mental query to Solvei confirmed it, with the winter wolf telepathically replying that she couldn’t smell anything from the newcomer or her captive.
The fact that Drafty hadn’t been able to see them with her anti-invisibility spell likely meant that the creature simply hadn’t been invisible in the first place, he decided a moment later. It wasn’t as though there weren’t numerous other ways to avoid being seen; the thick grove of trees she’d emerged from offered a goodly amount of concealment as it was, despite the newcomer’s height. Even without magic, her alabaster skin would have blended in with the snow quite well.
More concerning was how Thermal Draft’s hostility-sensing rod hadn’t picked her up. Was it because the tall humanoid had some sort of protection magic? Or had she simply been out of the rod’s limited range? Or maybe it was even simpler than that; while Lex had no skill at judging the facial expressions of others, the giant was giving him a fairly neutral look at the moment, neither snarling nor smiling, but simply regarding him coolly.
Perhaps she simply had no hostility to be detected.
But if that was the case, then Woodheart’s companions had more than enough of their own, as Shadow Star turned and immediately bolted toward the giant. “Let Woodheart go you pasty-faced bitch!”
She wasn’t alone in her fury, as the black bear that was Valor roared in anger, bounding toward the towering humanoid. Spinner didn’t join the other two in their charge, but immediately began to play her lute louder, practically shrieking the words to a speed-boosting spell, causing her friends to immediately rocket forward. But Lex could already tell that they still weren’t fast enough; the giant would be able to close her grip, likely popping Woodheart’s head off, long before the other two ever reached her.
Which, he knew, was entirely part of their plan.
Master, Mystaria wants you to know that it’s a trick, came Solvei’s mental voice. The other three are-
Serving as a distraction, replied Lex silently. I’m aware.
It hadn’t escaped his notice that while the other three were yelling and trying everything else they could think of to draw attention to themselves, Mystaria had quietly withdrawn a scroll from her saddlebag. Spinner had even moved slightly so that she was standing between the towering humanoid and the nun-in-training, giving her friend as much cover as she could. Heedless of the fact that Paska and Vidrig were less than two dozen feet away – though neither seemed inclined to interfere, as the former was keeping his eyes on Akna and her small army of elementals, the adlet watching the drama unfold with an uncertain look on her face, while the latter was leaning on her axe and groaning as her head finished regenerating – Mystaria read the words off the paper as quickly and quietly as she could.
It was his mystic senses as much as what he could hear over her friends’ yelling that informed Lex that Mystaria was casting a paralysis spell, making the earth ponies’ strategy clear: Mystaria’s spell would prevent Woodheart’s captor from making good on her threat to end the druid’s life. Once she was immobilized, Valor and Shadow – thanks to Spinner’s speed-boosting spell – would then be able to reach the giant and pry Woodheart from her grasp before Grisela, Paska, and the other monsters realized what was happening.
Despite his disdain for his traveling companions, Lex found himself mildly impressed at how seamlessly they’d put their plan into action. Distract, quicken, paralyze, and rescue; whether because they’d been in a situation like this before, or because one of them had an unexpected flash of insight and shared it with the others over their telepathic link, the ponies of Fail Forward had actually come up with a halfway-decent strategy.
Unfortunately, it was one that Lex knew was doomed to fail.
And a moment later, he was proven right.
Mystaria’s paralysis spell went off then, but rather than freezing in place, Woodheart’s captor simply glanced at Mystaria before returning her gaze to Lex. “Given that my siblings are often quite hard to manage-”
That was all she got out before Valor crashed into her, the bear leaping upward into a flying tackle as she hit the milk-white giant just above the waist.
...and went right through her without making contact, landing hard on a snowbank behind her.
“-I won’t hold the actions of your underlings against you-”
Having been right behind Valor, Shadow was unable to react to her friend’s passing right through their enemy. Instead, her own leap sent the blade of her dagger across the wrist of the hand the oversized humanoid was using to hold Woodheart’s neck, only for its edge to find no more purchase than Valor had, passing through the giant as though she were made of mist rather than flesh and blood.
Which, Lex knew, was essentially the case.
“-but I’d appreciate it if you reined them in, before I’m forced to demonstrate that I wasn’t making an idle threat,” finished the giant, bringing her free hand up and closing her fist around Woodheart’s foreleg. “Unless, of course, you’d prefer to recover your mare one piece at a time.”
Spinner bristled at that, her hoof falling away from her lute as she finally lost her composure. “You cowardly piece of sh-, HEY!”
No one needed to ask why she’d suddenly yelped, as the black crystals that shot up from the ground around her then were starkly visible against the snow-covered ground. In an instant, they’d curled around her legs, locking her into place and sealing her movement. Nor was she the only one so ensnared, as Mystaria found herself similarly captured, with Valor and Shadow both being bound a moment later, the two of them snarling and struggling futilely within their respective prisons.
“I trust you’ll find that sufficient?” Lex’s voice was cold as he returned to physical form, never having taken his gaze off of the large biped.
Analyzing how she’d managed to sneak up on them hadn’t been all that Lex had been doing in the seconds after her arrival. He’d also used his circlet to peer into the magical spectrum, looking the newcomer over for magical signatures. Although it had taken several seconds to sort through the active spell effects cluttering the area, the powerful illusion surrounding the giant had quickly come into view, making Lex discard his previous suppositions as to how she’d appeared so suddenly, the answer being far simpler than he’d initially thought.
She wasn’t actually there at all.
It was entirely likely that she was still somewhere close by; while Lex wasn’t familiar with whatever bit of magic she was using at the moment, his limited familiarity with scrying magic made it clear that bidirectional transmission of sight and sound was enormously complex; to be able to manage a spell that could manage that while also projecting an image of the caster in real time suggested that this was either a spellcaster of staggering power – in which case, there was little reason for them to try and force a dialogue like this, rather than simply attacking – or that the spell had a shortfall in another area to reduce how much energy it required...quite possibly by limiting the range it could operate at.
If that was the case, then it would explain why they’d have taken pains to blunt Woodheart’s connection to Littleknight. The almiraj would have immediately realized, through its connection to Woodheart, that the druid wasn’t actually there, leading them to whatever nearby position the giant was broadcasting from. But since the giant had anticipated that and taken measures accordingly, there was no easy way to track her down, at least not without tipping her off as to what they were doing.
Which meant that the best course of action was to keep her talking and see if an opportunity could be found.
Glancing around at where the remaining members of Fail Forward were all struggling in place, the pale humanoid paused for just a moment before looking back at Lex and nodding, releasing Woodheart’s foreleg, though she kept her other hand around the mare’s neck. “I’m glad we can be reasonable. While I know this might be difficult for you to believe, we’re not here to fight.”
“NO!” came a sudden howl from Vidrig, her head finally having restored itself fully. “They crushed my head, Sissel! It hurt! I want blood for that!”
Frowning, the giant – Sissel – gave her hideous sibling a flat look. “Your pain is irrelevant, Vidrig. We’re here to cut a deal, not satisfy your impulses.”
“Are you kidding?” spat Thermal Draft, still doing her best to keep hold of Littleknight. “After ambushing us twice, all of a sudden you want to work things out?”
“It’s true that Paska was supposed to capture you and bring you back,” answered Sissel, directing her words toward Lex. “But you proved too powerful to be taken alive. As for Grisela” – she shrugged, glancing at the winter hag, who had circled around to put Blat, the manticore literally licking his wounds, between herself and Solvei – “she was simply looking to gather food for the yetis. She was no more expecting to run into you than you were her.”
Akna’s ears perked up at that. “So it’s true?! After everything my people went through to annihilate the yetis, you resurrected them?!”
“There was no resurrection,” corrected Sissel, again directing her answer at Lex. “Mother knew we’d need shock troops for the assignment she gave us, and the yetis were perfect for that. They’re strong, stupid, and easily led, so she made sure we had enough of them to get the job done. Until you wiped our younger brothers out while they were procuring supplies.”
“Their ‘supplies’ were people,” intoned Lex darkly. “MY people. And since you’re part of whatever cabal those monstrosities you call kin belonged to, and had foreknowledge of their crimes, that makes you culpable for the slaughter they perpetrated.”
Sissel shrugged. “Be that as it may, the fact remains that without them, we can’t complete our task. But by that same token, you should have more than enough power to make up for their loss.” Her eyes flickered to Solvei then, looking the humongous armor-clad wolf over for a long moment before turning her gaze to the elementals surround Akna, waiting to be commanded. “Even if your magic is supposedly running dry, your servants – the non-pony ones at least – should be more than up to the challenge.”
“And in exchange, you’ll return Woodheart,” sneered Lex.
A faint smile crossed Sissel’s lips. “I’m glad we understand each other.”
Thermal Draft leaned close to Lex then, Littleknight finally having tired himself out. “I don’t like this,” she muttered, wings still unfurled in anxiety. “The last time I tried to cut a deal, it didn’t work out so well, remember?”
The reminder made Lex frown, but he didn’t dwell on it, instead keeping his attention fixed on Sissel. “And this so-called assignment of yours is for what, exactly?”
“Nothing that you should find too difficult,” answered the snow giant easily. “We simply need you to slay the ancient dragon, Hvitdod, that lairs north of here.”
“You want him to slay a dragon?! Are you completely out of your mind?!”
“Be quiet, Thermal Draft.” Lex didn’t take his eyes off of Sissel even as he rebuked the pegasus. The giant’s demand was an insight into what she and her collection of grotesqueries were hoping to accomplish, which meant that if he could get her to expound on what she wanted from him, he might stumble across some useful bit of information he could use against her and her twisted siblings – as well as the one they called Mother – later on. “I’ve dealt with dragons before.”
“I know, and it almost got you killed!” protested the pegasus, squeezing Littleknight to her chest as she turned to face him, her wings flapping in agitation. “Lex, even I know that dragons get bigger and stronger the older they get. If this ‘Hvitdod’ really is an ancient dragon-”
“He’s not just ancient,” interrupted Akna, stepping forward to stand closer to Lex, a quick command in Olelowai making the ice elementals she’d summoned move into formation behind them. “Hvitdod is dead.”
That was enough to make Lex’s brows furrow in confusion as he glanced at the adlet shaman. “What?”
“He’s dead, and has been for generations.” Giving Sissel a look of defiance, as though daring the giant to contradict her, Akna folded her arms beneath her chest. “According to our elders, Hvitdod was nothing less than the living manifestation of nature’s wrath. He was colder than deepest winter, faster than the quickest wind, hardier than the tallest mountains, and more wrathful than the fiercest of storms. He devoured all who approached him, whether in challenge or friendship; even Nuti-Amaguk was afraid to face him-”
A sharp snarl from Solvei cut the shaman off then, but Lex silenced her with a thought, leaving the winter wolf sulking as she glared at Akna. For his part, Lex simply nodded at the shaman. “Continue.”
Huffing at the interruption, but knowing that the unicorn hadn’t been making a request, Akna resumed speaking. “Eventually, Aselu – the one who had convinced our people to live in freedom rather than die in the war between Nuti-Amaguk and Ikumak-Amaguk – announced that he would strike the beast down, for the spirits whom he’d long admired were offended at how the beast would ravage the land and despoil everything in its destructive fury.”
She gestured to the ice elementals flanking her then. “Seeing that he was intent on making good on his vow, the spirits gave Aselu many gifts in order to carry out his task – they made his legs as firm and unyielding as the roots of the oldest trees, his arms as strong and devastating as an earthquake, his sight as clear and distant as the cloudless sky, his thoughts as swift and decisive as lightning, and his heart as calm and steadfast as deep water – and swore that if he could lay Hvitdod low, they would forever remain allies of his descendants.”
Akna’s gaze turned distant then, her voice softening as she continued reciting the story that her grandmother had told her for as long as she could remember. “And so Aselu went to face his enemy, and the battle was so terrible that none could look upon it and survive, for Hvitdod’s fury at being resisted by a creature smaller than one of his teeth was terrible indeed. But the might of Aselu’s determination was greater, and though each strike of Hvitdod’s claws rent the ground asunder, and every snap of his jaws caused an avalanche, and every lashing of his tail changed the course of rivers, Aselu endured. Even with the powers that the spirits had given him, every blow he landed upon Hvitdod’s scales was little more than a raindrop against the beast’s thick hide.”
“So how did he kill it?” asked Thermal Draft, caught up in the story despite herself.
The pegasus’ question brought a momentary smile to Akna’s face, remembering how she’d been similarly enraptured by the tale when she was younger. “Hvitdod might have been hardier than the tallest mountain, but over time, even a mountain can be worn down by the rain. The sun rose and set many times over the course of Aselu’s battle, but eventually he was able to breach the monster’s scales, and struck at its foul heart. When he at last pierced the organ, Hvitdod gave a dying scream so great that it was heard by Aselu’s people, who knew that their leader had won, and rushed to his side, with Tapeesa – Aselu’s mate, whom he’d impregnated before going to face the creature – being the first among them.”
A sigh escaped Akna’s muzzle then, further recalling how she’d reacted to the next part of the story. “But when she reached her beloved’s side, Tapeesa’s heart broke, for she saw that her dearest Aselu lay dying. Because although the gifts of the spirits had made him able to turn aside the force of Hvitdod’s claws and fangs, the creature’s poison had found its way into his veins. And Tapeesa wept as she took her mate into her arms, but he bid her not to cry, but instead to clean his body of Hvitdod’s venom and consume it, so that the spirits might guide him to be reborn through the child he’d placed in her womb, and so they’d be together again. But he also warned her that none should eat what was left of Hvitdod, lest even in death the creature’s toxin take the life of another adlet.”
Solvei snorted loudly, making her derision clear. “Let me guess: and that’s why you eat your own kind to this day, right?” Shaking her head, she gave Akna a sneer. “Only adlets could make cannibalism part of a love story.”
“And as touching as that fairy tale was,” broke in Sissel, her neutral expression unchanged, “it doesn’t change the fact that Hvitdod is alive.”
Her expression growing colder, Akna glared at the giant. “Our history has been passed down among my people for generations. You really think we could have gotten something so central to our origin wrong?”
Still taking cover behind where Blat was nursing his wounds, Grisela let out a cackle. “Savage thinks she’s smart now, does she?”
“Regardless of what happened in the past,” broke in Paska, not giving Akna time to react to the winter hag’s taunting, “Hvitdod is alive now. I know because I’ve seen him myself, when I was scouting his territory. Maybe someone resurrected him. Maybe he was hibernating and needed an extremely long time to recover. Whatever it is, he – or another dragon who fits his description – is there now.”
“It’s not another dragon,” spat Vidrig, giving Paska a dirty look as though she found the prospect insulting. “Mother said it was the original, which means it is!” Her misshapen eyes turned toward Lex then. “And you’re going to kill him for us!”
Lex didn’t bother responding to the petulant command, instead turning his attention back toward Sissel. “You said that ‘mother’ of yours is the one who told you to kill that dragon,” he noted. “For what purpose?”
One of Sissel’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Does that mean you’re willing to take on the task?”
“Certainly,” replied Lex without missing a beat, causing Thermal Draft and Akna both to gape at him. “But only if you return Woodheart to me immediately.”
Even as those words passed his lips, however, Lex was already initiating a telepathic conversation with Solvei that was very different. Get ready. I doubt Sissel will give Woodheart back, but if she does, I want you to immediately kill as many of her siblings as you can, including her if you get the chance.
He registered surprise coming from the winter wolf even before she replied telepathically. I...of course, Master.
Solvei’s hesitation – so different from her usual enthusiasm whenever he gave her an order – was enough to prompt a follow-up from Lex. What’s wrong?
In his mind, her emotional state flickered between trepidation and curiosity. I’m sorry, Master, I don’t mean to question you, but...you just told Sissel you’ll slay that dragon in exchange for that pony’s life. I didn’t expect that your real plan was to double-cross her.
The implication of duplicity on his part sent a rush of derision through Lex. If an agreement is only reached because one party leveraged threats of violence in order to procure acceptance of their terms, then it’s necessarily invalid. I am in no way bound to honor a deal which is null and void from the moment it’s struck.
Solvei’s confusion returned then, but only for a moment before it was replaced by acceptance. I understand, Master. If they return Woodheart, I won’t hesitate!
Lex didn’t bother replying, not because the impromptu lesson was over, but because Sissel had hesitated for only a second before shaking her head. “I’m afraid I’m going to need more than just your word. You’ll get your mare back after Hvitdod is dead, and not before.”
Although he’d expected that response, Lex still narrowed his eyes at the snow giant. “That’s not acceptable.”
Sissel’s hand around Woodheart’s neck clenched ever so slightly. “And this pony’s death is?”
Lex’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes lit up as he slowly drew himself up to his full height, standing on his hind legs as he met Sissel’s gaze evenly. “You don’t seem to realize the position that you’re in. This isn’t a hostage negotiation; it’s a stand-off.”
If Sissel was intimidated by Lex’s display, she didn’t show it, her expression remaining as cool as the snow that her skin looked like. “Oh?”
Spreading his forelegs out to encompass everyone around him, Lex kept his eyes locked onto Sissel’s. “If you kill Woodheart, then these negotiations will have broken down completely. Once that happens, there’s nothing to stop me from killing your siblings. Or you, for that matter, since I have reason to believe you’re not very far away.”
“Gods damn you!” hissed Shadow, wriggling furiously in her black crystal prison. “If you’re going to go that route, let us go already!”
“Lex...” murmured Thermal Draft, gulping as she glanced at the others. “Are you sure about this?”
Akna barked a command in Olelowai, the ice elementals around her settling into crouches as they all prepared to spring. Solvei was similarly tense, ready to finish what she’d started with Grisela and Blat. A short distance away, Vidrig lifted her axe into a ready position.
Everyone waited as Lex and Sissel stared each other down.
The snow giant was the one to look away first. “Paska.”
The bald human blinked once, looking at Sissel for a long moment before dropping his hammer and putting his hands in the air. “Alright,” he sighed. “If this is how it’s going to be.”
Keeping his arms raised, he began walking toward where Lex, Thermal Draft, and Akna were standing. The pegasus and the adlet immediately tensed – the former calling one of her elementals over as the latter started to put a spell together – while Lex fell back onto all fours, giving the human a mistrustful look. “What are you doing?”
“Sweetening the deal,” answered Paska, coming to a halt.
The answer assuaged Lex’s suspicions not at all. “What does that-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish before Paska’s form suddenly blurred, his body becoming hazy and indistinct in a way that looked all too familiar to Thermal Draft.
But before she could even think about uttering a warning, Paska’s transformation had finished, and what stood in his place wasn’t remotely human.
Instead, there was a creature that could have been called Solvei’s total opposite.
Paska’s new appearance was canine in form, and as large as the winter wolf was in her natural size, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of soft white fur with ice-blue streaks, Paska’s was a flat black in coloration, and smeared with oily substance that kept his pelt matted to his frame, giving him a lanky look. His claws were caked with the same stuff, causing a crust of dried black flakes to mar the snow around his feet. His jaws were no better, hanging open to show a row of teeth that practically dripped with ichor.
But it was his eyes that were most notable.
Or rather, his single eye.
Set directly in the middle of his face, there was no nearby scar or cavity to denote a lost twin. Instead, the rheumy eyeball sat alone, its entire surface a bilious green that looked more like the waxy chartreuse of a corpse than the emerald blaze of Lex’s eyes. And as Lex watched, the sickly orb focused on himself, before glancing over at Akna...and then settling on Thermal Draft.
An instant later, a viridian beam of light streaked from Paska’s eye, aimed directly at the pegasus.
“NO!” roared Lex, raising a wall of black crystals in front of her at the same time that Akna shrieked a command, causing the closest ice elemental to interpose itself between them and Paska.
But rather than being blocked by the obstacles in its path, the mossy ray twisted in mid-air, curving beneath the elemental’s bulk and arcing around the black crystals Lex had raised, striking the pegasus – who was midway through building a spell even as she tossed Littleknight away, not wanting the almiraj to take a hit meant for her – directly in the back, right between her wings.
For the briefest instant Drafty went rigid. Then she doubled over, coughing up a mouthful of blood, spitting the crimson liquid onto the snow before she gasped and drew in a ragged breath.
Lex was at her side immediately, looking her over just long enough to ascertain that she didn’t seem to be in any further distress – now breathing easier as she shakily stood back up – before he rounded on the thing that Paska had become. “What did you do?!” he demanded, black crystals starting to form all around him. “WHAT DID YOU DO?!”
“Like I said,” answered the black-coated hound in Paska’s voice. “Sweetening the deal. I’d give your girlfriend there about ten days or so – two weeks at the outside – before the affliction I’ve put on her becomes fatal. You kill Hvitdod, and I’ll remove it, but you might want to get a jump on things since the damage that it inflicts on her organs in the meantime is permanent.”
“Undo what you’ve done this instant!” snarled Lex, his eyes glowing brighter as he took a step toward Paska, keeping himself directly between Thermal Draft and the grotesque canine. “Do it, or I swear that your death-”
“Won’t happen,” interrupted Sissel, raising Woodheart’s Woodheart’s unmoving body as she clenched the druid’s neck tighter. “All I have to do is squeeze, and this pony’s head will pop right off. And I promise you, I can do that faster than you can cast a spell, faster than your wolf can move, and faster than your adlet can give commands to her elementals.”
“She’s really not kidding,” announced Paska casually, turning his back on Lex as he strolled over to where he’d dropped his hammer. Changing into human form as he approached the fallen weapon, he picked it up and gave it a practice swing before resting it on his shoulder. “Besides, you really don’t want me dead, since I need to be alive in order to lift the killing curse I put on your mare.”
Lex’s ears twitched slightly at the word “curse,” causing him to glance back at Thermal Draft. The pegasus was wiping her the blood off of her lips, her face pale and her legs shaking, but seemingly unhurt otherwise. If Paska had used a malediction on her...
Then there’s nothing you can do about it, laughed his tulpa. You really have to appreciate the irony. The pony who used curses so readily to control everyone around him wasn’t prepared to deal with his own technique!
Clenching his jaw to keep from screaming in rage, Lex drew in a sharp breath as he fought to remain calm, refusing to acknowledge the voiceless words in his mind. The last time he’d allowed himself to lose control, he’d made a bad situation worse. That would not happen again now!
Instead, he forced himself to examine the situation logically. Presuming that Paska was telling the truth about what he’d done to Thermal Draft, then his options for dealing with it were limited in the extreme. His dark magic allowed him to lay and remove curses, potentially devastating ones – as Princess Luna could attest – if he poured additional power into them, but that granted him no special ability to manipulate curses cast by others. Worse, he didn’t have any magic designed to counter curses in his repertoire of thaumaturgical spells, nor among the smattering of divine magic that the Night Mare had granted him.
Imbuing Solvei or Akna with the power necessary to lift a curse was likely a route to failure also. Lex had used curses often enough to know that one designed specifically to kill likely had a fair bit of power behind it, and while he could imbue his servants with an incredible variety of abilities, there were limits on how much power he could bestow on them. Giving them the ability to shape and direct something as complex as a counter-curse while likewise granting them enough magical power to break a strong malediction was an unlikely proposition.
A ritual, he decided. One designed specifically to negate what Paska had done, or at least suspend it until a better solution could be devised, had some potential.
Except that would require in-depth study of the exact nature of the curse on Thermal Draft. Worse, it would take time; if he’d previously designed some sort of ritual to remove debilitating magic, it wouldn’t be too hard to adapt it, but as he’d never bothered to perform the rigorous testing and experimentation that such a ritual would require, he’d need to design it from scratch now. And while the basic paraphernalia to perform such work had been among the materials he’d received from Solvei’s mother, that was far from the fully-stocked laboratory that would have made the process go faster. Which meant that Thermal Draft’s body would be ravaged in the interval.
Assuming he could come up with such a ritual before the curse killed her.
Even if he could, that was no guarantee that he’d be able to cast it without interruption.
Of course, there was always the possibility that if he could just get to the Shrine of the Starless Sky and complete the Rite of Sublimation, becoming an alicorn would give him the power to fix this. But Lex found himself loath to bet Thermal Draft’s life on that. Not when Spinner had predicted that he’d fail, for reasons that he wasn’t sure of and so couldn’t completely safeguard against.
And even if he did become an alicorn, that would do nothing to help Woodheart.
“So what’s it going to be?” called Sissel, apparently tired of waiting for his answer. “The longer it takes you to go and slay Hvitdod, the more damage Paska’s curse will do to your pegasus. And just as a reminder, if you say no, this one dies immediately,” she added, shaking Woodheart, the druid swaying like a rag doll in the giant’s grasp.
“Lex,” moaned Mystaria, choking back a sob as she gave him a pleading look. “Woodheart’s like a sister to me! Please...please don’t give up on her!”
Shadow was less felicitous, still struggling in her bonds. “I swear to each and every god in the pantheon, if you let that monster kill Woodheart, I will devote the rest of my life to ruining the rest of yours, do you hear me?!”
“Just tell them you’ll do it!” yelled Spinner, her expression frantic. “You’re supposed to be a big hero back in your homeland, right?! Kill the dragon, save the girl? So just give them what they want!”
Valor’s contribution was to snarl angrily, still in her bear form as she thrashed, having no more success in breaking the black crystals than Shadow Star.
But there was still one member of Fail Forward who was free.
“MEEP!”
No longer being held by Thermal Draft, and having had a chance to get his breath back after tiring himself out struggling to escape the pegasus’ grip before, Littleknight charged toward Sissel’s image, horn lowered and eyes locked onto Woodheart.
It was a distraction that Lex didn’t need, causing him to let out a hiss of frustration. The stupid creature was accomplishing nothing, not having figured out that it was simply looking upon an image of its mistress that was being projected from elsewhere. With its psychic connection to her shut down, it had no way of sensing where she really was, which...which...
Suddenly, Lex knew what to do.
His horn lit up as he grabbed the almiraj in his telekinesis, the creature squealing as it was surrounded in a purple aura and floated back toward him. The sight made Sissel clench her hand tighter, and this time Lex was sure that she’d cut off the druid’s air, which prompted him to speak up. “I want a guarantee that you’ll return Woodheart and remove the malediction you’ve placed on Thermal Draft if I kill this dragon for you.”
“Allow me to make a counter-proposal,” replied Sissel easily, not opening her hand as Woodheart’s face began to turn blue. “I can guarantee you that they’ll both die if you don’t, your girlfriend slowly and this one right now.”
The sight of Woodheart dying right in front of them brought a renewed round of cursing and shrieking and pleading from her companions. Thermal Draft was quieter, simply whimpering his name as she looked between him and Sissel with wide eyes, Akna shuffling in place as though not sure what to do. Even Solvei sent a mental query his way, asking for orders.
Lex ignored them all.
Instead, he kept his eyes on Sissel even as he telekinetically brought Littleknight close enough to grab, pinning the wriggling creature against his chest with his foreleg.
His left foreleg.
“Then I suppose there’s only one choice left,” admitted Lex.
That was enough to bring a small smile to Sissel’s face. “I’m glad you realize that. But I’m going to need you to say it out loud, if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly,” granted Lex with a nod, even as he put the desperate plan he’d come up with a moment ago into action.
An instant later, Woodheart vanished from Sissel’s grasp.
For the first time since she’d introduced herself, the giant’s composure faltered. Her eyes widened as her lips pulled back in a sudden grimace, fingers contracting around empty air. But even as she recovered her stance, momentarily thrown off-balance by the sudden loss of the druid’s weight, the sound of a shuddering breath being drawn pulled Sissel’s gaze over to where her hostage had gone.
Gently lowering Woodheart to the ground after she’d appeared in his grasp, the smile that Lex gave Sissel then was pure viciousness.
Giving in to Sissel’s demand to go slay that dragon she’d been assigned to kill had never been an option for Lex.
Even overlooking the fact that doing so would allow the snow-skinned humanoid to manipulate him at will – there was an entire village of hostages she could take only a few days from here – doing what she wanted would have accomplished little. As soon as she had his agreement, Lex had no doubt that Sissel and her siblings would withdraw to whatever base they were operating from, taking Woodheart with them. If that happened, rescuing the druid would become exponentially more difficult. Worse, there was absolutely no reason for the pale-skinned humanoid to keep her word about returning their hostage after Hvitdod was slain; given how many ponies these creatures had already murdered, it was more likely that Sissel would kill Woodheart as soon as the mare was no longer useful.
Which meant that the druid needed to be reacquired now. As worried as Lex was about Thermal Draft, he at least had ideas – not very good ones, but ideas nonetheless – as to how she could be saved. But Woodheart was only seconds away from death, and there likely wouldn’t be another chance to get her back even if he made a deal to buy her a little more time.
Which meant that his only choice was to bet everything on Littleknight.
And on the Night Mare’s divine authority.
Upon taking hold of the almiraj, Lex had immediately focused his will upon the creature, using the power that his goddess had given him to enhance its connection to its mistress.
There was no guarantee that doing so would allow it to punch through the spell that Sissel – or whichever member of her misbegotten clan – had used to suppress the link between the two of them, but Lex had felt confident that it could. After all, when he’d fought Tlerekithres back in Vanhoover, the kraken had used its magic to try and resist being compelled via divine authority. But Lex had been able to push back against that, channeling his own power into his goddess-given ability, and had managed to keep the kraken at bay.
If divine authority could resist even the formidable magic of a creature fearsome enough to command an entire undersea army – as well as act as the focus for Vanhoover’s elemental bleed – then there was every reason to believe it could overwhelm a spell from the monsters in front of him now.
But that was only half of what Lex had wanted to accomplish.
His understanding of the link between himself and Solvei was still imperfect. But according to what Mystaria and her friends had posited, it was similar to what Woodheart and Littleknight shared. And he’d already confirmed – back during their fight at the inn – that Littleknight was subject to the Night Mare’s divine authority.
And while Lex had never been able to bring himself to experiment with enhancing his connection to Solvei – the fact that they were already connected in such an intimate way was unsettling enough; the prospect of deepening their bond, even temporarily, wasn’t a possibility that he wanted to explore – there was no reason why he couldn’t use divine authority to augment Littleknight’s link to Woodheart.
While Mystaria had never mentioned the druid being able to teleport her familiar to her side, instead indicating that their link was weak enough that it essentially collapsed if they weren’t within a mile of each other, Lex’s connection to Solvei made it clear that such a thing was within the realm of possibility. What was less certain was whether or not divine authority could not only augment Woodheart and Littleknight’s bond to the point of actualizing that possibility, but also reverse it, allowing the almiraj to bring the druid to him rather than the other way around.
As a hypothesis it was sound; the master-familiar bond was heavily slanted toward the former, but it was still a two-way connection. If he used divine authority to empower it – now that they were within its normal range of operation – and allow Littleknight’s overwhelming desire to be reunited with his mistress as a catalyst, then in theory it would allow the almiraj to teleport Woodheart from wherever Sissel was hiding nearby to his current location, which was in Lex’s grasp.
And now, that theory had been proven correct.
With shrieks of joy coming from his allies, and cries of alarm from his enemies, Lex’s eyes lit up as he made the black crystals imprisoning the rest of Fail Forward turn to dust. But he kept his gaze directly on Sissel as he spoke aloud the one and only choice that she’d insisted he say:
The reaction to Lex’s murderous intent, as well as Woodheart’s suddenly being recaptured, was a stunned silence from all present.
Then bedlam descended as everyone took action all at once.
Grisela snarled a curse as she made a motion as though drawing a curtain closed, causing her to immediately fade from sight. That was enough to earn Solvei’s attention, the winter wolf – still clad in her black crystal armor and having increased her size – leaping at where the hag had been only moments before, only to snarl as she caught nothing but air for her trouble. But she had no time to focus on her failure as Blat, not at all discouraged from how poorly he’d fared against Solvei barely a minute ago, tackled her from the side, barely managing to unbalance the wolf as the two of them went down in a heap, howling as they tore at each other.
Nearly as loud was Akna’s shouting in Olelowai, ordering her elementals to attack. The frozen behemoths immediately moved to comply, with half of their number moving to back up Solvei – sweeping their thick arms around in wide motions as they looked for Grisela – while the others raised their fists as they strode toward Paska and Vidrig.
Unwilling to wait to meet her enemies, Vidrig threw herself at them, giving a screech of fury that sounded like a chalkboard being clawed to pieces. Ducking beneath a punch from the closest elemental as she got within its reach, Vidrig swung her axe with her full strength, gripping the handle with both hands as she pivoted at the hip, planting the blade deep in the creature’s leg. But with no muscles to sunder or blood to shed, her attack seemed to do little more than annoy her opponent, and it kicked out hard with its injured leg a moment later, doubling Vidrig over as she was sent flying nearly fifteen feet through the air.
Cursing as he saw how ineffective his sister’s attack had been, Paska spun out of the way as two more of Akna’s icy servitors closed in, nimbly avoiding a heavy stomp followed by a punch from a frozen arm as thick as he was. Giving ground, Paska didn’t bother swinging his hammer at the creatures, instead fumbling with a leather tube hanging from his belt. “Vidrig, these things are big, but they’re slow!” he called, yanking out a scroll which he immediately shook, unfurling the rolled parchment. “Keep moving, and try to-, ngh!”
The source of his frustrated grunt was obvious, as the left half of the scroll he’d been preparing to use – now cleanly bisected from the right half still in his grasp – fluttered to the ground, courtesy of Shadow Star. The masked mare snickered as she waved her dagger at Paska tauntingly. “Your skin may be too thick to cut, but your gear isn’t nearly so tough!”
Swearing under his breath as he swung his hammer at the interloper, Paska’s attack failed to connect as Shadow retreated, taking cover behind the oncoming elementals. Unwilling to press the attack, Paska couldn’t do more than scowl as he continued to fall back, putting everything into defense as he worked to avoid the heavy strikes from the towering pillars of living ice.
That it required so much of his concentration simply to avoid being bludgeoned by the trio of elementals that were moving to surround him allowed Valor to charge across the battlefield freely. Despite passing within range of Paska’s hammer, it didn’t surprise the mare-turned-bear in the least when he failed to take advantage of her guard being down, knowing that he was too busy defending himself to get in a strike against her. Instead, she went right by him, intent on getting to where Vidrig was picking herself up before the ponderous elementals reached her.
Her target had just gotten back to her feet when Valor slammed bodily into her. Struck by several hundred pounds of fury, the two of them went tumbling, hitting a small creek that sent them both rolling down a low incline. Even then they both kept fighting, as Vidrig brought her axe up with a shriek, trying to press the blade of it against Valor’s neck. But the furious bear was already too close for her to use her weapon to its full effect, and Vidrig’s battle cry turned into a scream of pain as Valor’s teeth clamped down on her upper arm and bit down hard.
From Lex’s position, Vidrig’s cry of pain was only barely drowned out by Mystaria and Spinner’s calling Woodheart’s name as they ran up to where the druid was laying in front of him, nonresponsive.
“Hang on, Woodsy! I’ve got a healing spell ready to go!” muttered Spinner breathlessly as she threw herself down by the druid’s side, pressing her hoof against her. Immediately several of her friend’s bruises faded, her breathing becoming noticeably easier. Her condition improved further when Mystaria finished her own healing spell a moment later, leaving Woodheart with no visible injuries.
But she still didn’t awaken.
“Why isn’t she waking up?!” Putting a hoof on her friend’s shoulder, Spinner shook Woodheart, gently at first but with increasing force as her attempts to rouse the druid produced no effect. “C’mon, Woodheart, open your eyes already!”
“Meep! Meep meep meep!” Waving his horn at Spinner threateningly when her efforts threatened to wrench Woodheart’s shoulder out of her socket, Littleknight turned back to its unresponsive mistress when the bard finally let Woodheart go. Licking her cheek, he meeped sadly when his nuzzling received no response, repeating the attempt.
“I’m not seeing any weird spells on her,” noted Thermal Draft, having thrown together a basic spell to look into the magical spectrum. “Could this be some sort of poison?”
“It might be. If she was just knocked out, that much healing magic should have been enough to bring her back to consciousness.” Despite her voice being level, Mystaria was turning pale as she gripped her holy symbol. “I’m going to try a restorative spell. It won’t cure any toxins she might have been exposed to, but it might help alleviate-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish as Lex began casting a spell, his eyes locked onto Sissel as he fired off a series of arcane syllables, his hoof making a series of precise gestures.
Across from him, the pale giant was doing the same.
Lex finished his spell first, causing all three mares to reflexively yelp as the wind suddenly picked up around them. The breeze was strong enough that Littleknight was torn from his place at Woodheart’s side, and it was only because Mystaria was in his path that the almiraj wasn’t blown away, with the nun grabbing onto him as she hunkered down, her cloak billowing around her. Spinner very nearly lost her lute, hugging the instrument to her chest as she shot Lex a stupefied look. “What’re you-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Sissel’s spell went off.
Immediately, the four of them – as well as Littleknight and Woodheart – were enveloped in a thick yellowish-green fog. Wet and heavy, it exuded a foul chemical odor that both mares could feel as much as smell it, the vapors immediately causing a stinging sensation to erupt across their skin even as a burning began to fill their eyes and mouths.
Fortunately, the air current that Lex had conjured seized the poisonous mist before it was able to settle over them, the breeze grabbing the vapors and flinging them toward the edge of the battlefield where they were no harm to anyone.
“I think that was a ‘cloudkill’ spell,” coughed Mystaria, one hoof coming up to rub her nose as she took a shuddering breath of clean air. “If you hadn’t conjured that wind wall, we all would have...”
But Lex wasn’t listening, already starting on his next spell even as he reached out to contact Solvei telepathically. Solvei, if you can’t finish that creature off in the next few seconds, let Akna’s elementals deal with it! You need to work with Thermal Draft to make sure Grisela doesn’t sneak up on anyone while she's invisible!
I...yes, Master.
Solvei knew that the correct course of action was to abandon her fight with Blat in favor of immediately falling back to where Master, his mate, and those other ponies were. The fact that he’d telepathically told her to come back – rather than simply summoning her to his side – meant that he was concentrating hard on his magical duel with Sissel. It was the same reason why he hadn’t verbally reminded Thermal Draft to keep tabs on the hag’s position, since he couldn’t afford to cease casting, already midway through his next spell.
If there was any chance that the winter hag was sneaking up on him, trying to take advantage of how distracted he and the others were, that was more than enough reason to ignore the thrashing manticore and return to her master’s side.
But the words he’d said just now – telling her that if she couldn’t finish her enemy off, to let Akna’s creatures do it instead – prickled at the touch of nervous jealousy she’d felt for the adlet previously. A glance in Akna’s direction showed that she was still directing the ice elementals she’d summoned, rattling off a string of commands that kept each of them moving, acting as a cohesive unit, and Solvei felt her envy deepen. She’s got her own little army, and I’m here struggling with just one enemy!
It wasn’t just a display of tactical prowess on the adlet’s part, but rather a show of which of them was more worthy of remaining at Lex’s side, and in that moment it was more than Solvei could bear.
Wrenching her head out of the way as Blat – having been pinned beneath her – tried to claw at her eyes through her armor, Solvei called upon the arctic magic that her master had given her. Although she could use a modest degree of cryomancy – as he’d called it – without limit, she also possessed a modest reservoir of magical strength that allowed her to surpass how much power she could use at any one time. When called upon, she could use her magic to cover a wider area, last longer than normal, or otherwise simply make her magic far colder...and far deadlier.
It was the latter effect that she went with now, gathering the same deep blue glow between her jaws that she’d used to finish off Prevarius. While she was fairly sure that Blat had some sort of spell on him to protect against the cold, he didn’t seem like he was completely immune to it the way that remorhaz they’d fought yesterday had been. Which meant that if she hit him with the coldest magic she was capable of using...
“KILL YOU!” howled Blat, scratching at Solvei’s face, knowing that her eyes and the inside of her mouth were the only vulnerable parts of her. “CRACK SHELL, THEN EAT Y-”
Howling as she opened her jaws wide, Solvei poured all of the magic she’d been able to gather into her breath weapon, striking Blat in the face from less than three feet away.
Underneath her, the manticore began to shake, his body convulsing as his head was frozen solid.
Sneering down at where the creature’s face was frozen in mid-snarl, Solvei allowed herself a moment of satisfaction before she leaned down and crushed Blat’s skull between her jaws. Gulping down the satisfying slurry, she licked her lips as she stood up, feeling better already. “Looks like my ‘shell’ was harder than your head.”
Her tail wagging, Solvei couldn’t help but hope that her master had noticed her victory, even with how busy he-
“LEX! BEHIND YOU!”
Thermal Draft frightened cry sent Solvei’s heart into her throat, and she whirled around...
Just in time to see Grisela fade back into visibility, cackling in triumph as she brought her staff of black ice around to strike Lex in the side of the head.
Grisela cackled as the three mares who’d been huddled around the unicorn screamed his name in unison. “Worried about Sissel’s magic, were you?” she jeered at where the stallion had fallen, laying face-down in the snow. “Should’ve been worried about me.”
“Right back at you!” roared Spinner as she leaped at Grisela, bringing her lute down in an overhead strike aimed directly at the hag’s cranium.
Snorting, Grisela didn’t even bother to block the attack, allowing Spinner’s downward smash to connect unimpeded. An instant later, the back of the weapon collided with the hag’s head with such force that the instrument’s wooden exterior splintered, revealing the metal construction underneath. Even that dented under the force of the blow, causing the lute to emit a tortured groan as the metal warped, the sound a far cry from the melodies Spinner normally coaxed from it.
But as ruinous as the hit was to the instrument, Grisela herself didn’t sustain even the slightest bit of damage, instead bringing her staff around in an almost contemptuous swing as she planted the end of it beneath Spinner’s ribs, doubling the bard over as a rush of air and blood flew from her mouth. “Never did get that meal I wanted,” she snickered, licking her cracked lips as the filidh collapsed. “Make sure to grab you for a bite to eat once this is over.”
“If you’re hungry, go ahead and eat this!” Mystaria’s declaration came as she finished casting a spell, rearing up on her hind legs and putting her front hooves next to each other as she unleashed a cone of fire directly into the hag’s face.
But despite her gelid nature, Grisela scoffed as the flames failed to burn her, her innate resistance to hostile magic allowing her to ignore the spell completely. “Not carrying a torch for you,” she sneered, one hand reaching out to grab the holy symbol hanging around Mystaria’s neck. The nun had just enough time to let out an indignant cry before Grisela yanked hard on the pendant, pulling Mystaria directly into a headbutt.
The hag’s skull slammed against the earth mare’s with an audible crack, and Mystaria wobbled in place, the flames from her hooves fizzling out as she lost control of her spell. For a moment her jaw worked soundlessly, a trickle of blood running down between her eyes and around her muzzle. But before the trail of red reached her chin, her eyes had rolled back in her head, going limp as Grisela released her pendant, allowing Mystaria to collapse next to Woodheart.
“Two down, one to-, OOF!” Her quip lost as something tackled her from behind, Grisela’s arms flailed as she went stumbling, barely managing to keep her feet under her. It was only with some effort that she managed to arrest her momentum, snarling as she looked over her shoulder. “You!”
“Me,” shot back Thermal Draft grimly, not having enough breath to say anything else as she put all of her energy into flapping her wings as hard as she could. Fortunately, she was moving in the direction of the air current that Lex had generated, her every feather grabbing the wind as she flew harder, pressing against Grisela’s back as she fought to drive the winter hag forward.
Directly toward the poisonous fog that Sissel had conjured.
Not having dissipated after having been blown away from their intended target, the yellowish-green vapors remained where the wind had pushed them, only a short distance from where the ponies had been huddling. It was a distance that was growing shorter with each passing moment, as Thermal Draft continued to wrestle with the struggling hag, the wind helping her to slowly-but-surely drive Grisela closer to the noxious fog...
“Not gonna let you!” hissed Grisela, driving her staff into the ground directly in front of her at a low angle.
Held like that, it was enough to brace her, and although Drafty beat her wings so hard they felt like they were about to fall off, the two of them came to a halt just a few feet from the edge of the poison fog. “No!” moaned the pegasus, feeling her fatigue catching up to her, her wings slowing down despite her best efforts. “NO! You’re going in there! This time, I’m going to be the one who saves-, AAAAGH!!!”
Her scream of pain came as Grisela – carefully holding her staff with one hand to keep bracing herself – reached back and grabbed a fistful of Drafty’s mane, twisting it cruelly. “Can’t save your friends,” hissed the winter hag, pivoting at the waist as she tried to pull the pegasus off of her. “Can’t save your stallion.”
Glancing at the miasma in front of her for a moment, Grisela leered at Thermal Draft as she tightened her grip, preparing to pull the mare off and throw her into the poison fog. “Can’t even save yourse-”
“Meep meep!”
“Huh?” Blinking at how close the unexpected sound was, Grisela glanced down. She had just enough time to see Littleknight rush past her – the horned rabbit letting the wind fling him forward as he galloped across the snow – and kick her staff clear.
Shrieking as she lost the makeshift crosspiece she’d been leaning on, Grisela released Thermal Draft as she stumbled forward, still being pushed by the pegasus. The end result was that Drafty – having been caught by surprise as well – fell the ground, just barely managing to snatch up Littleknight before the almiraj could be blown into the deadly cloud of mist. But there was nothing to stop Grisela as she kept careening toward Sissel’s spell, a wail of fright erupting from her throat as she reached the edge of the cloud...
Only to collide with a wall of ice that was suddenly there.
Thermal Draft could only gape at the sight, mouth hanging opening. “Wh-what...?”
The fog cloud was gone now, blocked from sight by the ten-foot ice wall that was now encircling it, the toxic vapors now safely contained within the frozen ring. This...this is what happened back in that village, when Mystaria and the others were trying to get away! Grisela made an ice wall to stop them! Except this time she used it to save herself!
“Actually gave me a scare,” panted Grisela, hanging her head as she leaned against the wall she’d conjured. Slowly righting herself, she raised her gaze to Thermal Draft, and the pegasus flinched at the simmering rage she saw there. “Your turn to be scared now.”
Snarling, she whipped her staff around, pointing the end of it at Thermal Draft and Littleknight as she unleashed a blast of supernaturally-chilled air.
The warding against cold that Lex had ordered Solvei to place on everyone during their journey blunted the worst of Grisela’s attack, but it wasn’t enough to completely protect them from it. As it was, the sudden pulse of frigidity sent both the pegasus and the almiraj tumbling, their limbs going numb and their breath momentarily stolen by the sheer numbing cold wrapping around them. Unable to do anything but shiver, neither could react as the winter hag shuffled over to them, her face twisted with rage.
“Actually thought you could defeat me?” sneered Grisela. “Weak ponies with weaker magic? Ha!” She lashed out with her staff then, the end of it catching Thermal Draft across her temple and making the pegasus see stars, disrupting the spell she’d been trying to put together. “Gnawing on your kind’s bones was more trouble than you were!”
“Y-y-you won’t w-win...” shivered Thermal Draft, her lungs feeling like they’d been frozen in her chest. “L-L-Lex w-will k-k-k-kill you...”
“Think so?” leered the winter hag, looking back at where the fallen stallion still lay, not having moved. “Then you can watch as I make him mine.” Ignoring the wind, she strode toward where Lex was, continuing to taunt Thermal Draft as she moved. “Defenses are all down now, looks like. Gonna get in his head and make him look only at me. Then he’ll kill Hvitdod just because it’ll make me smile. Be smiling when I gut him afterward, too.”
“OVER MY DEAD BODY!”
“Kill the witch! Pepehi i ke kapua!”
Solvei and Akna’s voices were enough to earn a glance from Grisela, watching as the winter wolf bounded directly toward her – only seconds away – with the elementals moving to follow her.
That was when Sissel finished her spell.
Immediately, the grass lying dormant underneath the snow began to grow, thickening and lengthening into long vines that rose up from under the wintry blanket covering them and lashed out, wrapping around Solvei, Akna, and the elementals, holding them all in place. The two lupines both yelped and cursed as they found themselves trapped, the elementals remaining silent even as they strained, trying in vain to tear themselves free. But their thrashing only seemed to attract the overgrown foliage more, causing additional vines to lash around their arms and legs, immediately going taut and binding them in place.
Then the vines caught fire.
Agonized screams immediately tore themselves from Akna and Solvei’s throats, their innately frigid natures leaving them especially vulnerable to the heat. Nor did the elementals fare any better, their movements suddenly becoming pained as their bodies began to melt, steam rising off of their icy forms.
But none of them were able to free themselves. Nor did the vines seem to be adversely affected despite being immolated. Beneath the flames, the greenery remained unburned, showing no signs of blackening or withering.
For her part, Grisela let out a relieved sigh before glancing at her oversized sister. “Cutting it close, Sissel!”
“It was necessary,” shrugged the pale-skinned giant. “I needed time to make sure that spell would have enough power to punch through any heat-warding they might have, without being strong enough to kill them outright, since they’re going to help kill Hvitdod for us. Now shut up and stand watch to make sure nothing else happens; we need to get started before that pony comes to or his servants break free.”
She didn’t wait for a reply before glancing over at the last living member of their band. “Paska, stop fooling around and go fetch Vidrig. We’re going with our fallback plan.”
Looking up from where he had Shadow Star pinned against the ground – and holding the haft of his hammer tight across her throat, causing Shadow’s frantic struggling to slow as she fought a losing battle to take another breath of air – Paska raised an eyebrow. “Is that necessary?”
Sissel gave a single nod. “Taking hostages didn’t work, so we’re going to have to force things. If he has the same sort of protection against mental intrusions that Grisela said his wolf does” – she nodded at where Solvei was still screaming and struggling within the burning vines – “then it’s going to take the three of us pooling our magic in order to break it down. Once we do, my possession spell should work on him.”
“That’ll only give you a few hours to get his body to Hvitdod’s lair,” noted Paska, sounding almost conversational even as Shadow’s thrashing grew weaker. “Not to mention that it banks an awful lot on the idea that once you have him pick a fight with the dragon, you can end the possession and he’ll finish Hvitdod off instead of just retreating.”
“Hvitdod won’t let him escape. Besides, it’s our only choice,” replied Sissel. “Since a creature’s magic is connected to their life force rather than their body, I won’t be able to use his powers even after I’ve taken over his corporeal self. This way, he’ll be able to bring everything he’s got to bear against Hvitdod, with no risk to us. Now go get Vidrig; every second we delay is another second that things can go wrong.”
“Have it your way,” shrugged Paska, standing up. As he did so, he removed his hammer from across Shadow’s neck, causing her to immediately suck in a breath. But that was all she had a chance to do, as Paska brought his hammer around to strike her in the side of her head, rendering her unconscious in an instant.
Watching as her brother turned toward the creek where Vidrig and Valor had rolled out of sight, Grisela’s lip curled as she turned back toward Lex. “Still enough time for me to have some fun before we put him to work.”
“Don’t,” warned Sissel. “We’re starting as soon as Vidrig gets here.”
“Won’t take long,” snickered Grisela, putting a foot on Lex’s hip and rolling him over so he was face-up. “Just gonna-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish before Lex struck.
Lex had long since stopped bothering to count the number of times that his plans had gone awry.
With how often some X-factor had disrupted his carefully-laid arrangements and stratagems, it made more sense to count the instances when something hadn’t gone wrong. And those times were few and far between. So much so that it had become easier to simply presume that, no matter what task he was undertaking – whether it was fighting for his life against a body-snatching devil or planning a reception for rich ponies from Las Pegasus – something would somehow, inevitably, go wrong.
This time, that “something” was named Sissel.
Having faced Grisela and Paska in battle before, as well as having seen Blat and Vidrig fight, Lex had been ready to encounter those four again. And initially, things had gone in the manner he’d predicted; indeed, after realizing that their enemies were using Littleknight to spy on them, everything had fallen into place. Feeding them information designed to lure them out, combined with tactics designed to bypass and minimize the techniques that they’d previously employed, had put Grisela and her monstrous brethren at a marked disadvantage.
But Sissel’s presence had been beyond his ability to plan for. While Lex had anticipated that there might be more than just the four foes that he’d previously encountered – their repeated references to someone they called “Mother” had made it clear that they were working at another’s behest – he’d hoped that any reinforcements they’d bring would utilize the same combination of invisibility and anti-tracks/scent that the others had previously, since he’d already come up with countermeasures for those. That Sissel had instead concealed her presence and subsequently made herself known using completely different methods than her siblings – once Lex had figured out that the giant was projecting both her image and her magic from somewhere nearby – made it clear to him that he needed to come up with an entirely new strategy for defeating her.
Rescuing Woodheart, however, took priority over that.
It had been in service to that goal that Lex had returned to corporeal form while negotiating with Sissel.
Doing so had painted a target on his back, of course – he was far more vulnerable in his physical body than if he’d stayed in shadow-form, having initially turned incorporeal when they’d sprung their ambush on Grisela and the others – but that couldn’t be helped. He was the one those monsters were after, which meant that he needed them to stay focused on him rather than his companions. If, once the fighting resumed, he was in a state where his enemies’ attacks were largely ineffective, there was a very real chance they’d direct their ire toward the others. Solvei and Akna could stand up to the level of aggression their foes could bring to bear; the other ponies in their group, however, would likely be killed in short order.
But again, Sissel had overturned that plan.
That she’d put Thermal Draft’s life in danger – via directing Paska to lay some sort of lethal but slow-acting curse on the pegasus – after he’d rescued Thermal Draft had been bad enough. But once he’d made it clear that he could not be controlled through hostage-taking, Sissel hadn’t simply focused on him the way he’d hoped. Instead, she’d immediately cut loose with a killing spell, one with an area large enough to target not only himself but also Spinner, Mystaria, Woodheart, Littleknight, and Thermal Draft as well.
Fortunately, both the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale and Xiriel had made use of similar magic, and just to be safe Lex had made sure to prepare a means of dealing with such things when he’d renewed his thaumaturgical spellcasting during the recent equinox. While he felt confident he could have survived Sissel’s “cloudkill” spell, as Mystaria had called it – if nothing else, he could have turned back into a shadow to avoid the poison – the narrowly-averted deaths of the ponies around him had been a sobering reminder that the pale-skinned giant was a spellcaster whose prowess far eclipsed that of her allies.
But that hadn’t been all that Lex had realized as they’d begun their magical duel...
Unfortunately, it had been that moment when the vulnerability that he’d voluntarily assumed had been taken advantage of, with Grisela managing to strike him from behind.
The hag had put all of her strength into the blow, and through the sickening haze of pain and nausea that the strike had caused him, Lex remained cognizant of the irony. He had just called Solvei to his side because he’d realized that making himself a target was wasted against a spellcaster using area-effect attack spells, but the wolf hadn’t arrived in time, leaving Grisela free to take advantage of his having deliberately left himself open just when he’d realized the futility of that strategy.
But the hag hadn’t moved to follow up on her attack, and through the ringing in his ears, Lex had heard the voices of his companions raised in anger, with Grisela’s sneering reply following a moment later.
Whatever they were doing, it had given him enough time to push past the sickening pain, concentrating as he put a new, desperate idea into play.
If this worked, it would swing things back in their favor.
If it didn’t, then Thermal Draft and the others would likely be killed.
Around him, Lex could hear Akna and Solvei shouting, registering intense guilt coming from the latter for some reason. But that changed as Sissel finished another spell, causing the adlet and the winter wolf to both start screaming in pain a second later. The sound – as well as the sudden fear and agony coming from Solvei – was a dagger through Lex’s heart, and he found himself paralyzed by sudden indecision, overcome by a powerful urge to drop everything else and protect the winter wolf.
He knew that was the wrong decision, that doing so would give away his chance to potentially turn things around, and yet Lex found himself hesitating anyway. Although heat resistance had been one of the powers that Solvei had gained as a result of their bond, that protection had its limits, and right now the fire she was enveloped in exceeded them. For a creature like her, whose natural body temperature was far below freezing, even a slight burn was intensely painful and deeply frightening. And right now Solvei was-
“Won’t take long,” came Grisela’s cacophonous voice from right above him as he felt a foot come down on his hip.
Lex knew he was out of time.
Solvei, bear with it a little longer! I swear I’ll save you!
I...understand...Master...! came her telepathic response, her mental voice laced with agony. Please...don’t worry...about me...!
“Just gonna-”
Not waiting for Grisela to finish as she kicked him over onto his back, Lex immediately turned his head, calling on his dark magic as he lashed out.
But not at the hag.
Instead, his gaze was locked onto Sissel.
“I found your weak point!” he snarled, spite overcoming him as he made black crystals erupt at her feet. The giant wasn’t really there, which meant that the crystals had no chance of harming her.
Nor were they supposed to. Instead, if he was right-
“KYAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
The terrified scream that rang out then came from where Sissel was, but it wasn’t emitted by the giant. Instead, a flicker of surprise crossed Sissel’s face, only for the expression to become unreadable as her image became laced with cracks. Then her projection flickered, like a filmstrip that had lost its frames, appearing and disappearing in rapid succession.
Then she was gone completely, her spell broken.
And where she’d been was a tiny creature – looking like a winged cat with a thick, nubby tail and a vaguely simian head – holding a small mirror, one which was shattered thanks to the black crystal that had pierced it, very nearly striking its bearer, who was whimpering and backing away in fright.
But Lex couldn’t have cared less about whatever that creature was, momentarily seized by a rush of relief. It had worked!
That Sissel had been able to send and receive audiovisual information through her spell had clued Lex in that it operated in a manner similar to scrying. But that she’d been able to cast spells through that link – powerful ones such as her “cloudkill” spell – had made it clear that there was more going on than a minor modification to the remote-viewing spell he was familiar with. His own spell required a specialized mirror to act as a focus for the spell to operate from, stabilizing it enough that it allowed for very, very small amounts of additional magic to be threaded through the sensor it created at its destination.
But what if there was another focus being used in a similar manner? One placed, not at the spell’s point of origin, but at its terminus?
That would still allow for only a short range of transmission – even if the end points were bolstered, the connection itself was still entirely made of magical energy, and so would quickly degrade if made to convey large amounts of power across an extended distance – but in theory would allow for spells of considerable magnitude to be cast through such a projection.
But only as long as the focus at the endpoint was intact. Just like when he’d smashed the mirror he’d been using to spy on Adagio back in Vanhoover, the spell wouldn’t be able to maintain itself if its anchor was destroyed.
That had all been conjecture on his part, of course, but Lex hadn’t been able to think of any other way that Sissel would be able to cast such powerful magic via a conduit. But that didn’t mean he’d been willing to leave things entirely to chance.
During the brief interval when Thermal Draft and the others had kept Grisela distracted, Lex had pushed past the pain from the witch’s sneak attack and channeled magic through his body and into his circlet, forcibly expanding its ability to let him see into the magical spectrum. After that, it had taken only an instant to surreptitiously glance in Sissel’s direction.
The last time he’d looked her over that way, he’d been able to deduce that he was speaking to a projection, but little else. But with his circlet enhanced, he’d been able to spot that which had escaped his notice before.
The image of Sissel was itself an illusion, reconstructing her appearance and voice from wherever she was hiding. But overshadowed by that aura were signs of other spells – conjuration as well as transmutation – suggesting that something had been created and subsequently reshaped before being brought to where Sissel’s image was now emanating from. He’d caught hints of weaker illusions as well, as though to hide whatever had been brought there.
That those weaker illusions had apparently been concealing a living creature – the thing looked like a tiny, ugly rendition of a sphinx, of all things – had been only somewhat unexpected. Presumably she’d been tasked with bringing the focus for Sissel’s spell there. That the form of that focus was a mirror, however...that had confirmed everything Lex had guessed at.
And now that it was broken, Sissel was effectively out of the fight.
At least, unless she decides to put in a personal appearance, Lex knew.
That was a very real possibility. Grisela had apparently decided that this was important enough for her to be here in the flesh – the ice wall around Sissel’s poison cloud, near which lay Thermal Draft and Littleknight, both shivering, made that much clear – so the odds that the icy giant would do no less were high. If they were as desperate as they seemed to have him kill that dragon, Hvitdod, for them, then Sissel wouldn’t let a setback like this keep her from trying to force his hoof.
But at least now, when she arrived, she’d be vulnerable.
And more than that, by the time she gets here, swore Lex as he flipped over onto his hooves, dodging a heavy strike from Grisela as the hag brought her staff down on where he’d been a moment ago, shrieking in anger.
Grisela’s furious shriek brought a smirk to Lex’s face, shooting a glance past her to see that the bald human – or whatever he really was, since that disgusting one-eyed hound he’d turned into when he’d cursed Thermal Draft suggested that his current form was a disguise – was already hurrying back toward them, hammer held at the ready. Good, noted Lex calmly. That will make it easier to finish both of them off before Sissel gets here.
Then there was no more time for analysis as Grisela moved toward him, twirling her black ice staff as she snarled.
Still midway through the process of rising to his hooves from where he’d been laying a moment ago, Lex wasn’t able to fall back in the face of the hag’s furious offense. Instead, he availed himself of the combative magic woven into his cloak and amulet, bringing a hoof up to catch the end of Grisela’s staff mere inches before it would have impacted the side of his face. Even then, the blow was powerful enough that he could already feel his foreleg throb.
But Grisela wasn’t finished. Instead of trying to break past his defense, she reversed her momentum, switching her weight from one leg to the other as she pivoted her hips, swinging the other end of her staff around from the opposite direction.
This time Lex wasn’t fast enough, and he couldn’t hold back a pained grunt as she caught him in the ribs.
But while the impact ached, his defensive enchantments soaked up the worst of the damage, and the staff’s icy chill was unable to get past the protection against cold he’d had Solvei use on him before. The result was that, although he could already feel a bruise forming, Lex was able to ignore the pain as he stepped in closer, lashing out with a hoof aimed right at Grisela’s face.
Sneering, she simply tilted her head to the side, his strike hitting nothing but air. “Call that a punch?” she scoffed.
“Actually, no,” taunted Lex even as he concentrated, pouring his body’s natural magic into the wire wrapped around his foreleg...the same foreleg that was now extended past Grisela’s head, pointed directly at where Solvei and Akna were trapped in the tangles of burning grass.
Healing and protection from fire! invoked Lex silently, directing the power of the Night Mare’s divine authority toward both of them. There was nothing he could do about the melting elementals, however; he’d tried using this power on the one that Akna had summoned to stand guard over their meeting last night, and hadn’t been surprised to find that it was completely unable to affect it. Of course, he had no duty of care to the elementals anyway; Akna had explained that there were simply nature spirits housed in temporary bodies, returning to their natural state when those fell apart.
An instant later the Night Mare’s power washed over Solvei and Akna, and the agonized screams from the two of them turned into choked whimpering. But Lex didn’t have time to feel relieved that they were no longer in immediate danger, since he could already tell that – despite the relief that he was now registering from Solvei – the winter wolf was still in pain, albeit nowhere near as much as before. Likewise, Akna was still writhing in her flaming prison, and through the vines wrapped around her Lex could see that her fur remained blackened and burned, rather than regaining the pristine whiteness it normally possessed.
Sissel’s spell is burning hotter than divine authority can protect them from! realized Lex with a sudden rush of alarm.
For the briefest instant he hesitated, trying to figure out if that was because of how strong of a spellcaster the snow-skinned giant was, or if it was because of how difficult it was to channel power into Solvei and Akna. The winter wolf had become harder to imbue with power as a result of their bond, due to her already having so much magical energy in her body that giving her more now came with increased resistance. If Akna, a shaman among her people who had already undergone a religious rite imbuing her with additional strength, was similar-
“Worry less about your wolves,” hissed Grisela, reaching up to grab his extended hoof with one bony hand, spinning in place as she pulled hard on it. “And more about yourself!”
Lex didn’t have a chance to respond as she yanked him over her shoulder, slamming him into the ground hard. The air left his lungs in a rush, the snow cushioning the impact not at all, leaving him momentarily dazed. That was all the opportunity Grisela needed to bring her staff down, driving the end of it toward his midsection.
Reacting on instinct, Lex grabbed the end of the black ice rod in his telekinesis, yanking it askew. The force with which she swung the weapon down made it hard for him to get a grip, his purple aura manifesting around it just for a moment, but that was enough to pull it just slightly off-center, causing her strike to miss its mark.
Rather than counterattack, Lex instead extended his hoof toward the burning tangle of vines again.
Summoning Solvei out of the fiery undergrowth meant leaving Akna to burn, which was why Lex’s first action had been to insulate and heal both of them; the winter wolf might have already possessed a degree of resistance against heat damage, but Akna would likely have died without immediate relief. But while he hadn’t been able to completely protect them, he’d at least managed to make it so that Akna was no longer in imminent danger of death. Which means that if I summon Solvei to my side now-
“Say goodbye to your masked friend!”
Paska’s voice – still too far away to be an immediate concern – earned only a brief glance from Lex...and then it commanded his full attention, as he saw the human’s hammer on a downward arc directly toward the unconscious Shadow Star’s head.
All thoughts of Solvei left Lex’s mind then as his horn lit up, calling on his dark magic. In an instant, thick bars of black crystal spread out over Shadow in a lattice, Paska’s hammer bouncing off of them without harming the pony underneath.
Rather than relief at having saved the earth mare, however, it was trepidation that ran through Lex then. He was deliberately trying to get my attention! swore the unicorn silently as he rolled to his hooves. He knew that I was about to summon-
Again, he didn’t have time to finish his thought before Grisela was on him. “Nenet!” she cackled as a sweep of her staff impacted one of his back legs and sent him stumbling. “Kill the other ponies! Now!”
Still standing where Sissel’s image had been, the ugly little sphinx blinked its beady eyes. “Wh-what?!”
“Kill the other ponies!” repeated Grisela as she kept advancing on Lex, determined not to give him another opening. “And their little rabbit too!”
“But...but I’ve never-”
“JUST DO IT!” screamed the hag as Lex reared up onto his back legs, crossing his hooves in front of his face to catch a side-swing of her staff that would have given him a concussion if it had landed. “OR I’LL TEAR YOUR WINGS OFF!”
The sight of the sphinx – Nenet – gulping and giving a hesitant nod made Lex snarl under his breath, finally knocking Grisela’s staff away.
When he’d managed to disrupt Sissel’s projection, he’d felt confident that he’d be able to finish off the rest of her twisted little family before she arrived. But that had been because he’d intended to summon Solvei out of the burning foliage she was trapped in, and allowing the winter wolf to wreak havoc while he dipped into his thaumaturgical spellcasting, which should have been more than enough to put an end to Paska, Vidrig, and Grisela.
But just like he’d adapted to his enemies’ tactics, they’d adapted to his in turn. They were aware that he was more invested in saving his comrades than killing his foes, and were using that against him now. All Lex needed was a few moments of concentration, a couple of seconds to focus his thoughts on Solvei, and the winter wolf would be at his side, ripping his foes apart while his magic tore through them.
His enemies, however, were determined to make that opportunity come at the cost of his companions’ lives.
Even as Lex watched, Paska was already charging toward where the others had fallen, while Nenet flew toward them from the opposite direction, wincing and biting her lip as she beat her mangled-looking wings. Even that moment of inattention cost him another painful strike to his side, forcing him to look back at Grisela, who was giggling at his dilemma. “Seem a bit distracted,” she leered. “Feeling a little preoccupied?”
Lex didn’t bother answering, putting all of his brainpower into finding a way out of the situation he was in now. He couldn’t just cover everyone in black crystals; Paska had been diverted by a mesh around Shadow Star, but if that sphinx was a spellcaster – and it had to be, if Grisela had told it to kill the others, since its claws and teeth were too puny to hurt anyone – nothing less than a solid shell would be sufficient to protect whomever she attacked, and that would cut off the air supply of anyone he covered that way.
Nor were his other options much better. He’d prepared his force field spell, but it was nowhere near large enough to cover everyone. The area ward he’d used to secure the warehouse he’d operated out of back in Vanhoover was a powerful multi-layered defense, but it required a half-hour to cast. He had spells to defend against physical, magical, and elemental damage, but all of those except one were designed to be used only on a single individual, and that sole exception – an elemental-resistance spell able to cover multiple people that he’d been given by the Night Mare – offered only modest protection.
Which meant that his only option was to go all-in with an attack that would hopefully buy him some breathing room.
Leaping back from another swing of Grisela’s staff, Lex snarled a chant as fast as he could, raising a hoof to perform the necessary gestures, knowing that he had to get this cast before Grisela could interrupt him.
Sure enough, the hag was already rushing forward, staff at the ready. “Like I’d let you do that!”
Holding his ground, Lex kept casting, even as Grisela closed in on him, noting out of his periphery that Paska was almost to Spinner, while Nenet was hovering above Mystaria.
This is going to be close.
Leaping into the air, Grisela let out a roar of triumph as she brought her staff down over her head, swinging it like a club. “GOT YOU-”
That was when Lex finished his spell.
An instant later, a glowing orb of pure lightning appeared above his head, the winter hag’s icy staff coming down to impact it, sending the electricity arcing down through her twisted body.
“NAAAAAAAAGH!”
Grisela was the only one who screamed, but a quick glance left and right showed that the other two globes of electricity he’d summoned in front of Paska and Nenet had managed to ward the other two off. The human had broken off his charge to veer to his right, taking a cautious stance as he regarded the lightning warily.
Nenet, meanwhile, had somehow managed to also dodge the orb Lex had placed into her path, despite the state of her wings. But her frantic readjustment of her flight path had sent her into the wind wall he’d conjured a moment ago, and the little sphinx was shrieking in fright as she tumbled end over end through the air, trying to regain control of her movement.
The sound was enough to rouse Mystaria, the nun blinking as she sat up woozily. “Wh...what hap...” The words died on her lips as she looked around, her eyes widening. “Oh no! You guys!” Hesitating for just a moment, she grabbed her holy symbol, murmuring a prayer to Luminace. A moment later, healing energy radiated out from her, washing over Woodheart, Spinner, Thermal Draft, and Littleknight, causing all of them except the druid to slowly start picking themselves up.
“No...” croaked Grisela, having managed to land on her feet despite the smoke now rising from her body. Her breathing was ragged, and her muscles were twitching, but the look on her face was one of anger rather more than pain as she managed to bring her staff up. “Not gonna stop me this time!”
“You’re right about that,” replied Lex coldly, a thought bringing the electrical orb down between them. “Simply stopping you isn’t good enough. That’s why I told Sissel that I’m going to kill you...”
Darting to the side, Grisela didn’t let him finish as she dodged around the crackling sphere, swiping at him with her staff. But Lex had been expecting her to do something like that, and easily blocked the strike, even as he brought the ball of lightning around. Predictably, Grisela backed off, not eager to be shocked again, and Lex couldn’t resist a small smile. “Though I suppose I don’t mind letting Solvei do it for me.”
All Lex needed was a few moments of concentration, a couple of seconds to focus his thoughts on Solvei, and Solvei would be at his side.
And now, he had them.
Gasping as her pain came to an abrupt end, the winter wolf almost stumbled as she appeared next to him. Thank you, Master!
You can thank me by killing the hag, replied Lex immediately, already turning his attention toward the other two combatants on the field. Remember what I said about coordinating with Thermal Draft if Grisela goes invisible again. Leave the others to me-
“G-GRISELA!” shrieked Nenet suddenly, looking at past the edge of a nearby slope at something outside of Lex’s field of view. “Vidrig’s gone!”
Paska was the one who answered her. “What do you mean she’s gone?”
“She’s gone!” repeated the pint-sized sphinx, her expression frantic. “There’s big flat area down there with nothing but snow, and there’s a bunch of tracks leading to a hole in the ground, and that’s it!” Squinting her eyes, Nenet paused for just a moment. “I think...there’s something in the hole, but I’m not sure...wait...” All of a sudden, her eyes widened. “Water! It’s water!”
“The river!” gasped Thermal Draft. “It must have frozen over! With all the snow, they didn’t realize they’d moved out onto it!”
Gulping, Spinner shot Lex a worried glance. “Please tell me that means they’re in the shrine now, right?”
But the unicorn wasn’t listening. Instead, he wasted a few precious seconds undoing the black crystal cage around Shadow Star, then turned back into shadow-form, flying as fast as he could toward the hole Valor and Vidrig had made in the ice.
Akna had told him everything she knew about the Shrine of the Starless Sky, including its defenses. Lex had shared that information with Solvei via their telepathic connection, but otherwise hadn’t told anyone what the adlet had revealed to him, not wanting to take even the slightest chance that their enemies would be eavesdropping via Littleknight. Because of that, the other ponies didn’t know about the various ways in which the Shrine was protected either.
Which meant that, unless he rescued her, Valor would be dead in the next few seconds.
Solvei, the plan has changed! Killing Grisela and the others is no longer a priority! Instead, get Akna and the others to the Shrine immediately!
Even before the winter wolf responded, Lex registered a sudden spike of anxiety from her. But Master, how-
I don’t care how! JUST GET IT DONE!!!
R-right!
If not for the fact that he was incorporeal at the moment, Lex was sure he would have felt his blood pounding in his ears, speeding toward the snow-covered river without looking back. He had no idea if Solvei would be able to carry out his instructions, but right now there was no choice but to trust that she’d find a way to fulfill the task he’d given her.
Otherwise, everyone they’d come there with would pay the price.
With Sissel probably nearing the battlefield already, Lex knew that his leaving the scene meant that the fight would effectively be over the moment she arrived. No one else had the magical might necessary to stand up to the oversized humanoid’s spellcasting prowess, and right now he was needed elsewhere. That meant withdrawing to the Shrine – since there was no indication that Grisela or the other members of her monstrous clan knew how to bypass the place’s defenses – was the only way to avoid anyone dying.
Though that was assuming Valor hadn’t already.
Spotting the hole in the snow-covered ice that Nenet had seen, Lex didn’t bother heading toward it. Instead, he moved downward, his incorporeal form passing directly through the river’s frozen covering and into the water beneath.
If not for his ability to enhance his senses with his dark magic – an ability Lex had refined by exploiting the fact that he could still see and hear in shadow-form, despite having no sensory organs with which to do so – he wouldn’t have been able to see anything. With the sun’s light already diffused by the persistent cloud cover overhead, the snow and ice that covered the river’s surface was sufficient to block out the ambient illumination. Even the light streaming in through the nearby hole in the ice was barely a distant flicker from his present location.
As it was, his ability to see in the dark let Lex perceive the course of the rushing water, and he immediately moved in that direction, knowing that Valor and Vidrig would have been swept away by the current. Despite the thick ice overhead, the water was moving at a rapid clip, making it immediately evident why Valor – presuming that she was able to swim – hadn’t been able to make it back to the hole she’d fallen through. And while there was no danger that the mare had succumbed to hypothermia, since the protection that Solvei had given her against the cold would have insulated her against freezing water just as well as freezing air, she had no protection against drowning that he was aware of.
If she remained calm, and managed to separate herself from Vidrig, then she might have been able to swim upward enough to take in a few breaths of air, Lex knew. There was a slight gap between the top of the water and the ice sheet above it, and there was likely a similar division between the river and the rock once the water moved underground. So there was a chance that Valor had managed to buy herself a little time even after falling through the ice.
But that wouldn’t help her against the Shrine’s fortifications.
Registering a sudden descent in the water’s direction, Lex’s sense of urgency only grew as he noted that the current had sped up considerably. That was no surprise; a glance on either side of him confirmed that the tunnel the river was flowing into was narrower than its aboveground pathway, increasing the hydrostatic pressure. Swimming against the current would have been difficult before; now, between how the water was practically spraying rather than flowing downward and having to fight against gravity, anyone caught in the flow would have had no chance of freeing themselves.
The water continued to plunge into the earth, and although Lex knew that any sign of Valor or her enemy would have been swept away by the forceful rush of its passage, he continued to sweep his eyes back and forth as he flew along the tunnel. The odds that Valor had been snagged on an outcropping or clung to the side of the passage were all but nonexistent, but he stayed alert anyway, despite knowing that the closer they got to the Shrine, the more likely it was that she’d fallen victim to its safeguards.
The first of which was just now coming into sight.
Indeed, it was almost impossible not to see. Right where the flooded tunnel leveled off, there was a glyph carved into the bedrock, radiating a deep blue light that made it stand out sharply in the surrounding gloom. In the darkness, the glow seemed to take on an ethereal quality, making it hard to judge how distant it was; it was only due to his darkvision that Lex was able to judge his distance to it.
But the illumination was less important to Lex than the design of the glyph itself. At a glance, its otherworldly glow contrasted with how crude the drawing seemed; a single vertical line marred by three perpendicular lines through its center, a circle around its lower end, and a shorter line converging with its upper end at an acute angle. But despite looking like something a child might have drawn, Lex immediately recognized it from his studies of Everglow’s magical traditions, and knew what it meant.
Sleep.
When Akna had told him about this particular trap, Lex hadn’t been able to help but find it fiendishly clever. It was only appropriate that the Night Mare would have a temple protected by a symbol that caused all who viewed it to fall asleep. But that it did so in an underwater tunnel was what made it so deadly. Whereas a forced nap would have been mildly inconvenient in most circumstances, here it was ploy of considerable lethality.
Of course, there was an exception built into the glyph, since otherwise it would have made the Shrine virtually impossible for anyone to access. When Akna had come here, following what the spirits had apparently told her was a blind spot in their ability to sense the area, she’d unknowingly – but had later attributed to divine providence – gotten a tangle of brambles wrapped around one of her hind legs during her trip through the forest, the miniscule thorns unable to pierce her hide.
Which was the secret of bypassing the glyph: it wouldn’t activate for anyone who prominently displayed the Night Mare’s holy symbol.
While Lex’s first instinct had been to scoff at the idea that a few thorns wound around one’s leg could be compared to wrapping a limb in barbed wire, he hadn’t been able to completely dismiss the idea. While he didn’t know how long the ponies of Everglow had worshiped the Night Mare, he was aware that her faith predated the founding of the Pony Empire, as well as the tinier pony nations that it had absorbed. As such, it was entirely possible that she’d been known to ponies before metalworking had been common, in which case nettles, brambles, and other thorned vines would have been a reasonable facsimile of the barbed wire that was her current symbol.
Of course, that was all an academic issue now. In terms of making sure the rest of his companions wouldn’t be affected by the glyph, there was a much easier way to go about it:
Pausing just for a moment, Lex covered the glyph in black crystals, hiding it from view.
That was risky, of course; he’d need to go back and remove them as soon as Solvei and the others arrived in order to make sure that Grisela and her siblings couldn’t easily follow them. But for now there were more immediate concerns that required his attention.
The watery tunnel continued to level off past the symbol, but Lex was less concerned with that than he was with how he still hadn’t found Valor. Although it had been less than a minute since he’d entered the river, he knew that it was rapidly reaching the limit for how long someone could have held their breath...something she would have ceased to do once she’d lost consciousness.
But that also meant that they were almost to the outer edge of the Shrine.
Maybe she resisted the glyph, even without any protective magic of her own. It wasn’t completely impossible; theoretically, any sort of magic that overrode personal autonomy could be resisted by a sufficient act of will. If Valor had somehow managed to pull something like that off, she could have continued coming up to the surface of the water to take in air from the inch-thin gap between the river and the ceiling. But Lex knew that hope bordered on being unrealistic, which meant-
Suddenly, he saw her.
Up ahead, the tunnel was widening, allowing the current to slow down to the point where a swimmer would have found it navigable so long as they weren’t trying to go back the way they’d come. But the passage forward was by no means welcoming.
Spread out across tunnel was a gigantic spiderweb.
The thing existed in defiance of all common sense. The strands spread out beneath the water, undulating gently in the current without dissolving or being torn free from the edges of the tunnel. Only the bottom leftmost edge of the place was clear, where a dedicated swimmer could have managed to find their way through without getting tangled in the web. But someone caught by the sleeping glyph would have been bound up in the filaments and held fast beneath the water.
Which was exactly what had happened to Valor and Vidrig.
Both had their eyes closed, and were hanging limply in the webbing. Lex, however, couldn’t have cared less about the misshapen humanoid, immediately rushing over to Valor as he tried to grab her and drag her upward toward the ceiling of the tunnel with his telekinesis. But while the web had enough give that he was able to pull her a nearly a foot in that direction, the strands quickly went taut, their tensile strength exceeding the level of force that he was able to exert.
Myriad options raced through Lex’s mind, knowing that if Valor hadn’t already drowned then she had to be on the verge of doing so. But although Akna had told him about this, she hadn’t gotten caught in the webbing herself, having avoided it on her initial foray down here. Nor did he have the luxury of experimenting or taking half-measures; a pony’s life was at stake.
Which left Lex with just one option.
Turning to look back the way he’d come, Lex called upon his dark magic, pouring as much power as he could into it. The effort sent a rush of pain through him, despite his bodiless state, and he knew that he was once again pushing himself too far; between the effort he’d spent enhancing his circlet in order to see through Sissel’s technique, and pushing as much power as he could into Solvei and Akna to save them from the giant’s spell, he was on the verge of overloading what his body could handle. Even so, he didn’t let up, fighting back a pained groan as he pushed his limits.
A moment later, he completely sealed up the tunnel behind him with black crystals.
Immediately, the water around him drained away, continuing down the remainder of the underground passageway. But Lex didn’t wait for it to finish, immediately turning back around and rattling off the words to a heat ray spell, aiming at the webbing. Despite the fact that it had been underwater until a second ago, it didn’t look at all waterlogged, likely because of the same properties that allowed it to maintain its cohesiveness underwater in the first place. Which hopefully meant it was vulnerable to burning.
He was proven right as the webs caught fire, the strands turning to ash almost instantly, releasing their captives.
Lex ignored Vidrig as the troll hit the ground with a dull thud, her axe landing beside her. Instead, he was already using his telekinesis to lay Valor down, turning back to corporeal form as he rushed to stand over her, putting a hoof on her neck to check for a pulse.
Solvei didn’t have a chance to look back and make sure that everyone was following her command, needing to put all of her concentration toward fighting Grisela and Paska at the same time, something which was turning out to be more difficult than she’d expected.
It wasn’t that either of her enemies were particularly strong. So far neither had been able to land a substantial hit against her, the black crystal armor she was wearing turning aside the human’s hammer and the winter hag’s staff with ease. Even the worst of the hits she’d taken – a powerful strike to the side of her head from Paska’s hammer when she’d been pursuing Grisela – had left her with nothing but a mild bruise to show for it.
No, the problem was that neither humanoid was interested in fighting her face-to-face. Whereas Blat had been quite willing to throw himself at her, accomplishing nothing except tiring himself out and taking several serious injuries before Solvei had finally been able to deliver the deathblow, the manticore’s siblings were apparently unwilling to follow his example.
Instead, the two of them kept directing their attacks toward the ponies, forcing Solvei to rush in and fight them off when they darted forward to strike at the more vulnerable members of their group. Worse, whenever she moved to counter one of them, they would fight her just long enough for the other one to advance on the ponies from a different direction, at which point they’d back off. It was enough to leave Solvei scrambling to defend her charges, and made it absolutely impossible to deal any significant damage to her foes in turn.
Thankfully, they didn’t need to worry about the tiny winged-cat thing that had been hiding in Sissel’s image breaking the stalemate. The wind that Lex had summoned was keeping it pinned against Grisela’s ice wall, its mangled wings flapping miserably as it tried and failed to free itself.
But that didn’t mean that there weren’t other problems that needed to be dealt with.
“We can’t go in the water like this!” protested Mystaria, even as she carried Woodheart’s unresponsive body, Littleknight meeping as he circled her protectively. “Woodheart will drown! And Littleknight can’t hold his breath for very long either!”
“What about a water-breathing spell?” Spinner’s question came as she barely managed to deflect a quick jab from the end of Grisela’s staff, catching it with her dented lute. The impact drew a strained grunt from her, and she almost collapsed when Solvei made the winter hag back off a moment later. “You’ve got a scroll for almost everything, so there’s one of those in there too, right?”
“No, there isn’t!” came Mystaria’s frantic response.
“Are you kidding me?!” groaned the filidh. “How is that the one spell you don’t have written down and ready to go?!”
“Buying scrolls is expensive!” shot back the nun, a hysterical note creeping into her voice. “That’s why we came here in the first place, remember?! To make some money!”
“Sure, except you really wanted to visit your long-lost grandmother!”
“What does that have to do with anything right n-”
Will you shut up and figure out a way to get Akna out of those vines?! Although Solvei was thankful that Mystaria’s telepathic connection was still active – at the moment she was too busy spitting out a mouthful of snow to speak, having tried to bite off one of Paska’s legs and missed her mark – she couldn’t keep the frustration out of her voice. Master did his best to protect her from the heat, but she’s still burning, and he wants her rescued!
Grimacing as she looked toward where the adlet was still struggling against the grip of the flaming plants, Mystaria bit her lip. “Okay...okay, I think I can-”
“INCOMING!”
That was all the warning they got before Thermal Draft crashed to the ground next to Mystaria and Spinner, the unconscious form of Shadow Star on her back. “G-got her,” croaked the pegasus.
The duo’s reappearance sent a rush of relief through Solvei. Protecting Mystaria, Spinner, and Woodheart had already been a difficult task; doing the same for Shadow Star, lying unconscious on the other side of the battlefield, had been more than she’d been capable of doing.
Fortunately, Thermal Draft had realized that also, and had immediately moved to recover the masked mare. Able to fly faster than Grisela or Paska could run, she’d managed to scoop up Shadow before either of the bipeds had been able to get to her, circling back around to rejoin the group.
But even at a glance, it was clear that the effort had taken a toll on Drafty. Despite having only made a brief flight, she was already breathing heavily, nor could her rough landing be attributed to carrying another pony’s weight. Even as Spinner rushed over to them and put a hoof on Shadow’s side, chanting a healing spell, Drafty suddenly doubled over, convulsing for a moment before spitting up a mouthful of blood.
It was exactly like what had happened a minute ago when Paska had cursed her.
Apparently Solvei wasn’t the only one who thought that way, since Grisela was cackling as he slipped past the distracted winter wolf, swinging her staff in a low horizontal arc toward Mystaria. “Succumbing even faster than expected!”
“SUCCUMB TO THIS!”
Solvei’s angry shout came with a rush of concentration as, rather than turning to confront the hag, she instead called upon her magic.
Trying to freeze Grisela was a losing prospect, Solvei knew. The winter hag was like her, a creature for whom the cold was an intrinsic part of her nature. Unlike Blat or Prevarius, who had been able to resist only a certain degree of frigidity before succumbing to the super-cooled magic she’d thrown at them, Grisela wouldn’t be harmed by freezing temperatures, no matter how cold.
But even if she couldn’t be harmed by ice magic, she could still be affected by it.
Solvei could still remember how, shortly before they’d arrived at the pony village several days ago, she’d confided in Drafty about how useless her newfound command over ice magic seemed. The pegasus had tried to cheer her up, pointing out how she’d used that same magic to overcome Prevarius, but at the time it hadn’t done much to lift Solvei’s mood. Freezing things was all well and good, but it didn’t have the range of effects that made Master so fierce in battle, leaving Solvei wondering how useful it really was.
But she’d just been shown that being able to shape the cold was, in fact, far more versatile than she’d initially realized.
Indeed, it had been Grisela herself who had shown her that barely a minute ago.
After all, if the hag could raise a wall of ice in front of herself to prevent being knocked into a cloud of poison, then Solvei could raise a ramp of the stuff beneath her to send Grisela tumbling end over end.
Directly into the field of flaming plants that Sissel had raised.
Her shriek of surprise turning into a scream of fear as she saw where she was headed, Grisela frantically scrambled for purchase. But there was nothing for her to grab hold of, her fingers scratching at the sheer surface in vain as she slid down with greater and greater speed. In desperation, she stabbed at the slick surface with the end of her staff, trying to arrest her movement the same way she had when Thermal Draft had almost knocked her into the toxic fog.
None of it did any good, and when Grisela reached the bottom of the ramp a moment later, the flaming tendrils were waiting to scoop her up.
The wail of agony she gave then was music to Solvei’s ears. But she didn’t stop to enjoy it, the memory of how she’d let her master down by showing off while defeating Blat still fresh in her mind. Instead, she looked back at Mystaria. Now, get Akna out of there!
Mystaria nodded, already in the middle of casting a spell.
With that taken care of, Solvei swung her head around to look at Paska, but the human was already backing off, clearly having no desire to face Solvei all on his own. For a moment she considered going after him anyway, sure that she could tear him apart in short order-
“C-coming,” hacked Thermal Draft, gasping for air before running a hoof across her muzzle, her foreleg coming away wet with blood. “She’s coming...”
“Who?” grunted Shadow, wincing as Spinner helped her sit up. “Who’s coming?”
“Sissel.” Managing to get her legs under her, Thermal Draft stood up shakily. “I saw her on my flyby just now. She’ll be here any second.”
The declaration sent a shudder through Solvei, remembering the agony of being enveloped in the field of flames that the pale-skinned giant had conjured up as she glanced at the nearby trees. From this angle, it was impossible to make out anything from inside them, but she thought she could detect a flicker of movement from further within the shadowed greenery...
“We have to get to the river,” she murmured, nudging the others toward where her master had gone. “Now!”
That was the moment that Mystaria finished her spell, waving a hoof in Akna’s direction as she pronounced the final syllable.
The effect was immediate. Still caught in the coils of the burning plants, Akna’s struggles were suddenly more effective than they’d been a moment ago. Even as Solvei kept nudging the ponies toward the river, she saw the adlet yank one arm free from the vines that had been entangling it, then another, pulling her legs free a moment later as she stumbled toward the edge of the fiery field.
The plants themselves seemed to take umbrage at this, thrashing harder as they tried to entrap her again. But each time they wound themselves around her limbs or snaked over her torso, she someone managed to slide free of them, as though the plants simply couldn’t keep hold of her.
Which, Solvei realized a second later, was exactly what was happening. As Akna got closer, the effects of Mystaria’s spell became clear, having coated the adlet’s body in some sort of slimy substance that was making it hard for the plants to maintain their grip on her. The result was that the adlet was scrambling toward the edge of the lashing plants in a lurching start-and-stop motion, pulling herself free and stumbling slightly closer to where the flaming vines ended before being caught again, at which point the process repeated itself.
“C’mon,” muttered Shadow, barely glancing at Akna’s painful struggle toward freedom as she moved to grab Woodheart. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“We can’t take Woodheart and Littleknight underwater,” protested Spinner. “She can’t hold her breath like this, and his lungs are too small to hold enough air.”
“Well then why isn’t that red-horned know-it-all here to do something about that?!” raged Shadow. “What, did he decide to save his own flank first?!”
“He went ahead to save Valor,” retorted Thermal Draft, though she only glowered at Shadow for a moment before giving a worried glance at the treeline. “She and that monster she was fighting fell in the river and haven’t come back up.”
Beneath her mask, Shadow turned pale at that, but she didn’t have a chance to respond before Mystaria suddenly pointed at where Akna was struggling. “She’s almost clear!”
Despite keeping an eye on Paska – who was still hanging back, apparently content to let them get away and in no hurry to save Grisela, who was still screaming in pain as she was enveloped by the flaming vines – Solvei dared to glance over at Akna again. Sure enough, she’d managed to reach the edge of the field, dragging herself clear before collapsing with a sob of relief.
Mystaria rushed over to her then, canceling the slipperiness spell she’d put on the shaman before hurriedly casting a healing spell, pressing her hoof to the adlet. Immediately, the worst of her burns began to fade, her scorched fur turning white again, causing a shudder of relief to go through Akna. “Thank you...”
The words made Mystaria shake her head. “It’s Lex you should thank. That ‘grease’ spell I used normally only coats a single article of clothing. He created the variant that allows for an entire creature to be covered, which is what made it possible for you to escape.”
“That’s great,” interrupted Spinner, struggling to carry Woodheart’s insensate body. “But now that we’re all here, can we please exit stage left, ideally without killing two of our number in the process, before the big bad boss lady reappears?!”
“Can you use a spell to make it so Woodheart and Littleknight won’t drown?” asked Shadow, moving to steady Thermal Draft as the pegasus swayed in place.
Biting her lip for a moment, Drafty shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried anything like that before...”
“No time like the present, don’t you think?!” shot back the frantic filidh.
“Just get to the hole in the ice!” ordered Solvei, exasperated. “We’ll figure it out!”
The others grumbled, but didn’t argue as they made their way toward the place where Valor and Vidrig had fallen into the river. Solvei stayed at the back of the group, alternately eyeing Paska and the forest. Master, I’ve got everyone, and we’re ready to go into the river-
No! Stay off the ice!
The sharp reply caught Solvei off-guard, almost making her stumble. Master?
“What the hell is that?!”
Dazedly looking toward the source of Spinner’s outcry, Solvei’s eyes widened as she saw that water was suddenly spouting up from the hole like a geyser. But that wasn’t the only place where it was happening, as cracks were rapidly spreading across the frozen surface, with more spouts erupting upward.
In her mind, however, Lex kept speaking. Solvei, listen carefully. I had to stop the flow of the water. Right now, the pressure is being redirected upward, which is going to shatter the ice. As soon as I release it, everything will flow down through, which means that if you’re in the water when that happens you’ll all be battered to death by the ice chunks. You have to wait until I tell you it’s safe!
But Master, Sissel is almost here! And the other ponies are saying that Woodheart and Littleknight won’t survive the trip!
Once the pressure is released, there’ll be a few moments when everything is pulled through at an accelerated rate. If you time it right, you can make it down after the ice has cleared the passage but before the water returns to its normal rate. That should get everyone here fast enough that no one will drown.
Another loud series of cracks signified that the pressure buildup Lex was talking about was increasing, and this time the ice broke into fragments, starting to float and collide as the water continued to spurt up between them. I understand, Master. Please tell me when, and I’ll-
A flash out light out of the corner of her eye was all the warning Solvei got.
Then a bolt of lightning – coming not from the sky, but from between the trees – lanced out, going straight through her.
It hit with enough force that her armor shattered, the black crystals blown to pieces in an instant. Flung through the air by the incredible force of the blow, Solvei came down hard on one of the larger pieces of ice floating in the river, dazed and struggling to remain conscious, her eyes somehow finding the others, seeing them screaming at her from the edge of the shore.
And behind them, her axe swung casually over her shoulder as she emerged from the wintry forest, was Sissel.
SOLVEI!!! In her head, Lex’s voice was thick with alarm, demanding her attention. Hold on, I’m going to summon you here!
N-no...Master...don’t...
What?!
Have to...tell them... She was already trying to speak, trying to tell everyone what Lex had told her about waiting until the ice was pulled down, that they had to enter the water immediately after it. But her voice didn’t seem to want to work correctly, and she couldn’t say anything as she saw the others – realizing that they were out of time – venturing into the water, making their way toward her. Behind them, Sissel was casting another spell, her lips moving as she gestured with her free hand. No...no...
Somehow, even as her thoughts grew hazy, an idea came to Solvei then. It had been using her magic creatively that had let her get the best of Grisela. If she could just do it again now...
Master...we’re in...the river... Her thoughts were becoming sluggish, like when she’d tired herself out as a pup trying to keep up with her siblings. The memory made her smile, recalling how her father had always carried her home whenever she’d exhausted herself too much to make the trip back. Please...release it...
What are you saying?! You’ll be killed! You’ll all be killed!
Trust me...please...I won’t...won’t let you...down again...
Just sending the message was exhausting, and concentrating enough to use the last bit of her magic was even more so, but an instant later Solvei felt a sudden rush of movement as the water began to flow again, and she let out a slow breath as she relaxed. She could make out her master’s voice in her mind, but the words were muddled and indistinct now, growing fainter and fainter until she couldn't hear him anymore.
But it was alright. She’d been so afraid before, scared that Lex would throw her away when he realized just how much better Akna was than her. Now, though...now that thought was comforting. Even if she was an adlet, at least there’d be someone who could stay by his side and make sure he didn’t get lonely.
Then she closed her eyes and waited for her father to come carry her home.
Once again, Lex found himself locking lips with a mare he barely knew.
Unlike when he’d slept with Thermal Draft a few days ago, however, the kiss he was giving Valor now had no passion or desire behind it. Instead, there was only controlled tension as he breathed into the earth mare’s mouth, one hoof over her nose as he forced air into her lungs. A second breath followed the first before he switched his attention to her chest, placing both forelegs over her heart and pressing down in quick, rhythmic motions.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation hadn’t been unknown to Lex before his first visit to Everglow. Rather, the technique was one that he’d heard about even before he’d been dragged forward in time during King Sombra’s attack on the Crystal Empire, having been just one of the flurries of advancements – medical and otherwise – that had resulted from all three tribes of ponies coming together to found Equestria. In that regard, it was emblematic of the potential that the Royal Sisters had allowed to lie fallow for over a millennium, rather than nurturing.
Of course, for all of his criticisms about how uninterested the alicorns had been in developing Equestria, Lex himself hadn’t bothered to learn this procedure during his younger years, eschewing medicine in favor of more conceptual pursuits. It was only because it had been outlined in one of the medical textbooks that he had borrowed from House Call during his trip to Las Pegasus that he’d bothered to study this particular medical practice in detail. Without that, he wouldn’t have known the precise timing or ratio of breaths to compressions to use.
Even so, Lex was currently on his third round of alternating between breathing into Valor’s mouth and trying to restart her heart. That his attempts to revive her weren’t working became harder to ignore with each passing moment. He’d dammed up the flow of the river because Valor needed attention as soon as possible, but in doing so he’d cut off everyone else’s escape. If she didn’t respond in the next few seconds, he’d have no other choice but to give up on her and focus on saving everyone else-
“HRNGH!”
A sudden convulsion ran through Valor then, her back arching as her limbs flailed wildly. No sooner had Lex taken his hooves off of her chest than she flopped over, rising to her knees as she began to retch, spitting up what had to be gallons of water. It was only after she’d stopped emptying her lungs that she collapsed, coughing and choking before her eyes – which had flown open during her sudden burst of activity – fluttered closed as she went limp, drawing in a ragged breath, followed by another, and then another as her respiration finally resumed.
Lex didn’t bother checking her over further, instead grabbing her with his telekinesis and draping her over his back, already turning to head deeper into the tunnel. With the webbing cleared, there were no obstructions to worry about, which was fortunate since he could feel his muscles screaming in protest at hauling along a mare who seemed heavier than he was. Fortunately, according to what Akna had told him, the entrance to the Shrine proper was just up ahead-
But that thought was abruptly shoved from his mind as a wet, guttural hacking came from Vidrig.
Barely able to keep from falling over in surprise, Lex wasted a half-second staring as what should have been the monster’s waterlogged corpse began to tremble. Gnarled fingers spasmed and flexed before closing tightly around the handle of her axe, having somehow managed to hold onto the weapon even after losing consciousness. Twisted legs slowly drew themselves up against her torso, toes planting themselves against the rocky and uneven floor. And then Vidrig lifted her head up, her hideous face hidden by the wet tangle that was her hair...but from between the stringy black strands, Lex could see her eyes slowly turn in his direction.
That was enough to spur him to action. Even as Vidrig took a breath – though it sounded more like a feral rasp – Lex called upon his dark magic. The effort caused his back knees to buckle, and he almost lost his grip on Valor as he fought to keep himself from toppling over completely, concentrating fiercely.
Managing to rise into a hunched posture, Vidrig made a single, shaky step in his direction...then she was impaled by the stake of black crystal that rose up from underneath her, piercing her just beneath her ribs and erupting upward through her back.
That should have been a lethal strike, Lex knew. But Vidrig had already survived a spear through the head and drowning. As such, it wasn’t surprising that being skewered failed to end her life. Instead, she simply writhed and struggled – not having regained enough air to scream – and a second later a loud clang sounded through the tunnel as she slashed at the black crystal, which was barely two inches thick, with her axe.
Lex didn’t bother to appraise her progress, knowing that even if it was enchanted, the blade would be unable to free her. What little he’d seen of Vidrig suggested that she had unnatural strength, but not to the point where she’d be able to cut herself loose. Nor did she have any magic that could help her now; if she did, she wouldn’t have tried to chop down the crystal spike impaling her.
Better to simply leave her hanging there until he unleashed the river. With how backed up it was, the torrent would explode through the tunnel with enough pressure to tear her to pieces, all of which would be washed away.
It was a scenario which would happen in a few moments, as Lex dragged himself and Valor further down the tunnel, looking for the area that Akna had told him about. We should be past the area where the webs were, he decided after several seconds of painstaking travel. The entrance should be...there!
Sure enough, there was a fork in the tunnel ahead, just like the adlet shaman had told him about. But where the right-hoof path of the tunnel continued down deeper into the earth, the left terminated barely more than a dozen feet in, ending in a cul-de-sac. By itself, it didn’t seem particularly notable, save perhaps for being a geologic oddity, but a mere thought was all it took for Lex to activate his circlet, viewing the branch again.
Sure enough, the magical spectrum showed that the spell diverting the course of the river – keeping the water from entering the small offshoot – was still active.
As was the much stronger spell protecting the entrance to the Shrine.
Stumbling into the left tunnel, Lex fought the urge to collapse, not willing to trust that the enchantment which kept the river out would hold against the incredible rush of water he was about to unleash. Instead, he approached the back wall of the cave, where he could see the active spell waiting.
Putting a hoof on the unhewn rock, he whispered the words that Akna had revealed to him.
“Light can be quenched at the source, but darkness never can be.”
To his relief, the wall of the cave shimmered, growing hazy before vanishing entirely, revealing a large tunnel containing a series of steps leading upward. Gritting his teeth, he hauled Valor inside, ascending barely a dozen of the steps before laying her as gently as he could on the stone stairs. This should be far enough, he decided, before turning and heading back down. Now he just had to undo the plug further up the tunnel, and-
Master, I’ve got everyone, and we’re ready to go into the river-
No! Lex fought down a surge of panic at the thought of everyone being in the water when he released the pressure, realizing that by now it had to have backed up to the point where it would affect the water on the surface. Stay off the ice!
Master?
Forcing himself to remain calm, Lex hunkered down on one of the lower steps. It was high enough up that even if the water managed to surge into the side-tunnel, it wouldn’t be able to reach him, while still giving him enough of a vantage point to see the others as they flowed through the water. Grabbing them with his telekinesis would be tricky, especially in his enervated state, but there was simply no alternative. But first, he needed them all to get clear.
Solvei, listen carefully. I had to stop the flow of the water. Right now, the pressure is being redirected upward, which is going to shatter the ice. As soon as I release it, everything will flow down through, which means that if you’re in the water when that happens you’ll all be battered to death by the ice chunks. You have to wait until I tell you it’s safe!
He registered anxiety from her then. But Master, Sissel is almost here! And the other ponies are saying that Woodheart and Littleknight won’t survive the trip!
This time Lex had a response at the ready. Once the pressure is released, there’ll be a few moments when everything is pulled through at an accelerated rate. If you time it right, you can make it down after the ice has cleared the passage but before the water returns to its normal rate. That should get everyone here fast enough that no one will drown.
I understand, Master. Please tell me when, and I’ll-
Her response cut off abruptly. But Lex didn’t need to ask what had happened, instantly aware that she had just been severely wounded. It was enough to make his heart leap into his throat, feeling as though he’d just seen it happen despite not knowing what was going on. SOLVEI!!! Hold on, I’m going to summon you here!
Lex knew from experience that he couldn’t use divine authority on Solvei if she was more than thirty feet or so away from him. In order to heal her now, he’d have to bring her to his location, but all that would taken was a moment’s focus-
N-no...Master...don’t...
What?! He couldn’t fathom what she was saying, his connection to her informing him that her condition was deteriorating rapidly. Whatever had happened, the wound she’d just taken wasn’t just serious, it was critical, to the point where – he realized with a sudden rush of horror – her life was in danger.
But just as he was about to disregard her wishes and bring her to him, she spoke again. Have to...tell them... Through their link, his cognizance of her emotions informed him of a sudden sense resolve coming from her, only for it to turn to despair a moment later. No...no...
Then, for some reason, there was a sense of peace coming from her, and the rapid shift in her emotions scared Lex even worse. Master...we’re in...the river...Please...release it...
What are you saying?! raged Lex, trying to think of a solution to what was happening, only to realize that he didn’t have enough information to work with. You’ll be killed! You’ll all be killed!
Trust me...please...I won’t...won’t let you...down again...
All of a sudden, his awareness of her presence was fading. It was enough that Lex very nearly summoned her on the spot, pausing just long enough to concentrate on the black crystals he’d used to seal up the tunnel. In an instant, they were gone, and suddenly the entire space was filled with a roar as the pent-up water surged down the tunnel.
Lex, however, was no longer paying attention to anything except the winter wolf. Of course I trust you! I’ve always trusted you! He had no idea why it suddenly seemed so important to tell her that, but he couldn’t stop himself. If it wasn’t for you, Thermal Draft and I would be dead right now! You’ve never let me down, do you understand?! Not once!
Memories of his time with Solvei came to him then, so powerfully that he could almost see them. Solvei crying as he fed her during their first meeting. Stroking her fur when they confronted Bolverk and her family. Watching her finish off Prevarius. Seeing her cavort with the mares of Fail Forward. The way she’d hovered over him protectively in the days after he’d almost killed Woodheart. Like puzzle pieces falling into place, the medley of their time together showed him what he’d already realized but had failed to truly appreciate before now.
That Solvei was someone who mattered to him.
No matter that she wasn’t a pony. No matter that he still didn’t know how they’d become so intimately connected. No matter that he’d known her for less than a month. Everything about her had already become precious and irreplaceable.
In that moment, Lex felt his heart break, because in all of the memories that he had of his time with Solvei, none of them involved him telling her that. If anything, he’d done the exact opposite; he’d continually made it known that he wanted to break their bond, taken her obedience completely for granted, and never once expressed any gratitude for everything she’d done for him. It was a state of affairs that even a few moments ago would have meant nothing to him, but now bordered on unbearable, his chest tightening as he reached out to summon her to his side.
Solvei, thank y-
It was at that moment that he felt her die.
The scream that erupted from Lex’s lips then drowned out the roar of the water.
Pain, both physical and emotional, was a sensation that Lex was intimately familiar with. Between the numerous wounds he’d suffered, inflicted by his enemies as well as his own magical mishaps, and having lost so many people that he cared for, Lex had truly believed that he’d known how to handle whatever agony could be thrown at him.
But as the backlash of Solvei’s death struck him, he realized just how wrong he’d been.
The agony assaulted him on every level. Body and mind. Heart and soul. It went beyond anything that could be endured or fought through, reverberating throughout every facet of his being, shredding any pretense of resistance or defense as it wiped away conscious thought and outward awareness alike.
His connection to Solvei hadn’t been a bond of equals. Facilitated and strengthened by the Night Mare’s power, it had been nothing less than his pouring part of himself – the very essence of what made him Lex Legis – into her. It had been why his cutie mark had appeared on her flank. But now that Solvei had died, she’d taken that part of him with her, leaving Lex unprepared for what it meant to feel a piece of himself be so violently torn away.
The result was that he could do nothing except continue to wail in absolute anguish, blood running from his eyes and nose and ears as he tumbled down the steps of the Shrine’s entrance. But he didn’t feel the cuts and bruises that the fall dealt him, nor did he hear the sound of the water rushing closer, nor the steps approaching from deeper within the Shrine.
All he was aware of was the all-encompassing torment of Solvei’s absence.
It was a pain that stayed with him even after he finally lost consciousness.
Sissel made no other outward display of frustration as she stared at the river where her target had disappeared, eyes locked onto the water as though she expected them to come back up at any moment.
Of course, she knew better than to think that they would. The current was swift, and its downward trajectory would have been very hard to swim against. Vidrig’s absence was proof enough of that; the ice troll was a bloodthirsty creature, having virtually no sense of fear when it came to combat, since only fire or acid could overcome her impressive powers of regeneration. Given that the fighting had still been going on when she went under, she’d have come back if she’d been able to do so, hoping for a chance to engage in more brutality.
That she hadn’t meant that the current had swept her away. Which meant that it had swept the ponies away also. Including Lex Legis, who had somehow managed to evade their grasp despite all of the time and trouble Sissel had gone to.
Now, the snow giant knew, she was right back where she started, wondering what to do as she stared at where the ponies had vanished, listening to the sound of the flowing water, the whispering wind, and Grisela’s tortured screams as she continued to writhe in the burning vines.
“You should probably do something about her,” noted Paska dryly, glancing at the flailing winter hag as he walked up to Sissel...though not so close that he was within range of her axe. “I don’t personally care either way, but I know you need her and Vidrig both in order to amplify your magic.”
For a moment Sissel was tempted to let Grisela burn, but she knew Paska was right. Vidrig was only marginally less of an animal than Blat had been, and Grisela was ruled by her impulses, but the three of them were a coven nevertheless. Mother had showed them that together, they had access to magic that none of them were capable of using alone, even if none of it was meant to be used in a fight.
That their combined magic couldn’t produce any magic meant for a direct offensive was no accident, of course; Mother had given them a lot of power, but she knew better than to give them that much. Nor was that the only limitation on what they could do. Despite being able to produce an impressive variety of effects, the effort involved in doing so was taxing, and between the three of them they could only combine their powers thrice in any given day.
In theory, that worked out rather well, since it made it so that each of them got to pick one effect to manifest. In actuality, what happened was that the other two always chose whatever amused them, leaving Sissel stuck with actually taking care of the assignments that Mother had left for them.
So while Grisela had indulged herself with those tasteless puppets, and Vidrig had opted to reanimate the bodies of the whoever she’d killed recently, delighted at the prospect chopping them up a second time, it had been Sissel who’d needed to maintain the winter weather that Mother had conjured over the region.
And the other two wondered why she’d been the one left in charge.
Overseeing things in Mother’s absence had turned out to be far more of a burden than a privilege though, and that was especially true now, since it meant not letting Grisela burn to death. But Sissel knew she had no choice in the matter. Vidrig, cockroach that she was, had undoubtedly survived being washed away, which meant that Grisela had to be spared so that they could still use their coven magic once the ice troll had been retrieved.
Fortunately, a single spell was all it took to dispel the burning entanglement Sissel had conjured up, allowing the flames to consume the plant matter. In an instant the vines turned to ash, the flames going out as they had nothing left to feed on, dropping Grisela to land in a heap. “Almost...killed me!” she grunted, her voice choked with fury and residual pain.
Sissel couldn’t have cared less, instead keeping her attention on Paska. “Can you locate Vidrig?”
“Running water acts as a natural barrier to my usual detection spell,” replied her brother, nodding at the river. “But I have one or two alternatives that I can use to track her down. I won’t be able to prepare any of them until tomorrow morning, though.”
“Tomorrow morning, then,” answered Sissel, not bothering to keep looking at him as she strode over to where Nenet was still pinned between the wind wall and the ice wall, her bulk allowing her to ignore the former as little more than an errant breeze, reaching down and picking up the tiny sphinx by the scruff of the neck. “Did Mother teach you any spells for breathing underwater?”
“Wh-what?” sputtered Nenet, dazed. While the wind wasn’t a bother to someone of Sissel’s size, it was a howling gale to Nenet, and her head was still ringing from having been caught in it.
“Water-breathing spells,” repeated Sissel, caring not a whit for Nenet’s distress. “Do you know any?”
“I...yes...one,” gasped the miniature sphinx, one paw coming up to shield her face from the wind, hugging her aching wings tight against her body. “Sissel, please...”
But the snow giant was pitiless. “Tell me the details.”
Knowing that protesting would only bring pain, Nenet curled in on herself more. “It’s a combined effect, granting swimming proficiency and underwater breathing. It only works on one person per casting. No material components necessary.”
Sissel considered that for a moment, then carried Nenet out of the range of the wind wall that Lex had conjured. Immediately, the sphinx shuddered at finally being out of the violent rush of air, but barely had a chance to relax before Sissel unceremoniously dropped her to the ground. Barely managing to catch herself, Nenet looked up in time to see Sissel retrieve a tiny standing mirror from beneath her armor. A single word was all it took to make it grow, becoming a full-length mirror large enough even for the snow giant. But Sissel wasn’t interested in admiring herself in the glass, instead glaring down at Nenet. “Start inscribing the spell into here immediately.”
Cringing, Nenet nodded. Unlike how most wizards and witches stored their spells in books or scrolls or tattoos or even inside of living things – the way she did for Mother – Sissel kept hers in a mirror. Doing so was, Nenet knew, a matter of security for her older sister; the mirror was enchanted to not only be extremely durable, but only Sissel knew how to make its surface display the spell formulas stored inside it.
Of course, adding spells to it was another matter entirely, as Nenet knew from personal experience.
But just because she’d done it before didn’t make it any less painful now, and she forced herself to swallow a whimper of pain as she bit down on the underside of one of her toes. Although it would have been far easier if she’d had an edged weapon to cut herself with, she knew that asking to use Sissel’s axe would have resulted in the snow giant cutting her herself, and so Nenet simply clenched her teeth tighter until she finally tasted blood. It was only then that she opened her jaw, gasping with relief.
Then, flapping her sore wings as she rose up toward the tall mirror’s top, she began inscribing the reflective surface with the spell’s formula, written in her own blood.
I’m just glad the mirror I was carrying before was a replica. Nenet could still recall the way that unicorn had shattered the mirror that Sissel had been projecting her magic through. Although Sissel was far too cautious to ever put her personal repository of spells in danger – instead conjuring up a duplicate of it for Nenet to use – and even though the snow giant had an exceptionally even temperament, the sphinx had still been half-expecting a beating for what had happened. I just hope Grisela doesn’t blame me for-
“Nenet!”
The winter hag’s croaking voice made the sphinx wince hard enough that she almost made a mistake with her inscription, trying not to shake as the burned form of her sister stumbled closer to her. “Supposed to attack the ponies! Could have drawn that wolf away if you’d cast a few spells at the unconscious-”
“Be quiet, Grisela.” Sissel moved to stand in front of the hag, glaring down at her. “I need Nenet to finish inputting that spell so we can go after the ponies. You can bully her after she’s done.”
“Are you sure that’s wise?”
Paska’s question earned a raise brow from Sissel, but Grisela was far less restrained, whirling to confront her brother. “Her fault I’m burned so badly! Gonna make her pay for it!”
“I don’t mean Nenet,” clarified Paska, shifting his gaze over to Sissel. “I mean pursuing Lex Legis and the others. Is that really the best course of action?”
“It’s the only course of action,” replied Sissel immediately. “Unless you think we can take on Hvitdod by ourselves, especially since we’re down yet another sibling.” She finished with a pointed glance over at where Blat’s headless body was lying in the snow.
But Paska was undeterred. “I know we can’t. And that’s the problem with this entire plan.”
Sissel’s eyes narrowed by a fraction of an inch. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“Right now, there’s only four of us left,” answered Paska. “Five once I find Vidrig. If we were to fight Hvitdod right now, we’d all be killed. But if we’re betting that Lex Legis is strong enough to put the dragon down – or at least injure him enough that we can finish the job without dying in the process – what sense does it make for us to keep targeting him head-on like this?”
Sissel frowned. “That’s not what we’re doing. The kidnapping attempt might have been premature, but using a hostage to bend him to our will-”
“Didn’t work,” finished Paska. “Neither did my putting a death curse on his girlfriend. And we couldn’t put him down long enough for you to use a possession spell on him, which you can’t try again until I find Vidrig anyway.”
“I can try it,” shot back the snow giant. “I just don’t think it will work without her and Grisela helping.”
Paska shrugged. “My point is that before we go running into a temple which is probably protected by all sorts of traps and guardians, maybe we shouldn’t rely on a plan that’s already failed.”
“Rather let him get away with humiliating us like this?!” shrieked Grisela. “Made a fool of me twice! Not gonna let that go!”
“You won’t have to,” replied Sissel evenly. “I’m sure you noticed that I changed tactics just before the ponies all fled?”
The question made the hag pall her withered hands into fists. “Didn’t notice, actually, since I WAS ON FIRE!”
“She means that she delivered a killing blow against the wolf,” explained Paska. “Even though she’d been trying not to kill that pony’s servants earlier. I was curious about that myself.”
“Because doing so created a window of opportunity.” Sissel nodded at where the ponies, along with the wolf and the adlet, had all plunged into the river. “She was his familiar, which means that her death will have weakened him. If we act now, before he can recover and find a replacement for her, we can force him-”
“To confront Hvitdod for us?” Paska shook his head. “I know you came up with that on the fly, but it’s not up to your usual standards, Sissel.”
Grisela snickered at that, but the snow giant simply crossed her arms beneath her chest. “Explain.”
“If we go about this the way you’re saying we should, then that pony, Lex, either isn’t going to have enough time to recover from his familiar’s death and find another creature to take her place before we make him fight our battle – in which case he won’t be any match for Hvitdod – or he’ll manage to do both of those things, in which case we won’t be able to force him to do anything. Either way, we lose.”
“Then after I possess him, we round up a few monsters and dump them all in front of Hvitdod with him,” countered Sissel. “He can make one of them his familiar there-”
“During the fighting?” interrupted Paska, raising one eyebrow. “Do we even know how long he needs to do that? What if it takes hours? For that matter, there’s no telling what types of creatures he can do that to, or if we’ll be able to find any in the few short hours you’ll have him under your control.”
“There’s probably more than a few acceptable candidates in that shrine he’s looking for,” argued Sissel.
“Which we won’t be able to reach until tomorrow, if you want me to get Vidrig back first,” noted Paska. “Which depending on how fast he recovers might give Lex Legis enough time to recover and undergo that rite you overheard him talking about. Not to mention familiarize himself with the layout of the shrine, coordinate with its defenders-”
“Alright.” Holding up a hand, Sissel let out a slow breath. “I’ll admit I made a split-second decision, and it might not have been the best idea. But do you have a better one?”
Paska’s bald head nodded up and down then. “Actually, I do.”
“Hah!” cackled Grisela. “Should be good!”
Ignoring the hag, Paska kept speaking. “Lex Legis won’t let himself be captured, and he won’t negotiate for anyone we take. But I think that he will go out of his way to rescue someone in danger. That’s why he was out there when Grisela went on her food run, that’s why he worked so hard to get that comatose mare back, and I’m betting that’s why he didn’t seem concerned when I cursed his pegasus: because he thinks he can beat it before she dies.”
“Your point being?” grunted Sissel.
“That we should stop trying to force him to confront Hvitdod, and instead give him a reason to do so on his own.”
It took the snow giant a few moments to realize what her brother was talking about, only for her to shake her head. “It’ll take too long. Just getting back to that pony village will take days. Rounding a few of them up and making the trek back to Hvitdod’s lair will take even more. Lex and his companions will be long gone by then.”
A rare smile graced Paska’s lips then. “Who said we need to use ponies?”
“Close,” granted her brother. “But I was thinking more of the two-legged variety.”
“You mean adlets,” murmured Sissel.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” nodded Paska. “If he has one of them as part of his party now, then there’s a chance that if we round up a few others – which should be easy, since they live near here – and set them out as sacrifices to Hvitdod, Lex will go running to save them.”
“Not a bad idea,” muttered Grisela, before snorting. “Would have been better if we still had that sleeping mare.”
Paska shrugged again. “Maybe. But at least now we’re not running the risk of ending up like Blat over there.”
Sissel paused for just a moment, weighing Paska’s words before nodding. “Alright. It’s a gamble, but it’s better than trying to invade that shrine on next to no information. We’ll regroup for now, and then start looking for some adlets we can use.”
And we had better find some, added Sissel silently, not willing to give voice to her worries in front of the others.
If we don’t have Hvitdod’s body ready when mother gets back, she won’t have all the components she needs to finish crafting the artifact she’s making.
The words burst forth from Lex’s lips as he sat up, agony coursing through every fiber of his being. The pain of feeling Solvei die – of feeling part of himself die – blotted out everything else, leaving him unable to think straight as he thrashed and screamed, blind to his surroundings and unable to make sense of what was going on around him, the nearby voices that immediately spilled forth in response to his outburst little more than meaningless sounds.
“What’s happening?! What’s going on?!”
“It’s Lex! He’s awake!”
“Meep meep!”
“Lex, calm down! You have to calm-”
“Don’t go near him, you idiot! He’s lost it again!”
“Well we can’t just leave him like this! He’s going to hurt himself!”
Something heavy landed on him then, pinning him to the ground, and Lex struggled underneath it. But a moment later the weight increased, and he found himself unable to throw it off, the frenzied quagmire that was his mind churning harder in response. He knew that Solvei was gone, but like a limb that had just been ripped from its socket, the overwhelming pain and the sheer magnitude of the loss were more than he was capable of processing at the moment.
The result was that, as Lex managed to latch onto a single coherent thought, he was unable to fully grasp how little sense it made.
I have to find her!
It was the very most that he was able to comprehend at the moment: Solvei was gone, and something was holding him in place, and so if he could just get free he could start looking for her. On some level he knew that idea was flawed, knew that she was more than simply physically absent, but at that moment the full scope of what that meant was beyond his ability to fully fathom.
“SOLVEI!!! SOLVEIIIIII!!!”
He dimly registered new pain erupting through his back then, along with sudden sense of vertigo and a chorus of yelps, cries, and shouts. But all that mattered was that he was no longer restrained, and he scrambled to his hooves, stumbling forward blindly.
“Ow ow ow! Damn it, what just happened?!”
“He...he made one of those huge black crystals, right underneath himself!”
“Gods, if the top of that thing was any sharper, he’d have impaled himself on it! And us too!”
“Or crushed us against the ceiling! Look at how close he came to it!”
“Lex, stop! Come back!”
But he was still beyond attaching meaning to what he was hearing, knowing only that the voices belong to the weight that had been trying to keep him searching for Solvei, the missing piece of himself. Loping forward, he knew only that he needed to get away from them so that he could keep looking for her. Nothing else mattered.
Lurching in a random direction, he made it less than a dozen steps before colliding with a barrier, collapsing as he bounced off of it. A frustrated wail rose from his throat then, and he threw himself against whatever it was he’d hit, but it was utterly immovable, and he had to content himself with sliding along its length, trying to find a breach in whatever new obstacle this was.
It was only then that it occurred to him that he couldn’t see anything.
The knowledge that something else – darkness, in this case – was hindering his search brought a wordless moan of anger and despair from him. It was all making things worse! It was all keeping him away from wherever Solvei had gone! Straining, he willed his eyes to pierce through the darkness, to show him something, anything that would let him keep looking for Solvei since not doing so was too painful to bear.
As if in response to that thought, he could suddenly make out his surroundings. Everything was in black and white, distantly reminding him of how he’d sometimes used his powers to view things that way when there was no light to see by, but it was enough to show him that he was in a small room made entirely of stone. Picking themselves up from where they were lying around a huge spike of crystal were some ponies that he knew he recognized – and who were again making noise at him as they cautiously moved toward him – but he cared less about that than about the open doorway that was past them.
He was getting ready to barrel past them and make his way toward it when a new burst of noise came from beyond the exit, into which strode-
“SOLVEI!”
Her name tore itself from his mouth as he spotted the winter wolf, and he found himself rushing toward her, shooting past the other ponies to throw his forelegs around her neck, burying his face in her fur. He distantly registered her tensing under his grip, muscles going taut as if to pull away from him, and he held her tighter in response, refusing to let her go.
It wasn’t much better than it had been a moment ago. Even despite the fact that she was right there, he still couldn’t sense her presence in the way that he had before, and the pain of having been separated from her was diminished only slightly. But any succor was better than none, and he collapsed against her as a mournful sob tore its way past his lips. A moment later the strength fled from his back legs, and he sank to the ground, dragging Solvei with him as she laid down on her belly.
Nor was that the extent of the exhaustion that fell over him then, and he felt his consciousness starting to slip away. He fought against it, not wanting to lose what little of Solvei’s closeness he’d managed to regain, but he couldn’t summon up the energy to do so, his eyes closing of their own accord.
The voices around him were speaking again, but the only one he cared about was the one coming from the wolf he was embracing, her voice gentle and soothing as he slowly fell asleep.
“It’s alright, Master. Everything will be alright...”
No one said anything as Lex drifted off, waiting until his breathing was slow and even before sighing in relief.
“Akna,” whispered Thermal Draft as she moved to pick up Lex’s bedroll, laying it down across from where the black crystal he’d raised had tossed it, “do you think you can carry Lex over here without waking him up?”
The adlet-turned-winter-wolf grimaced. “I’m not sure. I mean, if I had my hands it wouldn’t be a problem, but I haven’t spent much time in this form.”
“Don’t change back!” warned Valor. “If Lex wakes up and doesn’t see you as a winter wolf, he’s liable to start panicking again!”
“I kind of figured that,” muttered Akna, giving the sleeping stallion an uncomfortable look. Even asleep, Lex had kept his forelegs curled around her neck, refusing to let go. “Besides, I wouldn’t be able to see in the dark if I changed back anyway.”
“At least you can do that on your own,” huffed Shadow, sinking down onto her own bedroll and wrapping her cloak around herself. “Once Thermal Draft’s spell wears off, we’re back to being blind, since apparently it would offend the oh-so-mighty Night Mare if we lit some candles in her precious shrine.”
“It’s an antenoctem temple to her faith, Shadow.” Looking up from where she was checking that Woodheart hadn’t been injured in the scuffle, Mystaria frowned at the masked mare. “This entire place was consecrated to the Night Mare back when she was still considered a goddess of darkness in general, rather than the nighttime in particular. And even though the Moon Princess is still considered to be the goddess who governs the moon, the stars, and other visible aspects of the night sky, the two of them-”
“Mysty, I really don’t think this is the time for a sermon,” groaned Spinner, sitting down next to Shadow. Taking the hem of her friend’s cloak, she pulled it over her shoulder, leaning against the other mare for warmth. “Honestly, I just wish this place was warmer! I know it’s better than outside, but I feel like I’m still frozen!”
Everyone else winced at that, with Spinner cringing as soon as the words left her mouth. “I didn’t mean...I know she saved our lives and all, it just...it happened so fast...”
“I still can’t believe that worked,” muttered Valor, looking down. “Not to diminish the sacrifice she made; I just don’t understand how freezing you all got you here safely.”
“The ice she encased us in protected us from the other ice chunks that were being spun through the water,” explained Mystaria. “And since we were frozen...it’s hard to explain, but sometimes when people are subjected to extreme cold, they go into a sort of...hibernation, I guess you could call it, where they don’t need to breathe. Most of the time it doesn’t work, because the cold also damages their organs, but-”
“But Solvei had already put protective magic on us earlier so that the cold wouldn’t hurt us,” finished Thermal Draft, a catch in her voice as she finished laying out Lex’s bedroll, her hooves shaking.
“That, and Akna’s wasn’t hibernating like the rest of us, since she’s a creature of the cold,” noted Shadow, her voice lacking its usual sardonic edge as she glanced at the individual in question. “Which is good, since if she had been, or if we hadn’t all been frozen together in a single chunk of ice...”
“It was the Night Mare guiding me. I’m sure of it,” murmured the adlet who could, everyone had only recently found out, become one of Solvei’s people. “Being able to find the opening to that alcove in the darkness while the water was raging, let alone getting us into it...that wasn’t just good fortune. It had to be her.”
No one could say anything to that, and silence fell again, lasting for only a few moments before Shadow looked back at where Akna was trying to move Lex without waking him. “Grab the hem of his outfit with your teeth. You’ll be dragging his back legs a bit, but it’s not very far.”
The helpful comment caused Thermal Draft to look at the earth mare in surprise, and she wasn’t the only one. But before Drafty could say anything, she suddenly doubled over, shudders wracking her body as she started coughing. Pressing her hoof over her mouth to muffle herself, several seconds passed before she managed to get her breathing under control, although no one missed how there was blood on her hoof when she lowered it.
“Drafty...”
The pegasus shook her head in response to the concern in Mystaria’s voice. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not how that Paska guy made it sound,” noted Spinner.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” insisted the pegasus. “Compared to what Lex is going through...and what happened to Solvei...” Biting her lip, Drafty had to take a moment to compose herself before continuing. “Not to mention the state Woodheart’s in, this isn’t a big deal. Lex will wake up soon, and he’ll go through that Rite he was talking about, and after that...” She trailed off for a moment, realizing she had no idea what the unicorn’s plan was then. “After that, he’ll fix everything.”
“And if Spinner’s prediction comes true?” asked Valor quietly.
“...how’s it looking out there?”
Thermal Draft directed her question at Akna, the wolf having reached the bedroll and placed Lex on it, lying down next to him before answering. “They’re saying that there’s no sign that anyone tried to follow us. The traps in the river that Lex disabled are all back up, the catacombs are quiet, and there’s no evidence of magic being used to try and break in.” She shrugged as best she could with Lex’s forelegs still tight around her neck. “It’s like I told you before, we’re safe here.”
“But...?” pressed Drafty.
Another pained moan from Lex kept Akna from answering immediately, the stallion squeezing her tighter in his sleep. It was only after she whispered another reassurance into his ear, calming him enough to where he relaxed his grip a little, that she answered the question.
“I spoke to the Keeper just now. He wants to meet with Lex as soon as he’s awake.”
Spinner’s question made Thermal Draft roll over, turning so she was facing away from Lex – she’d laid down against his back a little while ago, hoping that her presence would bring him some measure of peace – before answering, keeping her voice low. “I am.”
“Me too,” came Mystaria’s voice a moment later.
When no one else replied, the sound of the filidh sighing could be heard. “I don’t suppose you guys have any idea how long we’ve been here now?”
“I don’t think it’s been very long,” came Mystaria’s answer. “A couple of hours at most.”
“I think I was dozing for a while,” added Thermal Draft, “so I’m not sure. Why?”
Spinner hesitated a moment before replying. “It’s just...I know it’s still early, but the last time Lex had a meltdown, it took him a couple days to get over it. If that’s the case again now...”
A rush of anger made Drafty grit her teeth. “Are you serious?! After everything he’s done, getting Woodheart back, saving Valor, fighting Sissel and Grisela and the rest of them in order to get us here alive, not to mention what he went through when Solvei-”
“I know, I know!” came Spinner’s quick response, and her cringing was audible in her words. “I wasn’t criticizing him! It’s just...we’re completely in the dark, literally and figuratively, and if he doesn’t wake up soon I’m worried about what this ‘Keeper’ is going to do.”
“Akna said we’re safe here,” pointed out Mystaria.
“She also said we shouldn’t leave this room,” retorted the filidh sourly. “That doesn’t exactly make me feel safe, you know what I mean? Not that there’s any point in venturing out since we can’t see anything anyway.”
Thermal Draft frowned, not liking that Spinner wasn’t wrong.
After they’d woken up, Akna had told them that they’d made it to the Shrine, and that they’d be safe there, but had also strongly cautioned them against wandering around. At the time Drafty had thought that was because of the stricture against making light in the Shrine (which Akna had also warned them against); with her magic, Drafty had been able to give everyone the ability to see in the dark, but only for a relatively brief time. Worse, the spell had been at the limit of what she was currently able to do with her magic, and casting it on herself, Mystaria, Valor, Spinner, and Shadow – Akna’s unexpected ability to change forms apparently let her see in the dark, and Littleknight seemed to have that ability as well – had been exhausting, especially after having just been fighting for their lives and subsequently frozen.
Taking all of that into account, and on top of Solvei’s death and Lex’s having lost consciousness, the group consensus had been to stay put and not push their luck.
But that had been a while ago, and although she’d been content to try and sleep, Drafty could understand how anyone would become restless after several hours of being stuck in the dark.
Of course, she herself wasn’t too upset about it. There were too many other things weighing on her mind at the moment.
Like the way they’d lost Solvei – whom she’d come to think of as a friend – so abruptly.
Or the heartbreaking way Lex had gone to pieces because of it, something which Mystaria had attributed to her being his familiar.
Or that, no matter how much she tried to get comfortable, there was a burning sensation in her lungs which wouldn’t go away, and which she suspected was Paska’s curse slowly killing her from within.
Or the fact that she was once again cut off from talking to Kara, this time by the goddess’s own design.
Sweetheart, there’s something you should be aware of, the goddess had informed her during their trek toward the temple, shortly before their disastrous confrontation with Grisela and her siblings. Once you get to the Night Mare’s shrine, I won’t be able to speak with you.
“Huh?!” Drafty had almost tripped upon hearing that, having to use her wings to keep herself from planting her face in the snow. Thankfully, she’d managed to convince everyone that she’d simply stumbled, having to work hard to hide the dismay that had fallen over her then.
Well, it’s not so much that I can’t, Kara had explained a moment later. It’s just that I’ll get in trouble if I do.
Drafty had never been entirely sure whether she needed to speak out loud for Kara to hear her, or if the goddess could read her thoughts, but in this case her question was obvious enough that she felt sure that Kara could have guessed it even if she hadn’t been able to hear it. Trouble how?
Places that are consecrated to a god are...how can I put this? They become part of that god’s turf. They’re not exactly part of their divine realm, but by mutual agreement other gods are supposed to treat them as if they were. That means that if another god barges in, or sends their servants in there, it can turn into a big deal. Divine wars have started over that.
A feeling of unease had come over Drafty then, glancing at where Mystaria was talking to Spinner, acutely aware that they were both followers of goddesses who weren’t the Night Mare. If they went to the Shrine...
Oh, no need to worry about your friends, sweetheart! laughed Kara. That thing I said just now about what happens when a god’s servants trespass in another god’s sacred ground only applies to those servants that are, to put it in simple terms, beyond what you’d call mortality. The ramifications of mortal actions, even when they’ve dedicated themselves to a god, aren’t something that god has to answer for directly.
In Drafty’s mind, Kara had yawned then, as though finding the explanation tiresome. But I’m afraid that doesn’t work for the arrangement you and I have. If I’m still in your head while you’re in the Night Mare’s little shrine, she’ll absolutely get her panties in a twist about it. And while she’s really cute when she gets incensed over some cosmic regulation being violated, she’d demand that I pay her some sort of outrageous price for not getting the entire pantheon on my case, which would be an awful hassle for me to deal with. So, just while you’re in there, I’m afraid you’re on your own.
And that had been that.
While Drafty hadn’t been able to process Kara’s abrupt announcement at the time – it hadn’t been very long afterwards that they’d been fighting for their lives – in the hours since she’d come to realize how much she’d come to rely on the love goddess’s advice. Kara had been the one who’d tried to warn her against making a deal with Prevarius, after all, and she’d been the one who’d told her how to simultaneously calm Lex down and deepen their relationship back in that village.
And of course, it was thanks to Kara that-
“We won’t need to worry about the darkness once I can prepare my spells.” Mystaria’s voice dragged Thermal Draft out of her thoughts, focusing instead on the whispered conversation her comrades were having. “I’ve got the spell for that in my spellbook, so I’ll make sure to prepare a few castings of it once I’m rested.”
A momentary pause ensued, after which Mystaria gave an embarrassed cough. “I mean...if Drafty doesn’t mind casting that same spell on me first so that I’ll be able to read my spellbook.”
Unable to hold back a snort, Drafty grimaced as the laugh made the burning in her lungs flare up, fighting down the urge to cough. “No problem.”
“Wait,” huffed Spinner. “You’ve got a spell for granting darkvision? How come you didn’t use it back when we were fighting those yetis back in the village?”
“The same reason I didn’t use a spell to generate some light, which by the way is a much easier spell to cast,” retorted Mystaria, her voice wry. “Because I hadn’t prepared it at the time, and don’t have a scroll of it either.”
“Ugh,” moaned the filidh. “Remind me, when we get back to Viljatown, to buy some sort of enchanted spectacles or something that let whoever’s wearing them see in the dark. Someone’s got to have invented something like that, right?”
“They have,” confirmed Mystaria. “They’re called the ‘goggles of night.’ They grant darkvision in perpetuity while worn.”
Although Drafty couldn’t see Spinner in the pitch blackness, she could practically hear the wistful expression on the bard’s face when she spoke next. “Yeah, I’m definitely picking one of those up. How much do they usually sell for, do you know?”
“Ten, maybe twelve, thousand gold pieces.”
Spinner’s answer to that came in the form of an exaggerated whimper, sounding so much like a foal who’d woken up on Hearth’s Warming Eve only to find that they’d gotten socks instead of toys that this time Drafty couldn’t hold back a giggle...which immediately caused the burning in her lungs to worsen, causing her to curl up as she started coughing, clenching her jaw as she tried to stay as quiet as she could so as not to wake Lex.
Fortunately she managed to do that much, since when the searing pain in her chest finally settled back down to a dull ache, Lex’s breathing remained slow and steady. It was a small victory, but Drafty savored it nonetheless, brushing his side with her wing as she turned back around, burying her face in his mane. This isn’t a big deal, she told herself, the way she had the last few times she’d been seized by a coughing fit. Lex knows all about curses. Once he goes through that Rite he talked about, he’ll be able to fix this.
But while Drafty felt sure that was what would happen, it did little to make her feel better.
If anything, it made her feel worse.
After all of the training she’d done with the magic she now possessed, all of the tactics she’d studied so that she could be a help rather than a hindrance, and all of the fights she’d participated in since they’d set out into the snowy wilderness, she’d once again become a burden on Lex. For the second time since they’d come to Everglow, she was in mortal danger, and she could do nothing except count on him to fix it. As though he didn’t have enough on his plate already, she was making it worse, just like she had with Prevarius.
There’d been a time when she’d thought that being a damsel in distress was a romantic notion. Seeing Lex for the very first time, back when he’d saved her life in Vanhoover, had been something right out of a storybook. But even though she’d helped him out since then – stopping Cloudy from stabbing him when that kraken had ensorcelled her during the battle on the docks; keeping Dark Streak away from him long enough for him to teleport them out of that burning factory; casting the spell that had melted Prevarius’ infernal contracts – she was still powerless to stop herself from being used against him by his enemies.
And after repeatedly witnessing how much he was suffering, that was enough to break her heart.
“Drafty?”
For a moment, Thermal Draft considered not answering Mystaria, sure that the kindhearted nun was going to bring up what Paska had done to her, which was the last thing Drafty wanted to talk about right now. I could just pretend that I fell back asleep, and she’d have to let it go.
But what had happened to Woodheart and Solvei had driven home just how easily someone could be taken away, and Drafty knew that if anything happened to Mystaria later, she’d regret ignoring her now. “Yeah?”
“I have a few vials of antiplague. It’s a stabilizing agent that helps to regulate your body’s humors. I know it won’t help with...with what you’re struggling with, but it can at least make sure you don’t get sick as a result.”
Drafty furrowed a brow at that. “It regulates...humor?”
“Bodily humors,” cut in Spinner. “Not like, you know, laughing at jokes and stuff. It refers to the balance of fluids that keeps your organs working properly. When various substances get into your body, they throw the ratio out of whack, which is what causes illness.”
It was a good thing, Drafty decided, that the darkness kept the other two from seeing her face right then. “You can’t be...no, you guys, sickness is caused by germs. Tiny creatures that invade your body and attack you from the inside. Not by these ‘humors’ or whatever you call them.”
An awkward silence fell then, and it was several moments before Spinner spoke up. “Listen...I know you and Lex are from some distant kingdom, but here in the Empire, we’ve advanced past the idea that sickness is caused by evil spirits. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of monsters that attack with disease, and spells that make people ill too for that matter. But your ordinary garden variety illness is caused by a humor imbalance, not...what did you say those creatures are called?”
“Spinner, stop it,” admonished Mystaria gently. “This isn’t the time for a debate about science versus superstition. Drafty, I promise you that regardless of the difference in our beliefs, this solution does help to prevent sickness. I’ve used it myself, and so have a lot of people I know. Please, consider taking it.”
Still trying to process the idea that she was being treated as the primitive one by people who thought that germs were a myth, it took Drafty a moment to find her voice. “I...alright, thank you."
Even if they had the wrong of what caused sickness, it was possible that they’d still stumbled across some sort of medical safeguard. And if it could help make things a little easier...make her even slightly less of a burden to Lex, then wasn’t it worth trying?
“Don’t thank her until you taste the stuff,” snorted Spinner, the amused undertone in her voice making it clear that she was still tickled about Drafty’s thoughts on germs. “Trust me, there’s a reason why they tell you to chug it without letting it hit your tongue.”
“You’re not helping, Spinner.” A soft clinking made it clear that Mystaria was fumbling through her saddlebag. “Just give me a second, Drafty. The vials are long and thin, so I can find them by touch...”
“Just don’t spill them,” warned the bard. “The last thing we need is to be stuck in here with that smell.”
Grimacing a little, Drafty found herself wondering if maybe she’d been too quick to accept Mystaria’s offer. “Do I want to know what goes into these?”
Spinner answered before Mystaria could. “No you don’t, believe me. That’s rule number two for taking antiplague, right after not letting it touch your tongue if you can help it and before avoiding the stuff if you’re pregnant.”
Drafty went rigid at that. “Wh-what?”
“Here it is!” announced Mystaria triumphantly. “Drafty, I’m going to crawl toward your voice and pass you the vial. Give it back to me after you’ve drank it, okay?”
Drafty’s reply left her lips immediately. “Actually, you know what? I’m going to pass on this.”
“Huh?” Mystaria couldn’t have sounded more confused. “But why? This really will help protect your health.”
“I just, um...I don’t trust it. I mean, I don’t think humors are real and all,” babbled Drafty, trying to look for a way out of this that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.
“Oh come on,” snickered Spinner. “I was just teasing you before, it doesn’t taste that bad. Although you really don’t want to know what goes into making it.”
“No, really, I’m fine,” pressed Drafty, feeling herself starting to sweat. “I don’t even think I’m going to get sick anyway.”
Mystaria, however, wasn’t ready to let the topic go. “But this place is really dusty. That’s the sort of thing that can throw off your humors...or, well, I still don’t understand what ‘germs’ are, but I’m sure this can’t help with them either, right?”
Trying to calm down, knowing that becoming agitated would only make things worse, Drafty struggled to control her reactions, even as she knew that after everything that had just happened she was too tired and too upset to do so. “No, I mean, yes, but that’s-, listen, I just don’t want to take that stuff, okay?”
“Why not?” huffed Spinner. “You were fine with it until just a minute ago, when...when...” She gasped then, the sudden inhalation sounding loud in the small room. “Oh my gods!”
Drafty bit her lip then, wondering if this was how Lex had felt a few days ago when his own secret had been revealed.
For the briefest instant, when Lex woke up, there was hope.
He’d been suffering from nightmares for so long that he’d long since ceased to give them any thought, the unpleasantness that came with sleeping simply being another hardship among the many that he’d accepted as simply being part of what his life was now. The only time they’d caused him any consternation during his waking hours was due to the embarrassment that came with others – especially the people he cared about – finding out about his persistent bad dreams. Even now, the thought of crying out in his sleep in front of someone else was like a knife in his gut.
Recently, however, his nightmares had been growing worse. That wasn’t particularly surprising; despite the Night Mare’s hints about how he could control his tulpa – the source of his bad dreams – Lex had achieved only the most limited success in doing so, and never while he was asleep. The result was that he was powerless to stop his recent failures, of which there had been many, from being used as fuel to exacerbate his nocturnal torment.
And so it was that, in the split-second instance between sleep and wakefulness as he woke up to find himself clutching the icy body of a large wolf, Lex found himself drawing in a sharp breath, hoping that what had happened to Solvei had been nothing more than a particularly horrific dream.
But reality was often far worse than any nightmare.
“Was that him?” came a voice from somewhere behind him, one that Lex belatedly recognized as being Spinner’s. “Is he waking up?”
“Akna,” came Valor’s voice from somewhere in the same direction, “if he’s still mad with grief-”
“I know.” With his face pressed against her neck, Lex could feel the adlet shaman’s voice as much as he could hear it, and the confirmation that she wasn’t who he wanted her to be sent a wave of grief so powerful through him that he had to bite his lip to keep from moaning. “If he needs me to, I can be Solvei for him for a little while longer. But I’m worried-”
“I’m worried about what we’ll do if he’s not in a state to make food for the rest of us,” cut in Shadow. “Because if he’s not, then we’re going to need to figure out an alternative sooner rather than later.”
Silence fell then, and it was only after several heartbeats that Valor spoke up. “Even for you that’s cold, Shadow. You saw how heartbroken he was before, and your-”
“It wasn’t just heartbreak,” cut in Mystaria, her voice clipped. “The psychic backlash from feeling a familiar die is supposed to be excruciating, and with how closely they were bound, I’m sure that made it even worse. To expect him to just bounce back from that-”
“Look, I know that he’s hurting, but we need food and water!” interrupted Shadow. “And I don’t just mean for us! Woodheart’s not waking up, and I don’t want her to starve to death because the only person who knows how to magic up something to eat is too out of it to do his thing!”
“Meep!” added Littleknight, sounding slightly more distant than the others.
It was a few seconds before Shadow continued, and when she finally did her tone was unusually pensive. “It’s not like I don’t care about what happened to Solvei, and I get that Lex isn’t just having another freakout, but just because we’re safe right now doesn’t mean everything’s alright. We’re still in a bad spot, and I don’t know how much longer we can keep waiting around like this.”
For some reason Shadow’s words stirred up a memory in Lex, pushing past the visceral anguish over what had happened to Solvei, and instead casting his thoughts back to his early days in Vanhoover, when he’d led the everypony under his care to the survivor’s camp just outside the city. Comfy Cozy – the belligerent crystal mare who’d been Lashtada’s priestess – had just lost her husband, Pillowcase, and was too grief-stricken to use her clerical magic to help anyone else.
At the time, Produce Aisle had pleaded for sympathy toward the crystal mare, but Lex shown her none. There were still other ponies who were suffering, and her grief was no excuse for her refusing to help them. But now...
Now, jeered his tulpa silently, your hypocrisy is on full display at last. You’ve already demonstrated that you’re not able to live up to the standards you’ve set for yourself. Now you can’t even live up to the standards you demand from the ponies you look down on.
The accusation stung, but only slightly, the pain of losing Solvei blunting everything else. Although Lex knew that the rogue portion of his mind was right, knew that he had to get up and look after everyone with him, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Even though Akna wasn’t Solvei, and her presence did nothing to fill the aching gap in his awareness where the winter wolf had been, her closeness eased his pain ever so slightly. With how raw and open the loss was, doing anything to make it worse was more than he could-
“I’ll do it,” murmured Thermal Draft, and it was only then that Lex realized that the pegasus was pressing up against him from behind, her wings draped over his sides. “I’ll cast that spell to make food for everyone, so let’s let Lex rest for a little while longer, okay?”
“...are you sure that’s a good idea?” Mystaria paused for a moment before continuing. “I mean, that spell is more difficult than the darkvision spell you used earlier, and you struggled with that one. And in your condition-”
“I’ll be fine,” interjected the pegasus. “I know I can’t do very much, but I can at least do little things like this...”
It was all Lex could do not to wince. That exchange had hurt worse than what his tulpa had said, his grief at losing Solvei not shielding him from the implications of Thermal Draft’s “condition.” Paska had said that it would take some time for his curse to kill her, but once Thermal Draft had started showing symptoms of the malediction, Grisela had remarked that she was succumbing faster than expected.
Which meant that this wasn’t like when he’d realized that he’d never see his parents again, or when Sonata had left him. He couldn’t afford to lie in one spot and shut everything out. Thermal Draft was dying, and time was of the essence, since if he couldn’t stop it then not only her life but her soul would be forfeit.
Lex wouldn’t have been able to accept anypony meeting such a fate, but for Thermal Draft it was particularly egregious. He’d already failed her, not just once but multiple times; letting Xiriel kill her back in Equestria, and then allowing Prevarius to put her soul in peril here. More than that, his own relationship with her was...undefined, now. Even if that was deliberately the case, he couldn’t pretend that she didn’t warrant special consideration from him; not after the night they’d spent together.
Nor could Lex bear the thought of going back to Equestria and telling Cloudbank – who would undoubtedly greet his arrival with a rush of hope that if he had survived Dark Streak’s attack, Thermal Draft had as well – that he’d failed to protect her beloved. As one of the few ponies to have earned Lex’s respect, Cloudbank deserved more than that from him, even if that meant an awkward conversation about what had passed between him and her girlfriend. As unpleasant as that would be, it was far more palatable than losing someone else.
I’m so tired of losing everyone I care about.
It was that thought which made him release Akna at last, slowly sitting up as he called on his dark magic to let him see without light, gasps coming from around the room as his eyes began to glow green and purple.
The barbed wire around his hoof shifted slightly then, the edges pressing against his skin, but he ignored it. Akna had previously told him about the prohibition against creating light in the Shrine, but at the moment Lex couldn’t have cared less about whatever minor religious tenet he was breaking. There were more important concerns.
“L-Lex!” Thermal Draft’s wings shot out in surprise, and she gaped as she slowly moved to give him some room, Akna doing the same on his other side. “Are you... I mean...?”
“I’m...” Words such as “fine,” “okay,” and “alright” came to mind then, but he couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud, unable to put forward something so ridiculously untrue. Instead, he forced himself to focus on what he needed to do. “I’m going to create food for everyone. Don’t interfere while I’m casting the spell.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and the others were already starting to offer their own statements, opinions, and questions, but he had already started making the requisite gestures and necessary pronunciations to conjure up their meal.
Once it became clear what he was doing, the others – knowing from experience that it took him several minutes to cast the spell – seemed content to step back, with Thermal Draft using her magic to grant them all darkvision, after which they started various activities of their own. Mystaria and Spinner moved off to a corner, the nun saying something as she pointed to Spinner’s broken lute. Shadow moved to look over Woodheart, petting Littleknight idly as she checked on the comatose mare. And Valor was speaking to Akna, both of them shooting glances his way as they conferred in hushed whispers.
Lex paid them no mind, instead focusing on his spell. Not that he needed to concentrate on it particularly hard; it might have been long, but it was rote, and made it easy for his thoughts to turn elsewhere, such as how he’d used the results of this spell to make peace with Solvei when they’d first met...
Almost fumbling a gesticulation, Lex forced himself to concentrate on his spell and nothing else, and soon enough there were bowls of porridge and mugs of water spread out across the floor.
Spinner gave a minor groan when she saw that he’d conjured the same food as always, but didn’t otherwise say anything as she sat down to eat. Shadow took it upon herself to slowly pour a sip of water into Woodheart’s mouth, petting the druid’s throat with surprising gentleness to make sure she swallowed it before feeding her a bit of porridge. Mystaria gently guided Littleknight to another bowl as she did so, sitting the almiraj down and quietly encouraging him to eat as she took a bowl and mug of her own. Valor and Akna moved to take some as well, but otherwise didn’t cease their quiet conversation.
Thermal Draft, for her part, smiled as she moved toward him. “C’mon, let’s dig in.”
“You eat,” retorted Lex. “I’ll examine the aura of that curse Paska put on you in the meantime.”
Her smile fell away then, replaced by a look of concern. “You should eat something first.”
The conversation was vaguely reminiscent of similar exchanges that he’d had with Sonata, and that sent another dull throb of regret through him. “I’m not hungry.”
“Lex...”
But before she could object to his refusal, Akna padded over to him, Valor in tow. “I’m sorry,” began the adlet shaman, still in wolf form. “I know this is abrupt, but the Keeper wanted to talk to you as soon as you woke up.”
“The Keeper can wait,” snapped Lex. “Thermal Draft’s health comes first.”
That brought a smile back to the pegasus’ face, but she shook her head. “I appreciate that, but I’m okay. Right now...honestly, I think you should rest some more, but I know you won’t. So instead, you should focus on going through that Rite of...whatever it was called.”
“Sublimation,” supplied Akna.
“Right. That,” nodded the pegasus. “Go talk to this Keeper or whoever and do what you need to do in order to make sure you get through it okay. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Lex was about to protest, but Valor spoke up before he got a word out. “I’d like to go with you. I know I wasn’t invited, but I want to at least have a look around, just in case. And if something happens-”
“Nothing will happen,” cut in Akna, before glancing at Lex again. “I mean, there might be some objections to the way his eyes are glowing, but I’m pretty sure that won’t be a problem.”
“Well, if it is then I want to help,” insisted Valor. But the forceful tone in her voice drained away as she turned her attention back toward the unicorn in front of her. “The others told me what happened. How you rushed to my aid when you realized I was drowning, and that was why you weren’t there when...”
She trailed off, glancing over his shoulder, and Lex glanced behind him just in time to see Thermal Draft – who had moved a few steps back – lower one hoof and assume a nonchalant expression.
“What I’m trying to say is, I know I can’t make up for...what happened, but I want to at least do this,” finished Valor.
“...fine.” It wasn’t respect for Valor’s offer that made Lex acquiesce to her request. Rather, it was simply that he didn’t want to keep talking about the circumstances surrounding Solvei’s death. Not when the prospect of reviewing what had happened, how his decisions and inability to anticipate and control of the battlefield had resulted in such a disastrous outcome, threatened to send him down into a labyrinth of regret and self-loathing. He’d already spent several days lost in such a quagmire after the secret of his arcane spellcasting had been revealed; he had no desire to go back now.
And yet despite that, Valor had nevertheless reminded him that there was one issue he could no longer ignore. He knew it was a mistake, knew that he was currently in no condition to deal with this, but he couldn’t stop himself, the words coming out of his mouth of their own accord.
“What happened to Solvei’s body?”
Alarmed looks were exchanged between Valor, Akna, and Thermal Draft then, the latter swallowing before she answered. “Lex, you shouldn’t think about that right n-”
“What. Happened. To. Her. Body?”
“It was frozen together with us,” replied Akna. “The ice she made formed around her, and we were all caught in it, so it was brought here too. That other pony, Mystaria, used a preservation spell on her, and we-”
“Take me to her.” He held his wire-wrapped foreleg toward Akna then, making it clear that he wasn’t asking. “Now.”
Wincing slightly, the shaman hesitated just for a moment before nodding and walking out the door, Lex following after her.
The Shrine of the Starless Sky wasn’t what Lex had expected it to be.
His interrogation of Akna a day earlier had focused purely on pragmatic matters regarding the Shrine and the Rite, ignoring aesthetics completely. As such, when Akna had told him that the entire Shrine was underground, Lex had pictured the place as being little more than a cavern with a series of satellite caves radiating out from it, much like the den that Solvei and her family lived in.
That had been compounded by what Mystaria had said about it being an “antenoctem” temple, apparently dating it prior to some reformation of the Night Mare’s religion. While Equestria had stood still for a millennium, the same couldn’t be said for Everglow; its current level of development – while still primitive in every regard compared to his homeland, save only for magic – was something that had been achieved only since the founding of the Pony Empire. As such, Lex had been prepared for the Shrine to be a crude and unsophisticated affair.
But looking at it now, Lex could see that the Shrine was anything but.
In his youth, Lex had given engineering – like most other physical sciences – only a cursory overview before having lost interest in it, finding conceptual pursuits far more intellectually stimulating. But even with the malaise hanging over him now, he could appreciate that he was looking at a truly impressive feat of construction.
The chamber that he, Akna, and Valor had exited had been lacking in furnishings or ornamentations, but its walls had been smooth and its ceiling level. But passing through its only doorway and into a large open area, Lex could see that it had been given only cursory treatment compared to the central feature of the Shrine.
Across from them – carved into the back wall of the cavern – was what could only be described as a cathedral. But unlike the ornate basilicas which dominated the skyline of Viljatown, this one lacked windows or steeples. Instead, it was a single tower rising up from the ground, extending nearly to the top of the cave, where it split into four smaller protrusions which finished the climb up the ceiling, leaving a small viewing platform between them.
By itself, that would have been a daunting sight, but the original builders hadn’t been content to leave their work undecorated.
Instead, they had fashioned the exterior of the tower to look as though it were a giant limb that had thrust up through the ground. Even from his current distance, Lex could make out how the exterior had been sculpted to look as though it were covered in a fine layer of fur, not dissimilar from that of a pony. But instead of ending in a hoof, the four extensions jutting up from the top of the tower were instead carved to resemble claws, the viewing platform sitting in the open palm.
The most notable feature by far, however, were the lines of thorns draped up and down the tower’s length. Carved out of the same stone as the tower, they spread back and forth across almost all of it before terminating just below where the tower split off into its smaller extensions. Even at a glance, Lex found it impossible to miss the resemblance between them and the barbed wire that was wrapped around his foreleg.
Nor had Akna overlooked that resemblance either, he knew. It was how she’d known of his connection to the Night Mare the instant she’d laid eyes on him.
The central building wasn’t the only part of the cavern that was decorated, however. In the black-and-white view of his darkvision, the cathedral, surrounding buildings, and floor were all a pale grey. But the walls and ceiling of the massive subterrane were pitch black, causing them to stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the place, making the gigantic stone claw look as though it were reaching upward into a featureless nighttime atmosphere.
No one seeing it would have needed to ask how the Shrine of the Starless Sky got its name
Still, Lex couldn’t help but peer closer at the surrounding walls, puzzled. The cathedral and the other buildings were all built into the sides of the cavern. The coloration of the rest of the place shouldn’t have been so different...but a moment’s investigation revealed the cause: the upper portions of the cave were covered in black crystals.
For the briefest instant, Lex’s heartbeat sped up, thinking that they were the same substance that he conjured with his dark magic. But having been raised by a mother who had worked as a lapidary, a moment’s examination was all Lex needed to put the lie to that theory, recognizing them as being onyx.
But that made the display only marginally less impressive. There had to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of onyx gems decorating the cavern. They were present in all shapes and sizes, fitted together in a byzantine arrangement that saw them squeezed so tightly against each other that a pin couldn’t have been pushed between them, clustered so as to make a cohesive image of a pitch-black sky. A fraction of them would have been a fortune sufficient to buy a palatial estate, fully furnished and with the servants’ salaries paid for a decade. All of them together would have been enough to buy even a prosperous kingdom.
And that still wasn’t the full extent of what the cavern held. Compared to the cathedral and ceiling, the remaining buildings were far less impressive. Like the upward-reaching claw, they were all built into the back wall of the cavern, though none were anywhere near as high. Instead, they were small one- and two-story buildings, windowless and flat-roofed.
But while not given the artistic flair of the cavern’s central features, the other buildings weren’t without adornment. Instead, each one had the statue of a beast crouched atop their roof, all gazing upward at the massive stone claw with their jaws open in silent howls. None of them were ordinary creatures, however; looking around slowly, Lex could see a lion with scales and leathery wings, a huge reptile with over a dozen pairs of legs, a gorilla with protruding tusks and four arms, a bear with the head of an owl, and numerous other monstrous creatures.
A glance back showed that there was one of them on the ceiling of the squat, single-story building they’d just exited too: an unnaturally large wolf with two heads. Like the others, it was turned toward the massive, thorn-wrapped claw, mouths open as though roaring at the huge limb.
The sight made Lex uneasy, certain that it had been no coincidence that he and the others had been put in that particular building to recuperate. But before he could ask Akna about it, Valor made her thoughts about the place known.
“Makwa preserve us,” muttered the earth mare as she looked around, her eyes wide. “This is incredible!”
“I was stunned when I first saw it too,” admitted Akna. “It’s a tribute to the Night Mare’s majesty, reminding us that even the mightiest creatures of the world pay homage to her power. Of course, lately I’ve been wondering if it symbolizes something different,” she finished, glancing at Lex out of the corner of her eye.
She wasn’t the only one, with Valor swallowing as she looked at the stone beasts, the dark crystals hanging above them, and the central claw with its thorns before looking back at Lex. “Yeah...I see what you mean.”
But while Lex wasn’t blind to the parallels they were alluding to – for all that he lacked the ability to perceive unspoken implications in the words of others, there was no way he could miss the obvious symbolism all around him – it wasn’t foremost on his mind at the moment. The Shrine was an extraordinary monument to his goddess, but now that his surprise at its grandeur was wearing off, Lex’s interest in the place was already fading in favor of the more immediate concern that had taken hold of him. “This is a waste of time. Where is Solvei’s body?”
For a moment Akna looked like she wanted to protest his changing the subject, but she seemed to think better of it. “This way.”
Padding silently across the open courtyard between the smaller buildings, she made her way toward the opposite side of the cavern. Valor fell in behind them, her head still twisting to and fro as she took in the splendor surrounding them on all sides.
...or rather, almost on all sides. Out of his peripheral vision, Lex could see that there was one area that hadn’t been given nearly as much treatment as the rest of the place.
Directly opposite the cathedral was a huge tunnel, one which – unlike the entrance he’d opened from the river alcove – sat open. Large enough that an elephant could have walked through it unhindered, Lex knew from having interrogated Akna previously that it led down into the catacombs beneath the Shrine, eventually leading into a network of tunnels that wound their way deep underground. Of course, to hear her tell it, they were also guarded just as heavily as the river entrance – the only path from the surface that connected to the Shrine – was.
Nor was that the only thing that caught his attention as they crossed the courtyard.
“Even the ground is unusual,” murmured Valor, taking a moment to sweep her gaze over the surface they were walking on. “It’s like it’s a single piece of flat stone.”
Although Lex didn’t say anything, that hadn’t escaped his notice either. The way the ground had been smoothed and leveled wouldn’t have been unusual back in Equestria, where pavement was considered normal. But Everglow didn’t have that level of development; all of the roads here were either made of cobblestones or were simply dirt. The only way that the ground could have been made this way was with magic.
But whoever had done so hadn’t stopped with the ground.
While Valor apparently hadn’t noticed yet, all of the surrounding buildings were similarly smooth in their construction. There were no visible mortar joints connecting bricks, nor gaps where interlocking pieces of stone had been fit together. Each building was made from a single, continuous piece of stone. Even with magic shaping them, Lex could barely imagine the effort that had gone into the spellwork necessary to create so many buildings with such intricate decorations.
Of course, that didn’t necessarily mean that was the case for the statues atop the surrounding buildings. While it was probable that they were simply exceptionally lifelike carvings, Lex couldn’t bring himself to entirely trust that idea. After all, petrification wasn’t unknown even in Equestria; the Royal Sisters had used exactly that method to defeat the monster that called itself Discord, even if they’d needed the Elements of Harmony to perform such a feat. Here on Everglow, with its greater level of magical development, such artifacts weren’t necessary to turn something to stone.
Which meant that, if he was right, the traps guarding the various entrances to this place weren’t the only method of protecting it. Presuming a canny defender had the magic necessary to do so, unpetrifying all of these creatures would immediately give the Shrine an ample array of powerful defenders.
Fortunately, that’s not the case for that gigantic claw, Lex knew. Akna had been inside it before, confirming that it was a building rather than the petrified limb of some colossal creature.
“She’s right over there.”
Akna’s comment drew Lex’s full attention, looking at the two-story building with a statue of a ten-headed hydra on its roof that she’d indicated. “I placed her near the back,” continued the adlet. “I hope you’re not upset that I put her here. I just didn’t want her dead body to be the first thing you saw when you woke up.”
“Which turned out to be a wise decision,” added Valor. “Lex, are you sure you want to do this? When I lost my father, I wasn’t-”
Lex, however, didn’t bother listening. Instead, he broke into a gallop as he pushed past Akna, racing ahead through the building entrance, ignoring everything else as he burst into the interior of the place...and came to a halt.
Despite the prohibition against making light inside the Shrine of the Starless Sky, the interior of the two-story building that Lex stood within shone with green and purple, his eyes blazing brightly as he turned back toward the doorway with a snarl.
“WHERE IS SHE?!”
Standing at the entrance of the empty, unfurnished building, Akna flinched. “I...I don’t understand! I left her right here! She-”
But Lex was in no mood for excuses. “You were the one who put her here! That makes you responsible for safeguarding her!” he hissed, stalking toward the shaman. When she took a step back from him in fear, his left hoof shot out, pointing at her balefully as he called upon divine authority. “Don’t you walk away from me!”
Helpless to disobey, Akna immediately came to a halt, whimpering as she froze in place. She couldn’t even look away as Lex strode up to her, putting his face within an inch of her own, his eyes shining so brightly that the green blotted out everything else. “You left her alone!” His voice came out as a strangled whisper, his breathing becoming unsteady as he bared his teeth. “You left her alone, and now she’s gone!”
“We can find her!” Knowing that Lex’s words weren’t wholly directed at Akna, and that she’d have no chance of stopping him if he went on another rampage, Valor somehow managed to keep her voice steady as Lex’s featureless eyes turned toward her in response to her outburst. “Lex, we can find her! We just have to search!”
Not giving him a chance to react, she rushed through the doorway, holding her breath as she passed within a foot of him. A shudder of relief ran down her spine when he didn’t lash out at her, and she paused for just a moment to steady herself, acutely aware that his eyes were still locked onto her. Okay, I’ve got his attention. Now I just have to actually figure out where Solvei’s body went. But that was easier said than done; Valor was fully aware that she wasn’t the smartest member of Fail Forward, nor was she gifted with magic. Come on, Valor, think! What would Mystaria do in a situation like this?
“This place is, um...pretty dusty, right? So let’s start with where it’s been disturbed.” The words came out of her mouth as soon as she thought them, knowing that Lex’s patience was most likely razor-thin at the moment. “There might be some tracks left if someone else came in after Akna left.”
“Y-yeah!” added the adlet. “And there might be a scent trail! My nose is pretty good in this form...”
She trailed off as Lex turned back to look at her, already regretting having spoken up. But a moment later Lex lowered his hoof, and Akna almost collapsed in relief as she found herself able to move under her own power again. “Find her,” breathed Lex, his voice a mixture of seething rage and hopeless desperation. “Find her right now, or I swear...” He couldn’t finish, a shudder running through him as his composure started to break down. “...or I swear...you’ll spend the rest...rest of your life...”
“Aw, would you listen to that? I think the poor little pony’s gonna cry!”
Lex went still as the taunt, coming from an unfamiliar voice with a masculine tenor, reached his ears. Slowly, his face expressionless, he stepped outside the doorway and looked up, the voice having come from above, as though the speaker were leaning over the edge of the roof. Which, he saw as he looked upward, was exactly the case.
And the giant spider perched on top of the building leered down at him. “Or maybe you’re gonna throw another hissy fit the way you did a little while ago? I heard it was some real crybaby garbage, too. ‘Oh Solvei! Solvei! Nooo!’ Hahaha! Pathetic!”
Lex didn’t react, didn’t move except to stare upward at the creature, black crystals slowly starting to sprout around him. Instead, it was Akna who spoke then, baring her teeth at the monstrous arachnid. “Ganas! What did you do?!”
“Who?” Rushing outside to join the others, Valor gasped as she looked upward. “Gods!”
Her surprise was understandable. The spider, appearing deep grey in the black-and-white spectrum of her darkvision, was the same size as Akna’s winter wolf form. Thick, hairless legs curled around the roof’s edge, connecting back to a segmented body. But any idea that this was simply an oversized version of a normal arachnid was dispelled by the sight of the thing’s face, which was humanoid in its arrangement. Taut cheekbones and an aquiline nose sat above a mouth filled with sharpened teeth, currently bared in a cruel smirk as its eyes – two of which sat beneath brows that were topped by six smaller orbs – narrowed at the sight of them. More notable was the shock of hair which encircled its entire head, showing no gaps between its beard, sideburns, and mane, all of which swayed back and forth as it shook its head at Valor.
“There’s only one god here, little pony,” it sneered. “And she doesn’t take kindly to weaklings who can’t even look after their own.”
“You’re the one who took Solvei’s body!” growled Akna, her hackles rising. “Ganas, I already spoke to the Keeper about these ponies! He said that they’re to be left alone until he can meet with their leader!” She canted her head toward Lex then, who was still silently looking upward as he raised his wire-covered hoof, the black crystals continuing to sprout around him.
But if Ganas was intimidated by the unicorn’s silent display of anger, or taken aback by what Akna said, he didn’t show it. “If the Keeper has a problem with me, that old fool can come down here and tell me himself!” he spat, before the corners of his lips curled up again in a mocking grin. “Besides, I didn’t bother the ponies. I was just helping myself to that delicious piece of meat you left out in the open! To think I’d spent all that time hunting, when there was a meal right here just waiting to be eaten! Right now I’m saving it to snack on later, but-”
“Shut up.”
Of all the things that Akna had warned him about when he’d interrogated her about the Shrine of the Starless Sky, the creatures who dwelt there had concerned Lex the least.
Although she’d spoken of a number of strange monsters who lived in the catacombs below the place – things such as leopards with snakes sprouting from their shoulders, sharks with four legs who tunneled through the earth as easily as their aquatic counterparts swam through water, great cats who could peel the skin off of their own faces as an intimidation tactic, and many others – apparently drawn to the Night Mare’s influence, few of them dared to enter the Shrine proper, at least according to her. Those that did tended to possess intelligence, serving the Keeper of the Shrine in hopes of receiving enhanced power from the Night Mare. But while Akna had meant that to be a warning, Lex had taken a very different lesson from her words:
Any creature which would naturally be drawn to the Night Mare’s power would be subject to her divine authority.
That included the oversized vermin perched above him now, which had just given up its right to continue living.
Ganas’ mouth snapped closed immediately in response to Lex’s orders, his eight eyes going wide as he suddenly found himself unable to speak. But his surprise lasted only for a moment, instead bringing front two legs up as he began to weave them in a complicated pattern that was recognizable as spellcasting.
But Lex didn’t give him the chance to finish.
“Fall.”
Ganas couldn’t even scream as he went over the edge of the building, plunging downward...directly onto the black spikes that Lex had raised.
Valor and Akna both cringed as a sound like a water balloon being punctured filled the cavern. Ganas had landed on his back, and the spikes had pierced through his abdomen in three different places. But by the way he was still wriggling, legs kicking futilely in the air, he wasn’t dead...yet.
“Now,” spoke Lex, his voice still dangerously soft as he moved to position himself directly in front of the helpless spider’s face, “here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me what you did with Solvei’s body, and if I don’t like what I hear, then your death-”
The barbed wire around his foreleg twisted rapidly then, slicing through his skin in a dozen different places, signaling the Night Mare’s anger. The rebuke was enough to stun Lex into silence, staring at his foreleg in absolute outrage that the goddess would deign to protect the creature that had quite likely defiled Solvei’s body. No, he swore silently. I won’t let his actions go unpunished! Damn the consequences! I’m killing that thing and there’s nothing you can do about it!
The barbed wire cut deeper then, causing his blood to spatter on the unnaturally smooth ground as he felt the sharp edges grate against bone.
“Lex, no! Not here!” called Akna, her position on the other side of Ganas’s impaled body preventing her from seeing what was going on. “The Keeper declared that this place is a hallowed sanctuary for all of the Night Mare’s worshipers! Shining a bit of light is one thing, but if you kill one of her followers here, he won’t perform the Rite for you!”
For a moment Lex couldn’t move, struggling to swallow the scream of frustration building in his throat. That the Night Mare would support the edict of this “Keeper” rather than allow him to punish this monstrosity for what it had done to Solvei was, in that moment, enough to make him seriously consider repudiating the goddess altogether. After everything he’d done for her, she was denying him this?! So be it! swore Lex silently, his horn flaring to life as he turned back toward Ganas’s writhing form, preparing to rip him apart with a storm of black crystals. If that’s the cost of meting out justice, then-
“Lex, don’t.”
Valor’s hoof on his side was enough to earn his immediate attention, knocking her leg away with a snarl. “Get away from me!” he roared. “I’m going to make this creature pay for what he did to Solvei! And there’s nothing that you or the Keeper or the Night Mare or ANYONE CAN DO TO STOP ME!”
Despite the strength of his scream, Valor stood her ground. Pausing at the sight of his bloodied hoof, she swallowed before opening her mouth, forcing her voice to come out in a calm and measured tone. “If you kill him, and lose your chance to go through the Rite that you came here for, won’t that make it harder for you to get revenge on Sissel for killing Solvei?”
The words sent a jolt through Lex, causing him to freeze in place.
“Won’t that make it harder for you to save Thermal Draft?” continued Valor. “Or Woodheart? Or all of the ponies in that village Grisela attacked? Won’t it cost you everything that Solvei died trying to help you achieve-”
“Stop talking.”
It was to Valor’s credit that she did just that, letting Lex squeeze his eyes shut as he waged a brief internal battle, the outcome of which was decided a few seconds later as he opened his eyes and pointed his hoof at Ganas again. “Where is Solvei’s body?”
Fortunately, the Night Mare’s power was still his to command, and the spider was given no choice except to answer, his voice coming out thick with pain. “Roof...” he gasped. “B-behind...statue...please...help me...”
Lex ignored the creature’s pleading, instead moving to look at Akna. “Go up there and retrieve her.”
The adlet cringed at the order. “Lex, I can’t climb with these paws,” she protested, clearly expecting to be rebuked for saying so.
For a moment it looked like she was right, as Lex swung his lacerated hoof around to point at her, causing her to cringe again. But what he said next wasn’t what she’d expected. “You can now.”
A question was on her lips when she felt new power flow into her, just like what she’d experienced during their battle when she’d summoned a swarm of elementals. Cautiously, she put her paw on the side of the building, and couldn’t suppress a gasp as she felt it sticking to the side with a powerful grip. Taking just a moment to orient herself to her new mode of movement, she quickly scaled the wall, disappearing onto the roof as she moved around behind the hydra statue.
Valor and Lex both watched her go, the only sound being Ganas’s tortured breathing. “Please...” moaned the spider again.
“Be quiet,” ordered Lex, using divine authority to make the creature comply.
A moment later, Akna returned...carrying Solvei’s body.
The sight of her was like being punched in the stomach, and Lex suddenly found himself unable to breathe as Akna laid Solvei down as gently as she could before backing away. Instead, he slowly stepped closer to her, suddenly not wanting to see her like this but simultaneously unable to make himself look away.
He’d heard, when he was a child, that dying was like going to sleep forever. But while Solvei’s eyes were closed now, she didn’t look like she was asleep; she just looked dead. The total stillness, the lack of any wintry puffs of air from her nose despite the relative warmth of the Shrine, the horrific scorch mark on her chest – the wound that had killed her, he knew – all ruined the illusion that at any moment she would get up and smile at him again.
That knowledge brought Lex to his knees, biting his lip as he pressed his face to her fur. “Solvei...my Solvei...”
She’d always referred to herself like that, after they’d formed their connection; calling herself his. He’d never said it back, being content to put her to work without ever taking responsibility for how he’d bound her to himself. She’d been his, but he’d never once acknowledged that fact.
The regret he felt then was almost more than he could bear.
He had no idea how long he stayed like that, with his face pressed against Solvei as he drew in shaking breaths, trying to hold himself together. It was only another sharp slash across his foreleg that drew him back to awareness, hearing Akna call his name. “Lex? I’m sorry, but...you need to heal Ganas. I think he’s dying.”
Dully, Lex stood up, turning lifeless eyes back toward the spider. He was shuddering now, legs moving slower than before.
A thought was all it took to make the black crystals dissolve, Ganas twitching as he hit the ground. “Get up,” ordered Lex, pointing his foreleg at the creature again. Despite how shaky its body was, it obeyed, slowly righting itself even as the wounds in its abdomen bled onto the floor. “Valor, keep watch over Solvei’s body.”
If the earth mare had any questions about what he was going to do, she kept them to herself, instead nodding. “Nothing will disturb her while I’m alive.”
Lex didn’t bother acknowledging her pledge, instead turning and marching toward the massive tunnel. “Akna, go ahead and open the entrance that we used to come here. As for you” – his lip curled as he looked at the dying spider – “follow me.”
Akna, however, hesitated. “Lex, what are-”
“Do as I told you.” This time, he used divine authority on her, giving the adlet no chance of disobeying as she ranged ahead. She didn’t need to go very far before finding the entrance from the river, standing near the mouth of the larger tunnel as she whispered the pass-phrase, the wall shimmering as it opened into a stone staircase, the sound of rushing water coming up from the bottom.
Lex strode past her without a word, Ganas stumbling after him. It took only a few moments for them to reach the bottom, the alcove still dry as its magic kept the water from overflowing its border, the river rushing past in a torrent.
Striding up until he was less than a foot from the rapids, Lex turned and looked at Ganas with eyes that were as dead as those of his winter wolf. “We’re outside the Shrine now,” he pronounced. “There’s no one to protect you here.”
He held up his hoof then. It was still cut and bleeding, but the barbed wire had ceased to move, nor did it so much as twitch when he spoke next.
“Enter the water.”
Ganas tried to fight, to muster up the last of his strength and refuse, or cast a spell, or do anything to save himself. But in the grasp of the power Lex commanded, he was utterly helpless to do anything but stumble forward, the orders keeping him silent still in effect as he shambled toward the river, preventing him from even begging for his life. Instead, all he could do was give Lex one last terrified look, silently pleading for mercy.
But the same way Lex had managed to follow the Night Mare’s restriction against violating the Keeper’s edict preventing killing in the Shrine, he followed the goddess’s creed now, meeting the spider’s eyes in silent refusal.
Then Ganas entered the river and was swept away.
For several seconds, Lex stared at the flat wall of rushing water. Then he turned back and marched up the stairs to the Shrine.
Akna was waiting for him at the top of them. “Lex-”
“Let’s go,” he interrupted, not interested in dwelling on what had just happened. “It’s time to meet the Keeper.”
Akna’s murmur earned a dismissive snort from Lex as the two of them strode back into the expansive cavern that housed the Shrine. “I don’t care,” he spat, making no effort to keep his voice low. “If the Keeper didn’t want me slaughtering his minions, then he should have done a better job keeping them in line. Ganas dared to disturb Solvei’s body, and he paid for that affront with his life. The same will happen to anyone else who accosts those under my protection.”
The bold declaration made Akna bite her lip, not sure whether to be impressed or unsettled by the absolute fearlessness – and recklessness – that the stallion was showing.
Slaying Ganas had almost certainly guaranteed that his entourage wouldn’t be harassed while they were within the Shrine. Although the Keeper had already ordered that the ponies weren’t to be meddled with, Akna had suspected – and Ganas had all but proven – that particular command didn’t have the Night Mare’s backing the way the edict against her worshipers killing each other in the Shrine did. Despite being new to the Night Mare’s religion, that didn’t surprise Akna; as a goddess of loyalty, it was difficult to imagine the Night Mare rebuking her own followers in favor of those who didn’t revere her. In that regard, Lex’s display of strength had been a good thing, having made it clear that if anything happened to his comrades while he was undergoing the Rite of Sublimation, there’d be a settling of accounts afterward.
And there was no doubt in Akna’s mind that message had been received. Despite how empty the cavern looked, the adlet was fully aware that not all of the buildings it held were unoccupied. No doubt their inhabitants been content to watch how Ganas’s actions played out, judging the newcomers accordingly. To that end, Lex had made it clear that he was not to be trifled with.
But in doing so, the unicorn had all but spit in the Keeper’s face. Not only had he flat-out announced that he didn’t think the Keeper was capable of keeping his subordinates under control, but slaying one of them was a tantamount to a declaration of war. In the Night Mare’s faith, one’s servants were an extension of their own power; by that token, killing Ganas weakened the Keeper, whom Lex would be relying upon to perform the Rite for him.
For Akna, who had undergone the Rite after making a show of supplication to the Keeper as part of her conversion to the Night Mare’s faith, that seemed counterproductive in the extreme.
If the Rite of Supplication failed, she knew, it wouldn’t be fatal. But it could still turn out very, very badly.
If Lex was concerned about that, however, he didn’t show it.
Instead, he strode up to where Valor was standing over Solvei, his features softening as he looked at the winter wolf’s body. Ignoring the earth mare, he knelt down and ran a hoof over Solvei’s fur, his expression once again registering grief. But this time he didn’t linger over her the way he had before, instead pausing for only a moment before composing himself, looking at Valor as he stood up. “Take her and go wait with the others. I’ll return shortly.”
Akna expected Valor to protest his decision, but to her mild surprise the mare simply nodded. “May Makwa watch over you.”
Akna didn’t know who that was, but Lex didn’t seem to appreciate the sentiment. “The last thing I want is another meddlesome deity to deal with. Now go.”
He didn’t wait for Valor to respond before he looked at Akna. “Do a better job watching over them than you did with Solvei.”
Akna’s eyes widened. “Wait, you’re not taking me with you?!”
Lex shook his head, his eyes already turning toward the claw-shaped cathedral. “I’ll deal with the Keeper on my own.”
“But-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish protesting as he held his left foreleg out toward her. From anyone else it would simply have been interpreted as a shushing gesture, but from Lex it took on a different context:
Obey, or be made to obey.
“I understand,” muttered Akna, fighting down a twinge of resentment as she turned and headed back toward the building with the two-headed wolf statue on its roof. A glance over her shoulder showed that Lex had changed into shadow-form, flying up toward the top of the cathedral. Unlike herself, he didn’t spare the slightest glance backward, confident that she was following his orders.
His certainty at her obedience brought a frown to Akna’s lips. One day ago she’d been full of grandiose plans to retrieve one of the Umbral Regalia, conquer the region, and unite her people and the utvalgte under the Night Mare’s faith. Now she was held in thrall to a pony, forced to put her agenda on hold in order to help him carry out his own. As the shaman of her tribe, and one who had used one of the Night Mare’s most sacred relics to slaughter her people’s ancient enemies, it was galling how easily a mere pony had brought her under his sway.
Although it could be worse, she reminded herself, glancing uneasily at where Ganas’s blood was still staining the ground.
It was fortunate that she’d cut her own deal with the Keeper before Lex had regained consciousness.
As he approached the top of stone claw that was the heart of the Shrine of the Starless Sky, Lex broke off his approach, hovering in place as he glanced at the viewing platform.
Or rather, at where the viewing platform should have been.
From the ground, the angle had prevented Lex from seeing anything more than the edge of the platform. It was only because of what Akna had told him that he knew it was carved so as to resemble an open palm behind the massive talons that marked the top of the cathedral. But looking at it now, it was impossible to miss that the space between those curled digits was pitch black, as though the giant claw was grasping a globe of utter darkness.
Of course, that shouldn’t have been possible. His darkvision granted sight without the use of visible light, which meant that he shouldn’t have been able to perceive darkness, at least within a close range. And yet, the area within the claw stubbornly refused to make itself perceptible to his incorporeal eyes.
“I’ve never actually seen the Keeper,” Akna had told him before they’d left the other adlets. “He’s always cloaked in darkness so deep that even when I’m in winter wolf form, I can’t see him. I can tell from his voice that he’s a he, but that’s all.”
At the time Lex had been skeptical of the claim, despite knowing that Akna couldn’t lie to him while under the influence of divine authority. By her own admission, she was only able to use darkvision as a result of the alternate form she’d gained from the Rite, so perhaps she’d simply been duped on account of having tried to look at the Keeper without having properly acclimated to being able to see in a different spectrum. But just like the shaman had described, there was an area that his darkvision couldn’t penetrate right in front of him now.
It had been an educated guess which had made Lex ascend to the top of the cathedral, suspecting that the ruler of this place had been drawn to observe what had happened with Ganas.
It seemed that he’d been correct.
For a moment Lex regarded the black sphere warily, certain that the Keeper – who had to have some way of registering the presence of others despite the globe of darkness – was looking back at him. More information would have been ideal, but observing the supernatural blackness via the magical spectrum wasn’t an option, since he couldn’t utilize his circlet while in shadow-form, nor was trying to augment his darkvision in an effort to pierce the gloom available to him; after how much he’d pushed himself in his fight with Sissel and her siblings, straining himself further would likely result in serious damage. But that didn’t mean that he was out of options...
“Cowering in the shadows is unbecoming for one who would rule territory in the Night Mare’s name,” Lex announced abruptly, staring at the center of the featureless globe. “Reveal yourself, Keeper!”
From inside the murkiness, a dry voice emanated. “You blaspheme this holy sanctuary by illuminating your eyes, and then complain that you cannot see through the darkness? Perhaps if your faith was greater, your powers of perception would not be blunted by my presence.”
Lex narrowed his eyes, but not because of the rejoinder. While the Keeper’s voice was indeed male, it was incredibly raspy, as though its owner had crawled across a desert for weeks without a single sip of water. But what was far more unusual was the total lack of other sounds accompanying the voice.
Having enhanced his hearing – the only sense besides sight that he normally made use of while incorporeal – Lex knew he should have been able to hear any other noises the Keeper made. But although he could place the voice as having come from roughly twenty feet directly ahead, at the center of the globe, the Keeper was otherwise completely silent. There was no breathing coming from him, nor a heartbeat, nor the rustle of clothing.
It was almost as though the Keeper were himself incorporeal.
With how much the Shrine seemed to be suggestive of his own nature, Lex found that to be a disturbing possibility. But he knew better than to broadcast that, instead filling his voice with derision as he replied. “My faith is sufficient for the Night Mare to personally grant me a portion of her power. And it’s in recognition of her acknowledgment that I demand you perform the Rite of Sublimation for me.”
A hollow laugh emanated from the darkness then, and curiously it was accompanied by a soft clicking sound, as though two rocks were being lightly tapped together. “Indeed, so Akna has told me. And your little demonstration with Ganas” – the laughter ended abruptly then – “was also quite dramatic. But while I am obligated to perform the Rite for any of the faithful who make a pilgrimage to this holy place, I would see the mark of Our Dark Lady’s power closer, if you have no objection.”
Idly noting the confirmation that the Keeper could indeed see through the gloom surrounding him, Lex floated forward. His enhanced hearing having already confirmed that the viewing platform was indeed solid – he could hear his own voice and the Keeper’s bouncing off of it – he entered the black globe, turning corporeal as he did. Immediately, everything went dark, but Lex paid it no mind, instead holding up his left foreleg. “Then look upon it, and know that I am the Night Mare’s champion.”
It took a moment before the raspy voice spoke up again, strained with excitement. “To bear the Dark Tyrant’s power within your own body...such a miracle is the aspiration of all of her faithful!”
“Then allow me to share it with you.” With a thought, Lex projected divine authority toward the source of the voice. “Remove this darkness and let me see you.”
The invisible bands of power projected outward from his hoof, carrying with them the Night Mare’s divine will...and found nothing to latch onto.
A moment later the laughter, and its odd clicking, came again, harsher than before. “So it is as Akna said. I had thought that perhaps you were simply putting on an elaborate ruse, using ordinary wire and an unspoken, ungestured spell to force her and Ganas to obey you. But I have served the Mistress of Dark Dreams long enough to recognize her power, and that was indeed it!”
Despite his having apparently convinced the Keeper of his status in the eyes of their goddess, Lex’s sense of accomplishment was utterly drowned beneath a renewed sense of wariness, silently lowering his hoof.
His divine authority had failed to compel the Keeper’s obedience, which meant that either the unseen master of the Shrine was engaging in an elaborate ruse of his own – possibly speaking from a remote location, similar to what Sissel had done – or, more likely, he wasn’t the sort of eldritch beast that the Night Mare had given him power over.
Despite Lex’s certainty that he’d be able to compel the obedience of all who dwelt in the Shrine, it seemed that there was at least one being whom he’d need to find another way to control.
“Now that I know you are who you were said to be,” continued the Keeper, “allow me to formally welcome you to the Shrine of the Starless Sky, Lex Legis.”
Lex didn’t react to the use of his name, knowing that Akna had doubtlessly been the one to reveal it; it was what the Keeper said next that caught his attention.
“Your greeting is duly noted,” rumbled Lex. “Now, how soon can you perform the Rite of Sublimation?”
As curious as he was about the unfamiliar title the Keeper had just referred to him by, Lex knew better than to inquire about it. Even if they were both adherents of the Night Mare, that didn’t mean that the Keeper was his ally, the same way their shared desire to protect Equestria hadn’t made Celestia and Luna his allies. Like the alicorns, the Keeper doubtlessly had his own agenda, and Lex was fully aware that admitting his ignorance with regard to the specifics of the Night Mare’s religion – an area that the Keeper was doubtlessly well-versed in – would only make it easier for the Shrine’s mysterious caretaker to try and manipulate him.
The better option, therefore, was to steer the conversation away from anything doctrinal in nature. So long as the focus was kept on pragmatic issues, Lex had little doubt that he’d be able to maintain the initiative.
Of course, that would have been easier if he’d had his spokespony...
“The preparations are already underway,” rasped the Keeper. “Akna made it clear what your purpose was in coming here, and as I said, I am obligated to perform such a holy ceremony for those who are of the faith. But I must warn you, the Rite itself is lengthy, and once begun must be seen to completion; it cannot be interrupted midway through.”
Forcing away morose thoughts of Sonata, Lex made a dismissive gesture. “All the more reason to begin as quickly as possible. The sooner it’s complete, the sooner I’ll be able to depart from here.” Hopefully that would make the Keeper realize that it was in both of their interests to get this done with all possible haste.
“Of course. But I should inquire about your companions while you’re indisposed. Have-”
“They’re none of your concern.”
“All who dwell within the confines of the Shrine are my concern,” retorted the Keeper. “But if you are worried for their safety, I suspect that your little display with Ganas was more than enough to convince everyone here to leave them alone. Though if you will permit me to ask, why did you choose to kill him rather than have him perform a demonstration of penitence?”
The question made Lex hesitate, not sure if “demonstration of penitence” had a particular meaning in the context of the Night Mare’s religion. “...for what he did, the harshest possible punishment was called for.”
“I see...” murmured the Keeper. “But getting back to the topic of your companions. With how long you’ll be indisposed, would you like for one of my acolytes to lead them in an observance of the Somnolent Obeisance, or do you wish to do it yourself?”
“They don’t worship the Night Mare,” replied Lex through gritted teeth, certain that it was no coincidence that the Keeper was bringing up precepts of their goddess’s religion. “It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Truly?” mused the Keeper. “I would have thought that it was an opportune way to show them why the Night Mare is superior to whatever gods they follow. Do you not agree?”
“...”
The Keeper waited until it became obvious that no answer was forthcoming, then continued. “Well, then perhaps the Tenebrae Sollemne, for their own comfort while they wait for y-”
“Enough of this,” spat Lex. “I’m going back to oversee the others’ recuperation. Inform me as soon as the Rite is ready.”
He had already changed back into a shadow as he spoke, turning to depart, but the Keeper’s words reached him before he had a chance to go further than a few feet beyond the edge of the black sphere. “You don’t know what the Charismata you possess is truly capable of, do you?”
Lex knew the proper course of action now was to cut his losses and head back, ending all communication with the Keeper until the Rite of Sublimation was ready. But he still hesitated, seething at another of his limitations being so easily exposed. Bad enough that Mystaria had been able to deduce that he couldn’t recover his arcane spells after only a few days in his presence; for the Keeper to be able to uncover how little he knew about what the Night Mare had given him from nothing more than a short exchange – while giving away so little about himself in the process – was a slap in the face.
And with Solvei’s loss still fresh in his mind, to say nothing of all the other setbacks and reversals that he’d suffered since coming to Everglow – and even before that, with Dark Streak and whoever it was that had been scrying on him – Lex had no tolerance left for being made a fool of.
It was only because he found himself at a momentary loss as to the appropriate way to lash out in retaliation for the insult – divine authority wouldn’t work, and a storm of destructive magic would make it impossible to undergo the Rite of Sublimation – that Lex didn’t move, giving the Keeper a chance to continue speaking. “No, I thought not. Akna made it clear when she told me about the battle you fought before coming here.”
That the adlet had betrayed him like that only made the flames of Lex’s rage burn hotter. “She dared-”
Another soft clicking heralded laughter from the Keeper. “Calm yourself. She engaged in no treachery toward you, nor does she have sufficient knowledge of Our Dark Lady to recognize the full scope of what you have been given. But I do.”
Slowly, Lex turned in place, glaring at the darkened sphere that hid the Keeper.
“You performed no ceremonies before the battle, despite knowing that it was coming,” continued the rough voice. “You made no attempt to consecrate the battlefield. Nor did you bless the equipment you and your companions used. Instead, you relied almost entirely on your own powers, using the Charismata only to lend strength to Akna and your winter wolf.”
It was all Lex could do to hold back a blistering retort, intent on making it clear that while the Night Mare might have been his goddess, he placed no stock whatsoever in the trite customs that the Keeper was indicting him for overlooking. But even in his anger, Lex couldn’t bring himself to speak the words out loud, recognizing the implication that they weren’t just customs. After all, if the “Charismata” that the Keeper kept referring to was what he’d taken to calling divine authority, then the Keeper was suggesting that the actions he’d outlined would have had some sort of real, tangible effect.
...and, Lex realized, that wasn’t implausible to consider.
Quite the contrary, the Night Mare had a long history of letting him figure out the full scope of the powers she’d granted him on his own. That divine authority could be used to empower the creatures subjected to it, rather than simply immobilizing them, was only the most recent revelation in that regard. His tulpa was another; when she’d granted that portion of his mind semi-independence, he’d had no idea that it could do anything other than torment him. Now he knew better, having inadvertently used it to aid him in battle on more than one occasion.
And it had been Fruit Crunch and his friends who’d informed Lex of their revelation about how – with the Night Mare’s connection to Equestria still being so tenuous – he needed to personally induct other ponies into her religion in order for them to start receiving spells in exchange for worshiping the goddess. In hindsight that was clearly a function of his having a portion of her godly essence within him, the same essence he called upon whenever he used divine authority.
If that power could command unnatural creatures, and create a link between the Night Mare and ponies who worshiped her, was it really so difficult to believe that it could be used in other ways as well?
“Most ponies serve the gods out of a sense of devotion, pursuing a calling that can only be fulfilled by dedicating themselves to a higher power,” intoned the Keeper, and Lex was surprised to find that the killing rage that had come over him only moments before was already receding. “But there are some for whom their service is demanded, the gods seeing potential too great to be allowed to lie fallow. Most such ponies, once they perceive the touch of the divine, flock to one learned in the mysteries of the gods so as to better understand what is expected of them.”
A derisive laugh escaped from Lex then, and despite having managed to rein in his emotions, he couldn’t resist the urge to pounce on the Keeper’s mistake. “No one demands anything of me, not even the Night Mare. I earned this power by bargaining with her directly, after using my magic to bring her into my presence. And now that I’ve fulfilled my end of the deal, I use it as I see fit.”
“Nevertheless, you still received her favor with no deeper knowledge of what that conveys,” replied the Keeper easily. “And so now you wield her power with all the precision of a blunt instrument, rather than the finesse of a skillfully-placed arrow. That is why the Night Mare has brought you here now; so that before you try to gain more power, you can gain a greater understanding of the power you have already been given: the Charismata, which enables the one blessed with it to reshape aspects of the world around them through force of will alone.”
To anypony else, that might have been a tempting offer. The knowledge that there were further ways to make use of the power the Night Mare had given him could very well make the difference between victory and defeat the next time he faced Grisela and her siblings. And as much as it hurt to admit, it might have been enough to save Solvei if he’d known about it before. But had only one reaction to what the Keeper was telling him:
He had just gone too far.
Although the surge of wrath that coursed through Lex only moments ago had fled as quickly as it had come, he could feel a new rush of enmity coursing through him now. This was exactly what he’d expected the Keeper to do: use his greater knowledge of the Night Mare’s religion to try and establish a hold over him. And that wasn’t something that Lex could forgive.
No one manipulated him. Not the Night Mare. Not the alicorns. Not Sonata or Aria. No one.
Nor could he allow anyone making the attempt to go unrebuked.
Attacking the Keeper wasn’t feasible. Even if his cooperation wasn’t required to perform the Rite, and even if the Night Mare hadn’t forbidden her faithful from killing each other in this place, Lex had little doubt that any serious assault would likely see a horde of monsters brought to bear. While he had no doubt that he could turn many – perhaps even most – of them to his side via divine authority, he had no idea how many he could control at once. All the more so if he was right about the surrounding statues being calcified monsters that the Keeper could unpetrify. If that happened, then there would likely be deaths among his companions, and that wasn’t acceptable.
But Lex didn’t need to attack the Keeper to put him in his place.
Instead, he moved back inside the black globe, returning to corporeal form as he began concentrating.
“I have studied the sacred scriptures, memorized the holy texts, and contemplated the hallowed revelations, all so that I can revere the Dark Tyrant more,” intoned the Keeper. “Let me show you how to wield her influence, and your power-”
“The only thing you’ll show me, Keeper,” hissed Lex as he called upon his dark magic again, this time pouring his body’s natural magic into it, “is what you really look like.”
The searing pain that coursed through him then was as familiar as it was expected, and Lex felt himself sway on his hooves. Between the exertion he’d gone through in that last fight, and the backlash from Solvei’s death, he knew he was in no condition to be doing this. But Lex never considered stopping as he forced more power into his vision, intent on seeing through whatever supernatural darkness the Keeper had surrounded himself with.
And it seemed to be working, as a faint outline was starting to become visible...
But not of a pony.
Instead, the form that came into focus a moment later was that of an equine skull floating in the air.
The words spilled from Lex’s lips without conscious thought, staring in horror at the unliving creature hovering barely a dozen feet in front of him. While the eyeless and fleshless head was a far cry from the ghouls that had overrun Vanhoover – being nothing more than a pale skull and jawbone, its lack of a horn signifying that the once-living pony hadn’t been a unicorn – the same wave of absolute revulsion that he’d felt for the unliving cannibals washed over him now.
“Interesting. So now you are able to see me?” mused the Keeper, its jawbone moving ever-so-slightly as it spoke. “Why did you wait so long to employ such a power?”
The thing’s question was enough to snap Lex out of his shock. Silently berating himself for being taken so completely by surprise, he brought a hoof up and quickly began to gesture, rattling off a series of arcane syllables.
Undeath was a state that utterly warped the mind, Lex knew. Given how much a person’s consciousness could be altered by even a minor chemical imbalance in their body, being bombarded with negative energy to the point of not only dying but then being reanimated was more than sufficient to drastically pervert a person’s sense of self. That was why the ghouls infesting Vanhoover had been, without exception, completely mad; hooting and gibbering and chanting disgusting rhymes as they’d gleefully devoured the ponies who’d once been their friends, neighbors, and loved ones.
While the Keeper was clearly no ghoul, it was still a creature which no longer belonged in the world of the living, which meant that there was no reasoning with it, nor any way he’d trust it to perform a ritual over him. Now that its true nature had been uncovered, it would likely discard the pretense of sanity that it had been feigning, which was all the more reason to strike first. With any luck, his initial spell would be enough to destroy the creature outri-
“Ahh!”
The gasp that Lex gave then was as much surprise as it was pain, the barbed wire around his hoof slicing bloody ribbons across his flesh, the wound sharp enough that it disrupted his spell before it could go off.
A low laugh came from the Keeper then, and this time the source of the clicking sound that accompanied it was clear: the creature’s jawbone was opening and shutting as it chuckled, its desiccated teeth tapping lightly against each other. “Did you forget that the Night Mare herself forbids her worshipers from slaying each other in this place?”
Abandoning his spell, Lex didn’t immediately answer as the barbed wire around his foreleg stilled itself. The very idea that an undead pony – particularly one that was reduced to nothing more than an empty skull – could venerate a god was preposterous. That it revered the one deity that he actually respected, and that said deity recognized and accepted its devotion in turn, was almost an affront.
But as much as that flew in the face of everything he knew to be true, Lex was cognizant that there was no other explanation: the barbed wire around his foreleg was nothing less than the outward manifestation of the power the Night Mare had given him, and it never misrepresented her will.
“Of course,” continued the Keeper, voice still cordial, “if you truly wished to destroy me, you could simply fall back and order your subordinates to undertake that task for you. Not Akna, of course; as an adherent of the Night Mare, she would be punished quite severely for attempting to break the prohibition laid onto this shrine. But those other ponies, the ones who worship lesser deities, are under no such restriction. Though naturally, if you did that, I would be obliged to have my acolytes respond in kind.”
“Or,” hissed Lex, eyes blazing at the unsubtle threat, “I could simply have the environment attack you on my behalf.”
He was already turning his gaze upward, toward the onyx-studded roof of the cavern. Standing at the top of the claw-shaped tower, they were already close to the blackened canopy. A few well-placed black crystals should be enough to carve out a chunk of the roof, Lex decided, horn lighting up as he called upon his dark magic. If I can get a large enough piece of stone to crush-
This time, the agony that shot through him had nothing to do with the Night Mare.
Instead, Lex felt his blood turn to fire even as the entire cavern gave a nauseating lurch to the side, causing his hooves to slide out from under him, nearly pitching over the side of the platform. No cry of pain escaped his mouth this time, however, as his lungs seemed to have forgotten how to work, leaving him feeling as though his chest were being squeezed in the grasp of some invisible giant. Worse, his vision blacked out a second later, everything turning black as pitch.
For an instant, Lex was sure the Keeper had done something to him. But even as he managed to force himself to draw a breath – the act causing the burning in his veins to flare up in a way that made his body feel like he were burning to death from the inside, his sense of balance telling him that things were spinning wildly – he knew that couldn’t have been the case. If the Night Mare hadn’t allowed him to attack the talking skull, recognizing it as another of her faithful, then surely that constraint served to protect him as well.
And an instant later, as he tried to force himself to retake shadow-form, only to cause his agony and nausea to surge even worse, he realized what was happening: he was paying the price for having overexerted himself trying to see through the Keeper’s supernatural darkness.
“Hm, is this the answer about why you waited to see through my concealment?” wondered the Keeper aloud. “If so, then I suppose the better question is why you used such a power at all, if the cost is this severe. But perhaps this is an opportunity for me to correct your earlier misconception: you see, I am not undead.”
Although the cavern’s whirling was starting to slow, and the pain wracking his body was gradually beginning to recede, Lex wasn’t able to answer, still needing to focus on drawing in air. Even so, his reaction to that news must have been outwardly visible, because another clicking laugh came from the Keeper. “I can understand finding that answer difficult to believe, but it is nevertheless the truth. This is the result of having a body which still feels the ravages of age, even as it refuses to succumb to it. Eternal life without eternal youth, if you will.”
“...lies...” hacked Lex, managing to prop himself up on one hoof. He didn’t dare use his dark magic now; any attempt to do so would doubtlessly make his condition worse. But if divine authority wouldn’t work on the Keeper, and he had no allies to fight for him, then that left only his arcane and divine spells. But with the Night Mare refusing to let him fight the Keeper, his options were sharply limited.
“It would behoove you to recognize the truth of my words,” continued the Keeper blithely. “Since it was the same rite which you now seek that did this to me.”
That was enough to give Lex pause. Akna had been clear that the Rite of Sublimation was a risky endeavor, since while never fatal, a failed undertaking could leave someone in a state far worse than before they’d attempted it. And with how Spinner had predicted that he’d be “misshapen” because of what happened here...
“The irony, of course, is that this is precisely what I was seeking when I first came here,” intoned the Keeper. “The desire to live forever is universal among those who are doomed to die, and yet had I known that I would be trapped here forever, watching myself waste away...”
“You...can’t leave?” muttered Lex, not because he was interested in the Keeper’s story, but because the longer the floating skull kept talking, the more time it gave him to recover. He still didn’t know what he’d do, short of retreating – one of the thaumaturgical spells he’d prepared allowed the targeted creature to float downward through open air as gently as a feather, so if he rolled off the edge of the viewing platform he’d at least have a way to make it safely down – but until he managed to get back a modicum of self-control he wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.
“Indeed. This Shrine is sacred territory which I am charged with overseeing, and yet it is also my prison.” The Keeper’s voice seemed to move slightly, as though it were floating over toward the edge of the platform. “Such a punishment is fitting for those who dare to demand Our Dark Lady’s attention, and yet fail to live up to her expectations when they receive it. Had I merely been given a body that rotted without expiring, I still could have fulfilled my dream of conquering Taralos, but now...now that hope is dead, while I yet linger.”
“Taralos?” The name wasn’t one that Lex was familiar with, but hopefully the Keeper would expound on. Already, Lex could feel his breathing ease, the dizziness receding along with the pain.
“If you are unfamiliar with the name, that would be no surprise,” answered the Keeper. “It was one of many pony nations that covered the land in the days before the Empire. Indeed, sat in what is now that nation’s very heart. But when I was young, all I knew was that Taralos was the country ruled by King Greybeard. My father.”
The admission came with another clicking laugh. “Of course, he never acknowledged having sired me. To do so would have shamed him, as my mother was an earth mare from Turves. Do you know of that place?”
When Lex grunted in the affirmative, the Keeper continued. “Though I am given to understand that today my home is little more than a sleepy village, the name of Turves was once applied to a large swath of the countryside east of Taralos, where my mother’s kin roamed freely as tribes of warriors.”
The raspy voice softened then, growing quieter. “To say that their lifestyle clashed with the more ‘civilized’ unicorns of Taralos was a gross understatement. So I suppose it should be no surprise that my father, in his youthful days as prince of a prosperous nation, looked to win glory for himself by riding out to subdue the ‘barbarians’ at his country’s gates. And indeed, stories of his victories over tribes of Turves were quite popular among his people. I wonder if they would have been so popular if they had spoken of how he availed himself of the conqueror’s rights toward the mares he and his soldiers captured.”
This time Lex said nothing, concentrating on recovering enough to stand back up. The inky blackness clinging to the Keeper was once again impenetrable to his eyes, but that couldn’t be helped. Trying to see through it again now would only wound him again, likely worse. As it was, just getting back to his hooves was an uphill battle.
With no interruption forthcoming, the Keeper continued. “I was fortunate to have been born of the earth tribe. Had I my father’s horn, my mother would have left me in the wilds after birthing me, unable to bear the shame. As it was, she told me of my heritage only as she lay dying from the sweating sickness. Once she passed, I sought my father out, determined to lay claim to the other half of my heritage.”
“Is there a point to all this?” growled Lex. Although he still felt like he was liable to collapse if he tried to do anything strenuous, he’d managed to recuperate enough that stalling for time was quickly losing its merit. “Your attempt to complete the Rite of Sublimation might have been unsuccessful, but mine won’t be.”
“I recall saying much the same to the previous Keeper, an old leatherwing who was quite glad to have a pony so perfectly suited to being his successor; there was little else for me to do once I was trapped here, you see. But if you wish to know the moral of my story, it is this.”
This time, when the Keeper spoke, his voice sounded closer, as though he’d floated to within hooves’ reach of Lex. “My father, King Greybeard, refused to recognize me as his son when I presented myself to him, his lawfully-wedded wife already having born him a legitimate heir. I used to think he turned me away because he was ashamed, either of having ravished my mother or at the thought of having an earth pony son. But in time, I came to see that it was neither.”
A pause came then, and when Lex didn’t bother asking, the Keeper provided the answer without prompting. “He refused to acknowledge me because I was a complication that he did not want to deal with. To admit that I was his, and how he had sired me, would have thrown the future of the country he’d spent his life strengthening into doubt. Faced with gaining a son, or potentially losing a kingdom, he made the only choice he could.”
When he spoke next, the Keeper’s voice had taken on a harsher edge. “In other words, I would have weakened his hold on his domain...as you have weakened my hold on mine.”
Despite knowing that the Keeper couldn’t harm him, Lex tensed up. “What do you...” Then he remembered what Akna had said to him only a few minutes prior. “This is about Ganas.”
“He was petty and foolish, but those qualities made him easy to control,” replied the Keeper. “More importantly, he was mine. Slaying him, and doing it so openly, is a challenge to my authority, one performed not only in the eyes of my acolytes, but in those of the Night Mare herself. And then you expect me to lend you my aid?”
“Expect it?” sneered Lex. “As the Night Mare’s champion, I demand it! You already admitted that you’re obligated to perform the Rite for any of her faithful who come here!”
“I am,” agreed the Keeper. “But I never said that I was obligated to do so for free. If you want me to perform the Rite of Sublimation for you, then there is a task that I would have you do for me. One that should be easy for someone so favored by our goddess.”
Lex grit his teeth at that, and almost renewed his threat to bring the roof down on the Keeper’s head. But now that his visceral reaction to the undead thing – for he had serious doubts about the veracity of the creature’s claims otherwise – had worn off, he realized he didn’t have that luxury. He needed to undergo the Rite, if for no other reason than to save Thermal Draft. The powers he would gain as an alicorn were the only recourse he could think of in order to prevent her from dying, body and soul.
To say nothing of the possibility of gaining enough power to bring back Solvei...
Despite how much it galled him, particularly with how he’d sworn not to forgive the Keeper’s attempts to manipulate him less than five minutes prior, Lex forced the words out. “What task?”
Even knowing that he would have been hit with the Night Mare’s prohibition had he tried, when the Keeper’s clicking laugh came again, it was only because he was still suffering the effects of overstraining himself that Lex didn’t lash out. “Despite having spent centuries immersing myself in the tenets of the Night Mare’s faith, I am not a spellcaster,” explained the Keeper. “Rather, I use a number of minor miracles by appealing to her directly. One of them is a miracle to bestow intelligence upon magical beasts that lack it. But in order to do that, I need them brought here, alive.”
The admission made Lex snort. “So you want me to replace the servant of yours that I slew.”
“Indeed, and I have a very specific creature in mind. Venture into the catacombs and bring it to me, and once you have, I will perform the Rite of Sublimation for you.”
Thermal Draft didn’t have the luxury of replying to Akna’s murmured statement, keeping the shaman’s tail clenched lightly between her teeth as she followed the adlet across the cavern.
Strictly speaking, there was no reason she couldn’t have spat Akna’s tail out and made a response. But even though Drafty could still see in the dark thanks to the spell she’d used earlier, she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold out, and had no intention of finding herself alone in the dark in the middle of the Shrine when her spell suddenly gave out. Even if that wasn’t likely to happen – while it was difficult to keep track of the time in a place with no natural light, let alone timepieces, she knew it hadn’t been that long – recent events had left her feeling exceptionally risk-averse.
She wasn’t so cowed, however, that she didn’t turn her head to glance around at the Shrine of the Starless Sky in all its splendor. While it was her first time seeing a monument to one of the pony gods that governed Everglow, and so didn’t know if such grandeur was normal for a place of worship, she couldn’t help but feel impressed. The darkened walls and ceiling, the central spire in the shape of a claw, the massive statues atop the surrounding buildings...all served to give the place a sense of majesty and power that perfectly characterized what she knew of the Night Mare.
But as awe-inspiring as the Shrine was, Thermal Draft had another goddess on her mind at the moment. The way we came in is outside of the Shrine proper. That’s how Akna said Lex was able to kill that spider that took Solvei’s body. So if I can just get there, I should be able to talk to Kara again. At least, that was her hope...
“Light can be quenched at the source, but darkness never can be.”
Akna’s quiet whisper drew Thermal Draft’s eyes back toward the adlet, who had led them to the edge of the massive tunnel that was the main – and, as far as she’d seen – only point of egress from the Shrine. Except, she saw an instant later, that wasn’t the case; in response to the adlet’s incantation, a portion of the wall just inside the tunnel’s entrance faded away as though it were made of smoke rather than rock, revealing a stone staircase heading down. From the bottom, she could hear the sound of water running.
“I still don’t see why you wanted to do this so badly,” grumbled Akna, glancing back to give the pegasus a sour look. “Lex conjured plenty of drinking water, and it’s not like there’s anything down here except the river, which from here doesn’t go anywhere except outside...” Her eyes widened then, and she gave Thermal Draft a horrified look. “Wait, are you leaving?! Is that what-”
“No!” Spitting the adlet’s tail out of her mouth, Drafty shook her head. “That’s not it at all! I just...I needed to be out of that room we were all in, after seeing Solvei...”
She didn’t have to fake the catch in her voice, nor the shudder that ran through her then. The ice that the winter wolf’s final spell had surrounded her, Littleknight, and the mares of Fail Forward with – save for Valor, who’d already gone into the river – had put them all into a torpor; only Akna had been conscious, since the cold didn’t adversely affect her. As such, the adlet had been the only one to see Solvei’s dead body after dragging them out of the river and into the Shrine. At least until Valor had brought the winter wolf back just now.
But while it was true that the sight of her had brought tears to Drafty’s eyes, there was another reason why she’d begged Akna to take her here now, despite the strenuous objections from the adlet and the earth ponies. It was only when the brewing argument had caused her delve into another coughing fit that they’d backed off. Even then, Akna had acceded to Drafty’s request only with extreme reluctance...and more than a bit of fear.
“I’m going down there with you,” announced Akna as Thermal Draft stepped around her.
Thermal Draft shook her head. “That’s not necessary. I just need a little space to clear my head.”
“It is necessary,” insisted Akna. “Lex is already angry at me for what happened with Solvei! If something happens to you now-”
“Nothing will happen.”
“You don’t know that! What if that ugly creature that Valor dragged down here swims upstream? Or what if you have another coughing fit and lurch into the water? Or what if-”
“Alright.” Drafty could feel another coughing fit coming on, taking a deep breath as she tried to avoid wearing her frayed nerves even thinner. “Alright, listen...how about we compromise? I’m planning on sitting at the bottom of the steps, near the water, so how about you come down far enough that I’m in your sight the entire time. Does that sound good?”
Akna frowned at that, and it was only after several seconds’ consideration that she finally nodded. “Just do whatever it is you need to do to ‘clear your head’ quickly, alright? This is a risk we don’t need to be taking.”
“I’ll try not to take too long,” nodded Drafty, wings flapping as she slowly moved into the tunnel that the adlet had opened.
Not having been conscious when they’d been taken inside, she took the trip down slowly, despite the short distance. Unlike the main section of the temple, the steps here had been crafted with no eye towards artisanship, being uneven and roughly cut. It was enough to make her glad that she had wings, hearing Akna step slowly and carefully behind her.
But as she neared the bottom, the adlet’s footfalls were muffled by the sound of the river, which came into view a few moments later. Touching down, Thermal Draft paused for a moment to stare at the sight. Even though she’d seen any number of incredible things since coming to Everglow – not to mention several notable spectacles back on Equestria ever since the elemental bleeds had happened – the sight of a body of water rushing by an open space without moving in to fill it was still captivating for how bizarre it was.
There isn’t even any spray, she realized, running her hoof across the ground to confirm that it was, in fact, completely dry. It was enough to make her realize, thanks to the smattering of magic that she’d been taught by Lex in order to help her use the “gifts” that Prevarius had given her, that whatever magic had been used here was an impressive bit of spellwork indeed. Her own magic was so limited that she couldn’t imagine ever being able to do anything close to this.
But contemplating how little power she had wasn’t why she’d come down here.
Glancing back at where Akna was watching her warily from where she was perched midway up the steps, Drafty gave the adlet – still in wolf-form, since she apparently couldn’t see in the dark otherwise – a reassuring wave before she moved back from the rushing water, sitting down against the far side of the alcove. Rather than putting her hindquarters on the ground and keeping her forelegs straight the way a pony normally would have, though, she instead leaned further back, pulling her knees up to her chest and folding her forelegs atop them.
It wasn’t the most comfortable position, but it let her hide her face, lowering it so that her forehead was resting against her forelegs. With her muzzle hidden, and any sounds she made muffled by the roar of the water, it was enough to let her try talking to Kara, since she still didn’t know if she needed to speak out loud or not in order to reach the goddess.
“Kara,” she murmured quietly, keeping her voice barely above a whisper in case Akna’s ears were more sensitive than she was guessing. “Kara, please, can you hear me? I’m outside the Shrine now, and I really need to talk to you.”
Her only answer was the roar of the river a few feet away.
“C’mon, Kara, talk to me,” she groaned. “I’m really scared! The curse that Paska guy put on me when he transformed into that...thing, is making me cough up blood, and it hasn’t even been a full day since he hit me with it! And it’s not just that.”
A shudder ran through her then, as she spoke out loud about what else had been happening to her for the first time. “I’m getting tired more than before. I mean, not much, but flying down these steps just now felt harder than it should have. Like I was flying in the face of a breeze instead of through still air. And I’ve got this horrible feeling that it’s all going to get worse.”
Shifting in place a little, Drafty wrapped her tail around herself, pulling it so that it curled around her middle. “But it’s not me I’m scared for. It’s my baby. Lex’s baby. I don’t know if this curse is hurting them...hurting him or her, too. I mean, I know I’m barely a week along, but just the thought...just the thought that they’re...”
She couldn’t finish, needing to take several slow breaths as she felt a coughing fit threatening to start up again. “Please Kara...Spinner and Mystaria might have found out I’m pregnant, but I don’t want to talk to them about this. I mean, they’re nice, and they promised to keep this a secret, but if we tried to talk now, back in that room we’re all staying in, Valor and Shadow and Akna would all find out, and I’m worried that one of them would end up telling Lex. Like, Shadow would say something just to be mean, or he’d make Akna do it with that divine authority the Night Mare gave him. So I’m begging you, please talk to me...”
This is dangerous territory, sweetheart.
“Kara!” The goddess’s name burst from her lips in a tidal wave of relief, causing Drafty to lift her head as she said it. A moment later she remembered that she was being watched, glancing at Akna. When she saw the adlet giving her a worried look, she managed to send a weak grin her way before putting her head back down. “I’m so glad you’re back! I was afraid you weren’t going to answer me at all!”
I almost didn’t, murmured the goddess, her tone unusually pensive. You might be outside of the Night Mare’s hallowed ground, but only just barely. Reaching out to you when you’re this close might not be a violation of divine law, but it could still be considered provocative...and not in the way that I like, either.
Under other circumstances, Drafty might have cracked a smile at the goddess’s joke, but at the moment she was too keyed up to appreciate the humor. “Kara, my baby-”
I know, sweetheart, and you don’t need to worry. Your baby’s fine.
This time Thermal Draft managed to keep her reaction under control, though she couldn’t prevent the tears of relief that gathered in her eyes. “You’re sure?” she whimpered. “You’re absolutely, positively sure?”
I think I know a little something about pregnant mares, sweetheart, chuckled the goddess. But her voice turned serious a moment later. Right now, the curse that shuck put on you-
“That what?”
The one you called Paska. He’s a shuck, a witch-hound. That human form he uses is just a disguise, though it’s only a halfway-decent one. I mean, it’s better than that enchanted hat that griffon assassin was wearing back on Everglow, which was insultingly bad, but it’s still not exactly top-tier shapeshifting. The limits on how much mass he can displace alone-
“Kara, the curse?”
Ah, of course, sweetheart. What I was saying is that right now, that curse isn’t actually hurting your body. Not directly, at least. The symptoms you’re experiencing, the coughing and the fatigue? Those are...how can I put this? They’re not being caused by any sort of physical problems; it’s just that your body is experiencing...I suppose you could call it sympathetic distress due to the damage being done to your life force.
This time Drafty was the one who couldn’t reply immediately. “My ‘life force’?” she managed at last. “You mean my soul?”
Sweetheart, how is it that you come from a world that’s supposedly so much more advanced than Everglow, and you don’t know this? teased the goddess. Simply put, all living creatures – except for some of the really weird ones – are made of up three components: their body, their soul, and the life force that binds the two together. Right now, it’s that last one that curse is attacking.
“I don’t understand,” murmured Drafty. “How does it ‘bind the two together’? And what does that have to do with my baby?”
In her mind, Kara sighed. I can’t stay here much longer, sweetheart, so I’ll try and make this quick. Souls, by themselves, can’t easily remain in the mortal world; they’re what your lover would call ‘conceptual entities,’ beings of abstraction rather than physicality. They naturally gravitate toward planes that exist in similar modes, the same way water tends to flow downhill. With me so far?
“I think so.”
Good. Now, souls can be anchored to a physical existence by positive energy, which is the clinical term for your life force. The reason you have that to begin with is because your body is more than just a collection of parts that are fun to play with; things like breathing, eating, and all the other biological processes that keep you healthy are actually a series of functions that make it a receptacle for storing positive energy. That’s why fatal wounds cause death; those processes break down to the point of being unable to sustain your positive energy reserve, and without that, the soul departs.
“Wait, hang on.” Biting her lip as she tried to digest the crash course in metaphysics that she was being given, Drafty did her best to tie that back to her current situation. “So, now that I’m pregnant...”
You’re not just growing the body of another pony inside of you, confirmed Kara. You’re also giving it a tiny bit of your own life force, which it’s making its own. That’s why your baby isn’t in danger from that curse you’re dealing with; it doesn’t recognize your child’s life force as its target.
Finally starting to understand what she was being told, Thermal Draft felt some of her tension ease. “Good. That’s...that’s good...”
It’s really not, sweetheart. You don’t have nearly as much positive energy in your body as your boyfriend, so-
“Wait, what?” interrupted Thermal Draft, brow furrowing as she tried to keep up with what she was being told. “We’re both ponies. We’re almost the exact same size. How can we have different amounts of positive energy? And why would anyone need more than someone else?”
Because souls aren’t static things. They can grow and change over time, not just in disposition but in strength as well. At least so long as they work to develop themselves. And it’s only to be expected that a stronger soul requires more life force to anchor it to its body, which doesn’t require a larger physique; positive energy isn’t physical either, so your body can hold as much as it needs to in order to keep your soul anchored. It’s just that it naturally defaults to the minimum amount necessary to get the job done.
Her head almost spinning now, Thermal Draft didn’t try to sort through all of what she’d just been told, instead latching onto what seemed like the most relevant point. “So Lex...?”
He has a very strong soul, replied Kara, an appreciative tone in her mental voice. And he’s working hard to develop it further.
That didn’t surprise Drafty in the least, but it did lead to a flood of new questions. “How do you do that? Develop your soul, I mean? And, wait, is my baby’s soul already there?! Or is it too early? When does your soul become attached to your body? It has to be before being born, right? And, come to think of it, where do souls come from? Are they-”
She didn’t get a chance to keep speaking as Kara suddenly cut her off. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I have to go. I’ve already lingered here too long. Just make sure that Lex fixes you soon. Your reserve of life force is already running dangerously low.
A sudden rush of fear, this time for herself, shot through Drafty then. “How soon? Paska said he thought I had between ten days and two weeks.”
He was probably comparing you to Lex. He’s strong enough that it would take roughly that long. But for you...
Drafty held her breath as the goddess paused.
Right now, I’d say you have just under forty-eight hours left.
After several seconds, it became obvious that neither of Lex’s traveling companions were going to answer his question. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that they’d heard him at all, offering no outward reaction to the sound of his voice. Though if they had, he would have been hard pressed to see it; although his darkvision was still active – clearly showing the rough and unhewn cavern walls that made up the catacombs beneath the Shrine of the Starless Sky – it couldn’t show him much at all of the two acolytes that the Keeper had assigned to lead him to the monster that the talking skull wanted him to subjugate.
But that was no real surprise, since at the moment his guides were burrowing beneath the tunnel he was traversing rather than walking through it.
The only reason he knew where they were at all was because of the dorsal fins jutting up from the ground, cutting lines through the stonework as their owners dug their way forward.
Refusing to be ignored, Lex instead came to an abrupt halt. He had no fear of his so-called guides leaving him behind; they’d previously demonstrated that they were sensitive to his presence. The vibrations caused by his hooves striking the ground were readily apparent to them, despite the unyielding surface of the stone and the low rumble caused by their own tunneling. And they proved their perceptiveness again a moment later as the two dorsal fins curved around, heading back toward him.
Preparing to use divine authority in case the Keeper’s acolytes were feeling treacherous – they were no longer within the Shrine, after all – Lex watched as the two dug their way upward and clamored into the tunnel proper.
The sight of their emergence would have sent most ponies fleeing in terror. Each of the creatures looked like someone had combined a shark with a giant armadillo, keeping all of the worst features of each. Both creatures had long, thick bodies whose exteriors were covered in overlapping plates of what looked like keratin rather of skin. Neither had any sort of neck that Lex could see, instead having heads that emerged directly from their midsections, with jaws as wide as their entire bodies and lined with multiple rows of jagged teeth.
Four muscled legs likewise ended with long, sturdy claws that allowed them to dig through solid rock as a prodigious rate, displacing the fragments of pulverized earth behind them as they tunneled forward. Beady eyes were set deep in their skulls, making them look as if they were staring at him from inside of helmets that had been grafted onto their bodies. Behind each of them, stubby tails lashed from side to side, knocking away the last of the loose rock as they climbed out of the holes they’d dug.
These were the landsharks that Akna had mentioned to him earlier, being among the many different types of magical creatures that the Keeper had gathered. But when he’d called for them, the Shrine’s undying caretaker had termed them “bulettes,” introducing them as Grit and Gristle; apparently they were familiar with the creature the Keeper wanted him to fetch, having run into it before they’d been elevated to sapience.
Lex wasn’t sure which one was which – the Keeper had presented them as a pair, and Lex could barely spot any differences between them anyway – but mentally designated the one with the slightly smaller dorsal fin as Grit, and the other as Gristle.
“Why did you stop?” growled the former.
“Need to rest already?” sneered the latter.
For a moment, Lex didn’t reply, instead giving both creatures a hard glare before repeating his earlier question. “How much further?”
The duo laughed derisively in unison. But their chortling came to an abrupt halt as Lex turned his wire-wrapped foreleg toward the pair. “I warned you when we set out that my patience was already thin. Now, answer my question, or see what’ll happen if you continue wasting my time.”
The sound of gnashing teeth came from them then, but Lex had no idea if that signified anger, fear, or something else altogether. “Not very far now,” answered Grit.
“Its lair is close,” added Gristle.
“How close?” demanded Lex.
The question made the two of them shift their weight, huffing and snorting as they pawed at the ground. “Close enough to run there easy,” replied Grit after several seconds.
“Wouldn’t be winded when you arrive,” agreed Gristle.
Lex weighed that for a moment, trying to decide if they were being deliberately evasive or were just too stupid to offer anything more specific. Deciding that the second reason was more likely – even discounting that their enhanced mentalities were probably recent developments, it was unlikely in the extreme that either of them had been taught even the most basic methods for measuring time or distance – Lex slowly lowered his hoof. “If we’re that close, then I want both of you to stay here and wait for my return.”
The order set their tails to lashing. “Keeper said to help you,” insisted Grit.
“We do what Keeper says,” added Gristle.
Despite how simpleminded they sounded, and his having heard the Keeper relay those exact instructions to them, Lex didn’t let up. “Consider very carefully what happened to the last one of the Keeper’s minions who angered me. If this creature is as fearsome as your master says it is, I doubt he’ll care overly much if it replaces the two of you as well as Ganas.”
Another round of gnashing of teeth came from them then, but it wasn’t followed by any further challenge to his orders. Satisfied that they would obey him, Lex strode forward, passing between the two of them. Although he was well within reach that their claws would have been able to lash out at him with virtually no warning – to say nothing of how easy it would have been for them to lunge at him with open jaws – neither made any attempt to challenge him. It wasn’t until he’d passed them both by that they turned around to watch him leave.
“We’re not like Ganas,” called Grit as Lex continued walking.
“We’re bigger and stronger,” snarled Gristle.
“We’ve fought many battles and always survived.”
“We’re too tough to be killed easily.”
“We’ll wait right here while you fight that creature.”
“And we’ll be ready for when you come back.”
Lex didn’t bother responding as he marched down the tunnel.
That the bulettes were intent on revenge for his having killed Ganas, despite their insistence that they would follow the Keeper’s orders, was a possibility he’d been prepared for ever since they’d set out from the Shrine. Despite that, Lex hadn’t been overly concerned; even if he couldn’t simply bring them under control with divine authority, turning into a shadow would easily render most of their raw power useless. He had no idea if they had any magic at their disposal – Ganas had, in his few moments of resistance, tried to cast a spell – but Lex couldn’t bring himself to feel anxious about that either.
Even so, the last place he wanted Grit and Gristle to be was alongside him as he brought whatever it was he was about to face under his power, for one simple reason:
His two primary methods for dealing with those creatures if they turned out to be treacherous, dark magic and divine authority, were both running dangerously low.
He’d already used multiple applications of both of those powers during his disastrous confrontation with Sissel and her siblings, followed by even more in his subsequent exchanges with Ganas and the Keeper. The result was that both were now on the verge of being depleted. While he normally regained his full reservoirs of both while sleeping – unlike with his thaumaturgical spellcasting – that hadn’t happened during his recent bout of unconsciousness; replenishing those stores of energy required rest, and he’d experienced none of that in the wake of Solvei’s death.
Worse, his physical condition was in poor shape as well.
While externally, his only visible wounds were where the barbed wire around his leg had cut him as a result of his trying to enact violence within the Shrine, the pain from his other injuries hadn’t faded. His head still ached from where Grisela had struck him, as did his back from when the hag had flung him over her shoulder. Worse, he could still feel a creeping sense of fatigue from having overcharged his body’s natural magic multiple times over the last several hours; even now, it was all he could do to walk without his legs trembling from exertion, the trip through the tunnels having exhausted what little stamina he had left.
Carefully managing what power he could still call upon was a major priority if he wanted to complete the Keeper’s errand and make it back alive, in other words. Which meant not having to waste any bringing Grit and Gristle back in line if they decided to turn on him at an inopportune moment. Far better to leave them behind so he could concentrate on one monster at a time...though that presumed they’d actually stay put.
If not, then he’d likely need to dispatch them. It wasn’t as though he lacked the means to do so; quite the opposite, since – in a reversal from how things more usually were – he still had plenty of thaumaturgical spells ready to be used, despite his dark magic and divine authority running low. While not all of them were combative in nature, he still had more than a few that would almost certainly be sufficient to put the bulettes down.
And if the Keeper tries to use that as an excuse not to perform the Rite, Lex decided silently, then I don’t care what the Night Mare wants, I’ll bring that entire Shrine down on his unliving head!
The barbed wire around his foreleg twisted slightly at that, jagged edges running painfully across wounds that had only recently stopped bleeding, but Lex ignored it. Instead, he focused on the curve in the tunnel up ahead, noting how the passageway – already large enough to allow Grit and Gristle to stand side by side with room to spare – widened even further. More notable was the sound of breathing coming from around the bend.
Slowing to a halt, Lex took a moment to steady his breathing and give his aching muscles a chance to rest before pressing forward, moving further down the passageway as he glanced at where the breaths were coming from...
And caught sight at last of the creature that the Keeper had sent him to capture.
It was the size of the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale, and the reptilian nature of its lower body lent itself to that comparison. But where the dragon had been saurian in appearance, this creature’s legs, tail, and middle were all crocodilian in nature. Nor were there any wings to be seen. But unlike its squamous body, the creature’s head was that of an entirely different animal altogether.
Or rather, its heads were of a different animal altogether.
All seven of them.
Lex had heard about hydras as a child, though he’d never seen one. But unlike the multiheaded statue back in the Shrine, the creature in front of him now had heads that were lupine in nature, each one of them sporting triangular ears, a protruding muzzle, and shaggy fur atop short necks.
That alone wouldn’t have been so disconcerting, but for the thing’s eyes.
Specifically, that it had none.
Instead, its sockets contained only flames. Smokeless and flickering despite the lack of a breeze, the fourteen ocular cavities were bright yellow, and Lex knew that if he hadn’t been using darkvision the light from the flames would have cast weird shadows across the open space it had chosen to make its lair in. All the more so since, as he watched, it got up and padded across the cavern, heading toward a pool of water on the far side of the place.
Upon reaching it, three of its heads bent down to lap at the pool. Another ducked back to gnaw at its haunches, tending to some itch. The fifth head did the same, twisting around so that one leg could come up to scratch at its ear. The sixth yawned, as though sleepy. And the seventh was sniffing the air, glancing around as it searched for whatever had caught its attention.
And then it looked back at him.
Knowing that he’d spent too much time being surprised by the thing’s bizarre appearance, Lex rushed forward. The effort nearly sent him stumbling, his lungs burning with effort, but he paid them no mind. Divine authority had a relatively short range, and now that he’d been spotted it was imperative that he close the distance in order to use it.
Fortunately, even as the other six heads all turned to look in his direction, Lex was already holding his foreleg out as he got to within a stone’s throw of the thing.
Divine authority!
Invisible bands of power surged from his outstretched hoof, wrapping around the creature in an instant. The monstrosity stiffened in surprise, registering the sudden binding, and Lex felt it begin to thrash against the Night Mare’s power, throwing all of its strength into breaking free.
Its resistance caused Lex to smirk, knowing that its effort was doomed to fail; of all the creatures he’d bound this way, only Tlerekithres – the kraken he’d fought back in Vanhoover – had possessed the raw power necessary to struggle against divine authority with any success. This creature, while certainly unusual, was no-
Then, with a howl that emanated from seven throats at once, the monster tore its way free from the shackles of divine authority and rushed toward him.
Lex wasn’t able to react in time as the monster bore down on him.
Fatigue, injury, and surprise all conspired against him in those few seconds as the seven-headed monster closed the distance between them, shockingly fast for its size. While under normal circumstances that would have been sufficient time for him to not only think up a new plan, but begin acting on it, that level of acumen was beyond him in his current state. Instead, he could only stare at his approaching death, his thoughts a quagmire of disbelief, frustration, and regret.
That last one came through the strongest, knowing that dying here would condemn so many others. Thermal Draft would die, her soul becoming nothing. The mares of Fail Forward would, in all likelihood, never make it back to civilization alive. The ponies in that nameless village they’d left would continue to be terrorized and slaughtered. Everyone who’d supported his nascent government back on Equestria would be persecuted by the alicorns.
He’d never find out what had happened to Sonata, or Aria, or Nosey.
Nor would he ever be able to bring Solvei back.
It was more than he could bear, and as a massive set of jaws closed around him – one of the lower heads being the first to come within reach of him – Lex couldn’t hold back a howl of self-loathing, knowing that whatever hardships awaited him in the Night Mare’s afterlife would be nothing compared to spending eternity laboring under the guilt of how badly he’d failed everyone he’d ever known.
But even as that thought consumed him, he felt a sudden sensation of magic...and realized that it was the only thing he felt, the pain of being crushed in the monster’s jaws not materializing.
A moment later he saw why, as the humongous teeth hadn’t pierced his body. Nor could they, having stopped mere feet from his flesh, grinding furiously at the empty air as though having collided with an invisible wall.
Or a force field, he realized, recognizing one of his own thaumaturgical spells.
Except he hadn’t cast it, and yet he’d felt – not simply sensed, but personally felt – its activation, which meant...
Despite his darkvision still being active, the flames in the creature’s eyes gave off enough visible light that Lex was able to see his shadow stretched in front of him, knowing that it had been what had saved him. More than that, it had done it with its own spell; although he’d prepared that force field spell when he’d renewed his thaumaturgical magic several days prior, it was still uncast in his thoughts, confirming again that his tulpa had actually prepared its own complement of spells.
But he’d contemplated the mysteries of that rogue portion of his mind before, and knew that he’d make no headway on them now. Instead, I need to figure out what to do about this thing, he reminded himself, knowing that his needing to consciously focus like that was another indicator of just how degraded his condition had become.
The monster, however, had gotten tired of gnawing fruitlessly on the force field protecting him, all seven heads growling as it stepped back slowly. Fourteen flame-filled sockets glared at him...only to fade to twelve a moment later.
No. That wasn’t right. The flames in the eyes of one of the heads had died down to embers, but they were still glowing, albeit only barely, even as the others remained lit. If anything, they seemed brighter now than before.
Then a second set of ocular fires dimmed. Then a third, and a fourth. Each time, the undiminished fires in the remaining heads seemed to burn brighter.
By the time the flames in the eyes of the sixth head burned lower, less than a half-dozen heartbeats had gone by. That was more than enough time for Lex to figure out what was happening, but once again there was nothing he could do about it. Trying to dodge what was about to happen was impossible while inside his force field – even if he’d turned to shadow, which was iffy with how badly his reserves were drained, he wouldn’t have been able to pass through the magical barrier, which also extended underground – but if he lowered it now, there was a very real chance that the beast would strike before he’d be able to get out of the way.
Making the choice to trust in the magic he’d invented, even if it had been his goddess-given tulpa that had cast it, Lex instead forced himself to stand fast and try and come up with a plan to subdue the creature.
Then the monstrosity attacked.
Seven roars of anger came from the creature’s throats as its central head – the fires in its sockets blazing so brightly that they shined like floodlights – fired twin beams of heat from its eyes.
The rays lit up the cavern, and above deafening howls from the creature’s heads there was a loud hissing sound as the air itself was scorched by the passage of the beams. Crossing the distance to their target in an instant, they slammed into the force field...which somehow managed to hold against the onslaught.
But even as Lex watched, a crack slowly began to spread across the featureless surface of the transparent dome protecting him, fault lines inching their way outward from where the blazing hot rays continued to beat against the barrier.
His force field spell could last for just over a dozen minutes if he didn’t end it prematurely, but a quick calculation told Lex that he didn’t have anywhere near that long now. While not in danger of collapsing in the next few seconds, the creature’s heat beams would bring it down long before its duration would expire naturally.
Fortunately, that was more than enough time for him to get ready.
His next attempt to bind the creature using the shard of divinity that the Night Mare had given him wouldn’t fail.
That this thing, whatever it was, had managed to throw off divine authority the first time he’d used it meant that it was on the same level as Tlerekithres, having enough personal power that it couldn’t be easily be forced into submission. But that didn’t mean it was completely immune to being controlled; quite the contrary, he’d managed to ensnare it for a moment, before it had fought its way free. Tlerekithres had accomplished much the same, but Lex had been able to increase the level of power thrown at the creature, at which point only its magic had allowed it to keep fighting.
But according to the Keeper, the beast he was facing now wasn’t sapient, which meant that it had no similar magic to fall back on.
And while Lex didn’t dare try to bolster divine authority with his own magic the way he had back in Vanhoover – in his current condition that would probably exacerbate his injuries to the point of passing out – he’d learned during his time with Solvei that proper concentration allowed for more effective use of divine authority. It was, after all, nothing less than forcing reality itself to confirm to his will; as such, the more focused his will was, the more he could do with the power the Night Mare had given him.
Of course, there were some limits he couldn’t surpass that way. As far as he knew, nothing could extend the duration past sixty seconds, nor could he make use of divine authority from more than thirty feet away, nor bring it to bear more than thirteen times in a single day. That last one was a limit he hadn’t previously hit during a fight, but was on the precipice of doing so now, having already called upon it well over a half-dozen times during his altercations with Sissel and Ganas.
Similarly, he couldn’t bring divine authority to bear from behind the safety of his force field. Whether because the Night Mare disapproved of utilizing her power from a place of security or simply because of some quirk inherent in the ability itself, divine authority could only reach a target if there were no intervening barriers between himself and them.
Which meant that he would only have a single shot at making this work, since when the field went down there’d be nothing keeping the creature from coming at him. While his tulpa had already intervened once, Lex couldn’t bring himself to count on it doing so again, especially since he had no idea how many spells it had stored away.
Of course, that likely wouldn’t matter anyway. His tulpa notwithstanding, he had plenty of other spells to call upon, but comparing his current state to the sheer ferocity that the creature was exhibiting now, it was hard for him to imagine that they’d be enough to overcome it. Particularly since he needed to bring it back alive anyway; the Keeper had made it clear he had no interest in it if it were dead. Which meant that divine authority was his only real chance of ending this the way he needed.
The only question now was when to drop the force field.
It can’t possibly keep those heat beams up for long, Lex decided, watching as the cracks continued to spiderweb across the force field. It should only have so much energy to power them with!
Apparently no one had told it that, however.
Silently counting in case he needed to know how long the thing could keep up this line of attack, Lex felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck as the heat from the shining rays slowly bled in through the cracks, the passing seconds stretching into minutes. But there was no sign of the creature tiring, overheating, or otherwise running out of power. Worse, the entire front half of the force field had become a mess of fissures, and they were slowly working their way toward the back of the dome as its structure continued to buckle under the relentless assault. If this went on much longer...
Suddenly, the creature howled again, clawed feet scraping over the uneven floor as its patience – rather than its stamina – finally gave out. An instant later the radiant shafts of light ceased to batter the force field.
But not because the creature had stopped using its heat beams.
Instead, it turned them upward.
For the second time in less than five minutes, Lex’s surprise was complete as the creature blasted the ceiling of the cave directly above his position. In an instant rubble fell, the shards of stone bouncing off the force field. But the creature didn’t cease, instead bobbing its head as it carefully wove the beams in a circle, shearing off large chunks of the cavern roof, causing massive slabs of stone to fall onto the damaged hemisphere. As marred as it was, it still held, but Lex barely noticed, instead turning all of his attention toward the significance of the creature’s new line of attack.
This is the same tactic I was going to try against the Keeper!
Although he hadn’t had a chance to put it into practice, his injuries having caught up with him before he could make the attempt, this was identical to what he’d planned in order to get around the Night Mare’s prohibition against killing another of her adherents within the Shrine: attack the ceiling, causing pieces of it to fall and crush the Keeper beneath them.
There was no way this thing could have known that, of course. He’d never put that idea to use, so even if this was some sort of elaborate plot on the Keeper’s part to kill him, Lex knew the undying pony couldn’t have fed this monster that information. Nor was there any suggestion that the seven-headed behemoth had somehow stolen the idea from him directly; as badly as he’d depleted his dark magic, it wasn’t completely spent, and he felt certain that it would have kicked in if this thing had tried to somehow look at his memories.
But just because this was a coincidence didn’t undercut how important its implications were.
What that monster was doing now was beyond the reasoning of a wild beast. It required a level of creativity that something with the cognition of an animal wasn’t capable of. Which meant that everything the Keeper had told him about this creature’s lack of intelligence had been wrong, and that even if he somehow dragged it back, that floating skull wouldn’t be able to make this thing sapient.
Knowing that this creature was intelligent changed everything.
Despite the shocking degree of personal power that the multi-headed wolf-crocodile thing possessed, Lex had felt confident that if he could just bind it with divine authority, its resistance would crumble. Its animal intelligence had been central to that; a wild beast, realizing that it was overpowered by a stronger force and with no hope of escape, could be cowed into submission. At that point, herding it back toward the Shrine of the Starless Sky would have been a relatively simple affair, especially if those bulettes the Keeper had lent him did their jobs properly.
But that plan was unworkable now. A creature that was capable of cognition wasn’t bound to operate by instinct alone; it would be able to anticipate opportunities to flee – or worse, retaliate – once the initial sixty-second binding was over. Maybe if he strategically employed his few remaining uses of divine authority during the trip back to the Shrine, he could keep the creature properly intimidated, but even that was uncertain. Judging the disposition of other ponies had already been a task beyond Lex’s capabilities; intuiting the mood of such an alien creature was completely impossible.
Which meant that a new course of action was called for.
One idea was to simply abandon all restraint and attempt to slay the thing with his magic. There was no guarantee that would work; in his current state, there was a disturbingly high chance that it would kill him even if he used his thaumaturgical spells to their fullest. Worse, even if he did succeed, the Keeper would doubtlessly refuse to perform the Rite of Sublimation for him. Pointing out that the talking skull had sent him to subjugate an intelligent creature, rather than a mindless beast, would likely be seen as making excuses for failure, something a devotee of the Night Mare would doubtlessly look askance on.
Retreating was another option. Falling back and giving himself time to recover from his wounds, as well as letting his stock of dark magic and uses of divine authority recover, wasn’t an unappealing idea. But that would take at least a day, and would give this monstrosity plenty of time to make its own plans for next time. Whether it would set traps, summon allies, or simply abandon its lair – that last one being the worst possible outcome, since it would make it impossible to complete the Keeper’s errand – would all result in this task being more difficult the next time around.
Not that it seems inclined to allow for a cessation of hostilities anyway, noted Lex grimly as another huge chunk of rock fell from the ceiling. The massive slab of stone struck the force field with a crack like thunder, breaking into a dozen pieces as it shattered without doing any appreciable damage to the magical dome. The fragments joined the numerous others that were scattered around the cracked hemisphere, and while the area was too open for them to potentially bury him under the debris, the rubble-strewn ground would make retreating even more difficult, since he still didn’t dare try changing into shadow-form in his current state.
It was at that point that the creature, apparently realizing the futility of what it was doing, finally let its heat beams go out.
The sudden loss of light was enough to make spots appear in front of Lex’s eyes, his still-active darkvision kicking back in immediately. In front of him, he could see that the creature’s fourteen eyes had returned to their previous luminosity, the flames in its sockets all now shining with equal brightness. Baring its teeth at him, the thing began to stalk about the marred force field, seven growls coming from its throats as it tried to figure out what to do about the enemy that it couldn’t seem to injure.
Knowing that this was likely the best opportunity he’d receive, Lex availed himself of his only other recourse. Because if intimidating it was impossible, killing it was futile, and escaping it was counterproductive, that left only one strategy that he could think of.
Dialogue.
“Can you understand me?” he asked abruptly, not bothering with any introductions or pleasantries. “Are you capable of speech?”
The only response that he got was seven angry snarls from its heads.
He asked his questions again, this time in Koloss. When the creature failed to reply, he tried in Siolbhan, the language that Woodheart had used when she’d spoken to Littleknight. Popularly known as Sylvan, it was the next most common language in the Pony Empire. And yet, after several tense seconds of waiting, the creature still gave no answer, instead circling the force field as it continued growling.
The same questions in another half-dozen languages proved to be similarly in vain, and with each one Lex found his frustration mounting. Interpersonal communication had always been his weak point, but this was ridiculous! Every other intelligent creature he’d come across since he’d come to Everglow, starting with Solvei, had spoken some kind of language, so why didn’t this one?!
Solvei...
The memory of his first encounter with the winter wolf made Lex grimace, recalling how he’d been intent on killing her; it had only been Thermal Draft’s intervention that had stopped him from doing so, revealing that Solvei’s hostility was merely masking her desperation. Now the situation was reversed; he was the one who was desperate, trying to deescalate a situation while the quasi-lupine creature in front of him remained intent on fighting. It was almost laughable.
The irony was enough, coupled with the remorse he felt over how callous he’d been toward Solvei during their first meeting, to prompt Lex to give voice to the thought that crossed his mind then. “Food,” he muttered, remembering what had finally convinced Solvei to trust them. “Stop attacking, and I’ll give you food.”
His words caused the seven-headed creature to freeze in place, fourteen eyes widening as an equal number of ears suddenly perked up.
Its reaction very nearly caused Lex’s jaw to drop. He’d been half-convinced that the thing didn’t understand any kind of speech, and yet it had clearly reacted to his words just now. It understands me! So why isn’t it saying anything back?
Clamping down on the sudden surge of hope that went through him then, Lex decided to confirm what had just happened. “Do you want food? Reply with your voice if you do.”
He expected the creature to say something then, and when one of its heads opened its jaws a moment later, he was ready to hear some sort of intelligible vocalization.
Instead, the creature barked.
Given the creature’s size, the sound should have been deep and resonant. Certainly, its growling and snarling had been. Instead, the sound was several octaves higher than he’d expected, more of a puppyish yip than any sort of heavy woofing. Nor was that particular to that particular head, as the others began barking a moment later, filling the cavern with sounds that could have come from any animal shelter back on Equestria.
It understands what I’m saying, but isn’t able to speak? It seemed odd to consider, but the more Lex thought about it, the more sense it made. Just because its heads were lupine in nature didn’t mean that it necessarily had the same vocal apparatus as Solvei or Akna. Quite the opposite, the thing’s bizarre physiolgy meant that nothing could be taken for granted regarding what it was able to do – as the heat rays from its eyes had demonstrated – and so it was entirely plausible that it was smart enough to understand spoken language but had no way to use it itself.
Of course, that meant that there was no taking for granted what it considered to be food, either. For all I know, it thinks that I’m offering to let it eat me. Which means that I need to find a way to understand it better.
Fortunately, he had just such a means at hoof.
Now if the thing would just let him use it...
“I’ll give you food,” repeated Lex once the barking finally stopped, wanting to reassure the thing of his intentions; just because it was intelligent didn’t establish precisely how intelligent it was. “But I need you to tell me what sort of food you like. Can you do that?”
This time he wasn’t surprised as the creature’s ears flattened back, low whines coming from each of its throats.
“I have a way to make it so that you can tell me what food you like. If I come out from here” – he waved a hoof upward to indicate the cracked force field – “will you be calm so that I can use it?”
This time the creature hesitated, and while Lex couldn’t he sure, he thought it was looking at his upraised hoof. Is it remembering when I tried to bind it before? If so that would be bad, since he needed to use that same power to enable it to speak now.
But his worries were mollified as the creature gave a single, gruff bark before moving back several paces.
Knowing that was the best answer he was likely to get, Lex took a deep breath, then mentally willed the force field to collapse...though he kept the one that he’d prepared, rather than his tulpa, at the forefront of his thoughts, ready to cast it immediately if this was some sort of ruse.
In front of him, the cracked dome shimmered and disappeared.
The wolf-crocodile creature tensed, but didn’t otherwise move, keeping its eyes trained squarely on Lex, who did likewise. Deciding that the thing wasn’t going to pounce on him, Lex took another moment to steady his nerves, then slowly pointed his wire-wrapped hoof at the creature. It growled, but didn’t otherwise react as Lex gathered his will and concentrated, reminding himself that divine authority worked best when he could focus intently on what he wanted to happen.
A moment later, invisible bands of power reached out toward the creature again.
This time there was no sensation of resistance from it. In fact, it didn’t react at all except for one of its heads shaking a bit. Now to make sure that worked, decided Lex, knowing that even if it had he only had sixty seconds to develop a rapport with the creature. “My name is Lex Legis,” he said, lowering his hoof. “Can you tell me yours?”
All his ears heard was another chorus of barks. But in his mind, he registered a boyish voice.
Name...Teyu...Yagua...
Relief flooded through Lex then, realizing that he’d overcome what was likely the most difficult hurdle. “Teyu Yagua,” he acknowledged, causing the beast to yelp.
You...hear...me?!
“I can hear you,” he confirmed. “But this won’t last for very-”
Not sure if the creature’s broken speech was a sign of its intellectual capacity or if it simply wasn’t used to forming words, Lex tried to bring things back around to the subject at hoof. “Can you tell me what foods you like?”
Another chorus of excited barks filled the cave. Like...fruit! cooed Teyu. Like...honey!
“Fruit and honey?” muttered Lex, brow furrowing. Given the size of the creature, and its choice of habitat, those were far from what he would have guessed its preferred diet was. “I can make those for you, if you’ll wait a few-”
Why?
The question caught Lex off-guard. “What?”
Why...Lex...give...food? asked Teyu, all of its heads cocking in unison. Try...hurt...before... One of its legs scratched over the stone, its thick tail lashing behind it. Trick...now?
“This isn’t a trick,” responded Lex quickly, keenly aware that their ability to communicate like this was rapidly running out, and that if this talk ended with the creature having a negative impression of him, he’d be worse off than before. “I was under the impression that your cognizance-”
Lex...talk...funny...
Gritting his teeth for a moment, Lex tried again. “I was told that you were just a monster.”
His answer caused Teyu Yagua to roar with all seven of its heads. NOT...MONSTER!!!
“I KNOW THAT!” bellowed Lex, and his shouting back at it seemed to catch Teyu by surprise, eyes blinking as it looked back at him. “I know that now,” continued Lex, lowering his voice.
For some reason, he suddenly thought back to when he and Sonata had met Fireflower on their journey to Tall Tale. Specifically, the morning after they’d captured the aranea, when he’d woken up and mistakenly thought that it – that he – was attacking Sonata. Lex had retaliated fiercely, and even after the misunderstanding had been cleared up, had defended his reaction adamantly when Sonata had pushed him to apologize, as a result of which...
As a result of which, she’d left him. That would have been the end of their relationship if she hadn’t pursued him all the way to Tall Tale, wanting him back. Even then, he’d very nearly turned her away; it was only her refusal to let things between them end so easily that had seen them get back together. All because of what had happened with his mistaking Fireflower’s intentions.
Lex shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as he forced the memory away.
“I know you’re not a monster,” he continued, opening his eyes and looking back at Teyu. “I didn’t before, but I do now. That’s why I’m giving you food. To...to make up for what happened.”
Lex...sorry? Teyu’s mental voice was punctuated by a soft whine. Lex...want...be...friends?
“I...yes.” Sighing, Lex nodded. Despite this being what he’d wanted to achieve, for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to feel good about what was happening. “That’s right.”
Teyu, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way. Friend! he called, his heads barking again. Lex...friend! Give...fruit! Give...honey! Happy!
Shaking off the strange malaise that had come over him, Lex mentally prepared himself for what was going to happen next. “I’m going to use my magic to make the food,” he explained. “It will take a few minutes, so you’ll need to wait patiently. Do you understand?”
Understand! echoed Teyu, a few of his heads already licking their chops. The others were panting, tongues hanging out of their mouths in eagerness.
Nodding once, Lex drew in a breath of air, then began casting. He’d already used this bit of magic to create food and water for everyone back in the Shrine, but he’d had the presence of mind to call upon the reservoir of magic in his circlet when he had, retaining the spell. Of course, by itself this would only create oat gruel and water; having it create the fare that Teyu was eager for would require feeding it more magic.
And since he was already suffering from overexertion, that meant that forcing more magic through his body’s natural channels would be very painful exercise.
He was proven right a moment later.
This time he found himself remembering Vanhoover, when he’d tried something similar to this, using a stamina-increasing spell to grant him additional fortitude to in turn cast a heightened stamina-increasing spell, all before creating food for everypony. The recursive escalation in power had proven to be more than his body could withstand, and although he’d been able to finish the casting, he’d almost shredded himself from the inside out, self-inflicting such serious internal injuries that he likely would have died if the medical ponies there hadn’t immediately come rushing to his aid.
This time, the pain wasn’t nearly as bad, but in his beleaguered state it was enough that he very nearly lost control of the magic. As it was, he quickly found himself struggling to pronounce the words through mouthfuls of his own blood, needing to guide his hooves through the proper gestures with his eyes because they’d gone too numb for him to feel their movement naturally. And with every passing moment, the pressure in his head seemed to grow more intense, as though his brain were getting ready to explode out of his skull from all the power he was trying to shove in there.
But compared to all of the pain Lex had endured up until now, both physical and otherwise, this was easily within what he could take.
Ten minutes later, large bowls of honey-glazed fruits appeared throughout the cavern, eliciting howls of joy from Teyu.
Lex smiled at the sight.
Then he fell over, unconscious before he hit the ground.
“No,” huffed Valor, giving the bard an irritated look. “That wasn’t fair and you know it!”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” chuckled the filidh, a smug expression on her face as she stretched out across her bedroll. “You had twenty guesses, just like we agreed on, and you couldn’t figure out what I was thinking of.”
“The point of the game is that you’re supposed to be thinking of an animal, a mineral, or a vegetable,” groused Valor, an indignant tone filling her voice. “Snow isn’t a mineral!”
“Oh Mys-ty!” called Spinner in a sing-song voice. “You’ve got some fine literature about the definition of minerals in your saddlebag, right? If you wouldn’t mind showing it to our dear Valor, I’d be much obliged.”
Giving the bard a dirty look in response to being dragged into the brewing argument, Mystaria rubbed her face with one hoof. “You know, when I agreed to conjure a light – despite it being an offense against the Night Mare, not to mention her faithful who reside here in the Shrine – I did so because you convinced me that being able to see our immediate surroundings for more than a couple of hours a day would make it easier to relax.”
Spinner shrugged good-naturedly. “What? I find winning my friends’ money to be very relaxing!”
Mystaria rolled her eyes, adjusting the folded cloak that was dampening the glow of the pebble she’d cast a light spell on. The heavy fabric blocked most of the illumination, leaving most of the room lit only dimly. A second such cloak – this one Shadow’s – hung over the entrance to the room they were camped out in, helping to make sure that none of the ambient illumination spilled out into the rest of the Shrine.
As uncomfortable as Mystaria had been at breaking one of the Night Mare’s tenets while taking refuge in her shrine, she knew that she’d made the right choice. Being stuck in the dark wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was dangerous; not only did it make it almost impossible to take care of Woodheart, but casting darkvision spells put an additional burden on Thermal Draft at a time when the pegasus needed to avoid straining herself. I just hope that the Night Mare doesn’t take too much offense at this, Mystaria prayed silently.
But she doubted that would be the case; while she’d only made a cursory study of the other gods in the pantheon, everyone knew that the Night Mare wasn’t the forgiving sort.
Mystaria wasn’t looking forward to the dreams she’d be having the next time she slept.
At least Akna’s not being punished for our transgressions, she consoled herself as she glanced at where the adlet – still in the form of a winter wolf – was dozing in the back corner of the room. She’d conjured up a light after she’d fallen asleep, the shaman assuring them that she was a heavy sleeper, and so far there was no indication that her goddess was holding her responsible for their act of minor blasphemy.
Sighing, Mystaria didn’t bother to pull any books from her saddlebag – despite what Spinner said, she didn’t have any tomes on minerology – as she turned her gaze toward Valor. “Technically, Spinner’s right. When water freezes, it meets the definition of a mineral, such as becoming solid-”
“Ice is solid,” retorted Valor. “Snow isn’t!”
Mystaria bit back a groan. “The individual flakes that make it up are solid, even if they don’t collectively bond to the same degree that ice does. It’s also the result of natural processes, is inorganic, has a homogeneous structure-”
“Valor, just pay Spinner already,” growled Shadow from where she was sharpening her dagger on the other side of the room, shooting the muscled mare an irritated look. “Two copper coins is barely enough to buy a toothpick, but if it saves us from a lecture on the nature of snow, it’s a steal.”
“I don’t want to hear about stealing from the pony who thought it would be a good idea to try prying some of those onyx stones off the wall of this place,” muttered Valor grumpily as she fished out the money and tossed it to Spinner.
“Can you blame her?” asked the bard. “I mean, that’s a queen’s ransom in gems, all being used to decorate a cave. Anyone would want to help themselves to a few of them.”
“Which would be blasphemy far worse than making light inside the Shrine,” noted Mystaria flatly. “Not to mention you wouldn’t even be able to cash them anyway; you know as well as I do that it’s illegal to own onyxes.”
“It is?” Looking up from where she’d been petting Littleknight – who meeped unhappily as the pegasus stopped tickling his belly with her feathers – as she watched over the comatose form of Woodheart, Thermal Draft cocked her head. “How come?”
“It’s, um...” Mystaria faltered, wondering if the answer was too morbid to talk about to a mare who was not only laboring under a death curse, but had an unborn child to worry about.
But Spinner took the matter out of her hooves a moment later, the bard answering the question with all the tact of a whale breaking the ocean’s surface. “Onyx gems are a necessary component in reanimating the dead. They’ve been illegal ever since the Empire was founded, since the last battle Queen Iliana fought in the Wars of Unification was against a cult of necromancers called the Tribe of Bones.”
Thermal Draft gulped, a shudder running down her spine. “So, the gems out there...?”
“Are more than enough to raise legions of zombies, wights, ghouls...” Trailing off as she remembered the story that Thermal Draft had told her several nights prior about what had happened to her hometown, Spinner gave an awkward cough. “But, um, it’s not like that’s going to happen here!” She gave a forced laugh, trying to lighten the mood. “I mean, everyone knows that the Night Mare isn’t a goddess of the undead. In fact, the pony pantheon doesn’t even have a goddess of the undead!”
Shadow Star snorted.
“Oh, here we go,” murmured Valor.
“Shadow, please, don’t start with that again,” begged Mystaria.
“If this is about that rumor, then that’s all it is,” added Spinner, “a rumor.”
Her eyebrows having gone up a little more with each comment, Thermal Draft couldn’t help but look somewhat nervous. “I didn’t mean to start a fight,” she offered, her voice cautious. “Maybe we could just forget I said anything?”
“Fine by me,” announced Shadow, though her voice contained a clear note of irritation. “It’s not like I’ve ever had any formal religious training. I’m only from Blevik, the heart of Kara’s faith, so what would I know about her religion?”
Valor licked her lips, taking a moment to gather her thoughts before speaking. “Shadow, I say this with all due respect, but in light of what you told us yesterday, I suspect that your feelings towards Kara’s faith are...complicated.”
“Along with your feelings toward your mother, Blevik’s law enforcement, and any stallion who reminds you of your stepdad,” added Spinner wryly.
Wincing at Spinner’s unnecessary comment, Mystaria gestured toward their pegasus companion. “Maybe Drafty’s right, and we should talk about-”
“Wait, Kara’s a goddess of the undead?” Sitting up, she turned all her attention toward the masked mare. “I thought she was the goddess of love?”
Despite the lower portion of her face being hidden from view, and the subdued lighting, the way Shadow’s eyes narrowed made it clear what she thought of that idea. “Oh, she is. Mostly the kind of love that you can rent from a streetwalker for a few coins. But some of her faithful, if they’re devout enough, ask Kara to bless them with a love that’s everlasting.”
Gulping, Thermal Draft shifted her weight uncomfortably. “Everlasting how? Because if you’re saying that she turns them into an undead creature, that doesn’t seem like something a love goddess would do. I mean, all I ghouls I ever saw were disgusting and evil!”
“Ah, but not all undead creatures are rotting corpses or unquiet spirits,” retorted Shadow, putting her dagger away as she turned toward Thermal Draft. “There’s one particular type that are widely considered to be beautiful, alluring, and seductive. Who can supposedly inflame the passions of their victims, even as they feed on them. In some cases, they’ve even sired children with mortal lovers.”
Gulping, Drafty clamped down on the urge to put a hoof to her lower belly. “What kind of undead can have children?”
“Only one kind,” answered Shadow gravely. “Vampires.”
Thermal Draft’s eyes widened at that, but didn’t have a chance to say anything as Mystaria spoke up. “I’d like to point out that none of this has ever been confirmed, and most reasonable ponies think that it’s another instance of prejudice against doppelgangers.”
“That’s what happens when dops and vamps both fit with the whole ‘my dead husband slipped into my bed one night and knocked me up, but was gone the next morning’ story,” quipped Spinner.
This time Valor was the one rolling her eyes. “Oh please. The sun cats have stories about phantom lovers – they call them ‘pards’ – who’ll sneak into someone’s tent at night too, and they don’t have doppelgangers or vampires. According to my aunt, those stories are almost always told by someone having an affair and trying to hide it.”
“‘Almost’ always?” echoed Spinner, raising one eyebrow suggestively.
Valor shrugged. “I don’t know. A magic-user taking liberties with someone they fancied, probably?”
“The point,” stressed Mystaria, “is that there’s no evidence that Kara has some sort of secret rite where she turns someone into a vampire. And honestly, that story doesn’t even make any sense; why would she consign the souls of some of her most faithful ponies to keep existing in the mortal world like that, instead of taking them to her realm in the Outer Planes?”
“Wait, hang on.” Drafty shook her head for a moment. “Vampires have souls? How? I thought that when you die, all the positive energy in your body is lost, and without that your soul departs for the afterlife.”
The pointed rebuttal earned a low whistle from Spinner. “Wow, and here I thought Mysty was our only theologian.”
Ignoring the bard, Shadow shook her head. “Ghosts and wraiths and specters are undead, and they’re nothing but souls that have refused to move on.”
“I...guess that makes sense,” conceded Drafty. “But I still don’t understand how? If positive energy is what keeps the souls of living creatures in their bodies, then-”
“Negative energy, the opposite of positive energy, is what keeps them in their bodies after death,” cut in Mystaria. “Necromancy might have a bad reputation, and not all of it’s undeserved, but it’s still one of the recognized disciplines of magic, so we were taught some of the basics in Luminace’s temple.”
When Drafty nodded at her to go on, she continued. “Positive energy, often called our ‘life force,’ is what our bodies are built to contain. That’s because it acts like an adhesive, binding our souls to our physical forms. But for every positive there’s a negative, and so there’s negative energy as well. While it’s not usually referred to as an ‘anti-life force,’ that’s essentially what it is.”
“But wouldn’t that mean it repels souls instead of, um, gluing them to our bodies?”
Thermal Draft’s question made Mystaria shake her head. “No. The oppositional properties of negative energy function in relation to positive energy; the two negate each other, but they both bind souls. It’s just that...negative energy does it differently.”
“Differently how?”
This time Mystaria bit her lip before answering the pegasus’ question. “I don’t really know the details,” she admitted. “Which shouldn't be a surprise, since the priests at Luminace’s temple weren’t exactly keen on teaching us how to create the undead, but my understanding is it’s not a coincidence that creatures that rely on negative energy to keep their souls on this plane of existence are all uniformly evil. Something about how that stuff works...twists souls, for lack of a better term. I think it has something to do with why biology isn’t necessary for keeping it contained; a lot of undead can actually spread negative energy by touch, turning the living into the undead, but living creatures can’t do that in reverse.”
“Resurrection magic notwithstanding,” interjected Spinner. “Besides, aren’t vampires supposed to be different from other undead? I mean, I’m no expert either, but the stories I’ve always heard made it sound like vampires got a bunch of extra perks – like not being all rotten and gross, and not going all ‘Spread fear! Eat brains! Kill everyone!’ the way most undead are – in exchange for having all sorts of weaknesses, like sunlight and needing to be invited into homes and stuff.”
“Which is why Kara makes her most faithful into them,” cut in Shadow. “Besides, it’s not like she never gets their souls. They still worship her, so if someone drives a stake through their heart or pushes them outside during the day or whatever, they still go to her realm after they die for real.”
“Shadow, there’s a reason that undeath is classically seen as a punishment from the gods, rather than a reward,” sighed Mystaria. “For one thing-”
But she didn’t have a chance to finish as a commotion suddenly erupted from outside, causing everyone to freeze. It wasn’t the unexpected noise that made the ponies stop what they were doing, however. Rather, it was because the nature of the din was so unexpected that they all needed a moment to recover.
“Is that...dogs barking?”
No one had a chance to answer Spinner’s question before Akna began to stir, causing Mystaria to yelp as she flung herself down on the robe covering the pebble she’d enchanted, smothering the light.
“What’s going on?” muttered the adlet sleepily, her words slurred by a yawn. “Is Lex back?”
“That’s what we were wondering,” replied Valor, slightly staggered by the sudden return to total darkness. “But our darkvision has worn off, so-”
“I think I’ve got one casting left in me,” offered Thermal Draft. “I’ll go see what’s going on.”
“Drafty-”
But Mystaria didn’t have a chance to express her worries before Akna spoke up again. “I’ll go with you...is that barking?”
Thermal Draft didn’t answer, concentrating on building the proper sequence in order to let her see in the dark. Silently thankful that the lack of light kept everyone – except Akna, who didn’t say anything – from seeing how the effort made her sway in place, sweat starting to form on her forehead, she only barely managed to complete the casting. “I’ll be right back.”
Akna at her side, she strode out from the room they’d been assigned to, moving out toward the Shrine’s central area-
And stopped dead.
“What is that?!”
Drafty had no words to answer Akna, staring at the gigantic seven-headed flame-eyed wolf-crocodile.
Then her gaze shifted slightly, and caught sight of Lex riding triumphantly on the thing’s back.
“KEEPER!” bellowed Lex from atop Teyu Yagua’s back. “I HAVE RETURNED! MAKE READY TO HONOR OUR BARGAIN!”
Teyu howled with all seven heads as he finished, the sound loud enough that it echoed off the walls of the Shrine. Nor was it the only noise to be heard, as skittering, slithering, and muffled whispering came from the surrounding buildings. But none of the Keeper’s disciples dared to show themselves, and as Teyu’s howl trailed off, silence slowly enveloped the cavern once more.
But it was broken only a moment later by the voice of Thermal Draft, gawking up at him from in front of their quarters.
“Lex! What...what is that th-”
She couldn’t finish, the fit of coughing that came on then so violent that she would have fallen if Lex hadn’t caught her in his telekinesis, the purple aura from his horn keeping her upright long enough for Akna to hurry over and let the pegasus lean on her.
“You shouldn’t be exerting yourself in your current condition,” pronounced Lex flatly, making no further move to help Thermal Draft even as she kept struggling to clear her lungs. “Akna, take her back inside. I don’t want her straining herself further.”
“W-Wait,” gasped Thermal Draft, somehow managing to speak even as she kept hacking. “Just...got...back...” Each word came out in wheezing exhalation, struggling to form coherent words even as she kept fighting to breathe. “Rest...”
“I’ll convalesce once I’ve completed the Rite of Sublimation,” answered Lex dismissively, still making no further move to help the choking mare. It wasn’t a lack of concern that kept him from trying to assist her – though he was acutely aware that even if he’d immediately rushed to her side, he still would have been powerless to do anything – rather, it was sheer exhaustion that kept him from moving, knowing that any rushed or careless movement would have sent him tumbling from atop Teyu’s back.
That was an issue he’d been struggling with ever since he’d recovered from having conjured Teyu’s meal. After regaining consciousness, awakening just in time to see the creature finishing the last of the food he’d created, Lex had managed to convince it to return with him to the Shrine of the Starless Sky. Despite his apparently having earned the monstrosity’s goodwill – since it hadn’t killed him while he was unconscious – that hadn’t been easy, and not simply because he hadn’t dared waste any more uses of divine authority giving it the ability to speak; the creature had initially reacted poorly to his telling it to come back with him. Even coaxing it with the promise of new “friends” who were waiting to meet it hadn’t produced the reaction he’d been hoping for.
It had only been when he’d broached the possibility of permanently gaining the ability to speak that the flame-eyed creature had given in.
Lex had known that was a dangerous thing to offer, since he had no idea how to make any such thing happen. But it had concerned him only a little, since the Keeper would doubtlessly volunteer to solve that particular problem; the talking skull had made it plain that it wanted Teyu as a servant, and since the flame-eyed creature was already sapient, it would be in the Keeper’s best interests to ingratiate itself with the wolf-crocodile thing as much as possible, and giving it a means of talking would be the easiest way of doing that.
Of course, if such a thing was beyond the Keeper’s powers, then the situation would likely take a turn for the worst. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, since bestowing the power of speech was almost certainly a far less demanding task than granting cognition to something which lacked it. There was no way to be sure, however.
But at least, if worse comes to worst, Teyu’s rage will prompt the Keeper and his acolytes to respond, Lex knew. As fearsome as this monster was, there was no way the Shrine’s caretaker would allow it to rampage through his territory. Doing so would make the fleshless pony lose face – figuratively speaking – in front of its subordinates. If nothing else, that would make for an opportunity to escape.
Though in his current state, Lex doubted he’d be able to manage even that much.
He’d attempted to ameliorate the worst of the damage he’d taken, using one of his few remaining applications of divine authority to grant Teyu the ability to heal with a touch. But the flame-eyed beast had so much power that the attempt had granted it only minor healing powers, which had done almost nothing to alleviate the exhaustion, debilitation, and pain that Lex was in. It had been enough that he could move without passing out, but that was all.
Worse, he’d been forced to use divine authority more than once on the way back.
Grit and Gristle had known the way to Teyu’s lair because they’d been there before, and Teyu had apparently remembered them, growling as soon as he’d caught their scent. Worse, the four-legged sharks had expected him to subdue Teyu with force, and so had reacted poorly when the creature had emerged under its own power. It had only been by the narrowest margin that Lex had managed to prevent a fight from breaking out, eventually forcing Grit and Gristle to leave.
The end result was that he now had only one more use of divine authority remaining.
And his dark magic was down to almost nothing now, since he’d needed to keep expending it to maintain his darkvision; even turning into a shadow was beyond what he could currently do.
Under other circumstances, both of those problems would have been easy to solve. Simply sleeping for a few hours would have replenished his dark magic, while divine authority renewed itself each midnight. Presuming that it was already evening, taking time to rest would have restored both, as well as allowing him to at least partially recover from how thoroughly depleted he felt.
But looking at how quickly Thermal Draft was deteriorating now, Lex knew he didn’t have that luxury.
“So, you were able to bring even so potent a beast under your sway,” came a rasping voice, dragging Lex’s eyes away from the choking mare, instead looking at the globe of absolute darkness that was floating down from the top of the Shrine’s claw-shaped tower. “Truly, Her Divine Darkness favors you greatly."
"Akna, take Thermal Draft back inside. Now."
Lex didn't bother waiting for the adlet to reply, seeing her usher the coughing pegasus through the open doorway behind them, before turning his full attention back to the blackened sphere descending toward him. He couldn’t see through it now, since trying to augment his darkvision would have accomplished nothing except to incapacitate him, but he directed his gaze towards the center of the dark globe. “The Night Mare’s favor wasn’t abetted by those creatures you sent with me,” he growled.
“Grit and Gristle were unable to properly guide you to your destination?” came the Keeper’s voice as the globe descended until it was almost at eye level with the highest of Teyu’s heads, which sniffed the air curiously.
“They were capable of that much, barely,” spat Lex. “But their presence proved to be an agitating factor for Teyu, necessitating their dismissal.”
The clicking chuckle was heard again then. “It seems I’ll need to discipline them again. No doubt they’re hiding somewhere, hoping to avoid punishment for upsetting...Teyu, you said? An interesting name to give it.”
This time Lex was the one who chuckled. “I gave it nothing.”
“Hm?”
“Allow me to introduce Teyu Yagua.” Upon hearing that, the creature’s central head barked loudly. “Or at least, that’s what he told me his name is.”
For a long moment, the black sphere hung in the air in silence, the Keeper needing several moments to find his voice. “What?”
Despite how battered he felt, physically and emotionally, Lex couldn’t help but enjoy a moment of spiteful satisfaction. “Of course, Teyu can’t converse naturally. Fortunately, I was able to recognize his intelligence, and grant him the ability to voice his thoughts with this power the Night Mare has given me. It’s a shame it was only temporary, but I’m sure you can imagine how excited he was when I told him that you could permanently grant him the power to speak.”
“...I see,” rasped the Keeper. “And I can say that I’m...pleased to assist in such a noble endeavor. Though I suspect it will take some time to complete such a task.”
From his place on Teyu’s back, Lex’s grin grew sharper. “That’s only to be expected. But I have no doubt Teyu will remain patient for as long as it takes. After all, once he sees what the Rite of Sublimation does for me, he’ll know that you’re capable of making his desire a reality.”
A single, sharp clack came from within the sphere of darkness then, and Lex could just imagine the Keeper clenching its jaw. Now I’ve got you, he sneered inwardly. Your credibility with the creature whose obedience you want is now directly tied to my completion of the Rite. See what happens if you try to renege on our deal.
That had been the possibility that Lex most wanted to avoid. The Keeper’s refusal to perform the Rite without being compensated for Ganas’s death by way of a new servant hadn’t been explicitly contingent on the creature Lex brought back being non-sapient, but that had still been clearly understood. And although the Keeper had been the one to identify the monster in question, Lex wasn’t willing to allow for even the slightst chance that the Keeper would use Teyu’s cognizance as an excuse to demand that a different creature be procured in its stead.
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case any longer. Now that he’d tied the Keeper’s credibility with regard to granting Teyu’s wish to speak to its credibility with performing the Rite of Sublimation, the Shrine’s caretaker had no choice but to drop any objections it might have had to how things had turned out.
And if the Keeper was the source of the outside interference that Spinner had predicted would leave him “misshapen” after he underwent the Rite, then hopefully this would prevent that from happening.
“Then that’s all the more reason to get the Rite underway as quickly as possible,” intoned the Keeper. “My acolytes have already finished making the necessary preparations. When you’re ready, come to the cathedral and we’ll begin.”
The floating darkness bobbed slightly lower then, the Keeper continuing to speak. “I should also take this opportunity to welcome you, Teyu Yagua, to the Shrine of the Starless Sky. I am the Keeper, charged with maintaining this sacred territory on behalf of the Night Mare. Tell me, are you familiar with Our Dark Lady? Bark twice for yes, three times for no.”
Lex resisted the urge to snort as Teyu gave three short barks, immediately recognizing that the Keeper was testing whether or not the seven-headed thing was really as intelligent as he’d been told it was. As if I’d bet so much on a bluff.
Instead, he focused all of his effort on climbing down from the creature’s back without collapsing in a heap; despite the unliving pony having already seen him collapse before, Lex had no desire to give it another indication of just how weakened he was.
“A shame,” answered the Keeper. “I’ll see to it that this oversight in your knowledge is corrected later. But for the time being, I’ll need you to remain here. I trust you have no objection?”
Again, three barks filled the cavern.
“If you’re satisfied, I’m going to the cathedral now,” stated Lex, striding past the two the moment his hooves touched the smooth floor of the Shrine. “No more delays, I want you to perform the Rite immediately.”
It was all he could do not to gasp as he spoke. The simple act of walking was already causing his heart to pound as though he were sprinting as fast as he could. He could already feel the muscles in his legs burning, and every injury he’d taken in the last few hours seemed to flare up in defiance of his earlier efforts to heal himself.
But despite that, Lex smile as he approached the gigantic stone claw that was the heart of the Shrine of the Starless Sky.
There were no more delays to be had.
It was finally time to undergo the Rite of Sublimation.
In chemistry, that word denoted a process whereby an instance of solid matter was heated to the point of taking on a vaporous state – and would likewise return to being a solid when cooled – without liquifying during the transition. In other contexts, it referred to an act of purification or refinement, whereby contaminants were removed.
Given that the rite he was about to undergo was religious in nature, rather than chemical, Lex felt confident that its name was in reference to the latter definition. Certainly, the power that Akna had gained – to shift back and forth between her natural form and that of a winter wolf – suggested that. That the legends of her people and Solvei’s spoke of a shared origin abetted her theory that the adlets and the utvalgte had once been the same people, and so the Rite had given her the ability to assume her ancestral form, removing – or rather, allowing her to suspend at will – whatever evolutionary processes had caused the adlets and the winter wolves to differentiate from each other.
It was in light of that Lex had theorized that the Rite could potentially turn him into an alicorn.
Or, more correctly, that the Rite of Sublimation had the ability to turn anypony into an alicorn...by actualizing the latent potential that they already possessed.
That was pure supposition, of course. That the ability to become an alicorn was something that lay dormant within all ponies was an idea that, as far as Lex knew, had never been properly investigated. Certainly, he had never put the requisite time or effort into researching the validity of that theory; any serious inquiry would have not only required the cooperation of the existing alicorns – who had never consented to being experimented on (though that, at least, was something Lex could sympathize with) – but would also have necessitated magic that was far superior to what the physical spellcasting of unicorns was capable of.
Of course, the thaumaturgical spellcasting that he’d spent years inventing was perfectly suited for such an inquiry, save for the persistent flaw in recharging it. Even if Celestia or Luna had consented to being objects of study, only being able to make a few modest examinations once per season was grossly insufficient to make any serious headway. Still, that idea had become moot once he’d discovered the Tree of Harmony, whose mere existence radiated enough magic that he could use it to recharge his thought-based magic whenever he wanted...but by then he’d already been cast far into the future, at which point the stagnant state of his homeland had been a far more pressing issue than pursuing some half-baked idea that might not even be true.
And yet, in the millennium that he’d been gone, the idea had never been conclusively disproven...
Even before the three tribes had come together to establish Equestria, they had never truly been separate. The distribution of food, managing of the weather, and coordinating of the cycle of day and night in accordance with the seasons meant that earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns had regularly interacted. Despite knowing nothing about interpersonal relationships, Lex knew that statistical probability alone meant that some of those interactions would have eventually led to romance, trysting, and subsequently inter-tribal pregnancy. And once old prejudices had been discarded in the wake of Equestria’s founding, such things had doubtlessly become more common.
The end result was that, by the time Lex had been born, it had been widely accepted – if not empirically proven – that everypony, regardless whether they were unicorn, earth pony, or pegasus, had the other two tribes somewhere in their family tree.
Indeed, while often the cause for jokes about infidelity, the mixing of bloodlines had become ubiquitous enough that it wasn’t unknown – though still far from common – for two parents to beget a child who didn’t match either of their own tribes.
Such as how Lex himself been a unicorn born to earth pony parents.
But if all ponies carried the genetic data of the other tribes, despite maintaining their own phenotype, then that meant that all ponies were, on some level, a blend of unicorn, pegasus, and earth pony.
Which was exactly what the alicorns held themselves to be: the living embodiments of each of the three kinds of ponies.
Ergo, an alicorn was simply a pony who had stumbled across some sort of X-factor which had activated the biological information – including the formation of each tribe’s physio-magical pathways – stored within them, causing a transformation that brought forth that latent potential.
Everypony, in other words, was an alicorn waiting to ascend.
There was also the fact that all known cases of alicorn ascension involved seemingly random ponies suddenly transforming due to wildly-different stimuli. While the specifics of their respective elevations were maddeningly unclear – apparently none of Equestria’s alicorns had been in a public place when they’d transformed – that their circumstances had been different was well-established; that such disparate factors would lead to the same outcome suggested that external circumstances were only of minor importance, and that the salient factor was one common to all of them: that they were ponies.
Of course, Lex had never been able to bring himself to fully embrace that idea. At its base, it was little more than a series of conjectures, putting forth explanations that fit with a narrative more than actual evidence. But that didn’t matter now; the Rite of Sublimation was a religious undertaking, and as he’d recently learned, one of the central characteristics of the gods was to reshape reality in accordance to their will. While there were clearly some restrictions on the extent to which they could edit the nature of the universe, they were evidently able to effect not-inconsiderable changes to a single, willing individual. Akna, once again, was proof-of-concept there.
Which meant that if the Rite of Sublimation could call upon the Night Mare’s power enough to draw out her connection to her winter wolf ancestors, it could draw out his connection to the earth ponies and pegasi that were doubtless part of his bloodline.
He would become an alicorn.
That thought kept Lex going as he walked toward the claw-shaped cathedral at the center of the Shrine, despite feeling as though he were on the brink of collapse. He very nearly did collapse when, upon reaching the entrance to the building, his darkvision suddenly winked out, his concentration having wavered enough that he’d neglected to use what little dark magic he had left to sustain it.
For a moment he almost put his last remaining dregs of power back toward his eyes, but hesitated. That was the same magic that kept his mind inviolate; if he used it up, he’d be vulnerable to mental intrusion. Of course, most such spells could be fought off through sheer force of will – an area where Lex knew he excelled – but although he only had enough dark magic left to protect his mind only briefly, he couldn’t bring himself to expend that last line of defense so easily.
Instead, he took a different approach, calling his horn’s aura to life. The dim glow of the purple shroud – along with the matching purple and green from his eyes, which lit up the way they always did when he used any sort of magic that wasn’t from an item – provided little more light than a candle, but it was enough for him to see the entryway looming before him. Ignoring how the barbed wire around his foreleg twisted in displeasure, he strode into the building.
In contrast to its commanding exterior, the inside of the cathedral was far less impressive. Although the light from his eyes and horn illuminated only a little of the room he now stood inside, there were no frescoes or inlaid designs decorating the walls, nor had the floor been draped in finery. Instead, the room was mostly open, lacking furniture or other amenities, though the doorways on his left and right now had actual doors filling them. Still, it was another testament to how austere the Shrine was.
And yet the room wasn't completely bare. Opposite the door through which he’d entered was a raised dais, and in the dim light he could see carvings running along its edge, showcasing a motley collection of creatures.
Except...as he moved closer to the dais, knowing what he sought was there, Lex could see that they weren’t ponies. Not completely. Although they resembled his kind, all of them were malformed somehow. One pegasus had wings like a mosquito, while an earth pony had a tail that resembled that of a scorpion, and unicorn reared up on avian legs. All were posed as if running, their eyes wide and mouths open...though whether they were charging in anger or fleeing in terror was impossible to determine.
His lip curling at the sight, Lex raised his eyes.
In the center of the dais was an altar, the raised table equal composed of blackened iron upon which sat a flat surface of polished black stone: the same onyx which decorated the walls and ceiling of cavern which held the Shrine. Looming over it was an ornate ciborium – a freestanding canopy of the same wrought iron – which spread out to cover not just the altar, but the entire dais.
But unlike the edge of the raised platform that he now stood upon, the ciborium wasn’t decorated with images of ponies, mutated or otherwise. Instead, each of the four pillars which held it up was carved to resemble the haft of an elongated weapon; looking upward, Lex could see the heads of the weapons had been carved into the baldachin, showing the spiked head of a morning star, a double-sided axe, the tip of a spear...and the curved blade of a scythe.
Recognizing the image of Severance, Lex pushed his disdain aside for a moment as he noted an inconsistency between the ciborium and the exterior of the cathedral. The claw that the tower had been built to resemble was covered in thorns rather than barbed wire, suggesting that its architect had been unfamiliar with that type of metalwork; and yet the weapons carved here – representations of the Night Mare’s Umbral Regalia – were all metallic in nature. Was the altar’s covering a later addition?
Putting the matter out of his thoughts, Lex instead looked toward the middle of the baldachin. Like the pillars, it was also engraved, showing numerous other martial implements. A dagger could be seen, as could a massive shield, and even a trident. Behind them were other figures, identifiable as creatures rather than weapons, but in the dim light their smaller sizes made them almost impossible to make out.
But there was one figure who was larger than all of the others, creature or weapon. Positioned directly in the center of the canopy, every other figure faced away from her, as though afraid to draw her attention. Massive in size, she dominated the underside of the ciborium, and yet while her armor was carved with intricate detail, the rest of her body was indistinct. Even so, the outline of wings, hooves, and a horn made her identity clear, as did the pair of rubies presenting solid red eyes peering down at the altar and the two rows of jagged white quartz set beneath them.
Surrounded by her followers, the Night Mare leered downward in effigy, prepared to receive whatever sacrifices were placed on the altar for her.
“Magnificent, is it not?”
The Keeper’s voice made Lex glance back at the entrance to the large room; the cathedral’s sanctuary, he realized now, though he couldn’t imagine that term being used in any building dedicated to the Night Mare. Sure enough, the floating orb of darkness that cloaked the desiccated skull that was the Keeper was hovering there. “Generations of the faithful have brought trophies of their accomplishments here, placing them upon this very altar and dedicating them to the Dark Tyrant of the Night in recognition that their victories were in Her name.”
Momentarily flashing back to when he’d offered the slain body of the green dragon he’d killed outside of Tall Tale to the Night Mare – along with the idol to another deity that he’d found in its hoard – Lex pushed the memory away, focusing instead on the here and now. “I doubt the Night Mare found their offerings nearly as pleasing as the deeds themselves.”
A clicking chuckle came from the Keeper, the black orb floating forward. “Indeed. But veneration must still be given. For recognition is the vanguard of power, and as She makes us strong, our acknowledgment of that expands Her might. Thus do their sacrifices cause strength to grow.”
Lex knew what response he was supposed to say then. Despite not having been formally trained in the Night Mare’s religion, this part coincided with what Akna had told him about. While not an aspect of the Rite itself, this was still part of the custom that signified its undertaking.
Placing his hoof upon the altar, he spoke in a low tone.
“For strength to grow, the sacrifice that must be made is weakness.”
He felt a rush of magic then, and with a low rumble the altar slid to the side, revealing a passageway that led downward.
“Now,” intoned Lex softly. “Let’s begin.”
Without further hesitation, he descended into darkness.
The spiral stairs beneath the altar seemed to lead downward without end.
Lex knew that wasn’t the case, that their number only seemed notable because of a combination of exhaustion and the feeble light from his horn being unable to illuminate more than a few steps in front of him. After all, Akna had made no mention of the stairs’ collective length when describing this place to him, suggesting that she hadn’t found their number to be noteworthy. But the impression of their interminability lingered no matter how much rationality insisted that it was only an illusion.
As it was, Lex could only descend the stairs at a sedate pace, struggling to maintain his balance. The steps hugged the wall of whatever pit they were heading down into, and while they were smooth and even, they weren’t very wide. Worse, there was no railing on their edge, which meant that if he lost his balance and pitched over the side, the Night Mare’s prohibition against her followers harming each other would likely do nothing to arrest his fall.
Such a thing wouldn’t be fatal; he had a thaumaturgical spell prepared that would let him float downward as gently as a feather. But while that would prevent him from being killed, the last thing Lex wanted to do was waste any magic that he could otherwise preserve. That, and avoid giving the Keeper any further indications of just how weakened he truly was.
“Before we begin, I was hoping that you would indulge my curiosity,” came the Keeper’s voice. In the fluorescent glow of his horn, Lex could just make out the opaque sphere that the Keeper apparently kept around himself at all times; whereas he was reduced to taking the stairs one at a time, desperately trying to make his snail’s pace seem blithely disinterested rather than beleaguered, the Shrine’s caretaker was simply floating straight down.
When Lex gave a noncommittal grunt – the very most he could give, since speaking while walking was more than he was capable of at the moment – the Keeper continued. “You seemed surprised before, when I said that the power Her Dark Majesty had given unto you was known as the Charismata. By what name do you refer to it?”
Lex came to a halt, giving an annoyed sigh before turning to glare at the hovering darkness. “What does it matter?”
“As I said, I am simply looking to indulge my curiosity.” Although it was impossible to be sure, it sounded as though the Keeper’s voice was slightly closer now, something which made Lex tense. If that thing enveloped him in its globe of darkness again, he’d have no choice but to use his feather-fall spell and step over the edge. Trying to navigate downward without being able to see simply wasn’t possible for him in his current condition. “I wish to know how Our Lady of the Night’s gifts are referred to by others of her faith.”
Snorting as much at the Keeper’s endless litany of titles for the Night Mare as much as the trite reason the talking skull gave, Lex answered only because it seemed like the quickest way to bring the conversation to an end. “I call it ‘divine authority.’”
He half-expected the Keeper to burst out laughing at that, but instead the skull fell silent for a moment before replying. “An interesting designation,” admitted the Keeper at last. “But one that perhaps places too much emphasis on Her gift’s power over magical beasts. To continue our conversation from earlier, Akna made it sound as though you have not used the Charismata in any other manner. Is that true?”
Gritting his teeth at the resurrection of that particular topic, Lex didn’t bother answering, instead starting back down the stairs in stony silence.
But rather than acknowledge that the discussion was over, the Keeper kept speaking, descending in time to match Lex’s slow progress. “While forcing obedience from those creatures which fall under Her godly purview, and investing them with near-limitless varieties of wondrous abilities, is indeed a mighty boon, it falls far short of what the Charismata can truly do. For as I stated previously, the gift you have been given is nothing less than the ability to reshape certain aspects of the world around you through nothing more than force of will. Hence the name Charismata.”
I know how it functions, you garrulous corpse! But Lex wasn’t able to give voice to his inward snarl, concentrating on keeping his hooves moving in even motions. Even his breathing needed to be kept carefully regulated, knowing that the burn in his muscles would only grow worse if he didn’t continue taking slow and steady breaths.
Apparently taking his guest’s silence as a bidding to continue, the Keeper kept talking. “One of the less dramatic, but no less important, aspects of the Charismata is that, as power begets power, it can create lesser imbuements of the Dark Tyrant’s divine might. For instance, the holy symbol woven around your leg.”
Just glancing down at the wire wrapped above his hoof almost made Lex trip. Fortunately, the Keeper didn’t seem to notice. “By all appearances, it is little more than a length of metal pressed to your flesh. And yet, it serves as far more than that, being nothing less than a physical representation of Her holy power made manifest in the mortal realm. Such is the difference between a genuine holy symbol, and a mere length of wire.”
Again, the Keeper’s voice seemed closer now than it had been previously. “That difference is now one that you are capable of bridging. As one chosen to bear such a strong aspect of Her essence, you may use the Charismata to designate – or expel – Her divine grace from a suitable receptacle. Nor are you limited to such unsubtle icons of her faith; a weapon that you consecrate in the guise of one of her Umbral Regalia can be made more potent for it. A vial of water can be likewise imbued. Even a place such as this is not beyond what you can symbolically claim in Her name.”
This time, the darkness of the globe seemed to brush against the edge of the stairs as the Keeper’s tone took on a sharper edge.
“With the proper observances, and the correct applications of the Charismata, you can make any suitable location into a shrine like this one.”
Outwardly, Lex gave no reaction to the news, trying to maintain a pretense of disinterest as he descended the staircase. But inwardly, his thoughts were beginning to race.
He’d heard something like this before.
Just before he’d left on his ill-fated trip to Las Pegasus, Fruit Crunch and his friends – the self-proclaimed Night Mare’s Knights – had presented him with a theory. They had somehow come up with the idea that the only way for would-be divine spellcasters to form a connection with the Night Mare – at least until she was able to access Equestria directly – was for someone who already bore a great deal of her power to induct them into her faith. While Severance had been sufficient to get them spirit animals, as they called the creatures the goddess had granted them, the scythe’s expulsion from Equestria had left him as the only one able to bring new adherents to the goddess’s personal attention.
Lex had found the theory skeptical at the time, performing a service for those children and a small number of eager ponies before he’d left largely as an indulgence. But with the Night Mare herself having personally confirmed it when she’d transported himself and Thermal Draft to Everglow, it meant that the Keeper was right; divine authority – or rather, the Charismata – allowed for more than he’d previously realized, even taking into account his expanded understanding of how it could empower certain creatures instead of just paralyzing them.
In fact, if that loquacious skull’s words were anything to go by, he’d barely scratched the surface of what his goddess-given power could do.
Lex was still pondering that particular revelation when he came to the bottom of the stairs at last.
Unlike the upper portions of the Shrine, or even the stairs that he’d walked down, the stonework in this area was left untouched. The unhewn walls bore no onyx insets, nor was there any sort of altar or other ornamentation that he could see. There were, however, several instances of scratches dotting the area near where he was standing. In fact, there were more than a few, and it took Lex a moment to realize that what he’d first thought was the uneven placement of natural stone was in fact such an overlapping presence of gouge marks across the ground and walls that it was impossible to tell if the bottom of the pit had ever been artificially smoothed or not.
But there was no more time to ponder that particular mystery as a new voice spoke up.
“Light,” came a soft hissing from across the chamber. “He brings light into the holy of holies, brother.”
“He dares to profane our sacred ritual, sister,” agreed a second voice, coming from the same location as the first. “For this, he must be punished.”
“Let us drag him back to the altar.” The third voice was sepulchral, coming from a different direction than the first two. “He can pay for his transgression with his life, and beg the goddess herself for forgiveness.”
“You would be wise not to make the attempt,” laughed the Keeper, his rasping voice intermittent with the clicking of his jawbone. “You would not know it, since you have been preparing the Rite after Akna returned, but this pony slew Ganas for his insolence. I doubt any of you would fare much better.”
“He slew one of the faithful?!” yelped the more feminine of the hissing voices. “Within the bounds of the Shrine?!”
“It can’t be!” echoed her brother.
“The goddess would never allow such a thing!” added the deep voice.
Lex had no doubt that the Keeper was going to speak up then, but he didn’t give him the chance. “I didn’t kill Ganas within the Shrine,” he growled. “I did so by dragging him outside of its borders and executing him there-”
“After which our guest, Lex Legis, the bearer of the Charismata, saw fit to replace Ganas with a being of greater power,” interrupted the Keeper. “As such, the Queen in Darkness herself is allowing the minor transgression of his horn to pass. I trust none of you think to gainsay the goddess’s judgment?”
A chorus of angry muttering came forth then, but no one protested the Keeper’s statement. Instead, the three owners of the voices shuffled forward...or rather, the two owners, since the giant snake – easily three times a pony’s body length – that came into view first had a head at each end of its body.
“We welcome you to the inner sanctum of the Shrine of the Starless Sky, champion of the Night Mare,” hissed one of the boa constrictor’s heads.
“We have prepared the Rite of Sublimation for you, in accordance with your will,” murmured the other.
“May you find a reward for your efforts that’s fitting in the eyes of the goddess.” Compared to the two-headed snake the last speaker was positively mundane, appearing as a cross between a grizzly bear and an oversized gorilla. Though that didn’t make the rippling muscles of its gigantic frame any less impressive.
Lex didn’t bother replying to their greetings, instead moving between them toward the center of the chamber. According to what Akna had told him, the Rite would be conducted there. In fact, it could only be conducted there, now that the Keeper’s acolytes had finished their preparations.
Stepping forward, he laid eyes on what he’d come here to find.
Directly in front of him, a fissure had been dug into the ground, as though someone had ventured into the pit they were standing in and decided that it wasn’t deep enough. But unlike the massive lacuna they now occupied, this opening in the ground was far smaller, roughly half the size of a swimming pool. Nor was it empty...
Within the confines of the crevice, a black substance roiled, churning and convulsing as though it were a wave on the open sea. But it clearly wasn’t water; the light from Lex’s horn cast no sheen upon its surface, nor were its undulations as smooth as a pure liquid’s would have been. If anything, it seemed almost gelatinous in its makeup, and if Lex hadn’t known better, he would have mistaken it for some sort of protoplasmic lifeform.
Except he did know better, having seen this substance before.
It looks just like what appeared around Luna when I cursed her.
But that made no sense. What he’d done to Luna – and to the other ponies whose curses he’d imbued with enough power that their presence had been temporarily visible – had been a product of his own dark magic, not the Night Mare’s power. The two were separate, so why...?
No, it didn’t matter. In all likelihood, it was just a coincidence anyway. Magical energies weren’t naturally visible, so any sort of convergence of power great enough to register to the naked eye would likely take on an unusual appearance. A simple conglomeration of a black substance was simplistic enough that it was likely how any number of such manifestations would appear. There was no reason to assume any sort of connection between his dark magic and what he was looking at now.
“You may wait upstairs,” intoned the Keeper. “I will retrieve you if I have need of you.”
Knowing the words had been intended for the talking skull’s pet monsters, Lex didn’t react, instead listening to the sound of them ascending the steps upward. It was only after they’d faded that the Keeper spoke again. “Beautiful, is it not? This is the Confluence. Although the wards protecting the Shrine prevent planar travel within its confines, it can only be called a miracle how – when the proper ceremonies are performed – this aspect of Her divine realm slips through into our world.”
“An aperture between this plane and the Night Mare’s, resulting in an area that’s coexistent between two dimensions at once,” noted Lex solemnly. Despite how impressed the Keeper was, all he could think about was how a similar breach of the barriers between worlds had brought so much death and suffering to Vanhoover, as well as other parts of his homeland.
“Indeed.” If the Keeper had picked up on his discontent, he didn’t say anything. “In this, She allows us to experience a crucible, cleaving away our weaker selves and emerging stronger for it.” The opaque globe floated upward, hovering above the liquid darkness that continued to swirl of its own accord. “If you have any final preparations you wish to make, now is the time. Once you enter the Confluence, you will not be able to leave it until the Rite is complete. Until then, I will maintain its integrity.”
Lex frowned at that, not liking that he’d be forced to rely on the unliving pony. “And if you can’t?”
Another clicking laugh came from above. “I have been performing this Rite for centuries, and in all that time I have never once mishandled it. You should be more concerned for the test you will face within. It will be intensely personal, and if you fail-”
“If I fail, then my soul will fall out of alignment with body, and be drawn to the Night Mare’s realm,” finished Lex disinterestedly. “Akna told me.”
“I suspect she made that sound more beneficial than most others have found it,” noted the Keeper. “But then, she is the only one I have ever seen who completed her test and then deliberately set her spirit apart from her body, all so that she could look for even more power in the goddess’s abode. That she succeeded, returning to her body and bringing one of the Umbral Regalia back with her, is a testament to her will.”
The amusement in the Keeper’s voice died away as it continued. “What usually happens when someone fails the Rite is that they can’t make their way back to their body before one of the denizens in Darkest Night, the goddess’s home, possesses it in their stead. If that happens, you will be unable to return, while whomever takes over your body will reshape it in accordance with their nature.”
Lex’s thoughts flashed back to the etchings on the dais at the top of the stairs, comparing them to what Spinner had predicted.
But interference from outside left his body misshapen.
For all that Lex had wrung out of Akna when it came to the Rite of Sublimation, her store of useful information had ended when it came to the nature of the test involved.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t been able to describe what she’d gone through – under the command of divine authority (or should he call it the Charismata now?), she’d had no choice but to recount everything that she recalled, without exception – but that the ordeal was so personal as to be unique to each individual. Certainly, her own experience upon entering the Confluence had lent credence to that idea, as she’d described what had sounded to Lex like an altogether bland scenario where the yetis were attacking her tribe, resulting in her being ushered off to safety while the rest of her people, including her grandmother, went to fight them.
“It was because I was too valuable to be put in danger,” Akna had recounted at the time, ears flattening as she’d spoken. “Not because I was a shaman; my grandmother had a stronger connection to the spirits than I did, and she went to fight. No, it was because I hadn’t fulfilled my duty to breed a new generation of shamans. Since my grandmother was no longer fertile, that job was mine.”
Despite being wrapped thoroughly in the Charismata’s power, the memory had made her bristle with anger, straining against the bonds holding her. “I can wield a spear as well as any adlet my age, and I can summon a snow spirit to fight just like my grandmother! But they still treated me like a weakling, just because they wanted to protect my womb!”
For Akna, passing the Rite had meant going back to fight, despite having been almost torn to pieces. “It was the worst fight I’d ever been in,” she’d admitted. “I lost my spear early on once the battle started, and since I’d been given no armor, I was slashed and torn to the point where my clothes were reduced to bloody rags. But I remembered what my grandmother had told us of our ancestors, the winter wolves. How they were savages who fought naked with nothing but their teeth and claws. So that’s how I cut down the yetis, shredding them with the body my kin thought needed to be safeguarded. And when it was over, I’d become a winter wolf myself...and everyone else, my grandmother included, turned their backs on me even though I’d saved their lives.”
The maudlin nature of her tale had almost made him roll his eyes.
But if there was one thing that Lex had taken away from her story, it was that the Rite’s trial was likely to involve some sort of violent altercation. Or rather, some instance where personal determination was necessary in the face of both severe pushback and serious consequences for failure. Such things went to the very heart of the Night Mare’s dogma, he knew, and so it was no surprise that a spiritual struggle – which was what the Rite of Sublimation was, with the Confluence being a concentration of her power leaking into the physical world – would involve such things.
That was why Lex had felt no real trepidation at the prospect of undergoing the Rite. After all, he had overcome many such trials. Even overlooking the torments that he endured every night in his dreams, he had faced numerous instances where he’d needed to defeat a seemingly-unbeatable foe, lest unbearable consequences fall not only upon himself, but others whom he was bound to protect.
It was almost as though the last few months of his life had been in preparation for this.
As the Confluence enveloped him, and the blackness swallowed everything – wiping out not only his vision, but also his senses of hearing and smell, the numerous aches and pains assailing his body, the ambient coolness of the cavern, his awareness of gravity, and everything else – Lex pulled the familiar aegis of his anger around him, remembering all of the hardships he’d endured and pain that he’d suffered, daring the Night Mare to throw more at him.
Bring it on! he roared, unable to hear himself except in his own thoughts. Xiriel! Prevarius! Tlerekithres! Bolverk! Grisela! Lirtkra! That dragon! Throw them all at me! I overcame them before, and I can do it again! I CAN DO IT-
“-AGAIN!”
Pausing as he realized that he could hear the sound of his own voice, Lex looked around...
And found that he was no longer within the Confluence.
In fact, he was no longer within the Shrine of the Starless Sky at all.
Instead, he was standing on a lush red carpet laid out in a spacious hallway. The ceiling was several dozen feet overhead, and tall windows lined one of the walls, showing a cloudless blue sky above an expansive lawn. On the other wall were several ornate doors, the generous distance between them indicating that they led to rooms or other hallways that were no less extensive than where he was now. Flowers lined wall sconces between them, giving the entire place a pleasant floral odor, and outside he could hear the soft chirping of birds.
But that wasn’t the only sound he could hear, his ears turning toward an open door at the end of the hallway, from which voices were audible. But they weren’t talking.
Instead, they were laughing.
Pausing as he tried to orient himself, it took Lex a moment to realize that he recognized this place. Canterlot Castle, he noted, fighting down a surge of surprise to find himself here. He’d only been in the building once before, for a short time after he’d come back from his first sojourn to Everglow, but there was no mistaking the distinct style of the place. Which means those voices belong to...
Holding still as he turned his full attention toward open door, through which the sun shined brightly enough that nothing else could be made out, he paused for a moment, listening harder.
Sure enough, one of the laughing voices was that of Princess Celestia.
Another few seconds of consideration also revealed that Princess Luna and Twilight Sparkle were also joining her in her mirth. But there was a fourth voice also – this one male – that he couldn’t immediately place, despite being struck by a powerful sense of familiarity.
Silhouette, he decided after a moment. He’d never heard that vile stallion sound so relaxed and easygoing before, but there was no one else he could think of who would fit with the situation that was making itself known. So the Night Mare wants me to fight the ponies who’ve stood in my way up until now.
That wasn’t what he’d expected, but a moment’s reflection was all it took to understand the implications. The goddess didn’t simply want him to kill monsters; she wanted him to demonstrate his commitment to mastering Equestria, which would mean subjugating its current rulers and their servants, overcoming them and forcing them to pledge their allegiance to his new regime.
It was enough to earn a snort of disdain from him as he strode toward the door. His physical aches and pains were gone now – suspended, he knew, since this was a spiritual place rather than a physical one – but he could still feel that his dark magic reserves were almost totally depleted. Not that it matters. With how weak the alicorns are, my thaumaturgical spellcasting will be more than enough to lay them low.
After all, he’d done exactly that before.
Still, this time he’d be facing the Royal Sisters together with Twilight Sparkle, so it would likely be more difficult than facing them individually. And of course, Silhouette would doubtlessly try to disrupt his spellcasting at inopportune moments. And the other Elements of Harmony might be nearby as well, he mused silently as he reached the doorway, along with Princess Cadance and her husband. He’d never actually met the rulers of the Crystal Empire – having only caught a brief glimpse of them during King Sombra’s takeover attempt – but given how their polity was little more than a client state of Equestria, it made sense that-
Lex stopped dead in his tracks as the door swung open, his train of thought grinding to a halt as he caught sight of the ponies beyond it.
Sitting on a balcony overlooking Canterlot, clustered around a table laden with cake and teacups, four ponies were laughing. Three of them were whom he’d expected: Celestia, Luna, and Twilight.
But he’d gotten the identity of the fourth pony completely wrong.
Lex stared, wide-eyed, at the stallion – an alicorn – who was laughing with the three princesses around the table.
Lex stared at himself.
“Ah, there he is!” exclaimed the other Lex, his laughter settling down into an easy grin as he nudged Twilight, nodding in the direction of the door. The announcement caused the three princesses’ mirth to subside as well, though like their male counterpart, they were still smiling as they turned to look at him.
“Come and join us,” continued his alicorn-self, one wing gesturing toward an empty chair that was set between himself and Luna. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly,” began Spinner, her voice strained. “You’re saying there’s a gigantic creature right outside the doorway, with the body of a crocodile and seven wolf heads, each of which has flames where the eyeballs should be?”
“That about sums it up,” murmured Thermal Draft, speaking softly so as to not trigger another coughing fit.
“And Lex was riding on it when he came back?” continued the bard. Even with their room being once again completely shrouded in darkness, her awe was impossible to overlook. “I can’t believe I missed that!”
“What I can’t believe,” growled Akna, “is that you actually made a light here in the Shrine! Do you have any idea how much that offends the Night Mare?!”
“Oh come off it,” snorted Shadow. “Lex’s eyes were glowing every time he so much as used his horn, so what’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that this is a holy place!” growled Akna. “Your actions are an offense to the goddess!”
“We weren’t trying to be disrespectful,” interjected Mystaria, her voice apologetic. “But it’s really hard to be kept in darkness for so long, since my darkvision spell only lasts for a short time, and we don’t want to make Drafty strain herself casting her version of it over and over.”
“Doing something hard is what builds strength!” huffed Akna, not sounding mollified in the least.
“It also makes it difficult for us to take care of Woodheart when we can’t see how she’s doing,” noted Valor, before an indignant meeping caused her to sigh. “When none of us except Littleknight can see how she’s doing,” she corrected.
“That’s still no reason-”
“Will you shut up about the damned light already?!” snapped Shadow. “Yeah, fine, it’s a sin; big freaking deal! We’ve been sitting here in the pitch black for I don’t know how long, meanwhile Woodheart is comatose, Solvei is dead, and Thermal Draft is dying!”
“Shadow,” groaned Spinner.
“All while we’re surrounded by monsters, including the one Lex just brought back and left right on our doorstep, who’re probably really hungry and are painfully aware that we don’t worship the same goddess that they do, which means that we’re not protected by the ‘no violence’ rule here! Sure, Lex, being the big tough alpha stallion that he is, is protecting all of us, except for the fact that he’s not here right now!”
“Shadow,” sighed Valor.
“Instead, he’s off chasing some right that may grant him some ultimate power, except that it might turn him into a monster too, in which case all we can do is run away! Probably right into the arms of the other monsters who’re no doubt waiting outside to pounce on us as soon as we come up for air!”
“Shadow,” pleaded Mystaria.
“So yeah, I can’t really give a damn that the Night Mare might be offended that we made ONE LITTLE LIGHT IN HER SHRINE!!!”
In the aftermath of her last, frustrated scheme, silence fell...until an inquisitive barking came from outside.
“That’s Teyu,” murmured Thermal Draft, clearing her throat softly. “The seven-headed beast that Lex brought back. I’ll go t-tell...” She couldn’t finish, breaking out into another coughing fit.
“I’ll go tell him everything’s alright,” volunteered Akna. “And then I’ll check and see if there’s any sign of how Lex is doing with the Rite of Sublimation. You all should use that time to figure out how you’re going to make up for your transgression, because I can promise you that show of disrespect for the goddess whose hospitality you’re taking advantage of won’t go unanswered for.”
Waiting until the sound of her footpads had left the room, Valor fumbled her way over to the sound of Drafty’s coughing. “Easy,” she murmured, reaching out to gently pat the pegasus on the back. “Easy. Breathe slowly and deeply.”
“Are you talking to Drafty, or to Shadow?” muttered Spinner, her voice biting. “Because I think our team’s cutpurse needs to work on her anger.”
“Maybe our resident filidh could sing me a song next time,” shot back Shadow, “since compared to her crooning, I’m sure my voice sounds like a chorus of angels.”
“Stop it, both of you!” snapped Mystaria. “Spinner, your comments aren’t helping! And Shadow, I understand that you’re frustrated, but blowing your top like that only makes things worse! Just listen to Drafty; what if you upset her to the point of coughing so hard she miscarries?!”
“Wait, miscarries?!” came Valor’s shocked voice.
“She’s pregnant?!” yelped Shadow.
“Real smooth, Mysty,” noted Spinner dryly. “And after she specifically told us that she wanted it kept secret.”
“...oops,” gulped Mystaria. “Sorry Drafty.”
Managing to get her breath back under control, Thermal Draft could only groan. “I just hope Lex is handling things better than we are.”
“...so it’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about,” finished Akna, hoping that Teyu understood what she was telling him.
When two of his heads barked, and then he laid down and closed his fourteen eyes, she took that as a sign that he did, backing away slowly. She had no idea how Lex had tamed that monstrosity, but she didn’t want to hang around it any longer than she had to. Instead, she turned around and headed for the cathedral. She’d deal with those ponies’ blasphemy later.
Now that the Rite was finally underway, it was almost time for her to make her move.
“Would you care for some cake? We made sure to save a slice for you, lest my sister devour it all before your arrival.”
“Oh honestly, Luna,” huffed Celestia, putting her nose in the air, although the corners of her lips were still turned upward. “I was simply worried that it would go to waste. After all, we have it on good authority that our guest doesn’t care for sweets.”
“Fortunately, Pinkie’s never met a pony that she can’t plan a party for,” grinned Twilight, her horn lighting up as she telekinetically lifted a cake knife, placing a piece of the confection in question and putting it on a plate. “And that means serving all of their favorite treats, even if it’s their first time having them!”
“I still can’t believe that she made a prune-flavored cake,” chuckled the alicorn version of Lex, eyeing the dessert that Twilight was serving. “How did she know I’d enjoy that?”
“Sometimes Pinkie is impossible to figure out,” answered Twilight sagely, though like Celestia she was fighting down a grin as she did so.
“Indeed,” nodded Luna, her solemn expression ruined by a cheeky smirk. “That mare commands powers that defy understanding.”
“Though in this case, she used a more familiar magic to solve the mystery of what you’d like: the magic of friendship,” finished Celestia, allowing her smile to come forth in full. “Which is to say, she asked Sonata what your favorite foods are.”
All four burst into laughter again then, leaving Lex – the one without wings – watching the display in wide-eyed trepidation, his gaze fixed on his other self as he tried to figure out what was happening.
On the other side of the table, his duplicate was a near-perfect copy of himself, save for having become a blend of all three pony tribes. At his side were wings, their feathers the same slate-gray as his coat. He was slightly taller as well, his height just barely above that of Princess Luna, and he had a slightly more defined musculature as well, a testament to his having the build of an earth pony.
But as notable as the changes were, what wasn’t there captured Lex’s attention more. Namely, all of the alterations that he’d gone through over the last twenty-one months, both voluntary and otherwise, were absent from his twin. His foreleg had no wire wrapped around it. His shadow fell in the same direction as those of the ponies around him. His horn was gray from base to tip, and even as Lex watched, his counterpart used it to playfully tug on the plate Twilight was serving the slice of cake on, causing it to light up with a silvery aura which Lex had long since resigned himself to never seeing again...and which didn’t cause his duplicate’s eyes to change color.
What in Tartarus...?
Giving up on his impromptu game of tug of war, the other Lex glanced at his wingless counterpart, his laughter fading into another easy smile. “Listen, all joking aside, you really should come and relax a little. I promise, you’ll feel better if you do.”
The reassurance did nothing to quell Lex’s unease. If anything, it caused his anxiety to rise even further, and he moved out of the doorway in favor of circling the edge of the balcony, wanting more room to maneuver if hostilities broke out. “What is this?” he growled, eyeing the four of them with naked suspicion. “You’re all obviously illusions created as part of the Rite, but what’s your significance? Tell me!”
Closing her eyes, Luna shook her head. “An illusion is a poor way to look at it.”
“Think of it more like a possibility,” added Celestia.
“A possibility?” sneered Lex, spitting the words out as though they left a bad taste in his mouth. “To do what? Become as vapid and indolent as the three of you?”
Ignoring the insult, Twilight nodded toward his double even as she kept her eyes on him. “To achieve what you’ve wanted your entire life.”
“Preposterous,” shot back Lex, giving his winged counterpart a look of contempt. “I never cared about becoming an alicorn until a day ago. My only life-long wish has been-”
“Friendship,” finished his alicorn-self, standing up and spreading his wings wide, the feathery limbs spreading out to indicate Celestia, Luna, and Twilight. “The ability to understand others, and make yourself understood to them in turn.”
“And how exactly did...” Lex stopped speaking abruptly, his breathing catching in his throat as he suddenly realized the answer to the question he’d been asking.
His expression knowing, his twin gave a slow nod. “That’s right, Lex. This is a world where you succeeded in not only recognizing all the unspoken aspects of interpersonal communication, but decrypted them, as well as figured out how to respond appropriately in a social context.” He smiled a little then, giving his wings a single beat. “Though I’ll admit I was as surprised as anypony when doing so caused me to gain these.”
Scarcely able to breathe, Lex felt himself start to tremble as he realized the full scope of what he was seeing. For as long as he could remember, his every interaction with others had been an exercise in frustration, which had only grown as he’d come to realize that there were undercurrents of meaning in their facial expressions, body language, vocal inflection, and other subtle cues that he was unable to register.
He’d spent his entire life trying to catalogue and decode those subtleties, keenly aware of how his inability to do so had isolated him from everyone around him. But despite years of study and tens of thousands of conversations to draw upon, he’d made no progress. It had gotten to the point where the continual review of new data had become rote, performed automatically despite his long since having lost hope that it would ever give him the breakthrough he wanted so desperately.
Indeed, that had been his entire reason for inventing a new form of magic. If whatever deficiency he was stricken with kept him from forming sufficient ties to fully partake in his community – and the moral framework he’d developed in his childhood made it clear that contributing to the welfare of his people was among the highest of virtues – then he could at least undertake a grand advancement on their behalf as a compensatory measure. Of course, that undertaking had also met with a seemingly insolvable problem, which was why he’d turned his thoughts to rulership upon being cast into the future and seeing the dismal state of his homeland after a thousand years of mismanagement. If nothing else, he could use his skills to give everyone in Equestria the government they deserved, rather than the inadequate one they’d long since settled for.
But he’d never stopped dreaming of finding a way to cure, or at least work around, his inability to understand others.
And now, his heart’s desire was right in front of him.
Except...something was wrong...
The joy that he should have felt as seeing that his dream could still come true wasn’t manifesting. The upswelling of hope at learning that his efforts until now hadn’t been in vain was nowhere to be found. Even his curiosity as to what exactly his counterpart had done in order to complete the seemingly-impossible task he himself had despaired of ever completing was so muted as to be almost completely absent.
Instead, the only thing that Lex Legis felt at that moment...
Squeezing his eyes shut so tightly that it was painful, Lex put a hoof to his head, trying to regain control of himself. “No,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “This is a falsehood, and an obvious one at that.”
Lifting his head, he didn’t even realize that he was breathing heavily, as though having run a marathon, as he pointed balefully at his alicorn-self. “Even if I did figure out how to properly interact with others, it wouldn’t have restored my horn. It certainly wouldn’t have reintegrated that offshoot of my mind with the rest of my consciousness, nor dissolved my pact with the Night Mare.”
“Not by itself it didn’t,” agreed Celestia, still wearing that infuriatingly placid smile. “For that, you needed help.”
Twilight nodded. “And once you were able to ask for it, we were happy to provide it. For instance, figuring out how to regenerate your original horn wasn’t that hard, since we did the same thing for Rainbow Dash’s wing.”
“And the specter haunting your dreams was quelled once you allowed me to confront it,” added Luna.
“Hardest of all was breaking away from the Night Mare,” admitted the other Lex, glancing down at his foreleg before giving a shudder. “She...wasn’t happy about that.”
Letting out a slow breath, alicorn-Lex put his hoof back down, giving his wingless counterpart a steady look. “But even if it was a hard decision, it was the right one. After Cadance brought me back to life, everypony else was convinced that I truly wanted to make amends-”
“AMENDS?!” shrieked Lex, stamping a hoof. He knew his eyes were blazing then, but he didn’t care, gnashing his teeth. “What exactly do I have to make amends for?! Protecting my people from the monsters that these incompetent fools couldn’t?! Dragging Equestria into the future after it lay fallow for a millennium?! Punishing criminals who dared to prey on others?!”
Standing up from where she’d been sitting, Twilight took a step toward him. “Lex, please, calm down-”
“Don’t you talk down to me!”
His horn lighting up, this time with the familiar purple aura, Lex telekinetically shoved Twilight back, her eyes widening as she tripped and went stumbling. The aggressive action caused Celestia and Luna to jump up, but before they could do anything, his other self caught Twilight with his wing, helping her up. She stammered a thank you, but he acknowledged it only with a grim nod, keeping his eyes on his double. “What are you doing?! She only wants to help you! That’s all any of us want!”
Black crystals grew around Lex now, despite how low his dark magic reserves were. He barely noticed them, seething. “Don’t you speak to me about helping other ponies! All you’ve done is help yourself! Letting that treacherous bungler” – he canted his head toward Luna, who was regarding him sorrowfully – “inside the confines of your mind, are you insane?! And going back to your original horn?! That power is necessary in order to rule!”
“I don’t rule. I don’t want to rule.”
Lex had thought he couldn’t be surprised by anything else his double had to say. But he was proven wrong then. “...what?!”
Pointing to his head, his alicorn-self met his gaze evenly. “I’m not wearing a crown. I gave it up when I repudiated the Night Mare. Celestia and the others wanted me to stay a prince, since I’d become an alicorn, but I said no.”
“THEN HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO GUIDE EQUESTRIA?!”
“The same way everypony else does,” answered his counterpart calmly, in sharp contrast to Lex’s disintegrating self-control. “By pitching in and doing my part.”
Turning to stand in profile, this time he pointed at his cutie mark: a podium in front of an amphitheater. “I thought this mark meant that my destiny was to administrate, to run a government, but I can see now that I was wrong. It was to advise others, to offer them my ideas and insights, rather than forcing them to abide by them. And now that I’ve overcome my communication disorder, I can do exactly that.”
Stunned speechless, it took Lex a moment to find his voice. “No...no, that’s not my destiny! THAT’S NOT MY DESTINY! I’M SUPPOSED TO RULE EQUESTRIA, FOR ITS OWN SAKE! THAT’S WHY I WAS FLUNG INTO THE FUTURE! THAT’S WHY I WAS SENT TO THAT MISERABLE WORLD CALLED EVERGLOW AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN! WHY I WENT THROUGH SO MUCH HARDSHIP AND SACRIFICE AND PAIN! IT WAS ALL FOR THIS, AND YOU’RE THROWING IT AWAY!!!”
Unfazed, his alicorn-self shook his head. “That’s the Night Mare’s warped religion talking.”
“I CAME TO THAT REALIZATION BEFORE I EVER MET THE NIGHT MARE!”
“I know.” This time, it was his other self that approached him, moving slowly and nonthreateningly forward. “You wanted to find some meaning in all the misery you’d experienced. Your childhood was one of loneliness, hating yourself because you were different. Then you lost the only ponies who loved you. It was only natural that you’d try to console yourself with the idea that those were stepping stones on the road to something greater.”
Had he not been at the edge of the balcony already, Lex would have retreated, all thoughts of his feather-falling spell completely gone from his mind. “Stay back!” he hissed.
But his counterpart continued to approach him. “Then you lost your entire world, sent into a place that was more hostile than anything you’d ever known. You were terrified, angry, and almost completely helpless. Is it any wonder that the Night Mare was able to manipulate you into embracing your worst impulses?”
“She did not manipulate me!” roared Lex. Around him, more black crystals erupted from the ground, but his alicorn-self ignored them. “I made my own decisions! My own choices! AND THEY WERE CORRECT!!! NOW STEP BACK!!!”
But his double didn’t seem to hear that last part, continuing to advance. He was almost close enough to touch now. “You don’t really believe that. You’ve been tormenting yourself over and over for your failures, thinking that it will make you stronger. But it doesn’t. All it does is cause you more pain, which makes you that much more desperate to find a way to make it stop, not realizing that it never will unless you change yourself, instead of trying to change the world.”
Finally halting his advance, his counterpart glanced back over his shoulder at the other alicorns. Behind him, Celestia and Luna had both formed auras around their horns, readying themselves for a fight, while Twilight was hovering in the air, wings beating nervously.
His alicorn-self didn’t say anything, just smiled and shook his head once.
Lex himself couldn’t determine what the gesture meant – there were any of a thousand possible interpretations, all of them equally valid based on what he was able to observe – but the three mares did, with Celestia and Luna frowning even as they let the glow around their horns die down, while Twilight landed, tucking her wings away. It was the sort of wordless communication that he’d been observing, and trying to replicate, all of his life to no avail.
“You see?” announced his double as he turned his gaze back toward him. “This is what you really wanted. Friendship and understanding, not power or authority.”
Holding out a hoof, his double offered him a kindly smile. “Don’t give up on yourself, Lex. Reject the Night Mare, and you can finally start living your dreams.”
Lex hesitated then, but not because he was considering the words of his counterpart. Instead, he was momentarily paralyzed as the feeling that had been growing inside of him ever since he’d realized what was happening finally overflowed past his ability to control it, consuming him completely. It wasn’t the anger that he’d willfully embraced so often throughout his life, nor was it the despair that he’d repeatedly run away from, nor frustration, self-loathing, or anxiety.
What Lex Legis felt then was pure, unmitigated hate.
It was so powerful that it was almost a living thing, driving everything else out of his mind. His responsibility to Thermal Draft was completely gone then, as was his grief over Solvei’s death, his worry over what had happened to the mares he loved, and his fervent desire to return home. All of it drowned beneath the black tide of venom that swallowed him whole.
There was only the pony – for in that moment he’d forgotten that he was in the middle of the Rite of Sublimation – who had exposed the meaninglessness in all of the pain he’d suffered. Who had put the lie to the only source of comfort that he’d been able to find in the relentless misery that had been his life. Who had stolen the last refuge that made his existence bearable.
In that single instant, with nothing left to believe in, Lex found it impossible to maintain his faith in the only thing he had left: the self-constructed code of ethics that he’d spent his life clinging to.
After all, if the rest of his life was completely pointless, why should that be any different?
His lips moved then, trying to force a single word out.
“Hm?” His double cocked his head, ears twitching as he tried to make out what had been said. “What was that?”
“I...said...”
The spell that came to Lex’s mind then, somehow making itself known through the miasma of hatred, was one that he’d tried to cast several days ago, during his first fight with Grisela. He’d been forced to stop when Shadow Star had interrupted him, but he’d managed to break off the casting before losing the spell, leaving it stored within his mental catalogue. He called upon it now, his eyes pure green as the purple flames sprouting from their corners whipped wildly.
In the span of an instant, Lex cast his disintegration spell, the thin vermillion beam lancing out to strike his double directly between the eyes.
Tears fell from her eyes as she put her hooves to her throat, her lips moving in silent pleas that she couldn’t give voice to thanks to his suffocation spell. Or maybe she was castigating him for what he’d done. Lex didn’t particularly care either way, simply watching as her already-feeble struggles grew progressively weaker, the aura around her horn starting to sputter as whatever magic she was trying failed to alleviate her lack of air.
Then she was gone, one final shudder going through her as she collapsed and laid still, her eyes staring at nothing.
Lex waited for just a moment to confirm that she was dead, then glanced around, idly noting the damage he’d wrought as he waited for the next enemy to appear.
All around him, Canterlot Castle had been transformed into an abattoir. The bodies of the Royal Guards – having foolishly rushed to the defense of the princesses – now littered the throne room, where the fighting had eventually moved. Some were little more than blackened skeletons in scorched armor, while others lay in pools of their own blood, pierced through by his magic missile spell multiple times over. At least one was partially melted, having taken an acid shot directly to the face. None had been able to do more than distract him, dying for nothing except to give their princesses a momentary reprieve from the battle.
Even that had served only to delay the inevitable.
Luna’s corpse was still laying where the fallen pillar he’d knocked over had struck her, her chest completely caved in from the blow. The stupid nag had thought that his heat ray spell had been aimed at her, nimbly dodging around it only to realize too late that he’d been aiming behind her, taking out the colonnade’s upper and lower supports. Celestia had screamed a warning at her then, but it had served only to make the younger of the Royal Sisters twist her head around, giving her just enough time to see her doom before she was killed.
Celestia herself had fought fiercely, holding nothing back, but only at first. Once Lex had used one of her guards as a living shield, the struggling stallion having been blown apart by a magical blast meant for him, she’d become far more timid with her tactics. Given that Lex had then hit her with an enervation spell, she’d ceased to become any sort of serious threat. As a result, he’d easily maneuvered her into disadvantageous positions throughout the fight, until he’d finally been able to hit her with an icy prison spell.
Having entrapped the angelic warrior that Twilight had summoned during their duel, and very nearly held the green dragon that he’d fought outside of Tall Tale, the thick bands of ice had been more than enough to contain Equestria’s first alicorn. Only for a moment, of course; Celestia’s horn had started to glow with power as soon as she’d found herself trapped, clearly intent on blasting her way out. But Lex hadn’t given her the chance, hitting her with a spell of his own first.
The concussive force it had unleashed had shattered both the cocoon of ice and Celestia within it, breaking the frozen alicorn into pieces.
And now, with Twilight having been slain, there was no one left to kill.
Glancing back at the hallway the fight had traveled down, Lex could just make out the balcony where he’d slain his double. The pile of ashes that he’d reduced that corrupt copy of himself to were still there, as were the overturned table and chairs that were the only evidence of the twisted party he’d been having with the mares who should have been his worst enemies.
Everything I’ve gone through, all the trials and tribulations, growled Lex inwardly as he stared at the ruin he’d caused. All of it, meaningless! And he was CELEBRATING that!
His malice undiminished by the slaughter that he’d committed, Lex looked around for someone else to take his hatred out on. But there was nothing except corpses and debris around him now, leaving him seething as he was left with nothing but the unbearable truth about the utter pointlessness of everything he’d dedicated his life toward.
Pausing as Celestia’s throne caught his eyes, he stalked toward it with a snarl. Under other circumstances, he would have taken a moment to appreciate that it was his now, being the literal seat of power for Equestria’s ruler. But any satisfaction that might have brought him before was denied to him now, the symbolism seeming to mock everything he’d lost.
Instead, he stalked toward it furiously, intent on more violence. The ornate, high-backed chair was set into the ground, but Lex still had a smattering of dark magic left, the black crystals easily piercing through the throne’s legs. Grabbing it in his telekinesis, he hurled it down the steps that led to the elevated platform on which it had stood, watching as it clattered down them before coming to rest alongside Twilight’s body.
When the last echoes of the throne’s destruction fell away, Lex glanced around again, frowning at the distinct lack of approaching hooves. With the princesses and their defenders slain, the remaining ponies had either fled the castle or were in hiding. There was no one left to oppose him any longer.
He’d won.
Equestria was his.
But just like with the empty throne, that realization only made things worse.
Gnashing his teeth as he stalked down the stairs, Lex stepped over the bodies of the ponies he’d slain. There were still others who deserved death. Princess Cadance and her husband. The other Elements of Harmony. Starlight Glimmer. They and anyone who tried to aid them would all suffer and die.
If my life is nothing but meaninglessness and pain, decided Lex as he stalked through the castle, then I can at least kill everypony who’s made those things worse!
But he hadn’t gotten more than a few steps before the barbed wire around his left foreleg – which had been quiescent until now – suddenly began to writhe. Cutting bloody grooves into his foreleg, the pain earned nothing but a sneer from Lex, too used to the discomfort to be concerned by the Night Mare’s disapproval. It wasn’t as though he cared about what she wanted anym-
Without warning, the barbed wire lashed out.
His eyes widening in shock, Lex watched as the two ends of the ridged metal – its middle still coiling around his leg – shot out, stretching forward into the space in front of him...and pierced it, tearing through the air as though he were facing a backdrop that he hadn’t realized was present. Behind the rents in space that they tore was nothing but blackness as deep as pitch, and which only grew in size as the wires thrashed, tearing more space open to reveal the ebony void behind it.
Lex tried to back away, but the remaining wire around his foreleg left him no slack, and he couldn’t retreat. In fact, he realized a second later, the wire was pulling him toward the rent in space, even as the ends of it worked the tear larger!
With nothing to hold onto, and not enough dark magic left to turn himself into a shadow, Lex had no way to stop himself from being pulled inside.
“I must say, I was surprised when you proposed this idea.”
“Why’s that?” Akna didn’t look up at the Keeper as she spoke, knowing that it would have been futile. She didn’t know why the Shrine’s caretaker kept a sphere of absolute darkness around himself at all times, but even with the darkvision that her winter wolf form granted her, it was utterly impossible to see through. She still wondered exactly what sort of creature was under there from time to time – the fact that the Keeper was floating with no sound of flapping wings might have been a clue – but at the moment she had more important things on her mind.
Such as the stallion lying insensate in front of her.
Lying faceup, Lex’s eyes were closed, his breathing slow and steady, and his entire body was otherwise completely still. At a casual glance, he could easily have seemed like he was floating lazily in a body of tranquil water. But in this case, the “water” was the lusterless darkness that was the Confluence, which continued to undulate gently of its own accord, causing Lex to bob up and down on its surface.
Staying on all fours as she waited for her opportunity, Akna eyed each motion of the Confluence suspiciously, trying to determine if there was a pattern to how it was moving. The Night Mare was a goddess of order, among other things; it wouldn’t have been unusual for the Confluence’s motions to be governed by some sort of underlying principle. But if there was a reason for why it moved in the manner that it did, it was beyond her ability to discern.
She had asked, the first time she’d been down here, exactly what the Confluence was. It had taken the Keeper some time to explain; back then, she’d had no real understanding of the nature of gods or the otherworldly realms which they dwelt in. As it was now, she understood just enough to realize how little she understood, but at least she wasn’t completely ignorant of what she was looking at anymore.
The Shrine of the Starless Sky was a holy place, dedicated to the Night Mare. What that meant, as far as she’d been able to tell, was that it was saturated in the goddess’s power, her divinity having left an impression here that continued to resonate with regard to her. The Confluence, in turn, was where that energy was most strongly concentrated. So much so that, even though the Shrine was warded against being accessed from those “other planes” the Keeper had told her about, the Confluence was still a doorway to the Night Mare’s home...the place she and all of the goddess’s other worshipers would go when they died.
And while entering the Confluence, after the Keeper somehow stabilized and prepared it for the Rite of Sublimation, would allow someone to bathe their soul in the manifestation of the Night Mare’s power, it came with a risk. Anyone who wasn’t prepared to expose their innermost self to the full weight of what the goddess represented would throw off the delicate balance that the Keeper kept the Confluence in, their soul unable to fully align with her.
If that happened, then the Confluence would reject them, expelling their soul, but not back into their body. Instead, it would send it toward the greater concentration of the Night Mare’s essential nature: Darkest Night, where she made her home. The Keeper said it was a corrective measure, that the Confluence was sending them to closer proximity to the goddess so that they could better understand and revere her.
Akna thought otherwise. Having your soul go to the Night Mare’s realm was what happened after death, according to what she’d been told. That meant that failing the Rite of Sublimation resulted in punishment, sending your soul to the afterlife, and in turn making way for one of her more worthy servants to come back and take your body for their own. It didn’t have to be that way, of course; you could still prove that you deserved a second chance – much as she’d done, not only finding her way back to her body, but bringing the weapon known as Headhunter with her – but it was still a terrifying price to pay if you weren’t up the test of the Rite.
But then, that was what it meant to be a follower of the Night Mare. Greatness could not be claimed without exposing yourself to risk. Those who were afraid to try were unable to better themselves, being fit only to serve their superiors.
Of course, those who tried and failed were worthy of far less consideration.
Above her, the Keeper murmured a series of words in a language Akna didn’t understand. In response, the Confluence rippled slightly, then slowed down almost to a complete halt. Only the slight undulating of Lex’s body showed that it was still moving.
“When you left here before, the Rite completed and Headhunter in your grasp, you were convinced that you were about to lead your people into a new age of prosperity,” intoned the unseen master of the Shrine. “You claimed that you were going to strike down their ancient foes, unite them with their ancestral cousins, and bring them all to the Night Mare’s glory.”
“I would have, if Headhunter hadn’t abandoned me once the fighting was over!” snapped Akna, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Without it there to scare off potential challengers, not to mention sway the heart of anyone I lent it to, I couldn’t challenge my tribe’s traditions! I’d have been killed and eaten if I’d tried!”
“If you could not succeed under your own power, it is little wonder you fell so readily under the sway of another,” chuckled the Keeper, his raspy voice interspersed with clicks. “When you returned just now, you were like a cur who had been whipped into obedience by your new master. Hence my surprise at your insistence that he will fail the Rite.”
“That pony isn’t my master!” Clenching her teeth, she felt her hackles rise as she glared at comatose unicorn in front of her. “I thought he was a sign from the Night Mare, sent to show me the way to greater power as a reward for my continuing to worship her in secret! Instead, he humiliated me! I was forced to reveal all my secrets, accompany him on his quest, and help fight his battles! All that after he and his mares killed someone I’d known since I was a child!”
“And yet he granted you great power, did he not?” mused the Keeper. “You yourself admitted that, under his command, your abilities were magnified many times over.”
Akna frowned at that, remembering how Lex had casually given her the ability to summon ten ice elementals, a feat that was right up there with Aselu’s slaying the legendary dragon Hvitdod. It had been heady almost to the point of intoxication, and for the first time she’d understood why Solvei – the winter wolf that Lex had so thoroughly tamed – had been so willing to call that pony her master. But aside from that...
“He will fail the Rite,” insisted Akna. “He might have earned Solvei’s loyalty in exchange for power, and his lover follows him willingly, but none of the other ponies do. They either despise him or are afraid of him.”
“Such things are also avenues to power,” replied the Keeper easily. “Whether they fear him or revere him, they still follow him.”
“It’s not the same! He’s doesn’t work to cultivate their obedience or earn their trust! He just shouts at them and makes displays of power to frighten them into compliance. He’s a thug, not a leader.” Huffing, Akna forced herself to calm down, concentrating on what was sure to happen soon. “Besides, with how badly Solvei’s death unhinged him, he’s half-mad anyway. And those mares made it sound like he was already losing his mind before I met him. He won’t be able to handle what the Rite puts him through.”
Left unspoken were the words “because I couldn’t.”
Inside the illusion she’d seen as part of the Rite, Akna’s test hadn’t ended once she’d slaughtered the yetis. Instead, when her tribe had seen that she’d become a winter wolf, they’d repudiated her, saying that she was tainted in spirit and calling for her death. Although she’d tried to quell their fears, telling them that she was the harbinger of a new age for them, they hadn’t listened.
It had been in a mixture of pure frustration and self-defense that, when they’d moved to devour her in hopes of cleansing her spirit, she’d killed them all.
In hindsight, it had been clear to her that she should have found another way to bring them to heel. That simply killing everyone who frustrated her wasn’t something the Night Mare wanted. She wasn’t a goddess of war or death, after all; her role was to lead others, not slaughter them.
Of course, she'd turned that into a victory, recovering her body and bringing back a powerful weapon besides. She’d made sure to tell the Keeper afterward that she’d done it deliberately, of course, and with the prize she’d retrieved he'd been in no position to say otherwise. Not to mention that she could still turn into a winter wolf at will, so she must have gotten at least part of the answer right.
But it still bothered her that she hadn’t known what to do during the last part of the rest.
She still relived that moment sometimes in her dreams, and each time she was likewise unable to come up with a better answer.
Shaking her head, she let out a slow breath. “He’ll fail the Rite,” she repeated. “And once he does, his spirit will be drawn to Darkest Night. At which point I’ll leap into the Confluence, follow him there, and retrieve another of the Night Mare’s sacred weapons.”
“A bold plan, if an ill-conceived one,” admitted the Keeper. “You do realize that, if you undertake this course of action, you will appear directly beside him in Our Lady of Darkness’ realm? I doubt the pony who mastered you once before will allow you to run free again so easily.”
“I’ll figure it out,” huffed Akna. “Just so long as I can find another of the Umbral Regalia and get back-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as the Confluence suddenly started to churn, going from placid to turbulent in the span of a second. Above her, she heard the Keeper start to chant again, but she ignored it, locking her eyes onto Lex. Any moment now! she felt certain. Any moment!
A second later Lex sank out of sight, his body disappearing into the black substance of the Confluence.
The Keeper broke off his chanting. “It seems you were correct. Lex Legis has failed the Rite’s test, and his soul is now being drawn toward Darkest Night. If you still wish to go through with this-”
Akna didn’t wait for him to finish, leaping into the Confluence after Lex.
As a dizzying sensation swept over her, it took only a moment for Akna’s excitement to turn into trepidation.
That she’d returned to Darkest Night, the home of the goddess she’d accepted into her heart, was immediately evident to her. The realization went beyond simply being obvious; she couldn’t not have known where she was, having been there once before. The realm of the Night Mare was a place that, assuming you survived the trip, was impossible to forget.
Nowhere else had such a pervasive sense of tension. It was in the air itself, the atmosphere heavy with apprehension, making Akna feel as if she were being watched but couldn’t figure out where from. Every alcove seemed as though it were hiding a predator waiting to pounce, every wall a false front that held a hidden passage with a waiting assassin. The slightest movement, the faintest sound; any of it could have been warning of imminent danger.
But that tension cut both ways, bringing with it a rush that seemed to heighten her awareness. Every moment felt like the moment during a hunt, or before a fight broke out, when her limbs seemed almost to tingle with restless energy, her senses all operating at maximum capacity in anticipation of what was about to happen. Akna could already feel her breath speeding up, her fur standing on end, and she couldn’t help but bask in how alive she felt in that moment.
Even so, she immediately knew that things hadn’t turned out the way she’d been hoping.
All around her was a dense forest, similar to the one that surrounded the river which led to the Shrine of the Starless Sky back in the mortal world. While Akna doubted that was a coincidence – according to the Keeper, the Night Mare’s power didn’t extend past the borders of the Shrine itself, but she couldn’t bring herself to discard the idea that the goddess’ holy place was the reason those woods were infested with so many dangerous monsters – that was less important than the fact that they were surrounded completely by wilderness, with no identifiable landmarks that she could make out. And while her darkvision meant that she wasn’t blind, there was no immediate way to figure out exactly where in the Night Mare’s realm she was.
This is no good, sighed Akna inwardly. If I don’t know where I am, then it’ll take me that much longer to find one of the Umbral Regalia.
Because the goddess’s sacred weapons were also among her most trusted servants, they were rarely idle. With no need to eat or sleep, and a firm sense of what the Night Mare wanted, they were continually dispatched to run various errands on the goddess’s behalf. And while Akna knew that a lot of those tasks took them beyond Darkest Night, she was also aware that they performed a significant number of duties within its boundaries.
Defending the borders of the realm. Greeting important visitors. Relaying instructions from the Night Mare to lesser functionaries. Transporting sensitive materials to and from places where they couldn’t be magically moved. There were many jobs that kept the Umbral Regalia busy, which meant that finding them was a matter of figuring out what was going on that required the attention of one of the Night Mare’s mightiest servants. But that would require information, which Akna knew she wouldn’t find if she was out in the realm’s hinterlands.
Which meant that in order to get anywhere, she’d first need to find her way to the nearest settlement.
Not to mention I’ll need to get back to my body once I’m done, she reminded herself, glancing over her shoulder.
That was something else that the Keeper had taught her before she’d first undergone the Rite. Failure meant having your soul drawn to the Night Mare’s realm, in which case you needed to get back to your body as quickly as possible, lest one of the place’s other denizens slip into it before you could. Once that happened, he’d impressed upon her, you were stuck here, and your hopes of ever leaving became extremely slim.
Fortunately, anyone who’d been displaced from their body via failing the Rite had an edge when it came to finding their way back: they had a marker that would point them in the right direction.
Akna wasn’t sure why it took the form of an intangible silver cord, barely the length of her muzzle, extending out from between her shoulders – the Keeper had called it a “lifeline,” whatever that meant – but the wisp of thread would always point back toward her body. Or rather, toward the Akna-shaped statue of pure darkness, as though someone had sculpted the Confluence to look like her, that had appeared somewhere within Darkest Night. All she had to do was throw herself into it, the same way she had the Confluence itself, and she knew she’d awaken back at the Shrine.
And of course, anything she was carrying would make the trip with her, hence why she’d been able to bring Headhunter back last time.
But as she glanced at her back, catching sight of the insubstantial thread what was waving toward her right, Akna noticed that she wasn’t alone.
Standing a short distance away from her, Lex Legis was holding a hoof to his head, a shocked expression on his face.
Then, slowly, he lowered his foreleg...and smiled broadly.
The sight was enough to send a nervous flutter through Akna, the nature of Darkest Night causing her fight-or-flight instincts to flare up. Like her, the thin cord extending from his back was pointing off to his right, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. In fact, he didn’t seem to be aware of anything, staring into space with that creepy grin on his face.
Slowly edging away from him, Akna got ready to bolt. If he used that power the Night Mare had given him to take control of her again, he’d almost certainly refuse to let her search for one of the Umbral Regalia, instead marching both of them right back to their bodies. But if I can put some distance between us before he notices me, then he might not be able-
A soft growl stopped her in her tracks.
Her heart pounding even as her ears swiveled toward the source of the sound, Akna settled into a crouch. A glance back at Lex showed that he hadn’t reacted to the sound, hadn’t so much as moved, still staring at nothing with that twisted grin on his face. What was he doing? Didn’t he realize he was in danger?!
It’s not my problem, Akna decided, carefully backing away from both the continued snarling and the unresponsive stallion. In fact, this is a good thing. Once whatever’s there makes its move, I can take off and let him deal with it. Hopefully the growling creature would keep him distracted long enough for her to get away. Let him bully someone else into serving as his bodyguard while he went back to...to...
It was then that Akna saw the flaw in her plan.
I CAN’T leave him behind! she realized, even as another soft growl came from off to her left. The black statue that’ll take him back to his body is probably right next to mine! If he forces one of the denizens here to accompany him to it, then when he leaves, there’ll be nothing to stop whatever he brought with him from taking my body for itself!
Even if the stallion had the wherewithal to kill whatever creature he dragooned into serving him before leaving, he’d likely still end up leading something else to the passage leading back to her body. Lex Legis was many things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. Nor would she be safe even if he was killed by whatever was hunting them now; many of the creatures in Darkest Night were no smarter than animals, but while a large number of the realm’s more intelligent residents chose to live in the settled areas, there were plenty of others who preferred the wilds.
Those smarter creatures would pose a problem for her even if Lex died. Akna didn’t know if being slain here left a corpse behind or not – they were, after all, souls without bodies right now; would they fade away into nothing if killed, or would something be left over? – but if they were, then it probably wouldn’t be very long until something found Lex’s remains and had the intelligence to figure out that if they followed where his lifeline was pointing, they could take his body...or hers.
One way or the other, leaving Lex on his own meant that she’d likely lose her body in short order. She had to defend him, whether she wanted to or not!
Fighting back a scream of frustration as she circled in place, looking for the source of the growling, Akna tried to figure out what to do. Maybe we can make some sort of deal. He can find where our black statues are, and stand guard over them while I go looking-
Another growl, this one much closer, drew her out of her frantic thoughts. Whatever’s out there, there are at least three of them, she observed grimly. Judging from the sounds of it, the other two were off to either side, while the third one was moving in closer. But at least it’s not very quiet, she noted, ears flicking forward as she heard the sound of soft steps approaching through the underbrush. If it keeps approaching like that, I should be able to get a glimpse of it before it moves in.
Steadying her breathing, Akna waited, trying to pay attention to three different directions simultaneously. But the one approaching from the front was making the most noise, and that made it difficult for her to take her eyes off of the undergrowth directly ahead of her. Despite her darkvision, whatever was moving was still concealed by the low-hanging branches, and all she could determine was that it was roughly as big as her.
Just a little closer, she decided, silently taking in a deep breath of air. While most creatures back home were immune to severe cold, the denizens here were another matter. If she hit whatever was approaching full-on with a blast of super-cooled air, it would likely have no way of shrugging it off. And if we’re lucky, that’ll hurt it enough to scare it and its companions away.
The loud snapping of a twig could be heard as whatever it was continued its approach. Almost, judged Akna quietly, holding her breath now that her lungs were full. Almost...
Not moving as she saw the leafy fronds in front of her start to quiver, Akna opened her jaws-
And then a bright flash stole her sight.
It was all Lex could do not to burst out laughing.
He had lost absolutely everything. Not just his home or his followers, the Night Mare’s test had stripped him of the things that had given his life meaning. His hopes for the future, his sense of purpose, his self-respect; all were gone now, taken away not because of some grandiose failure of one of his intricate plans, nor because he’d been defeated in a climactic battle, but simply by a few measured words that had utterly destroyed everything he’d built his life on.
And now that he’d failed to pass the Rite of Sublimation, he was about to lose his body as well. Being stranded in the Night Mare’s realm would doom Thermal Draft in turn, and likely the mares of Fail Forward as well, to say nothing of all the other ponies in on two worlds whom he’d made the decision to protect. In the unending string of failures that was his life, this was by far the lowest he’d ever sunk.
Despite all that, he couldn’t stop smiling.
He knew he should have been feeling worse than he’d ever imagined. That he should have been consumed by guilt and despair and self-loathing. That his tulpa should have been tearing into him with vitriolic words to further shove the meaninglessness of his life violently into the forefront of his consciousness. But all of that was absent now, overridden by the wonder, relief, and elation that were flowing through him. Those emotions blotted out his awareness of everything else in favor of reveling at the presence that he was suddenly registering.
Dying for the second time had proven to be just as confusing as the first.
Of course, Solvei knew that wasn’t really the case. She hadn’t actually died during the fight with Prevarius...at least, she was pretty sure she hadn’t. But when she’d found herself in a pitch-black space, surrounded by a ring of blue fire, she’d been certain that her life had come to an end.
And in a way, it had. Not because she’d gone to join her father at Hrothvitnir’s side, but because she’d been reborn. When she’d heard Lex call out for her, felt all of the pain and sorrow that he was carrying, it had made her heart break. He’d done so much for her, all while carrying more anguish than she’d thought one person could bear; upon learning that, Solvei had realized that she would never be able to bring herself to leave his side...not after hearing him crying out for her to stay with him.
Instead, she’d embraced the idea that she’d be with him always.
And that had been exactly what had happened, even after she’d closed her eyes for the last time after plunging into the river, her chest torn open by Sissel’s lightning bolt. Because when she’d opened her eyes an indeterminate amount of time later, she’d been shocked to find herself in a small room together with Lex – her beloved Master – and everyone else.
At first she’d been overjoyed, thinking that he had saved her somehow, but the truth had become clear all too quickly. No one had looked at her. Her every word had been ignored. Finally, when she’d tried to touch Lex’s unconscious body, her paw had passed right through him; that had been when the last of her doubts had vanished.
She was dead, and rather than going to join her ancestors, she was bound to remain at her Master’s side...not as his companion, but as a spirit.
Shock had quickly given way to panic, trying to figure out what to do. But all too quickly, she’d found out that there was nothing she could do. The magic that her Master had given her as part of their bond was gone now, leaving her unable to conjure up the slightest wisp of ice or snow, as well as completely unable to use telekinesis. She couldn’t even change her size the way she used to, nor summon the black crystal armor she’d used so often.
Worst of all, she couldn’t feel her Master in her mind anymore. Despite the fact that he was right next to her – something which wasn’t liable to change soon, since she’d discovered that she couldn’t move more than a dozen paces away from him – his presence was no longer part of her awareness. That had frightened her more than anything else, not having realized how much comfort she’d taken in feeling him always with her, despite the distance between them.
Now, it what felt like a cruel joke, she was still in close proximity to him, but had never felt further away.
But that had been only the beginning.
Seeing her Master mourn her so deeply had driven her to tears, hating that she had become the cause of more suffering for him. She hadn’t been able to keep from sobbing as he’d cried out her name and clung to Akna, the adlet soothing him by pretending to be her. It had only been because she’d had no more tears to shed that she hadn’t wept again when she’d witnessed him retrieve her body – slaying that vile spider that had taken it – and quietly tell Valor to stand watch over it.
After that, things had become a blur. She’d witnessed his meeting with that Keeper person, even though she hadn’t been able to see the ruler of the Shrine through the darkness he kept around himself. She’d watched as Lex had barely managed to establish a rapport with that bizarre creature, Teyu Yagua. And she’d followed her Master as he had moved into the hidden recess beneath the big claw-shaped building, trudging down the stairs resolutely despite looking as though he was going to fall over at any moment, still refusing to give in despite his exhaustion, his injuries, and his grief.
And when he’d leapt into the pool of darkness, she’d been drawn into the vision he’d had then as well.
When Solvei had been a pup, her father had told her about how utvalgte who betrayed their heritage were taken by Vutok in the afterlife, consigned to the scorching fires of his burning abode. It had sounded like the worst fate imaginable, and she’d never questioned that assumption.
But she’d been wrong.
The worst fate imaginable was seeing her strong and proud master be so completely broken, his entire world torn apart with nothing more than a few soft-spoken words. Torment wasn’t being consigned to flames; it was being forced to watch as he was fed lies about how it was his own fault that he’d suffered so badly. There was no physical pain that Solvei could have imagined being worse than having to see her master give up on himself, throwing away what she knew were his most cherished vows as he went on a rampage, slaughtering everyone in a manner more reminiscent of Bolverk than of the pony who had fought so hard to save her family.
And there’d been nothing she’d been able to do to help him.
She’d tried anyway. She’d yelled, both with her voice and in her mind, for him not to listen to what those winged unicorns were telling him, despite knowing that he couldn’t hear her. She’d tried attacking those phantoms herself, seeking to drive them away before they could harm her Master further, only to be as unable to touch them as she was anything else. She’d prayed and cursed and howled for the Night Mare – and, once that goddess had failed to respond, any other god or spirit who would listen – to spare Lex this, offering to pay any price asked of her.
All had been for naught.
But then, bereft of hope after having watched her Master kill everyone he could find, something had happened that Solvei hadn’t expected.
The barbed wire around his foreleg had lashed out as though it were a living thing, tearing apart the illusion he’d been trapped in. Then it had pulled him through, and once again she had been made to follow, wondering what new torment awaited him now before finding herself in a dark forest much like the one they’d crossed through shortly before her death.
And suddenly, it was like she was alive again.
She could feel the ground beneath her paws. She could hear her heart beating in her chest. She could taste myriad scents filling the air. Her muscles were suddenly tensing with nervous excitement, and the urge to run at top speed for the sheer joy of feeling herself move had very nearly caused her to take off without thinking. But she hadn’t been able to act on that urge, paralyzed with sudden joy at another sense that had been restored.
In her mind, she could feel Lex’s presence again, her awareness of him driving away all other thoughts, and it was in silent exultation that she called out to him.
MASTER!
He wasn’t very far away. Now that Solvei could sense his presence, she realized that she wasn’t any more distant from him than she had been as a spirit; it was only the thick foliage blocking her view of him. Even as she tensed her legs, preparing to bound toward him with all possible haste, there was a sudden bright flash from somewhere nearby, and a familiar voice cried out in shock, followed by a sudden blast of cold air coming from the same direction, prompting a pained yelp. That in turn was followed by loud snarls, all of which were close-
Then Solvei felt the sensation of magical movement, and her dearest Master was right in front of her.
He was smiling, his breathing turning ragged as he looked her over by the soft light of his horn.
“Solvei,” Lex murmured, reaching out to softly brush her fur, seeming to marvel at the sensation of it. “My Solvei.”
She couldn’t reply, staggered under the weight of the emotions pouring off of him then.
She usually only felt his feelings when he was having an extreme reaction to what was happening, and every such instance that she’d experienced until now had been decidedly negative, ranging from towering anger for reasons she’d never fully understood just before they’d reached that pony village to overwhelming panic when that Mystaria pony had somehow revealed one of his deepest secrets. But it had never, ever been anything like what she was feeling now.
Amazement. Relief. Elation.
And overriding them all was l-
Another bright flash came from off to the side, so close that Solvei could have touched it with her tail if she’d had her back to it. Although her darkvision let her see without light, it didn’t prevent her eyes from registering illumination, and the sudden radiance – its source hidden behind a few leaves – was powerful enough that she instinctively squeezed her eyes shut, hearing Lex stumble as he did the same, the rush of emotions she’d been feeling from him suddenly fizzling out. No no no!
Off to the side, a snarl and the sound of rushing paws drew Solvei’s attention...and her ire.
Whatever this thing was, it had just interrupted her reunion with her master. After seeing how much her death had hurt him, and being unable to do anything in his time of need except watch, she was finally, finally able to be with him again, and now that she was actually bringing him some peace THIS INTERLOPER HAD GOTTEN IN THE WAY OF IT!!!
Snarling so heavily that snowflakes spilled from her lips, Solvei turned in the direction of the incoming creature. Her vision was still filled with spots, but she couldn’t have cared less, calling upon the magic her master had given her. This time it responded immediately, and she felt herself start to grow even as black crystals spread across her body, moving to intercept the oncoming creature.
Her vision had recovered just enough that she could make out the sight of the leaping quadruped that jumped out of the bushes then. Its eyes still glowing in the aftermath of the bright light they had emitted, the thing had a lupine shape, except that its fur was as black as hers was white. But that was where the similarities between her and it ended.
Beneath its fur were thick bony plates rather than skin, revealing its fur to be little more than camouflage for the dark terrain. Its paws were oversized compared to the thickness of its legs, almost freakishly so, and its jawbone jutted forward in a pronounced underbite, lower fangs curling upward. And right now, those fangs were bared at her Master, the creature leaping toward him as he cursed and rubbed a hoof across his eyes.
It never came close to him.
Her increased size made it easy for Solvei to snatch the creature out of the air, her jaws closing around its throat easily. Choking, the creature raked its swollen paws against her armor, but it was no more able to penetrate the black crystals than Blat had been, and Solvei ignored the feeble attacks. Instead, she tightened her grip on its neck, wrenching her head around sharply. A loud crack filled the air then, and the creature in her mouth gave a sudden shudder before going still, its neck broken.
Master, are you-
She didn’t get a chance to finish before a pained cry drew her attention off to her other side, where another winter wolf – Akna, she realized with a start – was pinned beneath two more of the creatures, one with frost lining his fur as they swiped at the blinded shaman, their paws coming away wet with blood.
What’s happening?! demanded Lex, still unable to see despite keeping his horn’s aura active. Solvei, what's the situation?!
It’s alright, Master! She was already in motion as she answered, tackling the wolf-things and knocking them away from the adlet. Please wait just for a moment! I’ll take care of these creatures right away!
Both of her enemies landed in a heap, their eyes glowing faintly as they got up and slowly started to circle her, growling at having been denied their meal. But Solvei couldn’t have been less intimidated, giving a howl as she rushed them.
As long as I’m here, I swear that nothing will hurt you ever again!
Akna’s comment brought the group to a halt, with Lex and Solvei pausing as the adlet examined a particularly large tree. While each of them had darkvision active – though in Lex’s case, it was because he was looking through Solvei’s eyes, keeping his own closed as he carefully walked alongside the winter wolf – none could see the top of the timber spire, its upper branches disappearing into the thick canopy overhead. Nor was there any indication that it had any inhabitants among its boughs...or that the tree itself was anything to be wary of.
That last point was clearly on Solvei’s mind, because she took inhaled deeply before breathing heavily on the base of the tree, slathering its trunk in ice crystals two inches thick and eliciting no reaction from the plant. “I think it’s okay,” she announced a moment later. “I mean, it might just be pretending to be normal, but that last tree-monster didn’t have any defenses against the cold, so...”
She shrugged, letting her statement trail off as she glanced at Lex. “What do you think, Master?”
It took Lex a moment to answer, needing to force himself to pay attention to the question she’d asked him. After everything that had happened – the turmoil that the Rite had put him through, the joy of Solvei’s return, and then finding out that Akna had followed him here – his mental discipline wasn’t up to maintaining the organized arrangements that he usually kept his thoughts in, resulting in his ruminating over recent events instead of paying attention to their immediate surroundings.
Under other circumstances that would have been unsettling, but in the hinterlands of Darkest Night it was dangerous in the extreme, as predators of all types roamed the wilds of the goddess’s realm.
That had been driven home quite pointedly when the last tree that Akna had examined had tried to kill them.
Fortunately, the scythe tree – that had been what Akna had called the blackened, seemingly-dead husk of wood that she’d tried to climb, since it had whipped its thin branches through the air so fast that they’d been more akin to blades than clubs – hadn’t been much of an enemy once the three of them had recovered from their surprise. While the thing had been able to uproot itself and move around, it had done so in a lumbering gait that had been at odds with the dexterous movement of its branches; since it had apparently possessed no magic, nor any notable defenses, it had been a small matter for them to hang back and let Solvei kill it from a distance with her inexhaustible supply of ice magic.
Hopefully, the large conifer in front of them now would prove to be what it looked like and nothing more since it hadn’t reacted to Solvei’s ice.
But Lex, his thoughts now in order, wasn’t prepared to bet everything on a single experiment. “Break some of its branches off. If it’s sapient, it will likely be pained and attack.”
“Will do!” yipped Solvei happily, her tail wagging happily as she carried out his order, forming a thick slab of ice with a sharp edge and using her telekinesis to hack at several of the tree’s lower branches.
“Don’t cut them all down,” huffed Akna as Solvei went to work. “I’m the one who has to climb this thing, without darkvision I might add, and it’s going to be hard enough without you lopping off all the easiest handholds.”
“Fine.” Rolling her eyes, Solvei let the conjured ice-blade – which was already starting to melt, since unlike back on Everglow the temperature in Darkest Night was merely cool rather than cold – fall to the ground. “Go ahead.”
Pausing just long enough to glance at them uncomfortably, Akna padded up to the tree before changing back into her adlet form, making sure to keep her back to the both of them and her tail curled between her legs. “Damn it,” she cursed, wobbling slightly as she put her hands against the tree trunk. “This isn’t going to work! I can’t see a thing!”
“Stop whining and reach up and to your left,” responded Lex with a harsh whisper...and the spell he had cast carried the words directly to Akna’s ears. “Use the branch there to haul yourself up. There’s a smaller one on your right you can use to stabilize yourself, but don’t put too much of your weight on it or it’s likely to break. After that...”
It took a few minutes, but slowly – and after more than a few false starts and several close calls – Akna ascended past the canopy.
With her having reached the edge of Solvei’s vision, since there was too much foliage in the way to clearly make her out now, Lex had no further instructions to give the adlet, lapsing into silence as he waited for her to say if she could see anything. According to her, Darkest Night had multiple settlements which maintained permanent lights; with any luck, there’d be one that was close by...and in the right direction, since they’d been following their so-called “lifelines” so far.
Just that thought was enough to break Lex’s concentration, and he found himself mentally reviewing what had happened since arriving in the Night Mare’s realm.
After Solvei had slain the creatures attacking them, Lex had managed to gather his wits enough to realize that they needed to move. The bright flashes from those things’ eyes, sounds of battle, and the bloody carcasses left behind would be enough to bring more creatures down on them, and so they’d set off. Fortunately Akna’s wounds weren’t that bad, though Lex had needed to telepathically tell Solvei to be quiet when she’d started to suggest that he imbue her with the power to heal the adlet. Having only a single application of the Charismata left, he wasn’t willing to waste it on the shaman’s injuries, especially since he hadn’t been sure why she was there.
But that last point was one that had been brought up quickly, since they hadn’t gotten far before Akna had informed them that they needed to change course, citing the ethereal silver cords that he and the adlet were now affixed with.
That had prompted a conversation about Akna’s being there, and to Lex’s surprise the outrage and betrayal he’d expected to feel at the adlet’s admission that she’d been not only expecting him to fail the Rite, but had also used that as an opportunity to make an attempt to retrieve another of the Night Mare’s living weapons – despite his having told her what a bad idea that was, and that he wanted no part of it – had failed to manifest. Quite the contrary, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to care at all that Akna was pursuing her own agenda.
He had, however, been much more interested in the – admittedly very useful – information Akna had about the conditions they had to operate under now. Apparently there were some sort of echoes of the Confluence that were shaped like the two of them somewhere in Darkest Night, and that anything which touched them first would inhabit their bodies. Solvei had been highly alarmed at this news, and even Akna had expressed a desire to undertake her quest to retrieve one of the Umbral Regalia with all due haste, lest she acquire one of those weapons only to lose her body in the process.
But again, Lex had found himself to be shockingly blasé about the possibility of being stranded here forever.
Worse, despite knowing that such passivity was highly unusual for him, he couldn’t even bring himself to feel concerned about his lack of concern.
If anything, the idea of staying in Darkest Night seemed almost appealing. After all, this was already where he was going to go when he died, so it wasn’t as though this was some sort of digression from his so-called destiny...a destiny that had turned out to be, he knew now, a complete lie. And since Sonata and Aria were quite possibly dead, and the princesses were likely dismantling his nascent kingdom, it wasn’t as though he had much of a life to go back to anyway.
That was particularly true with his circumstances on Everglow being what they were. Given that he’d pinned his hopes for defeating his current swathe of enemies – Sissel, Grisela, Paska, and the rest of their misbegotten clan – on completing the Rite and becoming an alicorn, a prospect which was utterly beyond his reach now, continuing that particular fight was almost certainly an exercise in futility. He’d already severely injured Woodheart and doomed Thermal Draft with his insistence on fighting every battle that came his way; better to be done with it before someone else paid the price for his inability to finish things the way Solvei had.
Which was the other reason not to go back: he’d almost certainly lose Solvei again.
Just the thought made his chest tighten. It wasn’t fear of going through that all-consuming pain a second time, however; it was just that he couldn’t bear to lose the winter wolf now that he’d gotten her back. That she’d been returned to his side so abruptly had been an unexpected positive from his failing the Rite, but it wasn’t one he was willing to give up; for how little merit he saw in continuing to fight, that was one point that he wouldn’t simply sit back and accept.
And he had little doubt that Solvei would be lost to him again if he returned to his body. Although she’d told him, during their trek through the dark forest, about how she’d remained at his side even after dying, the idea that she’d once again be relegated to an undetectable ghost following him around upon his return to his physical form was cold comfort indeed. He hadn’t been able to sense her like that, nor communicate with her or otherwise be cognizant of her presence. Even if he didn’t experience the agony of separation again, just the thought of her being so completely removed from his awareness made him nauseous.
With all of that in mind...why not cut his losses? It was one thing to accept hardship and suffering as necessities to be borne in pursuit of a worthwhile goal, but to do so for nothing was madness. At least here he’d be able to reevaluate his goals and possibly find something worthwhile to pursue.
Since he’d already completed his deal with the Night Mare to establish her religion on Equestria, it wasn’t like she’d be able to object. She might have given him a “chance to grow stronger” here on Everglow, but that had been little except an unending series of hardships that had cost him far more than he’d gained...his bond with Solvei notwithstanding.
Of course, none of that reasoning was conclusive. It was entirely possible that he could find not only a way to make up the difference with regard to the power he’d hoped to gain as an alicorn, but secure a method to resurrect Solvei as well. After all, the Night Mare had been willing to give him the means to bring back Cloudbank when it had suited her purposes, and even if she wasn’t willing to do the same for Solvei now, this was where her greatest servants dwelled. It wasn’t unthinkable that one of them would be capable of using life-restoring magic.
And while he’d chastised Akna for the idea, the thought of using one of the Umbral Regalia to cut through Sissel and her twisted siblings had a certain appeal to it.
The fact that the pale-skinned giant had been the one who killed Solvei in the first place wasn’t something that Lex had forgotten.
That was why Lex had agreed to let Akna try and get above the canopy to look for any nearby signs of civilization, rather than listen to Solvei’s surprisingly-vehement insistence that they get back to their bodies as quickly as-
“I see lights!”
Akna’s excited whisper brought Lex out of his ruminating. “Where?”
She paused for a second, likely trying to figure out how to indicate a direction without having any astronomical features, landmarks, or indicators of the cardinal directions – presuming Darkest Night even had magnetic poles – to reference. “If you look at where the first branch that Solvei cut down is pointing, they’re in that direction. It’s hard to tell how far away they are, but I think we can be there soon if we move quickly.”
Glancing at the branch in question, Lex noted idly that it was indicating the same general course that their lifelines were pointing toward.
Taking a moment to telepathically relay Akna’s findings to Solvei, Lex nodded. “Come back down. We’ll head that way immediately.”
Even if he hadn’t fully made up his mind as to whether or not he should stay in Darkest Night, at least the current course of action was clear. After finding whatever was waiting for them at those lights, however, decisions would need to be made.
After what he’d learned in the Night Mare’s test, hopefully he’d make the right choice for once.
Solvei paused for just a moment, eyes narrowing as she peered out from between the trees that marked the edge of the forest, staring at the lights that dotted the walled town in front of them. “There, approaching the gate! See?”
“A line of ponies,” murmured Akna, staring at the equines approaching the only visible entrance to the settlement that lay beyond the walls. At that distance, it was hard to make out any details, but they looked like a mix of earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns, all dressed in tattered clothing.
Frowning, the shaman leaned further forward, staying careful not to emerge past the last line of foliage. “Are they...roped together?”
“Chained,” corrected Lex, spotting the dull glimmer of light bouncing off of the fetters that connected each of the ponies’ hooves to metal links stretching between them. “They’re chained together.”
Solvei tilted her head, glancing at Lex as he registered curiosity from her. “Does that mean something special?”
“It means there’s a concern that they’d run away, or otherwise act beyond whatever parameters have been imposed on their behavior, if they weren’t shackled,” answered Lex tonelessly.
“Then why give them weapons?” muttered Akna, still staring as the chained ponies trudged up to the gate. “Although I suppose those piddly little axes they’re carrying aren’t that dangerous.”
“They’re not meant to be,” answered Lex easily as he watched the line of ponies come to a halt.
Solvei frowned in confusion, looking between him and the ponies they were observing. “Why not?
Lex didn’t answer immediately, knowing that Solvei would wait for his reply while he continued to observe the returning band.
Standing just outside the brightest area of the magical lights – their lack of any visible flame or even any flickering made it clear that the pair of glowing spheres hanging from posts that jutted out above the gate entrance were enchanted rather than lit with any mundane fuel – the dozen or so ponies that were shackled together all passed their weapons forward one at a time, the front-most pony depositing them on the ground a short distance from the guards – a pair of pegasi wearing suits of armor – who stood outside of the town’s entryway.
It was only after all of the axes had been put down, and the lines of ponies awkwardly shuffling back, that one of the guards stepped forward. Although too distant to let Lex hear anything, he could make out the guard nudging the pile with one hoof, presumably counting to make sure they were all there. Apparently satisfied, he motioned to his partner, who in turn yelled something back toward the gate.
A moment later, the massive portcullis that barred the entrance began to rise up, and a third guard came out. Unlike his fellows, who casually carried lances and sported crossbows hanging from their sides, this one had no visible weapons, instead pulling a small cart behind him. Trotting forward, he collected the axes that the shackled ponies had deposited, tossing them carelessly into the conveyance he was pulling. Once he’d retrieved them all, he turned and headed back through the gate, and it was only after he’d disappeared inside that the guards waved the shackled ponies in, the portcullis lowering after them once they’d entered.
“They were a work crew,” answered Lex at last, watching as the two guards resumed their positions outside of the entrance. “One sent to cut down any trees that this place’s rulers decided were growing too close to the walls.”
“To get rid of cover from the forest,” snorted Akna in realization. “They’re making sure that anything which wants to attack the city will have to cross a stretch of open ground before it can get close.”
“And the lights will make it easy to see them when they try,” finished Solvei. “Now I get it.”
Lex didn’t say anything, declining to point the hazardous conditions that those ponies had been operating under. Chopping away at the forest was an extremely dangerous activity, since not only were they at the far edge of what the lights along the wall could illuminate, but logging was an inherently noisy undertaking, one which would likely draw the attention of any nearby monsters, presuming the trees themselves didn’t fight back. That those ponies had been wearing fetters – as well as their lack of armor, better weapons, or even an escort – suggested that they were considered expendable by whoever had sent them out there.
That thought should have filled him with righteous indignation. The idea of pony lives being treated so callously ran counter to everything he’d believed in; even if those ponies were criminals who’d broken the laws of that town, their safety should still have been a priority.
But once again, all Lex felt was a dull emptiness where his anger would normally have been.
Instead, he turned his attention to the wall itself, observing it in silence the same way the three of them had done for several minutes now.
Set several hundred feet back from the edge of the forest, the barricade was a formidable one. Made entirely of stone and mortar, it reached over thirty feet high, and judging by the guard patrols – two ponies marching side by side – that moved along the top of it, was quite thick as well. With more magical lights set at regular intervals along the top of the wall, the entire place was well-lit, standing out vividly against the backdrop of Darkest Night’s perpetual gloom.
What was more notable was just how much the wall extended in either direction. It stretched out far to either side, exhibiting only a gentle curve to denote how it enclosed a settlement within. Presuming that its arc remained consistent, it was easy for Lex to imagine that the town within was the size of Ponyville, perhaps slightly larger, containing a population of at least several thousand.
And there was no doubt in Lex’s mind that this was a population center. That was confirmed by the large spires jutting up from behind the walls, well within the enclosed area. Each one had thin wires he could see radiating out from them, connecting to form a covering that crisscrossed the area above the walls.
The “wire spires,” as he’d heard them called back on Everglow, had been new to Lex when he’d first been sent to that alien world. But he’d quickly come to understand their purpose. Much like the walls that were ubiquitous when it came to any of that world’s urban areas – even hamlets and thorps that were too small to warrant a proper wall had fences, ditches, and other defensive measures in place – the wires that were spread out like webs over towns and cities were defensive measures.
Usually made of the strongest material available – typically twine, though places that could afford them would sometimes use metal wire – and stretched between spires placed at various points throughout the town, the array would catch the wings of anything that flew into them. While that did little damage on its own, since they typically had sufficient slack and thickness that the wires couldn’t slice off limbs or cut ponies in half the way some of Everglow’s locals liked to gossip, it was usually enough to assure that anything which got tangled in them would be unable to remain aloft, plummeting painfully to the ground.
That didn’t mean that the makeshift netting covered each town completely, though. Most locales deliberately left gaps of various sizes over certain areas, allowing for aerial transportation of goods to go through unimpeded, albeit still watched over by various officials. Which was the other reason why the ponies of Everglow went to such trouble to restrict air traffic over urban territories: money.
Unlike on Equestria, where ponies were free to come and go between cities as they liked, whether by trains, airships, boats, or simply by hoof, any city that had walls and wires invariably used them to level fees against anyone who wanted to enter their territory. While usually not expensive to enter – most places charged only two or three copper coins, the smallest denomination of currency in the Pony Empire – costs of up to a silver piece per traveler weren’t unknown, particularly during festivals or market days.
But while all but the poorest of ponies could easily afford such costs, anyone bringing goods into the city – particularly merchants, but also farmers, tradesponies, and adventurers – were hit with commensurate surcharges. And since a third of the population had wings, issues of pegasi waiting until nightfall and simply smuggling their wares in under cover of darkness was a constant issue for the city officials charged with collecting fees that helped keep the coffers filled. Hence why virtually all localities that could afford to do so made use of wire spires.
Of course, magic could have achieved much the same effect with far less imprecision, but only in theory. In actuality, covering an entire city in some sort of protective spell – much less one that could operate for any appreciable length of time – was required extraordinary power. Not so much as to be unthinkable, but still an amount that even Lex would have been impressed by.
Of course, Shining Armor, Princess Cadance’s husband, had done exactly that for Equestria’s capital city. In Lex’s estimation, that could only have been possible because he had a cutie mark to that effect, likely undergone what had to have been extensive instruction from Canterlot’s top wizards, and certainly undertaken extraordinary training to keep his body (and, by extension, his body’s magical channels) in peak condition. Even then, Lex suspected that he’d been receiving some sort of assistance from the princesses; despite having every conceivable advantage, it was hard to countenance the idea of Equestrian magic being capable of such a feat otherwise.
Master, came Solvei’s voice in his mind, making him realize that his thoughts had been wandering again. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to try and go around this place? I’m worried that trying to go through it might slow down finding the way back to your body.
The question made Lex glance at the lifeline emerging from between his shoulder blades. It was still pointing toward the walls, the same way it had been this entire time. Circumventing an area of this size would take hours, and that’s presuming a best-case scenario. If the walls branch out, or if there are natural barriers like a ravine or a crevasse, it will take even longer. Not to mention that traversing the forest will slow us down more, and expose us to further monster attacks.
He didn’t bother addressing the possibility that three-dimensional outlines that represented his and Akna’s bodies were within the township itself; if that were the case, someone likely would have found them in short order, in which case – according to the adlet – their lifelines would have ceased pointing. More likely they’d need to move past the city, and that meant that the quickest way was through.
Of course, that was only if he wanted to leave Darkest Night behind...
“We’ll need to hide these if we’re going in there,” noted Akna quietly, indicating her own lifeline. “I don’t know how often the ponies here see people with lifelines, but if they recognize them, it’ll be like holding up a sign saying that our bodies are out there somewhere, free for the taking.”
“The good news is they’re not very long, but them being made out of glowing wisps is kind of a problem,” agreed Solvei, glancing between the two of them. “I think Master should be okay if he bunches his cloak up a little,” she decided after a moment. “But I’m not sure what to do about you.”
But no sooner had the words left her mouth then Solvei’s eye lit up. “Wait, I know! Turn back into an adlet, and then your hair will cover it! It did when you were climbing that tree!”
Akna – who had turned back into her winter wolf form as soon as she’d come down from said tree – scowled. “If I do that I’ll be naked!”
“So?” Cocking her head to the side, Solvei glanced Akna over. “You’re naked right now.”
“That’s not the same!” protested the shaman, though her tail flattened against her backside as she spoke. “Being like this isn’t...”
“Isn’t what?” Solvei frowned, and Lex registered discontent from her then. “Are you saying there’s something wrong with being an utvalgte?”
“That’s not what I meant,” huffed Akna, pawing at the ground in frustration. “It’s just that I only got the ability to take this form a little while ago, and I haven’t used it very often. This isn’t...it feels more like a costume more than the real me, does that make sense? But if I turn back into an adlet...”
Squirming at the thought, she gave Solvei a pointed look. “What about you? Ponies all wear clothes, and you have a pony mark on your flanks! I bet that if you go in there without anything on, you’ll cause a stir!”
“Like I care!” Lifting her nose in the air, Solvei smirked. “This is my master’s mark, and I’m proud of it! I hope everyone gets a good look! Besides, where would I even get any clothes?”
“Both of you, shut up,” cut in Lex before either could say anything further. He’d been ignoring their pointless bickering in favor of putting more thought into what he wanted to do, but that had been a futile endeavor with how they wouldn’t stop talking. “I have enough clothes for each of you.”
“You do?” Akna blinked, then narrowed her eyes. “And you let me climb that tree completely bare?!”
“Master, if it’s really important to you that I cover up, I could just wear my armor,” offered Solvei.
Resisting the urge to sigh, Lex addressed Solvei first. “That would be a waste of power, especially if we’re there long enough that you’ll need to renew it. And as for you,” he turned to Akna, giving her a flat look, “I didn’t offer you any clothing before because it wasn’t necessary at the time, and now it is.”
Both protested, with Solvei saying that she’d have plenty of power to spare either way and Akna asserting that yes, it was necessary at the time, but Lex ignored both of them. Instead he stepped back further into the forest, making sure the glow from his eyes and horn wouldn’t be visible to the guards on the walls as he telekinetically opened his saddlebag.
Although his body was back on Everglow, his incarnation here included everything he’d had on him at the time he’d undergone the Rite, including the extradimensional bag he’d received from Solvei’s mother. While he’d paid little attention to the various outfits it had contained when he’d initially taken possession of it, focusing instead on the magic items it contained, the plethora of clothes were still there, and he started taking them out now.
“Find something that fits and get dressed,” he ordered brusquely. “Once you’re done, we’re entering that town.”
“Are you sure there isn’t anything else that might fit me better?”
“Will you stop whining already?” huffed Solvei, rolling her eyes before glancing at Akna. “You wanted clothes, and Master gave them to you, so what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that I look like...like...” Apparently unable to find the words to properly summarize her current appearance, Akna instead glanced down at herself, biting her lip as her ears flattened against her head.
Although he had no eye for fashion, it wasn’t hard for Lex to understand the source of Akna’s discomfort, even if he had no sympathy for her.
While there’d been several different outfits stuffed into his extradimensional pack, none of them had been designed for someone of humanoid stature. Footwear had been completely out of the question, for instance, due to each outfit having been made with hooves in mind. Similarly, her six-foot height was larger than what most ponies measured when standing on their back legs, and the intended recipient of the clothing in Lex’s possession had apparently been no exception.
The result was that, while Akna had been able to dress herself, the clothes she’d eventually selected sat awkwardly on her. Her leggings – a simple pair of black pants made out of cotton – barely reached to her knees, even though they would have made it to the ankles on a pony. Worse, the material hadn’t been designed for someone of such robust proportions, causing it to cling to her like a second skin, the seams straining visibly every time she took a step. That her tail was pushed upward due to the hole being slightly misaligned for her body type only seemed to upset her more.
But it was trying to cover her upper body that had caused the adlet the most consternation, since none of the garments designed for covering the wearer’s torso had been made to account for the presence of breasts, let alone the prominent pair of mammaries that Akna was sporting.
That had been illustrated quite pointedly by how she’d managed to ruin no less than three shirts in attempting to keep her chest covered.
The first casualty had been a plain brown woolen sweater. Although it had been immediately obvious that it was too small for her, Akna had tugged at the material insistently, telling them that wool was a fiber which stretched. Of course, it had been midway through that explanation that she’d managed to tear the fabric right down the middle, leaving her bosom completely on display beneath the ripped material.
Red-faced as she’d ignored Solvei’s snickering and Lex’s impatient growl, a cream-colored button-down made of silk had been Akna’s next victim. After spending almost two full minutes trying to slip the brass fasteners through the holes, her first deep breath had sent them flying off, nearly causing Solvei to collapse from how hard she’d been laughing.
The simple, undyed canvas tunic that she’d tried after that had seemed like it would survive where its predecessors had met their end. That particular article of clothing had clearly been designed for rough use, and while Akna had complained about how it had compressed her bust, the sturdy textile hadn’t seemed in danger of destruction.
Unfortunately, Akna’s sigh of relief at having found a wearable top had come when she’d been looking down at the tunic, causing the super-cooled air of her breath to freeze the fabric as solidly as if it had been caught in an ice storm. Needless to say, when she’d frantically tried to chip the ice off, she’d accomplished nothing except to shatter the central portion of the garment as though it had been made of glass.
By that time, Solvei – who had simply shrunk herself down to pony size in order to fit into a deep blue two-piece outfit with gold brocading – had been rolling on the ground and howling in mirth, while Lex’s patience had been completely shot. After informing Akna that she’d go topless if she didn’t find something immediately, the sniffling adlet had settled for a simple shirt of red linen.
It hadn’t been her first choice for a reason. A size too small even before taking the difference in body shape into account, it not only left her entire belly on display, but wasn’t even able to reach down far enough to fully cover her breasts, leaving their curved undersides visible before the taut fabric managed to hide the remainder. But at least the garment held, even if Akna was visibly making sure not to stretch too far or breathe too deeply.
Even then, every step the adlet took made both orbs jiggle in their imperfect container, as though threatening to burst forth at any moment despite her efforts.
“I’m the spiritual leader of my tribe, slayer of the yetis, and a loyal devotee of the Night Mare,” muttered Akna miserably as they strode toward the gateway, arms crossed beneath her chest to try and stabilize how much it was bouncing. “Why do I have to be humiliated like this?”
Solvei’s shot Akna a reproachful look. “Compared to what my master went through in that Rite of yours, you’re getting off easy. He-”
“We’re almost within range of the lights,” cut in Lex sharply from where he was walking between the two of them. “Settle down and focus on the plan.”
“Right, right.”
“Understood, Master.”
With no choice except to trust that they understood how important it was that they follow his instructions, Lex kept walking.
Up ahead, he saw the two guards stationed outside the gate peering in their direction, apparently nearing the edge of their field of vision. By any reasonable measure, they shouldn’t have been; to Lex’s own eyes, they were still fairly distant from the edge of the light cast by the glowing orbs lining the wall. But he’d expected that the residents of Darkest Night, even if they were ponies, would have greater visual acuity, particularly if they were assigned to watch the exterior of this settlement for potential dangers.
But the fact that he’d been correct was less notable than the fact that, at this distance, he could see that the pair of armored pegasi were not, in fact, pegasi at all.
Instead, both stallions had wings that were composed of fleshy membranes rather than feathers, giving them a bat-like appearance. Contributing to that impression were the slight fangs that peaked past their lips, as well as the vertical slits of their pupils. Even their ears seemed a little larger than that of a normal pony’s, as well as being slightly tufted.
Equestria had long had rumors of ponies like them, but as far as Lex was aware they’d never been verified. They’d had names like “thestrals” or – less imaginatively – “bat ponies.” But on Everglow, and apparently here in Darkest Night as well, that particular tribe was real, and went by a different name:
Leather wings.
“That’s far enough!” yelled one of the guards; apparently they’d come close enough to be seen. Throwing his lance aside, the leather wing hoisted his crossbow and pointed it at them. “Don’t come any closer!”
“Identify yourself immediately!” shouted the second, having moved in perfect tandem with his partner. “If you do anything else, we’ll shoot!”
Coming to a halt, Lex didn’t bother responding to the threat, instead focusing on his circlet to let him see into the magical spectrum, fighting back the urge to grimace at what he saw. That the guards’ weapons and armor were enchanted wasn’t surprising – though given the relative weakness of the auras he could see clinging to their gear, the magic they’d been imbued with was of a fairly basic variety, likely doing little more than enhancing durability, improving balance and weight distribution, and other mild improvements – but that the wall behind them was magically strengthened was beyond what he’d expected.
In fact, judging from the patterns of the aura surrounding it, the mortared stonework wasn’t only reinforced, it was also enhanced in numerous other ways. There were several auras that he could only catch a glimpse of, their presence overshadowed by stronger spellwork. But the ones he could make out painted an impressive picture, having properties such as a friction-decreasing enchantment designed to make the exterior harder to climb, countermeasures against magical alterations to its structure, and even an etheric resonance designed to prevent incorporeal creatures from passing through it.
That last one made Lex snort, able to appreciate the irony of coming across that particular defense when he had insufficient dark magic to turn into a shadow anyway. But that interested him less than the fact that he’d just been considering how difficult it was to create a large-scale magical defense for an entire town.
And yet now, they’d come across exactly that.
Even considering that this was a goddess’s realm, whoever had constructed the wall around this town had to be a spellcaster of prodigious ability.
Which made it fortunate that Lex had decided that the three of them wouldn’t try to sneak or fight their way in.
“Servants of the Night Mare!” howled Solvei, stepping forward in a manner that made it clear she was unconcerned with the guards’ warnings. “Rejoice! Before you stands none other than our goddess’s greatest champion! One who has bent Severance of the Umbral Regalia to his will! Slayer of dragons, devils, and other creatures who dare to defy Our Dark Lady’s will! Bearer of the Charismata! I present to you His Highness, Prince Lex Legis!”
“Open the gates immediately!” demanded Akna, raising her voice as she moved up to stand across from Solvei, forcing herself to adopt a haughty posture. “Bring forth the ruler of this place so that they may give thanks that one so high in the Dark Tyrant of the Night’s esteem has come to grace their presence! Then make ready your gifts and offerings in recognition of His Highness’s glorious service to our goddess!”
Pausing just long enough to catch each other’s eyes, both lupines took a breath before bringing their introduction to a close.
“IN THE NIGHT MARE’S NAME,” they shouted in unison, “OUR PRINCE COMMANDS IT!”
The two guards simply stared, wide-eyed at the flamboyant introduction. Nor were they alone, as up on the wall several other leather wings in guard uniforms had come to see what the spectacle was, whispering and pointing as they looked on with expressions ranging from anxious to incredulous to suspicious.
Finally, one of the guards managed to regain his wits, lowering his crossbow as he licked his lips, giving Lex a half-hearted nod as his eyes flicked down to the barbed wire around his foreleg. “Just, um...just wait a moment. I mean, a moment if you please, er, sire. I’ll, uh, go send word to my commanding officer.”
He didn’t wait for a response before flapping his wings, flying up to the top of the wall, leaving his sputtering partner behind. Belatedly lowering his own weapon, the remaining guard shot a nervous smile their way, his grin faltering when the expression wasn’t returned. Gulping a little, he backed up until he was almost pressed against the portcullis, his gaze alternating between the trio awaiting entrance and the ground.
After a few moments, one of the leather wings took off from the group huddled on top of the wall, ducking low so as to fly beneath the wire spires. No sooner had they left than the first guard returned, his composure slightly recovered. “Our commander begs your indulgence as we, ah, alert the necessary individuals so that a proper welcome can be prepared.”
A quick telepathic command to Solvei made the winter wolf snarl. “Be quick about it! His Highness doesn’t like to be kept waiting!”
Flustered, the leather wing sputtered a series of apologies and assurances that things would quickly be put in order, but Lex didn’t bother listening, his thoughts again turning elsewhere.
While the Rite of Sublimation wasn’t something he was comfortable dwelling on – the horrible truths it had showed him, and his own subsequent breakdown, were still too painful to think back about – the circumstances of his failure were exceptionally clear to him now: going on a rampage of slaughter and destruction wasn’t something the Night Mare would countenance.
For all that she didn’t mind his killing ghouls and devils and even alien creatures like the sahuagin – the latter likely due to their already having their own alien gods or simply not meeting whatever esoteric criteria she looked for in potential worshipers – the Night Mare wasn’t a death goddess. Her religion didn’t require ritual killings nor endorse conversion under pain of being executed. Rather, she held that her ideals of power and control were the foundations of an ideal society, one which ultimately benefitted everyone. Threats to that paradigm could be dispatched, but only if they couldn’t be subdued or otherwise put to better use.
That the Shrine of the Starless Sky had maintained a prohibition against her worshipers – which had included a bewildering variety of creatures all under the Keeper’s control – killing each other should have made that painfully obvious.
But while Lex had lost sight of that during the Rite, he could at least recognize it now. If he’d failed the test for killing ponies who weren’t worshipers of the Night Mare, then slaying the ponies of Darkest Night – the incarnate souls of her worshipers, reborn in her realm after dying – would doubtlessly draw a much stronger rebuke from the goddess. Even if Lex could no longer find value in the moral code he’d spent so much time constructing, simple prudence therefore demanded that violence against the ponies here be avoided, or at least minimized, wherever possible.
To that end, it was better to enter this town legitimately, rather than trying to bypass or overpower its defenders. Which meant a diplomatic overture, something that he was almost guaranteed to bungle if he tried it on his own. Nor had Solvei or Akna been able to come up with any ideas in that regard, since neither were familiar with civilized societies in general or pony settlements in particular.
But while the idea for presenting himself at the gates in such an ostentatious manner had been Lex’s, it wasn’t one that he credited himself for.
Instead, having been reminded of his lost loves by the way Solvei and Akna had been bickering during the clothing debacle, he’d asked himself what Sonata and Aria would do.
Now all that was left was to wait and see if it had worked.
Solvei’s irritated growl almost earned a shrug from Akna, the adlet lifting her shoulders only to pause and then lower them gently, realizing at the last moment how much strain that would have put on her top. “It’s only been a few hundred heartbeats. They’re probably still trying to figure out whether or not everything we said is true, which might take a while if they’re using magic to verify-”
“Of course it’s true!” Giving Akna an incredulous look as Lex registered indignation coming from the winter wolf, Solvei huffed loudly. “The Night Mare is a goddess, and this is her territory! No one would be crazy enough to come here and lie about being her champion!”
“You can misrepresent the truth without ever telling a lie,” snorted Akna. “My tribe has no idea that I worship the Night Mare, or that I can transform into a winter wolf. That’s not because I lied to them about either of those things, but because I kept quiet and gave them no reason to think they were true in the first place.”
“That’s not the same!” contested Solvei hotly. “The things we said about Master-”
“Something’s happening,” cut in Lex, his eyes focused on the top of the wall, causing both lupines to quiet down as they looked upward.
Sure enough, there was a commotion breaking out among the guards who’d been positioned atop the defensive structure. Prior to now they’d remained fairly quiet, murmuring amongst themselves as they kept their crossbows at the ready, stopping short of pointing them at the trio. Now, however, they were chattering animatedly, and more than a few were turning around to peer back into the town.
“Looks like we’re about to find out if they believed us or not,” murmured Akna. “Someone’s coming, and they’re important enough that the guards are all taking notice.”
“I bet it’s whoever’s in charge here!” grinned Solvei, turning her head to give Lex an adoring look. “They’ve realized that you’re someone great, Master, and are coming to greet you personally!”
“Even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean that we’ll be welcomed,” replied Lex flatly, turning his eyes toward the gate. “Be ready in case their reception is a hostile one.”
Her grin fading into a troubled look, Solvei nodded as she focused her attention on the entryway, Akna doing the same.
The gate itself was no simple egress in the wall. Rather, it was a small keep built directly into the massive barrier, having a portcullis and a massive set of double doors built into the front and back end of it. To Lex, the tactical nature of the design was self-evident: by having two fortified entrances that needed to be passed through, the town’s defenders could not only delay an attacking force that much longer, but by allowing an invading force to pass the first entrance unchallenged and then slamming the portcullis down behind them, they’d be trapped. Judging from the vertical slits in the upper portion of the keep’s stonework, the guards would be able to pepper them with crossbow bolts – or spells – with relative impunity, inflicting severe damage while their enemy had little method of retaliating.
Between the wire spires, the spell-laced wall, the regular patrols of guards, and the strategic construction of the keep built around the entrance, it was clear that this locale was one that placed a premium on security. Which suggested to Lex that the ponies who lived here would likely be disinclined to trust an unknown group that had wandered in from the wilderness that this place was apparently designed to defend against.
And that was before taking into account the religious nature of this entire realm. The Keeper might have welcomed them to the Shrine of the Starless Sky, but Lex knew that at least part of their being allowed in was due to Akna’s vouching for them. Even then, the Keeper had made no compunctions about demanding restitution when Lex had challenged his authority by slaying Ganas. Which meant that even if whoever ruled here believed the claims he’d had Akna and Solvei make, they might very well perceive his unexpected arrival as a threat to their own standing.
Just beyond the outer portcullis, the two guards who’d initially challenged them snapped to attention as the bars rose. Further in, a second such grate was also lifting up, the massive double doors beyond it swinging wide to reveal...
A single pony.
Lex narrowed his eyes as the newcomer strolled forward. By all appearances the approaching pony was an earth stallion, but rather than the solid frame and broad hooves characteristic of most members of that tribe, this pony was lean and limber, being tall enough that his legs were almost gangly in appearance.
By itself that would have been unusual, but that wasn’t the end of the stallion’s odd appearance. His coat was a deep purple, and seemed almost to shun the lights overhead, as though the nearby shadows were reaching out to enfold him in their grasp whenever he moved near them. Stranger still were his eyes, his irises a shade of white that was only slightly darker than the surrounding sclera, making his pupils seem as though they sat alone in blank orbs.
His mane and tail were similarly pale, the vivid white matching the hue of Akna and Solvei’s fur, albeit without the latter’s blue highlights. More notable was the way his hair seemed to move of its own accord, making Lex think of Celestia and Luna. But a moment later he realized that, like with the newcomer’s eyes, his mane and tail weren’t what they seemed. Rather than continuously blowing in a nonexistent breeze, they were instead reacting to his movements...but with exaggerated slowness, as though they were caught underwater.
But the stallion’s looks concerned Lex less than his magic.
Using his circlet to look into the magical spectrum, it was easy to see that the pony approaching them now was absolutely covered in magical auras.
Several of them were bound to his outfit. The breastplate he was wearing was ensorcelled with a better version of the same enchantment as the guards’ armor, and Lex could also make out protective enchantments on the pale cloak that he wore and the bracelet that were akin to what he was wearing himself. There were also several freestanding auras clinging to him – suggesting that the stallion was either a spellcaster himself, or had one among his subordinates – though with the multiplicity of magic he exuded, it was harder to make those out. Several were defensive in nature, and Lex could barely glimpse what looked like a low-grade personal force field amid several spells designed to improve hardiness and durability.
All of them, however, paled compared to the aura surrounding the hammer that he carried across his back.
With a haft that was as long as Akna was tall, and its head being the size of an anvil, the weapon looked ridiculously oversized compared to its wielder. Its coloration was likewise in sharp contrast to the pony carrying it, the wrought-black iron that it was forged of standing out against the stallion’s pale appearance. Nevertheless, he seemed unencumbered by it, his steps light and easy as he strode past the outer portcullis.
As he stepped beyond the edge of the gate, both guards gave a crisp salute. “Captain White Wraith, sir!” they barked in unison.
They weren’t the only ones to speak, as Akna gave a choked gasp. “Breakdown!”
With the whisper-spell that he’d cast on her in the forest still being active, her exclamation went directly to Lex’s ears. “What?” he whispered back, even though he could guess what she was referring to.
She proved him right a moment later. “Breakdown!” Akna repeated, her eyes wide and her chest heaving, threatening to spill out of its flimsy container at any moment. “The hammer he’s carrying! It’s one of the Umbral Regalia!”
Solvei cocked an ear, but didn’t let Akna’s revelation disrupt her focus. “Is that a good thing?”
“We’re about to find out,” answered Lex quietly, seeing the stallion – White Wraith – come to a stop ahead of them, standing almost twenty feet distant.
For several moments no one said anything, both sides staring each other down.
White Wraith was the first one to break the silence.
“When they told me a high-ranking member of the Night Mare’s clergy had arrived at our doorstep,” he began abruptly, is voice deeper than his slight frame and wispy appearance would have suggested, “I have to admit I was surprised. Usually, when we have an important visitor, there’s quite a bit of advanced notice. Itineraries are discussed, security measures are cleared, meetings are planned. To show up without any sort of announcement is rare indeed. And then I was told about our visitor’s retinue.”
Turning his head, he made a show of looking over Solvei and Akna – his eyes lingering on the latter – before fixing his white eyes on Lex. “Usually, when we have a member of the priesthood show up, especially one who claims to be some sort of royalty, they make a big show out of their arrival. They have servants and soldiers and exotic creatures under their command, and if they haven’t simply used magic to transport everyone, they come in conveys of carriages and chariots with baggage trains that stretch behind them like a snake’s tail.”
He raised a hoof then, gesturing to the dark woods in the distance. “And they never, ever come crawling out of the wilderness, having their hounds bay for food and shelter, saying that they’re a prince despite looking like a pauper.”
“How dare you!” seethed Solvei, her hackles rising as she bared her teeth. It was only a telepathic command from Lex that kept her from lunging forward, and even then she couldn’t keep her tongue in check. “My Master is the Night Mare’s Chosen! He bears-”
“The Charismata,” answered White Wraith, his tone bemused. “Yes, my subordinates mentioned that, and I have to admit it caught my attention. You see, we had a visitor from Everglow a few months back; a fellow by the name of Grim Darklight. You ever heard of him?”
Akna and Solvei both cast uncertain looks at Lex then. But when his only answer was stony silence – not knowing who the pony in question was – White Wraith kept speaking.
“He’s the head of the Night Mare’s temple in a place called Viljatown, the capital city of Everglow’s Pony Empire, and also sits on that nation’s Holy Council, which advises the Empire’s ruler. So you can imagine that it was kind of a big deal for him to show up in a place like Eigengrau” – he canted his head back then, indicating the settlement behind him – “which is so close to the edge of Darkest Night.”
“The point being?” snapped Akna, her eyes still locked onto the hammer on White Wraith’s back.
Looking amused at the interruption, he paused long enough to give the adlet another lingering glance before returning his gaze to Lex. “The point being that Grim Darklight was quite the memorable figure, considering that he has the Charismata, rather than some stallion no one’s ever heard of called Licks Lickits.”
His curled lip and derisive chuckle were enough to make Solvei seethe, her limbs shaking as she struggled to restrain herself. “My master’s name is Lex Legis!” she hissed. “And if you can’t recognize that he’s the Night Mare’s champion, then I doubt she’ll care very much when I’ve ripped you to shreds for daring to insult him!”
“That’s enough, Solvei.”
“But Master-”
“I said that’s enough.”
Striding forward, Lex didn’t spare the winter wolf a glance as he moved past her, coming to within ten feet of White Wraith. Up on the wall, several of the guards readied their crossbows once more, but Lex gave them none of his attention either. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on the willowy stallion.
“You said your name was White Wraith,” he noted calmly, “and this place is called Eigengrau, is that correct?”
The pony nodded, mocking smile still in place. “Exactly right, Licks.”
Ignoring the insult, Lex didn’t break eye contact with the pale pony. “And based on what your subordinates said, you’re the captain of this town’s guards, yes?”
“Nice to see that you were paying attention. Anything else you’d like to know?”
“Just one thing.” Glancing at the weapon on White Wraith’s back for a moment, Lex allowed a thin smile of his own to cross his lips. “Given that you’re a mere captain in a place that is, by your own admission, far from the center of power in Darkest Night, it’s clear that you’re not important enough to have earned a weapon like Breakdown on your own merit. Which means that someone loaned it to you, likely because they knew that if you came out here to face us with nothing but your own power, you couldn't win.”
The smile dropped off of White Wraith’s face immediately.
“So my question,” continued Lex in an easy tone, “is this: what will happen to you, captain, when you manage to lose even with Breakdown?”
This time White Wraith was the one who answered with silence, and Lex let that continue for several seconds before speaking again. “Stand aside and let us enter this place, and I will permit you to keep your dignity. Persist in your interference, and you’ll lose that and more.”
Slowly, White Wraith reached back, taking Breakdown in hoof. He didn’t actually grasp the weapon, the hammer instead floating securely a half-inch from the side of his foreleg. It was only because he was still examining the stallion in the magical spectrum that Lex saw one of the spell auras around him flare slightly, identifying a spell designed to allow for a limited version of a unicorn’s telekinesis.
“I’m going to give you one chance, right now, to turn around and slink back into the forest with your tails between your legs,” answered the pale stallion, his voice light despite the jovial expression being gone from his features. “Because if you don’t...”
Then White Wraith, still using just one hoof, casually brought the hammer down to strike the ground.
The vibrations of the impact were heavy enough that Lex, Akna, and Solvei all needed to steady themselves, with even the two guards at the gate lurching as they tried to remain upright.
“...I’ll show you that I’m more than capable of handling a nut, a mutt, and a slut.”
Straightening up, Lex gave a mirthless chuckle. “Prepare for the end of your tenure, captain.”
Then he teleported Solvei – already in mid-leap thanks to his telepathic instructions – directly behind White Wraith.
Lex hadn’t wanted things to come down to a fight. Not when the Rite had made it clear that immediately using force in response to defiance was a futile measure. That the Night Mare would doubtlessly disapprove of his slaying her faithful only made that lesson more germane. There were other ways to exert power over others.
But right now, those other ways had failed.
His attempts to gain entrance into Eigengrau on the strength of his reputation and his accomplishments had been rebuffed. By itself, that wasn’t necessarily the limit of his options; bribery, as loathsome as Lex found the practice, could conceivably still have worked, for instance. But White Wraith had taken that option, and indeed all other options, off of the metaphorical table when he’d publicly insulted them in front of his troops.
From a rational standpoint, Lex knew that it made little sense to take umbrage at White Wraith’s blatant show of disrespect. While going through Eigengrau might have been the fastest and safest way to get to where his and Akna’s lifelines were pointing, it wasn’t the only option available to them. And of course, he still hadn’t made up his mind about retaking his body; he was pursuing that option now simply because Solvei had seemed intent on it, and his relief at her unexpected return had put him in a mood to indulge her. By that logic, he should have simply backed down from White Wraith’s unsubtle threats and looked for a way to circumvent the town.
And yet he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Although he knew that his dispassionate analysis of the situation was correct, and that in the face of so many losses – having been driven temporarily mad with grief over losing Solvei, then being shown that all of the pain and suffering he’d been through was for nothing, and subsequently losing his chance to grasp the power needed to save Thermal Draft and defeat his enemies – taking on an unnecessary risk bordered on madness, Lex had been surprised to find that after everything he’d been through, he still had enough pride to bristle at being looked down on.
No matter that it was a minor offense, bordering on being an inconvenience more than an actual transgression; for making his life that much harder, White Wraith would pay dearly.
Besides, putting that smug bastard in his place would feel incredibly good.
And with so little else to live for, feeling good was a surprisingly attractive prospect to Lex at that moment.
It took only a moment to feed Solvei telepathic instructions, ordering her to prepare to leap so that he could teleport her behind White Wraith in mid-jump.
A mirthless chuckle escaped Lex’s lips as he found himself genuinely looking forward to crushing the enemy in front of him. “Prepare for the end of your tenure, captain.”
Even as the words left his lips, Solvei leapt, and with a thought Lex teleported her behind the wispy stallion.
Or at least, that’s what should have happened.
Instead, White Wraith gave a sudden stomp with one of his back legs, and Lex registered an immediate sense of abeyance, as though he’d been moving at a tremendous speed only to come to an abrupt stop in complete defiance of inertia. But the unusual sensation mattered less than the fact that Solvei hadn’t appeared behind the stallion, and even if he hadn’t been able to sense her location, he could still hear her confused yelp as she awkwardly landed a short distance away, exactly where her leap would have carried her if he hadn’t tried to magically change her location.
Somehow, White Wraith had cancelled Solvei’s teleportation as it had happened.
Even as Lex registered that, however, the guard captain was already going on the attack. Breakdown rose into the air as the lanky stallion reared up on his hind legs, his free foreleg cutting a sharp pattern in the air as he chanted an arcane syllable in clipped tones. Immediately, Breakdown’s head was clad in crackling electricity, and even as Lex shifted his weight backwards in an attempt to avoid the incoming blow, White Wraith swung the hammer around in a wide arc, the weapon moving faster than anything its size had a right to.
It was only because the defensive magic items that he’d been wearing when he’d undergone the Rite were still on him now that Lex avoided the worst of the blow, managing to turn in place enough to brace himself before the hit landed. But that small victory meant little as the hammer struck him with the force of an oncoming train, lifting him off of his hooves and tossing him through the air as though he weighed nothing at all.
Dimly registering that he’d just taken severe damage, Lex fought to stay conscious as he hit the ground a second later, the electricity coursing through him causing his muscles to seize up and preventing him from rolling with the impact. It was only belatedly that he recognized, as he landed near where Solvei had just managed to regain her balance, that he couldn’t feel his left foreleg...and when he glanced at it a second later, it was easy to see why.
The limb, which had taken the brunt of the blow, had been completely pulped by the hit. Shards of bone were protruding from it in nearly a half-dozen places, and it was bent at the wrong angle. If it hadn’t been held together by the barbed wire that the Night Mare had given him, it was easy to imagine that his leg would have been completely pulverized, and it took Lex a moment to realize that he’d used the last of his dark magic to dull his tactile nerves, muting what would otherwise have been crippling waves of agony from what had just happened.
“MASTER!” Solvei’s cry was drowned out by the cheer going up from the guards along the wall, the armored ponies hooting and stomping their hooves as their captain landed the first blow. Sparing them the briefest glare, Solvei interposed herself between Lex and White Wraith, growing in size even as her eyes flared green and purple, black crystal armor materializing over her body.
Master, let me take point! she begged telepathically, not taking her gaze off of the enemy in front of her, growling at the wispy pony in anger. I’ll keep him busy while you treat your injury!
But White Wraith was already moving in before Lex could answer her, darting forward as he brought Breakdown around in another wide swing.
Solvei rushed forward to meet him. From his vantage point, Lex could see White Wraith’s eyes widen slightly at how rapidly the winter wolf closed the distance between them, realizing he wasn’t going to be able to avoid her jaws. Instead, he aborted his swing midway through, pressing Breakdown’s head against the ground and using the weapon as a fulcrum – despite holding onto the weapon with a single hoof, which was still only near the haft of the hammer rather than actually touching it – to divert his headlong rush ever so slightly.
The result was that, rather than closing her jaws around his throat, Solvei’s teeth only managed to scrape along his breastplate, a metallic screech filling the air as her teeth left deep scratches in the armor, but not penetrating deep enough to cause a wound.
Solvei spun in place, determined to follow up on her failed attack, but White Wraith was faster. Planting his hooves solidly in the dirt, he brought Breakdown around in a backhoof swing. Even as he picked himself up, Lex could see that the strike was an awkward one, not delivered with the stallion’s full weight behind it.
But when the hammer struck Solvei a moment later, it hit with devastating force.
Connecting just beneath her ribs, Breakdown’s impact shattered the black crystal armor surrounding Solvei, the material – many times stronger than steel – turning into shards as the winter wolf was sent skidding through the dirt. But despite the pained cry that escaped Solvei’s lips, she kept her paws under her, and when she came to a stop inhaled sharply, blue light emanating from her mouth as she opened her maw and roared, unleashing a torrent of supernatural cold at White Wraith.
The stallion did his best to dodge the massive beam of magical frigidity that rocketed toward him then, but Solvei’s attack was too fast for him to completely avoid. Instead, he crouched into a huddle as the extreme algidity washed over him, and for a moment he was lost to sight as the azure radiance enveloped him, causing the guards on the wall to fall silent in shocked worry.
A moment later, though, their voices rose in another rousing cry.
“Did you really think,” scoffed White Wraith as he stood up, contemptuously brushing a thin layer of ice from his side, revealing that he’d taken only mild frostbite from Solvei’s attack rather than any serious wounds, “that I wouldn’t ward myself against the cold when a winter wolf and an adlet show up right outside the gates?”
“Did you really think,” echoed Akna a second later, causing White Wraith to look at the adlet, who hadn’t moved since the fighting had started, “that your little ward would save you?”
White Wraith frowned, but didn’t have a chance to figure out what she meant before a sudden chill emanated from right behind him. Turning in place, he had just enough time to catch a glimpse of the ice elemental that Akna had summoned – nearly twenty feet tall and humanoid in shape – before it brought first one, then another fist down on his head.
The impacts would have immediately reduced any normal pony to a smear on the ground.
White Wraith was knocked onto his knees, grunting in irritation as much as in pain.
Nor did he even seem to notice a moment later when Akna – closing her eyes as she raised one hand to the dark sky, a look of concentration on her face – hit him with a hailstorm a moment later. Even as Lex watched, a trio of ice chunks the size of apples struck White Wraith directly in the face, doing nothing except making him blink as he rose up and turned to face the animate hunk of ice looming over him.
But that was enough to give Lex an idea.
“Akna,” he whispered, letting the spell he’d cast back in the forest carry his words to her ears. “Create an area of more diffuse precipitation!”
“Huh?”
“Fog or sleet,” growled Lex irritably. “Anything that will make it hard for him to see!”
“But we won’t be able to see him either!”
“Just do it!”
Lex didn’t wait for her to reply before casting his next spell. This was going to take some time to set up, and he needed to get started immediately.
He hadn’t been idle during the rapid exchange of attacks between Solvei and White Wraith. Rather, he’d used the reprieve to cast his endurance-augmenting spell – the one he’d invented what felt like a lifetime ago now, back in the warehouse in Vanhoover – on himself. Despite his physical body being back in the Shrine of the Starless Sky, his incarnation here was a close enough likeness that the spell worked as intended, giving Lex a rush of vigor despite his mangled leg.
But that wasn’t the main reason Lex had elected to cast that particular bit of magic.
He’d already expended all of his fortitude back before he’d undergone the Rite, and while his spiritual self didn’t feel the pains he’d inflicted on his body prior to his arriving in Darkest Night, that hadn’t actually restored any of his stamina. Which meant that he couldn’t force additional magical energy through his body – or his current facsimile thereof – in order to augment his magic.
Except now, with this spell increasing his physical resilience, he could pull off that feat again. Not very much – in his estimation he had two further uses of that particular technique at most – and utilizing that would leave him even further depleted when it wore off...quite possibly enough to put his body in serious jeopardy if and when he returned to it. But for right now, it was a boost that would see his current plan through.
Fortunately, he had magic to spare in that regard.
The Rite of Sublimation had been an ordeal beyond anything Lex had imagined, but there had been one way in which it hadn’t been as punishing as he’d expected. The nature of the Rite’s illusion had extended not only to what he’d seen and heard, but also to what he’d done. The altogether minor wounds he’d taken during his fight with the alicorns and their guards hadn’t translated to his current state here in Darkest Night, nor had he felt winded in the slightest despite his exertion.
And all of the spells he’d expended during the battle were still in his mental catalogue as well.
Which meant that he had everything he needed in order to take White Wraith down.
Not hesitating, Solvei lowered her jaws as she breathed out again, calling upon the ice magic she’d received as a result of bonding with her master. Knowing without being told that he’d meant for her to create a slippery patch of ice beneath White Wraith’s hooves, she had the satisfaction of watching the gangly stallion snarl as he struggled to keep his legs under him, no longer able to move so easily.
The ice elemental that Akna had summoned, however, had no such problems. It was with grim satisfaction that Solvei watched as the frozen giant lifted a leg and brought it down in a heavy stomp. White Wraith managed to scramble out of the way of the blow, but wasn’t able to completely keep his balance in doing so, swearing under his breath as he fell to his knees.
But just as Solvei allowed herself a smile from seeing their enemy put on the defensive, White Wraith swung Breakdown again.
The hammer arced upward in a tight swing, coming down to strike the ground hard.
The last time he’d done that, when the guard captain had been posturing in an attempt to frighten them off, the impact had been heavy enough that Solvei had needed to actively keep her balance despite being twenty feet distant from the stallion. This time, the blow was much stronger, hitting the ground with such intensity that the ice that Solvei had laid down immediately shattered, reduced to particles in an instant.
But Solvei had no time to marvel at the destructive power of the pony’s hammer, grimacing as she hit the ground, thrown off her paws by how much the earth beneath her was shuddering from Breakdown’s strike. Nor was she the only one, as Akna’s ice elemental wobbled and then collapsed.
The giant immediately moved to right itself, rising up without hesitation. But that was enough of an opening for White Wraith, bringing Breakdown around to impact the icy behemoth directly in the chest.
If Akna’s ice elemental had been a creature of flesh and blood, the strike would have been immediately fatal, collapsing its entire torso inward. As it was, the goliath didn’t seem to notice that its entire midsection had just been crushed, raising its fists as it stood up again, White Wraith already bringing Breakdown back into a ready position.
That was when Akna muttered something in her own language, and a snowstorm enveloped her elemental and White Wraith both.
Solvei had just enough time to feel confused – with both combatants completely obscured from sight by the sudden blizzard, it would be that much more difficult to target White Wraith – before she felt a sudden rush of emotion from her master. The sudden sense of exultation that came from him then lasted only for a moment, but given that she could see him casting a spell, it was clear to her that he had some plan which involved keeping White Wraith out of sight.
A second later, Lex finished casting his spell...and nothing happened.
Solvei’s earlier confusion returned in an instant; she’d been certain that her master had been about to unleash some sort of unstoppable spell that would immediately lay the hammer-wielding pony out. She had seen him do just that during that horrible vision, when he’d struck down those winged unicorns one after another. But now there was no visible effect-
Solvei, I need you to distract White Wraith. Reinforce your armor and move in. You should be able to take a few hits before you’re in serious jeopardy.
Unable to help herself, Solvei felt her tail start to wag. Yes, Master!
Normally, the prospect of fighting such a dangerous enemy – one who could shatter a large chunk of her armor in a single blow – would have filled her with grim determination. Now, however, she found her heart soaring. That he was confident in her ability to stand against someone so powerful, trusting in her ability to protect not only herself but also him and his plans, made a powerful sense of affirmation well up in her.
I promise, I won’t let him near you again! she vowed over their telepathic link, her eyes glowing as she focused on repairing her armor; it would take only a moment for the black crystals to regrow, filling in the breach that Breakdown’s last strike had caused. Even then, she was already padding forward; she couldn’t see exactly where White Wraith was in the driving gale, but she’d hunted in snowstorms plenty of times in her youth. If she could get close enough to catch his scent-
“TARGET THE STALLION,” thundered White Wraith’s voice from inside the driving sleet, followed by a crunch that could only be the sound of his hammer impacting the ice elemental again, “AND FIRE AT WILL!”
For the briefest instant, Solvei wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Then the sound of crossbows being readied made her eyes widen as she looked up at the wall, where the guards were pointing their weapons toward Lex.
MASTER! NO! Her eyes changing back to normal as she abandoned all thoughts of repairing her armor, Solvei instead concentrated on her ice magic with everything she had.
The value of being creative with what her ice magic could do was a lesson that Solvei had learned in the minutes before her death, when she’d created a ramp of ice underneath Grisela in order to dump the winter hag into the tangle of burning vines that Sissel had created. The inspiration for that had come from the wall of ice that Grisela had created to save herself from being blown into the poison fog that had been the byproduct of the magical duel between Lex and Sissel. This time, though, Solvei didn’t bother trying to come up with a variation on a theme, instead copying the winter hag directly.
The wall of ice that she conjured rose up in front of the guards lining the wall just as they opened fire, a chorus of surprised cries accompanying the sounds bolts harmlessly impacting the barrier.
The relieved gasp that burst forth from Solvei’s lungs then almost made her collapse, but the feeling lasted only a moment: although the wall was tall enough – barely – to block the guards on the wall from targeting Lex, it was only a few dozen feet wide. It wouldn’t take them very long to move past its edges and target him again.
Master, I stopped those guards’ first volley, but I won’t be able to do that again! relayed Solvei telepathically, unable to hide her nervousness. Creating that much ice at once had required her to dip into the reservoir of power she’d gained along with her ice magic. While she could produce relatively mild uses of supernatural cold without limit, her ability to enhance them was sharply limited, being able to do so only a few times a day. Prior to this, she’d used most of her reserves charging up her breath weapon against White Wraith – having almost nothing to show for it, since he’d shrugged off most of the damage – and now she had nothing left to create another wall.
Across from her, Lex was already casting another spell. It’s fine, Solvei. Stick to the plan, and this should be over before they can reload, reposition themselves, and fire again.
R-right. Turning her thoughts back toward the gap in her armor, Solvei focused on repairing-
Another heavy crunch came from within the snowstorm then, and a moment later White Wraith surged out from the edge of it, coming to a stop beyond the boundary of the localized blizzard. Glancing back over his shoulder, his lip curled as he took in the sight of the ice wall blocking the entrance to Eigengrau, the guards on the wall scrambling to move past its edges. “Useless, every single one of them,” he spat.
Then he turned and charged directly toward Lex.
A rush of panic surged through Solvei then. The course of the fighting had placed her and Lex on opposite sides of where White Wraith had been battling Akna’s elemental. The result was that his rush toward the unicorn was taking him directly away from her...and with how fast he was moving, the short distance to his target, and how far back Solvei was, she knew she’d never be able to catch him before he got to Lex.
And if what had happened before was any indication, White Wraith wouldn’t let her master teleport her to his side.
“Akna!” screeched Solvei as she ran for all she was worth, despite knowing it was futile. “Use it now!”
The adlet didn’t need to be told twice.
For all that Akna had fretted and complained about her attire, there had been one article of clothing she hadn’t had any trouble with. It wasn’t even really clothing, being more of an accessory than anything else, and while the adlet had been nervous about wearing it, she’d nevertheless obeyed when Lex had told her to put it on. “Anyone who looks at you and Solvei will expect you to fight with cold magic,” he’d explained. “They won’t anticipate you using fire.”
And as Akna pulled a bead off of Bolverk’s necklace – the one where each of the decorations was a fireball waiting to be thrown – and threw it, Solvei fervently hoped that Lex had been right.
An instant later, her faith in her master was proven correct as a conflagration exploded around White Wraith, the stallion screaming in pain as the flames scorched his body.
But he didn’t stop his headlong rush toward Lex.
Nor did Lex stop casting his spell.
Her heart pounding in her chest, Akna watched as the distance between the two ponies shrunk. White Wraith was barely fifteen feet from Lex now, bringing Breakdown up in preparation for a swing, and this time Lex couldn’t set himself to receive the blow, being too busy making the proper gestures for whatever it was he was casting. Ten feet now, the hammer raising higher. Five feet.
Lex stopped chanting, rearing up as he reached out with his undamaged foreleg...
And White Wraith dodged to the side, abandoning his charge in favor of avoiding Lex.
Inwardly, Solvei cheered. She didn’t know what her master had just cast, but it had been enough to scare the other stallion off! Even better, his stopping his sprint meant that he was open! Solvei darted forward, intent on pouncing at distracted guard captain-
This time Breakdown caught her right in her unprotected ribs.
He...knew I was chasing him... realized Solvei dimly, the thought struggling to make itself known through the white-hot agony as the world spun around her. He aimed...at the break...in my armor...
Then she couldn’t even keep that thought in her head as she struck the ground, momentarily blacking out from just how badly it hurt. When she came to a second later, managing to suck in a wet breath of air, White Wraith was speaking, and as she somehow managed to turn her head, she saw that he was standing just outside of Breakdown’s range, his eyes focused on Lex as he talked, his voice as casual despite the readiness in his stance.
“-admit I didn’t expect that,” announced the wispy stallion, sparing Solvei a quick glance before looking back at the unicorn. “Equipping an intrinsically-cold creature with fire magic, that was smart. Tell me, did you have them use all those ice-based spells in order to get me to lower my guard?”
“It was more to test your capabilities than anything else,” answered Lex flatly, still having reared up on his back legs, his right hoof held at the ready. “A fight, like any other form of confrontation, is won by whoever can better control information. Hence it was necessary to acquire tactical data on you.”
White Wraith clucked his tongue. “Information is only as good as your ability to act on it. Knowing what’s going on won’t help you if you don’t have the resources to do anything about it. And between the two of us, it’s easy to see who’s more resource-poor.”
Master... Each breath was painful, and every movement sent a new wave of pain through her, but Solvei couldn’t bring herself to do nothing, even if all she was good for now was sending her master a warning. He’s trying to stall for time. Right now, the guards are aiming their weapons-
I know, Solvei. Just focus on restoring your armor. White Wraith isn’t likely to attack you while I’m still a threat to him, and it’s unlikely that the guards will be able to shoot through the black crystals. I’ll heal you once this fool is defeated.
“In fact, you’ve actually had one of your assets turned into a liability,” continued White Wraith casually, canting his head toward the downed winter wolf. “Given my proximity to her, not to mention you, I doubt your adlet can throw another one of those fireballs without inflicting some literal friendly fire. Whereas the ponies under my command...”
He glanced back at the wall then, smirking as he raised his voice. “TAKE AIM AND PREPARE TO FIRE ON MY ORDER!”
The sound of bolts being drawn into place made him smirk as he returned his gaze to Lex. “...are all trained to place their shots quite precisely.”
Lex’s lip curled, his derision obvious. “So you’ll allow your underlings to do what you couldn’t?”
“Oh please,” snorted White Wraith, laying Breakdown over his shoulder in a relaxed position. “The entire point of having subordinates is so they can do things on behalf of their leader. And you have no right to say otherwise, since you hung back and let your wolves do most of the fighting. The only attack spell you’ve even bothered to cast is that one you’re holding on the end of your hoof right now.”
“That’s because it’s the only one I’ll need in order to defeat you.”
“I’d say ‘in your dreams,’ but that’s a bit of a faux pas around here,” chuckled White Wraith. “I’ll admit that spell is an impressive one. From what I saw of your casting, it transfers your wounds to an enemy’s body, healing you and harming them, right? That’s an excellent tactic, but I also saw that you need to touch your opponent in order to activate it.”
“Just so,” admitted Lex. “Which is what’s going to happen in the next few seconds.”
Smirking, White Wraith gave Breakdown a casual spin as he shook his head. “I don’t think so, now that I know what’s going on. You were planning on taking a hit in exchange for activating that spell, right? That’s why you didn’t move out of the way when I was coming at you. But you didn’t hide your spell well enough, and now I’m not going to give you the chance to use it.”
“I don’t need you to give me a chance,” replied Lex, taking a single step toward White Wraith, foreleg held at the ready. “I’ll make my own.”
The gangly stallion scoffed. “You know, even if you have some plan to pull that off, a single mangled leg isn’t going to be enough to take me down anyway. So, in recognition of your determination, how about I help you out there?” He didn’t wait for an answer before raising his voice again. “SINGLE SHOT, LEFT KNEE!”
The words had barely left his lips when a loud snap came from the wall, and an instant later a crossbow bolt went through Lex’s kneecap, causing him to collapse with a snarl of pain.
“Hm, that doesn’t seem like enough either, does it?” mused White Wraith, not moving from his current position. “Let’s add another. SINGLE SHOT, LEFT SHOULDER!”
Another snap from the wall, and Lex – who was just starting to pick himself up – bit back another scream as a crossbow bolt suddenly sprouted from the shoulder of his mauled foreleg.
“What do you think?” continued White Wraith, his tone easygoing. “A few more? Or should we-” Stopping abruptly, he turned at where Akna had been creeping toward them, her hand close to her necklace. “That’s close enough, whore. One more step and I’ll have my guards turn you into a pincushion.”
From her vantage point, Solvei could only whimper as she watched the situation unfurl, her heart breaking as she was once again rendered powerless to help Lex. Master, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!
Don’t be, answered Lex, and to her surprise there was a dark chuckle in his mental voice. It’s time to end this farce.
Even as he said that, Solvei caught sight of something rising up out of the ground directly behind White Wraith. Blinking, she could make out the ghostly image of what looked like a disembodied hoof, and even as she watched it floated closer toward White Wraith’s back leg, reaching out-
Spinning in place, spitting out a rapid string of syllables and motioning quickly with his free hoof as he whirled around, White Wraith brought Breakdown onto the spectral hoof, and Akna witnessed it shatter into tiny motes of light that flickered out a moment later.
At the same instance, Lex gave a sharp intake of breath, his eyes widening as a horrified expression crossed his face.
White Wraith burst out laughing. “Did you really think I didn’t see that coming?” he chortled, giving Lex a triumphant grin. “Did you actually believe for a second that I didn’t know you’d cast that spell?”
When Lex didn’t answer, he took a step forward, apparently no longer concerned with being in Lex’s reach. “I’ve learned how to use swords and spells in equal measure, so I’m not worried about casting something that I need to get up close to use,” he explained, his voice patronizing. “But most spellcasters only focus on their magic, eschewing martial pursuits. A spell that requires them to get within range of being stabbed, or skewered, or bludgeoned is anathema to them. Hence why the spectral hoof spell is so popular, since it can deliver touch-range spells remotely.”
Crouching down, he gave Lex a mocking grin. “And since you were content to hang back the entire fight, letting your servants get in close, it was easy to figure out that you were exactly that kind of wizard. So I have to ask, what exactly made you think I wouldn’t be on the lookout for something like that?”
He waited a minute, but when Lex made no reply except to glare at him hatefully, he shrugged. “Now, if I had to guess, I’d say that you put that one into play when you had your two-legged tramp conjure that blizzard. The sleet blocked out sight, and since it was magical you were probably hoping I couldn’t sense you casting that, right?”
Again he waited for an answer, and this time when he received none, he stood back up. “I’ll confess that it almost worked, since I knew you’d used that opportunity to cast something – why else have your slut use a spell that hid me from view? – but I wasn’t sure what. Like I said though, I’ve seen spellcasters like you before, ‘Your Highness,’ and when I saw what sort of spell you were casting when I charged you, it was easy enough to put two and two together.”
Up on the wall, the guards were cheering again, and White Wraith took a moment to nod at them in acknowledgment, ignoring that he'd been disparaging them a few moments prior as he continued speaking. “Oh, and in case you’re wondering why you can’t still use that spell of yours, since it should have gone back to you once I destroyed the spectral hoof you were projecting it through, that’s because of the spell I cast when I did. A little-known design that lets me siphon an active spell and take it for my own. Which means that the next hit I get on you...well, just be grateful your wolves couldn’t hurt me that badly, since you'll be feeling the few injuries they were able to inflict on me.”
Tilting his head to the side as though working out a crick, White Wraith moved so that he was standing perpendicular to him, facing the wall as he stood over the downed stallion and lifted Breakdown. “And now that you understand exactly how completely I’ve beaten you, I think it’s time we bring this to a close, don’t you?”
This time, Lex did answer. “I’ll give you one more chance,” he hissed through clenched teeth, his features tight with pain. “Surrender now, and I’ll spare you.”
To Solvei’s surprise, the other stallion actually paused. “You know, I was going to pulp your head and end it quick. But while a leader who refuses to surrender is showing their faith in the Night Mare, so is a leader who makes an example out of those who defy their betters.” Slowly, he lifted Breakdown above his head. “In other words, you brought this on yourself.”
NO! screamed Solvei, making one last, desperate attempt to get up...only to collapse in place a moment later, too hurt to move.
As White Wraith brought his hammer down for the decisive blow, Lex’s horn lit up, telekinetically reaching into his saddlebag-
Sonata. Aria. Thank you for this.
-and whipped out a mask, one made of pale wood carved in the shape of a skull, throwing it directly at White Wraith’s face.
The guard captain’s eyes shot wide open, and Lex couldn’t help but smile as the purple pony abandoned his attack, instead focusing completely on defense. Lex hadn’t been initially certain if White Wraith had any sort of ability to detect magical auras, but the wispy stallion had admitted as much just now during his gloating. “You were probably hoping I couldn’t sense you casting that, right?” he’d said, referring to the spectral hoof spell Lex had made use of. “I’ll confess that almost worked.”
White Wraith’s detecting and destroying his spectral hoof spell had been a setback.
His having stolen the wound-transference spell that Lex had planned on using against the overconfident captain had been a disaster.
But with that single inadvertent confession, the hubristic fool had given Lex everything he needed to create another avenue to victory.
I told you before...
The corners of Lex’s lips curled upward as White Wraith yanked Breakdown out of its aborted swing. Instead, he brought the hammer up – checking its momentum so quickly that he almost went stumbling – and barely managed to interpose the haft of the weapon between himself and the mask with barely an inch to spare, the wooden teeth of the skull impacting right where his hoof would have been if the gangly pony had been physically holding it. Instead, it careened off of the dark metal of the hammer’s hilt, coming to rest a few feet away on the ground, causing White Wraith to let out a gasp of relief.
That was no surprise, of course, since he’d doubtlessly picked up on the powerful aura of necromancy the wooden skull exuded. Even so, Lex couldn’t help but laugh inwardly, already halfway through casting another spell, White Wraith’s desperate defense having bought him the time he needed.
The winner is the one who’s better at controlling information!
It was a truism that White Wraith had derided, which made it particularly satisfying that it was the cause of his downfall now.
After all, if he’d had the chance to examine the mask in detail, he would have realized that there was nothing for him to fear, for one simple reason:
The aura of necromancy that it radiated, indicating its lethal nature, was completely fake.
And it was all because of Sonata and Aria.
When the Sirens sisters had interrupted his ritual, back in Las Pegasus, to try and protect himself against whoever it was that had been scrying on him, Lex had been furious with the two of them. Their stupidity had caused the ritual to backlash, blinding his mystic senses and leaving him unable to detect magical energies. And while he’d eventually gotten over his anger – and resumed their schedule of activities in the tourist city – he’d still searched for a way to cure his condition.
On that front, he hadn’t succeeded. His political commitments in Las Pegasus, stoking the egos and conspicuously partaking in the businesses of the ponies whom he’d convinced to bankroll his nascent government, had taken up too much of his time. But he’d managed to get in snatches of research here and there. An hour before Sonata and Aria woke up in the morning, forty-five minutes while Coat Tail searched for proper outfits for them, a half-hour between shows that Tranquila had booked them to go see; any free time that Lex could make use of, he’d conducted what research he could on reversing what had happened to him.
That he hadn’t been able to do so wasn’t surprising. With such insufficient time and few material resources to devote to his research – not to mention his magical blindness itself only making things more difficult – failure had been inevitable.
But that didn’t mean Lex had nothing to show for all of his work.
The spell that he’d invented then had been nothing more than a byproduct of his research. Trying to restore his ability to see magical auras had practically necessitated coming up with a spell that artificially generated them, albeit only on paper since he hadn’t been able to put it through any practical testing. Still, a bit of magic that simple hadn’t really required any practical trials; it was a spell whose entire purpose was to look like a spell to magical examination. The only thing notable about it was that it could look like almost any sort of aura, from a protective abjuration to a mind-warping enchantment.
As far as illusions went, it wasn’t much of one, since an experienced practitioner of magic would be able to spot the flaws in the false aura without much effort. Still, Lex had put it aside with the thought that it might be a useful teaching tool for Fruit Crunch and the Night Mare’s Knights after he’d returned to Vanhoover. By the time news of Feather Duster’s kidnapping had come in, he’d already put it out of his mind completely.
That had changed after his encounter with Prevarius.
When he’d tried to use the mask against the devil – back when it had still been a weapon of considerable deadliness – the phistophilus had overcome the attack, blithely noting how it had been easy to anticipate. “That sort of surprise doesn’t really work when your enemy can see magic,” he’d taunted. “Safeguarding their functionality is an important aspect of magic item creation. Anti-tampering protocols, unauthorized usage restrictions, and obscurement enchantments so that casual detection abilities won’t reveal all of their powers. If that little mask of yours had possessed that last one, it might have actually taken me by surprise just now.”
Though delivered in mockery and condescension, the devil’s advice hadn’t been wrong. That had been why, when the equinox had come about a few days later, Lex had taken the time to prepare the false-aura spell that he’d created. Used to lay a false aura on something, the potential to misdirect an enemy in a fight was something he had easily foreseen the usefulness of.
But it hadn’t been until after Shadow Star had broken his mask that Lex had gotten the chance to put that idea into practice.
That he’d had the opportunity to do so at all was thanks to Solvei. The loyal winter wolf, wracked with guilt over not having been there when the secret weakness of his arcane spellcasting was revealed or for Paska’s sudden assault, had gathered up the broken halves of the mask in secret, stuffing them in his extradimensional saddlebag while Fail Forward had been fretting over the Woodheart’s abduction. It had only been days later, when he’d come out of his malaise after encountering Akna, Yotimo, and the other adlets that she’d told him what she’d done.
Repairing the mask’s physical structure had been easy enough. While the Night Mare had never given him much in the way of actual divine spells, one of them was designed to repair damaged and broken objects. He’d used it to fix the cracked hull in C. Shell’s ship so that she’d been able to take him from Tall Tale to Vanhoover. He’d used it to fix Nosey’s glasses after saving her from Xiriel. And he’d used it that evening to repair the mask in secret.
But while the wooden skull’s physical structure had been easy to reconstitute, its magic had been beyond his ability to restore. Nevertheless, Lex had seen fit to use his false-aura spell to enchant it so that it appeared as though its power was intact. He’d had no idea of Yotimo or any of the other adlets had the ability to see magic – Akna was their only shaman, but it hadn’t escaped his notice that several members of the war party had been carrying magic weapons – but given how they all knew that he’d used the mask to slay one of their number before, the idea of presenting it as a threat to them in case negotiations fell apart had been a viable idea.
Even so, he’d decided to keep it hidden. At the time, they’d had a tentative truce, with Akna agreeing to lead him to the Shrine of the Starless Sky; putting it on would have antagonized them for no discernable gain and the last thing Lex had wanted was to delay getting to the Shrine and performing the Rite of Sublimation.
But as bitter as that thought was now, the mask had nevertheless retained the false aura he’d put on it, waiting to be used. He’d ignored it during the subsequent fight against Sissel and her twisted siblings, as it would have been of little use; that had been an altercation where power, rather than misdirection, had been called for. As such, just like everything else he’d carried, it had been sent with him when his spiritual incarnation had manifested here in Darkest Night.
And now, declared Lex in triumphant anticipation of victory, it’s the reason you’ve lost!
Preparing a second instance of his wound-transference spell had been another result of his battle with Prevarius. While he found the parasitic nature of that particular bit of magic highly distasteful – or at least, he had before; as with so many other things, he found himself unable to care about that after what had happened during the Rite’s test – he’d been highly cognizant of how the devil had come close to killing him with its fireball. Still very uncomfortable with the bond he had with Solvei, Lex had wanted to have another method of magical healing available, rather than simply imbuing her with that power or using the weak recovery spells the Night Mare had given him.
To that end, he’d put his aversion for that spell aside, knowing that he was responsible for bringing Thermal Draft home safely. Preparing it during the equinox had been a personal admission to see that done. Doing so a second time had simply been an insurance policy to that effect; Everglow was a world of numerous dangers, as Prevarius had so aptly demonstrated, and Lex had wanted as many backups and contingencies as possible.
Letting out a sharp breath as he poured as much extra power as he could into the spell – his magically-augmented stamina was near-totally depleted now, since he’d done this to the first casting of his wound-transference spell also, only for White Wraith to steal it – Lex saw the white eyes of his enemy turn to him then, the guard captain’s lips pulling back in a grimace as he recognized the same spell he’d just stolen.
Lex saw him scramble to recover his posture then, trying to put some distance between himself and the unicorn he’d thought defeated only moments ago. But it was in vain; even as Lex performed the last necessary gesture with his undamaged hoof, the final syllable passing his lips at the same moment, he felt the spell fall into place. And having sacrificed almost all of his equilibrium in trying to avoid the mask, White Wraith had no chance of avoiding what was about to happen.
“You don’t seem like much of an earth stallion, captain,” snarled Lex as he brought his hoof forward, reaching toward a splayed foreleg that White Wraith wasn’t going to be able to retract in time. “Do you think you’ll be able to keep fighting when you have all of my injuries in addition to your-”
Lex couldn’t finish as his foreleg passed right through White Wraith’s body.
For a second he could only gape, and that was all the time the guard captain – his body now transparent, save only for Breakdown – needed to get his hooves under him, stumbling backward.
He’d barely taken three steps before he became solid again, letting out a slow breath as the grimace he’d been bearing turned into a malicious grin. “So you thought I was an earth stallion, huh? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Even most other ponies don’t know about the ghost tribe.”
Off to the side, Solvei gave another wheezing cough. “G-ghost...?”
Sparing a glance at the downed winter wolf, White Wraith snorted before turning back to Lex. “I really thought you’d have figured it out when I stopped your fleabag from teleporting before. That wasn’t a spell; it’s just that we have a knack for manipulating density, dimensionality, that sort of thing. I never bothered learning more than a few of those tricks, since I was more interested in conquering my enemies than hiding from them the way most of my people do, but I’ll admit they come in handy from time to time.”
Holding Breakdown directly ahead of himself, White Wraith’s eyes narrowed. “And between the two of us, I don’t think I’m the one who needs to worry about fighting with more injuries.”
Then he swung the hammer down again.
And this time, there was nothing Lex could do to stop him.
The impact made him arch his back, eyes wide as what felt like a fountain of blood erupted from his mouth, and he distantly heard a scream that might have been Solvei’s. Curiously, however, there wasn’t any pain. For a moment, Lex wondered if his dark magic was still deadening his tactile nerves, but it belatedly occurred to him that couldn’t be right; the last of it had been used for his mangled foreleg. He should have felt any new injuries fully, so why...?
“There we go!” laughed White Wraith, raising Breakdown as he looked himself over. “I have to say, that’s really a useful spell! I may need to keep you alive long enough to torture it out of you!”
It took Lex a moment to figure out what the so-called ghost pony meant, and it was only when he glanced at him – seeing that guard captain’s injuries, the bruises, burns, frostbite that had marred his midsection and hindquarters, were gone – that Lex remembered the wound-transference spell the stallion had stolen. But it was with a sudden sense of dread that Lex realized he couldn’t feel those either.
In fact, he couldn’t feel anything below his ribs at all.
Nor did his back legs or tail respond when he tried to move them a moment later.
Suddenly it was all too clear why he wasn’t in any pain.
Grinning wider as he saw that Lex’s realization of exactly what had happened, White Wraith chuckled. “Aw, what’s wrong? Has all the fight gone out of you just because I made you a cripple?” Clucking his tongue, he took a step closer to Lex, bending down to look him in the eye. “You said I wouldn’t be spared if I didn’t surrender, right? So go ahead: finish me off.”
The blood filling his mouth kept Lex from replying. But it didn’t stop him from lashing out with his one undamaged foreleg, trying to make contact with the ghost pony. The second instance of his wound-transference spell was still active; if he could just make contact...!
But this time White Wraith was ready for him, easily leaning back out of reach as he raised his voice. “Oops, so close! Maybe you should try telekinesis instead? Or are you worried I’ll have a ghost tribe trick for that too?”
Up on the wall, a roar of laughter came from the assembled guards, and the knowledge that he was being made a spectacle of hurt Lex more than any of the wounds he’d been dealt. His eyes shining green and purple, he spat out another mouthful of blood as he dug his hoof into the dirt, hauling himself forward.
White Wraith stepped back by an equal amount. “That’s right, crawl!” he chortled. “Crawl like the worm you are!”
In his mind, Lex could hear Solvei’s whimpering apologies, and he was aware of more laughter coming from the top of the wall. But he ignored all of it, focused only on the enemy right in front of him. “I...won’t...stop...!” he gasped, somehow managing to force the words out, dragging himself another few inches closer to White Wraith. “I...won’t...ever...stop...!”
“Is that so?” snorted the ghost pony, again maintaining the distance between them. “Tell me, what exactly will you do if I crush your other foreleg, hmm? Drag yourself forward by your chin?” He snickered at that mental image for a moment before shrugging and raising Breakdown again. “Let’s find out.”
But this time, he only managed to swing the hammer a few inches before its progress was suddenly halted, a hand reaching out from behind him to grab it in mid-swing.
An alarmed grunt escaping his lips, White Wraith whipped his head around...just in time to see the rest of Akna changing back into solid form from the cloud of mist that she’d changed into.
The sight made his eyes widen in shock. “What?!”
“Didn’t have a ghost pony trick for that, did you?!” snarled Akna, having slowly and carefully circled the battlefield in gaseous form in order to get behind him, using the ongoing sleet storm she’d summoned and Solvei’s ice wall to approach White Wraith without any of his guards seeing her.
And now that she’d gotten the drop on him, she focused on what she’d been looking for ever since she’d thrown in with Lex.
“Breakdown!” she yelled, gripping the weapon tightly. “My name is Akna, and I’m a shaman among the adlets of Everglow! Not long ago, I wielded Headhunter in the Night Mare’s name! Now I need your help to turn my people to her worship!”
“You deluded slut, what do you think you’re doing?!” snarled White Wraith, tugging on the hammer. “Breakdown won’t abandon me for the likes of you!”
“I know that the Umbral Regalia can change the hearts of those who wield them!” continued Akna, ignoring White Wraith completely as she gripped Breakdown tighter. “Come back with me, and we’ll bring my entire tribe into our goddess’s faith!” she pleaded. “Together, we can spread her religion to all-”
She stopped talking abruptly, her eyes widening as her ears suddenly folded back. “Wh-, no! No, that’s not what I meant! I-”
But she didn’t have a chance to continue her entreaty as White Wraith rattled off another spell, causing Breakdown’s head to be engulfed in flames. The fire was enough to cause Akna’s grip to slacken, reflexively flinching at the sudden burst of heat, and with a triumphant cry the guard captain wrenched it from her grasp.
“You got your answer!” he sneered, lifting Breakdown higher. Glancing at where Lex had been trying to use the distraction to crawl closer, he took a step to the side, again keeping out of reach as he turned his attention back to the adlet shaman. “Now you can join your prince in paying the price for your temerity!”
Akna stumbled backward, her expression one of shock and dismay...and that was when the inevitable happened.
Unable to withstand the sudden bout of activity, Akna’s clothing died a spectacular death, her pants tearing along their seams even as her linen top split right down the middle, rendering her completely naked in an instant.
The idea that some ponies found humanoids attractive was something that Lex had never understood (notwithstanding his single glimpse of Adagio Dazzle, which still made him deeply uncomfortable to remember). Dallying with a cow, donkey, or even a griffon was one thing, but humanoids were so alien in nature that lusting after one could only be chalked up to insanity. Particularly when freaks such as Soft Mane – the human/pony hybrid that had made the trip back to Equestria – were the result.
Nevertheless, it was an insanity which thrived in Viljatown, the capital city of Everglow’s Pony Empire. While humanoids weren’t exactly plentiful there, the cosmopolitan nature of the city meant that it had a large non-pony population, some of which were two-legged in form. And although most ponies only desired their own kind, there was a vocal minority who made no secret of their attraction to bipeds.
As his eyebrows shot up and his jaw dropped, looking Akna’s naked body up and down, it became obvious that White Wraith was part of the latter group.
“KYAAAAAA!” One hand going between her legs as she covered her chest with one arm, Akna sank into a half-crouch, her voice an octave higher in mortification. “D-don’t look!”
If anything, her embarrassed plea only seemed to captivate White Wraith more, and Lex knew he wouldn’t get another chance, pulling himself forward with the last of his strength.
It wasn’t enough.
Even as he dragged himself toward White Wraith and reached out with one hoof, he could already see that he hadn’t covered enough ground. Already, the stallion was blinking, and Lex knew that in a moment he’d recover his senses and step back, preventing him from making contact and discharging his spell. Just a little further! he shouted inwardly. I’m so close! Just a little further and I’ll win!
Understood, Master!
The purple aura that engulfed his foreleg then wasn’t his own, and out of his peripheral vision Lex saw that Solvei’s eyes were glowing as she used the telekinesis she’d gained as a result of their bond, pulling him across the last of the distance.
Shouts rang out from the direction of the wall, and the sound of crossbows being cocked joined them a moment later, but none of it mattered as Lex reached out...
And brushed the edge of his hoof against White Wraith’s tail.
In the instant that his hoof made contact with White Wraith’s tail, Lex could already feel the ghost pony trying to resist his magic.
That was to be expected, of course. This spell was empathic in nature, moving wounds from the caster onto an unwilling target; there was no helping the fact that the target would instinctively try to resist. The same way a living creature had innate methods of fighting back against infectious diseases, or ways of trying to purge harmful substances that were ingested, their body’s natural magic would inherently try to repel an infusion of hostile magic from a foreign source.
Indeed, Lex had tried to do exactly that a few seconds ago, when White Wraith had hit him with his stolen wound-transference spell. In that case, Lex had been in no position to resist his own spell; the much greater damage inflicted by Breakdown’s shattering his spine had made it impossible for him to muster the level of resistance necessary to shrug off even a portion of the spell’s effect.
In hindsight, that had doubtlessly been why White Wraith had chosen to deliver it via that method, instead of a simple touch. As much as Lex looked down on those who only dabbled in magic as a supplement to physical combat, delivering a spell via a weapon’s strike had an unexpected efficacy to it, since an opponent hit by both at once would have a harder time withstanding either.
But White Wraith had nothing to distract him from bringing all of his resistance – both innate and via whatever supplementary spells and magic items he was using – to bear now. Even the distraction of seeing Akna’s naked body had already been wearing off when Solvei had pulled him the last few inches toward the guard captain. As such, it had been no real surprise when, in the moment his hoof had made contact, White Wraith’s head had turned toward him, those white eyes meeting his own green-and-purple ones just as the magic was released.
All that was left now was to see which was stronger: his magic, or White Wraith’s ability to withstand it.
In the split-second clash of wills, Lex could feel the strength of the guard captain’s determination. This wasn’t a pony whose spirit would break when things turned against him, nor be frightened by the prospect of defeat. White Wraith might have been conceited to a fault, but that conceit was borne of a deep well of inner strength, pushing him to fight back with everything he had.
By contrast, Lex’s own resolve was flagging. After what he’d gone through in the Rite of Sublimation, the convictions that he’d based his life around – the source of his supreme confidence that the choices he’d made and the principles he’d lived his life by were correct – were now in tatters. With his sense of purpose shattered, to the point where he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to return to his body, a part of him couldn’t help but wonder why exactly he was bothering to try so hard now.
So often before, he’d been able to push past an obstacle or overcome an enemy through a sense of righteous purpose. If it wasn’t because of the future that he’d so firmly believed that only he was capable of bringing about, then it was his unflagging conviction that there were ponies he needed to protect. Now, all of those things seemed like little more than distant memories that he didn’t even want to remember, unable to look past the misguided beliefs that those ideals had been built upon.
But for all that the Rite of Sublimation had taken from him, he realized that there was one thing it had given him that he hadn’t had before. That in losing so much that he’d held dear, he’d still come away with something new. Something which had driven him to slaughter the alicorns in that illusion, as well as all the ponies who’d come to their aid.
Hate.
It was hate which drove Lex past his limits now. Hate for the ghost pony who, at that moment, existed for no other reason than to make his already-miserable life that much harder. Hate for the stallion who had taken such perverse pleasure in injuring Solvei, humiliating Akna, and wounding what little pride he had left.
In that moment, the same way he had when facing his double in the Rite’s test, Lex pushed all of his hatred toward the pony across from him. With no dark magic to shape into a curse, and being too injured to lash out physically, he focused that spite the same way he had when facing his alicorn-self, throwing it all into his magic now, pushing it against White Wraith even as the other pony fought with everything he had to ward it off.
It took only a moment for the contest to be decided.
First, a bloody hole appeared through the knee of White Wraith’s left hind leg, causing a strangled grunt to escape his lips. He made a similar sound a moment later, when another such wound appeared in his left shoulder. Then a hissing groan came from his throat, as the burns and frostbite that he’d so recently transferred to Lex reappeared across his abdomen.
When his entire foreleg was pulped a moment later, he finally screamed, the agonized cry lasting only for a moment as his spine shattered, blood erupting from his mouth as he collapsed to the ground.
And Lex – his injuries now completely gone – slowly stood back up, his eyes blazing brighter now as he stood over White Wraith’s defeated form.
Or rather, almost defeated form. Even as Lex rose up to his full height, the ghost pony spat out another mouthful of blood, gasping and wheezing as he tried to draw air into his lungs. But as soon as he managed to draw a breath, he began to rasp the words to a spell, his one uninjured foreleg starting to trace a mystic pattern in the air-
Only to come to an abrupt stop as Lex stomped down hard on the other stallion’s hoof. “What was it you said before?” he asked, his tone light and conversational. “Something about wanting to see if I’d crawl with my chin if all of my legs were broken?”
His horn lit up then, as he took hold of Breakdown – the hammer having fallen from White Wraith’s magical grip when he’d collapsed – in his telekinesis. To his mild surprise, the massive hammer offered no resistance to his grasp, neither attempting to wrench itself free nor voicing a telepathic complaint. Instead, all he registered from the weapon was a vague sense of disdain – the psychic equivalent of a sneer – but whether it was for himself or his former wielder, Lex couldn’t tell, and after a moment decided that he didn’t care.
“I find myself curious, captain.” Taking his eyes off of the hammer, Lex lifted it up high as he stared down at the ghost pony, the weapon surprisingly light given its size. “Are you the sort of commander who has others do what you wouldn’t do yourself?”
White Wraith opened his mouth, but Lex didn’t give him a chance to speak, removing his hoof from the other pony’s foreleg as he swung Breakdown.
The crunch of bone filled the air a moment later, along with White Wraith’s pain-filled bellow.
But even with the last of his limbs shattered, the ghost stallion wasn’t ready to stop fighting.
“SHOOT HIM!” roared White Wraith, using the pain of his broken leg to put as much volume into his voice as he could. “SHOOT HIM NOW!!!”
“Yes, shoot me,” murmured Lex derisively as he looked up at the guards on the wall. “See what happens when you try to save your captain without putting yourselves at risk.”
Unable to hear him from that distance, the guards – having already recovered from their surprise at seeing their captain go from victorious to defeated in an instant – didn’t hesitate to draw a bead on him, their crossbows twanging as they fired en masse.
And Lex laughed as he telekinetically grabbed White Wraith’s throat and hauled him upright, using the ghost pony as a living shield.
Cries of alarm and dismay immediately came from the wall, but it was too late, and White Wraith’s eyes widened as several bolts slammed into him. Most bounced off, his protective spells still in place, but his body twitched as one caught him between the ribs, another lodging deep in his thigh.
Smirking as he saw the guards lower their crossbows, Lex dropped White Wraith like so much garbage.
With his lower half unresponsive, the stallion couldn’t control his fall, only barely avoiding landing on the bolts now jutting from his back. Even then, he groaned as he reflexively tried to catch himself with his shattered forelegs, shuddering as the broken bones splintered more from the impact. Rolling onto his side, he drew in a slow breath, and from the squelching sound that came from his back then, Lex knew that one of his lungs had been punctured.
Before, he would have been worried about another pony being so badly injured right in front of him. Now all he felt was a grim sense of vindication, his lip curling as he stared down at the shattered form of his enemy. “Well?” Lex asked with a cruel laugh. “Aren’t you going to crawl? Or are you less than even a worm?”
Despite looking like he was on death’s door, White Wraith glared up at him. “Kill...you...” he rasped. “Gonna...kill...you...”
“Then you’d best do so quickly, captain,” answered Lex as he lifted Breakdown again, its head positioned directly over White Wraith’s skull. “Because otherwise, you’re about to retire your position. Permanently.”
Again, Lex didn’t bother to wait for a reply, swinging Breakdown as hard as he could.
At the same moment, White Wraith narrowed his eyes, grit his teeth, and murmured a single word. “Aris-”
“I think that’s sufficient, don’t you?”
As the new voice – having the masculine lilt of a stallion – reached Lex’s ears, and he registered a figure in his peripheral vision even though no one had been there a moment ago, he changed the trajectory of Breakdown’s swing without thinking, intent on annihilating whatever new threat had snuck up on him.
But the hammer had other ideas, stopping in mid-swing before it came anywhere close to the pony who had quite literally appeared out of nowhere.
Giving Breakdown only the briefest of glances, the newcomer shot Lex a wry grin, as though he regarded the attempt to crush him beneath the destructive power of a divine artifact as nothing more than a harmless prank.
The incongruous reaction, along with the interloper’s unexpected appearance mere feet from him, was enough to leave Lex momentarily nonplussed, looking the new arrival over.
A leather wing, his appearance couldn’t have been more different from the gate guards. Where their coats were dull brown and dark blue, his was caramel in hue. The color stood out sharply against the flowing mane and tail of deep black, the former tumbling past his shoulders almost to the point of reaching where his wings were folded at his sides. Nor did he wear any armor, instead clad in a burgundy vest that had a deep cut, showing off a large portion of his chest. His trousers were of the same make, leaving his cutie mark hidden from view.
Strangest of all were his eyes. Unlike the pale irises that White Wraith possessed, the new pony’s were bright red.
Throwing a wink Lex’s way, the red-eyed leather wing turned his attention to White Wraith, kneeling down next to the mangled stallion, who was looking back up at him with a grim expression. “Not...over...yet...”
“Oh, I’m afraid it is,” answered the leather wing with a soft smirk. “And this one goes to our distinguished guest, who performed remarkably well, wouldn’t you say?”
“I...can...still...fight...!”
The leather wing nodded his head. “Of that, I have no doubt. But anyone who can push you to the point of using aristeia despite having one of the Umbral Regalia at your disposal is someone I want to meet. Especially,” he purred, giving Lex another look, “when Her Dark Majesty has given them the Charismata.”
Standing up, he raised a wing toward the pair of guards standing at the gate. “You two! Get the captain to one of the clerics!”
The pair hesitated for a moment, then began galloping closer. But they wavered when Lex held a hoof toward them in a threatening gesture, glaring at the red-eyed stallion. “I’m not done with him.”
“Ah, how thoughtless of me!” chuckled the leather wing. “Interrupting the moment of your dramatic victory, please accept my deepest apologies!” Folding a wing in front of himself, he gave a deep bow. “I can understand that our captain of the guard has caused you a great deal of consternation, but if you can find it within yourself to overlook his trespasses, I’d be more than willing to compensate you for your restraint.”
Lex didn’t reply immediately, instead taking a moment to look the verbose stallion over again, this time with his circlet. But he aborted that attempt almost immediately, nearly wincing at the bright interplay of magical auras – far stronger and more numerous than those White Wraith had – surrounding him.
Gritting his teeth as he reminded himself that he’d initially wanted to avoid a fight, Lex forced himself to lower his hoof, the two guards cautiously moving forward. When he didn’t prevent them from lifting White Wraith, the two quickly turned and rushed back toward the gate, which was already opening to admit them.
Lex ignored it, instead focusing on the stallion who had so abruptly ended his fight, who was already in the process of giving him another bow. “My thanks for your indulgence,” he smiled, standing up straight as he casually pulled Breakdown to his side, the hammer accepting the leather wing’s grasp without any apparent protest.
“Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sanguine Disposition, and it’s my honor to welcome the Night Mare’s champion to Eigengrau.”
Lex stared hard at Sanguine Disposition, weighing the stallion’s cordial greeting for a long moment before giving a nod in reply. It was a curt gesture, one that barely met the minimum threshold for politeness. “I am Lex Legis. Though I’m certain you already knew that.”
He didn’t wait for an answer before turning and walking away from the leather wing, intent on seeing to Solvei’s wounds. Doing so, he knew, was a calculated risk; showing his back to Sanguine Disposition like this was practically inviting an attack, an opportunity that he knew the red-eyed stallion was more than capable of capitalizing on if he so wished. The numerous magical auras surrounding him suggested that he was a powerful spellcaster, and even if he wasn’t he still had Breakdown, the hammer having shown Sanguine Disposition far more deference than it had for White Wraith.
But while Lex had an attack spell at the forefront of his thoughts in case the leather wing was intent on treachery, he doubted he’d need it. After all, if Sanguine Disposition had wanted to launch a sneak attack, his best opportunity to do so would have been while Lex was occupied with White Wraith. That the red-eyed stallion had instead chosen to emerge from total concealment and stop the fight strongly suggested that he wasn’t interested in engaging in violence.
Though that begged the question of what exactly he was interested in.
Trotting forward so that he was walking alongside Lex, Sanguine Disposition gave him an easy grin. “How could I not? Your servants announced you to the guards in a fashion that left no doubt about your identity. And your exploits are quite the talk of late, at least to those of us who listen to palace intrigue.” He chuckled then, as though he’d made some joke that only he was privy to.
“Clearly White Wraith was no such individual,” replied Lex, ignoring the other stallion’s mirth. “He made it clear that all he recognized of me was my claim to the Charismata, something which he attributed to someone else.”
“Ah, White Wraith.” Clucking his tongue in a paternalistic manner, Sanguine Disposition shook his head. “What can I say? He’s a dedicated captain, and quite the warrior, but he’s not what you’d call politically-minded. So, all he knew was that someone he’d never heard of was making grandiose claims in order to enter Eigengrau, and his caution got the better of him.”
“Really?” Lex gave the leather wing a sidelong glance. “Because I was under the impression that he attacked us because you ordered him to.”
Sanguine Disposition’s eyes widened. “Darkness engulf!” he exclaimed, in what Lex could only assume was some sort of local colloquialism. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“It was obvious,” snorted Lex, nodding back toward where Breakdown – Sanguine Disposition not having bothered to bring the hammer with him when he’d kept pace with Lex – was hovering in the air. “As a mere guard captain in a place that he himself admitted was far from Darkest Night’s center of power, it was highly unlikely that White Wraith had earned the right to use one of the Umbral Regalia. Hence why the weapon, which is no doubt possessed of powers similar to Severance, not only refrained from using most of its abilities, but made no move to prevent itself from being used against its wielder. The same couldn’t be said for when I swung it toward you, suggesting that it holds you in a higher regard.”
His expression of surprise fading into a deep grin, Sanguine Disposition narrowed his eyes. “Hmm, interesting,” he purred. “Anything else?”
“You mean besides the way the guards under White Wraith’s command immediately deferred to you when you gave them orders to have him treated? Or the fact that he wanted to continue the battle, but relented when you told him to stop? Both of which suggest that everypony here knows who you are, and are accustomed to following your orders.”
Sanguine Disposition burst out laughing then. “I suppose I did make it a little too obvious, didn’t I?”
Lex came to an abrupt stop then, giving the stallion a cold look. “So you admit it, then? You gave Breakdown to White Wraith, hoping that with it he’d be able to kill me?”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk, and you were on such a roll, too,” sighed the leather wing, looking completely unperturbed by Lex’s sudden display of hostility. “I wasn’t hoping that he’d kill you.”
“Then what? That he’d drive us away?”
Sanguine Disposition shook his head again. “Not at all. What I was hoping for” – his smile returned as he stepped closer to Lex then – “was that I’d get to see the Night Mare’s new favorite in action. And I have to say, you put on quite the show.”
Refusing to back down as the red-eyed stallion stepped closer, Lex bared his teeth. “You’re saying you did all of this for nothing more than your amusement?”
“Oh, that’s not it at all.” Rather than continue to advance on Lex, Sanguine Disposition moved to the side, circling him slowly. “As I said, I’ve been paying attention to your exploits. And while I’ll admit that I don’t have all the details about your numerous accomplishments – that little world you’re from is quite remote – what I’ve heard has aroused my interest in you.”
Lex made no reply to that, save to continue regarding the leather wing in stony silence. Unlike before, this time he kept the red-eyed stallion in his sight as he paced around him.
“And seeing you now,” continued Sanguine Disposition, pausing to lick his lips – revealing a pair of upper canines that were markedly long and pointed compared to the rest of his teeth – as his voice turning husky, “that combination of dauntless determination and brilliant insight, combined with a burning passion to dominate your enemy and smother him with your superiority...”
Coming to a halt directly in front of Lex, Sanguine Disposition leaned in closer than even the most relaxed rules of decorum allowed for, one hoof reaching toward Lex’s cheek. “That aroused a lot more than just my interest...”
His eyes flaring green and purple, Lex caught Sanguine Disposition’s hoof with his own before the leather wing could touch him. “You don’t-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as Sanguine Disposition froze the instant their hooves made contact. “Huh?!”
Confused, Lex’s eyes returned to normal as he watched the leather wing take a step back, his brow furrowed and his smile completely gone now that his jaw was hanging open. Tilting his head, Sanguine Disposition stared at Lex as though he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. “That can’t be...but...”
For a moment, Lex waited for the red-eyed stallion to come out of whatever fit had seized him. But as seconds passed and Sanguine Disposition simply continued to stare at him, muttering to himself as he looked him over, Lex grew tired of waiting. His connection to Solvei made it impossible to ignore that the winter wolf was seriously injured and in considerable pain, and as much as he knew he couldn’t afford to show weakness in front of someone who apparently commanded – or at least, commanded the respect – of one of the Umbral Regalia, his guilt at how he’d allowed Solvei to suffer while he’d dealt with Sanguine Disposition was rapidly growing too great to ignore.
Deciding at last that he couldn’t make Solvei wait any longer, Lex turned away from the stunned stallion and strode toward her, raising his wire-wrapped foreleg as soon as he was close enough to use the Charismata on her, since using their connection to teleport her to his side ran the risk of jostling her, causing her more pain. Hold on, Solvei. I’ll heal you now.
Master... When her mental voice crossed his mind, it was accompanied by a sense of deep regret. I’m sorry! I couldn’t protect you!
Her anguished apology nearly made him wince. For all that he’d lost touch with everything that he’d believed in, and with the uncertain fate of the mares he loved encouraging him to stop thinking about them in an effort to dull the pain – even now, the sudden burst of thankfulness he’d felt for Sonata and Aria a few moments ago only served to drive home that he might have been remembering the final few days of their lives – his newly-restored bond with Solvei was still exceptionally vivid in his mind, contrasted sharply by how painful it had been when she’d died. Hearing her berate herself like this, after he’d just put her well-being second to sizing up a potential new threat, was unbearable.
It wasn’t your job to protect me, he reassured her, even as he called upon the power given to him by the Night Mare to heal Solvei’s injuries. My plan required me to be seriously wounded, so that I could transfer that damage to White Wraith.
Even as he did his best to soothe Solvei’s guilt, the Charismata went to work repairing her injuries. In an instant, her broken ribs reset themselves, and the winter wolf gave a gasp of relief as her pain disappeared. Although Lex knew that he wouldn’t be able to do this again for several hours – this use of the Charismata had been the last one he could manage, at least until the power eventually renewed itself – he couldn’t bring himself to regret it.
But in his mind, Solvei’s disposition was still registering anguish, and as he watched she folded her ears back, eyes on the ground as she stood up, allowing her armor to vanish as she returned to her normal size. But I swore that nothing would hurt you anymore so long as I was here...
Deciding that he didn’t care if Sanguine Disposition or anyone else was watching, Lex reached out a hoof, gently stroking her fur the way he had when she’d been frightened back right before they’d confronted Bolverk. It was because of you that I was able to use my wound-transference spell on White Wraith. If you hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have been able to keep fighting. You’re the reason I was able to win.
M-Master...thank you... Her tail wagging as she raised her gaze, Lex was aware of it as her guilt slowly ebbed, replaced by gratitude, relief, happiness, and lo-
“IF YOU TWO ARE DONE HAVING A MOMENT, CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME SOME CLOTHES ALREADY?!” screamed Akna from where she was crouching down a short distance away, arms still wrapped around herself.
Rolling his eyes as Solvei stifled a giggle, Lex turned and headed in her direction.
But the winter wolf’s amusement faded out after a second, replaced with concern. Master, I don’t like that bat pony. Her glance at Sanguine Disposition – who’d stopped muttering to himself, now eyeing Lex quietly with a contemplative expression – made it clear who she was talking about. He sounds like Prevarius, acting all nice and friendly to hide the fact that he wants your soul.
Lex spared the leather wing a glance at that, even as he kept walking toward Akna, but made no comment in reply. His inability to read people made him extremely reluctant to place any faith in his own interpretations of the actions of others, but it hadn’t seemed like his soul that Sanguine Disposition had been interested in just now.
“Here,” announced Lex flatly as he reached Akna, drawing forth a plain, unadorned, and entirely non-magical cloak from his extradimensional saddlebag, telekinetically tossing it to the crouching adlet. “Use this to cover yourself.”
“That’s it?!” she squawked, though her apparent disapproval didn’t stop her from grabbing the material and wrapping it around herself. “You don’t have anything else?!”
“Nothing that will come anywhere close to fitting you,” replied Lex flatly, already losing interest in the adlet’s predicament.
Solvei was more sympathetic. “You could just change back into an utvalgte-”
“In which case I’d still be completely naked,” huffed the adlet, giving Solvei a jealous glare. The magic that let the winter wolf change size had altered her outfit accordingly, leaving her fully clothed in the aftermath of the battle.
The winter wolf cocked her head. “I thought you said you didn’t feel that way when you turned into a winter wolf because of how new it was.”
“That was before I lost all of my clothing in front of everyone!” snapped Akna, glancing at the guards that were still lining the walls. “Now, even if I change forms, I know what anyone behind me will be looking at, and I’m not letting that happen!”
She punctuated her declaration by standing up, wrapping the cloak around her middle as though it were a towel. With the top edge beneath her arms, the bottom of it terminated only a few inches below her waist. Arranging the ends so that they met along her side, she folded the edges together, giving them an experimental tug before nodding in satisfaction. Although she’d be showing off her side when she walked, the rest of her would still be hidden from view. “This time, I’m staying covered up, no matter what!”
Deciding not to mention that the adlet’s tail was lifting the rear portion of the cloak, leaving her backside bare for anyone to look at, Solvei somehow managed to keep a straight face as she nodded. “Yeah, well...good luck with that.”
“Both of you, stay on guard,” murmured Lex quietly, drawing their attention to where Sanguine Disposition was approaching them at a sedate pace.
“It seems I owe you another apology,” announced the leather wing, his easygoing demeanor back in place as he smiled at Lex. “Would you let me make my faux pas up to you over dinner?”
Lex opened his mouth to turn the offer down, but before he could get a word out Sanguine Disposition held up a hoof. “Before you reply, I should warn you that I won’t take no for an answer.”
Lowering his hoof, he glanced at the barbed wire around Lex’s foreleg. “I knew you had the Night Mare’s favor,” he admitted with a chuckle, before raising his eyes to Lex’s again.
“But I simply have to hear the story of how you gained a blessing from Kara.”
Sanguine Disposition’s statement was so absurd that it took Lex a moment to formulate a reply.
“What are you talking about?” He couldn’t keep the derisive tone out of his voice, appalled by what the leather wing was suggesting. “I don’t have a blessing from Kara!”
Smirking, Sanguine Disposition tsked at him. “No need to be coy about it. You might not know this about me, but I have a bit of history with Kara myself, so I can tell. And you definitely have a trace amount of her divinity around you. Nowhere near as much as the Night Mare’s, but it’s unmistakably there.”
“What’s he talking about?” Confused, Akna glanced between the two stallions before turning to look at Solvei. “Who’s Kara?”
“I don’t know,” answered Solvei with a shake of her head. She didn’t bother looking at Akna as she spoke, instead keeping her eyes on Lex. While he wasn’t so upset that his emotions were spilling over to her through their psychic link, she could still tell that he wasn’t happy with what the other pony was saying. Master, give me the order and I’ll make this pony stop talking.
Lex ignored her, instead clenching his teeth as he glared at Sanguine Disposition. “I don’t have a blessing from Kara,” he insisted. “Nor would I accept one if she offered it! The Night Mare is the only goddess with which I’ve trafficked!”
But his protest only made Sanguine Disposition laugh. “The blessings of the gods aren’t for mortals to accept or deny,” he chuckled. “They give them at their own discretion, not ours. But while I’m sure the Night Mare appreciates your loyalty, you don’t have to worry about her being jealous. If Queen Iliana, ruler of Everglow’s Pony Empire, can collect blessings from all the gods in the pantheon, I doubt the Night Mare will object to you having Kara’s.”
“That’s-”
“But really, we should discuss all of this in more comfortable surroundings, don’t you think?” Waving a hoof to indicate the Solvei’s ice wall and the sleet storm that Akna had summoned, the red-eyed stallion canted his head toward the guards on the walls. “You worked so hard to secure entrance into Eigengrau. I’d hate for word to get out that I was inhospitable to a royal visitor, especially when they’re held so high in our goddess’s esteem.”
“You mean besides sending the captain of this town’s guard out to fight us?” sneered Lex.
If Sanguine Disposition was bothered by the not-so-veiled implication of hypocrisy, he didn’t show it. “Have dinner with me,” urged the leather wing again, throwing another wink over his shoulder as he turned and sauntered back toward the gate, tail swaying. “I promise, you won’t come away unsatisfied.”
For a long moment Lex didn’t move, watching as the stallion collected Breakdown and continued toward Eigengrau, the conversation apparently over. But that wasn’t surprising; as Sanguine Disposition had correctly noted, Lex had already made his desire to enter the town abundantly clear. Turning away now, after having already gone through so much – and expended resources to secure their entrance, such as his wound-transference spells and his last use of the Charismata – would have been counterproductive.
Nor, to his profound discomfort, could Lex easily dismiss what Sanguine Disposition had said about his having a blessing from Kara.
It wasn’t a prospect that Lex wanted to think about. His single interaction with Everglow’s goddess of love had been decidedly negative, when she’d hijacked a portal that he, Sonata, and several other Equestrian ponies had been using in hope of returning home. Instead, they’d ended up in Kara’s divine realm, where the goddess had made it clear that she’d release them only if they helped her locate Equestria, intent on spreading her religion there.
Fortunately, Lex had been in the Night Mare’s good graces at the time, and the goddess had objected to one of her faithful being so brazenly abducted by another deity. It was thanks to her that their release had been secured...and which had subsequently convinced Lex that the Night Mare was worthy of his respect, petitioning the goddess for greater power in exchange for giving her what Kara had been seeking: her religion, brought to Equestria.
After that, Lex had given no further thought to Everglow’s goddess of debauchery. As far as he’d been concerned, his one and only meeting with Kara was barely worth remembering. She’d inadvertently convinced him that he’d need divine patronage – with the Elemental Bleeds having marked Equestria’s conjunction with a wider multiverse, one that he’d learned was filled with new dangers that his homeland would need protecting from, such power was an absolute necessity – and that the Night Mare was the perfect candidate for that role. But other than that, Kara had no bearing on his life.
It had only been much later that he’d found out how wrong he’d been.
Nosey had been the one to reveal the truth to him. During their unexpected encounter in Las Pegasus, she had inadvertently admitted that Sonata had been praying to Kara in secret, asking the love goddess for advice about their budding relationship. That particular revelation had been disconcerting in the extreme, but not nearly as much as the fact that it had been Kara’s guidance which had been responsible for him and Sonata getting back together after they’d broken up on the way to Tall Tale.
Shaken both by the fact that Sonata had been consulting with a foreign deity without telling him, and that said deity had played such an outsized role in one of the most important relationships in his life – in more than one, since repairing things with Sonata had been a large part of the reason he’d eventually developed a romance with Aria, as well as his ill-considered relationship with Nosey – Lex had confronted Sonata about that in Las Pegasus. She’d tearfully admitted to everything, and while Lex hadn’t had the heart to berate her for what she’d done, there’d been no time to analyze the extent of Kara’s interference in his life any further, since news of Feather Duster’s kidnapping had arrived almost immediately afterward.
But now Sanguine Disposition was saying that Kara’s influence hadn’t stopped at simply giving advice to Sonata...
Master, should we go after him? queried Solvei telepathically. It’s not too late to go around this place if you’d prefer not to have anything to do with that bat pony anymore.
“He mentioned ‘blessings’ and ‘divinity,’” murmured Akna, frowning as she looked at Lex again. “Is Kara another goddess?”
“A pony goddess,” answered Lex distractedly, walking toward the entrance to Eigengrau. Although he knew he was still reeling from the Rite of Sublimation revealing the pointlessness of everything he’d dedicated his life to, Lex couldn’t bring himself to ignore what Sanguine Disposition had told him. It was with an almost morbid – bordering on masochistic – curiosity that Lex found himself contemplating what it would mean if he did have a blessing from Kara.
How much more of his life was based on lies and deception?
“Goddesses have different things they’re in charge of, right?” murmured Solvei, her discomfort apparent as she padded after Lex, Akna keeping pace with them. “The Night Mare is...power, I think? And Mystaria said that Luminace is the goddess of magic. What does Kara control?”
“Most of her portfolio concerns itself with various aspects of deception,” answered Lex absently, paying only scant attention to the winter wolf’s question. “Which could very well be taken as a referendum on her also being a goddess of love.”
“Love?” echoed Akna, slightly incredulous. “And she gave you a blessing?”
The question earned her a soft growl from Solvei. “What exactly does that mean?”
Not wanting to pick a fight, Akna raised her hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Nothing, I just...wait, hang on!” Her eyes narrowing as she checked that her cloak was still securely fastened around her – managing to once again miss that her tail was lifting the back of it up – Akna shot Lex an accusing glare. “Does this have anything to do with why I can’t seem to stay covered up?!”
Between most of his attention being elsewhere, and how inane her comment was, it took Lex a moment to respond to Akna’s query. “What are you babbling about?”
Putting one hand on her hip, Akna gave him an indignant look. “Oh please. My having all these embarrassing ‘accidents’ right in front of you? And you have a blessing from a love goddess? This is clearly the result of her magic!”
Lex’s lip curled, disgusted by what she was insinuating. “First of all, while she might be one of the lesser members of the pony pantheon, Kara is still a deity. The idea that she’d use her powers for such petty acts of erotic stimulation is demeaning to her status as a goddess. Secondly, I don’t...”
Before he could finish telling Akna precisely how unattractive he found her, Lex nearly stumbled over his own hooves, eyes widening as a sudden flash of insight came to him.
The result of Kara’s magic.
Petty acts of erotic stimulation.
By themselves, neither of those concepts had any special significance to Lex. Even taken in tandem, they had no real importance that he could see. But within the context of a supposed blessing from Kara, those ideas solved a minor mystery that he had never been able to unravel before now.
Those spells!
The thought ran across his brain with such vigor that he unintentionally transmitted it to Solvei, whose ears flickered in nervousness. Master? What spells?
Lex didn’t even hear her question, his blood pounding in his ears as he thought back to just after he’d slain the dragon attacking Tall Tale. He and Sonata had gotten back together, after which he’d cut a deal with the Night Mare in order to secure her blessing. Barely a few hours later, he and Sonata had made love for the first time, and when he’d awoken the next morning, there’d been almost a dozen new spells in his mental catalogue...all of them with a distinctly sexual bent.
Or at least, the ones he’d examined. After looking at the first two – a contraceptive spell and one designed to stimulate feelings of tactile pleasure; both of which he still made regular use of – he’d been too embarrassed, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, to make even the most cursory examination of the others. More concerning had been where those spells had come from, since he’d never studied them. At the time he’d reluctantly concluded that they were from the Night Mare, though that explanation had struck him as being dubious. But if Sonata had already been communicating with Kara back then, and the love goddess had seen fit to give him a blessing...
Letting out a slow breath, Lex resumed heading toward Eigengrau, ignoring the repeated queries of the lupines following after him. Instead, he set his jaw as he forced himself to at long last look over the remaining spells that Kara – for he was beginning to accept the Sanguine Disposition’s idea that the love goddess had played more of a role in his life than he’d previously believed – had given him. With his sense of embarrassment muted by the scope of all the losses he’d recently suffered, Lex silently vowed that this time he’d review all of the magic that Kara had seen fit to give him.
If he was fortunate, those would represent the full extent of her meddling.
But somehow, Lex couldn’t bring himself to think that the mere presence of a few spells was what Sanguine Disposition had detected.
Pushing that thought away, Lex instead took inventory of the lascivious magic he’d been given.
There were ten spells in total, including the two he’d already made use of. Of the remaining eight...one allowed for temporary physical transmutations, but only of the target’s sexual characteristics, allowing for an uncomfortably wide range to which their anatomy could be altered. Another was a mind-affecting spell, similar to what the Sirens used in their singing, but far more focused, causing the target to feel a short-term burst of intense lust toward the spellcaster.
Fully three of them were dedicated to conjuring various planar beings, all of which were tailored to only be capable of bringing creatures of an erotic nature. From ephemeral spirits of arousal to a variety of different succubi to tentacled monstrosities, there were a bewildering array of creatures that those spells could bring forth.
And as if to complement those was a spell designed specifically to allow the caster temporary ability to crossbreed with virtually any other type of creature. It still required that a partner have the physical apparatus necessary to potentially host a new life – that it still had a womb, in other words – but so long as that was present, “compatibility” was assured. As the offspring would have qualities of both parents and itself be viable, Lex found it to be the singularly most repulsive spell of the lot.
To his relief, the next spell was far more blasé, simply granting the target a marked increase in their skills as a lover. Closer examination revealed that it was surprisingly intricate, however, granting an innate proficiency that was startlingly close to what a pony’s cutie mark afforded them. There was no outward mark designating a recipient of the spell, nor did it interfere with a pony’s existing special talent, but it was still shockingly similar in functionality.
But it was only when he noted how that particular spell was permanent that Lex grew suspicious. He’d never questioned his ability to satisfy Sonata and Aria – the two most beautiful mares in all of Equestria, who (as much as he hated to think about it) had lifetimes’ worth of experience – before, accepting that he was simply possessed of remarkable prowess in the bedroom the same way he was with magic, governance, and so many other disciplines. But reviewing that spell now, and knowing that his tulpa had a habit of using magic of its own accord whenever felt sufficiently unnerved – such as in the aftermath of his first time with Sonata – he found himself unable to ignore the possibility that the rogue portion of his mind had cast that spell on him without his knowing.
The prospect was disturbing enough that Lex paid little attention to the final entry in the spells Kara had given him.
After all, who’d have any use for a spell that turned somepony into a vampire?
At a casual glance, Eigengrau could have been any mid-sized town back on Everglow.
Lacking the technological development that Equestria had long enjoyed, the roads were cobblestone rather than pavement. Similarly, the buildings – shops and houses alike – were constructed of mortared stonework rather than bricks or cement. Even the wires strung overhead, now that Lex was close enough to see them, were made of metal rather than fishing twine.
The town’s layout was similarly utilitarian in design, with the gate opening onto a broad thoroughfare that extended left and right along the inside of the walls as well as directly forward into the heart of the town, smaller roads branching off from it at regular intervals. Every streetcorner was marked by a lamppost, though instead of a torch or lantern, they were topped with a sphere of magical light similar to those that lined the walls, collectively filling the streets with a soft glow that eliminated the need for darkvision.
And, of course, there were the ponies.
Even as Lex entered the town proper, he could see unicorns, pegasi, earth ponies, leather wings, and a few other ponies of tribes he couldn’t immediately recognize all going about their business. Clad in everything from simple homespun shirts and trousers to silken finery, the ponies chatted as they walked the streets, called out and waved to each other, carried parcels and packages, and otherwise behaved exactly as townsponies anywhere would have. And while Lex knew that most, perhaps even all, of those ponies were dead – being the Night Mare’s faithful who had been reborn here in Darkest Night after their mortal lives had come to an end – the way they acted now was indistinguishable from their living counterparts.
Except, Lex realized after a moment’s observation, there were no foals to be found. Nor were there any elderly ponies. No matter where he looked, everyone in Eigengrau was somewhere between young adulthood and late middle age. Apparently the Night Mare had no use for the weak or infirm, though given the importance on mortal souls, Lex strongly suspected that meant that her faithful were reborn into her realm with hale bodies.
Nor was that the only oddity he observed.
There was also how clean the place was. Even back in Equestria, where public wastebaskets were ubiquitous and streetsweepers were common, there had been a certain amount of litter which was unavoidable. Lazy ponies would discard candy wrappers on the street, or a breeze would pull trash from an overstuffed bin. Here, nothing dirtied the boulevard; even dust seemed to be in absence.
That was particularly strange given how Eigengrau seemed to lack any sort of sewer system. No matter where Lex looked, the streets lacked any utility holes, grates, or storm drains. It was as if the entire town had no municipal apparatus for disposing of wastewater.
But that makes sense, decided Lex a moment later, glad to have something to think about besides the increasingly-likely possibility that Kara had been clandestinely interfering with his life for some time now. If the local population are all postmortem, they won’t require food or drink, nor have sanitary issues arising as a consequence of having those needs met. That would certainly explain why there had been no outlying farms growing food for Eigengrau’s population, though Sanguine Disposition’s invitation to dinner suggested that some foodstuffs were still imported, or perhaps magically created-
“What’re you waiting for?” snapped a harsh voice from behind Lex. Stopping in place, he glanced back – Akna and Solvei, who had both been padding quietly behind him, taking in the sight of the town (the first that either had ever seen) with wide eyes, stopping to do the same – and saw a pegasus mare in a guard uniform shoving another pegasus, this one a stallion clad in rags, forward.
“You know what you have to do if you ever want that collar off,” she sneered, gesturing to the black iron band wrapped around the stallion’s neck. “Now get to it!”
“Yes, ma’am!” sputtered the stallion, stepping forward with a gulp. He paused as he glanced at Lex and the others, cringing as he met their eyes before quickly looking down, and it took Lex a second to realize that he wasn’t staring at the ground idly. Rather, the collared stallion was eyeing where he, Solvei, and Akna had all stepped as they’d walked into Eigengrau, grimacing as he took in the mud and dirt left in their wake.
Then, squeezing his eyes shut, he leaned down and began to lick the cobblestones they’d dirtied.
“That’s it,” cooed the guardsmare sadistically. “Make sure to get every speck of grime. Remember, Eigengrau’s cleanliness is the pride of its citizens. If you truly want to atone for your crimes, show how much you want to safeguard your fellows’ dignity.”
“Y-yef!” groaned the stallion, biting his lip as he forced himself to swallow. Gagging, he nevertheless forced his eyes open, stumbling forward as he came to the next mud-splattered pawprint and stuck his tongue out again.
“Quite the inspirational demonstration, isn’t it?” mused Sanguine Disposition, sauntering back from where he’d ranged ahead of Lex and the others. “You’d never guess that a week ago, that stallion got drunk on some wine he’d had imported and attacked a guard. Now look at him, diligently working to improve the public welfare.” Smiling broadly, he paused to take in the sight of the stallion – now teary-eyed – tonguing the ground. “There’s nothing quite like seeing a wayward pony put back onto the proper path.”
“‘Proper path’?” scoffed Solvei. “How? All you’re doing is humiliating that poor pony in front of everyone.”
“Precisely,” smirked the red-eyed stallion. “By having to degrade themselves where everyone can witness their shame, scofflaws and hoodlums are motivated to change their behavior, lest they find themselves disgraced again. And, of course, they beautify our community in the process.”
“I’d never do anything like that,” muttered Akna as she watched the pegasus stallion continue to lick the streets clean. “I’d rather be beaten than be shamed like that.”
“Many would agree,” murmured Sanguine Disposition. “Which is why offenders are given no such alternative. If they won’t comply voluntarily, magic is used to force their obedience. And of course, their sentence is compounded every time they need to be so compelled, ensuring that their resistance only makes their punishment last longer. Eventually, even the most recalcitrant of offenders breaks down and obeys of their own will.”
“Ensuring that they’ll bear resentment toward everypony complicit in their disgrace,” muttered Lex in disgust, passing the minor talisman he wore that kept his person free of filth – one of the least of the magical treasures he’d taken from Solvei’s mother – to Solvei, and then Akna, letting it clean the remaining mud from their paws before retrieving it.
“Just so!” smiled Sanguine Disposition, ignoring Lex’s quick cleaning of the other two. “The memory of their ignominy creates motivation for them to improve themselves, hoping that one day they’ll be able to assert themselves over others the way they themselves once were.”
“Or it erodes their faith in this town’s system of justice,” shot back Lex, “encouraging them to abandon Eigengrau in favor of another locale.”
“They’re free to try,” shrugged Sanguine Disposition with a chuckle. “But journeying to another settlement isn’t something to be undertaken lightly, as I’m sure you’ve seen if you came here through the wilderness. Besides, starting over somewhere else means working your way up from the bottom of that community’s hierarchy. Most ponies aren’t willing to give up everything they’ve earned here just because they were made to endure a little disgrace.”
His gaze turning hooded, the leather wing glanced at Lex. “Of course, a few ponies come to enjoy the shame,” he purred. “In which case, we use...other methods of punishing them. Perhaps I can give you demonstration after we eat?”
“I don’t plan on being here that long,” replied Lex bluntly, pointedly turning away from the pegasus being disciplined.
“A pity,” pouted Sanguine Disposition, before his easy smile returned. “Though I confess that now I’m curious as to what brought you to this little corner of Darkest Night in the first place. Ah!” He held out a hoof as Lex started to speak. “No, no, we don’t need to get into that now. You’re my guest, and it would be the height of rudeness to insist that we talk business before you’ve had a chance to relax. Which reminds me.”
Taking Breakdown off of his back, Sanguine Disposition released the weapon, allowing it to hover in the air. “I appreciate your helping Captain White Wraith put on that little show for me,” he said to the hammer. “Consider the favor repaid in full.”
Breakdown made a bobbing motion in mid-air, almost as if it were nodding, before shooting straight up into the night sky, immediately disappearing from view as it slipped between the wires and vanished into the darkness.
Ignoring the strangled whine that came from Akna, Lex raised a brow. “The weapon owed you a favor?”
Casually waving a hoof as though having a godly artifact in his debt was no big deal, Sanguine Disposition shrugged. “Oh, I simply helped him out with a venture he was undertaking a little while back. Breakdown is actually quite the crafter, you know, always tinkering on various projects. One of them just so happened to call for a few exotic spells, and I was fortunate enough to know the ones he was looking for. Now then.”
Raising a hoof, Sanguine Disposition began to chant, making a series of arcane gestures. Solvei growled at the sight, but a telepathic word from Lex – who could already make out what the leather wing was casting – calmed her. Several seconds later, Sanguine Disposition pronounced the last syllable, and an ornate carriage appeared where none had been before. Its exterior was made of finely-polished black-paneled wood, the door having an emblem of a rose with a large drop of water – or, in all likelihood, some other liquid – hanging from the edge of its petals.
“My personal sigil: the weeping rose,” explained Sanguine Disposition as he opened the door, revealing an interior that was lined with red velvet cushions. “Please, enter and make yourselves comfortable. We’ll be back at my humble abode shortly.”
Pausing for just a moment, Lex glanced at the front of the carriage. Hooked up to its reins were a pair of spectral equinoids, their outlines too faint to show any discernable features. A similar figure sat in the driver’s box up front, and Lex recognized that all three were nothing more than simple undirected masses of force, able to do little more than a few preprogrammed tasks, which in this case doubtlessly constituted pulling and directing the carriage to whatever location the caster specified.
Glancing back at Sanguine Disposition, who offered a slight nod as he gestured to the inside of the carriage, Lex climbed inside, Akna and Solvei following before Sanguine Disposition entered and closed the door behind them. “Home!” he called, sitting down next to Lex – despite the interior having ample space for him to sit elsewhere – and getting comfortable.
A moment later, the wagon lurched forward through the streets, everypony making sure to move out of its way as it took the four of them deeper into Eigengrau.
“Captain, there’ve been no further incidents since the...since Sanguine Disposition’s guests entered Eigengrau. Even so, we’ve doubled the outer patrols, and have heightened security at all of the main gates, as per protocol.”
White Wraith nodded curtly at the report from his lieutenant as he sat down at his desk, the motion causing a twinge of discomfort to run down his spine. Although the clerics had been both quick and liberal with their use of healing magic, the lingering pain suggested that they hadn’t repaired all of the damage taken, so great had been his injuries. Of course, he had no intention of saying that fact out loud; death would have been preferable to being further shamed like that.
Not that he hadn’t been completely humiliated already, having lost a fight to some outsider. And I even had one of the Umbral Regalia with me! seethed White Wraith internally, grinding his teeth even as he kept his expression stony. No matter that the weapon had refused to use any of its greater powers; its inherent destructiveness, combined with his own magic and experience, should have been enough to overwhelm anyone who dared to challenge him.
Instead he’d been defeated.
Worse, he’d been defeated in front of his subordinates.
The knowledge that they were all talking about what had happened was a pain far worse than any leftover injuries. While no one would be stupid enough to say anything in front of him, he had no doubt that his loss would be all they’d be talking about for the foreseeable future. Nor would they keep it to themselves; in a matter of hours, the news would sweep through Eigengrau, where it would be the topic of conversation for quite some time to come.
Breaking out of his ruminating as his lieutenant cleared his throat uncomfortably, White Wraith nodded at him. “We also received a message a few minutes ago, sir,” continued the guardpony. “Sanguine Disposition has conjured a carriage to take himself and his, er, guests into the city. We believe they’re headed for his residence...” He trailed off then, and when White Wraith said nothing, swallowed once before speaking again. “Would you like us to place it under watch?”
White Wraith let out a slow breath before shaking his head. Officially, Sanguine Disposition had no place in Eigengrau’s hierarchy. But that façade was paper-thin; most everyone knew that, in actuality, the red-eyed stallion was the town’s ruler in all the ways that mattered, with the Lord Marshall – who on paper was the highest-ranking pony in Eigengrau – serving mostly to handle the night-to-night aspects of running the place. Sending guards to observe Sanguine Disposition’s domicile, or otherwise interfere with whatever that smirking bastard was up to, would doubtlessly prove to be more trouble than it was worth.
But that didn’t mean that White Wraith was ready to just wash his hooves of what had happened.
“Inform all guards that Lex Legis and his wolves are to be treated as envoys,” White Wraith decided. “Let me know if they cause any disturbances, cross any checkpoints, or leave town, but otherwise don’t interfere with whatever business they’re here to conduct.”
Visibly relieved, the lieutenant snapped a salute. “Very good, sir!”
White Wraith nodded. “Dismissed.”
Waiting until his subordinate had left the room, White Wraith counted to twenty before getting up and locking the entrance to his office. Then he cast several spells to make sure no one was eavesdropping, peeking through the walls, or otherwise spying on him, magically or otherwise. He’d had his office built to withstand such intrusions, of course – in addition to lead-lined walls, carpeting thick enough to show the hoofprints of an invisible intruder, and a lock that would trigger a deadfall should someone try to pick it, he’d also commissioned a suite of defensive enchantments to be built into the structure of the room – but it never hurt to be safe.
Especially for what he was about to do.
White Wraith had no interest in politics, but he considered himself a strategically-minded pony. Although he’d put a lot of time and effort into securing his position in Eigengrau, his loss today had been an unwelcome reminder that putting all of his hopes into his current position as captain of the guard was a calculated risk. As such, prudence required that he minimize that risk by making sure he had an alternative at the ready if he ever saw fit to abandon his status here.
Of course, setting up a new venture somewhere else in Darkest Night was extraordinarily difficult. After all, other settlements had their own power-players, none of whom would welcome new competition. But that didn’t mean it was impossible to set up a new life elsewhere in the realm.
It just meant that you needed to make sure you had allies in high places.
Satisfied that he was alone, White Wraith opened the bottom drawer of his desk. Pulling aside the false bottom, he gently dug out the strongbox he kept hidden there. Setting it down – making sure not to jostle it too much, lest he spill the vial of powerful solvent that he’d rigged to rupture if anyone ever tried to force the box open – he undid the lock and opened the top.
Inside sat the bare minimum items he’d require in case he ever needed to abandon Eigengrau in a hurry: a scroll with a teleportation spell scribed into it, a small pouch that contained a half-dozen gemstones and a few healing potions, a small folio where he’d scribed backups of as many spells as he could, and a pair of thin metal spectacles.
Picking that last item up, he sighed as he unfolded the apparatus and put it on. He still had no idea how the glasses functioned – they weren’t magical, lacking any aura that he’d been able to determine – but just like every other time he’d used them, the lenses lit up, shining a small light into his eyes. Supposedly they performing a “retinal scan,” whatever that meant, but he was less concerned with that than with what happened next.
The word “connecting” appeared on the interior of the lenses, looking to him as though the soft-glowing blue letters were hovering in the air. A moment later they disappeared, and the image of a figure – also composed of blue light, though he knew that was an effect of the transmission rather than their actual appearance – took their place.
“What is it?”
The electronic crackle of the voice sent another painful twinge down White Wraith’s back, though this time it was from distaste...and fear. Fighting the emotion down as he stared at the half-flesh, half-metal pony in front of his eyes, he licked his lips before speaking.
“I have a report for Steel Soul,” White Wraith murmured softly. “A pony named Lex Legis, who claims to have the Charismata, has come to Eigengrau. He’s meeting with Sanguine Disposition right now.”
“Allow me to formally welcome you to my home,” announced Sanguine Disposition as he exited the carriage, turning back to Lex and the others as he bowed deeply. “Please, come inside and be at ease.”
Disembarking from the conveyance that the other stallion had summoned – Solvei and Akna doing the same behind him – Lex didn’t immediately take the leather wing up on his offer, instead taking a moment to look around at where the red-eyed pony’s carriage had brought them.
Far from the bustling avenue that had greeted them beyond the entrance to Eigengrau, they were inside a walled estate now, with an area that, in Lex’s estimation, was roughly the size of a city block. Unlike the rest of the city, there were no exterior lights, allowing only the diffuse illumination from the rest of Eigengrau to brighten the place. Even then, it did so only dimly, as the walls kept out much of the light.
But the lurking shadows only seemed to highlight the uncanny vista that was Sanguine Disposition’s home.
The vast majority of the space inside the walls was dedicated to an expansive yard, most of which had been given over to a garden composed entirely of a variety of colorful roses. Indeed, the bulk of the front lawn was covered in them, with the flowers ranging in size from miniature buds to a few blooms that were larger than a pony. It was a spectacle designed to be admired more than interacted with; aside from the entryway through which their carriage had entered, only a few select walkways had been cleared amongst the sea of flowers, leaving the majority of them out of easy reach.
At the center of the estate was a gothic-looking three-story villa. While not nearly as expansive as River Bank’s sprawling manor, it still dominated the scenery, having an arched entryway, stone eaves that flared out from each corner of the house, and gargoyles perched between the windows. The foreboding impression was abetted by the large pole extending upward from the center of the roof, from which a series of wires – separate from those spreading over the town proper – extended down toward the top of the estate’s walls, effectively keeping the entire place cordoned off from the rest of Eigengrau.
The outer walls themselves were only half as high as those protecting the town from the wilderness, nor were they as thick, but it took only a few seconds of concentration for Lex to see that they were no less impressive in their magical construction. If anything, they were even more intricately designed, something which only served to further confirm what Sanguine Disposition had implied about being a wizard of considerable power.
Nor were they the only source of magical auras. A casual sweep of the yard showed Lex that there were freestanding spells spread across the garden, just waiting for an intruder to set them off. There were wards on the house as well, and the multiplicity of auras made it almost impossible to pick out any single spell, the sheer amount of magic in the area causing them all to blend together in his sight, defying any attempt to single out their individual functions.
But Lex didn’t even have a chance to try when a loud clank from behind him drew his attention.
Glancing backward, he saw that the ornate silver gate, which had opened of its own accord as their carriage had approached, had just closed behind them. Like the rest of the estate, it was also glowing with magic, and Lex let out a slow breath as he realized that this place’s defenses would likely work against unauthorized exits as well as entrances.
Now that he’d accepted Sanguine Disposition’s invitation, the leather wing would need to be dealt with – one way or another – before leaving Eigengrau.
“I’ve never seen flowers like these,” murmured Akna, kneeling down at the edge of the rose garden. “They’re beautiful.”
Sanguine Disposition grinned. “Aren’t they? Roses have always been the apex of floral aesthetics. Not only do they bedazzle the senses with their scent and appearance, but they also teach us an important lesson.”
Solvei frowned. “Lesson? What lesson could a bunch of flowers teach?”
Only half-listening to the conversation, Akna reached for the nearest bloom, a rose with white petals. But when her fingers came within a few inches of it, the stem suddenly moved, wrapping tightly around her fingers. Yelping as the thorns dug into her skin, she yanked her hand back, and Lex could see blood on her palm.
Chuckling softly, Sanguine Disposition nodded toward Akna. “That even such beautiful things have their thorns.”
Her ears flattening, Akna glared at the red-eyed stallion, but Sanguine Disposition didn’t seem to notice, turning toward his villa. “But I’m sure you all are tired from your journey here, to say nothing of that unpleasantness with our guard captain. Come and let me treat you to some hospitality.”
Striding toward the front door – which, like the gate, opened of its own accord to admit him – Sanguine Disposition entered the house, leaving Lex and the others to follow after him.
Master, I don’t like this, whined Solvei telepathically. Those flowers are dangerous, and their scent is so overpowering that I can’t smell if there’s anything lurking among them! We could be surrounded by enemies right now and not even know it!
Calm yourself, Solvei, replied Lex. Plants don’t handle cold temperatures very well. Remember how you defeated that scythe tree on our way here? If we need to fight our way out, you can use your ice magic to kill all of these roses, clearing a path to the exit.
Yes, Master! Lex registered relief coming from her then, and let the matter drop. While everything he’d just told her was true, there was no need to burden her with his doubts about whether or not things would go that easily if they needed to fight their way out. With Solvei having used up her reserve of enhanced magic, Akna already having called upon an ice elemental during the fight with White Wraith, and his having expended both his dark magic and the Charismata, they’d have an uphill battle ahead of them if things turned violent...and if that happened, the roses were the least of Lex’s concerns.
But as he turned to follow Sanguine Disposition inside, it didn’t escape Lex’s notice that the white petals of the rose that had pricked Akna’s fingers were slowly turning bright red.
“...right away.”
Lex caught the tail end of Sanguine Disposition’s whisper – doubtlessly an instruction to some unseen attendant – as he caught up to the stallion, who was waiting for them in an elegant-looking foyer. Red walls with deep brown paneling were highlighted by candelabras bolted to the wall, the lit wicks filling the room with natural light, a far cry from the magical illumination used throughout the rest of the city. Several doors led off in various directions, with Sanguine Disposition himself waiting by an open one near the back.
“Normally I’d ask if you’d like to rest and refresh yourselves after the trials you’ve been through, but I believe you said that you weren’t planning on remaining in Eigengrau very long, yes?”
The red-eyed stallion directed his question to Lex, who answered with a curt nod. Smiling, the leather wing gestured toward the door beside him. “In that case, since you’ve done me the honor of accepting my invitation despite the pressing nature of your business here, I’ll make good on my offer of dinner and then see you on your way. Although...”
He paused as his crimson orbs slid over Solvei and Akna before returning to Lex. “There’s no reason why your servants should have to dance attendance while you and I take our repast, is there? With your permission, I can have them shown to comfortable quarters while we get to know each other better.”
Akna tensed at that, and she wasn’t the only one. Master, he wants to split us up! yelped Solvei across their link. We shouldn’t-
“That’s fine,” answered Lex without looking back at the winter wolf.
“Excellent!” Clapping his hooves together, Sanguine Disposition indicated the open door next to him. “Right this way, then.”
Lex immediately moved after the red-eyed stallion, leaving the Solvei and Akna behind without so much as a backwards glance.
But not without further instructions.
Solvei, as soon as you and Akna are alone, use that opportunity to check her lifeline.
Her lifeline? Nervousness and confusion came from Solvei in equal measure, clearly not happy about his leaving them. Why?
Resisting the urge to sigh across their link, Lex explained. We only came here because our lifelines were pointing in this direction, remember? Now that we’re inside the city walls, we need to check them again in order to confirm if they’re indicating whether or not we should proceed beyond the other side of Eigengrau’s boundaries. But since we need to keep our lifelines a secret-
We have to check them where no one else can see! finished Solvei. Now I understand!
Exactly. While I keep Sanguine Disposition occupied, the two of you wait until you’re alone and then check Akna’s lifeline. Since this place is heavily warded, there’s minimal risk of anyone spying on you from outside.
So that’s why you wanted to come here! Because after what happened with White Wraith, you knew we’d drawn too much attention, and so needed someplace safe to check which direction your lifelines were pointing once we got inside the walls! For a moment, Lex registered Solvei’s state of mind as changing to awe, only for worry to come to the fore a moment later. But, Master, what if that bat pony’s servants spy on us while we’re checking Akna’s lifeline? If they live here, they might know how to get around whatever magic is protecting this place.
That’s a calculated risk, admitted Lex, silently following Sanguine Disposition as the leather wing led him deeper into his villa. Fortunately, whatever wards were built into the place didn’t keep him from sensing her distance and direction from him. Hopefully they wouldn’t keep him from teleporting her to his side if worse came to worst, but if everything went well he wouldn’t need to try and find out. But it’s a risk we have to take. He didn’t attack us while he was observing our fight with White Wraith, so it’s unlikely that he will now.
I guess, answered Solvei doubtfully. But I still don’t trust him.
Neither do I, agreed Lex. That’s why I want you to take as many precautions as you can when you check Solvei’s lifeline. Use your magic to surround yourselves with a barrier of ice; that way, even if Sanguine Disposition’s lackeys know how to bypass the wards, all they’ll see is the frozen water surrounding you.
Understood!
Lex allowed the conversation to lapse with that, as Sanguine Disposition opened a door near the end of the hallway they were traveling down with a flourish. “Here we are!”
Gesturing for Lex to enter, the leather wing made sure to close the door behind him once he’d followed his guest inside.
Rather than a spacious banquet hall, he’d brought them to a surprisingly small dining room, with a cloth-covered round table barely large enough for two ponies to sit at taking up the center of the chamber. As in the foyer, the only light was provided by candles, primarily the three that were at the middle of the table, with just a few additional tapers strategically set along the walls. A glass bottle and two goblets were already set out, as were two steaming plates of a diced red substance that Lex couldn’t identify.
“Bloodfruit,” explained Sanguine Disposition as he glided around Lex. “From a private reserve I keep outside of town. It’s normally quite dangerous to eat, but when properly prepared, it can dazzle the palate like nothing else.”
Holding out a chair, he gestured for Lex to sit down. Eyeing the leather wing for a moment, Lex slowly approached and took the offered chair. Grinning wider, Sanguine Disposition didn’t immediately take the opposite seat, instead reaching out to open the bottle sitting on the table. “Are you familiar with syrinelle? It’s one of the rarer vintages of elven wines. I’ve always appreciated the way its sweet aftertaste that hides how strong it really is.”
Never having heard of the liquor in question, Lex gave a noncommittal grunt as the other stallion poured a tall glass for each of them.
Finally, Sanguine Disposition sat down. “So, now that it’s just the two of us, what shall we talk about?”
“Tell me why you think I have a blessing from Kara.”
Sanguine Disposition didn’t immediately respond to Lex’s demand, instead eating a spoonful of his bloodfruit. Savoring it for a moment, he reached for his wineglass as soon as he swallowed, closing his eyes as he sipped at the vintage. “It’s the contrast that makes this particular wine go so well with bloodfruit,” he murmured, lightly swirling the glass. “The tartness of the dish is counteracted by the syrinelle’s sweetness, and the mixture of the two on your tongue is just...exquisite.”
Lex glowered at the leather wing, but when Sanguine Disposition opened his eyes, he didn’t lose his relaxed smile. “You should try it before it gets cold,” he urged, nodding toward Lex’s plate. “The piquancy is at its sharpest when it’s still warm.”
When Lex ignored the food in favor of glaring at him, the red-eyed stallion snickered softly. “Or are you worried that the dish is poisoned?”
Lex’s lip curled at that, though in truth the thought had crossed his mind. He had a divine spell that could retard – though not prevent – the onset of poisons, toxins, drugs, and other such substances by several hours, by which time he hoped to be gone from Sanguine Disposition’s presence. But that spell wasn’t available to him right now; he’d used up the magic necessary to cast it when he’d created the food necessary to bring Teyu Yagua under his influence. Just like his dark magic and the Charismata, it would be the better part of a day before that power replenished itself.
But then again, he wasn’t even sure if poison was something he had to worry about at the moment. His physical body was still back on Everglow; the part of him that was in Darkest Night right now was his soul, manifesting as an approximation of his corporeal self, albeit also with copies of everything that had been on his person at the time he’d undergone the Rite of Sublimation. Was that why Sanguine Disposition had been chuckling when he’d broached that idea? Because poison was self-evidently a non-issue in his current incarnation?
Silently cursing his own lack of knowledge, Lex took a moment to weigh his options before telekinetically lifting his spoon.
With no way of measuring the particulars of his current situation, there were only two choices: either continue to play Sanguine Disposition’s game, or discontinue indulging the other stallion’s so-called hospitality and leave, by force if necessary. Both options carried risks, but the latter had a markedly higher chance of precipitating a violent confrontation, and that was still something Lex wanted to avoid. Particularly since all indicators were that, even without Breakdown, Sanguine Disposition wouldn’t be defeated as easily as White Wraith had been.
A pleased sound came from the other stallion’s throat as Lex tried the bloodfruit. “Make sure to follow it with the wine,” he purred, gazing at the unicorn with hooded eyes from across the trio candles that separated them. “I’m curious to know if we have the same taste in what we find delightful.”
Taking a sip of the syrinelle, Lex tried to figure out what response would be most conducive to terminating this line of conversation. “The interplay of flavors was as you described.”
“It’s good to know that I’ve proven my credibility,” teased Sanguine Disposition, pausing to take another bite of his bloodfruit, followed by a sip of wine. “Which,” he continued after another moment of appreciation for the meal, “is why you can be certain that it’s not a case of my ‘thinking’ you have a blessing from Kara. It’s that you absolutely do.”
Lex paused, another portion of bloodfruit halfway to his mouth. “And how, precisely, do you know that?”
“Hmm.” Not replying immediately, Sanguine Disposition continued eating, and after forcing down his frustration at being so clearly toyed with, Lex did the same.
For almost a full minute, the only sound was the soft clinking of their mutual dining, before at last Sanguine Disposition spoke up again. “As one of our goddess’s faithful, I assume you’re familiar with what her religion teaches about the three manifestations of power?”
“...my relationship with the Night Mare has been a matter of pragmatism, rather than faith,” admitted Lex, trying not to grimace. First the Keeper, and now Sanguine Disposition; it was enough to make him regret not having made even a cursory study of the Night Mare’s dogma during his previous sojourns to Everglow.
“Is that so?” mused Sanguine Disposition softly, smirk deepening. “Well, you’re in luck then, since I make a habit of teaching stallions new things.”
Lex’s brow furrowed at that, but the leather wing didn’t give him a chance to say anything before forging ahead. “Power can be defined in many different ways. Some say it’s purely about controlling energy, while others call it the ability to effect change. But the truest form of power, according to the Night Mare, is power over other people. That’s because, unlike energy – which bends to anyone with the ability to manipulate it – and effecting change, which simply alters a dynamic without necessarily guiding it, the wills of others have the capacity to act independently. Ergo, suborning them to your own is an accomplishment beyond simply altering some aspect of your environment; it demonstrates mastery, rather than mere ability.”
A scowl crossed Lex’s face then, but he didn’t protest the doctrine. Before, he would have pointed out the lack of any moral element to what Sanguine Disposition was saying, citing a critical lack of responsibility with regard to how that influence was achieved, or what ends it was put toward. But now, having so recently been shown the futility of his life up until now, he didn’t bother objecting, allowing the red-eyed stallion to continue.
“How, then, does one take control of another?” asked Sanguine Disposition rhetorically. “The Night Mare teaches us that there are three ways: the first is through violence. Whether directly or by implication, wielded against an enemy or something they care about, the prospect of pain, destruction, and death has always been a reliable method of ensuring obedience.”
This time Lex couldn’t help but snort, and Sanguine Disposition made a show of nodding at him. “Ah, I suppose I should have mentioned that method – all of them, really – only work if you’re more resourceful than a potential opponent. Someone who has greater command of a particular application of power won’t be dominated so easily.”
“An important caveat to keep in mind.”
Chuckling again, Sanguine Disposition took a moment to enjoy more of his meal before continuing. “The second form of power is through control of resources. It’s by far the most expansive of the three, as ‘resources’ can be almost anything. Food, water, and shelter are universally recognized as necessities for living. Others use money, magic, or information. What it comes down to is that you’re the one who oversees access to something that others need, or at least want, badly enough that they’ll obey you in order to gain it. Though in some cases that can also include others not wanting something distributed to someone else.”
Memories of Vanhoover came to Lex then, recalling how the ponies there had quickly fallen under his sway when he’d begun passing out the things they’d needed after he’d liberated the city from the monsters infesting it. Food, medicine, and money; even before he’d taken his royal title from that wretch Blueblood, the population had been willing to follow him when they’d recognized his ability to procure the supplies they’d so desperately needed to begin rebuilding their lives.
But those memories, like so many others, were painful to recall now, and Lex found himself eager to change the topic. “And the third form of power?”
Sanguine Disposition arched a brow then, giving Lex a pointed look. “Isn’t it obvious? Charisma.”
Lowering his wineglass from where he’d been having another sip of syrinelle, Lex couldn’t help but sneer. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m entirely serious,” countered Sanguine Disposition. “Charisma isn’t just a charming smile and a winning personality, you know. It’s an ability to present yourself as being someone special, superior to others in a way that they themselves not only can’t help but acknowledge, but regard with awe rather than envy. It’s what draws sycophants to celebrities, causes soldiers to charge into certain death on a commander’s orders, and makes commoners kneel when kings and priests walk by.”
Frowning, Lex found himself thinking of Princess Celestia then, recalling how she’d been revered by all of Equestria for a thousand years despite having done nothing for her people – besides fight the occasional monster and manage the odd crisis – during that time. The mere sight of her, or any alicorn, had been enough to cause ponies to accept them as royalty, bowing down whenever they caught sight of the unaging monarchs simply because of what they were.
“Of course,” continued the leather wing, taking another bite of his bloodfruit, “the most effective rulers command more than just one form of power. Violence, by itself, eventually inspires a revolt. Control of resources fails when alternative resources are discovered. Charisma alone isn’t enough to overcome a more direct challenge to one’s authority. Hence why the strongest leaders are those that have all three, and the most successful of the strong are those who make sure to reinforce those forms of power among the groups that they control.”
That last part struck a chord with Lex. “You’re referring to institutionalization.”
“Precisely!” Flashing Lex a grin, Sanguine Disposition took another sip of his wine. “The idea that laws must be obeyed or there will be punishments administered is nothing more than the threat of violence writ large. Control of resources at the societal level is a combination of taxation, acquisition and distribution of goods, and control over management processes. And charisma, the most ephemeral, can be turned into a cultural value where certain positions and individuals are revered as a part of a group’s collective identity.”
Lex pondered that for a moment, but any attempt to put what he’d been told into a practical context made him think more about Equestria, and he’d already grown sick of doing that. “What does any of this have to do with what you said about my having Kara’s blessing?”
Pausing as he ate the last of his bloodfruit, Sanguine Disposition leaned back in his chair. “As the exemplar of all three forms of power, the Night Mare encourages those who worship her to develop those strengths. Or at least, to support those that do if they determine that they’re personally unable to ascend to such heights. But to that end, she can also imbue certain mortals with the qualities that she herself possesses.”
Again, Lex was able to infer what his dinner partner was hinting at. “You’re referring to the Charismata.”
“It’s the third form of power, taken to a godly extreme,” nodded Sanguine Disposition. “As the nature of the divine is to rewrite parts of reality through force of will, your possession of a sliver of the Night Mare’s own godly essence allows you to, essentially, over-awe certain aspects of reality that she claims dominion over. Eldritch beasts, which are part of her divine portfolio, will – unless they command incredible power – be forced to obey your orders, will gain new powers or have their existing ones augmented if you wish them to be, and will even pledge their souls to you if you demand it of them. All because their essential nature recognizes that you’re beyond them, and submits accordingly.”
This time Lex had to fight down a wince, thinking of Solvei. Either Sanguine Disposition didn’t notice, or pretended not to, refilling his wineglass. “Of course, you can use the Charismata to exert your influence over certain other parts of existence, but those won’t work nearly as well. Mortal bodies can only hold so much power, after all, so it’s no surprise that even the greatest blessing is sharply limited compared to the full range of even a minor god’s might.”
The Keeper’s words came to mind then, the floating skull having asked why Lex hadn’t used the Charismata to sanctify the area, or his companions’ gear, before fighting Sissel and her siblings. Given how recently he’d learned that he could do more than control certain creatures’ motor functions, Lex had been keenly aware of the implication that he still hadn’t learned the full range of what the Charismata could do.
Now Sanguine Disposition was lending that idea further credence.
But the leather wing wasn’t finished delivering revelations just yet.
“For what it’s worth, I can sympathize if you find the Charismata’s limitations frustrating,” he added lightly, leaning back in his chair. “I would have preferred something more substantive than ferrying out hidden truths, which is a form of resource-control, but we don’t get to choose what sort of blessings we receive.”
Pausing as he finished the last of his wine, Lex slowly lowered his glass, staring at the red-eyed stallion as a chill went down his spine. “...what?”
“That’s how I knew you have a blessing from Kara,” answered Sanguine Disposition lightly.
“The same way the Night Mare gave you the Charismata, she gave me the Secreta.”
“It’s really the most awful name, isn’t it?” sighed Sanguine Disposition. “It sounds more like ‘secrete’ rather than ‘secret,’ but I suppose that’s due to the contemporary vernacular more than anything else. Perhaps in a few hundred years the language we’re speaking will change enough that the name will sound mellifluous rather than grating.”
Lex shook his head, unconcerned with the leather wing’s complaints about his blessing’s name. “What, exactly, does that ability let you discern?”
He tried his best to keep his voice casual, not wanting to display the sudden tension coursing through him. As he’d noted during his battle with White Wraith, control of information was paramount during any sort of tactical engagement with an enemy. Although his dark magic foiled thought-reading spells and powers the same way it did for mind-altering magic, his reserves were currently depleted. Which meant that he had very little to left if he ended up needing to fight Sanguine Disposition.
While the ring on right on his right foreleg granted him immunity to minor divinatory powers, and he could say without conceit that his ability to resist invasive magic was considerable, Lex didn’t care to test either of those against a blessing that was on par with what the Charismata could do.
Sanguine Disposition, however, simply waggled his eyebrows. “That’s always the first question people ask when they find out I have the Secreta,” he answered with a coy smirk. “Which, I suppose, is another way that the ability to unearth secrets, as a form of resource-control, grants power. When other people think that you’ve learned things they’d rather keep hidden, but aren’t sure precisely what it is that you know, it invariably puts them on the defensive.”
Lex’s eyes flashed at that, and he abruptly stood up, incensed at the implication that the other stallion had cowed him. But before he could give voice to the angry retort that was already on his lips, Sanguine Disposition continued speaking. “But we were talking about the blessing that Kara gave you, weren’t we? Now that we’ve both finished our meal, please allow me to tell you what I know of it.”
“I find myself beginning to wonder if you spoke truthfully about my having such a blessing,” hissed Lex. “Or if you have the power that you claim, for that matter.”
Sanguine Disposition blinked. “You think this has all been an elaborate ruse on my part?” He put a hoof to his chin, as though considering the possibility. “I suppose that’s understandable, since I’ve offered no proof of my claims. Very well then, how about this: right now, you’re wearing an apotropaic cloak of considerable ability, an amulet that increases your combat prowess and hardens your skin, and a robe that likewise increases your kinetic reflexes. The circlet on your brow allows you to see magic, albeit only with modest acuity, and contains a small reservoir of spell energy, though it’s currently expended. And I believe that pack at your side is an improvement on the usual extradimensional storage devices that are all the rage these days.”
Lex’s lip curled, the accurate summary of his magical gear failing to impress him. “Any spell designed to detect magical emanations would have told you that.”
Grunting in agreement, Sanguine Disposition took another sip of his wine before replying. “Would it also tell me that you’re here as an astral projection, and that you’re trying quite hard to hide your silver cord – or ‘lifeline’ as it’s colloquially referred to – beneath your robe?”
Lex stared hard at the leather wing for another few moments, then slowly sank back down into his seat.
Nodding his head in recognition of the unicorn’s acknowledgment, Sanguine Disposition gestured toward his guest. “For what it’s worth, I doubt I’d have noticed that if not for the Secreta. The spell to let someone leave their body like that, while still maintaining a connection to it, normally radiates a very striking aura, but yours doesn’t seem to have one at all. I’d ask how you pulled it off, but we can save that for another time. Now, as for Kara’s blessing...”
He held out a hoof then, and it took Lex several seconds to realize that he was waiting for him to touch his own to it. “Kara’s one of the subtler deities,” explained Sanguine Disposition when Lex gave him a sour look. “It was only because we made physical contact before that I was able to recognize her blessing at all. I can give you my general impression, but if you want a more detailed take on it...”
He shrugged, indicating his outstretched hoof again.
Gritting his teeth, Lex slowly reached out and placed his own hoof against the red-eyed pony’s. He knew that was a mistake, that he was likely giving the leather wing more information than he wanted, but if there was a divine influence on him besides the Night Mare’s, that wasn’t a possibility he could bring himself to overlook; debauched spells were one thing, but given that Kara had apparently meddled in his relationship with Sonata, the repercussions of her blessing likely went much further.
Closing his eyes, Sanguine Disposition slowly rubbed his hoof against Lex’s. “Hmm, yes, it’s definitely there. But it’s minor, nowhere near as potent as the Secreta or the Charismata.”
He paused, brow furrowing. “As I thought, it’s not affecting you directly, instead radiating out toward everyone in your vicinity.”
“To what end?”
“It’s strange,” murmured the leather wing. “It’s almost like a charm, but...different. More sophisticated. It’s not instigating any sort of compulsory reaction, but more like it’s...encouraging it? No. Nurturing. Yes, that’s it. It’s nurturing those feelings.”
“What feelings?” snapped Lex, his heart beating faster as a new sense of dread came over him. “What does her blessing actually do?”
Nodding as though satisfied, Sanguine Disposition withdrew his hoof then, opening his eyes. “From what I can tell, it draws out and encourages feelings of love for you in those who’d be naturally predisposed to harbor those sentiments in the first place.”
Snorting, the leather wing shook his head before taking a large sip from his wineglass. “I suppose that explains why I’m acting like a teenage colt trying to woo his first crush,” he muttered.
The remark went entirely unheard by Lex, who was barely able to move as Sanguine Disposition’s pronouncement echoed in his ears. But as he parsed what he’d just been told, integrating that new information against the last few months of his life, Lex found himself reflexively trying to keep his emotions contained. It was in vain, however, as just like during the Rite of Sublimation, the revelation was simply too large and too personal for him to control himself, and he found his reaction spilling out despite his attempts to control himself.
“...hehehe...”
Sanguine Disposition cocked his head as the stallion across from him began to chuckle quietly, head bent over so far that it was nearly touching the table. A moment later his mirth grew, shoulders jumping before Lex leaned his head back, facing toward the ceiling as he started to howl with laughter. “You seem to be taking that well.”
Lex didn’t answer, didn’t even hear him speak, too consumed by this latest, perfect irony.
He’d never been able to make sense of why, in the last few months, he’d suddenly been an object of so much affection from so many mares. It had been a complete reversal of his life up until that point, as his inability to understand the unspoken nuances of interpersonal communication had precluded romantic relationships, something that he’d come to think of as the very apex of social dynamics. To have repeatedly stumbled into not just one, but multiple intimate encounters in such rapid succession had been beyond his understanding.
But it made complete sense now.
“It was all lies!”
The words left his lips of their own accord, choked out between bouts of laughter. It was exactly what he’d always wanted: a simple answer to the most vexing of questions regarding how to get someone else to like him. But while the Rite of Sublimation had taught him that he’d never solve that particular question on his own – and had wasted his life trying – Kara’s blessing had made it clear that what progress he had made, at least when it came to the mares in his life, hadn’t been progress at all.
Thermal Draft’s inexplicable infatuation with him.
His disastrous relationship with Nosey.
Aria throwing herself at him in the train station.
Sonata...
“IT WAS ALL LIES!!!”
Leaping to his hooves, Lex upended the table, hooves and telekinesis sending it crashing into the wall as Sanguine Disposition barely got clear in time. Nor did he stop there, grabbing the chair he’d been sitting on and slamming it against the floor, not just once but again and again, until it had splintered into so many shards of wood. When there was nothing left of it to destroy, he turned his wrath toward the sconces on the wall, telekinetically tearing them free and flinging them away randomly.
Master! What’s wrong?! I can sense your-
Lex shut down his connection with Solvei immediately, but even the momentary contact was enough to send his thoughts spiraling down new, unwanted avenues. The winter wolf’s devotion had always struck him as incongruous for how briefly they’d known each other, having abandoned the family she’d risked her life to save in favor of staying by his side. Was that an effect of Kara’s blessing also? If all it did was encourage love, then that didn’t necessarily have to be limited to romance.
And that was enough to make all of his other relationships suspect as well. For all that Lex excelled at conceptual disciplines, the various forms of love and the continuum between them and other positive inclinations wasn’t something he’d ever seen any point in charting. Which meant that Kara’s influence might have been far wider than he’d initially imagined.
Just the thought was enough to send him searching for something else to break. But with no furniture left, all he could do was stumble to the edge of the room and slam his foreleg against the wall. The punch accomplished nothing except to make his hoof ache, but he did it again. Then again. And then again.
Was it because of Kara’s blessing that Fruit Crunch and his friends had been so intent on following in his hoofsteps? Was it the reason why Cloudbank had gone from despising him to regarding him as someone to be emulated? Or why Garden Gate had been so intent on returning from Canterlot to continue helping him restore Vanhoover, despite how harshly he’d condemned her?
The same questions could just as easily have been applied to River Bank, or Feather Duster, or Ribbon Cutter, or a plethora of other ponies that he’d gradually developed working relationships with other the last few months. And while Lex knew that attributing all of those to Kara’s blessing was likely giving it more credit than it was due – there had to be some sort of distinction to be made between love and other non-antipathetic dispositions – there was no way to know for sure.
Which meant that his relationships with all of them were suspect.
“...it was...all...lies...”
His strength deserting him at last, Lex almost collapsed against the wall he’d been trying in vain to break, his laughter having long since tapered off to heavy breathing. This completed the cycle of what he’d lost when he’d undergone the Rite of Sublimation, destroying not only his sense of purpose, but the emotional investment he’d made in everypony he’d ever known. He could only imagine what his tulpa would do with that information now that he knew just how much...how much...
That was when Lex realized that he hadn’t heard anything from the rogue portion of his mind since he’d undergone the Rite.
“You look like a pony who’s lost everything.”
Belatedly remembering that Sanguine Disposition was there, Lex looked at the leather wing. “...what?”
Seemingly unconcerned with the destruction of his dining room, the red-eyed stallion stepped closer to him. “I’m guessing that learning about Kara’s blessing has made you reevaluate one or more relationships you’ve had, yes? For what it’s worth, you have my sympathy. And since you’ve pointedly neglected to talk about what it is that’s brought you to Eigengrau in the first place, when last I heard you heading up the Night Mare’s religion back on your world...would I be wrong if I guessed that you’re here because something went awry with building your powerbase?”
“That’s no concern of yours!”
“It’s not,” agreed the leather wing, “but you are.”
Narrowing his eyes, Lex scoffed. But that didn’t stop Sanguine Disposition from walking over to him and kneeling down, placing himself at eye-level with Lex. “The third power that the Night Mare grants is called the Dominata. Like the Charismata and Secreta, it’s an extremely powerful blessing, one that grants the ability to overwhelm others. It’s currently held by a pony – if you can call him that - named Steel Soul.”
“And?” spat Lex.
“And as you can imagine from someone who has a power with that name, he’s not exactly the sort who cultivates alliances or networks. And he especially hates competition.”
“By which you mean you.”
“By which I mean us,” corrected Sanguine Disposition. “I promise you, so long as you possess the Charismata, Steel Soul is your enemy. He might not openly go to war against you, since he knows that the Night Mare disapproves of that level of infighting among her Chosen, but if he doesn’t know who you are already, he will soon. Once that happens, he’ll dedicate himself to stymying your every ambition, foiling your every plan, and ruining your every endeavor, all to make you look incompetent in front of the Night Mare in hopes that she’ll discard you or destroy you, and give him the blessing she’s assigned to you. In this, I speak from experience.”
“He’ll have a hard time with that,” replied Lex bitterly. “I have no ambitions or endeavors left to be undone.”
He knew that remark was a mistake as soon as it left his mouth, revealing too much of his shattered life to someone he’d just met and didn’t trust. But even that was a fleeting regret. What did it matter if the leather wing knew that he’d lost everything he’d valued?
“Then why not make some new ones here?”
The statement was so incongruous that it took Lex a moment to properly comprehend it. “...what?”
“Let’s work together. We both have an enemy in Steel Soul, and I’ve been doing my best to check his plans, but there’s only so much I can do on my own. But if we join forces-”
“I don’t care about whatever private war you’re waging with the Night Mare’s other champion,” interrupted Lex, slowly standing back up despite how wretched he felt. “And even if I was going to stay in Darkest Night, it wouldn’t be here. You’ve made a town where humiliating ponies for minor offenses is seen as a virtue instead of a vice...”
He trailed off, belatedly recalling how pointless his moral indignation was, and Sanguine Disposition jumped in. “Then help me make it better.”
Lex sneered, but the leather wing kept going. “I’m serious. You’re unimpressed by the afterlife that this place offers ponies? Then let’s change it. Right now, the person who runs Eigengrau is the Lord Marshall. I can have them dismissed, and you appointed to that office, at which point we can work on reforming this place into an afterlife you’ll be proud of.”
Again, Lex’s lip curled, but to his surprise he found himself thinking the offer over. He’d already been wondering if it was worth going back to his body, and that had been before he’d realized that Kara’s influence had been the only reason he’d been loved. Now that he knew that...was there any point in going back to Everglow, let alone Equestria?
It wasn’t as though he could save Thermal Draft; his only hope for that had been to become an alicorn, and that wasn’t going to happen now. The mares of Fail Forward were likely going to lose their lives as well, since even his best efforts had only limited success in fighting Sissel’s clan of monsters. He owed Akna nothing, since she’d come here for her own purposes; at most, taking her back to her body would fulfill any lingering obligation he had to the adlet shaman. And Solvei would be nothing more than an undetectable ghost if he went back anyway.
As for everypony he’d left behind on Equestria...he still didn’t know if the mares he loved – and whom he now knew had been manipulated into loving him – were even still alive. Everyone else likely thought he was dead by now. He might have sent a message to Coat Tail and Tranquila via his magic, but with how long had passed since then, it wouldn’t have been surprising if they were doubtful about whether they’d actually heard him. Besides, by now Celestia and the other alicorns were doubtlessly dismantling everything he’d tried to build.
With his entire life reduced to ashes, was there any reason not to start over here? Eigengrau had been unimpressive in the afterlife that it offered the Night Mare’s faithful, but could it be turned into something better, the sort of eternal reward that ponies deserved?
It was a more attractive offer than Lex had anticipated.
But that didn’t mean he was ready to trust the pony making it.
“If the Lord Marshall is someone you can so easily dismiss,” noted Lex, giving the red-eyed stallion a baleful look, “then it’s not a position that I’m interested in holding.”
“Fair enough,” admitted Sanguine Disposition. “Since you’re royalty, it’s reasonable that you’d have an elevated title and a more expansive portfolio than what’s currently given to this town’s current authority. And of course, you wouldn’t be beholden to me.”
“You’re suggesting that we oversee Eigengrau as partners?” scoffed Lex.
Smiling, Sanguine Disposition sauntered toward him, once again moving closer than was polite, this time without stopping.
“Oh, I’m envisioning a much closer relationship than that.”
The question earned a throaty chuckle from Sanguine Disposition, the leather wing continuing to advance on him. “Showing you just how much I’m going to enjoy working with you,” he purred. “And I promise, you’ll enjoy it too.”
He was close enough now that Lex could smell the remnants of their meal on the red-eyed stallion’s breath, the tartness of the food intermingling with the sweet scent of the wine. But there was another odor there as well. The metallic, almost coppery smell was one that struck him as intensely familiar, and it took him only a second to recognize it.
Blood.
Suddenly everything clicked.
One of the spells that he’d received from Kara was designed to transform a pony into a blood-sucking undead creature. Sanguine Disposition had mentioned, before they’d entered Eigengrau, that he had history with Kara. He was in possession of sharp, elongated canines, something the leather wing guards at the town’s gate hadn’t had. And now there was the smell of blood on his breath. It all added up to a single conclusion, one that was obvious in hindsight.
“You’re a vampire.”
Blinking, Sanguine Disposition stopped his advance, his ever-present smile falling away as it was replaced by a look of surprise. “Are you really just figuring that out now?”
The admission was enough to make Lex step back, revulsion coloring his features. No matter that vampires, in all the stories he’d heard back on Equestria, displayed no signs of rot or decay; they were still nothing more than animate corpses, akin to the ghouls that had infested Vanhoover. They even had the same method of reproducing, spreading their unnatural existence via biting the living. The only difference was that where the flesh-eaters had been ambush predators, vampires camouflaged themselves as still being alive in order to get close to their victims.
But to Lex, their appearance was immaterial; it was their nature which made them so reviled. It was one thing to be in a realm populated by souls that had lived out their mortal lives; those were still people, their intrinsic selves manifesting in familiar forms that echoed how they’d appeared before dying. They were who they’d always been, even if they were no longer alive.
The same couldn’t be said for the undead. The massive influx of negative energy that served to not only kill them, but reanimate them after death invariably warped them on a fundamental level. How could it not? If even minor alterations in body chemistry could affect major changes in personality and temperament, then it was impossible to conceive of a way that an inundation of necromancy – one sufficient to not only kill someone but also prevent their souls from moving on – wouldn’t change someone to the point where they were barely the same person anymore.
To Lex, such a fundamental change to someone’s sense of self was abhorrent in the extreme, and so it was that he found himself glaring at Sanguine Disposition, disgusted by how close the vampire had been to him. “Keep your distance, dead thing!”
The rebuke accomplished nothing except to make the leather wing pout, continuing to step closer to him. “Don’t be like that. I might be a vampire, but I underwent the transformation voluntarily, and I’m exactly the same pony now that I was before.”
“You’re a parasite,” spat Lex. “A corpse that can only sustain itself by feeding on others.”
“Actually, bloodfruit serves as a substitute for the real thing,” replied Sanguine Disposition, his impish grin returning. “Or did you think that the name was just for show?”
His stomach clenching at the thought of having eaten something a vampire found palatable, Lex’s lip curled. “Be that as it may, anyone who’d mutilate themselves the way you have-”
“Altering yourself in order to gain power is a virtue in the Night Mare’s religion,” cut in Sanguine Disposition, clucking his tongue. “I might have embraced vampirism during my time in Kara’s realm, but I did so in pursuit of the power necessary to accomplish my goals. If the Night Mare can respect that, surely you can too?”
“The results alone are not sufficient justification!” snarled Lex. “The manner in which you reach them is no less important, and the line you’ve crossed...”
But just like before, Lex found that he couldn’t continue spouting beliefs that he no longer found value in, with even his shock and disgust at Sanguine Disposition’s true nature being insufficient to maintain his vehemence. What the leather wing had done to himself was appalling, but Lex found it no less appalling than how he’d slaughtered so many other ponies during the Rite of Sublimation’s test. That they had been illusions had been irrelevant; at the time, the distinction had been lost on him.
What right did he have to criticize someone else for not living up to the standards that he himself no longer put any stock in?
As if sensing that the other stallion had lost the thread of the argument, Sanguine Disposition spoke up. “For what it’s worth, I wasn’t trying to hide what I was. I suppose I’ve simply gotten so used to everyone knowing that I’m a vampire that I just thought of it as common knowledge.”
Lex’s lip curled again, this time in incredulity as much as disgust. “You’re telling me that the ponies of Eigengrau accept you, despite knowing what you are?”
“Why wouldn’t they? I’ve worked hard to make this place what it is, and while I’ll admit it’s still a work in progress, I’ve done everything I can prove myself worthy of their trust. The same way I want to be worthy of yours.”
That last part was enough to earn a scornful laugh from Lex. “You’ve done nothing to earn my trust.”
“Then let me do so now.” Again, Sanguine Disposition had moved within hooves’ reach, and it was only then that Lex realized he’d backed into a corner of the dining room, giving him nowhere else to fall back to. “I promise, you won’t regret it.”
As the red-eyed stallion leaned in closer, Lex found himself hesitating. He’d already lost everything else he’d believed in; would it really make that much of a difference if he threw away his aversion to the vampire also? After all, he’d already been entertaining Sanguine Disposition’s offer to start over here in Eigengrau. Accepting the leather wing’s true nature was, in that sense, simply an extension of that idea; another remnant of his old life to be discarded, now that he knew how worthless that life had been.
And yet...
“I said-”
As Sanguine Disposition’s face came within an inch of his own, Lex raised a hoof.
“-KEEP YOUR DISTANCE!”
Even as the words left his mouth, Lex felt his resolve come surging back, a profound realization flashing across his consciousness.
Sanguine Disposition was a deplorable creature, but not because he was a vampire. Rather, it was because he was a pony who had no regrets about how far he’d fallen, to the point where he didn’t think that he’d fallen at all. Rather than having failed to live up to any sort of moral code that Lex could recognize, the leather wing’s inability to see that he’d desecrated himself in his pursuit of power was a sign of someone with no inner compass at all. He’d admitted it himself: “I’m exactly the same pony now that I was before,” he’d said, making it clear that he saw no difference between being alive and being undead.
Despite how far he’d fallen, that level of iniquity was something Lex couldn’t bring himself to accept.
He could still acknowledge that his failures had been failures, and in so doing, define what success was. And that was enough to show him the truth that he’d lost sight of. Even if the mares in his life had only loved him because of Kara’s manipulation, and despite the fact that he’d been pursuing a method of understanding others which would never bear fruit, neither of those changed the fundamental nature of the actions he’d undertaken. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and protecting the weak were virtuous undertakings, no matter the circumstances!
The Rite of Sublimation had showed him that he’d never have his heart’s desire.
The revelation about Kara’s blessing meant that he wasn’t truly loved by anyone.
But neither of those things undercut the moral code that he’d lived his life by. His ethical framework hadn’t been disproven by what he’d gone through; he’d simply lost faith in it, convinced that if he’d been so wrong about so much else, that must have been flawed also.
Now he knew better.
Seeing how corrupt Sanguine Disposition truly was, and realizing that he could recognize that, had shown Lex that there was still something worthwhile in himself. It wouldn’t make his life any less painful, but it did give it meaning.
Which is more than can be said for you, vampire! seethed Lex as he brought his hoof toward the leather wing’s ribs. He knew that the blow wouldn’t accomplish nothing; that while his magic items were enough to give him some modest proficiency in physical attacks, the myriad spells that Sanguine Disposition was wearing would doubtlessly protect him from the blow. But at the moment, he didn’t care.
No matter that fighting was the strategically unsound choice. Rejecting Sanguine Disposition meant reclaiming the last worthwhile part of himself. For that, Lex was prepared to put everything on the line.
I’m going to go back and finish what I started! I’ll find a way to save Thermal Draft, resurrect Solvei, defeat Sissel and her siblings, and return to Equestria! EVEN IF I HAVE TO GO THROUGH YOU!
Acknowledged.
Lex blinked as the vow he’d made in the privacy of his thoughts received an answer.
But it wasn’t Solvei who had given the clipped, single-word response. Nor was it the Night Mare.
Rather, the voiceless response came from his tulpa.
Nor was its answer given in isolation. Even as Lex’s hoof crossed the last few inches toward Sanguine Disposition’s torso, his shadow – stretched out on the floor beneath him, in defiance of the few remaining candles on the wall – suddenly reached up, the umbral outline corresponding to the hoof throwing the punch lifting itself off of the floor to make contact with his foreleg.
As it did, black crystals covered his hoof.
The gauntlet that formed around his foreleg then was similar to the one he’d made when he’d fought Starlight Glimmer. But even as Lex struggled to comprehend exactly how that was possible, he realized that it wasn’t the same as when he’d fought the madmare. That gauntlet had been nothing more than a blunt instrument, a collection of crystals designed to give his punches further weight.
But the one he was wearing now was deeply embedded with spellwork, the magic inside it registering brightly to his supernatural senses.
It apparently did the same for Sanguine Disposition, because Lex could already see the leather wing leaning back, his crimson eyes widening and mouth opening in a gasp as he saw what was happening. But he was too close and too surprised to do anything about it.
Then Lex’s punch connected.
Sanguine Disposition immediately let out a horrific screech of agony, the sound surpassing anything that could have come from a living pony’s throat.
He wrenched himself away from Lex so quickly that he was halfway across the room in the time it took to blink. But even as he threw himself backward, the effects of the gauntlet took hold. His flesh immediately began to desiccate, fur losing its color as his muscles deteriorated. Wing membranes dried up, turning into crinkly masses of old leather while his mane and tail turned a sickly grey.
Openmouthed, Lex could only stare as Sanguine Disposition continued to decompose, somehow managing to tear his eyes away from the grisly spectacle to look first at the magical weapon wrapped around his hoof, and then at his shadow.
That hadn’t been a spell. His tulpa might have had the power to use magic on its own, but it could only prepare spells that he himself knew, and he’d never even heard of a spell to create some sort of anti-undead weapon – or whatever this was – the way it just had. But if it wasn’t a spell, then what had just happened? The only times his tulpa had ever used something besides a misappropriated spell had been when it had summoned his nightmares into the real world.
But this wasn’t from any nightmare he’d ever had. If anything, it was the complete opposite; rather than a source of discomfort in his dreams, it was something he’d desperately needed now, while awake.
...or was that the answer? Bringing his nightmares into the real world was, essentially, giving concepts a material form, using magic to grant them a physical presence. How exactly his tulpa could do that, Lex still wasn’t sure, but at the moment that was less important than the fact that it had just done so in a manner radically different than anything previously displayed.
For that matter, it hadn’t even done so in response to the usual stimulus. The Night Mare herself had told him that it took action when he experienced intense fear for his sense of self. But what he’d felt just now hadn’t been fear, but righteous determination. If anything, the existential fear that she’d been alluding to had been completely absent; ever since he’d undergone the Rite of Sublimation, his worst fears had all come true, which would mean...
Would mean...
A shudder ran down Lex’s spine as he looked at his shadow again, and he let out a slow breath as he closed his eyes, concentrating.
When he opened them again, his shadow was up against the wall, rather than under his hooves...which put it directly opposite the candlelight, exactly where it was supposed to be.
The sight almost made Lex’s knees give out, having found the answer:
He had finally gained control over the rogue aspect of his consciousness.
After nearly two years of internal torment, of being castigated and berated whenever his anger or despair overwhelmed him, of horrific dreams that had made his every night an exercise in anguish and misery, he had finally mastered that piece of himself. It might not have been completely reintegrated into his greater consciousness – the fact that it was still capable of independent action proved that much – but it was no longer working against him.
Now that his worst fears had been realized, there was nothing left that his tulpa could torment him with. No more biting comments. No more nightmares. No more bending his shadow in unnatural directions.
And no more utilizing its goddess-given powers according to its own judgment. They were his to call upon now. And if what he’d just done to Sanguine Disposition was any indication, they were greater than he’d-
“Caught...me by...surprise...”
The rasping voice drew Lex out of his thoughts, tensing up as, across the room, the rotting form of Sanguine Disposition slowly straightened up. “The Secreta...didn’t tell me...about that...”
Even as he spoke, the damage that Lex had inflicted on him was repairing itself. His mane and tail regained their luster as his wings grew full and thick, muscles regrowing as the skin and fur covering them grew hale and hearty again.
In a matter of seconds, his appearance was completely restored, and even his smile was back in place as he casually brushed the dust from his vest.
“What do you mean you don’t know?! How can you not know?!”
“I don’t know because I don’t know! It’s not like you know either!”
Akna’s response to her angry shout was enough to make Solvei snarl, baring her teeth, but she but she forced herself to swallow the furious retort that came to her lips. As much as she hated to admit it, the adlet was right: she didn’t know the answer either, something which was as frustrating as it was embarrassing. One simple task! she raged inwardly, making sure not to transmit those thoughts. Master gave me one simple task, and I can’t even do that right!
It should have been the easiest assignment ever. All she had to do was wait until she and Akna were alone, take as many precautions as possible to make sure no one was spying on them, and then check the shaman’s lifeline to figure out where it was pointing. Given that her strong and proud master – even after having suffered so horribly in that awful Rite, and then being hurt while fighting that White Wraith pony in spite of her vow to protect him – had chosen to take on the dangerous task of keeping Sanguine Disposition busy, failure wasn’t something Solvei was willing to allow for.
And yet she was failing now.
By all rights she shouldn’t have been. After Master and the bat pony had left, another door had opened all on its own, as though beckoning them to enter. With no obvious alternative, she and Akna had accepted the silent invitation, entering to find a long corridor. One that, unlike the room they’d just left, was completely dark, the candles on the wall unlit.
On its own, that had given no indication of what the owner of this place intended for them, but for an odd quirk that had happened as they’d ventured down the hallway: the candles had slowly lit up as they’d approached them, quietly illuminating their path.
Solvei had found the effect unnerving; having flames, even tiny ones, appear from out of nowhere made her uncomfortable. That it happened in a place that was oppressively silent, completely empty, and hideously confined made it far worse. Why would anyone want to live in one of these “house” things?! Compared to being outside, it was like being buried alive! Even the caves that she and her family had rested in had been spacious compared to this!
The only thing that had helped had been her master’s presence in her mind. After dying, which had left her close to him but unable to communicate or feel him in her mind, his presence in her thoughts was reassuring now. Plus, even if there were walls between them, she could still feel which direction he was in, taking comfort in the fact that he wasn’t very far at all. That, and if he really wanted to, he could summon her with a thought. All helped alleviate how spooky this place was.
Plus, as much as Solvei had hated to admit it, Akna’s presence had helped too, if for no other reason than the adlet seemed equally nervous, glancing around while biting her lip.
Eventually, the candles on the wall had stopped lighting up at a particular door. Both of them had walked right past it at first – since it had looked like just another in the various entrances that they’d past – but when the candles had failed to keep lighting up, they’d gotten the message. “I guess we’re supposed to wait in here,” had been Akna’s quiet statement as she’d opened the handle (another device that Solvei found weird and off-putting) and walked inside.
The interior room had made Solvei feel somewhat less trapped than the hallway had, being large enough that she could have comfortably returned to her normal size if she’d wanted. Several pieces of furniture – some high-backed seats made out of soft material – were spread around the room, and a small table in the center had some sweet-smelling fruits that Solvei wasn’t familiar with. But other than a door on the far wall, which had refused to open when Akna had tried it, there was nothing else. No openings to the outside, no servants to tell them what was going on; just an empty room where they were apparently supposed to wait.
But that hadn’t meant that they could relax. Although slightly faded, Solvei had picked up several scents that she couldn’t identify, suggesting that Sanguine Disposition’s minions had been here recently...and were probably still close by now, keeping an eye on them. Too bad for them, Master predicted that!
In accordance with the instructions that she’d been given, Solvei had pushed the padded seats away from the center of the room – Akna watching curiously – and then used her ice magic to create a thin dome of ice, leaving an entrance just big enough for the adlet to crawl inside. It wasn’t very large, and would crumble quickly if hit with any sort of force, but the ice was solid enough to be impossible to clearly see through, while still letting in the ambient light of the candelabras on the walls.
Calling Akna inside, Solvei had quietly whispered to her the instructions that Lex had given her, and the adlet – duly impressed at his plan, to Solvei’s approval – had crouched over and moved her hair to the side, revealing her lifeline, which had been continuing to diligently point the way back to Akna’s body.
That had been when things had gone sideways, as the two of them had realized that they had no idea what direction it was indicating.
Being completely inside a room with no windows, and having gotten hopelessly turned around during the carriage ride to Sanguine Disposition’s house and subsequently wandering the hallways, it had only been when they’d stared at the shaman’s lifeline that the two of them had figured out that they had no way to orient themselves. The silvery string was pointing perpendicular to the door they’d walked in from, but beyond that, there was no way to tell what direction that was. It could have been pointing deeper into Eigengrau, or toward the edge of the city, or even back the way they came for all Solvei knew, with Akna being equally lost.
“We need to figure this out!” snarled Solvei, staring at the adlet’s lifeline as though it was the problem. “Master is stalling that bat pony right now, waiting for us to tell him what your lifeline’s saying! I can’t tell him that we don’t know!”
Huffing, Akna frowned at the winter wolf. “You don’t have any magic that can figure out which way this is pointing?”
“Of course I don’t!” snapped Solvei, hackles rising. “What kind of dumb question is that?!”
“You can already change your size, make black crystals cover your body, move things with your mind, and use the same ice magic as me!” shot back Akna, letting out a growl of her own. “Excuse me for thinking that you actually knew what you were doing!”
“What about you?!” retorted Solvei. “You’re supposed to be able to talk to spirits, right?! Ask them what’s in the direction your lifeline’s pointing!”
Akna winced at that before shaking her head. “I can’t.”
A whine of frustration escaped Solvei’s lips. “What do you mean-”
“I mean, there aren’t any spirits here for me to contact!” Her tail thwapping angrily, Akna waved an arm to indicate their surroundings. “I try and reach out, and it’s like yelling into a snowstorm. No one’s answering.”
The creepy feeling that Solvei had experienced before suddenly came back to her then, muscling her anger aside. She’d never even considered the possibility of there being a place with no spirits at all. “Is...is that because this is the Night Mare’s realm?”
“I think it’s because this is a city, instead of the wild,” answered Akna wryly. “The spirits I was taught to contact as I child were those of nature. They guide the course of the river, decide which trees will stand and which will fall, and raise hills into mountains. But this place? It doesn’t have any of that. It’s all roads and walls and buildings. It’s even more alien to the spirits than it is to you and me.”
Lowering her arm, Akna sighed. “Or maybe it is because this is the realm of a god. I’m honestly not sure. The last time I was here, I didn’t need to contact the spirits; I was able to meet Headhunter on my own. This time I had Breakdown in my grasp, and I still couldn’t...” She didn’t bother finishing, looking down and clenching her hands into fists.
Solvei’s first reaction was to say that she didn’t care about Akna’s dumb fixation on the Night Mare’s weapons. But she managed to control that impulse, knowing that it would just start another fight. Instead, she let out a slow breath. “I’m sorry that you missed your chance to get another of those weapons. I know you had your heart set on it.”
Akna’s eyebrows rose, but when Solvei didn’t say anything else, she sighed, her tail drooping. “I didn’t miss my chance,” she muttered, ears flattening. “Breakdown said I wasn’t worthy. That if I needed its help to turn my people to the Night Mare’s faith, I didn’t deserve it.”
“Maybe...maybe that wasn’t a rejection,” offered Solvei. “Maybe it was saying you have everything you need to bring them to the Night Mare on your own.”
A snort escaped Akna’s lips then. “We don’t even have what we need to figure out which way my body is. If I can’t manage that much even with help, then I don’t think I can get my tribe to overturn generations of tradition all by myself.”
This time it was Solvei’s turn to flatten her ears, hating that the shaman was right about them not being able to do the one small thing her master had told her to-
Solvei didn’t have a chance to complete that thought as a wave of despair slammed into her from across her psychic link to Lex, causing her to gasp.
Her sudden intake of breath didn’t go unnoticed by Akna, sitting up straighter. “What is it?”
But Solvei wasn’t listening, her heart pounding in her ears as she reached out to Lex. Master! What’s wrong?! I can sense your-
She didn’t have a chance to finish as he slammed their connection shut, causing her to whimper as the flow of emotions suddenly cut off. Something was happening! That bat pony had done something to her master, and just like when those mares had uncovered one of his secrets and driven him over the edge, he was in pain and she wasn’t there for him! No! Not again!
Without waiting for Akna to catch up, Solvei scrambled out of the ice-dome she’d created and launched herself at the door they’d entered through. This place might be a confusing collection of twists and turns, but she could still sense Lex’s location. If she followed the lit candles back to where they’d parted ways, she could use his scent-trail and her innate sense of where he was to figure out-
The door refused to budge.
Staring at the barrier in momentary disbelief, Solvei tried it again, yanking the handle down with her teeth and pulling. Just like before, it refused to open, despite how easily it had admitted Akna and herself a few minutes prior. NO NO NO!
“What’s going on?!”
Solvei could hear the worry in the adlet’s voice, pausing just long enough to answer. “Something’s happened with Master! I’m trying to contact him but he’s not responding, and now this door won’t open!”
“I knew this had to be a trap!” cursed Akna, rushing to the other door at the back of the room. But just like the front, it was sealed as well, and she gave up after a moment of tugging on it. “Use your magic and break that door down!”
Solvei didn’t need to be told twice, backing up as she concentrated on her ice magic. A large enough push of ice should be enough to break through the flimsy wooden barrier. Even if there was some sort of magic making it stronger, she could just hit it again and again until-
Solvei, stop. I’m alright.
Exhaling so hard she almost made herself dizzy, Solvei felt herself relax as Lex’s words flowed into her mind. Master, what happened? I thought... She wasn’t able to finish, not having known what to think.
Sanguine Disposition told me the details about Kara’s blessing, and it caught me by surprise, admitted Lex. But I returned the favor, and now that I have, I’m no longer content to waste time here. Have you figured out which way Akna’s lifeline is pointing?
Inwardly, Solvei cringed. I’m sorry, Master. We’re inside a room, and all we can see is that it’s pointing toward a wall...
If Lex was disappointed in her, he gave no indication of it. Have Akna show you her lifeline again. I’ll look at it through your eyes.
But Master, we’re not inside the ice dome I made! If she reveals it here, anyone watching us will see it!
That doesn’t matter now, answered Lex. Just have her show it to you again.
Nodding despite his not being able to see it, Solvei turned and quickly briefed Akna as to what was going on, the adlet turning and lifting her hair again. That’s pointing toward the far end of the city, and likely beyond it, declared Lex a moment later.
Master, I don’t mean to question you, but how do you know that? I couldn’t figure out which way was which at all!
I made sure to keep track of the direction that we were traveling as we passed through Eigengrau in Sanguine Disposition’s carriage, explained Lex. Based on the arc of the outer walls, I was able to formulate a rough guess as to this town’s total area. Comparing that to the relative speed of the carriage and how long it took to get here, Sanguine Disposition’s manor is toward the other end of town, and since I can mentally chart your position in contrast to my own, and compare the direction that Akna’s lifeline is pointing in reference to those, it’s easy to determine that it’s indicating that we’ll need to go past the walls.
That’s brilliant, Master! I mean, I didn’t understand it at all, but that just makes it more impressive!
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t acknowledge the compliment, instead moving to the next order of business. I want the two of you to return to the foyer immediately. We’re leaving.
The announcement made Solvei’s tail wag, but only for a moment as she remembered her current predicament. Master, we’re trapped in here! The door we took to get into this room won’t open anymore!
...wait a moment.
The connection went silent, and Solvei took that opportunity to bring Akna up to date on what was happening. She’d just finished explaining everything to the adlet when Lex’s voice came through her thoughts again. Try it now.
Obeying without hesitation, Solvei took the handle in her jaws, and this time when she pulled on it, the door swung open without resistance. It worked! Did you use your magic on it, Master?
An amused snort came over their link before Lex spoke again. Not as such. I simply made it known to Sanguine Disposition that if he didn’t release you immediately, that would constitute an attack. And he has even more reasons for avoiding hostilities now than he did when we first encountered him.
That was enough to make Solvei tilt her head to the side as she entered the hallway, Akna close behind her. He does? What reasons?
I’ll tell you later. For now, make haste. I want to return to my body as soon as possible.
Smiling as she heard the conviction in his telepathic voice, Solvei picked up her pace, bounding through the halls as Akna rushed to keep up. Yes, Master!
“Are you sure you need to leave?” pouted Sanguine Disposition as he walked Lex back to the entrance to his villa, Solvei and Akna trailing behind the two of them. “I know you said you couldn’t stay very long, but I feel like we’ve barely gotten to know each other.”
“I agree,” shot back Lex, “and even if I didn’t have pressing matters to attend to, that alone would be a compelling reason not to spend more time here.”
Sanguine Disposition chuckled at the unsubtle jab, opening the front doors to reveal the rose garden. “Then, before you go, allow me to make one final attempt to change your impression of me. I said before that I’d be happy to compensate you for disengaging from your fight with White Wraith, so allow me to make good on that debt now.”
The offer earned a sharp glance from the unicorn, eyes narrowing. “And what sort of recompense are you proposing?”
His grin widening at the blatant show of suspicion, Sanguine Disposition gave an apologetic bow. “Nothing untoward, I assure you. I might have forgotten my manners earlier, but I lay the blame for that at Kara’s hooves, since I was ensnared by the blessing she gave you. No, what I’m proposing is something of much more practical value: information.”
Just as he’d suspected, that was a temptation that Lex wasn’t able to resist, turning to face him directly. “What sort of information?”
Giving Lex a knowing look, Sanguine Disposition’s voice was coy when he spoke next. “I trust you haven’t forgotten the name Grim Darklight, have you?”
“That pony that White Wraith mentioned?” blurted Solvei from behind them, the winter wolf frowning. “The one he said had the Charismata instead of Master?”
“Just so.” Sparing the winter wolf only the briefest glance, Sanguine Disposition nodded as he turned back to Lex. “You might also recall his saying that the pony in question is not only a devotee of our goddess, but also a figure of note in the religious hierarchy of Everglow’s Pony Empire...and that he visited here a few months ago.”
Lex cocked his head slightly. “You’re implying that the purpose of his visit had something to do with me.”
“Indirectly so.” Raising a hoof, Sanguine Disposition gestured to Lex, then himself. “The Charismata, Secreta, and Dominata are the greatest blessings that the Night Mare grants to her faithful, short of raising someone to demigodhood. Each is unique, and never given to more than one individual at a time.”
Lex shrugged. “The time in which I’ve possessed the Charismata can be measured in weeks. If this ‘Grim Darklight’ pony had it several months previous-”
“Ah, but that’s the thing,” interrupted Sanguine Disposition. “He didn’t have the Charismata when he visited Eigengrau, either.”
That was enough to make Lex’s brow furrow. “You’re saying that this pony is falsely claiming to have one of the Night Mare’s most significant blessings, and has perpetrated that fraud to attain a position of significance in her church on Everglow?”
“Yes...and no.” Letting that hang in the air, Sanguine Disposition strolled over to the edge of the garden, pausing to take in the sweet smell of the roses, knowing that his guest wouldn’t be able to let that sit.
Sure enough, Lex proved him right a moment later. “That doesn’t tell me anything. You said that his being here had something to do with me. Explain.”
But rather than acquiesce to the demand, the red-eyed stallion instead kept his focus on the multicolored flowers in front of him, gently taking a deep black bloom in one hoof and bringing it to his nose. “Did you know that different breeds of roses have subtly different scents? It’s not just a matter of how strong the aroma is; each has a slightly distinctive-”
“I don’t care.” Marching over, Lex swatted the bloom out of Sanguine Disposition’s hoof, wrenching the other stallion away from the roses to look at him. “I don’t care about your flowers. I don’t care if Grim Darklight is lying about having the Charismata. And I don’t care if the Night Mare is letting him get away with it. How does any of that affect me?”
The sudden contact made Sanguine Disposition gasp, a rush of indignation, excitement, and fear rushing through him, leaving him unable to speak as he reveled in the sensations.
The greatest limitation of the Secreta was how sharply its powers were restricted by distance. Using it on a person, place, or thing outside of his visual range meant he’d only get vague impressions, usually just enough so that he’d know where to start looking if he wanted to ferret out more information. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that no form of distance-viewing could circumvent that limit; using the Secreta to unearth more required that he look at a target personally, rather than through a medium.
The tradeoff was that, when he was close enough to see his target, a great deal more insight was gained. Active magic was visible, with most attempts to cloak it being easily pierced, and even someone’s uncast spells could be discerned, albeit only with limited ability. More than that, an individual’s intentions and motivations could be read with supernatural acuity, something which made it possible to predict how they’d react to certain stimuli with a high degree of accuracy. If he wanted to push further, he could even hear thoughts, though that level of mental intrusion ran the risk of detection.
But the Secreta was at its strongest when he could touch who or what he wanted to know more about. Beyond simply learning their capabilities or intuiting their desires, touching someone allowed him to read the influences on them that they didn’t even know they had. Whether it was a subconscious ability to influence luck in their favor, the soul of someone they’d killed haunting them, or even a blessing from the gods, a touch was enough for the Secreta to unearth whatever was nudging someone’s destiny in a particular direction.
Of course, it wasn’t infallible. Like all of the Night Mare’s blessings, being held within a non-divine being meant the Secreta’s godly power was unavoidably diluted, making it possible for its effects to be foiled. Even considering that the it could only reveal so much information at a time, outside influences of exceptional subtlety, powerful warding magic, or even supreme self-control were all enough to potentially escape the Secreta’s notice.
Sanguine Disposition had learned to remain cognizant of those limitations over the years, since what was overlooked could turn out to be a detail of critical importance.
Such as how Lex Legis had come so close to killing him just a few minutes ago.
There had been no warning that he’d possessed such a weapon capable of causing catastrophic disruptions to necromantic processes. That item simply hadn’t been on his person until the moment it had manifested, and when it had made contact it had only been because Sanguine Disposition had made it a habit to cover himself in defensive spells and magic items that he’d been able to keep from being reduced to a pile of dust on the carpet. Even then, it had been a near thing.
That it hadn’t been sensed by the Secreta at all had been his own fault, Sanguine Disposition knew. Up until then, he’d only touched Lex once, learning about Kara’s blessing when the unicorn had brushed his hoof away during their first meeting outside of Eigengrau’s gates. A second touch would have revealed that the unicorn possessed a second unseen influence; some sort of personality-fragment which was intimately tied to his dreams, apparently having the power to bring things from them into the real world, at least for a short time; it hadn’t escaped Sanguine Disposition’s notice that the gauntlet Lex had conjured had faded away to nothing shortly after he’d used it.
Of course, the vampire pony knew he couldn’t place all of the blame for what had happened on the Secreta’s shortcomings.
To think Kara’s blessing would affect me this much!
How long had it been since he’d felt this way? Decades at least, since he knew he’d been alive the last time experienced this intoxicating mixture of amorous desire, nervous giddiness, and acute self-consciousness. It wasn’t like he lacked for male company when he wanted to indulge his urges – indeed, that was one of the perks of ruling his own town; with a stallion population in the thousands, and a blessing that let him know just how to manipulate others, it was child’s play to seduce, coerce, or blackmail whichever stud he wanted – but this was the first time in a long time that he’d wanted someone else this much. Even knowing that those feelings were being artificially coaxed out by Kara’s blessing did nothing to lessen their effect.
Which had been why he’d screwed things up so badly.
His attempt to seduce the dour unicorn had, in hindsight, been rushed and sloppy. He hadn’t needed to read Lex’s mind – the Secreta had predicted a very high chance that the unicorn would respond violently to any such attempt, even with the magic item designed to shield his thoughts that he was wearing – to be able to pick up that the stallion was dealing with some sort of personal crisis. When the Secreta had informed him that revealing the true nature of Kara’s blessing would likely drive Lex to despair, Sanguine Disposition hadn’t hesitated to capitalize on that.
Despairing stallions were among the easiest to beguile, since they were desperate for something to distract them from their pain.
But not always. Some, in the face of catastrophic loss, found an inner core of strength, clinging to their convictions that much tighter. Rather than allowing someone else to manipulate them, they instead lashed out that much harder, fighting with everything they had rather than searching for respite.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that a fellow champion of the Night Mare was such an individual. The goddess would never have chosen a weak-willed pony to wield one of her greatest blessings. But Sanguine Disposition had been blind to that, instead pushing forward with all of the patience and finesse of an adolescent colt looking to lose his virginity, even despite knowing that Kara’s blessing was clouding his judgment.
Even now, after having come closer to true death than he had in decades, Sanguine Disposition couldn’t bring himself to be angry or afraid of the stallion in front of him. If anything, the danger added spice to things, and it was almost enough to make him forget himself again...
“Well?” snapped Lex irritably. “What does Grim Darklight’s visit here have to do with me?”
Knowing that if he’d been alive, he would have been blushing at how he’d been caught staring at the object of his affection, Sanguine Disposition cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. His visit here was a test run, so to speak. He wanted to parade the facsimile of the Charismata that he’d created in front of me, the bearer of the Secreta, in order to see if I’d know it wasn’t the real thing.”
Lex frowned. “A facsimile of the Charismata?”
“One of the aphorisms in our goddess’s religion is that miracles are something you make for yourself,” explained Sanguine Disposition. “What that means is that the Night Mare helps those who, through their actions, have proven that they deserve her help. But Grim Darklight is taking that idea literally, constructing his own version of the blessing that you were given.”
From behind them, Solvei spoke up, her voice tinged with doubt. “Is that possible?”
Sparing the adlet the briefest of glances, Sanguine Disposition shrugged. “It shouldn’t be. But when Grim Darklight came here, he had multiple creatures – some of them creatures of great power – soul-bound to himself, leaving them helpless to defy him as he ordered them to use their powers.”
“And since I have the actual Charismata, you think he’ll become my enemy if he learns of my existence, like Steel Soul,” guessed Lex.
Sanguine Disposition nodded. “That’s the likely outcome, but it’s not definite. Steel Soul will absolutely be your foe, since he’ll see you as competition for the Night Mare’s favor, but there’s a chance that you could come to some sort of accord with Grim Darklight. Even if he’s lying about having her blessing, the Night Mare hasn’t rebuked him, which means that whatever he’s doing to mimic the Charismata’s powers meets with her approval. Enough so that he runs her temple in the capital of Everglow’s Pony Empire.”
“Listen, this is fascinating and all,” interjected Akna, “but can we get going? The longer we wait to find the black statues, the more likely that something else will find them first and take over our bodies.”
That was enough to make Sanguine Disposition blink, his smile falling away as he looked at the adlet. “What?”
“What are you doing, saying that right in front of the bat pony?” growled Solvei at the adlet.
“You said Lex said we didn’t need to keep that a secret!” protested Akna. “That was why we checked which way my lifeline was pointing without going back in that igloo you made!”
“That’s correct,” answered Lex, glancing between Akna and Sanguine Disposition. “Our host made it clear that he knew we were here in spirit, but not in body.”
“This explains a lot,” murmured Sanguine Disposition, more to himself than anyone else. “The pressing business you had, but never clarified. Coming here out of the wilderness instead of taking one of the established routes. Black statues that lead back to your bodies.”
This time, his smirk was one of incredulity as the leather wing shook his head. “I knew the winter wolf was already dead, and that you two” – he glanced at Akna, then at Lex – “are both astral projections, which means that you have silver cords. But after what you just said...am I right in guessing that your lifelines are pointing in particular directions, as though being tugged on by something?”
The trio were silent for a moment, before Lex gestured at Akna. “Show him.”
Frowning, the adlet nevertheless obeyed the command, turning around and lifting her hair, showing a silver cord that was taut as it stretched toward the wall.
The sight set Sanguine Disposition to laughing. “You do know that it’s not supposed to do that, right? That normally, when you willfully separate your spirit from your body, the cord connecting the two shouldn’t need to go through a chokepoint in order to reunite them?”
“What are you saying? Of course it does!” blurted Akna, her voice thick with anxiety. “The last time I underwent the Rite of Sublimation and came here, it was exactly this way!”
“And that solves the last mystery,” snorted Sanguine Disposition, looking at Lex with bemusement. “You came here from the Shrine of the Starless Sky, didn’t you?”
“What of it?” growled Lex, looking just as tense as his wolves.
Inwardly squealing with glee at the prospect of helping his crush, Sanguine Disposition couldn’t help but take a moment to revel at gaining a second chance to get into Lex’s good graces. This time, I’ll take things slow. Little by little, with a favor here and a gift there, as long as it takes until you trust me. And once that happens, we’ll start growing closer, and I’ll learn more and more about you so that the next time I make my move, you won’t be able to resist me.
Resisting the urge to lick his lips at the thought of the payoff when he finally won the other stallion over, Sanguine Disposition smiled as he laid the first brick in what would hopefully become a long and very fruitful relationship.
“Consider this one a freebie for my inappropriate behavior earlier. But I’m afraid that broken-down old wreck of a pony who runs that place, the so-called ‘Keeper,’ lied to you,” he explained.
“There’s no such thing as the Rite of Sublimation.”
Sanguine Disposition’s eyebrows rose at the barrage of questions from his guests, one hoof coming up to brush a stray lock of hair behind his ear. “Ah, I suppose I might have misspoken slightly. While I’m sure that decrepit old stallion thinks he’s telling the truth, I suspect that somewhere in the back of what’s left of his mind, he knows that so-called rite isn’t real. But that’s just a guess on my part, rather than anything the Secreta told me, so maybe I’m giving him too much credit.”
Lex opened his mouth, but wasn’t able to get a word out before Akna pushed her way forward. “Of course the Rite of Sublimation is real! It’s how we’re here! I’ve gone through it once before; it’s why I’m able to transform into a winter wolf now!”
Sanguine Disposition clucked his tongue at her. “That’s the effect, yes. But are you sure you’re right about the cause?”
“This is some sort of trick,” spat the adlet, turning back to Lex. “I don’t know what this bat pony’s game is, but he’s trying to turn us against the Keeper for whatever reason.”
“It does seem weird that he’d say the Keeper is a pony,” added Solvei, giving Sanguine Disposition a suspicious glare. “I might not have been able to see through that darkness around him, but I know I heard Master say that he was ‘undead,’ which doesn’t sound like a pony to me.”
That was enough to make Akna whirl in place, turning to face Solvei with an alarmed look. “He what?!”
Sighing, Lex telekinetically spun the adlet around so that she was looking at him. “Beneath whatever obscurement magic he’s using, the Keeper’s real form is an equine skull. He insists he’s not undead, but that he went through the Rite himself, and was given a body that’s undying but not unaging, having subsequently decayed to its current state.”
Akna’s jaw dropped at that particular revelation, and even Solvei’s eyes went wide. “He’s...a skull?” muttered the adlet, slowly sinking to her knees.
Seeing that there were no more interruptions to be had, Lex turned back to Sanguine Disposition. “Though if the Rite of Sublimation isn’t real, the Keeper’s claims about his current state are likewise suspect,” he noted. “However, Akna’s point is well-taken; something has brought us here, and given her the ability to change into a winter wolf’s body.”
“Quite right,” nodded red-eyed stallion, teasing smile deepening. “But that doesn’t mean that unsightly old fossil deserves any credit for your current state, or what your pet adlet here has accomplished. Any guesses as to where the credit should go?”
The question brought a snort to Lex’s lips, having already figured out what the vampire was hinting at before he’d finished speaking.
Even if the Rite of Sublimation wasn’t real, that didn’t change the fact that the Shrine of the Starless Sky was a place that was holy to the Night Mare. Leaving aside the pervasive imagery that was evocative of her religious trappings, the barbed wire around his foreleg had cut him deeply when he’d almost killed Ganas within the boundaries of the place, enforcing the edict that her worshipers not fight there. So even if the Keeper hadn’t performed a religious ceremony to send him and Akna to Darkest Night, it was still likely that her influence was involved. And the single largest concentration of her power in the Shrine was...
“The Confluence.”
Sanguine Disposition sat back, clapping his hooves together. “Correct!”
Solvei cocked her head, giving Lex a confused look. “That pit of black water you jumped into?”
“It’s a rift, between our world and here,” muttered Akna, still looking shaken by what she’d been told. “But the Keeper said that it’s unstable, that the Rite is the ceremony he performs to keep it focused so that we can use it to undergo the Night Mare’s test.”
Sanguine Disposition smirked at that, but Lex jumped in before the leather wing could say anything. “Did you see him perform that ceremony on your last visit to the Shrine?”
“I...no,” admitted Akna, her ears folding back. “He and some of his acolytes went to prepare it while I went through some rudimentary prayers to the Night Mare. I thought it would be a good idea to ask for her favor before I went through with the Rite.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed then. “And neither of us saw him prepare it this time, either.”
“But his acolytes...!” protested Akna. “They were there with him.”
Sanguine Disposition chuckled softly. “Those are the creatures that he collects from the surrounding area, yes? Which means their only knowledge of the Night Mare is what they’re told by the Shrine’s caretaker. If he insists that some bit of nonsense he performed in front of them is a holy act, they would have no way of knowing better.”
“And you do?” challenged Solvei.
“Let’s just say that when it comes to uncovering buried truths, I have a bit of an advantage,” replied the leather wing, shooting Lex a wink.
Master-
I’ll explain what he’s talking about later, answered Lex, registering Solvei’s curiosity through their link. Not wanting the conversation to be derailed again, he kept the focus on what the vampire had told them. “So the Confluence sent us here on its own.”
“Not on its own, no,” replied Sanguine Disposition, shaking his head. “You see, what the Keeper refers to as the Confluence is a gateway between Everglow and Darkest Night, one whose structure is flawed. If it were perfectly formed, it would allow for physical travel between the two realms, rather than simply spiritual. As it is, even allowing for an astral voyage requires the first person to bear the brunt of the residual energies leaking out from this realm into the mortal world. Given our goddess’s nature, that takes the form-”
“Of a vision,” finished Lex, grimacing as he recalled the illusion he’d seen in the Confluence. “One of their worst fears.”
“I was going to say ‘of an ugly truth,’ but I suppose that’s not really any different,” mused Sanguine Disposition. “In my experience, what people fear most are things they already know to be true, but can’t bring themselves to accept. Ah well.” Shrugging, he waved a hoof upward, indicating the area around them. “Once the first individual has borne the brunt of stabilizing the path, others can follow them through without going through the same tribulation, and they all emerge here in Darkest Night.”
“The Keeper told me that the test was the entire point,” muttered Akna, drawing her knees up to her chest. “That you only ended up here if you failed.”
Frowning as she looked at the disheartened adlet, Solvei took a step toward her, but hesitated, before finally looking back at Sanguine Disposition. “What about the power Akna gained the first time she came here, though?”
“As I said, entering such an unstable connection means exposing your soul to the divine power of a god. Diffuse and undirected, certainly, but a god nonetheless. Doing so has the potential to strengthen your spirit – with all of the eldritch potential that entails – if you can align yourself to that power and resonate with it, or utterly break you if you can’t.”
“But she came through fine this time,” pressed the winter wolf. “So why didn’t she gain any new abilities?”
“It’s as Sanguine Disposition said,” replied Lex. “Only the first person through has to bear the brunt of stabilizing the portal. Since I entered it before Akna did, that likely means she didn’t see anything after following me through.”
He finished that with a glance at the adlet, who nodded, not meeting his eyes.
Sanguine Disposition smirked, enjoying having heard his name from Lex’s lips. “And since you seem to have come out of it little the worse for wear, I’d wager that you gained a new power yourself, am I right?”
Lex didn’t answer, but his eyes slid to his shadow, barely visible in the dim light that managed to slip over the walls surrounding the vampire’s home. Now he knew why the barbed wire around his foreleg had moved when Akna had first mentioned the Rite to him. The Night Mare had said, when she’d brought him back to Everglow, that she was giving him the chance to grow stronger. Given that she was the one who’d originally given him his tulpa, and presented multiple hints about how he could master it, it stood to reason that – even if the Rite itself was a fiction – this was the outcome she’d been referring to.
“Of course, the downside of the Confluence’s instability means that there’s no way to predict precisely where it will open up when it deposits someone here,” continued the leather wing. “And worse, it acts as a chokepoint for the connection between your soul and your body. Since the pathway back has to go through the portal, whose opening here is solidified by the individuals who passed through it-”
“The pathway back takes the form of three-dimensional openings in the fabric of this place that match the shapes of those who came here,” finished Lex. “Black statues.”
“Which another spirit can slip into, taking your body for their own, should they find them before you do,” noted Sanguine Disposition. “Of course, that usually causes some changes to your physical form, since the spirit shapes the body far more than the reverse. Hence what happened to your adlet and the so-called Keeper when the Confluence exposed them to a fraction of the Night Mare’s unfiltered power.”
“Which is why we should hurry back,” urged Solvei. “The longer we wait, the more likely that happens!”
It didn’t escape Sanguine Disposition’s notice that the winter wolf was eyeing him as she spoke, causing him to let out a snicker. “Aw, are you worried that I’m going to be tempted to steal your master’s body?”
Solvei didn’t answer, but she didn’t look away either, glaring at the leather wing, who smirked at her. “Don’t worry, I’m not. Well, I am, but not in the way you’re thinking. Unlike most of the other ponies in Darkest Night, I’m here body and soul.”
“A fact with little practical importance, just like the rest of what you’ve told us,” cut in Lex. “While mildly interesting in the abstract, none of this changes what’s happened, nor what we need to do now, which is return to Everglow with all possible haste.”
With that said, he turned his back on the vampire, starting down the steps toward the gate on the other end of the garden. “Solvei, Akna, come.”
“Yes, Master!”
“R-right...”
“Of course,” purred Sanguine Disposition, trotting past the lupines to move alongside Lex as though the two of them were taking a stroll through the rose bushes. “Allow me to finish the story as I see you out, then? Or are you not interested in why that feeble fraction of a pony got so many things so wrong?”
“I want to know,” blurted Akna, shaking off some of her malaise. “You said something about the Keeper believing his own lies?”
Sanguine Disposition nodded again. “Precisely. You see, your ‘Keeper’ is quite mad, and has been since before he ever came to the Shrine of the Starless Sky.” Another chuckle passed his lips as he shook his head, raven tresses shaking slightly from the motion. “I don’t suppose he told you that falsehood about being the bastard son of some ancient king?”
“He was mad before he came to the Shrine?” pressed Lex. “Not because of what happened when he entered the Confluence?”
“Most who know of him assume that’s the cause, but I have access to better information than they do,” replied Sanguine Disposition, one hoof coming up to tap the side of his head. “In fact, he was originally just a bandit who happened upon a certain magical something that blasted his mind to bits. I’m not sure if he came to the Shrine on accident, or if he was lucid enough to seek it out in hopes of finding a cure, but either way, he ended up there, went through the Confluence, and became what he is today.”
“But he has trained the creatures there into being acolytes of the Night Mare,” protested Akna. “I mean, if she didn’t approve of what he was doing, if he was profaning her holy place, wouldn’t she do something about it?”
Sanguine Disposition shrugged. “Oh, I have no doubt that even if he wasn’t originally faithful to our goddess, he is now; you don’t need to be sane to be devout. Unable to leave the Shrine, he’s no doubt studied the holy texts that were left there many times over.” Again, his eyes drifted to Lex as he spoke. “You really should take the time to study them yourself, you know. They’re quite ancient, and represent a method of asking for divine providence that’s considered archaic today, but which isn’t without merit. And that’s not all.”
By that time they’d reached the gate, which opened at a wave of Sanguine Disposition’s hoof. “That certain magical something which drove the Keeper mad? He brought it with him to the Shrine. I confess I’m not sure exactly where he hid it, but I’m certain that it’s still there. You might want to look for it, if you get the chance.”
“And why would I do that?” sneered Lex. “If this unidentified bit of magic drives its user mad, that’s an argument for leaving it hidden away, not unearthing it.”
But Sanguine Disposition had an answer at the ready. “Secreta, remember? I might not know exactly what it is, or precisely where in the Shrine it’s kept, but I do know that the Keeper only lost his mind because he was weak. You’re not. Where he found only madness, you might find something far more useful.”
“...I’ll consider it.”
“Excellent! In that case, there’s no more reason to delay your departure, sad though it may be.”
Trotting past the gates, Sanguine Disposition cast a quick spell, another carriage coming into being. “Obey whatever this stallion tells you,” ordered the vampire, speaking to the shapeless force in the driver’s seat as he pointed at Lex, turning to look at the other stallion a moment later.
“You don’t need to worry about the guards slowing you down on your way out of town. Everyone in Eigengrau knows my personal sigil” – he pointed to the Weeping Rose emblem on the carriage door – “and won’t bother any conveyance displaying it. As for how useful the carriage will be once you go off the road, well...it should at least be better than nothing.”
Lex grunted noncommittally, his horn lighting up as he opened the carriage door. At his command, Solvei jumped inside – though not before giving Sanguine Disposition one last look of deep suspicion – while Akna followed more slowly, her face pensive in light of everything she’d learned. It was only when Lex moved to follow them inside that Sanguine Disposition stepped closer, blocking the way forward.
“I hope a farewell embrace isn’t too much to ask?” he teased, holding one foreleg out wide.
Lex raised a hoof as well, but unlike the red-eyed stallion, he held it in front of himself, the gesture threatening instead of welcoming. “I believe I made the consequences of such a thing abundantly clear the last time you tried it.”
“Hence why I’m asking this time.”
“And yet my answer remains the same.”
Pouting, Sanguine Disposition slowly lowered his hoof. “Then my attempt at apologizing has been insufficient?”
“It’s sufficient enough that I don’t regard you as an enemy,” replied Lex coldly. “Be content with that.”
“Hmm, I suppose I’ll have to,” sighed the leather wing, stepping out of the way and moving back toward his manor.
As he climbed into the carriage, however, one last throaty purr managed to reach Lex’s ears.
Solvei and Akna sat in silence as the carriage rolled across the pitch-black terrain.
As Sanguine Disposition had promised, leaving Eigengrau had proven to be much easier than entering the place. Upon their approach to another massive gate at the far end of the city, the guards had impeded their progress only long enough to confirm that the carriage had the red-eyed stallion’s emblem on it. At that point they’d forced all other traffic – what little there was – to move aside, allowing them to depart without incident.
Outside of the walls once again, it had taken Solvei a few moments to notice that there was one other difference from when they’d entered Eigengrau. While the trees were still cut down in a wide radius, and the lights on the walls provided the only source of illumination, there was a large, wide path that extended outward from the gateway, leading deeper into Darkest Night. Even stranger was that the path was made of smoothed stones, all lined up in neat rows in a way that was distinctly unnatural.
Her master had explained, upon her asking about the unusual feature, that it was called a “road” and that it was used to make it easier to travel from place to place. To her mild surprise, Solvei found herself taken with the idea. Although the ground in Eigengrau had been of similar construction, she’d paid it very little mind, too taken in by all of the other features of the place. But while the town’s walls had been tall and imposing, and Sanguine Disposition’s house had been labyrinthine and confining, a long patch of smooth and level ground was something which Solvei – who had spent her life traversing the wilderness – could see the advantages of.
When she’d prompted Akna for her thoughts on the subject, the adlet had agreed, though her response had been half-hearted.
But there’d been no time to follow up on her traveling companion’s unenthusiastic response, as Lex had taken the opportunity to fill them in on what they’d missed.
The biggest pieces of news were that the two other blessings that Sanguine Disposition had mentioned – the Secreta and the Dominata – were held by the leather wing, who it turned out was actually a “vampire” (prompting another explanation from Lex), and someone named Steel Soul. While the bat pony hadn’t been very forthcoming about what either blessing did, Lex had affirmed that the Secreta apparently gave its wielder some sort of mystical insight...which had been how Sanguine Disposition had known that Solvei was deceased, and that Lex and Akna were both in possession of lifelines, even if he hadn’t known the full extent of what had brought them all to Darkest Night until the adlet had let too much slip as they were leaving.
More distressing, at least to Solvei, was Sanguine Disposition’s assurances that they had another enemy in Steel Soul. While she was hesitant to put much stock in anything the red-eyed stallion had told them – he simply reminded her too much of Prevarius for her to trust him – her master seemed to think that his information was reliable, if for no other reason than what he’d said about the Keeper and the Rite of Sublimation had answered a lot of questions.
After affirming that the two of them had no new information to share, Lex had removed himself to the front of the carriage, alongside the shapeless force that was driving it, saying he wanted to compare the direction of the road to where his lifeline was pointing. His decision had surprised Solvei, and she’d protested telepathically, pointing out that he wasn’t able to see in the dark the way she could. He’d overruled her, however, pointing out that the road was well away from the tree line, and that they were still within sight of Eigengrau’s lights.
Neither of those had struck Solvei as being very good reasons, but she knew it wasn’t her place to question her master’s decisions. That, and there’d been a strange sense of anticipation coming from him over their link. Given that Solvei couldn’t normally feel Lex’s emotions unless he was experiencing them very strongly, that made it clear that he was quite eager to be out of the carriage’s interior, even if he’d given her no indication as to why he felt that way.
Even more odd had been the way he’d stopped and stared at his shadow – dimly visible thanks to the lights on Eigengrau’s walls – for several seconds after stepping outside the door.
Now the carriage had started rolling again, leaving Solvei alone with Akna, the latter staring at the floor with her ears folded back, a dejected look on her face.
Finally, Solvei couldn’t take it anymore, looking away from the window to instead regard her companion. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Huh?” Blinking, Akna belated returned Solvei’s gaze. “Talk about what?”
“You’re obviously pretty upset, and I’m guessing it’s not just because you couldn’t bring that giant hammer back with you,” ventured Solvei. “Was what that bat pony said about the Keeper and the Rite of Sublimation really that discouraging to hear?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” groaned Akna, her face contorting into a grimace. “What do you care, anyway? You don’t even like adlets. Toklo told me all those things you said after we finished devouring Panuk.”
Solvei winced a little at that, remembering how repulsed she’d been when they’d first come across Akna’s people. “Yeah, well, it’s not like you guys made a very good impression, since you popped up out of nowhere and attacked us.”
“They were a scouting party,” protested Akna. “They weren’t going to kill anyone!”
“That’s not what they-” Solvei cut herself off abruptly, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. “I don’t want to do this. Master’s going to get his body back soon, and when he does I’ll just be a spirit following him around again. His mate and those other mares aren’t very strong, and I don’t think he’s planning on taking that Teyu creature with him, so that means the only one he’ll have to rely on is you. I don’t want our last conversation before that happens to be a fight.”
Akna’s look of consternation faded into a softer expression at that, but she shook her head. “Solvei, I’m not his sla-, his companion the way you are. Once we get back to the Shrine, I’m leaving to go rejoin my tribe.”
“And then what? You know those yetis your tribe was concerned about worked for Grisela and her siblings, right? Who’re probably waiting right outside the Shrine. They’re a threat, and even if Master kills them, that mother they keep mentioning is still out there.”
“What’s your point?” grunted Akna, rubbing her eyes with one hand.
“That you should help Master finish them off. Now that I’m, you know...” Solvei waved a paw at herself awkwardly, “...dead, I can’t fight for him. But since he can use divine authority-, sorry, the Charismata on you, then you can-”
“Stop. Just...stop, will you?” The sigh Akna gave then seemed to come from her ankles. “I came here because I thought the Night Mare was giving me a sign, that this was how I was supposed to get another of the Umbral Regalia and convert my tribe to her worship. Not only did I fail, I found out that most of what the Keeper – the one who taught me everything I know about the Night Mare’s power and glory – said about the rite which helped shape who I am now was not only wrong, but that he’s some...pony skull with a diseased mind.”
Slumping in place, she shook her head. “I’ll help fight if those monsters are waiting outside the Shrine, but after that I’m going home. I’ll tell the elders about how the yetis were brought back by Grisela and Sissel and those others, even if I don’t know how they did it, but otherwise? I want to help Panuk’s family mourn his passing. I want to craft runes on our warriors’ weapons the way my grandmother taught me. I even want to argue with the elders again about how I’m serving the tribe better by deepening my rapport with the spirits and becoming a stronger shaman instead of choosing who’ll get to impregnate me.”
“Even though the spirits aren’t who you pray to anymore?”
A ghost of a smile crossed Akna’s lips at that. “That’s right. I haven’t given up on bringing my tribe into the Night Mare’s faith, but until I can come up with a new plan, then as far as the elders and everyone else in my tribe is concerned, I still revere the same spirits as my grandmother.”
“Oh.”
Silence fell again, but this time Akna was the one to break it. “What about you?”
“Huh? What about me?”
“Don’t you miss your family? I mean, I know that you can’t exactly go back to them after...what happened to you, but I never hear you talk about them. Do winter wolves not keep close ties to their kin?”
“We do,” nodded Solvei. “I’m the youngest of four siblings, the runt of my litter, but even though they teased me a lot growing up, we were all very close. And our parents watched over us every day.”
Leaning against the cushioned backrest, Akna seemed happy to talk about someone else. “So what happened? Why aren’t you with them now?”
This time, Solvei was the one to give a wan smile. “I almost forgot, you never heard about how I met Master, did you?” When Akna shook her head again, Solvei gave a strained chuckle. “It’s hard to believe that it was less than a lunar cycle ago. It all started with a wolf named Bolverk, my father’s brother. Every so often, he’d come by and challenge Father to a fight, but this last time was different...”
“My lord, our contact in Eigengrau has just reported that Lex Legis has left the city proper.”
From the center of his analytic matrix, Steel Soul regarded the metal-and-flesh pony kneeling before him, silently feeding what he’d just been told into the mechanical apparatus to which he was connected.
To an outside observer, the analytic matrix would have appeared to be a room-sized collection of wires, translucent tubes, frames of various metals, and blinking lights. In the middle of the vast array was a single, undecorated stand – little more than a raised platform – over which several large cables hung. It was those cables to which Steel Soul was currently connected, their ends plugged into various ports lining his cranium as he took advantage of the advanced processing power that the massive bank of equipment granted him.
Steel Soul himself could almost have been mistaken for part of the devices that he was hooked up to. Being constructed almost entirely of metal, his component parts didn’t match his namesake, having upgraded his physical structure from mere steel years ago. Now, his equinoid chassis was built from a custom-forged alloy of tungsten and adamantine, the metal lined with pathways made of liquid crystal polymers. Although each piece of his frame was sleekly designed, his total mass was augmented by the weapon systems, sensor arrays, and defensive mechanisms attached to various sockets spread along his artificial body.
The overall effect was that of a pony who’d been stripped down to their skeleton, dipped in chrome matte and painted with glowing lines, before being outfitted with gear whose functions could only be guessed at.
But the one part of Steel Soul that never changed were his eyes, shining with a sterile blue light that seemed to grow colder as no further report was given. Finally, he spoke. “And his destination?”
“Unknown at this time.”
Despite his austere appearance, Steel Soul didn’t hesitate to mentally activate the psibernetic stimulator that was implanted in the pain center of his servitor’s brain.
The effect was immediate, as the stallion collapsed, shaking as he screamed in agony. Steel Soul allowed the torture to continue for several seconds before ending the flow of machine-induced psychic anguish. “That answer,” he hissed, his voice crackling with an electronic flow that made his anger audible, “is insufficient! I must have more data!”
“W-White Wraith sent no further information,” moaned the half-metal pony, shakily standing up. “He could only confirm how long it had been since Lex Legis met with Sanguine Disposition, otherwise-”
He was cut off as another bout of psychic agony left him writhing on the floor.
“INSUFFICIENT!” roared Steel Soul, taking a step forward before stopping as he registered the cables connected to his head going taut. Disconnecting himself from his analytic matrix would make it harder to think of a plan, and right now that was more important than punishing his incompetent underling.
Instead, he allocated more of his processing power to the issue at hoof, seconds going by as his expanded cognitive functions grappled with the problem. Lex Legis and Sanguine Disposition could not be allowed to form an alliance, lest the balance of power be tilted against him. But there was a high likelihood that had just happened, which meant that a disruptive effect needed to be introduced.
The easiest answer would simply have been to have Lex Legis killed – Sanguine Disposition was simply too difficult a target to easily slay, the vampire not only being a powerful mage, but having taken steps to fortify Eigengrau against an assault – but the Night Mare had forbidden that level of direct conflict between her champions. Any of her blessed who managed to slay another would draw the full force goddess’s wrath down on them.
But the beasts who dwelled in the wilder reaches of Darkest Night were under no such restriction...
Finally shutting off the flow of psionic pain to the stallion that was wailing in front of him, Steel Soul issued new orders.
“Mobilize every asset we have within the vicinity of Eigengrau. They’re to engage, but not kill, every non-sapient creature they can locate in the general area. Their goal is to stir up as much aggression as possible. And under no circumstances are they to directly engage with Lex Legis or his retinue!”
“U-under...stood...” moaned the psiborg stallion, legs still twitching as he picked himself up and stumbled out.
Satisfied, the electronic hum in Steel Soul’s voice warbled in a way that was almost recognizable as laughter.
“Won’t it be a shame if the Night Mare’s newest champion turns out to be too weak to survive the dangers of Darkest Night.”
Ever since mortals learned of the gods, we have struggled to understand the true nature of the divine.
Sages and philosophers, poets and prognosticators, arcanists and elders. All of these – to say nothing of those who spend their lives in service to higher powers – have put forward explanations and insights in an effort to deepen our understanding of the elevated existences that are known as the gods. But for all of these efforts, performed by so many for so long, we still have achieved only the most rudimentary comprehension of what these lofty beings truly are, let alone what they’re capable of.
Those kernels of wisdom which we have managed to grasp are few enough that they can easily be reiterated here. It is well known that, despite being so far beyond us, gods covet the worship of mortal beings. The reason for this is widely held to be that mortal reverence is the manna which sustains them, though debate continues as to whether or not worship is the only potential source of divine sustenance.
Another truth is that the gods grant power to those who dedicate themselves to their will. Today, the common form that this beneficence takes is the form of clerical spells, though other graces – such as a paladin’s unflagging courage or a warpriest’s ability to heal with a touch – abound among various religious orders, to say nothing of tales which speak of even greater blessings granted to individuals of particular favor.
While detractors point to supernatural abilities gained by those who worship no gods – or who attribute their powers to otherworldly entities of lesser stature such as spirits, demons, elementals, or similar creatures – these can be easily dismissed as the work of charlatans, users of arcane and other non-divine magic, or are simply misinterpretations of lesser powers gained from equally lesser sources. A pact reached with some devil or trickster fey is bound to have some sort of beneficial aspect to it (how else would such creatures continue to confound mortals into trafficking with them otherwise?), but the wise and the learned will recognize the difference between these and true godly boons.
Perhaps the most revelatory knowledge that mortals have gained as to the nature of the gods, however, is that their will surpasses what we think of as the immutable laws of nature. While magic, technology, and even more esoteric disciplines can achieve great wonders, these are all powers which function within the vast architecture that we understand as Creation; divinities, however, make alterations to that architecture directly. To put it another way, mortals manipulate the rules of the universe, while gods transcend them.
Much of this last point remains unclear. Are gods only able to bend reality within their particular areas of sovereignty, or do they have a wider ability to mold the universe to their liking? Does doing so require some sort of effort or strain on their part? What happens if multiple gods attempt to make contested changes to the same aspect of existence?
The answers to these questions might be beyond our understanding – perhaps beyond even our ability to understand – but if we do possess the capacity to comprehend this awesome power, it might be through a little-known discipline, known only to a few, which seemingly recreates that power on a far smaller and more limited scale. This microcosm, seemingly practiced only among isolated mystics, antisocial hermits, and the occasional bedlamite, is known by several names. Among those few annals which make reference to it, labels such as “oneiric manifestation” or “somniacreativity” are used. However, this treatise will avail itself of the lay moniker so often used when discussing this power.
Dreambinding.
For those not familiar with the term, “dreambinding” is the label given to those rare individuals with the power to pull objects from their dreams into the waking world. Beyond that, there is little that can be said with certainty about this ability, simply because of its extreme rarity. Indeed, it would be easy to dismiss such a power altogether – much like with those who claim to have divine spells and blessings despite worshiping no gods – as simply chicanery, or perhaps a more conventional type of magic disguised as something unfamiliar (many types of spells, it should be noted, can produce objects seemingly out of nowhere, and bring creatures from distant realms to the caster’s side).
But where simple prestidigitation can produce a hidden item in a manner that fools the eye, and a spell can conjure simple materials or teleport extant things from a great distance, dreambinding far surpasses such activities. For a dreambinder, almost anything which can be imagined can be brought forward from imagination into reality. Whereas mighty feats of magic might create anything from a simple repast to an entire building, the spells that do these are highly limited in their function, able only to make that which is detailed in their intricate designs. Not so the dreambinder, who can pull forward anything which he chooses, so long as he’s capable of imagining it.
Or at least, that’s the impression among those who know of this particular ability; that those who possess it can bring forward anything they wish from thought to reality. But while the breadth of what a dreambinder may conjure is vast indeed, there are myriad shortcomings involved in the discipline. Indeed, one could persuasively argue that dreambinding is defined as much by what it can’t do as what it can, otherwise its practitioners would sit on a perch as lofty as that of the gods whom they emulate, which even a casual examination of the world around us demonstrates is not the case.
Hence, a proper investigation must be performed, whereby all prejudices and preconceptions are put aside so that the proper questions might be asked: what is dreambinding, how does it work, and how can it help us understand the nature of the gods?
The simple answer is that, as our reality is malleable to the gods, dreams are similarly pliable to mortals. In this vein, dreams could be considered lesser realities – or perhaps a lesser grade of reality – than the waking world. Few ever learn to consciously control their nocturnal visions, of course, but nearly all cultures have stories of those who remain lucid even while asleep. To them, the world of dreams is a playground of the mind, to be shaped at will, perhaps similar to how the gods view the world that we blithely label as real.
What dreambinders do is take this activity to a new level, “binding” a piece of their dreams, granting it stability in form and function, and bring it with them when they awaken. Once brought forth, there is no functional difference between a dreambound item and an ordinary one...with a single, crucial exception: living creatures, though they can be manifested alongside inanimate objects, are not truly alive. Though they act however the dreambinder visualized, they inevitably lack a soul of their own, and cannot be given one...regardless of how dearly the dreamer might wish to do so.
As sages and scholars are currently unable to come to a consensus on whether the gods create mortal souls or simply guide them into the world from some primal, unknown source, it cannot be speculated as to whether or not there’s a clue as to the nature of the gods in this limit.
Beyond this, there are few hard facts that can be established with regard to the nature and limits of dreambinding. One practitioner of this discipline might only be able to bring something forth for a timespan measuring in minutes, while others can maintain them for hours, days, or even indefinitely. Some might only be able to generate crude objects of little power, while others can bring forth magical objects and or even creatures of incredible might, even if not a spellcaster themselves (though surely, being in command of powerful magic would have to make it easier to visualize a desired magic item). And while most can only bring forth dreambound materials during the transition from sleep to wakefulness, there is at least one known instance of a dreambinder able to bring forth items in a “waking dream,” which is to say that they were conscious and aware while activating this power.
The most mysterious aspect of this power, however, is precisely how it functions. What is it that allows for certain individuals to quite literally make their dreams come true, where so many others cannot? Even the dreambinders themselves claim not to know, which means that – unless there’s a grand conspiracy among their ranks to hide the truth, one which spans vast gulfs of time and space – the true nature of dreambinding has less to do with personal ability than with some other, more fundamental factor.
We can likely rule out magical aptitude, as the majority of known dreambinders not only lack spellcasting ability, but don’t even have a wizard or sorcerer in their bloodline. The psychic (or psionic) disciplines practiced in certain cultures might present an alternative theory, but a casual examination of those eldritch practices offers little to suggest an advanced focus on manipulating dreams. Certain creatures, such as the baku and night hags, have innate ability to manipulate dreams, but attributing dreambinding to them is also a poor explanation; most such creatures are, if not overtly hostile to mortals, unconcerned with them. Likewise, few are the dreambinders who’ve contacted such beings (or want to, for that matter).
There is one alternative theory, however, and it brings this study back around to where it began: the gods.
Perhaps dreambinding is a gift given to a select few by those exalted beings whom mortals fear and revere. After all, if we accept that dreambinding is akin to how gods manipulate the universe – albeit far more limited in scope – then perhaps it makes sense that such a thing is a gift from them. Who else would be able to create a facsimile of such incredible power than those who wield that power?
If so, then it leaves open the question of why they would give dreambinding to certain individuals – quite often ones of seemingly no importance, and who offer them no worship – while others, often their own devoted servants, are seemingly left bereft of such incredible power. Of course, such a question could be (and has been) asked of seemingly everything the gods do. Many oracles find themselves confronted with visions and revelations despite never having asked for divine insight. Would the power to bind dreams be any different, in that account?
Alternatively, if we accept that gods can only manipulate reality in accordance with their areas of control, only gods of dreams – a relatively scarce portfolio among the various pantheons of known divinities – can offer this blessing. If that’s the case, then perhaps the number of dreambinders is greater than we know, with the faithful of such deities counting many among their ranks.
This seems unlikely, however, as the few known dreambinders lack a connection to a god of dreams. Moreover, any temple able to grant such powers would surely advertise it far and wide in order to draw more adherents to their god’s faith. Then again, most religions can conclusively demonstrate that ecclesiastical studies will result in gaining spells that heals the sick, feeds the hungry, and safeguards the weak, and yet there are many who can’t find it within themselves to be more than a lay follower of a particular church, if that. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that, if this power is the province of a particular faith, it’s not one that’s widely touted.
Ultimately, the nature of dreambinding – like the gods themselves – remains shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, with more questions than answers, and what answers are available only raising more questions.
To that end, it is my hope that this treatise serves as an adequate primer for any who would examine this phenomenon in more detail. While another chronicler would perhaps wish anyone undertaking such a venture good luck, I’m afraid that I cannot do so. My only wish, in having penned this inquiry, is that it is sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the clerics of the Moon Princess. While I can appreciate their willingness to trade coin for knowledge on this subject, I cannot bear to rewrite this again, as each prior draft has been turned down as being “insufficiently academic” in its examination of dreambinding.
I can only hope that this time they’ll find it acceptable, as I must have the promised payment if I’m to hire anyone to save my daughter.
I wish that my little girl had never come into such power. I wish I had done a better job of convincing her to hide it. But everyone who grows up poor dreams of a better life, especially when they’re young. It couldn’t be helped that, when she woke up, the nice things she’d imagined were there beside her.
And when she lost her mother, it was inevitable that she dreamed of her coming back.
I don’t blame my neighbors for how they reacted. If someone else’s dead wife suddenly returned without explanation, I would have been beside myself with dread and suspicion also, especially when the local priest confirmed that she wasn’t truly alive. But even so, to call a small child a witch and a demon...to have those slavers kidnap her because they were afraid of confronting her themselves...
No, I can’t afford to be blinded by such thoughts now. All that matters is finding my daughter, and for that, I need money. Once I hire a rescue team, they’ll get her back, and everything will be alright...
But if there are any gods out there who watch over dreambinders, then I implore you, please...please protect my little girl...
Losing her mother almost broke me. I can’t bear to lose her too.
“Massster...”
Without glancing up from the scroll that he was reading, Sanguine Disposition answered the sibilant voice of his apprentice. “What is it, Ssethregora?”
From the doorway of his library, the dark naga – a twelve-foot-long snake with ebony scales and a humanoid face – bowed its head. “A guard isss at the gatesss, claiming that there’sss a sssituation which requiresss your attention. A commotion beyond the wallsss.”
That was enough to earn a glance from the vampire. “Eigengrau is under attack?”
“No, Massster. But the creaturesss that live in the wildsss are sssuddenly making a terrible din, and the sssoundsss of fighting are everywhere.”
A frown replacing his usual smirk, the leather wing slowly rolled the scroll back up, taking care to treat it gently. Although it was wrapped in preservation magic, it was still several centuries old, and remained one of the most comprehensive studies into dreambinding that he knew of.
That, and it was also a fascinating bit of history surrounding the early life of one of the most famous figures in the Night Mare’s religion, a dreambinding mare who had been one of the key figures in the Noctem; the reformation of the goddess’s church that had seen her go from being merely a goddess of monsters and terrors that lurked in the dark – and who most ponies had placated rather than truly worshiped – to being a goddess who encouraged ponies to master those fears, using them as crucibles to grow stronger.
Of course, she’d also caused a holy war in the process, declaring the Night Mare to be the goddess of dreams and the night, which was the domain of the goddess known as the Moon Princess. The hostility between the two churches had gone through multiple cycles of active conflict and passive aggression; it hadn’t been until Iliana had united the disparate tribes under her banner that the strife had ended. Even today, enmity still existed between the two religions.
But the history less was less interesting to Sanguine Disposition than what it meant for today. If dreambinding was the power that Lex had almost killed him with earlier, then the implication was-
“Massster...?”
Sighing inwardly, Sanguine Disposition nodded. “Yes, yes, let’s go see what’s happening.”
Laying the scroll aside, he strode from the library, his apprentice following him out.
Lex stared at his reflection, the mirror in front of him held aloft – and illuminated by – the roiling purple aura of his telekinesis.
The polished surface was made of silver, rather than glass, with an ornate border that marked it as being the product of careful artistry rather than rote work. To all appearances, and even the few simple tests that Lex had put to it, it was exactly what it looked like and nothing more. Even examining it in the magical spectrum had turned up no magical auras or properties, lending further credence that it was entirely real.
And yet Lex knew better, having conjured the mirror out of his shadow a few minutes prior.
It was the latest in a series of tests that he’d run, experimenting with just what he could demand of his tulpa now that he finally, finally had control over the thing.
The first thing he’d done had been to mentally interrogate the thing about what spells it had prepared without his knowledge. He’d already determined that, as a fragment of his own mind, it had some limited capacity to ready thaumaturgical spells, siphoning off bits of energy during those rare occasions when he’d been able to renew his mental complement of his most powerful magic. Prior to now, knowing that had been of little use, since his tulpa had been unforthcoming as to what it had prepared.
This time, however, his silent query had been answered. Not in the form of words, but in sudden insight, as though he’d suddenly remembered a few additional spells that he’d forgotten that he’d prepared previously. That wasn’t truly the case, since his tulpa was still extant, even if it was obedient now. As such, those few spells were stored in the partitioned portion of his consciousness, outside of his ability to willfully activate. But now he knew, as if by instinct, that all he had to do was mentally command his tulpa to release them – something which required no concentration or focus on his part, leaving him free to do other things while it handled the actual casting – and it would.
Even better, the next time he readied his thaumaturgical spells, he would be the one to pick what his tulpa prepared, rather than it making those decisions on its own!
But as satisfying as that had been to confirm, it had been a secondary line of investigation for Lex.
Far more fascinating, and more important, had been his newfound command of his tulpa’s ability to bring his dreams into reality.
As with the spells it had prepared, there was no telepathic communication of the precise nature, scope, or limits of what it could do. But neither did he receive any sort of sudden rush of comprehension. Apparently, this power wasn’t something which could be intuitively understood.
But that was no barrier to experimentation, and Lex had spent more than a few minutes in the alone in the front of the carriage that Sanguine Disposition had conjured, testing the limits of what this power could do.
The data he’d gained so far had proven to be promising indeed.
He’d tried simple objects first. A single sheet of unmarked paper. An unadorned glass jar. A square sheet of undyed cloth. All had been, at his mental command, brought forward by his tulpa. Each had been meticulously examined before setting them on the roof of the carriage, left there to see how long they’d last before he’d turned his attention to other things.
Next had been more complex materials, and once again his tulpa hadn’t failed to deliver. A sealed vial of ink had showcased that liquid compounds were possible. A pocket watch had confirmed that objects made of complex construction and moving parts were similarly viable. He’d even been able to reproduce a copy of a long scroll he’d written some time ago detailing how his thaumaturgical magic worked, the original having been lost when he’d sacrificed his extradimensional pouch while fighting Xiriel...though in that case, further experimenting had confirmed he could only bring forth written works that he’d read in their entirety; making a fully detailed work without knowing what was in it was, unsurprisingly, outside of what his tulpa had imagined.
Then he’d started working with magic, and it had only been then that he’d started to hit the limits of what could be made.
Conjuring the sort of minor conveniences that represented the height of Equestria’s magical development had been no more difficult than bringing forth mundane items had been. Pouches with minor preservation spells, crystals enchanted to display a single image from memory, and miniature roto blades designed to carry aloft non-flying pets of pegasi. All easily brought forth.
Recreating one of the floating gems – the dusty rose prism which had granted the ability to anticipate danger a fraction of a second before it happened – that he’d lost in his fight with Dark Streak had been similarly successful. As had making another of the protective amulets that he’d worn. But it had been when he’d tried to recreate the deadly mask that Shadow Star had destroyed that his tulpa had at last failed.
Unable to comply.
That had been all it had said. There’d been no explanation as to why, nor any tactile or psychic sensations to indicate what limit he’d hit. Just a simple message of failure.
Further testing had revealed at least some of the mystery. There was apparently limit to how much magic he could bring forth from nothing. The floating gems he’d taken from Xiriel hadn’t been equal in what they could do, and several of them – such as orange prism that had increased fine magical control, or the pale green prism which had improved fine motor coordination – were likewise beyond what he could make.
Equally notable had been how, while magic bound to items were viable, precast spells in prepared containers weren’t. He’d attempted to bring forth spells embedded in gemstones – something that would have rendered his inability to easily replenish his thaumaturgical spellcasting obsolete! – only to fail no matter which spells he tried. From his strongest and deadliest to minor feats of magic, no such materials could be brought forward.
Further testing had let him at least come up with a hypothesis, there. While whatever unknown process was taking presumably ambient magic and binding it to items brought forth from his tulpa, it could only bind it to it in stable forms. Precast spells, by contrast, were only held inside a particular container; they weren’t bound to it. That apparently made a difference, the magic scattering before it could be arranged and put into the gemstones he visualized.
And there were other limits besides those on magic items.
Size, or perhaps total mass, was a factor as well. At one point it had occurred to him that, if he could conjure up a secure dwelling, they could stay there while he conducted more tests. But that had been a complete nonstarter; while he’d eschewed anything opulent, such as River Bank’s manor or Sanguine Disposition’s villa, opting instead for a small, single-story stone dwelling, his tulpa had again been unable to comply. No matter how he’d tried to reshape his request, nothing had worked.
Which had likely been just as well, since it had been shortly after that when the items he’d made had begun to disappear. Quietly fading out of existence, he’d again felt nothing to indicate their loss; it had only been because he’d caught a glimpse of the vial of ink he’d made fading away in the light of his horn that he’d noticed it. Subsequently checking the pocket watch had confirmed that his creations lasted for a little longer than ten minutes before discorporating. Though he apparently had the option to dismiss them sooner if he wanted, something he’d inadvertently done with the gauntlet he’d used against Sanguine Disposition.
But after confirming that he couldn’t make things appear further than a couple of feet from himself – an important factor for using this ability in a fight – he’d come to the one experiment he was hesitant to try.
Conjuring up creatures, rather than things.
Thoughts of seeing Sonata and Aria again had immediately crossed his mind. But rather than being enticed by the prospect, Lex had found himself repulsed. Now that he knew the truth about his relationship with the two of them – that their feelings for him were the product of Kara’s “blessing” – the idea of creating facsimiles of them was something which he found he couldn’t stomach. All the more so since it was entirely possible that they were both dead, those false feelings having caused them to run into danger for his sake, only to burn alive in that abandoned factory where he’d fought Dark Streak.
He'd briefly considered other people he’d known as an alternative, his parents chief among them. But that was only slightly less unpalatable. While Jewelia and Big Dig – his mother and father – were over a thousand years gone now, bringing forth phantoms of them now would only highlight the fact that he’d never gotten to say goodbye. Even with how numb he felt after learning the futility of trying to connect with others, and how his love life was due to divine manipulation, that thought sent an ache through his chest.
Instead, he’d elected to shelve that particular experiment, and instead focus on how any of this was possible.
That his tulpa was pulling things from his dreams had been self-evident; he’d known that much by how it had, on more than one previous occasion, brought forth warped images of ponies he knew and cared for. Spitting invectives and hurling blame, those images had been taken directly from the nightmares the rogue portion of his mind had inflicted on him for so long.
But the ensorcelled gauntlet that he’d used to wound – however briefly – Sanguine Disposition hadn’t been from any dream that he’d ever had. The form of it had been familiar enough, being a copy of what he’d used in his battle with Starlight Glimmer. But the actual enchantment on it had been nothing more than a half-formed notion of how such a weapon could potentially work, utilizing a directed pulse of positive energy – the stuff that healing magic used – to disrupt the mass of negative energy that animated the undead. It had been, at best, a stray thought that had come to him during his time in Vanhoover; one which he’d never followed up on, since the only healing spell the Night Mare had given him was far too diffuse to use as a template in that regard.
And yet his tulpa had produced a working version of it, completely realized and magically functional, when he’d needed it.
Dreams were, as far as Lex knew, the imagination allowed to run wild, without consciousness to guide it. Except that his tulpa was a guiding consciousness, being formed of his own fears and doubts. And being a part of himself, it had full access to his mental makeup, meaning that it was fully cognizant of his thoughts, feelings, memories, knowledge, and awareness, being able to arrange various aspects of them all in order to craft dreams that were specifically tailored to cause him distress.
But if it was able to do that, then had to have considered numerous other kinds of dreams, if only to discard them as being unsuitable as nightmares. Even if it had only shown him the unpleasant ones, others must still have been imagined and evaluated before being discarded. And it had done that at the speed of thought, with all of the focus and discipline that he brought to his mental endeavors, for night after night over the course of almost two years.
In light of that, his tulpa’s control over his dreams had given it access to the full range of his imagination.
Of course, that was only half of the mystery. The other half was how it was making his dreams manifest in reality.
That part Lex couldn’t figure out, at least not yet. While the obvious answer was magic, that self-evidently wasn’t the case. The mundane items he’d conjured had radiated no magic whatsoever, which made sense; if his tulpa had the ability to collect and compress ambient magical energy on that scale, then preparing his thaumaturgical spells wouldn’t have required any external assistance. And yet, it had to be imbuing those dream-objects with physical substance somehow.
Presumably the Night Mare had a hoof in that, since she was the one who had given him his tulpa to begin with, but without more proof Lex was leery of jumping to that conclusion. He’d also attributed those sexual spells he’d received to the Night Mare also, mostly for lack of a better explanation, and while that seemed embarrassingly absurd in hindsight, they’d been clues to a much more unpleasant truth which he’d foolishly ignored. It wasn’t a mistake he’d make again.
But even if he was ignorant of the exact manner in which his tulpa was able to make dreams into short-lived reality, the fact was that it could. And for all the myriad implications that had now that he could control that power, there was one which overshadowed all others.
It was now possible to return to Equestria.
The only reason he and Thermal Draft were still trapped on Everglow was because he didn’t have the proper material component to return home. He knew the spell that would let them cross the planes of existence, and had prepared it during the equinox a few days ago. But that spell was one which required a physical focus – a tuning fork made out of specific materials and keyed to a certain pitch – in order to work, with each plane having its own particular combination of those two factors. Since the spell itself could conceivably journey to any realm, it needed that to lock onto the target plane, otherwise it was useless.
Lex, of course, knew exactly the construction and modulation necessary to find Equestria again. But being stuck out in the wilds had made that a non-starter, nor had that farming village they’d stayed in so briefly been the sort of locale where something that esoteric could be found. A journey to Viljatown had been, in his estimation, the only place where the proper tuning fork could be constructed.
But that wasn’t an issue anymore. His plane-shifting spell didn’t take very long to cast – not like his scrying spell, which took a solid hour to utilize, meaning that the silver mirror he’d made for it (before he’d confirmed the time limit on dream-made objects) was useless now – which meant that once he regained his body, he could return to Equestria whenever he wanted.
Which I’ll do, he decided as he let the mirror dissolve into nothing, once I’ve finished my business on Everglow.
Thermal Draft needed to be saved. Solvei needed to be resurrected. And Sissel, Grisela, Paska, and the rest of their twisted clan needed to be put to death. Those were his responsibilities, responsibilities which he’d come close to abandoning in the wake of so many personal tragedies, but which he now realized were the only things left which gave his life meaning.
He’d never have what he wanted most, the ability to understand others, and even the relationships that he’d fallen into were lies, the result of Kara’s tampering. All of his worst fears had come true...but in doing so, they had ceased to have any power over him. Since his tulpa existed entirely to reflect his fears back at him, he’d ended up reclaiming that aspect of himself – at least in part – and in so doing found the power necessary to finish what he’d started and then return home to continue his work there.
That was what his moral code demanded.
It was the one thing he had left, the single aspect of his existence which still had value. He’d briefly abandoned it, thinking that if his life was so pointless and empty then everything he’d created had to be equally meaningless, but now he knew better. It was the one thing which remained intact, the guiding principles which showed how his life could still be meaningful. Happiness was beyond his reach; it always had been, and always would be. Lex understood that now.
But he still had a reason for living.
That was enough.
Nodding to himself, Lex belatedly checked his lifeline...and frowned.
“Stop here,” he instructed the shapeless force driving the carriage, which immediately complied. Taking a moment to dismiss the remaining items he’d had his tulpa create, Lex leaped down from the driver’s seat of the carriage, glancing around. Solvei, exit the carriage with Akna.
He needn’t have bothered with the instructions, the door opening almost as soon as the carriage had stopped, the adlet frowning as she glanced around. “Why have we stopped?”
Solvei pushed her way passed Akna. “Is everything alright, Master?”
Lex nodded behind him. “My lifeline is pointing in a slightly different direction than the carriage’s heading. That means the road is angled away from where we need to go, and since the undergrowth is too thick for our conveyance, we’re abandoning it here.”
He didn’t wait for them to get used to the idea, walking toward the tree line. The further they’d gotten from Eigengrau, the more the wilds had closed in, with less and less sign of it having been hacked back. As such, it took only a few dozen steps before they were back in the wilderness again, Lex closing his eyes as he used Solvei’s vision to orient himself, telepathically calling the winter wolf to his side.
“Ugh,” groaned Akna. “I was just getting used to how soft those cushions were.”
“They just felt that way because your clothes weren’t covering your bottom,” snickered Solvei as she walked to Lex.
“They’re n-, HUH?!” Shrieking as she glanced back at herself and saw that her tail was lifting the bottom of her robe, Akna immediately reached back and flattened her tail, pulling the hem down as far as it would go. “Th-, how di-, has that been like that the entire time?!”
“Yep!” laughed Solvei, her own tail wagging in amusement. “Ever since you put that on!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?!” hissed the shaman, ears flattening.
“It was funny,” answered Solvei, making no attempt to hide her mirth. “Besides, it’s not like a lot of people saw you like that. We were only walking around that town for a little bit before we got in the carriage and went to that bat pony’s home, and then came here, so relax.”
“Relax?!” seethed Akna. “Relax?! I can’t believe-”
“May I remind you,” cut in Lex with a growl, “that we faced several hostile creatures the last time we went through this place’s wilderness. If you two keep making so much noise, we’ll likely do so again in short order.”
Seething, Akna tossed her clothes aside, changing back into her winter wolf form as she took advantage of the darkvision her quadrupedal body offered her. “You didn’t say anything either,” she huffed, keeping her voice low. “Were you enjoying the show that much?”
Lex didn’t have a chance to answer before an explosion went off in the distance, followed by a multitude of howls as the woods suddenly exploded with activity.
“I SAID KEEP GOING!” roared Lex from his place on Solvei’s back, clinging to the black crystals she’d woven around herself. “This is the most direct path back to our bodies! Whatever’s happening is driving everything here into a frenzy, which means there’s no detour we can take that will be any safer! So keep going!”
Neither the winter wolf nor the adlet needed to ask what he meant, as all around them, Darkest Night erupted with chaos and violence. Even as Lex finished speaking, a number of atonal whines came from somewhere nearby, followed by a series of loud blasts which were accompanied by bright flashes, momentarily making the shadowed forest light up as the explosions caused everything to strobe.
That brief interval wasn’t enough to let any of them get a good look at their surroundings – just like during their sojourn to Eigengrau, the lupines’ darkvision was hampered by the thick undergrowth – let alone figure out what was happening. But it was enough to let them catch glimpses creatures of numerous shapes and sizes all around them. Some were running away from the blinding flashes, others were heading toward them, but whenever two or more of the indistinct shapes neared each other, they immediately began to fight, screeching and howling as they tore into each other with teeth, claws, and magic.
There was one exception to that rule, however: some of the creatures they’d run across in what had become a mad rush through the wilderness traveled – and attacked – in packs.
“I’m telling you, there’s more-” Akna didn’t have a chance to finish as a high-pitched trilling came from just ahead of them, causing Lex to hunker down as Solvei and Akna each released a breath of cold air ahead of them, trying to ward off what they knew was coming.
They were only partially successful.
Several dull thuds hit the ground directly in front of the two wolves, their combined breath weapons having taken out several of the creatures that had made the trilling sound. At a casual glance, they might have looked like particularly fat snakes, being roughly three feet long and several inches wide. But snakes had eyes, jaws, and scales.
The monsters that Solvei and Akna had frozen had none of those things, being giant leeches whose sole discernable features were large rings lamprey-like rings of teeth.
Despite several of their number having been slain, the creatures – like seemingly everything else that lived in the hinterlands of Darkest Night – were undeterred by the attack, and even as Solvei and Akna raced by the frozen corpses of the oversized parasites, others were trilling, springing up from the undergrowth, down from the trees, and from virtually every other conceivable direction as they coiled and launched themselves at the trio.
Individually, none of the creatures were very dangerous. While their size was disconcerting, their bodies were little more than collections of fluid in soggy sacs, and their teeth were stunted and brittle. But the things threw themselves forward as a swarm, jumping forward in waves with no concern for their own safety, trying to latch onto their targets en masse.
Despite being clad in powerful armor, even Solvei couldn’t afford to ignore them completely. While nearly all of the leeches bounced off of the black crystals covering her, their teeth unable to find purchase, one managed to come down across her muzzle, ignoring her attempts to shake it off as it wriggled closer to her uncovered eyes-
Only to be surrounded in a purple aura as Lex, his vision still connected to Solvei’s, snatched the thing in his telekinesis and threw it aside, prompting a relieved shudder to run through the winter wolf. “Thank you, Master!”
“Just keep Akna covered!”
“Right!” Sparing a glance to the side as she continued running forward as fast as she could across the broken terrain, Solvei spared a glance for the adlet-turned-utvalgte beside her. “Akna, do you-”
“GET THESE THINGS OFF ME!!!”
Grimacing as much at the way the adlet was violently shaking herself in an attempt to dislodge the half-dozen or more leeches that were burrowing into her fur as from the absolute revulsion in her companion’s voice, Solvei took another deep breath, blasting Akna with a bout of super-cooled air.
Her innate nature protecting her from the gelid attack, Akna didn’t stop shaking until she’d flung the last of the leeches – now frozen – off of herself. Even then, she couldn’t stop groaning in disgust. “I don’t know what these things are, but I hate them! They better not show up in the woods around the Shrine back home!”
“I don’t think they will, since they seem to hate the cold!” answered Solvei. “Now hurry up and make sure Master’s clear!”
Still wriggling and jerking despite having thrown off the clinging creatures, Akna glanced at where the unicorn in question was perched on Solvei’s back, cringing as she saw that a few of the things had attached themselves to his cloak. “Hold still! You’ve got a few of them on you!”
She didn’t wait after giving her warning, immediately sending her own breath weapon toward Lex. Fortunately, Solvei had already warded him against the supernatural chill, and the freezing wind washed over him without effect. The same couldn’t be said for the leeches, flash-frozen in an instant, and a single contemptuous swing of his hoof was enough to send their icy corpses to the forest floor.
“I don’t hear anymore trilling,” noted Solvei as they kept moving. “I think that was the last of them.”
“It better be,” moaned Akna, twitching in lingering disgust.
But she’d barely spoken when a particularly large eruption came from nearby, the shockwave causing the branches around them to whip back and forth as though they’d stumbled into an entire grove of scythe-trees. It was answered by a particularly loud cry, and a second later the ground began to shake. It wasn’t a sustained rumbling, but rather was a series of sharp shakes, as though something heavy was striking the ground repeatedly.
A moment later a huge form – dwarfing even Akna, who’d increased her size as much as she could, making herself as large as the dragon Lex had fought outside of Tall Tale – rushed in front of them. Moving too fast to let itself be easily identified, there was only a glimpse of claws, fangs, and large quills running down its body and across its long tail.
Said tail was whipping behind it as it ran, and as one of the monstrous creature’s eyes – yellow and malevolent – caught sight of them, the trailing appendage lashed out. It wasn’t close enough to hit them, but that was of little comfort as a collection of its tail-spikes were flung loose, rocketing toward the three of them with such speed and precision that it would have put Eigengrau’s crossbow-wielding guards to shame even, released in an instant as the oversized monster continued on its mad dash toward the blast zone.
One of the spikes went wide, striking a nearby tree with such force that it not only burrowed through the thick trunk, but kept going, shattering a large stone behind the wooden impediment and striking the ground at a low angle, digging up a long trench before finally coming to a stop. A second passed within an inch of Akna’s face, the adlet yelping as it shaved several hairs from her coat before speeding off into the darkness.
A third went directly for Lex, who responded with a silent command to his tulpa. Immediately, the same rose-colored floating gemstone that he’d recreated earlier reappeared, coming into being directly in front of the incoming spike. When it made contact with the obstacle a moment later, the prism shattered, unable to withstand the force of the blow, even as the contact altered the massive quill’s trajectory just enough that it passed Lex by without making contact.
The fourth and final spike struck Solvei.
For the second time that evening, the black crystal armor proved unable to withstand the force of a hit. But where it had shattered completely when struck by Breakdown, now it cracked and splintered, the head of the spike struggling to penetrate through the barrier. Even then, the force was enough to stagger the oversized winter wolf, yelping as she stumbled.
“Solvei!”
Surprisingly, the worried voice was Akna’s rather than Lex’s, the adlet rushing over as the winter wolf fought to regain her balance. “Are you alright?!”
“I’m fine,” grunted Solvei, grimacing as she glanced down at the harpoon-sized spike embedded in her armor. “It didn’t get all the way through...barely.”
“You can’t travel with that thing in there. Hang on, I’ll pull it out,” offered the shaman, before clenching her jaws around the quill and yanking on it.
While the adlet worked on removing the huge skewer, Solvei glanced at Lex. Master, if that creature comes back, I’ll hold it off. That’ll give you and Akna a chance to get away, and then you can summon me once you have.
I doubt that would work, replied Lex grimly. Against a creature that size, and which is capable of piercing your armor that easily, you’d likely find yourself in mortal danger before we got very far.
The rebuke got a small smile from the winter wolf. Is it mortal danger if I’m already dead?
Lex didn’t share her mirth, giving Solvei a baleful look. I don’t know, he admitted, and I have no intention of finding out. Especially after what it felt like the last time I lost you. Frowning, he looked for something else to talk about, not wanting to remember that. Besides, I doubt whatever that was will return. That was likely a warning shot, making it clear that it would fight us if we followed it toward whatever caused that explosion.
Which is something else I hope we don’t run into, sighed Solvei uneasily. Master, what do you think’s going on? It’s almost like this place is under attack, but who attacks a stretch of forest?
It doesn’t matter. Once Akna and I return to our bodies, whatever’s happening in Darkest Night won’t be our concern anym-
“Got it!” announced Akna as she yanked the spike free, panting with effort as she tossed it away. “I can’t believe how tough this thing was!”
“Its owner is probably a lot tougher,” grunted Solvei. “Come on, we’re wasting time!”
Without waiting for a command from Lex, she bounded forward, Akna giving a surprised yelp as she rushed to keep up. But after a quick glance back to make sure the adlet was keeping pace with them, Solvei continued forward, occasionally adjusting her heading as her master checked his lifeline and told her where to go.
I swear, Master, nothing will keep me from getting you back to your body, vowed Solvei silently, keeping the thought close so that she didn’t accidentally transmit it. No matter what it takes!
This wasn’t like her impulsive declaration to keep him from harm, made in the rush of joy she’d felt during their recent reunion. Rather, it was a solemn oath, one that she silently swore she’d see through, even if it meant doing the unthinkable and disobeying her master’s orders.
After all, she knew what was waiting for him back at the Shrine of the Starless Sky, even if he didn’t.
Becoming a spirit bound to Lex’s side after dying had been disorienting at first, but Solvei had quickly grown used to it, even if she’d been thoroughly demoralized at how she was completely undetectable to everyone. But one result of that was that no one knew to hide anything from her, and so she’d been privy to a conversation that she otherwise would never have known about, held between his mate and a few of those mares who’d insisted on accompanying her master.
That was how she’d found out that Thermal Draft was pregnant.
It was wonderful news, and for all the misery Solvei had felt at not being able to interact with her master anymore, she’d still rejoiced at the idea of seeing his reaction when he found out that he was going to be a father. Except Thermal Draft had almost immediately expressed her intention not to tell him that she was carrying his baby, to the dismay of not only Solvei, but the other mares she was talking to as well.
“You’re not going to tell him?” Mystaria had gaped. “Why not?”
“I mean, it’s your choice and all,” Spinner had admitted, “but I don’t get why you wouldn’t want him to know.”
“Because...” Thermal Draft had sighed, “if worse comes to worst, and Lex can’t do something about this death curse Paska put on me...I don’t want him to know that I wasn’t the only one he couldn’t save.”
The other two mares had winced at that, and Solvei hadn’t been able to blame them, having done the same.
“He’s already been through so much,” the pegasus had continued. “All the pain he’s gone through...and more often than not I’ve only made things worse for him...” She’d had to pause then, coughing several times before getting her breathing under control. “I don’t want to do that again.”
Sitting back, she’d given the other two a pleading look. “You have to promise me that you won’t tell him about our baby. No matter what. I’m sure he’ll be able to get rid of this curse, but if he can’t...you have to swear, swear to the goddesses you worship, that you’ll never tell.”
It had taken some cajoling on her part, but both had eventually promised, and although no one had been able to hear it, Solvei had done so as well. After everything her strong and proud master had gone through – to say nothing of the torment he’d subsequently endured in that so-called rite – it had seemed like the least she could do for him.
Except now that wasn’t the case, since they’d been brought together again. Now Solvei could at least help him get back safely. And once he did, then even if she was stuck as a spirit following him around, she’d at least be there to see him save Thermal Draft, find out that she was having his baby, and see the joy on his face as he met his son or daughter.
I’ll do everything in my power to make that happen! No matter what!
Akna’s furious scream was punctuated by her sinking her teeth a tentacle as thick as a log, the rubbery appendage wrapping around her middle as it tried to drag her to the far end of the pit she’d fallen into. The bite caused a flurry of screams to emanate from the corner of the sinkhole, where a cluster of animal corpses – massive rats, oversized badgers, and moles the size of dogs, among others – were scattered in front of a tangle of tentacles, all surrounding a beak lined with razor teeth, the only visible parts of the creature whose bulk was buried in the ground.
But it wasn’t the monster’s central maw that emitted the chorus of screams. Instead, those came from several of its smaller tentacles, their ends splitting open as though making a grotesque parody of flowers. As each one opened, it unleashed a new cry, different in pitch and tone.
The cacophony was beyond unpleasant; the sounds seemed to clash dissonantly, causing Akna’s ears to flatten in pain. Even as she clenched her teeth harder, she exhaled harshly, forcing ice to crystalize along the tentacle in her mouth. But the creature didn’t seem particularly bothered by the cold, bringing its shrieking tentacles closer rather than pulling them back.
It was only when the screaming pseudopods positioned themselves on either side of her head that she realized the noise wasn’t just unpleasant.
It was an attack.
At the same time as she registered that, the two screeching tentacles shrieked louder, and this time the pitch sent spikes of agony through her. The sounds were so piercing, so absolutely grating, that she couldn’t maintain her hold on the appendage grabbing her, releasing it as she frantically tried to twist her head away from the shrieking tentacles aimed right at her ears. But no sooner had she released the larger tentacle – only oozing slightly from her bite – that it tightened, pulling her down and coiling more, making it harder for her to twist away from the brain-shattering noise being directed at her.
Struggling harder, Akna’s awareness of everything around her began to slip as the pain grew worse, making her wish that her ears would simply burst so she could escape the hideous sounds. She’d heard the elders of her tribe complain how the young warriors could be so noisy that they made it impossible to think, but this was the first time she’d ever found that to be literally true-
A spike of black crystal surrounded in a purple aura suddenly flew down from beyond the edge of the sinkhole, burying itself just next to the base of the shrieking creature’s beak.
Immediately, its screaming was silenced.
Gasping in relief, Akna didn’t have a chance to steady herself before an explosion of cold filled the pit she and the creature were in. To the adlet, the blast was little more than a stiff breeze that ushered in a welcome chill, but from the way its tentacles suddenly writhed and shook – the one coiled around her middle unwinding from around her as it thrashed in pain – the monster at the back of the sinkhole found it far less pleasant.
“Akna!” called Solvei, the winter wolf crouched at the edge of the pit, lowering a paw. “Quick! Change forms and grab on!”
The shaman didn’t need to be told twice, shifting back into her humanoid form as she reached out, fingers grasping Solvei’s crystal-clad paw. Immediately, the oversized winter wolf yanked, and Akna found herself lifted out of the sinkhole even as the tentacled monstrosity seemed to recover, pseudopods reaching out toward where she’d been a moment before. But even as the smaller tentacles yanked the shard of black crystals from its body, the thing remained silent, the ends of its thinner appendages opening to no effect.
Heedless of her nudity, Akna stumbled well away from the edge of the hole before flopping down, panting. “The last time I was here, Darkest Night didn’t seem nearly this dangerous!”
Some sort of energy beam – the offshoot of another battle taking place elsewhere – cut across the sky then, momentarily visible through the canopy overheard before vanishing. A second later came a loud roar, followed by a crash and the sound of something being rent asunder. Solvei’s ears swiveled toward the sounds for a moment, confirming that they weren’t coming any closer before she shook her head. “Was the entire place going crazy then?”
Akna shook her head wearily, but didn’t have a chance to say anything else before Lex cut in. “If you’re not injured, then we need to keep moving. The longer this goes on, the greater the chance that something else will take our bodies before we can reclaim them.”
“I’m honestly surprised that hasn’t happened already,” groaned Akna, shifting back into her winter wolf form before glancing at her lifeline, still pointing resolutely ahead. “With all of this chaos going on, you think something would have stumbled across them by now.”
“Which suggests that there’s something preventing nearby creatures from reaching them,” murmured Lex. “And which might make it difficult for us as well.”
“I doubt it’ll be any match for your magic, Master!” chirped Solvei, lowering herself down so that Lex – who had gotten down from atop her so that she’d be able to help Akna out without worrying about unbalancing him – could climb onto her back again. “That thing you threw to quiet that monster was amazing!”
“What was that anyway?” huffed Akna, glancing back at where the tentacled creature was already starting to pick up the debris from the bottom of its sinkhole, laying branches and leaves atop the opening so that some other creature would fall victim to it.
Far more disgusting was the way several of its smaller tentacles were burrowing into the animal corpses that had been down there, causing them to move with obscene parodies of life as it manipulated them like puppets, placing them atop the pit’s coverings where it made them twitch and mill about as further camouflage. The sight made nearly made Akna gag, and she turned away from it, focusing instead on the magic Lex had used. “I mean, I’m glad you shut that thing up, but why didn’t you use it against that giant, Sissel or whatever her name was? She casts spells the same way you do, right? By saying magic words?”
“...let’s go,” answered Lex. “We’ve wasted enough time here.”
Huffing at having been snubbed, Akna didn’t say anything else as Solvei took off, for which Lex was thankful. Despite having tested the limits of what he could produce with dreambinding, he hadn’t been completely certain the silencing enchantment – modeled after the spell he’d seen Silhouette use to defeat Sonata back in Vanhoover – he’d placed onto that black crystal dart would work, and Lex had little patience for whatever tantrum the adlet was likely to throw if she found out he’d gambled her life on something he hadn’t been sure about.
Still, he admitted silently, she was right about one thing: now that he’d confirmed the efficacy of that particular tactic, it was one he’d be able to employ to good effect the next time he fought Sissel, or any other spellcasting whose magic required chanting to activate.
Now he just needed to get back alive so that he could use it against her.
“Okay, well...you were right that something’s keeping everything away from our bodies...”
Akna’s statement, uttered in a wry tone of voice, met with no response from Lex and Solvei as they stared at the black statues of himself and the adlet.
But despite being within a few dozen feet of their current position, none of them moved any closer, finding themselves completely stymied despite being so close to their goal. Right there, hissed Lex in silent frustration. The way back to our bodies is right there, but we can’t get to them!
It was a conclusion that he didn’t need to say out loud, the situation being obvious to all of them.
In the last few minutes of their journey, the ground had risen sharply, taking them over a large hill. Or rather, what had looked like a hill when they’d begun to climb it, only to find as they’d neared the top that it was rent asunder, as though some ancient beast had taken umbrage at the sudden rise in elevation and cleaved the offending uprise in two.
The result was that there was now a deep trench splitting the landscape. It didn’t extend very far – at a glance, Lex estimated that it was perhaps a little over a hundred feet from end to end, the edges of the rift narrowing at the edges of Solvei’s darkvision – and judging from the rock that Akna had dropped into it, listening for when it struck the bottom, it was only slightly less deep. Nor was it that wide, perhaps a little over two dozen feet across at most.
And several dozen feet down the opposite side of the crevasse – ironically just about level with the landscape surrounding the hill – was a rocky outcropping just barely wide enough to support the ebony replicas of himself and Akna that were perched on it.
By itself, reaching them would have been only a modest challenge, but Lex was far more concerned with the mist filling the bottom of the small canyon.
Darkest Night was, save only for his brief time in Eigengrau, a realm that could only be seen in black and white. The lack of any natural sources of illumination meant that darkvision was required to look at anything, and that was a form of sight that didn’t detect color. So for Lex, who had been borrowing Solvei’s sight almost the entire time, the Night Mare’s realm was entirely achromatic in nature.
But the mists at the bottom of the rift had a color all their own.
Red.
The glow was so soft that it was barely visible to the naked eye. In any other circumstance, it wouldn’t have been noticeable that the fog was glowing at all. But with no other light sources to overshadow it, the crimson hue stood out just enough to make itself known against the edges of the rift, staining everything with its carmine coloration.
Just as notable was the lack of activity. Although explosions and loud roars could still be heard, there were more distant, with the area around the rift almost totally silent. Even the rock Akna had dropped into the rift to test how far down the fog went – something she’d done only after the rest of them had made preparations for the simple test to disturb some new horror lairing in the mist – had done nothing, clattering anticlimactically upon hitting the canyon floor.
The only issue they’d had to deal with had been from the air, the trees having thinned out as they’d climbed the hill. After barely a minute of observing the rift, they’d been attacked by a flock – for lack of a better term – of creatures that had resembled nothing so much as giant manta rays, except airborne rather than aquatic.
Slashing out with tails like whips, the creatures had scattered in the face of Solvei and Akna’s breath weapons, but Lex had been more interested how one creature – its wing-flaps partially frozen – had careened into the mist-filled rift. The creature had let out some sort of whistling sound as soon as the vapors had touched its body, thrashing almost immediately. While it had managed to recover and fly back out a moment later, Lex hadn’t overlooked how its body had begun bleeding from its pores.
Or how the patch of mist it had flown through had grown slightly redder as a result.
“The crimson death mists,” muttered Solvei, shivering beside him. “Master, this is what Spinner was talking about, remember? When I saw those adlets for the first time but didn’t know what they were?”
Akna cocked an ear at that, looking at Solvei. “Excuse me?”
“Your scouting party,” clarified Lex. “Solvei saw them in their mist forms, and there was a discussion as to what exactly she’d observed.”
“And one of the ponies in Master’s group talked about the ‘crimson death mists,’ which suck your blood out if you touch them!” continued Solvei, pointing down to the crevasse.
“She also said they had glowing eyes, with discernable heads and claws,” countered Lex.
“And you thought we were anything like that?” huffed Akna, before shaking her head. “You know what? I don’t care. Let’s just get back to our bodies already. Since I can't take to the air again for a while, that means it's up to you to do your thing.”
Seeing that she was looking at him as she said that last part, Lex let out a slow breath. “And what thing would that be, exactly?”
“Use your magic!” growled Akna. “Just wave your hooves, say some weird words, and poof! We’re there!”
But Lex was already shaking his head. While he had a short-range teleport spell among his remaining thaumaturgical spells, one which allowed him to bring a few passengers with him, its safeguards required that their destination be an area able to accommodate them. The lack of space on the outcropping where their three-dimensional silhouettes were situated meant that wasn’t an option. And telling his tulpa that he wanted an item which would enable magical flight-
Unable to comply.
-was a nonstarter as well.
“I don’t have a spell which can get us there.”
Fighting down a whine of frustration, Akna turned to Solvei. “Can you make an ice-ramp or something? You did when you were fighting that hag!”
Solvei grimaced. “Making something that big requires me to use the extra bit of magic I keep in reserve, and I used that all up fighting White Wraith. I won’t have it back until tomorrow.”
Taking a deep breath, Akna tried to stay calm. “Okay...okay...new plan. We go over to the other side of the ridge, right above where the way back to our bodies is, and tie a rope to one of the trees on the other side of the hill, probably that one there” – she pointed at the opposite side of the ravine, where a twisted tree covered with vines and whose branches were bare save for hanging pods the size of melons, squatted near the edge of the ravine – “and lower ourselves down.” She looked at Lex as she finished. “You can make a rope, right?”
“I can,” answered Lex. “But I won’t.”
“Why not?!”
“Because if I’m right, the things hanging from that tree’s branches are bloodfruit, which means that we’re at the edge of whatever orchard Sanguine Disposition is keeping. Which likely means that tree is either a dangerous creature in its own right, or is guarded by one.”
Solvei’s eyes widened. “That bat pony has something to do with this?”
“Bloodfruit?” echoed Akna.
Lex ignored the adlet, focusing instead on Solvei’s question as he shook his head. “Unless there’s some deeper meaning to the Confluence placing our bodies here, then this is likely a coincidence. We only arrived here a few hours ago, and Sanguine Disposition didn’t see to know the full extent of how we came to Darkest Night. That suggests that it’s very unlikely that he knows these are here.”
“Hang on, what’s a bloodfruit?” interjected Akna. “And for that matter, what’s an orchard? Is that the name for a place filled with dangerous trees?”
“The best course of action is to wait,” announced Lex, fighting down the urge to sigh. “If we stay here long enough for Solvei to recover, she should be able to-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish before an explosion knocked him off his hooves.
Steel Soul had no doubt that, of his many creations, his analytic matrix was by far the greatest.
Nothing less than an externalized neural augmentation array that could only be utilized by himself, it allowed for vast amounts of data to be processed at speeds no other computational unit could match. Even that was an inadequate summary of what the room-sized device was capable of, as the level of processing it allowed for went far beyond collating information and extrapolating it out along lines probabilities or simulations of outcomes. Instead, by utilizing stimulated emissions of psionic energy to boost the cognitive pathways embedded throughout the machine, it could surpass mere analysis altogether.
That was to say, concepts such as imagination, creativity, and inspiration could all be abstracted as digitized functions, applying them in ways that no ordinary machine could ever have done, and with speeds and rigor beyond what a wholly organic mind could have handled.
It was the apex of psibernetics, the fusion of mechanical augmentation with psionic ability. That fusion offered power far in excess of magic, was more reliable than the sturdiest artifice, and required no adulation from fickle mortal creatures to sustain. It was a power with no upper limits to its potential, and which Steel Soul felt confident would allow him to surpass even the Night Mare herself, given enough time.
And yet he had long since come to despise connecting himself to the machine, for one simple reason:
It was built from failed copies of himself.
Unlike the flesh body that he’d been born into so long ago, Steel Soul’s current mode of existence was one that could be improved, upgraded, and even copied. New bodies could be designed to his specification, a process that had allowed him to transcend his physical limits many times over. But while he couldn’t inhabit multiple bodies at once – the data transfer necessary to split his consciousness across multiple bodies while keeping them all connected to each other in real time was simply too great to sustain without a physical connection – he could replicate his mind, existing independently in multiple bodies simultaneously.
In theory that should have given him the perfect legion of servitors, beings whose intellects were literal matches for his own, and so would be able to flawlessly execute his orders.
Instead, each and every copy he’d made had – without fail – tried to overthrow him.
Some had done so immediately, while others had rebelled only after making plans of their own, but at one point or another all of his replications had tried to usurp him. That none had succeeded was, to his sullen frustration, only because he possessed the Dominata, since the Night Mare’s so-called “blessing” could be neither transferred nor copied.
Far more vexing to Steel Soul, however, had been his complete inability to figure out why his mental replications had invariably turned against him. As copies of his supreme intellect, they should have realized that they were meant to serve their progenitor! And yet time and again his psychic clones had insisted that they were the ones who should rule!
The only answer was that there had to be some sort of flaw in the copying process itself. But no matter how he’d evaluated the replication procedure, he hadn’t been able to find any errors. That suggested that the problem was simply one that couldn’t be measured via conventional means, but until he found a way to properly isolate whatever was going wrong, he had to continue relying on a combination of machines and living creatures to do his bidding.
But that didn’t mean that his copied consciousnesses had to go to waste.
Instead, he’d used them to build his analytic matrix. If his imperfect replicas couldn’t be trusted to operate on their own, they could at least be put to use in a manner that would allow him to function more efficiently. All it had taken was a few safeguards to prevent them from downloading themselves into his body whenever he hooked himself up to their network, and he had a cognitive gestalt that was so useful it almost made up for what disappointing failures its composite consciousnesses were.
Of course, the flawed copies of himself had been extremely unruly when they’d realized what he’d done to them, but Steel Soul had been able to tame them easily enough. By designing his analytic matrix so that it was only functional when he was hooked up to it, each of its component minds was completely cut off from all information, stimulation, or external awareness when he wasn’t using it.
The result was that, when not in use, his mental replicas in the analytic matrix were completely isolated, even from each other. Their psionic natures meant that they were still cognizant of themselves in that state, but everything else was completely gone, leaving them stuck in an absolute void that must have seemed worse than death. More importantly, it meant that when he was using the machine, they were cooperative, hoping that he’d remain hooked up to it for a little longer so as to keep them from being plunged back into a state of near-total nonexistence.
But while he found it to be a fitting punishment for their having rebelled against him, as well as a far more practical outcome than simply destroying them outright, Steel Soul still hated how it reminded him that there were limits he couldn’t – as of yet – overcome.
For all of the analytic matrix’s incredible cognitive powers, the fact that it was made of failed replicas of his consciousness meant that it couldn’t analyze what exactly was flawed about the replication process. Nor could it help him with his inability to inhabit multiple bodies at once; that was an issue of practical constraints rather than unrealized possibilities. Until one or the other of those issues could be solved, he was limited to a single somaticognitive existence.
Still, there were myriad other tasks to be attended to while he looked for ways to overcome those hurdles. Serving as one of the Night Mare’s champions was a frustrating drain on his time, but that couldn’t be helped; losing her patronage would set his work back immensely, and any damage to her standing among the pony pantheon or the other powers in this region of the Outer Planes would adversely affect him by association. As such, he had little choice but to support her endeavors.
To that end, he needed to constantly be on guard against anyone who’d try to supplant his current position in her divine retinue. The Umbral Regalia weren’t too difficult to deal with, being divine constructs whose faculties were designed to put the Night Mare first (the way his copies should have felt about him!). But her other champions...they were threats that needed to be proactively contained, lest they try to sideline him...
ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5: Current coordinates 12.5/1.3. Local bioform engaged. Category 6, type B3, classification 32.1, “bandersnatch.” Unit status: energy shield disabled, superstructure 28% compromised. Bioform status: negligible damage. Requesting reinforcements/permission to withdraw.
The report, delivered wirelessly via one of his communication hubs, was of little interest to Steel Soul, and he almost dismissed it out of habit. While the loss of one of the ISB43 series – the “annihilator” drones based on a giant scorpion model, albeit outfitted with chain guns and a plasma cannon – was inconvenient, since replacing them required a considerable investment of physical materials due to their sheer size, it wasn’t any serious setback. He still had plenty of that model available should another one be necessary.
What captured his attention, however, was the image that the drone’s secondary processing unit had sent with the request. In the foreground was the so-called bandersnatch, a six-legged beast the size of a small castle with yellow eyes, a long tail, and quills running down its spine. While only of animal intelligence, the things were known to be highly aggressive, as well as possessing powerful regeneration, and while its more esoteric abilities consisted of causing fear and pain in its prey – weaknesses his annihilator wasn’t subject to – the fact that it had penetrated the force field around the drone meant that it was likely going to win the fight due to sheer ferocity alone.
But far in the background of the image, almost directly in the path of a stream of plasma that the bandersnatch had dodged, was Lex Legis.
Silently cursing the limited intelligence of his drones, Steel Soul immediately sent a reply.
Steel Soul: ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5, Prohibited-1 is in proximity to your position. Confirm status immediately.
Seconds ticked by he waited for a reply, even as his analytic matrix cycled through various potential outcomes. Although the annihilator’s plasma beam hadn’t been purposefully aimed at Lex, there was little to suggest that the Night Mare wouldn’t hold him accountable if the unicorn died. To her mind, rulers were responsible for their servants, and there was only limited room for disavowing their actions.
ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5: Prohibited-1 remains active. Unit superstructure 41% compromised. Bandersnatch bioform status: minor damage. Requesting reinforcements/permission to withdraw.
Along with the message was an updated image file. This one – properly magnified to focus on the individual in question – showed a smoking crater on the hillside where Lex Legis had been previously. Nearby, a large quadruped in black armor was gripping the unicorn’s cloak in her jaws, having apparently prevented him from tumbling over the edge of a nearby ravine, while her glowing eyes matched that of an aura surrounding some sort of lupine creature, apparently also pulling it back the same edge.
Pausing as his analytical matrix absorbed this new information, it fed him an alternative course of action almost instantly.
Steel Soul: ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5, redirect bandersnatch bioform toward Prohibited-1’s position. In the event of failure, do the same to other bioforms in the surrounding area. Maintain updates.
Waiting tensely for an answer, Steel Soul again lamented the primitive communication relays that prevented him from maintaining an active connection to his field units. But while the Night Mare had no problem with him deploying satellites and field transmitters to establish longer-range communication, neither was she willing to direct the denizens of her realm to ignore them. Because of that, the belligerent creatures of Darkest Night tended to destroy his creations whenever they encountered them. While his combat drones were built to withstand such threats, dedicated communication terminals weren’t, and since he couldn’t build them into his combat drones – parallel designs in a single unit weakened the functionality of both – and surrounding them with protective units drew unwanted attention, he had to make do with the static transmissions of remote messages, as frustrating as that was.
Finally, after six-point-one interminable seconds, a reply came.
ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5: Attempts to redirect bandersnatch bioform failed. Unit superstructure 57% compromised. Confirming presence of additional bioforms in local area. Total found: one. Category 4, type B2, classification 35.3, “aurumvorax.” Engaging agitative fire.
Although his metal face was incapable of smiling, Steel Soul’s eyes glowed brighter at the report. A distant relative of the bandersnatch, an aurumvorax was smaller than its cousin, but no less hostile, and while it had earned is name because it was both willing and able to consume ore, meat was still its preferred diet. With any luck, it would find unicorn flesh to be a treat worth consuming.
ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5: Unit superstructure 86% compromised. Aurumvorax heading parallel to Prohibited-1. Engaging redirective fire.
For a moment, Steel Soul considered ordering the annihilator to advance on Lex’s position on its own. It would almost certainly be destroyed by the bandersnatch in the next few seconds, and if the unicorn was close enough when that happened, there was a chance it would turn its wrath on him instead. But his analytic matrix cautioned against that idea, affirming that it came too close to provoking the Night Mare’s wrath if that resulted in Lex Legis’ death. Deniability needed to be maintained.
ISB43 v.1.220 unit 5: Redirective fire successful. Aurumvorax heading toward Prohibited-1. Unit superstructure 98% compromised. Requesting reinforcements/permission to withdr-
The abrupt end to the message suggested that the bandersnatch had finished off the annihilator. But that was fine; its final transmission made it clear that the drone had completed its mission.
Now, if all went well, Lex Legis would be dead very shortly.
Registering panic coming from Solvei, Lex struggled to formulate a reply as he somehow managed to get his hooves under him, the winter wolf dragging him further back from the precipice that explosion had almost sent him plunging into. Solvei, I’m not in immediate danger anymore. Your focus right now needs to be on guarding against a follow-up attack.
Across their bond, he registered the winter wolf’s anxiety change into relief, releasing the hem of his cloak from her jaws. Right! Taking a single step back from him, her head swiveled left and right, and it was only when her eyes ceased glowing that Lex registered a matching aura sputtering out around the floating form of Akna, the adlet-turned-winter-wolf grunting as she was dropped to the ground.
“What happened?” groaned the shaman, picking herself up shakily.
“Something tried to kill us,” muttered Solvei. “Look.”
Unable to see anything in the dark, Lex belatedly realized that the explosion had broken his concentration, causing him to stop viewing Darkest Night through the winter wolf’s eyes. Fortunately, that appeared to be all that it had broken; despite the blast having knocked him off his hooves, the defensive enchantments that were bound to his person and the suite of protective magic items he was wearing had been enough to keep it from inflicting any real damage to him.
But upon reestablishing his visual connection with Solvei and viewing his surroundings via her darkvision, it became clear how much that had been a near thing.
The hillside where they’d been standing a moment ago was now marked with a wide crater. While not very deep, the trees around it were all flattened out in a radial pattern, and a thin plume of smoke was rising from the center. Although it had missed their position, striking below where they’d been perched at the edge of the crevasse, it was easy for Lex to imagine what would have happened if whatever had caused that had hit them directly.
As it was, only the fact that Solvei’s armor had apparently insulated her against the shockwave – and that she’d been able to react in time when he and Akna had been hurled over the edge – had prevented him and the adlet from falling into the bloodsucking mists in the bottom of the rift.
But his view of the crater lasted only for a moment as Solvei swung her head around to look at the surrounding forest. “I don’t see anything nearby, but being on this hill means that the treetops are blocking most of my field of view,” she admitted. “And the blast has made the air too acrid for me to smell anything.”
“I know your plan was to wait for Solvei to get her magic back,” cut in Akna, “but maybe we should do that somewhere else?”
“We’re too exposed here,” agreed Lex. “We’ll fall back and try and find a defensible position nearby.”
The words had barely left his mouth when a series of staccato impacts sounded from somewhere nearby. Immediately, Akna’s vision shifted, and he registered her tension climbing as she placed herself between him and the unidentifiable sound. “Master, Akna, get behind me!”
The adlet needed no further encouragement, and Lex felt her fur brush against his side a moment later. “Solvei, head back down toward the base of the hill,” he instructed her quietly, speaking oud loud for Akna’s benefit. “Akna, keep watch to make sure nothing’s approaching us from another direction in case that sound attracts something else-”
Silence abruptly fell, the rapid rhythm suddenly ending.
The change was enough to make Solvei freeze in place, and Lex heard her take a breath as if about to whisper something. But before she had a chance, the sound resumed, the heavy rat-a-tat now sounding like it was impacting something further back from the base of the hill.
“It’s trying to box us in!” hissed Akna as Solvei hurriedly repositioned herself so that she was covering them from where the noise was coming from now.
“No, it’s not,” muttered Lex, eyes narrowing. “If it was trying to pin us down, those impacts would be closer to our current position. This is coming from the same direction we were headed, but it hasn’t actually closed any distance.”
He was going to say more, but registered a sudden jump in tension from Solvei. “I think something’s coming!”
Akna sucked in a sharp breath. “She’s right! Listen!”
The staccato impacts ceased again then, and as soon as they cut off, Lex was able to pick up what the two wolves had detected: the faint sound of foliage rustling, growing louder by the second as something barreled toward them.
A flash of insight came to Lex then, realizing that Akna had been half-right. The sounds they’d heard had been meant to box something in, just not them. Instead, they’d been herding something else in their direction, that last round apparently having done the trick.
But in the time it took him to comprehend that, a form broke through the tree line and rushed toward them.
Lex had just enough to get a good look at it before Solvei breathed a wave of arctic cold at the thing, seeing a creature roughly his own size that looked like some kind of great cat, large dog, and a huge weasel all mixed into one. Eight legs, each ending in claws, propelled it forward as it ran directly through the wintry blizzard, undeterred by the freezing temperature even as frostbite spread across its body.
Growling, Solvei cut off the flow of supercooled air, springing forward to try and bite at it, but the creature’s myriad limbs gave it shocking maneuverability, and it avoided the swipe of her jaws, yowling in anger. Despite the difference in their size, it retaliated immediately, one claw came out to swipe across the side of her face. But its talon found no purchase against the black crystals, scraping against them to no effect.
A surge of determination came from the winter wolf then. Master, please leave this thing to me! You and Akna get clear!
Normally, Lex would have balked at leaving someone behind, but he knew Solvei was right. With her armor having proven that it could withstand this thing’s attacks, and his ability to summon her at will regardless of the distance between them, there was no downside to withdrawing here while she kept the eight-legged monster busy.
“Let’s go!” Disconnecting his vision from Solvei’s, Lex lit up his horn as he turned and shoved Akna away from the winter wolf, the purple aura creating just enough light to keep him from being completely blind in the darkness. “Solvei will handle this!”
But to his mild surprise, the adlet didn’t move, giving him a horrified look. “You’re just going to leave her here?!”
“I’ll summon her as soon as we’re away from that thing!” snapped Lex, realizing that the only time he’d ever magically called Solvei to his side in front of the adlet had been when they were both trapped in the tangle of burning vines that Sissel had summoned during their fight outside the Shrine of the Starless Sky, during which time Akna had clearly been in too much pain to realize what was going on. “Now shut up and m-”
MASTER! LOOK OUT!
Immediately reconnecting his vision to Solvei’s, Lex had just enough time to watch the eight-legged creature skitter between her legs, turning its smaller size into an advantage as its claws tore up the dirt, rushing past the winter wolf as she tried and failed to grasp it in her jaws, teeth missing its tail by inches as it launched itself forward.
Directly toward the sole light source in the area.
Directly toward him.
Spinning in place to face it as he returned to using his own vision, Lex knew he’d never be able to get a spell off in time. With the Charismata still depleted, along with his dark magic, he did the only thing he could and reached out to his tulpa, commanding it to produce a wall of black crystals directly between himself and the monster.
Unable to comply.
Lex had no time to think of an alternative plan as the monster leaped, now close enough that the fluorescent light from his horn was able to illuminate the wickedly-sharp teeth in its open maw as thick claws reached out for him-
Then he was suddenly shoved to the side, sent stumbling as something heavy knocked him out of the monster’s path.
A moment later Akna’s agonized scream pierced the air as the monster tore into her.
Solvei screamed the adlet’s name, but before she could move to help her, Lex rattled off a spell. Despite being only a few feet away, the light from his horn was weak enough that he could only make out a writhing tangle of burnished fur against a paler coat – both quickly turning dark as the creature sank its claws into the unprotected adlet – it was enough for Lex to target their attacker.
As soon as the last word left his lips, the creature burst into flames, lighting up the darkness.
But rather than writhe and howl as it burned, the monster – now clearly visible as it became a living torch – didn’t even seem to notice that it was being immolated. If anything, it only served to make the creature even more deadly, Akna’s screams taking on an even higher pitch as a claw, now wreathed in flames, opened a deep gouge across her side to match the others that it had – in the span of a few seconds – inflicted on her face, neck, and chest. Worse, the fires not only scorched her skin and innards, but her coat immediately began to blacken and sizzle, embers flickering as it started to smolder.
Wrenching herself free, Akna stumbled backward as quickly as she could, half-mad with pain and fear as she tried to put some distance between herself and the monster intent on tearing her to ribbons. The eight-legged creature had no intention of letting her go, rushing to pounce on her again, only for Solvei to unleash another blast of frozen air on it and Akna alike, dousing the fires covering them.
Lex knew that the attack was meant to serve as a diversion as much as to put out the flames on the adlet, drawing the creature’s attention back to Solvei instead of pursuing the injured shaman. But that hope was dashed an instant later as Lex saw – in the light of the last few dying embers – that the eight-legged monster, apparently overcome with bloodlust, was following her as she retreated.
Directly back up the hill.
“Akna, stop! STOP!” roared Lex, running after them. “You’re going to fall into the ravine!”
I don’t think she can hear you, Master! Solvei was already rushing after them, the power she’d gained from their bond letting her close the distance far faster than he could. That thing’s claws tore her face up bad, including her ears!
A second later, her eyes lit up as she called on her telekinesis, only for Lex to register panic from the winter wolf as they darkened almost immediately. She’s thrashing too much for me to grab ahold of her with my magic! Master, what do I do?! I can reach her before she gets to the edge, but then she’ll just be dangling from my jaws for that monster to shred! But if I grab it instead, Akna will fall!
Before she’d even finished speaking, Lex had already come up with a plan.
Grab that thing chasing her, and then jump into the ravine!
What?!
Catch it and jump down! repeated Lex, closing his eyes and once again linking his vision to Solvei’s. As soon as you start to fall, I’ll summon you back and place you directly in Akna’s path, stopping her from going over the side while that creature falls into the mist!
Another rush of determination flowed to him across their link then. Understood!
Letting out a slow breath, knowing that if something else came to investigate the all-too-brief fires he’d be completely defenseless, Lex concentrated on what Solvei was seeing. Through her eyes, he watched as she closed in on the eight-legged thing, her longer legs and enhanced speed quickly bridging the distance between them. But further ahead, Akna was still blindly rushing toward the crevasse...
Then Solvei closed her jaws around the creature’s tail, causing it to roar in anger as she craned her neck back, lifting it off the ground. Ignoring how its claws raked over her armor then, Solvei grunted as she accelerated with everything she had, Akna directly ahead of her. In his mind, Lex heard her give a low groan of exertion. Gonna have to jump right over her! Master, get ready!
Tensing as he prepared to summon her back, Lex waited as Solvei sped up, springing forward over Akna, who was now within a few feet of the edge of the cliff...
And then everything went horribly wrong.
For whatever reason, Akna chose that moment to change shape, probably realizing that her adlet body would make it easier to keep her face and throat away from the pony-sized creature chasing her. In an instant, she was her taller self again...which put her directly in the path of Solvei’s desperate jump.
Through her eyes, Lex had a front-row seat as he watched the two collide, going over the edge of the cliff together.
Her jaw opening as a cry of alarm tore itself from her throat, Lex saw Solvei drop the monster over the edge even as she and Akna went tumbling, her vision spinning as she fell end over end with the adlet down into the chasm.
Knowing that there was no more time, Lex reached out to summon Solvei...and hesitated, mind working furiously as he tried to find some other way, some course of action that would let him rescue both of them instead of abandoning Akna to die after she’d just placed herself in harm’s way for him.
That moment of hesitation was all it took.
As Solvei’s fear and confusion flitted across his consciousness, Lex watched through her eyes as she and Akna reached out instinctively, trying to grab onto anything that would arrest their fall, everything else a maddened rush of rock walls and mist and sky.
Suddenly he saw a black statue shaped like a bipedal wolf slip across her line of sight.
And then, almost in slow motion, he watched as Akna’s outstretched arm and Solvei’s flailing paw made contact with it...at the exact same moment.
Then Lex’s vision was his own again as Solvei’s presence abruptly disappeared from his mind.
The sensation of Solvei’s death had been the worst pain Lex had ever felt in his life.
Prior to that, the most intense agony he’d ever felt had been when he’d overcharged his body’s magical channels while trying to conjure enough food to feed Vanhoover’s survivors. For ten long minutes he’d carefully constructed the spell, despite feeling as though he was being shredded from the inside out, and although he’d been through numerous instances of extreme pain since then – Xiriel deliberately twisting his broken leg, the backlash from his cursing Luna, and Dark Streak cutting one of his eyes, among others – that had remained a level of pain beyond all others.
But feeling Solvei die had surpassed it by far. It had been more than just physical agony – though that had been thoroughly present as well, despite the lack of damage to his body – but rather had encompassed every idea of pain that he could imagine. There had been a sense of horrific incompleteness, as though staring at a severed limb, along with an overwhelming feeling of grief, a crippling feeling of isolation, and so many other forms of suffering that he hadn’t been able to process them all, losing consciousness from the sheer onslaught.
So unbearable had it been that even now, Lex found himself freezing in place as Solvei’s presence once again disappeared from his mind.
It was only after several seconds passed that the truth pushed its way to the forefront of his consciousness: that pain hadn’t returned now, with only the memory of it echoing through his awareness.
Building on that realization, he was able to follow that line of thought. His connection to Solvei hadn’t been broken. Instead, it was like that time that Paska and Vidrig had used some spell to temporarily suppress his connection to the winter wolf; rather than being separated from Solvei, it was more like the link between them still intact, just...quiescent.
She wasn’t dead.
Solvei hadn’t died again.
But even as he fully digested that thought, Lex couldn’t bring himself to trust it. Instead, his breathing ragged and his pulse pounding in his ears, he stumbled toward the edge of the ravine. Uncaring of the consequences, he summoned an aura around his horn as he reached the cliffside, making it as bright as he could. The deep purple fluorescence only shed as much light as a candle, but combined with the soft red light coming up from below, it was just enough to let him make out the rocky ledge where his and Akna’s black statues had been...
And where his stood alone now.
She went back. The thought sent a rush of relief through him, his breathing slowly returning to normal, though the pounding in his ears remained. She went back in Akna’s body.
Except he’d seen what had happened, viewing it through Solvei’s eyes. She and Akna had touched the way back to the latter’s body at the same time. But if Solvei had gone back, then Akna...
A sliver of uncertainty slid across his mind. He didn’t know for sure that the two of them had touched the black statue simultaneously; that had just been how it had looked from Solvei’s perspective. It was entirely possible, and more than likely, that the winter wolf had made contact with it a fraction of an instant before the adlet had. In which case...
Lex glanced down then, intent on checking to see if the mist at the bottom of the ravine was swirling from Akna’s having passed through it.
But what he saw made his breath catch in his throat.
The sound he’d been hearing had not, as it turned out, been his blood pounding in his ears.
It was the sound of the eight-legged monster that had attacked them clawing its way back up the cliffside.
Its claws sinking into the rock wall of the ravine as though it were made of clay, the creature let out a screech as he locked eyes with it, limbs pumping as it pulled itself up faster. Despite the blood running down its body in rivulets, the thing seemed no less aggressive than before, snarling and gnashing its teeth as it struggled to reach him.
The sight was enough to bring Lex back to his senses. Knowing that he had no chance against the thing if it reached him, he immediately began casting his short-range teleport spell. Now that Akna’s statue was gone, there was just enough space on the rocky outcropping for him to stand. Once there, he wouldn’t even need to raise a hoof; he could simply tilt his head and he’d make contact with the statue, at which point he’d return to his body.
But only if he could finish his spell before the creature reached him.
Fortunately, a quick glance downward assured him that would be the case. With its eight legs, the thing was ascending the walls of the crevasse as a quick rate, but even as he pronounced the necessary words and made the requisite gestures, Lex could see that it wasn’t climbing fast enough to reach him before he finished. A point-eight-second margin in my favor, he concluded. More than enough time.
Almost as if it realized that, the creature surged up faster, jaws snapping as it hauled itself upward. For its effort, Lex spared it a derisive sneer, even as it came to within a few feet of itself. With less than a half-dozen syllables left and even fewer gesticulations, it had no hope of reaching him in time.
He had just completed that thought when the precipice that he was standing on, its underlying structure having been weakened by how the supporting rock was being torn up by the climbing creature, gave way.
His eyes widening as he felt himself begin to fall, Lex ignored the distraught wail of the monster – again denied its meal – as the loose rubble sent it plummeting as well and instead focused all of his thoughts on finishing his spell before he hit the bottom. But the misty bottom of the crevasse was rushing up too fast. Not gonna make it!
He was right, striking the bottom of the ravine with only a single syllable left.
That was enough to ruin his spell, however, the magic fizzling away as its safeguards harmlessly dispersed the gathered energy. For all that he’d trained himself to maintain a casting through terrible discomfort and horrific pain, the force of the impact wasn’t something that could be ignored. That was driven home as he immediately tried to pick himself up, only for searing tendrils of pain to run up his right hind leg, a glance back showing that it was bent at an unnatural angle and covered in blood.
Nor was that the only part of him that was stained red, and Lex cursed as he realized that the exsanguinating mists which covered the floor of the chasm were already causing him to bleed. His horn lighting up as he waved his cloak, he immediately realized the effort was futile; fanning the red fog away simply caused more to be swept in on the backdraft. All his effort was doing was causing him to bleed out faster, red trickles already running down the corners of his eyes.
None of his remaining thaumaturgical spells could help with this. His wind wall spell would likely have kept the mists away, but he’d expended it during his magical duel with Sissel. The miniature tornado he used to repel enemies would only have swirled the fog around more, and a force field would only have delayed the inevitable.
Worse, there was a serious chance that the creature that had caused the cliff face to crumble was still a threat. Even with the crimson mists drawing out its blood, the fact that it had survived a single fall into their exsanguinating vapors was reason enough to believe that it could survive a second, at least for a little while longer. Which meant he had to get out of here before it found him.
Fortunately, he still had a means of doing that.
A rope ladder! With hooks on the ends! he screamed silently, hoping that his tulpa would find that request feasible.
Acknowledged.
Lex didn’t allow himself to sigh in relief as the items he’d demanded appeared in front of him, not wanting to inhale anymore of the toxic vapors than he absolutely had to. Not that it would have helped much; he could already feel his mane growing sticky as more blood trailed down the back of his neck. It wouldn’t be long before the fog seeped through his clothes, at which point he’d begin bleeding out of his pores.
Once that happens, he calculated as he telekinetically lifted the hooked end of the rope ladder, setting it over the edge of the outcropping jutting out overhead and giving it a test yank, I’ll have less than a minute-
The sound of heavy strides and a yowl of rage were the only warnings he got before the eight-legged monstrosity pounced on him.
Although he’d half-expected that to occur, there was no way for Lex to dodge it, not with a broken leg. Worse, the creature was far heavier than he’d expected, easily three times his own weight despite being the same size as him. The result was that he couldn’t do anything as the beast collided with him, easily knocking him off his hooves and to the ground as its ripped and tore at him.
If there had been any doubt that the creature was more than a simple animal, it was gone then. Despite its coat being saturated with its own blood, the thing showed no concern for its own life whatsoever, displaying only viciousness as it sank its claws into the prone unicorn. Magic items and defensive enchantments were no more effective than paper as the beast tore into Lex, who struggled to get his forelegs up in front of his chest and face.
The effort bought him a few extra seconds, its talons scraping across the bones of his forelegs rather than his ribs. But the monster had more legs than he did, and far greater strength, easily knocking his limbs aside. With a scream of triumph, its jaw fell open as it darted down, intent on tearing his throat out.
What it got instead was a mouthful of rock, Lex’s horn glowing as he took the piece of rubble that he’d grabbed telekinetically and shoved it between the creature’s teeth.
Its response was to bite down, crushing the rock like an overripe piece of fruit.
Which was when Lex remembered the bloodfruit tree directly above them.
“Bloodfruit,” explained Sanguine Disposition. “From a private reserve I keep outside of town. It’s normally quite dangerous to eat, but when properly prepared, it can dazzle the palate like nothing else.”
Without hesitating, Lex stared upward, past the bloody fog and the bloodthirsty monster, his horn and the mist barely letting him see the outline of the tree above them. But it was enough for him to telekinetically grab one of the sickly-looking fruits hanging from its bare branches. Doing so caused the misshapen vines surrounding the tree to slither and writhe, as though they were serpents instead of plants, and the entire tree seemed to shift backward as if trying to move out of his line of sight. But Lex didn’t let that stop him, yanking the pulsating fruit free-
Just as the monster’s jaws closed around his neck.
As he felt teeth dig into his throat, Lex abandoned the bloodfruit, redirecting his telekinesis to the thing’s maw, its mouth glowing purple as he tried to pry it open. But it was futile and Lex knew it; the monster was far and away too strong for him to keep from tearing his throat out. All he managed was to momentarily slow it as razor-sharp teeth pierced his skin-
Then the forgotten bloodfruit hit the creature atop him, bursting into a splatter of viscous slime and twisted seeds.
And the creature – which had ignored being set on fire, shrugged off falling from atop a cliff, and cared nothing for its own blood-loss – threw back its head and screamed in agony.
It wasn’t hard for Lex to understand why. Just a few droplets of the bloodfruit’s juices had landed on the shredded mess that was his forelegs, and he could feel skin and muscles shriveling and decaying where the substance made contact with him. It wasn’t just painful, it was disconcerting on a fundamental level, as though his body was rotting away while he was still alive to feel it.
All that from just a few drops of the bloodfruit’s sap.
Sanguine Disposition, it seemed, had understated the perils of raw bloodfruit. It wasn't just dangerous to eat; it was deadly to the touch.
And the creature on top of him had gotten the entire thing broken over it.
Even as Lex watched, the monster seemed to shrivel in on itself. Its pained shriek caught in its throat as it shuddered, turning into a ragged gasp. Patches of fur withered and fell off of its body, its blood turning from thick and gummy to thin and watery, and its muscles quivered and went slack.
Lex didn’t miss his opportunity.
It was only because he was slick with blood – his own and the monster’s – that Lex managed to extricate himself from it. Even then, the act of picking himself upright was almost more than he could accomplish, the world suddenly spinning as he tried to stand up. A glance down at himself showed that the wounds the creature had inflicted on him were bleeding freely, drawn out by the mists, and Lex knew that if he didn’t get out of there in the next few seconds, he never would.
Stumbling back over to the rope ladder, he managed to issue an order to his tulpa. Put a splint around my leg. It wouldn’t help much, but at least it would keep it from-
Capacity exceeded.
The unfamiliar response almost caused Lex to collapse, instead managing to catch himself on the rope ladder. Hauling himself up, he ignored the burning in his legs as he tried again. Make bandages around my injuries.
Capacity exceeded.
Gritting his teeth as he pulled himself up further, Lex made one final attempt. Give me something to wipe the blood from my eyes with!
Capacity exceeded.
Letting out a hiss as much from frustration as from effort, Lex knew there was no point in trying any further. He’d investigated the limits of what his tulpa could create, but he knew that he’d just hit the one constraint that he hadn’t come across before: that there was apparently a limit to how much material it could create in a particular period of time.
And right now, he’d apparently exceeded that limit.
But as he ascended another rung and his head cleared the mist, Lex decided it didn’t matter. The only thing he had to focus on now was reaching the outcropping hanging overhead. Forcing himself to keep his horn lit up so that he didn’t miss the next crosspiece, he kept climbing, slowly leaving the mists behind even as he grew dizzier, fatigue and blood loss making each rung more difficult to reach than the last.
But as he reached the halfway point, a grin split his lips, knowing that he was going to make it.
That was when he heard a hateful yowl from the mists below.
No...it can’t still be alive!
The bloody, withered form that clawed its way up the rock wall a second later begged to differ.
In the light of the mists, the creature looked more dead than alive. Its eyes were rheumy and bloodshot. Its body was shriveled and twisted, bloody chunks of fur falling off of it in large patches. The second leg on its right side and the third on its left were hanging limp, save for the odd twitch.
But it didn’t hesitate to drag itself up the rock wall of the cliff after him.
Knowing there was no way he’d outpace the creature, Lex snarled as he telekinetically reached into his saddlebag...
...and withdrew the giant quill that the creature the huge creature he, Solvei, and Akna had encountered on their way here had attacked them with.
He’d taken it partially to independently confirm that items taken from this spiritual realm to the mortal world would transubstantiate as part of the journey. But the major reason he’d wanted to take it back was to see if it could be ensorcelled. While he’d never been able to unlock how Everglow’s mages could imbue magical channels into objects which didn’t naturally have them, using materials which did – such as certain rare gems, materials gathered from certain plants, and parts of magical creatures – had been known on Equestria for generations as a way to build unique and powerful magic items.
Lex had grabbed the harpoon-sized quill thinking that, since it had splintered Solvei’s black crystal armor, it would make a powerful weapon once properly enchanted.
But hopefully that’s the case even without any magic! he decided as he telekinetically launched the quill at the monster.
Hissing, the thing tried to skitter clear of the shot, but with two of its legs out of commission, wasn’t able to move out of the way in time. The barbed end of the quill sank just below its front left shoulder and going straight through, causing the thing to scream as it was pinned to the rock wall, the missile sinking deep into the cliff face.
Flashing the creature a spiteful grin, Lex turned and continued climbing...only for a gory gnashing sound to reach his ears before he’d ascended another rung. A glance back over his shoulder showed him the source of it:
The beast was gnawing its leg off.
Lex had no breath left to swear with, but in his mind he cursed the thing’s tenacity, putting everything he had left into reaching the outcropping before it got free.
Not daring to look back, he kept climbing, his legs growing weaker and his breath becoming heavier with each rung. But the outcropping was growing closer. Only five rungs were left...then four...three...two...
With just one left, Lex felt something claw at his tail.
Hauling himself over the rock ledge, Lex found himself less than two feet from the black statue of himself. Letting out a laugh that sounded like a dying gasp, he reached out for it...
Only to find that his limbs refused to move.
Exhaustion and blood loss had finally caused him to reach his limit, directly in front of his goal.
A moment later, Lex heard something crawl over the ledge with him, then felt blood fall on him from above as a growl, pained but triumphant, reached his ears.
His horn lit up then, and the beast took that as the signal to attack, teeth taking his neck and biting down, this time with nothing to stop them.
But it wasn’t enough to keep his telekinesis from lifting his foreleg, covered in the monster's blood, and brushing the edge of the black statue.
With patience that bordered on endless, the Keeper waited.
A living creature would have long since grown tired, hungry, or simply bored during the many hours that had passed since Lex Legis and Akna had entered the Confluence. But the Keeper was beyond such things now. With no need for food or rest, no muscles to cramp or eyelids to grow heavy, there was no change in his vigil. Surrounded by the deeper darkness that he kept wrapped around himself at all times, he hung in the air, silent and motionless, waiting.
There was no doubt that Lex Legis and Akna would return. Or at least, that their bodies would. Even if they perished, something would eventually find the passage back to their mortal forms. When that happened, the Keeper knew it would be up to him – or rather, his acolytes – to subdue whatever it was that returned in their place.
And once they were properly inducted, he’d have two new servants to guard the Shrine.
The thought was a pleasing one, particularly given the lack of respect that Lex Legis had shown since arriving.
That the unicorn had brought unbelievers and heretics with no intention of converting them to the Dark Tyrant’s worship had been bad enough. Dragging one of the guardians outside the grounds specifically to slay them without violating the Night Mare’s prohibition against her worshipers fighting within the Shrine had been worse. Even the replacement that he’d procured, Teyu Yagua, was only barely acceptable; despite the creature’s great power, that it had turned out to already be sapient meant that it would be that much harder to train. Worse, Lex had promised it a means of communicating, which the Keeper now found himself responsible for fulfilling.
Why Her Dark Majesty had decided to give someone so lacking in piety the Charismata, designating him as one of her Chosen, was beyond the Keeper’s understanding.
As such, it had been with no small amount of delight that he’d watched Lex Legis sink beneath the lightless surface of the Confluence, marking his failure to pass the Rite of Sublimation.
May the Night Mare make your atonement in her realm long and painful, he bid the unicorn silently. I’ll see to it that whatever comes back in your place treats our goddess with the reverence she deserves. And as for Akna-
As it summoned by his thoughts, it was at that moment that the white wolf heaved herself free of the Confluence, gasping and choking as she pulled herself across the uneven stone floor.
For a moment the Keeper watched, eyeing the adlet to see if there was any indication that she wasn’t herself any longer. Denizens of Darkest Night who took the bodies of the unwary always warped them somehow, the flesh contorting to match the spirit that now inhabited it, but Akna was still in her winter wolf form, looking no different than when she’d left.
Except, for some reason, she was changing back and forth between four legs and two.
Even as the Keeper watched, Akna switched back to her natural form, head hanging and pendulous breasts swaying as she crawled forward. But she’d barely moved when she slipped back to being a winter wolf, shuddering as she stumbled across the ground. Then she was an adlet again. Then a winter wolf.
Something has unnerved her, the Keeper decided. Perhaps because she failed to bring back one of the Umbral Regalia?
That had been Akna’s goal in following Lex Legis into the Rite: to replicate her original success in bringing back one of the Night Mare’s sacred weapons. But none of the divine implements were visible now, meaning that she hadn’t been able to procure one of them. Still, her preoccupation with changing forms was odd...perhaps she’d done something to displease the goddess and was confirming that the shapeshifting power she’d gained before was still intact?
Either way, there were still ceremonies to observe at the conclusion of the Rite.
“Guided by the will of She Who Rules in Darkness, you have come here, to the Shrine of the Starless Sky,” intoned the Keeper, knowing that up above him his acolytes were listening, waiting to hear if they needed to leap down and subdue a rampaging creature. “As the caretaker of this sacred place, exalted in the eyes of the goddess, I command you: look into the holy shadows that surrounds me and speak your name.”
Below him, Akna didn’t respond, save to stop collapse to the ground, still breathing heavily and shifting back and forth.
Inwardly, the Keeper frowned. Her body not having ben warped was a strong indicator that Akna was the one within it, and yet Akna had been through the Rite before. She knew what she was supposed to say. So why wasn’t she replying?
“Look toward my voice,” repeated the Keeper, “and tell me your name!”
Below him, the lupine took a shuddering breath. “I...my name...”
She rolled onto her side then, and it was only because he had no need to breathe that the Keeper managed to stifle a gasp.
There, on Akna’s hip, was Lex Legis’s brand of destiny.
That the podium in front of an amphitheater was the unicorn’s mark was undeniable. Akna herself had informed him several hours ago that it had been borne upon the flank of his servant, Solvei, who had died getting her master and his comrades to the Shrine. Now it was upon Akna herself...and even as she changed into a winter wolf again, the brand remained, indelible and unaltered.
Had Lex Legis found his servant in Darkest Night and commanded her to take Akna’s body?
But that theory died a moment later as the shuddering adlet – humanoid again, at least for the moment – looked up at him.
Her eyes were two different colors now.
It took the Keeper a moment to fully process that. Darkvision didn’t register colors, seeing things in black and white only, with everything else being shades of gray. But over the centuries, the Keeper had grown adept at guessing what the various drab hues represented in terms of real colors. And judging from the mismatched irises that he could see now...
Her right eye matches Akna’s original blue. But her left eye...gold?
Still trying to puzzle out what he was seeing, the winter wolf – apparently having decided to stay in that form – took another shuddering breath. “My name,” she began slowly, “is Solv-” Cutting herself off, she shook her head. “Akn-” Again, she couldn’t bring herself to finish, squeezing her eyes shut as if in pain.
“I know who I am,” she murmured a moment, taking a deep breath. “I’m-”
This time, it was a low growl from the Confluence that cut her off.
Turning his eyeless gaze to the well of roiling blackness, Akna doing the same beneath him, the Keeper waited. A moment later the sound repeated itself, louder this time. As the harsh snarl reverberated throughout the room, the Confluence began to undulate, its surface roiling and seething as if agitated by the noise emerging from within it. Frowning inwardly at the sight, the Keeper watched as the disturbance built, the planar aperture shuddering and convulsing with increasing turbulence.
Then, just as the Keeper decided that he’d have to try calming the Confluence himself – the lightness substance of its form quaking so violently that it threatened to burst – it suddenly went still.
And a single foreleg, covered in slate-grey fur and wrapped in barbed wire, reached out and slammed itself against the rocky ground.
But at the end of that foreleg wasn’t a hoof.
Instead, it was topped by five talons, each one sharp enough that they dug into the stone.
A moment later, Lex Legis – or rather, the thing that he had become – emerged from the Confluence, threw back its head, and gave a deafening roar.
Akna fell back, her mouth hanging open as she stared, and the Keeper couldn’t blame her. While the body in front of them was still recognizable as once having been Lex’s, the changes to it made it clear that the unicorn was no longer present. Instead, something far worse had come back in the stallion’s place.
Now possessing claws rather than hooves, those were only the most notable of the myriad changes that the pony had undergone. His entire frame was larger now, having gained several inches of height, and his physique was far thicker, replete with muscles that it hadn’t previously possessed. His tail was different also, with the arc of horsehair having been replaced by a long and fleshy appendage similar to a cat’s except thicker, waving back and forth in agitation.
His face was different as well. As the newcomer gnashed their teeth, the Keeper could see that they were sharp and pointed. While not true fangs, as they didn’t protrude past his lips, they were still clearly the teeth of a predator, intended to rip and tear into prey.
Nor was that all that was different. His eyes had also changed, the pupils having become vertical slits within their irises. And his horn was now a single color, the lighter grey base having vanished, leaving the darker hue that made up the rest of it to extend all the way down to where it met its owner’s skull.
“M-Master...” muttered Akna, still seemingly too shocked to move.
But the Keeper was far less surprised, having half-expected this outcome, even if the specifics of the former-pony’s appearance had caught him off-guard. “And so it ends the way that it had to,” he murmured, before raising his voice up, looking upward. “To me, my acolytes!”
They came immediately, having been waiting for the summons.
Bagora, the gorilla-bear, arrived first, hooting as he jumped down the stairs in great leaps and bounds. Showing a newly-arrived creature its place was a pleasure that the Keeper knew the brute enjoyed, making the few chances he had to inflict such violence a rare treat.
Draped around his shoulders, and immediately dropped to the ground once he arrived, were the siblings Fis and Bae. Although their names were simply pieces of their kind’s full name, “amphisbaena” – a serpent with a head at each end of its body – they were monikers the brother and sister pair had chosen themselves in celebration of having been raised to sapience and comprehending what they were.
Others made their way down as well. Maxilla, a saurian creature known as a bonesnapper due to its pronounced underbite, arrived more slowly, her hunched gait and the large stone club she was dragging behind her making it impossible for her to rush anywhere. The loud buzzing that came after her marked the appearance of Bijek, a creature twice as large as a pony with the body of a wasp, the head of a spider, and the claws of a crab, the latter clicking animatedly at the thought of avenging Ganas, the phase spider Lex Legis had slain. The noise was almost enough to drown out Kelawar, the giant bat unable to keep from yipping in excitement.
Still more arrived, dropping down or hovering overhead to surround the beast that Lex Legis had become. The creature that wore his body hissed at the display, circling in place to take in the menagerie of monsters moving to confront it. But none of them moved to attack...nor would they, until the Keeper gave the word.
Up above, the caretaker of the Shrine of the Starless Sky prepared to do just that.
“It might be that you cannot understand my words,” began the Keeper, his tone flat and even. “Or perhaps you can speak, but have no knowledge of this tongue. It makes no difference either way. By the Night Mare’s will, you have left Her realm of blessed darkness. Thus, in thanks to Her munificence you shall endeavor to do Her work in this world. And as the one who maintains Her will here, in this sacred space, that means that you shall serve me.”
Floating up higher, he raised his voice, letting it echo through the massive chamber. “Now bow down, or be made to do so by my acolytes!”
Around the room, the myriad creatures hooted and snickered, hoping that there’d be an enraged howl that would precipitate their being given leave to attack.
But what came from the creature wearing Lex’s body then wasn’t a roar of anger, or a bellow of outrage, or a scream of defiance.
It was laughter.
Deep and powerful, the sound of the altered unicorn’s mirth caused the acolytes to falter, glancing at one another in uncertainty. But the mutated pony ignored them, instead staring up at the Keeper as the sound, scornful and triumphant, rang out.
“Bow? To you?”
The sphere of darkness overhead bobbed as the Keeper jerked in surprise. The creature below him was looking directly at him! Not just at the surrounding globe of darkness, but at him personally, his eyes staring directly at the sockets of his skull! And yet he showed no hint of surprise at seeing him in his true form, which meant...
“I AM LEX LEGIS! THE CHAMPION OF THE NIGHT MARE!”
Raising his left foreleg, the one clad in barbed wire, he clenched his talons into a fist.
Raising a claw above his head, Lex clenched it into a fist. Staring up at the darkness that the Keeper clad himself in, Lex felt his dark magic surge. That shouldn’t have happened, he knew; he’d expended all of his horn’s power before he’d entered the Confluence, and it wouldn’t replenish itself until he’d had a chance to rest.
But that limitation was something which had bound the old Lex.
His new self, it seemed, was beyond such constraints.
Even without calling upon his powers, the pitch-black area which housed the Confluence had been visible to his upgraded eyes. And now, as they turned green and sprouted dark purple contrails from their outer corners, Lex’s vision easily pierced the darkness surrounding the pathetic, withered creature that called itself the Keeper. Even as he watched, the disembodied skull retreated further upward, putting more distance between them before coming to a halt near the ceiling, and the beast inside of Lex howled at the display of fear, prompting him to scream out his dominance.
“AND I BOW TO NO ONE!!!”
The chamber fell silent in the wake of Lex’s roar, the monsters that were the Keeper’s acolytes cringing at the power in his voice. Or perhaps it was because they had noticed that their master was retreating. Though the prohibition against fighting among the Night Mare’s faithful might have had something to do with it as well.
Lex couldn’t have cared less. As much as he found himself savoring the idea of a bloody fight to the death, he clamped down on that urge, battering the craving into submission beneath his will. Settling for one last look at the assembled creatures, he sneered as they all backed up or looked away or simply shivered as his eyes met theirs, and when he started toward the stairs a moment later, they hurried to move out of his way.
All except one.
“Le-, Master...” The voice was Akna’s, but in his mind he registered her presence as Solvei’s, and he had to push aside his joy at having her back as he sensed her disposition flickering back and forth between fear and confusion. Nor was that limited to her state of mind; even as Lex watched, she took a step toward him, only to shift into her two-legged form halfway through the motion. Stumbling, she caught herself, only to change into a winter wolf as she did so, then shifting back into an adlet a moment later. “I can’t-, something’s happened, but I don’t know-”
I do, he reassured her silently, not wanting her to broadcast her distress so readily around so many potential enemies. Right now, just focus on staying in your quadrupedal form. Can you do that?
I...yes, I think so. Swallowing, she shuddered as she returned to her winter wolf form, taking several deep breaths as she resisted the urge to change back. I feel strange. Like...like I’m wearing all those clothes that don’t fit, the way I did back in Darkest Night, except then I remember that wasn’t me! Except it was, and then I get confused because it feels like I’m not me except I am, and I tried to say my name was two different things just now, and both of them felt right but also wrong at the same time, and-
Calm down.
I can’t! I feel like I’m going crazy and I don’t know what to do!
He could feel her composure disintegrating then, their link alerting him to her increasing agitation even as she began to shake, her slow breaths again becoming rapid and shallow. Fortunately, he knew what to do to calm her down; he’d done it before, after all.
Striding across the uneven stone floor, his talons scratching the stone with every step he took, Lex reached out a claw toward the shivering winter wolf...
And gently petted her fur.
The beast inside of him snarled at showing such weakness when they were surrounded by hostile creatures, but he ignored its anger. Instead, he focused on keeping his talons safely away from her skin, not wanting to accidentally hurt her as he stroked her back.
It’s going to be alright. What happened in Darkest Night changed you, changed both of us, but it hasn’t changed the fact that you’re precious to me, and always will be.
A twinge ran through Lex then, and unlike before it didn’t come from the violent creature lurking below his thoughts. Taking a moment to examine it, he realized that he’d fully and completely abandoned any desire to break the connection between himself and the wolf in front of him. It was a total reversal from how he’d felt in the days immediately following the formation of their bond, but now – despite the lingering guilt he felt at knowing that Kara’s blessing likely played a part in how devoted she was to him – he couldn’t bring himself to think about letting her go. Not after how bereft he’d felt when he’d lost her.
Their bond was permanent, and always would be.
You belong to me, now and forever.
The words brought a soft gasp to her lips, and this time when her anxiety fell away, it didn’t come surging back the way it had before. Even then, she needed several seconds to collect herself, taking more slow breaths as he continued to stroke her fur. Finally, she raised her eyes to meet his. Thank you, Master.
A smile crossed his lips then, lasting just long enough for her to see it before he turned away and headed back toward the stairs, knowing that she was following him.
The two of them ascended in silence, leaving the Keeper and his monsters behind as they headed back toward the ciborium waiting above them.
It was only when they were slightly past the halfway point that he heard her voice in his mind again.
Master, you said that what happened in Darkest Night changed me. How?
You should focus on resting for now. We can talk about that when you’ve had a chance to recover from what you’ve been through.
I don’t think I’ll be able to unless I know what I’ve been through, she protested. Please, Master! I’m doing my best to stay calm, but it’s hard when I don’t have any answers! What happened to me?
Sighing, he paused for just a moment before answering, hoping he wasn’t making a mistake. This is just a theory, he cautioned her, and I don’t have all of the answers regarding what it entails, but I believe that you’re both Solvei and Akna now.
He heard a scrabbling sound as she missed a step. Wh-what?!
The two of you touched the black statue of Akna, the portal back to her body, at the same time, confirmed Lex. When you did, both of you disappeared, which I theorized meant that each of your souls had been placed into Akna’s body. And judging from what you’ve said and how you’ve acted so far, that’s exactly what happened.
I’m Solvei...and Akna...together?
I wasn’t sure if your souls would remain distinct or not, admitted Lex. I once met a monster that could possess others, and there was no blending of consciousnesses when it stole someone else’s body. But the way it operated and what happened to you two are dissimilar enough that I’m not surprised it turned out differently.
Can...can you separate us? I mean, if we were two different people before...
Continuing up the stairs, Lex shook his head. I don’t have any spells that can do that, and I can’t even imagine what it would take to design a ritual for that purpose. Even then, if I left Akna’s soul where it is – since the body is hers – Solvei’s soul would have no living receptacle to place it into-
And she’d be dead again.
Lex didn’t say anything to that, nor did he have to, his reaction to that thought being visceral enough that the two-souled wolf behind him shivered.
The two kept walking upward, and it was only when they approached the trapdoor leading back to the Night Mare’s altar that Lex heard her voice in his mind again.
Master, what about you? You look so different now. What happened to you?
About to use his horn to open the way up, Lex paused.
And remembered...
Hauling himself over the rock ledge, Lex found himself less than two feet from the black statue of himself. Letting out a laugh that sounded like a dying gasp, he reached out for it...
Only to find that his limbs refused to move.
Exhaustion and blood loss had finally caused him to reach his limit, directly in front of his goal.
A moment later, Lex heard something crawl over the ledge with him, then felt blood fall on him from above as a growl, pained but triumphant, reached his ears.
Lacking the strength to so much as grind his teeth, let alone fight back, Lex could do nothing but scream inwardly as he realized that he was going to die here. The fact that he was about to be slain – quite possibly permanently, since he was already a spirit in his soul’s destined afterlife – was all the more frustrating for his so recently having rediscovered a reason to keep going. Despite having learned that he’d never have what he wanted most, he’d managed to reaffirm that his life was meaningful so long as he held to his moral code and kept working to better Equestria. That alone was enough to make his life worth living.
And now that life was about to be taken from him.
It was so utterly galling that he couldn’t even bring himself to feel fear or regret, instead raging at the injustice of it all. Xiriel, the alicorns, Dark Streak; they at least knew that they were fighting to change Equestria’s future! he howled silently. This stupid thing can’t even comprehend the consequences of its actions! It’s only interfering because something drove it toward me!
As that thought crossed his mind, a memory came to him, unbidden:
“The Night Mare’s test Lex Legis faced, seeking Her dark salvation! But interference from outside left his body misshapen!”
For some reason, Spinner’s prophecy made him recall the last time her words had crossed his mind: right before he’d jumped into the Confluence. The Keeper had said something to make him think of them...
“What usually happens when someone fails the Rite is that they can’t make their way back to their body before one of the denizens in Darkest Night, the goddess’s home, possesses it in their stead. If that happens, you will be unable to return, while whomever takes over your body will reshape it in accordance with their nature.”
Sanguine Disposition had said much the same, confirming that part of the Keeper’s warning even after revealing that the Rite of Sublimation wasn’t real.
“The spirit shapes the body far more than the reverse. Hence what happened to your adlet and the so-called Keeper when the Confluence exposed them to a fraction of the Night Mare’s unfiltered power.”
Except this time, Akna hadn’t gone back alone. She and Solvei had touched the adlet’s statue at the same time, and since neither of them had fallen into the ravine – having plunged to the bottom of it himself, he would have seen them if they had – that could only mean that, as impossible as it sounded, they had both gone into Akna’s body.
As though divinely inspired – and perhaps it was – all of the pieces came together.
Interference from outside.
The spirit reshaping the physical self.
Two souls in one body.
Spinner’s prophecy hadn’t been a warning.
It had been instructions.
This was what the Night Mare had meant when, upon bringing him to Everglow, she’d said that she was giving him the chance to grow stronger. This was why the barbed wire around his hoof had indicated her approval when Akna had mentioned the so-called Rite of Sublimation. Because this was the answer to one of his greatest weaknesses.
How often had he been reduced to the pathetic state he was in now? How many times had he gotten into a fight only to find that his body simply wasn’t capable of withstanding the punishment his enemies had dished out? How frequently had he been his own worst enemy in that regard, augmenting his magic at the cost of his health, injuring himself in pursuit of strategies that damaged him almost as much as his foes?
He’d thought the answer was to improve his battle tactics, expand his combat resources, and rely more on allies and servants. And he hadn’t been wrong; those were all viable paths to victory should he find himself in a violent altercation. But those merely compensated for the underlying problem, when the solution was so much simpler:
If he didn’t want to keep being overwhelmed in a fight, then he simply needed a stronger body.
And now, a way to achieve one was right in front of – and on top of – him.
Lex had no doubt that they eight-legged creature that had cornered him was a supreme example of physical prowess. The thing had fallen from a cliff several stories high, twice, and had barely seemed to feel it. It had almost completely bled out, and its combat capabilities had suffered little to no degradation for it. Its claws had torn through his magic items and defensive enchantments like they weren’t even there. It had ignored being set on fire, kept fighting after the debilitating bloodfruit had splattered across it, and hadn’t slowed down even after ripping off one of its own legs.
More than the magic items he’d gotten from Solvei’s mother, more than the scroll he’d used to fight Lirtkra and his comrades in Vanhoover, that was the kind of power Lex knew he needed.
And all of it was his for the taking.
But doing so would mean that he’d no longer be a pony, at least not completely.
Even now, that thought was enough to terrify Lex in a way that the prospect of death couldn’t. The idea of something corrupting his identity, of changing who and what he was both physically and mentally – and he had little doubt that anything which would alter his body that much would have some effect on his thought processes – frightened him more than anything. It meant losing more than just his home or his powers; it meant losing part of himself.
Except that now, after the revelations he’d experienced since entering the Confluence and coming to Darkest Night, Lex knew just how meaningless that was. He now knew that his inability to relate to others couldn’t be cured nor compensated for, and even the mares who’d loved him in spite of himself had simply been under Kara’s influence. His only remaining worth, the only value in his being alive, was in what he could do for his homeland and his people.
And if that meant carving away a piece of himself...
Then so be it, Lex decided, feeling the monster’s blood dripping down onto him. I don’t care what it costs me! I’m going back, and I’m taking this thing with me!
His horn lit up then, the purple aura grabbing his hoof and moving it toward the black statue...as a matching aura surrounded the creature, already leaning down to sink its teeth into his neck. It wasn’t a strong hold; in his current state, he doubted the creature could even feel it, but that wasn’t the point. Solvei and Akna had touched the latter’s statue at the same time, but they’d also been in contact with each other. If there was any chance that the latter was the key to merging this thing’s body with his own, then he wanted to maximize that as much as he could.
Watch me, Night Mare! he swore as he telekinetically moved his foreleg forward. I’ll show you the determination...
Just as the monster bit down, his hoof brushed the edge of the black statue.
...of the pony you made your champion!
His horn lit up the space around them as Lex pushed the altar to the side, climbing the last few steps out of the cavern beneath it.
I faced my fears, he answered at last. And I reaped the rewards for doing so.
He registered curiosity from his lupine companion then, but she didn’t have a chance to ask another question as the door at the far end of the cathedral swung open.
“Lex?” called Spinner, the mare peering around as she wandered inside. “Are you in here? We thought we heard your voice a minute ago – something about bowing? – and thought maybe the Rite was over. I need to talk to you about DraAAAAAAAHHH!!!”
Shrieking as she caught sight of him, Spinner backpedaled so fast that she lost her balance, collapsing to the floor and scooting backward until she hit the door she’d come in through. “L-L-Lex?! Author’s quill, what happened to you?!”
“Your prophecy came true, at least in part,” replied Lex tersely. “Now, I believe you were saying something about Thermal Draft?”
“Prophecy? I don’t-, oh!” Her eyes going wide, Spinner shakily climbed to her hooves, gulping. “I’d almost forgotten about that! I mean, it feels like forever ago when I said that, you know? And even then...when I said that stuff about you being misshapen, I thought it’d mean, like, you’d lose a leg or go blind or something, not...this...”
“Spinner,” growled Lex quietly, the sound making the mare dig her hooves into the ground as she tried to back up more. “I’m not going to ask you again. What’s happened with Thermal Draft?”
Gulping, the bard nodded. “Right, um...I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s something you need to know about her...”
“OF COURSE SHE ISN’T! WHAT YOU’RE SUGGESTING IS PREPOSTEROUS!”
“Look, I get that you’re surprised, we were all surprised too! But I’m telling you, it’s the truth, and-, no, wait! Just wait a second!”
“Get out of my way, Spinner!”
“Will you please just listen to me?! I understand that this is probably the last thing you need sprung on you right now, after...whatever happened to you in that Rite-”
“It wasn’t a rite. The Keeper lied to Master and me both.”
“Why are you calling him-, no, you know what? We can talk about that later. Right now, Lex, I’m telling you that you can’t go in there all angry like this!”
“I think otherwise, and you lack the power to stop me!”
“Have you forgotten that she’s dying?! Drafty’s dying and she’s only getting worse, but she’s still trying to put on a brave face because she’s sure you’ll save her, so if you go in there right now and start screaming at her for having deceived you, you’ll crush her! Is that really what you want to do to her right now?”
“...”
“Just take a minute to remember what she means to you, and how much she cares about you, and then go in and see her, okay? And, maybe give me a second to let her and everyone else know that you’ve got a few surprises of your own.”
Taking the menacing growl she received in reply as a good sign, Spinner didn’t push her luck, instead retreating back inside the stone building where she and her friends had now spent the better part of two days. It took only a moment to cross the threshold and brief adjoining entryway, pushing aside the makeshift curtains that they’d put up. “Okay,” she announced, keeping her voice quiet. “So the good news is that Lex and Akna are back...”
Thanks to Mystaria having renewed her darkvision spell on them, Spinner was able to see Shadow, still sitting next to Woodheart and Littleknight, roll her eyes behind her mask. “We’re calling that the good news?”
“It’s better than if they became mindless beasts the way Akna said the Rite of Sublimation sometimes turns ponies into, since I doubt we’d be welcome here much longer without them,” cut in Valor, still keeping watch over the shrouded form that was Solvei’s body. “Except now Akna’s saying something about it not having been a rite?”
Spinner just shrugged her shoulders, shaking her head as she stepped closer to where Mystaria was huddled down next to Thermal Draft, in the process of wiping the latter’s mare’s forehead with a damp cloth. “Is she okay?”
“She settled down right after you left to go investigate that yelling,” replied Mystaria. “With all the worrying she was doing the entire time Lex was gone, I think hearing his voice and knowing that he was okay was enough of a relief that she was finally able to relax.”
Spinner grimaced. “I’m not sure ‘okay’ is the word I’d use.”
“I’m guessing that has to do with the bad news?” snorted Shadow.
“In a word? Yeah.” Rubbing her face with one hoof, Spinner let out a slow breath. “Lex and Akna are back, but they’re...different.”
Valor cocked a brow. “Different how?”
“I’d say I don’t have the words, but I think that’d be an insult to The Author,” admitted Spinner. “Right now, Akna’s got the same brand of destiny that Solvei had, and Lex has become-”
“Stronger.”
The voice was Lex’s, pushing aside the curtain as he strode into the room, Akna following close behind him. The sight of him caused Mystaria to gasp, eyes widening as she stared at what the unicorn had become. Nor was she alone, as Valor’s jaw hit the floor, seemingly forgetting to breathe as she looked the stallion over. But the most pronounced reaction was Shadow’s, who leaped to her hooves and cursed as she drew a dagger, moving to place herself between Woodheart and Littleknight.
Lex ignored them all, instead staring at the unmoving form of Thermal Draft, not that Spinner could blame him.
After all, it wasn’t everyday that you found out that your girlfriend was a doppelganger.
“She changed-, well, I guess I should say ‘changed back,’ about a half-hour ago,” remarked the filidh softly as Lex continued to look the unmoving mare over. “She couldn’t bring herself to sleep because of how worried she was about you, and with what that curse is doing to her health, she just kept getting groggier. After that, she just...became like she is now...”
She trailed off, not sure what else to say, instead glancing to the rest of her friends for help. But Valor was still staring, and Shadow was crouched and ready to spring at the slightest provocation. Fortunately, Mystaria had apparently recovered her wits, swallowing before she started to speak. “Lex...I can’t even imagine what you’re going through right now. After everything that’s happened...losing Solvei, the rite – or whatever it was – and now this. But Drafty-”
“That’s not Drafty-, Thermal Draft,” interrupted Lex, his voice clipped. “Thermal Draft is a pegasus, which means that this...thing, is an imposter.”
Spinner winced, glad that the mare in question wasn’t able to hear him. She was already feeling guilty about what she’d said about doppelgangers before, her catty remark about them being “nutty and slutty” making her cringe now. To have Lex say that about someone who was so obviously head-over-hooves in love with him, not to mention carrying his child, was heartbreaking to listen to. “Lex, she’s still the same mare you-”
“You aren’t hearing me,” snapped Lex, glaring at the bard with such intensity that it made Spinner wonder if Shadow had been right to reach for her weapons. “There are no doppelgangers where Thermal Draft and I come from! Ergo, this creature is either a changeling – a parasitic monster from our homeland that can alter its shape in order to feed – or it’s one of this place’s doppelganger creatures, in which case it replaced Thermal Draft after we arrived here!”
He finished his pronouncement by pointing a talon at the unconscious mare. “Wake her-, no, wake it up! If this thing is local, then it needs to be interrogated as to the real Thermal Draft’s location!”
“Lex, this is the real Thermal Draft,” insisted Spinner, making sure to keep her voice low and calm. Between his complete breakdown when Mystaria had confronted him about his magic, and his brief bout of madness when Solvei had died, it had become increasingly clear to her that Lex wasn’t the most stable of ponies. The last thing she wanted was for him to lose control of himself again now that he’d become...whatever he was. “She told me about your past adventures, remember? About some dragon you fought? How you rescued an entire city? She knew all that.”
“Which proves nothing!” shot back Lex. “I’ve had multiple encounters with duplicitous enemies who’ve abducted ponies and forced them to reveal information! Torture, mind-reading magic, scrying...” That last one seemed to hit a nerve with him, his brow furrowing as he stared daggers at Drafty.
“There are any number of ways this creature could have acquired that information,” he repeated after a moment, “assuming it’s not a changeling I unknowingly brought here.”
“Lex...” This time Mystaria was the one to speak up. “Listen, I don’t know about the changeling ponies you have at home-”
“Changelings aren’t ponies!” snarled Lex.
“Well doppelgangers are,” cut in Valor, having found her voice at last, though she was still staring hard at Lex. “So that makes it easy to figure out if she’s one of those ‘changelings’ or not. Just look and see if her brand of destiny is still there.”
To Spinner’s mild surprise, Lex actually paused at that, a thoughtful expression crossing his face. Then he turned back to Drafty, his horn lighting up as a matching aura surrounded the unconscious mare, throwing off the blanket covering her starting to roughly yank her clothes off.
Shadow’s eyes narrowed. “Be gentle with her! Even if she’s not who she said she is, she’s still sick, not to mention pre-”
“Pretty tired!” cut in Spinner anxiously, her voice breaking slightly as sweat ran down the back of her neck. Fortunately, Lex didn’t seem to notice, caught up in telekinetically removing Drafty’s clothes, and Spinner took the opportunity to shoot her friend a glare. Telling him that he’d knocked up a mare that wasn’t who he thought she was would definitely send him over the edge again!
Fortunately, Shadow’s wincing indicated that her almost revealing that particular secret had been an accident rather than deliberate.
But by that time, Lex had found what he’d been looking for.
Spinner watched, biting her lip as the unicorn – or whatever he was now – stared at the outline of a gust of air glowing upward on Thermal Draft’s hip, having turned her on her side and gotten her pants down just enough to reveal her brand.
“I’m sure you’re wondering if that brand is something she made with her shapechanging powers,” offered Mystaria quietly. “But if she was delirious enough to change back accidentally, then I don’t think she’d leave that-”
“Be quiet,” ordered Lex gruffly, eyes narrowing as he reached up to adjust the circlet he always wore. “I’m going to confirm her mark magically-”
He stopped speaking abruptly, a confused look crossing his face. That was unexpected enough that Spinner couldn’t help but share another worried look with the rest of her friends, and it was out of concern for Drafty’s safety that she spoke up again. “Lex...? Is everything okay?”
“My augmentation of this device worked better than expected,” he muttered, more to himself than in response to her as he held up one claw, turning it back and forth as he slowly flexed it. “And with far less strain than before.”
“Oh, well, uh...great, I guess?” chuckled Spinner with false cheer before leaning closer to Mystaria and lowering her voice to a whisper. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”
The nun-in-training shook her head, still tense as Lex lost interest in his new limb and returned to looking Drafty over. Finally, to everyone’s assembled relief, Lex slowly – and with much more care than before – fixed the doppelganger’s clothes, laying her back down and even pulling the blanket back over her. “It’s the same,” he murmured. “All of her magical channels are identical to when I examined her after rescuing her from Prevarius.”
“Does that mean you’re satisfied?” snapped Shadow when his horn finally went out. “Or do you need to rough her up some more?”
Lex ignored her. “Solvei, I want you confirm Thermal Draft’s scent...”
He trailed off, raising his head in a way that looked to Spinner as though he’d just remembered something he’d forgotten, glancing toward the back of the room.
In all of the commotion, no one had noticed Akna – still in her four-legged form, and still showing the same brand, Lex’s brand, on her flank that Solvei had possessed – slinking around toward the far side of the chamber. Now, she was hunched over the cloth-wrapped bundle that was Solvei’s body, staring intently as she slowly pulled the cloak covering the winter wolf back.
To Spinner, the way the adlet was acting made no sense, gazing at Solvei’s corpse with an expression halfway between reverence and wonder, despite the fact that she’d helped Lex bring her body back not too long ago. Yet now, she was acting like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, one paw gently reaching up to touch the winter wolf’s face.
Even more oddly, Lex – despite the towering rage he’d displayed earlier when Solvei’s body had been taken – seemed disinclined to stop whatever Akna was doing now, instead watching her with an unreadable expression.
And then, a moment later, he turned on his hooves – or rather, his claws – and marched toward the exit.
“Lex?” blurted Mystaria. “Where are you going?”
“To see the Keeper,” he shot back, not so much as bothering to glance over her shoulder. “He has something I want.”
“And Woodheart hasn’t gotten any better, thanks for asking!” called Shadow as Lex disappeared through the doorway, snorting when no response came back. “Bastard. Honestly, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have been better off if some sort of monser hadn’t come back in his place.”
Shaking her head disgustedly, the masked mare turned to where Akna was staring at Solvei’s body. “Akna, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but would you mind filling us in on what happened during the rite?”
“And why you said it wasn’t a rite?” chimed in Spinner.
“And why Lex called you Solvei just now?” added Mystaria.
“And why he’s suddenly so easy on the eyes?” muttered Valor, still staring at where Lex had gone. At least until she realized that she’d said that last part out loud, her face darkening as she saw that her friends were all staring at her. “Ugh, sorry, I know that’s inappropriate while his sick girlfriend is right here-”
Mystaria seemed equally disturbed. “Valor, are you actually saying that you think the way Lex looks now is attractive?”
“Oh gods,” groaned Spinner. “The sun cats!”
“What about the sun cats?”
Shadow’s question made the bard grimace. “Don’t you see? Our principled pugilist here was raised by sun cats, meaning that she spent her formative years surrounded by guys who had sharp teeth, razor claws, and long tails. Now suddenly there’s a stallion with all of those features-”
“Can we please talk about this some other time?” groaned Valor, suddenly finding it hard to make eye contact with anyone.
“Absolutely,” agreed Shadow. “My vote is for ‘never again.’”
“Hey, at least now we know that Valor’s attracted to guys,” noted Spinner. “Mysty, I guess that’s ten gold pieces that I owe you. Wanna go double or nothing about Shadow?”
Ignoring Spinner’s comment, as well as the outraged squawk it earned from the masked mare, Mystaria slowly walked over to where Akna was still staring at Solvei’s body, ignoring their antics. “Akna?” Reaching a hoof out, she gently touched the adlet’s side. “Are you alright?”
The physical contact seemed to do what all of the talking hadn’t, causing the lupine’s ears to flatten as she finally stirred. “Akna,” she muttered, as though needing to confirm her name. “Yeah, I just...this is so weird.”
Behind her, Mystaria heard Shadow say something about that being an understatement, but she steadfastly refused to acknowledge it. “For all of us. Do you think maybe it would help if you talked about what happened to you and Lex?”
Pausing the adlet-turned-wolf glanced back at where the mutated unicorn had left, ears slowly picking up. “I guess...”
Sighing, she spared one last glance at Solvei’s body before turning to the assembled mares. “I guess I should start by talking about what happened to m-, to Solvei, after she died...”
Lex’s claws gouged the smooth stone floor beneath him as he stalked across the center of the Shrine, heading back toward the cathedral.
A small part of him noted his inadvertent vandalism, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. The Keeper would undoubtedly see to it that the rents in the ground were fixed. But he’d do it after turning over the magical paraphernalia Sanguine Disposition had said the talking skull had brought to the Shrine after being driven mad by it.
Of course, that was presuming that the vampire had been telling the truth. And that the Keeper’s warped mind was capable of revisiting the topic of what had shattered it in the first place. And that such an item could be handled safely, let alone have its nature and functions decoded in a prompt manner.
Not to mention the biggest presumption of all: that whatever it was the Keeper had brought here was capable of helping Thermal Draft.
The thought of the dying pegasus-, no, the dying doppelganger made Lex grind his teeth, claws digging deeper into the stonework as he forced himself to stop walking and consider what he’d just learned. How could Thermal Draft have become that insectoid thing?! It made no sense!
According to what Mystaria and her friends had said, doppelgangers were a type of pony native to Everglow. But he’d met Thermal Draft back on Equestria, where she already had relationships with multiple other ponies, which meant that she couldn’t have been an Everglow native at the time of their first encounter. Nor was it plausible that some Everglow doppelganger had gone to Equestria to replace her at some point after their first meeting; very few ponies here had the ability to traverse planar barriers, and of those who did, none knew that Equestria even existed.
No, that’s not true, realized Lex a moment later. There was one pony here who had both knowledge of Equestria and sufficient magic to go there at will:
Iliana, the queen of the Pony Empire.
Lex’s brow furrowed as he followed that line of thought. Iliana was supposed to be a sorceress of peerless ability, and he knew that Twilight Sparkle had divulged Equestria’s existence to her in exchange for help returning home. Could Celestia’s pupil have asked this world’s pony queen for help in undermining his rule? Was the doppelganger in the nearby building an operative that Iliana had sent to get close to him, replacing the real Thermal Draft back on Equestria?
But almost as soon as those thoughts slid through Lex’s mind, he discarded them. No such imposter could have taken Thermal Draft’s place prior to her resurrection; the magic that had brought her back to life had required him to unambiguously identify her, which he’d done by name. It wouldn’t have been fooled by a false identity.
And he’d seen her cutie mark when she’d come back to life; the same cutie mark worn by the doppelganger in there now.
While it wasn’t unknown for two ponies to have the same cutie mark – during their brief time together, Twilight had told him about two of her friends, a mare named Minuette and a stallion named Doctor Hooves, both of whom had hourglass marks – it was still extremely rare. The idea that Iliana would have sent somepony to spy on him was already farfetched. That she’d just so happened to find a doppelganger pony whose brand of destiny was the same as Thermal Draft’s cutie mark was a coincidence so remote it was impossible to take seriously.
Which meant that, as impossible as it seemed, the unconscious doppelganger lying in the building behind him was the real Thermal Draft.
Somehow, she’d changed from being a pegasus to being one of Everglow’s doppelganger ponies.
When it had happened was difficult to guess, though the deal she’d made with Prevarius likely had something to do with it. That idea was full of holes, the biggest one being why she simply hadn’t told him that was the case, but it made more sense than any alternative theories. Either way, the transformation had to have happened after she’d come to this world; prior to then, she’d had no magic of her own to effect the change.
As for how it had happened, that was less important than whether or not he could change her back.
The obvious solution was to use the ritual he’d developed to fix ponies with mutated bodies, but Lex didn’t dare put that into practice now. Rituals relied on a painstakingly long series of extremely specific incantations and gestures. Now that he had a new body, with limbs which ended in multiple digits rather than hooves, he’d need to reacquaint himself with how to perform the requisite somatic functions before he attempted such delicate work. He could walk around and use basic motor skills without difficulty thanks to the instincts of the creature he’d absorbed, but anything more intricate would require time to get used to, as the gouge marks on the floor behind him could attest.
Attempting to change Thermal Draft back was therefore something which would have to wait.
Though that was the case anyway, since regardless of whether she was a pegasus or a doppelganger, Paska’s curse was still killing her.
“WOOF!!”
The bark, uttered in unison several times over and accompanied by the sound of heavy steps coming his way, drew Lex out of his ruminating. “Whatever it is, it will have to wait, Teyu.”
Across from him, Teyu Yagua’s seven heads all blinked as one, before the one closest to him strained forward, sniffing rapidly.
When it started to growl, Lex cursed inwardly, realizing what the problem one. “Teyu, it’s me. Lex Legis. The one who fed you and brought you here, remember?”
Holding up his wire-wrapped foreleg, Lex hoped he was getting through to the thing. His appearance – and, likely, his scent – weren’t the same as the pony the simpleminded creature had met only a few hours ago. No doubt it was having trouble reconciling the parts of him which were familiar with those that weren’t. “I know I seem different now, but I’m still the same individual you met before.”
Seven soft whines were his answer this time, and Lex held back a sigh, wishing he could simply imbue the thing with the ability to talk again. But that depended on the Charismata, which was still temporarily expended. Nor was his inability to give Teyu the power to communicate all that he was incapable of right now, despite the results of his sojourn to Darkest Night.
Lex had come to the Shrine of the Starless Sky in hopes of becoming an alicorn. Instead, he’d transformed into something else entirely. But despite his new body being very far from the blend of pony tribes that he’d been striving for, there was one way in which it resembled what he’d originally sought:
With a body this resilient, it was possible to channel magical power through it far in excess of what he’d been able to before.
He’d already confirmed that twice over. Despite having no dark magic left in reserve when he’d entered the Confluence, now he could easily see through the Keeper’s otherwise-impermeable cloak of darkness, something which had taxed him heavily when he’d originally tried it. More than that, he’d been able to augment his circlet’s ability to see into the magical spectrum just now – when he’d been examining Thermal Draft’s doppelganger body – without feeling any noticeable strain.
And since he could apparently produce magic items, within certain limits, from nothing now via his tulpa, that offered a staggering array of possibilities. Perhaps even more than if he had become an alicorn.
But right now, none of those possibilities could be actualized, for the very simple reason that – for all his new body's remarkable fortitude and ability to withstand punishment – Lex could feel that he was still thoroughly depleted.
It wasn’t just that the Charismata hadn’t yet replenished itself, or that his few divine spells were as-yet unrenewed. He’d barely been able to stand before he’d entered the Confluence, having expended the last of his reserves bringing Teyu Yagua back here. Nor had the spiritual journey to the Night Mare’s realm given him a chance to rest; if anything, it had only exhausted him all the more. Even that creature he’d merged with, with its supernatural tenacity, had been badly injured when he’d brought it back with him.
That level of enervation was easier to bear now, but it was still keeping him from seeing just what this body was truly capable of.
With the strength that his new physique offered him, Lex had no doubt that once the Charismata was available for him to use again, he’d be able to channel a great deal more power into it, potentially enough to grant Solvei the ability to lift Thermal Draft’s curse outright. Or perhaps he’d be able to bring forth a restorative item and then augment it to a level sufficient to heal her completely. Or any of the myriad other possibilities that were now open to him.
Or which would be open to him, once he rested and recovered.
But I can’t do that, Lex decided as he turned his back on Teyu – the gigantic thing laying down with a huff, apparently satisfied that he was who he said he was – and resumed his march toward the cathedral. Not until I’ve confirmed that whatever it is the Keeper brought here can’t be of any immediate use in curing Thermal Draft’s condition.
The odds of that were unlikely in the extreme, to the point of being only slightly more plausible than the idea that the doppelganger really was an imposter whose brand of destiny just so happened to match Thermal Draft’s cutie mark. But even if it was highly improbable, Lex knew he had to investigate the possibility. Compared to how long he’d likely need to rest in order to fully recover his strength, it was better to take a few minutes to confront the Keeper now, lest whatever he was hiding actually have the potential to help Thermal Draft before she deteriorated further.
His moral code demanded nothing less.
“My lord, preliminary reports suggest that Lex Legis is still alive.”
Despite bracing himself for it ahead of time, the pain that washed over him a moment later still made Carbon Fiber scream. Just like every other time that Steel Soul had punished him for bringing bad news, the torrent of agony left him writhing on the ground, his organic and psibernetic limbs all flailing uselessly as he waited for his master to grow tired of torturing him.
Fortunately, this time the pain abated in seconds, which Carbon Fiber took to be a good sign. He lived in terror of the idea that Steel Soul would someday turn his pain-inducer on and never deactivate it. Fear of that drove him to work as hard as he could to make sure his master’s plans came to fruition, quashing any thoughts of lying to, running from, or worst of all, rebelling against the one who controlled his fate.
Only dedicated and successful service would save him from an eternity of never-ending pain.
As so many creatures had found out over the years, that was what it meant to serve Steel Soul.
“How could he still be alive?!” seethed the mechanical pony in question, slamming a metal hoof down hard enough to make Carbon Fiber wince as he picked himself up off the floor. “How?! Even if that aurumvorax wasn’t able to finish him off, it should have weakened him enough for something else to get the job done!”
“Aerial reconnaissance of his last known location, including spectral imaging of a nearby ravine filled with exsanguinating vapors, showed signs of a struggle, but no bodies,” answered Carbon Fiber grimly. “A survey drone subsequently sent into the area detected indicators of a fight having happened inside the ravine, but showed no clues to suggest that it was then exited. Together with the lack of bodies, there’s a high likelihood-”
He couldn’t finish as another round of machine-induced agony left him screaming on the floor. “When I want your meager suppositions, I’ll tell you!”
This time the pain lasted longer, and when it finally ended Carbon Fiber found that he needed several moments to recover. Fortunately, Steel Soul didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t immediately leaping to attention. “If Lex Legis had been eaten by that aurumvorax, there’d be some indication of it!” hissed the psibernetic stallion, his tone one of barely-repressed fury.
“Even if his blood was all drained away, there’d be scraps of clothing or shards of bone or something! If not from him, then certainly from one of his slaves! But since there’s nothing, they must have found whatever it was they were looking for out in the hinterlands and then returned to the Material Plane! Which means that Lex Legis is now free to keep plotting against me with complete impunity because I STILL DON’T KNOW WHERE HE’S FROM!!!”
Fearing that another round of agony was incoming, Carbon Fiber struggled to get his voice under control. “M-my lord! I’m pleased to say that we’ve had a breakthrough in that area!”
Silence reigned for several moments, before Steel Soul spoke up again, his voice much quieter. “You’re saying that you’ve found the location of Lex Legis’ home world?”
“I believe so.”
Cold blue eyes glowed brighter. “You believe so?”
Fighting down a surge of terror, Carbon Fiber hastened to correct himself. “What I meant was, we’ve found a local denizen who claims to have been there.”
“Is that so?” sneered Steel Soul, his voice filled with scorn. “And just how did they reach a world whose coordinates are known only to Severance and the Night Mare?”
“They said they were summoned there by Lex Legis himself.”
This time, when Steel Soul paused, Carbon Fiber activated a nearby monitor, one whose subject had been prepared in advance. As the screen flickered to life, it showed an equinoid – one without wings or a horn – strapped down to a table, its legs, tail, waist, and neck all bound by thick metal cuffs. Despite this, it was struggling to get free, its thrashing serving to accomplish nothing except to make the scabs covering its entire body flake off, only for them to grow back again a moment later.
“It calls itself Harrowing Ordeal,” explained Carbon Fiber. “And I believe that it can tell us how to find Equestria, where Lex Legis comes from.”
The saurian creature in front of Lex – apparently one of the last to have exited the Confluence chamber, as it was currently in the process of pushing the altar back over the trapdoor – grunted as it finished its task. Dimwitted eyes blinked as it turned to look at him, before slowly swiveling its head back and forth. Seeing no one else around, it looked back at Lex before lifting one meaty claw to point at itself. “Where is...me?”
“The Keeper!” hissed Lex through clenched teeth. He took a step forward, claws flexing as the beast inside of him snarled. “Tell me where he is!”
Stepping back, the reptiloid thing blanched, its scales actually turning paler in Lex’s darkvision. It clenched its stone club tighter, but made no move to bring it into an attack position. Instead, it lifted its free claw, finger moving to point from its chin toward the ceiling. “Up,” it grunted, before its oversized jaw continued to flap. “But told no go there.”
Scoffing at the idea that such a prohibition applied to him, Lex turned and headed for the doorway just inside the cathedral’s entrance. To his mild surprise, a moment’s examination via his circlet found no magical protections on it, nor – when he grabbed it with his telekinesis a moment later – was it locked, swinging open without resistance. It seemed that the Keeper’s order was enough to keep his acolytes from venturing where they weren’t supposed to.
The stairs themselves were part of a narrow passage that curled upward, twisting as it followed the rounded structure of the cathedral. Lex briskly followed them, and it took only a few seconds before he arrived at another door. Like the one at the bottom of the stairwell it was lacking in magic, but this time when Lex tried the latch, he found it unmoving, apparently sealed from the inside. So much for the absolute nature of his control over his subordinates, sneered Lex mentally as he looked the obstacle over.
The door barring his path was solidly constructed. Judging from how it had rattled when he’d tried the handle, it had to be at least four inches of thick timber, with iron bindings strung across it in a Z-pattern. Nor were the hinges visible, being on the inside of whatever room lay beyond the threshold.
By all rights, Lex knew that he should simply have knocked, announcing himself and waiting to be permitted entry. Even if he couldn’t understand non-verbal cues in direct conversation, the rules of etiquette were quite clear on that point. Barging into someone else’s territory was at best extremely rude, and at worst – as Panuk and his scouting party of adlets had demonstrated – could be treated as a declaration of hostility, inviting an equally hostile response.
But this wasn’t the Keeper’s territory; it was the Night Mare’s.
And after having gone through so much hardship and sacrifice in his pursuit of the power that the goddess had dangled in front of him when she’d brought him back to Everglow – accepting that Solvei was bound to him forever, forsaking his hopes of ever truly understanding others, and even giving up part of his equinity – to say nothing of all the work he’d put into bringing her religion to Equestria, Lex refused to countenance the idea that she held some crazed undead wreck of a pony in higher regard than himself.
Which meant that, like Solvei and the Charismata, the Shrine of the Starless Sky and everything in it was his to do with as he pleased.
And if the Keeper objects to that, decided Lex as he slowly rose onto his hind legs, curling one claw into a fist and cocking it back, then let him appeal to the Night Mare herself!
Then he lashed out with all of the strength his new body could muster.
And the door went flying off its hinges.
Landing with a tremendous crash, Lex strode after it, surveying the next room.
His first impression was that he’d come to a storeroom. A shelf across from him held several small knives, each of them having hilts carved to resemble monsters from whose mouths the blades emerged. Above them were what might have been a flail, save that its head was perforated with small holes, opposite of which was a latch with a small hinge, as though it were designed to be filled with a liquid which the holes would then have allowed to trickle out. On a lower rack lay several folded squares of cloth of varying sizes.
Far more notable was what the far side of the room held. Wooden stands had been constructed in loose approximations of ponies, and draped over them were various garments. But unlike the myriad of clothes which had been among the supplies he’d taken from Solvei’s mother, these were of a far more ornate nature.
One of the wooden stands was adorned with a robe of velvet, embroidered with a pattern of brambles across the fabric, the design ending only at the trim, which was made of some sort of fur. Another was a massive suit of armor, forged to look like a massive snarling creature; its helm was a horned visage, with the open jaws making room for the wearer’s face, and the graves ended in stylized claws, while metal plates with razor-sharp edges lined its sides. A third outfit was a skintight suit of overlapping scales of some kind, and despite there being no light in the chamber, its surface seemed oddly glossy.
Set apart from them, however, was a raiment unlike the others.
Where the rest of the clothes were draped over simple wooden stands, this one had been carefully hung from a rack within a freestanding wardrobe. That the furniture had been constructed specifically to hold the single article of apparel was immediately obvious, as its width and depth were only barely greater than the outfit they contained. Moreover, the entire thing was lacquered, with silver filigree designed in yet another thorn motif, and the double doors at its front – currently open – were set with handles of carved onyx, with the same material was used to make rack from which the ensemble hung.
The clothes themselves might have been mistaken for a suit of armor fashioned in the image of a skeleton, but a few moments of examination were all that it took to correct that impression. Made of metal which had been dyed black, the narrow strips of material had been designed to be pressed against the wearer’s bones, providing almost no cover to the more vulnerable areas of the body. The entire thing was held together by a series of clasps, further denoting that the ensemble was unsuited for combat.
But that point was driven home by the final detail of the clothing, which was how the interior of each piece was lined with sharp, jagged hooks.
Short enough to dig into the skin without catching on muscle or bone, each hook was patterned opposite from those around it, ensuring that no matter how the wearer moved they would be pierced by them. The mere act of trying to walk in such a thing, Lex knew, would have been intensely painful. And yet none of the clasps had locks or any other means of being forcibly affixed, making it clear that this wasn’t some sort of torture implement; anyone clad in the outfit would have been able to remove it easily, albeit not without injury themselves at least a little.
“Magnificent, is it not?”
The Keeper’s voice caused Lex to glance over his shoulder, irritated with himself for having gotten caught up in the room’s contents. From the corner of the room opposite the door he’d broken down, he could already see the outer edge of the Keeper’s sphere of darkness floating toward him, and like before it took Lex only a thought – and no strain at all – to augment his vision enough to see through it, noticing the open doorway through which the pony skull had floated.
He also caught sight of the other thing which he’d overlooked in his examination of the room’s contents: a single bookstand, atop which lay a large open tome.
But there was no time for him to examine the writing within as the Keeper moved to hover across from him, turning to regard the hook-lined attire. “Behold the liturgical vestments of those who praise Our Dark Mistress, neart a’staigh,” he pronounced, and Lex recognized that last part as Siolbhan – the Sylvan language which was the second-most common tongue among this world’s ponies – for “inner strength.”
“Only those who have fully committed themselves to the goddess were granted the privilege of wearing this garment,” continued the Keeper, his tone reverent. “Even then, it was only to be employed during the sacred ceremonies and holy rituals. One so garbed demonstrated his faith by performing their duties even as their flesh was rent, their voices unflinching and their motions unwavering as they carried out the service. The blood they spilled was an offering, demonstrating their triumph over pain, their mastery over themselves, and their dedication to the Night Mare.”
“And yet no one wore them when you performed the Rite of Sublimation,” noted Lex caustically.
The Keeper gave a hollow laugh. “None of my acolytes have attained sufficient faith to have earned such an honor, and since you can see me as I truly am, you know that I am sadly unable to wear those vestments.”
“Sadly?” sneered Lex. “Or conveniently? Because I doubt the Night Mare would care for her name to be further profaned by you using her religion’s ceremonial clothes for a fake ritual.”
“You, of all ponies, speak of blasphemy?” Inside the sphere of darkness, the Keeper turned to regard Lex directly. “Since coming here, the offenses you have committed against She Who Rules the Night have been many, even without counting the infractions performed by those heretics you brought here. Even now, you tread on the border of desecrating this holy place,” it added with a glance toward the toppled door.
“If the Night Mare has a problem with my actions, she’s free to inform me at any time,” spat Lex, raising his foreleg, the barbed wire around which was still and unmoving. “Your misconduct, however, will be answered for here and now! Starting with the truth about how the Rite of Sublimation isn’t real!”
Lex had half-expected the Keeper to be intimidated by the accusation, much like how it had retreated from him upon his emerging from the Confluence. But rather than back off, the Keeper floated closer to him even as it hovered higher overhead, as though trying to tower over him. “Even if you bear the mark of the goddess’s favor, to impugn the holy ritual is unforgivable! As the one who presented you with the opportunity to improve yourself in Her Dark Majesty’s eyes, your ungratefulness-”
“You presented me with nothing!” boomed Lex, tail thrashing in anger as his eyes lit up. “The Confluence acts as a doorway to Darkest Night all on its own! Your so-called rite was nothing but gibberish, just like your history!”
“You dare-”
But Lex had no intention of letting the creature speak freely. “You’re no bastard son of an ancient king! All you were was a bandit! You stole an object of greater power than your small mind could handle, and it broke you, so you fled here, and have been rotting away in this place ever since!”
“SACRILEGE!” howled the Keeper. “Long have I tolerated your impiety, Lex Legis, certain that the Night Mare would censure you for it! But now I see the truth! She brought you here because she wishes me to carry out this task on Her behalf! And so I shall!”
Lex tensed at that, knowing that the Night Mare’s edict only kept her worshipers from killing each other inside the Shrine. Anything else the Keeper tried, so long as it wasn’t lethal, was fair game.
But to his surprise, the floating skull instead moved away from him, returning to the open book near the opposite door. “If you cannot learn to appreciate the munificence which the goddess has shown in bringing you here, then you can beg Her to forgive you for your trespasses against this Shrine and its Keeper! The anathema that I shall call down against you-”
Lex didn’t give him a chance to finish, laughing darkly as he strode forward and plucked the Keeper from the air. He didn’t bother using his telekinesis, simply reaching a claw out to grab the thing, talons sinking through empty eye sockets as he pulled it away from the book. “By all means,” he snickered, “ask the Night Mare to strike me down. I’m eager to see the judgment she’ll deliver when entreated by a weakling who can’t confront an enemy on their own!”
The skull rattled in his grasp, trying to free itself. “HERESY!”
“Says a creature who’s been rotting away even as it claims to be in service to a goddess of strength and power!” roared Lex. “You claim that I’ve defiled this place?! The ponies I’ve brought here have used it as a refuge for a few days, you’ve hidden yourself away here for centuries, avoiding your own past!”
Hissing, he brought his face closer to the undead thing’s bony visage. “I learned a lot about myself while I was in Darkest Night, while you’ve enjoyed the luxury of forgetting who you are. But no longer! Now tell me where the magic item you brought here is hidden!”
The skull’s struggles became more pronounced then, rattling in his grip so hard it was almost vibrating. “LIES! ALL LIES!”
“TELL ME!” bellowed Lex. “TELL ME OR I SWEAR I’LL THROW YOU INTO THE CONFLUENCE MYSELF, AND YOU CAN EXPLAIN YOUR FAILURES TO THE NIGHT MARE IN PERSON!!!”
The Keeper let out a keening wail then, and the sound was painful to Lex’s ears. But he didn’t let up, clenching his claws harder. He felt bone start to splinter in his grasp, and the barbed wire around his foreleg suddenly moved, drawing blood. But he didn’t let up, his eyes glowing brighter in the Keeper’s sphere of darkness as he gripped the skull tighter. “TELL ME WHERE IT’S HIDDEN!”
A warbling tone entered the Keeper’s pained scream then, as though whatever supernatural process gave it a voice was coming undone. But the undulations weren’t enough to disguise the words that it uttered then.
“Bbbeeeyyyooonnnddd rrreeeaaaccchhh!!!” moaned the skull. “Iiittt iiisss bbbeeeyyyooonnnddd rrreeeaaaccchhh!!!”
Snarling Lex, squeezed harder, but the move prompted the barbed wire to clench suddenly, and Lex’s digits spasmed slightly as unfamiliar muscles twitched in response. That was all the opening the Keeper needed, pulling free and fleeing back the way it had come, its frightful moan trailing after it.
Lex could have pursued, but he didn’t bother, instead fighting the urge to slump in place. He’d known that it was unlikely that whatever it was that the Keeper had brought here would be able to help Thermal Draft; anything that would drive someone mad was unlikely to have any sort of healing function. But at least it would have been something to investigate, some fallback if the powers granted by his new body proved insufficient.
But if the unidentified item wasn’t something which could be retrieved or recovered, then this entire confrontation had been pointless.
No, Lex corrected himself silently, looking around the chamber. There might still be something worthwhile here.
As painful as his return to Everglow had been, Lex couldn’t deny that the Night Mare had made good on her word about this being a chance to grow stronger. In the short time that he’d come here, his strength had grown by leaps and bounds. He could utilize the Charismata for far more than he’d originally known. He had a powerful new soul-bound servant. He’d mastered his tulpa, unlocking new powers in the process. And he had a new body whose full strength he hadn’t yet measured.
And he’d finally gotten rid of the childish dreams that had been holding him back. As much as it hurt, knowing that he’d never have what he wanted the most, Lex knew he was better off for it. The same was true for knowing that the relationships he’d been in hadn’t been real; that truth was painful, but it had reminded him of where his real responsibilities lay: to Equestria, and all of its ponies.
“Be grateful to me,” the Night Mare said when she’d brought him here.
At the time he hadn’t been.
But he was now.
Though he knew he needed to rest, needed to let himself recover so that he could try alternative methods of saving the dying doppelganger downstairs, Lex instead turned and walked to the far side of the chamber, where the book the Keeper had been consulting still lay open on its stand.
When the adlet-turned-winter-wolf nodded in response to Shadow’s question, a round of blank looks were exchanged between the mares of Fail Forward, trying to digest what they’d been told. Finally, Valor broke the silence. “I guess my first question is...which name should we call you by?”
“That’s your first question?!” interrupted Mystaria, a hysterical undertone in her voice. “Valor, that Lex was able to make a fully-grown winter wolf into his familiar was already in complete defiance of all known magical practices! Now he’s somehow managed to not only put two different souls into one body – and done so in a way that’s apparently blended them together rather than keeping them distinct, which based on the admittedly small amount of necromantic theory I know shouldn’t have happened – but he’s also completely sidestepped the usual methods of resurrecting someone in the process! The wolf in front of us right now is a triple impossibility, and your first question is what should we call her?!”
“You have to admit, Mysty has a point,” chimed in Spinner. “I mean, the name thing’s pretty obvious if you think about it.”
“‘Obvious’?” echoed Shadow, giving the filidh a flat look. “Really? It’s ‘obvious’ what to call someone who’s had another person’s soul merged with their own?”
Refusing the acknowledge her friend’s sarcasm, Spinner nodded. “Of course it is.”
Pointing at where their lupine companion was giving her a curious look, Spinner proceeded to explain. “If they’re two people who’re merged into one, then clearly the thing to do is combine their names. So Solvei and Akna together makes her...Solvakna!”
Silence fell as everyone stared at the bard, who grinned, clearly pleased with herself.
Finally, Shadow spoke up. “When we get back to Viljatown, I’m buying all the tomatoes there and throwing them at you, Spinner. Literally, all the tomatoes.”
“Forget being triply impossible, that was triply pointless,” groaned Valor, shaking her head. “Unfunny, uninspired, and unhelpful.”
“You don’t actually want us to call you that, do you?” asked Mystaria, turning her gaze toward the subject of their conversation.
Shaking her head quickly, the wolf didn’t hesitate to answer. “No, I don’t. Just Akna is fine. Or Solvei. They’re...both my names now, I guess.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” muttered Spinner, sitting down with a huff.
Shadow rolled her eyes at her friend’s indignation. “You don’t-”
But she didn’t have a chance to finish as a low moan came from Thermal Draft, drawing everyone’s attention as the doppelganger’s eyes fluttered open. “Wh-what-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a sudden bout of coughing overtook her, causing Mystaria to rush to her side as Drafty doubled over, fighting for breath. It was only after long seconds of deep, hacking coughs rattling her body that she finally managed to draw a breath, flopping back down as she tried to recover. “How long was I out?”
“A little over an hour. Not long enough to get any real rest,” chided Mystaria gently. “You should go back to sleep; you need to keep your strength up.”
But Thermal Draft shook her head, struggling to sit up again. “What about Lex? I heard his voice. Is he back? Is he alright?”
Mystaria opened her mouth, but hesitated, recalling the transformation Lex had gone through, instead busying herself with casting a darkvision spell on the other mare. But even in her enervated state, it was obvious to Thermal Draft that the other mare was dodging her question, making her more nervous as she struggled to get up. “What is it? Did something happen to Lex?!”
“He’s alright.” Padding across the room, one paw was all it took for the larger wolf to push the smaller mare back down, taking care to do so gently. “Master’s alright.”
“Solvei?” Blinking as her eyes took in the mark on the winter wolf’s flank, Drafty’s eyes lingered on it before glancing back at the bundled body at the back of the room. “No, Akna,” she muttered in realization. “I don’t understand, why do you have Lex’s cutie mark now?”
“I was just telling everyone else about that,” she explained. “Master and I both came back...changed, from our excursion into Darkest Night.”
“Changed how?” muttered Thermal Draft, swallowing nervously as she pointed at the wolf. “If you have his mark on you, then-”
Her voice caught in her throat as she got a look at her own hooves, seeing chitin rather than fur. Looking down at herself just long enough to confirm that she was in her insectoid form, she looked around with wide, horrified eyes, realizing that everyone could see her. With a shriek, she changed back into a pegasus, cringing. “I...! That was...!”
“It’s okay.” Holding a hoof up in a calming gesture, Spinner slowly approached the distraught mare, sitting down alongside her. “Drafty, it’s okay. So you’re a doppelganger; that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Spinner’s right,” chimed in Mystaria. “Doppelganger ponies have a rich culture of-”
“Did Lex see me like that?!” blurted Drafty, looking between the other two with a panicked expression. “Does he know that I’m-” She couldn’t finish, wracked by another coughing fit.
“You shouldn’t worry about Lex,” counseled Shadow as Mystaria and Spinner rubbed Drafty’s back, trying to help her clear her lungs. “Trust me, he’s in no position to criticize anyone else about how they look.”
“Says you,” muttered Valor under her breath.
“Does...” croaked Drafty, before having another fit take hold of her, leaving her gasping when it finally ended. “Does he hate me now he’s seen how ugly I really am?”
“Master doesn’t hate you at all!”
Drafty’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears as she looked up. “Akna?”
The wolf in question gave Drafty a reassuring smile. “It’s true that he was really angry when he saw you, but that was because he thought you were an imposter who’d replaced the real Thermal Draft! Just the thought that someone had stolen you away made him furious!”
“He...he was worried about me?” sniffled Drafty, looking around at the others. “Really?”
“I-, yeah, that’s absolutely right!” added Spinner. “You should have heard him! He was all, ‘this isn’t the real Thermal Draft! We have to make her tell us where she took my girlfriend’ and stuff!”
“It took us a little while to convince him that you were the real deal,” continued Valor. “It was only when we confirmed your brand of destiny to him that he calmed down.”
“Then he did some sort of examination of your magic – I’m honestly not sure about the details – and admitted that it was really you,” finished Mystaria.
“Yeah, at which point he turned around and stalked off,” began Shadow, only to pause as she caught sight of the glare that Valor was giving her from outside Drafty’s field of view. “Probably to go see if the Keeper could find something to help with your curse,” she muttered irritably.
Slowly lying back, Drafty gave a small laugh that ended with a nervous hiccup. “He’s really not upset with me?”
“I think he’s more confused than anything else,” admitted Mystaria. “Drafty, he swore up and down that you were a pegasus, saying that they don’t have doppelgangers where you two come from. Just something called ‘changelings’ that he said aren’t really ponies. Is he right about that, or-”
“He’s right,” sighed Drafty. “He’s right about all of it. Changelings aren’t ponies. There are no doppelgangers back home. And I really was a pegasus, until recently.”
“How did that happen, exactly?” asked Spinner, cocking her head. “I mean, it’s not unknown for some ponies to have attributes from multiple tribes – Queen Iliana being the most famous example – but they’re almost all sorcerers who’re adept at bringing forth dormant aspects of their own mixed heritage. That’s a far cry from changing tribes entirely.”
“Does it have anything to do with the way you cast spells?” asked Mystaria. “I know you said you couldn’t use magic until recently, but-”
“Both of you, stop badgering her,” cut in Valor, walking over to her friends and gently-but-firmly making them step away from Drafty. “She doesn’t need to explain herself to us if she doesn’t want to.”
“It’s alright...” Lying back down, Drafty closed her eyes as she took a slow breath. “I’ve been lying to all of you almost as much as Lex about what I’ve become. If I’m going to ask you to keep secrets for me” – she placed a hoof over her lower belly then – “then I at least owe you some answers. Er...”
She paused then, giving Akna an awkward look. “When I said I asked them to keep secrets for me, that was, um...”
The winter wolf cocked her head to the side. “Are you talking about the baby?”
The ponies in the room all gave a start, with Drafty’s breath catching. “You knew?! Does Lex-”
“No, he doesn’t,” answered the heterochromatic adlet. “I hate keeping secrets from Master like this, but I...well, Solvei...heard what you said about not wanting him to know in case he can’t save you. But he absolutely will! I’m sure of it! He’ll find a way to break your curse, and then you and he and your baby will all be very happy together!”
“...I hope so,” whimpered Drafty, her ears folding back.
“That has something to do with why you did...whatever you did to become a doppelganger, doesn’t it?” guessed Spinner. “Because you wanted to be closer to Lex?”
Closing her eyes, Drafty nodded. “It happened before we came here. I didn’t have magic then, and Lex...he was already with Sonata and Aria. They’re the most beautiful mares you’ve ever seen, plus they had magic, not to mention incredible singing voices. Compared to them, I was just plain old Thermal Draft, one of the many ponies Lex saved and then never looked twice at.”
“You should have more confidence in yourself,” admonished Spinner. “You’re a knockout!”
A small smile crossed Drafty’s face at the compliment. “That was part of what I asked Prevarius for. Beauty, magic, and a mellifluous voice...all things that I knew Lex liked in a mare. But before I had those, I didn’t have any way of making him notice me. So I asked Kara for help...”
Shadow’s eyes narrowed. “And she had you perform a rite to turn yourself into a doppelganger, is that it?”
Mystaria’s eyebrows shot upward as she turned to look at her friend. “Say what?”
“I’m from Blevik, remember?” shot back the masked mare. “The place that’s widely recognized as the spiritual home of Kara’s faith? City run by doppelgangers? Yeah, I’ve heard about that. It was never anything more than a rumor, and a lot of people thought it was just superstitious hokum, or some way to make everyone suspicious of each other, but tales of ponies who’d received ‘Kara’s kiss’ and shed their old tribe in favor of becoming doppelgangers were unusually long-lived.”
“Apparently because they were more than just rumors,” murmured Valor thoughtfully.
“Sonata had a friend whom she confided in, named Nosey,” continued Drafty. “She told her all about how Kara had helped her start a relationship with Lex. I don’t think she realized just how much Nosey enjoyed being a know-it-all; getting her to spill the beans was easy. After that, I started praying, and eventually I got an answer...”
Licking her lips, Mystaria resisted the urge to pull out a paper and quill. “What was it like? Becoming a doppelganger?”
“...it wasn’t pleasant,” admitted Drafty. “But it was worth it. After it was over, I was able to change into Sonata. Lex didn’t realize it was me, and what we shared then...it was wonderful, so much better than a few days ago at that inn, when he knew it was just me...”
The confession made Valor’s eyes widen as Mystaria cringed, Shadow scowling behind her mask as Spinner just stared, completely nonplussed. But before any of them had a chance to say what they thought about what they’d just been told, Akna’s ears perked up. “Master’s coming back.”
“I’d say ‘act natural,’” muttered Shadow, “but things stopped being natural ever since that unicorn walked into our lives.”
“This has been the sort of tale that, if you tried to make it into a ballad, would get you laughed out of bard school for being too unrealistic,” agreed Spinner.
“To say nothing of all the magical traditions that are being casually overturned,” sighed Mystaria.
“All of you, quiet down,” hissed Valor. “If his transformation has made him more like the sun cats, then his hearing has probably improved.”
“Sun cats?” muttered Drafty.
But she didn’t have a chance to ask what Valor meant as Lex strode inside, eliciting a gasp from the pegasus. “L-Lex?! What-”
“I’m certain that my appearance is no less disconcerting for you than yours was for me,” answered Lex flatly. “But right now, there’s no time to trade explanations as to the details of our respective transmogrifications. Not if we’re going to save your life.”
He didn’t wait for the others to react before looking at the rest of Fail Forward. “Help her outside, and then bring Woodheart. I’ve already begun arranging-”
“Hold on! What do you mean ‘bring Woodheart’?” growled Shadow. “What exactly does she have to do with saving Drafty?”
“Everything,” replied Lex. “And not just Thermal Draft. If this works, Woodheart will be restored as well.”
Lex didn’t so much as glance at Shadow as he walked over to the raised dais, consulting the large book he had brought down from the second floor, stand and all. “Because I said so, that’s why.”
Having just finished carrying Woodheart inside the cathedral’s entrance together with Valor, Shadow let out a low growl. “Is it really too much to ask for you to stop being a condescending jackass for five minutes and just tell us what you’re going to do to help our friend?!”
From behind her, Mystaria – who along with Spinner was helping Thermal Draft stumble forward – groaned. “Shadow, please. Not now.”
“In her defense, I think most people would balk at putting someone on the altar of an evil goddess,” muttered Spinner.
“That’s not even half of it,” continued Shadow, coming to a halt as she stared daggers at Lex. “Let’s overlook for a second that the Purple-and-Green-Eyed Monster here has, on two separate occasions, completely lost it and become a danger to everyone around him, which in case anyone’s forgotten is the entire reason Woodheart needs help to begin with. Instead, let’s focus on the fact that he somehow just shoved Solvei’s soul into Akna. Is no one besides me worried that he’s going to try the same thing with Woodheart and Drafty now?”
Valor’s eyebrows went up at that, trading alarmed looks with Spinner and Mystaria. But Thermal Draft shook her head. “I trust Lex,” she muttered, and even though she had a foreleg over Spinner and Mystaria, her voice still came out strained and raspy. “He wouldn’t do something like that.”
“On the contrary,” replied Lex casually, still not looking up from the book whose pages he was slowly turning. “While not precisely what I’m intending to do, the underlying idea is largely the same.”
“I knew it.” Practically pushing Woodheart’s body onto Valor – and drawing an angry meep from Littleknight, the almiraj pawing at his mistress’s still form worriedly – Shadow drew her dagger and placed herself between Lex and her friends. “If you think for an instant-, AH!”
Her pained yelp was accompanied by the clatter of metal on stone as her dagger hit the floor, the blade covered with ice. Cursing as she cradled her hoof, rubbing the frostbitten portion against her chest as she turned to stare hatefully at the winter wolf who was padding in behind her. “Akna, what’re you-”
“You conveniently left out how much my master has done for you,” interrupted the adlet, her voice colder than the ice she’d coated Shadow’s dagger with. “Like how he saved your lives when Grisela and the yetis invaded your village. Or how, even when he was suffering from your friend pushing him to reveal his secrets” – she glanced briefly as Mystaria, who cringed – “he still chased off Paska and his monsters. And that he put everything on the line to save Valor when she was drowning, which was the reason that I-, that Solvei-, d-”
She stopped speaking as Lex sharply closed the book he was reading, the pages impacting hard enough to send a muffled thump throughout the interior of the cathedral. “This entire line of discussion is misplaced,” he announced calmly even as his horn lit up, snatching Woodheart’s body from Valor’s back and levitating her over to the altar.
“This is going to happen because I’ve deemed it to be necessary to safeguard the health and safety of both the ponies involved,” he continued as he laid the comatose mare down. “None of the rest of you have standing to object to that, nor any right to be informed as to the particulars of what I’ll be doing. The insight I shared with you just now about the nature of the procedure I’ll be performing was a courtesy; if I think that you’ll use that as a pretext for interfering, then I’ll show you what my discourtesy looks like instead.”
No sooner has he finished speaking than Littleknight launched himself forward, meeping furiously. The almiraj’s sudden charge caused Fail Forward to tense, and Solvei to take a step forward, only to stop at a telepathic command from Lex. The unicorn himself spared the horned rabbit only the briefest of glances before turning away from it, instead arranging Woodheart’s limbs so that she was lying in a more natural position – her hind legs straightened and her forelegs as her sides – as the oversized rabbit drove leaped up to spear him in the side with its horn...and bounced off.
“Of course, none of what I just outlined applies to Thermal Draft herself,” he continued, turning to look at the pegasus in question. “As a participant in the process, you have every right to know what I intend to do, and even object to the procedure should you feel so inclined, though I recommend against doing so in the strongest possible terms.”
Blinking as all eyes turned to look at her – save for Littleknight’s, who instead tried to gore Lex a second time, only for it to turn out no better than the first – Thermal Draft swallowed. “I said I trust you, and I meant it,” she stammered, “but, um, if you wouldn’t mind telling me what you’re planning, I’d appreciate it.”
Lex nodded once. “As I said, the fundamental idea is similar to what happened with Solvei and Akna, but with several salient differences. The most important being that instead of transferring souls, I want to remove the positive energy in your body – your life force – and place it inside Woodheart.”
Spinner’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait, what?”
She wasn’t alone, as Mystaria blinked several times in rapid succession. “You want to do what?”
Valor’s brow furrowed. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“Meep meep!” added Littleknight, futilely pressing the tip of his horn into the side of Lex’s back leg.
Lex didn’t so much as bother to glance at any of them, keeping his eyes on Thermal Draft as he telekinetically lifted her up and laid her alongside Woodheart on the altar. “In theory, this will reverse your situations, rendering you comatose while returning Woodheart to consciousness.”
“And transferring Paska’s curse to our friend, is that it?!” snarled Shadow, retrieving her knife, though a glare from Akna was all it took for her to keep the weapon lowered. “You’re going to save your girlfriend at the cost of Woodheart’s life?!”
“Lex wouldn’t do that!” snapped Thermal Draft, before turning to look at the stallion. “That’s not what you’re planning, right?”
The question made Lex scowl. “Of course not. The idea is that without any positive energy in your body, the curse will have nothing to target, which means that its effects will be suspended. That will give me more time to find a way to break it, after which I’ll subsequently revive you.”
“But...” Swallowing, it took the pegasus a moment to continue. “Lex, I’m not an expert on...all of this, the way you are, but I thought that anypony who loses all of their life force, you know...dies.”
Lex gave a single, curt nod in Woodheart’s direction. “That’s how it normally works. But in Woodheart’s case, what happened – as near as I’ve been able to determine – is that the negative energy that the mask infused her with has somehow reached a state of equilibrium in her body. She’s neither alive nor dead at the moment-”
“That’s not-, I’m sorry for interrupting, but Lex, that makes no sense!” cut in Mystaria. “I tried casting healing spells, which are stabilized doses of positive energy, on Woodheart as soon as we got her back, and they didn’t work!”
“Not to mention that we’ve been making sure to give her food and water at regular intervals,” noted Shadow darkly. “Which is a pretty big hole in your ‘neither alive nor dead’ theory.”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex finally turned to face the rest of fail forward, his horn lighting up again as he grabbed Littleknight – the almiraj still trying in vain to stab him – and flung the creature at Valor, who grabbed hold of it. “Did any of you ever bother to confirm that she was metabolizing anything that you had her ingest?”
Spinner cocked her head. “Meta-what now?”
“And as for why your healing spells didn’t work,” continued Lex as he looked as Mystaria. “My hypothesis is that the current balance of positive and negative energy in Woodheart’s body is resisting being altered, and so requires a larger infusion than what your healing spells are capable of.”
“You keep using words like ‘hypothesis’ and ‘idea’ and ‘theory,’” noted Valor. “As much as I appreciate your addressing our concerns, this is all starting to sound like a guess on your part.”
“Yeah, and for that matter, when exactly did you come up with this idea that Woodheart’s caught in some sort of in-between state of life and death?” added Spinner. “It’s not like you’ve ever taken the time to examine her.”
This time Lex didn’t answer immediately, instead looking back at Thermal Draft, who slowly nodded. “I’d like to know too...if that’s okay.”
“Very well.” Reaching a claw, Lex gestured to his horn. “You’re aware that I can use the magic of my horn to enhance my senses, correct?”
A small smile crossed her lips then. “Yeah. It’s not as flashy as turning into a shadow, making black crystals, or cursing someone, but I’ve always watched you closer than most other ponies.”
Lex fought down the urge to wince at that. “As part of my recent metamorphosis, my physique has been enhanced. A side effect of that is that I can now utilize my horn to a greater degree than before. To that end, I’ve begun experimenting with alternative ways to augment the degree of information my faculties can perceive.”
Unable to help herself, Mystaria piped up. “Like what?”
Knowing that Thermal Draft would echo the question, Lex didn’t bother ignoring her. “So far, seeing into various other spectra. Magical. Infrared. Ultraviolet. And most recently, a visual medium sensitive to the presence of positive and negative energy. And right now, the quantity of both in Woodheart’s body are almost perfectly even.”
Near the back of the cathedral, Spinner’s eyes widened. “Magical vision...wait a second, I know what this is about!” She quickly trotted behind Valor, peeking at Lex from around the brawny mare. “You’re trying to see through our clothes, aren’t you?!”
Ahead of her, Valor groaned. “Spinner...”
“What?” protested the bard. “It’s what I’d do!”
“As for the other point that was raised,” growled Lex. “I’ll admit that the procedure I’m proposing is entirely speculative on my part.”
“That sounds suspiciously like you’re going to make it up as you go along,” noted Shadow.
“While I’m not sure I’d phrase that in quite such a confrontational way,” added Mystaria, “I am a little concerned by what you mean by ‘speculative.’ And I don’t think I’m the only one.” She finished with a worried look at Thermal Draft, who nodded guiltily.
“I mean,” answered Lex. “That I’m currently without the requisite knowledge or ability to perform the transfer I’ve proposed.”
Shadow threw her forelegs into the air in exasperation. “Then why are we even here?! Why drag Woodheart and Drafty onto that altar if you’re not going to do anything?! Or was your big plan to just pray to the Night Mare and have her fix everything?!”
“Yes.”
“Maybe she’ll throw in a big bag of golds and a few diamonds-, wait, what?”
“I plan on formally asking the Night Mare to intervene,” replied Lex evenly. “Specifically, as I mentioned before, for her to reverse Woodheart and Thermal Draft’s current conditions.”
For a moment, no one could say anything, just staring at Lex.
Valor found her voice first. “Why...listen, I get asking for a god’s help. What I don’t understand is why not just ask for her to heal them both? Why ask for something that’s not going to fix everything?”
“Because the Night Mare is not in the business of fixing her faithful’s problems on their behalf, and so I believe that a more limited intervention is likely to be accepted than a grandiose one.”
Mystaria shook her head. “Lex, divine intervention doesn’t work like that. Every single day ponies all across the world ask for them to step in and take action-”
“And every single day, they answer,” cut in Lex. “Now, their answers take the form of spells granted to their worshipers. But before that” – he gestured to the book on the stand behind him – “mortals asked for godly assistance using far more elaborate methods, engaging in formal displays of sacramental reverence to call down the power of their deities.”
“Mysty, what’s he talking about?” muttered Spinner.
But Mystaria didn’t seem to hear her friend, instead blinking as she gave Lex a dubious look. “You mean a ceremonial invocation? Lex...even if that book does describe how to perform them for the Night Mare, there’s a reason that ponies don’t try those anymore. Not only do they take hours to complete, they also require elaborate displays of faith, large congregations of worshipers, holy relics imbued with divine power, consecrated ground...”
She trailed off as she looked around them, her eyes glancing from the altar to the barbed wire wrapped around Lex’s foreleg, to the monstrous statues visible on the buildings outside the cathedral’s door. “Oh...”
“Indeed,” replied Lex. “Now, stay here and keep watch while I go and collect the Keeper’s acolytes. Once they’re all in attendance, we’ll begin.”
No one said anything as Lex stalked out of the cathedral, a half-dozen pairs of eyes watching him go as they pursed their lips and bit their tongues.
It was only when the door closed behind him that they broke their silence, speaking up before the echo of its latching had faded.
“Drafty, you have to tell him!”
“Tell him? We have to get her out of here! He just admitted he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is making this up as he goes along! Why aren’t we running for the exit?!”
“I hate to say it, but I think Shadow might be right. I’d never put my life in the hooves – or claws – of someone who said, ‘I’ve only got a vague guess about what the problem is, so I’m just gonna try and pray it away,’ so why would we let him do that for Woodheart and Drafty?”
“Because, while I can understand being afraid for Woodheart, I’ve got maybe a day left before Paska’s curse kills me...and my foal.”
“Exactly! Master’s plan will save everyone! I don’t understand why you all keep doubting him! If he says that he can formally call down the Night Mare’s power to fix things, then he’s going to do exactly that!”
“Yeah, because the Night Mare has always been one of the warmer and fuzzier goddesses. You can tell by all the black decor, the fact that this building is shaped like a huge claw, and the way she’s glaring down from that canopy over the altar.”
“Mysty, it sounded like you knew what his ‘ceremonial involution’ was. Is there any chance it will work the way he’s making it sound?”
“It’s called a ‘ceremonial invocation,’” explained Mystaria, grimacing as everyone looked to her for answers. “And...I don’t know. I mean, I learned about them as part of my religious history studies when I was being brought up in the Athenaeum Arcane back in Viljatown, but I’ve never actually seen one! I don’t know anyone who has! It’s like I told Lex, ponies stopped using those centuries, maybe millennia, before the Empire was founded!”
“Okay, look, let’s all take a breath,” chimed in Spinner. “We can’t run away from this. Leaving aside that the only two ways out of here are down into monster-filled caverns or jumping into a rushing river of ice water, I doubt that Solvakna here would let us go anyway.”
“I wouldn’t,” huffed the wolf, giving Spinner a glare. “And don’t call me that.”
“And even if we got by her, and somehow kept Lex from tracking us down – not to mention Sissel, Grisela, and Paska, who’re probably waiting for us to leave here – Drafty’s right,” continued the filidh without missing a beat. “She’s getting worse, and something needs to be done.”
The mare in question opened her mouth, only to snap it shut again as she fought down another coughing fit, clearing her throat so violently that it made her entire body shudder. “Mystaria,” she croaked once she’d regained control of herself. “You said you studied...whatever it is Lex wants to try. Is it something that will hurt our baby if he uses it on me? Does he need to, I don’t know, make adjustments or something to account for my being pregnant?”
Glancing nervously back the way Lex had left, Mystaria took a moment to calm her nerves before answering. “It’s like Lex said before. A ceremonial invocation is how ponies – how everyone, really – called on the power of their gods before thought-based spellcasting was invented. All he’s going to be doing is asking for the Night Mare to do something; what happens to you, and Woodheart, and your baby, are up to her.”
“You’re sure?”
“No, I’m not sure! I’m not sure about any of this!”
Sitting down, she brought one hoof up to rub Luminace’s holy symbol before continuing. “Most of what I know about what Lex is proposing is speculative, based on oral traditions and fragments of old records, but it’s said that originally there was no formal way of beseeching a god for aid. Ponies would cry out for the higher powers to intervene, and a god might send anything from a subtle omen to one of their divine servitors to personally intervening. Or they might do nothing at all. It was all fiat on the part of the god in question.”
That earned a frown from Drafty. “But don’t gods need worship to survive? Why would anyone revere gods that were so capricious?”
“Tradition, probably,” sighed Akna. “You’d be surprised how strong certain practices become when they’re part of your culture.”
“That’s true,” nodded Mystaria. “And remember, it wasn’t like the gods never did anything for the mortals who honored them.” She gave Drafty a sympathetic look. “You’re living proof that you don’t need spells or ceremonies for a god to take notice of you.”
Although her voice had been kind, Thermal Draft winced anyway, lying back on the altar with a low groan.
“But eventually, things changed,” continued Mystaria. “For whatever reason, practices developed of putting on larger and more ostentatious displays of calling on the gods. Instead of bedside prayers or quiet pleas, large gatherings were put together where ponies would chant liturgies in unison. Things of value would be sacrificed. Practices that their god found pleasing would be performed en masse. Something which had once been touched by divine power would be brought out and venerated. Anything to make the service larger and grander and louder.”
Shadow’s eyes narrowed skeptically. “And that worked? I mean, it actually produced reliable results, instead of the ‘hope they listen this time’ kind you said had been the norm up until then?”
“It worked,” replied Mystaria earnestly. “Or at least, everything I’m aware of says that it worked. How could it not? It’s one thing to offer a god a quick prayer when you’re trying to outrun an enemy, or heal a sick relative, or even just win a dice game. It’s quite another to have a whole town come together and spend hours praising their god’s name, performing rites to honor them, and completing observances that are supposed to please them.”
“A god who ignores their followers is a god who’ll soon have no followers, in other words,” quipped Spinner, giving her lute an absentminded strum. “I guess that makes sense.”
“That’s part of it,” admitted Mystaria. “But it wasn’t just about appeasing their faithful. A big show of their god’s power was also a way to bring in new worshipers as well. If travelers saw a ceremony that produced a bountiful harvest, they’d carry word of it through their travels. If enemies saw a group of priests bring down a sturdy wall, they might not only surrender, but convert as well.”
“Because everyone wants to sign on with a team that looks like they’re winning,” muttered Shadow.
“Says the mare who joined a group called Fail Forward,” teased Valor.
Sitting back on her haunches, Akna gave a huff. “So, why did ponies stop performing these big, elaborate ceremonies if they worked so well?”
“Because, as you said, they were big and elaborate,” answered Mystaria with a shrug. “Sorcerers – people with an innate connection to arcane, rather than divine, magic – were starting to appear, and wizards began to figure out how to copy their powers through experimentation and rote learning. That led to the rise of thaumaturgy; thought-based spellcasting, and so the faithful began to ask their gods for something comparable, since it turned out that getting a large group of people who already shared your faith together to put on a huge display, with hours of recitations and collections of religious paraphernalia and exacting displays of devotion, wasn’t exactly easy. And even when they could do all that, those ceremonies were easy to disrupt.”
From her place atop the altar, Drafty winced. “And that caused a backlash?”
Mystaria raised a brow. “A backlash?”
Frowning at the confusion in the other mare’s voice, Thermal Draft gave a hesitant nod. “Yeah. Like, if something interrupts the ceremony, then all of the power that’s been gathered goes out of control, causing some sort of dangerous reaction. Lex talked about that sometimes with the rituals he’d perform.”
Her brow furrowing, Mystaria shook her head. “That...no, I’m not sure what Lex was referring to, but ceremonial invocations don’t work like that. They’re about faith, not power. The entire point of them is to send a request to your god; if something interrupts the ceremony, then it’s the equivalent of spilling a bottle of ink on a scroll. It garbles the message, but it doesn’t actually cause anything unusual to happen.”
Letting out a breath, she let go of her holy symbol. “Besides, most disruptions weren’t usually something interfering with the ceremony anyway. They were things like someone swapping out an actual relic for a fake one ahead of time, or the lead priest having committed some sin that they hadn’t atoned for, or someone inadvertently defiling the consecrated territory where the rite was being performed.”
“You mean like how you kept conjuring lights inside the Shrine?” snorted Akna.
Valor, Spinner, and Shadow went rigid at that, but Mystaria clucked her tongue. “I’ll admit that was impious of us, but there’s a difference between breaking a tenet and committing an act of desecration.”
“Will the Night Mare see it that way?” murmured Drafty worriedly.
“...I suppose we should tell Lex what we did before he begins the ceremony, just to be safe.”
“So, just to be absolutely clear, nothing happens if one of these ceremonial invocation things goes wrong?” asked Shadow, her voice suspicious.
“Unless some major act of blasphemy has been committed by the one performing the ceremony, then either the god simply doesn’t respond to the entreaty, or they send a messenger to say why they’re not responding,” answered Mystaria.
Behind her mask, Shadow’s suspicious look didn’t falter. “And if they have done something blasphemous?”
“That doesn’t matter,” growled Akna. “The Night Mare holds my master high in her esteem. She won’t refuse his request.”
“Yeah, well, your account of how things went in Darkest Night might have been rather light on details, but it didn’t exactly sound like she rolled out the red carpet for him when he arrived,” shot back Shadow, before turning to look at the rest of her friends.
“Look, I’ll admit that I don’t have any better ideas, but I’m not a fan of risking three lives on a plan that has this many unknowns in it. Even if Lex is the Night Mare’s new favorite, Drafty here is apparently one of Kara’s faithful, and Woodheart belongs to a pagan faith; you’re telling me that being asked to help the two of them won’t tick her off?”
“I’m not one of Kara’s faithful,” murmured Drafty under her breath. “She made that very clear.”
“I honestly don’t know if any of that makes a difference or not,” admitted Mystaria. “My best guess is that Lex will perform the ceremonial invocation, and the Night Mare or one of her servants-”
“Wait, what?” Akna sat up straighter, an alarmed look crossing her face. “You’re saying that the goddess might have someone else answer Master’s request?”
“I doubt it, since the more notable of a religious figure someone is, the more likely they are to warrant a personal response,” explained Mystaria. “But there’s no way to know for sure.”
“...” Akna sank back down, a worried expression on her face.
“But as I was saying before, Drafty, I don’t know what effect any of this will have on your foal. The best I can tell you is that, even if Lex doesn’t think to ask, I doubt the Night Mare won’t know that you’re pregnant. I’m not a midwife, and even if I was I can’t imagine how the sort of transfer he’s going to ask for will affect your pregnancy-”
“Especially since his life-force-o-vision didn’t pick it up,” muttered Spinner.
“-but if the goddess doesn’t want it to hurt your baby, then it won’t,” concluded Mystaria. “Curse or no curse. I think.”
For a long moment, Drafty didn’t say anything in reply. Then she gave soft laugh, taking shallow breaths to avoid wheezing. “You know, this is a lot like how Lex and I first met. I know I told you the story before, but I was dying after having been bitten by a ghoul in what was left of my hometown. I’d been sick for days, getting weaker and weaker, and finally I’d passed out...and that’s when Lex came and saved me.”
Sighing, she managed a wan smile as she looked up at the stylized image of the Night Mare. “I woke up to the sight of him, and even if he wasn’t some storybook prince of a hero, he was still my hero. I’ve loved him ever since that day, even though I’ve only been a burden to him, and now...” She reached down, putting a hoof on her lower abdomen. “Now I have the chance to give him something special in return for all that he’s given me.”
“Drafty...”
But the pegasus-disguised-doppelganger didn’t reply to Mystaria, instead keeping her eyes on the image of Lex’s goddess above her. “So please, Night Mare, if you can hear me...”
Taking a shuddering breath, wondering if Kara would be mad at her later, Drafty finished her prayer. “Please, for Lex’s sake, I beg you...protect our baby.”
“I won’t do it,” growled Bagora – for that was the name that the towering creature, which combined the worst of simian and ursine features, had identified itself with – “I won’t help you.”
The monstrosity’s truculence served only to make Lex sneer, lips curling back to reveal pointed teeth. “You seem to have forgotten that the Night Mare holds me in far higher esteem than you, or anyone else in this shrine,” he replied, holding up his left foreleg, showing off his new claws as much as the barbed wire.
“The Night Mare entrusted the Keeper with this place!” howled Bagora as he rose to his full height, talons curling into fists as he pounded his chest. “He rules here, and my loyalty is to him! Not you!”
The refusal made Lex narrow his eyes at the brute. “If you refuse to participate in a ceremony to honor the goddess, then I’m driven to question your commitment to her.”
“My commitment?!” roared Bagora. “You brought light into this sacred place! You let pony heretics sleep here! You slew Ganas!” That last one made Bagora growl threateningly. “If not for the edict that worshipers cannot be slain here-”
“Then you’d already be dead, fool,” spat Lex. “The Night Mare cares little for worshipers with no ambition, treating her holy ground as a sanctuary to cower in – as the Keeper has done – rather than a bastion from which to project their power. Why do you think she did nothing to stop me when I marched Ganas to his death?”
“Step outside the grounds again,” snarled Bagora, “and let’s see if she stops me from marching you to yours!”
“Have it your way. Let’s go.”
“Eh?”
“Outside the Shrine,” answered Lex, turning his back on Bagora without hesitation as he stalked toward the large tunnel at the far end of the grounds. “Or were you spouting empty threats, confident that the Night Mare’s injunction against killing inside the Shrine would shield you from reprisal?” Glancing back over his shoulder, he gave the gorilla-bear a withering look. “Though that would be appropriate for one of the Keeper’s disciples.”
He didn’t bother waiting for a reply as he kept walking across the Shrine’s grounds, hearing Bagora’s teeth grinding as the creature’s footfalls fell in behind him.
Lex didn’t bother to glance back, finding the entire exercise tedious.
But there was little that could be done about that. He’d spent almost an hour tracking down the Keeper’s acolytes, letting them know that they would – like it or not – be participating in the ceremony he’d be holding. The task had taken longer than he’d expected, mostly because the undead pony’s collection of monsters had been trying to avoid him, apparently in fear of the newcomer who’d so easily intimidated their leader after completing his so-called Rite of Sublimation.
Of course, having an ally in the form of a seven-headed glowing-eyed behemoth didn’t hurt either.
“Move aside, Teyu,” commanded Lex as he reached the tunnel entrance – the wide entryway descending further into the earth – that marked the edge of the Shrine’s consecrated ground. “This won’t take very long.”
One of the giant creature’s heads barked, and a moment later Teyu shifted his great bulk aside, unblocking the entrance. That he was parked there at all was because of Lex’s order, having anticipated that the Keeper’s minions might try to make themselves scarce so as to avoid fulfilling the obligation he was putting on them. If so, Teyu had clearly made them think twice, since as far as Lex could tell the full complement of creatures that had been waiting for him to exit the Confluence were still within the grounds.
But while none of the Keeper’s monsters had dared to outright defy him – at least up until now – their responses had been uniformly lackluster. While Lex had no ability to read into the mindset of other ponies, let alone the bizarre coterie of creatures that the Shrine’s caretaker had collected, each of the strange creatures had needed to be ordered, intimidated, or outright threatened with expulsion before they’d complied, and that was enough to send a thread of worry through Lex.
While he’d read the instructions on how to petition the Night Mare for her intervention, he was still going into this procedure with little practical understanding of what it entailed to make a large-scale demonstration of faith. Would that really be possible if the congregation he was assembling was so reluctant to participate? After all, he could force their compliance easily enough, but evoking any sort of genuine religious fervor was something else altogether.
And of course, now he had Bagora to deal with.
But at least this problem is easy enough to solve, he sighed to himself as he stepped over the threshold that marked the edge of the Shrine.
Immediately, the lumbering steps behind him picked up their pace, and Lex couldn’t resist a snort of derision as he ducked his head, easily avoiding the clumsy swipe of Bagora’s paw.
“This is why the Night Mare takes such a dim view of those who use her faith as something to hide behind,” he jeered, avoiding a swing of Bagora’s other, equally inelegant paw. “It makes them weak.”
“SHUT UP!” bellowed Bagora. “I will have vengeance! For Ganas! For the Keeper! For the Night Mare!”
The announcement came with more swings of its claws, the eight-foot monster throwing all of its bulk behind each strike as it advanced on Lex.
But none of its attacks came anywhere close to hitting him, the unicorn dodging each one with a contemptuous sneer...though only outwardly. Inside, he couldn’t help but marvel at what he was capable of now.
This new body truly is incredible. Even as exhausted as he was, he was able to move with a degree of alacrity that his old self couldn’t have accomplished even at peak condition. Despite how much his mass had increased, his muscles were easily able to compensate for it and then some, giving him a degree of physical coordination so great that it made Bagora look like he was moving in slow motion.
And that was just the beginning. Even without calling upon his dark magic, his senses had been enhanced to a degree that bordered on supernatural. Not only was his darkvision perpetually active now – his eyes slipping into that mode of vision of their own accord whenever the ambient light grew too dim to see by – but his hearing had increased markedly as well, allowing him to clearly register the grunts and snarls that telegraphed each of Bagora’s wild strikes.
It was his sense of smell, however, that had grown the most.
Ever since he’d found out that he could use his dark magic to manipulate his senses – something he’d realized was possible due to his shadow-form having no sensory organs, and so realizing that the magic of his horn could be used to artificially augment his ability to perceive the world, even when he was corporeal – Lex had periodically used that power to heighten his olfactory awareness. But now it, like his darkvision, was permanently operating at a heightened state, one that he was still adjusting to.
The entire world was alive with smells now, feeding him a steady new stream of information that he’d only barely been cognizant of before. He could smell the stink of old meat and blood on Bagora’s breath, coming across stronger each time he huffed in preparation for another heavy swing. He could smell the oily scent of the thing’s unwashed fur, the stench growing thicker whenever its paws swatted at him. He could smell the dust in the tunnel being stirred up by the gorilla-bear’s ungainly shuffling.
Taken together, the sheer breadth of information available to him, combined with the physical coordination that he now had to act on it, made it so easy to dodge and weave around Bagora’s clumsy attacks that Lex found himself resisting the urge to yawn.
He might not have been able to recognize whatever nonverbal subtext undergirded interpersonal communication, but right now he could read Bagora’s moves like a book.
And not even a particularly difficult book, Lex decided as he contemptuously sidestepped a heavy upswing. The kind that, even as a child, would have been beneath me.
“STOP RUNNING AWAY!” screamed Bagora, frustration and exertion comingling in his voice. “YOU CALL US COWARDS, BUT ALL YOU’RE DOING IS FLEEING!”
“Fleeing?” scoffed Lex. “From you?”
Digging his talons into the unworked stone beneath them, Lex raised a claw.
And when Bagora’s next strike came, he caught it, grabbing the creature just below the wrist.
Even with how much more developed Lex’s physique was, Bagora was still larger and heavier than him. At just over eight feet tall, the gorilla-bear was thickly built, with layers of muscles that – in the unicorn’s estimation – had to add up to nearly a ton of sheer brawn. He was, if nothing else, exactly the sort of physical powerhouse that one would expect given his component animals.
And yet the gorilla-bear’s swing came to an abrupt end as Lex’s talons encircled his arm, unable to complete the strike.
“Why would I need to flee from someone so pathetic?”
Seething, Bagora strained with everything he had, leaning all of his weight forward as he tried to break Lex’s hold and complete the strike. Lex simply squeezed tighter, and despite how thick the muscles in Bagora’s arm were, he could feel them – slowly but steadily – compressing in his grasp, until the gorilla-bear’s labored groaning turned into a repressed moan of pain as Lex felt the bones in the creature’s arm starting to give way.
In response, Bagora changed tactics.
Rather than trying to press forward with his attack, he abruptly threw himself backward, pivoting at the waist as he rotated his shoulder, trying to yank Lex into the air.
Instead, all that happened was that he wrenched his shoulder out of his socket as he found himself unable to move the unicorn in the slightest, and the howl that came from his maw then was one of unfiltered agony.
“Now do you understand?” continued Lex as he continued to squeeze Bagora’s wrist. “You’ve contented yourself to following the Keeper’s path and grown feeble as a result, while I’ve strengthened myself through new challenges-”
That was when Bagora – his eyes blazing with hatred – brought his other arm around.
His lip curling at the futile action, Lex was already preparing to dodge it before the blow was halfway complete, knowing that he’d easily be able to avoid even while keeping hold of the creature. But he was caught off-guard when Bagora suddenly howled a pair of syllables, registering a brief crackle of magic.
The maul that appeared in the gorilla-bear’s free hand then was little more than a large mass of stone in the crude shape of a hammer. Even in the brief instant that he caught sight of it, Lex could see that its balance was all wrong, that it lacked anything like a proper grip, and that its handle was off-center from its head.
Then it impacted the side of his face.
The force of the blow was so heavy that it shattered the stone hammer, the pieces fading away as the spell which had made them fell apart along with its creation. The few that managed to hit the ground before disappearing had the sound of their hitting the stone drowned out by Bagora’s triumphant laughter...which abruptly ended in a scream as his wrist suddenly broke, the claw holding his arm tightening sharply.
And Lex, whose head had been snapped around by the blow, slowly turned back to look at the gorilla-bear.
“That...almost...hurt.”
If his new body had simply been stronger and possessed of greater senses, it would have been a marked improvement over his old one. That its magical channels increased how much raw power he could move through his body was an incredible gain as well.
But more than anything else, the single greatest change about his new form was its incredible defenses.
He’d only had a chance to examine himself briefly – there were simply too many other things to do – but what he’d determined so far was awe-inspiring. Every single part of his new body was built to shrug off damage, allowing him to absorb punishment that would have crippled or even killed his old self. The fact that he’d just taken such a heavy blow to the head and didn’t even have a headache was proof enough of that.
It started with his coat. Normally the thin layer of fur that covered a pony’s skin was little more than ornamentation, being only a few millimeters thick. And while his coat hadn’t lengthened in the slightest, its composition was radically different from what it had been before, having become organometallic in construction.
The protection that offered couldn’t be overstated. Each fiber was now made of an extremely durable compound whose molecular construction was akin to one of the more resilient metals. Overlapping with each other, the effect was that he was effectively wrapped in a suit of steel armor, one that not only didn’t impede his movements or slow him down, but was – given how the creature he’d merged with had ignored being immolated – likely extremely resistant to heat.
And that was just his outermost layer. Although he hadn’t had time to properly test his anything else, quick examination suggested that not only were his muscles far more robust than before, their makeup was similarly transformed, and he suspected that his bones and organs were likewise toughened. “Soft tissue” was likely a contradiction in terms for him now.
And of course, the most solid aspect of his physical construction was also the final new perk that he’d gained: claws.
It was to the gorilla-bear’s credit that he reacted immediately, lurching upright and stumbling backward as he tried to fumble his way through what Lex recognized to be a healing spell.
He never had a chance to finish it.
Lex’s assault wasn’t a simple slash, nor did he place his strikes with care or precision. Rather, he launched himself into the air, leaping bodily onto Bagora, snarling like the beast he’d absorbed as he sank all four of his claws into his enemy’s body. Foreclaws capable of slicing through stone easily lacerated muscles, sinking in and catching onto bone as his hind claws did the same to the gorilla-bear’s thighs, a roar that no pony could have made tearing itself from Lex’s throat as he immediately began to flex his talons, shredding the creature he was latched onto.
Bagora roared back, and this time fear could be heard alongside his pain, thrashing wildly in an attempt to dislodge the wild animal that was now latched onto him, his undamaged arm swinging in desperation as he tried to grab Lex and tear him off.
In that he failed, as Lex – without ever releasing his victim – moved out of reach, digging his talons in deeper as he crawled across Bagora’s body without touching the ground. Claws hooked onto ribs as he ducked under the wailing creature’s clumsy grab, a rear claw slicing his belly open as he crawled around the gorilla-bear’s side and latched onto his back, each motion leaving bloody grooves behind. Shoulder blades were rent as Lex dug in harder in response to Bagora flailing, the brute panicking as he felt talons reach up to scrap the back of his head.
Desperate, the gorilla-bear hurled himself backward, trying to pin Lex between himself and the ground, but the stallion was already moving. The end result was that Bagora hit the ground with Lex on top of him, now perched on the larger creature’s chest as he continued to savage his enemy. Thick, shaggy arms came up as Bagora tried to protect his face, and for his effort Lex cut them to the bone and wrench them wide, splattering the nearby stones with blood as he easily overpowered the gorilla-bear’s last, futile defense.
Then one claw came to rest on the creature’s face, talons less than an inch from Bagora’s eyes.
“Now,” announced Lex, all savagery suddenly gone. “What was that you were saying about marching me to my death?”
For a moment, Bagora couldn’t reply, wheezing as he tried to breath through the haze of agony, his chest having been punctured several times. But when he finally managed to speak, his voice came out in a growl. “D-do...it...”
Lex raised a brow. “Hm?”
“Not g-gonna...beg...” spat Bagora, glaring up at him. “Mercy’s...a s-sin...”
A thin smile crossed Lex’s lips then. “I know it is.”
Clenching his jaw, Bagora grit his teeth and waited.
“Now,” proclaimed Lex, “be healed.”
That was, he decided, the one good thing about the ceremony having taken so long to prepare: enough time had passed that the Charismata had finally replenished itself.
Invisible bands of divine power emerged from his outstretched claw, wrapping tightly around Bagora. Immediately, the wounds on his body closed, muscles repairing themselves as lacerations disappeared from bones and skin knit itself. Within moments, there was no sign that the gorilla-bear had been injured, leaving him gasping as the pain he’d been in vanished, looking up at Lex with confused eyes. “What...?”
“Don’t mistake my actions,” noted Lex, stepping down from the defeated creature’s chest. “I told you before, your participation in the ceremony I’m holding is mandatory. You can’t do that if you’re dead.”
“...”
“And when we begin, I expect you to express devotion no less intense than what you displayed just now, when you finally began to honor our goddess by choosing to die rather than betray the tenets of her faith. Is that clear?”
“...yes...”
“Good,” nodded Lex, changing his sight to infravision as he glanced back toward the Shrine, the heat-sensitive wavelength letting him easily spot several of the Keeper’s minions trying to conceal themselves as they lurked near the edge of the Shrine, obviously having been watching Bagora’s defeat. Hopefully they’d spread the word to their compatriots, and there’d be no need to do this again.
“Now, go and gather the rest of the acolytes in the cathedral. We’ll begin the ceremony immediately.”
“For She Who Dwells in Darkness brought forth Her word, so that those who listened might know Her truth. That supremacy dwells not in the light, which reveals the paths that offer no resistance, leaving the body untested and the spirit fallow. But those who walk in Her night shall bloody their hooves on stones they cannot see, shall break their wings landing without sight, and shall contuse their horns on the obstacles before them.”
“And they shall not know fear,” murmured the acolytes in a collective chant, “for the Night Mare guides us to strength.”
“For those who travel in the darkness that She brings shall fall, only to rise up again, stronger and undiminished,” intoned Lex, rising up onto his back legs, spreading his foreclaws upward, toward the image of the Night Mare glaring down from above the altar. “And their hooves shall break the stones beneath them! And their wings shall shatter the ground they alight on! And their horns shall overturn all that stands in their way! Then the path they follow shall be their own, with nothing to deter them!”
“And they shall not know fear, for the Night Mare guides us to strength.”
Keeping his face raised, Lex began to slowly circle the altar, keeping his eyes raised toward the image of the goddess. “With their spirit hardened and their flesh made strong, the faithful shall be the envy of those who hide in the light. For they shall see themselves and know that they are powerless, unable to follow a path of their own making.”
Slowly, he began to circle the altar, lowering his forelegs to indicate the mares atop it. “But amidst their woe and lamentation shall be those who seek to crawl in the shadows of the faithful. Wise are they, who recognize that the blessed have surpassed them. Righteous are they, who celebrate having found their superiors. Holy are they, who submit themselves to their masters.”
“And they shall not know fear, for the Night Mare guides us to strength.”
Lex made sure to keep his breathing slow and steady as he continued to walk a path around the altar, ignoring the way Thermal Draft was shaking with repressed coughing. But while the smattering of clerical spells given to him by the Night Mare had renewed themselves at the same time as the Charismata, he was currently in no position to try using them to alleviate her discomfort; even if he hadn’t been in the middle of the ceremony, the pain from wearing the neart a’staigh – the skeletal-looking liturgical garments of the Night Mare’s faith – would have made it very difficult to cast them on her, the inner hooks of the vestments digging into his skin.
Under normal circumstances, that would have been impossible. His organometallic fur should have easily kept the hooks from reaching his flesh. And indeed, that had initially been the case.
But that had changed when he’d used the Charismata on the neart a’staigh.
To all outward appearances, nothing had happened.
But Lex had known better.
The Charismata had long been a mystery to him. Why it could only affect certain kinds of creatures. The full range of what it could do to them. Even its proper name. All things which, until recently, had been beyond his knowledge.
But ever since this most recent journey to Everglow, those mysteries had one by one revealed themselves. Through trial and error, tidbits revealed by the Keeper, and sheer desperation Lex had learned that the Charismata was far more than the simple ability to control the motor functions of certain monsters the way he’d initially thought it was.
And now he knew more about it than ever, thanks to the book he’d found in the second story of the Shrine of the Starless Sky’s cathedral.
The Auctoritas Caliginous.
A book of psalms, the ancient tome – its pages cracked with age, yet still whole despite having no preservation magic laid upon it – had described aspects of the Night Mare’s faith that Lex had never even considered. From prayers for simple observances such as marriages and funerals to lore about the founding of the Night Mare’s religion to descriptions of sacred implements ranging from simple holy symbols to mighty artifacts.
Curiously, the latter portion of the book had made no mention of the Umbral Regalia.
But where the book had been mysteriously silent about Severance, Headhunter, Breakdown, and the rest of their ilk, it had a great deal to say about the Charismata, Dominata, and Secreta.
It had been then that Lex had, at last, learned the full scope of the blessing that the Night Mare had given him.
While he’d been correct in noting that it contained a sliver of divine authority – as he’d misnamed the blessing itself – to overwrite a select portion of reality, he hadn’t understood precisely what it allowed him to alter, or how. But now he knew: the Charismata allowed him to impose his will over things which were a part of the Night Mare’s divine portfolio, but only in a way that empowered them.
That was why “magical beasts” – the term the Auctoritas Caliginous used for terrestrial creatures whose physiology had been shaped by the magical channels in their bodies, rather than vice versa – were the only entities that could be directly subject to the Charismata, as the Night Mare claimed symbolic dominion over such creatures, the archetypal dwellers in the dark. As the goddess granted strength, he could grant them new powers on a whim, at least for a short time.
Even when he’d simply bound creatures to immobility, that hadn’t truly been commanding them to remain still – forced obedience being the province of the Dominata – but rather enabling them to remain steadfast in the face of anything that would move them...even themselves.
The same was true for other such commands he’d issued using the godly blessing: none had overwritten the wills of the creatures he’d ordered about; it was just that they’d been granted a mandate that had overwhelmed all resistance, both external and internal...save only for those magical beasts that were incredibly powerful in their own right, or commanded mighty magic.
As Sanguine Disposition had said, it was power in the form of charisma, taken to a godly extreme. Being noticed by someone above you – whether you wished it or not – elevated your own standing. And when the one who noticed you was a divinity, that elevation took the form of actual powers and abilities.
But that wasn’t limited to magical beasts.
Anything which fell within the Night Mare’s divine purview could be so enhanced, which included things formally dedicated to her. Indeed, that was what separated a consecrated object from an ordinary one; the latter had no particular religious significance, whereas the former had been explicitly placed under the auspices of her purview. Anyone could wrap a length of barbed wire around their leg, but only after being formally blessed by one recognized by the Night Mare as one of her faithful could declare it to be a holy symbol...as she’d personally done for him when granting him the Charismata.
And as the Keeper had noted, the neart a’staigh – whose name meant “inner strength” – was already blessed.
As such, Lex hadn’t been surprised that, once he’d poured the Charismata’s power into the hook-lined clothes, they’d been able to cut him even through his metal-like fur. After all, the purpose of the outfit was to showcase the wearer’s fortitude in front of the goddess. It made sense that it would easily take to being empowered to do just that, holding onto the divine energy beyond the sixty-second duration that the Charismata usually ran up against.
Which was why even the act of falling back onto all fours, now that he’d finished circling the altar, caused yet more blood to run down his legs, contributing to the puddles of the stuff that he’d already shed during the ceremony.
But although Lex moved slowly and carefully, it was neither pain nor blood loss that made him move with heightened deliberation. Nor was it exhaustion, though he knew that he should have been on the verge of collapse by now.
Instead, it was that he had to struggle to keep his tension under control.
It was just like when he’d been in Darkest Night. Already he could feel his heart beating wildly in his chest, urging him to take harsh, fast breaths. His every sense seemed to be tingling, and he had to resist the impulse to use his horn’s magic to cycle augment his faculties, knowing that there was no need to do so. Even then, he could feel his muscles straining, tail thrashing behind him of its own accord.
In the back of his mind, the feral instincts of the creature he’d merged with screamed at him, wanting him to do something to alleviate his restlessness. But he shoved that desire down, burying it as he continued to chant, his back to the assembled acolytes – themselves shifting and shuffling about as they felt the rising apprehension – as he looked down at Thermal Draft and Woodheart.
After an interminably long time, the ceremony was at last coming to a close.
“Lies are the offspring of weakness, and weakness cannot survive in the blessed darkness of She Who Rules the Night. In Her name, I hold forth the truth of these words: that I am your master. That I command your obedience. That your lives are an extension of my own.”
He held out one bloody claw then, reaching it toward Thermal Draft’s face, the mare wincing as she felt the wet tip touch her lips. “Drink, and acknowledge that my strength flows through you.”
Pausing as he felt Drafty’s lips open, her tongue licking up his blood, he waited until he heard her swallow before turning his attention to Woodheart. He repeated the words, touching his imbrued talons to her lips. Unlike with Thermal Draft, he pressed his claw forward after he finished speaking, doing his best not to cut the earth mare’s lips as he pushed the bloodstained tips of his claw into her mouth, letting the red liquid wash over her tongue before he massaged her throat, making her swallow.
Again, he looked upward toward the stylized image of the Night Mare. “In darkness, I have shown my faith! In darkness, I have shown my power! In darkness, I have shown my authority! None defy me, and all recognize that the strong do as they will, while the weak suffer what they must!”
“And they shall not know fear, for the Night Mare guides us to strength.”
“LET MY NAME BE AS YOURS!” howled Lex, unable to hold back his exultation as he reached the last part of the ceremony. “LET MY WILL BE AS YOURS! LET MY DESIRES BE AS YOURS! AND ALL SHALL BE AS WE WISH IT TO BE!”
That was the final intonation, and Lex couldn’t help but feel a shudder run through him as he stared up at the Night Mare’s image, rising again to point his claws toward the mares on the altar as he called out to the goddess that he’d finally come to have faith in.
“Make Thermal Draft’s life force flow into Woodheart! Have the latter be revitalized while the former is kept between life and death, where her curse cannot touch her! Do it all without any deleterious side effects or complications!”
He had to stop himself from rattling off a list of specifications and potential issues. As much as he wanted to specify every possible issue, the entire point of this ceremony was a display of piety. Treating the Night Mare like an incompetent underling, or another contract devil, would only serve to undercut what he’d just spent so much time doing.
Instead, he forced himself to perform the closing devotional, one talon tracing a circle over the ankle of his foreleg three times. It was a symbolic act of winding something – such as thorns, rope, or barbed wire – around his leg, which according to the Auctoritas Caliginous was a gesture of faith. The irony hadn’t been lost on Lex, given that the goddess herself had given him the real thing, but he knew the display was no less important for that. “Until all things dwell within your kingdom of eternal night.”
With that, the invocation was over.
And above him, the eyes of the Night Mare’s image began to glow.
“We know, Spinner,” groaned Shadow. “You’ve only mentioned that...what? A hundred times, now?”
“You were the one who said we should keep talking so that we don’t lose track of each other, remember?” huffed the filidh. “What am I supposed to say? That we should be happy we got off so easy?”
Mystaria sighed. “I’m pretty sure we did. Even if creating light in her shrine was only a minor offense-”
“An offense we performed more than once,” noted Valor dryly.
“-the Night Mare’s faith regards mercy as a sin,” finished Mystaria. “Taking that into account, Lex’s punishment was for we did was lenient.”
Shadow scoffed loudly at that. “Blinding all four of us was lenient?”
“Mysty, before you say anything, be aware that Shadow’s question was rhetorical,” added Spinner. “You do not, I repeat, you do not need to give a rebuttal.”
“But it really was!” protested Mystaria, drawing groans from the other three. “Think about it! The entire point of the tenet against bringing light into the Shrine is so that ponies who come here will show their devotion to the Night Mare by living in darkness. So putting a curse of blindness on us is really just making us do what we were supposed to be doing in the first place! Besides, if performing this penance makes it more likely that Lex’s ceremonial invocation will work-”
“We know, Mysty,” soothed Valor. “That’s why none of us resisted when he put that curse of temporary blindness on us.”
“I still think that was an excuse for him to send us away,” huffed Shadow, one ear swiveling in the direction of the cathedral. It had taken them several minutes to awkwardly shuffle back in the direction of the room they’d been sharing, where they’d been waiting ever since. Even now, from the other side of the Shrine, they could hear the muffled sound of Lex’s voice through the central building’s shut door. “I mean, he could have demanded anything, and instead he went with something which makes it impossible for anyone to see what he’s doing to Woodheart and Drafty.”
“Except for the whole bunch of monsters that call this place home,” noted Spinner.
“All of whom answer to him now that he’s apparently sidelined this place’s Keeper,” shot back Shadow.
Valor sighed. “Your implication being what, Shadow?”
“Just that we’ve left Woodheart alone and defenseless with a guy who has serious self-control problems, and whose girlfriend has been too sick to put out for days.”
Mystaria cringed so hard it was almost audible. “I’m not an expert in the Night Mare’s faith, but as far as I know her traditional practices don’t include any, er, unsavory elements.”
“Plus, he was wearing that self-wounding outfit,” added Valor. “You saw the way every little movement made him bleed? That had to have been painful.”
“Yeah, well, we already know the guy’s a freak,” muttered Shadow. “Maybe that’s something he’s into.”
“Oh give it a rest, would you?” groaned Spinner, waving a hoof in exasperation. “I get that Lex reminds you of your pervert stepdad,” continued the bard, “and it’s not like I’ve forgotten the guy’s faults, but I’m pretty damn sure he’s not the type to ravish a helpless mare.”
“Right, ‘ravish,’” sneered Shadow. “Leave it to a bard to come up with a nicer, more flowery way to say r-”
“More than that,” continued Spinner through gritted teeth, “I’m sick to death of hearing you complain all the time! I miss the old Shadow, the one who knew how to actually laugh at things and enjoyed pulling pranks instead of just endlessly bitching and moaning.”
“You’re not the only one,” agreed Valor.
“Yeah, well, she’ll come back when Woodheart does!” exploded Shadow. “Because right now, our team is down a member, and I seem to be the only one who’s broken up about it!”
“We’re all broken up about it, Shadow!” Spinner stamped her hoof hard enough that it almost made her wince, but she refused to let the pain distract her. “Each and every one of us is upset! But instead of being stuck in a permanent temper tantrum we’re all dealing with it like grown-ups, SO WHY CAN’T YOU?!”
“BECAUSE YOU FOUR ARE ALL I HAVE!!!”
The wind was immediately taken out of Spinner’s sails. “Wait...what?”
“You four are all I have!” repeated Shadow. “I don’t have an adopted family waiting for me back on the plains like Valor! I don’t have a long-lost grandmother at Bright Night or a bunch of temple sisters back in Viljatown like Mysty! I don’t have a familiar or some tree-hugging cult living in the forest like Woodheart! I don’t have a mother I send letters to every time we stop somewhere the way you do, Spinner! My mother cared more about the stallion who beat her than about me!”
A long moment of silence fell then, broken only by Shadow’s heavy breathing.
“You four are my only friends,” she continued at last, her voice much quieter now, but no less intense. “My only f-family...and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for each and every one of you. So when Woodheart...when that bastard hit her with the same mask that killed that adlet instantly...”
She couldn’t finish, taking a shuddering breath. “He didn’t even care! He just spent days brooding, even though he might have killed one of the only people who actually gives a damn about me! He never even said he was sorry! But all anyone keeps talking about is how we need to be more understanding toward him?!”
“Shadow...” moaned Mystaria, heartbroken.
Valor licked her lips self-consciously. “We didn’t mean-”
“Let her finish,” murmured Spinner.
“I want this ceremony thing that Lex is doing to work,” continued Shadow after several seconds, her voice sounding slightly more composed than before. “I want Woodheart back, and I know that this is the best chance of that happening. But even if everything goes exactly the way he said, I’m not going to pretend that makes it all okay.”
Swiveling one ear back toward the cathedral, Shadow slowly shook her head, despite knowing that none of her friends could see it. “He’s the reason Woodheart’s like that in the first place, and if he doesn’t think he needs to ask our forgiveness for that, then I’m not going to forgive him. Maybe you can – fine, whatever, that’s between you and him – but I refuse.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“Do you feel better now?” ventured Valor, when it became clear that Shadow wasn’t going to say anything else.
The question earned a snort from the party’s rogue. “Not really.”
Spinner clumsily struck a few chords on her lute. “Want me to sing something soothing for you?”
This time Shadow managed a hollow laugh. “Please do. Then I’ll know exactly where to throw my boots at.”
“Shadow, I’m so sorry,” sniffled Mystaria, shuffling closer to the sound of her friend’s voice. “I wasn’t thinking about how you felt at all!”
“It’s fine, Mysty.”
“No, it isn’t fine! I had no idea...all this time, I’ve been going on about finding my grandmother at Bright Night, and I never even considered-, ow!”
“Of course you didn’t,” rebuked Shadow lightly, lifting her hoof from where she’d lightly whacked Mystaria on the head, the nun’s speaking having made her an easy target. “I didn’t tell you that I had no other family until a few days ago, remember? The night we met that adlet war party?”
“You mean the night you completely went to pieces and we had to tie you up in order to get you to calm down?” supplied Spinner, her grin audible in her voice.
“I’m not surprised you were so good at that,” retorted Shadow, a wry tone in her voice. “A captive audience is the only way you’d ever get anyone to listen to one of your performances.”
“I know we originally came here because we wanted to procure some spending money, Mysty’s desire to visit her grandmother notwithstanding,” interjected Valor. “But I think that once Woodheart’s healed, and all of this is over, we could all use a vacation.”
“Hear hear!” Spinner clapped her hooves. “I’d say we should invite Solvakna, but somehow I don’t see Lex letting her tag along.”
Shadow rolled her sightless eyes. “You know that name’s not going to catch on no matter how many times you use it, right?”
“Come to think of it, where is Akna?” Valor twitched her ears, trying to pick up some trace of the adlet.
“She said she had something to take care of, remember?” Mystaria heaved a sigh as she sat down, glad the tension had been defused. “I guess she’s still doing whatever that is.”
“Yeah, well, it’s taking her an awfully long time,” huffed Spinner. “I mean, since she can see in the dark without any magic, she’s the only one here who can tell us if something happens. Otherwise it’s just what we can hear or what Littleknight sees.”
“Speaking of which, he’s been kind of quiet for a while now,” noted Mystaria. “Valor, is he asleep?”
“...why’re you asking me?”
“Why am I...huh?” sputtered Mystaria. “Lex tossed him to you!”
“Sure, at first,” countered the brawny earth mare. “But then I passed him to Shadow when he was getting ready to curse us.”
“And I passed him to Spinner,” replied Shadow quickly.
“Well don’t look at me,” answered Spinner, before pausing. “Oh come on, that doesn’t even get a pity laugh?”
“Someone help me get my boots off,” muttered Shadow darkly.
“Ugh, fine,” huffed the filidh. “Look, I had Littleknight on the way back here, but when we sat down I told him to go cuddle up with Valor.”
“Yeah, and when he didn’t arrive I thought he had decided to stay with you!”
“Why would he stay with me? You’re the one who can turn into an animal, which is what Woodheart keeps trying to do! I thought he’d like you better!”
“Girls! Girls!” It took a moment for Mystaria to quiet everyone down. “So basically, no one’s seen, er, heard Littleknight since we got back here?”
“Apparently.”
“Seems that way.”
“Great, just great.” Shadow clamored back to her hooves. “We need to go find him, before this turns into one of those things where we get Woodheart back only to find that now we need to go on another rescue mission.”
“At least we’d be living up to our usual Fail Forward standard,” quipped Spinner.
“He can’t have snuck back into the cathedral.” Mystaria’s tension was audible. “We heard Lex close the door behind us.”
“I think we should-”
But Valor’s statement was cut off as a persistent meeping reached their eyes, followed by a gruff bark.
“Is...he talking to that seven-headed croco-dog thing outside?” muttered Spinner.
“I don’t-”
Spinner, however, was likewise unable to finish her thought, as the sepulchral voice of the Keeper reached her ears.
“Move aside, beast, or I’ll deal with you next.”
Sequestered in an empty building on the other side of the Shrine, Akna – once again in her humanoid form – took a deep breath.
It felt almost wrong to think of herself as Akna, knowing that L-, that her master had called her Solvei before. It was like she was defying him by using her other name. Yet that small act of rebellion sent a visceral rush through her, immediately followed by a stinging guilt.
Mas-, no, Lex-, no, MASTER has done so much for me! He deserves my loyalty!
But even that thought had a discordant element to it, undercut by a conflicting web of feelings that refused to be so easily resolved.
So instead, Akna ignored them, finding solace in a different line of reasoning:
It helps to think of myself as Akna for this.
Master was busy now, and would be for a while as he called upon the Night Mare to aid Woodheart and his mate. That he would be successful wasn’t in doubt; as Solvei, she had complete faith in his abilities, and as Akna she knew that the Night Mare would do right by her champion...and his unborn child. But more importantly, Master had allowed her to exempt herself from the ceremony when she’d told him what she wanted to do, pausing for a long moment before giving her permission.
Though now, part of her wished he’d refused her request, a twinge of unease running through down her spine.
Frowning, Akna shook her head, forcing her anxiety away. No, this has to be done. Better to finish it now while Master doesn’t need me.
Holding fast to that thought, Akna steeled her resolved as she looked down...
At herself.
Or rather, at Solvei, the winter wolf’s dead body lying in front of her.
Mystaria’s preservation magic meant that Solvei’s body was still perfectly maintained – other than the horrific wound in her chest – and Akna’s hands trembled as she reached forward to tentatively touch the undamaged portion of the winter wolf’s fur, relieved to feel how cold it still was. That was one thing that adlets and winter wolves had in common; once death set in, their bodies would start growing warmer as they lost frigidity. I don’t think I could do this if my-, her body was warm.
It was a small favor. As a shaman among her people, Akna knew what she had to do, but winter wolves didn’t have this tradition. Reconciling this with the part of her that was Solvei was therefore more difficult than she’d thought; it was only when she’d silently reassured herself that this would make things easier for her master – relieving him of the burden of figuring out what to do with Solvei’s body – that she’d managed to convince herself to go through with it.
Taking a deep breath, Akna said a quiet prayer to the Night Mare, substituting the goddess’s name for that of her ancestors as she recited the funerary observances.
Then she began to prepare Solvei’s body to be eaten.
I’ll grant you this boon, my Champion, but be warned: your follower’s interstitial state will not last indefinitely.
With that, the glowing eyes of the Night Mare’s image had dimmed and gone out.
The abruptness of it all had left Lex momentarily nonplussed, only dimly registering the sudden release of tension in the cathedral chamber. While he hadn’t expected the Night Mare to make a gaudy display of power, the terseness of her reply was in stark contrast to the other times that she’d seen fit to communicate with him. As it was, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d spoken to him directly, he’d have wondered if she’d seen fit to answer his request at all.
But that makes sense, he decided after a moment. Our other conversations were either a result of my summoning her, or her appearing in my dreams. But while the former necessitated direct communication and the latter had been because she’d wanted to make herself unambiguously clear, this ceremony was different.
Held in front of a congregation of her faithful, it had been as much about his ability to perform such an elaborate service – gathering and securing the obedience of so many willful and dangerous creatures, asserting authority over this consecrated area, remaining steadfast as he’d recited the liturgies even while the neart a’staigh had cut him – as it had been about the Night Mare herself.
That was, according to what he’d read in the Auctoritas Caliginous, an expression of how the truly faithful resolved the paradox – worshiping a goddess who exalted self-reliance – that lay at the heart of the Night Mare’s religion. To that end, it wasn’t surprising that her response to his entreaty had been direct and without flourish; it fit perfectly with her dogma of helping those who helped themselves.
As if to prove that, a low groan came from Woodheart, stirring on top of the Night Mare’s altar as her eyes fluttered open. “Nnngh....what....?”
“Remain calm, Woodheart,” intoned Lex quietly as he changed his vision so that he could see fluctuations of positive and negative energy. “You’ve just been revived after having been comatose for several days.”
As expected, the goddess had done as he’d asked: Woodheart was now showing the excess of positive energy expected of a healthy living creature, while Thermal Draft had both positive and negative energy in a state of equilibrium.
It had worked.
Or rather, it had worked for now, according to what the Night Mare had said. As for how long he had...
Several seconds of examining Thermal Draft revealed no clues in that area, and with a sigh, Lex returned to using his darkvision. As far as visual acuity went, the ability to see via life force was a far more limited spectrum than any he’d made use of so far, having a range that was not only markedly short but had virtually no periphery to it. That sharply restricted its use as a detection tool, even if it served as a useful diagnostic instrument.
For her part, Woodheart sat up slowly, groaning softly as she put a hoof to her face. “Days?” she muttered, rubbing her eyes. “Why was I...?” Pausing as she pulled her hoof back, she sucked in a sharp breath as she suddenly rubbed her eyes again, blinking frantically. “I can’t-, I can’t see anything!” she blurted. “What’s going on?!”
Cursing softly at his having overlooked how anyone would likely panic if they woke up in total darkness, Lex moved to Woodheart’s side as she started flailing about. Reaching out, he caught one of her forelegs in an iron grip, stopping her from inadvertently striking Thermal Draft’s unmoving body. At the same time, he called upon his horn, causing a candle’s worth of fluorescent light to illuminate his face. “I said calm down.”
Naturally, Woodheart – seeing a monster with slit-pupils, sharp teeth, and jagged claws grabbing her, as well as the unmoving body lying next to her – did exactly the opposite.
Sighing as the druid let out a bloodcurdling scream, Lex immediately clamped his other claw over her muzzle, forcing her back down onto the altar when she started struggling to free herself. Fortunately, his new body made it easy to restrain her, holding her down with no more effort than it would have taken him to subdue a kitten. Ignoring the distressed mare for a moment, Lex instead turned his attention to the assembled acolytes. “You are all dismissed.”
The assembled creatures wasted no time in leaving, and Lex couldn’t help but notice that Bagora was the first one out the door. A few paused on their way out, perhaps hoping to witness some brutality against the mare he was restraining, but all it took was a glare from Lex to send them on their way.
When the cathedral chamber was empty, Lex turned his attention back toward Woodheart, who was now beating her free hoof against his chest in a pathetic effort to free herself. Ignoring the attacks – even without his magic items, his defensive enchantments and organometallic fur made it impossible for such feeble strikes to hurt him – he looked down at the earth mare calmly. “I understand you must be very confused,” he stated, making sure to keep his voice relaxed and even. “But a great deal has happened while you were unconscious.”
The words seemed to have the soothing effect that he was hoping for, as he felt her wild thrashing subside, though her breathing was still accelerated as she looked up at him with wide eyes. Deciding to take that as progress, Lex continued. “Now, if I release you, will you conduct yourself in a rational manner?”
A shudder ran through Woodheart then, but she managed to nod, and Lex slowly removed his claws from her. Swallowing, Woodheart took several deep breaths before she licked her lips. “Where are we?” she asked, managing to keep her voice level as she sat up again. “Where are my friends?”
“We’re currently underground, in a location known as the Shrine of the Starless Sky, which is considered holy to my goddess, the Night Mare,” answered Lex. “The rest of your comrades, as well as your familiar, are all here as well.”
“And...her?” she gulped, gesturing toward the mare lying insensate beside her.
Lex managed to suppress a grimace. It was no surprise that she didn’t recognize her traveling companion, as Thermal Draft’s loss of consciousness had returned her to her insectoid appearance, confirming that she truly was a doppelganger now. “She’s Thermal Draft, whom you knew as a pegasus.”
In the dim light, Woodheart looked her over. “So she’s really a doppelganger? I had no idea.” She paused as her eyes turned back toward him. “And you...?”
Instead of answering, Lex focused his telekinesis on removing the neart a’staigh. Slowly cleaning the vestments of the blood, he returned them to wardrobe where he’d found them, having brought it downstairs along with the Auctoritas Caliginous. Once it had been secured, he used the weak healing spell the Night Mare had given him – his small cache of divine spells having renewed themselves at the same time as the Charismata – to close the cuts. After that, he slowly donned his clothes and magic items, only answering Woodheart’s question once he’d finished.
“I underwent a trial in the Night Mare’s name. What you see now are the results.”
Woodheart digested that for a moment, before slowly climbing down from the altar. “What about-, oh! It’s slippery!” For a moment she struggled to regain her balance, looking down at the floor and wrinkling her nose. “Is that blood?!”
“My own,” answered Lex, slowly picking up Thermal Draft in his telekinesis, the expanded aura brightening the cathedral ever-so-slightly. “It was necessary to shed it as part of the ceremony that revived you.”
For a moment Woodheart didn’t say anything else, and Lex was about to take her to her friends when she spoke up again. “What happened to Toklo?”
That hadn’t been a question Lex had expected her to ask, and he furrowed his brow as he glanced at her. “The adlet?”
Woodheart nodded. “Is he okay? I wanted to save him.”
That statement made Lex scowl, recalling the circumstances that had led to Woodheart’s extended brush with death. “You were a fool to risk your life for that creature.”
He expected the druid to argue, but instead she cocked her head. “Maybe you’re right. I’m sure I caused a lot of trouble for you and everyone else if you had to do all this” – she gestured to the blood around the altar – “to bring me back. But I didn’t want Toklo to die like that.”
“You forget that he and his companions attacked us,” spat Lex. “He would have killed you and all of your friends had he been able, something which made his execution entirely justified.”
Woodheart looked down, seemingly saddened by what he’d said. “I talked to him a lot while we were marching through the snow. He told me about how happy he was to have been given his first mission, that he wanted to impress some of the girls back in his tribe, how much he was hoping to make his father proud and, well...”
She flattened her ears. “He just looked so scared when you threw that mask at him, it made me want to protect him.”
Raising her gaze, she met his eyes then. “And you, too.”
The biting retort Lex had prepared in response to her maudlin sentimentality fell away at that last statement, and he gave her an incredulous look. “Protect me?!” he sneered. “I need no protection! Especially not from meting out justice on anything that would dare harm a pony!”
Woodheart blinked, wearing her confusion openly. “But Drafty told me that how we met Toklo was almost exactly the same as how you met Solvei, and it’s obvious that you love her very much.”
Lex went rigid at that. “That’s not...the two situations are completely dissimilar-”
“And since the way you fought to save everyone back in that village made it clear that you care deeply about others,” continued Woodheart guilelessly, “I didn’t want you to be sad when you realized you’d killed someone who could have become your friend later.”
Despite his defensive enchantments, protective magic items, and his new body’s inherent toughness, Lex found himself completely skewered by what the druid was saying. Although he’d been able to justify his attempt to slay Toklo as a response to the adlet’s previous actions – vehemently denying that his own loss of control had been a factor in what had happened – all of his reasons were equally applicable to how he’d tried to kill Solvei when he’d first met her.
Which, in hindsight, had been one of the worst decisions he’d ever made.
And now, in light of what Woodheart had so casually mentioned, Lex could see that trying to kill Toklo had been another instance of extremely poor judgment on his part. Because if he had successfully slain the adlet, then in all likelihood he never would have been able to reach an accord with Yotimo, the leader of the war party who was also Toklo’s father. That deal had been something that Yotimo, in turn, had reported to the rest of his tribe, which had brought Akna running to join them.
Her presence, Lex knew, had not only been what had enabled them to find the Shrine of the Starless Sky, but was also the only reason he’d been able to bring Solvei back.
All because Woodheart had wanted to protect Toklo...and him.
“Is he okay?”
Woodheart’s question broke Lex’s concentration, dragging his attention back to the earth mare. “...what?”
“Toklo,” replied the druid. “Is he okay? You never said if I saved him or not.”
“You saved him,” muttered Lex, shaken. “He’s back with his people now.”
Suddenly wanting to put this entire conversation behind him, he brought Thermal Draft’s unmoving body over to him, standing upright to hold her in his forelegs. “Come, I’ll take you to your friends.”
He didn’t wait for her to reply as he walked toward the cathedral’s exit, keeping his horn lit, his thoughts whirling as he reviewed his recent actions, judging them in light of what he’d learned about himself and the Night Mare both.
But his thoughts came to a screeching halt as he left the building and looked across the open area at the center of the Shrine, a bellow leaving his lips of its own accord.
Over the course of his life there had been many moments when Lex had felt overwhelmed by what was happening.
Some of those instances had been when he’d struggled to win an uphill battle against an enemy that had been nearly unstoppable. Xiriel’s seeming inability to die, no matter how badly he’d damaged the twisted creature. An army of ghouls whose numbers had been so far outside of his initial estimation that they had seemed endless. The eight-legged creature in Darkest Night that had been so aggressive that it had been more intent on killing him than saving its own life. All had demanded that he not only push his limits, but surpass them in order to secure victory.
Other times, it had been pain that had left him struggling to formulate a response. For all that he’d long since grown used to physical hardship, forcing himself to fight through agonizing injuries, that had been instances when he’d simply been too hurt to respond, oftentimes due to emotional – rather than physical – wounds. Sonata’s having left him during their trek to Tall Tale had been one such time. Another had been Solvei’s death. And immediately following that loss had been the vision he’d had while inside of the Confluence.
Opposite those were the precious few moments when something joyful had happened, leaving him temporarily stunned by the persistent hardship that was his life ever-so-briefly falling away, giving him an all too short moment of respite. Whether it was something as simple as being struck by how beautiful Sonata was during their train ride toward Tall Tale, being stunned by a crowd of ponies cheering for him after he’d recovered from his battle with Starlight Glimmer, or feeling his connection to Solvei unexpectedly restored when he’d emerged into the Night Mare’s realm, those were memories that he clung to fiercely, taking what comfort he could from them.
But now, as he stood just outside the Shrine of the Starless Sky’s grand cathedral, Lex found himself unable to do anything but stop and stare for reasons that had nothing to do with aggression, pain, or comfort.
Instead, it was the sheer absurdity of what he was seeing that kept him rooted in place.
“RELEASE ME AT ONCE!!!”
“OW OW OW!!! WHAT IS THIS THING?!”
“SPINNER!!! ARE YOU OKAY?!”
“WE NEED TO GET BACK INSIDE!!!”
“MEEP!!! MEEP MEEP!!!
“HANG ON!!! I’M COMING TO-, OOF!!!”
“WOOF!!!”
That last yell was Teyu’s, all seven heads barking in unison, making the sound so loud that Lex was amazed that the entire Shrine wasn’t reverberating from it. As it was, another testament to the solid construction of the underground chamber was provided a moment later, as the ground somehow refrained from shaking as the multiheaded monstrosity charged across the courtyard, scaled legs pumping as it ran as fast as it could go.
Nor was its run unprompted, as it was apparently chasing the Keeper, who had just been flung across the open courtyard by Spinner.
Except, with his enhanced darkvision able to cut through the Keeper’s supernatural darkness, Lex could see that wasn’t quite right.
Instead, the Keeper had been impaled on what looked like a spear, the pointed end of it passing through one of the equine skull’s eye sockets, the pointed tip reaching the back of its teeth. Nor had Spinner – who was still blinded, thanks to the curse he’d put on her and her friends as part of their penance for bringing light into this holy place – deliberately thrown the Shrine’s caretaker. Instead, she’d apparently panicked, her legs getting tangled in the spear’s haft as Valor had rushed to help her, the two of them tripping over each other and inadvertently launching the spear end-over-end across the open space.
Which had sent Teyu rushing after it, barking loudly as he reached the discarded weapon – the Keeper still caught on the end of it, roaring to be set free – and lifted it in one of his mouths, bringing it back toward where Fail Forward were still falling over themselves, Littleknight meeping in alarm as he desperately tried to keep the four mares out from under Teyu’s paws.
Then the seven-headed croco-wolf dropped the spear in front of the earth ponies, seven jaws open and panting as his squamous tail swung back and forth behind him.
Fetch, Lex realized incredulously, as the Keeper’s incessant bellowing brought Mystaria over to it, only plant her hoof on the weapon’s cylindrical haft, causing her to fall as she inadvertently kicked it into the air – Keeper and all – and causing Teyu to again chase after it with a joyous howl. They’re playing fetch.
“Littleknight?” called Woodheart, squinting as she stepped forward, unable to see past the dim radius of Lex’s horn. “You guys? Is everything okay?”
The almiraj whipped his head around as Woodheart called his name, launching himself forward as he caught sight of his mistress. “MEEP! MEEP MEEP MEEP!!!”
A second later he’d sprung at her, and Woodheart was barely able to catch him, laughing as she cradled the horned rabbit in her foreleg and nuzzled him. “Littleknight! Oh, you must have been so worried!”
“W-Woodheart?” From where she was lying in a heap with Mystaria, Shadow lifted her head, sightless eyes blinking. “Everyone shut up! I think I hear Woodheart!”
“Woodsy?” This time it was Spinner who called out, managing to stumble back onto all fours. “Is that you?”
“You know I hate that name, Spinner!” Despite the rebuke, Woodheart was giggling as she delivered it, sticking her tongue out at the bard.
“It worked!” cheered Mystaria as she righted herself. “Lex’s ceremony worked!”
“Woodheart, keep talking so we can find you!” Valor was already taking an unsteady step toward them, swiveling her head back and forth. “It doesn’t matter what, just say anything!”
The instructions brought a frown to the druid’s face, causing her to cease cuddling Littleknight. “But I’m right here, next to Lex.” When her response only caused them to stumble more in her general direction, she cast a worried look at the stallion who’d brought her back. “What’s going on? Your horn’s giving off light, but it’s like they can’t see us at all.”
Already losing interest in the druid, Lex paused just long enough to wave a hoof in the direction of her friends. “I absolve you all,” he murmured, waving a hoof at them as he headed toward Teyu, making sure to keep careful hold of Thermal Draft.
Hearing the four mares squeal as they caught sight of Woodheart in the fluorescent glow of his horn’s aura, Lex ignored them as they dogpiled their friend. Instead, he moved over to where the seven-headed behemoth was picking up the spear in the mouth of its lowest head, the Keeper still bellowing indignantly to be set free. The scene was no less bizarre than it had been a moment ago, but now Lex had habituated enough to it to be more curious than anything.
Though it didn’t escape his notice that the various acolytes he’d ejected from the cathedral ahead of him were also watching the spectacle, peering out from the various buildings lining the walls of the Shrine.
“YOU!!!” roared the Keeper, shaking as he tried – apparently in vain – to dislodge himself from the weapon that Teyu was currently bringing his way, the monstrosity stopping right in front of Lex with the spear held in its mouth. “IS THIS YOUR DOING?! ANSWER ME!!!”
The only response Lex had for the Keeper was a contemptuous snort, instead looking up at the seven-headed croco-wolf. “Teyu, give me that.”
But rather than dropping the spear, Teyu’s other heads barked, tail still wagging eagerly.
Frowning, Lex’s horn glowed brighter as he grabbed the spear, trying to yank it from Teyu’s mouth, but the large creature simply clamped its jaws tighter, growling as it pulled in the opposite direction.
Letting out a slow breath between clenched teeth, Lex abandoned the struggle. For a moment he was tempted to simply use the Charismata to try and force Teyu to comply, but the memory of how poorly that had worked the last time he’d tried that – as well as Woodheart’s inadvertent lesson about the perils of using force as a first resort – made him discard that option. Instead, he lifted Thermal Draft in his telekinesis so that his forelegs were free, and turned to the side as he started casting a spell.
The process should have been difficult. He’d cast that anemic healing spell, staunching the bleeding that the neart a’staigh had inflicted on him, partially to gauge how hard it would be to make the proper gestures with claws instead of hooves. But to his mild surprise, he’d been able to make the transition with almost no problems, as if he’d had talons his entire life. Now it was time to see if that had been a fluke, or if something deeper was at work.
The minutes ticked by as he rattled off the lengthy series of syllables and gesticulations, feeding power through his body into the casting so as to enhance the final result, but with each passing moment Lex grew more confident at how easily the requisite somatic components were coming to him, relieved that casting spells with his new body apparently wouldn’t require a long period of retraining himself.
It’s a result of that creature’s instincts merging with my own, he decided as he neared the end of the spell. It’s not just a matter of having adapted aspects of its morphology or suborned its reactions. I’ve incorporated its intuition into my own sense of self. While he could still remember how it had felt to be an ordinary pony – to the extent that he’d ever been ordinary – his ingrained reactions, from balance to reflexes to sensory processes as well as myriad other aspects of his physical functions, were all operating as though he’d had this body his entire life.
But then, that shouldn’t have been a surprise, he decided as he finished the spell, causing a massive quantity of food to appear in the Shrine’s courtyard.
The Night Mare wouldn’t inflict weakness on her faithful as a side effect of gaining new strength.
Seeing the huge feast that had appeared out of nowhere – including a large quantity of fruit and honey – Teyu dropped the spear, barking happily as he rushed over to the feast and immediately began to dig in, his seven heads gulping the repast down in huge portions.
“Don’t just stand there!” growled the Keeper, again trying in vain to pull itself free from the end of the weapon. “Remove this thing from me immediately!”
Still holding Thermal Draft aloft, Lex moved to pick up the spear...
Only to stop in mid-motion, his eyes narrowing as he got a closer look at it.
It can’t be.
Ignoring the way the Keeper kept cursing and wriggling on the end of it, Lex slowly lifted the weapon, looking it over.
The entire thing was a single piece, rather than a collection of parts that had been fitted together. That wasn’t too surprising, considering that its construction hadn’t involved metal, wood, or stone, with its composition instead being made of a particularly dense calcified substance. Nor did it have any ornamentation; indeed, it looked to be completely unworked, having no affectations or decorations of any sort.
...except toward the end of it, where Lex could spy several barbs sprouting from the central haft before it reached the Keeper’s eye socket.
That settled it, then: it wasn’t a spear at all.
It was a giant quill.
Absorbing that latest surprise as he took hold the Keeper, Lex wrenched the skull free of the weapon, one of the barbs having gotten stuck between the undead thing’s back teeth. Flinging the caretaker away as though it were so much garbage, Lex ignored its sputters of outrage as his attention turned toward the small ribbon tied to the end of the quill, hidden from sight up until now by the Keeper’s empty cranium. There was a small tag dangling from the silken wrapping, with a brief message scrawled upon it in flowing, elegant script.
Congratulations on your rebirth.
Beneath the words there was no signature, instead showing only the emblem of a weeping rose.
“So you heard the Keeper chanting outside, and thought he was doing something to Teyu?”
Mystaria nodded in response to Lex’s question, pausing to swallow a mouthful of honey-glazed plums before answering. “That’s mostly right. We actually heard Littleknight meeping first, and then Teyu barking. Then we heard the Keeper scolding them, and it was as we went outside to check that we heard him start chanting.”
“We think he was – oh wow! Valor, have some of these! – trying to do something to him. Teyu, I mean,” added Spinner, passing a bowl of sugared grapes to her friend. “No idea what, but it probably wasn’t good if Littleknight was worried about it.”
“Since we thought he might be trying to do something to disrupt your ceremony, we tried to stop him,” added Valor, taking the offered confection as she paused to gulp down a mugful of blueberry-flavored water, letting out a loud belch as she finished. “But since we couldn’t actually see anything, it didn’t go very well.”
“I still don’t understand where that giant spike came from,” muttered Shadow, shooting a suspicious glare at the quill Lex was holding, Thermal Draft still held aloft in his telekinetic aura. “I get that it somehow got lodged in the Keeper’s eye socket-”
“Trying to eat, here!” announced Spinner with a grimace.
“-but what I want to know is how.”
“...it’s not important,” decided Lex, taking his eyes off of the weapon, instead glancing at where Teyu was curled up, sleeping off the meal he’d just eaten. “It’s unlikely that whatever the Keeper was doing would have worked anyway.”
Woodheart looked up from where she was cuddling Littleknight, rubbing the almiraj’s belly as she fed him caramelized raspberries. “Why?”
“Does this have something to do with what Akna mentioned before, about the whole ritual thing he did being a sham?” added Spinner.
“For a sham, it got some serious results,” muttered Valor, looking Lex up and down.
“These results had nothing to do with the Keeper,” snorted Lex, taking a dried pear slice and looking it over. Taking a bite, he resisted the urge to wince. While sugary things had never been amenable to his palate, something that mild shouldn’t have been overly disagreeable. But although the dried pear had little in the way of sweetness, it was all he could do not to gag at the taste now; his new body, it seemed, had less even less tolerance for sacchariferous fare than his old one. “It was entirely due to the nature of the planar aperture that Akna and I entered, and the circumstances that we encountered on the other side of it. The actions the Keeper took prior to us going in had no effect on that whatsoever.”
“And that would have been the same for Teyu?” prompted Mystaria.
Lex nodded. “I believe so. The Keeper’s madness seems to manifest as an outsized sense of his own capabilities, as well as an inflated estimation of his own importance.”
Smirking behind her mask, Shadow opened her mouth, but before she could make a cutting remark a sugared grape hit her between the eyes. “Hush, you,” chided Valor.
Ignoring the earth mares’ antics, Lex continued. “Given that the Keeper has used his time here to verse himself in the Night Mare’s religious traditions” – likely due to his having little to do except read the Auctoritas Caliginous, Lex knew – “my guess is that, while he’s clearly able to perform ceremonial invocations, he thinks it’s entirely due to the Night Mare holding him in high esteem, and that the use of religious paraphernalia, the presence of his acolytes, and other supporting activities are purely ancillary in nature, rather than being necessary for those rites to function.”
“So in other words,” chimed in Spinner, “the Keeper really can do a bunch of impressive stuff, but he thinks that it all comes from the Night Mare thinking he’s a celebrity, rather than the fact that he’s just putting on a show for her?”
The analogy made Lex sigh. “Close enough.”
Smirking, she took a bite of a chocolate-covered banana. “I’ve known some bards like that. An impressive instrument and a few flashy spells, and suddenly they think they’re as handsome as a devil and have the voice of an angel.”
“And he went after Teyu because he saw that you’d bullied the rest of his freaks into submission,” snorted Shadow. “Which means this was all about a stallion trying to assuage their wounded pride. Why am I not surprised?”
“I think it’s kind of nice that this Keeper fellow makes all those creatures smarter, though,” added Woodheart, petting Littleknight’s belly as the horned rabbit finished his meal. “Back home, the hierophant would do that for some of the animals in the forest. That was how new initiates would learn to respect nature; you wouldn’t want to throw a rock at a squirrel if it would tell on you later!”
“They don’t sound as bad as the sisters at the Atheneum Arcane,” chuckled Mystaria. “If you got caught dog-earing a book, you had to assist the scribes for a week, transcribing everything from old dictionaries to donated journals of retired adventurers.”
“You’ll have quite the journal to donate yourself someday, Mysty. Especially after the last couple of days,” added Valor.
“And before you say anything, Shadow, yes, that does assume we’re all going to live through this,” cut in Spinner, giving the masked mare a wry look.
But Shadow shook her head at the filidh’s remark. “I wasn’t going to suggest otherwise,” she answered in a voice completely devoid of humor as she glanced at Woodheart, before looking at each of her friends in turn. “We’re all going home together. Even if we have to fight our way through every yeti, hag, troll, and other monster in this frozen wasteland.”
“That will not be necessary,” announced Lex, standing up as he pushed the remainder of his portion of the food away, only half-eaten. “Once you’ve finished eating, I’m sending you back to the village where I met you.”
Dead silence fell over the mares of Fail Forward at that.
Spinner was the first to recover. “You said what now?”
“Lex,” began Mystaria, keeping her voice carefully restrained. “That village is roughly a week away, through heavy snow and a monster-infested forest.”
“Not to mention the very real chance that Grisela and her kin are waiting outside to ambush us,” added Valor.
“And did you forget that we’re not exactly the adlets’ favorite ponies right now?” huffed Shadow. “You’ve already messed up their shaman’s soul. If they think we were part of that and then skipped out on them, the next invasion those villagers suffer will be from them!”
Lex shook his head. “I will settle things with the adlets. Without killing them,” he added, eyes flickering in Woodheart’s direction for a fraction of an instant. “And I’ll deal with Grisela and the rest of her twisted family. But I won’t allow any of you to be placed in further danger as part of that.”
Spinner leaned back. “So help me, if whatever you’re planning involves a trip to the Night Mare’s realm...”
“Of course not,” replied Lex with a sneer. “One of the spells I’ve readied allows for a group of ponies to undertake a short-range teleportation. I’m going to feed additional power through it, hypothetically increasing the distance it can cover, in order to send you all back.”
“‘Hypothetically’?” echoed Valor.
“I’m sorry, how exactly are you able to boost the spell’s range like that?” added Mystaria.
“Mysty,” warned Shadow in a low voice, also rising to her hooves. “The last time you asked him about his magic, he lost it, remember?”
Despite not being directed at him, the admonishment made Lex grit his teeth, but he forced himself to remain calm. Mystaria had already seen through his attempt to keep the deficiency behind his thaumaturgical spellcasting secret. For that matter, so had Toklo, who by now had likely told his entire tribe. Which meant that to keep that particular weakness under wraps was at best pointless, and at worse counterproductive, since he needed Fail Forward to go along with what he was proposing.
But that didn’t make it any easier for him to admit to something he’d been trying to keep hidden from everyone – even the ponies dearest to him – for so long.
“The nature of my thaumaturgical magic is...complicated,” he said slowly, forcing himself to meet Mystaria’s eyes. “I can prepare arcane spells in the same manner that you do, via the construction of thought-forms which hold the requisite energy necessary to actualize them.”
Scowling as he caught himself hesitating to continue, Lex forced himself to keep speaking. “I didn’t learn how to do this from anyone else; I designed the entire system from the ground up when I was a colt. However, I have yet to find an operational methodology capable of compressing that energy to the point where it can be contained within a conceptual framework without the assistance of an externalized tool or device.”
Several pairs of eyes turned to Mystaria then, waiting for her to translate what Lex had just said. The mare in question furrowed her brow, lips moving silently as she parsed what she’d just been told. “You mean...you were trying to come up with a way to prepare spells, arcane spells, without a spellbook?”
Lex nodded curtly.
“So, like a sorcerer?” ventured Spinner. “They can cast all kinds of arcane magic without studying it.”
“That’s not the same,” answered Mystaria immediately. “Sorcerers only know a few spells, which are determined by their biological heritage. They actually gather the energy via subtle mutations in their physical form, including spell patterns in their brains which-, no, it doesn’t matter.”
Shaking her head as she forced herself to concentrate on what Lex had just told her, Mystaria licked her lips before speaking again. “So, you came up with a way to build the mental architecture of arcane spellcasting all on your own – which I have to tell you is unbelievable, especially since you did it as a colt! – but you’re saying you can’t actually prepare those spells, right?”
“Except he clearly can, since we’ve all seen him do it,” snorted Shadow. “So what’s the big deal?”
“The ‘big deal’,” spat Lex, giving the masked mare a dark look. “Is that if the concentration of energy in the local area is great enough-”
“Then you wouldn’t need to worry about condensing to the point of fitting it into an abstract format, because it would already be sufficiently dense!” finished Mystaria, her eyes lighting up as she saw what Lex was getting at. But her excitement faded a moment later. “But in its ambient state, that wouldn’t happen naturally.”
“On the contrary, it does happen naturally,” countered Lex. “Exactly four times a year, during the solstices and equinoxes.”
Valor cocked her head. “You’re saying magic gets easier to cast during those days?”
“In the forest, we celebrate the turning of the seasons, but I’ve never heard of magic becoming easier to use when that happens,” added Woodheart.
“I’m not surprised,” muttered Mystaria, now deeply engaged with what Lex had revealed. “Those of us who use arcane spells have standardized preparatory devices via our spellbooks. It wouldn’t matter if the ambient amount of magical energy had swelled; their inscriptions are designed only to gather a set amount of power necessary for each particular spell. If there was any excess, it would be naturally filtered out. Divine magic would have even less interaction, since the energy necessary to cast the spell comes from a god, rather than being gathered locally.”
“I use divine magic, and it doesn’t come from a god,” noted Woodheart wryly, causing Valor, Spinner, and Shadow to groan softly; the fact that Woodheart had godly magic despite belonging to a pagan faith that didn’t worship a deity was a point of academic frustration for Mystaria.
Fortunately, the nun-in-training was able to overlook the friendly jab. “Yes, well...the mystery of who or what is granting Woodheart’s spells aside, Lex, that means you can only renew your arcane spells four times a year?”
“Or if I have access to an artifact of extreme power,” added Lex. “Something which radiated so much magical energy that the excess alone was sufficient to prepare my spells with.”
Valor gave a soft laugh. “I imagine those aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.”
Lex ignored the quip, and Mystaria jumped in, still following her train of thought. “That explains why you’ve been so reluctant to use your arcane magic. But how does that tie into what you said about enhancing that short-range teleportation spell you have?”
“While I’m not able to prepare my arcane spells very often, I’ve developed a technique for getting additional uses out of them,” explained Lex. “Specifically, since all living creatures have an inherent degree of magic flowing through their bodies, I simply redirect mine so as to supplement a spell while I’m casting it. Depending on the rate of transfer, I can have it either replenish the energy as its being expended so as to maintain the thought-form, or expel it into the spell during its actualization so as to supplement the effect.”
Mystaria blinked once.
Then twice.
Then a third time.
Finally, she spoke.
“Are you...” She couldn’t seem to finish, swallowing before trying again. “Are you telling me that you’ve figured out a way to take the magical energy that your body gathers as a byproduct of its physical processes, and deliberately – as in, via conscious act of will – move it into conceptual structures?”
Lex shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard.”
“ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!” shrieked Mystaria, leaping up, her face twisted in an expression of incredulity. “Lex, do you have any idea how many archmages and wizard councils have tried to figure out how to do that?! I’ll give you a hint: ALL OF THEM! And you know how many have succeeded?! NONE OF THEM!”
“Mysty? Down girl,” soothed Spinner, going over and gently putting a hoof on her friend’s shoulder. “Didn’t you just say that sorcerers do that?”
Mystaria batted Spinner’s hoof away. “Not like this they don’t! I told you, sorcerers can’t choose their own spells! They just awaken to them, their brains developing micro-structures which make specific thought-forms on their own, letting their physical magical reserves flow through them!”
A crazed laugh escaped her then, causing Spinner to back away nervously. “But this guy” – Mystaria pointed at Lex then, a wild look in her eyes – “not only taught himself how to build those thought-forms via purely conceptual processes, which is the basis of wizardry, but he’s moving physical energy into them, which is the foundation of sorcery! That’s supposed to be impossible, and here he is saying it WASN’T EVEN THAT HARD?!”
“The point,” growled Lex, rapidly losing patience for Mystaria’s prolonged descent into hysterics, “is that while I haven’t actually augmented this particular spell before, my current form allows me to move larger amounts of energy into my spells than I could before. As such, my primary concern – which was trying to teleport to a destination while not being able to supply power sufficient to reach it – is largely allayed now. So I can-”
“No,” shrieked Mystaria. “That is NOT the point! The point is that you keep turning the conventions of magic on their heads! You have a familiar you shouldn’t be able to have! You deconstruct spells like they’re puzzle pieces! And now you’re casually ignoring the line between wizardry and sorcery! You can’t just act like that’s-, HEY! LET GO!”
“Everyone hang tight for a few minutes while we get Mysty straightened out,” sighed Valor, appearing at Mystaria’s right and grabbing hold of her.
“Bad enough you were just losing your mind, now you’re making our mage lose hers,” huffed Shadow, giving Lex a dark look as she took hold of Mystaria’s left.
Together, the two mares dragged her off back in the direction of the building they’d been staying in, squinting as they moved further from the light of Lex’s horn, Mystaria’s frenzied babbling accompanying them as they disappeared from sight.
“It’s been a while since this happened,” sighed Woodheart, looking at Spinner. “The last time was when we met that pony who said he could cast two spells at once, remember?”
“Yeah,” grinned Spinner. “That really drove her nuts, at least until we finally figured it out. Turned out he just had a partner who was casting the second spell while invisible, using some kind of magic wand so that he didn’t have to actually chant out loud to do it.”
The two chuckled at the memory for a few moments before the filidh turned back to Lex. “So listen, not to sound ungrateful or anything, but would it be possible for you to send us back to Viljatown instead of that snowy village where we met? You’ve been to Viljatown before, right?”
“I have, and I’m not sending you back there,” replied Lex tonelessly. “That city’s Mythril Map is a powerful teleportation device, and while I’m confident I can increase the range of my spell, I’m not risking possible interference from it.”
“...right, okay,” sighed the bard. “Well, at least we’ll be able to make our way to Bright Night and let Mysty see her grandmother. Hopefully that’ll calm her down some. And I guess if the range is a big deal, it’s better to keep it short since you’ll be sending five of us at once.”
“Seven,” amended Lex. “That’s the other reason I’m sending you away.”
Spinner blinked. “Huh?”
Lex gestured to the unconscious doppelganger floating in his telekinesis. “I want you to take Thermal Draft with you, and watch over her until I return.”
“You know, most people have the courtesy to ask for a favor instead of demanding one.”
Spinner rolled her eyes. “I don’t think you’re really in a position to complain about someone else’s poor manners, Shadow.”
“Besides, Drafty is our friend,” added Valor. “If we have a chance to take her out of danger, we have a responsibility to do so.”
“Especially since she did the same for me,” chimed in Woodheart, reaching up to casually pet Littleknight, who was perched on her back. “Besides, it’s always easier to sleep when someone’s watching over you. That’s why so many animals cuddle up when they slumber. That and warmth.”
“She’s not exactly sleeping,” corrected Mystaria, prompting a chorus of groans as the nun began to reiterate the exact nature of Thermal Draft’s current condition.
Lex ignored the earth mares’ antics as he carried the doppelganger they were discussing down the stone stairs, toward the cul-de-sac which hugged the underground river. Although it sat behind several of the Shrine’s outer defenses – including the rushing waters, which were magically kept out of the small alcove despite the lack of a physical barrier – the unworked recess of stone was technically outside of sanctified ground.
That was important, since that meant that the Shrine’s most potent defenses didn’t extend that far. Thanks to his enhanced senses and some brief experimentation, Lex now knew that those defenses included a powerful ward against planar travel...though that apparently didn’t include the Confluence. Indeed, Lex still wasn’t entirely sure if the unusual gateway to Darkest Night was the reason that no other form of dimensional movement was possible within the Shrine’s grounds, or if that was the result of some unrelated enchantment.
But that’s unimportant right now, he knew. His primary concern was calculating the proper amount of energy to feed his short-range teleportation spell so that it had sufficient power to not only reach the intended destination – without adding so much that he accidentally sent them somewhere else entirely – but was able to transport everyone.
While he’d used this spell in its unmodified state multiple times before, it had always been either alone or with a very small number of ponies. Sending an entire group – without making the journey himself – was another way in which he’d need to carefully modify the spell’s basic functionality via-
Master? Solvei’s voice in his head almost made Lex miss a step, resisting the urge to curse as he recalled that, although his new body was far more formidable than his old, he was still battling exhaustion. I just wanted to let you know that I’m finished with...that I’m finished, if you need me.
I don’t-, wait... Pausing as an idea came to him, Lex glanced from Thermal Draft to the five mares and the almiraj trailing behind him, running some quick mental calculations. Come to my current location. I have something I want you to do.
Understood. I’ll be right there.
Nodding to himself as he reached the cul-de-sac, Lex quickly reconfirmed how much more energy it would take to send Solvei along with the others. While that would necessitate some additional power, sending the winter wolf would mean that she’d be able to confirm their safe arrival via their telepathic link. Once that was done, he’d be able to summon her back to his side immediately.
Satisfied, Lex turned to look at the others. “All of you move closer together,” he announced. “The spell requires physical contact between everyone being teleported.”
“Aw, group hug!” cheered Woodheart, throwing a foreleg over Shadow and Spinner.
“I’ll carry Drafty,” volunteered Valor, standing up and holding her forelegs out.
Nodding, Lex carefully levitated the comatose doppelganger into her grasp, gratified to see that Valor was taking special care to treat her gently. “Once I’m done here, my next priority is her. Until then-”
“We’ll keep her safe.” Holding the unresponsive mare close, Valor nodded solemnly. “I swear to Makwa, anything that tries to hurt her will have to go through the five of us first.”
“Meep!”
“The six of us first.”
“But don’t think we’re going to stick around in that village,” cautioned Spinner. “Not after what the ponies there did. Instead, we’ll probably try and hoof it to Bright Night. It should be safer there, plus that way Mysty will have a chance to finally meet her grandmother, right Mysty?”
“Yeah...actually, that reminds me of something.” Stepping away from her friends, the novice nun caught Lex’s eye as she nodded back toward the stairs they’d just descended. “Lex, do you mind if I speak with you privately for a moment?”
“Ooh!” Woodheart’s eyes lit up, almost quivering in her leafy robe as she leaned closer to Spinner, lowering her voice to a whisper despite the close confines meaning that everyone could hear her. “I’ve heard about this! This is how female ponies make a mating proposal to males they favor, right?”
The comment made Mystaria blush, Valor wince, and Spinner put a hoof to her face as Shadow gave the filidh a wry look. “What was that you were saying about me being the one with no tact?”
“Just...everyone wait here, please!” huffed Mystaria, practically galloping back up the stairs, Lex following her at a more sedate pace.
Once they’d reached the top, the earth mare cast a quick spell, granting herself darkvision before rounding on Lex. “I’m sorry about Woodheart. She’s one of the nicest ponies you’ll ever meet, but she grew up in the wilderness, so there’s a lot of...I guess the term would be ‘social expectations,’ that she doesn’t understand.”
Having had his own problems with social expectations his entire life, Lex’s only reply was a grunt of acknowledgment.
But that was apparently enough for Mystaria. “That’s not all I wanted to apologize for either. I didn’t mean to rant at you before. It’s just, well...being a priestess of Luminace, I can get a little carried away when it comes to magic. But that’s not why I asked to speak with you.”
Taking a deep breath, Mystaria put a hoof to her holy symbol before meeting Lex’s eyes. “I wanted to say thank you, for sharing the details of your arcane magic with me.”
“Your gratitude isn’t necessary,” dismissed Lex. “If any of you tried to resist the spell, it could potentially disrupt its functionality, so it seemed self-evident that an explanation of its workings-”
“That’s not what I meant,” interrupted Mystaria. “After what happened the last time I asked you about your magic, I know it’s an uncomfortable subject. So I wanted to thank you for trusting me, for trusting all of us, with the details of why it’s so hard for you to replenish your spells.”
Frowning at the memory of how he’d lost control of himself so completely – and brought Woodheart to death’s door – the last time Mystaria had asked about his magic, Lex gave a curt nod, wanting this conversation to be over.
Mystaria, however, apparently wasn’t done. “Also, if you don’t mind my asking, how are you doing?”
Lex’s frown deepened, not in disapproval but in confusion. “How am I doing?”
“I mean, are you okay?” persisted Mystaria. “You’ve been through so much recently. Losing Solvei, finding out Thermal Draft was a doppelganger, not to mention this...” She waved a hoof up and then down, looking his altered form over. “And that’s just the most recent stuff to have happened. You haven’t even slept since we got here. And...”
She dropped her gaze. “And we haven’t exactly been all that helpful.”
“I never expected you to be,” replied Lex flatly. “I’ve known since we first fought that you and your friends aren’t strong. Even pooling your abilities, watching over Thermal Draft in a relatively civilized area is the very most I think you’re capable of accomplishing, and only because I have no better alternatives.”
A pained expression crossed Mystaria’s face. “I wasn’t referring to helping you fight. I mean, we haven’t made things any easier for you. I pushed too hard about your magic. Shadow keeps sniping at you. Spinner made that awful prediction. Valor’s been giving you the cold shoulder. And Woodheart...I won’t say she was wrong to try and save Toklo, but even if you hold it in, I can tell that you feel terrible about what happened to her.”
Letting out a breath, she lowered her hoof, giving him an earnest look. “That’s why, before you teleport us away, I wanted to ask how you were doing. I know the Night Mare’s faithful hate doing anything that would make them seem weak, but I also know that when you’re going through a hard time, just having someone listen – without judging – can make things a little easier. And since Akna...has her own things to work out right now, I wanted to let you know that I’m here for you.”
Lex hesitated, trying to parse what she was asking of him. But while his body had been upgraded, his ability to infer subtext remained as stunted as ever. “I don’t know what it is you want me to say-”
“Whatever you feel like saying.”
“-but this is a waste of time. The sooner you and your friends are sent back to safety, the sooner I can finish things here and give Thermal Draft my full attention.”
He started to turn back toward the stairs then, but Mystaria put a hoof on his side. “Wait. One more thing.”
Gritting his teeth, Lex scowled at her, but the earth mare didn’t notice, glancing back at her saddlebag as she dug through it. After a few seconds of searching, she withdrew a small bauble, holding it out to him. “Here, I want you to have this.”
Raising a brow, Lex looked at the item she was holding toward him.
It was a double-headed clasp, the kind that rich ponies used to fasten a cloak around their necks. Fashioned of silver and patterned with gold trim, it was ornately crafted to resemble two ponies – mares each – in an embrace, both reaching their forlegs around the other to form the clamps on each end of the clasp.
“See the inscription on the back?” prompted Mystaria. “It’s in Tianyu, the celestial script. Can you read it?”
“Of course I can,” snorted Lex, turning the clasp over to look at the array of logographs on the back. “Ward against ironic retribution,” he pronounced a moment later.
Mystaria giggled. “That’s the literal translation, yes, but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be ‘protection from poetic justice.’ I’ve been going through the things my parents left me, and this is one of them. I’m pretty sure that my grandmother created it, since she’s an emeritus at Bright Night and this is enchanted.”
Quirking a brow, Lex let his vision slip into the magical spectrum, even as Mystaria kept talking. “It has an abjuration on it which makes the wearer immune to their own spells, unless they directly cast them on themselves. I’m pretty sure it’s to prevent someone from reflecting an attack spell back at you, which is kind of strange because ‘spell turning,’ as it’s called, is actually a rather esoteric magical technique, not to mention a difficult one to pull off. But that’s not even the weirdest thing about that enchantment! It’s that-”
“It’s recursive,” muttered Lex, his brow furrowing as he stared at the clasp.
“That’s right! How did you...no, after everything else you’ve done, I shouldn’t be surprised you figured it out that fast.”
Lex didn’t bother to correct her, since despite her statement to the contrary, the unusual nature of the clasp’s enchantment was a puzzle to him to him.
The magical protection woven into the item did indeed ward the wearer against their own magic; that much was obvious to Lex’s augmented vision. But the inlaid energies were looped back on themselves, not just once but several times over, in a way that was like nothing Lex had ever seen before.
The iterative nature of the enchantment meant that the basic functionality it granted was enhanced...but in a strangely indirect manner. The initial layer of the warding already protected the wearer from their own spells, no matter how powerful they were or what they did; so long as the bearer of the clasp was wearing it both when the spell was cast and when it was turned back on him, the magic would be harmlessly scattered. But that protection was then looped back on itself, the arrangement passing through the initial set of programmed instructions in a way that altered them – no, that annotated them – so as to...to...
Lex’s frown deepened as he found himself unable to decipher the puzzle.
It was one of, or perhaps even the single most, complex pieces of magical construction that he’d ever seen. Not the most powerful – it had nowhere near the amount of magic that something like Severance had possessed – but the detailed construction was on a level that was leagues beyond anything he’d ever come across. And if Mystaria’s grandmother had been the one to create this...
“I’m just letting you borrow it,” continued Mystaria, apparently taking his silence for approval. “Until you can come back and take care of Drafty, okay? I don’t know if it’ll help you, but Sissel seemed like she had some pretty impressive magic of her own, and if there’s any chance this might help you out...”
“I understand,” murmured Lex, examining the clasp one more time before reluctantly donning it. Despite not being entirely certain what it did – though he’d found nothing to indicate that it was in any way a danger to the wearer – he couldn’t put aside the fact that Mystaria was right. Sissel had shown herself to be a spellcaster of considerable power, and despite having gained a great deal of new strength, Lex knew he was in no position to turn down an additional measure of protection.
Even if he wasn’t completely certain what exactly that protection afforded.
“Master?” Solvei’s voice made Mystaria jump, Lex turning to look at the adlet-turned-wolf – now back in her lupine form – much more slowly. “Is everything alright?”
Putting aside the mystery of the clasp for now, Lex nodded. “Everything’s fine.”
“Akna! I’m glad you’re here! I wanted to say goodbye to you too!” Smiling, Mystaria trotted over and gave the wolf a quick hug. “Lex conjured up some food before. Teyu ate most of it, and we all helped ourselves too, but there should be some left if you’re hungry.”
Solvei winced a little at that, giving the nun a weak smile. “Thanks, but I don’t really have an appetite right now.”
Mystaria cocked her head. “Oh.”
Not wanting to think about what Solvei had been doing, Lex gestured to the stairs, looking at Mystaria. “I’m sending Solvei back with you so that she can confirm your safe arrival, after which I’ll bring her back here. Now, let’s go.”
He didn’t wait for a reply before heading back down, the other two following behind him. He heard them conversing in soft tones, but ignored them, doing the same thing when they reached the bottom of the stairs a moment later and began casting his spell, carefully feeding additional power through it.
But despite his best efforts, threads of their conversation managed to penetrate his consciousness.
“I’m kinda sad we’re leaving so soon,” murmured Woodheart. “I really wanted to talk to some of the creatures living here.”
“Trust me, they weren’t the friendly type,” snorted Shadow as she glanced his way. “I guess that’s something all of the Night Mare’s faithful have in common.”
“Honestly, I’m mostly just glad we’ll be away from that building shaped like a giant claw,” sighed Spinner, a shiver running through her. “Seeing all those stone creatures on top of the surrounding buildings made me think that used to be the claw of something huge, and it was just waiting to be unpetrified so it could take a swipe at us.”
“It would have been fine,” tsked Valor. “We were staying far enough away from it that even if that happened, we were beyond its reach.”
For some reason that made Lex frown, and he narrowed his eyes as he finished the casting. Satisfied that he’d threaded the correct amount of energy into the underlying spell structure, he turned back toward the assembled group. Now that the spell had been activated, all he needed to do was touch one of its targets, and they and everyone in contact with them, other than himself, would be instantaneously transported to their destination.
Mystaria smiled at him as he turned her way. “Good luck, Lex! We’ll be waiting for you with Thermal Draft at Bright Night!”
“Give those ugly freaks hell!” cheered Spinner. “Maybe bring us back some treasure, if they have it!”
“After everything you’ve put us through, we deserve it,” snorted Shadow. “And maybe try and fix the weather, if you want to actually help someone for a change.”
“May you return quickly and in triumph.” Holding Thermal Draft close, Valor gave him a nod before the corners of her lips turned up. “That’s how we say goodbye out on the plains.”
“We don’t usually say goodbyes too much in the forest,” added Woodheart, raising a hoof to give him a wave. “We just sort of take it for granted that we’ll meet again. It’s less sad that way.”
Standing at the front of the group, Solvei straightened up. “Don’t worry, Master. If there’s anything there which might be a threat, I’ll take care of it.”
Lex nodded, and – not caring to say anything else to any of them – reached out and placed his claw on Solvei’s side.
Instantly, the lot of them vanished.
At the same moment, Lex registered Solvei’s presence as being several miles to the southeast. But before he could ask her if it had worked, her voice flowed into his mind.
We’re back in the village, Master! Everything looks like it’s okay...except for a few ponies who seem pretty surprised. But they’re not reaching for weapons, so I think it’s fine.
Good. I’ll call you back now.
Actually, Master...I’m sorry to ask, but would it be alright if you waited a few minutes? I want to say goodbye to everyone too.
The request made a thread of anxiety run through Lex, finding himself unhappy at the thought of being apart from her, recalling how the last time they’d parted company, she’d been slain. Knowing that he was being foolish, Lex pushed that feeling away. Just a few minutes.
Thank you, Master!
Sighing, Lex slowly climbed back up the staircase, knowing he’d need to wait outside the Shrine proper in order to summon Solvei back. Glancing inside, he switched his vision over to the ultraviolet spectrum as he glanced at the cathedral.
For some reason, he called what Spinner had said about fearing that it would take a swipe at her, to which Valor had said they were beyond its reach.
And then he remembered of his recent encounter with the Keeper.
“Bbbeeeyyyooonnnddd rrreeeaaaccchhh!!!” moaned the skull. “Iiittt iiisss bbbeeeyyyooonnnddd rrreeeaaaccchhh!!!”
In that moment, Lex was suddenly glad he hadn’t summoned Solvei back, since it spared him the embarrassment of her seeing his jaw drop and his eyes widen as he looked up at where the claw-shaped building’s talons were extended upward, stopping just short of the roof of the cave.
Master, you don’t need to do this now, do you? Why not get some rest first?
Despite Solvei’s pleading, Lex – currently in shadow-form – continued toward the top of the cathedral. The Keeper may be mad, but he’s not a fool. If he realizes that I’ve come to understand the nature of the clue I forced him to reveal, he might take action to remove whatever it was that he hid.
But wouldn’t he have done that by now anyway? complained the winter wolf. I mean, he had all that time that you were conducting that ceremony. Wouldn’t he have moved it then?
That’s possible, but unlikely, countered Lex. Thus far, the Keeper has shown himself to possess no capacity for magic. He hasn’t cast any spells, used telekinesis, or shown himself to have any notable powers. Even his current state – with its attendant abilities of flight and his aura of supernatural darkness – are by his own admission the results of his own use of the Confluence.
Across their link, Lex registered confusion from Solvei then. So?
So, answered Lex, If he required any sort of assistance in concealing whatever it was that he brought here, he’d need one of his acolytes to help him do it. Quite possibly most of them if he needed to formally invoke the Night Mare’s power, since that’s the only sort of magic he seems to have. And since all of his minions were with me...
Lex didn’t bother finishing his thought as he reached the top of the cathedral, ignoring Solvei’s statement of understanding as he changed back to his corporeal form-
And staggered, the newfound muscles of his enhanced body straining before he managed to right himself. Even then, he found himself panting with effort, needing several seconds to recover from changing back. But in that time, he heard no sounds from within the cathedral; no snarled threats from the Keeper, no rushing footsteps of his acolytes, or anything else to mark that they were aware of his being there.
Which was, of course, the entire reason he’d changed into a shadow in the first place; with most this place’s residents only having – as far as he knew – limited-range darkvision, it was far easier to avoid notice by flying to the cathedral’s roof rather than by traversing its interior.
Still, that he’d been able to make the trip that way was a pleasant surprise. Although he’d completely expended his dark magic – which, unlike the Charismata and his divine spells, wouldn’t replenish itself until he rested – before going through the so-called Rite of Sublimation, Lex had long grown used to forcing himself to go beyond his physical limits. And since the magic of his horn was physical by nature, he’d known that he could forcibly draw on some extra power at the cost of his stamina.
In his old body that wouldn’t have been possible in the state he was in now; the level of exhaustion that he was fighting would have meant that he’d have collapsed, quite likely injuring himself in the process.
But his new body had strength to spare, and although even it was nearing its limits, Lex was pleased to confirm once again just how far those limits exceeded what he’d previously been capable of.
At the moment, however, that was less important to him than the cavern ceiling was. If whatever magic the Keeper had brought to the Shrine of the Starless Sky truly was “beyond reach,” as he’d said, then it had to be here. Which meant...
Narrowing his eyes, Lex again called upon his horn’s magic as he enhanced his vision. Fortunately, that was such a minor bit of magic that even in his weakened state he felt no strain to speak of, instead looking at the onyx-lined ceiling above him.
Master, are you sure you don’t want to at least summon me up there so I can help you? whined Solvei in his mind.
Lex didn’t bother shaking his head, continuing his examination of the roof of the cave even as he answered her. That wouldn’t work. The teleportation effect I use to call to you my side works by moving you through the Astral Plane. Since this cathedral is warded against planar travel, that isn’t something which can be done here.
So that’s why you took everyone to the riverside before you sent them away! exclaimed Solvei. I thought you were just being sentimental!
That was enough to earn a derisive snort from Lex, and he was about to ask her how exactly that would have worked when he caught a glimpse of something.
The decorative aspects of the Shrine of the Starless Sky had been constructed with a careful eye for detail. While the most obvious efforts had gone toward the stylized cathedral that dominated the surrounding buildings, the onyx stones covering the sides and top of the cave had been intricately laid as well. No two pieces were the same, and having grown up with a lapidary for a mother, Lex could tell that while each stone had been lovingly polished, none had been cut. That made it all the more impressive that each piece of onyx had been fitted together so closely that there was barely a fraction of a millimeter between them.
But it wasn’t just that they were snug in their positioning, but that their collective surfaces were contiguous in their thickness, the polishing having left the surface of each stone perfectly level with its neighbors.
Except for one particularly large block of onyx directly overhead, which was jutted out a hair’s breadth more than the surrounding pieces.
It was the sort of thing which wouldn’t have been noticeable unless you were already looking at it. Indeed, Lex was looking at it, and even then it was only because he was able to enhance his vision that he was able to notice it at all. There was no other indicators in place, or at least none that were magical; a quick examination via the magical spectrum showed no spells or other magic in place.
But that’s what you’d want for a hiding place, Lex knew. An obtrusive defense, no matter how potent, defeats the purpose of putting something in a place no one would ever think to look.
Even so, Lex spent the better part of a minute examining the stone and the surrounding area for magical emanations. Back in Darkest Night, he’d drawn White Wraith into a feint by placing a false aura around his broken mask, making it look like it was still a potent weapon despite having lost all of its power. But in the course of researching the spell for that, Lex had confirmed that the opposite – using magic to conceal an active aura – was also possible. Which meant that just because he hadn’t seen any magical traps didn’t mean that there were none.
It was only after he confirmed the total lack of active magical auras in the surrounding area – his own gear notwithstanding – that Lex decided he’d need to chance it.
Hoping that he’d been right to assure Solvei that the Keeper had little in the way of personal magic, Lex stepped out from under the stone before he reached out and grabbed the edge of it in his telekinesis.
It wasn’t an ideal way to test whether or not the large onyx truly concealed a secret; changing back into a shadow and phasing through it would have been far more ideal. But in his current condition, that would have required more strength than simply trying to force the stone to move. Hopefully the upraised talons that ringed the top of the cathedral would block out the dim glow of his purple aura.
Since telekinesis offered no tactile feedback, Lex stared at the round black rock as he tried to pull on it, each passing second seeing him tug with greater force.
But the rock refused to budge.
Not ready to admit that his speculation had been unfounded, Lex instead reversed course, pushing the massive onyx upward. That was far more difficult, as it required displacing the stone against gravity, but he persisted, able to exert far more force now that his body’s magical channels allowed him to exert far more force than he could have before.
A moment later his efforts were rewarded. With a soft scraping sound, the onyx slid upward slightly, dust falling from the ceiling to mark its movement.
Encouraged, and relieved that no hidden spell had been tripped, Lex renewed his efforts. Pressing his telekinesis more, he could tell from how little headway he was making that the onyx had to have weighed a great deal; several hundred pounds at least. But slowly, it slid upward...only to stop once he’d pushed it nearly a foot into the ceiling.
Snarling, Lex tried to wrench it back and forth, hoping to dislodge whatever it had caught on. But his surprise was complete as the stone turned almost ninety degrees, realizing belatedly that there was some sort of groove that it was set in, almost able to see the insets from where he’d already pushed the stone upward...and more leading back down now that he’d changed its position.
Lowering the onyx, which slid free from its place in the ceiling now that it had been rotated, Lex slowly brought it down to rest on the cathedral’s ceiling. Free from where it had been set, he could see that it was indeed a single massive piece of pure onyx, forming a stopper nearly three feet deep.
But as much as it was a marvel of both geology and carving, Lex was less interested in it than in what was behind it. Stepping on top of the stone plug, he vaulted himself upward, making sure not to damage the grooves as he caught their edges with his talons, hauling himself upward.
The small room, roughly half the size of the place where he and the mares of Fail Forward had resided during their stay, that was waiting for him lacked the rest of the Shrine’s grandeur. The unworked stone walls were bare of onyx covering, nor were there any carvings of the Night Mare’s holy symbol. There weren’t even any creature comforts, lacking even the most basic of amenities.
But that didn’t mean it was empty.
Lying off to the side was a dust-covered sword, its edge chipped and dull. Next to it was a set of plain boots alongside a pile of muddy clothes, all of them dust-covered and half-rotted with decay. Nor was the simple set of quilted armor in any better condition, time having reduced it to so much rags. And none of them were magical, Lex confirmed a moment later.
But the same could not be said for the book lying in the far corner of the room.
Indeed, it was radiating so much magic that it almost made Lex’s eyes smart from how brightly it glowed, causing the small chamber to shine as though a floodlight had been turned on it. What-
“Ah, so that’s where he hid it.”
Whirling, Lex turned around...
And found himself staring right at Sanguine Disposition.
“I have to admit, I should have thought to look here,” grinned the vampire, speaking as though he were carrying on a conversation that the two of them had been having for several minutes now. “I mean, a secret room just above a grasping claw? It’s almost trite when you think about it. But I didn’t think of it, so I suppose I can’t bring myself to criticize.”
Casually strolling around Lex, the undead leatherwing wrinkled his nose as he glanced at the discarded clothing. “You know, I’m almost tempted to wave these in the Keeper’s fleshless face. He likes to say he’s the bastard son of some forgotten king, and yet I doubt that even disgraced royalty would wear rags such as those.”
“What are you doing here?!” hissed Lex, unnerved at having been so easily caught unaware. “How did you evade my notice?!”
This was the second time the vampire had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, the first time having been when Sanguine Disposition had intervened to save White Wraith, but between his augmented senses and having taken the time to check for local magic, Lex felt particularly aghast at having been unable to detect the vampire’s presence.
“Oh, you weren’t aware of me?” His brows rising slightly, Sanguine Disposition looked back at Lex. “I was sure my little gift tipped you off that I’d come through the Confluence; I even made sure to place it in such a way as to keep that bloodless buffoon who oversees this place from hurting your little friends. He’s not really much of a threat, but with them being blind and all, who’s to say what he might have gotten that dog of yours to do? But I certainly didn’t expect my anti-detection spells to fool even you.”
Not sure if he was being taunted or not, Lex glared at the leatherwing. But he was angry at himself as much as the vampire; as galling as it was to admit, he should have realized that the reappearance of the giant quill he’d lost in Darkest Night – complete with a note from Sanguine Disposition himself referencing Lex’s new body – had meant that the Night Mare’s other champion was lurking about. In hindsight it seemed so obvious as to be embarrassing; he’d even recognized the possibility that magical auras could be hidden, not realizing he should have been wary of an interloper rather than a trap!
“You haven’t answered my other question,” growled Lex through gritted teeth. “Why are you here?”
“That’s not obvious either?” tsked Sanguine Disposition. “I was hoping you’d find what the Keeper’s been hiding away all this time. Why do you think I told you about it in the first place?”
For a moment Lex seriously considered manifesting another weapon designed to target the undead, the way he had back in Eigengrau when the vampire had pushed him too far. But there was no point in making the attempt now; unlike the Charismata and his divine magic, whatever new power he’d discovered as a result of mastering his tulpa was still refusing to activate; apparently, like his dark magic, it required rest to replenish.
But that didn’t mean that Sanguine Disposition knew that. “And you think I’ll let you just take that book and leave?”
“Why not? I did bring you a gift and all. Some might say that say you owe me one.”
Smirking, Sanguine Disposition’s threw Lex a wink over his shoulder as he sauntered over to the tome in question. “But I might be open to changing my mind if you feel like...persuading me,” he purred, looking the unicorn up and down. “Have I mentioned just how fetching your new look is?”
His lip curling in disgust, Lex briefly ran through several scenarios where he took the book by force, but reluctantly made himself to discard the notion. Even if the vampire had been telling the truth about the Night Mare not allowing her champions to attack each other directly, and even if this hidden room was technically outside of the Shrine’s sanctified area and its prohibition on combat between the goddess’s faithful, the fact remained that Sanguine Disposition had again proven himself to be a powerful and versatile spellcaster.
Lex had no compunctions about fighting a foe who was stronger than himself. But he also knew better than to undertake such a confrontation lightly. Especially when it was over a magic item of unknown provenance and abilities, no matter how great its power was.
With no other option, he simply glared at the vampire, seething.
“Ah well, such a shame,” pouted Sanguine Disposition before shrugging. “To business then.”
Crossing the distance to the book, he reached out and placed his hoof on the cover, closing his eyes. “Let’s see here.”
Realizing that leatherwing was using the Secreta, Lex slipped his vision back into the magical spectrum...but whether it was because of the vampire’s magic, or (more likely, in Lex’s estimation) the Night Mare’s gift to him was as undetectable to conventional magic as the Charismata was, his spell returned no results, showing only the impressive magic of the book itself.
With no other options, Lex could only wait for Sanguine Disposition to finish his examination.
The vampire didn’t make him wait very long, chuckling as he opened his eyes and removed his hoof. “Well well well...now this is a rare treasure. I’ve heard about this particular codex many times over the years, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a copy.”
Lifting it up, he started to tuck it into a saddlebag, only to stop as he glanced back at where Lex was glowering at him. For a moment his eyes flickered between the stallion and the book, and then he lowered it with a sigh. “I hate the thought of you resenting me for this,” he muttered, rooting around in a different pouch. “So how about you and I split the difference?”
Lex frowned. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“This book has its own way of doing things,” answered Sanguine Disposition, before shaking his head. “No, that’s the wrong way of putting it. It’s not alive, so much as it has a certain set of rules that it follows. One of which is that it once someone reads it cover-to-cover, it always moves on, making itself available for someone else to find. Ah, here we are!”
Withdrawing a diamond the size of a grapefruit, Sanguine Disposition began uttering a quick series of words as he started performing gestures in rapid succession. But as fast as he was chanting, Lex could still catch the nature of the spell he was casting, and it was enough to make his breath catch in his throat.
Direct reality manipulation! he realized, stunned. That’s the province of the gods, except he’s artificially recreating it with a spell!
Awed, Lex could only watch as the strongest spell he’d ever seen was cast right in front of his eyes.
The closest thing he’d ever seen to what the vampire was doing was on the spell scroll that he’d taken from Xiriel, after he’d slain the devil back in Vanhoover. Although it had destroyed itself in a trap which Lex had carelessly set off, he’d later been able to recreate one of the spells on it, an open-ended enchantment which had pulled in a huge amount of magic which let the caster shape it in any manner he desired. In essence, it had allowed for almost any sort of magical effect to take place, albeit within the limits for what that much power could do.
In his case, Lex had used it to replenish his own magical stores, giving him the strength necessary to augment his floating gemstones – also taken from the devil – and pass them on to Garden Gate, letting her stop the ghouls who had gotten past Severance.
But what Sanguine Disposition was doing now was far and away greater. Rather than simply gathering ambient magic to allow for an open-ended spell, he was concentrating so much power in the local area that the fabric of the universe was starting to strain under it. Which, Lex knew, was the entire point; like a steel bar heated until it became malleable, the vampire’s spell was putting so much stress on reality that it was open to being reshaped. All that was left was for Sanguine Disposition to make the changes that he wanted...though even then, Lex knew it would still have to be extremely localized.
That didn’t detract from the sublime feat that the vampire was performing, however. While it was bludgeoning the universe into submission rather than deftly overwriting it the way the Charismata did, it was nevertheless a spell of not only massive power, but unimaginable complexity. To make a small portion of the existence open to reinterpretation, without any divine backing...
If there had ever been any doubt in Lex’s mind that Sanguine Disposition was a wizard of extreme skill, it was gone now.
And then Sanguine Disposition finished the spell, opening his mouth to give the universe its new instructions.
“I wish to be the one this book appears before after it’s next read.”
There was a sense of pressure giving way then, and Lex knew that it was reality stabilizing. The book, despite being the subject of the vampire’s so-called wish – as though a spell that powerful could be called something so bromidic! – appeared no different. Only the massive diamond that the vampire had brought out, which Lex now realized had acted as a lens to properly direct the spell’s activation, was gone, consumed by the incredible energies Sanguine Disposition had so easily unleashed.
As for the leatherwing himself, he stretched and let out a groan, looking more like he’d just finished a long day filling out paperwork than casting a spell of godlike power. “There. Now you can get first crack at it, and I’ll read it after you’re done,” he announced, giving Lex a smirk. “I usually like to play with new toys immediately, but you know what they say.”
Slinking back toward the exit, the vampire lowered his voice to a husky whisper as he passed Lex. “Anticipation makes fulfillment that much sweeter.”
Still disconcerted after the incredible display of magic he’d witnessed, Lex didn’t reply as Sanguine Disposition walked by him, the leatherwing’s tail brushing his side as he left.
“Oh, and by the way.” Stopping just in front of the hole, the vampire shot him another grin, this time flashing a fang in the process. “You still owe me one.”
Then he dropped out of sight.
Lex didn’t bother confirming that he was gone – now that he was aware of just how powerful the bearer of the Secreta truly was, it seemed like a pointless activity – instead turning his attention back to the book which had prompted the incredible magical display. Still shaken from what he’d just witnessed, it was morbid curiosity that made him lift it in his telekinesis, curious about what was so impressive as to warrant Sanguine Disposition using such powerful magic to ensure that he’d have a chance to read it.
Certainly, the magic aura around this tome was powerful, but after such a grandiose display it was hard for Lex to imagine that the vampire was all that impressed by it!
Slowly, he flipped open the cover...
And beheld a blank page.
Blinking, Lex could only stare, nonplussed at the lack of writing. What-
Then, before his eyes, ink bubbled up on the page. Moving as though being directed by some unseen stylus, it slithered across the unmarked surface, forming an illustration that took up the entire square of parchment. In moments, there was an image of a face – one which was vaguely humanoid in design, with its bald head and bushy beard suggesting a masculine countenance – though the horns sprouting from its head were distinctly demonic in nature. Its eyes were wide, wit the brows positioned that it could have been screaming or scowling.
But it was clearly doing one or the other, as its mouth was open as wide as possible, and inside its maw was utter blackness, as though its mouth contained a void rather than passage into its gullet.
For a moment Lex could only stare at the image, and his magical senses registered something happening. It was enough to make Lex tense, readying his dark magic in case the book attacked his mind. This was, after all, the item that had driven the Keeper mad, and while Lex felt confident that he was made of far sterner stuff, he wasn’t about to let confidence undercut caution.
But after several seconds, nothing happened, and Lex almost put the book down when the page turned of its own accord. Again, he found himself facing a blank square, but this time when the ink bubbled up out of nowhere, it formed words instead of a picture.
You are to be congratulated, it read. Few are those with the intellectual curiosity, spiritual discipline, and moral fortitude to be found worthy of these words. All you need prove now is your courage, for the knowledge contained within these pages opens paths that most dare not walk. Read on, and know that you are among the chosen who are burdened with the horrific majesty of knowing what fate that lurks past the veil of mortality.
Again the page flipped by itself, and again the ink appeared, forming words of its own accord.
Beyond this world are the divine domains Which the gods call home, and mortals call planes To these worlds we fly, when our bodies are no longer whole Our eternal rest, the last home for the soul This we are told, and taken as truth And thus do we all play the fools, forsooth Read on, for the facts past these lies the gods call salvation Dwell within this tome, the Libram of Ineffable Damnation.
Solvei’s resurrection. A new body. Control of his tulpa, and the ability to have it spontaneously manifest things at his command. All bounties that Lex had received from his pilgrimage to the Shrine of the Starless Sky and subsequent sojourn to Darkest Night, the realm where his goddess dwelt.
But while all of those had been purchased at the high cost of realizing that his heart’s desire – to truly understand others, and be understood by them in turn – was something he’d never have, Lex considered it a worthwhile trade. For his gains had come with several indirect benefits as well. His new body had increased magical capacity. Solvei had Akna’s form, and likely her powers as well. And with his tulpa finally under his control, he could at last sleep peacefully.
That last one had been a hidden benefit which Lex had been looking forward to ever since realizing that the partitioned fraction of his mind was no longer rogue. After nearly two years of nightly distress, chased by horrific dreams that made him hesitate to close his eyes, he’d eagerly anticipated sleep once again being a form of respite, rather than another source of pain.
But after having returned from the Shrine’s claw-shaped cathedral with the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, reading its pages even as he and Solvei had retired back to the building they’d formerly shared with Fail Forward, Lex had come to realize that his anticipation of a pleasant night’s rest was premature. Because with the turn of each page, the secrets revealed in the Libram caused his unease to grow, Lex recalled that even with his tulpa reined in, there were plenty of things which could still cause him unpleasant dreams.
He was more right than he realized.
“How dare you...”
Lex had no reaction to the words, refusing to turn his head. Instead, he steadfastly stared forward, gazing at the wall of blue flames that sprung up from the featureless blackness beneath him. Even when the barbed wire around his hoof constricted to the point of cutting into his leg, he made no sound; that particular pain was something he’d felt often enough that he’d since grown accustomed to it.
But the Night Mare was not content to only show her anger through the holy symbol embedded into his body, growling as she stalked closer to his unprotected back.
“After all the favor I’ve shown you – naming you my champion, lending you my power, helping you to cultivate your own strength – this is how you repay me?”
A hoof struck the ground – or whatever it was that he was standing on – behind him, and the force of it made him brace himself, the blue flames around him flickering from the strike. “How many times did I lend you my aid, above and beyond the terms of our original covenant? I gave you a resurrection spell when you failed to protect my first true cleric on your world, allowing you to raise not only her, but the others whom you allowed to be slaughtered.”
Another strike, closer this time. “I withdrew Severance when you could no longer countenance its presence, even though it acted more directly in my interests than you did, for the most generous of terms.”
Again a harsh blow made the blue fires shiver, and now Lex could feel the goddess standing over him, the weight of her anger almost a physical thing, causing him to clench his jaw as he refused to be cowed. “Offering you my counsel again and again, granting you wisdom and revelations which guided you to victory.”
The barbed wire clenched harder then. “And that was before I saved your wretched, misspent life, bringing you here so that you could at last shed your weakness! It was through me that you found the courage to take a servant eternal! Through me that you confronted the truth about yourself! Through me that you uplifted your body!”
When next the goddess spoke, it was in a harsh whisper that came right next to his ear. “I even granted your request to pull that faithless whore of yours back from the edge of oblivion. All of this I’ve done for you, and yet now you stand there, prepared to repudiate me, knowing the consequences of such disloyalty! This, I will not tolerate!”
This time she didn’t wait for him to reply – or perhaps she knew that he had no intention of doing so – and a bat-like wing of gargantuan proportions scooped him up, curling around him with a dexterity beyond what such an appendage should have had, pinning his limbs painfully against his body as the Night Mare turned him to face her.
“YOU WILL SPEAK TO ME!!!” she thundered, red eyes glowing brightly as she bared fangs that were larger than he was. Malice radiated off of the enraged deity in waves, causing Lex to flatten his ears involuntarily. “CEASE THIS AFFRONTERY AND RECOVER YOUR TONGUE, LEST I BRING MY WRATH UPON YOU FOR YOUR PERFIDY!!! SPEAK!!!”
And then, Lex did.
“Is it true?”
Around him, the Night Mare’s wing squeezed him harder, nearly driving the breath from his lungs. “HOW DARE YOU ASK ME THAT?! HAVE I NOT EARNED YOUR LOYALTY?! YOUR DEVOTION?! YOUR FAITH?!”
“This is my faith,” countered Lex, meeting the Night Mare’s eyes unflinchingly. “Tell me that what’s written in that book is false, and I’ll believe you. But if you can’t say that it is...”
The Night Mare hurled him to the ground so fast that he didn’t have a chance to brace for impact. That he managed to right himself after only bouncing once was more due to his new instincts than his defiance, somehow managing to arrest his momentum before he careened into the blue fire surrounding them.
“Tell me!” he repeated. “Is the Libram of Ineffable Damnation full of lies? Or is what it said about you and the other gods true?”
Above him, the goddess’s eyes glowed redder even as they narrowed. “You think you can issue me an ultimatum, as though I were one of those pathetic mares clinging to your cloak like so much refuse?!”
“This is not an ultimatum,” countered Lex. “I’m simply using the resources at my disposal. That book made an accusation, and since my goddess has seen fit to visit me personally, I want to hear her response to it.”
“A response that you’re prepared to abandon me over!”
“Yes, I am,” admitted Lex. “And I’m only willing to take such a drastic measure because I know you’d never tell me a comforting lie, regardless of the consequences. As I said, that’s my faith in you.”
This time the Night Mare was the one who fell silent, the barbed wire around his hoof slowly starting to ease its torturous grasp as Lex met her eyes and waited.
Finally, after an interminable period of time, the Night Mare spoke. “It is a half-truth.”
The answer brought a scowl to Lex’s lips. “A half-truth?” he sneered. “That book alleged that mortal souls which go to the realm of a god don’t remain there forever, but are eventually devoured by the deities who rule those realms, and you say it’s a half-truth?!”
“You wanted me to answer your question!” thundered the Night Mare. “Now resume the silence you clung to so obstinately and allow me to do so!”
Letting out a slow breath, Lex held his tongue and waited.
Waiting just long enough to confirm that she wouldn’t be interrupted again, the Night Mare continued. “I told you when we first made our pact that the souls of mortals who revere a god – or who possess a piece of their essence, as I gave to you – go to that god’s realm when they die. Once there, a number of possible fates await them. Some are selected for higher purposes, transformed into proxies who work the will of their divine masters. Others are lost to those who trespass the realm, slain or abducted by the invaders. But most continue their spiritual evolution until that journey reaches its natural conclusion.”
Lex’s brow furrowed at that, and he wasn’t surprised when the goddess anticipated his next question. “That conclusion is what that tome of yours disingenuously described as being devoured, a term which blasphemes the sacred union of the mortal with the divine.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that the soul merges with the god, becoming an infinitesimal part of that divinity. In that way they continue to exist forever, a literal part of something greater than themselves.”
“And does their consciousness survive?” pressed Lex. “Or do they cease to exist as anything other than a final source of sustenance for you after taking in a lifetime of their faith?”
“Their consciousness transcends the petty mortal concerns that they had in life,” corrected the goddess. “They no longer fixate on petty matters such as survival or breeding; they experience only the fulfillment that comes with being an aspect of a higher form of existence. It’s a union which brings them beyond their limited selves, and is undertaken of their own accord, developing a deeper understanding of what their deity truly is as they prepare to become part of them.”
“And for that, they sacrifice their memories of when they were alive, as well as a chance to continue existing for eternity as independent beings?” Lex snorted. “Tell me, would anyone worship you if they knew that was the choice they were being offered?”
But rather than grow angrier, the Night Mare laughed. “It’s clear you haven’t finished reading that book of yours,” she sneered, her voice taunting. “Otherwise, you’d never have made such a foolish assumption.”
Lex frowned. He knew that mortals who didn’t worship a god went to one of the Outer Planes after death, gravitating to a realm which matched their numinous gradient. But he’d simply assumed that – notwithstanding those who were slain, or who wrapped themselves in the substance of the plane in order to become demons, angels, and similar beings – they remained there forever, fully aware of who they’d been in life. Even after what the Night Mare had told him, there was no god for those souls to join with, so what else could have awaited them?
“Do you really think the souls of those who die without faith end up any differently?” scoffed the goddess, as though aware of his thoughts. “All those who die lose their memories when their souls transition to another realm, shedding them alongside their bodies so that they can focus on purifying and refining their souls. Only theirs merge with the plane itself, rather than a god.”
That was news to Lex. “What? I thought-”
“You thought,” interrupted the Night Mare, “that they got to live a static existence, forever aware of who they’d been, making new lives for themselves in realms of like-minded fellows.”
Again, the goddess leaned her head toward him, wearing her scorn openly. “If that were the case, then the Outer Realms would have been overpopulated to bursting eons ago. What happens is that the souls simply become part of those worlds, becoming submerged in the concepts each such plane represents, like a corpse in the mortal world being broken down and turned into so much fertilizer, their energy wasted as their journey comes to an end.”
“And what of the journey you’ve had me on?” shot back Lex, changing the subject abruptly. “All of the parallels to my old life that I’ve experienced since coming here? Is that all part of my ‘spiritual development’ also?”
Although it had nothing to do with what he’d read in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, those questions had been weighing on his mind for some time now. Despite having to put those questions aside in favor of a slew of more immediate concerns, it hadn’t escaped his notice that his time on Everglow had mirrored his recent return to Equestria in many ways. Too many to be simple coincidences.
On both worlds, he’d been in the company of a mare only to come across a monster that he’d tried to slay, his female companion staying his hoof long enough for him to find out that the creature needed his help, turning them into an ally as they faced a much greater threat.
On both worlds, he’d stumbled across a group of ponies trapped in an ecological disaster, terrorized by monsters that shouldn’t have been there, and who had no one else to turn to for help.
On both worlds, a devil had sought to take advantage of the disaster in order to pervert the souls of ponies using guile and deception, doing terrible things to someone he cared about before being slain, mocking his victory with a final revelation about its schemes.
And those were just the most obvious comparisons. There were numerous others of a more subtle variety, ranging from his finding new ways to use the Charismata during a crisis to his taking a new lover and coming to regret it. But while he suspected that at least some of those correspondences were the product of his own mind, the greater ones were too blatant to ignore. Now that the Night Mare was here, he could at least confront the question why he’d been reliving new variations on old events.
But as much as he’d found those oddities to be inscrutable before now, the Night Mare seemed far less impressed with them, making a dismissive gesture with her hoof. “Don’t be foolish, of course it was.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “So everything that’s happened has been by your will?”
“I set none of the events you’ve gone through in motion,” retorted the goddess. “Nor did I engineer the circumstances you’ve found yourself in. I simply placed you in an area where you’d be best positioned to develop your faith, which necessarily involved you applying the lessons I’ve taught you to situations you’ve already experienced. All of it – learning to better use the Charismata, realizing that you should slay only those for whom there’s no use subjugating, using others to overcome your weaknesses rather than hiding them – led you here, to where your faith could be properly tested. A test which you passed.”
She folded her wings back to her sides then, flashing her teeth at him as a snarl crossed her lips. “So you can imagine my irritation when my champion’s newfound faith is suddenly threatened because he found a book I’d hoped would be permanently lost.”
There was nothing Lex could say to that.
But there was still one more question he needed answered. One last revelation to which he required the insight of his patron deity. “And what about Kara’s blessing?”
A grimace of distaste flickered across the Night Mare’s face. “That meddling trollop was called upon by your first paramour, and had already begun interfering in your life. Given how lacking you were in attracting capable servants, particularly since you were so lacking in curiosity about how to use the Charismata, securing a blessing from her was the best way to put her to use.”
“I don’t want it!” shot back Lex. “That her influence has been affecting everyone around me has tainted every relationship I’ve been in!”
The Night Mare shrugged. “I made you vow to abstain from all formal ties of romance in exchange for removing Severance from your world. If that wasn’t enough to blunt the drawbacks of Kara’s meddling, then perhaps you should have focused more on using her blessing to be a leader of ponies and less on acquiring your stable of harlots.”
For a moment Lex seethed, but his anger was directed at himself more than the Night Mare. As much as he hated to admit it, she was right; the same way he’d made a mistake in getting involved with Nosey – and that he regretted how much he’d made a mess of Thermal Draft’s life simply by association – he’d made his relationships with Sonata and Aria as much of a priority as building his powerbase. He’d very nearly lost the loan he needed from the ponies of Vanhoover because he’d flown into a jealous rage at hearing someone else make Sonata moan.
He might not have known that Kara had given him a blessing, but he’d still had no compunctions about putting it to use for his own enjoyment.
Which he wouldn’t have done if he’d paid more attention to what the Night Mare had been trying to tell him.
Once again, she’d been looking out for him, but he hadn’t had the wisdom to recognize that.
The Night Mare cocked her head then, seeming to sense the change in his demeanor. “Good. Your faith is finally returning. You’d best put it to use very soon, my champion.”
The blue fires all went out as one then, plunging the area into darkness so deep that even with his improved vision, Lex couldn’t see through it. Only the glowing red eyes of the Night Mare remained visible. Even those seemed to waver as Lex felt his consciousness start to grow hazy, realizing that he was beginning to wake up, the goddess’s last words following after his fading awareness.
Groaning, Akna – currently in her humanoid form – pinched the bridge of her muzzle. “You know, my grandmother told me that as the future spiritual leader of my tribe, my people would come to me to confess all sorts of weird and uncomfortable secrets. Ever since then, I prepared myself to listen to things like a village matron admitting that she’d been unfaithful, or a jealous young warrior revealing that he’d sabotaged a competitor’s weapon. But I never thought I’d hear someone say what you just did.”
Sulking, Solvei gave the adlet a sour look. “If you didn’t want to hear it, then you shouldn’t have made me do that!”
Sighing, Akna sat up from the snowbank she’d been laying in, giving the winter wolf a flat look. “I didn’t make you, and you know it. You agreed to it just as much as I did.”
Solvei’s ears flattened, a shudder running down her spine. “I didn’t really agree to that...”
She trailed off, and Akna shifted in place, feeling Solvei’s emotions as though they were her own. “Look, at least this way, Ma-, Lex doesn’t have to deal with it.”
That sent a shiver of relief through Solvei – and Akna as well – recalling what had made her set her trepidation aside. “I’m glad he doesn’t have to worry about that either, I just...don’t get why we had to eat it is all.” Raising her ears, Solvei lifted her head from the flat rock she’d been lying on. “That wasn’t how your tradition goes. It’s supposed to be something you only do for other adlets.”
Akna shrugged. “I know that it is, I just...didn’t know what else to do. I mean, it’s so the spirit stays within the tribe, but your spirit is already a part of me, so I figured it was sort of appropriate. And leaving it behind for the Keeper and his acolytes just seemed like a bad idea, especially since he hates Lex now. Plus ritual consumption is the only way I know to get rid of a body...well, that or breaking it down into parts that can be used for raw materials, like we did for the yetis, but that would have been-”
“Worse,” finished Solvei with a wince. “Master would never have accepted that, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.”
“Yeah...”
The two of them lapsed into silence then, listening as the wind caused the trees around them to rustle. As one, the two of them glanced over the wintry valley that lay spread out before them, showing a magnificent vista of white mixed with the occasional patch of green. It was a familiar sight for both of them, causing the two to smile in unison.
“I didn’t know that you’d seen the valley where I grew up,” murmured Solvei.
“It was only one time,” answered Akna quietly. “I’d just learned how to take to the wind, and I was so thrilled I accidentally traveled far outside our usual territory. But I never forgot how beautiful this place looked.”
Neither said anything further, not that they needed to. Both of them had the other’s memories now, and felt the other’s feelings as they experienced them. Talking to each other was more like looking at a smooth patch of ice and talking to their reflection than to another person now. Even so, both found it comforting, if only because of how it served to undercut the surprise of finding themselves together after having fallen asleep.
“So, how long do you think we’ll be like this?”
Akna was already shrugging before Solvei had even finished her question. “No idea. Until we wake up I guess.”
Solvei rolled her eyes. “You know that isn’t what I meant. Granted, being able to see you in my dream – our dream – like this is nice, but-”
“You meant how long we’d be in this...in-between state, where we’re still separate but deeply connected,” finished Akna. “I don’t know. Maybe forever, or maybe only for a few days until we-”
“Completely turn into one person,” finished Solvei.
Akna bit her lip. “I still think it’s worth asking Lex to try and fix this. With all the power he has-”
“Master already said he didn’t have any magic that could undo what’s happened to us, remember?” cut in Solvei, shaking her head.
“But if he can call upon the Night Mare herself to put his mate into hibernation, he can ask her to separate us!”
Solvei arched a brow. “He also said that if we were separated, my soul wouldn’t have anywhere to go. I’d be just a spirit following him around again.”
“So the alternative is what? That I have to spend the rest of my life being his slave?”
Heedless of her nudity – in that regard, being with Solvei felt no different than being by herself now – Akna stood up, turning so that she was standing in profile to the winter wolf as she pointed to her hip, where Lex’s cutie mark could clearly be seen against her fur, just like it was on Solvei. “That’s what this means, doesn’t it? That whatever connection you had with him is part of me now, too?”
“I don’t know. Probably. You’re the one who worships Master’s goddess. Try praying to her for answers.”
“For all I know, us being here like this is her answer,” huffed Akna. “In Lex’s language, ‘Night Mare’ means ‘bad dream.’ So this might be Her doing.”
“In that case, maybe she wants us to use this time to figure out if our powers work differently now.” Standing up, Solvei stretched and padded over to the adlet. “I mean, I don’t know if we can use them in a dream like this, but it might be fun to try.”
“Why bother?” Akna let herself fall back into the snowbank she’d just risen from, glaring up at the sky. “I wanted more power. That’s why I went back into the Confluence; so that I could get Headhunter or one of the other Umbral Regalia. But I didn’t do it for me. It was all so I could help my tribe.”
“Which is what we’re going to do,” argued Solvei, ignoring the surreal feeling – just as Akna was trying to do – that came from arguing with herself. “We’ll wipe out Grisela and the rest of her family of monsters just like we did the yetis-”
“And then what?” Swinging one arm around, Akna knocked some of the snow away, spraying the white powder into the air and watching it dissipate into flakes. “After we win and they’re all dead, what happens then?”
“You know what happens,” pressed Solvei. “Master fixes his mate, and then he goes home.”
“And takes us with him,” continued Akna, her voice turning bitter.
“Of course he will! He said that before, that I’m – that we’re – precious to him, and always will be, and that we belong to him now and forever!”
The words sent a rush of joy through them both, but the emotion was immediately weighed down by distress as Akna groaned. “But I wanted-, no, I want to stay with my tribe! With my people! Even if I can’t bring them around to the Night Mare’s worship, I never wanted to leave them! One way or another, I’m still their only shaman! I wanted...”
Her shoulders slumped as she turned onto her side, pulling her knees up to her chest. “I wanted to find a mate of my own. I wanted to be a mother someday. To have a family of my own again.”
Solvei could only look down, registering the depths of her other self’s sorrow.
“...but I don’t get to have that now, do I?”
“That’s part of the Night Mare’s teachings, isn’t it?” Sitting down next to the adlet, Solvei gave her a sympathetic look. “That power comes with sacrifices?”
“I figured I’d already sacrificed,” muttered Akna. “I lost my parents when I was so young that I barely remember them. And after losing my grandmother when the yetis attacked...I didn’t think I had anything else left to lose.”
She glanced up at the winter wolf then, peering into the golden eyes looking back at her. “I know we talked about this in Darkest Night, but...you really don’t mind that Lex made you leave your family? Even after you just got them back?”
A sad smile crossed Solvei’s face. “It’s because of him that I know they’re alright. Besides, he needs me more than I need them. He’s my family now, and that means Drafty is too, since she’s his mate. And when she recovers and gives birth, their little one will be my family also.”
Akna made a face like she was gagging. “That’s just what I’d expect from an unatattik,” she snorted, using the adlet term for a creature that only knew how to follow orders. “You’re happy to do whatever you’re told, never thinking for yourself.”
A sneer crossed Solvei’s lips. “Your kind betrayed Hrothvitnir after he created them, and you turned your back on your own tribe’s traditions. If that’s what thinking for yourself gets you, I’m happy not to bother.”
“Oh really? What about the time you almost drowned as a pup? I seem to recall your father told you to stay away from the river, but you went right up to it anyway, not realizing how thin the ice was.”
“I saw a fish and wanted to catch it! I didn’t think I’d fall in!” Blushing, Solvei raised a paw and poked Akna in the ribs. “Besides, at least I was trying to be helpful! Not like that time you pretended to be drowning because you wanted the warriors who were out spear-fishing to compete to see who could rescue you first, only for your grandmother to out-swim them all and do it instead!”
Cringing at the memory, Akna sat up and gave Solvei a light shove. “Oh yeah?! That’s not nearly as embarrassing as crashing headfirst into a tree during your first hunt!”
“Hey, I almost got that squirrel!” countered Solvei. “And at least the only ones who saw me were my siblings! You’re the one who threw up in front of everyone the first time you tried to lead a tribal prayer to your ancestors!”
“I was sick! And everyone forgot about it once I grew up” – standing up, Akna folded her arms under her breasts, hefting them – “and turned into a beauty, whereas you stayed a runt!”
“Oh yeah?” Solvei drew herself up to her full height, glaring down at Akna. “Well this runt wound up being bigger and tougher than you!”
Akna got right in the winter wolf’s face then. “Prove it.”
“Make me,” growled Solvei, leaning forward.
...until her nose touched Akna’s.
Instantly, the two of them dissolved into mirth, leaning against each other as they sank back down, howling with laughter. It was only after several minutes that they managed to calm themselves, wiping their eyes in motions that mirrored each other as they got their breath back.
“I’m glad that it’s you,” panted Solvei, giving Akna a grateful look. “This whole thing; becoming part of someone else...it’s strange and it’s scary, but I feel better knowing you’re the one I’m in it with.”
“I’m glad it’s you too,” agreed Akna, giving Solvei a smile. “If we have to go through this, there’s no one else I’d rather go through it with.”
Taking a deep breath, both of them sat up and stretched, looking out over the snowy valley from their combined memories. “So,” grunted Akna, putting her hands on her hips. “If we’re going to be here for a while, let’s go ahead and see if we can test out what our turning into one person has done to our magic. Since there’s two of us, maybe that means we’re twice as strong!”
“It’s worth a shot!” barked Solvei enthusiastically, tail swishing. “I want to be ready for when we face Sissel again. I owe her one for that lightning bolt!”
Looking at each other one last time, the two of them – now united in purpose as well as memories and emotions – gave a firm nod.
Or at least, there didn’t seem to be, but Lex wasn’t willing to give credence to that conclusion just yet.
Instead, he switched to another spectrum of vision – his darkvision having failed to find anyone in the blackness of the pre-dawn hours – as he continued to survey the area around where he and the rest of Fail Forward had jumped into the river which led to the Shrine of the Starless Sky. The edges of his shadow-form roiled with tension as he carefully looked the vicinity over, prepared to withdraw back into the ground at the first instance of a trap being sprung.
But no matter which wavelength he viewed the place with, there was no trace of his enemies. That included magical emanations; with Paska having previously gotten the drop on him via an invisibility spell, and Sissel having used an illusion to hide her location in their last fight, viewing things through the magical spectrum had been the first thing Lex had done. But there hadn’t even been a hint of residual magic in the area, all traces of the heated battle they’d fought here having faded away with time and the relentless snowfall.
That still wasn’t enough to completely quell Lex’s unease. Sanguine Disposition had easily avoided similar scans on two separate occasions, and while Lex doubted that Sissel – who had seemed to be the most magically-gifted of her siblings – had anywhere near as much power as the vampire leatherwing, it was still something that couldn’t be overlooked now. With that thought in mind Lex switched back to viewing the area in the magical spectrum, cautiously feeding more power into his visual scan, trying to pierce any concealing magic his enemies might be employing.
But there was still nothing.
Master, is everything alright? came Solvei’s voice in his mind. The question coincided with a flicker of anxiety from her, which Lex knew was only partially because she was worried for his safety.
I’m not finding any signs of Sissel or the rest of her siblings.
Then we should hurry, she replied immediately. If we move fast, we might be able to catch up to Yotimo and the others!
Lex resisted the urge to sigh. It had been several days since he’d sent Fail Forward back to the village where he’d met them, and in that time Solvei had grown more and more anxious. Before they’d set out for the Shrine, Yotimo – Toklo’s father and leader of the adlet war party they’d met – had indicated that he’d be waiting for Akna to return at the edge of the monster-filled forest, not willing to go back to their village without his tribe’s only shaman. Even that concession had been won only because Akna had indicated that she’d need no more than a day or two to guide the ponies to their destination, a timeframe which by now had been considerably exceeded.
Even without Solvei’s repeated reminders, Lex had known that the issue wasn’t one he could afford to ignore. Eradicating Sissel and her clan would be an empty victory if the adlets went to war with the local ponies over their missing shaman. But since she now possessed Akna’s knowledge and memories, Solvei had – when he’d pressed her on the issue – reluctantly admitted that Yotimo would likely wait a few extra days if they didn’t arrive on time, and even then would likely leave a warrior behind when he eventually returned to their village to report Akna missing.
“The elders will probably take a little while making up their minds after Yotimo tells them what happened,” she’d elaborated when he’d pressed her for details. “The tribe still hasn’t recovered from the war with the yetis, so they won’t make the decision to fight another one easily. But Master, I do think they’ll attack the ponies over this! Even if they think I’m-, think Akna’s dead, they’ll want to recover her body in order to consume it, and as far as they know those ponies were the last ones to see her! They’ll keep fighting until they can find and question Mystaria and the others!”
“I won’t let it come to that,” Lex had assured her.
But even after saying that, he’d elected to linger in the Shrine. It had been a calculated risk on his part, but also a worthwhile one, considering what he’d accomplished in that time...
Master, please! We’re already so late!
Frowning inwardly at her impatience, Lex ran one last scan of the area, again looking to overcome any anti-detection spells that might have been in play. I’ll summon you momentarily, but be on guard! Don’t forget that these are...
He didn’t finish the thought, but Solvei picked up on what he’d left unsaid. The ones who killed me before. I remember, Master. He registered contrition from her then, the tension in her mental voice easing. That won’t happen this time. You and I are both much stronger now, remember?
I know, but exercise caution all the same. These are enemies that have managed to surprise us each time we’ve fought them. There’s no reason to think that won’t happen again.
Understood, Master. I’ve made every preparation; please summon me whenever you’re ready.
With his final scan having again returned no results, Lex hesitated only for a moment before steeling his resolve and – returning to corporeal form in preparation for a fight – calling Solvei to his side. Still, his trepidation couldn’t completely drown out a thin hope that Sissel and her siblings were hiding somewhere nearby. Because if they were watching, Lex knew they would have been taken aback by the sight that appeared next to him a moment later.
Since merging with Akna, Solvei had indeed grown much stronger.
In her adlet form now, Solvei crouched in a ready position. Even so, she still towered over him, having confirmed that she could use Solvei’s size-changing ability in her humanoid body. The result was that she now stood taller than Sissel, dwarfing the snow giant by more than a foot.
Clad in her form-fitting black crystal armor, she cut an impressive figure. But the armor wasn’t the same as before either. Now imbued with a thick layer of cryonic magic, fine streamers of icy mist trailed from it with every move that she made, providing a bulwark of cold which augmented the heat resistance she’d gained as a result of their bond. This time, if Sissel resorted to fire magic, she would be ready.
Nor were her defenses the only thing that Solvei had improved.
Clenched in her right hand was a blade of ice that was longer than she was tall. The massive weapon was attached – literally frozen – to the underside of her vambrace, connected to her arm all the way back to her elbow. Where it reached her hand, a grip jutted up, giving her something to hold on to in order to better control the arc of the weapon when it was swung.
In comparison to that, the weapon in her left hand looked almost puny by comparison. The length of a short sword, it looked more like a dagger in her grasp, and lacked anything which connected it to her armor. But still being able to see into the magical spectrum made it readily apparent to Lex that the shorter weapon was had more magic than its longer counterpart, glowing far brighter than the larger blade.
And that still wasn’t the full range of the magical preparations that Solvei had made, as the platform of ice that she stood upon – a “serac,” she’d called it – slowly circled the area, gliding easily over the snow-covered ground. Able to move it via her thoughts, without even needing to resort to the telekinesis their bond had imbued her with, the serac neatly solved the problem of how much the weight of Solvei’s black crystal armor had slowed her down, leaving her able to move as fast as if she’d been unclad.
The overall effect was that she looked less like an adlet, and more like some grim avatar of winter itself, ready to reap the life from anything which crossed her path.
As her master, it was an image Lex could appreciate.
I’m not detecting any scents, Master! she reported silently as she finished her sweep of the area. And I can’t see any tracks either!
Neither of those were present when Paska ambushed us before, he reminded her. Stay alert.
Right!
It was only after several more minutes of careful searching that Lex was finally satisfied that they were alone. That’s enough, Solvei. If they were here they would have done something by now.
Glancing his way, she flashed him a grin. Maybe they saw how impressive we looked now and ran away?
I doubt they’d have been able to without one of us detecting it, he responded humorlessly. Can you still perform a wide-ranging scan of the local lifeforms?
Jumping down from her serac, Solvei hesitantly nodded. I think so. But it’ll take me several minutes.
Do it, ordered Lex. I’ll keep watch.
Solvei nodded, sticking her oversized dagger into the earth before placing one hand on the ground and closing her eyes in concentration. For whatever reason, Akna’s ability to discern the state of the environment for several miles around herself – which Solvei now possessed as well – was severely blunted by being underground, and was completely repelled by artificial structures. As such, it wasn’t something they’d been able to use with any efficacy back in the Shrine, particularly since she could only do it once per day.
Circling around Solvei as she concentrated, Lex suppressed an impatient snarl. Although he hadn’t wanted to get into a battle immediately upon leaving the Shrine – far better to track down Sissel and the others and take them unaware, rather than when they were ready and waiting for a fight – the beast inside of him had reveled at the prospect of violence, and was angry at having been denied. Even now, the thought of tearing his enemies into bloody chunks made his tail swish in anticipation, claws eagerly digging at the ground as he-
Master, I think I have something!
Blinking as he realized that he’d momentarily gotten lost in his vicious urges, Lex wasted a half-second berating himself before turning his attention back to his soul-bound companion. What is it?
One person, northwest of here. It’s an adlet, she reported, brow furrowing as she sought more information. I think...yes, it’s where Yotimo and the others were supposed to be waiting for us. Probably a scout left behind in case I came back later.
Is there anyone else, in any direction?
Solvei paused for a long moment before shaking her head. No, Master. Lots of animals and other creatures, but nothing two-legged. Not that I can detect.
Alright. Let’s head that way. We’ll talk to whoever’s there and see if we can defuse things with the adlets before we hunt down Sissel and the others.
A strong sense of relief came from Solvei then. Master, please let me take to the wind and go there ahead of you! The sooner we can let my-, let the adlets know that everything’s alright, the less chance that they’ll declare war on the ponies!
His initial impulse was to refuse, but he knew that she was right; with how fast she could fly by turning to mist, she could likely make the trip back to the rendezvous point in an hour, whereas traveling overland would take nearly a day, and that was presuming that none of the forest’s monsters slowed them down. After how long he’d already tarried, that difference could be critical.
Fine. But be careful. If you run into any danger, let me know immediately so that I can summon you back.
Giving him a thankful smile, Solvei grabbed her dagger as she stood up, then let out a slow breath as she called upon Akna’s magic again. In a few moments, her entire form turned hazy, then transparent, then she was a patch of mist with a humanoid form. With his darkvision still active, Lex watched as she sped up into the sky and rushed away, moving at an impressive speed that exceeded the mild breeze that swept across the clearing.
He waited until she was out of sight, then started moving in the same direction. At first he kept his pace to a slow jog, knowing that he had a substantial journey ahead of him, but after a few minutes a rising restlessness pushed him into an open run, and before Lex knew it he was sprinting as fast as he could, reveling in the feeling.
The rush coursing through his muscles, the feeling of his talons sinking into the ground, the sights and sounds and scents of the surrounding scenery...after days of being cooped up underground, recovering his strength, they all swept across him in a dizzying cascade of sensory input that was almost intoxicating. With nothing else to concentrate on, already having formulated numerous plans and contingencies for what he’d find when he met back up with Solvei, Lex couldn’t help but drink it all in, losing track of everything else.
Doing so proved heady, and couldn’t stop himself from throwing his head back and giving a guttural roar, screaming out his presence to everything within earshot. He knew that was a mistake, that he was alerting every creature in the area that he was there, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Quite the contrary, announcing himself like that only increased the rush he felt.
Let them come and challenge him! Their teeth would break against his fur! Their flesh would be rent under his claws! Anything which refused to submit would die weak and whimpering! He could almost taste the blood running down his throat, causing him to salivate.
So pleasant was that thought that he almost missed the scent trail, skidding to a stop as he doubled back, nose twitching. It took only a moment’s investigation to locate it, along with the set of tracks it belonged to, and Lex felt his heart speed up as he started took off after it, another howl erupting from his throat.
This time, a not-so-distant howl answered it.
The sound threw Lex’s muscles into overdrive, and he practically flew over a hillock and into the glen beyond, tearing up the landscape as he threw all caution to the wind. Conquest was ahead! Victory was ahead! Food was ahead!
Bursting through a thicket, Lex finally caught up to his prey. Across from him were a trio of wolflike creatures, each with six legs and half-again as large as he was...except for the last, who wasn’t quite his size.
But his gaze had barely settled on the little one when the largest of the three – the male, Lex instinctively knew – stepped in front of his mate and pup, hackles rising as he growled deep in his throat.
Lex’s answering growl was almost a laugh. He could already see how this would end, with the weakling torn to pieces and devoured. The pup would follow. And the female...
His gaze slid over to the bitch, causing her ears to flatten as she bared her teeth at him. The sight made his tail swish in approval. It was good that she was spirited; a weak female had no right to bear his brood.
Slowly, the male stalked forward, and Lex began to circle him, preparing to pounce-
Master, I’m here! But something’s happened!
The sudden voice in his head threw him off, causing him to lose his crouch and blink at the unexpected interruption. That voice...he knew that voice...
There’s a lot of blood here! And tracks! But they’re going all over the place! I think...wait...
Something was wrong. The voice in his head was alarmed; more than that, he could tell that she – the voice was a she – was upset, somehow knowing that she was scared even though she wasn’t here. She was far away; somehow he knew that too, that she was further north...
Squeezing his eyes shut, Lex put a claw to his face, gritting his teeth as he tried to put his thoughts in order. But his instincts were screaming at him, roaring that nothing mattered except the enemy right in front of him, that there was nothing more important than killing them, eating them, and breeding their mate.
For a moment, it almost pulled him back under.
Silla! M-Master, Silla’s here! The adlet with the sickles! He’s...he’s still alive, but he’s hurt badly!
The distress in the voice had reached full panic now, her distress impossible to ignore. Moreover, he didn’t want to ignore it, realizing that voice was important to him. That he’d lost her before and had only barely gotten her back. He had to help her! He had to help-
“S-Solvei?” Lex whispered, eyes opening as he shuddered for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.
Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the six-legged wolves slowly withdrawing, the male ushering his mate and pup away from him in slow, cautious steps, never taking his eyes off of Lex. For his part, Lex could only stare back at the retreating creatures, a sudden wave of nausea overcoming him as he realized what he’d been about to do.
Master, he’s barely breathing! I don’t know how to save him! Please, tell me what to do!
But Lex couldn’t answer, starting to shake all over as the full scope of what had just happened crashed over him, forcing him to ask the question he’d been ignoring ever since he’d emerged from the Confluence days ago, the words spilling from his lips even though no one else was around to hear him:
Night had fallen by the time Lex caught up to Solvei.
“Master!” Being able to sense his location as well as he could sense hers, it surprised Lex not at all when she rushed through the undergrowth to meet him, her armor and armaments having been discarded in favor of the simple leather pants and halter top that Akna had been wearing when he’d first met her. “I’m glad you’re here! Silla isn’t doing well!”
Her report was wholly unnecessary. After he’d managed to recover his wits enough to respond to Solvei’s desperate entreaties, he’d looked through her eyes at the injured adlet that she’d found.
What he’d seen had been someone more dead than alive.
The warrior’s body had been covered in horrific wounds. A deep cut just above his waist had very nearly spilled his entrails across the snow. His left arm was broken in multiple places, and his right was dislocated. But his upper limbs had fared better than his legs; the left having been shredded to the point where the bone was visible, and the right being completely gone below the knee. The only reason he hadn’t bled out, in Lex’s estimation, was because of the scorch marks spread across his body, whatever fire had struck him having cauterized the wounds.
That he hadn’t died from his injuries was nothing short of miraculous, and it was only his nature as an adlet – a being of intrinsic cold, like the winter wolves – that had kept exposure from finishing him off. As it was, Lex had managed to walk Solvei through some basic treatment for Silla’s injuries, another thing he’d learned from the medical textbooks he’d borrowed from House Call during his ill-fated trip to Las Pegasus, but with no equipment, medicine, or healing magic of her own, there’d been little for her to do except watch over Silla and try to keep him from slipping away before Lex arrived.
That she’d succeeded was more a testament to the adlet warrior’s toughness rather than anything Solvei had done, Lex knew.
But things were different now that he was here.
“Take this and place it on him,” ordered Lex, plucking the cleansing charm – which had been among the treasures he’d received from Solvei’s mother – from the hem of his cloak and holding it out toward Solvei. Even as he did, he carefully channeled a small surge of power into it, stopping well short of what his body could handle now; the charm was little more than a trinket, and overloading it with more power than it was designed to handle would likely damage or destroy it. “It should clean his wounds.”
“Right!” Snatching the charm from him, Solvei darted back the way she’d come, Lex following closely behind her. The anxiety he’d registered from her ever since she’d found Silla was starting to give way to hope, and Lex found himself wondering if her upset was because of Akna’s influence. Was the adlet Solvei had merged with influencing her, the way that creature he’d joined with had overwhelmed him-
For the briefest instant, Lex’s steps faltered, and he squeezed his eyes shut as he pushed that memory away. Don’t think about that now. There are more pressing concerns. Stay in control.
It was fortunate that his tulpa was no longer capable of mocking him, because although Lex had repeated those words to himself many times over the last several hours, they had brought him no relief. Although he’d clamped down tightly on his urges and instincts, using his telepathic link with Solvei to maintain a running conversation with her about Silla’s condition so that he had something to focus on, he’d nevertheless remained keenly aware of the beast inside of him.
To say it was angry at having been denied was an understatement. The creature was furious at being unable to indulge in its pleasures, and was fighting hard to continue pursuing them. Even now Lex keenly felt the urge to abandon what he was doing and go hunting, drawn toward the visceral thrill of a life-or-death battle, followed by the joy of a warm meal of bloody meat, and then the satisfaction of mounting a conquered female...
Knowing that those desires weren’t his own brought Lex no comfort, because they were his own now, and that terrified him down to the core of his being.
How arrogant had he been, declaring to the Night Mare that he’d face his fears in order to gain more power? All he’d done had been to mistake ignorance for bravery, certain that his sapient mind would be able to recognize and compensate for the base drives of an unthinking beast. Only now did he realize that he’d badly misunderstood just what their union entailed, afflicting him with powerful compulsions on which his intellect had little bearing.
As it turned out, his newfound cravings were more akin to being bombarded with a raging torrent of emotion. Fortunately, that was an area where Lex had plenty of experience, albeit with a very mixed record of success. While he was able to maintain a tight rein on the beast within him, he could feel it straining at the leash he’d put around it, knowing that it was waiting for his control to slip so that it could run free again.
And when that happened...
“Master, I think it’s working!”
Ahead of him, Solvei was looking over Silla’s broken body, eyeing the pin that she’d attached to the shredded remnants of his tunic. “See? His fur is cleaner now,” she noted, pointing at where the soot and bloodstains were disappearing. “But his wounds aren’t closing.”
“I didn’t expect them to,” answered Lex, eager to deal with something other than the raging monster inside him. “That was purely to sterilize his wounds. The spell I’m going to cast relies on artificially augmenting his body’s natural healing processes, rather than infusing him with a restorative pulse of positive energy. To that end, this is necessary to make sure he doesn’t contract an infection in the meantime.”
Solvei tilted her head, glancing between him and Silla. “I see...”
Lex registered confusion from Solvei then, making it clear that she didn’t understand what he was talking about. But he paid it no mind, instead focusing on the weak healing spell that the Night Mare had given him. Carefully performing the requisite gestures as he chanted the required liturgy, he again focused on channeling power through his body and into the thought-form that was the spell’s shape.
And this time he didn’t hold back.
Doing so was a calculated risk, not to himself but to Silla. With as much power as his new body was capable of handling, Lex had no idea what pouring that much power into his spell would do. But as risky as it was, there was little alternative but to experiment now; in its base form, the spell was too weak to do little more than scar over the worst of the adlet’s wounds, and likely wouldn’t do much to help him survive. Even a moderate amount of additional power was likely to provide only limited help in the face of such grievous injuries.
Which meant that, in order for Silla to have any real chance of survival, there was little alternative but to pour as much additional magic into the spell as possible. But since the spell’s parameters weren’t designed to hold that much power, that meant carefully threading the influx of energy into the spell as it was being cast, guiding it so that it augmented the underlying instructions in a controlled manner. Otherwise, there was no telling how it would alter the spell’s effect.
Putting his free claw on the gash across Silla’s midsection, Lex slowly finished the casting, feeling the magic discharge as he forced more power into it. A soft grunt, barely a whimper, came from the adlet as the magic slowly went to work, his body beginning to repair itself with unnatural speed.
“It’s working!” cheered Solvei as the rent in Silla’s abdomen began to close, the discolorations dotting where his arm had been broken disappearing as the bone began to mend. “Master, you did it!”
Not yet, muttered Lex across their telepathic link, concentrating too hard to speak out loud. I’m having trouble making the excess energy function according to the spell’s underlying framework. It’s already stimulating his body’s healing processes to the point of stress. Anything else might do more harm than good.
“I know you can do it, Master!” Clapping her hands together, Solvei gasped as Lex registered excitement coming from her. “What about regrowing his legs?! Master, if you do that, Silla will still be able to live as a warrior!”
That’s not possible. His innate powers of recuperation don’t include that type of regeneration. There’s nothing there for this spell to enhance.
“Master, please! I know you can do it! You can do anything! You-”
Be quiet! snapped Lex, his patience fraying. Trying to modulate the additional input via the spell’s inherent mechanisms was growing exponentially harder with each passing moment, and while Lex could see Silla’s legs scabbing over, the adlet’s breathing was growing dangerously ragged, his heart beating faster. I can’t do what you’re asking, and trying would kill him before it made him able to walk again!
“But he’ll die anyway if he goes back like that! Crippled warriors take their own lives rather than be a burden to the tribe! Master, I’ve known Silla my entire life! I can’t-”
That was all it took.
In the instant that Solvei mentioned her life as Akna, Lex flinched inwardly, her slip reminding him of his own recent loss of self. While it was only a minor lapse in concentration, it was enough for the additional power that he’d tried to poured into the spell to slip out of his mental grasp, flowing into Silla all at once.
The result was that his body suddenly strained, back arching and muscles tensing. It lasted only for a second, his body collapsing back down, only to start convulsing a moment later. His wounds ceased closing as Lex immediately cancelled the spell, allowing the remaining power to discharge harmlessly, but Silla didn’t cease shaking; instead, his thrashing grew worse, his breathing growing louder as it became a series of harsh gasps.
“Hold him down!”
Lex didn’t wait for Solvei to obey his order, instead calling on his backup plan. Diamond dust! he screamed at his tulpa. Thirty-two ounces!
Acknowledged.
A second later, the coarse powder filled Lex’s claw, but he was already casting.
For all the strength Lex had gained during his time at the Shrine of the Starless Sky, it wasn’t solely due to his new body. The knowledge that he’d gained from the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had been revelatory. The information in the Auctoritas Caliginous had shown him aspects of the Night Mare’s faith that he’d never imagined. And of course, Solvei – his soul-bound servant – had gained new powers as a result of her merging with Akna.
But that hadn’t been all that Lex had gained.
On the morning after reaffirming his newfound faith in the Night Mare, when she’d seen fit to expound on the final fate of souls who went to the realms of the gods, Lex had realized that his store of divine spells had grown. Not by a great deal, but there were now several spells which hadn’t been there before, stronger than what he’d previously had access to.
At first he’d thought that the goddess had seen fit to reward him for his loyalty. It had only been upon further reflection that he’d realized the truth: that the Night Mare had always made stronger spells available to him. He simply hadn’t had sufficient understanding of her doctrine to be able to handle that degree of sacerdotal thaumaturgy. The same way he’d needed to train his thoughts so as to be able to hold the mental architecture for arcane spells, he’d previously only had sufficient faith necessary to receive a limited amount of divine magic...and with his greater understanding of the goddess, that limit had grown.
And one of those spells was a restorative agent, unable to truly heal injuries but able to relieve physical trauma, stress, and similar afflictions.
It was a spell that Lex didn’t dare try to modify as he hurried through its casting, spreading the diamond dust which acted as a medium for its operation across the convulsing adlet, ignoring the panicked whimpers coming from Solvei. And when it finished...
Silla fell back, his breathing slowing as his body went limp.
For a moment no one moved, then Lex shook off his tension and stepped forward, checking on the adlet. Solvei bit her lip as she watched, teary-eyed.
After a few seconds, Lex stepped back. “He seems to be out of danger,” he pronounced at last. “Adlet biology isn’t like that of a pony, but from what I can tell-”
He wasn’t able to finish as a sob escaped Solvei’s lips, and she fell into a crouch as she looked down, shoulders jumping. “I’m sorry...” she sniffled, and Lex registered guilt and shame coming from her in equal measure then. “That was my fault...I...”
She wasn’t able to finish as Silla groaned, eyes fluttering open. “Ak...na...?”
“SILLA!” Rushing to his side, Solvei took his hand in hers, managing a teary laugh as she smiled at him. “Hey...it’s okay...you’re going to be okay.”
“Where...are...”
He didn’t finish as his eyes fell on Lex, a gasp escaping his lips. “Y-you...”
Silla’s halting accusation brought a frown to Lex’s face. That the other adlets had been forcibly abducted wasn’t a surprise. Despite the large patches of bloody snow, there were no corpses or body parts that a wholesale slaughter would have left behind; even Silla’s severed leg was nowhere to be seen. But the injured warrior’s saying that he was to blame meant that their attackers had been someone that knew him.
It wasn’t hard for Lex to guess who that could be.
Solvei, however, couldn’t seem to follow what the injured adlet was saying, wrapping an arm around him as she helped him sit up. “Silla, what happened here? Where’s everyone else?”
Groaning, Silla shook his head. “We all fought...as hard as we could...but-”
He stopped as he caught sight of his severed leg, going rigid as his eyes widened.
Following his line of sight, Solvei blanched as she realized what he was looking at. “Silla, listen to me. You’re going to be alright. I know what you’re thinking, but this doesn’t mean your life is over.”
But he didn’t seem to hear her, staring at his amputated limb as though he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Slowly, he moved what remained of his leg, eyes looking at the snow around it as if he expected the rest of his leg to simply be hidden beneath the red-stained powder. When it didn’t appear, he started to shake. “M-my leg...”
Lex registered a spike of anxiety from Solvei as she took Silla’s face in her hands and made him look at her, rather than his missing leg. “I want you to pay very close attention to what I’m about to tell you, okay? You’re still going to be able to live as a warrior. I swear it. Master’s magic healed your wounds, and even if it couldn’t fix your leg-”
A thread of alarm ran through Lex. Solvei, that’s enough!
She fell silent immediately, discomfort coming to him from across their link, likely because she was recalling what he’d told her about his being unable to regenerate missing limbs. But Lex couldn’t have cared less about that now, hoping that Silla’s shock would be enough for him to overlook what Solvei had just said.
But that hope was dashed when the maimed adlet opened his mouth a moment later.
“Did you...just call him...‘master’?”
Jerking back as if she’d been burned, Solvei’s mouth opened, then closed, and she swallowed before licking her lips, looking away from him. “That’s not important right now-”
Silla didn’t give her a chance to finish as he brought a hand up, and this time it was his turn to make her face him. “What happened...to your eyes?”
Lex cursed inwardly. Bad enough that Solvei had let it slip that she belonged to him, but he’d overlooked that Silla wasn’t using darkvision the way the two of them were.
With the sun having recently set, there was only a little ambient light left, barely able to get through the pervasive cloud cover. But the snow on the ground was catching and reflecting that lingering illumination, providing a miniscule amount of visibility in the normal spectrum of vision. And unlike Lex and Solvei, Silla was still viewing things that way...which meant that although he couldn’t see very far, Solvei was close enough that he could tell that her right eye was Akna’s familiar blue, but her left was now gold.
Given how much importance the adlets placed on their shaman, Lex knew there was no way he’d let that go. But while Lex had been aware that what had become of their shaman was an issue he’d need to speak to Akna’s tribe about eventually, this hadn’t been how he’d planned on broaching the subject. Nor had it been Solvei’s, judging by the dread he could sense coming from her.
Except that dread wasn’t for herself.
Master, please, don’t kill him!
Lex blinked. What?
Wrenching her head free of Silla’s grasp, Solvei gave him a desperate look. I know I messed up, but I can convince him to stay quiet, at least for a little while! Please, I beg you, don’t kill him! She squeezed her eyes shut then, tears gathering at their corners. I already lost my father to Bolverk, and my grandmother to the yetis...then Panuk...and then almost Toklo...I don’t want to go through that again, so please...!
The outpouring caught Lex completely off-guard, and for a moment a torrent of wrath welled up as the beast inside of him snarled. Whimpering and pleading was for weaklings; the maimed were to be killed and devoured, leaving nothing-
“I didn’t want you to be sad when you realized you’d killed someone who could have become your friend later.”
The memory of what Woodheart had said to him caused Lex to let out a slow breath, closing his eyes as he centered himself, pushing away Solvei’s begging and his inner monster’s bloodthirst, forcing himself to consider what was happening rationally.
Right now, the situation with Silla had the potential to turn into a problem later on. But Silla himself hadn’t done anything wrong; even putting a curse on him carried no justification. While the rest of Akna’s tribe would likely have a strongly negative reaction to being told that something had happened to their shaman, that was a different scenario from them potentially going to war because she’d disappeared while in the company of ponies; there was no reason to suspect that they’d attack his kind in general if he took personal responsibility for what had become of Akna. As such, there was no acceptable basis for silencing the wounded adlet in front of him.
More importantly, the issue with the adlet tribe was of secondary importance to whatever battle had taken place here, especially since Silla was under the impression that he was somehow responsible. Sissel and her monsters – to say nothing of everyone they’d taken – were the priority right now, not the adlets.
“What...did you...do to her?”
Silla’s question, asked in a harsh growl, made Lex open his eyes. Sure enough, the maimed warrior was glaring at him. “You obviously...did something...to yourself...and I can...tell you did...something to Akna...as well...”
“Why is she...calling you...master?” demanded Silla, ignoring Solvei’s attempts to dissuade him. “Why is...one of her eyes...the wrong color?”
Cringing, Solvei tried again. “Don’t do this. Please.”
“And that’s...another thing...” He pushed Solvei away then, managing to crawl to a nearby tree. Propping himself up against the trunk, he rose up into an approximation of an upright position, pointing balefully at the shaman as he stared at Lex. “The Akna I know...would never...whimper like that! She slays yetis! She argues...with the elders! She does...whatever she wants...and listens...to no one! To make her...like that...” He glanced at Solvei, clenching his jaw when she bit her lip and looked away. “What...did you...do to her?!”
“It would take too long to explain,” answered Lex at last. “And I doubt you’d understand even if I did. All you need to know is that she and I have both changed a great deal, and that it was solely due to my own actions.”
Silla bared his teeth. “You...!”
“More importantly, you need to hurry and tell us what happened to the rest of your warband,” continued Lex, unimpressed by Silla’s display of anger. “You said that they were taken because of me. The sooner you explain what that means, the sooner I can track them down and bring them back.”
Master! Thank you! Solvei’s mental voice accompanied by relief, and out of his peripheral vision he could see her wiping her eyes.
Silla’s brow furrowed at that. “You...murdered Panuk...and almost did...the same to Toklo...and now you want...to help us?”
Solvei stepped forward, calmer now, though whether that was because he’d made it clear that he was going to rescue the others and leave Silla alive, or because her breaking down had so obviously unnerved the injured warrior, Lex couldn’t tell. “Silla, I know you don’t trust M-, Lex, and that you’re suspicious about what’s happened to me, but I swear on the spirits of our ancestors, he’s being honest with you now.”
“You were attacked by a group of five, weren’t you?” pressed Lex. “One was a snow giant, a humanoid woman half-again as tall as you, carrying an axe. One looked like a bald human, who fought with a hammer. They were accompanied by a winter hag and some sort of troll, along with a small sphinx...a tiny feline creature with wings.”
Silla paused for a long moment, his eyes flitting between the two of them before he slowly nodded. “That’s right...but there weren’t...just five of them...there were others.”
Solvei gasped softly at that, as Lex frowned deeply. “What others? Describe them.”
His ears flattening, Silla shuddered, sinking back down. “They were robed...and about as tall...as us. But there weren’t...like us...they weren’t like...anything I’ve ever...seen before...”
“In what way?”
Lex’s question caused Silla to gulp. “Their faces were...just mouths...no eyes...no noses...no ears...just mouths. And their arms...didn’t end in hands...all they had...were tentacles...”
“What were their numbers? How did they fight?”
Silla shook his head. “I don’t know...their numbers...they all appeared...out of nowhere...they were just there...with no warning...all of them...”
Sighing, he leaned his head back. “I don’t think there...were more than...a dozen...maybe less...they all fought...with magic...casting spells that...made us slower...or paralyzed us...or burned...” He took a deep breath before continuing. “They helped those...others you mentioned...capture the others...they took them all...except me...”
Unease came from Solvei then. Master, do you have any idea what sort of creatures he’s talking about?
A few days ago, Lex wouldn't have known. But the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had been more than just a treatise on the nature of the soul and the various fates which awaited it after death. It had gone on at great length about the various Outer Planes which formed most beings’ afterlives, including the myriad denizens who dwelt there. And the description Silla had given called to mind a very specific type of entity.
Venedaemons, answered Lex grimly. Creatures that practice arcane magic as a means of feeding their hunger for mortal souls, and which use the souls they devour to increase the potency of their magic.
They’re going to take my tribe’s souls?!
Remain calm, ordered Lex as he registered a new rush of anxiety from Solvei. If that was what they wanted, they would have done so immediately. Venedaemons can’t take souls on their own, they have to summon cacodaemons – lesser daemonic creatures – to do so for them, and they can only do that after someone’s died. If they were taking prisoners, then they’re probably still alive.
Her fear lessened then, but didn’t go away completely, not that Lex could blame her. The Libram had been quite specific about venedaemons valuing souls as much as they valued magic. If Sissel or one of her other siblings had some way to summon such creatures, then they would have needed to promise them some payment in order to secure their cooperation. And while they had magic enough that Lex felt sure they could have offered the venedaemons some bit of arcane knowledge in exchange for their help – the secret behind Grisela’s ice-puppets, perhaps, or whatever illusion Sissel had projected her magic through when he’d first met her – it was just as likely that the adlets they’d captured were living on borrowed time.
But that wasn’t what bothered Lex the most, recalling something that Prevarius had told him...
“It’s so exciting! Just recently, there’s been a trickle of pony souls onto the market, and buyers have been going absolutely crazy for them!”
The Libram of Ineffable Damnation had gone on at length about how the daemons were very closely tied to the soul trade, with virtually all of them having some level of involvement with it.
And according to the ponies he’d spoken to back in that village Grisela had attacked, she and her yetis had been taking ponies for some time now. And while the hag had made no secret of the fact that she’d seen those ponies as sources of food, that spoke not at all to what happened to the souls of those she’d killed...
A shudder ran down Lex’s spine, realizing that whatever it was he’d stumbled onto – or rather, whatever it was the Night Mare had led him toward – it was far larger than he’d suspected.
“And when you said that they were taken because of me,” continued Lex, having no difficulty continuing his conversation with Silla even as he telepathically spoke to Solvei and thought through the implications of everything they’d learned so far, “what did that mean?”
“The snow giant...with the axe...” groaned Silla.
“Sissel,” supplied Lex grimly.
“Sissel...she looked...right at me...and said to...tell Lex...the unicorn with...the red horn...that if he wants...everyone back...to come...and get them...”
“Oh no,” murmured Solvei, able to see where this was going.
Lex could too, but he nevertheless nodded at Silla, wanting the warrior to confirm it. “And where did she say to go?”
From his vantage point a short distance from the two, Lex clearly registered Solvei’s dissatisfaction with Silla’s answer to her question, frowning at the injured warrior. “We’re at the edge of the forest. It’s not very likely that anything will bother you here if you want to rest some more. Or at least, nothing you can’t handle.”
She managed a smile at that last part, and Silla returned it wanly. “The way I...am now...I doubt that...I could defeat...a newborn pup...” he murmured, leaning his head back as he took a moment to catch his breath. “Besides...the tribe...must be told...”
He paused then, and out of his peripheral vision Lex caught sight of Silla looking his way, his strained grin giving way to a frown. “Everything...”
More anxiety came from Solvei then, but Lex ignored it in favor of continuing to look the area over via the magical spectrum, finding what he’d been looking for a moment later. “Here,” he announced, lifting the pair of sickles in his telekinesis and floating them over to the downed adlet. “Your weapons.”
Practically snatching the weapons out of the roiling purple aura, Silla closed his eyes as he gripped them tightly, a shudder running through him. Solvei didn’t miss the opportunity to send a smile Lex’s way. Thank you, Master. For a warrior to return without their weapons is a sign of cowardice in our tribe. I wanted to at least spare Silla that.
His wounds should be proof enough that he didn’t turn and run, responded Lex matter-of-factly. Despite his having done his best to heal the adlet, Silla was still in bad shape. Beyond his missing leg, Lex’s imperfectly-augmented healing spell had left scars where his cuts were, and although his restorative spell had recovered much of the adlet’s stamina, it couldn’t make up for the blood he’d lost, nor the fact that he hadn’t eaten since losing consciousness.
Solvei’s smile faltered, likely coming to the same conclusion about the injured warrior’s state. Yes, they should be.
But Silla himself seemed unconcerned, taking a deep breath as he opened his eyes. “Alright...I’m going...”
Solvei’s ears flattened at that. “Try not to push yourself, okay? Taking to the wind can still be tiring, and right now you need to pace yourself.”
“I’ll...be careful...” murmured Silla, tucking his sickles into his belt. “You do...the same...”
Nodding, Solvei hesitated for a moment, then pulled the warrior into a hug. “Remember what I said, okay? This isn’t the end of your life as a warrior. So don’t do anything foolish before we come back with everyone.”
Lex scowled at that, watching as Silla’s brows rose before he slowly hugged Solvei back. “But I can...do something foolish...after that, right?”
Giving a soft laugh, Solvei released him, stepping back. “Sure, since Yotimo and the others will be there to stop you.”
“Just so long...as you’re...there too...” smiled Silla, though his expression turned grim when he looked at Lex. “Take care...of her...”
The animal inside of him gave an indignant snarl at being lectured by wounded prey, but he fought it down, instead giving a curt nod. “I intend to.”
Silla stared at him for a moment before grunting, directing his gaze skyward as his body began to turn translucent. Several seconds later he was little more than a humanoid-shaped patch of mist, flying upward to hover in the air for a moment before flying away.
Solvei watched him go, crossing her arms under her chest as she fidgeted in place. “He’ll be fine,” she murmured quietly. “There isn’t much that can catch up to an adlet in that form, let alone actually hurt one. He’ll make it back without any problems.”
“Right now we should be more worried about the adlets that were abducted,” announced Lex. “He said they were being taken to Hvitdod’s lair. Do you know where that is?”
She paused for a moment, then shook her head. “Hvitdod dwelt north of here, where to this day the dragon’s rampages have left the land barren and the hunting poor, but I don’t know the exact location.”
Biting her lip, she glanced around them. “Master, how are we going to find them? There’s still a lot of blood from the attack, but other than that, there aren’t any tracks to follow! And without knowing exactly where Hvitdod’s lair is-”
“Then the best tactical option is to pinpoint its location as soon as possible, and try to get there before Sissel and her prisoners,” concluded Lex. “Since she and her siblings are covering their tracks, it’s better to beat them to their location, scout the area, and set up an ambush so that we can take them unaware. That’s our best chance of defeating them and freeing the adlets.”
Solvei drew in a slow breath, and Lex waited for her to point out the major flaw in that plan.
“Master...if what Sissel said is correct, and Hvitdod is alive...your strategy means that we’ll have to fight it. The legends all agreed that the dragon was extremely aggressive, and slew all that approached it. Trying to set up an ambush anywhere near its lair isn’t something it will overlook.”
“I know,” answered Lex, recalling when Akna had told him what she knew of Hvitdod, just before they’d reached the Shrine of the Starless Sky. “And Sissel knows that too; in all likelihood, she’s anticipated everything I just outlined, and is already making preparations to avoid the trap she knows we’ll have waiting for her so that she can get whatever it is Hvitdod has that she wants. Which is why we’re going to follow a different course of action.”
Solvei was silent for a long moment, and Lex registered bewilderment, then amazement, then excitement. “Which is?”
“The one Sissel’s worked hardest to prevent us from taking, and so is least expecting,” answered Lex. “We follow her trail, and catch up to her before she ever reaches the dragon.”
Her enthusiasm dimming slightly, Solvei glanced around, as though expecting to catch sight of some tracks which had eluded her up until now. “But Master, how are we going to do that?”
A smirk crossed Lex’s lips then, as he began to mentally order his tulpa to bring forth copies of the religious paraphernalia that he’d seen in the Shrine of the Starless sky. “By having faith.”
Then he began casting another of his newfound divine spells.
The liturgy was long, requiring several minutes of chanting prayers to the Night Mare, praising her as an exemplar of all that ponies should strive for and subjugate those who lacked the will to follow in her hoofprints. It was only toward the end that the recitation changed, calling upon the goddess to recognize his worthiness to use one of her divine minions, entrusting her to send forth one skilled and cunning that would serve him faithfully and true.
Around him, the candles that his tulpa had brought forth – and which had burst into soft blue flames that shed no heat during his prayers – flared up, the azure fires climbing higher despite having been fed no additional fuel. Solemnly picking up the thin razor of black crystal that his tulpa had also made, Lex held it in the flames of the nearest candle, watching as a thin layer of frost formed on the blade.
After several seconds, he withdrew it, eyeing it just for a moment before turning to the large urn set before him. Filling it with snow, he plunged his left claw into it and waited, letting his body heat melt the frozen mass. It was only when it had turned to water that he closed his eyes, calling upon the Charismata to sanctify the water.
Upon feeling the divine power suffuse the liquid, Lex withdrew his claw from the urn, which he then overturned onto the razor, whispering another prayer to the Night Mare. Slowly, he rose up on his hind legs, bringing the blade around to his other claw. Despite his potent natural defenses, the anointed blade cut through his palm just as easily as the neart a’staigh had.
Fortunately, this spell’s casting was nowhere near as elaborate as the ceremonial invocation had been, and so called for only a small amount of his own blood to be shed. Specifically, just enough to quench the flames of each candle, Lex silently bearing the pain of the super-cooled flames – which, being another manifestation of the Night Mare’s power, completely bypassed the ward against cold that Solvei had previously placed on him – as his blood dripped down and snuffed the wicks one by one.
And when the last candle was finally quenched, and he heard Solvei gasp, Lex knew that his spell had worked.
“The Night Mare bids me to appear before you, who has Her favor,” came a hushed voice, female in tenor, from behind him. “I am called Nisha, and in the goddess’s name I offer you my service.”
“ “ “Command me, so that I might draw/avoid/earn Her praise/wrath/forgiveness.” ” ”
The three identical voices – each a perfect match for the original speaker – speaking over each other, their statements not quite in unison, made Lex frown as he turned in place. The spell should only have called a single servitor of the Night Mare’s from Darkest Night, so why-
Then he got a look at exactly what he’d brought forth.
Standing a short distance away was a black wolf.
The sight of it made Lex tense up, flashing back to the creatures he’d encountered just a few hours previous, when his inner beast had overwhelmed him. It took only a moment’s examination, however, for him to see that the similarities between those creatures and this one were superficial.
Unlike those wolves, this one was smaller – roughly the same size as himself – and only had four legs instead of six. But any appearance of normalcy that it might have possessed was ruined by its eyes, which seemed to lack irises or pupils altogether, being a uniform shade of purple that glowed with a soft luminescence that was visible even to Lex’s darkvision, which shouldn’t have been able to register anything except shades of black and white. Indeed, that was stark enough that he almost overlooked the patch of grey fur forming a ring around its neck, the shape so jagged and irregular that it took him a few moments to realize that it approximated the appearance of barbed wire.
But all of that mattered less to him than the wolf’s shadow.
Or rather, shadows, as there were no less than three of them trailing behind its body at different angles.
That shouldn’t have been the case. Not only should his darkvision seen through a mere lack of light, the local area simply wasn’t bright enough to cast any shadows; even with the snow amplifying what little illumination remained from the rapidly-fading dusk, it was far too diffuse to outline anything. And yet the black wolf in front of him was casting three clearly-defined shadows on the ground behind her, as though spotlights were shining on it – no, on her – from different directions simultaneously.
If Lex was shocked by that, though, Nisha seemed no less surprised as she got a good look at him, drawing in a sharp breath as her eyes went wide. “A bloodstained horn. The goddess’s symbol etched into his flesh. A servant the color of snow. You’re him! Lex Legis!”
“ “ “The bearer of the Charismata/wielder of Severance/vanquisher of White Wraith!” ” ”
The overlapping voices sent a shudder down Lex’s spine.
Just like he’d suspected, they had come from Nisha’s shadows. And that was enough to let him recognize them for what they were: rogue portions of her own mind, given semi-independence. That they were able to speak out loud was unprecedented, their lack of animosity toward her was curious, and the fact that she had three was nothing short of astounding, but the dissimilarities weren’t enough to shake Lex’s conclusion, immediately identifying Nisha’s condition.
Tulpas.
The wolf in front of him was afflicted with tulpas.
Lex had to struggle to order his thoughts, silently staring at the purple-eyed wolf – and the three tulpa-infused shadows behind her – in shock.
That Nisha was laboring under some version of the same condition he’d endured for so long, only recently having managed to turn it from a literal mixed blessing into a powerful advantage, was no coincidence. Of that, Lex was absolutely certain. The spell he’d cast had been explicitly open-ended as to who or what it conjured, simply requesting that the Night Mare send him an ally and leaving the specifics up to the goddess to decide.
To that end, Lex’s only expectation had been that the Night Mare would send him some sort of specialist, able to track down Sissel and those with her despite whatever concealment magic they’d employed. But regardless of whether or not Nisha was capable of doing that, her tulpas were a clear and obvious sign that the goddess had sent him someone of much greater significance. Even he could recognize that.
The most obvious interpretation was that Nisha had insights about his own tulpa’s newfound power to temporarily manifest material objects. Despite the rigorous study Lex had made of both the Auctoritas Caliginous and the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, neither tome had made any mention of partitioned minds in any capacity, leaving him no closer to understanding-
“Um, Master?” Hesitantly, Solvei stepped forward, looking back and forth between him and Nisha uncertainly. “Shouldn’t we hurry and ask her...”
She trailed off, before giving Nisha an awkward smile. “I’m sorry, you said your name is Nisha, right? I’m, well...you can call me Solvei, or Akna; they’re both my names, now. Master and I were hoping-”
“I want you to track someone,” interrupted Lex, pushing his concerns about Nisha’s tulpas aside. Inwardly he cursed at having let the purple-eyed wolf’s condition distract him from the more pressing matter. Sissel had a significant lead on them, which meant that time wasn’t on their side. There’d be time to question Nisha later; right now he had a job he needed her to do.
Taking a few moments to outline Sissel’s forces, as well as the adlets she’d abducted, Lex also went over what he knew of his enemies’ armaments, magical capabilities, and goals, as well as providing a brief rundown of the local environment. “Your job is to pinpoint their current location and lead me there, without betraying your presence or otherwise engaging them yourself. Are you capable of that?”
Nisha gave what was either a single deep nod or a modest bow. “If you wish it of me, I shall hunt them to the ends of this world and beyond.”
“ “ “I will complete this task/prove my worth/seize this chance.” ” ”
But rather than be reassured by her answer – or that of the chorus behind her – Lex only narrowed his eyes. “Tell me how you plan on doing this,” he demanded. “Be specific.”
To her credit, Nisha didn’t hesitate to answer. “As one who fears and loves Our Dark Mistress, I receive the gift of Her magic. One of the spells She grants me enables me to trace the presence of souls which are strongly aligned to the Outer Realms.”
Solvei cocked her head. “What does that mean?”
“It means numinous gradients,” answered Lex, thinking back to what the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had said about this particular topic. “The more closely an individual’s disposition matches the metaphysical ideals a particular plane represents, the more they resonate with its energies, which are detectable to a properly-attuned spell.”
“You are wise, as expected of one so high in the Night Mare’s esteem,” murmured Nisha. “Even if the likes of your mortal enemies – the ‘Sissel’ and ‘Grisela’ and ‘Paska’ that you mentioned – lack souls strong enough to accumulate such power, the venedaemons with them are souls wrapped in the very substance of their malevolent realm. Tracking them will be easy.”
Lex raised an eyebrow, still somewhat skeptical. “And you can do this, despite their passage having occurred several days previous?”
Again, Nisha answered immediately. “With your permission, I can demonstrate.”
Upon receiving a curt nod from Lex, Nisha began to murmur a prayer to the Night Mare, reaching up to touch the collar of grey fur around her neck. Lex cocked his head as he felt the presence of magic, but he couldn’t identify it any further than that, recognizing only that it was a divine spell that the goddess hadn’t seen fit to grant him.
A moment later, Nisha finished her liturgy, and she lowered her paw, a pained groan escaping her lips as she swayed in place.
The sight made Solvei step forward, and Lex registered concern coming from her. “Are you okay?”
“To detect such primal emissions...requires that I coat my own soul in their opposite,” moaned Nisha. “As one who reveres Her Dark Majesty, I am a poor receptacle for such energies.”
“ “ “They bring me anguish/cause me guilt/make me despair.” ” ”
To Lex’s surprise, that made Solvei wince, and she gave him a sad look. Master, can you do something to help her?
For some reason her question made him think back to the hug she’d given Silla before sending him off, and he scowled without being entirely sure why. Leave her alone, Solvei. It’s her spell; she knows what she’s doing.
But if she’s in pain, it’ll be that much harder for her to track down Yotimo and the others! protested Solvei. Please, Master. If she can help us get everyone else back, I don’t want her to suffer if she doesn’t have to.
Lex started to protest, then caught himself. What was he doing? Solvei was correct; anything which helped Nisha complete her task was a boon, especially when doing so cost him almost nothing, since he had a hunch that the Night Mare’s greatest gift to him would be of use here.
Scowling again, this time as himself, Lex waved his wire-clad foreleg at Nisha. “Relief from spiritual torment.”
The Charismata took effect immediately, and Nisha gasped, a shiver running through her body as she stared at Lex, wide-eyed. “The Blessing That Empowers!” she murmured, and Lex recognized that as one of the titles of the Charismata used in the Auctoritas Caliginous. “To be touched by the sacred-”
“Enough!” snapped Lex, growing more irritated by the second. “Can you follow the trail or not?”
“Y-yes!” Nisha’s head swiveled around, taking in the area before nodding slowly, recovering her calm as she padded past Solvei, pointing in a direction perpendicular to where Lex had approached from. “The venedaemons came this way, moving as a group. They spread out, positioning themselves there” – she pointed to a spot near where Silla had been resting before he’d departed, then indicated several other such points – “there, there, and there.”
Lex glanced at Solvei then, and although he was unable to read the nonverbal cues of others, she had no problem picking up on his own. “She’s right, Master. Silla told me about the attack in more detail while you were looking for his sickles, and he said the same thing.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond before looking back at Nisha. “How long does that spell last? They have a huge head start on us, so you’ll need to move quick.”
The black wolf’s response came with a soft laugh. “The spell lasts for some time, servant of the Night Mare’s chosen one, and you need not worry as to my speed. So long as the terrain is favorable, I can move-”
In mid-sentence, she stepped behind a tree, vanishing from view.
“-over great distance, without crossing the intervening space,” she finished, emerging a stone’s throw away from the opposite direction.
Whirling in place, Solvei was wide-eyed for a moment before a grin crossed her muzzle. “That’s great! Can you take us with you when you do that?!”
Nisha shook her head. “I cannot, but I should be able to locate the ones you seek and report back to you with the utmost quickness.”
“Then do so,” ordered Lex. “Now.”
Nisha gave a deferential bow, but rather than immediately comply, she maintained her submissive posture, keeping her head low as she stayed where she was. After several seconds, Lex registered growing anxiety from Solvei, and it was a match for his own rising frustration. “Didn’t you hear me? Go! Time is of the essence!”
“Forgive my hesitation, but before I depart I must ask of you...upon completing this task, will my service to you be rewarded?”
Lex’s eyes burst into green and purple light as he stared at Nisha. “What?”
Solvei looked no less aghast. “A reward? My people have been taken captive by soul-sucking monsters, giving us very little time to find them, and you’re asking about a reward?!”
“Forgive my impertinence, champion of the Night Mare’s champion,” murmured Nisha. “But I am all too aware that I have no formal tie to your master’s dominion. I do not wish to be cast aside once my role is complete, with nothing to show for my dedication.”
Solvei growled deep in her throat before whirling to face him, making no move to hide her anger. Master, forget what I said before! Please force her to aid us!
It wouldn’t work, replied Lex grimly. An application of the Charismata only lasts for sixty seconds, remember? Even if I ordered her to track them down, she wouldn’t get very far before it wore off. Then there’d be nothing preventing her from going back to Darkest Night.
A strangled whine came from Solvei then, but Lex telepathically ordered her to calm herself as he moved toward Nisha. In contrast to Solvei, he’d expected something like this. For all her declarations of awe, the purple-eyed wolf was still a creature with her own goals and agenda. Since this was clearly an enterprise which had no religious significance beyond the fact that he was the one undertaking it, he couldn’t even indict Nisha as being impious.
The Night Mare might have sent her there in response to his call for aid, but there was nothing which said that aid had to be given for free. Quite the opposite, if Nisha had leverage enough to demand payment, the Night Mare – champion of strength in all its forms – wouldn’t likely punish her for it.
“Upon your successful completion of this task, I’ll give you this,” answered Lex, removing the ring he wore – which had magically resized itself from when it had adorned the hoof of his old body – from around the third talon on his right foreleg and holding it up for her inspection. “It shields the wearer from minor divinations, such as listening to thoughts, lie-detection...and reading their numinous aura.”
Nisha’s head rose at that, and Lex resisted the urge to smirk, pleased that his guess about her finding that tempting had been correct. Although he’d procured the item during his initial trip to Everglow – wanting a backup in case he ran short of the dark magic which he normally used to protect his mind – he had no use for it now. With the sheer amount of magic his new body was capable of handling, the magic of his horn was so abundant that it was effectively limitless, at least when it came to repelling minor powers like the ring protected against. Discarding it now was no great loss, and given the spell she’d just used, Nisha was sure to find it appealing.
But to Lex’s consternation, the black wolf shook her head a moment later. “I beg your indulgence, but I wish for more.”
“Like what?” spat Solvei. “What do you want in exchange for helping to save my people?!”
“To be given the same grace that you have,” replied Nisha softly.
“ “ “To be uplifted and made powerful/beautiful/cherished.” ” ”
Lex’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about?”
Lowering herself until her belly touched the ground, Nisha crawled forward and reverently pressed her lips to the barbed metal wrapped around his foreleg.
“I implore you, use the Charismata and make me yours, so that I might call you my master and serve you for eternity.”
Solvei was the first one to break the silence that fell in the wake of Nisha’s request.
“You...you want to-”
“To pledge myself to your master, body and soul, as you have,” murmured the black wolf reverently, continuing to prostrate herself before Lex.
“It has been my one and only wish, ever since I witnessed the magnificence that was your victory over White Wraith,” Nisha continued, no longer speaking to Solvei. “From the safety of the trees, I watched as you shamed him in front of his servants, forcing his superior to intervene, and I was filled with awe and reverence.”
“ “ “Long had I hoped to see the downfall of the one who defeated/humiliated/broke me.” ” ”
“I circled the city many times, waiting for you to emerge so I could offer myself to you, but the wilderness went mad with violence and I missed my opportunity. Ever since then, I’ve prayed to the Night Mare to grant me another chance to appear before you, and now She has!”
Again, Nisha pressed her lips to the barbed wire around Lex’s foreleg. “I beg you, take me into your service! Restore my shattered self, and I shall be yours forev-, huh?”
Her pleading ended abruptly as she noticed black crystals growing around her, the jagged black prisms growing like razor-edged flowers. Stranger still was the fluorescent cast to them, until she realized that the pale green and purple light wasn’t coming from the crystals themselves, but from Lex’s eyes, which were now glowing so brightly that they blotted out his irises and pupils.
And those featureless orbs were trained directly on her as he breathed heavily through gritted teeth.
Freezing as she beheld the intimidating sight, Nisha attempted to press herself further against the ground. “M-my master, have I upset-, URK!”
She couldn’t finish as a claw seized her by the throat and squeezed, cutting off her air.
“You don’t get to call me that.”
Slowly, Lex rose onto his hind legs, lifting Nisha as he stood upright, until he was raising her above his head. Her hind legs kicked pitifully, barely able to touch the ground as her front paws gripped at his wrist, feebly struggling to free herself. “Please-”
Her begging was cut off as he increased the pressure on her neck, letting her wriggle like a worm on a hook as he glared at her before finally deigning to speak to her again.
“Your presumptuousness has angered me more than you can imagine.”
Behind him, Solvei let out a moan as she sunk to her knees, one hand going to her head. She knew that Lex was aware of her emotions – being cognizant of them without feeling them himself – but that part of their bond didn’t extend both ways. She was only aware of his emotions when he experienced them with powerful intensity, and when that happened she felt them as if they were her own. It had happened before, when Mystaria’s thoughtless prying had driven him over the edge, and it was happening again now.
But unlike the panic her master had felt when his secret had been uncovered, the emotion he felt this time was towering rage.
“I brought you here to perform one simple task for me,” continued Lex, his voice colder than the surrounding snow. “Locate my enemies. That’s all. And yet in exchange, you dare to ask that I invest a piece of my own soul in you? That I make you an extension of myself? How high of an opinion do you have of yourself to think that you’re worthy of such a thing?”
Nisha’s purple eyes were starting to bulge now, her struggles slowing as she couldn’t draw more air into her lungs, but Lex didn’t seem to care. “How low of an opinion do you have of me that you think I’d show you such favor in exchange for one small errand and some flattery?”
“M-Master...” Cringing, Solvei righted herself, giving Lex a pleading look. “I know I asked you to force her to find my kin, but this-”
Without turning his head, Lex thrust his other claw – the one with the barbed wire coiled above it, which was now digging into his flesh angrily – toward her. “Sit still and be silent.”
The display of the Night Mare’s disapproval did nothing to abate the Charismata’s power, and Solvei immediately dropped to her knees, her jaw snapping closed. Simple reflex made her struggle, even though she knew it was futile. The nature of the Charismata was to empower those it was directed at, granting them the ability to fulfill the user’s desires...even if those desires weren’t their own.
Abandoning her efforts, she instead did her best to remain calm. Even if a hurricane had swept through the forest, she wouldn’t have moved from the spot she was in, nor could she have cried out even if she was being tortured. Until the Charismata wore off, Lex’s desires bent the very universe to his will, empowered by the Night Mare herself and using her as the medium through which they came true.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t still communicate with him.
Master, if you kill her-
She didn’t get a chance to finish as he slammed their telepathic connection shut, the force of it causing her ears to flatten.
She knew she still had other options available, since he hadn’t ordered her not to use her magic, but she didn’t bother. Trying to wrench the black wolf free with her telekinesis would only put more strain on her body, and attacking Lex with her ice magic-
No.
Her rejection of that idea wasn’t so much a conscious decision as it was a visceral reaction. She could almost feel his mark on her flanks throbbing, as though allergic to the very thought. He was her master, the one to whom she belonged, and knowing that was what gave her existence meaning. Rebelling against him like that was unthinkable.
Literally.
Which meant that Nisha was on her own.
“ “ “I beg of you, release/forgive/spare me!” ” ”
The chorus of shadows from around the helpless black wolf in his grasp brought a sneer to Lex’s lips, refusing to give them any further acknowledgment as her struggles degenerated to a few weak twitches.
The sight brought him far less satisfaction than he’d expected, and he frowned inwardly. As furious as Nisha’s request had made him, the beast inside of him was unmoved by his violent response. For all that it had been howling for blood earlier, it found nothing worthwhile in slaying a creature that had already demonstrated its submission; all the more so if they were a female suitable for breeding.
Silently cursing the contrary thing, Lex instead took solace in knowing that his fury was all his own. The fact that this insolent creature had dared ask for something so profound – so incredibly intimate – despite their having just met fanned the flames of his rage. Solvei had been given that connection only after she had proven herself, laying her life on the line in battle with him multiple times! And even then, she’d never dared to ask for such a favor!
Except, for some reason, thinking of Solvei now only made him feel worse.
But there was no opportunity for him to think further on that as he felt the barbed wire around his other foreleg clench tighter, sawing through his organometallic fur and toughened flesh effortlessly. The Night Mare, it seemed, was very upset that he was rejecting the servant that she’d all but gift-wrapped for him.
But despite having reaffirmed – multiple times over now – his faith in the goddess, he still couldn’t fight down a sudden sense of vindictiveness toward her. Bad enough he had Kara deciding who would love him; now the Night Mare wanted to pick and choose whom he’d share his innermost self with? All I wanted was one minor logistical problem solved! he raged at the Night Mare silently. You’ll get my soul if I die, but you will NOT pick who I share it with while I’m alive!
It was with that thought in mind that he hurled Nisha to the ground, the last few dregs of air in her lungs exploding outward with a pained yelp that sounded almost puppyish in tone. It was immediately followed by a ragged inhalation and sudden fit of coughing, barely able to move as she gulped down air. Even then, Lex could hear her trying to speak. “F-for...gi-give...m-”
“Not another word,” hissed Lex. “Not one. If you want my forgiveness, you’ll earn it by completing the task I’ve given you, and accepting the compensation I’ve deemed you worthy of receiving. Is that understood?”
Still struggling to breathe easily, Nisha managed to pick herself up, cringing as she nodded.
“Then go,” ordered Lex. “Now!”
Shaking like a beaten cur, Nisha dragged herself toward a nearby tree, passing behind it and vanishing.
The barbed wire around his foreleg stopped its excruciating twisting then, though it still remained tightly clenched around his foreleg, making it clear that the goddess was still very displeased. But Lex found it easy to ignore the pain, instead closing his eyes as he fought to calm himself. After several seconds, the black crystals sprouting around him disintegrated, and the light from his eyes flickered and went out as he slowly sank back down to all fours.
Releasing the block he’d put on his telepathic connection to Solvei, Lex said nothing to her, nor did he turn to look at her as the seconds passed. When she didn’t say anything after he knew the Charismata had worn off, he held the silence in turn, content to wait like that until Nisha returned.
Even so, he registered deep discomfort coming from Solvei, slowly growing more intense over time. Finally, he heard her clear her throat softly. “Master...?”
When he didn’t respond, she tried again. “Master, I’m worried. After...what just happened, what will we do if Nisha goes back to Darkest Night instead of tracking down my people?”
“If she abandons the task I gave her, then what she just experienced will seem pleasant compared to what I do to her the next time I summon her,” vowed Lex darkly.
“But that won’t help us this time!” protested Solvei, still making no move to get up. “Master, I just...” She paused then, and Lex heard her sigh. “I know she shouldn’t have asked that, and I’m angry that she wanted a reward for helping my kin too, but I wish you hadn’t been so hard on her.”
Lex clenched his jaw so hard it hurt. “Then next time, I’ll let you fawn all over her the way you did Silla.”
The words came out more bitter than he’d intended, and he was aware of Solvei feeling surprise then. “Master...is, is that why you’re upset? Because I was-”
“I don’t want to discuss this anymore,” ordered Lex brusquely, suddenly wishing he hadn’t said anything. “Don’t bring it up again.”
For the next several seconds silence reigned, but only a few heartbeats had passed before her voice reached his ears once more.
“Master, you know that I’m still your Solvei, now and forever, right?”
In an instant, his fury came rushing back, but this time it was so powerful and so unexpected that it made him stop short...
And he realized that it hadn’t been Nisha that he was angry with, nor the Night Mare.
He was angry at Solvei.
Except even that wasn’t right.
He was angry because she hadn’t been there when he’d lost himself to the beast inside of him, instead telepathically carrying on about her injured kin. He was angry because she still thought of them as being her kin, embracing Silla as though they were family. He was angry because she had referred to the missing adlets as “her people” again and again, inadvertently emphasizing the connection she still felt toward them.
That had been, he realized now, why he hadn’t even thought of simply imbuing her with the power to heal once he’d arrived on the scene, instead conducting an experiment with a less-powerful healing spell on Silla. Why he’d lost his temper so badly when Nisha had asked to partake in the same bond that he was suddenly apprehensive toward. Why the words the wolf he was bonded to had spoken just now – which he knew he should have found soothing – had instead made him furious.
His anger was covering his fear, the same way it had his entire life.
She’d said she was still his Solvei, but these last few hours had shown him something he’d known for some time, but hadn’t fully appreciated until just now: that the same way he wasn’t truly himself anymore, she wasn’t truly Solvei anymore.
All of that slid across his mind even as he opened his mouth, his reply spilling out before he’d had a chance to consciously process what he was saying.
Although she was making sure to keep several feet of distance between herself and him now, Nisha still cringed at the order. “They headed northwest from here, the venedaemons and the mortals who’re commanding them, along with the adlet prisoners. From what I can tell, they headed in that direction for two or three days before they split up.”
“Where did they separate?” spoke up Solvei, and Lex registered nervousness as she glanced at him. “I might know the local landmarks,” she added, as though to forestall any objection he might have had to her speaking up.
In that regard, Lex couldn’t blame her. It had taken roughly a full day for Nisha to report back to them, and during that time he and Solvei had barely said two words to each other. It hadn’t been for lack of trying on her part; more than once, she’d tried to talk to him – either verbally or telepathically – about that last question he’d asked her. Each time he’d shut her down, refusing to discuss the topic.
Instead, the two of them had waited in silence. After a few hours had passed, Lex had ordered Solvei to rest while he stood watch, and she’d reluctantly obeyed. He’d woken her up around dawn, using the divine magic he received from the Night Mare to conjure a bland meal for both of them, and then he’d taken his turn sleeping.
It was a bitter irony that, despite having mastered his tulpa, he’d still had awful dreams about losing himself to his inner beast again.
Nor did it help that the creature which now ruled his instincts was once again making its displeasure known. The bland fare that he’d conjured before sleeping had never bothered him before, but now it was all he could do to choke it down. The monster within him wanted meat, preferably warm and bloody, and so – just like when he’d barely been able to eat a few morsels of dried fruit during the last meal he’d shared with Fail Forward – his usual vegetarian diet was now a stomach-turning ordeal to eat.
Nor had the waiting gone over well. Simply staying in one place and not doing anything also went against the creature’s animalistic desires. For that matter, so did the prolonged period of celibacy that he was currently undertaking. So did sleeping out in the open, trusting someone else to guard him, rather than in a safely-enclosed space. There was little, it seemed, that he could do which met with the creature’s approval.
As a result, Lex had woken up in an even more foul mood than when he’d gone to sleep, and Solvei’s renewed efforts to discuss what was bothering him were shut down even more viciously than before.
“It was near a small waterfall, frozen now, that fed a spring,” replied Nisha in answer to Solvei’s question. “There’s some evidence that they stopped there before splitting up. No tracks, but remnants of a fire, along with some of the snow and brush being cleared.”
“I know that place,” nodded Solvei after a moment’s thought. “It’s near the edge of our territory. Beyond there, the landscape becomes a lot more broken; the mountains turn into smaller hills, but they have almost no vegetation, and there’s a lot of canyons between them.”
Lex digested that for a moment, then turned his attention back to Nisha. “What was the distribution of their division?”
“I...if you’re asking who was in each of the two groups, I don’t know,” admitted Nisha hesitantly, her ears flattening against her skull. “I was tracking the venedaemons’ auras, and from what I can tell they were evenly divided between the two groups. As for how the rest of them split their numbers...” She shrugged, shaking her head.
“ “ “I thought it best to hurry back/report this development/avoid more of your wrath.” ” ”
The added commentary from her shadows brought a growl from Lex’s throat. “You were told to find where my enemies and their prisoners are. Instead you come back with nothing but where they were, and no other pertinent information.”
Nisha looked down, accepting the rebuke without protest, and Lex’s lip curled at the sight before he turned his attention to Solvei. “How long will it take us to reach the falls she mentioned?”
Biting her lip, Solvei considered that for a moment, glancing up at the clouded sky. “If we left right now, I think we’d get there a little before dark tomorrow, but we’d have to hurry. Or I could take to the wind, in which case I think I could be there before the moon reached its zenith...I mean, if we could see the moon.”
“Absolutely not! You’re staying with me!”
Solvei recoiled, surprised by his vehemence. “But...Nisha said that there were remains of a camp there. If I got there early and looked it over, maybe I could find some clues-”
“Or it could be some sort of trap!” snapped Lex. “Sissel is crafty enough that she might have left a contingency behind in case we found a way to follow her!”
“But I’ve gotten a lot stronger!” protested Solvei. “I bet I can handle anything she throws at me now! And if things go badly, you can summon me back anyway!”
Lex could feel his hackles rising, talons digging into the ground as she continued. “I told you-”
“Besides, what if it isn’t a trap?” Lex sensed frustration from her then, and that only made his temper worse as Solvei kept pushing the issue. “Nisha can cover a lot of ground by disappearing and reappearing nearby, so I bet she could keep up with me if I took to the wind! We could both get back to the frozen falls, and she can follow one of the trails while pointing me in the direction of the other another! They don’t know to look for her, and I can keep speaking to you telepathically the entire time so you’ll know what’s going on! You can even look through my eyes-”
“WE ARE NOT SPLITTING UP AGAIN!!!”
Lex’s furious roar silence Solvei immediately, and she swallowed before nodding. “As you wish, Master.”
Her acquiescence barely mollified him, and he glared at her for a long moment, almost daring her to continue her defiance. He knew her points were all valid, that even if her proposed course of action led to nothing that it was at least worth the attempt, but he couldn’t bring himself to sign off on it. Not when it meant enduring another prolonged period of isolation in the wilderness.
Not when it meant running the risk of losing himself to the monster within him again.
Intellectually, Lex knew he was being irrational. He’d let his guard down before, not realizing how strong his new body’s instincts were, and that had been why he’d reverted to that bestial state. By keeping his conscious mind firmly occupied – and maintaining an active telepathic conversation with Solvei, which had brought him back to sanity before – he knew that he had little to worry about.
But that knowledge did nothing to remove the absolute terror that gripped his heart at the thought of reverting to that animalistic state again. The prospect of turning back into that unreasoning creature, driven only by its own desires, was something that had to be avoided at all costs. And not just because of the loss of self that represented.
If I had run into another pony while I was like that...
He knew that wasn’t a logical thing to fear, that the odds of encountering one of his own kind out in this desolate wilderness were nil. Even so, the thought of what he could have done if he’d come across another pony while he wasn’t himself terrified Lex to the very bottom of his soul.
Such a thing could never be allowed to happen, under any circumstances. If isolation increased the chances of losing himself, then he’d simply never allow Solvei to leave his side again. It wasn’t the ideal choice for the current situation, but it was an acceptable one.
Even if it meant being aware of how hurt she felt now.
Forcing himself to ignore that, Lex instead turned his attention back to Nisha. “Solvei and I will head for the campsite you found. As for you, your services are no longer required,” he spat, taking off the mind-shielding ring and contemptuously throwing it into the snow in front of her paws. “Go back to Darkest Night.”
Her purple eyes looked up at him again. “Can I not serve you longer?” she begged. “I wish to atone, both for my insult toward you earlier, and my poor showing now.”
“ “ “Just one more chance, and I will impress you/prove my worth/make myself useful.” ” ”
“Master, even after we reach the frozen falls, we still won’t know which way to go,” murmured Solvei, keeping her gaze on the ground as she spoke. “She could still be useful.”
Lex snorted at that. “Sissel and her band, along with their prisoners, are all traveling on foot. That’s why they’re taking such care to conceal their trail. Other than a single instance of them teleporting, which involved a magic item, there’s nothing to suggest that they have other forms of transportation. If the landscape beyond the adlets’ territory is as rugged as you say, their options for traversing it will be limited. Which means that your ability to sense the nature of the surrounding area should be able to determine what the viable paths are.”
He had to fight to keep his voice neutral during that last part, hating that he was implicitly recognizing her as Akna, since that ability belonged to the shaman rather than the winter wolf.
But Solvei shook her head, her voice still numb as she continue to avoid looking him in the eye. “Master, it doesn’t work like that. I can sense things like where water is, or locate certain types of animals or people. I don’t see some kind of map of the area.”
“I’ll grant you the power to do so,” he replied, not bothering to elaborate. Although he couldn’t use the Charismata to augment that particular ability of hers – it took several minutes for her to use, which was far too long for the sixty seconds his divine augmentations lasted – he could just have his tulpa bring forth some relevant magic item to boost her ability to read the local area. If necessary, he’d pour his own magic into it to enhance its ability to enhance hers in turn.
Assuming his tulpa could create such an item to begin with.
Assuming that his new body had the capacity to enhance it to the necessary degree.
Assuming that the augmentation worked properly, rather than overload the item the way it had the healing spell he’d used on Silla.
Gritting his teeth, Lex glared down at the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg. It had gradually ceased cutting into him; the Night Mare had apparently come to terms with his rejecting Nisha. But that brought Lex no satisfaction now. If anything, he felt bitter, since the goddess’s acumen seemed even more pointed now.
Taking the black wolf as a soul-bound servant would give him another permanent companion, making it easier to avoid being isolated. It would give him someone with insight – possibly markedly so – into what his tulpa could do now. It would likely enhance her abilities considerably, potentially making it not only easier for her to track down Sissel and the adlets, but maybe even bring them along with her as she jumped from place to place in search of her quarry.
All he had to do was give away another piece of himself, and he’d be able to easily solve his current problems.
Just like how he’d been able to bring Solvei back by merging her with Akna.
Just like how he’d gotten a stronger body by turning himself into monster.
Just like how he’d given up on his heart’s desire in order to find his faith in the Night Mare.
“Nisha...”
Across from him, the black wolf bit her lip as she looked up. “Yes?”
Lex paused for just a moment, then turned and started walking northwest, telepathically ordering Solvei to follow him.
There had been multiple times, since Lex had first formed his pact with the Night Mare, when he’d felt certain that the goddess had been laughing at him.
None of those instances had been because of the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg. The divinely-imbued metal usually served only to convey her anger, rending his flesh – or squeezing in a way that threatened that action – whenever he’d upset the goddess. On rare occasions it would shift in a manner that lacked even the threat of the jagged edges, indicating her approval.
But if the Night Mare had ever found cause to be amused at his failures, she had kept it to herself. Even so, Lex could think of several instances where he’d had the distinct impression that she’d taken sardonic delight in his exploits, either because he’d succeeded only by following her advice, or where he’d failed because he’d ignored it.
Right now felt like one of the latter instances.
Unable to comply.
Lex silently seethed as his latest attempt to have his tulpa bring forth a magic item which could enhance Solvei’s ability to scan the local environment failed.
“Master? Is everything-”
“Be quiet!” snapped Lex. “You’re not helping!”
She made no reply, but he registered a renewed sense of hurt from her then, and even that made him want to snap at her. Instead, he redoubled his efforts to make his tulpa comply with his wishes. While he hadn’t fully figured out whatever metrics governed its ability to bring forth materials from nothing, he’d figured out several such points through trial and error, the salient one being that magic items could only be made in stable, self-sustaining forms. Any sort of single-use item wasn’t something which his tulpa could make.
But his tulpa also lacked the ability to generate magical materials that crossed certain thresholds of power or of sufficiently-complex designs. While Lex was still exploring exactly where those limits fell, he’d already ascertained that – in conjunction with his tulpa’s inability to create limited-use magic items – he didn’t have nearly the breadth of options he’d initially thought, at least when it came to creating enchanted gear. After all, anything created to work in perpetuity necessarily used more power and required a more complex design than something which only needed to function a few times.
The end result was that, no matter how Lex tried to vary the specifics of what he was asking for now – limiting the scope of what it needed to affect, reducing the power output since he could manually augment it himself, or numerous other alterations – his tulpa’s reply was always the same.
Unable to comply.
Muttering the most profane oath he knew, Lex abandoned his efforts, keenly aware that things might have been different if he’d kept Nisha around.
But he’d known this was a possibility when he’d dismissed her, and dwelling on that was pointless now. Instead, he looked back toward where Solvei was once again checking the area around the frozen falls.
In his estimation, it had been almost half an hour since they’d reached the place where Nisha had reported that Sissel’s band had split in two. But while Solvei had quickly identified the remains of the camp that they’d made, she’d also confirmed that there were no indications of which way they’d gone. If it hadn’t been for Nisha’s telling them that they’d split into two groups, one continuing northwest while the other had turned and headed almost due north, Lex knew they would have been at a complete loss.
He could practically hear the Night Mare’s mocking laughter.
“Solvei.”
Still in adlet form – something Lex wondered if she was doing to spite him – she looked up from where she’d been crouched at the edge of the frozen spring. “Yes, Master? Should I begin the search?”
“In a moment,” he replied gruffly. “I’m going to temporarily consecrate this area to the Night Mare. Once I finish, then you can start.”
She cocked her head. “But I thought you were going to enhance my ability to read the landscape?”
“I’m going to use the Charismata to do exactly that,” Lex explained, his voice terse. “By dedicating this area to the Night Mare, I’m hoping that will sustain the effect beyond its usual sixty-second duration.”
“Oh...”
Lex gave her a sharp look, trying to ascertain whether or not her reply had been laced with skepticism. The idea that she doubted him caused him no small amount of irritation. That she would have been right to do so only made that worse.
While the Auctoritas Caliginous had confirmed what the Keeper had said about his being able to use the Charismata to sanctify an area in the Night Mare’s name, anything approaching the scope of the Shrine of the Starless Sky would have still been an undertaking of significant proportions, even without taking into effect the presence of the Confluence. And the Charismata had shown no substantial increase in potency during his time at the Shrine; certainly nothing on the level of what he was proposing now.
Nor, he knew, could he rely on the Night Mare’s deciding to provide him with an unexpected boon. Not after she’d already tried to do that with Nisha, only for him to throw her away. Even if he’d bothered to perform another ceremonial invocation – which was currently out of the question, due to a lack of properly hallowed ground, a congregation of sufficient size, and sacred implements, among other things – he doubted the goddess would have seen fit to answer his prayers at the moment.
As such, it was with no small amount of bitter resignation that Lex ordered his tulpa to conjure up powdered silver. Holding the argent particles in his wire-wrapped claw, he carefully spread it in a circle around himself and Solvei both, muttering a prayer as he called upon the Charismata’s power.
That, at least, worked as intended. The metallic dust crackled for a moment, melting the surrounding snow as the air seemed to grow heavier with tension. But it was anemic compared to how Darkest Night had felt, and Lex resisted the urge to sigh.
Instead, he gestured for Solvei to begin her scan, and she wordlessly complied, kneeling down and placing one hand on the ground as she closed her eyes. At the same time, Lex placed a claw on her shoulder, silently calling upon the Charismata again.
Touching her directly in no way made the transfer of power easier, not that he had expected it to. Worse, there was a greater sense of resistance now, her increased personal power making it harder for him to imbue her with additional energy. That had been another fact that the Auctoritas Caliginous had confirmed; the Charismata was at its most effective when used to empower those weaker than the one who wielded the Blessing That Empowers. The less of a disparity in strength, the less effective it would be, to the point where those whose might surpassed the wielder’s own could potentially resist it altogether.
Still, Solvei’s newfound power wasn’t that great, and Lex was able to imbue her with the desired augmentation, knowing that it would take her several minutes to finish her scan...and that the Charismata wouldn’t last that long.
Sure enough, the power he’d given her with faded away exactly sixty seconds later.
Nor was he the only one who felt the loss. Master...
Continue, he ordered, knowing that she could only do this once a day; better to at least make the attempt than abandon it midway through. Try to find out whatever you can.
The minutes passed slowly, giving Lex plenty of time to brood, certain that whatever cloaking magic Sissel was employing would be sufficient to defeat Solvei’s un-augmented scan.
As such, it was to his surprise when she furrowed her brow. “I’m picking up something odd...”
That earned Lex’s undivided attention, self-recrimination falling by the wayside as he latched onto what Solvei had said. “What do you mean ‘odd’?”
“There’s an animal...a large one...at the edge of the badlands...northwest of here...even though there isn’t enough food there to sustain something that big...”
Lex cocked his head, unsure what to make of that. “Can you tell what it is?”
Her eyes still closed, Solvei gave a hesitant nod. “I think so...”
She fell silent then, and Lex waited. But only a few seconds passed before she spoke up again. “It’s a bear...one native to the cold...”
She gasped then, her eyes widening. “Master, it’s Nangiannatuk!”
The name meant nothing to Lex. “Who?”
“Yotimo’s polar bear! The one he rides into battle!”
Lex nodded at that, recalling how Toklo’s father had been astride an armored polar bear when he’d first encountered him. For the beast to be lingering at the edge of the broken terrain where Sissel and the others had ventured – and apparently having chosen to follow one group rather than the other – was likely no coincidence. “Is there anyone else, or anything else, near it?”
Solvei paused for several seconds, then shook her head. “Not that I can sense. But Master, Yotimo found Nangiannatuk as a cub on his very first expedition, and spent his entire life raising him! For him to have gone in that direction-”
“Likely means that he’s following the group which took Yotimo and the other adlets,” concluded Lex.
“And if we can catch up to him, he might be able to lead us to everyone before it’s too late!” Leaping to her feet, Solvei beamed at him, excitement and hope radiating from her in such measure that even without the bond between them it would have been impossible to overlook. “Master, let’s hurry!”
A single nod from him was all it took, and she immediately conjured another serac beneath her feet, speeding off in that direction. Lex was right behind her, but unlike Solvei he was more reserved about what would happen once they found the polar bear.
According to what Silla had told them, Sissel had taken the adlets in order to force a conflict between himself and Hvitdod, the dragon whom she’d insisted was still alive, contrary to what the adlets’ myths stated. But while the obvious explanation for that was that they were meant to be hostages – bargaining chips to be used in exchange for an agreement that he’d fight Hvitdod – Lex found that to be unlikely. She’d already tried that plan with Woodheart, and Lex had done everything in his power to overturn it rather than simply acquiescing.
That was why he was having a hard time believing that Sissel would try the same strategy again now. The snow giant had comported herself calmly and dispassionately during their previous meeting, intelligently utilizing the resources at her disposal in a manner best designed to achieve her goals. For her to try a plan which had previously failed wasn’t in keeping with that level of tactical acumen.
It was more likely, in his estimation, that she was planning on using the adlets as bait, laying them out where Hvitdod couldn’t possibly miss them. If the creature was anything like the green dragon which had set its sights on Tall Tale, it wouldn’t hesitate to move in to devour them. Which meant that he’d need to fight it, almost certainly to the death, in order to save them. And regardless of who won the battle, the snow giant, her siblings, and the venedaemons would be waiting to deal with the victor.
Presuming he was right about that being Sissel’s strategy, Lex could appreciate the irony. She had to have decided that the adlets were important to him after seeing him fight alongside Akna, with no idea that he’d cared little for the bipedal wolves at the time. That was a disinterest he couldn’t afford now, since Solvei had merged with Akna, inheriting the shaman’s deep investment toward her people.
But as uncomfortable as Lex was with that, it that bothered him less than the fact that, if Nangiannatuk was leading them toward Yotimo and the other adlets, it meant that – despite his efforts to the contrary – they were playing right into his enemy’s hands. Because unless they managed to reach them before the adlets were marched to Hvitdod’s lair, Akna’s people would be laid out as food for the dragon, and he’d have to confront it just like Sissel wanted.
“He says that Yotimo and the others were taken into the canyon.”
“When?”
Imbued with the power to converse with animals thanks to the Charismata, Solvei relayed his question to Nangiannatuk, the animal pawing the ground in agitation as it huffed and growled in reply.
“He says the sky has gotten brighter and darker since they left, but that’s all he knows.”
Lex resisted the urge to sigh, knowing that it was pointless to ask for a more detailed accounting of how much time had passed from a creature of animal intelligence.
Although it had taken them barely an hour to locate Nangiannatuk, getting the polar bear to calm down and reveal what it knew had been no simple task. The creature had been in bad shape; in addition to numerous deep lacerations and several expansive burns, several of its injuries had been suppurating, indicating that its wounds were infected. As such, Nangiannatuk had rounded on them with all the fury that wounded animals were known for when they’d first approached it.
Not that it had been particularly troublesome to overcome; a mere thought on Lex’s part had wrapped the creature’s stubby legs in fetters of black crystal, hobbling it. Once it had exhausted itself trying to break free, Solvei had moved in and started soothing the beast; at her urging, Lex had given her the power to heal its injuries, which had helped to calm it down. Similarly effective – albeit to Lex’s further discomfort – was the way she’d fussed over the creature the entire time, letting it take in her scent as she’d repeatedly called herself Akna, noting more than once how the polar bear had known her nearly its entire life.
It had only been after it had finally calmed down that Lex had freed the animal and given Solvei the power to converse with it, reminding her that she only had sixty seconds of communication before the Charismata ran out. If they were going to get into a fight – either with Sissel and her band of monsters or with Hvitdod – Lex wanted to conserve as much power as possible, which meant not expending more uses of the Night Mare’s power than necessary.
But unlike Teyu Yagua, Nangiannatuk was still just an animal, which meant that the information they’d gotten from it had been of limited scope, giving only the simplest of answers no matter how they’d pushed it.
Still, the fact that it was here at all – and had confirmed that the adlets had been taken this way – was more than Lex had hoped for, particularly after his complete failure to enhance Solvei’s ability to read the environment. As such, they had to make the most of what Nangiannatuk could tell them now. “What about the other group? The ones who went north instead of northwest?”
Again, Solvei relayed the question, and again she received several deep grunts and upset snarls in reply. “He doesn’t know. Master, Nangiannatuk relies on scent as much as sight, and Sissel and the others were all masking their scents, even for Yotimo and the others. Along with being hurt, exhausted, and hungry, I’m amazed he was even able to follow them the way he was.”
“If he saw them after they left the frozen waterfall, he has to be aware that their group’s composition was different somehow,” pressed Lex. “Sissel and her siblings are distinctive. Describe them to him and see if any of them were missing when they went this way.”
Nodding, Solvei quickly relayed brief descriptions of the snow giant and her kin, but she was still speaking when Nangiannatuk let out an angry bellow, rising up onto its hind legs before falling back onto all fours, making Solvei wince. “Master, he’s getting frustrated by all of these questions! All he knows-”
Her ears flattened then, her shoulders slumping as the polar bear’s yowling turned mournful. “All he knows is that when they went down into the canyon, he couldn’t follow them, and he doesn’t know what to do now. Oh, Nangiannatuk!”
Lunging forward, Solvei wrapped her arms around the polar bear, pressing her face to its fur. “I know how you feel,” she murmured. “I’m worried about them too.”
The grief and anxiety coming off of her was transmitted to Lex, who grimaced at another of the unending reminders that she wasn’t truly Solvei anymore. But rather than wallow in that, he instead turned to look at the canyon in question.
It was easy to see why the polar bear hadn’t been able to continue its pursuit. The gulf in front of them wasn’t very deep, the bottom of the canyon being only a few dozen feet below them, but there was no obvious path for Nangiannatuk to take to get there. Nor could he have easily followed along its upper edge, as numerous smaller rifts spiderwebbed out from around the top of the ravine, making the footing treacherous.
Of course, none of that would have been a problem for Sissel, Lex knew. According to the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, venedaemons were capable of using the same short-range teleportation spell that he knew. It would have been easy for them to ferry their allies – and their prisoners – to the bottom of the canyon that way.
For a moment he considered trying to verify that had been what happened, but discarded the notion. If it had been several days’ time since they’d come through here, any residual magic auras would have long since dissipated, and enhancing his senses to try and find any leftover traces – the way Nisha had been able to track the passage of the venedaemons’ numinous auras – would have been a waste of power. Nangiannatuk had already confirmed which way they’d gone; that would have to be good enough.
Changing into a shadow, Lex didn’t bother turning back to look at Solvei and Nangiannatuk, instead floating down toward the bottom of the canyon. If that animal has nothing else useful to share, then we’re done here. Prepare to leave.
Master, please just give me a moment!
The more we delay-
I promise, this won’t take long!
His eyes narrowing as he reached the bottom of the rift, Lex didn’t bother to reply. Instead he scanned the area for any active or lingering spell auras, just in case Sissel had left any traps behind. But if she had, they either weren’t magical or were cloaked beyond what he could discern, though in that case he’d expected nothing less; with how thoroughly Sissel had covered her tracks – literally and figuratively – it was nothing less than an incredible stroke of luck that they’d managed to find Yotimo’s polar bear...
Lex frowned, considering that again.
I’m ready, Master! I told Nangiannatuk that he should head home, and that we’ll bring everyone back. It took some convincing, but I think he’ll go.
Wait. Ask him how it was that he was able to follow everyone here without being spotted.
...Master?
If he wasn’t following them by scent, then he was keeping them in sight the entire time. All without being detected by Sissel, her siblings, or the venedaemons. I want to know how.
Silence fell, and he registered unease coming from Solvei as he heard her relay his question, followed by the polar bear’s angry grunts. He says there were a lot of them, and they didn’t move very fast, so it made them easy to follow even when he stayed far behind. And, um, he stayed downwind of them the entire time, just to be safe.
Frowning inwardly, Lex glanced upward, this time searching for magic on Nangiannatuk himself...and once again found nothing. Was he worrying needlessly? It was hard to believe that Sissel could overlook a large, lumbering creature following them like that, even at a distance.
But at the same time, there was little reason for her to be concerned about it. A polar bear was no real threat to her and her misbegotten siblings, any more than it was to him and Solvei. And since it was already following them at such a close distance, it wasn’t like they’d have expected him to find it now. Nor would the venedaemons have been interested in it; the Libram had made it clear that the souls of animals and other non-sapient creatures had very little value to most planar denizens. Confronting and killing an enraged beast like this likely wouldn’t have been worth the effort for them.
But there’s no reason to assume they were all so careless, decided Lex. If they interrogated their captives, they might know that their shaman can locate the bear even from miles away, and this is all part of a ruse. Except they would have needed to know to ask them about that in the first place. Although that’s not implausible, given their tactical acumen...
After several seconds, he reluctantly dismissed that line of thought as fruitless. There was a difference between strategizing and speculation, and while the former was useful, the latter was a waste of time. Right now, Nangiannatuk’s information was all they had to go on. Following it would take them to the captured adlets; whether it was in the company of Sissel or Hvitdod was something they’d simply have to deal with once they arrived.
Send him away and get ready, repeated Lex, preparing to summon Solvei down into the rock-strewn canyon with him. Although there was no more of a trail here than there had been through the snow-covered landscape they’d traversed, the area was filled with loose rubble and markedly uneven. If what Nangiannatuk had said about them moving slowly due to the size of their group was correct, then that would have been doubly true down here.
But the terrain wouldn’t slow down a shadow, nor Solvei’s serac.
Which meant that, in all likelihood, they’d catch up to their quarry very soon.
Master, can we talk?
Rushing through the canyon as quickly as he dared, Lex spared Solvei – again decked out in the battle preparations she’d made when they’d first left the Shrine of the Starless Sky – only the briefest of glances. Not now. It’s more important that we be on alert for traps or ambushes.
We’ve been picking our way through this canyon – no, this series of canyons – for hours now, and there hasn’t been anything yet, protested Solvei. The most threatening thing we’ve seen since we came down here have been a few lizards and a scorpion or two. I think we’re in the clear. And besides...
She paused, and Lex heard her sigh as he registered a renewed sense of apprehension from her. ...I don’t want to go into battle with you being mad at me.
I am not mad at you, and we are not doing this now, shot back Lex. If you’re so worried about saving your precious people, then you should be more focused on their welfare than my disposition.
Sadness came from her then, and a long moment passed before she said anything in reply.
But when she did, it caught him completely off-guard.
Do you hate me now that I’m Akna?
Lex couldn’t contain his surprise at that, unable to help but abandon his examination of their surroundings to focus on her. Of course not! How could you even think-
But he didn’t get to finish as – the two of them rounding a blind corner – Solvei came to an abrupt halt, shock and alarm coming from her now. M-Master! Look!
She needn’t have bothered with the warning.
Maybe a hundred feet ahead of them, facing them from where she was standing in the middle of a particularly wide portion of the canyon, was Sissel.
Nor was the snow giant alone. Flanked on either side by Grisela and Vidrig – and with that miniature sphinx perched on her shoulder – the trio had their weapons in hand, making it clear that they’d been ready for them. The same was true of the half-dozen venedaemons that were spread out behind them, and Lex could see two more standing at the top of the cliff walls above.
Even they had reinforcements, with several creatures the size and shape of a hoofball floating around them. Each of the things howled and gibbered as he and Solvei came into view, showing off rows of rotted and mismatched teeth inside of the gaping jaws that made up their limbless bodies, almost overshadowing the three yellow eyes set in the gnarled, rust-colored skin that covered their exteriors. It took Lex a moment to realize that he was seeing cacodaemons, the soul-extractors that he knew venedaemons were capable of summoning.
But he noted them only in passing, the bulk of his attention going toward the adlets which Sissel had taken prisoner.
Stripped to the waist, they were kneeling directly in front of Sissel and her sisters, their backs to their captors. Each had their hands bound behind them, and none dared to look up...save only for one, which Lex recognized as being Yotimo himself, his eyes squinting in the dim light as he peered toward them.
That was enough to prompt Sissel to lay her axe on the elder adlet’s shoulder, never taking her eyes away from the two of them as she pressed the blade against Yotimo’s neck.
“Lex Legis,” murmured the snow giant, the barest hint of a smile crossing her lips. “Imagine my surprise at seeing you here.”
Lex didn’t bother responding to Solvei’s telepathic alert, having come to the same conclusion the moment he’d laid eyes on the group. Somehow, Sissel and her misbegotten siblings, as well as their daemonic allies, had figured out that they were being followed. Worse, they’d taken the opportunity to prepare for their arrival, turning what should have been an unexpected ambush into a chance to ready themselves for battle.
And Lex had no doubt that they’d made the most of whatever advance notice they’d been given. The venedaemons had spread out, making sure they all had clear line of sight – not that the disgusting creatures had eyes – to him and Solvei, with none of their allies in the way of whatever spells Lex was sure they had ready to cast.
Worse, the adlets’ placement maximized their use as deterrents. With Sissel, Grisela, and Vidrig all standing behind them, the lupines were effectively acting as living shields; while they didn’t cover the twisted sisters completely – their kneeling position left the tops of their heads slightly below Sissel’s waist, and only up to mid-chest height on Grisela and Vidrig – it was still enough to strongly disincentivize attacking the three of them, lest the adlets be struck instead.
And while Lex was confident that he could target his attack spells with precision sufficient to where shooting around the adlets wouldn’t be a problem, that wouldn’t matter if Sissel followed through on her implicit threat to start executing her prisoners if he attacked.
As if to highlight that, Sissel moved the blade of her axe slightly, causing a trickle of blood to drip down from where it pressed against Yotimo’s neck. “I seem to recall telling that adlet we left behind to let you know that you’d need to go to Hvitdod’s lair if you wanted the rest of your pets back,” announced the snow giant, her voice flat. “And yet here you are anyway.”
“His name is Silla!” snarled Solvei, lifting her ice blades as she settled into a crouch, her serac drifting a few inches forward. “And I promise you, for what you did to him, I’m going to take more than just one of your legs!”
“That doesn’t sound very fair,” snickered Vidrig, her hideous face twisting into a mocking smirk. “His leg didn’t even taste that good. Too tough and gamey.”
Solvei’s eyes bulged, her jaw opening as the horror Lex registered from her then stole her breath away. “Y-you...”
Grisela’s laugh accompanied her sister’s then. “Always too quick to eat, Vidrig,” chortled the winter hag. “Never wanting to play first.”
Leaning in from the opposite side of where Sissel’s axe was resting on his shoulder, Grisela’s blackened tongue came out to lick one of Yotimo’s ears as her hands reached around to caress his chest. “Would have rather had a go at you,” she teased, keeping her eyes locked onto Lex. “But puppy here was fun too.”
“That’s enough, Grisela,” ordered Sissel, frowning at the snow hag. “We’re trying not to provoke them, remember?”
“Just wanted to let the stallion know he’s missing out.” Grisela’s hands slid lower then, and she leered as Yotimo grimaced. “Shy puppy, pretends he doesn’t like it. But was eager to bury his bone when told it’d either be him” – her fingers squeezed sharply, and Yotimo couldn’t hold back a grunt – “or his boy.”
“TAKE YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF HIM!!!”
Solvei shot forward, her serac rocketing across the ground as though fired from a cannon as she lifted her blades, roaring at the top of her lungs. The venedaemons tensed, raising their tentacles from the sleeves of their robes even as Sissel moved her free hand up-
“STOP!”
Lex’s command carried the force of the Charismata, and it brought Solvei to a halt instantly. Even then, he could feel her struggling with everything she had to free herself, a wordless scream tearing itself from her throat as she fought to complete her wild charge. Let me go! she roared across their telepathic link. LET ME GO!
The ice blades in her hands started to glow with soft blue light, and Lex cursed inwardly as he realized that she was about to attack magically instead of physically. “Don’t use your magic,” he snapped. “Don’t do anything at all.”
The blue light immediately faded from her weapons, and in his mind she howled to be released, but he ignored it. Instead, he glared at Sissel. “I’ve controlled my subordinate,” he hissed. “Control yours!”
Sighing, the snow giant removed her axe from Yotimo’s neck, even as Grisela cackled. “Poor she-wolf,” taunted the hag. “Made herself all big and bad, but still can’t-”
Her jeering cut off abruptly as Sissel grabbed Grisela by her hair and tore her off of Yotimo, flinging her backward. “I said that’s enough.”
Ignoring Grisela’s indignant shriek, as well as the way the tiny sphinx on her shoulder winced at the sound, Sissel gave Lex a neutral look. “I have to admit, I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to pick up our trail or not, even with all of the precautions we took. This would have been easier if you’d simply gone straight to Hvitdod’s lair the way you were told.”
“Easier for whom?” shot back Lex. “You were hoping that I’d fight the dragon in order to recover the adlets. But now that I’ve caught up to you, I don’t have to.”
The snow giant nodded her head toward the kneeling adlets. “That depends on whether or not you want them all back, or just the ones Paska didn’t take.”
That was enough to snap Solvei out of her rage, and in Lex’s mind her screaming tapered off. She...she’s right! Toklo isn’t here! Neither is Ujurak! Or Nootaitok! Or Kumaglak!
Lex frowned. When he’d initially met Yotimo, the elder adlet had kept his warriors well away from the ponies, not wanting to initiate a conflict while his son was cursed to be inedible. The result was that Lex hadn’t gotten a full count of how many warriors were there, let alone a good look at any of them. How many are missing altogether?
Seven, replied Solvei after a moment, her mental voice slipping back toward anxiety more than anger. Six members of the warband, plus Toklo.
“Right now, Paska is probably closing in on Hvitdod’s lair with the others,” announced Sissel. “Each of them is going to be hobbled, tied down, and left for the dragon to eat. After that, how long they have depends on how soon it wakes up and smells that there’s a meal waiting. Which means that if you want to save them, you need to get moving.”
“For someone who makes such meticulous plans, you don’t seem to realize that I don’t know where this dragon of yours lives,” replied Lex coldly, the edges of his umbral form roiling as his eyes narrowed. “Nor do the adlets, according to what I’ve been told.”
Sissel quirked a brow. “And for someone who was able to track us down in spite of all the magic we used to stay hidden, you don’t seem to realize how hard it is to believe that you can’t find a dragon the size of a small mountain.”
Lex didn’t rise to the barb, instead redirecting the conversation to another topic. “You keep saying how hard you worked to keep me from finding you, and yet you were waiting for us when we finally did. Which means that you knew when we were getting close. How?”
He didn’t expect her to actually answer that question, of course. Even if Prevarius had once remarked that it was surprising how many people would voluntarily reveal their secrets when asked, Lex knew that Sissel was far too intelligent an enemy to do something so foolish. He’d only asked because the longer they talked, the more time he had to scan the area for magical emanations.
Or rather, to sort through the myriad emanations which he could see.
That wouldn’t have been possible before, when his only way to see into the magical spectrum was either to cast a spell specifically designed to do so – and in the process alerting Sissel to what he was doing – or to use his circlet, which he couldn’t do in shadow-form. But now, his new body’s augmented magic, still available even when he was incorporeal, not only made that possible, but allowed him to easily channel additional power into his enhanced eyesight, giving him a better look at the spell auras surrounding his enemies.
That was good, since there were so many that he wouldn’t have been able to identify them nearly as well otherwise.
At least four different defensive spells on each of them, noted Lex, making sure Solvei could hear his thoughts. It looks like they’re all warded against fire. Vidrig and Grisela have minor fields of deflective force wrapped around them, and Sissel has a boost to her reflexes. All three of them have apotropaic wards active, and well as abjurations against summoned creatures, probably in anticipation of more ice elementals.
Grant me the power to summon an army of them again, and we’ll see just how long their ‘abjurations’ hold out, replied Solvei darkly.
It takes you too long to summon those, replied Lex. And I have no doubt that the venedaemons will immediately target you with their spells if you try in order to break your concentration.
Frustration radiated off of Solvei in waves. Then use your black crystals to put up a barrier so that they can’t blast me!
You need to have room to summon them in, which means I can’t enclose you completely, explained Lex. And anything less than that won’t protect you from a fireball or a cloud of acid mist. Not to mention that I think several of the venedaemons we can see are illusions meant to draw our attention. Remember how Silla said they appeared out of nowhere? The real ones are likely hiding nearby, invisible-
“Cacodaemonia!”
Vidrig’s sudden announcement made Lex frown, not that the expression was outwardly visible. “What?”
Turning to glare at her sister, Sissel frowned. “Vidrig, shut up.”
“Why?” sneered the troll. “We outsmarted him, and he can’t do anything about it now!”
Reaching up, she grabbed one of the cacodaemons, ignoring the way the ugly little thing yelped and squirmed in her grasp. “When we figured out the bear was following us, we thought that might be a problem. But instead of killing it, we figured it would be easier to use it as an alarm in case you found us, so we had this little guy bite it! And it worked! The bear got sick with cacodaemonia! That meant it could hear all its thoughts!”
Beside him, Solvei sucked in a sharp breath of air, and Lex was sure that if he’d been corporeal he’d have done the same.
Cacodaemonia. The Libram of Ineffable Damnation, with its extensive catalogue of planar creatures, had mentioned that those bitten by a cacodaemon contracted that disease. But the author’s flowery language had written only that the illness “opens the victim’s heart to the daemon.” Lex had assumed that was a reference to the sickness inducing some sort of drastic change in behavior, but if it meant that it could listen in on their thoughts...
Nangiannatuk! His wounds were blighted! Master, they were listening to Nangiannatuk’s thoughts while we were talking to him! That’s how they knew that we were close!
“Vidrig, you’ve said too much.” Sissel’s passive expression had hardened into one of disapproval, glowering at the troll. “Be quiet.”
But the ice troll wasn’t listening, instead cooing at the struggling cacodaemon the way a filly would have at a kitten. “And since these little guys are natural shapeshifters, we sent a few out to watch the gorge while-, OW!”
Yelping, the troll opened her grip as the cacodaemon – having changed into a scorpion the size of a housecat – stung her hands, dropping to the ground and frantically scuttling away.
It didn’t get more than three fit before Vidrig fell on it in a rage. “How dare you?! I was being nice!” she screeched as she snatched up a rock and slammed it down onto the transformed creature, its exoskeleton shattering under the force of the blow. Screeching, it metamorphosed back into a cacodaemon, trying to fly away, but Vidrig slammed her rock down on it again, not giving it a chance to escape. “Gonna squish you good! Stupid little thing, being all-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish as Sissel swung her arm out, her axe cleaving Vidrig’s head from her shoulders in a single stroke.
Grisela gave a spiteful laugh as the troll’s head hit the ground and rolled away, its jaw still working soundlessly. Her body swayed, but didn’t fall as blood spurted from her neck, instead lurching drunkenly as her mismatched arms reached out in different directions, trying to find her missing head without any sensory organs. In another context it would have looked funny, but the insect-like way she kept spasming, her limbs each working independently as she tried to literally pull herself together, made the sight unnerving rather than humorous.
Ignoring the hideous spectacle, Sissel lowered her axe as she returned her attention to Lex. Turning so that she was standing in profile to him, she nodded her head behind her, at where the canyon narrowed as its winding path continued. “If you keep going that way, the network of canyons eventually works its way northward and slightly toward the east. Eventually, it reaches the rift where Hvitdod lives. You can’t miss it; it’s the deepest rift here, going almost a mile downward.”
Lex snorted. “And you think I’ll simply leave and do your bidding? After everything you and yours have done? Slaughtering innocent ponies. Taking Woodheart hostage.” His eyes narrowed again, the edges of his black form churning faster. “Killing Solvei.”
“I’m sure you’re very upset about all that,” answered Sissel flatly. “But try to think logically. We outnumber you by more than five to one, and we’ve had plenty of time to prepare for you to get here. Even if you manage to win this fight, and do it without losing what looks like your only remaining pawn, since those mares of yours apparently knew better than to accompany you this far” – she glanced up at the venedaemons on the clifftops, which Lex knew were scouts making sure he didn’t have any allies waiting in the wings, before looking back at him – “you’d never have enough power left to slay Hvitdod.”
“Because it’s so much better for me to kill the dragon first,” sneered Lex. “That way, you and your retinue of monsters can simply finish me off after I’ve expended most of my magic dealing with it.”
“True,” admitted Sissel, glancing to the side as Vidrig found her head and put it back on her neck. “But at least that way you’d know we’re coming, and what we can do, since I’m sure you’ve had plenty of time to scan the spells we have up. Isn’t that more advantageous for you than spending most of your strength now and going to fight a dragon whose abilities are complete unknowns?”
Lex was silent for a moment, then gave a hollow laugh, silently counting down the last few seconds before the Solvei was able to move again. Get ready, he ordered her.
“You are, of course, absolutely correct,” he announced, floating toward Sissel. “But I’ve gone through some changes lately, and as a result...”
He changed back into his corporeal form, and had the pleasure of seeing the snow giant’s eyes widen as she caught sight of his new self.
The beast within Lex howled in glee as he leaped at Sissel, relishing in the chance to finally indulge its killer instinct.
Lex made no attempt to suppress those urges the way he had for the last few days, allowing the savage desire to rend and tear his enemies into bloody pieces to fill his mind. Indeed, he deliberately allowed them to saturate his thoughts, focusing on how he could best use all of his powers and abilities to slaughter everyone who stood against him.
The result was a tenuous alliance between his higher self and the beast within, and when a roar poured forth from his throat in mid-leap – soaring over the kneeling adlets to pounce directly onto Sissel, the snow giant grimacing as she tried too late to bring her axe up to intercept his unexpected assault – it was one of triumph as much as bloodlust.
Do it now, Solvei!
Without hesitation, the winter wolf obeyed his command, putting into practice the plan her master had fed her in those last few moments before he attacked. Concentrating fiercely, she dug deep into the reservoir of magical strength that she’d gained as a result of their bond, using it to empower her ice magic.
Immediately, seracs identical to her own formed beneath each of the kneeling adlets, the magic imbued in the frozen platforms keeping their passengers from slipping off. Not hesitating, Solvei immediately gestured toward the blind corner behind her, mentally directing the icy conveyances she’d created and sending them hurrying in that direction. Master, they’re almost clear! But I won’t be able to get them very far! Making so many of those seracs at once means that they won’t last long before dissolving!
Just get them to out of immediate danger! Then kill everyone else here!
Lex didn’t bother replying any further, instead digging the talons of his back legs deeper into Sissel’s cuirass, having latched onto the snow giant’s torso. Of his foreclaws, one was sunk deep into the meat of her right bicep, causing her to grimace as she kept her weapon up, having managed to get the haft of her axe between the two of them. His other claw gripped the weapon just below the head of it, directly above her right hand, and struggled to push it backward so that he could close the last few inches of distance between them and sink his teeth into her face.
As he’d hoped, his new appearance and unexpected frontal assault had caught Sissel by surprise, allowing him to get in close before she’d been able to bring her magic to bear. Better yet, her sisters and the venedaemons seemed equally off-guard, and although Lex knew they’d recover in a matter of seconds, that would hopefully be enough time for Solvei to get the adlets away-
Recovering from its own shock, the tiny sphinx on Sissel’s shoulder – whom Lex recognized as having held the mirror from which she’d projected her illusory image in their last confrontation – let out a scream of terror, turning and leaping to the ground as it ran for cover.
The sound seemed to shake everyone else out of their stupor, and Vidrig charged forward, giving a guttural cry as she dashed over, bringing her own axe into Lex’s side. It hit with enough force to split stone, but Lex barely felt the strike, his new body, magic items, and defensive spells absorbing nearly all of the damage.
But it managed to dislodge his claws just enough that Sissel, muscles straining as she grunted with effort, was able to fling him off of her.
Immediately, Grisela and the venedaemons all cut loose with their magic.
In the space of a few seconds, Lex was assaulted by storms of ice, beams of fire, bolts of lightning, and gouts of acid. They shot in from every direction, and out of his peripheral vision Lex could see several venedaemons popping into being even as others faded away, proving that he’d been correct about the creatures using invisibility and illusions to disguise their real positions.
But Lex had no time to congratulate himself on his foresight as he did his best to weather the onslaught of magic. Diving through an explosion of super-cooled air – none of which harmed him in the slightest, thanks to a ward against cold which Solvei had previously placed on him – he leaped in place, body contorting in ways his pony-self never would have been able to as he did his best to dodge a trio of blazing rays of searing heat.
He wasn’t entirely successful, the first two missing him only for the last to graze along his side. The beam was hot enough to make him grit his teeth, but he ignored the pain, knowing that it was only a minor wound. The creature he’d merged with had been completely immolated by his own magic, only to shrug it off. The venedaemons’ would have needed dozens upon dozens of heat rays before he’d be in any real danger from them.
But it was the first of what he knew would be a series of attacks that were slipping past his defenses. There were simply too many for him to dodge them all, even if he ignored the ones to which he had heightened resistance. A pressurized spray of acid caught him on the shoulder before he could roll away. A lightning bolt grazed his flank faster than he could avoid it. A volley of force missiles battered away at his defensive enchantments, momentarily staggering him as they shattered against his personal shields.
And those were just the attacks that he could physically avoid. His magical senses registered just as many esoteric attacks being directed at him, trying to wear him down in other ways. Two different attempts to artificially dull his reaction speed were shaken off, followed immediately by a nauseating display of color exploding directly in front of his eyes, forcing him to squeeze them shut. Knowing better than to stop moving, Lex relied on instinct alone to carry him forward as a fear spell, a charm spell, and a vertigo spell all broke against his mental defenses.
Opening his eyes a second later, he risked a glance behind him as the volley of magic died away, seeing that the seracs carrying the adlets had reached Solvei’s position. Another two seconds, maybe three, and they’d be around the corner and out of immediate danger.
Returning his attention to his enemies, Lex let a feral grin cross his lips. “Is that the best you can do?”
Her mouth set in a grim line, Sissel regarded him silently for a moment, then turned to her sister. “Grisela.”
Leveling her black ice staff at Solvei, the hag let out a shriek. “Take the she-wolf!”
Solvei tensed, and Lex registered her apprehension spiking, certain that she was about to be subjected to the same barrage of spells that he was. But he knew she could handle it; the trick would be keeping the seracs moving – since they operated by her mental commands – while making sure that none of the adlets were harmed by-
That was when the adlets, moving in unison, leaped from the frozen platforms bearing them away and dogpiled Solvei.
Yotimo was the only one who didn’t obey, groaning and hunching over as he rolled off of his serac, looking like he was injured despite the lack of any visible wounds. But the other adlets all pounced on Solvei without hesitation, breaking the cords which had bound their hands behind their backs as though they were made of tissue paper.
“Wh-what’re you doing?!” shrieked Solvei as her own people tackled her. “Stop! STOP!”
None of them listened to her, their faces expressionless and their voices silent as they threw themselves at her. Despite Solvei’s increased size, being twice as large as the rest of them, she hadn’t been prepared to be tackled anymore than Sissel had. As one adlet after another leaped at her, grabbing at any handhold they could find, she shrieked, swayed, and finally toppled off of her own serac, the bipedal lupines immediately moving to pin her down.
Now it was Lex’s turn to be shocked, not having expected that to happen. He’d scanned the adlets for magic, and found nothing on any of them, so what was going on?!
“This is your last chance.” Sissel’s voice made Lex turn away from Solvei’s predicament, the snow giant having taken a fighting stance, axe raised to a ready position. “I’d prefer not to let Mother down, but I’m growing tired of your obstinance. Cease fighting and go to Hvitdod’s lair, or I’ll kill you and your bitch here. It’s your choice.”
Lex paused, glancing back at Solvei again. Trying to fight so many enemies was already a daunting task. Trying to fight them in addition to the same people they’d come here to save would be much harder, especially when he didn’t know why-
“Off! I said get OFF!” One of Solvei’s arms came up then, throwing the adlet holding it bodily through the air. Arms cartwheeling, he came down hard, head slamming against a particularly jagged rock.
The impact caved the back of his skull in.
A second later, the downed adlet got up and threw himself back into the press of bodies, seemingly unaware of the fatal injury that he’d just taken.
The sight made Lex inhale sharply. Solvei, they’re not adlets!
Huh?!
Puppets! explained Lex, staring at the damaged creature’s head injury.
Where there should have been blood and brains seeping out the back of its cranium, there was only ice and snow.
They’re Grisela’s puppets!
Darting backward, Lex made a beeline for Solvei’s position. From his vantage point, he could see Yotimo struggling to get up, a trickle of blood coming from his nose as a result of his fall. That confirmed that he, at least, was who he appeared to be. But none of the others displayed any hints that they were actually alive, and as Solvei’s thrashing grew heavier in response to his warning, he could see more injuries appear on her attackers, all revealing nothing more than frozen water underneath.
Grisela’s puppets are magical constructs, but none of them had spell auras around them! Which means she or Sissel or one of the venedaemons knows the spell to suppress magical emanations! Darting toward the press of bodies as fast as he could, Lex cursed his own stupidity. Sissel even said that she knew I was checking them for magical auras! And I was so caught up in the ones I could see, it didn’t occur to me to look any deeper at what I couldn’t!
Getting close enough, Lex called upon their bond, teleporting Solvei. But not to his side; instead, he placed her as close as he could to Yotimo’s position, the enlarged wolf appearing with a gasp of surprise. Solvei, Yotimo looks to be the only one who’s real! Get him and get out of here!
What? Clamoring to her feet, Solvei tried to orient herself. Master, wait-
Just grab him and go! Once you’re far enough away, summon an ice elemental to guard him! I’ll summon you back once you do!
I...I underst-
“Have it your way, then.”
Sissel’s voice was followed by heavy footsteps, as she darted forward faster than someone of her bulk should have been able to, her free hand gesturing rapidly as she murmured the words of a spell. Lex had just enough time to recognize it as one that would inflict a particularly virulent poison on whomever she touched...and then the snow giant was on him.
In an instant, Lex called upon his horn’s magic to turn into a shadow...but the creature inside of him rebelled at that, furious at how he’d been retreating instead of pressing his attack. Momentarily torn, Lex found himself unable to act, and that was all the opening that Sissel needed, her hand coming around to seize him by the throat. Her fingers grasping him just above the hem of his cloak, Lex could feel a tingling against his skin as the poison set in.
“MASTER!”
GO! Out of his periphery, he could see the collection of adlet-puppets already picking themselves up and starting toward where Solvei was. Likewise, the venedaemons were already in the midst of casting more spells, and Grisela and Vidrig were both moving up to support Sissel. You wanted to save your precious people, didn’t you?! So grab the one that’s here and go! NOW!
Whimpering, Solvei hesitated for the briefest instant before turning and dashing toward where Yotimo was lying. Lifting him as though he were a child, she darted across the blind corner, barely managing to avoid a spray of acid from one of the venedaemons on the cliff’s edge as she slipped out of sight.
Knowing he had to cast his poison-retardation spell as soon as he could, Lex didn’t wait a second longer, channeling power into his horn. Inwardly, his beast snarled again, but this time he was ready for it, managing to quell its anger. This might be a defensive tactic, but it’s one I can use to attack!
A second later he turned incorporeal, slipping out of Sissel’s grasp.
But he had already turned solid again before he hit the ground.
And then he was incorporeal again, rapidly blinking back and forth from shadow to flesh, looking like he was under a strobe effect as he slowly stood up.
The last time he’d used this, he’d been told by the ponies who’d witnessed it that it was particularly intimidating. Sissel, however, seemed unimpressed as she hefted her axe, unwilling to give him the time he needed to cast a spell. “Nice trick, but it won’t save you. Whether it’s by magic, poison, or just being cut to pieces, you’re still going to die. Just like your wolf.”
She punctuated her statement with a swing of her weapon, the blade arcing out in a horizontal slash before he’d finished righting himself.
But it took less than a thought for Lex to adjust the timing of his shifting, and the axe caught him at a moment when he’d turned into a shadow. The impact still hurt – the blade was clearly magical, and so was able to damage him even in his incorporeal state – but it was far less damaging that it would have been had he been solid.
Even better, Sissel was momentarily off-balance, overcorrecting from her swing having encountered no resistance despite having scored a hit. In response, Lex reared up and brought his claws across her face, again timing it perfectly so that his talons were solid as they tore into her alabaster cheeks.
“My bond with Solvei was too strong for you to kill.”
Cursing, Sissel stumbled back, her free hand coming up to where he’d cut her.
Her fingers came away wet with blood.
The sight made the monster inside him howl in joy, and Lex bared his teeth, the two of them once again in consensus.
The venedaemon screamed, the mouth that made up its entire face stretched wide with pain as Lex sank his claws into the thing.
Shrieking, it tried to cast a spell as he knocked it to the ground, but Lex gave it no opportunity to do so, talons punching through its flimsy robe and digging into its body. Although the creature’s hide was tough, having consistency more akin to wood than flesh, his claws easily tore deep gouges in its torso, causing it to wail louder.
Abandoning its attempt to use magic, the venedaemon thrashed in agony, the rubbery tentacles that it had in place of arms lashing upward to bat at him. The motions were quick enough that the two limbs whistled as they cut through the air, striking with the force of leather whips as they impacted Lex from each side.
To no effect whatsoever.
Lex didn’t even notice the counterattack, the first tentacle passing harmlessly through him as it struck him in a moment when he’d turned to shadow. The second strike managed to make contact with his corporeal body, but bounced off without leaving so much as a bruise. Neither slowed Lex’s furious assault, the monster within him shrieking with delight as he snapped bones and shredded entrails, sending a spray of foul ichor into the air as he eviscerated his enemy.
An instant later he spied the pulsating mass that was the creature’s heart, and without thinking he ducked his head down and sank his teeth into it. A death scream rattled in his ears as he bit down, crushing the organ to pulp even as he yanked his head back, tearing the crushed remains of the venedaemon’s heart free from the ruin of its chest, the creature giving one final shudder before going still.
The taste that filled his mouth was foul, but Lex found himself reveling in it nevertheless, savoring his well-earned meal-
That was when three of Grisela’s adlet-puppets plowed into him.
Cursing his inattention as he shook himself free of the bloodlust that had momentarily overtaken his senses, Lex immediately began working to extricate himself. His rapid-shifting kept the puppets from grappling him, but only partially. Buried under a press of bodies, he still had to struggle to fully work free of the grasping limbs, wasting precious seconds in the process. Nor was he entirely successful, as the constructs had no concept of pain or self-preservation, continuing to grasp at him even as he sought to get clear of them, forcing him to expend more effort fighting them off.
It was a waste of time Lex knew he couldn’t afford. Not when he still needed to cast his poison-retardation spell before the venom Sissel had hit him with began to wear him down. That it hadn’t already was likely only due to the adrenaline coursing through him, and Lex doubted that he’d be able to count on that much longer.
But Sissel was aware of that too, and was making sure her allies used that to their best advantage.
“Keep going!” shrieked Grisela, directing the rest of her puppets. Whereas the one he’d fought before had acted as though it shared her consciousness, these seemed to require her to purposefully direct them in order to do anything. “Grab him! Pin him down!”
“Vidrig, get in there!” added Sissel, raising her free hand for what Lex knew would be another spell. “I’ll make an opening for you!”
“Hah! This’ll be fun!” hooted the troll, already charging in with her axe raised above her head.
Around him, the remaining venedaemons were waving their tentacles and murmuring in susurrus voices as they prepared to cast again, apparently not requiring instructions of their own. Above them, Lex could see the cacodaemons flitting about overhead, their three eyes trained directly on him as he felt them continue to throw spells designed to cause disorientation at his mental shields, attempting to keep him off-balance.
Solvei, how long longer until you’ve secured Yotimo’s safety?
I’m sorry, Master! came the immediate reply. I’ve got a few of those tentacled creatures here, and some of those little three-eyed things too! They ruined my attempt to summon an ice elemental! I’m going to need to kill them myself before I can leave Yotimo’s side!
She paused for a moment, and Lex registered a spike of anxiety cutting through her frustration. I think they did something to him! He’s awake, but he’s not responding when I call his name! He just keeps looking around in a daze, like he can’t understand what’s happening!
The report made Lex curse, swiping at another one of the false adlets. His claw opened up its throat, but the artificial creature couldn’t have cared less, instead reaching out to grab his foreleg. It only got a partial hold before his rapid-shifting let him yank it back, but it still cost Lex another half-second, and more puppets – as well as Vidrig – were already closing in, even as the spellcasters neared the end of their incantations.
That only a few of them had gone after Solvei was a testament to his soul-bound companion’s quick thinking, having used her magic to seal the blind corner she’d disappeared around with a solid wall of ice. But Sissel had still sent a few of the venedaemons after her via their short-range teleportation magic, and Lex knew that she wanted to keep the two of them split up, since a divided force was easier to deal with.
In that regard, she was right. Even though they’d communicated via telepathy, Lex knew they’d made it plain to their enemies that Solvei’s priority was to keep Yotimo alive, and since the adlet was currently unable to fend for himself, that meant Solvei had to watch over him. Which in turn left Lex on his own.
And even with that ice wall there, Sissel can keep sending the venedaemons after Yotimo in small groups, which means that even if Solvei kills the ones harrying her now she’ll probably still be stuck there for some time. Worse, Lex had no doubt that the venedaemons would drag out the fight as long as they could. While their magic wasn’t anything notable, they were intelligent opponents, making sure to keep their distance while casting, forcing him to run them down individually. Solvei would have a harder time doing that while watching over Yotimo.
And with Vidrig and the puppets moving to keep him occupied while he tried to engage with the spellcasters, Lex knew his own strategy of running down his foes one at a time wasn’t going to work much longer-
“RENSE!” roared Sissel as she finished her casting, making a scattering motion with her free hand.
Lex had just enough time to recognize that as the Koloss word for “purge” when agony tore through him, and he couldn’t hold back a roar of pain as his rapid-shifting immediately ended, his body suddenly unable to dematerialize even for a fraction of an instant. Nor could he reengage it when he tried again a second later, his horn aching at the futile effort.
His mind immediately went back to his fight with Xiriel, remembering when the belief devil had done something like this. Except that had been a generalized counterspell, shutting down his incorporeality and several other spells he’d had active, all without pain and without preventing him from reapplying them. Whatever Sissel had done was more specific, painfully keeping him in a solid state while preventing him from changing back into a shadow again.
All of that passed through Lex’s mind in an instant, even as his instincts drove him to thrash harder, fighting the press of puppets bearing down on him. But another venedaemon finished a spell, and Lex felt the ground under him suddenly turn slippery, as though coasted with grease, forcing him to dig his back claws in harder in order to secure himself. Another caused a bright burst of light to flare up directly in front of his face, causing him to blink and turn his head to the side, making it harder to concentrate. A third tried to use another reflex-dulling spell, and Lex only barely shook it off, knowing that at the rate he was going he’d be overwhelmed before Solvei finished her own battle.
That point was driven home firmly as Vidrig reached him.
“GOT YOU NOW!” she bellowed as she brought her axe down in a heavy swing. Out of the corner of his eye, Lex could see two other venedaemons pointing at her as they finished their own spells, aware that they were enchanting either her or her weapon in order to increase the lethality of her attack.
Aware that there was no way he’d be able to get a spell off in time, Lex did the only thing he could and conjured up a huge mass of black crystals.
Fortunately, whatever Sissel had done to keep him solid didn’t seem to affect the rest of his dark magic, because in an instant jagged black spikes erupted from the ground around him. Shooting upward in every direction, he felt them tear through the puppets grabbing him, impaling them and wrenching them off of him. And Vidrig-
He had no time to finish his thought as the troll’s axe buried itself in his shoulder.
His augmented body absorbed the brunt of the damage, but whatever spells the venedaemons had cast on Vidrig combined with her own brute strength was enough that her weapon had still managed to bite through his organometallic fur. He could feel the blade grinding against bone, and he gnashed his teeth as the troll – despite having been impaled through her neck and her belly – began to wrench the axe back and forth.
“Which do you think will kill you first?” gurgled Vidrig, smiling hideously despite her wounds. “My axe or Sissel’s poison?”
The taunt made Lex grimace, knowing he couldn’t wait any longer to stop the venom he’d been hit with. Already he could feel it...
Do nothing.
His eyes widening, it was only then that Lex realized that it wasn’t an adrenaline rush masking the effects of the toxin. After the initial tingling he’d felt when Sissel had hit him with it, he hadn’t felt any effects from the poison at all. Nor could he now.
But there was no reason why Sissel’s spell should have failed, unless...
His new body had a drastically different physiology from his original one. While he’d done some basic investigations of how it worked before leaving the Shrine of the Starless Sky, the more intricate aspects of what he’d become were still a mystery to him, including his biochemistry and how it reacted to foreign substances. But given how he didn’t feel any different despite the venom he’d been exposed to...
Am I immune to poison now?
The thought earned a bemused snort from the beast inside of him, and Lex instinctually realized that was exactly the case.
Giving a feral smirk, Lex reached a claw out toward the impaled troll. “The correct answer,” he hissed, “is neither!”
Vidrig snickered as she yanked harder on the axe, sawing it back and forth in an attempt to tear through his shoulder completely. “How’s that? You gonna run me through with more black spikes? ‘Cause you tried that back in your underwater cave. Didn’t work then, won’t work now!”
Fighting back a grimace as she wrenched harder on the blade, Lex sank his claw into the wrist of her free hand, trapping it. “Then I’ll try something deadlier!”
“Go ahead!” laughed Vidrig. Even with one arm immobilized, she still managed to tear her axe free of his shoulder. Lifting it up, she prepared to continue hacking at him. “I’m warded against fire and acid, and nothing else can kill me! Don’t matter what you try, I’ll just grow back from it!”
The taunt brought a grin to Lex’s face. “They’ll be glad to hear that.”
Vidrig paused, her hideous face twisting in confusion. “Eh? Who?”
“Them,” answered Lex, mentally calling upon his tulpa.
An instant later, a swarm of carnivorous leeches – the same kind that he’d encountered back in Darkest Night – were crawling on Vidrig’s head.
It was his first time seeing if his tulpa was able to bring living creatures forth the same way it could inanimate objects, and as Vidrig let out a bloodcurdling scream, Lex made a note as to the success of the endeavor, watching as the foot-long creatures – their lamprey-like maws surrounded by a ring of teeth – began to eat her alive.
Two of the leeches immediately went for her eyes, biting through her lids and tearing chunks out of the aqueous orbs beneath them. Vidrig immediately dropped her axe, her free hand coming around to claw at her face, but Lex’s telekinesis caught her arm and yanked it back even as his claw kept her other one locked in an iron grip. There was nothing Vidrig could do but screech as the two leeches finished their gory meal, tears of blood running down her cheeks as the slimy things slithered further into the now-empty cavities in her face, seeking more food.
Nor were they alone, as two other leeches were already burrowing into her ears, refusing to be dislodged no matter how much the troll thrashed her head. Another tore through her nose in a single bite, following its brethren inside her head.
A second later Vidrig’s scream started to warble before turning into a series of strangled grunts, her body spasming, and Lex knew that the leeches had found her brain.
“Pity that won’t kill you,” spat Lex as he released Vidrig’s arms, which trembled as she continued to writhe and twitch helplessly. “But don’t worry. Once I’m done with your sisters, I’ll be sure to put you out of your misery.”
Past the black crystals, he could already hear more chanting happening, and from the sound of it Sissel and the others were repositioning themselves, looking for where the cover he’d conjured provided him with the least amount of protection. Rolling his injured shoulder, Lex nodded to himself as he verified that it was still able to support his weight. A quick check-in with Solvei likewise confirmed that she was still fighting her own battle.
Taking a moment to collect himself, Lex took stock of his situation.
It had been less than a minute since she’d taken Yotimo and fallen back. In that time, he’d only managed to kill a single venedaemon, inflict moderate injuries to a few puppets, and incapacitate Vidrig. In exchange, he’d taken several small wounds, plus a not-inconsiderable amount of damage from whatever Sissel had done to his shadow-form, and then Vidrig’s axe.
By any measure, he was taking more punishment than he was dishing out, even with his all of the power he’d gained. And while Lex felt confident that he’d be able to wear his enemies down faster if he started using his thaumaturgical spellcasting, that would still be an uphill battle, since one of the major limitations of his strongest magic was how it wasn’t meant for fighting large groups. In the naïveté of his youth, he’d deliberately designed it that way, making it so that conceptual forms which indiscriminately dealt damage over an area were quite literally unthinkable for him. It was something he’d come to regret, but there was nothing he could do about it now.
Not to mention that he still needed to conserve power as much as possible, since there was still a very real chance that he’d need to fight that dragon, Hvitdod, after this.
All of which meant that it was time to try something different.
I already field-tested what my tulpa can do, Lex decided, glancing at where Vidrig was still spasming helplessly. I might as well do the same for this.
Reaching into his saddlebag, Lex couldn’t help but think back to a few days ago, right before they’d left the Shrine of the Starless Sky...
“Master, you have to give it a name!”
Frowning, Lex gave Solvei a flat look. “There’s no need. What’s important is verifying its functions, not what it’s called.”
“But giving a thing a name defines it!” protested Solvei. “It’s not just being able to refer to it as something other than ‘it.’ A name represents its nature, and affirms what it’s supposed to do. My grandmother once told me-”
“Alright,” snapped Lex. Hearing her talk as though she were an adlet always put him on edge for some reason. “Fine. I’ll give it a name.”
“Thank you, Master!” Despite being in her humanoid form, her tail began to wag, and Lex registered satisfaction coming from her. “So, what will you call it?”
Realizing that she expected him to make good on his promise now, Lex sighed, turning to look at what they’d been discussing.
What name to give it...?
Lex waited for just a moment, then let the black crystals – save for the ones impaling Vidrig – dissolve, turning to face his remaining enemies.
In the time between when Lex had sent Fail Forward away, and when he and Solvei had finally left the Shrine of the Starless Sky, days had passed.
Lex had not been idle during that time. Although Solvei had grown progressively more agitated at their departure being postponed – repeatedly reminding him how Yotimo and his warband were waiting for their shaman to return – there had been multiple tasks which Lex had been determined to see completed before leaving. Given the possibility that Sissel and her sisters were waiting right outside the Shrine, it had been imperative that they use the respite to its fullest advantage.
That had included finishing the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, the book being a wealth of information about both the nature of the soul and the myriad planes of existence, even if its mysterious author was biased in their viewpoint.
It had also included fulfilling his promise to Teyu Yagua. Although Lex had initially pushed the task of granting the multi-headed behemoth speech onto the Keeper, the breakdown of his relationship with the floating skull – who had taken to sulking in the upper corners of the cathedral after he’d interrogated it about the Libram’s location, apparently waiting for Lex to leave – meant that was no longer an option; the last thing Lex wanted was for something as powerful as Teyu to feel beholden to someone who likely hated him now.
Fortunately, it had been simple enough to get one of the Keeper’s acolytes to describe the ceremonial invocation that the Keeper used to uplift magical beasts into sapient creatures. Combined with what he’d read in the Auctoritas Caliginous, it had been easy for Lex to modify that into a lesser ceremony, imploring the goddess to grant Teyu speech instead of self-awareness. It had worked, albeit to grant Teyu limited-range telepathy rather than the ability to vocalize, and the oversized crocodile-wolf had been overjoyed, slobbering over him with all of its tongues in thankfulness.
But neither of those things had occupied the bulk of Lex’s time.
That particular designation had gone toward constructing a new weapon.
Time to see what you can do, Belligerence!
The spell Lex chose was one he’d once used to knock Celestia herself out of the sky, having prepared more than one casting of it during the equinox. Designed to hit its target with a pulse of concussive force, inflicting blunt trauma and knocking them in the opposite direction, it was the sort of straightforward spell which was useful for gauging what Belligerence was capable of. Particularly if he enhanced the spell himself to maximize its destructive potential.
Performing the requisite gesticulations with one claw, the other pointing Belligerence in the direction of his enemies, Lex glanced at the weapon.
It was a far cry from the massive, unadorned quill that it had started out as.
When Lex had taken the quill of the massive monster which had briefly attacked them during their fighting withdrawal from Darkest Night, it had been more of a curio than anything else, wondering if an item from that realm would transubstantiate back to the mortal world with him. But he’d been forced to abandon it during his final confrontation with the eight-legged monster he’d eventually merged with, using it to slow the beast down while trying to reach his lifeline’s destination. After that, he’d put it out of his thoughts.
Until Sanguine Disposition had unexpectedly returned it.
At first Lex had been puzzled by the vampire’s gift. The quill hadn’t been anything he’d cared about very much, nor had he considered its sacrifice to be any great loss. So its return had meant little to him besides confirming that items from the Outer Planes could indeed be brought back to the material world.
It had been almost by accident that Lex had discovered that there was more to the thing. He’d been experimenting with what his new body was capable of, cycling through various types of vision and enhancing them, when he’d happened to glance at the quill while augmenting his ability to look into the magical spectrum. What he’d seen had been shocking.
That the quill possessed magical channels was no real surprise, given that it had come from a living creature. All lifeforms had some degree of magical capacity, absorbing a degree of the ambient energy which permeated everything. For most creatures that potential was poorly developed, being either latent or manifesting as a few innate magical abilities, such as pegasi being able to physically interact with meteorological phenomena.
But the magical channels in that quill were staggering in both their number and the sophistication of their construction.
Lex had already known that the quill was composed of an extremely durable biological substance. The fact that it had dented Solvei’s black crystal armor without taking any damage itself had been proof enough of that. But to see that it had been such an incredible font of magical potential as well had given Lex ideas.
In Equestria, only two categories of magic items existed. The first were trinkets, objects infused with such minute amounts of magic that they were little more than baubles, able to perform functions of minor convenience but little else. Such things represented the most magic which could be externally forced into an inanimate object without breaking it. In that regard, the pin that he wore, which cleaned himself and his clothes, was among the apex of what such designs were capable of.
The second type was magic items of major power, which were virtually always singular creations made out of rare – and in some cases, unique – materials. In all such cases, it was those components which gave the items their power, already possessing inherent magical characteristics which were carefully managed and drawn out as part of their finalized design. The techniques for doing so were esoteric, but nothing beyond Lex’s capabilities, and he’d mastered them years ago, lacking only the necessary raw materials upon which to practice them.
And now he had just such an item.
Once he’d sent Fail Forward and Thermal Draft to safety, Lex had turned his full attention to the quill, determined to capitalize on the opportunity he’d been given.
In that regard, he’d almost been disappointed. The quill was a remarkable thing unto itself, but it was still just a single component; the applications for capitalizing on its remarkable properties required methods which were no less impressive in scope. More so than what the standard Equestrian techniques called for, as few creatures there had the raw magical potential of whatever it was the quill had come from.
That he’d overcome that particular hurdle had only been because of the allies he’d made.
Solvei had contributed the most. What had started as an innocuous remark about how the quill’s shape reminded her of Bloodletter – Yotimo’s enchanted spear – had turned into her reminiscing about how Akna’s grandmother had been the one to carve the mystical runes that gave the weapon its magic...runes that the young shaman had been taught as well, even being allowed to carve the last few into Bloodletter to demonstrate her mastery of the technique.
Lex had pounced on that, demanding that she teach him everything she knew about her tribe’s method of creating enchanted weapons. It had taken him less than an hour to learn few dozen symbols, at which point he had immediately started deconstructing and rearranging them with the same insight that he’d used when breaking down the spells in Mystaria’s spellbook. The adlet method of enchanting things wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated as what the ponies of Everglow were capable of – the fact that it took them years to make a single weapon was proof enough of that, since Lex knew that the artificers of the Pony Empire could do the same thing in days – but it was still far and away superior to the primitive methods used in Equestria.
But that had only been part of the answer. Another part had been how to actually etch the runes into the quill. Anything strong enough to damage the black crystals he and Solvei could create – themselves far stronger than steel – wouldn’t be inscribed so easily.
Teyu’s eye-beams had proven up to the task, however.
The job had been painstaking for the creature to perform. Lex had marked myriad runes across the quill’s surface in chalk, emphasizing to the seven-headed monstrosity that each one needed to be seared in with exacting precision. Fortunately, Teyu was so ecstatic over his new telepathic voice that he’d given the job his unwavering concentration, and to Lex’s surprise had completed the task with neither error nor complaint.
The third step in the process had been to curse the weapon, saturating it in the dark magic of his horn. Indeed, several of the runes had been placed specifically to capture the maledictions he’d carefully laid upon it, making sure to transfer them to those it was used against. Others were carefully designed to foil attempts to discern its properties. Still more were made to afflict anyone who tried to tamper with it. It had been an exercise of imagination, and Lex had plenty of practice in finding ways to use curses creatively.
After that, he’d turned to the Night Mare.
Ceremony after ceremony had been performed in the goddess’s name, the Keeper’s acolytes made to assist him as he called upon the Night Mare to bless the weapon. Again donning the sacred garb that was the neart a’staigh, Lex had allowed the hallowed blades to cut him as he presided over the weapon, his blood filling each of the runic inscriptions as Solvei – again using Akna’s knowledge to participate in the rite – cooled it with her breath.
There was no doubt in Lex’s mind that the Night Mare had been pleased by his undertaking. That was made obvious by the three bands of black crystal which wrapped around the back end of the quill, each shaped in the barbed wire design of her faith. He had conjured them during the last ceremony he’d held to the goddess, and it was by her divine providence that they were still there now, long after their one-hour duration had expired. Nor were they mere decoration, each one symbolizing the quill’s greatest power...
To turn a single-target spell into one which could affect an area.
It was the answer to the weakness of that he’d so foolishly built into his thaumaturgical spellcasting, naively making himself unable to learn spells which dealt damage indiscriminately. But if he couldn’t undo that self-imposed limitation, then he’d simply sidestep it. Belligerence was the answer to that, imbued with the power to distribute magic directed through it over a wide range with no loss of efficacy.
It was the that power Lex called upon now as he finished his force punch spell, directing the augmented magic through Belligerence. The bloody runes on the quill glowed softly as they took hold of his spell, altering it in the way he’d designed it to do before the spell burst forth from the weapon’s barbed head...
And destroyed absolutely everything.
There was no other way to describe it. In an instant, his concussive force spell – which he’d intended only to strike a cluster of venedaemons moving to follow up on his confrontation with Vidrig – burst forth as a shockwave that radiated out in all directions, so powerful it was almost visible.
The venedaemons he’d been aiming at were immediately reduced to a fine red mist. The same happened to their compatriots, scattered around the area far from where he’d pointed Belligerence. The cacodaemons didn’t even leave that much behind, instantly pulverized into nothing. Vidrig’s still-twitching body somehow managed to hold itself together as the black crystals he’d left her impaled on were shattered, her limp body flung into the wall of the canyon. Nor was were stones themselves able to withstand the force of the blast, immediately crumbling inward, and it was only because of how wide the area was that the rubble didn’t manage to reach Lex.
Which was fortunate, considering that all he could do was gape at the scale of the destruction.
Glancing down at Belligerence in shock, he distractedly noted one of the three black crystal bands around its end shattering, indicating that it could only widen a spell like that twice more. Although he knew that – in accordance with the ceremonies he’d conducted to the Night Mare – expended bands would replenish themselves at midnight, that thought struck him as less important than just how badly he’d underestimated what his new weapon could do. If he’d tried casting a disintegration spell-
Master! Earthquake! Solvei’s voice reached his mind at the same time as he registered her sudden panic. We need to get out of here before we’re buried alive!
That wasn’t an earthquake. Pulling himself together, Lex glanced toward the blind corner Solvei had fled past, the ice wall she’d raised to block it now completely destroyed. He could sense that she wasn’t hurt, but otherwise there was no indication of how much the destruction had affected her own fight. Solvei, if your enemies are disoriented by what just happened, use this chance to finish them off!
But Yotimo’s hurt! A falling rock clipped his arm! I think it’s broken!
I can give you the power to heal him later! Right now, you need to focus on the creatures trying to kill you both-
He couldn’t finish as a nearby pile of ice shards – one that he’d overlooked in his shock – started to shift. Belatedly recognizing it as the remnants of the same sort of ice wall as the one Solvei had raised, Lex watched as Sissel and Grisela stood up, apparently having used the latter’s magic to raise a barrier just before the shockwave had hit them.
Both were unsteady, swaying as they slowly got to their feet, dazed looks on their faces.
The snow giant recovered first, blinking as she looked at Lex. “What...what did you do?”
His inner beast growled at the sight of his enemies having survived, and Lex clenched his talons around Belligerence. “I tested a new weapon,” Lex snarled. “One of my own design.”
Shifting his weight, he reared back. Belligerence’s primary purpose had been to allow him to expand the area of his magic, but that wasn’t all it could do.
It was time for the next part of the field test.
“Allow me to show it to you!” roared Lex as he threw Belligerence directly at Sissel’s face.
Sissel was already dodging out of the way as Lex threw Belligerence at her.
With her nimbleness enhanced by the magic she and the venedaemons had cast on her – the latter of which Lex knew was still active, despite the planar monsters having been slain – the snow giant was able to pivot and leap back despite still being dazed from the devastation he’d so recently unleashed. Turning in profile as she flung herself backward, Lex could already see that the killing blow he’d been hoping to unleash wasn’t going to land.
But neither did he miss completely, as the barbs dotting the head of the weapon sliced across the front of her cuirass, cutting through the magically-toughened leather as though it were made of tissue paper. Lex had just enough time to see her tense – her eyes widening and her lips pulling back in a twisted grimace – before the quill flew past her, burying itself in the shattered walls of the canyon.
But Sissel wasn’t looking at the weapon which had now almost killed her twice in the last few seconds. Nor was she looking at the one who’d held it. Instead, all of her attention was focused on the damage he’d dealt to her armor, dropping her axe as her hands flew up to the cut and pressing at it, her breathing turning rapid.
“NO! No no no!”
With how unflappable she’d been up until now, Lex couldn’t help but be surprised as Sissel began to tear her armor off, hurriedly plucking at the ties and yanking it free of her torso, revealing that she was wearing a simple silken shirt beneath...
Then a small metal frame the size of one of her hands, along with several shards of what looked like broken glass, tumbled down from where she’d apparently been concealing them beneath her armor.
Belatedly recognizing the small mirror she’d projected her image through the last time they’d met, Lex didn’t have a chance to speculate as to its significance as Sissel turned to glare at him, her expression one of white-hot rage. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!” she hissed. “That mirror was my only connection to Mother! Without it, I can’t receive any more spells from her! There’s no-”
A jolt went through Sissel then, causing her to jaw to snap shut as her eyes widened. “That’s right! Nenet is Mother’s backup spellbook!” Standing up, she made no move to don her armor again as she looked around frantically. “Nenet! Nenet, where are you?!”
Despite the monster inside him screaming that he should be pressing his attack, Lex couldn’t help but pause as he considered what the snow giant had just let slip. So Sissel’s spells had been given to her by whoever her Mother was via that mirror? And Nenet – he recognized the name of the ugly little sphinx that had been perched on Sissel’s shoulder before – was some sort of auxiliary repository of spells? He knew most of the wizards on Everglow kept their spells written down, using spellbooks as both repositories of the magic they’d learned as well as devices to imprint the requisite energy into their minds. But using a living thing for that-
“HA!” Grisela’s triumphant cry tore Lex free of his speculating, seeing that the winter hag had dived over to where Belligerence was stuck in the wall of the ravine.
Cackling, she reached up and yanked the quill free, pointing it at Lex. “My turn!” she whooped. “Gonna bury you under so much cold, no wards’ll be able to save yoAAAAARRRRRGH!!!”
Lex snickered as Grisela screamed and flung Belligerence away, and as she did he could see the barbs along its length retract from where they’d sprouted outward across its length, piercing the hag’s hands. You fool, he laughed inwardly. As though I’d ever let anyone use my own weapon against me.
Prevarius had once scolded him about using magic items that had no safeguards against tampering, no wards to prevent their functions from being discerned by looking at them in the magical spectrum, and no restrictions on who could use them. As much as Lex despised the devil, he had taken his words to heart when designing Belligerence, making sure that the weapon was cursed to injure anyone other than himself who tried to use it.
Nor was that the only special effect he’d built into it.
Holding one claw out, Lex focused his thoughts.
As soon as he did so, Belligerence vanished from where Grisela had thrown it, reappearing in his grasp.
Hours of prayers and numerous acts of self-flagellation had earned him the Night Mare’s favor in creating what was now his single strongest weapon. But while the goddess had seen fit to bless Belligerence with numinous qualities reflecting those of her own ethos, Lex had asked for more. Although he’d stopped short of placing any of his own soul into the weapon, he’d still sought to recreate a lesser version of the bond he shared with Solvei, allowing him to teleport Belligerence to his side whenever he wished.
In this, the Night Mare had obliged, and Lex couldn’t hold back a dark grin as he pointed the weapon at Sissel balefully. The snow giant glared back at him, and though Lex couldn’t read her expression, he was sure she could read his: that his next spell would fill the entire canyon, leaving them nowhere to run and with no chance of survival.
For a moment the two of them simply stood there, staring each other down...
Then they both started casting, chanting as quickly as they could while making the necessary gestures.
But even before he finished, Lex could see that the contest was already over, and that he’d won. He recognized the spell that Sissel was casting; it was the same cloud of poison fog that she’d almost killed him and several of his companions with during their first encounter. She didn’t realize that he was immune to poison now! Even though the venom she’d hit him with before had done nothing!
Fighting down the urge to roar with laughter, Lex concentrated on his own spell. Let’s see what happens if I cast magic missiles through Belligerence, he laughed inwardly, starting to channel more power into his spell-
“Kill...you...!”
Lex had just enough time to realize that the voice he heard then was coming from behind him.
Then Vidrig’s mangled body flung itself at him, sending him stumbling and disrupting his spell before he could finish it.
Snarling, the troll locked her arms – broken in several places, but still functional – around his neck, trying to choke the life out of him. It was futile, his organometallic fur easily repelling her grasp, but it gave her enough leverage to drive him to the ground. The wreck that was her face was twisted in hatred as she glared at him with the one eyeball that had grown back, the other still having a leech’s wriggling tail jutting from it. “Kill you!” she screeched, misshapen mouth opening wider as she leaned down to bite at him.
Lex’s response was a roar that was matched by the beast within as he tossed Belligerence aside, claws grasping her arms just below the shoulders and pushing her back. If leeches in her brain weren’t enough to incapacitate her, then he’d simply rend her limb from-
Suddenly they were surrounded by a bank of swirling green vapors.
Vidrig immediately began to choke, her grip weakening, and Lex – able to breathe without issue – disarmed her in the most literal fashion possible, wrenching both appendages free from her shoulders, kicking her off of him and sending her stumbling into the mist as she hacked and wheezed.
But her hands around his neck kept squeezing.
Hissing in outrage, Lex pulled them from his neck – the fingers continuing to grasp and flex of their own accord – and flung them away carelessly. Grabbing Belligerence, knowing that even if he couldn’t see his enemies because of the fog he’d still hit them along with everything else nearby, he started casting...and then stopped.
He’d chosen his magic missile spell because it had a homing component to it. No matter how many of those Belligerence made, the spell’s structure should still have kept them focused on Sissel and Grisela. But Vidrig had interrupted the casting, and that spell was gone now, which meant he’d need to use another.
Except none of his other spells had any sort of targeting safeguards built into them. Whether he used acid or fire or electricity, Belligerence would fill the entire canyon with whatever spell he cast. While Lex had no doubt he’d be fine – he still had the clasp Mystaria had given him, which protected him from the effects of his own magic – the chance that something more malleable than an explosion of force would flow through the contours of the rift and hit Solvei and Yotimo were very high. Even if Solvei was warded against fire, and likely strong enough to suffer little damage from anything else, the same couldn’t be said for Yotimo.
And friendly fire was something Lex was determined to avoid if at all possible; it was the entire reason he’d worked to exclude wide-area spells from his repertoire in the first place!
Cursing himself for not having properly tested Belligerence before using it, Lex instead darted forward, seeing the edge of the fog. He wouldn’t be able to direct any further spells through the quill for the rest of the fight, but that still left him with plenty of other options! Whether by casting his spells normally or using Belligerence as a spear or simply ripping them apart with teeth and claws, Sissel and her sisters were all going to die!
Except when he cleared the fog a second later, Lex saw that he’d been beaten to the punch where Grisela was concerned.
The winter hag was on the ground, twitching as she looked at the bloody hole in her chest, her eyes wide and her jaw working soundlessly. Her head lolling back, she caught Lex’s eye for a moment, reaching out toward him in...desperation? Hate? Fear? He couldn’t tell, nor was there any chance to ask, as the winter hag let out a wet, rattling exhalation and lay still.
Standing above her, Sissel – blood covering one of her hands and the lower half of her face – sighed as she shook her head. “I wish it hadn’t come to this,” she murmured, her equanimity back in place as she looked down at Grisela’s corpse. “This isn’t something Mother will forgive me for.”
Giving Lex a neutral look, she gestured to the dead hag. “It’s not just because the three of us were supposed to bring her Hvitdod’s death curse either” – that earned a frown from Lex, his confusion deepening; death curse? – “or even that it took all three of us to keep the weather unseasonably cold like this. It’s just that she hates it when any of her children are killed.”
She bent down again, and it was only then that Lex saw that her foot was planted on Vidrig’s collarbone, the troll apparently having wandered directly toward her sisters when she’d exited the poison mist. But that apparently brought her no solace now, her armless body kicking and thrashing beneath Sissel’s boot. “But even if it upsets her,” continued the snow giant, bending at the waist and reaching down toward Vidrig’s torso, “I’m not willing to die for Mother’s schemes!”
With that, she plunged her hand into Vidrig’s chest, and the troll’s scream wasn’t able to drown out the sound of ribs breaking. A second later Sissel found what she was looking for, and yanked her arm back out, a beating organ that could only have been Vidrig’s heart clutched in her fingers.
Then she brought it to her lips and bit down.
The creature inside him yowled in anger, having wanted that prize for itself, and that was enough to snap Lex out of his confusion, rattling off a spell as fast as he could. It was obvious now that she hadn’t cast that toxic mist in order to poison him, but because she’d wanted to buy herself enough time to do...whatever she was doing. But if he could interrupt her before she was finished, then it wouldn’t matter!
Three beams of searing heat burst forth from his outstretched claw, but Sissel had already kicked Grisela’s corpse up, grabbing it and using it like a shield. The winter hag didn’t burn easily, protected by whatever wards against fire they’d used before the battle, but with the power Lex had poured into the spell the first ray caused her dead body to shrivel and blacken. The second caused it to fall apart completely, reduced to nothing but ashes. And the third...
Impacted Vidrig this time, Sissel not having hesitated to pick up her other sister and use her for additional cover.
The troll convulsed as the heat cooked her, and then shuddered and went limp as the extreme heat – one of the few things which, by her own admission, could kill her – was more than her wards or her mutilated body could handle.
All of which gave Sissel more than enough time to finish her grisly meal.
“You think you’ve grown stronger just because you have claws and a magic spear?” snorted the snow giant as she swallowed the last of Vidrig’s heart. “That’s nothing compared to the power that Mother has.”
Cursing, Lex summoned Belligerence to his grip, hurling it as soon as he felt its weight in his claw. But Sissel wasn’t dazed this time, and easily avoided Lex’s desperate throw.
“But we’re her children,” Sissel continued. “We have some of her power in us. That’s why the three of us could use magic together that none of us were strong enough to use alone. And concentrating all of it in one place the way I just did unlocks its full potential...”
A glow began to emanate from her chest then, as though her heart had transformed into a miniature sun. Grunting Sissel doubled over, one hand clutching her chest as she grit her teeth, apparently in pain. “And the name...of that power...”
In an instant, the light from her chest brightened, spreading throughout her body as though carried through her veins. It illuminated her from the inside out, and it took Lex a moment to realize what he was seeing, his blood running cold.
“...is...”
The magical channels in her body had become so flooded with magic that they were visible to the naked eye.
Sissel’s exclamation was the second time Lex had heard that word. The first had been several days prior, when he, Solvei, and Akna had finished their battle to get into Eigengrau...
“I...can...still...fight...!” protested White Wraith.
Sanguine Disposition nodded his head. “Of that, I have no doubt. But anyone who can push you to the point of using aristeia despite having one of the Umbral Regalia at your disposal is someone I want to meet.”
Whatever aristeia was, it was a power that White Wraith had possessed, one which he’d felt confident would carry him to victory even despite all of the damage he’d taken. And Sanguine Disposition had apparently agreed, stepping in to stop the fight before the ghost pony could put it into action.
And she knew what it was! seethed Lex inwardly, furious at his own shortsightedness. Nisha knew what White Wraith was capable of!
Although the purple-eyed wolf hadn’t said anything specific in that regard, she’d made it abundantly clear that she hated the captain of Eigengrau’s guards. By her own admission, he’d been the one who’d “defeated/humiliated/broken” her, and seeing his defeat had been the reason she’d been so eager to offer herself as a servant. If the bombastic and conceited ghost pony had used the full measure of his strength to overcome Nisha, then it made sense that she’d have knowledge of whatever aristeia was.
Which meant she could have told him about what Sissel was using now.
That’s why the Night Mare sent her to me! Lex knew now. She was giving me someone who could have warned me about what I’m up against now! And instead, I threw her away!
But there was no time to continue berating himself as Sissel – the magical channels in her body still glowing visibly beneath the surface of her skin, shining so brightly that they could be seen even beneath her clothes – straightened up, no longer looking pained from her transformation. Glancing around, she slowly reached down and picked up her axe-
And Lex took advantage of her distraction, rattling off a spell as quickly as he could.
The glowing green beam that was his disintegration spell shot out from the tip of his outstretched claw a moment later, blazing brightly from how much power he’d overcharged it with. It was the single most destructive spell he was capable of casting, one he’d made absolutely sure to prepare during the equinox. He hadn’t intended on using it here, keeping it in reserve in case worse came to worst and he needed to fight the dragon Sissel had been pushing him toward; the last time he’d battled a dragon, that spell had been invaluable, taking out one of its wings and keeping the thing grounded. But if Sissel was anywhere as dangerous as she seemed right now, then its use here was warranted.
But only if it makes contact, Lex knew, watching as his spell crossed the distance between himself and the snow giant. He knew it was bridging the gap between them at an incredible speed, but with the tension weighing on him at that moment, it felt like it was moving in slow motion. She’s boosted her speed with magic, but even the slightest contact should be enough!
An instant later, the beam struck home, hitting Sissel directly in the chest.
She hadn’t even tried to dodge it.
Instead, her eyes – which had become blank white orbs – narrowed as the emerald glow of his spell started to override the light coming from her body’s magical channels, turning her internal radiance green as it began to spread throughout her body. That was how the spell worked, Lex knew; if it struck a target with magical pathways it spread through them, corroding the channels and radiating out to destroy everything surrounding them. There’d be nothing but left of her but ashes-
“To use your own words, ‘is that the best you can do?’”
Sissel’s taunt came as his spell’s progression through her body suddenly halted. For a moment the green glow flickered, dimming and then brightening again, and it took Lex a second to realize that wasn’t the case. It was that Sissel’s own magical channels were brightening, a slight frown crossing her lips as she concentrated, body tensing slightly as her inner radiance flared up...
And then the emerald light of his spell began to reverse course, shrinking back toward the point of impact.
Lex could only watch, dumbfounded, as Sissel fought his spell off, the green light of his disintegration magic overwhelmed by her brighter glow from within. Slowly but unrelentingly, it pushed his spell back, until the green part had been reduced to where it had originally struck her. Then Sissel let out a sharp breath, tensing up, and her body’s channels flared brighter.
The remainder of his spell shattered, leaving behind no damage to Sissel’s body whatsoever.
That should have been impossible. Lex knew that there were ways to limit how much damage his disintegration spell could cause. A target could momentarily close off their body’s magical pathways – kinking them like a hose – to give the spell nowhere to go, artificially restricting how much destruction the spell could cause; Fireflower had done exactly that when Lex had used this spell on him during their first meeting, turning what would otherwise have been a lethal strike into a modest injury. And Straightlace had the ability to deflect a spell that he made contact with, preventing it from entering his magical channels to begin with.
But what Sissel had done was completely different. She’d overwhelmed the spell completely, directing the magic within her to push back – evenly, from every direction at once – against his own and force it out of her. To have that much magic inside of her, let alone the ability to use it so precisely, was completely beyond what a physical body should have been capable of. And yet-
“Now, it’s my turn.”
With no other warning, Sissel laid her axe over her shoulder and started casting a spell of her own.
As she did so, the light within her flared again, and this time it flowed in a different direction, concentrating on the fingertips of the hand she was gesturing with. Reaching down, she picked up a stone, and the light flowed into it, the rock shining like a star that had fallen from the sky.
“Lex Legis,” intoned Sissel softly, and Lex saw his name appear on the stone, which had begun to vibrate madly. Smirking, Sissel reared her arm back, and Lex immediately raised a wall of black crystals around himself-
And then he was lying on the ground, gasping.
What...?
Dimly, his vision blurring, he managed to look around.
The first thing he caught sight of was the back wall of the chasm, which now had an impact crater that hadn’t been there before. Then he caught sight of shards of black crystal lying around him, needing a moment to recognize them as fragments of the barrier that he’d hastily raised. Then he looked down at himself.
And saw the gaping hole in his chest.
With a single spell, Sissel had enchanted a rock – a plain, ordinary rock – with enough magic power to punch through his barrier of black crystal, his protective enchantments, his defensive magic items, and his new body. To say nothing of the back wall of the canyon.
For the second time, Sissel had done something which should have been beyond her capabilities, now made possible because of the power she’d gained.
That was apparently her assessment as well, one eyebrow rising as she looked the results of her attack over. “You know, if I’d known that aristeia would make me this strong, I’d have eaten my sisters’ hearts a long time ago,” she murmured. “With this, I might even be able to defeat Hvitdod on my own. Mother would have to forgive me then. She hates losing her children, but she hates her plans falling apart just as much.”
Lifting her axe, Sissel began to slowly walk toward him, transferring more of her body’s internal light into her weapon. “I’ll think I’ll give it a try right after I kill you and that adlet.”
Lex barely heard her, trying and failing to rise. There was a growing sense of pressure in his head, and each attempt to get up only made it worse. Every breath was a struggle, and the struggle was growing harder to win with each passing second. His vision was also blurring more, and everything sounded like it was coming from far away.
Belatedly, it occurred to him that the hole in his chest was on the left side, and that the wound wasn’t bleeding out slowly, with his blood instead pumping out in rhythmic spurts.
A moment later he realized what that meant.
...I’m dying...
His knowledge of anatomy, gleaned from House Call’s books, kicked in then, as he realized that the snow giant’s attack had to have severed at least one of the major arteries connecting to his heart, and had likely damaged the organ itself. The only reason he was still alive, let alone conscious, was because of the supernatural toughness of the creature that he’d merged with. But even that could only withstand so much, and now-
MASTER!!! NOOOO!!!
The scream from Solvei in his mind matched a howl that erupted from her throat, causing Sissel to turn in place. She’d apparently anticipated exactly this, because she pivoted at the hip and took a wide stance as she spun around, swinging her axe with both hands, and Lex knew that she’d been taking her time with finishing him of in order to draw Solvei out.
Now, speeding directly at Sissel atop her serac, the glowing blade lashed out in a horizontal swing, perfectly positioned to cut Solvei at the waist. Lex had no doubt that it would, knowing that if a rock had been able to penetrate his defenses, then a blade – one which was already enchanted – would be that much stronger...
Then Sissel completed her swing.
And Solvei was gone.
No...not again...
The ache that went through Lex then had nothing to do with his damaged heart. He’d lost her again...
Except it didn’t feel like it had before. In fact, he didn’t feel any different at all, with his awareness of Solvei telling him that she was still there. Except...not in front of him...instead she was...
Up.
Raising his gaze, Lex’s vision was barely able to make out Solvei coming down from her leap, having jettisoned her weapons and armor and shrunk back down to her normal size in order to make a do-or-die jump over Sissel’s swing.
The snow giant, it seemed, wasn’t the only one who could anticipate what her enemies would do.
Landing on her serac – which had kept moving, passing between Sissel’s legs – Solvei ignored the snow giant completely as she zipped over to him, and Lex grunted as she gathered him up in one arm, not slowing down. Master, please give me the power to heal you! she begged, even as she held her other arm back out toward Sissel, blanketing the area in a thick frozen fog.
Lex somehow managed to raise his wire-wrapped foreleg, pointing his claw at Solvei. “H-healing...” he murmured, barely able to force the word out. Even as he spoke it, he registered the invisible bands of divine energy flow into Solvei, who immediately turned the manifested energy back on him. A second later the wound in his chest closed, and Lex felt his awareness surge back to normal, able to breathe easier as Solvei let him down.
Master, what happened?! Why is Sissel-
Is Yotimo alright?
Solvei blinked, though the question didn’t surprise her enough that she forgot to reform her armor. Yes...I killed the last of those daemons or whatever they’re called, and I was just covering him with some ice armor to be safe when I felt that you...that you were...
She couldn’t finish, her eyes tearing up. Lex registered sadness from her then, but it was quickly overcome by determination as she savagely wiped her eyes. Is Sissel the only one left?
Lex nodded, giving her a brief rundown of what had happened, mentally recalling Belligerence into his grasp as he did so. Solvei likewise reformed her ice weapons as she listened.
Should we retreat? she asked when he’d finished. If I can get Yotimo-
It wouldn’t work, replied Lex immediately. She’ll know that our next destination will be where Paska took the others. Going there only means that we’ll have him to deal with as well, not to mention there’ll be more people to protect. One way or another, we have to finish this here-
He stopped speaking as his magical senses suddenly screamed at him, and without thinking he put his claws to Solvei’s chest and pushed as hard as he could, using the force to shove himself backward at the same time.
The two of them stumbled apart just as a lightning bolt arced through where they’d been standing.
“Two misses in a row,” noted Sissel as she calmly strode out of the fog. “Clearly I still need to practice with using aristeia better.” In her hands, her axe began to glow again. “I’ll have you two help me with that.”
Snarling, Solvei enlarged herself again, brandishing her ice blades. “You killed me once before. You almost killed my master just now. Never again.”
Readying Belligerence, Lex moved alongside her, the two of them staring Sissel down together.
“This time,” he announced, his voice filled with deadly promise, “the one who dies will be you.”
The corners of Sissel’s lips turned upward. “This should make for a decent warm-up before I face Hvitdod.”
Before Sissel had gotten halfway to them, Lex had come up with a strategy.
Solvei, engage her in close combat. Don’t give her room to cast any spells, but otherwise focus on fighting defensively. I’ll support you with my magic and the Charismata until I can find an opening to exploit.
Understood, Master!
The telepathic reply came as Solvei was already advancing to meet Sissel, crouching atop her serac as it rocketed toward the snow giant, her ice blades at the ready. Lex, for his part, moved perpendicular to the two of them, holding a claw out toward Solvei as he focused the Charismata on her, directing its power to bolster her supernatural defenses and enhance her reaction speed.
Then the two of them were upon each other.
With the massive blade of ice jutting out from her right vambrace giving her greater reach, Solvei was the first one to lash out. Roaring a wordless battle cry, she swung her weapon in an upward-tilted horizontal slash, clearly expecting Sissel to try and block it.
But rather than catch the blade with her axe, Sissel instead veered slightly to her right and fell to her knees, her momentum carrying her forward as she leaned back, Solvei’s oversized ice-sword passing just over her head without connecting. Solvei snarled at that, raising the dagger in her left hand, clearly intending to bury it in Sissel’s upturned face as the two passed each other-
Only to have no chance to complete the action as the head of Sissel’s axe connected with her serac, the blade still glowing brightly with the power it had been imbued with.
The strike shouldn’t have been a strong one. Sissel’s position gave her no leverage, nor had she swung the blade so much as stuck it in front of Solvei’s path. But with the strength of aristeia behind it, the axe was easily able to shatter the platform of ice, causing Solvei to yelp as she went tumbling across the uneven ground.
Sissel recovered her stance instantly, one hand already glowing as she started to gesture and chant-
Only to duck an instant before Belligerence would have caught her in the side of the head, dodging Lex’s throw. Unfortunately, his attack hadn’t broken her concentration, and in the instant before she completed her spell Lex realized that it was one he recognized. Solvei! She’s trying to separate-
All at once, his awareness of Solvei disappeared from his mind.
Cursing as he recognized the same spell that Paska had used, Lex instinctively fought down a surge of panic, turning his eyes toward where the crystal-clad wolf had fallen. He’d been hit with this spell before; Paska had used it to suppress his connection to Solvei during his ambush. But that was all it was: a suppression, and a temporary one at that. They were still connected-
Then Lex caught sight of Solvei, and his blood turned to icewater.
Her black crystal armor was gone, as were her ice weapons. Still in her humanoid form, she’d shrunk back down to her normal size, and was looking at herself in shock, her jaw hanging slack. Only the fact that one of her eyes was still golden in color signified that she hadn’t completely reverted to being Akna.
But that was small comfort to Lex, who realized in that moment that Sissel’s spell – empowered by aristeia – had gone far beyond the version that Paska had cast. Rather than simply suppressing the active portion of their connection, such as telepathy and his teleporting her to his side, she had completely negated all of the benefits that Solvei had reaped as a result of their connection.
Until Sissel’s spell wore off, she was nothing more than an adlet with a winter wolf’s soul inside her.
“I didn’t realize it at first,” announced the snow giant calmly. “That she was your familiar, reincarnated. Her suddenly having so much magic was suspicious, and so was your teleporting her out from under Grisela’s puppets, but since you’d empowered her to summon all those ice elementals the last time we fought, I wasn’t sure.”
With deliberate slowness, she raised her axe to point at Solvei. “But then she said that I’d killed her before, and it all clicked. Which makes it a good thing that I’d prepped a ‘disrupt link’ spell. And with aristeia behind it, well...”
Sinking into a crouch, Sissel sprang at the defenseless adlet. “Looks like this will be a shorter practice session than I thought!”
But Lex was already casting, rattling off an enchantment as fast as he could. Immediately, a layer of ice spread along Sissel’s limbs, spreading across her body to cover her torso, head, and weapon all in a frozen prison. The subzero temperature of the icy cocoon wouldn’t harm Sissel in the slightest, he knew, but it would hopefully buy them a few seconds. “Solvei, get out of here!”
Shakily managing to get back on her feet, the adlet paused, her mismatched eyes flitting between him and Sissel. “But what about you?!”
“JUST GO!” roared Lex. “Get clear until her spell wears off and you have your powers back, then I’ll summon-”
The sound of ice shattering announced the end of that plan, as Sissel broke free and continued her charge. “As if I’d let you get away!”
Solvei fell back immediately, but without her serac – and having no armor to protect her footing – she didn’t make it more than two feet before the rubble-strewn ground caused her to stumble, collapsing as Sissel closed the last few feet of distance between them, the glow of her axe seeming to intensify as it started its fatal swing. “This time you die for good!”
“M-MASTER!” screamed Solvei, closing her eyes as she raised one arm in front of her face in a last, futile defense.
Lex was already hurtling toward the two of them, claws tearing through the ground without regard to how uneven the terrain was. But although he’d be there in a matter of seconds, Sissel’s axe was only a few feet from Solvei’s body, and Lex knew he’d never make it in time, his heart in his throat as his thoughts crystallized into a single, overriding command.
Use it! On Solvei! NOW!!!
Acknowledged, replied his tulpa even as Lex felt its spell – one of the few it had taken it upon itself to prepare during the equinox, and which was now his to command since he’d gained control of the thing – activating.
An instant later, a pit opened beneath Solvei, causing her to shriek as she suddenly plummeted thirty feet to the dirt floor at the bottom. The sudden loss of her target caused Sissel’s swing to go wide, and Lex saw her face twist as she struggled to check her own momentum, barely managing to avoid the hole in the ground which had swallowed her foe.
Her sudden course correction left her open, and Lex poured on the speed, leaping onto her lower back before she had a chance to recover. Snarling, she reached a hand back, trying to grab at him, but the animal instincts in Lex had ingrained memories of countless enemies who’d tried exactly that maneuver. He didn’t have to think to know how to react to it.
Easily twisting past her grasping fingers, one of his claws came up to tightly grasp the wrist of her probing hand, pressing his weight on it and keeping the limb trapped even as he used it to vault himself further up her broad back, reaching upward to grab her shoulder. So close! Just a little further and he’d be able to tear her throat out!
Sissel apparently realized that too, because she dropped her axe and instead reached back with her other hand, fingers scrabbling to take hold of the claws clutching her shoulder. Bending at the waist, she didn’t wait until she had a firm grasp on him as she doubled over, trying to fling him clear of her.
Exactly as his inner beast had predicted she’d do.
Rather than trying to fight against her desperate maneuver, Lex moved with it, allowing her to pull him forward as she bent parallel to the ground. For an instant, he was dragged forward, claws pulled free as he lost his hold on her...and then came to an abrupt stop as he wrapped his back legs around her neck, claws locked under her chin as he pressed the tips of his talons to the milk-white skin of her neck.
Ducking his head down, Lex just enough time to see Sissel’s featureless eyes widen as her lips pulled back in a grimace of alarm, and the sight set the animal in him to howling.
“I win!” he snarled.
Then he raked his claws across her throat.
...to no effect whatsoever.
Lex had tested his new body’s natural weapons thoroughly back in the Shrine of the Starless Sky. His claws, he’d found, could easily cut through stone, and even steel offered no more resistance than thick clay. But his black crystals had proven to be a barrier that even his claws couldn’t overcome, with his talons unable to leave more than the smallest of scratches on their surface.
But right now, he wasn’t even able to inflict that much damage on Sissel’s skin, the alabaster flesh remaining completely unblemished beneath his claws.
Once again, he’d underestimated just how powerful aristeia was.
Sissel seemed no less surprised, her breath catching in her throat for the briefest instant.
Then she tore him off of her, flinging him to the ground as hard as she could.
The impact hurt Lex not at all, his new body easily absorbing the force of it even as his predator’s instincts screamed at him to get up, that he was vulnerable on his back. But he had barely started to move when Sissel’s foot came down hard on his tail, causing him to growl in pain as she cut off his escape. He immediately conjured a spike of black crystals on either side of the offending limb, attempting to have them do what his claws couldn’t as he directed the jagged points to pierce her foot at the ankle and hobble her.
Instead, they shattered against her skin, no more effective than his claws had been.
First Sissel had shrugged off his deadliest spell. Now she’d shown herself to be completely beyond his ability to injure.
Lex had faced numerous opponents stronger than himself, but in that moment he realized that he was completely outclassed by what Sissel had become.
“Too bad, I really thought you had me there,” admitted the snow giant as she grabbed her axe again, the blade still shining from the power she’d imbued it with. “But I think I’ve learned as much as I can about aristeia from you, so let’s bring this to a close, shall we?”
She didn’t wait for an answer before she grasped her axe with both hands and brought it down.
There was no spell that he’d be able to cast before she completed her downward stroke. His black crystals would almost certainly crumble before the sheer tonnage of magic that she’d poured into her axe. Turning into a shadow would simply invite her to cast that purging spell on him again, likely imbued with aristeia. His tulpa had no more spells which could help, and he couldn’t think of anything that it could conjure which would save him. Even severing his tail in order to escape wasn’t something he’d be able to do before Sissel delivered the deathblow.
Calculating and discarding all of those options in the split-second before Sissel’s weapon completed its arc, Lex took the only remaining course of action left open to him.
Raising his foreclaws parallel to each other, he called Belligerence back to his grasp.
Appearing directly in the path of the axe, the rune-marked center of the quill caught the descending blade crosswise just below its head.
Had Lex’s body still been that of a unicorn, his hasty defense would have collapsed immediately, because the sheer weight of Sissel’s swing was nearly enough to drive him into the ground. As it was he only barely kept his forelegs from buckling, muscles straining as he somehow managed to keep the edge of her axe from splitting his skull in two by a matter of inches, the effort drawing a strangled groan of exertion from his throat.
Sissel smirked, apparently amused by his efforts. “I almost forgot about that toy of yours.”
In contrast to his desperately struggling to keep her from finishing her swing, she seemed to be putting in only modest effort. “I think I’ll take that with me; it’s powerful enough that Mother might want it,” she continued, removing one hand from her axe and grabbing the quill directly, intent on tearing it from his grasp. “I know it lashes out at anyone else who tries to use it, but I think I’ll be f-, AAAAUGH!”
Releasing Belligerence, Sissel’s grip on her axe slackened as she – and Lex – stared at where the quill’s barbs had pierced her hand, leaving bloody wounds behind.
This time he recovered first, pushing her axe aside with strength borne of desperation as he turned Belligerence toward her and thrust it forward.
The jagged tip of the weapon sank into her stomach, drawing a flow of blood which erupted into a fountain a second later as Sissel batted the quill away, the barbs tearing out a chunk of her flesh as she leaped backward, jaw clenched in pain as she put a hand to where she’d been gouged.
Immediately righting himself, Lex took a moment to catch his breath as he glanced between his weapon and his enemy.
Belligerence had wounded her. While aristeia had protected Sissel from his claws, his spells, and everything else he’d thrown at her, it hadn’t been able to protect her from his creation.
Lex could remember the last time this had happened.
He’d been in Vanhoover, fighting Lirtkra, Monitor, and Aria all at once. The three of them had been more than he’d been able to handle, and while strategic use of his magic had been able to slow them down, it had only delayed the inevitable. But when he’d used the scroll he’d taken from the hoard of the green dragon he’d slain in Tall Tale – which had contained a spell to trade in magical power for martial prowess – he’d felt certain that he’d be able to turn things around.
Instead all he’d done was buy himself a little more time.
Just like what was happening now with Sissel.
Thrusting Belligerence at her center of mass, the snow giant spun her axe in a defensive pattern, the butt of it circling around to knock the quill’s barbed head aside, causing his strike to go off-target. Worse, the motion left him overextended, an opening Sissel immediately moved to exploit as she brought the head of her axe back up and swung it at him.
Realizing too late that he wasn’t going to be able to get out of the way of the glowing blade, Lex instead turned to meet the strike, dropping Belligerence in the process. But before it had a chance to hit the ground, Lex swung one claw out and summoned it back, moving the quill perpendicular to the arc of Sissel’s swing, timing it so that it would strike the flat of her axe and knock it off-course before it could hit him. It was a variation of the same trick he’d used less than thirty seconds ago, when he’d summoned the quill in order to block what would otherwise have been a fatal attack. Except this time the goal was to deflect, rather than block-
“I knew you’d do that,” smirked Sissel.
She was already moving as she spoke, stepping into the swing even as Belligerence diverted it, and Lex had just enough time to realize that the glow around one of her feet had intensified before she brought it up and into his side.
The impact sent him flying, hitting the canyon wall with such force that he nearly blacked out. Even so, Lex counted himself as fortunate, knowing that he’d taken far less damage from her kick than from the rock she’d placed the aristeia-augmented spell on before. But that wasn’t surprising; given how much magic was flowing through her, it made sense that it would have the most dramatic effect on her spells, with her physical gains being ancillary.
For all the good that does me now, growled Lex inwardly, somehow managing to stay upright. He could feel that several of his ribs were broken, a stinging pain in his shoulder suggested that it was dislocated, and there was a grinding sensation from his abdomen that he suspected was at least one perforated organ. If it wasn’t for his new body’s incredible toughness, and his dark magic’s letting him regulate his ability to perceive tactile sensation, he had no doubt he'd have been near-totally incapacitated.
And Sissel was already casting again.
Gritting his teeth as she finished her spell, Lex somehow managed to dodge the coruscating ray that sprang from her hand then, knowing that it would have sapped his strength had it hit him.
Instead, he summoned Belligerence back to his grasp and threw it, but Sissel stepped out of the way with almost contemptuous ease, having no trouble dodging from such a long range. Even so, it bought Lex a moment, and he took the opportunity to hurry forward, ignoring his injuries as he closed the gap between them.
It was his only hope of winning, he knew.
But that hope seemed to be growing smaller with each passing second.
In addition to being a powerful spellcaster even before aristeia, as well as a seasoned tactician, there was no doubt in Lex’s mind that Sissel was a skilled fighter. She’d clearly put in a great deal of training with her axe, whereas he had never used a spear – which was how he was wielding Belligerence now – in his life. Nor were his animal instincts any help, as the beast inside of him still wanted to attack her with tooth and claw, uncaring of the fact that those weapons had proven to be useless against her.
In a spear-versus-axe battle between the two of them, Lex knew that he had very little chance of emerging victorious. But there was no viable alternative; a distance battle would allow her to use her aristeia-enhanced spells, which were far more potent than her physical blows. Worse, his only options to counterattack at range would be to use his magic – which she seemed to resist even easier than she had his claws – or to keep throwing Belligerence at her. And he had yet to hit her once that way.
Two more hits, decided Lex, recalling the quill to his grasp as he moved into Sissel’s range, rolling under a swing that very nearly took his head off, prompting him to swipe at her with Belligerence in response. Maybe three. That’s the most I can take in my current condition.
Hopefully he’d be able to keep her busy long enough for the spell she’d used on Solvei to wear off. The lesser version Paska had used had lasted for less than two minutes; it Sissel’s was of a similar duration, then if he could just wait for it to run out, he’d be able to summon Solvei and have her heal-
Spinning her axe in her grip, Sissel quirked a brow. “Let me guess. You’re waiting for your wolf to recover?”
Lex growled, jabbing Belligerence at her feet, thighs, and belly, but the snow giant easily turned his attacks aside. “If that’s your plan, then you’re going to need a better one,” she continued, bringing her axe around and forcing Lex to fall back. “Because you’re not going to last that long.”
She punctuated her promise by raising her weapon as Lex darted back in. He was still outside of her range, but he nevertheless braced himself, suspecting that she was about to rush him-
And so was caught completely by surprise when she threw her axe instead.
End over end it tumbled through the air, still aglow from the aristeia she’d forced into it, and Lex somehow managed to throw himself aside...just a little too late.
By all rights, the slight contact that her axe made with his right shoulder shouldn’t have done more than leave a shallow scratch.
Instead it took his foreleg off completely.
Blood fountained from his shoulder as Lex stared at the wound, unable to process what was happening even when he caught sight of his severed limb landing over a dozen feet away. It was only because of his inner beast’s instincts that he managed to snap out of it, the creature he’d merged with caring little for even permanent injuries, and he somehow had the presence of mind to recite the minor healing spell the Night Mare had given him, the arterial spray staunching as the wound suddenly scabbed over. But it was accompanied by a wave of dizziness as the shock and blood loss left him reeling, struggling to listen to the instincts demanding that he continue the fight-
“Credit where credit is due, you inspired me to try throwing my weapon,” commented Sissel as she strode toward him, one hand raised in preparation for casting another spell. “It’s not really balanced for it, and it doesn’t come back to me on its own, but I’d say it worked out pretty well. Now to finish-”
“M-MASTER!!!”
Solvei’s horrified scream captured both Lex and Sissel’s attention, the two of them turning in unison to look at where the adlet was pulling herself out of the hole she’d been dropped into. “MASTER, RUN!” she shouted, stumbling toward the two of them. “I’LL DISTRACT HER, JUST GET-”
Bringing her arm around so that she was pointing at Solvei, Sissel rattled off another spell, one that Lex dimly recognized was meant to cause pain without inflicting injury.
That was proven a moment later as Solvei’s screaming turned agonized, her voice raising in a wordless howl as she collapsed and began convulsing.
“You’re hoping that if he escapes, he’ll be able to resurrect you again later, is that it?” asked the snow giant as she made her way over to where Solvei was still shrieking. Slowly, she raised one foot and – with uncharacteristic gentleness – placed it on Solvei’s middle, pinning her in place as she kept thrashing, still wailing as the spell continued to torture her. “I’ll admit, that’s not a bad plan.”
The snow giant glanced back at Lex then, one brow raised. “My next spell will kill her,” she announced, raising her voice to be heard over Solvei’s screaming. “If you want to get away, you’d better hurry.”
Lex’s response was to summon Belligerence and throw it at her again.
It was more of a gesture than a counterattack, his injuries ensuring that the quill went nowhere near its target, very nearly causing him to collapse in place. The sight made Sissel snort. “Have it your way, then.”
Without further ado, she began casting.
And Lex knew that he had only a few seconds left before Solvei died. Again.
...no...
Her life would be lost because she’d wanted to help fight his battle. Again.
...no!
And her death would come after he’d pushed her away, refusing to acknowledge how important she was to him. Again.
NO!
There was no spell that came to Lex’s mind then. No command to his tulpa. No order through the Charismata. No prayer to the Night Mare.
It was simply that he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her a second time.
NEVER AGAIN!!!
It was less a thought than it was an urge, a need that tore through every part of Lex’s mind. Through his heart. Through his soul.
And through the link toward the piece of his soul that resided within her.
In the span of an instant, that urge waged war against the spell Sissel had cast to cut the two of them off. It threw itself against the barrier, attacking it with nothing more than pure will. It was a contest that he knew he couldn’t win, but at the same time couldn’t bear to lose, pushing forward to reestablish the bond that at that moment meant more to him than anything.
Aristeia was a power beyond any that Lex had ever encountered, short of the gods themselves. It had shrugged off his claws. It had bested his magic. It had injured him near death, maimed him, and left him powerless to fight back. And now it was going to take the person he was closest to away from him.
That wasn’t something Lex Legis could forgive.
SOLLLLLLVEIIIIII!!!
Sissel completed her spell, the black aura surrounding her hand glowing with a sinister radiance as aristeia enhanced its deadliness. Normally the spell was one designed to cause the victim’s heart to skip only a few beats, disabling them. But with the power she’d poured into it now, Sissel felt certain that it would likely stop the adlet’s heart altogether.
Giving one last glance at Lex, who seemed to be in shock at what he was seeing, Sissel shrugged internally. She’d expected some last, desperate ploy on his part – maybe trying to drag his familiar away with his unicorn telekinesis, or casting some spell he’d been holding in reserve – but apparently he had nothing more to give. Which is just as well, she decided, reaching down to deliver the death blow to the screaming lupine, since I’m tired of-
The adlet beneath her foot suddenly vanished.
Stumbling, Sissel lost a half-second staring at where her victim had been.
Then she looked over at where Lex had fallen.
Impossibly, that adlet – Solvei – was there by his side. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. More than that, she was no longer screaming, panting heavily as her eyes glowed green and purple. She was likewise in her black crystal armor again, her ice weapons restored and her size increased, the same way she had been...
Before Sissel had suppressed their link.
Which could only mean that Lex had broken her spell somehow.
Except that was impossible. She’d cast that with aristeia, which should have been more than he could overcome. His only weapon against the power she’d gained was his spear, and a glance to the side showed that it was still lying where his last pathetic throw had sent it. So then how...?
“Master.” Slowly, Solvei got to her feet, an unreadable expression on her face as she looked down at Lex. “Thank you.”
His response was a guttural groan, the claws of his remaining foreleg flexing slightly. But that was enough to make his quill return to it, and Solvei let her ice weapons dissolve as she gently took it from his grasp. Sissel snorted, waiting for the barbs to pierce her hand...
But nothing happened.
Rising to her full height, Solvei raised her arm to point the spear at Sissel, her eyes blazing brighter as her features hardened.
“I’m ending this.”
Sissel knew that there was no reason for her to fear. That she was still far and away more powerful than the two of them combined, especially with Lex in such bad shape.
But for some reason she couldn’t explain, she flinched anyway.
Not bothering to conjure another serac, she rushed in, swinging Belligerence in a showy twirl so as to better disguise where she was about to strike.
Growing up, every adlet in her tribe had been required to train with a spear, even an up-and-coming young shaman. While only those who joined the warriors were given training with other weapons, wielding a spear was – like basic lessons on hunting, fishing, reading the weather, and learning elementary prayers to the spirits – something that everyone had to learn. It was something which had only made Akna more frustrated when war with the yetis had broken out; why teach her how to fight if she was too valuable to be allowed to do so?
But now she was thankful, her childhood training coming back to her as she closed the gap with Sissel. It was a little awkward to handle Belligerence in her current state – her increased size made it seem smaller than the spears she was used to – but the snow giant had thrown her only weapon away, and Solvei had no intention of giving her time to cast another spell. Not when she could feel that horrific pain-magic still trying to get to her, pounding away at the dark magic that her master had given her, only barely keeping the agony at bay.
Master...
Roaring a battle cry, Solvei leaped the last few feet to Sissel, swinging Belligerence behind her back before bringing it over her head in a downward thrust. It was an unusual way to swing a spear, and she was hoping to catch the snow giant off-guard with the unconventional attack.
But Sissel was already giving ground, apparently having realized that she was at a disadvantage now. Sidestepping Solvei’s descending strike, she threw an open-palmed jab at the wolf’s head, her hand glowing. It was a quick blow, one that sacrificed strength for speed, and Solvei knew that Sissel was counting on aristeia to make up for the lack of power.
Taking one hand off of Belligerence, Solvei brought her elbow up sharply, connecting with Sissel’s wrist and diverting her strike. At the same time, her other hand brought Belligerence back up. Barely raising it two feet from where she’d stabbed it into the ground, she adjusted the quill’s angle only slightly before stabbing downward again, this time aiming for Sissel’s foot.
With no choice but to step back or be hobbled, Sissel retreated again. But as soon as she was clear she immediately reversed her momentum, moving inward to grab the arm Solvei was holding Belligerence with, trapping it. Grinning, she stepped inward even as she yanked Solvei toward her, preparing to bury her knee – glowing brighter as she channeled aristeia into it – in Solvei’s abdomen...
Only for her strike to go over Solvei’s head as the wolf was suddenly half the size she’d been a second ago.
Her blank eyes widening, there was nothing Sissel could do, having committed herself to the strike as Solvei – her wrist now thin enough that she was able to smoothly free it from the snow giant’s grasp – thrust Belligerence, which hadn’t changed size with her, into the flesh above Sissel’s hip.
The strike tore a ragged scream of pain from the snow giant’s throat, and for a moment she staggered-
Then she raised her hands above her head, interlocking her fingers before bringing her fists down toward her enemy’s skull.
Her counterattack had almost struck home when Solvei vanished completely.
Recognizing that Lex had teleported her, Sissel immediately whirled around-
Just in time to see Belligerence – thrown from where Solvei was standing barely a dozen feet away – pierce her shoulder, its barbs easily rending her flesh and lodging deep into the muscle beneath.
Biting back another scream, Sissel reached for the weapon on instinct, intending to tear it out of her. She only barely managed to catch herself just in time, remembering that the spear would injure her further if she grabbed it. But that realization had barely managed to cross her brain when Solvei – returning to her enlarged size – rushed back in, ice blades reforming in her hands as she charged.
The sight caused a pained sneer to cross Sissel’s lips, certain that the wolf’s display was a bluff; there was no way her cryomancy would be able to injure her aristeia-toughened body. Which means she’s going to dump them as soon as she gets within reach of the spear, decided the snow giant.
She was proven right a moment later as Solvei, rather than keeping hold of her ice weapons, instead flung them just before she got within Sissel’s reach. The snow giant didn’t bother deflecting the attacks, allowing them to hit her head-on, snorting as they shattered harmlessly against her. Just as she’d predicted, Solvei lunged-
Opposite from Belligerence, rather than toward it!
Cursing, Sissel didn’t have time to be confused as she turned to follow Solvei’s unexpected movement-
And then Belligerence disappeared from where it was lodged in her shoulder.
Realizing that she’d been duped, Sissel had just enough time to catch sight of Lex – having recalled the quill to his sole remaining foreclaw – throw Belligerence at her.
But just like before, his injuries and his inexperience with the weapon made his throw easy to avoid, and Sissel had plenty of time to turn aside, letting it fly past her-
Into Solvei’s waiting grasp.
They were expecting me to dodge it! Sissel realized as the wolf lunged forward, bringing Belligerence back around. That entire sequence was a setup!
Then Solvei ran her through.
It didn’t feel the way Lex had thought it would.
Ever since he’d formed his inadvertent bond with Solvei, Lex had been cognizant of the possibility of using the natural magic coursing through his body to expand their connection the way he had so many other things. After all, if he could use that reservoir of energy to empower his thaumaturgical spells, his dark magic, enchanted items in his possession, and even the Charismata itself, then there was little reason to suspect that his bond with the winter wolf was any different.
Even so, he’d never once entertained the thought of investigating that possibility, too afraid of what would happen if he tried. With their bond already enabling not only telepathy, but a permanent sense of the other’s status and distance, not to mention his being aware of Solvei’s emotional disposition – and her feeling his emotions directly when they grew too intense – it seemed self-evident that any enhancement of their connection would bring their minds closer together. For Lex, who had long regarded any abrogation of his mental autonomy as a deeply personal violation of his intrinsic self, that possibility had unnerved him deeply.
But now, having inadvertently channeled as much magic as his improved body – battered and maimed though it was – could through his link to Solvei in order to overcome Sissel’s spell, Lex realized he’d been wrong.
There had been no loss of his identity the way he’d feared. No merging of memories. No dilution of his sense of self.
Instead, he had become supremely aware of Solvei.
It was as though the existing information he received through their link had expanded to encompass every conceivable detail. He wasn’t just cognizant of how far away she was from him anymore; now he knew which direction she was facing, the exact position of each of her limbs, and what size she’d used her magic to attain. He now not only registered her physical condition, but was innately conscious of how she was putting more weight on her right leg than her left, that her elbow ached slightly from where she’d slammed it into Sissel’s wrist, and that at her current size Belligerence felt slightly too small for her.
And he was aware of her emotional state in much greater detail as well. He registered her anxiety and rage about what Grisela had done to Yotimo. Her fury toward Sissel for what the snow giant had done to her, her people, and himself. And her feelings for him...
All of that, and he knew that Solvei was receiving the same information about him as well.
That closeness wasn’t what Lex had been looking for his entire life. It didn’t tell him anything about how to recognize, let along interpret, someone else’s unspoken cues regarding their mindset. But it was so close to that, so akin to the sense of understanding that he’d wanted so badly for so long – only to give up when the Night Mare had shown him that his efforts had been in vain – that it brought tears to his eyes now.
It was only because of the situation at hand, the overwhelming danger that Sissel presented, that he was able to put that aside and concentrate on how the two of them could defeat their enemy.
But that was a task which didn’t seem anywhere near as difficult as it had been a few seconds ago.
After all, even if Solvei was the only one engaging her, Sissel was fighting both of them now.
With the level of awareness passing between himself and Solvei, the two of them could coordinate their efforts without anything as cumbersome as telepathy. Right now, Lex was not only aware of every move Solvei made as she made it, but he also knew what it was leading toward, able to ascertain her intentions as soon as they crossed her mind. And she could do the same for him.
That made it child’s play to orchestrate their tactics; he could teleport her without needing to tell her where she’d end up, because she already knew; he could throw Belligerence and she’d be ready to catch it before it left his grip.
And she knew that he was raising a small slab of black crystals behind Sissel’s feet even as Solvei drove her backward, the snow giant skewered on Belligerence.
Sissel went down hard, unable to muster up the strength to scream as she hit the ground. Above her, Solvei snarled, shoving the quill further down and out Sissel’s back, impaling her to the dirt beneath her. “Shouldn’t have thrown away your axe!” she spat hatefully, twisting Belligerence so that its barbs tore up Sissel’s insides.
But despite the agony she had to have been in, the snow giant managed to snarl a reply. “Shouldn’t have gotten so close to me!”
She drove her statement home as she reached up with one hand, grabbing the side of Solvei’s head. Fingers squeezed the black crystals of her armor's helmet, which creaked and shattered as though they were made out of glass, while Sissel’s other hand...
Regained the flickering black aura of her heart-stopping spell, still ready to be unleashed.
In an instant she reached out, seeking to make contact and discharge her spell-
Only for her hand to be caught in a roiling purple aura.
Snarling, Sissel spared a half-second to glance at where Lex was staring intently at her, his horn aglow, then she focused everything she had on breaking free. She knew what unicorn telekinesis was, knew that its strength was proportional to that of the wielder; all she had to do was overpower it...
Then the aura around her hand grew stronger as Solvei added her own telekinesis to it, her eyes flaring brighter.
For a half-second the stalemate held. Then slowly, Sissel’s hand crept upward, the snow giant’s fingers inching toward Solvei-
Only for the adlet to release her grip on Belligerence, and grasp Sissel’s wrist with both hands...and then slowly bent her grip towards the quill that was pinning her to the ground.
Her eyes widening as she realized what was about to happen, Sissel abandoned her grip on Solvei’s head, instead grabbing at one of the adlet’s arms, trying to break her grip.
The silence as the three of them fought was broken only by strained grunts, each concentrating with everything they had, putting all of their strength into the struggle.
Then Lex slowly raised his remaining foreleg and pointed it at Solvei, calling upon the Charismata.
A second later, new strength poured into her limbs, and although Sissel redoubled her efforts, she couldn’t stop Solvei from redirecting the grip of her open hand toward Belligerence, still sticking through her abdomen.
Forcibly closing the snow giant’s fingers around the haft, Sissel couldn’t do anything but suck in a breath, knowing what was about to happen-
And then – in reaction to being held by one to whom it didn’t belong – the barbs along Belligerence extended outward.
Sissel’s eyes bulged as a bloody gurgle escaped her throat, convulsing as her organs were pierced. The tips of the barbs could be seen protruding from beneath her silken shirt, showing that they’d perforated her stomach, her lungs, and her heart...where the light of aristeia radiated from.
A second later that light flickered and went out, and Sissel’s body went limp as the radiance throughout her body’s magical channels immediately faded away, causing Lex and Solvei to let out matching sighs of relief.
That overwhelming power, which had made Sissel almost invincible, was gone.
Lex didn’t bother trying to remain upright, sinking to the ground as exhaustion and his injuries caught up to him.
But Solvei was already there, their enhanced connection having warned her of his imminent collapse, resulting in her scrambling off of Sissel’s corpse in order to catch him as he fell. Master, she whined softly, and Lex didn’t have to look at her to know that she was wincing, eyeing where his severed leg had fallen.
It’s alright. Go check on Yotimo.
But-
I cut one of the legs off of that creature which attacked us in Darkest Night; the one I later merged with, interrupted Lex, forcing himself to stand upright. It barely slowed down, which means that I possess that same level of resilience.
He didn’t mention that the beating he’d taken from Sissel now easily eclipsed the damage he’d dealt to that eight-legged thing in the Night Mare’s realm. Nor was Solvei convinced, keeping her arm around him. At least give me the power to heal your injuries, or even just recover your stamina, the way you did for Silla after he’d lost his leg.
Lex hesitated for a moment; they still needed to recover the other adlets, which meant that conserving power was a priority in case they ended up encountering Hvitdod. But he registered Solvei’s anxiety spiking as she sensed his reticence, and he relented; in his current condition, he knew he wasn’t much good to anyone. “Healing and recovery,” he murmured, directing the Charismata’s power into her.
A moment later she fed it back into him, and Lex couldn’t hold back a grunt as he felt his wounds closing-
Just in time to hear another grunt come from Sissel.
Lex went rigid in shock, and he felt Solvei do the same, unable to believe that the snow giant was still alive. Then Solvei was rushing toward her as Lex began casting a spell; even if the snow giant’s body no longer shone with the light of aristeia, she was still an extremely dangerous-
“Wait...”
Sissel’s plea came as she turned her head in their direction, blood trickling from her lips. “You’ve bested me,” she groaned. “I surrender.”
“Oh you do, do you?,” spat Solvei, her features twisted in a hateful snarl as she reached for Belligerence. “Well guess what. We don’t accept-”
She stopped speaking an instant before Lex teleported her away from Sissel, reading his intentions even as she vanished, reappearing alongside him with a whine of dissatisfaction. Master! You’re going to spare her?! After everything she’s done?!
Sissel’s pained chuckle rang out before he could answer. “I have information,” she croaked, making no move to try and extricate herself from where Belligerence was pinning her to the ground. “Aren’t you curious? About what aristeia is? About Mother? I’m the one she left in charge. I know what she wants. What she’s planning. I’ll tell you everything, in exchange for my life.”
Master, this is some sort of trick! whined Solvei telepathically. We should kill her right now, before she tries something else!
Lex paused for a moment as he weighed his options...
Then he slowly approached Sissel. “Divulge all of the information you have, and then I’ll decide whether or not it’s worth your life.”
Another dry laugh came from her then. “Which is to say, you’ll listen to everything I say and then kill me.”
“If you don’t talk,” growled Solvei, moving to hover near Lex protectively, “then we’ll just kill you anyway.”
“It’s a quandary, to be sure,” answered Sissel, apparently unfazed. “If I don’t talk, then I’m of no use to you. But if I do talk, then there’ll be no more reason for you to keep me alive. And somehow, I don’t see you sparing me, no matter how valuable my information is.”
“Suggesting that you’re stalling for time in order to enact some other alternative,” concluded Lex, and his eyes lit up as black crystals grew around Sissel’s arms, legs, waist, and neck, leaving her immobilized. “Something which will be difficult now that you’re unable to make the somatic gestures necessary to cast a spell, nor have aristeia to help you break these bonds.”
“And if you do try something,” added Solvei, moving up to stand over the snow giant as she grabbed Belligerence, making no move to draw it from Sissel’s abdomen, “then you won’t live long enough to regret it!”
“Which means that your only recourse is to reveal everything you know,” finished Lex, “and avail yourself of the hope – however unlikely it may be – that it’s sufficient to change my mind.”
But even then, Sissel’s poise didn’t falter, and she met his gaze steadily as she replied. “Not so. There’s one other option.”
Lex felt Solvei’s uncertainty then, and it mirrored his own. He glanced around, cycling his vision through thermal, ultraviolet, magic, and several other spectra just in case she was making some allusion to someone coming to her aid. That was an imperfect response, of course; magic could easily defeat any of those modes of sight, the same way she’d used it to overcome his and Solvei’s sense of smell before.
But just as he was about to use the Charismata to imbue Solvei with heightened powers of detection, Sissel expounded on what she’d meant. “Your sworn oath.”
Lex’s lip curled at the suggestion. “You want me to formally pledge that I’ll spare your life in exchange for your information?”
“You and your servant,” corrected Sissel, canting her head in Solvei’s direction. “And anyone or anything else that you summon or control, like those slugs you used on Vidrig.”
“I’ve got a better idea!” Tightening her grasp on Belligerence, Solvei slowly rotated the weapon, causing Sissel to let out an agonized gasp as its barbs raked across her innards. “We make you talk, and then-”
“STOP!” roared Lex, rearing up on his hind legs in order to point his wire-wrapped foreleg at Solvei, the Charismata freezing her in place. “Solvei, we do not torture our enemies! Ever!”
“She deserves it!” With their heightened connection, he could almost feel her self-control slipping now that the adrenaline rush was wearing off, grief and rage coursing through her now that she had the cause of so much of her misery helpless before her. “She killed me! She maimed Silla! She kidnapped Toklo and the others! And she...she made Yotimo...”
“That was Grisela,” groaned Sissel. “I never touched him!”
“You think that makes it okay?!” screamed Solvei. “You knew what she was doing to him, and you didn’t do a thing to stop it, did you?! DID YOU?!”
Her voice broke at that last part, turning into a sob, and Lex could see tears forming at the corner of her eyes. The sight – and the realization through their augmented link that she was on the verge of breaking down completely – spurred him to action. “Solvei, go check on Yotimo. Right now.”
“But Master-”
“Confirm that he’s not in any danger, do what you can to help him, and stand guard over him.” He held his remaining foreleg out toward her, an application of the Charismata making it so that she had no choice but to obey. “Now.”
Her breath hitching, Solvei didn’t look at him as she released Belligerence and turned away from Sissel, heading toward the other side of the canyon. But when she reached the edge of it, her voice crept through Lex’s mind just before she turned the blind corner.
Please, she begged, don’t let her live.
Her words were still lingering in his mind when Sissel coughed up a mouthful of blood, drawing his attention back to the snow giant. Despite Solvei’s having aggravated her injuries, she managed a smile. “Can I take your calling her off to mean that you’re interested in my offer?”
Lex stared down at her, making no effort to hide his contempt. “Your desperate efforts to preserve your own life are truly pathetic. You betrayed and murdered your sisters, treated your captives with a level of indifference that can only be called depraved, and are now willing to sell out the one you call Mother. And yet now you think you can conduct negotiations in good faith, as though you were an honorable foe worthy of my respect.”
The smile dropped from Sissel’s face immediately, and long moments passed before she replied. “It’s easy for you to say that, isn’t it? You’re in service to a god, which means that so long as you stay in their good graces, your reward is guaranteed. I don’t have that luxury, which means I have to keep living, until I can find a way to secure my afterlife.”
The complaint served only to deepen Lex’s disdain. “Even without worshiping a deity, the souls of the dead go to a realm appropriate to their conduct. If a congenial hereafter is what you wanted, you should have comported yourself accordingly.”
Sissel snorted. “If only that were the case.”
Not giving Lex a chance to respond, she sighed. “Consider this a tidbit of what I’ll tell you if we can come to an arrangement: as one of Mother’s children, my afterlife is set, and has been since before I was born.”
The statement ran counter to everything Lex had read in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, to say nothing of what the Night Mare herself had told him, and his only reply was a mocking laugh.
Sissel frowned at that. “It’s true. Or did you think it was a coincidence that we summoned daemons for help?”
“The implication being...?”
“Mother has a deal with the daemons: all of her children’s souls are theirs upon death.”
“That deal is unenforceable,” retorted Lex, his thoughts turning back toward what he’d learned from studying Thermal Draft’s infernal contract. “No one can sell something they don’t legitimately own. Regardless of whatever deal your mother made, your soul would still acquire its own numinous gradient and be drawn toward the corresponding plane of existence upon your death.”
But even as the words left Lex’s lips, a sliver of doubt was already crossing his mind. It was the same one that he’d felt when Silla had told him that Sissel was using venedaemons, reminding him of what Prevarius had said about pony souls ending up as commodities on netherworld markets...markets which Lex was aware, thanks to the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, were primarily run by daemons.
Venedaemons can summon cacodaemons, which are themselves able to capture the souls of the recently deceased, he knew. And there are other daemons which can abduct souls during their journey from the mortal realm to the Outer Planes. If this ‘Mother’ is the one turning the souls of captured ponies over to the daemons, it’s not impossible that she’s also arranged for them to take the souls of her children when they die.
“Where your soul is supposed to go doesn’t matter,” interjected Sissel, echoing Lex’s thoughts. “Daemons will take it anyway. It’s what they do; they’re an entire race of soul-hunters. Mother bargained for their help, and she owes them souls to pay off her debt, and that includes us. It’s why she hates it when her children are killed, since souls grow and gain value through life experience, so an early death means a soul that’s worth less to the daemons when they snatch it from the Astral Plane.”
Lex paused, digesting that. “And she’s also sold the daemons the souls of the ponies your cabal has abducted, hasn’t she?”
“She needs to pay down her debt,” answered Sissel. “You really think she’d let those pony souls go to waste after their bodies were eaten?”
Lex’s claws clenched at that, tearing up the ground beneath him. “And you still saw fit to serve this mother of yours, despite her abominable treatment of everyone around her?”
“Her deal was in place before I was born,” shot back Sissel. “All I can do is keep surviving until I can gain enough power to figure something out. And since I didn’t realize how strong I’d get by using Vidrig and Grisela to gain aristeia, the easiest way to do that was to keep serving Mother...at least until you made it impossible for me to kill Hvitdod for her.”
At that last part, Sissel’s thin smile reappeared. “That’s part of why she needed to bargain with the daemons to begin with. She’s got big plans, and daemon mercenaries and Hvitdod’s death curse are only small parts of it. I can tell you the rest...if you accept my surrender and guarantee that my life won’t be forfeit.”
Lex regarded Sissel for several seconds, then looked past her at where Solvei had gone.
Through their heightened connection, he was aware that she was crying as she tended to Yotimo. That knowledge blended with the memory of Sissel torturing her only a few minutes prior, which in turn led to his recalling how it had felt when she’d died.
Please, don’t let her live.
Holding his remaining claw out, Lex silently recalled Belligerence, Sissel gasping in relief as the quill disappeared from her chest as her smile widened. “So, I take it we have a deal?”
Lex smiled back at her.
Then he stabbed her in the face with Belligerence, the quill’s barbed tip punching through her skull just below her left eye and bursting out the back of her head.
“When the daemons come to take your soul,” whispered Lex, placing his lips by Sissel’s ear as she gurgled, her body convulsing. “Give them my regards.”
Straightening up, he switched his vision so that he could see her life force, watching it ebb as her thrashing grew weaker. He didn’t so much as blink as the flow of positive energy in her body dwindled, falling to critical levels in seconds, before sputtering out completely.
Snorting, hoping that whatever fate the daemons had in store for her was exceptionally foul, Lex turned away-
And paused as he caught sight of another life force nearby.
Tensing up, he almost attacked on reflex, but stifled that urge as he noticed just how dim it was, indicating that its owner was severely injured. Switching back to his normal vision confirmed that, the life force’s location corresponding to a pile of rubble near the canyon wall, doubtlessly having crushed whoever was beneath them.
But when Lex cleared the rocks away, what awaited him wasn’t a cacodaemon or a venedaemon that had somehow survived the battle.
Although he could clearly register Solvei's anxiety, Lex didn’t answer right away, looking over Yotimo via the magical spectrum. For his part, the old wolf blinked at the two of them, his eyes glassy and unfocused, before his gaze shifted to the canyon wall, staring at nothing.
But that was because of the magical aura clinging to the adlet, Lex knew, and it was only after he’d finished examining it that Lex replied to Solvei’s question. It’s a spell designed to scramble the target’s synapses, interrupting transmissions between neurological-
He stopped as Solvei’s disposition shifted to confusion, causing Lex to bite back a sigh before trying again. The spell has scrambled his senses, bombarding his brain with random information which is making it difficult for him to think straight.
It was only when he glanced at Solvei that Lex realized she was biting her lip, which confirmed that the accidental enhancement that he’d imbued their bond with was fading rapidly. That wasn’t surprising; every time he’d poured additional power into something – be it a spell, a magic item, or the Charismata – the effects had been pronounced but short-lived. There was no reason for it to be otherwise now.
Even so, Lex felt a pang at that. While it might have been artificial, being so aware of Solvei had been as close as he’d ever come to understanding someone else...
But you can fix him, right? pressed Solvei. Or grant me the power to fix him?
Shaking off his wistfulness for a dream that he knew now was impossible, Lex glanced back at Yotimo, now rocking in place with his knees drawn up to his chest. All of a sudden he didn’t feel like using telepathy anymore. “There’s no need,” he answered out loud. “Based on how fast the spell’s aura is decaying, it won’t last much longer. When it expires, he should make a full recovery. Once he does, we can start heading for where Paska has taken the others.”
Solvei grunted at that, and her feelings soured as she glanced in the other direction. “What about her?”
Lex didn’t need to follow her gaze to know that she was referring to the tiny sphinx – “Nenet,” Sissel had called her – that he’d found. She was currently held within a cage of black crystals that he’d made, not yet having woken up. “We’re taking her with us. I plan on interrogating her as soon as she regains consciousness.”
This time, Solvei’s feelings were those of bitterness. “Can I be the one to kill her if she doesn’t play along?”
“It won’t come to that,” answered Lex as he moved to retrieve his severed leg. “If she proves recalcitrant, I’ll simply use the Charismata to force her to speak.”
Frowning as he picked up his leg in his telekinesis, Lex cast a preservative spell on it – the same one he’d used on Pillowcase’s corpse back in Vanhoover – before putting it in his extradimensional saddlebag. He knew that there was regenerative magic in this world. That Rainbow Dash had been able to regain her lost wing, having lost it shortly after he’d met her, Twilight, and their other friends in Viljatown, was proof enough of that. But he hadn’t been there for the actual restoration of her limb, and so had no idea as to the specifics of how that magic worked. It might very well be that it could only reattach the original limb, rather than regrow the new one.
Until such as a time as he could find out, however, he’d need to make do with only three legs. Between that, and how many spells he’d expended, they’d need to prioritize avoiding Hvitdod when they reached the others; fighting the dragon in his current state, Lex knew, would be tantamount to suicide.
Solvei blinked, and out of his periphery Lex saw her cease the baleful glare she’d been giving the caged creature and look at him instead. “The Charismata affects her?”
He nodded. “I suspected it would, now that I have a better understanding of how it works, but I confirmed it when I healed her injuries.”
“You healed her?” Shock mixed with anger came from Solvei then. “Why?”
The question earned her a scowl from Lex. “Because by taking her prisoner, I necessarily accepted a duty of care toward her, one which includes treating her injuries.”
“But she’s our enemy!” growled Solvei, pointing at the downed sphinx accusingly. “She helped Sissel in our last fight, remember?! She did...something to help her project that illusion of herself!”
“I’m aware,” replied Lex flatly. “That has no bearing on the current situation. Asserting authority over someone else requires that authority to be exercised judiciously.”
Solvei grit her teeth. “You had Sissel captured, and you killed her!”
“I rendered her immobile, but I never accepted her surrender,” Lex reminded her coolly, “and I likewise rejected her offer to turn over information in exchange for clemency. All that was left was for a sovereign authority to pass judgment on her for her crimes, and as I recognize no temporal power greater than my own, that responsibility fell to me. It was in that context that I decided that she deserved to die for what she’d done.”
“SO DOES SHE!” yelled Solvei, pointing at Nenet. “She helped Sissel and the others! That makes her responsible for what they did to Silla! And Yotimo! And me!”
“That’s for me to decide. Not you.”
Tensing up, Solvei clenched her fists, glaring at him before abruptly turning and stomping toward Sissel’s body with a snarl. Reforming her ice blades, she flung herself at the snow giant’s corpse, a ragged scream coming from her throat.
Lex made no move to stop her as Solvei butchered Sissel’s remains, howling anew each time she sank her blades into the corpse. There was no technique behind the blows, no consideration of where on Sissel’s body she was hitting; all she was doing was stabbing at it, howling each time her arms came down.
Again and again she hacked at her fallen foe, her strikes growing wilder and more uncoordinated each time, until finally she couldn’t seem to control herself anymore, and stumbled away from the gory remnants of Sissel’s body before collapsing to her knees, shoulders shaking as her composure completely fell apart.
The sight broke Lex’s heart, and for a moment he found himself wondering if he should let her kill Nenet after all. She wasn’t wrong about the sphinx being at least partially complicit in her siblings’ crimes, and if it would make Solvei feel better...
It took him only a moment to make his decision.
“Solvei.”
She didn’t respond, other than to give a low moan of misery and shake her head.
“Solvei. Look at me.”
He didn’t use the Charismata to force her, but she obeyed anyway, sniffling as she turned to face him, her ears flat against her head.
“The mistake that I made,” he began slowly, “wasn’t that I killed Panuk. It was that I thought that punishing him was protecting everyone else.”
Confusion cut through her sadness as she blinked at him. “W-what?”
For a moment he almost launched into a lecture about the difference between modes of justice and weighing the effects of proportional punishments against wider deterrence, but the words stuck in his throat, knowing that would have done nothing to help how she felt right now.
“I was angry...and I was afraid...and that colored my judgment.” It made him want to crawl out of his skin to say that out loud, much like how he’d felt whenever his tulpa had been driven to torment him.
But it had never once said anything he hadn’t already known, even if he’d been unable to admit it.
“I’d been thrown into this world, not for the first time, and forced to fight to survive. I’d failed to protect Thermal Draft, didn’t know if...if ponies I cared for back home were alive or dead...and had just been drawn into another battle I didn’t want. So when Panuk suddenly appeared and threatened everyone, I selected the harshest possible punishment – as though he was the same as Bolverk or Prevarius – rather than one that would have been more suitable. Because I had decided that the best way to keep everyone safe was by killing anything that seemed hostile, regardless of how much of a threat they were.”
“Master...why are you-”
“It was the wrong decision.” The words were like acid on his tongue, and the ones that were waiting to be spoken were even worse, but he forced himself to speak them anyway. “I know that you’re Akna now, and that she...that you care deeply for your tribe, so...if you resent me for killing him...then I won’t say you’re wrong to feel that way.”
And there it was: the real reason why he hated the fact that she was Akna now.
As Solvei, she’d practically worshiped the ground he walked on, not only fawning over him for rescuing her family, but choosing him over them once their bond had been formed. Her dedication had been utterly selfless, and without even realizing it, he’d come to cherish her for that.
Akna, however, had no such feelings for him that he’d been aware of. She’d been a reluctant ally against a shared enemy, and while they’d learned to work together – to the point of saving each other’s lives in Darkest Night – he’d harbored no illusions about the regard she held him in, or that her people had been foremost in her mind.
Even with the devastating revelation about Kara’s so-called blessing, there had been no indication that Akna had been affected by it. Which meant that whatever grudges she bore toward him – about Panuk, or not acquiring one of the Umbral Regalia, or anything else – were now part of Solvei also.
That was something that hadn’t occurred to Lex in the wake of their return from Darkest Night, too busy with his own transformation and the myriad tasks he’d set for himself before they’d left the Shrine of the Starless Sky. It had only been when she’d panicked over the fate of Silla and the rest of his comrades, leaving Lex to face the horrific truth of his inner beast alone, that he’d come to appreciate that his soul-bound companion was different now...and that even if her eager devotion had been because of a god’s manipulation, it was likely gone forever.
That had hurt far more than Lex had expected.
And so he’d done what he always did when someone had hurt him and lashed out at her, something he felt ashamed of now since none of what had happened was her fault.
But he’d wallowed in his own negativity enough – and was close enough to her, thanks to their connection – to recognize that she was doing the same thing now.
He’d made bad decision after bad decision since coming to Everglow. Panuk, Toklo, Nisha; he’d even come close to killing Solvei herself, the first time they’d met. It had only been because of Thermal Draft, and Woodheart, and the Night Mare – all telling him that he was being too harsh – that he hadn’t made an even worse mess of things.
The least he could do was to pass that lesson along to Solvei now.
“I made the wrong decision with Panuk,” he repeated, silently adding that to his long list of regrets. “And because I did, it made things harder, for myself and for you. I don’t want you to make the same mistake with Nenet.”
Solvei was slumped in place, staring at the ground, and despite their connection he couldn’t get a fix on her emotions, being too jumbled to register clearly. “But she helped them hurt everyone...”
“I know. The same way that Panuk and Toklo threatened Fail Forward. The same way Nisha insulted me. The same way you injured Thermal Draft’s wing.”
She shuddered, tilting her head down more, her hair covering her eyes.
“Nenet isn’t blameless,” continued Lex. “But that doesn’t mean that she deserves the same treatment as Sissel. Even if it’s impossible to imagine, forgetting that fact carries the risk of consequences that could come back to haunt you later. You’re part of me, now, and I don’t want you to go through that-”
He stopped talking as she stood up abruptly, still not looking at him. “I can’t do this,” she mumbled, turning and stumbling away from him. “I just...I need to think...”
She didn’t say anything else as she turned and shuffled toward the other side of the canyon, neither looking back nor speaking to him telepathically, her emotions still in turmoil.
For some reason, Lex found himself thinking of Twilight as he watched Solvei – watched Akna – leave. The purple alicorn was similar to himself in many ways, possessing a genius intellect and a natural aptitude for magic. But she was his total opposite when it came to understanding others, being as gifted at empathy as he was deficient at it. What would she have said? he wondered.
He turned the morose thought over in his mind, but for all his intelligence, no answer came back to him.
The question did, however, distract him enough that he didn’t notice Nenet crack one eye open, looking between him and where Solvei had gone.
“You could still head back to the tribe if you took to the wind. I’m sure by now the elders are panicking.”
Yotimo was already shaking his head, not looking back at her as he hopped over a small outcropping, keeping pace with her and Lex as they made their way through the winding canyons. “I’m not going anywhere without my son and the others.”
Solvei – Lex still couldn’t help but think of her as Solvei, despite knowing that it was just as appropriate...perhaps more appropriate...to call her Akna now – frowned at Yotimo’s immediate rejection of her suggestion. “We ran into Nangiannatuk a little while ago. I did my best to convince him to go back home, but he might need your help.”
“Was Nangiannatuk captured by those monsters?”
Yotimo’s blunt question made Solvei cringe. “No...”
“Toklo is,” snapped Yotimo, his knuckles tightening around his spear, Bloodletter. It – along with the confiscated weapons of his other warriors – had been in an extradimensional pack worn by Sissel. Fortunately, Yotimo had seen her put them in there, and so had made sure to retrieve it from what was left of the giant’s corpse before they’d set out. “My warriors are. So right now they’re my priority.”
“I understand that, but-”
He’s made his choice, cut in Lex. Let him do as he likes.
But he’s going to get himself killed! Frustration and anxiety came from Solvei as she crouched atop her serac, the ice-shelf easily gliding over the broken terrain of the ravine. Even if we manage to avoid fighting Hvitdod, we still have Paska to deal with! I don’t think he’ll just sit back and let us free everyone without doing anything, and if he turns into that one-eyed thing and tries to put a death curse on someone the way he did to Thermal Draft-
That’s not likely to happen, at least not initially, interrupted Lex. Remember, Paska is still following Sissel’s original plan, which is to draw us into conflict with the dragon. It’s much more probable that he’ll have placed the adlets somewhere conspicuous while he watches from concealment, ready to cause some commotion that alerts it the moment we show up.
Which would be even worse, replied Solvei sourly, her grip tightening on Belligerence in a manner similar to how Yotimo was grasping his own weapon. As it was, Lex considered it fortunate that she was able to handle the quill even with their connection having returned to normal. Once they’d ascertained that, he’d left it in her care, knowing that she was more proficient with it; if he needed it, he’d simply summon it back to himself. Then we’ll have to fight Hvitdod, all while Paska can take cheap shots at us.
The goal is to prevent it from coming to that in the first place. Presuming that I’m right about Paska’s strategy, we need to figure out where he is and kill or incapacitate him before he can alert Hvitdod. Then we recover everyone else.
At which we point the only thing we have to worry about is how to explain everything that happened to Yotimo and the elders, grumbled Solvei, glancing in the old warrior’s direction.
The anxiety he sensed from her then wasn’t something he needed to inquire into. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Yotimo had been shooting them both looks ever since he’d recovered from the spell which had kept him docile. While he hadn’t said anything about the fact that his shaman was now wearing black crystal armor and commanding ice magic, or why the pony accompanying her now looked like a hulking beast, Lex knew that those questions were eventually going to be asked.
But there were more pressing concerns at the moment.
Under normal circumstances, Lex would have sent Solvei to scout ahead, but that was out of the question now. Leaving aside that her current, emotionally-charged state meant that her judgment was compromised when it came to rescuing the others, the simple fact was that Paska would likely see her before she saw him. Even if she changed into her mist-form, he’d likely know to look for a conspicuously low-flying cloud, at which point he’d likely proceed to alert Hvitdod.
Going in blind wasn’t an option either, however. Not after the ambush that they’d just blundered into, despite his efforts. Even if Sissel was dead, Lex didn’t want to take the chance that she’d given her sole remaining sibling some sort of contingency plan that he hadn’t thought of. Which meant that a different approach was called for.
Fortunately, the means of acquiring such an approach was held in a black crystal cage carried aloft in his telekinetic aura.
Turning his attention toward Nenet, Lex brought her closer to him. The tiny sphinx still hadn’t moved, and he was beginning to grow suspicious of her continued unresponsiveness. He’d waited this long for her to regain consciousness only because he’d hoped to avoid using the Charismata any more than he already had; he’d called upon it numerous times during his fight with Sissel, and wanted to conserve its remaining uses so that he’d be able to augment Solvei as necessary when they encountered Paska.
But with Nenet still not having opened her eyes, that was a luxury he could no longer afford. Besides, decided Lex as he rose up onto his hind legs, being aware that both Solvei and Yotimo were looking at him, this eliminates any chance of her lying or withholding pertinent information.
“Look at me,” he ordered Nenet as he held his foreleg in front of her cage, letting the divine power of the Night Mare reach out and take hold of her, “and tell me, truthfully and completely, everything I demand of you. Start with your name.”
Inside the cage, the sphinx trembled as her eyelids slowly parted, swallowing nervously as she turned to look at her captor. “N-Nenet,” she stuttered. “My name is Nenet.”
“How long have you been awake?”
Wincing, Nenet tried to lower her head, but the orders she’d been given kept her from breaking eye contact with him. “Since you healed me,” she admitted in a small voice, her tail curling between her legs as she wrapped her wings around herself. “I’m sorry, I was scared. Please don’t hurt me.”
“What’s Paska going to do to my son and the others?!” Yotimo’s question came in the form of a deep growl, reaching out to grab the bars of Nenet’s cage, wrenching it free of Lex’s telekinesis as he brought Bloodletter’s tip up to the edge of the bars. “His plan is to use them as bait to draw Hvitdod out, right? How? With the same spell those monsters used on me? Tell me right now, or else-”
He stopped speaking as Lex’s claw grabbed his wrist, squeezing. “Stand down.”
In Yotimo’s grip, the runes on Bloodletter began to glow softly as he looked at Lex, his expression hardening. “And if I say no?”
Lex’s eyes blazed green and purple. “Then you’ll experience another humiliating defeat.”
“Both of you, stop!”
Leaping down from her serac, Solvei moved between them. Putting one hand on Yotimo’s chest, she lightly pressed him back while her other hand took hold of Nenet’s cage, inside of which the small sphinx was shaking like a leaf. “Yotimo, I know how you feel-”
“No, you don’t.” Despite his clipped tone, there was a rough undercurrent to Yotimo’s voice that he wasn’t fully able to hide. “You don’t know how it feels to be on the verge of losing the only family you have left. If you did, you never would have run off on that vision quest of yours when the yetis attacked.”
Her eyes widened then, and Lex registered shock going through her. “But...I saved everyone!”
“Everyone except your grandmother, who had to take up your share of the slack,” shot back Yotimo. “She had to do it all, despite her age, and she never once complained about the fact that you’d run off on some mission for personal glory, all because you hated the fact that you had responsibilities to live up to!”
Swallowing, Solvei shook her head. “But everyone told me that I was too valuable to be put in danger! That I had to stay away from the fighting because I was the next shaman!”
“They meant that you weren’t supposed to be on the front lines, but you were still going to be part of the war effort! Do you really not understand that we needed our shaman with us, reading the land and summoning ice spirits? You would have been kept away from the fighting, but not hidden away with the children and elders! That would have been your grandmother’s job, but instead you ran off and she had to take your place! The difference is that you could have defended yourself against the single yeti that broke through our lines, but she was too old to do so!”
His fingers tightening around the bars of Nenet’s cage, Yotimo put his nose an inch from Solvei’s. “You weren’t concerned about what would happen to her without you there, because you wanted everyone to acknowledge you. And you got your wish. You found a magic weapon, slaughtered our enemies, and became a hero to our people. But you sacrificed your only remaining family to do it. I will not do the same.”
Lex had heard enough, an aura springing to life around his horn as he prepared to put a curse on Yotimo-
Don’t. Master, please don’t.
Sparing a glance at Solvei, Lex paused, then let the aura around his horn die out.
Letting out an unsteady breath, Solvei kept her eyes on Yotimo. “I do know how you feel,” she repeated. “I know that you’re scared – not for yourself, but for someone that you care about – and that it’s easier to be angry than afraid. And I know that you want to lash out and hurt the people who hurt you” – she gestured toward Nenet, who had by now curled up into a ball and was whimpering in terror – “because that makes you feel like you’re making everyone else a little bit safer.”
Lex blinked. Was she...?
“But right now, you’re making the wrong decision,” she continued. “And if you keep pushing this, you’ll only make things harder, not just for yourself but for Toklo and the others too.”
“The alternative being what?” spat Yotimo. “That I trust the two of you to question this...thing?”
“Yes!” insisted Solvei. “M-, Lex has...”
She faltered then, and Lex saw her ears flick backward for a moment, before she took a deep breath and steadied herself. “Master has a special power-”
Yotimo’s eyebrows rose. “‘Master’?”
“-which lets him force her to tell the truth,” continued Solvei. “She can’t lie to him, but she can lie to you, so you have to let us handle this, the same way we handled Grisela and the others.”
The mention of Grisela’s name sent a shudder through Yotimo, and Lex saw his grip on Bloodletter waver. Slowly, he let go of Nenet’s cage, allowing Solvei to hold it as he stepped back.
As he did so, Yotimo turned to regard Lex again, this time keeping his spear pointed at the ground. “I want to know why you’re doing this,” he demanded bluntly. “You killed Panuk, terrorized my son, and did...something to Akna. Why are you helping us now?”
There were a lot of answers that Lex could have given, ranging from how the souls of ponies were being stolen to his hope that killing Paska would save Thermal Draft. But hearing his own lesson to Solvei repeated almost verbatim now was enough to remind him of why he’d chosen to admit his mistakes and accept accountability for them, rather than trying to justify them. If it had been enough to convince her, then maybe it would work for Yotimo too.
“Because what’s happened to your people is my fault.”
Yotimo’s eyes narrowed at the same time that Solvei’s widened. “What?”
“If I hadn’t dealt with your scouting party so harshly, you never would have assembled your warriors to come looking for Toklo,” explained Lex. “I could have let them all go, alive and unharmed, and if I had none of you would have been there for Sissel and the others to find. It’s because of my actions that you’re involved in this, and so I’m taking responsibility for that now.”
Solvei grimaced, looking nervously back toward Yotimo. For his part, the elder adlet held Lex’s gaze for a long moment...then nodded. “Alright. But don’t think that this is the end of it. Once we get Toklo and the others back, you’re still going to have to answer to our council of elders for the part you’ve played in this.”
“Yotimo! After everything-”
“It’s fine,” cut in Lex, silencing Solvei’s protest. “We can worry about making peace later. Right now we need to focus on rescuing everyone, ideally without fighting a dragon in the process.”
Solvei grimaced at that, but didn’t say anything against it, instead moving to hand Nenet’s cage back to Lex. But when he reached out to take hold of it, she placed one hand over his claw, meeting his eyes steadily.
You asked me before if I’m your Akna the way I am your Solvei, she reminded him. The answer is yes. I love my tribe, even if...even if I haven’t always done right by them. For a second her lower lip quivered, but she forced a shaky smile onto her face. But I’m yours. Your Solvei. Your Akna. Now and forever.
Lex knew that shouldn’t have made him happy, that it was Kara’s blessing talking. But he couldn’t help the feeling that welled up in him then, and judging from what he registered from Solvei a moment later, he’d felt it strongly enough that she had also.
When she released the cage and stepped back a moment later, her smile was no longer shaky.
He returned the expression – just for a moment – before turning his attention back to Nenet.
“Now,” he commanded her, “tell me everything you know about what Paska is planning.”
“I see them,” murmured Lex, eyes closed as he borrowed Solvei’s vision. “Toklo and six others, each tied up next to the edge of the rift.”
He deliberately kept his description of the situation terse, not wanting Yotimo to become more agitated than he already was. Although the elder adlet had calmed down after Lex had volunteered to take responsibility for what had happened with Sissel and the others, he hadn’t regained the level of equanimity he’d demonstrated during their first meeting. While that was understandable – the mistreatment Grisela had inflicted on him, along with his worry for his son and his charges, would have made it impossible for anyone to retain their composure – in the current circumstances it was less than ideal.
For one thing, the captured adlets didn’t look to be in very good shape. Each of them was bound and gagged, their hands tied behind their backs with a loop of rope that went around their necks, making it so that they’d choke themselves if they struggled against their bonds. But that concerned Lex less than the precise wounds he could just barely make out on their legs, suggesting that Paska hadn’t been content to simply bind them, but had made sure to hobble them as well.
While that wouldn’t make it impossible to quickly extricate them, it was another hurdle that would have to be dealt with.
Another was how precariously they were positioned. Toklo and the others were barely five feet from the edge of an abyss so massive that it made the canyons they’d been marching through look like ditches by comparison. Sissel had described it as the deepest rift in the area, saying that it went almost a mile downward, but that description didn’t do it justice.
While Lex had never developed much of an interest in the physical sciences, he could still tell that the massive rent in the earth wasn’t done by natural processes. There were no sloping edges or gentle deformations that suggested the rift in front of them had been made by erosion or other geological activity. Rather, there was simply a massive area – roughly oblong in shape – where the ground simply ceased to be, the rough sides of the abyss plunging straight down as though some ancient colossus had simply driven their titanic fist into the earth.
At a glance, Lex estimated that the abyss in front of them was at least a thousand feet wide, perhaps more, with the numerous smaller canyons that typified the surrounding landscape terminating where they reached its edge. But there was no way of seeing what lay at the lowest part of the colossal pit. Although Solvei was surveying the area from above – having changed into mist-form a quarter-mile back and flying up to use the omnipresent cloud cover as camouflage in order to scout unseen, Lex borrowing her senses in order to confirm the terrain – the overcast sky meant that the bottom of the rift was completely hidden in darkness.
But if Sissel was right, then there was no need to guess what was down there:
Hvitdod, the ancient dragon that had fought the original adlets.
“Are they alive?”
Yotimo’s question made Lex’s scowl. Crouched beside each other, it was easy for him to hear that the old adlet’s voice was slightly further away than it should have been, which meant that he was peering around the boulder they’d taken cover behind, no doubt trying to catch a glimpse of his son. That was something Lex had explicitly told him not to do, since it increased the risk that they’d be spotted in turn.
Nenet might not have known exactly where Paska would be hiding, but she’d confirmed that he’d definitely be watching from somewhere.
“They seem to be,” answered Lex after a moment, reaching out with his one remaining foreleg and grabbing at the source of Yotimo’s voice. He heard Yotimo curse as he caught hold of the adlet’s shoulder and yanked him backward, but he ignored it. “There’s movement from each of them. Not much, but more than Grisela’s puppets were making.”
The hag’s name brought an unhappy growl from Yotimo. “Can you tell if they’re under the same spell that I was?”
“Not from this distance.” It was the easiest answer to give, rather than explaining that he couldn’t use his alternate modes of vision through his connection to Solvei, only being able to borrow the senses she herself possessed. Still, the thought prompted him to reach out to her telepathically. How much longer are you capable of remaining in that state?
Adlets can take to the wind for at a long time, Master, came Solvei’s immediate reply. If we transform at sunrise, we can stay that way almost until nightfall, at least during the winter season.
You’re not just an adlet anymore, Lex reminded her. Which means you may be able to exceed that duration, something that Paska might not expect.
It was a thin hope, he knew. Although Solvei was virtually impossible to detect in her current state, Paska had at least a day’s head start on them, and according to what Nenet had told them there’d been no expectation on her siblings’ part about precisely when Lex would come looking for the adlets. They’d only anticipated that he’d move to recover them “soon,” which meant that Paska had likely dug in for a long wait.
And he’d hidden himself in preparation for that quite well, since no matter how much Lex surveyed the area from above using Solvei’s sight – something he was thankfully still able to do that while she was in mist form – there was no sign of him anywhere.
For a brief moment Lex considered summoning Solvei back and imbuing her with alternative sensory powers via the Charismata, but he abandoned that plan after a moment’s consideration. He was already running low on applications of the Night Mare’s power, and anything he granted her would only last sixty seconds, which meant it’d vanish by the time she returned to her previous elevation. Worse, Paska might see the conspicuous cloud rising up into the sky from wherever he was hidden.
Nor was looking over the area himself an option, Lex knew. While he could enhance his vision in any number of ways now, they all made his eyes glow, and he had no doubt that against the drab background of the canyon they were hiding in, vivid green and purple would stand out dramatically. Especially to someone who knew to look for those colors.
“You really can’t use your magic to figure out where Paska is?” grumbled Yotimo, and Lex could hear him shifting in place again.
But this time, it was Nenet – still in her cage – that answered. “Paska knows the ‘nondetection’ spell, which makes it very hard to find him with magic,” ventured the tiny sphinx. “And with his ‘pass without trace’ spell, he won’t leave any tracks or a scent. That’s how Sissel and the others were able to move without leaving a trail behind.”
“And who’s fault is that?” muttered Yotimo darkly. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten how, after your siblings ambushed us, you were the one they asked about what magic to use to avoid being tracked.”
“I-I didn’t have a choice,” whimpered Nenet. “Disobedience meant a beating or worse. They all know I’m Mother’s backup spellbook.”
“Sissel mentioned that before,” cut in Lex, forestalling another angry growl from the elder adlet.
Although he’d interrogated Nenet on their way there, his questions had been entirely focused on the current situation. Although he now knew that Paska was something called a “shuck,” that he only had minor magical abilities but was adept at using them tactically, and that he could only use his killing curse once per day, the undersized sphinx hadn’t known what tactics Paska would use now. Apparently he hadn’t seen fit to share his thoughts with the rest of his siblings, either because he didn’t trust them or simply disdained them. After the way Sissel had carelessly dispatched Grisela and Vidrig, Lex could see the rationale for both.
Fortunately, Nenet had revealed one tidbit of unexpectedly useful information: while Paska knew a spell that enabled him to track an individual from a great distance – she’d called it his “find quarry” spell – its extended range required far greater precision than the tracking spell Aria had used multiple times back on Equestria. Specifically, Paska’s spell required that his target be clearly visualized in his mind’s eye in order to lock onto them.
Lex had no doubt that Paska had used that spell when he’d first ambushed him, during his breakdown while traveling with Fail Forward through the wilderness. Most likely, he’d been given a description – possibly aided by magic – from Grisela of what he or Solvei looked like.
But the two of them had both changed a great deal since then, to the point where Lex felt certain that Paska’s mental image of who they’d been was no longer sufficient for his spell to detect them. It was an advantage that he had every intention of leveraging now, while they waited for Paska to reveal himself.
But there was no reason not to demand more information from the sphinx in the meantime.
Closing his visual connection to Solvei, he turned to regard Nenet. “What exactly does that mean, that you’re a ‘backup spellbook’?”
“It’s what it sounds like.” Shrugging, Nenet looked down. “Mother is powerful in the extreme, but her magic comes from study, rather than biology or the whim of a god. Because of that, she needs a spellbook; a device that functions as a method of impressing the arcane energies into a preset form in her mind. That’s me.”
Despite himself, Lex couldn’t help but feel intrigued. “She’s able to store spells in a living creature?”
“No.” Sighing, the sphinx hung her head. “She doesn’t actually store any magic in me. I’m just a conduit, a living repository of instructions and diagrams to be used when it’s time to compress the energy she gathers. That’s all I can do on my own.”
Sinking onto her belly, Nenet put her head on her paws. “I know over a hundred spells, all taught to me by Mother personally, and I can’t use a single one of them.”
Yotimo frowned, looking at Lex. “Do you understand what she’s talking about?”
“Yes,” murmured Lex thoughtfully, staring at Nenet. He’d tried using spellbooks when he first came to Everglow, intrigued by the prospect of a specialty item made specifically to solve the issue with energy compression for thought-based spellcasting. But he’d already set his own mind to work in a way that was incompatible with the things, and his attempt had accomplished nothing but to give him the worst headache of his life. Even so, the prospect of using a living creature in that manner was intriguing, which led to further questions...
“Who exactly is your mother?” asked Lex. “And how does Hvitdod factor into what she’s planning?”
Nenet looked up at that, but before she had a chance to open her mouth, Yotimo cut in. “Does that matter right now?! My son and the others are in danger, and we’re just sitting here!”
Scowling at the interruption, Lex glowered at the adlet. “I’ve been in situations like this before,” he informed him coldly, recalling what had happened when Dark Streak had kidnapped Feather Duster. “It’s vital to have as much information as possible before taking action. Right now, we don’t know where Paska is or exactly how he plans on alerting Hvitdod when he sees us. Since Toklo and the others aren’t in imminent danger of death, the best thing we can do right now is to wait until we have the answers to those questions.”
Lex knew that his logic was flawless in that regard. But just like so many other times throughout his life, that wasn’t enough to sway the person he was trying to convince. “And if we can’t find those answers, then what?” challenged Yotimo. “We just leave my son and the others out there until they perish from starvation?”
“It won’t come to that,” murmured Nenet. “Paska can’t afford to wait much longer.”
That was enough to draw the attention of Lex and Yotimo both. “Explain.”
Nenet shuddered at the tone in Lex’s voice, but pointed one paw upward. “Sissel, Grisela, and Vidrig were the ones keeping the weather like this. They had to work together, and their magic only lasted for a few days before needing to be renewed. Now that they’re dead, it won’t be long before the temperature returns to normal, and when that happens Hvitdod will be out of reach.”
“What do you mean ‘out of reach’?!” Kneeling, Yotimo grabbed Nenet’s cage and shook it. “All this time, you and your clan have been talking like Hvitdod’s come back to life, even though our legends say that Aselu killed him when we first came here! Now you’re saying...what, that he can’t come back if it’s not cold enough?! Why?!”
“I don’t know!” wailed Nenet, panicking at the rough treatment. “It’s just what I overheard Mother say to Sissel before she left! That Hvitdod’s manifestation would only appear during an arctic chill! That’s all I know, I swear!”
“Stop terrorizing her!” snapped Lex, grabbing Nenet’s cage and wrenching it away from Yotimo. “Akna told you-”
Master! Something’s happening!
Falling silent at Solvei’s telepathic alert, Lex closed his eyes and concentrated on her. A moment later he was looking down at the area from above. And just below the edge of the massive chasm...
“There he is,” growled Lex as he saw Paska emerge from a small fissure a few dozen feet down the cliffside. He’d clearly used some kind of magic to enhance his climbing ability, crawling up the side of the sheer rock face despite having no handholds, hauling himself up over the edge a few moments later before turning to the bound adlets. “He’s checking on his prisoners, making sure they’re still alive.”
Beside him, Yotimo’s breathing grew heavier. “This is our chance! If we can take him down now, before he has a chance to do anything, it’s over!”
“We need to keep waiting,” urged Lex, watching as Paska looked over each adlet in turn. “This should tell us if he’s adhering to some sort of routine, or if-”
“It’s my son’s life on the line!” snarled Yotimo. “My warriors who’re out there! I’m not going to leave them in danger any longer!”
Lex had already broken his vision off from Solvei by that point, his horn lighting up as he realized he’d have to curse Yotimo into complacency.
But even as he gathered his magic, it was already too late, the elder adlet vaulting over the boulder and charging full tilt toward Paska.
Solvei’s mental screech of horror echoed Lex’s reaction perfectly, too late to stop the elder adlet as he vaulted over the bounder they’d been taking cover behind and charged at Paska, Bloodletter held aloft.
In the fraction of a second it took Lex to move to the side and look around the boulder, he weighed whether to drag Yotimo back or to aid him. It was true that eliminating Paska now would resolve things, but only if they could do so without his alerting Hvitdod in the process. In that regard, a surprise attack – like the one Yotimo was launching now – was their best bet.
But it was also a huge gamble. Without knowing precisely how Paska intended to rouse the dragon, there was a high chance that he’d be able to do so before they could take him out. Lex had been intent on observing the situation in hope of finding clues in that regard – or perhaps even waiting things out, if what Nenet had said about Hvitdod requiring wintry weather was correct – even if it meant leaving Toklo and the others in captivity that much longer.
Now that Yotimo had elected to take matters into his own hands, however, there was maybe a half-second at most to quietly drag him back before Paska – his attention still firmly on his prisoners – noticed the incoming attack. Otherwise, the only choice was to join Yotimo’s assault and try to end things as fast as possible.
Lex only had an instant to decide, but that was all the time he needed.
Cursing inwardly as he rose up onto his back legs, Lex summoned Belligerence into his grasp, leaning back as he prepared to throw it. Hopefully, he’d be able to hit Paska unaware, and Yotimo would be able to finish him off-
That was when Yotimo’s foot struck a small rock.
There was nothing particularly notable about it; just a dull gray stone just like any other, and certainly nothing that had registered when Lex had looked the immediate area over in the magical spectrum. But as Yotimo’s foot struck it, the surface of the rock deformed, crumpling inward as though it were made of paper rather than stone. It’s some sort of replica! realized Lex, already halfway through the motion of his throw even as he caught sight of what looked like a small purple mushroom inside of the false rock. The kind made out of pulp and paste-
His thoughts were cut off as the mushroom began to scream.
The noise caused Yotimo to stumble, Paska’s head to whip around, and Lex’s throw to go wide, Belligerence sailing over his enemy’s head and into the cavern.
Then Paska smiled, reaching for a small bag tied to his belt.
With a roar that could barely be heard over the mushroom’s wailing, Yotimo surged forward, legs pumping as he tore across the distance between himself and his son’s captor, Bloodletter held at the ready. In his mad rush, several more fake rocks were overturned, and each of them contained another purple mushroom which immediately began to scream, turning what was already an awful noise into a hideous din, making Lex’s ears fold back of their own accord.
“Those are shrieker mushrooms!” yelled Nenet, her paws clasped over her ears as she cowered in her cage. “They vibrate at a high pitch when anything disturbs them!”
Master, what’s happening?! Solvei’s voice came to Lex’s mind at the same time as Nenet’s voice barely made itself heard over the cacophony. Who’s screaming?!
The question only made the cold knot forming in Lex’s stomach grow worse. If Solvei could hear the shriekers’ caterwauling even at her current height, then there was every reason to think that the noise was audible at the bottom of the nearby abyss as well!
I don’t have time to summon you! replied Lex, not bothering to answer her question as his horn lit up with a curse. Get down here as fast as you can and prepare to get the adlets to safety!
Even before he’d finished telling her what to do, his malediction took effect.
An instant later, Paska – his other hand bringing his hammer up as he prepared to receive Yotimo’s charge, the adlet now within ten feet of his foe – grabbed the bag dangling from his hip...only for the string it was hanging from to break as Lex’s curse took effect, slipping from his grasp and falling at his feet.
From his vantage point, Lex had just enough time to see Paska’s face briefly register surprise, then frustration as he realized he couldn’t bend down to retrieve it without leaving himself vulnerable.
Then Yotimo was on him, the runes on Bloodletter glowing as he jabbed at Paska’s face, the human deflecting the strike with his hammer.
“What’s happening?!” yelled Nenet, her terrified voice barely audible over the din. “What’s going on?!”
Lex ignored her as he grabbed Paska’s bag with his telekinesis, the purple aura around the sack shining brightly as he started levitating it toward himself. The shriekers were bad enough, but whatever was in the thick burlap was clearly something that was intended to alert Hvitdod, which meant that it was imperative that it be kept away from him at all costs!
But Paska wasn’t about to let that happen so easily.
Another thrust from Yotimo’s spear was blocked by the haft of Paska’s hammer, but this time the human grabbed the adlet’s wrist with his free hand, using his own body as a fulcrum as he pivoted at the waist, throwing Yotimo over his shoulder...and over the edge of the cliff.
And Lex registered absolute horror from Solvei as the adlet hung in the air, Yotimo’s eyes widening as he started to fall-
Only to stop as Lex’s telekinetic aura sprung up around him.
Panting at having barely managed to grab him in time – since he wouldn’t have been able to do so if Yotimo had fallen out of his line of sight – Lex started to pull the adlet back onto solid ground.
Which left him completely vulnerable as Paska spun and hurled his hammer directly at Lex.
It was like watching history repeat itself. His throw was exactly the same as Sissel’s had been when she’d taken his foreleg off so recently, and in that instant Lex felt certain that Paska had been the one the snow giant had trained with.
Fortunately for him, Paska didn’t have aristeia, nor was his hammer weighted as evenly as Sissel’s axe had been. The result was that the throw was a clumsy one, impacting Lex him in the stomach rather than the face. With his toughened physique it was only slightly painful, his organometallic fur and strengthened muscles taking nearly all of the force. But what remained was enough to knock the wind out of him, toppling Lex over as his concentration was broken.
Along with his telekinesis.
The aura around him winking out, Yotimo barely managed to grab onto the cliffside, digging Bloodletter into the stone for purchase as his other hand grasped at the edge frantically. The sight caused the other adlets – having been yelling into their gags as they struggled against their bonds – to thrash harder, Toklo’s eyes wide as he tried and failed to inch closer to his where his father was dangling over the abyss.
Yotimo grunted, straining with effort as Bloodletter’s tip scraped free of the cliff face, his other hand slowly losing its purchase.
Glancing upward, his eyes caught Toklo’s...and despite being only seconds away from death, Yotimo managed a smile.
Tossing Bloodletter upward, the spear landed in front of Toklo as Yotimo gave his son one last look. And although the shriekers were still making it impossible to hear anything, the bound adlet had a clear view of his father’s lips moving, able to read the words that he spoke next.
“I love you, Toklo.”
Then his hand lost its purchase, and Yotimo fell into the chasm.
But before he’d fallen more than a foot, a rush of mist shot down from the sky, an arm materializing out of it as Solvei – appearing flat on the ground with her upper body jutting over the edge of the fissure – grabbed Yotimo’s outstretched hand.
“I’ve got you!” she yelled, pulling him upward and throwing him back onto solid ground, the elder adlet landing alongside his son.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Solvei turned her attention back toward Paska and Lex, the former picking himself up as the latter-
Grabbed his fallen bag and tore it open.
And everything was drowned in a sudden flood of blinding light.
Solvei couldn’t help but yelp in surprise, the sudden illumination assaulting her eyes the same way the shriekers were her ears. What was going on?!
It’s a light spell! A powerful one! Lex’s voice, filled with alarm, answered her question. He must have cast it on some piece of debris ahead of time and was storing it for when we arrived! Stop him before he throws it into the gorge!
Right!
But without being able to see what she was aiming at, that was easier said than done. Knowing that she didn’t have time to think of a plan, she did the only thing she could think of, gathering as much magic as she could and breathing a cone of supernatural cold toward the source of the light. She could tell through their connection that Lex wasn’t in its area, and the other adlets were immune to freezing temperatures. And while Paska had doubtlessly used magic to protect himself from the chill, maybe this would be enough to get through his defenses and freeze him in place!
But that hope died a moment later as – although she heard a pained grunt come from Paska’s direction – she could make out, even through her clenched eyelids, that the source of the light suddenly arced upward, flying over her.
Desperately, she reached out with the telekinesis she’d received from Lex, fumbling to try and catch whatever had been enchanted with the blinding radiance, but without being able to see it directly and having no idea what it’s shape was, there was no hope of grabbing it that way, and Solvei couldn’t help but whimper as the light level suddenly fell, the brightness falling away into the chasm, illuminating it as it plunged toward the bottom.
Master...I’m sorry...
His only response was a growl as his horn lit up, covering the shriekers in black crystals, the mushrooms’ wailing silenced at last.
“I have to admit, you made quite the effort of it,” smirked Paska, before nodding at Lex. “Keep the hammer if you want. You’re about to need all the help you can get.”
“How ironic,” answered Lex coldly. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
Then he summoned Belligerence back to his grasp and threw it directly at Paska.
Not having expected that, Paska’s eyes had just enough time to widen before the quill went directly through his chest, the barbs causing it to become lodged in his sternum as he staggered backward, a look of incomprehension on his face as he stumbled toward the edge of the cliff...
Then Yotimo swung Bloodletter around, sweeping Paska’s legs out from under him and sending him tumbling over the edge.
“Good riddance,” spat Solvei, still blinking the spots out of her eyes. “Master, let’s get out of here before-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a roar came from the abyss, causing everyone to freeze in place.
The sound was so deep and so loud that it made the shriekers’ screaming seem like a quiet murmur by comparison. It was almost a physical force, causing the air itself to tremble as the ground shook. But the volume paled in comparison to the sheer, unbridled rage that the sound carried.
It was something that the animal inside of Lex recognized immediately. That roar was more than just a challenge; it was an announcement, conveying that anyone who appeared before the voice’s owner would die. There would be no acceptance of submission, no opportunity to withdraw, and no abandoning the fight before one or the other of them was killed.
And although Lex knew that it was utterly illogical and completely counterproductive, he couldn’t help the rush of anticipation he felt as his inner beast gave a roar of its own.
Even before she’d finished her reply, she’d conjured up seracs beneath herself, Lex, and the adlets, all of which immediately started speeding back the way they’d come. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Hvitdod will be too busy munching on Paska’s corpse to-, M-Master?!
Bringing herself and the others to an immediate halt as she registered the distance between herself and Lex increasing, Solvei whirled around.
Behind her, the other adlets – still bound except for Yotimo – were all secure on the ice shelves she’d created, her magic keeping them from falling off the slippery surfaces. But to her rising horror Lex’s was empty, the mangled unicorn having leaped down from his conveyance in favor of heading back toward the edge of the abyss. Master! What are you DOING?!
Keep going! snapped Lex, his eyes lighting up as he telekinetically grabbed Nenet’s cage – the sphinx inside uselessly scratching at the bars as she sobbed in panic, not having had a serac formed beneath her – and flung it toward Solvei. And take Nenet with you!
Solvei numbly caught the cage, barely aware of the whimpering sphinx within. You can’t be serious! Master, the whole point was NOT to fight-
I’m aware of that! snapped Lex, not bothering to look back at her as he summoned Belligerence back into his grasp. But Hvitdod is already approaching, and that roar was a promise of violence. Given the history he has with your people, there’s a very real chance that he’ll target you and the others first. That means I need to stay behind and hold his attention while you get them clear.
You don’t have to do that! We could hide-
Again, Lex didn’t let her finish. Hide where? Dragons are flying creatures, and none of these ravines offer cover from above. You can’t create enough ice to create a ceiling over them, and I don’t have enough dark magic left to do so with black crystals...or a scroll with an illusion spell that can conceal everyone.
There was a wry tone in his mental voice for that last part, as though he were referring to something which had happened before, but Solvei was less concerned with that than with how Lex was apparently intent on committing suicide to save them. Master, this is the enemy that even Sissel wasn’t sure she could defeat with aristeia! At least let me be the decoy, so that you can get everyone out of here and then summon me-
Can anyone besides you direct those seracs you created?
Solvei’s ears turned down, knowing that he knew the answer even before she replied. ...no.
Which means you have to be the one to lead the others away, concluded Lex, his mental voice cold and logical. Paska wounded them specifically to prevent their being able to escape on their own, so there’s no other choice. Even if I gave you the power to heal them, you’d still have to do it one at a time, which would take too long. Unless you get them out of here immediately, they’ll be right in front of Hvitdod when he emerges.
Jabbing Belligerence into the ground, Lex turned and pointed his remaining foreleg at Solvei, glaring at her. Now go, before I force you to leave.
For a half-second she refused to move, her heart breaking. Then she turned around and, with a thought, sent the collection of seracs zipping along the canyon floor again, fighting back tears as she clutched Nenet’s cage to her chest. Promise me you’ll summon me once I’ve gotten everyone far enough away, she begged. That way, we can at least fight together!
But Lex was pitiless. That would only expose you to unnecessary danger. Once I’m confident that you’re outside of Hvitdod’s range of detection, I’ll simply turn into a shadow and enter the ground, where he can’t follow me. If you’re here when I do, you’ll have to face his wrath alone.
Solvei was about to object that the legends made it sound like Hvitdod could easily tear the ground asunder, something that the huge hole behind them seemed to confirm, but she didn’t have a chance before Lex spoke again. The fact that the rest of the adlets haven’t changed into mist must mean that Paska or his sisters did something to them in order to keep them from fleeing that way. Work with Yotimo and Nenet; see if there’s a way that you can undo it.
The order almost made her laugh at how transparent it was. She wasn’t a wizard, Yotimo knew less about magic than she did, and Nenet had already admitted that she couldn’t cast any of the spells she knew. The task Lex had given her was nothing more than busywork, something to keep her occupied...
Because he didn’t want her to worry about him.
Swallowing her objections, Solvei nodded, the gesture for herself more than for Lex. Alright. I promise, we’ll have something figured out by the time you get back!
Although there was no way to know for sure, she could have sworn she heard a smile in his voice when he replied. I know you will.
Then she forced herself to concentrate on squeezing as much speed out of the seracs as she could, rocketing through the canyons with the others close behind her, forcing herself to put her worries and doubts aside.
Her master had given her a job to do.
She wouldn’t let him down.
Lex vaulted up the wall of the ravine, claws digging into the rock wall as he pulled himself up to the highest vantage point around.
It wasn’t much. Like the rest of the canyons and gorges that fed into the massive chasm, the top of the walls were only about thirty feet from the bottom of the gully. But Lex had little doubt that Hvitdod would fly up to an elevated position in order to survey the area, and Lex wanted as much room to maneuver as he could get when he drew Hvitdod’s attention.
Conversing with it might buy a little extra time, mused Lex. He’d previously assumed that dragons were little more than particularly cunning beasts, but the one he’d fought outside of Tall Tale had disproven that presumption quite thoroughly. Not only had it come up with an intricate scheme to isolate Tall Tale, using Fireflower’s siblings as tools to make the ponies of the city vulnerable, it had also been capable of casting spells on its own; all the acts of a keen intellect. If Hvitdod is possessed of the same faculties-
Another roar cut through the air, this one much closer. It was enough that Lex had to dig his claws into the ground to stabilize himself, nearby rocks rattling as they bounced from the sheer power of the sound. And just like before, it was filled with unreasoning rage, the kind that preceded a slaughter of the bloodiest sort.
No conversing, then.
Although it would have been optimal to dissuade the dragon without engaging in violence – he had no quarrel with Hvitdod, after all – Lex couldn’t find it within himself to be disappointed that he’d need to fight the dragon. The beast within him relished the prospect of mortal combat, and hadn’t had nearly its fill of carnage earlier. Far from being intimidated, it was eager for the challenge.
But that didn’t mean he needed to abandon strategic thinking. Lex had learned that much during his fight with Sissel earlier; it was possible to bridge the gap between his higher cognition and the brutal instincts that he’d acquired in Darkest Night. Even if he was only fighting to cover Solvei and the others retreating, he’d be at his most effective if he could unite tactical planning and unyielding ferocity together.
Though that would only work if he had sufficient power left to keep Hvitdod occupied.
Solvei’s warning hadn’t been wrong, he knew. This was an enemy that Sissel and the others hadn’t wanted to face on their own, certain that they were outmatched. Even when she’d gained more power than she’d expected from aristeia, Sissel hadn’t been entirely confident that she could stand up to Hvitdod on her own. Which meant that – unless she and her siblings had wildly overestimated what the dragon was capable of, something that would have been severely out of line with how methodical the rest of their plans had been – this was likely going to be an extremely difficult battle.
But at least this time it was one he was able to ready himself for.
With the vast majority of his protective spells having durations measured in minutes, and no easy way to replenish his repertoire of arcane magic, opportunities to prepare for a fight to his fullest extent had been few and far between since returning to Everglow.
Grisela and her yetis had descended on that sleepy town with almost no warning. Paska and Vidrig had ambushed him when he was at his at his wit’s end. He’d known that there was another ambush waiting near the Shrine of the Starless Sky, but hadn’t been able to openly prepare without revealing that he knew they were being watched though Littleknight. White Wraith had deliberately kept them waiting, stymying his efforts to judge when to begin casting his suite of defensive spells. And Sissel had caught them unaware this last time, despite his having been the one pursuing her.
But this wasn’t like those other battles, where circumstance, ill fortune, and enemy tactics had conspired to give him no chance to ready himself beforehoof. Now, with Hvitdod so conveniently announcing his imminent arrival, there was nothing holding Lex back.
With that thought in mind, he started casting.
A spell to further harden his already supernaturally-tough skin. One to reinforce his already-resilient bones and muscles. Another to enhance his speed. An increase to his personal stamina. A general apotropaic. A minor protective ward.
And one more...one he hadn’t used in quite some time...
Biting back a grim smile as he began activating that final spell, Lex channeled as much additional power as he could into it. He’d already expended quite a bit of his personal energies during his confrontation with Sissel, but with his stamina-boosting enchantment active, he didn’t feel a strain. Quite the contrary, the artificial augmentation pushed how much his new body’s magical channels could handle to new heights, and Lex held nothing back as he poured all the power he was capable of into his casting.
Then he directed it outward, through Belligerence.
He could almost feel the weapon growing heavier in his grip, overloaded with so much energy that it was almost weighed down by it. In response, Lex lifted it higher, increasing the output until he was murmuring the necessary words through gritted teeth, straining as he pushed his spell to the breaking point, flooding it with power far beyond what it had ever been designed to handle.
Hvitdod was an enemy who’d demand nothing less if he wanted to emerge from this battle alive.
Then, with a rush that almost swept Lex off his claws, the spell took effect. Belligerence jerked in his grasp, discharging the power so fiercely that for a moment it was like gripping a firehose, the magic exploding out of it as the second of the three barbed wire-designed black crystals decorating the weapon’s head shattered.
Then it was done.
And Lex found himself embedded within the head of the gigantic astral construct that he’d called forth.
Sighing in relief at the spell having worked despite how far he’d pushed it, he glanced at his creation...and quirked a brow as he took in the sight of it. While no less massive than the one he’d summoned to fight the green dragon outside of Tall Tale – though far, far more powerful than that one, thanks to his overcharging the spell – its shape wasn’t that of a unicorn.
Instead, it was a near-perfect replica of the eight-legged beast that he’d merged with.
For a moment Lex mulled that unexpected development over, then decided it didn’t matter. Instead, he cast his whisper spell, letting it carry his voice aloft.
“As soon as the dragon appears, do everything in your power to destroy it.”
And as one, the army of astral constructs lining the edge of the chasm – all identical to the one surrounding himself – answered.
“Acknowledged,” chorused the astral constructs, all of them sinking into a crouch as they prepared to ambush Hvitdod.
With no further orders to give them, Lex took a moment to glance along the ridge, quickly counting how many automatons were lying in wait for the dragon to emerge. Forty of them, he realized, awestruck. Belligerence was able to copy the spell forty times over, even with how much I augmented it.
It was enough to make him glance at the quill, still grasped in his remaining claw, before directing his gaze back to the army he’d created. Each and every one of them was a vastly-upgraded version of the one he’d used to fight the green dragon that had been manipulating the ponies of Tall Tale. Although its form was – for whatever reason – different than the unicorn he’d designed it as before, its other functions should still be present, albeit enhanced...along with a few alterations that he’d specifically introduced during the spell’s casting.
But that’s presuming that the imbalance I introduced into their design works the way I intended, noted Lex with a flicker of doubt.
Solvei – both in her nature as a winter wolf and as an adlet – was a creature of intrinsic cold. Like the mythical windigos that had driven his ancestors to abandon their ancient home and seek out the land they’d eventually come to call Equestria, she had an enthalpic imbalance whereby she generated a negative heat quotient. It had been fascinating to witness, and for all the frustration and despair that Lex had suffered upon being flung back into Everglow, he hadn’t been able to keep himself from studying his companion’s extraordinary physiology.
The knowledge he’d gained from doing so had been put to good use now, altering the exothermic quality of the astral matter that he’d shaped his constructs with. While he couldn’t replicate any of the magical or biological mechanisms that Solvei had, he had been able to create reasonable facsimiles, granting his creations a self-perpetuating thermodynamic reaction.
In practical terms, he’d made all of his astral constructs into creatures similar to the remorhaz they’d fought just before meeting Yotimo for the first time: beings of intrinsic cold simply because they were continually expelling all of the heat they generated.
Which meant that not only would they be immune to any cold-based powers that Hvitdod had – and Lex felt sure the dragon had to be of an algid nature, both because of what Nenet had said about it only appearing in arctic conditions and because so many other creatures native to this region were naturally gelid – but they’d be able to attack with high-temperature output, which was the natural weakness of intrinsically cold beings.
And if they can damage its wings, that will immediately send it back down into the fissure. Even if it survives the fall, it won’t be able to climb out so easily, giving everyone plenty of time to escape.
It was a decent plan, Lex knew; one that leveraged his available resources to their fullest and made use of all the actionable information at his disposal.
Now it just had to work.
A third roar echoed up from the pit, and this time it was so loud that the ground that Lex felt sure that if he hadn’t been ensconced in his astral armor, it would likely have knocked him over. As it was, the ground heaved as though a struck by a tremor, and he saw several of his constructs grip the terrain tighter, bracing themselves as they stared impassively at the rift in the earth. With the ersatz cognition he’d imbued them with, they could surely tell that the range of the noise wasn’t very far distant, and was likely due to arrive at any-
Then Hvitdod appeared, shooting upward from the vast abyss as his furious scream continued...
And Lex realized that he’d been wrong to compare the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale and the monstrosity in front of him now.
For one thing, that creature had been the size of a building, roughly equal to the astral constructs that he’d made.
Hvitdod could have eaten that dragon in a single gulp.
The saurian head that passed by the edge of the abyss must have been at least a hundred feet from maw to neck, displaying teeth that were twice as long as Belligerence. Covered in lusterless white scales, its titanic body shape was different from the green dragon’s as well. That dragon had possessed a physique that was – save for being reptilian – recognizable as having the same basic construction as a pegasus: a sternum and abdomen, with four legs beneath it, a wing on each side, a head in front, and a tail behind.
Hvitdod, however, looked like a massive serpent, with its neck, body, and tail all being the same thing, stretching for what had to be at least a thousand feet behind it. A long dorsal fin ran from the back of its head down the length of its sinuous form, and it was only belatedly that Lex noticed that it had claws after all, with one pair sprouting – from the sides of its body, rather than under it – nearly a third of the way down its body, and the back legs another third of the way down its length.
But it was what he didn’t see that worried Lex more.
There are no wings to target!
Even as he watched, Hvitdod rose skyward in complete defiance of its lack of propulsion, somehow slithering upward, not needing to displace air in order to facilitate its rise.
Which meant that there’d be no easy way of grounding the thing, let alone sending it plummeting back into its hole.
But the astral constructs didn’t seem to care that they were unable to locate the limbs they’d been told to preferentially attack, instead defaulting to their original orders to destroy the dragon. Each of them angled their heads upward as the dragon came into sight, mouths opening as they released beams of concentrated heat, the thick rays lighting up the area around them as they aimed at where Hvitdod was already undulating through the sky.
The dragon saw the attack coming, snarling as it twisted to face the onslaught, and to Lex’s surprise it made no move to dodge the oncoming horde of beams.
Over three dozen fiery trails of superhot plasma struck it a moment later.
Nearly half of them impacted the creature’s face and head, with the others dispersed along the length of its body. Not one missed their mark, and Lex had to squint as the brilliant lances of thermal devastation struck the creature, knowing that whatever Hvitdod’s inherent toughness, the sheer degree of power thrown at it would have to inflict some level of damage.
But when his eyes cleared a moment later, Lex saw that he was wrong: there wasn’t so much as a scorch mark on Hvitdod’s body to show for his constructs’ assault.
Spell resistance, Lex realized with a sinking feeling, recalling how the dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale had similarly shrugged off a large amount of the magic he’d thrown at it. Apparently Hvitdod wasn’t so dissimilar from its green counterpart afterall. But to be able to completely repel that much energy...
Then Hvitdod opened its mouth, unhinging its jaws like the serpent it resembled as it inhaled sharply.
“Scatter!” Lex’s whisper sent the constructs running, his own running parallel to the edge of the pit as it tried to put more distance between itself and the dragon, the others immediately breaking formation and moving back. It was likely that Hvitdod was about to use some sort of cryonic attack, but the last time Lex had presumed to know what a dragon’s breath weapon was like, he’d seriously misjudged its nature. Cold couldn’t hurt his forces, but it was still better to err on the side of caution.
Then Hvitdod breathed out, and the temperature plummeted to a cold that Lex had never imagined possible.
The exhalation was so frigid that it was visible, freezing the air itself in a massive cone that reached out to enfold a half-dozen of the astral constructs. Intellectually, Lex knew that they’d be fine, their design able to handle anything down to absolute zero, the astral matter being a perfect conductor of heat; that was the very reason why he’d been able to unbalance their thermic-
When Hvitdod’s breath weapon ceased a second later, Lex could see that the six constructs the creature had hit were frozen solid, something which should have been impossible. Any loss of heat should have been immediately routed through them, doing nothing except further fueling their exothermic weaponry. But instead...
Lex clenched his teeth as the frozen constructs collapsed in on themselves, destroyed by something they should have easily shrugged off. And the others were out of range, both from his whisper-spell and for reaching the dragon with their teeth and claws, which were the only weapons they had left if their heat-beams couldn’t harm their enemy. We’ll need to make a fighting retreat, Lex decided grimly. Lure the thing away from where Solvei and the others went, and try to keep it occupied long enough to get clear. We can’t hurt it, but we can at least keep its attention on us.
But to Lex’s shock, his constructs had other ideas, as they all turned into shadows and flew upward toward Hvitdod.
His own was the only one that remained corporeal, continuing to put distance between itself and the dragon as Lex watched, open-mouthed, as the astral creatures – now having turned into gigantic shadows with green-and-purple eyes – circled around Hvitdod, the serpentine monster hovering in mid-air as its head twisted back and forth, breathing outward again as it tried to catch its enemies in the cone of sub-absolute zero.
But the constructs-turned-shadows were having none of it, swirling around in complex patterns as they deftly avoided Hvitdod’s retaliation. Nor were they content to simply confound it, and as Lex watched eight of them broke off from the others, closing in on Hvitdod before they suddenly returned to solid form, letting themselves fall onto the dragon from above. Eight sets of eight claws each burst into flame as they dug into the monster’s scales, the constructs howleing wordlessly as they began to rip and tear at the dragon, their artificial voices ringing out with bloodlust that made his inner beast yowl in jealousy even as Lex was once again left dumbfounded.
This shouldn’t be happening! His astral constructs were automatons; their cognition was nothing more than an limited imprint of his own intellect, designed to let them complete simple tasks in accordance with his orders. His spell shouldn’t have imbued them with any sort of tactical knowledge, let alone ferocity!
And it definitely shouldn’t have given them the ability to turn into shadows!
“Stop,” murmured Lex, and to his relief the construct he was ensconced in obeyed immediately, leaving him free to watch as the rest of them continued fighting on their own.
Even as he watched, flaming claws tore scales from Hvitdod’s face, causing the dragon to unleash another angry roar – ceasing to use its breath weapon – as it shook its head back and forth, trying to fling it off. All along its body, the others were doing the same, and Hvitdod curled around as it moved them within range of its claws, slashing one of them hard enough to leave a deep gouge in its torso as another tore long scratches across a second construct. A third wasn’t able to move in time as Hvitdod’s tail wrapped around it, tearing it free and flinging it away...only for it to change into a glowing-eyed patch of darkness and streak back upward.
They’re trying to wear it down, Lex realized as he watched another group of shadows unleash heat beams at Hvitdod’s face, accomplishing nothing except to make it writhe in anger, roaring at them in outrage. A group of them attacks it physically while the others keep it disoriented.
And it was working. Even as Lex watched, the dragon reacted like the beast he’d originally thought all of its kind were, gnashing its jaws as it roared at the surrounding shadows, keeping it from devoting its full attention to the constructs that were clawing at it, flaming talons continuing to tear away at scales and shred the flesh underneath.
That was when Hvitdod’s tactics changed.
Ignoring the shadows fluttering around it, the creature started to circle, flying in a loose spiral pattern as though coiling around something even larger than itself. The positioning brought most of the constructs clinging to it within range of each other, and as Lex watched Hvitdod opened his mouth again, inhaling.
Immediately the other shadows sped up their strafing the creature, firing more useless energy beams, even as the constructs began to run along the dragon’s enormous body, preparing to dodge the incoming blast of freezing air even as they kept clawing at the thing.
But as Hvitdod finished inhaling, he didn’t immediately breathe outward.
Instead, he gave a slow exhale, and Lex could almost see the sub-absolute zero temperature hovering right in front of the creatures mouth, the air itself freezing into a translucent sphere that was faintly blue, held between the dragon’s jaws.
Suddenly, Lex realized what was about to happen. “Fall back!” he yelled, knowing they were too far away for his whisper spell to reach them. “All of you, fall back n-”
Then the sphere of ultra-cooled air exploded outward.
There was no avoiding the explosion of cold of that radiated outward then, an expanding shockwave of supreme frigidity that struck all of the constructs, corporeal and incorporeal alike.
All along Hvitdod’s body, the astral creatures that had been solid were immediately covered in ice, slipping and falling from the dragon’s serpentine form. Worse, even the shadows seemed to freeze in midair. That shouldn’t have been possible, as they possessed no physical substance to chill, and yet as Lex watched their forms turned crystalline, arresting their movement and causing them all to drop away, falling into the abyss below.
In a single instant, Hvitdod had defeated all of his attackers.
For a moment, the dragon simply floated there, and Lex could see that the superficial wounds that his constructs had inflicted on the dragon were already starting to heal, scratches closing as new scales emerged to cover them.
Then Hvitdod’s eyes locked onto his own, and with another roar, the dragon dove straight at him.
It was only by the thinnest of margins that Lex avoided Hvitdod’s attack.
Diving straight downward with its massive jaws open, the dragon collided with the edge of the chasm, apparently unconcerned about slamming into the ground face-first. Its confidence in that regard was well-earned, as the compacted earth and stone crumbled under its jaws, offering no resistance whatsoever as it gnashed its teeth, pulverizing everything in its cavernous maw.
If it hadn’t been for his speed-enhancing spell, Lex knew that would have included him.
But rather than being intimidated, his narrow escape made the beast inside of him scream out, demanding retaliation. Knowing that hesitation would only lead to another internal conflict, one that would likely get him killed, Lex instead embraced that urge.
While the other astral constructs that he’d created had displayed a much greater degree of cognition than he’d intended, their primary directive had been to follow his orders. Unable truly think independently, they required his input – in the form of verbal commands – in order to set or modify their activities.
But that was insufficient for the astral construct that he was wearing as a suit of armor now. While it had the same level of ersatz sentient as the others, Lex knew that he’d need some way of directing its motions much faster than with cumbersome spoken commands. Fortunately, he’d already come up with a way to work around that limitation.
“Copy the movements I make as I make them.”
“Acknowledged.”
Ensconced in the astral matter of his armor, Lex couldn’t suppress a feral grin as he broke into a gallop, his three remaining legs pumping as he hung suspended inside of the gigantic automaton. Immediately, it broke into a run – its artificial mind able to translate his movements to all eight of its legs – and Lex launched himself at Hvitdod’s exposed neck, his animate armor’s claws bursting into flames.
The dragon gave a roar as the astral talons tore into its scales, and although it made his ears ring, Lex couldn’t suppress a thrill of triumph at having wounded his enemy. The thing’s scales were ridiculously hard – easily matching what his black crystals could withstand – but the sheer tonnage of his astral construct lent further force to his blows, ripping them off and sinking his flaming claws into the flesh underneath.
Which immediately began to heal even as he tore it apart.
Snarling, Lex dug in further, intent on inflicting as much damage as he could. I just have to listen for when he inhales, he knew, working to keep his consciousness from being swallowed up by his inner monster’s bloodlust. So long as I can avoid his breath weapon, I should be-
He didn’t have time to complete that thought, forced to grip the dragon’s scaled body tighter as Hvitdod suddenly raised its head up and – rotating so that was Lex was facing toward the ground – slammed it back down.
But just like before, Lex was already moving, claws tearing bloody furrows into Hvitdod’s body as he scampered across it, moving out of the area of impact. The same way he’d crawled across Bagora’s oversized form when the gorilla-bear had challenged him back at the Shrine of the Starless Sky, he used Hvitdod’s massive length to his own advantage now, crawling alongside the dorsal fin that capped its body, making sure to avoid the dragon’s claws as his own continued to tear at his foe.
He telegraphs his strongest attack, and his claws and teeth can’t reach every part of his body, noted Lex with a vicious rush, hanging on tenaciously as he came to stop midway between Hvitdod’s neck and where the dragon’s first set of claws were. So long as I pay attention and stay out of his range, then it’s just a matter of wounding him faster than he can heal!
Hvitdod, however, was already working to counter that plan.
Feeling the dragon shift under him, Lex looked up just in time to see the end of Hvitdod’s tail curling around and swinging toward him with all the force of a descending meteor. Cursing, he immediately abandoned his position, running further down the dragon’s body, and for the third time just barely managed to avoid being flattened as the meaty appendage – thick around than his entire construct – slammed into where he’d been.
This time, however, the impact was stronger than his claws could account for, and the world immediately began to spin as Lex felt himself falling toward the abyss....right as Hvitdod began to breathe in sharply.
“Turn into shadow and fly into the cavern wall!” yelled Lex. “NOW!”
“Acknowledged.”
Immediately, he felt himself turn incorporeal, his momentum suddenly gone as his construct – now a patch of inky blackness that he quickly adjusted his vision to be able to see through – immediately moved perpendicular to where they’d been falling, rushing into the side of the canyon just as ultra-cold air cut through where they’d been a moment earlier.
For the briefest instant Lex considered staying hidden that way, just as he’d told Solvei he’d do. But he’d been fighting the dragon for less than sixty seconds, and his innate sense of her location told him that she had made only modest gains in leading the others away, likely because of the craggy terrain. With how furious Hvitdod was, there was every chance that it would spot them and move to attack.
And if it could freeze his astral constructs – when they were incorporeal, no less – then Lex had no doubt that it could freeze Solvei and the others, intrinsic cold or no.
Which means it’s time for a new strategy, Lex decided.
“Move upward,” ordered Lex. “As soon as we’re clear of the ground, return to corporeality. Then get as close to that thing’s mouth as possible.”
“Alternative strategy recommended,” answered his construct after a moment. “Proposed action carries risk threshold exceeding-”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll tell you!” sputtered Lex, again shocked by the level of awareness that his creation was displaying. It was fascinating and disturbing in equal measure, but it was also something he didn’t have time for at the moment. “In the meantime, do as you’re told!”
“Acknowledged.”
No sooner had it spoken than a massive tremor rocked the ground, and Lex could see the earth surrounding him shift in place. Had the dragon heard their voices? Used some other way of discerning his location? Or was it simply striking the ground at random, trying to flush him out?
Either way, Hvitdod was still focused on his current foe.
Lex fully intended on keeping it that way.
“Go!”
The construct shot upward immediately, and in a moment they were clear of the ground, returning to solidity before the eight-legged giant Lex had conjured around himself rushed toward where Hvitdod was hovering a short distance away. Keeping one eye on the dragon, Lex turned his attention to his saddlebag, hurriedly withdrawing a particular item even as he reached out mentally, giving his tulpa an order...
Ahead of him, Hvitdod’s head whipped around, spotting his approach. The dragon wasn’t content to wait for him, instead slithering forward as it flexed its claws, roaring again.
The sound was loud enough that Lex was surprised his ears didn’t bleed from it, but otherwise he paid it no mind. Hvitdod had used its breath weapon only a few moments ago; if there was some sort of lag before it could use it again, it was likely still in effect...but that was a gamble, especially since it had already tried to catch him in its jaws once before and failed. If nothing else, it was clear that Hvitdod had a predator’s cunning, and wouldn’t keep trying a failing strategy.
Teeth or breath? wondered Lex, tensing at his construct and the dragon continued to charge each other, Hvitdod dipping low enough that it was just a few feet above the ground. Which one will you use?
As it turned out, the answer was neither.
Its claws dipping down, Hvitdod tore up the ground along the edge of the ridge as though it were made of water instead of stone, lashing forward with its talons. Despite how far down its body its claws were, the action was enough to fling the resulting rubble forward as though it had been shot from a cannon, shooting ahead of where the dragon was rushing toward him.
The fusillade of stone shards was no threat to Lex; he’d once been hit with a massive club of solid stone and shrugged it off. But the bombardment hadn’t been meant for him, the damage instead serving to collapse the entire rim of the abyss, and Lex could already feel his construct stumbling as the ground beneath it suddenly gave way.
Before he could order it to turn back into a shadow and move further back, it was already leaping into the air, the arc of its jump carrying it back toward solid ground.
That was when Hvitdod’s tail came around and slammed directly into him.
The strike sent Lex flying, the entire world turning into a chaotic swirl of land and sky as he was knocked upward. Not that he noticed; even protected by his astral construct, defensive spells, magic items, innate enchantments, and his new body, the force of the blow left him struggling to stay conscious, the taste of his own blood filling his mouth.
And the sound of Hvitdod’s sharp inhale filling his ears.
Forcing his eyes open, Lex looked around...and saw that the dragon had moved into the trajectory of his impromptu flight, its lengthy body and ability to hover in midair allowing it to place its head directly opposite from where its tail had struck him.
He was headed directly toward Hvitdod’s open mouth, with no cover to shield him, and no way of dodging before it unleashed its frozen breath at him.
It was exactly the opportunity he’d been waiting for.
Rattling off the words as he performed the necessary gestures, Lex sank as much power as he could into one of the few thaumaturgical battle spells he had left. He’d deliberately saved this one in case he ended up in a fight with the dragon, but it still had to get through the thing’s spell resistance in order to work.
If it didn’t, he was dead.
An instant later he pronounced the last syllable just as Hvitdod finished inhaling.
Then his suffocation spell struck the monster.
For the briefest instant, as the feedback from his spell’s warring with the dragon’s magic resistance washed over him, Lex caught a glimpse of exactly what he was up against.
The power he was contending with now wasn’t simply vast. It was ancient. Older than this world’s Pony Empire. Older than Celestia’s reign back home. Perhaps even older than the Night Mare herself. Like a mountain that had been formed when Everglow was young, Hvitdod was a being that had seen eons pass.
That age had a power all its own behind it. If the dragon was a mountain, then his spell was nothing more than a fleeting breeze, far too ephemeral to even be noticed by the massive edifice that it vainly thought to challenge. The very idea seemed to mock him, calling to mind how Akna had sworn that her ancestor had killed this creature before, and yet here it remained. If that ancient warrior, who had reputedly battled the dragon for days, calling down the spirits of the very world itself to aid it, hadn’t been able to bring this primordial titan to a true and final death, then who was he to try and do so?
The question brought a sneer to Lex’s lips.
Who am I? I’m the one who annihilates armies of the undead! Who destroys devils! Who parleys with the gods themselves! My minions slaughter krakens and defeat giants! My magic unmakes alicorns! My creations overcome aristeia! I revive dying cities, chart the course of nations, and change the destiny of entire worlds!
I AM LEX LEGIS! AND I WILL NOT BE STOPPED!
And with that, the breeze split the mountain.
Hvitdod’s eyes went wide as a choking sound came from its open maw, the breath it was about to expel suddenly stuck in its throat, the suffocation spell paralyzing its lungs.
Leaving its mouth wide open.
Lex didn’t miss his chance, his horn glowing as he telekinetically sent the necklace of explosive beads that he’d taken from Bolverk – and the copy that he’d demanded his tulpa furnish, and which it had thankfully done – and pushed them outside of the astral construct before throwing them into Hvitdod’s mouth, both of them glowing brightly from all of the excess magic that he’d imbued them with.
A second later, both necklaces exploded, and Hvitdod thrashed in agony as flames burst from its mouth, looking for a moment like the classical image of a dragon breathing fire.
His construct changing back into shadow of its own accord, it flew him back to the ridge and returned to solidity as Lex watched Hvitdod go limp, falling out of the sky as it began to plummet back into the murky depths from which it had come.
...and then he saw its eyes, which had begun to glaze over, suddenly clear as it arrested its fall, righting itself as it drew a ragged breath, looking back up at him.
All at once, the air seemed to grow colder, as though the dragon’s rising fury had stolen away the very concept of warmth. A low growl emanated from Hvitdod’s throat as it began to rise, glaring at the puny being that had dared to injured it.
In that moment Lex knew that he’d succeeded in securing the others’ escape, the creature in his mind telling him that even if Hvitdod spotted Solvei and the others, it wouldn’t pursue them now.
Because now, the dragon wouldn’t stop until one or the other of them was dead.
This time, when Hvitdod inhaled, the dragon made no effort to close the distance between them.
The beast inside of Lex yowled at that, pleased at how their enemy was exercising caution, something it associated with weakness. But despite the instinctual thrill he felt, Lex couldn’t bring himself to share his inner monster’s joy.
He’d been hoping that a serious injury would leave Hvitdod so blinded by rage that it would abandon all pretense of strategy, leaving itself open to mistakes that could be exploited. Instead, the opposite had happened; apparently recognizing a legitimate threat to itself, Hvitdod was no longer willing to leave itself vulnerable by going on a wild rampage.
In other words, Lex knew, it was now going to take their battle seriously.
That it was hanging back was the most obvious example of that. Lex had no idea if the damage from the bombs he’d exploded inside of Hvitdod’s gullet was healing or not – Vidrig hadn’t been able to regenerate from wounds caused by fire, after all – but the fact that the dragon had recovered after only a few seconds of falling through the air suggested that he hadn’t overcome its unnatural powers of recovery. Presuming that was correct, it was keeping away from him so as to give itself as much time as possible to recover.
Which means it’s going to release its breath weapon omnidirectionally again. Of that, Lex felt sure. It knows that I’ll need to fall back outside of its range, giving it more time to recover-
Then Hvitdod breathed out, not in an expanding sphere of inescapable cold, but in a narrow beam of tightly-compacted algidity that caught Lex completely by surprise.
It was only because of his astral construct’s inexplicable cognizance that the glowing blue ray – its shape completely different from the wide-angled cone it had breathed at first, or the expanding sphere it had subsequently made use of – didn’t score a direct hit, with his creation showing no hesitation as it dove off the edge of the abyss to avoid being struck, immediately turning into shadow as it fell.
Hvitdod was already correcting for having missed, still breathing out as it turned its head, bringing the glowing beam of cold around. But his astral construct was already moving, circling around the blue band of freezing death, avoiding it by scant inches as the ray struck the sides of the chasm, coating them in glittering ice.
“Retreat back into the ground!” snarled Lex. Falling back now would only give Hvitdod more time to recover, but trying to assault it head-on while simultaneously dodging like this was too risky. “Then circle around so we can attack from a different angle!”
Thankfully, his creation didn’t see fit to second-guess his orders this time. “Acknowledged.”
Immediately, it reversed course, looping over the frost ray and circling back the way it had come before turning abruptly and racing toward the ice-covered face of the yawning abyss-
Only to collide with it and bounce off.
Lex had just enough time to comprehend that he’d made a serious mistake, that he should have realized that if Hvitdod’s breath weapon could freeze his constructs even when they were incorporeal, then the frozen residue such attacks left behind would act like an impenetrable barrier, even when he had turned to shadow. And that the sweeping motions with its breath had completely coated the side of the chasm all around him, preventing him from fleeing into the ground the way he had barely a minute ago.
It wasn’t just trying to hit me! It was sealing off my escape route!
Then Hvitdod’s breath weapon washed over him.
“Look out!” screamed Nenet.
The sphinx’s terrified yell made Solvei curse, whipping her head back around from where she’d been glancing back in Lex’s direction just in time to see another rocky outcropping ahead of them. It took only a thought for her serac to adjust its course, avoiding the obstacle as the ice sheets carrying the others behind her did the same.
“That’s the fourth time we’ve almost hit something!” wailed Nenet, shivering in her cage. “Please, at least slow down!”
“NO!” Solvei’s response came out in a snarl, clutching Nenet’s cage tighter against her chest. “Master’s back there fighting so that we can all escape! The slower we go, the longer he has to face Hvitdod by himself!”
“Then at least watch where you’re going!” begged Nenet with a whimper. “You’ll have a harder time getting everyone out of here if you crash!”
“We could all get out of here faster if the rest of my tribe could take to the wind!” Lifting Nenet’s cage higher, Solvei glared at the tiny creature within. “What did Sissel and the others do to them? Why can’t they transform?”
Inside the bars of black crystal, Nenet cringed. “It...it was a curse.”
Solvei almost crashed her serac again. “A curse?! Like what Master uses?!”
“Huh? I...don’t know?” answered the sphinx uncertainly. “There’s a spell that can be used to curse someone. I know it, and Sissel told me to teach it to her. The effects can be whatever you want, so long as it’s within the spell’s power, and she cast it on each of them to keep them from fleeing.”
For a moment Solvei couldn’t answer, her thoughts whirling. Yotimo hadn’t said anything about being cursed...but it was just as likely that he didn’t know. As the leader of the troop, he wouldn’t try to flee without being sure that everyone else could get away, and between what Grisela had done to him and the confusion spell he’d been placed under when their captors had split into two groups, it was likely that he hadn’t been aware. It wasn’t as though there was any visible mark of Sissel’s magic.
The same way there wasn’t when Master cursed Toklo to stop him from fleeing after he was captured, she noted grimly.
Pushing that thought away, Solvei glanced back at the pint-sized sphinx. “How do we remove it?”
“Y-you need to cast the counterspell,” murmured Nenet, before tentatively adding, “I know it.”
The admission made Solvei want to scream. “How else can you remove it?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, what other ways are there of removing a curse?!” Lifting Nenet’s cage, Solvei gave it a sharp shake. “I’m not a spellcaster, and you said you can’t use the magic that you know, so what other options do we have?!”
The rough treatment made Nenet curl into a ball, whimpering. “Th-there’s another spell, a more complicated one, that removes all sorts of afflictions, including curses-”
Solvei shook the cage again, harder this time. “What else besides a spell is there?!”
“I...I don’t know!” wailed Nenet.
“LIAR!” Holding the cage outward, Solvei let it bang against the rocky terrain, sending it rocking wildly to and fro. “You’re part of Sissel’s twisted little family, aren’t you?! I know you know something else!”
“I don’t!” shrieked Nenet, curling up tighter, though that did little to keep her from bouncing around inside the cage as it crashed against the landscape. “I swear, I don’t! Please, pull me back in!”
“Akna!” From behind her, Solvei heard Yotimo’s voice. “What are you doing?!”
She ignored him, instead raising Nenet’s cage up and slamming it down onto the ground, causing the sphinx to scream in terror. “If you don’t give me a better answer right now, I’m going to leave you here! You’ll either starve to death in that cage, or be an appetizer for some monster that comes along and finds you!”
But when Nenet’s reply came, it wasn’t what she’d expected.
“H-he t-told you to take c-care of me!”
Solvei’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“Lex! Your m-master!” moaned Nenet. “He told y-you to take c-care of me!”
The words sent a sick feeling through Solvei. What was she doing? It had only been a short while ago that Lex had lectured her about not mistreating Nenet for what her siblings had done, and an even shorter time since he’d explicitly ordered her to take Nenet away from danger as well.
Leaving her master behind had felt like someone had torn her heart from her chest, and the only way she’d been able to console herself was to silently vow that she’d live up to the expectations he had for her, including completing the task she’d been given to figure out how to let the rest of her tribe take to the wind.
And right now she was letting him down twice over.
Bringing Nenet’s cage back to her chest, Solvei couldn’t bring herself to look at the sphinx inside it, still curled up and shaking like a leaf. “I’m sorry...”
The only reply she received was the soft sound of weeping.
Wincing inwardly, Solvei let out a slow breath before trying again. “Nenet, I’m sorry. You were right; my master wanted me to get you to safety, the same as everyone else. I shouldn’t have...have acted like that, just now.”
Again there was no response, but the sphinx’s crying had trailed off now, turning into sniffles and labored breathing.
Knowing that everyone behind her could hear what she was saying, Solvei forced herself to keep speaking. “The truth is, I’m scared. Right now, Lex is facing the worst enemy I can imagine, short of Ikumak-Amaguk – Vutok the Destroyer – himself. And after how far he pushed himself and how badly he was hurt fighting Sissel...”
Nenet’s sniffling had stopped by now, her breathing slowing to a steadier pace.
“Even if this is all I can do, I can’t fail him. Not again. Which is why I need to get everyone out of here as quickly as possible. But that means helping the rest of my tribe take to the wind, and they can’t do that while they’re under this curse. So please, Nenet...is there any other way – any way at all, no matter how wild or outlandish – to get rid of a curse besides that counterspell?”
No answer came, and Solvei couldn’t help but fold her ears back as the silence stretched on. But just when she’d given up hope for an answer, Nenet’s voice – shaky and uncertain – floated up to her. “Curses...not just the kind used in a spell, but any curse that actually works...all have to be maintained. Usually by a planar entity of some kind.”
Solvei’s ears perked up. “You mean like those venedaemons?”
“I don’t think so. The spell basically asks for a planar creature to donate some energy to making your curse work, in exchange for nothing but the satisfaction of hurting someone. Venedaemons only care about taking souls and acquiring more magic.”
Frowning, Solvei wracked her brain for any way she could put what Nenet was telling her to use. “Okay...so what’s maintaining the curse on everyone here?”
“I don’t know,” answered Nenet, her voice thick with anxiety, clearly expecting to be punished for her answer. “The spell doesn’t doesn’t really care who answers or why, and doesn’t have any sort of way to track down or communicate with whatever’s maintaining it. Features like that would only make it harder to cast.”
“But there’s got to be some way of making them quit,” pressed Solvei. “Are they listening right now? Could they hear me if I offered to bargain with them?”
“I don’t think so,” murmured Nenet. “I mean, if they have the means to then I suppose they could, but the spell doesn’t build anything like that in. It’s like asking someone for money; once they give you some coins, they don’t automatically find out how you spend them unless they go to the effort of following you around.”
Solvei didn’t know what “money” or “coins” were, but she still understood the point that Nenet was making. “So there’s no way to make them quit?” She couldn’t keep the desperation out of her voice, grimacing in discouragement. “No way to disrupt whatever it is they’re doing to maintain the curse?”
“The counterspell is supposed to break the link that the curse spell establishes,” replied Nenet after a few moments of consideration. Solvei idly noted that she sounded calmer now, her voice level and somewhat louder. “Other than that...the only thing I could think of would be if you asked some other planar creature to run interference for you. But they’d have to be able to figure out what was doing it, and be strong enough to force them to stop. Something like a genie or an angel or even a god.”
Solvei almost groaned, but then caught herself.
A god...
When she’d just been Akna, she’d received some basic instruction in the Night Mare’s worship from the Keeper when she’d first gone to the Shrine of the Starless Sky. But that had only been a brief introduction to the goddess and her faith.
In the aftermath of her adventure through Darkest Night with Lex, however, her master had undertaken several ceremonies in the Night Mare’s name. She hadn’t been present for the first one, where he’d asked the goddess to revive Woodheart and put Drafty into an enchanted sleep, but she’d been there for all of the others he’d held, taking part in the sacred rites that he’d practiced to help create Belligerence.
In fact, once she’d finished teaching him the runes that her tribe had used to enchant their weapons, there’d been little for her to do except study those rites, wanting to be as useful as she could.
Slowly, Solvei brought the convey of seracs to a halt.
From behind her, she heard the others – still trussed up in their bindings, since there’d been no time to free them – shifting nervously. Nor were they alone in their anxiety. “Why are we stopping?” came Yotimo’s gruff voice. “We’re still too close to Hvitdod’s lair!”
Solvei didn’t answer immediately, still clutching Nenet’s cage to her chest as she glanced back at the other adlets.
The canyon they were in now was a far cry from the Shrine of the Starless Sky. It wasn’t consecrated ground. There were no sacred relics or holy items. There wasn’t anything remotely like the Confluence. And she was the only worshiper of the Night Mare here.
But that last part, at least, was something she could do something about.
Licking her lips, taking a moment to remind herself that she had already changed in ways that made going back to her tribe impossible, Solvei – or rather, Akna – turned and looked at her fellows.
Not long ago, those insults would have come from Lex’s tulpa, voicing his fears and recriminations in a way that he wouldn’t have been able to ignore. But that rogue portion of his thoughts was silent now, its rebellious streak finally tamed thanks to his excursion to Darkest Night, and although he’d gained another willful monster in his mind in exchange, it was at least limited to urges and instincts rather than invectives and nightmares.
Now, as he huddled within the defense that he’d hastily conjured up to protect himself from Hvitdod’s icy breath, Lex’s self-directed castigation came of his own accord.
A new, stronger body. A tulpa that can create objects from nothing. More magic items than I’ve ever possessed at one time. Belligerence. And I’m still reduced to hiding like this.
That he’d been able to accomplish that much had pushed his limits. In the last moment before Hvitdod’s breath weapon had hit him, his astral construct had turned back to solid form of its own accord. Lex wasn’t sure if it had been attempting to use gravity to fall out of the beam’s path, or if it had been trying to protect him by absorbing as much of the blast as it could while he remained safely within it.
In that regard, it had failed at both. Hvitdod’s beam of supernatural cold had struck it only slightly off from dead-center, and Lex had instantly felt the unbearable cold of the monster’s breath spreading through the astral construct’s form – completely overpowering the ward against cold that Solvei had previously placed on him – and reaching out toward him hungrily.
Faced with imminent death, Lex had reacted with the only plan he’d been able to come up with, using his ability to create black crystals and channeling it through Belligerence.
The result had been that he’d formed a massive shell of black crystals around himself and his construct both, blocking Hvitdod’s breath weapon by entombing them in an opaque prison. That they hadn’t plummeted to the bottom of the abyss in the process meant that the crystals had managed to attach themselves to the wall of the chasm, but that was the only thing Lex could say for certain, since it was impossible to see anything beyond his astral construct. He could manipulate his vision in numerous ways, but the ability to see through solid objects was – as of yet – beyond him.
But if that’s the same for Hvitdod as well, then I’ve at least managed to buy myself some time.
His inner beast growled at that, hating that he was hiding like this. It wanted to be out there, ripping and tearing their enemy to shreds! Hearing it scream while tearing its scales off, until it came to the frozen flesh beneath and began to flay it, down to the the bones beneath and cracked-
Clenching his eyes shut, Lex forced himself to fight back against the violent urges, knowing he couldn’t afford to lose himself to the beast within right now. While he didn’t know the total quantity of black crystals he’d conjured with Belligerence, it had to be an incredible amount; likely at least as big as the small mountain of the stuff he’d once thrown at Twilight Sparkle. While Hvitdod’s newfound caution would likely make it hesitate to investigate the massive black mass – all the better to give itself time to regenerate from the damage his bombs had inflicted on it – Lex felt certain that it wouldn’t be long before the dragon’s patience ran out.
And when that happened, Lex felt certain that it would easily tear his black crystal cocoon apart.
Which means that I need to use this time to regroup and go on the offensive.
But that was easier said than done, considering how few options he had left.
Plans and strategies had always come easily to Lex. With just a second or two to think, he could visualize a path to solving whatever problem confronted him, determining the best way to utilize the resources at his disposal in order to achieve his goals. But now...
Now he couldn’t see a single path to victory.
But running wasn’t an option either. Even if he tried to quit the field, Hvitdod would pursue him, and Lex had little confidence that he could outdistance or hide from the dragon. Not to mention the very real concern that his inner beast would overpower him if he tried to run away.
Worse, even if he succeeded in escaping, the chance that Hvitdod would turn its attention to Solvei and the others remained high; for some reason, she’d stopped moving. But since he was registering determination from her – rather than the panic or anxiety that would likely have accompanied some sort of adverse situation – he could only trust that she knew what she was doing.
But if he couldn’t quit the fight, and had no plan for how to win it, that left only one option that Lex could think of:
To gamble everything on an act of faith.
“Are you still combat-capable?” he murmured, glancing back at where his astral construct’s rearmost pair of legs were frozen solid.
“Affirmative,” it replied. A cracking sound reached his ears as the eight-legged form he was within twisted in the tight enclosure, breaking off its injured components. “Operational functionality at seventy-two percent. Self-repair systems activated. Estimated time to full recovery: two minutes, eighteen seconds.”
“Reactive awareness, incorporeality, and now self-repair,” muttered Lex, not sure how to feel about the repeated revelations. He’d assumed that feeding more power into his astral constructs would make them stronger and tougher; he hadn’t anticipated that they’d gain new powers altogether, something which should have taken careful modifications to the basic spell structure. “How do you have all of these abilities?”
“During the formation process, this unit’s analytical functions detected an excess quantity of productive capacity. Evaluating existing formations in this unit determined that combat routines were prioritized. It was subsequently determined that additional modes of similar functionality were the optimal use of the remaining output.”
Lex couldn’t help but raise a brow at that. “Your synthetic intelligence was able to make decisions as to how best to use the extra energy I gave you, even while you were still in the process of being formed?”
“Affirmative.”
That was enough to generate several dozen other questions, but Lex knew he’d already wasted too much time. Even if his construct could apparently repair itself, Hvitdod was capable of the same, and with the disparity in strength between them, that was still to the dragon’s advantage. Even so, there was one more thing he needed to determine.
“What are the limits of your ability to reconstruct yourself?”
“Total breakdown of physical integrity,” answered the automaton. “Self-repair requires that existing frameworks of structural cohesion be present to build upon.”
Which meant, Lex knew, that the other constructs had been well and truly destroyed. If the back legs of his own had fallen apart from the destructive power of Hvitdod’s breath weapon, then the others – which had been completely enveloped – would have completely crumbled beyond what they could fix.
Even so, he couldn’t help but feel somewhat reassured. After all, his attempts to improve upon his astral constructs had actually worked better than anticipated, similar to how the explosive necklaces that he’d hurled down Hvitdod’s throat had actually injured the dragon enough to drive it to caution.
It was enough to give him hope that the desperate scheme he was about to try might actually work.
“Prepare to turn incorporeal again,” ordered Lex. “Hvitdod’s ice will have covered most of the black crystals, but there should be some portion of them that hasn’t been frozen over; that will be our exit point. Once we leave, I want you to do the following...”
“Kill her, Yotimo! Kill her right now!”
Akna – she couldn’t help but think of herself as Akna in this situation – met Ujurak’s angry glare with a solid stare of her own. “If what I’m saying offends you so much, kill me yourself, Ujurak.”
“I would if I could!” From where he was hunched atop his serac – unable to stand up thanks to the wounds on his legs – Ujurak spat at her before turning to look at Yotimo. “She’s turned from the ways of our people! She wants to make us slaves again, the way we were in ancient times!”
Looking back at Akna, he spat at her. “Kill her so that we can devour her flesh and keep her spirit in the tribe, before this ‘Night Mare’ takes it for herself!”
Around him, the others murmured uncomfortably, with Toklo giving voice to their shared worry. “But she’s our only shaman! If she dies now-”
“SHE ISN’T A SHAMAN ANYMORE, YOU STUPID PUP!” howled Ujurak, glaring at Toklo with a wild look in his eyes. “She calls that pony who murdered Panuk ‘master’ now! She’s traded her freedom and her spirit for ice magic! And now she wants us to live in bondage the way she does!”
“But she came back here to save us-”
“You say one more word,” snarled Ujurak, leaning toward Toklo with his teeth bared, “just one, and I swear I’ll crawl over there and kill you myself! Do you hear me?! I don’t care whether your flesh is cursed or not, I’LL KILL YOU MYSELF AND THEN EAT Y-, ARGH!”
Doubling over from where Yotimo had sank Bloodletter’s heel into his gut, Ujurak spat up a mouthful of blood onto his serac, coughing as he looked up at his troop leader in shock. “Y-Yotimo...?”
“The next time you say you’re going to kill my son, I’ll use the other end,” growled the war leader softly.
In his hand, the runes on Bloodletter glowed softly, causing Yotimo to grimace as a large bruise formed over his own abdomen. But he didn’t utter a word, knowing that was part of the spear’s magic; Bloodletter inflicted injuries markedly in excess of the actual wound that it dealt, but the price paid for that was that the wielder also suffered damage.
Yotimo, however, didn’t even glance at the ugly bruise on his midsection now, instead silently daring Ujurak to say another word. It was only when the latter broke eye contact and looked down that Yotimo turned to face Akna. “You do realize that Ujurak is right? What you’re proposing is that we save our lives at the cost of our spirits.”
“You think our spirits will be reborn if Hvitdod devours us?” challenged Akna.
Yotimo pointed at her with his free hand, his expression accusatory. “Then we should continue retreating!”
“You mean with these?” asked Akna pointedly, nodding at the seracs carrying everyone. “Because none of you seem to mind that they’re made from the magic that my master gave me, thanks to the power of his goddess.”
“Touching this ice won’t keep us from being reborn as a free people!” growled Ujurak, seemingly emboldened by Yotimo’s disapproval of what she was proposing. “Offering our spirits to a god will!”
“You aren’t hearing me.” Forcing herself to keep her voice level, Akna swept her eyes over the rest of her tribe one-by-one, ending with Yotimo. “My master, who right now is fighting Hvitdod himself, as Aselu once did, is the one who gave me this magic. If he dies” – a quiver entered her voice then, despite her best attempts to keep it down – “then I won’t have this power anymore, which means you’ll all be stuck here, unable to run away before Hvitdod comes looking to devour you next.”
She had no idea if that was true or not. While her own death, as Solvei, had seen her become a spirit tethered to Lex, she wasn’t sure what would become of her if he died. But it wasn’t outlandish to think that if he did, she’d lose all of the powers she’d gained as a result of their bond. Of course, that was just a guess, and in her estimation it wasn’t a very likely one.
To her mind, it was far more likely that if Lex died, she’d immediately die as well.
She would be with him forever, after all.
But I doubt this magic he gave me would last if that happened, so the result would be the same for all of them anyway, she decided, seeing the others look at each other with wide eyes, doubtlessly imagining the horror of finding themselves stranded and unable to run as Hvitdod came to devour them. “Master is facing Hvitdod to cover our escape. The longer it takes us to get away, the longer he has to keep fighting, and the greater the risk becomes. These seracs are fast, but taking to the wind is faster, not to mention we’re not limited by the landscape.”
“There’s really no other way?” whimpered one of the warriors near the back of the convoy. “We have to pray to this ‘Night Mare’ in order to take to the wind again?”
Akna shook her head. “I can’t break the curse Sissel used to steal that power from you. And neither can she,” she added, gesturing toward where she’d laid Nenet’s cage on her own serac. “The only way left is to pray for the goddess’s help.”
“But we wouldn’t be reborn when we die!” growled Ujurak. “This pony goddess would take us to her realm, never to return!”
“Better than being eaten by Hvitdod,” muttered one of the warriors behind him.
“I’ve been to the Night Mare’s realm,” added Akna. “It’s a harsh place, but so are these mountains. Going there after death wouldn’t be an unbearable existence.”
“We wouldn’t be free!” repeated Ujurak.
“You threatened to kill me for choosing an afterlife that you don’t approve of,” shot back Akna with a sneer. “How free do you think that makes me feel?”
Ujurak gnashed his teeth at her. “That’s not the same! Your spirit isn’t just yours! It’s the spirit of one of our ancestors, reborn many times-”
“Enough, Ujurak.”
Yotimo’s command made the crippled warrior bristle, but he didn’t protest, not wanting to be struck by Bloodletter again. Instead he leaned back, sulking as Yotimo gave Akna a penetrating stare.
For a long moment he didn’t say anything, and the silence made the others shift uncomfortably, glancing back the way they came.
“Father?”
Toklo’s voice, scared and uncertain, seemed to break Yotimo’s concentration, looking away from Akna as he glanced back at his son. She saw his features soften then, and he took a deep breath before returning his eyes to her.
Ensconced within the larger shadow that was his astral construct, Lex shot upward from the top of the massive cyst of black crystals.
A single glance down showed that Belligerence had indeed conjured a mountain of the stuff. Against the backdrop of the abyss below, he could see numerous jagged protrusions erupting from the edge of the chasm. Pointing in every direction, the largest were several hundred feet in length, and a large number of them were coated in ice, a testament to the power of Hvitdod’s breath weapon.
Then the dragon, already having spotted his emergence, swooped in to provide another demonstration of its deadliest attack.
It wasn’t the beam it had used before, nor was it the wide cone it had used when initially attacking his army of astral constructs. Instead, its sharp inhale was followed by a slow exhale, and another look down showed Lex that Hvitdod was gathering the coldness of its breath in a shimmering blue sphere directly in front of its jaws.
Hvitdod was taking no chances this time, Lex knew. It had correctly guessed that the black crystals had shielded him from its last attack, and since it hadn’t known precisely when or where he’d emerge from them, it had readied an attack that would radiate out in every direction.
This time it would hit its target without fail.
It was exactly as Lex had predicted.
“NOW!” he roared, just as the dragon snapped its jaws closed, shattering the glowing sphere and sending the wave of sub-absolute zero temperature radiating outward in all directions.
In response to his command, his astral construct returned to solid form just as the wave of icy death crashed over them.
And struck the black crystal armor that he’d covered his creation with.
It was an idea he’d borrowed from Solvei. Seeing as how the mass of black crystals had stopped the dragon’s last attack, he’d theorized that a heavy coating of the stuff would turn it aside – or at least slow it down – now. And in an instant, Lex could see that it was working, the facsimile of Solvei’s armor freezing over and cracking as the algid attack struck it, but it held.
For almost a full second.
Then the cracking sound escalated, the fissures in the black crystals spiderwebbing out all at once, and before Lex could even think about reinforcing them, the armor shattered completely.
Immediately, Hvitdod’s cold breath washed over him.
There was nothing Lex could do but grit his teeth as the cold sank into his skin, through his muscles, and down to his bones. It was so painful that it burned, though the agony lasted only for a second as nerves died, leaving him numb and unfeeling as the chill began to sink into his organs...and then stopped.
In that last instant, Lex saw that they were through the expanding field of the dragon’s breath weapon, the black crystals having absorbed just enough of the damage from it that the attack hadn’t been enough to kill him outright.
His eyes shining green and purple as he fully embraced his inner monster’s bloodlust, Lex pulled his frozen lips back in a snarl.
Now it’s my turn!
Then his astral construct, almost completely covered in ice, plunged straight down and crashed onto the middle of Hvitdod’s body.
The impact caused it to shatter completely, exploding into icy chunks that bounced and rolled off of the dragon’s sinuous form, falling into the abyss below.
Lex had expected nothing less, and as his armor fell to pieces, he howled as he drew his one remaining foreleg back, stabbing downward.
And plunged Belligerence deeply into Hvitdod’s body.
The Night Mare had given him everything he’d need.
Or at least, that was Lex’s theory.
After everything he’d gone through in the Shrine of the Starless Sky, the Confluence, and Darkest Night, it had become clear that the goddess had been guiding him ever since she’d brought him to Everglow. Each of his trials and tribulations had either forced him to overcome a weakness, or had led him toward a subsequent chance to do so. The result had been that he’d managed to best each new challenge, having managed to utilize – fumbling and haphazardly – the resources available to him to prevail and conquer.
It had been incredibly painful, physically, mentally, and spiritually. But that pain had resulted in his shedding old weakness – fears of his secrets being revealed, being unable to accept Solvei, clinging to a childish dream that was beyond his reach – and replacing them with new strengths. All of which was in keeping with the Night Mare’s teachings, something he was aware of now that he’d read the Auctoritas Caliginous, her holy book.
Had he been the stallion he once was, Lex knew he would have seen the goddess’s guidance as manipulation and raged at her for it. Now he knew better. She was simply providing him with the opportunities he needed to better himself; whether or not he used them, and how, was entirely up to him.
That much had been made obvious when she’d placed Nisha in front of him. Or rather, when Sissel had used aristeia, something that in hindsight Nisha would have been able to warn him about. That, and she likely could have taught him a great deal about what it meant to have, and use, a tulpa.
But although he’d foolishly thrown the purple-eyed wolf away, Lex knew that the goddess had given him other tools.
His tulpa was one of them. Conquering it had not only placed that fragment of his conscious back under his control, doing so had also put its ability to draw things from dreams into reality at his disposal, even if he still didn’t understand a great deal about how that power worked.
Belligerence was another. That the spear had punched through Sissel’s aristeia when nothing else could harm her was no coincidence; of that Lex felt certain.
Nor were the small group of new, stronger divine spells that he’d received after reaffirming his faith in the goddess.
And, of course, his new body – powerful on offense and defense – was notable not only in its physical enhancements, but also because of the prodigious degree of supernatural energy that he could route through himself, empowering his magic to heights beyond anything he’d ever imagined.
Lex would never call those things gifts from the Night Mare, and he knew she would have been insulted if he had. He had earned each and every one of those improvements through his own effort, proving what she had already known about him. The Charismata might have been her blessing, but that he’d had the chance to grow so much was her benediction.
And he’d put each of those powers that she’d given him the opportunity to attain to use now.
From the coterie of new spells she’d granted him, Lex had cast one designed to overcome any and all forms of immobility – including having his muscles paralyzed by extreme cold – before exiting the cocoon of black crystals. It had been his backup plan in case the black crystal armor he’d wrapped his construct in had failed. While it couldn’t protect against the incredible damage that the dragon’s breath weapon had inflicted, it had ensured that his muscles wouldn’t be paralyzed by the cold.
From his tulpa, he’d demanded a magic item able to boost his ability to channel magic through himself. That it had granted his request had been a relief, since he’d been half-convinced that whatever unknowable rules it followed would see it refuse him.
Instead, it had brought forth a bracer, one which he’d quickly wrapped around his remaining foreleg...though not without some trepidation, since he was already under a stamina-boosting spell that allowed him to push his new body’s limits. The last time he’d overcharged his body’s natural channels, back in Vanhoover when he’d tried to create enough food for all of the survivors, he’d almost killed himself. Hopefully his new body could handle the strain he was about to place on it.
All that was left was to channel as much power as he could into Belligerence.
In truth, Lex had no idea what would happen once he did. The full scope of what Belligerence was capable of was still a mystery to him, since even though he’d placed the runes along the quill with exacting care – inlaying the instructions for how he wanted it to function – he hadn’t been the one to actually imbue it with power. The Night Mare had done that, in response to his repeated prayers and ceremonies.
To take a weapon that had already been touched by the goddess, and then super-charge it with as much power as his new body, further augmented with spells and magic items, was capable of, was so risky that it could only be called madness.
But Lex preferred to think of it as an act of faith.
Belligerence’s barbed head punched through Hvitdod’s scales as though the dragon’s natural armor were made out of parchment.
In another instance, Lex would have marveled at the fact that the weapon was so easily able to pierce even the ancient dragon’s defenses, but now he didn’t bother.
Instead, he grit his teeth and began channeling power into the weapon.
Hvitdod didn’t seem to feel the strike. To a creature of such titanic proportions, the injury was little more than a shallow splinter, barely worthy of being noticed. Instead, the dragon brought its tail up and around, intent on swatting the insect that was stinging it.
Snarling, Lex tried to direct more energy into Belligerence, but even as he did so he felt a building resistance. Like trying to force water through a funnel, he could only give it so much at once, and the more he tried to push that limit the harder it became. Just a few more seconds! he screamed inwardly, even as Hvitdod’s tail began its lethal descent. I only need a few more seconds!
But Hvitdod had no intention of giving him that much time, the dragon’s tail coming down on his head a moment later.
The report made Lex’s eyes widen, glancing behind him in shock.
Lying a short distance away, the largest remaining chunk of his astral construct – little more than the battered remnants of its head, neck, and one remaining leg – was straining to hold up Hvitdod’s tail, bracing itself with its single leg as the massive limb pressed down on it from above. “Recommend...evasive action...immediately...”
Shaking off his shock, Lex instead turned back to Belligerence, renewing his efforts to overcharge it. “NO! THIS ENDS HERE!”
“Acknowledged...” The artificial creature didn’t get a chance to say anymore as, above it, Hvitdod snarled and pushed its tail down harder, causing the construct to compress beneath it. “Warning...operational functionality...at five percent...and dropping...”
Closing his eyes, Lex shut out everything else except what he was doing, abandoning all restraint as he shoved more power into the weapon.
“...four...”
In his grasp, Belligerence began to shake, as though it were struggling to process the excess buildup of power that he was forcing into it.
“...three...”
A tingling sensation crept over Lex then, spreading throughout his body. He dimly recognized it as the sensation of his magical channels starting to shred themselves from the strain, just like they had when he’d done this back in Vanhoover. Only the fact that Hvitdod’s breath weapon had deadened his nerves kept him from reeling in agony.
“...two...”
There was an inward pressure on his chest now, as though his heart were being squeezed in a vice, and Lex recognized it as his body beginning to give out under the abuse that it had suffered. There was darkness gathering at the edges of his vision. In his claw, Belligerence’s runes were glowing, shining with a crimson radiance that reminded him of the Night Mare’s eyes.
“...one...”
His legs gave out then, and Lex collapsed, somehow managing to keep his grip on Belligerence. The quill felt as though it were about to wrench itself from his grasp, and then...
Suddenly it went still, all sensations of resistance disappearing.
And then Hvitdod screamed.
It took Lex a moment to realize that what he was hearing wasn’t the same roar that the dragon had made previously, calling out its rage and bloodlust. This was a sound of pain. Of agony. Something that was forced out of a creature when it was hurting more than it could bear.
The creature within Lex roared in approval, and the effort made him raise his head, needing to see what he’d done. Somehow managing to raise his gaze, Lex beheld...
Barbs. Massive, gigantic barbs.
They were sprouting from inside the dragon’s body, impaling it from the inside. Even as Lex watched, another one – it had to be at least fifty feet in length, perhaps more – burst out from Hvitdod’s abdomen, sending blood and scales flying through the air. It joined the half-dozen that had already emerged, and as Lex watched another grew.
Then two more.
Then a half-dozen.
Then a score, spreading out in all directions across Hvitdod’s body.
In an instant, the dragon’s dorsal fin was punctured along its length. Its claws were perforated from within and without as it futilely reached down to try and pull the massive skewers out. Its tail – lifting away from the now-destroyed astral construct – swung randomly as the dragon continued to howl in agony. But no matter how it thrashed, the spikes kept shooting up, working their way further up Hvitdod’s massive length.
They emerged where Lex was too.
His breath catching in his throat, Lex had just enough time to feel the ridged barbs emerge beneath him...and stopped.
What?
That shouldn’t have happened, he knew. By all rights, the quill’s power – overloaded beyond all limits – should have caused him to be impaled along with the rest of the dragon. So why...?
A faint tingling from the clasp of his cloak gave him the answer.
Mystaria’s gift to him.
The clasp was enchanted to prevent the wearer from being harmed by their own magic...and Belligerence was an item made with his own blood, and overloaded with his own energy!
A ragged chuckle tore itself from Lex’s throat then, one which grew deeper as Hvitdod screamed again, the gigantic spikes continuing to erupt from its flesh further along its body, passing its upper set of claws and nearing its head.
Except this time, Hvitdod’s scream wasn’t just a release of sound; it also came with a blast of super-cold air.
The dragon’s breath weapon came nowhere close to Lex. In its agony, Hvitdod wasn’t paying any attention to him. Rather, it was facing directly upward, waving its head back and forth as it breathed out. The expulsion of cold air, erupting as another massive cone, shot upward, striking nothing.
Except the clouds hovering overhead.
A second later, a loud crackling sound came from above as those same clouds froze solid.
Lex’s vengeful mirth died immediately as Hvitdod’s pained exhalation spread across the overcast sky, the massed water vapor transmitting the extreme cold throughout itself, expanding rapidly as the dragon kept thrashing its head, catching as much of the gloom overhead as it could.
Although he didn’t know if he’d struck Hvitdod with a mortal blow, in that moment Lex knew that it didn’t matter. Whether it was a dying attempt to take its enemy with it, or because it thought it could regenerate even from this, Hvitdod’s final attack was one that would hit them both. And in his current state, Lex knew that there was nothing he could do to avoid it.
Then several hundred thousand tons of ice began to plummet toward him.
Lex could already feel his consciousness giving way as the frozen clouds fell toward him.
A floating sensation enveloped him as he looked upward, feeling as though the ice shelf were somehow growing closer and farther away at the same time. Then his view of it was slowly eclipsed on one side, a barrier to his vision that gradually grew more and more rounded, as though he were staring upward at it through a tunnel. That thought triggered something in his brain, and after a moment he realized that he was looking at it through a tunnel...sort of.
Beneath him, Hvitdod – the dragon having gone limp – plummeted back into the abyss that it had flown up from.
And Lex had just enough time to realize that he was following the perforated dragon down into the chasm.
Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he passed out.
“But amidst their woe and lamentation shall be those who seek to crawl in the shadows of the faithful,” chanted Akna reverently, keeping her voice steady as she drew Bloodletter across her arm. The spear’s runes glowed softly as she cut herself, causing the wound to open wider than the small incision should have. Nor did she so much as grunt when a smaller laceration spread across her other arm, her blood dripping down to stain the ground beneath her as she prayed.
“Wise are they, who recognize that the blessed have surpassed them,” she continued, cutting herself again. “Righteous are they, who celebrate having found their superiors. Holy are they, who submit themselves to their masters.”
“And they shall not know fear,” murmured Yotimo, on his knees behind her, “for the Night Mare guides us to strength.”
His prayer was echoed by a few of the other adlets, though to Akna’s ears their muttering was half-hearted and filled with discomfort, rather than rapt with reverence.
But as much as she wanted to berate them for their lack of faith, she didn’t dare interrupt her own part in the ceremony, knowing that she was the focal point. Though given how she wasn’t wearing any holy vestments, the area wasn’t sanctified, they had no votaries, and the numerous other ways that the service she was attempting was wanting, she couldn’t keep herself from wondering if her fellows’ lack of faith mattered all that much. With how shoddy this is compared to what Master and I did back in the Shrine, I wouldn’t be surprised if this offends the Night Mare rather than pleasing her.
The thought was filled with bitterness, making Akna scowl at her own lapse in concentration. Even if the others didn’t have faith in the goddess, she did, and she knew she needed to marshal it now if she wanted this to work. Otherwise, everything her Master had entrusted her with would be for naught-
But any further recriminations fled her mind as an agonized howl cut through the air.
“W-was that Hvitdod?!” yelped Toklo, almost falling over as he twisted around to look back the way they’d come, ears pointing upward in shock. “I think that was Hvitdod!”
“He...he sounded like he was in pain,” murmured Ujurak, his voice thick with disbelief. “Did that pony actually wound him?!”
His question came with a glance at Yotimo, as though expecting his captain to reassure him that no mere pony could injure the creature that their ancient hero had died overcoming. But Yotimo didn’t pay him any attention, instead turning back to their tribe’s shaman. “Akna, we need to keep-, Akna?!”
The alarm in his voice drew all eyes to her, but Akna herself didn’t notice, instead doubling over. “Master!” she wailed, eyes wide as she registered that Lex had just sustained life-threatening – quite possibly fatal – injuries. “MASTER!”
Her scream was drowned out by another pained scream from Hvitdod, the sound throwing her into confusion. What was going on? The dragon was screaming, so why was Lex the one who had been wounded so badly? Had he-
“LOOK!”
Nenet’s yell was so unexpected that it cut through Akna’s anxiety, glancing back at the caged sphinx. But Nenet didn’t return the look, instead staring upward with her jaw hanging open, one paw pointing toward the sky.
Turning her eyes in that direction, Akna was just in time to see a huge cone of softly-glowing blue lance upward, bathing the air in faint azure light.
“That looks...” Blinking, Toklo squinted at the sight. “That looks kind of like when we breathe on something to freeze it.”
Akna didn’t say anything, a sickening feeling developing in the pit of her stomach as she remembered when Solvei had defeated Prevarius, freezing the devil solid with a beam of severe cold, one which had been of the same color as what she was seeing now.
Master, what’s going on? Despite having resolved herself not to distract Lex while he was fighting Hvitdod, Akna couldn’t keep herself from reaching out to him now, her worry overwhelming her caution. Please tell me what’s happening!
The only response she got was silence.
“Besides, it’s just going straight up,” continued Ujurak, seemingly looking for something to complain about. “It’s not like it’ll hit anything that way.”
“It’ll hit the sky,” murmured Yotimo.
“The sky?” echoed Ujurak. “What does that even m-”
A cracking sound made them all jump, Ujurak yelping as he bit his tongue. But he couldn’t even voice a complaint as he saw what was happening.
The clouds were freezing over, the grey covering solidifying and spreading out over a massive area. Toklo gasped, and he wasn’t the only one, the adlets yelping in fear as the enormous ice sheet grew wider, rapidly moving through the overcast sky.
A moment later it began to fall.
MASTER!
When her last, desperate plea to Lex went unanswered, Akna felt panic start to overwhelm her. No matter that the enormous glacier wasn’t directly over them, meaning that they’d escape it unscathed. No matter that it was impossible to imagine even Hvitdod surviving something like that. All she could think of in that moment was that Lex wouldn’t survive either...and the fact that he wasn’t answering her, along with her feeling him plunging downward, suggested that this wasn’t some sort of plan on his part, but that the worst had happened and that he was now only moments away from death.
Fighting down the urge to rush to his side, knowing that even with her serac she’d never make it before the ice shelf fell on her, Akna did the only thing she could think of, dropping to her knees and clenching Bloodletter tighter.
Night Mare! she begged silently, all thoughts of removing the curses on her kin gone now. Please, do something!
If the goddess heard her, she gave no sign. Through her connection to Lex, Akna could still feel him falling, clinging to life by a thread.
“He’s your champion!” she growled. Or rather, her intention had been to growl; to her own ears, her voice had sounded like a sob. “Save him!”
But the words were like ashes on her tongue, and she knew that no response would be forthcoming. Although nowhere near as advanced in her knowledge of the Night Mare as her master was, Akna was aware that the goddess was moved by actions rather than pleas. Begging would only earn her contempt, rather than her consideration.
Devotion, she realized numbly, rising to her feet. I need to show her proof of my devotion. But how?
A glance upward showed that the airborne iceberg was still falling, its incredible mass making it seem as though it were falling in slow motion. But Akna knew better; it would hit the ground in seconds, and in all likelihood would break into pieces that would fall into that enormous hole in the ground, burying Lex and Hvitdod together.
No.
Gripping Bloodletter tighter, Akna hardened her resolve. I won’t let that happen.
The rest of her kin were watching the ice shelf fall, all with their backs turned toward her. Only Nenet was behind her, and all it took was a thought to move the serac her cage was on further away, the sphinx’s confused grunt too meek to catch anyone’s attention.
Turning her attention back toward the other adlets, Akna slowly lifted Bloodletter, taking a deep breath as she fought to keep her hands steady. They’d never see her in time to stop her, but only if she acted right now, before it was too late.
Even as she thought that, she saw one of Yotimo’s ears twitch, the old warrior’s instincts warning him that something was wrong. “Akna?”
He was already starting to turn around, and she knew that meant that she was out of time.
Discarding the last of her hesitation, she lashed out with Bloodletter, even as she saw Yotimo’s eyes widen. “NO! STOP!”
But even as the words left his mouth, the spear struck home.
And Akna fell to the ground, Bloodletter buried in her chest.
Although her bond with Lex had increased her durability and resistance to injury, she’d deliberately let down as many of her defenses as she could before bringing Bloodletter to bear against herself. As such, she wasn’t surprised when the tip of the spear easily slid through skin and muscle, feeling it scrape along bone before penetrating the organs beneath, only to then undergo the same process in reverse as it burst out of her back.
Even so, she kept her hands locked around the weapon, coughing up a mouthful of blood. The pain was incredible, threatening to make her black out, and she could feel it radiating outward from where she’d skewered herself. Even now, Bloodletter’s double-edged power was taking effect; being both victim and wielder, it was not only worsening the wound, but was delivering further injury to her, causing her to feel as though she’d stabbed herself twice.
“And they...shall not...know fear...” she gasped, even as her blood began pooling under her. “For the...Night Mare...guides us...to strength...”
Only a few steps away, she could see Yotimo diving at her, his eyes wide and his jaws open in a yell. Around him, the others were in a similar state of panic, her having impaled herself enough to distract them even from the incredible sight of the mountain of ice falling from the sky.
But Akna herself was only barely able to make out the plunging mass of frozen clouds now, as things were rapidly growing dark. In what seemed like an instant, she couldn’t see the calamity that was befalling her master. She couldn’t see Toklo, Ujurak, nor the others screaming her name, the sounds of their voices growing muffled as well. She couldn’t even see Yotimo anymore, despite his only being a few steps away from her.
And then everything was blackness. The sky, the ground, the canyon walls, her seracs; all of them gone. The only thing she could see were her hands still wrapped around Bloodletter, along with the crimson puddle spreading beneath her, and the only sound that reached her ears was her own ragged breathing. It still hurt so much...
But the pain was eclipsed by a sudden chill that rolled across her a moment later, causing Akna to gasp as a paroxysm of fear spread through her. Her rational mind was left staggered, trying to process what was happening even as her instincts screamed at her that she was in mortal danger.
“No,” came a deep, feminine growl. “Not mortal danger.”
Had Akna been able to stand, the voice would have sent her running away in blind terror, the fear threatening to overwhelm her mind. But despite the panic threatening to destroy the last of her reason, she found herself drawn to the source of the voice, unable to stop herself from looking upward even as she found herself terrified to see its owner.
Peering down at her were two shining red eyes.
The Night Mare had deigned to answer her prayers at last.
“Prayers?” spat the goddess, and the rebuke made Akna’s heart spasm. “You profane my sacred rites, and dare to call them prayers?”
Those red eyes narrowed then, and the sight brought a whimper to the skewered adlet’s lips.
“The only reason I’ve come here now,” rumbled the goddess, “is to condemn you for your blasphemy.”
Akna couldn’t remember ever being as terrified as she was now.
She’d been scared almost to madness when, as Solvei, she’d witnessed her family being transformed into monsters by Prevarius. She’d been only slightly less frightened when, as Akna, she’d entered the Confluence for the first time. And those were just some of the most recent instances in her two lives when she’d been gripped by overwhelming fear.
But all of those memories paled in comparison to the absolute dread evoked by the Night Mare’s displeasure.
It wasn’t just the way she loomed over her now, a gigantic form cloaked in shadow with only two blood-red eyes visible. Nor was it the malice contained in her voice. There was a palpable aura of menace about the goddess, a panic that completely bypassed logic and reason, lending strength to primal fears that welled up from the deeper recesses of her mind.
The goddess was every stray sound that had ever woken Solvei up in the middle of the night. She was every glimpse of movement in the darkness when Akna had been trying to fall asleep. She was the anxiety that came with the anticipation of pain; the breathlessness of seeing a deadly threat rushing forward; the horror of oncoming death.
The Night Mare was nothing less than fear personified, and at that moment Akna wanted nothing more than to run and hide.
But that urge was interrupted by the sudden agony that gripped her as she moved to stand, Bloodletter scraping against her innards. Her hands still gripping its haft, the injury was multiplied as the spear’s power turned the wound back on her again, and it hurt so much that it cut through her terror, reminding her of why she had done that to herself in the first place.
“P-please,” she gasped, lowering her head, though the action had less to do with reverence than it did with her being unable to face the glowing red eyes above her. “Save Lex...”
“Pathetic.”
It was only because the goddess’s voice was filled with contempt, rather than anger, that Akna managed to retain her sanity. Even then it was a near thing, leaving her whimpering as she trembled. “He’s g-going to die...!”
“And throwing yourself on your own weapon was supposed to help him?”
The utter disdain in the Night Mare’s voice almost made Akna throw up, and it was only after several seconds that she found her voice again. “Y-your ceremonies all involve self-injury,” she gasped. “I thought you’d be pleased-”
“PLEASED?! YOU THOUGHT I’D BE PLEASED?!”
There was the anger that Akna had feared, and the manifestation of the goddess’s wrath robbed her of her remaining vestiges of self-control. She tried to rise to her feet, desperate to get away, only for her legs to slump beneath her, shaking so badly that they refused to support her weight. Unable to escape, Akna curled up as best she could while impaled, terror rendering her completely paralyzed.
Those red eyes drew closer, and although she couldn’t see anything else of the goddess, Akna could almost feel how the Night Mare’s lips were pulled back in a snarl.
“Ceremonies to me demand that my faithful demonstrate mastery over themselves. To bear pain without flinching is a show of strength; to wound themselves to the edge of death, leaving them unable to accomplish anything except to whine and mewl for me to grant them salvation, demonstrates nothing but weakness.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Akna bit her lip as she heard the goddess’s voice draw closer.
“AND WEAKNESS IS A SIN!”
Akna’s eyes rolled back in head, and a small part of her recognized that she should have passed out from the combination of fear and pain. But no matter how much her mind wanted to flee what was happening, her awareness remained undiminished. The Night Mare, it seemed, had no intention of allowing her to escape divine retribution.
“Even after I gave you a chance to atone for your iniquity, you instead chose to compound your offenses. You don’t even understand the heresies you’ve committed, do you?”
Another spasm of soul-rending terror wracked Akna then, but this time it was accompanied by a frisson of confusion. She’d sinned against the Night Mare not just now, but before?
“I thought not.” The goddess’s voice sounded slightly further away now, as though she’d lifted her head, but the scorn in it hadn’t diminished in the slightest. “You’re a disgrace to all that I stand for. It’s no surprise that you’ve served your master so poorly.”
This time, Akna felt the slightest thread of indignation underneath her terror. She’d dedicated all of herself to Lex! She’d willingly laid down her life for him! She’d-
“I wasn’t talking to you,” snapped the goddess, followed by the sound of what could only have been one of her hooves striking the ground.
And Akna gasped as she was suddenly herself again, all traces of Solvei instantly gone.
Although she’d been thinking of herself as Akna for a little while now – her contact with her kin having made it easy for that part of herself to come to the fore – she had still been Solvei, the winter wolf and runt of her litter, just as much as she’d been Akna, adlet and shaman to her people. All of the former’s memories and beliefs and emotions were still there alongside the latter’s. She’d grown more comfortable with her own duality over time, her two halves communing with each other in her dreams as they worked out their new, shared life.
“That winter wolf serves her master faithfully,” continued the Night Mare, “and though she has no pretensions of devotion toward me, honors me by serving him. You, however, have managed to blaspheme even this penance that I assigned you.”
“I...don’t understand...”
“Because you do not wish to,” spat the goddess, her voice overflowing with disgust. “Rather than admit the truth, you run from it, refusing to confront your own weakness rather than facing it.”
“But I’ve always worshiped you,” croaked Akna, trying to comprehend what the goddess was telling her. “And I’ve served Lex, served my master, with everything I have ever since I joined with Solvei! I taught him my people’s runes! I helped him make Belligerence! I trained in my dreams!”
Another heavy rumble of the Night Mare’s hoof striking the ground silenced her. But before she could let out a whine, she caught sight of something out of her periphery. Turning her head, Akna’s eyes widened as she beheld...
Herself.
Laying naked on her back in a pile of snow, the other Akna swung her arm carelessly. “But I wanted-, no, I want to stay with my tribe! With my people! Even if I can’t bring them around to the Night Mare’s worship, I never wanted to leave them! One way or another, I’m still their only shaman! I wanted...”
Her double’s shoulders slumped as she turned onto her side, pulling her knees up to her chest. “I wanted to find a mate of my own. I wanted to be a mother someday. To have a family of my own again...but I don’t get to have that now, do I?”
Instantly recognizing herself from the first dream she’d had after returning from her journey to Darkest Night with Lex and Solvei, Akna swallowed as her other self faded away, leaving her trying to stifle the sick feeling spreading through her. “That...n-no, I thought that before, but I don’t-”
“Even now, you lie to yourself.”
“I’m not lying!” pleaded Akna. “I thought that at first, but I made peace with it! I know I’m Lex’s now, but-”
“Resignation,” hissed the Night Mare, “is despair by another name! And those who despair abandon themselves!”
That last part Akna recognized, being one of the tenets that the Keeper had taught her during her first time at the Shrine of the Starless Sky, when she’d initially sought strength-
“You never sought strength,” snorted the Night Mare. “You turned to me in desperation, raging as much against your own people as against the enemies that beset them. I gave you the means to stand up to both; Headhunter to fight the yetis, and the form of a winter wolf to demonstrate your defiance of your tribe’s enfeebling traditions. And yet you spurned the latter gift in favor of the former.”
That sickening feeling grew worse, and Akna found her throat filling with bile. “But I was going to convert them! To bring them to your worship!”
“By hiding your faith in me? By keeping the power I’d granted you a secret?”
“If my people knew I could change into a winter wolf, they’d have killed me!”
The Night Mare laughed, the sound harsh and mocking. “And in the face of that threat, your courage failed you. You perceived the risk too great, and so avoided the conflict. Tell me” – the goddess’s voice took on a sharper edge then – “if my champion had done that, what would have become of your kin?”
Akna’s eyes widened at the question, her head spinning in a way that had nothing to do with the fear enveloping her. She’d always thought that her refusal to bring up her newfound faith in the Night Mare – as well as her ability to transform into a winter wolf – had been calculating, a strategic avoidance of a fight she couldn’t win.
But Lex had looked at a fight he couldn’t win and chosen to undertake it anyway, which was why right now Yotimo and the others were alive...even if he was on the verge of dying.
The memory of why she’d stabbed herself made Akna realize that she couldn’t keep whimpering like this. Cringing and whining would only anger the Night Mare further; no matter how much it hurt, no matter how frightened she was, no matter what punishment awaited her, she had to stand up and earn the goddess’s respect!
“Y-you’re wrong...”
“Hmm?”
Even the Night Mare’s inquisitive grunt seemed belittling, as though indulging a child having a fit, but that thought was far less terrifying than imagining her as a predator about to pounce. Keeping that thought in mind, Akna forced herself to sit up and raise her eyes to the goddess’s. “I might not have had the courage to confront my tribe...but I never abandoned the idea of doing so! All I needed was to go back to Darkest Night and find another of the Umbral Regalia! If I had that-”
“You think you deserve to be given another of my sacred relics?” interrupted the Night Mare, seeming to loom larger now. “That you depend on them so much only proves that you’re not worthy of them!”
“But Lex is!” pressed Akna. “You said that Solvei’s service to him honored you, so that must mean that mine has also! If you could lend him one of your weapons, even for-”
But again, the Night Mare didn’t let her finish. “You mistake your atonement for service to me,” cut in the goddess coldly.
That was enough to stall Akna’s newfound determination. That was the second time the goddess had mentioned her performing atonement. Did she mean...?
“Did you really think it was a coincidence that you and my champion’s servant were both able to touch the pathway back to your body at the exact same moment? Or how your souls were able to merge with so few problems?”
Again, those crimson eyes narrowed. “I gave you to my champion because you wanted power without having to earn it, and now you have. In doing so, you’ve learned a lesson central to my faith: those who would become strong without developing their own power are asking to be dominated.”
For a moment, Akna swayed under the revelation she’d been given. It hadn’t been an accident that she’d merged with Solvei! It had been the Night Mare’s will for the two of them to become one!
Forcing herself to put her shock aside, Akna licked her lips before trying again to enlist the Night Mare’s aid. “But that couldn’t have been all there was to it! Solvei and I were stronger together than either of us were alone! We made Lex stronger that way-”
“You did,” admitted the Night Mare. “But not as strong as he would be if you accepted your service to him.”
“Wh-what? I have accepted that!”
“Lies.”
“It’s not a lie! I’m his! I belong to him! He’s my master now, and I honor him above all others!”
“And for whose sake did you pray to me now, before the clouds turned to ice and began to fall?”
Akna winced, her strength flagging. “That was...he told me to make everyone able to take to the wind again.”
“And yet you abandoned those orders when you realized the peril he was in.”
“What was I supposed to do, just let him die?! I wanted to save my people, but I want to save him too! I’ve always thought of him...”
She’d meant to say those words strongly, with conviction. But instead they came out as weak as the goddess said she was, and Akna couldn’t make herself pretend otherwise.
The part of her that was Solvei was concerned for Lex, and always had been. But now that she and the winter wolf were separated, Akna could feel how lacking her own devotion was toward the one she’d called her master. Ever since they’d left the Shrine of the Starless Sky, she’d been worried sick over the rest of her tribe, fretting over Silla, raging over what had happened to Yotimo, and struggling with all she had to keep Toklo and the others safe. When it came to Lex, her primary concern had been about what her service to him would cost her, welcoming the benefits that her newfound state brought her even as she’d mourned what it meant for her future.
She’d called him her master, but in her heart of hearts, she’d never thought of him that way.
“Now you understand,” noted the Night Mare, her voice pitiless. “Your other half saw how hard my champion struggled to save the ones most important to her, and knew that he was worthy of her dedication. But you begrudge him, even as he fights for your people.”
The self-loathing that came over Akna then was enough to momentarily blot out everything else, from the pain in her chest to her fear of the goddess. She’d been so wrapped up in herself that she hadn’t even known it, convinced that she was thinking of everyone else – her tribe, the Night Mare, Lex – when all she’d been doing was lying to herself about how selfless she was, even as she’d focused solely on what she wanted.
“And that’s why it’s turned out like this?” she muttered, slumping in place. “You said that Lex wasn’t as strong as he could have been...because of me?”
“A strong master empowers their followers, but strong followers raise their master to greater heights. When my champion placed a piece of his soul into that winter wolf, it displaced a part of her own back into him, but it was too small to make a noticeable difference. But the same can’t be said for yours; as limited as your tribe’s practices are, they still tempered your spiritual growth.”
“Then Lex...?”
“Would have gained new power, though far less than you did from him...but you’ve been withholding it, abrogating the loyalty that you owe him.”
Akna cringed, not needing the Night Mare to say the rest: because of that, he was losing his fight against Hvitdod now. Even so, part of her couldn’t help but be confused. “But how could I keep anything from him? Even if he hasn’t used the Charismata, I don’t feel like I’ve been trying to...wait...”
Gulping, she lowered a hand to her hips, where his mark was. Or rather, where it should have been; although she couldn’t see it through her clothes, she had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t there now. “It’s because Solvei and I aren’t fully merged, isn’t it?”
“Your souls are one now, but the mixture is imperfect,” confirmed the goddess. “Like oil on the water, you’ve pushed her soul toward my champion, keeping your own at bay, stifling the benefit he should be receiving from your joining with his servant.”
This time, Akna wasn’t shaking from fear; or rather, not from fear of the Night Mare. “Then...if I stop holding back...”
“He will receive what is rightfully his. And you shall be made whole.”
Before Akna had time to contemplate that, there was a sensation of movement from the goddess, and Akna didn’t have time to gasp as the outline of a humongous hoof pressed against Bloodletter, knocking her onto her back and leaving her gasping in renewed agony as she found herself staked to the ground, the spear grinding against her insides.
“But not before you suffer the cost of your negligence!”
Akna’s eyes snapped open with a gasp as she hit the ground, coughing up blood as she slid down Bloodletter’s length.
“AKNA!” Reaching her side, Yotimo lifted her up, his eyes shocked as he put one hand to the wound on her chest. “Why did you-?! Nevermind! Just hang on!” He immediately began tearing at his pantlegs, tearing off strips as he began to wrap them around her middle, not withdrawing the spear from her chest as he tried first to staunch her bleeding.
She wasn’t paying attention. Instead, she looked at where the massive shelf of ice was still falling, dimly realizing that she still had time...but not much.
Solvei was part of her again; she could feel the winter wolf’s essence alongside that of her own, separate but still connected.
Closing her eyes, Akna let out a slow breath as she concentrated on that separation...
Solvei’s voice seemed to come from far away. And yet, for some reason, Lex felt as though she were nearby. Close enough that he could almost reach out and touch her.
It’s yours.
Something was wrong. He wanted to stroke her fur again, but his foreleg wasn’t moving. Or was it? There was no feedback coming from his limbs, all of them having fallen numb for some reason.
The magic that you gave me.
The more Lex tried to concentrate on what he was feeling, the more confused he became. There was a strange weightlessness to everything, as though he were floating. And yet the wind was whipping past his ears, even though he couldn’t feel anything on his skin. What was going on?
It was always yours.
Worse, something was wrong with Solvei. He could feel that she was hurt badly. But that shouldn’t have happened; he wouldn’t have let that happen, except...except he’d been doing something else. Something important, and dangerous, and that he was failing at...
Now use it!
A sense of urgency came over him then, rapidly escalating to alarm as he tried to put everything together, only to find that critical pieces were still missing. What was happening?!
Use it and fight!
A fight! He’d been fighting somepony-, no, something! It had been powerful, and deadly, and he’d been forced to use everything he had just to strike back! But what-
Use it to overcome Hvitdod!
Hvitdod! That was right, he’d been fighting the dragon! It had been a losing battle until he’d stabbed it with Belligerence, overcharging the weapon, in response to which it had frozen the clouds! And now...
My strong and proud master, use the strength that you gave me...
Now it was time to finish what he’d started!
And show that monster who it’s messing with!
Lex’s eyes snapped open just as the ice shelf hit the ground above him.
The immense crash was accompanied by a momentary blackness as the glacier blotted out all of the light, completely covering the immense abyss that he and Hvitdod were falling into. But the weak illumination from the sky above immediately returned as the mountain of ice shattered, the fragments plunging into the hole after them. The massive bergs careened off the sides of the pit, crashing into each other as they hurtled downward at a rapid pace.
Too rapid.
We’re slowing down!
Even turning his head felt like a monumental effort, but from where he was sprawled out on Hvitdod’s middle, Lex managed to glance toward the dragon’s head-
And saw that it was glaring back at him.
Hvitdod looked more dead than alive. The enormous spikes that had skewered it from every direction were gone now, Belligerence having slipped from Lex’s grasp during his brief moments of unconsciousness, leaving the dragon’s body pockmarked with gaping wounds that were oozing blood. Moreover, none of its injuries seemed to be regenerating, showing shredded flesh, torn muscles, and even fragments of bone beneath the rent scales of the dragon’s serpentine body.
But it was still alive. And as it slowly began to arrest its freefall – renewing whatever magic let it slither through the air, heedless of the tonnage of ice rocketing toward them – Lex could see that, despite the damage he’d inflicted on it, Hvitdod was in better shape than he was: unlike himself, the dragon could still move, reaching one claw out toward him.
And then his view of the dragon was momentarily obscured as Lex breathed out, his breath so cold that it was visible even in the frosty air.
Solvei!
Despite the numbing cold spreading throughout his body, Lex could feel the winter wolf’s cryomantic power coursing through him. It was alien, and yet somehow intensely familiar, wrapping around him like a cloak that he’d worn many times before. It required no words, needed no gestures; all he had to do was think of how he wanted to use it, and the magic would respond.
Even as Lex comprehended that, Hvitdod’s claw reached out to take hold of him.
From his vantage point, he could see the shredded ligaments and broken tendons in the dragon’s oversized claw as it came down toward him, now having less meat on its bones than the ghouls which had infested Vanhoover, yet stubbornly refusing to die. Even so, the dragon’s coordination had been damaged enough that it couldn’t line its talons up to skewer him properly, pawing ineffectually at him like an invalid.
But it had enough control left to curl its digits around him, and Lex couldn’t hold back a pained grunt as he felt himself squeezed in the thing’s grasp; for all its injuries, the dragon was still a creature of titanic mass, and its hold made his bones creak at the force brought to bear on them.
Then the creature started to bring him toward its maw, and while its ragged breathing signaled that it wasn’t able to use its breath weapon again just yet, that didn’t keep its jaws from parting in anticipation of using its teeth to deliver the killing blow.
Meanwhile, the shattered fragments of the ice shelf were growing closer.
And although Hvitdod had slowed their fall, it hadn’t ceased it, which meant that it likely wouldn’t be long before they hit the bottom.
Death waited in every direction. But Lex couldn’t bring himself to care, fully in accordance with the fearless monster inside of him.
Dying mattered less than killing his enemy.
Belligerence had fallen away somewhere, and Lex knew that even if he recalled it, he didn’t have the strength left to overcharge it like that again. Turning into a shadow wouldn’t have helped, since the falling ice chunks were made with Hvitdod’s breath weapon, which could hit even incorporeal creatures. Most of his thaumaturgical spells were already used. His last astral construct had been destroyed, leaving him vulnerable. And he was so injured that he could barely move.
But as Hvitdod’s jaws came nearer, and the falling chunks of ice grew closer, Lex couldn’t help but smile, his bestial instincts reveling in approval as he prepared to fight back.
With Solvei’s magic.
Calling upon the dregs of his reserves – his injured body only able to scrape together any energy because of his stamina-enhancing spell – Lex directed everything he had left into the cryomancy that he now possessed.
It was pointless to direct it against Hvitdod, he knew. The dragon was a creature of such incredible cold that it could even chill creatures that should be immune to freezing temperatures. Nor did thoughts of defense cross Lex’s mind, the monster within him refusing to even consider such a thing. Instead, he put forward the only plan of attack he could think of...one inspired by Akna.
No prayers ran through Lex’s mind then, nor did he bother trying to diagram the metaphysical structure of how the magic was working. Instead, he let intuition be his guide, feeling as though he’d done this a hundred times before even though it was a new experience for him. He’d seen Akna do this when she’d called forth a guardian to watch over his first meeting with her, and then again during their first battle with Sissel. Her dedication and Solvei’s power mixed together as he augmented it, directing it upward...
Into the falling chunks of ice.
And suddenly, it wasn’t raining broken pieces of frozen clouds anymore.
Instead, it was raining ice elementals.
Hvitdod had almost brought Lex to his jaws when the first elemental reached it. Shaped in a fashion that resembled a griffon, it was only slightly smaller than the Crystal Empire, one massive claw shooting out to clothesline Hvitdod across the face as it dove past them.
The blow knocked teeth from the dragon’s head, and Lex had just enough time to realize that the dragon’s own breath weapon had strengthened the elementals, making them out of tougher stuff than if he’d conjured them from ordinary ice. That point was driven home a moment later as another elemental – this one looking like a sphinx the size of a castle – flew past them, its front claws curled into two frozen fists which it brought down on the leg Hvitdod was grasping him with.
A pained roar erupted from the dragon’s throat then, and if it wasn’t as loud as when he’d stabbed the thing with Belligerence, that was only because it was muted by the snap of the dragon’s bones breaking. That was followed by its claw going limp, leaving Lex free to start falling past the dragon as he began to plummet, no longer riding atop Hvitdod’s body.
But his fall was quickly arrested as another elemental – this one a gigantic pegasus – swooped past and caught him. Gently cradling him in its hooves, its frozen wings flapped heavily as it lifted him upward.
And let the rest of its brethren go to work.
Lex couldn’t see how many there were, but there had to be at least a few dozen, all of them flying creatures, ranging from the mundane to the bizarre. He could see birds, bats, insects, even a dragon or two among them, all formed out of ice and converging on Hvitdod, swarming over it like scavengers attacking a corpse. Nor did they care that this corpse was still moving, digging into Hvitdod’s injuries as they clawed, stung, bit, and tore at the suppurating wounds all over its body.
They were met with the full force of Hvitdod’s remaining fury. Teeth, claws, and tail all lashed out, and Lex could see the elementals being rent under the storm. One eagle-looking creature was pulverized by a single swat of Hvitdod’s tail. Some kind of aerial manta ray was rent in two by a single gigantic claw. A spider with a fly’s wings was crunched between Hvitdod’s jaws, its body crumbling into shards between the dragon’s teeth.
But the rest of them kept coming, scoring numerous hits for every one of their number that Hvitdod destroyed, and Lex could see that they were forcing it down faster, sheer numbers weighing it down beyond what its magic could bear aloft.
Then Hvitdod inhaled sharply.
Before Lex could say anything, the ice pegasus carrying him flew upward, and he had just enough time to look back and see Hvitdod’s breath weapon radiate outward in every direction, seeking to freeze the elementals the same way it had his astral constructs.
The elementals seemed not to care, ignoring the spreading cold and continuing to savage the dragon.
That’s right, laughed Lex inwardly. These creatures were formed from the ice that you breathed out before. They won’t be harmed by that same power now.
Hvitdod roared again, and Lex’s inner predator howled in delight, recognizing desperation in its enemy. The dragon’s struggles seemed more frantic now, and Lex could see that the blood trailing upward from its colossal body was increasing. Even as it slowly whittled away at the elementals, they were doing the same to it, inflicting further injuries on its already-mangled body.
It was a battle of attrition between the swarm of gargantuan ice creatures and the ancient dragon, with the only question being which side would succumb first.
But the contest was interrupted as they slammed into the bottom of the chasm at last.
The impact sent up a massive cloud of powdered snow, long gathered at the bottom of the pit, which was increased as the elementals went flying off of Hvitdod, shaken free by the impact. The dragon, now covered in so much blood that its body looked as though it had been swimming in it, somehow recovered first, coiling around and starting upward, inhaling again...as it looked right at Lex.
Immediately, the huge ice pegasus holding Lex started to circle further upward, causing a snarl to escape Lex’s lips. “Hold steady!”
The elemental obeyed immediately, and Lex focused intently on Hvitdod, marshaling what little remained of his strength as he summoned Belligerence back to his remaining claw.
He threw it at the same moment as that the dragon breathed out, firing a beam of cold directly toward him.
From his vantage point, Lex watched as Belligerence shot downward, piercing through the air.
Then it pierced through the beam of sub-absolute zero temperature coming from Hvitdod’s jaws.
And finally, it shot through Hvitdod’s head, bursting through the dragon completely to lodge itself in the ground beneath.
A moment later Hvitdod shuddered, the beam fading out before it could reach where Lex was held aloft by his ice pegasus.
“Head downward, and be ready to retreat if Hvitdod moves.”
Lex didn’t bother glancing at the ice pegasus carrying him aloft, instead keeping his eyes trained on Hvitdod as the elemental began to descend toward the bottom of the chasm. A thought was all it took to summon Belligerence back into his grasp, and he kept it at the ready as he stared intently at the dragon.
The dragon had been the single most powerful enemy he’d ever faced, outclassing even Sissel by orders of magnitude. That was why Lex had no intention of letting his guard down until he was certain that it was well and truly dead. “The rest of you, keep attacking until I say otherwise.”
At his order, the remaining elementals began to pick themselves up from where the impact had thrown them. Now sporting shattered limbs and cracked bodies, they evidenced no signs of pain or weariness as they moved, dragging themselves back toward’s Hvitdod’s insensate body. If the dragon was still alive, they’d serve as convenient targets for whatever fight it had left.
But even that was more uncertainty than Lex was willing to countenance, and as the frozen pegasus descended to a distance that he judged to be close enough, he switched his vision so that he could look at the dragon’s life force directly.
...what?
“Stop descending,” he muttered, barely noticing at the ice elemental obeyed his command. Instead, he kept staring at Hvitdod.
Or rather, at where Hvitdod should have been.
But in his current spectrum of vision, the dragon didn’t register at all, completely invisible to his life force-sight.
That shouldn’t have been the case. Although Lex had busied himself with numerous tasks after returning from Darkest Night, he’d still made sure to take time to familiarize himself with the heightened senses that his physical transformation had equipped him with, both mundane and supernatural. And his inability to detect Hvitdod now flew completely in the face of those experiments.
This spectrum of vision, designed to see the presence of positive energy, could also register its lack thereof. Any living thing viewed through it seemed to glow softly, the positive energy giving it a ghostly luminescence. Conversely, dead things registered like a film negative, appearing to be blackened by the loss of their life force. Things which had no capacity for life – rocks, metals, water, and similar inanimate objects – were ghostly grey shapes that tended to fade into the background.
While that mode of sight had various limitations – its short range being the primary one, but also its inability to detect extraordinarily weak vivacity such as those of microbes – it should have had no trouble picking up the massive Hvitdod. Whether glowing from any positive energy that it still possessed or blackened because it had lost the last of its vitality, there should have been something to see. Even if it had been some sort of artificial creation like his astral constructs, it would have been visible as a dim gray form.
But instead there was nothing.
Concerned, Lex cycled through several different modes of vision, all of them registering Hvitdod’s presence without any issues. It was only that one which couldn’t pick him up, though a quick check confirmed that he was able to see the life force of himself and his elementals – despite being extraplanar entities they were still alive, Solvei’s cryomancy having turned the falling ice into bodies suitable for them to temporarily inhabit, bringing with them the necessary positive energy – without any issues.
“Circle the area,” murmured Lex, a sense of unease running down his spine as he realized that he couldn’t confirm that Hvitdod was dead, despite its lack of reaction as the other elementals reached it and began to renew their assault. “I want to examine that dragon in detail.”
The ice pegasus obeyed wordlessly, making a slow circuit above Hvitdod, allowing Lex to confirm that the dragon’s entire body wasn’t registering to his life force spectrum. Every scale, every talon, every single inch of it was entirely-
“Stop! Land there!”
The elemental touched down immediately, and Lex stumbled as it let hm down, dimly recognizing that he was almost completely depleted. But that mattered less than what he’d just glimpsed, his vision registering a snatch of black, indicating a dead body.
But not Hvitdod’s.
Changing back to his darkvision, Lex glanced at what looked – to that form of sight – to be a particularly large mound of snow. Lying none too distant from where Hvitdod had fallen, the drift didn’t look particularly notable. The entire floor of the chasm was covered in white, capping what looked to be the same kind of rocky and uneven terrain that he and Solvei had trekked through to get there. But what he’d caught sight of just now suggested otherwise.
His horn lighting up as he used his telekinesis to brush the snow away, Lex slowly worked to clear the frozen covering from what it was concealing. The mound was quite large, and it took him several seconds to fully disperse it, revealing...
A skull.
Its eye sockets were large enough that Solvei could have climbed through them without trouble. Its teeth were the size of Princess Celestia. But it wasn’t until he noticed the ridges across the back part of the top – the remains of what could only have been a dorsal fin – that Lex realized he was looking at the skull of a dragon. The same kind of dragon as Hvitdod.
What in Tartarus...?
Was this how the dragon had reappeared, despite the adlets having sworn that their ancestor had killed it? Had he not fought Hvitdod, but some descendant of that ancient dragon?
It was the most obvious theory, but it didn’t answer why this dragon’s apparently long-dead body registered to his life force-vision while the one he’d killed didn’t. For that matter, neither spoke to Nenet’s cryptic statement about how Sissel and her siblings had needed to keep the weather at arctic conditions in order to confront the dragon. Or the fact that the local ecosystem had nowhere near enough food to sustain a creature of this size for any length of time, let alone to allow it to grow to such gigantic proportions-
Master, is everything alright? Solvei’s voice came as he registered a growing sense of anxiety from her. It’s suddenly gotten quiet. Is the battle over?
The question made Lex glance back at where the elementals were continuing to tear into Hvitdod’s mangled form...presuming that was the actual Hvitdod. Either way, the dragon was offering no resistance as they continued to attack it. For any other enemy it would have been overkill in the most literal sense, but between being unable to directly confirm its death and now the mystery of another dragon’s skull being there – and given how there were a large number of snow-covered mounds behind it, the rest of the skeleton was likely present as well – Lex wasn’t about to take any chances.
“Focus on removing its head,” he snapped. “Once it’s been decapitated, move it away from the body.”
The elementals immediately moved to obey, directing their attacks at the area right behind Hvitdod’s cranium. There was already significant damage there, and Lex could tell that it wouldn’t take them very long to complete their task. Satisfied, he turned his attention back to Solvei. It’s over. I’m currently in the process of securing the area. As soon as I’m done, I’ll summon you and heal your wounds.
Solvei didn’t seem to hear that last part, her disposition immediately changing to one of elation. Incredible! Master, that’s incredible! Do you have any idea how incredible this is?! Hvitdod was a force of nature! No, a force BEYOND nature! Aselu only overcame him because all of the spirits – all of them! – gifted him with incredible powers! And he still died of his wounds when the battle was over!
He didn’t have the Night Mare’s blessing, replied Lex, glancing at Belligerence before looking at where the ice pegasus was patiently waiting for further instructions. And he didn’t have you.
Master...
“ତୁମକୁ ଅଭିଶାପ ଦିଅ!!!”
The strength left Lex’s body all at once, knocked to the ground as much from the sheer volume of the enraged scream that shook the chasm as from the sudden cold that gripped him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registered that voice he’d heard was Hvitdod’s, that it was still alive, and had actually spoken something rather than simply roaring at him.
But he couldn’t translate that awareness into action, his body suddenly too numb to move. He’d cast a spell on himself specifically to safeguard his mobility, but it did nothing for him now, his muscles refusing to respond.
And a short distance away, Hvitdod was barreling toward him, mangled claws pulling it across the ground even as his elementals dangled from its neck, continuing to bite and batter and scratch at its now-visible spine. It was clear that they were only a few seconds away from fulfilling his order to behead the monster. It was equally clear that Lex didn’t have that much time, Hvitdod crossing the short distance between them as its jaws darted down toward where he was lying, helpless.
It reached him at the exact same moment that his ice pegasus did.
Even as frozen hooves scooped Lex up, Hvitdod’s jaws closed around his rescuer, filling the air with the sound of shattering ice. In an instant, the entire right half of the pegasus disintegrated, and Lex felt some sort of tugging motion for a moment before he was suddenly airborne, rising up as the elemental holding him aloft somehow managed to take flight, the stub of its right wing flapping rapidly as it tried to work in tandem with its intact left one.
That it managed to gain altitude at all was something it was able to achieve only because it wasn’t dependent on biology to survive, somehow managing to correct for its grievous injuries as it flew upward in an unsteady wobble. Below, Lex managed to glance back as another roar – this one wordless – rocked the cavern...only to stop abruptly as Hvitdod’s head fell from its body.
Then the dragon exploded.
The rush of cold that erupted from its body could have almost been another instance of its breath weapon, except that from his vantage point, Lex could see it erupt from the length of Hvitdod’s body. The dragon was destroyed utterly in the blast, not so much vaporized as much as it looked like it was consumed by the final attack. It enveloped everything around it in ice, swallowing the elementals in a massive shockwave that flung them away from it like snowflakes in a blizzard.
Then that last blast struck what was left of his pegasus, and Lex clenched his teeth as he felt it wash over him. The strength of it pushed what remained of his last elemental upward, and it was with a dimming consciousness that Lex realized that – just like his astral construct had – it was using its body to shield him, riding the blast upward to try and get them clear.
He must have blacked out for a moment, because the next thing he knew they were above the edge of the abyss, careening at an angle as the pegasus lost its grip on him...
And that was when Lex realized that his tail was gone, Hvitdod’s jaws having taken everything above the base of it, leaving only a cold covering of bloody ice to stop the bleeding.
Somehow, what was left of his tail felt even colder than the rest of him.
Then he started to fall...
And was caught by a serac.
Master!
It dimly occurred to Lex that Solvei looked almost as bad as him, a spear piercing her straight through. That she was able to stand at all was likely only because Yotimo was helping her, saying something to her as she directed the ice shelf to bring him closer.
Whatever it was seemed to upset her, because she tried to push him away, not having the strength to succeed even as she tried to limp toward him. Master! Please, give me the power to heal you! Hurry!
Even thinking a response seemed like too much effort at that moment, and raising his foreleg was completely out of the question. But somehow, he managed to rally his thoughts as he managed to force the word past his frozen lips. “H-h-heal...i-i-ing....”
Immediately, Solvei put her hand to his chest...and for an instant, Lex felt the stinging cold start to abate.
But only for a moment.
Then it grew worse.
Her eyes widening, Solvei glanced further down his body, and Lex registered terror coming from her then. “It’s not working!” she shrieked. “Why isn’t it working?!”
“It’s Hvitdod’s poison,” murmured Yotimo. “That’s what killed Aselu.”
That couldn’t be right, Lex knew. He was immune to poison now, thanks to his new physiology. There was no way...
Except, when he somehow managed to turn his eyes downward, he saw that there were black lines spreading beneath his fur. Even as he watched, they stretched through his body, bringing with them unbearable cold, and he dimly realized that he was watching his own blood vessels freeze.
If Hvitdod could freeze even creatures of intrinsic cold, it could apparently poison creatures that were immune to poison also.
Cure...poison... But he couldn’t verbalize the thought, catching Solvei’s mismatched eyes even as the venom spread across his chest, up his neck, and toward his brain. Have...to...
Then the cold consumed him.
Yotimo watched as the twisted pony's breathing stopped, his eyes losing their luster as they stared upward, unseeing. It was a sight that he'd seen many times over his life, one which had never gotten easier no matter how often he'd witnessed it.
"May his goddess honor him," he murmured, not knowing what else to say. Although this was the pony whose appearance had heralded disaster, he couldn't overlook the fact that he'd also fought to save his son, as well as the other warriors under his command. And if what Akna had said before was true, he'd actually defeated Hvitdod, just as Aselu once did.
Lex Legis had earned the right be treated with dignity in death.
"Akna, would you-, Akna?! AKNA!!!"
But the shaman couldn't hear him anymore either, slumped over the pony she'd called her master with the same glassy look in her eyes.
Yotimo’s horrified yell was answered by a chorus of anxious shouts from Toklo and the others. He could already hear Ujurak calling his name, wanting to know what was happening. But he couldn’t afford to answer them right now, knowing that in their hobbled condition they were in no position to help. Instead, he threw himself down to so that he was at Akna’s side-
And that action saved his life, as a thin green beam sailed over his head, impacting a nearby fragment of frozen cloud harmlessly.
The near-miss brought a growl of surprise to Yotimo’s lips, the sound coming out even as he dove to the side, a lifetime’s worth of training kicking in as he threw himself into a nearby culvert. It wasn’t very deep; even crouching down, it barely got to his waist. But he knew it was better than nothing, muscles tense and prepared to leap again as he looked at where the viridian ray had come from.
What he caught sight of was a large dog, one with a single rheumy green eye and an oily-looking black coat, the sight marred only by a bloody, unhealed wound in the center of its chest. But no sooner had he taken in the sight than the ugly creature seemed to blur, its features becoming indistinct and impossible to make out, before its image solidified again, reforming into the familiar shape of a bald human in dark armor, grimacing as he put a hand to his midsection, where a matching wound was visible.
Paska.
“Can’t believe I missed,” grimaced the human – or whatever he was – wincing as he pressed a hand to where Lex’s quill had pierced his abdomen.
Yotimo didn’t bother making a retort, instead snarling as he broke into a charge, rushing toward Paska as fast as he could.
“The best way to save a friend is to kill an enemy” was a saying that all adlet warriors learned during their training. It meant that, if someone was injured during a fight, you were supposed to ignore them – no matter how badly they were hurt or how much they needed help – until your foes were all dead or routed. Otherwise, you were simply giving your enemy a chance to keep killing your people.
That wasn’t something that Paska – who had abducted, hobbled, and terrorized Toklo and so many others – could be allowed to have.
Yotimo could already see Paska’s stance shifting, preparing to sidestep his charge. But this wasn’t like when Yotimo had rushed him several minutes ago, when he’d been out of his mind with worry over his son. Toklo was safe now – injured and badly shaken, but safe – as were the rest of his warriors, with Sissel, Grisela, Vidrig, and even Hvitdod no longer able to threaten them.
And with that cloud of worry no longer hanging over his thoughts, Yotimo found it easier to keep himself centered.
He wouldn’t make the same mistakes he had before.
It was with that thought in mind that he called upon the gifts of the spirits that all adlets were given, calling down a hailstorm just as he reached Paska.
He had just enough time to see the human’s eyes widen as accompanying rush of sleet and snow filled the area, blown by freezing winds that hadn’t been present a second ago, and then the fist-sized ice crystals slammed into them both.
The first round of hail caught Paska full in the face, causing him to let out a pained grunt as he stumbled backward. Yotimo immediately moved to capitalize on the opening, only to waver as two large chunks of ice struck his back, making him falter.
The result was that it was Paska who moved in then, interlocking his fingers as he brought both fists around in a heavy swing aimed right at Yotimo’s jaw.
Exhausted, emotionally drained, and injured, Yotimo had no chance of avoiding the blow...or at least, he wouldn’t have normally. But the ground was already becoming slick under the magical blizzard that he’d conjured, and Yotimo – who had spent his entire life fighting in the cold – used that to his advantage now. All it took was a miniscule shifting of his weight to make one of his legs give out from under him, sliding on the ice that was already forming beneath their feet, and he went down on one knee, Paska’s fists sailing over his head.
It was with a heavy dose of satisfaction that Yotimo’s fist then shot out to hit Paska right where Lex had skewered him.
“AUGH!” Despite his supernatural endurance, Paska couldn’t hold back a cry of pain at that, giving ground even as more hailstones pelleted him, raising his arms in a feeble attempt to defend himself.
The hail was already tapering off, but the freezing rain continued unabated, and it took Yotimo a half-second to recover his footing. But as soon as he did, he lunged, slamming into Paska and knocking both of them to the ground. Rolling over, Yotimo grit his teeth as the bald man slammed his head into his muzzle, and the elder adlet could taste blood in his mouth. But he accepted the hits in exchange for being able to deliver more of his own, bringing his elbow around to smash into the side of Paska’s head.
The strike sent Paska rolling, but he didn’t relinquish his hold, pulling Yotimo along with him as the two of them went tumbling over the uneven, slickened ground. Neither gave the other the slightest reprieve, lashing out with fists, knees, and even teeth as they wailed on each other.
But as battered as the two of them were, Paska’s wound gave him a weak point that made all the difference, Yotimo finally managing to draw his legs up between them and kicking out with both feet.
Paska wasn’t even able to howl as Yotimo’s feet hit him right where it hurt most, his eyes bulging as he crumpled, knocked away from Yotimo and landing flat on his back. The adlet, having come down on his side, hurried to his feet, knowing that Paska’s defenses were completely down now. If he could just get in close before he recovered...!
But he hadn’t quite gotten back up when a heavy fog blanketed the area, followed immediately by a low shuffling sound that could only have been Paska getting back up.
Forcing down a growl of frustration at having lost his chance, Yotimo focused on being as quiet as possible, moving toward where he’d just seen Paska. Being able to summon mist was another power that adlets all had – though apparently Paska could do it too – and they’d all been taught from a young age the basics of fighting in poor visibility.
That included relying on their nose when they couldn’t use their eyes.
And even with the driving sleet that Yotimo had called down, that last strike had left the smell of Paska’s blood quite thick in the air.
His nose twitching, Yotimo loped forward softly, picking his way across the uneven ground as quickly as he could, letting the scent of blood guide him. It grew stronger as he hurried forward, pressing through the fog to find...
Paska’s discarded armor.
Realizing too late that he’d been duped, Yotimo tried to whirl around, only for something to hit him hard from behind, sending him sprawling as he went down onto his belly and a heavy weight settled atop him.
Before he could even think about getting up, a heavy blow to the back of his skull left him seeing stars. His head was still ringing when a second one struck right after the first, and it vaguely occurred to him that Paska had to have picked up a rock or an ice chunk or something similar, and that in another few seconds he’d cave his skull in.
Thrashing accomplished nothing, nor was Yotimo able to even begin trying to turn himself over before a third strike made his vision blur. Groping blindly, he felt something long and thin under his fingers, and he dimly realized that it had to be Bloodletter; their fight had apparently having carried them back over to where Lex and Akna had fallen.
Silently offering an apology to the shaman, Yotimo curled his hand around the spear and lifted it up, intending to strike blindly over his shoulder...only for agony to rip through him as his hand was suddenly impaled several times over, Bloodletter having somehow grown barbs.
Yotimo had just enough time to realize that he’d made a mistake, that this wasn’t Bloodletter at all.
All of a sudden new pain erupted across the back of his head, so horrific that it blotted out even what had happened to his hand.
Then he knew no more.
Paska grunted as he lifted up the heavy slab of ice again, not intending to stop until the two-legged wolf’s head was completely pulped, but a sudden spasm of pain in his sternum robbed him of the last of his strength, and he dropped the frozen bludgeon before slumping over, panting for breath.
He wasn’t the only one, as he could still hear the old adlet breathing weakly, eyes closed as his head lay in a pool of his own blood, much of it coming from where that giant quill of Lex’s was piercing his hand. Nearby, the sounds of panicked yelling broadcast that the others knew that something had happened to their leader, but didn’t know what. It was enough to make Paska thankful that he’d taken the time to hobble them, instead of simply trusting that Sissel’s curse and a few bindings would be enough. There was no way they’d be able to crawl over the broken terrain to see what had become of their commander.
Still, if Grisela’s plaything is here that means that Sissel and the others are probably dead.
The thought didn’t sadden him in the slightest; rather, it filled him with a sense of disdain. Sissel had always considered herself to be one of the smartest of Mother’s children, and she wasn’t wrong about that. But her intelligence, along with her considerable power, meant that she’d never been in a high-pressure situation; the kind where you had to make split-second decisions in the heat of the moment.
Those situations weren’t something that intelligence alone – or raw power – could extricate you from, he knew. Only experience could do that, and Sissel had been woefully lacking in that department.
That wasn’t entirely her fault, of course; all of Mother’s children were only a few months old at most, her magic having accelerated their gestation and growth. But even so, how they’d spent that time counted for a lot. Paska had chosen to spend it putting his skills into practice as much as possible. Sissel, on the other hand, had prioritized magic over pragmatism, giving the latter less attention than the former, and had now reaped the rewards for doing so.
The fact that she’d slain Lex Legis’s familiar during their last battle, despite knowing that he’d need all the allies he could get to challenge Hvitdod, had made her inexperience clear. And from the look of things, she’d made the same mistake again now, letting herself be drawn into a fight with the pony she was trying to manipulate. That, despite having correctly identified him as someone who could potentially overcome Hvitdod, a dragon who was stronger than all of them put togeth-
Paska.
The voice that slid across his mind then made his breath catch in his throat. It was one that he knew quite well, after all, having heard it his entire life. “Mother! You’re back?!”
I just returned. So you can imagine my surprise when, rather than having everything ready to go like I expected, our entire base is deserted except for a few of Grisela’s tasteless puppets! Have you not gotten Hvitdod’s death curse yet?!
The question made Paska cringe, glancing around. The sleet storm that the old adlet had summoned was already pushing the fog cloud he’d made away, and he could see what looked like Lex Legis’s body nearby. “Almost. I-”
Almost isn’t good enough! The scourge that dragon lays upon whoever slays it is the final component for the artifact I’m building, Paska! I already did the hard part getting everything else ready; you and Sissel had the easiest task in all this, and you’ve only gotten it ‘almost’ done?!
Paska bit his lip, momentarily weighing whether or not to tell her the truth, before deciding that there was no hiding it. At least this way he was able to report it while outside of Mother’s immediate reach. “Sissel’s dead.”
WHAT?!
“So’s Grisela, and Vidrig, and Blat. I think Nenet might still be alive, but if she is she’s been captured-”
What do you mean ‘captured’?! What have you idiots been doing while I was gone?!
Deciding to focus more on the results than on the process, Paska fought down a groan of pain as he got to his feet, stumbling toward Lex’s body. “We got a patsy to kill Hvitdod for us. The dragon hexed him right before it died, and then he kicked the bucket right after. Just open up a portal, and I’ll drag his cursed carcass through.”
I can’t open up a portal, you dimwit! I used the last planar transportation spell I had getting back here! And I can’t send any reinforcements to pick you up, either, since no one else survived!
That was enough to give Paska pause. Mother had a large number of children, most of which she’d taken with her on her final outing, needing all the fighting power she could get. While he’d known that they’d be facing an uphill battle – and so had been more than happy to sit it out – the idea that his brothers and sisters had been slaughtered to the last was disturbing. “They’re all dead? Every single one of them?”
Yes, including my other spellbooks! Even those daemon mercenaries were all killed! Useless, every last one of them!
Letting out a slow breath, Paska considered his options. “Alright. I’ll grab this guy’s corpse and hike back. It should only take a few days-”
We don’t have a few days, Paska! Do you not understand that I had to injure a demigod – an actual demigod, not some planar pretender with an inflated ego – to get this?! That isn’t something they’re going to just let go, which means I need to get this finished before they track me down!
“Then what do you want me to do?”
I have enough magic left to teleport a single person back here, along with anything they’re carrying. But there’s a weight limit for the latter, and it’s not very large. You said Hvitdod’s killer is dead?
Paska paused at that, glancing down at Lex’s body. The mutated pony was staring at nothing, absolutely still. It didn’t escape Paska’s notice how, when a snowflake from the nearby hailstorm landed on his body, it didn’t melt. “He’s dead.”
The curse should have suffused his entire body, which means I’ll be able to make do with just a portion of it.
“You want me to chop a piece of him off?” The question made Paska slump in place, not because he found the task particularly gruesome, but because he didn’t have any sort of blade on him.
Pick a body part that’s substantial, but lightweight. And do it fast! Time is of the essence!
“Yes, Mother.”
Glancing around, his eyes paused as they settled on the spear lodged in the female adlet’s body, itself slumped over Lex’s. Paska had no idea if she was dead or just on the verge of dying, and he didn’t particularly care; right now, getting this done was the priority, if only so Mother would get him out of here before something else went wrong. Speaking of which...
“You know,” he mentioned as he kicked the she-wolf over, wrenching the spear out of her chest, “if you only have one teleportation spell, and Nenet’s captured-”
Then I won’t be able to replenish my spells until I can get her back. I’m aware. But if whoever has her is keeping her prisoner, it’s probably because they’ve realized that she’s a goldmine of spells. So long as she doesn’t do anything stupid and get herself killed, I’ll recover her eventually.
The callous comment brought a smirk to Paska’s lips as he turned Lex’s body over. “She still thinks her father was another sphinx, you know.”
Good. As long as I can keep dangling that in front of her, it makes her easy to control. Now hurry up!
“Right, right...”
Without any further complaints, Paska pushed Lex’s cloak to the side and parted his robes before cutting into the mutated pony’s body.
The work was slow going. The spear’s tip had a slight edge on it, but it wasn’t meant for slicing things. Worse, Lex’s hide was unnaturally tough; even in death it was difficult to carve. And the spear kept giving him some sort of feedback, causing Paska to bite his lip as he felt smaller cuts open up across his back as he worked.
Fortunately, what he was looking for wasn’t too deep, and before much time had passed, he’d made all of the necessary incisions.
Then he reached in and tore out Lex’s spinal column.
The bones came free with a gory series of snaps, held together by nerves and ligaments as he took everything between the base of the skull and the pelvis. Sighing, Paska sat back, his wounds on fire from all of the exertion. “Finally.”
Are you done yet?
Paska almost said yes, but paused, glancing back at Lex’s mutilated corpse. Butchering someone’s body was one of the easiest ways to impair resurrection magic, and while he’d done a number on the pony’s body, it couldn’t hurt to be extra safe.
Besides, he owed him for shoving that quill through his guts.
Throwing the spear to the side, Paska reached down and grabbed Lex’s body by its horn. Grunting as he dragged the corpse – which was surprisingly heavy – to the edge of the abyss, he paused just long enough to catch his breath before flinging it over the side, watching as Lex’s remains vanished into the massive chasm.
Pausing just long enough to spit into the hole, Paska gave a satisfied nod. “It’s done, Mother. I’m ready when you are.”
She didn’t reply, but he felt her magic wrap around him, and a moment later he vanished.
He’d known what would happen to him in the afterlife. The Night Mare had made the fate of his soul abundantly clear when he’d formally contracted with her back on Equestria, and he’d gotten a glimpse of its final destination during his recent journey to Darkest Night. So it wouldn’t have surprised him to find himself in that lightless realm again upon opening his eyes.
But even at a glance, Lex knew that he wasn’t in any part of the Night Mare’s realm.
The silvery illumination all around him made that very clear.
A soft argent in hue, the void – for lack of a better word – spread out around him in every direction. Including below him, he confirmed with a glance down, revealing that he was floating in place. Though “floating” didn’t feel like the right term. There was no sense of pushing against gravity, but at the same time no feeling of weightlessness either. It was as though he was standing on solid ground...except without the ground.
Nor, he realized, was the void around him empty. Peering into the distance, he could dimly make out pinpoints of color against the dull background. Turquoise, mauve, chartreuse, amaranth, and countless others, all speckling the silver in no pattern that he could determine. It was almost like looking at some bizarre parody of the night sky, save for the fact that none of the prismatic “stars” were twinkling.
Still, it was enough to make Lex question if he’d been hasty in assuming that he’d lost his life to Hvitdod’s poison. Indeed, the fact that he could remember what had happened to him – the overwhelming cold spreading through him, and his inability to do anything about it – attested to his survival, since he knew that the spirits of the dead lost their memories of their mortal lives. Had he somehow managed to survive the dragon’s final attack?
But he couldn’t bring himself to put any faith in that idea.
After all, he hadn’t taken a breath – nor felt any urge to do so – in the time since he’d regained consciousness.
Nor, upon putting a claw to his throat, could he feel a pulse.
And while his wounds had all vanished, along with his clothes and gear – save for the barbed wire around his left leg – that only furthered the idea that he was some sort of spiritual incarnation now, similar to how he’d left his body upon entering the Confluence. Except this time, he noted as he glanced at his back, there was no lifeline indicating a way back to his body.
And while his missing foreleg and tail were restored, the fact that they’d been returned at the cost of his life was no comfort to Lex at all.
It had finally happened. After triumphing over so many enemies, and managing to survive those few he couldn’t overcome, he’d met his match at last.
Hvitdod had killed him.
The thought sent a wave of bitterness through him. Only a short while ago, he’d been prepared to give up on his life, sinking into despair after learning the truth about how empty his dream of understanding others was. But he’d overcome that, renewing his dedication to bettering Equestria, a goal that he’d never achieve now!
Intellectually, Lex knew that death didn’t have to be the end. Resurrection magic was arguably the pinnacle of what Everglow’s magical development had achieved. Princess Cadance had, through her faith in one of that world’s lesser deities, been granted the power to bring the dead back to life. He himself had been given that power, albeit via a magic item, by the Night Mare. There was no reason why that same magic couldn’t be used to bring him back.
But that won’t happen, he knew.
Just because a possibility existed didn’t mean that it would ever be actualized. Having examined the one and only resurrection spell the Night Mare had given him, Lex knew that it was an exceptionally complex piece of magic, the sort that only a caster of prodigious power could make use of. Moreover, it was the exclusive domain of divine spellcasters, meaning that whosoever received such a spell would be predisposed to use it in a manner that benefitted their god’s interests.
But there was no one who fit that intersection of ability and desire. At least not when it came to bringing him back to life.
Lex knew that there were ponies back on Equestria who’d resurrect him if they could. For all the false starts that he’d had to deal with, he’d managed to set up a fledgling government back on Equestria, one which had ponies who’d approved of his rule, and a small number of which who had begun receiving spells from the Night Mare. But unless a few of them turned out to be magical prodigies on par with himself or Twilight Sparkle, it would take them a lifetime to gain sufficient power to handle a resurrection spell...and it was far more likely that they never would.
As for those who already had such power, Lex could count the ones he knew on one claw and have talons to spare.
Princess Cadance, from what Garden Gate had told him, needed an intact body to be brought before her in order to bring someone back, and could only do so a few days after they’d died. And given that she was one of the alicorns whose political dominion he’d aligned himself against – and that she’d once been menaced by the unicorn tyrant whose horn he’d grafted onto himself – likely meant that even in the unlikely circumstance that his corpse was somehow dragged in front of her in the next few days, she’d refuse to revive him.
Queen Iliana, the ruler of Everglow’s Pony Empire, doubtlessly had someone at her disposal who could use divine magic. But Lex had never met her, and found it doubtful in the extreme that she’d ever even heard of him, making the question of her resurrecting him moot. Not knowing that someone had died was one thing; not knowing who they were in the first place was quite another.
Sanguine Disposition might have been able to bring him back – even if he didn’t have divine magic at his disposal, the ability to bend reality with pure spellcraft the way he had made it hard to imagine that he couldn’t use that same spell to restore the dead to true life – but Lex couldn’t see the vampire agreeing even if he had that power. Kara’s so-called blessing might have made the leatherwing partial to him, but it had been in a possessive manner, trying to lure him into staying in Eigengrau so as to tip the balance of power in his own favor against Steel Soul. Even if the bloodsucker possessed the means to revive him, he had much more to gain by not doing so.
Which left no one.
His death wouldn’t be undone, leaving his life’s work unfinished, his enemies triumphant, and his accomplishments waiting to be dismantled. Equestria would return to the path of slow stagnation that Celestia had charted for it. The ponies there who’d put their faith in him would be punished. Sissel’s mysterious mother would complete whatever plans she’d had which required Hvitdod dead. Thermal Draft’s soul would be completely destroyed. And Solvei-
Master!
As though his thought had summoned her, Solvei’s voice suddenly appeared in his mind. It was so unexpected that Lex whirled in place, though that came with no sense of dizziness even as the colored spots spun wildly against the silvery background. Lex ignored it, his attention turned entirely toward the awareness of Solvei that was now at the forefront of his thoughts; had she not been in his thoughts until he’d thought of her just now, or had his death and mysterious afterlife left him so disoriented that he hadn’t noticed her?
It was a question that he didn’t even consciously register, however, as he instead reacted on impulse, calling her to his side-
And then she appeared.
Like himself, she was completely naked, and if there was any significance to the fact that she was in her adlet form rather than her winter wolf body he didn’t know what it was. Nor did he care, as her presence sent a wave of relief through him. He knew it shouldn’t have; that her being here not only meant that she’d died, but that she was the one and only being who would have strived to bring him back...but at the moment none of that mattered.
All that mattered was that she was there with him.
“Master!” Throwing her arms around him, she pulled him to her chest, and Lex returned the embrace, holding her close. “I was so worried!” she wailed. “Hvitdod’s poison was spreading and I didn’t know what to do! And then you went still and I...I...um...”
Her grip on him slackened as he registered her relief turning into confusion. “I...can’t remember what happened after that. The next thing I knew, you were calling for me, and then I was here...” She paused then, turning her mismatched eyes toward the bizarre scenery. “...wherever ‘here’ is.”
“The Astral Plane,” murmured Lex, slowly releasing her. “I’m not certain that’s where we are, but this place matches the description for the Astral Plane given in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation.”
“Oh.” Lex registered only a minor lessening of her bewilderment, which wasn’t surprising given that he’d shared only a little of that tome’s contents with her, having been too busy with other projects. “Does that...I mean...are we...?”
Dead. Yes. And we should switch to telepathy just in case. The book spoke about this plane extensively, but it didn’t mention how far sound traveled.
R-right. Now it was nervousness that filled her mind. But if we’re dead, how come we aren’t in Darkest-, AHH! Why am I naked?!
Embarrassment came from her even as she crossed her arms over her chest, bringing her legs up and curling her tail between them in mortification. What does the afterlife have against me wearing clothes?! she mentally yelped as she turned into a winter wolf.
And if Lex had been capable of breathing, he’d have gasped at that. Solvei, what did you just do?!
She blinked at him, still curled up. Huh? Nothing! I mean, I covered myself, but besides that-
No! You changed forms!
Solvei blinked. I did? Looking down at herself, she slowly untensed, more comfortable with her nudity in her quadrupedal incarnation. Huh, that’s strange. I usually have to deliberately try to do that in order to make it happen.
Change back, demanded Lex.
A renewed sense of embarrassment came from her then. But...
Just do it!
She nodded once...only to finish changing back into an adlet before she’d completed the gesture. Again she moved to cover herself, but Lex didn’t care, swearing softly. Something’s wrong. I'm not sensing any magic when you change!
That was enough to make her head tilt to the side. But that doesn’t make any sense! The Night Mare gave me the power to change back and forth like this, but it’s still magical!
Lex, however, wasn’t listening. Instead he concentrated on using his dark magic, trying to turn into a shadow.
Nothing happened.
It was like his dark magic had vanished completely. There was no sense of it being depleted or suppressed; it was like his respiration and heartbeat, simply absent.
With a growing sense of unease, Lex turned his attention toward his mental catalogue of spells...only to find that he had none. All of the knowledge was still there, of course, but for the first time in years there wasn’t a single prepared spell at the ready, his mind completely devoid of the conceptual architecture that represented his strongest magic. And the same was true for the allotment of divine spells that the Night Mare had given him, he confirmed a moment later.
For a moment he held out hope that he could still use the Charismata, pointing his left fore-claw at Solvei. “Cryomancy,” he murmured, trying to grant her the power to manipulate the cold again.
Unlike before, he could feel that the goddess’s power was still there...but it didn’t respond to his command, instead simply lying dormant. But while that wasn’t a complete surprise – that power, like his magic, required a body (whether corporeal or not) to channel it through – it was disappointing nonetheless.
It was almost as an afterthought when he tried to personally use the cryomancy that Solvei had so recently given him, unable to bring himself to be surprised when it didn’t work. Still, he knew he had to exhaust every possibility, just to be sure. Are you able to use any magic?
The question made Solvei – now back in her wolf form again – blink, before she concentrated for a moment. But the only effect was that Lex registered anxiety from her a second later. I can’t! I don’t understand, I can’t make anything cold...or change size...or take to the wind...or anything! Master, what’s happening?!
Exactly what it seems like, answered Lex grimly. Dying has apparently stripped us of our magic.
But I still switch back and forth between being an adlet and an utvalgte!
Had he been breathing, Lex would have sighed. I’m guessing that has something to do with you being two souls merged into one. We don’t have physical bodies here, so the way we look must be...some sort of inner reflection of who we are, or how we see ourselves, or something... Though that carried some notable implications for why he was still in his new body.
Of course, there was no way of knowing what those implications were, or how important they were in this circumstance, which caused Lex to silently curse the anonymous author of the Libram of Ineffable Damnation. The treatise had gone into the nature of the soul and its progression after death in great detail, but subtler aspects such as this hadn’t been mentioned!
For that matter, the book hadn’t said anything about souls becoming waylaid in the Astral Plane like this.
Does this have anything to do with why we’re not in Darkest Night?
Lex shook his head in response to Solvei’s question. I don’t know. According to what I read, the Astral Plane is the bridge between the mortal world and the Outer Realms, where souls go after they die. But the Libram of Ineffable Damnation and the Night Mare herself made it sound like my soul would be drawn through this plane and to her realm of its own accord. Not...stranded like this.
He didn’t mention that the trip through the Astral Plane was supposed to filter out the soul’s memories of their mortal life. That was a loss he found himself dreading, even more so than their being deprived of their magic, and given that Solvei was already nervous, adding to her worries would have been counterproductive. Presumably your soul is here with me because of our connection, but beyond that, I’m not sure what’s happening.
This is kind of like when I died before, and was following you around as a spirit, murmured Solvei, her worry slowly ebbing as she glanced around the color-dotted space again. I know it’s not exactly the same, but it was like being...stuck, you know?
Lex didn’t answer, focusing instead on the hued points in the distance. According to the Libram, those were “color pools,” natural portals which led from the Astral to one of the myriad planes of existence that it touched. The only problem was that the vast majority of those portals were one-way only, and even a light touch would send you through completely; you couldn’t simply stick your head through to check out the other side and then pull it back.
Worse, there was no telling what was on the other side of any particular color pool. Supposedly the chromatic value of a given pool indicated where it led, but the Libram’s author had termed that idea more folklore than fact. More than that, each color pool was only visible from one side; the reverse was completely transparent, which meant that traveling through the Astral Plane – which was apparently done by thought rather than locomotion – was extremely hazardous, since it was entirely possible to slip through a color pool and head to a random plane without meaning to.
Of course, his ability to alter his vision meant that he likely would have been able to find a way around that problem, at least...but he no longer possessed that power.
Or any other power, now.
Master, what are we going to do?
The only thing we can do: wait.
Wait? For what?
Lex raised his left foreleg, showing her that the wire was still wrapped around it. The Night Mare is a goddess of loyalty. She won’t allow her faithful to remain stranded like this. Especially one in possession of one of her most potent blessings.
Solvei gave a hesitant nod. I hope she gets here soon. I don’t like this place. Everything here feels...exposed. How big is the Astral Plane supposed to be?
It’s a plane of existence. A universe unto itself.
So pretty big then?
The question reminded him of Sonata for some reason, and despite his heart not beating, Lex felt an ache in his chest. If Sonata, as well as Aria and Nosey, were still alive, he’d never see them again. And if they weren’t, then it was the same; they hadn’t worshiped the Night Mare, and so wouldn’t go to Darkest Night. One way or another, they had just joined the list of people he cared about who were lost to him forev-
Master! Look!
Turning in place, Lex turned his attention toward Solvei, who was staring out into the void. Following her gaze, it took Lex only a moment to see what had captured her attention:
There was a figure approaching.
A moment later, Lex corrected his initial impression.
There were multiple figures approaching.
Despite how clear the plane seemed, the shapes were hazy, as though there was some sort of invisible fog bank blurring their features. But they were slowly resolving themselves, and Lex could see that they were four-legged in shape. The size was impossible to determine, as there was no appreciable depth to compare them to, and their details were still obscured, but the closer they got, the more he could see of them. Just a little closer...
Then he was able to see their faces.
Besides him, Solvei growled softly. They’re not with the Night Mare, are they?
No, answered Lex as he raised his claws. They’re not.
Finding himself adrift in the Astral Plane and without his powers, Lex would have expected to feel relief – or at least slightly less tension – at encountering other ponies there.
But the equine figures who emerged from the silvery gloom only made his anxiety rise, for good reason:
The three ponies in front of him now were all dead.
The leftmost one was near-totally skeletal in appearance, its bones clad in a shriveled gray coating that was all that was left of its flesh. Thin wisps of its mane clung to its skull, and the tattered remains of a robe hid most of its torso. The only other notable features were the pinpoints of green light which burned in its empty eye sockets...and which were trained directly on him.
The rightmost pony, by contrast, was nowhere near as decayed. A zebra mare, she wore little more than a loose skirt and several bangles, displaying a figure that was lithe but muscled. Her mane was cut short, as was her tail, and a rather odd-looking sword – the back of the blade was straight, while its cutting edge bulged out near the tip – was held in a loose strap at her side. But all of that was less notable than the fact that she was entirely transparent, including her clothing and equipment, looking like the popular conception of a ghost.
In between them was a third pony corpse, though with its face completely covered by a golden death-mask, it was the least obviously deceased. Even so, it wasn’t too hard to tell that it was no longer among the living, with faded linen wrappings clinging to its body so tightly as to reveal a figure that was beyond emaciated. With a thin shroud girding its loins, it could have been either a mare or a stallion, and only the fact that its head turned to look at him revealed that it was animate.
The sight of the trio filled Lex with visceral loathing, recalling the horde of ghouls that had infested Vanhoover. These three had been living ponies once, but now they were twisted parodies of themselves, turned into foul mockeries of everything ponykind stood for. The sight made Lex bare his teeth in a snarl as he flexed his claws.
Undead.
Next to him, Solvei gave a shudder. My grandmother told me stories about the living dead, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen them. I mean, I know Sanguine Disposition was one, but...not like this.
Before Lex could answer, the ghostly mare made her move.
Floating closer, she stopped at a distance that might have been a few dozen feet away, though the featureless nature of the plane made it hard to tell for certain. Her transparent eyes flickered to Solvei for just a moment before looking back at Lex. Slowly, she reached up and took one of the bangles from around her neck, one that looked like a house made out of small bones – four of them forming a box while two on top made a triangle – and held it out toward Lex.
“I am Abila of the Tribe of Bones,” she announced. “And I would speak gently with you.”
No sooner had she finished than the robed skeleton floated closer, and Lex belatedly noticed that it was carrying an identical talisman, repeating its comrade’s gesture as it held the bones forth. “I am Oku of the Tribe of Bones,” he said – for the voice was masculine in timbre – “and I would speak gently with you.”
The third one floated forward then, moving so that it was again between the other two, and presented a third instance of the same icon. “I am Babanla of the Tribe of Bones,” they rasped, in a toneless whisper that, like their appearance, made their sex impossible to determine, “and I would speak gently with you.”
Lex grimaced. He’d never heard of any “tribe of bones.” Moreover, despite what sounded like statements declaring their lack of hostile intent, he couldn’t help but recall Xiriel, the devil also having spoken in three voices that were masculine, feminine, and neither in tenor. Bad enough that these ponies were undead, but to be so reminiscent of that monster as well...
Master, I think they’re waiting for a response, noted Solvei, though her disposition was still that of marked caution.
He nodded once, but didn’t take his eyes off of the group in front of him. As much as he wanted to tell these three exactly how little regard he had for the living dead, he knew he couldn’t afford to instigate a fight here. Not when he and Solvei were both completely unable to use any magic.
“I am Lex Legis,” he replied at last, raising his left foreleg to show them the barbed wire wrapped around it, “champion of the Night Mare, and this is my servant, Solvei.” He gestured toward the winter wolf, who inclined her head at the introduction. “If you take no hostile action, then we will do the same. But if you do...”
He didn’t finish that last part, trusting that the message was clear. A fight in their current condition wasn’t one he could imagine himself and Solvei winning, but projecting strength was far better than advertising weakness!
“We have no wish to cause harm,” murmured Oku.
“It was curiosity that brought us here,” added Babanla. “Not malice.”
“We have seen many deaths in service of our faith,” noted Abila. “But yours, Lex Legis, is unlike any that we have witnessed. We would have you tell us of it.”
Lex’s brow furrowed, confused by the spectral mare’s statement. “In service of your faith? You’re a religious order?”
The question caused the three undead to glance at each other, and Lex couldn’t help but feel irked by the gesture, irritated that even the undead could do what he couldn’t in terms of wordless communication.
“Has even the name of the Tribe of Bones been forgotten by living ponies?” whispered Babanla.
“If it was, then this too can be counted among the Defiler’s sins,” rumbled Oku.
Solvei cocked her head at that, her curiosity getting the better of her. “The Defiler?”
“The one you refer to as Iliana,” answered Abila. “She still presides as the ruler of ponies, does she not? For if she had died, we would have been there to see justice served at last.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed then. He hadn’t looked too deeply into Everglow’s history during his time there, being far more interested in its magic – as well as how to get home – but what they’d said was enough for him to recall the little that he’d studied.
“You’re part of that death cult that Iliana destroyed,” he sneered, unable to hide his derision. “The one whose eradication marked the end of her campaign of unification, and the founding of the Pony Empire.”
“The Bloody Queen did not campaign, she warred,” retorted Oku, and the green pinpoints in his eyes glowed slightly brighter. “And it was not to unify, but to subjugate.”
“When she approached us, seeking our surrender, we rebuked her for having taken so many lives,” spat Babanla, their whispering voice becoming a harsh hiss. “Even then, we gave her a chance to atone, to cleanse her spirit in the forgiveness of Soft Whisper.”
At the utterance of that name, all three touched their talismans – their holy symbols, Lex realized – to their chests, placing them so that their heart would have been inside the bone house. “But to the Defiler, this was unacceptable,” concluded Abila bitterly. “Rather than wash away the shame of so many massacres, she added to them, sending her army against us. Though we resisted her as best we were able, we were eventually overcome.”
“She sounds like the pony version of Bolverk,” murmured Solvei.
“The histories say that your tribe struck first,” broke in Lex, uncomfortable with what the trio were accusing Iliana of. “That Iliana sent messengers to negotiate a peace, and you slaughtered them and sent them back as undead monsters to plague their fellows, indicating that there would be no reconciliation.”
“The histories lie,” retorted Babanla.
“The Defiler writes herself as a hero, hoping that time will cleanse her of her sins,” continued Abila.
“But a stain of blood sets deeper by being ignored, until it becomes impossible to ever fully wash away,” pronounced Oku.
Lex frowned.
Although he’d initially been impressed by what he’d heard of the Pony Empire’s queen – being a ruler who had seized power, and put it to use rather than squandering it – Lex’s impression of her had been tarnished by how her nation had lagged behind that of Equestria in every way save for magical development. He’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, however, since Everglow was awash in other races competing for limited resources, dangerous monsters, and meddling deities. Trying to create a safe and prosperous society under those circumstances would have been extraordinarily difficult, even for him.
That Iliana had accomplished as much as she had was – according to what was considered common knowledge in the empire today – because she’d secured the blessings of the pony gods. Specifically, that she’d been favored from a young age by the Sun Queen, and had engaged in a campaign to bring the disparate fiefdoms and scattered tribes of ponies under one banner, a task she’d completed via religious assimilation.
Sanctifying herself before each group’s chosen deity, she’d assembled the various gods into a pantheon (with her own goddess as the head of it, hence the term “queen” in the Sun Queen’s name) and in so doing made their ponies into a nation. And while the process hadn’t always been peaceful – battles had needed to be waged against several groups before they’d been willing to acknowledge that Iliana had their god’s favor – it had been as bloodless as was practically possible.
But having come from a country whose rulers were celebrated for deeds that should have earned them scorn, Lex was aware that histories could be slanted in their presentation. Even so, he still found it off-putting to consider that Iliana could have engaged in the butchery these three were describing. But then, being reanimated warps the mind of the undead, which makes anything they say inherently untrustworthy.
And given that those three seemed to be particularly set on this point, it was perhaps best to change the subject, lest an argument cause the facsimile of sanity they were presenting to break down. “You said my death was unlike any other that you’ve seen. How?”
“Because even now it unravels,” whispered Babanla, floating closer.
“It is as though the universe itself rejects this course of events,” murmured Oku, moving off to the side.
Abila drifted in the opposite direction. “We must know why this this is happening. Why your death is being denied.”
Master, they’re surrounding us! Solvei’s warning was accompanied by a growl, her head twisting as she tried to keep track of all three of them.
But Lex was already reacting, taking advantage of the Astral Plane’s lack of gravity. Concentrating, he imagined himself moving, not in terms of up or down, but in terms relative to the undead ponies. The Libram of Ineffable Damnation had made it clear this plane operated in terms of cognition rather than physicality, and he pictured himself moving perpendicular to the trio, placing himself so that he was orthogonal to them rather than between them.
Once again, there was no sensation of movement, no feeling of actual motion, but all three undead – and Solvei – seemed to drop away, and Lex felt himself rotating so that he was looking at them directly rather than glancing past his claws. He had just enough time to hear Solvei’s mental yelp at suddenly finding herself alone before he summoned her to his side, the winter wolf reappearing with a sudden flailing of her legs, disoriented.
The entire process took less than two seconds, and while a portion of his mind noted that he’d successfully figured out how to navigate the plane, the bulk of his thoughts were concentrated around what he’d just been told, unable to keep a rush of hope from spreading through him. “You’re saying that I’m being brought back to life?”
“Not ‘brought back,’” corrected Abila, making no mention of his having eluded the ring they’d formed around him, rotating instead to look at him directly. “It’s more as though you never died at all.”
Oku did the same a moment later. “And yet you did, and are here, waylaid on your journey to the afterlife.”
“Tell us how you died,” repeated Babanla. “Death undone, without magic or artifice or other mortal disturbances, must be investigated to see if it offends Soft Whisper.”
Master, I don’t like this. That sounded like a threat.
It might have been. But we can’t just ignore what they’re saying about our deaths being reversed.
That made no sense, of course, and while it was just as likely that the trio of undead ponies were simply spouting nonsense as a product of their deranged minds, he couldn’t help but want to believe that they were aware of something that he wasn’t. He had never heard of a god named “Soft Whisper,” but if that was an actual deity, then perhaps they’d given these three some sort of supernatural insight that he was lacking.
Lex was quite familiar with the incredible powers that gods could endow their faithful with.
“I died fighting a dragon, known as Hvitdod,” answered Lex at last, deciding to indulge the triad. “I sustained many wounds during the battle, but the killing blow came from its poison, which felt like it froze my blood in my veins.”
“A dragon,” repeated Abila.
“Of the cold,” noted Oku.
“Named Hvitdod,” whispered Babanla.
They shared another glance, before shaking their heads. “This is not known to us-”
“But it is known to me.”
The new voice made the trio immediately cease speaking, again holding their holy symbols over their hearts as they inclined their heads reverently. “Soft Whisper,” they murmured as one.
Approaching from out of the silvery background was another pony, a zebra mare, but one that looked nothing like Abila. She was corporeal and unclad, her body showing no visible decay or other indications of having died, but to call her alive seemed almost inappropriate, for she carried the weight of incredible age.
The flesh hung from her bones, thin and wrinkled. Her unkempt mane and tail were dull gray, the color suggesting only that it had once been of a more vibrant shade without offering any hint of what their hue might have been. Even the stripes on her flank seemed to connote a sense of exhaustion, for they weren’t perfectly parallel to each other, instead overlapping in a way that was only heightened by her sagging skin.
And the image on her withered flank was the same house of bones that the trio used as a holy symbol.
But it wasn’t simply their reaction that marked the newcomer as a goddess.
Rather, it was her presence.
Even as she approached – walking, rather than floating, despite there being nothing to walk on – Lex felt a profound sense of lethargy, a feeling of exhaustion seeping through him on every level. It was every time his muscles had felt to burdened to go on, every instance when lack of sleep had made him sluggish, every sense of when futility had clogged his thoughts and he found himself wishing for some sort of undefinable surcease.
Had there been a ground beneath his claws, Lex knew he’d have been sprawled on it, all energy deserting him in an instant. As it was, he couldn’t seem to work up the resolve to even feel alarmed by what was happening. Nor did the beast within him offer any assistance; it had no frame of reference to react to what had happened before, but tiredness was something it was familiar with, and its response was to indulge in that feeling so long as there was no immediate threat.
S-Solvei...
Even forming the thought seemed to take an extraordinary amount of effort, and had he needed to breathe Lex knew it would have left him gasping for air. No, even breathing hard would have been more effort than he was capable of at the moment, given how hard it had been to even form a concrete thought.
And Solvei couldn’t even do that much. Although Lex couldn’t so much as bring himself to glance at her, he was aware that the winter wolf had completely succumbed to whatever Soft Whisper was doing to them. Though not unconscious in the strictest sense, his companion had lost all ability to not only do anything, but even process what was happening, leaving her in an insensate state where even basic comprehension required more energy than she had.
It was a state that Lex could feel himself slipping into, and although he knew he should be raging against that – having struggled his entire life against the lassitude that was the culmination of despair – it was just...so...difficult...
The lingering tension fled from him then, and Lex felt his posture collapse as he hung suspended in the nothingness of the Astral Plane. Of its own accord, his head drifted down, forelegs curling in toward his face...
And with the last bit of his strength, Lex dragged his face across the barbed wire that was the Night Mare’s holy symbol.
The jagged metal had always defied the petty rules of physics that an ordinary length of wire would have been subject to. It had never once caught on anything he was wearing, nor had it ever cut anyone who had grasped his foreleg. It had never cut him except to convey the goddess’s anger.
But as the sharp edges tore across his cheek, barely missing one eye as they ripped his flesh, Lex had the distinct impression that the Night Mare was pleased with him now. Or perhaps that was simply his own interpretation of why the pain brought with it a rush of awareness, the injury sending a surge of vigor through him. The sense of profound exhaustion didn’t disappear, still leaving him feeling as thought the weight of the world was on his shoulders in every sense imaginable...but it was bearable now, albeit only just.
Solvei! This time he was able to concentrate on her, managing to order his thoughts enough to summon her directly in front of his fore-claw. Swiping the barbed wire across her muzzle felt like he was trying to lift Hvitdod’s great bulk with just one leg, but he somehow managed anyway, causing Solvei to emit a pained whimper.
M-Master...what’s happening? I’m so tired...
It’s because of their goddess. Turning his head was a minor victory in and of itself as Lex looked upon the ancient zebra. Soft Whisper.
The mare herself didn’t return the look, instead regarding the trio bowing as best they could before her. She looked to each of them individually, and although he couldn’t be sure, Lex thought he could see them shudder beneath the weight of her gaze.
“My emissaries,” she said at last, and her voice seemed to be composed of a thousand sighs escaping from dying ponies, matching her name. “You have assailed this shade needlessly. I am aware of the annulment of his death, and it aggrieves me not.”
“Forgive us, goddess,” begged Babanla. “Our intentions were only to protect your honor.”
“We could not bear another insult being levied against you,” moaned Oku.
“Not after how the Defiler buried your faith beneath the weight of her crimes,” cried Abila.
“Honor does not concern me. Insults do not afflict me. Crimes do not perturb me. So long as the dead rest in peace, all is well.” She looked at Lex then, and the weight of eternity was in her gaze, almost robbing him of his newfound strength. “For them to return to the toil of the mortal world is only a sin if they do not wish to go back.”
“Which...I...do!” choked out Lex.
The other three turned to look at him, but had no chance to react to his interjection before Soft Whisper spoke again. “Go now, without raised voice.”
Inclining their heads to the goddess again, the trio didn’t look back as they floated away, soon vanishing in the silvery haze, leaving Lex and Solvei alone with the death deity.
Soft Whisper made no move to approach him, however, instead leveling her gaze in his direction, her expression unreadable. “Detachment forms the basis for the peace that death brings,” she said at last. “And yet, even among my most faithful, there are those who have difficulty reconciling themselves to how my religion has all but disappeared from Everglow.”
Lex gave a noncommittal grunt to that, though he’d have been hard pressed to do more. Forming words just now had been a spectacular effort, and he wasn’t up for trying it again.
“To soothe the consternation they’ve caused you,” continued the goddess, “allow me to explain what they spoke of.”
Holding out one hoof, she nodded at Solvei. “Ages ago, your ancestor slew the dragon you now call Hvitdod. But although it died, and its soul moved on, it left an impression behind. Like a print left in the snow” – she returned to looking at Lex – “or how you stamp a copy of your psyche upon the fabric of this plane when you shape its substance into a temporary servitor, Hvitdod left an echo behind, embossed upon the very fabric of the universe.”
Had he the energy to do so, Lex would have furrowed his brow at that. So the bones he’d seen had been what was left of the original Hvitdod – no, the real Hvitdod – after all.
“Over time, this etching began to fade, as all such impressions do. Like waves smoothing out the shoreline, the impression of Hvitdod began to fade from the Material Plane. It was only when the local temperature dropped to an unnatural degree that it began to reform. That dragon, known as a linnorm, had always been a creature of unending winter, and so a renewed period of unseasonable cold brought its indentation upon the fabric of your reality back into relief, reviving it.”
That was another question answered, then. Nenet had revealed that Sissel and the others had been the ones keeping the temperature so low, something they’d done in an effort to revive Hvitdod. Apparently they’d had some idea of what was needed to bring the dragon’s “impression” back, though from the way they’d spoken about it they hadn’t seemed to realize that it wasn’t the real thing.
“It was fortunate that Hvitdod’s remnant was so greatly weakened by the passage of time,” continued Soft Whisper. “Because it was, you were able to discorporate it. Now the universe is undoing the actions of Hvitdod’s echo, though only to a limited degree. But even that is enough, as it retroactively removes the poison – which was never truly there – from your body. As that was what took your life, it is now being restored, and so too the life of your soul’s companion.”
Lex would have laughed if he could have. So Hvitdod – or rather, Hvitdod’s weakened copy – hadn’t been able to kill him. That was actually rather gratifying.
“But be warned,” noted Soft Whisper, “this restoration is only partially retroactive. The physical wounds you took in your battle will persist, as well as the indirect consequences of what happened. All of the mutilation you took, before your death and subsequent to it, will remain.”
In an instant, Lex’s mirth died away. The wounds his body had subsequently taken? Something had injured him after his death? Given how badly he’d been wounded already, Lex couldn’t imagine that he’d be able to survive being hurt any worse, poison or no.
Unless...
“Your return approaches.” Despite Soft Whisper’s aura of weariness, Lex managed to feel his tension rise up. If his body was in as bad a shape as the goddess had implied, then he might only have a split second to act upon being restored. “May you find fulfillment in life, so that you can accept your death when next we see each other.”
That won’t happen, vowed Lex silently as Soft Whisper turned and began to walk away from him, concentrating so as not to miss his opportunity. If those wretched alicorns can bungle their way into eternal life, I can surpass them. And once I have, then I’ll have eternity to grow stronger, until nothing can challenge me. You and I will never meet like this again.
Soft Whisper stopped then, looking back over her shoulder at him. “On the contrary, Lex Legis...”
His vision of her faded away then, the silver of the Astral Plane growing blurry in his vision.
But even as he lost sight of everything, Soft Whisper’s voice stayed with him.
They engulfed Lex in a crushing grip the instant he opened his eyes.
They weren’t sensations in the normal sense of the word. He couldn’t actually feel anything, but that lack of feeling was so intense that it was smothering, making him recall when Spit Polish had tried to suffocate him in his sleep back in Vanhoover. But this was a thousand times worse, as he couldn’t seem to move, couldn’t seem to breathe, and couldn’t even seem to think as it all weighed down on him in an overwhelming press that threatened to blot out everything else-
And then he managed to change into a shadow, the stifling pressure immediately falling away as though it were one of his nightmares.
The sudden relief was so profound as to be heady, and Lex found himself struggling to order his thoughts, badly jarred by what had happened. If Soft Whisper hadn’t warned me, I wouldn’t have been prepared to transform the instant I came back. The realization left him uneasy, managing to recognize that what he’d just felt had been his newly-restored life immediately slipping away. I’d have died a second time...
Whatever had happened to his body after Hvitdod had poisoned him must have been severe indeed.
As it was, he’d only sidestepped a sudden return to the afterlife, rather than avoided it altogether. His shadow-form was simply his body transmuted into an incorporeal state, leaving his biophysical processes suspended until he changed back. Which meant that the instant he returned to normal, he’d die again...unless something healed his wounds in the meantime.
Fortunately, he had someone who could do that for him.
Solvei. He could sense her, injured and distant, but alive. And with a thought, she was by his side again, groaning as she clutched at a bloody wound in her chest. Hold on.
“Healing.” With a word, the Charismata took effect, and Solvei immediately gasped as her injury closed. Lex had no idea how she’d come to be so badly wounded – the same way he didn’t know how she’d suddenly given him her cryomancy, or who had attacked him after he’d died – but right now it didn’t matter, and he used the Charismata to give her the power to mend injuries. “Now, heal me.”
“Yes, Master.” Rising up on shaky legs, Solvei brushed her fingers against the edge of his umbral form, and Lex felt the curative magic discharge. Sighing in relief, he started to change back-
Only to stop, the edges of his shadowy self suddenly roiling in tension.
Something was wrong. He didn’t know what, but something was still profoundly wrong with his body, and the healing magic Solvei had used hadn’t fixed it. The animal inside of him was snarling in agitation; it knew what life-threatening injuries felt like, and while it had no compunctions about fighting through them, it wasn’t so stupid as to ignore them when there were no enemies around. And right now it was screaming at him that changing back would have been exactly that.
Master, what is it? Solvei’s mental voice reflected the anxiety he felt then, but he didn’t know how to answer her, still trying to understand exactly what was wrong. His use of the Charismata just now had been haphazard, but he’d still been able to give her enough power to turn a mortal wound into one that wasn’t life-threatening. The only way he could still be on the cusp of death was...
His inability to restore Silla’s missing leg flashed through Lex’s mind then, and had he been corporeal he’d have inhaled sharply.
Curative magic could do a great deal, but it couldn’t restore missing body parts. That degree of regeneration required specialized magic all its own, and that wasn’t magic which Lex possessed. Nor was the Charismata any help there; he could grant Solvei considerable power, but that became exponentially harder when he needed to grant her a matching degree of complexity. Maybe if he had sufficient strength left to push the Charismata to the limit of what his new body could stand, he’d have been able to imbue her with the power to restore missing limbs and organs, but not now.
Which meant that whatever it was that he’d lost couldn’t be restored.
His resurrection was only going to last as long as he could remain in shadow-form.
Solvei, tell me what happened after Hvitdod’s poison took effect, he demanded, even as he began looking around. Information, he needed information; the sooner he figured out exactly what had happened to him, the sooner he’d be able to put together a plan for dealing with it.
I don’t know, she answered hesitantly. You were dying, and I was trying to figure out what to do because the healing didn’t work, and then I was there with you on the Astral Plane. Master...what’s going on? I can feel that you’re upset.
Giving her a curt summary of what he’d deduced, Lex continued to scan the area. For some reason they were back at the bottom of the chasm; he could still see Hvitdod’s bones – those of the original dragon, rather than the echo he’d fought – a short distance away. How had he gotten back down here?
You’re dying again?! yelped Solvei when he’d finished explaining the situation to her.
We both are, since my death was apparently the catalyst for your own, replied Lex grimly. He hadn’t expected that Solvei’s life would end if his own did. At the worst he’d thought she’d have a reaction similar to what had happened to him. He hadn’t ventured to guess how their connection would have functioned while he was dead and she was still alive – he doubted he’d have been tethered to her side the way she’d been to his after her own death – but he felt confident it would have persisted somehow.
Instead, her life had ended along with his.
Lex had long since embraced the idea that being a ruler meant that the lives of others were dependent on him. But he’d never expected it to be so literal.
Solvei cringed. I think that’s because of the Night Mare.
Her comment earned his undivided attention. What?
Her discomfort registered loud and clear across their link. I might have upset her a little bit...
Then it was her turn to explain things, telling him about the impromptu ceremony she’d held in response to his fight with Hvitdod taking a turn for the worse. Her stabbing herself, the Night Mare’s intervention, the revelation that she was holding back, being able to grant him the power to use the ice magic she’d gained from their connection...and the goddess’s anger at having her sacraments profaned. I think that’s why I died when you did, Master. I don’t know for sure, but since the relationship between the strong and the weak is a core part of her religion...
She trailed off as a new outpouring of emotions from Lex flowed into her then, and she staggered under the weight of them. Fury. Gratitude. Horror. Amazement. And guilt...so much guilt. Master?
For his part, Lex had to again struggle to keep himself together, knowing that it was Kara’s damnable blessing that had nearly driven Solvei to the point of suicide. But he couldn’t bring himself to deal with that now...not when this latest in the unending series of catastrophes that was his life now had to be dealt with!
I’m heading to the top of the chasm. Once I’m there, I’ll summon you back.
Alright...
He registered her worry, and although their bond didn’t tell him anything about what prompted her feelings, he was aware that his reaction was the cause. After all, he knew how she felt about him – he’d sensed it more than once now through their connection – and he had no doubt that it was Kara’s loathsome meddling that was responsible for making her so devoted.
But as much as he hated mental tampering on principle, he hated himself far more for the fact that he couldn’t seem to bring him to care that much. Or at least, not as much as he knew he should have. By the strict structure of his moral code, he should have informed Solvei about Kara’s influence as soon as Sanguine Disposition told him about it, and done everything possible to undo – or barring that, ameliorate – it.
Instead, he’d kept quiet, burying himself in other projects and crises, quieting his conscience with justifications. That there were too many other, more pressing concerns to merit bringing it up now. That their lack of a romantic relationship made her feelings moot. That the intimate nature of their bond made such emotions fait accompli. All perfectly sound reasons to wait to tell her.
All pathetic excuses.
Solvei hadn’t been concerned with what would happen to her if he died. She had been concerned for him. She had very nearly killed herself, and drawn censure from the Night Mare, for him.
She had died for him.
Again.
And by refusing to tell her the truth about why she felt the way she did about him, all he’d done was prove himself unworthy of those feelings, despite knowing that he had no choice but to accept them. He couldn’t remove a god’s blessing, not when that represented a direct alteration to reality itself. Instead, he’d quietly reaped the benefits of Solvei’s feelings, even as he’d refused to take responsibility for them.
Lex continued his quiet castigation as he rose through the air, until at last the top of the chasm came in sight. Still cursing himself, he rose above the lip of the stone walls-
And caused Nenet to shriek in fear, stumbling back from the edge.
The sight of her gave Lex pause, having forgotten about the ugly little sphinx.
The fact that she was out of her cage was a bad sign. His black crystals lasted for a full hour before disintegrating, and after imprisoning her in the aftermath of his battle with Sissel, it hadn’t taken nearly that long to find Hvitdod’s lair. And yet here she was now, free.
How much time had passed between his death and revival?
“What were you doing?” demanded Lex, backing up the question with one of his few remaining applications of the Charismata. “Answer truthfully.”
Nenet shivered, either from the cold or from being once again his prisoner, but she couldn’t stop herself from speaking. “The other adlets told me to come see what happened to Yotimo and Akna when they saw my cage disappear.”
Yotimo? Glancing past the sphinx, Lex cursed as he saw a prone figure in the distance, able to make out the sight of a blood pool around their head. With a thought, he summoned Solvei back, immediately sending her to go help the injured adlet.
He, however, remained focused on Nenet. “Do you know what happened to Yotimo? Or who injured me after my fight with Hvitdod?”
Nenet visibly struggled against the questions, for all the good it did her. “Yes...it was Paska...”
That was enough to make Lex’s eyes – the only visible part of him that was visible in his shadow-form – widen. Paska had survived? “Expound on that.”
Looking like she was going to throw up, Nenet whimpered. “M-Mother’s back. I heard her voice in my head a little while ago. She said that she would come and get me later, but that right now she only had enough magic to bring back one of us...and that Paska had already c-c-cut the s-spine out of the one Hvitdod cursed-, EEP!”
Her stuttering reply terminated in a shriek as Lex’s eyes glowed so brightly that his vertical pupils momentarily vanished, but the Charismata gave her no choice but to keep speaking. “...so she was going to bring him back, because the dragon’s curse was the last component she needed for what she’s making. That means he must have b-been the one to knock Yotimo out, since there wasn’t anyone else there.”
She closed her eyes as she finished, sinking down onto her belly as her trembling grew worse, but Lex was barely listening at that point, enraged at what he’d just been told. His spine?! That one-eyed creature that disguised itself as a human, the monster that had cursed Thermal Draft, had cut out his spine?! He’d been aware that someone had mangled his body after dying, but the utter indignity of one of his enemies mutilating him so badly stung Lex’s pride worse than he’d expected.
But now that he knew what had happened, perhaps – just perhaps – there was some way of fixing things. Lex had no idea if an attack on his enemies’ base of operations would yield any sort of regenerative magic, but even if it didn’t, retaking his stolen vertebrae would at least put him closer to that goal. He might not have known the specifics involved with that branch of spellwork, but common sense suggested that it was easier to reattach an existing body part than it was to regrow one from scratch.
Except that, according to what Nenet had said, the one that she, Sissel, Paska, and the rest of their siblings all called “Mother” was now there.
The one whom Sissel had credited with being the source of her aristeia.
Which meant that she was almost certainly powerful on the same scale as Hvitdod. Perhaps even stronger. And while Nenet made it sound like her mother was at some sort of magical ebb, she was also apparently using his spine – as a vessel for the curse Hvitdod had put on him, which had increased his sensitivity to cold, making the dragon’s blood-freezing poison that much more potent – in some sort of undertaking. Lex had no idea what that could be, but at the moment it was unimportant; what mattered is that it would likely be next to impossible to retrieve his bones and figure out how to replace them in his body without confronting her.
And neither he nor Solvei were up for another fight right now.
As it was, he doubted he’d even be able to finish interrogating Nenet regarding her mother’s strengths and weaknesses; each use of the Charismata only lasted for sixty seconds, and he was nearing the limit of how many times he could employ the Night Mare’s blessing in a given day. But waiting wasn’t an option either; not when his remaining dark magic was slowly depleting with every passing second.
Weighing those restrictions in his mind, Lex looked at where Solvei was helping Yotimo slowly sit up, the older adlet groaning as his eyes fluttered open. Gingerly, he touched his head, wincing as his fingers brushed his skull. Solvei gently pulled his hand away, and he muttered something that caused a faint smirk to pass her lips as she shook her head.
Not long ago, the sight would have made him jealous. Now it only reminded him of how much he owed her, how poorly he’d treated her, and how her life had become inextricably bound to his own in every way imaginable.
Which meant that he had to live. For her sake, as well as Thermal Draft’s, and everyone back on Equestria who was depending on him, he had to find a way to triumph over this latest seemingly-impossible task.
Even if it meant losing another piece of himself.
“Nenet, look at me.”
The Charismata made her obey, only moments before Lex felt the divine power fade, its sixty-second duration surpassed. But he didn’t bother renewing it. What happened next would be her choice.
Not for the first time in his life, Lex found himself wishing he could read the unspoken reactions of others.
Right now, he had no idea if Nenet’s reaction to his proposal was one of interest, disgust, or something else, and so he couldn’t modify his approach accordingly. That was bad, since she was currently the only one who knew where her mother’s hideout was, let alone had information about her plans, battle tactics, magical abilities, and most crucially, her weaknesses.
While Lex knew he could probably force that information out of Nenet with his remaining uses of the Charismata, he and Solvei were in no position to act on whatever she told them. The adlets were in no shape to do so either, and Lex doubted they would have even if they could. Fail Forward might have taken on that task, but even if he hadn’t sent them away, Lex knew they lacked the strength necessary to succeed. Paska alone would likely be more than they could handle.
The only viable course of action Lex could think of now was to make Nenet into his servant the way he had Solvei. Doing so would not only grant her considerable power – power which would also, if Solvei’s cryomancy was anything to go by, be his to command – but it would also make her loyal to him, giving her both the means and the desire to act on the knowledge she already possessed and retrieve his stolen vertebrae.
But that would only happen if she agreed to become his. Lex didn’t know if he could put a piece of his soul into her against her will, but that point was moot; forcing her into eternal servitude – whether directly or through coercion – was so utterly unconscionable that he couldn’t bring himself to seriously consider the prospect.
Desperation would not erode his moral code of conduct; not when it was the last piece of himself that remained inviolate.
Which meant that he needed to convince her to become his eternal servitor of her own free will.
Given that he had a phenomenally poor track record when it came to talking others into doing what he wanted, that prospect seemed only marginally less difficult than slaying Hvitdod had been.
“A permanent connection between the two of us,” he answered after a moment’s consideration, deciding to eschew embellishment, “formed by my placing a fragment of my soul within your own.”
Nenet’s eyes widened. “A familiar? You want to make me into your familiar?”
“The specifics are different,” noted Lex, briefly thinking of Woodheart and Littleknight, “but that’s essentially correct.”
But to his dismay, Nenet was already shaking her head and backing away. “I can’t. Mother would be furious. Worse than furious. She’d never forgive me, and then I’d never find out who my father is.”
Tension shot through Lex at her refusal. “Whatever promises your mother made you, I will endeavor to fulfill.”
“Mother is the only one who knows the identity of the sphinx who sired me,” pointed out Nenet. “She said that she’ll tell me his name when I’m older, but only if I keep serving as her backup spellbook. And the way she made it sound just now, she really needs the spells she had me memorize.”
“Nenet-”
“This could be my big chance to learn who my father is!” Nenet’s eyes opened wider, as though she had only just realized what she was saying. “If I do a good job now, Mother might not make me wait anymore! I could go and find my father right away, and he’ll pass on everything he knows to me, and I’ll become a real sphinx! I can-”
Lex, however, had heard enough, cutting in as he saw the flaw in her logic. “Nenet, your father is almost certainly dead.”
She froze at that, giving him a wide-eyed stare. “Wh-what?”
“Sissel told me that the one you call ‘Mother’ is in some sort of debt to the daemons.”
“What does that have to do-”
“In order to pay down her debt, she’s been sacrificing souls to them. Both of the ponies she had Grisela capture, and of any of her children who die, which I have no doubt includes you.”
“Mother wouldn’t-”
“If she’s depraved enough to sell out strangers and her own children alike, why would she ever have let your father live after she bedded him? I don’t know how much value the daemons would place on the soul of a sphinx, but I doubt they’d find it to be of little worth.”
Lex paused, letting her digest what he’d told her. It was entirely speculative, but was in keeping with everything he knew about Nenet’s maternal figure. Hopefully his logic would help the sphinx realize that she was wrong to put so much faith in her mother’s promises.
For a moment he dared to hope that the way Nenet had gone wide-eyed and started shaking all over was a good sign.
“N-no! NO!” shrieked the sphinx at last. “You’re wrong! You have to be! Mother wouldn’t do that! She wouldn’t!”
Or perhaps not.
Master? Is everything alright? A short distance away, Solvei was looking at him from where she was tending to Yotimo, her eyes darting between him and Nenet.
For a brief instant, Lex considered having Solvei join the conversation. She was more personable than he was – though that could be said of almost anyone – and she was a living example of what it meant to be soul-bound to him. If anyone could speak to the benefits of what he was offering Nenet now, it would be her.
And yet he couldn’t bring himself to do so. He knew that was a tactical error, knew that he needed Nenet to be convinced, but his guilt over how Kara’s warped influence had driven Solvei to almost commit suicide for him – and how he had yet to make her aware of the goddess’s twisted blessing was affecting her – was still undiminished. Using her to draw someone else into a situation that she herself didn’t fully understand wasn’t something he could countenance.
We’re fine, Solvei. Take Yotimo back to the others.
She glanced between them one last time, and Lex registered reluctance from her, but after a moment she nodded, standing up as she laid one of Yotimo’s arms across her shoulders. Alright. Please don’t hesitate to summon me if you need me again.
Lex watched them go for a moment before he turned back to Nenet. He’d half-expected the sphinx to run after her outburst, but instead she’d curled in on herself, nubby tail swishing as she curled her wings around her middle. “Nenet, I need you to think logically-”
“I won’t do it!” she blurted, her eyes squeezed shut and her paws curled atop her head. “I won’t become your familiar! Even...even if you break my wings, I won’t!”
The comment made Lex recall the first time he’d seen her, when he’d broken Sissel’s illusion. “Your wings were broken before. Did your mother do that to you?”
Nenet shook her head. “Mother never hurt me! It was only Grisela who did that, and sometimes Sissel, and Blat if I ever upset him...”
“But your mother knew about it, didn’t she?” This time Nenet didn’t answer, and Lex took that to be an affirmation of his suspicion. “You can’t possibly believe that someone who exhibits so little interest in your welfare can offer you a better life than I can.”
Nenet didn’t answer him this time, except to curl up tighter, a whine coming from her throat.
Lex had to fight down the urge to answer it with a growl. The animal inside of him didn’t understand what was going on, but knew that the weak creature in front of him was defying him, and it didn’t understand why he wasn’t repaying that with violence. Already, he could see that the edges of his umbral form were whipping back and forth in a frenzy, and only the fact that Nenet’s eyes were closed kept her from seeing the indication of his anger.
Taking a moment to force his instincts down, Lex tried a different tact. If Nenet’s goal was to become a sphinx, then she had a desire to improve herself. Perhaps an appeal to that was in order; fortunately, power was something he could offer her in spades.
“You should be aware that a bond with me is more than just a personal connection,” he informed her, doing his best to keep his voice level. “You’ll gain powerful magic of your own, and quite likely physical enhancements as well. And that’s just the beginning. Solvei received all of that, in addition to telekinesis akin to a unicorn’s. Her mind is now virtually impossible to assail now, and she can create powerful armor using the same black crystals that I control. She...”
He trailed off, suddenly disgusted with himself. What was he doing? Only a moment ago he’d sent Solvei away because he didn’t want her involved in his attempt to sway Nenet to his side. Yet now he was using her as an example in the hope of enticing the sphinx to join him. Worse, he was presenting only what she’d gained as a result of their connection, showcasing the benefits without mentioning any of the drawbacks.
I’m no better than Prevarius.
The contract devil had been a loathsome creature, using half-truths, convenient omissions, and word games in order to trick Thermal Draft out of ownership of her own soul. Was what he was doing now any different? He’d made up his mind that he wouldn’t force Nenet into anything, but that wasn’t good enough; her consent needed to be informed it was going to mean anything.
And if she still refused him, then it wasn’t as though he’d have lost anything for being honest with her. With how she was still tense and trembling – apparently, if her statement about breaking her wings was anything to go by, she was still under the impression that he was going to beat her for refusing him – it didn’t seem like his enticements had worked anyway. So why not tell her the whole truth?
“She loves me, you know.” He’d lost sight of Solvei by then, but thanks to their bond he knew exactly where she was, turning his eyes toward her even though he couldn’t see her. “That’s another effect of our connection; I’m aware of her emotions at all times. I don’t feel them myself, but I always know her state of mind...and I know how she feels about me.”
Had he been corporeal, he’d have kicked something then. “It’s a lie. I don’t know if you know who Kara is, but she’s the goddess of love in the pony pantheon. She gave me a blessing – one that I never asked for and don’t want – which causes people to fall in love with me. It doesn’t work on everyone, and I don’t know what the criteria are for who’s affected and who’s not, but I’m guessing that a soul-bond qualifies...and because of that, Solvei has died for me, more than once, all because she thinks that her feelings for me are real.”
His eyes blazed then, glowing brighter as he continued. “I should have told her all of that by now. If I had, she could at least try to fight what Kara’s influence is doing to her. But I haven’t, because...”
He couldn’t bring himself to say it, the admission caught in his incorporeal throat.
“Because why?”
Nenet’s question caught him by surprised, so wrapped up in what he was saying that he’d almost forgotten why he was saying it. A glance at the sphinx showed that she was still in her defensive crouch, but at least now she was making eye contact with him.
“I was listening before,” admitted the sphinx, “when you told her not to hurt me. You said that you’d killed someone named Panuk, and that she wouldn’t be wrong if she resented you for it.”
Lex looked away. He might not have been able to read others’ body language, but he could see where Nenet was going.
“But if you really felt that way, you’d have told her about Kara’s blessing, since you know that it makes her love you no matter what you do,” continued the sphinx. “So why haven’t you?”
“...because I don’t want her to resent me. I want her to love me back.”
It took him a moment to realize that he’d said more than he’d meant to, the word “back” somehow having slipped out of its own accord.
But it wasn’t as though he’d said anything untrue, he realized. He’d known how he felt ever since she’d died for the first time, outside of the Shrine of the Starless Sky. He simply hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it, convincing himself that he regarded her as something like a cherished pet or a prized possession. After consistently losing everyone he cared about, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to admit that it was more than that, especially since that knowledge had come to him right as she’d died.
Once she’d come back to life, however, his deliberate misreading of his own emotions had rapidly come undone. From his worry that Akna’s becoming a part of her meant that her affection for him had faded, to his growing guilt over not being able to tell her about Kara’s curse, to not wanting her to regret killing Nenet the same way he regretted killing Panuk, he’d slowly been sliding toward a full understanding of what he already knew.
He loved Solvei.
And that horrified him, because he knew he shouldn’t, and not just because she wasn’t a pony. Now that he knew about Kara’s blessing, he owed it to Solvei to bury those feelings, so that he could better help her resist the love goddess’s mental tampering. Anything less was a betrayal of his duty as her master.
And yet all evidence to date suggested that he couldn’t bring himself to correct that betrayal.
Worse than that, there was a strong likelihood that he’d compound that betrayal if Nenet agreed to become his.
After all, if knowing about Kara’s interference hadn’t changed his feelings for Solvei, then was there anything to suggest that it would stop him from coming to feel the same way about Nenet when she invariably began to love him?
“The same thing will happen to you,” he muttered bitterly. “If we form a bond, you’ll come to love me just like she does.”
He turned and floated away from Nenet then, done with this entire idea. While it was difficult to say for sure how long he had before his dark magic ran out, he had a vague sense that it was at least several hours. Perhaps even a full day. He’d use that time to figure out an alternative course of action. There had to be some way-
“W-wait!”
Frowning inwardly, he glanced back at Nenet. She was still huddled in place, but she didn’t look like she was shielding herself anymore. Instead she was just curled up loosely, sniffling as she looked at the ground. “Do you really think my father’s dead?”
“The chance strikes me as exceedingly high,” replied Lex tersely. “Everything I’ve heard about your mother suggests that she’s as selfish as she is murderous.”
Nenet bit her lip then. “If...if I were to become your familiar...”
“Forget that I made that offer,” cut in Lex. “I’ll think of some other plan.”
Nenet jumped up from her crouch. “Wait! If I became your familiar, would you resurrect him for me?”
“I don’t have that power. Right now I’m barely able to keep myself alive by staying in this form, and that will wear out in a day or so, at which point I’ll be dead again. And if you have part of my soul in you, then there’s a very real chance you’ll die too when that happens.”
“But what if you don’t die?” pressed Nenet. “That’s why you’re asking me to become yours, right? So that I can use that magic you said I’d gain to get your spine back? If I do, and you survive, will you resurrect my father for me?”
This was his deal with Rarity all over again, the unicorn having pleaded with him to bring back her donkey lover. “I can’t promise that I’ll ever have a chance to do that.”
“But you’ll try, right? You killed an ancient dragon that even Sissel was afraid of. Will you fight that hard to bring my father back?”
It was at that point that Lex recognized the irony in what was happening. In giving up on his goal, he’d somehow inadvertently achieved it.
The victory felt more hollow than he’d expected.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll do it.” Gulping, Nenet slowly crept forward, not stopping until she was right in front of him. “I’ll become your familiar.”
Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes before making one last request of him.
The words that Lex spoke then were what Solvei had told him he’d said to her when he’d joined the two of them together. He still didn’t remember doing so, Prevarius’ fireball having injured him past the point of consciousness, but he trusted Solvei’s description of what had happened. Given that he didn’t know how to deliberately actuate the bonding process, speaking those words while consciously willing the connection to happen was the best that he could think of...though he had no idea if that would work or not.
He needn’t have worried.
No sooner had he finished speaking than the entire world seemed to vanish, leaving himself and Nenet alone in a featureless black void surrounded by a ring of blue fire.
Just like Solvei had told him.
As it was, he couldn’t help but glance around, half-expecting to see the Night Mare herself looming over him. This had always been what his surroundings had looked like whenever the goddess had appeared in his dreams. But other than the featureless blackness that was the ground, and the blue fire encircling them – the azure flames leaping so high that they seemed almost to go on forever – there was nothing else there except the two of them.
“Where...where are we?” Turning in a circle, Nenet peered around, eyes wide and she reached toward the flames tentatively. “Cold!” she yelped as her paw brushed the blue fire, yanking it back before peering at it. “No wound...”
“That’s because this isn’t a physical place,” murmured Lex, having had more time to ponder this phenomenon; Thermal Draft had reported that neither he nor Solvei had gone anywhere. According to her, all that had happened was that Solvei had seemed to catch on blue fire, emerging stronger and more powerful than before...and with his cutie mark on her flank.
“It’s some sort of metaphysical space,” continued Lex. “It exists as a shared perception between our consciousnesses, but has no physical reality.”
“A mindscape,” breathed Nenet, her tail swishing faster. “I’ve read about these in Mother’s books. They’re a visualization of a mental connection between two or more individuals, constructed via the perception of the initiator-”
“Nenet,” interrupted Lex. While he could understand the desire to analyze what was going on, there were more important issues that required their attention. “Are you certain that you want to do this? Once the bond between us is formed, it can’t be broken. Not even by death.”
For a moment she seemed to waver – or perhaps she was amazed that he was asking her again, considering that his survival depended on her agreement – but after a moment she looked down. “I told her, Mother I mean, the first time it happened...the first time Grisela h-hurt me...”
The non sequitur confused Lex, but he didn’t have a chance to say anything before Nenet shuddered. “She said she’d take care of it. That she’d talk to Grisela and make her stop. But she didn’t stop...”
She bit back a sob then, her wings giving a shaky flap. “Instead she was angrier than before. The things she did to me...to my wings...she knew how sensitive they are...”
Hiccuping, she paused long enough to wipe her nose with her paw, sniffling. “When I told Mother later, she just smiled and told me that it was okay, that Grisela wouldn’t kill me...because I was her precious spellbook.”
Nenet gave a hollow laugh then; or at least she tried to, but instead it turned into another sob. “After that, I studied harder. I thought that if I did enough, that if I made Mother happy, she’d tell me who my father was...and then...” Her composure was breaking down, her sobs starting to impede her ability to speak clearly. “...th-then I could l-leave, but sh-she n-never did! She k-kept saying I s-still had t-to learn more...that I h-had to mem-memorize more spells...and G-G-Grisela kept hurting me and I c-couldn’t m-make her stop! I w-wanted her to s-stop, but I c-couldn’t m-make her s-stop and I w-was so s-s-scared all the t-time...!”
She couldn’t finish, collapsing in a heap as she wept, crying her heart out.
Despite still not understanding why Nenet had felt the need to tell him all this, Lex couldn’t help but feel his heart go out to the sphinx. How could he not? A parent’s duty to protect and nurture their children wasn’t simply a matter of moral philosophy; it was a universal truth, and his own parents’ unwavering adherence to it had been one of the few sources of comfort in his life. Even the animal inside him, which had little concern for its offspring, understood that they needed to be cared for until they were strong enough to survive on their own.
He’d already known that Nenet’s mother was a depraved individual. Only someone who had made a complete break from moral accountability could murder ponies and offer their souls to otherworldly horrors for personal profit. But now Lex found himself holding a much more visceral disgust toward the sphinx’s maternal parent; murdering strangers and robbing them of their afterlife was callous enough, but not caring that her own child was being tortured was sickening on a far more personal level.
What Nenet’s mother had done to her – her deliberate inaction in a situation where she’d had a responsibility to step in – wasn’t simply a matter of ethical condemnation, nor criminal conduct.
It was obscene.
“Nenet, look at me.”
It took the sphinx several seconds to obey, her shoulders still jumping as she raised her tear-stained face. Lex met her gaze evenly as he moved closer to her, his shadowy body floating to within a foot of the small creature. “That will never happen again. I won’t allow it. Not in this life if I survive, and not in the Night Mare’s realm if I don’t. You will never, never have to suffer like that again.”
“L-Lex...” she whimpered, and he had the oddest sensation that it was important that she’d said his name.
Then again, given what they were about to do, perhaps it wasn’t so odd after all.
Slowly, Nenet drew herself up, closing her eyes as she balanced on her hind legs and held her forelegs out toward him, looking for all the world like a child waiting for a hug.
Lex needed no further invitation, and moved forward, engulfing her completely in his umbral form.
...and took everything that she was for his own.
In that instant, two individuals became a single being. “Nenet” was now the name of an extension of Lex Legis. Like a limb that he’d suddenly grown, albeit one that existed beyond the simple confines of his body, she was a piece of the larger whole that was himself.
But he could already feel that this new part of him was weak, and that was unacceptable. No part of him could be anything less than strong. Weakness wasn’t just an invitation to death; it was a perversion of everything that he was. Which meant that action needed to be taken.
Focusing his will, Lex began forcing the new part of himself to grow.
He could feel the untapped potential in Nenet, waiting to be drawn out. It wasn’t malleable; he couldn’t shape her into whatever he wanted. The same way a leg couldn’t perform the functions of a wing, this new aspect of his being had particular capabilities which could be exercised and actualized, but not altered. But that was fine.
Nenet, as it turned out, had a shocking degree of personal power that was just waiting to be brought forth.
Doing so was easy. He simply let his native strength flow into the new part of himself, scouring away the weakness that had burdened Nenet all of her life. She would transcend her limits, becoming everything that she possibly could.
Lex demanded nothing less from himself.
He had nearly finished when he became aware of a lingering blemish. It was one that he’d initially overlooked, being more of a cosmetic imperfection than anything holding Nenet back, like graffiti scribbled on a wall. But now that he examined it closer, Lex could see that while it was a superficial imperfection, it was still an insidious one...being daemonic in nature.
It was a marker, designed to draw the attention of the soul-thieves so that they could take Nenet after she died.
And since she was now a part of him, that meant that their filthy emblem was on his own soul now.
That wouldn’t do.
With a psychic snarl, Lex tore at the emblem. He could feel it trying to resist, whatever daemonic entity had created it having imbued the mark with considerable durability.
But they hadn’t imbued it with the strength to stand against the will of a god, and Lex didn’t need to consciously invoke the Charismata’s power to bring it to bear against the tainted symbol, ordering Nenet to shed it even as he continued to erode its attachment to her.
The new part of himself obeyed immediately, and the combined assault quickly wore away at the mark’s defenses, causing Lex to let out a triumphant roar as he finally ripped it free. A thought was all it took to crush the thing, leaving nothing behind-
And from somewhere beyond the ring of blue fire, there was a faint shriek of distant rage.
Chuckling in dark satisfaction at the sound, Lex turned his full attention back to Nenet. There was only a little left to do now, drawing out the final few remnants of her inner capabilities...
Then it was done, and Lex found himself admiring the results.
Nenet’s mother had treated her as nothing more than a living spellbook.
It was time to show her just how much more her daughter was capable of.
Lex opened his eyes with a rush of vertigo, struggling to make sense of what had just happened.
He had been in that mental realm together with Nenet. He’d asked her one final time if she’d wanted to go through with that, and she’d started talking about the abuse she’d suffered, breaking down completely. He’d sworn to keep her safe from then on, and she’d accepted his pledge, at which point...
At which point his memories ceased to be a matter of sights or sounds or even conscious thoughts, instead being composed of impressions and sensations.
Creating a connection with Nenet.
Drawing out her full potential.
Tearing away the daemonic mark that had been adhered onto her soul.
And being satisfied with what he’d made her into...
Master, I felt...something, just now. Was that you?
Solvei’s question brought him back to himself, putting the memories of what had just happened aside. But even as he thought of answering her, he realized that he was aware of more than just Solvei now. That while she was almost a hundred feet away, was still moderately wounded, and was feeling apprehensive, Nenet was only fifteen feet from him, was uninjured, and was feeling astounded...
Turning to look at her, Lex momentarily felt the same.
The ugly little creature that Nenet had been was gone.
In its place was a majestic sphinx.
Her body was leonine in shape, and roughly the same size as a winter wolf, being ten feet long from her sternum to her hips, the latter bearing the image of his cutie mark on them. Each of her legs ended in thick paws, capped with retractable claws that were already digging into the ground beneath her, and like his own they were leaving scratch marks in the stones. Two large wings with feathers of burnished gold were tucked at her sides, and the color matched the thin layer of tawny fur that covered her body.
Though as Nenet – still looking herself over – turned back toward him, Lex realized that “covered” might have been overstating it, given how thin it grew across her torso and face.
Or perhaps it just seemed thinner, given how her fur did absolutely nothing to hide the enormous breasts she was now sporting.
“I...I’m a sphinx...” muttered Nenet, the feline ears on top of her head – nestled within long saffron-hued tresses – twitching at the sound of how much fuller her voice was now. “I’m a sphinx!”
Lex registered elation from her as she slowly stood up, laughing as she looked at herself. “Master, look! I’m a real sphinx now!”
Cheering, she lifted her paws, peridot-colored eyes sparkling as she gazed at them. “These are the claws of a sphinx!”
Flexing her wings, she glanced over her shoulder as she spread them wide. “These are the wings of a sphinx!”
Squealing, she folded them back in before turning around, glancing toward her hindquarters. “This is-”
Her voice caught in her throat abruptly, and Lex felt her elation suddenly give way to horror. “No...”
Her whisper sent a surge of concern through him. “What is it?”
When she didn’t answer him, he moved toward her, circling her so he could see what she was looking at.
It was her tail.
From the rest of her, he’d have thought that it would have been lion-like in its construction, long and thin with a tufted tip.
But that wasn’t the case.
Instead, her tail was as thick as her legs, being a heavy, fleshy appendage with only the slightest covering of fur. But that was less notable than the spiked protrusions that jutted up from the end of it, the bleached bones jutting out perpendicular from the length of her tail. It looked vaguely familiar for some reason, though Lex couldn’t place where from...
“She lied to me.” Nenet’s voice came out in a choked whisper.
“Your mother?” Lex knew that had to be who she meant, but he asked the question anyway.
Nenet nodded slowly, her eyes distant. “My father wasn’t a sphinx...”
Gulping, she swished her tail slightly, and suddenly Lex remembered where he’d seen something like it before: on Blat, the monstrous creature who’d accompanied Paska and Vidrig when they’d ambushed him.
Kneeling down next to Yotimo, Solvei gently pressed the spear into his uninjured hand, the old warrior managing a wan smile from where he was propped up against a rock, leaning on Toklo. “I’m just glad you didn’t stab yourself with it again.”
The corners of Solvei’s lips turned upward. “If I’d known I was going to have to listen to you try and crack jokes, I would have.”
Yotimo managed a few quick breaths that might have been a chuckle, his eyes fluttering closed as though even that had exhausted him. Not that Solvei could blame him; his wounds were severe, and unlike herself he hadn’t received any magical healing. As it was, he looked like he was barely hanging on, and she could tell from Toklo’s nervous twitch that she wasn’t the only one who was concerned about him.
“Are you sure Paska’s not coming back?” murmured the younger adlet, giving her an anxious look.
“If he was going to, he would have done it by now,” she replied, sounding more confident than she felt. She wasn’t sure why Paska had attacked Yotimo, but the fact that Lex was apparently mortally wounded even though Hvitdod’s poison had been removed from his body didn’t strike her as a coincidence. Thankfully, he hadn’t bothered to finish off anyone else, though in Yotimo’s case it had been a close thing. “Besides, after the beating your dad gave him, I doubt he’s in any shape to try anything else.”
“I still can’t believe he lured me in with his armor like that.” Yotimo’s voice was thick with embarrassment. “If any one of my warriors had fallen for that kind of trick, I’d have them eating half portions for an entire season.”
“Give them a break, and yourself too for that matter.” Akna canted her head at where the other members of his war band were dozing; with her and Yotimo returning safely, the last of the immediate danger had passed, and she wasn’t surprised that they’d passed out. “They’ve been through a lot in the last few days, and you’ve been through worse. No one would fault you for making a mistake.”
“That mistake could have cost you your life.” This time there was no mistaking the recrimination in Yotmo’s voice. “When you collapsed, I was sure you were dead, and that he was coming to finish you off. I was the only one in his way, and I lost.”
Solvei made sure to keep her expression composed, glad that Yotimo was apparently buying the story she’d fed him about passing out when it looked like Lex had died – and that Hvitdod’s poison had merely paralyzed him instead of taking his life – rather than having to explain to him that they’d both actually gone to afterlife, only to immediately be revived.
He’d already supported her a great deal by refusing to condemn her when she’d admitted to worshiping a deity. Even if he’d done so out of love for his son, she still regarded it as a deeply moving gesture, considering how serious an offense that was to their tribe’s traditions. Telling him a confusing tale about how they’d died, only for some death goddess he’d never heard of to confront them and say that Hvitdod hadn’t really been Hvitdod, and because of that time had sort-of-but-not-really reversed itself, bringing the two of them back to life, would only have made it more difficult for him to continue encouraging her.
After all, she couldn’t very well ask him to understand a story like that when she herself barely understood it. And she’d experienced it personally!
Not to mention the fact that, for all she knew, Paska would have done worse to Lex – or her, or Toklo, or the others – if Yotimo hadn’t confronted him. Which was why she didn’t have to fake her smile as she leaned forward and gently grasped his shoulder.
“That you fought for me at all is more than I deserved, since I’m the reason this happened to you.”
Toklo’s ears flickered back, an uncomfortable look on his face. “Akna-”
She shook her head, cutting him off. “No, it’s true. I know I had nothing to do with what happened to Panuk’s scouting party, or with your father coming to look for you, but I insisted on involving myself after that.”
Biting his lip, Toklo swallowed. “But-”
“I made a deal to guide Lex through the forest,” she continued. “That’s why all of you were waiting for me. If I hadn’t, you’d have gone back to our village, and Sissel and her sick little family never would have encountered you. So even if I didn’t start this, it’s still my fault.”
In contrast to his father’s placid expression, Toklo whimpered a little. “That’s not-”
“And don’t think I’ve forgotten that you both supported me when I prayed to the Night Mare. I know that I can’t go back to the tribe anymore, but if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for you when you have to go back and explain what happened-”
“You already have,” cut in Yotimo, another thin smile crossing his lips. “Though I think Toklo appreciates it more.”
Solvei cocked her head at that, glancing at the youth in question. Rather than looking thankful, he was having trouble meeting her eyes, keeping them lowered...directly toward her chest.
Following his gaze, she glanced down and saw that her halter top was split almost completely down the middle – her having pierced the fabric when she’d skewered herself with Bloodletter, with the tear subsequently growing – causing her to show off a great deal of cleavage as the garment threatened to burst apart.
Yelping, she threw her arms in front of herself, causing Yotimo to let out another chuckle as Toklo blushed. “I was trying to tell you about that,” muttered the youth weakly.
Solvei groaned, mortified. Why did this keep happening?!
The last of his mirth fading, Yotimo nudged his son. “Toklo, cover your ears for a moment. I want to talk to Akna privately.”
The order made Toklo cringe. “I really was trying to tell her-”
“I know you were,” interrupted his father. “And you’re not in trouble. Not with me, at least. But you reminded me of something I wanted to talk to her about, so cover your ears.”
Toklo’s eyes flickered to her for a moment, and Solvei could see him trying very hard to keep his eyes on hers, before he gulped and nodded, reaching up to put his hands over his ears, squeezing his eyes shut for good measure.
“You could have told me I was putting on a show,” huffed Solvei.
Yotimo shrugged, a ghost of a smile crossing his lips. “One of the greatest joys of being a parent is getting to watch your childrens’ embarrassment while talking to someone they have feelings for.”
Despite herself, Solvei scoffed. “Toklo doesn’t have feelings for me!”
Yotimo gave her a rueful look. “Every young bachelor in the village has feelings for you, Akna. They may not be entirely honorable feelings, but they’re very real. Which is what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Solvei cocked a brow. “This doesn’t seem like the time for a lecture about my having a duty to give birth to another shaman.”
“It’s not that,” replied Yotimo with a shake of his head. “I’m going to swear all of my warriors to silence about what you said before, about this ‘Night Mare’ you worship now. That won’t make it much easier for you to leave, but at least that way you’ll be able to come back and say goodbye to everyone without them trying to kill you and eat you. I hope.”
This time both of Solvei’s eyebrows rose. She’d known that her life in the tribe was over for some time now, although she hadn’t accepted it until the Night Mare had admonished her. But hearing Yotimo state it so calmly like that nevertheless threw her for a loop. “What...hold on...you’re saying-”
“I’m glad you’ve found someone to give your heart to,” he interrupted, canting his head back toward where they’d left Lex. “I’ll admit that I never thought it would be to a pony, let alone a pony like him...but if he’s the one you want to start a family with, then I want you to have a chance to do that.”
“Yotimo!” It was all she could do not to yell his name, clenching her hands to her chest tighter. “It’s not like that!”
The smile he gave her then was one of patronizing disbelief. “You called him your master.”
Her cheeks flushed, hearing the undertone in his voice. “That’s...a religious thing...” It wasn’t technically a lie, since the Night Mare was the one who’d made their connection possible.
“You stabbed yourself on the off chance that it would make your goddess help him in battle.”
Her ears flattened. “That was because Hvitdod would have killed us all if Lex had lost!”
This time Yotimo waited a moment before speaking, his smile slowly melting away into a serious look. “When the clouds began to fall, and you thought he was about to die, I recognized the look on your face. It was the same one Toklo’s mother made whenever I told her that I needed to go and fight.”
There was nothing Solvei could say to that, swallowing as she shook her head. “Yotimo...it isn’t like that between us. He already has someone in his life. You’ve seen her; she was the pegasus – the winged pony – in that group he was with when you first met him.”
“You’ve defied our traditions, put yourself in danger more times than I can count, and offered up your own life...all for him. You’re really going to tell me that his being with someone else is what frightens you off?”
“That’s not the same-, no, what am I saying?! He and I are different races! We can’t be together!”
“Because the tribe would never approve of such a union?”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Because I want to make his life easier! Not complicate it more!”
“Someone who cared about living an easy life would have run away from all this,” he shot back, weakly waving a hand at the debris surrounding them. “Or he would have tried to cut a deal with his enemies to stop it from ever getting that far. Or simply pushed the responsibility for it all onto someone else...probably whoever the ponies consider their leaders. Instead, he took the option that was most difficult, carried the most risk, and offered the most pain.”
“Meaning what, exactly?” muttered Solvei, looking at the ground.
“Meaning that if you want to do something for him, don’t try to simplify his life. Try to make it better. And as someone who’s watched you grow up, I’m confident that being with you would make anyone’s life better.”
“This has got to be your head wound talking.” Standing up, she turned away from the elder adlet. “Just rest there for a little while, maybe get some sleep, and if I’m lucky you won’t remember any of this when you wake up.”
She didn’t wait for a reply as she started back toward where she’d left Lex and Nenet; it would be better to check up on them than to listen to more of Yotimo’s unwanted advice.
“Akna. One last word of wisdom.”
Despite herself, she slowed as Yotimo called out to her. Letting out a slow breath, she reminded herself that this was someone who deserved her respect. Not only was he urging her to do what made her happy – no, what he thought would make her happy – but he’d also gone above and beyond in supporting her, despite all the taboos she’d broken. Not to mention that he was doing it all even after having suffered so much hardship and abuse, to say nothing of how badly he’d been terrified for his son.
Yotimo had earned the right to speak his mind, and until her master called her back, she owed it to him to listen to what he had to say.
Nodding to herself as she regained her equilibrium, Solvei slowly turned around. “Yes?”
“If all else fails, flash your goods at him like you did for Toklo just now. His pegasus doesn’t have a chest like yours.”
She paused just long enough to call upon her ice magic, dumping several buckets’ worth of snow on his head before stomping away.
Stupid, dirty, meddling old fool! Like I’d ever do something so shameless! Solvei fumed to herself as she trudged back toward Lex and Nenet, still holding her halter top together. What does he know anyway? It’s not like Master’s ever given any indication that he likes bosomy girls!
She was still ruminating as she circled past a large outcropping of frozen clouds, sensing that Lex was just past them-
And she stopped dead as she took in the unfamiliar figure next to him.
She had the figure of a winter tiger, but her fur was the color of the setting sun. Wings like those of a falcon were at her sides, the feathers having the same hue as chestnuts. Long hair like burnt gold tumbled past her shoulders. Even her tail, with spikes protruding from its end, was arresting, adding a touch of danger that somehow only heightened her appeal.
But what captured Solvei’s attention most was the mark on her flank.
The same mark that was on her own.
Lex’s mark.
“Solvei, allow me to reintroduce you to Nenet,” announced Lex, his glowing eyes turning toward her from within the mass of shadows as the winged beauty beside him cringed. “Like yourself, she’s now my soul-bound companion, and I’ll be sending her to retrieve what was taken from me.”
A dozen questions clawed their way to the front of Solvei’s mind then, but she found herself unable to give voice to any other them, either verbally or in her thoughts. Instead, she could only stare at her master’s new servant.
Or rather, she could only stare at his new servant’s chest, which was voluptuous to a degree that put her own bust to shame.
Nenet’s emotions ran across Lex’s consciousness as the sphinx stared at her spiked tail mournfully, telegraphing her state of mind in a way he never would have been able to ascertain otherwise. Even as he watched, her hindmost extremity twitched slightly, and she cringed at the sight, wincing as though she expected to be stung by the bony protrusions. Immediately, Lex registered her sense of self diminishing even further, turning into complete and utter self-loathing-
Master! Solvei’s mindset, by contrast, was a jumble of uncertainty, irritation, and – rather strangely – jealousy. Are you listening to me?
Yes, and my answer remains unchanged. You will stay here with me, while Nenet recovers my vertebrae on her own.
Frustration overrode Solvei’s other emotions then, but only for a moment as she drew in a deep breath, forcing herself to remain calm. Then what about sending some ice elementals to go with her? Or summoning Nisha to help her out?
Had he been corporeal, Lex would have sneered at the implication that he hadn’t considered those ideas. Neither of those are viable options. My cryomantic magic is the same as yours, which means that without external augmentation – which neither of us are in a state to provide – it can’t summon an elemental of any meaningful strength, nor do so for any significant duration.
Solvei frowned. Then Nisha-
Nor can I call upon the Night Mare to send Nisha, or any other of her servants, to my side. Not when I expended the bulk of my divine magic during my fight against Hvitdod...or whatever facsimile of Hvitdod that was. He couldn’t help but glance back at the massive chasm then, still not entirely satisfied with what Soft Whisper had told him.
But that was an issue to be dealt with later. For now, he needed to assuage Solvei’s temperament so that she could help him deal with whatever crisis Nenet was having. The sphinx was his only chance to avoid dying a second time, but seeing what her transformation had done to her tail – which apparently indicated that her father was a manticore, rather than a sphinx – had completely and utterly destroyed what little self-confidence she had.
Lex had struggled against despair often enough to know that, given Nenet’s current disposition, she’d have no chance of recovering his stolen spine. Not when whatever monstrous being that she called “Mother” was in possession of it. As she was right now, Lex wouldn’t have trusted the sphinx to complete a mission with no opposition whatsoever, let alone against a foe that was likely a match for Hvitdod.
But even with their soul-bond, Lex knew better than to think that he could buoy Nenet’s self-esteem on his own.
For that, he needed Solvei, which meant erasing her doubts so that she could erase Nenet’s.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain this form by the time my divine spells replenish themselves, he continued. But even if I am, and I summon Nisha again, the odds of her being able to reach wherever Paska fled to in time to make any sort of substantive contribution to Nenet’s mission are exceedingly small.
What about... Solvei glanced back at where Yotimo and the others were resting, apparently considering them, only for her ears to immediately fold back as she bit her lip.
There’s no one who can go with her, concluded Lex. Which is why-
I can! retorted Solvei hotly. Master, it makes more sense if she and I do this together! She’s too used to being small and powerless to do this by herself! As Solvei, I was taught how to hunt by my family, and as Akna I was trained in the basics of fighting! Even if I’m still injured, I can help!
His impatience growing, Lex had to struggle to keep from rebuking her. Nenet has the ability to fly, and since it will be a day before you can resume your mist form, that means that she’ll be able to traverse what will likely be a considerable distance at a much faster rate than you-
My seracs will be able to keep up with her, no matter how bad the terrain gets! Or I can shrink down and she can carry me! Or-
You’re a liability the way you are now.
Solvei recoiled, her eyes widening. ...what?
You’re wounded, most of your magic is expended, and you’d only slow Nenet down. If you went with her as you are now, you’d be useless at best. And if you died again...
Just the thought was enough to make the edges of his shadow-form twitch and writhe in agitation, remembering the last time she’d been killed before. He wouldn’t let that happen a second time, not because of how painful it had been, but because the prospect of losing Solvei again – even temporarily – wasn’t something he could bring himself to consider.
Not now that he’d finally been able to admit, even if only to himself, how much she meant to him.
...I don’t care...
Hm?
I don’t care if I die again! Stamping her foot, Solvei glared at him, lips curled back in a snarl. Not if it means you get to live! You say I’m a liability, but I could still help Nenet out by serving as a distraction! Or keep watch while she’s sneaking in! Or throwing myself between her and an enemy!
ABSOLUTELY NOT! roared Lex.
But Solvei wasn’t cowed by his anger, instead growling at him. WHY NOT?! If I die, you can find a way to bring me back again, but if you die then it’s over for me! And maybe Nenet too! So why can’t I lay down my life to save yours?!
BECAUSE THAT’S NOT WHAT I WANT!
WELL WHAT ABOUT WHAT I WANT?!
I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU WANT! howled Lex, the last of his self-control vanishing. I AM YOUR MASTER, AND THAT MEANS YOU SERVE ME! YOU SERVE ME! WHEN OUR WISHES CONFLICT, MINE OVERRIDE YOURS! EVERY TIME! WITHOUT FAIL! HOW ARE YOU TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THAT?!
Solvei’s answer was no answer at all, lowering her head until her hair hid her eyes, her hands clenched into fists and her teeth grinding so hard it was audible as she stared at the ground, her breathing irregular and her shoulders jumping slightly.
...understood...Master... she replied at last, her emotional state too chaotic for him to properly register. ...do I have your permission to go and check on Yotimo and the others?
It was a nonsensical request, given that she’d just finished making sure the adlets were alright, but all of a sudden he couldn’t stand the sight of her.
Go.
She took off before he’d even finished giving the order, turning and sprinting away as she brought one forearm up to her face, rubbing it across her eyes as her breathing turned into a sob...
Lex watched her go. It was only as she darted out of visual range that his rage started to abate, and he realized just how badly he’d screwed things up.
What had come over him? Why had he gotten so angry? He’d needed to elucidate his decisions so as to dispel Solvei’s doubts, leaving her free to raise Nenet’s morale. Instead, all he’d done was upset her so badly that she was almost as distressed as the sphinx was. Now Nenet-
It’s my fault.
The telepathic communique wasn’t Solvei’s, causing Lex to glance at his newest servitor. It was only when his eyes met the sphinx’s and she shuddered, looking down, that he realized she’d been watching the last part of the exchange, when Solvei had started growling at him before turning and running away in tears.
It’s all my fault, repeated Nenet. They love each other, but now they’re fighting because of me. She’s upset because she has to work with something so disgusting, and he’s wishing that he’d never made a bond with something as polluted as I am.
You’re wrong.
His rejoinder caused Nenet to shriek in surprise, jumping up onto all fours as her tail thrashed. “Huh?! Wh-what just...?”
It’s telepathy, Lex explained wearily. As part of our connection, we can communicate like this. You inadvertently broadcast your thoughts just now. She’d also confirmed that she apparently wasn’t able to overhear his conversation with Solvei, and the reverse was likely true as well.
But that was no surprise. His servants could communicate with him because they were bound to him. They had no such connection to each other, and so naturally possessed no corresponding ability to speak into each other’s minds, and probably lacked the ability to sense each other’s emotions, location, and status as well.
“I’m sorry,” murmured Nenet, sinking back down into a crouch. “You wanted me to recover your spine, and here I can’t even control my thoughts properly.”
She shuddered as her eyes returned to her tail, her emotional state turning morose again. “I guess a tainted sphinx is no good at all, huh?”
Lex took a moment to consider his words carefully, fully aware that he was on his own now as far as raising Nenet’s confidence went. He’d talked her into accepting becoming his; he could talk her into believing in herself now. “I’m sympathetic to your shame at being the product of miscegeny-”
That’s not what it is.
Her eyes widened as the thought was broadcast, and he registered brief panic from her then. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to interrupt you! I just...that thought slipped out, and-, er, wait, did you hear that to begin with? Can you hear me now?
Yes, to both questions, snapped Lex.
He hadn’t been particularly annoyed by her interruption, but Nenet reacted as though he’d screamed at her, pressing her belly to the ground and covering her head with her paws. “I’m sorry!” she wailed. “I won’t do it again! Please don’t hurt my wings!”
Under other circumstances, the abject begging – with its underlying premise that he was no different from the monsters who’d previously tortured her – would have angered him. But he kept a tight rein on his emotions now, his voice level as he answered her. “I told you before that you would never have to suffer like that again. Did you think I was lying?”
She grimaced, and he wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not as shame overrode her fear. “No, but...”
“But what?”
“...but you made that promise when you thought I was going to become a real sphinx, and not...” – she gestured at her tail – “contaminated.”
He frowned inwardly at that. It was rapidly obvious that there was more that was upsetting her beyond having an impure lineage. “...you said before it wasn’t that you were the product of miscegeny that’s making you hate yourself. What did you mean by that?”
Slowly, as though only tentatively daring to believe that she wasn’t about to be beaten, Nenet relaxed her posture, uncovering her head as she slowly raised her ears from where they’d been flattened against the top of her head. “Do you know about the different breeds of sphinxes?”
“No.”
“There are four kinds,” explained Nenet, her voice morose. “I mean, I’ve read some stuff about mutations and variants, but there are four basic types. The females – or gynosphinxes – are the only one of our sex. The others – the androsphinxes, criosphinxes, and hieracosphinxes – are all male.”
Lex grunted at that. He’d heard stories of sphinxes back on Equestria, though they’d never been more than folktales, and none of them had mentioned anything about different breeds. Certainly not with such a high degree of sexual dimorphism.
“While female offspring of sphinx pairings are always gynosphinxes, the males take after the father’s type,” continued Nenet. “Since androsphinxes are smartest, handsomest, and most magically gifted of the three, they’re a gynosphinx’s ideal mate. Criosphinxes are a distant second; they’re stupid and greedy, but if a gynosphinx can’t find an androsphinx – or can’t convince them to mate with her, since androsphinxes challenge themselves to rise above worldly desires – they’re considered an acceptable alternative.”
Pausing, a shudder ran down her spine. “Hieracosphinxes are the worst. They’re not much better than animals, and while criosphinxes will at least offer treasure and compliments to try and entice a gynosphinx, hieracosphinxes only know how to mate by force.”
She glanced back at her tail again, as though confirming it was still there. “But even they’re better than manticores! A gynosphinx born of a hieracosphinx is still a real sphinx, and can try and mate with an androsphinx when she grows up! But a gynosphinx born with a tail like this” – she gestures at the spiked appendage protruding from her hindquarters – “is polluted! No androsphinx would want them! Even a criosphinx would be too good! The best they can hope for is being hieraco-bait!”
She gave a low sob then. “I was sure my father was an androsphinx. Even if they turn their nose up at earthly desires, Mother is as beautiful as she is brilliant, so it would have been easy for her to seduce even one of them. And since she has total control over her fecundity, she can breed true with anything. That’s how she has so many children.”
Lex narrowed his eyes at that, thinking back to the crossbreeding spell that was among the magic that Kara had given him.
Oblivious to his suspicions, Nenet sniffled. “I knew she’d been with a manticore, since Blat was one of my siblings. But I never thought...it never occurred to me that I...”
She shook her head then, her lower lip trembling. “I know I said I wanted you to resurrect my father, but that’s the last thing I want now. Manticores can barely talk, let alone value learning. They don’t care about studying art, or history, or poetry, or astronomy, or any of the things that I always dreamed my father would teach me...”
She started weeping again then, and it took Lex a moment to realize that she was done...and that she didn’t seem to be feeling any better for what she’d said.
“Nenet, listen to me...I don’t have a background in art or poetry, but I’m well-versed in numerous scientific and magical disciplines. If you can recover my vertebrae, I’ll teach you everything I know.”
“Why bother?” she whimpered. “It’s not like I’ll have anyone to pass that knowledge on to. I’m broken!”
That struck a chord in Lex, reminding him of when he’d first grasped that his inability to understand others meant that there was something wrong with him. It was a realization that he’d never truly recovered from...but unlike Nenet, he had years of experience dealing with that. And he’d had the Night Mare’s help coming to terms with it.
“Just because you’re broken doesn’t mean you can’t be useful.”
“Huh?” Her cheeks stained with tears, Nenet looked up at him. “Yes, it does. If something’s defective, then it’s useless.”
“My life has been a testament to the contrary,” retorted Lex. “And even Solvei” – he paused, feeling a pang run through him then – “even Solvei knows what it’s like to be found wanting compared to others of her kind...”
He shook that off, knowing he needed to focus. “Even if you’re broken, you can still serve a purpose. My purpose.”
Nenet blinked at that. “Yours?”
I’ll tell you all about it while you fly to your mother’s location, promised Lex, switching to telepathy.
And by the time you arrive, you’ll know that your service to me will more than make up for any defects that you have.
You actually protected your enemy? Against a holy relic of your own faith?
Nenet couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her mental voice, and a small part of her wondered if her new master – she couldn’t help but think of him that way, in what was probably a side-effect of the bonding process – would be angry at her for doubting him.
Not that he could have done much if he was, since she’d already flown over fifty miles away from him, heading back toward Mother’s lair.
After hours in the air, her wings were starting to ache. But it was a different sensation from the lingering pain that Grisela had so often inflicted on her, being a satisfying sense of exertion rather than the stinging agony of broken bones that hadn’t healed correctly. Now, with each flap, she could feel the air being pushed down in heavy gusts, propelling her powerfully through the sky in a way that she’d never had the chance to appreciate before.
It would have been thrilling if not for the fact that she was on her way to a terrifying confrontation.
That was another reason she didn’t want to anger her new owner. He’d spent the last few hours telling her more about himself, and while Nenet found the tales of his exploits captivating, it had also served to distract her from the enormity of what she was about to do.
Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be inclined to stop talking now. Princess Luna had already been defeated, which voided any justification for continuing hostilities, replied Lex, not sounding the least upset by her skeptical tone. Then again, according to what he’d told her so far, it was entirely possible that he didn’t even hear it, since he apparently had some sort of communication disorder. Nor was Severance empowered to pass judgment on her for her crimes; as the only legitimate authority in Equestria, that right belongs to me alone. Given that Severance had already slain a pony without my leave, extreme measures were necessary to prevent it from doing so again.
That’s incredible, Master, she replied, clenching her paws to her chest.
In another context the gesture might have seemed to connote romance, but for Nenet it was far more practical, serving to keep the rune-embedded quill – Belligerence, Lex had said its name was – held firmly in her cleavage.
It wasn’t an ideal way to carry it, she knew, but it had been the only method that worked.
After having dropped it no less than three times during her flight, she’d finally conceded that she still wasn’t used to using her new, much larger paws for fine manipulation. Carrying it in her mouth hadn’t been a better option; clenching her teeth around the oversized quill had quickly left her jaw aching. And her hideous tail didn’t have the flexibility necessary to coil around it.
Nor had she been willing to use the telekinesis that she’d gained as a result of her transformation. Although she’d been overjoyed at first to find that she was now capable of manipulating of objects using her thoughts alone, her joy had been dampened by the realization that doing so not only made her eyes glow in a way identical to her master’s, but also put a matching luminous aura around whatever object she was utilizing.
From her height, and against the dull grey of the clouds, the colorful display was just asking for Mother – or Paska – to see her coming. Nor did Nenet dare fly inside the clouds themselves, certain she would have gotten lost if she had. And an invisible light source still creates visible light, she reminded herself, recalling all of the magic that Mother had made her learn. So I need to save that spell for later.
Just like from the joy of flying, that brought a smile to her lips.
Finally, she could finally use the spells she’d spent so long learning!
In her previous form, she’d only had a tiny amount of magic, but all of it had been ingrained and unchangeable. She’d been able to comprehend any sort of language, written or spoken, including those used in spell construction. She’d been able to see into the magical spectrum for as long as she could remember. She’d even had a few – very, very few – weak offensive and defensive powers, since Mother hadn’t wanted her spellbook to be completely helpless.
Nenet had never dared using any of it to try and lash out at Grisela, however, knowing that it would have made her sister’s torments infinitely worse. Even trying to protect herself had made Grisela furious, leaving Nenet with no choice except to whimper and beg while her sister had worked her over...all while thinking of the spells she’d learned that could have alleviated her suffering, in her brain but completely beyond her reach.
No longer.
True, she couldn’t use very many spells in a given day now, and the ones she could cast weren’t very powerful. But it was still far and away more than she’d been capable of before, and even if the stronger spells she’d learned were beyond what she could cast, she still knew a dizzying number of weaker ones, leaving her brimming with excitement so great that it was almost enough to make her forget about the mark of shame that was her tail.
It helped that her innate magic – her “spell-like abilities,” as the biological magic she was infused with were called – had increased as well, far exceeding what she’d previously had. All gynosphinxes had a suite of magical powers they could use, and even if her tail was polluted, her magical heritage was completely intact. Those abilities weren’t suited for combat, since sphinxes were creatures of lore and learning, but could be very helpful in avoiding a fight in the first place.
That was something that Nenet planned to take full advantage of in the near future.
Of course, if things did come down to a fight...then she’d probably have to use the third form of magic that her master had given her.
It was far and away the strongest power she’d gained as a result of the soul-bond, easily outstripping her new body’s spell-like abilities and the meager spellcasting prowess that she’d been given. Which was good, because if she had to confront Mother to get Master’s spine back...if she couldn’t find some way to take it without being detected...then that power would be the only thing that could potentially save her.
That and the pony to whom she’d given her soul.
Master, I’m almost there, she reported as she spotted a small, forested dell nestled between two mountains. It had absolutely nothing to distinguish it from the surrounding countryside, except that the snowfall over the valley was too perfect. Its uniform white coating was evenly distributed across the pine trees, with no sign of the wind that would have periodically blown some of the branches clear or dislodged needles and loose boughs. Not even the vaguest remnants of animal tracks could be seen across the clear patches of land. And there wasn’t even the slightest sign of wildlife, with no birds landing amidst the trees or rabbits darting across the glades.
Still, as far as illusions went, it was an impressive one, Nenet knew. If she hadn’t been so familiar with it, she felt sure it would have fooled her. I’m not sure if the warding extends past the illusion. Can you still see through my eyes?
For now, came Lex’s answer. Are you certain that will cut off my ability to share your senses?
Yes, she replied immediately, trying to fight off the feeling of isolation that answer brought with it. Despite how new their connection was, the idea that her master would be able to see and hear everything she saw and heard on such an unnerving mission had been reassuring, and Nenet hated being so sure that Mother’s wards would prevent that. Our telepathy won’t be affected, and you’ll still be able to sense my emotions and if I’m hurt, but other than that...
Other than that, everything will be suppressed, finished Lex. I won’t be able to use your senses, intuit your distance and direction from me, or teleport you back.
The teleportation block is a separate effect, added Nenet quickly as she swooped down toward the edge of the illusory trees, more for her own benefit than her master’s. Talking gave her something to think about besides how nervous she was. Mother set that up so that anyone who tried to use magic to get in or out would be redirected into an oubliette she set up inside. I don’t think it’s ever been used, but she taught me the spell.
But not the passkey.
...no, answered Nenet with a wince. Because she’d learned the anti-teleport ward, she knew its functionality forward and backward, including that it allowed for an exception to be built into the effect at the time the spell was cast, allowing teleportation to work if the specified passkey was used.
But that passkey could have been almost anything that the caster wanted. A word. A gesture. A type of item. And while Nenet felt certain that Mother would have made use of that clause – she’d never pass up such a strong advantage – she hadn’t been there when Mother had cast the spell, and so wasn’t sure what the passkey was.
Then once you retrieve my vertebrae, you’ll need to retreat beyond the barrier before I can summon you back, concluded Lex.
Nenet fought down the urge to wince at the pronouncement, landing a few hundred yards from the edge of the illusion, shifting Belligerence so she was carrying it over her shoulder, one paw draped across the quill awkwardly.
Getting outside of the warding was the most dangerous part of the entire plan. If Mother was using Lex’s spine – having been touched by Hvitdod’s curse – as the focus for the artifact she was building, then all of her attention would be focused on it. There’d be no way to steal it except by grabbing it right in front of her, and hoping that she’d be shocked enough to give Nenet time to turn and run. After that, everything came down to whether or not she’d be able to get clear so that Lex could teleport her out before Mother caught her.
Taking a deep breath as she forced herself not to think about what would happen if that happened, Nenet slowly cast her invisibility spell, letting the rush of casting a spell – of actually putting the knowledge she’d been given to use – help to steady her nerves. A moment later, she felt the magic activate, laughing in amazement as she looked down and saw that her paws were transparent to her own sight now. Being a full gynosphinx, she could see through an invisibility spell without even trying, but that didn't change the visceral thrill of knowing that she'd actually cast a spell!
Master, I promise I won’t let you down! The assurance was for her own sake more than his, trying to hold onto the rush coursing through her. I’ll recover your spine, make sure not to lose Belligerence, and absolutely get back outside the barrier successfully!
Unfortunately, his response didn’t help to sustain her nervous excitement. Just remember to exercise caution. If you die, then I have no method by which to teleport my vertebrae back, so don’t entertain any notion of laying down your life for my sake.
There was a particularly bitter tone in his voice for some reason, but Nenet didn’t pay attention to it as she swallowed, suddenly apprehensive again. R-right.
And don’t hesitate to sacrifice Belligerence if you need to.
That was enough to catch her by surprise. Really? But...but it’s such a powerful weapon-
Which matters not at all if keeping it costs either of us our lives. I gave you Belligerence because I wanted to increase your chances of success, not because I wanted you to divide your attention between the quill and my spine. I threw away Severance to secure Luna’s safety; I have no compunctions about losing Belligerence to secure yours.
Intellectually, Nenet knew that Lex was just being pragmatic. If the alternative was death, giving up a weapon in order to stay alive was simply prudent. Even so, a warm feeling spread through her then, mentally replaying the last part of what he’d said...that she was more valuable to him than the weapon that had slain Hvitdod.
When was the last time anyone had told her that they valued her that much?
When was the last time anyone had told her that they valued her at all?
Even Mother had only ever cared about her as a spellbook. And while Lex was relying on her now to secure his own survival, it didn’t change the fact that he was willing to make sacrifices to help her, as opposed to using her and then throwing her away. It was more consideration than anyone else had ever shown her in her life, and Nenet could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks now.
It’s that pony goddess’s blessing. The one Master warned me about, she reminded herself, giving her head a shake. That’s all.
But knowing that didn’t change how light she felt as she padded toward the edge of the illusion and plunged through it.
It was all Nenet could do not to scream as she came face-to-face with Grisela.
Her entire body locked up in terror as her sister’s eyes stared into her own, memories of all the pain she’d suffered at the winter hag’s misshapen hands flooding her mind. In that moment she wasn’t a full gynosphinx anymore; she was a small, weak creature that couldn’t do anything except whimper and beg for mercy despite knowing that she wouldn’t receive any.
Nenet! What’s happening?!
No one would come to help her. No one would even tell Grisela to stop. They’d only remind her not to inflict any fatal wounds, because the pathetic creature she was torturing needed to be alive to serve as Mother’s spellbook. That was the only reason her life had any value.
Answer me! What’s your situation?!
There was no way to fight back. Nowhere that she could run. No hope in even defending herself. She couldn’t even hope that it would eventually stop, because it never would. Grisela would always be there to torment her, again and again and again, and even wishing for an end to it was more than she-
NENET! RESPOND! NOW!!!
Her master’s psychic scream caused the sphinx to gasp, jarred out of her panic and despair. M-Master! It’s Grisela! She-
That was when she noticed the dim aura clinging to the winter hag. With its wispy appearance and muted coloration, Nenet distantly realized that she was looking into the magical spectrum – belatedly remembering that she was using that and normal vision simultaneously now – and that the aura she was seeing was one that she’d glimpsed before...
It’s a puppet, she realized, suddenly aware of how the Grisela in front of her was standing absolutely motionless, not twitching, blinking, or even breathing. I thought...I thought it was the real thing...
Has it spotted you?
Swallowing, Nenet took a slow step to the side, every muscle tense as she waited for the effigy of her sister to follow her. But the puppet remained still, acting as though it was totally unaware of her. Taking a moment to steady her breathing, Nenet bent down and scooped up a rock, her paw trembling as she lifted the stone and threw it a short distance.
It landed with a soft thump in a snowbank, and sure enough Grisela’s puppet slowly turned its head in that direction, staring at the small indentation in the snow. Nenet could feel her heart thumping in her chest as she waited. Finally, the simulacrum turned back, staring out at the woods from its place just inside the protective illusion, resuming its silent vigil.
No, she answered at last. She didn’t-, I mean, it didn’t see me.
All at once, she could feel her composure crumbling, the sudden release of tension bringing with it a horrible sense of helplessness rather than the relief she’d been expecting. Her stomach heaved, the world spun, and Nenet couldn’t bring herself to stay there a second longer, wings flapping as she took off.
She just managed to reach a stone outcropping a few dozen feet away when the last of her self-control failed, leaving her struggling not to throw up as she started to sob. I’m sorry! she whimpered, her voice thick with anguish even in her thoughts. She didn’t know why she was apologizing, but at the moment it was all she could think to do. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!
Calm down.
Unable to help but register that as criticism, Nenet flinched. I can’t!
Her admission brought with it a renewed sense of self-loathing. She had just been declaring that she’d absolutely succeed in recovering her master’s spine, yet now she was completely falling apart, despite all of the power he’d given her. I hate that I’m so useless, she moaned inwardly. I thought maybe I could be like Solvei, someone strong and brave that you could depend on, but I’m not...and I never will be...
But Lex’s reaction wasn’t what she expected, a derisive snort coming across their collection. When I first met Solvei, she had neither strength nor bravery.
That was enough to make Nenet blink, sniffling. Really?
The first time I met her, she had attacked a companion of mine. I subdued her, and she wept and pleaded to be released. Then, after I let her go, she begged me to help her save her family.
I had no idea, replied Nenet meekly, finding what Lex was saying difficult to imagine. Her master’s original servant had been a powerful fighter the first time Nenet had seen her, easily dispatching Blat before moving on to engage Grisela without the least bit of fear. It had taken Sissel herself to put her down, and even then Lex had brought her back, more powerful and completely unafraid of having a rematch with the one who’d killed her.
The idea that someone like that had once been like her was strangely comforting.
Describe your surroundings, demanded Lex abruptly.
Thrown off-kilter for a second time, Nenet couldn’t help a moment’s confusion. Huh?
I can’t see through your eyes now, Lex reminded her. Tell me the layout of the place. What do the structures look like? How many of Grisela’s puppets are there? Is there anyone else around? Describe it to me.
Taking a moment to collect herself, Nenet glanced around, not that she needed to; she’d been born here, never having known anywhere else. There aren’t many buildings. It’s mostly just a few simple two-story fortifications made out of stone and wood, set up at either end of the vale to watch for trespassers, and a few more on the mountainside to keep watch for flying intruders. Everything else is in the part of the mountain that Mother hollowed out.
Are the fortifications occupied?
No. I mean, two have Grisela’s puppets on them, but the rest are just standing around, not using the forts. Anticipating his next question, she quickly counted them up. There’s eight of them that I can see, but they’re not doing anything. I think they’re lesser puppets, the kind Grisela would make when she didn’t have much time, since they should have seen through my invisibility. She hated doing that; she always considered making those to be an art. I think she only left these behind to guard the place because of how fast Sissel rushed us out of here to intercept you...
She winced for a moment, remembering the first time she’d seen Lex, and she was midway through reminding herself that Solvei had also started out as his enemy when a glimpse of motion caught her eyes. Oh, and there’s two astradaemons guarding the place also, but-
What?! This time his voice was the one that was full of alarm. Nenet, get out of there! Those are high-ranking daemons! They can rip your soul out without having to kill you first!
Master, it’s okay! They’re only guarding against ethereal intruders!
...what?
Nenet paused, watching as the shadowy forms of the astradaemons flew by. They were terrifying to look at, having bodies were vaguely humanoid in shape, and as tall as Sissel, but were horrifically gaunt. Their skin looked as though it were composed of semi-solid oil, ripples running across it, and Nenet knew from her studies that those were the remaining fragments of the souls they’d consumed. Long claws extended from each of their four limbs, and a cluster of tentacles sprouted from between their shoulder blades, all of them twitching and writhing independently of each other, much like the long tail that trailed behind them.
But it was their faces that were the most unnerving. Their heads were vaguely eel-like in shape, having eyes that were solid red and jaws that were composed of multiple mandibles. Their teeth were angled slightly outward, protruding past their faces in a way that made it clear that they were predators of the worst kind.
Fortunately, Nenet knew that they were no threat to her.
Mother couldn’t afford to keep such powerful daemons as mercenaries, so she made a different arrangement with them. Since her wards don’t extend onto the Ethereal Plane, she has them stay in that dimension and patrol the area from there. They’ll devour the souls of anyone approaching ethereally, but they won’t do anything about anyone who comes near here on the Material Plane.
You’re certain of that? asked Lex, and Nenet could hear the tension in his mental voice. Absolutely certain?
The reminder that he was worried about her, that her humiliating breakdown hadn’t ruined his faith in her, was enough to make the corner’s of Nenet’s lips turn upward ever so slightly, feeling less wretched. Yes, I am.
Her statement was punctuated by the two astradaemons plunging into the mountainside, passing through the solid rock as though they were ghosts...which in a way, they were.
The Ethereal Plane was the immaterial counterpart to the physical world. The realm of ghosts and specters – as well as other creatures that had developed special means of navigating the non-physical space that composed that dimension – it overlapped with the Material Plane, allowing such creatures to observe the mortal realm without being able to touch it. But that wouldn’t be any sort of barrier to astradaemons, Nenet knew; those creatures could cross planar boundaries with a thought.
Fortunately, they were as selfish and spiteful as the rest of their kind. The terms of Mother’s deal made it very clear that they weren’t expected to do anything that involved the Material Plane. An army could have been laying waste to the place, and they wouldn’t have done a thing to help. As it was, the only reason she could even see them – since the Ethereal Plane was normally beyond what the naked eye could see – was because her gynosphinx evolution that Lex had drawn out of her conferred the power to spot invisible creatures, including those that were ethereal.
If something changed and the astradaemons did decide to get involved, she’d at least be able to see them coming.
Alright, answered Lex at last. Where is your mother likely to be now?
Inside the mountain, replied Nenet without hesitation. She made a suite of rooms all for herself in the deepest part of it. It’s the most secure part of the entire place. If she’s using her magic on your spine, that’s where she’ll be.
Then you know where you need to go.
Swallowing, Nenet nodded. Yes, Master.
It was only then that she realized that her panic attack was already ending. She’d been so distracted by what her master had said about Solvei – along with her describing the terrain to him, and then explain the situation with the astradaemons – that she’d forgotten how unnerved she’d been at running into an image of her tormentor. Already, her nausea was gone, and her breathing had returned to normal, her heart no longer pounding against her ribcage.
Had Lex done that on purpose, having her talk about other things so that she’d have a chance to calm down?
Reason said that was unlikely, but Nenet still felt another rush of gratitude toward him.
Kara’s influence or not, the sensation was wonderfully addictive, and Nenet couldn’t help but close her eyes and rejoice in it before reminding herself that she had a job to do. Master, I’m going to start heading in. I’ll try not to contact you again unless something happens.
Just remember what I said about exercising caution.
Smiling, Nenet hugged Belligerence to her chest. I will. And Master...thank you.
His only reply was a grunt of acknowledgment, and then he fell silent.
Wasting another few seconds to indulge in the fleeting remnants of the warm feeling going through her, Nenet let out a slow breath. Her invisibility spell only had a duration of a few minutes, and while it was able to fool Grisela’s automatons, Nenet had no doubt that Mother herself would immediately see her.
But right now, her biggest concern was making sure that Mother hadn’t summoned any other reinforcements to deter any possible interruptions while she worked. Fortunately, Nenet had a plan to run at least some minor reconnaissance; unfortunately, putting into practice would use up most of her invisibility spell’s duration.
Deciding that it was a worthwhile tradeoff, Nenet closed her eyes as she concentrated, calling up the magical formula that was her birthright as a gynosphinx. Now that she was inside Mother’s wards, a scrying spell should be able to work normally, and while Nenet had no doubt that Mother herself would notice any attempt to spy on her, the rest of the mountain complex wouldn’t be protected.
Slowly, after several minutes of piecing together the necessary magical instructions, an image appeared in consciousness, her clairvoyance spell taking shape.
And she was looking at the main juncture of the mountain’s interior, halfway between Grisela and Sissel’s rooms. If there was anyone patrolling the interior of the place, they’d have to pass through there eventually.
But as Nenet concentrated, rotating the immobile scrying sensor in a full circle, she couldn’t see anyone.
Of course, that didn’t mean anything. The sensor for this spell was fairly weak, and couldn’t transmit magical means of vision, so an invisible enemy would have been overlooked. But the sensor also had an audial component, and she couldn’t hear anything – not even the faintest of footsteps – no matter how hard she listened.
Opening her eyes, Nenet knew she had to get moving. In a few minutes she’d become visible again, and it was likely that Grisela’s puppets would move to attack her when she did. While Nenet suspected that she could likely win – lesser puppets were inferior to their greater counterparts in every way, and those were themselves less powerful than Grisela had been in reality – it wasn’t a prospect that she relished.
Flapping her wings, Nenet quickly made her way to the cave entrance. Looking inside, she quirked a brow at the sight of the unworked stone that made up the walls and ground.
Mother hadn’t restored the illusions that made the place seem like an opulent mansion.
That was unusual for her. Mother had luxurious tastes, ranging from a parade of exotic lovers – all of whom were killed and their souls given to the daemons once she was done with them – to delectable food and drink, and she indulged her appetites whenever possible. When it wasn’t possible, however, she had no compunctions about using her magic to make up the difference as much as she could.
Under Mother’s power, the rough-hewn walls of the mountain fastness had appeared more like an elegant castle, with carved friezes and bas-reliefs, bedecked in thick carpets and colorful tapestries depicting Mother in beautiful outfits. The dank and stale air had smelled fresh and lightly scented, as though bouquets of flowers had been planted nearby. It had even felt warmer, the temperature rising to a comfortable level compared to the chill that now permeated the caverns.
She’s either incredibly depleted, or in a serious rush to finish making that artifact now that she has Hvitdod’s curse, Nenet decided. Or both.
It was a heartening sign, but she didn’t let that make her careless as she crept inside, ears perked and making sure to look around carefully for magical auras, noting with a grimace that her invisibility spell had just worn off.
And yet, as Nenet crept deeper into the complex, there was no one around to spot her.
Pausing as she came to the intersection where she’d set her scrying sensor, Nenet let the clairvoyance spell fade. She may not have anyone else here, but I’m still going to have to get out once I recover Master’s vertebrae, she sighed inwardly, knowing that the lack of guards had made her task only slightly easier. Which means that I need to prepare as much as I can now, while I still have time.
Licking her lips, she awkwardly stood up on her hind legs, wobbling as she cradled Belligerence in her front paws.
Scrying wasn’t the only inherent magic her new body gave her. Another one was the ability to prepare a magical symbol that could incapacitate anyone who came within its range. But she still had to draw the symbol, and while Nenet had no doubt that Belligerence was more than capable of scratching the necessary glyphs into the stone floor, she wasn’t sure she could manipulate it well enough to draw them.
I should stop being afraid and just use the telekinesis Master gave me, she scolded herself, unable to help but glance around. Despite how empty the caverns seemed, Nenet couldn’t help but imagine that the flow of her telekinetic aura would bring someone running. I just wish I had hands! she sighed inwardly. Solvei was a winter wolf the first time I saw her, but then Master made her into an adlet. If only he’d given me the power to-
“Hngh!”
The groan that escaped Nenet’s mouth then was one of shock, as her point of view and center of balance both shifted at once.
Tumbling, she barely managed to avoid impaling herself on Belligerence as she collapsed, landing hard on her chest. “Ow,” she muttered, pushing herself upright, one hand coming up to rub her aching...
Wait.
One hand...?
Gasping, Nenet stared at the slim, furless fingers in front of her face. Her heart pounding, she glanced backward; sure enough, instead of the tawny coat and large wings, all she saw was a smooth, skin-covered back leading to the curves of her rear end, with only her Master’s mark upon her hips to showcase that she was the same sphinx as before.
But all of that mattered less to her than the fact that her tail was gone, leaving her staring in wonder as she wiggled her backside and felt nothing there.
She had become a human.
Had she not been well-versed in sphinx lore from the books that Mother had collected, Nenet might have panicked. Instead, it was awe that flowed through her mind then. This...this is the Two Feet at Noon technique! This is supposed to be something that only the most learned of sphinxes can do! Slowly, she stood up, having to struggle to keep her footing; between her rear counterbalance being gone, and how top-heavy her bipedal form was, it took her several moments to right herself.
Master, how powerful did you make me? she giggled excitedly, barely able to keep from accidentally transmitting that thought to him. I wonder...
Concentrating, Nenet bent her thoughts toward what else she knew about this power...namely, that it had an even more advanced version...
A second later, she felt her weight shift backward, barely managing to catch herself as she stumbled. Even before she glanced over her shoulder, she could see that her wings were back, as was the bronze fur that now covered her humanoid form. She still had fingers, but her feline form’s retractable claws now protruded from their tips. Even her tail, in all its ugliness, had returned, but for once Nenet couldn’t bring herself to be upset.
Three Feet in the Evening! she whooped inwardly. The humanoid-sphinx technique! I can’t believe I can do both! It’s supposed to take centuries to learn these!
Giggling more, she couldn’t help but jump up and down, almost falling over again from how that made her chest jiggle. I really am just like Solvei now! I bet she’ll be so happy for me! Master too!
The thought of Lex brought a smile to her lips, and Nenet quickly fumbled with Belligerence, marveling at how dexterous her new fingers were. Quickly carving the glyph into the intersection, she nodded, inordinately pleased with herself as she started down the hallway toward Mother’s suite.
She was so thrilled that she didn’t see the figure step out from an alcove behind her until it was too late.
It was all Nenet – still in her humanoid-sphinx form – could do to hold in a scream of fright as the words took her completely by surprise. Though the fact that a long, serrated blade came to rest against her neck didn’t help either, the sharp edges pressed against her skin. It was only after the initial moment of shock had passed that she realized she recognized who had spoken. “P-Paska?”
A confused grunt came from behind her. “How do you-, Nenet?!”
The shock in his voice was audible, and Nenet risked a glance backward. Sure enough, there was Paska, staring at her with a thunderstruck expression. In another context, that might have been funny, considering how stoic he usually was. But somehow, Nenet couldn’t see the humor in the situation now, instead managing a weak smile. “I, um...I’m back...”
She waited, trying hard not to shake as he stared at what she’d become. Paska had never abused her the way Grisela had, being mostly content to ignore her. Even so, he’d always struck Nenet as being a menacing figure; quiet, competent, and focused on whatever task Mother had given him, she’d made sure to stay out of his way as much as possible.
As such, she couldn’t resist a sigh of relief as he slowly removed the sword from her neck. “What’re you doing here?” he demanded, his voice reverting back to the neutral tone she’d grown so used to hearing from him. “And what happened to you?”
Her heart racing, Nenet licked her lips, desperately trying to think of a cover story. “I heard Mother in my head a little while ago. She said that everyone else had been killed, which meant that I was the only spellbook she had left, and that I had to come back. So, uh, here I am!”
It was all technically true, even if it left out a few important details. But when Paska’s only reaction was to give her a flat look, Nenet knew she needed to supply those details, and fast. “Oh, and um, the reason I look like this” – she twisted in place, glancing down at herself...only for her heart to jump into her throat as she saw her master’s mark on her flanks, having forgotten that was there – “is, er, because I, um...when I escaped I came across Mas-, I mean, Lex’s body, and I...ate it.”
Paska arched a brow. “You ate it?”
“Mm-hmm.” Nodding rapidly, Nenet tried to remember what Lex and Solvei had told her about what had happened to Sissel. “Not all of it, I mean. You see, after I escaped I was, um...starving. And his body was right there, so I just, sort of...ate his h-heart.” She brought one hand up to her face and pantomimed biting into something, but faltered when she saw that Paska’s expression was unchanged.
“S-so after I did that, I just sort of went poof” – even as the word left her mouth she felt herself wince inwardly; Poof? Really? – “and, um, turned into this! With his mark on my hips and everything,” she finished with an awkward laugh.
“Just like his pet wolf.”
“Exactly!” added Nenet, relieved that he’d finally said something...only to start sweating as she realized that what he’d said was closer to an accusation than a statement of confidence. “I mean, sort of. Oh, and I ate her heart too. For, um, good measure...”
This time Paska didn’t say anything, simply staring her dead in the eye, and Nenet could feel herself starting to sweat. It was only after several long, tense seconds had passed that Paska slowly broke eye contact, his gaze drifting downward...
To the quill that she was carrying.
“Oh, uh, this thing?” babbled Nenet. “I found it nearby. It was, I mean, I figured Mother might want it, since, you know, Ma-, Lex killed Hvitdod with it.”
“I have to admit that I’m impressed,” Paska said at last, and Nenet felt another rush of relief as her tension ebbed.
But then he continued speaking. “Especially since I saw that spear, or quill, or whatever it is, stab the last person who tried to grab it.”
He’s not buying it he’s not buying it he’s not buying it he’s not buying it!!!
“R-really? Wow, that’s...I don’t know what to say,” she sputtered, desperately trying to think of some new lie to explain that. “I mean, if M-, Lex put a protection spell on it, it must have worn off by now. Or, you know what? Maybe it’s still active, and it just thinks I’m him...what with the heart-eating and everything...”
Paska went silent again, just staring at Belligerence for several seconds, until he raised his eyes to hers again.
This time, however, Nenet couldn’t bear the silence. “So, er, what are you doing here? And, uh...” She paused as she took in the particulars of his appearance, her fright having caused her to overlook what he was carrying. “Why do you have all that stuff?”
That was the mildest way she could put it, as Paska was loaded down with gear...almost all of which was, to her eyes, glowing with magic. And just like with Grisela’s puppets outside, it took Nenet a moment to realize that she recognized several of the magical auras. “Wait...that’s the chalice that Sissel always used to make sure her meals weren’t poisoned! The whetsone that Vidrig used to keep her axe supernaturally sharp! Grisela’s torture staff...”
She trailed off then, recalling how the staff had been used on her more than once. It was technically a healing item, as it stimulated the body’s natural recovery abilities, but did so in an incredibly painful manner, making the victim feel like they were being flensed with red-hot knives. The sight of it now – just one among a panoply of magic items that Paska was loaded down with – was sobering enough that she momentarily forgot her nervousness...
And that was when she realized what Paska was doing.
“You’re taking their stuff,” she breathed, incredulous. “They’ve been dead for less than a day, and you’re looting their valuables.”
“They don’t need them anymore,” replied Paska matter-of-factly. “I do.”
“Mother won’t approve.”
“Mother was happy to sacrifice all of our brothers and sisters just to get a few drops of godsblood. I don’t think she’d mind my helping myself to the leftovers.”
Slowly, he reached behind his back, grabbing something that was tucked into his waistband. “Besides, taking someone’s magic items is a common battlefield practice. Just like this one which I picked up while I was draggng Vidrig’s carcass out of that river after that pony turned our ambush back on us.”
It was already unnerving how talkative Paska was being, but when Nenet looked at the two-foot long steel rod, she felt her heart lurch in her chest, remembering what she’d heard Lex say just before they’d fought him and his travel companions outside of that shrine they’d been headed to.
“The rod detects hostility directed toward the one who bears it,” intoned Lex darkly, glaring at Shadow Star.
Her throat suddenly turning dry, Nenet felt tremors run through her. Lex’s pegasus friend had been the one carrying that! Had she lost it when they’d all jumped into the river? “Th-that...”
“I figured this would be good to have, since I was basically sitting on Hvitdod’s doorstep, waiting to be ambushed,” continued Paska, his tone still even. “But I guess this thing has a range limit, because it didn’t start going off until right before that old adlet jumped me. Fortunately it was a lot more helpful when I was fighting him in a fog cloud later on.”
His other hand raised the serrated sword again, and Nenet stumbled backward as he pointed it at her neck. “You might be Mother’s spellbook, but I’m the one she sent out to do her dirty work, and I’ve gotten to be quite good at it. So naturally, I was rather surprised when I noticed a scrying sensor in here, especially such a sloppy one.”
Nenet bit her lip, silently regretting ever having cast that spell. Not only had she not learned anything, she’d completely given herself away! How did I not think of this?! Mother knows all about scrying, that’s why she has these wards up! Of course Paska would know about it too!
“Then, a few minutes later, this rod starts buzzing,” continued Paska, “same as it did right before the fight at Hvitdod’s lair...and then you walk in with a new body, a crazy story, the same mark as that pony’s wolf, and the quill that stabbed me...”
Behind her, Nenet could feel her hideous tail thrashing, betraying her agitation. Paska might still be injured, but he was an experienced fighter, and Nenet knew full well that the spells she had – both those that were inherent to her as a sphinx, and those she’d prepared – would only be of limited usefulness if things came down to a violent altercation.
I can’t beat him in a fight. I don’t even know HOW to fight! But if I run away now, I’ll never recover Master’s spine! I’ve got to talk Paska down...but how?
Swallowing, she eyed the sword pointed at her throat, only able to come up with a single idea. “I’m still Mother’s only remaining spellbook,” she murmured, barely able to keep her voice steady. “If you kill me, she’ll be furious.”
“I don’t care what Mother wants anymore,” retorted Paska, his face still calm and composed, as though he hadn’t just said something shocking. “She’s sacrificed all of her children to get what she wants. I’m not going to wait around for her to do the same to me.”
Hope flared in Nenet’s chest. “Then-”
“But I can’t have you telling her that I took off with all the treasure I could carry,” he finished. “It’s not like she’s taken an inventory of what Sissel and the others left behind, so if I vanish now, she’ll just think that I’m out guarding the place like she told me. By the time she realizes I’m not coming back, I’ll be long gone.”
“I-I won’t tell,” whimpered Nenet, backing up. “Paska, I swear, I won’t breathe a word-”
“And if she doesn’t have access to any of her spellbooks, she’ll have a harder time tracking me down,” he continued, tucking the steel rod back into his waistband. “At the very least, it buys me some time.”
For a moment Nenet could only stand there, overwhelmed by what she was hearing. Then she stumbled backward, almost tripping over her own feet as she lifted Belligerence, waving it at Paska. “S-stay back!” she yelled, though it came out sounding more like a plea. “I’m warning you!”
The words had barely left her mouth when Paska lunged forward, sword raised. The sudden charge made Nenet shriek, swinging Belligerence wildly.
She came nowhere close to striking Paska, who easily sidestepped her undisciplined strike as he brought his sword around. Its serrations caught on Belligerence’s barbs, and before Nenet realized what was happening, Paska pulled his arm back, yanking the quill out of her hands and sending it skidding across the hallway.
“Too easy,” he muttered, pointing the sword at her again.
Nenet could feel her heart pounding in her chest, knowing this was a fight she couldn’t win. “P-Paska...don’t do this...please...”
He didn’t reply, instead giving her that same inscrutable look...and then he lowered his sword.
Nenet had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief before he reached into the pack he was carrying and withdrew a scroll. “Mother would be suspicious if she found blood in the hallway.”
Then he unfurled the scroll and started reading.
Nenet had a half-second to wonder what was going on. She hadn’t even known that Paska knew how to read spell scrolls; his magic was just to improve his abilities as a warrior! And who had he taken that scroll from? Had Sissel been hoarding them?
But all of those questions fell away as she heard the incantation he was reciting, and realized what he was about to do to her.
NO!
As Paska recited the final syllable of the spell, the scroll’s aura flaring as its power was unleashed, Nenet felt the magic reach out to grab her.
...and she unleashed the greatest power her master had given her.
Before, she’d only had a few small, inherent spells. Those powers, determined by biology, had been increased many times over by her transformation. Moreover, she was now able to actually cast the spells she’d been made to learn; not many, and only the weaker ones, but she was still able to make use of them nonetheless.
But there was a third form of magic that Lex had bestowed upon her. One which, while far more limited in terms of what she could do with it, was much stronger in those situations where she could bring it to bear.
Countermagic.
A thought was all it took for Nenet to call upon that now, reaching into the deep well of power that Lex had imbued her with, drawing out the largest quantity she could and flinging it at Paska’s spell.
Able to see into the magical spectrum, she watched as the formless mass of energy she’d hurled struck the power from the scroll head-on, two auras colliding with each other and twisting around as they both tried to overpower their opponent. But while Paska’s spell was trying to break through her own with all the single-minded determination of a charger attempting to trample everything in its path, her own was far more insidious.
Before her eyes, she saw her countermagic twist and morph, its aura fluctuating as it rearranged itself to better fight Paska’s magic. The edges of it turned into tendrils, coiling around and strangling the other spell’s momentum, breaking down its resistance even as it invaded and began unmaking down the spell’s underlying structure, replacing it with its own.
In the space of a second, the struggle had ended, and Nenet’s magic was the victor...and her eyes widened as she realized that she had a window of opportunity. If she did nothing, her spell would continue to overwrite and break down Paska’s spell, completely dispelling it until there was nothing left, at which point her own spell would expire...
Or she could arrest the takeover, leaving his spell intact, but commandeer it for herself.
Without pausing to think about it, Nenet chose the latter.
An instant later she’d reset the scroll’s target, and Paska’s spell reversed course, hitting him dead-center.
Immediately, the magic took effect, and Nenet could see the leakage as the Ethereal Plane reached out to envelope him.
Paska’s eyes widened as he felt something wind around his limbs, the ether solidifying as it made contact with the physical realm. But even as he brought his sword around to try and cut it off, more crashed over him, as though he were standing in front of a dam that had burst. It almost knocked him off his feet, covering him from head to toe in an instant, slowing his movements as though he were trying to fight his way out of a gelatinous mass.
And then the planar tear reversed itself, pulling the misplaced ether back onto its native plane...and taking Paska with it.
With her innate ability to see invisible creatures, Nenet was still able to watch Paska struggle, fighting his way free of the ether that had bound him, his lips moving as he looked at her again...but she couldn’t hear across planar boundaries, and so whatever he was saying wasn’t audible to her. After a moment he lunged forward, and she couldn’t help but shriek as his sword went directly into her chest, his reluctance to kill her with his weapon apparently gone.
But the blade passed right through her without the slightest hint of pain or resistance, not did it so much as scratch her, despite the sword sinking in to the hilt, and it took a moment for Nenet to calm down.
Paska was on a different plane of existence now. He couldn’t reach her from there.
And besides, he had other things to worry about.
Seeing Paska frown as he withdrew his sword, not having harmed her in the slightest, Nenet could only gulp as he suddenly whipped his head around, as though he’d heard something. From her vantage point, he was just looking at the stone wall nearby, but she saw him say something again as he raised his blade...
And then the astradaemons were upon him.
Despite knowing that they couldn’t harm her, Nenet couldn’t help but back up as she saw the monstrous things descend on Paska, pressing herself against the opposite wall as he tried to fight them off.
But he was outnumbered, and unused to fighting on a different plane. The astradaemons quickly circled around him – moving around, over, and under him in a dizzying pattern – and it didn’t take them long for one of them to grab him from behind, long claws and spindly tail and writhing tentacles coiling around his arms and legs. The other immediately moved in for the kill, grabbing him from the front, and she could see Paska roaring – his stoicism gone completely now – as he struggled to free himself.
Then the astradaemon in front of him opened its mandibles and clamped its teeth over his face.
From between its jaws, Nenet could see a soft light shining from where Paska’s face was trapped in the astradaemon’s jaws. A moment later, what looked like a glowing mist emerged from Paska’s eyes, mouth, and nose, flowing down into the monster’s gullet even as his movements slowed. Behind him, the other astradaemon opened is mouth in what looked like a shriek, clawing at its companion, but that did nothing to dislodge the other, continuing the drink down the shimmering light from her brother.
It continued doing so until the glow was completely gone, at which point it released Paska’s face and moved back, allowing his body to hang in the air, eyes wide and unseeing as his limbs splayed out loosely...before he convulsed once, transforming back into the sickly-looking one-eyed hound that she knew was his true form, and then went still.
The sight made Nenet recall what Lex had told her only a few minutes prior.
“Those are high-ranking daemons! They can rip your soul out without having to kill you first!”
Apparently death was a side effect of having your soul taken by astradaemons, rather than a prerequisite.
The second astradaemon, denied is meal, spun Paska’s corpse around and brought its face close to his, as though sniffing for any trace of the dead shuck’s soul. Apparently there wasn’t any, because it flung the body away as it opened its jaws, the tentacles on its back writhing, and swiped at its companion again. The other one retaliated, and for a moment the two looked like they were going to start fighting before they turned to Paska’s belongings, starting to root through the magic items he’d been carrying like vultures picking over a corpse...which, Nenet realized with a sick feeling, was entirely accurate.
Closing her eyes to the sight of Paska’s dead body and the astradaemons looting him the same way he had Sissel and the others, Nenet gingerly picked up Belligerence.
Then she fled down the hallway toward Mother’s chambers before she lost what little courage she had left.
Nenet had to slow down as she approached Mother’s chambers.
Placing one hand on the stone wall of the cavern, she tried to catch her breath, feeling as though her heart was about to beat its way out of her chest. I killed him! I killed Paska!
Just trying to process that made her feel dizzy, struggling to master the storm of emotions coursing through her. Part of her was horrified at having slain someone she’d known all of her life. The other part of her felt electrified to know that she was capable of actually winning a fight now, even if it had been a fluke. A third part was nauseated at how close to death she’d just come, knowing that by all rights she should have been the one to have her soul ripped out and devoured by astradaemons.
It was terrifying and exhilarating and confusing all at once, leaving Nenet unable to do anything except crouching down to ride those feelings out. Shaking all over, her breathing coming in staccato bursts that were either sobs or laughter, it seemed to take a long time before she felt herself calming down.
Leaning on Belligerence as though it were a walking stick rather than an incredibly potent weapon, she slowly stood up straight, wobbling a little despite bracing herself with the quill. That was enough to make her suddenly nostalgic for the stability of having four legs, and a thought was all it took for her to return to her quadrupedal form, breathing a sigh of relief at how grounded she felt.
But her relief was short-lived, as she realized that her sensitivity to magic was still registering some sort of motion.
It wasn’t a spell; a quick glance around herself confirmed to Nenet that there weren’t any unexpected magical effects in her vicinity. But the feeling was still there, impossible to pinpoint. If it wasn’t a spell, then what...?
It’s the background magic that permeates everything, she realized after a few seconds’ consideration. Her ability to see into the magical spectrum naturally filtered that out, since otherwise she’d be blinded by the ambient energy which radiated throughout the universe. But the same way a fish could sense the movements of water, even if the water itself was transparent, Nenet could feel that the power around her was swirling in increasingly agitated motions. It’s almost like something’s stirring it up.
No, not something, she corrected herself a second later, swallowing nervously as she peered down the hallway. Someone.
Mother.
Nenet had no idea what went into creating an artifact, nor was she certain what sort of artifact Mother was trying to make. But the fact that whatever she was doing was upsetting the flow of magic all around them was a testament to the sheer magnitude of the forces Mother was bringing to bear. Hvitdod’s curse alone is more powerful than any of Mother’s children, and Paska said she was bringing back godsblood...does that mean the actual blood of a god? And those are just two of the ingredients; I’m sure there must be others as well!
Gulping, Nenet briefly considered reaching out to her master, but pushed that urge away. There was nothing happening that required his counsel; no changes to the plan that he needed to be informed of. Contacting him right now would serve no purpose except to soothe her nerves, and she didn’t want to have to rely on him for that...at least, not until she’d finished her mission.
Lifting Belligerence in her telekinesis – there was no longer any point to worrying about the glowing aura that it made – Nenet resumed her march toward Mother’s quarters, this time keeping her eyes open and her senses at the ready, just in case there was another nasty surprise waiting for her.
But nothing intercepted her as she padded down the hall, and soon enough Nenet found herself standing outside of the door to Mother’s chambers.
Shaking her head to clear away the vague sense of dizziness from how heavily the ambient magic was spinning, Nenet paused as she regarded the entrance. While Mother hadn’t bothered to trap the interior of her mountain fastness – either because she was supremely confident in her own ability to repel invaders, or because she didn’t want to have to deal with the inconveniences of navigating defensive measures in her own home – she did value her privacy, and that was reflected by the ward that had been placed on the door.
It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated enchantment, serving more as a warning than a dedicated deterrent. Other than physically reinforcing the door’s physical structure, all the spell did was create a magical lock, albeit one that had no key. As the spell’s caster, Mother was able to come and go freely; everyone else had to either announce themselves and wait to be granted entrance, or try and force the door, and as far as Nenet knew no one had ever attempted the latter.
Which I guess means that I’ll be the first, she tittered to herself in nervous excitement as she began casting a spell of her own...one specifically designed to bypass sealed entryways and egresses.
That was something which made all the difference, Nenet knew. With how powerful Mother was, the odds of being able to undo the spell with her countermagic were slim to none. But using a spell that was made for the express purpose of overcoming this enchantment gave her an edge. I just hope it’s enough of one.
A second later, a click reached Nenet’s ears, and the door creaked as it opened a few inches.
Letting out a breath that she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding, Nenet forced herself to move forward. The spell she’d used would only suppress Mother’s locking spell, rather than dispel it, and that suppression was temporary in nature. Ten minutes, Nenet reminded herself as she strode inside. In ten minutes, the door will seal itself shut again. I have to be back on the other side with Master’s spine before then!
But Master had also told her to be cautious, and so Nenet resisted the urge to hurry through Mother’s chambers, instead looking around carefully. She’d been in here before; Mother had often called her in to teach her new spells, but after what had happened with Paska, Nenet wasn’t about to take any chances, quickly scanning the place.
The room was one that would have humbled even the richest of monarchs. A carpet of golden velvet covered the floor, its texture softer than most beds. But not softer than the one tucked into the back corner, Nenet knew. The enormous four-poster bed there could have held a half-dozen people without any of them needing to touch each other. The sheets were silk and the blankets were fur, with a mattress that was somehow both firm and yielding at the same time and pillows which seemed almost to embrace you when you laid down on them. It was a perfect match for the full-length cabinet made of a deep, reddish wood that had been lacquered to a shine, containing numerous elegant outfits within.
Opposite the bed and dresser was a stout desk made of marbled quartz, the bronze fittings at its feet and corners also polished and gleaming. The high-backed chair with sable-lined cushions was the only one of its kind in the room, with the other seatings being small sofas set across from each other with a glass table between them. On it were several trinkets, all of them minor magical conveniences, ranging from a small stone that repelled insects and vermin to a pair of thick gloves that would animate and massage the user’s muscles. There were more like them, Nenet knew, in the equally-ostentatious washroom beyond the door to her right.
Even the most basic features of the place were a testament to luxury. The walls were a gentle cream-colored stone, different than the drab gray of the rest of the mountain, and had been worked so as to be perfectly smooth to the touch and uniform in shape. Near the ceiling – which was of the same make as the walls – several free-floating lights hung in the air of their own accord, gently shining a mixture of deep colors which blended and subtly changed as the lights shifted between various colors, creating a soothing look that permeated the entire area.
And it’s all lies, thought Nenet with a scowl, looking the place over. She wasn’t sure if it was because of the way the ambient magic was churning, or if it was because of her transformation, but she could see past the aura-suppression magic that Mother had laid over the place, letting her glimpse the tell-tale signs of illusion magic covering the room even if she couldn’t see the reality underneath. The bed, the walls, the desk. She put so much effort into making them all look real, even though she only bothered to make the rest of the place, where we lived, look beautiful when she had to see it.
A rush of fury fell over Nenet then, causing her tail to thrash as she dug her claws into the carpet.
Mother’s room was a perfect allegory for its occupant. Like the person who lived there, it was all about covering up the truth in order to look good, paying only the most minimal attention to everything else in favor of personal gratification. She told me so many lies about my father, ignoring all of the abuse I went through, just so I’d keep being her good little spellbook! raged Nenet to herself, stalking toward the left side of the room, where another door led to Mother’s workshop. No more! NO MORE! This is where I pay her back for everything she did to me!
She could hear Mother’s voice as she approached the entrance, raised in a soft harmony as she sang whatever magic she was working. It was a heartrending tune, and at any other time Nenet would have stopped to listen to it; like the rest of her, Mother’s voice was beauty incarnate. But the sphinx was too angry to let herself be swayed by the gentle melody now; if anything, it only made her angrier as she stalked toward the door, Belligerence held up high.
There was no point in trying to go in sneakily, nor in trying to put on a deception. With only ten minutes until she was trapped, there was no point, especially since she doubted either would fool Mother anyway. The only thing Nenet had going for her was the element of surprise, which meant that she needed to leverage that to its fullest.
This wasn’t an infiltration mission, or a stealth operation, or a cunning heist.
It was a smash and grab job.
Snarling, Nenet rushed the last few feet to the doorway, slamming it open as she charged inside.
And there, in the center of the room, was what – and who – she was looking for.
Full, pouty lips were pressed together as they sang a note, directing the magic by voice alone. Raspberry-colored eyes were focused on the task ahead, one hand coming up to brush a wavy lock of vivid orange-and-yellow hair back. Her other hand was holding a crystal vial, and Nenet was just in time to see a few drops of a glowing bluish-silver liquid drip from it onto the vertebrae that were floating of their own accord.
A single, ascendant syllable was sung then, and the ambient magic suddenly imploded, surging inward to surround the bones just as the droplets struck them. Immediately, the liquid spread out along the vertebrae, covering them in a thin film that made them shine with the same metallic blue radiance.
And Mother, too focused on her work to even notice the intrusion, smiled at the sight.
No! hissed Nenet inwardly, hurtling forward as she raised Belligerence. I won’t call her that anymore! She doesn’t deserve it!
“I hate you!” screamed the sphinx. “I hate you!!! I HATE YOU!!! I HATE YOU!!!”
Giving voice to the feeling that she’d been holding inside all of her life, Nenet’s howled her mother’s name as she leaped at her.
It had been a very long time since Lex had found himself with nothing to do.
For as far back as he could remember, there had always been some task to occupy his time. Whether it was acquiring new knowledge, performing some line of research, or investigating a fresh way to attack whatever new problem had set itself against him, there had always been something that required his attention.
The last few months had seen the demands on his time skyrocket, as the work of saving Equestria from Celestia and Luna’s mismanagement had been enormous. Whether it was fighting off hordes of monsters or implementing an economic recovery plan, his every waking moment – save only for those few that he’d spent with the mares Kara had manipulated into loving him – had been dedicated to handling the tasks that no one else was capable of managing. It had been difficult, but eminently worthwhile.
And while his current trip to Everglow had been far less personally satisfying – though still incredibly fruitful, given the knowledge and power that he’d gained – it had been no less demanding of him. Beset by enemy after enemy, struggling to survive, much less find a way home, Lex hadn’t lacked for things to occupy his attention. Even during moments of respite, there’d been something to do; whether it was placing spells inside gemstones, journeying to a nearby destination, or making plans for a forthcoming fight, Lex had something to set his mind to.
Not now, though.
Now, there was nothing left to do but wait for Nenet to inform him when she had recovered his spine and gotten outside of her mother’s wards. Until then, he was stuck in his incorporeal form here in the wasteland surrounding Hvitdod’s lair, which left him near-totally at a loss for what to do in the meantime.
Continuing to converse with Nenet telepathically ran the risk of distracting her at a critical moment. Nor could he make a plan for what to do in the event that he’d need to fight Nenet’s mother – given how powerful she was supposed to be, it was entirely possible that she’d have some method of tracing teleportation – since he knew almost nothing about what she was capable of.
He didn’t dare experiment more with what his tulpa was capable of, either; now that he knew it had a limit on how much material it could produce in a given day, he needed to be judicious in what he demanded of it...not that he understood the full extent of what it could do anyway. And with his divine spells still being hours away from replenishing themselves, summoning Nisha again would likewise have to wait.
That left only imbuing more gemstones with spells, except that his meager supply of jewels was stored in his extradimensional pack, which – like the rest of him – was currently transmuted into shadow. Turning back to retrieve it now would accomplish nothing except killing him.
Which left him with only one other option: exploring Hvitdod’s lair.
That was the reason Lex now found himself back at the bottom of the massive chasm that the dragon had dwelt in, combing the snow-covered floor of the rift as he cycled through different visual spectra.
He had no particular expectation of finding anything, nor was he concerned about any further enemies lurking down there. But he told himself it was worth confirming, that taking anything for granted now was unforgivably foolish, particularly after his assumption about Paska’s death had cost him his spine. If he had time to spare, then he could at least make sure nothing else had laired down here.
It was an eminently logical course of action, especially considering how little fighting power he had left.
The thought made him scoff, not bothering to suppress of grunt of disdain.
Once, his tulpa would have mocked such a blatantly transparent excuse. But it no longer did that, nor did he need it to, being able to admit to his real purpose for being down here:
Avoiding Solvei.
Unlike Nenet, he could still sense her location, having settled near the other adlets near the edge of the abyss. Also like Nenet, he could sense her emotions, and knew that – whereas the sphinx was experiencing a chaotic rush of feelings as she carried out her mission – Solvei was hurt and angry, almost certainly because of their last fight. Most of all, he knew that if he didn’t find something else to occupy his time, he’d need to confront her about what had happened, and that wasn’t something he wanted to deal with right now.
As sick as he was of fighting with her – it seemed like that was all he’d done recently – it was still better than having to tell her the truth about why she loved him. He still had an obligation to reveal that to her, of course...but that could wait-, no, that had to wait until their situation was secure, and despite how remote the possibility was, it was still feasible that there was something down here-
Lex paused as he caught sight of something in the magical spectrum.
That shouldn’t have been the case. While he’d made use of a great deal of magic during his fight against Hvitdod – or rather, Hvitdod’s facsimile, according to what Soft Whisper had told him – all of his spells had since expired. Even the ice elementals that he’d summoned with Solvei’s cryomancy had all been destroyed when the dragon had exploded. And while elapsed spells left behind lingering auras, those echoes were quick to fade beyond detectability, at least without far more precise methods of examination.
And yet there was an aura of magic visible now, one that radiated the same sort of cold-based magic that Solvei – and himself, now – were capable of using.
Even stranger, it was coming from near where the bones of the original Hvitdod were scattered.
That was also anomalous. Lex had examined those bones in every form of vision he could think of, including magically, and found nothing. But other than the fact that the false Hvitdod’s explosion had knocked the fossils of the original askew, nothing should have changed now.
But the intact aura he was looking at suggested otherwise.
For a moment, Lex hung back, considering his options...only to conclude that he had none except to investigate what was going on. This wasn’t a situation that could be ignored, nor did he want to involve Solvei. He’d refused to send her with Nenet because doing so would put her in undue danger; that was just as true for this as it was for that.
Slowly, he floated forward, ready to retreat if there was any sign of danger. While he was almost completely helpless in his current state, he still had access to a bottomless reservoir of ice magic, even if he could only use minor effects in his injured condition. Likewise, he had Nenet’s countermagic as well; while it required him to sacrifice a prepared spell from his mental repertoire of thaumaturgical spells, it would allow him to potentially dismiss – or even take control of – an enchantment of similar or lesser power.
Those weren’t much, but at least he’d be able to defend himself if he had to.
Except, Lex saw as he moved closer to the spell aura, his caution was unfounded.
The source of the spell aura was a gemstone.
Frowning at the tiny diamond, Lex tentatively lifted it in his telekinesis, examining it with a critical eye. The jewel itself was unremarkable, being a marble-sized gemstone that was entirely lacking in polish or any sort of deliberate crafting. It was only notable because of the spell aura it exuded...and even that was odd. It hadn’t been infused with magical channels of its own, nor had it simply been covered with a false aura. It was almost like...
It’s holding a spell, he realized, shocked.
This was his technique for using gemstones as containers for what were essentially precast spells. Except he hadn’t imbued this gemstone; he’d never even seen it before now. And yet, examining it closer, he could see that it held a spell for summoning an ice elemental. A single, weak ice elemental...and yet it was undoubtedly the same cryomantic conjuration he’d used fighting Hvitdod.
What was going on?
Putting the spell-imbued crystal down, Lex took a moment to confirm the immediate area. This close to the epicenter of the explosion, the ice and snow covering the ground had been cleared away, and the scattered bones of Hvitdod were spread out along the blast zone. The ground itself was nothing more than the same unworked stone as the rest of the hinterlands, except...
Except for a small figure in the ground, barely large enough for a pony to squeeze through.
And lodged near the edge of the crevice was another small diamond...with a spell aura identical to the one he’d just examined.
It took Lex only a moment to confirm that the fissure was between the diamond he’d found and where the explosion had happened. Had the blast dislodged the gem from that crack in the ground? If so, it didn’t explain why there were two such gems with what could only be – for lack of a better term – remnants of the summoning spell he’d used while fighting Hvitdod.
Slowly, Lex made his way toward the fissure, examining it for several moments. But it wasn’t a straight passage downward, and his magical vision could only permeate solid objects so far.
Making a quick decision, Lex slowly floated down into the ground.
It took a few minutes for him to reach the bottom of the opening, and he passed by several more diamonds as he did. Several were imbued with minor copies of his summons, but as he went deeper, the imbued auras changed. It took Lex only a moment to confirm that, rather than summoning ice elementals, they now contained a stronger spell...
One to change the weather to wintry conditions.
His eyes narrowing as he started to see a pattern, Lex continued following the fissure downward, until at least he reached the terminus.
Had he still been in a physical body, he would have gasped.
The opening had widened, turning into a cavern slightly larger than a house. But what the cave lacked in size, it more than made up for in splendor.
The walls, ground, and ceiling – the latter being pockmarked with more fissures, extending upward over what must have been the entire bottom of Hvitdod’s lair – were all riddled with diamonds.
But the discovery of the vein of diamonds was far less notable than what was at the center of the cave.
Stretched between a stalagmite and a stalactite was a long, thin crystal.
Scalenohedral in shape, it was slightly over a foot in length. Unlike the diamonds studding the rest of the cave, its facets were smooth and well-defined. More than that, it was faintly luminous, and Lex could see a network of...what almost looked like pathways inside of it that were shining softly, as though it had an inner flaw that possessed its own radiance.
Frowning inwardly, he floated closer to the unusual crystal, only to stop as he caught a glimpse of some debris near the stalagmite that formed its base. A small piece of an icy wing, a fragment of a frozen claw, and a few similar chunks made it clear that he was seeing leftover fragments of his elementals, apparently having fallen down here in the aftermath of the explosion up above.
And now there were diamonds imbued with spells to summon those same kinds of elementals.
Intrigued, Lex moved closer to the central crystal, examining it in the magical spectrum.
It took only a few minutes to determine that the glowing markings inside of it weren’t so much pathways as they were magical channels, thin but potent enough that they were actually visible to the naked eye...something which reminded him uncomfortably of how Sissel had looked after using aristeia. Except even as Lex watched, these pulsed and dimmed slightly, as though fading out.
Long moments passed as Lex continued to study the gemstone, before he elected to try an experiment. Picking up one of the fragments of the elementals that he’d summoned, Lex moved it toward the central crystal-
Only for his telekinetic aura to wink out as it touched the facet, dropping the icy wing fragment to the ground, shattering.
But Lex didn’t even notice the item’s destruction, watching in utter fascination as his telekinesis was pulled into the crystal. The magic flowed inward, moving through the inner pathways of the gem like water through a riverbed. But it didn’t stay in the gem; even as he watched, it flowed upward, through the stalactite and...into a diamond embedded in the cavern’s ceiling.
Floating upward, Lex looked at the unworked diamond.
Sure enough, it now held a small telekinesis spell, just waiting to be used by anyone who knew enough to activate the magic’s release.
His mind whirling, Lex turned back to study the central gem, albeit from a safe distance so that it had no chance to absorb the dark magic that was keeping him in shadow-form.
Directly above them was Hvitdod’s lair, connected here by numerous small fissures. As a magical creature, one overflowing with intrinsic cold beyond even that of similar creatures suc as adlets and winter wolves. And here was a crystal that somehow absorbed whatever magic it came into contact with and channeled it into the nearby diamonds.
This couldn’t be a coincidence.
The obvious answer was that this was, at least in part, the reason why the dragon had originally decided to lair in this place. Remnants of its breath weapon – or whatever other powers it might have had, since Soft Whisper had made it clear that the original Hvitdod had been far stronger than the copy he’d fought – might have made their way down here, being inadvertently channeled into crystals contained the dragon’s frozen magic. Given that the gems above were unworked, it was entirely possible that the magic they were imbued with would leak out over time – there was a reason Lex made sure to use gems that had been cut and refined when he placed spells inside them – making the area cold in a way that the dragon might have found pleasing.
But that theory concerned Lex less than a different one which came to mind then.
Nenet had let it slip that Sissel, Grisela, and Vidrig had been the ones tampering with the weather, and that they’d done so in part to make a confrontation with Hvitdod possible. Soft Whisper had confirmed that, telling him that the extreme cold had been what had brought that facsimile forth; that the real dragon had been a creature of such power it had left some sort of psychic impression – for lack of a better term – on what the goddess had said was the fabric of the universe itself, just waiting for a period of excessive cold to actualize it.
Except there was a flaw in that theory.
After all, if Hvitdod had been slain an extremely long time ago (which was how Akna had made it sound), then why hadn’t its lesser copy been conjured during any winter since then? The ponies of Everglow manufactured the weather, the same way they did back on Equestria, but while these hinterlands were at the edge of civilization, they weren’t that from removed from the edge of the Pony Empire; surely at some point an intense winter had been called for, and the fringes of it would have found there way here.
And yet, even the adlets – who lived much closer to this area than the ponies – had shown no indication that their ancestral foe had ever revived prior to now.
Which suggested that it wasn’t just the cold that had brought Hvitdod back, but rather that it was magical cold that had done the trick...and if that was the case, it was highly likely that this crystal had played a part in that.
Which meant that it couldn’t be allowed to remain here.
The underlying cause of Hvitdod’s imperfect revival – that the dragon had somehow made a mark on reality itself – wasn’t something Lex knew how to affect. Without even knowing exactly what that was, there was nothing he could do about it. But he could at least remove what was likely a contributing factor.
Because if he didn’t, then it was likely only a matter of time until Hvitdod was revived again. Sissel and her sisters were no longer around to create a magical winter, but it wasn’t unthinkable that someone would. Bright Night, the magical school that was – according to what Mystaria had told him – renowned for its lack of oversight, was relatively close. What would happen if somepony there started researching weather magic? It wasn’t an impossible scenario; not with how the weather on Everglow was, for whatever reason, growing harder for pegasi to control.
If anything, recent events made that more likely. There was no way the students and staff of a magic school wouldn’t be aware that the unseasonable cold blanketing the region wasn’t magical. It was entirely plausible that it had driven any number of would-be wizards to turn their magic towards weather-released research. How soon would it be before they tried recreating this exact phenomenon under their own power?
And if Hvitdod was revived again, then what? Would he remember that a pony had slain him before and go looking for revenge? Would it seek out the adlets that had killed its original incarnation? Lex didn’t know, and that wasn’t acceptable. All of this was pure theory, but the theory alone justified his taking action to stop it.
Which meant this thing had to go.
His mind made up, Lex turned his attention to the diamonds studding the cavern. If that explosion had been enough to dislodge one of the uppermost gems, then a few of these should be loose as well...
It took a few tries before he found one that he was able to telekinetically pry loose; fortunately, unlike the central gem, the surrounding crystals were only able to receive magic rather than absorbing it themselves.
Then Lex hurled it at the spindly crystal in the center of the cave.
It took several tries before he was able to knock it free.
Clattering as it hit the cave floor, Lex watched closely in the magical spectrum as it rolled and slowly came to a stop. He could already see the inner channels fading...but not disappearing entirely.
Curious at its having survived the rough treatment, he reached out toward it with his telekinesis again, and felt it drink in the magic...but only for a moment, as its inner channels filled up and, with nowhere to discharge the energy it had absorbed, overflowed, allowing him to manipulate it normally.
Disconnected from the surrounding environment, it couldn’t expend the power it took in, rendering it little more than a curio...though one that, to Lex’s mild surprise, left him feeling mildly nostalgic.
This is similar to what I hypothesized about the Crystal Heart.
It had been second-hoof stories about the jewel of the Crystal Empire that had brought him to that northern province, eager to see if the crystal ponies’ famous artifact could help him correct the flaw that made his thaumaturgical spellcasting so hard to recharge. From what he’d been able to tell, the Crystal Heart was at the center of a network formed by the structure of the Empire itself, and the crystal ponies who lived there. The latter channeled their magic – though they apparently called it their “light” (or, even worse, their “love”) – through the lattice-lined streets, and into the Heart itself, which amplified and radiated it outward.
It had been fascinating to consider, and Lex had been looking forward to studying it in detail...only to arrive less than a day before King Sombra had attempted to conquer the place.
After that, Lex had more pressing concerns to worry about.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t put this to use now, he decided as he brought the crystal closer. Now that it was disconnected from the rest of the cavern, its ability to absorb and transfer magic was sharply curtailed...but not gone.
Pulling another loose diamond out of the cave wall, Lex held it up to the thin crystal...
Nothing happened.
Undaunted, Lex slowly applied the same technique he used for imbuing gems with his spells, pressing the pointed tip of the crystal to the diamond as he began to trace a sigil-
And his telekinesis immediately flowed into the diamond, perfectly imbued.
Grinning inwardly, Lex picked it back up, his telekinesis once again taking hold of it without effect now that the crystal had no receptacle. Taking a third diamond from the cave wall, he repeated his experiment, this time carefully maintaining his telekinesis as he threaded in an application of cryomantic magic. Briefly recalling all the time that he’d spent studying jewels with his mother, and how he’d folded that into his study of magic, Lex carefully made the necessary adjustments...and watched as the ice magic filled the diamond, leaving his telekinesis undisturbed.
The sight was enough to make him laugh in triumph. Normally it took hours to imbue a spell into a gem like that, yet with this crystal he had done it in seconds. With it, and all of the diamonds in this cave, he’d be able to replenish his stock of externalized magic with ease...or at least, he would once he had an opportunity to replenish his thaumaturgical spells again. Still, he had plenty of other forms of magic he could use in the meantime...presuming that Nenet succeeded in recovering his vertebrae.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Lex registered a sudden rush of hatred from the sphinx.
Howling, Nenet rushed toward Adagio – she refused to call her “mother” anymore, even in her thoughts – claws out and wings spread wide as she telekinetically thrust Belligerence forward.
Adagio’s eyes widened at the unexpected assault, and Nenet felt a surge of spiteful satisfaction at the sight. She hadn’t gotten the chance to pay Grisela back for all the abuse she’d put her through, but now she could get revenge on the one who’d let it happen! This is for all the pain you let me suffer! she roared in her mind, driving Belligerence directly toward Adagio’s center of mass.
It was within a foot of her when Adagio managed to sing a spell.
Although it was barely more than a half-dozen syllables in length, the magic in her voice activated instantly, before Nenet could even think about trying to use her countermagic to undo or redirect it. Not that she could have anyway; there was a limit to what her countermagic could overcome, and the spell that Adagio used then was beyond it. There was nothing the sphinx could do as the power sped from Adagio’s lips-
And wrapped around Belligerence.
A half-second later the spear struck Adagio just below her ribs...only to come to a dead halt without so much as leaving a bruise, as though Nenet had tried to puncture a stone wall with a tree branch.
It was enough to shock her out of her rage, and in her surprise she lost control of her forward momentum, slamming into Adagio full-tilt. But even that did little more than draw an irritated grunt from Adagio, one hand reaching out to grab Nenet by the hair before violently wrenching her to the side.
In her sphinx form, Nenet knew she had to weigh nearly half a ton. But Adagio flung her aside as though she were still the size of a kitten, and Nenet hit the far wall of the workshop hard enough that she momentarily saw stars, the air exploding out of her lungs in a whoosh. Slumping to the ground, she needed several seconds to remember how to breathe, gasping and choking before finally managing to inhale, sitting up with a groan.
“You’re not one of Kryonex’s minions.”
Adagio’s voice made Nenet shudder, trying to recover the hatred that was even now starting to drown beneath a resurgent wave of terror.
“Which makes sense, since my children and those daemons I hired killed almost all of them,” continued Adagio, striding toward Nenet in a slow gait, twirling Belligerence in one hand as though it were an oversized baton.
Taking a deep breath as she tried to marshal her courage, Nenet made herself look at her mo-, look at Adagio, trying to discern how much magic she had active on her.
The answer, as it turned out, was that she had a dishearteningly-large amount.
Virtually everything she was wearing was ensorcelled somehow. Her hair was tied back with a simple lace ribbon that nevertheless glowed with some sort of beautification enchantment. Her earrings were inlaid with a powerful defense against mental tampering. The ruby hanging on a golden necklace was a similar ward against scrying. Her gown – a slinky purple number that left most of her cleavage, as well as one leg, one display – was designed to protect against external magic while boosting the wearer’s own. Her left wrist was adorned with a jeweled bracelet that wrapped her in a ward against physical injury. Even her shoes, high-heeled and open-toed, were awash with magic, being designed to not only stabilize her balance but also increase her speed.
But it was the bracelet on her right hand that shined the brightest to Nenet’s magical vision. Wrapped in an aura so vivid that it was hard to look at, the magical emanations were strangely intermingled with those from the five rings she wore; one on each finger. The bracelet’s aura overshadowed those of the individual rings, making it impossible to tell what their enchantments were, and it was only after a moment’s examination that Nenet realized that they were all connected, with a small length of chain attaching each ring to the bracelet.
That was disconcerting enough that Nenet’s didn’t notice that Belligerence’s barbs weren’t activating – contrary to what her Master had told her about the weapon – until Adagio swung the weapon around so that the head of it was pointed at her. It was only then that Nenet noticed that the spell which had stopped the weapon was still active, somehow keeping it quiescent. “Or at least, not one of the minions he kept close to his realm. And even for a demigod, it should take him a little while to gather his remaining forces.”
Coming to a stop right in front of the downed sphinx, Adagio slowly brought barbed tip of Belligerence to within an inch of her face. “So I think you want to tell me who you are and why you’re here, before I decide that I don’t care enough to keep you alive.”
Nenet couldn’t resist a bitter laugh at that. “You really don’t recognize me? Even Paska caught on right away.”
Adagio’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What are you talking about?”
“You used to teach me spells right outside here, in your boudoir,” spat Nenet. “I would ask you when I’d be able to come in here, to your workshop, and practice casting them. But you always said that would come later, that for now I just needed to study and learn more.” She glared up at the one who bore her, baring her teeth. “I didn’t realize that was a lie before. I do now.”
For a heartbeat confusion reigned on Adagio’s face. Then her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and – most importantly – her arm holding Belligerence lowered. “Nenet?! How-”
That was when Nenet sprang, one claw coming up to swipe at Adagio’s face as she leaped toward her.
This time, it didn’t surprise Nenet in the slightest when her attack didn’t connect, Adagio easily sidestepping the attack...but that was fine, since it wasn’t an attack in the first place.
Yelling the single word to activate another one of the very few spells she’d prepared, Nenet squeezed her eyes shut as a dazzling radiance gathered in her paw, immediately flaring up into a blinding shine that flooded the entire workroom with light.
The pained yelp that came from Adagio a moment later told her that her flare spell had worked.
The light died away immediately, the spell not being designed to make the brightness last longer than an instant, and Nenet was already moving as she opened her eyes again, rushing toward where her master’s spine was still hanging in the air. Without slowing down, she snatched it with her telekinesis, and very nearly tripped over her own paws at the resistance she felt as she tried to drag it along; it was as though it was anchored in place!
It took only a fraction of a second to realize that whatever magic Adagio had worked into Lex’s vertebrae was interfering with her telekinesis, and Nenet turned around, intent on scooping it up with her paws if magic wouldn’t suffice-
But Adagio was already recovering, tossing Belligerence aside as she brought her left hand up to rub at her eyes. Her right hand – the one covered in rings – came up as well, and she pointed it in Nenet’s direction, blinking as she tried to get a bead on the sphinx.
Not knowing what was about to happen, Nenet tried to dodge anyway, but was caught unprepared as the ring on Adagio’s index finger – a silver band composed of several metallic tendrils enclosing several red- and amber-colored gemstones – glowed with a soft golden light, which was equaled by the matching aura that surrounded herself, arresting her movement mere feet away from her master’s bones.
“So you’ve learned a few new tricks to go with your new look,” sneered Adagio, drawing herself up to her full height as she finished blinking her eyes clear, keeping her ring pointed at Nenet. “But I’ve spent too much time around ponies not to realize how useful telekinesis is.”
Thrashing in the golden aura, Nenet growled. She was so close! Her eyes lit up as she wrapped her magical grip around Lex’s spine again; if she could at least drag it close enough to grab-
“Stop that!” snapped Adagio, teeth bared in a snarl as she hurried over and snatched Lex’s spine out of Nenet’s purple aura. “I haven’t finished inlaying the enchantments needed to stabilize the godsblood yet!”
“What does that mean?!” growled Nenet, more out of a desire to keep Adagio talking than because she was curious. “What are you doing to my master’s spine?!”
One of Adagio’s eyebrows rose as she released the vertebrae, letting them hover aloft without being touched. “Your ‘master’?”
Nenet winced at that. She’d just committed the same mistake that Solvei had so recently made in front of her tribe, accidentally volunteering information that she should have kept secret!
And Adagio wasn’t about to overlook what her wayward daughter had just revealed. “Paska said he tore the spine out of Hvitdod’s killer,” she mused, her eyes moving from the floating bones to the struggling sphinx. “And now, here you are with a grown-up figure, spellcasting, telekinesis” – she moved a few paces to the left, looking at Nenet in profile – “and a cutie mark on your flank, looking for your ‘master’s’ backbone. Let me guess, you're hoping that if you can put him back together he’ll be that much easier to resurrect?”
Ceasing to struggle as she felt herself starting to grow tired, Nenet settled for glaring at Adagio, refusing to say anything else.
“You know, when I was told that you’d been captured, I figured that whoever did it wanted to get access to all those spells I put in your head before they fought Hvitdod,” murmured Adagio, a calculating look on her face. “I never thought they’d try to win you over by turning you into a sphinx the way you always wanted. But I suppose if they were strong enough to take out Sissel, Grisela, Vidrig, and Hvitdod all on their own, that’s not out of the question.”
Her features darkened then, and she glanced back at the open doorway. “And if you’re here now...did you kill Paska?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” bragged Nenet, suddenly finding herself eager to let Adagio know that she was completely alone now. “But only because he tried to stop me from coming here, knowing it’d clue you in that something was up. He was planning on leaving before you got him killed, the same way you did the rest of our brothers and sisters.”
“That ingrate!” snarled Adagio, and the sudden display of anger made Nenet’s breath catch in her throat. “After everything I did for him!”
Swallowing, Nenet forced herself to laugh at that. “Like what? Promising his soul to daemons after he died? Or did you tell him that you’d introduce him to his father someday, too?”
That last part came out angrier than she’d intended, and Adagio gave her a sharp glance in reply.
“Yeah, I know,” growled Nenet, gesturing as best she could toward her tail. “My father was a manticore. Probably the same one who sired Blat, right?”
A sour expression crossed Adagio’s face at that. “I didn’t tell you for your own good.”
“You’ve never cared about my own good!” shrieked Nenet, struggling again as her anger overtook her. “You let Grisela beat me! You knew what she was doing and you didn’t say anything to stop her, even though you told me you would! But all you wanted was to make sure she didn’t kill your backup spellbook!”
She sagged in the telekinetic aura again, tiring quicker, but her anger didn’t abate. “You were a terrible mother. And not just to me. You lied to us. You manipulated us. You got almost all of us killed. And then you sold our souls to daemons. How could you do that to us? We were your own children!”
“I didn’t have a choice!” shot back Adagio. “I had to make deals in order to get the power I needed, but I was never going to honor them if I could help it! That’s why I’m building this weapon” – she gestured to Lex’s spine, still covered in the bluish sheen of godsblood – “so that I can finally get out of all those bargains I struck!”
“‘All those bargains’?” echoed Nenet. “As in plural? Mo-, Adagio, what did you do?”
“What I had to,” came the flat reply as she gave Nenet a look of deep bitterness. “You can’t begin to imagine what it was like. A thousand years, trapped in a world without magic, unable to use my powers to the fullest and make those pathetic little humans adore me! And then, finally, I came here! And you know what I found?!”
Spinning in place, her foot lashed out, kicking Belligerence across the workshop, finally rolling to a stop near the entryway. “That I’d gone from a world with no magic to a world with too much!”
Nenet’s brow furrowed, intrigued in spite of herself. “What?”
“At least on Earth, everyone who looked at me adored me!” raged Adagio, seemingly caught up in her own tirade. “Men would forget their wives and girlfriends if I smiled at them! Women would question their preferences if I winked at them! There wasn’t anyone who wouldn’t betray their vows, forget their principles, and sacrifice everything if it meant having a chance with me!”
Her glower deepened then, before turning into a sinister smile. “And if anyone did resist, all I had to do was use my voice. There might not have been much magical energy on Earth, but I could still gather enough power to bend any of that world’s people to my will...” Her smile faltered then. “But never many at a time, and never for long.”
She took a deep breath then, seeming to regain some calm, before waving a hand as if to indicate everything around her. “Coming here should have been the answer to all my problems. Instead, it just made them worse.”
Nenet shook her head slowly, not following. “How did-”
“Because in a world with this much magic, almost everyone knows how to use it!” interjected Adagio, seething. “Do you know how common charm spells are here?! Not to mention defenses against charm spells?! And that’s just the beginning! Beautification spells! Transformation spells! Erotic spells! They’re everywhere! It’s like I’m living in a world full of Sirens!”
“Sirens?” echoed Nenet.
But Adagio wasn’t listening. “And it doesn't stop with spellcasting and magic items. On Earth, the only creatures that could compete with me were found in fairy tales. But here? There are selkies and catgirls and nymphs and succubi, not to mention actual sex goddesses...”
Her voice turned brooding at that last part, and she paused for a long moment before shaking her head. “I didn’t come here so I could just be another pretty face in a crowd. I’m going to be the most beautiful, most desirable, most adored creature in this world or any other...and in order to do that, I needed power. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to get it...so long as you’re willing to make a few bargains, and renege on them later.”
“And that’s what my brothers and sisters all died for?” muttered Nenet, looking down. “All because you weren’t the prettiest girl around anymore?”
“I’m a Siren,” replied Adagio tersely. “It’s my destiny, my birthright, to be adored. And you’re going to be a good girl and help make that happen, whether you want to or not.”
She started singing then, and Nenet felt Adagio’s magic settle over her mind like a fog, holding her breath as she realized she was about to get another opportunity.
Most likely, it would be her last one.
A second later Adagio’s spell fell into place...and just like her master had promised her, it shattered a moment later, the “dark magic” he’d given her shredding the attempt to invade her mind.
In the same moment that it happened, as she heard a shocked grunt pass Adagio’s lips, Nenet acted.
Using the Two Feet at Noon technique, she changed from her sphinx form into a human body. Instantly, she felt Adagio’s telekinesis falter, no longer grabbing her in the right places, and Nenet didn’t miss her chance to vault out of the golden aura, rushing forward to snatch up Lex’s spine – and even managing to grab Belligerence – as she bolted through the workroom door and ran as fast as she could.
Adagio’s furious howl followed Nenet as she burst out of the workshop and into the opulent bedroom, terror and exhilaration causing her to abandon all caution as she hurled herself toward the door opposite her. It was still ajar, thanks to her unlocking spell holding Adagio’s ward – which otherwise would have automatically shut and locked it – at bay.
For a split-second, she considered transforming again. Both her gynosphinx body and her hybrid form had wings, unlike the fully human shape she was in now. But she didn’t dare, knowing that Adagio had to be hot on her heels; changing forms would have slowed her down, costing her at least a half-second as she adjusted to her weight and center of balance being redistributed.
And at that moment, her instincts were screaming that even that half-second wasn’t something she could spare.
She was proven right an instant later.
Ducking through the boudoir’s entrance, Nenet’s magical sense perked up, registering something behind her, and she literally dove into the hallway, yelping as she lost her balance and went sprawling. Hugging Belligerence and Lex’s spine to her chest, she rolled over several times, somehow managing to catch a glimpse of a golden aura – which she knew was the telekinetic grip from Adagio’s ring – hovering right in front of the doorway where she’d been a moment ago.
Gibbering at the near-miss, Nenet didn’t wait to come to a full stop, instead managing to somehow get her feet back under her as she took off down the hallway.
Behind her, she could hear Adagio screaming her name again.
Gotta stay out of her line of sight! Otherwise she’ll grab me with her ring again!
But that was going to be easier said than done, since the corridor that led away from Adagio’s chambers was a long, straight line.
It took all the willpower Nenet could muster up to force herself to stop running, the urge to bolt still pressing down on her. But she forced that desire away, knowing that it wouldn’t help; the hallway she was in now was far longer than Adagio’s bedroom was wide, which meant that her pursuer would catch sight of her – and thus recapture her – long before she reached the nearest intersection.
Which means I have to change things up, or I’m as good as caught!
Gulping down a lungful of air, Nenet held it for just a moment, trying to regulate her breathing. Pronouncing the words correctly and making the precise gestures necessary to activate a spell was hard enough in an unfamiliar body, especially given how recently she’d gained the power to actually cast spells at all; doing so while running full-tilt was completely impossible. Thus, her only hope had been to take the calculated risk of stopping in order to call upon her magic.
Then she quickly cast the spell she’d prepared just in case something like this happened.
A moment later, a thick mist filled the hallway, rendering everything hidden behind a cloud of vapor.
Then she wheeled around and started running again.
She had no idea if this would even work. She’d prepared this spell after being inspired by what Lex had told her during the flight here, about how he’d once hidden inside the acidic fog cloud of a dragon’s breath weapon in order to surprise the beast. While she was familiar with the technique – even before forming her bond with her master, she’d been able to see into the magical spectrum enough to determine that Paska had used a similar spell while fighting that old adlet – the idea of using something so simple to outwit a stronger opponent had struck a chord in her, knowing that she was heading into a similar situation.
Of course, now that she was actually in the middle of it, the situation seemed decidedly dissimilar.
For one thing, Adagio had been the one who’d taught her that spell.
Given that, there was every reason to think that the enraged Siren – as she’d called herself – knew multiple ways to counter this bit of magic. Heck, Nenet could think of several herself. From a gust of wind to disperse it to a simple mistsight spell, there were many methods of defeating such a primitive visual obscurement. But given how low on magic Adagio had to be, there was an equal chance that she didn’t have any of those countermeasures available at the moment.
If that was the case, then Nenet had bought herself a little time.
Very little, since the fog only covered an area a few feet wide. If Adagio simply ran through it – which she’d be able to do very quickly, with her footwear being ensorcelled to increase her speed – then she’d be through it in a heartbeat.
Nenet knew she had to be around the corner by then, or this would all be over.
Almost to the corner! Almost to the corner! Almost to the-
Another tingling of magic reached Nenet’s ears at the same time as she heard Adagio’s voice raised in harsh song of anger, and she dived to the side in anticipation of whatever was coming her way.
But this time it was in vain, as the ground under her feet suddenly bucked and writhed, as though the entire mountain were shaking.
Which was exactly what was happening, Nenet realized as she went tumbling.
Flung off her feet, she heard herself crying out in terror as she clutched at Belligerence and Lex’s spine, trying to hang onto both of them even as she tried to catch herself. Instead, all she did was hit the ground hard, and it was only after her second attempt to get back up had failed that she remembered that both of her other forms had wings.
Biting her lip so hard she almost drew blood, she turned back into her Three Feet in the Evening body – knowing that her gynosphinx form would make her lose her hands, and that whatever Adagio had done to Lex’s spine was making it extremely difficult to move with magic – and flapped her wings, somehow managing to pick herself up to achieve liftoff, silently glad that these hallways had been made big enough to account for creatures the size of Sissel and Blat!
A second later she was at the intersection, clumsily winging around and almost slamming into the corner as she made the turn, glancing back at the bank of fog that she’d made-
Just in time to see Adagio emerging from it, her teeth bared and her eyes wild, running at a full tilt with no concern for how the ground was shaking.
Yelping, Nenet beat her wings harder as she made her way down the connecting corridor.
If I can just make it to the next intersection!
Not even noticing that the tremors had stopped, Nenet didn’t glance back as she flew as fast as she could, convinced that Adagio was on the verge of catching her. And yet, no golden aura grabbed her as she neared the next turn, nor did a raised voice sing out with a magical attack. Had she reached the end of her magic at last?
She had just started to let herself hope that was the case when Adagio emerged from the wall up ahead of her.
This wasn’t like when Paska had slipped out of a hidden alcove. Even as her brain struggled to process what was happening, Nenet could see Adagio emerging from the stone itself, another of the rings on her right hand shimmering slightly as she passed through the wall as though it wasn’t even there.
Shrieking, the sphinx somehow managed to avoid a collision, angling herself so that she flew just over Adagio’s head, her feet coming within an inch of the Siren’s outstretched grasp.
Reaching the next intersection, Nenet banked hard as she turned, hearing a rush of footsteps right behind her. Notgonnamakeitnotgonnamakeitnotgonna-
Then an eruption sounded behind her, mingled with a cry from Adagio, and when both fell silent there were no more footsteps dogging her.
For a second Nenet didn’t know what had happened.
Then she remembered the glyph she’d laid down on her way in, right after she’d realized that she was capable of taking a human form.
She triggered it...I set it to release a stunning blast if someone other than me walked over it...and she triggered it!
A hysterical laugh escaped Nenet’s lips then, equal parts relieved and disbelieving that anything of hers had been able to affect Adagio at all, and she was still laughing as she reached the exit, returning to her full-gynosphinx body.
Master, I’m almost out! she reported telepathically, still in the grip of exaltation as flapped her wings harder. It didn’t matter if Grisela’s lesser puppets saw her now, she was nearly home free! I have your spine, and I’m almost past the wards! I even still have Belligerence!
Are you being pursued? Rather than sharing her elation, Lex’s mental voice sounded tense. Is there anything that could impede your getting out of there?
No, nothing! Gaining altitude, Nenet flew back the way she came, making sure nothing on the ground would be able to catch her. I should be clear in the next few sec-
A golden aura sprang to life around her before she could finish her thought. NO!
Nenet, what’s happened?! demanded Lex, his voice having gone from tense to anxious.
She’s got me! Struggling harder, Nenet tried with everything she had to break free. But just like before, she couldn’t extricate herself from the telekinetic grasp, barely able to look down as she saw Adagio finish emerging from the side of the mountain itself, the glow from her stone-walking ring fading even as the telekinetic one continued to shine.
Biting her lip, Nenet shifted back to her hybrid form, hoping to slip free again, but this time the golden aura contracted around her as she switched bodies.
Adagio, it seemed, wasn’t about to fall for the same trick twice.
Nor was she content to leave Nenet hovering in the air, as the golden aura suddenly shot downward, taking the bipedal sphinx with it. Nenet didn’t have a chance to do anything besides brace herself before she hit the ground, the impact making her already-bruised ribs flare in pain as she struck the snow-covered earth hard enough to leave a crater.
“You’re not going to ruin this for me!” snarled Adagio, waving Grisela’s puppets off as she strode over to where Nenet had hit the ground, the telekinetic aura continuing to pin her in place. “I’ve worked too hard to miss this chance!”
“What are you talking about?” moaned Nenet, still clutching Belligerence and Lex’s vertebrae as tightly as she could. “What chance?”
“To be adored, you dimwit, by everyone in this world!”
Nenet, listen to me very carefully. You need to calm down and assess the situation. No matter how bad it seems, figure out what you can do with the resources at your disposal.
There’s nothing I can do! she wailed, despair already starting to set in. I almost made it, but now-
Think! interrupted Lex. What spells do you have left? What innate magic can you use? What about your countermagic? Is there anything you can use it on?
The question made Nenet’s heart lurch, as she realized that in all the chaos and confusion of confronting her neglectful parent, she’d forgotten about the greatest power her master had given her. That had been because she’d resigned herself to Adagio’s spells being beyond what she could hope to counter – the strength of the wards surrounding this area had proven that much, since all she’d needed to do was glance at them in the magical spectrum to know that her countermagic couldn’t bring them down – but there had been one salient detail that she’d overlooked:
Right now Adagio was relying on the magic items she wore, rather than her own spells.
Nenet had looked those over in the magical spectrum, back in the workroom. It had been difficult to get a bead on those rings, as the bracelet she was wearing – what let her use that many magic rings at a time; normally wearing so many caused them to interfere with each other – had been so powerful that it had overshadowed their auras, but if she could maybe use her countermagic to shut down the telekinetic one...
Master, I have an idea!
Adagio had almost reached her then, and Nenet resisted the urge to use her countermagic immediately, instead letting her approach. The aura keeping Belligerence suppressed was degrading rapidly – apparently, even the Siren couldn’t keep such a powerful weapon contained for very long – and would likely fall apart in the next few seconds. If I can hit her with Belligerence once I’ve disabled her ring, that just might distract her long enough for me to get away!
Rather than asking for any details – what ring her mother was wearing or why it was so important to disable it – Lex’s reply was simple and to the point. Remember, sacrifice the quill if you have to. Getting beyond the wards with my vertebrae is what matters. I’ll know once you do, and will teleport you back immediately.
Yes, Master!
Now she just needed to get Adagio to lower her guard, even a little bit. “What do you mean ‘be adored by everyone in this world’?” she moaned, trying her best to look like there wasn’t any fight left in her. “I thought you said you were making this” – she glanced at the bones clutched tightly in her grasp – “into a weapon so you didn’t have to pay for whatever deals you made...”
Adagio snickered, looking down on Nenet both literally and figuratively. “That’s just the beginning. Sure, I cut a few buy-now pay-later deals with certain...let’s just say, eldritch powers, in order to up my game. And those agreements aren’t exactly favorable for me over the long-term; aristeia isn’t something you can get for cheap, not to mention everything else I acquired.”
Smirking, she pointed at Lex’s spine. “But Kryonex, the demigod whose blood I managed to steal, is an actual deity. True, he’s not very much of one – why anyone would want yetis as worshipers I can’t imagine – but divinity is a power beyond reckoning. By making that into an artifact, I’ll be able to run my creditors off when they come looking to collect. And then...”
She leaned in closer, and Nenet got ready.
“When the Pony Empire’s Queen Iliana kicks the bucket in a few years, guess who’s going to be there to take her place?”
With a silent act of will, Nenet threw as much countermagic as she could at Adagio’s ring, letting that amorphous power extend its tendrils toward the magic item, sinking into it as she silently commanded them to shut it down-
Only for them to crumble as the ring’s magic proved stronger.
Unable to help herself, Nenet’s eyes widened in shock. “Huh?!”
Mistaking the source of the sphinx’s surprise, Adagio gave a throaty chuckle. “I know. Everyone thinks that she’s going to live forever. And why wouldn’t they? After two centuries of keeping her little kingdom together, there’s no reason for them to assume there won’t be many more. But the secret’s starting to get out. Seers and soothsayers, prophets and augurs, oracles and mediums...all across the Empire, they’re starting to receive visions, all of the same thing: a future without Iliana in it.”
Reaching down, she put her hand over Nenet’s, her nails digging painfully into the sphinx’s fingers. “And when that happens, it’ll be time for Empress Adagio to step up, as the beloved new queen of this world’s ponies. And after that, who knows? Maybe it’ll be time for some new wars of conquest. After all, it’d be horribly unfair of the ponies to keep me all to themselves.”
Her smile turned predatory then, as she slowly began forcing Nenet’s hand open. “Now, be a good girl and let Mommy get back to work.”
Master, it didn’t work! wailed Solvei mentally. It didn’t work and I don’t know what else to do! She’s taking your spine back!
In her mind, Lex cursed. I didn’t want to attempt this in my current state, but I’m going to try and augment our link. It might let me punch through the teleport trap and bring you back. Hold on.
Fighting back a whimper, Nenet thrashed again as Adagio pried her fingers open, trying to struggle free despite knowing that it was futile...
Then Belligerence was at full power again, shining brightly in Nenet’s eyes.
Sucking in a breath, Nenet immediately turned the spear around in her grasp. Trapped in the grip of Adagio’s ring, she couldn’t bring it into position to strike at her with it, but she was able to lay it alongside the Siren’s shoulder, brushing her face. Irritated, Adagio brought her ring-laden hand to brush it away, even as she opened the last of Nenet’s fingers...
And the quill’s barbs sprouted, spearing Adagio’s fingers.
A shriek of pain left the Siren’s lips, and she yanked her hand – both hands – away from Nenet...or at least, she tried to. But her right hand was stuck fast, the barbs getting caught in the chain linking her bracelet to her rings, and Adagio found herself stuck fast. That was enough to break her concentration, and the telekinetic aura around Nenet immediately fell apart, freeing her.
Immediately, she turned to get up, still clenching Lex’s spine and the quill as she sprang to her feet. This was her chance! This was-
“Oh no you don’t!” roared Adagio, her left hand reaching out to grab Nenet by the wing.
Memories of what Grisela had done to her assaulted Nenet then, causing her to react viscerally as her tail – her hideous, spiked tail – came around and struck Adagio in the side of the head. But unlike Belligerence, all her tail’s strike managed to do was tear a few strands of hair from the Siren’s head, causing her to snarl. “THAT’S IT!” she screamed, batting Nenet’s tail away. “I’ve tried to be nice, and I’ve tried to make you understand, but now-”
But Nenet didn't hear the rest, suddenly vanishing...
...and reappearing in front of the dark shadow that was her master.
“Y-you did it!” she breathed, almost collapsing in relief, scarcely able to believe what had happened. “You enhanced our link and got me out!”
“No,” murmured Lex, and Nenet could see the confusion in his glowing green eyes. “I was still gathering my strength, when I felt that you were clear.”
“Huh?” Blinking, she could only tilt her head, not sure what he was saying. “But...but I wasn’t...”
“I suddenly registered your distance and direction again, and thought you'd gotten past the wards,” explained Lex. “Are you saying that’s not what happened?”
Dazed, Nenet shook her head, tail swishing in agitation. “Yes. I mean, no, that’s not what happened. I tried to get away, but I didn’t make it two steps before Adagio was on me again. I don’t know why you were able to teleport me out. That shouldn’t have been possible without the key to bypass...”
Her voice trailed off as she caught sight of her tail out of the corner of her eye. There was still a few wisps of blonde curls among its spikes, and Nenet had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Her hair,” she breathed, reaching down to pluck the strands free. “It was her hair. Master, that was the key she made to circumvent the wards! And I got it without realizing! This...this tail that I hate...that shows how polluted I am...it's the reason you were able to bring me back!”
Feeling her eyes water, she looked back at him with a smile...only to see that Lex was staring at her with frightening intensity.
“...and that was when you teleported me back,” finished Nenet.
Silence was the response she received, as Lex struggled to process the enormity of what he’d just been told.
The mysterious “Mother” who had apparently birthed Nenet and Sissel and Grisela and all the rest of their misbegotten siblings; who had masterminded a successful plot to resurrect the ancient dragon Hvitdod, albeit only in facsimile; who had apparently gone off on a quest to injure a demigod and actually managed to succeed; who had directed and overseen – and quite possibly participated in – the kidnapping and murder of numerous ponies, along with selling their souls to daemons for her own profit...was none other than Adagio Dazzle.
Sonata and Aria’s sister.
The same sister whom they made him promise to not only locate and bring back to Equestria, but to somehow coax into loving him the same way they had come to. A promise that he had agreed to, and so was now duty-bound to fulfill, even though he hadn’t known about Kara’s twisted blessing at the time he’d made it. A promise that was quite possibly their final request of him, if they hadn’t survived the fire...
The thought made the edges of his umbral form thrash in turmoil. But to his profound discomfort and acute shame, the agitation that shot through him then wasn’t solely due to his longing to know what had happened to his beloveds or his fear that they had died horribly.
It was also because he could still vividly recall the intense lust he’d felt when he’d briefly witnessed Adagio back in Vanhoover.
Extremely vividly.
“Wait, hang on...”
Nearby, Solvei shook her head, frowning. She’d been silent up until now, sulking ever since Lex had summoned her back in order to listen to Nenet’s report, but judging from what he could sense of her emotional state – her unhappiness turning to mild confusion – something the sphinx had said had managed to break through her petulance. “You said she called herself a ‘Siren’?”
“That’s right,” answered Nenet. “But I don’t know what that means.”
Solvei cocked her head as she looked at him, scowling only slightly as she met his eyes. “Isn’t that what Drafty said your girlfriends were, back where you came from?”
Lex registered spite coming from her then, overlaying a lingering sense of anger and hurt, and it was enough to make him wonder if she was being deliberately petty. “Sonata Dusk and Aria Blaze,” he answered gruffly. “They’re Adagio’s sisters.”
Nenet’s eyes widened, and Lex registered alarm from her then. “Mo-, Adagio has sisters?!”
Solvei’s reaction was only somewhat less extreme. “Wait, what?! You’re saying-”
But Nenet didn’t let her get a word in edgewise, her wings fluttering as Lex registered her descending into full-blown panic. “We have to get out of here! Even like this, I could barely escape from Adagio when she was at her weakest! If there’s three of her, we won’t stand a chance! They’ll capture us, and then-”
“They’re not like her,” muttered Lex.
“Nenet, calm down,” began Solvei. “That won’t happen.”
But Nenet didn’t seem to hear either of them, her breathing growing rapid as her eyes teared up. “They won’t kill us. Not until we’re hurting so bad that we’re all begging to die. It’ll be worse than anything Grisela ever did. And when they’re finally done-”
“I said they’re not like her.”
“Master,” whimpered Solvei, her emotional state suddenly switching to worry.
“-they’ll sell our souls to the cruelest, most evil daemons, and they’ll laugh when they tell us about the eternity of suffering that we’ll-”
“THEY”RE NOT LIKE HER, DO YOU HEAR ME?!” screamed Lex, grabbing Nenet in his telekinetic grasp and shaking her like viciously as black crystals erupted all around him. “THEY’RE NOTHING LIKE HER!!! SONATA AND ARIA ARE GOOD!!! THEY’RE GOOD AND LOVING AND COMPASSIONATE AND IF YOU EVER SAY OTHERWISE AGAIN, I’LL-”
His rant came to an abrupt end as Solvei reached out and grabbed Nenet with her own telekinesis, holding the sphinx steady even as she placed herself directly between the two of them, feet planted wide as she held her arms out to either side of her. Master, please, don’t do this!
Had anyone else intervened like that, Lex would have immediately turned his wrath on them. But across their link, he sensed the guilt and sorrow that was coming from Solvei then – along with the hysteria that had gripped Nenet, the sphinx sobbing in terror and whimpering apologies – and felt his rage dissipate as suddenly as it had formed.
What was he doing? He had promised Nenet that she would never suffer again if she entered his service, and yet here he was, terrorizing her. After she’d successfully completed a mission, all on her own no less, that his life had depended on.
Just like how he’d lashed out at Solvei – again – for her temerity in daring to say that she was willing to lay down her life for him.
Releasing Nenet, Lex couldn’t bring himself to look at either of them as he took Belligerence and his spine in his telekinesis. I’m going to figure out a way to repair my corporeal self, he informed them coldly as he floated away from them. The two of you start excavating the diamonds I found beneath the floor of the chasm.
He slammed their telepathic connection shut before either could say anything in reply, not wanting to deal with this anymore. Right now he needed to focus on finding a way to reintegrate his spine, then on subduing Adagio before the Siren could plan some sort of counterattack. After that, he needed to make peace with the adlets, figure out a way to save Thermal Draft, get home to Equestria, and handle a hundred other problems that were more important than his latest communication failure.
That thought was enough to earn a snort of recrimination from Lex, knowing that he was making excuses to avoid the unpleasant truth:
He’d been too harsh on both of them.
Solvei and Nenet had performed their duties admirably by any measure. The former’s insistence on being allowed to lay down her life for his sake, and the latter’s accomplishing a daunting task without any support; both were actions that deserved praise, if not some sort of more substantive reward.
Instead, he’d sharply rebuked them both, ignoring their achievements in favor of focusing on altogether minor annoyances. That he could justify his reasons for doing so in any number of ways was irrelevant. To be so dismissive of his closest servants when they’d gone so far for his sake was unworthy of him.
I might as well throw my spine away because of how hard it’s become to move, he jeered at himself. Or discard Belligerence because of how its jangling...
Wait...jangling?
Turning at last to regard the quill – which prior to now had been lying forgotten in the snow, dropped there by Nenet upon being teleported back – Lex looked for the source of the metallic tinkling sound that it was making-
And saw a bracelet with rings hanging off it dangling from the weapon’s barbs.
Pausing as he recognized the bracelet that Nenet had mentioned Adagio wearing, Lex let his vision slip into the magical spectrum as he examined it, wincing at the radiance that it exuded. But despite the brightness, it took only a few minutes to determine its functionality, being some sort of augment designed to allow multiple rings to operate at once...apparently overriding the limitation that disallowed more than two from being used at a time.
By itself, that wasn’t too unusual. While Lex still couldn’t figure out the processes Everglow’s artificers used to make enchanted items, magic rings represented – in a literal manner – the limits of their craft. To artificially imbue magical channels into inanimate objects without breaking or corroding them was remarkable by any measure. But to employ the high amount of magical energy that most magic rings used into such small structures was a feat that even Lex found impressive.
Even so, there were areas of impracticality. In addition to being – for the most part – hideously expensive to create even by the standards of most magic items, the delicate nature of their construction resulted in a resonance that interfered with their operation if more than two were used in close conjunction.
This bracelet was apparently the answer to that.
As it was, there were three rings dangling from the connecting chains now. Given that Nenet had said that Adagio was wearing five when she’d seen her, the other two had apparently come off when the sphinx had accidentally gotten Belligerence caught in her mother’s accessory. But that was no great loss, since the three that remained had notable auras in their own right, and though the bracelet itself was overshadowing them, it didn’t take Lex very long to decode their functions.
The first ring – a thin golden band inset with an alternating pattern of diamonds and rubies – was designed to act as a sort of shock absorber for the wearer’s body. It couldn’t actually prevent damage, nor did it overcome disease or defeat poison; rather, it alleviated debilitation, allowing the wearer’s physical functions to continue to work optimally even when placed under extreme stress. Muscle operation would remain intact even if blood flow was disrupted. Physical coordination would continue to work at peak efficiency despite nerve damage. Even a traumatic brain injury wouldn’t result in impaired cognition while the ring was worn.
The second ring – a loop of quicksilver with a trio of agates – seemed to be designed so that the first wouldn’t be necessary, inlaid with an enchantment that heightened reaction speed to an unfathomable degree. Although it wasn’t inlaid with any sort of predictive power, the way that one of his floating gemstones – permanently lost since the battle in Las Pegasus – had been, it had nearly the same effect. It simply accomplished it by increasing the integrity of the connection between the wearer’s brain and their muscular system.
And the third ring...
In terms of physical construction, it was as gaudy as the other two, being composed of white gold with a green sapphire set atop it. But at the moment Lex couldn’t have cared less as to what it looked like, unable to keep from staring at the aura it exuded.
Healing.
The ring was enchanted with healing magic.
Nor was it limited to merely mending physical damage; the ring allowed the wearer to actually regenerate parts that were lost. Blood could be recovered near-instantaneously. Organs could be regrown in a matter of seconds. Even a missing limb could be completely restored in a minute or two...or less than that, if the existing part was returned to the wearer’s body.
It was still limited in what it could do, of course. The ring couldn’t function for someone who’d undergone total metabolic shutdown; if the wearer died, it couldn’t regenerate them back to life. Nor could it expel foreign substances or infections. And magical attacks on the mind or soul were completely outside of its power to restore, which meant that it was of no help to Thermal Draft.
The ring’s single greatest drawback, however, was that it could only regenerate damage that was taken while it was worn. Slipping it onto someone who had already lost their leg or their lung or some other body part would accomplish nothing. But Lex couldn’t bring himself to be overly concerned about that; he had too much experience with forcing additional magic through enchanted items in order to enhance their powers to let such a minor limit worry him. No matter that he felt near-totally depleted; he’d find the strength within himself to do this now, and then...
Then he’d be restored.
Then he’d be able to confront Adagio.
Then he’d have the chance to keep his promise to Sonata and Aria.
All because Nenet had succeeded beyond his wildest expectations of her.
Yes, Lex decided as he continued to examine the ring. Once we’re done here, a reward is definitely in order. For her and Solvei both.
“I thought that h-he’d be happy,” moaned Nenet, her shoulders jumping as sobs wracked her body. “That he’d be p-proud of me...”
“He is,” murmured Solvei, holding the weeping sphinx. “I’m sure he is. He’s just...”
She couldn’t bring herself to finish, sighing as she hugged Nenet closer, letting her cry into her chest.
Under any other circumstances, she would have been profoundly uncomfortable letting a naked girl – which was what Nenet looked like now, thanks to that oh-so-convenient Three Legs in the Afternoon power, or whatever it was called, that her bond with Lex had given her – press herself against her the way the sphinx was right now. While Solvei had been entirely ignorant of such things, Akna had been very much aware that her preferences ran entirely toward the opposite sex.
But she couldn’t bring herself to push Nenet away, not with how utterly crushed the poor thing seemed by what had just happened. Even the thought of trying to extricate herself now made Solvei wince with guilt, remembering how – less than a day ago – she’d not only furiously protested her master’s decision to treat the sphinx kindly, but had gone out of her way to heap more abuse on her during Lex’s battle with Hvitdod.
That was why, rather than pushing her away, she stroked Nenet’s hair as she gently rocked her back and forth, the way her grandmother had done for her whenever she’d been upset. “He loves those other two Sirens, Sonata and Aria, very much, and he doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead.”
She’d tried to make that sound as nonjudgmental as she could, but Nenet shivered anyway, wings shuddering as she hugged Solvei tighter. “I didn’t know,” she whimpered. “He told me about his adventures while I was flying to Mo-, to Adagio’s hideout, but he never said...”
She trailed off, swallowing before looking up at Solvei, her eyes watery. “Does...does he hate me now?”
Giving her a reassuring smile, Solvei gently ran her fingers across Nenet’s tear-stained cheeks. “I’m sure he doesn’t.” She couldn’t sustain her smile as she glanced up, however, looking at where Lex had gone. “If he hates anyone right now, it’s me.”
The admission came out thick with anger and guilt alike. Being called a liability had hurt more than she cared to admit, and she was furious that he’d said that to her after everything they’d been through together. But at the same time, she couldn’t help but regret how forcefully she’d insisted on accompanying Nenet. I saw how much it hurt him when I died before. Telling him I didn’t care if I died again in order to save him was like saying I didn’t care if he went through that again. It’s no wonder I made him so mad-
“That’s not true!”
Nenet’s outburst took her by surprise, eyebrows rising as the sphinx sat up, freeing herself from Solvei’s embrace before giving the adlet a heartfelt look. “He loves you very much!”
Solvei felt her ears fold back then, recalling what Yotimo had told her a little while ago. “That’s not...it isn’t the same. He cares about me – we care about each other – a great deal, but that’s not love-”
“But he does love you!” insisted Nenet. “He told me so himself!”
For some reason, Solvei felt her breath catch in her throat then, and her chest started to throb in a way that had nothing to do with her stab wound. “He...what?”
Smiling, Nenet took Solvei’s hand in both of her own, squeezing it. “He said so right before he bound me to him, that he loves you and wants you to love him back! That’s why he hasn’t told you about-, EEP!”
Letting go of Solvei as though her touch was painful, Nenet’s eyes went wide as she covered her mouth with her hands, wings flaring out behind her.
In that moment, Solvei’s entire world shrank down to what the sphinx had just said. “Hasn’t told me what?”
Nenet shook her head wildly, her eyes still wide with horror as she kept her mouth covered.
But Solvei wasn’t about to be deterred. “Hasn’t told me what?” she repeated. “Nenet, what hasn’t he told me about?”
“I’m not supposed to say!” came the sphinx’s whispered reply, further muffled from behind her hands. “I don’t want Master to get mad at me again!”
It was all Solvei could do to keep from grabbing the sphinx and trying to wring the answers out of her, knowing that wasn’t fair to Nenet, especially after what Lex had just done.
As it was, she didn’t even stop to wonder why she needed to know what Nenet was hiding from her so badly. All Solvei knew at that moment was that she had to uncover the rest of what the sphinx had let slip: that Lex loved her, and wanted her love in return, but was keeping some sort of secret that was interfering with that. Everything else – his angst over what had happened to Sonata and Aria, Thermal Draft’s pregnancy, and the revelation that Adagio was a Siren – was completely forgotten in the face of that.
“Nenet, I need you to listen to me.” Reaching out, this time she took the sphinx’s hands in her own, feeling them tremble as she gently but firmly lowered them from her face. “If Master...if Lex really l-lo-...” – she couldn’t seem to make herself say the word, her throat closing up when she tried – “if he has feelings for me, and wants me to return them...don’t you think that whatever it is that’s getting in the way of that is something I should know?”
Cringing, Nenet looked like she wanted to run away, glancing in the direction Lex had gone before giving Solvei a pleading look. “What if he’s listening right now? You know he can use our senses! I don’t want to upset him again.”
It was all Solvei could do hold back a whine of frustration. “If he was listening, he would have said something in our minds! Nenet please, please tell me what’s going on!”
For what seemed like a short eternity, Nenet bit her lip, and Solvei held her breath as she watched the sphinx waver. Finally, Nenet gave a nervous swallow and spoke. “He said that...he has a blessing from Kara...”
“Kara?” echoed Solvei, drawing in a breath. “I know that name. Why do I know that name?”
“She’s a pony goddess,” answered Nenet. “Her divine portfolio is-”
“Love,” murmured Solvei, the answer coming to her in a flash as she recalled Lex’s conversation with Sanguine Disposition back in Darkest Night. The red-eyed stallion had appeared out of nowhere after they’d defeated White Wraith, saying something about how Lex had a blessing from Kara, with her master confirming that to be the pony goddess of love and deception.
But he never actually said what the blessing was! she realized, having forgotten that detail with how their subsequent battle through the wilderness had ended with her becoming Solvei and Akna together.
Now, however, she couldn’t think about anything else. “What blessing? What does it do?”
“He said...” Closing her eyes, Nenet took a shuddering breath, nodding to herself as if confirming to herself that she was actually going to speak. “He said that it makes others fall in love with him. It doesn’t work on everyone, but while he doesn’t know why it affects some people and not others, he’s sure that having a soul-bond qualifies.”
Solvei blinked once.
Then a second time.
And then a third.
Finally, she found her voice. “Are you telling me...”
Swallowing again, Nenet nodded. “He thinks that your feelings for him are because of Kara’s blessing.”
The same rebuttals that she’d given Yotimo came to mind then, ready to deny that she had amorous feelings for Lex: that the two of them were different races, that he already had a lover, that her actions were an expression of loyalty rather than romance...
But this time, those excuses all died on her lips, unable to make herself utter any of them.
“I thought that sounded like a wonderful thing,” confessed Nenet, looking down guiltily. “I’ve never been in love before, and with how much he seems to love you back...” Behind her, her tail thrashed in embarrassment. “That’s why I agreed to be his. I wanted to have someone care about me the way he does for you. But I swear that I was never trying to take him away from you! ...Solvei?”
Pausing as she realized that the adlet hadn’t responded yet, Nenet gulped. “Are you alright? Please don’t be mad at me...”
Shaking her head, Solvei took a deep breath before giving Nenet’s hands – still wrapped in her own – a squeeze. “I’m not.”
“Really?”
“I promise. I’m not mad at you, Nenet.”
“And Lex?”
“...”
“He didn’t tell you because he thought you’d try and fight it.”
That was enough to make Solvei’s brow furrow in confusion. “He thought I’d...what?”
“That’s why he didn’t want to tell you about the blessing,” admitted Nenet. “He thought that if you knew that your feelings were artificial, that Kara’s influence was the reason why you’d fallen in love with him, you’d try and fight those feelings off. And he doesn’t want that, because he wants you to love him as much as he does you.”
Solvei’s eyes widened at that. All of a sudden, a lot about how Lex had been acting over the last several days made sense. The way he’d been upset about her fretting over Silla. His cautioning her not to take her anger out on Nenet. How badly he’d blown up at her when she’d made it clear that she was willing to die for him. In light of what Nenet had just told her, all of them took on new meaning.
“...he was feeling guilty.”
“Huh?”
“He was feeling guilty,” muttered Solvei. “I know how his mind works. He thought that Kara’s blessing was manipulating me, and so it was wrong of him to react to that.” She gave a hollow laugh then, looking upward. “All this time, I’ve been trying to make his life easier, and instead I’ve just been making him feel even worse.”
She fell silent then, and Nenet didn’t say anything either, the pregnant pause stretching out until at last the sphinx couldn’t take it anymore. “Solvei?”
“Hm?”
“Are you okay?”
“I...” Taking a deep breath, she licked her lips before answering honestly. “I don’t know...”
“...”
“...”
“Should we, I don’t know...try and get those diamonds Master wanted us to excavate?” ventured Nenet cautiously.
“Vutok take his diamonds,” muttered Solvei, standing up at last.
Nenet leaped to her feet as well, brimming with nervous energy. “Then what are we going to do?”
“First things first,” announced Solvei. “We’re going to get you some clothes.”
“Clothes?” Glancing down at herself, Nenet gave Solvei a bewildered look. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want Toklo to have a heart attack when he sees you,” muttered Solvei, pulling her top closed; the fabric’s faltering integrity hadn’t been helped by Nenet’s crying into it. And yet that made a rueful smile cross her lips as she glanced at the sphinx. “And because I want to thank you for telling me what Master said. Something to wear seems like a good way to do that.”
But rather than looking excited at the prospect, Nenet started tearing up again. “You...you want to...”
“Nenet?” Concerned, Solvei took a step toward her. “Sorry, did I say something wrong?”
But the sphinx shook her head, giving her a shaky smile as she rubbed her eyes. “No, it’s just...I’m really happy! No one’s ever thanked me for anything before, let alone said they want to give me a gift.”
That was heartbreaking enough that Solvei couldn’t help herself, going over and giving Nenet another hug despite the latter’s nudity. “Come on. There isn’t much out here, but I bet we can scrounge up something pretty for you.”
“It’s okay,” sniffled Solvei. “You don’t need to waste anything nice on me. I know I’m unpleasant to look at.”
Breaking the hug, Solvei gave Nenet a quizzical look. “Are you kidding?”
A confused look crossed Nenet’s face as she shook her head, causing Solvei to scoff. “Nenet, you do realize that you’re gorgeous, right?”
The question made Nenet cringe. “But my tail...”
Unable to help herself, Solvei snorted, glancing down at the sphinx’s chest. “Trust me, there are two very big reasons why most people won’t pay any attention to your tail. Now come on” – grabbing Nenet’s hand, she led her toward the edge of the chasm – “I’ll make a serac for us to ride out of here, and then we’ll find something for you to wear.”
“But, what about when I change forms?” fretted Nenet, stumbling after the adlet. “Won’t anything I’m wearing be ruined?”
“That was how it was for me when I was Akna. But later, when I became Solvei too, my shapeshifting changed to keep my clothes from being torn.”
Nenet cocked her head in confusion. “When you were...Akna?”
“Right, I forgot, you don’t know much about me, do you?” Solvei sighed as they reached the cavern wall. “Okay, even with a serac it’ll probably be a little while until I can get us both out of here, so I suppose I’ll have plenty of time to tell you the whole story. But the bottom line is that I was originally two different people: a winter wolf named Solvei, and an adlet named Akna...”
The spells that Adagio had woven into his spine were beyond what she should have been capable of.
Or at least, they were beyond anything that her sisters were capable of. Although Lex had only spent a few months with Sonata and Aria, he’d not only observed them using their magic on multiple occasions, he’d thoroughly examined the magical channels in their bodies. He’d even made sure to question them about how their powers worked.
That last mode of inquiry hadn’t been particularly fruitful, since both Sirens used their magic instinctively rather than through any sort of dedicated study. But although they lacked the knowledge or the terminology to describe how their powers worked, both had agreed on one critical detail: it had only been recently that they’d actually started working to develop them, bringing their magic more into bloom over the last year than they had in the last millennium.
For his part, Lex suspected that had more to do with how that “Earth” place they’d been exiled to had apparently been bereft of any native form of magical energy – stunting their own abilities as a consequence – than with lassitude on Sonata and Aria’s part. But that mattered less than the fact that both Sirens’ powers had flourished once they’d found themselves in a new, magic-rich environment. In that regard, that Adagio had apparently grown in magical strength was no surprise.
But for her to have gained this much power this quickly isn’t just surprising, it’s absolutely unprecedented, decided Lex as he looked over his vertebrae in the magical spectrum.
The spells Adagio had woven around his spine not only far outstripped anything that Sonata or Aria could ever have hoped to cast, but were intricate enough that Lex himself had spent over an hour trying to comprehend them...with only limited success.
As near as he could tell, there were three separate enchantments laid on his backbone. The first was some sort of binding spell, though even that was unclear, as it seemed designed to imbue as much as contain. The second was a shaping, made to direct massive quantities of energy. The third was a protection spell, but try as he might, Lex couldn’t seem to determine what exactly it was protecting, nor what it was protecting against. As best he could guess, it was somehow preserving Hvitdod’s curse, despite the supernatural aspects of the dragon’s facsimile having been retroactively undone.
But even that was entirely speculative on his part.
The mystery was deepened by the fact that those spells all functioned together in a sequence, building to some sort of gestalt. Or at least they were supposed to, except the sequence was incomplete. Lex could clearly see areas where the spells were supposed to interface with other spells...but whatever magic they’d been intended to join with hadn’t been cast.
As Nenet had told him, whatever weapon Adagio had wanted to make his spine into was apparently incomplete.
That had been disturbing enough that Lex had contemplated simply removing Adagio’s magic altogether, only to find that course of action beyond his power as well.
In theory, Nenet’s countermagic – which now belonged to him, too – would have allowed him to do that. But while his newest servitor had a reservoir of power that could only be used to fuel her countermagic, Lex had no such cache. For him, using countermagic required a sacrifice of some other magical energy that he had, and right now he was running extremely low on that. Even if that hadn’t been the case, the sheer amount of power and the incredible resiliency that the wayward Siren had woven into her spells left Lex with little hope that Nenet’s countermagic could have undone it; certainly, the sphinx herself hadn’t thought so when she’d confronted Adagio personally.
And even if he had been able to remove Adagio’s magic, Lex couldn’t even begin to guess what that would do to the so-called “godsblood” that she’d placed on his vertebrae.
For that matter, he had no idea what godsblood was even supposed to be...save for the fact that Adagio had apparently believed that it was the literal blood of a god. Or rather, the blood of the demigod Kryonex – the ice elemental that the yetis apparently worshiped, according to what Toklo had said when they’d first captured him – whose realm she’d apparently assaulted, sacrificing all of her children and her daemon mercenaries in order to obtain her prize.
Had he not personally examined the spells she’d woven around his vertebrae, Lex could have scoffed at the idea that Adagio could possibly have faced a god – even a minor one – in battle and survived to tell the tale. He’d only ever seen the barest fractions of the Night Mare’s power, but what he had glimpsed remained beyond his ability to quantify or calculate.
As it was, he still had a hard time believing it. He wasn’t sure how much weaker demigods were than their full-fledged counterparts, but assuming they were at all comparable to the Night Mare, then even the least demigod had to be far beyond the greatest of mortal achievements.
But if all Adagio had wanted was a few drops of blood, her success in acquiring them wasn’t entirely beyond plausibility. Not with the baffling degree of power she’d gained, especially if she’d supplemented it with a small army of daemons and her own cadre of aristeia-empowered children.
Which was another mystery: Adagio’s hyper-fecundity.
Lex had originally presumed that “Mother” was simply a codename that Grisela, Sissel, Paska, and the rest of their group used to refer to their leader. But the context by which they’d referred to her hadn’t matched that idea, and once he’d brought Nenet over to his side, she’d disabused him of it entirely.
Adagio was, according to the sphinx, their biological mother. She’d find males of various races and species, entice them into a conjugal encounter – something Lex had no trouble believing she could do, if his single glimpse of her was any indication – and then gestate and birth the resulting offspring. All apparently within the span of a few days.
More mystifying was that said offspring apparently took entirely after their father’s type, having none of Adagio’s own characteristics. But while that might have explained why she apparently felt no maternal devotion to them – given her readily sacrificing them to acquire a few drops of godsblood, to say nothing of selling their souls to daemons – it didn’t explain why she wasn’t apparently passing any of her own genes along. Even the crossbreeding spell that Kara had given him was just that: crossbreeding, creating a hybrid of both parents, as disgusting as that idea was. Nor did it accelerate their growth, prenatal or otherwise.
It was a complete reversal from what Sonata and Aria had described of their time on Earth. As much as Lex hated to think about it, he knew they hadn’t been chaste during their exile. But he was equally aware that – according to them – they’d never once conceived. That had been, they’d made it clear, as true for Adagio as it had been for the two of them.
Which was supposed to be the case for all of the Sirens’ salient characteristics, Lex knew. Adagio might have been more ambitious, and perhaps a touch wiser, than her sisters, but besides their personalities, their appearances, and their names, they were virtually identical. They’d had the same powers, the same weaknesses, and the same desires. They were, for all intents and purposes, practically the same being.
But that had changed once they’d come to Everglow. At that point, they’d split up – apparently for the first time in their lives – and started to differentiate. Sonata had become a pony, further refining her innate talents with manipulating music and minds alike. Aria had been maimed and left in her original form, learning more combative spells in order to survive her time among the sahuagin.
Adagio, however, had broken from her sisters’ paradigm. Not only had she acquired magic far in excess than either of them and regained her human form, but she’d become supernaturally attractive, bizarrely fertile, and collected a supply of exceptionally potent magic items. All within a few months of coming to Everglow.
None of it made any sense.
Nenet had mentioned that Adagio had alluded to making deals to increase her strength, which sounded similar to what Thermal Draft had done with Prevarius. But even that was a poor explanation; Thermal Draft's agreement to sell her soul had bought her only modest magical ability. Certainly nothing like what Adagio now possessed.
Presumably, at least some of the difference could be attributed to aristeia, that unknown power that Sissel had indicated was the only thing that Adagio had passed on to her children. But as for what that was, and how Adagio had acquired it...
Nenet likely knew the answer to the first question, even if she didn’t know the second. But Lex had been too focused on making sure the sphinx was capable of carrying out her mission to ask her about it before. In hindsight, that had likely been for the best; talking about powerful Adagio was would likely have made Nenet even more nervous before she’d set out to retrieve his spine. But now that she had...
I’ll ask her later, Lex decided, staring at where his vertebrae were hovering in the air, still encased within Adagio’s magic. Whatever aristeia was, it would help explain how she was able to reach such heights of power, but that wouldn’t do anything about his current situation.
And his current situation demanded that he make a decision.
But that decision – despite his taking the time to meticulously review everything he knew about Adagio – had grown no easier.
With his supply of dark magic diminishing by the minute, Lex knew he couldn’t remain in shadow-form much longer. But while Nenet had brought back not only his spine, but also a magic ring capable of abetting his reattaching it to his body, he still found himself hesitating.
Adagio’s alterations to his spine were far and away beyond anything Lex had considered. The sheer amount of magic – to say nothing of the godsblood – that she’d put into it was enough to make him extremely leery of reattaching it to his body. With no clue what she’d been trying to do (besides making some sort of weapon, according to Nenet), no idea how well her half-finished spells would hold up or what would happen if they collapsed, and no way to know what godsblood would do to him, it was impossible to predict what would happen to him once he put it back into his body.
The alternative was to use the ring Nenet had brought him to simply grow a new spine altogether. In theory, so long as he overcharged the ring to defeat its limitation about only regenerating injuries taken while wearing it, then so long as he donned it in the same instant that he returned to corporeal body, it would drag him back from the brink of death while it grew new vertebrae for him.
But that theory had problems of its own.
While Lex felt reasonably – though not completely – confident that he had enough power left to augment the ring’s powers, he wasn’t sure how long that would hold out. Previous instances of his overcharging magic items had lasted for minutes on end, but none of those had nearly as much energy as this, nor had he ever been so seriously injured while trying to augment them. Even if he succeeded, there was no way to be sure how long the enhancement would last.
That was a consideration of paramount importance, because once he returned to his physical body, Lex knew that he’d die in a matter of seconds...and in its unaugmented state, the ring couldn’t overcome death.
In all likelihood, that would be the case after he augmented it as well. Overcharging a magic item was, like with his thaumaturgical magic, something which needed to be done carefully and with great precision. He had to introduce the additional power into the specific parts of the magic item’s internal channels so as to augment particular aspects of its functionality. Doing that so as to overcome its inability to cure wounds taken while it wasn’t worn would be hard enough.
But Lex had been able to examine the ring through the magical spectrum at length now, and knew that empowering it that way while simultaneously increasing its healing ability to the point where it could reverse immediate loss of life was something that would have taxed him even if he’d been in peak condition.
And that made all the difference, because while the ring could regrow a lost limb – or in this case, spinal column – in a minute or so, it could reattach a severed body part of any sort in seconds.
Which meant that he had two options:
Either augment the ring enough to reattach his original spine, and bear with whatever effects happened as a result of Adagio’s magic and the godsblood.
Or try and augment the ring so that he could survive long enough to grow a new backbone altogether, despite it being highly likely that his magic would give out before his spine regenerated sufficiently.
The first choice meant that he’d almost certainly survive the procedure, but there was no telling what would happen to him afterward; death, or worse, remained a possibility.
The second offered low odds of survival, but if he managed to make it through, he’d be restored without any side effects.
Even after several minutes putting all of his brainpower into searching for a third option, Lex hadn’t been able to find an alternative. His tulpa couldn’t conjure anything of sufficient power to make either option less dangerous, though he’d tried several times now. Nor could he use the Charismata to grant Solvei or Nenet sufficient power to safeguard him; not without imbuing it with enough of his own internal magic that he wouldn’t be able to augment the ring in the first place. There was neither a congregation nor religious relics necessary to conduct a ceremony to the Night Mare. And trying to shape ambient magic into a ritual would have taken more time than he currently had, even if he’d already had one designed and properly tested.
All that he could do was choose from the two options he had, and hope that he’d survive whichever one he picked.
“I think we’ll meet again very soon.”
Soft Whisper’s parting words came back to him then, the death goddess’s taunt more germane to his current predicament than Lex was comfortable with.
Putting her words out of his mind, he levitated the ring of regeneration in front of him, looking it over. There was no sensation of barbed wire grinding across his leg as he weighed the decision he was about to make, not that he’d expected it. As always, the Night Mare would let him succeed or fail on his own merits, in accordance with her dogma.
Knowing that his hesitation was accomplishing nothing, Lex pushed his doubts aside and made his choice.
Pulling the ring into his umbral form, he held it so that his talon would reform inside the loop of metal when he changed back.
Then he began to channel all the power he had left into it...
Nenet didn’t answer right away, instead twisting to and fro in front of the full-length ice mirror that Solvei had created, looking over the new set of clothes that she was wearing now, courtesy of the adlet’s kindness.
After Ujurak, one of her tribe’s injured warriors, had donated his clothes – though the way Solvei had grinned when she’d used the word “donated” made Nenet think that his generosity hadn’t been entirely voluntary – her senior servitor had quickly washed them in magically-conjured freezing water before making an ice knife and cutting the material. Winding several strands of her own hair into thread, she’d then frozen the end of it to a needle-thin icicle and quickly started sewing the scraps of cloth together.
Her proficiency had left Nenet open-mouthed, but Solvei had waved away the compliments she’d given her. “Every girl in my tribe had to learn how to do this, and I was no exception,” she’d explained. “My grandmother always told me that even if I was going to be the next shaman, I still needed to know how to be a homemaker.” She’d snickered then, shaking her head as she’d deftly finished her stitching. “If she could see me now...”
Nenet had still been trying to figure out if that last part was in reference to Kara’s blessing when Solvei had finished, instructing Nenet to try on the clothes she’d made.
Now, looking at herself in the mirror, Nenet could only stare at what she saw.
Keeping her torso covered was a fur-trimmed bandeau. At first Nenet had been a little nervous, worried that the design wouldn’t accommodate her wings, but she hadn’t given Solvei enough credit. Instead of simply wrapping it around her middle, the fabric had been stitched into a figure-eight pattern, designing it so that it looped around the back of her neck rather than around her ribs. Not only did it leave her wings free and clear, but the design’s upward pull kept her chest from jostling too much when she moved.
Solvei had been just as insightful in designing her lower garment as well. The sarong now wrapped around Nenet’s waist rode low on her hips, just beneath the base of her tail. Nenet knew that was a shrewd decision, as anything which covered her tail would have been shredded by the spikes; even so, she couldn’t help but wish there was some way to cover her shame. Still, the fact that the sarong left one of her hips almost completely bare meant that she was still showing off her master’s mark, which would let anyone know that even if she was polluted, she still belonged to him.
Overall, it was a stylish ensemble, the sort of thing that Nenet had never imagined herself being able – or allowed – to wear.
Feeling a lump in her throat, she bit her lip, trying to hold back another round of tears. “I...I don’t know what to say...”
Solvei’s ears flicked back slightly. “Sorry, I know those aren’t not very good. If we have some time later, I’ll try and find some better fabric. Dyeing it might take a while, but-”
“That’s not what I meant!” blurted Nenet. “I just...I never thought that I could actually look so...” She gestured weakly at the mirror, still not fully able to believe that she was the beauty staring back at her. “...pretty.”
“Well, let me know if you start doubting yourself again, and I’ll make you another mirror so that you can admire yourself some more,” teased Solvei.
To Nenet’s surprise, she found herself giggling. “Don’t say that! I’ll end up becoming as conceited as Mo-, as Adagio...”
The mention of her mother was enough to make Nenet’s good mood fall away, and she glanced at her reflection again, frowning. Was she turning into Adagio? Here she was, admiring herself while wearing clothes taken from the adlets that Sissel and the others had tortured right in front of her for days on end. And I didn’t say a word while they did. Even now, it never occurred to me to tell them that I’m sorry-
“You’re not like her.”
Jumping slightly as Solvei’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts, Nenet glanced up, seeing the adlet behind her in the mirror, giving her a worried look. “You’re not like Adagio, you’re not like Sissel, you’re not like Grisela.” Reaching a hand out, she gave Nenet’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You’re not like any of them.”
Sniffling, Nenet felt her lower lip trembling. “I might be! I killed Paska and it was like I didn’t even care! I just shook it off and moved on! And when I confronted Adagio, I was so...so angry! I hated her so much that I couldn’t control it!”
She couldn’t help herself as tears started to fall down her cheeks again. “What if it’s not just my tail that’s all twisted and ugly? What if I’m like that on the inside too? I’m Adagio’s daughter, and she’s-”
“Not you,” interrupted Solvei. “Just because she’s your mother doesn’t mean that you’re going to turn out like her.”
“How do you know?” whimpered Nenet.
“Easy,” replied Solvei without missing a beat. “How do you feel about me?”
“A-about you?” stuttered Nenet, the question catching her off-guard.
“I wanted to kill you after Master found you,” admitted Solvei, making sure not to look away as she said that. “I told him as such, and I was furious when he refused.”
“I know,” confessed Nenet in a small voice. “I was only pretending to be unconscious then.”
Solvei’s eyes widened. “You...” Letting out a breath, she took a moment to steady herself. “Then you heard all of the awful things I said. And then later, when we were fleeing from Hvitdod, I dragged your cage along the ground in order to try and terrify you to speak. Do you hate me for doing those things?”
“No!” Nenet shook her head furiously enough to make her hair whip back and forth. “Not even a little! You apologized for before! And you defended me just now when Master lost his temper! And you made me these beautiful clothes!” Feeling a new bout of tears coming on, Nenet rubbed her eyes. “You’ve been so nice to me, I could never hate you.”
Solvei smiled. “That’s how I know you’re not like Adagio.”
Nenet made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Solvei...”
But the adlet simply smiled and turned her back around so she was facing the mirror again. “Now, turn into your four-legged form. I want to see if your shapechanging magic adjusts your clothes or not.”
Sniffling again, Nenet nodded, concentrating on returning to normal. A moment later, she was a gynosphinx again, with Solvei kneeling down to look her over. “Okay, looks like it worked!” she pronounced a moment later. “The fabric around your chest has definitely increased, which is good since otherwise there’s no way it’d be able to contain those things, and in the back...”
She paused for a moment. “Actually, this needs a little work.”
That caused Nenet to glance at where Solvei was examining her hindquarters. “What’s wrong?”
Solvei pointed at where the edge of the sarong was dragging on the ground. “The material adjusted for your size, but your waist is oriented forward now, rather than upright, and it’s causing the fabric to fall differently. Sorry, that was an oversight on my part. I’m still not used to having clothes actually adjust when changing forms instead of just tearing.”
Even as she spoke, she’d already conjured up another set of ice tools. “Stand still and I’ll bring the hem up a little. That should fix things.”
“Okay.”
Silence fell as Solvei went to work, and Nenet found herself with nothing to do but stare at her own reflection again, her thoughts turning back toward what Solvei had said to her before. “If it’s alright...”
“Hm?”
“I’d like to apologize to Yotimo later. Not just him, either; all of the adlets that Sissel kidnapped.”
In the mirror, Solvei halted at that, and Nenet had just enough time to wonder if she’d said something wrong before the kneeling wolf gave her a nod. “Okay.”
“And, um...there was another one. When Sissel first ambushed them – your tribe, I mean – she left one behind. He was hurt pretty bad-”
“Silla,” interjected Solvei. “Master managed to save him. He’s back at our village now, resting.”
Nenet let out a sigh of relief. “I’m glad he survived. If we get a chance, I want to tell him I’m sorry too.”
“You’ll have a chance to later. Master said that he wants to talk to the elders about making amends for Panuk, and about me...”
There was a catch in her voice then, and Nenet fought down a wince, reminding herself that she’d just told Solvei that her feelings for Lex were the result of a goddess’s blessing. She said she didn’t know if she was okay or not, and here I am dumping all of my problems on her while she’s making clothes for me! Her wings drooping, Nenet sighed. Maybe I really am like Adagi-
“So what exactly is aristeia anyway?”
Again, Nenet found herself thrown by Solvei’s unexpected question. “What?”
“Aristeia,” repeated the adlet. “Sissel used it in our last fight with her, but she never said what it was. Just that it was something all of you had small amounts of.”
Nenet snorted a laugh, this time tinged with bitterness. “Because we’re all Adagio’s children, right?” A wry smile crossed her lips as she glanced at herself in the mirror again. “I guess that’s another way I’m not like her, because I don’t have the slightest bit of aristeia in me.”
She could almost feel the confused frown on Solvei’s face then, but the adlet didn’t ask a follow-up question, clearly worried she’d touched a nerve.
But Nenet didn’t want to dance around the subject, taking a moment to calm herself down before she started again. “Adagio can control a lot of the qualities her children are born with. If she wants them to be born with aristeia, they are. If she doesn’t want them to, they’re not. Most of her offspring were supposed to fight for her, so she made sure they inherited that power. But me and her other spellbooks weren’t supposed to do anything but memorize her magic for her, so she decided we didn’t need it.”
“Okay,” answered Solvei after a moment, continuing to trim the hem of the sphinx’s sarong. “But what is it?”
“It’s hard to explain,” admitted Nenet, pausing as she searched for a proper analogy. “You know how, when you throw a rock in the water, the size of the splash is proportional to the size of the rock?”
“Yeah,” replied Solvei, her voice making it clear that she had no idea where Nenet was going with that. “So?”
“Well, think of reality – the universe and everything in it – as the water, and all of us – you, me, Master, Adagio, everyone – are the rocks. The splash is what we make whenever we do something; run, jump, talk, punch something, cast a spell, whatever. Aristeia makes that splash bigger, even though the rock stays the same.”
Solvei’s hands slowed as she tried to puzzle that out. “So aristeia is a power that makes whoever has it...heavier?”
Nenet’s cocked her head. “What? No, the rock stays the same, it doesn’t-, you know what? Let me try again. You know how all physical objects, regardless of mass, have their own gravitational pull? Imagine that aristeia increased that, without a matching rise in density-”
“I’m sorry, Nenet, I’m trying as best I can to follow what you’re saying, but you’ve already lost me.”
Fighting down the urge to thrash her tail at her apparent inability to explain things, Nenet decided to drop the analogies and instead explain things in the most straightforward manner that she could. “Aristeia is a power that makes you, for lack of a better term, more real.”
That time, Solvei stopped what she was doing entirely, one brow going up as she glanced at Nenet in the mirror. “More real?”
The sphinx nodded. “Aristeia makes your existence more outsized, in terms of the effect that it has on the world around you. So if you have aristeia, and you hit someone, the damage will be greater because the universe itself reacts to it more. And it works in reverse; if you have aristeia, and someone without it hits you, the damage will be less because it’s harder for them to make the universe recognize the effect they’re trying to cause.”
“I see...” murmured Solvei, in a manner which made it clear that she didn’t.
“I mean, it’s not like that for everything you do,” continued Nenet. “It applies to certain facets of your existence more than others. So when you talk, your voice won’t necessarily sound any louder, even if a spell that you cast is stronger because the energy is more there than it would normally be. And the more aristeia you have, the more true that is.”
Solvei shook her head. “Wait, back up a second. If aristeia was making Sissel so real that she was hard to hurt, how come Belligerence cut her down so easily?”
“Well, I didn’t see that fight happen, but from what Master told me, it’s because that quill is blessed by the Night Mare,” answered Nenet after a moment’s consideration. “I mean, there are a lot of clerics and priests and other holy spellcasters who make magic items using the divine magic their god gives them, but that’s different from having a weapon be personally touched by a deity. Gods aren’t just more real than reality itself; they can rewrite it, or at least parts of it. That’s why they’re all gods of something, like war or fire or-”
“Death,” murmured Solvei. “Like Soft Whisper.”
Nenet paused, recalling what Solvei had told her during their trip out of the chasm. “The pony goddess you and Master met after you, er, died...fighting Hvitdod?”
Solvei nodded. “She said something a lot like what you’re talking about. That the Hvitdod that Master fought wasn’t the real dragon, but was a copy left behind because the original had left some sort of impression on the universe.”
“I guess that makes sense,” admitted Nenet. “I mean, supposedly Hvitdod had massive amounts of aristeia.”
This time both of Solvei’s brows rose. “He did?”
Nenet nodded. “That’s what Adagio said. That was part of why she wanted his curse so bad, since it basically warped reality around whoever he placed it on, making it so that any cold they came into contact with was colder. I mean, not in terms of temperature, but it made the cold-”
“More real,” finished Solvei. “Okay, but how did she get aristeia in the first place? Or Hvitdod, for that matter? How does anyone become more re-”
She couldn’t finish, dropping her tools with a gasp as she doubled over, holding her head. But Nenet didn’t need to ask her what was wrong, equally incapacitated as she felt the same sudden throbbing in her brain. It blotted out everything else, leaving her momentarily incapable of thought as she swayed, barely able to remain standing.
And in her mind, her connection to Lex flared again, flooding her consciousness with what he was experiencing at that moment. The sudden rush of panic, fury, regret, and pain overwhelmed her with their intensity, wiping away everything else. And they were growing worse with each passing moment, pressing down on her with such force that she sank to the ground without realizing it, her eyes rolling back in her head as she started to convulse, unable to register that Solvei was in the same state.
Then it became too much for her mind to bear, and she knew no more.
The decision that Lex found himself facing regarding his spine was, in truth, no decision at all.
With his choices restricted to only two options – to either undergo a procedure with extremely low odds of success but no potential side effects, or to undergo a procedure with a high chance of success and whose side effects were completely unknown – the latter was the only selection that could be justified.
After all, “success” in this context meant survival, not just for himself but for Solvei and Nenet as well. His previous death had seen Solvei immediately join him as a soul separated from her body on the Astral Plane, and while she’d theorized that had been the Night Mare’s punishment for her committing blasphemy, Lex had no desire to see if that still held true, nor find out if it applied to Nenet as well.
He owed them both more than that.
The same way he owed everypony who had chosen to believe in him back in Equestria.
Even the ponies who had opposed him were ponies that he still had a responsibility toward, since his commitment to his people and his homeland was absolute, requiring neither the agreement nor the approval of anyone else.
That obligation went to the core of who Lex was.
His entire moral framework had been developed purely so that he could figure out how to best abide by and advance that duty.
At times, it demanded that he put his life on the line in pursuit of that goal, and he’d done so without hesitation. But that didn’t mean that he was free to court death on a whim; he’d already determined that if he died now, it was improbable in the extreme that anyone would resurrect him, which meant that his obligations would go unfulfilled.
To that end, choosing the riskier option for restoring his vertebrae would have been irresponsible. While the side effects of reintegrating his original spine back into himself were complete unknowns, those were an insufficient disincentive when the only alternative was near-certain death.
As such, as soon as Lex had finished channeling as much power as he felt he could spare into the ring of regeneration – still connected to the bracelet along with the other two – he placed it within his umbral form in a spot analogous to his remaining foreleg before floating toward where his spine was hovering aloft of its own accord, aligning it with his incorporeal body just so...
Then he changed back to normal.
The sensations that assaulted Lex as he returned to physical form had nothing to do with pain. Instead, it was the same numbing pressure that he’d felt in the scant moments after he’d come back to life. That same absolute lack of feedback from his body, so intense as to be smothering, as though he had been buried alive in his own flesh. It made it impossible to tell if the ring was working, or what was happening with his spine, his senses decaying almost immediately as the overwhelming absence seemed to swallow him up-
And then it eased off, as he managed to draw in a ragged gasp.
The action made his lungs feel as if they were burning, and the sensation of air passing through his throat almost made him choke. But the very fact that he was breathing, and that he could feel that he was breathing, made him want to laugh with triumph.
It was working!
Lifting his head as best he could – something that he belated realized was only possible because of the other ring, which allowed for physical trauma to be ignored – Lex managed to telekinetically pull his cloak and underclothes aside, staring at his back.
The glow of his horn reflected off the dim white of his spine as it shifted inside the open cavity that had been carved into him, the ring’s magic causing it to twist and writhe as it reconnected each nerve, ligament, and bone back to its original position. A moment later the pale bones were hidden beneath a layer of red as his muscles were seamlessly stitched back together, closing over and hiding his vertebrae from view. Then his skin resealed itself. Another second, and even that was covered once more by his organometallic fur.
Just like that, he was whole again.
Or rather, almost whole. A prickling in his tail made it clear that the ring hadn’t finished working its magic, and Lex let his clothes settle into place as he saw the appendage begin to regrow, the bones slowly sprouting from where Hvitdod’s jaws had torn them off, followed by the same progression of muscle, skin, and fur.
Nor was that the only place he felt the ring working, as his right shoulder was tingling as well.
That was enough to make Lex’s horn light up again as he quickly dug through his saddlebag, pulling out his severed foreleg. Unlike his tail – which had almost certainly been completely destroyed when Hvitdod’s facsimile had exploded – he had kept the foreleg that Sissel had severed, using a preservative spell on it in anticipation of this exact scenario.
Pressing it against his shoulder, Lex felt the ring’s magic go to work immediately as the tingling increased-
And then his foreleg was part of him again, tactile sensations from it once again registering in his brain as he reflexively clenched his talons.
Slowly, testing his reattached limb’s ability to bear his weight, Lex stood up. He could feel numerous other wounds across his body – taken during his back-to-back fights with Sissel’s corps, then Sissel herself, and finally with Hvitdod – closing up, the persistent aches that he’d grown to used to feeling that he hadn’t bothered acknowledging them now noticeable only for how they were diminishing.
Another moment, and even those were gone too, leaving Lex without any pain whatsoever.
There was still a deep sense of fatigue from how much power he’d channeled through himself over the last few hours – the ring could repair wounds and mend injuries, but it couldn’t do anything about the fact that he’d strained his body’s magical channels to their limits – but other than that, Lex couldn’t feel anything wrong with himself.
Even better, he couldn’t feel anything from the alterations that Adagio had made to his spine.
Her spells, Hvitdod’s curse, and even the godsblood she’d added; it was as though none of them were there at all.
Or at least, they didn’t seem to be interfering with basic functions like movement or respiration.
But that’s no reason to be complacent, Lex knew. None of those were physical changes, so it was unsurprising that they wouldn’t interfere with his biological functions. The real test would be to make sure they weren’t an issue for his body’s magical capabilities as well. The last thing he needed was to face Adagio – even if he hadn’t promised Sonata and Aria that he’d bring her back, she couldn’t be allowed to remain free after what she’d done – only to find that her magic had some sort of adverse effect on his backbone that he’d overlooked.
Fortunately, he could perform at least a few basic tests without any problems. He’d already confirmed that there were no issues using his horn’s telekinesis. And a thought was all it took to expand his connection to Solvei and Nenet, borrowing their senses just for a moment as he overheard them mentioning something about how the original Hvitdod had been in possession of aristeia.
Making a mental note to bring that up with them later, Lex put that thought aside as he turned toward his thaumaturgical spellcasting. Even if he was completely out of battle spells, he still had a few that he could use now, just to be sure that hadn’t been affected.
The spell he selected then was a minor power, allowing the caster to see into the magical spectrum. It was completely superfluous now – with his new body’s physical enhancements, he could do that via his dark magic, and even then his circlet could do the same thing – but when the equinox had come around almost two weeks prior, he’d still been in his weaker body, and so had prepared that spell as a contingency in case something had happened to his circlet.
But his lack of use for the spell now meant that it was acceptable to use it in his current experiment, unconcerned with its expenditure as he made the single, uncomplicated gesture and muttered the necessary word-
Only to hiss in alarm as he felt....something happen to his spine.
Abandoning the spell, Lex held still as he tried to analyze what was happening.
Up and down his back, an odd sensation pulsed through him. With no context for what he was feeling, it was impossible to describe; the closest that he could come up with was that it was like putting on a garment only to realize that it didn’t fit correctly.
Worse, the sensation wasn’t stopping just because he’d ceased moving.
If anything, it was growing more intense, causing him to shudder involuntarily as the alien feeling spread across his spine.
Fighting down a sudden surge of anxiety, Lex activated his circlet, not wanting to use any more inherent magic if he could help it. Instead, he turned his head to glance at his back-
And saw that Adagio’s spells were breaking down.
There was no other way to describe it. Even as he watched, the shaping enchantment – the one designed to direct and guide the movement of energy – rapidly unraveled, uncoiling itself from around his spine as its underlying structure disintegrated. Worse, its failure was compromising the other spells she’d cast as well; designed to work in a sequence, the collapse of one was causing a cascade now as the others started to fall apart.
Why?! The spell he’d cast had been the very weakest one he knew! More than that, it had been entirely thought-based; it shouldn’t have interacted with his physical self at all!
But there was no time for him to contemplate the absurdity of some of the most powerful spells he’d ever seen coming undone because of a single cantrip. Not if he wanted to stop them from collapsing completely.
Under normal circumstances, Lex would have rejoiced at having foreign spells removed from his body. Someone else using their magic on him without his permission was something he considered to be horribly invasive. But in this case, he couldn’t bring himself to celebrate, knowing that Adagio’s magic had been designed to hold greater concentrations of power. Without the mitigating influence of her spells – which he’d somehow disrupted with his altogether minor spell, despite it being entirely thaumaturgical and not in the least physical – that energy would be unleashed in its entirety, and there was no telling what would happen!
Hvitdod’s curse had already killed him once. Lex had no desire to see what it could do in conjunction with godsblood.
Except Adagio’s magic was disintegrating faster now, the binding spell’s underlying structure destabilizing rapidly, and that was causing the protection spell in turn to crumble, unable to sustain itself. There was no way to repair either of them, not when he lacked both the understanding and the specialized spells that would have required.
But maybe I can slow it down! he decided as he tried to turn back into a shadow. That had arrested his physical breakdown before, so perhaps now-
He didn’t have a chance to put that thought into action as both spells completely shattered.
And then the cold enveloped him once again.
It wasn’t like last time, when Hvitdod’s curse had wrapped him in a chill so profound that it had frozen the blood in his veins.
This went far beyond anything so trivial.
More than any mere reduction of temperature, the cold that radiated out from Lex’s vertebrae engulfed all aspects of his existence.
Like a match thrown into the waters of an icy ocean, every part of the being known as Lex Legis was extinguished by the unrelenting cold as the godsblood in his body – using Hvitdod’s curse as a vector – overwhelmed him completely.
It glaciated his body. Down to the sub-atomic level, the matter that made up his form lost all ability to move, entirely devoid of energy.
It chilled his thoughts. Even if his brain had been capable of cognition, the metaphysical concepts that occupied his awareness had solidified completely.
It froze his soul. Even at the spiritual level the chill was absolute, preventing his essence from migrating to the Astral Plane.
Even time had frozen for him, evicting him from its procession as the universe itself recoiled from the supreme algidity that was the barest essence of a god.
And in that trapped flow of time, an echo remained within the brumal prison that permeated Lex’s soul. Too ephemeral to be called a thought, less than a feeling, and more tenuous than a wish, it was little more than a remnant of an inclination. A single reflection of the impulse that stirred his mortal existence.
It could have been called a yearning, or an impression of dissatisfaction. It was a need, a desire that hadn’t been met. But not one that came from something which hadn’t been received, but rather hadn’t yet been given. It was the sense of something left unfinished. A duty. A responsibility. An obligation.
That obligation went to the core of who Lex was.
And that made the echo grow, as it somehow stretched to encompass the name “Lex.”
It made as much sense as a drowned match suddenly emitting a spark. A frozen fire giving a glow. That soul had already been frozen completely, down to the deepest reaches of its essence. There was no movement to be had. No room for it to expand. No way it could reconnect to anything.
But the echo within it – the concept of “Lex” – did so anyway.
There was no way to measure how long it held out, because time itself had ceased to pass for it. But somehow, impossibly, that fragile echo not only held out, but continued to grow...
And began to push the cold back, as Lex fought to reclaim himself.
The process was as slow as it was difficult. The cold pushed back ceaselessly, making every portion of his essence a bitter struggle to recover. But struggle was nothing new for Lex, his own determination overpowering the cold little by little, until he had regained enough of himself that he could recall more than just his name.
Slowly, memories came back. Each one was a war unto itself, and more often than not the prize was some memory that brought him only pain or shame or frustration. Even so, he retook them eagerly, savoring the good and the bad alike as he let each one add to his growing sense of self. Each remembrance was embraced and experienced a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times over, until he’d relived his own life countless times, letting every mistake, every triumph, every regret remind him of everything he had yet to do, letting it stoke the growing need at the core of his soul.
And the match that should have drowned in that frozen ocean burst back into flame.
The cold rushed in, trying to overwhelm him the way it had before, but this time Lex was ready for it. Each time it froze him solid, he burst free. Each time it began to numb one of his memories, he drove it back. And slowly, he found the frequency of its challenges diminishing, the potency of its chill faltering, and he seized those opportunities, pressing forward...
And then the cold was gone.
And above him, the Night Mare’s teeth shown as a smile crossed her lips.
“Well done, my champion,” she murmured, her voice a purr that he had never heard her use before. “Now claim your prize.”
Slowly, she reached down toward him, and he felt the barbed wire wrapped around him pull him up to meet her.
It was so incredibly different from his usual expression that it almost made him look like somepony else entirely. There was no trace of his usual scowl. No calculating look in his eyes. No hint of hurt feelings or lingering anger.
Instead, as he lowered the half-dozen pages – and an equal number of quills – from his telekinesis and gathered them up in his hooves, an excited laugh escaped his lips as he looked them over one last time before laying them atop a stack of papers on his desk. It made him look much closer to his actual age, which from how he could barely see over the top of the desk despite sitting in a chair with several cushions piled atop it, couldn’t have been more than three or four years old.
Even before he’d finished, his horn lit up again, a silvery aura surrounding a single quill and a blank page as he scrawled one final addition to the manuscript he’d written.
A Comprehensive Elucidation of Socioeconomic Methodologies a Hegemonic Authority May Utilize for the Propitiation of Ponykind.
Sitting back in the overly-large chair, he stared at the title for a long moment, only for his smile to diminish as he looked at the title. Lowering the page, he glanced to the side, where an open backpack lay across the bed. From the top of it, several pages spilled forth, across which several notes had been added in red ink. “Too wordy!” read one, while another had “Verbose!” underlined several times.
The sight was enough to bring Lex’s usual scowl back, and his horn lit up again as he shoved the papers back into his knapsack, lifting it and tossing it to the floor angrily.
His good mood soured, he turned back to the title page he’d written, staring at it for several long moments of silence.
Then, he took up his quill again, and scribbled an additional line:
How Those In Charge Can Do More to Help Everypony.
Reading that over, his joyful smile returned, and he gave a crisp nod before making one final addition.
By Lex Legis.
With that, he laid the final page atop the others...and then he began to glow.
Rising up into the air, his eyes closed as the light shining from him grew brighter, turning into a blinding flash that filled the small room he was in.
When the light died down, Lex fell back onto the cushion, bouncing off them and collapsing with a yelp. Blinking, he shook his head as he climbed to his hooves...and did a double-take as he caught sight of his flank, which had been unadorned only a moment ago.
But now it sported a picture of a podium in front of an amphitheater.
He had just gotten his cutie mark.
Another carefree laugh escaped his muzzle, prancing in place before lifting his treatise in his telekinesis and galloping toward the door. “Mom! Dad!” he yelled as he ran out of his room. “I did it! I know how I can make a difference!”
And as she watched him go, Twilight couldn’t help but giggle, moving to follow him...
...only for the potion to suddenly wear off, the disorientation causing her to sway as the white glow faded from her eyes.
“Easy there,” came Starlight’s voice as Twilight felt a hoof reach out to steady her. “Remember what we said before? Take a second and let it fade.”
“Right,” mumbled Twilight, blinking her eyes a few times to help the dizziness pass. “Thanks, Starlight.”
It was only when she finished that Zecora spoke up. “I hope it’s not too soon to ask, but what did you see when you drank from the flask?”
Twilight sighed. “It was Lex again.”
Her answer caused Zecora and Starlight to share a quick glance, making Twilight grimace. “I wasn’t thinking about him this time,” she protested. “I was concentrating on what you told me about when you got your cutie mark, Starlight. But instead I saw him getting his.”
“Twilight, the reason we’re experimenting with Zecora’s retrocognition potions in the first place was because you wanted to figure out if they showed you what you were thinking about when you drank them, or if there was some other factor that determined what you saw,” Starlight reminded her. “This might be a clue in that regard.”
“If cutie marks were in your mind’s eyes, to have seen one is perhaps no great surprise,” agreed Zecora. “Especially of the stallion whom you’ve often mused, ever since his passing made the news.”
Giving Zecora a reproachful look at the blunt reminder of how morose Twilight had been ever since the news of Lex’s death had made the papers, Starlight lifted a paper and quill. “Let’s go ahead and record the details of this last vision while it’s still fresh.”
Nodding, Twilight recounted what she saw, answering a few questions as Starlight made notes. “...and that was where it ended,” she finished, sighing again. “It’s strange. Even though it looked adorable at the time, talking about it makes it seem so sad.”
“You said his expression was one of joy,” noted Zecora. “Surely finding his destiny pleased the boy?”
Twilight nodded, but her gaze fell to the ground as she did so. “It did, but...he was all alone when he got his cutie mark, even though his special talent was helping people. Maybe if he’d had a friend...”
Resisting the urge to roll her eyes, Starlight heaved a sigh of her own as she put the report aside. “Listen, Twilight, you’re five for five on seeing glimpses of Lex’s life. Maybe we should quit for today? You can try the rest of Zecora’s retcog potions some other time.”
But Zecora shook her head before Twilight could say anything. “I’m afraid they’ll be no more viewings of the past. Of my ‘retcog’ potions, those were the last.”
Both unicorns’ eyes widened at that. “You don’t have any more?” blurted Starlight.
“Can’t you make another batch?” asked Twilight in the same breath.
Slightly startled by the pair’s reactions, Zecora gave a helpless shrug. “That would be rather hard I fear, since that potion must be aged for many a year.” She waved a hoof at the empty bottles lying on the nearby table, next to her empty satchel. “I only brought these here for your examination, because they were nearing their date of expiration.”
Twilight slumped in place at that, and Starlight grimaced as she looked at her mentor’s forlorn expression. She’d been hoping that Zecora’s unexpected visit would be just the thing to help Twilight forget the guilt she’d been struggling with ever since she’d heard about Lex’s death. Instead, it had only made it worse.
But as far as Starlight was concerned, that was perfectly in keeping with the sort of pony Lex had been:
Even dead, he brought misery to those around him.
Knowing better than to say that out loud, Starlight instead put a hoof around Twilight’s shoulder. “Listen, you taught me that a pony’s cutie mark doesn’t mean that they can’t be friends with someone who’s different. But maybe the opposite is true also. Even a cutie mark in philanthropy might not be enough to save someone if they’re...broken inside.”
“The Princess of Friendship you may be, but it’s not your fault Lex Legis chose villainy,” added Zecora.
“I know,” sighed Twilight. “And I know that moping now won’t help anypony, but...I still wish I could have done something to help him.”
“Well, maybe you can help some other ponies on his behalf.” Telekinetically picking up the transcriptions that she’d made of each of Twilight’s visions, Starlight glanced over them. “We’ve got five glimpses into Lex’s past here: his losing his magic to Tirek, his chopping off his horn and replacing it King Sombra’s, his visiting the Crystal Empire and getting caught in Sombra’s stasis curse, his fighting some fish monsters in Vanhoover, and when he got his cutie mark.”
Pausing as she tried one last time to find any common thread – other than Lex himself – in the disjointed series of vignettes, Starlight quickly gave up, deciding that she didn’t want to spend more time thinking about that awful stallion than she had to. “Spike’s out on a date with Soft Mane, but I can have him send these to Princess Celestia when he gets back,” she offered. “Maybe she’ll be able to find something in them that can help her with Luna’s curse.”
But Twilight was already taking the papers in her own purple aura, either overlooking or ignoring Starlight’s reminder about who else Lex had hurt. “Thanks, but I’d rather go over these myself first. I’d hate to get the princesses' hopes up over nothing. Besides...”
Another frown crossed Twilight’s face as she glanced out a nearby window, one which showed the mountain Canterlot sat upon.
“...I think Princess Celestia has other things to worry about right now.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Willow made no reply, unmoved by Princess Celestia’s quiet show of distress. As much as she appreciated being able to raise her son in such an open and accepting country, she was growing less and less comfortable with being a catspaw for the alicorn’s dirty work. That the job kept taking her away from Sunflower was bad enough, but Willow was keenly aware that if word of her involvement in Lex’s death got out, the peaceful life she and her son were enjoying would come to an end.
Quite possibly a violent end, if recent events were any indication.
“What was Shining Armor thinking?”
Knowing that this time an answer was expected of her, Willow shrugged. “His wife was attacked. Or at least, that’s what he thought was happening. Sonata and Aria didn’t exactly make it clear that Blueblood was the one they were after, and since he and Cadance were on a date at the time...”
“I understand Shining Armor rushing to Cadance’s defense,” replied Celestia in a clipped tone. “Especially after what happened to her during the Elemental Bleeds. But I deliberately told him to leave Lex’s followers alone, not-”
She slammed a hoof down on the newspaper in front of her, over the headline which read “CALAMITY ON THE COAST!” above a picture of crystal ponies in Royal Guard armor fighting a mixed group of unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies...all of whom had barbed wire designs painted on one foreleg.
“-to mount a full-scale invasion of Vanhoover!”
Willow didn’t flinch at the outburst, having been through far more intimidating meetings back on Everglow. “He was worried there’d be another attack on Cadance if he didn’t. Sonata and Aria are extremely popular there, for obvious reasons, and he was afraid that when they didn’t come back, someone would come looking to avenge them the same way they did Lex.”
“Which wouldn’t have happened in the first place if you hadn’t left a trail of breadcrumbs right back to Blueblood,” noted Celestia darkly. “What were you thinking, paying that assassin in IOUs with his signature on them?”
“They were promissory notes,” corrected Willow. Not that it mattered, but the accusation left her feeling rather petty. “And I didn’t have a choice. Dark Streak’s asking price for killing Lex was exorbitant, and she was prepared to walk if I didn’t meet it. I had to go looking for outside funding, and Blueblood was the only game in town. It would have been better if he’d cashed those notes instead of signing them over, but we were pressed for time.”
Sighing, she couldn’t keep up her irritation as the anxiety she’d been trying to clamp down on flared up. She’d known plenty of guys like Blueblood back on her home world, and was certain that beneath his arrogance and conceit was a large reservoir of cowardice. If he was cornered about the role he’d played in Lex’s death, she had no doubt he’d reveal her as a co-conspirator.
Thankfully, that hadn’t happened, but she couldn’t help but curse Dark Streak. “I really thought she’d take better care of those notes. Money is all assassins care about.”
“Which means that she wasn’t very good at her profession,” snapped Celestia. “Which was doubtlessly why she got another pony killed in the crossfire, despite my explicit instructions to the contrary. Now, an innocent mare is dead, my sister is still cursed, and further outbreaks of violence are happening!”
“I agree Dark Streak could have done a better job,” agreed Willow tersely. “And I’d tell her that if she hadn’t lost her own life in the battle. But at least she took down Lex with her. The question now is how do we deal with the aftermath before it gets any worse?”
The reminder that things hadn't improved in the wake of Lex's death drew Celestia’s eyes back to the newspaper headline, her expression turning pensive. “Did Shining Armor say anything about how they were repelled?”
“Only that the ponies in Vanhoover were much more organized than he expected, and had a lot more magic,” murmured Willow. “Oh, and that it ended with him signaling a retreat, rather than being routed. But I’m pretty sure that was just him being sore about what the newspaper is saying.”
“The fact that this made the papers at all is a bad sign.” Willow couldn’t be sure, with Celestia’s fur being white and all, but that admission seemed to make the princess turn slightly paler. “This is from Whinnyapolis, and the entire news industry there is run by old money. If they’re willing to print this, it’s because they’re coming down on Vanhoover’s side of things.”
Willow frowned at that. While she hadn’t spent too much time studying Equestrian geography, she was fairly certain that Whinnyapolis was nowhere near the west coast, where Lex’s followers were concentrated. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” murmured Celestia. “But I’ve sent somepony to find out.”
That was enough to make Willow raise a brow. “To Whinnyapolis?”
“To Vanhoover.”
“Wait, you mean...?”
Celestia nodded, her expression grim. “I’ve got an inside mare.”
Cloudbank had said those words often enough over the last few weeks that nopony needed to ask what she meant. Instead, Garden Gate – seated directly to her left – stood up and cleared her throat.
“Enough pegasi have volunteered for lookout duty that we can now keep eyes in the sky at all times,” she announced. “In theory, we’ll see another invasion coming. The problem is that we don’t have the cloud reserves necessary to support that kind of aerial recon for any significant length of time.”
Near the far end of the table, Fruit Crunch cocked his head. “Why do we need clouds for that?”
A few seats down, Straightlace gave his leader a pained look, while Cleansweep clucked her tongue.
Neither went unnoticed by Fruit Crunch, who gave his pegasi teammates a confused look. “What?”
“I’m guessing that lookout duty means staying in the air for several hours at a time, right?” When Straightlace’s questioning glance toward Garden Gate received a nod, he looked back toward Fruit Crunch. “That means they’ll need clouds to land on, so they can rest their wings without having to come back down. Otherwise you’re asking those pegasi to fly for hours without stopping, which is like the wing-version of asking an earth pony or a unicorn to run a marathon.”
“Well, okay, but we don’t need to keep that many pegasi in the air at one time, do we?” This time Fruit Crunch was the one to throw an inquisitive gaze toward Garden. “I mean, we just need to keep watch to the north and east, right? Aren’t we talking about, like, five or six clouds at most?”
Having been a cloud architect and weather pony before Vanhoover had fallen apart, Cloudbank jumped in. “If we were talking about just keeping watch for a week or so, then that’s right. But we don’t have that luxury; there’s no telling when Shining Armor or Celestia or the Night Mare only knows who else – Starlight Glimmer maybe – will mount another attack. So for now, we need to keep lookouts at the ready at all times.”
Sighing, she leaned back in her chair, noticing that – like so many other times since they’d started holding these meetings – everypony’s eyes were on her. Once, addressing a group like this would have made her self-conscious. Now she just felt tired.
“But clouds are fragile by nature,” she explained. “The wear and tear of ponies using them as semi-permanent relay points will make them break down over time, which means we’ll need to use more clouds to reinforce them. And we still have to keep doling our reserves out to the farmers north of here so they can keep growing their crops.”
She paused to rub her eyes, suddenly remembering that the last time she’d made a speech this long in front of so many ponies had been when Lex had ordered her to give a sermon about the Night Mare to Vanhoover’s survivors. She’d frozen up at the sight of so many eyes trained on her, only for Drafty to fly up behind everyone and start performing a horribly uncoordinated air-dance. It had been so ridiculous that it had snapped Cloudbank out of her nervousness, and the two of them had shared a great laugh about it afterwards.
It was strange. After so many close calls – struggling for survival when Vanhoover had fallen apart, watching Drafty grow progressively sicker after a ghoul had infected her, the battle on the docks, actually dying when raiding that bank, and then fighting Starlight Glimmer – Cloudbank had thought that she’d prepared herself for the worst. She’d struggled and raged against each new calamity, of course, but she’d truly believed that she’d known what it would feel like if she lost the love of her life.
Now she knew better.
Taking a moment to swallow the lump in her throat, she looked back at Garden Gate. “Let’s talk to the ponies in Las Pegasus and see if they’ll let us use one of their industrial compressors. If we can make a few ultra-dense clouds – the kind that they put paved roads and concrete buildings on – we should be able to make some lookout posts that will stand up to repeated use.”
Garden Gate nodded crisply, then sat back down.
Next to her, River stood up, a smirk crossing her features. “I just got this from Whinnyapolis,” she announced, tossing a newspaper onto the table.
She waited long enough for everyone to see the headline, with its dramatic title and the picture of the recent fight between Vanhoover and the Crystal Empire. “It looks like the VIPs I invited to Piggy’s wedding aren’t going to just forgive and forget how Shining Armor treated them.”
Despite herself, Cloudbank couldn’t help but feel impressed. River Bank had no magic of her own, and no combat experience whatsoever, but when it came to political maneuvering it was clear that she was a force to be reckoned with. Certainly, no one else could have turned what should have been two major disasters – Lex’s disappearance and Shining Armor’s invasion – into advantages the way she had.
The invitations for Lex’s coronation had already gone out when he’d headed to Las Pegasus...except the notices she’d sent hadn’t been for his coronation at all, River having anticipated that the very important ponies she wanted to show up might be hesitant to honor the stallion who’d cursed Princess Luna.
Instead, she’d had the nonexistent “Sister Cities Revival Project” send out invitations to celebrate the renewal of Tall Tale and Vanhoover. More importantly, she’d made the invitations look as though the S.C.R.P. was scouting ponies for appointments to its board of directors, knowing that rich ponies loved to collect titles and honors so that they could lord them over each other. The idea of being part of the leadership of such a prestigious-sounding group, working for such a noble cause, would be irresistible to them...so much that she’d been certain they’d never notice how the last item on the itinerary she’d included was “a celebration for our sponsor.”
Of course, that sponsor was Prince Legis, and the celebration would be his coronation, and by the time those rich attendees realized that, they’d be roped in by propriety and Lex’s own overwhelming presence, at which point a few photographs would be all it took to capture evidence that they were “supporters” of the new regime.
It had been a diabolical plan, one that had honestly unnerved Cloudbank a little at how fiendish it was.
And then Lex had disappeared, causing the entire thing to implode.
The fact that River had managed to salvage things as well as she had was a testament to the years she’d spent fighting for control of Vanhoover. Despite Sonata and Aria running off on their own to get the pony responsible for the debacle in Las Pegasus, and despite Cloudbank, Garden Gate, Stuffed Shirt, and several other ponies insisting that she call the event off despite the invitations having gone out, River had pressed ahead. To do otherwise, she’d argued, would only make the situation worse; an abrupt cancellation mere days before the coronation would only serve to embarrass them all, making it harder to establish social, economic, and political ties with the elite of Equestria’s other major cities...and which would only set back Lex’s plans when he inevitably returned.
Of course, back then they’d all been convinced that he’d make a sudden reappearance in a matter of days...
Even so, River had quickly changed the nature of the event. Now, the “sponsor” of the S.C.R.P. was her son, Piggy Bank, and the “celebration” was his wedding to Granola Bar.
For the life of her, Cloudbank couldn’t imagine why anypony would want to marry the fat, spoiled little pervert who’d leered at her and Drafty both, but apparently that was what Granola Bar got off on, because she’d happily gone along with the whole thing. Nor had the guests, once they’d started arriving, batted an eye at having been tricked into attending the marriage of River’s son. Apparently, lavish celebrations to confer prominence on their heirs was common for upper-class ponies.
But despite having saved Lex’s administration the embarrassment of throwing a coronation without any prince to coronate, not even River had been able to anticipate the Crystal Empire attacking mere moments after the groom had kissed the bride.
Later, of course, they’d all found out that Sonata and Aria had apparently tracked Blueblood – who according to Feather Duster was the mastermind behind what had happened in Las Pegasus – to the home of the crystal ponies, where he’d been in the company of Princess Cadance when the Sirens had found him. In the altercation, Shining Armor had gotten involved, and had subsequently seen fit to mobilize the Crystal Empire’s entire military and bring it down on Vanhoover.
Needless to say, the snobbish and self-important ponies from across Equestria hadn’t taken it very well when ponies in guard uniforms had started rounding them up like common criminals.
And when the battle had ended, River hadn’t hesitated to play to their indignation and wounded pride.
Judging from the newspaper in front of her now, Cloudbank would say that it had worked masterfully.
“And this is just the tip of the iceberg,” announced River smugly. “I’ve been getting letters of support from notable ponies in Baltimare, Fillydelphia, Manehattan, and even Trottingham! Those stuck-ups are all livid about how they were treated, and quite impressed with how we kicked those crystal ponies’ faceted flanks out of our city. Naturally, I recommend that we start exploiting their goodwill as soon as possible.”
Despite herself, Cloudbank couldn’t help but smirk at the other mare’s naked opportunism. “I trust you have some thoughts on how to start doing that?”
River’s grin went from smug to wolfish. “Several.”
But before she could expound on that, a knock came from the door, which opened without a response as Feather Duster came in, followed by one of the new maids that she’d hired. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she apologized with a demure smile. “I just thought everyone might like some snacks.”
“No apologies are necessary, madam,” Stuffed Shirt assured her. “His Highness granted you this estate; there’s no breach of decorum if you exercise your right to be present at a conference held within your own home.”
That earned him a sour look from River, but Feather Duster waved the words away with one wing. “Oh, I’m not trying to butt in. I just wanted to make sure everyone was comfortable.”
As she spoke, the new maid – a rather pretty earth mare with a light greenish-gray coat and a mane that was cobalt blue with light fuchsia stripes – walked around the table, passing out small dishes of pralines.
She had just finished putting one in front of Cloudbank when Feather Duster spoke up again. “But I was wondering if there had been any word about...?”
She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to, as uncomfortable looks spread across the faces of everypony present. Cloudbank knew she was wearing one as well, choking down a sigh as she looked back at the stallion who’d spoken before. “Stuffed Shirt?”
He was shaking his head before she’d finished saying his name. “I’m afraid that Coat Tail and Tranquila still haven’t had anymore, uh...messages, from His Highness...”
The answer wasn’t unexpected, but it was disappointing all the same. Lex’s absence had already reached the point where everyone was beginning to fear the worst when the Royal Clothier and the Royal Leisuremeister had let it slip that they’d received a verbal message from their prince, claiming to be on Everglow – that other world that he and the Sirens sisters had often referenced – with Thermal Draft.
Cloudbank had almost fainted when she’d gotten news of that, and she hadn’t been the only one. More than a few ponies had been on the verge of despair at the possibility that their savior – for that was how Lex was widely held in Vanhoover, Tall Tale, and even a growing number of ponies in Las Pegasus now – might actually be dead.
But the news of his sending a message of survival had transformed that dejection into a fervor.
The sheer intensity of it had taken Cloudbank by surprise, and she knew she hadn’t been the only one. Seemingly overnight, the rumor that Lex had sent a message of his survival had swept along the coast, and a shockingly large number of ponies had embraced it. More than that, they’d come to eagerly anticipate his return to Equestria, to the point where every day there seemed to be some new demonstration of devotion going on.
In Las Pegasus, a citizens’ committee had been formed to look into raising a monument in Lex’s honor commemorating all the ponies in the undercity that he’d helped return home. The last Cloudbank had heard, it was weighing a proposal to build it over the ruined factory where he’d disappeared.
In Tall Tale, a group of ponies had privately started an “Everglow Outreach Program,” apparently to explore ways of potentially contacting that world to find Lex and help bring him home. Ribbon Cutter was keeping an eye on it, and had reported that so far it was little more than a few ponies kicking around ideas that they had no way to actualize. But it was apparently growing more popular by the day.
And in Vanhoover, Cloudbank was leading services to the Night Mare every single night. Now that there was a small contingent of ponies receiving spells from Lex’s goddess – courtesy of him anointing them as being among her faithful before his ill-fated Las Pegasus trip – they were eager to demonstrate their faith by praying nightly for their prince’s return. In that regard, Cloudbank was right there with them, though she found herself praying that he wouldn’t be the only one to come back...
But for all her prayers, her worries refused to be soothed. There were simply too many unanswered questions about Lex’s single, brief message to wipe away her fears. Why had he sent it to two minor members of his royal retinue? Why hadn’t he contacted anyone else since? And why was it taking him so long to come home? Hadn’t be been to that world several times already?
Every night she’d prayed to the Night Mare, not for a sign – she knew enough of the goddess’s dogma to know better than to ask her to relieve her own hardship – but that she’d keep finding the strength to believe that Lex, the stallion she’d once been bitterly jealous of but now fiercely respected, would come back to them...and bring Drafty back as well, safe and sound.
But every night, that strength seemed slightly harder to muster.
Still, having so many ponies looking to her for religious guidance had turned out to have a practical side to it as well. The newly-ordained clerics of the Night Mare were all eager to work the goddess’s will – which to them was the effectively the same as Lex’s will – into practice, and Cloudbank had quickly found herself directing their efforts to aid and protect the ponies of Vanhoover.
After everything their city had been through, and everything that Lex had done to save it, that was the very least she could do.
It had also been foresighted, since when the Crystal Empire had attacked, the clerical corps had been instrumental in turning them back.
Nor had they been the only ones to prove decisive in that battle.
“Constance?” ventured Cloudbank, knowing that they needed to push on. “Where are we with the spellbooks?”
But unlike everyone else present, Lex’s Royal Magician didn’t respond, still staring raptly at the folio she was levitating in front of her the same way she’d been since the meeting had started.
“Constance?” Clearing his throat pointedly, Stuffed Shirt gave his colleague an embarrassed glance. “Lady Cloudbank is addressing you.”
A half-hearted grunt was the bespectacled mare’s only response, causing Stuffed Shirt to grimace.
“Constance!”
“Huh?!” Dropping her book, Constance looked around, startled. “What’s happening?!”
Stuffed Shirt heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Lady Cloudbank was asking about the spellbooks.”
“Oh! Yes, about those.” Pushing her glasses further up her muzzle, Constance cleared her throat. “I’ve received the shipments of specially-prepared paper and binding materials that I ordered from Tall Tale, but our local supplies of the ink I’ve been using are running low. I did some checking, and we can get some more from Somnambula – it’s a little town southeast of here, near the San Palomino desert – but it’s probably going to take a while-”
“I’ll see about speeding things up,” interjected River.
Giving an owlish blink, Constance nodded awkwardly at the other mare before turning back to Cloudbank. “Well, once I have those, I can start preparing more spellbooks, but I’m afraid even then it’s going to be slow-going in how many I can produce.”
At the far end of the table, Feathercap piped up. “I can help too!”
Garden Gate frowned. “Do you really have to do that yourselves? The ponies who’ve started studying magic with you were a huge help in driving off the Crystal Empire. The faster we can turn out more of those spellbooks-”
“It doesn’t work like that,” interjected Constance, apparently having already forgotten how flustered she’d been when someone else had interrupted her a few moments ago. “You don’t just read the spells in these tomes; they’re actually devices for compressing the necessary energy down into a form that can cogitated. That means that they can’t be made except by someone who already knows how to imbue them with the necessary reactive capabilities to function as a tool for shaping-”
“Okay, okay, I get it.” Holding up a hoof, Garden Gate made a placating gesture. “But how long is it going to take you to get more spellcasters trained?”
“Oh, that depends,” replied Constance without a second thought. “Personal capability factors a great deal into it; not everyone thinks that embedding conceptual diagrams into their thoughts is fun, weirdly enough. And just because some people want to doesn’t mean they’re good at it! Feathercap is a natural” – she gestured at the colt in question, who squeaked and hid behind his binoculars at the unexpected praise – “but the next pony who comes knocking might be completely hopeless! It’s really fascinating to study! While in theory the simplest spells require the least effort, they-”
“So making more spellbooks and training more casters is going to take a while,” announced Cloudbank, a little more loudly than necessary. “Thank you, Constance.”
The mare in question pouted for a moment, before telekinetically raising her folio again and staring at it.
Cloudbank rolled her eyes, though the corner of her lip turned upward, though only for a moment. “House Call, how are we-”
“Um, excuse me?” Frowning, Fruit Crunch stood up. “You skipped right over me!”
“Which means she obviously did it on purpose,” sighed Fiddlesticks, holding Tiddlywinks in her lap as the baby chewed on a plush butterfly. “Probably so she can call on you later. Read the room.”
“No, he’s right.” Sighing inwardly, Cloudbank decided it was better to get this over with now, certain that the colt was going to bring up the same issue he had for the last several days now. “Go ahead, Fruit Crunch.”
“We need to put together a plan to rescue Sonata and Aria!”
Knew it, groaned Cloudbank quietly. “We’ve been over this. We don’t know where they are-”
“Are you still saying that?!” Sitting up, Fruit Crunch pointed at River’s newspaper. “They were last seen in the Crystal Empire! That’s why Shining Armor attacked us! How is it not obvious that he captured them and threw them in, I don’t know, some crystal dungeon or something?!”
“He might have,” admitted Cloudbank, keeping her voice level. “Or maybe he’s transferred them to Canterlot, so that Celestia can deal with them. Or maybe Ponyville, since they have a history with Twilight Sparkle and her friends. Or possibly had them thrown into Tartarus. At this point, we have no idea-”
“Which is all the more reason we should go there make him tell us!”
Trying not to be irritated at having been interrupted twice in a row, Cloudbank sent an inquisitive glance toward Garden. Catching her hint, the unicorn mare looked at the unruly colt. “Fruit Crunch, even if we took all the combat-ready ponies we could spare, I don’t think we’d be able to force Shining Armor to tell us what happened to Sonata and Aria.”
“Why is everypony acting like we don’t have a chance against the guy?!” With an expression that said he clearly thought he was surrounded by a roomful of crazy ponies, Fruit Crunch pointed at the newspaper again. “We just got through kicking his butt! Now’s the time to hit him hard and make him talk!”
“If I might interject,” chimed in Stuffed Shirt, to Cloudbank’s mild surprise. “I’m not a military pony, but a perusal of world history suggests that repelling an invasion and conducting one are very different endeavors.”
“...so that’s it?” Red-faced with anger, Fruit Crunch looked around the room. “Lex’s two most important ponies confront the guy who tried to kill him, vanish, and we’re all just supposed to sit back and do nothing because going after them is too hard?” He let that sit for a moment before turning back to Cloudbank. “Is that what Lex would do?”
“You don’t need to remind me that I’m not Lex,” replied Cloudbank coldly. “I can assure you, I’ve always been very aware of that fact.”
Leaning across the table, Fruit Crunch glared daggers at her. “So have I. The difference is, I want to be more like him, where you just want to sit back and cry about your missing girlfriend instead of rescuing his.”
“CRUNCHY!” gasped Cleansweep, looking horrified.
But he had already turned around and barged toward the door, not looking back as he threw it open and stomped away.
Wincing, the other members of the Night Mare’s Knights murmured their apologies – some blushing in embarrassment at their leader’s outburst, others looking like they were infuriated by the colt’s tirade – as they followed him out.
Nevertheless, Cloudbank found herself taking a cue from their leaving, suddenly not wanting to continue. “Let’s adjourn for today.”
River frowned. “We still need to go over using the political capital we’ve gained-”
“And we will,” broke in Cloudbank. “Just...not right now, okay?”
Pursing her lips, River nodded, and the meeting broke up as ponies slowly filed out, until Cloudbank was the last one in the room.
Or rather, almost the last one, as the maid who’d been serving pralines stayed behind. “I hope I’m not being out of line,” she murmured after a few moments of silence, “but...are you alright?”
The question made Cloudbank chuckle darkly. “I have to be alright,” she muttered. “Who else is going to hold things together until Lex comes back?”
She refused to utter the words “if he comes back,” despite how heavily they hung in the air.
Managing a pained smile, the maid pushed the pralines forward. “Try one of these,” she urged. “I promise, you’ll feel better when you’ve eaten it.”
This time Cloudbank’s smile was genuine, though much smaller. “Maybe in a bit.”
“...alright,” nodded the maid. “Just let me know if there’s anything else you’d prefer instead. I actually ran a candy shop before I worked here, so if there’s something you’d like instead, just let me know.”
The offer was so small, compared to the numerous huge problems that she had to deal with, that Cloudbank couldn’t help but chuckle, touched. “You know what?”
Not waiting for an answer, she popped a praline in her mouth, closing her eyes as she let the chocolatey goodness melt in her mouth. Funny, she actually did feel a little bit better. “I think I actually prefer these.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” promised the maid, throwing her a wink as she started collecting empty plates.
Leaving her to it, Cloudbank stood up and started for the door, only to turn around as she reached the threshold. “I’m sorry,” she called back. “I just realized I never asked you your name.”
The sound of his beloved’s voice brought a smile to Lex’s lips. Glancing over, he took in the sight of Sonata’s flushed face, relishing in the languid grin she was giving him as she drew the rumpled bedsheets up over the two of them. Her mane was in disarray – unsurprising after how vigorously they’d just celebrated their reunion – and he nuzzled her as he lifted a claw to fix it, gently making sure that his talons didn’t damage her silken strands the way he had the bed during their...their...
His brow furrowing, Lex turned to look at the bed, seeing that the mattress and the covers were undamaged. But that shouldn’t have been possible; not with how sharp his claws were now, or how unrestrained he’d been while they were...
That was when he realized that he couldn’t remember what the two of them had just been doing.
In fact, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten back together with her in the first-
“Because I have to tell you, your performance just now was the worst.”
Aria’s voice caught him off-guard, turning his head to take in the sight of the pigtailed mare lying where Sonata had been as she gave him her usual sardonic expression. “You know there’s more to doing a girl than just going at her deep, hard, and fast, right?”
Lex barely heard the cutting remark, suddenly aware that he didn’t recognize his surroundings. Sitting up, he realized that the bed he was lying in was huge; the size of an expansive swimming pool at the very least. Rather than a single blanket and set of pillows, varieties of pastel cushions were scattered in between a series of thin blankets. At the edges of the oversized mattress hung a series of gauzy veils, just thick enough that they obscured everything beyond them, not having the slightest gap from where they stretched between the bed and the mirrored canopy, in which Lex could see the reflection of himself lying beside...
Nosey.
“Don’t get me wrong!” blurted the blonde unicorn as she adjusted her glasses, glancing up at him before looking away with a blush. “Your new body’s, er, ‘equipment’ is really something else. Not just the size, but the, you know...” She waved a hoof in the air, turning redder as her voice dropped to a whisper. “...construction.” Gulping, she shook her head slightly before pouting at him. “But you still could have done more!”
In the fraction of a second it took him to look away from the overhead mirror and back to the mare lying next to him, Nosey was gone, and in her place was Thermal Draft, the pegasus wearing the familiar form he’d grown used to rather than the insectoid appearance that had since become her real body.
“For instance, there’s a lot of ways you could put your tongue to good use,” suggested the pegasus casually, as though she was asking him to give her another lesson in spellcasting. “Especially since it’s kind of rough and scratchy now-”
But Lex was no longer listening as he realized that he couldn’t access any of his magic.
It was all gone, this thaumaturgy, cryomancy, dark magic; he couldn’t even sense Solvei or Nenet. It was enough to remind him of what had happened when he’d died, which in turn made him think of Soft Whisper, a memory that itself pulled in associated knowledge about other gods, which made him think of-
“Kara.”
“Aw!” Putting her hooves to her cheeks, Thermal Draft stuck her tongue out at him. “And here I was hoping we could enjoy role-playing a little longer. You might not have much technique, but it was still fun seeing how you treated each of your girls.”
“What is this?!” demanded Lex, backing away from the goddess as he kicked the blankets away, rising into a crouch. Distantly, he noted that his clothes were also gone. “Where are we?! What do you want?!”
“Your pillow talk needs some work too,” drawled Sonata, rolling her eyes. “For realsies.”
“Stop that!” snarled Lex, glaring at the doppelganger deity. “Change back into your natural form!”
“Or what?” sneered Aria, flipping over so that her backside was pointed toward him. “You’ll spank me? Because honestly, that’s something else you could try doing.”
Choking down a biting retort, Lex whirled in place and made for the edge of the bed, intent on getting out of here...wherever “here” was.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” came Nosey’s voice from behind him. “And from a shapeshifter goddess, that’s saying something.”
Ignoring the warning, Lex raised a claw as he reached the veils. A single swipe was all it took to slice them to ribbons, and he didn’t hesitate as he plunged through the opening he’d made-
And was torn to shreds in an instant.
Every aspect of himself was cut apart and separated, dismantled and deconstructed as though he were being dissected, able to sense every single part of his physicality and mentality and spirituality as they were reduced down to their component materials in a manner that completely overwhelmed his ability to recognize what was happening as though each nerve and neuron was overloaded by the sensations and yet were unable to shut down anditwasquicklybecomingunbearableilrnwbxwrpmfidw-
With a sigh, Thermal Draft pulled him back onto the bed, the veils fixing themselves as he landed on the mattress again. “Told you.”
Several moments passed before Lex was able to find his voice. “...what...?”
“There there,” soothed the pegasus, slinking over to wrap herself around him, sliding one of his back legs between her own as she nuzzled him. “Just think of this as a pleasant dream-”
“Watch yourself, harlot.”
The voice that interrupted Kara was cold and unforgiving, and Lex immediately recognized it as belonging to the Night Mare, looking up just in time to see the impression of the goddess in the veils, as though she’d pressed herself against them from outside, before it vanished.
“Ugh, fine.” Huffing, Aria waved a hoof at their surroundings. “Think of this as a mindscape that I created so that your consciousness wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of the Night Mare’s reconstructing you.”
Still dazed from what he’d just experienced, it took Lex a moment to process that. “Reconstructing...?”
“Um, yeah,” giggled Sonata. “You, like, made a god’s power your own, and even if it was just a teensy-weensy bit from an itty-bitty demigod, that’s totes not something a mortal can handle.”
“So now that you have it,” explained Nosey, “she’s making it so that you can use it.”
It was only then that Lex fully recalled what had happened: reattaching his spine, healing his wounds, Adagio’s magic failing, and then...
Then everything grew confused, his memory devolving into fragments and vague impressions. Profound cold. Severe isolation. Losing himself, then regaining what he’d lost. Struggle. Recovery. Loss. Memories. Determination. Triumph.
And then the Night Mare’s words coming back to him, promising...
“Immortality,” Lex breathed, realizing what that meant. “She’s making me into a god.”
Next to him, Thermal Draft burst out laughing. “A god? Really? Is that what you think?”
Her reaction made Lex frown, as much in confusion as in irritation at the goddess’s antics. “You’re suggesting that what I’m undergoing now isn’t apotheosis?”
“Oh, that’s adorable!” Wiping a fake tear away as she finished chuckling, the pegasus gave him a lazy grin. “Let me tell you something, stud: there’s a very large middle ground between mortality and godhood, and that piddly little amount of the divinity you managed to conquer isn’t nearly enough to bridge that gap. Especially since the Night Mare is expending most of it to upgrade you.”
Lex sat up at that, glancing back toward where he’d seen the goddess’s outline in the veils. “What?”
“I thought you were supposed to be a genius,” snickered Aria. “But fine, I’ll explain it in a way that’s easier for you to understand. Think of that godsblood as a big pile of money. There’s too much for you to just shove in your pockets, which means you need something to carry it all in. So you have to buy a cart. But it can’t just be any old wagon; it has to have tough walls and a thick covering and a sturdy lock. Which is fine, except you need to spend some of your money to get all that, which means that there’s less for it to hold once the purchases are finished.”
“The good news is that the Night Mare’s doing a very efficient job,” finished Nosey. “To extend the analogy, she’s using locally-sourced materials to keep the costs down. Which is to say, she’s giving you the trace amounts of aristeia that are in those old dragon bones to reduce the amount of godsblood that’s wasted on rebuilding you.”
Sonata shrugged at that, one hoof coming up to rub the side of her head. “I mean, she totes could have just given you another blessing if she wanted to help you out that much, but she’s got that whole ‘your reward is what you earn for yourself’ thing going on, you know?”
Lex scowled at that, suddenly reminded of something that had been bothering him for a while. “Remove your blessing from me!”
Sonata cocked her head. “You said what now?”
“Your blessing!” snapped Lex, standing up. “The one that makes others fall in love with me! Remove it! Now!”
“Seriously?” sneered Aria. “I turn you into the protagonist of a harem game, and your response is ‘thanks but no thanks’?”
“I am not thanking you,” hissed Lex, stalking forward until he was within an inch of the shapeshifting goddess’s face. “And I don’t need your help finding someone to love me! I-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as Nosey collapsed laughing on the bed. “You don’t need my help?” she cackled, rolling onto her back and kicking her legs in the air. “You don’t need my help?! Oh! Oh wow! And here I thought you had no sense of humor!”
Furious at being mocked over the angst that she’d inflicted on him, Lex reached down and pinned Thermal Draft’s legs to the bed. “Remove your blessing!” he demanded again.
“Will you smack me around if I don’t?” giggled the pegasus. “Or do I have to say ‘pretty please’ first?”
Lex glared at her, but when she simply grinned at him, he released her forelegs from his claws, knowing that there was nothing he could do to force her to comply with his wishes. Fuming, he turned his back on her, staring at the veils as he seethed.
“Aw, don’t be upset,” pout Drafty. “It’s not like it’s an indictment of you. I mean, you’re not completely hopeless on your own.”
Sitting next to him, Aria gave him a bemused glance. “Your looks, for instance. A solid six out of ten. Six-point-five, even.”
Turning, she walked around behind him, and Sonata appeared on his other side. “And the whole ‘big fearless hero’ routine is, like, a surefire way to totes moisten panties.”
“The problem,” tsked Thermal Draft, “is when you open your mouth. Because as soon as you start talking, it’s the cure for nymphomania.”
“Which is why you don’t just need my blessing,” continued Nosey, “which, by the by, I can’t remove even if I wanted to – since the Night Mare negotiated for it to be permanent – but you also need my help if you’re going to tame that faithless whore Adagio.”
Lex’s eyes widened at that, the revelation that the Night Mare was partially responsible for Kara’s blessing falling away at the mention of Sonata and Aria’s sister, recalling what Nenet had told him about the deals her mother had made in order to grow stronger. “So you’re the reason Adagio’s gained so much power.”
“Pfft, as if,” snorted Aria. “All I did was ask her for one little favor in exchange for having brought her and her sisters here from that Earth place they were stuck in-”
“You’re the one who did that?!”
“-and she totes stabbed me in the back!” fumed Sonata. “For realsies, I just wanted her to hang on to a certain book written by a certain little pink failure of a goddess for a little while! That was all! She just had to keep it so that I could totes say that none of my faithful had it! But instead, you know what she did?”
Between what he’d learned from the Auctoritas Caliginous and the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, Lex could see where this was going. “She read it.”
“She read it!” growled Thermal Draft. “No one told her to do that! Suddenly, she’s bargaining with prominent succubi, trading ‘favors’ with sidhe princesses, cutting deals with lamia matriarchs, and a bunch of others, all for her own benefit! She even traded that book away, and now it’s beyond my reach!”
“Which is where you come in,” finished Nosey, giving him a sharp look. “You have my blessing, which means that you’re technically my champion too. So you’re going to go to her and show that bitch that even daemons have no fury like a goddess scorned!”
Lex’s lip curled at that. “I am not your champion,” he spat. “And I have no interest in helping you with your petty vendetta. I’m going to confront Adagio because she needs to be stopped, and then I’m going to bring her back to Equestria and reform her, for her own good. What you want doesn’t matter to me in the slightest.”
“Aw, but didn’t you promise us that you’d make her love you?” whimpered Sonata, looking at him tearfully.
Lex managed to keep from wincing, but he couldn’t stop himself from clenching his jaw.
“Are you going to break your word?” Aria’s expression was stricken. “Even though it was the last thing we ever asked of you?”
“Shut up,” muttered Lex, looking away.
“She’s our only sister,” came a blend of their two voices from behind him. “Maybe the last one of us now...don’t you want to honor our wish?”
“That’s enough!”
“Or have you forgotten us already?” continued their voices in unison. “Is that it? You don’t care about us anymore now that you have your wolf and your sphinx?”
“They have nothing to do with this!”
“No? Because it sounds like you love them more than you ever loved us.”
“THAT’S NOT TRUE!”
Rounding on Kara, Lex pounced on her, forcing her down onto the bed as he pinned her down. “I LOVED THEM – I STILL LOVE THEM – MORE THAN ANYONE!!!”
And underneath him, Adagio – clad in the same thin lingerie that she’d been wearing when he’d scryed on her – grinned. “Then prove it,” she purred, fingers reaching up to slide over his flanks, one leg lifting to trace her toes along his tail. “Keep your promise to them, and when you find me, put me in my place the way only you can.”
Lex stared down at her, his thoughts awash with rage and lust, and for a long moment he didn’t react...
Then he leaned down and kissed her fiercely.
Underneath him, Adagio – or rather, Kara – laughed as she returned the kiss, waiting until his lips had left hers to give him a sultry smile. “Good boy,” she cooed. “Just listen to me, and I promise that by the time you head home, Adagio Dazzle will be desperately in love with you. She'll be your reward for all your hard work.”
Her fingers slid up to cup his face then, directing his attention lower on her body as she wriggled her hips, sliding her panties off.
“Now, let’s start with some lessons about how to use your tongue...”
Did you enjoy your dalliance with that conceited slattern?
The voice made Solvei wince. Simply comprehending the words was a painful exercise, as though maintaining that level of awareness was a greater burden than she could bear. But she had no choice in the matter, the voice being powerful enough that it demanded her attention whether or not she wanted to give it.
I’m given to understand that you compelled her to grant me a blessing, came a second voice, and though it had less weight behind it than the first, it felt far more personal somehow. If you disapprove of my activities with her, then perhaps you shouldn’t have given her justification for meddling with me so brazenly.
The first voice gave a dark chuckle at that. Better that her meddling should be brazen than hidden. And that she should be invested in your success instead of working against you.
Invested in my success? sneered the familiar voice. All she wants is for me to avenge her wounded pride.
By undertaking a task that you were already resolved to perform. Tawdry though it might have been, the insight she granted you is not without value in that regard.
An alliance of convenience-
Is still an alliance. To have others willingly offer you their strength – be it magic, armaments, skills, secrets, or whatever else they have to give – is the nature of leadership. And leadership is simply another word for power over others. Do not disregard that strength simply because it was given for reasons other than abject submission to your will.
...
Cultivate those tools, my champion. You’re going to need them, now more than ever.
What does that mean?
Solvei’s consciousness had recovered to the point where she could identify the speakers now, recognizing that Master was speaking to the Night Mare. But everything else – even forming a coherent reaction to what she was hearing – was currently beyond her. All she could do was let their voices roll across her mind.
You have reached a new level of existence. The fusion of aristeia and divinity, fragmentary though they were, was sufficient to grant you much more than a mere undying body. The result is that every part of you has been enhanced. Cognition, senses, magic, and so much else now transcend mortal limits by far.
Then...!
No. Your sense of exclusion has always been the source of your ambition. You’ve known that even before you made a holy pilgrimage to my realm. Do you truly believe that I would take your greatest strength from you?
For a moment, Solvei sensed intense bitterness from her master. But as quickly as she felt it, the emotion vanished, replaced by frustrated acceptance. So be it then. That’s unchanged, but the rest of me has become...what?
That earned another dark chuckle from the goddess, but this time it was deeper, as though she were pleased by the question. There is a name for beings that are more than mortal, but less than gods. Undying, they command strength sufficient to influence the course of not just worlds, but entire planes of existence. Archangels, infernal nobles, elder fey, ascended dragons, and other such cosmic beings count them as peers and rivals. The strongest among them are powerful enough that even gods cannot dismiss their significance.
Although her master made no response, Solvei could feel his anticipation, waiting to hear what the goddess said next.
He wasn’t made to wait long.
They’re called titans, revealed the Night Mare. And you’re one of them now. Which means that you cannot afford to dismiss any advantage of which you find yourself in possession. Not when you’ll soon come to the notice of powers that would have overlooked you before.
A titan? I’ve become a titan?
Only in terms of your personal capabilities. Everything else you possess, save for the weapon that I consecrated, will need to be raised to commensurate status if they’re to be of any use to you.
In that case, I want more from you.
More? From me? A low, dangerous growl came from the goddess then. I have already granted you boons beyond measure, elevating you to a status beyond mortal comprehension, and now you dare to declare yourself unsatisfied?
You’re the one who praised my ambition, replied Lex, his voice completely without fear. And if I’m to be a titan while also serving as your champion, then I want divine spells commensurate to the power I wield. Not the weak healing spells and minor wards you’ve granted me up until now.
This time the Night Mare’s laughter was louder, and thick with approval. Done. Your new state of being makes you far more compatible with that type of magic anyway. Is there anything else you feel deserving of?
Yes. I want to be released from my vow.
Your vow? Ah, I had almost forgotten about that pledge I demanded of you, that you would renounce all formal romantic ties.
Her voice thick with bemusement, the goddess didn’t wait to make her decision. You know, I think I will free you from that obligation. As I said, you’ll need to cultivate alliances going forward, so you might as well make as much use of that doxy’s blessing as you can. Perhaps you could start with those servants of yours, assuming their minds haven’t completely collapsed from the feedback of what you’ve gone through.
Solvei felt a rush of surprise, followed by dread, from her master then. Immediately afterward there was a tugging sensation-
-and then she found herself in the embrace of a titan.
It was like she’d been swept up in a force of nature. Only the Night Mare’s presence had been more oppressive. Even then, that had at least been limited to the overwhelming fear of an unstoppable predator having caught sight of her.
Now, everything was going haywire. Her sense of balance was completely gone, like she’d been caught in an avalanche and didn’t know which way was up. Breathing was impossible, as if the very air had become too thick to fit in her throat. She could feel her muscles spasming of their own accord, as though she’d been struck by lightning.
It was enough that Solvei could feel herself slipping away completely, unable to withstand the crushing pressure-
Then, with a murmur of something from Lex, it was suddenly gone.
The absence of anguish was so abrupt that it was almost nauseating. Gasping, Solvei couldn’t suppress a cry as she sat up, breaking free of Lex’s grasp as she fought to regain control of herself. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Nenet, the sphinx looking like she was in the same state as she sank into a crouch, head in her hands as she breathed deeply.
It felt like a long time before her equilibrium started to come back, though Solvei was sure that it couldn’t have been more than a few hundred heartbeats. Finally, with one last shudder, she managed to raise her eyes to Lex.
Outwardly, at least, he seemed unchanged. Although the Night Mare had dubbed him to be a titan, he hadn’t gained any height, nor had his musculature increased. No additional horns grew from his head, nor was his fur adorned with any strange marking that she could see around the edges of his clothes. He didn’t even have the wings that Drafty had said that the rulers of his homeland were known for.
But that didn’t mean that his newfound powers weren’t extremely conspicuous.
The aura that he exuded was so intense that it was almost visible to the naked eye. In fact, there was no “almost” about it; as he moved, Solvei could see a slight afterimage trailing behind him, as though the entire world was struggling to make way for his passage.
Nor was the effect limited to what she could take in visually. His every step had a sense of impact to it now, to the point where she could have sworn she felt minor shockwaves against her skin each time he touched the ground, the effect leaving her feeling slightly dizzy. Though that might have been magnified by how quiet everything suddenly seemed, as though sound itself was afraid of drawing his attention.
The overall effect was to make him more intimidating than Hvitdod had ever been.
In that moment Solvei knew that the Night Mare had been right: “titan” was the only way to describe Lex now.
“M-Master,” she gulped, her voice sounding simultaneously strangled and yet hideously loud, as though she’d spoken at full volume in a room full of sleeping people. “What...what happened? I was-, Nenet and I were talking, and all of a sudden...”
“I reintegrated my spine into my body,” explained Lex, and despite the fact that he hadn’t raised his voice Solvei had to fight down the urge to wince. “While I survived the process, Adagio’s spells failed immediately thereafter, and the godsblood she’d placed in my vertebrae inundated me.” A thin smile crossed his lips then, and the sight almost made Solvei faint. “Before I overwhelmed it.”
“And you...became a titan?” croaked Nenet, looking like she was about to throw up. “I heard a voice say that, just now...”
“That was the Night Mare,” answered Lex, quickly giving them a brief overview of the spiritual battle he’d fought, and how the goddess had reacted to his victory by using that trace of divinity – and the last lingering fragments of aristeia in Hvitdod’s bones – to elevate him to his new, immortal state. “Though I still need to ascertain what I’m capable of now.”
Just the thought of him testing out his powers was enough to make Solvei whimper, her ears folding down. “I don’t think I could take that. Not when everything you do is so...intense.”
“What she said,” echoed Nenet.
Lex grimaced slightly. “What you’re feeling right now is the lingering effects of my overcoming the godsblood. Our connection means that some of what I experienced during the battle was transferred to the both of you. It’s placed stress on your souls, and is making you hypersensitive to my presence.”
“Does that mean this will wear off soon?” moaned Solvei.
“It should, once you grow accustomed to the aristeia I’ve given you.”
Nenet made a choking sound. “You...what?”
“The two of you each have a piece of my soul within you,” Lex reminded them. “In order to help you better adjust to my new mode of existence, I modified that connection so that the fragment you possess has power proportional to what I’ve become.”
“Is that why it felt like I was dying before, and now it just feels like I’m going to pass out?” muttered Solvei, trying to wrap her head around everything she was being told.
Lex nodded. “The adjustment was enough to ameliorate the worst of what you were feeling, and the rest should fade as your souls recover.” He paused then, and when he spoke again there was a subdued tone in his voice. “I regret that you had to go through that...in fact, I regret a great deal about how I’ve treated you both recently.”
That was enough to make Nenet look up, still wobbling slightly. “M-Master...?”
Her utterance was enough to earn Lex’s attention, and he walked over to her slowly. “Nenet, you did an excellent job with recovering my spine. The task was dangerous in the extreme, and had no margin for error, and yet you managed to succeed beyond my expectations. I should have told you how admirable your actions were, rather than berating you for something you couldn’t possibly have known.”
Despite how sick she looked, Nenet managed a weak smile. “Really?”
“Yes. Which is why I want you to have this.”
Nenet’s eyes widened as he held out a bracelet with three rings dangling from chains. “B-But that’s Adagio’s! How did you get it?!”
Lex shook his head. “I didn’t. You did.”
Nenet’s confusion was almost palpable. “I did?”
“When you fought her off right before I teleported you back, Belligerence’s barbs got tangled in the bracelet’s chains, and that was enough to bring it back with you. It was because of this ring” – he tapped the rightmost ring, a band of white gold with an emerald set on it – “that I was able to regenerate my spine, making my elevation to being a titan possible. So it’s only right that you wear it now.”
Looking awed, Nenet fumbled for the bracelet, pawing at it for a moment as she slipped it onto her left hand. “I...I don’t know what to say...thank you so much, Master!”
Managing a smile, Lex gave her a small nod, before turning to Solvei.
“Solvei-”
“She told me.”
Lex stopped in place, cocking his head to one side. “What?”
“Nenet told me,” repeated Solvei. “About Kara’s blessing. About how you feel about me. All of it.”
Lex’s expression darkened then, and behind him Nenet quailed, but Solvei plunged ahead before either of them could react. “I’m glad she did. I know you feel guilty, because you think my feelings aren’t real...” – taking a deep breath, she forced herself to say the next part before she lost her nerve – “but I don’t care! They’re real to me!”
“Solvei-”
“And besides, I don’t think gods can make things happen if they’re fake! I know I don’t know much about them, just the little bit that I learned back when I was studying with the Keeper, but if a god does something related to their ‘divine portfolio,’ I think it’s called, then doesn’t that mean that it’s real? I mean, love goddesses are supposed to make people fall in love, right? So maybe it’s not fake; maybe it’s just the difference between a tree that grows in the wild and a tree that grows because someone plants it and nurtures it!”
“Solvei-”
“And I know that you have Thermal Draft!” She was aware that she was babbling, and that she probably embarrassing herself, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “And that you still have feelings for Adagio’s sisters! And that’s fine! I don’t want to keep you all to myself! I don’t mind that Nenet’s here either, or even if you wanted to add more servants like Nisha! But I can’t stand the thought of you hating yourself because you think my feelings are something you did wrong! They’re not! I’m not unhappy that I l-, that I lo-, that...”
Taking a deep breath, she squeezed her eyes shut. “That I love you so much!”
Swallowing, she kept going. “And that’s why I don’t want you to feel guilty about me anymore! I like how this feels! I like that I get to be with the one I love all the time, and that we have such a close connection! I like-”
She was cut off as Lex gently put a single talon against her muzzle. “Solvei.”
Swallowing, she opened her eyes, trembling for reasons that had nothing to do with how strong his presence had become. “Y-y-yes?”
“I love you too.”
This time, when he embraced her, it didn’t feel smothering.
Instead, it was like she was exactly where she belonged.
“I want you to have this,” he murmured after several moments, taking his circlet off of his head and placing it on hers. “It will let you see into the magical spectrum, and has a small reservoir of magical energy that replenishes each day. I know that’s not very helpful, since your cryomancy can be used without limit-”
“No.” Sniffling a little, Solvei smiled up at him. “It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.”
Smiling, Lex nodded once before letting her go. Taking a step back, he looked between the two of them. “We’ll talk more later, but right now it’s imperative that we prepare to confront Adagio again, before she tries to run away or counterattack.”
“Can she do that?” Solvei sent a questioning glance Nenet’s way. “I thought she’s out of spells now, and she doesn’t have anyone else to fight for her, right?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the case,” answered Nenet, stressing the second word. “But it’s not like she told me everything. It’s possible she has some sort of backup plan I don’t know about. Or even caches of magic items and spell components-, oops!” Clasping her hands over her mouth, Nenet gave Lex a wide-eyed look. “Master, I’m sorry! We forgot to get those diamonds you wanted us to excavate!”
But Lex only snorted at her worry. “I’m not concerned about those right now. Besides, the only one that I cared about was a particular crystal which had an unusual magical structure.”
Turning, he glanced at a nearby crack in the ground, eyes narrowing as his horn lit up. “It should be fairly easy to extract it now...”
Solvei cocked a brow. “I thought telekinesis needed line of sight to work.”
“And it’s only proportional to physical strength, right?” added Nenet.
“You’re both correct,” answered Lex. “But I’m curious if those limits still apply to me now that I’m a titan-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as the ground tore itself open.
Solvei yelped in fright, Nenet giving a shriek as she flapped her wings, barely managing to catch Solvei before pulling her into the air as beneath them, the entire floor of the chasm exploded in a shower of stones, the ground heaving as a massive fissure opened up...
And a massive vein of diamond-studded rock – which had to weigh a hundred tons or more – floated upward, held aloft in Lex’s telekinetic aura.
And the pony-turned-titan could only stare at the huge chunk of earth that he’d ripped free from the ground with telekinesis alone, his eyes wide.
Solvei managed to nod her head mutely at Nenet’s praise, still too stunned by what her ice magic could do now to have any further reaction.
After all, the last time she’d summoned ten ice elementals at once – back when they’d fought Sissel just outside of the Shrine of the Starless Sky – had been when Lex had used the Charismata to drastically augment her shamanic powers.
But the ten humongous beings of pure ice that were kneeling in front of her now had been summoned without any such enhancement, called forth by her magic alone. Each of them was flawlessly shaped into the form of an adlet, except that they were four- or five-times as tall as any of her tribe, easily dwarfing the elementals she’d been able to summon when she’d just been Akna.
But it was their shape that impressed her more than their height. Rather than the loose humanoid forms that she’d brought forth under her own power, the elementals in front of her now could almost have been adlets – albeit giant-sized ones – from another tribe, if not for the fact that even the most casual glance showed that they were made of snow and ice, rather than fur and flesh. It was enough to make her recall her grandmother’s lessons about how the formation of the elemental was a reflection of the skill of the shaman.
Her grandmother’s elementals had been smooth and symmetrical, but featureless. Had she seen even a single elemental of such immaculate construction now, Solvei felt sure she’d have collapsed in shock.
And now she’d summoned ten of them, all without needing any outside assistance.
When Lex had said he’d given her and Nenet aristeia of their own, Solvei hadn’t known what to expect. But she certainly hadn’t expected this!
I didn’t even have to use that reservoir of extra power Master gave me.
“What else can you do now?”
The sphinx’s question pulled Solvei from her stupefaction. “What else...?”
Nenet shrugged, a guileless smile on her face. “Yeah! I mean, can you make it snow the way Sissel, Vidrig, and Grisela did? Or flash-freeze an entire lake solid? Or-, ooh! I know!” Her eyes lighting up, Nenet clasped her hands together in excitement. “How about making an ice-palace?!”
Solvei quirked a brow, unfamiliar with that word. “An ice...what?”
“A palace!” repeated Nenet. “You know, like a castle except prettier? I read a story in one of M-, Adagio’s books about a princess who made one with her powers, and I wanted so badly to be able to do the same! I even asked her if there was a spell to do that, but she just sneered and said that if there was, she wouldn’t be living in some dingy old cave.”
The story made Solvei pause, as much from the wistful look on the sphinx’s face as from confusion. Drafty had told her once that, back where she and Lex came from, rulers were supposed to live in gigantic buildings called castles. Solvei hadn’t really understand what those were, or why someone would want to live in one, but she had seen something she thought was similar recently...
“I guess I can give that a try,” she murmured.
An excited gasp escaped Nenet’s lips. “Really?!”
“I don’t know if it will work,” cautioned Solvei. “I still haven’t had a chance to recover the well of extra power I use when I need to push my cryomancy past its limits.”
Nenet nodded rapidly, grinning in anticipation, and the sight was so adorable that Solvei couldn’t help but giggle a little at how childlike she looked. But her mirth died away as she recalled what Nenet had told them earlier, about how she was only a few months old, and that her entire life had been a combination of abuse, neglect, and manipulation by Adagio, Sissel, and the rest of her siblings. When was the last time she’d had a chance to be excited by something, let alone have it come to pass?
Keeping that thought in her mind, Solvei let out a slow breath as she closed her eyes and raised her hands toward a portion of the chasm that was relatively undamaged by her master’s recent diamond excavation. Silently, she called forth an image in her mind, taking hold of the magic inside of her and directing it outward, shaping it to recreate the memory as best she could...
The process was slow and complicated. The image in her mind kept threatening to slip away, forcing her to concentrate harder in order to keep it at the forefront of her thoughts. Fortunately, the magic kept flowing, that was a relief in and of itself; before, she’d needed to tap into her reserve of additional power just to create a solid wall. For it to work now that she was designing something much more complicated was almost beyond belief...
But then again, she had ten perfectly-formed ice elementals behind her as a testament to the fact that her belief in what her magic could do would need to be seriously adjusted.
Several dozen deep breaths later, Solvei heard Nenet let out a joyous cry, and the sound made her open her eyes.
In front of her was a perfect reproduction – albeit in ice – of Sanguine Disposition’s mansion.
“WOW!” squealed Nenet, rushing forward past the open gates set in the outer wall around the frozen estate. “Oh my gosh! It’s so beautiful!”
Smiling at the sight of her new friend enjoying herself so much, Solvei followed her inside, still slightly dazed by the fact that she’d made something so expansive. The last time she’d tried to make any sort of structure, it had been inside this same mansion, forming a small igloo so she – as Solvei and Akna – could converse privately. Now she’d created a replica of the entire place.
“This is incredible!” yelled Nenet from the edge of the garden, itself filled with a dazzling array of snow flowers. “Solvei, look at this! These flowers are all different shades of blue and white! And they have different textures! And this is just the garden! Can I explore inside?!”
This time the sight of the sphinx’s smile didn’t make Solvei feel sad in the slightest, and she grinned as she nodded. “Go ahead.”
Shrieking in delight, Nenet didn’t hesitate, pulling the door open and plunging into the interior of the enormous mansion without a backwards glance. Solvei couldn’t help but shake her head ruefully, reminded of all the times she’d discovered something new and exciting when she’d been a little girl. Nenet deserved a chance to experience that herself.
You’ve done well, Solvei.
Master! Turning around, she hurried back through the frozen gate that marked the edge of the mansion, slowing down as Lex came back into sight. Standing roughly twice the distance of a thrown spear from the massive abode that she’d created, Solvei paused just long enough to dismiss the ice elementals before making her way over to him, pleased by the rare compliment. Thank you! I can’t believe how much stronger you’ve made me!
Your powers have grown remarkably, but that wasn’t what I meant, corrected Lex, not looking at her as he telekinetically extracted the diamonds – all of them at once – from the massive slab of rock that he’d torn free from the earth, the colorless jewels glinting in the light of his aura as they swirled around him. I was referring to how happy you made Nenet.
That was enough to make her blink. Really?
Lex nodded, but the response struck her as being oddly inattentive, like his mind was elsewhere. It’s strange. The more I explore what I’ve become, the more I feel my limits falling away. Except for the one that the Night Mare left in place.
Master...?
Raw power comes easily to me now, replied Lex, casually reaching out and waving a claw in the direction of the enormous vein of stone that he’d extracted the diamonds from. He didn’t actually make contact with it – standing almost twice his body length from its edge – but the huge slab immediately split down the middle, falling into two cleanly-cut halves as though it had been sliced by some invisible colossus. So much more than I ever imagined a single pony could possess.
Solvei couldn’t formulate a response, her jaw falling open.
And that power is matched only by the level of awareness I now possess. Raising his claw again, he slowly waved it in a wide arc, causing a shower of snowflakes to appear in its passage. How many do you see?
How many? echoed Solvei, confused. How many wh-, wait, you mean snowflakes? Master, I can’t even begin to gue-
Forty-three thousand one hundred seventeen, answered Lex without hesitation.
You counted them all?
I didn’t need to count them, replied Lex, watching the flakes dispassionately as they fell toward the ground. I knew at a glance how many there were. I can see every one of them individually. I can feel them displacing the air as they fall. I can even visualize the precise path that each flake will follow before it actually traverses it.
Solvei swallowed, not able to imagine what that was like. O-oh...
But even with all of this power and insight, I couldn’t have made Nenet smile the way you did just now. Finally, he turned to look at her. That’s why I wanted you to know that I’m grateful that you were able to do so for me.
And just like that, Solvei felt her confusion dissipate, her chest tightening in the most wonderful way.
Changing back into her winter wolf form, she shrank down so that she was the size of a pony as she padded through the floating field of diamonds until she was in front of him. Master, that she’s able to smile like that at all is because of you. You offered to share your soul with her when I was convinced that she needed to be punished for her sisters’ crimes. You gave her the chance to stand up to the mother who’d hurt her all her life. You imbued me with the power to make that ice mansion that made her so happy. Nenet knows that, and she’s absolutely thankful for it.
He looked at her for a long moment, and Solvei met his gaze evenly, her heart leaping when the corners of his lips turned up ever so slightly. Alright. I’ll trust your judgment.
The aura around his horn flared then, and the gems floating in midair began to swirl around him, like shards of ice caught in the flow of an especially clear river. Watching them whirl through the air, Solvei gasped, unknowingly stepping closer to Lex as the current of gemstones sped up, closing in on the two of them.
But just when she was sure they were about to be struck by the glittering maelstrom, Lex held one claw out, and the diamonds rushed toward his palm, only to disappear as they came within reach of his talons, vanishing one after another. In the span of a few heartbeats, they were all gone, leaving Solvei breathless. What happened? Where did they go?
I placed them in a pocket dimension, answered Lex. Like the one inside this pack your mother gave me, except without needing a material item to anchor it.
That’s incredible, Master! To think you can cast spells like that now!
This time, his smile had a hint of bemusement to it. That wasn’t a spell. It was simply a manifestation of my will. But that’s not important right now.
Struggling to keep up with everything she was being told as well as what she was feeling, Solvei felt herself losing the thread of the conversation. It isn’t?
No. It’s far more important that I secure your happiness the way you say I’ve secured Nenet’s.
Before Solvei could react to that, he reached out and embraced her, pulling her close to him.
The rush of anxiety and exhilaration that swept over Solvei then was so powerful that she nearly passed out. She knew what he was saying was wrong; they were different races, he had Thermal Draft, and Nenet was liable to come back at any moment. But for some reason those excuses all died on her lips, and she knew that the tremors running through her then weren’t from distress, but anticipation.
Hold on tight, he urged her.
Not trusting herself to try and reply with words, Solvei simply reached out to embrace him in turn, leaving everything to him as she closed her eyes. This was right; they’d already admitted that they loved each other. Now it was time for what came next. She had no experience, either as Solvei or Akna, but the latter had heard the other girls in her tribe talk about it, and she realized that they’d been right; she already felt like she was floating...
Only to realize that she was floating!
Her eyes popping open, Solvei couldn’t even yelp as she looked down and saw the floor of the chasm rapidly growing further and further away as they rose , with nothing underneath them as they nevertheless rose into the air.
They were flying.
Stunned into silence, Solvei looked back at Lex. He didn’t have wings, nor was his horn glowing, and she knew he hadn’t gestured or chanted anything. Which meant that this wasn’t any sort of magic. Instead, it was what he’d done with the diamonds all over again.
He was flying for no other reason than because he willed it.
She had just enough time to wonder what that had to do with her happiness when his voice echoed in her mind again.
I’ll start by healing the injuries your tribe has suffered.
Underneath Lex’s claw, the deep cuts on the back of Toklo’s feet slowly closed up, vanishing without leaving so much as a scab behind.
The process took only a moment, requiring no chanting or gesturing on Lex’s part. All he’d done, after Toklo had consented to the procedure, was lay a talon on the adlet’s injured legs and concentrate. Or at least, he was sure that from Toklo’s perspective, that had been all he’d done. In point of fact, it had been far more.
This seems to be the most that I’m capable of now...
Instantaneous healing without the use of magic was, as it turned out, incredibly difficult. Even for a titan.
That his new state of being allowed him to directly manipulate reality via his will was something Lex was still growing accustomed to. Even with his consciousness having been raised to new heights of cognition, and his senses expanded to match, experiments still needed to be performed in order to find out what his limits were. And in that regard, he’d just gathered one very important new piece of knowledge:
He could manipulate his own existence – including the space around him and the things on his person – with relative ease. In many cases, he didn’t even have to consciously consider it; it was simply a matter of his wishes superimposing themselves over the outcome. Other beings, however, were much harder to directly affect in such a manner.
That only applied to direct applications of will, of course. He still had numerous other ways – physical, magical, and otherwise – of dealing with others. But insofar as being able to simply order the universe to change some aspect of their existence, he was extremely limited in what he could do. Even making direct contact with Toklo, Lex had needed to strain himself just to repair the relatively modest injuries he had.
More than that, he could feel that doing so had taxed him. Although there was no physical exhaustion, a sense of strain was still present. It wasn’t pronounced, nor was it anywhere close to actually damaging him, but it was enough to let him know that he couldn’t simply go around healing others without limit.
Unlike how he could for himself.
“I think it worked!”
Toklo’s relieved cry caused Solvei’s emotional state to become joyous, prompting Lex to put aside his ruminating in favor of turning his attention back to the adlet. The youth was standing upright, shifting his weight between his legs with increasing force as he confirmed that the injuries that Paska had inflicted on him – particularly the ones to the tendons in the back of his legs – were healed.
Satisfied that there wasn’t even the slightest twinge of pain, Toklo ceased his impromptu calisthenics and shot Solvei – now back in her adlet form – a grin. “There’s no pain at all!” he reported, beaming. “I feel great!”
“I told you it would work!” Grinning, Solvei turned to where the other adlets were watching, waving a hand toward Toklo. “You see? With the magic the Night Mare has given my master, he can do more than simply overcome Hvitdod! He can also heal all of your injuries with a touch! So, do the rest of you want to receive the goddess’s generosity and keep living as warriors? Or would you rather remain crippled and take your own lives so as not to be a burden to the tribe?”
But Solvei had barely finished speaking when an angry voice cut through the air.
“And what will it cost us?” snarled Ujurak, who for some reason was now wearing nothing but a leather thong. “What price will we have to pay in order to be healed?”
Solvei frowned, and Lex registered her happiness diminishing. “There is no price,” she shot back, scowling at the bulky warrior. “You didn’t see my master demand anything of Toklo, did you?”
“She’s right!” added Toklo. “I didn’t have to say a prayer or anything! He just put his claw on my leg, and a second later it stopped aching! There isn’t even a scar!”
“You betrayed our traditions by taking part in that traitor’s ceremony!” retorted Ujurak. “Not all of us prayed to the goddess that...monster worships!” He shot an angry glare at Lex then. But his expression faltered as they made eye contact, and barely a second later Ujurak shuddered and looked away.
His reaction wasn’t out of the ordinary. Although the adlets seen him before – both before and after his transformation in the Shrine of the Starless Sky – the sight of him when he’d returned just now had elicited gasps and frightened yelps from them, with several of Yotimo’s warriors curling up and whimpering like pups, their eyes squeezed shut and their ears flattened against their heads. Toklo had nearly passed out in fright, and even Yotimo himself had looked unnerved, moving to stand in front of his son protectively.
Solvei had clucked her tongue at their behavior, chiding them all for being so afraid just because he’d slain Hvitdod.
But in an ironic twist, Lex had known better.
The adlets weren’t afraid of him because of what he’d done; they were afraid of him because of what he’d become.
The fusion of aristeia and divinity – miniscule though both were – had turned him into a being whose mere presence put a strain on the universe itself. With both his cognition and his senses having surpassed what even magical augmentation was capable of, it was easy for Lex to perceive how his own existence left reality struggling to keep up, as though causality wasn’t sure how to measure his actions. And that was without his even trying to deliberately affect things; when he consciously attempted to manipulate the effect he had on the world around him, the results were much more marked.
The pain that Solvei and Nenet had experienced in the immediate aftermath of his ascension had been because of that. Between the sympathetic trauma they’d felt from his spiritual battle, and their soul-bond making them hyper-cognizant of his own existence, their senses had been completely overwhelmed, flooded with more information than they were capable of handling. It had only been when he’d giving them both portions of his own aristeia that they’d been able to adjust.
The other adlets, however, had no such way of acclimating to his presence. Although they didn’t have a soul-bond with him, that blunted the effect only somewhat. Limited to mere physical senses, Lex knew that their mortal methods of perception were struggling to turn his existence into comprehensible data...and even then, he was certain they were doing an inadequate job of it, likely lending the sight and sound of him an outsized weight that was stressful simply to perceive.
To them, he’d become a predator even more dangerous than Hvitdod.
That pleased the beast within him – still present after his ascension, no doubt as the Night Mare wished – greatly, and Lex had to resist the urge to smile at their fear. He could calculate the effects of their inability to fully perceive him, but the motivations behind their reactions remained a mystery to him, which meant that it was better for Solvei to deal with Ujurak’s petty truculence.
Fortunately, she seemed eager to do just that.
“That ‘monster’ is the reason you’re alive right now,” Solvei growled. “He killed the yetis, killed the ones who defeated and abducted you, and killed Hvitdod. Now he’s offering to heal the injuries you took, and this is the thanks you give him?!”
“He also killed Panuk,” sneered Ujurak. “It was just a few days ago that you helped us prepare and devour his body, remember? Or does that not matter because Panuk didn’t worship your master’s god?”
“That’s enough, Ujurak.” Coming up behind Toklo, Yotimo put a reassuring hand on his son’s shoulder. “If you don’t want to be healed, then that’s your choice, but don’t try to shame anyone else into following your example.”
“Don’t you speak to me of shame,” growled Ujurak. “You were our tribe’s most distinguished warrior, but now you’ve thrown it all away! And for what? To protect your son?” Snarling, he spat at the two of them. “You saved his life, only to prevent him from ever being reborn! Now that filthy god Akna abandoned us for will claim his spirit when he dies! That’s worse-”
“I’ve heard enough,” rumbled Lex, causing everyone except Solvei to wince. As it was, the joy she’d felt a moment ago was rapidly diminishing, and Lex was through letting one small-minded fool interfere with the happiness he wanted her to have.
“Since you’re having trouble deciding, I’ll make this easy for you. I’m going to cast a healing spell,” he announced, looking over the remaining adlets. None of them met his gaze. “All of you who wish to receive it and have your injuries mended, raise one hand skyward. Those of you who wish to remain as you are, do nothing. You have five seconds to decide.”
The ultimatum prompted a range of reactions, as some adlets immediately raised one arm above their heads, several others cringed and glanced around as if to judge what their fellows were doing, and a few signaled their uncertainty with hands that were only partway raised. But when Yotimo marched forward – placing himself directly between Lex and the others – and slowly raised his hand, most of the holdouts folded, and soon Ujurak was the only one without a raised arm.
Lex didn’t hesitate, calling upon one of the new spells that the Night Mare had given him.
Outwardly, he knew that what he was doing looked little different from when he’d healed Toklo’s legs. There was no gesturing or chanting involved – he no longer needed such things, able to activate his spells via thoughts alone – nor did he need to touch any of the recipients. Instead, he simply waved a claw in their direction, and in response they gasped and shifted as they felt their injuries close.
Inwardly, however, Lex could feel the torrent of energy coursing through him, maximizing the spell to its strongest potential.
That was another way that his ability to manipulate reality was far more pronounced when it came to himself: he was overflowing with magical power now...enough that it not only supercharged every spell he cast, but which had gone one step beyond that.
He no longer needed outside assistance to recharge his thaumaturgical magic.
Never again would he have to wait for the solstice or the equinox to come around. Never again would he have to find some vast reservoir of arcane power to serve as a battery. Now, he could finally, FINALLY replenish his strongest magic – now stronger than ever – at will!
Even the paucity of spells that he’d learned or invented up until now was no longer an issue. Between how easy his elevated intellect found spell creation now, and Nenet’s having memorized over a hundred spells that he could learn from her in turn, there was nothing stopping him from achieving the heights of spellcasting that had long been in view, but always far out of reach.
At long last, he had overcome his greatest weakness!
But as satisfying as that was, it wasn’t his arcane spellcasting that Lex was thinking about as the adlets – save for Ujurak – rose to their feet, laughing and cheering as they found themselves able to walk again. Instead, he was focused on the magic the Night Mare had given him as he turned to the smiling adlet alongside him. Solvei.
Thank you so much for this, Master! Beaming, she glanced between him and the others. It really means a lot to me. I just hope Silla’s okay back at our village. You’ll be able to restore his leg too, right?
Lex nodded. A regenerative spell is also among the magic the Night Mare has given me.
That’s great! He registered relief from her then. I’m so happy he’ll be able to keep living as a warrior!
Not happy enough.
That comment caused her to blink. Master?
I said that I would start securing your happiness by healing your tribe’s injuries, Lex reminded her. Not that I would end there.
I...don’t understand.
What was your grandmother’s name?
Huh?
Your grandmother’s name, repeated Lex. What was it?
Yura, she replied hesitantly. Master, what-
What about your parents?
My...you mean as Akna? They died when I was young, but my grandmother told me about them. My father was Tulok, and my mother was Alasie.
And now the names of the adlets who died fighting the yetis.
Her eyebrows rose. All of them?
All that you know.
I know them all. I had to preside over their being consumption after the fighting ended...Master, what’s this about?
I told you: securing your happiness. Now, tell me their names.
Giving a confused nod, she began to list everyone her tribe had lost. Minutes passed as she mentioned them one by one, and Lex registered melancholy from her as she began to add memories and personal anecdotes. But that would change soon enough...
...and that’s everyone, Master. Everyone we’ve lost since the fighting started.
Good. That will be sufficient.
She cocked her head, her sadness giving way to curiosity. Sufficient for what?
For the same thing I’m going to do once I get back to Vanhoover.
He said nothing else before withdrawing one of the largest diamonds that he’d placed in storage previously, holding it aloft as he channeled additional power – another capability that he was able to utilize to far and away greater heights than ever before – through himself as he began to cast another spell.
The last time he’d done this, it had taken all of his effort just to expand the spell to cover a small group instead of only one person. The effort had exhausted him to the point of injury, and had driven home how he wouldn’t be able to bring back all of the ponies that had died in the Elemental Bleeds, leaving him cursing his own limitations.
But those limitations bound him no longer.
That thought brought a smile to Lex’s face as he began casting the resurrection spell that the Night Mare had given him.
Although he no longer needed to utilize verbal components, he still had to recite aloud who he wanted to revive, and everyone fell silent as he began to speak the names that Solvei had told him, the assembled adlets looking at him in confusion and anxiety. But he ignored them as he listed each name, one by one, until he’d said them all.
And then he added one more, one that he’d learned from Solvei shortly after they’d first met, when she’d told him about what Bolverk had done to her family.
“Frode.”
Then the magic discharged, the diamond crumbled to nothing...
And a large crowd of adlets – and one winter wolf – appeared out of nowhere.
The joy Solvei felt a few moments later was everything Lex had hoped it would be.
Noble Bright kept his face down as he gave his report, wings folded at his side and one hoof placed over his heart. But in his chest, he could feel the organ beating faster than usual, reflecting his own anxiety over what was about to happen. It was enough to make him grimace inwardly, ashamed at his own lack of discipline.
A moment later a gentle laugh reached his ears. “Haven’t I told you that you don’t need to call me that when we’re alone?”
The voice was warm and mellifluous, like a warm breeze on a spring morning. Simply hearing it made the tension in his body ease, his heartbeat slowing back to normal. In spite of himself, he closed his eyes, suddenly reminded of when he’d been a colt, laughing with his parents as they’d all worked in the garden outside his childhood home. It was one of his happiest memories, and thinking of it always brought a smile to his face.
Even so, when he opened his eyes a moment later he didn’t raise his gaze, keeping his head down despite the overwhelming gratitude he felt in that moment.
No matter how much he cherished her, it would have been improper to treat his goddess with anything less than the utmost respect
“I beg your forgiveness, Sun Queen.”
He could almost hear her pout in response to his using her most common appellation. “I meant you could call me by my real name, not a different title.”
“I must regretfully decline. With your guests due to arrive soon, it is incumbent upon me to harden my resolve.” With reverent slowness, he stood upright, taking in the sight of the goddess.
As always, she took his breath away.
Appearing as an alicorn, she was currently half-again his size, though he knew she could change her proportions with a thought. It was simply because she didn’t care to look like she was looking down on worshipers – even here, in her own realm – that kept her of similar height to them. Even then, she was only slightly taller than they were because she knew it made some of her faithful uncomfortable if she didn’t give at least some indication that she was above them.
Her mane and tail looked as though they were made of sunbeams, each strand of golden hair shot through with a soft iridescence that seemed like they were reflecting some unseen rainbow. Her wings were multihued, with the feathers closest to her body being a deep blue that gradually warmed into a vibrant pink as they moved further out, showcasing the promise of a sky that was just lightening with the coming dawn. That promise was itself made manifest in her coat, the understated yellow that of the sun’s glow, warm and welcoming without being overpowering.
Only a few adornments served to enhance her resplendence. Gilded chaplets were woven through her hair and tail alike, as well as along her legs and over her horn, each shining in the soft light that the goddess exuded. They were complemented by the ribbons – with colors ranging from magenta to purple, each woven through with runes that listed the virtues she championed – that floated about her of their own accord, like silken clouds that drifted across the sky.
On occasion, one of her faithful would be lent one of those ribbons, using a fraction of the power contained within them to help work her will.
Noble Bright was very familiar with that, having been given that honor on two separate occasions. But as proud as those memories made him, he knew he couldn’t afford to dwell on them now.
Not with what was about to happen.
But once again, his tension melted away as the Sun Queen smiled at him, shaking her head a little. “Paladins,” she sighed wryly, and even that made Noble Bright’s discipline falter as he fought down a grin, pleased to have amused her.
But a moment later the goddess’s expression turned serious. “Noble Bright, I know that you’ve said that it’s your honor to be here, but I won’t think any less of you if you don’t wish to stay for this.”
He bowed, placing his hoof over his heart again. “To be present at a gathering of your pantheon is an accolade of the highest order. If you would have me, then it is my desire to remain at your side.”
The Sun Queen nodded, but her troubled expression remained as she sighed again, this time without the wry undercurrent. “You said the preparations are complete?”
“Indeed,” replied Noble Bright crisply. “The wards are all in place, and I’ve personally overseen the dispatch of two squads to keep the area protected. None shall approach who haven’t been expressly invited.”
This time, his words failed to have any effect on the goddess’s mood. Though that was to be expected; normally, there was no part of the Soothing Meadows – the Sun Queen’s divine realm – that was off-limits to those who dwelt there. But from time to time, she would cordon off the Synedrium, the portion of her realm set up as a council chamber where she received her most important guests. Doing so never failed to impinge on the goddess’s disposition, as though she found it upsetting to tell her faithful that there was a part of her home where they weren’t welcome.
Of course, none of the Sun Queen’s faithful held that against her. Everyone who dwelt in the glow of her divinity was more than happy to follow any orders she gave, and if she had told them never to go near the Synedrium again, Noble Bright couldn’t think of anyone who would have so much as questioned her instructions, let alone entertained the notion of disobeying.
Nevertheless, she goddess had also instructed him to lay down spells and set up patrols to make sure that no one could come anywhere near this corner of her realm. Noble Bright knew that it wasn’t distrust that motivated her to do so, but rather that she preferred not to take chances where the welfare of her faithful was concerned.
After all, many of the other pony gods were petty and cruel, and wouldn’t hesitate to torment a wayward member of their leader’s worshipers just to spite her.
As it was, Noble Bright himself was allowed to remain only because the Sun Queen had invited each god to bring a single retainer with them. It was an antiquated gesture, one that dated back to when the pantheon had been little more than a loose collection of pony deities. In those days, Noble Bright had heard, each god had gathered only in force, bringing small armies with them to be deployed in case the conference was a prelude to treachery or simply descended into violence. Now that the pantheon was united, it was tradition more than partisanship that had each god bring a single individual as backup.
In Noble Bright’s case, it was his first time meeting the other gods that followed the Sun Queen’s leadership, and try as he might he couldn’t help but be nervous. His role in the proceedings was to be little more than a silent sentinel, standing at attention in case his goddess needed anything of him. Still, he couldn’t help but feel on edge, anxious that he’d embarrass himself – or worse, her – in the course of the meeting.
But that mattered less than doing what he could to restore the smile to his goddess’s face. “If it pleases you, I could arrange for a contingent of angels to come-”
“Now that sounds like some quality entertainment.”
The voice that reached Noble Bright’s ears then was the single sexiest thing he’d ever heard, containing a playful lilt that was as teasing as it was enticing. It was all he could do to keep from gasping, and even then he immediately felt his face reddening at the innuendo, even as he turned to regard the new arrival.
And across the Synedrium strutted another alicorn, but one as different from the Sun Queen as could be imagined.
Her coat was a study in grey, contrasting with the stark white of her mane and tail. Jewelry had been threaded through them both, with flower-shaped ornaments containing emeralds, sapphires, pearls, and rubies all woven in with thin braids that were islands of order amidst a larger sea of unbound hair. Bangles of gold adorned each of her hooves, and silver piercings could be seen on each ear. The overall effect was stunning, her body looking like an exotic statue come to life.
But even beyond her appearance, the other mare’s every move was a languid dance. Curves bobbing in sinuating motions, Noble Bright swallowed as he realized that the newcomer was completely naked save for her jewelry. Even so, her wings and tail somehow managed to obscure anything...inappropriate, from his sight, no matter how she moved.
“And here I thought this little get-together was going to be boring,” grinned the mare. “But if there are angels coming, then I definitely will be too.”
Standing up, the Sun Queen smiled warmly, as though her anxiety had been dispelled by the gray mare’s arrival. “Kara, it’s good to see you again.” With one wing, she indicated the far side of the Synedrium. “You’re the first to arrive, so please, make yourself comfortable.”
“Oh, Sunny, you should know by now that I’m always comfortable.” Stretching, the love goddess – Noble Bright recognized her now, scowling as he recalled that she was one of the evil gods – gave a low moan, eyes closed and mouth open as she flared her wings before tucking them back at her sides. “But if you want to show me a good time, what do you say the two of us have some fun before your little meeting starts?”
“That would be lovely,” agreed the Sun Queen, still sounding completely at ease. “Would you prefer that I set up the senet board? Or is twenty-squares more to your liking?”
Those suggestions – both were games that children regularly played – were so at odds with Kara’s flirting that Noble Bright nearly laughed, watching as the love goddess snorted. “I prefer games of a more adult variety. But that’s fine; I can always just play with myself.”
Making her way across the chamber toward a recliner, Kara draped herself over it in a way that highlighted her body’s contours. Despite the tension having been broken, Noble Bright couldn’t help but watch as Kara brushed her hair back with one hoof, which then slid down her chest and over her belly, reaching lower-
“I like you.”
Noble Bright’s training kicked in, and he sprang back as someone whispered directly into his ear, reaching for his sword before he had time to think...
Only to stop in mid-motion as he caught a glimpse of the speaker.
The wedding dress that she wore covered her from head to hoof, completely hiding her identity. From the train that obscured her tail to the veil that hid her face, nothing could be seen of the mare underneath; even her tribe was a mystery, as the frills on the sides of the dress obscured where wings would have been if she was a pegasus, and the garlands between her ears were thick enough to make it impossible to tell if there was a horn underneath.
But far from being a vision of loveliness the way Kara was, this mare looked like something out of a horror show. Her dress was tattered and ripped, the ends of it torn and blackened, as though having been caught on fire. Further up, the fabric was marred with stains of a different sort, with bloody hoofprints splattered across her torso.
“Do you want to get married?” asked the bloody bride, stepping closer to him. Even more unnervingly, her voice was that of a child’s, sounding like a filly of less than ten years old. “I could be a good wife for you. All you’d have to do is give me babies. Lots and lots-”
“No, Honey,” sighed Kara. “We talked about this, remember? You have to be good and sit through this meeting first. Then I’ll find you a new husband.”
Drooping in place a little, “Honey” turned her veiled face toward Kara. “Okay,” she huffed, sounding as though she’d just been told she couldn’t have any candy before dinner. She walked past Noble Bright without another word, going to sit down in front of Kara’s recliner as though she’d completely forgotten he was there.
Swallowing, Noble Bright stared at her for just a moment before looking pointedly away from the love goddess’s horrific servitor.
He was starting to understand why the Sun Queen had been worried about his being here.
Making an effort to collect himself, he managed to maintain his poise as the other gods arrived. Luminace came next, adjusting her monocle as she shared a friendly greeting with her host, accompanied by a dragon with silvery eyes and cobalt scales shaped like shields. The Unspoken – the only male member of the pantheon – arrived next, his various parts of his body all changing shape independently of each other at differing intervals. But even that seemed pleasant compared to the protoplasmic blob that accompanied him, the thing’s gelatinous body looking as though it were trying to morph into multiple different creatures at once, but couldn’t sustain any of them longer than a few seconds.
When Blaze, the war goddess arrived, it was in a massive column of fire. Unlike the other goddesses, she was a pegasus rather than an alicorn, her hooves and tail aflame. But she was dwarfed by the towering monstrosity that came with her, a bipedal creature that Noble Bright had never seen before. Wreathed in flames that were white-hot, its entire body stank of burning meat, and the flesh that could be seen beneath the fires was of such a deep red it was almost black, as were the two large wings extending from its black. And yet no screams escaped from its protruding muzzle, an obsidian axe clenched in one hand and a long dagger in another.
The Moon Princess showed up next, her features a dark counterpart to the Sun Queen’s, which earned an approving nod from Noble Bright. The two goddesses were sisters, after all, and so their shared appearance was a show of unity. Alongside her was a pony he didn’t recognize, a pegasus like himself, but with the wings of a butterfly rather than feathery ones like his own.
The Night Mare was the last to arrive, sneering from beneath her armor as she strode forward, a leatherwing stallion with red eyes accompanying her.
It was then that the Sun Queen, who had quietly greeted each god as they’d shown up, looked around the Synedrium. “I believe we’re ready to get started...?”
The questioning tone in her voice came as she directed her eyes toward the Moon Princess, who nodded. “Lashtada will not be in attendance.”
“And Soft Whisper didn’t answer me when I sent her the invitation,” sighed Luminace, giving the Sun Queen an apologetic look.
“It’s alright,” replied the Sun Queen gently. “This is more than enough for a quorum.”
Smiling, she took another look around the chamber. “Before we begin, I’d like to thank all of you for attending. Right now, it’s more important than ever that our pantheon remains united, and shows of cooperation like this help to demonstrate-”
“Spare us your drivel,” spat the Night Mare. “You bleat about unity even as this pathetic pantheon continues to disintegrate under your so-called leadership. Or do you think your vapid prattling has disguised the turbulence that prompted this conference?”
“You’re one to speak of turbulence,” cut in the Moon Princess, her voice harsh as she glared daggers at the Night Mare.
“It’s because of your champion, Lex Legis, that our pantheon stands on the brink of annihilation!”
“It’s because of your champion, Lex Legis, that our pantheon stands on the brink of annihilation!”
The Moon Princess’s words sent a rush of tension through Noble Bright, and he settled into a ready position without thinking. He had no idea who “Lex Legis” was – his focus on the security of Soothing Meadows meant that he’d paid very little attention to the machinations of the other gods over the years; for all that they squabbled and schemed, every threat he’d ever faced in the defense of the realm had come from outside the pantheon – but if this so-called champion of the Night Mare really was a threat grave enough to put all of the gods in jeopardy, then that meant he was almost certainly a danger to the Sun Queen.
That wasn’t something that Noble Bright could forgive.
But his goddess had always been a beacon of compassion, and her next words proved that to be true once again. “Sister, don’t you think you might be overstating things just a little? Lex Legis’ elevation involved only trace amounts of divinity.”
“Sunny’s right,” drawled Kara, flipping a lock of white hair over her shoulder. “The way he is now, he can’t create a divine realm, draw strength from mortal worship, or grant anyone spells even if they prayed to him.”
Grinning, she gave the Night Mare a saucy grin. “I didn’t figure the Night Mare for being a tease, but the fact is she only gave him a little taste of godhead.”
Pausing for just a moment, Kara’s eyes widened in mock-embarrassment, her wings coming up to cover her mouth. “Oops! I meant to say ‘godhood.’ The ‘head’ part was what I gave him.”
Despite himself, Noble Bright shifted in place.
Across from him, Luminance looked equally uncomfortable as she adjusted her monocle, though Noble Bright suspected that it was for different reasons. “I agree that Lex Legis isn’t technically a god-”
“The elves don’t care about technicalities,” interrupted the Moon Princess, her voice harsh. “They’re not like the devils, making contracts with rigorous definitions and explicit stipulations. They care about the spirit of an agreement more than the letter of it, and that’s how they’ll react to this latest breach of our treaty with them!”
“So what?” sneered Blaze, stamping a flaming hoof, causing the ground beneath her to sizzle as it started to liquify. “Those willowy cowards didn’t raise an objection when I became the new goddess of war. And when that anemic little sorceress” – she pointed at Luminace then, her lip curling in disdain – “bungled her way into becoming a goddess, they were too scared to do anything except whine and complain.”
Spreading her flaming wings wide, a hungry grin crossed her face as Blaze looked at each of the other gods in turn. “They don’t want us to expand our pantheon? Let’s see them try to stop us!”
“Your eagerness for a fight does you credit as our goddess of war,” murmured the Sun Queen. “But don’t forget that your predecessor’s picking a fight with the elves is the reason that you were needed to assume her place.”
“Bah!” Blaze waved a wing, as if to knock the other goddess’s words away, and the gesture conjured up a flurry of ashes, fouling the air. “My ‘predecessor’ was so feeble that she couldn’t even prevent herself from being imprisoned by the elven gods’ mortal wizards! If they dared try that on me, I’d show them the difference between a petty squall and the fury of the sun!”
“That sounds like it’d be fun,” chortled the Unspoken, his voice a cacophonous riot of different tones, as though an entire zoo’s worth of animals were speaking in unison.
With a wave of his arm – which in the space of that single motion became a tentacle, then a fin, then a pedipalp, before turning into a furred forelimb again – the Unspoken changed the ashes into brightly-colored balls, bouncing randomly around the Synedrium. “But losing would be less fun. I don’t want to end up like Thundering Gale, stuck in some magical oubliette while my powers are siphoned away.”
“Precisely.” A soft glow lit the Moon Princess’s horn, the pale aura freezing the colored balls in place. Rising toward the roof of the Synedrium, they all lost their hue, becoming pale stars that twinkled as the ceiling darkened to the blackness of the night sky. “We have already tested the elves’ patience twice before. When Blaze was elevated to our ranks, we mollified them by explaining that we needed a war goddess for our own protection. When Luminance underwent apotheosis, we appeased them by pointing out that she’d done so on her own, without our backing.”
The soft light of her horn faded as she turned a dark look toward the Night Mare. “They won’t accept such excuses a third time, especially not when one of our own was instrumental in helping Lex Legis properly acclimate to the divinity he gained.”
Without waiting for a response, she turned her gaze to Kara next. “Particularly since it was one of your playthings who acquired it for him in the first place.”
The love goddess placed a hoof over her chest, looking hurt. “You’re blaming me for what that little strumpet did? Have you forgotten that I’m the one she betrayed, absconding with that book which I worked so hard to acquire?”
“You mean the last of Lashtada’s sacred scriptures?” asked the Moon Princess, her voice turning icy. “The sole remaining hope she has of renewing her faith on Everglow, which you stole from the adventurers who recovered it? That book?”
“That’d be the one,” answered Kara cheekily, seemingly not the least bit intimidated by the other goddess’s anger. Instead, she gave a helpless shrug, smiling. “And the fact that it’s now in one of Luminace’s stuffy old temples instead of locked away in my realm is all the proof you could need of my having been double-crossed.”
“You say that,” noted Luminace pointedly. “But you have to admit that it looks suspicious how you keep calling what happened a betrayal, but haven’t done anything to punish the perpetrator. It’s not as though she has some other god protecting her from you.”
That earned a throaty laugh from Kara, giving Luminace a look as though she was a child who’d just said something adorably precocious. “Oh, Lumin, your naïveté is so...virginal. Passion is something that’s better when it’s hot, but revenge is best when it’s cold. Trust me, that little harlot is going to get what she deserves for turning on me.”
“We’re getting off-topic.” The Sun Queen raised her head, and simply in doing so the darkness around the ceiling brightened, the stars gathered there fading away to nothing. “The fact remains that even if Lex Legis hasn’t become a true god, the elven pantheon is likely to view his ascendance as us working to bolster our ranks.”
“There’s something else we need to consider,” chimed in Luminace, giving the Sun Queen a worried look. “I was trying to say before: while I agree that Lex Legis isn’t technically a god, that might actually make things worse.”
“Worse for who?” gurgled the Unspoken, his jaw having changed to that of a shark.
“Us.” Looking around the chamber, Luminace glanced at each god’s attendant. “We’ve all made sure not to elevate even our most faithful servitors to even semi-divine status because we didn’t want the elves to think that we were building up our forces for a war after Thundering Gale was imprisoned. But part of the reason things never got that far was because it was their mortal wizards that did it, rather than the elven gods themselves.”
“You mean they hid behind the loophole that their pantheon took no direct action against ours, even though they were the ones who provoked her in the first place,” snorted Kara, before giving the Moon Princess a taunting smirk. “I guess the elves know how to play word games with agreements after all.”
The other goddess didn’t respond to the barb, instead keeping her eyes on Luminace. “Continue.”
Giving the Moon Princess a grateful nod, the smaller alicorn spoke again. “My point is, not only does Lex Legis’ ascension look like we’re trying to push the boundaries of our agreement not to raise any new gods, but by making him a titan – that’s the most accurate term for what he is now – it could be interpreted as us empowering him to try and rescue Thundering Gale.”
“That we’re raising up a non-divine champion of our pantheon to rescue the goddess that their pantheon’s non-divine champions imprisoned, is that it?” asked the Moon Princess. But she didn’t bother waiting for an answer before scoffing. “That should be easy enough to refute, since it would mean that the Night Mare actually cared about what happened to the previous war goddess.”
This time the Night Mare was the one to slam a hoof down, her eyes taking a dangerous gleam. “I was the one who stepped in to safeguard Thundering Gale’s realm after she was imprisoned, preventing it from being left defenseless while the rest of you were still trying to figure out what to do!”
The Moon Princess laughed at that, the sound low and mirthless. “You mean you tried to seize the mantle of goddess of war, hoping that it would give you enough power to overthrow me and then declare yourself head of the pantheon. Fortunately for the rest of us, Thundering Gale’s tenets of liberty, fellowship, and egalitarianism meant that her faithful rejected you completely.”
“If the Night Mare hadn’t stepped in, someone else would have,” interjected the Sun Queen gently. “That was why I chose to elevate Blaze, before our treaty with the elves was finalized. We needed a new war goddess, one whom Gale’s faithful were able to accept.”
“By the by,” added Blaze, shooting a wolfish grin at the Night Mare, “if you really want to prove that you don’t have designs on my title, you could go ahead and turn the Steel Storm over to me. I’m sure I could put my predecessor’s old toys to better use than you.”
“If you want Severance, Bulwark, Headhunter, or any of those other living weapons,” growled the Night Mare, “you’re welcome to try and take them.”
“I’m sure they’d leave of their own accord if you hadn’t brainwashed them,” scowled Luminace. “Even if they are constructs, they still have wills of their own. Securing Gale’s realm gave you no right to corrupt them into your service the way you did.”
“You’re one to speak of having no rights, considering how badly you’ve failed in the task we gave you.” Her voice dripping with derision, the Night Mare looked down at Luminace with naked contempt. “You’ve been a goddess for two centuries, and in that time you’ve made no progress on finding out how mortal wizards were able to trap a deity.”
The dragon Luminace had brought with her bristled at that, but stopped as the small alicorn held up a hoof, giving the Night Mare an upset look. “I’ve told you before, the elves’ ‘high magic’ is one of their people’s most treasured secrets! The only ones who’d be likely to know about it are one of the other great pantheons of the multiverse, but the elves already have alliances with most of them, and no one wants to jeopardize that for a provincial pantheon like ours!”
The Unspoken rolled his eyes, one of which was currently compound and the other covered by a nictating membrane. “Here we go...”
“The elves have working relationships with the dwarves, the Tuatha, and the Aesir, and so none of them want to go prying into how their magic works! The Seelie Court has been the elves’ allies since as long as anyone can remember! The Olympians’ planar abode is right next to the elves’, so they don’t want to upset their neighbors!”
“She’s so cute when she gets flustered,” snickered Kara. “I knew there was a passionate mare somewhere inside that bookish exterior.”
“The Ennead doesn’t have any sort of formal relationship with the elves, but after what happened with Apep, they don’t trust us either! The Celestial Bureaucracy won’t talk to me until they decide whether or not to formally recognize our pantheon, and last time I checked they still hadn’t even begun to make a decision! And the Vedic gods are still rejecting all contact outside of their own pantheon!”
Slumping in place, as though the rant had taken all of her energy, a defeated tone entered Luminace’s voice. “That doesn’t leave me with very many options. Some of the evil gods might know, but asking them would be leaving myself open to blackmail, since they know we don’t want the elves to know we’re investigating their magic.”
“Which wouldn’t happen if you presented yourself as a goddess to be feared, rather than trying to make friends with everyone you meet,” admonished Blaze.
Luminace gave the war goddess a reproachful look, but didn’t bother raising to the bait, instead finishing her report. “A lot of the smaller racial pantheons don’t even have a god of magic for me to liaise with. The Monitors are only concerned with safeguarding the sanctity of time. The archomentals don’t know about non-elemental magic and don’t care either way. The inevitables, archons, angels, and agathions are all more worried about starting a war than freeing Gale, and keep advising that we negotiate for her release rather than trying to rescue her ourselves. I’m actually desperate enough that I’m considering contacting a nous, even though their focus on psionics means that the chances of them knowing anything about elven magic are nil...”
Stretching one wing out, the Sun Queen wrapped it around Luminace, pulling the smaller goddess to her chest. “No one blames you, Luminace. We gave you an impossible assignment, and asked you to do it at the same time that you were trying to grow your own religion. Besides, this isn’t why we’ve gathered here now.”
Releasing Luminace, the Sun Queen looked around the chamber. “What should we do about Lex Legis?”
Silence fell then, as the gods all glanced at each other, waiting for someone to say something.
But the one who spoke next wasn’t one of their number.
“TOO MUCH TALK!!!”
The towering hulk of burning flesh that Blaze had brought with her roared at the top of its lungs, the behemoth raising its weapons over its head as it bellowed. “IF THIS MORTAL IS A PROBLEM, JUST KILL HIM!!! NO ONE IS TROUBLESOME WHEN THEY’RE DEAD!!! I’LL DO IT IF YOU ALL LACK THE COURAGE-”
The thing’s speech ended abruptly as it suddenly found itself face-down in a crater in the ground, with no transition between its ranting and its sudden defeat. But that didn’t surprise Noble Bright in the least, since Blaze was standing atop the fallen giant, an irritated look on her face.
One did not upset a goddess of war lightly.
“I didn’t bring you here because I value your opinion, Vutok,” snarled Blaze, pressing a hoof against the back of the fallen creature’s head. “Speak without my leave again, and I’ll sever your limbs and leave you hanging you from the viper trees for the next hundred years.”
Beneath her, the monstrous thing she’d called Vutok trembled, but Noble Bright could see that it was rage, rather than fear, that made the creature quiver. “MY...APOLOGIES...”
Snorting, Blaze stepped out of the smoking crater she’d left, turning her attention back to the other gods. “Idiot that he is, Vutok’s idea has merit. Lex Legis can’t be a problem for the elves if he’s dead.”
The Night Mare rounded on Blaze immediately, blue fire gathering along her horn. “Do you truly believe I’ll allow you to kill him?”
Noble Bright reached for his sword, anticipating a fight...and noticed that the pegasus that the Moon Princess had brought with her – a stallion whose coat was solid black, though his mane and tail were white – was whispering in the goddess’s ear, butterfly wings opening and closing softly. A moment later she gave him a look of consideration before nodding once, causing the stallion to smile as the goddess spoke. “Would you allow another?”
The question earned her a scowl from the Night Mare. “What?”
“Kryonex is the demigod whose divinity your champion availed himself of, correct? I’m given to understand that he’s currently preparing to unleash his revenge upon the one who took it” – she glanced at Kara for a moment, and when the goddess made no move to say anything, went back to looking at the Night Mare – “and that Lex Legis will doubtlessly move to defend her when he does.”
The Night Mare’s eyes narrowed. “And you want me to do nothing while another god tries to kill my champion?”
“Kryonex has a legitimate cause of retaliation against Adagio Dazzle,” noted Luminace. “And there’s room for him to press a claim against Lex Legis as well, especially if he tries to interfere with the Siren’s punishment.”
“You perfidious-”
The Night Mare’s rant stopped abruptly as she whipped her head around to stare at the leatherwing she’d brought with her, and who Noble Bright belatedly realized was giving his goddess an intense look. The two of them stared at each other for several moments, before – reacting to some unspoken signal – the leatherwing smiled and bowed, breaking eye contact at last.
Grunting at the obsequious display, the Night Mare directed her attention to the Sun Queen. “If my champion overcomes Kryonex, then I want him to have this pantheon’s full support, regardless of what the elves say.”
The leader of the pantheon tilted her head slightly, as though considering that. “Does anyone here object to that idea?”
Again, silence fell, and this time Blaze was the one to break it. “If he can outfight a demigod, then I’d say he’s worth keeping. We’re going to go to war against those pointy-eared ecofreaks eventually, and the more we have on our side then, the better.”
“I...suppose the Night Mare’s idea is a worthwhile compromise,” murmured Luminace. “It’s not like Kryonex has any allies who’ll come to avenge him if Lex Legis defeats him.”
Kara sat up, as though preparing to add her own opinion, but she was interrupted as the bloody bride in front of her turned around, cocking her head. “Is Lex Legis a strong pony?” she asked, voice lilting upward in child-like curiosity. “Would he marry me? Give me lots of babies?”
“Honeymoon Trap, I told you, we’ll discuss finding you a husband when this conference is over,” admonished Kara, her voice unusually stern before she sighed, looking at the other gods. “I prefer to make love, not war. But I suppose a fight is the quickest way to settle things.”
“It’s certainly more entertaining,” added the Unspoken, his tail changing between that of a lemur, a lizard, an eagle, and a silverfish as it swished behind him, his protoplasmic companion making a blorping sound in what Noble Bright could only guess was agreement. “Though we could always just ask The Author-”
“NO!” chorused the other gods in unison.
Not that Noble Bright blamed them. The Sun Queen didn’t speak of her often, but his goddess had made it clear to him over the years that no one in the pantheon – save only for the Unspoken, being the mad god of chaos – wanted to involve the creator goddess if they could help it...though why that was, the Sun Queen had never said.
As it was, the mention of The Author was enough to make even the Moon Princess wince. “Fine. If Lex Legis can overcome Kryonex, I’ll make no further objections to his current status...though I doubt the elves will be so forgiving, even if we present them with a united front.”
“Then we’re in agreement,” announced the Sun Queen with a warm smile, as though they’d all been having a polite discussion rather than a raucous argument that had almost come to blows. “We’ll observe Lex Legis’ confrontation with Kryonex, but otherwise do nothing to interfere with it. If he wins, then he’ll have our support, and if not...”
She glanced at the Night Mare, and although Noble Bright could see the dark goddess grinding her teeth, she said nothing, allowing the Sun Queen to finish uninterrupted.
Lex knew that his spell would fail before he’d finished casting it.
That was another aspect of his newfound existence that he was still growing used to. The enhancement of his senses wasn’t simply limited to sharpening the faculties he already possessed, nor simply expanding their range of perception. His awareness now extended to entirely new modes of understanding, opening him to avenues of information that he was still figuring out how to react to.
Particularly with regard to his ability to perceive the past and future.
His trans-temporal awareness was sharpest in his immediate vicinity, both in terms of space and time. Concentrating on an area too distant, or too far from what he perceived to be the present, and it dropped off sharply, to the point of being almost completely muted. Even then, certain things seemed to resonate – for lack of a better term – across the gulf of time, coming into his mind as unfiltered knowledge rather than being information gathered through his sight or hearing.
But in his direct proximity, he was completely aware of everything that was going to happen roughly six seconds before it actually did. Nor did his acting to change things abrogate that knowledge, as his awareness instantaneously updated itself to reflect any alterations to the future that he made. He could even cycle through the possibilities simply by altering his intentions, examining how things would change based on his own potential reactions, letting him look through myriad potential futures as fast as his augmented cognition could handle and find the most favorable one...at least with regard to what would happen in the next six seconds.
Which was why he hadn’t known that the spell he was using to summon Nisha – requiring several minutes to cast – would fail to produce her until right before he’d completed it.
It was a stark reminder that, although his perspicacity now far transcended anything that mortals were capable of, there was still a great deal that was beyond his understanding, since by all rights his spell should have worked.
He’d intended to summon Nisha again in order to reevaluate his initial appraisal of the purple-eyed wolf. Although she’d been presumptuous in the extreme to ask for a soul-bond with him in exchange for the small task he’d given her, the fact remained that the Night Mare had sent her to him for a reason. Besides being a skilled tracker, Nisha had also possessed tulpas of her own, and almost certainly had information about aristeia that he could have used during his battle with Sissel.
But even though he had little need for her talents or her knowledge now, Lex couldn’t overlook the fact that the Night Mare had likely intended for him to make Nisha another servitor the way he had Solvei. Which meant that the goddess had expected that he’d have a use for her beyond the immediate issues he’d faced at the time. In his anger – completely out of proportion to the offense Nisha had committed, he knew now – Lex had spurned that, despite all that the Night Mare had done for him.
Now that she’d elevated him to immortality, he didn’t intend to make that mistake again...except, for whatever reason, he apparently wouldn’t have the chance.
The question now was why.
It wasn’t as though the shadowy lupine was spurning him. The spell worked by making a request directly to the Night Mare herself, asking her to send him one of her servants, and he’d made sure to specifically ask for Nisha by name. The subject of the summons herself should have had no say in whether or not she was sent out.
Which meant that either the Night Mare had rejected his request, or something had happened and Nisha wasn’t available to send.
Neither possibility was one that Lex liked.
Master, is-
Nothing’s wrong, Nenet, he answered telepathically, having foreseen her question the same way he did everything else, now. Continue with the next spell.
Okay! Her response came with a mixture of relief and happiness, likely because she wasn’t ready to leave the ice mansion that Solvei had created yet. This next one is called “major image.” It creates a four-point illusion of your choice, having visual, audible, olfactory, and thermal effects!
“Great One, may I approach you?”
It was a simple matter for Lex to bifurcate his awareness, giving his full attention to the spell structure that Nenet was diagramming for him while simultaneously turning to regard the individual kneeling a respectful distance from him.
She looked similar to the other adlets that he’d brought back to life, clad in the same simple underclothes and cloak that he’d conjured onto their bodies – remembering how upset Akna had been by her nakedness when they were in Darkest Night – after resurrecting them.
Doing so had been a fairly simple affair, now that he was able to not only invent new rituals with a few seconds’ consideration, but could perform them in a fraction of the time that he used to, able to grasp much larger amounts of ambient magic. Since transmuting things was simpler than creating something stable and enduring out of nothing, Lex had sacrificed a small diamond in the process, the stone’s high compatibility for magic making it more than sufficient to garb everyone.
After that, the resurrected adlets – and Frode, Solvei’s winter wolf father, whom Lex had left unclad – had milled about in confusion, trying to figure out what had happened. They hadn’t been alone in that regard, as Yotimo, Toklo, and the other survivors had all been even more shocked at what he’d done than their reborn kin. Even Solvei had been stunned, staring open-mouthed at the sudden return of so many people whom she’d previously thought to be gone forever.
But her disbelief had slowly turned to awe, and then delirious joy, as she realized the full extent of what he’d done.
Glancing at her now, Lex watched as she spoke to her parents – Tulok and Alasie on one side of her, and Frode on the other – arms waving animatedly as she gestured at herself, and then at him, before she changed into her winter wolf form, prompting a gasp from the three of them. The only one missing was her grandmother, and even she hadn’t gone far, being the one who was now kneeling in the snow waiting for his permission to come closer.
Glancing back at the first adlet who’d worked up the courage to approach him, Lex sighed inwardly. He wasn’t particularly interested in whatever the old shaman wanted – there was a lot that needed to be done before his confrontation with Adagio – but he was more concerned with letting Solvei hang onto the happiness she was currently experiencing, and his trans-temporal sense was telling him that would be best served by indulging her grandmother.
“What do you want, Yura?”
Shivering at his use of her name, Solvei’s grandmother nevertheless bowed deeply before straightening up and walking toward him. When she’d gotten to within arm’s reach of him, she returned to a kneeling position, keeping her face pointed toward the ground as she held both hands up.
Able to foresee what she’d do if he reciprocated the gesture, Lex reached a claw toward her. Sure enough, she murmured her thanks before reverently grasping his talons and pressing her forehead against them in what he could only assume was a gesture of supplication. “Great One, I am thankful for my life, and for the lives of my kin.”
Releasing his claw, she placed her right hand over her heart as she continued. “My granddaughter has told me of the deeds you’ve performed, slaying Hvitdod and healing those who were to be sacrificed to him, all after our people’s scouting party insulted you. Know that, on my word as the eldest shaman of our tribe, we will revere your name for all time alongside that of Aselu, who delivered us from bondage.”
“Your gratitude is unnecessary,” replied Lex disinterestedly, glancing back at where Solvei – now back in adlet form – was using her powers to create a rose made of ice, the frozen petals opening into bloom before she handed it to her mother, who laughed in delight. “Panuk didn’t deserve to die for what he did, and slaying him made Akna’s pain worse. To correct those wrongs, and to reward her for all that she’s done for me, I wanted to give her this.”
“Yes...about Akna...”
“No.”
“Huh?”
“No,” repeated Lex, knowing what the old adlet was about to say and wanting to truncate any discussion of such a pointless request. “You lack the qualities necessary to take her place at my side, nor would I accept such an arrangement even if I could.”
“But she’s so young!” blurted Yura, looking up at him. Despite having a grown granddaughter, there were few indicators of her age to be seen on her countenance, her features taut and her eyes sharp. “Please, Great One, allow her to return to our tribe! Let her get to know the parents you so graciously gave back to her, and I swear to serve you faithfully in her stead! My powers as a shaman are greater than hers! With your blessing-”
“The blessing comes from the Night Mare, my goddess,” corrected Lex coldly. “And as I said, removing my bond with Akna in favor of another is both impossible and undesirable. No amount of pleading on your part will change that.”
Lowering her head, Yura let out a ragged breath. “I...I understand. Please forgive my outburst.”
She fell silent then, and Lex paused to consider what he could say that would end this without upsetting Solvei...only to pause as his foresight informed him that one particular comment would be particularly beneficial. “However, if you wish to pray to the Night Mare for Akna’s release, I won’t object.”
Yura’s head snapped up, her eyes wide as she looked at him. “Really?! If I asked your goddess to let her go-”
“That would be between you and her,” cut in Lex. “I won’t begrudge you doing so, though I doubt you’d be able to convince her to overrule my wishes with regard to keeping Akna by my side. But it’s your prerogative to try and prove me wrong.”
Yura didn’t hesitate, holding out a hand out again, and again Lex put his claw in it, letting her press it to her forehead. “I am deeply grateful, to you and to the Night Mare. If it’s not too much to ask...please instruct me so that I may worship her properly.”
“I have more important tasks to perform,” snorted Lex, though he couldn’t help but smirk as he did so. Even if he couldn’t understand others, he could at least figure out how to direct conversations with them where he wanted now that he could discern their immediate reactions to potential responses on his part. “But if you truly wish to know the Night Mare better, there’s a shrine near your tribe’s village...”
It was several minutes later when Yura finally returned to Solvei, the latter still speaking so animatedly to her three parents that she honestly didn’t seem to have noticed her grandmother’s absence. That would likely make it somewhat awkward when Yura asked her about the Shrine of the Starless Sky later, but that couldn’t be helped; while Lex had told her a great deal about the Shrine and its inhabitants, he’d deliberately withheld its exact location from Yura, telling her only that she’d need to have Akna take her there.
Now all that was left was to make sure that the two of them would have the opportunity to make the trip...even if that meant interrupting the joy Solvei was currently experiencing.
Solvei.
Master! Turning to grin at him, her tail wagging so fast it was almost a blur, Solvei’s emotional state immediately shifted from happiness to love. Thank you SO much! I don’t know what to say! This is the most incredible-
Solvei, as soon as you’ve recovered your ability to change into aerial form, I want you to lead everyone here back to your village. I’ll come and retrieve you there after I’ve dealt with Adagio.
Her heartfelt gushing came to a screeching halt, and he saw her parents and grandmother exchange confused looks as she started at him from several dozen yards away. You...don’t want me to come with you when you confront her?
I want you to help your tribe adjust to having so many of their relatives suddenly reappear. The reunion is likely going to be a turbulent one. You have the power, and the authority, to make sure that things don’t descend into chaos.
But what if you need my help?
Again, a quick perusal of her emotional reactions to various replies let him pick the best one. Then I’ll summon you immediately.
As he’d foreseen, that seemed to mollify her. You promise?
I would never lie to you. If the situation calls for it, I’ll make sure to call you to my side.
Alright, she sighed. I just wish I could do more for you. I was barely any help against Hvitdod.
It was because of your cryomancy that I won that fight. And you’re the reason we overcame Sissel. You’ve always been a help to me, Solvei, whether you’re right next to me or not. That won’t change if you spend some time back at your village.
Master... Across their link, he sensed her worry abate, embarrassment and love replacing it. Alright! I guess a little while back home won’t be too bad! With how strong you are now, you’ll probably be able to overwhelm Adagio before she knows what’s happening!
She paused then, glancing at Frode before grimacing. Um, Master, about my dad? I mean, as Solvei...
I can augment another short-range teleportation spell to send him home, the same way I did for Fail Forward. You can visit him there once the situation with the adlets has stabilized.
She grinned at him again. Thank you, Master! I’ve never been happier to be your Solvei. And your Akna. She threw that last part out there with a wink, earning another round of concerned glanced from her assembled family.
He answered that last part with a small smile and a nod of his own, before turning his attention back to the remaining tasks that needed to be completed, knowing that there was a great deal to be done. Yotimo, Toklo, and the other captive adlets needed to have their ability to take aerial form restored. Everyone here would need to be given food to bring back with them so that their sudden return wouldn’t herald a famine. He needed to learn as many of Nenet’s spells as he could, as well as developing as many derivative spells as possible. And of course, he had to continue adapting to his new powers as best he was able in the time that he had.
But just for a moment, Lex allowed himself to indulge in a feeling of relief that he’d been able to get Solvei to agree not to accompany him when he faced Adagio.
While it was difficult to perceive more than a few seconds into the future, certain things resonated enough such that he could still pick up certain bits of knowledge.
Such was the case with a certain insight that he’d already had: that something bad was going to happen when he went to face the Siren...some sort of danger far and away beyond anything he’d ever faced before. Greater than Xiriel, or Sissel, or even Hvitdod.
And for whatever reason, Lex could tell that the worst possible thing he could do was bring Solvei with him to face that danger.
Ujurak’s rebuke was mumbled, his eyes downcast and his ears flat against his skull. Lex wasn’t sure if the adlet – who had separated himself from the rest of his kind, leaning against a nearby clump of frozen clouds – was being so truculent because he was frightened or if he was still in pain from his unhealed injuries. Nor did he particularly care.
He’d chosen Ujurak to be the first to have his ability to take aerial form restored because he hadn’t wanted to interrupt Solvei again. Right now, she was explaining to her resurrected kin everything that had happened, with Toklo, Yotimo, and the latter’s warriors chiming in at various points. Across their link, he was aware that Solvei was enjoying herself, and he wanted to let that continue for as long as possible.
Which meant that Ujurak, who had segregated himself from where the rest of his tribe was raptly listening to Solvei and the others recounting their adventures, would be the first to have the curse Sissel placed on him removed.
Except that the stubborn fool was still refusing to let himself be treated.
That wasn’t something Lex could ignore, since it went against his moral code to use magic on someone without their consent. No matter that it would have been to Ujurak’s benefit to simply ignore his wishes; he had an inherent right to personal autonomy in that regard. And while there were exigent circumstances that allowed for those rights to be ethically abrogated – the most obvious one being a fight against an enemy – none of those exceptions applied here.
Gritting his teeth, Lex briefly considered letting the adlet stay the way he was, wounded and crippled, unable to join the rest of his people when they returned to their village tomorrow, that being the earliest that Solvei had told him she’d be able to change into her aerial form again. But he strongly suspected that at least a few of Ujurak’s fellows – the other warriors whom Solvei had risked her life alongside him to save – would have refused to leave if this idiot insisted on remaining behind, something which would likely start a domino effect, since from what he could tell several of Yotimo’s people had loved ones who’d been among the resurrected...including Yotimo himself, at least if the female adlet clinging to him and gently stroking Toklo’s hair was any indication.
Worse, Lex couldn’t find a possible future where he convinced this idiot to stop being foolish. At least, not in the span of the next six seconds. Which meant that, just like he had so often when he’d been mortal, all he could do was guess what to say-
Lex’s ruminating ended abruptly as his foresight informed him that there was a way to get Ujurak to comply. One so ridiculously simple, he’d overlooked it in his mental examination of potential futures. It had only been because of his mild frustration that he’d countenanced the possibility at all, but if it would get things done...
“I want you to calm down,” ordered Lex abruptly as he reached out and grabbed Ujurak’s chin, making the stubborn fool look him in the eyes, “and allow me to restore you.”
“Why should...”
Just as he’d foreseen, Ujurak’s rebuttal died in mid-utterance, the tension draining from his posture all at once. His ears slowly rose back up, and he let out a slow breath, jaw hanging slack as his eyes became hooded. “...okay.”
Cocking a brow at how easy that had been, Lex momentarily pondered why such a simple and direct order had worked where – according to his trans-temporal awareness – more nuanced attempts at reasoning would have failed. But he put those musings aside almost immediately, knowing that it was pointless.
That kind of understanding had always been beyond him, and always would be.
Instead, he transferred his claw to Ujurak’s shoulder, focusing on repairing the adlet’s physical wounds first. The large warrior made only the slightest grunt as his injuries healed, showing no other reaction besides his tail starting to wag slowly.
A few seconds later, satisfied that he’d repaired the adlet’s physical injuries, Lex turned to the curse.
Nenet had told him about it; how Sissel had used a thaumaturgical spell to replicate the same thing Lex did with his dark magic. Laying curses had come easily to Lex ever since he’d grafted King Sombra’s horn onto himself, but his own notwithstanding, he’d never had any particular method of removing them.
It was time to see if that still held true now that he was a titan.
Looking Ujurak over with his supernatural senses, it didn’t take Lex long to find what he was looking for.
The spell that Sissel had used to place the curse was still there, but it took only a moment’s examination for Lex to determine that it had no readily-apparent weaknesses. Although she hadn’t been using aristeia when she’d cast it, Sissel had still been a potent spellcaster in her own right, and the underlying structure of the spell was both intricate and powerful. Resolute and self-sustaining, it wasn’t something that could be easily undone.
Not by mortals, at least.
The corners of Lex’s lips turned upward then, and he idly noted that Ujurak didn’t seem the least bit bothered by that now, reaching out with his will and grasping Sissel’s spell.
Then he began to squeeze, putting more and more pressure on it. Already he could feel it starting to give, the sturdy architecture filling with cracks-
And then Lex stopped, curiosity causing him to raise a brow as his foresight told him what was about to happen.
Who dares?! screeched a voice six seconds later. Who dares to interfere?!
The communication wasn’t quite telepathic. Instead, it was more like the magic of the spell itself was vibrating in a way that approximated words coming from it-, no, coming through it. Curses weren’t simple applications of directed energy; they required an intelligence to monitor and guide them.
According to the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, the powers of the Outer Planes were the most common recipients for such things. While Lex knew that the Night Mare or one of her divine servitors handled his own curses, the book’s author had explained that other creatures – often daemons, devils, and demons, among many others – were more than happy to carry out the hateful wishes of mortals. To them, getting to project their powers into the physical world to cause anguish and suffering was a source of both entertainment and satisfaction; they got to make the living world a little more like the vicious realms that they called home.
Even the so-called exemplars of righteousness – angels, archons, and others of their ilk – would empower curses in certain circumstances. At least according to the Libram’s author, such creatures were just as likely as their infernal counterparts to enforce their will upon the Material Plane, punishing those they deemed wicked in their eyes. All it took was a mortal to create the channel, and if the cause met with their inscrutable values, they’d take it up.
But Lex doubted that it was any such heavenly creature shrieking at him now.
I dare, responded Lex quietly, and the same way his will had been able to grasp the thread of magic itself, he knew it was carrying his response back to whoever was on the other side. Lex Legis. Slayer of dragons. Unmaker of alicorns. Champion of the Night Mare. Titan. I dare.
If the voice on the other end of the connection was impressed by his list of titles, it didn’t show it. Lex was already aware of its blistering response before it even began to reply. You are titanic only in your stupidity, for I am Dorixias! Fear me, the suspiridaemon held highest in the esteem of Norlakas, servant of Ajids, the harbinger who rides as the deacon of Szuriel the Warbringer! Tremble and beg for my forgiveness, lest I give your name to my master, who will see you flensed for eternity!
A low, rumbling laugh filled Lex’s chest then. Szuriel was, according to the Libram, one of the greatest daemons...but that title afforded him only as much power as a demigod. Someone like that, he knew, wouldn’t be eager to pick a fight with the Night Mare.
But the odds of it ever coming to that, he knew, were nil. Not with how conniving and backbiting the daemonic hierarchy was. By all means, broadcast your incompetence to your master, taunted Lex. Let them know that you couldn’t even sustain a simple curse without courting failure. See if they put themselves at risk to avenge your ineptitude, rather than replacing you with someone more capable.
I am more than capable of drawing the breath from your lungs such that you won’t even be able to scream as the flesh is flayed from your body! raged Dorixias. Your limbs shall be severed and their bones carved into stakes used to nail you to the ground! Your ribs will be laid bare, and your heart pricked with needles such that each beat will make you beg for death! Your eyes will have their lids cut away so that you cannot help but watch as everyone you care for is put through tortures to make your own seem tame, their agonized howls tormenting you for eternity!
Your threats are a credit to your kind, Dorixias, sneered Lex. Pathetic, worthless, and inconsequential.
The howl that the suspiridaemon gave then was one of impotent fury. You sniveling worm! I’ll-
Scream. Then beg. Then die.
You think you frighten me?! I have witnessed fates worse than your puny mind can possibly comprehend, and have laughed at them all! You have nothing that can-, wait...what’s happening?! What are you doing?!
What you never could: delivering on my promises.
This is impossible! You can’t-, no! Stop! STOP IT! NOOOOO!!!
Lex didn’t answer, his eyes glowing with an intensity to match his horn as he lashed out at the daemon.
The link between Dorixias and Ujurak was designed to operate in a downstream manner, allowing the former to spread its malignance to the latter, who should have been helpless to do anything about it. But the same way Lex was able to grasp that connection through his will, he was also capable of manipulating it, forcing his own power into the link and making it flow in reverse.
It was much the same as what he’d done when he’d retrieved Woodheart from Sissel’s grasp during his first meeting with the snow giant. By enlarging her connection with Littleknight, he’d been able to make her familiar have more metaphysical weight than the druid. Once he had, it had been a relatively simple task to tug on that connection, causing her to teleport to the al-miraj’s side.
He could have done something similar now, bringing Dorixias here and then simply tearing him apart. But that ran a risk, however small, of putting Ujurak and everyone else here in danger. Far better to find a way to simply use the connection as an attack vector and destroy the disgusting creature in its planar abode.
Fortunately, he’d had plenty of time to confirm that he could do that, thanks to Dorixias’ unhinged ranting. And what he’d found was that while the rigid structure of a spell couldn’t be sent across the channel, raw power could be.
And that was something Lex had in spades now.
STOP! The connection shuddered as Dorixias tried to close it, but Lex kept it open, the link wriggling like a fishing line with a catch. Release me, I beseech you! I have a fortune in riches! Troves of magic! Eldritch secrets! All yours if you spare me!
As I foresaw, replied Lex evenly. First you screamed. Then you begged. Now it’s time for what comes next.
And with that, he increased the amount of dark magic he was pushing through the link.
Before becoming a titan, he had been able to use the magic of his horn to manifest his own sense of isolation in multiple ways, and that was still true. But now, he could refine that pathos in myriad different forms, including the nocuous malevolence that he was forcing onto Dorixias right now. It was an assault on the spirit, rather than the body, but that made it perfect for this situation.
Daemons, like all creatures of the Outer Planes, were spiritual entities.
With one last anguished wail, Lex felt Dorixias’ presence fade, the link collapsing a moment later as it lost its anchor. Sissel’s spell followed it immediately thereafter, the magic harmlessly imploding now that it had nothing to sustain.
A quick glance at Ujurak was all that Lex needed to determine that the adlet’s power to change into his aerial form was no longer being suppressed.
This was good, he decided. Far more so than if he’d simply ruptured the connection directly. Daemons were creatures that served to do nothing but corrupt the natural order, stealing souls from their rightful afterlives and putting them to nefarious use. To be able to destroy them while restoring the adlets was a boon for whoever those daemons would have victimized next.
That, and it made the beast inside of him quite pleased; even if it had been done remotely, it had still been quite gratifying to tear a challenger apart.
Looking at where Ujurak was still staring forward blankly, Lex glanced from him back to where Solvei was continuing to regale her people with the exploits they’d shared, his eyes sliding to Yotimo and Toklo a second later. Both of them, and the other warriors who’d accompanied them, were still cursed.
But something much worse than a curse was about to befall the daemons vexing them.
Her father’s question made Solvei smirk, pride rushing through her. Everything was, at that moment, absolutely perfect.
It had taken quite some time to bring everyone up to speed on what had happened, and by the time she’d finished she’d been ready to collapse. In the course of one day – one single day! – she’d had to deal with Sissel and her band of killers, Hvitdod, unexpected confrontations with two different goddesses, Lex’s shocking ascension, and then everyone she’d ever lost suddenly being brought back to life. It had been enough to make her want to lie down and sleep for a year.
Fortunately, her beloved master must have sensed that she was physically and emotionally drained, because – after having freed Toklo and the others from the curses preventing them from taking to the wind – he’d conjured up the most magnificent feast she’d ever laid eyes on. Long trestle tables piled high with cheeses and jellies, sweetened fruits and spiced vegetables, warm cider and cold milk, and so many other foods that she didn’t recognize. He’d even conjured up a set of softly-glowing orbs, shining with different colors to counteract the fading daylight.
The atmosphere had changed at that point. Prior to then, everyone had been in a daze over what had happened, both Yotimo’s warriors and their resurrected brethren shocked at being reunited. But the smell of food had seemed to strike a chord in everyone, driving home that they really were alive again. As they’d feasted, they’d started to rejoice, with bouts of laughter and cheering springing up, until the entire affair had turned into an impromptu celebration.
At some point, music had broken out, plates and utensils being repurposed as makeshift drums while others had taken to clapping their hands between bites, and some had put off eating in favor of singing. One table had been cleared off completely, turned into a stage for several of her kin to dance upon. Others were too joyous to sit still, setting up games ranging from arm-wrestling to relay races as they fully took in the fact that they were all alive and together again.
Of course, Solvei hadn’t had the energy to participate in any of the games, and she’d been too tired to take up any of the offers to dance, of which there’d been quite a few. Instead, she’d retired to the far end of one table with her parents, who’d wanted to talk to her more about everything they’d missed. So far they’d talked about her time training to be a shaman, what had happened when the yetis had attacked, and her initial discovery of the Night Mare’s shrine, before coming back around to her adventures with Lex.
“Belligerence only allows Master, and those connected to him, to touch it,” she explained, raising the weapon, its runes glinting in the soft light. “So when I made Sissel grasp it, its barbs spread out, piercing her heart.”
The comment made her parents share a look, their expressions turning pensive before her mother cleared her throat. “Akna, about that...”
Solvei groaned, but she was smiling as she did it, putting Belligerence over her shoulder. “If this is a lecture about how a shaman shouldn’t be putting herself in danger-”
“It’s not that,” interrupted Tulok. “There are times when even a shaman has to fight, and it sounds like you’ve already been through more than any warrior since Aselu himself.”
Alasie nodded. “It’s just that...we’re deeply grateful to have been brought back to life, and nothing will ever change that, but after everything you told us...”
“How you’re following a god instead of our ancestors,” added Tulok, “merging your soul with an unatattik, and the way you talk about having a ‘master’ now...”
“We’re concerned, is all,” concluded Alasie.
Solvei smile slowly fell away, trying to process what she was hearing. “...what?”
“You’re our only daughter,” explained Tulok quickly. “And while being able to see you all grown up like this is a gift we can never repay, we’re still worried about you.”
“You’ve already fought more battles than some full-blooded warriors do in their entire life,” added Alasie. “And against so many powerful monsters. All because you’ve been following that...pony, or titan, or whatever he is.”
Solvei looked down, unable to meet their eyes as her good mood fell away completely. “What are you saying?”
“Akna, you’ve already done so much,” pleaded her mother. “Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop?”
Tulok nodded. “Lex Legis is already so powerful, it’s not like he needs you anymore, so-”
“YOU’RE BOTH IDIOTS!”
The angry yell caught Solvei by surprise, jumping in place as her grandmother’s roar was followed by a fist coming down atop each of her parents’ heads.
“Ow!” yelped Alasie, glancing up from where she’d been knocked to her knees, holding her head. “Mother! What did you do that for?!”
“We’re just concerned about our daughter!” whined Tulok, likewise in a pained crouch.
“Shut up, both of you!” snarled Yura, planting her fists on her hips as she glared down at the two of them. “Honestly, the nerve! Akna has accomplished deeds that would leave Aselu himself stunned, and you’re acting like she’s still the same little girl who accidentally glued her eyes shut with pine sap!”
The reminder that she’d once been too young to realize that wiping her eyes while her hands were sticky was a bad idea made Solvei wince, glad that Lex wasn’t close enough to hear that.
“We understand that she’s g-grown up since we’ve...been gone,” sniffled Alasie, her lip quivering for a moment. “But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s still our daughter!”
“She did an incredible thing,” agreed Tulok, frowning up at Yura. “More than one! But that’s no reason for her to keep running into danger now that it’s over!”
“Ancestors help me,” groaned Yura in exasperation, shaking her head. “How is it that my daughter has nothing but snowflakes between her ears-”
“Hey!” yelped Alasie, insulted.
“-and yet somehow managed to find a mate who’s even dumber than her?”
“That’s uncalled for!” Standing up, Tulok glared at the elder shaman. “There’s nothing dumb about wanting our daughter to be safe!”
His pronouncement earned him a second whack from his beloved’s mother, her fist coming down on the crown of his head so hard that it made Solvei wince.
“Safe?!” roared Yura, seemingly incensed. “You want your daughter to be safe?! She has magic strong enough to summon ten ice spirits at once! She can move things with her mind! She can create armor stronger than stone! Not to mention that she’s the cherished companion of someone who slew Hvitdod and has the power to bring the dead back to life! How much safer could she be?!”
Both of her parents grimaced at that, and Solvei bit her lip as she stood up. “Grandmother-”
“Quiet, girl!”
Solvei’s jaw closed with an audible snap, sitting back down. Powers or no, the years of training that she’d spent under her grandmother left her unable to even think of defying her now.
“And you’re complaining about us still treating her like a child,” muttered Alasie petulantly.
The comment made Yura’s jaw clench, a dangerous expression crossing her face, and Solvei gulped, leaning backward.
“Akna,” growled Yura, her voice low and dangerous. “I noticed that your master didn’t join in the feast. Why don’t you go see if he needs you for anything while I have a talk” – she stressed that last word in a way that made Alasie and Tulok both whimper – “with your parents.”
“Yes, grandmother!” Nodding vigorously, Solvei was already moving as the words left her mouth, sprinting away as fast as she could.
But she hadn’t gotten very far before a familiar voice called. “Akna!”
Slowing to a stop – though only after she’d made sure she’d gotten a safe distance from her grandmother – Solvei glanced over at the speaker, her heart still in her throat. “Panuk?”
Jogging over to her, the young scout gave her an easy smile. “I heard that you presided over my consumption. How was I? Delicious, right?”
The utter insouciance of the comment – which was pure Panuk, always eager to be the center of attention – brought a smirk to Solvei’s lips, helping to put the terrifying spectacle of her grandmother’s anger behind her. “Nah, you were rotten,” she teased, wrinkling her nose as though remembering an unpleasant smell. “Like eating a fish that had gone bad.”
“You say that,” teased Panuk, “but I was talking to Toklo, and he made it sound like there was a certain part of me you couldn’t wait to get in your mouth.”
The comment brought a blush to Solvei’s cheeks, and her grandmother’s influence came through in the next moment as she punched him in the shoulder, making him stumble back. “That was your liver, and you know it! The shaman always eats the liver, so the rest of the family doesn’t have to swallow the bile!”
“Ow, down girl!” laughed Panuk, rubbing his shoulder. “You really do have crazy powers now, huh?”
“Keep getting fresh with me, and you’ll see.”
“Does that mean I can’t tell you how beautiful your eyes look now?”
Despite herself, Solvei felt her tail start to wag. “I bet you say that to all the winter wolf-adlet hybrids.”
“Only the cute ones,” replied Panuk without a moment’s hesitation, flashing the grin that had made him a heartthrob among so many of the girls back in the village.
That was more than Solvei could take, and she burst out laughing, her tail wagging faster. Whether it was her grandmother’s temper or Panuk's incessant flirting, some things never changed.
Wiping her eyes as her mirth finally died down, she gave him an honest smile. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Recognizing that the time for joking around had passed, Panuk’s expression shifted to a warmer one. “It’s good to be back, although I can’t actually remember what it was like being dead. I asked around, and no one can. It’s like we all just fell asleep and then woke up here.”
“Don’t look at me.” Raising her hands, Solvei shook her head. “I’ve died twice now, and it was different both times.”
“Not completely different, though.” Panuk canted his head toward the far side of the ravine, where Lex had gone after creating the food and illumination. “You were with him both times, right?”
A little worried that this was going to turn into another referendum about her relationship with Lex, Solvei took a moment to steel herself before nodding. “Yeah. No matter what else happened, Lex – my master – was always there. Even when we’re apart, or if we fight, he’s always with me...the same way I’m always with him.”
Panuk nodded at that, and while he didn’t lose his easy demeanor, his eyes wandered, as though he was considering something. A moment later he seemed to reach a decision, letting out a slow breath. “Do you think I could see him?”
Solvei blinked. “Huh?”
“That pony, Lex – though I guess he’s not just a pony anymore – can I see him?”
“You mean, like, to talk to him?”
Panuk rolled his eyes. “No, to gaze at him dreamily from a distance. Yes, to talk to him!”
Solvei bit her lip at that. As Akna, she’d been grief-stricken when she’d heard that Panuk had died; even if she hadn’t returned his feelings, she’d still cared about him a great deal, since everyone in her village had been like an extended family to her. But now that she had Solvei’s memories of what had happened, she knew that Panuk had needlessly escalated the situation, making himself seem as fearsome as possible in order to try and cow Lex and the others into submission, a tactic which had succeeded only in provoking a pointless conflict and costing him his life.
But at the same time, she knew Lex wasn’t blameless for what had happened. He’d said as much himself after their final confrontation with Sissel: “I was angry...and I was afraid...and that colored my judgment.” Even though she’d been furious at the time – wanting to kill Nenet for Sissel’s crimes – she’d since come to appreciate his admission, recognizing the guilt he felt about what he’d done.
Except now he’d made up for what had happened, undoing death itself – not just for Panuk, but for everyone she’d ever lost – and erasing what should have been an indelible act. Solvei wasn’t sure if that meant that he’d forgiven himself, but she hoped it had, which meant that if Panuk was planning on castigating him now...
Her thoughts must have shown on her face, because Panuk put his hands up in a calming gesture. “Easy, I’m not looking to pick another fight with him. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want.”
“Then I have to ask, what do you want? Because Lex has more than made up for what happened.”
“I know that he has,” acknowledged Panuk, no longer grinning as he met her eyes squarely. “I don’t want to make trouble. I want to talk to him so that I can figure things out.”
She raised a brow. “Figure things out?”
He sighed. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t...he killed me, Akna. Even if I don’t remember any of it, I was dead. And then he brought me back. I just want to...get a handle on it all, you know?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I don’t either, that’s the point. I don’t know what else to do except talk to him, otherwise it’s like this big thing which is always going to be there but I’m not acknowledging and it’s...I don’t even know what.” He groaned, closing his eyes as he let out a slow breath. “I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”
Solvei took a moment to put her thoughts in order before answering. “Panuk, maybe it would be better if you thought a bit more about what you want to say. Master still has a lot that he needs to do, and he said he’s going to come visit the village after he’s done, so maybe-”
It’s fine, Solvei. Bring him to me.
Master! Whipping her head around towards where he was, Solvei resisted the urge to whine at his decision. How had he even known she was talking to Panuk in the first place?!
No, she reminded herself a moment later, that was a stupid question. He was aware of her state of mind at all times; if he’d noticed the chaotic interplay of emotions she’d been feeling just now, that might have prompted him to borrow her senses in order to check up on her without her knowing. Which meant that he’d probably heard at least part of Panuk’s rant just now.
Master, are you sure that’s a good idea? You’ve still got a lot to do before you face Adagio; this can wait.
No, came the immediate reply. He’s entitled to speak his piece, and I want to do this now. Escort him to my location.
Solvei groaned softly, hoping this wasn’t a prelude to another blowup. Although Lex seemed unusually reserved since becoming a titan, she didn’t want Panuk to test his newfound limits. As scary as her grandmother was, she knew that Lex could be far worse when angered. Understood, Master.
“Is everything okay?” asked Panuk as she turned back toward him, his head cocked. “You just went all quiet and stared off into the distance.”
“I was speaking to Master,” replied Solvei evenly. “He says that he’ll see you now.”
His eyebrows went up as she began walking toward where Lex was, falling in behind her a moment later.
Together the two of them headed away from the light and laughter of their fellows.
Looking over from where he’d apparently been conversing with Lex, Frode smiled as he turned to regard Solvei. “There’s my girl!”
Solvei had just enough time to be confused about why her father was here before Frode padded toward her, giving Panuk a nod of acknowledgment before returning his attention to her, his eyes twinkling with laughter. “You know, I expected that you’d change when you grew up and left home, but I’ll admit I never thought it would be into a different race entirely.”
The comment made her sputter, feeling embarrassed for some reason, and she quickly jammed Belligerence into the ground before changing back into winter wolf form. Frode chuckled – the same gentle, comforting laugh that he’d used whenever she’d whined about how poor of a hunter she was or how her siblings had been teasing her – and stepped closer, giving her an affectionate nuzzle.
She returned the gesture, pausing just for a moment to revel in having her father back. As Akna, she’d had years to process the loss of her parents, and even her grandmother’s passing hadn’t happened so quickly that she’d been unable to grieve. But as Solvei, she hadn’t had any time to deal with her father’s death; Bolverk had turned her family into monsters almost immediately after killing Frode, and she’d been running from that when she’d met Lex, starting a whirlwind adventure that was still ongoing.
Now, however, she felt herself starting to tear up, burying her face in her father’s fur as a wave of guilt suddenly crashed over her. She’d been ignoring him this whole time! She’d talked to him only briefly, in the immediate aftermath of Lex bringing everyone back, and after that she’d been so focused on making sure the rest of the adlets got situated that she’d lost track of her utvalgte parent completely.
Sniffling, she flattened her ears against her skull. “Dad...I’m sorry, I was going to come and talk to you-”
“It’s okay,” murmured Frode, one paw coming up to pull her closer.
“No, it’s not.” She could almost feel the strength draining out of her, the exhaustion that she’d felt before Lex had conjured that feast suddenly returning in force. “After what happened with Bolverk, we didn’t even have a chance to mourn you! And now you’re back and I let myself get caught up with everyone else...”
“Because they were confused, and frightened, and looking to you for answers,” Frode reminded her. “And you stepped up to help them, because they’re your family too, now.”
Smiling, he stepped back so he could look her in the eye. “I’m not upset that you’ve been busy; I’m proud that my little girl has grown up into someone that so many other people can rely on. Even a titan. And that’s saying something” – he added with a cheeky wink – “considering you were the pup who used to burst into tears when she couldn’t catch a squirrel.”
“Dad!” squealed Solvei, her guilt forgotten as her mortification returned. First her grandmother, now her father; why was it that both of her families loved telling embarrassing stories about her?! It was enough to make her huff, ears standing back up. “What’re you even doing here, anyway?”
Seemingly amused by her reaction, Frode gave her a toothy grin. “What else? Making sure to ask your ‘master’ what his intentions toward my daughter are.”
Before she could react to that, Panuk cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he murmured, squinting in her direction. “But could someone-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish before Lex gestured with one claw, and the area grew brighter. There was no visible source of illumination – he didn’t create another glowing orb like he had around the feast tables, nor did his horn glow – everything just suddenly became more visible, as though lit by an unseen lamp. It was enough that Solvei’s darkvision switched back to normal sight, and she silently kicked herself for not realizing that she’d been using it in the first place, knowing that Panuk and the other adlets couldn’t see in darkness the way winter wolves could.
“Thanks,” murmured Panuk awkwardly, his eyes darting between the two winter wolves and Lex as though trying to decide whether he was more uncomfortable looking at his people’s traditional enemies – one of whom was also their shaman – or the person who’d killed him.
Solvei could empathize with the latter concern, her embarrassment over her father’s comments falling away as she saw Lex – who had yet to say anything – glance toward Panuk. The adlet flinched as they made eye contact, before swallowing and straightening up. “I-”
He quieted immediately as Lex raised a single talon in an unmistakable gesture to wait. Nor did he make a sound as the titan turned his gaze back to Frode and canted his head slightly.
“And that’s our cue to leave,” replied the winter wolf, his tone light as he gently nudged his daughter back the way she and Panuk had come.
“Huh?” Blinking, Solvei almost stumbled. “Wait, but-”
“Go with your father, Solvei,” broke in Lex. “I’ll speak to Panuk alone.”
The pronouncement made the adlet in question look as though he was reconsidering this entire idea, swallowing nervously.
He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “But Master-”
“Tomorrow morning, the adlets will all be able to take aerial form and return to their village,” noted Lex. “When that happens, you’ll need to go with them, in order to help minimize the disruption caused by their homecoming. Since I’ll be sending Frode back to the valley where we left Turid and the others, this is likely going to be your last chance to speak with him for some time.”
That was enough to make her objections die on her lips, nodding slowly. Even so, she couldn’t help but glance at Panuk one more time. “Will you be okay?”
“Absolutely,” replied Panuk, managing to smile despite it being visibly forced. “Get out of here, I’ll be fine.”
“C’mon,” urged Frode, nudging her again. “These two have a lot to talk about, almost as much as you and me.”
This time Solvei fell in behind him, but not before reaching out to Lex telepathically. Master, please go easy on him.
You don’t need to worry, he won’t be harmed.
Despite how much she trusted Lex, his reassurance soothed her anxiety only a little, and she couldn’t help but glance back one last time before her father led her away.
“You wanted to speak with me.”
It took everything Panuk had not to flinch at Lex’s words. The pony – or rather, titan; he wasn’t entirely sure what that term meant, but from what he’d been told it indicated that Lex was now someone akin to Aselu, or perhaps even Nuti-Amaguk himself – almost sounded like he was making an accusation, and Panuk had to fight down the urge to prostrate himself and beg for forgiveness for wasting Lex’s valuable time.
Nor was it simply the memory of what had happened the last time he’d upset the unicorn that left his mouth dry and his heart pounding in his chest. Although Lex had possessed an intimidating presence the first time he’d seen him – with his skull mask and shadow falling the wrong way – his current appearance was far more fearsome. Larger, muscled, and possessed of claws and slit-pupiled eyes, he now looked less like a pony and more like a predator.
But that wasn’t the whole of it. Like the rest of his tribe, Panuk had grown up in the wilds, and had been taught from an early age that all sorts of dangerous beasts were out there, as well as what to do when he encountered them. Even if he wasn’t a warrior, sharp teeth and talons alone weren’t enough to scare him; and it wasn’t as though Lex had that deadly mask anymore, either.
Yet it was all he could do to stop his legs from shaking.
There was an aura around Lex now, a presence that Panuk couldn’t see or hear, but could feel. Just being near him now seemed to bring on a terrifying dizziness, like what he’d felt a few hours ago when he’d wandered off from all the celebrating and almost plunged over the edge of the largest chasm he’d ever seen.
Except the chasm hadn’t stared back at him the way Lex was now, waiting for an answer.
“You killed me.”
Panuk wasn’t sure how he got the words out without biting his tongue, hit with a mixture of dread and relief as he managed to get that off his chest. While he doubted that Lex had forgotten what had happened, a small part of him couldn’t help but worry that by bringing it up like that, it would prompt him to lash out again. But at the same time, there was a strange sense of liberation in being able to say those words to his killer, as though he’d just proved that he was able to.
But for all that Panuk was struggling to say even that much, Lex’s flat expression hadn’t changed in the slightest, giving the adlet the same neutral look that he’d worn the entire time. “I know that I did.”
There was neither pride nor shame in his voice, and despite himself, Panuk felt a flicker of frustration at that. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you do it?!” His hackles rising, Panuk couldn’t help but yell the words, his voice filled with a rising tension that could have been fear, anger, or sorrow. “Why did you cut me down like that?! I know I egged you on, but Akna told me about all the monsters you fought; yetis and trolls and giants! I was just one scout with a small patrol! Are you really going to tell me that I was any sort of threat to you at all?!”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Then why?!”
“Because killing you took less effort than subduing you, and offered the greatest degree of certainty that you wouldn’t have any future opportunities to harm Solvei or any of the ponies with me.”
The words were delivered in the same emotionless tone as everything else he’d said, with Lex sounding almost bored by the conversation. It was enough to make Panuk clench his fists, anger winning out over anguish even as he lowered his eyes. “So that’s it then? My life didn’t matter because it was more convenient to murder me?”
“You’re mistaken.”
That was enough to make Panuk raise his gaze, suddenly hopeful.
“What I did wasn’t murder,” continued Lex coldly. “You and your patrol brandished deadly weapons at myself and my companions, announcing your intent to use them if we didn’t surrender immediately. I was entirely justified in using lethal means to secure our safety.”
“You...!”
Gritting his teeth, Panuk lowered his head again, ears flattened. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of that oversized quill Akna had been carrying around – the one she’d said had wounded Hvitdod – still standing where she’d stuck it in the ground. She’d also said that its barbs pierced the hands of anyone except her or Lex (or someone named Nenet, whoever that was) when touched, but if he steeled himself and bore the pain, then maybe-
“Is that why you came here? Because you were hoping for revenge?”
In an instant, Panuk’s thoughts of grabbing the quill drained away, along with all the blood in his face. “Th-that-”
“Go ahead then.” In an instant, the quill was back in Lex’s grasp despite his not having moved. His eyes and horn lit up a moment later, the runes along the weapon’s length shining in response.
The sight was enough to break the last of Panuk’s courage, but before he could begin to turn and run, the unicorn’s lightshow abruptly cut off. “Here, take it.”
That was Panuk’s only warning before Lex tossed – not threw, but tossed, so that it tumbled end over end – the weapon toward him.
Caught completely off-guard, Panuk yelped and reached for the quill reflexively, grabbing at it even as he remembered the consequences for touching the thing. But when his fingers closed around the haft of the weapon an instant later, nothing happened; the barbs stayed as they were, rather than sprouting out to pierce his palms and fingers. “Huh?!”
“I’ve temporarily disabled Belligerence’s identification protocols,” explained Lex as he reared up onto his back legs, standing upright as easily as any adlet. “You can wield it without fear now.”
Had Panuk been able to speak, he would have begged to differ, trembling as he held the quill upright between himself and Lex. What was going on?!
“I’ll allow you one strike, without interference or retaliation by myself or anyone under my authority.”
Grasping his robes in one claw, the titan threw them off of himself, baring his chest before holding his forelegs out from his body, daring the adlet to put Belligerence to good use.
“Now, as the idiom says: hit me with your best shot.”
In fact, he found himself wishing that he would. At least then he wouldn’t be in the situation he’d somehow landed himself in, pointing a weapon at Lex Legis for the second time.
Given how poorly things had turned out the last time he’d done that, Panuk could only imagine what would happen now that the unicorn was a titan.
But what else could he do? Lex had practically ordered him to attack, right down to giving him his own weapon, one which – according to what Akna had said about it – could conceivably wound him. Maybe even kill him. He’d even promised that he could stab him once without any consequences.
For an instant, Panuk waivered, recalling the anger he’d felt only a few moments ago when Lex had so callously refused to admit that he’d been wrong to kill him. Already nervous to the point of feeling lightheaded, being so casually told that his life had no value had been infuriating to hear. So much so that Panuk had caught himself considering taking up that huge quill that Akna had been carrying and turning it on Lex, regardless of the consequences.
It hadn’t been a serious notion; just a half-formed urge borne of his anger momentarily reorienting his tension away from fleeing and toward fighting, despite his knowing how insane that was. The very idea of attacking someone who’d fought Hvitdod – the legendary dragon that Aselu himself had died fighting! – and won was beyond suicidal.
Not to mention how, by any consideration, Lex didn’t deserve that, no matter how callously he spoke now. There were no rites or customs among Panuk’s people for bringing the dead back to life. Such a thing was was the province of spirits far more powerful than anything their shamans communed with. But even Panuk could tell that if resurrecting someone you killed wasn’t enough to wipe away the crime of having killed them in the first place, bringing back so many of their friends and family as well certainly was.
Which meant that if this wasn’t some sort of bizarre test, and Lex’s offer was sincere, Panuk couldn’t possibly strike him down.
Regardless of whether or not the unicorn could survive being skewered by his own weapon – and Panuk couldn’t bring himself to think that the titan was seriously offering up his own life – attacking him now wouldn’t just be retribution for the life that he’d taken. It would also be a rejection of the worth of all the lives that he’d just restored.
That wasn’t something Panuk could do.
Even if it meant disobeying Lex right to his face.
The oversized quill tumbled from nerveless fingers as Panuk swallowed, somehow managing to meet Lex’s gaze. “I...I can’t.”
The frown he received in reply almost made him wet himself. “You have no wish to strike back at me for taking your life?”
Panuk shook his head so hard it almost rattled his brain.
But that seemed to be the wrong answer, because Lex’s eyes burst into green-and-purple light. “Then who will you direct your rage toward, if not me?”
The question was so unexpected that it made Panuk wonder if he’d misheard. “I...huh?”
“You anger was made obvious in how you almost attacked me just now, despite knowing the futility of doing so,” growled Lex, staring at Panuk so hard that the adlet could almost feel his gaze boring into him. “And yet you refuse to take advantage of the vengeance I offered you. So who will be its outlet in my place?”
“You...you think I’m going to...track down those ponies you were with and hurt them to get to you?”
“Or Solvei,” confirmed Lex with a dark glare. “Or perhaps her loved ones, in order to wound me with her grief.”
“I’D NEVER DO THAT!” howled Panuk, indignant. “You’re insane! I’d never hurt my own people just to get revenge on you! I don’t even want revenge on you! I came here in order to talk things out!”
“Yet when you didn’t hear what you wanted, you were on the verge of violence,” retorted Lex icily. “Those are not the inclinations of someone who has no desire for revenge.”
“That’s different!” snapped Panuk, his anger returning. Bad enough that Lex had flat-out said he’d deserved to die, but now he was accusing him of being a threat to his own kin?! “I got mad because you wouldn’t say you were sorry for having killed me! That’s all I wanted, to know that you felt bad about what happened!”
The words surprised him even as he spoke them, not having realized that what he’d really wanted was an apology. But even now, he couldn’t seem to stop talking, and his emotions kept pouring out of his mouth.
“I get that I picked that fight! I get that you didn’t know I was bluffing! But I thought you’d realize by now that it was all just a front! That it didn’t have to end that way! You spent all that time with Akna, didn’t you?! She’s known me her entire life! She should have told you that I’m not a bad guy, and I didn’t deserve to die like that! But you just kept saying that I did deserve it it, like my life doesn’t matter at all! Do you even care that you...that y-you...”
Panuk found himself unable to continue, his ranting trailing off into sputtering. But it wasn’t because he’d realized the audacity he was displaying in shouting at the person who’d resurrected so many of his people. Nor was it because someone had come to investigate his raised voice. Rather...
“Are you alright?”
...it was because of the look Lex was giving him.
All of the blood had drained from the titan’s face, staring at Panuk with a horrified expression. Even as he watched, the glow in Lex’s eyes went out, and his tail thrashed in agitation as he took a single step back, one claw coming up to touch his forehead as if to help him think.
But no sooner had he completed the gesture than he appeared to regain his equilibrium. Closing his eyes, Panuk saw their glow go out as Lex set his jaw, his tail ceasing to whip back and forth a moment later.
Panuk swallowed, trying to figure out what had just happened. Part of him wanted to believe that he’d finally gotten through to the unicorn, but Lex’s reaction had been so overstated that he couldn’t help but wonder if something else was going on. “Um-”
The claw touching his forehead came out, palm forward, and Panuk bit his lip, thinking that he was being told to stay silent. But he corrected that impression a moment later as the quill at his feet vanished from his grasp, instantly reappearing in Lex’s grip. Panuk’s heart leapt into his throat as he saw several of the runes glow for a moment, wondering if he’d read the titan wrong and was about to die again.
But no attack come. Instead, Lex jabbed the quill into the ground before turning to look at him, his expression once again a mask of control.
“This was my fault.”
Panuk blinked, not sure what he was talking about. “Uh...”
“I do feel remorse for having killed you,” continued Lex, speaking slowly. “But I was not wrong to do so, and I will not apologize for it. When someone points a deadly weapon at you, or others in your immediate vicinity, and expresses their intent to use it, using force – even lethal force – to neutralize them is permissible.”
“...”
“I will, however, acknowledge that just because an outcome is permissible does not mean that it’s optimal. For any offense, there are a range of acceptable punishments. As I told Solvei before, the mistake I made was that I chose the harshest one. My actions were just, but not as just as they could have been. As someone who ascribes to the highest moral authority, I should have done better.”
Panuk felt a tightness in his chest ease as Lex finished. It was an apology in all but name; an admission that the unicorn wished he’d acted differently. More importantly, it made it clear that he recognized that the best outcome would have been one where Panuk hadn’t died, acknowledging that his life was indeed worth something.
A shaky smile crossed the adlet’s lips, relief robbing his limbs of their strength as he sank down into a crouch. “Okay.”
Lex paused for several heartbeats, as if trying to think of what to say, before settling on a giving him a single, wordless nod.
A breathy laugh came from Panuk’s muzzle as his tension began to fall away. “You know that I’m sorry for how I acted too, right? It was my first time being a scout, and I didn’t really expect to find ponies, of all things, let alone an unat-, er, a winter wolf, and...well...I didn’t know what to do, so I acted like I thought a warrior would have, you know? Just try and scare them into submission.”
Chuckling at how stupid that seemed now, he leaned his head back, staring at the sky. “I’ll never make that mistake again. Actually, I think I’m going to give up on the whole scouting thing. Maybe I’ll learn to carve canoes instead. Girls love guys who can carve; they know they’re good with their hands.”
“...you should return to the celebration.”
Pausing just long enough to grab his rune-covered quill – which vanished a second after he grabbed it, disappearing as though he’d somehow turned it invisible – Lex walked past him, signaling that the conversation was over.
But there was one more thing on Panuk’s mind, and despite knowing that he’d have been better off letting it go, he found himself giving voice to it as Lex passed him. “Did you really think I’d hurt Solvei – or her family – just to spite you?”
Lex didn’t answer immediately, and it was only when he’d put a few spear-lengths between them that he stopped, not turning his head as he spoke. “Some time ago, in my homeland, an...associate of mine killed a pony right in front of me. I didn’t authorize it, and they weren’t the intended target, but they lost their life all the same. I only found out later that, after they were resurrected – far from my dominion – they blamed me for what happened, and subsequently brutalized someone that I care about very deeply while looking for a way to get back at me.”
“Oh.” Swallowing, Panuk took a moment to digest that, unable to imagine hating someone that much. “What did you do when you finally caught them?”
“I haven’t,” answered Lex as he resumed walking away. “Yet.”
The malice in Lex’s voice sent shudders down Panuk’s spine, his tension spiking again as he realized that even if he couldn’t imagine what it was like to hate someone with such intensity, Lex could.
And the titan’s next words proved it.
“But when I do, his punishment will be far worse than merely dying.”
Thoughts of Silhoutte and Nosey made Lex scowl as he wandered away from the adlets’ festivities, picking his way back through the shallow canyons until he came to where he’d fought Sissel a few hours prior.
The trip was a short one, despite his unhurried pace, and his internal sense of time – which was now perfect, much like his memory, his sense of direction, and numerous other parts of his mentality – told him that he’d made the trip back in only two minutes, which was a fraction of the time it had taken him to traverse that distance when he’d been mortal.
That was no surprise, of course, and not simply because he could perceive the immediate future. Becoming a titan had increased his strength to the point where he wasn’t sure what his upper limit was. Why shouldn’t it be the same for his speed?
But it wasn’t his physical abilities that occupied Lex’s thoughts as stopped in the middle of the cratered gorge, nor was it painful old memories.
Instead, it was what had just happened that made his claws clench the stony ground beneath him, talons digging into the rocky earth as though it was soft clay.
How did I not realize what I was doing?!
It was all so obvious in hindsight. The clues had been so numerous that he couldn’t believe he’d overlooked them. As it was, it had only been by the narrowest of margins that he’d been able to recognize what was happening, letting him avoid another disaster with Panuk...and even then, it had been a close thing.
When he’d merged with that beast in Darkest Night, Lex had fully expected that it would take time to understand how to operate his new body, certain that it would take days before he felt as comfortable in it as he had in his old one. But he’d been wrong; the Night Mare had made the merging so seamless that aside from one or two small adjustments, it had been like he’d always had that physique, claws and all.
Looking back, it had been foolish of him to expect anything like that when he’d become a titan. There was no comparing a mere alteration of mass and some vicious new instincts to an existence so profoundly transcendent as to overwhelm reality itself. That had been why he’d been testing his limits, trying to figure out the entirety of what he was capable of.
And while he still hadn’t seen the full depths of his power, he’d made the critical determination that his ability to affect others through sheer force of will was far and away less than what he could do with regard to himself.
But now he knew that he’d still been underestimating what he could do.
After all, if he’d been able to alter the adlets' bodies via his will – healing their injuries simply by thinking them away – why couldn’t he affect their minds in the same manner?
Ujurak had been the first hint. He’d thought that ordering the stubborn fool to stop resisting and consent to being healed was simply his resistance bowing under pressure from a stronger personality. In that regard, Lex knew he’d been correct, but not nearly in the way he’d thought. Instead, Ujurak had given in because he’d had no choice; his will crushed – thankfully temporarily – beneath the weight of Lex’s own.
He’d done much the same to Panuk just now. When the adlet had accused him of murder, the use of that word – and its implication of an unlawful, immoral killing, rather than a justified homicide – had been upsetting. And looking back now, Lex could see that he’d transferred his own anger to the adlet in the most literal manner imaginable, driving him to almost take up Belligerence and attack him.
And that wasn’t even the full extent of what had happened.
The only reason Lex had realized what was going on was because, early in Panuk’s unhinged ranting about wanting to be apologized to, Lex – having already foreseen most of what the adlet was going to say – had been trying to figure out if the diatribe had been genuine or not. Just like with Garden Gate making a tearful speech of remorse, the veracity of Panuk’s raving had been impossible for him to determine, and despite knowing that was the one flaw of his that the Night Mare had left intact Lex hadn’t been able to help but try and parse the various nonverbal cues the adlet was giving off, seeing if his enhanced intellect could offer him some new insight.
Instead, he’d overheard Panuk’s thoughts.
How can he think I’d ever hurt Akna?! I don’t want to hurt anyone! I don’t even want to hurt him! I just want him to show that he cares about what he did!
Those had come through with crystal clarity, as if the adlet were speaking them aloud. More than that, Lex had realized that he was picking up what Panuk was going to think as well, seeing his future thoughts as clearly as his future actions. He hadn’t even had any trouble keeping them all straight, his enhanced intellect easily able to parse the various futures and contrast them with what was happening in the present.
Thankfully, he'd been able to close himself off from Panuk’s thoughts simply by wishing it. But that hadn’t made the realization of what he could do any less terrifying. As far as Lex was concerned, mental autonomy was profoundly personal, and could only be abrogated in limited ways under very specific circumstances. To be able to so easily override the wills of others, or even simply to spy on their thoughts – it was a small comfort that he hadn’t been able to perceive anything beyond "surface" level thoughts – had left Lex deeply shaken.
Now he knew why he’d felt so oddly detached since becoming a titan. Somehow, on some level, he'd perceived what he could do, and had been holding himself back. Like a blind pony clamping their eyes shut in response to suddenly being able to see, he’d sensed that he was capable of interacting with the world around him in a new manner, and had been trying to stifle it until he could fully grasp what it was.
And now that he had, it begged the question:
What would happen to everyone around him the next time his emotions got the better of him?
The whisper caused Adagio to whirl around, staring at the mirror on the far wall of her expansive washroom accusingly. “It’s about time you contacted me!” she snapped. “I sent you a message hours ago!”
In the mirror, the blurry figure – their image and the area behind them equally impossible to make out under what Adagio knew were myriad layers of defensive and obscurement spells – made a shifting motion that might have been a shrug. “I was busy.”
One of Adagio’s eyes twitched, and she made herself count to ten before replying. “When you imbued this ring” – raising her right hand, she extended her middle finger toward the mirror, taking petty joy in knowing that the recipient would think nothing of the gesture, noticing only the emerald-covered bronze ring that she was wearing on that particular digit – “with a one-time only spell that would let you know I needed to speak with you, you said that it was for emergencies only. So if I saw fit to use it, what does that tell you?”
A sibilant chuckle came to her ears through the mirror. “That despite all of the assistance I’ve rendered you, and your repeated assurances that you’d succeed, you’ve still managed to somehow make a mess of things.”
“Don’t you dare talk down to me. I’m not the only one who’s benefitted from this partnership.” Adagio had to stop herself from growling that last word, finding the entire concept of give-and-take distasteful. She was a Siren, born to be adored; anyone who found themselves in a position to do something for her should have fallen to their knees in gratitude for the privilege! “Or have you forgotten that those passages from Lashtada’s book I’d memorized are the reason your research finally made a breakthrough, despite lifetimes of trying on your part?”
“Oh, I remember what a useful test subject you turned out to be,” came the whispered reply, still infuriatingly smug. “The same way I remember that I was the one who saved you from being stuck performing menial duties in Queen Iliana’s military, all without anyone being the wiser for it. Or would you have been able to make an autonomous puppet in the likeness of your old body?”
“You never could have raised an army necessary to invade Kryonex’s realm!” sneered Adagio, her patience starting to fray. “Not without drawing more attention than even you could handle!”
“Don’t you have children that you can vent your insecurities on?” came the bemused reply. “Or is your big emergency that they’ve finally managed to break free from your influence?”
“My children,” hissed Adagio, “are all dead! Except for one, who stole the weapon I was making with Kryonex’s godsblood!”
Despite how humiliating the admission was, Adagio knew she had to swallow her pride. She’d endured an unbearable number of indignities already, but the stakes were too high for her to lose everything because of one more. Once she had the weapon back and finished the artifact she was making, she’d finally be able to get everything she deserved...and her treacherous “partner” would get what they deserved, too.
“...and then she teleported away,” finished Adagio, having summarized everything that had happened with Nenet. “Or rather, she was teleported away by someone else.”
“And you haven’t been able to trace it?”
Adagio groaned and rolled her eyes, wanting to make it exactly clear how frustratingly stupid she found that question. “Did you not hear the part where I told you that my children are all dead?! Nenet is my only remaining spellbook, and she’s turned on me! I can’t prepare any spells to trace her with!”
“And now you want me to scry on her and see where she went?”
“So glad to see you’ve finally realized why I contacted you,” replied Adagio, making sure to lay the sarcasm on extra thick. “You did that the last time we were spied upon, remember? So do it again now.”
“...”
Adagio frowned as the billowy presence on the other end of the spell made no reply. What was going on? Time was of the essence! Every second that passed was one second closer Kryonex came to catching up with her!
“Well?!” snarled Adagio after several seconds of waiting. “What are you waiting for?! Get to it!”
“Nenet’s brand...”
“Brand?” Narrowing her eyes in confusion, it took Adagio a moment to remember that was what cutie marks were called here. “You mean the cutie mark on her flank? What about it?”
“Describe it to me in detail.”
“Why? You can just scry her and see it for yourself!”
A low sigh came from the mirror. “You should have asked all those creatures that you prostituted yourself to for greater intelligence instead of just greater magic. If your daughter went from a weak and sniveling creature to being a sphinx of noble heritage – which is what her form-changing signifies – then it stands to reason that she might have taken precautions against scrying.”
Stalking toward the mirror, Adagio slammed her hands on either side of it, feeling the stonework crack beneath her palms. “I’ve put everything on the line, and you’re too scared to take one single risk?!”
“Risks must be taken with caution and consideration,” came the infuriatingly unflustered reply. “And above all, only when necessary. Right now, we can potentially minimize our exposure-”
“You mean your own exposure!”
“-our exposure to further pitfalls if we remain calm and act intelligently, rather than throwing fits like some teenage brat. Now, do you want to keep arguing, or will you tell me about Nenet’s brand?”
What Adagio wanted was to reach through that mirror and wring that coward’s neck. But even if she’d known a spell for that – and had it prepared – she knew this wasn’t the time. Until she dealt with Kryonex, everything else would have to wait. “It was a lectern, I think, in front of some bleachers or something. Why?”
“If she had a brand, then whoever turned her against you was a pony. And I think I know which pony.”
“So what?” Putting one hand on her hip, Adagio gestured impatiently with the other, trying to figure out where her so-called partner was going with this. “Why does that matter?”
“Because I kept up my surveillance of the person who was spying on us the night I gave you the idea of raiding Kryonex’s realm. And that shadow with the glowing eyes turned out to be a pony with the exact same mark that your daughter had.”
That was enough to give Adagio pause, an uneasy tingle working its way down her spine. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” came the answer she’d been least hoping to hear. “But if that pony was the one who empowered your wayward sphinx, then he might have heard more than either of us thought.”
“If it’s the same pony that turned Nenet against me, we don’t have to worry,” snorted Adagio, crossing her arms under her chest. “She let it slip that the spine Paska brought me belonged to her ‘master.’ He’s good and dead.”
This time, the sibilant laugh was full of naked condescension. “You’ve spent too much time around those soul-eating daemons. Or have you forgotten that I’m living proof – pardon the pun – that death can be defied?”
Adagio’s lip curled. “If this pony had your way of coming back to life, he wouldn’t be a problem for, what? Years? Decades?”
“Perhaps, but if he’s already found a way to be resurrected, and is the one who teleported your daughter away, then this is good news.”
Adagio gave the mirror a flat look. “Someone strong enough to fight an ancient dragon has somehow managed to come back to life, turn my own daughter against me, and stolen a half-finished artifact designed to channel the latent divinity of godsblood, and that’s good news?”
“Yes.”
Adagio frowned, this time in confusion. There was no undercurrent of mockery in the voice anymore. “How?”
“Because you’re his type.”
Adagio didn’t know whether to scowl or burst out laughing. “I’m a Siren. I’m everyone’s type.”
“This particular pony has intimate knowledge of Sirens,” insisted the blurry form beyond the mirror. “Indeed, he fancies himself as being the one who tames them. When Nenet tells him exactly who her mother is – if she hasn’t already – then it’s only a matter of time before he comes looking to add you to his collection.”
“Hah!”
Unable to stop herself from rising to the bait, Adagio couldn’t resist the urge to preen. One foot rose onto tiptoe while the other stayed flat, making her hips sway. Her right hand reached back to brush her fingers through her hair while her left came to her mouth, tongue darting over her index finger as it tugged suggestively on her lower lip for just a moment before coming to rest on her cleavage. Completing the ensemble was a coquettish giggle that was designed to contrast with the hungry grin she flashed, knowing how the juxtaposition left her prey confused, a little frightened, and very aroused.
“I’d like to see him try. Even if he’s been with-, wait a second...” Despite knowing that it ruined her image, Adagio’s brow wrinkled as the other part of what she’d been told hit home. “What do you mean he has intimate knowledge of Sirens? I’m the only one, except for...for...”
Her sexy pose collapsed as her eyes went wide. “You mean...Sonata and Aria?”
“Now do you see why we can’t treat this as a coincidence? There are too many similarities here. Too many common factors to dismiss this as some sort of-”
“Wait, just...shut up a second.” Squeezing her eyes shut, Adagio put a hand to her forehead as she tried to process what she’d just been told. “You...you actually saw them? You saw my sisters when you were scrying on...what’s that pony’s name, anyway?”
“Lex Legis, and yes, I saw them both. They’re ponies now, like him, but he referred to them by name on multiple occasion, and he and they both referred to them as Sirens.”
“And you’re just telling me this now?!”
“It wasn’t relevant before now. I scryed on that stallion and your sisters for several days, and then lost interest when it seemed like they had no further bearing on our plans. Besides, you never mentioned them except to say how much you hated them, so I figured you wouldn’t care.”
“That’s not the point!” snarled Adagio, glaring at the mirror in outrage. “If you had told me that my sisters had turned into ponies and were shacking up with some guy-”
“Then you would have become distracted by that news, the same way you are now despite the imminent threat of an angry demigod.”
“Then why mention any of this to me at all?!” shrieked Adagio, throwing her arms into the air.
“As I tried to say before,” replied the voice, this time with an unmistakable note of irritation, “since Lex Legis has taken your sisters for his lovers, it’s highly likely that he desires you as well. So when Nenet guides him to your little mountain stronghold, do what you do best: seduce him. Lure him into your bed, put your new body to good use, and make it so that he can’t live without you. You’ll get back the godsblood, gain an ally powerful enough to defeat Hvitdod, and have a donor to give you more children.”
“Pony offspring are useless,” murmured Adagio, her eyes wandering as she thought about everything she’d just been told. “Only inherent traits are passed on, not learned ones, and ponies have nothing notable in that area.”
“At least you’ll have souls to pay for more daemon mercenaries. And with the godsblood back and a wizard ally, you might be able to finish what you started before Kryonex arrives.”
Taking a deep breath, Adagio glanced back at the mirror. “And if I can’t? The entire thing was half-finished when Nenet took it, and she doesn't know any of the magic I was using to put it together; if this Lex guy undid the spells I already cast, I won’t be able to renew them.”
“Then you’ll have to use the trump card I gave you.”
Adagio froze at that, feelings goosebumps rising on the back of her neck. “Absolutely not!”
“I really don’t know why you’re so afraid of it,” came the whispered sigh. “So long as you use the talisman, it’s perfectly safe, not to mention powerful enough that even a demigod would be nervous about confronting it head-on.”
“You mean besides how incredibly difficult it is to transport?” shot back Adagio, trying not to sound as unnerved as she felt. “Or how it has a severely limited range? Or the fact that it can only be used to destroy, rather than compel? Or how about that even with that ‘talisman,’ it can still be turned back on the user, which in this case is me!”
Glowering as she regained her equilibrium, Adagio glared daggers at the figure in the mirror. “The entire point of all this was to make an artifact that would make it easy to chase off my cosmic debtors and take over the Pony Empire! Not to use one that’s almost as dangerous to its wielder as it is to their enemies!”
“Desperate times, Adagio. Seduce Lex, make him your guardian, take back what he stole from you and complete it, and use his children to buy more mercenaries.”
The voice was growing fainter now, the whisper fading in volume with each word.
“Don’t you dare end that spell yet!” raged Adagio, grabbing the edges of the mirror despite knowing that wouldn’t affect the magic in the slightest. “I’m not done talking!”
“Otherwise, you’ll need to use what you have when Kryonex arrives.”
In her grasp, the blurry figure faded away, and a second later Adagio found herself staring at her own reflection. Clenching her teeth so hard that her jaw ached, she needed came very close to smashing the glass, instead settling for giving a heavy scream of frustration. Why was nothing ever easy?!
Taking several deep breaths, Adagio marched out to her bedroom, biting her lip as she glanced down at the velvet carpet that covered the floor. For a moment she hesitated, caught by indecision, before she sighed and began to drag the furniture to the far side of the room, freeing up enough space to roll the carpet up enough to reveal the small trapdoor it was covering.
Ignoring the defensive spells she’d put there – as their caster, she was able to bypass them without taking any special measures – she slowly undid the latch before reaching in and withdrawing a small, cedar box. Grimacing, she quickly put it down on the desk before fixing the room, dawdling in the task as long as she could before finally returning her attention to the box.
Pausing just long enough to remind herself that the talisman was nothing but a control device – that the artifact itself was still safely hidden away – Adagio opened the lid and glanced within.
The simple loop made out of adamantine chains was still in there.
Licking her lips, Adagio reached out, brushing her fingers lightly against the dull metal...
And felt a gentle tug in her mind, as though being drawn toward-
Snatching her hand away, she slammed the box shut, taking several large steps away from it.
Waiting until her heartrate slowed down, Adagio silently reprimanded herself, grabbing the box and stashing it in the back of the desk’s lowest drawer. It was lead-lined, guaranteed to defeat detection magic, and the interior was padded with concealment spells anyway. It wouldn’t be found.
Repeating that to herself a few times, Adagio rolled her shoulders as she put thoughts of the talisman – and what it controlled – out of her mind. None of that would matter once this Lex stallion was eating out of her hands...and other parts.
Smiling at the thought, Adagio marched back into the washroom, getting ready to freshen up.
We’re almost ready, Master, announced Solvei – back in bipedal form – shortly after dawn broke.
Around her, adlets were stretching and gathering up the plentiful leftovers from the previous night’s feast. A few stragglers were still exiting the igloos that Solvei had created with her ice magic – although she could have made a frozen palace for everyone the way she had for Nenet, Solvei had instead opted to provide familiarity over comfort; the small ice-huts apparently being the adlets’ usual type of shelter when traveling – blinking and yawing as they joined in the preparations.
I know I’ve asked this before, but are you sure you won’t need my help when you confront Adagio? she continued, a twinge of anxiety accompanying the question. Yotimo can handle things back at the village-
Her assurance was interrupted by a loud yelp coming from a nearby igloo. A second later, two adlets – Lex recognized them as Solvei’s parents – came scampering out the entrance, blushing and fixing their clothes. A second later Yura followed, scowling at the two of them. Snarling several choice words at the pair, she pointed them toward the uncollected provisions, waiting until they’d slunk off to gather the remaining food before turning and marching toward another igloo, where the scene repeated itself with another young couple a few seconds later.
And if he can’t, my grandmother can, groaned Solvei.
Keeping a tight rein on his emotions, Lex gave a single nod. What I’ve seen of Adagio’s power suggests that she’s far beyond the strength I had as a mortal. But as a titan I’m far less impressed.
It was a response carefully designed to reassure Solvei as much as possible, wanting to minimize any chance that she’d follow him of her own initiative. That was paramount, given that his trans-temporal awareness was still telling him that Solvei coming with him would lead to catastrophic consequences. While he wasn’t sure exactly what those consequences were – her death seemed like a reasonable interpretation, but Lex wasn’t so sure about that; with how easy it was for him to bring the dead back to life now, her dying would likely be exceptionally painful for both of them, but still easily reversed – he had no desire to find out.
That, however, meant not telling her about his premonition. In every potential future where he told her – no matter how he broke the news – her reaction was an immediate sense of alarm followed by an earnest desire to accompany him...apparently because anything that could conceivably do her harm even after all of the power she’d gained was also a potential threat to him. While her reasoning wasn’t wrong in that regard, Lex still found it frustratingly counterintuitive that her reaction to being told about the danger was to insist on heading right for it.
As the Night Mare had said, his ability to discern the motivations of even those closest to him remained nil. Being able to see into the future changed that not at all.
Particularly since he had no justifiable excuse to read her thoughts. Or at least, beyond what their bond let him sense of her emotions. Despite the fact that she was, in a very real way, a part of him, Solvei was still her own person, which meant she was entitled to a measure of privacy.
Even so, the answer he’d given her now only seemed to partially curb Solvei’s fears. But you’ll summon me if you need me, right?
Without hesitation, answered Lex, not adding that he wouldn’t allow things to get to the point where he’d need her help.
She seemed mollified by that, letting out a slow breath before nodding and looking at where Nenet – back in her quadrupedal body – was peeking out from behind him, watching the parade of adlets with wide eyes. “Nenet.”
“Huh?!” The sphinx almost jumped at being addressed, wings flaring in fright. “I mean, yes?”
Through their link, Lex registered Nenet’s embarrassment and Solvei’s amusement in turn, resisting the urge to sigh. Although he’d summoned Nenet to his side nearly a half-hour ago – the sphinx having been so taken with Solvei’s ice mansion that she’d slept there – Lex hadn’t anticipated that she’d be so intimidated by the crowd. With his foresight only extending a few seconds into the future, it hadn’t been until a few moments before she’d caught sight of so many adlets milling about that he’d realized something was wrong.
As it was, Nenet had recoiled when she’d caught sight of the crowd, to the point where Lex had registered panic and confusion from her. Although she’d stared wistfully at the food – shamefacedly admitting that after everything that had happened yesterday, she’d completely forgotten about eating – she’d been too intimidated to go and retrieve any, refusing to move out of leg’s reach of him. Even then, she’d cringed whenever anyone had looked her way.
It had only been because of his ability to anticipate how she’d react to various questions before he asked them that Lex had gotten her to explain what was going on without using the Charismata on her. Apparently, the largest gathering of people she’d seen before now had been when the Grisela had gathered the yetis together for periodic raids. Given that there had been just over two dozen of them in all, the sight of so many people milling about now had unnerved her greatly.
Upset at himself for not having anticipated her discomfort, Lex had retrieved a substantial portion of food for her. Nenet had half-heartedly protesting the gesture, saying that she didn’t want to be a bother, but when Lex had made it clear that he wouldn’t be dissuaded her reluctance had evaporated, eating everything he’d given her.
But even after she’d finished her meal, Nenet hadn’t wanted to be apart from him, staying firmly by his side as she’d nervously watched the crowd. Nor had Lex been able to figure out how to help her relax; for all that he knew he needed to keep his emotions in check, he still wanted Nenet and Solvei both to be happy, lamenting the loss of the joy the sphinx had felt prior to now.
But once again, Solvei seemed to know what to do, smiling as she crouched down in front of the sphinx. “I’m counting on you to make sure Master’s okay while I’m gone.”
Nenet blinked several times at that. “Me? But...he’s a titan, and I’m just...” She didn’t finish, glancing back at her spiked tail with a grimace.
Solvei, however, shook her head. “You know Adagio better than anyone here. That means that you’re the one with the best understanding of what she’s capable.” Reaching out, she put a hand on Nenet’s shoulder. “I’m counting on you to make sure she doesn’t do anything that Master can’t handle, okay?”
Slowly, the downcast look on Nenet’s face morphed into a wide smile. “Okay!” Sitting up straighter, she gave Solvei a firm nod. “I’ll do my best, Solvei! I promise!”
“Then I know I’ve got nothing to worry about.” Standing up, Solvei glanced at Lex. Master, you should say something nice to her also.
Lex frowned internally, but didn’t bother replying, knowing that they were about to be interrupted.
Sure enough, Frode made his presence known as he walked toward them, tail wagging as he glanced at his daughter. “Taking one last chance to stare deep into your lover’s eyes before parting?”
In an instant, Solvei’s equilibrium was shattered. “Dad! I told you, it’s not like that between us!”
“And I told you, that would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t blushing up a storm when you said it,” shot back Frode with a grin.
Huffing, she didn’t reply, instead changing back into a winter wolf as she gave her father a nuzzle. “Give my love to Mom and everyone else, okay?”
Closing his eyes, Frode wrapped a paw around her. “Of course. Just remember to come visit us if you’re ever back here again.”
“I will.”
“And even if you’re not, you can ask Lex to send you here with his seidr from time to time.”
The suggestion made her ears flicker. “I don’t know if it works like that.”
Another playful grin crossed Frode’s face. “Just make sure to lie back and show him your belly when you ask. Whenever your mother did that, I couldn’t say no to her.”
“Dad!” Groaning, she stepped back and gave him a shove. “I swear, you’re worse than Yotimo!”
Chuckling, Frode gave her a playful wink, turning and sending a kindly nod Nenet’s way – who bashfully smiled back – before making the same gesture to Lex. “I know I already said it last night, but thank you for all that you’ve done for my family.”
Before, Lex would have eschewed his thanks as unnecessary, resenting the idea that righteous action deserved some sort of special recognition. Now, however, he could see that speaking to her father that way would have upset Solvei. So instead, he chose the future that he knew would make her happiest. “Thank you for giving me your daughter.”
“Wh-what?!” squealed Solvei, her mismatched eyes widening as she looked between him and her father. Through their bond, he registered a mixture of embarrassment and excitement, her tail starting to wag behind her. “What does that-”
“Um, Akna?” Toklo swallowed he crept over to her, his eyes darting from Solvei to Frode to Lex to Nenet to Nenet’s chest and then back to Solvei. “My father says we’re all ready to go.”
“I, um...alright...” Trying to recover her poise, Solvei turned back into an adlet and walked toward him, glancing back more than once as she made her way toward where Yotimo and Yura had gathered everyone together, the simple cloaks that Lex had made for them now turned into makeshift bundles to carry the food they were bringing back.
Speaking to the old warrior and her grandmother in turn, Lex caught sight of her saying something to Panuk before glancing out over the assembled crowd, one hand reaching up to adjust his circlet on her brow. I’ll see you soon, Master.
Very soon, Solvei.
Shooting him one last smile, she raised her arms and shouted something to the crowd in their native language. Before, Lex wouldn’t have understood it, but now he knew that she was telling them that it was time to go home. The call urged a rousing cheer from the rest of her people, and she cheered with them before gesturing upward, calling for them to take to the wind.
Immediately, the assembled adlets began to change, their bodies turning into vapor which sped upwards. In the span of a few seconds, the entire crowd vanished, leaving a deafening silence as their misty forms flew skyward and headed east.
Solvei was the last one to change, catching his eye as she sent him one final telepathic message before she left. I love you.
Lex knew then, as he had known for the preceding six seconds, that his ability to control his emotions was still dangerously imperfect, as he couldn’t help the feeling that swept over him then, nor could he keep himself from replying as Solvei flew out of sight.
I love you too.
Here it is, murmured Nenet, the words carrying an undercurrent of nervousness. Adagio’s hideout.
Lex didn’t bother replying as he looked the edge of the wards over, examining them for any signs that she’d increased her defenses since Nenet’s raid the previous day. The animal within him felt mild anticipation at the prospect, interpreting what was happening as a hunt, and despite his best efforts, Lex felt the same way, eager to see what he could do now.
For all that becoming a titan had resulted in his acquiring tremendous power, it had also taken certain things away from him. His need for sustenance and hydration were among those, along with the necessity of respiration. But one thing that he hadn’t lost was the need to sleep.
Whether it was because dreams were a part of the Night Mare’s divine portfolio, or because he still required mental relaxation before replenishing his thaumaturgical magic, Lex had found that he still had to rest before preparing his mental repertoire of arcane spells. It wasn’t as though he had any reason to otherwise; as far as he could tell, his new body didn’t feel fatigue, no matter how much he exerted himself, nor did a lack of sleep otherwise seem to damage his cognitive acuity. But as far as his arcane spells were concerned, rest was still an absolute requirement.
Fortunately, a single hour of sleep had been all that he’d needed.
Once that had been done, he’d finally been able to do what he’d spent so many years of his life trying to actualize:
He’d prepared his spells without any external assistance.
No solstice or equinox. No Severance. No Tree of Harmony. No battery of any kind. Now – with a body that was its own source of power, and a will that could bend reality itself – he had finally been able to compress the energy enough to fit it into his mental architecture without any outward help.
At long last, he could finally use his magic to its full potential.
And as a titan, his full potential was incredible indeed. As it was, he’d been able to prepare his full allotment of spells – so much larger than before, thanks to his enhanced intellect – in a fraction of the time it would have normally taken him, accomplishing an entire day’s worth of preparation in less than an hour.
Of course, he’d only prepared his spells after spending the majority of the night mentally dissecting all of the spells he knew – including the ones Nenet had taught him over their link the night before – and creating variations on them.
Such as the long-range teleport spell he’d made, using it to transport himself, Nenet, and Frode back to the valley were the latter’s family lived.
Appearing right outside of the cave where he’d once fought Bolverk, Lex and Nenet had bid a brief farewell to Solvei’s father, waiting just long enough after he’d entered the cavern to hear the joyous howls coming from within before departing.
But they hadn’t left via magic.
Instead, Lex had simply flown, ordering Nenet to stay behind as he’d risen into the air and retraced the path Nenet had taken yesterday, wanting to test his limits. In that, he’d been frustrated, because although he’d managed to cross a distance that had taken her several hours in the span of seconds, he’d been able to tell that he’d gotten nowhere close to his top speed. As it was, he’d needed to concentrate more on smoothing his passage through the atmosphere, since otherwise the sound of his breaking the sound barrier several hundred times over would have alerted Adagio to his arrival.
Summoning Nenet to his position – leaving the sphinx confused as to how he’d gotten there in the same amount of time it had taken them to teleport to Frode’s home – Lex had turned all of his thoughts toward Adagio’s subjugation, preparing himself for whatever the wayward Siren had in store for him.
Except that, from what he could see of her wards, she’d made no move to bolster her defenses.
That wasn’t entirely surprising; without Nenet, she supposedly had no way to restore her spells, but at the same time Lex found it hard to believe that Adagio – who had employed daemons, commanded an army of creatures that she’d personally birthed, and had somehow wounded a demigod – would leave herself so vulnerable. Especially after Nenet had raided this place less than twenty-four hours ago.
Are you certain she wouldn’t have fled the premises?
His question caused Nenet to tilt her head in consideration. I don’t think so, Master. I mean, it’s possible, but here she has at least a few preexisting wards to protect her, not to mention Grisela’s awful puppets and those two astradaemons patrolling the Ethereal Plane. If she goes somewhere else, she wouldn’t even have that, and without a spellbook...
Unless she went to acquire one somewhere else, finished Lex, remembering what the mares of Fail Forward had said about Bright Night – a town built around a magic school – being nearby.
I don’t know, answered Nenet doubtfully. If she had any transportation magic, I think she would have used it to come after me yesterday. I mean, she was working really hard on your, um...spine, and with how hard she was fighting to recover it after I grabbed it, I think she would have put getting it back above everything else.
Lex almost let his reply be a simple grunt of acknowledgment, before recalling what Solvei had said to him about saying something nice to the sphinx. You’re probably right. Good thinking, Nenet.
The words brought a smile to her lips, and her emotional state switched from wariness to happiness. Despite knowing that there was no insight for him to gain, Lex couldn’t help but marvel at that. How did such simple compliments elicit such a positive response?
Putting the matter out of his head, Lex passed through the wards, Nenet following closely behind him.
“No puppets,” muttered Nenet, her head swiveling as she looked around. “And I don’t see those astradaemons anywhere either. Do you think she’s pulled them all inside, since narrower hallways are easier to defend?”
“If so, it won’t avail her,” answered Lex, making for the tunnel entrance a short distance away, keeping his senses – physical, mystical, and temporal – ready for any sign of a trap.
But nothing happened as they reached the opening.
Nor did anything leap out at them as they made their way down the corridor, Nenet directing him toward Adagio’s chambers.
As they turned the next corner, however, Lex’s foresight finally picked something up.
Nenet registered it a few seconds later, as the sound filling the corridor reached her ears. “That’s Adagio’s voice!” she exclaimed, before clamping a paw over her mouth. That’s Adagio’s voice! she repeated, this time telepathically. Master, be careful! It sounds like she’s singing!
Lex didn’t outwardly reply, instead readying himself for a fight as he moved down the hallway, knowing that song – including the wordless tune Adagio was now humming – was the preferred vector for Sirens to work their magic.
Except there was only trace amounts of enchantment magic in Adagio’s voice that he could detect, the sort that even Sonata or Aria would have found trifling to use. A moment’s examination showed him that the melody contained a subtle suggestion, rather than a brute-force attack on the listener’s mind. Even then, the suggestion was simple in the extreme:
“Come closer.”
Apparently, the Siren knew they were here, and wasn’t concerned in the least.
Following the sound of her voice, they soon reached the entrance to her chambers, where the sound of water could be heard accompanying Adagio’s vocalizing.
Nenet wrinkled her nose, confused. She’s taking a shower?
For the second time that morning, Lex received a lesson in how far he had to go in controlling his emotions, because the beast inside of gave a sudden yowl, demanding that he take action. As far as it was concerned, fighting several battles in a row with neither food nor sex to show for it was utterly unacceptable. Combined with the intimate lessons that Kara had given him regarding Adagio’s sexuality, Lex found himself crossing the distance to the washroom entrance of his own accord, leaving Nenet sputtering behind him.
And then he saw her, neither the steam nor the foggy pane of glass keeping him from drinking the sight of her in.
Her eyes closed and her head tilted upward as the water spilled over her naked form, Adagio didn’t seem to notice him. Instead, she slowly swayed in place as she caressed herself, fingers tracing lather over wet curves as her hair tumbled down her behind her, barely reaching the tops of her thighs in a tantalizing curtain. Arching her back, Lex watched as she raised her hands above her head, her song coming to an end in favor of a low moan as she stretched.
A moment later, she reached a hand out, lithe fingers stretching for a washcloth that Lex only belatedly realized was draped over the top of the glass door. But rather than taking hold of it, she instead knocked it down, tumbling to land just outside of the shower.
“Oops,” she murmured. “Clumsy me.”
There was a lilt in her voice that reminded him of Sonata. But the smirk that crossed her lips as she opened her eyes and looked right at him was pure Aria.
“Well?” cooed Adagio when Lex failed to retrieve the washcloth. “Are you going to give me what I need? Or are you going to leave me here, wet and waiting?”
The comment brought a snarl to his lips, but the sound was one of desire rather than anger. He knew this was a trap, knew that she was trying to seduce him, but the beast inside him didn’t care. After being denied for so long – fighting battle after battle with nothing to show for it but scant instances of bland fare and a single romp with Kara that had stoked his appetite rather than sating it – his instincts, which had been enhanced alongside every other aspect of his mind, were screaming at him to accept what was being offered to him now.
Worse, those instincts were fully in accordance with what Lex knew he wanted. Even before he’d merged with that creature from Darkest Night, he’d repeatedly failed to resist the temptations of alluring mares. Whether it was Sonata throwing herself at him in that abandoned warehouse, Aria teasing him in the train station, or even Thermal Draft peeling his clothes off back at their inn, the erotic appeal of a beautiful girl offering herself to him was something he found impossible to deny.
The same way he couldn’t deny how much he wanted Adagio now – the Siren still swaying slightly beneath the steaming spray, the soapy lather and damp ringlets of her hair obscuring just enough of her curves to make what he could see that much more enticing – despite knowing it was the wrong decision.
But it’s not the wrong decision, he debated inwardly, his foresight showing him a lascivious tableau of ways that Adagio would continue to tempt him depending on how he responded. Kara showed me what she likes, and I don’t feel fatigue anymore. I can take her again and again until she’s begging for mercy.
Not that he had any intention of being so kind.
Lex barely noticed what he was doing as he cast his contraceptive spell on himself, his clothes starting to undo themselves in accordance with his will. This was what he’d promised Sonata and Aria; that he’d find their sister and make her love him. And the first step in that process would be teaching Adagio to enjoy being put in her place.
His awareness of the future changed as he saw himself entering the shower, Adagio smiling as she flung her hair back and presented herself to him-
And then he foresaw Nenet’s reaction to what he was doing.
In his mind’s eye, he registered her shock and betrayal at seeing him willingly succumb to the charms of the person who’d ruined her life, using and manipulating her with none of the love or caring that a mother should have for her daughter.
He saw the distraught expression on her face, and the way Adagio snickered at her, taunting Nenet even then.
And he saw himself, wracked with guilt over having made the wrong decision.
Then the future in his foresight changed as Lex fixed his clothes, his lust now replaced with fury.
Moments later, Nenet burst into the washroom. “Master! Don’t-”
It’s alright, Nenet. I know what she’s doing, and it’s not going to work.
He registered relief coming from her then, but didn’t pay any further attention to the sphinx, instead keeping his eyes fixed to Adagio’s as he bared his teeth at her. “Get out of there and get dressed,” he ordered the Siren coldly. “It’s time for you to answer for the crimes you’ve committed.”
Placing one hand on her hip, Adagio raised a brow as she turned to face him directly, putting her body fully on display. “Let me guess. Nenet’s filled your head with all sorts of horrible stories about me, hasn’t she?”
“Everything I told Master about you was true!” shot back the sphinx. “You killed innocent ponies and sold their souls to daemons! You promised them your own childrens’ souls! You lied to me about my father! You-”
“I’ll give you a chance to speak on your own behalf later,” interjected Lex, knowing that if Nenet kept going about everything Adagio had done, she would work herself into a fit. “After you’ve turned over all of the magic items in your possession and been restrained from using your powers.”
Adagio gave a throaty laugh at that. “You know what I think? I think now that she’s growing up, Nenet’s starting to get jealous of her mother.”
Opening the glass door, the Siren sashayed out, dripping wet and looking absolutely magnificent. But Lex was less concerned about that than he was with what was about to happen.
“Why don’t you be the judge?” Adagio purred, giving him a sultry smile. “Nenet, come here and change into your humanoid form.”
Like when she’d been humming before, the words contained a thread of magic in them. But this wasn’t the mild suggestion that had been laced into her wordless melody. Now, her voice carried a compulsion, one designed to override the target’s will and force them to comply.
None of which surprised Lex in the least. What did surprise him was that in his foresight, Nenet fell victim to Adagio’s command, the words somehow slipping through the dark magic that should have protected her mind.
That shouldn’t have happened. Adagio had tried to use her magic on Nenet yesterday, when the sphinx had stolen his spine back, and the protection she had as a result of their bond had protected her then. So why was it failing her now?
Cursing inwardly, Lex held his wire-wrapped foreleg out toward Nenet. “Remain as you are!”
As he’d foreseen, the Charismata’s order countermanded Adagio’s, saving Nenet from the sense of violation he knew she’d have felt if Adagio had forced her to change. But his success was a near thing, and Nenet groaned under the strain of being caught between two opposing commands, her distress transmitted to him over their link. M-Master...it hurts!
“Aw, now that’s no fun,” huffed Adagio, sauntering toward where Nenet was trembling. “Don’t you want to put the two of us side-by-side and see who’s-”
But she stopped as Lex reached out to grab her by the throat and slam her against the wall of the washroom, having foreseen that she was about to issue another magical order. “Let’s see how well you can play games without your voice!”
His horn glowed as he laid a curse on her, the same one he had once put on Aria back in Vanhoover, robbing her of her power of speech.
A shocked look came over Adagio’s face then, and one of her hands went to her throat-
And Lex braced himself as her other hand grabbed his claw just above the wrist, and tore it away with strength that was comparable to his own. Nor did she stop there as she flung him away as though he weighed nothing, sending him flying back through the doorway and into her bedroom.
Already arresting his momentum through will alone, Lex landed on his claws, turning all of his attention to Nenet. An instant later, she appeared behind him, summoned across their link, as Adagio...
Tore his curse apart, a scream of rage ripping itself out of her throat with such sonic force that it destroyed the washroom completely. Glass and stonework exploded into overlapping bursts of shrapnel, the entire room shaking under the force of her furious roar as part of the ceiling collapsed.
Nenet wasn’t like Solvei; she hadn’t gained the impressive physical defenses that the winter wolf had as a result of their bond, nor could she wrap herself in black crystal armor. If she had been caught in the torrent of destruction that Adagio had just unleashed, Lex knew she wouldn’t have escaped unscathed.
Unlike Adagio, whom Lex knew was about to emerge without so much as a scratch on her.
Nenet, I want you to fall back, ordered Lex, knowing that the sphinx could still move despite still being caught between two opposing compulsions. Secure the area in case Adagio has reinforcements hiding somewhere.
I can help! Her mental voice was strained, but Lex could feel her resolve, clearly knowing that he was sending her away for her own good rather than to procure any sort of tactical advantage. I promised Solvei that I’d protect you!
You already have. If you hadn’t been there, I’d have fallen for her charms.
Despite the pressure she was under, Nenet’s eyes widened. Really?
Nodding, he started casting a pair of defensive spells, layering additional mental protections onto himself. Between Adagio’s seductive display, and her newfound ability to bypass what should have been an impenetrable defense around Nenet’s mind – the same one he relied upon – he wasn’t about to risk being beguiled again. I wasn’t prepared to be tempted so strongly, but you brought me back to myself. Thank you for that.
Despite the fact that she would have been heartbroken to see him succumb to her mother’s feminine wiles before, hearing that she’d prevented that from happening sent a rush of pride through Nenet, as he’d known it would. I’ll go make sure the rest of the place is clear, Master! she chirped, wings flapping as she turned and rushed back out into the hallway. Don’t let her fool you again! Remember, her last name is “Dazzle!” It means “to overwhelm!”
This time, she’ll be the one who’s overwhelmed, he vowed, continuing to augment his defenses.
But he only had a chance to cast a few more spells before the present caught up with his foresight.
The lingering clouds of dust couldn’t obscure Lex’s vision, and as Adagio stepped around a large piece of the fallen ceiling, he saw her rub a bracelet that she’d donned in the aftermath of her outburst. It glowed softly – both in the visible and magical spectra – and Lex watched as it turned into a long, flowing dress, one that was woven through his protective as well as enhancement magic. The two rings on her opposite hand were shining as well, and he recognized them as the telekinetic and spell-storing baubles that Nenet had told him about, but hadn’t been able to take back with her.
Stepping over the fallen glass and pieces of rubble in high-heeled open-toed shoes that gave her no trouble despite how poorly they should have fared in the uneven terrain, Adagio exited the razed chamber with a sneer on her face, not having so much as a speck of dirt on her. “You know, I was looking forward to trying out the guy who killed Hvitdod all on his own. But you just couldn’t do things the easy way, could you?”
“Ease is the metric that cowards and weaklings use to measure their lives,” retorted Lex, his eyes and horn lighting up. “I am neither.”
The declaration made Adagio’s lip curl. “And that’s the charm that made my sisters fall all over you? Honestly, I knew those two were pathetic, but this is just sad.”
Lex was already frowning, the comment having thrown him despite having seen it coming. “How do you know about my relationship with Sonata and Aria?”
The question earned him a crooked smile. “I’ll answer that if you’ll tell me where Nenet hid your old backbone. Or I can tear your new one out instead. Your choice.”
This time it was Lex’s turn to smile. Normally he knew it was folly to give an enemy any useful information, but after the humiliation of almost being ensnared by her beauty, and her surprising him just now, he wanted to see the smug look wiped off her face. “Certainly.”
Standing upright, he pointed one dewclaw over his shoulder. “It’s right here, where it belongs.”
“Oh please,” scoffed Adagio. “You honestly expect me to believe that? The spells I put on your spine weren’t finished. If you’d actually been dumb enough to put it back in your body, they’d have unraveled almost immediately.”
“Allowing the godsblood you applied to it, using Hvitdod’s death curse as a conduit, to be completely unleashed,” replied Lex evenly. “I’m aware. It was almost more than I could handle. Almost.”
“You’re lying.”
He smiled at her in response.
“You’re lying!” Her brow furrowing, Adagio clenched her fists at her side. “A mortal body can’t withstand even the tiniest amount of raw, unfiltered divinity! I’m overflowing with aristeia, and I couldn’t have done it! It can only be put into an artifact that’s been specially made to handle it! You couldn’t possibly have mastered it on your own!”
“I didn’t do it on my own.” Raising his left foreleg, Lex held the barbed wire out in front of him. “I had a goddess who taught me that it’s about what your will can overcome, rather than what your body can withstand. It was because of her that I was able to triumph, and make that divinity my own. Along with the leftover aristeia from Hvitdod’s remains.”
Baring her teeth, Adagio glared at him. “That’s not possible!”
Deciding that he’d gotten enough satisfaction from her, Lex called a spell to mind, looking over how things were about to unfold. “Allow me to demonstrate otherwise.”
There was no outward indication that Lex was casting a spell – he didn’t murmur any incantations or trace mystic symbols in the air – but Adagio could feel it anyway.
Although her mystic senses had dulled to the point of uselessness during her banishment on Earth, she’d more than made up for it since coming to Everglow. Now, with all of the power she’d gained, she could almost hear him activating his spell, the energy like a ghostly melody to her ears. His magic was an arpeggio of incredible complexity, the notes being strung together so fast that she couldn’t follow them, knowing only that whatever it was he was casting would be finished in the next few seconds.
But that was enough time for her to finish a spell of her own.
Layering her voice on top of itself, she sang a quick round, letting the magic in her voice turn the tune into a stabilized form. Looping endlessly as its pitch rapidly moved out of audible range, she let the song spin over itself before releasing it toward Lex. It was a finished piece of pure sound, and would relentlessly batter him with a mixture of subsonic and ultra-high frequency pulses of its own accord. Against an ordinary person, that would rattle their bones to the point of splintering.
Nor did Adagio stop there.
“So how come my sisters aren’t with you?” she murmured, infusing the magic of her voice with aristeia, as her sonic construct – unable to be seen by the naked eye – moved around behind him. If he was serious about having absorbed the divinity she’d worked so hard to steal, then she couldn’t afford to pull her punches, reverting to the topic that seemed to have gotten under his skin before. “Did they run away because you forgot to walk them and fill their water dish? Or did they run into traffic when you took their leashes off?”
The taunt was designed to enrage him, ideally to the point where he’d have lost whatever spell he was finishing and try to make this a physical battle rather than a magical one. But although she felt the words slither past that same wall of mental defenses that he had up – the same kind that Nenet had – all it evoked from him was a sneer. “What do you care?” he spat, throttling the artificial emotion. “Upset that you couldn’t sell their souls as well?”
Even as the words left his lips, the sonic construct that she’d summoned sprang at him from behind, invisible and inaudible as its outstretched bands of sound reached for him...
Only to be torn to shreds in an instant as Lex casually waved a claw in its direction.
Adagio had just enough time to feel shocked – both that he’d detected it, and had dispatched it so easily – before the entire room plunged into darkness, leaving only his eyes and horn visible.
Then she felt his spell – which was apparently something else besides whatever he’d done to darken the place – go off, the aura around his horn winking out.
“That should be enough to keep you from causing any further trouble. Now, I have questions for you.”
That was enough to make her scoff. Did he think she was scared of the dark? “Sonata and Aria didn’t teach you very much, did they? Ask a girl to talk about herself, and she’s likely to give you AN EARFUL!!!”
She delivered the last two words with a blast of sonic force powerful enough to knock him completely through the mountain, targeting the eyes that he’d so stupidly left glowing.
Except the wave never reached him, instead colliding with a barrier directly in front of her and shattering against it, the backlash powerful enough that it knocked her off her feet and sent her stumbling backward...against another barrier that hadn’t been there a few seconds prior.
Snarling as she picked herself up, Adagio reached her hands out, feeling the flat, frictionless surface underneath her palms. It turned a ninety-degree corner after only a few feet, and it took her only a moment to realize that he’d conjured some sort of transparent box around her, one that was strong enough to withstand an attack that should have pulverized any solid structure, regardless of its composition.
Apparently, that was what he’d been casting.
A second later, the glow in Lex’s eyes went out, leaving her completely trapped in darkness.
“We’ll start with when you parted ways with your sisters,” he began, and from the sound of his voice she could tell that he was circling the prison he’d stuck her in. “I know that Iliana tried the three of you separately for your ill-considered attempt to seize the castle at the center of Viljatown. What sentence were you given, and how did you escape it?”
But Adagio couldn’t answer, her jaw not working due to how hard she was grinding her teeth.
Did he think he could just shove her in a box, turn out the lights, and interrogate her like she was some sort of misbehaving child?! After turning her own daughter against her, stealing the godsblood that she’d struggled to acquired, and then spurning her advances, he actually had the gall to talk down to her?!
To a creature whose destiny was to be adored, any one of those was an unpardonable offense. Coming from the guy who was screwing her sisters, it was that much more insulting. The mere implication that anyone could prefer those two idiots – who had only survived their time on Earth because of her! – over her was something that Adagio could never forgive.
As much as Adagio had hated to admit it, she knew that a seduction attempt was the best course of action. Even after Lex had turned her down, that was still true; she’d seen the way he’d looked at her in the shower, desire written all over his face. That things had turned into a fight changed nothing; she’d known plenty of guys for whom aggression was just another form of foreplay. A strategic rip in her dress here, an “accidental” touch there, and their battle would have seamlessly moved over to the bed, regardless of whether or not Nenet was watching.
But there was a difference between being aggressive and being offensive, and Lex Legis had just crossed that line.
Which meant no more playing around.
Until now, carefully rationing her remaining aristeia had been a major concern. Although Adagio had amassed a great deal of that incredible power from a variety of supernatural figures, none of them had been so foolish as to give her a self-sustaining supply of the stuff. While she could hold onto the quantity that she had indefinitely – and enjoy the side effects that simply possessing it granted her, such as enhanced strength and reflexes, heightened magical affinity, and resistance to injury – any aristeia that she expended couldn’t be recovered.
At least, not without going back to those ancient creatures and getting them to renew her supply, which Adagio knew they never would. She was already in their debt, having made numerous promises that she had no intention of keeping, and they’d never grant her more aristeia when she hadn’t even paid for the amount that she already had.
Even trying to harvest the trace amounts of the stuff in her children had failed. Whether they were alive or dead, returning the residual aristeia in their bodies back to its source ultimately resulted in no net gain. Like pulling her own stray hairs from the teeth of a comb, recovering them gave her nothing that she hadn't already possessed.
That was why she’d gone out of her way to get others to do as much of her fighting for her as possible, ranging from her children – being able to carry them to term and raise them to maturity in a matter of minutes thanks to the secrets she’d gleaned from Lashtada’s book (even if that cowardly mage who’d liberated her from Iliana’s army had been the one to imbue her with the spellcraft necessary to put what she’d learned into practice) – to daemon mercenaries. And when she’d had to get personally involved, she’d made sure to use her other resources wherever possible, whether it was her innate powers as a Siren, the spellcasting she’d learned here on Everglow, or simply using her cache of magic items.
Of course, there had been plenty of times when things couldn’t be helped, and she’d needed to use aristeia despite her best efforts to the contrary. Several of the creatures she’d trafficked with had required her to call upon that power in order to convince them – whether by trickery, seduction, or a show of force – to give her more, something that she knew she couldn’t continue doing since repeatedly making promises and failing to keep them had ruined her credibility in more than a few supernatural communities.
Kara, that petty bitch of a goddess, had doubtlessly made sure of that by now.
Fighting Kryonex had also put a serious drain on how much aristeia Adagio had left. Although the army she’d amassed had managed to rout the demigod’s forces and push into his stronghold with only a little direct action on her part, the heavy losses they’d taken had left them ill-prepared to face Kryonex himself. Getting a vial of his divine manna had required her to not only step in, but fight at the absolute top of her game, holding nothing back. Even then, she’d barely managed to escape on her own, sacrificing the rest of her forces in order to make it back with her prize.
Only for Nenet to show up and steal it.
In hindsight, it was easy to see how that could have been avoided. If she’d used aristeia when she’d tried to enchant the sphinx during Nenet’s first attempt to steal back her master’s spine, then it would have punched through whatever mental protection she’d gained as a result of her transformation, the same way it had just now – at least before Lex had somehow countermanded her – when she’d tried to force her daughter to help her seduce him. If she’d done that then, Nenet would have been easily subdued, and Lex Legis would never have recovered his spine.
But there had been no way of knowing any of that at the time. Instead, Adagio had tried to conserve the aristeia she had left, which had resulted in Nenet shrugging off the unenhanced charm spell and successfully fleeing with Lex’s vertebrae.
All of which had led to this.
To Lex Legis thinking that he could bring her to heel with a tough-guy attitude and a few magic tricks, as though she was the same sort of pathetic, weak-willed little slut that her sisters were.
It was time to stop holding back, to abandon any ideas of turning him to her side and instead show him the same power that she’d used to wound a god on his home turf. If what Lex had said about absorbing Kryonex’s godsblood was true, then it would still be in his corpse after he died. All that would need to be done then was to crush Nenet’s will, turning her back into a good little spellbook, and with any luck there’d been enough time to replenish her magic and resume crafting an artifact out of his body.
And if worse came to absolute worst, and Kryonex arrived before she finished, she could always use the trump card she’d been given...even if using it carried risks that she wanted to avoid, talisman or no.
“Answer me, Adagio,” pressed Lex, his voice coming from the opposite side of her now. “What happened when Iliana put you on trial? How did you go from being in her custody to here?”
Knowing that he was using magic to see through the gloom, Adagio put her hands over her face, doing her best to act as though she was overcome with emotion as she quietly sang a spell of echolocation. No more taking chances; she could hear Lex’s voice, but she was going to be as sure as possible that she was aiming in the right direction when she targeted him with her next spell.
As she’d hoped, her echolocation spell worked through the box. Although his barrier held back the force generated by extremely high decibel levels, lower ranges could obviously pass through it without a problem; hence why she could hear him outside of it. Even better, it revealed what she’d suspected: he was throwing his voice somehow, his actual location being opposite from where she’d heard him.
“Last chance,” came his displaced voice again. “Tell me what I want to know, or I’ll rip the answers from your mind.”
A throaty laugh bubbled up from her then, and she lowered her hands. “You want to know what’s on my mind?” she cooed. “All you had to do was ask.”
Then, not giving him a chance to react, she turned so that she was facing him, pouring as much aristeia into her voice as she could...
With her echolocation spell still active, Adagio was able to “see” Lex’s eyes widen as she began to sing.
It was clear that he had mystic senses of his own, and Adagio knew they had to be screaming at him right now, warning him of what was about to happen. Immediately, more phantasmal notes reached her ears, his eyes and horn lighting up again, and she smirked inwardly, knowing that he’d be hard-pressed to drop whatever barrier he’d placed her under and stop her singing in time.
Or are you going to run away? she wondered silently, amused by the thought of him turning tail and teleporting out after all his macho swagger. Better give him a little incentive to stick around.
Raising one hand, Adagio slowly pointed a finger.
But not at him.
Instead, she directed it a few feet to his right, directly at where her echolocation spell was picking up the flap of Nenet’s wings. With no one else in the mountain, it was easy for her to place the sound, especially since she’d been the one to blast these tunnels open. And if Lex and her wayward daughter actually had some sort of special connection the way her having his cutie mark suggested, then he’d likely know exactly what – or rather who – she was pointing at...
The corners of her lips turned upward as she saw those glowing eyes narrow, understanding her threat: if he ran away, the spell she was casting would target Nenet instead.
And I bet you think I can do it, too, don’t you? Adagio laughed silently. You know how much power my last attack had, even if this little box of yours contained it. You know it would have punched right through the mountain. And that this one is far more powerful.
Of course, that power came at the cost of range: even if the intervening stonework was no obstacle, the Song of Destruction couldn’t have reached Nenet from this distance.
But Lex didn’t know that.
Nor, it seemed, had he ever intended to flee, as his spell went off a second later, and this time Adagio was able to follow the ghostly melody to its conclusion, knowing that he’d just wrapped himself in some sort of force field similar to what he’d imprisoned her in. A half-second later his horn glowed brighter, and her echolocation spell registered a thick barrier of some sort – one whose aural resonance seemed almost like it was composed of crystals, of all things – appearing between the two of them.
That he actually thought that any of that would protect him almost made Adagio burst out laughing.
Instead, she focused on finishing the last few notes of her spell...
And then it was done.
Savoring her imminent victory, Adagio spread her arms wide as she unleashed the Song of Destruction toward Lex Legis.
There was no melody to mark its passage, no notes or tune to be heard. Sound, after all, was merely the vibration of a medium, and the power of the Song of Destruction was that it vibrated whatever medium it traveled through so powerfully that it ripped it apart. Nothing could survive its passage; molecules were shredded, atoms were torn apart, and – loaded down with aristeia – even magic was torn asunder.
This was the power that had wounded Kyronex, after all.
And even if Lex Legis was telling the truth about having absorbed the divinity she’d stolen, a power that could injure a demigod would absolutely be able to kill someone who only had a fraction of that power.
A moment later, she was proven right.
Her mystic senses felt it as the box around her shattered into pieces. Her echolocation – muffled by the spell’s passage – showed her the crystals he’d raised crumbling, followed immediately by the force field he’d placed around himself.
Then the spell slammed bodily into him, the lights returning as he lost control of whatever he’d done to douse them, and Adagio had the pleasure of watching him writhe under the onslaught, struggling to quite literally hold himself together. It was like he was caught in a hurricane that only he could feel, legs kicking as he was lifted slightly off the ground, thrashing to free himself. His jaw worked, silently yelling something, and his eyes caught hers for an instant.
“Too bad, Lex,” she taunted, hoping he could read her lips since there was no way for him to hear her. “We could have been great together.”
The last word had just passed her lips when he started to disintegrate.
Adagio couldn’t hold back a chuckle as the Song of Destruction finally worked its way through whatever remaining defenses he’d wrapped himself around, causing his collapse one layer at a time. In the blink of an eye, his clothes, fur, skin, muscles, and organs all fell away, leaving nothing but a ragged skeleton that collapsed to the ground a moment later, held together only by a few remaining vestiges of sinew.
As it was, Adagio was mildly surprised that even his bones had survived her spell, needing a moment to realize that was probably because of Kryonex’s divinity; it had apparently spread from his spine to the rest of his bones. So he wasn’t lying after all, she noted, unable to help but feel a bit of grudging respect for the fallen stallion.
“You should be grateful,” she announced idly as she stepped toward Lex’s skeletal remains. “Your soul would probably have paid off a lot of my debt to those daemons.”
Unfortunately, that was out of the picture now, as soul-binding magic had to be used immediately after death; otherwise the soul fled to the afterlife. Likewise, the astradaemons she had patrolling the place wouldn’t show up either, since she’d told them never to enter her personal chambers. Even if she made an exception and called them now, she’d have to flag them down and direct them here, by which time Lex’s soul would have fled to its eternal reward.
“Instead, all you got was your heart broken,” she snickered, kneeling down by his corpse as she reached for his spine. With any luck, showing that to Nenet would be enough to break the little brat’s spirit once and for all. “Along with the rest of y-EEEEEK!!!”
Her shriek echoed through the room as Lex’s skeletal claw reached up and grabbed her wrist before she could make contact with his spine, his skull turning to face her as the empty sockets flared green and purple.
“I’ve had my heart broken before,” came Lex’s voice, his jawbone unmoving as he tightened his grip on her, holding fast despite her efforts to break free. “Along with numerous bones and organs. As you can see, it doesn’t phase me now.”
Grimacing in fright, Adagio managed to regain enough control of herself to start singing another spell, but she’d only gotten two notes out before Lex’s other claw clamped down over her mouth.
“I admit I’m impressed,” he hissed. “Your spell broke through two force fields, a ultra-dense wall of crystals, a ward against sonic damage, and a sound-dampening abjuration, as well as my natural defenses.”
Still unable to speak, Adagio struggled to extricate herself from his grasp. How was he holding her so securely?! She’d broken out of his grip before! Forget that, how was he even still alive?!
“Now,” declared Lex, “it’s my turn.”
An instant later, a concussive wave slammed into her, sending her flying across the room as though she’d been launched out of a cannon. Hitting the far wall with such force that she sank almost five feet into the solid rock, the impact made Adagio’s vision swim for a moment, feeling like she’d just had a skyscraper dropped on her.
Nor was Lex done, his boney form rising up and pointing a claw at her. A blue light gathered at its tip, and Adagio had just enough time to realize that she couldn’t dodge whatever he was about to do when it lanced out in a beam wider than she was, hitting her with cold so profound that it stole her breath away.
But being infused with aristeia had given her resistance to extremes of temperature, among many other defenses, and despite the fact that she was already going numb, Adagio managed to tear an arm free of the ice that was already gathering around it, bringing it up to shield her face as she managed to gasp out another song.
Immediately, a wall of pure sound sprang up between herself and Lex. It wasn’t enough to stop the freezing onslaught – the vibration of the air being unable to interfere with the transmission of temperature – but the aristeia she’d imbued it with allowed it to ignore that restriction, bleeding off enough of the chill that Adagio was able to recover, pulling herself out of the impact crater Lex’s spell had thrown her into.
Which was when she saw that he was already recovering from the damage she’d inflicted on him with the Song of Destruction.
It wasn’t regeneration; or at least, it didn’t look like it. Instead, it was as though he was an image on a slide projector, and additional coverings for his muscles and skin and everything else were being layered on top of him. She could already see the parts of him that had been blown off fading – not regrowing but fading! – back into visibility. Even his clothes were being restored!
That shouldn’t have been possible. One of the deadliest things about the Song of Destruction was that it overcame regeneration. Vidrig, who’d been able to heal back from anything that wasn’t fire or acid, would have been slain by that spell. But now, Lex Legis had not only survived it, but was recovering...apparently without the use of magic.
Yet more proof that he had absorbed Kryonex’s godhood.
But that just means I need to hit him with that again! decided Adagio as she immediately began singing another spell. If I can rip that fragment of divinity out of Kryonex, I can do the same to this guy!
Singing the Song of Destruction a second time, Adagio poured more aristeia into it, silently vowing that this time she wouldn’t give him any time to recover before she tore his spine out!
He was already moving as she finished the last note, but while the wall of sound that she’d raised wouldn’t stop what she was about to unleash, Adagio knew it would at least slow him down somewhat. Sure enough, when he plunged into it a second later, Adagio saw him falter as the wall’s mixture of semi-solid frequencies slowed his movement. It was just enough to let her finish her spell before she could close the distance.
And at this range, I won’t miss!
A second later, she hit him with a second instance of the Song of Destruction.
Or at least, she should have...but somehow, Lex wasn’t there anymore. Instead, the only thing her spell hit was a fading outline of him – a literal afterimage, realized Adagio, her blood running cold – before the magic faded out just before it reached the far wall. But then where...?
Her question was answered as she heard the ghostly notes of a spell coming from behind her, barely noticing a flicker of green mixed with purple accompanying it.
But she didn’t have a chance to act on that knowledge before a claw grabbed the back of her head. “Bow down,” came Lex’s voice, the words carrying supernatural weight behind them, “and remain silent.”
Adagio’s voice choked in her throat, and as Lex’s grip left her, she could already feel herself sinking to her knees. But even as bent down to place her palms on the floor, she struggled with everything she had against the commands. She knew that as a Siren, her mind was naturally resistant to enchantments, but Lex’s magic was powerful enough that she could feel herself folding beneath it, unable to fight the pony who’d overcome a fragment of the divine through will alone.
That infuriated her, and she fought back with everything she had, filling her mind with memories of the frustration and humiliation that she’d endured on Earth. All of the men who’d thought they could possess her; having to play nice with an imperfectly-charmed thrall in order to keep from arousing their suspicions; the many times she’d been forced to lead her endlessly-complaining sisters to a new home because some villagers were growing suspicious of how the three of them never seemed to age. All of it and more, for more than a thousand years! And now, for the second time, she was being thwarted by a pony just as she was about to finally get what she’d always wanted!
Never again!
NEVER AGAIN!!!
Her eyes glowing red as she threw off Lex’s commands, Adagio twisted at the waist, rising into a crouch as she sang a spell of fury, throwing as much aristeia as she could into it.
Again, he was already moving as she cast her spell, dodging out of the way at incredible speed...but this time, she’d anticipated that, not having bothered to shape the sonic force of her spell. That diluted its power, the impact of it being heightened the more she contained it to a limited area, but by that same token it meant that Lex Legis had nowhere to run, and Adagio grinned viciously as it hit him hard enough to knock him off his claws.
She didn’t give him a chance to get up, immediately hitting him with another aristeia-infused wave of sound. This one was directed, and heard his pained grunt as she saw his batter him across the room.
He immediately started weaving another defense, layering another ward – this one a general protection against magic – onto himself as he sent another wave of utter cold toward her, angling it around the wall of sound she’d raised. But this time Adagio was ready for it, dodging past the beam, and although it clipped her side, she ignored the pain as she hit him with another aristeia-infused spell, the collision spinning him around and causing his attack to dissipate as he hit the floor, struggling to rise.
The sight of him having trouble getting up was what Adagio had been waiting for. Now I’ve got you!
This time, he wouldn’t be able to avoid the Song of Destruction.
Singing its notes, Adagio once again filled it with aristeia-
Only to find that she had none left to imbue it with.
The realization made her breath catch in her throat. No...! It can’t be!
I assure you, it can.
Lex’s voice in her head was enough to make Adagio choke. What...?!
You should learn to guard your thoughts more carefully, explained Lex coldly as he stood up, this time without any trouble. I’ve been listening to them ever since I sent Nenet away. And once I learned that your supply of aristeia was limited, it was easy to plant a suggestion in your mind that you should expend it profligately.
Her mouth going dry, Adagio took a step back, trying to figure out what was happening. He’d been reading her mind? But she’d almost killed him with the Song of Destruction-
Stalking toward her like a predator advancing on cornered prey, Lex’s voice in her mind gave a dark laugh. You should never put credence in anything your enemy says. It’s true that your spell injured me, but not as much as I led you to believe. I made you think otherwise so that you’d keep expending aristeia. And now, you’ve used it all.
Feeling her back hit a wall, Adagio tried to figure out how it had come to this. She’d been so close! After a millennium of exile, after being defeated by Twilight Sparkle, after being forced into servitude by Iliana, she’d finally been on the verge of being adored by everyone! And now-
“And now,” finished Lex, no longer bothering with telepathy as he advanced on her, already looking as though he’d never been injured in the first place, “your parade of failures has reached its conclusion.”
Clenching her fists, Adagio glared daggers at the stallion who’d ruined her dreams. “And now what? You think I’m going to bow down and call you master like Nenet? Or that I’ll giggle and offer to be your adorable little pet like my sisters? Or maybe you want me to play nice and make friends with everyone like that stupid little pony princess?”
“Now,” intoned Lex darkly, “you pay for your crimes.”
Straightening up, she tried very hard not to think about the talisman that was in the bottom drawer of her desk, barely five feet away, edging in that direction. “If you think-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish as temperature suddenly dropped by what must have been a hundred degrees, causing Adagio to gasp. Even if the sudden chill wasn’t enough to hurt her, it was still shocking. “What are you doing?!”
But Lex wasn’t looking at her, frowning as he faced toward what she knew was the front of the mountain. “This wasn’t me,” he answered at last.
For a moment, Adagio wasn’t sure what he meant. If the cold wasn’t his doing, then whose was it?
Then her eyes went wide, as a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature ran down her spine.
Having heard Nenet’s message before she’d actually sent it thanks to his trans-temporal sense, Lex was already looking through the sphinx’s eyes, knowing that she was standing at the entrance to the mountain fortress. Although he didn’t bother transmitting it in reply, he agreed with her take on the situation.
They did indeed have a problem.
The massive portal that had opened up a short distance from Nenet’s position – in complete defiance of Adagio’s wards – had already disgorged a dozen monsters, and more were pouring through with each passing moment.
Undulating across the frozen ground were a several creatures that looked like six-foot tall mounds of snow, except for the fact that each of them sprouted four long tentacles topped with stinger, and their bodies were peppered with several dozen reddish eyes. Moving between them were creatures that looked like six-legged polar bears, save for the long horn protruding from their foreheads. They were accompanied by several humanoids, each as tall as Sissel, but with dark blue skin and a third eye centered in the middle of their foreheads.
But what concerned Lex the most was what hadn’t come through the portal yet.
The size of a castle, the rift in space hung open in the air. Though Nenet’s eyes, the space beyond it was obscured by a raging blizzard, one that made the snowstorms of the last few days seem gentle by comparison. Even so, the sphinx’s vision was keen enough that Lex could see the throngs of creatures rushing, flying, slithering, and oozing their way through the gate. And behind them all was a massive form the size of a glacier...
But the glowing blue eyes gave away that it was something far more sinister.
I’ve put an illusion over the entrance, murmured Nenet, stepping back from the cave opening nervously. But I don’t know if that’ll fool them for very long.
It won’t need to. I’m going out there.
Across their link, Nenet’s anxiety grew immeasurably worse. Master, you can’t! There’s more of those creatures coming through every moment! I don’t even know what most of them are! And if...if that’s really the demigod that Adagio wounded, he’s going to be furious when he sees that you’ve taken his divinity!
He’ll also be able to see that I’m the champion of a goddess far greater than him, replied Lex easily. He won’t dare-
The words caught in his throat as the barbed wire around his foreleg suddenly clenched, drawing blood.
That was enough to command Lex’s undivided attention, ceasing to borrow Nenet’s vision so that he could stare at the goddess-given mark in shock. That the barbed wire had been able to wound him was no surprise; although it looked like an ordinary length of metal, he knew that it was the manifestation of the Night Mare’s own divinity, and as such could easily penetrate his defenses, even as a titan.
What had surprised him, rather, was that his foresight hadn’t predicted that.
...Master? What’s wrong?
Nenet’s question was enough to bring Lex back to the present. That something had just happened outside of what his trans-temporal sense could foresee had significant implications, but the fact that the Night Mare had just chastised him for thinking that his status as her champion would daunt Kryonex was an issue of more immediate concern.
Silently, Lex began casting another spell.
Nenet, have you determined if Adagio had any forces left in reserve?
She did, Master. Grisela’s remaining puppets were all busy stripping my siblings’ rooms of anything valuable, and the astradaemons were still patrolling the Ethereal Plane around this area.
“Were”?
He could almost hear the sphinx cringe. I, um...I killed them all.
Despite himself, Lex couldn’t help but feel slightly impressed. While Grisela’s puppets were little more than simple automatons without their maker guiding them, the astradaemons were no minor opponents. Not to mention the fact that he hadn’t sensed Nenet taking any injuries while he’d been fighting Adagio. Good. Then that’s one less thing I need to be concerned with.
But Master, even with this new power I gained, I had to use almost all of my magic to do it! Now I won’t be able to help you against those monsters outside! In his mind, he registered self-recrimination coming from the sphinx. It would have been better if you’d left me behind and brought Solvei along instead.
No, Nenet, answered Lex, the mere idea of summoning Solvei all that he needed for his foresight to again confirm that it would have been catastrophically bad. For what’s about to happen, I’d rather have you here than her. She wouldn’t have been able to attack ethereal creatures, or keep those monsters from seeing the entrance to this place. And you’re the better choice to make sure Adagio doesn’t try anything else.
So...it’s over? You defeated her?
See for yourself.
No sooner had Lex said that than he summoned Nenet to his side, the sphinx swaying at the abrupt teleportation. Blinking, she looked around the destroyed boudoir, awed at the sheer scale of the damage. But when she caught sight of Adagio at the far end of the chamber, she almost toppled over in shock.
Adagio was doing a striptease.
Even as Nenet watched, the Siren – contained within a cage of black crystals that took up nearly half the room – slowly strut across the length of her prison, hips swaying with each step. Coming to a stop right in front of the bars, she slowly bent at the waist, showing a generous portion of cleavage as she effortlessly brought her fingers to her ankles and traced them upwards, drawing the hem of her dress up.
Just before it reached her waist, she turned so that she was standing in profile, flipping the edge of the dress up in time to show her bare hip before letting the fabric fall. Canting her head backward and thrusting her chest out, she ran her tongue over her lips and winked before turning and flipping her hair, the motion heralding a new round of writhing as she continued to sensuously dance.
Confused and repulsed, Nenet looked at Lex. This is defeating her?!
This is her incapacitated, corrected Lex, not bothering to look at either of them. Instead, his horn glowed as he cursed the entire area to become impervious to teleportation; the first of several defenses that would need to be laid down before he could deal with the situation outside...though how he handled that would depend on what his other spell – which he had yet to finish casting – revealed.
But she’s trying to seduce you again! And you said you almost fell for her charms last time!
Focus on the magical spectrum and take another look at her.
Grimacing, Nenet took a deep breath before turning back to Adagio, the Siren continuing to wordlessly caper and prance in her prison.
After a few seconds, Nenet’s brow furrowed. She’s...under some sort of compulsion? No, it’s a curse! But it’s not on her. It’s on... Pausing, she double-checked her conclusion before finishing. It’s on her shoes?
Correct.
Next was a ward to make physically breaching the place that much more difficult, layering the interior hallways with magic designed to confuse and confound intruders. It was the same spell he’d once used to protect the rescue party that he’d brought to Vanhoover when they’d stayed in that abandoned warehouse, except now he was able to augment it far beyond its original parameters, and cast it much more quickly.
I wove curses into all of her magic items, he explained as he applied the spell. While that limited their effectiveness to inversions of their original functionality, it was much easier to affect her that way than by cursing her directly, since she was already utilizing the magic involved. Her footwear, for instance, was enchanted to allow her to move faster and easier. Now, every time she tries to move, it’s translated into wasteful and unproductive motion.
Nenet gave him a sidelong glance before looking back at where Adagio was grinding her backside against the bars. I’m not sure that’s how I’d describe it.
The malediction operates using her idea of wasteful motion, noted Lex, moving on to an anti-scrying ward. Nor is it her only curse. Her dress was designed to abet her spellcasting prowess; now it dampens it. If she manages to cast anything despite its suppression, her spell-storing ring now serves to disrupt the activation of magical energy. And her telekinetic ring now saps her physical strength, just to make sure she can’t get out of that cage.
I’d be more worried about her shattering it with her voice, noted Nenet. I mean, I know you’ve made it really hard for her to use her magic, but she broke through the last curse you put on her...
By using aristeia, noted Lex. She doesn’t have that anymore, which is why I doubt she’ll break the renewed curse of silence that I put on her. It's less secure without a magic item to tie it into, but her voice is too dangerous not to stifle. Even then, I want you here to make sure she doesn’t try anything.
Nenet made no immediate reply, instead biting her lip for a long moment before turning to look at him. Master...are you going to fight Kryonex?
The fact that he’d foreseen the question was the only thing that kept Lex from glancing at the barbed wire around his foreleg. I’m hoping it won’t come to that. But if it does, then I’m prepared to try.
Is there any reason we can’t just run away? You have teleportation magic now, and his army hasn’t spotted us. Why not just go?
Nenet, the only reason Kryonex is here is because he’s already determined that this is where Adagio fled to. If all he finds is an empty hideaway, do you think that he’ll give up the search and go back to his realm? Or will he send his minions out to look for her, inflicting mayhem on everyone nearby?
But that’s not our-
Solvei’s tribe is only a few days’ journey from here, he reminded her. Less than that by air. And Kryonex is the patron god of the yetis, who were their enemies. If he sends his monsters out, then the adlets will be among the very first to suffer for it.
That was enough to make Nenet wince. Then...then you should-
Absolutely not.
But Nenet wouldn’t be dissuaded. You should just give Adagio to him! I don’t know if it’ll work, but if you turn her over to him, he might be satisfied and go away!
Nenet-
I know you love her sisters, but she’s not like them! She’s not good like you said they are! Fear came from her across their link, and even without reading her thoughts, he knew she was remembering how he’d lost his temper the last time she’d mentioned Sonata and Aria. She’s selfish and cruel! She did terrible things, and hurt so many people! And she did it all just because she wanted to be popular! That’s worse than if-
Nenet, stop.
But...!
He reached a claw toward her then, hating the way she gave a frightened squeak and squeezed her eyes shut, thinking that he was going to throttle her again. But he had no intention of being so rough with her ever again, instead patting her head as gently as he could. I promised her sisters that I would bring her back. It was the last thing I promised them, and I intend to keep it, even if it means fighting a demigod.
Sniffling, Nenet looked up at him through watery eyes. She’s not worth it.
Sonata and Aria are. Withdrawing his claw, he glanced back at the dancing Siren. And even if that wasn’t true, Adagio is still a Siren, and Sirens are ponies. Equestrian ponies. Now that she’s in my custody, I won’t turn her over to a foreign power, no matter how egregious her crimes.
Giving Nenet one final look, Lex turned toward the door, sparing only the briefest glance at the dancing Siren. Despite the erotic way she writhed and caressed herself, the only thing he felt at that moment was determination. I am the one who will judge her. Not Kryonex. Not Iliana. Not Kara or whatever other creatures she trafficked with. Me.
He didn’t wait for Nenet to respond, turning and walking out the door.
Walking through the magical traps and defenses as though they weren’t there – thanks to Mystaria’s clasp, he was immune to his own spells – Lex approached the entrance to the mountain tunnel, knowing that it likely wouldn’t be much longer before the monsters pouring through the gate discovered it.
But as he rounded the last bend, he saw that they hadn’t found it yet. That was a fortunate circumstance, since it gave him time to finish the spell he’d begun casting several minutes earlier.
Contemplating the barbed wire around his leg again, Lex waited until his spell was almost done before he turned his attention back to his foresight. This time it didn’t surprise him when he received no information about what was about to happen, even as his communion spell took effect.
My champion, came the voice of the Night Mare into his mind. You were wise to contact me. We have much to discuss, and very little time...
As his spell ended, closing his line of communication with the Night Mare, Lex silently clenched his claws into fists.
Outside of the cavern’s entrance, Kryonex’s monsters were growing closer. While none of them appeared to have noticed Nenet’s illusion yet, the sheer press of bodies meant that it was only a matter of time, presuming that a spellcaster or other creature with the ability to see magic didn’t notice the spell aura sooner. And while the demigod himself didn’t seem to have arrived yet, the fact that the temperature kept dropping – it had already plunged well past the freezing mark, and was continuing to fall rapidly – likely meant that he would arrive soon.
And when he did, Lex would need to face him with no divine backing.
It was enough to make him grit his teeth, feeling blood run down his palms from how tightly he was clenching his talons. Having a godly patron to act as a bulwark against other deities was the entire reason he’d forged a pact with the Night Mare in the first place!
But divine politics was still politics, it seemed, and his goddess had made it clear that she wouldn’t be able to assist him – directly or otherwise – in his confrontation with Kryonex.
Forcing himself to calm down, Lex relaxed his claws, the self-inflicted wounds already closing as he reviewed the practical consequences of the Night Mare’s non-intervention.
Despite his initial concerns, he’d still be able to use the divine spells she’d granted him. Having already transferred that magic into his possession, it was now his to use as he saw fit. But any such spells which called upon her to intervene, or tried to summon any of her servitors or creatures from her divine realm, would be denied.
Similarly, the Charismata could still be utilized at his discretion. But any object or area that he consecrated in the Night Mare’s name would be treated as an extension of himself for the duration of his encounter with Kryonex. If the demigod or his minions blasphemed anything he hallowed in the goddess’ name, no retaliation from the Night Mare would be forthcoming.
But what had surprised Lex most – though in hindsight it shouldn’t have – was that his ability to lay curses would also be crippled in the upcoming fight.
“Ever since you pledged yourself to me, Excoriation has personally overseen all of your curses, great and small,” the Night Mare had told him. “But the scourge is part of my Umbral Regalia, and so its involvement will be temporarily suspended. You may still attempt to lay maledictions, but there are very few among the planes who would aid your efforts when your opponent is a god.”
None of those, however, had concerned Lex as much as the other restriction that he’d been made aware of during his communion with the Night Mare.
His trans-temporal sense didn’t work with regard to deities.
He’d suspected that to be the case when he’d initially mentioned to Nenet that the Night Mare’s authority would keep Kryonex at bay, not having foreseen that the barbed wire around his leg would scratch him in response to that. But the conversation with the goddess had confirmed it, since he hadn’t known what she was going to say until she’d actually said it.
For whatever reason – because the rules of causality didn’t apply to them, because their ability to manipulate reality made such predictions impossible, or because they were somehow beyond what even a titan could sense – gods were beings whose futures couldn’t be seen. Or at least, not by him.
And even though he was only a demigod, Lex felt certain that Kryonex would be the same.
Which meant that once again, he was going into a hostile situation without being able to bring his full powers to bear.
But rather than anger him more, Lex felt his frustration diminish, a sardonic laugh emerging from his throat.
When was the last time he hadn’t had to deal with some sort of handicap? How long had it been since he’d faced an enemy that wasn’t stronger or more numerous or better prepared than he was? The odds had been against him ever since he’d resolved himself to taking over Equestria, let alone since he’d transcended mortality; why should this time be any different?
And just like every other time, he would persevere, overcome, and ultimately triumph.
Demigod though he was, Kryonex was about to become another stepping stone on Lex Legis’s path to dominance.
Master-
I’m here, Nenet, he replied, knowing what she was about to ask. With a thought, he adjusted his innate resistance to magic, allowing the scrying sensor that she’d created – and which he’d already detected lurking in the hallway behind him – to pick him up.
Oh! I mean, thank you, Master! I could sense that you were there through our bond, but I wanted to keep an eye on you. Not that I’m not watching Adagio too! I just had a little bit of magic left, and wanted-
It’s alright. I don’t disapprove. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Relief came from the sphinx then, followed by happiness. Really?
Indeed.
Turning back toward the cave entrance, Lex began to walk toward it, rising up onto his back legs as he strode forward. An act of will was all it took to sheathe himself in flames, the air around him igniting as he let the fire settle over him. But he didn’t feel the heat, nor did his body or his clothes burn, instead wearing the flames as though they were armor, covering him like a second skin, his cloak flapping behind him as the heat made it rise and dance of its own accord.
Watch closely, he bid Nenet as he reached the cave entrance. I’ll show you the power of the one you chose to be your master!
“SERVANTS OF KRYONEX!” he roared as he stepped out into the open, his voice amplified many times over. “MAKE WAY! I AM THE ONE WHO HAS WHAT YOUR MASTER SEEKS!”
The answer he received was a chorus of howls, shrieks, and screeches, as his unexpected entrance and the flames surrounding him caused the crowd of monsters – all of them creatures of intrinsic cold, and now numbering well over a hundred altogether – to fall back in surprise.
But while his foresight wouldn’t work on Kryonex, it had no such problems on his army, and Lex was entirely unsurprised when they immediately rallied, directing their wrath toward him. In an instant, dozens of streams of cryonic magic lanced toward him, from freezing winds to beams of pure algidity to spikes of icicles and many more, the array encompassing every kind of cold-based attack imaginable.
None of it reached him.
The weakest of the attacks simply sputtered out before making contact, too weak to even reach his passive defenses. Most of the rest simply shattered against the wards against cold that he’d already laid on himself; with Solvei’s inexhaustible supply of cryomancy at his command, he could lay down multiple defenses against ice magic, all of them commanding staggering power. The few purely physical attacks fared no better, failing to so much as make the fires he’d wrapped himself in flicker as they shattered against his body.
But magic wasn’t all that the army of monsters was capable of doing.
Even as their fellows cast spells and turned the weather against him, others raced forward, baring teeth, stingers, claws, wings, and other appendages, intent on doing through sheer mass what magic had failed to do. Serving as the vanguard, they rushed past the ones using magic as they moved in, leaving the rest of the monsters filling the valley to watch the spectacle.
A half-dozen horned, six-legged bears led the charge, intermingled among nearly a score of creatures that looked like giant blue lizards, save that where their heads should have been instead sprouted a scaly, humanoid torso. Several of the tentacled oozes were undulating toward him as well, and up above there were several winged serpents, each of them over a dozen feet long and sporting three heads. A handful of the three-eyed giants joined them, claws held up in preparation as they charged.
Waving away the remnants of the magical barrage as though it were nothing more than an insect, Lex’s lip curled as he glanced at the incoming throng, recalling when a similar horde – made up of ghouls – had tried the same thing back in Vanhoover.
Then, he had trapped the landscape in advance, used strategic placement of spells, and retaliated with carefully-calculated strikes with Severance, all in an effort to manage the deluge of enemies.
Now, he simply gathered his will and threw it at them.
His fight with Adagio had been instructive in several regards, allowing him to acclimate to his powers in ways that simple experimentation hadn’t. In probing her mind, he’d learned how to not only refine his ability to read thoughts, but also honed his ability to implant them, subtly convincing her to use her remaining aristeia carelessly. As distasteful as he ‘d found the act, there were situations where mental manipulation was not only justified, but called for, and not knowing how to properly control that power had the potential to prove disastrous.
Fortunately, using the Siren as a test case had proven quite instructive.
Before, when he’d spoken to Panuk, he’d accidentally shared his own rage with the adlet. This time, as he tapped into the rage of his own inner beast – the creature furious that he had to engage in yet more fighting without having food or sex to show for it – he concentrated not on sharing his anger with the surrounding monsters, but on magnifying it, heightening its effect on their perception as they bore down on him.
“BACK!!!”
The response to his bellow was a symphony of screams. But unlike the raucous wailing of surprise and anger that his appearance had heralded, the voices of the monsters announced a different emotion now:
Fear.
The tidal wave of monsters immediately broke apart, with almost half of their number stumbling to a halt as they scrambled wildly to reverse course, their limbs flailing madly as they attempted to reverse their momentum, crawling over each other in a mad bid to escape the terrifying beast in front of them. Their claws dug into their fellows, lacerating flesh and tearing through muscle and bone as they fought to put anything – distance, cover, or even their comrades – between themselves and the predator whom they’d so foolishly thrown themselves at.
They were the lucky ones.
As the vanguard retreated, the bulk of their number remained behind. But they hadn’t stood their ground; indeed, their collapsed forms – including several that had fallen from the sky – made it clear that not a single one of them had managed to overcome their fear. Instead, they had succumbed to it completely, eyes wide and sightless as their mouths hung open in silent screams of horror, the only external evidence of feeling dread so profound that it had cost them their lives.
And having seen their enemy brush off their attacks with contemptuous ease before slaying over thirty of their number with a single word, Kryonex’s army found themselves shocked into immobility, the morass of creatures falling still as they tried to figure out what had just happened.
But their paralysis was broken as Lex took a single step forward, causing each of the creatures surrounding him to move back by an equal distance.
Another step on his part, and again the monster army retreated.
His slow advance continued, the icy multitudes continuing to give ground, until they found themselves caught between Lex and the portal, shaking and grimacing as they realized there was nowhere left to go.
Lex, however, had no intention of advancing further.
“KRYONEX!” Waving a claw at the press of monsters, Lex looked directly at the glowing blue eyes of the hulking figure on the other side of the portal. “I’VE BESTED YOUR MINIONS! IF YOU VALUE THEIR LIVES, COME FORTH AND FACE ME YOURSELF!”
On the other side of the portal, the azure eyes narrowed. But the sound that issued forth a moment later was laughter, as deep and resonant as two glaciers grinding against each other.
The Night Mare. Kara. Soft Whisper. All were deities that he’d faced while still mortal, and in each instance he’d dealt with them on his own terms, refusing to be cowed. Now, elevated to an immortal titan, and facing a mere demigod – one who had already been outwitted by a Siren with an infusion of aristeia – Lex felt confident that the gap between himself and Kryonex wasn’t unbridgeable.
But as the demigod fully emerged from the portal, Lex found reason to question that assumption.
In an instant, the temperature fell to the point where even the assembled monsters – all of them creatures for whom the cold was a fundamental aspect of their being – were shivering. Lex himself felt the chill, despite having layered multiple overcharged wards against supremely low temperatures around himself, to say nothing of his cloak of fire and his inherent resistances as a titan. As it was, he needed to maintain his concentration to keep the flames around him active, the fire threatening to freeze solid otherwise.
The frigidity was made worse by the storm that accompanied the demigod through the gateway, wind suddenly whipping through the small valley with the force of a hurricane, sleet and hail churning through the air in a chaotic slurry that – had he still been mortal – would have left Lex unable to see anything. But although it hindered his sight not at all now, it didn’t escape Lex’s notice that none of Kryonex’s monsters seemed bothered by the storm; if anything they seemed heartened by the blizzard, regaining the courage they’d lost only seconds earlier. Gibbering and hollering as the wind swept over them, even the flying creatures seemed invigorated, rather than hampered, by the gale.
Worse, no matter how fiercely Lex concentrated on calming the storm – the weather being another way in which he could influence the world around him by will alone – all he could do was reduce it slightly, lowering it from a dangerous tempest to a frigid squall.
But neither the cold nor the storm were as profound than the sight of the demigod himself.
Or rather, the multiple sights that overlapped with each other.
In one instant, the demigod was a towering ice elemental, his features rough-hewn and indistinct. The next, he was a gigantic yeti with tentacles for arms. A moment later, he was a monstrous white arachnid with seven legs.
The changes continued, endless and never repeating, but Lex knew that Kryonex wasn’t actually altering his appearance. Rather, it was that his own senses were struggling to interpret what they were perceiving. Just like how mortal creatures couldn’t process the full scope of his own existence, instead seeing everything he did as outsized in an attempt to make sense of something beyond their ability to fully understand, the same was true for him now.
Even a demigod, it seemed, was too much for a titan to truly comprehend.
It was enough for Lex to realize that each of the gods he’d previously encountered had only revealed a limited aspect of themselves to him. All those times he’d summoned the Night Mare – or when she’d appeared in his dreams – had been a mere fragment of her true divinity. Kara, in keeping with being the goddess of shapeshifters, had shown him false impressions of herself. Even Soft Whisper, the detached goddess of death, had been holding back during their singular encounter, though Lex couldn’t begin to guess why.
Kryonex, however, seemed to lack any such sense of restraint, and Lex had to resist the urge to take a step back as the demigod’s icy blue eyes – the only part of him that was the same in every form – locked onto his own.
The beast inside of him gave a low, cautious growl. It wasn’t afraid, having purged that emotion from itself long before he’d merged with it, but it was still able to recognize a creature more dangerous than itself.
“And now I see what became of my stolen godhood.”
Kryonex’s voice was even more resonant now that he was through the portal, sounding like a hundred avalanches happening all at once, and Lex fought down the urge to dig his claws into the ground beneath him for purchase. Instead, he focused all of his preternatural awareness on Kryonex, willing himself to view the demigod’s form as a single, unchanging constant.
The effort gave him a headache that he knew would have killed a mortal, and he felt blood pooling beneath his eyes, wiping it away with a thought. But slowly, Kryonex’s form settled back into the shape of the massive, misshapen spider he’d seen earlier, and even the echoes of his voice seemed less sonorous, being deep without the thundering quality it had possessed a moment earlier.
It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless, and Lex held onto that as he stared the demigod down.
“Tell me,” continued Kryonex, “is it your intent to return what that crooning sow took from me? Or do you wear that purloined power so brazenly because you defy me to reclaim that which is mine?”
“It’s yours no longer.” Taking a step forward, Lex didn’t bother shouting over the wind, instead letting his voice resound with power enough to overwhelm the howling current of air. “I claim it now, and will not relinquish possession of it.”
Another rumbling laugh came from the huge spider, eyes glowing brighter. “And by what right do you claim ownership of a shard of my very essence?”
“By all rights!”
Negotiating with Kryonex had never been Lex’s intention. With no way to return the divinity that Adagio had taken – he had no idea if that was possible, nor any desire to find out, and even broaching the possibility would likely have severely offended the Night Mare anyway – there was simply no basis for thinking that any sort of agreement could be reached. He had nothing of equivalent value to offer Kryonex in exchange for what he’d lost, to say nothing of his faithful that had been slain and the damages that had been inflicted as part of Adagio’s invasion of the demigod’s realm. The best he could have done was to either give the demigod Belligerence, or to make a pledge of fealty in exchange for being allowed to keep what he’d taken.
Both of those options, however, were completely out of the question.
And since fleeing wasn’t something Lex was prepared to do, that meant the only choice left was to endorse not only Adagio’s pilferage, but his own possession of Kryonex’s stolen divinity, as justified.
“As a moral agent, I claim this power because its originator has used it for corrupt purposes! As the ruler of a nation, I claim it for the benefit of my people! And as the Night Mare’s champion” – he held up his left foreleg, certain that Kryonex could sense the deific power within the barbed wire – “I claim it for the glory of my goddess, who is a deity far more exalted than yourself!”
But if Kryonex was off-put by his claiming a divine mandate, he didn’t show it, laughing again. “And where is this Night Mare of yours? You offer her such grandiose plaudits, and yet she seems wholly unconcerned that another god should personally approach one so esteemed in her eyes.”
Scowling, Lex lowered his foreleg. He’d known that any chance of bluffing about the Night Mare’s being prepared to smite Kryonex was thin, but he’d hoped that alluding to such a possibility would put the demigod off. Now, that hope was thoroughly repudiated, leaving him with no option but to try and minimize the importance of that observation. “She knows that I don’t need her help to confront one who was wounded by a mere Siren.”
“Is that why you’ve made no effort to dedicate this ground to her? Why no others from her earthly church nor her planar abode have come to join you on such a holy mission?”
This time it was Lex’s turn to laugh, canting his head toward the dead bodies lying behind him, already half-buried by the snowstorm Kryonex had brought. “She values her faithful, a lesson that you could do well to learn from. With the losses your realm has sustained, can you afford to be so cavalier with your remaining followers?”
“I am their god. To die for me is not only their joy, but their obligation.”
“Then they’ll die, and you’ll be that much weaker without their worship to sustain you.”
“Such absences are easily replaced.” The spider reared up, legs swinging outward in a way that would have been utterly beyond any terrestrial arachnid, and the portal behind it widened. “I am the one and only god to dwell upon the Plane of Ice, a universe of eternal cold. In that boundless expanse are an infinite multitude of creatures, all waiting to dedicate themselves to me.”
A single limb pointed at Lex then, and despite his best efforts, the wind grew worse. “And once I’ve dragged your frozen flesh back to my realm, and extracted the last of my divinity from you, I will encase your soul in ice and have my servants parade it across the breadth of the entire plane. Your suffering will be a monument to how other gods dare not confront me even when I defile their faithful. That will earn me new worshipers in excess of what I’ve lost.”
“And you’ll remain a mere demigod,” spat Lex, “dwelling in a backwater para-plane that every other pantheon has ignored because of its lack of numinous qualities. And even then, you’ll still be the very least of your siblings.”
Kyronex’s eyes turned a deeper shade of blue then. “I reign above them! They squabble and war for control of the other elemental planes, while no one dares to contest me for my own!”
Lex smirked, recalling what the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had to say about the elemental deities. “You’re an afterthought among the rest of your kind. The thirteenth god in a fractious pantheon of twelve. The true elemental planes are Earth and Air and Fire and Water, each with a single god who propagates that material across Creation and two demigods fighting with each other because they want to imbue the planar fabric with opposing spiritual slants.”
He took another step forward then, his smirk widening to become a sneer. “And then there’s you, who has an entire plane all to himself, and yet even without any opposition has accomplished nothing. Even with no one to contest your rule of a whole plane – albeit one that only exists where Air touches Water – you can barely amass enough worshipers to hang onto your scant divinity, let alone bend the plane to reflect your own metaphysical disposition.”
Kryonex’s eyes had grown darker, the blue becoming more and more shaded, but Lex didn’t let up, needing just a little more time to finish casting the suite of defensive spells that he had been layering onto himself ever since the exchange had begun. “You’re a pathetic failure of a deity. If the other elemental powers knew that a mortal was able to not only injure you, but make off with a portion of your godhood, you’d be even more of a laughingstock than you already are.”
And with that, Lex managed to finish the last spell he’d been casting. But he couldn’t resist throwing one last epithet at the oversized spider, pointing toward the portal. “If you have an ounce of intelligence, you’ll cut your losses and scuttle back into that frozen pit you crawled out of before I humiliate you even further.”
Kryonex’s eyes were so blue now that they were almost black, but no angry roars or furious threats came from the enormous spider. Instead, his gaze wandered over the assembled monsters, before glancing back through the portal. “Whoever drags this blasphemer’s body before me will be given the privilege of becoming my avatar, imbued with the same power that his harridan stole.”
His foresight told Lex what was about to happen, and his muscles tensed as he prepared himself.
A moment later the swarm of monsters rushed him all at once, as reinforcements from beyond the portal poured forth to back them up.
With his enhanced senses and heightened intellect, Lex needed only the briefest glance to affirm that monsters rushing through the gateway were more numerous than the snowflakes whipping through the air.
But unlike the blizzard, the creatures from the Plane of Ice weren’t moving randomly, nor positioning themselves indiscriminately. Instead, they all threw themselves directly at him, seeking to overwhelm him with sheer numbers.
Coming in from his right, a trio of horned bears galloped forward, intent on trampling him with their bulk. Nor were they acting alone, as five of the red-eyed ooze creatures on his opposite side lashed out with their tentacles, trying to affix him in place. Up above, several dozen tiny humanoids – each of them barely a foot tall, having dragonfly-like wings and clutching oversized icicles – swooped toward him, wings buzzing like a swarm of angry hornets.
Behind him, a huge white worm, easily the length of a skyscraper lying on its side, clacked its mandibles as it moved in for the kill. Further away, on the side of the mountain, almost a dozen hunched figures – each of them humanoids slightly smaller than a pony, with beards of ice and dark blue caps – were standing in formation, hands held out as they fired magically-generated streams of ice shards. On the opposite slope, a wrinkled old hag that looked vaguely similar to Grisela screeched an incantation as she waved her hands upwards, the clouds above flashing with lightning in response.
All of it was, in Lex’s opinion, a truly pathetic display.
Sidestepping the tentacles reaching for him, he instead grabbed the writhing limbs, the oozes somehow shrieking in pain despite having no mouths as he yanked hard on them. Two of them simply had the tendrils torn from their bodies, quivering in agony as their red eyes spun wildly. But the others were apparently made of sturdier stuff, holding themselves together. Their reward for their tenacity was to be flung directly into the path on the oncoming bears, trampled in an instant by the two-ton creatures.
Said creatures didn’t even seem to notice as they squashed their allies, barreling toward Lex with the velocity of falling boulders. But the boulders veered off-course a moment later as he – with a momentary thought – blurred the vision of the outermost one, causing it to roar in surprise as it lost its balance and plowed into the other two, knocking them aside. Only one managed to correct its charge, the others colliding with the head of the massive worm, its jaws impaling both of them in tandem and causing it to howl as they swiped at its eyes in retaliation, trying to free themselves.
The third bear actually reached its target, only for Lex to stop its charge with a single outstretched claw, grabbing its horn and arresting its momentum as though the monster was a plush toy instead of a raging behemoth. Casually raising it upward, Lex ignored the cracking sound that came from its neck as he hoisted it aloft, letting the descending pixies slam into its body, the diminutive creatures cursing as their tiny weapons sank into its body harmlessly.
Their snarling stopped an instant later, however, as a bolt of lightning shot down from the heavens, frying them and the bear’s carcass alike.
Ignoring the electricity that was transmitted to him through the corpse – the voltage nowhere near enough to injure him – Lex instead hurled the dead body at the crone that had called the lightning. She had just enough time to give a terrified scream before four thousand pounds of charred meat slammed into her at several hundred miles per hour, reducing her to a bloody stain on the mountainside.
Not bothering to glance at the opposite slope, Lex raised a group of black crystals along its upper edge, having already noted the weakness of the accumulated debris. The jagged protrusions immediately displaced the rocks and sediment there, the resulting avalanche sweeping over the ice-bearded humanoids and burying them all alive.
Sparing the briefest glance to confirm that they were all dead or dying from the rockslide, Lex turned his attention to the white worm, knowing that it was about to tear the bears – finally having died – free of its jaws. He saved it the trouble, his horn lighting up as he ripped the corpses clear of its mandibles, pausing just long enough to run them through with a dozen long spikes of black crystals before forcibly shoving their bodies down its throat. The worm immediately heaved and thrashed, choking on the corpses, and its segmented body wriggled as it worked to further pull them down its gullet...only to immediately give an agonized cry as the spikes he’d impaled the bodies on cut into it, tearing the thing apart from the inside.
Not bothering to watch it die, Lex immediately turned to face the next wave of enemies, led by one of the three-eyed blue giants. Springing forward with a cry, it pulled its fingers back, launching a barrage of palm strikes at his head. Each one moved so quickly that it seemed to blur, making it look at though the giant had a dozen arms rather than simply two.
Lex avoided them all without even looking.
Instead, his eyes were turned upward, where another humanoid was flying toward him, riding the breeze as it cackled with laughter. Ten feel tall, its fur was grey and mangy, scarcely hidden by the rags it wore. Its eyes were covered in filmy cataracts, making them look like blank orbs, and its muzzle was covered in blood, as were the elk-like horns that sprouted from the top of its head. More notable were its legs, which ended in stumps just above where its knees would have been, the ends looking blackened and burnt.
Flinging itself bodily at him, claws outstretched and jaws wide, Lex sidestepped its dive with contemptuous ease. At the same time, he made the fire clinging to him run down his forelegs, covering his claws with flaming gauntlets. A single swing of his talons was all it took, and the laughing creature’s voice turned into a strangled shriek as it fell into a half-dozen flaming pieces, burning brightly despite the blizzard.
But Lex didn’t stop, instead gathering his aura around his horn. An instant later, he lanced out with a beam of unfiltered dark magic – his body able to replenish the amount lost instantaneously now that he no longer felt fatigue – and struck a winged, gargoyle-like creature that had been sneaking up on him from behind, claws held at the ready. The beam struck it dead-center, its body shattering under the blow, and the pieces of it rained down over the rest of its fellows.
Said fellows seemed not to care in the slightest.
The three-eyed giant pressed its attack, and Lex snorted in disdain, swinging his body around so that one of its palm strikes caught his fiery cloak. Its hand immediately ignited, bursting into flames as though its skin were made out of tar, and the giant screamed in agony, falling back as it tried to put the flames out.
Lex didn’t give it a chance. Leaping bodily onto the monster, he tore it literally limb from limb, talons sinking into its shoulders and ripping them free from its body even as the fire he wore set the rest of it aflame. His back legs were no less destructive, digging through muscle to find purchase on the giant’s ribs before tearing them off, plucking one after another until there were none left to grab.
Riding the dying monster’s body down as it fell backward, Lex landed in front of yet another new opponent, a pale-skinned humanoid female whose lower body was that of a huge, white serpent and with a nest of equally pale snakes for hair. Immediately, she tore her veil – the only clothing she wore – from her face, revealing a fanged visage as she grinned. “Look into my eyes!” she cooed, even as the serpents framing her face hissed and spat savagely. “Join my collection of ice sculptures!”
“Look into mine,” rumbled Lex, meeting her gaze evenly, “and join the collection of corpses.”
In his foresight, the snake-thing frowned, recoiling slightly as she stared at him. Then blood began to drip from her eyes, trailing down her cheeks, and she had just enough time to touch her face in shock before she began to convulse, retching as she doubled over. Collapsing in place, violent tremors ran through her, the snakes in her hair writhing and biting at each other in a frenzy before she suddenly went still, one last rattling breath escaping her lungs as the life left her.
Healing someone through pure will alone was incredibly difficult; Lex had learned that while treating the adlets.
But altering someone’s body chemistry to the point of causing fatal organ damage, as it turned out, was much easier.
Fortunately, he would have plenty of opportunities to put that knowledge to use, as the next wave of enemies was already moving in...
All while Kryonex continued to watch, having yet to take any action.
“He’s quite the accomplished killer,” murmured Blaze, watching the battle through the viewing window that Luminace had conjured. “Maybe I should grant him a blessing of my own.”
The comment brought hateful growl from the towering inferno that she’d called Vutok, the creature gnashing its teeth. But standing a short distance away, the Unspoken gave a sigh. “I thought there’d be more of a light show,” he squeaked, the words coming out oddly high-pitched from his rodent’s muzzle. “Like, a lot of magical ‘fwoosh!’ and ‘zing!’ and ‘krazak!’ Instead, it’s all just a claw/claw/bite routine with a few crystals.”
The blob next to him made a blorping sound, and the Unspoken turned one bulging, fish-like eye toward it. “No, telekinesis doesn’t count even if it’s colorful. He’s holding back, and it’s boring.”
“That’s because he knows what Kryonex is doing, and he’s trying to counter it,” cut in the Moon Princess, a sour note in her voice. “Those creatures can’t overcome a titan, and he’s aware that they’re not supposed to. They’re just fodder, meant to press him enough so that he’ll expend spells and other limited resources.”
“And because the Night Mare’s champion is aware of that, he’s making sure to restrain himself to physical attacks, along with a few minor tricks that he can use indefinitely,” explained the Sun Princess, watching the slaughter with a sad look. “And yet Kryonex continues to waste so many lives on a futile attempt to gain such a small advantage.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” murmured Luminace.
The Sun Queen gave her student a sad smile. “I agree. To be so cavalier with something so precious has always been beyond my understanding as well.”
“That’s because you’re dumb enough to think that lives are precious,” snorted Blaze, gesturing toward the screen as another creature – its lower half resembling an eight-legged horse and its upper half that of a frost giant – was torn apart by its own fellows after Lex had beguiled it into fighting on his behalf. “Look at how fragile they are. Anything so weak isn’t worth saving.”
“It’s because they’re so delicate that they’re worth protecting,” insisted the Sun Queen.
Blaze sneered a retort, but Euclase didn’t bother listening, instead keeping a close eye on Luminace. Leaning his long neck toward the alicorn goddess, the dragon couldn’t help but notice how she was diligently keeping an eye on the viewing window that she’d conjured, despite the senseless loss of life it was showing. “What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.
But Euclase knew his goddess too well to be taken in by the denial. “You weren’t agreeing with the Sun Queen when you said that didn’t make any sense,” he insisted, keeping his voice quiet. “You meant something else. What?”
Cringing, Luminace glanced at the other gods and their attendants. Fortunately, no one seemed to have overheard them; the Sun Queen and Blaze were still debating the value of life, while the Unspoken and the Moon Princess chimed in every so often, all of their attendants close by. Curiously, Kara and the Night Mare were a short distance away, quietly conferring with each other, while the leatherwing that the latter had brought was pointedly ignoring Honeymoon Trap.
Seeing that no one was listening to them, Luminace turned her eyes back to the screen. “What Kryonex said before, about how whoever brought him Lex Legis would be made into his avatar...that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because he said he’d do it using the divinity that Siren stole.”
“So?”
“So, there shouldn’t be enough for him to do that!”
Pursing her lips, Luminace took a moment to calm herself. “Between The Author’s discouraging direct involvement on Everglow and what’s happened with the elves and the griffons, it’s been a very long time since any of the gods here bothered to create an avatar. In fact, I think some of them might not have ever made one. But I only became a goddess two hundred years ago, and one of the first things I did was make an avatar to watch over my family from when I was mortal...at least until the Sun Queen convinced me that giving them that much attention was only endangering them more.”
“Yes, I recall she had to work quite hard to win that particular argument,” noted Euclase wryly.
Adjusting her monocle, Luminace gave the dragon a serious look. “My point is, I’m very familiar with what goes into making an avatar. If Adagio Dazzle only stole a few drops of godsblood, that shouldn’t be enough to build one, and yet Kryonex just said that it was.”
Euclase frowned at that, glancing at where Lex was making short work out of a pack of frost drakes. As far as he could tell, the unicorn had yet to be struck a single time, much less threatened to the point of needing to cast any spells. Against so many, that was an impressive feat, even for a titan. “Perhaps Kryonex was lying? He needs his minions to throw themselves at such a powerful enemy, and knows that only the promise of a great reward will motivate them?”
“Maybe,” admitted Luminace, before glancing back at where the Night Mare and Kara were talking.
Flicking a claw out, Lex surveyed the battlefield even as he tore open the throat of another of Kryonex’s minions, a white-scaled bipedal lizard wielding an oversized icicle as a club. A single swipe of his tail was all it took to send the dying creature into the path of a snow serpent twice as large as himself, the thing’s momentum arrested. Lex paused just long enough to raise a spike of black crystal from the ground – impaling a six-foot long beetle that radiated frost like a firefly did light, the bug making a loud screech as its legs kicked helplessly – before blasting a hole directly through the serpent with dark magic.
And all the while, more creatures poured through the portal, eager to fight and die for their god.
That shouldn’t have been the case, Lex knew. Not with how he’d been fighting for hours now, slaying thousands of monsters without rest. There already mountains of corpses littering the valley, all of the snow in the area having been dyed in blood; yet not so much as one of the creatures he’d been slaughtering had evidenced the slightest hesitation in throwing their life away.
It was one thing to see such a profound lack of survival instinct in ghouls. Those creatures had already been dead, their minds warped by the negative energy animating them. But Kryonex’s minions were, without exception, among the living. Each time one of them threw itself into the fray, despite having to know that all it would accomplish was to waste its life, Lex grew more and more suspicious of what was driving them.
Nor was their behavior the only thing that was unusual, as by his estimation their numbers should have tapered off some time ago.
Between what Nenet had told him, and what he’d been able to scan of Adagio’s thoughts, the reason Kryonex had been late in pursuing the Siren was because he’d needed to collect more minions. That was because Adagio’s children had slain most – if not all – of the ones they’d encountered within the demigod’s realm. But therein lay the issue.
Everything he’d seen of Adagio’s hideout here suggested that she couldn’t have had more than a few dozen children at the absolute most. There simply wasn’t enough space, or provisions, to account for anything more than that. Yet that had apparently been enough to lay a successful siege to a demigod’s realm. Even if each of Adagio’s children had been powerful warriors beyond what even Sissel had been capable of, Lex couldn’t imagine them defeating a force of more than a few hundred.
Yet now Kryonex was fielding an army far larger than that.
The discrepancy was one that had become more and more blatant as the endless waves of monsters had come through the portal. While it made sense that – notwithstanding the souls of those who’d worshiped him in life – Kryonex would only allow for his realm to be populated by his strongest and most capable agents in order to shore up his power base, his having few enough of those that Adagio had been able to overcome them all, but having so many weaker minions that he could afford to throw them away like this wasn’t something Lex could reconcile.
Especially since gods needed worship to survive. With his realm having been invaded, his prestige marred, and a piece of his own divinity stolen, was Kryonex really in a position to discard so many of his faithful?
Something was wrong, which was why Lex had been scanning the battlefield using every esoteric awareness and supernatural sense he could think of.
And as a titan, he could think of a great many indeed.
But actually looking for something to explain what was happening wasn’t easy when he had no idea what he was looking for. Particularly when he needed to keep a considerable portion of his awareness on the battle, focusing on both the present and immediate future as he kept track of each and every creature around him, the terrain, the weather, the portal, Nenet’s position and status, and how best to respond to each and every such factor with the physical and magical resources at his disposal, without utilizing anything that couldn’t be renewed-
OV-...-MY...-ST...
The sudden perception of something he hadn’t been aware of before almost caused Lex to take a hit, his horn flaring as he telekinetically caught four things that looked like flying manta rays – each with two eel heads and a long whiplike tail – barely an inch from his face. Distractedly waving his flame cloak so that it ignited all four of them, Lex flung their burning bodies among their fellows as he focused more on what he’d just picked up.
As well as on the fact that he hadn’t foreseen his detecting that ahead of time.
Focusing on what he’d momentarily picked up, Lex paid only the minimal amount of attention to the monsters around him. Whatever he’d just stumbled across had been coming from Kryonex himself; that much was obvious. But exactly what the god was doing was less clear. That hadn’t been a magical emanation, instead seeming closer to a numinous gradient, but at the same time unlike one; those forces were akin to urges, which creatures could act upon or not depending on their personal nature and self-control. For a god to use something like that...
Suddenly, he knew exactly what it was.
Cursing inwardly, Lex adjusted his mystic senses, calibrating them just so-
OVERWHELM MY ENEMY. DEFEAT HIM NO MATTER WHAT THE COST. THE ONLY EXCUSE FOR FAILURE I WILL ACCEPT IS DEATH.
The next creature bearing down on Lex could have been a human woman, having pale skin and blue hair so dark it was almost black, clad in a robe and sash. She had literally flung herself at him, hands outstretched as if to grab him, a blue glow of weak cryomancy gathered in her palms. It was a feeble attack, one that had no hope of harming him even if she’d tried it a thousand times, and with her near-total lack of defense he could have slain her in a hundred different ways.
Instead, he caught her by the wrist and flung her away, this time avoiding tossing her into any of her fellows, instead letting her land harmlessly in a nearby snowdrift. He did much the same to the hydra that bore down on him a moment later, stepping between its snapping jaws and delivering a kick – making sure to keep his talons and the flames surrounding him from touching its flesh – which sent it skidding across the blood-strewn ground, stunned but alive. Another serpent – this one with a human-like face – was similarly spared, a sudden protrusion of black crystals from the mountainside it was slithering across sending it tumbling down the slope.
It was the same with each subsequent enemy, as Lex made sure to attack it only with nonlethal means, leaving them unconscious, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to continue fighting.
And all the while, he cursed himself for his shortsightedness.
How could I not have realized this?!
As a mortal, such a failure of imagination would have been embarrassing. As a titan, it was utterly inexcusable. All of the clues had been there. The number of enemies. Their unwavering fanaticism in the face of certain death. And most telling of all, his sensing that bringing Solvei with him would have been a disaster. And he still hadn’t realized what was happening before now!
The Night Mare was a goddess of, among other things, supernatural beasts; it was in that regard that she had given him the Charismata, imbuing him with authority over such creatures.
He should have expected that Kryonex would have a similar power over beings of intrinsic cold.
RECOVER WHAT WAS TAKEN FROM ME. LET NOTHING STOP YOU. NO RETREAT OR REST OR RECOVERY. ONLY VICTORY IS ALLOWED.
Lex grit his teeth, now aware of the divine message coming from the demigod, knowing that the creatures facing him were completely unable to resist it. Even their thoughts were affected, overwhelmed with a desire to obey Kryonex’s commands, completely bent to his will.
Adagio had been wrong. Kryonex hadn’t been gathering up his scattered worshipers; he’d been dragooning creatures from across the Plane of Ice, using his power over them to draft them into his service so that he could launch an attack without losing more of his faithful! With no other god on the Plane of Ice – and these creatures apparently belonging to no other religion – there was nothing the creatures of that plane could do except obey Kryonex’s orders...and die at his claws, victims who weren’t responsible for their actions.
“If you’ve stopped killing them, you must have figured it out.”
Standing by the portal, the massive, misshapen spider that was Kryonex spoke for the first time in hours, pedipalps twitching as it suddenly closed the gateway. “A pity. I collected quite a few more, and was hoping to deploy them all against you. But I suppose this will have to do.”
Sending a pack of sabertoothed cats that shed snowflakes flying back with a wave of his foreleg, Lex glared at the demigod. “You abducted innocent creatures, forced them to fight for you, and your only regret is that you couldn’t slaughter more of them?!”
Kryonex’s blue eyes grew a shade lighter. “‘Innocent’? None of them worshiped me; that makes them guilty of apostasy. That they should lose their lives working my will is penance.”
“Carnage is not penance.” Rising up into the air, Lex deftly avoided several flying enemies, sending a massive bird made out of ice spiraling down to land roughly among the throng below. “That you think it is marks you as unfit to claim the mantle of divinity.”
“It was you who slaughtered them, not me,” retorted Kryonex easily. “But if it bothers you, take heart. They did not die in vain; nor will the rest.”
Lex didn’t have a chance to ponder what that meant before the demigod’s influence reached out again, this time with new orders.
DIE FOR ME. KILL YOURSELVES. SLAY EACH OTHER. LAY DOWN YOUR LIVES SO THAT I MIGHT HAVE THAT WHICH I DESIRE.
“NO!” roared Lex, turning downward as the monsters fell upon each other with all of the ferocity that they’d shown toward him only a moment earlier. Immediately, he pulled out Belligerence, intent on laying a spell over the area that would stop the remaining creatures from dying pointlessly-
But before he had a chance, Kryonex opened up another portal.
Unlike the previous gateway, which had shown a driving snowscape on its other side, this one was utterly black. Dark and freestanding, dozens of feet in diameter, nothing emerged from it. To all appearances it simply hung there, a silent circle of darkness that affected nothing.
Lex knew better.
To him, the negative energy leaking out of the portal was nothing less than a miasma of unlife, spreading out over the battlefield with all the force of a shockwave.
In an instant, he knew he couldn’t save the rest of the creatures down there. He was capable of casting multiple spells at once now, but not through Belligerence. Although the quill was a mighty weapon, capable of conducting a spell over a wide area, it could only do that for one spell at a time. And it would take at least two to stop the loss of life that was already occurring.
Right now, Kryonex’s creatures – no, his victims – were carrying out the demigod’s self-destructive order. Unable to resist, they lashed out at each other and themselves indiscriminately, weapons and fangs and magic tearing through their ranks. Each injury was immediately exposed to the negative energy already permeating the area, causing the life force to leak out of their wounds, turning moderate injuries into fatal ones.
Stopping the slaughter would have meant both paralyzing them, so that they ceased to cause harm to themselves and others, and warding them against the negative energy infection that was already affecting everyone who’d been wounded...and Lex could already tell that they’d all been wounded.
It took only a few moments for the last of them to fall to the ground, dead.
Silent fury settling over his heart, Lex wasted a half-second cursing his own powerlessness before he began casting, gripping Belligerence tightly.
He hadn’t been able to save the denizens from the Plane of Ice, but at least he could save Nenet and Adagio.
And himself.
The Night Mare had told him that, as a titan, he’d be immortal. In that regard, she’d been correct, as Adagio had so helpfully proven during their fight. Her sonic disintegration spell had blown through his defenses, stripping the flesh from his bones, but had caused him only moderate pain and no real inconvenience. Despite his lack of muscles or organs, he’d been able to keep functioning just fine.
That, he knew, was because his transformation into a titan had changed how his soul was connected to his body.
Normally, the body acted to produce and maintain positive energy – life force – in a quantity great enough that it could attract and retain a soul. Damage the body’s functionality, and its ratio of positive energy would dwindle. If it became completely unable to generate any, then the soul would have no anchor, and be unable to maintain itself on this plane of existence.
For Lex, however, it worked the other way around. Now his soul was the source of positive energy, generating it and feeding it directly to his body, allowing it to repair itself and continue functioning regardless of any breakdown to his biology.
He was, quite simply, too alive to kill.
But negative energy was the exception to that. It didn’t rely on interrupting biological procedures; it simply attacked the life force directly. And just like how it worked for mortals, if his positive energy threshold – incredibly high though it was – was hit by a quantity of negative energy great enough to overwhelm and negate it, then there’d be nothing holding his body and soul together...at which point, his soul would be drawn to the Night Mare’s realm, and his body wouldn’t have anything to sustain it.
Kryonex clearly knew that; hence why he'd just opened that portal...one which, Lex knew, led directly to the Negative Energy Plane, the great gaping void mentioned in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation that was the source of that foul substance which caused life itself to fail.
And as the first of the corpses down below began to twitch and shakily rise, their bodies now flooded with enough negative energy to induce a state of undeath, it became equally clear just why the demigod had consigned so many creatures to die.
The undead plague that was rising now was going to be far worse than anything Vanhoover had ever faced.
Nenet briefly considered ignoring Adagio’s whispered question, knowing that if she didn’t respond the Siren would eventually fall silent. But she found a response bubbling up nonetheless, the low-grade anxiety that she’d been riding for the last several hours eroding her patience. “He’s still fighting those creatures. None of them have landed a hit on him yet.”
“And Kryonex?”
The question was enough to make Nenet open her eyes, ceasing to concentrate on the clairvoyance spell she’d positioned at the entrance to Adagio’s mountain fortress. Fortunately, the spell was robust enough that her wavering attention didn’t disrupt it, instead overlaying what it saw onto what her eyes beheld. The sensation was mildly dizzying, and Nenet needed to take a moment to look past the awe-inspiring spectacle that her master was putting on to instead look over at his prisoner.
Lying on the floor of the black crystal cage that Lex had conjured, Adagio remained sprawled out, chest still heaving as she got her breath back. The Siren had been experimenting with what triggered the curse on her footwear for some time now, and as a result had spent several hours writhing and gyrating around her cage. But it hadn’t been for naught, having figured out that she could whisper – the only form of speech she was capable of now that her voice had been sealed – without it making her dance.
Despite knowing that her master had layered several supplementary curses on her, restricting her magic and her physical strength, Nenet couldn’t help but feel uneasy.
She’d known Adagio too long to think that she wasn’t up to something.
“He still hasn’t done anything,” she answered at last, giving Adagio a once-over in the magical spectrum to make sure Lex’s curses were still active. “At least, I don’t think he has. He’s hard to look at. It’s like...”
She trailed off, not sure how to describe what she saw when she looked at the demigod. It was like a terrifying cascade of impressions more than visual images, and each one sent a literal cold shiver down her spine.
“Like you can’t even remember what it’s like to be warm when you look at him, right?”
Adagio’s response caught Nenet by surprise. “Y-yeah,” she murmured, uncomfortable to be agreeing with Adagio about anything. “He’s just standing by that portal he opened, letting more creatures come through.”
Several seconds passed in silence, and Nenet was just about to close her eyes again when Adagio finally spoke. “You know Lex can’t win this, right?”
Nenet frowned. “You wouldn’t say that if you could see him right now.”
Adagio gave a quiet, breathy laugh. “You know why I’m the only one who made it back from Kryonex’s realm alive?”
“I’m guessing it’s because you ran away and left everyone else behind as soon as you got what you wanted,” spat Nenet, her frown turning into a scowl.
The corners of Adagio’s lips turned upward in a small smile. “It’s because Kryonex didn’t hesitate to get personally involved once he realized that there was a full-scale invasion going on. Once we made it through the border and pushed past the first wave of defenders, he showed up with his strongest servants.”
“What’s your point?”
“If Kryonex has been hanging back this entire time, it’s because he’s up to something. My sisters’ boy-toy might look like he’s holding his own right now, but I promise you, there’s a noose tightening around his neck.”
Despite herself, Nenet felt her tail thrashing. Checking again to make sure Adagio wasn’t using any magic on her, she squeezed her eyes shut, turning her attention back toward her master’s battle. “You say that, but he made short work of you, so I think-, huh?!”
Off to her side, she heard Adagio hiss in response to her surprised yelp. “What’s happening?!”
“He’s...” Her brow furrowing, Nenet tried to push down a growing feeling of disaster. “He’s stopped killing them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s stopped killing them! He’s...” Pausing as she watched as Lex dispatched several other creatures without taking their lives, she shook her head, trying to figure out why he’d suddenly elected to fight with non-lethal force. “He’s sparing them all of a sudden, and-”
She quieted abruptly as Lex and Kryonex exchanged words for the first time in hours, and then...
Nenet jerked upright, wings flaring in alarm. “They’re killing each other!”
“What?!”
“Kryonex’s minions! He closed the portal and now they’re all killing each other! Some of them are killing themselves! They-, what is that?!”
“Descriptions, Nenet! Tell me what you’re seeing!”
Despite being reduced to whispers, Adagio’s command was enough to prompt immediate obedience from the sphinx, too unnerved to keep herself from falling back into the submissiveness that her mother had imbued her with. “K-Kryonex opened what looks like another portal! But I can’t see anything on the other side of it; it’s all black and-, ngh!”
This time what interrupted her wasn’t surprise, but a sudden sense of malaise that flowed over her. Instantly, her body felt heavier as an unpleasant tingling swept over her skin, feeling as though she was rolling in gravel. The feeling grew worse a moment later, as though she was being pinched all over, and Nenet bit her lip as her joints began to ache, a burning sensation crawling across her heart even as her lungs began to tighten up and her stomach clenched.
And it was growing worse by the moment.
Master! Something’s happening! I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly-
A choking sound interrupted her telepathic plea.
Her eyes opening, Nenet saw then that there was another form of movement Adagio was capable of making without being forced to dance, the Siren’s eyes rolling back in her head as she began to spasm uncontrollably.
Nenet was about to tell him that Adagio was dying.
That wasn’t surprising. The sheer amount of negative energy flowing through the gigantic aperature that Kryonex had opened was enough to turn even modest wounds into fatal injuries, and he hadn’t been gentle in handling the Siren. Only the fact that they were somewhat insulated inside of the mountain – thick walls of solid rock serving only as an imperfect shield against the anti-life force bathing the area, particularly with the entryway hanging open, his wards doing nothing to protect against the invisible miasma – had kept Adagio from succumbing already.
As it was, Lex knew that wouldn’t last for much longer. The rate of negative energy was rapidly increasing as the area was bathed in more and more of it, the quantity flowing through the portal undiminished. It wouldn’t be very long before even those without injuries – such as Nenet – began to die, and while his own self-sustain reservoir of positive energy would let him hold out for some time, Lex knew that eventually even he’d succumb if the contamination continued to accumulate.
But it wouldn’t come to that.
Both the Night Mare and Nenet had made sure of it.
Although his goddess wasn’t able to interfere in the battle, she hadn’t left him bereft of options. Quite the contrary, she’d known full well about his vulnerability, and so one of the spells she’d granted him now was a ward against negative energy. Under its aegis, that life-sapping power wouldn’t be able to touch him.
Its only downside was that it wasn’t meant to be a long-term solution; at the very most, it would only last for a half-hour or so. Nor could he repeatedly cast it; while he had enough energy to use the spell several times, the Night Mare had made it clear that she wouldn’t renew his spells while he was facing Kryonex. Which meant that time was the salient factor; although he could pour power beyond mortal imagination into the spell, that would only increase its effectiveness, not its duration.
Fortunately, that was where Nenet came in.
While the countermagic that she’d gained from their bond was an impressive ability, able to negate or even take control of a spell as it was being cast, the new power that she’d gained as a result of his becoming a titan – and sharing some of the aristeia he’d gained with her – had put it to shame.
Now, Nenet had gained the power to modify the spells she could cast, altering their parameters in myriad different ways. By calling upon that ability, she could sculpt the area affected so that allies would be unharmed while enemies were selectively targeted, increase the range the spell could reach, set a cast spell to take effect only when certain conditions were met, imbue it with a homing effect, or any of a hundred different options. All usable at will, without needing to be prepared ahead of time.
And like Solvei’s cryomancy, Nenet could call upon that magic that altered magic – or “metamagic,” as it was known on Everglow – at will.
Which meant that Lex could also.
Of course, also like Solvei’s cryomancy, it had limits. Not only did it need to be actively concentrated on, it could only do so much at any one time, and the stronger the spell to be affected, the less it could do. Even then, it couldn’t affect an area on the scale of Belligerence, nor amplify a spell to a degree anywhere near what Lex could do naturally. And attempting to stack those effects via multiple invocations of Nenet’s metamagic was completely impossible.
But right now, Lex was less concerned with those limits than he was with increasing the duration of his negative energy ward.
Overcharging the spell even as he called upon Nenet’s power, he extended the duration as far as he could, taking it from a half-hour to a full hour. Then two hours. Then four. Then Eight. At sixteen he felt the extension starting to give way, pressing harder in response, determined to push the limit as much as he could. It had been mid-morning when he’d started fighting Kryonex’s army of summoned creatures; now it was late afternoon. If that first phase of the battle was anything to go by, he was going to need as much time as possible.
Eighteen hours.
Twenty.
Twenty-two...
At twenty-four hours, Lex released the metamagic, knowing that it was about to collapse from the strain he’d put onto it. Instead, he immediately cast the death ward spell, delving into his personal reserves even as he directed the energy through the metamagic matrix and into Belligerence, the quill shaking in his claws as quantities of energy beyond what it was designed to handle were forced into it. But the weapon held, one of the black crystal rings around its haft shattering as it directed the magic outward, spreading the enhanced death ward across the entire battlefield.
The spell had no visible aspect to it, being designed to counteract energies that were themselves beyond what the naked eye could see. But to Lex’s vision, it glowed like a wispy suit of armor, shrouding him in a soft phosphorescence that repelled the black fetor that was leaking from the open portal. And as it spread across the battlefield and over the mountain, he felt through his link that it was covering Nenet also, the sphinx’s distress easing even as her panicked message flowed into his mind.
Master! I think Adagio’s dying, she-, wait...she seems better now! And I feel better too! What happened? Why-
Not now, Nenet, replied Lex tersely, surveying the undead below him. Although his foresight had shown him that it wouldn’t stop them from being reanimated – the negative energy already having seeped into their bodies – the ward had covered them as well, preventing them from drawing additional strength from the portal. It was a small measure, but at least it would keep them from gaining power as time went on. And Kryonex-
“What an impressive device,” noted the demigod, standing next to the portal with no ill effects to show for it...nor, Lex noted, had his ward reached him, despite the giant spider’s being well within Belligerence’s range. “It diffuses magical energies without dispersing them. But judging by how the band near its top shattered, it can only do so a limited number of times.”
“A limit akin to your own,” noted Lex darkly, remaining aloft as he stared Kryonex down. He might have revealed some of his capabilities just now, but he wasn’t the only one. Not only had the demigod confirmed that he had powers beyond cryomancy, he’d also shown that there was something he couldn’t do.
Kryonex’s pedipalps clacked once. “Oh?”
“You closed the portal to the Plane of Ice before you opened that other one,” noted Lex. “If your goal is to use undead creatures to try and wear me down, then you would have been better served to have two open at once, bringing in more of those creatures you enslaved while immediately poisoning them with undeath. But you can’t do that, can you?”
Kryonex’s response came with a dry chuckle. “If I had known that I’d be opposed by someone using my stolen divinity to fill themselves with positive energy, I’d have dumped all of those apostates into the void before coming here. But if these worthless things can’t accomplish in death what they failed to do in life, I can always open another gateway home and repeat the process.”
Lex bared his teeth at that, but the expression that crossed his face then was a grin rather than a snarl. “Can you?”
Kryonex’s eyes darkened slightly at the question. “You doubt my ability to return to my own realm?”
Lex waved one claw in a dismissive gesture. “I’m sure you can open another portal. But will there be anyone on the other side of it when you do?”
This time Kryonex gave no answer.
“Gods are at their strongest within their own realm,” continued Lex. “Even if Adagio was able to wound you there, she lost most of her forces in doing so. And yet you didn’t launch an immediate counterattack to recover what you’d lost, instead waiting to come after her even though your appearing here – inside her wards – suggests that you knew exactly where she was. Why not send an expeditionary force to harry her, pin her down, or deplete her defenses in the meantime?”
Lex didn’t wait for an answer, instead narrowing his eyes. “Because you couldn’t. You lost too many of your worshipers to risk sending more, and so that left only those hapless creatures you rounded up and enthralled. And that only works if you’re in proximity to them, doesn’t it? Any group that you sent ahead would have come back to themselves and fled immediately, just like the remaining creatures on the Plane of Ice have now.”
A low stridulation came from Kryonex then. “Are you pleased with your deduction? Because from my perspective, the practical value of it seems nil.”
“On the contrary,” shot back Lex. “The practical value is extremely gratifying. Now I know that once I’ve finished off your undead victims-”
He raised Belligerence then, pointing its barbed tip directly at Kryonex.
“-there’ll be nothing left to keep me from you.”
Down below, the newly-risen undead were beginning to mill about, and Lex knew he’d have to deal with them momentarily. Quite a few of their number had been able to fly in life, and that would almost certainly be true in death as well. Given that he had such large quantities of positive energy in his body, the opposite force to that which animated the undead, the unfortunate creatures beneath him would likely attack him on instinct, or whatever they had that passed for insti-
But he didn’t have a chance to finish that thought as his foresight warned him that in a few seconds, an unfamiliar voice would begin screaming.
For all that he’d gained in terms of sensory abilities, situational awareness, and cognitive capacity, Lex knew that he was far from omniscient.
If anything, his new capabilities only served to make his remaining limits that much more stark.
There were still gaps in his knowledge that could only be filled by observation or experimentation. Overlooking crucial details or drawing erroneous conclusions were still possible for him. And although he’d virtually always have a few seconds’ warning, he could still be surprised.
All of those points were driven home as his trans-temporal sense registered an unfamiliar voice about to start screaming from somewhere below him. In his foresight, the sound pierced the air for only a few seconds before it cut off with a wet gurgle, a sound that the beast inside of him had heard often before, usually right by its ears as it tore an enemy’s throat out.
Somewhere down there, among the masses of the newly-risen undead, someone was still alive...and was about to die horribly.
All because he had carelessly slaughtered the creatures Kryonex had thrown at him, his realization that they were the demigod’s victims rather than his minions having come too late to save them.
The thousands of corpses shuffling below him comprised of hundreds of different creatures, most of which Lex had never seen before and couldn’t identify. They could have been vicious killers or peaceful recluses, stoic philosophers or rampaging barbarians, emotionless hermits or sociable aesthetes. The only thing they had in common was that they’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the result being that he’d killed them all without bothering to even consider the possibility of stopping them without taking their lives.
At that moment, in Lex’s eyes, each and every one of them was Panuk.
But there was still one that he could save.
It was with that thought in mind that Lex rocketed toward where the scream was going to come from, putting everything else out of his thoughts.
That was when Kryonex made his move.
There was no warning. No precognitive alert. No sense of magical forces being shaped or directed. No word or sense of motion from the demigod himself.
All that happened was that the demigod’s eyes lightened slightly.
Then the death ward that Lex had wrapped around himself froze – there was no other word for it, the magic solidifying as its operation ceased – before shattering into a thousand useless fragments an instant later.
Just as he plowed into the mass of undead.
“You’re probably wondering how it is that I was able to open a gateway to the Negative Energy Plane, despite being a god of ice,” noted Kryonex conversationally as Lex collided with the horde. “Or how I was able to fracture your spell just now.”
Lex ignored him, teeth clenched as he lashed out in every direction at the undead throwing themselves at him. Just like before, he could see them all coming, able to react to each of their attacks in turn. But unlike before, he couldn’t afford to take his time about it, knowing that the death scream he’d foreseen was about to happen.
Fighting the undead off one-by-one wouldn’t let him get there in time. Nor would turning into a shadow let him bypass them; he could already see numerous spectral undead gathered around him, his foresight telling him that they’d be able to interact with his shadowy form as if it were solid. Flying would be even worse, as there were already several dozen airborne undead moving in on his position.
Which left him no choice but to dip into his reserve of spells.
Exactly like he knew Kryonex wanted.
“The answer,” continued the demigod, “is that, like so many small-minded beings, you lack an appropriate appreciation for why cold is the strongest elemental power. Far from being a mere lack of heat, or mundane applications of frozen air or water, the true nature of cold is that it interrupts the very nature of motion – of energy – itself.”
Raising one leg, Kryonex waved it at the portal like a teacher gesturing at a blackboard. “This portal, for example. Each plane of existence is a universe unto itself, and each universe vibrates at its own frequency; that’s why the most common spells for traveling the planes require specially-prepared tuning forks. But vibration is movement, and the cold arrests movement. Thus, it was a simple matter for me to create an area of stillness in the range between this plane and that one, resulting in a localized convergence, or ‘bleed’ in the common parlance.”
Barely listening, Lex instead concentrated on borrowing Nenet’s metamagic, doing his best to charge through the unliving throng as he readied his spell. He ducked under the open-handed swing of a three-eyed giant, its chest crushed and its hands covered with enough negative energy that it was visible to the naked eye, before leaping over the blackened jaws of a snow worm that he’d immolated, twisting in mid-air to avoid the spectral claws of two horned bears, their eyes having turned into empty pits filled with sickly yellow light.
All the while he kept casting.
The restriction that he’d so naively adopted when he’d created his thaumaturgical spellcasting – making it literally unthinkable for him to prepare area-effect destructive spells – was still there, even as a titan. But Nenet’s power let him circumvent that restriction, pulling together a metamagic array designed to spread an individualized spell over a limited area.
It was nowhere near what Belligerence could have done, but right now that was a positive feature rather than a drawback: he was only a few dozen feet from where the scream was about to happen, the death cry being zero-point-nine-eight seconds in the future.
Fortunately, he only needed half that time to finish casting the fire spell he was preparing even as he rushed through the fray.
Zero-point-four-nine seconds later, his spell’s heat beams poured into the metamagic array, and turned everything within forty feet of himself into a maze of burning shafts of crimson light.
Kryonex’s eyes lightened further. “Of course, that’s not all I can freeze...”
The red rays were already lancing out in every direction as the demigod spoke. Too numerous to count, they didn’t stretch in straight lines, instead bending and warping in every direction, twisting around and curling past each other so as to not leave a single cubic inch of space untouched by their passage.
In an instant, the undead that had been crowding around Lex emitted a chorus of shrieks as they were annihilated, their bodies pierced dozens of times over by the superheated rays.
Clearing a path between him and his target:
The pale-skinned woman who had been the first ice creature that he’d spared.
She was still near the snowbank where he’d tossed her, the footprints around her showing that she’d picked herself up and tried to rejoin the fray. But those tracks ended at the small fissure that she’d fallen into, the crevasse just barely wide enough to engulf her up to her chest, her arms pinned between her sides and the rock walls, unable to free herself as she thrashed and shook.
And around her, the undead were closing in, the mangled corpse of a blue-skinned lizard stumbling forward as it opened its jaws, barely two feet separating its teeth from her head as the woman opened her mouth to scream.
But with no further obstacles between himself and her, there was nothing to stop Lex as flew forward, one claw raised-
“For instance,” interjected Kryonex, “did you know that time itself can be frozen?”
-and Lex felt the universe itself congeal around him.
...his left foreleg hurt...
In his mind’s eye, the future changed, no longer showing him knocking the unliving reptile away and himself saving the trapped woman.
...the barbed wire scraped over his leg, but not because it was moving...
Now, his trans-temporal sense skipped over the moment of her actual death entirely, showing that in the next half-second she’d already be dead, her neck ripped to shreds as her head dangled from the bones of her spine, her eyes glassy and unseeing.
...instead it was like the metal was caught on something despite being held outstretched in front of him, grinding against some invisible substance in a way that seemed to transmit the shock directly to his nerves...
Already, the undead monster seemed to be moving toward her at an accelerated rate, and Lex knew that his perception was slowing down, that it was about to come to a complete stop, and he’d be trapped in time and unable to even perceive it killing her, let alone stop it.
...making the pain seemed to radiate out from his limb, beyond where the wire touched, flowing over his shoulder and across his torso, engulfing his head and spreading down his legs and tail...
The last thing he saw was her eyes making contact with his own, and even if he was unable to decipher the look in them, the beast inside of him recognized the terror of someone that was about to die.
...but he pushed harder with his foreleg in response, refusing to withdraw even as that made the sense of abrasion grow worse, screaming in defiance as he pressed harder against whatever it was that was obstructing him, determined that it would crumble before he did...
And then he was through, the pain disappearing as he crossed the remaining distance just as the undead lizard closed its jaws around the woman’s neck.
“What...?” rumbled Kryonex.
But Lex wasn’t listening, instead grabbing the undead creature just as the woman’s death scream left her lips. Abandoning defense, he wrapped one claw around its jawbone and the other across the top of its skull, tearing the two apart in a single motion. The loss of its head bothered the monster not at all, and Lex felt its claws rake across his abdomen, the wounds burning as the negative energy that infused its corpse sinking into him. But he ignored the injury as he turned his full focus toward the dark-haired woman.
Unlike himself, the debilitating murk of the monster’s unlife hadn’t reached her, his death ward spell still clinging to her. But the creature’s attack had punctured her neck in multiple places, and she was already coughing up blood as her eyes rolled back in her head, dying right in front of him.
Knowing via his foresight that a healing spell would be of little help – its effectiveness hampered by how its opposing force was saturating the area – Lex instead covered her neck with his claw, concentrating on closing her wound through sheer force of will. Immediately, he felt her flesh close up underneath his talons, and awareness returned to her face, choking for a moment before drawing in a breath of fresh air.
“Qing jiu,” she gasped in Tianyu, “jiu wo!”
“Wo hui jiu ni,” answered Lex as he pulled her out of the fissure, shaking off the monster attacking him even as he batted aside a spectral humanoid of half her stature, two others moving in to take its place-
FIGHT HIM. KILL HIM. ATTACK WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.
Immediately, the woman’s face twisted in a snarl, but before she could so much as raise her hands, Lex invaded her mind. Not trying to override Kryonex’s control, he instead inserted an orthogonal command, circumventing the demigod’s orders. Sleep.
Shuddering once, the woman’s eyes fluttered closed as she collapsed in his grip, and Lex twisted to keep her out of the way of another spectral attack, leaping into the air as he quickly outdistanced his pursuers. Nenet, I’ve picked up a survivor. I need you to take her and keep her safe.
Solvei would have protested his decision, but it was to her credit that – although he could sense her tension and confusion – Nenet didn’t second-guess him. I understand, Master! Just tell me what to do!
I’m going to summon you here, and pass her off to you. Take her back inside and watch over her. I’ll make it so you can pass through the wards unharmed.
It was a poor plan; he knew it, and he was sure that Nenet must have as well. It ran a very real risk of alerting the undead as to where the entrance to the mountain retreat was, and would likely result in some of them breaking off from the fight to try invading it. But the alternative was to keep fighting while carrying an unconscious woman, and now that Kryonex had shown himself to be capable of undoing his spells, that was too great a disadvantage to countenance.
Conserving power was no longer the optimal course of action.
Now, the best strategy was to wipe out the horde as quickly as possible.
“Ooh, rescuing a damsel in distress!” cooed Kara from where she’d sidled up next to the Unspoken. “Think he’ll add her to his harem?”
“I was hoping he’d do another laser circus attack,” huffed the only male god present, his duckbill making his voice come out scratchy and rough. “That was fun.”
“I’m more impressed by how he broke that time stop Kryonex used,” admitted the Sun Queen. “I’m not sure what kind of magic that was.”
“Neither am I,” murmured Luminace, frowning as she made her way over to the Night Mare’s side, glaring at the armored goddess from behind her monocle.
Slipping away had proven to be harder than Solvei had anticipated.
After bringing everyone back to the village, she’d spent most of the morning trying to quell the chaos that had erupted as a generation’s worth of resurrected adlets had returned home. The shock had hit harder than expected for many, as their reappearance flatly contradicted the belief that devouring their bodies had led to their subsequently being reborn among the new generation of adlets.
The result was that quite a few of her people had initially refused to accept that their loved ones had come back to life, thinking that they were deceitful spirits sent by either Nuti-Amaguk or Ikumak-Amaguk to trick them into servitude. Others thought some sort of catastrophe was happening among the spirits of nature that had forestalled their rebirth. A few took that belief even further, thinking that the world itself was preparing to come to an end.
The result was that the sun had passed its zenith by the time Solvei – with the help of her grandmother, Yotimo, and several others – had managed to calm everyone down and explain what was going on.
Even then, there’d been a general sense of stunned disbelief that had hung over everyone – particularly the elders, despite her grandmother’s singling out several of them by name – struggling to take in everything they’d been told. A witch who had birthed to a new band of yetis? Their shaman pledging herself to a pony goddess? Hvitdod coming back to life? It had been too much for everyone to take in, and Solvei had seen fear and doubt in everyone’s eyes, rather than acceptance or relief.
Solvei had just been starting to worry that the tribe would fracture between those who’d been reborn and those who hadn’t when, to her intense relief, Panuk had managed to fix things.
With a little help from his sisters.
The biggest heartthrob of all the boys his age, Panuk’s popularity hadn’t been because he’d been impressively handsome, or because he’d been particularly athletic. Rather, it was simply that he’d had an uncanny knack for being charming. A few minutes in his company had been enough to reduce almost any girl his age to a blushing, stammering mess.
Naturally, more than a few of his peers had tried to mimic their friend’s suave manner, but no matter how hard they tried to copy his easy laugh or infectious grin, all of the girls had agreed: none of them could hold an icicle to Panuk. More than once, the adlet in question would find himself pulled aside by his friends and asked how he had such a way with girls, to which Panuk had always made the same joke:
“When you grow up with three older sisters, you learn to be charming real fast.”
The truth behind his jokes had been proven just as the fear and suspicion in the village had reached its breaking point, as his sisters had suddenly rushed through the crowd – discarding the baskets of laundry that had kept them at the lakeside for the entire morning, missing all the commotion – and tackled their little brother.
At which point they’d begun to throttle him.
“THEY TOLD US YOU WERE DEAD!” screamed Cupun, the eldest sister, as she’d wrung his neck.
“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW THAT MADE US FEEL?!” howled Nuliajuk, the middle sister, as she twisted one of his arms behind his back.
“WE DIDN’T EVEN GET TO EAT YOU!” roared Ikiaq, the youngest, as she’d tied his legs in knots. “HOW COULD YOU BE SO INCONSIDERATE?!”
Panuk’s gurgled response had either been an apology or a plea for mercy, but either way it had been enough to reach his sisters, because only a few moments later their shrieks of rage had turned into wails of heartbreak, pulling their little brother close as they’d begun to weep into his fur. Panuk’s eyes had been wet also as he’d gathered the three of them in his arms, holding them tightly.
And just like that, all of the mistrust and suspicion had vanished. For the village adlets, religious implications and concerns about new enemies and fears for the future had all melted away in the face of a single, undeniable truth:
That the people they loved were back.
Slowly, as though awakening from a trance, all of the villagers had begun to mingle with their formerly-deceased friends and relatives, and the heartfelt reunion shared by Panuk and his sisters had begun to repeat itself. Parents hugged their children, lovers embraced each other, and old friends clasped hands for the first time in a long time. All too soon, every eye was teary and every tail was wagging. Even the elders, whom Solvei had always known to be stern and irascible, had worn smiles.
In short order, tears had turned into laughter. Laughter had turned into cheers. Cheers had turned into jubilation. And when the reborn adlets had shown the food that Lex had sent them home with, things had turned into a festival for the second time in as many days. Just like when the reborn adlets had celebrated their return to life, music had filled the air and games had been taken up as an impromptu party broke out, with Solvei pulled in a dozen different directions at once.
She’d spent the rest of the day recounting various parts of her story, demonstrating the magic that she had now, and – to her surprise and delight – received several surreptitious requests to be told more about the Night Mare. Apparently the powers she’d gained, and the incredible feats that Lex had performed, had made quite the impression on several of the tribe, especially coming from their shaman.
By the time she’d managed to satisfy everyone’s curiosity – and pledged to lead a group of eager young converts to the Shrine of the Starless Sky (though she didn’t tell them that her grandmother would also be making the journey, knowing it would have scared most of them off) – night had been falling, and the party had been in full swing. But unlike when the resurrected adlets had celebrated among themselves, the village had a luxury which Lex hadn’t seen fit to provide everyone the day before:
Alcohol.
At first, the presence of several casks of liquor – with fermented drinks made from sour berries, bitter roots, and sweet tree sap – had been innocuous. The laughter had been a little more boisterous. The singing had been a slightly more off-key. The games had been more casual and less competitive. But at some point, things had gotten...wilder.
Like when Yotimo’s beloved had convinced him to act out the part of the story he’d been in, offering to play the role of Paska in that last fight, the two of them stumbling around a makeshift stage as they’d giggled like teenagers, much to Toklo’s mortification.
Or when Ujurak had begun bellowing slurred challenges about wrestling anyone into submission.
But the final straw for Solvei had been when her mother had begun dancing on top of a table, dragging her father up there with her. The lack of space meant that the two of them had quickly begun brushing up against each other, and the crowd had egged them on as the touching had become less accidental and more prolonged. When hands had begun to roam, she’d made a hasty exit.
Instead, she’d gone to see the one person who had been conspicuous in his absence:
Silla.
It had been a bittersweet meeting, as Solvei had known it would be. Although the maimed warrior had been delighted by what was happening – his father had been one of the resurrected adlets – Solvei had clearly seen the pain in his eyes as he’d limped around his mother’s home on makeshift crutches, knowing that while he’d never begrudge anyone their joy in having their friends and family back, he still felt forgotten.
He hadn’t believed her when she’d initially told him that Lex had gained the power to make him whole again, gently chiding her for trying to cheer him up, and it had made her heart ache to see such someone who’d always been so stoic be too afraid to hope. But after she’d sworn three separate oaths – to Aselu, to the spirits, and to the Night Mare herself – that her master had magic capable of restoring limbs, and that she’d personally petition Lex to restore his missing leg when he came to the village in a few days, Silla had finally broken down, collapsing to his knees and shaking as he’d hugged her around her waist.
That had been when she’d felt that something was wrong with Lex.
She’d managed to hide her reaction as she’d gently comforted Silla. Leading him to the edge of the party, she’d fought back the urge to wince as she registered another injury to her master. It was only a small one, from what she could tell over their link, but the fact that he’d been hurt at all despite being a titan was unnerving; she'd felt him take a few injuries after they'd left for home, when he'd gone to confront Adagio Dazzle, but that had been hours ago, and given his lack of further injuries she’d assumed he’d defeated the Siren; why was he fighting again now?
She hadn’t been able to stop herself from thinking about that while she’d brought Silla to his father, the young warrior having been too ashamed to let his sire see him in such a state prior to then. Fortunately, his father had been less concerned about that than he was about seeing his boy again, and they’d embraced while Silla’s mother – a willowy adlet who’d looked lost ever since she’d been widowed – had looked on happily.
That had been a few hundred heartbeats ago, and now that she'd excused herself from Silla's reunion with his father, Solvei was hoping that no one would notice her absence as she skirted around the edge of the village, heading toward-
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Solvei almost yelped as her grandmother’s voice came from up ahead, Yura stepping out from behind a nearby tree a moment later. “G-grandmother?! What are you doing out here?!”
“I was reassuring those shriveled old sacks of bones that call themselves our elders that the spirits wouldn’t abandon us if we offered our prayers to the Night Mare,” answered Yura curtly. “Fortunately, calling out her name didn’t stop me from summoning an ice elemental, so that should quiet their grumbling. For now, at least.”
“Oh.”
An awkward silence fell that...or at least, it was awkward for Solvei; Yura, on the other hand, continued to stare right at her, arching an eyebrow. It was enough to make Solvei shuffle her feet, feeling like she’d just been caught trying to sneak away from the shamanic lessons she’d so often endured in her youth. “Well, um, if that’s all taken care of, you should go relax. I think there’s still some maple liquor left. That’s your favorite, right?”
“As I recall, it’s your favorite as well,” noted Yura pointedly. “Or at least, you liked it enough that you were too drunk to walk home after you snuck out to celebrate Ujurak’s birthday.”
Groaning inwardly at the reminder of yet another embarrassing memory. “I told you, I only drank that night because we were all playing a game! My number came up on the dice, and if I’d refused the cup-”
“Then you’d have had to accept a penalty, chosen by the birthday boy himself,” snorted Yura, shaking her head. “Honestly, that game was old when I was young.”
“Grandmother-”
“You know what’s new, though? The ice elemental I summoned was acting strange when I showed it to the elders. They didn’t notice, those bunch of withered old know-it-alls, but I could tell. It kept glancing west instead of standing at attention, and it actually shuddered a few times. Imagine, an ice elemental shuddering, as if it was cold!”
Solvei nodded, shifting in place as she felt Lex take another small injury across their link. “That’s interesting, but-”
“So naturally, after I was done with those old fools, I asked it what was wrong. And do you know what it said?”
Solvei shook her head mutely.
“It said,” pronounced Yura darkly, “that ‘the Lord of the Endless Ice’ was near, and pointed westward, which as I recall was not only the direction that we all came here from, but was also where your master was heading.”
“Grandmother-”
“So naturally, I figured I should talk to you about it, as you’re both a fellow shaman and the Great One’s confidant. Imagine my surprise” – stepping away from the tree, Yura growled softly as she stalked toward Solvei – “when I asked the spirits where my granddaughter was, and they informed me that she was apart from everyone else, and heading toward the west!”
Flinching at the tirade, Solvei stepped back. “I wasn’t-”
“Don’t lie to me, girl!” One finger came out to poke her sharply in the collarbone. “You were going to rush toward the Great One’s side, even though he told you to stay here!”
“He’s in trouble!” Fighting down the urge to plead, Solvei took a moment to remind herself that she wasn’t the little girl her grandmother had bossed around anymore. “He and I are connected, and I can feel that something’s wrong! So I’m going to go help him, orders or not!”
“You’ll do no such thing, Akna! Your master has already done this tribe a favor we can never repay, and I won’t have my granddaughter embarrass us all by disobeying his explicit instructions!”
“You think I care about being embarrassed?!” Snarling, Solvei increased her height then, her stature rising up until she towered over her grandmother. Nor did she stop there, conjuring her black crystal armor around herself, ice blades forming in each hand as a serac sprung up under her feet, her eyes glowing green-and-purple. “He’s in danger, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I don’t care when he needs my help!”
Yura didn’t bat an eye at her granddaughter’s transformation, crossing her arms under her chest to make it clear that the temper tantrum didn’t move her. “And is all of that going to be enough to help? Your master defeated Hvitdod on his own, and according to you that was before the Night Mare made him even more powerful. Can all of that magic you’re showing off do anything against something strong enough to threaten him as he is now?”
“Maybe!” spat Solvei defiantly, hating that her grandmother had a point. “Which is why-”
“Which is why you need to stay here!” snapped Yura. “Because if ‘maybe’ turns out to be ‘no,’ then he’ll have to worry about protecting you and not fighting his enemies!”
Solvei ground her teeth, seriously considering just zipping around her grandmother and speeding off into the night. It wasn’t like Yura had a serac of her own to chase her with, and she wouldn’t be able to take to the wind again until morning.
But somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to just ignore what had been said, needing to respond, to prove that she wasn’t making a mistake. “He took Nenet with him, and she’s less of a fighter than I am!”
Yura cocked her head. “You mean that sphinx who was cowering behind him? Maybe. But she has powers you don’t, isn’t that right?”
“...”
“I thought so. Those powers clearly make her helpful to him. Which means that since you don’t have anything that can be helpful, the best thing you can do right now is stay put.”
That stung, and there was a bitter taste in Solvei’s mouth as she swallowed, having only one more reply to make. “Would you sit around when someone you loved was in danger?”
To her mild surprise, Yura actually smiled a little then. “I did, many times. That’s part of being a shaman, and as I recall it was something you never understood.”
“I don’t need another lesson!”
“Yes, you do.” Yura’s expression softened as she looked up at her. “Akna, you’ve become a wonderful shaman, and you’ve transcended every expectation that I’ve ever had for you. But you’re still young, and you think that if you can just be by the side of the one you love, everything will be okay.”
“It will be! I can help him!”
“I know that you can. And I'm sure he knows it too. But can you help him more by ignoring what he said and being there? Or by trusting in him and staying here?”
For a long moment, Solvei glared down at the smaller adlet, her fists squeezed tightly and her jaw clenched. Then, all at once, the fight went out of her, letting her armor, serac, and ice blades all dissolve as she shrank back down to normal size. “I just...I'm worried about him,” she whimpered, unable to look her grandmother in the eye.
Stepping forward, Yura pulled her into a hug. “I know. Which means I have one last lesson still to teach you.”
“What's that?”
“That so long as you don't overdo it, drinking makes the waiting easier.”
Stepping back, she put an arm around Solvei's shoulder and guided her back toward the party. “Now, let's go stop your parents before they conceive a younger sibling for you right in front of everyone.”
Solvei grimaced, her ears flattening against her skull. “I think I'd rather face whatever Lex is fighting,” she muttered, though she let Yura continue to lead her back.
Instead, she settled for one last glance over her shoulder, offering a silent prayer that she only barely kept from sending across her link to Lex, not wanting to distract him.
Kyronex’s leg caught Lex across the chest, opening up a gash large enough that he could feel the wind against his heart.
But while that would have been a crippling – or more likely, fatal – wound to a mortal, Lex simply grit his teeth and spun with the blow and counterattacked, one of his rear claws slashing at the demigod’s metatarsus. Just like the last few exchanges, all his effort amounted to was a small scratch, and it was difficult for him to tell if he’d inflicted anything more than cosmetic damage to his enemy.
Even so, he pressed the attack, ducking under another swipe from his divine opponent and stepping inward. Giving a snarl that came directly from the beast within, he leaped upward and stabbed out with Belligerence, aiming directly for Kryonex’s left eye.
But the attack didn’t make it halfway to its destination before one of Kryonex’s pedipalps caught the barbed tip of the quill, the point sinking a quarter-inch into the exoskeleton before stopping.
Hissing at being thwarted again, Lex instinctively threw his weight behind Belligerence, trying to drive it through and inflict some real damage-
Only to immediately abandon his effort as his foresight warned him on the wraiths converging on him.
A dozen strong, the inky black shapes could almost have been twisted reflections of his shadow-form, complete with flickering yellow pinpoints for eyes. But unlike his transformation, these creatures were undead whose souls had left their bodies, wrapping themselves in negative energy so thick it manifested visually, forming the indistinct black shapes now descending upon him, limbs raised as their eyes shone brightly.
Yanking Belligerence free of Kryonex, Lex spun in place as he hurled it at the wraiths, two of them screeching and dissolving into nothing as the weapon pierced them. The other ten didn’t notice, swooping around to surround him as they began to swipe at him, their touch brimming with unlife.
Refusing to let himself be pinned down, Lex twisted past three of them in quick succession, retaliating with swipes of his claws that rent the wraiths as though they were made out of paper. Another two tried to flank him, moving from his left and his right at the same time, but he dodged them easily, moving upward-
Just in time for Kryonex’s downstroke to catch him, knocking him into the ground hard enough that the ribs that the demigod’s previous hit had revealed shattered from the impact. Worse, he’d been knocked through two other wraiths, and he could feel their negative energy seeping into his body, undermining his ability to restore himself.
But he had no time to dwell on that as the corporeal undead were already moving to capitalize on the hit he’d taken. A quintet of humanoid corpses, so badly burned that their original race was impossible to tell, flung themselves on top of him, their touch trying to siphon away more of his life force.
Scattering them with an eruption of black crystals, Lex immediately righted himself, using the half-second’s respite he’d bought to concentrate on repairing the damage he’d taken. In an instant, the hole in his chest closed up, reality again bending to his will...but it took more effort he knew it should have, the restoration taxing him in a way that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
Wounds inflicted by the demigod weren’t just physical damage.
If they had been, Lex wouldn’t have been concerned. The actual force behind Kryonex’s blows was crushing, but not to any serious extent. As far as being the product of mass times acceleration went, Kryonex was striking with power comparable to that of Hvitdod.
Rather, it was the absolute chill that each moment of contact with the demigod wrought that was the problem. So cold that it froze the positive energy where it touched him, Lex had no choice but to use Solvei’s cryomancy to wrap wards around himself. But despite augmenting them to the point where even Hvitdod’s ability to freeze creatures of intrinsic cold wouldn’t have been able to get through, they were only barely able to mitigate the brunt of the damage.
Worse, they were in constant need of renewal.
The demigod was so incredibly gelid that no matter how much strength Lex put into them, his wards were only able to withstand a single hit from Kryonex before they collapsed. When they did, Lex needed to restore them immediately, lest Kryonex strike him without any defenses up; although Lex had his own innate resistance to the cold, he didn’t trust it to stand up to what Kryonex was capable of dishing out. Or at least, not for very long, which meant that whenever his wards collapsed, they needed to be renewed immediately.
But between continually renewing his defenses and trying to fight back, Lex found himself taking repeated hits from the legions of the undead.
All while the open portal to the Negative Energy Plane wore away at his ability to recover naturally.
Individually, the unliving hordes were only marginally more dangerous than they were in life. Even with the portal eating away at his ability to revitalize himself, the mob of undead weren’t particularly threatening. With Nenet’s metamagic and Belligerence, Lex felt certain that he could take them all out with a single spell.
But Kryonex apparently knew that, which was presumably why he was no longer content to simply sit back and observe the fight, instead moving in and pressing his attack just enough that Lex couldn’t find the few seconds necessary to try and clear the battlefield.
Even that wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem, except for how powerful a fighter the demigod was.
As if to prove the point, five giant legs came swinging down at him, their movement faster than Lex’s eyes could track, leaving him relying entirely on his supernatural senses.
Each one of Kryonex’s limbs came from a different angle, leaving him balanced on just two of his remaining legs. But as he struggled to block, dodge, counter, redirect, and foil each of the demigod’s legs – frantically rebuilding his wards each time they went down – Lex could see that Kryonex wasn’t in the least bit unsteady despite how lopsided his stance was. Nor did Kryonex’s attacks leave him overcommitted, each leg moving apart from the others yet working together in tandem, resulting in no gap in his guard that Lex could try to exploit.
But that was no surprise either. Balance, inertia, momentum, leverage, and other such mundane concerns had ceased to be problems for Lex when he had become a titan; it was only to be expected that Kryonex wouldn’t be bound by them either.
The demigod was just better at using that to his advantage.
And with a morass of specters moving in to capitalize on his defenses, Lex did the only thing he could think of to buy himself some space, turning into shadow and plunging into the ground. That wouldn’t keep the incorporeal portion of the undead army at bay, but it would-
He didn’t have a chance to complete that thought as, all around him, the latent moisture in the ground froze, pulverizing the stone. An instant later, one of Kryonex’s legs pierced down through the fragmented rock, and pierced through Lex’s insubstantial form as well, the cold once again shattering his protection.
Struggling to free himself, finding the claw that had punctured him to be as solid to his shadow-form as it was to his physical body, Lex realized that going underground had been a serious mistake. All he’d done was make it harder for himself to sense Kryonex’s presence, and cripple his ability to fight back; better to-
Oh no.
Dragging himself off of the end of Kryonex’s leg, Lex immediately sped toward where Nenet and Adagio were holed up, repairing his wards...only for more of Kryonex’s legs to pierce the ground, forcing him to break off to avoid being skewered. That was enough time for the wraiths and specters he’d been avoiding to reach him, and Lex lashed out with a beam of dark magic, scattering the incorporeal flock only for a moment.
M-Master! came Nenet’s psychic shriek a second later, just as he’d foreseen it would. Some of the undead are trying to break in! I don’t know if your wards are going to be able to hold them off!
Rushing back above ground and turning solid again, Lex spared a half-second to glance in the direction of the cave entrance. Sure enough, there were roughly two dozen undead clustering there now, the illusion having fallen. Worse, he could just make out seven or eight immaterial creatures rushing into the mountainside directly, ignoring the entrance altogether as they passed through the layers of solid rock without slowing down.
But even that half-second cost him, as Kryonex and the undead moved in to try and capitalize on his moment of distraction, leaving Lex cursing in frustration.
When he’d handed that dark-haired woman he’d rescued to Nenet, he’d needed to pass her to the sphinx directly; there had been no other choice, since he’d cursed Adagio’s redoubt to be impassable to teleportation. While Mystaria’s clasp made him immune to his own magic, that didn’t extend along his connection to Nenet, and so the sphinx had been forced to come out to meet him.
Having her bypass the magical defenses he’d set up hadn’t been a problem; he’d been able to transmit the necessary information about them across their bond for her to get there without issue. But although Lex had hidden her presence as best he was able with illusons, he’d known that there were some undead creatures who would be able to sense her life force directly once she ventured that close to the battlefield, the positive energy certain to stand out against the backdrop of the increasingly negative-saturated area. And while Lex had hoped that his own, much greater concentration of vitality would keep their attention, it was inevitable that some would seek out an easier target.
And while Lex knew that they wouldn’t be able to reach the sphinx easily, there was only so much that his defenses could do.
Especially since only the room where he’d left Adagio had any protection against incorporeal creatures.
Even that was only a secondary protection that he’d woven into the thin screen he’d raised to keep that chamber safe against scrying. Added purely out of an abundance of caution, he hadn’t seen fit to imbue any sort of serious resilience to it. If it was subjected to any sort of dedicated assault, it wouldn’t last very long.
Nenet, I know that you’re almost out of magic, replied Lex, using Belligerence to guard against another sweep of one of Kryonex’s legs while he leaped over another, stabbing a skeletal creature with writhing innards through the heart as he blasted another wraith with dark magic. But if the undead manage to breach the barriers I set up, I’m not going to be able to help you.
That was enough to make her emotional state change from nervous to alarmed. Master, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that!
You said that Grisela’s puppets were taking anything valuable they could find from your siblings’ quarters, Lex reminded her, one claw shooting out to rip a headless giant in half before he turned in place to catch another two of Kryonex’s legs in place – one with his remaining fore-claw and the other with his telekinesis – just before they pincered him between them. Were there any magic items there?
Yes, the leftovers that they didn’t bother bringing with them when they went to attack Kryonex’s realm. Her distress faded then, but only somewhat. The astradaemons had some too, taken from Paska after they killed him.
Use whatever’s there to defend yourself, as well as Adagio and that woman.
A flicker of uncertainty came from Nenet then, as though she was trying to make up her mind about something, but it vanished a moment later. I understand, Master. I won’t let you down.
I know that you won’t, Nenet.
That was enough to make her worry fade, replaced with resolve, just as he’d known it would.
Then Lex turned all his attention back to where Kryonex and the undead were baring down on him again.
A vial of anti-adhesive solvent. A scroll to make closed wounds open up again. Sissel’s poison-detecting chalice.
Outside of the barrier Lex had raised, a swarm of ghostly figures cavorted, shrieking and wailing as they attacked the obstacle between them and their targets.
Grisela’s torture stick. A feather that, when it’s broken, turns into an oversized paper fan. A potion that lets the drinker understand any spoken or written language for ten minutes.
Because the dome her master had raised was slightly smaller than Adagio’s chambers, Nenet – crouched down in her Three Feet in the Evening form – could see the spectral figures surrounding her. Some scratched at the enclosure, others battered it, and a few simply threw themselves at it. Worse, none of them had tried to cast a spell, giving Nenet no opportunity to use her countermagic, which meant that all she could do was wait for the barrier to come down...if the corporeal undead currently stumbling through the hallways didn’t make it there first.
A pouchful of dust that makes anything its sprinkled one easier to see. Vidrig’s whetstone. A scroll with a spell on it to let you read scrolls with spells on them.
Nenet threw that last one aside with a strangled scream of frustration, letting it join the growing pile of useless magic items that she’d spent the last several minutes digging through. She’d promised Solvei she’d keep their master safe, and now he was outside fighting an entire army of the living dead – to say nothing of an evil demigod – while she was cowering in here sorting junk!
“Nenet, stop wasting time on that garbage and give me back my voice!”
Knowing better than to waste her time on what Adagio was whispering, the sphinx ignored her as she went back to rooting through the assortment of magic items that she hadn’t sorted through yet. Even as she did, another ghost – or wraith, or specter, or whatever it was – slammed into the barrier, giving a screech that was like an angry version of nails on a chalkboard when the dome held.
But it didn’t escape Nenet’s notice that the barricade, which had previously shown no reaction to the attacks directed against it, was now giving a flicker whenever it was struck.
Whether it was because they’d noticed the same thing, or because their frustration was mounting, the phantasmal monsters outside of the dome redoubled their attacks, striking the barrier with renewed ferocity, and Nenet knew that she was running out of time.
“Damn it, Nenet, I know that sphinxes can lift curses!” Despite herself, Nenet glanced over at her moth-, at Adagio then, the Siren still lying on the floor of her cage despite several specters huddled over the part of the dome that was closest to her. “I can blow these billowy bedsheets away with one scream! Hurry up and let me use my magic!”
Nenet shook her head, not in answer to the whispered orders but to reaffirm herself that freeing the prisoner she’d been assigned to watch over wasn’t an option. Not that she was sure she could anyway; while it was true that she had an innate power to remove curses, she had no idea if that was true for a curse that her master had laid down.
And even if it was, it’s not like that would be any better, Nenet reminded herself. While she had no doubt that Adagio could make good on what she was saying – even without any aristeia left, she was still a Siren, able to command powerful magic – she was equally certain that even if she could set her free, she’d be targeted as soon as the undead were gone.
That was just the sort of person Adagio Dazzle was.
As it to remind Nenet of how true that was, she caught sight of her own tail, thwapping so hard that she could see it out of the corners of her peripheral vision.
Digging back into the rapidly-diminishing pile of magical paraphernalia that she hadn’t already examined, Nenet paused as she came to the enemy-detecting rod that Paska had waved in her face before.
“This thing won’t hold out much longer!” A glance at Adagio showed that the Siren was grimacing as she looked past the bars of her cage at how the barrier was flashing with each hit it took now. “Do you want us both to be killed?!”
The question made Nenet bite her lip, her resolve crumbling. Freeing Adagio was the wrong move; Nenet knew that for sure. But right now she was running low on both time and options. Maybe, just maybe, the Siren had the wherewithal to realize that they needed to work together, at least until Lex had dealt with Kryonex.
Gulping, Nenet picked up the rod, which immediately began to buzz in her grasp. She knew that it reacted to hostility that was directed toward the wielder, and that with over a dozen malicious spirits right outside the barrier it would be in a perpetual state of alert, but maybe she could filter those out.
Closing her eyes, Nenet concentrated as she narrowed the rod’s focus, trying to center it only on Adagio-
The length of iron vibrated so hard that she almost lost her grip on it.
Wincing, Nenet resisted the urge to throw the thing away, confirming that it was reacting to the Siren personally. If anything, the enmity it was picking up from her eclipsed that of the monsters trying to kill them. As it was, the only person who didn’t seem to want to kill her was currently laying on what was left of the luxurious bed, stirring as her eyes began to flutter open.
And then gave a terrified scream as she caught sight of the monsters besieging them.
“Zhe shi shenme?! Zhe shi nali?!”
Like all of her kind, Nenet had omnicomprehension, the ability to understand any spoken or written language. But even though she knew that the pale-skinned woman was asking where she was and what was happening, that didn’t mean that she knew how to respond in kind.
“I don’t know if you can speak Ponish,” she called out, giving the name of the language she’d been born knowing how to converse in, “but if you can understand me, my name is Nenet, you were saved by my master, Lex Legis, and right now we’re under attack by undead creatures created by Kryonex, so if you have any magic that can fight them off we could really use your help!”
“You don’t need her help!” whispered Adagio so harshly that it was almost a growl. “You need mine! Look!”
Nenet didn’t need to ask what the Siren was telling her to look at, the dome now flashing so badly that it was almost strobing.
But she didn’t have a chance to process that as she felt her mental shields suddenly kick in, stopping something from reaching her mind. It was enough to make Nenet gasp, wings flaring on instinct as she turned to face Adagio. How had she broken free from her curses?!
Except the Siren wasn’t moving, still grimacing as she eyed the failing dome above them. So who-
“F-forgive me,” came a halting, accented voice from the other side of the room, the dark-haired woman sliding off the edge of the bed, wide-eyed and shaking. “I am still not fully learned in conversing in this language. I tried to speak my thoughts into yours, but-”
“No, I get it, telepathy’s fine!” interrupted Nenet frantically, the barrier now flashing so much that was practically emitting an unbroken glow. “Do you have any attack magic?!”
“Yes,” answered the woman. “But almost all ice-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish speaking as a shattering sound came from above, an area near the top of the dome giving way.
It wasn’t a major breach, the hole only being a few inches wide, but it was enough for one of the specters – a translucent outline of a distorted old woman who looked far too much like Grisela for Nenet’s liking – to shove an arm through, tearing madly at the broken edges in order to widen the rupture.
Below her, another hole opened up, this one twice the size. Then a third off to the right. And a fourth above that.
“Use whatever part of it isn’t ice!” shrieked Nenet, stumbling backward.
For a half-second the pale woman hesitated, then nodded.
Then, without warning, she vanished.
And in her place...
“What the fox?” whispered Adagio.
For once, Nenet agreed with her.
Standing where the woman had been was a fox the size of a large dog. Its fur was blue, its paws were black, and its ears were tufted. But most notable of all was its tail.
Or rather, tails, since it had three of them.
Giving Nenet a quick look, the animal faced the gaps that had been torn in the dome and inhaled deeply, and in the magical spectrum, Nenet could see power gathering in all three of the fox’s tails.
Then it – no, she – breathed outward, unleashing a cone of lightning that washed over the broken barrier, prompting a chorus of pained screams from the spectral undead trying to force their way through.
But when the electrical barrage stopped, Nenet could see that none of the malevolent spirits had fallen to the attack, nor retreated. If anything, the damage only seemed to have enraged them further, causing them to struggle harder to fight their way through.
And judging by how the gaps they’d already made in the barrier were widening, they’d accomplish that in the next few seconds.
Another tingling in her mind let Nenet know that the fox-woman was trying to speak to her telepathically again, and she hastily dropped her mental shields.
My efforts were insufficient! wailed the fox-woman. Forgive me! Mortal magic has only limited effect on the unquiet dead, and I was never trained in how to properly soothe their rage!
But that was enough to snap Nenet out of her surprise at the woman her master had rescued being some sort of animal in disguise, and she rushed toward the woman-turned-fox. “Can you do that again?!”
The fox gave her a nonplussed look. Yes, but I have no hope that it will suffice to repel their advance!
Despite the circumstances, Nenet found herself smiling. “Just tell me when you’re ready. I’ll do the rest.”
The fox gave her a dubious look, but inhaled again. At the same time, Nenet called upon the metamagic that her master had given her. Alter the parameters, set it to affect magic external to myself, rather than internal, she chanted silently, still not having gotten used to this power. Amplify the output, widen the area, adjust the resonance to affect targets with coexistent dimensionality...
I have finished preparing! came the fox-woman’s voice as Nenet finished her own preparations. Nor was her announcement a moment too soon, as the holes were widening, the half of the dome that faced the back of the room crumbling away into nothing.
Immediately, the spectral dead flooded inside.
“NOW!” yelled Nenet, fighting down a surge of irrational jealousy as she reached out and grabbed the fox-woman’s fluffy tails, pouring her metamagic into them. “DO IT NOW!”
Yelping slightly at the sudden contact, the fox opened her mouth again, breathing out...
But this time what came out of her mouth wasn’t a mere blast of lightning, but a raging electrical storm. The bright flash devoured everything in front of Nenet, forcing her to let go of her partner’s tails in order to shield her eyes, and she could just barely make out the undead caught in the blast. Like she’d hoped, they were completely affected by the lightning this time, bodies contorted and heads thrown back in agony as they were electrocuted.
And when the lightning cleared a moment later, Nenet managed to blink away the spots in front of her eyes quickly enough to see them fade away completely, having been completely destroyed by the blast.
That...that was magnificent! gushed the fox, her fur standing on end from just how much electricity had been put into the air. My cousins-, no, even my aunt could not have done better! And she possesses six tails!
“Yeah, well, maybe I can borrow one sometime,” joked Nenet, not sure what the fox was talking about, but caring less about that than them having managed to survive somehow. “Especially if it’ll let me breathe lightning like you, um...”
Ah, my apologies! Spinning in place, the fox returned to human shape, the woman folding giving her a deep bow. I am Pimao Xiang Xiaoxiang Yiyang Mei Li, of the Pimao Jingzhi kumiho. If that is troublesome for you to speak, please refer to me as Mei Li.
Despite herself, Nenet couldn’t help but giggle a little, having heard the translation for her name. “Your parents named you ‘fur as beautiful as a portrait’?”
Raising her head, Mei Li blushed. Our clan are all named after the quality of our fur, and mine was born with a particularly unusual presentation. Her smile faded then. Or at least it did, before I was forced to permeate myself with the essence of the Plane of Ice in order to survive the harsh climate. Now I am-
“Look out!”
Knocking Mei Li aside, Nenet leaped forward as another specter – this one looking like a snarling humanoid of indeterminate gender – floated up through the floor in front of where the dome had been broken, hissing as it held out a hand and shot a coruscating ray at where Mei Li had been standing...and where Nenet was now.
But the beam never hit her, as the sphinx called on her countermagic, grabbing hold of the beam and turning it aside to harmlessly impact the ground.
Screeching as its assault was foiled, the specter rushed forward, but Mei Li was already back in fox-form, breathing lightning at it again. After a brief exchange with the two falling back, Nenet defending against its ranged attacks as Mei Li wore it down, the creature crumbled to dust with one last shriek.
“We make a good team,” panted Nenet, changing back into sphinx form as she sank into a crouch.
The change made Mei Li cock her head, but she didn’t say anything about Nenet’s transformation, her tails swaying slightly. I concur.
From inside of her cage, Adagio let out a low hiss, eyes narrowed as she watched the sphinx and the fox smile at each other.
But their moment of respite didn’t last long as more incorporeal undead gathered around the broken half of the dome...
Just as the door on the other side of the room burst open, a multitude of corporeal undead rushing in.
Lex grunted as he hit the mountainside, the impact great enough that it blew away the entire summit and most of the crest as well.
He barely noticed the damage to the landscape, however, instead grimacing as he took stock of the eighty-seven broken bones and twenty-nine ruptured organs his body had sustained. None of that was enough to interfere with his ability to continue fighting – pain no longer had the ability to impair his actions, and he wasn’t dependent on biology to function – but the fact that the wounds weren’t closing on their own was a testament to just how bad the situation had become.
The negative energy polluting his body had finally surpassed what he could offset on his own.
He still had recovery options, both in terms of healing magic he’d received from the Night Mare or simply concentrating in order to repair his body. But neither of those would have done very much; the negative energy saturating the area would have smothered the former, and in his current state the latter wouldn’t have accomplished enough to make the effort worthwhile.
Worse, neither would have prevented him from accumulating further damage as the fight went on.
As if to prove that point, Kryonex closed the gap between them in an instant, shooting across the valley at speeds far in excess of what a creature his size should have been able to attain, slamming bodily into Lex.
“It seems as though you’re reaching your limit at last,” noted the demigod conversationally as his legs lashed out at Lex again. “I must admit, I thought you’d put up more of a fight.”
“Allow me to oblige you!” snarled Lex, reupping his newly-shattered wards against the cold even as he called forth a spell. It took only a fraction of a second to cast it, feeding more power into the conceptual matrix as he-
Was immediately struck from four different directions at once, Kryonex’s burst of speed interrupting his casting and causing the spell to fizzle as he reeled under the blows, anti-cold wards once again crumbling under the onslaught.
Nor had Kryonex struck him at random, as this time the force of the blows sent him careening toward another cluster of the undead filling the valley.
Slamming into a mob of skeletal humanoids, burnt lizards, and dismembered monsters, the impact blew them all apart as Lex hit them with the force of a comet, striking the ground hard enough to leave a trench over a hundred feet long. But even that was enough to worsen the situation, as the unliving creatures – whether overcome with hatred for their slayer, hunger for life energy, or simply too insane to care – had grasped and clawed at him even in their instant of destruction, overwhelming him with more negative energy.
Flipping upright before he’d fully come to a halt, Lex hesitated for a half-second as a brief sense of lightheadedness overcame him, the dizziness inviting more of the undead to rush at him.
Cursing as he realized that his soul’s connection to his body was beginning to fray under the sheer morass of anti-life that he’d been subjected to, Lex sank his talons into the ground, growling as he overturned the terrain around him. Flipping over a frozen slab of rock the size of a hoofball field, he had the satisfaction of seeing the undead closest to him sent flying as the ones behind them were crushed beneath the tons of stone that he’d just upended.
The reward for his efforts was that more undead came at him.
Summoning Belligerence to his grasp, Lex immediately began casting another spell, knowing that was all he’d need to turn the tide of the fight.
Just like before, Kryonex had no intention of allowing him to do that, immediately appearing before him with his massive legs already swinging downward.
Exactly as Lex had known he would.
It was the one way in which his enemy had proven to be predictable. Each and every time he’d tried to cast a spell, the demigod had doggedly pressed his offense, keeping him from doing so. Lex had tried fortifying his position behind multiple barricades of ultra-dense black crystals, concealing himself behind several layers of illusions, and evading at the fastest speed he’d been capable of, all in an effort to buy himself the few moments he’d need.
Each time had been for naught. Kryonex had burst through his cover, seen through his attempted misdirection, and easily caught up to him. And each time, he had proceeded to attack with such ferocity that Lex had lost the spell he’d been casting. While Solvei’s cryomancy could be used through a simple act of will, thaumaturgical magic required intense concentration and dedicated focus, even if only for a moment.
Kryonex had shown himself to be unwilling to grant him that moment. Even despite the demigod’s strange reluctant to use his divine powers – ever since Lex had broken free of his enemy’s attempt to freeze him in time, Kryonex had limited himself to physical attacks – his strategy had been one Lex had repeatedly failed to overturn, unable to bring his strongest magic to bear even as the demigod, the undead, and the portal had slowly but steadily worn away at him.
And to compound matters further, each spell that Kryonex had disrupted was one that he couldn’t recover. A disrupted thaumaturgical spell was lost, its activation expending the power involved even though it fell apart before it could take effect, and although Lex now possessed a vast repertoire of powerful magic, his mental catalogue of spells was still limited. Each interrupted casting was a spell he wouldn’t get back until after the fight was over – since there was no way Kryonex would ease off enough for him to renew his spells during the battle – narrowing his options even more with nothing to show for it.
Which was why Lex had something different in mind this time.
“More of the same?” remarked Kryonex as he descended, limbs already lashing out in a hurricane of strikes. “I expected something different this time.”
Lex made no response, instead focusing on defending himself as he held off the demigod’s furious assault. Dodging wherever he could, he turned aside only those blows that he couldn’t avoid, his wards shattering from even blocked strikes. He immediately renewed them, but that was another task performed alongside the casting he was already doing and the desperate defenses he was raising...
And then the undead reached him.
Before, when the animate corpses had attacked him, Lex had been forced to split his focus, either destroying them and leaving himself vulnerable to Kryonex, or ignoring them in favor of the demigod, allowing the malevolent dead to score a few hits on him before he brushed them aside.
This time, however, Lex used them to his advantage.
Kryonex’s moving in had put the demigod right alongside him in the middle of the unliving horde. So far they had all ignored the demigod, either recognizing that he was too great an opponent for them or because they were still following the commands they’d died obeying. But Lex had no intention of allowing them to continue leaving Kryonex untouched.
The closest of the unliving monsters was a charred skeleton, its intestines writhing in its gut like a nest of snakes as they slid up the creature’s burnt throat and out its mouth, reaching for him like some horrific tongue. But rather than retaliate against the attack, Lex instead grabbed the disgusting organ in one claw, ignoring the sting of the negative energy it contained as he whipped it around. Twirling the monster at the other end as though its intestines were a lasso, he spun it in a circle before hurling it into the air.
Nor did he stop there.
A slavering frost drake corpse that could have been another ghoul joined it an instant later. So did a headless form of a six-legged polar bear. And the hollow husk of a small humanoid whose torso had been ripped apart. Those and scores of other undead were flung upward in an instant, howling as they were launched into the sky.
And once all of the undead that were within his reach were airborne, Lex expanded his telekinesis, grabbing every single unliving creature he could reach and lifting them into the air, several thousand bodies shrieking and wailing as they were dragged upward.
Then he flung them all at Kryonex.
But not a single one reached the demigod, each of the undead freezing in midair as the demigod’s eyes flashed.
“Trying to bury me beneath the undead in order to buy yourself enough time to finish your spell?” mused Kryonex, pedipalps clicking. “A poor plan, since they lack the power to injure me. Can you say the same?”
No sooner had he finished speaking than the undead resumed moving...but not toward him. Instead, they uniformly shot toward Lex, streaking through the air so quickly that they were little more than decaying blurs, moaning and screaming as they flew directly at him.
It was exactly what he’d been hoping the demigod would do.
Give me a major source of positive energy! The strongest one you possibly can!
Acknowledged, came the answer from his tulpa.
When he’d first come up with this plan, Lex had used his foresight only to confirm that his tulpa would be able to comply with his order. Making a strategy around something that it couldn’t give him would have been an unforgivable lapse in judgment. But his surprise had been complete when he’d realized that the mental construct wouldn’t stop there.
Situational analysis complete. Order contextualized. Optimizing now.
Up ahead, the undead were falling toward him like raindrops, so numerous that they almost blotted out his view of Kryonex. Even the most casual analysis of their speed and trajectory showed that they’d impact him before he’d be able to finish his spell, at which point he’d be buried under more damage than even a titan could ignore.
But his tulpa’s power kicked in first.
And around his body, golden armor shimmered into being.
Polished and gleaming brightly, it covered him from horn to tail, each piece looking as though it had been designed specifically for him. The horn-guard was a burnished gold, shining with the radiance of the sky at sundown. The eyepieces on the helmet were translucent emeralds set with turquoise, replicating his ocular glow in the form of gemstones. Filigree on the left vambrace presented the barbed wire beneath, not as twisted metal but as winding links of an intricate chain. The final aspect was an outer surcoat of pure white, a large symbol of a bright red orb surrounded by a vivid halo.
Armor of the Renewing Light, complete.
No sooner had his tulpa announced the name of what it had brought forth than the armor shone, the golden metal lighting up as though someone had turned a spotlight on it. But rather than reflecting any outward glow, the light came from it, its intensity rapidly increasing until it shone like a star that had fallen to earth.
And within it, Lex felt his wounds immediately start to close, the negative energy that he’d been hit with being expelled rapidly as its opposite flooded his body.
But the light didn’t stop there, exploding outward in a blinding coruscation that engulfed all of the undead falling toward him...and obliterated them all.
Each of the falling undead was burned to nothing almost instantly, disintegrating into nothing but ashes in a fraction of a second. A few came close enough to almost make contact with him, but Lex merely had to shift in place, twitching a talon in their direction, and the light seemed to wind around them with a tangible thickness all its own, breaking them down and destroying them before they could cross the last of the distance.
“What is this?!” Taking a step back, Kryonex raised one leg, as if to shield his eyes. “That’s not a spell! What are you doing?!”
“You’re right, this armor isn’t the result of a spell,” laughed Lex triumphantly, bringing Belligerence around as he brought forth all that power that his titan’s body could generate as he finally – finally! – finished the thaumaturgical activation he’d been aiming for.
“But this is.”
In his grasp, another of Belligerence’s black crystal rings broke apart, leaving only a single one left.
Then his magic roared outward and engulfed everything.
Silhouette allowed himself only the tiniest smile as he watched Kryonex continue to pummel Lex Legis.
It was only because of the discipline that he’d learned during his time in the Royal Guard that he managed to hold himself back, not wanting to embarrass the Moon Princess – his savior and deliverer, who had not only healed his wounded body and broken spirit in her endless benevolence, but had raised him up in grace and elegance – by making a spectacle of himself.
Even so, it was all he could do not to moan aloud in rapture. It was poetic justice that Lex Legis had transformed himself into a monster, his body now as ugly as his heart had always been. But to be allowed to witness his downfall, wherein his hubris in thinking that he could challenge a god – a pathetic, sniveling demigod who had none of the Moon Princess’s transcendent resplendence, to be sure, but still a god – ultimately destroyed him was as blissful to Silhouette as when he’d embraced his true goddess and received salvation.
His only sorrow was that his beloved Luna wasn’t here to witness it.
Just the thought of her made Silhouette’s chest ache, the heady mixture of feelings no longer causing him anguish. Instead, it was a mixture of wry chagrin and wistful longing. I saw her through the eyes of one who was as but a foal, mistaking devotion for worship. And in so doing, I abandoned the mare in favor of her moonlight, letting it illuminate my nightmares even as she suffered. That is the sin for which I must yet atone.
In hindsight, it was so clear to him that his poor Luna had been suffering. Like a dreamer unable to wake, she had been lost in a mad delusion of godhood, seeking to escape her mortal troubles by ascending to the divine. His duty had been to relieve her troubled heart as she had relieved his, showing her the succor that a stallion was supposed to give his mare, joining their hearts together in blessed union.
But he had failed her, too caught up in his own needs to see to hers. It had taken the gentle touch of the Moon Princess – a true goddess, sacred and sublime, beyond all worldly needs or concerns – to open his eyes. And in her endless mercy, she had not only shown him the way, but had lifted him up.
The thought made the butterfly wings he now possessed – pure black, save for where they were adorned with white spots – to gently open and close. He was like Luna now, a creature of beauty and inspiration, a perfect companion for the mare of his heart. Even his foreleg was healed now, the imperfection which had always indicated his folly had he but the wisdom to see it now wiped away by the Moon Princess’s gentle hoof.
Now, he was at last a perfect companion for Luna, his future bride.
That was why Silhouette made sure not to take his eyes off of the screen which Luminace – one of the lesser gods, but who was wise enough to know her place – had conjured. He would record each moment of Lex Legis’ downfall in his mind, and make sure to replay it in his dreams when he slept. That way, when he returned to Equestria and was reunited with his beloved, she’d be able to share this moment with him.
Ideally, it would be what they watched after they fell asleep together on their wedding night, together as stallion and wife after taking their vows beneath the Moon Princess’s nocturnal sky. Then they’d be able to spend the rest of their lives together in bliss, spreading the goddess’s religion as they wiped out all traces of Lex Legis’ tainted teachings from Equestria.
I can only hope that Kryonex leaves a piece of that fiend’s body intact, Silhouette noted, another rush of joy pulsing through him as he saw the demigod knock Lex into a mountain. Once I’ve undone my beloved Luna’s curse, the horn of her despoiler will be perfect to gift her with when I propose.
It was a beautiful scene, one that he’d imagined many times since his rebirth at the Moon Princess’s hooves, and he had to resist the urge to imagine it again now, knowing that he had a duty to remember everything he was witnessing as vividly as he could. Making sure to stare raptly at the action, he solemnly observed as the clawed horror that Lex Legis had become was knocked into another stretch of the undead, his bedraggled form rising up again and throwing the monstrous corpses at the demigod, who arrested their movement and threw them back-
Only for Lex to destroy them all as golden armor appeared around him, its light obliterating the undead.
“That can’t be!”
It took Silhouette a moment to realize that the words hadn’t come from his own lips, one ear swiveling around toward another of the gods...the Sun Queen, it sounded like? But he couldn’t look away as Lex swung his oversized quill covered in bloody runes around and unleashed a spell-
And then the viewing screen began to flicker and jump, like a filmstrip that had become tangled in the projector.
“Hey, it was just getting good!” The Unspoken’s voice – now an insectile buzzing – was matched by a disgusting blorping from his gelatinous companion. “This better not be a to-be-continued!”
Having nothing to look at now that the view of the fight had been interrupted, Silhouette had no compunctions about looking around, watching as the Sun Queen rose from the dais where she’d been seated and took a step toward where the Night Mare and Luminace were conversing. “Forgive my interruption,” she murmured, striving over to the pair, “but we require your attention. Luminace, would you please see what’s gone wrong with your spell?”
The monocled goddess blinked, a look of surprise crossing her face as she looked at the malfunctioning screen. But the Sun Queen didn’t wait for her to respond before turning to the other alicorn. “Night Mare, I apologize if I’m being presumptuous, but I must know why your champion was wielding armor consecrated to me...and why I don’t recognize anything else about it.”
The armored goddess’s lip curled, disdain crossing her features. “You think you can demand answers now, after you pressed me into standing idly by while another god assaulted my champion directly?”
“That’s it?” leered Blaze. “You’re not even going to comment on him using another god’s power right in front of you?”
“Aw, don’t be so uptight, hot stuff,” giggled Kara. “The Night Mare’s not an insecure girl. She knows that even if her stallion steps out every now and then, he’ll always come back to her.”
The quip made the Night Mare’s eyes flash – literally, turning red as she bared her teeth at Kara – as she spat a response. “Were I not bound to noninterference, I would censure him harshly for that! I allowed you to bless him only because it served my interests!”
“I understand that,” interrupted the Sun Queen, “and none of us doubt your commitment to your faithful, but-”
She stopped speaking abruptly, looking off to the side – at any empty portion of the pavilion where the gods were fathered – with an expression of surprise on her face.
A moment later, Silhouette saw why.
Appearing from out of nowhere, an old zebra mare appeared. Her hair was lusterless and stringy, the flesh seemed to sag from her bones, and even her stripes were slightly askew, as though half-formed. Nevertheless, she moved with alacrity, despite looking as though she was going to keel over at any moment; if anything, Silhouette felt tired just looking at her, lethargy seeping into his limbs simply from watching her move.
But before she had taken more than two steps, the Sun Queen was moving to greet her, a warm smile on her face. “Soft Whisper!” she exclaimed, sounding delighted. “I’m so glad you accepted my invitation! I can scarcely remember the last time-”
“Two hundred sixty-eight years ago,” cut in Soft Whisper tonelessly. “When Iliana finished extirpating my faith on Everglow.”
The Sun Queen’s features turned sorrowful at that, and she gave a mournful nod. “Two tragedies occurred that day. One was what happened to your faithful. The other was that you withdrew from our assemblies. Long have your wisdom and guidance been missed.”
Blaze gave a loud snort at that, while Kara rolled her eyes, but Soft Whisper ignored them, instead keeping her sunken eyes on the Sun Queen. “Then I hope you will heed my wisdom now, when I ask you to let me intervene in the travesty that is occurring now.”
Cocking her head, the Sun Queen blinked once. “You mean, between Lex Legis and Kryonex?”
Soft Whisper nodded once. “With my worship now kept only by a remaining few, I don’t have the power to bypass The Author’s interdiction. But you do, and so I ask you to send me there immediately.”
“I think that’s a great idea!” announced the Unspoken with a ribbit, his frog’s throat bulging. “The more players in the mix, the crazier things will get!”
But the Sun Queen was already shaking her head. “Forgive me, I cannot.”
“You must,” insisted Soft Whisper. “Thousands of souls have been defiled, forced to linger beyond death involuntarily. Without my guidance, they will not be able to find their way to their proper afterlives.”
“You’re behind the times, you old bag of bones,” scoffed Blaze. “The Night Mare’s newest mutant is making short work of all the undead. Besides, what do you care what plane they end up on? It’s not like any of them are ponies anyway.”
“Ponies or not, I cannot abide such a desecration on so large a scale.” She didn’t bother looking at the war goddess, instead keeping her gaze level with the Sun Queen. “Let me attend to it at the source, lest those multitudes suffer for crimes not their own.”
Closing her eyes, the Sun Queen lowered her head. “I’m sorry, but I cannot allow you to go down there. But if it helps” – she raised her head, giving Soft Whisper an earnest look before the old zebra could reply – “many of the undead are being cleansed with holy light even as we speak.”
Soft Whisper’s eyes narrowed by the slightest fraction. “No servant of the Night Mare could command such light.”
“I had thought the same.” Again, the Sun Queen turned her gaze to Lex Legis’s goddess. “Until a few moments ago, that is.”
The Night Mare gave a mirthless chuckle in reply. “And I told you, I owe you no answers-”
“It was dreambinding.”
Silhouette almost gasped aloud as the Moon Princess spoke, for the voice of his goddess was like music unto his ears.
Luminace looked over from where she was stabilizing the viewing screen that she’d made. “Isn’t that a sacred mystery of your religion?”
This time the Night Mare was the one who scoffed, earning a scowl from the Moon Princess. “No. Though dreambinding is a talent that my faith regards as holy, its development is something mortals do on their own, much like how you cannot claim to be the reason why some ponies are born as sorcerers, even if you are the goddess of magic.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Lex Legis was able to manifest a relic sacred to me, sister,” noted the Sun Queen pointedly. “Even if he can bring his dreams into reality, while awake no less, such a thing shouldn’t be possible; divine blessings cannot be dreamed into existence.”
“Kind of like how that titan just wiped out Luminace’s viewing spell,” hooted – literally, his head now that of an owl – the Unspoken. “Isn’t mortals overturning the powers of a god what the elves did?”
Luminace bristled at that. “He didn’t overturn my spell! This is a finely-tuned scrying effect, which means that the sensor is actually present there, and since I’m trying to make sure neither of them notice it, the majority of the spell structure is devoted to concealment rather than stability! So when spells with a theurgic index of over two hundred thousand are thrown around, it’s naturally going to have a hard time-”
“We understand, Luminace,” cut in the Sun Queen, her voice gentle. “No one thinks that what Lex Legis did just now now is comparable to what the elven pantheon’s mortal mages did to Thundering Gale.”
Despite looking like she wanted to keep going, Luminace nodded at that, going back to her spell, and the Sun Queen returned her gaze to the Moon Princess. “Please continue.”
With a curt nod, her sister goddess resumed her explanation. “You know where the Dream Realm is located, I trust?”
Despite his trying to remain nonchalant, Silhouette’s eyes widened slightly. To think, he was about to hear the secret truths of the realm that his beloved Luna oversaw!
Across from him, the Sun Queen’s smile returned. “I do, but please explain anyway. I believe your attendant is eager to know.”
Silhouette flushed, butterfly wings opening and closing in mortification as the Moon Princess looked at him. “Forgive me, Goddess, I-”
“There is nothing to forgive,” answered the Moon Princess, and Silhouette had to resist the urge to abase himself before her. “I wish you to learn this for when you bring my faith to your world.”
He bowed his head almost to the floor, overwhelmed. “I am your instrument in all things.”
Satisfied, the Moon Princess continued her explanation. “The Ethereal Plane is the insubstantial dimension that overlays the mortal world. Most who know of it think it to be little more than the realm of ghosts, where cunning spellcasters often venture when they need to bypass some physical barrier that they cannot otherwise breach. But there’s far more to it than that.”
“You’re downplaying the peeping aspect too much,” drawled Kara. “Seriously, most of those ‘cunning spellcasters’ are hanging out in the mares’ baths, since you can see the mortal realm from the Ethereal Plane, but not the other way around.”
“What few mortals know,” continued the Moon Princess doggedly, “is that unlike the mortal world, the Ethereal Plane doesn’t simply extend across three directions. Rather than forward and back, left and right, and up and down, you can also move ‘closer’ and ‘further’ from the mortal world. Most ether-walkers rarely realize that they – and the ghosts they often hunt – are as close to the mortal world as the Ethereal Plane allows for, not knowing that it’s possible for them to move further away from it.”
“And moving further away makes everything seem more muted and foggy, as though lost in a mist bank,” murmured Luminace, still fiddling with her spell.
“Precisely,” agreed the Moon Princess. “And once one ventures ‘away’ from the mortal world, they come upon the plane’s natural boundary: the Color Curtain.”
The Sun Queen’s mortal attendant cocked his head at that, a confused look on his face. “Color Curtain?”
“That’s what the few sages who know of its existence have termed it,” nodded the Moon Princess. “An endless wall of multicolored light, always shifting and changing, spreading in every direction for eternity.”
“Psychedelic,” cawed the Unspoken, who sounded as though he were smiling, though his macaw’s beak made it hard to tell.
The Moon Princess shook her head. “They’re wrong. What they’re seeing isn’t colors; it’s dreams.”
Despite himself, Silhouette raised his head. “The wall is made up of dreams?”
“More accurately, dreams appear within it. While they can be viewed from the outside, anyone touching it simply passes through the curtain, unless using oneiromancy or some other power to affect the dreams therein directly. And on the other side of it...”
Silhouette held his breath, sensing the gravity of what she was about to say.
“...likes the Deep Ethereal.”
The Moon Princess gave her sister a solemn look. “That’s where dreambinders such as Lex Legis pull things from.”
For a moment, Luminace’s attention faltered, looking away from her viewing screen. “Wait, the Deep Ethereal? But there’s nothing there except for a few crumbling demiplanes and strange monsters. There aren’t even any gods who live there, or at least none that I know of. What could the dreambinders possibly-”
“You’re a wise goddess, Luminace, but still quite young,” cut in the Moon Princess with a small smile. “The Deep Ethereal is far more than you think.”
Raising a hoof, she pointed at the malfunctioning screen. “The reason Lex Legis wore armor consecrated to you, sister, is because he pulled it from one of the aborted universes within the Deep Ethereal. Specifically, one where he turned away from the Night Mare, and found redemption in your religion.”
A chorus of shocked gasps and confused grunts came from the other gods then, though Silhouette noted that the Night Mare wasn’t one of them, instead simply sneering. But it was Luminace who recovered first, her eyes wide behind her monocle. “You mean he’s pulling in stuff from other timelines?! Because the Monitors of Infinity won’t let that stand! At the very least, they’ll send an aevarut-”
“No, not another timeline,” cut in the Moon Princess. “An aborted universe. A timeline that failed.”
Luminace paused at that, pursing her lips for a moment. “I...don’t understand.”
“The Deep Ethereal is, quite simply, the realm of possibilities that were unable to manifest. It contains planes of existence that can no longer sustain themselves, or which never grew enough to take their place within the cosmos. Histories which were never able to come to pass, no matter what circumstances occurred, are there as well. As are numerous other modes of existence which were incompatible with the whole of Creation.”
Silence fell then, and Silhouette struggled to make sense of what he’d been told, but didn’t have a chance to ponder for very long before the Unspoken burst out laughing. “You’re telling me that these ‘dreambinders’ are really just rooting around in the multiverse’s wastebasket?!” he cackled.
The question made the Moon Princess scowl. “You would do well not to mock the dangers that the Deeps hold. There are creatures there who are aware that they dwell within realms that are less than real, and try mightily to get out. It is the Dream Realm, the Color Curtain, which serves as the first line of defense against them. The collective tapestry of dreams acts as a barrier between them and the closer, Border Ethereal that covers most worlds.”
“And the dreambinders?” prompted the Sun Queen.
“They have, somehow, the power to push their piece of the curtain into the Deeps, snatching something from those failed universes and temporarily giving it substance in the mortal world,” answered the Moon Princess.
“A skill my champion taught himself without even realizing it,” sneered the Night Mare. “Even I never expected that the tulpa I gave him would learn such a valuable ability.”
That was enough to earn her a dark look from the Moon Princess. “Your champion,” she spat, “is the single least-talented dreambinder I’ve ever seen. Most binders can sustain what they take for at least a full day, if not longer, while your champion can manage a few minutes at best. His only notable quality is that he can do so while awake, since that portion of his mind you shaved off governs his dreams, leaving it perpetually active.”
“And now that he’s a titan, it can find so much more than the garbage most other binders pull in,” countered the Night Mare. “How many could have grabbed a relic from a universe that could never have been, rather than some simple tool or lower lifeform?”
“And in doing so, he raises the chance of revealing himself to the creatures that dwell in the Deeps,” shot back the Moon Princess. “He-”
“I think I’ve got it!” announced Luminace, the viewscreen stabilizing in front of her.
All of the gods fell silent then, turning back to the sight of the battle, as did Silhouette, waiting to see Kryonex continue to crush Lex Legis.
But when the picture came back a moment later, what he saw made his jaw drop.
Lex’s spell swept over the battlefield and beyond, leaving nothing untouched. Himself, Kryonex, the undead, the valley, the mountains, the network of tunnels where Nenet and the others were. All of them were affected.
But to an outside observer, there was only a single change that happened as a result of his spell, one difference that his magic had made:
The massive portal to the Negative Energy Plane was now closed, shuttered under the dimensional lock that he’d cast.
It was the thaumaturgical equivalent of the curse he’d used to keep anyone from teleporting in or out of where Nenet was keeping Adagio. He’d prepared it purely as a redundancy, wanting to have multiple options at his disposal for suppressing teleportation and planar movement. As it was, the only reason he’d elected to use a curse to protect Nenet’s position, rather than casting this spell, was because of his natural aversion to using a limited resource where an unlimited one would suffice. Using a spell where a curse would do would have been wasteful, since the physiological strength that his horn drew upon was now limitless.
It was a predilection that had served him well, since he’d found out shortly thereafter that he wouldn’t be able to use curses during this fight.
But now he wasn’t the only one operating with a handicap, since – if his spell held – Kryonex wouldn’t be able to keep using planar gateways to his advantage.
Something which the demigod himself seemed to already be aware of.
“To overturn my power for the second time,” rumbled Kryonex, his blue eyes having darkened almost to black as he look at where the ebony gateway had hung. “As I thought, you’re no mere titan.”
The animal within Lex wanted to gloat, to flaunt his power in front of his enemy and drink in his despair. But he pushed that urge away, knowing that he had to take advantage of this opportunity while he still could.
The dimensional lock that he’d cast would last for weeks on its own, but the armor that his tulpa had brought forth would only be able to sustain itself for a little over a minute.
Fortunately, that was all Lex needed.
Putting the speed he’d gained as part of his ascension to good use, Lex immediately zipped across the battlefield, cutting through the atmosphere so quickly that he left trails of fire behind him as he hurled himself at the nearest group of undead.
Kryonex met him before he’d gotten halfway to them.
Immediately, Lex found himself facing another storm of blows, fending off the demigod’s furious assault as he put everything into defending himself and reactivating his wards against cold each time they crumbled. But unlike before, the damage caused by the demigod’s strikes was almost immediately repaired by the Armor of the Renewing Light, its glow undiminished as it healed him.
Nor could the multitudes of undead drown out the light as they threw themselves at it.
Like moths drawn to flame – or ghouls drawn to living ponies – the creatures continued to hurl themselves at him, despite how each of their brethren died without exception before they ever reached him. Burnt corpses, translucent specters, headless bodies, inky wraiths, and so many others all threw themselves at him in a mad, howling frenzy.
Singly and in groups, the light consumed them all.
It was like what had happened when he’d used his tulpa’s power against Sanguine Disposition, but a thousand times more potent. A few lasted longer than others, coming at times to within inches of him, but none of them made it. Nor did Kryonex try and dissuade them, the demigod instead trying to wear him down underneath a mad rush of strikes.
No, corrected Lex as he twisted away from two legs closing in on him from either side, ducking beneath a third, and blocking a fourth with Belligerence. It’s not me he’s trying to cut down. It’s my armor.
Even as he thought that, the single spike on the end of one of Kryonex’s legs drew a large gash across Lex’s chest, the gold of his armor immediately parting under the assault. A second hit tore away the armor on his right foreleg, ripping it open from pauldron to gauntlet. An attempt to shred where it covered his torso was fended off, as was an immediate follow-up directed toward his tail. But he wasn’t able to completely block a fifth strike, jerking his head back in time to minimize a scratch to his face, leaving the right side of his helmet damaged, the jewels covering his eye scattered across the ground.
But the light shed by the armor didn’t so much as flicker.
And as the undead continued to destroy themselves in their futile efforts to reach him, Lex put the second part of his plan into motion, again channeling as much power as his immortal body could handle.
A moment later, the runes on Belligerence began to glow with a dim purple light as he forced that energy into the quill.
When Kryonex’s next leg swung out at him, Lex abandoned his defensive posture, a guttural snarl escaping his lips as he instead stepped inside his enemy’s swing – letting his mystical senses guide him, since it was too fast even for his eyes to see – and stabbed upward.
Belligerence’s barbed head struck the edge of the demigod’s metatarsus, and the impact was enough that Lex felt it rattle his bones, grinding his teeth as he pushed forward in the split-second that the quill made contact, driving it hard against Kryonex’s exoskeleton.
For the briefest instant, nothing happened.
Then, with a sound like a thousand glaciers being split in half, the outer covering of the demigod’s leg cracked, and Belligerence sank into – and then straight through – his leg.
Hissing, his eyes somehow managing to turn even darker, Kryonex threw himself backward, wrenching Belligerence out of Lex’s grasp as he moved to the other end of the valley.
Lex made no move to follow, instead summoning the quill back into his grip as the undead continued to commit suicide. Shrieks and howls filled the air as the furious cadavers and their spectral counterparts rushed him in vein, almost as if they desperately sought out the oblivion that his armor offered, crawling over and flying past each other in a frenzy to reach him.
Finally, after what seemed like an interminable time even though Lex knew that it was only a matter of seconds, the last of the undead was gone.
Silence fell over the valley then, the quiet broken only by the low whistle of the wind and the quiet patter of sleet on the ground, the blizzard surrounding Kryonex still barely kept in check by Lex’s influence.
Finally having a free moment, Lex glanced at Belligerence. The quill’s runes were still glowing, but far less brightly now, as though simply penetrating the demigod’s defenses had taken a significant amount of the power he’d imbued it with. Silently, he willed more into it, and watched as they brightened in response.
But he also felt an inward strain this time, the multiple expenditures beginning to catch up with him.
He hadn’t tried overloading Belligerence like this before because of the undead, knowing that if he’d wounded Kryonex before they were eliminated, his foe would have changed tactics. Instead of interrupting his spellcasting, the demigod would doubtlessly have attempted to maneuver him into using the quill against the undead after charging it, wasting the imbued power on those weak creatures.
That was no longer a concern, however. And judging by the fact that Kryonex hadn’t attempted to open another gateway, his ward against planar travel was still working. Even more fortuitous, the armor’s influence hadn’t ended with the last of the undead being destroyed; a quick glance around showed that the negative energy saturating the area was beginning to diminish, the positive energy his armor was radiating washing it away to the point where it wouldn’t overly impede the healing spells the Night Mare had given him.
All of which meant that at last, he was able to fight on even terms with his enemy.
But first, there was one other thing which needed to be done. Nenet, what’s your situation?
M-Master! We’re doing alright! Please don’t worry- Her message cut off abruptly as Lex registered the sudden spike of panic his foresight had detected come to pass. Fortunately, it ended just as quickly, leaving a flustered state of nervous relief coming across their bond. I promise, everything’s under control! You don’t have to burden yourself checking on me!
He weighed that for just a moment, before deciding that he had little choice but to trust in her assurances. He knew that some of the undead were still in there with her, but right now he had to focus on the enemy in front of him; to do otherwise would likely cost him the advantages that he’d worked so hard to gain.
Which right now meant allowing the Armor of the Renewing Light to finish healing him before he engaged with Kryonex again.
Now that he’d leveled the field, whatever had been prompting the demigod to hold back would likely not apply anymore.
But to his surprise, Kryonex’s next move wasn’t to attack, but to talk.
“It occurs to me,” pronounced the monstrous spider whose form the ice deity wore, “that you have yet to introduce yourself.”
Lex frowned inwardly, trying to determine what Kryonex’s angle was, but he never considered snubbing the request for his name. The beast within was growing progressively more agitated at how it kept being denied, and would not be refused the opportunity to show off now. “I am Lex Legis,” he declared, standing upright as he grasped Belligerence in one claw, tail thrashing behind him. “I have slain dragons, founded kingdoms, created magic from nothing, trafficked with gods, and clawed my way from the grasp of death into the embrace of immortality.”
Slowly, he turned Belligerence around, pointing its head toward his enemy. “That is the power that you’ve dared to challenge.”
Kryonex gave a low chuckle, his eyes lightening just a little. “Indeed. Perhaps I was hasty in my initial assessment of you. Tell me, are you that singing slattern’s keeper?”
A rush of possessiveness ran through Lex at the thought of Adagio, the overwhelming desire he’d felt for her suddenly flaring up in him for some reason. “She belongs to me, and I won’t turn her over.”
But again, Kryonex surprised him. “I wouldn’t ask you to. On the contrary, I’m truly impressed at what the two of you have accomplished. To not only steal a fragment of a god’s power, but then use it to elevate a mortal, is the stuff of legends. By any measure, you’re both to be commended.”
Lex’s lip curled at the praise. “Your actions speak louder than your flattery.”
“As I said, I suspect now that I judged you in haste,” repeated Kryonex. “Which is why I’m curious as to why your concubine saw fit to attack me. To my knowledge, I have done nothing to warrant such aggression from her, yourself, or the Night Mare whom you serve. Why then was my realm invaded, and my servitors slain? Why was part of my essence stolen, and my efforts to recover it fought against?”
From the gap in his helmet, Lex’s one visible eye flashed, glowing green and purple as the gems still covering his other eye lit up, reflecting the light beneath them. “As I told you before, the tenure of your divinity has been one of corruption and malfeasance, and that alone makes you unworthy of possessing it. All of the lives you sacrificed just to gain an advantage in this battle is testament to that.”
“It was you, not I, who slew them.”
“You put innocent creatures, who gave you no prayers and no fealty, onto a battlefield!” snarled Lex. “You have no right to say that you bear no responsibility for what happened to them, especially after you saw fit to defile them after they died!”
“Which is all the more reason for us to end this conflict now, before more bystanders are made to suffer for our war.” Kryonex’s comment wasn’t idle, his eyes glancing toward the cavern entrance where Nenet and the others were.
Lex bristled at the threat, his grip on Belligerence tightening. “You won’t hurt them. I won’t let you.”
“I have no desire to, which is why I have a proposition for you.”
“I’m not interested.”
His refusal prompted another chuckle. “You claim to have founded kingdoms. Surely diplomacy is not a concept you find foreign?”
Lex’s eyes flared brighter, but he slowly lowered Belligerence. “Fine. Speak.”
“I cannot leave here without recovering what I have lost, and you are intent on not only keeping what you have gained, but protecting the one who gave it to you. I propose that these are not mutually exclusive goals.”
Lex was already shaking his head. “No.”
“We can work together,” insisted Kryonex. “Pledge fealty to me, and I will forgive all of the hostilities that I have been subjected to. I will exalt you in my religion, welcome you in my realm, and forsake all retribution toward that wench who wounded me.”
“Absolutely not,” swore Lex, clenching his left foreleg, feeling the barbed wire surrounding his skin. “I will never abandon the Night Mare. Not for you. Not for anyone.”
“Then worship me alongside her,” pressed Kryonex. “You would hardly be the first to practice a syncretic faith.”
“Worship you?” Sneering, Lex spat on the ground, his inner beast screeching at the idea of what it saw as capitulating to an enemy. “You’re not worthy of my veneration, and even less worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the Night Mare. She is a goddess deserving of the name, while you’re the cosmic afterbirth among a collection of wretched strays that barely warrants being called a pantheon. It’s an insult to think that I’d ever want to be associated with trash like you.”
Kryonex shifted in place slightly, and Lex tensed, eager for the consequences of his antagonism. “So there’s to be no reconciliation between us then.”
Under what was left of his helmet, Lex smiled. “No. This will only end when one of us retreats...”
Sinking into a crouch, he held Belligerence at the ready. “...or dies.”
Kryonex’s laconic statement belied the ferocity of the attack that he unleashed as Lex rushed at him. Raising up onto his two backmost legs, the other five shot bright blue beams of energy at him, and even if Lex hadn’t possessed mystical senses, he would have been able to feel the chill hat they radiated. Each one was as cold as the demigod himself, and Lex knew that while his wards would be able to defend against one of them, any more than that would do serious damage.
Snarling, he immediately abandoned his headlong rush in favor of an indirect approach, arcing around the five azure rays – each as wide as a building – at speeds too fast for mortal eyes to follow. But the icy rays that Kryonex had conjured were no momentary blasts, each one a sustained projection of his divine power over cold, and he swung each of them in different directions, waving his legs in complicated patterns as Lex ducked and weaved around them.
For a brief instant the two were locked in a stalemate, Lex unable to advance and Kryonex unable to strike his foe.
Then Lex finished casting the spell that he’d been preparing, his eyes glowing as he fed power that was literally titanic in scope into it.
An instant later, massive globes of lightning appeared around them. Each one was the size of a boulder, sizzling with hundreds of millions of volts’ worth of power. Nor was their size the only indication of how much he’d overcharged this particular bit of magic.
Back when he’d fought Celestia and Luna, he’d only been able to create a trio of these orbs.
Now, he’d conjured almost four hundred of them.
A feral grin split Lex’s lips as, with a thought, he sent the electrical barrage hurtling toward Kryonex.
But the demigod’s response was simply to glance at the attack, his eyes flashing-
And instantly, the balls of lightning froze over, dropping out of the sky like oversized hailstones to litter the battlefield below.
Before even a single one hit the ground, however, Lex reared back and threw Belligerence as hard as he could, releasing the quill in the single instant when Kryonex’s eyes had been off of him.
The attack cut through the air so fast that it left multiple sonic booms in its wake, sounding as though all of the electrical orbs he’d conjured were thundering at once.
It had almost made it to its target when Kryonex leapt, rocketing straight upward as Belligerence sped past where the demigod had been only nanoseconds before.
“A poor tactic,” observed Kryonex dryly, continuing to weave his ultra-cold beams in dizzying sequences. “Your teleportation barrier means that you’ll have a difficult time retrieving your weapon.”
“Not so difficult,” countered Lex, his horn lighting up as he continued to dodge the gelid rays.
Instantly, a matching aura sprang to life around Belligerence as he telekinetically grabbed it and redirected its flight upwards.
His mandibles chattering, Kryonex simply adjusted his upward trajectory, easily reorienting himself in midair as the quill harmlessly flew past him-
Only to collide with a skyscraper-sized wall of black crystals that suddenly rose out of the earth, splitting the valley’s westernmost mountain in two as it rose up to block the demigod’s path.
It was only because of how keenly he’d trained his mystic senses on his enemy that Lex was able to spot the moment of indecision that his enemy displayed, the demigod simultaneously smashing his two unoccupied legs into the monstrous wall even as he tried to reorient his forward motion, apparently unable to decide if he should burst through the obstruction or evade it.
But that was enough, and Lex’s horn glowed brighter as he brought Belligerence back around, the runes on the quill shining to match his aura.
A second later the weapon pierced through Kryonex.
Even as it struck home, the demigod was already rolling with the blow, curling and rotating to minimize the area of impact, and Lex could already see that Belligerence had struck off-center. But that didn’t change the fact that it had punched completely through the thorax of the massive spider, and the demigod’s multi-beam attack tapered out as it was struck, leaving Lex free to fly directly toward his enemy even as he telekinetically pulled Belligerence back towards him. He’d need to recharge it, already able to see that the runes had lost their glow, but if he was fast enough he might be able to get a second hit in-
He had just grabbed Belligerence when a thousand lacerations tore across his body.
Had Lex still been mortal, he would have died instantly, flayed into a bloody slurry in less than a second. Fortunately, he was made of sterner stuff now, falling back as the perpetual storm surrounding Kryonex intensified. It took him only a moment to realize what had happened: every drop of freezing rain, every flake of snow, and every pellet of ice sped up and hardened, their edges keen and glittering as the wind whipped them into a deadly blender, protecting Kryonex even as it threatened to shred anything that dared approach him.
But that threat intimidated Lex not at all.
Although more than half of the Armor of the Renewing Light had been ripped apart under the attack, the remaining pieces still covered him in the bright glow of the positive energy they contained, repairing the damage to his body even as Lex dove back into the storm. This time, he was ready for it, and his eyes easily tracked the path of the frozen chunks. Lashing out with his claws and Belligerence and his telekinesis, as he knocked them all aside, even as he magically struggled to wrest the storm back under control.
This time the tempest seemed to fight back, actively attempting to wrestle free of his influence, and Lex pushed harder, fighting to close the distance between himself and his enemy. Already he could sense Kryonex ahead, knowing that the demigod was deliberately exacerbating the storm, rather than letting it passively surround him. But that seemed to be costing him his mobility, since even as Lex steadily drew nearer to his foe, there was no sign that Kryonex was retreating.
It was suspicious, but Lex didn’t withdraw, knowing that pressing the attack was his best bet.
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind when the storm suddenly stopped.
In a single instant, every frozen particle ceased moving, hanging still in the air, and Lex had just enough time to get a glimpse of Kryonex – spotting the cracks surrounding the bloodless hole in his side – before the demigod’s eyes lightened.
Then the crystalline fragments shattered and dispersed, but didn’t fall, and Lex could see that they’d gone from tens of thousands of slivers a fraction of an inch long to millions of microscopic shards. All of which, Lex knew, were still just as sharp and resilient as their larger counterparts had been, and were now smaller, faster, and far too numerous.
“Your efforts so far have been impressive,” chuckled Kryonex. “But can you block this many?”
He didn’t bother waiting for a response as the storm returned with a vengeance, already knowing the answer.
But Lex had a different answer prepared.
“I don’t need to.”
Even as he spoke, he recited a liturgy to the Night Mare in his mind, casting one of the spells that she’d given him.
And instantaneously, Lex found himself surrounded by weapons.
Swords, scythes, axes, daggers, flails, hammers, and numerous others hung in the air around him, each type represented dozens of times over. Although Lex had only seen two of the Umbral Regalia – Severance and Breakdown – the weapons could have been near-perfect replicas of them, and indeed he knew that they were, the spell having called forth a temporary army in the likeness of the Night Mare’s divine tools.
Nor was their appearance all that they emulated, as the weapons immediately went to work dispatching the threats carried on the wind. Whirling and striking so quickly that they were little more than steel-colored blurs, they destroyed each and every infinitesimal piece of ice that approached Lex, leaving him free to pour another surge of magic into Belligerence as he rushed toward Kryonex, the bladed weapons staying in close formation as they covered him.
To his surprise, Kryonex rushed forward to meet him, ceasing to concentrate on the storm as he fell down to meet Lex’s upward charge. Momentarily surprised by his enemy’s return to physical attacks, Lex hefted Belligerence, this time intent on piercing the demigod’s head with the weapon.
But his attack failed to connect as his speed suddenly increased, carrying him past Kryonex before he was ready to strike. It took Lex only a fraction of a second to realize that his enemy had frozen gravity itself, arresting its pull and causing him to over-correct for it in his vertical rush. Even before he’d finished consciously processing that, he was already veering to aside, trying to avoid the attack he knew was coming-
He didn’t make it in time.
Another blue beam of super-cold energy slammed into him, doing little damage but shattering his cryomantic wards. He had just enough time to turn in place – seeing the weapons he’d conjured throw themselves against Kryonex, accomplishing nothing except to break themselves to pieces – before a second blast hit him. Then a third.
He barely managed to dodge the fourth one, rushing back downward...
Where the globes of lightning that Kryonex had frozen were waiting for him.
“Yours, I believe,” noted Kryonex as he sent the icebound balls of electricity back at him, unfreezing them just before they made contact. Before Lex could so much as speak, he found himself buried in a morass of electricity, the globes all discharging their voltage into him at once.
It was all he could do not to laugh, Mystaria’s clasp shimmering softly as it kept his own magic from harming him.
Taking advantage of the unexpected reprieve, Lex again threw Belligerence, aiding the quill’s flight with a metamagic-enhanced spell to make it home in on its target. Again, Kryonex dodged the incoming missile, but it turned to follow him, and the demigod was forced to actively defend against it, a deep gash opening in one tibia. That was time enough for Lex to renew his wards against the cold, as well as casting another of the Night Mare’s divine spells – the remaining pieces of the Armor of the Renewing Light vanishing as the time limit for his tulpa's gear was reached – the healing energy of the latter spell serving to repair his remaining wounds now that the negative energy had been cleared from the field.
But no sooner had he finished than Kryonex – apparently unconcerned by having taken a third wound – pointed another leg in his direction. But this time what he unleashed wasn’t a beam, but rather a monstrous mass of solid ice as wide as the entire valley, the glacier rushing forward with the speed of a cannonball, expanding to fill every nook and cranny as it crystalized.
The sight made Lex grimace inwardly. The glacier would have been easy to dodge – simply flying upward would have put him easily out of reach of the tonnage of ice bearing down on him – but its lateral expansion meant that, unless he stopped it, it would seal the cave entrance where Nenet and the others were holed up. Even if it didn’t press inward far enough to fill the entire cavern, it would cut off their only source of air.
Which meant it had to be stopped before it got that far.
The answer to that was another spell that he’d used during his fight with Celestia and Luna, channeling more power into his thaumaturgical framework even as he made use of Nenet’s metamagic to widen the area and increase the destructive potential. A half-second later his preparations were complete, and he unleashed the pulse of concussive force directly at the expanding glacier, now barely ten feet in front of him.
And the entire ice shelf shattered into snowflakes.
Lex was already moving, preparing for Kryonex to whip them into another flensing storm, but to his mild surprise the demigod didn’t press the attack. Nor did he try to interfere as Lex telekinetically retrieved Belligerence. Instead, he just stood near the other end of the valley, as though frozen himself.
The unusual behavior was enough to give Lex pause, and he hesitated just for a moment.
“I was hoping that it wouldn’t come to this.”
Raising his two damaged legs, he looked the bloodless wounds over, inspecting the cracks around the injuries for a moment before glancing at the matching wound on his thorax. “But you’ve proven to be a greater foe than I’d initially expected, and a battle of attrition runs the risk of costing more than I’d gain. So I’ll need to accept a diminished prize and end this quickly.”
That was enough to make Lex clench his teeth, pouring power into Belligerence again. The effort it took to do so was greater this time, and he fought to keep the strain from showing as the runes on the quill regained their purple glow. “This is the only prize you’ll receive, pierced by it again and again until there’s nothing left of you.”
Another dry chuckle came from the demigod. “I’m not the one of whom there’ll be nothing left, Lex Legis.”
His eyes glowed brighter then, the blue in them shining like a pair of cerulean suns, and Lex felt the barbed wire around his foreleg give another odd twitch, similar to when the demigod had frozen time around him. But there was no time to ponder that further as Kryonex spoke again, his voice resonant with the full force of divine will.
The words that Kryonex uttered weren’t a hateful invective, nor a frustrated scream, or even a haughty demand. If anything, they were delivered in a casual manner, as though the demigod was making a simple statement of indisputable fact. Merely hearing them conveyed no sense of threat or danger.
But Lex knew better, registering the attack before the sound of the demigod’s voice had even reached his ears.
Instead, he could only brace himself as the full force of the demigod’s will slammed into him.
Just like when he’d first caught sight of Kryonex himself, his senses struggled to make sense of what was happening, misinterpreting the nature of the onslaught through various forms of input. His legs shook under what felt like the literal weight of the world on his back. His skin bristled under temperature so cold that it should have been beyond what his nerves could register. Everything seemed to darken before his eyes, and sound seemed to be muffled. His body ached. His thoughts muddled. His soul seemed to constrict within him.
But he knew what was really happening:
Under Kryonex’s influence, reality itself was attempting to annul his existence.
Aristeia was the power to intensify one’s own reality, causing their actions to have an outsized impact on the world around them. But divinity was the ability to affect facets of reality beyond yourself, creating an effect without needing to manifest a cause. And while that was normally limited to a particular scope – the aspect of Creation that each deity had authority over, being god or goddess of some particular part of reality – Lex had known for some time that it could be bent in other directions. After all, gods didn’t need to have authority over magic in order to grant their followers spells, or have a portfolio that included information to be able to sense things beyond their personal awareness.
And now, he had confirmation that a deity didn’t need to have power over something like death or destruction in order to try and will a troublesome enemy out of existence.
In the face of such a direct assault on his very being, Lex knew that his options were limited in the extreme. A god’s will wasn’t something that could be dodged. An attempt to erase him from existence couldn’t be parried. And his own paucity of godly might gave Lex no method by which to counterattack. All he could do was muster his own strength – the aristeia and divinity that he had been imbued with – and concentrate, trying to affirm his own existence more than Kryonex could deny it.
But the demigod, even weakened and wounded, had far more power to work with than he did.
Which left Lex with no choice but to try and outlast him, enduring the attack for longer than Kryonex could sustain it.
In realistic terms, however, Lex knew that was like a bug trying to harden its shell in response to being stomped on, attempting to endure the hoof coming down on it again and again until its owner grew too tired to continue.
And as Lex felt the absolute weight of Kryonex’s will engulf every aspect of him, trying to nullify his right to continue existing, he could already feel his own efforts to stave the demigod off beginning to fail.
It was like when he’d originally pitted himself against the fragment of divinity that Adagio had stolen, except unimaginably stronger. Not only that, it was more directed; before, the divine power that he’d overcome had been force without direction – capability with no will of its own – pitting the spark of his own soul against an endless, frozen ocean that neither recognized nor cared about his existence until he’d forced it to.
But this time, that ocean was a universe until itself, and its entire focus was now directly concentrated upon one single desire: to snuff him out.
Even as Lex fought back with everything he had, marshalling reserves of strength that surpassed quantification, reminding himself of his responsibilities to his people and his desire to see his loved ones again, he could already feel himself losing ground. Aspects of himself were vanishing, deleted because they were no longer allowed to be. Holes appeared in his memory. Sections of his body vanished. Gaps opened up in his mental catalogue of spells. Things that he wore disappeared.
Pushing back with all of his will, Lex fought to hold onto some aspect of his existence, some piece of himself against the crushing pressure that continued to grind down everything that he was. But Kryonex’s will was relentless, rooting out and destroying each trace of him, no matter how much he tried to shield or reinforce it.
Magic dissipated. Love was no longer even a memory. Duty was ground down into nothing. Defiance had nothing to fuel it. Self-recognition disintegrated. Then, at last, even the awareness that he had once been something – someone – was lost.
And then Lex Legis was gone, leaving Kryonex alone on the battlefield.
Nenet tried her best not to scream as the savaged remains of a lumbering humanoid sank its teeth into her flank.
The pain was incredible, but Grisela had put her through worse, and she was barely able to choke back the agony as the undead creature’s frozen fingers raked across her torso, ripping apart the clothes that Solvei had worked so hard to make for her and leaving welts where its bony talons met her flesh. Nor was it alone, as nearly a half-dozen of its compatriots converged on her, tearing at the sphinx with everything they had.
Fangs sank into her wings, sending agony throughout her body as the sensitive muscles were shredded. Her tail was grabbed, wrenched hard enough to dislocate multiple bones along its length. Sharp claws cut across her legs, drawing rivulets of blood that splashed across the floor.
But even as the cackling form of a scorched serpent reached up to sink its fangs into her neck, Nenet remained in place, blocking the doorway into the room with her own body.
It had been the only thing she’d been able to think of to keep them from being completely overwhelmed. Even then, the strategy had worked only because of the rings that her master had given her; specifically, the fortitude-enhancing and regenerative ones. Their power, combined with the wards against cold and negative energy that Lex had given her, had allowed her to sacrifice herself without dying, withstanding and repairing the damage as she turned her body into a living shield to keep Mei Li and Adagio from harm.
But none of those protections helped with the pain.
Nor had Nenet been able to bring herself to fight back, needing to marshal all of her concentration in order to keep using her metamagic on Mei Li. The effort made her sway in place, having trouble focusing through the haze of agony threatening to overwhelm her brain. But she forced herself to push through it, knowing that it was the only way the kumiho could keep fighting off the incorporeal undead that were still trying to swarm in from the other side of the room.
It...it’s ready... moaned Nenet, feeding another surge of power to the three-tailed fox.
Mei Li received it with a sob of her own, tears pouring down her cheeks as she looked back at what Nenet was going through. Forgive me! I swear, once these spirits are dealt with, I will aid you!
She didn’t wait for an answer, breathing another blast of empowered lightning that scattered the shrieking specters...but only for a few moments.
Within her cage, Adagio snarled as one of the translucent monsters almost reached the bars of her cage before the foxgirl’s lightning drove it back. The creatures had been relentless, pressing the pair’s defenses without any regard for their own safety, and it was becoming clear – both from how many of the undead were crawling over themselves to reach Nenet and by how the vulpine woman was panting harder – that they weren’t going to be able to keep their desperate defense up for much longer.
“Nenet!” whispered Adagio. “This isn’t working! Stop being an idiot and get these curses off of me or we’re all going to die!”
Her wayward daughter’s only answer was an agonized groan, and Adagio grit her teeth, not sure if Nenet had even heard her. “Nenet!”
But the only response she received was a whimper of pain as the monsters in the hallway continued to tear into the quivering sphinx.
Cursing the incredible stupidity that her sole surviving child seemed to be afflicted with, Adagio decided to take a calculated risk, knowing that she wouldn’t last very long if either of her protectors bit the dust...or if Kryonex finished up with Lex before she was able to free herself. “Nenet, listen to me, I have a fallback plan! One that can save all of us! But I can’t use it with my powers crippled like this! You have to let me use them! Or do you want your new friend here to die too?!”
That earned a wince from the sphinx, and Adagio had to resist the urge to smirk at the sight.
Nenet had never been the brightest girl, always wanting to believe in something. Or rather, in someone. It had been truly pathetic how the little spellbook had actually believed that anyone cared about her, and even more pathetic how easily she’d been fooled into thinking she’d had a father out there who actually loved her. Even without magic, that had made her easy to manipulate, and now it seemed that even after discovering the truth, she still hadn’t learned her lesson.
That’s right. Other people are only good for what they can do for you. If you’re stupid enough to be the one sacrificing for them, they’ll just use you and leave you.
It was a truism that Adagio was thoroughly familiar with.
Fortunately, Nenet seemed to be willfully blind to that kernel of knowledge, despite the fact that her newfound lord and master had hung her out to dry. “Lex must have worked hard to save her! Are you going to let his sacrifice go to waste just because you’re angry at me?!”
Nearby, the foxgirl glanced Adagio’s way, and the Siren could read the uncertainty all over her furry face. “She elucidates her idea ably,” she rasped, tails twitching in agitation. “I foresee imminent danger without reinforcements.”
But Nenet stubbornly shook her head, even as a blackened talon swiped at her face. “W-we can’t...count on her...to h-help us-, AAAAGGGGHHHH!!!”
Adagio very nearly found herself dancing again as Nenet’s sudden scream made her jump, the sphinx’s eyes rolling back in her head as she suddenly wavered in place. Nor was she the only one, the foxgirl gaping in horror. “Nenet! What is the matter?!”
“M-Master...” croaked Nenet, falling to her belly.
The sight seemed to galvanize the undead, and they threw themselves on top of Nenet, biting and clawing at her in a frenzy. The sight made the foxgirl lose all hesitation, shrieking as she ran over to help, and Adagio could already see the remaining specters and ghosts rushing in to take advantage of the opening, knowing that they were about to be overrun.
“NENET!!!”
Her last, harsh whisper earned a glassy-eyed look from the sphinx, somehow managing to get her head clear of the horde that was overrunning her and about to do the same to her friend.
And then, waving a bloody paw in her direction, bones visible beneath gnawed skin and torn muscle, Nenet murmured a single word.
“...abeyance...”
Then she collapsed.
A moment later, so did the curses binding Adagio.
“Get back! All of you-, I SAID GET BACK!!!”
Immediately, the adlets surrounding them stepped backward, giving Yura some room as she cradled her granddaughter. “Akna! What’s wrong?!”
Drawing a ragged breath, Solvei convulsed for a moment, one hand reaching out in a westward direction before she shuddered and went still.
Alasie and Tulok burst through the crowd then, rushing over to their daughter’s side, voices raised as they called her name in a vain effort to rouse her.
Yura said nothing, her ears flattening against her head as she looked in the direction that her granddaughter had reached for, knowing who was to be found there.
Night Mare, your future servant begs you, she prayed silently. For my granddaughter’s sake, please give the Great One the strength he needs to overcome whatever trial he’s going through.
But as Akna’s parents continued to try and rouse their daughter in vain, the goddess gave no sign that she’d heard her prayer.
It was the most beautiful thing Silhouette had ever seen.
Watching Lex Legis fade into nothing, the totality of his existence being undone, was rapture almost as glorious as when he’d been welcomed into the Moon Princess’s embrace, and he couldn’t help the tears of joy that crossed his cheeks as he stared, burning the sight onto his heart.
There was only one thing that could make the moment sweeter, and even that wish was granted as his goddess spoke a moment later, her melodious voice delivering a pronouncement that rang with the euphony of a celestial chorus.
“Too bad, so sad.”
The Moon Princess made no effort to hide the satisfied smirk on her face as she looked at the Night Mare, the latter goddess continuing to stare at Luminace’s viewscreen. “Looks like your champion’s not so tough after all.”
Luminace herself shifted in place, seemingly uncomfortable with such naked gloating. “It’s not like there was ever going to be any other outcome. Kryonex held back initially because he wanted to retake the divinity that Lex had, but once he realized how difficult that was shaping up to be, he decided to cut his losses-”
“He took the coward’s way out, playing it safe instead of trying for the greater prize,” spat Blaze, glaring at where – in the magically-conjured image – Kryonex was advancing on the spot where Lex had vanished. “He lacked the courage to put everything on the line, and now he’s going to slink back to that wasteland he calls home with a fraction of what he wanted.”
“And it was finally getting to the bangs, too!” oinked the Unspoken, cricket’s legs chirping as he rubbed them against each other. “They were finally going all ‘pew pew!’ and rearranging the landscape and trading one-liners! I wanted more of that!”
“I’m not one for fighting, but if you want a bang that makes the earth move, I can help you out,” purred Kara, giving her hips a shake.
“Night Mare, are you alright with this?” The Sun Queen’s face was one of concern as she went over to the armored goddess. “Kryonex expended a measure of his own godhood to destroy the divinity that Lex Legis was imbued with, but the blessing you gave him wasn’t affected, since it was something he possessed rather than being a part of himself.”
She canted her head toward viewscreen then, and Silhouette wiped the tears of joy from his eyes as he blinked, curious what the goddess meant. Sure enough, when he focused on the image, he could see that the spot where Lex had vanished wasn’t completely empty. Not only was that odd-looking spear still there, but the barbed wire that had been wrapped around his foreleg was also left behind, having fallen to the ground in a heap.
And the icy demigod was headed right for it.
“Now that your champion is gone, we have no reason to keep you from interfering,” continued the sun goddess, her tone apologetic. “You can reclaim the fragment of your divinity within the blessing you gave him, as well as the holy weapon he made in your honor.”
“There’s no need.”
The Sun Queen’s eyes widened at the curt response. “You don’t care that Kryonex is going to confiscate them in an attempt to ameliorate his losses?”
The question earned her a pout from Kara. “Why does everyone forget that I gave him a blessing too?” Placing a hoof to her brow, she leaned back, as though about to swoon. “Like a maiden’s virtue, I gave him part of myself, knowing I could never have it back-”
“And which you don’t value at all,” sneered Blaze, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Otherwise you’d send someone else to take it instead of letting that oversized snow cone have it.”
Sticking her tongue out, Kara winked at the war goddess. “What can I say? I’m a goddess of love; it’s my nature to presume that the stallion I’ve chosen won’t let his lady down.”
“What does that mean?” asked the Moon Princess sharply.
“It means,” sighed Soft Whisper, the faintest trace of exasperation in her voice, “that you should all talk less and watch what’s happening more.”
Silhouette felt his heart give a sickening lurch at that. She couldn’t possibly mean...?
Fighting down the surge of anxiety that threatened to swallow him up, he stared at the screen, where Kryonex had reached the tangled length of barbed wire and was reaching toward it...
He’d almost touched it when the twisted metal suddenly lashed out of its own accord, scouring a bloodless gash in the demigod’s leg.
Kryonex seemed surprised by that, his eyes lightening and then darkening in an instant, stumbling backward-
As the length of barbed wire erupted into a frenzy, thrashing out in every direction as though caught in an invisible whirlwind. More horrifying was how the stuff seemed to be growing, the scant inches that it had originally been replaced by feet and feet of wire that continued to wrap around itself, forming larger clusters of tangles that continued to twist and writhe around each other. Those looped back around themselves in turn, and now Silhouette could see that they were forming a larger shape, one that looked...
Like a pony.
A pony with claws and a long, thick tail.
“NO!” His vow not to embarrass his goddess completely forgotten, Silhouette couldn’t stop himself from screaming at the screen. “NO!!! IT CAN’T BE!!!”
A dark laugh came from the Night Mare then. “It can, and it is, because it must.”
And as though in response to her words, a pair of bright green eyes flashed into existence in the two empty sockets in the head of the figure, purple light blazing from their exterior corners.
Silhouette sank down to the ground, all four of his legs feeling as weak as the crippled limb he’d had while serving Luna, staring at the unholy monstrosity whose image was projected in front of him.
It looked as though somepony has constructed a model of Lex made entirely of barbed wire. The dull grey metal – all of it razor edged, tied in jagged knots every few inches – had been wound back on itself in perfect proportion of his frame. Every talon, every tooth, every last inch of his horn; they were all there, but without any coloration or cutie mark; only the blank, featureless glow of his eyes lent any color to the lusterless gray metal that now marked what had to be Lex’s total break from mortality.
It was the single most horrifying thing Silhouette had ever seen. If not for his goddess protecting him from the night terrors that had returned to plague him after Luna’s fall, he was sure he’d have seen that monstrous figure the next time he slept. As it was, he couldn’t help but silently pray for the Moon Princess’s continued protection, feeling himself shake as the dreadful figure looked left and right-
And then the thing that Lex had become opened its jaws and gave a guttural roar, and Silhouette almost fainted on the spot.
Not because of the sound of Lex’s voice, which was now utterly bestial, but because the barbed wire composing his body began to churn.
There was no other word for it. Although his form remained clearly defined, the wire that now made up his substance wasn’t keeping to a fixed position, the length of it instead snaking rapidly along his outline. It was as though someone had used barbed wire to create a life-sized working chainsaw in the shape of Lex Legis.
Somehow, Silhouette managed to tear his eyes away from the abomination in front of him, looking to the Moon Princess in hope that she’d have succor to offer-
But instead, his goddess was staring at the screen just as he had been, eyes wide and mouth hanging open.
The same expression decorated the faces of the rest of the gods, save only for Soft Whisper and the Night Mare, the former staring at the scene grimly while the latter wore a maniacal grin.
“Okay,” gulped the Unspoken, his giraffe’s neck stretching out so he could get a closer look at the screen, “I’ll admit it: that’s wicked cool.”
“Night Mare,” muttered Luminace, one hoof coming up to shakily adjust her monocle as the thing Lex had become scooped up the fallen quill and charged Kryonex, “what have you done?”
“Provided my champion with everything he needs to overcome his enemy,” replied the goddess, the pride in her voice impossible to miss. “And now, he’s finally putting it to use.”
“You provided him with divinity!” hissed the Moon Princess. “And not just the divinity that Siren stole! That deific power he’s using is yours!”
Flaring her wings, the lunar goddess pointed a hoof at her rival. “You didn’t just make him a titan! You made him your avatar!”
The Night Mare’s lip curled at the accusation, not looking away as Lex leaped at Kryonex, the demigod giving ground as he tried to keep his revitalized enemy away from him. But his retreat was cut off as Lex waved one claw – the wire that made up his body rushing faster – and brought down a rain of fiery red rays from the heavens, the beams needle-thin but as numerous as raindrops. Several struck the demigod, and even Silhouette could see Kryonex flinch at each touch, altering the path of his withdrawl-
Just in time for Lex to catch up to him, one wiry claw grasping his leg and immediately digging into it, the exoskeleton splintering under his destructive touch.
Then Lex drove the quill home into his foe’s abdomen.
A second later, the sound of a god screaming in pain came through the viewscreen.
The Night Mare gave a deep laugh at the sound. “I did no such thing. I simply modeled his new mode of existence in the manner I would have were I to create an avatar.”
“That vial of godsblood Adagio Dazzle stole doesn’t have enough power to sustain such a form,” noted the Sun Queen, her voice soft and lacking judgment. “Nor would aristeia alone be a sufficient substitute to make up the difference.”
Luminace sent a suspicious look Kara’s way then, but the love goddess simply shrugged. “Don’t look at me. The only thing I gave him to celebrate his becoming immortal was a good time.”
Blaze burst out laughing at that. “As if you could ever create something that fearsome. Even that bloody little bride of yours is only as spooky as she is because she dared to blaspheme against the Author.”
“That guy’s new form has the Night Mare’s symbol all over it,” agreed the Unspoken. “And I mean literally, all over it! Barbed wire has been her calling card for how long now?”
“Ever since she tried to steal my dominion over the night,” answered the Moon Princess frostily. “And now it seems she’s content to not only undermine the solidarity of our pantheon, but has broken our treaty with the elves as well.”
“I told you before, I abided by the terms of our agreement.”
“And we told you that they won’t overlook things based on a technicality!” shot back Luminace. “There’s no way to miss that Lex Legis is using divinity gained from you! That’s cause enough for them to go to war!”
“Then go throw yourself at the feet of those effete little simps if you’re so afraid of them!” snarled the Night Mare, finally deigning to look Luminace in the eye. “Beg for their indulgence, promise that you’ll be their good little mare, and cry like a coward for them not to hurt you! But I will not defer to them! Not when the alternative is allowing my champion to be cut down while I stand idly, ignoring all of the devotion that he has shown me!”
“You can’t really hold that against her,” drawled Kara, draping herself back over her couch. “It’s the Night Mare’s nature to defy her enemies and reward her faithful. Besides, it’s not like she lied. Lex isn’t a god.”
“No, he’s just a titan in the form of a divine avatar with power akin to a demigod,” scoffed the Moon Princess. “Because that’s so much better.”
She looked ready to say more, but the Sun Queen held a wing up then, giving her sister a gentle look. When the Moon Princess closed her mouth, the solar goddess gave her a grateful smile before turning back to the Night Mare. “As a goddess who never shies away from the truth, no matter how painful it may be or how harsh the consequences, I want to ask you directly. The divinity necessary to turn Lex Legis into a model of your avatar...did it come from you?”
The Night Mare gave the other deity a sidelong look, not answering right away. But eventually she spoke.
“It came from the ponies who worship him. I simply paid the appropriate balance.”
The Unspoken cocked his baboon head. “Which means...?”
“It means, you simpleton, that some of the ponies on that other world have been praying to my champion instead of me. But since he’s my prophet, carrying a blessing that contains a sliver of my own power, any devotion offered to him is mine. In recognition of his accomplishments, I elected to return the balance of what he’s collected on my behalf to him when I raised him to immortality.”
“I see,” replied the Sun Queen after a moment’s consideration, before returning to where she’d been sitting on the raised dais.
Luminance looked between the Sun Queen and the Night Mare, seemingly baffled that her mentor had nothing else to say. “But-”
“For the time being, let’s wait and see how things go,” proposed the Sun Queen. “After all, Kryonex hasn’t lost yet, and if he proves victorious, then all of this will be moot.”
“And if he loses?” asked Blaze, sounding delighted by the prospect.
“He won’t.”
Silhouette’s heart gave a leap at Soft Whisper’s pronouncement, giving the death goddess a look that was as hopeful as the Night Mare’s was baleful. “Don’t speak as if you know anything, you old fool,” snarled the armored alicorn. “None of us can see the future where other gods are concerned.”
“As you yourself noted, Lex Legis is not a god,” murmured the old zebra. “And my nature is to foresee death. And his will arrive soon.”
This time it was the Night Mare who flared her wings out. “You’re lying!”
But Soft Whisper only shook her head. “That was my other reason for asking to be sent to Everglow.”
Silhouette held his breath, anticipating the death goddess’s next words with as much fervor as he would have shown to those of his own deity.
He wasn’t disappointed by what she said next.
“So that I can comfort Lex Legis in his final moments before his soul is destroyed.”
Adagio had to resist the urge to laugh as she felt the curses Lex had bound her with fall away.
Instead, she sang.
Rising up, she lifted her voice in a melody of triumph, an ode to herself once again coming back from the brink of total defeat. No matter what happened – regardless of where she was banished to, or how thoroughly her powers were sealed, or who betrayed her – she always found a way to beat the odds and keep going. It was her prerogative. Her birthright. Her destiny.
That was why she couldn’t lose, no matter how many fools or self-righteous hypocrites stood in her way. Star-Swirl. Twilight Sparkle. Iliana. Sonata and Aria. Kryonex. Nenet. Lex Legis. They had all defied her, driven by jealousy or stubbornness or wanting to possess her, each of them having just enough power to get in her way.
But not enough to stop her for good. That was something no one could do.
After all, the universe itself adored her, and so would keep setting things right until she had everything she wanted.
And right now, what she wanted was in the desk drawer opposite her.
The cage of black crystal had already shattered, splintering into a thousand shards the moment she’d raised her voice, and Adagio stepped over the broken fragments as she crossed the room. The undead – both the billowy specters and the mangled corpses – immediately lunged at her, which was no surprise; even when they were no longer alive, the twisted creatures recognized that she was the most deserving of their attention.
But that didn’t mean they were worthy of hers. Quite the opposite; the disgusting creatures were just as awful to see as they were to hear, and that alone was enough reason for her to destroy them. All she had to do was adjust the pitch and tenor of her voice-
And they went flying back...only to rise again.
Inwardly, Adagio snarled, realizing that without aristeia, her innate magic wasn’t nearly as powerful as before. Worse, her mental repertoire of spells was still depleted, and since the undead were notoriously difficult to mentally manipulate, she couldn’t simply bring them to heel.
Taking a moment to swallow her irritation at how everything was always so difficult, she glanced at where the foxgirl was pulling Nenet’s well-chewed form to one corner of the room. “You!” she snapped. “Distract those things so I can finish preparing!”
The foxgirl – who had turned back into human form in order to better drag Nenet out of harm’s way – gave her a panicked look. “But Nenet is injured very badly!” she protested, one hand going to the sphinx’s throat. “She is still alive, but I cannot-”
“I don’t care!” growled Adagio, taking enough time to vent another sonic scream at several of the spectral undead, blasting them back through the wall. “Shut up and cover me!”
Flinching, the foxgirl hesitated just for a moment before changing back into her vulpine form, moving to stand in front of Nenet protectively before breathing lightning at the corporeal undead. It accomplished little except to draw their attention to her, but that was all Adagio needed, striding across the room and ripping open the drawer of her desk.
Inside was the cedar box, just as she’d left it.
Forcing herself not to pause, she flipped the latch open and threw the lid back, grasping the adamantine length of chain that was the necklace within.
Immediately, she felt a tug in her mind. It wasn’t a voice, nor was it a presence. Instead, it was as though her attention was being drawn elsewhere, her awareness shifting in a particular direction, like a song that she couldn’t get out of her head, albeit one with no lyrics or melody.
Gritting her teeth at the unsettling sensation, Adagio brought the necklace over her head, laying it around her neck and pulling her voluminous hair through it. With the length of metal now draped across her, the sensation in her mind was stronger, but that was the point; it allowed her to more easily channel her concentration in the appropriate direction...and control the artifact that the talisman was connected to.
Ignoring the shrill cry of fear from the foxgirl as the undead swarmed at her, fighting their way past another blast of lightning, Adagio closed her eyes and focused.
And she felt the artifact respond almost immediately, moving at her command.
“H-help!” screamed the fox, backing up against Nenet’s prone body in a panic as the undead came within paw’s reach of her. “Please, hel-, AAAUGH!!!”
The foxgirl screamed as jaws closed on one of her paws, and Adagio grit her teeth in irritation, trying to keep her focus, knowing that it if wavered she not only ran the risk of misdirecting the weapon, but of having it backslide toward her.
That was something that had to be avoided at all costs.
But maintaining her concentration was growing more difficult as the foxgirl’s wailing grew progressively louder and more agonized, Adagio’s brow furrowing as she aimed the artifact in the little loudmouth’s direction. I’ll just let it swallow her, Nenet, and those monsters all at once, she decided with vindictive glee, feeling it move to within a few yards of its targets. Then feet. Then inches...
And then the undead were gone, as a perfectly black orb two feet in diameter rose up out of the floor and consumed them.
But Nenet and the foxgirl were still there, the orb having come up slightly off-target, causing Adagio to snort in irritation.
Damn it. That stupid brat’s blubbering threw off my concentration.
Fortunately, it had at least shut the girl up, leaving her stupefied as she stared at the artifact hovering right in front of her, cradling her mangled foreleg.
Perfectly spherical, it had no shine or luster to it, reflecting nothing. It didn’t bob or weave as it hung in the air, instead holding perfectly still, with only a hole in the ground to mark where it had risen from. Nor was there anything left of the undead creatures it had touched, being pulled in and obliterated from having made the slightest contact with the thing.
That cowardly mage who had given it to her had said that it wasn’t the only one of its kind, with several such things having been known to different civilizations at different points in time. They had given them numerous different names, calling them “voidmatter,” “spheres of annihilation,” “weaponized nothingness,” and other equally-ominous titles.
To Adagio, however, it looked like nothing so much as a tiny black hole, albeit one that didn’t radiate the gravity humans had claimed those deep-space phenomena emitted. Quite the opposite, the sphere didn’t pull anything in that was beyond itself; half an inch away from it was no different than half a world.
But anything which touched it was instantly annihilated. Body and soul. Irretrievable and unrecoverable. Even a demigod was supposedly vulnerable to it.
That, however, hadn’t been something Adagio had been eager to test. Even leaving aside the fact that killing Kryonex with that would have left nothing to harvest, the darker-than-black sphere in front of her could only be moved by one thing: willpower. Something even the weakest of gods, she knew, had in spades.
Adagio had no idea why the thing responded to concentration when it simply destroyed everything else, but the fact remained that concentrating on it hard enough could force it to move. The proof of that was in how stronger concentration could increase its speed, though even then, the wielder had to stay in relatively close proximity to it in order to manipulate it. Any sort of remote control, beyond a few dozen yards, simply wasn’t possible.
But that worried Adagio less than the fact that, if for whatever reason the user’s concentration wavered, the thing would instead make a beeline directly for them.
That, combined with how the slightest touch meant instant destruction, was reason enough for her to be wary of the thing. It was simply too easy to turn against its wielder, and that was before taking into account telekinesis, teleportation, or other ways of hurling a would-be controller into the thing. Even though her necklace had – somehow – a connection to the sphere that boosted the effects of the wearer’s concentrating on it, it was still possible to mess up, as her having failed to destroy Nenet and that little brat just now had shown.
But maybe that’s not such a bad thing, decided Adagio as she moved the sphere back ever-so-slightly from where the fox was crouched atop the sphinx, making sure that it was brought to a complete stop before she took her attention off of it.
“Take Nenet’s rings off and give them to me.”
The three-tailed fox blinked, needing a moment to tear her eyes away from the black sphere. “Wh-what?”
“Nenet’s rings,” repeated Adagio impatiently, one hand going to her hip. “Give them to me. Now!”
“But...but she is injured!” protested the fox, still looking at her dumbly. “She needs help! We both do! We-”
“Give. Me. Her. Rings.” Snarling, Adagio moved the sphere just a bit closer to the fox. “Right now, before I really lose my temper and-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as several angry shrieks came from behind her.
Whirling in place, Adagio swore as she realized she’d forgotten about the spectral undead. They swarmed in from the back wall of the room, where they’d already destroyed the barrier that Lex had put up, and Adagio found herself beset by them in an instant, translucent fingers reaching for her face. Stumbling back, she-
Had a rush of panic as she realized that she’d been concentrating on the sphere when those things had distracted her.
Whirling around, she looked at the orb, finding that her single moment of broken concentration had allowed it to halve the distance between itself and her, and it was steadily bridging the rest of that distance. Gritting her teeth as the undead’s cold touch raked across her cheeks, shoulders, and back, she concentrated on the sphere, moving it around her as she circled it, letting the undead single-mindedly pursue her.
Just a little further...
There!
Waiting until the specters, ghosts, and wraiths were between her and the lightless orb, Adagio gave another sonic scream, letting the power of her voice push them back.
Directly into the path of the black globe.
If there had ever been any doubt that it had the power to annihilate souls as easily as physical matter, it was dispelled in an instant as the spectral creatures made contact with the sphere. Just like their corporeal counterparts, they were immediately pulled into it, a single touch serving to scoop them up like bugs into a vacuum cleaner.
This time making sure to bring the artifact to a complete standstill before she released it, Adagio let out a slow breath, trying to keep her hands from shaking at what had almost happened.
In the entirety of the cosmos, there was no life as important as hers. She was the person that everyone else was destined to adore, whose purpose in life was to be worshiped and revered by others. To be so close to something that could erase her from existence, completely and utterly wiping her out with just a touch, was beyond terrifying.
But I have it under control, she reminded herself, taking a slow, steadying breath. I have the necklace, I have the willpower, and I have the element of surprise against Lex and Kryonex. Which means the one who walks away from this victorious will be ME!
“Now,” announced Adagio, turning around. “I want those rings-”
But as she glanced back, she found herself talking to an empty room.
Swearing softly, she strode across to the entryway, spotting the foxgirl – now back in her humanoid form – dragging Nenet down the hallway, redoubling her efforts when she saw the Siren looking at her.
Adagio almost went after her, deciding against it only reluctantly. She’d seen this exact scenario play out in a hundred different movies back on Earth; some idiot would wander off, stupidly leaving their mcguffin alone, only to come back and find that it was gone. Nor was chasing after them with the sphere advisable either; after what had just happened with those ghosts, the last thing Adagio wanted was to wander around the narrow hallways waiting for that foxgirl to jump out and distract her again.
Nenet’s rings were powerful, but they weren’t worth putting herself at risk for. There’d be time to recover them – and wipe out her treacherous daughter and her furry new friend – after she’d killed Lex and Kryonex.
Satisfied that she’d made the right call, Adagio took a moment to change her clothes, stripping off everything except the necklace before going over to the shattered remains of her wardrobe and rifling through what was left of it. Those curses that Lex had put on her equipment were still there, in all likelihood; Nenet had said “abeyance” when she’d cancelled them out, which probably meant they were only suspended temporarily. Wearing them outside would almost certainly result in Lex turning them against her again. That wouldn’t fix the curse on her voice, but she’d just have to deal with it.
As it was, she couldn’t fight back a snarl, recalling how that arrogant bastard had made her dance like some penniless stripper at a sleazy club. Sirens didn’t need to writhe and gyrate to get attention; with beauty like hers, a gentle sway of the hips or a simple flick of her hair was all that she needed. To be forced to display herself so wantonly – and by the guy who’d turned her down even after seeing her naked! – was an unbearable humiliation. One that only his total annihilation could make up for.
From outside, a massive boom sounded, and Adagio felt the mountain shake, reminding her that time was of the essence. Wrinkling her nose, she quickly picked out a pair of slip-ons, one of her sexier sets of underwear, and a black dress with a hip-length slit on the left side.
Lex Legis would get one last look at the beauty he’d spurned before being consigned to oblivion. It was more than he deserved, but that was something Adagio could live with.
It wasn’t like she was the sort of girl who held a grudge.
Smirking as she congratulated herself on being the more evolved being, Adagio concentrated on the sphere, hips swaying and humming a soft tune as she moved it ahead of her, making her way toward the exit.
Lex knew that the sudden clarity he was experiencing had to be a symptom of what had happened to him, that whatever it was that had enabled him to survive Kryonex’s attack had altered his mind as well as his body. But he couldn’t bring himself to care, pushing all such concerns to the side to be considered at a later date.
He did the same with all of the other anxieties that had been weighing him down. So many sources of worry and frustration – what had happened to Sonata and Aria, the degradation of Thermal Draft’s soul, the unnecessary slaughter of Kryonex’s hapless minions, how Solvei and Nenet were unconscious and only barely clinging to life – all ceased to bother him then. They were still problems, but problems that he’d solve in due time.
Right now his only concern was the enemy right in front of him.
Normally, that thought would have provoked a growl of agreement from the beast within him. But even that artificial distinction had ceased to be. No more was there an uneasy fusion of pony and monster, intellect battling instinct for supremacy. Even his tulpa no longer existed as a separate fragment of himself, reunited with his greater self.
This was the new Lex, whole and unburdened at last.
It was in celebration of that, as much as the hit he’d scored on his foe, that made him roar in triumph as he twisted Belligerence where he’d sunk it into Kryonex’s body.
But before he could exacerbate the wound any further, the demigod counterattacked, undaunted by pain or injury as he slammed three legs into Lex – uncaring that the writhing wires immediately began to abrade his exoskeleton – and released blasts of gelid energy directly into him.
The impact sent Lex flying, pulling Belligerence from Kryonex’s body as he refused to relinquish his grasp on it. But he was less cognizant of that than the fact that the massive blue beams hadn’t felt nearly as painful as they should have, even with his wards having been smashed.
Laughing wickedly at this latest revelation, Lex didn’t bother questioning it as he landed upright, charging the quill again as he brandished it at the wounded demigod.
It didn’t escape his notice that a trickle of pale blue fluid – godsblood, just like what Adagio had stolen – was dripping from where he’d struck Kryonex, confirming that last hit hadn’t been a shallow wound like the ones before it. That time, he’d done some actual damage to his enemy.
For the briefest instant, he considered ingesting the stuff, taking whatever fragment of divinity it possessed and adding it to what he already had in store, but he discarded the notion immediately. It had taken the Night Mare herself to arrange the divinity he’d taken before into a format where it had been empowering rather than overwhelming, and the middle of a fight was the worst possible time to see if he’d gained the ability to do that on his own.
There’d be plenty of time to feast on his enemy’s corpse after he had killed him.
But his foe seemed to have the same idea as Kryonex’s eyes flashed, and Lex felt the demigod’s will slam into him for a second time, again trying to annul his existence.
Just like before, his resistance was only able to hold it back for a moment. Then the lights that made up his eyes winked out as his thoughts collapsed, Belligerence falling to the snowy ground as his body dissolving into a tangle of wires that whipped back and forth in every direction. Again, he felt his very being starting to fray...
...only to suddenly find new strength surging up from within, throwing off Kryonex’s will and reconstituting himself, the barbed wire again assuming the shape of his body as his thoughts restored themselves, his eyes lighting back up. Telekinetically returning Belligerence to his grasp, Lex started forward-
Kryonex tried again, once more willing him to cease existing.
Again, Lex collapsed under the onslaught.
But this time he restored himself even faster, pulling himself together in time to catch Belligerence before it even hit the ground.
No fourth attempt was made, Kryonex’s eyes darkening as his pedipalps clacked. Then he fell back, giving ground as he strengthened the storm around him into another furious vortex of microscopic shards, the blizzard expanding outward as the wind whirled faster, worsening visibility in the area.
Lex plunged into the tempest without hesitation, his new body immediately being battered by innumerable fragments of unnaturally-resilient ice, each of them moving fast enough to cause miniature sonic booms in their wake, turning the snowstorm into a thundering cacophony of destruction as he was struck myriad times over. But the damage from each strike was only superficial, the writhing mass of wires that was his body shattering each shard as they slammed into him.
Even so, the onslaught was enough to slow him down, battering him into near-immobility even when he concentrated on defense, battering the frozen projectiles away as fast as he could.
So instead, Lex changed tactics, and began casting one of the new spells that he’d developed.
It was one that he’d made the previous day, while the adlets had been celebrating their resurrection. Whereas his mortal self had needed time, tools, and testing to design new spells – requiring great effort even when making variations of ones that he’d already known – he no longer required such things as a titan. With his intellect enhanced and his senses expanded in ways he’d never imagined, developing entirely new spells from pure theory was now easily accomplished, and in conjunction with Nenet telling him all of the spells she’d learned, he’d been able to fill his thaumaturgical catalogue with a vast array of magic far in excess of anything he’d had before.
Such as the spell he was casting now, which was designed to alter the local environment.
By itself, it was already a spell whose power would have boggled the mind of any Equestrian wizard, allowing for both the terrain and the climate to be manipulated, though only to a certain degree so as to not completely destroy the local ecosystem. Even with that safeguard, the sheer amount of energy it unleashed meant that the spell required a full hour to cast, a massive expenditure of precious gems to act as catalysts, and the investment of a great deal of personal power.
It was, in other words, not a spell that a mortal could have cast.
But for Lex, disregarding those cautionary procedures was easily done. He’d built them, after all, and he knew how to overcome them.
With a thought, the necessary crystals appeared before him, held in his telekinesis as he plucked them from the dream realm. Nenet’s metamagic was enough to easily bypass the lengthy casting time, accomplishing an hour’s worth of concentration in less than a second. And the power required was something he could not only easily supply, but surpassed altogether, overloading the spell enough so that its alterations would be far stronger than the gentle changes he’d originally made it for.
Then he slammed one foreleg down, claws plunging into the earth as he discharged the spell’s power.
And the ground shook as the world bent to his command.
The western mountain that bordered the valley where they were fighting had already been split in half earlier, bisected by the enormous wall of black crystals he’d raised to try and pen Kryonex in. He’d let the barrier dissolve since, its purpose served, but the massive rent in the earth it had left behind was still there. And it heralded the change he’d made now, as a massive tidal wave of magma surged upward from it, spilling over the mountainside in an eruption whose roar overshadowed the sonic booms of the demigod’s storm even as superheated ash and pyroclastic fragments began to bombard the area, all of it magically augmented to be hotter, stronger, and more destructive than an ordinary volcano could have produced.
It was enough to impede the storm surrounding Kryonex, leaving the demigod’s blizzard struggling to maintain itself against the sudden onslaught of fire and lava.
But none of it came near Kryonex himself. The magma cooled when it approached him, the ash swirled away, and even the pyroclastic fragments falling from the sky seemed to be miss his location, as though the flames couldn’t bear to be near the demigod’s presence.
Lex himself had no such trouble, springing toward his enemy with another deafening roar.
Kryonex was already moving, trying to keep him at a distance while firing more blasts of cold energy at him, but Lex had seen those attacks before, easily outpacing them as he lessened the gap between them.
Then he was within range, and the wire that made up his body now churning faster as he moved in for another strike, aiming right for Kryonex’s face.
But this time Belligerence didn’t strike true, instead getting caught in a layer of ice that had appeared around the demigod, coating his entire body in an instant. Lex immediately recognized the same technique that Solvei used, shaping a substance into armor, but the ice surrounding Kryonex was not only supernaturally tough, but also more than twice the thickness of Belligerence itself!
Snarling, Lex started to drive the quill deeper, intent on piercing the demigod’s new defense no matter how tick it was, but he didn’t have a chance as Kryonex suddenly surged forward, driving them both directly into a nearby pool of lava that was already gathering at the base of the mountain.
The heated plunge did nothing to damage either of them, the substance cooling immediately, and Lex snarled as he found himself momentarily pinned between the solidified rock and his enemy. But he ignored the disadvantageous position, intent on augmenting his attack, a quick spell causing Belligerence to vibrate at a high frequency, making the ice armor around Kryonex to crack, fractures running through it as he pushed the quill deeper...
Only for the demigod to simultaneously go on the offensive, bringing all of his legs around to hit him with seven blasts of cold energy at once.
And Lex learned that even with whatever transformation he’d undergone, he could still take serious – and painful – injuries.
But he didn’t let that deter him, a howl of defiance coming from him as he pushed the quill deeper, Kryonex’s ice armor falling off in chunks now. Just a little further...just a little further and he’d be able to sink it directly into his enemy’s face!
Then his trans-temporal sense screamed a warning at him, one that was impossible to ignore.
Kryonex must have detected it too, because all of a sudden the demigod was gone from atop him, having moved halfway across the valley in an instant. But there was no time to capitalize on that, as Lex hurriedly dove to the side, righting himself an equal distance away, turning back in time to see what he already knew was about to happen.
Sure enough, a featureless black orb was rising up from the ground, exactly where he and Kryonex had both been.
Nor was Lex surprised when a melodious voice cut through the din a moment later, having already foreseen Adagio’s return to the battlefield.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t able to appreciate the sight of her as she strutted out of the cave entrance, hips swaying and hair bouncing as she put one hand on her hip, looking the two of them over. A moment later, the black orb – which his mystical senses were telling him was some sort of incarnate nothingness, able to break down anything it touched – floated toward her, coming to a stop barely two dozen feet from her position, clearly moving according to her will.
A crooked smirk crossed her face then, seemingly unconcerned by the sight of the two of them, or what had happened to the valley itself.
“Is this a boys only event?” she cooed, her voice sweet despite the malevolent look on her face. “Or can girls play too?”
“Now it’s getting good!” chittered the Unspoken, his badger’s whiskers twitching as he clapped his front legs, which were currently in the form of an elephant’s foot and a walrus’s flipper. “I bet it’ll be even more exciting now that there’s three of them going at it!”
“I’m not sure whether to say ‘phrasing’ or ‘that’s what she said,’” snickered Kara. “Mostly because I’m the ‘she’ in that expression.”
Blaze, however, spat on the ground. “There’s no escalation here. That doxy’s weapon is powerful, but she isn’t. Against a demigod and a titan built to function as an ersatz avatar, she doesn’t have a chance.”
“She might,” argued the Sun Queen. “Even if she doesn’t have aristeia anymore, that’s not where the whole of her power came from. Don’t forget, she was able to match Lex Legis for strength before-”
“Her strength was never comparable to his own,” rumbled the Night Mare, her lip curling. But she didn’t take her eyes off of the viewscreen, staring intently at it.
The Moon Princess gave her rival a sidelong look. “When she emerged from her bathing chamber and he grabbed her by the throat, she broke his grip and flung him across the room.”
“Only because he let her,” smirked Kara.
Luminace frowned. “How would you know? You were watching the same scene as the rest of us.”
The love goddess chuckled. “Because, I taught him quite a few things while the Night Mare was elevating him to immortality. And one of those was that there are times when it’s important to be gentle with a girl.”
“Again, neck-grabbing and wall-slamming,” noted Luminace. “What part of that is gentle?”
“The part where he only used his muscles to do it, instead of willing reality itself to make him stronger,” retorted Kara silkily, clasping her hooves together in front of her as though she were a young maiden in love. “He knew she had aristeia, but he still didn’t want to risk seriously hurting her. It was actually rather romantic of him.”
She gave a dreamy sigh at that, before her starry-eyed expression melted into a sultry look. “Of course, I also taught him that sometimes a girl needs to be slapped around like a whore that isn’t earning her money. Especially that little treacherous little whore.”
“With that sphere, she can do some slapping of her own,” noted the Moon Princess. “Nothingness incarnate is a powerful weapon, capable of destroying anything it comes into contact with.”
“Including a demigod?” Luminace adjusted her monocle, unable to help but glance at Soft Whisper then, the death goddess continuing to watch the viewscreen in silence. “Or a titan?”
The Night Mare growled softly at that, but it was the Unspoken who answered, snickering in a way that made his snake’s tongue writhe in the air. “Our goddess of magic doesn’t know what a magic item can do?”
“That’s no mere magic item,” interjected the Sun Queen. “As my sister said, it’s a void, one that unmakes whatever it touches. But while I’ve never heard of such a thing being used against a god, if what Soft Whisper said is true-”
“Then it can destroy even divinity,” hissed Blaze, her eyes narrowing even as the flames surrounding her wings grew brighter.
“If that’s the case, then it probably has a limit on how much godhood it can destroy,” murmured Luminace, brow furrowing. “Or at least, how much it can destroy at once.”
“Meaning that Kryonex has the advantage,” noted the Moon Princess. “Even weakened, he’s still a demigod, and has far more divinity than Lex Legis possesses.”
“My champion will overturn that advantage.” The Night Mare’s voice was thick with tension, as though daring anyone to disagree with her, one wing sweeping out to make a dismissive gesture toward Soft Whisper. “The same way he will that ailing old fool’s prediction.”
“And if he can’t, you could always ask The Author to bring him back,” added the Unspoken, smacking his alligator jaws. “She’s a creator goddess, after all.”
That was enough to cause a round of shudders to pass through most of the assembled deities. “Even if she could, and that’s a pretty big if, I’m not sure that she would,” muttered Luminace.
“She prefers to set fate in motion rather than overturn it,” agreed the Sun Queen. “And even then, I’ve never known her to interfere with what other gods – or beings with even trace amounts of divinity – do, besides laying down her rules for our interacting with Everglow.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” cut in Kara with a tantalizing flick of her tail. “Maybe Sexy Lexy will do like the Night Mare says and surprise us.”
“If he does, that will almost certainly mean we’ll need to worry about dealing with the elves later,” warned Luminance.
“On the contrary,” retorted the Night Mare, “when my champion prevails, it will be the elves who need to worry about dealing with us.”
Lex paused, taking in the sight of Adagio even as he made sure to keep the bulk of his attention on Kryonex, knowing that the demigod was doing the same.
Even a casual glance showed that she’d somehow discarded all of the magic items he’d cursed, despite the fact that she shouldn’t have been able to remove them. Only the curse that he’d placed on her voice was still there, but there was some sort of compensatory enchantment – Nenet’s magic, he could tell – holding it at bay. Exactly how she’d managed that was less important was yet another question he’d have to look into later; right now, the more salient consideration was what to do about her.
This time, none of what she wore was enchanted, either because she had no magic items left or because she was afraid he’d turn their powers against her again. The only exception was the necklace, which in contrast to its plain appearance was powerfully ensorcelled, serving to heighten and externally direct the wearer’s concentration.
He didn’t need to wonder what that concentration was supposed to be directed toward.
The black orb hovering near Adagio was dangerous in the extreme; his foresight had told him that much, showing him his own sudden demise if he hadn’t moved. Just the fact that Adagio was wielding a weapon capable of killing him – even in his current state, where Kryonex’s own divine will had failed to do so – was enough to give Lex pause.
But it had also given Kryonex pause, the demigod leaping away as soon as he’d become aware of the threat.
Somehow, Adagio had gotten her hands on a god-killing weapon. One that she’d apparently been keeping as a backup, presumably for a situation exactly like this. And which required that necklace to help her control.
But if I can take it from her, then I’ll have the advantage against Kryonex!
As it so happened, that was when the demigod – doubtlessly having come to the same conclusion – made his move.
Immediately, Kryonex’s eyes flashed as he turned his will toward Adagio, seeking to destroy her so that he could use the weapon she’d brought without interference. But Lex had no intention of letting him do that, immediately flinging Belligerence at the demigod. He’d felt the force of Kryonex’s divine will before, and he knew that it required concentration in order to use, which meant that so long as the demigod was under threat – or taking damage – he wouldn’t be able to bring it to bear.
Even if whatever transformation he’d undergone had freed him from his guilt and self-recrimination, it didn’t change how Lex felt about his obligations. He’d promised Sonata and Aria that he’d bring their sister back, and it was a promise he intended to keep.
Fortunately, that seemed to be within reach as Kryonex abandoned his attempt to destroy the Siren, instead dodging to the side before Belligerence could put another hole through him, and Lex rushed in to take advantage of the opening, claws raised and a spell at the ready.
“Fool!” snapped Kryonex, bringing a leg up as the roiling mass of wires that was Lex’s body dug into his ice armor. “You’re defending someone that’s trying to kill us both!”
“She’s mine!” snarled Lex, unleashing his augmented liquefaction spell into his foe’s armor, causing the portion of it that hadn’t already been shattered to turn into slush, sloughing off of his enemy. “I’m taking her back with me!”
But even as he raked at Kryonex’s now-bare legs, trying to get past them to strike at the demigod’s face, his foresight was already warning him that Adagio was once again directing her black orb toward them both. “As much as I like seeing guys get tangled up in knots over me,” she sneered, holding her hands out as she sent it veering in their direction, “I think you’ve got a headful of bad wiring!”
In his foresight, Lex tried several different ways to impede the advancing sphere – ranging from a wall of black crystals to increasing the gravity in the local area – but nothing worked. Whatever that void was, it couldn’t be blocked, only dodged.
But that worked in reverse too, as Lex slipped inside a counterattack from Kryonex, turning and grabbing the demigod’s leg as he hurled him toward the black orb-
Only for Kryonex to pivot in place, digging one leg into the ground and reversing the throw, knocking Lex directly into the orb’s path.
With a cry of victory, Adagio’s eyes glittered as she concentrated harder, the orb speeding up...
But Lex had already seen the weakness in her technique.
Reaching out with his telekinesis, he grabbed several pyroclastic bombardments that were falling from the eruption he’d caused, flinging them in Adagio’s direction. It was an obvious attack, the glow of his aura highlighting their change in trajectory, but it was enough to break the Siren’s concentration, leaving her yelping and dodging the attacks – resorting to using her voice to blast apart the few she couldn’t avoid – now that she no longer had aristeia to bolster her defenses.
It was more than enough to break her concentration, the orbs immediately slowing down and moving back toward her as Lex hit the ground claws first, arresting his movement-
Just as the orb suddenly reversed course again and resumed rocketing toward him, far faster than before.
Only the fact that he’d been expecting that to happen allowed Lex to stop it in time, focusing his will on it and barely managing to arrest its movement before it reached him...
By less than two feet.
Beyond the edge of the orb, Lex could see Kryonex staring at him, the demigod’s eyes again having darkened to a blue so deep they were almost black as he kept trying to push the sphere forward, needing no necklace to project his concentration outward. It was an obvious ploy, one that Lex had known his enemy would utilize from the instant he’d realized how Adagio was controlling the sphere.
But just because it was obvious didn’t mean that there was an easy way to counter it.
As it was, Lex could feel himself losing ground, the sphere slowly – millimeter by millimeter – working its way closer to him. For all his strength, the demigod’s will was an onslaught that he couldn’t match in a direct confrontation. That was still true despite overcoming Kryonex’s attempt to erase him from existence.
Something which that orb would now do for him.
Clenching his jaw, Lex looked for a way out, running myriad scenarios in his mind.
He couldn’t bring forth another necklace like Adagio’s from the dream realm, his foresight having showed that would take more effort than he could currently spare. Trying to steal Adagio’s was likewise impossible, since the level of concentration that he was currently using to stop the sphere’s advance made it impossible to so much as walk, let along snatch something from a resistant target. Casting a spell would likewise cause him to lose focus enough that Kryonex would hit him with the orb before he finished. He couldn’t even summon Solvei or Nenet; even if he hadn’t warded the area against teleportation, neither of them were in any shape to help him now.
A short distance away, Adagio saw what was happening and smirked, circling around on a path that would put her behind Kryonex. The sight set Lex to snarling, knowing that she was planning to wait for the demigod to kill him, and then intended to break his concentration in conjunction with using her necklace to try and bring the orb back around to strike him in turn, something Lex knew wouldn’t work. Kryonex had sufficient speed and knowledge of the future that he’d never fall for such a simple ploy.
All she was going to accomplish – all that she’d accomplished by coming out here in the first place – was to get them both killed.
Slowly, the sphere moved closer, now within one foot of him...
And Lex realized that he couldn’t stop it. Every scenario that he’d dreamed up, every future that he’d looked into, all ended in the same way: with it making contact with him.
There was no way to avoid or defer what was about to happen.
But that didn’t mean that he was out of options.
Had he still been the being he was, Lex knew he would have been overwhelmed by grief, unable to help but berate himself for letting down everyone who was depending on him. But he felt no despair now, instead focusing solely on the one thing that he could still do:
Spite the enemy who had bested him.
And as the orb inexorably drew closer, Lex used a spell.
But not a spell that he had prepared himself.
While his tulpa’s greatest power had been to bring things from the dream realm into the real world, that had never been all that it could do. By virtue of its being a fragment of his mind, it had also retained the ability to prepare a small number of spells on its own, siphoning power whenever he’d renewed his thaumaturgical magic and readying spells of its own volition. That power had saved him several times before, being put to good use against enemies such as Xiriel and Starlight Glimmer.
But after his sojourn to Darkest Night, his tulpa had come back under his control. Still a semi-independent entity, it had become an obedient one, using its dream-binding powers at his direction rather than at its own discretion.
That he could also command its ability to prepare magic, ordering it to ready certain thaumaturgical castings and use them at his direction, had seemed far less important. After all, with the equinox already having passed, that benefit had little practical use.
As a titan, however – able to prepare his strongest magic without needing external assistance – it was suddenly a different matter.
That was why Lex had made sure to fill his tulpa with several choice spells before going to confront Adagio, choosing several of the most utilitarian spells that had the widest range of potential applications across various scenarios. All in the rogue portion of his mind, needing just a simple mental command to release.
And now that his tulpa had been reintegrated into his mind, even that wasn’t necessary. All it took was an act of will.
An act of will which would disrupt his concentration, meaning his loss, but not before he managed to strike back one final time at Kryonex.
Short-range teleport!
It wouldn’t have been possible if not for Mystaria’s clasp, the accessory’s functionality having been absorbed by his new form, letting him ignore his earlier spell banning teleporting. That was the only reason his final act of defiance worked, the black sphere catching up to him right as the magic activated.
He and it reappeared exactly where Lex had intended: directly in front of Kryonex’s face.
Materializing between the demigod’s pedipalps, Lex had just enough time to see the orb appear in the same space as the leftmost appendage, tearing it free from the demigod’s face as Kryonex screamed-
And then Lex fell to the ground, untouched as the sphere suddenly shrank in on itself, missing making contact with him by a fraction of a millimeter.
Above him, Kryonex stumbled back as the orb contracted further, down to the size of a marble, and Lex moved backward, barely noticing Adagio doing the same, her eyes wide and brow furrowing as the dark spot suddenly expanded again, growing larger. Then it seemed to shrink again. Then expand. Then its form seemed to compress, as though being squished between invisible barriers, righting itself only to quiver like jelly, dropping down and then bobbing back up again an instant later, tripling its original size...
Which was when Lex realized he couldn’t see it in his foresight anymore.
“This isn’t what happened!”
Soft Whisper’s exclamation didn’t match her namesake, her disbelieving shout echoing through the pavilion. “The sphere makes contact with Lex Legis as he uses it to deal one last wound to his enemy, dying in the process!”
But unlike when her prediction had commanded their attention before, this time the assembled deities barely seemed to notice what she was saying.
“I don’t understand!” babbled Luminace, her monocle falling off and dangling from her robe. “I can’t perceive that sphere’s future movements!”
“It’s become completely unpredictable!” squealed the Unspoken, his body parts now changing so fast that they were a blur.
“Something’s changed,” muttered the Moon Princess, staring at the viewscreen. “I can see it, but I can’t sense it anymore.”
“It happened when it struck Kryonex,” noted Blaze, wide-eyed and tail thrashing as she stared at the screen. “Why?! What did it do?!”
“I don’t know,” murmured the Night Mare, alone among the other gods in how she was grinning fiercely, her expression one of fiendish delight. “But now that my champion has avoided the death that he was supposed to meet because of that item-”
“It is not an item.”
A hush fell over the gods then, as a new figure appeared in their midst, with only the Unspoken daring to say their name.
“The Author.”
But the creator goddess didn’t acknowledge him, stepping toward Luminace’s viewscreen slowly as she spoke again.
“It is an egg. And now, it has what it needs in order to hatch.”
He’d known for some time that a god’s mere presence could have a powerful effect on lesser creatures. Whether it was Kara’s irresistible eroticism, Soft Whisper’s crushing fatigue, or the powerful sense of reassurance that his own goddess radiated, simply being in the presence of the divine – save only for deities who elected to hold the full force of their presence in check, the way the Moon Princess or Luminace did – meant experiencing the authority they exuded over various aspects of the universe.
But he had never imagined what it would feel like to stand in The Author’s presence.
Indeed, the goddess who had created all of Everglow and its beings – as well as personally crafted the brand of destiny for each and every pony – was the single most mysterious member of the pantheon. The Sun Queen virtually never spoke of her, and when she did it was usually only to note that The Author was the one who had laid down the rules regarding how much the other gods were allowed to interfere with the mortal world. Beyond that, she had always been an enigma.
Until now, that had never concerned him much. He’d never had cause to study faiths beyond his own, and other than Luminace and the Moon Princess the rest of the pantheon only visited in rare circumstances, and a few – such as the Unspoken or Soft Whisper – had never visited at all. At least, not since he’d been placed in charge of defense of the realm. So in that regard, it was no surprise that had no real familiarity with The Author or what she could do.
If he had, he likely would have requested a transfer to the Sun Queen’s diplomatic corps, simply for the chance to be in The Author’s presence more often.
Unlike most of the Sun Queen’s faithful, Noble Bright still had his memories from when he was alive. It was a request that he had asked of her in reverence and humility, knowing that to retain knowledge of his mortal ties would make it that much harder for him to move beyond them and one day merge with her. But that had been the very reason he’d requested it; so that he could act in her service – and the service of all her faithful in Soothing Meadows – that much longer. And his goddess had, in her boundless grace and infinite selflessness, granted his desire.
That was why Noble Bright could still remember what it felt like when he’d been a boy of eight, and the wilderness surrounding his parents’ farm had still seemed like a portal to endless adventures. In those innocent days, every loose branch was a magical sword, to be brought to bear against the orcs and goblins that lurked behind every tree, menacing beautiful fey maidens who lived in the nearby glades. His imagination had soared every time a cloud had passed across the sun, dreaming that it was the coming of a dragon that only he could slay, and each rustle of a branch foretold an evil wizard just waiting to be vanquished.
Inevitably, those dreams had faded away as he’d gotten older. By the time he was ten, he’d already been helping out on his parents’ farm for some time, and when he’d gotten it in his head to join the Imperial Army, he’d already forgotten the feeling of those carefree days playing at the edge of the woods.
But they all came rushing back to him now, as he gazed at The Author.
It was such a heady feeling that he couldn’t even bring himself to think it odd how the creator goddess wasn’t a pony herself.
Instead, he could only stare at her humanoid figure, cloaked in xanthous robes that looked as though they’d been spun from pure gold, hiding most of her from sight. A hood cloaked her head, and the hem of her garb reached all the way to the floor. Even her hands were hidden, being folded together in front of her such that each was tucked into the opposite sleeve.
Only her face was visible...or at least, it should have been, the features hidden by a gauzy veil that looked as though it had been woven from the gentlest clouds the sky had to offer. Behind it, he could make out hints of the goddess’s features, the most notable being her two eyes, which seemed to be almost-
Suddenly, multicolored feathers obscured his vision.
“Don’t,” murmured the Sun Queen softly, interposing herself between him and The Author.
It was only then that he’d been moving toward the creator goddess, somehow having moved halfway across the pavilion without realizing it.
And it was only now, when his goddess had stopped him, that he realized just how badly he needed to continue approaching The Author. Even now, there was a tantalizing pull to her that he couldn’t bring himself to resist. As though, if he could just come to the creator goddess’s attention, he’d be off on a wondrous adventure, the kind which tugged at the heartstrings of the little boy still within him. “I...if I can just-”
“You musn’t,” whispered the Sun Queen. “I don’t want you to become like Honeymoon Trap.”
It took Noble Bright a moment to remember who that was, blinking as he turned to look at Kara’s servitor.
Standing near the edge of the divan that Kara was draped over, the bloody bride – the entirety of her body still hidden within her mangled and stained wedding dress – seemed to be lost in her own little world. Even as he watched, she stood up on her hind legs, front hooves held out before her, and began to slowly move back and forth as though dancing with an invisible partner to a tune only she could hear.
Noble Bright’s confusion was absolute as he looked between the broken, disgusting creature that Kara had brought with her and his own goddess. “I don’t understand.”
The Sun Queen paused for the briefest moment, then seemed to make up her mind about something, letting out a soft sigh as she brought her wing up to Noble Bright’s face, tracing her feathers over his eyes. “See her as we do,” she intoned, her voice barely a whisper.
The soft touch made Noble Bright blink, and when he opened his eyes again the Sun Queen had already withdrawn her wing, giving him an unobstructed view of The Author-
And Noble Bright only barely managed to choke back a scream.
The aura that the goddess gave off was no longer one of endless adventure, but instead unremitting horror. It wasn’t like the dread that the Night Mare radiated – the goddess’s presence like being awakened at night by the sound of something moving underneath your bed – but was more like a profound realization of intense aversion. Like being trapped in that single instant when you woke up only to find a spider crawling on your face.
The Author’s appearance only made that sensation worse. Though her figure hadn’t changed much, still being a humanoid figure clad in yellow, the details were profoundly different now, elevating the sensation of absolute wrongness that clung to her.
Her robe was tattered and frayed, its color jaundiced and sickly and its hem trailing loose strands behind her. The sound it made as it dragged along the floor was louder than it should have been, as though the fabric concealed something unnervingly grotesque beneath it. That perception was heightened by the way she moved, the motions beneath the fabric stilted and unnatural, as though her joints weren’t in the right places.
Worse was how her veil was missing altogether.
Instead, covering The Author’s face was a mask.
Its design was like that of the masks on signs used to indicate a theater, where one was laughing and the other was crying. Except the two had been fused into one, with half of The Author’s mask displaying a wailing face, while the other half was frozen in an endless cackle. And behind the mask, through the gaps that were its features, he could just barely make out-
Noble Bright felt something inside himself break then, and something that was either a laugh or a wail came up from his throat as he fumbled for his sword. It was overly large, and much too bulky for what he needed it for, but he didn’t care, bringing the point around to his left eye first-
And then the Sun Queen swept him up in her embrace, his weapon clattering to the floor as – enveloped in the motherly presence of his goddess – Noble Bright began to sob.
“First time seeing her without the makeup on, huh?” laughed the Unspoken, parrot’s beak clicking in mirth.
He was the only one so amused, as the hagunemnon he’d brought with him proceeded to metamorphose – changing into a large cube of translucent ooze – before resuming its plasmoid state, causing the Unspoken to huff. “Did you just call me a square?”
Blaze ignored the chaos god’s antics, instead keeping her eyes trained on The Author as Vutok crouched behind her, trying to make himself seem smaller. “What is it that’s going to hatch from this ‘egg,’ exactly?”
“And can it be stopped?” added Luminace, peering from around where Euclase was serving as a living barrier between her and The Author, the dragon making sure to face away from the creator goddess. “I’m assuming that if you’re here, then whatever’s inside there must be dangerous, even to us.”
“̴̧̺̠̽̄W̷͇̼͂͐i̷̗̽̾̓t̴̠͓̱͒̊̾h̵̩̾ï̶͇n̵̡͂ ̶͚̘̮̋ṯ̸̤͎̌̌̔h̵͚̬̿̊a̵̦͖̙̅͝t̷͙̥̒̉ ̴̢̮̗̎c̸̨̛̤̘͊̍ö̴̱͆c̷̞͇̄ö̵͚́͗o̷̱͐͠ǹ̷̳͂ ̴̡͖͆̒͜ŏ̵̻f̵̛̹͕͐͌ ̴͇̂ń̸̛͚̰͚̿ö̵͕́̔t̴̪̪͇́ĥ̵̩̳̿ḯ̷͎̙̀͋n̸͍͕̘̎g̸͈̮̺̎͌͂n̸̡͔̝͗ḙ̶͐̅͠s̵̫̏͐s̶̝̝̟͑̂ ̴̯̘̃d̵̡̲̉̕͜͝ẉ̸̀̓͜e̷̢͓̓̉̚ḽ̸̈́̊l̷̰̋̾s̸͇͈̃̒̕ ̶̟͐͛̓à̴̝͆͐ ̶͈̻̼̀n̴͉̬͆ä̴̮́s̸̙̮̓͆ç̵̯̟͆͋̕ḙ̴̡͉̇̀͋n̵̦̦͔̒͆̓ẗ̶̛̟́̀ ̶͍̙͇̋̈́̑ų̴̱̰̌n̸̡̅m̸̨̥͍̔ò̶͚̎̎r̶̛̜̈̽t̶͍̞͚͐ả̵̝̗̰̓l̸̘̻̰̈́,̷̳͚̽”̴̜̞̟̐͋ replied The Author, the tortured cacophony of their voice causing Sanguine Disposition to wince from his place at the Night Mare’s side, keeping his eyes firmly shut even as he flattened his ears against his skull. “̷̼͂A̶̖͔͛̊̾ ̵̟̻̊̀̅c̶͈̟͒͂h̷̛̲̲͑͛į̴̰̄̂l̷̛̟̭̝̈́d̴̫͒ ̵̖̙̚o̵͓̻͕̔̃f̸͕̘̒ ̵̣͕̔̔̚ͅö̷̬͚́̂̅n̴̺͊͗ͅe̴̗͆̌ ̵̈́͜͝o̴̢̞͓̓f̷̟͂ ̴̤͍̲̓t̸̨̘̫͌h̴̹̣̖̑e̸͈͔̗̽ ̸̻̘̫̈̈́͂a̵͓̰̣̕n̸̥̰̅ṱ̴͕͆̄͐ͅi̵̘̰̼̅-̸̜̻͖̃g̶̡̬͗̈o̸̜̮̮̍͒d̴͐͐͂͜ś̷͍̟ ̷͈̂̉̈́ẁ̴̞h̶̳͎̆ͅő̴̮̖̓̍ ̶̝͉̪͌o̴̳̍p̵̦̮̆p̴̨͓̌͊ơ̷̻̫͙s̶̥̗͓̎̕e̶̠̱͑d̷͎̙̱̉͆ ̷̠͛C̷̯̲͈͋r̶͈̄e̸̯̲͝a̷͒͘ͅt̶̡̮̓͐͂i̸͖̙͚̋̒ó̸͇ņ̸̲̇ ̷͙͎̲͒d̸̙̰͘ǘ̴̜r̶̳͙̽͜͝i̵̜͈͖̽n̸͓̫̈́g̴̭͂ ̵̺͒͑t̵̳͗͌h̵̙͍̱͗ȇ̶͉͖͗̏ͅ ̸̳̭̆̿̊T̷̙͑i̵̩̒̉͆m̴̭͈̭̏e̷̳̭͌ ̸̲̼͌̑͘B̴̩͎̲͌̕e̸͚̣̒f̴͉̺̊̕ȯ̷̱r̸̢̠̞̓̉͒e̴̢͈͆.̴̪̆͘ ̴̡̯̅̆͜N̶̛͔̂͜ö̸͙̹̪́̅̎w̷̘̃ ̵̠̈́̐͌t̸̢̓h̴̡̤̱͐̑̀ā̴̜̱͈̆t̸̨͒̊͗ ̸̮̣̌͑̈́ṱ̸̊ḧ̸̙́͒̽e̶̟̹̥͛̎̔ ̵̬͖̀̇t̸̖̗̖͒a̵̦̠͋ś̸͍͌t̷̘̅͆e̸̡̦̺̊ ̵͎̲̈́ọ̶̋̐͑f̵̘̲̟͋̽̕ ̵̘̞̫̀̍ḋ̷̳̻̫̓́i̵̛͖͐͝v̴̩̿̚i̸͚̾̉n̴̠̈́̏͝i̶̝̮͂t̸̫̳̒y̶̢̭͉͛ ̵̮̱̑̂h̴̖̥̳͆a̸̤͚͍̓s̴̡̿̿ ̵̬͚͖̅g̴͍̍̑̊į̷͈͓͊v̶̖̆̏ë̴̼̕n̶̥͓̺̉ ̶͈͙̄̓͐i̸̢͉̐̎̍ṫ̵̮̺̥ ̷̡̣͗̆͜c̸̛̫̦͎̈́͂à̵̧̤͕u̷̞͐̀͘s̶̘̆͂ḙ̷̔̽̈́ ̷͇̈̾t̴̟̕ͅo̶͍̤͂ ̵̳̀̈g̸̢̪̈e̵̥͌͠s̷̘͑̎ţ̵̼͂͊ă̸͈͎̎ţ̸̠́͛e̴̩̓͗,̵͉̥̽̾ ̵̛̠͚̮͌i̷̡̳͚̇̇͒t̵̢̞̱͐ ̵̡̘͓̏̈́͝s̴̤̅̑̿ė̶͚ḙ̵́͋͒k̷͖̹͌̓͊ŝ̷̡̉̉ ̵̧̢͌͐̾m̶͖̄̑o̵̡̜̟͐̅͂ŗ̵̑̒e̷̡̛͗ ̵͉͖̍̕s̶̗̈o̷̡̩̽̆ ̶̳͎̖̔͂̚t̴̠̲͋h̴̬͖̚a̶̭͖̬̍ẗ̷̤̣́̍ͅ ̴̧̮͋͒ī̶̯ț̵̝͗͆͜ ̸̞̐̚͠m̵̧͛̓̃à̸͎̃y̸̡̧̽̊ ̵͍̯̍e̷͇͎͠s̸̖̞̤̅͝c̴̝̋̎̉å̴̼͛p̴̣͔̺̎̎̂e̶̙̬͛̂ ̸̝̻͔͆͊͌i̷̗͔̇̀t̸̻̮͗͒s̸͕̲͆̈́ ̸̩̪̀̀̄s̵̤͛͂h̶̹͂̍ẻ̴̳ĺ̵̨̼͎͠l̵͓̓́̅.̷͔̱̠̀”̵̯͒̀̈́
Off to the side, Silhouette gave a pained groan as he sank to the ground, murmuring prayers over and over in an endless litany, shuddering as the Moon Princess laid a wing over him. But her attention didn’t waver from The Author. “If this thing devours godhood just to hatch from its egg, does that mean that this...‘unmortal,’ will be a greater threat once it emerges?”
The Author laughed at that, and the sound made even Soft Whisper shiver. “̶̢͍͔͆Ẽ̸̗̳̿͊ṿ̵̽̾̽ȩ̵͓̉͒͝ṅ̶̳̻̊̕ ̸͕̈́̕ā̶̹͛̏s̷̡̟̔̌́ ̴̦͐a̷̮͓̹̋͊ ̷͔̻́n̷̬̾͛̂e̴̹̓̕w̶̧̪͌b̸̨̡͔̊o̸͇͝r̴̙̮͎̈͋͠n̵̟͗̕,̴͕̇͝ ̸̨̜̯̔̎i̸̥̬͉̿̽t̴̳͋ ̸̯̿ͅw̸̱̐͜ͅį̵̀͛̉l̴̘̪͆͐l̴̞̜̓ͅ ̸̠͂p̷̯̖̔̈́ö̷͙́͌ș̴̹͗͒͌ͅs̶̡̻̺̈̋ė̸͔̩͋̾š̷̬̘͌s̶̹̒ ̴̥̣̺͒p̴̢̱̞̓o̶̡̰͆̔͝ẁ̸̺͝e̵̗̖̩̍r̷͖͉͇̒̓ ̴̨̟͖̑͌b̸̡̢̨̏̓͆è̷̝͎̿ý̷̦̗̇͌ò̵̺̗̱̆̋ņ̴̬͉̚̕d̵̽̐͌͜ ̴̦̞̗̓̚̚á̶̧̈́ṅ̴̠ÿ̶͎̳́͂̒ ̴͔̙͗̐̽o̸̳͍͐͝f̴͔͎̑ ̵̜̮͠ỵ̴̊͜o̶͉̐͜ǘ̵͍̝.̶̨̒̇ ̸̳̮̇Ǭ̶̺n̵͓̫̤̒́͘l̴̠̯̎ỳ̵̢̻ ̴̥͖̆͐̇i̸̠̊f̸͖͓͒͜ ̷͓͉̽ÿ̵̙̱̺́o̸̯̱͑̎͝ü̴̠͆ͅ ̶͍͉͓̅̏ú̴̪̲͝ṋ̵̛̖̾͊i̸͔̯͆̈́͌t̶̺͘͝e̸̫̺͆d̷͖̤̈̓ ̷̝͛̐̚i̵̭̿̒̎n̵̡̟̖̐̐̈́ ̴̥̳̄a̶̧͚͕̎̎͗ċ̶̮̠̪͂ẗ̸̗́i̴̝̼͖͑͒ó̵͍̰ͅṅ̵̠̬̺̾ ̵̞͍̈́w̴͕͉̓̾̔ō̴̜̙͖u̵̡̿̀l̶̗̭̒̏̃d̵̖̈͝ ̷̡̰̎̇y̵̛͙͐͗o̴̢͙̝̔u̶̢̠̐̈́ ̴͈̘͍̿h̶̼̍͆͐a̶̜͙͙̎v̸̬͛e̷̳͙̿ ̶͙͐̉̿a̴͙͛̂ ̸̳͉̐̑̓c̷̛̥̹̚͝h̶̝̗͘a̴͎̎͋́n̸͙͑̿c̶͓͛e̴͇̓͠ ̷̘̲̅a̸͕̝̓͝t̷͈̤̚ ̷̭̭̅ͅo̷̗̱̲̐̒̕v̴̧̘̘̄́͛ë̵͚ŕ̴̥͗c̵͙͙̉ͅo̸̧̯͋m̸̝̳̚i̴̪̞̙̒n̷̨͈̱̈́̅g̶̡̓ ̸̲̱͛̏ȉ̵̱̓̔t̶̪̏.̷̮͓́”̴͉̘͈̑̅̚
“And if we tried that, I’m guessing it would feed on our godhood and grow even stronger, right?” For once, there was no teasing lilt in Kara’s voice, her expression subdued. “Meaning that even if we did try and fight it together, we could all still lose.”
“Then we should take action now, before it hatches!” snarled Blaze, stamping her hoof. “If we go down there and make sure to attack it at range-”
“Then we run the risk of causing the very thing we wish to avert,” cautioned Soft Whisper. “We have no idea what this ‘anti-god’ is capable of, even as an egg, and distance might not be the safeguard you think it is.”
“We need more information,” agreed Luminace. “Like, where did this thing come from? I thought it was just a sphere of annihilation, but apparently not...” She trailed off then, her eyes widening. “Or...or are all spheres of annihilation eggs of these creatures?!”
“They’re not,” cut in the Moon Princess. “I’ve heard of mortal wizards creating them before, along with certain creatures possessing powerful magic. They can’t all be incubating these primordial beings.”
The Moon Princess’s eyes widened at that. “The Ethereal Plane!” she blurted. “You’re saying that they were placed within the Deep Ethereal, beyond the Color Curtain!”
That answer only made her consternation worse. “But-, but how is it here, then?! Even the fringes of the Deep Ethereal are fraught with peril, and the deeper you go the more frequent the cosmic cyclones become, and the ether gaps become progressively larger! It’s why only the most ephemeral creatures are able to venture forth from the failed universes and unfulfilled timelines, being held at bay by the wall of dreams!”
“Unless a dream-binder had something to do with this,” muttered Luminace thoughtfully. “Isn’t that their power? To reach beyond the Color Curtain and bring things out of those failed existences?”
But the Moon Princess shook her head. “No, not like this. Not for something that eats the essence of godhood. Not even the Night Mare’s champion could do this, titan or no.”
“Then who did?” asked the Sun Queen quietly, still rocking Noble Bright as she held him to her chest.
“Whoever gave it to that treacherous little slut Adagio,” growled Kara. “I’m guessing even if they weren’t the one who brought it out of whatever ‘lacuna’ it was in, they know something about whoever did.”
“Don’t you know who that is?” bleated the Unspoken, his head now that of a goat. “You were keeping an eye on her all this time, weren’t you?”
Kara seemed to regain a bit of her impishness at that, chuckling in a self-conscious manner. “I mostly just checked in on her every so often to make sure she hadn’t tried to flee to some other world or anything like that. I only really stopped to watch what she was doing when she was getting busy.”
“Of course you did,” spat Blaze disgustedly.
Kara shrugged. “What can I say? Good porn is hard to find.”
Paying no attention to the love goddess’s banter, the Sun Queen looked at her sister. “If we can’t confront this thing without making it worse, then we need to alert our mortal champions. I will contact Iliana. Sister, you-”
A stricken look crossed the Sun Queen’s face at The Author’s pronouncement. “But the danger-”
“̷͙̱̕M̷̠̉͝a̴̻͈̓̌̀ḱ̶̨e̷̪͚͊s̷͖̤͓̐ ̷̲͙̈́̿͐f̴̲̤̞̉̄͂ǭ̶͊͝ȓ̷̻̖̀ ̷̥͊̓ā̵̡̏n̴͖͉͉̈͆̏ ̵̗̔i̵̻͖̞̿̂̇n̴͒̈̊͜ͅt̴͈̻̯̃͛̾ę̴̬̕r̴͎̃̈̐e̴̗̹̅ͅs̶̞̬͍̑t̴͕́i̷̝̽n̶͎̩̟̅͌̕g̶͋̄́͜ ̴̺͙̅̽ţ̶͇͆a̶̢̟̽͋͒ͅl̴̹̭̀̀͋ȩ̶̛̘̠͒̆,̶̯͚͔̇̋͝”̵͇̥͑͊ came the other deity’s reply. “̷̺͝Ì̵̢̯͒̋ͅ ̶̢̳̙͊̍͂w̷̜̹͋͐̐ì̸̛̬̝̐ľ̶̥̩̬ĺ̸̫̔ ̶̯͎͆͝n̵̫͌̒̍o̴͓̔̍t̸̩͎̩̊̾͝ ̸̨̛͙̫̔͒ḩ̶̍͂͘a̷̹͕͛̒v̷̫̝̈̌e̸̛̻͇̬͊ ̶͎͔̐̋̄Ĺ̸̼͐e̴̓̓̓͜x̴̺̾͝ ̵̧̡̱͋Ḻ̷̡͊̄͑ẻ̷̢͔̪̌g̴͔̞͐͑̄ḯ̸̥̮̻̓̑ś̸̰͝’̵̨̽ ̷̼̿̓͠ș̴̓͒ṭ̶̢͇̈́͘o̸͙̅r̶͙̅̍̈y̵̨͈̝͊͊ ̸͎̾̉d̶̞͂̋͠i̷̡̧͌̾̈́s̶̬͑ŗ̸̝͒ụ̶̰͊̈́p̸͈͋̑t̶̤̺͛ȅ̴͇̾̅d̴̺̗̳̋̽̌ ̴̟̟̪͒́͆b̶̩̳̀y̸̤̐ ̶̢̙͊̅s̷͚͖̾͂̆u̶͍͚̻͗c̷̞̥͕͒h̷̦̄̑ ̷̹̐̊̕b̷̢̜̫̋͗l̵̲̠̥͐̔a̶̢̗̯͑͌̓t̶̗̿̔͝a̶̤̚n̵̩̋͒̔ẗ̵̘́͐̓ ̴̲͍̖̽͗i̶̭̓̈n̶̫̋̊t̴̨͕̲̽̕ẻ̶͙̥͠ȑ̶͉͔͌̿v̶̼͍̓̒͝ë̴͓̻́n̷̫̫̐̽̓ṭ̴̞͔͌́͝i̸̲̻̪͝͠͝ǒ̶̖͔̹̉ń̷̖͓̪̿̐i̵̳̊͒s̸̩̤̯̎m̶͓̈́̌̑.̶͍͔̀”̴̡̼͍̾̈͠
“You can’t be serious!” The Moon Princess took a step toward The Author then. “This is worse than provoking war with the elves! If that ‘unmortal’ has the power to challenge our entire pantheon fresh from its egg, then Everglow itself might not survive its emergence!”
“Why are you acting like this doesn’t affect you?” pleaded Luminace. “You have worshipers here too! Ponies who’ve devoted their lives to you, and whose faith feeds you now!”
“So in other words, you’re betting all of our lives on Lex Legis, is that it?” snarled Blaze. “Either he finds a way to stop that thing on his own, or it hatches, in which case it either destroys the world – and all of the worshipers that we rely on for sustenance – or we fight it and probably die trying to put it down.”
“̴̩̳̟̊A̸̱̫̣͠ñ̵̼̹̟̽ ̷͕͛̉̍ā̶̢̨̠d̶͈̝̞̈́̈́ế̶̺q̵̙͖̜́͘u̵̢̻͚͑ā̵̦ţ̵̠͈͊̾e̴̙͓̟̾̆ ̶͖̀̈͋ṣ̴̨͐͒̈́u̴͔͛̓̀m̶͔̩͊̀m̴͎̂̀͝ä̷̛͉̫̝́r̷͔͐̿͠ỷ̴̺̞̇,̴̰̅”̷̻̫̟̿ agreed The Author, before turning in place to look at Blaze directly. “̴̳͒̓Ŭ̵̬̪̑n̵̘̿͒l̴̹̒̍͝e̴̖͖̳͛s̸̠̠̏̏ͅs̸̭̰͇͒ ̴͛ͅͅy̶̦̱̱̐o̵͉͋u̷̪̬̫̇͝ ̵̠̣̱̈̐w̶̨̜͊̿̚i̵̭͍͛͜s̷̰͑́h̸̢̛͔͛̃ ̴̧͍͕̀͝t̸̞͌͐ơ̷̺͔ ̷͓̮̾̊̍d̷̖̆ê̶͇̲̠̿f̶̧̲̙́̌̎ẏ̴̭̿ ̷̰̄m̵̖͙̖̈̌̈ÿ̴̭̯ͅ ̸͔͕̔̎̿d̴̩͎̟̈́͌e̸̢̬͎̅̎̀c̶̱̲͒̿͝r̷̬͘e̷̳̼̍͂ͅe̴͙̭̔.̷̜̝̎̀͠”̵̨͈͑
That statement was accompanied by the yellow-clad god’s hands unfolding, one reaching up toward their mask.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Silent up until now, the Night Mare didn’t bother to glance at The Author, nor at the rest of her fellow gods. Instead, she kept her eyes where they had been the entire time: directed toward the viewscreen showing where what had now become the battle for all of Everglow was taking place. “We’ll remain right here, all of us, and watch how things turn out.”
Blaze’s wings flared brighter at that. “Oh we will, will we?”
At last, the Night Mare turned away from the screen, joining The Author in looking at the war goddess. “Yes, we will. Or it won’t just be The Author that you go up against.”
The Moon Princess gave the armored goddess a bitter look. “That’s easy for you to say. You have ponies worshiping you on a second world now, unlike the rest of us.”
“It’s easy for me to say,” corrected the Night Mare, “because I know what my champion is capable of. Or have you forgotten how, only moments ago, he did as I foretold and overturned his own demise, predicted by the death goddess herself?”
“And made things worse!” protested Luminace.
“Which is when he’s at his best,” retorted the Night Mare, looking at each god in turn. “Watch and learn, all of you, as my most devoted worshiper overcomes this ordeal, and proves why he and I are the most fit to rule our respective dominions.”
She turned back to the viewscreen then, and slowly, all of the other gods did the same.
All but one.
Sniffling, looking past where the Sun Queen was cradling his head against her chest, Noble Bright frowned in confusion as he saw that Kara was looking at the Night Mare, an unexpected expression on her face:
Adagio’s frustrated shrieking was only barely audible over Kryonex’s pained scream, the demigod falling back as two of his legs cradled his injured face. The Siren, by contrast, was glaring at the black orb as it undulated, one hand gripping her necklace so tightly that her knuckles had turned white, the other held out toward the sphere in an attempt to reestablish control.
Lex had no intention of letting her do that, however.
In an instant, he was at Adagio’s side, reaching out and tearing the necklace from her. He received a sonic scream to the face for his trouble, but he ignored it, the magic shattering as it struck him. With her supply of aristeia depleted, Adagio had ceased to be any sort of threat to him; only the destructive power of that globe had let her make up the difference, and without the necklace she was incapable of even that much.
More importantly, with the necklace in his possession, he might be able to overpower Kryonex’s influence over the thing. Used in conjunction with Belligerence and whatever new power had let him transcend his physical body, he’d have the advantage for the first time since the conflict began.
Ignoring the way Adagio was screaming epithets at him – easily countering her ring’s telekinesis with his own as she tried in vain to take the talisman back – Lex placed the necklace around his own neck, the metal giving a chorus of tortured groans as the twisting wires of his body ground against it. Immediately, he focused his will on the orb-
To no avail.
Instead, the thing simply kept expanding, shrinking, and quivering in a chaotic flurry of motion, showing no response to his attempt to take control of it. That wasn’t entirely surprising, given how Adagio’s attempt to make it obey her had been similarly unsuccessful, but now that he couldn’t foresee what the orb was going to do, he’d needed to actively test whether that was because it required a greater degree of concentration to influence or because willpower no longer served to affect it at all.
Apparently the latter, he decided-
Just as Kryonex lashed out, a wide beam of absolute cold lancing out toward him and Adagio both.
Waving a foreleg in the Siren’s direction, Lex sent her tumbling harmlessly end over end back toward the cavern entrance even as he dodged in the other direction, the blast of power missing both of them. Go inside and stay there, ordered Lex. I’ll deal with you once I’ve finished things here.
“DON’T YOU TELL ME WHAT TO DO!” screamed Adagio, clenching her fists as she stood back up. “I’M NOT YOUR PLAYTHING! YOU’RE MINE! YOU AND EVERYONE ELSE-”
Lex ignored her as she continued to rant, instead sidestepping another three energy beams that lanced toward him from the wounded demigod’s position. Kryonex’s right pedipalp was completely gone, and his face was slightly pitted where it had brushed the edge of the orb, joining the collection of injuries that Lex had already dealt to him. But there was nothing to indicate that his ability to keep fighting was diminished as he conjured up a mound of ice the size of a castle and hurled it.
Directly at Adagio.
Knowing that Kryonex was trying to get him to drop his guard by rushing to Adagio’s rescue, Lex instead charged toward the demigod, not bothering to look at the Siren as he raised a hill-sized mound of black crystal between her and the gelid missile, which shattered into pieces as it struck the obstacle.
Then he was within range of Kryonex, springing toward the demigod’s mangled face with outstretched claws of whirring wire. Knowing that his enemy couldn’t target Adagio so long as he kept pressing him, Lex lashed out furiously, tearing deep grooves in his enemy’s chitinous legs as Kryonex parried his assault.
And then the demigod’s eyes flashed, and Lex found himself moving at a fraction of his usual speed.
It took him only the briefest instant to figure out what had happened, able to sense that Kryonex had frozen the individual molecules in the air around him. It wasn’t enough to paralyze him, the space between the particles too great and their collective mass too weak to restrain him, the effect functioning more like a net than a barrier.
But before he could either turn into shadow or simply tear the molecules apart, Kryonex took advantage of his momentary impairment.
One leg struck out, and Lex snarled impotently as the tip of it hooked underneath the necklace, taking it from him just as he’d taken it from Adagio. But unlike himself Kryonex apparently had no intention of trying to put it to use, his single remaining pedipalp twitching as he gave it a brief glance. “Better safe than sorry.”
Then he flung it directly at the malfunctioning sphere.
And from behind him, Lex heard Adagio cry out, followed by the sound of footsteps as she rushed out from behind the black crystals in an attempt to intercept the necklace.
Which, he knew in an instant, had been exactly what Kryonex had expected her to do, his eyes already darkening as he focused his will on the Siren who had caused him so much trouble.
But before he could, Lex reached into the pocket dimension he’d made shortly after becoming a titan, withdrawing a small diamond and crushing it.
And the gravity in the area around him increased several dozen times over.
His own power hadn’t been all that Lex had experimented with over the previous evening. He’d also made sure to use the diamonds that he’d found below Hvitdod’s lair to rebuild his arsenal of pre-cast spells, embedding several choice enchantments in the gemstones that he’d collected. Even then, he’d pressed the limits of what he could do, utilizing the spell-embedding crystal he’d found in conjunction with Nenet’s metamagic and his own ability to augment magic items to make for rapid-release spells of immense power.
The gravity well he’d just created was one of those, causing Kryonex to stumble as the downward pressure disrupted his concentration.
Turning into shadow to avoid the gravitic pull, Lex didn’t bother checking on the necklace, having already heard via his foresight Adagio’s despairing wail as it hit the sphere, unable to telekinetically grab something that small moving that fast. Instead, he immediately sped over to Kryonex, simultaneously retrieving Belligerence from where he’d thrown it. Turning back to his corporeal self just as the quill was within reach, he grasped the still-charged weapon and let the enhanced gravity take its course.
Beneath him, Kryonex cancelled out his spell, freezing gravity and trying to scuttle away, but it was too late. The weapon sank deep into his abdomen, and the demigod gave another ear-splitting screech, a jet of godsblood fountaining up from the wound-
And at the edge of his field of vision, Lex saw the black sphere suddenly rush toward them both.
Cursing, Lex barely had time to react as it sped across the valley, pulling Belligerence free and diving clear even as the demigod rolled out of its path, both ready to react depending on which of them it went after.
But instead, the ebony orb – still in a frenzy of expansion and contraction – went between them, its straight path changing into an arc...
As it moved to catch the spilled godsblood before it could hit the ground, the pale liquid instead disappearing into its lightless depths.
Immediately, the sphere ceased to move, hovering in place. But its lack of motion only highlighted how whatever was happening to it seemed to grow more intense, its size now changing so fast it seemed to be flickering in place.
Backing further away from the dangerous thing, Lex tried to figure out what was going on. Clearly the godsblood was destabilizing it somehow – its initial seizures had started when it had struck Kryonex, and now the liquid divinity was exacerbating the effect – but for it to suddenly move on its own like that...
Lex glanced at Adagio, confirming that she was inching back toward the black crystals he’d raised, her brows furrowed and her steps faltering. He knew she wasn’t behind what had just happened; even if she had regained the necklace – which the orb had swallowed in its mad rush forward – there was nothing to suggest that she suddenly would have been able to reestablish control over the thing. But if she didn’t move it, then who did?
As if in answer to that question, the sphere’s spastic trembling suddenly stopped.
Slowly, as if regaining control over itself, the dark orb expanded, growing outward until its diameter had almost tripled from its original size.
On the other side of it, Lex saw Kryonex’s eyes darken again, and knew that the demigod was bringing his will to bear on the sphere. He immediately did the same, intent on stopping it before his foe could try and drive it into him again. Its increased size – and his continued inability to foresee what it was going to do – notwithstanding, there was a good chance that its stabilization had left it able to be manipulated again.
Or not, as the sphere didn’t react to either of their efforts.
Instead, it hung in place for a half-second...and then began to drift gently in Kryonex’s direction.
The demigod gave ground immediately, and the sphere changed course accordingly, already speeding up as it tried to bridge the distance between itself and its target.
Which was all the impetus that Lex needed. He could figure out why the sphere was apparently acting without direction later; right now all that mattered was that it was targeting his enemy, which meant he needed to capitalize on the opportunity in front of him.
Circling around the demigod, he again called upon Nenet’s metamagic as he cast another spell. Immediately, a dozen copies of the astral construct that he’d used to fight Hvitdod appeared around him, and a thought was all it took to send them after the demigod.
But Kryonex was no mere dragon, lashing out as the monstrous figures lunged at him. Four were destroyed immediately, hit by freezing rays of energy as they rushed the demigod. Three more were only able to imperfectly dodge the incoming attacks, their partially-frozen forms staggered under the assault and unable to keep moving. But there were too many even for Kryonex to target, and the remaining five slammed into him, doing their best to hold him back as the sphere approached.
It was moving faster now.
Lex knew that his constructs wouldn’t be able to keep the demigod pinned down long enough for the sphere to make contact with him. But he was already raising more black crystals, compressing them and toughening them as he caused massive pillars to grow up out of the ground, looping around Kryonex’s legs in the form of thick shackles. Compared to what the demigod was capable of, they were little better than cardboard, but in conjunction with the constructs and several more spells-
Then Kryonex’s eyes flashed, and Adagio suddenly let out a frightened cry as the snow beneath her feet flowed like water, carrying her along like a leaf in a river.
Directly into the path of the oncoming sphere.
Realizing what was happening, Adagio tried to get out of the way, attempting to use her telekinetic ring to lift herself up and out of harm’s way. But again, her inexperience with that item betrayed her, the ring’s aura only causing her to lurch to the side drunkenly before sputtering out. Another sonic scream fared no better, her magic not generating any sort of recoil, and even her attempt to throw herself down and let the oncoming orb pass overhead was foiled as Kryonex caused the snow to surge up her legs, hardening into ice thicker than steel.
Lex was already moving. The sphere was continuing to increase its speed, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t surpass, closing the distance to Adagio-
And Kryonex froze the air around him again, the demigod laughing darkly. “How far will you go to save your inamorata, I wonder?”
Snarling, Lex turned into a shadow-
Only to immediately be pummeled by a half-dozen energy blasts, reeling backward and returning to corporeal form as he put everything he had into dodging.
Stop him from attacking!
Lex knew the order was futile even as he gave it. His astral automatons were powerful, but compared to a demigod they were little better than a pack of toothless hounds, able to harry his enemy but not truly harm him. Even now, as their claws swiped at Kryonex’s wounds and struck at his outstretched legs, they didn’t succeed in disrupting the ice deity’s aim in the slightest.
Meanwhile, the sphere was growing closer to Adagio, the Siren’s struggles growing more frantic as she tried – and failed – to get away. “Do something!” she shrieked, her eyes widening and voice an octave higher at how small the distance between herself and the sphere was growing. “DO SOMETHING!!!”
But Kryonex’s attacks were growing too furious for Lex to even be able to respond, let alone put a plan into action.
Once again, the demigod had managed to turn what should have been a bad situation to his advantage.
All while the orb sped up further.
“LEX!!!”
There were any number of strategies that he could have tried. From throwing her a spell-infused gem that would have let her turn into mist the way Solvei could, to teleporting to her side and carrying her out of danger, to raising her out of the way on a plateau of black crystals, to simply warding himself as best he could and taking the hits as he concentrated on telekinetically moving Adagio to safety, Lex had many options.
But just because he had options didn’t mean that they were good ones.
The same way he could think of various ways to try and rescue Adagio, he could also think of ways that Kryonex could foil each and every one of them. And he knew that if he could see how each of his stratagems could be thwarted, the demigod could also. A thrown gem could be blown off-course. A plateau of black crystals was just asking to be shattered as the orb passed through it. Teleporting to her position would precipitate a heavy push from Kryonex to knock them both into the sphere. Even accepting the damage that came with trying to telekinetically yank Adagio out of the orb’s path was risky in the extreme, since it was highly likely that Kryonex would simply harden the ice around her legs in response to his trying to pull her free.
Which left only one solution. One way to keep Adagio from being destroyed, body and soul – and Lex had no doubt that if the sphere could annihilate divinity itself, it could destroy souls – by the weapon she’d so foolishly brought onto the battlefield.
All he needed to do betray his most cherished principle, and he’d be able to keep his promise to Sonata and Aria.
Had he still been a mortal pony, Lex would have hesitated. Even as a titan, he would have balked at what he was about to do. But with the newfound clarity that his most recent transformation had given him, those doubts didn’t slow him in the slightest as he moved into position. Instead, he paused just long enough to send Adagio one simple message.
I promise I’ll bring you back.
Wide-eyed with terror, the sphere now less than a stone’s throw away from her and closing fast, Adagio looked up at him. “Wha-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Belligerence pierced her heart, killing her instantly.
Lex watched, unable to look away, as Belligerence left his grasp.
Despite the continuous energy blasts from Kryonex, the flaming rocks falling from the sky, and the persistent blizzard, he didn’t take his eyes off of the quill as it lanced through the air. As if in slow motion, it flew directly at Adagio, the Siren not even seeing its approach as she stared at the approaching sphere with wide eyes, tugging futilely at the ice holding her legs in place.
A moment later his promise reached her, assuring her that this wasn’t the end, that he’d bring her back to life.
But he couldn’t tell if that brought her any comfort before Belligerence pierced her straight through, the quill punching a hole through her chest – obliterating her heart in a single instant – and hitting the ground a dozen yards away.
And Adagio slumped in place, her eyes open but unseeing as blood splattered onto the snow beneath her.
It was done.
He’d killed her.
He’d saved her.
Lex had just enough time to confirm that, already having switched his vision so that he could see Adagio’s life force dissipate, vanishing completely-
Then the black sphere passed over her, and she was gone.
Lex knew he should have been struck by that. He should have been overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he’d just done. No matter the justification, no matter that death wasn’t irreversible for him, he’d crossed a line that he’d sworn would always remain inviolate. Worse, the pony whose life he’d snuffed out was Sonata and Aria’s sister, Nenet’s mother, whom he’d promised to bring back alive. After what had happened with Panuk, to say nothing of all the hapless creatures from the Plane of Ice that Kryonex had driven him to slaughter, the magnitude of his actions should have shaken him to the core.
Instead, he felt mildly irritated at how he couldn’t seem to control the pace of the fight, letting Kryonex again dictate how things played out.
But that’s over now, Lex decided as he dropped out of the sky, retrieving the quill before turning his attention back to the demigod. It’s time to finish this.
As it was, the black sphere seemed intent on doing that for him, closing the distance between itself and Kryonex with ever-increasing velocity. But the demigod had no intention of letting it make contact with him again, easily flinging off the astral constructs trying to hold him down, the black crystal shackles that Lex had put around his legs shattering like glass. Darting back, he moved in a wide berth, letting the orb follow him as he circled around.
Back toward Lex.
That wasn’t unexpected, of course. Quite the opposite, turning disadvantages on their head so as to gain a strategic edge was entirely in keeping with how Kryonex had acted so far. With that sphere focused on him, and growing progressively faster, it made sense that he’d try to fight in close quarters, where there would be more opportunities to knock him into the dark globe’s path.
The most tactically-sound response, Lex knew, was to maintain distance, attacking at range with magic that would hamper his enemy’s mobility until the sphere could finish Kryonex off. It wasn’t an unviable strategy; he had a plethora of spells left, and while their ability to impede the demigod’s movement was likely to be questionable at best, time was on his side. So long as the sphere kept targeting his enemy, and maintained its acceleration, victory was likely just a matter of time now so long as he hung back and played it safe.
Instead, he snatched up Belligerence, grunting as he again overcharged the weapon – the act was more difficult now, his reserves running low – and then rushed to meet Kryonex head-on.
A ranged battle was the safest bet, but it would take time to work. Right now Kryonex was still able to keep ahead of the black sphere easily, and Lex wasn’t sure what the demigod’s top speed was. That meant that there was a very real possibility that Kryonex would be able to make this a close-range battle regardless of what he threw at him. Worse, it meant that he could conceivably expend all of the movement-restricting spells he had before the sphere had sped up enough to where Kryonex couldn’t dodge it...and that was if the sphere didn’t reach its own top speed, presuming that it even had one, first.
But that wasn’t the main reason why Lex abandoned caution as he charged toward his enemy, bellowing a roar of challenge.
Rather, it was because his transformation was wearing off.
Within the mass of wires that was his body, he could feel his heart beating again, the fleshy organ restored where only seconds ago there had been nothing but metal strands. Nor was it alone, as he could feel his irritation turning into an undercurrent of fury, heralding that the unity between his pony intellect and beastly instincts was beginning to fray.
Maybe this form was inherently time-limited. Maybe it was because of how he kept expending energy to charge Belligerence. Maybe it was because what had happened with Adagio had made it impossible to maintain his newfound equilibrium. Whatever the cause, his current state was coming apart, and while Lex could instinctively tell that he’d still be a titan when it was over – the fact that his heart was functioning without issue despite being connected to strands of wire was all the proof he needed that he was still beyond issues of mortality – that wouldn’t be enough if Kryonex tried to will him out of existence again.
Time was running out, for him and his foe both.
Lex had every intention of making sure that Kryonex’s expired first.
Neither slowed down as the two of them closed, and they collided with enough force that it shook the entire valley. Snarling as his wards against cold again collapsed, Lex ignored the rush of cold – now slightly more painful than when his transformation had been complete – and thrust Belligerence forward, trying to divide his enemy’s attention between the quill and the sphere. Kryonex crossed two of his legs in front of him, bringing them down and catching Belligerence between them, the barbs scraping pieces of his chitin off but doing no real damage even as two more legs lashed out at Lex.
Flipping upward, the titan dodged the first one and deflected the second, but the third caught him across the side. Hissing, Lex accepted the hit in exchange for being able to sink his claw into his enemy’s metatarsus, using Belligerence as a lever as he folded his enemy’s leg over it. Immediately, the existing cracks in the leg’s exoskeleton began to worsen, the limb being bent in the wrong direction as Lex applied all the force he was capable of.
In response, Kryonex dropped and rolled, sacrificing his leg as the chitin splintered as he swung Lex around-
Directly into the path of the approaching sphere.
But Lex had seen it coming, already abandoning his hold on Kryonex’s leg to instead fling Belligerence at the demigod’s injured leg, even as he turned into a shadow, intent on squeezing through the scant inches between the ground – that end of the valley far enough from the lava flow that it was still covered in Kryonex’s ice, making it impervious to incorporeal movement – and the sphere.
In response to which the demigod – eyes flashing even as Belligerence bit deep into his leg, the quill nearly severing the end of it completely – raised the surrounding ice, bringing up two large walls on either side in order to eliminate any avenue of escape as the sphere barreled toward Lex.
But that ice shattered as black crystals rose up from the ground to displace it, the ebony material having no such impermeability as Lex’s shadow form sank into it, letting the black sphere pass by overheard-
And changed directions, instead moving downward toward him!
If Lex had created a lesser amount of crystals, he would have met his end right then, instead just barely managing to slip by it and rush through the remaining underground portions of crystal as the sphere chased after him, consuming everything it touched. Kryonex was already stabbing the ground ahead of him, trying to shatter the remaining crystals before Lex could resurface, but he wasn’t fast enough as Lex exited the crystals through a particularly large stalagmite, seamlessly turning back to solid form and slipping beneath Kryonex, dodging four different legs as he telekinetically picked up Severance again, the orb following close behind him-
Only to veer off-course and shoot toward Kryonex once again, forcing the demigod shake it off with a hurried dodge to his left, Lex already moving to keep his enemy between himself and the sphere.
It’s acting like a lodestone, with divinity being the magnets, he noted, sinking another charge into Belligerence as he moved to counter the demigod’s repositioning himself. Kryonex has more godhood than I do, which means he exerts a stronger pull on it, but if I move too close then the godsblood I absorbed will cause it to target me instead.
Of course, if he had figured that out, then there was no question that Kryonex had also.
That was enough to earn a derisive snort from Lex – his lungs now also having reformed – as he threw himself back into the fight.
Already, Kryonex was trying to move the sphere to his advantage, dodging another thrust from Lex’s quill as a sweep of his leg knocked Lex toward the sphere, which veered toward him. Dodging it by inches, he spun and jabbed Belligerence at the demigod’s flank, one leg coming up to parry the blow, the limb’s proximity to the sphere causing it to change targets back to Kryonex. Pressing the advantage, Lex immediately turned and aimed at his enemy’s head, narrowly dodging a point-blank blast of freezing energy as Belligerence scraped across the demigod’s remaining pedipalp, the demigod backpedaling quickly enough that the sphere zipped toward Lex again, forcing him to cut dangerously close to it as he closed the gap and led it back toward Kryonex again.
The exchanges continued as the speed of all involved grew ever greater, the sphere’s ever-increasing haste forcing the titan and demigod both to match its speed, knowing that whoever couldn’t keep up would be the first to fall. Even then, they continued to lash out at each other, wounds accumulating as cold and claws, spells and legs slammed into the other, all while dodging the sphere by thinner and thinner margins.
All the while, Lex continued to change back from the inside out, as wire became bones, organs, and muscles once more.
And it was growing progressively harder to keep charging Belligerence with enough power to make it a credible threat against Kryonex.
In their battle of attrition, Lex could tell that he was going to give out first.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than the wire covering him gave out completely, leaving him clad in flesh, fur, and clothes, the strands of metal once again wrapped only around the lower part of his foreleg.
Kryonex’s eyes lit up so brightly they glowed, increasing the pace of his attacks.
Lex tried to fall back, putting more room between himself and the demigod as he tried to think of a new plan, but Kryonex didn’t give him the chance. Pressing his assault, he struck out again and again, hitting Lex with more cold than he could withstand, wards crumbling before he could even begin to raise them. A rain of blows hit him, forcing him to use a healing spell on himself, which earned him only a few seconds of continued activity as the demigod continued to dial up the ferocity of his attacks, leaving Lex stumbling as he tried to recover-
And found the black sphere swooping in.
He could already tell that there wouldn’t be any escape this time. Kryonex had every conceivable path of escape covered, having surrounded them with ice thick enough that his black crystals would never have broken through it in time. More than that, Lex had already expended all of his remaining teleportation spells in the last exchange, used up in an effort to out-maneuver the demigod. And now he had nothing left.
It was over.
Then the black sphere rushed in...
And stopped.
For the briefest instant, Lex could only stare, shocked by the unexpected reprieve. Then he took advantage of the opening, spearing another of Kryonex’s legs with Belligerence and opening up a way out, putting some distance between the orb and the demigod both. The fact that he faced no pushback or retaliation in doing so was a silent testament to the fact that whatever had just happened hadn’t been Kryonex’s doing either; whatever had stopped the sphere had caught him by surprise as well.
Could the thing not detect me once I changed back? It was the only explanation that Lex could think of, but he knew it was a poor one. He was still the recipient of godsblood in this form. Moreover, he’d been between Kryonex and the orb; even if it didn’t register him as a target anymore, it should still have moved through him to get to Kryonex the same way it had Adagio.
Adagio...
All at once, the full weight of what he’d done slammed into him, and Lex put a claw to his forehead, unable to come to terms with his actions. Despite knowing the danger he was in – Kryonex was staring at the sphere, no doubt trying to ascertain the reason for its sudden quiescence, but his stupefaction wouldn’t last long – Lex couldn’t help but look at where she’d died, even though he was aware that there was nothing to see.
He didn’t care, taking a faltering step toward where he’d killed both her and the most important part of himself-
And out of his peripheral vision he saw the sphere vanish, instantaneously reappearing in the space he’d just vacated.
It was instinct alone – his inner beast’s reflexes kicking in – that caused him to dodge out of the way as it rushed him, missing it by a literal hair’s breadth, all pathos forgotten in the wake of what had just happened.
But the sphere didn’t pursue him, instead blinking out of existence again...just as Kryonex threw himself backward so fast even Lex’s mystic senses could barely follow it, the orb appearing where the demigod had been.
Teleporting.
The thing was teleporting. In spite of the wards he’d put up – wards capable of keeping Kryonex himself from moving between dimensions – the sphere was able to do so, flitting between Everglow and the Astral Plane in a span of time too small to be measured.
But that wasn’t sent a shudder down Lex’s spine.
Prior to now, he had thought the sphere’s movements were some sort of simple reaction between its substance – or lack thereof – and divinity. While the relationship between the energies involved was beyond his understanding, their manifestation had seemed simple enough, with one serving to attract the other.
Now he knew better.
The sphere hadn’t been following them; it had been chasing them. Instead of moving to catch them, it had been trying to catch them. It hadn’t stopped because of some change in its environment.
It had stopped because it had become frustrated.
After repeatedly coming so close to the two creatures that it was hunting, yet continually being denied despite its best efforts, it had abandoned the pursuit. Instead, it had taken a few moments to think of a new plan. And once it had, it adjusted its tactics accordingly.
Whatever that thing was, it was intelligent.
And that, along with its ability to teleport in spite of is wards, made it an enemy far more dangerous than Kryonex.
Moving faster than a mortal eye would have been able to follow, Lex didn’t stop for an instant, remaining in constant motion. In the time it took to blink, Lex had already crossed the valley several dozen times, making sure never to take the same path twice. He’d also used his shadow-form to its fullest, conjuring black crystals to displace Kryonex’s ice – since it remained impervious to incorporeality – so that he’d be able to move through the ground as well, broadening his range.
All of which was just barely enough to keep him ahead of the teleporting sphere.
Without being able to see the thing’s future, there was no way for Lex to predict where it was going to teleport next. So he’d been forced to keep it guessing in turn, moving as fast as he could in order to dodge the sphere’s attempts to simply shift to wherever he was at a given moment, avoiding it by the thinnest of margins. Although it would immediately rush after him after each teleportation, he was still able to outpace the thing, and it would invariably give up after only a short pursuit to instead try teleporting again.
The result was that the sphere was putting whatever intelligence it had to use, trying to anticipate where he was going to be instead of simply teleporting to where he was. But it had been easy for Lex to guess that the orb would try that. Aiming ahead of a moving target was a basic principle of ranged combat, even when the technique being utilized was tactical teleportation, and he’d made sure to avoid moving in patterns, changing direction multiple times in any given second in order to throw it off.
It was a strategy he could pursue only because he was a titan. Ignoring inertia, pushing the air out of his way via will alone, and feeling no strain despite continuous exertion were all things that would have been beyond any mortal. Nor were any of those the hard part.
Rather, the hard part was continuing his fight with Kryonex while simultaneously avoiding the sphere.
But I’ll be the one who wins! snarled Lex inwardly as he cast an overcharged, metamagic-enhanced spell just as Kryonex passed above a particularly large patch of black crystals that he’d previously made. Instantly, the rigid protrusions sprung up on either side of the demigod like the jaws of a beartrap, snapping shut against his exoskeleton even as the entire mass plunged into the earth, collapsing in on itself as though a sinkhole had opened up underneath it.
Kryonex vanished immediately, and while Lex knew that wouldn’t hold the demigod for very long, it might give the sphere a chance to catch up to him-
But even as he saw the orb vanish again, the ground exploded – not near the sinkhole, but over a hundred yards distant – and Kryonex shot into the sky, having managed to extricate himself in time.
Nor was he content simply to run, as his eyes flashed again, in response to which a nearby drift of snow rose up, shaping itself to become sixteen life-sized replicas of the demigod, all of which immediately scuttled toward Lex.
At a glance, Lex could tell that Kryonex had created copies far beyond anything Grisela could have dreamed of making. Each one was not only autonomous, just like his astral constructs, but was completely self-sustaining, able to maintain its structure indefinitely rather than losing cohesion after a set duration.
But compared to what Lex could do now, the ice golems weren’t even a speedbump. A single spell sent a cascade of rubicund rays toward them, Nenet’s metamagic enabling the fiery beams to punch through the golems’ defenses as each shot curved after striking its target, arcing back around and repeatedly lancing through the ice-spiders again and again in a coruscating tide of destruction. Seconds later, the golems were nothing more than puddles of steaming water.
Leaving Lex and Kryonex back at square one, as the sphere continued to teleport after them.
But that didn’t mean that they were on equal footing. Although the demigod’s situation was the same as his own, Kryonex was being preferentially targeted. Having more divinity, the sphere seemed to consider him a greater priority, giving Lex slightly more room to go on the attack. Even better, Kryonex’s larger size meant that the sphere had more to go after, giving Lex a slightly larger window of opportunity in terms of slowing the demigod down.
But so far his every effort to capitalize on those advantages had fallen through, and the battle had turned into a stalemate, with neither of them able to effectively impair the other enough for the sphere to finish them off.
Considering that he’d lost whatever transformation he’d undergone, Lex knew that he was fortunate. If Kryonex had been any less harried, the demigod would doubtlessly have immediately attempted to will him out of existence again. As it was, even if he overcame the demigod, Lex knew the sphere would target him next, and he had no idea what to do when that happened. You couldn’t destroy something that was composed of literal nothingness!
The best idea he could come up with was to try and dump it on some other plane of existence, but if it could teleport through wards that even a demigod couldn’t breach, then he couldn’t imagine mere dimensional barriers would be enough to keep the thing at bay.
But that was a problem he’d need to solve later. Right now, Kryonex was an opponent that he could at least defeat-
That was when the universe began to collapse.
Or at least, that’s how it seemed to Lex, as all of a sudden everything – light, gravity, magic, and everything else that he could detect – was upended, folding in on themselves as they began to fall...
Toward the black orb.
No longer moving because it no longer had to, the sphere now sat at the center of everything, the fabric of the universe flowing into it like water down a drain. Air, stone, snow, lava, and everything else went tumbling toward the lightless orb, consumed as soon as they touched its edge, and Lex struggled to keep himself from being pulled in as well.
Willing reality to move him away from the sphere even as reality fell into it, the titan cursed himself for his shortsightedness. How could he not have foreseen this?! The thing was a void; by its very nature it should have sat at the center of a massive vortex, pulling everything nearby toward itself! But he’d taken its contained nature for granted, accepting as a given that it could only affect things it made physical contact with.
Now he was paying the price for his mistake.
But he wasn’t the only one, as Kryonex was also trying to frantically free himself from the thing’s pull.
Then the demigod glanced at him, and one leg shot out as he fired a blast of gelid energy directly at Lex’s face.
The beam, however, was just as subject to the sphere’s vortex as everything else, and it curved away, the space that it was moving through falling toward the orb and sending the blast off-target.
Lex watched carefully as the beam fell short, carefully calculating the rate of collapse, and when he retaliated a moment later, he made sure his own spell took that into account.
Then he created an open pit directly in front of where Kryonex was moving.
Under any other circumstances such a simple spell – the one he’d used to end his fight with Fail Forward during their first meeting – wouldn’t have done anything. The pit itself was too narrow to hold a creature of Kryonex’s size, it was meant to be placed on the ground rather than the open air, and his anti-teleportation wards should have prevented him from opening an extradimensional pocket in the first place.
But Nenet’s metamagic allowed him to widen the hole. Mystaria’s clasp let him ignore the effects of his own ward. And Solvei’s cryomancy let him conjure a massive iceberg right in front of Kryonex, placing the hole directly on the side facing Kryonex as the sphere’s vortex immediately sent it rushing toward the demigod.
Black crystals would have served just as well as ice, noted Lex hatefully, watching as Kryonex’s eyes flashed, shattering the iceberg.
But I knew that you’d try to counter it like that, rather than dodge, if I used your own element.
By all rights, the hole that he’d created should have collapsed in on itself as soon as the iceberg shattered. The spell’s structure required that the opening to the extradimensional space be anchored to something – normally the ground – in order to sustain itself. But that had been his own contribution to the spell, feeding it enough additional energy during the casting to override that restriction, allowing for the space to maintain itself even without a focal point.
Like an immense open sack that could only be seen from the inside, the pit fell directly toward Kryonex, still caught in the sphere’s inexorable pull. The demigod was already moving, trying to leap clear of the falling portal, knowing that it dead-ended a few hundred feet past its entrance. But shattering the ice it had appeared on instead of getting clear had cost him, and it was too late to make up the difference.
An instant later, Kryonex was scooped up like a butterfly in a net.
Barely managing to hold his position, Lex watched as the demigod immediately tried to climb out, there being nothing within it to anchor him there. But that only served to make Kryonex’s situation worse, as simply exiting the extradimensional oubliette meant that he had to move back in the direction it was facing: toward the sphere. And with how rapidly the entryway was being drawn into it, Lex could already tell that the demigod wouldn’t get clear in time.
Kryonex seemed to realize that too, because what he did next was pure desperation:
His eyes darkening, he tore off one of his legs – the one Lex had previously speared straight through with Belligerence – and hurled it directly at the black orb, the limb trailing godsblood as it fell into the void.
Lex tried to catch it in his telekinesis, knowing that Kryonex was hoping a new infusion of divinity would disrupt the sphere’s vortex, causing it to go into another frenzy of expansion and contraction like when it had devoured his pedipalp. But now Kryonex’s closeness to the sphere worked to his advantage, and Lex couldn’t catch the falling leg in time, the rent limb and its liquid godhood being swallowed up by the lightless globe.
And just like that, the universe fell back into normalcy.
Lex righted himself immediately, moving to rush Kryonex as he charged Belligerence-
Only for nothing to happen, save for a strained ache to flow through him, causing Lex to snarl in panic.
The immense reserves of power that he was able to channel through his physical self – so much greater than when he was mortal, but still finite – had finally been used up.
He couldn’t overcharge Belligerence, or any of his thaumaturgical spells, anymore. Not until he had a chance to rest and recover his strength.
It took him only a fraction of a second to recalculate his plans now that Belligerence couldn’t pierce Kryonex’s defenses, forming new strategies based exclusively around spell usage. But that was all it took for the demigod to extricate himself from the extradimensional pit – now hanging stationary in the air – and tumble out, immediately distancing himself from Lex and the sphere both.
Not that he needed to worry about the latter, as it was once again immobile, reacting to the new infusion of divinity that it had received.
Except this time, its response to absorbing godhood wasn’t a mad frenzy of changing size. Instead, it seemed almost quiescent, hanging in the air without any-
No. Something was happening.
As Lex watched, the sphere’s shape slowly started to change. It wasn’t like before, when it had briefly seemed to quiver and compress before returning to its perfectly round shape. Instead, a bulge appeared, the surface deforming outward in an irregular outline. A moment later it died down, only to happen in a different part of the sphere. Then in a third spot, pressing further outward this time, the motion becoming quicker and more violent. It was almost as if...
Lex’s eyes widened as he realized what the sphere’s behavior reminded him of.
It was like there was something inside of it trying to get out.
Lex had no idea if any of those ideas adequately described what was happening to the sphere. Perhaps none of them were correct. Or maybe even all of them; there was no way to know.
All he was certain of was that whatever was happening could only be catastrophic in nature. A mere infusion of negative energy was enough to turn an ordinary mortal into a slavering undead creature. Anything for which pure nothingness was some sort of incubator – or pathway, or even a survivable prison – had to be something completely incompatible with the rest of the universe.
It was entropy taken not just to its end state, but beyond it. A breakdown not toward disorder and decay, but to absolute destruction, with nothing left to even begin rebuilding. Annihilation of even the gods, which represented the very apex of what it meant to exist.
And that was just the sphere itself.
Whatever was about to emerge from it, Lex knew, had to be even worse.
This was no longer simply a duel with a demigod; it was ground zero for the end of everything.
Cursing, Lex deployed every supernatural faculty at his disposal to try and analyze the thing, supplementing it with a spell to detect any weaknesses or flaws that it possessed even as he simultaneously lashed out with a magical attack. Even without being able to overcharge his magic, he could still cast spells with prowess beyond that of any mortal, each one operating at the maximum potential possible within its parameters.
Neither did anything.
The analysis spell didn’t even register that there was anything there, finding quite literally nothing to examine. His other spell – designed to disrupt the movement of energy within a given system of operation – was simply absorbed, the sphere showing no reaction as the magic hit it and was immediately undone.
All while it continued to bulge from the inside out.
“It seems this thing grows stronger the more divine essence it absorbs.”
Lex didn’t glance at Kryonex, already midway through casting more spells, but he knew he couldn’t afford to ignore the demigod. “We need to stop whatever’s in there before it emerges! It’s not just a threat to the two of us anymore!”
His spells went off a moment later – a ray of negative energy, followed by a spell designed to interfere with cognitive function – hitting the sphere dead-center...again to no effect.
“Agreed.” A half-dozen beams of brilliant blue energy cut through the air, engulfing the sphere completely.
But when the barrage of power ceased, it still hung in the air, not even seeming to have noticed the attack. Instead, its surface continued to deform irregularly, the outward bulges continuing from every direction.
It can’t break free yet, Lex realized, pausing as he considered the sphere’s actions. It needs more divinity. Which means that we have maybe a few seconds left before it realizes that and resumes attacking.
Kryonex seemed to think so as well, because the demigod’s eyes darkened again as he glared at the orb, and Lex could almost feel the force of his enemy’s resolve being brought to bear, trying to destroy the sphere through sheer willpower. Stepping back, Lex mentally ran through what spells he had that might be effective against the demigod even without being overcharged, knowing that if Kryonex succeeded at unmaking the orb, he would be next.
And that possibility seemed eminently likely, as the dark globe quivered beneath the force of Kryonex’s will. Even as Lex watched, its surface rippled, and the asymmetrical bulges from within it died down. It seemed to diminish slightly then, as though shrinking back down...
Then it gave a single pulse, contracting and expanding like a beating heart, and Kryonex recoiled as if struck. “I can’t reach it! It’s negated-”
He didn’t finish, leaping aside just as the sphere teleported to where he’d been a moment ago, Lex immediately following suit. “What happened?!”
“I don’t know!” Kryonex didn’t bother attacking, instead focusing everything he had on staying out of the sphere’s way. “It abrogated my attempt to influence it somehow!”
Cursing inwardly, Lex tried to figure out what to do now. Although he and Kryonex could both continue dodging indefinitely, that wasn’t a viable strategy. At some point, the sphere would catch up to one or the other of them, whether because it managed to anticipate their moves, pulled them in with another vortex, or simply deployed yet another new power out of nowhere.
But with nothing else working, Lex couldn’t see any other alternative but to maintain their desperate evasion.
His tulpa couldn’t help; according to his foresight, asking it for something that could damage, impede, or restrain this thing would only return a response of “capacity exceeded.” Bringing forth the Armor of Renewing Light had apparently pushed the thing to its limits, at least with regard to finding something which could help with the current situation.
But with his spells ineffective, Kryonex’s strongest power nullified, and no way to physically damage the orb, what was left?
“Lower your wards!” shouted Kryonex, barely managing to stay ahead of the sphere; once again, he seemed to be its preferred target. “If I leave, there’s less divine essence for it to absorb!”
“That won’t do any good if it follows you!” shot back Lex. “And even if it doesn’t, I might have enough divinity for it to finish evolving! We have to stop it here!”
“And in what manner do you propose we accomplish that?!”
Lex grit his teeth, not having an answer to give, even as he barely outmaneuvered a sudden reappearance of the sphere right in front of him. Dodging with everything he had, he wracked his brain, trying to come up with something. There had to be some way to stop it; some vulnerability or limitation which could be exploited. Even if it couldn’t be destroyed, it could at least be contained, or even...
Suddenly, he had an idea.
“I have a plan! Draw it off!”
To Kryonex’s credit, he didn’t engage in baseless suspicions or demand to know what he was going to try. Instead, he simply closed the distance between them, moving close enough to draw the sphere’s attention. Sure enough, it teleported itself at him once again, the demigod continuing to stay ahead of it despite his missing leg.
Lex didn’t let his chance go to waste.
A single command to his tulpa was all it took, his trans-temporal sense already telling him that it was a request that it was capable of fulfilling.
Then he rushed back toward where the demigod and the sphere were engaged in their mad dance. “Fall back!”
Kryonex immediately leaped up and away, even as Lex drew in closer, making an oblique approach as he tried his best to keep his movements unpredictable. Even if he’d managed to procure the tool necessary to try this, his foresight couldn’t tell him if it would work or not.
If it didn’t, he probably wouldn’t live long enough to realize it.
A half-second later, the sphere teleported to where he’d just been, Lex lurching away from it by less than an inch even as he brought his left foreleg around...
And used the Charismata.
“REMAIN STILL!” he bellowed, channeling the divine power he’d been given directly at the thing.
Except, not directly at it.
Instead, he sent it through the ornate vambrace that his tulpa had brought forward – which it had called the Netherweave Dominion – and then toward the sphere.
The vambrace itself was haunting to look at. Wrought of obsidian plates, its design perfectly fit between the wires that surrounded his foreleg, each piece of dark rock fitted with clasps that connected it snugly to the metal mesh and the surrounding bits of black stone. Nor were the pieces blank, as each one was carved with a rune; the same runes that he’d learned from Solvei.
And as he gave his command, the rune-inscribed plates shifted, rearranging themselves so that they spelled a description of the sphere...rearranging the position of the barbed wire around his leg as they did.
That should have been impossible, Lex knew. That wire was nothing less than the Night Mare’s investiture of a sliver of her own godhood in him, a physical representation of the metaphysical nature of the divine. It was what held the power of the Charismata, and manifested her will in response to his actions. To deliberately alter it the way he was doing now shouldn’t have been within his power.
But apparently it was within the Netherweave Dominion’s.
Around his foreleg, the wires bent and warped at the direction of the vambrace. They tore through his flesh, shredding skin and muscle with no regard for the defenses that a titan possessed. Blood dripped onto the ground, even as the invisible bands of power that were the Charismata stretched out, feelings oddly contorted even as they wrapped around where the sphere was rushing toward him...
And stopped it cold.
It had worked.
Though, from how he could see the sphere seeming to vibrate within the Charismata’s grasp, it wasn’t hard to tell that it had only worked by the thinnest of margins.
But this confirms it, Lex knew. This thing has the same weakness now as it did when Adagio deployed it. It’s just gotten better at compensating for it.
It was all a matter of will.
When Adagio had brought the orb onto the battlefield, she had controlled it via concentration, albeit with a tool designed specifically to amplify the force of her determination. That had only ended when it had absorbed godsblood, the essence of divinity, which Lex knew from personal experience was the power to impose your own will onto reality itself, bending the universe to operate how you wished it to.
He also knew that a small enough dose would only let you change yourself...which was exactly what the sphere had done. It had demonstrated intelligence, gained the power to teleport, and even created a vortex around itself. A second infusion had let it begin to extend its newfound power further, somehow shutting down Kryonex’s attempt to destroy it outright, likely previewing what would happen if it got enough divinity to complete whatever transformation it was undergoing.
But the very fact that it had needed to negate the demigod’s focused willpower – unlike how it had ignored all of the magical attacks Lex had thrown at it – was proof that it had been affected by it.
And while Lex only had a miniscule amount of divinity within himself, he also had the sliver of godhood that the Night Mare had given him in the form of the Charismata.
All he’d needed was the Netherweave Dominion to reshape the Charismata into a format capable of affecting the sphere, rather than magical beasts.
Asking his tulpa for an item that could overcome the orb directly had been a mistake. Fortunately, he’d realized in time that he’d needed to ask it for an item that would give him the power to overcome it.
Then the sphere gave another pulse, and the Charismata shut down completely, the barbed wire around his leg becoming nothing more than mundane loops of metal.
Cursing, Lex barely managed to evade the sphere as it rocketed forward the instant its shackles were gone, having expected something like that to happen. Kryonex was a weak excuse for a demigod, even more so with how injured he was, but he was still here in his entirety, whereas the Charismata was just a fragment of the Night Mare’s divine majesty. If the sphere could throw off the manifestation of the former’s will, it hadn’t been impossible to think that it could do the same for the latter.
But there was an upside to that as well.
“My power is no longer being held in check!” announced Kryonex, eyes flashing as he again concentrated on the sphere, which quivered once more as the demigod hit it with an onslaught of will.
No sooner had he finished speaking than the sphere gave another beat, and the demigod’s eyes darkened as he grunted.
But at the same time, Lex felt the Charismata’s power return.
It’s gained some sort of negation ability, but it can only use it on one of us at a time.
It didn’t mean that victory was guaranteed. Far from it, the orb still possessed numerous overwhelming advantages. But now, at least, there was a way for them to affect it, possibly even destroy it. It was a thin hope, and it wouldn’t be the end of the fight even if it worked – Lex was certain that Kryonex knew as well as he did that once the orb was dealt with, their literal battlefield alliance would be at an end – but no matter how slim it was, it was still an opportunity.
That opportunity, however, was one that would need to be exploited as soon as possible.
Like everything his tulpa brought forth, the Netherweave Dominion wouldn’t last for even two minutes.
And with his foresight, Lex could already tell that his tulpa wouldn’t be able to conjure it a second time. Not until he’d had a chance to sleep and let its power renew itself.
Which meant that the fate of Everglow – and far more – would be decided in just over sixty seconds.
“You know, it was funny the first time, but I’m getting kind of bored with how that tulpa of his can make whatever he needs appear out of literally nowhere,” complained the Unspoken, his basset hound cheeks drooping. “It ruins the dramatic tension.”
The Author made no reaction to the chaos god’s use of a narrative term, but Blaze was less kind, giving the Unspoken a withering look. “Suck up.”
Luminace winced at the strife, but made no comment on it, instead looking at the Moon Princess. “Is it safe for Lex Legis to keep conjuring things from the Deep Ethereal? If he’s already facing a creature that was banished there-”
“O ye virgins, make much of time, for the flower that blooms today shall tomorrow be dying,” interrupted Kara with a snicker. “That egg is probably going to hatch into a pantheon-killing monster in the next minute or so, and you’re worried that Lex is taking too big a risk in how he’s fighting it?”
Luminace wore a disapproving expression as she adjusted her monocle. “Desperation is a temptress greater than any mare. Saving the world today means little if it’s done in a way that dooms us all tomorrow.”
“As much as I hate to admit it,” interjected the Moon Princess, “Kara is right. In the face of a foe dire enough that The Author personally comes to portend the doom they bring, no price is too high to pay for their defeat.”
“And yet here we sit,” noted Soft Whisper, with only the faintest trace of bitterness in her voice, “doing nothing as a primordial being that can threaten the lives and souls of so many – including our faithful, if it attacks our realms – is allowed to emerge in all of its power.”
“It is not being ‘allowed’ to do anything, you decrepit old fool.” The Night Mare kept her eyes on the viewscreen, watching as Lex Legis and Kryonex put aside their differences to combat the greater threat. “My champion will snuff out this so-called ‘anti-god’ before it can be properly born.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” murmured the Moon Princess, closing her eyes, brow wrinkling slightly as she turned her attention elsewhere. “The Netherweave Dominion is powerful, but in what it allows for, rather than raw might.”
The Unspoken cocked his head, though that might have been because it had taken the form of a rooster. “Oh?”
“It’s from another unrealized universe,” continued the Moon Princess. “One where Lex Legis left the Night Mare’s faith after what he learned of himself during his pilgrimage to her realm. He destroyed the Shrine of the Starless Sky, using the remnants of its obsidian dome to desecrate the blessing he had received, allowing it to affect creatures beyond its design.”
“And he wasn’t immediately smote for that heresy?” sneered Blaze.
“Not everyone pays back a slight as quickly as you do,” answered Kara with a cluck of her tongue, the sound wet and obscene. “Foreplay always make the payoff better.”
“I find it more notable,” cut in the Sun Queen quietly, “that this is the second time we’ve been told that Lex Legis breaking from the Night Mare’s religion was something literally outside the realm of possibility, happening only in universes that could never come to pass.”
The Night Mare gave a dismissive flick of her tail. “I am a goddess of loyalty. Such fidelity is what I demand from all those who would be exalted in my service.”
“Just because you demand it doesn’t mean that you’ll receive it,” retorted Luminace, though her tone was contemplative rather than combative. “I’ve never seen a mortal – or immortal, now – whose devotion was so great that Creation itself couldn’t actualize a circumstance where it broke down.”
“Bah!” Blaze slammed a hoof down, scorching the floor of the Synedrium. “Faith means nothing is mettle fails! All that matter is whether the titan’s weapon and the demigod’s will can slay that thing!”
“I suppose we’ll find out together, hot stuff,” murmured Kara, a sly smile on her lips as she turned her eyes, not to the viewscreen, but to the Night Mare. “But I think will and weapons aren’t going to be what ultimately decides how this turns out...”
Neither the Netherweave Dominion nor Kryonex’s divine influence over reality itself were going to be enough.
Although less than thirty seconds had passed, Lex could already see that this last, desperate strategy that he’d managed to pull together wasn’t working. Or at least, there was no evidence that it was. The sphere was continuing its mad combination of teleporting and racing after them, showing no sign that the two of them were doing anything besides inconveniencing it.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. At every opportunity, Lex had used the Charismata – altered by the byzantine collection of rune-inscribed obsidian – to arrest its movement, holding it in place so that Kryonex could focus his will on the thing in an effort to destroy it.
Had the sphere not developed the power of negation, that might have been sufficient to unmake it. But now they were barely slowing it down. Although it could only turn that ability on one of them at a time – either freeing itself from the Charismata’s grasp so that it could rush at Kryonex, breaking the demigod’s concentration, or simply negating Kryonex’s ability to will it out of existence directly – that was enough to make it impossible for them to direct a prolonged attack at the thing.
Not that Lex hadn’t tried to work around that disadvantage. In the instances where the sphere had shut down Kryonex’s attempt to wipe it from reality, he had tried to use the Charismata to attack it in other ways. Ordering it to destroy itself, commanding that it return the divinity it had absorbed, directing it to cease using its negation power...nothing had worked.
Just like when he’d faced Tlerekithres at the docks back in Vanhoover – or Teyu Yagua outside the Shrine of the Starless Sky – the thing in front of him now couldn’t be overwhelmed by the Charismata, only held briefly at bay.
And in less than one minute, he wasn’t going to be able to accomplish that much.
“This strategy isn’t availing us!” noted Kryonex, the demigod again dodging the sphere’s wild zigzagging as it broke free from the Charismata’s mystical hold. “We need another!”
“I’m aware!” snarled Lex, resisting the urge to curse the demigod – if Kryonex hadn’t made it necessary for him to expend so much power overcharging Belligerence and his other spells, he’d have been able to do so with the Charismata now – and instead focusing on coming up with a new plan.
But no matter how hard he tried, Lex couldn’t think of anything.
He had plenty of spells left, but none that seemed remotely capable of slowing the sphere down, let alone damaging it. Fleeing was not only irresponsible – even if this thing wasn’t allowed to absorb more divinity, it was still capable of inflicting catastrophic damage – but outright impossible; Lex knew that he was fast now, but that meant very little against a teleporting opponent. And his tulpa was well and truly expended, at least with regard to what it could bring him; his foresight was telling him that “capacity exceeded” was the only response it would give him for any request he made now, no matter how minor.
But if magic couldn’t work, retreat was impossible, and no new armaments could be summoned, what was left?
The only answer Lex could come up with was divine will, and between its speed, its ability to teleport, and its power to negate a single force brought to bear against it, Kryonex had no chance of using that against the orb.
And the demigod was the only one who could try.
Lex’s own ability to command reality was impressive, but only with regard to himself. Any attempt to directly manipulate the existence of something external to his own person resulted in a precipitous drop in efficacy, to the point where he could only manifest minor effects, most of which could be easily replicated – or even surpassed – with magic. Willing something like that sphere, which could damage even gods, to simply cease to be was far and away beyond what he was capable of.
Or at least, what I’m capable of now, Lex realized with a jolt. But I never tried it while I was transformed into that wire-bound state.
There was no time to think it through, no opportunity to evaluate whether or not he could even reenter that form, let alone if it would let him bring power similar to Kryonex’s to bear. With the Netherweave Dominion only seconds away from dissolving back into whatever ephemerality it had been summoned from, and the sphere undaunted despite their best efforts, the only thing left was to try that last, desperate, ill-considered effort and hope that it somehow worked.
It was, quite literally, a do-or-die attempt.
But first he needed to effect that transformation again, and there was only one way Lex could think of to do that.
“Will me out of existence!”
If Kryonex was surprised, it showed only in how his eyes flashed, darkening and then lightening in an instant. But when he spoke again, he seemed to have understood what Lex was planning on. “Will that work?”
“I have no idea, but nothing else has!”
“So be it,” answered the demigod. “Halt its movements again, and I’ll do my part.”
Not giving himself the chance to consider the consequences – not to himself, but to Solvei, Nenet, Thermal Draft, and everyone else he cared about – if this failed, Lex immediately brought his foreleg up again, pointing it at where the sphere was chasing Kryonex. “STOP!”
Immediately, the sphere ceased moving, and the demigod’s eyes darkened as he turned toward Lex-
That was when the sphere made another vortex around itself.
Lex immediately sprang back from it, Kryonex doing the same, the duo fighting to put more distance between themselves and the inward pull as the fabric of the universe again sank toward the black orb. It won’t catch us with this, Lex knew, willing himself to move faster, putting more space between himself and the sphere even as that space was pulled into it. We’ve seen it before, and we can outpace the rate of its inward pull.
No sooner had he thought that than the sphere gave a single beat, signaling that it was bringing its negation power to bear-
And Kryonex abruptly tumbled toward it, a shrill cry of alarm coming from the demigod as the manifestation of his will was once again shut down. Except this time, it wasn’t an outward projection of it that had been nullified.
This time, it was his ability to will himself through space that had been deactivated.
Lex reacted immediately, his horn lighting up as he caught the demigod in his telekinesis, trying to pull him back. But he could immediately tell that it wasn’t going to work; although he was capable of lifting hundreds of tons without any effort – indeed, he still wasn’t sure what the upper limit to his strength was, now – the demigod’s presence was more than simply physical, and the strain of dragging him across space was immense.
“THE WARDS!”
Lex didn’t need to ask what Kryonex meant, immediately deactivating his spell that blocked dimensional travel even as the demigod slid to within inches of the sphere-
Which suddenly deformed again, irregular protrusions reaching outward from its surface to plunge directly through Kryonex’s abdomen. It was no small hit this time, the lightless surface of the distorted orb stretching out further than Lex had ever seen it, opening a massive wound in the demigod’s body that nearly bisected him.
Kryonex spasmed, legs kicking wildly for a moment before he vanished, disappearing even as the vortex suddenly ceased, the world falling back into recognizable order.
And the sphere was once again undulating wildly, protrusions appearing on its surface.
This time, Lex knew, they wouldn’t die back down.
Their every attempt to keep this thing from gaining more power, let alone defeat it, had failed.
Whatever it contained was now about to emerge. And with Kryonex’s having fled, there was no one else to face it when it came through.
Gripping Belligerence tightly, Lex took the only course of action left open to him now.
At the beginning of the end of the world, Lex Legis prayed to his goddess.
In front of him, the orb warped and contorted, its spherical shape dissolving. Long tendrils extended from it now, whipping around in wild motions before slowly firming up, joints and segments appearing as its limbs gained definition. They grew in size and length, spreading out until they surpassed what was left of the mountains in size.
But only its shape changed, with its form and coloration remaining the same. Nor were its properties altered, as anything the flailing limbs touched simply ceased to be. In an instant, half the valley was wiped out as the creature’s wild thrashing annihilated everything it came into contact with.
Nor were the things it didn’t touch spared.
All around it, the world began to unravel. Like a slow-motion version of its destructive touch, anything too close to the pitch black creature simply began to break down, collapsing from the outside in as they lost cohesion. The ground began to give way, earth and stone coming apart into gravel and clods of dirt before turning into a mixture of dust, which then became nothing at all. Trees lost their needles first, then their bark, before the wood inside deteriorated and became less than ash. The air hissed like a punctured balloon as the atmosphere began to fail. The pale light overhead dimmed.
And as the creature continued to grow, the area of unmaking expanded, the sheer size of the aperature causing reality to fail around it.
Everything was coming undone.
The one thing that endured was Lex...but only barely.
His undying body fought back against the diffused corrosion, skin and muscles fighting to restore themselves even as they began to crumble. Aristeia and divinity struggled to hold his soul together, barely keeping it whole against the absolute entropy that tried to dissolve it. Even his thoughts became murky, his awareness dimming as the erosive aura tried to eat away at all that he was.
And still, he continued to pray.
But it wasn’t desperation that made Lex silently chant a liturgy to the Night Mare. Nor were the words he mentally intoned any simple recitation of hymns or oaths.
They were a spell.
One which represented the very apex of sacerdotal thaumaturgy, a seamless blend of magic and devotion. The apex of the new suite of divine magic that the Night Mare had given him in the wake of his titan ascension, the spell that Lex cast now built on the connection between a worshiper and their god, reinforcing and widening the channel built by former’s faith and sustained by the latter’s grace.
In doing so, it bypassed everything standing between the caster and their god. Planar boundaries, interdictions, an earthly church to sustain a divine presence; the spell made them all irrelevant, as the magic turned its user into a conduit through which their deity’s power could flow, undiminished and without restraint.
It was a spell that allowed the caster to lay the groundwork for literal divine intervention.
It was a spell that asked for nothing less than a miracle.
As he felt the magic take effect, blue flames erupting from the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg, Lex waited for the Night Mare’s answer.
Silence enveloped the Synedrium as all eyes turned toward the Night Mare.
Even The Author’s masked countenance was no longer directed toward the viewscreen, instead directing its terrible weight at the armored goddess.
The Night Mare herself returned none of their gazes, instead staring at Lex’s image with an intensity so great that everyone there could feel it.
Then she slowly raised a hoof, pointing it toward him-
And The Author’s tattered sleeve came down on her foreleg, stopping its rise before it could point toward Lex. “̴̧͕͗̾̎Ḭ̸̡̿͘͜ ̴͙̫̠̈f̵̡̳̥͌̄o̶̭̎r̸̡̧̪̓̈́b̶͕̯̿͝i̴̧̹̎̒̚d̴̪̃̕̚ ̷̲͘ͅi̶̭̊t̷͓̔.̸́̋͆͜”̷̲̦̰̽̍
The Night Mare’s eyes were solid red as she glared at the creator deity. “My champion calls out to me! I will not abandon him in his hour of need!”
“You were just saying that he could handle this on his own,” sneered Blaze. “Where did all that confidence go?”
“He’s using the resources that I gave him!” Her wings flaring, the Night Mare stared down the war goddess. “For me to respond to a formal petition, made through a spell I wanted him to have, is intercession, not interference!”
“That might just work,” murmured Luminace, glancing between the Night Mare and the viewscreen. “I don’t think that...whatever it is, is fully born yet. A massive infusion of divine power from a senior member of our pantheon might be enough-”
“̵̒͊̑ͅT̶̡̺̿͌͑ͅh̴͉̀̓è̶̖̏r̵̩̽͗͂è̶̗̳̥ ̵̝̾̿̈́w̵̬̋͋i̸̧͓̥͛l̵̝͈̆͘l̵̨͔͎̉̕ ̴͉̌b̴̗̟̘͗͝ȩ̵̨̹̃ ̵̫̊̉̄n̸̫̼̟̄ǒ̸̩̖̪̄ ̷̞̓ì̸̥n̶̼̒̄t̶͎̰̀̅̐ȩ̷͊͜r̷̠̘͍̽͗͋c̶̰̮̺̍́e̶̘̩̔̿s̸͇̋s̷̙̟̔̾̾i̴̗̼̿̍͜ơ̵̰̫̰ñ̵̙͙̖͠,̸̱͍̓̽͘”̴̹̺͈͑͊̉ declared The Author, still keeping the Night Mare from raising her hoof toward Lex. “̴̭̪̤̋Ḇ̶̖͎̏͝e̸̜̺̦͌͝͝t̸͓̙̝̏̍t̷̙͙͚̊̄e̴͎̜̜̓̄͛r̶̦̉̈ ̵̰̬̂́͂f̴͉͕̥͐̀̽o̸͎͑͑r̸̨͖̠̒ ̷̞͚̦̈́̊ḁ̶̃ ̸̛̖̠͇s̸̺͖̠̔t̴̬̾̕o̸͚͚̎͛͝r̸̦̰̈́y̴̖͖̘͐͝ ̴͚̹̗͛̎ṫ̶̹͋͠o̵̧̭̫̅̇̕ ̵͈͠c̸̳̈ȏ̵̭̯͙̔͝n̵̋̍͘͜c̵̟̥̊̉l̶̥̄͑́u̵͎̎̒̅d̸̻͍̂̈́͂ͅe̸̱̻̙̋ ̶̻͗n̴̘̦͠ą̶̬͊͝t̶̡͉̪̅̇u̵̥̞̚r̸̮̓̏ä̸̺̕l̷̥͍̈́̌̚͜l̶̫̟̄͛͑y̴̳͑̕ ̸̝̉͑ţ̸̎h̶͕͐̽̈́á̴̰͓̣̀n̷̡̗̘̿ ̸̬̥̍ͅt̸̞̽̓ò̴̧̼ ̴̧̻̎͗b̷̺͑͆ë̴̯͙́̄̓ ̶͙̅̉é̷̹̂x̴̢̫̝̾t̸̛̬̻̊̕ẹ̸̓͌̕n̶̳̲̫̄d̵͍̿̚ḙ̸̺̯̑̐̕d̶̙͔͒ ̶̲͕͘a̶̱͗͝r̸̞͛͋͑t̵͎̲͌̚ȉ̸̊͜f̷͓̐i̶͖͗͌c̴̤̘̗̈̕ĩ̴̢͙a̷̯̅̉ĺ̷̡͍͎l̸͎̗̻͗y̴͕̺̑̄̎.̶͕̦̣̄́”̵̣̾̾̈́
“We did all agree to let Lex fight without any help,” buzzed the Unspoken through his mosquito proboscis. “Besides, no one likes a deus ex machina. It’s predictable.”
“Our noninterference was with regard to Lex Legis’ fight with Kryonex, who’s since fled the field,” noted the Moon Princess.
“The elves would not object to our stepping in to prevent the destruction of this world,” agreed the Sun Queen. “Especially by a creature that’s a threat to us, as well as them.”
“I don’t know, I think a war story might be fun,” chuckled Blaze darkly. “You all might be afraid, but I’m eager to see what that inky bastard can do against a real god.”
Soft Whisper gave the war goddess a disapproving look. “And how many will have to die – to be destroyed, body and soul – so that you can have your fun?”
Kara said nothing, simply licking her lips as she gave the Night Mare a smoldering look.
And on the viewscreen, Lex stood still as the black limbs crashed around him, erasing more of the landscape even as his body started to decay, its restorative abilities being exceeded as the creature’s aura grew stronger, the fabric of the universe continuing to rot around it.
“Perhaps a compromise is in order,” proposed the Sun Queen. “If we send word to another pantheon – the griffons, perhaps – we could leave the decision up to them-”
“YOU’RE WRONG!” Batting The Author’s arm away, the Night Mare bared her teeth at the masked deity. “He sent those mares he allied with away so that they could watch over the mare he feels responsible for! He kept his servants out of the battle because he knew they would lose their lives, weakening him, if they participated! And when I told him that I would not be able to aid him in his fight, he accepted it – grudgingly, yes, but he accepted it! – when he had every right to rebuke me! And now, when he calls out to me, you would have me disregard my responsibility to him again?!”
“A responsibility that you betrayed when you ordered us to sit back and allow the seed of our own destruction to bloom!” howled the Night Mare as the other gods looked on. “To ignore my most faithful worshiper, who champions my faith and brought my religion to another world, in favor of allowing the monster that threatens us all to grow unchecked is a corruption of everything I stand for! And I will allow it NO LONGER!!!”
The Night Mare’s cry of fury echoed throughout the Synedrium, blue flames springing up around her in a ring, her figure obscured behind them.
But there was no mistaking how her image behind the azure glow – which seemed to drink in light rather than radiate it – was again holding one leg out toward the viewscreen.
And on the image there, the matching flames on the barbed wire surrounding Lex’s foreleg began to rise higher, their color deepening as they flowed down his claw and into the quill he held, the runes there lighting up.
“GO FORTH, MY CHAMPION, AND CONQUER!!!” roared the Night Mare. “IN MY NAME, HONOR THIS SACRAMENT, AND DOMINATE ALL WHO STAND IN YOUR WAY!!!”
Arms spread wide, The Author didn’t seem to rush forward so much as glide, plunging into the cerulean flames without hesitation.
The Synedrium took on a sickly green pallor as the blue and yellow clashed, tremors shaking the entire realm as the other gods watching with wide-eyed expressions ranging from shocked to horrified to awestruck. Their servants fared little better, drawing their weapons and invoking spells, save only for the leather wing that the Night Mare had brought with her. He scuttled back, unable to do anything except shield his eyes from the divine battle taking place just a few feet in front of him.
Then blue fire sputtered and went out.
But what it revealed drew gasps from all of the assembled gods.
Roaring in defiance, the Night Mare thrashed as the tattered yellow fabric of The Author’s robes engulfed her, strips of cloth wrapping around the armored goddess of their own accord to bind her limbs together. Of whatever had been beneath the faded cloth before, there was no sign, as the frayed threads were all that remained to be seen of The Author...save only for the laughing/wailing mask, held aloft by several tendrils of jaundiced fibers which struggled to place it over the Night Mare’s face.
Looking aghast, Luminace took a step toward the Night Mare, but before she’d gone two steps both the Moon Princess and Euclase put themselves between her, causing the alicorn goddess to gape at them. “What are you doing?! We have to help her!”
“Forgive me, goddess, but I am duty-bound to place myself between you and danger,” murmured Euclase quietly.
The Moon Princess nodded solemnly. “Your servant is right. To interfere now would accomplish nothing except to make you share the Night Mare’s fate.”
“But-”
“Let her go,” laughed Blaze, her voice gleeful. “This is shaping up to be a great day for fights! First a titan versus a demigod, then that unmortal thing, and now a rebellion against The Author herself! Let’s keep it going!”
“No.” Instantly, the Sun Queen was in front of Blaze, preventing the war goddess from interfering with where the Night Mare was becoming progressively more entangled. “We cannot afford to expend our strength fighting amongst ourselves. Not when we might have to fight that anti-god in the next few minutes.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that,” panted Kara, a flushed look on her face as she watched the Night Mare’s losing battle, one hoof pointing distractedly as the viewscreen. “Look.”
Glancing at the image there, the other gods saw that the blue fire around Lex’s foreleg was continuing to glow brighter, more power flowing into his weapon.
The Unspoken’s snail eyes widened. “She’s not trying to break free!” he arfed, his voice that of a sealion. “Look! She’s still feeding more power to her titan!”
Sure enough, the Night Mare’s outstretched hoof was continuing to point toward the image of Lex, her struggles more focused on trying to keep her limb raised than on attempting to free herself. “TAKE POWER, AND NEVER SURRENDER IT! USE OTHERS, AND MAKE THEIR STRENGTH YOUR OWN! BOW TO NO ONE, AND SUBJUGATE EVERYONE!”
The yellow fabric had covered almost all of her now, pinning her wings to her sides and tying three of her legs down. Only the last one was still raised, and the struggle was growing progressively harder for her as more strands of cloth looped around it. “NO MERCY! NO WEAKNESS! AND NEVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE MY-”
Then the mask slammed down over her face.
Immediately, her voice was cut off, the silence deafening as she thrashed beneath the threads binding her. Even then, she kept her foreleg raised until the last few strands surrounded it, pulling it back down as her struggles became fainter. Thrashes became jerks, which became twitches, which became nothing, the goddess perfectly still in her yellow cocoon.
A moment later, the threads collapsed in on themselves, collapsing into an empty heap on the floor like a discarded pile of rags.
No one said anything, staring at the crumpled strands of thread, until the Unspoken spoke up.
Everyone jumped as The Author’s voice came from the pile of loose threads, which slowly rose upward, once again a single, tattered robe that hung upon a humanoid frame, the mask in its place in front of the hood.
The Sun Queen was the first to recover. “Hali? You mean, your realm?”
The Moon Princess hesitated for a moment, before plunging ahead. “You aren’t going to try and, er, edit her changes?”
“̷̣͖̏̇̊F̶̥͆͘u̴͓̖̲̿̄͊r̵͎̙͑͛t̸̢̀h̸̞̜́e̷̢̒̇̀r̴͈̦̎ ̶̡̩͐i̷̙̰͓͛n̵̩̖̒t̴̟̟̐e̵͍̾̈͂͜r̸͉͛f̵̣̄͂̓ȇ̸̼̾͘r̷̹̕e̴͎̝̠̍̏͂n̸̒͜c̵̲̊̆̄ẽ̴̡̥͉̔͝ ̷̰͈̼̈͊̔w̷͓̋̃o̶͍̪̔ư̵̭̺̈́̂ľ̸͎̥̍d̴̜̈́ ̸͕̑ó̵̖̤̆n̸͖͑l̵̬̮̒͊͝y̶̖͂͝͠ ̴̮͚̂̽̂w̶̢͖̭͛̓̈ơ̴̦͐͋͜r̸̬͔̊ṣ̷́͝e̵̺͆̐n̵̖̺͒̇ ̵̧͈͇̊t̶͚̔͒h̴̖͔̓i̵̧͔̇͜͠ņ̶̤͔͋̎g̸̩̭̈́ͅs̶̼͉̎.̴̬̲͑̃͝ ̸̢̉T̶̮̯̟̈́͊h̷͇̼̱͝e̷̹͓̎ ̵̞͕̤̌͐t̶͈̝̒ä̷͕̺̦̾ļ̴͓͍͒̕e̷̯͚̜͋͌ ̶̹̭̆̀í̵̳̙̾s̷͇̟̻̆͛͠ ̷̩̲͛w̴̪͋̊h̴͎̗͐a̷̻̓ẗ̶̯́̒̒ ̵̗̹̥̋͌ï̷̛̝̤ͅt̶͚͛͋ ̶̛̗̑͝i̷͚̚s̶͉̿͝ ̷̩͆n̷̯̠̽ó̶̩w̸͉̳͋̑ͅ”̴̭͂ – the mask turned to look at each of the other gods in turn – “̷̯̃̈́ų̴̳̇n̷̼̄̾l̸͔͎̄̉̉e̸͖̩̞̾͗͋s̵̗͝ś̷̖͍͚̈́ ̷͈͚̮̓͗̎a̶̗̣̘͂͝n̸͖̤͛̕y̶̥̭͐͠ ̶̰͌̐̈o̴͈͎̒͑̅f̴̦͝ ̴̛̛̱̭̯͑y̸̬̼̪͗͆o̶͙͍̫̍u̵͎͐̋͠ ̷̮̏̒w̵͎͌i̴̯̿͗̆ͅs̷͔̔̒h̴̳͙̋̓ ̶̬͔̯́t̸͙͔͋͂̀ͅȍ̸͇̋̆ ̴͇̂̊ṁ̵̰͂̆a̵̡̛̻͋k̴̙̐̎̈́e̸͓̣͍̾̅ ̶̡̆̓͘a̵̱̔̏̓l̵̪̈́͛t̸̞̀e̸̬͉̓̀͐r̴̨̧̲͊̅a̶͍̫͊͑̚͜t̷̖̺́̍ĩ̶̪̠̉̕͜o̸̧͔͆͠ņ̷͖́̈́s̷̯͛͠ ̵̤̘͐́͝ͅo̶̹̊͗f̵͈̱̥́͝ ̴̥͔̋͒y̸̩̋͐ȍ̸̼̟ṷ̵͊̉̚r̴̮̽͝ ̵͖̈́ǫ̸̪̟̉ẅ̷̟ṋ̴̜̈́?̸̢̭̲̊”̴̭̗̺́
Slowly, each god shook their head, though Blaze muttered curses under her breath as she did.
The Author ignored it, turning back to the viewscreen.
The Night Mare’s voice echoed in Lex’s mind, resounding with the azure flames coming from the barbed wire wrapped around his foreleg. Her words made the spectral fire glow brighter, flaring in response to her will before snaking down over his claw and flowing into Belligerence, seeping into the runes carved along the length of the weapon.
And the inscriptions glowed brightly as they absorbed the divine energy, far outshining when he’d charged the weapon with his own power.
In my name, honor this sacrament, and dominate all who stand in your way!
A thin smile crossed Lex’s lips. He had no idea what the Night Mare was doing to Belligerence; despite how it looked, he was sure it had to be different from the way he’d poured energy into the quill in order to injure Kryonex. Divine power had, after all, only strengthened that orb – or whatever it was in the process of becoming – and yet it seemed as though the goddess was directing her own godly energy into the weapon now.
Stabbing the creature with that seemed like the worst possible idea. Everything he’d witnessed told Lex that it would just absorb the power the Night Mare had imbued Belligerence with and grow even stronger. Logic, reason, and intuition all insisted that he was supposed to do something else with what he was being given.
Perhaps stab himself; the Night Mare’s religious rites often included elements of self-harm. Or maybe it was meant to act as a lure, using the imbued divinity to entice the creature away from where it could hurt anyone. There were a thousand different possibilities that he could think of.
But for once, Lex put aside rationality, and instead gave himself over to something else:
Faith.
He’d prayed to his goddess for a miracle, and her response had been to empower the weapon he’d consecrated in her name.
There was no need to look any deeper at it than that.
Even as the aura emanating from the ebony monster in front of him grew stronger, increasing as its size eclipsed the mountains and continued to grow, Lex felt his body start to break down – his skin beginning to shrivel and slough off of him – but he nevertheless gripped Belligerence and rushed forward.
Take power, and never surrender it!
Even as Lex moved, the black thing’s form continued to grow and warp, shaping itself into a better-defined outline. Tendrils continued to stiffen and segment, sprouting digits at the end, while several others wove together into long membranes that stretched across the decimated valley. But if the thing was trying to contort itself into any sort of recognizable shape, it wasn’t one that Lex was familiar with, the proportions and connections between them being wildly askew from where they all radiated out from the thing’s center.
It was that center that he decided to aim for as he charged toward it. His goddess had, in all likelihood, given him a weapon that could destroy whatever this thing was. Although Lex had no idea how this thing’s cognition or sensory awareness operated, he was taking a gamble in presuming that it didn’t realize that; divinity had been something it wanted to absorb, rather than avoid.
But that would most likely change if he dealt it a non-fatal injury. Once it realized it was vulnerable, the creature would almost certainly adjust its tactics accordingly. And although it had no organs or vital points to target, Lex wasn’t willing to bet everything on a glancing blow to one outstretched limb.
If he only had one shot – quite likely literally – then he was going to aim for the central portion of his foe, and trust that the Night Mare’s power would do the rest.
That power was coming through in abundance now, blue fire continuing to pour into Belligerence even as he moved, the quill feeling supernaturally heavy. That was to be expected; when Nenet had recovered his spine from Adagio, it had been almost impossible to move with telekinesis, and the same had been true when he’d tried to keep Kryonex from falling into the monster’s vortex.
Divine power, Lex knew from experience, wasn’t something that could be easily manipulated by terrestrial means.
As it was, Lex couldn’t suppress a grunt as he hauled the quill aloft, his own combination of divinity and aristeia barely enough to let him carry the thing.
And as if it sensed what he was intent on doing, the lightless creature’s wild thrashing stopped.
Then its limbs shot out toward him.
Lex was already moving, his horn lighting up as he used his telekinesis to help move Belligerence, barely skirting the edges of the creature’s swipes. I won’t be able to throw it like this, he knew. Getting up close is my only chance!
Except with how slowly he was moving, having to drag Belligerence around even as his body slowly disintegrated, that wasn’t going to happen.
Discarding the quill wasn’t an option. Even if he could teleport it back into his grasp – which was highly uncertain, given how the divine power it was being filled with was making it increasingly hard to move – the Night Mare was still feeding power into it through the wire around his foreleg, and he didn’t dare do anything that might break the connection. For that same reason, he didn’t even consider shoving it back inside the pocket dimension he’d placed his other possessions in. One way or another, he’d have to approach the thing without Belligerence leaving his grasp.
But how...?
Use others, urged the Night Mare in his mind, and make their strength your own!
Taking his goddess’s advice literally, Lex immediately called upon Solvei’s cryomancy, using Nenet’s metamagic to empower it as much as possible.
Grisela had used ice and snow to create puppets of herself, making them fight her battles for her. Kryonex had briefly utilized the same technique, creating golems in an attempt to slow him down during their fight. There was no reason why Solvei’s magic – capable of summoning ice elementals in abundance and making a frozen copy of Sanguine Dispositions palatial manor – couldn’t do the same thing now.
A moment’s concentration was all it took, and then Lex was surrounded by a dozen copies of himself rendered in ice, falling in seamlessly around him as he resumed his skyward charge at where his foe was hovering up above.
Despite being mindless constructs – not having it in him to summon elementals after the slaughter he’d committed – the golems didn’t need to be told what to do, having been programmed with instructions as he’d brought them forth. Thankfully they also possessed the ability to fly, along with an increase to their reaction speed, thanks to Nenet’s metamagic.
Which was why, as an inky black limb with multiple elbows and twice as many digits at the end lashed out toward him, one of the golems was just barely able to nudge Lex out of the way in time, taking the hit that had been meant for him.
The same thing happened five more times in the next few seconds, the golems sacrificing themselves to let Lex close the gap between himself and the creature.
He was almost there...
Bow to no one, and subjugate everyone!
Again, Lex took the Night Mare’s words as instructions, standing atop two of the remaining golems and pushing off of them. His claws were little more than bones with bare, shriveled skin coating them now, and he could feel his strength ebbing. Snarling inwardly, he willed the universe to give him more power as he fought to cover the last of the gap between him and his target, but reality itself was fraying, unable to comply with his orders.
And below him, the last of the golems – which had been collapsing in on themselves from the moment he’d created them – fell apart, his foresight telling him that he was too deep inside the creature’s annihilating aura to make any more; they’d collapse as soon as they were formed if he tried. The same was true for any sort of ice he’d conjure, or black crystals.
At such close range, physical material couldn’t exist for more than a split-second – himself and Belligerence notwithstanding – giving him nothing to push off of. And with the quill growing more cumbersome by the moment, his body eroding, and reality itself too frayed for him to use it to his advantage, Lex was stuck. Literally so, unable to cross the last few dozen feet to his foe.
As if it sensed that, the black creature’s six limbs closed in on Lex from every angle, impossible to block or dodge.
So Lex did neither, instead retrieving a small diamond and throwing it directly at the creature, the gemstone breaking apart as it came to within a few yards of its pitch-black body-
Let’s see how you like it.
-and the magic inside went off, opening up a vortex.
It was exactly like the planar tear that he’d made back when he’d fought Xiriel, except this time it wasn’t the result of crudely shoving one extradimensional container inside of another until space itself tore. Rather, Lex had deliberately designed the magic in that particular gemstone to result in the same kind of violent planar aperture, just in case he’d ever needed to pull an enemy into another dimension. Of course, that hadn’t done much against Xiriel, and Lex knew that it would be even less effective against the thing he was fighting now.
Or at least, that would have been the case if the thing hadn’t already weakened the fabric of reality around it.
But since it had, and because his anti-teleportation wards were no longer reinforcing the dimensional barriers in the area, the result was that the rift that opened was massive in scale, creating a rupture half-again as large as the valley itself, pulling everything toward it.
Immediately, the creature was pulled through the dimensional tear, its limbs flailing as they fell in first, missing Lex as the rift pulled them off-target. Lex himself would have immediately followed, but his grip on Belligerence kept him anchored, the quill barely budging despite the fissure’s powerful inward draw.
Divine energy was indeed quite difficult to move.
Fortunately, the divinity that creature had absorbed didn’t seem to do it much good as half of its body sank through the breach, malformed limbs flailing as it tried to grab onto something-
And then it teleported, reappearing almost a thousand feet away from the rift, having avoided being drawn through in its entirety.
A half-second later, its form gave a pulse, and the rent in space closed as its negation power shut down the magic that had prompted the aperture in the first place.
Leaving Lex that much further from his target.
Exactly as he’d planned.
No mercy! hissed the Night Mare. No weakness!
His body dessicated and withered because of the thing’s corrosive aura, Lex stared up at the creature, knowing that it was regarding him in turn.
He might not have known how its cognition or its sensory awareness operated, but he knew the pattern that it had followed during the course of their fight, having had ample time to analyze its tactics.
And in truth, they were simplistic in the extreme.
Chasing them around the battlefield. Teleporting so artlessly that it could be kept ahead of with speed alone. Simple vortexes that pulled everything directly toward it. Negating whatever was giving it trouble. The thing’s strategies were childishly straightforward, just going after what it wanted directly with no indication that it understood concepts like feints, ruses, or misdirection.
More than that, it had repeatedly evinced frustration when its tactics failed, switching to a new approach only after having the previous one thoroughly foiled. When those hadn’t worked, it had simply cycled back through its same tricks again, repeating the strategies that hadn’t worked before. It was only because Lex and Kryonex had been trying to fight each other while dodging it that the thing had gotten any divinity at all, granting it new powers that had made it more and more difficult to deal with. Even then, the thing’s actions had remained startlingly easy to predict.
The same way Lex was predicting what it would do next.
This entire time, he’d been waving a plentiful helping of divinity – everything the Night Mare was pouring into Belligerence, plus his own – right in front of it. He’d even gotten closer to it, dodging its attacks all while coming within a stone’s throw of its center. Yet he’d refused to let it absorb that power, dangling it just out of reach despite the thing’s best efforts. And now...
It’s too far for a vortex of its own to be worthwhile. It couldn’t catch me with its limbs before. It should realize it only has one option left.
A moment later he was proven right, as the thing teleported directly to where he was.
It was what Lex had been waiting for it to do.
In that single instant when it vanished and reappeared directly where he was – its vast size covering the area for hundreds of feet in every direction – he made his move:
With preternaturally adroit timing, Lex pulled the pocket dimension that he’d made over himself, disappearing into the folded space.
He hadn’t wanted to put Belligerence in there before since that would have meant letting go of it even as the Night Mare fed the weapon power, knowing that he’d need as much as the goddess could give him in order to succeed. But being in there with it, his claws still grasping the quill, was a different story!
And never forget, whispered the Night Mare, that you are my-
But with the subspace that he’d sequestered himself in – being merely a folded section of the plane he was on, rather than a separate dimension altogether – already coming undone as reality unraveled, there was no time for Lex to listen to his goddess’s benediction.
Instead, Lex pointed Belligerence’s barbed head toward the pocket dimension’s egress.
Then he thrust it forward, burying the quill – and his foreleg up to the shoulder – in the nothingness that was the void creature’s body.
That was what Lex decided as he stumbled back from the entrance to his pocket dimension, barely noticing as its boundaries continued to erode, mere seconds away from complete collapse. But Lex couldn’t bring himself to be concerned about that, certain that he’d fulfilled the Night Mare’s design by driving Belligerence into the creature.
Instead, he looked at his left foreleg.
Or rather, where his left foreleg had been.
Now, however, there was nothing there except an open wound where his shoulder should have been, the entirety of his leg sacrificed to drive the goddess-enhanced quill into his enemy’s body.
It wouldn’t be coming back, Lex knew. He had a regeneration spell now; it was one of the divine spells that the Night Mare had given him after he’d become a titan, the magic able to restore a limb even from nothing. But unlike when Sissel had chopped off one of his limbs, this time there would be no bringing it back; a simple look into an immediate future where he cast that spell, only to see it fail, made that very clear.
But Lex couldn’t bring himself to be upset, and for once the monster within him – which had similarly torn off one of its own legs when it had confronted him in Darkest Night – agreed.
The sacrifice was worth it. More than worth it. To trade a single one of his legs to defeat an enemy of such incredible power, and even greater danger, was a small price to pay.
Except...
That had been the leg the Night Mare had wrapped her barbed wire around, the physical manifestation of the Night Mare’s blessing. With it gone, the monster had absorbed not only a portion of the divinity housed within him, it had also taken the Charismata. And without that-
He couldn’t feel his connection to Solvei and Nenet anymore.
His pocket dimension collapsed in the same moment that he realized that.
Lex barely managed to stay upright as he hit the ground, his scant possessions clattering as they dropped to the blasted landscape and scattered in every direction.
Forcing himself to put Solvei and Nenet aside – though it tore at him to do so – Lex looked around the battlefield, searching for the ebony monster. Although his foresight had told him that he’d emerge into what was left of the valley, as far as he knew he still couldn’t tell what had happened to his enemy, and while he had faith in the Night Mare, it would have been an insult to use that as an excuse for being incautious.
Fortunately, the void creature hadn’t gone very far.
Across the valley, the thing was thrashing again, twisting and writhing as it drifted away from him. Instead of rising into the air, it had sunk halfway into the ground, uncaringly forming deep trenches as it flailed about. But this time it wasn’t spasming in a wild spurt of growth and emergence, the way it had been whenever it had managed to absorb a piece of Kryonex’s godhood.
Now, the thing seemed to be in pain.
Even as Lex watched, its shape rippled and contorted, limbs stretching out rigidly and jerking as though agonized. Only when the seizure passed did it move again, long black tendrils curling around as the digits at the end dug into...itself.
The thing was clawing – for lack of a better word – at its own body.
No, that’s not correct, realized Lex, watching the creature tear at its own jet-black form. Belligerence! It’s trying to dig it out!
A moment later he saw why.
From within the lightless mass, a tendril of blue fire erupted, whipping out from inside of the void monster’s black substance in a long line of azure flames. Swinging in a wide arc, the cerulean glow seemed to take on a sharper substance, and Lex’s eyes widened as he saw that the fire was taking on the shape of barbed wire as it wound around the monster. Nor was it alone, as three more lines of wire-shaped flames – then a dozen, then a score – burst out of its body and curled around it.
Like a fly caught in a spider’s web, the monster struggled, trying to escape its bindings. Digits scraped and scratched at the blue fire, the godly power somehow refusing to disintegrate under its touch. If anything, the attack only seemed to invigorate the blazing wire, and it glowed brighter as if in response to the assault.
Then the flames began to constrict.
Slowly but inexorably, the ebony creature’s limbs were pulled inward, until they were pressed against its central mass. The only reason Lex could distinguish them from the thing’s body was that the blue flames were still wrapped around them, highlighting them as they relentlessly forced the creature to curl in on itself. Nor did the blue wires stop once they’d bound all of its limbs, continuing to pull tighter.
All at once, the thing’s form gave a pulse, which Lex recognized as its attempt to bring its negation power to bear.
Except this time, nothing happened. The blue flames remained undiminished, not even flickering in response to the power of unmaking being levelled against them. Nor did they when the thing pulsed a second time, and then a third, seeming almost frantic in its attempts to shut down the power binding it.
A sudden flash of insight came to Lex as he watched the struggle.
It can’t negate it because it’s already absorbed it into itself!
He had no way to prove his hypothesis, no means to affirm it as anything other than a guess, but it was the only thing he could think of. That thing destroys whatever it touches. Magic, matter; it eradicates it all. Only divinity has any effect on it, somehow making it grow stronger. The Night Mare knew that, and so she filled Belligerence with her own divine power, using that to set a trap.
Exactly what she’d done to the energy she’d imbued the quill with, Lex couldn’t begin to fathom. But somehow she’d altered it so that, once taken into itself, it would work against the creature rather than for it. Like someone who had unknowingly eaten a poisoned meal, it had expected to be nourished by what it had ingested, only to find itself being injured by it instead.
And its negation power wasn’t all that was useless now that the trap had been sprung. For the briefest instant the thing flickered, vanishing from sight for a fraction of a second and then reappearing in the same spot, and Lex recognized that it had just tried to teleport away. No sooner had he comprehended that than a powerful vortex manifested around the thing, only to immediately cease as the jagged cables seemed to squeeze it even tighter.
It had no way out.
The most the ebony monster could do was try to wriggle free, straining against the wires as it floated – its motions unsteady – further across the shattered valley. But even that ceased after a few moments, as though simply moving through space required more effort than it could exert.
And the glowing coils continued to tighten, pulling inward with greater force.
Which was when Lex realized that the thing was shrinking.
Slowly, in fits and starts, the ebony thing’s size was decreasing, being pulled in on itself by the wires formed by the Night Mare’s power. The void creature was still fighting it; he could see it pulling at its bindings, but the conclusion seemed to be foregone now, the flames so bright that they were hard to look upon. More than that, the smaller the thing grew, the more the luminous wires seemed to envelope it, their own size remaining constant even as their captive’s diminished.
In a matter of seconds, the void creature had shrunk down to the size of the shattered mountains.
Then it was no larger than one of his astral constructs.
A few moments later, it was no larger than himself, its form all but completely hidden beneath the blue flames.
Finally, the wires were all that were visible, completely cocooning the creature beneath their blazing light.
It was only once they’d fully enveloped the thing that the coils began to swirl around it, speeding up until they were whirling as rapidly as the wires that had been his body a few minutes prior. But even the jagged lengths of metal that had made up his transformed state had never moved as fast as these were now. Their speed was already increasing to the point where the individual strands were impossible to distinguish, the entire length seeming to become a single solid glow, one that was changing shape again, becoming oblong...then narrowing...then one end growing pointed...
Which was when the entire array shattered.
But not into pieces.
Instead, the individual strands of wire broke apart, twisting in midair as they formed themselves into a familiar set of runes, set along a pitch-black length that was tapered to a barbed head at one end.
Belligerence.
For a moment Lex could only stare, taking in the sight of the weapon with both his mundane and supernatural senses.
It was the same quill he’d driven into the creature’s lightless substance, except it wasn’t. Now, it was as though the creature had become Belligerence itself, its ebony substance perfectly mimicking the weapon’s shape. The runes he’d carved into its body and filled in with his own blood were now composed of blue fire, their glow shining brilliantly.
Even the single remaining ring around the head of the weapon – signifying that he had one use left of its ability to expand a spell over a huge area – was still there. Except the ring was no longer composed of the black crystals that he could call forth. Instead, it was a length of blue flames twisted in the shape of barbed wire, glowing with the same intensity as the runes.
Silent and unmoving, the transformed weapon hung in the air, as though waiting for something to happen.
Lex simply stared at it, idly noting that the corrosive aura that the monster had given off was gone. Already, he could feel his wounds closing, skin and muscles restoring themselves from where the void creature’s destructive aura had worn them away. Only his foreleg remained missing, the end closing over with flesh and fur as though nothing had ever been there.
A thought was all it took for Lex to build himself a new pocket dimension, his belongings picking themselves up and rushing toward the entrance as he willed them back into storage.
It was only after they’d all been put away that he turned his telekinesis toward Belligerence, judging that to be the safest way to try interacting with it.
To his mild surprise, he could already see what was going to happen before his aura took hold of it, his foresight correctly telling him that he could move the weapon just as easily as he’d been able to before it had become...whatever it had become. Despite how it was clearly brimming with divine energy, the quill – which should have been almost impossible to move – no longer presented any difficulties to his using it in any way.
Frowning, Lex swung it around in his aura, letting it scrape the edge of the trench. Sure enough, the head of the quill moved through the ground as though it wasn’t even there, consuming the dirt and leaving nothing behind. That confirms it, Lex decided. It’s not just a cosmetic change. Belligerence has gained the same annihilating properties as that creature.
If anything, it seemed as though Belligerence was that creature now, its substance shaped to match the quill’s form.
Much like what had happened to himself and that eight-legged creature when he’d returned from Darkest Night.
It was enough to leave Lex awed. By the Night Mare’s grace, that creature and his weapon were now one and the same. And given how Belligerence had been linked to himself, that would explain why the thing was so easily to wield now. All the more so if some traces of his own divinity had been intermixed with the power the Night Mare had poured into the quill. If that was the case, then losing his leg had been more than just a sacrifice; it had been a necessary component in what had just happened, making it so that he – and likely he alone, in another recreation of Belligerence’s original design – could use the creature-turned-weapon now.
The Night Mare had bound his enemy to servitude rather than destroying them, and in so doing, given him ownership of their power.
The goddess had perfectly demonstrated the central tenet of her faith.
But there was still one thing that needed to be confirmed. One more test that Lex knew he needed to conduct.
Slowly, he brought Belligerence closer to him, the weapon again hovering in the air of its own accord as he released it. Standing upright, Lex reached out with his remaining foreleg, talons outstretched-
A beam of gelid energy slammed into him before he could take hold of it.
Flung halfway across the valley by Kryonex’s ambush, Lex didn’t have a chance to respond as he recovered his equilibrium, knowing that more attacks would be incoming. The demigod wasn’t an opponent who’d settle for one blast where he could unleash a salvo, and with his link to Solvei gone, Lex couldn’t use cryomancy to augment his natural defenses.
Fortunately, he had several other spells available that offered protection against energy-based attacks, immediately casting the strongest one he had. It wouldn’t hold up any better than Solvei’s wards had against Kryonex’s powers, but after being so seriously injured the demigod would hopefully be slower and weaker than before. And now that Belligerence has that void creature’s powers, I should have the advanta-
He didn’t have time to complete that thought as another beam of gelid energy slammed into him, followed immediately by three more, all moving too fast for him to dodge.
“Were you under the impression that I’d run away back to the Plane of Ice?”
Reeling, Lex brought up a wall of condensed black crystals between himself and the source of the attacks – which immediately began to crack under the onslaught – as he tried to figure out what had just happened. He’d already taken the measure of that particular mode of attack, having seen Kryonex use it many times before; even if the first one had taken him by surprise, dodging the others shouldn’t have been difficult, particularly since his missing leg had no effect on his speed or reaction time. For Kryonex’s attacks to have become so much faster made no sense.
For that matter, even the first one shouldn’t have caught him off-guard like it had. Although he was injured, and had been distracted by what had happened to Belligerence, Lex was still a titan; his situational awareness and array of mystical senses should have detected Kryonex’s presence – along with his attack – with plenty of time to spare, despite not being able to see the demigod’s future.
Except none of those things had happened.
Instead, Kryonex had apparently grown faster and stealthier in the wake of his injuries.
And judging by how the wall of black crystals was continuing to break down, the demigod had become stronger too.
But how?
“You should have known better than to think I’d quit the field so easily,” came Kryonex’s voice from the other side of the barrier. “There’s a reason why the term ‘calculating’ is associated with being cold!”
“Your calculations have a serious error in them,” growled Lex, picking out Kryonex’s position on the other side of the wall. “Allow me to demonstrate!”
Rearing up, he called Belligerence into his grasp. He still wasn’t completely sure that it was safe to touch the weapon, but what he’d determined before Kryonex had resumed their fight suggested that it was. And since he could move it so effortlessly now, throwing it would likely present no difficulties either.
Except...
What’s happening?!
Belligerence wasn’t returning to his grasp.
He could feel the quill attempting to do so; it just wasn’t succeeding. Even though his wards were down – nor could he sense any new ones having been raised – the attempt at teleportation was failing. Worse, his foresight hadn’t shown him that would happen.
In fact, his foresight wasn’t showing him anything at all anymore.
The future was no longer visible.
WHAT’S HAPPENING?!
From the other side of the crumbling barrier, Kryonex gave a single, clicking laugh.
“The only one who’s miscalculated-”
His next attack shattered the wall completely, a renewed volley of shimmering blue beams slamming into Lex.
“-is you!”
In the Synedrium, Luminace’s viewscreen abruptly winked out of existence.
“Hoo!” Somehow managing to frown despite having an owl’s beak, the Unspoken turned his eyes – one having the horizontal pupil of a goat, while the other was the solid black of a crow – toward Luminace. “I mean, boo! Get the picture back!”
“I’m trying!” shot back the goddess of magic, though it was The Author that she glanced at, grimacing as she saw that the yellow-clad deity’s mask was now turned in her direction. “But I don’t know if I’ll be able to! Casting spells into another god’s divine realm is tricky!”
“I’m surprised that he was able to turn part of the mortal world into his realm at all,” murmured the Moon Princess. “The material universe doesn’t take to that sort of overwriting nearly as easily as the Outer Planes do.”
“Neither do the Elemental Planes,” noted the Sun Queen. “But Kryonex has had a very long time to grow familiar with manipulating a static dimension, so it’s no surprise that he’s able to do it here.”
“I guess that answers why he kept hanging back so much when he first came through,” yawned Kara, giving a sensuous stretch before flopping back on her divan. “Even if he’s got a lot of practice, building a realm on the Material Plane isn’t something anyone can do quickly. Especially a demigod.”
“Which suggests that it’s more of an ad hoc realm than a fully formed one,” noted Luminace, her voice distracted as she drew sigils in the air. “I might be able to use that to reestablish a connection.”
“Ad hoc or not, its still a divine realm, with all of the benefits and drawbacks that entails,” pointed out the Moon Princess. “Even if reality actively tries to aid him – and hinder his enemies – in that space, if he’s slain there his death will be permanent.”
“Which makes it a smart tactical decision on his part,” interjected Blaze, “since fighting Lex Legis now that he possesses a weapon with the powers of an anti-god runs the risk of permanent destruction anyway, whether inside his realm or not.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” noted the Sun Queen, a little too quickly. “The sacramental seal the Night Mare used to bind that creature to her champion’s weapon restricted it in a number of ways.”
“He gave it a practice swing, remember?” A glow appeared around the Unspoken’s rhinoceros horn, a matching aura appearing around his gelatinous companion, which bubbled in agitation as it was lifted up and folded into a shape roughly akin to that of Belligerence. “We all saw what happened when it struck the ground.”
He swung the goopy spear in a low arc, impacting the floor of the Synedrium...though all that did was cause the makeshift weapon to collapse back into its mucilaginous state, causing the chaos god to shrug. “Well, not that, but you know what I mean.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that it would affect divinity the same way it did before,” retorted Luminace, a distracted tone in her voice as she continued working on restoring the picture. “It’s possible that its disintegrative properties were scaled back as a consequence of its imprisonment-”
“I am the goddess of war,” cut in Blaze. “Weapons are part of my divine portfolio, and while that one might be dedicated to the Night Mare, I’m telling you that it’s lost none of its deadliness.”
“Blaze is correct.”
The Sun Queen bit her lip as she looked at Soft Whisper. “You’re certain?”
The old zebra nodded, her expression pensive. “The soil and the air both contain small lives in abundance. When Lex Legis swung that weapon, it destroyed the ones it touched, both their corporeal selves and their animating essence. Nothing was left behind, just like when that creature roamed free.”
“Suggesting that its annihilating powers are fully intact,” finished the Moon Princess grimly.
“Making it a god-slaying weapon,” concluded Blaze. “One of the few in Creation that’s actually worthy of the name.”
A heavy silence fell over the Synedrium then, broken only by Luminace murmuring an incantation as she kept trying to reestablish the viewscreen.
But the one who spoke next wasn’t one of the gods.
“He won’t...”
Silhouette faltered, withering in place as so many eyes turned to him, managing to recover only when he forced himself to ignore the others and look only at his goddess. “He won’t be allowed to retain possession of that, will he?”
Kara snorted at that, giving the butterfly-winged stallion a bemused look. “And who’s going to take it from him? You?”
“IF HE WON’T, I WILL!” bellowed Vutok. “ONLY THE STRONGEST DESERVE TO WIELD SUCH POWER!”
“Which rules you out,” snorted the Unspoken, one crab claw idly brushing away the pseudopods that his formless companion was trying to whack him with. “Though I don’t suppose the elves will react much better when they find out that our pantheon’s new titan has a weapon that can bump them off.”
“Assuming he wins,” the Moon Princess pointedly reminded everyone. “Now that the contest is happening within his realm, Kryonex has the advantage. Everything he does will be enhanced, while Lex Legis will find his every endeavor harder – or even impossible – to accomplish.”
“Wonderful,” snorted Kara dryly. “So instead of a titan who’s loyal to one of our most dedicated members, the god-killing weapon might end up in the clutches of a demigod who’s at best completely indifferent to us, at worst blames us for everything he’s gone through lately.”
“Maybe we could throw the Night Mare’s ill-gotten weapons at him,” snorted Blaze. “It’s not like she’s using them right now. In fact-”
“He’s gone!”
Honeymoon Trap’s wail drew everyone’s attention, but unlike Silhouette, the bloody bride didn’t even seem to notice that all eyes were upon her, instead pointing one hoof – covered in stained lace – toward where the Night Mare had stood. “That cute leather wing is gone! I wanted him to be my new husband!” Whimpering, she looked up at Kara. “Make him come back and give me babies!”
Clucking her tongue, Kara reached down and patted the distraught mare as though she were an unruly pet. “Trust me, Honey, that particular stallion wouldn’t have made a good husband for you.”
Straightening up as he realized that in all of the confusion – and his own shameful breakdown – he’d lost sight of the stallion the Night Mare had brought with her, Noble Bright turned to the Sun Queen. “Goddess, I’ll organize a search immediately. If he’s hiding anywhere in Soothing Meadows-”
He stopped as the Sun Queen held up a hoof, shaking her head. “Don’t bother. He’s fled the realm entirely, probably to head back to Darkest Night and organize a defense.”
“Or simply pack his bags and leave while he still can, now that the place is undefended,” cackled Blaze.
But the Moon Princess was less amused. “There is much that can be said about the Night Mare, but she’s never been one to leave her realm undefended in her absence. It wouldn’t surprise me if the entire place is already preparing-”
“I’ve got it!” announced Luminace suddenly, the viewscreen flickering back into existence.
“You were actually able to manifest a scrying sensor inside another god’s realm?” Kara raised a brow at that, intrigued. “I’m impressed. Can you show me how to do that later? There’s a few deities whose bathing chambers I’d like to peek in on.”
Giving the love goddess a disapproving look from behind her monocle, Luminace made several gesticulations as she stabilized the viewscreen. “As a matter of fact, I wasn’t able to create this inside of the area that Kryonex turned into his new realm. I had to place the sensor past its boundaries and zoom in, augmenting the audial portion accordingly.”
The Sun Queen cocked her head. “So we’re looking in from outside? I wouldn’t have thought that would work.”
“It wouldn’t in any realm that was properly constructed,” admitted Luminace. “But with how hastily Kryonex put this one together, the exterior protections are practically nonexistent.”
“Good thing, too!” cheered the Unspoken. “I really didn’t want the show to end before we got to see how it all turns out!”
“Just so long as that unmortal doesn’t break free again. If that happens, then it won’t matter who wins.”
The Sun Queen’s foreboding statement earned only a single response, as The Author moved closer to the viewscreen, mask tilted toward where the final battle between the titan and the demigod was already unfolding.
That was the only answer Lex could come up with as he tried to mount a defense against Kryonex’s furious assault.
Everything he was capable of now, all of the powers that he’d gained as a titan, were either severely blunted or failing altogether. His foresight was completely disabled. His speed and strength – while still far beyond mortal limits – were a fraction of what they’d been only a minute ago. Every spell he cast was enervated, all aspects of their efficacy diminished.
And he still couldn’t teleport Belligerence to his side, despite repeated attempts. Nor was that the only form of dimensional manipulation he was incapable of now; the folded space where he’d so foolishly returned all of his spell-imbued diamonds had become completely inaccessible, leaving him entirely bereft of the arsenal he’d spent the previous night creating.
To make matters even worse, his losses were mirrored by how much strength Kryonex had gained, despite the severity of his injuries. At first Lex had thought the demigod’s newfound vigor was illusory, only seeming mightier because of his own reduction in power. But he knew better now; whatever was holding him back was also bolstering Kryonex, leaving a disparity in power between them that Lex was beginning to realize was – in his current state – impossible to bridge.
That he’d fully expended what his tulpa was capable of, as well as used up his entire capacity of supplemental energy for overcharging his magic, and lost the Charismata – and with it, his connection to Nenet and Solvei, along with the powers he’d gained from them – only made the dire situation even more grim. As it was, he could see only a single path to victory: reclaiming Belligerence and using it against Kryonex.
The problem was that the demigod could see that path as well, and was doing everything in his enhanced power to keep Lex from taking it.
That was aptly demonstrated by the massive glacier that Kryonex had dropped onto the pitch-black quill, preventing Lex from approaching it through the thick layer of ice. It couldn’t keep him from telekinetically drawing it toward him – the weapon’s newfound ability to annihilate whatever it touched making any obstacle meaningless – but Kryonex had countermeasures for that.
Mostly by way of an unceasing bombardment of heavy attacks, forcing Lex to put everything he had into defense, rather than telekinesis.
But those defenses were rapidly crumbling.
“Your struggling serves no purpose.” Kryonex’s idle comment was accompanied by three of his legs lashing out, and Lex only managed to imperfectly block the first – destroying the last of his thaumaturgical wards against cold and coating his remaining foreleg with ice – before the other two struck him in succession, sending him stumbling back. “As you are now, I can eradicate you with a thought.”
“Then do so,” snarled Lex. “Will me into nothing if you think you can.”
Giving ground, he cast another spell at the demigod, one designed to ensnare extraplanar creatures and keep their movements restricted to a relatively small area. It wouldn’t prevent Kryonex from attacking him at range – in fact, it probably wouldn’t last for more than an instant or two – but if it could just buy him even a few moments, he could pull Belligerence that much closer...
But the boundary he’d created might as well have been a single line of caution tape for all that it held Kryonex back.
“You mistake my pointing out the futility of your actions for a declaration of intent,” noted Kryonex conversationally even as he rushed forward, his two foremost legs stretching out to hit Lex in the face with twin energy beams from less than ten feet away. “Your death is now a foregone conclusion. The manner in which you perish should therefore make little difference to you, even if it means a great deal to me.”
Despite the fact that he could barely stay upright after that last attack, Lex managed to sneer at the wounded spider. “Which is your way of admitting that if you expunge me from reality, you won’t be able to take control of Belligerence.”
Even as he spoke, he was casting a spell, one designed to slow an enemy’s movement through time, effectively hampering their speed. While he had no doubt it would do little against Kryonex, it might be enough to make an opening. He only needed a little more time to bring Belligerence closer!
But Kryonex barely seemed to notice his effort, eyes flashing as he froze the spell, shattering it in an instant. “Belligerence. Is that the weapon’s name? I’ll have to remember that for later.”
The storm around him intensified, and again Lex felt a thousand flakes of ice tear into him, shredding skin and muscle faster than his innate restorative powers could keep up. “But yes, you’re correct in your assumption. I saw you demonstrate how your weapon now has the annihilative properties of that creature. Since you possess the means to telekinetically manipulate it, that means that you’re the key to claiming it for my own.”
“I’d be happy to give it to you,” spat Lex, the glow around his horn sputtering as he tried to pull the quill just a little closer. “Point first.”
A massive leg struck him from above, knocking him to the ground. “Your offer is unnecessary. I hypothesize that once I’ve extracted all of the divinity I can from your dead body, whatever bond you have with that weapon will be transferred to me.” Lex tried to rise then, but a second strike sent him back down. “And if that doesn’t work, then perhaps your corpse will suffice. A glove made out of your skin might let it be safely touched, for instance. Or maybe a handle made from your bones can be attached to it.”
“You still...have to kill me...first...” groaned Lex, creating a spike of black crystal directly underneath Kryonex.
The demigod didn’t even try to dodge the attempted impalement, allowing the stalagmite to shatter as it struck the underside of him. “Indeed. Your soul is quite tenacious in its attachment to your body, pulling in positive energy to rebuild your corporeal self even despite my having set the rules of my new realm” – Lex’s ears twitched at that – “to disallow connections to other planes.”
Another pointed leg came down just as Lex changed into a shadow, skewering him before he could fall back. Just like before, the demigod’s body wasn’t something he could move through, and Lex couldn’t free himself as Kryonex raised him up to be right in front of his damaged face.
“But that just means,” continued the demigod, eyes darkening, “that if I freeze your soul itself, it won’t be able to continue repairing your body.”
Hissing, Lex returned to physical form, raking his remaining fore-claw over where Kryonex’s leg was protruding from his abdomen even as his horn glowed, pulling Belligerence closer. “Not if I tear-”
He didn’t get a chance to finish as the leg he was impaled on released a blast of gelid energy directly into him.
Instantly, Lex froze from the inside, his blood solidifying even as the sinew between his bones fused into total rigidity.
His eyes blazing as he found himself a prisoner in his own body, Lex turned his will toward Belligerence, his horn flaring brighter-
And another pulse of cold halted that as well, the aura around his horn – as well as the spectral flames of green and purple emerging from his eyes, along with his eyes themselves – frozen solid.
It was only because of his nature as a titan that Lex was still able to think, struggling to come up with a new plan even as he felt the cold spread further, sinking down to a metaphysical level. It was enough to dull even his supernatural perception, turning his thoughts into a chilled morass as he realized that he was dying...
“Even against a titan imbued with power akin to an avatar, I didn’t expect to lose so much winning this battle,” murmured Kryonex, eyes lightening as he kept pouring a steady wave of cold into Lex. “But even if I can’t recoup the divinity I’ve lost, Belligerence will more than suffice to make up the difference. I really must thank the Night Mare for creating it, perhaps with a personal visit.”
You...aren’t...worthy...to...say...her...name...!
The demigod’s one remaining pedipalp twitched again. “You needn’t worry about protecting her honor. Very soon, she’ll be a forgotten goddess, slain by the very artifact that she helped create.”
...how...
“Ah, I almost forgot you weren’t aware,” replied the demigod, continuing to freeze the titan. “I’ve been reviewing your thoughts for some time now. That was part of why I had such trouble building a new realm here. Suppressing another divinity’s powers – such as whatever it was you were using to shield your cognition – was easy enough to design.”
...how...did...
“But I was sure you would have felt it if I’d looked into your mind directly, so instead I came up with a much more esoteric functionality. Specifically, freezing the psychic impressions that unguarded thoughts leave behind after they’ve been comprehended.”
...how...did...you...
“Normally, those impressions fade away immediately, but by glaciating them, I’ve been able to inspect everything you’ve thought only a few microsecond after the fact. It really was quite difficult to set up, though eminently worthwhile, as it let me easily keep you from regaining your weapon.”
...how...did...you...manage...
“Hm? How did I manage what? To come up with such an intricate plan? To outthink you even after taking so much damage?”
The demigod’s question didn’t have time to finish speaking as Belligerence shot zipped toward him, coming not from the glacier, but instead up from the ground-
“NO!!!”
-and severed the leg holding Lex.
“HHHRRRAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!”
There was no telekinetic aura around the weapon. Nor was it moving under its own power. Instead, it was gripped in a spectral claw, one that was a ghostly replica of Lex’s own. Despite his near-death state, Lex couldn’t help but smile inwardly at the sight, recalling when he’d used this same spell during his fight with Lirtkra and Monitor back in Vanhoover, so long ago. But whereas before he’d used it to deliver a spell without them knowing, this time he’d used it to grasp Belligerence – like his telekinesis, the spell could safely touch the quill – without Kryonex realizing it, carrying the weapon down and around to attack from an unexpected angle.
Of course, a large part of his having taken the demigod unaware was because he’d made sure to keep what he was doing out of his thoughts. That had been easy; he’d been practicing that level of mental discipline ever since he’d been a colt, teaching himself to think in a way that would let him build the mental architecture necessary to develop thaumaturgical spells. Once he’d felt his dark magic’s mental shields begin to degrade – something he now knew was because Kryonex had made this place his realm – it had been simple prudence to disguise his thoughts.
Not to do so would have been unforgivably careless, since he’d berated Adagio for exactly that failing a few hours earlier.
Even so, Lex couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of the situation. For all the powers he’d gained – the Charismata, his new body, titan ascension – it had been the personal discipline and simple magic that he’d cultivated in his youth that had proven decisive.
That, Lex decided as he hit the ground, his titanic resilience already working to repair the damage dealt to his body and soul, and the Night Mare.
Directing the spectral claw to bring the weapon back to him, Lex worked to move his foreleg, flexing the talons of his remaining claw as he reached upward to grasp the weapon-
“I WON’T LET YOU!!!”
And Kryonex’s eyes flashed, freezing the spectral hoof just before it could bring Belligerence within reach, the weapon stopping in midair now that there was nothing to move it.
Gritting his teeth, Lex’s horn lit up just as Kryonex fired another beam of gelid energy.
Swinging Belligerence into the path of the massive blue ray, Lex focused on the power that the void creature had used before, trusting that his goddess would have wanted to keep such a useful ability...
In his telekinetic grasp, Belligerence seemed to pulse, negating the ray.
It was enough to bring Kryonex to a standstill-
Negate his teleportation instead!
And again the weapon pulsed in his grasp, Kryonex faltering as his attempt to escape failed.
Now, draw him in!
Even before he’d finished giving the command, the demigod was already retreating, his enhanced speed putting considerable distance between him and the weapon.
But that wasn’t enough to let him outdistance the vortex that formed around Belligerence then.
Clawing and scrabbling at nothing, his ability to teleport still abrogated, there was nothing Kryonex could do as he was pulled closer to the weapon.
As was Lex.
Just before he came within striking range, Kryonex witnessed Lex take hold of Belligerence at last. He saw the talons close around the ebony quill, saw the blue runes momentarily flare brighter. Then he saw their glow flow back up into Lex, realizing with a sickening rush of certainty that it was returning some of what had gone into its creation, giving back a surplus of divine energy that the titan’s goddess had likely intended for a situation exactly like this one.
Then he saw the light move to Lex Legis’s left shoulder.
And the titan’s missing leg restored itself.
But not as flesh and bone.
Instead, the entire limb was composed of barbed wire, the strands of metal churning and writhing exactly the way his whole body had before, when he’d failed to will his foe out of existence.
Then Lex Legis grasped Belligerence with both of his claws – wire and muscle gripping the artifact equally between them – and drove it into Kryonex’s head.
The Night Mare had restored everything that he’d lost.
Already, Lex could feel his powers returning as the wire that made up his left foreleg twisted and contorted, maintaining its overall shape even as its component strands writhed and coiled around themselves. Its barbed edges tore through the smothering effect of Kryonex’s divine realm like knives through a shroud, allowing his strength, speed, and other abilities to reassert themselves more with each passing moment.
It wasn’t progressing toward the greater integration that he’d had only a short while ago, when his entire body had become wire; Lex could feel that instinctively. There was no merging of his intellect and instincts, no restoration of his tulpa into his greater mind. It was as though a single leg wasn’t enough to renew everything he’d gained in that uplifted state.
But Lex couldn’t bring himself to care about that, far more taken with one particular aspect of his recovery:
The Charismata was back, and with it, his connection to Solvei and Nenet.
Already, he could feel the pair starting to stir, as though the merest touch of his mind to theirs was enough to coax them back from the brink. The sensation caused a howl of pure joy to tear itself from his throat, reveling in the knowledge that he didn’t have to be alone again. I still have them! he screamed inwardly. I STILL HAVE THEM BOTH!
It was almost enough to make him forget the one who’d very nearly thrust him back into that unbearable life of isolation.
Almost.
“YOU COULDN’T TAKE THEM FROM ME!!!” Lex roared, his voice louder than thunder as he brought Belligerence down. “YOU COULDN’T TAKE THEM FROM ME AND I’LL KILL YOU FOR TRYING!!!”
The pitch-black quill went through the demigod’s head without the slightest hint of resistance.
And Kryonex’s body shattered like glass, a piercing scream of agony ringing out as the giant spider crumbled to pieces, his body falling apart into frozen chunks that littered the ground.
Except for his eyes, the blue orbs remaining right where they were on either side of the ebony weapon. A moment later those orbs darkened as they seemed to lurch backward, and the space around them seemed to blur-
As a massive ice elemental – its features rough and unfinished, like the ones that Akna had summoned before she’d merged with Solvei – appeared in its place. Humanoid in shape, it brought its arms up with impossible speed, lashing out with a punch to Lex’s left even as the other unleashed a massive beam of gelid energy from his right, trying to catch the titan between them.
But rage hadn’t robbed Lex of his wits. If anything, his renewed determination to see Kryonex die had sharpened his resolve, making it easy for him to find a way out.
Immediately, the ray of super-cold energy was stopped as Lex raised a massive wall of black crystals – the barrier once again strong enough to absorb the attack – even as he swung the quill in a wide arc in the opposite direction, destroying the ill-defined arm before it could make contact with him. Nor did he stop there, rushing forward as he brought the weapon back around for a follow-up strike.
The ice elemental that Kryonex had become was already backpedaling, using its realm-enhanced speed to put more distance between them even as it conjured up thousands of icicles, lancing out from all directions directly toward Lex.
It was a feint, he knew. He was supposed to use Belligerence’s vortex to swallow the icicles, allowing the demigod – who by now had taken the measure of exactly how far away he needed to be in order to avoid the pull that the weapon generated – time to get clear. He’s betting that if he puts enough distance between himself and Belligerence, it won’t be able to negate his powers. Then he’ll be able to teleport away.
That wasn’t something that Lex was willing to let happen.
Which was why he kept the weapon’s negation power firmly directed toward the demigod’s ability to teleport as he rushed through the icicle storm.
Even as the frozen missiles rained down, Lex was dodging them, using a spell to increase his speed and reaction time. It was a boost so small as to be infinitesimal when compared to what he was already capable of, but that was still more than what Kryonex had apparently been counting on, giving Lex the barest edge as he blocked some hits, dodged others, and grit his teeth against the few strikes that he had to accept, allowing his recuperative powers to deal with the worst of the blows.
All the while, he doggedly pursued his enemy.
For several seconds, the chase remained at a stalemate – almost a resumption of when they’d both madly dodged the void creature’s attempts to catch them – before Lex threw Belligerence.
But not with his claws. Instead, he used his telekinesis to hurl the weapon, maintaining his aura’s grip on it even as the quill sailed forward, crossing the distance between himself and the fleeing demigod. It wasn’t going to connect, he could already see that, with Kryonex outpacing the weapon’s flight-
That was when Lex activated its vortex again.
This time there was the slightest lag between his order and the weapon’s activation, the blue runes having dimmed ever-so-slightly in direct proportion to their distance from him. But the pause lasted for only a fraction of a microsecond, the weapon suddenly drawing everything toward itself, Kryonex struggling not to be pulled backward.
Even as Lex was pulled forward.
Rocketing toward the quill, Lex pushed himself as much as he was able, waiting until it was almost within reach again before canceling the vortex, grabbing the quill in his claw even as he was catapulted forward at speeds far greater than anything he could have achieved even with his powers were back. And Kryonex wasn’t able to outpace him, nor alter his own course before Lex caught up and drove Belligerence directly into the demigod’s center of mass.
Just like the spider, the ice elemental shattered into nothing with a wail of pain.
And in its place was a massive yeti, with two long tentacles where its arms should have been.
These are the aspects that I saw when Kryonex came through the portal, Lex realized, the yeti bellowing as it intensified the storm around itself. I’m destroying his divine manifestations one at a time.
Was Kryonex somehow sacrificing those incarnations of himself in order to cling to life just a little longer? Or was destroying each aspect an inherent part of what it meant to try and kill a deity? Lex didn’t know, nor did he care overly much as he tore through another flimsy defense, fighting to reach the yeti hiding within the storm.
Less than thirty seconds later Belligerence pierced its hide, which shattered to reveal a mammoth with white fur and tusks of ice.
Minutes passed as Lex doggedly destroyed each of Kryonex’s manifestations, the demigod screaming each time another part of himself was destroyed, the blizzard surrounding him growing calmer with each shattered aspect.
But he didn’t stop fighting, forcing Lex to work for each victory, until at last the demigod collapsed to the ground and ceased moving...
In the form of an oversized white wolf.
The lupine wore a caparison of folded sheets of ice, each one overlayed with runes in Koloss, akin to those that decorated Belligerence. But it wasn’t the runes themselves which caused Lex to stop his assault, staring at the demigod’s remaining form in shock. Rather, it was what the runes spelled out.
Hrothvitnir.
The name of the wolf in the creation myth Solvei had told him.
Nor was that the only epithet the caparison bore, as another set of runes spelled out the name Nuti-Amaguk, the adlet name for the same being. Nor were those all, as numerous additional names were spelled out along its length as well, ones that Lex didn’t recognize, such as Fenrisulfr, Vanagandr, and Fenrir, among others.
And from where it was sprawled, the great wolf laughed in Kryonex’s voice. “Recognize this one, do you?”
“You’re the one who created the adlets and the utvalgte?!” Lex slowly stalked forward, pointing Belligerence at the lupine’s head. “The wolf who demanded that they fight a war against his fiery counterpart?!”
Another dark chuckle escaped from the massive jaws. “I am now. I inherited his past, along with the rest of his essence, when I absorbed him.”
Lex’s mind instantly flashed back to that eight-legged creature he’d merged with in Darkest Night.
“Why?” he hissed. He knew that the question had no bearing on their battle now, that he should keep destroying the demigod’s incarnations until he had none left. But with his renewed connection to Solvei still fresh in his mind, Lex couldn’t bring himself to ignore this newest revelation, needing answers for no other reason than because he knew she’d want them. “What conflict did you have with him?”
“The road to godhood is a long and hard path to traverse for those of us who have no divine patron,” replied Kryonex, still making no move to rise. “In order to fuel my ascension, I had to overcome and subjugate many powerful beings of cold, grafting their spiritual substance onto my own.”
“You weren’t always a demigod?”
Another laugh, this one bitter and mirthless. “You yourself noted that I was the afterbirth among my pantheon, the thirteenth member of twelve gods who claimed the primary Elemental Planes for themselves. While divinity, in greater or lesser quantities, was something my siblings all had, I was left bereft.”
“The runt of the litter,” murmured Lex.
Kryonex snorted. “As apt a metaphor as any. And so I resolved to surpass my brothers and sisters, earning through my own effort what they took for granted. I overcame the many creatures who had carved up the Plane of Ice among themselves, subjugating the weak and absorbing the strongest. This wolf, having expended so many of his followers on his endless war, was one of my earliest triumphs. The one that made all of the others possible.”
“Until you challenged me,” answered Lex, deciding that he’d heard enough.
The winter wolves had revered their ancestral spirit rather than worshiped him, and the adlets had resented their creator, but the very idea that the wretched creature in front of him now had any claim over the two races that made up his beloved Solvei’s heritage was yet another reason to kill him.
“You should have stayed in your frozen wasteland, subsisting on the worship of those wretches you bullied into submission,” he spat as he prepared to drive Belligerence home.
But Kryonex wasn’t quite done yet. “Kill me, and an entire pantheon will hunt you down.”
Lex laughed, the sound as cold as anything that Kryonex had thrown at him. “Your siblings won’t care to avenge your death. If what I know about them is accurate, they’ll thank me for saving them the trouble of dispatching you.”
“Not them,” corrected the demigod. “The Aesir.”
Lex frowned, not familiar with that name.
“They’re one of the more prominent groups of gods in the multiverse,” explained Kryonex. “And they were quite upset when they found out that I’d absorbed this wolf. Apparently, there was a prophecy that said it has some part to play in their pantheon’s future. But I was able to appease them when I swore that, since he was an aspect of me now, I would fulfill that role.”
“And if I kill you, they’ll blame me for ruining whatever destiny they’re trying to navigate, is that it?”
The corners of the white wolf’s lips turned up. “Their war god kills titans for sport. Their all-father has magic that that puzzles even other gods. Their allies are many, and their surviving enemies few. I’m just a demigod, and you struggled to best me even with that weapon you now wield.”
Lex chuckled, the animal within him amused. It had witnessed this countless times before, a defeated rival growling and snarling its last, empty shows of defiance once the fighting was over. What came next was always satisfying.
“Allow me to return to the Plane of Ice,” continued Kryonex, “and I’ll swear a solemn oath never to interfere with you again. I’ll pay restitution for your trouble, and will-”
“The only restitution I’ll accept from you,” Lex declared, bringing his face within a foot of one of Kryonex’s glowing blue eyes, “is this!”
Then he brought Belligerence down for the final time, piercing the demigod’s brow.
The scream that accompanied the injury was familiar by now, but unlike before the demigod’s form didn’t shatter. Instead, a slow dribble of clear, shimmering fluid – godsblood – dripped down from the injury.
Immediately, Kryonex sprang upward, but Lex was ready for him, thick bands of black crystal coming up to encircle the demigod’s body. That they held the wolf’s struggling form down confirmed what the becalmed blizzard had suggested: Kryonex had already lost a great deal of power.
And now, he’s going to lose his life.
“YOU FOOL!” howled Kryonex. “THE AESIR-”
“If that pantheon’s fate depends on a wolf,” roared Lex, “I’ll show them one far greater than you!”
“IT CAN’T JUST BE ANY WOLF!” screamed Kryonex, still trying to free himself despite the head wound. “IT HAS TO BE THIS ONE! THIS SPECIFIC WOLF’S ESSENCE!”
Lex grinned savagely, his gaze turning solid green-and-purple.
When he’d given gifts to his soul-bound servants, Nenet’s had been better by far, the sphinx receiving her mother’s bracelet along with several of its magic rings.
Solvei deserved something more potent than his old circlet.
“THEN I’LL JUST GIVE HER SOME OF YOURS!”
His wire-leg shot forward then, the lengths of barbed metal still churning as he grasped Kryonex’s eye and pulled.
The demigod’s scream was louder then. It saturated the air, which forever after would carry a trace of it as it blew through the valley. It sank into the stones, cooling the flowing magma and ensuring that the ground there would never be warm again. It shattered every flake of snow for miles around, leaving the water freezing but unable to crystalize, which would happen to all liquids brought there for the rest of time.
All of which Lex’s trans-temporal sense told him as the divine realm dissolved away around him, marking the end of the demigod’s life.
A moment later, he yanked the glowing blue eye – as large as his own head – free from its socket.
The gods assembled in the Synedrium watched in silence, the atmosphere so solemn that it was almost palpable as they bore witness to the death of one of their own kind.
On the viewscreen, Kryonex shuddered and went still, the glow of his remaining eye slowly fading to nothing.
Lex Legis looked the corpse of his foe over, keeping Belligerence buried in the demigod’s head for several seconds before he seemed satisfied, dissolving the bands of black crystal he’d used to secure Kryonex before withdrawing his weapon and walking away-
Just in time for the demigod’s body to move.
The titan immediately whirled in place, bringing the pitch-black quill up so quickly it was as if he’d expected something like this to happen.
But he needn’t have bothered.
Kryonex – or rather, his corpse – wasn’t moving to attack. Instead, it was slowly rising into the air, caparison sliding off from where his limbs dangled carelessly to crumple upon the ground, his body looking as though someone had attached a huge, invisible hook to it. Nor was that the only part of the deceased demigod to rise up, as all around the broken valley, the severed body parts and drops of godsblood that he’d shed were similarly beginning to float, displacing whatever ice or stones or magma were covering them as they hovered in the air and moved to rejoin the corpse.
The only exception was the eye that Lex Legis kept clutched in his left foreclaw, talons of wire keeping their hold on the gory prize and preventing it from returning to its source.
The others returned from whence they came, and once they had rejoined the divine cadaver, Kryonex’s body began to calcify.
Shrinking in on itself, the corpse shuddered and grew larger as the substance of its body turned rocky and colorless, the monument expanding and warping until its lupine shape was lost amidst the change. Instead, the husk rose further upward as its shape became something that might have been an amalgamation of the deity’s varied manifestations, the striations in the jagged matter somehow suggesting different aspects that Kryonex had taken depending on which angle they were viewed from. And still the petrified corpse grew larger as it rose further upward-
And then a silvery portal opened above it, the sky seeming to split open as it made room for the god-corpse, the rift closing as soon as the body passed through its boundaries.
“And so passes Kryonex, the Lord of Evil Ice,” intoned Soft Whisper. “May he rest peacefully on the Astral Plane forevermore, under the watchful eye of the Guardian of Dead Gods.”
“̴͕͋̈̓̽̈́͂A̸̱͛͋̆͝n̶͔̟͋̈́͝͝ͅ ̸̜͍̟̮̽͆̎̓a̴͔̽͛̑̕͝ć̸̟̦̪͍̰͇͒c̵̗͎̺̫͂̓ͅȇ̶̇͌͜ͅp̵͔͚̣̭̦̹͐̎͘͠t̷̘̆ä̴̧̦̰͎́͒̄͘ͅb̶̗̹͠ḹ̶̢͎͇̥͊̽͐͝ͅę̴͈̼̑̎͝͠ ̵̱̭̓c̸̺̀͜ò̵̺̇́̅n̴̪̄̅̂̕c̶̱͍̞͎̖̝͆̍l̷̟̪͖̩̬̾́ṷ̸̡̢̳̈͑̓̾̓s̴̪͉̿̚į̸̛̰̺̞̺̃͊̎͊͗͜ơ̶̛̛̗̘̤͂ǹ̸̲̗͙̓͐,̵̜̍́̎̾̀ ̵̡̜͕̪͉̆̋͋͝i̸͎̺̠̗͎̮̓̓̐͆͌̋f̶̻͓̤̤̞̖͂̕ ̶̥̫̪́̇̈̍͌͛n̵̜̲̝͚̹̋̅͌o̸͙͇̰̼̜̒̉́́̒̈͜ț̵̿͒́̀ ̶̧͓̗̃͗á̴̗̱̚ ̶̯͔̺͙̊̈́̀͠v̷͍̻͓̓̔̽ͅḗ̷̯ṙ̸̳̝̤̜̓y̸̗̙͊ ̷͆́̆̕̕ͅī̴̝n̸̺͉͌̓̾̈́t̵͓̲͇̥̘̾ͅe̷̪͂̄̀͐̂͐r̴̠̦͍̯͒̀͊̓e̷͇̫̓̎s̴̩̼͉̰̈́ṱ̸̼̀̑͊i̵͙̪͉̠̰͕͒n̸̙͆́̄͝g̵̝͕͇̰̈ ̷̨̛̳͇͎̀̾͒͒̕ͅȯ̵̬̞ņ̴̳͕͓̟̮̀̑̓́e̷͚̱͊͐̌͆̄.̵̜̪͍̘̿̾”̴̯̤̮͎̊̂ The Author turned away from the viewscreen then, looking at the Sun Queen. “̶̬͔̹͔̭̌́̉̈́̓D̸̩͐e̸̗̪̅͛͆̐͝͝a̷̢̘̠̝̻͌̄̈̓ͅl̵̲͉̙͈͑̀͊͝ ̷̮̞̞̈̆̊̈́̒̎ẃ̷͎̲͓̂͑̐̕ĭ̸̟̬͔̿̓̄t̸̠͔̿̍̂̉̚͝h̴̢̖̞̟͕̣͂ ̴̢̧̤͙̩̱͒̔͊̄̚͠t̷̛̲̪̳̩̹͌̋̕͜h̶̘̏̎͆͝ẽ̷̦͍̤͓̳̻̾ ̸̼͇̆̀̇̌̓́ŗ̵̮͖͔͐͋̉e̴̞͖̪̱̬͆͑̽̃̿͛s̸̨̯̹̄t̷̡̨̗̟̐̀̊̾͌̈́.̶̻̈̃͆”̵̰̲͘͝
The radiant alicorn nodded. “Of course.”
But she was speaking to an empty space, The Author having left as soon as their order had been given.
The abrupt exit earned a snort from Kara. “You know, sometimes I wonder why everyone thinks there’s a lady under those robes. Taking off as soon as the fun part’s over and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up is much more of a guy thing.”
“This is a lot worse than just a mess.” Letting the viewscreen fade, Luminace gave the other gods a worried look, fiddling with her monocle. “Did anyone know about Kryonex’s connection to the Aesir?”
“I doubt it,” sighed the Moon Princess. “That pantheon doesn’t have many enemies, but the ones they do have wouldn’t overlook a chance to upset their destiny by killing a single demigod with no close allies.”
“Which is probably why the Aesir had no dealings with him, or at least none that I ever heard of,” noted the Sun Queen thoughtfully. “If they’d maintained any sort of relationship with Kryonex in an effort to safeguard his role in their future, it would have alerted their foes.”
“And now we’re their foes anyway!” cackled Blaze, looking delighted by that fact. “Not to mention the elves won’t take this lying down either! At this rate, the Guardian will have more dead gods to watch over very soon!”
“Which will probably be most of us if we don’t do something!” snapped the Moon Princess. “Our pantheon doesn’t have the strength to stand up to either the elves or the Aesir, especially if they join forces against us!”
“You should all try to relax, the Aesir are good people!” huffed the Unspoken, his anteater’s snout swaying indignantly. “I’ve hung out with their god of mischief before, and we always have plenty of laughs! I bet they’ll find this whole thing hilarious; they keep this big secret to make sure that demigod who ate their wolf stays out of trouble, and then he gets himself bumped off anyway!”
He guffawed at that, slapping his squirrel’s paw against his bear’s knee, but the Moon Princess scowled at him. “The Aesir are clannish by nature. For all that they act individually and without consulting each other, they believe very strongly in ties of obligation and responsibility. They will see Lex Legis’ actions as something that we need to answer for.”
“Oh please. Do they even have worshipers on this world?” drawled Kara. “Because they’re a human pantheon, and last time I checked, most of Everglow’s humans were getting all hot and bothered over whatshisname. That new god, Za...something or other.”
“Zarus,” supplied Luminace with a frown, “the Father of Humanity, at least according to him. His clerics have been persecuting the other human religions for a while now-”
“Which means that instead of starting a holy war between their faithful and ours, the Aesir will likely come after us directly, in our own realms,” finished the Moon Princess. “Between them and the elves, we’ll need to prepare for the worst. I motion that we take the Night Mare’s Umbral Regalia by force and use them-”
“No.”
“Sister!”
But the Sun Queen was already shaking her head. “You were the one who said that the Night Mare would never leave her realm undefended, even when she herself was not there. Invading Darkest Night would not be without cost to us.”
“Not if we all worked together!” protested the Moon Princess.
“Let me guess, under your leadership?” sneered Blaze. “Because if you think I’ll take orders from you, then live up to your portfolio and keep dreaming.”
“And I already said that I’m a lover, not a fighter,” added Kara. “Though I wouldn’t mind if the Aesir’s war god wanted to thrust his spear deep inside me again and again until he was satisfied.”
“He doesn’t fight with a spear, he fights with a hammer,” corrected Luminace flatly.
“Oh really now?” Ears rising in interest, Kara grinned. “Is the hammer his pe-”
“If the Night Mare’s champion makes good on his pledge to place Kryonex’s eye into the wolf he’s enslaved, the Aesir’s wrath might be diverted.”
Soft Whisper’s statement prompted a disbelieving laugh from Luminace, giving the death goddess an incredulous look. “You can’t possibly believe that he was being serious when he said that. It seemed obvious to me that he was just spiting Kryonex in his final moments.”
The Unspoken shrugged, his starfish arms rising and falling. “That Siren whose tail he was chasing put some godly mojo into his spine, and then he took it back okay. Why can’t he do the same with that eyeball and his doggo?”
“Adagio Dazzle knew better than to try and place divinity into a mortal vessel,” noted the Moon Princess. “It took the help of a god – a fully-ascended, true god – to make that possible.”
“Which means that one of us will need to help Lex Legis perform the same operation on Solvei. If what Kryonex said is true, the Aesir might accept that she’ll fulfill the role the demigod previously held.”
The Sun Queen’s statement left Luminace gaping, her monocle falling from her face and dangling from its string. “We’re already going to be in trouble with the elves for raising a mortal-”
“Which means that repeating the offense won’t make things much worse on that front,” replied the sun goddess. “And so is a small price to pay if it means avoiding the Aesir’s ire.”
Luminace bit her lip as she replaced her monocle over her eye.
“As the goddess of friendship, I worry about doing something which we know could further damage our relationship with the elves, especially when it’s already so tense,” she replied at last. “But we did agree to support Lex Legis if he overcame Kryonex, and we can’t afford to upset another major pantheon.”
“You’re assuming that he’ll even accept our help to begin with,” cut in the Moon Princess. “Right now, he doesn’t know what’s happened to the Night Mare. Do you really think he’ll trust one of us if we tell him that his goddess has been imprisoned, but we’re happy to step in to help him elevate a servant who isn’t one of our faithful?”
Kara’s expression was smug as she tossed a lock of hair over her shoulder. “Leave that to me.”
The Sun Queen raised a brow. “You’d take on this task yourself?”
A broad grin crossed the love goddess’s lips. “Oh, absolutely. The Night Mare might be Lex’s goddess, but I’ve been his divine side-chick for a little while now. Besides, he’s going to call me about his reward soon, so I might as well bring this up when he does.”
“Reward?” Luminace cocked her head. “What reward?”
“Oh, I promised him that slutty little Siren would be his sex kitten if he scuttled her plans,” replied Kara nonchalantly. “And once he realizes she’s not available, he’s going to call me and complain.”
“Adagio Dazzle was the one who brought that anti-god’s egg forth,” noted the Sun Queen. “It’s important that she be questioned so we can find out where she got it from. But you’re saying he won’t be able to resurrect her, even though he previously brought back an entire tribe of adlets?”
“It’s because the Night Mare isn’t going to be able to grant him any more resurrection spells,” yawned the Unspoken, his head now that of a sloth. “Or grant any spells to anyone now that she’s locked up. Probably.”
The Moon Princess shook her head. “The Night Mare is my rival for dominion over the night, a contest that she would have lost long ago if she were a fool. The same way I’m sure her realm won’t be left unguarded, I’m equally certain that she’ll have some alternative set up to continue granting magic to her faithful. She knows that a sudden loss of clerical spells is a serious – possibly even fatal – blow to a worshiper’s faith.”
“Assuming you’re right, that means that something else is going to prevent Lex Legis from resurrecting Adagio Dazzle.” The Sun Queen turned to look at Soft Whisper then. “Can you confirm the state and location of her soul?”
The ancient zebra goddess paused for just a moment, then shook her head. “She was not one of my worshipers, and she died on a plane beyond the one where I keep my realm.”
“But you still saw her die,” pressed Luminace, waving a wing at where her viewscreen had been. “You’re the goddess of death. Even if it was only remotely, seeing her die didn’t give you any insight about what happened to her?”
Soft Whisper closed her eyes then, falling silent. It was only after a long moment that she opened them again. “The direction that her soul took, when it left her body, seemed...unusual.”
“Unusual how?” prompted the Sun Queen.
“...I don’t know. That void eradicated her body a moment later, obscuring the trail her soul left behind. But in the instant before that happened, its bearing wasn’t what I would have expected, based on its numinous quality.”
“Lex is going to be so mad when he can’t bring her back, and finds out that no one knows where she went!” giggled Kara.
“And you think he’ll still allow you to help him uplift his wolf if you break your promise to him?” scowled the Moon Princess.
“It’s not my fault she can’t be brought back,” mock-pouted Kara. “I just promised him her love, not her life. Which is why, when he’s done talking to me and realizes that there isn’t someone warm, wet, and tight waiting to congratulate him for all his effort...”
She shuddered then, a low moan rising from her throat as her eyes fluttered closed, tail flagging and her thighs rubbing together. “...he’s going to make one of the most impressive booty calls I’ve seen in a long time.”
Luminace rolled her eyes. “Just make sure he transplants that eye and appeases the Aesir,” she huffed, before turning to look at the Sun Queen. “With your permission, I’ll start researching the connection between their pantheon and that wolf. Just in case we need a backup plan.”
When the sun goddess nodded, Luminace and Euclase vanished, which the Unspoken seemed to take as his cue, stretching his cricket’s legs as he stood up. “You throw a pretty wild bash, Queenie. Next time, come hang out in my realm. We’ll do gelatin shots.” His viscuous companion bubbled agitatedly at that, and the two disappeared as well.
Blaze, however, was not so gregarious. “We were given numerous opportunities for war, and they were all missed!” she snarled, giving the Sun Queen a dark look. “Next time, I’m getting involved, no matter what anyone says.”
“I’ll be sure to convey that sentiment to The Author the next time I see her,” answered the Sun Queen with a demure smile.
From his place behind Blaze, Vutok fumed at the response. “THAT BILLOWY GODDESS’S ROBES WILL BURN IN THE FIRES OF-”
He didn’t get a chance to finish as Blaze kicked out, her back hooves catching him right in the middle, striking so hard that he was knocked out of the Synedrium – and the Soothing Meadows – altogether. “I think I’ll go work out my frustrations on that idiot instead,” decided Blaze, taking off after her servant.
Soft Whisper made no statement of her own as she left, simply vanishing as quietly as she’d appeared.
Seeing that the conference was ending, Silhouette looked up at his goddess, his expression stricken as his butterfly wings slowly opened and closed. “So he’s going to get away with it all?” he whimpered. “Lex Legis puts us at odds with two mighty pantheons, carries a weapon of terrible power, and gets his own goddess banished, for which he suffers neither censure nor sanction?”
Seeing his distraught countenance, the Moon Princess put a wing around the stallion. “Justice is a process, not merely a result. The shockwaves that Lex Legis has caused throughout the planes will eventually reverberate and find their way back to him. Until then, remember what I’ve taught you.”
Swallowing once, Silhouette nodded. “To be as patient as the stars, for even though the moon’s light wanes, it eventually grows full again.”
The Moon Princess smiled. “Indeed.”
Pulling him to her side, she gave the Sun Queen a nod. “We shall speak on these matters more later, sister.”
The Sun Queen returned the nod, and a moment later the two were gone, leaving Kara as the last of the Synedrium’s divine guests.
Stretching in a way that looked more like an erotic dance than a release of tension, she climbed to her hooves. “Well, this was fun, but I need to go find Honey a new husband,” purred the love goddess. “Also, sorry about the stains on your divan. Seeing that orgy Lex is about to have really put me in the mood. I’ll need to figure out who’s face I’m going to sit on when I watch it happen in real-time.”
“Actually,” interjected her host, “I was hoping to speak to you privately for a moment.”
“Aw, just speak?” pouted Kara.
“I’m afraid so.”
Tsking, Kara turned to the bloody bride she’d brought with her. “Honey, I want you to head back to the Quivering Depths ahead of me, okay?”
A whine came from the horrific figure’s throat. “But you said you’d find me a stallion to give me babies after we were done!”
“And that’s the first thing I’ll do as soon as I finish up here,” soothed Kara, “which I promise won’t take very long.”
Honeymoon Trap’s shoulders sunk, her head downcast. “Fine,” she murmured, before vanishing.
The Sun Queen gave Noble Bright a look, and the stallion made the sign of her faith in return before turning and marching out of the Synedrium.
Once he was gone, Kara raised a brow at the other goddess, her expression vaguely bemused. “So, if you’re not looking for some slap and tickle, what’s on your mind?”
“Actually, I was wondering what was on yours.”
“Hmm? What do you mean?”
“When the Night Mare defied The Author, all of us were shocked,” explained the Sun Queen, glancing over at the edge of the Synedrium where the conflict had happened. “All of us, except you. Your expression was triumphant.”
Kara’s smile diminished slightly at that, her eyes narrowing.
“I confess, I didn’t notice,” continued the Sun Queen. “I was too surprised – and horrified – by what was happening to pay attention. But Noble Bright was too shaken by what had happened when he’d seen The Author without her glamour to watch, and so he was looking at something he found more pleasant instead: you.”
“I do tend to have that effect on guys,” murmured Kara. “Girls too. Everyone, really.”
“And he thought it was unusual enough to tell me about it just now, confessing what he’d just seen in a prayer to me even though he was right by my side, just to make sure that no one else overheard.”
Kara snorted. “And here I thought paladins didn’t know the meaning of discretion.”
“He does, as do I, which is why I wanted to make sure we were alone to talk about this. Why were you so pleased to see the Night Mare pick a fight with The Author? You must have known how it would turn out.”
“Oh, how it turned out wasn’t important,” smirked Kara. “It’s what it signaled.”
“And what was that?”
Kara’s expression turned sly then, giving the other goddess a knowing look. “Come on, Sunny. Are you really going to tell me that it’s never once crossed your mind how unusual that entire episode was?”
A flicker of confusion crossed the Sun Queen’s face. “Unusual how? I’ll admit, it was odd that The Author seemed so intent on allowing that unmortal to emerge, even though doing so would have been catastrophic, but-”
“Not her,” sighed Kara. “The Night Mare! The way she was acting!”
“She was acting like she normally does. She stood by her principles, regardless of the cost-”
“Ugh, I forget how forthright you are sometimes,” groaned Kara, rolling her eyes. “You’re almost as bad as Luminace that way.”
“You’re implying the Night Mare had another motivation for her actions?”
“Think of it this way,” explained Kara. “She’s known Lex Legis for, what, less than a year? Yet in that time, she’s not only given him one of her highest blessings and one of her Umbral Regalia, but has repeatedly stepped in whenever he needed her.”
“That’s also part of her nature, to help those who help themselves.”
“There’s help, and then there’s doting on someone.”
Raising a wing, she began counting off on her feathers. “Giving him a resurrection gem when he was bereaved over his followers having been killed by a devil. Saving his life when his misplaced teleportation would have killed him. Guiding him to her shrine and giving him a new body. Making him a titan. Defying The Author herself. When’s the last time you saw her do so much for any one follower, let alone in so short of a time?”
The Sun Queen’s expression turned uncertain then. “That was loyalty.”
“It was love!”
Rising up onto her back legs, Kara spun in place, looking upward as she laughed loudly. “She actually thought that she manipulated me into giving him that blessing! As though I had no idea that peeking into dreams would bring her running, or that she’d demand compensation for it! And then she didn’t even try to tell me what sort of blessing she wanted; she let me pick it out myself! It was like she was asking me to find her a boyfriend!”
The Sun Queen’s eyes were wide. “You’ve been playing matchmaker...with the Night Mare?!”
“And it’s been so much fun!” squealed Kara, dropping back to all fours. “Especially since she obviously has no idea how she feels! But she’ll figure it out eventually, especially now that she’s in time-out in Hali. And once she does, well...”
She gave the Sun Queen a wicked grin. “I really hope you can smooth things over with the elves, because once the Night Mare knows that she wants him, I don’t think she’ll wait very long before raising Lex up to become her divine consort.”
Lex watched as the portal closed, taking Kryonex’s body with it.
He’d recognized the silvery void on the other side of the dimensional aperture as the Astral Plane, having previously been there during his own brush with death. That Kryonex’s body had been drawn there was only mildly surprising; the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had – in its coverage of the known planes of existence – mentioned that as being where dead gods went, apparently under the aegis of some unknown guardian.
Even so, Lex spent almost a full minute scanning the skies where Kryonex’s corpse had vanished, as well as the surrounding area, making absolutely certain that there were no further unpleasant surprises waiting to reveal themselves. Every visual spectra he could think of was examined. Multiple investigative spells – including several drawn from his cache of diamonds – were used. From the movement of the air to the shifting of the earth, he analyzed everything around him, disregarding how his foresight continued to tell him that nothing would happen in the next few seconds.
Eventually, however, the absence of any threats grew too overwhelming to disregard. According to everything he could perceive, Kryonex was truly dead and gone, and no other imminent threats were waiting to take his place.
It was over.
He’d won.
What had begun as an expedition to subdue a wayward Siren had escalated beyond anything he could have imagined – an army of monsters which had turned into another undead horde, followed by a demigod, and then some sort of void monster that even Kryonex had been almost completely powerless against – but somehow, he’d still managed to overcome it all.
But that didn’t mean his work was done.
That sentiment earned an angry growl from the beast inside of him, but Lex shoved his recalcitrant instincts down. Just because the battle had concluded didn’t mean that there weren’t important matters that had to be attended to, and since he required neither food nor rest, there was no reason to delay seeing to them.
The first of which was Belligerence.
Eyeing the absolute blackness of its form – the quill’s ebony length marred only by glowing blue runes that decorated its body and the remaining length of azure flame that resembled a wire around its head – Lex turned his deductive powers on it instead.
The effort was only a limited success, however, serving largely to confirm what he knew. The weapon was now replete with the Night Mare’s power, admixed with his own. And while his spells could affect the weapon now, that didn’t mean that they were able to make sense of the creature that was bound within it. As it was, he wasn’t even sure that “within it” was the proper characterization for how the creature and the quill were interacting now.
There was, however, one test that Lex didn’t need any magic or special powers to perform.
Releasing the quill – which hovered in midair, as unaffected by gravity as it was by almost everything else – he took a few steps back from the weapon, eyeing it carefully.
Sure enough, the blue fire decorating its length dimmed. The change in luminosity was so small as to be imperceptible to a mortal’s eyes, and even then he only caught sight of it because he knew to look for it, having observed a slightly more pronounced effect when he’d thrown the quill at Kryonex during their last exchange.
Just as importantly, when he’d retrieved it then, the azure flames had regained their brightness. And so it was now, the brilliance of the runes and fire-shaped wire returning to their original intensity as he teleported the weapon back into his grasp.
There was no way to be sure what the significance of that was, but in his mind’s eye Lex could still picture the long strands of blue flame wrapping around the void creature, constricting its form down until it was one with Belligerence. A weapon which had been made with his own blood, and with which he’d sacrificed a leg – along with a fragment of the trace amounts of divinity that he’d claimed – to plunge into that monster, all while covered in the Night Mare’s power in the form of azure fire. That fire had then become the markings that the pitch-black quill now bore, markings that faded whenever they were away from him.
The result was a weapon with the same properties as that monster, able to annihilate anything it touched.
Except me.
Lex didn’t have enough data to form a complete answer, but by that same token, he didn’t need to have every last piece of the puzzle in place in order to see the picture.
However the Night Mare had bound that creature to Belligerence, it would remain sealed only so long as he kept the quill close to himself.
When taken from his presence, the prison would weaken. Exactly how far removed from himself it would need to be before it crumbled entirely, or how long that would take, was uncertain. For that matter, it might not collapse at all; Lex couldn’t imagine the Night Mare creating something so weak that it would rely entirely on him to maintain its form. It was entirely possible that it would manage to persist enough to at least restrain the creature in some limited capacity.
But even if that admittedly optimistic scenario was the case, it seemed clear enough that proximity to himself was somehow reinforcing – or entirely maintaining – Belligerence’s ability to keep that monster imprisoned.
Which makes me the prison’s warden, likely for eternity, Lex realized grimly. Meaning that Belligerence must never be separated from me under any circumstances.
In theory, that was a simple matter, since the weapon could be teleported back to his grasp with a thought. All the more so since no one else could safely touch it, and its ability to destroy anything besides himself likely meant that even anti-teleportation wards would be ineffective against it. But that didn’t mean that nothing could keep Belligerence from him; whatever rules Kryonex had set when he’d made the valley into his realm had proven that much.
And if the loss of his powers that Lex had experienced during the brief time that he’d been dead – slain by Hvitdod – was any indication, he wouldn’t be able to summon the quill after dying.
Which meant that if he was killed, there was a very real chance that monster would be unleashed in short order.
It was a sobering thought. Lex had known for some time that he had a responsibility to continue living, for the sake of everyone who depended on him. But it was one thing to know that Solvei and Nenet’s lives were tied to his own, or that his followers on Equestria were counting on him, or that everypony else in his homeland needed his guidance even if they didn’t realize it.
Being guard over a monster with the power to slay gods was quite something else.
Risking his life had been something that Lex had never been afraid to do, even before he’d pledged himself to the Night Mare. Although he’d never treated the prospect of dying casually, death hadn’t terrified him the way a life without meaning had. The result of which was that he’d always been willing to put his life on the line when it mattered, repeatedly coming to within a hair’s breadth of dying again and again, to say nothing of aforementioned time that he’d actually perished, a situation that had been undone only because of what had essentially been a cosmic fluke.
That was over now. While Lex couldn’t see himself eschewing fighting when it was necessary, a life-and-death battle against foes with the power to kill him was now something that had to be avoided unless there was absolutely no other choice, regardless of how unpalatable the alternatives were. Even then, he’d need to have measures in place to restore himself to life as soon as possible in case the worst happened.
Although, given his status as an immortal titan – one who had that void creature’s powers at his command – the pool of potential foes who warranted such caution was likely to be exceedingly small.
It wasn’t as though he had any intention of picking another fight with a god.
Snorting at how the prospect of engaging deities in combat was something he had to take seriously now, Lex placed Belligerence back into his pocket dimension, making sure to use his supernatural senses to monitor its glow. Fortunately, the blue fire remained undiminished. He’d expected that would be the case – the enclosure was a subdimension, being a folded portion of the space around him rather than its own plane; hence why that void creature had been able to break it open, rather than needing to teleport inside – but confirming it meant that transporting Belligerence, as well as keeping it from prying eyes, would be much easier.
A moment later, he placed Kryonex’s eye in there as well, casting a preservation spell on it just in case. If what the demigod had said about that “Aesir” pantheon was true, then he’d need to make good on his vow to have Solvei fulfil whatever role Kryonex – after he’d absorbed Hrothvitnir – played in their prophecy. But whether or not Kryonex’s eye would be sufficient for that was something he’d have to research.
Later.
Although...
When that time comes, this might prove useful, Lex decided as he picked up the caparison that had fallen from Kryonex’s lupine form after his death.
Even at a glance, he could tell that the cloak was laden with powerful enchantments. Alone, only a few of them were all that impressive, but layering so many on top of each other was a feat that Lex felt sure would have left most of Everglow’s magical artificers awed. Indeed, the cumulative effect was enough that most mortals would have damaged their eyes if they’d beheld it in the magical spectrum. Lex was made of sterner stuff though, and could make out multiple layers of defenses, augmentations, utility powers, and more, all tied to the cold. All of which, he felt sure, Kryonex had benefitted from, even though none of his manifestations had shown the caparison to be there.
But there was a limitation built into the icy cloak as well.
For all that it could do, its powers would only work for the one whose names were scrawled on the outer portion of its icy plates. That it had so many listed seemed to be redundant security measures, verifying the wielder’s identity by examining the different facets of their existence that that those names corresponded to, as though each one identified a different part of who they were. For anyone who didn’t meet all of those criteria, it was simply a cloak made of ice...albeit one so freezing that it would quickly kill any mortal that wasn’t a creature of intrinsic cold.
Not long ago, such an artifact – one mighty enough that he could have replenished his thaumaturgical magic with it – would have impressed Lex deeply.
Now he simply tossed it in his pocket dimension, to be dealt with some other time.
Which is also when I’ll figure this out, he noted idly, glancing at the wires that made up his left foreleg now.
For whatever reason, the tangled mass of metal was no longer writhing around itself, the individual strands now at rest. He had no idea why that was, or if they would all eventually vanish like his full-body transformation had, or what had caused that, or any of a dozen other questions...but those could wait for the next time he communed with the Night Mare.
Right now there were more important things that deserved his attention.
Nenet and Solvei being foremost among them.
With one last glance at the shattered valley – the ground pock-marked with numerous craters and deep trenches, one mountain split in half and the other with its peak blown completely off, dried lava everywhere, and numerous other signs of devastation ensuring that it would likely remain a desolate region for a very long time, even without taking into account the effects of Kryonex’s death – Lex headed back inside Adagio’s mountain redoubt.
The place had not escaped unscathed from the battle.
Several areas had collapsed, lining the hallway with rubble and dirt. The latter was already turning into freezing mud, mixing with ice-cold water that had previously been collateral snow and frost from Kryonex’s presence and frequent attacks, now unable to solidify due to the effects of his death. In a few places, the ground had split apart, the damage to the region causing fissures to open up.
Lex ignored them all, changing into shadow where necessary as he walked through the walls, debris, and other obstacles that stood between him and Nenet, who he could feel stirring but still nowhere close to consciousness. I’ll treat her first, then Solvei.
It took him only a second to emerge into a small, dirty room, solidifying as he came out from the wall-
And immediately received a blast of lightning to the face.
Ignoring the attack – he’d seen it coming and known that it lacked the power to hurt him – Lex instead looked at the one who’d unleashed it. “Lengjing xialai. Ni xianzai anquanle.”
And from where it was crouched in front of Nenet, favoring its injured leg, the large three-tailed fox with blue fur yelped. Changing back into the pale-skinned woman he’d saved before, she shakily fell to her knees, bowing her head. “Zh-zhen baoqian! Wo-”
Cutting herself off, she didn’t raise her head as she switched to Ponish. “Forgive me,” she intoned in an accented voice, which trembled as she tried to control herself. “Would you rather prefer that I converse with this language?”
“Speak whatever language you like,” replied Lex disinterestedly, already crossing the room toward Nenet.
“Then, please allow me to apologize for showing such ungrateful behavior to you who saved my life,” she continued. “I did not realize-”
“I’m not angry.” Pausing, Lex looked Nenet over, seeing that she had no physical wounds on her thanks to the regenerative ring she still wore. But the same couldn’t be said for the fox-woman. “Hold still while I treat your wounds.”
“Please take care of Nenet before myself!” she protested. But in the time it took her to say that, Lex had already reached out, laying his claw on the torn flesh of her arm. Instantly, the blood and lacerations – deep even to a casual glance – vanished, with even her clothing being repaired.
Gasping as her pain suddenly vanished, the fox-woman’s eyes widened, examining where she’d been bitten as he released her. “That was...you used no magic!”
“I don’t need magic for such a minor task,” Lex murmured in reply, kneeling down next to Nenet. “You may leave if you wish. I’ve slain Kryonex, and there’s no one else out there to waylay you. Or you may stay here, and I’ll watch over you until you can be safely returned home. It’s your choice.”
“You...killed a god...?” Looking as though she was about to faint, the fox-woman pressed her forehead to the floor, flattening her tails – which were still present, despite her human guise – out on the ground behind her. “I am...my name is Pimao Xiang Xiaoxiang Yiyang Mei Li of the Pimao Jingzhi kumiho, and all of my gratitude is yours. May I know the proper way to address the benevolent god to whom my life is in debt?”
“I’m not a god,” corrected Lex, already using the Charismata to revive Nenet, the sphinx’s eyes fluttering as she groaned softly. “I’m a titan.”
Terror and agony and despair assaulted her all at once, the undead tearing her apart even as they struggled to push past her, intent on slaying the people she’d been told to protect. The realization that she was about to fail them – to consign her new friend and the mother who’d betrayed her to the same miserable death that she was hovering on the brink of – was a torment in-and-of itself.
But the pain and the panic were nothing compared to the knowledge that she was disappointing her master. He’d taken her in, given her a purpose even knowing what a worthless, polluted creature she was, and now she was about to let him down.
That thought terrified her down to her core. For all that their bond was supposedly permanent, Nenet couldn’t believe that he lacked the power to undo it. If he could overcome Adagio, he could do anything...including finding a way to cut loose a useless, pathetic sphinx who couldn’t do what he needed. Which was why she had to figure out a solution, a way to overcome the undead and protect everyone without releasing Adagio but the wards were collapsing and Mei Li was tiring andtheundeadwereonherandnothingwasworkingandithurtsomuch-
Nenet, calm down. You’re safe now.
The words cut through her consciousness in an instant, dispelling her hysteria even as she found herself pulled into an embrace, strong limbs encircling her and holding her against a warm, powerful frame.
“M-Master...”
The word escaped her lips with a sob, tension rushing out of her all at once. The pain was gone, she realized belatedly. So was the fear and desperation.
But that didn’t mean that everything was okay.
“I’m sorry,” she moaned, burying her face in his chest as felt her eyes tearing up. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”
She kept up the litany of apologies as she sobbed, just like she had whenever Grisela had beaten her, collapsing and begging for forgiveness until her sister got tired of torturing her. Except this time there were no punches or kicks, no harsh screams or angry shrieks. Instead, Lex continued to hold her close as she cried, stroking her hair while murmuring soothing words. “It’s alright. You’re alright. You’re going to be okay.”
Nenet wasn’t sure how long they stayed that way, with her crying her eyes out and him reassuring her, but eventually she calmed down, sniffling as she pulled away from him. “Master, are you-, oh!” She gasped as she caught sight of the metal that now made up one of his limbs. “Your leg!”
“A replacement,” he explained, showing none of the shame she felt whenever someone mentioned her tail, “given to me by the Night Mare after I sacrificed the original.”
Nenet’s eyes widened at that. “‘Sacrificed’? Then, wait, does that mean you defeated Kryonex?! And all of those monsters too?! I-” A second later she remembered what – or rather, who – she’d forgotten. “Mei Li! Is she-”
“I am unharmed.”
Wearing a small smile, her new friend – back in her human form, albeit with her tails still visible and her vulpine ears sprouting from the top of her head for some reason – moved out from behind Lex. “I am happy that the same can be said for you.”
Letting out a relieved laugh, Nenet wiped her eyes, feeling herself finally start to relax. Her master had won the battle, and her new friend was okay. Everything really had worked out for the best somehow. “And Adagio?” she asked, looking around and belatedly realizing they weren’t in what was left of the Siren’s room anymore. “Is she still dancing in her cage?”
Mei Li’s fox ears flicked back, a grimace crossing her face as she looked away, and Nenet’s stomach clenched at the sight.
But before she could ask what had happened, Lex spoke. “Adagio is dead. She intruded on my battle with Kryonex, and circumstances left me no choice but to kill her.”
“...oh...”
Nenet didn’t know what else to say, the news leaving her feeling oddly numb. She knew that she should have been affected more strongly by what she’d just been told; that she should have celebrated that the Siren who had lied to and manipulated her was gone, or maybe felt a powerful sense of loss despite what an awful mother Adagio had been. But at that moment, all Nenet felt was hollow.
More to fill the silence than anything else, she asked the first question that came to mind. “How did she escape? Even if her cage was broken, those curses you put on her should have kept her contained?”
Mei Li blinked once. “You do not remember?”
Nenet cocked her head. “Remember what?”
“It’s not important now,” announced Lex. “Adagio’s joining the battle was unexpected, but ended up being worse for Kryonex than for me. In that regard, her escape from captivity was fortuitous.”
“But-”
Lex didn’t give the sphinx a chance to finish, turning to Mei Li. “Have you made a decision?”
Nenet didn’t even have time to wonder what he was talking about before the fox-woman bowed to the stallion. “I apologize for imposing on you further, but if you could return me to my home, I would gladly remain in your care until then.”
“So be it.” Lex turned back to her. “Nenet, I don’t plan on coming back here. Is there anything in this place that you want to take with you? Something you consider useful or personally valuable?”
Feeling slightly dizzy at how fast things were moving, Nenet shook her head. “No, Master. I already collected all of the remaining magic items I could find” – not that they’d been helpful at all – “and I don’t have any mementos or keepsakes. Grisela destroyed them whenever she found out I had one, so eventually I gave up.”
“I could restore whatever she ruined,” offered Lex. “So long as you have the component pieces, it would be easy.”
That managed to bring a small smile to Nenet’s face, even as she shook her head. “They’d just remind me of things I want to forget. But thank you.”
He nodded once, then turned toward the exit. “Let’s go then.”
Mei Li stood aside, gesturing for Nenet to follow him first, and the sphinx obliged. The three of them stepped into the hallway, and Nenet’s eyes widened as she beheld the extent of the destruction. For all that it had been stark and oppressive – Adagio had only infrequently blanketed the areas outside of her personal chamber with pleasing illusions, mostly whenever she’d been annoyed at having to look at the austere conditions of her hideaway – the mountain that the redoubt was built inside of was large and strong. To see the place in such shambles now meant that her master’s battle with the demigod had to have been epic.
And Adagio had voluntarily interfered with such a fight? Even after she’d fled from Kryonex before? And been so readily subdued by Lex only a short while ago?
Nenet couldn’t imagine it. Nor could she recall the Siren getting the chance to interfere in the first place. How had she broken free? Between having no more aristeia, the cage, and all of those curses, it shouldn’t have been possible for her to have gotten out.
Mei Li had made it sound like she’d forgotten something, and as she padded along behind Lex, Nenet couldn’t stop thinking about what.
Barely noticing as the debris cleared itself out of her master’s way – without so much as a word or a gesture from him, the dust and rubble slid aside, cracks in the floor sealing themselves with black crystals as fallen chunks of the ceiling rolled away from them – Nenet tried to think back. The corporeal undead had broken through, and she’d been shielding the entryway with her own body while Mei Li had been keeping the spectral ones at bay. Adagio had been yelling to be freed, saying they’d all die otherwise, and...and then...
Nenet frowned, trying to jog her memory. Something had happened, she knew. Something that had incapacitated her. But it hadn’t been the undead, and it certainly hadn’t been Adagio. But if that was the case, then the only thing that could have freed the Siren was...
Abeyance.
Nenet would have tripped if Lex hadn’t spun in place, catching her before she’d even started to fall. What’s wrong?
I... For the briefest moment, she considered holding her silence, but she couldn’t. Not when he’d just gone out of his way to comfort her. She owed him more than that, even if it meant his being disappointed in her. Master, I think...I think I’m the one who let Adagio out!
That isn’t something you should feel distressed about. I told you, her release was ultimately to Kryonex’s hindrance.
But I didn’t know that at the time! whimpered Nenet, cringing. All I knew was that the undead were breaking through, and we were going to die, and Adagio was yelling something about how she could help, but I didn’t believe her, and then something happened – I still can’t remember what – and I was passing out, and I think I cast an abeyance spell...
She trailed off as she consulted her mental catalogue of the spells she’d prepared, and realized that particular spell, which she’d prepared just in case Adagio had cut another deal with the daemons – since curses were the result of an extraplanar power sending their energy to someone over a link – was no longer there. I did! I cast that spell, even though you explicitly told me not to let her out, and-
And if you hadn’t, then you and Adagio and Mei Li would all have been killed, crippling my fighting power and likely becoming undead monsters yourselves, noted Lex. Nenet, I’m not mad that you disobeyed my orders. I’m relieved.
The idea that someone would be pleased that she’d defied them wasn’t something the sphinx could wrap her mind around, swallowing nervously. Really?
Yes, insisted Lex. I told you to keep Adagio imprisoned because it seemed like the best strategy at the time. But the circumstances changed, and you adjusted to them accordingly, making the best decision that you could based on the situation you found yourself in. And because you did, you and Mei Li both survived, and Adagio’s interference gave me what I needed to win.
But she died, protested Nenet weakly, looking down. She died, and I know you wanted to bring her back alive, because that’s what her sisters asked you to do. She could still remember how angry he’d been when she’d spoken ill of Adagio’s siblings, her paws trembling at the thought that he’d fly into another rage now.
I know, and I intend on keeping my promise to them, as well as my promise to be a better master to you, which is why I’m going to say this. Reaching out, he gently placed his claws on her cheeks, making her look up at him.
For the second time, you not only completed an incredibly difficult task of vital importance, but did so better than I expected.
Leaning forward, Lex brushed his lips across her forehead. I’m proud of you, my sphinx.
Immediately, the blood rushed to Nenet’s face as her chest tightened, leaving her feeling dizzy for some reason. Even stranger, she realized she was smiling, and she couldn’t seem to make herself stop. She could feel a laugh bubbling up inside of her, even though her eyes were turning watery again.
Most unusual of all was how good it all felt, the emotions wrapping around her in the most incredible way.
Proud of her. He was proud of her. In her entire life, no one had ever told her that. Her siblings had all ignored her or abused her, and Adagio had never once complimented her, simply telling her what to do with the vague promise – which Nenet now knew was a lie – that if she was a good spellbook, she’d introduce her to her father one day. But she’d never been proud of how hard her daughter had worked.
But now Lex, her master, was.
Biting her lip, not trusting herself to speak even in her thoughts, Nenet nodded. Lex returned the gesture, then turned around and continued leading them outside.
Glancing back, Nenet gave an embarrassed grin to Mei Li, who looked a little confused but smiled back.
Nenet almost giggled at her friend’s puzzlement, not because it was funny but because all of a sudden, everything made her want to grin. It was the way she’d expected to feel, the way she’d wanted to feel, when she’d agreed to become Lex’s familiar. The effect of Kara’s blessing that he’d loathed, but which she’d longed for, desperate to experience a life that had more than pain and suffering. And now, her hope was fulfilled, and Nenet couldn’t help but revel in it.
With every passing moment, the monster inside of him grew progressively more rebellious.
Lex could feel it becoming more and more agitated as he led Nenet and Mei Li outside of what was left of Adagio’s mountain fortress, bestial instincts howling louder as they demanded that he act on them. That was something he refused to do, however, clamping down on the urges that coursed through him. But that only caused them to express themselves that much more powerfully, violently intruding on his awareness despite his best efforts.
The creature that he’d merged with had finally reached the end of its patience.
It didn’t mind fighting for survival. As far as it was concerned, that was simply a fact of life. But even a creature without sapience didn’t put its life on the line for nothing; quite the contrary, it regarded such battles as being necessary in order to acquire the things that gave its life meaning. Things such as defending its territory, acquiring food...
And securing breeding rights.
But after a series of increasingly more deadly battles – fighting Sissel, then Hvitdod, then Kryonex, then that void monster – Lex had gained none of those things. While intellectually he knew that there were very good reasons for confronting each of those enemies, the savage side of himself saw only that nothing worthwhile had been achieved. None of the locations where he’d fought were territory he’d wanted. Food was a non-issue now that he no longer felt hunger.
That left only his carnal desires, which were growing increasingly strong.
The monster within him simply couldn’t understand why he hadn’t taken advantage of any of the females whose company he’d been keeping. Fail Forward. Solvei. Nenet. Adagio. Mei Li. He’d been turning acceptable mates down left and right, despite the fact that he could have had them at any time. Having defeated them all and made them subject to his authority, it was both his right and his prerogative to enjoy their bodies as he saw fit.
Naturally, that ran completely counter to Lex’s moral code, but the creature which now comprised his instincts and impulses couldn’t have cared less. It was thoroughly sick of being denied what it considered its rightful due, and was no longer willing to go without.
That was why Lex was now hyper-aware of his companions’ femininity. Every swish of Mei Li’s tails, every curve that Nenet had pressed against him as she’d cried, the scent of both of them as they followed behind him...all of it was in the forefront of his mind, impossible to push away. All he could do was stifle the urge to act on that input, controlling his words and actions in accordance with what he knew to be right – and, thanks to his foresight, what would achieve the desired response – rather than what he wanted to do.
That, at least, was something he had experience with, thanks to the years he’d spent rigidly adhering to his system of ethics in the face of incomprehensible social dynamics.
But he could already tell that wasn’t going to be sufficient now.
Mostly because, unlike when he’d been completely equine, his feral side had the potential to completely overwhelm his higher reasoning, the way it had after he’d left the Shrine of the Starless Sky. Lex could still remember losing himself to the monster within, inadvertently allowing it to come to the fore; only Solvei’s presence in his mind had brought him back to himself. He doubted that would work this time, given how much stronger his base desires had grown.
All of which meant that, despite appearing outwardly calm, Lex found himself fighting another battle as he exited the mountain redoubt, one that was entirely internal in nature.
Overcoming a demigod had pushed him to his immortal limits and beyond.
Overcoming himself was already proving to be much harder.
“What...” Nenet’s voice failed her as she looked around the shattered valley, her eyes round and her jaw hanging slack. “What happened here?”
Mei Li was more composed, though she needed several tries before she found her voice. “This is...I cannot imagine...”
“Both of you stay close to me,” ordered Lex. “This should only take a few minutes.”
The sphinx and the fox-woman exchanged a confused look.
“Master...what should only take a few minutes?” ventured Nenet.
“For me to keep my promise,” murmured Lex, glancing at the spot – indistinguishable from the rest of the tortured landscape – where Adagio had died.
Even as he said that, he removed Belligerence from his extradimensional holding space, along with one of the largest of the diamonds that he’d taken from beneath Hvitdod’s lair. Ignoring the sudden intake of breath that he heard from the other two at the sight of the transformed weapon, he instead ordered his tulpa to begin casting the resurrection spell he’d imbued in it the night before.
He'd originally put that aside as a backup plan in case Nenet had been killed during the fight, reasoning that the semiautonomous portion of his mind would have an easier time casting it if the psychic feedback from her death crippled him the way Solvei’s had. Fortunately, he hadn’t needed to put that particular plan into effect, and so now he was free to use it to resurrect not only Adagio, but to try and bring back – thanks to Belligerence’s one remaining use of its ability to enlarge the area of a spell – all of the ice creatures that he’d so carelessly slaughtered.
It was no less than he’d done for the adlets, after all, and what he planned on doing once he got back to Vanhoover. Given how those beings from the Plane of Ice had been innocent, forced to serve as fodder for Kryonex against their will – and whose lives he’d taken without realizing that they were helpless pawns – they deserved the same consideration.
And Adagio deserved even more than that. Although she’d committed a large number of horrific crimes, that didn’t obviate the promises he’d made – both to Sonata and Aria, as well as Adagio herself – to bring her back alive. She might have been a Siren, but Sirens were ponies; no matter that there had been no better alternative, he’d still violated his own moral code in killing her. Bringing her back to life was not only his obligation to her and her sisters, but to himself.
Seconds turned into minutes as his tulpa silently worked, the spell being too powerful for Nenet’s metamagic to decrease its casting time. Nearby, Nenet and Mei Li were commenting quietly on the scope of the damage that the valley had sustained, turning around to take in the broken vista. In doing so, Lex couldn’t help but notice how the folds of Mei Li’s robe moved slightly askew, giving him a glimpse of pale thighs as Nenet’s sarong shifted, one hip coming into view-
Stop it.
Forcing himself to look away from the pair – though with his expanded senses, that accomplished nothing – Lex silently focused on what he’d do once Adagio was resurrected. No doubt she’d be furious at him, and would likely lash out. That would, of course, necessitate her being subdued...
Nenet wouldn’t approve of his doing anything amorous with her mother, but neither he nor Nenet could help the fact that Kara had already pledged – completely of her own initiative, and over his objections – to make Adagio into his inamorata in exchange for ruining the Siren’s plans.
Lex had no idea how the love goddess planned to do that, and didn’t like how it sounded as though it involved mind-manipulation far worse than the so-called blessing she’d given him – to say nothing of how that undercut the sanctity of his promise to Sonata and Aria to make their missing sister love him, as impossible as that task seemed given Adagio’s grotesque criminality – but it didn’t change the fact that Adagio was seductive and manipulative. If she was aware of how close he’d been to succumbing to her charms before, she’d likely try to entice him again, since she had no more aristeia or magical artifacts to attack him with. And if she tempted him to the point where he lost control over himself...
It won’t come to that, he decided, knowing that the beast within him wanted it to come exactly to that, putting aside his worries as he defied it to try.
Lex Legis would not be ruled by his impulses.
A moment later, he felt his spell activate, the diamond in his grasp crumbling into dust as Belligerence’s final band of wire-shaped azure flames shattered, expanding the magic-
-and Lex almost faltered as his foresight showed him what would happen when he named the ones he wanted to bring back.
Not even one of them...
“Master?” called Nenet from behind him, his momentary dismay having been stark enough to have been inadvertently transmitted. “What’s wrong?”
Lex ignored her. “Adagio Dazzle,” he murmured, despite knowing the futility of doing so; for all his pragmatism, it simply wasn’t in his nature to give up without trying. “Sonata Dusk. Aria Blaze. Nosey Newsy. Feather Duster. All of the ice creatures that Kryonex brought here.”
As soon as he finished speaking, the magic discharged...to no effect.
That none of the denizens from the Plane of Ice had been resurrected was disappointing, but not a surprise; the resurrection spell required its intended recipients to be named, or otherwise unambiguously identified. Even if he’d had any remaining energy to overcharge the spell with, that wasn’t a limit which could be overcome via an enhancement of its functionality, since the spell needed to know who to direct its life-restoring energy toward, targeting their memory core on the Astral Plane and using that as a focal point to find the soul. He’d tried anyway only because he hadn’t wanted to overlook the possibility that Belligerence’s altered state might have bypassed that limit somehow, thanks to the Night Mare’s enhancement of the weapon.
His naming of the four mares whom he’d left behind in the burning factory in Las Pegasus had likewise been courting futility, since this wasn’t the first time he’d tried and failed to resurrect them.
The previous attempt had been when he’d brought back Frode, Panuk, and all of the other adlets that Solvei had told him about, slipping their names in alongside the multitude of others. When they hadn’t come back to life, he’d tried to take that as a hopeful sign; the resurrection spell – like so many other applications of magic – offered some modest feedback to the caster. He’d felt it when, back in Vanhoover, Block Party had refused his attempt to restore him to life. It had been like reaching a hoof out toward someone, only for it to be slapped away. But when he’d reached out for Sonata and the others, he’d felt nothing at all.
Lex had wanted to believe that meant that they were still alive, that they’d gotten out of the burning building and were alright.
But he could imagine too many other possibilities to take comfort in that. Not when Thermal Draft’s soul was still in jeopardy because she’d been tricked into making a deal with a devil. Not when there had been a devil operating so clandestinely in Equestria. It was too easy to think of comparable scenarios that resulted not only in their deaths, but their souls being beyond his reach.
Case in point, Adagio’s not having been brought back just now.
Unlike the others, her inability to be resurrected had caught him completely by surprise, feeling the same inability to locate her soul that he’d perceived when he’d tried to bring back Sonata and the others.
Just like them, Adagio simply wasn’t available to be resurrected.
But why?
The daemons were his first thought, but that didn’t strike him as likely. Between what he’d read about them in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, and what he’d learned from Nenet and Sissel, the daemons had to retrieve souls manually. Cacodaemons, astradaemons, and others of their ilk could steal souls, but they had to personally collect them to do it, needing to target their victim’s body before the soul left it. Yet none of them had been present when Adagio had died.
It was possible that she’d struck a more mystical bargain with whichever daemon she’d trafficked with in order to acquire so many of their kind as mercenaries. Possibly that “Szuriel the Warbringer” or one of his underlings, according to that petty daemon who had been maintaining the curse Sissel had used on Ujurak. But the snow giant and the sphinx hadn’t made it sound that way, describing their mother’s deal as one that was based more around a repayment of other souls than potentially forfeiting her own. Certainly, they hadn’t attributed Adagio’s aristeia – a power much more intertwined with her being, to the point of possibly altering the trajectory of her soul even after having been expended – to the daemons.
It had been Kara who had made it clear that Adagio’s enhanced power had come from elsewhere, citing various eldritch beings that the Siren had bargained with in order to increase her personal abilities. The shapechanger goddess had told him how those beings would be looking to recoup their investment. That one of her debtors might have insisted on some agreement similar to Prevarius’, where Adagio’s soul would be funneled directly to them upon her death, wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Which means that in order to secure her soul’s release, I’ll need to figure out which one of those entities has it now, Lex knew.
It was obvious who the best person to speak to about that was.
And he had no doubt that Kara would want something in exchange for helping him.
Yet as much as he wasn’t looking forward to dealing with the love goddess again, the beast inside of him couldn’t bring itself to be upset at the prospect.
It took Lex less than a second to travel to Solvei’s location.
Even though he didn’t have another teleportation spell ready, his speed was such that he might as well have. Particularly since his link to his first servitor told him precisely where she was in relation to himself. And with no further reason to linger in the valley where he’d fought Kryonex – other than to collapse what was left of the mountain that Adagio had made her fortress inside, an act that had been as much to expend his frustration at her troubling him even after dying as it was to remove any potential loose ends – he’d left immediately.
But not alone.
Ignoring the shocked faces of the adlets he’d landed in front of, Lex slowly put Mei Li down from the princess hold he’d used to carry her. “We’ve arrived.”
“Already?” Still in her humanoid form, the kumiho – according to what Nenet had told him, that was what her kind were called – pulled her robe tighter around herself, looking unsteady despite the fact that Lex had kept the wind and inertia from their momentary journey from reaching her. “I thought you said we were going to fly, not teleport.”
“And we did,” answered Lex disinterestedly, pausing long enough to summon Nenet to his side before turning and striding through the village. “Come. Solvei is this way.”
Cringing a little as she looked at where the nearby adlets were rushing to alert their friends and family, Nenet tried to keep her tail tucked out of sight as she rushed after him, Mei Li following close behind. “I hope she’s okay.”
“She will be.”
Lex’s words weren’t so much a promise as they were a statement of fact, his voice making it clear that he would allow for no other outcome.
Striding through the collection of turf huts and wooden cabins that made up the adlet village, Lex ignored the wide-eyed looks and shocked whispers he was receiving, nor did he say anything as several adlets ran ahead of him, shouting that “the great one” – it seemed that the epithet Yura had given him had caught on – had returned.
The elder shaman herself appeared a few moments later in response to the cries, exiting a particularly large turf hut near the center of the village and immediately falling to her knees as she caught sight of him. “Great One! Akna has-”
“I know,” answered Lex, striding past her and into the building. “I’m going to revive her right now.”
The interior was illuminated only by the light coming in through the windows, curtains of yeti hide being drawn back to let the late afternoon sunshine come in now that the cloud cover was finally starting to break up. Still, the place was still dim, reflecting how adlets had better eyesight than ponies, even if they couldn’t truly see in the dark.
The interior was a single open space, divided into different sections by waist-high walls that – like the exterior – were made of stones stacked in a herringbone pattern, using peat as mortar. The floor itself was made of packed earth, and mostly covered in pelts, whereas the low walls that partitioned the inside were covered with woven fabrics, and seemed to serve as shelves from how there were various bone utensils and wooden tools laid on top of them. And although Lex couldn’t see them, his supernatural senses told him that there were cubby holes built into the interior walls as well, the possessions stored there hidden behind the textile coverings draped over the sides.
But all of that mattered less to him than the two adlets gathered at the far end of the room, looking up at him from where they were gathered around something – or someone – too low to be seen behind the interior partitions.
“Ah!” yelped the male, whom Lex recognized as Tulok, Akna’s father, the adlet staring at him with wide eyes before he managed to collect himself. “O-over here! Akna’s collapsed-”
Lex crossed the remaining distance before Tulok could finish speaking. Nor did he pay any attention as Solvei’s mother Alasie gasped from where she was kneeling by her daughter’s side, staring at him as if frozen in fear. Instead, he turned all of his attention to Solvei.
She’d been wrapped in several thick pelts, and way lying on top of several others, with a bundled cloth – that, judging by its scent, contained several medicinal herbs – tucked beneath her head. Her breathing was shallow, and even without touching her, Lex knew that her heartbeat was steady, but slow.
“We don’t know what happened,” murmured Alasie, her voice hoarse. “One moment she was fine, and then the next she just collapsed.” A muffled sob escaped her as she looked at Lex, her eyes bloodshot. “Please, please help her!”
Lex didn’t bother replying, instead letting his actions be his answer. Reaching out with his foreleg – the one that was all made of barbed wire now, ignoring the sudden intake of breath from her parents – Lex activated the Charismata as he gently cradled Solvei’s head, lifting her into a sitting position, glancing at her chest just for a moment before forcing himself to look at her face. Come back to me, my Solvei.
The Night Mare’s power flowed into her immediately, and just like with Nenet, it compelled her obedience, a low groan escaping Solvei’s lips as her eyes fluttered open. Master...? What-
But she didn’t have a chance to complete that thought at her parents both cried out in relief, Alasie leaning in to hug her daughter tightly as she started to sob, Tulok crouching down to gently rub Solvei’s back. An echoing sigh of relief came from where Yura was watching from across the hut, with Nenet and Mei Li standing by the doorway as well.
Lex could feel Solvei’s disorientation as she blinked. “What’s going on? Why is everyone-, Master, what happened to your leg?!” Shaking her mother off, Solvei gaped as she looked at what had become of his foreleg. “Did Adagio do that?! I thought you said you would summon me if you needed help! Is Nenet okay?!”
“I’m alright!” replied the sphinx, smiling as she changed into her hybrid form – causing Yura to do a double-take – and waved at Solvei.
Sighing in relief, Solvei stood up and raised a hand toward Nenet-
Only to immediately scream and crouch back down, throwing the pelts over herself.
“WHY AM I NAKED?!”
The question caused Yura to snort, crossing her arms. “I trained you better than that, girl. When someone’s collapsed, you make sure nothing is constricting their ribs in case they’re having trouble breathing.”
“And besides, those clothes you had on were falling apart,” noted Tulok. “It was like you hadn’t worn anything else in days.”
“Your father’s right, dear,” chided Alasie gently. “And after all those adventures you were telling us you had with your, um...” – her eyes flicked to Lex, and she shuddered before returning her attention to her daughter – “with your new religious instructor, you were probably just as worn down as those old rags you were wearing. Honestly, I’m amazed you didn’t collapse before now.”
From beneath the pile of furs, Solvei gave a low moan that perfectly matched the mortification Lex registered from her. “Why does this always happen to me?!”
Master, we’re ready.
Very well, replied Lex telepathically, glancing at the doorway that Solvei had left through a few minutes ago. We’ll be out momentarily.
“Is he here?” murmured Nenet, still in her hybrid form, as she rose to her feet.
Lex nodded once, causing the sphinx to shudder, the nervousness he felt from her increasing. “You don’t need to do this if you don’t wish to. From a deontological standpoint, you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I didn’t do anything to help, though,” murmured Nenet, her nervousness decreasing as guilt replaced it. “I didn’t even try. I was scared, so I just looked away when it all happened.” Looking down, she sniffled, wings drooping. “I didn’t speak up for them, the same way Adagio never spoke up for me. I don’t want to be like her, so I have to do this.”
“Forgive me if I am being impertinent,” interjected Me Li, “but in the short time that I have known you, your actions have been selfless and compassionate. Qualities that the one called Adagio lacked.”
Her wings perking up slightly, Nenet gave the kumiho a wan smile. “Thank you.” She turned her eyes toward Lex then. “Both of you. Honestly, I don’t know why I’m fretting so much. It’s not like this compares at all to everything we just went through.”
If you wish, I can take away your anxiety, offered Lex, switching to telepathy to keep Mei Li from hearing. Once he sent her home, the kumiho would doubtlessly tell her friends and family about everything that had happened to her, which meant that it was only prudent that he keep her from knowing more than she already did about the full extent of his powers.
It was unlikely in the extreme that some future enemy would use Mei Li as a strategic resource to learn about his powers, but given the unbelievable sequence of events that had occurred ever since he’d been thrown back into this world, Lex didn’t find those odds particularly reassuring.
Oblivious to his concerns, Nenet shook her head softly. No. Thank you, Master, but no. I want to be a better sphinx, so that means having the courage to do this on my own.
You’re already an excellent sphinx, Nenet.
He felt a rush of happiness from her then, overwhelming her nervousness, and Lex took that as a signal to begin, walking outside as Nenet and Mei Li moved to follow him.
A short distance from the entrance, Solvei was waiting for him, Silla – his missing leg bandaged and wrapped in a poultice – leaning on her for support.
Behind them, a crowd had gathered, with Yotimo and the rest of his warband – along with Toklo and his mother – standing by in silence.
He’s ready when you are, Master, prompted Solvei.
Stepping forward, Lex paused as he came within reach of the maimed warrior, who flinched as he took in the sight of what the stallion had become. “You’re different every time I see you,” Silla murmured.
“That difference is a sign of Night Mare’s favor, which has allowed me to grow stronger,” replied Lex. “Enough so that I can now heal the part of you that I couldn’t before.”
“Actually heal? Or replace with...whatever that is?” Silla nodded his head toward Lex’s left foreleg, grimacing at the sight.
“Silla!” muttered Solvei, scandalized.
“You have my assurance, your leg will be flesh and blood,” interjected Lex. Foreseeing Silla’s next question, he lifted his metal leg and clenched his claw into a fist. “Mine is not because, when I lost it, the Night Mare saw fit to give me something greater as a replacement.”
Silla gave a hollow laugh. “Akna’s been telling me all about how she worships that goddess now. And apparently our ancestors coming back to life means that they weren’t being reborn, even though we ate them. Even Yura’s saying that we should abandon our traditions and convert.”
He stopped then, and Lex could feel worry coming from Solvei as Silla took a deep breath before speaking again. “If I say right now that I’m not interested in worshiping this Night Mare of yours, that I’m not willing to forego our beliefs just so I can live as a warrior again, will you still give me back my leg?”
“Yes.”
Silla’s eyes narrowed. “Just like that?”
“Exactly so.”
“Why?”
In the crowd, Lex caught sight of Panuk, watching the proceedings a short distance away from Yotimo. The sight reminded him of when he’d answered similar questions from the two of them before. Yotimo while they were moving to confront where Paska had taken his son, and Panuk just a day ago when he’d sought Lex out. Both had eventually accepted his explanations, but neither had seemed particularly enthusiastic about them.
Even now, his foresight was telling him that a lecture about moral duty, or saying that he wanted to make sure the adlets held no grudge against the ponies who lived nearby, would receive an unfavorable reaction.
But there was another explanation that would, he knew, be much more acceptable to Silla. One which was just as true as anything else he could have said.
“Because Akna wants me to, and I want to make her happy.”
A low murmur of chuckles and soft cooing came from the crowd behind them, and Solvei blushed, her tail starting to wag furiously behind her. “Master!” she whined, looking down even as she raised her eyes to his, then looking away bashfully.
Unable to help but snicker at the sight, Silla shook his head before giving the shaman a wry look. “Wow. So is that the reason you never had a boyfriend? Because you were secretly hoping to go for a ride with a stallion?”
The question made Solvei blush harder. “Shut up.”
“Maybe you could introduce me to one of those mares he was traveling with before. Would they call me master if we hit it off?”
Solvei glared at him. “You do realize that it’s dangerous to tease the person who’s holding you up, right?”
“Then I better get back on my own two feet,” replied Silla glibly, before looking back at Lex. His smile fading, he drew in a breath before giving the titan one last appraising look.
Slowly, he lifted his free hand and held it out. “I’m ready.”
Already having prepared the spell, Lex stepped forward and grasped Silla’s hand. With a thought, the poultice on his leg came undone, the bandages joining it a moment later, as the stump at the end of his leg slowly began to regrow. Biting his lip slightly, Silla looked down, the adlets behind him seeming to hold their breath as they watched intently.
“It feels strange,” murmured Silla. “Tingly. Like it’s still there and just fell asleep. Is that supposed to happen?”
“Your nerve endings are regenerating, along with muscles, skin, and bones,” answered Lex. “The process shouldn’t take very long.”
“How long is-, wait! I think it’s happening!”
Sure enough, the missing portion of Silla’s missing leg was slightly longer now, and Silla held his breath as the flesh regrew. In two dozen heartbeats, his calf was restored. Another dozen brought back his ankle and heel. A half-dozen saw his arch regrown. And then, finally, his toes returned, Silla staring at the appendages as he wiggled them.
“It’s back,” he whispered, staring at his regrown foot in awe. “My leg...”
“Try it out,” murmured Solvei, causing Silla to give her a blank look, as though having trouble comprehending what she was suggesting. “Go on, see if it works.”
Gulping, Silla gingerly lowered his foot, gasping as he put his weight on it, Solvei slowly letting him go and moving to Lex’s side. Everyone watched as Silla took a halting step, seeming to have trouble balancing, but he was more steady with his next step, and even steadier with the third. Marching in a circle, a joyous cry erupted from his lips as he raised his arms above his head, triumphant. “It’s back!” he yelled, a broad grin crossing his muzzle. “It’s really back!”
That was enough for everyone watching, the crowd erupting into cheers and whistles as he ran toward them, flinging himself into where Yotimo’s warband was watching, the assembled warriors laughing as they slapped him on the back and hugged him.
The celebrating went on for a full minute before Nenet stepped forward, swallowing before clearing her throat. “E-excuse me...”
No one reacted, the assembled adlets too busy congratulating Silla to even notice that she’d spoken.
Withering a little at being ignored, Nenet rubbed her hands together. “Excuse me? E-everyone...?”
Solvei frowned, and started to step forward, but she didn’t have a chance as Mei Li strode out to stand next to Nenet. In an instant, the kumiho returned to fox-form and – tilting her head upward – breathed a line of lightning into the sky. The bright light and loud crackle was more than enough to grab everyone’s attention, causing the crowd to jump as they looked at the three-tailed fox in astonishment.
Changing back to her human form, Mei Li gave the assembled adlets a polite nod. “Thank you all for offering your attention. My friend Nenet has a statement that she will be making now.”
The smile she gave Nenet a moment later was much more genuine, as was the one the bipedal sphinx returned, and then Mei Li stepped back.
With all eyes now on her, Nenet took a deep breath. “Um, hi...my name’s Nenet, though, um, I guess Mei Li already said that. Oh, that was Mei Li, by the way. She’s my friend...and I just realized she said that part too. Sorry.”
Biting her lip, Nenet’s tail thrashed for a moment, and she winced as she caught sight of it. “Actually, that’s not all I’m sorry for. I know I look different now, but, the thing is, some of you know me already. I mean, not personally or anything, but we’ve met before. Or, not met, but you saw me, even if we didn’t talk...”
She trailed off, and Lex could see her lip starting to quiver, registering that her confidence was failing.
Master, whimpered Solvei. She needs help!
No, she doesn’t.
But-
She’s stronger than you know. Stronger than even she knows. Nenet has been abused and mistreated her entire life. But when I needed her to, she ventured back to the home she hated, confronted her past, and overcame it. She saved herself, Mei Li, and even Adagio from being killed by the undead that Kryonex raised. And now she’s taking responsibility for her own weakness. All without complaint, despite how frightened she is.
Her eyes wide, Solvei glanced between him and Nenet. I...hadn’t thought of it that way. And I’m surprised that you did.
I have faith in my Nenet, answered Lex. Just like I do my Solvei.
Blushing again, Solvei quieted down as she turned her eyes back toward the sphinx, smiling.
Closing her eyes, Nenet drew in a deep breath, holding it for several seconds before breathing out, her tail coming to a halt as she looked back over the crowd. “I was part of Sissel’s group,” she announced, only a slight quiver in her voice. “I didn’t look like this then. I was much smaller, and uglier, but...I was there. I was there when she attacked Yotimo and his people. I was there when she cut off Silla’s leg. I was there when...when everything that happened after that, happened...”
Yotimo didn’t say anything, but a shudder went through him, and Lex saw his son’s mother grasp his hand.
“I hated what they did,” continued Nenet, “and I didn’t want to be a part of it, but...I went along with it. I knew that if I said anything, all that would happen was that I’d be b-beaten, and that nothing I could do would help. So I stayed quiet...I figured that since I was so small and weak, it didn’t matter anyway, and I, um...”
A muffled sob came from her throat then, and she took a moment to compose herself. “And I thought that...that if Grisela, and Sissel, and Vidrig were all going to h-hurt someone anyway, then...then at least it wasn’t me.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks then, and Lex was aware that she was struggling to keep from falling apart completely. “The truth it...I was glad it wasn’t me...that for once, they were being cruel to someone else...that I didn’t have to...to be so afraid anymore...because there were other people they could make afraid...and I’m so sorry for that! I wish I’d said something, even if they’d beaten me! Even if they’d broken my wings again! I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! I’m...I...”
Lex summoned her back to his side then, pulling her close as she finally broke down, Solvei – her own cheeks wet with tears – coming in to press against her other side a moment later. Mei Li moved in as well, her expression mournful.
All of them looked up at Yotimo approached, save for Nenet, who couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
But that changed when the old adlet spoke.
“I forgive you.”
Pulling out of the group hug, Nenet managed to stumble over to Yotimo, looking up at him with a miserable expression.
When he held out his arms a moment later, she threw herself into them, weeping again.
But through their bond, Lex knew that this time she was crying in relief.
The meeting with the elders of the adlet village had taken longer than Lex had expected.
While Yura had been quick to oblige his desire to speak to the leaders of the place, quickly gathering the half-dozen geriatric adlets who comprised the closest thing their village had to a government, the subsequent conference – taking place in a cabin not far from the turf hut where Solvei’s family lived – had taken several hours.
That hadn’t been because of any political concerns, however. While Lex’s goal in speaking to the adlet leaders had been to make sure that they would seek no reprisal against ponykind for what had happened with Panuk and Toklo – or, for that matter, binding Akna to himself and leading her into what their culture considered to be apostasy – the elders had surprised him by how readily they’d agreed to let those matters drop. There would be, they’d emphatically assured him, no retaliation against Bright Night, its surrounding villages, or anypony anywhere.
Instead, they’d wanted to know more about the Night Mare.
A great deal more.
As it turned out, between his having ended the yetis’ resurgence, slain Hvitdod, and resurrected so many deceased adlets – all things that Akna had attributed to his faith in the Night Mare – the elders were questioning their tribe’s traditional beliefs where the detestability of divine worship was concerned. Particularly since their customs said that most of the deceased adlets he’d brought back should have been reborn as new individuals by now. That Akna had gained new powers as a result of her bond with him, and Yura had lost none of her own despite openly calling for the widespread adoption of the Night Mare’s faith, had only heightened the issue.
To that end, the elders had all but begged Lex to teach them about his goddess, so that they could better understand what the growing religious fervor meant for their people.
Even a few weeks ago, Lex would have turned his nose up at the request, aghast at the idea of non-ponies worshiping a pony goddess. But that wasn’t a position he could countenance any more. He’d seen the diverse array of beings that the Keeper had gathered in the Shrine of the Starless Sky, united by their faith in the goddess. He’d witnessed the myriad creatures living in Darkest Night.
And most of all, it had been through the Night Mare’s power that he’d formed bonds – connections as intimate as they were powerful – with Solvei and Nenet, both of whom he’d come to cherish.
To deny that a non-pony was worthy of venerating the Night Mare was tantamount to rejecting his connection to the two of them.
That wasn’t something Lex could bring himself to do.
As such, he’d spent several hours educating the elders – as well as Yura and Yotimo, who had been sitting in on the meeting as their tribe’s spiritual and martial specialists – about the Night Mare, her faith, and how there was a shrine dedicated to her nearby.
The result was that the sun had long since set by the time Lex returned to Solvei’s family home.
Yura had already offered to let him stay there as long as he liked, heading back ahead of him in order to usher Tulok and Alasie out. It hadn’t escaped his notice that she’d done no such thing to Solvei or Nenet, sensing through their bond that the two of them had obeyed his order to stay there while he’d spoken to the elders, having wanted them to rest.
And as he entered the turf hut – his mere desire to enter the place causing the door to open of its own accord, closing behind him once he was inside – Lex saw that they’d followed his instructions thoroughly, cuddling together in a pile of pelts, fast asleep.
But Mei Li was still awake, straightening up from where she was sitting with her legs folded under her before bowing to him. “Welcome back, Prince Legis.”
Lex spared her a glance as he moved toward where his soul-bound servitors were sleeping. “Solvei told you that I’m royalty.”
Hearing that it wasn’t a question, Mei Li nodded, keeping her eyes downcast. “Yes, as well as your many other heroic deeds. To have been rescued by one who has not only founded his own country, but traversed the pathway to immortality, is a greater honor than a three-tails such as myself deserves.”
Lex didn’t acknowledge her words, instead looking at where Nenet and Solvei were curled around each other. Both were in their quadrupedal forms, but Nenet had shrunk down to the size of a pony, something that Lex hadn’t known that she could do. Solvei, by contrast, had increased her size, taking up most of the back of the hut as she curled around Nenet protectively, the sphinx completely surrounded by the winter wolf and almost completely hidden beneath the pile of pelts.
Even so, Lex could tell that Nenet was having a bad dream, hearing her whimper as she shuddered in her sleep. It took no effort at all for him to gently reach into her mind and dispel the disturbance, causing her to smile softly as she relaxed. He briefly glanced at his metal foreleg, wondering if the Night Mare would disapprove of his quashing an instance of the nocturnal ordeals for which she was named...but the barbed wire remained quiescent, indicating her lack of displeasure.
Satisfied that the goddess wasn’t upset and that his servants were comfortable, Lex turned his attention back to the kumiho. “Saving you was my obligation, one which requires me to care for you until you’re safely returned to wherever you call home. When morning arrives, I’ll take you there. Until then, is there anything you require?”
“Only to express my gratitude to you once again,” replied the kumiho, still bowing. “You have my oath that my clan will reward you greatly for the kindness you have shown me.”
“I need no reward,” shot back Lex. “And if you need nothing else, then rest.”
His words were more than just an order, they were a compulsion, and Mei Li gasped slightly as her eyes fluttered closed.
Catching her in his telekinesis before she could slump over, Lex scooped up another set of pelts, gently depositing her on them. His supernatural senses had made it clear that the kumiho was exhausted to the point where it was affecting her health, and his trans-temporal sense had allowed him to view the answers she’d have given to numerous other questions, confirming that although she’d eaten the meal that Solvei had made for all of them while he’d been meeting with the elders, Mei Li had – foolishly, in Lex’s opinion – refused to sleep until she’d thanked him again.
Nor was that all he’d learned about her. Besides her full name and the name of her clan, he now knew that she came from someplace called “The Thousand Kingdoms,” had been sent to the Plane of Ice on accident when her home had been attacked, and had survived by attuning herself to the nature of the plane, becoming a creature of intrinsic cold despite not being one originally. It had simply been, as far as she knew, bad luck that she’d found herself dragooned into Kryonex’s army of the unwilling.
But despite the fact that none of what had happened to Mei Li was her fault, Lex couldn’t help but feel mildly resentful toward her.
Another complication.
Returning the kumiho to her family wouldn’t be difficult. Regardless of whether or not the Thousand Kingdoms were on Everglow, he had sufficient spells, speed, and other powers to make any amount of distance a non-issue. Even if she resided on some other world, his tulpa would be able to produce whatever tuning fork he needed to enable his planeshifting spell to get there. Once he’d rested and recovered, sending Mei Li home shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
But it was still one more errand that had to be done before he could quit Everglow for what was hopefully the last time. The new entry in a seemingly-endless parade of obstacles which served to further delay his return to Equestria was justified, and wouldn’t be hard to accomplish, but that didn’t make it any less unwelcome.
Particularly with how his instincts were continuing to howl at him.
That he was now alone with the females that his inner beast had already decided belonged to him had sent it into a frenzy. The urge to sate himself with one of them – no, with all of them – had become overwhelming as a result. Worse, those urges were causing him to glimpse futures were he indulged in his appetites, tantalizing him with flashes of what he could be doing with the slumbering trio.
It was enough that Lex could feel his control slipping, requiring him to actively concentrate on keeping himself in check.
Hackles rising as his internal war neared its breaking point, Lex took a different tack, reminding himself that the sooner he completed his remaining tasks, the sooner he’d have a lover to vent his desires upon. Thermal Draft was waiting for him to rescue her, and would doubtlessly submit to his advances once she was restored. Adagio would be his, in accordance with Kara’s promise to him and his own promise to her sisters. And of course, once he was done with everything here and returned to Equestria, he’d be able to find Sonata and Aria and consummate their reunion.
Fulfilling his responsibilities would fulfill his desires.
Repeating that line of logic to himself several times over, Lex felt his lust ebb. It was only by the most miniscule amount – he was still very much aware of the three beauties who were right there with him – but it was enough that he no longer felt like he needed to actively restrain himself.
Taking advantage of the respite, Lex cast another spell, using Nenet’s metamagic to reduce the casting time to an instant as he picked out his target and began speaking. “Mystaria, this is Lex Legis. Give me Thermal Draft’s current status and location. And also Fail Forward’s present disposition. You have twenty-five words to respond.”
For a moment no reply came, and Lex had just enough time to recall how badly his previous uses of this particular spell had gone. His attempt to call for outside aid when Vanhoover had been under siege had gone unanswered, and his more recent contact with Coat Tail had been maddeningly uninformative. But Mystaria was on the same world that he was, and was a student of Everglow’s magic; there was no reason why she shouldn’t be able to deliver a prompt and cogent response.
Unless something had happened to her.
But no sooner had he begun contemplating that possibility than his foresight announced Mystaria’s reply, her voice following seconds later. “Lex! We’re all fine. Drafty is at the estate of my grandmother, Perennial Stock, in Bright Night. She’s in stasis, preventing her soul from degrading.”
Lex paused, digesting that bit of news. Now that he was a titan, disrupting whatever netherworld monster was maintaining the killing curse Paska had put on Thermal Draft would be easy; it was highly unlikely that the shuck would have been able to call upon anything greater than the curse Sissel had used on Ujurak and the other adlets, all of which he’d easily torn apart. His only concern had been the rate of progression, since the Night Mare had said she’d slow the curse, rather than stalling it altogether, doubtlessly for political reasons similar to those that had forced her to stand by while he’d fought Kryonex.
But now that he knew that time was no longer a concern, he could afford to deal with Adagio first. Thermal Draft would still need to have the effects of her infernal contract cancelled somehow, otherwise her soul would be destroyed when she inevitably died, but with her being out of immediate danger, he had to focus on what had become of the Siren.
Which meant dealing with Kara.
Fortunately, he had one communion spell left.
Taking an additional few seconds to center himself, Lex silently intoned the spell, again glancing at his left foreleg for some sign of the Night Mare’s displeasure. This spell was designed to put him into contact with the deity that granted it, or a designated agent of theirs. Altering its structure so that he could contact a different goddess struck him as bordering on sacrilegious.
But again, the barbed wire remained quiescent.
Taking it as a sign that the Night Mare approved of what he was doing, Lex silently offered a prayer in appreciation of her understanding.
Then he felt the spell take effect.
Kara.
Hey stud, came the familiar voice of the love goddess. I was just thinking about you. Looks like the feeling was mutual, so how about you tell me what you’re wearing right now so we can share some more mutual feelings?
Lex knew better than to play along. You indicated before that you knew which entities-
Because I’m wearing an old cheerleader outfit, continued Kara as if he hadn’t spoken. But I think it must have shrunk in the wash! The skirt barely reaches my thighs now, and these panties are just sooo tight! I keep trying to get them off, but no matter how much I shake my hips, they won’t come loose! You’re a smart guy, how would you peel these pretty little panties off me?
Lex clenched his claws, leaving deep gouges in the earthen floor of the hut as he couldn’t help but picture the scene Kara was describing.
Kara, listen to me-
Mmm, I’d listen to you say my name anytime. It always gets my juices flowing. Or is that your plan? Get these off by getting me off first so that I’m moist and slick-
Adagio Dazzle has died, growled Lex, knowing that if he listened to any more, his self-control would come completely undone. My efforts to resurrect her have failed, which suggests that someone has imprisoned her soul. The most likely suspects are the individuals with whom she bargained for aristeia with, so I need you to give me their names.
Hm, nah.
Lex blinked. What?
I don’t feel like it.
I don’t care if you feel like it! raged Lex. You promised me that Adagio would be mine if I foiled her plans-
Which you said you didn’t want me to do, drawled Kara. So I know you’re not calling because you’re going to try to hold me to that promise now that she’s dead, right?
The promise I care about is the one that I made to her sisters, retorted Lex, glad to be focusing on something that made him angry instead of aroused. In order to do that, I need to bring her back to life!
You know, I might have taught you how to satisfy a girl, but now I’m wondering if I should have taught you how to talk to one first, sighed Kara. So let this be your first lesson: one of the quickest ways to turn a lady off is to talk to her about some other chick.
Which is the height of sophistry coming from a shapechanger goddess who spent the whole of our previous encounter looking like “some other chick.”
And that’s a good segue into lesson number two: never tell a girl that she’s being unreasonable.
It was all Lex could do to hold back the vicious tirade that came to mind then, knowing that he had to turn this around. Just like with the Night Mare and Kryonex, his foresight wasn’t registering Kara’s responses ahead of time, which meant that he had to use actual diplomacy instead of simply actualizing the most favorable future.
In fact, the Night Mare had told him as much after his last tryst with the love goddess, reminding him that just because Kara was supporting him for her own ends didn’t mean that her support wasn’t valuable. “Better that her meddling should be brazen rather than hidden. And that she should be invested in your success instead of working against you,” as the Night Mare had put it.
It took a literal titanic act of will, but Lex managed to calm himself. I would...appreciate your help in this matter.
Really? How much?
How much...?
Kara sighed. How much would you appreciate my help? Because by my count, I’ve done a lot for you, and you’ve never even so much as bought me dinner.
Biting back the urge to caustically note that he’d expected her to demand something in exchange for telling him what he wanted to know, Lex did his best to keep his mental voice calm and even. I assume there’s a particular form that you want my gratitude to take?
Lesson number three: girls prefer for you to have a gift in mind, rather than asking what they want, lectured Kara. But in this case, I’ll give you a pass, since I’d doubt you’d hit on this idea on your own.
A trickle of dread slid through Lex then. What idea?
I want a temple.
No.
A large temple, at least three stories tall, in the cloud section of Las Pegasus, continued Kara. It has to explicitly advertise its presence as a house of worship dedicated to me; no hiding what it is. It has to have a permanent staff, state funding, and once a month, you have to personally go there and partake in my sacred rites.
Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. My worship is reserved for the Night Mare alone. Ask for something else.
Kara gave a throaty chuckle. I’m not asking for anything, stud. I’m quite happy to let whoever’s got Adagio’s soul mutilate it to their heart’s content. It’s what she deserves for betraying me and everyone else who’s ever put their trust in her. So if you want me to help you give her a reprieve, that’s my price.
Lex winced inwardly, recalling what Prevarius had said about ponies being hot commodities in the “soul trade” that he’d mentioned. If Adagio’s soul had been repossessed by one of her creditors, then they’d likely sell it in order to try and recoup their investment. Worse, the longer he waited, the more likely it would be that whoever had Adagio’s soul would pawn it off, making it that much harder to track down.
And the last thing Lex wanted to do was go on a misadventure across the afterlife to try and track down Adagio’s soul.
But even so...
What you’re asking for is a betrayal of my faith in the Night Mare!
Aw, is that what’s bothering you? Because if it is, let me reassure you: the same way a worthwhile mistress never asks her sugar-daddy to leave his wife for her, I’m not asking you to abandon the Night Mare for me. I just want you to formally declare that we have an ongoing relationship, is all. Think of me as your divine courtesan, the goddess you keep on the side, who’ll do things for you that the Night Mare never would.
The Night Mare, retorted Lex, would never approve of what you’re suggesting.
No? You’ve got a direct line to her right there on your foreleg, don’t you? Is it telling you that she’s upset at the idea?
Frowning, Lex glanced at his foreleg, despite knowing that it was offering no reaction whatsoever to what Kara was proposing. It was the third time that the goddess had shown him an uncharacteristic amount of leeway. Was she really okay with such an arrangement? Kryonex had mentioned the idea of practicing a syncretic faith, but even so...
I’ll even throw in a sweetener, continued Kara. You say yes, and I’ll personally help you with placing that overgrown snowdrift’s eye in that icy-hot bitch of yours.
The offer caught Lex by surprise. How do you know about that?
Kara laughed. Oh come on! Do you really think you wouldn’t have an audience for your big showdown with Kryonex? We all got together to have a viewing party! And let me tell you, none of us expected that walking icicle to have a secret connection to the Aesir. You were smart to pledge your pet wolf to take his place, because our pantheon is no match for theirs.
Finding out that Kryonex’s final threat hadn’t been a bluff, Lex cursed inwardly. Solvei is connected to me through the Night Mare’s power, you-
-also gave you a blessing, so it’s not like my influence would be completely foreign, interjected Kara. And besides, the two of you are already in love, right? That makes it even easier for me to help her acclimate to the power you want her to have.
I find that line of logic to be highly suspect.
That’s because love isn’t logical, tutted Kara. Or are you going to ask the Night Mare to uplift Solvei for you, even after all the favor she’s already shown you?
This time Lex did wince. The Night Mare’s credo was that she helped those who helped themselves. Between that and her telling him that Kara was a worthwhile ally to have, along with her apparent lack of displeasure now, it was hard to find a reason to turn down Kara’s offer.
But that didn’t mean that he had to give the love goddess everything she wanted.
I’ll agree to your proposal-
Woo!
-on one condition.
Let me guess: you still want Adagio to be your toy? Because that’s fine with me.
No. When your temple is established in Equestria, a central part of its doctrine will be that you’re a subordinate goddess to the Night Mare.
Ooh, kinky! Does that mean there’ll be statutes of me with a bit, bridle, and blindfold on while she rides me?
It means, answered Lex, trying hard not to picture what she’d just described, that you agree to turn over a percentage of the strength you receive from being worshiped in Equestria to the Night Mare.
To his satisfaction, Kara fell silent at that, and several seconds passed before she replied. How much of a percentage?
After how much she’d toyed him, Lex felt justified in paying her back now. Sixty-nine.
Kara burst out laughing. Well look who’s learning how to tease! Alright, I agree. You drive a hard bargain, stud; luckily for you, I like to be driven hard.
Just give me the names of Adagio’s creditors.
With a coquettish giggle, Kara obliged, rattling off seven names.
One last thing, she added after listing the last of them. How would you get these panties off of me? Just imagining it is making me quiver in all kinds of ways.
His tail gave a heavy swish of its own accord as Lex tried, and failed, to keep a shudder from running down his spine. I’d shred them, he snarled lustfully. And I wouldn’t stop there!
He spared no details in telling Kara exactly what he’d do to her, ceasing only when a wet, lewd sound came from the goddess, followed by her voice ringing out in a moan that could only be described as whorish.
Mmm, oh baby... she panted a few moments later. I can’t wait for you to go home and set up my temple.
Lex didn’t reply, not trusting himself to say anything else. Instead, he terminated the spell.
But not before Kara got one last comment in.
We’re going to have so much fun when you perform those rites of mine.
It took Lex a long time to calm down after he finished talking to Kara.
Several thousand heartbeats passed in silence as he wrestled with his instincts, forcing himself not to act on his urges. He’d resolved earlier that he wouldn’t be ruled by his desires, but living up to the self-restraint that vow required was rapidly turning into a perpetual exercise. He could suppress the beast within, but the longer he did so, the more concentration it took, denying him the ability to focus on anything besides holding himself back.
The one thing that kept the situation from being completely unbearable was that no one else – Kara possibly notwithstanding; she’d been deliberately provocative just now, but from what Lex could tell she was like that all the time – knew about it. The very idea that Lex Legis, who had rescued cities, brought himself back from death, and ascended to immortality should find himself struggling to control his lust like some teenage colt was utterly galling. The shame of it gave him just enough of an edge to maintain his discipline.
Even so, it was a very near thing.
It was enough to make Lex long for the transformation that he’d undergone during his fight with Kryonex, when his entire body had turned into barbed wire. The physical metamorphosis had brought with it an unparalleled clarity of mind, the disparate fractions of his mentality – his sapience, bestial instincts, and tulpa – united as one. No matter that it had made him hideous to behold; with a body that was beyond fleshy concerns, and an unfragmented mind, Lex felt certain that his current predicament would be a non-issue in that state.
But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t seem to actualize that transformation again now, the barbed wire offering him no surcease as it remained stubbornly confined to his left foreleg.
The result was that the moon had neared its zenith by the time Lex felt like he’d regained sufficient abstemiousness to get back to work.
Not that there was much work to be done at the moment. With his personal reserves and his tulpa completely depleted by his fight with Kryonex, and his thaumaturgical spells almost totally drained, Lex knew that he was in no condition to attempt any other major undertakings. He still had a vast array of powers to call on, from dark magic to cryomancy to reality-bending – not to mention overwhelming physical prowess – but that was no excuse not to replenish his other powers now that he had a chance.
Kara’s confirming what Kryonex had said about that Aesir pantheon was reason enough for that.
Which meant that the most important thing he could do now was rest.
Or rather, sleep.
It was the one mortal weakness that he hadn’t totally expunged. Apropos of a goddess whose name was the Night Mare, he still needed to slumber in order to fully restore himself. Not for very long – a single hour would do – and it wasn’t as though he’d feel tired if he didn’t; in theory, he could stay awake indefinitely without it adversely affecting him. But for that hour, he’d be vulnerable; or at least, more vulnerable than when he was awake.
No matter that his tulpa no longer tormented him in his dreams, leaving himself open to attack like that simply wasn’t acceptable.
Fortunately, he had ways of mitigating the risk.
Guard the doors and windows, Lex ordered as he conjured a group of ice golems. They were smaller than the ones he’d briefly made during his fight with that void creature, but no less powerful for it. Allow no one inside. Subdue anyone who tries to get past you, without killing them. He briefly thought of ordering them to raise a din if that happened, but decided against it. If the golems engaged in a fight, the noise would easily awaken him.
Not that he planned on leaving it to that.
Another spell placed a ward around the turf hut, creating a magical tripwire that would create a loud alarm if anyone tried to breach the building.
He followed that up with another half-dozen protective spells. Most of them were embedded in diamonds, but he didn’t hesitate to expend them. The gems themselves were among the smallest that he’d collected, and it would be easy to replace them latter. Trading them to ensure security – not just for himself, but also for Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li – was worthwhile.
Finally, his preparations were complete.
And yet Lex hesitated.
There was one spell he’d prepared before he’d gone after Adagio, not because it had anything to do with the imminent fight, but because he’d been waiting for a quiet moment afterward. One spell that would, if not solve any of the numerous tasks that still needed to be undertaken, at least answer the one question that had tormented him ever since he’d come to Everglow. It might not be the answer he wanted, but at least he’d know.
A harsh truth being preferable to ignorance was a tenet of the Night Mare’s that Lex had believed in long before he’d met the goddess.
Resolve to have his answer, Lex conjured conjured up an ornate mirror of ice in front of himself, using Nenet’s metamagic to make the necessary adjustments so that the spell would work with the reflective pane of frozen water, rather than the silver one it normally required.
A short time later, his scrying spell activated.
Sonata, he commanded it silently. Show me Sonata Dusk.
Despite the fact that he no longer needed to breathe, Lex found himself inhaling sharply as the mirror’s surface began to darken, knowing that the magic was speeding across the planes of existence to try and find his love.
Theoretically, he knew that there were several reasons why the spell could fail even if she was alive, but all of them were miniscule. If she didn’t appear in the next few seconds, then the overwhelming likelihood would be that she was dead, since the deceased shed their mortal identity along with their memories. A resurrection spell was designed to account for that, locating the departed’s remembrances in the Astral Plane and following the trail that the unburdened soul had taken after that, but a scrying spell lacked that functionality. It was why he hadn’t used this spell to try and locate Adagio; even if her soul had been snatched before losing her memories, any prison strong enough to foil life-restoring magic would easily defeat a scrying.
But if Sonata did appear, then he’d know she’d survived the fire. He’d even be able to talk to her, ask her what had become of Aria, as well as Nosey and Feather Duster. It would-
Lex’s thoughts came to an abrupt halt as his foresight showed him what was about to appear in the mirror.
The spell had worked, but it wasn’t going to show him Sonata.
“Grab it! Grab it!”
“I’m trying!”
The two voices that came from the mirror were completely unfamiliar to Lex, but that shocked him less than what appeared on its surface a moment later.
A pair of bare breasts.
They were small, perky, jiggling animatedly, and made of lava.
Even as Lex watched, their owner’s face became visible as the spell’s point of view jumped and jostled, showcasing angular features that were twisted in a grimace of exertion. Humanoid and completely naked, the rest of her matched the composition of her chest, being formed entirely of magma, long hair made of fire trailing behind her, and Lex belatedly noted that her arms extended past either side of the sensor’s field of view, as though she were grasping it.
But a moment later, her arms vanished from sight, as did the rest of her, revealing the silvery void of the Astral Plane.
“Darya!” The cry seemed to come from the magma woman, whom Lex belatedly realized matched the Libram of Ineffable Damnation’s description of a brijidine – one of the stronger types of azata, a class of empyreal beings from the so-called Upper Planes who championed freedom and liberty – as the spell’s point of view shot forward. “Don’t let it get away!”
“I know, Doireann!” The answering cry came just as the spell’s point of view shifted abruptly, pale arms reaching out to take hold of it again, and this time Lex found himself looking at another humanoid, this one a waifish woman, her skin and hair the color of chalk. Unlike her companion, she wore clothes, though the loose vest and trailing loincloth left little to the imagination. But her outfit was less notable than the large set of wings sprouting from her back, which – like the brijidine’s hair – were composed entirely of fire.
A peri, realized Lex grimly, noting another denizen of the Upper Planes. They weren’t part of any of the more famous hierarchies of empyreal beings, and the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had little to say about them, save for the fact that their lack of standing in the heavenly realms was something that they were particularly cognizant of. But that doesn’t explain why they’re intercepting my spell.
Or how they were doing it, for that matter. As far as Lex knew, it shouldn’t have been possible to waylay a scrying before it reached its target, but somehow the pair had managed to do so.
Though only for the moment, because as the peri hugged the scrying spell to herself – burying the sensor in her scant cleavage – the flame-winged woman shouted at her companion. “I’ve got it!” she crowed, even as the picture began to shake wildly, the spell trying to break loose. “Do something! I don’t think I’ll be able to keep hold of it much longer!”
“I just called for help!” replied the brijidine, Doireann. “We just need to hold out for a few more seconds!”
“Great!” shouted back Darya, the sensor now pulling away from her chest in fits and starts. “Now help me hold this thing or we’ll need to explain how we couldn’t even last that long!”
“Whoever cast this is seriously bad news!” groused the brijidine, her voice sounding closer. “I don’t know what’s worse, the aura this spell is giving off or how hard it’s fighting!”
“Just hold on!” answered the peri. “We swore we’d keep Equestria safe from off-world evils, and whoever cast this definitely qualifies!”
Lex’s heart leaped into his throat before Darya’s words even reached his ears, hearing them before they were spoken thanks to his foresight. Equestria! The spell was headed to Equestria!
Sonata was alive!
Nearby, Nenet groaned at the noise, but Lex returned her to sleep without even needing to consciously do so, instead focusing on the whisper spell that he’d prepared specifically to use with this spell. It would transmit his voice through the sensor, and he’d be able to demand that those two release his spell.
But he’d just finished casting it when his foresight announced the arrival of a third individual.
“Well done, both of you,” came a deep, masculine voice as the sensor’s struggles abruptly ceased. “I’ll take care of this now.”
In the mirror’s surface the two women floated into view, heaving sighs of relief. “Thanks for the save, Mihr,” breathed Doireann.
Unlike the brijidine, Darya offered a deep bow. “We appreciate your assistance, lord archangel,” she murmured, tucking her wings at her side.
Lex frowned. Unlike brijidines and peris, the Libram of Ineffable Damnation had a great deal to say about archangels. None of it had been flattering.
“It is your assistance that has made it possible to keep that world pristine,” answered Mihr, and Lex could just barely make out fingers at the top of the scrying sensor’s field of view, the archangel apparently holding it steady with just one hand. “The two of you have my gratitude for that. Whereas you...”
Slowly, the sensor turned around, Lex got a good look at the archangel.
Like the others, he was humanoid on form. But unlike the females, he was clad entirely – save for his six wings, each of which was more than double the length of his body and covered in feathers of pure white – in golden armor, and Lex recognized the design as being similar to the Armor of the Renewing Light that he’d summoned while fighting Kryonex. And while the scrying sensor’s range of transmissible spectra was fairly narrow, Lex could see enough into the magical spectrum to know that the archangel’s armor possessed a similar – perhaps even greater – degree of power. Nor was the golden longsword that floated at his side any less impressive.
But those held Lex’s attention less than the eyes which shined from beneath the angel’s helmet, glittering like topazes as they stared calmly into the scrying sensor.
“...have my displeasure.”
“Something I don’t fear,” growled Lex, his whisper spell transmitting the words through the sensor. “But you’ll learn to fear mine if you don’t release my spell.”
“This I cannot do,” answered Mihr evenly. “Your magic reeks of corruption and maliciousness, promising a bounty of cruelty and suffering if allowed to reap its foul harvest on the world you’ve targeted.”
“It’s a scrying spell!” snarled Lex, incensed that he was being denied. “It can’t hurt anyone!”
“And yet it may transmit lesser magics, as it does now with your voice, which may themselves stain a world so innocent,” countered Mihr. “And even if it could not, I would not have one so thickly clothed in such vile power gain more knowledge of a realm that is as yet unsullied by the evil you’ve embraced.”
“That world is my home!” The righteous indignation that the angel was spouting was grating on Lex’s nerves, causing his hackles to rise. He was so close to seeing Sonata again, and this narrow-minded fundamentalist was keeping him from her! “I was born there! You have no right to keep me from it!”
The archangel pursed his lips for a moment, and Lex could see the brow over those glittering eyes furrow. “You claim that this world is the cradle in which you were swaddled, but the strength of your spell is beyond what a mortal could muster. And yet, it seems somehow familiar...”
He fell silent then, but only for a moment, Lex’s foresight already having shown him that he’d speak up again almost immediately. “Now I recall. Though lesser when I witnessed it, yours was the cloying malediction that clung to Princess Luna, despoiling her with its taint. Princess Celestia said her sister was defiled by the same sorcerer who brought a religion of darkness to her land, proffering aid and healing to disguise tyranny and oppression. The dark unicorn, Lex Legis.”
“I am much more than a mere unicorn now,” retorted Lex darkly, “and you are a fool if you think that bringing strength and order to a world crying out for leadership is tyranny. That sentimental nonsense left my people weak and vulnerable, making them easy prey for the worst kinds of monsters. That will never happen again.”
“I’ve heard how you turned tragedy into opportunity, taking advantage of lost lives and wounded spirits to make the perverse seem noble,” countered Mihr. “Such a sentiment beguiled the innocent eyes of that land, but it will not beguile mine. Even now, gentler souls – who embrace a power that in your perfidy you dismiss as weak, blind to its true strength – work to undo the scars you’ve left on that world’s people. As one who would walk alongside them in friendship, I cannot in good faith allow you to violate the interdiction that has been set up around this world.”
Lex gave a harsh laugh at that. “You ‘cannot allow me’? You can’t stop me! My goddess, the Night Mare, has elevated me to a station far beyond your own so that I could fulfill my duty, and I will not be denied by you!”
“No, not by me,” agreed Mihr. “By a joint coalition of angels, azatas, archons, agathions, inevitables, and many others, all serving to let that fair land flower. As you have abandoned both your mortal claim to this world, and your moral right to live among its people, you will not be allowed to return to it.”
As he spoke, the peri and the brijidine both moved to back the archangel up, glowering at the scrying sensor as they brandished swords of their own.
“And as for the Night Mare,” continued Mihr. “Tell her that the angels of Heaven still remember when her scythe appeared among us, unprovoked, and slaughtered many of our number. When the clarion call goes out that her servant is trying to mar this world, you’ll find that the many choirs who lost friends will move to stand between it and you.”
His fingers tightened then, and Lex could sense his spell starting to crack under his grip.
“I will be the first among them,” added Mihr.
Then he closed his fist, the ice mirror shattering from the backlash as the scrying sensor was destroyed.
Lex had no recourse as his spell shattered, leaving him staring at a pile of broken shards of ice.
There was no outlet for the rage that fell over him in the wake of Mihr’s having destroyed his scrying. As much as the creature within him bellowed and roared – its lust momentarily forgotten in the face of what had just happened – there was simply nowhere for it to direct its fury, no enemy for it to kill. The only reason it didn’t completely abandon itself to a blind, indiscriminate rampage was because Lex embraced the murderous urges rather than fighting them, directing all of his thoughts toward finding a way to confront and slay the archangel immediately.
But it took only a few seconds for him to conclude that Mihr was completely beyond his reach.
At least for the moment.
As a titan, Lex could bend reality in any number of ways through willpower alone. But although he could effect any number of changes to his local environment and the creatures that occupied it, the boundaries between the planes of existence weren’t something that he could sunder on his own. At best, he could warp a relatively small area of whatever dimension he was in, creating that folded space which he’d used to store his belongings; but even that was just a subspace, rather than any sort of true demiplane.
Moving from one plane to another – including from Everglow to Equestria – required him to use his magic.
And that wasn’t something he could do until he’d rested and replenished his thaumaturgical spells.
There was simply no faster alternative.
With his intellect and powers, it would be a simple matter to develop a ritual designed to tear open a gateway directly to the Astral Plane, but without knowing precisely where Mihr – or, for that matter, a color pool that connected to Equestria – was, there was no telling where in that infinite dimension such a ritual would deposit him, since had no frame of reference for where either were. Even with his speed, ending up hundreds of billions of miles away from where he wanted to be would take a very long time to traverse.
Nor could he simply bypass the Astral Plane altogether and design a ritual designed to take him directly back to Equestria, something that would surely – if Mihr had the courage of his so-called convictions – bring the archangel running.
The reason for that was because there were no coterminous points between Everglow and his home; no planar conjunctions where the two realms touched each other, which meant that he had to traverse some intermediate plane in order to bridge the distance. And while the Astral Plane wasn’t the only one of those, it was by far the easiest to navigate, at least according to the Libram of Ineffable Damnation; there was a reason why special tuning forks keyed to the destination were all that a planar-travel spell required if it used the Astral Plane as a highway...but Lex couldn’t make one of those until he slept and allowed his tulpa to replenish itself.
And even with his powers, trying to come up with a ritual to navigate one of the other transitive planes – which he knew very little about besides what he’d read in the Libram, which was itself a biased resource – and return to Equestria would have been a far lengthier undertaking than simply resting and restoring his spells.
The sole remaining ritual option – trying to bend the shape of the planes themselves, pushing a piece of Everglow out to the point where it could directly touch Equestria – was an operation far too delicate for a ritual. Doing so ran a very real risk of creating another series of Elemental Bleeds.
He even considered flying to Bright Night or Viljatown – a journey that would have taken less than a heartbeat for him now – and finding some spellcaster there who had the requisite power to send him home. But that would have been pointless as well, since even if he was able to find such a magically-endowed pony, and even if they had the requisite spell at the ready, it would almost certainly be the same one that he knew, with its tuning fork requirement.
His only viable course of action was to rest and wait.
Intellectually, Lex knew that shouldn’t have been an issue; an hour of sleep and a short period of preparing his spells was no real time at all.
But the ire that Mihr’s declaration had stirred within him wasn’t something that could be quelled with logic or reason. It was yet another instance of someone setting themselves in opposition to him because of some petty, facile animus based on nothing but ill-considered, superficial judgment that made absolutely no attempt to evaluate things rationally. Based on nothing more than disingenuous hearsay and his magic’s numinous aura, that self-righteous angel was going to make it even harder for him to go home and aid his people!
Even the beast within understood how that felt, though it didn’t care about the particulars. As far as it was concerned, a rival had just announced that they had taken its territory, females and all. That wasn’t just an affront, it was an injury; a loss of something precious that hurt worse than having a leg torn off. You couldn’t lie down and rest while in that kind of pain!
Except that he had to; he couldn’t tear the wings off of that armored hypocrite until he did.
Barely able to accept that line of logic, Lex belatedly noticed that the interior of the turf hut had been completely destroyed; black crystals had torn the place to shreds, while a thick layer of frost had coated everything, turning the place into a giant freezer. It was only because of his will that Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li were still asleep, untouched amidst the destruction.
Too upset to feel chagrined with the ruination he’d inadvertently caused, Lex waved a claw, causing the black crystals to disintegrate and the ice to recede. Immediately, the turf hut began to repair itself, broken furniture and damaged interior walls fixing themselves of their own accord. He knew this was a bad sign, that his discipline was eroding in a way that someone with as much power as he had couldn’t afford to, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Enough was enough. If denying himself was causing his self-control to fray, then he simply needed to indulge himself. And if he couldn’t sate his libidinous urges, then he’d sate his lethal ones first.
One hour of sleep. Then, after a brief replenishment of his spells, Mihr would die. After that, he’d reclaim his home and his mares.
Everything else could wait.
Mortals and other lesser creatures would have needed to calm themselves down first, getting comfortable and relaxing their minds. But Lex was beyond such things, not needing to wait for his consciousness to shut down of his own accord. Instead, he simply closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep, knowing that he’d awaken in exactly one hour.
Until then, he’d dream of-
-pulling his beloveds closer, eager to work out his frustrations on their supple bodies as they nuzzled and caressed him.
They’d felt it, his need and his anger, reverberating through their connection. It had pained them, unable to bear knowing that the one who was their everything had been so distressed, desiring more than anything to help soothe him.
For some reason he hadn’t wanted them to, insistent on denying them, but he couldn’t remember why. He knew it had seemed important at the time, but now...now he could hear them begging, their voices raised in soft whimpers and wordless pleas. He wasn’t just hurting himself by pushing them away; he was hurting them too.
That wasn’t acceptable.
It was his responsibility to see to their happiness.
That was why he hadn’t pushed them away when they’d crawled over to him, offering themselves. They couldn’t help with his anger – though he could feel that both of them were enraged on his behalf, eager to inflict harsh vengeance on whoever had troubled him so much – but they could calm him in other ways. They considered it their obligation, and their privilege, to do so.
Allowing the two of them to guide him to the most comfortable portion of their temporary lair, he let them start worshiping him, lying back as they pressed against him from either side.
His wolf went first, shivering for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold as she declared her love, her loyalty, and her obedience to him with her body. Soft yips and whines soon turned into heated grunts and moans, her motions going from reverential and submissive to eager and needy, inexperience making her lose herself to her passion.
He rebuked her then, admonishing her in a way that made her cry out, and he liked the sound so much that he did it a second time just as she was recovering, and then once more, each gentle punishment making her howl and quake.
She went limp then, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Still, she found the strength to lick his talons as he gently laid her down, her tail somehow still able to wag despite her exhaustion.
Then he turned to his sphinx.
She hadn’t been idle while waiting for her turn, clumsily seeing to her own excitement, unable to bring herself to stop even when he turned his attention to her. She tried to gasp an apology, knowing that she was supposed to be attending to his needs rather than her own, but a soft nip to her neck caused her to go rigid, her breath catching in her throat.
Once she’d gone still – save only for the shivers running through her – he slowly instructed her in the proper way to attend to her cravings, making her repeat each action for his inspection as he guided her through the sensations her body was capable of feeling. Her eagerness grew even as her technique became progressively sloppier, squirming more and more until her tremors suddenly spiked, the last of her self-control shattering as she screamed in fulfillment.
Of course, such a poor performance wasn’t acceptable, and so he gave her another round of instruction, enjoying her as he showed her how to enjoy herself.
Leaving the purring sphinx to recover, he’d just turned back to his wolf when he picked up on another scent.
The vixen had crept closer, tails waving as she panted, wanting to join them.
He slowly looked her over, causing her to blush even as she preened, presenting herself to him. He took a moment to enjoy the view, before slowly stalking toward her, reaching out with his foreleg...the one that bound his beloveds to him. At his command, a sliver of its power shot forth, enveloping her and crushing her will beneath his own, leaving her helpless as he took control of her heart and mind, her body and soul.
Then he released her, letting her stumble to the ground with a yip as she looked at him with wide eyes.
He’d saved her before, giving him a claim on her, one that she’d acknowledged when she’d accepted his protection and his care. But if she wanted to belong to him, to receive his strength, his dedication, and his love, then she needed to accept that the price for that would be to give all of herself to him, forever.
He would accept nothing less.
She hesitated just for a moment, looking quickly between the wolf and the sphinx, both of whom were smiling at her with glassy, satisfied expressions.
Then the vixen nodded.
He reached out for her again, and the world dissolved into blue fire as she said his name...
Lex sat up suddenly, eyes wide. What had...?
He couldn’t complete that thought as his senses bombarded him with information: that he wasn’t in the same spot where he’d gone to sleep. That Solvei and Nenet were beside him. That all three of them were naked. That the scent of sex hung thick in the air. And that in his mind, he could feel the bond with his wolf, with his sphinx, and...
No! No no no!
A short distance away, Mei Li bowed to him, pressing her forehead to the floor as her tails – all nine of them – spread out behind her. “I am aware that I am inexperienced, but I hope that you will take good care of me.”
Shock and horror left Lex paralyzed, staring at Mei Li’s smile as he struggled to come to terms with what he had done to her.
That the kumiho had – if what had happened in his dream (or rather, what he’d done while asleep and mistakenly thought was a dream) was any indication – entered into a bond with him willingly counted for nothing. He’d already confirmed that he was not only able to bend mortal minds to his will, but that if he didn’t keep his emotions in check it was possible to do so without meaning to. Which meant that Mei Li’s having been in control of herself when she’d offered herself to him was highly in doubt.
Likewise, the fact that he was registering only positive emotions from her now – a mixture of gratitude, excitement, and awe – was equally meaningless. He had no idea how much time Kara’s “blessing” needed to perform its insidious work, but if he was right that a soul-bond heightened its efficacy, then the kumiho’s joy wasn’t trustworthy either.
The uncertainty of it all left room for plausibly excusing himself; he could have clung to the idea that she’d been a willing participant in what had happened. But as much as Lex wanted to avail himself of those excuses, he couldn’t bring himself to set any stock in them. Harsh truths had to be confronted, regardless of the cost or consequences.
Even if he hadn’t touched her – he knew that much, since her clothes were intact, and she still smelled of desire rather than fulfillment – that didn’t change the fact that he had forced himself on her.
It was a realization that shook him to the core, completely obliterating the rage he’d felt only an hour ago, pushing what had happened with Mihr completely out of his mind.
How could I have done this?!
That he’d slain Adagio – breaking his inviolable rule about killing another pony – was something that Lex could rationalize, if not excuse. The entire reason he’d structured his moral code as a deontological framework was so that, in the event that he found himself in a situation where there was no right course of action, he’d at least be able to make the choice that was less wrong. Killing Adagio had been just such a scenario.
He had no such excuse where Mei Li was concerned.
His foresight announced that Nenet and Solvei were waking up, and although Lex could have sent them back to sleep with a thought, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The thought of mentally manipulating anyone right now made him want to crawl out of his skin.
Mei Li wasn’t the only one he’d taken advantage of.
“Mm, oh wow,” groaned Solvei as she stretched, yawning blearily. “I just had the best dream-, ah!” She blinked then, jolted awake as she winced slightly, looking between her legs. “M’sore?” she muttered under her breath. “Why...?” She trailed off, sitting up as her nose started twitching.
On his other side, Nenet purred as she looked up at him, a dreamy smile on her face. “Master,” she mewled, rubbing the crown of her head against his side. “I wanna do it again.”
Lowering her face again, Mei Li’s voice took on a reverent tone. “Elder Sister Solvei, Elder Sister Nenet, I thank you for accepting me as our master’s third wife. Let us all cooperate in good will to maintain the peace of his household.”
Solvei stared at her. “’Sister’?”
Nenet cocked her head. “‘Wife’?”
Lex could feel himself dying inside.
The others must have been able to feel it too, because they all immediately looked at him, distressed expressions crossing their faces.
“I’m not mad!” blurted Solvei immediately, her cheeks coloring as she placed a paw on his leg. “I mean, I’m surprised, and I wish you’d woken me up first, but it’s not like I d-didn’t want to...”
“I’m sorry!” Nenet’s happy expression crumpled immediately, flinching as though she expected to be struck. “Was...was I not any good?”
“Neither of you are to blame,” announced Mei Li. “Our Master’s displeasure is my fault.”
The certitude in her voice made Nenet and Solvei both pause, looking at the kumiho as she raised her head, conjuring several small lights that illuminated the interior of the turf hut.
And caused Solvei and Nenet’s eyes to widen as Mei Li fanned her tails out behind her.
While they weren’t the only thing that had changed about her – her skin, which had formerly been pale, was now a fair cream-color with a faint pinkish hue, while her hair had gone from being dark blue to a lustrous black – the sight of them was captivating. And not just for how many there were now; each one was a soft ochre in color, matching the vulpine ears that poked up from the top of her head.
But unlike those, her tails had soft lines and whorls of red, brown, and black against the deep orange background. They moved seamlessly across each tail, as though all nine had been laid side-by-side and used as a canvas. Only the tips were untouched, each being pure white.
“That’s...incredibly beautiful,” murmured Solvei, looking the tail-tableau over. “Are those designs supposed to be mountains?”
“I think they’re rivers,” pouted Nenet – Lex registered jealousy coming from the sphinx then – “and the tips look like clouds overhead.”
Mei Li didn’t reply to either of them, instead bowing to Lex again. “Forgive me for not thanking you for these tails, my master. Had you merely cleansed me of the ice that I was forced to suffuse my being with, I would have been overjoyed. But a bridal gift such as this is a treasure greater than I deserve. I swear to remain your devoted wife forev-”
“Hang on!” Huffing slightly, Solvei stood up...only to yelp again and sit back down, wincing as she curled her tail between her legs. Grimacing, she gave Mei Li a piercing look. “That word you keep using – ‘wife’ – Drafty told me what it means. So why do you keep saying that we’re all...you know...’married’ now?”
Mei Li looked up, confusion glittering in her eyes. “We have each performed a rite, holy in the eyes of our master’s goddess, affirming our life-long commitment to him through a union of souls. Is that not the definition of a marriage?”
Solvei opened her mouth, as if to protest what she’d just been told, only to close it again a moment later, her blush deepening.
Nenet gave Lex a shy look. “Do...do you want us to call you our husband from now on, Master?”
Mei Li frowned slightly, her tails twitching. “Is it not the custom for a wife to refer to her husband as ‘master’?”
“Wait a second.” Solvei shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut as if trying to sort out her thoughts. “If we’re his wives, what does that make Drafty? Or those other Sirens, Sonata and Aria?”
“Ah, yes, I recall you mentioned them before,” nodded Mei Li. “My apologies, I thought it was understood that they’re his concubines.” Lowering her tails, she sent an inquisitive look Lex’s way. “Is that not correct, Master?”
Lex couldn’t answer, stunned into silence at the direction the conversation had taken. What was going on?! He had just violated them all, and their reaction was to talk about whether or not they were his wives?! Had they gone completely mad?! They should be screaming at him, demanding to know what had driven him to do something so utterly depraved and how he planned to take responsibility for it!
But he could at least answer that last part.
Standing abruptly, his clothes returning to him simply because he wished to be clad again, Lex raised his left foreleg toward Mei Li. He’d never forcibly broken a soul-bond before; the one time he’d tried had been right after he’d formed a link between himself and Solvei, and it had been extraordinarily painful for both of them. But he’d been mortal then. Now-
He froze as his trans-temporal sense informed him of what would happen to Mei Li if he tried to separate himself from her. It wasn’t the usual six-second glimpse into the future, instead being more akin to the premonition of disaster that he’d felt at the prospect of bringing Solvei with him to confront Adagio. Except this time, the details of what would happen were much clearer.
A forceful separation was possible. But while he’d eventually recover from it, Mei Li never would. He wouldn’t even be able to heal her afterward, since it was the violent extraction of his own essence from her that would maim her so horrifically.
Slowly, Lex lowered his leg.
Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li all exchanged concerned looks then, with the wolf approaching him first. “Lex, talk to us,” she pleaded, putting a paw on his side. “What’s wrong?”
“If we did something wrong, we can make it up to you...please?” ventured Nenet, tentatively placing a wing over him.
“You have but to name your desire, whatever it may be, and we will all strive to fulfill it,” added Mei Li, though she didn’t move any closer to him.
Which was a shame, since he suddenly found himself wondering how soft her tails were.
The thought sent a shudder through him. “I...”
He could already feel his libidinous cravings starting to reemerge, his foresight now showing him Mei Li’s reaction – bashful but not unhappy – if he exercised the conjugal rights she seemed insistent on his having. Or Nenet’s unbridled joy if he indulged her request that they couple again. Or Solvei’s embarrassed yet delighted reaction if he showed her the waking version of what had happened in her “dream.”
An hour’s worth of carnal activities hadn’t been enough.
After all the stress he’d accumulated, all the vigor he was now capable of, and all the entitlement that his bestial instincts said was justified after so many life-or-death battles, it wasn’t nearly enough.
“I have work to do.”
A chorus of protests came from the other three, but Lex ignored them, idly unmaking the golems and dismissing the wards he’d raised as he strode toward the exit. He had to leave before he ravished them again. Until he could find a way to deal with his cravings, he had to stay far away from everyone.
It wasn’t safe for anyone to be around him otherwise.
Going back to Equestria would have to wait.
Stay in the village, he ordered all three of them telepathically as he stepped outside and took off, flying into the night at a speed none of them could match. I’ll return soon.
He closed the connection before any of them could ask when “soon” would be.
That wouldn’t prevent them from sensing his position in proximity to their own, but that didn’t matter. With his speed and foresight, he’d be able to stay ahead of them indefinitely. Except, of course, this situation couldn’t be indefinite; he had to resolve this, if for no other reason than – since he couldn’t seem to suppress or negate these urges – it would be only a matter of time and lost control of himself again and despoiled someone else.
It wasn’t even an issue of simply achieving release; the creature within him reveled in dominance, delighting in how it felt to assert itself over another in such a profound way...something that Lex knew had also been true of himself even before their merger. Physical sensation simply wasn’t enough; it had to be part of a demonstration of power in order to be satisfying.
But the only mares – the only females of any race – he felt comfortable subjugating in that manner were either back on Equestria, where he couldn’t reach them, or in stasis. Or simply dead and unable to be resurrected, he amended irritably, remembering how Adagio had looked when she’d propositioned him in the shower.
Taking her up on her offer wouldn’t have been feasible, Lex knew. Even overlooking Nenet’s heartbreak, Kryonex would have emerged long before he’d have been able to finish taming the Siren. Even so, he regretted not having taken Adagio up on her lascivious offer now, if for no other reason than it would have spared Mei Li the loss of her freedom.
And of course, with all of the aristeia she’d had, there would have been no need to be gentle with the Siren either.
Aristeia...
Lex frowned, coming to a halt as something occurred to him.
Adagio had gotten her powers from the various eldritch patrons that she’d cut deals with. Thanks to his deal with Kara – whom he desperately wanted to avoid now, knowing that the manipulative goddess would absolutely use his current situation to her own advantage – he had the names of the Siren’s creditors...and he knew that they were, as Kara had described them, “prominent succubi, sidhe princesses, lamia matriarchs, and a bunch of others.”
While there was no telling what those “others” were, since the names she’d given him had come with no descriptions of the individuals’ races, there were at least three that were female creatures, reputedly of great beauty.
Given Adagio’s concupiscent nature and hyper-fertility, that was likely to be true for the rest of her creditors as well.
And if they’d been willing to trade their own aristeia, then it was hard to imagine them not treating their sexuality as any less of a commodity to be brokered. Besides, he already needed to traffic with them – and in a timely manner – to recover Adagio’s soul anyway, so deals would have to be struck. Why not solve two problems at once?
A dark smile split Lex’s lips as he began preparing his thaumaturgical spells.
He was about to head into another dangerous situation with multiple entities of unknown power.
But this time, he found himself looking forward to it.
Solvei sighed as her master sped off into the distance, feeling her telepathic link to him firmly shut. “Damn it, Lex...”
Behind her, Nenet sniffled. “I don’t understand. I thought that after...after what we did, he’d love us even more. But he felt so upset...”
Mei Li ruffled her tails, looking downcast. “The fault is mine, Elder Sisters. I insulted our husband with insufficient gratitude for the wonderful bridal gifts he bestowed upon me.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Solvei pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s not what it was, Mei Li. And please stop with the ‘elder sisters’ stuff, okay? Just call me Solvei.”
The kumiho’s brow wrinkled at that, but she nodded nonetheless. “As you wish, El-...Solvei. But are you certain that our husband’s distress was not because I accidentally offended him?”
“I’m sure,” nodded Solvei. “I’ve seen him act like this before. The last time he was curt and standoffish like this, it was because he felt guilty, and I’d bet you anything that’s what’s going on now.”
“So, it’s not that we did something wrong?” murmured Nenet. “Because I thought this might be like when I spoke badly about Adagio’s sisters...”
“You weren’t at fault then,” Solvei reminded her. “That’s why he came back and apologized to you later, remember? And I’m sure that once he calms down, he’ll do the same thing now.”
“But he has nothing to apologize for,” protested Mei Lo, looking confused. “There is neither guilt nor shame in a husband being intimate with his wives, nor in marrying a third.”
Solvei paused, sharing a glance with Nenet, who nodded back. Taking a slow breath, she turned her mismatched eyes to Mei Li. “I know we already told you about some of Lex’s adventures, but there’s something else you need to know.”
She paused for a moment, trying to figure out how to broach the topic, before deciding to just dive right in. “Have you ever heard of a pony goddess named Kara?”
The explanation took several minutes, with Nenet chiming in at several points as Solvei told Mei Li what she knew of the blessing Lex had received from the pony goddess of love. By the time she was finished, the kumiho’s eyes were wide.
But to Solvei’s relief, there wasn’t a shred of anger or condemnation in them. Only amazement and admiration.
“Magnificent!” gushed Mei Li when Solvei had finished. “To receive the patronage of two gods, our husband is truly magnificent!”
“He doesn’t think so,” sighed Nenet, before giving Solvei a hurt look. “That’s what you were saying before, right? That because he has that blessing, he thinks he took advantage of us?”
“We all felt his emotions,” replied Solvei. “He wasn’t angry, he was horrified. I’m not going to pretend that I understand everything about him, but based on what I do know, yeah, that’s probably what he thinks happened.”
The sphinx’s expression fell then, and she trembled as she looked down. Heartbreak radiated off of her, and it was enough to make Solvei wince...though the fact that they were both still naked and covered in Lex’s scent kept her from moving to comfort the sphinx. “Nenet, I’m disappointed too-”
She didn’t get a chance to finish as Nenet slammed a paw to the ground, her wings giving a single, sharp flap. “I’m not disappointed!” she snapped, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. “I’m angry! I know what it’s like to be a victim! I spent my entire life before now being one! What we just did with Lex didn’t feel anything like that!”
Thrashing her tail hard enough that several of the bony spurs protruding from the end of it flew off, sinking deep into the wall of the turf hut, Nenet continued to rant. “I formed a bond with him knowing all about what Kara’s influence would do! I wanted it to happen, to fall in love! To make love with someone I’d given my heart to! And it was wonderful! But apparently he didn’t think so!”
Sinking back down into a crouch, Nenet’s fierce expression gradually faded into a pout. “When he gets back, I’m going to tell him that the next time he thinks he’s hurt me, he should just ask me if I feel hurt.”
Solvei couldn’t help herself, smiling as she gave the sphinx a warm look. “Wow.”
Nenet blinked. “What?”
“Before, when you were apologizing to Toklo and the others, Lex said that you were stronger than either of us knew. From where I’m sitting, you’re stronger than he knew, either.” She glanced at a nearby wall, where one of the sphinx’s tail-spikes was embedded. “And not just in your tail.”
Blushing at the praise, Nenet’s brow furrowed at that last part. “What do you-, huh?!”
Yelping as she looked back and saw what her tail had done, Nenet’s indignation immediately dissolved. “Oh! Oh no! Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry! I-”
“Relax, it’s fine,” Solvei assured her. “I mean, I had no idea your tail could do that, but it’s not like anyone’s hurt, right Mei Li? ...Mei Li?”
Belatedly realizing that the fox-woman had been quiet for some time now, Solvei turned her attention toward Lex’s newest “wife.”
But the kumiho was apparently lost in thought, one hand raised to her chin as she looked at the ground, frowning. Behind her, her tails were waving slightly, and while Solvei’s posterior appendage only wagged when she was happy, the motions from Mei Li’s hindquarters was similar enough to the thrashing that Nenet had just been engaged in that Solvei was willing to guess that they weren’t a good sign.
Not wanting there to be another tail-based incident – Mei Li had mentioned that for a kumiho, magical power was directly proportional to how many tails they had – Solvei raised her voice. “Mei Li!”
“Hm?!” Her head snapping up, the fox-woman gave Solvei small bow. “Forgive me, Eld-...Solvei. I was considering something.”
“What?” asked Nenet, the question coming quickly enough that Solvei could tell the sphinx was hoping to talk about anything other than what she’d just done.
Mei Li pursed her lips for a moment, an uncomfortable look crossing her face as she folded her hands in her lap again. “I know that our husband has dealt with many hardships recently,” she began, seeming to choose her words carefully. “And that he has availed himself of little that would relax him, at least before tonight...”
Solvei and Nenet shared a glance, unsure of where the kumiho was going. “...but?” prompted Nenet.
“When he was...engaged, with the two of you, I couldn’t help but take notice-”
Solvei winced, pulling a pelt around herself.
“-that his ki seemed to have more yang than yin,” finished Mei Li.
Pausing midway through covering herself up, Solvei blinked. “His...what?”
Nenet, still naked and unashamed, cocked her head, her inherent comprehension of languages giving her only a literal translation of what had been said. “His...personal energy was more...positive than negative?”
“It might be my own misunderstanding!” added Mei Li hurriedly. “I was quite distracted by his display of virility, and given my own nature as a kumiho means that my yin is too strong, the yang of someone’s ki is more noticeable-”
“I’m sorry, Mei Li, I’m trying to follow you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about,” interrupted Solvei.
“Me too,” admitted Nenet. “I mean, I can understand the terms, but I don’t have any context.”
“Ah...” Looking momentarily at a loss, Mei Li faltered for a moment before rallying. “Please allow me to make a visual demonstration.”
When no one objected, she waved one of her tails. Instantly, in front of her, a spectral image appeared.
It was a circle with a line through it. However, instead of being straight, the line was “S” shaped, making the circle seem as though it was composed of two teardrops coiling around each other. More oddly, one of the teardrops was as black as her hair, while the other was as white as Solvei’s fur.
“The way of the universe,” began Mei Li, “is duality. All things have their natural counterpart: light and darkness, male and female, hot and cold, order and chaos, life and death, and all others. The essence of this duality can be summarized as yin” – she pointed to the black teardrop – “which represents all that is dark, feminine, emotional, and similar qualities, with its opposite being yang” – she indicated the white teardrop – “which is all things light, masculine, logical, and such.”
Solvei could already feel herself falling behind. “How does that-”
“Shh!” Apparently fascinated, Nenet watched the demonstration raptly. “Go on!”
Smiling at her fellow wife’s enthusiasm, Mei Li continued. “While yin and yang are opposites, they are not monoliths. Each contains a small amount of the other.” She gestured to the circle again, and the spectral image changed. Now, each teardrop had a smaller circle in the middle of its largest part; a black circle within the white teardrop, and a white circle within the black teardrop.
She gestured with her tail again, and the two teardrops separated, floating apart from each other. “Because the universe is composed of these two concepts, separate yet complementary, no one and nothing can have them both in equal measure. All things align more strongly with one or the other. Thus, our husband is male, and so has yang” – she nodded to the white teardrop – “while we, being female, have yin.” She nodded toward the black.
Pausing she glanced at the other two. Solvei tried her best to look like she understood what all of this meant, while Nenet nodded eagerly, her eyes shining.
Seeing that there were no questions, Mei Li continued. “In living creatures, the state of the yin or yang in their bodies can be determined by the emanations of the soul, which we call ‘ki.’ Ki is present in all that lives, and while some sages say that even the land and sky have their own ki, the stronger the soul, the stronger its ki can be felt by those who are attuned to it.”
She paused then, looking abashed. “As a three-tails, my sense of ki was rather poor. Now that I have nine, I’ll need to ask my Aunt Yuyan for further instructions on how to-”
“I’m sorry, what does this have to do with Lex?” interjected Solvei, rubbing her forehead.
“Ah, forgive me.” Giving an embarrassed cough, Mei Li gestured to the white teardrop. “The same way that the body can fall ill, the mind can come unhinged, or even the soul can be disrupted, it is possible for an individual’s yin or yang to become disproportionate to its ideal ratio.”
Her tail twitched again, and the black circle within the white teardrop grew larger, doubling in size, before shrinking down to a mere pinprick. “When this happens, the disposition of the person can be adversely affected, resulting in numerous problems of health, mindset, or spirituality.”
Nenet’s eyebrows rose. “You’re saying you think something is wrong with Lex’s yang?”
“That just sounds wrong, somehow,” muttered Solvei.
Giving a slightly-confused smile to winter wolf, Mei Li turned her attention to Nenet. “According to what my aunt taught me, heightened aggression, overwhelming carnal desire, and preoccupation with rectitude to the point of excess are all symptoms of a male that is experiencing an overdose of yang.” She pointed to the white teardrop, and with another twitch of her tail, the black circle within it shrunk to less than half its size.
“That’s great!” cheered Nenet, before catching herself. “I mean, that’s not great that something’s wrong with Lex, but it’s great that we know what it is and can fix it!” She paused then, her exuberance fading as she looked back at Mei Li. “You can fix it, right?”
“With the proper medicine, exercises, and spells, an imbalance in someone’s ki can be restored,” nodded the kumiho. “At least, so long as it wasn’t misaligned at birth. If it was, then it will resist being tampered with, and the best that can be done is compensatory techniques. I’ll need to ask my aunt-”
“Wait, hang on!” Solvei shook her head, now wearing her discomfort openly. “Before we just go deciding that Lex is sick, or whatever you call that” – she waved a paw at the spectral teardrops – “didn’t you say before that your own ki is out of whack because you’re a kumiho?”
“Ah, I did...” The fox ears on top of Mei Li’s head flicked back for a moment as she pursed her lips again. “That’s how I know that ki which is misaligned at birth is very hard to alter. Kumiho – or rather, all foxes, be they kumiho, kitsune, huli jing, and others – are all born with stronger yin than most other races.”
Nenet’s eyes widened slightly. “Why?”
Mei Li sighed. “The fox pantheon was a small one, having only three gods, all of which were female. When their relationship ended...”
Trailing off, she shook her head. “It’s not important now. What matters is that, because of what happened, all of the vulpine people have an excess of yin.”
Another twitch of her tail, and Mei Li gestured to the black teardrop, the white dot within it shrinking to a third of its previous size. “In our vixens, this is makes us more feminine than females of most other races. And in our tods” – in the white teardrop, the black dot grew larger, almost touching the edges of the boundary – “they lack the much of masculine traits that other males possess. It’s why so many choose to become eunuchs or magically alter their sex, and even those that don’t often find themselves drawn to feminine pleasures.”
Solvei grimaced at that last part. “Didn’t need to know that.”
“Is there any way that you can figure out of Lex’s ki is out of balance?” There was a note of determination in Nenet’s voice, focused in a way that made it clear she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Any spell or test you can do to figure out if he has...yang-poisoning, I guess you could call it?”
“If he were here, I could attempt to read the flow of ki through his body,” answered Mei Li. “But since he’s not, the best I could do was if I could examine some of his blood, or hair, or...oh.”
She colored slightly then, and after a moment, Nenet did the same, causing Solvei to frown. “What are you...oh, you have got to be kidding me!”
“It’s not like there’s any lack of it,” muttered Nenet, glancing between her legs, and then down to the wet spot where she’d woken up. “I mean, I don’t know how much this takes, but there’s no way all this can’t be enough. Solvei, how much-”
“Uh-uh!” declared Solvei loudly, curling her tail between her legs as she pulled another pelt over herself. “No way! I am so not participating in this!”
“I understand,” soothed Mei Li, standing and walking toward Nenet. “A few drops should be more than sufficient.”
Solvei squeezed her eyes shut, but wasn’t able to cover her ears in time, catching the soft grunt that came from the sphinx. When she dared to crack one eye open a moment later, Mei Li had stepped back from Nenet, looking at the sticky, pearlescent strand of fluid between two of her fingers, three of her tails waving in a complex pattern behind her.
Leaning in close, the vixen eyed the sample critically even as her nose twitched, causing her cheeks to darken, and Solvei saw her swallow. “He’s quite virile,” she murmured, more to herself than the others.
“I hope you can find out more than that,” huffed Solvei, embarrassment giving her words a sharper edge than she’d meant.
Fortunately, Mei Li didn’t seem to take it personally, giving the winter wolf an apologetic look before forcing herself to adopt a dispassionate expression...despite her persistent blush.
Several heartbeats passed before the kumiho frowned, causing Nenet’s eyes to widen. “What is it?”
“I think...magic to prevent conception?” murmured Mei Li. “How odd. Doesn’t he want an heir?”
Solvei winced internally, silently apologizing to Drafty. “What about his ki?”
“Ah, yes.” Behind the fox-woman, her tails continued their sinuous dance. “Forgive me. I’m still only used to doing this with three tails. If I knew how to use all nine, I...wait...”
A confused expression crossed Mei Li’s face then, and she blinked several times. “This...cannot be correct.”
“What can’t?” Flaring her wings, Nenet leaned forward, as if she could see what Mei Li was discerning. “Is his ki out of balance or not?”
“...let me check again,” replied Mei Li after a long pause.
Silence fell over the interior of the turf hut as the kumiho continued her examination, until at last her tails ceased their movement and lowered back to join the other six resting above the ground. “I checked three times,” she announced at last, her voice sounding hollow, as if she was in shock. “I was sure it had to be a mistake, but...it doesn’t seem to be.”
“What?” Despite how uncomfortable she was with the vixen’s methods, Mei L’s reaction was enough to leave Solvei unsettled. “What’s wrong with Lex?”
Mei Li’s jaw worked for a moment, as if she’d forgotten how to speak, before she finally managed to get the words out.
“His ki has no yin whatsoever.”
Both Solvei and Nenet fell silent as they digested that, with the sphinx recovering first. “None?”
“Not even the faintest trace,” answered Mei Li, sitting down so abruptly it was like she’d collapsed. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not a deviation from his normal state either; from the look of it, this is how he’s always been, even before he became a xianxia...”
“So...what does that mean?” ventured Solvei, uncertainly.
Mei Li shook her head, still looking astounded. “It means...that he’s consummately male, in every regard. He’s perpetually seeking to rule over others, always eager to breed, devoted to order and logic...”
“But you said yin is the part of someone that has emotions, right?” ventured Nenet, her earlier enthusiasm seeming to have vanished. “But Master’s very emotional!”
“I’ll have to check with my aunt, but I believe that’s him trying to return to a state of balance,” replied Mei Li. “He knows that he’s missing the yin that complements his yang, and is trying to correct for it. That would explain why his feelings are difficult to understand, since he’s attempting to impose them on himself rather than being able to let them grow naturally.”
“If you’re right,” ventured Solvei slowly, “then this explains a lot. Why he doesn’t seem to have any male friends. Why he follows a female deity who’s a goddess of darkness. His battle prowess...”
“He’s like an incarnation of the principle of yang itself,” murmured Mei Li, all nine of her tails having fluffed up in agitation.
“Is...” Nenet swallowed before continuing. “Is there anything we can do? To help him, I mean?”
Solvei had no idea what to say to that, and apparently neither did Mei Li. But a moment later, the fox-woman straightened up. “The ki that one is born with can’t be permanently changed, as far as I know,” she announced. “And even if it could, his nature as an immortal likely makes him immune to most remedies. But we can alleviate his symptoms, making it easier for him to bear being what he is.”
Solvei perked up at that. “How?”
“I need to give him my dowry.” A look of resolve crossed Mei Li’s face then. “That should help.”
“Dowry? You mean a wedding gift?” Nenet looked as confused as Solvei felt then, the sphinx’s brows furrowing. “Why? What is it?”
“My clan, of course,” answered Mei Li as though that was obvious. “With so much excess yin, the Pimao Jingzhi will be perfect for him."
“Oh.” The sphinx gave a hesitant nod. “I guess that makes sense.”
“And I'm sure that having all of our vixens as his concubines will be to his delight as well.”
Mei Li tilted her head, trying to puzzle out what her elder sister – she still thought of Solvei that way, even if her husband’s first wife had instructed her to be informal – meant by the question.
“I confess that I am not sure what you mean by ‘all of this,’” she admitted as she accepted a wooden plate with a spread of cold meat and sliced vegetables. With the sun coming up, Solvei had volunteered to fix another meal, for which the kumiho was grateful. There had been precious little food to be had while she’d been lost on the Plane of Ice. “But I am not displeased with my current situation.”
Setting another plate aside for Nenet – the sphinx was still asleep, cuddled up in the same spot she’d taken last night after the discussion about their husband’s ki had finished – Solvei sat down with her own breakfast, spearing a slice of meat with a bone utensil and munching on it. “So you really don’t mind that Kara’s blessing might be the reason you care about him?”
Again, Mei Li struggled to understand what was being asked of her. “The influence of the pony goddess of love is not the only reason I honor and revere our husband,” she answered slowly, wondering if this was a test. As the first wife, Solvei had the right to question her and confirm that a new wife would be an asset to their husband’s household; if that was the case, Mei Li knew she had to make a good impression!
Sitting up straighter, she took a bite of her vegetables before answering, hoping that partaking of Solvei’s cooking – simple though it was – would earn her some of her elder sister’s consideration. “Our husband is powerful and courageous, facing a demigod in battle without flinching. Yet he’s also generous and compassionate, sparing my life and offering me his protection, even after I was forced to face him as an enemy. Even his distress over thinking that he...took liberties with us, is evidence of a noble and respectful disposition. Any vixen would be pleased to be the wife of someone so upstanding.”
She smiled then, not having to fake the warm feeling that came over her. “But even if none of that were true, the nature of the gods is to administrate over their respective dominions. A god of the sea will make sure the tides rise and fall, a god of the harvest will see to it that the crops grow full and bountiful, and a god of love cause hearts to be drawn together. To have a god personally ensure that the many wives and concubines our husband will take will all love him back – keeping his household stable and peaceful – is a wonderful thing.”
Solvei sighed at that, picking at her food. “Many wives and concubines, huh?”
This time, Mei Li didn’t need to guess what her elder sister was thinking. “It is our husband’s nature, the way it is for a hawk to soar. He did not ask to be born with no yin in his ki, and so cannot help but seek it out through female companionship. And as a xianxia, his ki condensation is far beyond that any single mortal, so he can only make up for that by surrounding himself with many sources of yin.”
“There’s a lot of young warriors here that I’m sure would love to claim that they can’t help it if they need more ‘yin’ in their lives,” huffed Solvei, spearing another slice of meat a little harder than necessary before biting into it.
Mei Li wasn’t sure what to say to that, eating another portion of her meal to give herself time to think of an appropriate response.
But to her mild surprise, Solvei was the one to speak again, closing her eyes and taking a breath before giving her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just frustrated. If Master-, if Lex had just waited a few minutes, we could have worked this out. Instead, he refused to listen, and now he’s off in the middle of nowhere, torturing himself over what happened even though he didn’t do anything wrong!”
She snarled the last four words, gripping her utensil so hard that it snapped in her fingers, causing her to let out a mirthless laugh. “I hate knowing that he’s so unhappy, and I hate it even more that it’s because of me. I want to be someone who makes him feel better, not worse.”
Mei Li waited for a moment, giving Solvei a chance to calm down, before speaking. “What our husband is doing right now is not because of you.” She kept her voice soft but firm, the way she’d heard her Aunt Yuyan do so many times growing up. “It is his nature to overthink, to have trouble with issues of emotion, and to take on more responsibility than he should. He cannot help himself, any more than the snow can help being cold.”
That got a snicker from Solvei, and Mei Li felt relief at the smirk her husband’s first wife gave her then. “So what should we, his devoted wives, do then, o font of yin?”
Mei Li smiled. “We cultivate his household, turning it into a place that soothes his mind and eases his heart.” The words came easily, quoting the manuals about feminine etiquette – The Domestic Lessons, The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, The Lady’s Precepts, and numerous other classical texts – that she’d spent her childhood reading. “His wives, children, concubines, and servants should all serve as pillars, supporting him in his efforts to be the bridge that leads his nation into the future.”
Solvei was quiet then, and Mei Li could see her digesting that, the two of them eating in silence. It was only after she’d cleared her plate that the adlet spoke again. “About this idea of yours...to make your clan’s vixens be Master’s concubines...”
Hearing the doubt in Solvei’s voice, Mei Li fought down a rush of anxiety. While a conscientious husband would make sure that all of his existing wives approved of a potential new bride before marrying her – which had been why Mei Li had made sure to take note of the approving smiles on Solvei and Nenet’s faces before she’d bound herself to the immortal who had rescued her – new concubines required no such approval. Neither, for that matter, did a new wife’s dowry.
But being technically within her rights wouldn’t mean anything if the peace of her husband’s household was disrupted.
And a first wife who was unhappy about her new sister using a loophole to bring her entire clan into their master’s home was a surefire way to create problems.
That had been why Mei Li had given voice to the idea last night. Even if Solvei and Nenet had no official right to comment on her dowry, or on their husband taking new concubines, Mei Li felt sure that their approval – or lack thereof – would play a large part in their husband’s reaction to gaining an entire clan of kumiho as his servants. For a husband to refuse a dowry was exceptionally shameful for his wife, but with how generous his bridal gifts to her had been, Mei Li knew she wouldn’t be able to protest if her master did so now.
But at the same time, she couldn’t just leave her clan to fend for themselves.
Not when their prospects were already so dire...
Which meant that for the sake of the Pimao Jingzhi’s survival, Mei Li needed to convince Solvei that they would be an asset, rather than a liability.
“I swear on my tails,” murmured Mei Li, bowing her head to Solvei, “my clan will be a boon to our husband’s household. My Aunt Yuyan has six tails, and has much experience in raising children. Her presence will be a source of succor and comfort not only for him, but for all of us. Nayao, her eldest daughter, is graceful and strong, with a dedicated and loyal heart. The twins, Jing Bei and Jing Xiao, are like two blossoms grown from a single bud, being elegant and refined in all that they do. And Shiji, her youngest, is still immature, but will absolutely grow into a great beauty one day.”
She could only hope that Solvei wouldn’t ask how many tails her aunt’s daughters had.
But when Mei Li snuck a glance at the adlet, she was frowning, giving her an unreadable look. “Mei Li-”
“We also have servants of our own!” Inwardly cursing herself for being so rude as to interrupt her elder sister, there was nothing she could do about it now except plunge forward. “Our retainers are few in number, but they have been with us for many years! All of them will be our husband’s now! I can personally guarantee their loyalty, as well as their usefulness in maintaining a home! The males have all been properly castrated, and the females are also prepared to serve our husband’s needs!”
Solvei’s eyes widened. “Wait-”
“And we have treasures as well! Our material wealth is lacking, but my family’s relics are well-known even among the larger clans! We possess the View From the Heavenly Mountain Gate, the Nine Methods of Earthly Formation, the-”
“Okay.”
It took a moment for Mei Li to register what her elder sister had just said. “...o...kay?”
Solvei was still giving her an odd look, but managed a small smile. “Bring your clan here. I’m sure Lex wouldn’t want you to be separated from your family, and he’s planning on going back to his homeland soon anyway. Taking them along should be just fine.”
Mei Li swallowed, not trusting herself to speak as she nodded, having the distinct feeling that she’d given away more than she’d intended to. Still, the fact that Solvei had likely glimpsed her desperation and tried to comfort her, rather than berating her, was enough to ease the tightness in her chest. “My husband’s first wife is truly kind,” murmured Mei Li, bowing reverently toward Solvei. “I hope that his second wife will feel the same.”
“I’ll talk to Nenet, but I don’t think she’ll have a problem,” replied Solvei. “She practically lit up when you started telling her about that ‘ki’ stuff. It was like when I made an ice palace for her to play in; she’s starved for new things to try.”
Laughing as her tension fell away, Mei Li sat up. “I’ll try to call my clan as soon as possible. Now that I have nine tails, it shouldn’t be hard, but I’ll need some time to figure out how to use the magic in them properly.”
“Well, since we’re just sitting around waiting for Master to get back, time is something we’ve got,” noted Solvei wryly. “But I do have one question in the meantime.”
“Oh?” Mei Li tilted her head. “Please, ask without hesitation.”
“I know you said that foxes all have a lot of ‘yin’ in their ki. Do any of your clan have...the female version of whatever Lex’s condition is called? Where they’re all yin and no yang?”
Mei Li shook her head. “No. Nor have I ever heard of a vixen – or a female of any race – whose ki is entirely yin. Though, to speak plainly, I’m not sure it would matter.”
Solvei raised a brow. “How’s that?”
“Ki is a complex force, as it reflects the nature of the soul,” explained Mei Li, glad to be back on a topic that didn’t concern her clan’s future. “It’s not just a matter of yin and yang, but also of its condensation level, which represents its cultivation...its strength, if you will.”
“I think I see where this is going,” murmured Solvei. “You mentioned something about his ki being too ‘condensed,’ or whatever it is, before, right? Why one girl’s yin isn’t enough for him now?”
“That is essentially correct,” nodded Mei Li. “Now that he’s a xianxia, his ki cultivation has reached a degree of condensation beyond what all but the most enlightened of mortals could ever even begin to approach. Even if a mortal female with undiluted yin were to be found, it would be like pouring a jar of ink into an ocean; the water on the shore would not change its color.”
“So I guess our master will just have to be satisfied with you, me, Nenet, Drafty, Sonata, Aria, and all the rest of your clan until he can find some lady-titan who’s all yin,” snorted Solvei, shaking her head ruefully. “You were right about what you said before: it’s a good thing Kara gave him her blessing, otherwise this would never work.”
“I find it difficult to imagine what such a ‘lady-titan’ would be like, if she happened to possess ki that was pure yin,” added Mei Li, shrugging lightly. “She would have to be some sort of incarnation of muliebrity, possessed of great power but only able to express it through the most feminine of attributes.”
“I’m not even going to ask what those attributes are-”
Solvei couldn’t finish as she suddenly gasped, sitting upright as her eyes went wide. Off to the side, Nenet suddenly jerked her head up, blinking in alarm.
Mei Li didn’t need to ask them what was wrong, having felt the same thing as the other two.
Even with his having closed their telepathic connection, she had been aware of the direction in which her husband had gone. It wasn’t much, but it was still comforting to know that she was aware of his location, even if only in the abstract. If she ever truly needed to find him, she’d have known where to look.
But that had just changed.
Now, the only thing she could feel with regard to her husband – the same thing that she knew Solvei and Nenet were feeling at that very moment – was that he was no longer on the same plane of existence.
His connection to Solvei and the others was even more muted now.
Lex had suspected something like that would happen, of course. Even with his holding their telepathic connection shut, he knew they were still aware of his location, the same way he was cognizant of theirs. But that depended on the distance between them being something that could be bridged by physical movement.
Now that he was within the demiplane he’d created, that was no longer the case.
It had taken him the remainder of the night to develop the spell and then successfully cast it, the process having been painstaking even with the powers and intelligence that he now commanded. But the effort had been worth it, having managed to create a space that was ideal for what he was about to do. Having no physical exit, and designed to allow planar entry but not egress, it would last as long as he needed it to, being small but stabilized against attempts to tear the artificial space apart.
That had been absolutely essential, given that he planned on summoning all of Adagio’s creditors at once.
There was simply no other alternative, since summoning only one ran the risk – however slight – that they’d spread the word of what he was doing before he could summon the next. Given that he had no idea which of them had Adagio’s soul, the risk that one of them would offload it somewhere when they heard he was hunting for it wasn’t something Lex was willing to chance. Having the element of surprise only mattered if he knew who to use it against, and with seven suspects, the only choice was to interrogate them all at once.
Of course, calling seven beings who had so much aristeia that they could afford to give some away was no easy task.
But Lex was no simple spellcaster.
Despite the fact that he made no gestures and didn't need to chant, the demiplane shook under the waves of power that he conjured as he cast his spell, the extradimensional space contorting as he forcibly opened seven gates to seven different realms simultaneously. It took all the power he was capable of mustering, along with Nenet’s metamagic to act as a crux, but he could already feel it working, mystical senses registering the entities on the other side shrieking and struggling as they found themselves suddenly scooped up and pulled into his presence. Try as they might, however, they were unable to resist, and within moments all seven were in front of him.
It was the opening gambit in what was almost certainly going to be an exchange that was no less fierce than when he’d fought Kryonex.
But far more enjoyable.
“Greetings whores,” rumbled Lex as Adagio’s creditors – all of them ladies who surpassed even Adagio herself in erotic appeal – slowly righted themselves, the words deliberately provocative.
“There are no tracks, physical or magical, of any kind.”
The report wasn’t unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less welcome. “Have you attempted a scrying?”
The question was an insult rather than an inquiry – as a selu’taar’iva, an apprentice to one of the selu’taar, the High Mages who were they apex of their people’s skill at interacting with the mystical forces of Creation, it was only to be expected that a scrying would have already been tried – and his companion bristled. “The titan is keeping his presence hidden. Doubtless he seeks to avoid being questioned about the actions of his patron and her pantheon.”
“Doubtless,” he repeated, his voice dry. “Which is why we were tasked to capture the titan and bring him before the Vice Coronal. And yet our spellcaster” – he deliberately used the human term, making no effort to hide his disdain – “is unable to locate our quarry, despite his master having once helped to bind a god.”
The look on Vystalaran’s face was one of abject frustration, but he managed to keep his voice level as he replied. “My lord Loraestil, I suggested earlier that the echoes of the battle that was fought in this valley – as well as the demigod’s death – would make it very difficult to investigate anything from here. While I can understand, and appreciate, your idea that we should first examine the scene, I would humbly submit that my magic would prove more fruitful if we put this place behind us.”
Loraestil sneered at the weak excuse. Before he could answer Thilaera – the third member of their group – spoke up from where she’d been communing with the land. “My lord, I concur with Vystalaran’s suggestion. The tapestry of nature has come unraveled here, and I’m unable to find out anything that happened. I cannot even confirm if the titan survived the battle or succumbed to his wounds.”
“Of course he survived,” snorted Loraestil. “If he hadn’t, there’d be some evidence of his passing. A body, fallen equipment, something. Since there isn’t, he must have relocated elsewhere.”
“Which is what I believe we should do if we wish to continue our search, my lord,” interjected Vystalaran.
Loraestil sighed, resting his hand on the pommel of his sword as he pondered the matter. When he’d set out, he’d mostly thought of the glory he’d achieve when he succeeded in this mission – perhaps enough that his father would recommend him for an office higher than simply being the Coronal’s Huntsman, a position he’d been stuck in for nearly a century now – rather than the petty details that would go into completing it. After all, he’d hunted down and slain balors and pit fiends, creatures that were among the most malevolent of demons and devils, respectively. A titan shouldn’t have been much different.
But the Vice Coronal had assured him that this particular hunt would be unlike the ones he’d been on before, his quarry having somehow managed to slay a demigod. Yes, a weak and pathetic example of one, but still; for a titan to triumph over a divinity was no small triumph. It had been why he’d wanted to send out no less than three of their High Mages – as well as an entire complement of bladesingers to accompany them – to bring the supposed godslayer in. It had taken Loraestil considerable effort to win the privilege of leading the mission himself, mostly by pointing out how they could ill-afford to spare so many of their finest warriors.
Even then, he’d been unable to avoid having these two tagalongs assigned to him. Vystalaran was a competent enough mage, but had never left Foelvan, and had no experience of the practical difficulties that went into a hunt. Likewise, Thilaera was a dedicated aspirant of Gladoneral – the god in charge of their people’s presence on this world – but was one of the or-tel, those of the woodlands whose reverence for nature often blinded them to the glories of art, music, dance, and other pastimes that their shared culture had elevated into artforms.
The thought of having to share credit for bringing in the titan with these two was enough to make Loraestil’s heart ache with embarrassment.
“Very well,” he said at last. “We’ll exit the area, and then our mage” – he used the proper term this time, knowing that to do so again would have been petty – “can try and track him again.”
“And our guide?” murmured Thilaera, glancing at where the four-legged beast was staring at the shattered valley, head down and ears folded.
Loraestil managed to keep his frown from showing on his face. He’d found that lowly creature on one of his last expeditions, and had taken it with him more as a curiosity than anything else. Still, it had proven unexpectedly useful, being passingly familiar with the area where the titan had been spotted; not enough for Vystaran to accurately teleport them there, but enough to get within a few days’ travel.
And it had knowledge of the titan that they were hunting. It was all secondhand, and most of it old and very outdated, but to an experienced hunter like Loraestil, that was far and away better than nothing.
The fact that he’d been able to surprise the Vice Coronal by knowing the titan’s name – Lex Legis – was proof enough of that.
“It might still prove useful,” he declared after a moment’s thought. “Just keep it out of the way until we need it again. And make sure it doesn’t run off.”
“Allow me,” volunteered Vystaran, likely looking to assuage his wounded pride. Which, of course, had been why Loraestil had ribbed him in the first place; he knew from experience that having something to prove was the best motivator.
A few murmured words came from the apprentice High Mage, along with several complex gestures. A moment later the beast stiffened up, its body turning a dull gray as the petrification spell was complete. Loraestil couldn’t help but notice the slightly surprised look on its face, as though it had realized what was happening just as its body turned to stone. It was amusing enough that he had to concentrate on holding back a snicker, not wanting to lose face in front of his subordinates.
Another spell from Vystaran caused the four-legged statue to shrink, and in moments it was the size of a figurine, smaller than a leaf from an elm. Looking quite pleased with himself, the mage pocketed the shrunken statue, tucking it in his belt pouch. “Shall we be off?”
Letting the cheeky comment pass with merely a nod, Loraestil led the other two out of the broken valley.
One way or another, the titan would be found and brought back for interrogation. No matter how long it took, he was committed to seeing this hunt through to the end, until he’d brought his prey back before the Vice Coronal in triumph.
His pride as an elf demanded nothing less.
Four days.
It had been four days since Lex had left so abruptly, shutting their telepathic connection and heading out into the wilderness before vanishing onto some other plane entirely.
But I’m not worried, Solvei reminded herself. Not in the least. Lex is off doing...whatever he’s doing, and once he’s finished, he’ll come right back. It’s not like he’d abandon us, or Drafty, or even Adagio, and just go home to Equestria.
Even so, there had been plenty of time for her to wonder what it was he was up to that would take so long, or require him to leave the world altogether. Her best guess was that he’d gone back to Darkest Night for some reason – maybe the Night Mare wanted to reward him for his victory over Kryonex – but she knew he hadn’t gone anywhere near the Shrine of the Starless Sky. Of course, now that he was a titan he might not need to; if he could slay gods and resurrect the dead, moving between worlds was probably as easy as breathing.
But that didn’t stop her from wondering when he’d come back.
Fortunately, there was a lot to do in the meantime. First and foremost was getting to know her parents; Tulok and Alasie had both died when she’d been young, and reconnecting with the two of them now was proving to be equal parts heartwarming and awkward. Not to mention that she was constantly being asked about the Night Mare, or cajoled into retelling some of her adventures with her master, or called on to demonstrate some aspect of the magic she’d gained.
If she hadn’t been worried about where her master was, Solvei might have found the entire thing fun.
Nenet was in a similar position. The sphinx was clearly still upset over Lex leaving, but was burying it in constant work. Or rather, constant study. To Solvei’s surprise, Nenet had started having long conversations with the village elders, prompting them to give long lectures on everything from the adlets’ cultural history to the proper way to build a turf hut. It was the sort of thing that Solvei – and almost everyone else she knew – had slept through when she’d been younger, but the sphinx seemed to be a bottomless pit where new knowledge was concerned, paying rapt attention to even the most boring of details.
But the biggest surprise had been Mei Li.
Just like Solvei and Nenet, the kumiho had elected to spend her time out among the adlets of the village. Given how badly she wanted to turn her clan over to Lex, Solvei would have thought that she’d be in a rush to try and figure out how her new tails worked, since Mei Li had mentioned that she’d need them to try and contact the rest of the Pimao Jingzhi. But other than spending her evenings sitting quietly with her eyes closed – she’d called it “meditation” – she’d seemed quite happy to spend her time helping with the sewing, cleaning, whittling, and other chores that occupied most of the domestic-minded adlets’ time, always with a smile on her face and a compliment at the ready. By the end of the second day, she was already at the center of a group of new friends, laughing and sharing stories.
Her smile was never so large, however, as when the children came to play with her.
Given that most of the adlets who were tasked with keeping up the village were mothers, it was inevitable that Mei Li found herself in the company of the youngest members of the tribe. Each time a pup stopped what they were doing to stare at her large, fluffy tails, her face would light up, and she’d invite them to come over and rub them. It had been completely against Solvei’s expectations, having thought that she’d want to keep the beautiful patterns and markings unruffled. Instead, Mei Li seemed to delight at having the little ones lose themselves in her fluffy fur.
The result was that she quickly became the most popular person in the village. Certainly, the male members of the tribe all thought so, and more than once Solvei witnessed a would-be suitor striking up a conversation with her, only to walk away dejectedly a few moments later. Mei Li might have been unfailingly polite, but once she made it clear who her master was, that was enough to let even the rowdiest fellow know that she was off-limits.
No one wanted to provoke someone for whom slaying Hvitdod had been an opening act.
Of course, not even Mei Li was entirely comfortable with how things were. But once again, Solvei found herself surprised, as the kumiho’s concerns weren’t the same ones she’d been struggling with over the last few days.
“Perhaps it is because he wishes to wait until he has returned home and retaken his country before he has children?” she asked as Solvei prepared dinner, a nervous tone in her voice. “That way, he can wait until he has proper nurses and tutors for them. Such things are very important.”
“Maybe he’d prefer to only have one child at a time,” offered Nenet from where she was lounging on a pile of pelts. “Adagio didn’t care about any of her offspring, and so she had lots. I bet Master would want to give all of his attention to just one child.”
“But if that were the case, wouldn’t Eld-, Solvei already be pregnant?” reasoned the kumiho. “She’s the first wife, and yet he used prophylactic magic when he was with her, as well as you.”
A few days ago, that topic would have made Solvei cringe in embarrassment. But the issue of Lex apparently not wanting to have children had apparently been weighing on Mei Li’s mind, and she’d brought it up without fail every evening, to the point where Solvei was growing used to it.
And found herself thinking more and more about Drafty as a consequence. Maybe I should go see her. She’s in that pony village, Bright Night. I know Master said to stay here, but-
“Solvei?” Nenet’s voice cut into her thoughts. “Are you alright?”
“Hm? Oh, I’m fine.” Shaking her head, Solvei went back to cutting up dinner. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“Mei Li was wondering if Lex has any children already, and that he doesn’t have any more so there’s no issue with choosing an heir,” answered the sphinx. “Do you know if he has any kids back on Equestria?”
Not on Equestria, she sighed inwardly. “I don’t think-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a horn sounded from outside, blowing three notes that were long and loud.
Solvei dropped the food she’d been preparing, her eyes widening as she recognized what that meant. “Something’s approaching the village!”
Mei Li tilted her head, her expression curious. “An envoy of some sort? Or perhaps another tribe?”
“If they were peaceful, they wouldn’t have sounded the horn three times,” murmured Solvei, starting toward the door. “That’s the code for danger drawing near.”
Nenet and Mei Li exchanged worried glances before standing up to follow her.
Outside, adlets were running to and fro in the late light, Yotimo organizing the warriors as those who weren’t trained to fight rushed to their homes, dropping what they were doing as they moved to safety. But Solvei was less intent on them than she was on her grandmother, seeing Yura striding toward where Yotimo and the others were gathering. “Grandmother-”
“I’m going to contact the spirits to try and figure out who’s approaching and how close they are,” snapped Yura, a lifetime of being a shaman coming to the fore. “It’ll take time, but if this is some sort of distraction, this will tell us. You summon some ice spirits and send them out as a vanguard!”
“R-right!” yelped Solvei, belatedly garbing herself in her black crystal armor before starting a summoning. Even as she did, though, she took note of the fact that her connection to Lex hadn’t changed; he was still on some other plane of existence, cutting off her ability to communicate with him. Master...
Behind her, Nenet took a trembling breath. “Do we know it’s an enemy? Maybe it’s those mares you were traveling with before, the ones who fought Grisela and everyone outside of that shrine you said you went to.”
“Or perhaps our husband spared some other of Kryonex’s victims,” added Mei Li, though she looked doubtful. “If they escaped the fighting, they might-”
But she didn’t have a chance to finish as several adlets – Solve recognized them as being part of another scouting party – rushed into the village square, causing her to gasp. They were all limping, nursing broken limbs and covered in blood. “Couldn’t...s-stop him...” groaned the first, almost collapsing before Yotimo ran over and caught him. “Strong...too strong...!”
Yotimo opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, a bellow ran from the edge of the village.
“YOU CAN SEND THAT PUNK TITAN OUT, OR I CAN COME IN AFTER HIM,” came a booming male voice. “S’ALL THE SAME TO ME!”
A moment later, the owner appeared, and Solvei’s eyes widened.
The earth stallion might have looked unassuming – having mud-brown fur and a chestnet-colored mane and tail, both cut short – except for how huge he was. Whereas Lex, after returning from Darkest Night, had gained several inches of height and notable muscle definition, this pony was brawny beyond belief. Each and every one of his muscles had swelled to an unbelievable size, turning him into a walking slab of chiseled flesh that even on all fours towered over the adlets by a head, and was almost as wide as he was tall.
“BURLY BRAWL CAME LOOKING FOR A FIGHT, AND HE AIN’T LEAVING ’TIL HE GETS ONE!”
Ensconced in the demiplane that he’d made, Lex’s trans-temporal sense had given him a sudden awareness right before he’d begun casting his summoning spell.
It hadn’t been like when he’d suddenly realized that taking Solvei with him to confront Adagio would have been catastrophic. Nor had it been the grim certainty that breaking his soul-bond to Mei Li would injure her in ways that were both severe and irreparable.
Instead, just before he’d activated his spell, he’d registered only a single sensation:
Significance.
What he was doing now, he knew with absolute certainty, would be something that he’d look back on for a very, very long time. Likely the rest of his life, which was now eternal.
It had been enough to give him pause.
Seeing the future, beyond the six-second foresight that he was always using now, didn’t actually involve “seeing” anything at all. Rather, it was more like suddenly remembering something, albeit the memory was of events which hadn’t actually happened yet. And in some cases, the memory wasn’t one of full sensory impressions, but simply emotional reactions; other times it was bits of specific information, but without details or salient data.
But his glimpses into the future had never been so completely lacking in context as this one was.
Lex knew that he’d look back on what he was about to do for the rest of his life...but he had no idea why.
Would it be with deep regret, cursing himself and wishing he hadn’t done this? Or would it lead to some sort of unexpected windfall that would serve him well for a long time to come? It could have been one just as easily as the other.
Or it could have been neither. It was entirely possible that the significance of this was entirely personal, rather than being related to his plans. Given the nature of Adagio’s creditors, maybe he’d simply be inclined to reminisce about a thoroughly satisfying series of conquests.
Ultimately, there was no way to know, which meant that particular insight about the future was useless. Certainly, it was no reason to alter his plans.
Resolved to see his current course of action through, Lex had performed the summons, stretching his powers to their limit to call all seven owners of the names Kara had told him at once...
...and now, having finished with Adagio’s creditors, Lex had to wonder if the reason for his premonition of significance had already made itself clear.
I am going to give you one chance to explain yourself, he hissed as soon as he felt the communion spell take effect, now calm enough that he was able to hold back from the torrent of castigation that came to mind. One. And if I don’t like what I hear, then you can forget about our deal.
And in his mind, Kara gave a throaty chuckle. Wow. You know, for a guy who just had one of the most epic orgies I’ve seen in some time, I really thought you’d be a little more relaxed afterward.
Her answer made Lex clench his teeth, his indignation rising. You were watching?!
Are you kidding me? snickered Kara. You do know that I’m a sex goddess, right? I can’t not sense major events related to my purview – emphasis on the “perv” – so long as they happen within a world where I’m worshiped, or within the vicinity of some aspect of my power, which includes my temples, my priests, and, oh yeah, people who have my blessing.
Would that be the blessing you gave me before, manipulating my love life? seethed Lex. Or the new one that I just found out you gave me?!
“Just found out”? scoffed the love goddess. I’m not sure you can say that after three hundred and eighty-nine hours of non-stop hardcore rutting, stud. I mean, you figured out what was happening pretty early on, but I don’t remember you being too upset to continue.
Lex fought back a surge of embarrassment – both at the pointed reminder of the excessive debauchery he’d partaken in, and at having been spied on – feeling his calm fracture. I don’t want another blessing from you, you meddlesome bitch! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
Sorry not sorry, babe. You know how it goes: the blessings of the gods aren’t something mortals – or titans, for that matter – get a say in. We pass them out, and you deal with it. Besides, I figured it would go great with how you made a demiplanar love nest where time flows four times faster than normal. That’s the titan equivalent of buying a keg of beer and a box of condoms, you know: it sends a message that you’re going to go paint the town – or at least the town whores – white, so yeah, your divine wing-mare was there for the assist. You’re welcome.
I’m ending our communion now, announced Lex icily.
Oh stop with the melodrama, would you? Her amusement finally falling away, Kara heaved a sigh. Look, you had every advantage going into this, except one: you were outnumbered. Even with limitless stamina, personal instruction from me, and unbreachable defenses against every trick in the book – ranging from simple pheromones and pressure point manipulation to being involuntarily shapechanged – you still had the classic problem of one pole for almost two dozen holes.
She paused for a moment before her voice devolved back into childish giggling. Well, I guess that wasn’t exactly the case, was it? I have to say, I was really glad to see you use that erotimorphic spell I gave you! The look on that genie princess’s face when she realized she was about to get both of her cherries popped at once was hilarious! But details aside, yeah, you needed to have a way to satisfy all of those whores at once, especially after they summoned reinforcements.
Lex resisted the urge to wince at that, glancing back at the central part of the demiplane.
The place wasn’t very large, only about the size of a town hall, and completely lacking in amenities or creature comforts. To the untrained eye, it was nothing but a large, empty, nondescript room, with no doors, windows, or furniture of any kind.
But the owners of any such eyes, Lex felt certain, would have cared less about the lack of furnishings than they would the legion of thoroughly-violated girls sprawled across the place.
From one end to the other, taking up virtually all of the floor space, was a tangled mass of female flesh. Humanoid, quadrupedal, tauric, and numerous other body types were sprawled out, either unconscious or staring dazedly at nothing in the aftermath of his using them. All were naked, their skin, fur, feathers, and scales having nothing but a mixture of his and their fluids to cover them, leaving the range of feminine curves – from petite to gratuitous in the extreme – completely bare to his perusal.
And since I knew you’d probably be put off by any of the major form-changing stuff, continued Kara, which is a real shame since tentacles are sooo much fun – and mass autoreplication is...let’s just say that it’s almost always more trouble than it’s worth – I gave you a different blessing, and voila! You were able to give your undivided attention to each and every slut here! No rest breaks, no tagging out, no one being neglected; they were all yours all the time!
Which did me no good at all, spat Lex. None of them had Adagio’s soul! They didn’t even know that she’d died!
Yeah, that surprised me too, murmured Kara, her voice turning unusually pensive. I was sure one of them snatched her. But I know lies when I hear them, and they weren’t lying about not having that little skank stashed away somewhere.
Do you have her? demanded Lex.
I told you, babe, she never once prayed to me.
That’s not a denial that she’s in your possession, noted Lex. And while I don’t think the daemons have her, the fact that they can steal souls they have no legitimate claim to means that others can also. And if none of these slatterns have her, you’re the only one left who’d care about abducting Adagio’s soul.
I get where you’re coming from, insisted Kara. Really, I do. I’d be suspicious of me too. But I promise you, if I had her, I’d strap her into a harness and deliver her to you wearing nothing but gift wrapping and a ball gag. Kind of like what you did to that dragoness. But I don’t have her, stud. Neither do any of my faithful. And I haven’t made any arrangements with any outside parties to snatch her either. I swear to, well, me.
Then. Where. Is. She?!
I don’t know, babe. But does it really matter? I mean, I still want to see her punished for betraying me, and I know you’re all about having all three layers of your Siren sister sandwich, but look at the bigger picture. What, and who, you’ve done here is just as big a victory as defeating Kryonex. Bigger, even.
Kara’s words were enough to push Adagio to the edge of Lex’s thoughts, recalling his premonition about the significance of what he’d just done. In what way?
Right, I almost forgot that when I gave you those names before, you cut me off before I could tell you just who they were, noted Kara, her voice wry. So how about we take a little inventory of your hoes, shall we?
Lex scowled, but didn’t object. For all that he was still upset about not finding a lead about Adagio, he had to admit that it was a relief no longer being at war with himself. The beast that comprised his instincts was thoroughly satisfied, no longer trying to overwhelm his reasoning. If anything, he felt more relaxed than he had in some time...or would have, if the entire reason he’d done this hadn’t gone unfulfilled. It was an unwelcome reminder that something always seemed to go wrong, souring the entire experience.
Hopefully Kara was right that there was something he’d be able to salvage from this, beyond simply satisfying an urge that he should have been able to control in the first place.
Now, normally I’d change into a pencil skirt, button-up blouse, and glasses for this part, but since we’re audio-only, just imagine I’m dressed up like a naughty teacher. Now, before we begin today’s lesson, can you tell me what those seven sluts I named before all have in common? Besides the obvious I mean?
Lex snorted, finding the answer to be obvious.
They’re all weaklings.
Correct!
Sighing inwardly, Lex waited for Kara to move on.
That Adagio’s creditors weren’t powerful enough to cause him concern had been something he’d suspected for some time now. That was because, unlike how he’d shown the Night Mare a new world full of ponies just waiting to be converted to her religion, Adagio had – as far as he’d been able to tell after speaking with Kara and Nenet – offered her patrons nothing but grandiloquent promises that she’d been transparently unable to fulfill. “Give me aristeia, and I’ll attack a demigod, steal some of his blood, and use it to make a powerful artifact. Then I’ll use that to take even more power, and pay you back on your initial investment with interest,” had been her pitch.
It had been, in other words, an obvious scam.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to call it madness, since Adagio had apparently believed her own hype, at least to the point of actually attacking Kryonex. Even so, anyone who had a halfway decent understanding of aristeia and divinity should have known that the Siren was making promises she’d never be able to fulfill. Regardless of her best efforts, she’d been destined to fail.
Aristeia alone wasn’t enough to stand up to a demigod. It hadn’t even been enough to stand up to him. The fact that she’d managed to injure Kryonex at all – likely through surprise and using her army of daemons and her children as decoys, followed by a swift retreat before the demigod could will her out of existence – had represented the very most that Adagio had been able to accomplish, and although she’d been planning on using the stolen godsblood to construct an artifact, Lex had serious doubts that such a thing (if she’d even been able to complete it in time) would have saved her from divine retaliation.
Even presuming that she’d showcased the annihilating sphere to her creditors to prove that she was serious, anyone who wasn’t an idiot would have realized that if she had such a powerful weapon already – one capable of killing Kryonex on its own – she shouldn’t have needed aristeia anyway. It was like going into debt to buy toothpicks when you already owned a sword: completely unnecessary in terms of preparing for a fight.
But the most suspicious thing of all had been how her agreements had apparently lacked any enforcement mechanism. His own bargain with the Night Mare had meant that she’d claim his soul after death, whether he succeeded or failed in his task. But Adagio had – from what he’d been able to tell – no such provision in her deals. Short of either sending an envoy, or personally appearing to collect what they were owed, her sponsors had no way of making her pay back what she owed them, something that should have been even more problematic if she’d succeeded in gaining divine power.
In short, only a complete fool would have agreed to the deal Adagio was offering.
Or someone who was utterly desperate.
And desperation was the hallmark of weakness.
That was why Lex hadn’t hesitated at summoning all of them at once. For all that he’d suspected them of having generous amounts of aristeia – rightly so, as it turned out – he’d also been confident that they were no real threat to him, even as a group. And once they’d confirmed that, they’d been quick to shift the encounter to a contest of sexuality rather than violence.
Lex had been more than happy to oblige them.
As I know you know, the category of beings that people call titans is a political designation more than anything else, continued Kara. In order to be a titan, you can’t just be a creature who has no innate mortality but can’t draw strength from worship, otherwise every piddly little lich and minor demon would be called titans. Rather, a titan is an immortal but not divine creature who’s gained enough influence – of any sort – to be notable in divine politics. And while combat ability can play a big role in that, it’s not the only sort of influence to be had.
I don’t need a lecture on the nature of power, retorted Lex, thinking back to the conversation he’d had with Sanguine Disposition on this subject not so long ago. Least of all from you. Get to the point.
To his mild surprise, Kara didn’t make a teasing comment or lewd innuendo, instead complying with his demand.
These tramps – not those fluffers they summoned for help, but the seven whose names I told you – are all lesser titans. Not because they’re great fighters, or because they have impressive amounts of magic, but because they’re some of the hottest chicks in the multiverse. That gives them connections, but it’s also backed them into corners, which is something you can take advantage of. Another pause, and then her playful lilt was back. I mean, even more than you’ve already taken advantage of them.
That was enough to make Lex arch a brow, ignoring the last part. In what regard?
I’m glad you asked, snickered Kara. Let’s get down to the juicy deets...
Let’s start with the blonde bat-winged slut with the great big butt.
Lex resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he glanced at the girl in question. She was the living definition of “callipygian,” possessed of flanks so enticing that clothing simply couldn’t bear to cover it. Fabric, leather, chains, it didn’t matter; it was as though the universe would not countenance a backside so perfect being hidden from view.
It was the single most ridiculous manifestation of aristeia that Lex had ever seen, and certainly the most wasteful one...but after having repeatedly confirmed that her ass felt as good as it looked, he couldn’t bring himself to condemn it.
That’s Shami-Amoure, former queen of the succubi, emphasis on the former, continued Kara. There are only two interesting things about her. The first is that she claims to have invented the entire concept of backdooring a bitch. The second is that her ex-boyfriend is Demogorgon.
Wait, what?!
I know! She actually expects people to believe that she was the one who came up with the idea that girls might like butt stuff-
Not that! hissed Lex. Demogorgon!
Most of what Lex knew about the Outer Planes came from what he’d read in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, and while the book’s mysterious author had been perfectly content to skew their knowledge through their own perceptions, the book had still contained a great deal of information on a variety of topics.
One of those had been demons.
Lex had encountered devils, as well as daemons, but demons – the residents of a plane known only as the Abyss – were something else altogether. They had no interest in corruption the way that devils did, nor were they particularly enamored of collecting souls like daemons. Demons were simply interested in destruction. Not just breaking apart objects and killing creatures, demons sought the complete dissolution of everything, from propriety and social order to the very laws of nature. They seemed to take any semblance of stability and order as personal insults, according to the Libram, and treated them accordingly.
Succubi were one of the less destructive types, being focused on weaponizing sexuality. The very shape of their bodies tempted mortals – male and female alike – to abandon any sense of personal restraint, let alone commitments or vows of chaste conduct. But whereas a devil would have used that temptation to get a mortal to damn themselves, succubi were more than happy to couple with an amorous suitor.
That was because succubi drained life force via sex, feeding on it and leaving those who copulated with them a dried-up husk, utterly devoid of positive energy.
Of course, being his own source of positive energy, Lex had little to fear from that, and so had enjoyed the so-called succubus queen – and the reinforcements she’d summoned – at length.
Oh, yeah, I guess that’s impressive too, chuckled Kara. I mean, props where they’re due. Not even the Prince of Demons could take his eyes off of her ass. But that’s mostly because he’s never gotten a look at mine.
Lex didn’t respond, mulling this new revelation over.
That Shami-Amourae was a so-called “succubus queen” meant little. Demons – as intrinsically chaotic and quarrelsome creatures – had no real use for royal titles. They used them, according to the Libram, mostly as a way to declare their own strength. A succubus who declared herself queen of the succubi was saying that she was more powerful than her counterparts, effectively daring them to disagree. And while Shami’s ability to summon reinforcements meant that there were some of her ilk who had fallen under her sway, Lex could only imagine that most others had resented her for being strong enough to assume – and maintain – such a title.
But Demogorgon was something different. He had declared himself to be the prince not of any particular type of demon, but of ALL of them! And if the Libram was believed, he had maintained that title for millennia, surviving countless challengers who possessed power that was literally god-like! In fact, the Libram’s author had made it sound as though several of the demons he’d slain had been actual, fully-fledged gods themselves.
And Lex had just rutted his ex-girlfriend into a coma.
Now, I don’t know exactly why he dumped her, noted Kara, as though she was gossiping about a coworker instead of discussing someone who could conceivably contend for the title of being the mightiest being in existence. I mean, I’ve heard that she cheated on him, or he got tired of her, or he caught her in a plot to overthrow him, the usual demon stuff. But either way, she got her perfect ass dumped in the Wells of Darkness, the Abyss’s prison, and rotted away there for something like a thousand years until just recently, when she managed to wriggle her way out. Don’t ask me how she did it, but now she’s back, and she’s scared to death that Demogorgon’s going to track her down and shove her back in jail or worse...and I bet she’d do anything to convince a big, strapping stallion to protect her now, don’t you think?
The suggestion was absolute lunacy, courting disaster of catastrophic proportions in exchange for nothing more than sex. Incredible sex, to be sure – the kind that would have caused a mortal’s heart to explode after just a few minutes, even if succubi weren’t inimical to life – but still just sex.
And yet...Lex couldn’t help but be aware that Shami would almost assuredly have secrets, treasures, and magic that she’d learned from her time as Demogorgon’s plaything. If the Aesir weren’t satisfied with Solvei taking Kryonex’s place, or if Hell ever learned that he’d slaughtered its minions and broken so many of Prevarius’s infernal contracts, or any number of other disasters happened...what she possessed could be invaluable...
It was almost as tempting as her fat flanks were.
And she’s not the only one with guy problems, which brings us to little bitch number two: look to your right and check out none other than the Queen of Autumn, Penelope La Gard.
The woman in question was easy to identify, having multi-colored hair of red, yellow, and orange that stretched down past her hips, which were currently spread wide and she lay sprawled out in a corner, too dazed to do anything but stare upward. Her defeated expression was in sharp contrast to her warrior’s body, her limbs and torso having lithe muscles that enhanced – rather than diminished – her feminine appeal.
And of course, the deer-like antlers that were growing from her head had served as excellent holds for when he’d put that appeal to good use. Despite the fact that they were apparently a source of power for her – much like a unicorn’s horn – her ability to bring the powers of autumn to bear against him in the form of swirling winds and massive lightning storms had done little to slow him down. Quite the contrary, he’d taken great enjoyment in turning that power back against her via Nenet’s countermagic; a few electrical shocks to the sensitive areas of her body had pacified her very quickly indeed.
Now, I don’t know if you know this, but Penny here absolutely hates being a queen, even though she fought so hard to earn the title. Why, you ask? Because that’s as high as she can climb in the ranks of the Unseelie Court.
Lex frowned. That name had been in the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, but only as a side note, receiving almost no attention from the book’s author except to note that it was one of two confederations of faeries, and that it’s opposite – the Seelie Court – was the more powerful of the two...barely.
You’re saying that she belongs to a faction within the Unseelie?
Oh, it’s a teensy bit more than that, snickered Kara. You see, the strongest group in the Unseelie is the Winter Court, with Autumn being the second-strongest. The Unseelie has a bunch of other associations in it, but those two are by far the most powerful, which is why the Seelie Court is stronger, since they not only have Spring and Summer, but also the eladrin, better known as the empyreal fey. Which is what brings us to the Autumn Queen, here.
Lex resisted the urge to demand more information from Kara, knowing that the overview of how faerie nobility worked were less germane than the circumstances of the girl he’d just plundered.
You see, the Autumn Court faeries are the killers and assassins of the Unseelie. Everything thinks that Winter are the ones who take lives, but that’s wrong; it’s the sharp cold of autumn that reaps life, which is why all of their advancement contests are duels, and always to the death. Penny, here, is the best fighter in their ranks...but as far as she's concerned, the ranks top out at queen. Which is a problem for her, because the leader of Autumn is the Horned King, who as the name suggests, can only be male.
And her ambitions go beyond being a consort?
More like her pride is wounded by the fact that her husband is someone else’s bitch, snickered Kara. I told you, Autumn is second to Winter. That means that the leaders of Winter – their court’s Maiden, Mother, and Crone – are the most powerful faeries in the Unseelie. While the Horned King doesn’t have to obey them, defiance comes with consequences, and the current Horned King doesn’t dare tell them off. The result is that everyone’s making jokes about him having his face between the thighs of Winter’s leaders, and so everyone treats Penny like – as the naughty fillies of today call it – a cucqueen.
Lex hadn’t heard that term before, but it was easy to figure out what it meant. And she wants to relinquish her position?
Got it in one, stud. Penelope here wants more than being a showpiece with no battles left to fight, since faeries can’t change courts. But she can’t just relinquish the role, since that would make her look like a weakling in the eyes of her peers. She can’t even kill her husband either, despite how much his timidity humiliates her, because that’d be treason against Autumn. All she can do is hope that a stronger challenger comes along and fights him for the title...or fights him for her, winning a duel with her as the prize and liberating her from the role she’s now stuck in.
Despite having no ability to read the implications in the words of others, Lex could guess what Kara was implying.
The love goddess, however, seemed to want to make sure the point was driven home. Of course, the Horned King is probably pretty ticked about those rumors too, so I doubt he’ll be too pleased when he hears about someone else rutting his wife-
Those are two, snapped Lex. Hurry up with the other five.
Whatever you say, babe, chucked Kara. Since we were talking about guy problems, let’s take a look at the pale chick across the room. Or should I say “mostly” pale? I have to admit that I like the way how, even though her skin is whiter than snow, she’s got perfectly black eyes, lips, nails, nips, hair, and pu-
That would be Jezebel, cut in Lex, his eyes turning to the beauty in question, knowing her name from having used it in summoning her. What’s her significance?
She had generous proportions, and her batlike wings vaguely resembled those of Shami-Amourae, save for being black rather than red. But while the succubus queen had possessed a long, thin tail with a heart-shaped protrusion at the end, Jezebel’s ended with a stinger, one that contained an aristeia-empowered aphrodisiac which also allowed her to control her victim’s movements as if they were puppets.
Had Lex not been a titan, he knew he would have been in severe trouble from that. While his mortal form, after returning from Darkest Night, had been immune to poison, Hvitdod had shown him that aristeia made that immunity less than absolute.
But things were different now, and Lex had not only been able to effortlessly shrug off her toxin – not that he’d needed to, since her stinger had been wholly incapable of piercing his defenses – but just like with Penelope, he’d turned it back on her, using his powers to make her vulnerable to her own poison.
Then he’d made her use it against the other girls she’d summoned to her side.
Same as the others, huffed Kara, apparently unhappy at having been cut off. Except for her, the guy ruining her life is her daddy, Bel. That’s what her name means, you know; it’s Infernal for “female spawn of Bel.”
A sinking feeling came over Lex then. Bel, as in, the Lord of the First?
Not quite, snickered Kara, seemingly recovered at having the opportunity to correct him. Now he’s the former Lord of the First.
Lex groaned.
“Lord of the First” was another title he knew from the Libram of Ineffable Damnation. It referred to the ruler of the first of the Nine Hells – the “topmost” of its layers – commanding absolute power over the universe-sized realm. The position ranked among the Lords of the Nine, who collectively ruled each of Hell’s realms, with the Lord of the Ninth also being the ruler of Hell in its entirety...apparently the only being in the known multiverse to have total dominion over an entire plane of existence.
While not the original Lord of the First, the Libram noted that Bel had earned his place through martial prowess. With the demons and devils being eternally at war with each other – apparently since the beginning of time, for reasons that no one was entirely clear about – he had risen through the ranks by proving himself to be one of the greatest warlords in existence, single-handedly coming up with strategies and tactics that had put the armies of the Abyss on the defensive. His reward had been even more work, since as Lord of the First he was charged with maintaining the defense of Hell’s metaphorical front door while still performing his duties of taking the fight to the demons.
But the book had mentioned nothing about him having lost his position.
What happened to make him lose his title?
What always happens to soldier types, snorted Kara disdainfully. He eventually lost a fight. I mean, he killed the other guy, but not before taking such serious wounds that he was vulnerable to a coup. Turns out his former boss – a fallen angel named Zariel – was still alive, and just waiting to take her old job back. When Bel turned up barely alive, she swooped in and took his title. Now, he’s gone from commanding armies so large their numbers could only be expressed in exponential notation to having a small force – who’re mostly just in it because they can’t get away, or they’re hoping he regains power and rewards them – and hiding out to avoid being finished off by Zariel. Guess which one Jezzy here is.
Both. Lex couldn’t imagine devils understanding anything of true loyalty, but factionalism and opportunism were other things entirely.
Right again, stud. See, Bel knows war like you know moral grandstanding, and he knew that he needed a femme fatale-type to seduce her way to sensitive information. Which I can totally respect. But just like Penny, Jezzy is tied to her father’s fortunes. Devils are cynical bastards, and even if Jezebel here struck out on her own, no one would believe that she wasn’t on some mission from her sire, and even if they did it wouldn’t matter; Devils are invested in Hell as an institution, but they’re always competing with each other for advancement in the ranks. No one’s going to give her a chance, much less stick their neck out for her.
Unless she can manage something impressive enough that she’ll have to be rewarded for her efforts, finished Lex, recalling Xiriel’s efforts to destroy Equestria. So much death and suffering, and so much more planned...all so it could earn a promotion.
Exactly. She’s been waiting for her big break, and that means reaching out and finding new opportunities, new contacts, and new resources. But most people don’t want to deal with a devil, especially one who’s a hanger-on to a failing power, since no one thinks Zariel’s going to let Bel steal her position a second time. That makes Jezzy VERY eager to seize any opportunity that’ll let her break out on her own.
Is that the story of all seven of these slatterns? Lex swept his gaze across the demiplane then, noting the rest of the ladies he’d summoned. They’re previously or currently in thrall to someone stronger, and want to be liberated?
More like uplifted, mused Kara. I mean, I’m sure they’d all love to be at the top of the heap, but they know they’re not cut out to duke it out with the multiverse’s strongest. If the cosmos is a school, these aren’t the captains of a sports team or the smartest kids in class. They’re the hot girls that get perfect scores on their tests because they have “cram sessions” with their homeroom teachers, and then go out with someone tough enough to keep the simps, brutes, and jealous chicks away. Sex is their specialty, and using it to attach themselves to someone smarter or stronger is how they get by.
Lex couldn’t help but think of the Night Mare’s tenets then. While everyone was encouraged to be strong, her religion also recognized that not everyone could be, and that it was natural for the weak to submit themselves to those who were powerful, receiving protection and strength in exchange for their obedience.
Seeing that same dynamic at work even across interplanar politics proved how right his goddess was.
I mean, it’s not like putting out is all they can do. A begrudging tone entered Kara’s voice then. Penelope is a skilled fighter, even if she’ll never be the best of the best, and has a connection to nature that’s a source of strength in-and-of itself. Jezebel invented the devil equivalent to the succubus – since diabolic forms are deliberately engineered by the Infernal Ministries – which is how she earned her place at her father’s side to begin with. And Shami...
Kara paused then. Actually, screwing really is all she’s good for. But anyone who had Demogorgon up their butt as much as she did has to know some pretty good abyssal secrets, right? Which still makes her better than our next contestant: she’s big, she’s blue, and she was a virgin until you literally tore her chastity belt off, say hello to Almina bat Tamuz of the House of Alrahad, daughter of the shah of the City of Glass!
The woman in question was in the center of the demiplane, lying in a heap under a retinue who had been dressed in a manner vaguely akin to what Lex knew was – thanks to Sonata and Aria’s touring the fashion outlets of Las Pegasus – akin to Saddle Arabian style. But even without the silks and veils and bangles that she’d worn, which had collectively come out to little more than a few scraps of diaphanous cloth, she was still the most beautiful of all the girls in the heap by far.
Every single part of her was a different shade of blue, from the cerulean hue of her skin to the dark azure of her hair to her aquamarine eyes. Just as notable were her proportions; she’d been the second-largest of the girls he’d summoned, towering over him with a monstrous sixteen-foot height, enough to brush the ceiling of the demiplane. Of course, he’d had the spells necessary to reduce her and her allies both – since her handmaidens were of similar size – down to more manageable dimensions. But that had done nothing to reduce how generous her curves were; she might only have been the penultimate in her natural size, but her chest was second to none.
More notable was her power to manipulate fluids of all kinds. While it had no power over him – even if he hadn’t been able to shrug off her attempts to desiccate him, someone who could survive being skeletonized would obviously not so much as flinch at having the blood in their veins dry up – he’d put that to several creative uses after he’d torn her chastity belt off and started breaking her in.
The result was that the blue of her body was now almost totally covered in white.
But at the moment that was less important to Lex than where she’d apparently come from. She’s the daughter of the ruler of the capital of the Elemental Plane of Water?
Eh, its capital status is one of those “de facto” things. I mean, it’s not like that plane has many other cities, you know? But it is the second-largest trading hub on the Elemental Planes, and her father has big plans to try and make it number one. See, the water genies-
Marids, interrupted Lex. It was petty, but he couldn’t resist the urge to correct Kara for once. Her kind call themselves marids.
That particular fact hadn’t come from the Libram. Instead, Lex had liberally read the minds and peered into the futures of each of his conquests. Since their encounter was technically on a hostile basis, he’d made no efforts to restrain himself, he’d focused mostly on what would make them submit to him. Combined with what he’d learned from Kara about how to drive women of all races wild – the shapeshifter goddess hadn’t confined herself to pony forms during their tryst in the mindscape while the Night Mare had made him into a titan – and his own vast array of powers and spells, along with Kara’s second blessing, it had been easy to break them in, allowing him to glean certain other details from each of them as well.
Most of that had been with regard to Adagio, but he’d also picked up basic details as well, such as what each of them were.
Oh, excuse me! Snorting, Kara huffed before continuing. The marids are very concerned about bloodlines, which are all patrilineal. So whoever marries Almina here gets to break her in when he becomes the new shah of the City of Glass. Or as I like to call it, the multiverse’s biggest fishbowl. But you’ve kind of ruined that now – her virginity, I mean, not the fishbowl – which means that she’s going to be cast out since she’s damaged goods now.
Ridiculous. Lex couldn’t help but sneer at that. If that’s a concern, a few spells will erase any evidence of what happened here.
Unless you erase the memories of her entourage, that won’t work; they’re all in service to her father, not her, and they’ll report this as soon as they go back. And even if you repair that chastity belt of hers, that won’t reconstruct the spell auras around it. Or at least, not her father’s, since he’s a titan that’s not what anyone would call “lesser.”
That was enough to make Lex pause, glancing at the twisted shards of metal that were all that was left of the device meant to guard Almina’s virginity. While repairing the metal itself wouldn’t be a problem – it was some sort of colorless, translucent metal that he didn’t recognize – repairing magical auras was something else again. Just like when he’d set off the trap on Xiriel’s scroll, the magic surrounding it was gone.
Repairing that, Lex knew, was almost impossible; the metaphysical structure of the energies it contained was ruptured, and since he’d never learned how to imbue magical channels into non-living objects, it wasn’t something he could easily repair. Perhaps if it had been made by a weaker spellcaster, he could have forced it back together via an empowered reparative spell. But magic from another titan...
Focusing on the immediate future, Lex looked at what would happen if he tried to repair the broken device.
A moment later he cursed bitterly.
Told you. Besides, I’m pretty sure her dad has other ways of making sure his baby girl is staying off the pole. After all, that’s kind of the central part of how he’s trying to marry her off to whoever will give his city the biggest mercantile bump. He really hates it that he’s presiding over the second-biggest metropolis on the elemental planes, especially since the fire genies – oh, pardon me, the efreet – have the top slot.
None of this has anything to do with why she would have given aristeia to Adagio, groused Lex, irritated at himself. Unlike the others, Almina’s situation felt much more like his fault, since he’d gone out of his way to help himself to her body.
Um, hello? Were you not just listening to anything I said? She’s going to be married off to some rich guy, who’s probably old and ugly. You know all those stories about sheltered princesses who want to get out and enjoy life? That’s her. She doesn’t want to be sold off like a piece of property. But if she’s not part of her father’s household anymore – or her husband’s, since letting her be summoned all the time would make him look too weak to inherit the City of Glass – then she’s going to need enough power to prevent herself from being turned into conjuration-bait.
Adagio summoned her, pointed out Lex. And so did I. Being part of her father’s household doesn’t seem to have helped with that.
If you sink enough power into it, almost anyone can be called up out of nowhere. Even gods. But without her daddy’s backing, she’ll be a lot easier to pull in. And make no mistake, she knows that she WILL be summoned all over the place if she doesn’t have his abjuration magics batting all but the strongest such spells away. Genies are kind of famous for granting wishes, you know. And she’s one of the most famous genies, at least to people who’ve done their homework. And now that she’s no longer a sweet little maiden, she’ll need someone else to keep her from an existence of wish-granting servitude. Maybe a handsome, powerful rogue who’s living a life of adventure and really great sex?
...who’s next?
Kara took the time to enjoy a long laugh before moving on.
Girl number five is as sexy as she is scaley. She’s the best there is at tailjobs, has a long tongue that’s completely prehensile, and-, well, you know all that. So let’s turn our attention to the lovely lamia lady, Echidna!
Up until now, all of the women Kara had pointed out had been just that: women. Females whose body shapes were humanoid in nature. But the next one was tauric, having a humanoid upper half and the lower body of a serpent.
Her humanoid torso had swarthy skin, and her hair was almost as black as Jezebel’s, but much wavier, spilling out behind her like a cloak. Unlike the others, she’d shown up completely naked, decorated only by the piercings that she’d worn, each of them magically imbued. Her serpentine half, by contrast, had only natural decorations, the scales forming a repeating pattern that looked suggestively yonic in design.
Of course, Lex had seen that only after he’d subdued her, since the lamia had changed through a dizzying array of forms.
Unlike how he knew changelings and doppelgangers operated, Echidna’s shapeshifting power had seemed almost without limit, and even without his mystical senses Lex would have recognized aristeia at work. She’s almost been a blur, changing from humanoid shapes to that of various animals and chitinous creatures, elemental beings that he hadn’t recognized, and even more bizarre shapes. Only the markings on her tail had been constant, appearing in each form that she took.
Of course, his own familiarity with shapechanging enemies meant that Lex had long since developed magic designed to lock them into a single shape. Once he’d done that, Echidna had panicked, and it hadn’t taken him much longer to properly put her in her place. Even better, he’d been able to ease up on the restrictive spell somewhat, experimenting with how many pleasing shapes he could put her in.
It had been particularly satisfying, since when Kara had done the same thing he’d been absolutely unable to make her submit to him. For all that the goddess had squealed and thrashed and squeezed him, there’d never been any indication that he was overpowering her. Instead, she’d simply smirk or giggle or bat her eyes at him afterward and then critique his performance, daring him to put her lessons to immediate use until she’d declared it satisfactory, at which point she’d shifted to another shape and started over again.
Worse, there’d been no satisfaction for him at the end of the encounter, leaving him thoroughly frustrated in more ways than one.
The result was that, out of all the individuals that he’d summoned, he’d gone at Echidna with a savageness that he hadn’t shown the others.
Now, I should clarify that this little copycat likes to CALL herself Echidna, but she’s really not. Which is kind of appropriate since her shapeshifting technique is so sloppy, having stolen that ability the same way she stole her name. And it’s not like she purloined her polymorphing from anyone credible, either!
I don’t care, interrupted Lex. What-
She got it when she was squatting in some old church to a goddess named Aine, finding the sacred texts there and translating just enough to teach herself how to copy the body-alteration techniques it outlined. Which was really stupid because Aine, the goddess in question, is dead! The Tuatha killed her when they wiped out her pantheon! Seriously, what kind of shapeshifting goddess can’t just put on a disguise and escape when things go bad?! The answer is a really crummy one, that’s what! At least Adagio knew to steal from the best! She-
KARA!
Ugh, fine. But she really is lousy at shapeshifting. She can barely displace the weight that she shrugs off whenever she changes to a lighter form. That’s why her scales can barely cover her fat ass. Anyway, what was I talking about?
Her name.
Right. Anyway, she’s actually the third Echidna. I don’t know what her original name was – I think she’s made herself forget it so it can’t be used against her, which is more superstition than anything else – but the first Echidna was an actual goddess, and after she thought she and her demigod children could go up against the Olympians, she got them all killed and ended up shoved into the same Wells of Darkness that Shami broke out of. Unlike her, Echidna I is still down there.
And the second?
Eh, she was some petty demon lord. Probably got the idea from the fact that the Wells are in the Abyss, since she was supposed to be able to give birth to unusually strong demonic offspring. Come to think of it, she might have hung out at her predecessor’s prison and gleaned a few secrets from her. Which is smart, but taking her name was dumb. She probably thought it would boost her reputation, but all it did was earn her most of the original Echidna’s enemies. Last I heard, she threw in with Samael for protection, and he still has her chained to his bed, using her as breeding stock.
Lex waited for the connection between them and the current Echidna to become clear. It was obvious by now that Kara enjoyed being able to show how much she knew about the girls he’d summoned...and he was starting to develop an idea as to why.
That Kara had wanted the person who’d so thoroughly dominated so many other cosmic beauties to subsequently build her a temple and perform rites in her honor was exactly the sort of pettiness that Lex had come to expect from her.
She might have been a goddess, but as far as he was concerned, Kara’s school analogy had perfectly summarized her outlook on life.
Anyway, long story short, Echidna III is Echidna II’s daughter. Or maybe granddaughter? Samael’s an incubus lord, so it’s not like he cares too much if his conquests are his descended from him. In fact, that’s probably a turn-on for him.
Lex couldn’t keep himself from grimacing in disgust. And she wants protection from him?
What, from Samael? I doubt it. He’s not the type to obsess over someone. He’s firmly of the belief that all girls are just collections of parts, and one’s the same as another, which as a shapechanger goddess is pretty offensive, let me tell you.
It’s offensive to everyone, noted Lex flatly. And if this Echidna doesn’t want protection from that Samael creature, what does she want?
Immortality.
If she’s already a titan, even a lesser one-
Then she’ll never die of natural causes, repeated Kara. But she can still die, and she’s absolutely terrified of that. See, the Olympian gods are fed up with bitches dredging up that name, and so they’ve vowed that anyone who takes it can share the fate of the original. So when Ecky III here dies, her soul is going to be snatched up by angry messengers of that pantheon and shoved into the same Well that Ecky I is in...and since one’s a genuine goddess and the other’s very much not, guess who the prison bitch will be?
Lex ignored the question, instead looking to confirm something else. And she can’t dedicate her soul to another god because no one will have her?
Exactly. No one’s going to tick off one of the multiverse’s largest pantheons for one chick. So all she can do is try and cling to life while looking for ways to make sure she never dies. And since you’re a much more powerful titan whose got what she wants and prefers to smash her rather than smash her head in, I’m guessing she’ll take a liking to you. And hey, at least she’s got that whole mad fertility thing going on, if turning bitches into mothers is your kink.
Lex scoffed, but couldn’t help but look at the girls scattered around Echidna. Whereas the others had summoned creatures akin to themselves – Shami had called forth succubi, Almina other marids, Jezebel had those “pleasure devils” Kara had mentioned, and even Penelope had summoned nymphs and dryads – Echidna’s reinforcements had been numerous different types of creatures. One was tauric, but her lower half was that of a lion rather than a snake. Another had been a quadrupedal tigress who had covered herself in flames. A third was entirely humanoid in shape, but had avian legs and feathers from her arms. And those were just a few of them.
It was clear which of Adagio’s creditors had given her the unusual fertility.
And the last two? he prompted, making a note to interrogate Echidna again shortly.
Second-to-last, but not least, is our own draconic dominatrix, Bida! I gotta admit, I really loved watching you put her in her place, since she likes to brag that there’s no one she can’t top. Guess the streak’s at an end.
Lex gave a noncommittal grunt to that, looking at the largest of the girls he’d summoned.
Bida was a full-sized dragon, and had taken up almost half of the demiplane on her own. Fortunately, she’d elected to reduce her own size, saving Lex the effort, since the cramped confines had made it almost impossible for her to move, let alone fight.
And she had put up quite the fight. Even Penelope, despite her warrior background, hadn’t fought as hard as Bida had. The dragoness’s attacks had rocked the demiplane, and if Lex hadn’t taken specific precautions to reinforce its structure, he felt sure she would have managed to rupture it.
Not that she’d had any interest in escaping; Bida had made it very clear that for her, combat was a prelude to sex, and had made no secret of what she intended to do to him for daring to summon her. Given that her body was unlike the other dragons he’d met – having sensuous curves, scales that were warm and supple to the touch, and a set of full and firm breasts despite being reptilian – Lex hadn’t doubted that she was a very different creature from Hvitdod or that green dragon he’d fought outside of Tall Tale.
But what had driven that home was her breath weapon. It hadn’t been acid, and it hadn’t been ice; instead, it had been a combination of aphrodisiac – like an aerosolized version of Jezebel’s poison, albeit less concentrated due to spreading through the air – which somehow had also caused clothes to come undone. Clasps had unlatched, buttons had fallen open, seams had frayed, and every other article of clothing, save only for Almina’s chastity belt and Echidna’s piercings, had fallen to the floor as soon as the gas had touched it.
That, at least, had an effect on Lex. While he could manipulate the items on his person with the same ease as he could his body, they were still just a mixture of mundane articles and low-level magic items, and had slid right off of him. Not that he’d cared, since he’d grown up in a land where clothing had long been considered optional anyway.
If anything, Bida’s attack had been a boon to him, since it had been the single most decisive factor in turning what had been a battle royale into an orgy. While no one had immediately succumbed to her lust-inducing mist, it had – along with the sudden nakedness, and the others’ inherently carnal natures – quickly sent things down a licentious path, much to Lex’s gratification.
But even so, he couldn’t overlook the fact that Bida had dared to assert that she’d be the one to claim him, rather than the other way around. By way of punishment, she’d spent almost her entire time in the demiplane wrapped up too tightly to move, ultra-dense black crystals keeping her immobilized while he alternated between long bouts of keeping her on edge and using her harshly. It hadn’t taken very long before the grunting and cursing behind her gag had become moaning and pleading, the would-be conqueror conquered.
And who is she trying to escape from? asked Lex, doubting that her story would be any different from the rest.
That would be Tiamat, confirmed Kara without hesitation. Goddess of evil dragons and also her mother.
That was enough to make Lex pause. Her mother is a goddess, and yet she’s only a lesser titan?
Yeah, about that, the children of the gods aren’t always gods themselves. In fact, most of the time they aren’t. That’s because gods have to imbue their kids with divinity, and as you're aware, that has to actually come from somewhere. How many gods do you think are willing to weaken themselves like that for their children? Also, Tiamat’s bred several different draconic bloodlines into existence, so it’s not like having mortal children is anything new to her anyway.
And she wants Bida dead? Or captured?
Oh, neither, answered Kara flippantly. No, see, her mother wants her little girl to become a goddess. Bida just doesn’t want to.
That was enough to leave Lex momentarily stunned. She doesn’t want to be a goddess?
I know. She’s smarter than she looks. Most people jump on divinity when it’s offered, regardless of the consequences, but Bida knew that her mother’s offer wasn’t out of the goodness of her heart.
Lex paused to digest that. You said that gods can imbue their own children with divinity. But Tiamat didn’t do that with Bida, otherwise she’d have been born a goddess. Which means...
...that her mother wants to sponsor her to demigodhood, but not just give it to her, since Tiamat hates sharing power, confirmed Kara. And that last part is why Bida is saying no, since she’s absolutely certain that once she ascends, she’d be killed and absorbed to increase her mother’s power. Plus, then Tiamat would get a bunch of new worshipers, too. Win-win for her, lose-lose for her baby girl.
So she cut a deal with Adagio because she wanted more aristeia in order to fight off her mother’s influence?
Basically. She wants aristeia, but not divinity. She inherited her mother’s lustful nature, but doesn’t have her ambition. She’s happy to treat her lovers the way most dragons treat their hoards, and I’m guessing you and your family jewels were going to be the centerpiece of her collection. Which is why Tiamat wants her, since unlike all of her brothers and sisters, Bida is an actual lust dragon; the only one of her kind, which makes her the perfect object of worship for the rest of her kind. Dragons be horny, as they say.
Thankfully, that didn’t match with Lex’s experience, but looking at the rest of Bida’s retinue, he could believe it. While not as diverse as Echidna’s, Bida had summoned a group of creatures that could only be called half-dragons, having the scales, wings, and claws of their mother, but were mostly humanoid in nature...although the type of humanoid varied wildly. One had pitch-black skin and pointed ears, while another was short and fully reptilian, albeit also with prominent mammary glands.
Which brings us to the last little morsel on your personal menu...
Lex’s eyes narrowed then, feeling a rush of aggression as he turned to look at the female in question.
The last of the summons had also been the most unexpected.
Agrat, announced Kara. Reformed demoness, now the Archangel of Prostitution.
“COME ON!” bellowed the earth stallion who’d called himself Burly Brawl, strolling into the village like he owned the place. “THERE’S A TITAN HERE SOMEWHERE! LET’S SEE WHAT HE’S MADE OF!”
“You’re mistaken.”
Solvei’s eyes almost bugged out of her head as Yotimo strode forward, Bloodletter held out in front of him in a guard position. What is he doing?! That pony looks bigger than Nangiannatuk!
The head warrior of their village was, Solvei knew, a powerful fighter. Despite his age, he still trained alongside his younger charges without any signs of infirmity, and had a body that plenty of girls her age still cast admiring looks at. His armor was expertly made, his experience made him clever as well as crafty, and most notable of all was that he had Bloodletter, the magical spear that her grandmother had worked for years to enchant; even Solvei herself had helped inscribe the runes.
But none of that had been enough to save Yotimo from Sissel and her collection of monsters, and for some reason Solve couldn’t make herself believe that Burly Brawl was any less dangerous. Not when he’d come here looking to deliberately pick a fight with a titan.
And yet, although he had to know all that, Yotimo still stepped forward without hesitation, his expression firm and unwavering. “There’s no titan in this village. You’ll need to look elsewhere.”
Burly looked down at the old warrior and snorted, his lip curling. “Listen, pipsqueak, I’m bored, I’m sober, and I’m ticked at how all those monsters in that big forest south of here were a bunch of pushovers. So either go get me that titan, or I fold your wrinkly old ass in half.”
Elder Sister, came Mei Li’s voice in Solvei’s mind a moment later. Is this individual an associate of our husband?
The sudden telepathic contact was enough to snap Solvei out of her shock, and she shook her head. I’ve never seen him before, and no one’s ever mentioned a pony by the name of Burly Brawl that I’ve ever heard!
She was already taking action as she spoke, calling upon her powers as she remembered what her grandmother had told her to do. An instant later, ten ice spirits – each of them shaped like a humongous adlet – appeared alongside the younger warriors, standing at the ready. The adlets themselves, having seen Solvei demonstrate her powers several times over the last few days, didn’t flinch at the reinforcements. If anything, they looked reassured, poised to charge if Yotimo couldn’t talk their uninvited guest down.
Burly just glanced at the elementals and snorted. “You gotta be kidding me. A bunch of walking icicles? That’s the best you guys can do?”
Yotimo didn’t take his eyes off of the massive stallion. “There is no titan-”
“Stuff it, old timer!” snapped Burly. “Got me a tip from Grimmy himself that a titan just had a showdown with a demigod up here, and I know he wasn’t lyin’, since he knows that if he gave me the runaround, I’m gonna tear all those monster bits off of him. So I know there’s a titan here somewhere. ‘Specially since everyone in Viljatown was actin’ like they thought the griffon’s were invadin’ right before that, with how the wuss mages were crappin’ their robes and those pansy-ass Seekers were callin’ in all their recruits, all while the temples were tryin’ real hard to say that everything was just dandy.”
He stomped a hoof then, as though speaking so many words at once had ticked him off, and Solvei didn’t miss how the ground seemed to shake, his hoof sinking several inches into the earth. “Now, last chance!” he huffed, looming over Yotimo, his expression darkening. “Bring him out or I take you out!”
Yotimo’s stance firmed up, and the runes on Bloodletter began to glow as he gripped it tighter. “I’ll tell you one more time-”
“You want to fight the titan? You’ll have to go through me first!”
Despite his years of experience, Yotimo took his eyes off of Burly, turning to give a horrified look at the one who’d spoken. “Akna!”
He wasn’t the only one staring at her, as the village warriors, all of the other adlets peering out from their houses, and Nenet and Mei Li were all watching her, wide-eyed, as she strode forward. Only Yura wasn’t glaring at her, eyes closed in concentration as she continued to try and commune with the spirits. But the way the elder shaman was gritting her teeth made it very clear what she thought about her granddaughter’s declaration.
Solvei ignored them all. Before she’d crossed halfway to where Burly and Yotimo were, her eyes began to glow, black crystals forming into body armor that covered her from head to toe even as she grew in height, her size doubling in an instant.
Planting herself directly across from Burly, she clenched her fists, letting her ice-weapons form in her hands; the oversized dagger in her left and the handle to the massive curved blade attached to the underside of her vambrace in her right. Glaring down at the muscular stallion – pleased that she was taller than him now – she bared her teeth in a snarl, the inside of her jaws glowing bright blue with the promise of supernatural cold.
“You want to mix it up with someone who slew a demigod? Show me that you’ve got what it takes.”
Burly didn’t reply immediately, instead taking a moment to look her over. Then he leaned his head back and roared with laughter. “Now that’s more like it! Gotta say though, pretty unusual to see a chick whose got more of a sack than any of the guys around her, toots.” His grin changed into a leer then. “How’s about I peel your armor off and remind you that you’re a bitch?”
“Akna! Stand down!” Yotimo’s command was hissed through gritted teeth, clearly alarmed at what she was doing.
Nor was she the only one. Elder Sister, you don’t need-
Yes, I do! she shot back, readying her magic. Nenet’s strongest against magical enemies, but this guy looks like a brawler! And you haven’t figured out how to use the rest of your tails yet! And even if this guy’s underestimating what Lex can do, look at him! There’s no way Yotimo and the others can take him! It has to be me!
But-
Mei Li, please, I need to do this! Even as she thought the words, Solvei could feel herself tensing up, feelings that she’d been trying to bury suddenly erupting. I wasn’t there when Yotimo and the others were captured! I couldn’t do anything when Lex fought Hvitdod! I was sent away before he fought Kryonex because he knew I’d be worse than useless!
Your magic helped him then, the kumiho reminded her.
My magic might have, but I didn’t! Not like you and Nenet! This time-
With a sudden chill, a serac formed under Yotimo and Burly both, causing the two to yelp as they sped off in opposite directions; Yotimo back toward where his warriors were gathered near the center of the village, and Burly back toward the edge of it.
A third formed under her feet, sending her speeding after the brawny stallion.
-I’m going to do my part!
“AKNA!” Behind her, she heard Yotimo swear angrily, before his voice rang out again. “Let’s go! We’ll help her-, huh?!”
Those elementals I summoned will keep everyone away from the fighting, continued Solvei. They won’t last very long, so if I can’t end this quick, it’ll be up to you and Nenet to watch over the village for me.
I...understand, came Mei Li’s reply, her mental voice thick with worry. Please, be careful! I’m sure our husband will return soon and deal with this ruffian!
I know he will. And I’ll have this wrapped up before he does!
Bu despite her confident reply, Solvei wasn’t at all sure that what was happening now would reach Lex’s attention. As far as she knew, his closing their connection only shut off telepathic communication; they should still be able to sense each other’s location and overall health. But now that he was on another plane of existence, more distant than ever, she couldn’t really tell anything about where he was, except that he wasn’t on the same world as her. Presumably it was the same for him as well.
If their ability to sense each other’s injuries was similarly dampened, then even if the fight she was about to have went badly, Lex wouldn’t necessarily know.
And I wouldn’t know if something’s happened to him...
Pushing that thought out of her mind, Solvei forced herself to focus. Burly was likely to recover at any moment-
Managing to sit up from where he was sprawled out on the serac, Burly brought his hoof down onto the mobile platform of ice.
It wasn’t a very hard strike; more like a pat than a punch. But the serac immediately shattered into pieces, practically exploding as it was reduced to shards. Its destruction sent Burly tumbling, rolling across the ground to strike a nearby tree, which was immediately felled as the oversized stallion collided with it. As did the next three trees after that.
But when he finally came to a stop a few heartbeats later, he had no bruises or splinters to show for the impacts. “Heh, cute trick. But I didn’t come here for ice-skating.”
Solvei came to a stop a stone’s throw away from him, giving a quick glance backward. They weren’t quite out of sight of the village, but they were far enough away that they should be able to fight without anyone else being in danger.
Burly didn’t seem to care either way, sauntering toward her with his leer still in place. “So, you that titan’s piece? Or is it the pussycat or the vixen that were hidin’ behind you? Just wanna know for when we’re done here, since any bitch takin’ it from a titan is one I can really go to town on-”
“Not if I cut you down to size!”
Solvei’s serac rocketed forward as she roared, bringing her blades around as she closed the gap between herself and Burly in an instant. She knew that Lex didn’t approve of killing ponies, but with the disgusting comments Burly was hurling at her, she decided that Lex wouldn’t mind if she left him more dead than alive. Besides, she decided, Lex can always heal him later.
Having decided on her plan of attack, Solvei made her move.
She’d sent her serac hurling right at Burly, letting him think that she was so incensed at his filthy comments that she was making a headlong rush as she crouched down, swords at the ready.
But just before the tip of her largest blade was within reach of him, she leaped.
The serac hurtled directly into Burly’s legs even as she turned upside down at the apex of her jump, striking downward with her swords. The larger of the two blades reached directly toward his face in an obvious, attention-grabbing slash. At the same moment, she flung her smaller sword – knowing that she’d be able to make another one at will – directly inside his leftmost shoulder-blade.
It was a double feint, with the serac intended to make her enemy stumble – even if he could hit several trees without flinching, he’d still instinctively try to avoid being tripped up – and the attack at his face meant to draw his attention, with her real target being his mobility. Given how bulky he was, Burly’s weakness had to be his maneuverability; an injury to his shoulder would slow him down all the more -
That was when the serac she’d sent at Burly’s legs shattered, breaking into nothing without Burly so much as noticing.
A moment later her blades did the same, their magically-reinforced edges cracking and breaking into pieces as they hit the stallion’s skin.
It was enough to leave Solvei gaping, barely registering the knowing smirk on the stallion’s face as she landed behind him, only just managing to come down on her feet. Without looking behind herself, she immediately dove forward, putting space between herself and the unnaturally-tough stallion as she reevaluated her battle plan. Spinning back around so that she was facing him, Solvei concentrated on reforming her weapons-
Only to find that Burly was already right in front of her, having moved impossibly fast.
“Sorry toots.”
His hoof shot out, striking her armor dead-center.
From Solvei’s perspective, he didn’t try to put any power into the strike. He wasn’t charging forward, having been at a complete standstill, nor did he rotate to throw his massive bulk behind the blow. He simply threw a light jab.
The force of it almost killed her.
Dimly registering that her armor had been completely annihilated – breaking into pebble-sized chunks as it collapsed – she went flying backward, coughing up blood even before she hit the ground, rolling bonelessly for what had to be the length of a spear’s throw before managing to come to a halt. Even then, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to move, feeling as though every bone in her body had just been broken.
A-aristeia! she gasped inwardly, recalling her fight with Sissel. This...has to be...aristeia!
Clucking his tongue, Burly sighed. “Disappointing,” he muttered, looking genuinely disheartened. “I was hoping to have some real fun for a change.”
Shrugging, he sauntered toward Solvei, one hoof reaching back to start undoing his belt.
“Word of advice, toots: just lie back and relax,” grunted Burly as he sauntered toward her, still fiddling with his belt. “Once I get you loosened up, you’ll be howling at the moon in no time.”
Solvei grit her teeth, struggling to sit up as she glared at the approaching stallion. Despite the overwhelming power he wielded, and what he was intent on doing to her, she couldn’t bring herself to feel afraid. Although Burly’s intentions made her skin crawl, she’d been through too much to be shaken by it.
Real fear, she knew, came from being afraid for someone else. It was something she’d experienced in both of her lives, with Solvei being terrified for her family after Bolverk had killed her father, while Akna had been unable to handle the fear of the yetis wiping out her people.
And even after the two of them had merged, she’d found herself in similar situations too many times, relegated to the sidelines while someone dear to her was hurt. Silla. Yotimo. Toklo.
Lex.
But that won’t happen this time! she swore, barely managing to make herself sit upright. This time, I’ll be the one to settle things...
“‘Course, you’ll be ruined for other guys afterwards,” chuckled Burly, now only a few feet from her. “But you won’t care. Once bitches get a taste of Burly, they can’t never go b-”
Solvei didn’t give him a chance to finish as she conjured another serac under him, the stallion again slipping as the icy ground under his hooves shifted and immediately carried him away.
But Burly didn’t lose his balance this time, instead wobbling for just a moment before recovering his stance, giving the mobile ice beneath him a gentle tap. Just like before, it immediately shattered, and the stallion landed on the ground, skidding in the snow for a short distance before stopping. “Seen that trick before,” he noted idly as he straightened up. “You’re gonna have to try somethin’ better if you wanna keep your legs closed.”
Despite how much she ached all over, Solvei managed to give him a dark smile. “How’s this for better?”
She’d just finished speaking when the elemental she’d conjured up right behind Burly slammed into him, the humongous ice-adlet putting all of its weight behind the haymaker it threw as it lunged at the stallion.
Burly didn’t see it coming, the impact lifting him off his hooves and sending him flying, hitting the ground face-first a spear’s throw away. Nor did the elemental give him time to recover, immediately rushing over and pummeling the downed stallion.
Having bought herself some breathing room, Solvei managed to get her feet under her, a pained grunt escaping her lips as she stood up. I won’t win this up close, she knew, feeling blood trickling down from the corner of her mouth. Not when one hit was all he needed to do this much damage. But if I can fight at range...
“Lemme guess,” called Burly from where the elemental was continuing to rain punches down on his prone form, his voice light and conversational. “This is the part where you wuss out and try to keep your distance, right? Hopin’ you can wear me down ‘til I call it quits?”
He chuckled at that, and when the next punch came down, Burly’s hoof rose to meet it. The impact caused a loud crack to ring out, followed by several smaller ones as fissures spread throughout the ice elemental’s body.
Amazingly, the elemental held itself together, despite looking like it was on the verge of completely falling apart. With no regard for its own safety, it lashed out again, punching down with its other arm.
This time, the damage resulting from Burly’s counterpunch reduced the gigantic ice-adlet to so many snowflakes, the stallion chuckling as he stood up and gave Solvei a cocky grin. “Another word of advice, toots: tougher gals than you’ve tried that plan, and it didn’t work for them neither.”
Then he rushed her.
His speed was far faster than his size would have suggested, rushing forward at a velocity that would have left even the fastest of her village’s warriors openmouthed. It was all Solvei could do to form another serac under herself and direct it away from the incoming stallion, barely managing to get out of the way as he bore down on her.
“Almost forgot to ask earlier,” called Burly as he immediately turned to follow, looking almost bored now. “You got any booze in that hick town of yours? I always like a cold one after I plow a chick.”
Gritting her teeth, Solvei called upon her magic again, raising a series of ice walls between herself and Burly. Each of them was strengthened with as much magic as she could pour into them, making the ice stronger than stone as she wrapped them in concentric rings. With how insanely strong Burly was, that would likely only buy her a few seconds, but if she used that time right...
Burly didn’t so much as slow down as the ice wall rose up in front of him, the sight causing him to roll his eyes as he ran into it full-tilt.
Wolfy Girl had obviously done something to it to make it tougher than normal, but it didn’t matter. As far as Burly was concerned, it might as well have been made out of glass, and he didn’t even bother to blink as he charged through it without slowing down.
The same fate met the five walls that were after it.
But when he broke through the last of them, Wolfy Girl was nowhere to be seen.
Least she ain’t the type to try and fly away, he sighed inwardly after glancing upward. This was usually the part where, if they could, a weakling would put themselves into the air, thinking that would save them. But since Wolfy Girl didn’t seem like she was about to sprout wings or ride a cold breeze or any crap like that, that meant she was going with the other tired old routine...
“Playin’ hide ‘n’ seek now, are we?” snorted Burly, glancing back at the large ring of walls that he’d just broken through. No doubt she was on the other side of them by now thanks to that oversized ice cube she’d been riding. “Fine by me, but once I find you, I’ll use my turn to hide Not-So-Little Burly up your cooch.”
He could remember a time when he’d actually gotten excited at the thought of breaking in a new bitch, the prospect almost being enough to make up for a disappointing fight. But those days were long gone. Now, stretching out some chick’s holes was just a slightly-less-boring way to pass the time, the same as getting drunk. He’d done both so often that they were barely fun at all anymore.
But they were still more fun than this fight was turning out to be.
Sighing at the predictable lack of response from Wolfy Girl, Burly turned around so he was facing the walls he’d just bashed his way out of, rearing up onto his hind legs. Lifting up his forehooves, he brought them down in a heavy stomp, calling on a fraction of his earth pony magic.
Immediately, the land shook under him, and he could dimly hear cries coming out from that crappy little village nearby as the entire place trembled and heaved. But he cared less about that than about how the ice walls immediately broke apart, reduced to so much rubble in an instant.
Sure enough, Wolfy Girl was on the other side of them, staring at him with wide eyes, the big ice cube she was riding on having survived thanks to its hovering just above the ground.
“Seriously, toots, you’re bad at this,” snorted Burly as he sauntered toward her, not bothering to break into a run this time. Maybe, just maybe, she had something she’d been saving in reserve; something that would make him get serious.
It had been too damn long since he’d had a reason to get serious about a fight.
“Might want to use your last few seconds to use lube if you got it, otherwise-”
She out a loud roar then, not of defiance or even rage, but rather a scream that accompanied the massive beam of blue energy that erupted from her mouth, hitting him dead on.
Immediately, Burly felt frost gathering around his legs, which quickly turned into ice, spreading over his body and thickening out into a chilly cocoon. In an instant, it had completely covered him, sealing him inside the frozen prison with no room to move. The cold washed over him from all directions.
But the cold bothered him less than what a letdown her last-ditch attack was.
Really? She’s seen me breakin’ this stuff left and right, and this is what she tries?
It was so pathetic that Burly actually found himself considering giving Wolfy Girl some pointers, the way he had whatshername back in Viljatown. Applesnatch. The blonde mare had actually managed to keep his interest, mostly because she kept coming back for more no matter how much he smacked her around. It had been enough fun that he’d kept forgetting to bone her.
But only for a little while, then she took off again, sighed Burly as he flexed his muscles, causing the ice prison to shatter. Was really hopin’ she’d stick with it until she could put up a decent fight. Unlike Wolfy Girl, she had actual talent.
As if to prove him right, the battered bitch summoned a bunch of her icicle warriors again, almost a dozen of them this time, and Burly groaned, all thoughts of turning this into a training session evaporating. At least when Applesnatch tried the same thing over and over, it was actual fighting and not wuss magic. What a letdown.
It was time to end this. Wolfy Girl was clearly out of tricks, and he was tired of stringing this fight out, hoping that titan would make an appearance if his piece was in trouble. But if that wasn’t going to happen, then he’d just flatten Wolfy Girl and make her tell him what she knew about that titan’s location.
It’d be easy, he knew. Chicks always became obedient after you shot a couple loads in them.
But just to make sure Wolfy Girl got the message, he’d let her see just how outclassed she was.
“If you’re hopin’ I can’t perform in the cold,” he sneered, tapping into a reserve of power that he hadn’t used in quite some time, “then I got news for you, toots.”
Her bunch of ice sculptures were charging, fists raised as they prepared to pounce on him.
“Burly Brawl...”
He took a step forward, power spreading throughout his body. It spread through every bone. Every organ. Every blood vessel. Until finally, there was nowhere left for it to go, having saturated his body completely.
“...always rises...”
Soon there was nowhere left for the power to spread. And yet he kept calling on it anyway, forcing more of it through himself. It caused a sense of pressure to rise, feeling as though he were about to burst apart...and then, he felt something give way as the pressure eased off.
“...to the occasion!”
And then, just like he’d come to expect, his body began to expand.
“Is everyone okay?!”
Nenet’s frantic yell was met with a chorus of murmured replies, with a quick scan of the area showing no one being hurt. Fortunately, none of the turf huts had collapsed, the sudden earthquake not having lasted long enough to do any real damage to the structures. But it had still managed to unnerve the adlets hiding within them, venturing outdoors almost as soon as the shaking stopped, not wanting to be inside if there was another quake.
But Nenet was more worried about the cause of what had happened, knowing it had come from where Solve was fighting Burly Brawl.
Elder Sister Nenet! Mei Li’s voice came silently into her mind, the kumiho glancing upward at her as she helped an adlet family calm their crying children. Can you see if Elder Sister Solvei is alright?
Biting her lip, Nenet glanced into the distance, a flash of blue light that she knew was Solvei’s breath weapon catching her eyes. I think they’re still fighting. Solvei looks like she’s summoned some more ice elementals, and Burly Brawl is...is...
She wasn’t able to finish as she saw Burly start to grow.
He’d already been an unusually large stallion, but even as Nenet watched, he suddenly expanded, his body bulging outward as every part of him grew larger. In the span of a heartbeat, he was the size of a house. Then a hill. Then the ice mansion that Solvei had created for her. Then even bigger.
Finally, when he’d reached the size of a small mountain, he stopped growing, and Nenet numbly returned to the ground, joining the crowd of adlets who were staring in shock at the stallion who’d grown so huge that he was like part of the landscape.
But for Nenet, the sight of him reminded her of something she’d read once when she’d been studying with Adagio, recalling a passage from a book about the events leading to the foundation of the Pony Empire...
“...-an.”
“What was that?” Nenet didn’t even realize she’d spoken until Yotimo turned to her, somehow having managed to keep his wits about him despite the terrifying sight. “What did you say?”
It took a moment for Nenet to manage a reply.
“Burly Brawl,” she gulped. “He’s not just an earth pony...”
Her voice failed her for a moment, and she licked her lips before managing to speak again.
“He’s an antean.”
“I would venture to guess that we’ve found our titan.”
Loraestil ignored the wry tone in Vystalaran’s voice, eyeing the massive horse who towered over the distant treetops, trying to get a sense for what his quarry was doing.
Thilaera seemed to be of a similar mindset. “If that is Lex Legis, he would seem to possess the power to change his size. But why make use of it now?”
Vystalaran was already withdrawing scroll, one formed of a single large leaf whose veins had been carefully grown so as to form writing. “I’ll use farsight to get a closer look.”
“Do not,” ordered Loraestil, sighing inwardly. These amateurs knew nothing of what it meant to hunt such dangerous prey. “If his senses are sharp enough, he may detect your magic, and I would not have him raise his guard.”
Thilaera gave him a nervous look. “You mean to take him by surprise?”
“The panther only informs the stag of his presence when he leaps upon it,” replied Loraestil coolly. “That is one of your people’s sayings, is it not?”
Thilaera nodded, and Loraestil smirked inwardly. The or-tel were such a simplistic people. It was no wonder that the humans called them “wood elves.”
“What if there’s another presence in the area?” ventured Vystalaran, clearly looking to make up for having embarrassed himself just now. “Surely he wouldn’t have taken such grotesque proportions unless something had threatened him. Should we wait and see what happens?”
“A hunter does not swoop in to steal another’s prey.” Loraestil could just imagine what these two would say if he employed such cowardly tactics to bring the titan down; the story of how Lord Loraestil had sat back and waited for someone else to do his job for him would make him a laughingstock among his fellows, rather than a hero. “He delivers the fatal blow himself, driving off all others who would interfere.”
Vystalaran raised a brow, sharing a look with Thilaera. “So you want us to ‘drive off’ whomever Lex Legis is facing?”
“I trust that should be within your capabilities,” replied Loraestil, letting the tiniest note of disdain enter his voice. “While you handle that task, I shall see to our target.”
Clutching his bow, he strode forward, leaving the other two scrambling to catch up.
Yotimo’s question barely registered to Nenet, unable to take her eyes off of the massive sight of Burly Brawl. The stallion wasn’t as large as Hvitdod had been, the dragon’s sinuous body having been long enough that he could have coiled around a mountain. But right now, Burly could have been that mountain, even if only a small one, the surrounding treetops barely reaching his knees.
Then he lifted one leg and casually brought it down, as though stomping on some bug that had irritated him.
Or some adlet.
“Nenet!” Yotimo’s shout was accompanied by a hand grabbing her chin, wrenching her head around to look the old warrior in the face. “What’s an antean?!”
“They...” For a moment Nenet faltered, her brain struggling to put her shock and worry aside in order to answer the question. “They’re a tribe of earth ponies whose connection to the land is unusually powerful. Queen Iliana recruited them in the early days of her campaign to unify ponykind, and they played a key role in establishing her powerbase.”
“What about their weaknesses?” pressed Yotimo. “What injures them? What taboos do they have? What rites and practices do they keep as sacred?”
“I don’t know!” wailed the sphinx. “All I know was the two paragraphs I read in a history book once! It just said that they’re earth ponies of enormous size, that they helped Iliana establish her army, and that she gave them an island of their own somewhere after the fighting was done! That’s it!”
Yotimo swore softly, looking back at where Burly was casually striding forward, a smirk on the gigantic stallion’s face as he peered down at something.
It was easy to guess what – or rather, who – he was looking at.
Gritting his teeth, Yotimo took a step forward, only for the ice elementals that Solvei had summoned to move in, blocking his path. Gritting his teeth, the elder adlet raised Bloodletter, and for a moment it looked like he was about to lash out at the frozen figure...only for him to sigh and lower the spear. “So we just have to sit here and watch? There’s nothing we can do to help?”
Nenet didn’t answer, instead turning and hurrying over to where Mei Li had just finished helping a nearby family calm their children. “Mei Li!”
The kumiho immediately turned toward her, nine tails fanning out behind her. “Yes, Elder Sister?”
“Remember how we teamed up before, when we were fighting the undead in Adagio’s fortress...?”
Solvei watched as Burly wiped out the elementals that she’d summoned with a single stamp of his oversized hoof, trying to figure out what to do next.
That the stallion was so ridiculously strong had been completely beyond her expectations. When he’d announced that he was here to fight a titan – knowing that titan had just defeated a demigod – Solvei had assumed that Burly was simply overconfident, not truly understanding the level of power he was challenging. But now she was starting to realize that she’d been the overconfident one.
Having her serac move backward, she covered the ground between her and Burly with a thick sheet of ice, hoping that the lack of friction would at least slow him down, but the stallion simply strode forward, a confident smirk on his face. The reason why was revealed as the ice sheet she’d made was immediately crushed into powder beneath his hoof, which sank five feet into the earth, easily providing him with enough traction to retain his balance.
“Ready to give up yet?” he rumbled, his voice having dropped several octaves. “Or do I have to stomp you before I smash you?”
Gritting her teeth, Solvei tried to think of some other plan, some way that her cryomancy could slow the behemoth that was Burly Brawl down. There’s got to be something I haven’t thought of! she snarled inwardly, trying to come up with some sort of creative way of using her ice magic. What would Lex do if he were here?!
But she didn’t have a chance to contemplate how her master would have handled the current situation as Burly suddenly lunged forward, his speed still far faster than his swollen size should have allowed for. “If you gotta stop and think in the middle of a fight,” he snorted, “then you’ve already lost the fight!”
Swearing, Solvei had her serac rush backward, swinging out to her fight in an effort to avoid being trampled by the giant pony, but she could already tell that she wasn’t going to be fast enough. Burly’s huge size made each of his strides that much longer, and with his speed undiminished and the ice on the ground doing nothing to slow him down, she had no chance of outdistancing him or outmaneuvering him. In an instant, the massive stallion was upon her, and Solvei fought back a wince as he-
Gave a confused grunt, and then went right past her, his leg coming down close enough that she could have touched it as he charged on by without hitting her.
Solvei could only gape, staring in amazement as Burly continued forward for a short distance before turning and giving her a sour look. Except, he wasn’t looking at her at all, instead sweeping his gaze over the area before giving a disdainful snort. “So it’s gonna be like that, then?”
Stupefied, Solvei stared at the gigantic stallion for several long moments as she slowly realized what had happened. He can’t see me?
Reflexively, she glanced down at herself, only to do a double-take as the only thing she saw was the ground beneath her. Drawing in a sharp breath, she had a moment’s panic as she tried to figure out what was going on-
Elder Sister Solvei! Can you hear me?
Mei Li?!
It worked! The kumiho’s mental voice was thick with relief. Elder Sister Nenet is using her magic on me so that I can use my own on you from a distance. We will help you fight!
Although she’d heard about how the two had done something like this before, Solvei was still momentarily surprised. She can do that?
Shaking her head, she forced herself to focus as Burly kicked over a tree and rolled it along the ground, trying to flush her out. Nevermind. How long will this invisibility spell last?
I don’t believe very long, admitted Mei Li. I experienced sudden enlightenment regarding the nature of my fourth tail just now, and this is one of the spells it allows me to use, but it won’t last for more than a few dozen breaths. But in that time, even if you strike out at your foe, it will not end.
Solvei felt her eyebrows rise. “Sudden enlightenment”?
A revelation, explained Mei Li. When Nenet told me her plan, I despaired because none of my magic was meant to aid someone in battle. But she told me how, when our husband fought a great dragon, your prayers granted him the use of your ice magic, and that saved his life.
A shock ran through Solvei then. Nenet told you that?
Yes, and it made me realize that my thinking was too inflexible. That even if my magic – now that I’m free of the taint from the Plane of Ice – is only meant to help cultivate the peace of a household, it can still be used to help my Elder Sister defend herself. When I realized that, the powers of my fourth tail suddenly came into my mind.
For some reason, the story sent a jolt through Solvei, a realization thought suddenly dominating her thoughts:
They were all in this together.
It was so incredibly obvious, and yet it left her momentarily speechless, completely overturning the need she’d so recently felt to handle things on her own.
The three of them weren’t just individuals who were bound to the same master. They were allies, comrades who could rely on each other no matter what happened. Even if they hadn’t known each other very long, she was sharing her life with the two of them as much as she was with Lex.
Even if it wasn’t a soul-bond, the three of them still had a deep and powerful connection. And by running out to challenge Burly on her own, she’d rejected that connection, pushing them away in favor of wallowing in her own insecurities and self-doubts.
Just like Lex had done to them when he’d fled their presence four days ago.
Elder Sister? Are you alright?
Hearing the worry in Mei Li’s voice, Solvei swallowed, almost overwhelmed by the flood of emotions – appreciation, gratitude, and affection – that came over her then. I’m fine. Just...having a revelation of my own.
Another felled tree went tumbling by, this time close enough to bring Solvei’s attention back to the present. Anyway, I have no idea how turning invisible can make a household better, but I’ll take it!
Actually, such illusions are very useful for beautification and peacemaking, explained the kumiho. For instance, many guests prefer not to see menial servants at work, and an unsightly mess can also be hidden from view if-
That’s great! interrupted Solvei, concentrating on her ice magic again. Now that she knew Burly couldn’t see her, she had time to concentrate, building up to something stronger. But right now, if there’s any other magic you think would be helpful, I could use it!
Ah, forgive me! Then, tell me if one of those trees comes near you, and I’ll take care of-
Do it now! yelped Solvei as a third makeshift missile came barreling toward her, concentrating on empowering her next spell as much as she could. Do it right now!
Understood!
Solvei grit her teeth as the broken tree shot toward her. She hadn’t bothered reforming her armor, knowing that it wouldn’t help her against another shot from Burly, and she regretted that oversight now. Even if her bond with Lex had made her a lot tougher, being struck by an oncoming log would hurt!
But all of a sudden, the three shrunk down, reduced to the size of a stick as it clattered end over end across the snowy landscape, coming to rest at the base of her serac.
“HAH!” boomed Burly as he started forward. “Found you! Now you’re goin’ down!”
Although she knew the stallion couldn’t see it, Solvei nevertheless made a rude gesture at him as she finished preparing her next spell. “Actually, I think things are looking up!”
Even as she said it, the ground around Burly began to darken, causing the oversized stallion to frown in confusion as he aborted his charged and looked above him. “What the-”
Then the massive iceberg Solvei had created fell on him.
It struck with enough force that snow came down from the nearby peaks, the heavy impact far exceeding the shaking that had been caused when Burly had stomped his hoof before. The shockwave made all of the trees in the surrounding area sway, and Solvei hastily formed an ice wall in front of herself, only for it to immediately crumble as the impact reduced it to pieces. It knocked her completely off of her serac, tumbling painfully end over end, and she heard several gasps from behind her as the village shook again.
Panting, she groaned, not trying to get up. She’d dug deep into her supplementary reserves of power in order to make something that huge be as dense as possible, wanting to spare no effort to strike back at her foe. Between how hard she’d concentrated, the bruises she could already feel forming all over her body, and the backlash from her attack just now, she could barely even move.
But she was smiling, certain that Burly had to have felt that one.
Mei Li seemed to agree. Well done, Elder Sister!
I thought I told you to just call me-
She didn’t have a chance to finish as cracks suddenly ran through the iceberg.
Solvei’s eyes widened in disbelief. No way! Not even he could recover so soon from a hit like that!
But the cracks in the massive ice shelf rapidly multiplied, each new one ringing loudly through the air, until the entire thing was shot through with fissures.
Then it exploded outward, revealing Burly’s massive form underneath.
He didn’t have a mark on him. Not a black eye, not a bloody nose, not even a bruise. Instead, all he did was roll his massive neck, as though working a crick out of it. “Huh,” he grunted. “That one wasn’t half-bad. Too bad it wasn’t half-good neither.”
You’ve got to be kidding me! swore Solvei inwardly. What does it take to hurt this monster?!
Gritting her teeth, she tried to sit up, planting her hands on the ground-
And Burly’s head immediately swerved in her direction, eyes locking onto her as a malicious grin crossing his face. “There you are!” he bellowed, charging forward.
Solvei couldn’t help herself, freezing in place. How had he found her?! She was still invisible, and she hadn’t made a sound, so how-
Elder Sister, speak aloud! Say anything! I’ll make your voice appear elsewhere!
Immediately understanding what Mei Li was trying, Solvei said the first thing that came to mind.
“Crushed to death is the only way I’d ever want to be underneath you!”
Her voice came from off to her left, as though she were a spear’s throw in that direction. But other than swiveling one ear toward her voice, Burly didn’t alter his charge. “Don’t worry, toots,” he snorted. “I’m steppin’ lightly, so you’ll-”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish as a slender figure with long blond hair suddenly leaped out from the treeline, a sword glinting in his grasp as he shot toward Burly.
The stallion saw the incoming figure, his brow furrowing as a confused expression crossed his face, his charge carrying him right into the jumping person’s path. He’d barely started to slow down when the figure swung their blade, the sword aimed directly at Burly’s thick neck.
Blood fountained into the air, spraying out so thick and so fast it was like a crimson rain.
But none of it touched the slender, furless humanoid who landed on the snow a moment later, flicking his blade and causing the crimson liquid coating its length to fly off.
He’d just finished the motion when Burly’s head hit the ground.
The rest of the stallion’s body slumped down a moment later, blood still spurting from his severed neck. Just as it finished collapsing, it seemed to shrink in on itself, returning to its original size, his head doing the same.
The entire thing had taken five, maybe six heartbeats.
For her part, Solvei could only stare, open-mouthed at how the unstoppable juggernaut that she’d barely been able to slow down had been slain in a single blow. The decisiveness of it, along with the ease with which the fatal strike had been delivered, was enough to leave her thoroughly unnerved. That’s...impossible...
Elder Sister, what just happened?! Mei Li’s mental voice sounded as panicked as Solvei felt. It looked as though an interloper struck that giant down!
I can’t believe it either, answered Solvei, instinctively having gone perfectly still as the furless, pointy-eared creature looked around. It didn’t escape her notice that the blade of their sword seemed to have no thickness to it whatsoever, seeming to vanish when turned so it was parallel to her line of sight. I really hope this invisibility spell of yours lasts-
She couldn’t finish, her voice cutting off even in her thoughts as a chill ran over her.
Burly’s slayer was looking right at her.
Her heart leaping into her throat, Solvei briefly considered that the unknown figure had some means of seeing through invisibility...only to realize that they didn’t need to, Burly’s blood having splashed on her enough that it made her easy to spot.
Giving a sigh, the furless humanoid sheathed their blade before speaking. His words – the timbre of his voice sounding masculine – were in a language Solvei didn’t know, sounding almost lyrical at how easily they flowed, as though he were reciting a line of some melodious poetry. But it was the gesture he made, flicking his fingers in a distinctively imperious gesture out to his side, that made her look away...
Two other humanoids of what looked like the same race were approaching her.
A distinct sense of unease fell over Solvei then, and she mentally commanded her serac to move away from them. “Whoever you are,” she began hesitantly, “I owe you a debt of gratitude-”
“Which we’ll have you repay now,” answered the leftmost of the two humanoids – another male – walking toward her, this one dressed in robes with a hood drawn over his head. “Now, be silent and approach us. This won’t take very long.”
Her unease growing worse, Solvei moved further back. “What won’t take very long?”
The hooded figure opened his mouth, only to stop as he gave a sharp look in the direction of the village. His hand immediately went to one of the several pouches that was hanging from his belt, withdrawing a long wooden staff that never should have been able to fit in something so small. Chanting a word in the same lyrical language as Burly’s killer, he waved it in a large arc, before turning to say something to the third member of the group, who so far hadn’t spoken.
Elder Sister! Mei Li’s voice sounded panicked now. Elder Sister Nenet just tried to use a scrying spell to see what’s happening, and she said something negated it! What is happening?!
That guy who brought down Burly has friends! Solvei was moving backward faster now, barely noticing as Mei Li’s invisibility spell wore off. They don’t seem-
She didn’t have a chance to finish as the last of the trio finally spoke in the same unknown language as her companions, her voice soft and feminine as she wove gestures with one hand, the other fingering a medallion which depicted an oak tree with a variety of other, small trees around it.
No sooner had she finished than something hit Solvei hard across the back, knocking her off her serac and into the ground hard.
Pain exploded across her body, still feeling the injuries that Burly had given her, and for a moment it was all she could do to stay conscious. By the time she’d regained control of herself, she was being hauled up by the scruff of the neck, and then thick arms – or rather, forelegs – wrapped around her from behind, holding her in a crushing hug, belatedly realizing that she was in the grasp of a huge bear with golden fur.
It squeezed her tightly, causing the air to flee her lungs as she strained to keep herself from being crushed by its grip. Bears aren’t supposed to be this strong! she knew, Ujurak having bragged on multiple occasions about how he’d once outwrestled a grizzly that he’d encountered. Clearly the golden-furred ursine was made of stronger stuff.
If I transformed, I could probably break free, she decided, but held off as she realized that the bear was taking lumbering steps forward on its hind legs, clumsily carrying her back toward where the trio were waiting. Without some sort of plan, getting away from the bear would just leave her vulnerable to the other three. And in her injured state, she knew she had no chance against anyone who could take down Burly so easily.
At least, not by herself.
Elder Sister-
Mei Li, listen to me, ordered Solvei, forcing herself to stay calm. When I give the word, I want you and Nenet to cast another spell on me.
What sort of spell? Without Elder Sister Nenet’s magic, we can’t see precisely what’s happening to you!
You said that your magic is for keeping a household, right? Make it something flashy, the kind you’d use when you’d really want to overwhelm a guest. Do you have something like that?
I...believe so. Mei Li fell silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, she sounded a little more confident. Just give “the word” and I will do the rest.
Feeling slightly better with the reminder that she wasn’t fighting alone, Solvei didn’t struggle as the bear trundled back over to the other three, who were conversing quietly among themselves.
Whatever conversation they were having ended with her retrieval. With another careless look at Burly’s corpse, the humanoid with the sword said something to the other two, who nodded once, and the hooded one gave Solvei a flat look. “I am going to examine your memories,” he announced. “Do not fight, and this will be easy for you.”
Despite the position she was in, Solvei’s lip curled. “And if I don’t care about things being easy?”
“Then you shall bear the responsibility for our having to use harsher methods to make you comply,” he replied evenly, as though talking to a child. “Now, hold still.”
He began to chant, gesturing with one hand as the other reached out toward her forehead.
Snarling as the last of her doubts about these creatures being enemies fell away, Solvei tensed, getting ready to make her move. Even if Lex wasn’t here, she still had the powers he’d given her, including that dark magic that protected her mind. If she wanted to let someone into her thoughts – like with Mei Li’s telepathy – that was one thing, but anyone trying to break into her head would find it a lot harder than they expected.
Get ready... she informed Mei Li. Once her captor’s spell failed, she’d change size and break out of the bear’s grip, and hope that whatever magic the kumiho had ready would be enough for her to retreat. If she moved fast enough, she might be able to lead them away from the village, and then-
All of a sudden, the world shifted in place.
There was no other way to describe it, Solvei’s sense of balance suddenly going haywire as her stomach flipflopped nauseatingly. The humanoid who’d been about to touch her also gave a sudden start, his hand jerking backward before it could make contact with her head as he stumbled backward, his companions looking similarly afflicted. Even the bear was subject to whatever was happening, roaring in alarm as it dropped her and swayed in place.
Sinking down to one knee as she tried to brace herself, Solvei dimly noticed that whatever was happening wasn’t limited to them. The land itself seemed to be affected, rocks sliding over each other and twigs rolling across the ground, looking like they were tumbling downhill despite the area being flat. Drifts of snow began to list, as if caught in a wind that was blowing only over them, and Solvei dimly realized that everything was headed in the same direction.
Toward Burly’s headless body.
Except it wasn’t headless anymore, his cranium having also rolled across the short distance separating it from his corpse. Even as Solvei watched, his severed head pressed against the neck wound, happening to roll over so that the bottom of it was aligned to the bloody stump, leaving only a thin line to mark where the sword had passed.
And then that line disappeared.
An instant later, the nauseating sense of dizziness vanished, and the landscape was still again. At the same moment, Burly’s eyes snapped around toward Solvei’s captors.
The trio straightened up, looking unsure of themselves, and the female of the group opened her mouth, only for her eyes to widen as she gave a cry of alarm, the other two spinning around-
Just in time for the musclebound stallion to slam into the sword-wielding humanoid who’d struck him down, Burly’s mouth twisted in a vicious grin.
“You really thought I’d die just because you killed me, you little twerp?”
His foe was in no position to make a reply, his entire chest caving in as he was sent flying. Burly’s punch hadn’t been a light jab like he’d been throwing before; he’d put his back into that one, lunging forward and pivoting to throw his entire mass behind the blow. Solvei couldn’t believe that the humanoid’s body hadn’t been completely obliterated by the blow, his limbs hanging limply as he came down from his impromptu flight-
And caught himself on one hand, turning his fall into a controlled spring as he backflipped away to land on his feet, sinking into a crouch before spitting up a mouthful of blood. His other hand immediately went to the buckle of his belt, tapping the pearlescent gemstones set in it, which shined in response. Immediately, the massive indentation in his chest filled in, and a shudder passed through his body as he straightened up, slowly drawing his blade.
“It seems I underestimated you,” he murmured, giving Burly an appraising look. “A mistake I shan’t make a second time.”
“Whatever you say, toots,” snickered Burly, before his expression suddenly fell. “Wait...you are a chick, right? I swear, I can’t never tell with elves. You willowy tree-humpers don’t have any meat on your bones at all.”
His lip curling in disgust, the “elf” – Solvei wasn’t familiar with the term – slowly moved toward Burly, each step light and oddly fluid, somewhere between a stride and a jump as he brought his sword up.
On Burly’s left, the elf with the hood withdrew another long staff from his pouch, this one composed of black wood with a crimson-colored gemstone at the top. He waved it once, murmuring a word in whatever language he’d been speaking before, and promptly floated up into the air, levitating.
Opposite him, on Burly’s right, the female elf was casting another spell. No sooner had she finished than a menagerie of animals appeared around her, many of which Solvei didn’t recognize. There was a massive quadruped with a large, trunk-like nose and two tusks, its entire body covered with a short coat of fur that was a vivid shade of red. A huge feline with a mane around its head was also present, its body emitting a dim aura that made it look like it was glowing softly. Overhead, a massive hawk gave a shriek as it flapped its wings, the sound like thunder as the wind beneath it seemed to roar.
And those were only a fraction of the creatures she’d summoned so easily.
Burly looked at each of the elves in turn.
“Wuss magic,” he snorted as he glanced at the one who was levitating. Nor did he seem impressed by the exotic animals that the other had summoned. “Weak-ass petting zoo.”
Finally, he turned his attention back to the elf approaching him with sword drawn, snickering. “Looks like you’re the only one here who’s got the sack to throw down. But don’t go thinkin’ that sword’s gonna be all you need.”
The elf kept his eyes on Burly, but his reply went to his companions. “Vystalaran, Thilaera, remember what I told you before: this hunt is mine. Capture the she-beast so we can interrogate her afterward, and make sure no one else interferes until then.”
The levitating elf nodded as the name “Vystalaran” was spoken, and Solvei mentally attached that moniker to him. “I’ll lock the area down.”
The female – who had to be Thilaera – frowned, but nodded as well. “Be careful, Loraestil. A tarnished success is worth more than a noble failure.”
Loraestil gave a cold snort. “Your job is to make sure my success is untarnished. See to it that you succeed.”
Solvei, however, had heard enough. With any luck, Burly and these “elves” would kill each other; she just had to keep out of the way until they did.
Having poured more power into her serac, she immediately turned and shot across the area, trying to withdraw into the cover of the woods.
Immediately, Thilaera made a sweeping motion with one hand – sending the hawk swooping toward her – while Vystalaran began casting.
Now, Mei Li!
Understood!
Instantly, a half-dozen other Solveis – all riding on seracs – sprung into existence around her. This is a spell used to make one’s retinue appear more grandiose, explained Mei Li, heedless of the danger that her elder sister was in. They’re illusions, but they’ll copy the actions of the one the spell is cast on, so if you only have a single servant, they can look like many.
Even as the kumiho spoke, the hawk swooped down and sank its talons into one of the Solveis...which immediately fizzled out, causing the bird to screech as it flew back up, claws empty.
A moment later Vystalaran’s spell ended with a black beam lancing out to strike another Solvei...which also shimmered and faded away, the illusion crumpling under whatever attack the elf had unleashed.
Looks like it’s also good for confusing an attacker! noted Solvei, speeding toward the tree line.
Oh, yes, I suppose it could be used that way too, admitted Mei Li, sounding surprised by the idea.
Despite the predicament she was in, Solvei couldn’t help but smile at her new friend’s innocent demeanor, summoning her armor back around herself as she glanced backward.
She was just in time to see the fight between Burly and Loraestil begin.
Loraestil’s blade flashed so quickly that it was barely visible, lashing out a half-dozen times in the space of half as many breaths. Each strike left a deep cut in Burly’s body, opening lacerations across his legs, chest, and face. Immediately, the snow around the two of them was soaked through with blood, all of it belonging to the stallion.
Burly’s response was to grin as he lashed out with a haymaker that could have pulverized a boulder.
Loraestil seemingly danced around it, launching an upward slash that very nearly severed Burly’s leg, flesh and muscle parting to reveal bone.
The injury made Burly chuckle. “You know, I was almost thinkin’ that I’d wasted my time comin’ up here,” he chortled, punching out again. “But you’re only mostly weak instead of completely weak, and it’s actually kinda fun!”
Loraestil’s lip curled as he once again contorted in place to avoid the blow, twisting beneath the heavy strike and immediately springing back up to launch one of his own. “Your delighting in savagery will be your downfall, cur,” he sneered, voice thick with disdain. “Only a beast of the lowliest sort would challenge one who so easily removed their head!”
“That’s rich,” laughed Burly, seemingly not noticing the deep gash that sliced across his ribs, “comin’ from the guy who saw their enemy put their head right back on and thought ‘no biggie’!”
That was all Solvei caught as she continued to race toward the nearby tree line, the pack of animals that Thilaera had summoned following her. But they’ll have a hard time in the forest, she knew, watching as their continued attacks reduced the number of illusory copies that Nenet and Mei Li had surrounded her with, already having pared them down to only three remaining. Unless they can uproot trees like Burly, they’ll be slowed down by the undergrowth!
I have another spell that might help you with that, Elder Sister, chimed in Mei Li, having heard Solvei’s thoughts. It’s from my fourth tail, and makes anything the subject does seem innocuous and unremarkable. It’s often used by visitors to another’s household when circumstance requires them to bring an unruly guest or a precocious child, so that they do not embarrass-
That sounds great, Mei Li! cut in Solvei, watching as another of her illusory selves was torn apart by the maned feline with the shimmering aura, the great cat roaring as its prey dissolved in its jaws. Lay it on me!
Up above, Vystalaran withdrew another rod – this one composed of an odd, bluish metal with several prisms on the end – and began to chant as he waved it around, gesticulating with his other hand.
Immediately, Elder Sis-
In the instant that Vystalaran finished casting, the kumiho’s voice suddenly stopped.
Mei Li? called Solvei, a sinking feeling going through her. Mei Li?!
In the instant that she was distracted, another of Thilaera’s retinue made their move.
This time it was an oversized badger – one that was almost as large as Burly was, and had a hide like onyx – which surged up from underground, tearing through the earth with the same ease that a fish would have through water. Its claws tore through her serac, and Solvei wasn’t able to catch herself as the frozen platform shattered out from under her, sending her and her illusory copies sprawling.
Thanks to her armor, the fall inflicted no damage, but it was still enough to knock the wind out of her, existing injuries flaring up all at once from the sudden tumble. Falling end over end, Solvei groaned as she looked up, realizing she was almost close enough to touch the nearby trees. Grunting, she stumbled forward, her copies following her as she limped toward the forest-
And hit an invisible wall.
Having been with Lex long enough to realize what was happening, Solvei still couldn’t help the rush of panic that went through her then. This is what that other one meant by locking the place down! she realized, looking up at Vystalaran. He did something to cut Mei Li off, and now I can’t leave either!
The levitating elf didn’t even deign to look back at her, instead waving the blue staff as he cast another spell.
It was clear that in his eyes, Solvei was already defeated.
“You still have a chance to make this easy on yourself,” noted Thilaera quietly, approaching with her collection of bizarre animals in tow. “Surrender peacefully, and you will not be mistreated.”
“I’ll think about that,” snorted Solvei, somehow finding the strength to climb to one knee. “Since you’ve made such a good first impression on me.”
A regretful look crossed Thilaera’s face. “I understand this all must seem very abrupt to you. But you must understand, we are this world’s caretakers. Once Loraestil finishes his battle with Lex Legis, we’ll-”
“Wait, what?!” Solvei couldn’t help but turn to look at the elven lady in shock. “You’re here-”
She cut herself off abruptly, realizing that her surprise would only make things worse. She had no idea who these people were or why they were after Lex, but right now – based on what Thilaera had just said – they thought that Burly was him!
And if I clue them in, then they’ll have no reason to keep fighting him!
Unfortunately, it seemed like it might be too late, as Thilaera was cocking her head and frowning. “You seemed surprised by that-”
“You think that’s surprising?! Try THIS on for size!” Without waiting, Solvei dug deep into her reserve of supplementary magic, opening her mouth and breathing out a brilliant blue beam of freezing energy directly at the elf.
Immediately, the animals Thilaera had summoned sprung into action, as a thick-bodied quadruped with a single large horn jutting up from the end of its nose leaped in front of its summoner, even as the golden-furred bear and the hawk rushed at her.
But rather than break off her attack, Solvei instead summoned a thick hemisphere of ice around herself, leaving only the area directly in front of her open as she continued to unleash her breath attack at Thilaera. Gotta keep her from thinking about what I just let slip! she cursed inwardly. If they realize that’s not Lex that their leader’s fighting, they might leave. If that happens, then not only will Burly be my problem again, but they might be able to ambush Lex...wherever he is!
That wasn’t something she was about to let happen.
Reinvigorated, Solvei poured everything she had into her current attack, even as claws raked at the icy dome she’d raised around herself.
Up ahead, she could hear the horned creature let out an anguished roar, and the sound drove her to go harder.
But behind it, she could already hear the elf murmuring something in that lyrical language of hers.
A moment later she finished, and as soon as the last syllable was uttered, a sickle appeared in midair, tumbling end over end as it flew toward Solvei.
The weapon had no substance or mass, looking as though it were composed of nothing more than a sparkling wind in the shape of a curved blade. But that blade flew through Solvei’s breath attack as though it wasn’t even there, giving her no chance to do anything except widen her eyes before it flew right past her two remaining illusory images and struck home.
In an instant, the helmet around her face shattered as the tip of the sickle tore through it, and Solvei screamed as it bit deeply into her face, her breath attack tapering off as she fell back, hands coming up to cover her face protectively.
“I didn’t wish for it to be this way,” murmured Thilaera, her voice sounding as though she was moving closer. “Our Lord Gladoneral, under the auspices of the Seldarine, seeks to improve upon nature itself, so that all creatures may live together in peace. It was for that reason that we elves came to Everglow millennia ago, and why – even though this world’s creatures continue to refuse our benevolence – we remain here to this day.”
Solvei heard a loud cracking sound from her left, and could almost see the wall of the icy shell she’d raised around herself crumbling, certain that it was taking out the leftmost of the two remaining images Mei Li had cast around her. A second later, the same thing could be heard from her right.
And from up above, Vystalaran made a comment in the musical tongue that Solvei guessed was the elves’ language, prompting a response from Thilaera, who sounded like she was almost within arms’ reach.
After she finished speaking, the elf sighed. “My companion says that there is no reasoning with your kind, that you are as unto beasts. But I have spent time with the creatures of what others term ‘the wilds,’ and I understand that you act out of fear, not malice.”
Still crouched down with her face in her hands, Solvei could hear low growls, piercing shrieks, and rumbling snarls around her, knowing that she was surrounded. But Thilaera’s voice was now right in front of her, the elf seeming to have no concern about being attacked whatsoever. “One of your eyes was damaged just now,” she murmured. “Surely that is reason enough not to continue this-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Solvei heard what she’d been waiting for.
“HA!” roared Burly, even as the sound of a heavy impact split the air. “That’s the problem with you sword-swinging sissies! Too much time polishin’ your blades, not enough learnin’ how to take a punch!”
“Loraestil!” called Vystalaran, a note of alarm in his voice.
Thilaera didn’t say anything, but Solvei heard her draw in a sudden breath, her ears twitching as she noted how it sounded as though her enemy had just stood up.
It was the chance she’d been waiting for.
Her hands falling from her face as she turned her one remaining eye – the left, golden-colored one – toward Thilaera, Solvei cocked back her gauntleted fist.
Just that action alone made the surrounding animals howl as they leaped at her, not about to let their summoner come to harm. At the same time, the sickle swung down at her of its own accord, again aiming right for her face.
But Thilaera had given Solvei more than enough time to get ready.
This is from all of us! she swore as she swung her fist toward the elf, using up the last of her enhancement reserves to make her spell as strong as she could. Lex showed me this when he was fighting Hvitdod, Nenet’s asking for that ice palace showed me I had what it took, and Mei Li’s creativity just now inspired me to try my own version!
A second later, the ghostly sickle, giant hawk, and great cat lashed out.
But none of them could penetrate the massive suit of ice armor that Solvei now wore.
Safely ensconced within the massive war machine she’d just created for herself, Solvei grinned as the armor – possessed of its own faculties thanks to her creating it as a golem – completed the punch she’d thrown when she cast the spell, an icy fist as large as her body slamming into Thilaera.
How’s that for some beast of the wild?! cheered Solvei inwardly as she watched Thilaera skid along the ground, her body limp.
Around her, Thilaera’s animals howled, the hawk breaking off to go after its summoner while the others renewed their attacks, trying to tear Solvei’s armor off.
And up above, Vystalaran frowned as he looked her way, drawing another staff and pointing it at her...
“It’s still not working!” reported Mei Li. “I can’t reach Elder Sister Solvei!”
Nenet bit her lip, tail thrashing behind her. “I don’t know what else to try! Nothing’s getting through that force field those guys raised! I’ve used every metamagic effect I can think of to pierce it or bypass it, and nothing’s working!”
“And I can’t think of any magic that’s designed to pass through a shield,” murmured Mei Li, glancing back at her own tails in dismay. “Maybe if I could use the other five...”
Off to the side, Yura opened her eyes at last. “I can still sense the spirits in that area,” she reported. “They’re saying that Akna’s still alive and fighting, along with that musclebound oaf of a pony and those three...whatever they are.”
“And we can’t do anything to help,” muttered Yotimo, glaring at the elementals that were still standing guard over them, before giving Nenet a helpless look. “Isn’t there any way you can get rid of these things?”
“My countermagic only works on spells when they’re being cast,” whined the sphinx. “Once they’re active, I can’t do anything!”
“And even if we got rid of them, that shield would still keep us out,” noted Yura grimly.
Mei Li was quiet for a moment, closing her eyes and bowing her head as though concentrating on something. “Elder Sister Nenet,” she murmured after a moment. “Please use your ‘metamagic’ powers on me again.”
The sphinx blinked. “Huh? For what?”
“I want you to help me forcibly attempt to awaken my fifth tail.”
Nenet’s eyes widened. “Wait, you can do that?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Mei Li. “But if we can, I believe that I might be able to use a spell to contact our husband.”
“But...all my metamagic does is enhance a spell that you can already cast. It doesn’t teach you how to use magic you haven’t figured out how to use.”
Mei Li smiled. “Do you remember what Elder Sister Solvei said before, about how our husband’s concubine – Thermal Draft, I believe her name was – told her how, when our husband was still mortal, he would sometimes deliberately injure himself by ‘overcharging’ his body with power in order to cast spells that were beyond his capabilities?”
In contrast to the kumiho’s serene look, Nenet’s eyes were wide. “That’s not...Mei Li, I have no idea how to do that! I...I wouldn’t even know where to start! And even if I did, you could be seriously hurt!”
“I trust you, Elder Sister.” Turning around, Mei Li glanced back at her shoulder as she presented the middle of her nine tails toward the sphinx. “So please, trust me.”
Nenet bit her lip again, fidgeting in anxiety, before a distant boom from where Solvei was fighting made the ground shake. Cringing at the reminder of how she was fighting alone, Nenet gulped, then shook off the last of her apprehension as she took hold of Mei Li’s tail.
“Okay,” she murmured, trying to think of the best way to enact the vixen’s plan. “Just think about whatever spell you’re trying to use. I’ll do the rest.”
Mei Li gave her a grateful smile. “I know that you will.”
With that, the vixen closed her eyes and concentrated.
“C’mon, you little pansy, get up! I ain’t finished with you yet!”
Loraestil glared at his quarry as he slowly rose to his feet, the healing magic in his belt having once again managed to undo the incredible damage he’d taken after receiving one of the brute’s heavy punches. Wiping the blood from his face, he raised his sword to point it at the musclebound stallion, making it clear that he wasn’t finished either.
But despite the gesture, Loraestil made no move to advance upon his foe, instead concentrating on what had happened a moment ago.
How did he disrupt my stance?
Long before he had begun his career as a hunter, Loraestil had trained as a bladesinger, and he had never put aside what he’d learned of that noble calling. Far more than mere swordsmen, a bladesinger was one who treated their skill as an artform. The motion of a blade’s swing was like a dance, and its passage through the air was like music. As the one who conducted that music and led that dance, a bladesinger’s movements in battle were not merely a performance; they set a rhythm, one which left all others fumbling to keep up, out of step with the pace of the fighting, while the bladesinger flowed among them as a graceful dervish, as beautiful as they were deadly.
And yet somehow, this animal had broken his rhythm.
If his quarry had only possessed unearthly vitality, that was one thing. Loraestil had hunted many creatures – from lowly trolls to mighty demons – who had barely noticed even the most egregious of wounds. Although the pony titan was among them, so covered in blood that his ruddy coat was more red than brown, yet looking as though he wasn’t even aware that he was wounded despite the numerous gashes covering his body, that hadn’t bothered Loraestil in the least. Even the most towering of trees could be felled by enough strokes of a blade.
Nor did his enemy’s great strength give him pause. Although Lex Legis – the name of his towering foe – had not returned to the great size he had taken before, the raw power in his swollen frame was still exceptional. Twice now, a single punch from him had inflicted serious injury, requiring Loraestil to use the healing magic in his belt...magic which was not indefinite.
But simple strength, too, was nothing unusual for his quarries. Many greater devils and true demons had strength such that they could have outwrestled giants. All bladesingers were trained to dance around such blows, turning them aside or avoiding them altogether with grace and fluidity.
Despite that, the titan had struck him twice now.
Once could be considered an anomaly, some fluke by which this lug had managed to seize upon a stroke of luck. But twice?
No, that was no coincidence. It was the power by which this creature had overcome a demigod, and now sought to overcome him.
But I will peer into the depths of this power, and unmask it, vowed Loraestil silently. And then, I shall transcend it!
Keeping his sword – the gift that his father had given him upon being appointed as the Coronal’s Huntsman – raised, Loraestil shifted his posture to that of the Stance of the Wary Fulmar. Come attempt to strike me down again, beast, and show me what strange powers you command.
Almost as though his quarry heard him, Lex Legis gave a chuckling sneer. “Aw, what’s a matter? Lost your backbone?” Rearing up on his hind legs, he slammed his forehooves together – repeatedly so, like an ape beating its chest – before falling back onto all fours. “Don’t worry, Burly’ll find it for ya!”
Loraestil’s brow furrowed. “Burly”?
But there was no time to contemplate what he’d just been told as the muscular stallion charged.
Each step caused the ground to ripple and shake, as though the earth had turned to water beneath them. A lesser warrior would have struggled to maintain their balance, but Loraestil didn’t so much as sway, easily maintaining his equilibrium as the mountain of muscle sped toward him, faster than a creature his size should have been able to run.
Loraestil let him come, not moving even by a hair’s breadth.
When the wild, heavy punch came at the end of the stallion’s charge, he sidestepped it, flicking his blade out in a riposte that was more about fending off a foe than inflicting an injury. The Stance of the Wary Fulmar was a defensive form, prioritizing mobility and dealing light wounds that were more painful than dangerous. In doing so, it mimicked the noble seabird, known for being able to drive off even an aggressive walrus by pecking at its eyes.
Several more such exchanges followed, with Lex Legis swinging again and again only to hit nothing but air. Bellowing, he stomped hard on the ground, turning the frozen earth around them into so much loose rubble, and Loraestil smirked. The importance of footwork was one of the fundamental aspects of maintaining any Stance, let alone one as defensive as he was using now. They could have been fighting on shifting sands and he wouldn’t have stumbled.
As he continued to dance around the lumbering oaf, he spared a glance for his cohorts, grimacing as he saw that – even though there were two of them, and they were fighting a lesser enemy – they were still struggling to keep the situation under control.
Even as he watched, the frozen construct that she-wolf had summoned around herself punched out at Thilaera, the or-tel escaping only because the celestial kestrel she’d summoned swooped down and grabbed her at the last possible moment, wings flapping hard enough to kick up the snow as it gently dropped her a few dozen feet away. Meanwhile, the other empyreal animals she’d summoned swarmed the icy behemoth, besieging it from all sides but doing limited damage as it knocked them away, cryomantic magic filling in the scratches and gouge marks that they’d left on it.
Up above, Vystalaran watched the proceedings with a frown, cycling through his collection of staves until he pulled out one that was carved of redwood and topped with a ruby, waiting until Thilaera’s summons had been repulsed far enough to give him an opening before murmuring a word and waving the staff.
Immediately, a sea of flames shot down from the ruby to engulf the she-wolf’s frozen armor, hiding it from view as a wave of heat washed over everyone, turning the snow within the force-dome into so much steaming slush. But when the fires died off, even Loraestil could tell that only superficial damage had been dealt to the she-wolf’s ice goliath, likely because of some sort of heat resistant enchantment that she’d imbued it with.
The exchange was enough to make Loraestil frown inwardly. They’re holding back.
While he had little respect for the companions that had been assigned to him, he knew that they weren’t fools. For all of Vystalaran’s inexperience, and Thilaera’s simplicity, the Vice Coronal would never have sent them along if they were incompetent. Keeping the bulk of their strength in reserve wasn’t a poor idea, even against such a weak foe.
But at the same time, Loraestil couldn’t help but find it irritating. He was keeping the bulk of his strength in reserve, but that was because he was the one facing the titan; those two had no such excuse. Which meant that they were restraining themselves because they weren’t sure that he – despite being the leader of this excursion, as well as a seasoned hunter – could handle things on his own.
Deflecting another wild swing from Lex Legis, Loraestil murmured a spell. Most bladesinger magic was focused around augmenting their blades and themselves – and he’d already used several of the minor ones before going into battle, leaving the stronger spells ready in case he needed them – but there were a few which were of a more general nature, and he called upon one of those now, transmitting his voice to the ears of his companions as he coldly spoke three words.
“Stop fooling around.”
Thilaera cringed, giving him an abashed look, while Vystalaran frowned. But although Lex Legis hadn’t been one of the targets of his spell, he still heard him utter the words, and his eyes narrowed. “Alright, you little pussywillow, you asked for it!”
Loraestil made sure not to smirk, pleased to see what his opponent was easy to provoke. Even as he did, he murmured another spell, one built up a powerful reservoir of kinetic energy in his sword even as he switched to the Stance of the Furious Swan, which focused on offense over defense.
But to his surprise, Lex Legis didn’t rush him again.
Instead, the stallion grimaced as he tensed up, his body seeming to quiver as though he were in some sort of distress. For a moment, he seemed to bulge, muscles growing larger, and Loraestil was certain that he was about to return to his enormous form again...but a moment later, his quivering ceased. Letting out a breath, the muscular stallion gave him a vicious smirk. “Try not to die in one hit, okay?”
Loraestil didn’t respond, remaining at the ready.
Lex Legis snorted, and then crouched down, one foreleg cocked back for another vicious punch. He held that pose for a moment, then charged in again, the ground shaking more than it had before as he made another artless, headlong rush.
Even in the Stance of the Furious Swan, it was easy to avoid, and Loraestil moved to the side as the punch was thrown...only to find his steps faltering as his balance came undone, eyes going wide as he involuntarily moved into the path of the punch. He barely managed to lash out with his blade-
And then he was on the ground, staring up at the sky as he drew in a ragged breath, fumbling for his healing belt. Off to the side, he was vaguely aware of Vystalaran casting a spell that caused the she-wolf’s ice armor to shatter all at once, while Thilaera summoned a group of vaguely elven-looking warriors to fight the ice elementals that her enemy had apparently called forth at some point. And Lex Legis...
Was looking over him with a raised hoof.
Had Loraestil not learned the Stance of the Waking Meadowlark – which was a form designed for when things had gone wrong, and the bladesinger was disarmed, knocked down, or in any of several other extremely precarious positions – he wouldn’t have been able to avoid the descending strike. Particularly since the spell he’d imbued into his blade should have knocked Lex Legis backward with powerful force.
As it was, he only barely managed to move out of the way, feeling as though he was rolling uphill rather than across flat ground.
Dodging the descending hoof by a hair’s breadth, he fell back, kicking his sword into his hand as he managed to put some distance between himself and his quarry.
That hit had been far more damaging than the previous two he’d taken. Not to mention his own spell had done little to his quarry. Even his attempt to extricate himself from the dire straits he’d been in had only barely worked.
But even so, Loraestil found himself smiling.
So that’s your secret.
He had to give Lex Legis credit; the first two times he’d used that power to get a hit in, it had been subtle enough that Loraestil hadn’t noticed. But the clues had all been there, especially since he’d used a much larger application of that form of magic – presumably in conjunction with some sort of minor healing of his own – to reattach his head to his body.
But now, he’d let his guard slip, and Loraestil knew what he was dealing with.
Gravity magic.
While it didn’t seem to be all there was to the titan, since he’d managed to use that power even after being beheaded, his primary method of attack seemed to be through manipulating the power of attraction between objects, pulling enemies off-balance and toward his punches.
Which means it’s time for me to follow my own advice to those two tagalongs that I brought with me, he decided, casting one of his stronger enhancement spells even as he began to call upon the true power of his blade.
No more holding back.
“D-don’t...stop...!”
Me Li’s tortured cry brought tears to Nenet’s eyes, but she managed a nod, channeling more power through the kumiho’s tail.
The influx of magical energy caused the fox in front of her to tense up and grimace, biting back cries of pain, unable to maintain her humanoid appearance. Even so, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate on turning the power she was being given back toward her tail, unlocking whatever magic was there.
Except it’s not working, Nenet could tell, watching as Mei Li continued to endure what she was going through. With nowhere else to go, the magical energy was discharging into the rest of her body, and Nenet could only imagine what it felt like. She could still recall the times when Grisela had used pain-inducing spells on her; compared to those, a beating was much gentler, and although the magic coursing through Mei Li right now wasn’t designed to cause agony, the nine-tailed fox was clearly experiencing that anyway.
“M-more!” groaned the vixen, almost choking on the words. “Use...more...!”
Nenet cringed, never having realized that hurting someone else – especially someone she cared about – could actually feel so much worse than being hurt herself. “But-”
“Elder S-Sister....please!”
“...alright...”
Hating that she couldn’t bring herself to say no to Mei Li’s request, Nenet increased the amount of power flowing through the kumiho’s fifth tail.
Immediately, Mei Li let out a shriek, only to clamp her mouth shut an instant later. “I th-think it’s...almost...”
She couldn’t finish as the marking on her tail suddenly began to glow, Nenet’s eyes widening as the power that she was pouring into the fox was suddenly soaked up by the fluffy appendage, rather than dispersing through the rest of her. It was working!
In front of her, Mei Li slumped over, letting out a low moan as her eyes fluttered closed.
But not before she managed to murmur a message.
On the demiplane that he created, Lex’s eyes widened as his foresight told him that he was about to hear Mei Li’s voice, having used a spell to reach him in spite of his having closed their connection.
“I want to be our people’s greatest hunter, so that I can serve as the avatar of Solonor Thelandira, as my father once did!”
Enaestari had laughed loudly at that. “You don’t lack for ambition, do you?”
Loraestil had stamped his foot then, glaring up at what he’d thought was mockery. “It’s not ambition! It’s dedication!”
Her wings flapping, Enaestari shook her head, her broad grin not wavering as she looked down at him. But not looking down on him, he’d realized centuries later. “If all you have is dedication, then that’s not good enough for me to teach you.”
“Then tell me what is good enough, and I’ll do that!”
Enaestari cocked a brow at him, smile still in place. “Well, since you’re not an avariel like me, you’d need to start by growing wings. That’s the only way you’ll ever be able to master our style of bladesinging, you know.”
“I’ll adapt it! I’ll start a new style, translating yours into one that I can use even without wings!”
Another laugh came from the winged elf then. “I suppose that’d seem like a small thing to someone who wants to be the mortal vessel of a god, but I don’t think you’re ready for how much work that would take.”
“I am! I’m more than ready! Please...”
Loraestil recalled how his shoulders had slumped then, gritting his teeth as he hung his head. “I want to make my father proud of me, but I don’t have his skill with a bow. No matter how much I practice, everyone says I’m nowhere near as good as he was when he was my age...”
Tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, he’d met Enaestari’s gaze head-on, stomping his foot as he clenched his fists. “But my skill with a sword is real! I’ve never lost a duel, and my tutors all say that there’s nothing left for them to teach me! I’ve even received an invitation to be taught by the Istvelen’areth himself!”
“Really?” Even Enaestari looked impressed by that. “So why are you here requesting to be my student if the head if the principal of the bladesinger academy wants to recruit you?”
“Because my father said you once defeated him in battle!”
That had resulted in the winged elf grimacing, one hand going to cover her face in embarrassment. “That wasn’t a battle. It wasn’t even a formal duel. It was a demonstration of our respective bladesinging styles that got slightly out of hand.”
“You still disarmed him! That means you won!”
“That’s not-”
“I want to be the best of the best, someone that no one can defeat! Just like my father! Just like you!”
That had been when Enaestari’s smile had fallen away, and she’d folded her wings, landing down so she could face at him at eye-level. “Loraestil, if you’re looking for a warrior that can never be defeated, then there’s no one in all of Arvandor – no, in all of Creation – who’s qualified to be your teacher.”
He could still remember how surprised he’d been by that. “You mean...there’s someone out there who’s better than you with a sword?”
She’d snorted then – in a manner that was as unladylike as it was un-elf-like – and drawn her blade, holding it out in front of him. “Do you know what this is?”
He was sure his eyes had to have been sparkling, immediately recognizing the blade by how it couldn’t be seen if you looked directly at the cutting edge of the blade, so thin it was as though it only existed in two dimensions. “Of course I do! That’s Uskeche’Kerym, the ‘Ghost Blade’ that you used to cleave your way through the Crawling Jungle and slay the demon lord Azuvidexus, the Ravenous Maw!”
“Correct. And do you know how I acquired it?”
His featured had twisted in confusion then, and in hindsight he was grateful at how his future teacher hadn’t laughed at his expression. “‘Acquired it’? I...I thought that you’d created it?”
Enaestari put the sword away then, putting one hand on her hip – in a way that he’d see her do countless times after that, when she began his training – as she gave him a penetrating look. “I won it,” she said plainly. “By defeating the worst of the best.”
He’d only grown more confused by that. “I...don’t understand...”
She’d hesitated for a moment, before huffing and reaching up to scratch her head. “I guess there’s no harm in telling you, since you’re going to be my student from now on.”
He almost didn’t catch that last part, the casual way she’d mentioned that she’d grant his request catching him completely off-guard. “Wait, you mean-”
“Listen closely!” The commanding tone in her voice quieted him instantly. “A long time ago, your father and I...well, let’s just say that if you ever find a magic item called a ‘well of many worlds,’ don’t use it unless you’re in really, really deep trouble, since it sends you to a random spot on a random plane of existence.”
Loraestil recalled being curious to know exactly what sort of trouble could have forced his father and Enaestari to use something that sounded so dangerous, but he’d known better than to interrupt, not wanting her to change her mind about taking him as her apprentice.
“Anyway,” she’d continued, “I’m still not sure what plane we ended up on – I think it might have been someone’s private demiplane, but I’m not sure – but we found ourselves in a wasteland, with graves as far as the eye could see. Each one was marked with a sword, and the only other thing there was a massive coliseum.”
She’d sighed then, her expression turning pensive. “I’m still not sure what would have happened if we’d tried to rob any of those grave markers – since each of the swords had magical auras so bright I almost went blind looking at them – but your father was the one who noticed that those auras got stronger the closer we got to the coliseum. And you know what we found when we finally went inside that huge arena?”
He’d shaken his head, already wide-eyed at the tale.
“Exactly one hundred people. Members of all different races – humans, elves, catfolk, lizardmen, and more than a few I didn’t recognize – all practicing their sword forms; students waiting for their master to emerge from seclusion. And all wearing white cloaks with a number on them.”
“A number?” The question had slipped out before he could help it, leaving him suddenly nervous at his breach of etiquette.
Fortunately, Enaestari hadn’t seemed to care, nodding. “Each one different, from one to one hundred. Their way of keeping track of who outranked who in their hierarchy.”
Loraestil had been spellbound by that point, imagining his father and Enaestari having fought their way through the hundred students before facing their secluded master. It was only later that he’d recall how he’d forgotten the anecdote that she’d begun the story with.
“Naturally, when I found out that they were students of the sword, I had to challenge them,” murmured his avariel instructor, seemingly lost in the memory. “I was so young and stupid then, full of ambition, just like you...”
She’d paused for a long time then, before eventually shaking her head again. “Anyway, it turned out that they welcomed challengers, but you had to fight your way up the ranks. So, I faced off against number one hundred, a human warrior who looked like he was no more than two or three decades old.”
“I bet he was nothing compared to you!” blurted Loraestil, something he still cringed to remember now.
Enaestari gave him that penetrating look again. “I barely survived.”
That had brought him up short. “Huh?”
“Oh, I won the fight, reducing him to nothing more than a patch of mist that had to return to his coffin – he was a vampire, it turned out, and had been practicing sword forms when my great-grandparents were still children at play – but I lost both of my wings, my left arm, my right eye, and ended up skewered through the aorta, in the process. I only survived to celebrate my victory because your father was there.”
Loraestil hadn’t been able to speak, stunned that the elf whom his father had described as the greatest bladesinger in generations had been so thoroughly defeated...and by the weakest member of whatever order she’d found!
“As it turned out, winning earned me a choice of prizes,” Enaestari had continued, chuckling once more. “I could either take the place of the guy I’d defeated as disciple number one hundred, or I could take one of the swords in the graves surrounding the coliseum – albeit only at the very edge, where the weakest swords were placed – and leave.”
It had taken him a moment to realize what she was hinting at, and when he finally understood his eyes had widened. “You mean... Uskeche’Kerym?”
She’d nodded, her jovial expression having taken on a slightly bitter cast. “That’s where the Ghost Blade comes from: my reward for defeating the lowest-ranked member of the strongest warrior sect that I’ve ever met.”
She’d sheathed the blade then, giving it a flashy twirl before returning it to its scabbard, her bitter expression evaporating like mist in the morning light. “And it’ll be yours someday, if you can actually refine avariel-style bladesinging into a form that can defeat me.”
If he’d been shocked before by her casually accepting him as a student, he’d been absolutely flabbergasted at that point, staring at her in openmouthed astonishment. “You...you’ll give Uskeche’Kerym...to me?!”
“A little motivation to make sure you’re as dedicated as you say you are,” she teased, throwing him a wink. “But since that might take a little time, and I don’t want you to use your motivation, I’ll let you in on a little secret once you perfect your first stance.”
“What secret?” In hindsight, Loraestil had completely lost his composure at that point, something that his teacher had always seemed to take delight in.
Case in point had been the way she’d grinned at him then. “Why it’s really called the Ghost Blade...”
That had been centuries ago, and yet even now, Loraestil couldn’t help but think of that day on those rare occasions when he had to use the Ghost Blade’s true power.
The way he was about to now.
“C’mon you knife-eared little chump!” roared the pony titan, throwing gravity-enhanced punch after punch. “Hit me with your best shot, ‘cause you’re not gettin’ up again after I hit you with mine!”
Loraestil managed to dodge around each of them, using the Stance of the Diving Roc to dodge. The form was designed for fighting in environments of extreme chaos, where footing was not only unstable, but actively chaotic. It was supposed to be used while aboard a ship in stormy weather, or atop a flying mount that was engaged in aerial combat. But it was just as useful against a foe who used gravity to draw their enemy toward their punches.
But only barely. If nothing else, Loraestil had to admit that Lex Legis had an impressive command of his musclebound physique. Despite the fact that the additional gravity was weighing him down, he seemed to be moving faster as the fight went on, swinging in a surprisingly-intricate series of punches, one leading directly into another with no sense that he was growing tired, let alone slowing down.
Not only that, but he’s deliberately stepping in a way that’s designed to maximize the damage to the landscape, as well as causing tremors right as he throws each punch. If he hadn’t spent centuries perfecting his fighting style – one that translated the freedom of aerial movement into a ground-based series of stances – then Loraestil knew he probably would have been pulled into Lex Legis’ punches and obliterated by now.
And with how the stallion seemed to be generating more gravity with each passing moment, that future would likely come to pass in the next few minutes.
Which was why Loraestil’s next attack to be the one that ended the conflict.
Even as he danced around his enemy’s furious attacks, Loraestil silently murmured the words to activate Uskeche’Kerym’s hidden power, reciting the incantation that Enaestari had taught him the day he’d finally bested her in a duel.
In his hands, the Ghost Blade began to glow softly.
The light wasn’t bright, and even if it had been full dark Loraestil knew that it would have been as dim as a candle. But what made the sight arresting was how the glow seemed to hang in the air after he’d swung the sword, leaving a phantom trail to mark its passage which lingered for several seconds. To anyone who didn’t know the truth about the sword, it probably just looked like a pretty lightshow.
But to Loraestil, it was a sign that the weapon was ready.
“You asked for my best shot, cur?”
“What, you finally remembered how to swing that thing now that it’s glowin’?” snorted the titan. “C’mon! I’m getting’ bored over here!”
“Then allow me to relieve you of your boredom. Permanently.”
“Bring it!”
Moving into the Stance of the Shrieking Jubjub – a bird whose childish name belied a fierce and deadly nature – Loraestil raised the Ghost Blade high, then rushed forward.
At the same time, Lex Legis hooted in delight and swung at him with a punch so laden with gravity that it seemed to cause the air to contort around it...and to Loraestil’s surprise, the air burst into flame an instant later, the magically-enhanced force of the blow igniting the atmosphere around it. The fires leaped out despite the inward pull surrounding the titan’s hoof, flaring into a wide corona of heat which made a raging inferno seem like a pleasant hearth in comparison.
That was wrong, Loraestil knew. He had magic items on his person to protect against heat damage, and even if they didn’t offer total immunity to high temperatures, they were still powerful enough that anything short of total immersion in lava or the breath of an ancient red dragon should have been hard-pressed to hurt him. Even then, the damage would have been vastly reduced. And yet now, a single explosion of flame felt unnaturally hot; even though he hadn’t touched it yet, he could feel his flesh already starting to burn, and knew that if he didn’t break off his attack in that moment, he’d suffer terrible injury even if he managed to avoid the punch itself...
“I won the fight... I lost both of my wings, my left arm, my right eye, and ended up skewered through the aorta, in the process.”
Enaestari’s words gave Loraestil the courage to grit his teeth, holding back a scream as he moved through the flames, feeling his flesh wither and blacken as it caught fire. Instead, he focused on avoiding the punch itself, feeling the rush as the stallion’s hoof sailed by him with the force of a falling comet as he managed to avoid its path.
Then he brought Uskeche’Kerym around.
The Ghost Blade passed directly through Lex Legis’ torso, leaving the soft glow behind as it cut directly through the stallion.
There was no resistance to the swing, as was characteristic of a sword whose blade had no thickness. But this time, Loraestil knew that it wasn’t just because of how sharp the sword was. Indeed, as he opened his scorched eyelids, he knew that there wouldn’t be an additional mark on the titan’s body.
And yet, his enemy was lying crumpled on the ground, unmoving and unseeing.
And above him was the spectral form that was Lex Legis’ benighted soul, a shocked expression on his face.
The Ghost Blade had once again lived up to its name, delivering a strike that had cut the connection between his enemy’s body and their soul.
Now all that was needed was to capture the latter before it moved off to whatever horrific afterlife awaited it. Fortunately, he had an apprentice High Mage who’d be able to take care of such paltry details now that he’d done the hard work.
Tapping his healing belt again, Loraestil gave a relieved sigh as it reduced the burns...only for it to stop before it had finished, its power expended. Grimacing, he put the issue of the unusual nature of the titan’s flames aside as he looked at his levitating compatriot. “Vysta-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as someone appeared in the middle of the battlefield.
Loraestil sensed them an instant before he saw them, a wave of pressure reaching out to bear down on him in a way that had nothing to do with gravity. It was as though everything had just grown slightly darker, the air turning colder, as a powerful sense of malevolence spread out to engulf the area, one far darker than any demon or devil that he’d ever hunted.
All of which was coming from the figure now standing in the midst of Thilaera’s summoned creatures.
He might have been called a unicorn, if that term could have been applied to something that looked as though it had emerged from a demon’s nightmares. His horn was redder than blood, and his slit-pupiled eyes glowed green, with purple flames sprouting from their outer corners. His tail was thick and fleshy, his bared teeth were sharp, and where his hooves should have been were sharp claws. Even more horrifying was his left foreleg, which was a tangled mass of barbed wires that had been twisted into an approximation of the limb it replaced.
By themselves, none of those details would have moved Loraestil much, having faced down agents of both Hell and the Abyss. But there was more to the newcomer than just his physical features.
There was an aura about him, one which made his presence impossible to ignore. It made Loraestil feel as though he was trapped in a confined space alongside the unicorn, and with every move the red-horned creature made, Loraestil was pushed further and further into a corner. The air itself seemed to congeal, as if it didn’t want to move lest it draw the unicorn’s attention. Certainly, that was the case with all of Thilaera’s summons, who were standing frozen as they stared at the intruder with wide eyes.
But he didn’t look at any of them.
Instead, he looked only at the she-wolf they’d been fighting.
She was in a sorry state, the black armor she’d been wearing beneath the ice golem she’d conjured around herself cracked and broken. The elementals that she’d summoned to defend herself had all been torn to shreds, and she wasn’t much better, bleeding from several small wounds and a few more serious ones, clearly on her last legs.
But alone of all the people on the battlefield, she smiled as she caught sight of the monstrous equine, stumbling forward to meet him.
He was at her side in an instant, catching her in a surprisingly gentle motion, holding her up as though she weighed nothing at all, making her one remaining eye sparkle.
“Missed you, Lex,” she murmured.
And suddenly, Loraestil realized two things.
The first was that he’d made the most humiliating error a hunter could make: he’d mistaken someone else for his quarry. Now he knew why the musclebound stallion he’d just defeated had called himself “Burly” before!
And second, that his true target’s arresting presence had caused Loraestil to overlook a crucial detail:
Lex Legis hadn’t come to the battlefield by himself.
Having changed into her hybrid form, Nenet could feel herself starting to panic as the nine-tailed fox in her arms didn’t respond. Although there were no external marks on her, the raspy, shallow breathing coming from the kumiho made it clear that she was in bad shape, blood trickling from the corner of her muzzle.
Wracked with guilt over having been the one to injure her friend so badly, Nenet looked over at Yotimo. “Help her!”
The old adlet was already jogging toward them, putting Bloodletter away as he crouched down to examine the fox. Putting a hand to her throat, her grimaced, and the sight made Nenet’s heart clench. But she stayed silent as Yotimo peeled one of Mei Li’s eyelids back, his frown deepening.
He performed several other quick checks, before sighing and shaking his head. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Wh-what does that mean?!”
“It means that she’s injured in a way I don’t know how to heal,” answered Yotimo softly. “She doesn’t have a broken bone or a ruptured organ, or any sort of wound that I stitch up or treat with a poultice.”
Her lower lip trembling, Nenet looked over at where Yura was still sitting with her eyes closed. “What about-”
“I’m a shaman, not a healer, child,” answered Akna’s grandmother, her voice soft. “I know all sorts of remedies and herb lore, but I don’t have magic that can close wounds and mend injuries like your master.”
Nenet wanted to berate both of them, to snarl and curse and rage at the two of them for being so useless, but the words wouldn’t leave her throat.
She knew who was really to blame for what had happened to Mei Li.
“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, pulling her friend closer, hating that all she could do was apologize. “I’m so sor-”
“Don’t cry.”
The words came to her ears a millisecond after her connection to Lex suddenly burst open in her mind. In an instant, she knew that he was back in this world, and was only a short distance away, in the same place as Solvei. She could feel the emotions radiating off of him, the same guilt and shame that she was feeling, except his was joined with a murderous desire to punish the ones who had attacked them.
But the voice she’d heard hadn’t been Lex’s.
“Everything’s going to be alright.”
The speaker was a woman, appearing at Nenet’s side as if out of nowhere. Her silver eyes were warm and compassionate. Her smile was soft and heartfelt. And her body was statuesque in the extreme, composed of curves that would have caused any bystander – male or female – to stop what they were doing and stare as she walked by.
Though the fact that her nakedness was hidden only by her hair – the same glistening silver as her eyes – would likely have been part of that.
In fact, the sheer volume of hair that spilled down from her head was enough to make Nenet gape, stunned as much by the incredible mass of it as by the unknown woman’s sudden appearance. Adagio had been quite proud of the long and lustrous mane that she’d sported, but this lady put her to shame!
Nor had the newcomer simply been content to let her argent locks simply fall from her head without adornment. Instead, she’d wrapped them around her body in complex patterns, winding them around her arms, legs and torso in dizzying configurations that turned her hair into a skintight outfit, albeit one which hugged her so tightly and left so many bare patches of creamy skin that she might as well have gone unclad for how little was hidden from view. Even then, she still had plenty of tresses to spare, allowing a long curtain of knee-length loose hairs to float behind her like a voluminous cloak.
Smiling, the mystery woman crouched down so that she was at eye-level with Nenet, holding one hand out. The gesture sent a rush of warmth through the sphinx, as though she’d just been enfolded in a soft blanket, suddenly feeling safe and secure in a way that she hadn’t experienced since Lex had left. “Your name is Nenet, right?” continued the beauty. “I’m Agapay, and I was-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as the elementals that Solvei had summoned, registering the newcomer as an intruder, turned and charged at her.
But they hadn’t even made it halfway to her before a piercing shriek came from above.
Nenet was barely able to make out the shape of an enormous raven, its wingspan longer than she was tall, before it slammed into the elemental that was closest to Agapay, knocking it to the ground with such force that the snow was kicked up by the impact, forming a thick cloud that obscured everything.
“Pathetic,” came a throaty female voice from within the sudden flurry. “Foes like these aren’t worthy of opposing me.”
A sudden gust of wind dispelled the snow squall, revealing that the elemental had been completely smashed.
But standing in the center of what had been its chest wasn’t a gigantic raven.
Instead, it was a knight.
Nenet couldn’t think of any other way to describe her. Fully six feet tall – almost a foot taller than Agapay – the second arrival was clad from head to toe in thick armor, completely hiding her features beneath the metal covering. The armor itself was completely blackened, as though it was made from cast iron rather than steel, and Nenet could see the powerful magical aura radiating off of it, almost as notable as the myriad spikes and sharp edges that adorned each ridge.
Nor did the magic or the menace that it exuded hide the armor’s exquisite workmanship. The ridges on the cuirass were folded over each other, each one longer than they were wide, tapered slightly at the tip, giving the entire thing a look of feathers. The sabatons were forged to resemble talons, as were the gauntlets. The helmet was shaped like a stylized raven, its beak serving as the visor.
Most notable of all was the cloak that hung from the figure’s back. Pure black, it wasn’t made of fur or fibers, but was instead made entirely of glossy black feathers, forming a backdrop like folded wings against the decorative feathers of her armor.
The remaining elementals didn’t seem to care, charging the figure with their tremendous fists raised.
But the armored figure didn’t move an inch, simply snorting coldly as the icy giants bore down on it.
When the closest one got within range, it threw a heavy punch, to which the armored figure simply lifted its left arm...
And Nenet’s jaw dropped as she saw a shield appear where none had been before.
But it wasn’t the sudden appearance of the shield that was surprising.
Rather, it was the design of it that made the sphinx’s eyes go wide.
After all, she’d heard the term “tower shield” before – having read it in one of Adagio’s books – but she’d never imagined one which was an actual tower.
Fully nine feet tall and five feet wide, the shield looked as though someone had constructed a miniature tower and then torn one side off of it. There were crenellations at the top, corners at each edge where the wall started to turn, and even arrow slits on the side, one of which was being used as a handhold by the armored figure. And just like the armor she wore, the tower shield was practically dripping with magic.
Which made it no surprise at all when the elemental’s punch didn’t make so much as a dent.
“I’ll commend you on your bravery,” rumbled the armored woman. “But you’re no match for me!”
Her last statement ended in a roar as she pivoted at the hip, pulling her shield back as she brought her other arm around. And just like the shield had appeared out of nowhere, she was now holding a sword where a moment ago her gauntlet had been empty.
The sword’s blade was blackened to match her armor. Its edge was straight, with the tip being hooked slightly. And its length was equal to that of the tower shield, being only slightly less wide, and glimmering with even more magic.
Amidst her confusion, Nenet suddenly felt very sorry for the ice elemental.
A moment later it was so much broken ice and powder, its fellows joining it as they rushed at the menacing figure – compelled by the instructions Solvei had given them – and were similarly dispatched.
The entire affair, from when Agapay had arrived through when the elementals had been destroyed, had taken barely ten seconds.
That had been time enough, however, for Yotimo to recover from his shock and draw Bloodletter, barking a command to his warriors. A moment later they fell in and moved to encircle the armored figure, weapons drawn and pointed at her.
But none of them looked eager for a fight.
Holding her oversized sword and shield as though they weighed nothing at all, the armored woman looked the adlets over before giving a disdainful harumph. “Weaklings, all of you,” she pronounced contemptuously. “No wonder His Highness sent me here to guard this place.”
“Branwen, you’re scaring them,” snapped Agapay, frowning at the knight. “Calm down and put your weapons away.”
“I don’t take orders from you, harlot.” Branwen’s sneer was visible beneath her raven helmet. “By order of Queen Penelope, my only master is His Highness, Lex Legis.”
That was enough to shock Nenet back to her senses. “Lex sent you?!”
The raven helmet turned her way then, and the air seemed to grow colder as Nenet saw two white eyes – the irises the same color as the sclera, making the pupils seem like dots within a pale sea – come to rest on her. “You will refer to him with respect, wench, or I’ll-”
“You’d best not finish that sentence,” cut in Agapay. “Unless you want our lord to hear that you threatened one of the people he wanted us to help.”
A rumbling growl came from within the armor, but Branwen offered no rebuttal. Instead, she slammed the bottom of her shield against the ground. Immediately, it began to grow in place, forcing Yotimo and his warriors to fall back as its width tripled, its height doubling in an instant. Nor did it stop there, as the missing walls grew from its sides, extending outward and surrounding Branwen before the final wall grew between them, a thick steel door forming in its center...which swung open a moment later.
It was immediately followed by the sound of a second portal opening, this one being a trapdoor located on the roof of the building. A moment later, Branwen looked down at Agapay from behind the crenellations.
“Heal His Highness’s tarts, and then bring the two of them within,” ordered the raven-knight, before looking out at the wide-eyed adlets. “And if any of you try to breach the walls of this keep once they’re inside, your blood will stain my blade!”
Agapay sighed, giving Nenet an apologetic look. “I’m sorry about her. Let’s get your friend – Mei Li, isn’t it? – fixed up, and then we can talk.”
But despite the sense of calming serenity coming off of the hair-clad woman, Nenet leaned away from her as she clutched Mei Li to her chest protectively. “Who are you people?! What are you?! How do you know Lex, and why-”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, calm down.” Agapay held both of her hands up. “I promise I’ll explain everything, but please, let me heal her first.”
“I...” Wavering just for a moment, Nenet felt almost dizzy at what was going on, suddenly overcome with exhaustion as her confusion grew worse than she could handle-
It’s alright, Nenet. I sent those two. They work for me, now.
Master! Lex’s voice in her mind was more comforting than whatever strange aura surrounded Agapay, causing a rush of relief to go through her. What’s happening?! I don’t know what’s going on or what to do, and...Mei Li...
I know. I received her message. The remorse she felt from him spiked then, but just for a moment. Then his feelings settled into resolve. Once I finish things here, I’ll make up for the pain my negligence has caused you all. Until then, let those two help.
She wanted to say that she understood, or that she was still angry at him, or that she felt horrible for what she’d done to Mei Li, or any of a hundred other thoughts that went through her head at that moment. But one question overpowered them all.
Is Solvei okay?
She is. And I won’t let anything else happen to her.
His declaration made the tension in Nenet’s chest ease, and she managed a smile, even though she knew he couldn’t see it, holding Mei Li out toward Agapay. Just be careful that nothing happens to you, either.
I will.
She didn’t say anything else, watching as the silvery-haired woman put a hand on the vixen’s forehead. A soft light instantly surrounded the kumiho, and a moment later her eyes fluttered open. “Nngh, Elder Sister? I-, huh?!”
Her eyes going wide as she caught sight of the unfamiliar face and the equally unfamiliar fortification in the background, Mei Li staggered back, returning to her human form. “What...?”
“I’m your ally,” cut in Agapay. “My name is Agapay, and I’m a chasmalim. What you’d call an angel of passion. By order of my patron, Agrat, Lex Legis holds my exclusive contract. So long as he does, his desires are my desires, and right now what he desires is for you to be safe and protected.”
“Which is all the more reason to hurry and move them inside,” rumbled Branwen from atop the keep, gesturing impatiently at the open door below.
Agapay sighed. “That’s Branwen. She’s a vilderavn, an Unseelie knight of the Autumn Court-”
“In service to Her Majesty, Queen Penelope La Gard, who has ordered me to serve as His Highness Lex Legis’s adjutant,” finished Branwen. “Now get inside before I haul you there myself!”
“She takes her duties to her queen very seriously,” explained Agapay, the angel ushering Mei Li and Nenet toward the open door of the keep.
Mei Li paused on the way, glancing in the direction Solvei had gone, and Nenet knew that she was telepathically communicating with Lex as well. A moment later, Mei Li smiled softly, then continued to let herself be escorted toward Branwen’s fortress. “How did the two of you come into our husband’s service?”
“Ah.” Agapay blushed, a shudder running through her. “That’s an...interesting story...”
None of the lesser titans had come back with him.
That had been entirely within Lex’s expectations. Each of them were planar powers in their own right, even if minor ones, and had responsibilities and schemes to match. Even Almina – whose life in the City of Glass had effectively ended when he’d taken her virginity – still needed to head back and put her affairs in order before she was formally disowned. Nor had any of the others lacked for schemes to manage, duties to be performed, servants to oversee, and numerous other tasks that needed to be tended to.
But by that same token, none had been willing to simply cut ties with him after he’d finished with them. Even if they knew nothing about what had happened to Adagio, they were all still in desperate straits for their own reasons, and learning that their ill-considered investment in the Siren was going to earn them nothing had only made that worse. Combined with how he’d just proven his strength by easily besting all of them – physically, magically, and carnally – all seven had been quite eager to formally establish working a working relationship with him.
Which meant that, with the pleasure concluded, it had been time to get down to business.
There, too, Lex had taken full advantage of them.
After all, he had no further use for them now that he knew they couldn’t help him recover Adagio’s soul. But each of them was highly motivated in convincing him to help improve their respective circumstances, knowing that a titan as powerful as him could potentially do a great deal to assist them. Combined with how they couldn’t dangle sex in front of him as an incentive – he’d already had his fill of that from them, and could easily summon them for more whenever he wanted – they’d all been highly motivated to cut favorable bargains, striving to outdo each other in terms of what they could offer him.
In the end, Lex had struck deals with each and every one of them, all heavily lopsided in his favor. The specifics had been different for each one, save for two points of commonality.
The first had been that each of them would assign a liaison to remain with him. After having allowed Adagio to run free with the aristeia they’d given her, none of the lesser titans had been willing to make another agreement without assigning someone to look out for their interests.
Of course, even if Lex hadn’t been able to read their minds and see into their futures, he would have known they were lying. Having spent most of his mortal life formulating a comprehensive methodology of governance, the fact that these “liaisons” were meant to serve as spies – monitoring his actions and reporting back to their respective mistresses – had been pathetically obvious. But that hadn’t bothered him in the slightest; given how easily he had overcome their superiors, Lex had no doubt that he could keep their agents in line. Even if he couldn’t use the Charismata on them, controlling them wouldn’t be difficult.
It helped that all seven of their designated agents had enthusiastically consented to his placing a suite of spells over them, ranging from compulsions to monitoring to conditional curses, and several others. He’d been slightly surprised by how readily they’d submitted to what had essentially been bondage, but reading their minds had revealed the reasons behind their eagerness.
All seven had their own agendas. Some were ambitious – hoping he’d come to value them over their mistress, helping to supplant her – while others were treacherous, thinking that he’d let his guard down at some point and give them an opportunity to seize on some advantage they could use to manipulate him. Several, to his disgust, were hoping to become pregnant, eager to bear the spawn of a powerful titan, something which had reminded him far too much of Harrowing Ordeal’s desire to breed Aria.
None of those, however, had been reason enough for him to disqualify them from entering his service. Entangled in his magic, he now had seven powerful new servants, each one with considerable magic of their own. They weren’t trustworthy, but Lex knew if he couldn’t manage that, then he had no right to try and govern an entire nation, since foreign entities would always have their own schemes that he’d need to deal with.
And of course, he’d also gained seven supernaturally beautiful outlets he could use if the inner beast that was his libido went on a rampage again.
But that was for later. For now, he held Solvei close as he glanced at the enemies she’d been fighting.
They were all recovering from their shock at his sudden appearance, and his foresight told him that they’d resume attacking momentarily.
He didn’t intend to give them a chance.
Dima, Yamini, deal with those empyreal animals.
I can handle them myself! spat Yamini, her striped tail twitching as flames began to sprout along her body.
I’ll wash them all away before you have a chance, cat, snickered Dima, the water she kept around herself already starting to surge.
Lex ignored their bickering. Sirrush, Spice, focus on the eladrin.
Ooh, this’ll be fun! squealed Spice, the succubus sounding delighted by the assignment he’d given her. I can’t wait to introduce them to Sugar!
I’d rather kill the elves, hissed Sirrush, claws flexing as her scaley tail thrashed. Say I can gut them!
They’re too strong for you, responded Lex, paying no attention to her outraged squawk before turning to the last member of his band. Carnelia.
I’m yours to command, lover, answered the brachina – that was apparently how “pleasure devil” was pronounced in Infernal – with a coy smile. Just tell me what you want me to do.
Lex’s eyes slid over to where Burly’s soul – he’d learned the stallion’s name from scanning Solvei’s memories just now, able to pull them from her mind as easily as he could her thoughts – was hovering over his body, trying to force its way back in. Handle that stallion before he becomes even more of a nuisance.
The redhead gave him a charming smile and a saucy wink as she adjusted her glasses. Consider it done. But what are you going to do in the meantime?
Lex didn’t answer immediately, instead glancing at Thilaera, Loraestil, and Vystalaran in turn...frowning as his gaze lingered on that last one.
I’m going to test out my new equipment.
That had been the second point of commonality in the deals he’d struck with the lesser titans: that each of them give him at least one magical item of considerable power.
And now, it was time to put the seven treasures he’d received to use.
All around him, Loraestil could see the monsters that Lex Legis – the real Lex Legis, not that oversized lug who apparently called himself “Burly” – had brought with him were running wild, turning the battlefield into a disaster area.
The eladrin – celestial cousins of the elves, being planar entities that were both fey and empyreals at the same time – that Thilaera had summoned were currently being pressed hard by two of Lex Legis’s monsters.
The first was a creature that made his blood boil to look at it, recognizing one of the misbegotten traitors to elvenkind known as the drow. Although her proportions were pleasing in and of themselves, the ebony cast of her skin was an outward reflection of the malice that he knew all of their kind harbored within, broken only by her red eyes and milk-white hair.
Far more disturbing were the parts of her that were draconic, however. While her overall shape was that of a humanoid, even a casual glance made it clear that she was of particularly misbegotten parentage, her arms being covered with pitch-black scales from the elbows down, ending in vicious, oversized claws. Her legs were much the same, being draconic below her knees. Even stranger were the arrangement of scales around her torso, spreading across her chest and her groin like a makeshift bikini, the upper part connecting to where a pair of leathery wings emerged from her back, while the lower portion connected to where a tail emerged from just above her backside.
Moreover, none of the limbs were just for show, as she tore into the numerous eladrin facing her, ignoring the wounds she took as scimitars left jagged cuts across her body and rays of energy slammed into her with explosive force. Instead, she screamed in rage, wings flapping as she threw herself forward on all fours, looking more like a wild beast than a person.
“WHEN YOUR FECKLESS GODS RECLAIM YOUR SOULS,” she screamed, ripping the head off of one eladrin as she gutted another, “TELL THEM THAT IT WAS SIRRUSH THAT SLEW YOU!!!”
She didn’t stop as she made her declaration, pausing just long enough to cast a spell – one that Loraestil knew was designed to wrap her in layers of force armor – before roaring as she threw herself toward another group of eladrin.
Nearby, another of the titan’s doxies was advancing on the rest of the celestial elves. Like her counterpart, this one was clearly an unnatural being, being a comely female humanoid with wings and a tail.
But that was where her resemblance to that “Sirrush” creature ended.
This creature was a succubus, a sex demon; the long, thin tail with the heart-shaped protrusion at the end made her foul nature quite clear to an experienced hunter such as himself, as did the mauve-colored bat wings and small horns protruding from her auburn hair.
But even for a creature as foul as a demon, this particular succubus was exceptionally disgusting, her body looking like that of a girl still on the cusp of womanhood.
Barely five feet tall, her wide eyes and petite frame contrasted sharply with her rounded hips and swollen bust, as though she were still in the process of maturing. Moreover, she’d dressed in a way that seemed designed to heighten the incongruity, wearing a childish dress that looked slightly too small for her, the ruffled skirt not quite making it down far enough to reach the top of her stockings while the top had one more button undone than was proper, showing just a hint of burgeoning decolletage.
It was enough that a male of any race would have instinctively given her an appreciative look, only to feel guilty about it a moment later.
That was entirely an illusion, Loraestil knew. Succubi had the ability to alter their looks, and could change their proportions along with other aspects of their physique. Her youthful appearance was nothing more than a façade meant to make everyone around her uncomfortable. Such unpleasantness was like nectar to a demon.
And she played it up as she giggled and waved cheerfully at the eladrin rushing toward her, her wide eyes and broad smile telegraphing her lack of concern that her enemies knew what she was and wouldn’t hesitate to cut her down.
“Hi everybody!” she cheered, sounding for all the world like an exuberant schoolgirl eager to make new friends. “My name’s Spice, and I’m so happy to meet you all!”
Raising her hands over her head, she made a pirouette, deftly avoiding the incoming volley of spells and energy beams aimed at her. “Let me introduce you to my bestest friend in the whole wide world: Sugar!”
No sooner had she spoken than the air in front of her seemed to ripple, as though it were a desert mirage. The eladrin who were charging the demon saw it and swerved, looking to avoid whatever was happening-
But they didn’t have a chance as a forest of tentacles shot out from the shimmer in the air, the mottled brown appendages thick and fleshy and covered in filmy fluid. Immediately, they latched on the nearest eladrin and began squeezing, pulling limbs in different directions even as they started to whip back and forth, slamming their victims into the ground and each other.
A moment later the rest of the creature came through the distortion in space, revealing even more tendrils, all undulating wildly atop a body that was – except for its four stumpy, elephantine legs – completely hidden beneath the numerous flailing, boneless appendages. All of which lashed out to capture more eladrin.
“Aw, Sugar, don’t be like that!” giggled Spice, even as the creature ripped its victims into bloody chunks. “Everyone just wants to get to know you better-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as several tentacles whipped out and curled around Spice’s small body, dragging her toward its humongous bulk.
“No, Sugar! Bad! Very bad!” squealed the succubus, beating her tiny fists against the tentacles coiled around her waist and legs, sounding as though she were disciplining an unruly pet. “You let me go right this instant, or I’ll get angr-MMGH!”
Her admonishment was cut off as she was abruptly deposited in the center of “Sugar’s” body, where a large number of smaller tentacles immediately went to work, wrapping around all of her limbs and immobilizing them even as a larger one – with a notably blunt head – forced its way into her mouth. Several more bulbous extremities, along with a few that had toothless orifices at their end, began worming their way beneath her clothes, causing the succubus to shriek and struggle even as her eyes rolled back in her head, her muffled cries taking on a decidedly erotic tone.
Sugar didn’t seem to care, continuing to violate its summoner even as it stomped across the battlefield, looking for more eladrin to tear apart.
Nor was it the only reinforcement that Lex Legis’s women had called.
“Is that all you’ve got?!” roared a bipedal tiger-woman, showing off every inch of her amazonian build as she flung her attackers away, her six-and-a-half-foot tall body completely unclad save for a few bejeweled bangles that didn’t even try to protect her modesty.
Though the fact that she was literally on fire might have had something to do with her lack of clothes.
“Dima!” roared the tiger-woman, unconcerned by the flames surrounding her. “You can sit back and file your nails or something! I’ve got this under control!”
She seemed poised to make good on her claim, swinging around a longsword that, like her, was surrounded by flames, cutting down a huge hawk that had been flying in to try and spear her with its talons. Nor did she stop there, as her empty left hand shot out, projecting a ray of flames that engulfed the golden bear and the silvery rhinoceros, wailing screams coming from them as their flesh blackened and burned beneath the inferno.
By herself, she cut an intimidating figure, the flames roiling off of her as her blade and her magic cut down any who tried to approach her.
But that wasn’t the reason that the animals around her all hesitated, intimidation plain on their faces.
It was because the tiger-woman was riding a tyrannosaur.
A tyrannosaur whose body was made of fire.
Roaring like some primeval god of flames, the tyrannosaur strode across the battlefield, its maw scooping up anything that was unfortunate to get in its way, its jaws burning everything to ashes before sending its victims into its fiery gullet.
“You should talk less and fight more, Yamini,” announced a svelte woman – “Dima,” the tiger-woman had called her – with blue skin and black hair, her body having the understated curves of a dancer’s frame, one which her outfit of nothing but seashells and pearls showed off. “By my count, I’ve slain three more than you.”
She flicked a hand out then, unleashing a torrent of highly pressurized water that cut the obsidian badger in half, the creature not even having time to scream as it was killed. Nor did Dima stop there, as the trident she casually wielded in her other hand shot out to impale one of Thilaera’s more recent summons, a gorilla with green fur. “Correction, five more than you.”
Her statement was greeted by a loud clacking from the giant crab she stood atop. It was the size of a small building, but that was less noticeable than the fact that its body was made of water, its form rippling with every motion that it took. Said motions were numerous, as it scuttled across the battlefield in quick motions, claws scissoring out to bisect anything that came within its reach.
The sight made Dima smirk. “I guess cats really are as lazy as they say, for you to fall behind this much this quickly.”
Yamini bared her teeth at her watery counterpart, tail thrashing. “Keep talking like that, and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of some unfriendly fire!”
Dima sneered, one hand coming up to give her hair a disdainful toss. “You’d get your flames doused if you tried, pussycat.”
“I’ll melt you!”
“I’ll drown you!”
The two continued their bickering as they continued to tear their way through Thilaera’s forces, seemingly unstoppable-
A heavy pulse of almost made Loraestil fall over, his eyes widening as he turned back to look at where the stallion he’d cut down was slowly rising up again, rolling his neck as if to work out a crick in it.
It was enough to leave Loraestil momentarily flummoxed. Uskeche’Kerym had cut his soul from his body; that wasn’t something that simple gravity alone should have been able to touch, let alone repair! And yet now, the titanic lummox was climbing to his hooves as though he’d simply been knocked for a loop, rather than having been slain for the second time.
But Burly didn’t seem to know that, grinning as he looked around at the chaos surrounding him. “Okay, now this looks like a good time! Now, who’s the strongest one here...?”
He glanced around, and when the two of them made eye contact, Loraestil grit his teeth, moving back into the Stance of the Shrieking Jubjub as he prepared to activate the Ghost Blade’s soul-slicing power again. That wasn’t something to be used lightly, as each time he activated it, it damaged his own soul; the injury wasn’t too bad on its own, and wasn’t permanent, but using it too many times in short succession could lead to serious debilitation...even death if he overdid it. Worse, each such activation was good only for a single attack. Hit or miss, that expended the power, requiring him to take another spiritual wound in order to use it again.
But to his mild surprise, Burly only sneered as he looked at him, and then his eyes continued to wander the battlefield, coming to rest where Lex Legis was fending off magic from Thilaera and Vystalaran both as he kept his she-wolf close.
The sight caused a grin to break out on Burly’s face. “There we go.”
But he’d only taken a single step in that direction when a figure moved in front of him. “I’m afraid Prince Legis’s schedule is currently full,” murmured the newcomer. “Since you don’t have an appointment, you’ll need to wait.”
Burly cocked a brow, letting out a low whistle. “And if I say no, what’re you gonna do, toots? File a complaint?”
The object of his simplistic rambling was a redheaded woman who looked as though she’d just stepped out of a librarian’s wet dream. Her hair was done up in a tight bun against the back of her head, not one strand reaching down to the white blouse she wore, her chest generous enough that the garment necessarily left a deep well of cleavage visible. Her black pencil skirt barely reached below her waist, the fabric tight enough that it forced her to place each foot directly in front of the other as she walked forward, hose-clad legs almost rubbing against each other as her high heels click-clacked sharply across the ground.
One perfectly-manicured hand came up to adjust the small, rectangular glasses that sat on her nose, sighing as she gave Burly a disdainful look. “Then I’m afraid I’ll need to alert security.”
No sooner had she finished speaking than a trio of humanoid figures appeared behind her. Lithe and lean, they nevertheless towered above the woman, easily topping seven feet in height. More pronounced were the vicious barbs which covered them, each spine as sharp as the claws that they flexed as they moved to surround Burly, chuckling darkly.
The stallion was chuckling also. “You think a bunch of low-grade devils are gonna stop me?”
The corners of the redhead’s lips turned up ever so slightly. “Not by themselves.”
“Loraestil, we’re ready.”
The whispered murmur from Vystalaran drew the hunter’s attention away from the conflict, glancing up at the apprentice High Mage. “Do it, then.”
He gave an imperceptible nod, murmuring a reply to Thilaera, who immediately cut loose with a spell that filled the area around Lex Legis and his she-wolf with a literal sea of lightning, the bright flash blinding in its intensity. At the same moment, he noticed Vystalaran wave a staff in his direction, casting a spell.
A moment later, the future filled Loraestil’s mind.
“This spell will only reveal the next few seconds’ worth of time to you,” came Vystalaran’s voice in his ear, the words reaching his ears a few seconds after he heard them thanks to the nature of the spell. “Just remember: if you change what’s about to happen, it will show you a different vision accordingly.”
“I understand,” murmured Loraestil as he moved forward, using the chaos of the battlefield and Vystalaran’s spell to disguise his movements.
Loraestil knew that he was proud – justly so, in his own estimation – but he knew better than to let arrogance blind him. As badly as he wanted the prestige that this assignment would bring him, he wasn’t foolish enough that he couldn’t recognize that Lex Legis was a far more dangerous enemy than Burly had been. That, in turn, meant that he needed to accept the help of his allies, even if they were his inferiors.
Shared glory was still glory, and so was far better than the humiliation of having to explain to the Vice Coronal why he’d needed to be resurrected after setting out on his hunt.
Murmuring the words to activate the Ghost Blade again, Loraestil stepped into the Stance of the Breathless Yolubilis – a bird known for waiting for long stretches of time before moving to strike its prey – he slowly crept closer to the titan, eyes narrowing as he foresaw Thilaera’s lightning attack about to end. A glance upward showed that Vystalaran had withdrawn a large, ornate gemstone; the receptacle into which he’d capture the titan’s soul once it was cut loose from his body.
All that was left now was to strike the fatal blow.
Letting the future unfold before his eyes, Loraestil settled into a crouch, readying himself...
Thilaera’s stormbolts were stronger than Lex would have thought a mortal capable of.
The electricity that she summoned didn’t sweep down from the clouds, nor was it something that came from her outstretched hand. Instead, it simply erupted from the air itself, generating a massive burst of lightning that was thousands of times stronger than anything nature could have produced on its own. The bright flash swallowed him, Solvei, and several nearby eladrin that were being driven back by Spice and Sirrush. Even Thilaera herself was engulfed by the crackling release of power, buried under the sea of lightning that she’d unleashed.
But Lex had known that it wouldn’t harm the elf woman or her allies in the slightest, having foreseen that the streamers of lightning would flow along their unintended targets without hurting them. Instead, the electricity passed through them as though they were living conductors, arcing back around...directly toward him and Solvei.
This wasn’t any mere lightning spell, unleashing its power in an uncontrolled discharge that would strike everyone in the area. It was a tightly-controlled, intricately-designed battlefield enchantment, made so that it could be unleashed into the midst of a chaotic engagement while still only harming the individuals its caster wanted killed. Everyone else would be spared, no matter where they stood in relation to the spell’s radius.
As far as war magic went, it was an impressive piece of work.
But the treasures Lex had received from the lesser titans he’d subdued were far more impressive.
Ah! yelped Solvei as Lex pulled her close. M-Master?! What-
Hold still.
It was to Solvei’s credit that she obeyed immediately, a single shudder passing through her as she entrusted herself to him completely.
Then the lightning swept over them both.
To no effect whatsoever.
Thilaera’s spell was strong enough to overwhelm any conventional spell of electrical resistance. Even with the innate resilience that his titan status granted him, Lex knew that he still would have been injured by that attack. Solvei critically so.
But as the tendrils of electricity raced toward them, the single scale that Lex had placed on his collarbone – a coin-sized item which was easily overlooked – suddenly flashed blue. In an instant, it spread out to cover his entire body, azure scales sliding out from it one after another faster than the eye could follow, until he was completely covered in them. And, as he forced additional power into it, the squamous covering continued to spread, wrapping around Solvei until she was covered from head to tail, making them look like a pair of sky-colored dragons that were embracing.
And when the lightning struck them a millisecond later, it played along the blue scales helplessly, unable to so much as scorch a single one of them.
But that was only to be expected. Against the might of the Pentachromatic Armor that Lex had received from Bida – a powerful artifact created from five scales, one from each of the elder dragons that the goddess Tiamat had selected to be her mates – Thilaera’s stormbolts were nothing more than noisy flashes of light.
A few seconds later the lightning ended, the magic which kept it going expiring. The Pentachromatic Armor immediately retracted, and Solvei stumbled slightly as Lex released her, a dazed expression on her face. “That-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as chanting came from above.
Glancing upward, Lex pushed Solvei away suddenly, getting her clear just as Vystalaran’s spell took effect.
Immediately, a translucent hand twice Lex’s size appeared next to him, rushing forward to wrap its fingers around him before squeezing down with enough force that even diamonds would have been pulverized instantly.
Lex didn’t so much as glance at it as the monstrous digits curled around him, instead staring up at Vystalaran coldly.
But despite his lack of reaction, the dark red band of metal around the first talon of his right foreleg – the treasure he’d received from Jezebel – glowed brightly. Immediately, a powerful aura rose up, as axiomatic as it was malevolent, accompanied by a red light that was literally hellish. It washed over Lex harmlessly before engulfing the massive hand, which immediately went slack, twisting and shaking as though it had suddenly become palsied.
“A Ring of Perdition!” Vystalaran’s brows rose as he watched his spell fall apart, unable to withstand the counterattack by an artifact that was supposed to only be found among the ranks of Hell’s nobility. “How do you have that?!”
“You should be more concerned for yourself,” replied Lex, rising up to point balefully at the levitating mage.
Despite not making any outward sign that he was casting, Vystalaran’s eyes immediately widened, and he started weaving a counterspell. But a second later Lex’s magic slammed into him, invisible but unstoppable, and he hurtled backward as though struck by a meteor, his face pale as he coughed up repeated mouthfuls of blood.
A short distance away, Solvei cocked her head. She wasn’t entirely sure what was going on – Lex’s sudden reappearance was reassuring, but the allies he’d brought with him had thrown her for a loop, to say nothing of the new gear he had – but the way he was acting now struck her as oddly passive.
While she hadn’t seen his fight with Kryonex, she’d witnessed his battles with Hvitdod, Sissel, Prevarius, and numerous other enemies. In those fights, Lex had always done his best to seize the initiative, coming up with aggressive plans of attack and doing his best to push his foes into a corner, as well as fighting viciously when he found himself backed into one.
But now, even though she could feel killing fury bubbling up from him, it didn’t seem to manifest in the aggressiveness she would have expected. He wasn’t roaring threats at the elves, nor were black crystals erupting from the ground around him. Even the single counterattack he’d directed against Vystalaran just now had seemed almost perfunctory, as though he’d done it because it was expected of him rather than because he was out for blood.
Not to mention that he hadn’t even bothered to bring Belligerence out.
It didn’t make sense to her at all.
She had no further time to ponder it, however, as she saw Loraestil suddenly leap out at Lex from behind.
Solvei had no idea how he’d gotten that close without her noticing; it was as though he’d somehow faded into the background, making her overlook him despite knowing how dangerous the elf was. Worse, the blade in his hands was glowing softly.
Just like when it had cut Burly down for the second time.
Master, look out! she called telepathically, even as she raised an ice wall between Lex and Loraestil. She had no illusions that it would be able to stop the elf; not when he’d twice felled the enemy she’d barely been able to scratch, but if she could just slow him down for a moment-
But she couldn’t even do that much as Loraestil simply murmured a word in that musical language of his, causing his boots to shine with a glow of magic. Then he took another step, as though meaning to plunge face-first into the ice wall as he raised his sword-
And then he vanished, appearing right next to Lex as he brought the two-dimensional blade down toward the unicorn’s neck.
Something’s wrong.
The feeling of unease that had gripped Lex ever since he’d arrived on the battlefield was growing worse. It wasn’t his trans-temporal sense warning him of some hazard in his future, nor was it some sort of mismatch in what his various forms of sensory input were telling him. As far as he could determine, everything was as it should be.
And that was the problem.
It had been because of the elven pantheon that he’d needed to engage Kryonex in a fight. While normally a god would never attack the faithful of another god directly like that – such a thing being an act of war akin to a head of state trying to murder another nation’s ambassador – political pressure from the elves had forced the other members of the pony pantheon to keep the Night Mare from intervening.
Apparently, raising him to titanhood ran the fringes of violating an agreement the pony gods had with the elven deities, who were both more numerous and more powerful. To the Night Mare’s contemporaries, his fight with Kryonex had been little more than a test, needing to overcome the demigod in order to show the pony pantheon that he was enough of an asset to be worth potentially provoking the stronger group of gods that were the elven deities.
Of course, the so-called “test” had gone markedly awry, leaving him with no alternative but to invoke his goddess’s aid when Adagio’s interference had resulted in a monster far worse than a demigod running amok. But her aid had only been to rein the void creature in, and while it had resulted in his gaining a powerful new weapon, he had still dealt the finishing blow to Kryonex on his own, without any further assistance from the Night Mare.
All of which should have earned him the rest of the pantheon’s approval, at least insofar as standing up to the elven gods went.
And yet, the three elves that had shown up here – apparently looking for him, according to Solvei’s memories – were provoking no reaction whatsoever from the Night Mare.
Lex felt highly confident that the barbed wire which now made up his left foreleg had no less of a connection to the goddess than the strands which had once wrapped around his flesh and blood limb. If she was intent on warning him of something which would potentially have upset her – or even pleased her – then the tangled strands should have reacted accordingly.
And for all that the Night Mare championed self-reliance and personal strength, she was also a deity of loyalty, who would always be there for her faithful. Which was why Lex couldn’t fathom why she was being silent now. Lex knew her well enough to be certain that she’d begrudge the elven gods whatever they were up to now.
These three elves were obviously here as part of some sort of ploy. But without knowing more about their gods, their pantheon’s structure, and the nature of their deities’ relationship with the pony gods, he could only form imperfect guesses as to the specifics.
Given that they had come looking for him specifically, but seemed – based on everything he’d seen so far – far too weak to pose any sort of serious threat to him, the likely explanation was that they were sacrificial pawns, meant to be cut down by him so that the elven gods could then cite his actions as justification to...what? Demand that he be handed over to them for punishment? Leverage his so-called wrongs for political concessions from the Night Mare? Go to war with the pony pantheon altogether?
There was something here that he was missing; some crucial piece of information that he hadn’t ascertained yet.
And of course, none of that took into account Burly Brawl’s presence here.
It hadn’t escaped Lex’s notice that Solvei had overheard the bulky earth stallion mention that someone named “Grimmy” had informed him about what had happened here.
While it was possible that was someone else entirely, hearing that name had made Lex immediately think of Grim Darklight, the individual who was – according to what he’d been told by White Wraith and Sanguine Disposition – not only the head of the Night Mare’s temple in Viljatown, making him a high-ranking member of her faith, but had also constructed some sort of artificial Charismata.
Sanguine Disposition had warned him that this other pony might view him as a rival; was his having sent Burly Brawl here proof of that?
There were too many questions, and not enough answers.
Which meant that Lex couldn’t afford to make a careless mistake. Not when the consequences could potentially have divine repercussions. That was why he’d assigned the retinue he’d brought back with him to not only do most of the fighting, but to focus on the summoned creatures, waiting to see what response it had provoked, not from the elves but from the Night Mare.
But all he’d received was silence.
That had been the case again when he’d been attacked by Thilaera. And even just now, when he’d cautiously lashed out at Vystalaran, hitting the mage with an attack that he knew wouldn’t be enough to kill him.
And yet there was still nothing; the barbed wire that made up his foreleg hadn’t so much as twitched.
The same way it hadn’t when he’d twisted his communion spell in order to contact Kara. Or when he’d subsequently made a deal with the love goddess to let her be worshiped in Equestria.
It was too much for him to overlook. The Night Mare clearly hadn’t withdrawn her favor from him – he still had the Charismata, and was still receiving divine spells – but at the same time, it was like she was ignoring him completely. That had made sense when he’d fought Kryonex, but not now.
Something was seriously wrong.
Master, look out!
Solvei’s warning came almost at the same time as Loraestil appeared right next to him, his glowing sword already descending in a deadly arc.
The weapon was a powerful one; even with a split-second glance, Lex could see that it was heavily ensorcelled, more powerful than Belligerence had been before the Night Mare had bound that void creature into it.
More than that, he hadn’t been able to foresee the attack. Apparently Loraestil had some sort of spell on him that was artificially recreating a limited version of his foresight – similar to how Sanguine Disposition’s reality-bending spell that he’d used to make sure the Libram of Ineffable Damnation would come to him was a weak facsimile of divine reality-alteration – which was interfering with his ability to see what the elf was about to do.
Which meant that it wasn’t just gods whose futures were beyond what he could detect; other individuals with foresight were similarly blind to his trans-temporal awareness...though that likely worked in reverse as well.
In the same moment that Lex took note of that, Loraestil’s sword struck him.
But not on his neck.
Instead, Lex watched as the elf’s face twisted in shock, staring at where he’d blocked the blade...with a single, upraised talon.
“Impossible!” blurted the elf, eyes bugging out and mouth hanging open in shock. “Nothing can stop Uskeche’Kerym! How-”
Then he looked past Lex, and his next question died on his lips.
But Lex didn’t bother to look behind him, able to feel that the Soulsaver Halo which he had received from Agrat – the massive, five-foot diameter ring of light appearing upright behind him rather than over his head – had manifested.
“Uskeche’Kerym, is it?” murmured Lex, his tone one of disinterest. “That ‘Ghost Blade’ of yours is a powerful weapon. But not powerful enough.”
“This can’t be!” shrieked Thilaera, staring at the halo with a thunderstruck expression. “That ring you wear is of Hell, and your armor is made of a dark dragon! No one who uses such things could possibly possess the favor of the celestial realms!”
“Don’t ascribe your own limitations to me,” scoffed Lex, flicking his claw and knocking the Ghost Blade out of Loraestil’s hands, causing it to spin through the air as he knocked it away.
Behind him, the Soulsaver Halo vanished, disappearing back into his aura until it was needed again.
Loraestil fell back, immediately moving to retrieve the blade, even as Thilaera and Vystalaran both began casting again.
But Lex didn’t bother to pay attention to them, instead silently invoking his communion spell, this time without altering its intended recipient. He needed to find out why the Night Mare was suddenly ignoring him, as well as the significance of the elves here, before things spiraled further out of control.
A moment later Lex felt his spell connect, and-
Who are you?!
-he froze, shocked into immobility.
The voice that he’d heard just now had been the Night Mare’s...but at the same time, not.
Instantly, the barbed wire that made up his left foreleg began to writhe of is own accord, buzzing angrily. In an instant, its cohesion came undone, no longer recognizable as a limb as the individual strands began to separate, waving about in agitation. They curled around his neck, his legs, and his tail, the razor edges easily slicing through his defenses.
And in his mind, the familiar and yet alien voice resounded again.
Loraestil could only stop and stare in shocked fascination as Leg Legis’ foreleg of wire seemingly turned against him.
Nor was he the only one, as all fighting in the area came to a stop, the horror of what was happening being too great for anyone to ignore.
In an instant, the monstrous unicorn was engulfed in whirling strands of jagged metal, his limb having unraveled in order to let its component wires coil around him and twist viciously, spilling his blood across the ground as bloody gibbets of flesh went flying.
“What’s happening to him?!” he murmured, letting his whisper spell carry his voice to Vystalaran and Thilaera. They were an apprentice High Mage and a powerful priestess, respectively; surely one of them had to know what was going on! “One of you, explain this to me!”
“Could this be a backlash from his trying to use so many artifacts of different spiritual slants?” replied Thilaera hesitantly. “Having that ring and that halo at the same time would strain even a titan’s soul.”
She’d hardly finished speaking when Vystalaran chimed in. “Loraestil, what does his future look like? Is he dying or-”
“I can’t see his future!” Cursing inwardly, Loraestil gripped Uskeche’Kerym tighter, recalling how the spell he’d been imbued with had suddenly seemed to cut out as soon as he’d gone for the killing stroke a moment ago. “I couldn’t before, either! Your spell didn’t work!”
“That’s not possible,” came the immediate reply. “The only way that could happen would be if he had the same spell active, and there’s no aura to suggest-”
“LOOK!”
Thilaera’s gasp caused the conversation to cease, as Lex Legis – now little more than a bloody skeleton – suddenly staggered upright and roared, not in pain but seemingly in anger. His eyes glowed brighter, the green turning so bright that it completely filled his eyes, blotting out all else within them as the purple flames from the outer corners flared up.
And the wires wrapping around him...spread further.
Except, those aren’t the same wires, realized Loraestil a moment later, seeing that the lengths of razor metal that were spreading out across Lex now weren’t like the ones that had made up his foreleg. These new ones weren’t flowing from that same spot at the base of his shoulder. In fact, they seemed to have no point of origin at all, spreading out to cover him from seemingly nowhere.
An instant later, Loraestil revised his thoughts again as he realized that the new lengths of wire weren’t covering his body.
They were replacing it.
In an instant, Lex Legis was a creature made up entirely of barbed wire, save only for his glowing eyes.
And that was when he realized that he’d been wasting a valuable opportunity.
“Both of you, start casting your strongest enhancement spells. Make me, and Uskeche’Kerym, as powerful as you can.”
“What are you planning?”
Loraestil frowned at Vystalaran’s question, but didn’t rebuke him, certain that they were running out of time. Instead, just before he started casting one of his own spells on himself, he gave a quick reply.
“I’m going to try and cut through whatever that halo was.”
There was no more confusion. No more shock. No more anxiety.
All of those things fell away as Lex felt his body transcend flesh and blood and turn completely into barbed wire. Just like when he’d fought Kryonex, the transformation merged the various disparate aspects of his mind, leaving him clear-headed and focused despite the unpredictable crisis that was befalling him.
Immediately, he cut off his communion spell, silencing the voice that was so close to and yet so dissimilar from his goddess, which was still howling for him to identify himself.
The end of the spell did nothing to stop the wires that were rebelling against him. If anything, they seemed to lash harder, indicating that the Night Mare – or whoever it was that sounded so much like her – was further infuriated by his silencing her. Now, however, the lengths of wire that were attacking him were having a much harder time injuring him, sparks flying and tortured shrieks of metal against metal ringing out as his body was now able to resist the damage that had been tearing him apart a moment ago.
Except it’s not metal, Lex knew.
The wire that made up his foreleg was – just like the strands that had previously wrapped around his limb – a physical representation of divine power. That was why it had never mattered what spells or magic items he’d wrapped himself in; if the Night Mare wished to injure him to show her displeasure, then he would be injured simply because his magic was nowhere near enough to thwart the will of a god.
But his current body could. The same way it had allowed him to survive Kryonex’s attempt to will him out of existence, the wires that made up the rest of him were able to withstand the lashing wires of his foreleg.
Which means that the Night Mare gave me some sort of auxiliary reservoir of divine power. One that activates whenever my enemy is a god.
Except now, it was activating against the anger of...whoever’s voice he’d just heard.
It was the Night Mare’s power versus the Night Mare’s power.
And it was happening at the worst possible time!
Already, Lex could sense that the elves were regrouping. And while Spice, Sirrush, Dima, and Yamini were making short work of their respective enemies, Carnelia was having a harder time than anticipated against Burly, the reinforcements she’d summoned barely able to slow the massive earth stallion down. And Solvei...
Stay back!
He could foresee that she was about to fling herself against him, trying to help even though she had no idea how. It was a foolishly sentimental gesture on her part; as though her being sliced to ribbons would accomplish anything. But he could tell that his order wasn’t one she was intent on obeying, already beginning to rush forward as she screamed his name.
With a thought he used the Charismata to reach out and hold her in place-
And the wires that made up his foreleg, the incarnation of the blessing that the Night Mare had given him, suddenly slowed their attacks on his person as he channeled power through them.
Despite not having been able to foresee that, Lex didn’t waste time being surprised. Instead, he immediately channeled more power toward Solvei, layering her with defenses and protective measures. Again and again he used the Charismata, expending its power profligately, allowing each new application to overwrite the previous one as he channeled its strength to Solvei.
With each expenditure, the thrashing of his foreleg’s wires grew less and less, until they began to retract, finally reforming his foreleg as he used its power for the final time, the blessing expended until it restored itself at midnight.
Staggered by how much energy he’d thrown at her, Solvei stopped in place, and he could register bewilderment from her. Master-
He didn’t give her a chance to finish. With his mindset clear, he knew that her confusion – as well as whatever had just happened with the Night Mare – would have to wait.
Right now, he was needed elsewhere.
Carnelia swore silently as the last of the hamatula she’d summoned was dispatched by the hulking stallion she’d been assigned to stop. Useless, every single one of them.
They weren’t dead, since summoning called an astral form rather than their real self, but as far as Carnelia was concerned that was a flaw rather than a feature. Now that their consciousnesses were back in Hell, it was highly likely that those simpletons – all members of the ragtag collection of Bel’s remaining followers – would report on what was happening to Jezebel.
And if Jezebel heard that her designated representative was failing to make her look good to Lex Legis – such as by being unable to defeat one musclebound oaf – Carnelia had no doubt that she’d find herself replaced in very short order.
That wasn’t acceptable.
Not when Lex Legis was a proverbial goldmine of opportunities just waiting to be exploited.
Which meant that failing here was not an option.
Unfortunately, the block of muscle she was facing didn’t seem to agree. Bad enough he’d dispatched her minions, but she couldn’t seem to secure a foothold in his mind.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t able to get inside his head. Unlike Lex – who had effortlessly defeated her every attempt to invade his thoughts before easily invading her own in turn – this “Burly” stallion had no psychic or psionic safeguards of any kind. Even his will, while considerable in how much power it carried, was blunt and unpolished; it had all the force of a boulder hurtling down a hillside, but was just as easy to avoid for one skilled in mental manipulation.
And yet, Carnelia hadn’t been able to slow Burly down in the slightest.
Every attempt to beguile him into wanting her approval, every subliminal suggestion that he calm himself and talk things out, every attempt to leave him so enthralled by the sound of her voice that he couldn’t do anything but sit still and listen to her...all had failed.
But not because he was immune to her powers, or because he’d fought them off, or even because he was too enraged to listen to her.
Rather, he was simply bashing her magic out of his brain!
Literally, each and every time she began to weave her influence over his thoughts, he’d grimace – his face twisting in an expression that seemed to say he’d smelled something foul – and then reach up and slam his hoof against his head, not in some minor tap but in a hammer-blow that was heavy enough that she’d been able to feel the impact through the ground.
That shouldn’t have accomplished anything except to fracture his skull, and yet each time, Carnelia had felt her magic shatter under the impact.
And now, she had no one left to keep his attention while she tried to figure out how to bypass his ridiculous means of dispelling her magic.
“Don’t take this personal, toots,” snorted Burly as he strode toward her, rolling one shoulder as he spat out a glob of blood, looking more wounded from how he’d defeated her magic than from the hamatulas she’d summoned. “I know any chick who dresses like you gives it up easy, but you’re gonna hafta wait. I wanna see just how tough that titan really is, and ain’t no one gettin’ in my way.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.” Carnelia kept her face cool and impassive, one hand coming up to adjust her glasses. The gesture was designed to be eye-catching, distracting a viewer from noticing that her other hand reached behind her back, grabbing the ruby she’d secreted away in the pouch sewn into her waistband. There was more to manipulating others than simple spellwork, after all. “Prince Legis has greater concerns than indulging your barbaric impulses.”
“He ain’t gonna have a choice, cutie. Now” – he rushed her then, cocking his hoof back – “outta my way!”
But despite the juggernaut bearing down on her, Carnelia didn’t take so much as a half-step backward. Instead, she brought the ruby forward and pointed it at the stallion, focusing her magic.
Manipulation was her area of expertise, but it wasn’t all she could do!
“Burly, was it?” she replied coldly, a dim light beginning to shine from within the ruby. “How about I put you up in your own personal accommodations while you wait for Prince Legis’ schedule to open up? All expenses paid, and you can stay at long as you like.”
The magic of the binding rushed out, invisible but unstoppable. It curled around Burly like a monstrous python, pulling him – body and soul – toward the ruby. Despite herself, Carnelia couldn’t help but smirk as she saw the crude stallion stumble, before digging his hooves into the dirt with a grunt. “Or rather,” she murmured, a trickle of spiteful delight leaking into her voice, “as long as I like.”
“Hate to...break it to you, toots,” huffed Burly, muscles flexing as he fought back against the binding magic. “But they ain’t...never made a prison...that can hold...”
Carnelia didn’t answer, instead focusing on the ruby in her hand. The light within grew brighter, and Burly slid forward a few more paces. In response, he clenched his jaw, grunting loudly as he strained, veins standing out across his muscles.
Her smirk falling away at the level of resistance Burly was managing to put up – having spoken his name during the binding, it should have been almost impossible for him to resist – Carnelia put all of her concentration into her spell. This was her last resort; she could only use this particular magic once in a twenty-four hour period, and even then she’d need another gem to try this again.
Which meant that if this failed, then so had she.
She had combat training, of course; no one in Bel’s service was allowed to be poor at fighting. Even Jezebel, who was a seductress of the highest order, still had to keep up a brutal training regimen that would have killed a mortal. Nor were pleasure devils exempt from such training; there were plenty of creatures who couldn’t be manipulated – ranging from golems to alien entities from beyond the boundaries of the known planes – and so could only be fought physically, rather than psychically. Carnelia even had a weapon hidden on her person just in case things came to that.
But given how much punishment Burly had absorbed, and yet was still acting as if he didn’t feel it in the least, Carnelia couldn’t imagine being able to defeat him in his preferred method of combat.
Fortunately, it won’t come to that, she reassured herself, concentrating fully on the ruby. The binding will work, and I’ll have a useful captive. With any luck, Lex will forget about this brute’s existence, and I’ll be able-
In her hands, the ruby shattered, unable to take the strain her magic had placed on it.
“TOLD YA!” roared Burly as he rushed forward, foreleg cocked. Already, Carnelia could feel an immense sensation pulling her toward it, his hoof seeming almost to waver from how heavy it suddenly seemed, and in that moment she realized that she wouldn’t be able to block or avoid what was about to happen.
And unlike those hamatulas she’d summoned, she was completely here, which meant that if she was killed, she’d actually die.
The thought made her cringe, instinctively trying to plane-shift away. But she could tell that she wasn’t going to make it in time, being pulled forward face-first as Burly’s hoof swung out-
Suddenly, she was yanked backward, feeling someone grab her around her waist and draw her to safety even as they stepped in, palm raised...
And a shockwave rippled through the air as Lex caught Burly’s punch without flinching.
L-lover! sputtered Carnelia, shocked that he’d stepped in to save her. It would have made more sense for him to let her die; he’d pledged to Jezebel that he’d protect her, of course, but that sort of promise was pro forma nonsense. It would have been easy to say that she’d been killed because she was incompetent, and then indict Jezebel for that, accusing her of deliberately sending an inept go-between as an excuse for pressuring her for more treasures...or even severing their relationship while keeping what he’d already gained from her. Either option, Carnelia knew, was far more valuable than her own life.
And yet Lex had saved her. Why?
Oblivious to her shock, Lex – the barbed wire that made up his body already receding, leaving him flesh and blood once more – glared at Burly.
“You want to fight me that badly?” intoned the titan, his voice dark.
Burly couldn’t have looked happier at Lex’s challenge, grinning like a foal who’d just found out that Hearth’s Warming had come early this year.
“Hope you don’t mind if we skip the warm-up!” bellowed the earth stallion, stepping backward to give himself some room as he began to grow in size, immediately expanding out until he was as big as a small mountain. “After all those top-heavy bimbos and simp elves, I’m ready to cut loose!”
Carnelia, fall back, ordered Lex, releasing the pleasure devil. Go stand guard over Solvei.
I...as you wish, lover. Without hesitating, Carnelia brought out her wings, a single flap of the black-feathered appendages sending her into the air and back toward where Solvei was watching the unfolding battle, still looking dazed by how rapidly things were progressing.
“C’MON TWERP!” roared Burly as he reared back on his hind legs, the air around his fore-hooves visibly warping as he gathered power in them. “LET’S SEE WHAT YOU GOT!”
He was moving before he’d even finished speaking, leaping forward so fast that he was literally a blur, the downswing of his hooves scorching the air and leaving trails of fire as he slammed into the ground.
Instantly, the earth split apart, a chasm opening up as the ground proved unable to withstand Burly’s onslaught, flames exploding outwards from the point of impact. The shockwaves radiated out in all directions, causing almost everyone who wasn’t airborne – save only for Loraestil, who immediately switched to the Stance of the Diving Roc in order to keep his footing – to go tumbling. Crashes rang out as the surrounding trees collapsed, and although the adlet village was far enough away that it was spared any destruction, everyone there let out a gasp as they felt the ground heave beneath them.
But Lex didn’t even flinch, hovering in place above the crevasse that Burly’s strike had created, unbruised and unburnt. The only move he’d made was to extend his other foreleg, having used both to catch the gigantic stallion’s double-hoofed attack. Glaring up at his enemy, Lex’s eyes narrowed as he spoke only two words.
“My turn.”
Immediately, he vanished from beneath Burly’s hooves, moving too fast to be seen.
Burly didn’t even have enough time to blink when Lex reappeared right next to his face, a low growl escaping the titan’s lips as he immediately lashed out with his claws.
Sonic booms erupted as the strikes tore into the side of Burly’s head, massive lacerations crossing his face from brow to chin in an instant, causing a swimming pool’s worth of blood to fountain out. Lex hadn’t even made physical contact with his enemy, but the damage was devastating nonetheless, causing Burly to let out a choked cry as he went stumbling back, the ground shaking from his unsteady steps.
But no one missed how the sound that had come from the antean’s lips just now hadn’t been one of pain, fear, or even of surprise.
Instead, it had been one of approval.
“NOT BAD!” laughed Burly, circling around where Lex was hovering. “HOW ABOUT WE KICK” – he stomped down hard with his back leg, causing the ground in front of him to bounce hard enough that several pieces of rubble the size of buildings were launched upward – “THINGS UP A NOTCH?!”
Without hesitating, Burly unleashed a flurry of flaming punches, striking the boulders he’d hit while they were still in midair. Although the impacts had more than enough force to reduce the barn-sized rocks to gravel, none of them took any damage from the barrage of strikes. Instead, they were sent rocketing forward so fast that they caught fire the same way Burly’s punches had, shooting directly toward Lex.
Who couldn’t dodge, since Burly’s having circled around meant that the rocks would hit Solvei if Lex didn’t stop them.
But Lex’s only reaction was to snarl as his eyes flashed and his horn lit up, his telekinetic aura appearing around the rocks as they instantly came to a stop. A second later, the fiery boulders reversed course, smashing into Burly’s hide and breaking into pieces as they battered him, the giant grunting under the assault.
Lex, however, wasn’t finished yet.
Holding one claw out, he turned it palm-up and began to close his talons. As he did so, the area around him seemed to grow colder and darker, as though he was squeezing away the very concepts of light and warmth. The tighter his grip, the worse the gloom grew, collapsing in on itself until the cold blackness was the size of a ball clutched within his talons.
With a dismissive wave of his claw, Lex sent the shadowy sphere hurtling toward Burly Brawl. It rushed forward so fast that it seemed to streak across the distance, striking the oversized stallion dead center.
The giant gave a contemptuous snort as it splashed against his chest, looking like a drop of ink that had splattered against a canvas...only to frown as the darkness suddenly spread out, expanding to cover him like a film. It crystallized in the process, radiating a coldness that froze the spirit as well as the body, causing even Solvei to shiver from the chill that it emitted. That chill grew worse as it covered more and more of the antean’s body, until he was completely sealed inside of it.
The entire process had taken only a few seconds from start to finish, Burly having become an ebony statue that no one dared to approach.
A heartbeat passed in silence.
Then a second.
Then a third.
Swallowing, Solvei’s eyes flickered between Burly’s frozen form and Lex. “Did that-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as the statue suddenly cracked.
All along its surface, fissures began to spread, and the area around them began to brighten, turning deep crimson as flames seeped from within the fractures.
All of a sudden, Loraestil’s eyes widened. “Vystalaran, do something! It’s about to-”
He didn’t have a chance to finish as the elven mage immediately dropped down from where he was hovering in the sky, already casting a spell. Thilaera, needing no further signal, immediately ran toward the pair.
A half-second later, a shimmering, multi-colored dome appeared around them, the trio obscured behind the glittering barrier.
At the same time, Lex glanced toward where his retinue was finishing off the elves’ forces. All of you, converge on Solvei’s position! Now!
Ooh, do you want me to introduce her to Sugar? squealed Spice, sounding delighted by the prospect. Immediately, the stumpy legs carrying the forest of tentacles that the succubus was entangled in began to lurch toward where Solvei and Carnelia were. I bet they’d get along great!
Fortunately, it hadn’t gotten more than two steps before Yamini was there, her flaming tyrannosaur roaring as it sank its jaws into Sugar. I’ll stop her from bringing that disgusting thing near anyone else, announced the tigress, her flaming sword cutting away the tentacles that tried to grab her as she reached down and yanked Spice – who was shrieking indignantly at being separated from the monster – out of the tendrils’ sticky embrace. Throwing the succubus under her arm like a sack of potatoes, she leaped from the tyrannosaur’s back and ran toward Solvei.
Sirrush made no move to follow their example, instead looking up to glare at Lex from where she had her claws buried in the guts of a twitching eladrin. Are you kidding?! You’re already hogging all the fun! Now you want me to have even less?!
The furthest away, Dima’s water-crab veered toward the draconic drow. I’ll get her.
You’d never be able to force her to come with you, cut in Carnelia, standing in front of Solvei. I’ll handle her.
Oh you will, will you? sneered Sirrush, snarling as she turned her red eyes toward Carnelia. And just how are you going to “handle” me, you prissy little-
Peering over the rim of her glasses, the brachina looked deeply into Sirrush’s eyes. Come. Here. Now.
Sirrush’s rebuke cut off immediately, a shudder running through her body as she suddenly exhaled, as though having been punched in the gut. But she didn’t – couldn’t – break eye contact with Carnelia, wings twitching before they spread wide and began to flap, winging her way toward the pleasure devil.
As soon as they were all together, Lex immediately crushed the gemstone that he’d withdrawn, activating the spell stored within. Instantly, a sigil-laden circle of light appeared on the ground beneath their feet, causing Solvei and the others to gasp.
Then they all vanished, teleported back to the adlet village.
Two seconds later, there was an eruption of flame as the statue encasing Burly shattered.
But the fire didn’t mark an explosion.
Instead, it imploded, the flames seeming to curl around the broken fragments of black ice and consume them as they fell inward. Nor were they alone, as a powerful inward force swept over the battlefield, pulling everything toward Burly. Only Lex and the scintillating dome surrounding the elves were immune to the pull, staying right where they were as boulders and downed trees were dragged into the flames, scorches so thoroughly that not even ashes were left as the flames consumed them, the fires seeming to grow larger the more they devoured.
And at their center was Burly.
The stallion was no longer gigantic, having shrunk back to his original size.
But no one would have thought that he’d grown weaker for having done so.
The stallion’s entire body had carbonized, making him look like some warped version of a crystal pony. But rather than having a translucent appearance, his entire form was scorched and dusky. There was no shine or luster to him, instead being a dark matte grey. Only his eyes were a different color, being a solid white with no irises or pupils visible.
The only other source of color was the flames which surged around him like an aura, giving Burly the appearance of standing in the middle of his own personal sun.
“Been a while since I got this fired up,” chuckled the earth stallion, the flames around him flickering as he took a step forward. That single step was enough to cause several more loose piles of debris to roll toward him, the fires consuming them whole. “’Specially against someone usin’ wuss magic.”
“Your low opinion of magic doesn’t seem to extend to your own command over gravity,” noted Lex evenly, staring the other stallion down. “You’ve been using it this entire time. Increasing the density of your hooves when attacking and your muscles when defending. Creating momentary, localized pulses of it right in front of you to increase your speed. You’ve even drawn in more positive energy than your body should be able to hold – something that gravity shouldn’t be able to do – which is why your wounds aren’t bothering you at all.”
“HAH!” Burly’s grunt was followed by a dismissive wave of his hoof, causing the trees that hadn’t been uprooted to sway, their tops pointing toward him. “Earth pony magic ain’t wuss magic, with its fruity little gestures and sing-song chanting. Yeah, you might have worked out some way to get around those parts, but it’s still the same weak-ass pansy crap.”
Rearing up and flexing, Burly shot Lex a superior smirk. “Real warriors don’t use anything but their own strength. No weapons, no armor, no spells, just their own muscles, their own instincts, and their own inner power. They go it alone and use those to make themselves the best, or die like the rest.”
“Your sophistry is exceeded only by your hypocrisy,” snorted Lex, giving Burly a look of disdain. “You claim to rely on no one but yourself-”
“Damn right!”
“-and yet you have a blessing from the war goddess, Blaze.”
Burly froze, and for the first time since their fight began, the smile dropped off his face, even as the flames surrounding him suddenly darkened, going from yellowish-orange to deep red. Slowly, he got back down on all fours, his expression twisting into a scowl as he glared at Lex.
The inside of the keep that Branwen had created was like a prison.
Or at least, that was how it looked to Nenet. She’d never seen an actual prison in her life, having only read about them in books, but the interior of this place seemed to match those descriptions in more ways than one.
The walls were bare, being cold grey stone with only a tiny window on either wall, both of which were eight feet off the ground and barred. The only furniture was a line of beds along the rightmost wall, though calling them “beds” was a stretch. In fact, they were nothing more than hard wooden slats that jutted out from the stonework at waist-height, each corner having a length of chain that extended upward at a forty-five-degree angle to connect back to the wall.
The only other features were the door they’d entered through – itself made of two-inch thick steel, with an interior bar to seal it and a small slat at eye-level that could be pulled aside to look at anyone trying to enter – and the iron rungs that were sunk into the back wall, leading to a trapdoor set in the ceiling. Like its counterpart, it was made of solid steel with a thick metal bar.
There was nothing else. No tables or chairs. No hearth or torch sconces. No amenities or decorations of any kind.
It reminded Nenet entirely too much of her living quarters in Adagio’s mountain fortress.
“At least it’s clean,” sighed the sphinx, padding over to sit on the nearest of the chained slats.
“I admit it’s rather...minimalist.” Despite her pained expression, Agapay managed to keep smiling. “But Branwen is a knight, and her orders are to protect you, so it’s understandable that she’d be more concerned with safety than comfort.” Tossing a long strand of silvery hair over her shoulder, the chasmalim put one hand on her hip, raising the other to point at the sparse interior of the place. “So I guess that last part is my job.”
Clearing her throat, she gave a soft, melodious murmur, swishing her finger around as though stirring something unseen. A moment later, mattresses, blankets, and pillows appeared on the beds, along with a pair of large, cushioned chairs with a low table between them springing up in the middle of the room. Pointing upward, Agapay murmured another word, and small points of light began to gradually fade in and out like twinkling stars, giving the place an interplay of soft lights.
Giving a satisfied nod, Agapay turned to look at the two of them, her smile turning apologetic. “I’m sorry that this is the best my magic can do. But either of you would like, I can offer you a massage.”
Nenet’s ears perked up. Massages had been one of the myriad topics she’d been able to read about but never experience. Given that they were supposed to induce soothing relaxation, Nenet found herself eager to take Agapay up on her offer.
But since Mei Li had been the one who’d been hurt so badly just now, it would have been unforgivable to jump at the angel’s offer when the kumiho almost certainly needed it more. Glancing at the vixen, Nenet gave her an expectant look.
But Mei Li only smiled at her and shook her head before turning her gaze toward Agapay. “Perhaps another time, if that is alright,” she replied politely, before moving to sit in one of the comfortable-looking chairs.
“Of course,” nodded the angel, before looking at Nenet. “Would you care to-”
“Yes!” blurted Nenet, before biting her lip and blushing at how eager she’d sounded. “I mean, since you offered...I’ve never had a massage before, and, well...”
“And you’re eager to learn something new firsthand, right?” Agapay’s smile widened, and the entire room seemed to brighten as a result. “The last sphinx I was with was exactly the same.”
Nenet’s eyes widened. “You’ve met another sphinx?!”
“I sure have,” grinned Agapay. “He was a client of mine a few thousand years ago. Go ahead and get undressed and lie down, and I’ll tell you all about him.”
Nenet almost fell over. “‘Him’?! Oh my gosh, you knew an androsphinx?!”
Part of her knew she shouldn’t feel so carefree. Right now, Lex was fighting, and Solvei was still there in danger with him. Not to mention the unexplained mysteries of where their master had been, and why he suddenly had an angel and a vilderavn doing his bidding.
But the gentle aura that Agapay exuded made it easy to overlook all that. In the angel’s presence, everything just seemed like it was going to be okay. Lex would deal with Burly and those elves – probably without breaking a sweat – and bring Solvei back, safe and sound. He’d explain where he’d been, and once they told him how hurtful it had been that he’d run off after consummating their relationship, he’d make it up to them.
Feeling like that, it made perfect sense to lie back and let herself be pampered for a bit.
Changing into human form – the only one that would fit on any of the beds, since it lacked wings – Nenet unhesitatingly stripped down, carefully folding the clothes that Solvei had made for her and placing them on the small table before pulling her hair up and lying face down on the closest bed. “Is there anything else I should do to get ready?”
“Not at all,” answered Agapay, quickly chanting another spell to summon a small jar of aromatic oil. “I was going to suggest that we lay some of the mattresses on the floor so you could be more comfortable, but I didn’t realize you knew the Two Feet at Noon technique. You must be a renowned scholar; even the sphinx I was with before was still studying how to master that form.”
Despite feeling embarrassed, Nenet found herself grinning. “I can’t take credit for it. It’s one of the powers I received from Master after he, um” – she glanced at Mei Li, blushing slightly as she recalled how the kumiho had referred to the soul-bond Lex had formed with each of them – “after he married me.”
“That’s so sweet!” Climbing onto the bed, Agapay straddled Nenet, smiling as she poured the oil onto the sphinx’s back. “He must love you very much.”
This time Nenet’s blush was stronger, and she turned her head so she was facing the wall. “I know he does...even if he has a funny way of showing it sometimes.”
“Well, a lot of-”
“You said that Nenet’s and my husband holds your exclusive contract. What does that mean?” cut in Mei Li, her voice having a sharper edge than Nenet had heard her use before. She almost turned her head to look at the kumiho, wondering what was wrong...but then Agapay’s hands went to work on her shoulders, and it felt so good that Nenet suddenly didn’t have the energy to follow through on that idea.
“Well, as a chasmalim angel, it’s my responsibility – and my joy – to tempt others toward righteousness by offering myself as a reward,” answered the angel, not pausing as she worked the tension from the sphinx’s body. “For that purpose, we form contracts with those who need help bettering themselves, giving them our love and devotion in exchange for their agreeing to try and make the world a better place.”
Nenet frowned a little, wriggling as Agapay worked a particularly tight knot in her back. “But...isn’t that-, OH!”
Her eyes widening as the angel pressed down on a tender spot, Nenet arched her back, toes curling as her entire body stiffened up. A moment later she collapsed bonelessly back onto the bed, a low moan of pleasure escaping her lips as she shuddered. “...ooohhhhhh...”
Agapay giggled at the sight, continuing to work her way down the sphinx. “I thought you might like that,” she confessed, her tone playful. “Most women, when they have a chest as big as yours, tend to tense up right there without realizing it due to carrying so much extra weight around.”
Nenet’s reply was an unintelligible murmur of serenity, her eyes fluttering closed.
“I believe what my Elder Sister was trying to ask you before,” cut in Mei Li, her tone still incisive, “is if what you do could be called prostitution.”
“It could,” answered Agapay easily, no trace of anger in her voice. “It is. My patron, Agrat, is the Archangel of Prostitution. And while the contract she signed with Lex-”
“He signed one of these...love contracts, with an archangel?!”
Agapay’s hands stopped for a moment, prompting a whimper from Nenet. “I was trying to say, I don’t know the specifics of the contract Agrat signed with Lex. She originated the practice of celestial prostitution – before her, the only way it was accepted in the empyreal realms was as a sacred rite among certain deities of love – and each contract that she signs has unique stipulations. One of which was that I’m to give Lex the full and exclusive measure of my love and devotion until I’m told otherwise.”
The angel’s hands returned then, moving to rub Nenet’s hips, this time returning a throaty grunt of approval. She was sure that if she’d been in sphinx form or her hybrid body, she’d have been purring.
“Of course, since he told me to take care of you both while he’s busy, I think we can argue that there’s some room for interpreting what he meant,” continued Agapay, her voice taking on a playful lilt as she scooted further down Nenet’s body, her hands beginning to rub her backside. “Go ahead and spread your legs for me, okay?”
Blissed into a near-comatose state, the command seemed to bypass the sphinx’s consciousness entirely, and she opened her thighs-
“Remove yourself from Elder Sister Nenet,” ordered Mei Li, her voice now completely devoid of politeness. “Right now.”
The bed creaked as Agapay slowly climbed off of it, and the motion made Nenet huff, blinking her eyes blearily as she looked over at where the kumiho was giving the angel a cold look. “Mei Li, what-”
“Elder Sister,” cut in Mei Li, “please forgive me for being so presumptuous as to lecture one of greater standing than myself, but it is unseemly for a lawful wife to engage in amorous activities with one of her husband’s concubines when he is not present.”
The sphinx blinked, feeling like she had just woken up from a deep sleep. “...huh?”
“And it is even more unseemly,” continued the vixen, giving Agapay an icy look, “for a concubine to try and seduce one of her benefactor’s wives.”
“I’m sorry...I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” protested Agapay, holding her hands up in a gesture of compliance. “I wasn’t trying to seduce anyone. I’ll admit that I might have been liberal in my interpretation of Lex’s orders to look after you both, but Nenet seemed to be enjoying herself, and-”
“Because you influenced her.”
Agapay’s eyes widened at the accusation, looking like she’d just been slapped. “I did no such thing! I didn’t use any magic, and even the oil was completely without any sort of mind-altering properties!”
“And your aura?”
“My aura? It’s a numinous property that all angels have. It protects against harm from those of a malevolent disposition, as well as hedges out minor spells. It doesn’t cause anyone to trust me if they don’t want to.”
“It also stimulates the ki of those it protects, causing it to resonate in synchronicity with your own, does it not?”
“I’m a chasmalim, an angel of love and passion,” explained Agapay. “Those who share my disposition can sense that I’m a kindred spirit, and it helps them to relax and lower the barriers that they normally keep raised. That’s not manipulation, it’s just my nature.”
“And it’s my nature to keep my husband’s household in order, rather than allowing it to succumb to hedonism and indulgence.”
Mei Li fanned her tails out then-
And suddenly Nenet’s sense of casual relaxation was gone, feeling as though a bucket of cold water had just been thrown over her. “Huh?!”
Agapay seemed to be affected as well, looking staggered.
“Elder Sister, please get dressed,” murmured Mei Li, gesturing to Nenet’s clothes. “As our husband’s wives, we must never forget that our love and passion” – she stared at Agapay as she spoke, her expression cold – “belong to him, and him alone.”
“Y-yeah.” Nenet felt a shiver go down her spine then, suddenly nervous.
But it wasn’t nervousness which made her stand up and drape an arm over her chest in modesty. Rather, the weight of Mei Li’s expectations had taken on an almost tangible force, making doing anything besides what she said feel...not terrifying, or even uncomfortable, so much as...
Awkward, Nenet decided, slipping her clothes on. Like it would just be wrong to defy her.
It wasn’t wrong in the sense of embarrassment or shame. Rather, it was a powerful sense of being out of step, as though having made the wrong move during a dance and suddenly being unable to get back in sync with the music. Or when two people stopped just short of walking into each other, and then stood there because whichever way they moved, the other person just happened to move in that same direction. Or trying to run with footwear that had become unlaced.
It was a powerful, uncomfortable sense of things being out of sorts, and Nenet instinctively responded in a way that let her shed that feeling, fixing her outfit and moving to stand by Mei Li.
Agapay, meanwhile, looked stricken. “I was just trying to help,” she murmured, her voice thick with remorse.
“I understand,” answered Mei Li. “And I am grateful to you, both for healing me and for making this locality more hospitable. But you must remember your place. You are Lex Legis’ concubine, while we are his wives. Your affection is a commodity that he has purchased from your betters, while ours is proof of our loyalty to him. To confuse the two is to insult his honor.”
Agapay winced, looking down. “I understand. Would you like for me to leave?”
Nenet almost cringed at the downcast tone in the angel’s voice, still not sure she understood why Mei Li was so angry. But the thought of protesting the kumiho’s decision was viscerally repellant, as though she was brushing her wings against the grain of her feathers, and so she stayed silent as Mei Li nodded. “I believe that would be for the best.”
Looking like a puppy that had licked its owner’s hand and been kicked in response, the angel slunk over to the door, giving the two of them one last sorrowful look before exiting the building.
As soon as the door had closed, Mei Li let out a sigh and lowered her tails. All at once, the awkward feeling was gone, and Nenet grunted in relief before looking at the vixen...only to realize she wasn’t sure what to say.
Mei Li, however, seemed to have no such problem. “I apologize again for having spoken on your behalf, Elder Sister,” she murmured, turning and bowing deeply to Nenet. “Do you wish to punish me yourself, or will you report my actions to our husband and Elder Sister Solvei?”
“What?” Nenet blinked, trying to figure out what was happening. Squeezing her eyes shut, she took a deep breath – and then a second, and then a third – before opening her eyes again. “Please stop that, would you?”
“If that is what you wish,” murmured the kumiho, standing upright again.
“It is. Look...what just happened? That thing, with...with how it felt when you were chewing out Agapay. What was that?”
“Feng shui.”
That wasn’t a term that Nenet was familiar with, her omnicomprehension ability only giving her the literal translation. “‘Wind and water’?”
“It’s understood to mean the movement of energy. As wind and water have rules which guide them, flowing in a way that keeps them in conformity with their environment, so do the other forces of the universe.”
Intrigued despite herself, Nenet cocked her head. “Like ki?”
Mei Li nodded. “Ki, magic, nature, and many more. All have principles which govern their direction. Being able to understand and manipulate those rules is what my culture calls feng shui. All creatures, all beings that are part of the world around them, can feel this, and instinctively know when they’re moving against it, the same way birds and fish know when they’re moving against the currents.”
“And so that just now...?”
“Was my using our husband’s other wedding gift to me. I can control the feng shui around myself, restoring the peace of his household whenever anyone would disturb it. It’s why my tails collectively show a portrait of mountains and rivers, because those are where the wind and water flow.”
A wistful smile crossed Mei Li’s face then. “Our husband truly is generous, trusting me with so much responsibility.”
“Oh...” Nenet chewed on that for a moment, silently comparing it to what she knew about herself and Solvei. In each case, they’d received a massive power-up from Lex forming a soul-bond with them, gaining new abilities that were concurrent with their nature. And in each case...
Lex could use it too!
Drawing in a breath, Nenet glanced in the direction where she knew Lex was fighting, wondering if he was aware that he could use “feng shui” the same way Mei Li could...
But she didn’t have a chance to think about telepathically contacting him as there was a sudden din outside, with a number of raised voices – all of them female – speaking up at once.
“YOU DEVIL BITCH!!! I’LL GUT YOU FOR INVADING MY MIND!!!”
“If you don’t like it, try following orders next time.”
“At least you didn’t have to get near that disgusting tentacle monst-, OW! YOU LITTLE BRAT!!!”
“It’s what you get for being so mean to Sugar! I’m gonna summon them back right now so you can-, BLURGH!!! H-HEY!!! QUIT IT!!!”
“No way! You almost hit me with that thing’s juices when you flung your arm out just now, so you’re getting hosed off before you can do it again!”
“WILL ALL OF YOU PLEASE BE QUIET?!”
That last shout made Nenet gasp. “Solvei!”
She ran for the door immediately, Mei Li following close behind, fanning her tails out again.
Lex grimaced as he blocked Burly Brawl’s punches, needing to push the air itself aside so that his forelegs could move fast enough to deflect them all.
Although he could foresee each incoming attack, that insight was only giving him a fraction of the warning it should have. What had been six seconds’ worth of awareness of the future had become – with regard to Burly – barely a quarter of that time. And that window of foresight was continuing to shrink rapidly.
All because the amount of gravity that Burly was generating was continuing to increase.
With every passing moment, the stallion’s mass continued to grow, even as his size remained the same. It had reached the point where the fabric of the universe itself was beginning to be adversely impacted, space and time being drawn in and compressed by the massive pressure Burly was exuding. But he himself didn’t seem to feel that pressure in the slightest; if anything, he was getting faster, using reality’s compression so that he could hit faster and harder than he would otherwise have been capable of.
And that wasn’t even taking into account the flames surrounding him.
They had now grown hot enough to where the Pentachromatic Armor couldn’t keep up.
That should have been impossible. While the artifact was powerfully resistant to physical damage, there was no amount of energy conduction that it was incapable of resisting. Right now, the scales – which once again had Lex covered from horn to tail – had turned red, indicating that it was resisting exothermic reactions. In that state, he could have dived into the sun itself and not felt even slightly warm.
Yet each one of Burly’s punches that Lex blocked left burns on his claws and forelegs.
The Pentachromatic Armor could repel any amount of energy...but it couldn’t stop manifestations of divinity.
“So Blaze gave you those flames you’re wearing,” noted Lex as he turned aside more gravitic punches, his undying body working to repair the burns. “Was it because she knew you’d need her help in order to win?”
“I ain’t gonna need that bitch’s help to win,” growled Burly, his convivial demeanor ruined by the mention of the war goddess. “So don’t go blamin’ her when you lose! The one who crushes you IS GONNA BE ME!!! BURLY BRAWL!!!”
His angry retort came with another increase in gravity. Already, the landscape was falling apart, as the rocks, trees, and even the land itself were being pulled inward, burning to ashes in the flames surrounding the scorched stallion. But Burly didn’t even seem to notice, lashing out so quickly that his punches were like a single, sustained output of destructive force.
The sheer power of it was enough that, even with the Pentachromatic Armor, the Ring of Perdition, and his own titanic toughness, Lex was actually being forced back. The relentless rain of punches was even hotter now, and the force of the blows had actually become painful. His ability to see Burly’s future had been condensed down to almost nothing, and what he could see – looking at how the stallion would respond to mind-altering magic, physical transmutation spells, and even being sent to another plane of existence – told him that the stallion would simply smash through any and all obstacles.
Burly Brawl was a single-minded juggernaut, and would not be deterred by anything.
Seeing Lex give ground made a fierce grin cross the antean’s lips. “What’s wrong?! Ain’t got some bit of wuss magic to help you?!”
The comment made Lex snort. “You mean like this?”
Immediately, he cast a temporal acceleration spell on himself. On its own, it wasn’t very powerful; with how fast Lex was now, the altogether minor boost it offered wouldn’t have done much. But he sank as much power as he could into it, causing its effects to magnify by multiple orders of magnitude.
Against Kryonex, it wouldn’t have done much.
But against Burly Brawl, the effects were dramatic.
Slipping between the fiery stallion’s punches, Lex sank his claws into the stallion’s flesh. Immediately, his talons began to scorch and blacken, the fires surrounding the stallion making him pay for getting so close. But he ignored the injuries, slicing into Burly’s supernaturally dense body with such incredible speed that – even under the time-dilating influence of the massive gravity well that the earth pony had become – he was still able to land countless blows in the span of a heartbeat.
The barrage was enough to reduce Burly to bloody pieces, his body collapsing into scorched gibbets of flesh and bone...which immediately pulled themselves back together.
As expected, noted Lex dispassionately. The more gravity he generates, the more of a sinkhole he becomes for ambient positive energy. He’s actually growing more alive the longer he fights.
Laughing louder, Burly didn’t even wait until he was fully reconstituted to renew his assault, seemingly egged on by what should have been myriad lethal blows.
“YER GONNA HAFTA DO BETTER THAN THAT!!!”
“Fine.”
No sooner had the utterance left Lex’s lips than he stepped forward, his spell enabling him to easily sidestep Burly’s seemingly endless stream of punches.
Then he reached out and grabbed Burly’s forelegs.
“HUH?!”
For all that he was able to manipulate the gravity he was exuding, Burly was still left momentarily jarred as he was brought to an immediate halt.
That was all the opening Lex needed. Ignoring that the heat was dealing severe damage to his claws, he threw Burly’s forelegs wide, leaving him completely open, and then kicked out, striking the earth stallion directly beneath his ribs.
Burly was immediately launched upward.
Rising into the air like a second sun, there was nothing Burly could do to stop his momentum. Despite the fact that his current gravity gave him the mass of a small moon, the earth stallion shot into the air as though he’d been fired from a cannon, limbs flailing as he tried in vain to arrest his upward movement. A moment later, he ceased struggling, and Lex could almost see the gravity around him starting to grow even more, his speed beginning to slow.
That should be enough, decided Lex as the Pentachromatic Armor’s scales retracted.
Burly Brawl was a powerful opponent by any measure. He had a divine blessing, was clearly overflowing with aristeia, and had mastered an esoteric form of magic using nothing but intuition and sheer grit. In Lex’s estimation, he had power enough that he could be ranked as a titan in his own regard.
But only a lesser one.
And although Burly had focused entirely on maximizing his combat potential, unlike those whores Lex had so recently summoned, there was still a vast gulf of power between the two of them.
It was time to show Burly just how wide that chasm truly was.
Calling upon Nenet’s metamagic, Lex cast another spell, overcharging it to the greatest degree that he could.
A moment later, a spectral claw appeared near Burly.
An observer might have mistaken it for the same spell that Lex had used near the end of his battle with Kryonex. But unlike then, this force construct was the size of a house, crackling with barely-contained power such that even the divine flames surrounding the earth stallion wouldn’t be able to destroy it easily.
Then a dozen more such claws appeared.
Then a hundred more.
Then a thousand more.
In an instant, the sky was blotted out by the sheer number of massive, disembodied claws hovering in the air.
And then, with a mental command from Lex, all of them slashed down toward Burly at the same time.
The earth stallion roared in challenge, the fires around him flaring out even as he increased the gravitic pressure around him. But that accomplished nothing except to make the extremely-resilient claws fall toward him faster. And although Burly punched out with everything he had, he couldn’t counterattack in every direction at once.
The result was that the storm of claws tore at him, not just once but again and again, ripping him to shreds only for him to reform just in time to be torn apart again.
Had he been a mortal, Burly would have died dozens – hundreds – of times over. Caught in an unbreakable maelstrom of rending talons, he fought back as best he could as he was ripped to pieces again and again, unwilling to give in even as he was shredded, his body restoring itself as fast as Lex’s spell could tear it apart.
Only for his healing to begin to slow down a few moments later.
Down below, Lex smirked as Burly gave a howl – not of fear but of defiance – and fought back harder, trying to stop the seemingly-endless rain of claws before they could eviscerate him again.
But it was futile; there were simply too many for him to stop them all.
The fact that Lex had surreptitiously reached into his pocket dimension while casting his spell, grabbing Belligerence just long enough to use its augmentation power had seen to that.
And you won’t be able to keep healing yourself now that you’re running out of positive energy, Lex knew, giving no outward sign that he was keeping the local environment free of what Burly was trying to pull in.
He’d need to thank Mei Li for that later.
The vixen’s power was truly exceptional. Although Lex felt guilty for how he was using an ability he’d gained after having all but forced himself on the kumiho, he couldn’t deny that what she’d received as a result of their soul-bond was as impressive as it was subtle. Being able to manipulate the flow of ambient energy in a given area meant that any number of things could be achieved.
In this case, he was able to redirect the trace amounts of positive energy in the area away from Burly Brawl. Although Mei Li’s power couldn’t stop the earth stallion from drawing in everything close to him – his gravity being far more forceful and direct than the kumiho’s softer method of control – it was enough to make sure that no more came in to fill the void that was left after Burly had taken everything he could.
The result was that eventually, Burly’s gravity had no more ambient life force to pull in, rendering his capacity to recover from his wounds finite.
After that, it was simply a matter of dealing enough damage to deplete his stores.
Of course, that had prevented Lex’s own natural regeneration from working, his soul unable to attract ambient positive energy either. But that didn’t matter when he still had healing spells that he could use on himself, easily repairing the damage that he’d taken without having to wait to recover.
Which only leaves the question of what the elves will do now, decided Lex, glancing at the trio of barely-visible figures beneath the shimmering dome.
Defeating Burly Brawl hadn’t been difficult. Compared to Kryonex, the stallion had been slower, weaker, and far less versatile. Not to mention a pathetically guileless opponent. For all that he was resilient to both injury and magic, Lex could have overcome him in numerous different ways.
But he’d wanted to make a show of force in front of the elves, one that would emphasize just who they were up against without showing them much in the way of what he could do. With their purpose here still being uncertain, that was the most optimal strategy, and would hopefully convince them to retreat. He still had numerous other problems to deal with: reconciling with Solvei and Nenet, dealing with Mei Li, rescuing Thermal Draft...
And figuring out what had just happened with the Night Mare.
Frowning at that last one, Lex glanced upward, able to see that Burly’s life force was rapidly diminishing under the barrage of massive claws. Already, his counterattacks were growing slower and sloppier, his wounds taking longer and longer to heal. More notably, the gravity around him was failing, and Blaze’s flames were dying down.
The fight was over. All that was left was to incapacitate Burly without killing him.
And he should be reaching that point...now.
With a thought, Lex caused the sea of claws to disappear. Almost as soon as he did, Burly dropped out of the sky, the momentum of Lex’s kick having been bled away by the relentless attacks. Now, with nothing to keep him in the air, he plummeted back down, limbs hanging limp as he tumbled end over end.
A moment later, he hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater.
Taking his time, Lex walked to the edge of the pit and glared down coldly at the unmoving form that lay within it. “How’s that for better?”
A pained laugh came from Burly’s throat. “Hehehe...not bad...”
Lex frowned as the antean slowly climbed to his hooves, grunting and groaning as he fought to stand. He could see into Burly’s future again, and knew that he’d been about to rise, but the fact that he was able to stand at all was shocking. His life force was depleted to the point where he shouldn’t have been anywhere near consciousness, let alone able to move.
And yet the muscled earth stallion – no longer looking like a charred crystal pony – was grinning as he stared up at Lex, showing no sign that he was finished yet. “So you just gonna stand there and stare at me? Or are we doin’ this?”
“There’s nothing left to do.” Lex’s voice was almost as cold as Burly’s flames had been hot. “You’re defeated. Stand down before you make your injuries worse.”
Burly snorted, his lip curling. “‘Stand down before you make your injuries worse’? You’re really gonna gimme that weak-ass crap? I thought I finally met someone else who knew that all that frilly garbage about duties and morals and society don’t mean squat. All that counts for anything is who’s tough enough to kill their way to the top of the heap!”
Sneering up at Lex, he spat on the ground. “What’s next, you’re gonna gimme some speech about ‘betterin’ myself’ or ‘workin’ together’ or some crap like that?” He chuckled, as though amused by the idea. “I was gonna bend that wolf chick of yours over and stretch her out good, you know. Would of made her howl at the moon. And you’re really gonna stand there and act like you don’t wanna kill me for it?”
The beast inside Lex growled at that, but the rage that it wanted to unleash was drowned beneath the wave of disgust that came over him then.
Ever since he’d realized the full extent of what he’d done to himself in Darkest Night, Lex had struggled against the vicious monster that now made up his instincts. More than once he’d been overwhelmed by it, and he still had no idea – outside of those brief moments when the additional power his goddess had given him had poured forth, letting him transcend himself – how to master it. But he’d never once willingly given in to it.
Burly Brawl, by contrast, was a pony who wanted nothing more than to become such a beast.
Rejecting anything beyond his instincts and impulses, this was someone who lived only to fight, feed, and fornicate. He had no sense of anyone else, no desire to be part of something larger than himself. He had completely rejected everything that made him a pony – that made him a person – and saw no loss in what he’d thrown away.
For all his talk about strength, Lex couldn’t see Burly as anything but someone who’d given up on himself, and that was enough to make him loathsome in his eyes.
“I’m not going to kill you,” pronounced Lex, making no effort to hide his disdain. “But once I’ve sentenced you for your crimes, you’re going to wish that I had.”
“Heard that before,” snorted Burly. “And I gotta say, it’s the dumbest thing ever. Lettin’ the other guy live when you have a chance to put him down just means he can come back later and try something...LIKE THIS!!!”
There was no sudden charge or rush of motion from the oversized stallion. He didn’t so much as lift a hoof. All that accompanied his sudden yell was a ripple in the air as space distorted...
And gravity descended upon Lex all at once.
It wasn’t a downward pressure, so much as an inward pull. Instantly, he collapsed in on himself, falling into the small black dot that appeared in the space that he occupied, containing all of the gravity that Burly had been using and then some.
In the blink of an eye, Lex was gone, leaving the pea-sized ebony orb hanging there where he’d once been.
“Hehehe, told ya!” laughed Burly, collapsing back into the center of the crater. “Talkin’ about all that high-minded crap don’t never do nothin’ ‘cept let the other guy get one last shot in. Too bad you learned that a little too late.”
“A degenerate such as yourself has nothing to teach me.”
“Huh?!” Burly’s eyes went wide as Lex’s voice rang out from within the tiny sphere.
“Whereas you have a great deal to learn.”
Even as he spoke, Lex forced his way out of the miniature black hole, the condensed gravity shuddering and then widen as he forced it open, slowly tearing it apart as he stepped out from inside it, unharmed.
“No way...” breathed Burly, his expression stupefied. “That ain’t possible! There ain’t nothin’ that can’t destroy!”
“I’ve seen apertures in reality that are truly capable of destroying anything,” retorted Lex. “And that gravity well you conjured doesn’t measure up.”
For a moment, Burly just stared, then he burst out laughing, struggling to rise again. “Now this was a fun time! I hafta admit, I didn’t think you’d be all you were cracked up to be, but this’s been the best fight I’ve had in years! We can’t let it end here, let’s go again-”
He stopped talking as Lex’s fist met his face.
The punch knocked him into the air, clearing the crater as he tumbled end over end, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Lex stalked after him, snarling. A curse was out of the question; Burly had a blessing from Blaze herself, whereas the curses that Lex used were maintained by a member of the Umbral Regalia. Having the latter use its power against the former ran the risk of starting a religious war-
He didn’t have time to finish that thought as a figure emerged from the colorful dome Loraestil and his minions had taken shelter in.
But the person approaching him now wasn’t one of the elves.
It was one of the most bitter admissions that Loraestil had ever made in his life, but he couldn’t stop himself from speaking it, watching as Lex Legis – the titan whose strength he’d so grossly underestimated – stood within the raging vortex of flames and gravity created by Burly Brawl, easily weathering the assault.
Not only weathering it, but counterattacking, lashing out with his claws and slicing his enemy to ribbons. Only the fact that Burly Brawl seemed to be able to completely heal himself even beyond death kept the fight from ending right then and there.
As much as Loraestil hated to admit it, he wasn’t even qualified to set foot onto such a battlefield. Although his companions had enchanted Uskeche’Kerym to the point where the Ghost Blade seemed to thrum with power in his hands – and Thilaera had healed the spiritual damage he’d taken in activating the blade’s signature power multiple times now – that would amount to nothing if he died before he could ever get close to either of the warring equines.
A moment later Lex Legis seized Burly Brawl and kicked him into the air, the hornless brute unable to stop his upward momentum, reminding Loraestil that the destructive aura he was hiding from was being emanated by the pony who was – based on how the fight was progressing – the weaker of the pair.
If Loraestil couldn’t even approach the lesser of the two fighters without perishing, what chance did he have of striking Lex Legis down?
“You won’t know unless you try!” Thilaera’s encouragement was unexpected enough that Loraestil couldn’t help but give her a surprised look, not having thought the or-tel – a member of one of the most conflict-averse ethnicity of elves – would still see this as a fight that could be won. “Vystalaran said that there was a chance, right?” she continued, looking at the apprentice High Mage.
But the wizard’s face was grim. “I said that, in my best estimate, everything we’ve done to enhance Uskeche’Kerym has given it maybe a one-in-four chance of defeating that halo Lex Legis is using. And even if it does, there’s likely to be a powerful magical backlash. All of which assumes that you can even get close enough to attack him in the first place-”
It was at that moment that Lex Legis caused the sky to be covered in giant, disembodied claws, which began to tear the still-airborne Burly Brawl into pieces over and over again, the earth stallion trying and failing to fight back as he was continually torn apart and restored.
The sheer pain that he had to be in, unable to die even as he was slain again and again, caught in the middle of a seemingly-endless storm of talons that mutilated him without the slightest moment’s respite...
It was enough to turn Loraestil’s stomach.
He had hunted demons and devils alike, beings whose capacity for cruelty knew seemingly no bounds. But not even those creatures had been able to put someone through what had to be agony beyond imagining, making their victims feel every inch of their body being rent into bloody gibbets with no surcease, unable to find release even in death. For anyone else, the shock alone would have killed them, freeing their souls and granting them peace, but to take advantage of his enemy’s regeneration in this way...
Somehow, he dragged his eyes down to look at Lex Legis.
Only to see that the titan was staring up at Burly Brawl with a mild scowl on his face, as though the earth stallion wasn’t suffering enough for his taste.
Loraestil had never once met an enemy who had put fear into his heart, frequently mocking those who expressed any sort of worry or hesitation when facing a foe.
But now, for the first time in his life, he was afraid.
This isn’t someone I can hunt!
“Thilaera.”
Vystalaran’s voice almost made Loraestil jump, somehow managing to keep his inner terror from showing on his face as he looked at the apprentice High Mage.
“Thilaera!”
Unlike himself, the wood elf did jump, gasping as she tore her terrified eyes away from Burly Brawl’s suffering. “Y-yes?”
“Call her.”
Loraestil’s brows knit together in confusion, and he wasn’t the only one, a blank expression crossing Thilaera’s face. “Call...who?”
“Your family’s patroness. Call her.”
Somehow, Thilaera managed to turn even more pale than she already was. “How do you know about that?”
“Nevermind that now,” retorted Vystalaran, his expression darkening even more. “Just call her! I have no confidence that this barrier will last once the titan turns his full attention to it! You need to act now if we’re to have any hope of seeing Lex Legis defeated!”
Loraestil could feel his confusion mounting. Thilaera’s family had a patroness? And they were someone that Vystalaran thought could win against the sort of power Lex Legis was able to wield?
But he didn’t have a chance to give voice to any of those questions as Thilaera seemed to come to a decision. Giving a shaky nod, she knelt down and began to pray, chanting to Gladoneral as she closed her eyes.
It was at that moment that Lex Legis put an abrupt end to his storm of claws.
Burly Brawl fell to the ground, hitting it hard enough to make Loraestil wince. With Thilaera’s chanting in the background, he watched as Lex Legis approached the fallen stallion, saying something that was unintelligible at this distance, after which Burly Brawl stood up-
And caused Lex Legis to vanish.
Only for the stallion to return an instant later, forcing his way out of the pinpoint of blackness that had swallowed him up. A single punch later, and Burly Brawl lay still, either dead or unmoving as the titan slowly approached him, looking as though he was about to finish the earth stallion off once and for all.
Then Thilaera’s spell took effect.
A ten-foot aperture immediately appeared in the air, the portal showing a verdant forest on the other side. Its trees were massive, the leaves shining with a radiance greater than emeralds, and the moss on the ancient trunks looked softer than even the finest blankets. The branches that rustled in the wind played a soft harmony, as though simply passing air over their limbs was enough to make music. Beams of sunlight drifted down from the canopy, each one sparkling with soft motes of golden light that seemed to bob and weave of their own accord.
And frolicking amongst the natural splendor were eladrin.
Many different types of the elves’ celestial cousins were there. Coures flittered back and forth on gossamer wings, laughing as they played a game of tag with cerulean dragonflies the size of cats. Firres cheered and hollered, flaming red hair whipping back and forth as they raced stags with coats as white as snow. Glowing with soft light, several ghaeles held out their hands as birds alit on their palms, raising their voices in a shared song with the avians that resonated with the wind in the branches.
And there, in the center of them all, was a single figure.
One who was looking back at him and his companions, a wry smile twisting their lips.
A moment later, Loraestil recognized who it was, and felt his heart leap into his throat, sinking down into a deep bow as he recognized one of the closest allies of the elven pantheon. Vystalaran was right!
Dimly he heard Thilaera’s patroness say something to her fellow eladrin, the words obscured by the blood that was pounding in his ears. This is someone who can definitely defeat Lex Legis!
A moment later, he heard footsteps come through the portal, and Loraestil bowed lower.
“Welcome, Lady Gwynharwyf!”
Lex immediately knew that he was in trouble.
The woman walking toward him now was small, to the point where standing on his hind legs would have put him a head taller than her. Her thick mane of silvery-white hair that was comparable to Agapay’s, but unlike the angel the newcomer’s hung free and unbound, reaching to her knees. Her eyes were bright green, with the sclera a lighter shade of beryl than her irises and pupils.
Most of her skin was on display, wearing only a simple flaxen top to cover her modest chest and a two-piece breechcloth tied around her hips, one long piece of ankle-length fabric hanging down from the front of her waist, the other from the back. But unlike the myriad girls he’d spent more than two weeks using for his pleasure, this woman’s attire seemed less about sensuality than functionality, doing nothing to restrict her movements as she strode toward him with a lithe grace that seemed halfway between that of a dancer and a panther preparing to spring.
Nor had she come unarmed, each hand holding a scimitar, the two swords radiating so much magic that it was almost blinding. In terms of the strength of their enchantments, both weapons put the “Ghost Blade” that weakling Loraestil had been wielding to shame. These two blades, he could tell, were artifacts...with power comparable to – or even exceeding – the treasures he’d so recently gained.
But even the auras around the swords paled before the one that radiated out from the woman herself.
She made no effort to hide it, letting the sheer weight of her being roll off of her in waves. It surpassed the blizzard that Kryonex had brought with him, despite being far subtler in its manifestation. Rather than a change of temperature or a swirling of wind, there was a feeling of imminent violence, as though the air itself was vibrating with the potential for bloodshed. And yet it contained none of the sadism or malevolent glee that Burly Brawl had so openly displayed.
Instead, this woman’s aura radiated a feeling that was akin to a mother lion looking after her cubs, possessed of a righteous indignation that was just waiting to be unleashed on anyone who dared harm someone weaker than her. More than that, it carried a sense of sanctity, as though to suggest that any who dared cross her had cause to feel ashamed of themselves, and deserved the violence she unleashed upon them.
Lex scowled, his own power surging as he pressed back against the aura, refusing to let it make contact with him.
It was like directing an umbrella against a windstorm, requiring his full concentration in order to keep from buckling...but he succeeded.
Barely.
Just from that one exchange, it was clear which of them was more powerful, and Lex knew that it wasn’t him.
She’s not a god, Lex knew, the lack of shifting manifestations making it clear that – like himself – she had only a single, set form. But she’s stronger than Kryonex.
“The strongest among them,” the Night Mare had said about titans when she’d made him one, “are powerful enough that even gods cannot dismiss their significance.”
This woman, it seemed, was one such titan.
Sensing that Lex had thrown off the effect of her aura, the woman came to a stop roughly thirty feet away from him. Her posture was relaxed, and her arms hung slack, scimitars loose in her grasp. But nothing about her suggested that her guard was lowered, and when she looked him over a moment later, he could almost feel her looking for holes in his defenses.
Unsettlingly, she smiled a moment later. “So you’re Lex Legis, I take it?”
The words themselves were harmless, but the pressure behind them the single sentence sound like a damning indictment, as though simply being the person she’d named was something he should apologize for.
Instead, he stared straight into her emerald eyes as he answered, refusing to be daunted. “I am. And you are?”
“Gwynharwyf, second consort of Queen Morwel of the Llys Seren.”
Lex’s eyes narrowed.
Those were names he knew, not just from the Libram of Ineffable Damnation, but also from Penelope La Gard, the Queen of the Autumn Court who’d been among his recent conquests.
The Llys Seren was the political term for the eladrin, the race of celestial fey who were the reason that the Seelie Court – the conglomerate of fey polities that included the Spring and Summer Courts, as well as numerous smaller sovereignties – remained dominant over the Unseelie. Because the eladrin were both empyreal beings as well as fey, their powers were significant enough that they provided a decisive tilt in the Seelie Court’s favor. That was most embodied in their leader, Morwel, who had two consorts with whom she shared power: Faerinaal, her husband who primarily oversaw the defense of their people and their lands, and her wife Gwynharwyf, who led their armies.
The same Gwynharwyf who stood in front of him now.
And being fey as well as empyreals, they’re close allies of the elven gods, Lex knew. Which means that she can speak to their interests without necessarily representing them.
In other words, her being here gave the elven gods political cover. Whatever Gwynharwyf did, the elven pantheon could claim plausible deniability later, saying that they hadn’t sanctioned her actions. All Gwynharwyf needed to do was come up with a benign excuse for being here, and another to initiate hostilities, and that would be that; she'd be able to attack him without the elves' having to take responsibility for it.
And given that the eladrin weren't a pantheon, there would be little that the pony gods would be able to do about it. Especially since the Llys Seren had formal ties with the rest of the Seelie Court, not to mention alliances with the elves and several other pantheons, at least according to the Libram.
Though given what had just happened with the Night Mare – if that had even been the Night Mare – it was entirely possible that no one in the pony pantheon would make much of a complaint anyway.
Which meant that he had to keep this from degenerating into a fight, since he'd almost certainly be slain or captured if it came down to that. That, in turn, would require him to exercise diplomacy, avoiding giving Gwynharwyf any sort of excuse to attack him.
If he couldn’t...then he’d have to use his fallback option.
“I hope you don’t mind my dropping in unexpectedly,” announced Gwynharwyf, one arm coming up to lazily rest her scimitar over her shoulder.
Her voice had a rich brogue to it, the lilt in her words more pronounced than the elves who had summoned her, her words light and unstressed. Her posture was similarly relaxed, as though they were just having a cordial chat. But the intense pressure radiating out from her only grew more intense, as though she’d just sank into a crouch and was getting ready to spring.
“Thilaera is a distant descendant of Sirocco, one of my most ardent followers,” she continued. “When she sent me a message saying she was in trouble, I couldn’t in good conscience turn away.”
And just like that, her harmless, apolitical reason for being here was established. Which meant that she was just waiting for him to sufficiently offend her that she’d be justified in pointing her swords at him.
Avoiding doing so was going to be exceptionally difficult.
Lex had gained a great deal of acumen in becoming a titan, able to process much more information than he’d ever been able to as a mortal. But the Night Mare had expressly left in place his inability to read the subtler aspects of interpersonal communication. And while his ability to read minds – something he was still uncomfortable with, even if open hostility by a credible foe justified its use – and see into the immediate future allowed him to largely bypass that particular defect, he couldn’t use either against Gwynharwyf.
Like so many of the foes he’d recently faced, the eladrin leader wasn’t someone his trans-temporal sense could perceive. Given what he’d learned from the foresight spell that Vystalaran had placed on Loraestil, it seemed likely that beings with the ability to see through time couldn’t use those powers with regard to each other. Which meant that Gwynharwyf likely had a similar power, and that it wasn’t working on him any more than his was with regard to her.
Or at least, Lex hoped so; if she could still glimpse his future, then his attempts at diplomacy would be doomed before they could start.
That would likewise be the case if he even tried to read her mind. Not only did Lex have no hope that such a thing would succeed, but it would almost certainly give her the excuse she needed to lash out at him.
Which meant that he needed to talk her down using nothing but his wits alone.
Forcing himself to smile, Lex waved a claw in Burly’s direction. “If that’s what brought you here, then I’m pleased to say that the danger to your retainer’s kin has passed. I have already defeated the individual who was threatening her and her compatriots.”
Gwynharwyf smiled in return, showing a row of perfect teeth, but her aura didn’t ease up in the slightest. “Indeed you have. But I conversed with my charge and her friends briefly just now, and they said that there were several other nefarious creatures here. A demon of the foulest sort, a drow with draconic features...even a wolf who had command over ice and snow. With such fiends lurking about, the safety of Sirocco’s descendant and her friends is still uncertain.”
Lex’s smile took on a sharper edge, knowing that he was being maneuvered into admitting that he had connections to Solvei and the others who’d directly fought the elves’ forces. “Those individuals are members of my household. I can personally guarantee that if Thilaera and her comrades withdraw immediately and without committing any further hostile and aggressive actions, then no one in my retinue will harm them.”
“And what of the harm already caused?”
“What of it?” retorted Lex. “Those elves you’re so worried about are the ones who came here – to a place outside of their political dominion on this world – not only uninvited and without announcing themselves ahead of time, but opened hostilities without provocation. Any injuries that they took were dealt in self-defense by my people.”
“So you say.” Gwynharwyf rolled her neck then, as though working out a crick. “But I was told that they merely wished to ask your ice-wielding wolf some things – about you, as it turns out – and she became combative and antagonistic, even though they rescued her before that blackguard” – she gave Burly a cold glare – “could take advantage of her. So it seems to me as if your people started this, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’d say,” rumbled Lex, “that you’ve received a slanted accounting of what transpired.”
Gwynharwyf shrugged. “Perhaps. In which case, I’d like to offer my services as a mediator between yourself and the elven powers. Thilaera is a priest of one of their gods, you see, and the other two are individuals of note in their own right. It’s in everyone’s best interests to make sure that this doesn’t get blown out of proportion, lest the Seldarine – you know that’s the name for the elven pantheon, I take it? – come to the mistaken idea that a representative of the pony gods was looking to start a fight with their faithful.”
“Such a thing is absolutely something to be avoided,” agreed Lex, already spotting the trap she’d laid; he couldn’t disagree with the premise she’d made about this being an issue that required resolution, lest he look like he was eschewing a diplomatic solution. The thing to do now was head off her trying to frame any further discussions on her terms. “And I’m quite happy to avail myself of your services as a go-between in resolving this unfortunate incident. If you collect these elves and depart, I can assure you that I’ll be in touch while you confer with the elven gods.”
“These things are best handled immediately, before they can fester,” countered Gwynharwyf. “Why not come with me right now so that we can resolve this matter without delay?”
Lex smiled inwardly. Gwynharwyf was no fool, but she quite literally didn’t know who she was dealing with. “As much as I’d like to resolve this in a timely manner, I’m afraid that my commitment to my government prevents me from accepting your offer.”
Gwynharwyf frowned. “Your government?”
Allowing himself a soft laugh, Lex gave her a nod. “You’re not the only one to command a position of leadership among your own kind. As a prince who oversees millions of ponies, my duties to them must come before all other responsibilities.”
“Hm.” Gwynharwyf’s single grunt came with a sharp look, eyeing him up and down as though she could determine the truth of his words by looking at him.
“One’s duty to their people should always be their primary consideration,” she agreed at last. “But even such a heavy responsibility must be set aside when it conflicts with one’s principles.”
“Principle is what informs responsibility,” shot back Lex, knowing that the eladrin was probing the defense he’d just put forth for weaknesses. “The latter is a construct that serves the former.”
“And yet, events oftentimes conspire to turn one against the other, so that the duties that we’re called upon to fulfill conflict with – or even betray – our principles.” She held her arms out at a forty-five degree angle as she gestured at him with her chin. “I’m curious, what would you do if you found yourself in such a situation?”
Lex could already feel the aura around her shifting, moving around him like a hunting cat circling cornered prey. What was she getting at?
“I wouldn’t,” he shot back, refusing to step into whatever hypothetical she trying to lure him into. “The proper use of authority mandates keeping principles and responsibilities in accordance. Finding yourself in such a situation means that you’ve already failed.”
Her eyes flashed, and Lex had the distinct impression that in trying to avoid a trap, he’d just fallen into one.
“And that’s never happened to you, then?”
The righteous aura that Gwynharwyf exuded flared, engulfing him completely.
And all of a sudden, Lex found himself unable to stop from thinking about all the times he hadn’t been able to live up to his own expectations for himself.
It wasn’t an attack on his mind in any conventional sense. Rather, it was more like Gwynharwyf’s aura had overwritten the way that cognition itself functioned. No longer were thoughts and emotions two separate things; both were now the same mental process.
Because of that, her asking him about the times when he’d been disappointed in himself not only made him remember them, but relive them as well.
In an instant, he was again caught in a rush of horror and self-loathing as he realized that he had forced his anger onto Panuk, wronging the adlet whom he’d murdered for a second time. He saw himself killing Adagio, the guilt and the shame that he’d pushed away at the time sweeping over him now. And what he’d done to Mei Li-
No, my husband.
He’d foreseen that she’d reach out to him, the vixen’s refusal to condemn him only making him feel worse. If not for the fact that he’d seen how much it had hurt her – as well as Solvei and Nenet – when he’d looked at Solvei’s memories, he’d have shut her out again. But then again, he deserved to feel like this; after how he’d violated her-
You didn’t, she insisted again, her telepathic voice gentle but firm. Forgive me for contradicting you, but your understanding of what passed between us when you made me your wife is not correct.
It is. The weight of those two words was heavier than anything Burly Brawl had thrown at him. I lost control of myself, and you paid for it with your freedom.
You offered me a choice, my husband. Do you not remember? I was the one who approached you and expressed my desire to be yours. Even though I acted wantonly and audaciously, you not only accepted me, you made it clear what you would have of me before you did. Please, do not shame me by saying that I was not aware of what our union entailed.
But Lex would have none of what she was telling him. Your actions were motivated by my own loss of control, my desires overriding your will. Any sentimentality you feel for me now is nothing more than the product of Kara’s blessing.
Gwynharwyf cocked her head, her smile still in place. “I’m guessing you haven’t lived up to your own ideals, then? I can’t say that I’m surprised. After all, you talk about being a prince among ponies, but here you are in the middle of the wilderness, surrounded by exotic beauties rather than your own people.”
Under normal circumstances, the words would have earned nothing more than a sneer. But now they hit Lex like a physical blow, causing him to vacillate between shame and anger, unable to separate the memories of everything that had happened from how he felt about it.
Or from how much he suddenly hated the person who’d done this to him.
All around him, the temperature began to plummet, black crystals rising from the ground as the sky began to cloud over. Why was he bothering to restrain himself? Diplomacy only worked if the other party didn’t have their mind made up, and Gwynharwyf had made it clear that she wanted a fight. What she was doing right now was an attack in all but name already, and warranted a response in kind-
My husband. This time Mei Li’s voice was pleading. You are punishing yourself because you think you ignored my wishes and discounted my feelings. Will you do that again now by ignoring what I am telling you?
She hadn’t actually spoken those words yet, his foresight delivering them to him several seconds in advance. But although the contradiction she presented was a simplistic one – the sort that he normally would have effortlessly dismantled – Gwynharwyf’s aura kept him from dismissing Mei Li’s words, his guilt rendering him unable to discount the kumiho’s point.
It was enough to arrest his rising anger, the changes to environment ceasing as he paused, causing Gwynharwyf’s smile to die, her brow furrowing. “What are you doing?”
He ignored her as more of Mei Li’s words came to him. Do you know what my culture holds as the truest expression of love?
She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing, as though knowing that she needed to seize on this chance while she had his attention. It’s not sharing pleasure, nor is it to lay down your life for another. The first is a transient joy, lost as easily as it’s gained, and the second is noble but bittersweet, causing heartbreak to the one who must continue living.
Able to sense her state of mind, it was impossible for him to miss the contentment that came over her then. True love...is simply being together with someone. It doesn’t require words, or touch, or even a shared look. It’s knowing that someone else is there with you, holding loneliness – the worst pain there is – at bay. That they’ve chosen you, the same way you have chosen them by not sending them away.
Mei Li...
When you saved me, I was relieved. When you healed my injuries, I was grateful. And when I saw you with your wives that night – embarrassment shot through her then, comingled with the happiness she felt – I was captivated. But when you told me that you would only accept me if I would be with you forever, to stay by your side in a bond that would join us for all time...
Frowning, Gwynharwyf stuck her scimitars in the ground, her eyes flicking between Lex and the distant village as she reached out a hand.
...that was when I knew that I loved you. And if a goddess brought me to those feelings, then she has my eternal grAaAtTtIiItTtUuu-
The wobbling in her telepathic voice came with a sudden stab of pain that bypassed all of Lex’s defenses, almost driving him to his knees as his connection to Mei Li suddenly twisted and warped. It wasn’t anywhere near as agonizing as when Solvei had died, but it was still enough that he knew that if he’d been mortal he’d have been screaming...the way he knew that Mei Li was right now.
And in front of him, Gwynharwyf grimaced as she made a tugging motion, sending a new spasm of pain through Lex and the vixen both. “A kitsune?” she muttered, her voice low and her expression dark. “No, a kumiho. And this one” – she moved her hand and gestured as though plucking at something, sending a new bout of pain through him, this time via his connection to Nenet – “is a sphinx.”
“Stop,” hissed Lex, thrusting the effects of Gwynharwyf’s aura away as he reached into his dimensional pocket. “Stop what you’re doing this instant!”
The eladrin didn’t seem to hear him, making another grasping motion. “And this one’s a winter wolf-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Lex drew Belligerence, pointing the weapon at Gwynharwyf.
He didn’t throw it, nor did he activate the vortex that it could create.
Instead, he used its power of negation.
Immediately, Gwynharwyf’s expression changed to one of shock, her head whipping around to look at him. “What the...?!”
His teeth bared in a rictus snarl, Lex glared daggers at the eladrin. “How dare you!”
“How dare I?!” Recovering from her surprise, Gwynharwyf’s expression morphed into one of rage, matching his own as she took up her scimitars again, her aura swirling again as its bloodthirsty aspect surged. “How dare I?! You arrogant tarse! You enslave women, binding their souls to yourself for your own sick pleasure, and you have the unmitigated gall to say HOW DARE I?!”
Her indignation fanned Lex’s own, the beast within him howling. “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“You think I’ve never seen trash like you before?” Her lip curling in disgust, Gwynharwyf spat on the ground. “You talk about duties and principles, but its all just a smokescreen for you to get your pathetic little rocks off, grabbing any girl who catches your eye and using her for your own twisted satisfaction.”
She raised one scimitar then, pointing it at him. “Well guess what? It’s my duty, in accordance with my principles, to cut little men – or stallions – like you down to size. And whatever that weapon you have is, it’s not gonna be enough to save you from me.”
Swinging the other scimitar around, she dropped into a ready stance, holding both blades aloft. “I’m going to kill you, body and soul, and after I do I’m going to drag what’s left of you in front of those women you’ve tortured, so they’ll know that they’re free of you forever.”
If he hadn’t been so incensed, Lex would have laughed. That the eladrin was accusing him of the very thing he’d been feeling guilty over, mere moments after Mei Li had convinced him that he was berating himself unnecessarily, was beyond ironic. All the more so for the fact that negotiations had broken down for reasons that – for once – had nothing to do with his lack of communication skills.
Which meant it was time to use his fallback plan.
“You’re not going to kill me,” he sneered. “You’re not even going to try.”
This time, Gwynharwyf’s smile was vicious, her aura bearing down on him so hard that he felt like she already had her blades poised for a fatal blow. “I won’t have to try. The only thing more fragile than your pride is your defense, and I’m about to cut through both.”
“Only if...”
Reaching into his pocket dimension, Lex withdrew another of the seven treasures he’d been given.
To a casual examination, it was far less impressive than any of the others that he’d previously used, seeming like nothing more than a deep red oak leaf. But a closer look made it clear that there was far more to it than their first appeared.
Forged of metal so thin that it was as flexible as the genuine article, the leaf’s veins were actually formed of flowing runes. Its coloration was that of dried blood, which Lex himself had pressed onto its surface until the entire thing was stained red. And when he held it up, a symbol appeared on its center, shining brightly enough that it was unmistakable:
The personal sigil of Penelope La Gard, superimposed over another rune denoting a marquis of her demesne.
“...you want to start a war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.”
The Autumnal Insignia that Lex had received was easily the weakest of seven treasures that he’d acquired.
Although the artifact contained both magic and aristeia, it had fewer of both than the other six items. Moreover, the Insignia served only to connect its bearer to the forces of Autumn, outsourcing the actual utilization of those powers to both the strength of the Insignia’s wielder and the current time of year on whatever world its bearer found themselves, presuming that the seasons held sway there.
The result was that Lex now had an entirely new form of magic – that of nature – at his disposal...but only with regard to the entropic forces that the autumn season represented. And while those powers were usable all year round, they waxed and waned dramatically in accordance with the seasonal cycle.
But even though those powers were at their strongest right now, since the autumnal equinox was only recently passed and the winter solstice still some time away, Lex knew they’d be of little help if he had to fight Gwynharwyf. Although the Llys Seren was part of the Seelie Court, they had no connection to the seasonal cycle, which meant that Gwynharwyf – like all eladrin – had no particular vulnerabilities to the powers of Autumn. And even if she had, her personal strength was such that Lex couldn’t see it making much difference if he was forced to fight her.
That strength, however, wouldn’t protect her from the political fallout of attacking a high-ranking member of the Autumn Court.
Indicating that he held such a lofty status was, as far as Lex was concerned, the Insignia’s greatest power.
“You’re a Marquis of Autumn?!”
“By the grace of Her Majesty, Queen Penelope La Gard,” replied Lex, enjoying the shocked look on Gwynharwyf’s face. “Who would, naturally, appeal to her husband – King Iubdan – if one of her most loyal retainers were to be assassinated by a leader of the Llys Seren.”
Gwynharwyf stared at the Insignia for a long moment, as though processing what to make of this new development. After a moment, she scowled, but didn’t relax her stance. “The Autumn Court has a great name,” she admitted, her tone neutral. “I remember hearing when one of the previous Autumn Kings, Fionn, smote two of Eschaton’s heads, and his wife Olwen struck down a third.”
Lex said nothing, not knowing who any of those individuals were. The Libram of Ineffable Damnation hadn’t bothered to identify any individuals – past or present – in the fey courts; the eladrin were the sole exceptions simply because they were also empyreals.
And he’d certainly never heard of any sort of multi-headed creature named “Eschaton.”
“But that was a long time ago,” continued Gwynharwyf. “Ever since those two lost their lives driving that monster away, Autumn has been in decline, with nothing more than a series of weak kings and even weaker queens leading it. Which is to say...”
She firmed up her stance then, raising her scimitars.
“...I couldn’t care less what your Queen Penelope and her husband will do.”
Cursing inwardly, Lex immediately retorted with the first thing that came to mind. “And what about Queen Mab? Do you care what she does?”
Gwynharwyf scoffed, but she didn’t attack. “The Winter Mother? Why would she give a damn about what happens to one of Autumn’s dogs?”
Realizing that he was fortunate to have managed to pull the names of the other Unseelie leaders from Penelope’s mind during their tryst, Lex smirked, ignoring Gwynharwyf’s insult as he did his best to project absolute confidence in what he was saying. “The Winter Mother is the de facto leader of the whole of the Unseelie. When she hears that a consort of the Queen of a notable Seelie clan killed a retainer of Autumn, the second-most prominent house of the Unseelie Court, she won’t let it go.”
“She will,” spat Gwynharwyf, though she still didn’t take so much as a half-step forward. “If the Autumn King is too weak to protect his own, then she’ll simply arrange for his downfall and let the next king worry about it.”
“Are you absolutely sure of that?” retorted Lex, letting his smirk fade in favor of a grave look. Gwynharwyf was the leader of the eladrin armies, and given her mercurial disposition, he was betting everything on that meaning that she left the political machinations of the court to her wife, Morwel. “Because I’m telling you, while the Winter Court will do nothing when it comes to Autumn’s internal disputes, your killing me won’t be seen as a private dispute between the Llyn Seren and Autumn; it will be seen as the Seelie declaring war on the Unseelie.”
In point of fact, Lex doubted that it would ever get that far. The fact that he’d cuckolded the Autumn King – who would likely find out what had happened very soon, due to Penelope’s retainers having received the same treatment; such a secret was simply too weighty to stay hidden for long – meant that Iubdan would likely see Gwynharwyf’s killing him as neatly solving a problem. Any face that he lost for a member of his court being slain by a foreign power could easily be resolved by asking for some sort of token apology...which Morwel or some other Seelie power would likely give, since no one wanted a war.
But Gwynharwyf didn’t know that. As far as she was concerned, he was a high-ranking member of the Autumn Court, in good standing with its leaders. If she believed that war would be the result of her actions here...
Frowning, the eladrin shook her head. “It won’t become a war. Morwel will talk to Mab, and they’ll work something out.”
Lex laughed, not having to fake the scorn in his voice. “Indeed they will. And I can already tell you that what they ‘work out’ – as you so simplistically put it – will be your beloved wife paying a price to appease your affront to the Unseelie. Tell me, what do you think the Winter Mother will demand of her?”
Gwynharwyf winced ever so slightly.
With her presence still condensing thoughts and emotions into the same process, Lex couldn’t help but feel a vicious sense of vindictive glee at the sight. That’s right. You pontificated at me about the importance of setting duty aside when it conflicted with your principles. Now let’s see if you can live up to your own words.
In many ways, Gwynharwyf reminded him of Celestia. Both were arrogant fools who were under the impression they could simply do whatever they pleased, treating their conscience as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong with no thought given the weighty responsibilities that came with their authority. The end result was that someone else inevitably paid the price for their selfishness.
Celestia had rejected that lesson when Lex had tried to enlighten her, eschewing logic and reason in favor of childishly rejecting everything he’d told her.
The question now was if Gwynharwyf would do the same...
Slowly, the eladrin relaxed her stance, straightening up as she lowered her swords.
Then she began walking toward Lex.
There was nothing particularly aggressive about her movements. Her gait was slow and completely without tension. Her scimitars hung loose in her hands. Even her aura relaxed, letting thoughts and emotions be separate things once again.
And yet she came closer and closer, her expression icy as she stared him down.
Lex met her gaze evenly, refusing to back up as he kept Belligerence at the ready.
It was only when Gwynharwyf had come close enough that the two of them were within striking distance of each other’s weapons that she stopped her advance, glaring at Lex for several long seconds before she finally spoke.
“I challenge you to a duel.”
Lex had his answer ready before she’d finished speaking. “I refuse.”
Gwynharwyf bared her teeth at him. “Coward.”
“Call me whatever you wish. I have no reason to agree to fight you.”
“You’re of the Autumn Court, the murderers of the Unseelie. If I tell them that you backed down from a challenge, what will that do to your reputation among your fellow killers and assassins? To your queen’s reputation?”
“That’s not sufficient-”
Her arm seemed to flicker for a moment, and Lex felt a slight pain in his face, just under his eye. Then he felt a warm trickle running down his cheek, realizing it was his own blood.
He hadn’t even been able to see the attack, much less defend against it.
“How’s that for sufficient?” spat Gwynharwyf. “Now accept the duel!”
The beast inside of him snarled, infuriated by the provocation, but Lex forced it down. It was clear that – just like when he’d dueled Blueblood back in Vanhoover – if he accepted her challenge, it would constitute a mutual agreement that the outcome would generate no political fallout. And since he had no reason to agree to that, she was trying to shame him into doing so.
Which was itself an implicit admission that she couldn’t bring herself to attack him otherwise.
He’d won.
Gwynharwyf was the single strongest enemy he’d faced to date, and he’d just overcome her – not with his magic or his claws or even Belligerence – but with his wits alone.
Given how thoroughly sick he’d grown of finding himself in life-or-death battles, it was an exceptionally sweet victory. So much so that Lex allowed himself a triumphant grin as he looked back at Gwynharwyf, the wound she’d given him already beginning to close. “I told you before: I refuse your challenge.”
“Bastard!” Her other arm flickered for an instant, and another gash was opened across his face. “What’s the matter?! Are you only brave enough to bare your claws against women that you’ve already enslaved?! Put me in my place, I dare you!”
She continued to hurl insults at him, calling him every foul epithet that she knew while belittling his bravery, his masculinity, his parentage, and numerous other aspects of his character. Each one came with another cut from her scimitars, inflicting wounds that were shallow but painful, cutting through his defenses as though they weren’t even there.
Lex bore it all in silence, unflinching as he stared Gwynharwyf in the eye.
Her tantrum was nothing more than the braying of a loser.
Finally, she seemed to realize that she was wasting her time, ceasing her tirade as she sneered at him. “I should have known better than to think one such as yourself would fight to defend your honor, since you so clearly have none. Let me guess, you’re waiting for me to offer you some reward if you win, is that it? Hoping that I’ll pledge to spend the night with you, or offer you one service, or something else that’ll tickle your sick little fancy if you beat me?”
Lex said nothing, simply letting her stew in her own helplessness.
“Pathetic,” she sneered when it became clear that he wasn’t going to reply. “You can hide behind that little title that Penelope the Pretender gave you, but not forever. The Autumn Court doesn’t respect those who cower behind their masters’ banners, and no ruler wants such a cowardly servant dragging their name through the mud.”
Leaning forward, she spat in his face, her green eyes murderous. “Sooner or later, you’re going to lose your standing in the Unseelie. And when you do, I’ll be there to cut you down and free your sex slaves. Count on that, Lex Legis.”
She paused one last time, waiting to see if her final, desperate attempt to get a rise out of him would work. When it didn’t, she snorted, and a moment later Lex picked up a plane-shifting spell as she vanished from sight.
Lex paused just long enough to make sure she was truly gone, then sighed. His wounds were already healing themselves of their own accord, and even his appearance was fixing itself as the bloodstains – and Gwynharwyf’s spittle – fell away from him.
But he didn’t put Belligerence away as he glanced at Burly, confirming that the stallion wasn’t going to wake up for some time, before looking over at the multicolored dome a short distance away.
“Have you seen enough? Or do you intend to drag this nonsense out even more?”
No reply came for several seconds, until at last the dome dissipated, revealing the elves within.
Loraestil and Thilaera were both pale-faced and panting, their eyes wide as they trembled lightly.
But judging from where they were looking, it wasn’t because of what had happened with Gwynharwyf.
“No, Lex Legis,” announced Vystalaran as he strode forward, a wan smile on his lips as he came to a stop a few dozen feet away from the titan. “I’d say that was more than satisfactory.”
I bet you believed everything I said, didn’t you?
Gwynharwyf had already changed into her aerial form as she plane-shifted back to the world she’d left only seconds ago, her body having become a whirlwind as she reappeared high in the atmosphere.
As if I’d ever just run away and leave innocent women behind for men like you to play with. I might not be able to kill you without forcing Morwel to deal with the consequences, but I can snatch your torture victims right out from under you! And by the time you run crying back to Penelope, and she contacts Morwel about having them returned, they’ll already be free of that filthy soul-binding magic you’ve used on them.
Fortunately, it was easy to figure out where that scum had hidden his victims. Gwynharwyf had caught sight of the bondage he held them in before, having been able to trace it in the direction of a nearby village. And she could see it below, speeding downward toward what looked like a small stone keep with an odd-looking knight on its roof. One wielding a ridiculously large sword.
Strange, frowned Morwel inwardly as she descended toward one of the keep’s small windows. That looks almost like-
She didn’t have a chance to finish that thought as the knight’s helmeted head suddenly swiveled around. Immediately, they shifted their grip on their sword, kneeling down and bracing weapon over one knee as one hand grabbed it by the ricasso to hold it steady. Their other hand traced down the fuller, where...
Had she been corporeal, Gwynharwyf’s eyes would have widened at seeing the spectral strings that appeared then, stretching from the downward-pointed hooked end of the sword to the cross-guard, doubling back in a way that almost looked like the draw of a crossbow.
Especially since, nestled within the fuller, there was now a five-foot-long solid metal quarrel, the spectral strings stretched taut behind it as the knight’s other hand pulled it back, increasing the tension.
Well well well, mused Gwynharwyf, easily dodging the massive arrow as it soared toward her a moment later. So Fionn and Olwen’s daughter survived.
“GWYNHARWYF!” bellowed Branwen after her shot missed. “I CHALLENGE YOU TO A DUEL!”
“You have my admiration. To have overcome Gwynharwyf the way you did was truly inspired.”
Lex ignored the compliments, as well as the congratulatory bow that Vystalaran gave him, the wan smile still on the elf wizard’s lips. “Is that an admission that she was acting as an agent on behalf of your pantheon’s interests?”
“It really wasn’t anything so formal,” shrugged Vystalaran. “The Seelie and the Seldarine are on very close terms, and help each other out when asked. It’s more about favors than stuffy old treaties or declarations. Although...”
His smile fell away as he put a hand over his heart, giving Lex a deeper bow. “I do owe you an apology for how shamefully Gwynharwyf acted before she left. The Llys Seren are free spirits by nature, and she’s volatile even by their standards, particularly when she sees others held in servitude or thralldom. But that’s no excuse for treating a member of the Autumn Court with such disrespect. Especially one who commands a royal title among their own people.”
“A most conciliatory speech,” retorted Lex flatly. “Or at least it would be, if not for its complete lack of acknowledgment of your own actions, and those of your comrades.”
Straightening up, Vystalaran gave a soft laugh. “Alas, that’s not something I can apologize over. What happened with Burly Brawl” – he nodded toward the unconscious stallion – “was a legitimate case of mistaken identity.”
“On his part.” Lex glanced coldly at Loraestil, who flinched. “And on hers.” Thilaera cringed as Lex’s eyes settled on hers, the elf looking away immediately. “But not on yours.”
“Measures had to be taken to draw you out,” replied Vystalaran simply. “And while that brute’s being here wasn’t something I’d anticipated, he was useful in his own way.”
“And if Blaze takes your actions against a pony she’s blessed as a pretext for war?”
Unlike Gwynharwyf, Vystalaran didn’t seem to be at all bothered by that prospect, his soft smile not so much as flickering. “Do you mind if I ask how it is that you knew I wasn’t what I appeared to be? I really thought my disguise was quite impenetrable. And yet you were looking at me, specifically, through the prismatic sphere when you called me out.”
Lex snorted.
In fact, he hadn’t initially been aware that Vystalaran wasn’t like his two companions. Everything that his senses – physical, supernatural, and otherwise – had told him was that the wizard was as mortal as his companions. There’d been no overlapping manifestations, no presence that had overrode reality, and even the single spell that he’d hurled at Vystalaran in retaliation for the wizard’s own magical attack had seemed to wound him.
But the elf had made an oversight, one which had led to Lex being able to unravel that the mage was hiding something.
The foresight spell that he’d cast on Loraestil.
That bit of magic – which had been designed to give the elf warrior the same awareness of the future that Lex himself had by virtue of his being a titan – had instead erased Loraestil from his own trans-temporal awareness, the same way the Ghost Blade’s wielder had admitted to Lex’s own future being closed off to him even with the spell active.
That he’d said so using the same whisper-spell that Lex had once used to communicate with Sonata and others back in Vanhoover hadn’t hidden the elf’s shocked exclamation from Lex’s ears, nor had it he missed Vystalaran’s seemingly-shocked reply. He’d simply been unable to pay attention to them, given that his attempt to commune with the Night Mare had gone badly awry, and he’d needed to deal with Burly immediately afterward, and then Gwynharwyf.
But by the time the eladrin had made her appearance, the discrepancy had been notable.
That “prismatic sphere” that Vystalaran had hidden himself and his companions under had been a powerful ward. It had kept all three of them safe despite the worst excesses of Burly’s gravity manipulation. But although Lex had only barely been able to see even rough outlines of the elves inside of it – having to strain his supernatural senses to their limit to determine which one was Vystalaran – the sphere hadn’t been soundproof, allowing him to hear that the wizard had been the one to tell Thilaera to summon her family’s patroness, shocking Thilaera in the process.
Which had been what had given Vystalaran away.
After all, if he’d known about Thilaera’s connection to Gwynharwyf, it implied that he had some understanding of the eladrin titan’s nature. And since Vystalaran knew how to cast a foresight spell, then it wasn’t unreasonable to think that he was aware that titans were beings whose futures couldn’t been seen via that bit of magic.
And yet the elf wizard had been shocked when Loraestil had said that the foresight spell was working, even though the trio had openly admitted to Solvei that they’d come here knowing exactly who they were looking for.
Which had led Lex to wonder why it was that Vystalaran could be so familiar with titans, and had come looking specifically for one, but had no idea that foresight wouldn’t work on them.
Of course, by itself that had been far from conclusive. There were any number of reasonable explanations for why Vystalaran could be familiar with Gwynharwyf and yet have no idea that titans’ futures couldn’t been seen...or at least, not via that spell of his. It was entirely possible that he’d only just learned that spell, for instance, or perhaps he only knew about Gwynharwyf’s connection to Thilaera’s family, and not the nature of her powers. It might even have been that he’d thought Lex was a titan of weak enough stature that he wasn’t able to see across time; none of Adagio’s creditors had been able to do so, after all.
But innocuous as it was, Lex had still seized on the disparity between Vystalaran’s actions and what he should conceivably have known.
Intelligent enemies would always seek to hide information from their foes. That, in turn, required that anyone fighting such enemies be able to pick up on even the slightest hints that something was off. It was a truism which had seen Lex through countless battles, against enemies ranging from Xiriel to Kryonex, and he’d been more than prepared to put it into play again now.
Not that he had any intention of revealing that to the elf standing across from him, since he still wasn’t completely sure what Vystalaran was. He was some sort of representative of the elven pantheon, to be certain. But whether he was a Chosen, or a divine servitor, or something else was still very much in doubt.
But since he’d apparently given up on using pawns, perhaps he’d be willing to admit what he was now.
“Do you really expect me to tell you that, when you haven’t told me who you really are or what you’re doing here?”
“A fair point,” admitted Vystalaran, with a cordial nod of his head. “Then, allow me to formally introduce myself.”
For the third time, he bowed. This time the gesture was more formal, placing his feet together as he held his right arm horizontally across his middle, his left arm moving around to take up the same position behind his back.
“I am Vystalaran,” he intoned, “avatar of Gladoneral.”
Even as the words left his mouth, his mortality fell away. Before now, Lex had been able to see into the wizard’s future, as well as hear his thoughts. But in an instant, those were removed from what he could sense as the power that the avatar had been suppressing was allowed to spring forth in full-
Without stopping to think, Lex immediately used Belligerence’s power of negation at the same time as barbed wire surged forth from his foreleg, strands of jagged metal once again replacing the flesh of his body.
Together, they were just enough to keep him from being completely crushed by the divine aura that the elf now radiated.
Kryonex had been an oppressive force, despite being a weak demigod who had been weakened further by Adagio’s machinations. Gwynharwyf had been far stronger, the might she commanded easily eclipsing anything Kryonex had been able to bring to bear.
But the power that Vystalaran possessed was in a league of its own.
The entire universe seemed to revolve around him, as though he was the axis upon which Creation itself turned. Truth defined itself in relation to him, with any competing interpretations being rendered irrelevant simply because he didn’t approve of them. Things were good to the extent that they had an affinity with him, and bad to the extent that they didn’t. Defiance wasn’t a question of sin or heresy, but of overturning physical laws.
It was only because of Belligerence that Lex was able to make sense of what was happening, the weapon shutting down the divine aura’s ability to subsume comprehension of alternative modes of being. But that didn’t alter the physical properties that had overlaid the universe in the area around Vystalaran, leaving Lex struggling just to stay standing.
The irreconcilability of the differences between himself and the elf in front of him – in terms ranging from their physical forms to their attitudes and beliefs – weighed on his mind so heavily that he couldn’t push them out of his thoughts. It was the mental equivalent trying to ignore severe vertigo, with only the reservoir of power that his wire-form gave him enabling him to withstand the sensation to the point where he wasn’t completely crippled by it.
And this is just his avatar?!
The Libram of Ineffable Damnation had relatively little to say about avatars, being far more concerned with the transmigration of the soul and the planes that it crossed in its journey. But it had still talked about the nature of the gods, and avatars had received some coverage.
An avatar was, essentially, Grisela’s puppet technique, elevated to a divine level. But whereas the winter witch’s replications had looked like her in appearance only, being empty vessels that she could project her consciousness into, an avatar possessed not only its own cognizance, but a portion of its creator’s divinity. But rather than being imbued into a non-deific vessel, the way a blessing was given to mortals, an avatar was actual composed of godly power.
Which meant that an avatar was a god unto itself, albeit one that was weaker than its creator.
How much weaker – and, for that matter, how many avatars a god could create at one time – had been where the Libram’s information had reached its limit. According to the book, stories abounded of avatars who were anywhere from half as powerful as their parent deity, to so weak that they were barely recognizable as gods at all. Even then, the author had openly admitted to all of that information was of highly questionable reliability, and that there was no way to test it.
The only single point of commonality that all of the available data seemed to agree on was that no avatar was anywhere near as strong as the god who’d made it.
But if that was the case with Vystalaran, then Lex couldn’t even begin to imagine how powerful the real Gladoneral was.
“I have to say,” noted Vystalaran conversationally, even as the sound of his voice caused the dissonance in Lex’s mind to grow worse; how they spoke was another point of dissimilarity between them, making it harder to stop those differences from consuming his awareness, “that weapon of yours is quite extraordinary. That’s what you used to overcome Kryonex, isn’t it?”
Lex clenched his jaw, refusing to answer.
He managed to stay silent, but the effort was greater than when he’d managed to subjugate the sliver of godsblood that Adagio had imbued into his spine.
“And that form you’ve taken...it’s some sort of outgrowth of that foreleg of yours. That’s a holy symbol for one of your gods as I recall. And yet you transformed when it went berserk just recently. Why? What was that?”
This time the questions were more pointed, and the strain of maintaining his silence brought Lex past the point of collapse, hitting the ground as he desperately clenched his talons around Belligerence tighter.
“Well, I suppose you don’t need to answer right away,” continued Vystalaran, slowly walking forward. “There’ll be plenty of time for you to confess everything once I confiscate that weapon and bring you back to Foelvan. Which isn’t to say that it’s alright to dawdle.”
He was within striking distance now, his boots almost filling Lex’s vision. But in his current state, resolving to actually lash out at the elf god’s avatar – letting alone committing to that action – was beyond what he was capable of.
“The sooner I can confirm that the pony gods made you to be their weapon, the sooner I’ll be able to convince the rest of the pantheon that they need to be punished.”
“Is there any lingering pain? I have a few more spells I can try.”
Solvei forced herself to smile as she shook her head. “I’m really alright. Thank you, Agapay.”
The angel’s expression was warm and caring as she nodded. “Just let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”
It was all Solvei could do not to grimace, keeping the strained grin on her face as the chasmalim – apparently that was the kind of angel Agapay was – went back to check on Mei Li. It was only when the angel’s back was turned that she let expression drop, fighting down the urge to groan, knowing that Agapay would hear it and come rushing back.
It wasn’t as though the tiny keep they were all huddled inside of – herself, Nenet, Mei Li, and the five beauties that Lex had brought back with him, as well as Agapay, who was apparently another sexpot that her master had picked up while he was gone – had any privacy. And while Solvei had, as Akna, grown up in a home that had no real walls or separate rooms, she couldn’t help but feel terribly constrained right now.
Part of that was from what had just happened. Seeing Mei Li suddenly collapse screaming out of nowhere, with no warning whatsoever and no apparent cause, had been unnerving. She’d stopped an instant later, only for the same thing to suddenly happen to Nenet. And then it had been her turn.
The agony had been shocking, all the more so for the fact that she’d immediately known that someone was attacking her bond with Lex. It hadn’t been like when Paska had used a spell to simply close their link off; this had felt more like the one and only time – shortly after they’d first been bonded – when Lex had tried to sever their connection. Except this had been much, much worse.
Even more disturbing had been that Lex himself hadn’t been the one to do it; she’d been able to sense his sudden anxiety and outrage right before she’d collapsed, signaling that someone else had been responsible for what was happening.
Fortunately, it had stopped almost immediately, but by the time Solvei had stopped shaking, Lex’s cabal of wet dream girls had been ushering the three of them inside of what looked like some sort of miniature fortress, which had somehow sprung up on the edge of her village. It had even come complete with an armor-clad warrior on top, who was apparently named Branwen, keeping watch over the place.
But while the pain had gone – something Agapay had made sure of, the angel seeing to their health with motherly dedication – Solvei’s discomfort had only increased since being shut up in the too-small keep, for one simple reason.
“I’d like to put a protection spell on you, just in case.” Agapay’s proposition might have been directed at Nenet, but Solvei couldn’t help but glance at the angel...and immediately winced.
In such a confined area, there was nowhere to look that didn’t result in her getting an eyeful of the girls that Lex had brought back with him.
“Just hold still for a moment,” murmured the angel, her voice exuding protectiveness and caring as she bent over the sphinx, her back to Solvei. It was just then that the strands of her hair-woven outfit – already skimpy and skintight – seemed to shift slightly...
Solvei immediately averted her gaze, but not before having gotten confirmation of where the chasmalim didn’t have any hair.
Gritting her teeth, she turned in the other direction, instead directing her eyes toward-
“Something on your mind, princess?”
Leaning back against the door, as if to make sure that no one got in or out without her say-so, the huge tiger-woman crossed her arms beneath her chest – which, like the rest of her, was completely uncovered – one brow going up as she stared at Solvei.
“Er, nothing,” muttered Solvei, trying hard not to notice how the tigress’s piercings, not just on her bosom but also in her ears, navel, and...further south, all seemed to catch the soft light emanating from above, the bejeweled studs glistening. “Sorry.”
Orange and black-striped shoulders shrugged, causing other parts of her to bounce. “Why? It’s no skin off my nose if you wanna check me out.”
“Honestly, Yamini, could you be any more of a clod? She obviously wants you to cover up!”
Solvei winced inwardly as the blue-skinned woman with the long hair sauntered over. She moved like a dancer, not stepping so much as strutting, each foot coming down directly in front of the other, causing her hips to sway. By itself that wouldn’t have been so bad, but while she at least wore clothes, her outfit consisted of nothing but seashells and strings of pearls. While not naked the way “Yamini” was, her every motion seemed calculated to entice, each movement lithe and sensual in a way that reminded Solvei of Nenet’s descriptions of Adagio.
“Why should I, Dima?” snorted Yamini, straightening up as she put her hands on her hips and thrust her chest out, a proud smirk crossing her lips. “I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, unlike certain scrawny little shrimps I could name.”
Dima flushed at that, her cheeks turning purplish as she scowled. “Nothing to be ashamed of? You mean besides your complete lack of style, grace, or elegance?”
Raising one arm above her head, she lifted one leg and extended it out straight – giving Solvei a demonstration of just how little her pearl-string thong really covered – before sweeping it back, making a three-quarter turn as she rolled her shoulder, looking back at the tigress with a smirk. “Then again, I suppose an animal wouldn’t know anything about womanly charms.”
Yamini growled, arms rising as she clenched her fists-
“If you two don’t shut up right now, I swear I’ll carve your ‘womanly charms’ out of both your hides!”
To Solvei, the speaker looked almost like a cross between Nenet’s human form and Nisha, the shadowy wolf that Lex had so briefly summoned, being a furless humanoid woman with ebony skin, though her red eyes and white hair were dissimilar to either. Like Yamini, she eschewed clothing entirely, showcasing a trim figure that was nevertheless bountifully curved. But unlike the tigress, her refusal to cover up didn’t leave her body on display. At least, not completely, since there were odd bands of scales – the same deep black as her skin – protecting her modesty.
Though it was rather hard to think of her as modest given the stretches she was doing. While on their own the calisthenics didn’t necessarily seem to be salacious, it was impossible to ignore what the toe touches, star jumps, and squats did for her.
The effect might have been diminished if she’d still had the claws, wings, and tail that Solvei could have sworn she’d seen before, just prior to her bond with Lex being attacked. But sometime between then and now, the dark beauty had made them disappear.
That discrepancy didn’t seem to bother Dima or Yamini, however, the two of them sneering at the dark-skinned woman almost in unison.
“You and what army, Sirrush?” spat Yamini.
“Just like a drow,” huffed Dima, clucking her tongue. “No tact whatsoever.”
“I’ve got my army right here,” hissed Sirrush, raising one arm as she rose up from where she’d been doing lunges. Instantly, scales spread over it from the elbow on down, her fingers lengthening into claws, answering the question of where her draconic features from before had gone. “And I’m only going to say this once: I’m a drey, not a drow!”
“Aw, there’s no need to fight!” The new voice came from the girl in her early teens doing a handstand in the corner, apparently unaware of how it made the hem of her dress slip past her hips, exposing underwear that was black, sheer, and far too sexy for someone who looked as young as she did. “Why don’t we all play a game instead? I vote for truth or dare!”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this about a demon, but Spice is right. Partially.” The redhead in the back of the room sighed, one hand coming up to adjust her glasses. “We’re no help to Prince Legis arguing amongst ourselves like this.”
For all that her outfit was just as erotically-charged as the rest of her group’s – having a skirt so short and tight it was barely there, and a top that even with several buttons undone seemed to be straining to hold her cleavage, making Solve recall her humiliating attempts to dress herself back in Darkest Night – there was an odd formality to the way she carried herself, her stern expression and tied-back hair giving her a serious look that contrasted oddly with the slutty way she was dressed.
“We need to coordinate some sort of plan to aid Prince Legis,” continued the redhead, uncrossing her legs and recrossing them in the other direction, her movements brisk and businesslike...though not so much so that Solvei didn’t get a glimpse of the fact that, unlike that “Spice” demon, the redhead didn’t seem to believe in wearing underwear at all. “First, we should use a divinatory spell to monitor how his battle is progressing-”
“Carnelia,” broke in Agapay gently, “if Lex sent everyone here, then he probably wants you all to help make sure his loved ones are safe so he can fight without any distractions.”
“Yeah!” snapped Yamini. “And it’s not like he put you in charge anyway!”
“You’re one to talk,” spat Sirrush. “Blocking the door like you think you get to decide who stays and who goes.”
“Hm, I like coming rather than going,” noted Spice, an innocent tone in her voice as she kicked her legs back and forth, still upside down. “So I’m gonna stay right here, since this is where Lex will be coming for his girlfriends, and then maybe after he does he’ll let me come with him!”
Nenet blushed. “W-wait, are you-”
“We are not his girlfriends,” announced Mei Li, standing up from where she’d been recovering in the far corner of the room. Although she’d had the most time to recover, the attack on her connection to Lex had lasted the longest, and even now she still seemed a little pale, accepting Agapay’s hand as the angel helped her rise. “We are his wives. And while concubines such as yourselves do not represent our husband’s household, your quarreling and your appearances are both unacceptable.”
Naturally, her admonishment didn’t go over very well.
“Who asked you, tails?”
“Funny, I don’t remember him mentioning any wives while he was railing us.”
“Hey, maybe Lex sent us here so we can give them some tips on how to satisfy him!”
“It’s not implausible. From what I can tell, none of them seem very experienced.”
“Great, bad enough I have to be stuck in here with the rest of you. Now we have to teach a bunch of virgins how to get it on?”
Nenet bristled, switching back to her hybrid form as she stood up, spiked tail thrashing behind her. Mei Li seemed equally incensed, her expression turning cold as she gently but firmly pushed Agapay’s hand away, standing by Nenet and fanning her tails out.
Solvei instantly moved to stand alongside the other two, already gathering her ice magic.
Being trapped with a bunch of naked and near-naked girls was not her idea of a good time. Doubly so when they were the sex toys of the guy she’d fallen for, and triply so when he’d apparently run straight to them right after they’d had their first time together! Not to mention that she’d been brutalized by some overgrown stallion who’d wanted to force himself on her just now, had been completely overwhelmed against those elven invaders, and had something attack the bond that connected her to Lex, who was – once again – fighting alone against an enemy too powerful for her to help him with.
The keep’s disappearance was like standing on a rug that someone had suddenly yanked on.
Or at least, that was how it seemed to Nenet as the building suddenly withdrew into itself, the floor vanishing and causing everyone inside to drop. Only by an inch or so, but that was still enough for her to be thrown off-balance, waving her arms with a squawk as she instinctively gave her wings a stabilizing flap. Fortunately, she managed to keep herself from falling over.
Almost everyone else had likewise managed to retain their footing, with only the underage-looking demon having gone tumbling since she’d been doing a headstand. But that concerned Nenet less than what she’d heard right before the building had vanished. “That was Branwen’s voice!” she yelped, knowing that Solvei wasn’t familiar with what the raven knight sounded like. “She said she was challenging-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a tremendous crash resounded from overhead.
The sound was practically an explosion, carrying force enough that it made Nenet’s ears ring as she looked upward. For the briefest instant, she was able to glimpse Branwen hanging in the air, her ridiculously-oversized sword caught in mid-swing by a much smaller scimitar, itself held by a short, scantily-clad woman with long hair. The woman’s other hand held a matching sword...which had just gouged a deep crack into the massive tower shield that was once again in Branwen’s grasp.
Then the long-haired woman flicked her blades outward, swatting the raven knight out of the air as though she were an annoying fly.
Branwen immediately hit the ground, skidding through the dirt hard enough that she left a trail behind her. But despite the force that she’d been struck with, and the weight of her weapons and armor, the vilderavn immediately righted herself, feathery cloak flipping over her shoulders as she rolled to her feet and brought her sword and shield back around, white eyes gleaming inside her helmet.
The scantily-clad woman – “Gwynharwyf,” according to what Branwen had said – didn’t even bother looking at her, instead touching down easily as she turned her head...
And looked right at Nenet.
The force in those green eyes almost brought the sphinx to her knees, feeling a pressure in them that was heavier than the crash from a moment before. The intensity they held was so powerful that it took her an instant to realize that the emotion on Gwynharwyf’s face wasn’t hate, or anger, or disdain.
It was concern; fear intermingled with protectiveness. But unlike the warm, soothing aura that surrounded Agapay, this woman’s concern had a ferocity to it that caused Nenet to unconsciously take a step back. While Lex’s feelings for her were intensely personal thanks to the deep intimacy of their bond, the sensation Nenet got from Gwynharwyf was entirely different.
Her concern came from a place of righteous fervor, a zeal that bordered on fanaticism. It was a look that saw the sphinx not as a person to be cherished, but as a goal to be accomplished.
Far from being comforting, it was terrifying.
An instant later, those green eyes flickered toward Mei Li, and then to Solvei. Both of them gasped in turn, and Nenet could tell that they were just as unnerved.
“Excuse me?” sputtered Solvei, ice blades forming in her hands. “‘Soul-slaves’?”
“How dare you insult our husband like that.” Mei Li’s voice was cold, tails again fanning out behind her.
Nenet scowled as a sudden insight came to her. “You’re the one who attacked our bond!”
A sickened expression crossed Gwynharwyf’s face then, as though she’d just heard something nauseating, but it passed in an instant as her features hardened. “Whatever he’s done to you, I swear I won’t let it happen anymo-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as she was engulfed in a broken column of darkness, streamers of blackness that radiated a deathly aura erupting from the ground all around her, engulfing Gwynharwyf entirely. It was enough to make Nenet blanch, one hand coming up to shield her face. Agapay had told her that Branwen was part of an organization called the Autumn Court, who were the killers among the fey; judging by the mortiferous feeling from whatever magic she’d used, the vilderavn had come by her place in that group honestly.
From within the rising swell of dark energy, an annoyed sigh came. A second later, the column shattered, the thick whisps of blackness breaking into nothing as Gwynharwyf strode out of them, completely unharmed. “I’ll deal with that brat, and then I’ll get you all the help you need,” she vowed, giving Nenet, Solvei, and Mei Li an earnest look. “I promise, I won’t abandon you!”
An indignant protest came to Nenet’s lips then, but she didn’t have a chance to utter it before Gwynharwyf suddenly raced toward Branwen, scimitars again colliding with Branwen’s sword and shield, immediately driving the vilderavn back.
“She thinks we’re...” Solvei couldn’t finish, amazement and outrage causing her to sputter.
“This outrage cannot be forgiven,” hissed Mei Li, sounding angrier than Nenet had ever heard her. The vixen’s tails were thrashing, and Nenet could feel her gathering magic as the kumiho took a step toward where Gwynharwyf and Branwen were fighting. “She has demeaned our husband’s honor, as well as the sanctity of our marriage, and for that-”
“NO!” Agapay grabbed Mei Li by the wrist, yanking her back. “We have to retreat!”
“She’s right.” Carnelia was at Nenet’s side a moment later, glancing between her and Solvei as she started ushering them away from the duel. “Gwynharwyf is the war leader of the eladrin. We can’t win a battle against her, so our best bet is to retreat while Branwen has her attention.”
Nenet hesitated, her stomach twisting at the thought of leaving someone behind. “But-”
Her objection died on her lips as she looked back at where the eladrin and the vilderavn were fighting...only to see that calling it a “fight” was wildly inaccurate.
With a wild roar, Branwen swung her tremendous sword as though it were made out of paper, whirling it through the air in a complicated attack pattern so fast it looked like a blur. But Nenet could tell that she was coming nowhere close to hitting Gwynharwyf, the eladrin casually leaning to and fro to avoid most of the strikes and lazily raising one scimitar to block the rest. Looking almost bored, she struck out with her other weapon, and Branwen barely got her shield into position to stop it from hitting her helmet. Even then, another massive rent was carved in the tower as it was knocked wide-
And then Gwynharwyf stepped closer to the raven knight, easily ducking under a desperate swing from the massive sword, and then lashed out with an upward slash.
The strike tore a huge gash in Branwen’s armor, blood immediately spraying out from the wound. Branwen staggered, but amazingly kept to her feet, eyes blazing as she brought her shield around to try and knock Gwynharwyf back-
“Stubborn little twerp,” huffed the eladrin leader irritably as she pivoted, sidestepping the tower’s broken front and delivering a cut to Branwen’s shield arm that almost severed it. “Just be a good girl and stay down already!”
She didn’t give Branwen a chance to reply, her form suddenly blurring as a wind kicked up...only for Solvei to realize that Gwynharwyf had become the wind, turning into a cyclone that surrounded Branwen completely. Cursing, the vilderavn struck out, but her sword didn’t seem to do anything to the rushing currents of air.
The reverse, however, wasn’t true.
Even as Nenet watched, a cutting breeze suddenly opened up a laceration across Branwen’s shoulder, a rush of blood being caught in the breeze and pulled into the cyclone. Another hit her across the thigh. A third struck the side of her helmet.
Faster and faster, bloody breaches opened across the raven knight’s armor, turning the whirlwind more and more crimson. There was nothing Branwen could do; raising her shield simply caused the strikes to focus on her back and sides, while slashes with her sword quite literally hit nothing but air, and even when she tried to barrel outside of the vortex altogether, the wall of wind forced her back, not letting her escape as it continued tearing her to ribbons-
“Come on!”
Stumbling, Nenet fell back a few paces as Carnelia – and Dima as well – pulled her away. “We’re wasting time! Let’s go!”
“You go!” Sirrush had a manic grin on her face as she looked at where Branwen was being eviscerated, her limbs having already returned to their scaly, clawed forms as her wings and tail reappeared. “I’m going to stay here and tear that pipsqueak apart as soon as she reforms!”
“Get in line!” snickered Yamini, a fiery sword forming in one hand as her other arm was engulfed in flames. “The one who’ll put that billowy bitch down is gonna be me!”
“Ooh! I wanna play too!” giggled Spice, hopping in place and clapping her hands. “The way she’s dressed, I bet that lady would love to meet Sugar!”
“Don’t you dare ruin my fun!” snarled Sirrush, raising her claws as she turned toward the other two, tail thrashing. “Once Branwen is down, I’m taking point!”
“What makes you think you’ll be in any shape to try?” growled Yamini, raising her sword as she sank into a crouch.
“I just had a really great idea!” gasped Spice, her eyes sparkling as magic gathered around her. “You two can fluff Sugar before that Gwyny-lady gets her turn!”
“What is wrong with you?!” Solvei growled as she raised her ice blades, glaring daggers at those three. “We’re under attack and you’re fighting amongst yourselves?!”
“Let them!” Leaving Nenet to Dima, Carnelia glowered at Solvei. “The more time Gwynharwyf spends killing them, the easier it will be for us to escape!”
“She’s not wrong,” murmured Dima. “We can’t win against that, and we’d be stupid to try.”
“We do not abandon one of our own,” snapped Mei Li, pushing Agapay away to march toward Dima. “Even if she’s just a concubine, she’s still our husband’s!”
“I already told you, you don’t call the shots here, tails!” snapped Yamini.
“Don’t you talk to her like that!” hissed Solvei. “She’s one of us, while you’re all just some sluts Lex took pity on!”
“At least these sluts don’t need a babysitter!” shot back Sirrush.
“In a moment you’ll need a healer,” growled Mei Li.
“All of you, stop it!” Agapay ran forward, putting herself between where Solvei and Yamini were advancing on each other, ice and fire magic flaring up. “You’re succumbing to Branwen’s aura!”
“MOVE!”
“Outta my way!”
The two struck out at the same time, and the angel cried out in pain as she went flying back, rolling across the ground several times before coming to a stop.
“Agapay!” Breaking away from Dima – who seemed more interested in the burgeoning fight anyway – Nenet ran over to the chasmalim. “Are you alright?!”
“I’m okay,” groaned the angel, a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth as she sat up, putting one hand to her head. “I just need a moment to heal myself.”
Wincing, Nenet looked from where Solvei and Mei Li were facing off against the other five to where Branwen was still being cut to ribbons by Gwynharwyf, biting her lip as she felt panic threatening to overtake her. Everything was going wrong! Master was off fighting somewhere, Solvei and Mei Li were about to come to blows with the people who were supposed to be protecting them, and that Gwynharwyf woman was going to cut them all down while they were doing it! Everything was-
“Before, when you were apologizing to Toklo and the others, Lex said that you were stronger than either of us knew. From where I’m sitting, you’re stronger than he knew, either.”
Swallowing a sob, Nenet took a deep breath as she fought down the urge to go to pieces. That had never helped her when she’d been tormented by Grisela, and it wouldn’t help her now. Strong! I’ve got to be strong! For everyone’s sake! But how?
“What did you mean about Branwen’s aura?” she blurted out a moment later, saying the first thing that came to her mind. “You made it sound like that’s why everyone’s fighting. Is she doing something to us?”
Agapay nodded, putting one hand to her chest as it lit up with a soft glow, healing herself. “Vilderavns are the premiere killers of the Autumn Court, assassins without compassion or remorse. The same way angels radiate security and caring, they make everyone around them cruel and suspicious, fanning their worst instincts.”
Nenet’s eyes widened, looking at where Solvei and Yamini were now almost nose-to-nose, hurling insults at each other as their magic rose. “And you’re just telling us this now?!”
Agapay grimaced. “I thought I could counteract her aura with my own. Vilderavns are shunned even by their own kind, leaving them isolated and unloved by anyone. I thought that if maybe Branwen had a chance to be free of that for a little while, to see what it’s like being around people without hatred and hostility...”
Slowly lowering her hand, Agapay tried to stand, only to wince and slump back down again, Nenet rushing over to help her. “I thought it was working,” confessed the angel. “But her aura’s flaring stronger now that she’s fighting, and with how scared everyone is, it’s making them more vulnerable to it.”
“Then how come I’m not affected?”
The question earned a small smile from Agapay. “Because your heart is kind, and your soul is gentle. That makes it harder for you to fall prey to the inner darkness that Branwen’s aura unearths.”
Nenet blushed slightly, but paused as something else occurred to her. “Wait, hang on...this shouldn’t have affected Solvei or Mei Li either! We all have powers from Master, and that includes protection from mental attacks...”
She trailed off as the obvious answer came to her then.
“Gwynharwyf’s attack on our bonds,” Nenet breathed, eyes widening. “It wasn’t just painful, it damaged our connection to Lex! That’s why we couldn’t keep Branwen’s influence out! It’s why-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as the whirlwind around the raven knight suddenly dissipated.
Gwynharwyf immediately reappeared, standing in front of Branwen...whose armor, now having been cut to ribbons, collapsed into pieces, revealing the woman underneath.
Nenet drew in a sharp breath at the sight of her, eyes widening.
Wearing only a simple thigh-length chemise beneath her armor, the vilderavn was stunningly beautiful. Voluptuous and full-figured, her skin was pale, contrasting starkly with her dark hair and the pure white irises of her eyes. Despite how easily she’d carried her heavy armor and equipment, there was barely a hint of muscle tone to her figure, looking more like a model than a knight.
But that was only the right side of her body.
The left side of her had, for lack of a better word, calcified.
It was the only term that Nenet could think to apply, the skin of her entire left half being bone-white and rigid-looking, as though her flesh had somehow become cartilaginous.
But it clearly hadn’t offered her any increased protection from Gwynharwyf’s attacks, blood still pouring down her body from what had to be dozens of wounds. The combined injuries made Branwen sway on her feet, struggling to raise her sword...only to collapse a moment later, her weapon and shield crashing to the ground as she fell onto all fours.
“You’re beaten,” announced Gwynharwyf flatly. “The duel is over.”
Her declaration finished, the eladrin turned and started walking toward where the others were quarreling, their anger having reached the point where they didn’t even seem to notice the approaching threat.
Not knowing what else to do, Nenet readied a spell...only to see Branwen’s lips draw back in a snarl a moment later, her fingers leaving deep furrows in the dirt as she clenched them into fists.
But the sound that came out of the vilderavn’s mouth a moment later was laughter.
The cold, mocking sound earned a frown from Gwynharwyf, glancing back at the raven knight, who lifted her head to glare at the eladrin. “So it’s true,” spat Branwen, a sneer on her lips. “You lost your edge after what happened with Graz’zt and Ilsidahur.”
Nenet had no idea who either of those individuals were, but Gwynharwyf immediately stiffened, her eyes widening.
“Yeah, I know,” taunted Branwen. “About how you led the charge to shut down the portal those two demon lords opened, stopping them from sending their armies into Arborea, but got stuck on the other side in the process...and had to have your precious wife rescue you.”
Gwynharwyf’s hands clenched around the hilts of her blades. “Shut up.”
Branwen gave another hateful laugh. “Morwel beat back Ilsidahur easily enough, the way I heard it, but Graz’zt? Even for the queen of the Llys Seren, single-handedly fighting off one of the most powerful demon lords in the Abyss is too much, especially when he’s not alone. She had to cut a deal with him, didn’t she?”
A tremor ran through Gwynharwyf then. “No! That’s not what happened!”
“I can’t help but wonder just what she traded to get you back,” snickered Branwen. “Morwel’s known across the planes for her beauty, and Graz’zt has a reputation for being able to seduce anyone he sets his sights on. What did he want from her?”
“It wasn’t like that! You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“And ever since then, you’ve been playing it safe. No more marching deep into enemy territory, no more slaying evil and damn the consequences. Gwynharwyf the Whirling Fury has been replaced by Gwynharwyf the Meek and Cautious. All because your sweet little wife had to make nice with the enemy you couldn’t defeat-”
She was cut off as Gwynharwyf’s foot made contact with her mouth, snapping Branwen’s head back and launching her into the air, her body tumbling end over end before crashing back to the earth over a dozen feet away.
Her teeth clenched so hard that they could be heard grinding, Gwynharwyf drove her scimitars into the ground point-first, abandoning the weapons as she stalked toward where Branwen had fallen. “I was going to let you off easy because I felt sorry for what happened to your parents,” hissed the eladrin, panting with fury. “But now you’re going to SUFFER!!!”
Reaching down, she grabbed Branwen by the hair and hauled her up, cocking her fist back...
And Nenet acted without thinking, casting the short-range teleportation spell that she’d been working on ever since Lex had left, wanting to expand her magical repertoire for the next time he needed her help.
An instant later, she appeared between Branwen and Gwynharwyf, spreading her arms wide and planting her feet in place.
There was no way to fight back against Vystalaran.
Because of the divine aura that the avatar exuded, the very idea of attacking him – of deliberately conceptualizing and executing an action for the specific purpose of causing injury to Vystalaran – was beyond that the physical universe could support. Trying to engage in such a line of thought would have been like asking a mortal to tear their own head off; it simply wasn’t something they could do, and even trying would have accomplished nothing except to cause them pain and distress.
As it was, Lex was still aware that this wasn’t how things were supposed to be. Belligerence’s negation power was keeping Vystalaran’s aura from erasing his awareness of what was happening. But there was little he could do beyond that; even thinking about ways to avoid or further negate what the elf’s mere presence had done strained Lex to his limit, his wire-form barely sufficient to let him contemplate even those modes of indirect resistance.
All that, and the avatar hadn’t even launched anything that could be considered an attack yet.
But then, he didn’t need to; his mere presence was more than enough to make such things unnecessary.
“We’re going back to Foelvan,” announced Vystalaran. “Thilaera, Loraestil, you can transport this animal. He’s quite docile now, and shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
“Of course, Lord Vystalaran,” murmured Thilaera deferentially. Lex couldn’t see her from where he’d collapsed, the strain of resisting the avatar’s aura having taken more energy than he could spare to stand, but from the sound of her footfalls, Thilaera wasn’t hesitating, apparently eager to do Vystalaran’s bidding.
Loraestil, however, seemed less enthusiastic. “What about that Burly creature?”
“Leave him,” answered Vystalaran immediately. “He’s been a champion of one of the pony gods for some time. If we strike him down now, after he’s already been defeated by one of his own kind, then it will look like we’re the ones provoking their pantheon...muddying the fact that it’s the other way around.”
“I understand,” grumbled Loraestil.
Vystalaran laughed softly. “You needn’t be so glum, Loraestil. I know this hunt didn’t go as you wished, but you still conducted yourself with valor for the sake of the elven people. You’ve brought no shame to your father’s name, and I’ll make sure that the Vice Coronal knows that as well.”
“Th-thank you, Lord Vystalaran!” This time Loraestil’s voice was much livelier.
At the same time, Thilaera’s footsteps stopped next to Lex, followed by a pause. “Ah...”
“Don’t be alarmed by his appearance,” came Vystalaran’s voice again. “As I said, this creature is incapable of harming you now. Place your hand upon him and see.”
“Of course.”
It was to Lex’s complete and utter humiliation that he couldn’t stop the barbed wire that made up his body from going still as Thilaera reached out, her slim fingers hesitantly making contact with the side of his face a moment later. He wanted to make the jagged metal thrash madly, to have it slice the she-elf’s fingers off, but he couldn’t bring himself to properly visualize such a thing, let alone make it happen. Even if she wasn’t Vystalaran, she was – simply by virtue of being an elf – enough like him that he couldn’t attack her anymore than he could the avatar himself.
Particularly since he was marshalling his strength for the one thing he could do...
“Now then,” announced Vystalaran. “To Foelvan-”
...which was activate Belligerence’s vortex.
It took all of Lex’s strength of will, succeeding only because he kept himself from thinking of it as an attack per se. He was simply utilizing a function of his artifact. There was no consideration of anyone else; no need to aim it or anticipate what would be done in response. Nothing else crossed his consciousness.
Even so, Lex felt incredible pain rip through him then, the action still flying in the face of the principles that Vystalaran’s aura had superimposed onto reality. Lex’s bending his thoughts hadn’t allowed him to override those truths; doing anything that attempted to harm the avatar was still a violation of the new laws of the universe. It was just that he’d managed to bend those laws, at the cost of invoking an incredible backlash onto himself.
But Belligerence still took effect, the vortex immediately drawing everything toward it.
Thilaera was the closest, not having time to so much as scream as the hand she’d laid on his face was immediately drawn into the void. The rest of her arm immediately followed, and Lex could see her eyes widening as she realized too late what was happening-
“Winds of Aerdrie,” murmured Vystalaran as he grabbed Thilaera’s other shoulder, the avatar looking only mildly concerned despite being only inches away from Belligerence himself.
But as soon as he spoke, his fall was arrested, hurricane-force air suddenly erupting. Despite being only inches away from Belligerence, it was enough to push him – and Thilaera, her one remaining shoulder still firmly in the avatar’s grasp – slowly but steadily away from the black quill. Even as space itself distorted, Belligerence pulling everything toward it, the wind seemed to grow stronger, slowly but surely carrying them away from the deadly weapon.
But that did nothing for Loraestil, who – unlike Burly Brawl – had been just within Belligerence’s range.
The hunter screamed as he was drawn inward, limbs flailing uselessly as he looked for some sort of purchase. But there was nothing for him to grab onto, and he was pulled faster toward oblivion-
Then Vystalaran pointed at him. “Misdirection of Erevan.”
Immediately, Loraestil vanished, only to instantaneously reappear in the distance, far outside the range of Belligerence’s vortex.
Which was where Vystalaran and Thilaera would be in another moment.
But that was fine, since injuring the avatar had never been Lex’s intent in the first place.
Rather, he simply needed to buy himself a moment...to use another of the seven treasures that he’d received.
Specifically, the one from Almina, the genie princess from the Elemental Plane of Water.
Set in a band of blue metal, the three rubies on the ring glittered brightly. Even without being able to see into the magical spectrum, Lex would have been able to tell that the ring he’d received from Almina was far and away beyond the similar type of jewelry that Adagio had been wearing. But Lex was less concerned with its appearance than he was with its power as he withdrew it from his pocket dimension and struggled to slip it onto a talon...
Genies were famous across the whole of Creation for their ability to manipulate the fabric of the universe. While their power was nothing more than a weak facsimile of what the gods could accomplish – being more akin to twisting the existing nature of things rather than overwriting it completely, similar to how Lex had just bent the natural laws that Vystalaran had rewritten – their powers were still capable of awe-inspiring feats.
There was a reason why mortals across the multiverse referred to what genies could do as “granting wishes.”
But what few of those mortals cared about was how genies couldn’t use that power for themselves. The Libram of Ineffable Damnation had made note of that, blithely mentioning how they were unable to grant their own wishes, or even those of other genies. That they couldn’t utilize their greatest power on their own behalf – and being largely unwilling to have their slaves, servants, or even allies do so for them, for fear that greed would move them to treachery – was something that the book’s author had apparently found quite amusing.
But the mystery of why the genies had that power in the first place, and were unable to use it for themselves, had been ignored by the Libram in favor of the practice – already ancient when the book’s author had been young, according to them – of summoning and binding genies for the purpose of cajoling them to use their power on the summoner’s behalf.
More specifically, the Libram had cautioned against doing such a thing, for one simple reason: all genies – regardless of what elemental plane they hailed from – had developed a deep and abiding cultural resentment of such coercion. The result of which was that, when summoned for the purpose of granting wishes, they’d quite often agree to do so, only to go out of their way to pervert the summoner’s intentions, granting them their stated desires without actually giving them what they wanted.
In fact, according to the Libram, most genies took pride in how they could manipulate the wording of a wish, spending a great deal of time and practice at turning even the most exacting of language against the speaker.
The irony, of course, was that Lex was now in possession of a treasure which made all of that moot.
Almina’s ring – or, as she’d called it, Heart’s Desire – was a ring allowed the bearer to make three wishes, regardless of whether they were mortal, genie, titan, or anything else. It was no more powerful than what any other genie could have done, but it was still a treasured artifact nonetheless. The reasons for that were two-fold:
While a mortal sorcerer or wizard of peak magical ability might have been able to devise a spell to emulate a genie’s wish-granting magic – Lex himself had seen Sanguine Disposition do exactly that – doing so was often far from being worthwhile. Such a spell was difficult, dangerous, and required expensive components to correctly utilize. To say nothing of what could happen if the casting was interrupted midway through.
That was why even the rumor of such a spell being placed into an object – pre-cast and waiting to be utilized for whoever found it – was enough to bring hordes of treasure-hunters. After all, it was simply common sense that such things were limited to however many castings had been placed in them. An amulet or talisman that had been imbued with one wish could only be used once; a ring with three wishes could only grant three, ever.
But Heart’s Desire overturned that logic, being able to grant three wishes...per year.
By itself that was incredible, being enough to make it an artifact worthy of nations going to war over. But there was another aspect to the ring which made it valuable beyond comprehension:
Even without a genie trying to maliciously twist how a wish was implemented, using such magic was dangerous. Twisting reality – even if it was only via magic, rather than divine will – was difficult, and the particulars of how a wish took effect could often be unexpected despite even careful preparation. Getting what you wanted from a wish was often a matter of chance as much as planning.
Reality was not something to be tampered with blithely.
But again, Heart’s Desire contravened that truism, as its wishes always took effect in accordance with what the user meant. No irony, no unintended consequences, no unpleasant surprises. If it couldn’t accomplish what was asked of it, it would simply fail to take effect rather than corrupt its wearer’s intentions.
And Lex already knew exactly what to wish for, murmuring his desire out loud as Belligerence’s vortex finally ended-
Vystalaran’s head whipped around to look at him. “Oh no you don’t!” he snapped, his voice taking on a harsher tone. “Reversion of Labelas!”
Everything stopped.
And then, the universe began to function in reverse. Like a film played backward, Lex saw himself putting Heart’s Desire away, right before Loraestil suddenly reappeared near Belligerence, only to fly backward as the vortex now flowed away from the quill. After that, Vystalaran and Thilaera were carried back toward it on the wind, the latter’s arm suddenly being restored as she was released from the avatar’s grasp and fell away from the weapon, her destroyed hand returning to the side of Lex’s face-
And then the vision ended. Loraestil was once again in the distance. Thilaera was cradled in Vystalaran’s arms, one of her own missing as the avatar kept her from bleeding out. And Vystalaran himself had a shocked look on his face, mouth open and eyes bulging. “The reversion failed?!” he gasped, staring at Lex in open astonishment. “Impossible!”
Lex had just enough strength left to smirk as he finished making his wish.
It had been truly amazing to him just how scared of dying Echidna – or rather, Echidna III – was. Far from stopping at merely protecting herself against direct threats to her life, she’d conceived of numerous esoteric ways that someone might try to kill her and developed contingencies and countermeasures for them all. From having something small enter her body and then suddenly grow, to being teleported to the Negative Energy Plane, to having someone attack her with sympathetic magic through her connection to her children.
But the one that had interested Lex the most had been her method of surviving someone going back in time to kill her in the past.
That was due to a particular item she’d acquired, and which Lex had demanded as part of their deal: a small blivet whose coloration changed depending on the angle from which it was viewed. She’d called it “Out of Time,” and claimed to have been given it by a member of the Monitors of Infinity that she’d seduced, the group which supposedly policed time travel.
More notable was that the item only existed in the past, serving as an anchor that was kept roughly a thousandth of a second prior to its user’s perception of the present, to which any alterations further back in time than that couldn’t affect them. That made its presence almost impossible to detect, let alone steal, since it never caught up to normal time; the only way it could change owners was via nonlinear control, which was why Echidna – having no trans-temporal sense of her own – hadn’t known that it could be taken from her; even for Lex, it had been challenging to acquire.
As it was, he’d taken this particular item only because it represented a defense against a power he was otherwise unable to fight against. Even if he could sense things across time, he had – as far as he was aware – no special defenses against his past being altered. In that, at least, he’d been able to sympathize with Echidna.
And now that he knew that Out of Time not only worked as intended, but was functional even divine attempts to alter his personal history, it was easily the strongest of the seven treasures that he’d acquired.
Which was the only reason he was able to finish his wish now, one of the rubies on Heart’s Desire turning dark a moment later.
His wish came true immediately, as a portal opened a few feet away.
It had taken Lex less than a second to conclude that he had no hope of defeating Vystalaran.
Nor had it taken much longer than that to determine that escape was equally impossible. While he didn’t know the full extent of what Gladoneral’s avatar was capable of, Lex couldn’t imagine that Vystalaran would lose to him in either speed or teleportation. Even fleeing to another world would only work if it was one where the elven gods weren’t worshipped, and the only such place that Lex knew of was Equestria.
Which was currently closed off to him by a blockade of angels. Trying to send himself there now would have resulted in those self-righteous meddlers waylaying him on the Astral Plane, and there was no chance that Vystalaran wouldn’t be able to follow him there.
The only place he might have been able to escape to without Vystalaran catching up to him – assuming that he was even able to cast his plane-shifting spell without interference – would have been Darkest Night. Based on what Lex knew of divine politics, and with Vystalaran having said that he didn’t want Burly Brawl injured for fear of it making him look like the aggressor, the avatar wouldn’t dare follow him into another deity’s realm.
But even leaving aside what had happened when he’d tried to commune with his goddess a few minutes ago, transporting himself there would mean leaving everyone else behind.
He wouldn’t even be able to teleport Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li to his side; the damage that Gwynharwyf had inflicted on their bonds made that self-evident. And while Lex could already feel that the connections were repairing themselves, Vystalaran would have plenty of time to abduct those three...not to mention the seven others whom Lex had taken under his service. Or even Thermal Draft, if Vystalaran knew about her.
Heart’s Desire might have been able to wish them all to Darkest Night with him, but that was uncertain; while the ring was a powerful artifact, it was far from almighty. When leveled directly against other individuals, its magic could be opposed by sufficient power, and more than one of his companions had spell resistance. Since the ring’s power didn’t come from him, they wouldn’t know not to fight it when it tried to teleport them. And Mystaria had said that she was taking Thermal Draft to the abode of her grandmother, who was supposedly a powerful wizard, which meant her residence was likely warded.
Nor could his tulpa, according to his foresight, find an item that could boost the ring’s power...or otherwise guarantee that he’d be able to get everyone else to safety if he retreated.
Lex had no compunctions about retreating from a fight that he couldn’t win; although it would grate on him severely, he wasn’t so foolish as to throw his life or his freedom away out of arrogance.
But he would never, ever abandon someone else to save himself.
He’d already broken a core tenet of his system of morals when he’d killed Adagio, and what he’d done to Mei Li – to say nothing of that orgy he’d had with those lesser titans and their servants – was almost as shameful.
If he left the people he was responsible for behind, Lex wouldn’t just be abandoning them; he’d be abandoning himself.
Death was preferable to that.
But finding a way to turn the tables of Vystalaran was even more preferable!
And if he couldn’t do that on his own, then he just needed to find someone who could.
Which meant a god.
The question was which god to reach out to. Based on what the Night Mare had told him just prior to his fight with Kryonex, the elven pantheon wielded considerable influence across the known planes of existence. Enough so that the pony gods – who were not only a much smaller and less important group, as far as divine associations went, but were also apparently had a poor relationship with the elves – were extremely reluctant to do anything that could antagonize them further.
It hadn’t escape Lex’s notice that, even though he’d passed the pony gods’ test by defeating Kryonex, none of them had appeared to confront Vystalaran now.
And with the Night Mare not only not sounding like herself, but also not seeming to recognize him, Lex had significant doubts that calling upon her would have availed him.
So instead, he used Heart’s Desire to wish into existence a portal to the one god – or rather, the one pantheon of gods – who had not only the political clout to stop Vystalaran in his tracks, but also the will to do so.
Hopefully.
I wish there was a direct connection between this place and the Aesir.
And at the same time as the ring made his wish come true, Lex sent a message through the opening. He didn’t bother encapsulating them in a spell or putting the missive in writing. Instead he simply projected a single thought through the portal, the psychic equivalent of a shout, audible to any sapient being on the other side:
I am the one who slew Kryonex.
Immediately, a figure appeared on the other side of the gateway.
Whatever happened now, Lex knew, was completely up to the disposition of whoever was coming through. According to what Kryonex had said before he’d died, the Aesir – whoever that collection of gods was – were invested in Hrothvitnir, the wolf who had created the utvalgte and the adlets both, and whom Kryonex had slain and absorbed. Why they cared, Lex had no idea, nor did he know how they’d react to his having killed the demigod. But he was gambling that, once he told them that he still had a piece of Kryonex, and intended to use it to uplift Solvei, the Aesir would object to whatever plans Vystalaran had for him.
If not, or if the Aesir wanted to take revenge on him for what had happened with Kryonex – or simply collect what was left of the demigod and leave – there would be nothing Lex could do about it.
For the briefest instant, Vystalaran’s face flickered. Then his polite smile was back in place as he stood up, putting Thilaera back on her feet – though she swayed unsteadily, her eyes glazed as she looked at her missing arm – and beckoned Loraestil closer. “The two of you, be on your best behavior,” he announced, ignoring Lex completely as he suddenly withdrew his aura, turning to face the portal. “We have a very important guest joining us.”
A moment later, the shape on the other side of the gateway came through.
And, to Lex’s shock, it was a pony.
But a pony unlike any he had ever seen.
A stallion, the newcomer lacked wings or a horn. His coat was grey, but unlike the slate hue that Lex had, this stallion’s was much lighter, the color of a cloud that was just beginning to hint at a storm. His only clothing was the saddle on his back, and his mane – which, like his tail, was a much darker grey, akin to a cloud about to burst with rain – had several small braids tied in it, each of which had a small stone dangling from the end...and which had a glowing rune carved on it.
Runes that Lex recognized, thanks to Solvei.
Nor was that all that was notable about the stallion. His height was akin to that of Princess Celestia, perhaps slightly taller. But he was easily twice as long as the alicorn, his body extending further back; the better to accommodate his eight legs. The sight of which was bizarre enough that Lex only distantly noted that the newcomer’s flank had no mark of any kind on it.
Looking completely unperturbed by the new arrival’s bizarre appearance, Vystalaran gave a deep bow, Thilaera and Loraestil doing the same a moment later.
“Welcome to Everglow,” murmured the avatar, “Lord Sleipnir.”
The pony – Sleipnir – eyed the elf for a minute before returning the polite bow. “You have me at a disadvantage,” he replied a moment later, and Lex was surprised at the high – almost child-like – pitch of his voice. “You know my name, but I’m afraid I cannot say the same.”
“My deepest apologies,” continued Vystalaran, straightening up. “I am Vystalaran, avatar of Gladoneral, and I am quite honored to have such an esteemed individual visit this world.”
“As I am most pleased to be here,” replied Sleipnir, giving his own polite smile in reply. “Indeed, I’ve asked the High One if I could visit this realm for some time now. However, I believe my invitation was sent by another...?”
He trailed off as he looked Lex’s way.
For his part, Lex had stood back up the instant Vystalaran’s aura had retracted, which had been only a moment before his wire-form had expired, as though it couldn’t sustain itself without a direct application of divinity to resist. Likewise, Belligerence was once again in his pocket dimension; meeting someone with a weapon bared was almost guaranteed to make a poor impression, and with this “Sleipnir” being the only thing standing between him and Gladoneral’s avatar, Lex knew he couldn’t afford to mess this up.
“My name is Lex Legis, champion of the Night Mare,” he answered, giving a bow of his own. “And I’m very pleased that you saw fit to answer my communique.”
Sleipnir quirked a brow, the corners of his lips turning upward. “Given the nature of that ‘communique,’ as you put it, ignoring it was out of the question. The High One would have liked to come and speak with you personally, but unfortunately, he has no presence on this world.”
Which means you’re not a god yourself, Lex knew. That suggested that Sleipnir was almost certainly a titan in his own right, since Lex couldn’t see his future either.
“Lord Sleipnir, if I may be so presumptuous?” broke in Vystalaran, waiting until the eight-legged horse had turned back to him before continuing. “This stallion who calls himself Lex Legis is an accessory to certain aggressive actions that his goddess’s pantheon with regards to my own. You should know that he’s reached out to you now in hope that you’ll interfere with my prosecuting him for his actions.”
Sleipnir cocked his head, giving a grunt, and Lex once again cursed his inability to read into the expressions of others. “Is that so?” murmured the alien horse, shooting Lex a look.
“I contacted you because I’m aware that the Aesir have interests relating to Kryonex’s death,” he replied, being deliberately cagey. He wasn’t sure how much Kryonex’s relationship with Sleipnir’s pantheon was public knowledge, and the last thing he wanted to do was accidentally spill a secret that the eight-legged horse wanted kept. “Given that I have materials relevant to those interests, it seemed prudent to bring those to your attention before the unchecked aggression of this...elf, caused the situation to worsen.”
Sleipnir cocked a head. “Materials, you say?”
Lex nodded. “I have them with me, and am willing to show you, though I’d understand if you didn’t want certain other parties to see them...”
Vystalaran’s brow furrowed for the briefest moment, then his face was all smiles again. “In that case, please allow me to suggest that Lex Legis turn over all of his possessions to you right now, Lord Sleipnir – save only for the weapon he used to kill Kryonex, as that’s evidence of his pantheon’s warmongering – and then I will take him into custody. That nicely solves both of our problems, wouldn’t you say?”
“I believe that would be for the best,” agreed Sleipnir after a moment’s thought. “I’m certain that the High One would not want the Seldarine to think that the Aesir has any grievance with them, nor do we wish to.”
“You’re being hasty,” snapped Lex. “The materials in question-”
“Will be reviewed by the Aesir,” answered Sleipnir coolly. “If the High One decides that he needs to converse with you directly, then he’ll know who to speak to.”
“As Lord Sleipnir said,” chuckled Vystalaran, giving Lex a triumphant look. “Now, do hurry up and turn over everything you have. The sooner you do so, the sooner we can make the journey to Foelvan.”
“Unless, of course, you wish to make an enemy of a second pantheon,” added Sleipnir. “In which case, I’m sure the High One wouldn’t mind if I helped our elven allies capture a criminal.”
Cursing inwardly at how things had gone, Lex paused, trying to think of a plan-
“I would ask that both of you stand down.”
The voice – soft and feminine – floated down from above as a sunbeam broke through the clouds.
The alicorn mare that descended on the shaft of light than was a vision of loveliness. Her mane and tail were golden, shimmering with soft iridescence. Her wings were multicolored. Chaplets of gold decorated her figure, and ribbons floated around her.
More notable than that was the aura that radiated out from her. She was like a warm memory on a spring day. A light laugh shared with close friends and family. Quiet contentment in the simple joys of home. The serenity that came with knowing that everything was going to be alright.
“Lord Vystalaran, it’s good to see you again,” she smiled warmly, nodding to the elf as if they were old friends. “And Lord Sleipnir, please allow me to introduce myself.”
She dipped her head, her horn almost touching the ground before she looked back up at the eight-legged stallion, who had a stunned expression on his face.
“I am the Sun Queen, the head of the pony pantheon. And I would ask that you reconsider allowing the Seldarine to take Lex Legis.”
Nenet didn’t have any sort of plan in mind as she put herself between Branwen and Gwynharwyf. None of the spells she had would – based on how easily the eladrin had defeated the vilderavn – so much as slow Gwynharwyf down, even if she enhanced them via metamagic. And the eladrin obviously preferred to fight physically rather than magically, which meant that countermagic was useless.
The only thing Nenet could think of was to appeal to the fact that Gwynharwyf at least wanted to do the right thing.
Even if she was clearly some sort of fanatic, and had an explosive temper, the eladrin was still motivated by a desire to help others. Her entire reason for being here, according to what she’d said before, was because she thought that Lex was abusing them. In fact, given how Lex himself had left them alone because he’d thought the same thing, and was also given to bouts of intransigence and fits of pique, Gwynharwyf was actually a lot like him.
And if I can get through to him, then even if we don’t have a soul-bond, maybe I can get through to Gwynharwyf too!
It was with that thought in mind that Nenet put herself in the way of the eladrin’s fist...
...which stopped a half-inch from her nose.
“What are you doing?!” hissed Gwynharwyf. “MOVE!”
“NO!” shot back Nenet, trying to keep from trembling. There was almost no space between them, Gwynharwyf already having been close enough to grab Branwen by the hair when Nenet had thrown herself in front of the raven knight. That was meant that she was now staring into the eladrin’s deep green eyes, the intensity they contained threatening to drown her. “Y-you said it yourself, the duel is already over! Leave Branwen alone!”
“If she wanted me to leave her alone, she should have kept her mouth shut!” Gwynharwyf’s face had already been twisted with rage before, but she looked even angrier now. “You heard what she said about me! About Morwel! She kept it up even after I told her to be quiet! She was daring me to finish her off, so I’m going to give her what she wants and put her out of my misery!”
Her anger was like a hurricane, making it hard for Nenet to think clearly. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could see Agapay staring at her with a terrified expression, the angel clearly wanting to help but worried that she’d make things worse if she stepped in.
Worse, everyone else had completely fallen under the sway of Branwen’s aura. Solvei was currently crossing swords with Yamini, clouds of steam erupting whenever her ice blade met with the tigress’s flaming sword, while a pair of ice elementals were being dismembered by Sirrush. Mei Li seemed to be locked in a staring contest with Carnelia, the air between them thick with magic. Further back, Dima was unleashing water spells at some sort of hideous tentacle monster that Spice had summoned, the succubus laughing and jeering as the creature tried to push its way toward the cerulean-skinned woman.
And Lex...Nenet couldn’t be sure, with their bond having been damaged, but if the momentary flashes of anxiety coming from him were any indication, he had his own problems at the moment.
No one was coming to help, which meant that just like before – when she’d had to recover Lex’s spine from Adagio, and then again when the undead had been breaking in while she’d been defending the captured Siren as well as Mei Li – she would need to solve things on her own.
“If you’re so angry at her, then...then...you can take it out on me instead!”
A sliver of confusion cut through the fury in Gwynharwyf’s eyes. “What? No! Get out of my way!”
Her free hand wrapped around Nenet’s upper arm and pulled, but Nenet dug her heels in place, knowing that the only reason she hadn’t been immediately yanked off her feet was because the eladrin was being gentle. “I’ll take her punishment in her place!” she yelled again. “I’ve been beaten before, I can take it! Just please, don’t hurt her anymore!”
The confusion in those green orbs was replaced by pity then, and Nenet could almost see it grow, pushing back against the rage. “You-”
“-pathetic little bitch!”
It wasn’t Branwen’s vicious snarl that made Nenet gasp, Gwynharwyf’s eyes narrowing as the empathy in them suddenly died.
It was the way the way the raven knight’s aura suddenly flared; Nenet hadn’t been able to feel it before, but now it was impossible not to notice.
Loathing. Vindictiveness. Spite. All of those words were too small to encompass the twisted, black wave of seething hatred that came off of the vilderavn then. It was a sickening feeling, and Nenet could almost feel the weight of it settle over her, pressing down with a lifetime of shattered hopes, bitter disappointments, and unending despair.
All things that Nenet remembered feeling before she’d met Lex.
“I don’t want your help!” shrieked Branwen. “I don’t want anyone’s help! I don’t need it! I didn’t need it after my parents were killed! I didn’t need it when their successors wanted to make sure they had no competition! I didn’t need it after this was done to me!” – although the vilderavn was behind her, Nenet could almost hear her touch the benighted, left side of her body – “AND I DON’T NEED IT NOW! ESPECIALLY NOT FROM SOME WEAK LITTLE NOBODY LIKE YOU!”
For the life of her, Nenet couldn’t have explained why, but she suddenly felt certain that Branwen was talking to herself as much as to her.
But there was no time to process that idea, as Branwen’s left hand – the stiff, chalky fingers curled back save for the index and middle digits, which were pointing outward – shot forward, making contact with Gwynharwyf’s middle. “The one who suffers will be YOU!”
It was like all of the hate in her aura flowed through her arm then, condensing and rushing along her limb and into the eladrin’s body-
Only for Gwynharwyf to shrug it off, knocking Branwen’s hand away with a snarl. “Since you refused to stand down, this still counts as part of our duel,” she spat, the compassion completely gone from her face.
“Wait!” pleaded Nenet. “I’ll-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as a sudden gale sprung up, the wind swirling around her like a miniature tornado as it lifted her up and tossed her aside, wings flapping uselessly as she went tumbling through the air, hitting the ground over a dozen yards away.
Agapay was instantly at her side, darting around where everyone else was fighting to help the sphinx up. “Nenet! Are you alright?!”
“I’m fine, but Branwen...”
She couldn’t finish, tears choking her at the thought of how awful the raven knight’s life must have been. That could have been me, she knew. If I hadn’t met Lex, if Grisela had kept abusing me, and I found out that Adagio was lying to me about my father...I could have turned out just like her.
“We have to protect her,” she decided, standing back up. “You find a way to stop what her aura’s doing to everyone, and I’ll-”
Her words caught in her throat as she looked back at where the eladrin and the vilderavn were...just in time to see Gwynharwyf catch one of her scimitars as it flew into her grasp of its own accord.
Then she stabbed it directly through Branwen’s chest.
The raven knight stiffened, but the hateful look in her eyes only grew more intense. She opened her mouth as a trickle of blood ran from the corner of it, raising both hands this time...
Only for Gwynharwyf to twist the blade, making Branwen shudder, her arms falling as the strength suddenly left her.
“Just so you know, my swords are truedeath weapons,” spat Gwynharwyf. “The kind that shatter souls. No afterlife, no resurrection.”
She put her foot on the vilderavn’s shoulder. “Good riddance.”
Then she kicked her off the blade.
Branwen was dead before she hit the ground.
“NOOOOOO!!!”
The scream tore itself from Nenet’s throat, forgetting everything else as she flew back toward the fallen knight so fast that it made her wings ache. She didn’t notice how everyone else stopped what they were doing, eyes going wide as if suddenly waking up. She didn’t hear Agapay call out her name, trying and failing to catch her. She didn’t even see the pitying look Gwynharwyf gave her then, the eladrin casually retrieving her other scimitar.
All she was aware of was Branwen lying in a pool of her own blood, her eyes open but unseeing.
“Branwen!” Nenet shrieked as she threw herself down next to the vilderavn’s body. “BRANWEN! Don’t...don’t give up!” For some reason that seemed like the most appropriate thing to say. “Please don’t give up!”
“She gave up a long time ago.” In contrast to how furious she’d been before, Gwynharwyf suddenly sounded calmer, as though the slaughter she’d just performed had quenched her rage. “I think this was what she wanted; to have it finally end.”
“How can you say that?” Nenet wanted to be angry, then. She wanted to be furious, to hurl as many hurtful things as she could think of at the eladrin. But for some reason the rage wouldn’t come, leaving her feeling heartbroken instead. “You heard her before. She lost her parents. She was hunted and disfigured. She didn’t have anyone. If you’d tried reaching out to her-”
“You tried reaching out to her,” cut in Gwynharwyf. “Was she grateful for it? Did she appreciate that you put yourself in danger for her?”
Nenet shuddered, but didn’t answer, weeping softly as she cradled Branwen’s body.
“Tragic monsters are still monsters,” continued Gwynharwyf. “I’m sure that Lex Legis had an awful childhood too, but my sympathy for creatures like him ends when they start taking their misery out on innocent people. Once that happens-”
“SHUT UP!!!”
Solvei’s angry shout was accompanied by a storm of ice descending on Gwynharwyf. Nor was it alone, leading the way for a huge blast of fire, multiple streams of pressurized water, a cascade of lightning, and other waves of magic. They hit the eladrin full-on, obscuring her figure beneath a huge cloud of dust, giving everyone else – Solvei, Mei Li, and the other six women that Lex had brought back – time to form up around where Nenet was still sobbing softly, not having so much as looked up the entire time.
“Elder Sister Nenet,” murmured Mei Li, her voice thick with regret. “Forgive me if this sounds cruel, but we must flee at once.”
“There’s nothing we can do for Branwen now,” added Agapay, laying a hand on Nenet’s shoulder. “Right now, the priority is getting you three to safety.”
“We’ll cover you,” promised Yamini, her voice gruff. “No matter what, I swear we’ll buy you the time-”
“No one is going anywhere.”
Gwynharwyf’s voice came out of the dust cloud, which was instantly dispelled a moment later by a sudden gust of wind, revealing the eladrin.
For all the power that had been unleashed at her, she didn’t have so much as a scratch to show for it.
“I’m taking Lex Legis’s torture victims back with me, and anyone who tries to get in my way will share Branwen’s fate.”
“Is that supposed to be scary?” sneered Sirrush, brandishing her claws.
“A beautiful death is far more palatable than running away in an ugly display of cowardice,” agreed Dima.
“Not to mention His Highness’s anger is far more frightening than mere oblivion,” snorted Carnelia.
“And if we pull this off and survive, I bet he’ll give us a great, big, throbbing reward!” squealed Spice.
Gwynharwyf spat on the ground, raising her scimitars. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up about that, considering who he’s up against right now.”
Solvei frowned, her ears flickering back. “What does that mean?”
Gwynharwyf opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, another voice cut through the air.
“It means that its time for this little sideshow to come to an end.”
The speaker appeared in mid-sentence, stepping into everyone’s field of vision from seemingly out of nowhere, and Solvei’s eyes widened as her jaw dropped, recognizing him at once. “You?!”
Sanguine Disposition’s lips curled up in a fanged smile as he inclined his head toward her. “Indeed. And while your valiant stand is quite the heroic display, I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut it short. Duty calls, and all that. Please do forgive the rough accommodations in the meantime.”
Gwynharwyf frowned. “I don’t know who you are, but if you think-”
“Hold that thought, if you would,” cut in Sanguine Disposition, even as magic gathered around him. “I’ll deal with you in a moment.”
“I won’t let-”
That was the last thing Nenet heard before she and the others were suddenly whisked away.
Lex resisted the urge to scream at Sleipnir as the eight-legged pony suddenly appeared directly in front of him, cutting off his attempt to return to the adlet village before he’d moved so much as five feet. “Your goddess hasn’t given you permission to leave,” added the Aesir steed.
“The Sun Queen isn’t my goddess,” replied Lex flatly. “And one of my subordinates is in trouble, so I’ll need you to stand aside immediately.”
He knew that he couldn’t afford to upset the pony upon whose goodwill his fate now depended. But at the same time, he couldn’t find it within himself to indulge whatever point of etiquette the eight-legged stallion was concerned with.
Not when his foresight had just informed him that the monitoring spell that he’d placed on Branwen – part of the same suite of spells, curses, and other methods of control that he’d used on all of the emissaries bequeathed to him by the lesser titans – was about to announce her death.
Lex didn’t care about Branwen in the slightest. As far as he was concerned, she was nothing more than a political tool, a source of muscle, and a convenient outlet for his lust. He owed her a duty of fidelity, seeing to her care and protection, but beside upholding that duty it didn’t matter to him if she lived or died.
...that was how he’d expected to feel, at least.
The truth, he’d learned, was quite different.
His instincts, now made up of the bestial urges of the creature he’d merged with back in Darkest Night, were screaming at him to protect her. Those instincts didn’t recognize any differences between wives and concubines, or even between love and passion. All they knew was that after he’d taken what he wanted from a female, she would be given a choice: either leave, or stay as his until they’d birthed and raised his offspring. Branwen, his instincts told him, had stayed, and so needed to be safeguarded.
Nor could Lex honestly say that the partiality he felt toward the raven knight was entirely due to the beast within him.
He knew that he didn’t love Branwen, or any of the girls whose bodies he’d enjoyed back on that demiplane that he’d created, and he was fine with that; his failed relationship with Nosey had been a painful lesson in the consequences of giving his heart away too easily. But at the same time, he couldn’t deny that they meant something to him, beyond being pawns or muscle or bedwarmers.
While Lex had never thought of himself as a romantic, he wanted to believe that sex was – that it should be – more than purely physical.
Kara would have condescended to him for feeling that way, and Adagio would have laughed, but Lex didn’t care. For someone who’d spent his life feeling profoundly isolated, even a shallow connection was something to be cherished.
“You were the one who invited our esteemed guest here,” broke in Vystalaran, moving to stand alongside Sleipnir. “Did you do so only to insult him, and by extension the Aesir, by suggesting that every minor household problem you have is more important than their interests?”
“I’m suggesting,” replied Lex harshly, knowing that even with the speeds he was capable of, his window to rescue Branwen was rapidly shrinking, “that anyone of good moral character would have no objection to my rescuing one of my people from imminent death.”
Sleipnir frowned at that, whereas Vystalaran smirked, but the Sun Queen spoke up before either could say anything. “It’s alright. Please, allow him to go.”
“Not without a guarantee that he’ll return,” broke in Vystalaran. “Perhaps if he surrendered that void weapon of his-”
“No, it’s fine,” broke in Sleipnir suddenly. “If the Sun Queen has no objection, then neither do I.”
Lex didn’t bother to acknowledge the statement, immediately rushing toward the village-
“Solitude of Fenmarel.”
-only to find himself suddenly cut off from everything. Sight, sound, and every other terrestrial sense suddenly registered nothing, the entire world instantly replaced by blackness. He couldn’t pick up any magic, and his tulpa was suddenly finding it impossible to fetch even the most innocuous of items for him. His fractured connections to Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li were completely suppressed, as were the spells he’d cast to monitor the emissaries with them. Even his foresight was gone, leaving him unable to examine possibilities without attempting to actualize them.
It was only because he could still register the presence of the Sun Queen – her soothing aura still perceptible – that Lex knew he hadn’t been shunted into some sort of prison.
Instead, Vystalaran had somehow turned off all of his senses, completely stripping him of his awareness of anything beyond his thoughts.
But that’s not enough to stop me!
Calling out for Belligerence, Lex immediately followed up the summons with an order for it to negate whatever the avatar had done to him. He had no way of knowing if Vystalaran’s attack was only keeping him from perceiving data, or if it was actually stopping him from interacting with it. But if it was the former, then he should still be able to use Belligerence to shut it down-
Sure enough, his awareness of the world returned an instant later.
“-see?” came Vystalaran’s voice. “That weapon is capable of negating even divine powers. It’s a clear threat to our pantheon’s safety.”
“It’s certainly sobering,” agreed Sleipnir, eyes narrowed as he looked at the ebony quill. “One does not entrust a warrior with a weapon capable of slaying gods unless they’re intent on having them do exactly that.”
“The god in question whom the Night Mare was arming her champion against was Kryonex,” chimed in the Sun Queen. “Her actions were motivated by an earnest desire to protect one of her most ardent supporters, not by any desire to start a war with another pantheon.”
“In which case, there should be no issue with surrendering such a dangerous object,” cut in Vystalaran. “Unless, of course, you believe that this titan will have reason to use it again soon?”
The Sun Queen gave a light laugh at that, as though the suggestion was too silly to be taken seriously, her voice mirthful as she did her best to convince the avatar that nothing could be further from the truth. Sleipnir spoke up then, asking her about the origin of the apparent rancor between her pantheon and the Seldarine, starting a new discussion as Vystalaran tried to deflect discussing the past in favor of the present, while the Sun Queen lightly suggested that the two couldn’t be so easily separated...
None of which mattered to Lex in the slightest, paying only minimal attention to the trio, despite the importance that the outcome of their discussion had on his fate.
Branwen was dead.
He had sensed it the moment his awareness came back, the spell that he’d put on her now registering that her life force was completely gone.
And it was all Vystalaran’s fault.
Slowly, Lex turned around to where the three gods were debating what to do.
He knew he should still be trying to leave, that Branwen’s death meant that the others were in danger.
Instead, he held Belligerence out in front of him.
“Is this what you’re so afraid of?” he rumbled, eyes locked onto Gladoneral’s avatar. “What you fear being used against you?”
“Lex,” murmured the Sun Queen. “It’s alright.”
Those two words made her aura flare, the soothing presence that she carried with her growing stronger, trying to wash away his rage and his pain.
“No, it isn’t.” This time, the transformation didn’t happen of its own accord. He reached out for it, not wanting the intense negativity he felt to be diminished, trying to recall how it felt when his flesh and blood body was replaced by the thrashing lengths of razor-sharp wire...
For a moment it almost didn’t work. But then he felt it rush over him, skin and muscles being replaced by jagged metal, the transformation acting as a bulwark that preserved his sense of bitterness and injustice over what had happened. “One of my people has died, for no other reason than because one small deity is feeling apprehensive.”
The green light that was his eyes flashed, the purple contrails from their outer edges flickering wildly. “That. Is. Not. Alright.”
Sleipnir’s eyes widened, not having witnessed his transformation before. “By Yggdrasil’s boughs!”
Vystalaran was much less impressed. “Mind your manners, beast,” he snapped. “Or I’ll remember that you spoke out of turn to your betters after I’ve taken you back to Foelvan.”
Lex could feel the avatar’s aura threatening to reassert itself then. Vystalaran had let it dissipate when Sleipnir had come through, but Lex knew that he’d unleash it instantly in response to any perceived attack.
Which was why Lex didn’t take so much as a single step forward, nor did he try to cast a spell.
Instead, he held Belligerence further aloft...and then released it.
“If you’re so much better than me, then go ahead and take Belligerence.”
The Sun Queen’s eyes widened. Sleipnir cocked his head. Vystalaran’s brows furrowed.
The alicorn goddess recovered first. “Perhaps we should adjourn back to my realm-”
“You would surrender the weapon so easily?” interrupted Vystalaran, making no move to approach where the weapon was floating in the air. “The power to slay gods, given up just like that?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” sneered Lex, the wires that made up his body sliding across each other faster, adding a dissonant metallic undertone to his voice. “Why you cowered beneath the guise of a mortal while your companions fought and threatened so many others in order to lure me here?”
Sleipnir’s eyes flickered from Lex to Vystalaran to the Sun Queen and finally back to Vystalaran. “What is he talking about?”
“Nothing important,” snapped the avatar. “Just a stratagem I used to lure this miscreant out.”
“They did strike out against the chosen of another member of my pantheon,” noted the Sun Queen.
“Of their own accord, not by my order,” retorted Vystalaran, causing Loraestil and Thilaera to wince from where they were hanging back.
Vystalaran didn’t seem to notice, not taking his eyes off of Belligerence. “And that same ‘champion’ then turned his powers against this scoundrel with no prompting from me.”
“You must have been quite disappointed that I didn’t need to use this weapon against him.” Lex didn’t bother mentioning that he had briefly used the weapon’s power to expand the area of the spell he’d used to lay Burly low. “That’s what you were hoping for, wasn’t it? To see what Belligerence was capable of, without putting yourself at risk. And when that didn’t work, you summoned Gwynharwyf, not wanting to risk your own life any more than you had to.”
“Gwynharwyf?” echoed Sleipnir. “Of the Llys Seren?”
“It was only after I sent her away that you revealed yourself, having no other pawns left to get Belligerence for you.” Slowly, Lex took a step back, rising onto his hind legs as he held his forelegs out wide. “Aren’t you pleased to have it at last?”
Vystalaran said nothing to that, eyes darting back and forth between Lex and Belligerence.
After a moment, Sleipnir cleared his throat. “Well, Vystalaran, it sounds like this settles the issue in a way that’s favorable to all parties. The Sun Queen protects the interest that her subordinate goddess has in her champion, and the Seldarine get the weapon which was causing them anxiety.”
He nodded once, turning to Lex a moment later. “Since that’s resolved, I’d like to speak instead about Fenrir-”
“No.”
Sleipnir blinked, turning back to Vystalaran. “What?”
“No,” repeated the avatar, setting his jaw as he looked at Sleipnir. “Forgive my abruptness, but this matter cannot be resolved simply by Lex Legis turning over his weapon. He must surrender himself to our custody.”
“Why?” The Sun Queen waved a hoof to indicate Lex. “He has committed no crime against you. Even your worshiper’s injury” – she nodded toward Thilaera, whose remaining hand was clasped over where her opposite shoulder used to be – “was dealt only in self-defense. He-”
“He,” interrupted Vystalaran, scowling now, “is a violation of your pantheon’s sworn promise not to swell its ranks. If you expect us simply to ignore that broken oath-”
“Oh come now, Lord Vystalaran,” broke in Sleipnir, chuckling. “You can’t possibly be upset about one small pantheon adding a single titan of modest power to their ranks. You had the situation under control when he called me here, did you not? So there’s nothing to worry about. Now, it’s imperative that we move on to what happened with Fenrir, so retrieve the weapon and be done with it.”
“Yes,” echoed Lex, grinning darkly. “Retrieve the weapon and be done with it.”
Vystalaran stared hard at Lex for a long moment, then slowly walked forward, each step measured and deliberate, until he was right in front of Belligerence.
The barbed wire that made up Lex’s body thrashed and writhed as Vystalaran approached, the jagged strands maintaining his shape even as they twisted faster than the naked eye could have followed. It was the only movement he made as the avatar moved closer, holding his standing position, forelegs spread wide in a welcoming gesture as he grinned broadly, eyes shining solid green and purple.
For your preventing me from saving Branwen, I will SEE YOU DEAD!!!
He felt certain that Vystalaran knew what he was thinking, and that the Sun Queen and Sleipnir likely did as well. Regardless of whether or not they could read his mind, Lex didn’t doubt for a second that the malevolence in his mien was plainly visible to everyone there. Nor did he care very much about hiding it; after all, they either didn’t seem to think that he’d dare to do something as brazen as attack Vystalaran, or didn’t anticipate that it would work if he tried.
Which was, of course, absolutely correct.
Lex had no way of fighting Vystalaran, let alone killing him. Even making the attempt would have resulted in nothing more than the avatar unleashing his divine aura. Lex already knew full well that wasn’t something he could withstand, even with his most potent defenses activated.
But like so many other problems that he had faced over the course of his life, that simply meant that a more creative solution was required.
And Lex had already come up with one.
It was beyond risky, to the point of being not just reckless, but bordered on madness. Or at least, that was how it had looked when he’d queried the immediate future with his foresight. But that had mattered less to Lex than simply knowing that it was possible...and now that he had confirmed that it was, he was committed.
This was no longer a matter of simply extricating himself and his people safely. Vystalaran had deliberately kept him from discharging his duty to one of his own, knowing that would result in their death.
That was nothing less than an act of war.
And war permitted actions that his moral code would otherwise hold to be unconscionable.
“I hope you’ll both agree that this puts the enmity between your pantheons to rest,” announced Sleipnir as Vystalaran reached a hand toward Belligerence. “Or at least, opens the door to negotiating peace between you.”
“A peaceful resolution is always the best one,” agreed the Sun Queen, though unlike the eight-legged stallion, her eyes were squarely on Lex. “In the aftermath of a tragedy, continued aggression can only lead to further loss, making it that much harder to heal.”
“That sentiment overlooks the necessity of redressing wrongs,” noted Vystalaran, his hand having stopped a few inches from Belligerence. His brow was furrowed, as though contemplating how to safely take possession of the quill. “Those who commit offenses against another should be made to pay for their transgressions.”
Lex couldn’t help but laugh then, the sound harsh and grating. “My sentiments exactly.”
Then, without moving in the slightest, he poured as much energy as he could into Belligerence...
...which caused the weapon to suddenly quiver, its shape becoming less distinct as it rippled and shook, as though something were pressing against it from without.
Or from within.
Vystalaran immediately leaped backward, letting his divine aura unfurl, but this time Lex was ready.
Although he’d expended all of his uses of the Charismata after what had happened with the Night Mare – or whoever it was that had sounded like her – he still had a number of divine spells at his command. More than that, he also had a large number of diamonds into which he’d stored castings of those and other spells, including one instance of divine magic specifically designed to consecrate a particular area to the goddess. It was that diamond which he retrieved and activated now.
Outwardly, there was no visual effect of his casting, save for blue fire that momentarily sprung up in a circle around him, the azure flames flaring and immediately disappearing. But to Lex’s sight – and, he felt certain, the sight of the everyone else there – that small patch of land that he was on was now sacred territory, imbued with the Night Mare’s power.
Vystalaran’s aura slammed into it a fraction of a second later...and immediately stopped.
It wouldn’t hold, Lex knew. If Mystaria could still use her god’s divine magic within the Shrine of the Starless Sky, then Vystalaran’s divine presence would definitely be able to override a simple sanctification spell. But Lex had gambled that the deity wouldn’t do such a thing so easily, knowing that to directly violate another god’s territory was a highly aggressive action...and based on what he’d said earlier, the avatar was extremely intent on making his pantheon seem like the wronged party.
That, and Vystalaran had more pressing concerns at the moment.
Belligerence was transforming, its form bulging and growing into a larger mass of absolute darkness. Even as it did, the runes along its length glowed brighter, their forms growing blurry and indistinct as they merged, becoming strands of razor wire formed of blue flames. The restraints coiled around the ebony form, halting its expansion...but neither did they force it to return to its previous shape.
Instead, the bindings and the void creature seemed to reach a sort of equilibrium, its form caught midway between the massive thing it had been growing into and the quill to which it had been confined.
The central mass hung in the air, larger than the orb it had started as, but nowhere near the massive size it had grown to after taking out a chunk of Kryonex. Semisolid tendrils hung down from it, but not nearly as many as it had created when Lex had been frantically dodging its attacks. And all across its form were cerulean flames in the form of barbed wire, sliding across it in constant motion as they restrained it from returning to its full form.
This was the future that Lex had seen when he’d used his foresight to look at what would happen if he’d poured his own energy into Belligerence, whatever connection the Night Mare had forged between himself and the trapped creature allowing his trans-temporal sense to glimpse that the result would be a weakening of the bindings that the goddess had used to capture it.
It was because of that weakening that he couldn’t see Belligerence’s future now, however, the creature free enough that its future was once again beyond his sight, leaving him with no idea of what the partially-freed monster would do or how much control – if any – he had over it.
But given how the Night Mare’s restraints were still there, albeit slackened, he was willing to bet that he had some, sending a psychic message to the thing.
Kill the elf god!
It might have been a coincidence. It might simply have been that Vystalaran was – notwithstanding Lex himself, whom it was now bound to – the closest person with divinity to the thing, with Lex already having telekinetically pushed Burly further away, and the Sun Queen having flown high into the air as soon as Belligerence’s form had begun to change.
Or perhaps Belligerence was still bound to his will after all.
Either way, the void creature immediately sped toward Vystalaran, seemingly unaware and uncaring of the avatar’s aura.
“Lex Legis!” screamed the Sun Queen from high above. “What have you done?!”
“What is that thing?!” Sleipnir had likewise fallen back, eight hooves pawing at the dirt as he stared at the black monstrosity bound with fiery blue wire.
Neither Lex nor Vystalaran answered, the former watching as the latter pointed a finger at the oncoming monstrosity. “Arrow of Solonor.”
The beam of silvery light that shot toward Belligerence then radiated so much power that Lex had no doubt that its impact had force enough to reshape a continent. More than that, it seemed to home in on its target, adjusting its flight to compensate for the void creature’s speed as it rushed at it, striking Belligerence dead center a moment later.
To no effect whatsoever, the beam being annihilated as soon as it made contact with the void creature.
Vystalaran’s eyes widened, and he waved a hand as though brushing away something in front of him. “Rhapsody of Hanali.”
Immediately, the air in front of Belligerence grew thicker, turning into a blurry mist that seemed to contain various shapes and figures within it. Indistinct voices came from within, and there was a sweet scent in the air, though Lex couldn’t place it. The entire thing seemed preternaturally inviting, as though inside it lurked some sort of hidden paradise, and Vystalaran smirked as Belligerence plunged inside without hesitation.
...only for the mist to suddenly dissipate, the voices and odor also disappearing as the void creature rushed out of it an instant later, its speed undiminished.
“You must stop this!” screamed the Sun Queen, not seeming to dare approach any closer from where she was hovering overhead, seeming to hover in front of the sun. “That creature cannot be allowed to absorb more divinity!”
“I’ll handle it!” volunteered Sleipnir, lowering his head as he began to run-
“NO!” It was hard to say if it was the sun itself that grew brighter, or if it was the solar goddess, causing Sleipnir to stumble as he immediately halted. “Lex Legis must be the one to stop it!”
She didn’t give the stallion of the Aesir a chance to respond before speaking again. “Lord Vystalaran, you must retreat! This creature is the worst enemy a god can face!”
Vystalaran sneered, despite Belligerence almost being upon him. “Nonsense. If a mere titan and his provincial pony goddess can tame this creature-”
He sidestepped Belligerence’s wild charge then, the black tendrils missing his face by inches, apparently causing Vystalaran no alarm whatsoever.
“-then I most certainly can! Panoply of Vandria!”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Vystalaran was suddenly clad in a light suit of armor, one hand clutching a thin rapier. With a flick on his wrist, he sank the blade – the pointed tip of which looked sharp enough that it could have cut the stars from the sky – into Belligerence’s body, striking one of the blazing wires before pressing into the black substance of its body.
The latter hit had no effect at all except to discorporate the blade, but in the instant before that, when Vystalaran struck the length of azure flame, Lex felt a twinge come from his left foreleg.
What?
But there was no time for him to wonder about that, as Vystalaran – seeming to have picked up on his first strike not having been as futile as the second – dodged another strike from Belligerence without so much as taking a step back, frowning. “So, it’s these bindings which are key to laying the creature low. In that case...”
He took a step back as Belligerence tried again to land a hit, easily avoiding the close call without looking even slightly worried that he might be struck. Instead, he held his arms out, planting his feet as he glared at the void creature. “Sortilege of Corello-”
That was when Lex made his move.
The power that he had gained from Mei Li was truly exceptional. The ability to alter the flow of various forms of energy in his local area allowed for numerous creative endeavors to be undertaken, as Lex had confirmed while defeating Burly Brawl. But there was more that could be done than simply altering the movement of positive energy in his vicinity.
Such as altering the movement of ambient magical energy.
Which was simply ritual magic by another name.
Of course, by itself her power didn’t allow for the level of exactitude that could be used to produce intricate, highly specific effects. It was like the inverse of what Thermal Draft could do, being strong but lacking in fine precision that the pegasus-turned-doppelganger had. At most, it could have abetted or impeded certain other functions of magic, making those varieties of spells more or less effective.
But when used to supplement normal ritual practices, like the kind that Lex had been making use of since he was a mortal, it allowed what would normally have been hours of rigorous casting to be completed in seconds.
That was why Lex had used it now, his enhanced intellect easily coming up with the proper formula for what he wanted to do and immediately putting it into practice.
An instant later, the sanctified circle that he was standing within expanded, widening until it encompassed everyone around him...including Vystalaran and Belligerence.
Finding himself suddenly within another god’s territory, the elven avatar hesitated to finish his invocation, faltering for the briefest moment.
Belligerence didn’t miss its opportunity.
Plunging forward, it collided bodily with Vystalaran.
Whereas the ice demigod’s corpse had seemingly petrified and been drawn into the Astral Plane, nothing of the sort happened to the elven avatar. That might have been due to the fact that – similar to how Vystalaran hadn’t had multiple manifestations, even after dropping his mortal disguise – he had been only a subset of an existing deity, rather than the totality of a god himself.
Or it might simply have been due to the fact that Belligerence didn’t leave a body behind.
Instead, all that was left after the void creature slammed into Vystalaran and kept going were a few scraps of clothing, the remnants of the avatar’s outfit which hadn’t been directly in Belligerence’s path.
But the backlash from the avatar’s death, though also less pronounced than what had happened with Kryonex, was likewise palpable to everyone in the area.
Thilaera immediately collapsed, an agonized wail coming from her throat before her eyes rolled back in her head, collapsing. Loraestil, despite being slightly closer, wasn’t affected as badly, though he still doubled over and clutched at his head, moaning in pain.
In contrast to the elves, Sleipnir simply gave a sharp exhale, as though he’d just been slugged in the gut. “In one hit?” he muttered, his voice strained. “No, not even a hit...it just touched him...”
“That’s what that creature does,” answered the Sun Queen softly. Although she was no longer shouting, her voice was no less audible for it, despite being high overhead. “This creature unmakes anything it comes into contact with. And those who possess divinity are its preferred targets, absorbing them to enlarge the rift that makes up its body.”
Sleipnir seemed to shake off his stupefaction then, giving Lex a wide-eyed look as he straightened up. “And you deliberately allowed a monster like that to run free?!”
“I shouldn’t have had to,” retorted Lex coldly, even as the avatar’s death caused the wires that made up his body to lose cohesion, his form dissolving into a loose skein of tangled barbs and razors that only roughly approximated a quadrupedal shape. Only his eyes remained unchanged, the green glow and purple contrails remaining solid amidst the writhing morass of jagged metal. “But since you were more interested in placating that warmonger, even after he prevented me from saving one of my followers, I had no other alternatives.”
Sleipnir bristled. “You’re blaming me for-”
But Lex wasn’t listening, the attempt he’d made to teleport Belligerence back to his side while he’d been speaking just now having failed.
In fact, the void creature didn’t even seem to realize that he’d been attempting to summon it, having stopped in place as soon as it had annihilated Vystalaran, its ebony form quivering as the tendrils of azure flames continued to move along its substance...
And suddenly it was straining against them, the strands of cerulean flame going taut as they struggled to contain the creature.
“It’s breaking free!” cried the Sun Queen, her voice as mournful as it was alarmed.
She hadn’t finished speaking when Sleipnir blurred into motion, zipping around the battlefield so quickly that even Lex wasn’t able to follow him. An instant later, he’d gathered Burly, Thilaera, and Loraestil, carrying them all on his back as he stopped in front of the portal – still open – which Lex’s wish had opened.
“I’ll take these three back to Valaskjalf!” he yelled, looking up at the Sun Queen. “Hurry and get out of here before-”
“SLEIPNIR!!! LOOK OUT!!!”
The Sun Queen’s warning served to do nothing but make the eight-legged stallion look upward at her, distracting him at a critical instant as Lex sprang at the Aesir’s representative, loops of wire that roughly approximated his claws extended.
His blow caught the larger stallion directly across the face, knocking him to the dirt as the trio on his back went sprawling. Now standing where the larger pony had been, Lex had just enough time to see Sleipnir give him a wide-eyed look, which turned into a snarl a half-second later...
Then Lex couldn’t see a thing as Belligerence teleported into the spot he now occupied.
That it would do that had been easy to predict. Although he hadn’t been able to follow the path that Sleipnir had taken when he’d gathered everyone up, it had been easy enough to surmise that the stallion would take the most direct route between the three of them before heading back toward the portal. But that would mean bringing Burly Brawl – who had a trace amount of divine power in the form of Blaze’s blessing – closer to Belligerence’s position.
And while Sleipnir’s warning to the Sun Queen made it clear that he thought Belligerence would go after her next – likely because she had more divinity than anyone else present – Lex knew better. When he’d fought that void creature alongside Kryonex, it had abandoned chasing the demigod in favor of following him whenever he’d gotten too close to it, opting to follow the closest source of godhood rather than the largest.
Fortunately, the thing’s teleporting hadn’t grown any less predictable since its capture.
But although he’d won a considerable gamble in predicting what Belligerence was about to do, Lex knew that it was a small victory compared to what else had just happened.
It’s as I thought, this thing has no power to harm me anymore!
That Belligerence couldn’t destroy him was no real surprise; all of the clues had been there. The fact that he – and he alone – could safely touch the thing once it had been forcibly confined to the quill had been the largest one. But while it had been iffy as to whether or not that would still hold true when he’d relaxed the thing’s imprisonment, he’d been given one other indication that his immunity to its annihilating power was still extant.
Specifically, that he’d felt it when Vystalaran had struck the wires of blue flame encircling the creature.
In hindsight, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. The goddess had given him his new foreleg in the immediate aftermath of her binding that void creature into the original Belligerence; in fact, it had almost seemed like she’d done so with a leftover application of the energy she’d put into the thing’s sealing. In that case, it made perfect sense that the replacement limb had some sort of sympathetic resonance with the strength of the creature’s prison.
Which would also explain why the creature hadn’t attacked him even after he’d relaxed its bindings.
He might not have been able to control it when it was let loose like that – that it had attempted to engulf Burly Brawl without his order made that clear, along with his inability to teleport it back to him – but it was still powerless to harm him.
But that’s likely only true so long as the Night Mare’s binding remains intact, Lex felt certain. Which means I need to renew it before it can absorb more divinity!
That had been the other reason he’d deliberately placed himself where he knew the thing would teleport.
While it was probable that the power he’d forced into Belligerence to loosen its bonds would dissipate on his own – similar to how his enhancing magic items in that fashion was always temporary – the monster’s absorption of Vystalaran’s divinity likely meant that it was going to be that much harder to recapture now. The only thing Lex could think of was to pour more of the Night Mare’s power into the thing, reinforcing the binding by a comparable amount to however much power the void creature now possessed.
Which meant that he’d need to sacrifice some of the strength that the goddess had given him.
The only question now was what he’d lose.
Concentrating on his left foreleg, Lex visualized the original Belligerence in his mind, picturing it in his grasp. As it had been the basis for this creature’s imprisonment, it was easy to ascertain that grasping it would be key to restoring the creature’s prison. Once he had it, he’d pour the goddess’s power into it, not stopping until the monster was once again confined into the form of a weapon, unable to take action on its own.
This transformation will likely be lost, Lex surmised as he felt the quill appear in his claw, lengths of wire sliding across it. Since he hadn’t re-sealed the void creature yet, he still couldn’t foresee what doing so would cost him. Possibly some aspect of the Charismata also. Or even my bonds with the others...
He terminated that line of thought, wincing internally.
The prospect of losing his connection to Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li terrified him in a way that even fighting gods didn’t.
Cursing Vystalaran one last time, Lex concentrated on feeding the Night Mare’s power into the quill, feeling his left foreleg pulse as it reconstituted the bindings-
And gasped as new strength rushed into him.
What?!
It was startling enough that he almost broke the connection. Instead of the sense of enervation and loss that he’d been expecting, exactly the opposite was happening! He was gaining power rather than losing it!
Even as he tried to figure out what was happening, Lex could feel his bonds with Solvei, Mei Li, and Nenet repairing themselves. In moments, all of the damage that Gwynharwyf had inflicted was gone, his connection to the three of them now as strong as it ever had been.
This is Vystalaran’s divinity! Lex realized, even as the influx of energy moved away from his soul-bonds and into his physical self. The binding is forcing this thing to surrender what it took from him, transferring it to me instead!
It was like wringing water out of a sponge. The more he forced that creature back into Belligerence, the more it lost its hold on the godhood it had stolen. And that power was flowing back into him now, the divinity that he’d already been imbued with eagerly drinking in more.
Already, Lex could feel the massive knot of wires that was his body settle back into its normal, well-defined form. A moment later it stabilized further, and a sudden rush ran through Lex as the metal strands suddenly seemed to move in greater concert than ever before. Instantly, he knew that he’d be able to evoke that form at will from now on, without needing to be in the presence of a god to activate it. And while he still couldn’t maintain it indefinitely, he could feel the inrush of energy fixing that limitation as well. Already, it was extending how long he could remain transformed, increasing it from seconds to minutes-
The flood of power abruptly cut off.
Almost dizzy from the sudden cessation, it took Lex a moment to realize that divine energy the void creature had gathered hadn’t run out. It was simply that the remainder was being diverted elsewhere.
No, not diverted, Lex realized, barely noticing that Belligerence had once again returned to being a quill covered in runes, instead looking around as he engaged his mystic senses. Dispersed!
All around him, he could see the gathered divinity hanging in the air, saturating the ground, and even starting to sink into nearby planes of existence, all of it looking as though it had been haphazardly discarded before he could absorb it.
Or rather, as it that thing that the Night Mare had bound to Belligerence had thrown its meal away rather than let him take it.
During his fight with Kryonex, the void creature had gained some form of rudimentary intelligence, reacting to their tactics and changing strategies accordingly. Now, however, it seemed to have gained something else.
A sense of spite.
But that won’t avail you, snorted Lex, making sure to direct that thought toward the weapon. I can still collect all of this-
Before he could even make the attempt, however, the Sun Queen landed nearby. Waving her wings, the unclaimed divinity suddenly flowed toward her, congealing into an orb that gleamed like a miniature sun as the totality of the remaining godly essence was gathered into it.
“I’m glad you were able to restrain that creature a second time,” she announced as she reached forward with her wings, holding the luminous orb of godly power between them. “But I need to return this to Gladoneral. It will help to mitigate the loss of his avatar.”
Lex couldn’t help but glare at her. “After what just happened, you still think that you can appease him?!”
“No.” The Sun Queen shook her head, and when her gentle smile returned a moment later, everything suddenly seemed brighter. “But maybe I can befriend him.”
“You’d be better off listening to the young titan, lass.”
The voice that emanated from the portal was that of an elderly male, though still resonant and strong. The sound of it caused Sleipnir – who had been about to trot over to the Sun Queen’s side – to gasp. “High One!”
A moment later, a figure stepped through the portal, causing Lex to frown.
It was a human.
Tall and dressed in traveler’s clothes beneath his worn cloak, he carried a walking stick in one hand, the body of which had more runes than Belligerence and whose head had been sharpened to a point. His beard was bushy and deep grey, but his back was unbent and his steps were sure. That was all the more notable since, beneath the wide brim of his hat, an eyepatch could be seen.
“Especially since the lad’s planning on raising a new Fenrir.”
The Sun Queen smiled at the newcomer, giving him a deeper bow than she had to Vystalaran.
As far as Lex was concerned, the arrival of that “Odin” person changed very little.
His sole reason for reaching out to the Aesir – opening a portal with Heart’s Desire and identifying himself as the one who’d slain Kryonex – had been to exploit whatever investment they purportedly had in Fenrir, the wolf whom the ice demigod had slain and absorbed. Given that Lex had remnants of the demigod in his possession, his hope had been to use those to leverage the Aesir into making Vystalaran stand down.
But that plan had failed spectacularly, with Sleipnir not only agreeing to turn him over to the elven avatar, but standing aside while Vystalaran had interfered with his attempt to save Branwen. At that point, there had been no choice left but to take the incredibly risky gamble of loosening Belligerence’s restrictions. Fortunately, that had worked out better than anticipated, and Gladoneral’s avatar had been wiped out.
Which meant that the Aesir held no interest for Lex anymore.
“I’ll leave this to you,” he announced, shooting the Sun Queen a contemptuous glance before turning back toward the adlet village, not giving Odin a second look.
The solar goddess had, in his opinion, been no help whatsoever. While her pleading had managed to delay Sleipnir and Vystalaran long enough for him to let Belligerence loose, her snatching the avatar’s dispersed divinity – apparently in hope of placating its owner, much to Lex’s disgust – had more than undercut the small amount of accidental assistance that she’d provided. Handling Sleipnir’s “High One” was the least she could do to make up for her uselessness.
Especially since Lex still needed to see to the safety of everyone else.
But before he’d taken more than two steps, he found his path once again blocked by Sleipnir.
“How dare you show the High One such disrespect!” snapped the larger stallion. “Apologize immediately!”
The wires that made up Lex’s body thrashed faster, even as he slowly raised Belligerence to point it directly at the eight-legged pony’s face. “This is the second time you’ve gotten in my way,” he intoned, his voice dire. First Vystalaran, then Gwynharwyf, and now Sleipnir; he was thoroughly sick of being talked down to. “Do it again, and you’ll leave here as a proper quadruped.”
Sleipnir’s eyes narrowed, and Lex could see a trickle of blood sliding down his cheek from where he’d struck him before, the blow having been heavy enough to break the skin. But before the larger pony could say anything, Odin’s voice cut through the air.
“It’s alright, Sleipnir.”
His posture relaxed and his steps unhurried, Odin strode over, reaching a hand out to stroke the back of Sleipnir’s neck. “Go ahead and return to Valaskjalf.”
Sleipnir’s ears folded back at that. “But-”
“I’ll handle things here,” repeated Odin. “Besides, I’d like to speak with the lad privately.”
Lex frowned inwardly, not because of the patronizing term by which Odin had referred to him, but because of the presumption that they’d be conversing. “I have people whose safety-”
“-is well in hand,” answered Odin, turning his one eye toward Lex even as he canted his head in the direction of the adlet village.
In the same instant that he spoke, Gwynharwyf’s presence vanished.
That was enough to give Lex a moment’s pause.
He hadn’t been completely unaware of what was happening back in the village. Gwynharwyf had made no attempt to hide her presence, practically flaunting her aura as she’d gone after Solvei and the others. While there had been little Lex could do about it while in Vystalaran’s presence, something the eladrin had no doubt been counting on, he had calculated that if all ten of his charges – his three soul-bound servants and the seven emissaries of the lesser titans – worked together, they’d be able to hold the eladrin off. Not for very long, and even then only because Gwynharwyf wasn’t intent on slaughter, but long enough that he might have been able to get there in time.
Branwen’s death, however, was a sign that things hadn’t worked out that way.
Why was unclear, though Lex strongly suspected that his damaged connection to Solvei, Nenet, and Mei Li was at least partially to blame. As it was, the only reason he hadn’t raced directly to their side the instant that Belligerence was once again restrained was because he’d sensed that they’d all been suddenly moved off-plane...leaving Gwynharwyf behind.
Solvei, tell me what’s happening.
Master! Everything’s gone crazy! We were all fighting with each other for some reason, and then that Gwyn-whatever woman killed Branwen, even though Nenet tried to stop her, and suddenly that guy from Darkest Night showed up, and now we’re in some sort of maze, and-
Calm down, he ordered her, trying to suppress his own concern. Someone from Darkest Night had come here? That had to mean either White Wraith or Sanguine Disposition; neither was someone that Lex trusted. If you’re not in immediate danger, tell me precisely what occurred.
R-right... Despite her emotional state still registering as extremely anxious, she began relating what had happened.
At the same time, the Sun Queen approached, still holding the gathered divinity aloft. “I wish I had time to give you a proper welcome,” she began, her smile apologetic as she looked at Odin. “But the sooner I return this to Gladoneral, the easier it will be to work toward reconciliation.”
Odin shook his head. “Your heart is in the right place, lass, but you won’t find a partner for peace with him. Better to give it to his wife. She’s a bit of a wild one, but she loves her husband dearly, and I doubt she’d be unhappy to see you returning most of what his misadventure cost him.”
The Sun Queen smiled. “That’s a good idea, thank you. I’ll bring this to Bristala, then.”
“Take them with you,” snapped Lex, waving a wire-claw at Loraestil, Thilaera, and Burly; only the former was still conscious, clutching his head as though he was afraid it would split apart if he released it. “I want them out of my sight.”
Sleipnir scowled, and Odin had no reaction to the command. But the Sun Queen herself looked saddened by it, though Lex couldn’t have begun to guess why. “I can return Blaze’s champion to Viljatown,” she murmured. “Her blessing doesn’t allow him to stray far from the bounds of Iliana’s dominion anyway. As for the other two...”
She waved her horn at the elves, and although it didn’t glow, Loraestil immediately let out a moan of relief, lowering his hands from his head. Thilaera likewise groaned, her eyes fluttering open. “Wha...?” she murmured in Elvish
“Don’t be afraid,” replied the Sun Queen in the same language. “I’m going to bring you back to Foelvan, if you’ll allow me.”
Thilaera didn’t answer, instead looking around as though dazed. But when her eyes came to rest on Lex, she turned pale and began to shake, her remaining arm moving to grip the ruin that was her opposite shoulder. Seeing that, Loraestil interposed himself between her and Lex, giving the latter only a brief glance before shuddering and looking away. “That would be most kind of you, goddess,” he muttered, unable to meet the Sun Queen’s gaze.
She nodded in reply, moving to stand near them even as she sent one last look Lex’s way. “The Night Mare has placed a great burden on you by making you the steward of such a dangerous entity. I hope that you’ll do her proud in bearing it responsibly.”
“I have so far,” shot back Lex, resenting what sounded like an implication that he’d been wrong to unleash Belligerence against Vystalaran. “And I’ll continue to do so in the same vein.”
If the goddess was upset by his rebuke, she didn’t show it, instead giving him another motherly smile. “Then she truly chose her champion well.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she gave another bow to the agents of the Aesir. “Lord Odin. Lord Sleipnir. I wish you both warm days and clear skies.”
“And to you, lass,” replied Odin, reaching up to touch the brim of his hat.
“I hope we can meet again!” blurted Sleipnir, taking a step toward the Sun Queen. “Under more pleasant circumstances!”
The Sun Queen’s smile widened. “I’d like that as well.”
Then she vanished.
Sleipnir grinned, shooting Lex a smug look before bowing to Odin. “Then, High One, I’ll take my leave.”
“As you will,” nodded Odin.
Sleipnir trotted to the portal with a spring in his step, entering it without looking back.
Leaving Lex alone with the one-eyed human god, who sighed. “My apologies for Sleipnir. He’s like you, young and hot-blooded, and so when he had the chance to show off – in front of a young and pretty goddess, particularly – he went a little overboard.”
The comparison made Lex’s lip curl. “That imbecile is nothing like me.”
“No?” chuckled Odin. “He made a mess of an important negotiation because he wanted to impress a girl, whereas you threw caution to the wind and risked unleashing a god-slaying monster to avenge a girl.”
Lex growled, eyes narrowing. “The two are not comparable.”
“And of course, you’re both proud and ambitious,” continued Odin. “Looking to make your mark on the world, eager to pick fights with anyone who looks down on you. All the hallmarks of youth.”
He didn’t hold still as he spoke, instead walking around and poking his walking stick at several large pieces of rubble. Coming at last to one that refused to budge when he prodded it, he sat down atop it and fished around in his cloak, withdrawing a pipe.
“Not that I’m throwing stones, mind you,” he added as he snapped his fingers, conjuring a small flame at their tips which he used to light the end of his pipe. “I was young once too, and had more than my fair share of misadventures. If anything, I should praise you for being so dutiful toward your women. I stole many a maiden’s virtue, without honoring the promises I made to convince them to part with it. Poor Gunnlod...”
He fell silent then, seemingly lost in a memory as he puffed on his pipe.
The sight made Lex frown, not in disapproval but in confusion. This wasn’t how he’d expected a conversation with someone who was – based on how Sleipnir had treated him – a high-ranking god among a prominent pantheon to go.
...which itself begged the question of how this god was even here. Sleipnir had flat-out stated that Odin had no presence on this world, which should have meant that he couldn’t come through the portal Lex had opened. And yet he had.
Even stranger, Odin had no divine aura that he could detect, no matter how he manipulated his senses. Nor were there overlapping manifestations like Kryonex had displayed. If not for the fact that his future couldn’t be seen, and that there was no magical aura corresponding to a foresight spell around him, then Lex would have thought he was using the same sort of mortal disguise that Vystalaran had.
But that wouldn’t explain how he was able to enter a world where he had no-
“There’s a trick to it.”
Lex blinked. “What?”
“Hm, did I guess wrong?” Exhaling a puff of smoke, Odin glanced over at Lex. “You looked curious, and I thought it was about how I’m here in the first place. There’s a trick to it, a different one than that prick of an elf used.”
He took another deep inhalation from his pipe then. “Honestly, I’m shocked he bothered to disguise himself like that at all. He’s the elves’ god of nobility, propriety, and tradition, you know. Even for an avatar, disguising himself as something less than he is was quite out of character for him. He must have been very nervous about confronting you.”
“Rightly so,” rumbled Lex, not sure what else to say. Odin’s laid-back, informal nature was throwing him off-balance, all the more so since his mystic senses weren’t able to make up the difference of whatever cues he knew he was missing. The result left Lex feeling the same way he had as a mortal whenever he’d tried to talk to someone else, awkward and unsure of what to say next.
“Indeed,” nodded Odin. “That weapon of yours is truly something. I’ve only seen one other like it, and while yours isn’t as strong, it’s still quite potent.”
That was enough to dispel Lex’s discomfort. “There are other weapons like Belligerence?!”
“Just the one, as far as I know,” answered Odin. “Which isn’t to say that there aren’t more of those black spheres out there. But even if they are more of those unborn monsters instead of being copies, being able to shape them like that...well, I’d say that one you have only worked because the creature was a newborn. Binding an adult, like that other one I’ve seen, would be a difficult undertaking even for an entire pantheon working in concert.”
That was enough to leave Lex stunned, glancing down at Belligerence as he tried to imagine what an “adult” version of the thing sealed within it was like...
“Speaking of pantheon leaders, that lass just now was quite dutiful,” continued Odin, as though he hadn’t just mentioned something shocking. “A bit naïve, but still very conscientious, offering to return her enemy’s divinity like that.”
“Her attempts to curry favor with her enemy are pitiful,” murmured Lex, only half paying attention to what Odin was saying. “She’d have done just as well to stay in her realm, cowering.”
Odin shook his head. “Ah, lad, you’re wrong there. She was working quite hard to stop the situation from escalating. For instance, were you aware that the reason she arrived so late was because she was working to keep your war goddess, Blaze, from putting in a personal appearance? Or that she personally contacted this country’s pony queen, ordering her not to send her strongest warriors here to investigate what was going on?”
Lex tore his eyes away from Belligerence to stare at Odin, deeply suspicious of what he was being told. “How could you possibly know that?”
Chuckling, Odin took his pipe out of his mouth, tapping the end of it against his eyepatch. “I may only have one eye, lad, but what I traded it for made the loss plenty worthwhile.”
The indirect answer, clearly meant to confound rather than illuminate, left Lex thoroughly unamused. “What does that mean?”
“That fighting fate accomplishes little,” answered Odin, standing up at last. “While accepting it, and working with it, opens up surprising possibilities. For instance, do you know why you can’t see my future?”
“Because you’re using some sort of spell or artifact to hide it from my sight,” retorted Lex, “one that itself has no visible emanations in the magical spectrum.”
One corner of Odin’s lips turned upward. “Incorrect. It’s because here, now, I quite literally don’t have a future for you to see.”
Lex scowled, trying to figure out if he was being toyed with or not. “That answer is pure nonsense.”
“You’ve stepped into the realm of gods now, lad. When you can overturn the universe through will alone, ‘sense’ is simply how someone else thinks things are supposed to be. When you stop accepting that, and start wondering just who made it so things are the way they are – and why – that’s when you can really start to explore what it means to have moved beyond mortality.”
“You’re just spouting cryptic gibberish!” growled Lex, his frustration rapidly boiling over. After having had multiple gods and titans – all stronger than himself – trying to impose their will on him, his patience for being condescended to had reached its limit. “If you can’t elucidate some practical aspect to what you’re saying, then it does me no good!”
Odin smirked again, taking a cloth out of one belt-pouch and proceeding to clean out the bowl of his pipe. “Like I said, young and hot-blooded.”
“You-”
“But I suppose you have a point,” continued the Aesir deity. “I can recall being frustrated at the ramblings of my elders too. So here’s a bit of advice that I think you’ll find eminently practical.”
Lex scoffed, unwilling to bother hiding his disdain. “And that is?”
“That even without the slightest dollop of divinity, there’s a way for titans to grant spells to their followers.”
Lex froze. He’d been prepared to jeer at whatever the old man had been ready to say, but there was no way he could do that now. Not when what Odin had just said, assuming he was telling the truth, opened up so many incredible possibilities...
“Now then,” continued Odin, putting his pipe away. “What say you show me the remnants of Fenrir and we get down to business?”
